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Growing up Okie
Part Five

There was no school bus, I was eleven years old,I couldn't drive a car. We had young friends out there that were fourteen and fifteen and driving to school. You didn't have to have a license. I was too young to do that, so that is when I went to a boarding school.

But first I should tell you about the Pretty Water school. It was in the Creek Indian Nation. We had some full blood Indians, very interesting people, most of them had oil money and the rest of them were oil field workers. Most of them were pumping the oil wells. Most of the oil wells were old, but still producing so most of the people stayed on and settled down and made a life for themselves.

That was what my girlfriend's father did. She had a brother that was my first sweetheart. He was fourteen or fifteen and he had already gone on to high school one year. He had a car. One afternoon, he said we could drive it around the block, a mile each way, a mile square. We went to sand springs, pretty close to Tulsa. We thought we were very adventuresome going on a trip like that and no one knowing about it.

Another thing about living out there, there were gas wells all around and we burned natural gas in our stoves straight from the well. When the gas came to a low point, the pipe ran from a hill down into the valley, down in that bottom part, pure gasoline would collect and you'd put a little 'drip' in there. Just drill a hole or make a hole somehow and the gasoline would drip out and you'd plug it up with a wooden plug. That was the kind of gasoline all of us used. A little later it became illegal and they could test for it. They would take your car into town and test it and tell if you were burning 'drip' gas or not. The Catletts, that was my girlfriend's family, they sold a lot of it. They had more 'drips' then they could use the gas from. But when anybody from their company was there, you didn't buy gas from them, you just kept quite. That was the way we got our gas.

That was when my folks decided to send me to a boarding school. I went over to Warner, Oklahoma. It was over in Eastern Oklahoma. I went to a school, called Conner's Agricultural College. It was a two-year college and a high school. It had dormitories. I stayed in the dorms. It was better that I stay over there because my mother and dad were not getting along at the time.

I went there my first two years of high school. I was a member of the pep squad. They were teaching the girls to be farmer's wives and the boys to be farmers. We studied gardening, we studied cooking, we studied sewing, we studied poultry keeping, we studied all these things a farmer's wife needs to know. During that year there was an epidemic of spinal meningitis. The kids who lived in town could not come out and those of us who lived on campus went on to school. Finally those of us on campus got so far ahead that they closed the school and sent us all home. Remember, this is my second year of high school, I'm twelve years old, I'm taking the train home, which I had done before and my parents had to travel several miles to pick me up. I had gotten away from Warner too late. I had to change trains in Muskogee. Here I am, I am twelve years old and stranded in Muskogee. My train won't go until tomorrow. I guess I thought things through pretty well. I called my roommate who lived in Muskogee with an aunt and an uncle. They picked me up and I spend the night. I have thought about that since, being twelve years old and having to fend for myself in a strange town. Anyway I made it home OK.

At the end of the school year, my mother and stepfather separated. He was gone somewhere, I don't know where. I think he went into the service. A lot of times that was where guys went, because there were no jobs, or anything. That left mother to take care of all the business, with not much money. I guess they were in debt from the business.

Mother let me live my junior year I lived with Aunt BC in Wewokka, Oklahoma. If you have noticed, these are all Indian names. Supulpa, Tulsa, all of that had been Indian Territory. That was the year I was twelve. I had been twelve the April before. My Uncle was the district Manager for the Maytag Washing Machine Company. Every Saturday he had to go to Oklahoma City for a meeting and my aunt always went with him. She had two little boys. One was about a year old and the other one was about three. Every Saturday I stayed all day with those two and cleaned the house. Everyday I was to be home and take care of those boys so that she could go out awhile. Remember now, I was twelve years old. I got pretty used to that.

Then on Sunday afternoon I got to go to the movie. The thing the high school kids did was go to the Key Theater and sit up in the balcony. So you can imagine a whole balcony full of high school students. There was always a policeman up there because we had a tendency to get a little rowdy up there.

The next year was my senior year. I went back to live with my mother. She was living in Bristol at the time. Teaching in the two room school there. It was in the midst of the depression, 1931, and there was a state law that said you could only pay a teacher $120 a month. At the time that daddy left, they had already signed up to teach here. When he left, that broke his contract, but not mothers. So they had to get a new man to teach the big room. That was the big kids, usually from the fifth on up. The state law was that you couldn't pay more that $120. So mother and Mr. Bray each took $120. Mr. Bray didn't think he could work for $120 a month. So they made a deal that my mother would give Mr. Bray ten to fifteen dollars a month. It was her money. It came in her check, but she had to give it to him.

If mother and daddy had moved there and fulfilled their contract, they would have had this house to live in. It was a teacherage. It was the custom in that part of the country for the school district to supply a house for the teacher to live. There is a little story about this. These were rich schools districts because they had oil and they had more than enough money to run their schools, but the state wouldn't allow them to pay the teachers any more. That was the wage ceiling.

The funny part of this was when the Indians were moved from the East, one of the darkest spot in our countries history, they were shoved back to Oklahoma because it was the poorest land in the nation because they were not worried about them. The joke was on them because that land was oil rich. They drilled and they could have anything that they wanted.

So they furnished a place for the teacher to live. They built a new school and remodeled the old school into a teacherage. They had a new building for the new two-room school. This house would have been fine if mother and dad had remained together. But we had to share this house with the Brays. We had two rooms. One was a little living room and we left our living room furniture in there. The other room was the kitchen. That kitchen had our bed in it. We only had one bed. Mother and one of us girls would sleep in the bed and the other one would sleep on the couch all of the time. But I was going to go to Wewokka and stay with Aunt BC and help her that winter and go to school there. I stayed a while with my mother and this house you'd have to see it to get an idea of what it was like. We had to store some of our stuff under the house. It was on the school grounds.

To Be Continued - let us know how you liked it.

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Updated by bill bowlan on 09/10/2001