“I had a very unique opportunity as a person,” says Carole Goble, who was recently honored as a “Woman of Distinction” by the Lone Star Council of the Girl Scouts in Austin. Readers of the Texas Hill Country magazine will be familiar with Carole’s tales of rural life during the Depression, but there’s a lot more to the Carole Goble story than growing up on a farm, and this latest honor was richly deserved by our own quiet Hill Country hero.

       Carole’s grandparents, who were to play a large part in her upbringing, were sheep ranchers from Frio County and neighbors of the famous Texas Ranger, “Bigfoot” Wallace (her grandfather enjoyed listening to Wallace’s stories as a young boy). They moved to a ranch near the small community of Prairie Point, about five miles north of Bertram, when Carole’s mother was nine years old.

       Carole’s father was born Zakaus Normann Stiegen in Tonsberg, Norway, in 1903. A talented artist, he was already teaching at one of Norway’s leading art schools when, at the age of nineteen, he decided to visit America.

       He traveled first to Duluth, Minnesota, where his mother’s brother lived. But he had a great desire to visit Texas (then and now, the people of Norway have been greatly enamored of Texas) and soon headed south, where he decided to further his education at the University of Texas in Austin. To pay his expenses, he took a job with the Bradford Paint Company, giving private art lessons.

       Carole’s mother, Fanny Velma Harris, was a junior in high school when she spent the summer in Austin with her older sister, a student at Durham’s Business School. She took art lessons at the Bradford Paint Company, and soon fell in love with her young Norwegian teacher. They were married the next spring, in 1928, and opened their own business, selling handmade gifts and giving art lessons at their small shop in Austin. Carole’s first home was a white clapboard house just a block from the state capitol, with a big front porch and a beautifully landscaped yard.

       The idyllic life was rudely interrupted by the Great Depression, and much of Carole’s life through her teenage years was spent on her grandparents’ ranch. She learned the basics of life from her grandmother, working hard to just get by during the depression and then the war. She attended school in Bertram.

       In the meantime, Carole’s parents were pursuing their artistic careers. In 1936, they worked together on a painting and a quilt for a patriotic art contest to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of Texas Independence. The painting, The Reading of the Texas Declaration of Independence, and the quilt, The Presidents, with portraits of all the U.S. presidents around a picture of the signing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, immediately became the focal point of the state fair, and eventually were displayed in Washington, D.C. They both are now in the Star of the Republic Museum at Washington-on-the-Brazos.

       After serving in the U.S. Army as a cartographer during World War II and becoming a naturalized citizen as Charles Berkeley Normann in 1946, Carole’s father went on to a distinguished career as art director at the Texas School of Fine Arts in Austin. He also painted portraits and murals all over Texas, including a “Heroes of Texas” series which was published in a popular book by Texian Press in 1964. “He could paint so incredibly fast,” Carole recalls, “He could do a beautiful painting in 30 minutes.”

       Carole’s mother, after earning a Fine Arts degree at the University of Texas, also distinguished herself as a painter, teacher, writer and philosopher. The combination of down-to-earth basic life skills and soaring intellectual vision that Carol learned from her grandparents and her parents has served her well all her life.

       Carole met Bill Goble when they were “kids on the sidewalk, waiting to get into the movie” in Bertram. Bill was from the nearby town of Briggs, so they didn’t go to school together, but Bertram was the “big” town with a movie theatre and all kinds of business establishments. On Saturdays, folks from miles around would converge on downtown Bertram for a day of shopping and socializing. In high school, Bill dated Carole’s friend, and Carole dated Bill’s friend; the two couples would often double-date, and Bill and Carole became good friends – much better friends than they realized.

       Bill joined the Air Force after high school, and Carole didn’t see him for two years. She was working at the prestigious Scarbrough’s Department Store in downtown Austin, in anticipation of entering the University of Texas, when “Bill came walking down Congress Avenue.” He had just got off the bus, and needed a ride home. Carole told him that there was a shower scheduled in Austin that evening for some mutual friends, and that he could get a ride home from there. They spent the day talking, went to the shower together, and “Before we got home that night, we were engaged,” Carole recalls.

       Bill and Carole were married on December 1, 1949. Bill was called back to active duty during the Korean War, then enlisted in the Marine Corps, so the first twenty-some years of their married life involved a lot of moving, mostly up and down the east coast from their home base at Norfolk, Virginia.

       During a stint at Parris Island, one of Bill’s friends, a drill instructor named Bill Love, was chosen to play a recruit in Jack Webb’s movie “The DI.” That was very interesting, since the movie was filmed there on the base, but Carole says, “I didn’t have any big adventures at all. I raised eight kids!”

       In fact, Carole claims that her life has been “very common-place, really. You get up in the morning and do whatever you need to; whatever falls in your lap to do.” Following that modest philosophy faithfully, Carole has accumulated an uncommon number of “common-place” achievements and a long list of honors culminating in the “Woman of Distinction” title this spring.

       A Girl Scout herself during her younger days, Carole became very active with the Girl Scouts as her family grew. Then it was Boy Scouts, Sunday School, PTA, the Red Cross, the March of Dimes, etc., etc. She did custom sewing and dressmaking (one of her customers was a prominent local TV personality), including costumes for the community theater. She worked outside the home a few times when it was necessary, and learned weaving while working at a 28’ loom for the Moore Company in North Carolina. During these times, Bill did an enormous amount of writing for the Marine Corps schools (textbooks, course material, etc. -- part of his job as instructor of Naval Justice); Carole wrote frequent articles and reports for her many associations, but did not consider herself a “writer.”

       When Bill retired from the Marines (after a tour in Vietnam) in 1971, the family moved back to Bertram. Bill bought and operated a service station while “decompressing,” then worked a several years with the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) before taking a job as zoning administrator with the city of Burnet. Since both had always been very interested in history (“My family stressed, ‘Know where you came from,” Carole says), they soon became involved in several local historical groups. Among other duties, they did research for genealogies, family histories and historical markers in Burnet County. When locals held the first living-history Fort Croghan Day in the mid-eighties, Bill and Carole were two of the volunteers. The next year, they were members of the Burnet Heritage Society and helped with the planning. Carole became a member of the Burnet County Historical Commission in the early 90s (a post she still holds today), and Bill began to write a weekly “Bertram News” column for the Burnet Bulletin (“We kind of helped each other on that,” Carole says.)

       When Bill died suddenly in 2000, Carole carried on with his newspaper column (“I wrote the very next column. We didn’t miss a week,” she recalls) and her community activities increased. She lobbied the city to create the Burnet Historical Board, and (as chairman) helped create the city’s historical district. She convinced the city of Burnet to build the (recently-completed) History Maze on the Courthouse Lawn, and accepted a position as director of the Fort Croghan Museum. She volunteered as a pantry-worker and food-buyer (she still serves on the board) for LACare, the community food bank; she is a past president of the VFW Auxiliary and present president of the American Legion Auxiliary. She is a member of the Prairie Flower Garden Club, Friends of the Bertram Library and an elder in the First Christian Church in Bertram. And, she is a contributing writer to the Texas Hill Country magazine!

       In between these organized activities, Carole continues to do “whatever falls into her lap,” and many of her good deeds are not listed here. But enough of her activities are recognized so that accolades keep coming her way. She has been nominated three times for Burnet County Woman of the Year, named Volunteer of the Year for the Lakes Area Food Bank, presented with the Judge Thomas A. Ferguson Honor Award for Outstanding Citizen by the Burnet Chamber of Commerce, named a Picayune Hero by a local newspaper for her accomplishments in Burnet County, and featured as an “outstanding small-town reporter” by the Austin American-Statesman.

       Carole’s legacy will live long in Burnet and elsewhere; her children, grandchildren (there’s 9) and great-grandchildren (11, so far) have inherited the family’s musical and artistic talents, and have earned a great reputation in the community and beyond. This “common-place” life has made a lasting mark, and we are proud to be associated with Carole Goble.

By John Hallowell

John Hallowell is the past editor of several Hill Country publications. He has been exploring the Texas Hill Country for almost 20 years.