THE WATERMELON RAID
I remember Charles playing football after he returned to Lohn. I remembered him as the quarterback, and now we have found the 1955 Lohn Eagles football roster that confirms it. Charles was listed as a 130-pound junior quarterback. That also corrects something I had remembered wrong. I had thought Charles returned to Lohn for his senior year, but the newspaper shows that he was already back at Lohn and playing football during his junior year.
I remember one evening after football practice when Charles had me with him. We climbed into Phillip Bloomer's pickup truck, if you could call it a pickup truck. It didn't have a cab. As I remember it, there was just the seat, the steering wheel, and the truck bed behind us. We left the school at Lohn, drove through Pear Valley, and went on out to the Faulkner farm. We were going to steal watermelons. Some of the other football players apparently had the same idea and had gotten there ahead of us. We loaded the bed of Phillip's pickup with watermelons and started back toward Lohn. The other boys were a couple of miles ahead of us.
They knew we were coming. Somewhere along the road, they stopped and busted watermelons all over the pavement and then went on. Here came Charles and Phillip and me in that old pickup with no cab, no windshield, and nothing between us and the road ahead. We drove right through those busted watermelons. Watermelon juice went everywhere. It splattered all over us. I can still remember that after all these years.
What makes the memory even more interesting today is that the old newspaper has helped put some of the pieces back together. The 1955 Lohn Eagles roster shows Charles Marshall as a junior quarterback, Phillip Bloomer as a sophomore quarterback, Kent Finlay as a senior end, and Wayne Faulkner as a senior halfback. I didn't remember those names because I found them in a newspaper. I remembered them because I was there. The newspaper just helped me confirm that those boys really were together on that Lohn football team.
There is one thing about that watermelon raid, though, that I don't remember. After going all the way out to the Faulkner farm, stealing a pickup load of watermelons, and getting covered with watermelon juice on the way back to Lohn— I don't remember eating any watermelon! Music was already part of the Marshall family before I understood that it would become such an important part of my own life.
Charles and Kent Finlay performed together before either could know where music would lead. I remember their losing a competition to a group that lip-synced a song in blackface, a performance treated as humor then. The later newspaper account identifies the winning group at Area as the Burnley Rumblers.
Charles had a band called Charles Marshall and the Charlie Horses.
The band included Charles as singer and rhythm guitarist, Jerry Tedder on upright bass, Curtis Wright on drums, and Jerry Dunn on lead guitar. This was the 1950s, when music in America was changing rapidly. Country music, rhythm and blues, and the new sound that came to be called rock and roll were beginning to meet each other. For young musicians in little Texas towns, something exciting was happening. You didn't have to live in Nashville or Memphis to feel it. We could hear it.
And we wanted to play it. Charles and the Charlie Horses became part of that world around me. I played with Charles, and watching and playing with older musicians gave me an education that no music book could have provided. Kent played lead guitar with Charles at a Brady High School talent show. Charles sang and played rhythm guitar, and they won first place.
THE FFA TALENT CONTEST
Charles and Kent's music together did not end with the Brady High School talent show. In 1956, Charles Marshall and Kent Finlay represented the Lohn FFA as a guitar-vocal duo. Charles sang and played rhythm guitar, and Kent played lead guitar. They advanced to the Area VII FFA talent contest in San Marcos, Texas. The Brady Standard reported that Charles and Kent placed second in the Area VII contest. The Burnley Rumblers from Lampasas won first place, but Charles and Kent's second-place finish was good enough to qualify them for the State FFA talent contest in Dallas.
Their Lohn FFA adviser, D. E. Edwards, accompanied them to San Marcos. Kent’s later work at Cheatham Street Warehouse belongs to another part of this story. In 1956, he was simply Kent Finlay from Lohn, playing beside my brother. I played with Charles too, and soon had my own group: The Rockin’ Three.