Sharecropper's Son by Tom R. Cook

INTRODUCTION

I decided to write down some of the things I remember from years gone by. I’m doing this for my kids and grandkids, not because they want it now, but because some day they might. There are a lot of things I would like to know about the experiences of my parents and grandparents but at this time my mother’s memory is failing her, and my father and grandparents are no longer in this world. My Grandpa Sullivan came to Oklahoma in a covered wagon before it was a state. My Grandpa Cook’s ancestors were citizens of the Republic of Texas. I have heard one talking about crossing the flooded Canadian river in the wagon and the other talking about shooting prairie chickens through the eye on the Texas plains. I have a thousand questions that I would like to ask them now. When I could have asked them, I was too busy or just not that interested. Now it is too late. Mom did write about her life after she was married but she didn’t cover her early years. So if I write my memories down, maybe it will answer some questions someone might have after I am gone. I have included the location of some of my old haunts so that my kids or grandkids can drive by them if they are ever in the neighborhood. I have first hand knowledge of most of the things I want to talk about, but I will tell some second hand stories too.

Part I-The Early Years, Chapter 1-Before School

CHAPTER 1
Before School
1935-1941

Mom and Dad were married on August 19th, 1933, right in the middle of the great depression. I was born September 23rd 1935, about three miles east of Mangum, Oklahoma. Our house sat on the south side of U.S. Highway 283. Dad was sharecropper on what then was known as the Dearman place. I don’t remember this but from hearing Mom and Dad talk, I know they farmed the place with a team of horses and would take a wagon to town for supplies. At some point in time they bought a car. Due to dust storms and depression times, we moved from there to Bakersfield, California. (See figure 1.) Dad never found steady work in California and I think they got homesick for family. Just before my brother Darwin was born in 1937, we moved back to Oklahoma. I have no memory of California, and only vague fragments for the next few years. For a while we lived in what they called the “weaning pen”, a small house on Grandpa Sullivan’s place that most of Mom’s brothers and sisters lived in for short periods, usually soon after they got married. I also have some vague memories of living in a house between the Dearman place and Grandpa Sullivan’s, but I don’t know exactly where it was located. We lived with Grandma and Grandpa Sullivan for a while and at times Mom and Dad would take care of his farm while he came down to work on the place in Texas that I live on now. I know Dad did some farming, he worked in the gin in season and then he got a “good” job working in the creamery in Mangum. Mom and Dad bought a house on the north side of Mangum and we were living there when I started to school. In those years before I started school, there are several memories burned in my mind; some of them may be scorched around the edges by passing years but I’m going to relate them to the best of my ability.

Not every one gets credit for coining new words. I shouldn’t either but I’m going to take it anyway. When I was little, my folks referred to the part of the anatomy that brought up the rear as the caboose. I had trouble pronouncing the word and called it a “boofy”. I guess it hasn’t caught on much in the English speaking world but it is pretty wide spread in the Cook family. For years my folks used to laugh at me when they remembered the time we were fishing and put a fish in a bucket of water. I had my head over the bucket, watching the fish when he splashed water on me. I picked the fish up by the tail and said, “Fishy, I’m going to spank your boofy.” Then I looked him over and after a pause said “Fishy, where is your boofy?”

One of my first memories was living in Grandpa’s “weaning pen”. I was probably two years old, going on three. I remember looking out the east door one morning. The door was open, the sun was shining bright, it was warm, and there was no screen blocking the exit. Outside the door, the most beautiful white sand you have ever seen had drifted up. It looked good enough to eat. That is just what I decided I wanted to do. The only problem was that the step down to the sand was about 18 inches high. There was something about my Grandpa and concrete. On that farm today, about the only part of the buildings left are steps, foundations, and concrete water troughs. This step I had to negotiate was a big concrete block and my guess is that over the years, the rain had washed the dirt away, leaving the big step. I thought about jumping but after seeing just how far down it was to the ground, I decided a better attack would be to get on my stomach and go down feet first. That worked fine until I got down to my elbows and my feet still hadn’t hit the ground. I couldn’t get back up but was afraid to turn loose and drop. After staying in that position for what seemed to be an eternity, fatigue set in and decided my fate for me. I dropped about a half inch with no bodily damage and there in front of me was this big pile of beautiful white sand.
It even looked better up close than it did from the doorway. I knew it was going to taste as good as it looked. I scooped up a handful and put it in my mouth. Need I say more? It was more disappointment than a young boy should have to face. Now, not only did I have my mouth full of this gritty sand that I couldn’t spit out but I couldn’t get back in the house either. No matter how hard I tried, the step was too big of an obstacle to negotiate. I sat down and cried. Mom came and got me. I don’t remember what happened after that but I know I never had an urge to eat sand again.

My Uncle Ray, Mom’s brother, had a son, Donny, just a little more than a year older than me. Donny and I were very close. Besides my brother Darwin, he is the only one I ever remember playing with before I started to school. (See figure 2.) Two months before I turned four, he had his tonsils out and died from the operation. At that time, Donny was living in the house I was born in. I remember my Dad and some neighbors helped dig the grave. Before the funeral, he was laying in a baby bed in the southeast corner of the house. The house was full of mourners. I made my way through the crowd and was watching Donny with my face between the bars of the bed. For some reason I felt I had to make sure he wasn’t breathing. I watched for some time and every once in a while I thought I might have detected motion. After a while longer I became convinced that he had no breath left in him.
Donny died in July 1939. I know it couldn’t have been too long after that when it happened: I heard a voice. I know it wasn’t long afterwards because I was standing in Mom’s garden, surrounded by big watermelons, so it was before winter. As I was standing there, I heard a voice say “Tommie” with an inflection like it wanted me to answer. I looked around and no one was in sight. I went in the house and asked Mom who called me. She said no on one did because she and I were the only ones at home. This was a house out in the country but I don’t remember where. She said I was just imagining things but I knew better and decided it was Donny talking to me from heaven. This is the only time I ever heard voices.

I’m sure that Donny’s death had a big affect on my psyche. For one thing, it made me think of God and heaven and death. I knew Donny was in heaven because Mom told me so. She was sure of it, so I was too. One day, again not too long after Donny died, I found a dead bird in the yard. When I ask Mom if the bird would go to heaven she didn’t seem to be so sure. That left me confused and I didn’t know what to think. At least I decided the bird needed a decent burial. I went outside, found some soft sand, scooped out a grave and buried the bird. I was still thinking about the bird a few days later when it occurred to me that I could run an experiment and settle the question of animals in heaven once and for all. I went outside, dug up the grave and found no bird. That convinced me that animals do go to heaven.

Grandpa had hired a black man named Andy that did a lot of tractor work for him. When Darwin and I would hear him coming in from the field at the end of the day we would run to meet him so we could ride the rest of the way to the house on the tractor. (See figure 3.) When kids come to my farm today I like to give them tractor rides; I know how much I enjoyed the rides when I was small.

I built my first house when I was about four. I didn’t really build it; it was more of a remodel job. The house I started out with was a shell my Grandpa Sullivan made to put on the back of his pickup. I closed the back of the old shell with a big block of wood that I rolled down the hill from a place where Grandpa cut his firewood. I put a wheel off some old car on the wood block for a window and then rolled in a wood barrel to fill the rest of the hole in the back of the shell; this was my door. I found parts of old wooden cattle panels to patch up the space around the bottom edge. Then came the finishing touch. REA had just extended electric power lines to Grandpa’s farm and he had the house wired for lights. For some reason, instead of having the house wired, I thought they had it “weird”, and I have always been teased about that. Anyway, I “weird” the house I built with bailing wire. I think mom was as proud of the house as I was; she got her camera out and took a picture of it with me sitting on the “door”. If you look real close, you can see the electric wire coming in the house on the right side of the picture. I have that picture that mom took hanging on the wall today. (See figure 4.) Since then, Uncle John and I built two houses in Alaska, Jerry Myers (my neighbor) and I built a house in Decatur and I built the house we are living in now. In addition, I built another small house on the place in Decatur for a hired man when I was milking.

The only time I remember Grandpa using the shell on the back of his pickup was when we made a trip from Oklahoma to the Texas place to pick up pecans. (Later Mom and Dad bought the Texas place from Grandma after Grandpa died and later still, I bought half the place from them and Darwin bought the other half.) I’m not sure who all went on that trip, but I do remember Grandpa, my folks, Uncle Ray, and some teenage boys from the farm next to Grandpa’s. On the ride down, I was in the back of the pickup with several others and we could smell exhaust fumes all the way.
There are two other things I remember about that trip. The first is that we stayed at Aunt Joye’s (which was located near the bottom of the hill that you go up just before getting to where my house is now). It rained hard the first night we were there and the roof leaked. It started leaking right over my bed and then there were pots and pans all over the floor to catch the drips. The only thing left of that house now is an abandoned four inch well that is located about ten inches on Darwin’s side of the fence and several feet up the hill from the gate. Once in a while I find scrap metal parts where Uncle Mac had his blacksmith shop in that area.
The other thing I remember about the trip was that when we were picking up pecans, nuts kept falling out of the tree and hitting me…hard. I finally figured out that the boys that came down with us had climbed up the trees and were supposed to be shaking the nuts loose; but when I wasn’t looking they were throwing nuts at me. We were picking up nuts from a tree that was near the draw that you face when you drive onto the place now. When I built the house that we are presently living in, a pecan tree from that same area had blown down; using a chain saw, I made it into a curved mantle for our fireplace. It might have been the same tree I picked up nuts under when I was four years old. If it wasn’t the same tree, it was from the same neighborhood.

I remember going out to the cow lot where Dad had a block of salt for the cows to lick. I figured it couldn’t be any worse than sand so I tasted it; it was good. Every time I was out that way I would take a few licks. Then one day Mom saw what I was doing and scolded me; she said, “If you don’t stop licking that salt you are going to grow horns like a cow.” That sounded pretty serious to me. I knew this wasn’t the first time I had eaten the salt and was hoping it wasn’t too late to stop. I felt the top of my head to see if there were any horn buds starting to pop up. Sure enough my head was not perfectly smooth; there were some lumpy spots. It was pretty scary so I gave up cow salt and waited to see what developed. Fortunately the horn buds stopped growing.

Grandpa Sullivan had an old ram sheep that was as mean as he could be. If you got in his pasture and didn’t watch him, he would sneak up from behind and knock you down every time. One day Uncle Earl put him in a pen by the milk barn and got him all stirred up. Then Uncle Earl would stand against the concrete wall of the barn; when the ram would charge, Uncle Earl would wait until the last second, jump straight up and spread his legs. The ram would hit the wall at full speed, his rear end would bounce off the ground, he would shake his head, back up and do it again. I guess he thought he was really getting his licks in. It’s a good thing that Uncle Earl didn’t lose his sense of timing.

It was about this time when Grandpa Cook’s house burned down. They said one of the kids left the fire on under a skillet of grease and left the house. It burned completely and they didn’t save anything. A little later he bought a house in Mangum and moved it to the farm. I remember watching them move the house the last quarter of a mile or so. They had the house on rollers but had to go over a strip of sandy soil. It kept getting stuck in the sand so they got all the tractors they could find in the neighborhood and hooked them together like a train. There were probably eight tractors there. I remember wheels spinning, sand flying and the house just barely creeping along. They finally got it where they wanted it. Grandpa Cook moved to California a few years later.

I don’t remember when we moved to north Mangum but I do remember several things while living there. I don’t know the street name or number but after looking at a computer map, I would guess it would be about the 200 block of Friendship Street. I think Mom and Dad bought this house. It was a small house. Darwin and I slept together in a bed in the living room. I can’t remember if we had indoor plumbing or not. I do remember Dad building a kitchen cabinet with a sink in it but I don’t know if it had running water; if it had a drain, I imagine it was just to the outside. There was a small shed in the back and we kept a cow there for milk. I can’t remember if we had any chickens or not. Dad worked in the creamery while we lived here.
There were at least two things that mystified me about life while we lived there. One was airplanes; I couldn’t understand why they looked small in the sky but as they approached the ground they got bigger. One day we were in the car, near the airport and I made a special effort to watch a small airplane, high in the sky, come down and land. The closer he got to the ground, the bigger he got until he finally came to a stop and these normal sized people got out. The only explanation I could think of was that everything shrunk as it left the earth and then returned to normal size as it returned.
The other mystery was Santa Claus. One day, shortly before Christmas, Mom was in her bedroom making up the bed. I was in there with her and happened to see a little metal tractor, a disk and a harrow in one of her open drawers. I got them out and started to play with them when Mom told me I had to put them back and leave them alone because Santa had left them there. She said if I didn’t, he would take them back and I would never see them again. So I put them back, but I couldn’t figure out why he brought them in the first place. Why didn’t he just wait until Christmas to bring them? On Christmas morning, the tractor and harrow were there but the disk was missing. I didn’t say anything about it to Mom at the time because I figured I had been just a little bit naughty. Years later, when I better understood the ways of Santa, I asked Mom what happened to the disk. She couldn’t remember anything about it. I guess there really is a Santa.

Part I-The Early Years, Chapter 2-School In Mangum

CHAPTER 2
School in Mangum
1941-1942

We lived in north Mangum when I started school. They didn’t have kindergarten in Mangum then so I started first grade in the fall of 1941. Shortly after starting, I came home with measles and whooping cough at the same time. It seemed like I was sick for a long time. While I was sick in bed one evening, Mom and Dad were sitting at the table playing dominos. I told them there was a big spider going across the floor. They told me not to worry, he would go away. They were absorbed in their game but after I finally got their attention they saw it was a tarantula. That was enough to interrupt their game, and Dad dispatched the spider. I don’t remember if Mom gave me castor oil when I had the measles but she used it to cure every other ailment I had. It tasted so bad just the thought of taking it would cure most things. She would mix it with tomato juice to help make the medicine go down. I was in high school before I could drink straight tomato juice and not taste castor oil.
Dad had a lot of trouble with his teeth. While we lived here, he finally ended up having them all pulled and he bought false teeth.
It was in north Mangum that Mom and Dad gave Darwin and me some fancy tricycles. We had them for quite a while and then one day I left mine behind the parked car. Dad backed over it and I never had my own wheels again until I was a junior in high school when mom’s cousin gave me a used bicycle.
During the fall, Mom would go to the country and pick cotton. (Actually, she would pull bolls. When you pick cotton you leave the burs on the plant; when you pull bolls, you harvest burs and all). When she did this on the weekends I would go with her, but during the week I would go home with the Tinsleys after school. The Tinsleys were in-laws to my Uncle Ray. It was on one of these weekends when news came over the radio that would change the life of just about everyone in the United States. When the cotton sacks were full, everyone would listen to the car radio as the cotton was weighed. That is where I was when I heard about the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor.
We had air raid drills in Mangum. Mom made black-out curtains so the enemy bombers couldn’t see our lights. At that time it never occurred to me that Mangum was not the number one target in the country. In the months that followed, we had scrap drives. People turned in old tires, inner tubes, shoe soles and anything with rubber in it. Tin foil was a premium product. Grandma Sullivan always took the string from the feed sacks and made string balls. She always had two or three balls around, each of them several inches in diameter. I think the string was for her use and not the war effort. Gasoline, tires and sugar were rationed. Everyone, including the kids had ration books which had stamps in them that allowed you to buy a limited amount of things over a certain period of time. Grandpa Sullivan always kept bees to make up for the shortage of sugar. On Grandpa Cook’s side of the family, five of eleven uncles were drafted or volunteered for service. On Grandpa Sullivan’s side there were none of seven; he was on the draft board but I don’t know if that was a coincidence or not.

Dad must have been doing pretty well at the creamery. We bought a bigger house on North Byers Street in Mangum, closer to the middle of town. It had indoor plumbing and two bedrooms, Darwin and me in one and Mom and Dad in the other. The walk to school was a lot shorter. There was a laundry not too far from our new house, and it was owned by a blind man. I can remember helping mom carry our dirty clothes to the laundry. She would wash them in one of maybe 15 or 20 wringer type machines. We would then take them home and she would hang them out to dry because there were no dryers at the laundry. Before we started using the laundry, Mom washed the clothes using a rub board in a big tub.
Mom bought a Singer sewing machine while we lived here; she paid $5 for it. I don’t know why I remember that but I do. She had always made clothes for Darwin and me with needle and thread so this was really a time saver for her. She used it for years. It had two drawers on each side and was powered by a foot treadle. When Nell and I moved to Texas, she still had it but the machine and the stand were separated and stored in the wood shed. I made a nice ash table top for the stand and now one of my brothers or sisters use it for a table.
Our neighbor lady gave me the shock of my life one day. She was sitting in her back yard smoking. Up to that time I didn’t know that a woman would even consider smoking. I didn’t like her to begin with because she had a dog that barked at night and kept me awake. After I saw her smoking, I knew she was evil.
I think I finished the first grade while we lived in this house and I know I started second grade while we lived there. That fall, like the year before, Mom and Darwin would go pick cotton while I was in school. One day after they got home Darwin showed me a hand full of coins he had earned in the cotton field. I’m sure it was less than twenty-five cents but there were several coins and it looked like a fortune to me. My eyes must have turned green because I felt jealousy come over my whole body. I wanted to pick cotton. Unfortunately, I got my wish before the year was over.

Part I-The Early Years, Chapter 3-City View School

CHAPTER 3
City View School
1942-1943

Dad started having health problems. He was working long hours, he had a bout of pneumonia and he always had a cold. The doctor said he needed to get out of the steamy environment of the creamery. So we moved in with Grandpa Sullivan and Dad went to work for him. I transferred to City View School. This was a school that Grandpa Sullivan helped establish when he first moved to Oklahoma; it was the same school Mom and Dad went to when they were kids. Unlike the school in Mangum, this was a country school. The school year started in the middle of summer and then when the cotton was ready to harvest, they would take a break until the cotton was out of the field. They were on fall break when we moved so I got to pick cotton. Kids were paid the same rate per pound as adults. It didn’t take long to figure out this was hard work. Some of Dad’s brothers, Grandpa Cook and a neighbor family named Larson were all working in Grandpa Sullivan’s cotton field. Two of Dad’s brothers, Uncle Hap and Uncle Ernest were known as some of the best boll pullers in the county. They would get over a 1000 pounds a day on a regular basis. The Larson’s had a girl my age and her grandpa in the field. There was a lot of competition between the grandpas to see which one of us would pick the most cotton. Her grandpa would put some cotton in her sack and my grandpa would put some in mine. I was so tired I really didn’t care and, as far as I know, she didn’t either. Every time we got paid, Grandma Sullivan would encourage me to save my money. She said if I would buy a $25 war bond, I could use it to buy a good suit when I got out of high school. Of course I didn’t have the $18.75 it took to buy a bond that would be worth $25 when it matured in ten years. But they had what I think they called “savings books”. You could buy stamps for 25 cents and paste them in the book. When the book was full, it had $18.75 worth of stamps in it. I did save enough for the bond and the picture in my college year book is taken in that suit. I can’t remember exactly what I paid, but it was right at $25.
I remember a lot of fun while living at Grandpa’s house. He gave Darwin and me each a goat. We played with them all the time; one day we decided to hitch them to a little red wagon. We made a baling wire harness but couldn’t control the goats. It was full speed ahead; the faster they went, the more noise the wagon made; the more noise the wagon made, the faster they went. It didn’t take long to get tired of the game because the ride was so rough and usually ended in a crash.
Grandma told us about a snake she found in the chicken house. She had gone out to gather the eggs and there was a snake in the nest. Actually he was in two nests. He had eaten the egg out of one nest, crawled thru a knothole to an adjoining nest, and eaten another egg. The eggs in his belly were too big to go through the knothole. He couldn’t back up or go forward so he was trapped.
Another time, Grandpa, Darwin and I were out in the pasture when the dogs alerted to some animals den in the ground. Grandpa went back to the house, got a piece of heavy wire about twelve feet long, doubled it and twisted it from one end to the other. We then went back to the den; he inserted the wire and started turning it. The end of the wire became tangled in a possum’s hair and he pulled it out of the ground.
I found a way to entertain my self while shut in during the winter. The house was heated with a wood burning stove. The stove had little adjustable vents in front to control the amount of air getting to the flame. I found that if I put a piece of bailing wire in the vent and waited a few minutes, it would be bright red when I took it out. The longer I left it in, the brighter it was. It would get real soft and was easy to bend into any shape when it was red. One day after I got tired of playing with it, I let it cool until it was no longer red and laid it down in a chair. Dad’s brother, my Uncle Henry, came in from outside and sat down to warm up. Evidently the wire had not cooled to the comfort zone because Uncle Henry yelled and jumped out of the chair. When he figured out what happened, in a pretty gruff voice, he accused me of trying to brand him.
Crows started roosting in the trees that grew on the river bank on the north side of Grandpa’s farm. Grandpa and several of the neighbors decided they were going to put dynamite bombs in the trees and, after dark, while the crows were roosting, they would set the bombs off. Afterwards, they were going to go in with lights and sticks to finish off any crow that had just been wounded. I don’t think I ever wanted to go any where in my life as bad as I wanted to go crow hunting. No matter how hard I pleaded, Dad would not let me go. So I missed the excitement. From what I remember, they didn’t kill many crows but they claimed they did scare them good.
Sometimes we would wear shoes to school and sometimes we would go bare footed. Sometimes we would wear shoes to school and come home bare footed. We just had to be careful to remember to bring our shoes home on Friday in case we went to church the following Sunday. The last day of school (I think it was second grade) I forgot and left my shoes. I knew Mom was going to be mad at me because I didn’t think I could get them back until school started next term. When I finally got up enough nerve to tell her what happened, it was no big deal. We just got in the car, went to school and picked up my shoes.
One of my favorite songs at this time was “Home on the Range” because I thought it was a song about “us”. I liked the fact that the song stressed the high morals of cowboys and the fact that they didn’t cuss. I came to this conclusion after I ask my mother what “discouraging” meant. She was busy at the time and kind of brushed it off; she said “Oh, it means something bad”. Well, I was familiar with “bad words” because I had tried to use some of them before and got my mouth washed out with soap. So I knew when the song said “Seldom is heard a discouraging word”, it meant that seldom is heard a bad word. In other words, cowboys didn’t cuss, or at least, it was very seldom.
There was another song we used to sing in church that would bother me every time we did. It had the words in it “The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door, And I can’t feel at home in this world any more”. In the first line, I thought “beckon” meant the angels were waving me off, not in. And I thought the second line confirmed this, meaning that I was so miserable from being waved off that I couldn’t even feel at home.
Speaking of church, Mom would take Darwin and me to a small Methodist Church on a pretty regular schedule when we lived in town but when we lived in the country, it was very seldom that we went. It was a rare event indeed when Dad went with us.

Part I-The Early Years, Chapter 4-Move To Granite

CHAPTER 4
Move to Granite
1943-1945

In November of 1943 we moved to Granite, Oklahoma. All the roads have been numbered since we lived there. From the map I can see we lived on the east side of Road N2030 about a quarter mile north of Road E1480. Dad bought an old Farmall tractor, a few other pieces of used equipment, and about ten milk cows. We had some hogs and chickens too, but they were for home consumption. Dad paid the landlord a share of the crops as rent for the place; I think it was either a third or a fourth.
We lived there when my sister, Linda, was born in January 1944. The day before Linda was born, we had been to town, and stopped by Grandpa Sullivan’s place on the way home. I think Grandma must have known something was about to happen because she insisted that Darwin and I stay with her that night. Any way, the next time we saw Mom and Dad, we had a new baby sister. Linda was born in the Mangum hospital; Darwin and I had been born at home. I think I became the official baby sitter while Mom helped Dad with the farm. I found that when she cried I could almost always get her quiet by laying her on her stomach on the bed and then lay down by her on my back with my feet on the floor; I would use my feet to bounce the bed. We spent many hours together like that.
Part of the house we lived in was made by standing “1x12”s on end and then patching the crack between them with a 1”x4”. On the inside, the walls were covered with a heavy felt paper. The front door opened into the kitchen/dining room which I would guess was about 15 feet square; we had a kerosene cook stove, table and chairs, cupboard, and water bucket in this room. After we lived here a while, we got a refrigerator for the kitchen. It was loaned to us by Mom’s sister, Aunt Dorris, who had won it for a 4-H project. Of course we didn’t have electricity but we didn’t need it for this refrigerator; it was run off kerosene. The living room was about the same size and located on the south side of the kitchen, with a door between the two rooms. We had a coal burning heat stove, a couch and a radio in here. The radio was operated on a car battery and the battery was kept up by a wind charger. A wind charger is kind of like a windmill except the blades look like an airplane propeller and they turn a generator. (See figure 5.) A lean-to had been built on the east side of the kitchen and living room. The north end, which opened into the kitchen, was a screened in porch about 8’x10’; the south end, which opened into the living room was the bedroom. There was a double bed for Darwin and me, another for Mom and Dad, and Linda was on a pallet; the bed room was about 8’x20’. When there was a good breeze, we always had the swish, swish, swish of the wind charger to sing us to sleep.
We had to walk about a quarter mile to the south to catch the school bus or get the mail. We were still in the City View School district so didn’t have to change schools on this move. We only lived here about two years but when you are eight or nine years old I guess two years is about 25 percent of your life. Maybe that is why it seems like we were there a long time. I remember it as being a happy time, playing with friends and cousins.
But I do remember some disappointments too. I saw a bow and arrow set in the window of a store in either Blair or Altus, Oklahoma; I can’t remember which. Anyway, I wanted that bow so bad. So I saved up my cotton picking money for what seemed like a long time. When I finally had enough, we went to town and I bought it; Aunt Pauline, Dad’s baby sister, was about 18 years old at the time and she went with us. As soon as we got it home, she was going to show me how to shoot it. She put the first arrow in it, pulled back the string and the bow broke. All my hard earned money went down the drain and I didn’t even get to shoot the bow once.
The other disappointment was from my own behavior. It was Christmas of either 1943 or 1944, I can’t remember which. Mom and Dad were strapped for cash. They got Darwin and me each a color book and a pocket knife for Christmas. The knives had our name engraved on them. The knives were mail order, and when they were shipped, mine came out of the package and never arrived. I made the comment to Mom that it sure wasn’t a very good Christmas. I could see the hurt in her eyes. I have said a lot of words in my life that I wish I could take back, but if there was just one sentence I could take back, that would be the one.
When the weather would start getting cool in the fall, Dad, Uncle Ray and maybe another neighbor or two would all bring their hogs out to our place to butcher them. After they were slaughtered and gutted, they would be rolled into a big vat of hot water and the hair scraped off. Then they would be cut and wrapped in butcher paper in meal size packages. We rented a cold storage locker in town where the meat was frozen. Then every time we went to town, we would bring home next week’s meat. At times, mom would also put vegetables from the garden in the locker. The day after butchering, Mom would take the extra hog fat, add some lye and what ever else it took to make our soap. She was always proud of her soap, and the whiter it was, the prouder she was. She used the soap for laundry, dishes and baths, and, on rare occasions, to wash out mouths from which bad words had been uttered.
Mom made all of our clothes except for shoes and socks. She even made the sacks we used to pick cotton; they were made out of a heavy canvas type material and frequently needed patching because they would wear out where they drug on the ground. When we went to town to buy chicken feed, Darwin and I got to pick out the feed sacks for new shirts. Each sack was printed with a different pattern that was suitable for shirts, dresses, table cloths, dish towels, curtains and many other things. The feed label was on paper, glued to the sack so when it was washed and flattened out, the sack made about a yard of good material.
When we took a bath, it was kind of a family project. Mom would fill the round tub in the living room with water she had heated on the stove. We would each take our turn, usually from smallest to biggest in the same water; that saved a lot of trips to the well. If the water got too cold Mom would bring in another kettle of hot water.
We went to Oklahoma City to see Dad’s Aunt Tess (Teresa Dean Price) and to go to the zoo. I don’t remember much about Aunt Tess but I do remember the monkeys in the zoo. They were in a big hole in the ground; it was probably 50 feet across and 20 feet deep. There was an old boat half buried in the middle of the hole. People were throwing food to the monkeys but we didn’t have any. Then I remembered that when we had been gathering corn a few days before, I had found a small deformed ear that I decided to keep because it was so cute; I had stuck it under the pickup seat. I went back to the truck, got the corn and Darwin and I started shelling corn off the cob to feed the monkeys. Then we decided to throw cob and all in. We thought it was real funny when the monkey that got it couldn’t figure out how to pull the kernels off the cob. He looked like an old man trying to balance the books.
We had a neighbor boy, Norman Fletcher, who was one day older than me. He would walk down to our house and we would play together. He always came to our house; I think it was because he had a house full of older sisters. I can’t remember if it was him or some other boy in school that had the ultimate toy…a cap gun. Darwin and I played a lot with our cousin, Wilma Griffin, who lived near by. Her mother, Aunt Vivian is Dad’s sister and her dad is Uncle Dude. Dad had a hydraulic jack; we would put a board on it and one of us would sit on it while the other jacked it up and let it down. It seemed like fun at the time. We had gone to Wilma’s house one time and our mothers were snapping beans. Us kids went out to Aunt Vivian’s chicken house and got about four eggs apiece. We then climbed on top of the barn and bombed the ants below. We got our spankings before we got home. Darrel Dean was my cousin; his dad is Uncle Henry, my Dad’s brother, and his mother is Aunt Opal. When he was about five years old, he was at our place and stepped in a big pile of chicken droppings while playing bare footed. He came hobbling into the house and said, “Mama, look what I stepped in, and it’s not mud either.” Another cousin, Jim Howard, would come out to help us pick cotton. His mother, Aunt Maurine is Mom’s oldest sister and his dad is Uncle Jack. We would complain about being tired in the field but when we got back to the house to eat we had a special game we played in the chinaberry trees on the south side of our house. The trees were so thick it was hard to walk through them. One of us would hide in the brush and the other would try to walk through without being ambushed. It was an exuberating game that we never got tired of playing but as soon as we got back to the field, we were exhausted.
Sometimes when we cousins got together we would try to scare each other after dark. It wasn’t too hard to do when the coyotes started howling and you could hear things moving in the brush. But the scariest thing was a state prison just across the river from us in Granite. Everyone knew that as soon as a convict escaped, he headed straight for the river to throw the blood hounds off. And our house was less than half a mile from the river. Just talking about it would usually bring us all back into the house.
Dad took Darwin and me out behind the house one day to teach us to shoot the .22. This was a big deal in our life because we had never been allowed to touch a gun before. Mom and Dad were both always reminding us how dangerous they were. Some time after that, Dad let me take the .22 out by myself to shoot some birds. I finally bagged a meadow lark. I decided I wanted to make a camp fire, cook him and eat him. I cleaned him just like I had seen Mom do the chickens but I had trouble getting my camp fire started. I finally went to the kerosene barrel, poured about a cup of oil on the wood and got it going. I put the bird on a spit and roasted him. Every thing went well until I tried to eat the meat. It was good and tender but it tasted like it had been soaked in kerosene.
It was my job to keep the kerosene tanks filled. We had the refrigerator to fill, the cook stove, lanterns used for milking, a small can to start the coal fire in the heat stove, and some lamps. Speaking of lamps, Dad bought an Aladdin lamp for the house. This lamp burns kerosene but it has a mantle and gives off a very bright light. It is actually bright enough to easily read by. Several parts of the lamp were broken while Mom and Dad were moving it from place to place but I found a store in Bowie, Texas that had every thing needed to repair it; the lamp is in working order in my house at this time.
Dad had a tractor to do the farming with but we also had a horse that we used to bring in the cows, among other things. I didn’t like to ride the horse because we didn’t have a saddle. If I had to get off to open a gate or get the mail out of the box, I usually ended up leading the horse back to the house because I couldn’t get back on. Sometimes I could get him to stand still long enough by a fence or something to mount, but usually it wasn’t even worth the effort. One time Mom was sick and there was so much snow on the ground that Dad couldn’t get the pickup out of the yard. He got on the horse and rode it south about two miles to what is now U. S. Highway 283. There was a little filling station at the intersection; from there he caught a ride into Mangum, bought some medicine and caught a ride back to the horse. We had two dogs at Granite. One was Tippy, a rat terrier that had one ear that stood up and one that didn’t. We got him when we lived with Grandpa Sullivan. When we first got him, Darwin tried to pick him up by the ear and it broke the cartilage; that gave him a distinctive look. When we moved from Granite, we left Tippy with Uncle Ray, and when we moved to Oregon, Uncle Ray was there and gave us Tippy back. He died there in a sheep chasing incident.
We called the other dog Pooch. Linda called him Pook so we did too after that. I don’t know what ever happened to him but I know he liked to get behind Linda when she was just learning to walk and pull her by the diaper until there was boofy showing. She would try to turn around and knock him off, but Pook would always twist out of her reach.
Linda also had an incident with a cow there. Mom was milking and I was supposed to be babysitting. I let her out of my sight and she made a bee line for Mom. To get to the barn, she had to go through the cow lot. There was a cow in the lot that had just had a calf; the cow wouldn’t let anyone go near her calf. Linda had just started through the lot when Mom, the cow, and I, all saw her about the same time. We all started for Linda, but the cow was closest and she got there first. She ran up to Linda, stopped and then gently nudged her out of the lot. Needless to say, Mom wasn’t too happy with my babysitting.
The old house there wasn’t very weather tight. One time a dust storm blew in and we had high winds for several days. When it was all over, there was close to a quarter inch of dust on every thing in the house. We actually used Dad’s scoop shovel to clean the floor. In places where tumble weeds caught in the fence, dirt would be piled half way up the post. Another time, a big black cloud blew in and there was a lot lightning, thunder, rain, and hail. It was the only storm that ever drove us to the fruit cellar. I don’t know which was the scariest, the storm or the cellar. There were shed snake skins there; when we shut the door, it was dark and when it started raining hard, the cellar started leaking. The door was trying to blow open, and Dad was trying to keep it shut. The storm blew some shingles off the roof but that was all the damage we had.
I remember only one night we had trouble sleeping because of the heat. In the middle of the night, Mom and Dad got up and moved their mattresses outside to see if it would be any cooler. Darwin and I moved ours out too. We hadn’t been out there ten minutes when we decided the mosquitoes were worse than the heat so we moved back inside. After sleeping in air conditioned houses, I don’t know how we survived then. I can remember times when we would come in to eat and the flies would be so bad we would open the door and get a dish towel to shoo all the flies outside.
For a while, I got hooked on radio programs. If I would run home from the bus after school, I could hear all of “Gang Busters.” There were several other programs too, but I can’t remember the names now. They were all 15 minutes long. I do know that every Saturday night, Mom, Dad and all of us would listen to “The Grand Ole Opry”. There was at least one day when the bus was late getting us home. We were out towards Lugert Dam when the steering wheel came off the bus. The driver finally got one of the big kids to put the bus in low gear and let the clutch out while he walked along by the side of the front wheel and kicked it left or right to guide it. There was a little station where Dad had left the horse when Mom was sick. The station man didn’t have the right tools to fix the steering wheel but he did have a lug wrench that fit the nut on the steering column. We came the rest of the way home with a lug wrench for a steering wheel.
We usually milked about ten cows. Shortly before we left Granite, that became part of my job. I would milk one cow while Mom and Dad would milk four or five each. We would drink some of the milk, put the rest through the hand cranked separator, feed the skim milk to the hogs and sell the cream. I do remember all the dirt that used to fall off the cow while I was milking and wonder if it made us stronger or if it made us sick.
Our cotton field had a lot of colorful flinty looking rocks in it, most of them no bigger than a hen’s egg. I found one once that had every color in it that I could name, from pink to black. I thought it was quite valuable. I didn’t know what else to do with it so I buried it. I took Dad’s post hold diggers and dug a hole on the south side of the house right beside the ground rod for the radio. It was easy digging so I didn’t stop until there was only about a foot of the post hole digger handles sticking out of the ground. I put the rock in a tin can, crushed the top closed and started to cover it up. I was about half through covering it when Darwin came around the corner and said he wanted to bury something in the hole too. Well, he didn’t have anything near as valuable as my rock but we looked around and found a foot roller off an old bed. We put that in the hole and finished covering it up. Years later, while I was still in the Air Force, Nell and I went by to visit Uncle Ray. I decided to try to recover the rock. I couldn’t remember exactly where it was but there was a hole in the wall of the house where the radio ground wire came out so I had a pretty good idea. I dug a hole about two feet in diameter and found nothing. It was getting dark and I had worn blisters on both hands so I had to leave. The next day we had to leave Oklahoma. As I finished covering the hole back up, I found Darwin’s roller in the dirt I was putting back in the hole. By this time it was completely dark and my hands were so sore I couldn’t hold the diggers. The next time we went by there, the house was no longer there so I had no idea where to look. There is a pretty rock still buried somewhere on that place.
Dad had a 1939 Ford pickup that we used to take the cream to town, haul feed, and do all kind of other farm chores. The headlights were a little bigger than a football and mounted on top of the front fenders. They were just the right size so you could sit on the fender with the light between your legs. Dad and my uncles liked to go jack rabbit hunting in the truck. Two of them would be saddled up on the fenders with shot guns and one would drive. Darwin and I would ride in the back and pick up the rabbits. We would go out in the wheat field at night and when we would see a rabbit in the headlights, we would take out after him, guns blazing. It wasn’t unusual to get 20 rabbits in a night. We shot the jack rabbits because they ate the wheat. Once in a while we would get a cottontail rabbit; we would take it home and Mom would fry it. We used this same pickup to move from Oklahoma, to Nebraska, to Idaho, to Oregon.
Mom and Dad bought a box of apples and had them stored on the back porch. That night a rat got into them and ate off of two or three. We had some steel traps so I set one the next night. In the morning, the trap was gone but no apples had been bothered. I had failed to tie the trap down and evidently, the rat had been caught by a leg and dragged the trap under the house. I always wondered if someone found a trap when they tore down the house.
We were going somewhere in a car one day. I was sitting in the front seat between Dad and Uncle Dude. Mom, Aunt Vivian and some other kids were in the back seat. I was about to choke because Dad and Uncle Dude were puffing away on cigarettes. Aunt Vivian said something to the effect that the smoke was about to kill me. That is when Dad told me that if I didn’t smoke until I was 18, he would give me $10 on my 18th birthday. I suppose that $10 sounded to me like a $1000 would sound to a nine year old boy today. Anyway, when I turned 18, Dad didn’t mention the $10 and neither did I. I figure it was the best $10 I never earned.
Dad started moonlighting for the Morrison Knudsen Company. Actually he was working for them full time and moonlighting on the farm. It really put a big load on Mom. Darwin and I did what we could to help but that wasn’t a whole lot. Dad was working on the dam at Lugert. One day he came in sick; he thought he had strained himself lifting something. After he waited too long, he went to the doctor. He had a ruptured appendix and the doctor later said he would not have survived without the penicillin drugs that had just been put on the market. No one had insurance in those days and if I remember right, the total bill was $300. It wasn’t until we moved to Idaho that Dad started making a dollar an hour. I don’t know what he was making at this time but it was something less that a dollar. When Dad started to work for Morrison Knudsen, he bought a big trunk type used tool box that had a few tools in it. It turned out that it was too big for the job site so he and Mom sat down with a Sears Roebuck catalog to order a tool box and more carpenter tools. He got a box, framing square, level, brace and bit set, sliding bevel and several other things. The tool box was about 36”x20”x8”. It had a handle on it like a suitcase and a little drawer in top that ran the full length of the box for bits and small tools. The door opened from the top half of the front and had a rack in it to hold saws. I know Dad wasn’t near as proud of that set of tools as I was. The boxes are real beat up today but I still have both. I also have the level, framing square and brace. I bought many of Dad’s tools from Mom after he died.
In August 1945, the work on Lugert dam was finished and the company wanted to transfer Dad to Hay Springs, Nebraska. I have looked on the map and the best I can figure out, he was to be working on Box Butte dam. So he went to Nebraska while Mom, Darwin, Linda and I stayed on the farm until we could get some crops in and have a farm sale. The farm wasn’t ours to sell but the animals and equipment were. This was a couple of hard months. Grandpa Sullivan and Uncle Ray helped us a lot. I remember one evening when I was tired and trying to get the pigs fed before it got dark. We didn’t have a gate into the pig pen so I was trying to climb over the fence with a bucket of feed when one of the hogs knocked me back into the barb wire. The pigs were trying to step all over me to get to the feed, I was in the mud and I had a pretty good cut on my boofy. I started crying; Mom came over and helped me out of the pen. She told me not to worry; we would soon be back with Daddy.
It was during this time that Mom and I were out doing the chores one evening and we saw a meteorite flash through the southeast sky. It was real bright and although we didn’t hear anything, I was sure it hit in the field between our house and Fletchers. I searched for it, but of course I didn’t find anything.
We went to the little Methodist Church in north Mangum on a sporadic schedule; the last time we went there before leaving Oklahoma, my Sunday School Class gave me a wood pencil with three different colors in the lead as a going away present.
The day of the sale finally came. We sold every thing we couldn’t get in the pickup. There was a big crowd there. Mom took the screen out of the kitchen window and sold sandwiches and ice tea to the people outside. I remember our heating stove was selling and Uncle Ray didn’t think it was bringing enough; he bid on it hoping to up the price but no one else raised him so he had to buy the stove. The place looked like a ghost town after every one left that night.
In October 1945 we headed for Hay Springs. It was quite a trip. Uncle Ray had built a camper shell for the truck. Darwin and I rode in the back with all the furnishings. Mom, Uncle Ray, and Linda rode in the front. We spent the first night at a hotel in Buffalo, Oklahoma. We spent some time (I can’t remember if it was hours or days) in Garden City, Kansas; Mom was going to make sure we had food to eat after we got to Nebraska; she took a lot of canned goods. They were heavy and made the old pickup squat down. Mom’s canned food was too much weight for one of the old tires and it blew out. The war was over but tires were still scarce. It took a while to find one and get back on the road. We finally pulled into Hay Springs, Nebraska. After we got to Hay Springs, Uncle Ray took the bus home.

Part I-The Early Years, Chapter 5-Hay Springs

Chapter 5
Hay Springs
1945-1946

I was in the fifth grade when we moved to Hay Springs. Darwin and I were enrolled in Harmony School, a few miles east of the town. It was a one room school with grades one through eight. Any high school kids were taken into town. There were eight kids and one teacher in the school. Darwin and two girls were in the third grade, our neighbor, Gary Segrist and I were in the fifth grade, Gary’s brother Martin and another boy were in the seventh grade and there was an eighth grade girl. The teacher would take one grade at a time and work with them in a corner of the room that had a little table in it. In the meantime, the rest of the students would be doing something she had previously assigned. Darwin and I took a lot of good natured ribbing about our southern accent. I always thought if the other students knew how silly their accent sounded they wouldn’t say a word.
There were three other buildings on the campus: a boy’s out house, a girl’s out house and a barn. The barn was about the same size as the school. It was divided into horse stalls and had some hay stored in it. We lived a little over a mile south of the school and the Segrists lived a mile west of us. They had horses and saddles. Since our house was on the way to school, they would stop and pick up Darwin and me. They also had a one horse buggy and sometime we would all go to school in the buggy instead of on the saddle horses. We didn’t have snow days, not because there was no snow but because the horses could always get through the snow.
The house wasn’t a lot better than the one we left in Oklahoma but it was a lot bigger. (See figure 6.) But that didn’t do us much good because we had no means of heating more than two rooms. So Darwin and I slept in the kitchen where Mom cooked and we ate; Mom, Dad and Linda slept in the living room where we had a heating stove. There was no indoor plumbing or electricity.
They said they had a warm winter in Nebraska that year, but I can tell you it was cold. It went to 18 below zero which was enough to freeze the pot under the bed. When you have to break the ice off the pot before you can empty it, you know it is cold. Thank goodness Mom had made a lot of quilts. We would put a Sears Roebuck catalog in the oven an hour or so before we would get in bed. Then we would jump in bed with the catalog and put our feet between the pages. When those pages started to get too cold, we would open up to a different section and reinsert our feet.
The school had a “spook house” for Halloween. The eighth grade girl read fortunes and everyone had a similar job. I helped with a booth where some one read a scary story about “brains” and “eye balls” while I guided blindfolded people’s hands through bowls of brains (cooked spaghetti) and eye balls (peeled grapes). I don’t remember what all the booths were but the whole community turned out and everyone seemed to have a good time.
Every one in school made their mothers and fathers a present for Christmas that year. I made Dad a woodpecker door knocker. I had seen one in Mangum on someone’s door and thought it was the neatest thing. It was the outline of a woodpecker mounted on a pivot between two blocks and when you pulled on a string that hung down between the blocks, he would peck on the door. I have no idea what ever happened to it. I made Mom a picture of a wolf howling in the snow. I painted the wolf and the snow on a pane of glass. The boy in the seventh grade with Martin had brought some “valuable” tinfoil to school that he said had been used to wrap aircraft sparkplugs during the war. I have no idea where he got it but he said it was ours to use. It was a pretty bluish color. I put it behind the glass to make the sky background. I then put tape around the edge of the glass for the frame. Mom gave the picture back to me after we moved to Texas and I think it is still around here somewhere.
There was an old abandoned cellar in the back yard of our house; well, it wasn’t really abandoned. It was teeming with skunks. The skunks would go into the cellar and then dig dens back into the earth walls. There must have been 15 or 20 dens in there. I guess it was warmer there than it would have been on the outside. Any way Martin, Gary, Darwin and I decided we were going to get rich selling skunk hides. I’m not sure where we got them (I think Dad bought them for us) but we had five or six steel traps. The first night we set them we had a skunk in every one. Unlike the rat trap in Granite, we had tied these down so none of them got away. In the morning when we went to claim the bounty, we found we had not planned far enough ahead. The odor was overwhelming. Not only did we have to go in the cellar but after we got there we had to pull an angry skunk that was still full of fight out of his den and right into our face. We got the first one out like that and shot him with the .22 but decided we needed a different plan to get the rest out. We found some baling wire, went into the cellar and tied the wire to the chain sticking out of the dens. Of course the other end of the chain was attached to the trap which was attached to a skunk. But we could stand some distance away and pull the skunk out. This was an improvement but it still required going into the cellar with an agitated skunk. Mom wouldn’t let us come in the house after that first experience until we had changed our clothes out on the porch. We waited a few days to let the cellar air out and then set our traps again. But this time we tied wire to each trap before it had a skunk in it. We never filled all the traps again in one night but we would catch a few just about every time we set them. We got to where we could skin the skunks pretty good without getting too much scent on us. When we left there, we must have had 15 or 20 skunk hides drying in the barn. Mom and Dad wouldn’t let Darwin and me take our share with us when we moved so we gave them to the Segrist boys. I don’t know if they ever sold them the next spring, but I hope they did.
There were also a lot of pheasants in Nebraska. Darwin and I were considered too small to use a shotgun so we got to go along but we couldn’t shoot. Just as the season ended, Dad learned how to find pheasants every time we went out. It happened by accident. There were a lot of trees planted in Nebraska as wind breaks. A grove might be 50 feet wide and a mile long. We would walk down these groves, hoping to scare up a pheasant. One day as we were walking down a grove, another group of hunters were walking down the same grove from the opposite direction. When we got about 100 feet from each other, pheasants started flying every where. Evidently pheasants had been running ahead of each group of hunters and when the hunters came together the pheasants were flushed out. Dad’s plan was to drop Darwin and me off at one end of a grove while he and his hunting partners would go to the other end and we would walk towards each other. The only thing I didn’t like about the plan was that it put pheasants directly between me and people with loaded guns. However the hunting season closed before we had a chance to put it into practice. We did eat a lot of pheasant that fall.
Grandpa Cook had lived in California for several years at this time. He got very sick and they didn’t know if he was going to live or not. Dad took the pickup with the camper shell on it and drove straight through from Nebraska to Oklahoma. There he picked up his sister, Aunt Fern, and several other relatives and drove straight through to California. I’ve heard different ones talk about what a cold and rough trip that was but I don’t remember any details. Grandpa survived and I’m not sure what the problem was.
The job was finished at Hay Springs in January and Morrison Knudson wanted Dad to move to Paxton, Nebraska.

Part I-The Early Years, Chapter 6-Paxton

CHAPTER 6
Paxton
1946

The company didn’t pay for moves so we loaded up the pickup ourselves and headed for Paxton. This would be my third school for the fifth grade. I’m not sure why Dad was at these places for such short times, but I would guess they had contract deadlines to meet and when it started getting near the end of the contract, they would bring in extra help to finish it off. I know Dad always went to the same place his boss, Mr. Herman, went.
Just a few days after we got enrolled in school at Paxton, we had a geography test. One of the questions was, “What state is Buffalo in?” Well, I knew the answer to that because just a few months earlier I had spent the night in a Buffalo, Oklahoma hotel. When I got the test back, my answer was marked wrong. The teacher thought it was in New York. I looked it up on the map and sure enough it was there too. I was too shy to tell her that there was also one in Oklahoma. Since then I found out there are Buffalos in several other states, including one in Nebraska.
I made up for it a few days later in music class. Everyone had to stand up in front of the class and name about 15 musical notes that the teacher had on a chart. After about six kids went through them, she would flip the page to another set of notes. It turned out that I was number six on the set I had to name. I listened very closely to the first five and when my turn came, I was able to go through the page without a flaw. The teacher was very happy with my knowledge, but I really had no idea what I was doing.
Our house in Paxton was completely different from the last two. We were right between downtown and school. The movie theater was attached to the building we lived in. We were on the second floor, if I remember right, of a vacant store. Our floor was an apartment complex and we had two rooms, a bedroom and the rest of the house. There were about four other families on the same floor with apartments similar to ours. There were two bathrooms that every one on the floor shared and they both had hot and cold running water. There was even running water in the kitchen end of our apartment. But the rooms were small. We had two double beds in the bedroom; there was no space between the beds and no space between the sides of the beds and the walls. There was about three feet between the foot of the beds and the wall. We had some old wooden orange crates at the end of the beds to keep our clothes in. Darwin and I slept on one bed, Mom and Dad on the other. Linda was kind of like the big gorilla; she slept where ever she pleased.
Paxton is on the South Platte River. Dad said it should be called the Flat River, not the Platte River. One of the main east-west railroads follows the river. The first few weeks in town we would hear a train whistle about every ten minutes; it was impossible to sleep at night. But after a while we got used to it and didn’t hear a thing. Sometimes we would go a few miles to the east to North Platte to go shopping. When we did, we crossed the time zone line and for some reason it seemed so strange to me that the time could change by an hour yet every thing else was the same.
Mom and Dad bought a pair of roller skates for Darwin and me to share. They were the kind you clamp on your street shoes. When I was trying to learn to skate I thought I was getting pretty good; I got quite a ways from the house so turned around to start home. I had been going slightly up hill all that time and after turning around, it was slightly down hill. I almost killed myself before I got home. Before we left Paxton, we got pretty good at skating on the sidewalks.
As I mentioned before, the movie theater was right next door. Mom and Dad were real good about letting Darwin and me go. We must have seen at least a movie a week and maybe more. It cost ten cents to get in. Roy Rogers became my hero there. He was in a movie called “Man from Oklahoma”. Since we were both from Oklahoma I knew he was my kind of people. If he was the man from Oklahoma then I was the boy from Oklahoma. It really broke my heart later when I found out he was from Ohio. We had a friend in Paxton whose dad was a fireman. Before we moved there, the theater had caught on fire. His father had helped put it out and as a result, the theater owner gave the firemen free passes for their families. So our friend (I can’t remember his name) often went to the movies with us.
Darwin had his tonsils out while we lived there. It kind of scared me when I found out they were going to do it because of memories of Donny. Every one said it would be okay but the next day when they went to bring him home from the hospital, he had almost bled to death like Donny did. Then it was scary.
Dad used to take us fishing some place there but I’m not sure just where it was. We would catch some nice crappies. (See figure 7.) I remember one time we were fishing; I had a cane pole and was catching fish about as fast as I could bait the hook. There was a man right next to me that had a fancy rod and reel set. He was using the same bait I was but he wasn’t catching anything. Every time I would pull a fish out of the water, he would move a little closer to my spot while I was taking the fish off the hook. Finally he got so close I couldn’t get back to the water so I moved to where he started. I kept catching fish and he never did.
One time I had a small piece of rope and was practicing tying knots. Linda was there so I thought I would see if I could tie her up to where she couldn’t get loose. She thought it was fun. I had her laced to the stair banister pretty good. About that time Mom called me and asked me to go to the store for something. When I got back about an hour later (I had met some friends) Mom was mad at me. She thought I had done Linda wrong; but sweet little Linda didn’t hold it against me.
It was in Paxton that I started making model airplanes. Unlike the plastic models today, these were made of balsa wood and covered with tissue paper. The first one I made was just wings and tail with one piece of wood connecting those two parts together. It wasn’t modeled after a real plane. It had a propeller powered by a rubber band and would fly. I soon started making bigger and more complex ones that looked like real planes. We didn’t have room in our apartment for me to work on the models there but there was an empty room and no one seemed to care that I used it. One of the ladies that lived in the apartment had a big effect on my attitude towards life by a comment she made. She saw one of the bigger models I was working on and said to Mom, “Oh, he has so much patience.” I didn’t even know what the word meant but I felt like a million dollars. I found out what it meant and after I knew, I made an effort to be even more patient. I recently made a wooden clock and if that lady had not made that comment, I doubt if I could have completed it. When you talk to kids, choose your words carefully. In June of 1946 the job Dad was on was completed, and the company wanted the crew to move to Cascade, Idaho. We loaded up the pickup and took off. We traveled in a convoy this time with Dad’s boss, Mr. Herman leading the way. Mr. Herman and his wife Beulah lived in a house trailer so they were prepared for this nomadic life. I think there were a couple of other families in the convoy but I don’t remember who they were.