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