Poppy Did Not Like Dewar

POPPY DID NOT LIKE DEWAR

Poppy throwed a fit about a boy that Bill was getting to like.

Poppy couldn't stand to be around 'the smelter talk'.

Truman got in another ‘little scrape.’

Poppy said, "Truman is going to get in trouble if we stay here.

He needs ‘room to grow.’ We are going to move back to Briartown."

Mommy hated to take us kids out of good schools.

She got 'mad as a wet hen'. She really talked up to Poppy.

She told him, "It was not a sin if you hear their dirty jokes and cuss words, while you are working to make a living to support your family."

I, Thelmer, can remember them arguing.

Imogene was born March 23, 1925, in the tiny town of Dewar, Oklahoma.

WE MOVED BACK TO BRIARTOWN in the fall of 1925. Poppy traded the trucks for a team of mules and a wagon. Poppy didn't drive a car again for years. It was 3 or 4 months after Granpa Stephens died, Bill had been staying with Granma Stephens.

CROWS Thelmer remembers, "The people who had rented our farm had tamed some crows. About seven of them would fly into our house. There were no window screens. The crows weren't afraid of us and would lite on our shoulder, we couldn't catch them. Poppy told us to ‘kill every last one of them’. We finally got them all with our ‘bean flips’".

Thelmer's brothers and sisters always declared that he could, “Shoot a fly, off a telephone wire without hitting the wire.” That’s what they always said. Him and Lawrence practiced.

HUNTING I liked to hunt in the snow, to keep my feet from freezing, I would wrap them in gunny sacks. Swamp rabbits were heavier than jack rabbits. Their bodies were the same size, but their legs were bigger. There were lots of them in the little creek bottom, a mile south of the Coleman Cemetery. I would track them, they would den up in a hollow log or dig a little hole. They would be huddled down and think they were hid.

There would be a little thawed spot in the snow. I would figure which way their head was facing and get right up behind them and shoot them with my bean-flip. Once I got five. They were so heavy that I thought I wouldn't ever get home with them. Mommy fried the young ones. She boiled the older ones and made dumplin's with them.

The town Marshal tried to get a rowdy young drunk to go home. The drunk managed to take the gun away from the Law. The Marshal told him that he was going to go and get another gun---and he better be gone, when he got back. He come back with a shotgun. The young man tried to take the shotgun away from the Marshal. The young man---it nearly blowed him into.

‘ANNIE WAS POORLY’ I, Bill, was 17, Annie was not in good health.

Before Bub was 'little' (born), Annie was 'poorly' and she couldn't do much.

Orba Lee was 4 and Ovilla was 2. I was staying there and helping them.

Some of the Raimers', come to visit, and there was more for me to do.

Dock worked in the oil field in Oklahoma City.

The Company furnished him a little 4 room house, on 29^th Street.

He drove back to Porum in his new Ford and come to see me at Lee's.

I had known him all my life and I complained.

He used his by-word, "Hell, Oh Hell", I can fix that" He went by and told Poppy, and drove to Okmulgee. He come back with a marriage license, I still have it. Tom Herrin married us at Lee's house, just Lee and Annie. It was

6pm. Annie helped cook us a good supper. Bub was born in a few days.

I just took the clothes that I had at Lees. We drove to Ok City that night.

The little house had a porch. We would sit on it. Dock would play the ‘Tennessee Waltz’ to me on his guitar. It is still my favorite.

Tennessee Waltz is recorded to have been written in 1945.

I know that is not right, Dock was playing it to me, when we married, 1926.

Others would come and play and I wasn't lonesome."

It didn’t bother me that I had very little to cook with.

(Bill told this following, just talking. I asked her if I could write it.

"Yes, but nobody is interested in it."---Louise Moore)

"Dock and I come to Porum, visiting from Oklahoma City, before Lorene was ‘little’. I remember that I walked to the outside toilet,

the only kind that anyone had then. They were set back from the house, usually at least a hundred feet, on account of the smell.

Most homes had a ‘two holer’, a bench with two round holes sawed.

The ‘paper’ was usually an old Sears Roebuck catalogue.

Everyone got one and the ‘new’ one was kept in the house, to order out of. Old magazines were used, their pages were torn in half, laying there, just fluttering. The catalogue was best because it had thinner paper. It’s pages weren’t torn until they were needed. Because we did set there and look and see things that we never noticed before, in the catalogue. We never saw

‘store bought’en’ rolls of toilet paper, until there were indoor bathrooms.

Wasps seemed to especially like to build their nests out in the toilets.

A wasp stung me over one eye.

Both eyes swelled, nearly by the time that I got back in the house.

I couldn't see. My face swelled, I swelled all over. Dr's Val, Ferris and Gullage all come. They didn't think that I would live.

My long hair had never been cut, they cut it real short.

Eight days later, I woke up and felt my stomach--for the baby.

It wasn't there, it had never nursed, and it didn't have a name.

She was healthy and we named her Lorene. Dock stayed with me and

it was four weeks before we could go back to Oklahoma City.

His pay had went on--that was unheard of then.

Then the government pro-rated oil, the wells could be pumped just one day a week. That good job played out, we were soon back to Porum.

Us boys were glad when Dock and Bill come to see us,

we would line up, and Dock would cut our hair. Mommy had always cut it, we all liked for Dock to cut it better.

OUR OWN HOUSE We owned 12 or 15 acres, west of Briartown, next to Orville Burnett. We wanted our own house. Thelmer remembers working on it. "I helped cut cottonwood or post oak trees the right length. We pealed the bark off the inside wall, part of the logs. Then chipped and notched them and fit them as close together as possible. We 'chinked' the cracks with red clay. Then split post oak logs and made shingles, that we nailed to cover the cracks. It was real nice and as tight and warm as could be. Norma Dean was born there. Lorene had to walk a mile and a half through the woods, to school at Briartown.

Lawrence got to finish the eighth grade, because he stayed with Dock and Bill and walked Lorene to school, her first year. He was janitor at school. One day he stayed late to play basketball. Lorene come home by herself, just a’bawlin. She was afraid he would get hurt, and she wanted him to walk with her. Sometimes they would come to get Lawrence to play basketball, he was good. He loved his ball playing.”

THE CATFISH Bill remembers, “An old slew come up from the Canadian River, on part of our land. When there was a head-rise, there was real muddy back-water, in the slew. There was an eddy place, it stayed clear.

It would fill up with carp. Once in a while, there would be a catfish. Dock was looking down in that water, one day and saw a BIG catfish. He shot it with his shotgun. It weighed 72 pounds on our cotton scales. It was 7 or 8 ft long. Dock and another man put a fence post over their shoulders, and hung the fish down between them. We took a picture of it. There was no ice, no way to keep that good fish. So we fried it all, in our big black wash pot.

We made our own fun. If we had a gallon bucket lid, we would find a stick with a T on it. We would run and push the lid with the stick.

We would think-like it was a locomotive, running along and rattling."

Thelmer remembers "I was riding a pony with a saddle, Poppy was walking behind me. We were trying to drive a big old calf into the lot. There was some wire laid out, to build a garden fence. Somehow the pony got his feet tangled and fell on me. Poppy raised me up, blowed on me and pushed on my sides a long time, before I could get my breath. It was a close call."

During the rainy season every year, an old 'sink hole' would come, out behind the Coleman barn. The bottom would drop down 10 ft deep and fill with water, 6 or 8 ft across. We were careful to keep the stock away from it. It would dry and close up in the summer.

Rocker Cox, his son killed him.He was drunk and mean to everybody. Don't know why someone didn't shoot William Beerns.

TRUMON MARRIED Empire Thompson in 1929. Empire had a brother Ted, was my age and twin brothers, Floyd and Lloyd, a year older. They hadn’t been married long, and lived in Porum. A neighbors chickens ranged in their yard, they were a nuisance. Lee would do about anything, he bought us some tiny little firecrackers. We would light them and pitch them out in Truman’s yard. Those chickens would run up and grab the little firecrackers. When they would ‘go off’, halfway down their throat, the chickens would throw a fit and we would nearly ‘die laughing’.

About the last whipping I ever got, was over those chickens.

We lived up on top of the mountain. Truman and Empire lived down below, there was a tank of water below the barn. Truman was gone and I went over there to feed their stock. I saw a duck on that water. I went in the house and got his 12 gauge shot gun. I slipped down to the barn, and got the gun through a crack and shot a mallard. It floated in the middle. It was cold weather, I throwed chunks in the water, until the duck floated to where I could reach it. I shot the head off real good, there wasn’t any shot in the body. Mommy boiled it and then roasted it. Everybody liked it, but me.

Thelmer remembers being barely 13 years old, the oldest boy at home.

EDUCATION WAS IMPORTANT, Poppy knew that and

he always enrolled us all. We walked 3 miles to school at Briartown. If it was real cold, the little ones stayed at home. When Poppy needed help, or at plowing time, I stayed at home, sometimes Lawrence did too. We had crops to work. I always hated to miss school. "Arithmetic was my favorite class, I could figure better than anyone else. Juanita Raimer and me were the top two to be in a spelling contest. I could win them all. I wouldn't be in the contest with her, I gave it to her. Ambrose Nichols, our teacher, he grinned and said, "That really was the proper thing for a man to do."

BASKET BALL I loved it and played forward. Lots of times I could catch a ball that people didn't think I could.

I had quick hands, I could pick cotton faster too. We had crops to work. Ambrose Nichols, he come and talked to Poppy. I went to school two years in a row— just on Friday evenings, basketball season. That was so I could be on the team. Nobody knew it but us. We beat a team in Whitefield, the woman coach really fussed, she thought we cheated. She thought that Briartown couldn’t beat Whitefield, but we did.

We had lots of Irish potatoes. We sold most everything for fifty cents a bushel. We would take a wagon load of sweet potatoes to the tank and wash them. Dirt seemed to stick to sweet potatoes worse, than Irish potatoes. Cars would get stuck coming up the hill just east of the Coleman cemetery. Poppy would take a team and pull them on up the hill.

They were building a new gravel highway between Stigler and Muskogee.

The gravel that they used was so smooth and round, I really liked them.

I would walk over there to pick me up a bunch of good 'slingshot rocks'.

I would cut a long cane pole, put one end on the ground and shake and swirl the pole. Bats would come flying in, ‘long about dark’, and try to fight the noisy thing. Sometimes I would kill a bat. The others liked to watch.

COMING IN FOR DINNER, I was riding, setting sideways, on one of the mules that I had been plowing with. Our big old white spotted bulldog was follerin’ along. A big calf was standing there and he must have shook his head at the dog.The bulldog ‘jumped that calf and had him down’, quick. He would have killed him. I slid off the mule and picked up a metal double-tree, and hit the dog. The dog kept fight’n and I kept hit’n. He lay there jerking, I thought that I had killed him. I went on to dinner and when I come out, that dog come walking up. He never offered to bother any other animal.

Our house was closer to Porum than to Briartown. We bought groceries in Porum and went to school in Briartown. Thelmer remembers, "For years I would carry a chain or club, for protection."

People from each town, liked to fight each other, Turpin was close too.

The school board kept changing the school, where we were to attend.

“LETHA WHITLEY was the Turpin teacher. She tried to make, me, Bill, right handed. She would hit my hands with a ruler, every time she saw me write with my left hand. They got real sore. Lee took up for me. The teacher didn't like it, she sent him outside to get a switch. He brought her a good looking one---but he cut around it, in a bunch of places. When she hit him with the switch---it broke all apart. They both started laughing.

Poppy and Mommy talked to the teacher, "We want Bill to write with which ever hand that she wants to", and after that, she did.

A student caught a fly in his hand, he was playing with it in class.

The teacher made him, "Put it in your mouth. Now chew it up and swallow it." She got in trouble over that.

A kid misbehaved, she would draw a little ring up on the blackboard.

Have them stand on their tiptoes, to put their ‘nose in the ring’. You stood there---with your nose touching---for no telling how long.

‘Till she told you that you could go sit down.

School boys put two little pigs up in the attic of her school room. When the pigs woke up, mid morning, they started walking around and grunting. Everyone was scared---except the two that did it. The teacher could tell by the expression on their faces. She made Lee and the other boy take them out AT THE COLEMAN HOUSE there was an old dug well, three foot across. But the water turned bad, gypsum, 'gyp water', it was a real strong laxative too. We dragged up a big rock with out team, and pushed it into the well and filled it up with dirt. We had another good well in the yard. Or we would carry water from a good well in our pasture across the road.

I was walking across the creek and got in quicksand. If you ever

stopped, you would keep sinking down. I got down and rolled to the other side, to get out of the quicksand. I made it, 'with nothing to spare'.

It was another close call.

We lost a good horse there, every time the horse moved or struggled, it went down deeper in that quick sand. We could not get it out.

After we lost a cow, we fixed it where our stock couldn’t get in that place.

HYDROPHOBIA come in with the hot weather season every year.

Loco-weed, blind staggers, it all affected stock about the same

Sometimes a horse would get over the blind staggers.

“Mommy was cooking and needed eggs. I, Bill was a little girl and I went to the barn to find a hen nest and get some eggs. Poppy had bought a big mule from Uncle Burl. She run at me, biting. I climbed up the logs on the side of the barn and got away from her. The mule tried to climb after me and fell back, kicking her legs. I run and told Mommy.

I remember that mule laying there, kicking that tin on the barn door---

kicking so long and so loud.”

Battles had 17 head of dairy cows die. They couldn't bury that many, having to dig it all by hand. Poppy helped chop wood to burn them.

Thelmer remembers that----

“Poppy had bought an old mare from Granpa Stephens. I was working her and another mare to the cultivator. I put them in the stable to feed them while I ate dinner. I come back to hook them up. She run at me trying to bite me, her teeth bared and wild eyed. I climbed up the logs on the side of the barn and screamed for Poppy. The mare kept trying to climb up and reach me. She fell back two or three times. It was another close call.

We made our living with our teams, that mare was valuable. Tom Goodner come to help. They tied her with ropes between two saddle horses and tried to treat her and save her. We never knew of an animal getting over it.

The vet couldn't help, if an animal was bit by a mad dog.

Other neighbors lost animals. They remembered a black dog coming through that bit other dogs. Everyone had to go out and kill their dogs. Several times we tied up our dogs for three weeks, if we thought there was a chance that they had been bitten. I never knew of a person that got hydrophobia.

Four or five miles away a mad dog bit Jewels wife.

Once Mommy was walking and a dog got after her.

She run and got away from it, she always thought it was mad.

Sam Brown went every night to check on his parents, on account of the mad dog scare. He carried his gun in his pocket.

When he crawled through the fence--- he shot his own leg, up high.

He lay there till morning. He lived, but he lost his leg at the hip.

We all remember his wooden leg.

GRANDMA STEPHENS had to be taken care of. She moved in with us when we moved from Dewar back to Briartown. She had a cancer. It was on the side of her nose, up under her eye. Bill can remember when she couldn't see out of her eye, over the knot. Bill knows that Grandpa took it off, at least twice. He used some acid, (salicylic?) to kill it. The last time he took it off, it left her where three or four fine streams of blood, that were squirting at each

heartbeat. Old soft cloths were used on it and Watkins Salve. Grandma loved kids and babies. Blood would drip out, she couldn't hold them close. She was gentle, never cranky or cross. We would fan her when it was real hot.

She was ‘timid about eating’. Poppy killed quail and put it, cleaned, in a quart jar. Put it in a pot of water and cook it until the meat falls apart.

The juice was strength for her.

Sometimes she spent a day or two with Lee and Annie, they lived in Porum. Orba Lee remembers that Grandma Stephens taught her how to peel potatoes. She had Lee set a wooden 'Calumet Baking Powder' box, next to the stove, so Orba Lee could reach the cabinet. She was 8 when Grandma Stephens died. Thelmer remembers Grandma Stephens being bedfast. “She was in diapers for two years. We drawed water from the well in the yard, and from the one across the road, to wash all our clothes.”

A BOUNTY HUNTER, that’s what Uncle Will was. He would stretch out on our floor all day and be out and gone all night. He was cranky and we were all kinda afraid of him. He had a knapsack, then one day he rolled it all up, in a bundle. He put it on his back and took off. We never saw him again.

Ham Bates, another of Mommy's uncles, was in the textile business.He went off around Henrietta and worked in the smelters, then California and Oregon they were shorter than any of us. The Stephens were mostly tall and slender.

MOMMY’S BROTHERS were Uncles Charlie, Burl and Bob. Imogene is the only one of us that remembers Mommy telling, "When I was little, my brothers would get drunk. They would use the buggy whip and make me 'jig dance'." Uncle Bob the youngest, never was near as heavy as Uncle Burl. He went to church and he always worked at the smelters.

His sons, Babe and Tootsie, they became dentists?

One of Mommy's brothers was riding his horse. A cougar got after them. It got so close that it's claws raked the horses hindquarters and legs. They got away but the horse was ruined for riding, after that.

Bill helped Grandma Stephens pick peach tree leaves, she made her own yeast. She made the best bread; three loaves in one pan.

Her bread had the best flavor, we would slice it and it would last a week.

Bill heard her talking to Grandpa--out behind the lilac bush in the back yard.

Uncle Burl got Grandma a new rocking chair and she set in it a lot.

One time he gave Mommy $10 to get medicine for Grandma.

She died March 16, 1930, the same night that Trumon and Empires first baby, Rondal was born. Her people come to see her, the last few years.

(Vaguely remembered, Granma Stephens come to Arkansas from Missouri. Phoebe Alexander, Winslow, Arkansas---Aunt Lillie Townsley—her husband a preacher--another sister 6 ft tall? Near Oklahoma City)

AUNT LAURIE was Mommy's younger sister. She and Uncle Ernie Youngblood lived a little over two miles from us. There were three boys and a girl, we were good friends. One boy was older than me, one the same age and one younger. Uncle Ernie wouldn't allow Aunt Laurie to bring her Mother to their house. He wouldn't keep his own Mother and didn't want to help out. There was a family problem over it.

Uncle Ernie sold everything and they moved to California.

Mommy used to 'walk the yard' at night. They had not been in California for very long, when they were driving across a train track. A train hit their car

and they were all killed instantly. Uncle Burl and Uncle Bob Stephens drove out there and buried them. And Mommy 'walked the yard', after dark.

Mommy's other sister was Aunt Maud. She and Uncle Matt Greenwood

would come to visit, once or twice a year. One girl was named Arizona, "Zona'. There was a boy about my age, Lee Greenwood.

Some neighbors named Sled lived in Muskogee and had some persimmon trees in their hog pen next to us. There was a big crop of persimmons that year. They believed the persimmons would not be good for their hogs. They paid me to get all the persimmons out of the pen. I shook all them down on the ground and picked up some of them. The hogs were glad to get the rest of them, they did not get sick, we knew that they wouldn’t.

Much later his son had a small airplane, He flew over our cotton field and was going to land. He ‘overshot’ it. The third time he come around, Poppy was out there with his shot gun. He saw him with his gun and did not land. We had just got the cotton hoed and thinned, it sure was pretty.

I believe Poppy would have shot the plane if it had landed in our cotton field. It would have tore up a lot of good cotton.

THE CRISENBERGS lived a mile across the field from us, on the way to Porum. I was 13, they had two boys just older than me, one was named Floyd. They owned 40 acres joining on the north and more land across the road, west. The Daddy had cancer on his lower lip, it looked terrible.

He had been to the Doctor in Muskogee, 28 miles, that day.

The Doctor told him that he couldn't help him any more.

He phoned and asked Mommy and Poppy to come over there.

They set and visited a while. He apologized for calling them over and excused his self and went in the next room.

He was standing up and put his shotgun under his chin and pulled the trigger. It nearly tore his head off, the hole went through and through. He had wrote a note that he was sorry, but he wanted Poppy and Mommy to be there with his wife. Poppy and Mommy went where they were called.

They were called for lots of things.

Bill took care of the children at home and helped people who lived around. “A neighbor's baby girl had typhoid fever. I, Bill was bathing the baby to get her fever down. I finally had to wake the Mother, Susie. The baby died, I bathed the baby again and put a clean cover on the sewing machine and ‘laid her out’ on the sewing machine. The baby's eyes wouldn't close, I put nickels on them. They took me to the town of Bowlegs, west of Porum, to get typhoid shots.”

I, Thelmer, liked to carry a snake. I would carry one at Kagel's house. The Kagel boy would carry it when we were at our house. Mommy never knew it. When I would see one, it was usually a black snake.

Use a forked stick to hold it's head down, hold it right behind it's head.

Just don't get excited and let it roll up your arm and loosen your grip.

Poppy saw me playing with a snake one time and I got a whipping for it.

People talked about ghosts, they seemed to be mostly at cemeteries and at night. When I was out at night, I would go up there, to the graveyard, across the road from our house and look for them. I never was lucky enough to see a ghost, there at the cemetery, or any where else.

John Corbel cut a big post oak ‘bee tree’ in the Coleman Cemetery. We would have cut it, if we had found it first. It was at the turn, by the corner of our 'Moore family' grave spaces. He cut it where it didn't fall across any graves. Honeybees were in a hollow in the top of it. They were so high that they hadn't ever bothered any body. It had little black bees that fought him, they run him off. He got stung something terrible.

He come by our house in a few days and I asked him if he had got his honey out of the tree yet. He said, "No, every time I get close, I get stung again. I am not going back. You are welcome to that honey, if you can get it." That was the meanest bunch of bees, you couldn't get close---without them coming at you. The tree lay quiet for a few days. I soaked some dry corn-cobs in coal-oil. I put a mosquito net over my hat and shoulders and tied my pants legs, and wore a long sleeve shirt and gloves. I rolled up all the papers that we had, and when the bees come at me, I had a roll of papers on fire, and held them out. I held the burning corn cob's out too. I could hear their wings sizzling. Finally the bees quit coming, there was a jillion on the ground with burned wings. I did not get stung. No one would want to keep fighting bees like that.

I cut the log open carefully, so as not to break up the honey-comb. Sylvia helped me and we got a good big dishpan of honey. We liked to eat the honey-comb too. We put a chunk on our plate and cut it and eat it, along with our biscuit and butter. We put it all in jars, covering the comb with honey. We melted the extra comb into a bar of solid beeswax.

When you pull a thread across the beeswax, the thread is stronger and waterproof. It is good for sewing on buttons or rips in our shoes. They used to make candles out of beeswax. We always had coal oil lamps and lanterns.

We watched for bee trees all the time. We bought a little bottle of 'sweet anise'. When we noticed any bees around, we would put a few drops on a bucket lid, on a post. Bees can smell it a quarter mile. They come to it, get some, make a little circle and fly straight to their hive. You watch them and 'course them', as they 'set their course' back to their hive. If you lost sight of the bee, you could wait, another bee would come along and you could follow that bee. Sometimes we went past the tree, or couldn't find it. Then we would move the sweet anise, and follow them again.

We would ‘rob’ the tree of honey and take the bees to our house. We would make a 'hive', for the bees to live in, by sawing a section of hollow log. We would nail a board on the top and the bottom of it. We would gently peck on the new 'bee box' and the bees would slowly go into it. Bees will starve in the winter if they run out of honey to eat. We would peep into the hive. If their honey was about gone, we would set a pan of old sorgum syrup or sugar water by their hive, for them to feed on. They make more honey than they need. So we could 'rob' them of the extra.

SPINACH, The first year that we moved back from the smelter, Poppy planted about 38 acres of spinach, it was real close to 40 acres. We worked the ground real soft. The seeder planted the rows of spinach, three inches apart. It sure was pretty, dark green. It wasn't much work until we picked it---one leaf at a time. You couldn't hardly walk, without stepping on it. You picked it before you stepped. It was harder to pick than cotton, spinach is right on the ground. Griffin Grocery Company in Muskogee, had a cannery for it. It had to be picked, leaf by leaf, before it got tough. We all picked spinach. Poppy hired all the help that he could get, sometimes 20 people. Ten cents a basket was what the pickers got, for layering in spinach leaves, to fill a bushel basket. He couldn't get enough help and lost part of it.

He would haul the baskets to a packing shed at Briartown. That was 3 miles south of our house and 30 miles south of Muskogee. When it quit raining, the weather got hot, the spinach got tough and it wouldn't sell.

Wagon loads of it went to waste. We made a little out of it, not much.

Poppy never planted any more spinach.

I got my first job, there at the packing shed in Briartown. I was 10 years old. I stayed out of school, I always hated to miss school.

I was real glad to be able to earn eight cents an hour.

A wagon would bring in a load of baskets of spinach. As it come up the conveyer belt, we would wash it in a long vat of water and take out the bad leaves.We would start at both ends of a railroad car, and layer the spinach in, with chipped ice. We would fill the railroad car up and close the doors.

We worked fast until there was not a wagon waiting to unload.

"You take the bench".

And we set there until another wagon drove up. Five hours a day was the most that any of us ever got to work. We all walked to work, usually two or three miles. We were all glad to have that job that paid us 40 cents a day.

One year all the farmers come to a meeting. A company 'talked big' about selling powdered onions. Poppy agreed to plant five acres of onions. The deal fell thru. There were truck loads that we couldn't get rid of.

We plowed them under, and never planted that many onions again.

We made our own fun. If we had a gallon bucket lid, we would find a limb with a T on it. We would push the lid and run and it would wobble

We would 'think like' it was a locomotive--rolling along rattling.

It was a thrill to find two tin cans to make stilts.

I would nail each one on a stick and walk on them.

I might have been 10 when Rex Pounds paid attention to me, he showed me the keys on the guitar. I would practice, so he kept showing me. He got me started to playing, taught me some songs. I liked to practice and sing "Once there was a little mule----His name was Simon Slick,

He would roll his eyes and back his ears

And how that mule could kick.

He would roll his eyes and back his ears

And greet you with a smile

He would suddenly telegraph his legs and send you--half a mile"

Wo-ah mule wo-ah-----wo-ah there mule I say

Hanner quit your foolishness and climb back in the sleigh."

I am still looking for more words to that song.

We had a bull and I found out that he didn’t like red. We had a red colored saddle blanket. I would wave it in front of him and he would run and butt it----clean to the other side of the lot. I thought I was enjoying myself, until Poppy used a peach tree switch on me.

IMOGENE “I was three and a half when we lived near the Coleman Cemetery. I remember hearing singing from the funerals, and how good the apples were from our orchard tasted. We really liked them when Mommy chopped them up and 'fried' them quick, with butter and sugar for breakfast. We raised pears and fried them too.

About 1929, we just moved off and left the Coleman place that Granma Coleman had given Poppy for taking care of her. Poppy never was a good manager. We moved a little closer to Briartown, I guess it fits its name, but what nice memories. Our front yard had a big rock. I would sweep out the big hole in it for Mommy's chicken water, the hole held about two gallons. Then I drawed water from the well and filled the hole.

The rent farm houses that we lived in were old. "Sometimes in the winter morning, you set your foot out on the floor and touch a little snow where it had drifted through a little crack."

We would the sweep the floor after we had ate a meal. Crumbs would fall through the cracks in the floor. Down under the floor, the chickens would be scratching and pecking to eat.

Me and Bill, remembers laying on the kitchen floor and crumbing cornbread through a big crack. We liked to watch the chickens gobble it up.

Walking up the rocky hill from Briartown, I knocked my toe nails off, we all did. They are still shaped a little crazy. I was scared of the lizards, mountain boomers and centipedes that had so many legs and the snakes too.

I remember Mommy sending me to hunt the guinea nest. The old guinea had 'hid out' on the creek, guineas were real bad about that. She had some baby guinea's that I found. They are better than hens to eat bugs and grasshoppers in the garden. They get started to chasing them, and keep on until they catch them. They fly better than chickens. We all liked to eat guinea, it was a little darker than chicken, Mommy cooked it the same ways that she cooked chicken. We ate guinea eggs too, they are a bit smaller and the shell thicker. Old hens made better mamas than guineas. Mommy set the guinea eggs under hens, to raise more little guineas.

Poppy burned corn stalks in the spring, I loved their smell and I always liked to smell coal burning too. I remember us building big bon fires on the creek.

I was born 33 years after Poppy's Mother died. I must have been about 8 or 10, when her brother, Wylie Chastain come to see us. He lived in Tulsa and turned out to be a rich man. Poppy made us get out of the house, and not talk to him. "Don't any of you ever go around him. We had money and he took it and left us." Poppy was afraid we might 'cabbage’ onto him.

I liked Tommy Muskrat and his sisters, they were Cherokee. We walked home from school together, at Van. I could have been a Muskrat.

Poppy never would let me go with a boy who owned a car, unless he knew him real well. "Something bad would happen to you, if you went out with a boy---in a car."

MEG AND BLUE Our team of mules, they were a pretty match.

Blue could pull some real runaway spells and kick. Work mules always have a one syllable name, it makes it easier to hollar at them.

He was plowing with Meg and Blue, and wanted to be the first to ride that blue mule. He unhitched them and stood Blue down in the middle of the row. He eased up on her and set down. Blue kinda humped up a little and bucked. There were rivets on the pockets of his jeans, and a hole in his pocket went up over one of the hames. (There was a hame on each side of the mules neck. The leather collar fit under them. The leather collar was where the pressure was, when the mule was pulling the plow) She bucked and he couldn't get off. She bucked. Finally she bucked him high enough for him to get his pocket off the hame. She walked off out there and stopped.

Huckleberries grew everywhere near our house. They grow on kind of a vine. When we found a bunch we would pick them and bring them home for Mommy to make a cobbler. We loved to eat them and they made our mouth so blue. Just east of our house was a fence row that had lots of dew berries, they were the earliest. They were nearly like blackberries, a little bit 'bluer'. Near the garden we had a row about a block long of tame black-

berries. They were the size of your thumb, Mommy canned most of them every year. They were good and sweet.

There was a wild cherry tree that had a good sweet flavor. But they were tiny, only the size of a pinto bean, they were ‘nearly all seed’. Mommy made jelly out of some of them and the birds and us kids got the rest.”

Thelmer remembers going with Lee and Trumon to the Canadian River to run their trot-line, “I was about 14. They set on the bank,

I was in the water, running it. They could tell the line had a fish on it, and told me to get it off and bring it across. I put a cord thru it's gills, it took me down deep. I had to swim 7 or 8 feet, across deep water. That catfish weighed 10 or 12 pounds. I wasn't about to turn it loose.

A bunch of us was going to seine the big slew by Dock and Bills house. Lee, Trumon, Dock, me, quite a few. We tied three seines together. Some of us were splashing and switching the water with little branches, trying to drive the fish into the seine. A fish jumped over the seine and hit Truman under the eye. It made a pretty bad cut. We figured it was a bass. We didn't get as many fish as we expected to.

One time I helped Dock and Trumon fishing. We gathered green walnuts that had the hulls still on them. The juicy green hulls are bitter and stain your hands. We put them in tow sacks and beat and bruised them.

We throwed them in a good fishing hole of water. That was to make the fish come to the top of the water to breathe. It didn't work so good for us.

My first girl was Thelma Barker. I was eating supper with them, they were eating cracklin bread and sweet milk. Cracklins are little pieces of pig skin, that have been fried to get the grease out. The fat is next to the skin.

They are real hard unless the grease was hot enough to make the skin bubble

All us kids liked carry them around and chew on them, kinda like popcorn,

Pieces of the cracklins are put in cornbread before it is baked. I always liked cracklin bread. But that family, they milked before supper and drank the warm milk. I was not used to that and couldn't wait to get away, after supper. I thought I was going to be sick. Thelma married John Shetley.

Me and Lawrence were hunting with bean flips in our pasture.

It was the time of the year that green persimmons were just the right size.

A man come down the road driving a Model A Roadster.

We shot him in the side of the head. We really run. We would sharpen a stick and punch it in a persimmon. Draw the stick back and flip it—

that persimmon would really go. We would do the same thing to little balls of wet clay that we rolled up.

Mommy would have me ride a horse to Porum, after something.

I would spend five cents for a little box of about a dozen vanilla wafers.

She made lots of cookies at home but I always loved vanilla wafers.

The Johnson brothers from Briartown started drinking in Porum. They got to fighting. Two-Gun Pete was the Sheriff, he tried to arrest them. There was a big fight. Me and Lawrence were in town and watched. Two-Gun Pete pistol-whipped them across their foreheads, blood was pouring like a stuck hog. They wrapped a big rag around their heads and ‘throwed them in the cooler'. It was just a one room house there in town, (no bathroom).

It was in the hot summer and I wondered how they could live.

Young people get to 'showing out'. They would get holt of corn whisky, they would get drunk, and there was sure to be a fight. They would fight a while and drink a while, and not know what was going on.

And I guess that we all tried smoking grapevine.

It was kinda hollow up the middle, so that we always burned our tongue.

One time I didn't have any shoes. One of Docks brothers had a pair that

he had outgrowed. I was so disappointed that I couldn't get them on my feet.

Lee would get on anything and usually ride it. We would gather up at a neighbors house. Empires Daddy would let us ride his stock, he generally had a pretty good herd. Empires twin brothers and the one my age, Ted,

we had lots of fun. When I went into the army, there probably wasn’t anything that I wouldn’t have got on. Truman always liked to rope.

Poppy bought a little ol’ horse and I got to fooling with it, riding it.

I would spin a lariat rope over my head. I got to making a bigger loop, big enough to go down over the horse. And the little horse wasn't afraid. Finally I could stand in the center of the lot and twirl a big loop and let the horse run through it. That little old horse would run around and around and run through the loop, while I was twirling it. The others all thought it was really something. I was still twirling the rope when I went into the army.

I would set on that horse and lean back and scratch the horse on the rump. It would ‘bow up’---like it would go over on it's head, and kick straight back. Poppy saw it and told me that if I did it again, he would give me a whipping. He needed to use that horse for other things. He didn't want it to be hitched to the wagon and ‘kick the front of the wagon out’. Others needed to be able to ride that horse.

I waited---and did it one last time. But Poppy saw me. He whipped me with the bridle reins. It was the last whipping that he ever gave me.

UNCLE CURTIS was Poppy's brother, Curtis Henry was six years younger than him. He traveled with Ringling Circus. He must have joined it young, he can not be found on any census records. He come to our house one winter, when the circus wasn't traveling.

Bill remembers his trunks of beautiful costumes, that he showed us.

He played drum in the circus band, rode elephants and performed on the high wire and slack wire.

I, Thelmer remember the tricks that he showed me. He tied a rope between two trees and showed me how to walk a slack rope and a tight wire too. ‘One foot right after another’. The only wire that I had, was bob wire.

I cut all of the barbs out of it and tied it between two trees, off out in the woods. I learned to turn flips and copy him. I liked to practice.

I wanted to learn it all, Mommy tried to stop me.

She wanted to keep me away from Uncle Curtis.

He was tattooed all over, his arms and body, mostly blue.

There is a newspaper picture of him, shirtless.

He was in the circus, performing, and fell from the high wire. He finally got over it. The Doctor told him that if he ever fell and hurt his back like that again---he could never walk any more.

He fell again from up high, and the Doctor was examining him where he lay. A woman from the audience stepped up and asked if she could pray for him, right then, before they moved him. The Doctor said, "Go ahead, nothing can be done for him anyway." Uncle Curtis left the circus and became a preacher. He always wore long sleeves shirts that would cover his tattoos. He would never talk about the circus or would tell his family anything about his earlier life.

His youngest son, Evin said that his back never bothered him.

SILVER HAIRED DADDY The Goodners had a family band. Tom could play the guitar or fiddle. They got paid to drive to Tulsa. They played on the KVOO radio station quite a bit. They heard Gene Autry sing the first song that he wrote, 'Silver Haired Daddy' there in 1929. He was 20, I was 14. I started singing it around Porum, with the Goodners. Gene Autry sold 500,000 copies in 1931. It was his most popular song. It is a most requested song that I sing, in 2006. Most people these days, never heard of it

They played for a square dance every Saturday night in Porum. Money was so short---that 'music money' was important. Poppy and Mommy didn't want me to play with them at all, sometimes I slipped off.

ELSTER BASS farmed near us. He drank a lot. He sold a bale of cotton one day and stopped at the beer joint on the way home. His wife Mildred called me on the phone. She asked me to go and get him and bring him home. I sure didn't want to, but I knew he would spend all their money.

"Elster, let's go home, your wife sent me---Come on you've got to go home---Get your bottle and let's go home---You are going home or I'll beat the tar out of you." He looked up at me, "Do you really mean that?" Threaten him and he would agree. He left nearly a full bottle on the table. I got him in the car and he was sound asleep in half a block. He did stink, I was so mad at him. After the first few times I got him, he come without so much fuss.

A neighbor boy might have saved his life.

It was in the winter and Elster had stumbled off the road, into the ditch.

It was dark and icy---he was wet and muddy and couldn't find the road.

The neighbor took him home in his car and his Dad thawed him out and cleaned him up. He died at 56. There were 13 in the family.

His wife went through a lot with him.

Jean was the youngest of the Elster Bass family. She came to our family reunion in 2001. She said Lee pulled all her baby teeth. She thought nobody could pull them but him, he used pliers. Twins, Earl and Murle were just older than she was. Jean said, "For years I heard my Mother, Mildred, say, "Bell Moore delivered our twins." Jean said, "I always tried to set by her

in church, to hear her sing so pretty, all us girls wanted to set by her."

I, Thelmer was hunting with my shotgun. My little old feist dog was running along with me. I come across a copperhead snake, they are poison. I shot the snake and it was in two pieces. About 6 inches was left on the head piece. My little dog run up and the snake bit him. I carried him home and put him in the doghouse. Poppy finally told me, "Son it's getting late, you have to come and get in the bed." Early daylight I run out and my dog was so swelled that he couldn't see. I held him and doctored him and then went off and cried. The next morning when I opened the door, my little dog trotted up to me. Poppy had told me that he would get well.

HARD TIMES There were a lot more hoboes in Dure, it was on a main highway. We always had quite a few around Porum. They would walk down the railroad track. Our house was not far from the tracks that were running from Briartown up to Porum. They would ask for a drink of water and bread. One wanted to spend the night. We had cornbread and milk for supper, there was enough for him too. The wagon had straw in it, and a wagon sheet.

We gave him an old cushion for a pillow. He was gone when we got up.

We looked and could see lice or bugs crawling on the cushion.

My sister, Opal felt sorry for them all, she would talk to the hoboes, while we fixed food for them. She tried to do ‘hand talking’ if they were deaf or another language. Any religious family never turned anyone away, they might be ‘entertaining angels’. Hoboes were fed first, before anyone else. They never stayed long.

Me and Lawrence cut across a neighbors land and picked us two watermelons. I stumbled over a tree limb and mine slipped off my shoulder. It bounced instead of busting, then we knew that they were 'pie melons'. They made good preserves, but they never got ripe. They were not good to eat raw. We didn't take them on home.

There was three sets of ‘Moores’ living in Porum, none of them were kin to each other. Besides Marion, there was Ben and Garland.

Porum Gap was a tiny settlement before 1904, just west over ‘Tater Hill’. It had a post office. It was named after John Porum Davis, a Cherokee leader that died in 1880.Starrvilla was about 3 miles east, it had a postoffice.

The Midland Valley railroad come through in 1904, from Briartown to Muskogee. Porum Gap moved east and Starrvilla moved west and together they were a new town on the railroad. The new town was named Porum. It was laid out, in a big old cow pasture. There were tents on some of the lots, at first. It was expected to really grow.

But Porum had a problem. A ‘range war,’ cattle rustling, accusations and grudges had started in 1880. During that 24 years, there were several murders. It rivaled the ‘Lincoln County, New Mexico, war of the 1870’s’.

Porum was kind of an outlaw place, the fighting and feuding lay smoldering and hurt its reputation and growth.

Judges, court trials and Federal Marshals kept a tense and uneasy peace.

Seven years later, hate and suspicion exploded with fury, in the final big battle on May 4, 1911. A masked gang of men rode to Pony Starr’s ranch home to kill him. The house was underpinned with rocks. Pony Star got under the house and shot out from between the rocks. When the mob ‘broke and run’, they left 5 masked men and 11 horses that were dead or dying. There were only three more bullets left at the Starr ranch house. After those three bullets had been shot, the mob would have had the two men and Pony’s wife, at their mercy. Among the masked dead were prominent ranchers and a former deputy. Poppy and Arthur knew them all. The house was not far north of where Rondal and Rudy live now. Two hundred bullet holes were counted in the house.

I, Thelmer, have been there and seen them. It happened 4 years before I was born. I have heard these stories ‘talked’, all my life. I remember that they said that one of the Deputies, was J A Shoemake, a butcher in Porum. He told his brother Charlie, to get a dray to load the dead and dying in. Charlie said, “Get your own wagon. I have stayed out of this and I aim to keep staying out.” If you ‘took sides’, the other side wanted to kill you.

I remember Poppy telling about the time that he and Mommy were in our front yard. Pony Starr and several others were driving cattle down the road. Pony Starr tipped his hat to Mommy and said, “Marion, Bell, you haven’t seen anything.” The Starrs were Indian, Pony was a cousin of Henry Starr and a nephew of Bell Starr.

Tension and violence was high for years, but there were no more murders.

Thelmer went to church at Pound's house. They were neighbors, about a mile and a half west. Thelmer took a Starr girl home, her Dad was Pony Starr’s brother. "I thought she was as pretty a girl as I ever saw, I really liked her." I had rode a horse to church. When a boy took a girl home, they both walked and led the horse. If a boy took a girl up on a horse, to ride with him, they would have run him out of town.

When we got to her house, she told me that she had to take me

in and introduce me to her Daddy. He asked me what my Daddy's name was. He said he knew Marian and Bell,and I could come and see his girl any time.

Poppy kinda discouraged me from seeing her. Hard feelings from the old range war that started in the 1880’s had smoldered and almost went away. Things gradually cooled down over the years, but the grudges still lingered. There were still bad memories and hard feelings that Poppy thought should be heeded. I never walked her home again.

Once Arthur, Sylvia's husband, had me, Thelmer, call Pony Starr, on the phone. He had moved to Cresson, near Fort Worth. He remembered Poppy and asked about him, Poppy was already gone by then.

Buster Harrison was in high school, his Daddy owned the grocery store. There was a big snow and lots of wires were down. Buster saw one dangling and he reached up and slapped at it. It knocked him down and they thought it killed him, but it didn't. It broke some of his bones and burned him. He was out of school for six months.

It was Sunday, summer time and it was hot in the church building in Porum. Lee come outside and was standing around with Argus, Annie's brother. A cat come by. "If you'll hold that cat, I'll 'turpentine him'." They held him up by the tail and rub him raw, with a corn cob. Poured some turpentine on his tail, and headed him into the church. It was a yowling running fit. Later, down town, that same cat come by, still meowing.

Somebody said, "Whoever did that to that cat, ought to have a whoopin''.

Lee was standing there, "Yea, and I'll help whoop em."

We had a little old pond on our land, the one that Bill and Granpa

Coleman used to fish in. It wasn't hardly ever over waist deep. We skated on it when it froze over. I was always afraid it would break in and one of us would get under the ice and couldn’t get out.

Truman had a trotline set out, on a little hole on the Canadian River. "Chop a hole in the ice, and pull the trotline and catfish out that hole.

Lay the fish on the ice, and it would stick.

We would come back later, and it would all be froze solid.”

SHIVERED Anyone get married, they knew they would get 'shivered'. In the night, one of us would slip up to their house and tie a wire to the house or a window screen. Pluck or rub on the string, and it made a weird noise. When they got up to check on the noise, the rest of us would ring cowbells and yell. There would be games for a while. We would eat up all their food and would end up making them, or the ‘old boy’ anyway, ‘ride on a rail', a post that we carried.

SNIPES Any newcomers move in, we would take them 'snipe' hunting. We would walk around in the woods for a while. When we didn't see any, we would leave them--setting on a bank. "Snipes are very timid and you have to set very quiet, to see one." If they stayed more than two hours, we went back and got them. "Well, I guess we must have scared them off today, we'll try again tomorrow." They would finally catch on.

Poppy had a big white horse that somehow got on his back in a small narrow gulley. That good horse lay there on his back.

He couldn't get up or out, and we couldn't help him. He died.

JESSIE Mindenhall was going home in his wagon. It was just about dark when he come to where the road crossed the creek, below our house.

He could see that the water was up, but he thought he could make it across.

The water was swifter than he thought and it washed his wagon and horses down stream. The tongue broke out of the wagon. Jessie got out of the water, but he couldn’t swim. He was afraid to go back in and get his horses. They were having to hold their head's up out of the water, to breathe. They were tangled in the long check lines, one horse on one side of a tree and one horse on the other side of the tree.

He come up to our house for help, by then it was dark---it got really dark. A lantern on the bank didn't help. We wore our miners caps with carbide lights. I handed Poppy the things out of my pockets, and held to trees and waded out into the swift water. The long check-lines were wrapped around the trees. I untangled them and led his horses out.

The creek went down and he come back and got his wagon and fixed it.

The very same thing happened to Jessie about a year and a half later.

Jim and Jestine Parsons lived just on the other side of that same creek. For their kids to go to school, they had to cross it. They would put the kids on 'Old Barney', to get across, then they would walk on to school.

That creek always went down fast.

Porum dumped their trash and garbage into that creek. It messed it up

from town, all the way past our house. It smelled bad and we couldn’t eat the fish in it.

It took years to get Porum to stop that.

SINGING SCHOOL We had one every summer. The teacher was usually from Stamps Music Company. They taught shaped notes.

In 1932 we were glad to get the new Stamps song book. The schools would be five nights a week, sometimes for two weeks and then the whole community would come for the Sunday evening singing.

Some church or donations would pay the teacher. There was no charge for individuals, I got to go 4 or 5 years. We really learned a lot. I can read shaped notes and read the old song books. Not many people can do that now.

Edith Raimer's Mama taught her to play the piano, she was good.

She could take the music and words of a new song and pick it out.

A whole bunch of us played and sang together. My parents wouldn't let us go where there was dancing. Shorty Dorsey was the best fiddle player around. He lived just a quarter of a mile south of us.

I didn't get to play with him, because he played for dances.

QUARTET The two Shelton brothers and Lawrence and I had a quartet. We took turns leading,Lawrence was about the best.We sang mostly at the little old Briartown school. Penticostal, Baptist and Methodist, they would all ‘have their night', for their church services, at the school buildings.

In our family quartet, Sylvia sang soprano and led the quartet. Opal sang alto, and Lawrence sang tenor. I sang bass. I wasn't very good at it, but the others couldn’t do it at all. It was the only way that we could have a family quartet. I had to strain, it made me hoarse. I got to where I was hoarse all the time and I finally couldn't sing at all.

We sang a lot for funerals. The schools always excused us any time we missed school to sing at a funeral. The last time we sang, was for the teacher, Letha Whitley's Daddy, we didn't even know him.

They picked us up and brought us back.

It was "stand on the platform, over the open casket and sing.”

‘When we all get to Heaven’, was a favorite.

When we sang that, most all the family started crying.

That was real hard for me to get used to----and keep on singing.

Poppy mentioned, "How much time it took off our farm work, for funerals."

(1942, Thelmer was in the army, he was sharpening a kitchen knife, on a long steel. The knife slipped and he cut his thumb real bad. An Army Doctor was sewing it up. He asked Thelmer how long he had been hoarse and had him come to his office. The Doctor found a tumor on his vocal cords, that the Doctor thought would be cancer. They took it off and it wasn't cancer. The Doctors warned him not to sing or strain his voice. He had to carry a pencil and pad around for the longest, he was 27. He got to be 75 years old and he started singing. He's 91 now and was called back onto the stage at the Arbuckle Bluegrass Festival, three times to sing, June 21, 2005.)

SORGUM All the farmers would raise sorghum cane. In the fall it got 'ripe', mature, the juice in it got sweet. It had to be harvested before it got frosted on in the fall, or it would turn bitter. We would break off the heads, they were full of grain, for chicken feed. Take two paddles and strip the 'fodder', the leaves, off the stalks. "Doing that was funny---for about ten minutes". It stood there in the field, like fishing poles. We would cut it off at the ground with a long, heavy, sharp 'cane knife'. Us kids all liked to strip the tough outside off the ribbon cane stalk and chew the juicy sweet inside.

Phillip's at Vann (community) made sorghum syrup, Shetley's at Ross made it too, and Ed Shelton and Lum Lynn. We would haul the cane stalks to their house. An old mule walked round and round to turn the crusher.

Sometimes one of the little kids would get to ride the mule.

The 'fishing poles' would be pushed, 'hand fed', into the crusher.

Sweet juice would run out of the smashed stalks. The smashed stalks were called 'pummies'. You could grind them up and make feed. The juice would run off into big flat pans and slowly cook, with a wood fire under the pans. It was a big job to keep the wood fire right, if it was to hot, the syrup would turn dark. A little taste of the foam, was pretty good, but if you got very much, it would give you 'the quick-step'. Keep skimming the foam off and it became sorghum molasses.

After 6 to 8 hours of boiling, 60 gallons of juice boils down to about 10 gallons of molasses. Pour it in buckets and jars and it sold for fifty cents a gallon. ($7 a quart in 2005.) Sometimes it was used to pay the Doctor or give to the Preacher. Cook it on 'down' and it becomes taffy candy---when you 'pulled it'. It started out hot and soft, ‘pulling’ it made it brittle. Two people pulled it, between them. If it was to hot or you just dropped it---you picked it up quick and no one saw you.

(Kathi's 'ten second rule')

When it got stiff and wouldn't pull any more, you laid it on the table,

tapped it with a knife handle and it cracked into smaller pieces.

It was tasty and so sticky that it would just pull your teeth out.

I would walk all day behind a plow, and then walk to Porum,

stand around a while and then walk home. If it come up a rain,

I would pull my shoes off and carry them and walk home in half-knee-deep water. Later I got a horse to ride. Porum had hitching posts out back, behind all the stores. Sometimes there would be so many horses and wagons tied up--that I couldn't find a place to tie my horse.

I got up early, lots of times, to go get the stock. It was a mile or more, to hunt them out of the woods. Three teams, that's six head of work stock and one or two milk cows. They probably would have come up at daylight, to get fed. I would feed them in stalls, 6 or 8 ears of corn each.

Then go to the house, eat breakfast and be ready to start work at daylight.

In the evening I would call our old dog and point and say,

"Go get the cows." It saved me a lot of walking.

We would stand behind the barn and smoke. One day Poppy stopped the wagon in front of the store and handed me a quarter. "You boys go and get you some tobacco, I know that you are out, I'm tired of you being so cranky. I know that you smoke, you think you are hiding out behind the barn. I can see the smoke curling up over the barn.

And I don't want you 'mooching,’ off other people."

BREAKFAST We always had fried potatoes, hot biscuits and meat with gravy for breakfast. Mommy would ‘fry up’ a big platter of eggs. Poppy always had two, fried real brown, I thought they smelled like burned chicken feathers. If there wasn't room at the table for everyone to eat, the women ate at the 'second table', and the kid's ate at the third table. The dishes had to be hand washed and hand dried, between tables. There never was anything handed to the kid's to eat, before their 'turn' at the table.

They waited quietly out of the way.

(MARRIED and Thelmer and I and went to see his folks, near Porum. Our first meal there, was breakfast. Because I was 'new', I ate at the first table with the men. I was uncomfortable. The food was good. Poppy said, "Pass me the coffee cream." It wasn't there. The girls said, "We'll get some.”

He said, "I know that I saw it, right here on the table." It had been in a clear snuff glass, on the table, near me. Everybody but Poppy had seen me reach out and get it and drink it. Oh I wanted to crawl under the table. Louise)

Bill remembers that “Mommy dipped snuff. She was very discreet, she kept it up high in the cabinet. Long-legged Imogene would sling her leg up on the cabinet, and climb up and get her a little taste. Mommy never did caught her.” Thelmer says that his Mommy never dipped snuff.

We had no way to keep beef or pork cold in the summer.

We didn't have ‘fresh meat’ then--unless we killed a calf or hog and quickly divided it among the neighbors. We always had squirrels, rabbits and fish.

We could buy beef fat, 'tallow' and put it with rabbits and make chili.

We all loved Mommy’s hot tamales. We would boil the rabbits, cut the meat off, roll it in cornmeal and then a corn shuck, just like now.

We looked forward to the first freeze, ‘hog killing weather’. We would kill a hog in the fall, as early as it was cool enough for the meat to 'keep'. When the first hog was killed in the fall, we almost made ourselves sick, on the fresh meat. Poppy would hit the hog between the eyes with an 8 lb sledge hammer and then ‘stick’ it’s throat with a butcher knife. It was important that it ‘bleed good’. He would have a barrel nearly half full of water. We would build a fire and get the water almost boiling, tilt it and let the hog down into it with a hoist.

In several minutes, they tugged on the hair to see if it ‘slipped’.

If it did, the hog was turned over and the other side was scalded. It was pulled out of the water and ‘scraped’. A paper thin layer of hide comes off, and if it ‘got a good scald’, the hair come out by it’s roots. Everybody crowded around, and the kids scraped on the smoother places. Under the legs were the hardest. ‘The quicker the better’, the hairs soon, ‘set’. A good knife to scrape with, was not real sharp, you wanted to pull the hairs out.

If the weather turned warm, after we 'killed hogs', we would have to fry all the meat and can it. Fry the pork sausage and cover it with it's own grease and turn the jar upside down, and it would keep. We would hang the meat in the smoke house. All the cracks between the logs were chinked with clay, it was nearly airtight. We would put hickory chips over the red coals. The chips got just hot enough to smoke, not blaze. The longer the smoke curled up around the meat, the darker the cured meat got..

LARD AND CRACKLINS We cut all the excess skin and fat from the hams and everywhere. We cut it in one inch strips and put it in the clean wash pot. Build a fire around the pot and stir it well, from the bottom.

A half gallon of water was put in to ‘start it’. Leaf lard was the loose fat around the entrails, it was put in the pot too.

Someone had to stand there with a long handle paddle and stir it. It sticks easily, and then it would burn. It is a long hot job, until the skin fries and bubbles come up in the skin. While it is still warm, strain it through a cloth. That was lard, it was the only baking and frying oil that we had to use besides butter.

The lard had to ‘last’, until the next year when it got cold enough to kill another hog. It was getting a stale smell by then. Cracklins were the solid pieces left. We carried them around and chewed on them, and cooked them in cornbread. We buy them now as ‘old fashioned pork skins or pork cracklins or chicharrones.’

Or Mommy used them to make soap, the only soap that we had. Two gallons of cracklins, one and a half quarts of water and a can of lye were mixed in our wash pot. Build a fire around it and stir it until it dissolves. Push the fire away and stir it until it looks creamy and begins to thicken. Cover it and the next day, cut it in bars and store it dry. That ‘lye soap’ was good for our hair, and everything. It was the only soap that we had.

We ‘grew up’ with the smell of it, kinda like tortillas.

We raised and cured our own ham and bacon. Smoked sow belly and lard, lasted from one year to the next. When it got cold enough to kill hog's again, we were glad to get 'fresh side meat', that was uncured bacon.

We ‘salted it down' and then smoked it, in our smoke house.

There wasn’t anything wasted. Some nationalities saved the blood and made ‘blood pudding’, we didn’t. The brains were especially good, scrambled with eggs. The head and feet were scalded and scraped. It was all put in the wash pot together and boiled until the meat come off easy. Mommy picked the bones out of it and mixed in salt, spices and vinegar, and pressed it in a pan. That made “hog head cheese’.

It jelled, she sliced it and we really liked it. (and still look for it to buy)

She made ‘pickled pig feet’ that we all liked.

Our orchard was good, the earliest fruit was a yellow apple, it looked just like a sheep nose. We had late apples too. We chopped them up and fried them quick, with butter and sugar. We had good pear trees and Mommy fried pears for breakfast too. A bowl of oatmeal might be our dessert for breakfast. We never ate between meals.

Mommy made jelly from grapes, blackberries, apples and plums.

We most always had honey. She 'put up' all kinds of fruit and vegetables.

One time, I counted over 500 jars that were full, in our cellar.

They were all half-gallon jars, except for the jelly.

The corn dried on the stalk in the fall and we made hominy in the wash pot.

Poppy made a long paddle to stir it. Mommy canned it.

Seasoned with meat grease or butter, we ate a lot of hominy, all winter.

When Mommy washed clothes, she first rubbed lye soap on the worst stains and scrubbed them, on the rub board. She twisted and wrung the water

out of them out by hand. Our clothes were all 100% cotton.

That wash pot was used a lot. A fire was built around it, in the direction that ashes would not blow into the pot. It was filled half full of water. Lye soap was ‘shaved’ off the bar, cut thin, into the hot water and stirred to dissolve it. Then the pre washed clothes were put in the wash pot.

They were boiled and punched, with a wooden stick. then took out and scrubbed on the rub board again. Sometimes Mommy’s knuckles would bleed, from so much scrubbing.

They were wrung out’ by hand and ‘put through’ two rinse waters.

The ‘white clothes’ sheets and pillow cases were washed first. Then the baby diapers, that had been washed out, then ‘colored’ clothes and then men’s heavy clothes.

Most of the clothes had to be starched. We first made starch out of flour, it had to be cooked. Then we could buy better, easier corn-starch. We hung then out to dry, usually some of the heavy work clothes were on the fence. There was usually one old cow that we had to watch, she would walk up and chew on them.

Wash day wasn’t over until the clothes were brought in, folded and put away. The starched ones were sprinkled, rolled up tight and put in a basket. Ironing was another full days work. The wood stove had to be kept with a roaring fire, to keep the irons hot. The heavy overalls and pants were

‘warped around the bed post’ to get some of the wrinkles and stiffness out.

Milk soured and spoiled if it wasn't kept cool. We would draw fresh water from the well and put in a pan, and set the milk in, with a damp cloth over it. If it was real hot, we let it down in the well. If the churning was 'to warm', the butter would be 'puffy', kinda white, kinda whipped.

'Good butter' was real yellow.

Mommy kept a flock of about 200 White Leghorns to lay eggs. Sometimes we had two, six-dozen cases to take to town and sell. And she kept a few heavier Dominecker hens for cooking. A hen will ‘try to set’, and ‘hide her nest out’, usually in the spring. Mama would ‘set an old hen’, on a clutch of about 21 fertile eggs, (the hen had run with a rooster). They hatched in 21 days. If it was a bantam hen that was setting, they couldn’t ‘cover’, with their feathers, but about 18 eggs. But bantams were real good ‘mamas’. To raise guineas, you set their eggs under an old hen. They made better mamas than the guineas. We never raised many turkeys.

A settin’ hen won’t leave her nest, except to hurry and get a drink and eat. She gets poor and wobbles because she has set so long. If you want to look under her, you nudge her over with a stick. She would peck your hand and bring the blood. A ‘settin hen’ has a different ‘cluck cluck cluck’ The little chicks would be eating size, in less than two months. It was according to ‘how bad that you wanted to eat them’. If she didn’t want the hen to set, and get back to laying eggs; she would throw her off the nest, try to make her forget it. If she still kept getting back on the nest; “grab her and souse her down in a tub of water, that usually worked.

Mommy raised lots of fryers, we always had chicken to eat. To help out the setting hen’s, she had an oil heated incubator that we put 500 eggs in. We put a dim pencil mark on each egg. We carefully ‘turned’ the eggs every day,just like the old hen on her nest did,so the chicks would not be deformed

One time we had an old hen that crowed like a rooster , usually in the morning. There is an old tale,

‘Somebody is going to die, when you hear a hen crow’---it is not true.

Cooking chicken for a big family, it was all cooked, the neck, gizzard, head and feet. When I, Bill, thought about chicken, “I thought of a foot.”

(Richard, 8 years old, out playing, come in late for supper. He looked over the pieces of fried chicken that was left in the plate.

"Why! You didn't even leave me the neck.")

When a hen got old, she gradually quit laying. You could hold a hen and 'feel', if she had eggs forming inside of her. Or you could put her in a coop and see if she laid an egg. She would soon be in a pot for dumplin's, if she wasn't laying eggs. Any old hen, rooster or squirrel had tough meat. They could be boiled longer and make good dumplins.

Hen's "molt', in the spring. Their feathers gradually come out and new ones come in, they looked real 'scrageldy', and they quit laying for a while.

Any where there are chickens, there are chicken snakes. They will swallow an egg or a baby chick. If the mama hen sees a snake, she will ‘flog’ him. Scratch with her feet, fly up a foot or so, screech, squack and peck. She will attack any cat, dog or person and make them turn away from her chicks. She can run anything or anybody off, with her noise and actions.

She shows her new chicks where to scratch for food and to get water. She has a sharp alarm ‘cluck’ that calls her little ones to come running. They all run under her and her feathers will cover them.

If she sets on duck eggs, she cares for them just the same. If they get near water, they swim away from her and don’t come back when she gives her danger signal. She frantically runs along the bank.

Any age chicken or bird puts their head down and dip up a bill full of water, to get a drink. They point their beak up, to let the water run down their throat.

2006, VIRGIL AND MARLENE have a chicken house that is 32 x 312 FT.

Monday, Tyson will deliver 1700, one day old baby chicks to them.

They will be in boxes of 100. A mist will be sprayed over each box, that will vaccinate them for any baby chick problems. The chicken house will be cooled by misters and fans. The feeders are automatic. The chicks will reach UP and get a drip of water from a feeder line that is always overhead.

Marlene will walk through the chicken house twice a day. And will pick up 2 or 3 dead chickens a day, natural deaths or heart attacks. She will pitch them into a freezer, just outside the chicken house.

In 30 days, 95% of the chickens will be living and weigh two and a half pounds each. Tyson will pick them all up. The frozen ones will go into dog food. And we will buy and eat the rest. That is if the electricity don’t go off, the feed lines don’t clog, or a water line get to leaking.

They will clean the chicken house and put fresh straw on the floor.

After a few days ‘off’ they will get another batch.They have three big houses

The Dill family lived near us. Ulema always wanted to be friends,

I wouldn't. She married Empires brother and they moved to California, later divorced. To tell the truth about it---I never intended to get married.

It seemed to me that Mommy always had heart trouble. She would have pain, we would help her to set down, or lay down. The Doctors never could give her anything but the little white nitroglycerine pills, that she put under her tongue. She always liked a good cool drink of well water.

In hot weather we would draw well water and splash it around on the wood floors, there was no rugs. And then go and draw another bucket for drinking. In an hour or two, go and do it again. It really cooled things off.

Before we went to bed, we sloshed the cool well-water on the floor, again.

Our last house had a metal roof. It sounded so good when it rained.

Butch Howard was 20, he had a Ford Roadster. He turned the corner in deep sand. It turned over on top and killed him.

MY FIRST CAR was a 1925 Model T Ford. I paid $15 for it. Lum Lynn needed the money to buy him some teeth. I took the bed off, right behind the driver and built a platform five inches higher than the drivers seat, and put a spring seat, kinda like a wagon. I picked cotton for the money. Two cents a pound was the most that I ever got for picking cotton. Most of the time it was less than one cent a pound. Times were rough. Sometimes the cotton got rained on and it 'got rotten' and it strung down into the dirt. Or it wouldn't pull out of the cotton burr. Then you would 'pull boles', grab the whole thing, it was heavier. You could have more to weigh, but you got paid less. You usually 'pulled boles' for 50 cents a 100 lbs.

Model T Fords had wooden spokes in their wheels. They would dry out and get loose and fall apart. When there was a wreck, ‘spokes would fly’. I was careful on bumps, so the hub wouldn't twist off. I never 'lost a wheel'. I had four 'wheel holes' in our yard, where I parked my car. In the summer time, I poured water in the holes, to keep the spokes from drying out. Model A Fords come out with wire spokes, that was a big improvement.

I would catch the sheriff out of town and go down the street in Porum, “Chug, Chug, Chug.” I had a special coil. I had a muffler but I would change it, to a short pipe. All the kids wanted to hang on and ride.

It was so slow and loud. “Chug---Chug---Chug---Chug---Chug.”

Then I started working at the coal mines, first I got a Model A Roadster. It was so cold, I traded it for a coupe that had a heater in it.

I didn’t have money to buy anti-freeze. I learned to “make do’ with kerosene, it cost a nickel a gallon, it worked.When it warmed up, I drained it out and put water in the radiator. When it got cold I put the kerosene back in.

Poppy had not drove for years. I wanted to teach Poppy to drive my car, he didn't much want to, but he tried. "Poppy, you need to shift it on up." "Why?---I'm going as fast as I want to, right now."

I bought a 1928 Model A Roadster and traded it for a year later model a 1929 coupe. Then a Model B 1930 Ford Coupe. When I had a 1934 V8 Model A, on Sunday evenings I would ride around on a horse, at home.

When we married I had a 36 V8 Ford, it soon needed work and I sold it.

'Casin-head' gas was nine cents for years. That is 'drip gas' that comes from the oil well itself, it has not been processed. It is not legal, but it has always been used. Regular gas was 10 or 11 cents a gallon.

It was many years before it got to where it cost 20 cents a gallon.

Once I got off from home and had a flat. I didn't have anything with me to fix it. I took the tire off and took the inner tube out. I laid the tire on the ground and carefully filled it with sand and put it back on.

I drove 8 or 10 miles, and got back home, without ruining the tire.

The first windshield wipers went ‘back and forth’, just like they do now. We had to reach up and grab the handle and turn them, by hand, ‘back and forth.’ Wipers and speedometers were optional,when they first come out

Truman and Argus Raimer, Annie's brother got caught, racing down the highway thru Porum (5 blocks) in 1928.

The speed limit was 15 miles an hour. Truman got a ticket for going 25.

The police estimated it. They made him pay the $3 ticket.

I have got out and pushed, many a time. In the mud or when the low bands had burned out in a Model A. Sometimes you would turn around and back the car up the hill, because the low bands were burned out.

I was driving down the rough country road. Poppy and Sylvia was in the car with me. The car was slow, it wasn't going much faster than you could walk. There was two drunk boys by the side of the road. They grabbed holt of Sylvia. They though they could 'take care' of me and Poppy, then they could have Sylvia. Poppy fought them like a tiger!!

That was the only time that I ever saw him fight. I got the car stopped and I hit one, they were running off. I was chasing them with the jack handle. They were drunk but they could run fast---I couldn't catch them.

Poppy always let every body run over him. But this was different.

Bill always said, "Poppy was so tender hearted. He would run a mile, with a teaspoon of water---if one of his kids needed it. Especially Lee."

THE VICTROLA Uncle Curtis, Poppy's brother, come to see us in the later 1930's. He said that he had a Victrola (78 rpm phonograph, made by the Victor Company) that he would give us, if we could come and get it. It had a radio too. We had an old hand wind up record player, it was real scratchy.

They lived at Vian, across the Arkansas river from Webber Falls.

I drove up around Muskogee, about 40 miles to get it.

I went in my 34 V 8 Ford, it had a faster rear end put in it, before I got it. Lawrence and two of Uncle Curtis's boys were with me.

Evin was 'to young' to run around with us. We were on our way back home.

North of Porum, I drove past a highway patrolman. There was no speed limit. They stopped lots of people to see if they were carrying 'Bottle and Bond' into the state. It was legal in Arkansas, but Oklahoma was a 'dry' state. My car was loaded, the bumper was setting down.

I didn't have anything to hide, but I didn't like the idea of them stopping me.

I said, "If that highway Patrolman turns that light on me, I'm going to outrun him." He turned his light on, and ‘took out’ after me.

About two miles north of Griffin Corner, I knew they had prayer meeting every Saturday night at, a house down that road, and would have their gate open. The Highway Patrol car was getting close. I whipped off the highway, onto the dirt road. The dust really rose behind us. I passed another car and turned into the open gate where the prayer meeting was going on.

The Highway patrolman kept following that other car.

I backed out the gate and drove on home.

We got a lot of good out of that radio. The Grand Old Opry, mostly Jimmy Rogers music, we really liked to listen to it. I would back my car up to the window, run a wire to a 6 volt battery and play the radio until the battery would be run down. We might have to push the car off to start it, that didn't matter, we lived on the hill. Driving to town would build the battery back up. It seemed to sound better with a 'hot battery.'

We were at church at Nowater. Truman was driving his wagon. He had a pretty pair of 'check lines'. They were long leather harness lines, to reach the horses heads, when he was setting, driving his wagon. He kept them rubbed with Neet's-Foot Oil, they were soft and smooth. Truman went to 'look about' his team and found that someone had cut his lines. They cut off and stole, enough leather to make them some good bridle reins. That made Truman's harness lines so short that he would have to lean over and stretch to drive his team.

He called the Sheriff. The Sheriff first grabbed me by both arms, and accused me. Truman told him that I was his brother. He searched saddle bags, until he found them. Truman braded them back on. Most people couldn't afford leather and they used rope for their harness lines.

Cooper at Van was coach of the Van baseball team. He had a truck and could haul us all around. One time there was a high foul ball, and he motioned me to 'let it go'. I run on out and caught it, and put the man out. He 'benched me' for not following orders. His son, Jean, went on and was pitcher at one of the major league teams.

Jug Bowlon was our Indian Pitcher, me and Lawrence were the best batters on the team. I could nearly always hit a ball down first base line and get on 1^st. I very seldom struck out. When we had a man on 3^rd, Lawrence could get on too, he was a real good batter.

Lee and Truman played on the Porum team. Trumon was a left handed pitcher. He had speed and a good curve. Once, he got a hit clean over a two story building. Another time the big old Weaver boy, he had on spikes. Trumon was playing on 1^st, he jumped up and caught the ball. Weaver jumped, to set his spikes in Trumon's side. Trumon managed to dodge some. Then Trumon just busted him with that ball. Truman had a bad bruise from the spikes. Once the Porum team played the Prison Team from McAllister. The Porum team got their socks beat off.

Reba La Rue (She and Lawrence married) and her sister Maggie and June Stacey, they tried to push girls off on me. That didn't appeal to me.

I kept it quiet, but I had decided that I wasn't ever going to get married.

Floyd Collins was trapped in a Kentucky cave in 1925, there was a lot of publicity. He died after several days, while being rescued. Vernon Dalhart wrote a song about it. I sing 'The Death of Floyd Collins' often.

Ambrose Nichols was the teacher at Briartown. He had a lot of musical instruments. I think that he ment to have a kind of school band.

He never could get enough people to play his instruments. He handed me a saxophone and showed me how to put my mouth on it. In just a little while, I could pick out a tune. He let me keep it at home a while. I got to where I could play just about any, old gospel song on it. After dark, when the work was all done, I liked to set out on the big rock in our front yard and play it.

Lum Lynn lived 3 miles from us, he said he could hear me, just playing away. He had a son, Plunkett, that was exactly a month older than me. Sherman was the oldest, and Floyd was younger. He had a younger daughter, Bonnie. Our families always lived around pretty close together.

They raised peanuts. They had a tall pole and piled the dry peanut vines around it, they would kinda cling together. They covered them with a wagon sheet. When a big crowd come, we would lift the wagon sheet and crawl under it and pick the peanuts off, and eat them.

Lynn's had an old tank that we swam and played in. There was a barrel tied in the water. We would get under it and try to sing. Lawrence would dive and go all the way across. He would crawl on the bottom, just clawing on the mud bottom. When he come up, he was so muddy,

you couldn’t see nothing but the whites of his eyes. We laughed a lot.”

The church building in town was hot. There was no air conditioning.

There was one or two big wood stoves for the winter. The windows were open in the summer. The only cooling was from the hand-held, cardboard fans that the funeral homes gave away at funerals. Lee gathered four cats and tied their tails together. When he pitched them in the church house window----It cleared the building.

Someone had turned loose an old mule, he stood around Porum. He liked to stand, backed up to the south side of Lee's house. Lee tried to run him off. Finally he poured some 'High Life' out the window, on the old mules back. He switched his tail and stomped his feet and---took off, he didn't come back. High-Life was a medicine for sores on animals. When it wasn't diluted, it itched and burned.

ORANGE, TEXAS 1938, I was 23, me, Thelmer and Lawrence and Orvil Donovan went to Uncle Curtis and Aunt Eltha's. He managed a big cotton farm .We went to pick cotton, I drove my Model A Ford.

We slept in a barn, wagon or on the open ground. Pork & beans was what we ate mostly, sometimes bologna. Our one change of clothes, we washed them in the big metal windmill water trough. Until they saw us and told us to not do it any more, because their stock drank that water.

If anyone felt sorry for us, they didn't tell us about it. Nobody ever fed us.

I drove my car to the cotton patch. All the other pickers would pile onto my car. I got tired of it and signaled for Lawrence and Orvil to hang on. I drove fast and drove across a cotton terrace. We come down hard and all but the three of us fell off. Those Mexican's never tried to ride again.

The motor mounts come loose, the motor and transmission come out and smashed the radiator. We pulled it back to Uncle Curtis's house. We found an old radiator, he loaned us some tools. We turned my Model A up on its side to work on it. It soon run again, I stripped it down there too.

On our way back home, we wanted to see Dallas.

There were no traffic lights, going through Dallas, but lots of stop signs.

There wasn’t much traffic. The radiator always leaked, we didn't have anything to carry water in. We stopped ever once in a while.

My brakes were not good, and I didn't have a speedometer.

Near Gainesville we stayed in a big old hay barn for two or three weeks. Every time we picked 100 pounds of cotton, we got 50 cents. Normally they paid twice as much. I had quick hands and could pick more than most anyone. I could pick 250 or 300 pound's in a day. We got a little money ahead. You could get 50 cents a day to hoe cotton, lots of people got paid 50 cents a day wages. Some farm hand's got 75cents.

Clem West liked to fight.Lawrence used to whip him,until Clem got to big.

I had 3 sticks of dynamite, it was easy to get, not illegal. Poppy knew I was going to use it to get fish. I knew there were fish in the big hole of water, in the creek behind our house. Two sticks might have been enough, but I decided to use the other one. I lit them all and stepped behind a big sycamore tree. All the water splashed out of the creek. It nearly washed me into the creek, as it come back down. The few fish were to small and tore up.

Thelmer remembers going with Lee to pick Annie up, from visiting some of her folks. They lived up around Anadarko. The café in Okemah was a good place to eat. We stopped there and set at the counter, there were no tables. There were two men eating there. We talked to them about which way we were going, and the weather. They left before we did, and left a big tip. The owner told us that they were 'Pretty Boy' Floyd and his brother-in-law, Birdwell--who was about as notorious as he was, for robbing banks.

Charles Arthur Floyd grew up 'dirt poor' in Salisaw, Oklahoma, from a well respected family. The depression had a strangle hold on the country.

Someone that he knew well, was going to have the bank foreclose on their place and 'take their home away from them'. It looked like they were going to loose everything.

'Pretty Boy Floyd’ was setting in the Salisaw café. He sent word to the local 'Law,' "I am going to rob the bank---don't you come, if you don't want to take part." He gave the money that he took from that bank, to save that farm. From that, he kept on, until he became the FBI's Public Enemy No 1. People liked him. They considered him as sort of a 'Robin Hood' who robbed banks pretty regularly, to give to the poor. There probably wasn't a family in eastern Oklahoma that wouldn't have taken him in.

One time, Pretty Boy bought gas at Hick's station in Briartown and gave them $!0. Hicks proudly told that for the rest of his life.

The government finally built a good highway through the Cookston Hills, east of Porum, so that the police could get after him better.

Federal Agents cornered him in Ohio. He was shooting from a log corn crib, when his luck finally run out. He was 30 years old.

Thelmer remembers, "I was 17. Me and Lee and Trumon went to his graveside funeral, north of Sallisaw. We left home two hours early. There was a big crowd, some 20,000 people, the paper reported. The cemetery was full. Bub set on Lee's shoulders. There were lots of big black cars, and tough looking people. People were jammed tighter than any other place that I have been. I tiptoed, and raised up a little bit, to see over the crowd, my feet wouldn't go back to the ground. We got in line to view the body.

The crowd, they actually lifted me off my feet, as the line moved.

People were told not to take pictures. I saw several cameras smashed.

As I got up to the casket, the man ahead of me, he eased his camera up, to take a picture. A big man grabbed the camera. When the big man stomped that camera, he looked straight at me. He pushed the man out of line, and

headed him out of the cemetery.

We looked at his body, anybody could look that wanted to. I would have recognized him, from seeing him at the café in Okemah. It looked just like any other corpse. It took us 3 or 4 hours to get out of the cemetery. Some people drove across bar ditches and across the ‘bob wire’ fences. It was just ‘stop and go’. We wanted something to eat on the way home. We stopped at café's in Vian and Webber Falls, they all had their doors shut. There were such a crowd, that they cleaned out all of the food.

Woodie Guthrie wrote a song about 'Pretty Boy'.

There were always cats around town. Lee tied a tin can with some gravel in it, onto a cats tail. He headed it into the church house.

Lee owned the house across the street from the nice big church house.

UNCLE CHARLIE was Mommy's brother, he never did drink, that I knew of. They had a farm in Nowater community, a mile and a half S E of us. Granma Stephens took a lot of care, they helped whatever they could,

him and Aunt Phoebe had one son, Robert.

Willie, Rachel, Georgie, Peachie and Pearlie were their girls, we would play 'Annie Over' and 'Keep Away'. Then we would climb tall saplings, young hickory trees, and ride them over to the ground. Sometimes five of us would climb a taller one.As it bent over, four would turn loose and send one flying. The tall slim persimmon trees, they would break before they would bend enough. I liked to climb a young hickory tree by myself, and be careful to not let it bend over. When I got as high as I could, it bent over and then it would send me sailing.

One big Easter Egg hunt at Uncle Charlie's house, there was about a half bushel of eggs to hide. They were all boiled hen eggs. "Us kids had to 'go inside and not peep' till they were all hid.

We excitedly run out and hunted and hunted, and couldn't find a single egg. The ‘grown-ups’ finally told us to hide our eyes again, and they would really hide them this time. They went a half mile up the hill, and then hid them."

There was a bad hail storm at their house one time. It busted and splintered the wooden shingles on the roof and littered the floor with them.

Uncle Charlie’s son. Robert was bad to drink. Robert and Wade Smith and his brother would drive down the road in front of our house.

Drunk, hollering and raising dust, 'Rot Gut' had made them crazy.

Me and my brother dug holes (the first speed bumps?) in the road, to slow down the cars. One time after they bounced, somebody had to come and get their car. We went right out and leveled the road. It did slow people.

Robert was about 20 when he had typhoid fever. After he come down with it, everyone else was vaccinated and no neighbors had it.

He was eating chicken soup and got choked on a piece of chicken and died.

Thelmer remembers that quite a few people around had small pox.

No one in our family had it, they took us and had us vaccinated.

Later Bill remembers living up toward Muskogee. “Dock had the small-pox, all of his family had it, all 13 of them. They were all there at our house, we were quarantined. All of them broke out, some worse than others. Some of them, you couldn't hardly see their eyes. I, Bill had it too, but only 3 little bumps. I waited on all of them. They wanted milk, I couldn't get it to come out of the cow. We did have a telephone. A man who lived across the field, come and milked.

I had a can of lye. I put some in the water that I used to soak the clothes when I washed them. They all got over the small pox.

Dock had pock mark scars left on his face

One day, later on, Dock was unhitching the mules, it was getting dark, time to quit plowing that day. A hobo come by and asked me for food. "You cut enough wood to fill that box, and by then, I'll have supper ready to eat."

The hobo turned that box over and set down on it. He ate with us.

Later, while we still lived there, Aunt Evie, Poppy's only sister, come and visited with us for three days. She lived in Muskogee, we all thought that she was real nice."

One hot August day it was storming all around. Dock was resting and laying out on the porch, he did not want to get up and go to the cellar.

"Don't bother me, I'm going to lay right here until it rains in my face."

And it did, the roof blowed off that porch.

Bill remembers that “We all thought it was 'something' when

Thelmer would bend a clothes hanger around his neck, to hold a harmonica up to his mouth. He had a drum that he would pat his foot on, and play his guitar, all at the same time.

Thelmer remembers the tiny towns of Whitefield, Briartown, Warner, and Porum, some of us would set around and play and sing, whenever we got a chance.

‘A medicine show’ come to town. Several men drove trucks carrying all of the things to sell. In bottles they had liniment, flat round cans of salve, and kitchen pots. There was lots of things that Porum didn’t have. A man stood up to sell what-all they had. He made his talk, and sold some.

He said that a good musician was going to come out and play music and sing,’---he built me up big.’ I was to play my guitar and sing, so a crowd would gather---to hear his next sales talk. I had been singing and playing all my life, at school and church.

When I walked out---there on the second row was a girl that I was kinda ‘struck on', Helen Crisp. I had wanted to date her and didn’t know how to ask. I could not say a word and my knees started knocking. The man 'turned it off'--- that it was part of the show, the crowd just roared. I was so embarrassed, I thought that I would die. I have never had stage fright again. They wanted me to travel and live with them. Poppy and Mommy wouldn’t even talk about it. I was 16 or 17, I could have run off with them.

George Blue bootlegged. He would hire different ones to bring in 2 or 3 cases of whiskey at a time. They knew better than to come through Stigler. They would get stopped and searched there. They come up through Warner.

During World War 2, bus loads of soldiers from Fort Chaffey in Arkansas would come for the big Saturday night dance. Main street was blocked off. At one big dance, 12 couples were fighting at the same time. There were so many that the laws didn't try to stop them.

Anybody from Briartown or Stigler have trouble, he would go back home and bring a couple of carloads of his friends. They would drink a while and fight a while. Police from Briartown, Stigler and Muskogee

would come to take their men home.

Us boys would chase all over town, watching fights. We climbed up on a fence to watch two women fighting.

The big old heating stove was in the middle of the school room.

The teacher would let us stand around it to warm.

The stove had a little bitty hole in the top of it.

Boys would take a .22 shell out of their shirt pocket and drop it in the hole. Then they would walk back to their desk. In a minute BANG!!

The way Chester remembers hearing it---one of Annie's nephews, Sonny Raimer, found a dynamite cap. Him and his sister, Edith put it in the fire. He bent down real close to watch it. It come back at him and put his eye out.

Lee had a half stick of dynamite. He rolled it in brown paper, real tight, he tied it ‘real confined’. He dangled it on the screen of the ball diamond, there in Porum. When it went off, it broke window lights all around. They never did find out who did it.

Not many years ago, the young Porum Policeman was on duty.

He was setting in the Porum Police car, parked at the end of Main Street, looking all the way through town, five blocks. He set there a while and slouched down in his seat. A bullet hit the windshield---right above his head. He left town the next day. No one was ever charged.

PORUM changed? 1999, a couple from our reunion drove

up to Pete's Place to use the telephone. They went in and Bill asked,

"Didn't you used to have a phone booth that set outside?"

"Well, yes, there was one, but last fall, two women wanted to use it at the same time. They got to fighting and both of them got inside it. They got the door shut. We had to break nearly all the glass, to get them out. We had all kinds of trouble with that phone booth and decided not to get another."

The signs outside of town now reads---

"A small town with an exciting history."

(Jack) Frost Skimmer was a very old Indian.

He had no relatives and no idea of his age. He would say, "Me no 100, me 1000 years old". After a bad storm, neighbors were looking for him. He was walking around, "Me no can find me house." It had blown away. Neighbors built him another little shack, just like it. Just one little room, no porch.

He was at Rosco Clements house at dinner time. Roscoe said,

"We don't have much to eat, but maybe it'll do you, until you get home."

Later, Frost was at another neighbor's who said,

"We don't have much to eat, but come on in and eat with us."

Frost told them, "Well, maybe it'll do me until I get home."

Rosco Clements would get drunk and whip his horses, them running down the road, pulling him in his wagon. We wondered how his horses could stand it. "One time he passed our house, his horses running as fast as they could go.

I 'broke and run' as fast as I could. I wanted to get out on the road, so I could look over the hill, and see the turn. I knew the wagon could not 'make that turn'. I saw that Indian get throwed higher than the ceiling and come down in some 'willer bushes'. He got up and started gathering up the bread that he had bought in town. The wax paper wrapper had busted open, and slices were everywhere. The team had broke loose from the wagon. He patched it up later.”

UNCLE BURL, I, Bill just loved Uncle Burl, Mommy's brother. He was named after his Fathers brother, who had two thumbs on his left hand.

I, Thelmer, remember those two thumbs, Abe Stephens was a Doctor, his brother, Burl Stephens had a pharmacy at Covington.

Aunt Alice was Uncle Burl's (Mommy's brothers) wife. She was part Indian. They all got Indian land. Rose, Edna and Josie went off to Indian school at Shiloco. I didn't think it was fair that I, Bill, couldn't go too.

Bertha, the oldest, died of a fever when she was a month old..

Josie(phine) died when she was 7, of ruptured appendix.

Rosa married Sam Brown and died in her 30's of breast cancer.

Edna died at 72 of altzheimers.

I was 16 and had never been the 28 miles to Muskogee.

Uncle Burl had a new car and took me to the fairgrounds and out to eat.

He gave me and Lee some peach brandy, it tasted good.

"Now, don't you want any more. I don't want you to start drinking.

Your Daddy would kill me."

I, Thelmer spent the night with them a few times.

I liked Clyde, Dave, Floyd, Sherman, Elmer, Pershing and Clayton.

Uncle Burl had diabetes real bad. He was sick the last few years.

They called Trumon to help with him the day that he died, he was 70.

Aunt Alice Bell lived seven more years, to Nov. 14, 1957.

CANADIAN RIVER There is a North and South Canadian River, they both start in the 'panhandle' of Texas. The Deep Fork runs into the North Canadian. The Little River runs into the South Canadian. The Canadian Rivers are big and wild, and flooded often, causing lots of damage, they join near Eufaula. Forty miles on down, it runs into the Arkansas River.

There was always talk of a dam to control it. We all knew the place to put the dam---was between the two mountains, right where the dam is now.

(The dam was newly built. An old Indian owned the land below it. There was a lot of rain up on the watershed of the Canadian River. The Corps of Engineers come to see the land owner. They told him that they were going to have to open all the 'gates' in the dam. If they didn't open all the gates, the water would run over the dam. His land was going to be flooded, he would have to move his cattle. He didn't believe his land would flood, it never had before. Some of his cattle were washed down for miles.

(Several years later he had his pit bulldog tied in his back yard. His ten year old grandson was visiting and the grandson fell out the window. The pit bulldog killed him.)

BELLE STARR’S GRAVE is on top of the mountain on the north of the dam. Just that single grave up there among the big trees. It didn't mean anything to us. We always knew it was there, none of us ever went up there.

Dock and Bill took their kids to see it in 1941. Over the years, souvenir hunters had chipped little chunks off of her tombstone. (It has since been replaced by a bigger, real nice six foot stone and a tight little fence built around it). Lorene, Norma Dean, Christene and James Val, thought it would be fun to send their Aunt Louise and Bennie Thel,a piece of that stone Their Uncle Thelmer was in the army, WWII, fighting Germans in Italy.

(They needed a school teacher at their local school. School teachers were hard to get during the war. Dock wanted them to hire me. And me and Bennie Thel live with them, while I taught school there. They found a teacher to hire, before they got to me. But it has always given me a good feeling, that I was thought of--- Louise Moore)

They mailed that little piece of tombstone to them in Texas.

Bennie Thel was two, he was playing on the floor with his Uncles' Eldridge, and Stanley, and Aunt Alicea. He picked up that little hunk of stone with both his hands and 'gave' it to his Uncle Eldridge---right on top of his head. The little spot bled for a while.

(Forty two years later, Eldridge had been coming to 'The Moore Reunion' for many years. He lived in Hog Eye, Arkansas. A bachelor, he enjoyed the visiting, the food and his great nieces and nephews. For NO, he said NAW. One year Ryan followed him around, looking up at him, trying to figure out---how he did that. Eldridge came as usual in 1994. On July 31, a month later, he helped a friend move. Walking back to his pickup, he fell dead. He was 65. He is buried in the cemetery on his home place.)

That Canadian river was dangerous. A little above where the dam is now, we would swim out and catch a log. We would push it out into the currant and ride it, we didn't have to paddle. It went fast, where the river was narrow. In the water current, we hung on, it was dangerous fun. When we wanted to stop, it was a job to get the log to the edge of the water. Sometimes we would have to turn the log loose and swim to the river bank.

Me and Lawrence and the three Kagel boys had us a swimming hole in the river. We had rigged up a diving board. We wasn't there the time that the older Kagel boy run and dived in first. The sand had washed up, in under the diving board. He broke his neck. He ended up wearing a neck brace and never could turn his head.

I never liked to go in the water as much as Lawrence. He could beat me diving and swimming. Once I dived way down and rubbed my nose on the bottom—‘sorest nose I ever had’. He liked to go under water at the cliffs at the Canadian River. Standing Rock was up around the old Hoos place, it is under water now. There was a place there---as big as a house, under water. Big fish liked to lay back in there. Lawrence would tie a rope around his waist and tell us to pull him out in 'so many seconds.' He sure liked to go under water and grope for fish, (noodle, grabble, guddle, go hogging)

I didn't, I got hold of a big snake one time. He was the daredevil.

We didn't know what a game warden was.

We very seldom saw any kind of 'Laws', outside of Porum.

Joe Hicks' son, Ray was driving his Model T Ford to fast in the deep sand. It turned over and crushed him.

INDIANS The Dawes Commission tried to register all Indians in 1890.Many wouldn't register—because, as a one-quarter Indian, they could not go into a saloon or drink whiskey or carry a gun or buy or sell land.

That all had to be handled by the Indian Agent. Indians around us were given land before I can remember. White men come from anywhere to get an Indian woman and land. Indians drank a lot. As far as I could see, whites drank as much, probably more. Indians might not ’hold their liquor’, as well.

About half the people around us were Indians. They had no Indian customs or clothes, that we saw. It never made any difference to any of us. Most of us were 'dirt pore.' Some of the older ones, mostly women, stayed home all they could. They spoke Indian altogether, almost never where whites could hear them. We don't remember hearing Poppy 'talking Indian.'

We knew that he knew what they were saying.

FIGHTING Thelmer and Jim Hornet were fighting at school. They weren't mad, they didn't have anything to fight about. Someone would come up to you and say, "He said he could whip you, Do you think that he can?"

Thelmer remembers, "I was on the ground, flat of my back. He kinda got the best of me, he was fixing to 'beat the tar out of me'. He was trying to choke me and hold my nose shut. I opened my mouth to breathe. A finger slipped in my mouth and I bit it. Jim jerked his finger out and nearly all the meat come off. It nearly pulled my teeth out.

That Indian jumped up and opened a knife, it looked a mile long. I was still on my back, reaching---I managed to reach a pile of broken bricks. I grabbed one (a brick bat, a half brick) and throwed it.

I hit Jim above the eye. Some of the kids declared that they could see his brain. They drove him to the hospital and didn't know if he was going to live or not. Jim had an older brother that was fixing to jump on me.

He backed off-------"Well, I guess he was afraid of them bricks."

His Dad come to Poppy, "Let's not have any trouble over these boys.

It's not any thing for grown people to fuss about."

He was real nice, a full blood Cherokee.

The last time I saw Jim Hornet, he just has a little bit of an eyebrow.

I always thought the fighters kinda stayed away from me after that.”

Thelmer, "I liked Tommy Hornet, Jim's little sister, when she was small. Later she did everything in the world to try to date me, I would not.

I had my mind made up not to date and get married.

Tommy was real pretty. When she was about 18 she was in an accident.

Her nose was smashed and you wouldn't have known her.

John Shetley was driving a truck and a whole bunch of them were riding on the back. They all had their legs hanging off. It's a wonder that some of them were not killed.

Lee, Bill and Truman were married and some of their kids were as old as my younger brothers and sisters. Sometimes them and Mommy and Poppy would go off and I would be the oldest, with all the kids. Lorene was little and she would hold her breath----just scare Dock and Bill to death.

One time as soon as they left, I told Lorene that if she held her breath, I would kill her. She didn't believe me. “How would you kill me?”

"I'll beat you to death, just beat you to death." She never held her breath around me again. And she still liked me---still does, I guess.

(When Lorene got to having grandkids, she said her greatest wish, was that she could be ‘as good a Granny, as her Granny Moore.’)

One time the grown ups left, Opal was setting down, churning--up and down, up and down. Orba Lee remembers, "We were the 'meanest little dickonses'(devils), we were running around and around, in the house. Thelmer was trying to get us to go outside. The churn turned over and I slipped down. The wooden churn dasher, it got tangled up in my dress tail. I was runnin’ and screamin’. I thought that Thelmer was runnin’ behind me, hittin’ me with the churn dasher"

Thelmer, “I was plowing with the old mule 'Pete'. Mommy would watch until we got to the other end of the row. Then she would ring the dinner bell. Pete would come straight to the house, at the sound of that bell. If Pete was in the middle of the field, he would turn around and cut across the rows. "We fought that old mule and never could control him." Mommy got to where she wouldn't ring the bell, when we were plowing with Pete, he would always cut across the rows.”

We had a bois’darc tree, It has the hardest wood, not good for anything. Sometimes we used it for posts, the wood was kinda red like cedar. Most people cut down the little trees. The 'apples’ on it are worthless.

It was unusual for livestock to eat them. But our little red mule would chew on them. His slobbers would reach the ground. He would get real skinney, 'pore as a snake'. We tried to keep him away from them

PETE SHOEMAKE had a store in Porum. Whenever me and Lawrence would come into his store, he would hand us a thick slice of cheese and a handful of crackers out of the barrel. The crackers were loose in the barrel, he would twist the paper liner back over them.

If we didn't have a dime, he gave it to us anyway.

We were talking about going bullfrog hunting. Us and the Parson boys had made a little boat that would float down the creek. We could buy better lumber than now, real cheap and we put a clear finish on it. We would drag it over the shallow places and go to the distinctive sound that bullfrogs make. It is different from the other kinds of frogs. One of us would set in the front of the boat with a carbide light on our cap and see their white belly shine. The boat would glide to them---they were blinded by the light, tap them on the back with the paddle and momentarily paralyze them. Have to grab them quick, you learned how to hold their hind legs. In a minute they start fighting and they would scratch the blood out of your hand. The big bullfrogs had claws.

We would string them on a wire through the chin. We had a horse trough where we could keep the frogs for several days. We ate lots of them.

Mommy would go to the house, from the field and it was amazing how quick she could fix those frog legs, for dinner. And how good they tasted. If it was a really big frog, you could cook the head and the back, too.

Mommy cooked anything that we brought home, and we always liked it.

Pete said he would like to have some frogs. We brought him some in a damp sack. He dumped them out on the floor. Those frogs started jumping. They jumped onto the shelves and started knocking cans over. We liked to have never caught them all. Then another would jump and knock more cans over. Pete thought the frogs would be dead.

I played with a little old mule. "It kinda acted like it was glad for me to get on it's back. A neighbor lived not to far, he had two daughters.

I would ride that little mule and go and see the oldest, Helen Crisp.

We liked to be out in the woods all day. If another bird got around a blue jay nest, there was always at least two blue jays to chase them off.

We would watch blue jays chase a hawk or a crow, get a hold and hang on. They would get them down on the ground and even whip a hawk and make him get 'high behind'.

A preacher lived not far from us, he had several kids and one was a younger teen age daughter. A visiting preacher was staying with them. The young girl said that he tried to molest her. He denied it---until he saw that they were going to put him in jail. He confessed, and when he repented,

they let him go.

We would gather up little round rocks off the railroad tracks for slingshot ammunition. We would roll clay in little balls for ammunition.

We would sharpen a stick and push the clay ball onto it. Swing the stick back; snap it forward with a jerk---and it would really go, persimmons too.

Jack Haygood would fight all the time. Beat him to death and he wouldn't 'give up'. 'Till the last dog died.'

I, Thelmer was working in the field by myself. A cloud come up, the wind started and I headed for the barn. I unhooked the snaps between the two horses and they run on to the barn. I couldn't walk against the wind.

I was holding along a rail fence. The wind blowed me over it and against the big persimmon tree in the hog pasture. I hugged onto the tree and thought it was going to be pulled out of the ground. I had some pretty sore spots from where hail had hit. That may have been the time that Mommy got caught out in the garden. She lay in the garden ditch--afraid to raise her head up--until the bad little storm blew over.

Me and Lawrence were on lots of school program. Sometimes we painted our faces and we were 'The Two Black Crows.' And we sang, "I come from Alabama with my Banjo on my Knee." They always asked me to be on the school programs, whether I was going to school regular or not.