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In 1943, when I was five years old, my mother and I moved to Llano, and lived with my grandfather, Sid Smith, and “Granny.” This arrangement was not unusual in those days because a woman living by herself was frowned upon by society, and could rarely make a living wage. Mother quickly found a job at the post office as a replacement for one of the men away at war, but it paid very little.

What was unusual about our living accommodations was that they were in the Llano County Jail, where Sid was a deputy sheriff and jailer. In Llano, the jailer’s family lived on the first floor; so Mother and I settled in for the next eight years.

In the old jail, Granny used a wood stove for cooking and heating. For winter bathing, water would be heated on the stove and poured into a number 10 wash tub on the kitchen floor. Later, we got a hot water heater of sorts; it was a large wood stove with pipes curled through the inside and leading to a small tank.

In the summer, the jail’s thick granite walls and high ceilings kept it cooler than most houses, but it still got hot in the late afternoons. Even when it was 100 degrees, Granny had to cook over that hot wood stove. At night, if there was no breeze, we would wake up soaked with sweat.

Out back of the jail was a chicken coop. When Granny needed a chicken to cook, she would chop off its head on an old tree stump. Of course, each decapitated chicken would fall to the ground and run around momentarily before it collapsed; hence the saying “running around like a chicken with its head cut off.” For a young boy, it was a strange sight.

Behind the front door of the old jail was a lobby where the accused were brought in and processed. There were two large steel doors; the one to the right led to the family quarters and the one on the left leading upstairs. The right door was always locked when a prisoner was brought in. The jail cells were on the second floor, which was completely open except for the bars dividing it into four cells. A screen of blankets provided a little privacy when there was a woman prisoner. A small third floor housed a gallows, but no hangings were ever recorded.

Granny cooked all of the meals for the prisoners as well as for the family. The food for the prisoners was placed in a small pass-through behind the kitchen, where a trusty picked it up and delivered it to the cells. Trustys did other chores, as well, including cleaning, minor repairs, and chopping wood for the stove.

One hot summer day, while I was standing by a window catching a southeast breeze, an escaping prisoner dropped suddenly to the ground in front of me. When I called out, he gave me a startled look and headed for the back of the jail. I called to Sid, who caught up with the escapee down along the river. His wife had baked a hacksaw blade inside a cake; the other prisoners were annoyed, because after that, Sid wouldn’t allow them to have outside food. When I was back at the jail a couple of years ago, I saw the place where the now-repaired bars had been sawed through.

Mother lost her post office job when the men came back after the war, but she was soon able to get another job as a telephone operator. There were no dial phones in those days; people just picked up the receiver and told the operator who they wanted to call. Since we had party lines, everyone listened in on each other’s calls. Operators became the best sources in town for all kinds of information; when the fire sirens went off, the operators were flooded with calls asking where the fire was.

I used to love playing in the back yard of the jail, throwing a tennis ball against the rough granite wall and fielding the ricochet at whatever angle it returned. One day in 1948, I was told that I could not play outside anymore because the chimney was in danger of falling down. Sid showed me a huge crack in the east wall, and said that the whole building might come crashing down. That scared me so much that I began to put my arm over my head while I slept. We had to move out of the jail for several months while repairs were made.

The repairs took six months and cost $23,000; double the original construction cost of $11,500 in 1895. At least we got gas heat to replace the old wood stoves.

Living in the jail was sometimes scary. When a prisoner’s friends showed up demanding his release, Granny sometimes had to call the sheriff. One time a prisoner refused to go up the stairs, and the sheriff pistol-whipped him with the butt end of his gun. The gun went off and the bullet hit the door-jamb, just inches from where Sid was standing, holding the steel door. Another time, a deputy sheriff was shot to death as he sat on a bench just a block away. The crime was never solved.

The summer I turned 13, Mother got a job with the largest office supply company in Dallas, and we moved away from the old jail. We have come back to visit several times, and each time my memories come rushing back like the floodwaters of the Llano River.