Sixty-four years ago I was a graduate student collecting ecological data from the Welder Wildife Refuge on the Texas gulf. A refuge employee drove up with a telegram that said my maternal grandfather Hasty was near death. Grandad was asking for me, his oldest grandchild. I stopped work, picked up Jenny and a wounded purple gallinule chick she was nursing. We drove non-stop to the Burnet hospital. George Lonzo Hasty had died. At 83 years of age, he was the oldest male in my genealogy line.
He had been removing weeds from his garden at five in the morning when he got tangled in a melon vine, fell and broke his right hip. Granny called the ambulance. When the medics arrived, Grandad insisted they load up several watermelons for the people who worked at the hospital. To my knowledge, he had never been treated by a doctor or a dentist. He had never owned a toothbrush and had all his teeth when he died.