THE MIERS FAMILY NAME

I am continuing with the story as I remember it about my my ex-late-husband, the father of my daughter, the grandfather of my grandchildren.  I said in a past post that he was an adopted child.  These things are what I remember I was told by him and his family during the fifteen years that he and I were married.

When Bob was a newborn, Irene said that Homer was a 'company man' superintendent over an oilfield and that she and he lived in oilfield housing in Silsbee, Texas.  They had an adopted son, named Homer Sidney Miers that hey called "Bunn", short for bunny because he had a thatch of soft white hair. Bunn had several wives, and when I met him in 1966 he was living in Las Vegas married to Pat.  Bunn and his first wife, I think her name was Jackie or Monty had a son named Butchie but as far as I know he had no other children.  Butchie lived in Nashville, Georgia.  I don't know what happened to any of that part of Bob's family.  Eva told me once that Bunn was there when Irene died but that years later she went to visit him where he'd lived on one of the streets off the Evangeline thruway in Lafayette and that his old house had been torn down. When Bunn was about four years old, Homer and Irene adopted a second baby.  

A doctor friend of Irene's who oversaw the home for unwed mothers and orphanage located at the Texas Women's College in Denton, Texas called her to let her know that there was a baby available because a 15-year old girl who was giving her baby up for adoption.  I think that means Bob's mother would have been born in about 1926 but I have no information about her. Irene told me that Homer could not go with her, so she drove from Silsbee to Denton alone to get the baby boy and bring the newborn back to his new home.  Irene said that she filled out the birth certificate before she left the orphanage and that she named the baby after Dr. Robert Bruce.  . 

Irene said that Homer had a twin brother I think his name was Floyd.   One time Bob and I drove to Daisietta and visited his wife named Flo. She had two children, Bob's cousins.  We stopped in Beaumont and visited his cousin Charles, and his sister Angela came over for a few minutes to meet Bob's new wife.  I see on my "find a grave" that a Florence Kathryn Miers of Liberty County is buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Beaumont and I think she must have died.  

Homer was from Texarkana, TX and Bob and I went one time to visit the old 'homestead' which we thought we found from the address Homer had given us in southern Arkansas, but it was a tumbled down bare old shack and I don't know if I have any pictures of it.  I remember visiting with Bob's Aunt Drew in Texarkana but don't remember the names of the other Aunt or the Uncle who lived in Texarkana.  

I only little about Irene.  Her maiden name was Cupit and she was born in a little town in Mississippi. When she was just starting school, she said that her mother died and that her father remarried to a girl who was only fifteen, the same age as Irene's sister Christine.  I met Irene's stepmother when Eva was born.  They called her and her husband Mammie and Mike and they were from New Orleans.   Mammie had worked for years lining coffins with silk at a casket factory and she made some clothes for my newborn baby in the blink of an eye and she helped me resize my own clothes to make them fit after I had the baby Eva.  

I met Irene's sister, Bob's Auntie Chrissy once when he and I went to Union Church, Mississippi.  Her married name was Varnador and I remember meeting one of her sons, Rayford (I think was a "junior" and had his dad's name) who owned the one little store in the town of Union Church.  I met his teen aged children and his wife back in the mid 70's when Eva was in about the first grade.  Eva asked me about Rayford once and had me look in my journals from back in the day.  I thought she was going to try to find people who knew Irene, but she never told me anything more.  I remember telling her about meeting Irene's brother Tom Cupit and his wife Rosalee who lived in Beaumont.  I told her more about Irene's friends than her family because I'd helped Irene send out baby announcements to Alice and Howard Brock in Austin.  I sent letters to her friend Jo Boudreaux in Lake Charles and to another in Norman, Oklahoma named Maggie Thrailkill and she had a friend in Lafayette named Mary Foss. I remember Irene once telling me that her father had 13 kids, but I didn't meet any others.  Irene said that her oilfield 'family' was sometimes closer to her than her real family.  Irene told me stories about how wanting nothing more than to get out of Mississippi and that when Tom moved to Beaumont she did everything she could to be able to go stay with him and Rosalie until finally permission was granted.  Once, on a trip to Beaumont Irene and I went to a big old office building and Irene told me that when she was in her teens she was the elevator operator and that's where she met Homer because his oil company's main office was in that building and he rode the elevator and told her how beautiful she was whenever he got the chance.  Homer and Irene always seemed to be in love and she was very distraught when he died. After she sold the house she'd lived in for a quarter of a century on Rena Drive in Lafayette, she developed heart problems and Irene had open heart surgery and a heart valve bypass back in the day when it was a very new thing for a doctor to operate on a patient's heart.

I met Bob when he was 24 years old and I was 19.  Ours was not a love at first sight.  It was more like a curiosity about one another.  Bob was a good listener and asked me lots of questions about what it was like for me growing up.  He seemed to like hearing about my moving around from place to place.  Even though he was a man of few words, I liked listening to him tell me about growing up in Lafayette.  He showed me the house he lived in and the schools he went to and introduced me to lots of his friends.  He always made me feel like what he had to say was important because he didn't always have a lot to say. 

We married in 1966.  We drove to Orange Texas to get married because a 3 day wait was required after the blood tests were taken and the marriage license granted in Louisiana. Once the decision was made between us that we were going to get married, instead of waiting 3 days, we drove to Texas.  In Orange, the courthouse staff was happy to help us get the license and steer us toward a doctor who'd give us blood tests and they even helped with suggestions about what preachers might be available to perform a wedding ceremony. We were married in the First Methodist Church in Orange and the preacher's wife and the church secretary acted as witnesses.  We had not made many plans, so the honeymoon was a trip to Houston where Bob put in some applications to do oilfield work overseas and the wedding dinner was a trip to the White Castle.  We went by and visited my Aunt Denny and Uncle Narb in Houston though and got hugs and congratulations and we drank a toast to our new union.  Then it was back home to Lafayette, where we lived at Bob's parents' house while he looked for work and I looked for housing.