Page 79 - Speedhorse March 2019

High School High Jinks
His 6-foot 7-inch height made him a natural for basketball, at which he excelled in high school and beyond. “I had an old beer barrel ring in the eave of the garage,” he says. “I drilled me a hole up there and knew it was 10 feet,
and I learned how to dunk a basketball when I was a freshman in high school. We were playing Taylor one night, and I did that at the end of the game. You’ve never seen such a disruption in your life! People in the stands were hollering ‘Showboat! Showboat!’ and Coach White got onto me about how it was unsportsmanlike, but the crowd was laughing and going on, and my teammates wanted me to do it again. Coach White knew I was going to do it. He just didn’t know when. I got to doing it more and more.”
Although a popular athlete, his business interests led to challenges with the ladies. Expanding his entrepreneurial skills, he set out to Llano one Saturday with his ag teacher to buy a boar pig for breeding. When the seller asked Charles if he’d like his $60 pig castrated, Doc responded, “No, sir, I’m going to make him a champion boar hog at the State Fair.
“That man said, ‘Well, that’s a big vision,’ but sure enough, I did,” Doc says. “I was offered $300 for that boar pig, but I wouldn’t sell him. I brought him back to the farm and I traded two sacks of corn, or five bales of hay, or $3, or two pigs from the litter, whatever I could get for the breeding fee.”
Doc continues, “I bred that boar hog before school, after school and on the weekends. Well, when you get that boar hog smell on you, you can’t get it off. That was prohibitive of you riding up front in the car. I had to ride in the trunk. I made me a bed out of a cotton sack with cotton seed in it and tied it down with baling wire.”
Soon, he’d parlayed his earnings into enough to buy an old four-speed 3/4-ton pickup.
“I built sideboards on it, dropped the tailgate and made it wider, and I punched a hole in the muffler, so it’d make some sound,” he says. “It didn’t matter if I was going 15 feet, I’d shift through all four gears.
“One night I got a date with a pretty little girl and I was real proud of myself. I picked
her up at her little country farm and we hadn’t gone too far, maybe four or five miles, when she turned her back to me, covered her nose with her hand and said, ‘What stinks in here?’”
They went on to the picture show, but needless to say, it was downhill from there. “That killed my love life,” he says, laughing. “Here I’ve got a vehicle, I’ve got money, but I stink.”
As a sophomore at age 14, however, he bought his first stud horse, Smokey Reed. He was now in the stud business.
Off to A&M
Regardless of high school pranks that
earned him the nickname Heathen with the superintendent, Doc earned a basketball scholarship to Texas A&M.
“We went to Sunday school and church every Sunday at my mother’s church,” he says. “When it came time for me to leave for college, my mother had made me a little old sack out of the end of a cotton sack and put me a few clothes in there and gave me $10. After church, I was going to hitchhike to A&M.
“I didn’t know where it was, but she drew me a little map. I kissed her on the cheek and thanked her for everything she’d done for me, and I walked that two miles to
Highway 79 crying like a baby.”
After his freshman year, he spent
six weeks in the animal morgue, where
he perfected the art of palpating mares
to determine their gestation status by comparing touch to what he could see when mares were dissected, by palpating his own mares and by making a case study of a friend’s mare by palpating her throughout her pregnancy.
“After that, I wouldn’t rope anymore,” he says. “I didn’t want to lose the tip of my index finger. I got to where I had confidence determining
gestation down to 14 days.”
He earned a Bachelor
of Science degree in animal
husbandry in 1953, the second
bachelor’s degree, in animal science, in
1954. He then spent two years in the
U.S. Army at Fort Hood. He served
under the post veterinarian, Col. Coburn, who taught him how to spay dogs, repair
bones and deodorize skunks - and
another money-making venture was born, selling deodorized skunks as pets.
He returned to Texas A&M, where he received his DVM in 1961.
Supporting Education
The Dr. Charles Graham street sign at Texas A&M University, to which he contributed to the development of the Texas Veterinary Medicine Diagnostic Laboratory.
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