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.