A marriage Proposal …
I was introduced to Ken and Kay FEB 1999, at the closing of a lot I purchased from them. I was leaving the closing office as they were going in. None of us knew in a little over a month, Kay would pass. I was looking for a house to lease in Cedar Creek Country Club while I built a house. A good friend at work came to my office and told me a friend in his golf group had a house for lease & gave me a number – he said I had to call right then. I did, and I met Ken Vieux at Shore Drive that September day & leased a house. Ken would come by & have dinner & stay and talk. He was different from any man I had ever met. He was smart, interesting, honest & seemed to love adventure and travel. Over the next several months we talked for hours about places we had been & wanted to go, things done & things we wanted to do. In January of 2000, Ken being all about contracts, presented a contract titled “OUR RELATIONSHIP” for me to sign. This contract stated that he would like for us to be a couple and he would like for me to think of us that way. He wanted me to think about him each day and give him a 3-minute call so he would know I was thinking about him because he thought about me all the time. If I wanted to sign the contract we would continue with some ways & ideas to make our dreams come true. I signed the contract and we became a couple. 
In May of 2000, Ken asked me to marry him, I told him he had no idea what he was asking. My mother lived with me & always would & I had four children, two still in college. Actually, we were more of a clan than a family. He never had children and his mother had never lived with him. He told me he liked my mother and he thought he had missed out on having children and would like to have a family. We were married October 7th; he embraced our family and became part of the clan. The rest was history. He loved every one of them. If I ever have doubts, I just have to look through the photos of him with the grandchildren. 

Real Estate …
Real Estate always seemed to run through Ken’s life. As far as I know, his first Real Estate license was in Arizona. It did not take him long to get back into Real Estate after he came to Dallas, first in Urban Rehabilitation and then Tax Appraisal. In Texas he had a Real Estate Brokers license until he retired in 1998. He always bought, renovated, leased, and sold houses. He usually owned several houses at a time. I came across his goals for 1985: 1. Legg TV (probably Satellite), 2. More planning- detailed plan, 3. New Clothes, 4. Job advancement or salary increase, 5. Sell Antlers, 6. Sell San Cristobal, 7. Buy 5 rent houses, 8. Increase cash reserves, 9. Sell Birkenhead Court, 10. Athletic Club, 11. Tennis, 12. Computer. Four of his goals involved buying or selling real estate.  He had just started his 1986 goal list: 1. Buy 5 rent houses, 2. Sell Torrey Manor, 3. Job advancement or salary increase. Two of these three involved real estate. After we married, I continued to work for another eight years and Ken continued to buy, renovate, lease, and sell houses in the Cedar Creek Country Club neighborhood. I usually helped him with his renovations and Christina would also. My fondest memory is when Ken and I would be working in one of the vacant houses. When Ken was working in a room by himself, he liked to sing. His two favorite songs to sing were Amazing Grace and How Great Thou Art. Ken had a beautiful voice and it would resonate through the empty house – especially the houses that were tiled. Often, I would stop what I was doing and just listen.

A Carpenter …
By the time that Ken was 12, he was learning to be a carpenter from his uncles & his father. The Vieux brothers traveled together where there was work if there was no work in McAlester, Oklahoma. They would always return to McAlester when there was work again. There were 3 migrations from Oklahoma to California during Ken’s early years. Once the women took a jobs picking cotton. Ken & his mom together he thought may have filled half a sack & Ken had got into the electric fence.  They were not asked to come back the second day. When Ken was in first grade, they went to the Sanger, California area and lived in the migrant worker camp. They lived in shelters that were wood three feet up and canvas on top. There was one water spicket for 200 families & the dust from the cars driving through was endless. As soon as Ken’s dad was working, his mom found them another place to live.  When Ken was 16, his dad quit his job & they moved to Phoenix, AZ, where they could stay with Ken’s uncle. Ken got his GED, and finished high school at night school, and went on to get his associate degree from Phoenix College. He worked framing houses on Camelback Mountain, & as project manager building Stuckey’s Convenience stores in Arizona. He taught prisoners carpenter skills at Lompoc Federal Prison in California and got his Real Estate License & sold Real Estate for a time.  He worked at General Electric at night & went to college days. After graduation, Ken came to Dallas to visit a friend who was framing apartments in North Dallas. His friend needed to get back to Phoenix, so Ken finished the project – and stayed. He worked for three months as a change out carpenter at the Ford Plant downtown Dallas before it closed and then for the City of Dallas at the Convention Center. From there he became a building inspector, worked in urban renewal, and finally appraisal. It was when he got into appraisal that he went back to college at SMU and carpentry became a hobby.

A story of Pigeons …
From an early age Ken knew one thing for sure – he did not want to be poor, and he did not want to have to depend on someone else. In Fresno, Ken always had something going to earn money. He had a large paper rout that he threw from his bicycle as well as successfully trading and bartering with friends and acquaintances. Many of his little friends’ mothers told them they could not trade with Ken. Ken would capture pigeons off of the roof of the Fresno Jr. College at night, set them at the street with a for sale sign the next morning, and his mother would sell them for $.50 each as squab to passerby’s while he was at school.  He would climb a tree up to the first roof level of the Jr College, and he had a ladder on that roof that he left there to use to climb up to the second roof level. At evening the pigeons would roost in the gutters and Ken would collect them and put them in a burlap sack. His was very successful for many months until one night the night security guard caught him coming down and wanted to know what was in the bag. Ken told him, he let him go but told him not to come back. Ken lost his ladder and the pigeon business. 

The story of Traveler…
When I married Ken, He had a dog, Honeysuckle. She was with us for two years before she passed away at 17. Ken was never going to have another dog - ever. One day when he picked me up from work, he told me “Someone threw a dog out over at the shop and it is under the trailer. I couldn’t let it starve so I went and got it some food. I am not going to keep him, I am just not going to let him die.” So, we had dinner and when we turned into the neighborhood, he asked me “do you want to see him?” I said sure and we went by the shop. This was the ugliest dog I had ever seen, he had no hair, but if Ken liked him, and it was clear he liked Ken. The next day my daughter, Christina and Ken took the dog to the vet.  The vet (who had been Honeysuckle’s vet for years) asked Ken what did you name him? Ken told him “I was thinking Traveler, but I am not going to keep him.” The vet told Traveler, “You have a really good daddy.” The vet also told Ken he probably wouldn’t have much if any hair.  Traveler thrived, and had beautiful thick white hair.  He would be waiting every morning at the shop for Ken. About three months later we left out on a 4-week rv trip. Ken told me if Traveler was still there when he got back, he was going to bring him home. He was there waiting – everyone Ken knew had been going by and taking him leftovers. He came home with us that night and slept beside Ken’s side of the bed until Ken went to the hospital. When Ken did not come home from the hospital, Traveler looked for him constantly. He grieved, so that he lost from 45 to 31 pounds. He passed in his sleep one Sunday afternoon five weeks after Ken. He was 18-1/2 years old. He had traveled with Ken and I through 45 states, walked on the Pacific and Atlantic beaches, the shores of the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes. He had been to Sturgis, Disney World twice and seen the last shuttle launch into space. I have no doubt that he walks in heaven with Ken.

OBITUARY

Henry Kenneth Vieux

March 27, 1940 – August 30, 2022

Eubank Cedar Creek Funeral Home & Memorial Park

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