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As the nation watched in horror while levees broke and water poured into the city of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, my mind went back to my hometown of Kopperl, which was also surrounded by a levee. It rose high above our school's playground—at least it seemed awfully high to me when I was four feet tall.
Dissected by Farm Road 56 in northeastern Bosque County, and founded in 1881, the small town where I grew up owed its early prosperity to cotton production and the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway. In fact, the community was named in honor of Moritz Kopperl, a Galveston banker and Santa Fe Railroad director. But the railroad declined, and the cotton gin closed. About the most exciting thing that happened was the flood of 1957, which Texas singer/entertainer, Steven Fromholz, who also grew up in Kopperl and memorialized in his popular Texas Trilogy, was described in an August 11, 1994 article:
"When the drought broke, the river rose above any level anybody had considered," said Fromholz. "That was in 1957. All of Lakeside Village was under water. Things were washed out all around there. It was a genuine seven-year drought that ended in '57. Everything you see in this part of the county has been built since then. Hell, they even had to build a levee all around Kopperl. It's not the same town I grew up in."
Fromholz's brother, Jimmy, was in my chemistry class one semester. The levee to which he refers was actually erected in 1953, after the construction of the Lake Whitney dam, to protect citizens from possible flooding. And it held during that horrific flood of '57, when it seemed it would never stop raining.
He was correct about Lakeside Village, as well as the Indian Lodge fishing camp my parents' owned, being underwater. My parents and grandparents had worked very hard building cabins, a grocery store, a motel, a swimming pool, and just before the flood, a new two-story home. My brother, Lyle, was born that fall, and mother was crossing the river in a boat for her doctor's appointments in Cleburne because all the major bridges (Highway 174 at Kimball and the Brazos Point Bridge) were under water. The low water crossings were all full, and our school bus driver was taking long, windy routes in order to get us to school. The Brazos River was way out of its banks, and I recall seeing houses and debris rushing down into the lake as my father feverishly moved his docks and boats to higher ground on a daily basis. Finally, the water was lapping at our back door. A number of neighbors had to vacate and some absentee owners were unable to get to their lake homes or had lake homes destroyed by the floodwaters.
We were fortunate. The rain stopped and the water receded. It never once occurred to me, as a third-grader, that we were in peril—even with water just inches from the top of the levee. Thanks to that levee, a disaster was averted.
It breaks my heart that New Orleans' levees could not protect that great old city's people and all that was near and dear to them. America has suffered a great loss.
