JOE BUCKNER

The following bio was taken from page 132 of the book entitled "Rusk County History" compiled and edited and used with permission of the Rusk County Historical Commission.

Transcribed by Shirley Koym

Submitted by Gloria Briley Mayfield, Rusk County TX Coordinator

Joe Balley Buckner was born November 5, 1900, to Robert Garrett and Lorey Etta Swink Buckner. The tenth of fifteen children, he was named for a famous politician.

Joe’s earliest memory is of a time in the fall of the year when he was about three. After the crops were all in, they would order needed things from a catalog. This time Joe was old enough for britches. When the big crate was opened and the britches were about to be tried on, his sister Benona, who was about six, cried and screamed like a tiger to keep from having britches put on her "little sister!"

Life was simpler in those days. The family had to work hard, but had fun, too. At Christmas time there were washtubs full of candy and a mantel full of stockings. The stockings held an orange and a new pair of wool socks, made by their mother – and sometimes there would be new gloves.

Joe enjoyed going to school. The Buckner children walked three miles to the Glenfawn schoolhouse. Joe and his younger brother Russell hated to wear shoes. They would take them off when out of sight of the house and hide them in a hollow tree. Before he was out of the first reader, Joe was reading geography and history books. He read everything he could get his hands on. He and Russell would skin cats and other animals and sell the hides. Joe spent all his money on books ordered through the mail.

In 1920 Joe left home for the first time and enrolled in Jacksonville Baptist College. He received a letter from his Dad in the spring of 1921. He was needed at home. He went home and helped to make a crop that spring and summer. In the fall he began school at Sam Houston Normal Institute (as it was known then) in Huntsville. He received a teachers’ certificate there and took a school in Buna, Jasper County, where he taught until 1926. He came back and went to school for a short time at Stephen F. Austin. After that he went home and made a crop for his dad, whose health was not good. After the crop was laid by he planned to get another school. At about that time, older brother, John, who was in road construction work, was in a serious car wreck. Joe went to help out and ended up working for him about three years.

Joe and John were working in Pecos when Joe met Clara Fuqua. She was the youngest of nine sisters. He was the good-looking Sunday School teacher, and all the girls, except Clara, flirted with him. She was shy. But, she was the only one he asked for a date. Six months later, on August 12, 1927, Joe and Clara were married.

Betty, first of Joe and Clara’s nine children, was born in Athens in 1929. The others were born after they moved back to the Buckner homeplace: Gene (1931), Louise (1933), Jeanette (1935-36), Ruby (1940), R. G. (1943), Mary (1947), Martha (1948), and Janice (1952).

The family lived first in a small house of his father’s. In the fall of 1934, they built a new house. That same winter, it burned down, on Louise’s second birthday. Before the ashes were cold, they began rebuilding. They lived with his sister Benona until they could move back into their own home.

Joe and Clara celebrated their 50^th anniversary in 1977. As of October 1981, they had twenty grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Submitted by M. R. Buckner