1406 6th Ave – Yard of the Month (June 2018)

Fairmount’s YOTM for June is 1406 6th Avenue, which has been owned for twenty years by Gail and Eddie Roberts.  The house, its garage and one-time servants’ quarters were built prior to 1910.  The home’s exterior quotes Greek Revival, Federal and Italianate features, including Doric columns, decorative cornices, 12-light over single-pane windows, a glass front door surrounded by side lights, and full-width portico supporting a second-floor balcony.  The wooden siding is painted white, while shutters and house numbers are red. The cornices, balustrade, window trim and door surround are painted dark green. A Gothic-style white picket fence completes the crisp color theme.

For decades, 1406 6th Ave. was a rental property owned by Charles Edward Rockett, co-owner of Lusher and Rockett Contractors and Builders.  Lusher built the Villegas’ gingerbready Queen Anne Revival home at 1330 6th Ave (May 2017 YOTM winner) a few doors away, as his personal residence.  From approximately 1935-1975, Madie Collins Park, a widow and mother of 7 from Carthage, TX, called 1406 6th Ave. home.  Like 1/3 of Panola country residents, Madie was obliged to give up her land during the depths of the Depression (pineywoodshistory.com).  The Parks owned the county’s still-extant newspaper, The Panola Watchman News, until patriarch Robert died tragically in an auto accident in 1929 (Youngkin). Madie’s four sons, Marcus, Robert, Jr. Bernard and Horace, finished their schooling at Pascal High, while her daughters Madie II, Thelma, and Hazel went to TCU and TWU, and all seven children worked after school at neighborhood shops. Madie II became a teacher and was named Texas Educator of the year in 1973 (Harrison County Legacy).  Mrs. Park’s second youngest, Horace, born 1919, was a delivery boy for the pharmacy at Magnolia and Hemphill (now the home of Panther City Salon).  After graduating from Paschal in 1937, Horace spent two years at the Swift and Co meat-packing plant in the Stockyards. Horace left the Stockyard in 1939 to join the Texas National Guard.  With his first paycheck, he bought little brother Bernard, a newly enlisted Marine, a dress uniform, which he deemed “the best investment I ever made.” By 1943, Horace moved to the Army’s 17th Airborne Division as a second lieutenant and glider pilot.  Horace Park was awarded the Bronze Star Medal and the Air Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster for his role in Operation Varsity: the Rhine Crossing, the last and largest air drop of WWII in Wesel, Germany, on March 24, 1945 (Youngkin).  Park landed a C-47 supply flight under anti-aircraft fire that looked “like the 4th of July,” a rather sanguine assessment of his danger, as 12 other C-47s were shot down all around him (Youngkin).  Approximately 1300 Brits, Canadians and Americans lost their lives over three days, and the eventual death toll in Operation Varsity was nearly 6800 (National WWII Fighter Pilots Association).  After the war, Horace and Bernard went to pharmacy school at UT-Austin on the GI Bill. In 1952, Horace returned, in effect, to his first job, when he opened Perrone and Park pharmacy and soda counter on Camp Bowie. The co-owner was his war buddy Paul Perrone, a paratrooper whom he “dug out of a foxhole” in Wesel in 1945 (Youngkin).  The childhood home of a military hero, became the home of another veteran, and a military historian and educator, as Eddie holds a PhD in History from UNT, teaches at Central Texas College in Killeen, and is the author of The Psychological War for Vietnam, 1960-68, published by the University Press of Kansas in 2018.

Modern Drugs Pharmacy as it looked in the 1940’s superimposed on the current façade.  The pharmacy which employed Horace Park as a delivery boy when he was a high school student at Paschal.  https://mapitwest.fortworthtexas.gov/historicphotos/

Horace Park, Bronze Star recipient, lived at 1406 6th Avenue with his mom and 6 siblings until age 20, when he went to San Diego for pilot training. Pictured here at left a young fighter pilot in 1944, and in 2008.  Photo from Bryan College Station Eagle

Fairmount’s photo archive shows 1406 6th Ave. in 2002 with an unadorned lawn enclosed by the picket fence.  Since then, the Roberts have transformed the space into a beautiful cottage-style garden, one featuring plants of Asiatic origin intermixed with thematic statues, including a kimono-clad woman and a pagoda lantern.  The lot is anchored on the left by a cluster of Christmas Berry trees — also known as Photinia fraseri —  a member of the Rosaceae family from China, whose green and red foliage harmonizes beautifully with the paint colors of the home. The trees shelter a profusion of ferns and Asiatic lilies in their shade.  Another China native here is the peony, a woody shrub with showy pink and claret blossoms which has long been used in Eastern medicine and cuisine. The garden’s visual impact is largely vertical, as it is graced with many slender and dramatically tall blooms, including sunflowers, and pink, white and deep wine hollyhocks (alcea rosea), members of the mallow family which can reach up to 9 feet in height. Though hollyhocks are tender plants, particularly susceptible to a rust-like fungus, slugs and snails, the Roberts’ hollyhocks are thriving.  The parkway has a profusion of Blue Nile delphinium, purple cornflower (echinacea), red yarrow (achillea millefolium petra), and pink guara or Bee blossom.  One standout plant for attracting bees and butterflies is the purpletop vervain, a drought-tolerant South American verbena with a tall, narrow stalk ending in a tight cluster of lilac-colored blooms.  Gail says her favorite thing about her garden its “wildness: plants go to seed and she just takes care of them.” Peonies drop four dry follicles per flower each year; hollyhocks live for two years before reseeding and starting a fresh root; and the upright verbena self-seeds as well. All are low-maintenance with a multiplying return on a gardener’s one-time investment.

Our thanks, and a $25 gift certificate to Calloway’s, go to the Roberts family. The YOTM committee is Leah Suasnovar and Bonnie Blackwell. Biographical source:  Bill Youngkin, “A Salute to Horace R. Park, WWII Veteran.” Bryan College Station Eagle. May 9, 2016.