Written by Suzanne Gage Faught
My mother was a fifth-generation Austinite, graduate of Austin High School and music student at The University of Texas. While a piano student at UT, Janet often played music live on the local radio station. She met my dad, Steve Gage Jr, through Young People activities at St. David’s Episcopal Church where they married in April, 1951.
Once they married, Janet left UT and attended a local business school, where she became an excellent typist, sometimes typing so fast the keys stuck together. Her typing skills landed her a job at the State Capitol where she worked until she had to quit during her first pregnancy. She never worked outside the home again…taking care of four children born within nine years was her full-time job.
Our family lived in the Travis Heights home that my father inherited from his parents. All of our neighbors were my grandparents’ age so my mother made sure we enjoyed activities like Brownies, swimming lessons at Big Stacy pool and playing at Zilker or Little Stacy park.
Janet Boy Gage at her wedding reception
Bergstrom AFB wasn’t far from our home, with bombers stationed there during the Cold War and on alert during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Once I became an adult, I recalled that time when the whole back end of our station wagon was filled with emergency supplies. My dad worked out on Burnet Road and, I learned later, he and my mom had an agreement that, if we had to evacuate Austin, they would travel separately to Longhorn Caverns, close to where we had a lake cabin on what became Lake LBJ.
My dad didn’t want us to wait for him to get home from what was then North Austin before starting for shelter because minutes would make a difference if missiles were on their way to Bergstrom. I don’t know how my parents slept at night during that time, knowing that in the blink of an eye, they might have to travel separately to reach an area where they thought we would be safe.
Although our family moved to San Antonio in the late 1960s, Janet and Steve Jr. always returned to put Christmas wreaths on their families’ gravesites at Oakwood. Toward the end of her life, she returned to live in South Austin for several years before passing away in 2015.
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