My Dad. Donald Paul Golden

My dad was the fourth of 5 children born to James Golden and Beatrice Golden on 16 February 1922 (for the record – he died on 21 October, 1991). My grandfather always called my dad by his middle name, Paul.

This is Donald P Golden from about 1925. He was a dandy! That dandy nature remained in him his entire life.

My dad was born in Graybow, Louisiana. Graybow no longer exists. His family followed the logging business all over southwestern Louisiana and southeastern Texas and Graybow must have been a ‘flash in the pan’ logging town.

There are a couple of family stories about my dad.

Lois and Hazel (his sisters) dressed him up and treated him as their doll.

The family was driving home on a rough road in a car with a rumble seat. When they reached home, my dad was missing. He had bounced out of the rumble seat. They retraced their path and found him walking, crying, toward them. miles north of Beaumont.

My dad was not afraid to tear into anything to repair or improve it. This is one of my legacies from him. I think besides his natural inclination toward this Dilbertian ‘knack’ he was driven by economics. We were not wealthy so if the washing machine broke, it was up to him to fix it. He was very good at it. This culminated in the 70’s when after retiring from Mobil he designed and built the lake house in Wildwood about 40 miles north of Beaumont.

He actually was formally trained as an aircraft mechanic by the US Army Air Corps - more on this later. When he went to work at the Magnolia Refinery in Beaumont following WW II, he worked as a machinist. It is my understanding that he became very good at doing machine shop work and that contributed to his ‘knack’