Millard Don Carriker

A Memorable Teacher

In my Freshman year I took Latin.  Teaching Latin to teenagers in Southeastern Kansas in the 1940’s had to be one of the most challenging jobs in Christendom.  The Roman Empire was farther from our world than the star Betelgeuse.  The school board, however, decreed that one year of Latin was...
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1501 Views
4 Comments
Millard Don Carriker

Love and War

Shrinks say that war heightens a man’s desire to be near a girl: As near as “possible”.  They say it comes from a primitive desire to preserve the species, to live beyond one’s own life, and from a war induced sense of our mortality.  Maybe that is what caused me to...
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1374 Views
2 Comments
Tom Cormier

Coach Bennett Teaches Me a Lesson

I knew I was caught but I was laughing so hard I couldn't breathe. And then the giant head turned around and...

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2226 Views
2 Comments
Rachel Johnson

My Adolescence in the 1960's and 1970's

I am a product of my era.

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Michael Wendel

Thoughts on My Pre Adolescent and Teen Years

When I think back to those years during the 60's I had a very good life. Of course at the time I was probably self-centered and didn't realize how wonderful it was. Like most young people I was in a hurry to grow up. And I remember my father always telling...
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1566 Views
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Millard Don Carriker

Making Do: And a Scientific Experiment

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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1311 Views
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Millard Don Carriker

The Iceman Cometh

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...
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1412 Views
4 Comments
Millard Don Carriker

Dust, Sweat, Tears, and a Mixed-Up Birthday

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...
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1080 Views
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Jeri J Steele

What Did I Want To Be When I Grew Up

Late fifties and early sixties were "changing times." ....In lower school, the teachers that inspired me the most were the ones that encouraged that spark of sheer desire to solve difficult problems....It wasn't but a few days into the (Computer Science) class before I realized this was the subject for me.  It was so fun, I forgot the time of day. I spent hours and hours hanging around the computer labs working on those first programs.

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1829 Views
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Annie Payne

Dear Diary.......What a weekend!

Dear Diary.......What a weekend!
What a grouse weekend! I went to stay at Coralie's house for the weekend, after school on Friday. Mrs Bevan calls me her 4th daughter now as I spend more weekend time at her house than at mine! We all went down to West Beach Surf Lifesaving Club for the Surfie...
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541 Views
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Annie Payne

Dear Diary.... June 13th, 1964 and the Beatles concert.

Normal 0 false false false EN-AU X-NONE X-NONE The Beatles concert last night was fantabulous !!!! We all wagged school yesterday (12th June) to stand in the crowd outside the Adelaide Town Hall, in our school uniforms, where they were welcomed to Adelaide by the Lord Mayor and Bob Francis who...
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1726 Views
5 Comments
Tom Cormier

It Hit Me In Stride

It Hit Me In Stride
Mum was and still is a fantastic singer. She sang like Billy and Ella during her teens. Dad was all about Country music and sang like Ferlin, George and Hank. With 10 kids in the house they played music all the time, Mum on the piano and Dad on the guitar....
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1907 Views
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Lillian Cormier

My Mother and Her Sisters

My Mother and Her Sisters
My mother was from a family of nine sisters and one brother. Uncle John was the first born. Can you imagine all those sisters coming one by one, and uncle John hoping he'd have a brother?  He had to have loved all of his sisters though as they were all so much...
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1861 Views
3 Comments
Millard Don Carriker

Grade School Gun-Slinger

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...
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1164 Views
2 Comments
Millard Don Carriker

Love Lifted Me

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...
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1402 Views
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Millard Don Carriker

The End of an America

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...
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1271 Views
1 Comment
Millard Don Carriker

A Cabin For Four

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...
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1385 Views
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Golden V. Adams Jr.

Squirting fresh milk for the cats, as the band played on

Growing up on a farm was much different in the 1950s and 1960s than it is today.  With six siblings younger than I, there wasn't much time for either music or movies.  The local movie theater was in Garland, about five miles away.  I'm sure I attended some movies, but nothing...
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2212 Views
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Patricia White

My Seventeenth Summer

The summer of 1959 began with my graduation from Farragut High School, one of 53.  I had many memorable events to enjoy, among them presenting a solo piano recital in May, and receiving many good wishes and in that day many graduation gifts.  The church members were very generous.  The money gifts were...
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1234 Views
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Golden V. Adams Jr.

On My Own….

On My Own….
  I graduated from Bear River High School in May, 1962 and had received two scholarships through my activities in Future Farmers of America (FFA).    One was a Union Pacific Scholarship and the other dealt directly with agriculture, as I recall.   My intention was to go to Utah State...
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1474 Views
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