Robert E. "Uncle Bob" Weisinger

"Uncle Bob" Weisinger was one of Burke's more memorable characters and was truly everyone's "uncle". He was a kind and gentle man who for many years ran a Gulf service station on old Texas 35 in the middle of town. His verbal trademark was "Uh, huh. Spec so" said while rubbing the palms of his hands together in a washing motion.

Jim & Bob Weisinger

The Weisinger Farm

Before buying the store, Robert and wife Fannie lived on a farm about 1/2 mile north of Ryans Chapel. The webmaster lived with his parents on the old Weisinger farm in the mid 1950s. The farmhouse was a typical high-ceilinged housd on blocks with a long front porch and a sheet metal roof. There were two cisterns out back, a chicken house, a junkhouse, and a barn. The property had numerous "paper shell" pecan trees and tame muscadine vines planted by Uncle Bob. The webmaster remembers climbing the trees with muscadine vines and whiling away the summer afternoons eating Uncle Bob's muscadines. The vines on one tree were so small that the webmaster would climb up through the thicket of vines and literally sit on top of the tree.

The Old Burke Road and "Burke Springs"

Access to the Weisinger farm was by a private lane that ran east from what is now FM 2497. The lane, which continued on eastward toward Burke, was the main road before the Burke to Delaney Crossing Road was built. Just down the lane toward Burke the land crossed a branch. To the left of the crossing in the creek bed is a roughly oval basin seemingly carved into the
limestone botton. What appears to be a step is carved into one bank of the basin. At the time the basin was coninually filled with clear water. It appears to be man made, and it might have been a spring used by early settlers. The webmaster believes this is the feature that he heard Kenneth Ryan, who lived nearby, refer to as "Burke Springs".

May Weisinger

The webmaster never knew Uncle Bob's first wife, and he was single for a long time. Probably in the late 50's Uncle Bob apparently joined a "lonely hearts club" and married a woman named May from Pampa, Texas that he met via correspondence. The first time he saw her was when she arrived on the train in Burke. She was a kindly and friendly woman. After Uncle Bob died she left the area, but eventually returned and lived in the old store until her death.

Sources:

M. Lee Murrah, Personal Recollections