Escapees May June 2015 Demo

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66 .ESCAPEES |May/June 2015 |
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film.” In 1995 she quit and moved to
Austin for a while before coming to
Livingston and buying a house.
Robert and Tina met at the Living-
ston Walmart. He was looking for a
woman with a house. She was looking
for a chauffeur. They were married in
November 2007. “I had to wait ’til I
was old to finally have a church wed-
ding,” says Tina.
“After the wedding, we lived in
Tina’s house,” says Robert. “Then
we got an ERPU (Escapees Rainbow
Parks Unlimited) lot and a fifth-wheel,
traveled to all 50 states, cruised to
Alaska and took a trip to Mexico.
A couple of years ago, we switched
to trips by car, and last year were
headed to the Midwest until we got
Robert and Tina Davis—Native Texans from Two Tiny Towns
to Kentucky and realized we were
tired.” They drove back to Rainbow’s
End, gave up the ERPU lot, sold the
fifth-wheel, bought a pull trailer, had
it delivered to CARE and moved in.
“I like CARE,” says Tina with a
big smile. “We eat all our meals in the
CARE dining room and someone else
cleans the rig, changes the bed and
takes care of the sheets and towels.”
Robert likes having others take care
of dumping, switching propane tanks
and site maintenance. “If something
goes wrong with anything, there’s
someone to help,” he says. “One
morning, after we overslept and
missed breakfast, someone called to
make sure we were okay.” They both
like the ease with which they can
get to the Texas Medical Center in
Houston, where they go regularly for
Tina’s checkups following surgery for
glaucoma at Methodist Hospital.
“We’re here for the duration,” says
Tina. “These people are friendlier and
more helpfu l than anyplace else in
the world!”
Article and photo by
Anita Hickman #41291
Robert began life in the two-square-
mile town of Agua Dulce, which
means sweet (or fresh) water. There,
60 Mexicans defeated 27 men from
the Republic of Texas in the 1836
Battle of Agua Dulce during the Texas
Revolution. When Robert was 18, he
left home to fight in World War II and
afterwards “had a Beaumont, Texas,
address for 50 years.”
“Most of my working life was spent
in the oil field,” says Robert. “I was
with Baker Oil Tools for more than 20
years until they made me a manager.
But, since I didn’t want to be boss,
I moved to TIW (Texas Iron Works)
where I ran tools in wells and super-
vised tool operations.”
Tina is from Merkel, Texas (found-
ed in 1880 and originally named
Windmill Town), where the first
school was held in a box car, which
also served as a post office, church,
telegraph station and railway station
while the Texas and Pacific Railway
was being constructed.
“I became a nurse,” says Tina,
“working in post-and pre-op surgery
in the days before kidney or heart
machines, dialysis or chemo. We had
to figure it out ourselves by looking at
Robert and Tina Davis #46271