Beginnings 

 

One clear day in October in 1926, Clancy Lyall was born on a farm at Orange Texas. The town is located on the banks of the Sabine River which is the boundary between Texas and Lousiana. He one time said that he had been born while his mother was out working in the farm fields. She gave birth and then continued with her work. The way this was expressed focused singularly on the toughness of his mother.  His father, who as a shipman who worked for an oil company shipping oil across the oceans, would likely have been at sea at the time, bringing oil from Texas across the Atlantic to Europe.

 

Clancy's family and surroundings had a profound influence on his formative years.  The time and place Clancy was born into was rather a remarkable mix of moderninity and rough southern and western back country that ranged from swamps to semi-desert.  Orange Texas had, until the years shortly preceding his birth, all the trappings of an aging frontier  standing inface to face and in starck contrast with large modern homes for the times, and  had until the Depression been a boom town of commerce, shipping ports, and farms. The Depression reverseved that trend which did not recover until the War years.  Orange and its environs were juxtaposed with miles of swamps and bayous on the one side and farmland on the other. There were modern stores, but trappers and Cajuns and lumbermen worked in the swamps in the area.   Clancy would learn early the hard work of farming, but would also learn important native survival skills from his mother's side of the family, and the ways of the Cajuns in the swamps. Those skills would help him more than he could have imagined in years to come.  

 

Clancy's mother, a Cherokee indian, named him Clarence, which she told him meant "Illustrious one" in Latin. That name coupled with the fact that his father was Scottish, but his mother a native, got him into a lot of fights as a child.  By the age of about thirteen he had taken on the nick name of Clancy to and that name stuck with him the rest of his life.

 

His mother had come from the Cherokee reservation to the North in Oklahoma. She, from the westernmost reaches of Orzak type terrain and only miles from Arkansas, knew how to take care of herself using traditional means. Clancy had been there too, having been raised for a time on the reservation when very young while his parents completed building the farm. He had hunted and learned much from his Grandfather who had taught him "The Ways", which were the things each generation of men taught the next generation about being a man in their culture and basic life skills such as hunting and other utilitarian skills.

 

By 1939, Clancy's father had gotten work further north in the Pennsylvania as part of the Sunoco company.  They moved when he was only 13, but those younger years would deeply shape Clancy's view of the world and his ability to survive in it.
 

Here are some photos which gives one a flavor of what being in Orange  was like when he lived in the area. http://oldorangecafe.com/photoalbums.html