The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 80, July 1976 - April, 1977 Page: 5
492 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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rose above this at the top of the house three stories up. It was all of wood,
painted brown, with white trimwork. With all my heart I wished we had
lightning rods; I would pray at night that before lightning could strike us and
burn us to the ground, as a house up the street had burned recently after
midnight amidst shouts and gongs and falls of fire and spark, God would send
us lightning rods. Watching the fire, and listening to it, and recalling the
lightning, my heart beat until it hurt.7
The early years he describes in the book are full of love, warmth, fine
foods, and what Horgan calls the "household arts"-good books and
pictures, and a great deal of family music and theatricals. In the summer
there are trips to the Adirondack Mountains-where Horgan's father
actually rented Cedar Island in Fourth Lake, in the Fulton chain of lakes.
Beneath these pleasures-as one senses in the description of his house-
there are strange tensions that tell on young Richard and his family: a
tyrannical German grandfather, an uncle who leaves the seminary for the
theater and later kills himself, a father who is somehow just too gentle at
the center, a mother who is too protectively loving and happily responsive.
7Horgan, Things as They Are, 6-7.
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 80, July 1976 - April, 1977, periodical, 1976/1977; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101204/m1/23/: accessed May 5, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.