During the summer of 1979 my company moved me back to Houston and the first customer that I had called on was Bob Baugh. On my first meeting with him, I happened to have a picture of a twelve-pound bass that I had recently caught which I promptly pulled out and showed to him. He responded by producing a picture of a six hundred pound blue marlin that he had also recently caught. Needless to say, we became close friends!

Shortly after our first meeting, we had Bob and his wife out to dinner and were enjoying a pleasant evening, when the phone rang and it was my Son, Randy. He was calling to let me know he was going to be late for supper. The reason that he was going to be late was that he was stuck in my new truck, on our new Katy Prairie, duck and goose lease, and needed me to come and help with the extricating of the truck.

One of his excuses was that the roads had been ruined because the week before, a low pressure, system had come barreling ashore between Galveston and Freeport, had hesitated over Alvin, thirty miles inland, and dumped over twenty-four inches of rain in twenty-four hours. This remained a contiguous states record for a twenty-four hour, period, until it was surpassed by tropical storm Allison! The low pressure, system also soaked the Katy Prairie, thirty miles northwest, with over twelve inches, making any dirt road travel very difficult.

He, luckily, didn’t use the real reason why the truck was stuck. It was because he and his friend Doug would try to see how much mud it would take to get stuck in. In most cases Doug would also have his truck and they would alternate pulling each other out of the mire. Not this time because he and Doug had taken advantage of the early Teal season and gone hunting together in my new truck!

Being familiar with where Randy told me he was stuck, I told him, “We’ll be right out,” and fuming, I ended the call. Filling Bob in on the details he said, without hesitation, “Let’s go get him!”

We loaded up in Bob’s 4WD, truck and headed out for the short drive to the new lease. Waiting for us at the main entrance was Randy and Doug. The boys had found the rice farmer and he had pulled them out with a tractor.

Randy, Doug and the new truck were safe and Bob and I didn’t have to wade in the mud. Our evening was interrupted but our friendship was sealed and lasts till this day!

One more fact about Randy and Doug; the owner of the local car wash, a nice man and a Deacon in the Baptist Church that we attended, had banned both boys from using his facility to wash their trucks. He said that he knew when they had been there because his main drain was always stopped up, with mud, of course!