The Great Mannford Gunfight

In October, 2012, I mentioned a gunfight that I had witnessed as a teen.  In 2003, the Keystone Crossroads Historical Society published a book of Mannford history called "Mannford Through The Years" and they asked me to write a short story about it.  Here is a copy of that story.

"One day in 1963, I believe it was on a Saturday afternoon, Mom asked Gary and me to take her car to Ted Norwood's service station for an oil change.

"Since we both worked for him, part time anyway, this was a good reason to go to town. We took the car in and put it on the rack. There were a few people hanging around as they often did, including Roy Russell, the Superintendent of Schools and a good friend of Ted's, the Pepsi route man whose first name was Bill and Willard Oller. Oller was a big man and very overbearing but we weren't particularly scared of him.

"In a little while, a tall, lanky man whom I did not know walked through the door of the station. Almost at once, he and Willard began fighting. I was amazed at this sight - two grown men fighting like school children. Ted told my brother, Gary, to go get Lee White, the local constable, and Gary left in Ted's pickup truck.

"As Willard and the other man fought (I found out later that he was Ted Hix, Willard's brother-in-law) the fight moved from the office out into the shop bay. Although Ted weighed about half of what Willard weighed, he soon began to get the better of Willard. Willard finally got a chance to escape and took off through the door of the station to his Cadillac, which was parked in the drive. I remember standing there in disbelief watching Willard lean over into his car and come out with a .32 automatic pistol. I thought to myself, "He will never use that thing!" The next thing I knew, Willard came back through the door of the station and, without saying a word, started shooting at Ted. I was standing behind Ted, and Bill, the Pepsi route man, pushed me down underneath Mom's car. Ted was hit four times, twice in the chest and twice in the leg. In spite of being shot, he chased Willard out the door of the station, took the gun away from him and tried to shoot him. Fortunately for Willard, the gun had jammed. Willard ran up the hill west from the station.

"About that time, Gary returned with Lee White, who very calmly walked up the hill and told Willard he was going to have to arrest him. Lee took Willard to Sapulpa and the ambulance took Ted to the hospital. I remember that while Ted waited for the ambulance, he sat down on the curb of the station, unlaced the work boot on the leg, which had been shot, and the boot filled up with blood.

"About two hours later, after Gary and I had gone home to relate the story to Mom and Dad, a pickup truck pulled into our driveway. Dad looked out and recognized the two men in it as being employees of Willard Oller. He said, "Well, it looks like we've got trouble!" then he got the 12-gauge shotgun off its rack, loaded it and the three of us, Dad, Gary and I went out into the yard. One of the men got out of their truck and said, "We understand that your boys saw what happened at the station today. We just want to talk to them about it." Dad told them that there was no way we were going to talk to them and with a shotgun pointed at them, they decided not to argue the point. They got into their pickup and drove off.

"Later that evening, I was back at Ted's station and Willard Oller came back in!  He had made bail and bragged that he beat Lee White back to Mannford from Sapulpa. In his usual blustery manner, he was chiding me for ducking under a car when the gunfight was going on. I don't know what he thought I should have been doing!

"During the next six months, I was called out of class four times by County deputies to be served subpoenas, twice for the criminal trial and twice for a civil suit filed by Ted Hix against Willard.

"Willard pled temporary insanity during his trial and was acquitted. He bragged to us later that he had "bought off' the jury". Since it was in Creek County, we all believed him.

"Ted did win a $38,000 judgment although it is not known if any of it was ever paid."

Collections

Everyone needs to collect something.  I don't know why but, as humans, we feel compelled to collect things.  Otherwise, how could a television show called "The Hoarders" survive and even thrive?

I collect several things, including tools and firearms (its a "guy" thing).  But the last few years I've been collecting hourglasses.  The hourglass is the perfect metaphor for life itself and has been used as such by many writers.  the phrase, "sands of time", of course, refers to our life as though it was the sand in an hourglass.

According to Wikipedia, the hourglass was first conceived in about the 8th century AD and was an indispensable part of ocean navigation for hundreds of years as it was used in conjunction with the sextant to determine one's position.  After the development of the mechanical clock, however, the hourglass became a much less popular way to tell time.

So why do I collect them?  Well, there are a couple of reasons.  First, they are generally fairly inexpensive, at least the ones I collect are.  Second, they seem to be pretty rare in flea markets and antique stores so you don't have to spend a lot of money on your collection.  I always, when I enter an antique mall, ask the owners if they have seen any hourglasses.  They almost always reply that, no, they haven't seen any.

In spite of the difficulty in finding hourglasses, I now have a grand total of eleven of them, in all sizes shapes, and materials.  They range in time measurement from three minutes to one hour.  My latest acquisition was given to me yesterday by a dear friend.  She is one of the most thoughtful people I know and she knew that I collected them so she gave me this one.

It's about half way through its 15 minute cycle.  One thing unusual about this hourglass is the color of the sand, almost pitch black.  Joy, thank you very much!

Joy also included a cartoon with it which relates to hourglasses.  Dan Piraro, one of my favorite cartoonists, does a strip called "Bizarro", which is slightly off the wall.  Here is his take on hourglasses:

At any rate, I enjoy collecting hourglasses.  If you happen to find one, think of me.  I'll never forget you!

The Boat Trip

One day in early August, 2003, I returned home and found a message from Foster Harness on the answering machine.  This was a little strange since, though I knew him, I didn’t know him well.

I returned his call and exchanged pleasantries and then he asked if I would be interested in making a boat trip down the Arkansas River.  I instantly replied “Yes!”, since I had thought about doing just that for years.  As it turned out, he had been planning this trip for over a year and had done quite a bit of research on the trip.  He wanted to leave from the park just east of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma on 71^st Street, go through every lock on the Arkansas River and get clear to the Mississippi.

I went to Foster’s house and we sat down and began making plans.  He would take his 25 ft. pontoon boat with a 130 hp Honda outboard and I would take my 19 ft. center console boat with a 125 hp Mercury.  Two of his sons and a friend were going with him and I told him I would find one other person to ride in my boat.  We planned to leave on September 6 and return on September 13 or 14, figuring that it would take eight or nine days to make the round trip.

I starting making plans including testing the boat for fuel consumption, finding a passenger, and making a list of provisions which would be needed.  Although I did not think he would be interested, I called my brother, Gary, and asked if he wanted to go.  Without hesitating, he said, “Count me in”.  During the next couple of weeks, he started helping me with the provisions and planning.

I hadn’t really planned on more than two people in my boat but Gary called one day and told me that he had mentioned the trip to his son-in-law, Bill Schaum, and Bill wanted to go also.  Who was I to say “No”?  Because Bill had a background in retail food, having managed several McDonald’s franchises during the past ten years, he took over the food planning.

We took the boat out and ran it one day over a known course to see what kind of fuel mileage I got.  I ran right at 4 miles per gallon, about normal for a boat of this kind.  I knew it wouldn’t do this good on the trip because it would be loaded to the gunnels with gear but I didn’t know what to expect.  It had a 34 gallon fuel tank, giving me a range of about 120 miles but I wound up taking extra cans totaling 30 gallons anyway.

With about two weeks to go, we had not found anyone else to go with us and we really would like to have had four or five boats on the journey.  Foster and I decided a little publicity wouldn’t hurt so we went down to the local newspaper office and talked them into running a story and picture.  In the story, we stated that we were looking for other people to accompany us.  It didn’t do much good – we didn’t get anyone else to go - but everyone in Mannford knew about the trip.  Meantime, one of Foster’s sons and his friend backed out, leaving just Foster and his son, Mike, on the pontoon boat.

Finally, the appointed day, September 6, came and we met at Bluff Landing Park at 6 am.  Foster’s daughter met us there and saw us off with Krispy Kreme donuts and coffee.  My son, Dan, drove us out there and took the truck home so we would not have to leave it there all week.  At dawn, we idled out of the park in our boats and headed down river!

Our Boat

Foster's Pontoon Boat

For the first couple of hundred feet, the water was full of debris and we had to idle through it.  I wasn’t getting a warm, fuzzy feeling about this.  However, we went through the first lock right at the park, and after getting out of it, we were home free.

Between Tulsa and the Mississippi River, there are seventeen locks and dams on the Navigation Channel and we planned to go through every one of them twice, once going and once returning.  We almost made that goal but more about that later.

The scenery on the trip was beautiful.  We spent most of each day motoring down the channel, looking at the views and trying to stay even with Foster.  His pontoon boat would max out at about 23 to 24 mph, while my boat would start to fall off plane at about that same speed.  Because of this, we couldn’t run down the channel side by side so I would run way ahead of him, and wait until he caught us.  After he had passed us and gone almost out of sight, we would start up again.  Each one of these “cycles” took about 30 minutes.

We quickly learned that the time you make on the river is largely dependent on how you catch the locks.  We had marine radios in the boats so we would radio ahead to each lock when we were about two miles out.  If they had no other activity going on, they would be ready for us when we got there and it would take about 20 minutes to get through the lock.  If there was a barge tow ahead of us, especially if it was a really long one, it could take as long as three hours for us to get our turn.  Pleasure craft, after all, are last in line at the locks.

The first day we made pretty good time and got to near Ozark, Arkansas.  We found a sandy beach and pulled up on it to make camp.  All of our plans about cooking food quickly went out the window and we resorted to the vienna sausage and pork and beans diet.  After this wonderful meal, we went to bed.  The first night I tried to sleep in the bottom of the boat and it was miserable.  The space almost didn’t allow me to roll over, which I like to do.  However, we did survive it and headed off the next morning, Sunday, toward the waiting Mississippi.

We didn’t fare nearly as well on Sunday with the lock situation and only made it as far as Little Rock before night began to close in.  In fact, we did have to wait three hours at one lock on Sunday because of a double length barge tow and then had to wait over an hour at our fueling stop for the fuel attendant to show.  Fuel continued to be a constant concern and we weren’t about to skip any places to buy gasoline.

When we got to Little Rock, we found a little cove just off the main river channel and tied up there.  I had decided that I was not going to spend another night sleeping on the boat, but there was no place on shore to sleep except in the middle of a poison ivy patch.  I opted for the boat again.  Gary said he was not going to sleep there so he took his sleeping bat and went up over the hill.

Once again, the sleep situation was miserable and I felt claustrophobic where I was lying.  Finally morning came and Gary came staggering down the hill.  I asked how his night had gone and he said “just fine but I did get a surprise when I woke up!”  I asked him what the surprise was and he said that when he woke up and looked around, he was sleeping just off the green on the 13^th hole of a golf course!

Monday, the third day, we began to have much better luck with locks and dams than we had the previous day and we began to sense that, with a little luck, we might be able to reach the Mississippi today.  Also, we found a Corps of Engineers Park on the river that had showers and we got to take our first showers of the trip.

We did get a bit of a surprise when we got to the Pendleton Bridge, near Dumas, Arkansas.  The marina where we had planned to fuel up was out of business!  We knew that we didn’t have enough gasoline to get to the Mississippi River, turn around and go clear back to Pine Bluff, where we had last bought fuel.  Fortunately, we talked a fisherman into taking all of our portable cans up to a Convenience Store and filling them up.  This did set us back about 45 minutes, however.

Finally, at 6:00 p.m. on Monday, we pulled out into the Mississippi River at Mile 590.  The current in the Arkansas River Navigation Channel had been about 2 mph; the current in the Mississippi was over 7 mph!  You could sure tell the difference.  We pulled across the Mississippi and got out of the boats just to be able to say we had been there.  Since it was going to be dark in about an hour, we had to head back upstream to a camping site we had selected.

On the way back upstream, Bill spotted a black bear and pointed it out to us.  It had come down to the bank of the river and was just standing there watching us.  As soon as I turned the boat around to go back and get a better view, the bear vanished.

After going through two locks going back upstream it was almost totally dark when we got to the park we had decided on.  Instead of being able to look for a good camping spot, we decided to just tie up at the courtesy dock next to a boat ramp for the night.  I was not going to spend another night on the boat so I took my sleeping bag and made a bed on the dock.

We had not been bothered by mosquitoes up to this point but they were thick this night.  Fortunately, I was able to douse myself in insect repellent and avoid getting bit.  For a while, however, the buzzing of these critters was enough to keep me from sleeping.

Tuesday morning, we got up and prepared to leave.  We had been cautioned to take an extra propeller with us and I found out why this morning.  I was trying to back out of the little cove we were in and hit something underwater.  It messed the prop up good but we got the spare on quickly.

We once again headed upstream, knowing that we were considerably ahead of our original schedule.  Like a bunch of stupid men, however, we approached the whole trip like it was a race!  The next time, I’ll slow down and take my time.

We got back into Little Rock about 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday and decided to have the first decent meal we had had during the trip.  There was a place called “Gator’s” on the river and we went in there, body odor and all.  I swear, this was the best meal I had had in years.  After we ate, we quickly got up to the Little Rock Yacht Club where we bought fuel and started looking for a place to camp.

Tuesday night was the best night of the trip for sleeping.  We found a sand bar off the main channel of the river and threw our sleeping bags out on it.  That sand really felt good.

Wednesday was another good day as far as timing the locks went.  We seemed to get through each one of them almost immediately.  We knew we were making good time and toward the end of the day on Wednesday, we knew that we could get home the next day, arriving back a full two days ahead of plan.  We also knew that the weather had been perfect for five days and was going to change on Thursday.  We had had five days of full sunshine and little wind, something unusual for Arkansas and Oklahoma.

Finally, at about 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, we got through Kerr Lock and Dam near Sallisaw.  Our last fuel stop was at Applegate Marina on Kerr and we knew they would be closed.  We also knew that we couldn’t get all the way home without adding fuel, so we decided to spend the night on Applegate’s dock, get fuel the next morning, and head out.

When we woke the next morning at 6:30, the wind was howling and the sky was gray.  Gary, Bill, and I talked it over and decided that it was not important to us to be able to say that we went all the way back to Tulsa.  We decided that we would call my son, Dan, and have him meet us at Three Rivers Landing in Muskogee.  We told Foster and his son about our plan but they wanted to go ahead and go all the way back to Tulsa.

Since our boat was not going to go all the way back, we knew we had enough fuel to get to Three Rivers so we took off, leaving Foster and Mike to wait on gasoline.  The trip across Kerr was absolutely frightening!  The waves were running three to four feet and that was really too much for our boat.  We were pounded like you wouldn’t believe but it still had not started to rain.

We finally got across Kerr to Gore Landing, just below Webbers Falls Lock and Dam.  We called in to the Lock on the radio but were advised that a barge tow had just gotten there and it was going to be about two hours before we could get through.  By this point, we were all about through boating so we decided to call Dan and have him come on down to Gore City Park and pick us up there.

We pulled over there to wait on Dan and while we were waiting, Bill and I walked up to a small café in Gore.  We got three great big breakfasts to go and took them back to the boat.  Again, this was awfully good eating!

Finally, Dan got there with the boat trailer and we got the boat loaded just as it started to rain.  We headed back toward Tulsa and it began to pour.  We were all glad that we had decided to “chicken out” at Gore.

Later, when we talked to Foster, he told us that the trip across Webbers Falls was just as hair-raising as Kerr had been.  On top of that, he and Mike got drenched in the rain.  Because the visibility was so poor, he got out of the channel at one point and hit a submerged rock.  He knew he had done some damage but he kept going.

He later found out that he had ruined his prop, bent the prop shaft in the motor, and knocked the skag, or bottom fin, off of it.  The total damages amounted to about $1400 but Foster was so happy about the trip that he didn’t even mind it.

When we got back, Gary and I agreed that we had said about everything that we had to say to each other for a while.  After all, we had spent six days in the boat with each other.  We decided that, when we saw each other at Mom’s house or somewhere else, we would just nod at each other.

The trip was one of those events where, when you finish it, your first reaction is that you would never do it again.  Then, about a week later, you start making plans to do it the next year.  Oh well, we’ll wait and see!

[Footnote: Nine months later, Gary passed away of a massive heart attack.  I was so thankful that I had gotten to spend this time on the water with him.  Also, I did make the river trip again, this time with my son, Dan.]

The Demise of Civility

As I get older, I become more convinced that people are not nearly as kind and thoughtful toward others as they used to be.  Perhaps this is just a natural part of getting older but I really don't think so.  I've thought about ways to quantify this but its one of those things that just cannot be measured.

All I can offer is anecdotal evidence but it does seem that everywhere I look, I see people being uncivil toward others.  Yesterday I was watching the PGA golf tournament on television.  The crowds at golf tournaments used to be famous for their  polite demeanor; not any more.  They yell, they taunt the players, and generally act like asses.

Although I haven't been a ham radio operator all that many years, I'm told by old timers that the airwaves are full of language that would not have been there forty years ago.  In fact, I was quite surprised when I got my amateur license at how much "CB" type discourse is out there.  I had always believed that amateur radio was a "genteel" hobby where everyone respected everyone else - not so!

Politics has always been a nasty business.  If you study historical news events, you find outrageous behavior among politicians from the very beginning of time.  However, it seems that our leaders have gotten to the point where they really do hate their opponents and try their best to "demonize" them.  Has this change in political behavior led to a polarization of our society or is it merely a reflection of it?  I really don't know.

What are the reasons for this loss of civility?  Like many other problems we face today, these values are not being taught at home anymore.  Our children are learning today that aggressive behavior is rewarded and those who are pacifistic are stomped on.  Public education occasionally makes a foray into this area (example: the "campaign" against bullying), but this effort ultimately cannot be successful without support from parents.

As I've told many people, I'm at an awkward stage in my life; I can remember being embarrassed when my Dad said the World was going to hell in a hand basket, but I'm now old enough to believe its true!

Bread Making

I don't recall what started it, but a couple of months ago, we got to talking about homemade bread.  It came up in conversations a few times and I started thinking about it.

I've always told Louise that beer is just liquid bread; they both have all the same ingredients (grain, yeast and water).  Beer, of course does have the additional ingredient, hops, but it is just a flavoring as are caraway seeds in rye bread.  This has been my excuse for the consumption of a few bottles of "liquid bread".

The other day, I finally took action.  I was at Whole Foods (or as my son, Dan, calls it, "Whole Paycheck"), and decided to look for rye flour since I had a yearning for rye bread.  Sure enough, there it was on the shelf so I purchased some.

I went home, found a reasonable looking recipe on the internet, and proceeded to make my own rye bread!  Surprisingly, it turned out quite nicely although I did trash the kitchen in the process.  It turned out so good, in fact, that I made another batch the next day and made two smaller loaves instead of one large one.  My neighbor, T.J., was the recipient of one of the two smaller loaves and, unless he was lying to me, really enjoyed it.  Of course, what are you going to say when your neighbor forces a loaf of bread on you?

Yesterday, I decided to try regular old homemade white bread.  Amazingly, it came out great too.  There's nothing to this bread making!  In my usual fashion, I'll probably wind up spending a lot of money on equipment to continue this and then stop as soon as the equipment has been purchased.  Lets see, we need a Kitchen Aid mixer, a bread machine, an outdoor stone oven, what else?

More bread projects will include English muffins, French rolls, and those really hard crusted rolls that taste so good!  I'm glad I don't have to worry about a gluten free diet!

A New Hex Beam

This blog, much like my entire life, has an identity crisis.  It kind of started out as a ham radio blog then became an on-line diary.  Today, however, we are going to go back and talk radio some.

A couple of years ago, I purchased a Mosley three-element tri-bander antenna.  It covers three bands: 20, 15, and 10 meters.  It worked fine until about four months ago when the SWR went to pot on 20 and 15.  Because it still works fine on 10 meters, I was sure that the problem is at a trap but I had not laid the tower down to check it yet.

The other day, after running an OMISS net on 17 meters, I decided I needed to do something so I acquired a 6-band hexagonal beam from KIO in Alabama.  Apparently, the phrase "hex beam" is copyrighted by someone else because KIO is careful to call theirs "hexagonal beams".  Anyway, this beam looks like an upside down umbrella frame.  A friend suggested that if it were mounted lower, she could use it to dry her delicates.  Perhaps the rf energy would help.

A very nice feature of it is that it covers 6 bands without using a tuner: 20, 17, 15, 12, 10, and 6 meters.  It also uses only one feedline which is very nice when you are shelling out big bucks for coax.

The hex beam is basically a two-element beam on all bands where the driven element is in the shape of a "W" and the reflector is in a horseshoe shape around it.  Being a two-element beam, it is not going to have the directional characteristics that a larger antenna would have but, as the old saying goes, you can't have everything.

Yesterday I took the Mosley down and put the hex beam up in its place.  I know that the World is full of anecdotal stories but here is one for this antenna.  There is a gentleman who lives in Florida, Dick, KI4QMB, who has a penchant for running one watt on the OMISS nets.  I'm not a big QRP (or low power) fan but many people are and that diversity is what makes ham radio so much fun.  At any rate, I had NEVER heard Dick on 20 meters, not even a peep, until yesterday with that new hex beam.  Not only could I hear him but we were able to have a QSO!

Now to fgure out what happened to the Mosley and fix it!

Vacation, 2013

I know that this is kind of like breaking out the vacation pictures and forcing everyone to look at them but our just-completed trip was a hoot and I want to tell you about it.

For the past several years, we have gone to Colorado to escape the summer heat but, for several reasons, we decided this year to go to Minnesota and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  The National Forest Service in Colorado has gotten "stinky" about camping in their campgrounds, to the point of making us decide to go somewhere else.

When we started talking about the U.P, our friends, Mary and Luther, indicated that they would like to go with us.  We decided to leave on July 17.  We got the motorhomes ready and prepared for the trip.  Our first stop was to be Wallace State Park in Missouri and that was the "kickoff" of our trip.

Our next stop was Clear Lake, Iowa.  For "rock and roll" fans, you know that this was the site of Buddy Holly's last concert before his death in a plane crash.  He, Richie Valens, and J.P. Richardson ("The Big Bopper", were killed when their plane left Clear Lake.  A side note is that Waylon Jennings and Tommy Allsup who were also members of the band but were not on the plane that crashed.  Many years later, we had the pleasure of meeting Tommy Allsup in Mannford; he was a friend of a good friend of ours, Faye Carroll.  We also toured the Winnebago factory in Forest City, Iowa, and got to watch Winnebago motorhomes being made.

Our next stop was Minneapolis where we went to the largest shopping mall in the United States, Mall of America.  Luther and I weren't thrilled with it but Mary and Louise were.  We also paid a visit to the nearby IKEA store which is amazing.

The next stop was Duluth, Minnesota.  Although I had been there on business several times, I had never been impressed with the city.  Being on vacation was different, however.  We found a campground right on the water.  In fact, our motor home was backed up right to the water on the pier.

One of the highlights of our trip was seeing the parade of "tall ships" come through Duluth.  We were close enough to walk from our campground to the channel to see them.  These are mostly replicas of the sailing ships of the 1700's and 1800's.

From Duluth, we went to Grand Marais, Minnesota for a couple of days where we camped in wilderness area.  We took a side trip while there to Thunder Bay, Ontario.  Then we were off to Copper Harbor, Michigan, a peninsula in northern Michigan.  We spent four days there and the scenery was beautiful.

From Copper Harbor, we went to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan for three days.  A highlight of our visit there was a boat tour through the Soo Locks and back through the Canadian side.  Once again, we were parked in an RV park right on the water.

After leaving the Soo, we went to St. Ignace, Michigan.  St. Ignace is a tourist town on the north end of the Mackinac Bridge and is a ferry ride away from Mackinac Island.  Mackinac Island is a famous tourist spot and is known for its lack of gasoline powered vehicles.  Everything on the island is "horse driven".  By the way, "Mackinac" is pronounced "Mackinaw" - I don't know why, it just is.

After we left St. Ignace, we spent a couple of days getting to Elkhart, Indiana.  Luther and Mary's motor home was made in Elkhart and we took a tour of their factory.  We also had some good Amish food to eat there!

After a couple more leisurely days of driving through Illinois and Missouri, we got back home on August 16. All in all, it was a fantastic vacation.  I must admit that Luther and I both did some minor body damage to our motor homes but all that can be fixed!

OK, I promise you I won't do any more of these vacation rambles until the next trip!

Genealogy Revisited

I continue to spend far more time than I should working on genealogy.  Every morning the computer gets turned on (electrically, of course) and Family Tree Maker is loaded.

Someone asked me the other day if I had found anyone famous in our family tree.  About the most famous relative I've found is Senator Lamar Alexander from Tennessee.  I did work on the trail of a link to the 12th President, James Polk, but I finally convinced myself that there was no link there.  There were several Alexanders who were instrumental in the American Revolution but they weren't famous, or at least they aren't well known today.

We haven't discovered anyone famous on Louise's side either.  We did, however, discover that my ham radio friend, Dave, is my wife's fourth cousin through a guy up in the Joplin, Missouri area.  That was a surprise!

What is as fascinating as finding famous people is examining how someone in your family fit into the grand scheme of things 100 or 150 years ago.  For an example, look at the story of my great great grandfather, Greenberry Stephens.

Greenberry was born in 1830 in Benton County, Missouri, the second oldest of a family of six boys and three girls.  His father was a farmer as was Greenberry.  In fact, looking through older censuses, most people did list their occupation as farmers back then.  What a change from today.

In 1861, when the Civil War broke out, Greenberry was 31 years old and, being a good southern man, joined the Confederate Army.  Missouri was split on the allegiances of its citizens; some favored the North but many were Confederates.  At any rate, Greenberry was captured by the North and was sent to an unnamed prison.

Many southern soldiers captured during the war were allowed to sign an oath of allegiance to the United States and then return to their homes.  One thing you did not want to do was sign an oath and then get caught again, which Greenberry did.  He was charged with the crime of "bushwhacking" and convicted.

This time, Greenberry was sent to the Gratiot Street Prison in St. Louis, and then later transferred to Camp Morton in Indianapolis.  We know how poor conditions were in these prisons and, if you were unlucky enough to be in one of them, your chances of surviving were pretty bad.

Greenberry did not survive Camp Morton; he died there on February 26, 1864.  We have found a couple of letters explaining this event - the first is from Greenberry (while he was still at Gratiot Street Prison) to his wife, Nancy,  where he knows that he might not ever see her again.

The second one if from someone in charge at Camp Morton informing Nancy that her husband had died.

While his death was a tragic event for the family, it was an indicator of all of the tragedy of the Civil War and it makes one realize what a horrible period that was.

It is also what makes me get up early in the morning and load Family Tree Maker!

Oklahoma Weather

Well, someone pushed the "summer" button and we instantly went to hot weather!  The forecasts call for highs in the mid-90's and lows in the mid-70's for the foreseeable future.  Oh, well, spring never lasts long enough.

The only good thing about moving from spring to summer is that we also get rid of tornado season.  This year has been a particularly bad one for Oklahoma and especially the Oklahoma City area.  The death toll from their two major outbreaks now stands at 47 people.  The real tragedy is the loss of the children in the school that took a direct hit.

I suppose that if we lived on the east coast, we might not look forward to summer.  They have to face the start of hurricane season.  By the way, while I was writing this, I heard a guy calling "CQ" on the radio and I answered him.  CQ is what you call when you want anyone to answer you.  He was located in Delaware and the first thing he mentioned was our tornadoes.  He told me that yesterday, they had a tornado watch in Newark, Delaware.  Go figure!

Will Rogers, our famous Oklahoma sage, once said that if you don't like the weather in Oklahoma, just wait a few minutes.  I have a feeling that he was talking about spring and fall, not summer.  I think we are in for a long stretch of hot weather.

New Radio

As a result of my trip to Dayton to the Hamvention, I did acquire a new radio.  I didn't actually purchase it at the show but I did compare all the radios on my list and make a decision.

I wound up with a Yaesu FTDX3000 transceiver.  For non-hams, that is about a Buick in the Chevrolet-Buick-Cadillac scheme of things, not the top of the line, but not the base unit either.  The word "transceiver" comes from "transmitter" and "receiver" since this radio has both functions built in to one case.

The upper picture shows the complete radio and the lower picture the TFT (thin-film transistor) LCD display.  Interestingly, the meter with the needle is not really a meter but a digital representation of a meter.

Transmitters are relatively simple devices and most of them do about the same thing, receive an audio signal from your microphone, convert it to radio frequency (rf) energy, and transmit it out.  However, the key to a good radio is not the transmit function but how well it receives a signal.  The receive function is the justification for my purchase of this new radio.  It has a much better receiver than my old FT950 which was still a good radio.

I was fortunate enough to sell the FT950 to a new ham in Oklahoma City.  It will make him a nice radio to learn with.  As for me, I think I'm about done for a while!

Autobiography, Chapter 7

Bob Langston worked in Personnel when I was hired at Vickers.  He told me that they were really looking for a graduate engineer with three years of sales experience but, since they were only paying $590 per month, they would take me.  That really made me feel loved and wanted.

Pres Whitson was the Personnel Manager, Bob’s boss.  Pres interviewed me as well and kept asking me if I would transfer if the occasion arose.  I kept telling him that, of course, I would.  I found out later that he was against hiring me because he was convinced that I would not move.  A year later I proved him wrong.  On June 4, 1970, I went to work for Vickers.

Louise and I had moved into a very nice house at 43^rd St. North and Cincinnati Ave. in Tulsa when we first moved there.  It was much better than we had expected to be able to afford and, sure enough, we couldn't.  After about 90 days, I had to tell our landlord that we couldn't afford to make the $125 per month rent and that we were going to have to move.  We moved into an 8’ by 46’ trailer house  at 6619 East King Street.

Before we moved, however, we had one experience which was somewhat funny.  Kenneth Moser, the guy I had tried to join the Police Department with, had a beat which covered my home.  He called me one night and asked if he could come by and drink a cup of coffee.  I told him I would be delighted and he said that he would bring one of his cohorts by.  In a little while, Kenneth showed up in his black-and-white and his partner followed him in in another black-and-white.  We all went inside and sat there for about 30 minutes drinking coffee when Kenneth announced that they had to go back to work.  When we opened the front door, the yard was full of people!  All the neighbors saw the police cars and thought that these white people had done something terribly wrong!

My first job at Vickers Tulsa Division was inside sales.  This company had started out in 1929 as the Tulsa Winch Manufacturing Corporation by Mr. Harley Pray.  It had been on the east side of downtown Tulsa for many years and had moved into the former Hale-Halsell warehouse on East Pine Street in December, 1968.

Mr. Pray started Tulsa Winch by making winches out of the rear ends of Model T trucks.  The gears used on those rear ends are very similar to the gears made today by Tulsa Winch.  When he ran out of used gears he had to start making his own.  The company grew and prospered and, in fact, won the U.S. Navy’s coveted “E” award for excellence during World War II.

In 1946, Mr. Pray decided to retire and sold the company to Vickers Hydraulics, a division of Remington Rand Co.  Harry Vickers had pioneered automotive hydraulics in Detroit and had built Vickers into the World’s premier hydraulics company.  Later Remington and Sperry merged and formed Sperry Rand Corporation.  Sperry Rand was most noted for building the World’s first true computer, the Eniac.

Enough of company history.  My job was to answer phones, take orders, expedite customer shipments, and field complaints.  There were four inside guys at the time: Garry Strouse, Fred Lamar, Bill Lewis, and me.  We had a supervisor, Johnny Kirk, and two secretaries, Janice Bain and Sherry Richardson.  It took me about two weeks to get up enough nerve to start answering the phone but I caught on quickly after that.  I’m convinced that having a farm background really helps in learning mechanical things.

There were three outside guys who worked out of that office as well.  They were Bernie Jiles, Jack West, and Chuck Bookout.  Bookout probably knew more about the technical aspects of our product line than anyone else.  When I would get a tough call, I would ask him to take it and he would always refuse.  It infuriated me but it did cause me to have to go to engineering and find out the correct answers for myself.  I became a better salesman because of his attitude.

Our general manager at the time was Russ Dupuis, an old-school manager who came into our sales office every day and looked at the sales sheet on Garry Strouse’s desk.  Russ had been with Vickers for many years and at Tulsa for about 10.  He retired in 1971, just a year after I went to work there.  The Marketing Manager was Chet Lenik, a Polish guy from Detroit.  When I first went to work at Vickers, he called me into his office and told me that if I heard any good Polish jokes he wanted to hear them.

Louise and I really enjoyed this time in our lives.  We were newlyweds, out on our own, and having a good time.  Louise worked at the Braum’s Ice Cream Store just around the corner from our trailer and I was having a good time in my new job.  We also met our good friends, Jerry and Marlene McCain, while living in the mobile home park.

Like us, they were just good country people, he from Jackson, Tennessee, and she from Jacksonville, Florida.  Jerry had been in the Navy and had met Marlene while stationed in Jacksonville.  After they married, they moved to Tulsa so he could attend Spartan School of Aeronautics.  He wanted to get his A & P (airframe and powerplant) license so he could become an aircraft mechanic.

We had a wonderful time living next door to Jerry and Marlene.  One Sunday morning, Louise made some biscuits from scratch and they didn't come out quite right.  In fact, they were terrible.  Well, I called Jerry and told him to meet me out in the yard.  We played a game of catch with the biscuits and not one of them ever broke!

Eventually, an opening in outside sales came up, this time in Detroit.  This was a major promotion and most people would have killed for it.  Of the four of us, one, Garry Strouse, had made it clear in the past that he would not transfer.  For some reason, the company didn’t want to offer Bill Lewis the job, so that left Fred Lamar and me.  Fred had seniority on me so they kept offering the job to him.  I wanted it badly so I kept badgering Estill Sherrill, the Sales Manager, for the job.  Finally, they decided that Fred just was not going to move, so they told me I had the job.

Being transferred from Tulsa to Detroit meant a raise from $690 per month (I had gotten a couple of raises) to $850 per month.  All of our friends told us that we would hate living in Detroit but the job opportunity was too good to pass up.  In early June, 1971, while the company was on strike, Louise and I moved to Detroit.

We found a small apartment at the corner of 14 Mile Road and John R., in Troy.  If you are familiar with Detroit, you know that the northernmost boundary of the city is 8 Mile Road, so we were six miles north of there.  Troy was a fairly young, growing suburb, and we were happy to be living there.  There was a giant mall across the road from our house, Oakland Mall, and just about everything you could think of was within close proximity.

Louise quickly got a job at a card shop in the Mall, Memory Lane, and developed a bunch of new friends.  I am convinced that this was the reason we liked Detroit so much.  We both had new jobs and were meeting new people and everything was right.

The apartment complex we moved into was named Canterbury Square.  It consisted of several buildings, each with eight units in it.  The day we moved into our building, not a single neighbor knew any of their neighbors.  However, within two weeks, Louise and I knew everyone In the building and, within six weeks, everyone in the building knew everyone else.  I really don’t give us credit for anything except being stupid enough to want to meet everyone.  Some of the neighbors included Chuck Schiff (our accountant friend who lived upstairs), John and Mary Bone, and Chuck and Sue Mowat.  Mrs. Cooper, a lonely widow, lived next door to Chuck Schiff.

One problem we had was that Louise did not know how to drive.  I’ve kidded her forever saying that the next time I get married, the first question I’m going to ask the prospective bride is whether she has a drivers license.  Louise did not want to learn but I wanted her to.  We set a practice time for every evening at 5:30 p.m. when I was in town.  After about 90 days, she was ready and took her test.  She passed it with flying colors.

I was in outside sales and my territory was Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia.  I worked out of an office at the Vickers Warehouse in Ferndale, about five miles south of our apartment.  I was assigned to train under a fellow by the name of Dick Karr, who had been in outside sales for Tulsa Winch for several years.

In retrospect, I was a very poor salesman at this time.  I was definitely not assertive, which you need to be, and I didn’t know the product line as well as I should.  I was reluctant to travel much, because I didn’t want to spend the Company’s money so I didn’t see my customers as often as I should.  In spite of all this, my bosses thought I was doing a good job so they were happy with me.

After about a year and a half, we had a reorganization in Tulsa and Jack West became my new boss.  Jack called me up one day and said he needed to talk to me and would meet me at the airport that evening.  Well, if he was going to fly over 1000 miles just to have a meeting with me at the airport, it had to be important!  When I met with him that evening, he told me that I was going to be transferred and had my choice of Chicago or Tulsa.  Inside I was screaming “Tulsa” but I played it cool and told him I would have to talk to Louise.

Of course, Louise wanted to move back to Tulsa as well so we took the transfer home.  In October, 1972, we moved back to Tulsa, into an apartment building on Harvard just south of Pine Street.

Journey to Dayton

In just over three weeks, Dave Ward and I will set off to Dayton, Ohio to attend the 2013 Hamvention.  This is the largest amateur radio convention in the United States and is "Mecca" for those of us who like to talk radio.  We will drive 800 miles there and back and, because we started planning so late, we are having to stay in a hotel which is 32 miles away.

I've been twice, in 2010 and 2011.  Dave hasn't been and figures this may by his only venture to see the show.  The attendance at Dayton will be about 18-20,000 people and every manufacturer who makes anything remotely connected to ham radio will be there.  New  equipment manufacturers and distributors will have about 300 booths and the flea market area will have over a thousand tables.

Like all shows, there will be seminars and demonstrations, along with dinners sponsored by various companies and groups.  The group I am most active in, OMISS, or Old Man International Sideband Society, will have a booth and they are also planning a dinner for Saturday night, May 18.  The dinners are really fascinating because you get to meet and see the people you talk to on the radio every day.  We have several people in the group who are musically inclined and there will be some "pickin' and singin" after the dinner.

I've kinda been eyeing a new radio and I might just take a look at them while I'm there.  Yaesu has introduced their new FTDX-3000 which is really neat looking and one of them may follow me home.  Besides that, I have a few odds and ends that I need to find but nothing else.

Dave says he is not in the market for anything but we'll see when we get there.  Regardless of any purchases made, it promises to be a lot of fun.

The Battle of Dove Creek

The Battle of Dove Creek took place on January 8, 1865, near the present city of San Angelo.  Remember that the Civil War was almost over by this time.  On April 9, General Lee would surrender to General Grant at Appomattox, essentially marking the end of the war.

The Kickapoo Indians had been assaulted and abused by both sides during the war and the triibal elders decided they would be better off in Mexico during the war.  The Mexican government had promised them a place of sanctuary in the state of Coahuila and they had also been promised safe passage across Texas by the Governor.

About a month before the Battle, Capt. N.M Gillintine and a Texas militia scouting party had discovered the remains of an Indian camp near the Brazos River.  A force was quickly put together of about 325 men consisting of Texas State militiamen and Confederate troops under the command of Capt. Henry Fossett.  They assumed, incorrectly, that the Indian party they sought was a war party and not a group of peaceful Indians traveling across the countryside.

On December 27, the militia force, under the command of Capt. S.S. Totton, began to follow the trail of this group of Indians.  For several days, through heavy rains and cold weather, they followed the trail.  Their provisions ran low and Totton dispatched fourteen men to Fort Chadbourne thirty miles away to replenish their food supplies.

At last, on January 7, the militiamen and Confederate soldiers caught up with the traveling Kickapoos.  The Confederate forced totaled about 220 men.  The Kickapoo Indians had a force of about 400 to 600 men, along with the women and children that such a movement would have.  Although significantly outnumbered, the leaders of the military force were sure that they would have no problem defeating the Indians.

Before dawn on January 8, the battle began.  It didn't take long to see that the Kickapoos were able to defend themselves.  They had recently been armed with new repeating rifles and knew how to use them.  Almost immediately, the militia and Confederate's were routed!  One of the participants who later became a judge, I.D. Ferguson, wrote an account of the battle in 1911.  An excerpt follows:


"Order could not be restored; officers seemed to lose control over their companies; they yelled themselves hoarse trying to get the men to halt and make a fight and drive the Indians back; men on wounded horses begun to drop in the rear, soon to be overtaken and killed. Among the number was Jim Gibson of our company, and myself.  Both of our horses had been wounded.  It was but a very short time until Mr. Gibson was killed, and it appeared that I was to be the next in order as it did not seem possible that I could escape death. I was getting far behind the retreating column and the Indians were getting close to me. A stream of singing bullets clipping my clothing, the air seemed alive with flying lead. My hopes had fled, and I became resigned to my fate. All fear and excitement passed away with my hope of safety and left a train of
thoughts passing through my mind faster than the speed of time; I wondered how I would feel when the deadly missle came crashing through my brain. I thought of home, and what the people would say about me when I was gone; I imagined that after death, the wolves would sneak up and gnaw my bones, and
the wild buffalo would click their hoofs against my dry skull and scare the crickets out of my eye sockets where they had hid away to sing their evening songs. I thought it would be better for me to be killed, as I was only a boy, and had no cares of my own nor none to care for me. That it would better be me than those who had no families to care for.

"Just as these thoughts were trooping through my brain, I saw the panic stricken column checking up and a little man wheel his horse and with a loud voice say, "Here boys, here, follow me, let us save that boy's life!"  It was J. O. Alexander of our company, God bless his noble name; to him I owe my life. He came charging back, followed by our own company and also Foycett's company, with the old gray headed commander leading them; and in a minute the whole command had rallied and were coming flying back, screaming and shooting as they came.  They drove the Indians back and we planted ourselves oa a ridge of prairie to stand and fight till every man was dead. We held up our hands and all took an oath that we would stay there as long as a man was alive, and that there would be no more running away."

J.O. Alexander was, of course, my great grandfather.  At any rate, the Confederates and Militia suffered a resounding defeat in a battle which should have not been fought!

Autobiography, Chapter 6

When I decided to return to Oklahoma State in early 1968, I looked around for the field which would be considered the easiest major in the University.  It appeared to be a tie between Business Administration and Political Science.  “Poly Sci” sounded more interesting to me so that became my newest (and last) major.

I had negotiated a settlement with Maurice Roger McSpadden’s insurance company (from the 1968 car accident - see my blog of March 21, 2013) which gave me about $10,000, a huge sum in those days.  Even though I had had surgery twice on the broken right arm, once to put pins in and once to take them out, I thought the settlement was fantastic.

I had enough money, in fact, that in the Spring of 1968, I decided not to come home to Mannford and work but to stay in Stillwater and go to school.  I took two classes over the summer including botany and remember that the ratio of female to male students in that class was about 10:1.  Yes, life was good!

When I first returned to Stillwater, I bounced around, living in two or three different places.  One was a boarding house on the second floor over the “General George” on Washington Street.  The General George was a head shop and the other people who lived there were all Indian students.  The smell of stewed, curried chicken legs became almost more than I could stand.

Since I didn’t have the crew from Mannford to run around with (which probably helped my grade point average!), I started running around with a group of “town” people, not students.  These included Junior Mullendore, who ran a service station, Jim Wellington, a Coors route man, Fred Wellington, his father and a jailer for the County, J.O. Dodgin, a motorcycle mechanic, David Turner, Ted Sebring, Tom Crozier, and J.R. Graves, who ran a detailing shop.

Most of these guys were into CB radio and motorcycles and I was into both of these as well.  In fact, it was about this time that I bought my first Harley, a 1963 Sportster.  The guy that I bought it from had done a lot of work to the engine and it was the fastest vehicle in Stillwater, bar none.  It actually got to the point that every Saturday, someone wanted to race me to see if they could knock me off my throne.

In the fall of 1968, I moved into the house that I would live in for the next two years.  It was a tiny house converted from a garage and was located at the corner of Ninth Street and Washington.  Ray Bigler was the landlord; I had met him while working for Joe Lewis at his Conoco Station out north on Highway 177.  By now, I had the motorcycle, a power boat, a slick 1963 Chevy and was living in a house by myself.  Now this was the way to attend school!

Even though I had quite a bit of money from the settlement, I did continue to work.  In 1969, I went down to the feed mill, Stillwater Milling Company, and applied for a job.  Since I had a chauffeur’s license, they put me to work immediately driving a truck.  I told the guy when I interviewed that I was good at driving bobtails but had no experience in semi’s.  He said that they had plenty of semi drivers so that wouldn’t be a problem.

The second week that I worked for them, I got a call one morning asking if I could take a load of feed to their store in Perry.  It was snowing that morning but I told them I could and went down to the mill.  As you may have guessed, the load that morning was on a semi.  Well, I “white knuckled” it all the way to Perry and from then on, I was in semi’s all the time.

By this time, I had figured out how to study and work and have a good time all at the same time.  In fact, there were a couple of semesters that I would work 60 hours a week, carry 15 hours in school, have a good time and still made the Dean’s Honor Roll.

On weekends and when I wasn’t working, I would hang out at Jim Smith’s Café at the corner of 6^th and Main and drink coffee with the guys.  The waitresses in there were attractive and we liked to harass them.  I was attracted to one in particular, a redhead by the name of Louise, but I didn’t get around to asking her out.  Besides, I was going with a girl, Carolyn Ventris, and didn’t need to confuse myself.

Carolyn had a little boy, Bobby, who was cute as a bug and Carolyn was looking for a Dad for him.  I wasn’t ready for it to be me, although I did have a close call one night.  Carolyn, Jim Wellington, Junior Mullendore and I all went out drinking and we had way too much to drink.  The next morning I woke up with a terrible hangover and finally made my way to the café.  Jim and Junior were in there and they both allowed as how it was too bad that we had not been able to find a minister the night before.  They both wanted to know if I was still going to marry Carolyn, like I had said last night.  Wow, I didn’t remember any of that!

In the summer of 1969, I had been going to school for four semesters straight so I decided to take the summer off and go back to Mannford and work.  I came home, lived with Mom and Dad and worked for Ted Norwood in his service station.  It was a pretty uneventful summer except the visitor I had at the station one day.

I was in the back working on a car when Ted came back and told me that Orville Barton was on the driveway and wanted to talk to me.  I went out to Orville’s car where he and his wife Bessie were in the front seat and another couple that I didn’t know was in the back.  Now, I knew Orville but he and I weren’t old buddies.  He made small talk for a couple of minute and then he and the others left.

I thought this was a really strange encounter until I explained it to Mom.  She knew that Orville and Bessie were friends with my Aunt Ninah, Roy Pierce’s sister.  The couple in the back of Orville’s car had been my aunt and her husband whom I had never met.  It would be another 30 years before I would meet her.

I did go over to Stillwater a few times during the summer.  One of those times I was on the Sportster and happened to see the red headed waitress from Jim’s.  She waved at me but I decided to be a big shot and ignored her.  Boy, would I pay for that later.

The other big event of the summer in Mannford was getting beat in a drag race.  The old motorcycle was still pretty fast but one day I raced Gary Walker in his 1967 Nova.  It had a 365 hp 327 ci motor and he waxed me.  I still hadn’t been beaten by a motorcycle but that day was coming too.

When I returned to Stillwater in the fall, it was just like I had left it.  I still had the little house on 9^th Street and I was still going with Carolyn, although I was beginning to feel uncomfortable about it.

One night in September, Carolyn and I were sitting in Jim Smith’s Café when the phone rang.  One of the waitresses came and got me and told me it was for me.  When I got to the phone, the caller was Bonnie McKnight, a girl I knew.  She said that Louise Nance (the red headed waitress) and she were both out at the Lamplighter Bar and they wanted to know if I would join them.  As I hung up the phone, I was trying to come up with a lie to tell Carolyn.  When I got back to the booth, I told her that my Mother had become very ill and that I was going to have to go to Mannford that evening.  That was the last time I ever saw Carolyn.

When I got out to the Lamplighter that night on the Sportster, I, for some reason gravitated toward Louise instead of Bonnie, and danced with her all night.  When the bar closed, it was raining but Louise wanted me to give her a ride home on the motorcycle in spite of the rain.  I can remember today as well as if it were yesterday standing outside her parents’ house, kissing her in the rain.

Well, it wasn’t love at first sight but it was just about that quick.  We went together until I proposed to her in November.  I had never brought a woman home to introduce to my parents until I started going with Louise so I’m sure they knew right away that this was going to turn into something.  We initially set the wedding day to be in May or June, after school was out.  Then we moved it to March, during Spring Break.  Then we moved it to January, between semesters.

Because I had gotten to the point where I really wanted to spend all my extra time with Louise, I had gotten to where I was turning down more loads at the Feed Mill than I was taking.  Finally, one day, the foreman called me to come down there.  He told me that I was going to have to make a choice, either the job or the girl was going to have to go.  Well, that was the end of my truck driving career.

We did get married in January, on Louise’s birthday, the 20^th.  We were married by Reverend Don Combs at the Methodist Church in Yale.  Her Mom and Dad, my Mom and Dad, her sister and brother-in-law, Esther and Vernon, and my brother, Milt, were the attendees.  I gave the Minister $20, I bought a corsage for about $5, and a roll of film for the camera.  This was the total of our wedding expenses.

We got married on Tuesday and were going to have to be back in Stillwater on the following Monday to begin school.  We planned to go to Arkansas but the day of the wedding there was a blizzard east of Tulsa.  We decided to go west instead and spent our honeymoon night at the Buffalo Motel in Canyon, Texas.  At the time we thought this was fantastic.  In 2002, we had occasion to be in Canyon again and the Buffalo Inn is still there, with a minor name change.  Our tastes have changed a little in 32 years, however, and we decided not to spend the night there.

During my last semester at Oklahoma State, I didn’t’ work much.  Louise was still working for Jim Smith at the Café and I worked some for Joe Lewis at the Conoco Station but not nearly as much as I had in previous years.  I had one class that last semester that was really eating my lunch!

I had taken a couple of courses under this guy (I don’t remember his name) and had done well in them, so I thought I would be wired in this course, Latin American Governments.  I got in there, found out that this was his specialty, and that I was the only student in there who was NOT a “Latin American Studies Student”.

Toward the end of the semester, I knew I was in trouble so I went to his office to beg for a grade.  I told him that I had to have that course to graduate.  On the day that grades were to be posted, I went running up to his office.  Next to the code number that was assigned to me was the grade “D” with two minus signs after it.  My begging had been successful!

In spite of that course, I managed to graduate with 128 hours and a 2.3 grade point average.  If you do the math and start with 60 hours of 1.4, it takes a pretty good effort to finish up where I did.  If that sounds like bragging, maybe it is but after my poor start, I needed to brag about something.

1970 was a horrible year to graduate in.  I had three or four interviews while still in school but no job offers from them.  After school was out, we decided to move to Tulsa where I could spend full time looking for a job.  The School Superintendent at Mannford then was Fay Stout; his son Allen worked for the State Unemployment Agency.  I went to see Allen and he got me interviews with several companies.  I had two offers, one from Allstate to go to work as a claims adjuster, and the other from Vickers, as an inside sales rep.  The Allstate job paid more, $650 per month, but I would not be able to start it for six weeks.  The Vickers job, which paid $590, started immediately.  We didn’t have any choice; we couldn’t wait six weeks.

Everyone Has a Story

Someone (I forget who) used to tell me this all the time and it really is true.  Everyone has a story.  They said, "Encourage people to tell you their story.  Most of the time it will be fascinating!".  Most of the time, however, people don't need encouragement; they are more than willing to share their stories (experiences) with you.

As expected, I find that as I get older, the number of stories I have available becomes larger and larger.  I now have a story for almost any occasion.  This blog is a perfect example of that.

It's interesting to watch the group dynamics with a bunch of people discussing nothing in particular (being retired, most of my conversations fit into this category; I seldom have a discussion about anything important).  Everyone wants to relate their experience and the subject becomes like a chain.  It gradually moves from one topic to another as the conversation continues.

To exchange information or ideas requires two things: someone who is has information or ideas and is willing to share them, and someone who is willing to listen to receive these ideas.  It seems that we have a lot more of the former than of the latter.  I know I fit into this category.

I used to work for a division of a large corporation.  This company decided that they needed a new tag line so they came up with the phrase, "We know how important it is to listen".  To support this philosophy, they sent every one of their 43,000 employees to a seminar on listening.  They truly spent a lot of money on the idea of listening.

Did it help?  I don't think so; that company doesn't exist today.  Oh, bits and pieces of it are still around but the company is not.  Someone on Madison Avenue made a lot of money promoting the tagline but we didn't listen.

The next time you see me, be sure to tell me your story (unless, of course, I have a more important one to tell you)!  Did you say something?

Genealogy Failures

I was going to write a post on my successes in genealogy but it dawned on me that I should first mention my failures.  I have two of them which are particularly outstanding and they both deal with great grandfathers.

The first is my mother's grandfather on her father's side.  Granddad always told us that he was raised in an orphanage in Utah.  He knew his mother and father's names but had never met them.  I have been able to track down the mother and her family all the way back to the Revolutionary War but have gotten ZERO on his father.

Granddad always said that his father's name was Harry Nash and that he was from Detroit, Michigan.  On the other hand, Granddad's sister, Sedelia, always said that their father was from Ohio.  At any rate, Harry Nash continues to elude me.

My other prominent failure relates to James Oliver Alexander, my great grandfather on Dad's side.  Coincidentally,  one of my greatest "Aha!" moments also relates to him.  Let me describe it first.

J.O.'s wife was an mystery, like a ghost in the wind.  Finally one day, I was examining a photo of Granddad, their child, and noticed that the photographer was located in Bentonville, Arkansas, a place I had never associated with J.O.  I began to dig into Bentonville and discovered my great grandmother, Malinda, was buried there, about a block from Wal Mar's World Headquarters!

My failure which relates to J.O. is where he was for the twenty years between Malinda's death in 1871 and when he resurfaced in Childress, Texas in the late 1880's.  Oh well, I'll keep plugging away and someday I will find out where he was.

This picture is of J.O. and his brother, John Walker Alexander.  It is interesting to note that these two brothers fought on opposite sides during the Civil War.  J.O. fought for the Confederacy in Texas and John Walker fought for the Union in Missouri.

One more thing which is interesting from a genealogy point of view is the loss of the 1890 census records.  Census records are a vital part of genealogy and are the "backbone" of most family trees.  However, the 1890 census records don't exist.

These records were stored in a warehouse in St. Louis.  In 1921, a fire swept through that warehouse and destroyed all but a few thousand of the census records.  I can't tell you how many times I have looked at someone's history and wished I knew where they were in 1890.  Oh, well!

Autobiography - Chapter Five

Another boring installment of my autobiography!  At least my children might enjoy it!

5-Working, Part One

Although I had worked at many jobs by this time in my life, I had not been in a situation where I just went to work and came home with no thought of school.  Things were about to change.

The war in Viet Nam was beginning to heat up and David and I decided to beat the draft by going down and enlisting in the Army.  We were going to go into the Army Security Agency on the “buddy plan” and the Army would guarantee that we would stay together, at least through Advanced Individual Training (AIT).  At any rate, we packed our duffel bags and went to Oklahoma City to take the induction physical.

I remember that there were long lines of guys carrying reams of paper from their doctors explaining why they should not be in the Army.  It didn't help; they were all going!  Here I was, trying to get in and I didn't make it!  On one of the forms I had to fill out it asked if I had any paralyses.  I checked it “yes” and wrote that my left thumb was paralyzed.

Sure enough, a doctor came up, asked me about the thumb and looked at it.  When he was done, he said, “Son, we can’t take you with that thumb!”  Well, I was heartbroken for about 30 minutes until it began to soak in that I was never going to have to go to the Army.  I found out later that David spent two tours of duty in Viet Nam lying in a ditch pounding code on a key.  I’m still glad I didn't have to go although I have the greatest respect for those who did.

Since I wasn't going to have to go to the Army, I decided to spend the summer of 1966 on the wheat harvest.  David had an uncle, Carl Rice, who lived in Cherryvale, Kansas and ran a custom combining crew.  Since David was going to the Army, his spot was open.  The pay was $300 per month and room and board.  I had a little S90 Honda motorcycle which I had bought during my last semester in school and I took it with me, at least as far as Dodge City.

Wheat harvest wasn’t bad, at least until late August, but I didn’t manage to save much money.  I did send some home but not a lot.  In late August, we had gotten to Opheim, Montana, about 10 miles from the Canadian border.  A serious rain spell set in and Carl and the older guys took off for Canada.  After about a week in the trailer house, I was out of money and out of food and there was no sign of Carl.  I called Mom and got her to wire me $50 to buy a train ticket home.

I had never been on a train before so this was quite an experience.  The train from Opheim to Williston, North Dakota was literally a milk run.  We stopped at every small town and loaded cream cans onto the train.  When I got to Williston, I caught the Great Northern Empire Builder to Minneapolis, then the Rock Island Rocket to Kansas City, and the Santa Fe Super Chief to Dodge City.

When I got to Dodge City, I had $5 left to get from there to Mannford.  I told the guy who had been storing my motorcycle that I didn’t have any money to pay him but that I would send him some.  He agreed to that and I took off for Mannford.  Fortunately, the S90 didn’t burn much gas and I had enough money left over for a couple of candy bars.  When I pulled in at home, however, I didn’t have anything but change in my pockets.

When I got back home, Mom had a hot lead on a job for me at a pipeline x-ray inspection company, Conam Inspection.  I got on with them and they sent me to Emporia, Kansas to help a technician on a 42” pipeline being laid from Emporia to Kansas City.  As I recall, I only worked on that job about 60 to 90 days before it was finished.  When we were done, the manager offered me a “camp” job but I turned it down.  In a “camp” job, you literally live in a camp in a remote area for weeks on end.  This did not sound at all attractive to me.

About this time, I decided I wanted to become a policeman.  A friend from Mannford, Kenneth Moser, and I went down to join the Tulsa Police Department together.  Does this sound familiar?  Well, to cut to the chase, he got in and I didn’t.  We both passed the written test easily but I flunked the physical because I was ¼” too short.  At the time, you had to be 5’9” tall and I was only 5’8 ¾”.  Kenneth wound up becoming a Major in the Police Department and had an excellent career with them.

In November, 1966, I decided to try to get a job at National Tank, since a bunch of the Mannford people worked there.  I went down to apply and talked to the Personnel Manager.  He told me that they couldn’t use me, probably because I had received a Workman’s Compensation claim from my injury at Creamer and Dunlap.  As I was leaving his office, I heard him say something to the secretary about him being gone the next day.

I went back the next day, filled out a new application, and sure enough, he wasn't there.  I talked to a guy by the name of Bob White, who offered me a job in the drafting department.  I told him that I would rather work as a welder’s helper, since they made more money than draftsmen.  I started work there the next day.

I was assigned to help a welder who was totally illiterate, F.W. Dobbins.  I think the reason they put me with him was because I had had two years of drafting in college and could do all his layout work for him.  The foreman in Bay 3A, our bay, was Gabby Etheridge and the assistant foreman was Marvin Code.  3A was a piping bay, where all the vessels were brought, mounted on skids and plumbed.

After about six months, I got to where I thought I was better than F.W., since he couldn’t read or write.  I’ve learned since that I’m no better than anyone else, but I didn’t know that at the time.  Anyway, my idea of punishing him for being “stupid” was to not talk to him at all, except where it was required for work.  After a couple of weeks of this, Marvin Code came up to me one day and asked if I liked my job.

Being a smart-alecky kid, I replied that I didn’t particularly like it.  He then told me that, if I didn’t start treating F.W. better, I was going to have a lot of time on my hands to look for a new job.  Even though I didn’t really like working at National Tank, I was too lazy to want to go find a new one, so I starting talking to F.W. again.

The whole time I worked at National Tank, just over a year, we worked nine hours a day, six days a week.  I started out at $1.85 per hour and worked up to about $2.15, so this was pretty good money for then.  National Tank had over 1100 employees at the time and was non-union.  It darn sure wasn’t a “sweat ship”; in the whole time I worked there I never overworked myself once.  On many a day, I would get Dobbins lined out for the day and I would spend the whole day working on some personal project.

Although the work wasn’t hard, it was extremely dirty.  I remember one day in particular I was laying on my back under a skid burning a hole overhead.  The fire was falling all around and on me.  When I got ready to get out from under the skid, I had to crawl through a big chew of tobacco that someone had spit out on the floor.  I thought then that I would be a lot better off being back in school.

In December, 1967, Bill Murr and I were trading rides back and forth from Mannford to work.  Because I liked to take a shower after work before I came home, Bill decided to quit riding with me.  This was probably the best move he ever made, since about a week later I had a head-on collision in Fisher Bottom on the way home.  The right side of the car was really caved in and Bill would undoubtedly have been killed if he had been in the car.

I was “tail gating” another car when, all of a sudden, it went into the ditch on the right side of the road.  When it did, I saw the Mustang coming right at me!  I guess I thought I had a better chance going left so I jerked it that way as I hit the brakes.  I left 39 feet of skid marks before the Mustang hit me, went airborne, and landed in the bar ditch behind me.

I wound up with a broken right arm and cuts and scratches and the car was “totaled”.  In fact, the front bumper on the passenger’s side was pushed back even with the windshield post.

The guy who hit me was Maurice Roger McSpadden, nephew of Clem McSpadden and a great nephew of Will Rogers.  McSpadden was a “disk jockey” at KVOO Radio and his air name was “Boomer” McSpadden.  He had worked all night the night before and then driven to Stillwater to see his girl friend.  He was on his way back to Tulsa and just picked that time to fall asleep and hit me.  He had several broken bones and cuts but survived it.

I never did talk to McSpadden about the accident, although I wanted to.  It had changed my life in a profound way and I always wondered what impact it had on him.  Once, a good twenty years later, I went up to him at the State Fair where he was working the KVOO booth.  I introduced myself to him and his jaw dropped.  I stood there for what seemed an eternity and he never said a word.  I finally just turned and walked off.  Apparently he was not able to deal with the memory which I wanted to discuss.

This accident provided me with the motive and financial means to go back to school.  I had had about enough of National Tank and was ready to do something else.  With my arm still in a sling, I went back over to Stillwater and enrolled for the Spring, 1968 semester.