BRIAN and LINDA (WREN) PARRISH

 

 

Across the Fence

 

By Arvord Abernethy

October 2,  1980

 

Do you remember that I was talking to you about three weeks ago about rock houses? Well, I got to noticing that the Bryan Parrishes had the Austin stone removed from their house and had it replaced with native stone right off the ranch. Curiosity got the best of me, so I dropped by the other day to see what was going on.

 

Bryan and Linda were both at home, so I soon got to asking questions. Linda’s grandfather, Leon Wren, built the house in 1950 and there were 43 windows in it. The windows were not the insulated type and would not work and with utility bills like they are, they had to do something about them. They reduced the number to 23 and relocated some of them, so it would have been impossibly to do all the changing with Austin stone without it looking patched up.

 

While they were at changing the outside, they also changed the inside a lot, making it a beautiful, comfortable home. Nearly all the room arrangements were changed, making it much more convenient. It is like a brand new home now.

 

They got Truett Townsend to do the rock work and are real proud of it. Charles Newsom did a fine job of redoing the inside and Linda appreciated the advice he gave in rearranging the layout of the rooms.

 

When I walked in off the patio into the living room, the first thing that caught my eye was a trophy case with over 200 trophies in it that their sons had won at rodeos. The boys are Brent, who is in the 9^th grade and Russell, who is in the 7^th grade. They started rodeoing in 1974, and have won most of the trophies in ribbon and break-away roping, barrel racing and pole bending.

 

The Parrishes think that a rodeo is fine family entertainment. As Bryan said, “After you have ridden three or four hundred miles to a rodeo all packed together in a pickup and pulling two horses, you really get to know each other.”

 

Around the dining table is another place where the family gets together. They have a snack bar, but they had rather all be together at the table. There is where their discussions and decisions are made.

 

They have bought a horse, Chigger by name, that was the world’s champion in break-away roping four times. Another horse, Old Star, has been retired on Social Security for horses as she is about 35 years old. That would be equal to a person being 105 years old. Star was the childhood pony of Linda’s sister, Tress.

 

I was shown through the house to see the many changes that had been made, and I noticed several pieces of needlepoint that Mavis, Linda’s mother, had made. She made a patriotic piece for the Bi-Centennial Celebration and it won first place at the Heart of Texas Fair at Waco .

 

The Parrishes are in the dairy business here. Bryan grew up in Evant, the son of the Kent Parrishes. After working in the bank there for six years, he, his brothers and their father got in the dairy business at their place on the Lampasas River west of Evant. They had a pretty extensive operation there, milking up around 450 cows a day. Bryan said it would take from 18 to 20 hours a day to milk the ones he had charge of. He is milking around 170 each day here now and they produce from 7,000 to 7,500 pounds of milk each day. But that is not all sweet cream. We went to the hay barn where they were stacking those large round bales of alfalfa, and you don’t get them with green stamps. Neither did he get a truck load of shelled corn for a song.

 

A big stainless steel milk truck was there loading out when I got there. When he left, Bryan showed me through the milking parlor. In the first room was the stainless steel milk tank that the truck had just emptied and it was automatically washing itself. The milk comes to the tank from the milking machines through pipes and there it is cooled down and held at about 35 degrees temperature. If you could see the cleanliness of everything, you could see why milk is such a wholesome food. I don’t have time to tell you about the milking machines and some of their automatic features.

 

The milking parlor and the holding lanes are built on a slight incline and when milking is over, a lever is pulled that turns about 1500 gallons of water loose at once and it runs down through the milking parlor and the lanes cleaning them real clean. The milking of 16 cows at a time is done at three in the afternoon and three o’clock in the morning; and cows don’t take weekends off.

 

Bryan keeps all of his calves. The steer calves are fed out and sold for beef and the heifer calves are kept for replacements. He has top grade producing cows and he has good bulls, so he feels that he could not buy replacements of better quality.

 

The Parrishes are grateful for the friendly way people have received them here. Linda was just coming back home as she spent much of her childhood days here. She is the daughter of the late Bill Wren and Mavis Wren, now of Waco . Bryan said there was one thing he has not got used to here, in Evant he was always introduced as Bryan Parrish, but here he is introduced as Linda Wren’s husband.

 

 

ACROSS THE FENCE