It was with a tremendous sense of relief and gratitude that the child greeted the arrival of his great-uncle, J. T. Robbs, who had come to claim him and take him back to the family homestead near Lone Star, Texas. They traveled home, first by train to Childress, Texas, then by horse and buggy across the prairie to Lone Star. Milton slept in the buggy and his uncle slept out on the ground. The little boy heard the howling of the coyotes across the prairie and he was afraid for his Uncle Jim.

     Milton was then raised by his great-uncle, James Taylor, “J. T.” Robbs (Uncle Jim to Milt) and his wife, Henrietta Virginia, whom he called “Mama”. He was raised with their five children, his cousins: Nannie, Mattie, Elizabeth “Lizzy”, Stoke and Olive. Olive was closest to his age, three years younger, and Stoke would have been sixteen when Milt came to live with the family at the age of six.

     Before Milt came to live with them, J. T. Robbs gave land on the northeast corner of his section for the school. The school was located about one-half mile from the Robbs home. Milt told stories about going to school, about his escapades and the games they played. One wonders how much school he actually attended since, as an adult, he was virtually illiterate. Either there were major gaps in his education, or perhaps he simply had no aptitude for study. He could not spell and wrote like a child of the second grade. His speech was pure rural Texas, not noticeable effected by rules of English grammar. This is not to say that Milt wasn’t an intelligent person. As an adult, he taught himself to play the fiddle, he was a talented story teller, a humorist along the style of Will Rogers, and in all, a wonderful entertainer.

     When Milt was fifteen, he left the home of his aunt and uncle and went with another boy his age to find work away from home. When he returned, some several months later, he was much taller, had shed the knee pants of his childhood and was wearing long britches. It seems that Milt may have felt that he had something to prove, especially to his cousin, Stoke. When telling this story, he repeated a couple of times that upon his return, “They like to not knowed me.”

     There is something about this early leave taking from the home of his aunt and uncle, that makes one wonder about the quality, at the time, of the relationship between Milt and his adopted family. A photograph of Milt taken in his late teens or early twenties shows a hard, guarded, almost angry expression, completely different from his open, genial face in later photographs. Did Milt go through a period of adolescent defiance and rebellion? Was the gratitude that he felt at being rescued from the orphanage by his Uncle Jim ever seasoned by resentment at having the status of perpetual supplicant? It is tempting to speculate but there is no way to know. People of that era didn’t spend much time examining their psyche and unworthy feelings were quickly suppressed and edited.

     After Milt married, he and his wife and children regularly visited with Uncle Jim and family. Family relations certainly were congenial at that time. We do know however, that Milt was led to expect that he would inherit some land from his Uncle Jim and that never happened. Why didn’t it happen? Another unanswered question.

     When Milt returned to live in his Uncle’s home after his first venture away at the age of fifteen, he took pneumonia. This was a truly dramatic and terrible event. They placed Milt upon the kitchen table of the home and two doctors performed an emergency operation. It was said that when the doctors made an incision into his side, a large quantity of corruption poured out. He was confined to bed for six months, and for six months there was drainage from the open wound in his side.

     It seems somewhat odd, but true to Milt’s fashion, that he later told about this traumatic event from a humorist perspective. Not allowed solid food, he swiped beans and cornbread which he hid in bed with him and under the bed. His enjoyment of the stolen cornbread received more emphasis than pain and fear and his close brush with death.

 

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