But his memories of John S. and Josie Ada Meason are vivid and they begin at the Whitewright train depot.

"That was my introduction to my new family," he said. "My new mother gave me quite a licking before we ever left the railroad station."

Once ensconced in the Meason home, George found that his new parents were a winter-spring couple with no other children. His adoptive mother was 24 and his new father was in his mid-40s. They were in close agreement about child rearing, however. While Josie Meason administered the first whipping, George's new father gave most of the rest. John Meason was a Christian Church preacher with a wooden leg (the result of a fall down a well) and a heart his son described as being of equally pliant material.

"I got a lot of whippings," he said. "Some I deserved and some I didn't, but they were pretty decent to me when I was little. It was just when I got a little older, especially when the Depression came along, that things got rough.

"My father never passed up that 10 percent discount," said Meason.  "It was customary in a lot of places back then for a preacher to get 10 percent off in businesses like a grocery or dry goods store and he always had his hand out for it."

"That was understandable, since the church didn't pay him that much, but what he did with me wasn't.  They had me out working as soon as I was big enough, doing yards and chores for people, but I didn't get to keep anything I was paid.  It all went back to them."

John Meason was semi-itinerant and the family moved often.  George, never a good student, changed schools frequently and had little time to make friends.  He also had lost all contact with his sisters and brother and heard nothing of them until he was living in Dallas in the mid-1920s.

"Julius and I hadn't seen each other in about five years. he said. "A lady who lived across the street from us knew I was adopted and she kept looking at me.  Finally, she asked if I had a brother who looked a lot like me and I told her I did and she said she thought she knew him, that he was living in Sulphur Springs.

"She took me out there to see him and we got to spend a whole day together.  We didn't see each other too often after that, but at least I knew where he was."

The Measons moved to Richardson when George was 12 and he continued working at odd jobs his parents found for him.  He had begun holding out small amounts of his pay and "tips" and purchased a few things for himself, a five-dollar .22 caliber rifle and an erector set and the beginnings of a stamp and coin collection.  His father preached and worked with the undertaker who managed a hardware store and a funeral home in the same building and prepared bodies in the basement.

"I remember a fellow got hit by a train there one time when I was about 14 and my father and the undertaker had him down there in the cellar and I was with them," he said.  "The undertaker'd drained the blood out of this man and was pumping embalming fluid n him.  The man's blood was in a bib bucket and my father handed me that bucket and told me to take that bucket and told me to take it tow miles down the train tracks away from town where nobody' see me dump it out.

"I remember walking down those tracks trying to hold that bucket out where it wouldn't slosh on me.  Holding it out straight-armed and it was getting on my anyway.  I finally just dumped it.  I didn't care who saw me.  I went straight back to that cellar and told him, "You can whip me if you want to, but I'll never do anything like that again."

"He just looked at me and he didn't whip me that time."

The family then moved to West Fork, Ark., where Meason completed high school.  He hadn't planned what he would do after school, but his foster parents had made the decision for him.  On graduation day he learned that they . . .


TEXAN KNOWS PAINFUL LEGACY OF ORPHAN TRAIN FIRSTHAND
by Sarah Westbrook
The Odessa American

ODESSA - An old rag doll with eyes sewn on and no mouth is more than a keepsake for Odessean George Meason = it's a part of his heritage.

The doll symbolizes a faceless seperation of former Orphan Train riders.

Mr. Meason was one of 150,000 children who were orphans during the immigration boom around the turn of the century in New York City. Through the Children's Aid Society of New York, the children were sent on trains to live with farming families in the West and Midwest. The society was created by Charles Loring Brace.

In 1916, Mr. Meason was less than 2 years old when he and his siblings were taken from their parents in Brooklyn, N.Y. He said he doesn't know why they were taken or much about his birth parents.

After living in several foster homes, Mr. Meason was taken into the custody of the society at age 5. He and his siblings were sent to the Brace farm School in New York for training in farming. Then Mr. Meason, his brother, Julius, and his three sisters rode a train to Whitewright, Texas.

Many children lost their identities through the process, Mr. Meason said. "When they put you on that train, they put Jewish boys in Catholic churches, they put Catholic kids in Protestant churches and mixed it up," he said.

"I didn't know for years I was German. People told me I was French," Mr. Meason said.

He was taken in by a preacher and his wife in Whitewright. One of his sisters also was raised in Whitewright. Another sister grew up in Bailey, Texas, and he said he's not sure where the other sister was raised. Julius was sent to live with a family near Sulphur Springs, Texas.

"When we got off the train there in Whitewright and they started to put my brother, Julius, back on the train, we were clutching each other and wouldn't let go." Mr. Meason said. "They finally yanked him away from me and we were both crying, and I was saying, 'Don't take him, don't take him.'"

After living in several towns, Mr. Meason's foster family moved to the Oak Cliff section of Dallas when he was a teen-ager. It was then that Mr. Meason found some information about his brother.

"There was a family that lived in the house right next door to us. I was out mowing the yard," Mr. Meason said. "The lady just kept staring and looking at me. About a day or two later, she asked me if I had a brother and my mother said yes. And she said, "Does he live outside of Sulphur Springs on a farm?" and my mother said yes. And she said, "Is his name Julius?" and (my mother) said yes," Mr. Meason recalls. "And she said she had lived right across from him."

Fifteen years after they were separated, Mr. Meason went to visit his brother.

Mr. Meason and his family later moved to rural Arkansas. After Mr. Meason completed high school, he was informed by his parents that he would join the Civilian Conservation Corps. The corps was a work camp established in 1933 as a part of the New Deal to help unemployed citizens.

"They said, 'Well, you're gonna go to the 3-C camp in the morning, bright and early. Your going to Fayetteville, and you're gonna be shipped out."

"I said, 'Didn't I have a choice to say anything?' And they said 'No.'"

While in the civilian corps, Mr Meason worked in forestry and farming programs.

Life at home became difficult for Mr. Meason. "I hardly ever went home because every time it was "You got any money?" I don't know where they thought I was gonna get a lot of money. After 18 months, Mr. Meason was discharged from the corps.

Mr. Meason and his wife, Audie, came to Odessa in the late 1930s from Bailey, Texas, looking for work.

He said he was asked once whether he liked his foster parents. "I said, 'They gave me a home when I was just a kid. But when you're a kid and you're growing out from under people who don't have any children ... you get to be a burden and an expense to them, and they realize that they made a mistake,'" Mr. Meason said.

Although Mr. Meason had an unsteady relationship with the parents who raised him, he and his wife took care of them in their later years until they died.

"The hardest part of it was the way that they were using me. It got back to the same old grind," he said.

Four years ago, Mr. Meason saw his brother for the last time and relived the time they were separated as chldren. "The last time I saw Julius alive, we had been to a meeting up in Arkansas. When I left there, it was in reverse," Mr. Meason said.