Revisiting Teague Park and Nugget Hill
I took an actual walk down memory lane last Sunday morning, while our “fancy car,” a 2021 Toyota 4-Runner, was being detailed for the first time since we bought it used two-and-a-half years ago. Usually, I run it through a car wash that has hard-working folks at the front to spray and scrub it before it runs through the automated wash, then a woman at the end who quickly towels it off. I take advantage of the free vacuum service after that.
However, we learned days earlier that our new puppy Daisy May, whom we acquired from an animal shelter a few hours away, gets carsick easily. She is just three months old but already 20 pounds, a Great Pyrenees/Golden Retriever mix — with possibly a dash of Aussie in the mix. She sat in my Beautiful Mystery Companion’s lap on the ride home. Without going into gross detail, the 4-Runner — and my BMC — both required extensive cleaning by the time we got home. My BMC can take care of herself. My task was getting the 4-Runner cleaned.
The detail shop I use is on the edge of my old neighborhood. The job was going to take about two hours, so I headed into Longview’s Nugget Hill for a walk. I bought a house there when I first returned to Longview in January 2008. The historic neighborhood is on the National Register of Historic Places. It sprung up during the oilfield boom, platted in 1931-1932 by a developer named Harry Turner, who named one of the streets after himself. Nugget Hill, before its development, was his family’s farm, where they raised horses and Jersey cows.
Stately, beautiful old homes are the hallmark of Nugget Hill — built in Tudor, Colonial Revival and Mediterranean styles. My home was considerably more modest, a brick English bungalow. This was before I met my BMC, so I did not require much space. It suited a single person well.
The house was less than 5 minutes from the newspaper I had returned to publish. Every morning, I got up early and headed out the door for a 45-minute walk. I walked over to Teague Park, which has a lovely pond, with loud white geese with yellow bills and a scattering of small wood ducks. Geese can be aggressive, especially if they have babies. I have a story about the Teague Park geese:
We nicknamed middle daughter Mere “Goose.” The reasons are obscure, but I called her that until she was in college, and it seemed time to move on to an adult name. When she was about 4, we came to Longview to visit grandparents and took her and sister Kasey to Teague Park. My mom snapped a photo of a couple of geese chasing Mere, who was trying to get away. My dad, who made a living as a commercial artist, did fine art on the side. He was quite talented. He took the photo, made a pastel drawing of the scene, and titled it “Wild Goose Chase.” The drawing hangs in our house to this day, more than 40 years after he created it.
My other connectio
n to Teague Park began barely a week after we moved to Longview in June 1968. I was on the cusp of becoming a teenager. My grandfather was a professional Boy Scout, the field director for the East Texas Area Council. He also ran Camp Pirtle on Lake Murvaul. Carl “Grampa” Borders immediately enrolled me in Troop 201, which began operation in 1917. The fabled log cabin hut for the troop, built in 1941, is on the grounds of Teague Park.
Our scoutmaster was V.G. Rollins, who served in that unpaid role for 22 years. Mr. Rollins was legendary for leading 50-mile hikes, air-dropping food supplies that Scouts then had to find, setting chickens loose in the woods that we were supposed to catch for dinner. (I brought a weekend’s supply of Payday candy bars and peanut-butter crackers.) His motto was “It Ain’t Done Yet.” He came to visit me in 2008, when he was nearly 80. You can read about him here.
These memories returned as I walked around the pond at Teague Park, admired the refurbished log cabin of Troop 201, and walked the quiet streets of Nugget Hill on a Sunday morning.
The 4-Runner was sparkling clean when I returned to the detail shop.
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