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.