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Growing up Okie I was born on Easter Sunday, 1916. My mother's name was Conie Hunter and my father's name was James Edward Douglas. My parents were married in the May before I was born the next April. My Grandfather's family came from Texas when my mother was only four years old. They came to Shawnee before Oklahoma became a state. My grandfather owned a bar. At that time I think it was called a saloon. When Statehood came in 1907 Oklahoma came in as a dry state so my grandfather had to get something else to do. He moved to a farm south about twenty miles from town and built a new house. It was not a big house, but it was better than the houses in the neighborhood. He had the specifications in his lumber order that there would be no knotholes in the boards. When they started to build the house, he found a knothole and he insisted that they go by horseback or in the wagon, back to Shawnee and get a replacement board. He was very specific in that. He was a very truthful person and very blunt. In the first place, he came to Oklahoma because all of his family lived in Texas and he wanted to get away from them to live his own life. He went to Maud, Oklahoma where one of his former employees owned a store. He bought a barrel of flour and he told the man plainly, "I don't aim to pay you for it, because you have stolen much more than this from me". A neighbor came one time to borrow a tool and he said "Hell no, you used it once and you broke it and you can't have it again". He was very plain spoken. My mother was one of six girls with very strange names. The first daughter's name was Ginney Ophelia, the second was name Quincy Illinois, the third was named Lady Corda, and my mother's name was Conie, She spelled it C-o-n-I-e. Her father said it was a Bible name. In the Proverbs, it says that the Conie is a very small animal. That is where she got it. Her next sister was Molly The youngest one had no name except the initials BC, which were my grandfather's initials (Barry Cornelius). They were very hardworking. My Father's mother was a widow. The Indians had killed her husband. She had several children. In those days there was no welfare. She had her farm. They raised what they ate. My mother told me about my grandmother one time with my grandmother saying that she could remember sitting up all night because she was worried about how they were going to get by and she would shell peas all night so they would have something to eat. They didn't go to school much of the time because they had no shoes. When they went out to hunt rabbits for meat, they tied rags around their feet. So my father had a very hard upbringing. Updated by bill bowlan on 09/10/2001 |