CB Radio

Those of you who are in your forties or older remember the CB, or Citizen Band, radio craze well.  This band, 11 meters, was designated by the Federal Communications Commission in 1958 as a place for private individuals to have access to radio communications.

Ham, or amateur, radio had been around forever; it was the beginning of radio communications.  CB required a license but it did not require proficiency testing like ham did.  I got involved in CB radio in the late 1960's and wound up with this license.

The licensing requirement was dropped sometime in the early 1970's and CB became so popular that it was a factory option for several years by the auto makers.  Truck drivers had been among the earliest users of these radios and they became the standard way of communicating between drivers.

CB became a place where profanity and filth prevailed.  I think this is what killed it with the average person.  I haven't owned or listened to CB in several years; I don't know whether it is still that way today or not.  I do know that there are an awful lot of former CBers who are hams now.

Eating Off the Land

If you know me, you know that eating is one of my favorite pastimes.  One of our favorite pastimes during our winter stay in South Texas each year is a discussion of where we are gonna have our next meal.

The other day, my friend, Carvell, posted something on Facebook about picking plums.  Well, if you are from around here you know that that means sand plums, not those great big plums you buy in the grocery store.  These are about the size of grapes and you have to pick them a bit early, before all the critters get them.  I can't tell you how many pints of plum jelly Mom made from those plums.  Because my siblings and I weren't really crazy about the taste of slightly unripe sand plums, Mom didn't have to worry about us eating most of what we picked.

Not true with blackberries, however.  My motto was always "One for the bucket, one for my mouth"!  In the early 1960's, we had a blackberry patch staked out that was amazing.  Dad said that these were tame berries and that a house had once stood right by where the patch was.  At any rate, the berries were huge and sweet, and we picked a lot of berries from that patch.  It was located on the south side of old Highway 51 west of Mannford; I've tried to find it a couple of times in the past few years with no success.  Maybe blackberry plants don't live 52 years.

There were a few hazards that came along with picking blackberries, however, including snakes and chiggers.  The snakes didn't really bother Gary or me but they did bother our sister and mother, a great deal!  The chiggers were worse; they ate on everyone.  And it always seemed that the hatching of chiggers coincided exactly with when the blackberries were ripe.  I can't remember for sure but it seems that Mom doctored our chigger bites with kerosene.  Whatever it was, it was one of those treatments where the cure is almost as bad as the disease.

In addition to the sand plums and blackberries, there was always a good supply of pears and apples.  Dad planted a small orchard right after we moved to Mannford, so our crop was close at hand.  However, there were enough trees in the area located next to abandoned home sites to feed anyone as many pears and apples as they wanted.

Because Mom and Dad had all the fruit they wanted or needed, a lot of it wound up on the ground.  Early one morning, Dad was looking out the window and called, "Sue, Come here and look at this!"  Out in the orchard, under a pear tree, was a drunk coyote.  He had happened along in the night, discovered the ground covered with fermenting pears, and proceeded to eat them till he could hardly walk!

Another way to get your belly full back then was to pick a mess of greens.  In the early spring, Poke was probably the favored vegetable.  Poke, or Poke weed, is most commonly found in late spring growing in wooded areas, preferably in rotted out tree trunks.  When prepared properly, it has a taste somewhat like spinach but with a little bit more bite.  We would take a burlap feed sack into the woods and load it up with tender poke leaves.  Mom would then par boil it, pour the water off, and then cook it with piece of ham hock or other pork in it.  That was mighty tasty!  We were always told that you had to par boil the poke and pour off the first juice or it would be poisonous.  I don't know today whether that's true or not but the last poke I fixed got the treatment.

The other popular vegetable dish we had when I was growing up was a salad made from all kinds of weeds.  I can't remember most of them but a couple were dandelions and lamb's quarter.  Grandmother Alexander could walk out into the weeds and pick a tasty salad!  It's interesting that dandelion has become a significant green in prepared salads you buy in the store today.

Even though we don't eat a lot of this stuff today, it was pretty good eating when I was a kid.

The Highway Revisited

I wrote the other day about State Highway 51 and some of our experiences growing up beside that highway.  I mentioned that it was originally designated Highway 33, was paved in 1924, and later became Highway 51.

One day I was talking to Dad and he was relating some stories to me.  He mentioned riding the train from Mannford to Keystone.  I asked why you would ride the train when it was only seven miles from one town to the other.  He pointed out to me that the highway didn't exist then and that you had to negotiate a long, winding series of dirt roads to make the trip.  A couple of years after he passed, I discovered this map on the internet.  It is from the US Geological Survey and is dated 1915.  If you look, you can see that there is no direct road from Mannford to Keystone, only the railroad.

To give you an idea of where everything is, the current city of Mannford is located just above and to the right of the "R" in what is shown of "Mannford" at the bottom of the map.

It's my understanding that the city of Mannford is getting ready to resurface the old highway from Basin Road west to the top of Gilman Hill.  It certainly needs it as the pavement is in really bad shape.  My only regret is that a set of animal tracks about 1/2 mile west of Basin Road will be covered up forever.  It has always amazed me that a dog or coyote ran across that concrete in 1924 and left his mark on that highway for many years!

The bridge over Salt Creek on Highway 51 was about 1 1/2 miles east of our house.  In the spring of 1957, there was severe flooding in the Cimarron River which backed up into Salt Creek and covered the bridge.  Dad was working in Tulsa and making the commute every day.  To get to work, he had to make a detour several miles out of his way to the south.  Fortunately, the flooding subsided after a few days.

We also had some neighbors to the east of us whose last name was Melton.  Their son, Chuck, had graduated from Mannford High in 1954.  He owned a Volkswagen beetle, the first one I ever saw.  They were touted as being so well constructed that they would float so Chuck rolled all the windows up and pushed his VW across the flooded bridge.  As a very impressionable 11 year old kid, I was awestruck that he could do that!

Another vivid memory I have of that era involved Mr. Kurtze's gasoline station on the west side of Keystone.  We would pull in there to get gas and Mr. Kurtze would pump it up into the glass bowl on the top of the old pump.  Then, while it was draining down into the car's tank, Dad and Mr. Kurtze would walk out to the well house behind the station.  Dad would return to the car with a paper sack containing a pint of whiskey. Oklahoma was still dry and Mr. Kurtze was the local bootlegger!  The State didn't vote liquor in until 1959.

In the summer of 1957, we moved from Mannford to Pampa, Texas, because the company Dad worked for, Franks Manufacturing Co., had relocated there.  Most weekends while we lived in Pampa we would load up and come to Mannford to keep the family home up.  Dad would put a big tool box in the trunk of the old '46 Ford which really weighted it down.  It seems that more times than not, we would get stopped by a Highway Patrolman, suspecting that we were carrying illegal whiskey!

The old highway held a lot of memories.  It was fun growing up beside it.

Kinfolk's Cookbook

In about 1983, Mom decided that she wanted to compile a cookbook, based on her mother's family in Mississippi.  Grandmother Nash, Lessie Hester, had five sisters and two brothers who lived to adulthood and Mom wanted to honor these aunts and uncles, as well as their mother, Nancy Ann.  Of the eight children, only one, Aunt Mallie, was still alive and she contributed several recipes to the cause.

Mom sent out an invitation for all the cousins to send her their favorite recipes.  She wound up with about 150 of them, ranging from pickles to snicker doodles.  In 1984 Mom had not embraced the computer age (most of us had not at that time), so she typed each page of the cookbook.  She wound up with about 54 pages of recipes.

At this point, Louise and I got drafted to help her publish the cookbook so we dove in.  I'm not sure but I think we may have printed 60 to 100 copies, all of which were given away to the recipe contributors and anyone else who wanted them.  Louise and I laminated the covers, collated the books and bound them with plastic binding combs.

The Kinfolk's Cookbook has been one of our favorites over the years and Louise and I wore our copy out completely.  A couple of months ago, Melissa, our niece, copied the cookbook and put it on a web site, which got me to thinking.  Perhaps it was time to reprint this family heirloom.

For the past couple of months, I've been entering the recipes from the original cookbook into a file.  That work is finally done and we are going to put it into a presentable format.  Originally, it was done in an 8 1/2" x 11" format.  This time we are going to print it in a 5 1/2" x 8 1/2" style.  Also, its a lot easier today to have a commercial company print it than to do it around the kitchen table.  I think we'll go that route.

Before long, if you see my phone number on your caller ID, you'll know not to answer because I'm probably going to try to sell you a cookbook!

The Highway

We grew up beside the highway.  To be more specific, our house was on State Highway 51, two miles from Mannford and five miles from Keystone.  Highway 51 extends from the Texas state line near Arnett, Oklahoma, to the Arkansas line just east of Stilwell.  It had been Highway 33 many years ago, then 33 was moved south and this became 51.

According to my father, who was around at the time, the highway was put there in 1924 and served us well until 1962 when the new highway was built (because of the construction of Lake Keystone) and this became known as the old highway.  I've spent more time walking that stretch of pavement, first as a teenager and now as a retired person, than any other piece of real estate I can think of.  As teenagers, my brother and I used that road to get to town; as an oldtimer, I walk it for the exercise.

Let me give you a brief description of what I remember about the highway.  As it left the old town of Mannford, it went under the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad overpass first.  It then crossed over Hazel Creek, a small stream on the east side of town.  You can still see the remnants of the bridge if you drive west up the old highway from Basin Road.  After a couple of curves, the road went up Gilman Hill.  I have no idea how Hazel Creek and Gilman Hill got their names.  If you know, I would be very interested in hearing from you.  At the top of the hill was a dirt road which turned off to the north; I don't remember whether anyone lived down there or not.  That road many years ago provided access to the Basin area.

The highway then proceeded east up and down three smaller hills to our house which was on the dirt road on the right.  From there it went on down the hill to another AT&SF railroad overpass and then down to the Salt Creek bridge.  Eventually, it ended up in Keystone.

As I mentioned earlier, my brother, Gary, and I, walked from Mannford to home many times before we got our coveted driver's licenses.  Many of these walks were late at night after we had been carousing around Mannford.  It was not uncommon then to walk the entire two miles from Mannford to our house without seeing a single car!  Compare that to the traffic on Highway 51 through our town today.

Once we were walking home late at night (probably after midnight), when we saw a car coming up Gilman Hill traveling east.  Of course we stuck our thumbs out - getting a ride home was very unusual.  As the car approached us, we saw that it was a hearse!  Of course, he pulled over up ahead of us.  This was a scary situation; did we want a ride home bad enough to get into a hearse late at night?  As it turned out, the hearse belonged to another teenager and we enjoyed the lift home.

Mae and Glen owned the Phillips 66 station on the east side of (old) Mannford.  Mom and Dad were very good friends with Mae and Glen and we spent a lot of time at each others houses.  At one point, they had a female greyhound whose name was Slim (of course).  Every once in a while, when we finished buying gas at the station, Slim would take off behind us.  When Mom or Dad saw this, they would drive slowly, about 20-25 miles per hour.  Slim would run that entire two miles to our house.  After a day or two of visiting, she would then follow us back into Mannford to the station.

Looking back on it, the highway provided us with a lot of experiences as well as a means to get to Mannford or Keystone.  I've got a lot more stories about the highway that I'll share with you some day.