Dan Nelson:  

Life My family moved to DeSoto in 1963, when the Hampton and Belt Line corner had Grime's Garage, Judah Brother's Hardware and a two story house that was a grocery store!! The Judah Brother's sign in front of their store usually had the head of the lastest HUGE, I'm talking 5 ft. plus, catfish they had caught hanging from it. If you didn't have enough money for a full box of shotgun shells, Mr. Judah would sell them for 3 cents apiece. Mr. Bagby at Bagby's Sinclair station would give you the patches and let you use his tools to fix the flat tires on your bicycle, more often than not caused by goathead stickers. There was a great fishing hole behind the funeral home, and you always honked and waved if Miss Ruby (Young) was in her yard when you drove by. There were only two stop lights in town. Hampton and Beltline and Hampton and Pleasant Run. Randy Scott and I would ride our horses Jubilee and Cricket to Ovilla for the entire weekend, hunting and fishing along the way and nobody panicked if we didn't show up again until dinner on Sunday with our spoils. A couple of boys with their horses, dogs, guns and fishing poles. Our world began when we crossed Parkersville Rd. heading south, which in 1966 was the edge of the earth!!! I would go to my great Uncle's farm (Wesley Dixon) in the Rio Grande Valley for the summers from when I was 9. In 1971,72 I went there for the entire school year, then returned to DeSoto. (No, I wasn't pregnant!) My mom passed on '05 but I still own our old house on S. Lyndalyn, behind the ORIGINAL DeSoto school. We were probably the poorest people in town (as I was constantly reminded by ahole Ken Martin and a few others who enjoyed that kind of thing), but I had the richest childhood. I had a younger sister, Laurie Hittson (Class of '80) who died in a mo...Expand for more