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 moved.   The house was no better than the one we left.  The Oil Company, as temporary housing, had built it for its workers.  It was a bare-bones house: Walls, wooden floors, windows and a roof.  It had no electricity, running water, natural gas, central heat, or telephone and no “bathroom.”  The toilet was a little house out back. With five kids still living at home there weren’t enough bedrooms to go around. Parents got one; our one and only girl, my sister Frances got one.  My oldest brother Robert had left home to join the Army when he turned sixteen.  That left four boys to share the third bedroom – three in the bed, one on a pallet on the floor.  Having a relatively small body I got the bed.

The inside walls were rough boards nailed onto studs, leaving the occupant to cover them with whatever they could afford or chose to use.  There was no wallboard or plaster covering the walls. Had Mother decided to buy any kind of wall covering the money would have had to come out of money needed for food and clothing.  She had learned an encyclopedia of knowledge about how to “make-do.”  Her solution was to paper the walls with newspaper.   When the “wallpaper” got torn, wet, or dirty, she just applied another layer.  In later years, teachers told parents that having lots of reading material around the house would help their child become a good reader.   I suppose that’s true.   I’ve always been a good reader, and the walls of my early childhood home were covered with words, pictures, and stories.  Hardly what educators had in mind, but maybe it worked although I truly don’t remember.

Mother cooked on a wood-burning stove that radiated the same amount of heat both summer and winter.  The stove almost certainly came with the house for it was a big cast iron monster that probably weighed half a ton.   That cook stove and a wood-burning, pot-bellied stove in the dining room were the only heat we had in the winter.  But that wasn’t too bad.  Central Oklahoma is a borderline Southern State.  The summer heat was a lot more uncomfortable than the winter chill, especially when Mother fired up that cook stove.

Our drinking, cooking, and bathing water came from a well a couple of hundred yards away.  My brothers carried water from it to our house a bucket at a time.  Being in the middle of an oil field the water smelled and tasted like sulfur.  We took our baths in an elongated galvanized sheet metal tub that doubled as a rinse tub on laundry day.  Since water had to be carried from the well and heated on the wood cook stove, baths were not an everyday occurrence.   Nor did everyone get clean bath water.  The first one in got the clean water.  After that it was “share the dirt”.   The order was ladies first, seniority second”.  I don’t know when I took my first bath in virgin bath water but I doubt it was while we were living on the Thomas Long oil lease

Gradually things began to improve.   Dad, who had been working here and there when and where he could for several years was hired by Sinclair Oil Company as a “pipeliner;” a euphemism for their common laborers to work on a traveling labor “gang”.   That put a little more money into the household but Dad was away from home for weeks at a time. Mother became a single parent.   Dad established credit at Jim Trout’s grocery store in Drumright so that Mother could buy groceries without having cash.   Dad took the family car with him most of the time.   When mother needed to buy groceries she either scrounged a ride with someone or walked.  I remember her at least one time walking and pulling a child’s wagon behind her filled grocery bags.  It was a difficult life for her and one that took its toll on her.

One thing that showed things were getting better was when Dad installed running water in the kitchen.  He didn’t have any way to pipe water from the well and the company would not have let him if he did, but if necessity is the mother of invention, poverty is surely its father.  Dad made a marvelous improvisation.  He built a wooden tower six or eight feet above the ground just outside the kitchen window, got a large, open-topped, circular water tank; the kind livestock drink from out in the fields, and set it up on that tower.  He soldered a pipe to a hole he had cut in the bottom of the tank and ran it to a faucet above the kitchen sink.  Then, just by turning a faucet, Mother had running water, so long as there was water was in the tank.  Water apparently still had to be carried from the well to fill the tank.  I don’t recall how that was done but it must have been less burdensome than carrying it a bucket at a time and it was surely easier for Mother.  The temperature of the water in the tank was, naturally, pretty close to whatever the outside temperature was on any given day.  And, since the tank wasn’t covered, our water was enriched by whatever happened to fall into it.

The installation of running water also made us unwitting parties to an unplanned, unknown, and unreported, scientific experiment.   The tank was made up of two or three pieces of galvanized tin, bent to form a circle and soldered together. The pipe was attached to the bottom of the tank with lead-based solder.   We drank, ate food cooked in, and bathed in water that was probably laced with lead.   None of us seemed to suffer any ill effects from it.