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.