By Lindsey Bever
lbever@neighborsgo.com

Mary Kathryn Clyatt remembers a different Irving than the one that exists today.

She remembers when her home on South Britain Road near Sixth Street was considered in the country; downtown, then uptown, covered two long blocks of Main Street; and Pierce’s Grocery Store was the local hotspot.

She’s lived here more than 80 years.

“The Fiddlers Breakdown Contest … that was Saturday-night entertainment,” said Clyatt, 87. “Mr. Pierce used to have the fiddlers in his grocery store. My dad would take me up there and sit me on the pickle barrel so I could hear. And I still think of it.”

Clyatt has deep roots in her hometown.

“My mother came to Irving to teach school,” she said. “My dad had lived here all his life. My grandfather picked my mother out. He said, ‘I have a son I want you to meet.’ And they did. And they got married.”

Clyatt spent her childhood in rural Irving riding her bike from south Irving to what is now State Highway 183.

“We’d go out there and hunt rabbits,” she said, smiling. “We shot a .22, I guess. The boys held the guns on their handle bars. But I was pretty good. I liked to shoot.”

And Clyatt went to school with the rest of Irving’s students at “Old Red,” a three-story, red brick building on Second and Jefferson streets with coal-burning stoves in the classrooms.

“The boys would have to go out with buckets and get coal several times a day,” she said. “It was miserable. If you sat too close to the stove you burned up and if you sat three seats away you froze to death.”

By the time Clyatt was in high school, the city had built Irving High School.

“We were the Tigers,” she said, holding an old photograph of herself a group of Irving High School cheerleaders.

In 1940, Clyatt’s graduating class of 40 was considered the largest Irving had seen, she said.

A year later, Clyatt went to the University of Texas in Austin.

“I was there when Pearl Harbor was bombed,” she said. “So none of us went back to school the next year, none of my friends.”

However, she later took photography and real-estate classes at North Lake College.

That same year in the early 1940s, she met her husband, Bill, of Dallas who would later graduate from Southern Methodist University.

“I said, ‘I think I’ll just marry him,’” Clyatt said, laughing.

The two were married Nov. 8, 1943, at First United Methodist Church Irving, where bricks in the courtyard record their family’s lineage. Clyatt said she is one of the longest members of the church.

“Love and joy of my life,” Bill Clyatt said, reading the brick he dedicated to his wife.

Shortly after, Bill Clyatt, a control tower operator for the U.S. Naval Air Corps, was sent to Saipan in the South Pacific during World War II.

Upon his return, the Clyatts briefly resided on a base in Corpus Christi before moving to Oak Cliff for a short time.

“When the war was over there was no place to live in Irving,” Clyatt said. “You couldn’t build houses during the war. Everything was commandeered. You couldn’t have metal, you couldn’t buy wood.”

More than six decades later, Clyatt has raised a family of three children, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, all of whom can truly see Irving only through the eyes of their Mary Kathryn Clyatt.

“It was so small,” she said. “You did know everybody. You really did. But I much prefer it today. We have beautiful landscaping and wonderful homes.”

Mary Kathryn Clyatt’s family was an influence on the city of Irving.

• Her mother, Mary Lively, was the city’s longtime music teacher and classical musician.

• Her uncle, Doc Lively, donated the land for the Lively Pointe Skate Park, Lively Pool and Lively Pointe Youth Center.

• Her grandfather, Charles P. Lively, and her uncle, Roy S. Lively, were postmasters in Irving.

• Her great-grandfather, Mark Callister Lively, was a pioneer schoolteacher

• Her great uncle, Edward Cash, was the state representative who got the legislation passed to start Irving ISD.

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Lindsey Bever is a reporter for neighborsgo and can be reached at lbever@neighborsgo.com or 214-977-8051.