“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 ...

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