The other large figures in my childhood
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oil painting were relatives: my maternal great-grandparents, my great-aunt Otie and great-uncle Carl Russell, and most of all, my great-uncle Oren—known as Buddy, and one of the lights of my life—and his wife, Aunt Ollie. My Grisham great-grandparents lived
oil paintingsout in the country in a little wooden house built up off the ground. Because Arkansas gets more t
china oil paintingornadoes than almost any other place in the United States, most people who lived in virtual stick houses like theirs dug a hole in the ground for a storm cellar. Theirs was out in the front yard, and had a little bed and a
china oil painting small table with a coal-oil lantern on it. I still remember peering into that little space and hearing my great-grandfather say, “Yes, sometimes snakes go down there too, but they won’t bite you if the lantern’s lit.”
handmade oil paintings I never found out whether that was true or not. My only other memory of my great-grandfather is that he came to visit me in the hospital when I broke my leg at age five. He held my hand and we posed for a p
oil painting reproductionsicture. He’s in a simple black jacket and a white shirt buttoned all the way up, looking old as the hills, straight out ofAmerican Gothic. My grandmother’s sister Opal—we called her Otie
Painting From Photo —was a fine-looking woman with the great Grisham family laugh, whose quiet husband, Carl, was the first person I knew who grew watermelons. The river-enriched, sandy soil around Hop
oil paintings wholesalese is ideal for them, and the size of Hope’s melons became the trademark of the town in the early fifties when the community sent the largest melon ever grown up to that time, just under two hundred pounds, to President Truman. The better-tasting melons, however, weigh sixty pounds or less. Those are the ones I saw my great-uncle Carl grow, pouring water fr
Decorative paintingom a washtub into the soil around the melons and watching the stalks suck it up like a vacuum cleaner. When I became President, Uncle Ca
Watercolor oil paintingrl’s cousin Carter Russell still had a
Group paintingwatermelon stand in Hope where you could get good red or the sweeter yellow melons. Hillary says the first time she ever saw me
Floral oil painting, I was in the Yale Law School lounge bragging to skeptical fellow students about the size of Hope watermelons. When I was President, my old friends from Hope put on a watermelon feed on
Landscape oil painting the South Lawn of the White House, and I got to t
Nude oil paintingell my watermelon stories to a new generation of young people who pretended to be interested in a subject I began to learn about so long ago from Aunt Otie and Uncle Carl. My grandmother’s brother Uncle Buddy and his
Artists oil painting wife, Ollie, were the primary members of my extended family. Buddy and Ollie had four children, three of whom were gone from Hope by the time I came along. Dwayne was an executive with a shoe manufacturer in New Hampshire. Conrad and Falba were living in Dallas, though they both came back to Hope often and live there today. Myra, the youngest, was a rodeo queen. She could ride like a pro, and she later ran off with a cowboy, had two boys, divorced, and moved home, where she ran the local housing authority. Myra and Falba are great women who laugh through their tears and never quit
Cartoon oil painting on family and friends. I’m glad they are still part of my life. I spent a lot of time at Buddy and Ollie’s house, not just in my first six years in Hope, but for forty more years until Ollie died and Buddy sold the house and moved in with Falba. Social life in my extended family, like tha
Family oil paintingt of most people of modest means who grew up in the country, revolved around meals, conversation, and storytelling. They couldn’t afford vacations, rarely if ever went to the movies, and didn’t have television until the mid- to late 1950s. They went out a few times a year—to the county fair, the watermelon festival,
Portraits oil paintingthe occasional square dance or gospel singing. The men hunted and fished and raised vegetables and watermelon on small plots out in the country that they’d kept when they moved to town to work.
