Tar Paper Shack

I have so many things to tell you about my life that it is overwhelmingly hard to figure out where to start. But, I have to start somewhere and then I can fill in the other details later.

I’m going to start at age 12 today. When I turned 12, my life changed dramatically. Before that I didn’t feel like we were weird or anything. My dad was a preacher, my mom a housewife, and I am the oldest of 5 children. We moved every year or so and I was used to being the new kid at school. I learned to make friends easily. I felt pretty happy with my life at that time. But on Dec 1, 1969, we moved to a piece of land about 4 miles from the smallest town I had ever seen, Frankston, Texas. That is when things got really unpredictable and full of anxiety.

Cult History

My dad had put a small down payment on 10 acres and my mom found a very small trailer/camper type of thing that we could pull on the back of our car and set up housekeeping. No one had ever lived on this piece of land and the only sign of civilization was a large pole with a light at the top. I think the trailer was maybe 10 feet long and about 5 feet wide. The interior was divided into two rooms. As you walked into the front door and looked to your right was a small sofa. The back of the sofa would fold down to make into a small bed. This is where my parents slept. In front of the sofa was a small space where a table top about the size of small desk would fold out from the wall and have one leg to support it off the floor. At night this table would be folded up and that is where a pallet on the floor became a bed for my 2 year old sister. On the other side of the table was a tiny little stove with 2 burners and a very small oven. Next to that was the tiniest counter and sink. On the wall next to the front door and across from the sink was a small refrigerator. I'm sure you can imagine just how cramped that space would be for a family of 7 people!

You could then walk through a doorway and see on your left the tiniest closet in the world and then look straight ahead to the second “room”. There was a double bed that filled up the room. My three brothers, ages 5, 8 and 10 would sleep side by side in that bed and that left the bottom of the bed  (below their feet) which is where I slept.

We had no electricity so we used kerosene lamps when it got dark. Really fun way to do your homework. We didn’t have running water or plumbing. We used our car to haul gallons of water every day. We used a 5 gallon empty pickle bucket for our toilet. We put a folded towel on the rim to sit on and kept the lid on it until time to empty it. My dad would dig a hole somewhere in the woods and bury it on a daily basis. For bathing we would use a #3 metal tub. My mom would heat the water on the stove and it would take several gallons to fill it up. My mom would bathe first as she was considered the cleanest and I would bathe in her water next. Then the rest of the kids as they were always filthy from running around outside all day. Pretty sure my dad bathed after all that but his water was clean water, I'm sure. It was a ton of work to take the tub out of the trailer to empty it so I don’t think we bathed very often – probably just once a week with sponge baths in between.

We did have propane gas which kept the oven/stove working and helped to keep heat in the trailer. The school bus picked us up right in front of the trailer. I was mortified plus I hated riding the bus. Having the whole bus of kids see the conditions we lived in was embarrassing.

I can’t really believe my parents thought we should live like this. I was horrified at the time because I loved my school, my friends, my piano lessons, and riding my bike around the neighborhood. I certainly didn’t want to move out to the country! My siblings were thrilled. They loved spending all their time outdoors exploring, but I was devastated. I missed all the things that made up my life before the mission. At first, I thought it was just a place to go for the weekend so the boys could run around and explore in nature. For me it just felt like everything was being taken away in one fell swoop! I was very lonely. The closest house to us was miles away. No TV, no radio, just lots of outdoor space and nature.

My mom was an expert seamstress and had always made my clothes. But fabric was expensive and so I only had 3 dresses that I rotated to wear to school. I’m sure they were lovely but I just wanted to be like everyone else and have “store-bought” clothes. My mom continued to sew even though we didn’t have electricity for her machine. She would just manually rotate the wheel and sometimes she would ask us to turn the wheel for her while she pushed the fabric through to make a seam. She was dedicated to making this lifestyle work. My dad had told her that he was going to build us lovely home and this would be where the kids would enjoy country living. Sounded awful to me.

My dad met a man, Mel, who said he knew something about construction, and they built a 10 x 10 shed next to the trailer to keep some of our things in. They used “found” lumbar and the roof was flat and used sheets of tin that covered tar paper. They found some large pieces of wood from an old gas station to put on the side of the shack. One of them had the word “Ethyl” printed on it. The inside just had some two-by-fours nailed together – so no real walls and the floor was just some plywood nailed to the two-by-fours. It leaked water something fierce when it rained. My mom called it the “Tar-paper Shack”. I had no idea that they eventually wanted to live in that Tar-paper shack!

One weekend, some friends wanted to come and see where we had moved. Leon and Priscilla were a young couple who had recently gotten married and lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma. My parents had met them when we lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma when they were part of the church my parents had joined. Leon and Priscilla drove down and decided to spend the weekend with us. My parents bought some cots and put my brothers and me in the shed for the night. Leon and Priscilla slept in the bed in the second room. I thought it was pretty crazy but I kind of liked having my own cot. It was a lot better than sharing a bed with my brothers. Why they wanted to visit us was a mystery to me. But, I was hopeful. We had never really stayed in the same place beyond a couple of years. Some of the time it would only be one year before we moved again. Hopefully, we wouldn't stay here long. I would love to get back to civilization!

Eventually, Mel and my dad actually built an additional 10x10 room onto the shack and we all moved into that place just as the Texas summer was really starting to heat things up. Of course we had no running water, electricity or plumbing but it was an improvement because it was so much bigger.

keywords: Holy Ground Mission, cult life