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During my sophomore year in college, in 1978, I made a friend. Kenny Sanford was not your average friend for a college student, as he was in his eighties, but we felt at home with one another from the very start. He and his wife, Dona, were members of the East Main Church of Christ in Nacogdoches, where I had begun to attend. It was a very small congregation - at the time about 40 on a good Sunday morning - and, like Kenny, the membership was getting on in years. They were very pleased to have someone young like me take an interest in their little place, and I went to work right away leading singing. It was a good fit, because I was raised by my mother to appreciate the elderly and had no problem working among them.
As we grew closer and I began to spend more time with Kenny and Dona on Sundays at their dinner table, I grew fascinated with the stories he had to tell. He was born in 1896 (the year Harriet Beecher Stowe died) and remembered well the events of his youth. One of his earliest memories was when he was four years old and witnessed someone being killed by the proprietor of a saloon...an old-fashioned "saloon shootout", he used to say. And he told of a time his family moved down to Trinity County when twenty miles was a good day's travel up and down the hills of East Texas in a covered wagon.
Kenny served in World War I, but never made it to Europe because the Armistice was signed the day before his unit was supposed to depart. In spite of that he was proud to have served and a picture of him in uniform was proudly displayed on the living room wall. Soon after he got back home from boot camp, right around 1920, he heard of an opportunity for veterans to buy "school land" east of Houston for $2 per acre. That was an offer that he forever lamented passing up.
He wasn't stuck in the past, though. His favorite TV show was the Dukes of Hazzard because he loved the car chase scenes, and we would often talk about the news, with "all the meanness going on nowadays". It was a delight to know Kenny, Dona and, later Kenny Jr, who, among his seven surviving children (one died in WWII), cared for them the most.
Because of their age, health issues occasionally popped up and I'd hear about what the doctors would diagnose and prescribe. One Sunday Kenny shared with me that he was supposed to cut down on salt, and that he and Dona were trying to figure out how. I observed that he was about to eat crackers with his soup, and pointed out that they were covered with salt on one side.
"Really?", he said, looking up. "How am I supposed to get it off?"
"Easy," I answered, "just get the salty sides and rub them together. All the salt will come off."
Willing enough to try, he did just that - found the salty sides of two crackers and rubbed them together...right over his bowl! He was satisfied that he'd done what the doctor said, and commenced eating his soup, which was now a bit saltier than before.
Our friendship endured for as long as I was in Nacogdoches, but the day had to come when he passed away, I believe in 1985 (I was living in Memphis, Texas, teaching high school at the time). On my first visit after that happened Dona took me to his closet and asked if I wanted any of his old shirts. I took a long-sleeve western-style shirt I'd seen him wear many times, and to this day it is hanging in my closet as a keepsake of our friendship.
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