respected and revered his father who was a reverend, but he was drawn into diversions from the straight and narrow early on. Eventually his fascination with gambling took him over and led him down a troubled road.

         W. T.’s father, William Porter, my great-grandfather, had a roadside general store on the west side of Damascus, Arkansas, in the early 1900’s. He was also a circuit-riding Baptist preacher. He had a beautiful white horse with a black saddle that took him from meeting to meeting in the surrounding area. He would preach at churches, tents, dinner-on-the-ground gatherings, wherever he was called to serve. He operated his general store to feed his family and preached the gospel to feed his soul.

My great-great-grandfather, James Marshall Nicholson, was also a minister and died in Perry County, Tennessee, in 1911. So, it appears that preaching was a calling with my ancestors, but it ended

with W. T.  

    Among his friends, W. T. was more knowledgeable than most about all the various card games. By age twelve, he’d learned how to shuffle and deal in a flamboyant style, with a few tricks thrown in. Unfortunately, that may be what boosted his confidence. By the time he was seventeen he had a bit of a reputation as a card shark. He got in a game with two guys who worked together to make the cards fall in their favor. W. T. got deeper and deeper in the hole to these scoundrels to the point that he used his dad’s magnificent white horse and custom saddle for his stake, mistakenly thinking he could play his way out of his bad luck. The gamblers were long gone with it all before W.T.’s father found out, or he would have surely gone to them and offered to pay the debts and get his beloved horse back—and then take it out of W. T.’s hide. The word got around fast, confirmed when William Porter rode a mule fifteen miles to his scheduled service, then cancelled the next month’s circuit entirely. The condemnation was stern. William Porter would not speak to W. T. and forbade the rest of the kids to as well. Although he was still living at home, he was made to sleep in the barn, in the stall the great horse had once occupied. After a cold Thanksgiving and Christmas passed that year, W. T. decided his only move was to leave what once was home. He was nineteen.

    What happens next is a Frank Capra movie in my mind. W. T. left Arkansas and headed West. Who knows if he had any destination in mind, but he soon landed in the little North Texas town of Whitewright. There’s no town square in Whitewright, just one main street with stores on both sides. In 1905 I can’t imagine there was much going on. W. T. made a promise to the owner of a storefront that if he would advance the space to him for one month, he would lease it for a year. He then collected an assortment of used tables and chairs, hooked up an electric light and fan to the ceiling, and declared it a domino hall. There were five tables with four domino players at each table. Players could bring whatever they wanted to drink, no waitresses required. There was no open gambling going on that would attract criticism, or the law. W. T. charged a nickel for each game, and the popularity of the place grew fast with local farmers desperate for a little diversion.

    Late one night, someone came to the house to report a fight had broken out at the domino hall. Tables and chairs were broken, and a window smashed. W. T. took his pistol and made the short drive into town. His oldest son, Bonnie, went with him. 

    W. T. arrived at the scene and sized up the situation fast. A couple of domino-playing farmers got in a fight over a trivial game dispute and, with white corn liquor fueling them, they were soon tearing up the place. W. T. knew he had to get them out and into the street. He stepped inside and fired a shot into the ceiling, willing to sacrifice a little plaster to get attention. Instantly, the room went dark, and the fighters could not see enough to carry on. It was easy enough to herd the drunks out the front door where they could keep fighting by the light of the moon and a streetlamp.

    The next morning, looking over the damage with some friends, someone saw that the electric wire that hung across the ceiling to the one lone light bulb had been split in two. When he left the scene that night, W. T. assumed that he’d gotten lucky and shot out the bulb. As he inspected the split wire, he commented to a friend, “Yeah, I decided to shoot the wire in two instead of shooting out the light. Those bulbs cost a nickel each.”  

    The story got around that W. T. was a sharpshooter and not to be fooled with. No fights broke out at the domino hall ever again. 

    After the domino hall got going, W. T. noticed that the farmers all went down to meet the train to get their feed from the boxcars. He secured another space across the street and opened a feed store. He simply went to the train and collected the feed, then he brought it to his store in town to sell, with a small markup for the convenience. 

    Next W. T. took over the town’s one grocery store from an older owner who was looking for a way out. W.T. knew the business from working in his dad’s store in Arkansas, and he quickly extended the stock to include patent medicines and other staples. He was selling local produce and eggs, had a butcher counter, and a moonshine connection. On Saturday nights, fiddles and guitars came out and music would be made right there with the canned goods. With the success of the grocery business, W. T. was able to open a men’s and women’s apparel store. The next obvious thing was to partner with a friend in a hardware business.

    The Model T Ford came into existence in 1908 and became an immediate sensation. You could get where you wanted to go ten times faster and more comfortably. W. T. started a jitney service from the surrounding North Texas towns into Dallas. It soon became very popular. In order to keep four or five of his cars running, he bought a couple more cars for parts. North Texas had mostly dirt roads, and sometimes not even that. It was amazing how well the design of the Model T could handle them.

With all his enterprises expanding nicely, W. T. got back into gambling, for fun and profit. After losing the horse and saddle and being thrown out of the family, he had sharpened his skills considerably. He would arrange games with doctors and lawyers and business owners who had a little money to play with. W. T. would always make a big deal of opening a new deck for every game, expressing great disdain for anyone who would cheat. He had picked up a way of marking the cards with a few shuffles while talking and carrying on with some card tricks. W. T. would host the games at an ever-changing, discreet location. He could manipulate the way the cards fell to favor various players, never drawing suspicion by winning any more hands than the others. The day after a game, players would show up at the house with W. T.’s commission for what he had helped them win. 

    Then the Great Depression hit. It devastated the little empire that W. T. had built up in Whitewright. One by one, all his businesses failed. There just wasn’t any money. The grocery store was the last to go. Whatever canned goods that remained were left for families everyone knew would not be able to pay. It was down to keeping your neighbors from starving. 

    I still have some of the checks written to my grandad that he never tried to cash. 

    Just when W. T.  thought things couldn’t get any worse, the beautiful Victorian home that he’d built burned to the ground. The house was magnificent, with bedrooms for all five kids, but the only pictures of the place went to ashes with everything else. My dad, his two brothers and two sisters, watched with their parents as their belongings went up in flames. The family moved to a farmhouse just outside of town that my dad described as a “rock farm” due to the lack of any worthwhile soil for planting. W. T. would joke, “The best thing that ever happened to me was going broke ’cause the kids got hungry enough to leave home.” 

    I was only two months old when W.T. passed, but I heard stories from my dad and aunts and uncles.      He was a jokester, a prankster, a juggler, who could throw an apple and hit any target.

    My dad always spoke of him with a reverent tone, as if amazed by his father’s talents and abilities. When I was only ten or eleven he introduced me to some old men in Whitewright who had known W.T.  He said, [MOU1] [GN2] “These fellas know all about your granddaddy and can tell you all about what a character he was.” One of the old-timers smiled and gave me a thumbs up[MOU3] [GN4] , he said, “I remember Nick throwing an apple and hitting Abernathy’s law practice sign and making it spin around, daring him to sue him if he was really a lawyer. It was all in good fun, Nick just liked to stir things up”. I can imagine my granddad hanging out “shootin the breeze” with his pals, organizing a poker game and drinking some homemade whiskey. When I look at the worn out finish and the scuffs and scratches on my old 1915 L1 Gibson I wonder what other scenes it might have witnessed at Nicks grocery store on a small town Saturday night.