STARK, JAKE AND BILLIE

                    
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JAKE AND BILLIE STARK

Across the Fence

The Hamilton Herald-News

March 19, 1981

 

By Arvord Abernethy

 

Whether we call him “Jake of all trades” or “Jack of all trades” Mr. Jake Stark has had a very colorful career and can do nearly anything he wants to do.

 

We have him and his wife Billie pictured here with his three-wheeled bicycle that he has put a motor on. The motor wasn’t built for that purpose, but Jake installed it along with the lights, horn and other required features to get the necessary license. He also built a chest on it to carry thing in. With gasoline prices as they are, he wanted some way to get around economically here in town. It will go about 20 miles per hour and get about 100 miles per gallon.

 

Jake and Billie were both born in Mills County, and both of their parents later moved to Brownwood, but they did not meet each other until his last year in high school. He graduated from Howard Payne with a major in chemistry and a minor in physics. She attended Howard Payne, but he gave her a Mrs. Degree before she finished.

 

Jake taught school at Lamesa the first year after graduation, and then went to Arizona to teach for a few years.  He would return to Texas every summer and help set up diversified occupation programs in schools. This was similar to the distributive education programs we now have.

 

The Great Depression in the 1930’s cut short his electronic schooling at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology so he returned to Dublin and began working for the light company there, and later became manager of the Brady Light Company.

 

After World War ii started in Europe and our friend, England , needed help badly, he was asked to train workers in out war industries and get them on the production lines as quickly as possible. He spent some time in the ship yards in Houston and was then sent to the Fort Worth area aircraft industry. Here he taught a two hour session to each of the three shifts of lady workers, which caused him to have to teach a session every eight hours.

 

They then went to Portland, Oregon, where they both did electrical work on new ships in the Kaiser Ship Yards. One day while he was working in Portland, three well dressed men approached Jake and told him they had checked him out and that the government had a very high priority job for him and Billie.

 

They were sent to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, under instructions not to say a word to anyone about the nature of their work. His work was mostly electrical maintenance and hers was checking uranium. They would guess among themselves as to what kind of work they were doing, but it was not until after the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan that they learned that they had been helping build the bomb.

 

At the close of the war, Jake began teaching at the Technical Institute in Knoxville, Tennessee, and continued to teach there for several years. While teaching there, they bought a little “get-away” farm out in the Great Smoky Mountains near Gatlinburg. They later moved there several years before coming to Hamilton in 1973.

 

They bought two other farms that joined theirs there at Gatlinburg and these had to be surveyed, so here is where Jake took on another vocation, that of a surveyor. Twice in his life, he could have worn the name of newspaper editor, as they owned two newspapers for short periods of time.

 

They might be called rock hounds now, as they spend some of their time collecting and making jewelry from rocks they find on their travels.

 

Jake has his workshop, Billie has her flowers and plants and both are active in the First Baptist Church, so their retirement time came and went and they are still going strong.

 

Someone has said that retirement time is when the only gleam in your eye is when the sun strikes your bifocals.

Shared by Roy Ables

ACROSS THE FENCE 

 

 

 
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People and Places: Gazetteer of Hamilton County, TX
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Copyright © March, 1998
by Elreeta Crain Weathers, B.A., M.Ed.,  
(also Mrs.,  Mom, and Ph. T.)

A Work In Progress