C. L. Fallwell: the Old Man from the Country

C. L. Fallwell: the Old Man from the Country

At the age of nine Claude began a new chapter in a life full of exploits as his family trekked from Wise County to Greer County Texas to homestead, unaware that sixty years later this same event would open another chapter of his life. C. L. Fallwell the Old Man from the Country is a humorous and autobiographical look at a “go getter” of a man full of adventure and stories to tell. With stories spanning a lifetime he narrates chapter after chapter of frontier-living around the turn of the century. Claude’s boyhood experiences include river crossings, bull-fights, homesteading north of Mangum, Oklahoma, ranching, farming, Indian encounters, school teachers, hunting, being “man of the house” and running away from home. In his teen years he goes “up the trail” on cattle drives and is “promoted” to camp cook when the boys are fed up with the old cookie. While spending long months away from home, he prepares an unprecedented variety of chuck including both traditional meals such as SOB stew as well as the unexpected such as iced layer-cakes and various pies. In addition to feeding as many as one hundred cowpokes at a time, he acts as doctor, nurse, veterinarian and even host for visiting wives. After months on the drive, he is afforded the opportunity to visit Kansas City where he finds just the thing he needs to woo his girl back home. Always ready for an adventure, Claude moves his wife and new-born son to New Mexico where he homesteads, opens a store, and is vehemently accused of robbing the train mail car. As if to remove any doubt, he soon becomes a lawman and witnesses a sad story of jealousy and betrayal which leaves a broken family. Later, with the economy failing and their land and house repossessed, he moves to the Pacific Northwest to care for an acquaintance’s rural property. After packing and selling what would not fit in three steamer trunks, the family of five boards the train for Portland, Oregon, and then a steamer down the coast to Myrtle Point, where they lived for several years. Claude encounters wildlife of all kinds while living, hunting and fishing in rural Oregon. Never content to stay in one place or do one thing too long, he moves to Montana to run a grocery store, Idaho to work on a fruit farm, and finally back to Oregon a second time as a preacher. Years later, Claude starts his last great adventure by opening a grocery store in La Grande, Oregon. As he is a natural spell-binding story-teller, he is easily convinced to use serial stories about the Old Man from the Country to advertise the Half Way Market in the local paper. As he recounts his life each week in the classified section, he quickly gains a following and enjoys a moment of fame and generosity. Gathered here are the delightful autobiographical tales of C. L. Fallwell the Old Man from the Country. Dwayne Towell has degrees in Computer Science and Software Engineering, but interests that are considerably more eclectic. After graduation and marriage, he spent fifteen years in Portland, Oregon, as a programmer, software architect and technical director for a game-oriented software development company, where he enjoyed both crafting and playing stories and puzzles his two children could enjoy. In 2003, he made a career change to college professor and has been teaching Computer Science at Abilene Christian University for the past eight years. When not engaging young minds in the intricacies of computation and software development, he spends time modeling with LEGO, enabling software entrepreneurs, playing board games, conquering video games and more recently exploring folk stories and the events surrounding them. Dwayne grew up hearing the stories of C. L. Fallwell read aloud by his mother as they travelled cross-country in a station wagon. His recent interest in history and these folk stories was fueled by a desire to preserve the stories in C. L. Fallwell the Old Man from the Country for future generations.