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.
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