Happy Mother’s Day to PT
PT’s husband calls her the Pathfinder. She knows every mile marker between Oklahoma City and Houston. The weather, too. When she’s traveling, and the kids call, first thing she tells them is what mile marker she’s at and what the weather’s like.
PT’s daughter calls her a saint with a servant’s heart. “Very steady. Stable and steady,” said PT’s daughter. “My kids usually call her for help before they call me. She has run many left cleats and basketball shoes to school for them. She mends their clothes and takes them to appointments. Life would be hard without her.”
PT’s son feels the same. But speaking of feeling, he still feels the sting of PT’s discipline from almost half a century ago. Remember those old paddles attached to a rubber ball for games of solitare ping pong? PT would turn them into Old Testament rods, which she did not spare. PT taught P.E. down in Texas years ago, and she would have her students draw pictures on the paddles. Some kid drew the cartoon character Jack the Cat. PT would tell her own wayward son, “Go get Jack the Cat.”
“She put respect and discipline in us at an early age,” said the son.
As you know, respect and discipline still pay off. “We talk about her
strict discipline, but since college, she has been one of my best friends,” said the daughter. “She did it right. I could not ask for a better example and role model as a mother.”
PT grew up down in Palestine, Texas – yep, Adrian Peterson’s hometown – and was part of a big and close family. Her mom worked in the school cafeteria, her dad drove a bread truck. She loved sports. PT was a cheerleader in Palestine and at the junior college not far up the road in Jacksonville, where she met a ballplayer she eventually married, after getting her degree from Stephen F. Austin.
PT’s husband started coaching and she started teaching. In Lufkin and Crockett and Beaumont. Nineteen years she taught, while also raising two kids and keeping her ornery husband in line. Then they moved to Oklahoma and found a home. Years later, when her kids were grown and had put down Oklahoma roots, PT and her husband moved back to Texas. That didn’t set well with PT. “She was ready to get back to Oklahoma,” said the daughter.
Everywhere PT went, she made what her daughter calls “forever friendships. Every town we lived in she made close friends that have continued to be family friends for life. She always included every coach’s wife and family as part of her own. That all made life much easier on our family as we moved around. We never had trouble transitioning.”
PT was actually best friends with her son before she was best friends with her daughter. When the family moved to Oklahoma, the son was going to college in Texas. So when he came home to visit, he didn’t know anybody else. His dad was always working.
“My buddy was always PT,” said the son. “My mom was always very positive, always very humble. Really sweet, friendly, strong lady. Made friends really quick and easy. The thing I just love about her, there’s not a pretentious bone in her body.”
Even when PT’s husband’s teams started winning big, and life got a little better economically, “never changed her at all,” said the son.
That strength they keep talking about was needed a year ago, when PT was diagnosed with breast cancer. “She went through treatment and thankfully recovered without hardly anyone knowing,” said the daughter. “Positive, without complaining. She’s as strong as anyone I know.”
PT turns 83 in August. In two weeks, she’ll have been married 59 years to that ballplayer from Lon Morris Junior College.
And so on this fine Sunday morning, a tip of the cap to the lady who not only was a Palestine cheerleader and the courier of cleats, the swinger of Jack the Cat and the Pathfinder, but a mother to Tommy and Taylor, and a wife to Billy. Happy Mother’s Day, to Pat Tubbs.