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!