The Highway Revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.