Added January 21, 2024
Interview of Ben Petmecky (Benjamin Joseph Petmecky Jr.), conducted May 24, 2009, in San Marcos, Texas, by Susan Burneson, interviewer, and Rob Burneson, videographer, for Voices of the Violet Crown. Ben lived on Joe Sayers in the Brentwood neighborhood of Austin in the mid-1950s. The interview DVD and transcript are archived at the Austin History Center.
Copyright 2009 Susan Burneson. All rights reserved. Kindly talk with us before reproducing any website content.
00:00:00
SUSAN BURNESON:
My name is Susan Burneson, and I’m interviewing Ben Petmecky of San Marcos, Texas. My husband, Rob Burneson, is videotaping. We are talking with Ben as part of an oral history project about the Brentwood and Crestwood neighborhoods of Austin, Texas. The project is called the “Voices of the Violet Crown.”
BEN PETMECKY:
That is very impressive. I didn’t know that Austin had a Violet Crown for a long time. I knew it had a kind of a funny glow over the top and I . . . Anyway, it’s a beautiful town I think and I love it. My ancestors have been there for generations. You’re not photographing me now are you?
00:00:55
ROB BURNESON:
Yes, Sir.
BEN PETMECKY:
Yes. Well, that’s been a while ago. My name is . . . I was born Ben Joe Petmecky, Jr. [Laughs] No, Benjamin Joseph Petmecky, Jr. But I shortened it as soon as I could and got rid of the junior. I still get mail from the University of Texas, for which I have three [3] degrees, addressed to Benjamin Joseph Petmecky, Jr., and I’ve been to the registrar’s office and told them to change it. I don’t know why they didn’t. Well, if this is gonna be about me I guess I’m supposed to talk about myself. I am eighty-six [86] years old and I’ve had two strokes and I cannot walk, and there’s a lot of things I can’t do. Of course, it makes you mad, but you sort of put up with it.
00:01:56
I used to live in the area that you’ve been talking about [Brentwood neighborhood of Austin, Texas]. I bought a little house there almost sixty [60] years ago, and this house was built by an architecture student. It’s sort of slanted across the block and it was made out of transite panels. Transite is a product about a fourth [1/4] of an inch thick and it’s made of cement and asbestos; very smooth. And there were these panels making a wall all around the front yard, and so nobody could see in at all. The house [as of 2009] is still there. The side of the house that faced the inside of the yard was all glass, and actually there were two couples lived there at first, one at each end of the house.
00:03:25
One time I went to the bank and made a deposit and left my address and the teller said, “Oh, you live in that house on Joe Sayers that has a nudist colony in it.” And I said, “How’d you know there’s a nudist colony there?” He said, “Oh, the pilots out at Bergstrom Field told me about it.” If you knew what goes on in there, and if walls could talk, you’d never leave home. Well, that’s kinda of what it was. I enjoyed living there, and Hugh Black and I lived there together. He is just two [2] years older than I am. He’s from Memphis, Tennessee. And, after Hugh and I were living there together for a while we decided to go to Mexico for a year and write.
00:04:35
While we were there I bought two puma cubs, a male and a female. They were siblings. And we found out from a zoo that if pumas are born in the wild and brought into civilization they won’t live. If they’re born in captivity they will live. But those poor little things; the female died right away. The male died almost a year later, and he had grown up. I’ll show you a picture of him with Hugh. He was a nice cat, and we had him inoculated while we were in Mexico and clipped his claws, because we were afraid we wouldn’t be able to bring him into the states. We also had two [2] tiny little parrots, and we knew that parrots are really forbidden. You can’t bring them in. But as the law says, if you’ve had the parrots in your possession in Mexico for six [6] months you can bring them on in. So, when we were coming over here to the border, the men in charge saw the parrots and said, “Oh, boy, we know what we’re gonna do now.”
00:06:29
And so, I brought out a letter I had that proved that I’d had those parrots for six [6] months, and they were just crestfallen. They were gonna take them away from us. But then we said, “But what about this puma?” They said, “Oh, take him on in. We don’t have anything on pumas.” So he came to live with us at Joe Sayers Avenue, 5512 Joe Sayers Avenue in Austin. And, this wall that was going all the way around, we stretched a wire across it about the middle, and run a chain on it, and the other end of the chain went around Thor’s neck, and we had locked with a lock, and that didn’t slow him down much. As he grew he could run and swing around . . . swing his feet around on the end of that chain, and he could even do it from a stop. We’d tell people, “Go out and look at the kitty cat.” And they’d go out there and he’d jump and swack them with his hind feet.
00:07:54
So, that was lots of fun. I have a movie of it I’ll show y’all of my nephew playing with the cat, wrestling. My sister would bring my nephew and niece here to spend time with us there, and when my sister would leave them there she said, “Well, don’t let Milton go near that cat.” She [INAUDIBLE]. I says, “Milton, [INAUDIBLE] play with the kitty?” Which he did so. They were about the same size, and they wrestled. A girl next door had an 8mm camera that she [INAUDIBLE] took pictures of them and that’s what I transferred on to whatever it is, the television tape, you know.
SUSAN BURNESON:
A DVD or VHS?
BEN PETMECKY:
VHS, yes. And I took him out to Barton Springs once when he was almost grown. We walked up the creek, and I was carrying him like this. [Holds up a photo of Hugh holding Thor, right.] I don’t guess you can see it.
ROB BURNESON:
Yes, we can.
BEN PETMECKY:
You can? And, I was going down a bank of the creek, and he whirled around to catch on to me.
00:09:40
You know, cats don’t like to be out where they’re not supported. And, he had one claw we had failed to clip, caught me right under the eye and ripped it open. I had five [5] stitches, big black stitches, that were very impressive looking. But he was easily trained. The only thing about it, if he got ahold of something that he’d overpower he would just revert to his savage. You wouldn’t dare go near him then. So, anyway that was . . . Oh, the day we went there he had a spell. We took him to the vet, and the vet said to bring him back in two [2] weeks, and so in two [2] weeks I went out to get him in his house which was a footlocker I’d had in the army, and he was lying there dead.
00:10:54
So, I wrapped him up in a tarp and took him out to the taxidermist and said, “There’s a dead puma in here. I want his hide tanned.” And he said, “Do you want the head with it?” I said, “No, no. Just the hide.” So, in six [6] months the hide came back, and it was just beautiful. He had to soak it in water, and take it down all flat, and when it dried it stayed that way. So, we still have that hide, and Cousin [Eula?], who was really my mother’s cousin — she’s traveled with us — said, “Yes, this is lovely. This way you’ll have him with you forever.”
00:11:48
And, Hugh said, “Yes, it’s so satisfactory we’re gonna have it done to all of our loved ones.” So, that was Thor the puma.
00:12:03
We enjoyed living in this place and sold it to Josephine Reagan, and then she lived there a while, and then she sold it again, I think. But that was almost sixty [60] years ago, and that’s all I know.
00:12:39
SUSAN BURNESON:
How did you choose the house on Joe Sayers?
BEN PETMECKY:
I chose it because I was working for the U. S. Geological Survey, upstairs, and downstairs on Lavaca Street there was this real estate agent, and on the way home one day I stopped and asked him if he had anything to sell that he thought I might like. “Oh, sure, I’ll show you this house.” So, he drove me out there and showed me.
00:13:09
And, I signed the paper leaning up against the wall. I liked it, and it was cheap.
00:13:14
And, I could just make monthly payments to the original owner. So, it was very satisfactory.
SUSAN BURNESON:
So, it sounds like an interesting design.
BEN PETMECKY:
It was. The house, as I said, is slanted across the lot and the glass, the whole side of it was just one long room ten-feet wide and oh, I don’t know, I guess about thirty-feet long over the kitchen, and in the middle it had a back door that you could go to the backyard. The main way you got in there was from the front of the house.
00:14:05
There was a door between the wall and the house, and the house was like this: the wall went this way and this way all the way around. And, I had carpet grass solid there, and I must tell you, Thor, as far as he could reach, he pulled it up with his teeth. He had it just absolutely blank. One thing that was interesting: I planted a pecan tree in the yard, and it had some lower limbs. One night I was asleep in the bedroom, which was way back here — dead to the world — and I woke up and ran out there. Thor was hanging by his neck by the chain from a lower limb. He hadn’t made a sound. I just put him back over the limb. And, that was the end of that. It was almost a mothering instinct. Well, oh, one time I was out in the front yard without any clothes on, and I had a little [INAUDIBLE] hat that I had bought in Europe.
00:16:02
That’s all I had to keep the sun off me. Next door there were tall elm trees, and I heard somebody say, “That sure is a fancy hat you have on.” That [boy?] had climbed up the tree. So, that was the end of that.
SUSAN BURNESON:
So, do you remember some of your neighbors who lived around there?
BEN PETMECKY:
I remember one on that same side. There was a blind couple, and they had a little girl, and that little [girl] would go and hide from them when she didn’t want to do what they wanted her to do. They’d ask us to come over and help them put up canned goods or something, once in a while, you know.
00:17:04
Well, they, you know, they were blind. They have real good memories, and they just remember which was which. There were other people that lived in that house, but I remember the blind people. On the other side of us lived a couple that had a little boy, and then they had chickens in the backyard. The wife’s mother would go out there and say, “Here pretty girl, come get your food.” I didn’t think the hens were as pretty as that, but she did. We didn’t really socialize with any of them.
SUSAN BURNESON:
So, at that time were you a professor in San Marcos [Texas]? You drove back and forth?
00:18:08
BEN PETMECKY:
Yeah, I commuted, but I was always looking for a place to buy here [San Marcos]. One time I wanted pea gravel in the driveway, and so I called this company. They came out, and they poured a lot of pea gravel in the driveway. It must have been about six [6] inches thick. So, I thought, oh, boy, this is gonna be nice. I had my car, a 1952 Studebaker, you know, the Bullet [it had a bullet-shaped nose on the front], parked out here. And, I came around with the wheels running into the driveway. The wheels hit that gravel, and they just stopped. They couldn’t drive through that pea gravel. So, I told them, and they came back and scraped up half of it and took it back.
00:19:19
SUSAN BURNESON:
Were the streets paved on Joe Sayers at that time?
BEN PETMECKY:
I don’t think so. I think they paved the street after that. That may have been where the number of the house got changed [from 5512 to 5514]. Now there was a space about twenty [20] feet out from the house, the wall around the house, and it left room for a driveway on the north side, I guess. And, in the [INAUDIBLE] space out in front, which I never did anything with,
00:20:02
I called that the desert, and I put yuccas and agaves and cacti out there.
00:20:12
I never did any work on it, but I loved the inside of the yard. I always liked doing yard work. I planted bushes all around the inside. There was a patch of fig trees on the far side away from the house, and it was just single trunks coming up. I planted camellias in among them, because the camellias are supposed to have half shade, you know, speckled sun on them. And, they’re supposed to have fertilized soil, so I put a lot of peat moss in there, and they grew real, real well. They put out buds, so I thought, “Oh, boy, they’re gonna make nice flowers.” I thought it would make the flowers bigger if I put on more fertilizer. But what I didn’t know was with fertilizer, you know, when they have buds they’ll make the buds fall off; which they did. But, I learned that the hard way.
00:21:50
[INAUDIBLE] On the inside, it had a wide overhang in the glass, and I put a gutter there and down at the far end of the gutter we had a great big olla that I brought from Mexico, and we’d catch rain in that. When I lived in Mexico, at the first place we lived, that olla was the only place I could get hot water. It was high up on actually what they called a mirador, which is a decorated room on top of a house and that was in Oaxaca. Only place we could find to rent. The only bathroom we had was three stories up.
00:22:59
Down at the far end of the building was the maid’s bathroom, and that’s what we had to use. And, no hot water.
00:23:14
So, the only way we could get a shower was to put this big huge olla on top of that and build a fire under that and get the water barely warm. We had a hose coming up with a siphon hose. That was really living. We didn’t last but about three [3] months there, and we moved to Ajijic which is a small town on Lake Chapala, which is thirty [30] miles south of Guadalajara. We went there because Life magazine had run a story about it, and they showed the lake, and the lake was half covered with water hyacinths that float, you know. When the wind would blow one way it would blow all of them to one side. When the wind changed, it would blow all of it backside. And, we lived there for the rest of the year.
00:24:36
SUSAN BURNESON:
How do you spell the name of that town?
BEN PETMECKY:
A, J, I, J, I, C. We liked living there. During the Holy Week they had a parade every morning that would come down the street. We rented a house there from Margaret Lake, a woman who had been on the stage in Mexico City and in New York.
00:25:12
She had written a play for herself, and it ran twenty-seven [27] performances in New York.
00:25:25
Margaret had rented this house from a man. You know, the houses in Mexico used to be rectangles along the block divided up into rectangles by adobe walls; thick adobe walls. So, the house had a green double gate you could drive your horse in, and a patio on the right, and then a big living room in the front, and the kitchen and dining room were back here behind that bedroom, and that was the end of the house. But in the back of that was a toilet and it was a two-room bathroom. It had a toilet on one side, and a shower on the other. To get the shower water hot you had to rapido, what it’s called. Rapido was the water call up in there and he’d put burning chips in there until you got the water hot then it would come down in the bathtub.
00:26:57
The bathtub was made out of concrete and cold as can be. You wouldn’t let any part of it touch you, at least not the soles of your feet. And, the house had no running water. But, we would get water, the house had a well, and the maid would go out there and pour water up out of the well, and put it in the big [INAUDIBLE] in the kitchen, and Margaret Lake rented that place to us for eighteen dollars [$18] a month. That was because she had rented it from the owner for about ten dollars [$10] a month, and she had furnished it, so while we were living in the back part, Margaret was still up on the living room, which was a big room with a bar and windows that opened up to the street.
00:28:07
And. she lived there for a couple of months and then she… oh, she could not go back to work in Mexico City, and every morning she’d go down to the bar and order one Martini.
00:28:31
The doctor told her she could have one Martini, so the bartender fixed her a Martini in a quart jar and I guess that held her for a while. Anyway, she disappeared, and one day this old man came to our door and says, “I want the rent.” We didn’t know what he meant. So, he told us he owned the house and the woman had rented it from him. So, I asked how much, and he told us just a little bit. We gave him that, and from then on that was all it ever cost every month, so we were practically living there for nothing. And we had a maid that did everything for sixteen dollars [$16] a month and well, neither one of us had much of an income. Each of us had about forty dollars [$40] a month to live on, but we stretched it. We got to know the people of Ajijic. And, one day one of them came by and says, “Come on, we’ll get in my Thunderbird, and we’ll go over here where they’re filming a movie.”
00:29:59
And, sure enough we went over there, and there were armed soldiers all around this place where they were filming the movie. And, we sat on the hillside . . . oh, the reason we could get in was because his brother ran the generators that used for electricity. We sat on this little hillside overlooking the road, and it took them half the morning to get set up for Mr. Peck, and then when they were almost ready Gregory Peck came out and shot his scene. Then he leaned up against the leaning board, you know, that they have so they can sit down and not mess up their costume, and I told Hugh, “I never have talked to a movie star. I want to say hello to Gregory Peck.” So, I did. I says, “Hi, Mr. Peck, I just wanted to say hello to you.”
00:31:11
He said, “Well, hello,” and turned away. So, I knew that was all he was going to say.
SUSAN BURNESON:
What year was that? When did you live in Mexico?
BEN PETMECKY:
1959. [Likely it was earlier. Gregory Peck and Joan Collins starred in The Bravados, which was filmed in Mexico and released June 25, 1958.] When we saw them filming, Joan Collins came riding up the hill on a horse, and stopped to talk to Gregory Peck. And then they said, “Ms. Collins, we’re ready for your close-up.” Highly familiar. So, they did that. And then, of course, they spliced it all together to make it right. I didn’t speak to Joan Collins.
00:32:13
SUSAN BURNESON:
Now you mentioned the rent you paid in Mexico. Do you remember how much you paid for your house in Austin?
BEN PETMECKY:
It was not very much. Seems like I still owed three thousand dollars [$3,000] on it when I bought it. And now understand this is a long time ago. I paid my monthly payments was something like twenty dollars [$20] a month. Out to the bank; I’d take it there.
SUSAN BURNESON:
Did you shop at the shopping center in Crestview or around in there?
00:32:58
BEN PETMECKY:
No. But they opened the new Handy-Andy over on Burnet Road. Is that still there?
SUSAN BURNESON:
No. I don’t remember where that was. [Asks Rob] Do you? [it was at 5240 Burnet Road, in the North Loop Plaza shopping center on the southwest corner of Burnet Road and North Loop; it opened in 1958.]
ROB BURNESON:
No.
00:33:16
BEN PETMECKY:
Well, to get to Burnet Road we went south on Joe Sayers, turned right on North Loop, and went straight over to Burnet Road, and then Handy-Andy was across, a little further south. And, when they were opening this thing. [Someone knocked on the door.] Come in! Hello! Somebody’s knocking.
00:34:03
[SOMEONE CAME IN TO BEN’S HOUSE, AND SEVERAL PEOPLE WERE TALKING OVER EACH OTHER]
BEN PETMECKY:
My great-grandfather, when he was four [4] years old, came from Germany with his father [Gottfried Joseph Petmecky] and his sister. That’s when the Verein was moving people here, and they’d give them land [The Adelsverein was an immigrant aid society specifically designed to bring German settlers to Texas]. So, they came to New Braunfels . . . and I wanted to show you my family crest.
00:34:46
It’s hanging on the wall just inside. Can you take it down? Yeah, that’s good.
[NUMEROUS PEOPLE TALKING IN BACKGROUND]
BEN PETMECKY:
All right. This is my family crest. And it says [INAUDIBLE], “Hungarian family Petmecky.” So, the crest was bestowed on my ancient, ancient grandfather in Hungary, and it means “little killer of Turks.” [Laughs]
00:35:46
Now see, here’s the Turkish arm and the crescent moon. That’s a symbol for Turkey. That’s my ancestor smiting the Turk [Ben laughs], so that’s that, and this great-grandfather’s name was Joseph Carl [Petmecky]. When they were living in New Braunfels, the mother died, and the father took his children and moved to Fredericksburg and married again. So, there are all sorts of Petmeckys in Fredericksburg that I don’t know. But, my great-grandfather and his brother they came to Austin and opened a business. I think they apprenticed for a while with somebody, and he made guns, and he invented a spur that all cowboys had to have, because they were spring steel, and you couldn’t get it just caught in anything, or it would come off. And I’ve seen one of those spurs at a museum out in Amarillo, I think. So, anyway they eventually had a store in Austin on Congress Avenue.
00:37:37
It was a sporting goods store, and any man who hunted or fished hung out at Petmecky’s, because the main thing that went on there was fish stories and hunting stories. The family name was known around Austin for a long time. My grandmother, in fact, when I was a teenager, she was at a store or something. She was gonna charge something, and the girl said, “How do you spell your name?” And, my grandmother said, “Well, it’s easy to see you haven’t lived in Austin very long.” [Laughs] And, she spelled it. But, the predecessors of Petmecky are still living there.
00:38:43
SUSAN BURNESON:
Do you know what year they came to the United States and then to Austin?
BEN PETMECKY:
Yeah, they came when Texas was still a Republic. That was before 1845. I know because that makes me eligible to belong to the Sons of the Republic of Texas. Anyway, he went on to be in the Civil War, closed his business, in the Civil War way out west. He was friends with Buffalo Bill Cody, the famous man. [J. C. Petmecky’s] son, my grandfather, had been kinda puny, and the doctor said, “Keep him outdoors.”
00:39:48
Well, he had to start with an unlimited supply of ammunition, and so he stood there and practiced shooting all day.
00:40:02
My grandmother’s brother said he had seen Fred up to his ankles in shell cases. That’s kinda hard to believe. But, anyway, he got to be such a good shot that Buffalo Bill asked him to perform and be in his show, you know, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. He wouldn’t do it, because nice people didn’t do that. But, he did go to St. Louis and competed in a rifle meet. He won a big gold medal that was inscribed “Champion Rifle Shot of the World,” and that, I thought, was impressive.
SUSAN BURNESON:
And his name was?
00:40:54
BEN PETMECKY:
Fred. There are about five [5] Fred Petmeckys in Texas. One down in Houston, one up in Fredericksburg, and my uncle, Uncle Fred. He lived to the age of one hundred [100], and he even got married three [3] times and never had any children. And I sorted of looked after him into the old age. He’d still be alive, if he hadn’t been so impatient. He was in the assisted living place here, and he got out of the shower, and the nurse was gonna come dry him, and she said “Now sit here, Uncle Fred, I’ll be right back.” Well, she wasn’t right back within about five [5] seconds, so he got up to go, and he fell and hit his head.
00:42:16
He was in a coma for a week, but he died then. [Earlier] I had a big birthday party for him. Back when I could use the computer I printed colored invitations.
00:42:35
I’ve forgotten how to do that, and it was sure fun when I could use it. [Chuckles] Different size print and . . .
SUSAN BURNESON:
Did you serve in the military yourself?
BEN PETMECKY:
Oh, yes, I did. I was a pilot in the Army Air Corps. See, my father had been in the Navy at the end of WWI in something called [kid crews?]. You could go in at age seventeen [17] and you were just in it for one year.
00:43:18
But [my father] was so gung-ho Navy that when I came to the University of Texas [at Austin] I got in the Naval ROTC. They took one hundred and ten [110] men. The first they took anybody, it just started. And, if you stayed there ’til you graduated you’d be a naval officer. So, when Pearl Harbor happened Dad tried to get back in the service, but he was too old and beat up. And, he called my grandmother and said, “Don’t let Bubba [Ben] do anything wild. [Laughs] I was planning on staying in until I got to be a naval officer. I thought that would make him happy.
00:44:11
But, recruiters came around recruiting for Army Air Corps pilots, so I went down and asked Dad about it. “Oh, yeah. That’s fine. That’s fine.
00:44:24
That’ll get you in the war quicker, so go on.” He was so patriotic. So, I had to wait three [3] months to get in . . . I went to pre-flights in Santa Ana, California, and then I went to Twentynine Palms [California] for primary, and most of the men washed out. See, the reason they were so eager to get you in was that if you washed out you stayed in. Now that’s not the way the Navy was. The Navy lets you out back to civilian life. But, if you stayed in you could go on to bombardier school . . . navigator school. But, I luckily passed primary and the preflight, where I met the girl I married much, much later [Betty Boyd]. Advanced in Marfa, Texas, and I graduated there. Then came to Bergstrom to learn how to fly a C47. And, then I went to Fort Benning, Georgia, and you had a choice.
00:46:03
You could stay there and be trained to tow gliders and drop paratroopers, or you could go with somebody that’s already learned that as a co-pilot. Well, that would get me overseas quicker, so I did that. Went overseas in a converted B24. The same one that Eleanor Roosevelt had been in. In fact, there was a little sign over the toilet, you know, “Eleanor Roosevelt sat here.” So, we got out and went to New Caledonia, and then went up north to Espiritu Santu in the New Hebrides. That’s where I was first based. I think the New Hebrides Islands have changed names [now Vanuatu].
00:47:11
But, from there we would fly up the Solomon Islands taking mail and medicine and food, and one time I had to get another plane.
00:47:28
Another plane had just come up from New Zealand. Had a big pile of dead sheep in the middle of the plane [Laughs], and we had to crawl over the dead sheep. We were really glad to get those sheep, I tell you. They were in a cheese cloth bag. Anyway, our crews out there had pilots, co-pilots, navigator, and crew chief, and we’d fly [for land?]. We’d go to [Sagi?], Munda, [Brussell?], and Bougainville [Island]. Bougainville was the end. And, picked up casualties. The planes had litters that fitted against the sides. We’d bring them back to civilization. And, for rest leave there was a group of P38 pilots right next to us, and we flew them down to New Zealand. That was my first glimpse of New Zealand, which I’ve seen a lot of since.
00:48:58
Anyway, while I was there my father died [June 11, 1944], and I was engaged to Betty [Boyd], and my mother died four months later [October 9, 1944]. That left my sister [Paula] in college, age seventeen [17], and Boomer [Fred], my little brother, age seven [7]. I was twenty-three [23], and I became their guardian. So, if you can imagine a twenty-three-year-old boy with that. I didn’t know anything to do but just what dad had done. So, anyway, I got out of the army then to raise those kids. Boomer lived with our grandmother in Hutto for a while. I lived with our grandmother in Austin. She lived in what is now Pillow House. The picture of Pillow House is on a button. [Ran?] the Austin Historic Society.
SUSAN BURNESON:
Where was that located?
BEN PETMECKY:
It was 1403 West 9th Street. 9th and Preston, and Preston runs very close to the house, because my great-grandfather, Ben Pillow, gave the land for Preston. And, the house his brother built is exactly like it, but the people that lived in it they were two old maids, Eugenia and Dorinda Pillow, and they wouldn’t give any land.
00:51:15
Dorinda Pillow taught school, and there’s a school in Austin named for her. Any more questions?
SUSAN BURNESON:
No, I think that’s good.
00:51:32
BEN PETMECKY:
Well, anyway, I’ve got three degrees from the University of Texas [at Austin]. Two master’s and one bachelor’s. Oh, well, anyway, I taught art at Texas School for the Deaf, and then when Boomer [his brother] got in medical school I moved down to La Marque [Texas] to be close by. And, he graduated and went on, and he now lives in Atlanta with his fourth wife, and he is a cosmetic surgeon. When he was with his third wife, she wanted him to go to heart school, and so he spent six years learning to be a cardiac surgeon, and he told me that it was too bad. He worked for two cardiologists. They would work on a patient first, and if they couldn’t save them they’d give them to Boomer. He’d try to save them, and, of course, most of them died.
00:53:08
So, it got him down, and he said as soon as he saved up two million dollars [$2,000,000] he quit, went up to Philadelphia, and spent two years learning cosmetic surgery.
[SUSAN AND ROB BURNESON WRAPPED UP THE INTERVIEW BY THANKING BEN FOR TALKING WITH THEM.]
00:53:26 End of Audio
00:53:26 End of Recording
Ben Petmecky (Benjamin Joseph Petmecky Jr.), 88, died October 13, 2011. Hugh Goldsby Black Jr., 100, died October 7, 2020.