Randle's long life to be celebrated

SHERRY KOONCE

PORT ARTHUR — Far from his home in Port Arthur, and in what seems like another lifetime, a shooting incident left Joseph Randle’s mother praying for her young son’s life. Her pleas were not in vain because the 9-year-old youngster not only survived, he’s now living in the second century of his long life.

At 102, Randle said he doesn’t know if he’s the oldest man in Port Arthur, but he is certainly the last man standing in his family.

“The good lord just took care of me,” Randle said. “I had a large family and now they are all dead except a couple of cousins and some grandkids.”

From his modest home in Port Arthur, Randle said he’s forgot more than most people have ever seen, and his memory is as sharp as a man’s much younger his age.

His life reads like dog-eared pages of a history book.

Born in 1907 — a year before Henry Ford introduced the first Model T automobile — he’s lived through the sinking of the Titanic, the first commercial radio broadcast, prohibition, the introduction of “talking movies,” the Great Depression, two world wars, the assassination of presidents William McKinley and John F. Kennedy, the moon landing, the Civil Rights Movement, the introduction of computer technology, and hurricanes too many to count, just to name a few of the many events coloring his long life.

“I’ve seen a lot,” he said from his porch swing at his Port Arthur home Thursday.

Raised in Brenham by his single-parent mother, Lucinda Gardner, Randle was the youngest of four children who did their part to eek out a hardscrabble existence.

Nearly from the cradle, he and siblings helped on the farm their mother owned. Days were long and backbreaking, but work tilling the soil was as productive as it was honest.

“She would put us at the end of the plow and she rode the plow,” he said.

The family’s mainstay crop was cotton and corn cultivated from fertile soil in the rolling hills of Washington County. Year after year, the garden yielded enough for a meager existence sustained from homegrown vegetables that kept the family from going hungry during the dark days of the Great Depression.

As bad as those days were, they could not compare with the heartache Randle’s mother felt when her baby boy was shot at the hands of a cousin in 1916 when he was just 9 years old.

Randle said it was no accident. His 17-year-old cousin was involved in an argument with someone else, and intentionally fired his shotgun toward Randle when the youngster stepped out from behind a tree. The No. 2 New Chief Shell struck Randle in the right elbow and the left wrist.

Doctors were scarce in those days.

He nearly bled to death waiting on the country doctor to get there. Once the physician arrived, Randle said he was laid on the kitchen table where the doctor performed a crude surgery.

“My mama prayed and prayed. I bled through two mattresses and onto the floor. They thought I was going to bleed to death, but I lived, and have outlived them all,” he said.

Randle said he was down for 321 days before the injury healed — and then his arm was twisted, leaving him partially disabled. He eventually found employment at what was known as a “plantation” down the road.

There, he raised cows, hogs and drove the tractor. During the prohibition years when alcohol sales were banned, Randle perfected another crop —moonshine whiskey.

Those who knew Randle called him by his nickname, “Booster.”

The name became synonymous with the best moonshine in Washington County, he said.

“They called it “Booster’s Whiskey,” and bought mine first. Them other people could not sell their’s until mine was gone,” he said.

Randle recalled how a man would come out of Houston to pick up a load of Booster’s Whiskey.

‘He had a running board on the car. He’d fill up glass jugs every two weeks and go back to Houston,” Randle said.

After prohibition was over in the early 1930s, making moonshine became as illegal as consumption had been a decade earlier.

Randle moved his still from the house where he and his first wife Lola lived with his mother, to the woods.

Eventually, legal alcohol sales put him out of business, forcing Randle to look elsewhere for employment.

In Port Arthur, an uncle said work at the plants was plentiful and the pay was good.

Without Lola — because she “quit us,” — Randle moved to Port Arthur and found employment with W.J. Construction, where he worked for 33 years before retiring.

“I did not intend to stay, just got to working and stayed here,” he said.

The pay, he said, was much more than the $2 he’d made a day farming, and far less risky than the whiskey business.

Though Randle married twice more — the third to longtime wife Mildred — his mother stayed in Brenham and raised his only child.

“I still go to the cemetery every May to put flowers on my Mama’s grave,” he said.

Though his beloved Mildred is gone, Randle still tends to the flowers she planted before her death, and has developed quite a green thumb of his own.

He’s also become adept in the kitchen, cooking three or four days a week.

But, not on Saturdays.

That’s when he takes his 1965 Chevy Chevelle out for a spin. One Saturday he drives to get chicken, the next seafood. On weekdays, he’ll drive his 1971 GMC truck around town, said his longtime friend Velma Frazier.

She’s known Randle from church, where they met in the 1970s.

“I’ve got real close to him over the years,” she said. “He’s just a grand man.”

Frazier marvels at her longtime friend’s energy and his sharp mind.

“He still goes to his union meeting, where he’s the treasurer,” she said.

Randle doesn’t know why he lived so long, all he knows is he has, and his life has been filled with countless days of living.

“I’ve seen a lot during this old life,” he said. “The good lord has just took care of me.”

skoonce@panews.com

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