"You can call me anything, as long as it's for dinner." That's the only quote I can attribute to Albert William Wortham. Like most people he passed by a number of names. Dub was probably given by me since I couldn't work my way up to the full enunciation of all the syllables. And Dub he remained as far as I am concerned. Mom and Dad and most of the others called him A. W. (Probably to make sure there was no confusion with Albert, which was the family name for Dad.) In fact it seemed strange when people called "Dub", Bill, or even as Connie named him, her "Beautiful Bill." How anyone could see beauty in a hulk of a man standing over six feet, wearing cowboy boots to add a couple more inches and then weighing in at two twenty or so, with a bulbous nose that in later years was surrounded by a mustache. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.
Dub inherited Dad's knack for trading. It really didn't make much difference what the object was so long as there was a deal to be had. That's the reason for his strange accumulation of "goods" over the years. He wasn't above driving up to a garage sale and after eyeing what was there, making an offer for the whole shooting match. That explains why they had need for a barn as well as a large house with spots to hang stuff on the walls. Over the years he bought a lot of rifles which hung over most ever door in the house. Did he enjoy guns, hunting, collecting? Naw, it was just too good a deal to pass up.
Much earlier, when it came time for me to go to College, the decision was made that I would go to Oklahoma A and M (later State), (it was an easy decision since Dub was there, finishing up his PhD in mathematics.) He came down to the farm to get me. Here Dame Fortune smiled, as it was mid-summer and watermelons were coming in to Market Square in Athens, it seemed only logical to buy a couple. Not being able to refuse a deal, the back seat of the car was filled to over flowing with black diamond melons which we hauled back to Stillwater. It may not have been such a good deal after all but regardless he got a good story out of it anyway.
Seems as we were driving back, the car with its "four-forty"air-conditioning (drive forty miles an hour with four windows open) was performing nicely when a honey bee got in the car. You might expect the melons to have been the attraction but somehow this deranged bee thought Dub's nose was the perfect hive and made several passes at it. When he swatted the bee, he may or may not have missed but his glasses he didn't. Out the window they flew and we could see them clearly lying in the road. Backing up the car in the usual Texas manner with the right arm on the passenger seat back and gas peddle to the floor soon brought us back to where the glasses lay. But just as we arrived, a semi ran over the glasses. Disaster, for you see he was as blind as a bat without those glasses (never mind that he had just backed the car a quarter mile). We gathered the broken glasses from the pavement and discovered one lense was still intact as was one ear piece. No problem, in the next town we got some "scotch" tape, made a suitable repair and away we went.
Most kids when they go off to school plan where they are going to live and what type part-time job they might get to pay expenses. I was lucky, Dub knew people in the Poultry Department so he arranged for me to have a job for the summer as well as housing. It seemed the department had an old two story farm house that was on the poultry farm, right in the middle of the campus. I could stay there for free. Now the first floor was used for storage of egg crates and the like and the basement had been fitted out for slaughter of birds, but the upper floor was uninhabited (or so I was told). It had one large room and a bath. I soon discovered that Oklahoma cockroaches put all others to shame. With the nice warm, moist basement, lots of foodstuffs and no enemies, they grew and multiplied. During the day there was not a sign of them but in the dark of the night they came out to play. Live and let live. Soon I developed some friends about campus and with a bit of imagination, we developed a sport. Returning from the Student Union in the evening, we would quietly climb the stairs. Then taking our pocket knives in hand, we would enter the darkened main room, and position ourselves along the wall. I would flick on the light and there on the floor, walls, bed, table, everywhere were cockroaches half the size of your hand. With the skill of those who had practiced mumble-peg from the time you could walk, the knives flew. The object was clear; pin a roach to the floor with your knife. If you missed, or even if you didn't, retrieve the knife and try again. For what lasted probably no more than a couple of minutes, the knives flew. After tallying the score, the evening fun was over.
While this was a fine place for summer living, it was obvious that come fall I would need something more civilized. Again Dub provided the answer. A fine gentleman by name of Clay Potts managed a building called the "Short Course Center". This brick structure located off campus had a manager's apartment in which Dub and his first wife Joyce lived. Since there was a room in the adjoining building, it seemed a natural place for me, and here I stayed for the next two years. Clay Potts and his assistant "Uncle Bob" provided meals for visiting conventions, whether it be cattlemen, sheepmen, rabbit raisers, chicken growers, or whatever. They prepared pit beef barbecue or chicken, rabbit or steaks on an open grill and all the dressings. If you think he was small potatoes guess again, one Cotton bowl game between Texas A & M and Oklahoma A & M, he fed both teams and all their guest at the game; a few thousand more or less made no difference. Of course, Dub and I helped serve when possible, once a week or more.
Shortly after he got one of his degrees he went to work at Chance Vought Aircraft in Grand Prairie, Texas and decided to be an artist. For the better part of a year, he put acrylics to canvas. Most people see a painting as an expression of the inner feeling of the artist, this Dub's did. It's just that he was brimming over and painted one a day, sometimes more. Don't ask him what the art represented. He would ask you what you saw, and that's what it was. Our painting which some saw as the three witches of Endore, could easily have been the three wise men, or maybe it was .....
I often wondered if he recovered his investment in paint and canvas; probably sold some here and there or more than likely, traded them for something else. He certainly had inherited Dad's genetic affliction. (Much later in life he returned to canvas. When the house in College Station was brimming to overflow, Connie put them up as a artist exhibition. She supposedly was the buyer of those that sold as she just couldn't part with them. Guess the ways of acquisition are not only genetic but environmental as well.)
Of course working at an airplane manufacturing plant was temporary as from his view of the world; everything was. He just couldn't sit still and do nothing. From there he worked for the Frito Lay people (designed a machine based on statistical averages that got the amount of chips in a bag down to a science.)
The family made it down to Texas A & M where some way he came to be in the foundry business. In the suburb of College Station he somehow bought an aluminum casting business. With laborers that he described as "wet backs", which they most probably were, a wire-twisting, seat molding, arch-welding enterprise manufactured chairs the likes of which were popular in "ice cream" parlors. Don't know if he made much money at it, and he bemoaned the fact that he went into the business just when energy prices skyrocketed and it became more than a little expensive to buy electricity to melt the aluminum. But make chairs he did. If you went to the Texas State Fair in Dallas, you more than likely would sit on one of the thousands that he made. They were (and are) virtually indestructible. When he decided to accept a job in Washington with the EPA, he loaded a trailer with the chairs and tables and headed north, stopping to drop off a few at our farm in Brownsville, Tennessee. I'm sure the rest he either swapped or sold for a profit.
Having learned the art of negotiation, you never lose it. When Connie (his second wife) and Bill (her beautiful husband) traveled when their baby girls were small, he would often claim the mantle of a "poor old college professor" and request the most modest of accommodations. Sometimes the girls would sleep in a dresser drawer, rather than in a crib which would have cost extra.
One of our favorite stories, and surely not his, had to do with his doing research for a book of genealogy of the Wortham family. He decided to write another book and designed a schematic for structuring the family tree, much like the Dewey decimal system for books (few people could decipher the method but all agreed that it worked). As he traveled, in every town and city he visited, he would call up any Wortham in the phone book and introduce himself as A. William Wortham doing genealogy on the family. Once when visiting Chicago, he dialed a Donald W. Wortham and after going through his long introduction, my son, Don said,"Hi, Uncle Bill, this is Don." For once in his life he was speechless, but not for long.
When Dub died Connie made sure that his favorite cowboy boots were buried with him. He wasn't going barefoot, wherever he wound up. A couple of years later when we were visiting with Connie and the girls and she had started to get her life in place, she said, "I guess he's not coming back." to which we agreed. In retrospect, knowing the way he like to make a deal, I wouldn't be surprised that if God and the Devil make a bargain, Dub will do the negotiation and would take as "boot" one last fling down here. If you meet someone who says, "I'm just a poor ole country boy." Hold onto your wallet. It could be he.
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