T. HASKELL FIFE
Submitted by Frank Butcher, updated
May 11, 2007
| Haskell was born on May 7, 1914 at the Fife home
place near Ben Hur, Texas. The “T” in T. Haskell Fife was not an initial for
his first name, but was his actual given name because his parents couldn’t agree
on what to call their son. He was schooled at Ben Hur, but "majored in
football" and did not graduate from high school, quitting after football season
in the 11th grade. As an older man, Haskell had a negative attitude about high
school football, believing that the sport fostered an attitude like the one that
caused him to ignore academics. Haskell remembered that growing up he had just
one pair of overalls, and got one pair of shoes a year. Clothes were made from
sugar and flour sacks. When he was eleven, Haskell was given a horse, which he
used for transportation until past the age of twenty. After a date on
horseback, Haskell told of pointing his horse toward home and sleeping in the
saddle until arriving home. The family bought only sugar, flour, salt and
pepper - everything else was raised on the farm. They killed 12-15 hogs a year
for meat and lard. As a young boy, he was burned severely when a skillet of
burning grease was tossed out the back door where Haskell was standing. He was
left with a scar above one eyebrow and extensive scars on his chest. The road where the family lived was called Fife Lane because various members of the extended Fife family owned all of the land on either side of the road for about one mile. They were one of the first families in the area to install a Delco generator system, which charged batteries and provided the house with electricity. For spending money, Haskell remembers hiring out to pick cotton from sunup to sundown, earning 50 cents a day. Haskell was a standout athlete, playing basketball, football, track, and baseball. He started playing at the high school level when he was only 12 years old. Ben Hur played "outlaw" football, so named because several of the schools they played recruited players who also played for other teams. One of his fondest memories was kicking a 59-yard field goal in a 3-0 win over Lorena. That year, Haskell remembered that he scored over 300 points, including all 56 points in a 56-0 win. He went to the state track meet in the pole vault (his best vault was 14' 5") and in the high hurdles. In one Limestone County track meet he won 5 first place medals – pole vault, javelin, high hurdles, low hurdles, and the mile relay. In the service, he played baseball and football at Blackland AFB with the likes of Bobby Layne, an eventual NFL hall of famer. Haskell even taught pilots to swim in the Bosque River. He also had quite a reputation among the ladies as a great dancer. His daughter Linda remembers that all of her life women have come up to her to say, "Honey, your father was the best dancer in the whole country." Haskell could even dance on roller skates, a testimony to his athletic ability and grace. It is interesting to note that the woman he chose to be his wife did not dance. Haskell volunteered for the Army Air Corps in 1942, and island-hopped in the Pacific from Hawaii to Guam to Kwajalein to Iwo Jima. He served in the squadron that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. His last 6 months of service were spent with the occupation forces in Japan. Haskell and his brother James planned to open a grocery store in Houston with money they had saved in the service, but their mother suffered a stroke and needed their help, so the two brothers began farming in the Ben Hur area. Haskell and James were brothers and best friends, and they were inseparable except for being apart in World War II. As young men, the two brothers were frequent tavern visitors, and likely as not, before the evening was over they would get into a fight. Haskell and James did not start fights, but they did not go out of their way to avoid them--often taking the side of the underdog in a fight that was really none of their business. Their fighting style was to get back to back or put their backs to a corner, and take on the world. As farmers they formed a company called Fife Brothers, and cooperatively bought some land and leased even more, farming as much as 1000 acres when times were good. Haskell met and married Mary Beth Lenamon in 1946 when she came to Ben Hur to teach in the local school. At the time of his marriage Haskell was about 5',10" tall and weighed about 170 pounds. He had a 32" waist, and wore a size 46 coat. He had hazel eyes, and thick brown hair. Haskell was married with a broken nose and a broken hand, because the night before the wedding, he and James were involved in a barroom brawl. A man approached their table and without warning, hit Haskell in the face. Haskell then broke his hand punching out his assailant. Haskell and Mary Beth eventually moved into the house on the farm that Haskell had built for his parents, where they lived until it burned in 1963. The family then moved to Mart, and thereafter Haskell commuted to the farm. Haskell supported Mary Beth's decision to complete her college education, and plowed during the day with his 3-year old son David in his lap so that Mary Beth could attend classes at Baylor. His Lenamon in-laws remember Haskell for the fireworks shows he would put on every Christmas. He brought large amounts of costly rockets and aerial displays to the Lenamon farm and greatly impressed Mary Beth's younger brothers and sister, who thought he was wonderful. Haskell always had time for his nieces and nephews, children and grandchildren. He was a great listener, a good judge of human character, and blessed with an abundance of common sense. Haskell was uncommonly good with animals. He won more than one bet by wagering that he could load a neighbor’s troublesome cow without using a bridle on his horse, Snowball. He would point Snowball at the offending cow, take off the bridle, and Snowball would separate the cow from the herd and load it onto a trailer. With the crash of cotton prices, the economics of farming became quite difficult for small farmers in the 1960's and Haskell looked for outside work to supplement an insufficient farm income. He was offered the job of police chief in Mart, and served in that capacity for many years, until disagreements with the city council caused him to resign. He ran as a write-in candidate for constable, and received the majority of the votes by a slight margin, but Haskell's name was not written in correctly on many ballots. Four years later he ran again for constable and won easily, holding that job until his health began to fail. As a law enforcement officer, Haskell took great pride in his ability to relate to and counsel young people. Haskell was privately prejudiced against blacks, but on the job he put that bias aside and was known in the black community as a fair man in a time when most white policemen were not held in high regard. Lola Hall, Haskell's black housekeeper and care giver after Mary Beth died, told his children that long before she knew Haskell, he was pointed out to her by a friend who said "There goes Mr. Haskell. He's a good man...a fair man". Kate McAdams recalled striking up a conversation at a religious conference in Dallas with a couple from Mart. The man said that many years earlier he turned to Haskell for assistance after his wife left him. Before helping the gentleman find his wife, Haskell counseled him that reconciliation would be impossible unless he stopped drinking and got right with God. The man told Kate that he followed that advice and credited Haskell for turning his life around. Though Haskell could be fearless in scary situations often faced by a lawman, his courage evaporated when it came to dealing with snakes. Because his fear of snakes was well known to the family, it left him vulnerable to practical jokes. Mary Beth once placed a dead snake on the front steps of their home and left the porch light on, so that her husband would encounter the carcass when coming in from his night patrol. When Haskell saw the snake he completely lost his composure, waking everyone in the house with his screams for Mary Beth to get a hoe and kill the varmint. On another occasion, David put a live chicken snake in the cab of the farm pickup truck prior to quitting time. Haskell and a farm hand were in the cab for the trip back to Mart only briefly before bringing the truck to a screeching halt and bailing out in total terror. All of his life Haskell had speech difficulties. It was hard for him to both retrieve and pronounce words and the result was a slurred speech pattern that was hard for listeners to understand. Also Haskell was not good with names, a problem that was probably related to his general word retrieval difficulty. Haskell occasionally used the name "Bill" to refer to his son-in-law Frank as long as 15 years after he married Linda. Haskell lost one eye in a farm accident, and suffered serious hip damage when he was thrown by a horse. He eventually had to have hip replacement surgery. Haskell smoked until the age of 65 when he contracted asthma. He became diabetic in his 70's, and died of congestive heart failure on February 14, 1996. Until the end, Haskell continued to work on the farm, which was his first love. |