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Many of us are confused about history and our own place in it. People think history is circuitous or swaying back and forth like a pendulum. Actually, humans have made a lot of significant progress since we first stood upright. History goes forward.
Even as a child, I was aware that each day was another slice in an unfolding history drama. And I knew that I was one of the characters. I was one of the privileged characters. I remember when I first realized that I might not have been born in the richest country in the world, male, and more or less Caucasian. I may not have been rich or smart, but I was grateful to be born with most of the world's advantages.
I also knew that I was living in a time of great changes. I am part of the great migration from country to town that took place around World War II. I was born in the town of Ada, Oklahoma, September 25, 1940. In 1945, for various reasons, my Granpa Pete decided to move Mother and her 4 urchins to a farm he had bought just before the war. His brother-in-law lived there through the conflict and, as a farmer,was not called to fight. The brother-in-law didn't need the farm when the war ended, so Granpa had an empty farmhouse and a very needy daughter. We moved to Lovelady, ten miles from Ada, when I was five.
I wonder how many Americans today can remember living without electricity? On a farm without a car? Without indoor plumbing or, for that matter, any plumbing at all?
Kerosene has a strong peculiar smell. One has to be particularly careful when pouring it into a lamp. One has to be sure to get the lamps ready while it is still daylight, for there is no other light afterward. Wicks must be adjusted carefully and they have to be trimmed to burn well. But if you trim too much, you'll be wasting money prematurely on a new wick. It's important to wipe off the bowl of the lamp before removing the globe and lighting the wick. People get burned, and there is no fire station for ten miles from Lovelady.
We went to town on Saturdays in a neighbor's car. Mother spent almost the entire day at the laundromat. In those days, the washing process consisted of the actual washer tub with an inside agitator. It was connected, in a square shape, to three tubs. The wringer was mounted on a swivel so that Mother wring our clothes, one at a time, as they moved from one tub to another. Then the wet clothes went into plastic baskets to be ready for the clothesline when we returned home. Mother also did all her shopping on those Saturdays. If there was any extra time, we visited one of our relatives. It was usually my father's sister, Aunt Clydia, because she lived near the laundromat. Sometimes, I would go there to stay while Mother did the washing. Sometimes I stayed with her at the laundromat. Sometimes, my two older sisters, 8 and 9, were forced to take me with them to downtown Ada where we walked back and forth "window shopping" because we had no money. Best of all was when we each had a dime to go to the movies. I loved the movies and still do.
Once, my sisters lost track of me. It may have been deliberate, but I remember looking up from my reveries and realizing that I wasn't following them. I panicked and went, sobbing, to a policeman. I couldn't think how to describe my problem, so I remember screeching "Have you seen my parents?" Of course, I didn't really have any parents, I just had Mother and I knew she was at the laundromat. Before the policeman could even answer, my sisters appeared and took me away, still sobbing, down the sidewalks of Ada. I don't think the older of my two sisters ever called me "Gene." "Crybaby" or "Mama's baby" only.
When we got home, Mother hung our wet clothes in the dark.
In my part of history, "horsepower" described something with four legs. When the mud was too deep on the country roads, we took the horse and wagon.
One day when I was five, Mother was called upon to join in a community hay baling. It was a school day, so other children did not go, but I went everywhere that Mother went. Hay baling, in those days, was a communal event.
First, the hay had to be cut and left out to dry. That took place before our communal event, but I knew how they did it because Mother often mowed fields with the tractor at our place.
They used a tractor with a long cutter blade. At the end of each row, when the tractor had to turn around, the farmer used a wooden handle to lift the saw blade up to a vertical position. If he forgot to lift it and turned the tractor, it would likely turn him over. If he lifted it to strongly or too swiftly, it could hit him. Those blades were dangerous as heck, as was all the farm equipment. Mother was really good at that cutting operation. My siblings used to remind me, "I don't know if you remember, but Mother had to drive a tractor like a man." My siblings don't remember that I went everywhere that Mother went, and that meant riding the tractor, too. I remembered her tractor-driving days because I was on the tractor with her.
After the hay dried, the community baling crew came together. The next job for the tractor was raking the dry hay. The rake was all metal. It had long, curved rake fingers spaced about five inches apart. One farmer drove the tractor to pull the rake and the other farmer sat on a metal seat that was part of the rake. The rake operator used a lever to lift the rake to leave the hay at a certain spot. Then he dropped it again to go on raking. At the end of the process, all the hay from the field was piled in long rows stretching from one side of the field to the other. I do not know to this day how that man managed to ride that rake for hours at top tractor speed without falling backward and breaking his neck. If he fell forward, of course, the rakes would probably stab him to death.
Then came bucking. The buck was a wooden frame with long 2X4 boards extending outward, like long fingers, more or less level to the ground. At the far end, the boards had been beveled downward to a point. The farmer driving the buck could lower the boards until they slid along the ground. The fingers slid under the dry hay and pushed it forward. Behind the buck was a wagon tongue that pushed it forward.
Bucking with a tractor was particularly dangerous, because the long "forks" might hit something on the ground and cause a dangerous sudden stop. Consequently, they drove the buck with two horses that day. They would start at one end of the long rows of piled hay, then buck it up into a pile. The actual baling machine was on wheels and could be scooted up to that pile. Mother was one of the pitchfork hands that picked the hay up from the big pile and dropped it into the hopper at one end of the baler. The baler then compressed it and pushed it out through a long chute that was about 8 feet long, 16 inches top to bottom and about 24 inches to the side. Somebody told us about a recent accident in which a pitchfork man lost an arm to the baler. I was scared for Mother, but she never flinched. In my lifetime, I've never seen a man that could outwork my Mother.
Where did the baler get its power? From me, of course. My five-year-old first job on the hay baling team was to drive the horse that went around and around all day, in circles, attached to a long wooden spindle, that turned a gear, that powered the baler. It was dirty and hot, and I sneezed and gasped the entire time, because I was always alergic to dust, fresh grasses, and country air in general, but I drove that poor animal around and around endlessly through the entire morning.
Lunch was fun. The host family, whose field we were working, was a really good feeder. In other families at Lovelady, I noticed, womenfolk stayed inside and did household chores like delicious cooking. Mother was always the only female field hand. The collective laughed and joked at a big long table. I ate alone in a side room, but the food was great. It was mostly mashed potatoes. All kids love mashed potatoes.
There was an incident during lunch that I didn't know about at the time. One of the farmhands was African American. They openly called him "N... Frank." As far as I could tell, he was just like the other farmhands, except darker. The host family, I learned later, refused to feed "N... Frank" along with the other hands. I don't think they were going to feed him at all, but Ted Pendergrass, who had brought Frank and felt responsible, was furious about it and threatened to pull out of the collective. Ted Pendergrass, I would learn later, was Mother's boyfriend and would be, many years later, my stepfather. He was extremely racist, but, apparently, not as racist as the rest of Lovelady, because he insisted that Frank be fed. Eventually, he was handed a plate outside and Ted stayed in the collective.
Mother was re-assigned in the afternoon. She became a "wire puncher." Then I learned how bales were actually formed from the compressed hay. Wooden plates with dimensions almost like those inside the chute were dropped innto the chute by the pitchfork operators every little bit. They separated the compressed hay in the chute about every four feet. The plates were made of two pieces of wood that came together with matching grooves that became holes in the plate's sides about four inches from the top and bottom. Into those holes went the baling wire punched through from each side of the chute. The wire would then surround the compressed hay in the chute and then go through the holes in the next plate. Then wires would be cut and "tied" arond the bale with deft fingers. It was dangerous, of course, but not as dangerous as the pitchfork job. As the finished bales exited the chute, the wooden plates would fall out on the ground.
Somebody, of course, had to take those plates back to the pitchfork operators at the other end of the machine. That was my afternoon job.
The finished bales were dragged to the truck then loaded high by the strongest of the men. They used hay hooks shaped like a "J". They were extremely sharp and dangerous, but not nearly as dangerous as everything else in the baling operation.
I don't think they ever used that horse-driven baling machine again. Ted Pendergrass bought an automatic baler. He just drove it around the field behind his tractor and it spit out the bales. Times were changing.
My place in history was a time of transition.
I may be one of the last Americans who attended a one-room rural school. Yes, it was red. It was one-and-a-quarter miles from our shack.
In past days, they actually had two rooms with a partition in between. There were more kids at Lovelady, but I come from a time when families, including farm families in America, started getting smaller. I think there were 18 children, grades 1 through 6, in the school when I started. In my last year, I think there were 11. Two of us finished the 6th grade there, then they closed the school forever.
They had a different teacher every year but one. I was afraid of the teacher. Even more, I was afraid of the big boys. I guess the only person I wasn't afraid of was W.C. Nichols. Nichols was older and bigger than any of us, but he was retarded and, as far as I know, was not in any of the grades. He just sat quietly alone while all the other children studied or had lessons. During recess, all the boys, including me, would beat up W.C. Nichols. He was happy to get the attention.
Marion Jackson was one of the big boys, but he was kind to me. We used to spread lunches together. I usually had a sandwich of balogna or maybe vienna sausages cut longways, and an apple. But Marion had things like homemade cinnamon roles that were absolutely wonderful. I don't know how he did it because Marion had no mother. He lived with his dad and older brother. They had the biggest and best vegetable garden at Lovelady. They worked it by hand constantly. His father took the boys fishing. I envied the Jackson boys their father. I saw mine maybe once a year, but only for a few days.
My nickname at Lovelady District 27 school was "old eyes," because any kind of ocular thought at all would set my tear glands to flowing. Anybody could make me "cry" just by saying "eyes, eyes, eyes." It was a momentary fun for the big boys, and even some of the girls, but Marion never did it once. I stayed by myself almost all of the time, but when forced to congregate with the big boys, I always tried to find Marion. I think he was two grades ahead. By the time, he graduated 6th grade, I was one of the big boys.
If anybody thinks that rural school was wonderful, they should re-evaluate. It may have been picturesque, but it wasn't fun. All of us had to sit quietly, no matter how cold it was at our desks, while the teacher sat up by the gas stove and called us up by grade and subject. "Third grade reading," meant that the third graders could sit by the fire for a few minutes while they showed their progress at reading. Then it might be "Fourth grade health." I particularly hated the subject of "health" because the books had big pictures of the insides of people's eyes. I couldn't even read the text without rivulets dripping down my cheeks.
The teacher, of course, had a long board. Whippings were executed publicly. The big boys took pride in their beatings and got a lot of them. Disciplinary time, or teacher-talking time, or visitor-talking time, was just more time to sit freezing in my wooden seat with my long legs folded under me and aching from what Mother called "growing pains." They were actually cramps from the cold and the tiny little desks.
We lived for those moments of our "lessons" when we got to sit by the fire and stretch.
We also lived for recess and lunch. Most of that time, we roamed the woods. We built caves or we tried to dam the little creek that ran behind the school. The caves were secret hideaways and the dams were supposed to be the start of our own swimming pool. All of them had to be rebuilt year-after-year. The hillside leading down to the creek was good for sledding when we had snow or ice. We built our own sleds from whatever wood we could find left behind by the big boys of yesteryear.
There was a big rocky area behind the school where nothing grew. It was almost circular and about 20 feet in diameter. If one kicked at the rocks, one could find coal underneath. In olden days, I suppose, the school was heated by coal.
There was a windmill at the school. The vanes still turned and it always faced the wind. But it wasn't hooked up to the pump below, so the windmill pumped no water. I suppose it did at one time, but, in my day, if you wanted water you had to pump it with the metal handle. Tar had been used to seal off water where the pump connected to the cement base of the windmill. We chewed it.
Of all my remembrances, the boulders are the best. They were granite outcroppings on the hill that rose up behind the school. My family called it "snakeshell mountain" because one of our cousins found a shell that a snake had molted there. But one of the old-timers from Lovelady insisted that it was truly called "Stink Hill."
About halfway up the hill, granite stuck up and formed a platform at the top. That's where we liked to eat our lunches. If we had time, we would climb through the blackjack oaks closer to the top where an even bigger outcropping with an even more accomodating platform was. I would love to go there now. It's probably the only thing left that is still the same as my childhood, but the school is gone and Stink Hill is fenced off.
After 6th grade, the graduates of Lovelady District 27 were bused about 14 miles, past the all-Black Napier school, to Byng Consolidated School north of Ada. I was 10 when I started at Byng. I would live in town, then country, then town, then country again before I was 16.
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