Patricia Hardin | Interview (Unabridged)
Interview: Patricia Hardin May 1997 by Arthur Wood For a facsimile of this interview as it appeared in Kerrville Kronikle no. 24 (PDF, 2.6 Mb), click on the magazine icon below. 1 2 3 Q: You were born in Texas, but when and where? Describe your hometown. Did you only live there, or did your family move around? A: Waco, 1943. It was a pretty intense year, right in the middle of U.S. involvement in WWII. By the luck of the draw, I was born in this normally bland, deathly-quiet town. At the time, it had about 60,000 mostly conservative inhabitants. Waco, also called “The Heart of Texas,” is the original home of Dr Pepper, Baylor University, and more recently the infamous late David Koresh of the Branch Davidians. And in case you’re wondering—no, I did not know that guy nor any members of his cult! But Waco isn’t really my hometown, or if it is, it’s only one of three. I’ll explain: My first seven years our family (I’m the second of five children) lived on a large, beautiful farm in the rolling hills just outside of Crawford (pop. 400). Crawford is 18 miles west of Waco and 7 miles north of McGregor (pop. 5000). If you draw a line connecting these three towns, what you get is an almost perfect little isosceles triangle with a perimeter of 43 miles. This is important, because although my first seven years were mostly stable, everything changed when I turned eight, and for the next five years we moved more times than I want to count, but only back and forth in this triangular pattern connecting Waco, Crawford, and McGregor.
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