H.E. McKelva was blinded at 19-years-of-age after being struck by buckshot in a gun battle on a bleak and weary night while riding in a posse in the deep pine forest that surrounds Shreveport, La.
It smacks of the stuff which Zane Gray novels are made.
As time passed, perhaps McKelva would recall that fateful evening, spending hour after hour sitting in his rocking chair, moving his finger across a wooden knob on the arm rest in his Bonham, Tex., home.
Day after day, year after year. Seasons passed.
In time, he would eventually wear the knob nearly flat to the surface of the arm. But it wasn’t idle time spent; no, purposeful in nature, the nightly ritual was broader in scope. He was simply being practical, softening his fingers by gently rubbing back and forth, back and forth. This allowed him to read braille easier. Two-fold, it also aided McKelva in opening the eyes of his fingers, useful in judging the softest cotton with which to stuff a mattress.
That was the kind of man he was.
Everything had a purpose. Indeed, his wisdom is still whispered in some Texas circles.
Trained at the Texas School for the Blind in Austin in the wake of that turn-of-the-century night, McKelva moved to Bonham and started a hand-crafted mattress company, which endures to this day still doing things the old-fashioned way, despite the passage of nearly a century.
It wasn’t easy. The disabled of turn-of-the-century rural Texas had perhaps the toughest road to hoe. Only through great struggle did he and his wife begin their business together. But even then, his company made one of the finest mattresses to be found anywhere. God bestows his miracles in various ways, and for McKelva, blindness gave him the insight to feel only the finest grades of cotton, planted in the fields scattered across the windy East Texas landscape.
McKelva had his home constructed next to his business. Every day, he would walk to and from work.
“Like so many people with handicaps, there are still legends about him,” explains his grandson, Monte Morris, who now runs the family business. “There are people who claim he could fell the denominations of currency. He had very sensitive fingers for reading braille, but the rest of the stories are really just the stuff of legend.”
Legend?
Morris confirms that McKelva could be taken outside, twirled around until anyone else would have been so dizzy they would have passed out, then the old man would point out north, south, east and west.
“Really, I guess he actually was brilliant,” Morris admits. “He could literally tear down and put much of the machinery in the factory back together with minimal sighted help. He was hands-on involved in everything.”
Morris recalls initially being intimidated as a small child when visiting his grandfather. Sitting in his rocking chair, he would motion his grandson over.
“He would take my hand and start to feel my face-’Oh, what a handsome boy!’”
As the years passed, Morris grew to understand, constantly amazed as the old man would rattle off the batting averages of all the major league baseball players. Often, legendary former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Sam Rayburn would drop by for a cup of coffee, a good domino game, or a chat. Often, Rayburn came seeking his knowledge-and more importantly-pray with this great man of faith. During the Great Depression, the mattress company was resilient like the man.
“In the Depression, he was successful because the local farmers couldn’t sell their cotton to the market,” Morris notes. “But they could still come to the mattress factory and find a place to sell.”
McKelva died in 1953 and eventually his son-in-law, L.B. Morris, Monte’s father, took over the business after a storybook career as a high school football coach that landed him in the Texas Football Hall of Fame.
But that is another story…