Hunt Co., TX - News: Celeste Courier, May 21, 1954 ************************************************************* This file was contributed for use in the USGenWeb by: Sarah Swindell USGenWeb Archives. Copyright. All rights reserved http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm ************************************************************* As you old-timers know, my father, Rev. Sam Jones, performed many marriages from 1902, when he arrived in Celeste, until his death in 1946. He never married a divorced person and was always careful to ask questions before performing the marriage. I was so well grounded in the way he tried to be led by God in marrying folks, that I, too, never marry divorced people, believing as he did with the Bible to be my role and practice. I shall never forget when I was about eighteen, going with a young lady about a mile from where we lived and on a Friday night, giving her a box of candy (I think it cost me fifty cents). Then on the following Sunday, she came with her real boyfriend and I served as witness while Papa married them. My friends congratulated me as being the lucky boy! I know they were right for God had a wonderful helpmate for me in the future when I got old enough and stable enough to marry. One day during the cotton season, after Papa had sold a few bales of cotton and had about one hundred dollars on his person and before he had deposited same in the bank, he was called out in the country to marry a couple. He went as fast as he could in an up-to-date buggy. The man he was to marry was known to be the stingiest man in Hunt County, I guess, and, of course, Papa never charged to marry people. If they wanted to give him something, it was all right. If they did not, it was all right. So Papa was surprised when the man said, "Do you have change for this twenty dollar bill, if so, I will give you five dollars?" Ordinarily Papa would have been broke, but when he pulled out the purse with the hundred dollars in it and made the proper change, the newly married man liked to have passed out. Papa had a big heart of love toward the Negro race and married a lot of them. They thought lots of Papa, too, and come to ask him advice and to get him to marry them. I remember a fine Negro couple coming on one occasion to get married and sitting on the stair steps while Papa was performing the ceremony. At the last word, the Negro man gave his recent bride a smack that still echoes in my mind. Next week, I want to tell you about some wonderful teachers I had as a boy in the Celeste Public School. (May 21, 1954, "Childhood Memories," by Rev. Lemmie R. Jones)