Losing One's Mother

Because of an event which happened last week, I'm going to take a break from the autobiography.

My mother, Sue Alexander,  passed away last Tuesday, October 30.  She was 86 years old.  She had been confined to the local nursing home for a couple of years and her quality of life slowly became worse and worse.

Mom had lost Dad in February, 2004, and a son, Gary (my brother) four months later.  Whether these events really had an accelerating effect on Mom's mental decline, we don't know but it sure seemed like it.  Dementia and Alzheimers are insidious diseases and Mom's mental condition became worse each time we saw her.  At any rate, she decided on her own a couple of years ago to go to the nursing home.

As her situation deteriorated, she had several accidents, culminating with a broken hip about six months ago. All of the accidents took a toll on her physical health while the dementia kept on in its march toward darkness.  The Hospice people were called in about three months ago to supplement the care the nursing home was providing.

A couple of weeks ago, Louise and I took the motor home to Atlanta, picked up the kids, and then drove up into the Smokey Mountains in North Carolina.  We had probably had the motor home set up for 30 minutes when my cell phone rang.  It was the hospice people telling me that Mom was not doing well and would not be around much longer.

It took us a hard two and one half days to get back to Mannford.  By the time we got back, however, Mom had had a slight recovery and was doing better.  We really thought that she might have escaped the inevitable for a while longer.  Last weekend, October 27 and 28, she really began to slip, though.

On Tuesday, Louise and I were in Mom's room at the nursing home and Mom was struggling with her heart rate and her respiration.  The hospice nurse, Tinnie, left the room for a minute and Mom just quit breathing.  Whle Louise was double checking her, I went to find Tinnie.  When she came back into the room and was taking Mom's pulse, she looked at me and asked what time it was.  I replied that it was 11:47 without even realizing that I was establishing Mom's time of death.

The last few days have been somewhat of a blur but I have been very impressed with how everyone involved  has been so polite and professional, including the people at the Nursing Center, the Hospice Group, The Funeral Home, and the Church.

Mom is at rest now and the rest of us will slowly return to some sense of normalcy but it will hurt for a long time.  We are now officially the oldest generation!

Autobiography - Chapter 3

This is part of a continuing series of chapters of my autobiography.  I hope you enjoy it.

3-High School Days

Upon our return to Mannford, I was greeted as a kind of “big shot” because I had gone off and lived in a “big” town.  Most of the students I had gone to grade school with were still there and it really was a homecoming.  I was fourteen and in the ninth grade.

For the first two years back in Mannford, we attended school in the old town.  Keystone Lake was being built and the town and school would move in 1962 about 3 miles to the south and east.

Gary and I would often hitchhike into Mannford in the mornings because we didn’t want to ride the bus and because we were still too young to drive.  We would go in early and drink coffee in the café.  On many occasions, a man by the name of Tuffy Weaver, who was related somehow to Uncle Albert, would pick us up and give us a ride.  He had been to Keystone to visit Mr. Kurtze, the bootlegger and was returning.  Every morning the drill was the same.  We would get into his car, he would take off, and then he would ask us if we would like a little nip.  Of course, we always said “yes” and he would pass us the bottle of Old Crow he had between his legs.

My first job in Mannford was washing dishes at the City Café for Callie Fields.  She paid me 35 cents per hour and I was probably overpaid.  She was a taciturn old woman and I was scared to death of her.  Her husband, Gene Fields, seemed like a nice enough guy and I found out many years later, after he had passed away, that he was an expert in Masonic ritual.  Callie sold the café to Lily Hudson and I got a raise to 40 cents.  As stern as Callie was, Lily was just the opposite.  I never met a nicer woman than her.

Most of the time, I would wash dishes but occasionally she would let me cook.  I can remember the pricing of some of our items: hamburgers, 35 cents; hamburger steaks, $1.25; veal cutlets, $1.35; and t-bone steaks, $2.65.  I remember one time that the bank brought all their employees over for a meal.  We grossed over $65 that day, the most the café had ever grossed.

Some of the memories I have of the old town include Hendricks Drug Store, Varnell’s Grocery, the bank, and the mercantile store.  Mr. Hendricks was a “curmudgeonly” old man and all of the kids called him “Baldy” behind his back.  We used to stand at his magazine rack for hours looking at the “Private Detective” magazines; these were about as risqué as you could get back then.  Mr. Hendrix told us one time, “The trouble with you boys is that you have more brains between your legs than you do in your heads”.  He was probably right.

Varnell’s grocery had a cream station and I can remember us occasionally selling a can of cream to them.  More importantly, every Saturday night in the summertime, they would set up a big screen in the street outside Varnell’s and show a movie.  It cost 25¢ to watch the movie; I don’t remember how they made sure everyone paid.  Maybe it was on the honor system.

Another vivid memory was of the bank.  Soon after we moved from Pampa to Mannford, Mom got a job at the bank so we were in there often.  It was constructed of cut sandstone and, on the outside, you could see pock marks where bullets had hit it during a robbery attempt.  Inside, there was a counter where you could fill out your deposit slips and endorse checks.  The counter was covered with a piece of plate glass and under the glass were pictures of dead bank robbers lying there in the bank.  What a deterrent to potential robbers!

As I mentioned earlier, Gary and I would walk to school.  We also walked to town on Saturdays and walked home late at night on Saturday nights.  Our house was two miles east of Mannford on State Highway 51.  Back then, however, there was not nearly as much traffic as today.  More often than not, we would walk the two miles from town to home without seeing a single vehicle.  It was a different, safer time back then; if you did see a car, you were almost guaranteed a ride.  Late one Saturday night, we were walking home when a vehicle came up the long hill.  We stuck our thumbs out as it neared and, sure enough, it stopped just past us.  Unfortunately, it was a hearse!  When we finally got enough nerve up to open the door, we found out that it was just some guys we knew who had bought the old hearse as a gag.

In the summer of 1961, Dad decided it was time to add on to the house.  It still only had two bedrooms and Mary Sue was getting old enough that she needed a place away from us boys.  Mom, of course, still dreamed about indoor plumbing.  Because the town of Keystone was going to be inundated by Keystone Lake, all of the buildings were being torn down.  Dad purchased an old three-story hotel and Gary and I tore it down.  We spent all summer down there, dismantling this hotel piece by piece and cleaning the nails from the lumber.  By the end of the summer, we had enough material to add on four rooms to the house.

Summers then were especially nice.  Mom and Dad ran around with another couple back then, Mae and Glen Tate.  Glen ran the service station in Mannford and had adopted Mae’s three boys, Kenneth, Jarrel, and Donald.  We spent many an evening either at their house in town or at ours in the country, eating hamburgers and homemade ice cream.  Glen had a heart of gold but Mom would get so aggravated at him.  Every time he would eat a bowl of her ice cream, he would say, “Sue, that’s real good but it sure could use a bit of (something) more”.

Our school in the old town was well past its prime.  The gymnasium was underneath the auditorium and had almost no seating for basketball games.  You had to climb up a narrow flight of stairs and work your way along underneath the steel beams to get to your seat.  If there had ever been a fire in there during a basketball game, it would have been devastating.  Mannford didn’t offer football, band, or other extracurricular activities; basketball was about it.  Since I was 5’8” tall and somewhat wide, I didn’t bother to go out for basketball.

We did have the Future Farmers of America, FFA.  Because the school board consisted mainly of farmers, vocational agriculture was required for all four years of high school.  On the evening of my initiation into the FFA, I was instructed to go to the home of the local town constable, Lee White, and steal the hubcaps from his 1957 Chevy.  I went down there and started the job.  All of a sudden, a booming voice from behind me said, “What are you doing there!?”.  Naturally, it was Lee himself.  As soon as I had left the school, my cohorts had called him to tell him I was coming.

 A.L. Steward was the vo-ag instructor and the FFA advisor.  Dad and he didn’t get along very well and my grade in vocational agriculture reflected it.  One time, Gary and I had a pair of registered Hampshire gilts, Mitzie and Ruby.  Mr. Steward came out to look at them and proceeded to tell Dad that we were feeding them all wrong.  Dad disagreed with him vociferously and Gary and I thought they were going to come to blows.

Another time, Gary and I each bought a registered Hereford heifer to show.  Grandmother Nash’s full name was Lessie Hester and no one had ever named their children after her so Gary and I decided to honor her.  I named my heifer “Lessie” and Gary named his “Hester”.  I’m not sure Grandmother was flattered.

During the early 1960’s, Dad was developing a pretty sizable cow-calf operation.  At one point, I think we must have had about 40 cows and a bull or two, in addition to the always present milk cow.  Dad leased about 240 acres from the government and some from the Bristow bankers.  We had part of this put up in hay and Dad contracted Sylvester Garrison from Silver City to bale it.

Mr. Garrison asked Gary and me if we wanted to work for him and we agreed to, so we went and lived at his house for at least parts of two summers.  The first year, the hay crop and business was good and we ate well; the second year, times were not so good and we had to eat most of Mrs. Garrison’s laying hens.  We had chicken for almost every meal every day.

I had my first date while I was working for Mr. Garrison.  A couple that he baled hay for in Hallett had a girl come to live with them to help take care of their two children.  She was about five years older than me but very shy (as I was) and I took her on one date.  I borrowed a 1960 Ford convertible from David Ruscoe, even though I was only 15 and didn’t have a driver’s license.  I think we went to the movie in Cleveland, though I’m not really sure.

In those days, getting a car was a rite of passage into adulthood and I talked Mom into taking me to get my license the day I turned 16.  Dad had an old two-tone brown Rambler hardtop which he gave to Gary and me.  Because the car belonged to Gary and me, he got to go along with my friends and me even though he was younger.  One day, Roger Carter, David Alsip, and I were heading up toward Roger’s house when something in the steering broke.  The car veered into a bridge abutment, totaling it but not hurting us.

Roger was known as “Wolfie” by all the rest of the kids.  One day, he, David and I were out in the woods near Roger’s house practicing our fast draw.  David and I were using revolvers but Wolfie had a semi-auto pistol, an old Ruger.  Well, he made a mistake and pulled the trigger before the gun had cleared the holster.  The bullet traveled down his thigh just under the skin and stopped just above the knee.  You could see the bullet below the skin.  He said that it didn’t hurt too bad so we kept fooling around.  Later, when we returned to his house, his mother became hysterical when he told her that he had shot himself.

In the fall of 1962, we started classes in the brand new school in the new town.  Everything worked good except for the heating system.  That first winter, it would get really cold in the classrooms and the superintendent would have to cancel classes.  We missed several days that year because of the heating system.

That same fall, we had a new English teacher when we arrived the first day.  I don’t remember her name but I do remember that she was terribly nervous and tense that first day and we were like a bunch of jackals smelling blood.  By tormenting her, we were able to run her off before the first semester of school was over.  I would only hope that my children never did anything like that.

One day in 1963, I took Mom’s car up to the service station to have it worked on.  I had worked for Ted Norwood before but that day was just there with her car.  There were a couple of people around; one of them, a tall thin man, was talking to Ted.  I found out later that his name was Ted Hix.  All of a sudden, Willard Oller, one of the town bullies, came through the door and he and Mr. Hix started fighting.  Well, Ted Hix whipped him pretty good and Willard got up and went outside to his Cadillac.

I saw him get a pistol from inside the car but did not believe he would use it.  Boy, was I wrong!  He stepped back inside the station and started shooting.  He hit Ted four times, twice in the shoulder and twice in the leg.  After being hit, Ted took the gun away from Willard and tried to shoot him with it but it was jammed.

Lee White, the local constable, came down, calmly arrested Willard and took him to jail in Sapulpa.  Later that afternoon, after I had returned home, two of Willard’s hired hands pulled into our driveway.  Dad saw them and knew they were up to no good so he got his 12 gauge double barrel and met them in the front yard.  They said that they just wanted to talk to me about what I saw; he told them to get back in their truck and get out of there!

I wound up testifying four times over that deal, twice in the criminal trial and twice in the civil trial.  Oller got off on the criminal charge; he swore that he bought off the jury and, since it was in Creek County, he probably did.  At any rate, it was pretty nifty to have the deputy come up to school and serve me.  At least, I thought so at the time.

High school was a lot more fun because of the things that happened outside the school, rather than events at school.  Gary and I, being full-fledged drivers, were free to get into all kinds of mischief and did.  One night, after we had consumed a few too many brews, we got home and got into our beds next to each other.  After a few minutes, I heard him get up, throw open the window, and heave up.  I laid there a couple of minutes longer thinking about this and I had to get up and do the same thing.  The next morning, bright and early, Mom woke us up and told us to get outside and clean the side of the house off.  I almost lost it again.

Once, in the summer, we were out extremely late and, as we were sneaking in the back door of the house, met Dad.  He was coming out to go milk the cow.  He didn’t say anything about us getting home so late; he just said to get our clothes changed and get ready to go to the hay field.  That was one of the longest days I can ever remember.

One of my bigger regrets is that I didn’t really apply myself in high school.  I did manage to finish third in the class behind Rick Spess and David Alsip but I could have easily done better, had I set my mind to it.  Our little class of twenty five students was really a microcosm of the universe.  Marilyn Fisher was the stunning beauty and she is still today a very attractive woman.  Rick Spess was the guy who always made an “A” in class and was destined to be President of the United States or something.  He wound up running a car dealership for many years in Cleveland, Oklahoma.

One of our classmates was a fellow by the name of Lee Sweatt.  Lee’s father was an engineer for KRMG radio and worked out at their broadcast towers, keeping the station on the air.  Lee was the biggest, meanest hell raiser any of us had ever seen or been around.  If there had been a category in our senior year for “most likely to wind up in the state pen”, Lee would have won it hands down.  Several years ago, about 30 years after we had graduated, I was watching television one Sunday morning and a show entitled “Lee Sweatt Ministries Presents” came on.  Sure enough, it was the Lee Sweatt I had gone to school with!  I met him later at a class reunion and he was the nicest guy you could ever hope to meet.

During my senior year in high school, I applied for a scholarship with Cabot Corporation.  Dad was still working in their service department out of Tulsa and they had a good scholarship program.  After I took a battery of tests, I was informed that I had won a $2000 scholarship, to be paid out at $500 per year for four years.  Since Mom and Dad had three smaller children at home, this was good news, for they certainly could not afford to help me much.

David Alsip and his girl friend, Donna Kellert, and I all went off to Oklahoma State University together, which is another story.

Autobiography, Chapter 2

If you are still awake after reading the first chapter, here goes the second.  We only have about fourteen more to go!

2-Life in Pampa

In 1957, Carl White sold Franks Manufacturing to Cabot Corporation and they announced that they were moving the entire operation, except for a service center, from Tulsa to Pampa, Texas.

Dad was an assistant foreman in the assembly department, and they offered him a job in Pampa but he had to move himself.  He didn’t like the area around Pampa but decided to take the move.  Mom, on the other hand, was excited about moving to Pampa, in large part due to the fact that we rented a house with indoor plumbing in town.  This was a definite step up from our house in Mannford!

The owner of the house in Pampa wanted Dad to buy the house we rented for $4800 but Dad declined, saying that he didn’t want to stay in Pampa that long.  Instead we rented it for $100 per month and stayed in it about 40 months.  Hindsight is always 20/20!

As I recall, we didn’t have any trouble fitting in in Pampa.  Our school, Lamar Grade School, was right across the street and we made a lot of friends in the neighborhood quickly.

One of my best friends in Pampa was Kevin Romines, who lived just down the street and around the corner.  He and I had a lot of fun and got into a lot of trouble but we always seemed to be able to get out of it.

My first job was helping the janitor at Lamar School clean after school.  I would run the dust mop, sweep floors and empty trash.  He gave me a 48-star U.S. Flag which had flown over the school and whose ends had become frayed.  I took it home and had Mom teach me how to sew it up.  I still have that flag today.

I also delivered newspapers and caddied at the Pampa Country Club while living in Pampa.  Delivering papers tested my resolve, especially when the snow was a foot deep and the wind was howling.  I had many good customers on the route and they treated me good.  At one house, the hedge was about eight feet tall in front and the area between the hedge and the roof of the house was narrow.  About once every five days, the woman who lived there would call and I would have to come down and either dig the paper out of the hedge or get it off the roof.  The biggest problem with paper delivery was the hamburger stand on my route.  When I went out to collect, I would spend all my earnings at the hamburger stand.  The burgers were 35 cents and were as good as you could buy anywhere.

Caddying was a lot of fun.  Had I known that, in later years, I would spend as much time on the golf course as I do now, I would have been a better caddy.  As it was, I had a good time and made a few bucks.  We got paid $2.50 for a round of golf.  If we carried two bags, that totaled $5 and with tips we could make as much as $7 in a day!  Big money for back then.  I did have a couple of customers who made a habit of throwing clubs.  I learned to watch them when they flubbed a shot.

One thing offered at Lamar School which was not available in Mannford was the opportunity to play in the band.  I had an old trumpet which Grandmother and Grandfather Nash had given me so I decided to play trumpet.  Gary opted for the French horn.  Our little grade school band wasn’t very good but it did prepare us for the big time – Junior High School.

In 1958, I started to school at Pampa Junior High School, downtown.  Some of my fondest memories of the next two years involved band.  Mr. Ben Gollehon, our band director, decided that I should play the tuba, since I was one of the few kids big enough to carry it.

The Pampa School System had just the year before built a new junior high school, Robert E. Lee, and Lee had been given our uniforms.  Mr. Gollehon got us all to dress in matching gray hooded sweatshirts and blue jeans and we marched in the Christmas parade that year.  Some rich patron saw us and donated enough money to buy brand new uniforms for the entire band.

Mr. Gollehon had a way of getting the most out of us.  We were preparing for the statewide band contest to be held in Canyon at West Texas State University and he kept telling us that we stunk!  He had us marching down the field in the form of a treble clef, playing “Say It With Music”.  This was pretty complicated stuff for a junior high band.  At the last minute, he told us that we were so bad that he wasn’t even going to go.  Of course, this inspired us to give the performance of our lives and we found out later that he had hired a 16 mm camera crew out of his own pocket to film our show.

While we kids were having a great time in Pampa, Dad hated his job and could hardly stand to go to work each day.  He had severe peptic ulcer problems and couldn’t seem to get them under control.  Mom had a lot of friends in Pampa and they all used to play canasta and go fishing together during the day.  In spite of this, she was having health problems and was finally diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis.  Fortunately, she has not suffered the debilitating effects which most people with MS do.  She has had problems at times, some of them severe, but they have never left her permanently disabled.

One of the scariest things that ever happened to us in Pampa was when  Mom fainted and fell on the bathroom heater.  She got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and just lost consciousness.  She had severe burns on her neck and breast but they healed and, over the years, became less noticeable.

While I had a good time in Pampa, some of it was at the expense of other people.  I got into a crowd which did a considerable amount of shoplifting and I did my share of it.  I also discovered the ridiculously stupid trick of sniffing gasoline.  Fortunately, that was as far as it went.  I also started an addiction to tobacco in Pampa that took me 35 years to get rid of.

When we moved to Pampa, Dad decided to keep the farm at Mannford, since he wasn’t planning on staying in West Texas very long.  We rented the house out to the Baneys, a family which had lived around Mannford for a while.  Thelma Baney was a Harvison and many of her relatives are still around Mannford today.  After a couple of years, they moved out and we kept the house empty till we moved back.

Often, we would load up the car on Friday afternoon and, when Dad got off work, we would take off for Mannford.  It was about a six hour drive up through Canadian, then to Arnett, Okeene, Stillwater, and home.  We would spend the weekend working and cleaning up around there and go back to Pampa on Sunday evening.

As I explained in the first chapter, Oklahoma remained dry until 1960.  On many a Friday night in 1958 and 1959, we would load up the car and head for Mannford.  Dad would always take his tools in the trunk which would make the car sit down in back.  Almost invariably, we would get stopped by a highway patrol trooper who was convinced that he was going to find liquor in the trunk

One Friday evening, we were rocking along in Western Oklahoma and someone asked Dad what time it was.  He slowed down, turned on the overhead light and looked at his watch.  About that time we topped a hill and there was a highway patrolman who waved us over.  He wanted to know how Dad had known he was there since he had been listening to the sound of our engine coming and had heard it slow down!

It seemed like every holiday that Uncle Albert and Aunt Beulah Winans would come out to Pampa to see us.  They didn’t have any children of their own and we were about the only family that they had.  Uncle Albert was a fine person who loved children and loved to play with them.  One summer when Uncle Albert came to visit, Gary and I had just gotten an old used Sears Allstate Moped.  Uncle Albert wanted to ride it and we couldn’t say no, but we were scared to death that he would break it!  Fortunately, he didn’t.

Every kid we knew had a dream of owning a Cushman Eagle motorscooter; Kevin Romines actually owned one.  We would go out riding together but our little Moped would not keep up with his Cushman.  We also spent a lot of time playing at a place we called the “big hole”.  This was an excavation about 2 or 3 blocks west of our house and it was huge!  You could almost not see from one side of it to the other, or so we thought at the time.  I went back there later, after I had married Louise, to show it to her.  Man, was I disappointed at this little tiny hole in the ground.

Dad finally had his fill of Pampa and gave the company an ultimatum: either transfer him back to Tulsa to work in the service center or he would quit.  Because of his knowledge and skills, they decided to transfer him.  We moved in early January, between school semesters.  I can remember that Gary and I rode with the man Dad had contracted to haul the furniture.  I’m sure that Mom did not want to go back to Mannford because of the condition of the house there and because of leaving her friends, but she did willingly anyway.

Autobiography, Chapter 1

I've been writing my autobiography for several years now so I'm gonna bore you to death with it.

Here goes:

1-The Early Years

I’ve heard some people talk about how they can remember their second birthday or the day they were born or some other such drivel.  My mind isn’t that sharp!

My very earliest recollection was of receiving a tricycle for my birthday and I thought that was the neatest thing I had ever seen.  We were living in Mt. Vernon, Illinois, at the time so that must have been about 1950 or 1951.  Mom and Dad had married on February 3, 1950, when I was 3 ½ years old.

He adopted Gary, my brother, and I and raised us like we were his own.  In fact, we were his own.

Dad was a service man for Franks Manufacturing Co., and Mom was a secretary to a man by the name of Doug Lawrence there.  They met and married and soon after got transferred to Mt. Vernon, Illinois.  From Mt. Vernon, Dad got assigned to Odessa, Texas, so we moved out there for a couple of years.  I really don’t remember anything about Odessa except that our sister, Mary Sue, was born there on April 17, 1951.  I do remember that Dad would get called out in the middle of the night to work on drilling rigs and he would take the whole family with him.

On one of these trips, we stopped on the way home and Gary and I played on this giant sand dune.  At least, it seemed gigantic at the time.  In reality, it was probably no more than six or eight feet high.

Soon after Mary Sue was born, Dad got reassigned again, this time back to Tulsa.  We moved back and rented an old house two miles east and a half mile south of Mannford.  There was an old house and shop building at the turnoff from the highway to get to our rent house and he decided to buy it.

The bankers at Bristow owned it, along with a great deal of the land around.  They sold it with four acres of land to Dad for $6000 and carried the note.  I’m sure that they thought he would default on the loan and they would get it back but, instead, Dad paid off every penny of the note.

The house was in horrible condition when we moved into it.  Dad bought a wood stove to heat it with but it wasn’t very long into winter before he had to replace it with a coal stove.  The wood stove just would not put out enough heat!  We had to stuff “gunny” sacks into the holes in the walls to keep the birds out and the heat in.

There was no indoor plumbing in the old house.  Consequently, one of our first projects was to construct an outhouse and dig a hole for it.  In later years, digging a new hole periodically was a job that Gary and I were assigned to do.  Dad would leave for work and tell us to dig a new hole and to make sure that it was at least three feet deep!  We never once got it deep enough on the first day.  Hey, three feet is a long way.

After we had lived here for a year or two, Milton was born on March 17, 1953.  I do remember vividly his arrival in the household and the stir it created.  He still causes a stir when he shows up somewhere!

We had a well down beside the shop building which had become a kind of “community well”.  It had a hand pump on it and was about 65 feet deep.  The water was cold and clear and tasted great on hot summer days!  For two or three years after we moved in, people continued to pull in there and fill their water cans with this sparkling water.  Gary and I would haul water from the well to the house in our little red wagon with two 10-gallon cream cans in it.

Eventually, Dad built a well house, ran electricity to it, and put an electric pump in.  He also put a line from the well house to the house so our little red wagon was retired from hauling water.  We now had water in the house but only cold water and only to the kitchen sink.

Baths were an experience in those days.  We didn’t take one every day like we do today because of the “hassle factor”.  The tub, which was kept hanging on the east side of the house, had to be dragged in and placed by the stove in the living room.  Cold water was added, then hot water which had been heated on the wood stove.  If you were the last one of the six to take a bath, the water was pretty milky by then.  After everyone had taken their bath, the tub was carried out and dumped in the front yard.

Dad built a porch onto the back of the house and it was kind of a screened in extension of the house.  It was, however, about two feet below the level of the house.  When you went out the back door of the kitchen, you were on a small landing and had to turn right to go down the stairs.  There was no electricity out there so it was dark at night and you had to negotiate the landing and steps from memory.

One night, Uncle Arthur and Aunt Gertha Bellis were visiting us and Uncle Arthur had a nature call.  He went out the back door and straight off the landing!  It’s a wonder that he didn’t hurt himself since he was over 70 at the time.

Gary and I slept on that back porch, winter and summer.  In the summer, it was delightful; you could lay there and listen to the frogs, crickets and other critters.  It was just like sleeping outdoors.  In the winter, Dad would put up some kind of cellulose covering over the screens to keep out the wind and moisture.  We would pile about 10 quilts and blankets up and sleep under that.  The covers would weight you down so much that it seemed you couldn’t move.

I don’t remember that either of us snored back then; we were just kids.  I do remember, though, that Gary would lay there asleep and wiggle his foot back and forth at the ankle.  I would get terribly aggravated at him but not enough to move away – we needed to share our body heat.

Another of my really strong memories of this time was the night that Ona Lee Larrimore came down to our house to tell us that we had an urgent phone call at the phone company office in Mannford.  Any time something like this happened, it was bad news and this was no exception.  We went into Mannford to use the phone and found out that my Uncle Dannie Nash had been killed in an accident in Utah.

Bill and Ona Lee Larrimore lived up on the hill south of us about a half mile and Ona became Mom’s best friend.  The Larrimore’s had four children, Earl, Janice, Alan, and Lynn.  Alan and Lynn were about the same age as Gary and I and we spent a lot of time playing with them.

After prohibition was over, Oklahoma stayed dry until 1960, at least as far as liquor was concerned.  It was always said that the Baptists and bootleggers were the two groups responsible for keeping Oklahoma dry.  There is probably more truth to this than not.  I can remember many times when we were small, Mom and Dad would take us to Keystone, five miles east of our house, and Dad would stop at Mr. Kurtze’s station to get gasoline.  Mr. Kurtze would pump the gasoline up into the glass bowl on top of the pump then let it start to flow into the car’s tank.  While this was going on, he and Dad would walk out to the well house behind the station and Dad would come back with a pint of whiskey in a brown paper bag.

For some reason, probably because of Dad being raised there, we traded more in Keystone than we did in Mannford.  We bought our groceries at Lang’s Grocery Store, our medicine at Queal’s Drug Store, and hardware at the hardware store which was run by Loval Clifford.  Mr. Queal at the drug store had an old fashioned soda counter and, as a treat, we would occasionally get a great big malt there.  If any of us kids were sick, Mom and Dad would take us down to Mr. Queal’s and he would give us a shot of penicillin.

When I reached the mature age of six, I began to attend school at Mannford Public Schools.  Mannford did not have a kindergarten back then so the first grade was your first year of school.  There were about twenty five students in my class and that was about the number that graduated twelve years later.  My first and second grade teachers were Miss Unger and Mrs. Krute and they were your typical early-grade teachers - kind and gentle.

My teacher in the third grade was my first indication that life as I had known it was about to change.  Sylvia Rhoades ruled her class with an iron fist and everyone was expected to excel!  She and her husband, Lester, were friends of our family for many years and she lived until 2001, a long and productive life.

In the summertime, we would often spend a week or two with Grandfather and Grandmother Nash on the oil lease at Cromwell.  Mom had been raised on this place, and Gary and I had lived there for a couple of years while Mom was working in Tulsa, so it was like a second home to us.

We were playing in the back yard one day and Gary tripped and fell on an oil squirt can.  The can punctured his neck and blood was pumping out.  Grandmother grabbed him up, put a handkerchief on the wound and Granddad drove us (at a high rate of speed) to the hospital in Wewoka.  When we got there and got in to see the doctor, Grandmother released her pressure and it was completely sealed up.  She still had her apron on and it was covered with blood.

Granddad had a 1956 Ford pickup and it would really run.  He would let Gary and I ride in the back and we would go to Okemah.  It was almost a ritual that one of the first things we would do when we visited was get haircuts.

The lease was a fascinating place to explore.  It had a pipe rack down west of the house, a tool shed between the house and the pipe rack, a storm cellar and storage building in the back yard, a garage where Grandmother did her laundry, and, of course, the wells and water tank.  The first tornado I ever saw was when we were standing in the doorway of that cellar.  It passed about a mile to the north of us.  Granddad refused to come to the cellar and sat in the living room watching television.

In the fourth grade I got to go back to the kindly, pleasant type of teacher with Mrs. McDonald and in the fifth grade, I got Miss Moorman.  Miss Moorman was very similar in methods to Mrs. Rhoades and firmly believed in capital (I mean corporal!) punishment.  One time she grabbed me up out of my chair by my shirt collar and proceeded to thump me on the behind with her paddle.  I protested that I wasn’t doing anything and she said, “That’s just it, You weren’t doing anything!”  Miss Moorman taught both the fifth and sixth grades so I was anticipating a very long two years with her.  Imagine my happiness when Dad came home and announced that he was being transferred to Pampa, Texas.

In my final six weeks of the fifth grade, I had received a “D” on my report card.  Knowing that I could never take this grade home, I did the only thing a smart young man could do: I stuffed it into the end of a fence post at school and told my parents that I had lost it.  The bad news was that, because Dad was being transferred out of state, I was going to need a report card to get into my new school.  I went up to the school office during the summer, explained my dilemma, and the secretary said she would get me  a new one.  When I got it and looked at my grades, the “D” wasn’t there!  It was a six-week grade and she had posted only the semester grades!

Wildfires (Continued)

The first numbers which were released by the authorities last week involving the fires were that about 70 "structures" had been burned.  It sure seemed like a lot more than that to me.

I went into the local hardware store on Monday after the fires and four of the six people who work in there were homeless, including Wes, the owner.  Richard, Susan, and Charles all had lost their homes.  The American Red Cross did a survey last Monday and raised their estimate to 209 families homeless.

Being late August, school is getting ready to start and the count of homeless at school was five teachers and 76 students.  It really is getting to the point that you hate to ask someone if they lost their home because the answer is probably going to be yes.

I had to go by the local tag office yesterday and, sure enough, one of the women who works there, Rhonda, had lost her home.  She and her husband are living in an RV until they can get started again.

Last night about 9:15 p.m., I was returning from a trip to my land which is about fifteen miles away.  At the intersection of Highways 48 and 51, I spotted a dog with no tail running around the intersection.  I recognized the dog as the one that our friend, Amy, had been trying to catch for over a week.  I pulled the Jeep over, got out, and tried to coax the dog up to me but she would have no part of it.

While I was trying to lure the dog up, a Nissan pickup pulled up with a young couple in it and asked if I needed help.  I explained what I was doing and the woman got out and tried to get the dog to come to her.  I idly asked the young man if he had lost anything and he said, Yes, he had lost everything, including his carpentry tools which he made a living with.

I was really struck that these people had lost everything they own but pulled over to see if they could help me!  Perhaps there is some hope for the human race after all.  By the way, the latest numbers I have heard from the wildfires are over 400 homes lost.  It truly is an unforgettable tragedy!

Wildfires

The past three days have been exciting, too exciting for my tastes.

We have had an exceptionally hot, dry summer.  In fact, at our house, we have received a total of .29 inches of rain since June 4.  The total for July was .26 inches and we got another .03 inches night before last.  We have had 24 days of 100° plus temperatures, 5 in June, 15 in July, and 4 so far in August.  The temperatures and lack of rain are very similar to last year.

Last Friday, August 3, there was a pretty good sized grass fire which started somewhere south of State Highway 33 and west of State Highway 48, about 15 miles from our house.  On Saturday morning, I drove down there to see if the fire had burned our land which we use for deer hunting.  It had not; the fire was west of our place about a mile.

Since Saturday was my birthday,  I planned to do nothing but laze around all day.  According to the weather forecast, it was going to be too hot to do anything outside anyway.  We decided to take Rachel and Mike, our daughter and son-in-law, out to eat that evening.

As the day progressed, that fire got bigger and bigger and closer to Mannford.  I was listening to a couple of scanners and it seemed that every few minutes, another fire department was called in to render aid.  About noon, we decided that we might not want to go off to Tulsa for dinner.  We lost both water and electricity around 1:00 p.m. and the house quickly began to heat up.  The high at our house that day was 109°.

About 3:00 p.m., the emergency management people issued a mandatory evacuation of the entire town of Mannford.  This, coupled with the huge amounts of smoke around and our lack of air conditioning, prompted us to decide to spend the night in Sand Springs with Rachel and Mike.  We packed a few things and the dogs and headed their way.

At the kids' house, we spent most of the evening keeping track of the fires on the television news and on Facebook.  I did discover how much misinformation can be found there.  There were several reports of people's houses and businesses being burned that later were proven to be wrong.  Facebook is a great social medium and I do enjoy it but I'm not going to believe much of the news I get from it!

Yesterday morning after breakfast, Louise and I and the dogs headed home.  We still had no electricity but we were going to stay home anyway.  We did get our water service back about noon and about 3:00 p.m., the electricity came back on.  The air conditioning sure does feel good.

We don't know yet how many people lost their homes but we do personally know about half a dozen who did.  Fortunately, there have not been any reports of fatalities or serious injuries.  We had lost a friend in the 2011 wildfires and were worried that that might happen again.

The only fatality at our house was our big old orange koi.  The fish pond pump was not running, of course, and the lack of oxygen and high water temperature was too much for him.  He was about 10 years old and weighed about five pounds.  Its kind of hard to get sentimentally attached to a fish but I hated to lose him after all those years.

We are extremely appreciative of all the emergency services people.  I know that some long, long hours have been put in the past three days to get these fires put down.  Hopefully, today will be the day that they all get to go home and rest.

The Vacation from Hell

Did you ever have one of those vacations where everything seemed to go wrong?  Louise and I, and our granddaughter, Gabby, just returned from Colorado two weeks early because nothing about our trip was going as it should.

Our first sign was a lack of water.  For years, we have taken our RV up there empty and filled the water tank at White Star Campground near Twin Lakes, a small town near where we camp.  When we got there this year, we discovered that the US Forest Service had cut the bibs off the hydrants so no hoses could be attached!  Apparently, this is the way our government insures that they are in compliance with anti-siphon faucet regulations.  Instead of installing anti-siphon faucets, just whack the old ones up where they can't be used!

When we got to our campsite, we discovered that no one else was there except for the host.  This was on July 2, two days before the biggest summer holiday of the year and no one was there!  I occasionally like a little solitude but this was just plain eerie!  At any rate, we decided to stay for a week and there were a few campers who came and went during that period.  I should point out that the Forest Service changed their rules: you can now stay in their campgrounds only 14 days out of every thirty!  We don't understand this new rule; its certainly not because the campgrounds are so crowded with campers.

After a week in the Forest Service campground, we decided to move to a commercial RV park.  Gabby was a bit unhappy because there was no one to play with and we also needed to be able to hook up to water and sewer.  Our friends Tom and Alice were coming up and were going to stay at the KOA in Buena Vista so we got a spot there as well and paid for eight nights.

The first couple of days in the KOA were not too bad but then our dog, Buddy, got sick.  I don't know what was wrong with him, but he really was lethargic.  We were going to find a vet for him but he managed to recover on his own.

About this time, I needed to receive and send a fax in order to change over some insurance so I sent Gabby to the office to obtain the fax number.  "Fax Services" was one of the items listed on the RV Park's brochure.  She came back in a few minutes and said that the owner wouldn't give her the number, that I had to come up there!  Well, to give you the short story, my "Okie" temper kicked in and the owners wound up suggesting that we should leave the Park.  We decided to stay there just to spite them.

While Louise and I were contemplating what we should do next, Gabby was out riding her bicycle.  She slid coming down a steep hill, lost control, and slid on the gravel.  She had a pretty serious case of "road rash" on her knees, legs and arms.  Louise got her "doctored up" but she was pretty sore.

After the bicycle wreck, the three of us sat down and decided to come on back home, even though we had planned to stay a couple of weeks longer!  The trip home was uneventful and we sure are glad to be home.

As an epilogue, I should tell you that I decided to post a negative review about the Buena Vista KOA on tripadvisor.com.  When I logged on there, I discovered that there was already a long list of negative reviews about the owners of this place!  The moral of the story, of course, is to check the reviews before you go, not after!

At any rate, we survived and the next one will be better.