Those Damned Condon Kids (05.17.22)

These three are those “damned Condon kids”, rascals who ran wild in the Fort Worth, Texas, Stockyards and environs, ca 1901. The eldest was Frank (r), my grandfather. Their dad was boss-of-bosses JW Condon, superintendent of the meat-packing behemoth Swift and Co, and as laughing old men, they told a tale about soaping the streetcar tracks” on the downhill side toward 20th Street, and it just slid past everyone who was waiting for a ride into town. I can see Bagley the motorman right now frantically trying to make that hand brake hold; it slid for ten or eleven blocks! Old man Bagley carried a hog leg six-shooter as big as the side of a house. He said he’d shoot any of us on sight, but we were long gone, high-tailing it for home to make up some sort of alibi.” The grandfather I remember was a forbidding sort, and rather disapproving once I became a teenager and less compliant. He thought more than one piece of bacon was an indulgence. The grandfather of these letters was a scrambler and a scrabbler, a traveller, a small-business entrepreneur who tried his hand at motor cars, amusement novelties, and promotions of all kinds, in the first part of a very American twentieth century. Without his letters, I wouldn’t know that fellow, the one who started out soaping streetcar tracks with his little brothers, evading old man Bagley and his hog leg six-shooter, and high-tailing it for home.