I passed easily into second grade, but shortly after school began, we moved again. This time onto a large tract of land about three miles east of Drumright that had oil wells scattered here and there on it. It was called the “Thomas Long Oil Lease.” I don’t know why we...
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1207 Views
We were now living in the fourth house we had occupied in the same number of years of my life. This house sat on a dusty unpaved road on the eastern edge of Drumright, Oklahoma. Calling it a “house” is a compliment. It was little more than a shack. My Grandma...
1297 Views
1297 Views
In the rousing title song of the 1930’s musical “Oklahoma,” the cast sings of corn waving as high as an elephant’s eye - growing “right up to the sky.” They conclude this joyous testimonial by exuberantly shouting “Oklahoma. . . . OK!” Good theater, and it may even have been true...
956 Views
956 Views
I was seven years old. My family and I were living in the fifth house we had occupied since I came as its sixth and last member. The house, located on the Thomas Long Oil Lease, east of Drumright OK had been built as a temporary, “company” house for oil field...
1050 Views
1050 Views
Love Lifted Me In the late 1930's , when I was somewhere around seven or eight years old I had a friend named Jimmy Cargill who had an older sister about the same age as my sister Frances. Her name was Neva and, like Frances, she played the piano. But unlike...
1279 Views
1279 Views
The “Cat” climbed the steep West Virginia mountainside as effortlessly as if it were cruising across the plains of Kansas. Its builders called it a Model D-8 but to the pipeline construction crews it was just a “Cat”. Whatever it was called it was the most powerful crawler tractor made by...
1146 Views
1146 Views
The spirit of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn was alive and well in my small hometown of Caney, Kansas during the `40's. We boys wandered the woods, shooting at, but seldom hitting, small animals with our .22's. Or, we climbed the “Shale Pit"; skinny-dipped in "Smelter Pond", and tested our courage...
1254 Views
1254 Views
I entered First Grade in September of 1937. I skipped Kindergarten. Not because I was precocious. Such an educational luxury wasn’t offered by Drumright’s schools. The Board of Education apparently didn’t favor naming schools in honor of presidents or heroes. They just named them according to where they were located in...
1064 Views
1064 Views