Into the Wild 
Aunt Sister
Cantankerous and independent, sharp-tongued and opinionated, Rosita Holdsworth Hollar was a frontier woman who loved teaching children and acquiring land, a terrible cook who had no use for housekeeping or fashion, a loner who was self-sufficient well into her nineties. In other words, she was the best role model a girl could ask for.
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She was born Rosita Franklin Holdsworth in 1899 in Piedras Negras, Mexico, and was carried about on Pancho Villa's shoulders whenever he passed through Descubridora and asked my great-grandfather to show him, once again, the operations of the electrical plant. She spent her early life in Mexico and Texas. At the age of eleven, she encountered the Mexican revolutionary and future president Francisco Madero in a general store, and forever afterward considered this one of the great experiences of her life. When the Mexican Revolution broke out, Thomas sent his family back to Texas for good and later returned himself, eventually purchasing the Kerrville Light and Ice plant.
At the time, Rosita had received no formal education, having been schooled by her mother, and spoke better Spanish than English. She attended Tivy High School, in Kerrville, and by the age of seventeen was teaching in Pipe Creek, in Bandera County, and later at Block Creek School, a one-room school with seven grades northeast of Comfort. She earned $60 a month, from which she paid out $12 for room and board with a local family. Two years later she took a teaching job in Dumont, in northwest Texas, and soon wrote home that she was planning to marry Roy Hollar, a man who worked on a nearby ranch. Her fiancé was barely twenty, no older than she. When Thomas Holdsworth received the letter, he got on a northbound train to stop the marriage but arrived too late.
Rosita and Roy were never a good match. They had almost nothing in common. Roy had a reading problem, and Rosita's greatest love, aside from land, was literature. Their only child, Ammie Rose, who now lives in Kerrville, was born the year after they married. They moved to Abilene and lived in an apartment attached to a filling station that Roy managed. Rosita wanted a college education and started taking classes at McMurry College. Needing money, she began to travel and teach throughout Texas, taking Ammie Rose along and placing her in the schools where she was teaching. At times she and Ammie Rose lived in houses with no running water. Roy came along sometimes, and sometimes he didn't. He found work where he could.
During the summers, Rosita took college courses wherever she was living. After she earned her bachelor's degree from McMurry, she took Ammie Rose and moved to Louisiana, starting work on a master's in library science at Louisiana State University. She did not go home to Roy after getting the master's but instead moved to Arkansas and supervised branch libraries in Poinsett County, visiting them by bus or train and by hitching rides on milk trucks or with county agents. There were other library and teaching jobs, and then finally, in their fifties, she and Roy moved under the same roof again, purchasing the stock farm near Comfort. She taught in Center Point and Comfort and was the principal of the elementary school in Hunt and a co-founder of the Comfort Public Library. After Roy died, in 1966, Rosita continued to operate the farm. When she retired from teaching, she tutored students free of charge—"any child, any time" was her motto—and coached them for UIL and 4-H events. On occasion she contributed tuition funds for her most promising students, but, having as a matter of principle sunk almost every cent she made into buying land, she often solicited donations from family and friends.
I would doubt that Aunt Sister was a very good mother. The travels were a hardship for Ammie Rose and deprived her of much contact with her father. Aunt Sister was also a terrible cook and had no use for order: She dropped her clothes on the floor where she undressed. Her daughter was often lost among the detritus of her ambitions. But she could tell a story that would hold you spellbound. She could nurse a sick calf back to life. She could take the dullest child and teach him to love books.
It has taken me into my forties to cobble together all the components of a life that I am happy to be living, and there have been many times when Aunt Sister's example—less than perfect but strangely beyond reproach—has been a comfort to me. When my first marriage failed, I thought of how Aunt Sister had never felt the need to explain to family members the shortcomings of her marriage or her lack of judgment in getting into it in the first place. When, in my present marriage, I suffered three successive miscarriages—babies I desperately wanted—in an attempt to have a second child, I reminded myself repeatedly of how Aunt Sister had been content with one child.
I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN INTRIGUED by how different yet intrinsically alike Aunt Sister and my grandmother were. They valued many of the same things—books, libraries, and helping children chief among them—but unlike Sister, my grandmother married a man with her same vision and drive, and together they influenced Texas in more ways than Aunt Sister could ever have dreamed of. I don't believe Aunt Sister was ever envious of my grandmother—Mama Two, we called her—though she would have had reason to be. Mary Elizabeth Holdsworth Butt was more beautiful, she had a better marriage, and she had more money and more children. She could recite more poetry than most of us have ever read. She wore kidskin gloves and large picture hats and wielded her influence in a charming, soft-spoken way. She had a girlish laugh and was never agitated or hurried. Like her husband, she was shy but inherently powerful. She read voraciously and gave so many books to her grandchildren—always with her own judgment about each one scribbled on the flyleaf—that she would sometimes lose track and give one grandchild several copies of the same book, sometimes on the same Christmas. Her handwriting became less legible over the years, but her opinions became stronger. I have a copy of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray with her remarks on the flyleaf: "I did not care for this story, I doubt you will enjoy it." I have two full sets of the Brontë novels that she gave me several years apart, the second set inscribed with basically the same opinions as the first.
When my grandmother was in her twenties, bearing her children and living in Harlingen, where my grandfather was building the grocery company, her dining room became the area office for the State Crippled Children's Program. She was the chairman of the Cameron County Child Welfare Board. She started a program to diagnose and treat tuberculosis in the Valley and bought the first equipment for testing the hearing and vision of the area's schoolchildren. She and my grandfather started the H. E. Butt Foundation, using it to build libraries, tennis centers, community swimming pools, and a camp on the Frio River where church groups and underprivileged children could stay for free. After the family moved to Corpus Christi, in 1940, the YWCA, the Nueces County home for the aged, the Mary McLeod Bethune Day Nursery for black children, and a local tuberculosis hospital were all organized around her dining room table. She led the citizens movement to have juvenile offenders removed from county jails and placed in separate facilities, then called in the fire department to have those facilities—a rickety old barracks—condemned as a firetrap so that the city would have to build more-decent housing.
In 1955 Governor Allan Shivers appointed her to the board of the state agency that later became the Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation, where she served for a quarter century. On one occasion, when her fellow board members were reluctant to approve the use of knives and forks for the patients at state mental hospitals, Mama Two sent each board member a metal bowl and a large spoon like the ones the patients were required to use, suggesting that they eat their Christmas dinner from the bowl so they might know what it was like. Some of the board members became so annoyed with her pressures for reform that they secretly asked Governor Price Daniel to remove her. He summoned her to his office and offered her instead a place on the UT Board of Regents, but she declined his offer. She was not looking for power, she said; she was trying to effect reform. "I just want to finish the work I've started," she told the governor. "Mr. Butt"—as she always referred to my grandfather—"would be very disappointed if I were not allowed to finish what I have started." Mr. Butt was, of course, a major campaign contributor. I can see the scene now, Mama Two in her picture hat, her gloved hands in her lap, her smile whimsical, her voice soft, her threat beautifully veiled. She outlasted the other members of the board, and all of her reforms were eventually accomplished.
My Library
