Although I was older, and we lived there about the same length of time, I do not remember Ft. Worth so well as perhaps Beaumont. I know Pop rented a house I think in the 2300 block of Tremont Avenue - anyhow it was the second house up Tremont from the junction of Tremont and El Campo Blvd. I remember that clear enough. (In later years here, I have had resort to this Google Earth application on the computer - and it presents you with high altitude photos of much of the world, which you can zoom in on to see the most remarkable detail: individual trees, and cars on the road, etc. I have zoomed in on many of the old addresses of my youth, and found it most informative as to what is still there and what is history. Our El Paso hacienda with its encircled patio - still pops right out when you "fly" overhead. But my grandfather's landmark mercantile company in Denver, seems to be the site of some kind of plaza now - with a statue or monument reaching toward the camera...).
Going up Tremont the other way you came to Camp Bowie Boulevard in a few blocks, and if you turned right a ways you soon passed the Will Rogers Memorial - a landmark and most appropriate to a cowboy town. The land around here was hilly and more forested with deciduous trees than the "Pineys." Just the other side of Camp Bowie was some kind of Country Club and if you cut cross-lots through it (as my new pals were soon to show me) you came down into an unsettled, wooded area along the "West Branch of the Trinity River" - and it was here we often played cowboys and Indians and camped out overnight. And we had the bestest fishing hole! The river made a bend here and there was sort of a deep pool and a huge fallen tree that lay halfway out into it. If you walked out on the tree trunk and dropped a baited line into the shadowed waters on one side, there would be an instant flash in the depths and a tug upon your line and bluegills and crappies were a dime a dozen thereafter!
Soon I met Kermit Smith and his younger brother Billy, and they became my bosom buddies. I had a red wagon, and an old pup tent my uncle had given me from the First World War (still had the Regimental markings on it...). We would pack everything in the wagon and haul it down into the woods by the fishing hole and pitch the pup tent and sleep out there overnight! There were owls and stray dogs and campfires on the bank as we fished and talked late into the night. Sort of a Huckleberry Finn existence. LOL! Once, I saved my money and sent away maybe all of 50 cents to Pfluger's Sporting Goods Store in Akron, Ohio (I had seen an ad in a Boys Magazine). For my 50 cents I got back a shoe polish type container of "mixed fishooks" - hundreds of them in the can and they were to keep us in hooks on our fishing expeditions. Well one night we crawled into our tent the three of - sleeping abreast - me in the middle - and I had this can in my pocket. During the night, it somehow came open, and the hooks came out everywhere! In the morning when we all woke up - no one could move! The blankets, our clothes and all else were one tangled up mess, held together by hundreds of tiny fishooks...! LOL!
Once, maybe twenty - twenty-five years later - I don't know - a business trip took me back to Cow Town and environs. Having a few hours to myself, I drove out Camp Bowie Boulevard. I parked by what I thought was the onetime Country Club land. It was all different now. I tried to walk down though to what I thought was the old fishing hole on the Trinity, where the "sunnies" and "stump knockers" once hung in the dark, watery shadows under a big fallen tree, but it was all chopped up and settled and cleared now: kids, dogs, homes everywhere. Once my Uncle told me he took my Grandfather back to Ohio where he had grown up as a kid in a cabin. They looked for a "large hill" my grandfather used to climb every day. They found it - but the hill was all shrunk - much smaller now, my Grandfather turned and told my Uncle in some puzzlement. Then my Uncle said, Grandad sat down on a log nearby, and cried. I went back to my car that time, too, and sat down behind the wheel. And I cried some, too. Must be in the genes, no?
Then two things happened! I graduated to W.C. Stripling Junior High - none other than the (later) infamous alma mater of Lee Harvey Oswald! Stripling was just up the long hill of El Campo Blvd. behind us. And ... I joined the Boy Scouts! Troop 43 of the "Ft. Worth Council."
I don't remember much about W. C. Stripling. Lee Harvey and his hangups were yet far in the future, of course. One thing I remember is "Park Show Night." Every Friday night the Town or somebody set up an outdoor theater here for the kids on the playground, and we swarmed in on our bikes. We sat on the ground and watched the most outrageous film clips you ever saw: "Our Gang" comedies, and Erpi Classroom films (anyone here still remember Erpi Films? They would have one, say, on "Daniel Boone Discovers the Cumberland Gap" (this was big news in my day! LOL!), and it would show coonskin-capped Dan'l standing on a hill and he would shoot his flintlock and a huge cloud of smoke would engulf the whole screen and go white. Then it would clear and there would be Dan'l standing nonchalantly and staring off into the West - while behind him on a distant hill in this land supposedly never trod by whitemen, would be a farm, and silo, and cows grazing on a distant hillside... LOL!. Best of all (and why we really came!) though, was an endless serial flick, called "The Scorpion." A sort of Lon Chaney guy in black cloak and hat and with a huge misshapen white glove on his crippled hand and arm, would wave it around and "sting" folks to death or paralyze them, and carry them off to secret places, etc. and everyone would scream and throw popcorn. Way to Go, Man! Way to Go!
I know I was enrolled in Latin Class for sure, as was the requirement for every student who "might someday go to college." If college were not in your future you could eschew Latin. My parents opted I should go for the Latin, but I 'eschewed' it all the same - even in class. Amo, Amas, Amat... who needs this? Strangely, for all my later love of etymology, a career even, in "Words", and catholic reading in Classics and the Ancients, at this time I showed no outward aptitude for same at all. My parents, summoned for a conference with my Teacher, were informed that in her opinion, "Bernard really has no aptitude for reading, writing, or learning Latin or the verbal skills at all." she informed them. It was her considered opinion that I should forthwith be un-enrolled from Latin Class and devote myself to "Shop" and the "manual arts" as more fitting for any foreseeable future I might have.
They (my parents) were beside themselves, and were some distressed I can tell you over my seemingly inevitable slide towards ya-hoo-ism (as it was called) and the "manual arts"... Mr. Bishop was my mentor in these affairs. He taught shop at Stripling and this was really a big deal. We even had a small cupola or maybe electric pot - I can't quite remember just what, but it was sufficient that Mr. Bishop could cast small objects in sand molds, and once I brought an iron elephant doorstop from home (they were very popular in those ancient days). Mr. Bishop and I made sand molds and back cast a copy of the elephant! In all the intervening years I have never thought of this, but perhaps in some metaphysical way this incident was a harbinger of my first job out of college eons late: I was actually hired out of the blue to be Managing Editor of Modern Patternmaking: a publication specifically for foundry pattern and model makers. And a delightful tale by first boss, who - beside Mr. Bishop - helped create and sustain my incipient interest in cast iron. See, for instance, How Frogs Acquired Peckers.
With time, I became ever more engrossed with the skills of ironworkers - past and present - the casters and the smiths who have worked iron throughout the ages, and so I eventually took it up as a serious avocation: The Journeyman.
But I do not want to skip ahead too much here, for I am an old-fashioned "serial thinker" - not a "multi-tasker" as we have everywhere today flitting about and over the landscape (on their roller blades). Our generation was the "walk-and-chew-gum" one. First you learn this, and then you do this; then you learn that, and then you do that. Etc. (Like Hitler - if you like! Grin! My second wife, Millie, was Jewish, and used to bristle when I gave my "explanation" of serial thinking. Hitler, I said, exemplifed this perfectly. First you take Poland, then you take Denmark. Then you take the Low Countries - then you take France. Etc. LOL! Today, everyone sets out to do all things at once: wired for sound, watching video, roller-blading, chatting on their cell phones, and, and, and. And: nothing ever really gets done, done right, or done up finally and finished.
Or so it seems.
And at Stripling, I had my first induction into the Armed Services! Yep! At the tender age of 12 or thereabouts I guess. ROTC, or as it was (is) known "Reserve Officers Training Corps". I don't know if they still have it in public schools down that way (my New England school counselors were horrified years later when I could not understand why I would not be taking ROTC when enrolled in Greenwich High School there)... They haughtily said it was something no longer de rigeur in the enlightened land of the Yankees - and its presence (still) in the South was a "hangover" from the South's ancient militaristic traditions and what not of the Antebellum Years... LOL! All I know is that I already knew the Manual of Arms, the intricacies of the '03 Springfield, and "Cover and Concealment" when I arrived at Camp Wheeler, GA six or seven years later as an Infantry draftee with my now-Yankee compatriots - which was more than some of them ever knew when they left Wheeler even! LOL! (Already yet!). H-m-m-m-m-m - wonder if old Lee Harvey hisself maybe took his "military training" here too much to heart or whatever?
We had uniforms we had to wear - but only certain days. Mostly we marched in Holiday Parades downtown and as a "Junior Unit", ROTC was little different from, and in fact, actually was "Gym" by another name down South. And I joined Troop 43 of the Boy Scouts! (More uniforms for my poor parents to squeeze into the budget). Boy Scouts back then was more of an outdoor activity with emphasis on camping and living in the woods, etc. than the "socially sensitive" do-gooder group it later became (at least in big metro areas). Or such is my impression. "Scouts" also acquired somewhere along the line a "racial" and "religious" bias connotation, that I anyhow was blissfully unaware of back then. But I am not here concerned to redress social wrongs - real or imagined - so let us press on. We went on countless hikes and "camp outs" weekends on ranches and other open properties owned by various families of my pals. Ed Stedman's folks owned a working ranch not far off - with a big tank (pond, down that way) - and this welcome waterhole is where a lot of us learned to swim...
I was 14 the Summer of 1941, and my Troop went off to Worth Ranch down near Waco (which projects a much upgraded "aspect" in these web pages over its predecessor facility nearly 70 years ago! LOL!) It was my first away-from-home-for-several-weeks venture. We lived in tents around a Quad with a permanent cookshack and Mess Hall and a big outdoors ring-of-stones-fire-circle 
where we gathered nights and rainy days to sing, tell ghost stories, hear about the Heros of the Alamo, how to avoid sunstroke, bug bite, snake bites - and bites from each other in tussles and free-for-alls - and proper deportment when young ladies were present should we ever be returned to civilization, and generally be harangued by our elders and betters. We were somewhere out in the scrub lands along the Brazos. At night the stars still went right down to the horizon: planets and stars rose and set with a clear wink right on the horizon in those days - a condition so far as I know, only rarely found on Earth anywhere anymore...
Said scrublands inconveniently took fire one day from lightning strikes (whoever heard of vandals or deliberate set fires as nowadays?), and all the Scouts were called summarily out and drafted into a huge force, accompanied by a scratch team of prison chain gangs, itinerant workers, local farmers, and "volunteers" to "fight the fires." Goodby to craftwork, story-telling and merit badge qualification try-outs. Hello - "Life is real, life is earnest." Daily now, every morning at dawn with scant breakfast and sleep-filled eyes, the bugle 
turned us out - and with wet gunny sacks and shovels we ran trooping through the absurd heat and flies and smoke and ashes up one hollow and down another, swatting out now this and now that small blaze, wherever sparks had landed. It was exhausting work. Midway of all this travail, my parents drove down from Ft. Worth to see me, for it was my birthday: June 22nd. (I remember it well, for on that day a world away, Hitler launched his infamous "Operation Barbarossa" -the Invasion of Russia - an event whose repurcussions would affect us all).
But here along the Brazos, my only concern (and Mom's) was how the special chocolate cake she had baked me, had become so hot in the car trunk on the way down from Cow Town, that the layers had slid apart and all over the trunk. (This perturbed Pop, too - but not so much as the grimy, soot-streaked, exhausted wretch who greeted him: me! LOL!) For such treatment (at the hands of the "Texas authorities," of course), Pop was rather dismayed - especially since, as he remarked to Mom, "For this, we are paying to send our son down to Scout Camp and fight forest fires all day free in this Godforsaken land?
God Bless my Pop: you had to get up early in the morning to get ahead of him! (Even if you were a Texan!)
And I could maybe say without being too wide of the mark (though some years would pass before it blossomed into a major aspect of my life) that it was "down on the Brazos" here that I got my first case of "Indian fever." For one night around the campfire, the Counselor told us all of the ancient Indians who had once lived hereabouts - and passed around the obligatory cigar box of "arrowpoints" (basically a misnomer as we shall see by and by...) he had found and picked up. Most were interested, and there was a lot of "Ohhhing!" and "Awwwwing!" - but soon the clamor rose for a more popular activity - Ghost Stories! - at which many of the Counselors really excelled (Later, in our tents, we huddled under our blankets and shivered and outside the owls and the coyotes held sway...). Travel is broadening, as they say....
But those "Indian things" stuck in my mind - and that of a friend - and long after lights out we resolved to "find out more" in the morning, as we lay in our tent and plotted an expedition. And this we did. The Counselor told us, in fact, that not very far away from the Quad, down under the edge of the "rimrock" off in that general direction (pointing), there were places "where the Indians had camped in under the overhanging ledges," and what he used to do was go down and shoo the rattlers out, and then with a sifter he had, sift the dry ashes of their ancient campfires - still visible back under the ledges. Here, he assured us we would find these arrowpoints. That was all we needed, and as we were not required for fire-fighting that day, the two of us nipped out soon after breakfast and made our way off down under the "rimrock" like he had said. We came into sort of a forested draw, I remember - with steep-to sides - probably limestone - reaching up above us and no real visible path along the bottom. We pushed on.
And so it was that as I was pushing through some dense brush along the sheer rock face on my left - almost touching it with my shoulder - I happened to glace sideways and just then a narrow vertical crack in the wall suddenly opened up and I had a glimpse of daylight and trees growing in the sunshine way down at the far end. I went on a ways and hollered for my companion to come back and see. In a few minutes he reappeared and we retraced our steps. At first, I could not find the vertical slot, though it was only a short way back. This was intriguing. Where was it? Then we found it again: right in front of the opening grew a large tree right next to the wall rock - and unless you lined up "just so" as you walked by - you never saw that the tree shielded or covered the entrance to the slot opening.
We entered the slot and squeezed on through - what? - maybe 50 or a 100 feet - I cannot remember. But at the end of this narrow "hallway" we burst out into a large, open, circular, walled area maybe 50 yards or more across. Trees and brush grew in the open center - open clear to the sky, but the rest of this amphitheater was vertical rock faces - which curved inwards at their bases various distances to provide sort of running, overhanging ledges or series of ledges all around the perimeter of this very private place. We scrambled up under the ledges near where we had entered and sure enough! It was dry as a bone in under them - and here and there everywhere you looked were "burn spots" and bits of charcoal and ashes - and firestains and smoke streaks on the rock walls... the Indians' Encampment! Our elation knew no bounds! We had found the spot! We would return, borrow the Counselor's sifter, and come back and set to work.
We squeezed back out of the opening and retraced our way back to the Quad. The Counselor was gone somewhere, but we found his sifter in a shack and grabbed it and started on the run back for our find. And from that day to this, I never saw that spot again! Boy Scouts we were, and supposedly learning at least something about the woods and how to find your way around in them. But those breaks along the Brazos, and those rough, cut-up sinkholes and limestone twistings and turnings and "draws" (All, I was later to learn, distinctive features of "karst," so-called, topography) threw us a curve. Try as we might and retrace steps as we might, we never could find that one spot again or that particular tree which admitted of only a quick glimpse as you passed by, of the way into this secret spot. And the ancient campfires never got sifted.
Perhaps they remain unsifted yet. Perhaps even Quannah Parker the fierce Commanche who once roamed these breaks, himself squatted by those long-cold ashes... Who knows?