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.

South Texas Revisited

Every once in a while, my friend, Larry, reminds me that I need to post something on my blog.  He just did that again so I suppose I should write something.

Louise and I came to South Texas again this year.  We arrived here on January 6 and will be here till March 6.  The weather was absolutely atrocious the first week we were here, making us wonder whether we had made a good choice.  It has since corrected itself, however, and has been beautiful for weeks.

There are too many things to do here to get them all done - many of the activities center around eating.  No wonder I can't lose any weight!  For example, we had the Oklahoma luncheon the other day.  Everyone in the Valley who is from Oklahoma is welcome to attend.  There were about 300 attendees at the luncheon and it was a lot of fun to meet and talk to some of them.

The woman seated next to me won the prize for being the oldest attendee.  She will turn 101 in June and lives in Bearden, Oklahoma, near where my mother grew up.  In the course of the conversation, I found out that she knew my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and my mother quite well.  As the old saying goes, it's a small World!

Another man seated at our table heard us say that we were from Mannford and asked if we had, by chance, known a fellow by the name of Bill Heller.  Of course, I had known Bill and Mary Heller from when I was a kid.  It turns out that he was their ex-  son-in-law.

Speaking of eating, today is half price day on oysters out on South Padre Island.  Guess where we are going this afternoon!  Last week, I ate 2 1/2 dozen of them, I think I can repeat that this week

After we leave here, we are going to go to Louisiana for a few days before returning home.  We have some serious eating to do (crawfish!) over there.  I'll keep you posted on our food adventures.

Big Toys

When I was in college, I had a part-time job driving a truck.  Back then, the state didn't have a Commercial Drivers License, or CDL.  They issued what was called a commercial chauffeurs license.  You didn't have to take a driving test; only answer ten questions in addition to the standard test and pay them a few bucks more.  This license made it legal for you to drive any truck on the road.

Because they were so easy to get, I had a commercial chauffeurs license.  Dad always had a truck around the place which we used to haul hay or other things with so the truck license came in handy.  When I went down to Stillwater Milling Company during my junior year in school, the people there found out that I had a truck license and asked me if I wanted to drive a truck.  I told them that I would love to but I only had experience with "straight" trucks, not semi-trailer trucks.  They replied that that was fine; they had a lot of loads that were in straight trucks.

Because I was in school, the boss would call me when they had a load.  If I had the time, I would go down to the mill and take off from there.  Sure enough, within a couple of weeks, he called with a load to go to    Perry to the company store up there.  When I got to the mill, I discovered that it was a semi load, not a small
straight truckload!  I protested but the boss said I could do it so that was the beginning of my short lived truck driving career.

After another month or two, I worked my way up to a somewhat regular run to Muldrow, Oklahoma, just west of Ft. Smith.  The truck I drove was a 1964 Mack, Model B61.  This truck had a five-speed main transmission with a 4-speed auxiliary transmission behind it.  The B Series Macks were made from 1953 to 1966 and were probably the most recognizable trucks of that era.  By the time I started driving this truck (in 1968), it had become outdated and slow.  I could reach a top speed of 64 miles per hour on the Interstate and get my doors blown off by all the other trucks out there!

Even though the driving job only paid $1.85 an hour, I felt like I was a big shot truck driver.  I did wind up quitting though, when my boss told me I had to choose between my job and my girl friend, Louise.  I chose Louise and it has been a good deal, since I've been married to her for 43 years.

Let's shift to the current time.  For the past several years, Louise and I had a 1999 International truck to pull our fifth wheel RV with.  I also used it occasionally to pull the small dozer around.  When we traded the trailer off on a motor home, I didn't really need the International other than for the dozer.  I thought about an older truck (we've always liked older vehicles) but couldn't find one I liked.

One day at the doughnut shop, my friend Wayne mentioned that his cousin in Owasso had an old Mack B61 and that it might be for sale.  This got my attention big time and I started asking questions.  Wayne assured me that the old truck was in pristine condition so I conned him into going to Owasso with me to look at it.  Well, it was in excellent condition and I wound up buying it from Wes, Wayne's cousin.

This truck is a blast to drive!  Its big, loud, and attention-getting.  I've got some work to do on it but not so much that I can't get out and herd it down the road some.  The other thing thats neat about it is the Tulsa Model 34 winch.  Having worked for that company for 28 plus years, its fun to have a truck with one of their products on it.

As the old saying goes, the only difference between men and boys is the size of the toys.  I guess this one is probably right!

Autobiography, Chapter 4

4-College, Part One

The reason this chapter is called College, Part One, is because it took me two hitches to get through school.  I know I have ruined the ending of this chapter by telling you this but you have a right to know.

In the fall of 1964, David Alsip, Donna Kellert, Rick Spess, and I all started to school at Oklahoma State as fresh Mannford High graduates.  David and I shared a room in a rooming house, Donna lived in a dorm, and Rick lived in another dorm across campus.

Our rooming house was at 301 South Duck in Stillwater.  A multi-story credit union stands there today but in 1964 it was an old two-story house with about four or five bedrooms upstairs.  I don’t remember the name of the woman we rented from but she seemed to be very old and very frail.  She occupied the downstairs part and rented out each of the upstairs bedrooms.  I remember coming in once and learning that her daughter had found her unconscious at the bottom of the steps going to the basement.  In a couple of weeks, however, she was back and seemed to be fine.

As college freshmen are apt to do, we did do our share of drinking.  There was a pub called the Anchor down by the fire station and we would buy gallon jugs of draft beer in there.  We would then carry the jugs home to the rooming house and have a good time.  Its hard to believe now that someone like me, whose parents could not afford to pay anything, and who had to work to go to school, would “screw off” and party as much as I did.  It is a fact, however.

One morning, I woke up and discovered that there was no door on our room.  David informed me that I had come home drunk, couldn’t find the key to my room and had just busted the door off the hinges.  We managed to get the door repaired before the landlord found out about it.

I had decided to major in Chemical Engineering, since I had done fairly well in chemistry in high school.  Well, college wasn’t like high school; you had to study to get good grades and I wasn’t into studying.  At the end of the first semester, I realized that I had made a terrible mistake and changed my major to Mechanical Engineering.  This wasn’t enough, however, to save my downward spiral.

Sometime during my freshman year, Cabot Corporation decided to close down their service center in Tulsa and let their former manager, Dudley Jorden, open up his own shop to do their service work.  Dad decided to stay there and work for Dudley.  The impact this had on me was that my scholarship from Cabot went away after only one year.

Mom and Dad didn’t have a lot of money and couldn’t help us with tuition or room and board but every time we went home we got the laundry done and managed to raid the freezer.  During my first year of school, I got a job sweeping floors in the university classrooms.  As I recall, it paid about 60 to 75¢ per hour.

Between the first and second years of school, I went back home to live with the folks and went to work at a “sweat shop” in Tulsa by the name of Creamer and Dunlap.  It was a fab shop that paid the minimum wage, $1.25, and the work was hard and dirty.  After about a month there, I got hurt on the job and spent the rest of the summer receiving physical therapy.  I got a rope wrapped around my left arm, almost cutting it off; in fact, the attending doctor told Dad that it probably would have to come off.  Dad told him to take it off when “it rotted off”.  Fortunately, I still have two arms, although the injury did paralyze my left thumb.  One year later, this injury was to affect my life in another profound way.

When I returned to school in the fall of 1965, there were some differences.  David, Rick, and Donna were still there but in addition to them, my brother Gary started to school at Oklahoma State.

Gary and I rented a small apartment together at 213 ½ North Husband.  It was on the alley between Husband and Main streets just behind Cooper’s motorcycle shop.  By this time, I was into a “no study” mode and should not have been in school at all.  I remember a lot of things about living in this apartment but studying was not one of them.

I did still have to work.  Instead of sweeping floors for the University, I got a job pumping gas for a fellow, Joe Lewis, who had a Conoco Station up north of downtown on Highway 177.  Joe was a prince of a guy and I really enjoyed working for him.

A couple of years later, Joe went into Burtrum Marine in Mannford to buy a boat.  He didn’t know that he was talking to Milt, my brother, and asked him if he knew Edd Alexander.  Milt replied that he didn’t think so until he found out that Joe liked me and then admitted that he was my brother.  Anything to sell a boat!

Probably the worst thing that happened to me while I was working for Joe was the day that Dr. Oliver Wilhelm, the President of the University, came in to get gasoline.  I wanted to impress him so badly that I opened the radiator cap too rapidly and almost burned him and me with coolant.  Fortunately, neither of us did get burned but I got really embarrassed.

By now I had switched my major to mechanical technology and the tech school was a lot easier than engineering school.  Still, though, you couldn’t pass the courses without studying at least a little bit.  My last major change was between the first and second semesters of my sophomore year, when I changed from Mechanical Technology to Aero Technology.  Alas, it was too little too late.  I had completely given up on school by this time.

I now had 60 hours of college credits but with a 1.6 grade point average on a 4.0 system.  Not a pretty sight!  David and Gary too were through with school and ready to quit.  Looking back, I don’t know whether I drug them down, they drug me down, or we all just self-destructed together.  I suspect it was the latter.  At any rate, we were done with Oklahoma State, at least for the time being.

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.