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.