I guess we all yearn to return to our youth, the carefree days of being a teenager. My teenage years were spent in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s in the small Southwest Texas town of Uvalde. It is located just south of the foothills of the Texas Hill Country and about midway between the Nueces and Frio Rivers. Most of my summer months were spent playing and wandering up and down the rivers up in the hill country.

There was a teenage paradise then at Garner State Park, 38 miles up US Highway 83 from our home in Uvalde. The beautiful cold and clear Frio River ran through the park. There were numerous swimming holes along the river. The park was constructed by the CCC’s (Civilian Conservation Corps) during the Great Depression in the 1930’s. The main attraction was a large outdoor dance pavilion there where every night there was a dance for the teenagers. Families with teenagers would camp there so their kids could go to these dances. Local kids, within a hundred miles, would drive up there every night for the dance. School Districts, from all over the state of Texas, would bring bus loads of teenagers up there and camp for weeks. The unwritten rules were that any boy, with enough courage, could ask any girl to dance. Sometimes we boys even had the manners to introduce ourselves while dancing. Summer romances were intense and rampant.

So, when I work on doing one of these oil paintings of a hill country river, such as the one above, titled “A Texas Hill Country Stream”, in my mind, I am just a carefree teenager at the dance getting up the courage to go ask that beautiful girl over there under the big oak tree to dance. If I will ask, maybe she will just dance with me.

The scene in this oil painting is of the Pedernales River in the Pedernales Falls State Park, about eight miles east of Johnson City, Texas. By-the-way, be careful driving through Johnson City, there are a lot of speed-traps there.

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