From Whence I Came

I was born May 4, 1926, in Hobart, Oklahoma, to a farming family. The youngest of four boys with a younger sister. My memory of Hobart is a blank, as we moved from there to Talihina when I was about three, a place we lived until I was 17, during WWII, and enlisted in the U.S. Navy. You might think Talihina is an unusual name for a town, but only if you are not a Choctaw Indian. Talihina means “railroad” in their language.

My early years were mostly happy, despite the Depression of the ’30s. Possibly the hard times made the situation more tolerable because we had never experienced much better. Television was a thing of the future and radio was in its infancy. We did have the movies. I remember the Saturday afternoon Western movies of Hoot Gibson, Tim McCoy, and others were thrills to behold for youngsters in their preteens, and the serials of Dick Tracy were especially looked forward to, especially if we could scrape up a nickel for the price of entry.

Afterwards we would gather at Ozments Drug Store, which had a soda fountain, and order a single ice-cream soda with lots of straws in order to share. We would pool our pennies to pay. Saturday movies were an oasis for a bunch of ragtag kids during those Depression years.

Talihina being in the mountainous area of the state, it therefore was not part of the “Dust Bowl” at the start of the Depression that caused ruination of farmers and cattle growers attended by the great prolonged lack of rain. Remember, this was before the days of pipeline irrigation. These people were wholly dependent on rain, which in that era produced the “Rainmaker” with his flimflam, stick, and bogus promise of making rain come. In desperation, some people would fall for it, to their peril. The combined effects of the Depression and Dust Bowl migration were devastating to the rest of the state.

It was so pointedly illustrated in John Steinbeck’s novel, later made into a heartbreaking movie, The Grapes of Wrath. A very touching movie, very graphic and realistic story of life in those depressing times. It seemed to give national attention and rudeness to the world “Oakie,” which these poor and unfortunate people hated. It was used as a word of hate and derision. The use of the word was cause for violence in those times on occasions. Its usage lingered on to WWII.

Since then the state of Oklahoma has grown in prosperity and influence. Now when the word is used, it is more in good humor and kidding. So was the growth and hard times of the people who left and remained in the great state of Oklahoma. Many who left, depressed and robbed of the basic ability to scratch out a bare living from the ground, later became successful and wealthy over the years, farming and ranching in the San Joaquin Valley of California.

As I write this, a good memory for an old man to recall is of one of my early buddies, Lawson Bell, whose father was a long-haul truck driver. Often they would invite me to Sunday dinners, a pleasure never forgotten. A child’s view is not totally removed from the shock of reality. In 1932-1933, in order to help stabilize the markets, the government passed a law to set the market for beef, requiring cattle growers to kill a certain percentage of their stock and dispose of the carcasses in lime pits. I was about six or seven years old then, and the memory is so indelible of the men who had to do this and bear witness on each other as it was done, still very vivid. I think it stands out because my father was so broken up by this action, he never fully recovered. In less than a year he disappeared, and we never saw him again. These were the stories and happenings during the Depression years throughout the country. Causes and circumstances were different I am sure, nevertheless it was the widespread devastation of people and property during the Great Depression that affected so many lives, some of them so severely.

As a very young boy, some of my great memories were of following my dad as he plowed the ground for planting. I followed the furrows and occasionally would pick up Indian arrowheads made from slate. I had no knowledge of what they were then, until my father explained to me they were actually made by the Indians and used on sticks to make arrows for hunting game and self-protection. During the mid-’30s and after my father had gone, we lived in town.

I was in school and my buddies were nicknamed Hoagie, Mose, Spike, etc. I got the nickname of Bunk. There was a character in some dime novels named Bunkhouse