The Glass Shop

Shortly before July 4, when I learned the location of Fort Worth’s annual fireworks show (touted as the best in North Texas), I knew the perfect spot to watch it from.  The city was built on a hill with the Trinity River passing on its northwest side.  Just beyond the river is a tall levee, built in the late 1950’s following a devastating flood.  And just beyond the levee is a small commercial district of various small businesses.

In the middle of this small commercial district is a little building that my family knows as The Glass Shop.  Shortly after my parents divorced in 1963, the year Kennedy was shot, my mother needed a job.  An aging neighbor across the street, Mr. Wolf, was looking to hire a secretary to help run his small business of selling car windshields.  My mother took the job and quickly learned about windshields, helping Mr. Wolf sell about 20 each week to individual customers.  Then, after 6 months, a heart-attack took Mr. Wolf.

Rather than look for another job, my mother decided to make a go in the auto-glass business.  She bought the building - named City Glass Company, and its small inventory on credit and continued to learn about windshields.  On her own she discovered that in the wrecking yards and abandoned car lots throughout the city, perfectly good windshields could be extracted for a handful of dollars and resold as used windshields just a little below the price of a new one.  Her business boomed.  By the time my mother sold City Glass after 7 years, she and her crew of 3 were selling and installing over 20 windshields every day.

Several years ago, the land and building fell victim to urban development.  The city, flush with money from the rich oil reserves beneath its ground, launched the Trinity River Project which would reroute the river and provide land for a sprawling residential and commercial paradise.  The river’s new path includes the glass shop building.  Today, nearly all the old buildings in the small commercial district are gone, anticipating the inevitable, as bridges and infrastructure are slowly taking shape.  Only the glass shop building and one other remain, awaiting their fate.

On the evening of July 4, me, Sara, Jonathan, Martha and Philip, and a family friend, Allie, traveled the back-roads to this abandoned commercial district and parked in front of the glass shop building.  We walked a short distance and climbed the levee where we had a panoramic view of downtown Fort Worth.  Ahead and below us we could see thousands of people crowded along the river banks to watch the fireworks.  But we had this little spot on top of the levee mostly to ourselves.

The show was fantastic; the spot was perfect.  Martha commented that only a boy who grew up in Fort Worth would know of this levee-top viewpoint.  As we lay on our blankets watching the sky being lit up with every color of the rainbow, I couldn’t help but reminisce of my boyhood days when I would help mom at the glass shop and work with her employees installing windshields.  If only other boys had the advantage of learning the value of ingenuity and hard work.

This week I received my plane ticket for the Philippines, purchased 3 months in advance.  I sent off 2 big boxes of household items by ocean freight that will take several weeks to traverse the Pacific.  Soon it will be time to wrap up my Stateside Assignment and head back overseas.  But for now, I am grateful to a mission organization that allows me to periodically return home to speak in churches, to enjoy my family, and to revisit those times and places that built me up into who I am today.