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A New World Weekly
Stormy Weather Ahead

The last three months of 1948 would be spent in Oklahoma; Dad would need offices at various times in four different towns, the family would live in three of those places. From Gainsville, Texas, where I started the third grade in September. we moved to Waurika, Oklahoma. I am not sure of the dates, but by sometime in October, we had moved. We were in Waurika on November 7th, according to the postmark on a letter we received while there. During our stay there, Dad had to take his crew to Madill for some detail work to wrap up a contract. He came to be with the family on the weekends while this was being done. The crew then moved to Frederick, and the family moved with them. When the work was done there, we moved to Sapulpa for  the rest of the year. By New Years Day, we were on the road again, headed for Casper, Wyoming.

My memories of living in Waurika have little or nothing to do with school, so I’m listing that part of my academic life as routine: nothing out of the ordinary to report. I remember that through some neighbors with kids our age, Wes and I got started in a Sunday School, which was a good thing, but I was given some false information which was a bad thing. A nice lady who had nothing but good intentions, and was probably a well-meaning, but an untrained volunteer who was ignorant of much of what she was attempting to teach, told me that if I was not good, Jesus wouldn’t like me. It is a wonder that I did not spend the rest of  my young years trying to hide from Jesus, because I had enough sense to know that I had not been good! Hopefully she learned to say that if He doesn’t always like our actions, He still continues to love the actors.

One detail that stands out in my mind, Mom sent me to the store to get a quart of milk. I was expecting to receive a glass bottle, which is how “town folks” got their milk. What I was given was a waxed paper carton. I did not like it. I would have taken an oath that it tasted funny and it had to be the carton. I would eventually drink milk from a carton but it took an evolutionary process, in other words, a long time!

Wes and I learned from an older neighbor kid that the railroad men working in a nearby switch yard, wore carbide lamps on their hats at night, and when they loaded their lamps they would spill some little “gravels” of the carbide compound. If you knew where and how to search, you could find some little chunks, put them in a dry bottle and save them for various purposes. Our most common purpose was to take small bottles collected from the trash along the alley way, add a little water and convert them into tiny “bombs“. About this time, our guardian angels were applying for transfers. Remembering how fast we had to throw those things after twisting on the lids makes me want to stop and count my fingers to make sure we got away with it.

Mom’s niece had come to live with us while we were in Waurika, and had gone to work in the five-and-dime store working the candy counter. She would weigh the bulk candy on a scale to determine the price of the sale, then pour the candy into a white paper bag. I can testify there was no advantage having a cousin be the candy clerk at the five-and-dime; her mama had raised her right! She came home from work one Saturday telling us that she had seen a woman arrested on the street in front of the store. Her crime: wearing shorts!

When we moved to Frederick, we did not enroll in school; we were not there long enough. We were packed up from the last move and were preparing to move again, so we managed to get our hands on the bare necessities to get by for a few days, and do without everything else. We had time on our hands and needed to fill it. Jean and Mom went to a store for a few items and came home with embroidery supplies, jig saw puzzles, a Donald Duck coloring book, and a Monopoly board game. Let the good times roll! It took a while to get tired of playing Monopoly, and the puzzle was too easy and we had it assembled in record time. Mom was working on her embroidery and I asked for a lesson and an easy project. It was not my cup of tea, those tea towels! I could not learn how to “deux” those French Knots!

As soon as we found an apartment in Sapulpa, we enrolled in school. Daddy was put to work in the Tulsa office, compiling reports, working up data, and slaving over a drafting table while they were forming the crew he would take to Wyoming. Some were already there, and would be kept employed. There was some turnover on the crews, so there was some reorganizing being done, a few layoffs and firings. There is no need to send someone out on a crew in the middle of winter if he’s going to quit the first time he gets his boots wet! The truth is, this kind of work is not for everybody.

Our apartment was downtown, upstairs over a business, and next door to a seafood restaurant. The aroma kept one hungry all the time. It was cold and snowy, and a church was into their Holiday program of playing Christmas music on their carillon every day and evening. Jean was still officially with us, but was enjoying spending this season with her mom and dad and siblings. Mr. Arnold, the supervisor Dad worked for in Shoshoni and Hazlehurst, had also been brought to Tulsa for the “shuffle” and was missing his family. So he had dinner with us a couple of nights a week; take-out from the seafood shop! His wife and kids were with her family in Coalgate, where they had been spending their summer vacation. While we were still in Gainesvile,  they drove down the 104 miles and stayed for a few days with us in Texas. We had not seen them since we lived in Hazlehurst. This was turning out to be a special Holiday season with so many old friends and family popping in and out!

My class at school was missing a boy who had gotten sick, so the art class was making get-well cards for him, and were being graded on their efforts. I did not know him, but this sort of thing was right up my alley, so I jumped right in. It looked like an easy way to get a good grade, and show my teacher I could draw. I was enjoying being in school, and even walking the six blocks to get there. Our snow had gone through so many freeze-thaw cycles, it was in a perpetual crunchy mode, crackling with every step. A hedge that bordered the sidewalk had been covered with a layer of ice, and if you tweaked a leaf just right, you could pop off a little frozen “thumbnail”. Every day seemed filled with fun, and every day was a day closer to Christmas! And then I got sick.

The doctor had a way of chuckling through his diagnosis. But then, maybe he had never seen a case like mine. I had a severe sore throat, an agonizing pain in my right side, and a very high temperature. We were not in the habit of running to the doctor every time the sun went behind a cloud, or at every little sniffle. But the high temperature was alarming, so here’s the doctor poking and prodding and chuckling away. He looked down my throat with his flashlight and popsicle stick, and.” Hmmm, chuckle, chuckle, this boy has tonsillitis”. He takes my temperature, folds me in half, presses my abdomen above my right groin, asks if it hurts; “not so much”, then he pulls the pressure away suddenly, and I double over with the pain! “Hmmm, chuckle, chuckle, this boy has appendicitis”. He reads the thermometer, listens to my chest, front and back, and “Hmmm, chuckle, chuckle, this boy is pretty sick. He has pneumonia. We need to get him to the hospital!” In a few days, I was much better. That vanilla ice cream must be a miracle drug! I was back in school in time for the gift exchange and party, and then school closed for the holidays.

We would have as close as you are likely to get to a “Best Christmas Ever”, if you exclude the first one in Bethlehem, with family so close by, visits to grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and old friends, the carillon‘s carols. the “crunchy” weather, my timely release from the hospital, and a few days following Christmas to prepare for our move to Wyoming. We had been to, and through, Casper a few times, and had lived nearby, and it would be our new home, for a while, anyway. Little did we know what that trip would entail and what we would encounter on the way. Here is how the news media would describe it: 

“The most significant blizzard in Wyoming’s history in terms of total human impact occurred from January 2, 1949 to February 20, 1949. Snowfall in parts of eastern and southeastern Wyoming measured up to 30 inches, with drifts 20 to 30 feet high. Within 24 hours of the storm’s initiation, all bus, rail, and air traffic was halted. There were thousands of stranded motorists and rail passengers. Thirty-three hundred (3,300) miles of state highway lay in the storm area. Seventeen people in Wyoming perished.”