About this time of the year, October 1974 took us down past Huntsville to do a drainage project. It was a new development on Lake Livingston called Waterwood. It was aptly named, especially that year. We were in a piney wood forest where it seemed to rain almost daily.

Being over a little out of the way for most contractors, they were having difficulty finding someone willing to come install a drainage network to help dry up the swampy terrain. We got what we thought was a fair price for going that distance and working in those conditions.

Our first son was born in August and two months later we were moving into an apartment in Huntsville. I remember that little fellow cried a lot in those first few months which made for a miserable time for us trying to adjust to parenthood and moving to a new place.

I would come in completely worn to a frazzle from trudging through the mud all day and all I wanted to do was eat and go to sleep. In a small apartment with a crying baby, that wasn’t always in the cards. My loving wife would take him for drives, to help settle him down.

I’d leave out well before daylight to make the drive out to the project. All the pipe had been pre-purchased by the developer, but unloaded a great distance from where it was to be installed. We would strap and few joints of the pipe to the blade of a dozer and take it into the site. Then the dozer would head back out to get the next load and bring it in.

The crew parked along a hard surfaced road and walked in each morning. Each day would be farther than the day before.

After a few weeks we had installed enough pipe and redirected the flow of water to where the conditions were improving. Evidently we made it to where we could actually drive close to where we were working.

Then one day a road builder started bringing in equipment to build the new roads. This whole thing was different than anything I’d ever witnessed. There were bulldozers to clear the trees and skidders to drag the logs to be loaded and sent to a local sawmill. I understood how all that worked, even though it was nothing I’d ever been around.

But once the roads were roughed in, a fleet of motor-graders started to arrive. There were probably four or five Caterpillar blades that would line up, staggered so that they would reach for one side of the right of way to the other, grading out a preparing the land for the next operation.

All of these Cat 12’s were older machines, but appeared to be very well maintained.

Behind those machines were another fleet of motor-graders that would follow. This group didn’t have moldboards for grading and leveling. Instead they each had a rome plow mounted in place of the blade and scarifying attachment.

The operator could rotate those plows to best breakup the soil and get it ready for the lime trucks to apply the dry powdery white lime that would condition the soil.

After the lime was spread along the roadway, the plows would make additional passes to throughly mix the lime and clayey soils, which would farther dry it out and make the subgrade ready to add the correct moisture content to get the proper compaction. This required several water trucks and a fleet of pneumatic and flat wheel rollers.

Each of these procedures, from the bulldozers, to the motor-graders, to the plows and compaction equipment was so perfectly choreographed. Every man on each team knew exactly what the next guy was doing.

Of course some of the tasks were alternated between the men. After the plowing runs were made those machines were parked and the same operators started running the water trucks and rollers.

At the very end a brand new Cat 14 blade came along to blue-top it. (that’s what setting the final grade is called)

As I was able to visit with the old fellow, the proprietor of the road building bunch, he told me that was going to be their last project.

“We’ve all gotten old together, and it’s time to rest”. In fact the whole bunch looked to be at retirement age. I don’t know for sure if they all went out together or some went on to build more roads.

I looked to see what I could find out about that great bunch of road hands but haven’t been able to find anything. The old gentleman’s name was Pennington and they were out of Grapeland, Texas.

I did see where there is a famous watermelon farm from Grapeland, Pennington Watermelons. Maybe they all just went to work growing watermelons.

I can’t say for sure about the exact racial makeup of that crew, but they were predominantly black and a very nice bunch to be around.

I drove down those roads not too many years ago, and they all appeared to have held up very well. Pretty good for a half century in the piney woods of East Texas.

That little boy that his mother would take for late night rides, turned 50 in August and his parents turned 72 that same month.

A footnote to this story: I have no clue what happened on top of that great subgrade that the Pennington Crew built. Not sure what kind of base material was used or where it came from. We were finished with our project before the final paving happened and we moved on, not wanting to look back on a miserable and wet winter.