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In 1962 we opened the doors of Austin-Williams Interiors at 38th and Speedway. We moved into the attached apartment with our baby, Eric Austin Williams. We were better grounded in design and decoration than we were endowed with business sense. Off we went, opening a new business with only $600 borrowed from my mother-in-law. The previous business in that location was Westfall Upholstery, which had gone broke...so we inherited a commercial sewing machine and some other necessary equipment. We stained the concrete floors, built a partition wall to separate the show room from the workroom, and set about hiring a full time upholsterer and a couple of drapery seamstresses.

To make ourselves feel better about 'living behind the shop', we hung a crystal chandelier in the dining room, and added a few antiques. We installed a little cupid-and-seashell fountain in the fenced in backyard, and stocked it with 3 goldfish. We put the baby's crib in the bedroom, and the two of us slept on a pull-out sofa in the living room. It was in that living room that I watched TV for 3 days straight after the Kennedy assassination. It was later in that living room that I was awakened by the roar of police motorcycles surrounding President Johnson's motorcade as he was driven from the airport to his home in West Austin.

In that tiny bathroom I turned on the hot water to fill the room with steam when baby Eric had the croup that first winter. The doorway between the shop and the apartment is where toddler Eric greeted me covered head to toe in yellow pancake mix. I had stepped away from him for a few minutes to great a walk-in customer, and he decided to make pancakes by himself. There was a trail of broken eggs from the doorway to the kitchen. Fortunately, our business was mostly dependent upon our making house calls, not walk-ins.

In the kitchen, with its hot and cold faucets installed wrong way around, the drapery ladies made delicious tortillas from masa flour. Between their cooking and our upholsterer's self-described "Mexican chicken" (bean burritos) that he kept warm on the