Chapter Fourteen: Settling into Randlett Community in 1914.

Pearl is very pleased with coming west, as the end of Chapter Thirteen suggested. Randlett is somewhat settled and a new comfort in their daily routines is noted. She is now nine years old and in fourth grade and reads well and eager to learn and observe and make new friends. RAN, Ed.

Pearl’s narration resumes:

      When we arrived at the new home, Billy and I were delighted!  The house was a square wooden structure, built some eight years before.  The outside was white drop-siding, trimmed in brown.  Inside there were four rooms with plastered walls and ceiling, two large windows in each room except one in the back bedroom.  A large kitchen with pantry, back bedroom with a large walk-in closet, with a narrow south window.  This small room was probably intended to be used for a bathroom at some future date, but likely never would be, as the only household water supply was a cistern.  The northwest room was the living room, also serving as Mama’s and Papa’s bedroom.  When Grandma Thornton visited us hers was the back bedroom, the southwest room was mine and Billy’s bedroom.  The inside doors with door knobs that opened and closed so freely encouraged Billy and me to play a game as we ran through the doors and closed them behind us just for fun!  The grown-ups were busy unloading and placing furniture here and there in proper order, so very soon our little game was brought up short!

      The house faced the west upon a “public” road, as opposed to a private drive.  We had not lived in a home on a public road before, as our homes had been at the end of the lane, more or less.  At the back of the house there was a chicken house, a near privy, with a door to open and close with a door knob such as the doors in the big house.  Some distance back, northeast of the house was a large barn, painted red, with enclosed pens on either side for livestock, northeast of the barn one pen led into a small pasture of native grass enclosed with a barbed wire fence.  Within this pasture a pond provided water for the livestock, also, containing live fish which satisfied a young fisherman’s yen for the sport sometimes, when Papa would allow.

      The house was equipped with gutters all around the four sides of its roof; a so called hip roof.  At the apex of these four triangular sides of the roof appeared to be two windows as the points came together, but it was only an architectural device used to strengthen the finished roof.  The gutters led into a cistern which caught and held water for household use.  The cistern was located at the southeast corner of the house.

        Not far from the kitchen door, which had a doorstep some four feet square, was a storm cellar, where Mama would store canned vegetables and fruits as she put them away for the winter.  All told, this new home was quite a step up from our home in Fannin County, Texas, among the creeks and post oaks.  The home we left was not such a far cry from the area where Papa was reared in Eastern Oklahoma, nor Mama either, in middle Tennessee, but they had each been “out west” long enough to enjoy the freedom of the fresh air and sunshine associated with it.  So everyone was happy in the new location.

        The next item on the agenda for me was school – a new school, with a new teacher and pupils.  My cousins, Cecil and Bob Hatcher attended Valley View School which was two miles away to the west.  Bob and Cecil lived two and one-half miles southwest from the school.  My recollection fails me as to who the young lady was who taught the one room school which encompassed all eight grades.  From names dropped in the conversation of friends who lived in the community through the years, I believe it was Miss Bertha Wilkerson.  She remained there only a few weeks in that spring semester of 1914, however, when Mr. Ridings from Randlett, our town three miles north, became our teacher.  He drove a horse and a buggy without a top, and smelled of leather as I rode with him to school much of the time to the end of the winter days.  He was a nice gentleman, wearing a black derby hat and black leather gloves.  He was a Baptist preacher.

   I soon made acquaintances and new friends in school.  I was nine now, and walked the road to school with other students along the way.  After spring opened and the mornings were longer we would walk to school well ahead of Mr. Ridings in his buggy.  There was a home west of our corner about one-quarter mile, perhaps, with a girl and a boy in school.  We never knew them very well, but I do remember stopping by a few times to walk to school with them and smelling the bacon frying, the coffee pot boiling over and the biscuits burning, as the father had built a hot fire in the cook stove to speed up a late breakfast.  The mother and father both busy trying to get the children ready for school, were neglecting the cooking on these early mornings.  I finally gave up on these kids and passed them by, I suppose.

        Farther up the road lived the Bowman family, who were all very nice.  Dorothy, the oldest daughter was in the eighth grade, and played the organ, Lemuel, her sister was a seventh grader, both tall girls, and Perry, their brother, in the sixth grade.  I walked along with them from school, sometimes, but they walked much faster than I, and I recall that Perry out distanced all of us in his hurry to get home in the afternoon.

        The Page family lived in the second mile on my way to school.  These young people were John and Florence Page, twins, and Jake and Vern Page.  Across the creek, in a large home set back from the road lived the Postelwaits; Glen, Fay, and Ralph were the boys and twin sisters Leota and Leola.  The schoolhouse was located in the southwest corner of their farm.  Across the road south from the Postelwaits were the Lents.  I recall a girl of that family who didn’t attend school, Lessie Lents and a small boy, probably in the third grade, Leonard Lents.

Valley View school faced the south.  On the west side was a large concrete cellar and at the back on the north side, the two privies to accommodate the boy and girl students.  The school playground was equipped with swings fastened on a large frame on the west side of the building, a baseball diamond on the east.  A cistern at the northeast corner of the building furnished water for the school.

          A little friend that I loved very much was Martha Wyatt, who lived one and one-half miles south of the school.  The family resided on the farm where Uncle Bert and Aunt Dora lived when Billy, Papa and I first came to the Randlett area in 1910.  I was familiar with the place and visited Martha a few times there, but we were mostly school friends.  Another small girl whom I loved dearly was Linnie Shaddock who lived north and west of the school.  We were only school friends, also.  While on the subject of small young friends I will relate the childhood romance that all of us young kids enjoyed.  The romantic pair was none other than Martha Wyatt and Leonard Lents who became interested in each other.  

The world always “loves a lover”, they say, and this begins to be realized at a very early age.  We kids were talking about it every day on the way home from school and the first words the next morning were on the romance of the two third graders!  She was a cute little doll with short black hair that fell into curls, and he was a nice little fellow with an engaging smile.  I’m told that these two came together finally in marriage in their later years!

        The summer of 1914 brought delightful days for Billy and me.  A patch of wheat  lay just north of our house, so after the reaper had cut and bundled the grain and the men had put it into shocks (several bundles stacked together), we kids would find catching grasshoppers quite fun.  The greatest variety of hoppers that I have ever seen before or since that time, infested that wheat stubble.  The huge yellow ones were our favorites, as they were so awkward in flight we could catch them easily.  The small hoppers of darker shades were not easily found as they hid themselves under the shocks of wheat, a shield from the sun.  But the most interesting grasshopper of all was the small insect without wings.  They were covered with multicolor speckles – each color distinguishable, as we pointed out the many colors to one another.  We would gather quite a collection of the hoppers each morning in an empty bucket, go to the shade of the house and play with them on the back doorstep.  We learned to de-wing the flying ones so that they were easier to keep under our control.  After an hour or so of enjoying our catch, Mama would make us take them to the hens to eat.  That was nearly as much fun as gathering the hoppers, as we watched the hens chase them and when they were caught, the hens made short work of them with their beaks.

       Another game for Billy and me was pulling and pushing an old buggy chassis around, which found its place out by the barn.  It was quite a task for two kids, ten and five years olds, to push the vehicle around, but we would try to roll it, not getting it far from its parking place.  We felt very victorious over the task when we accomplished it.  It was fun while it lasted.  But we had four little kittens who lived with their mother at the barn.  They were just learning to follow us around, but we had not learned yet to watch out for them, to see that they didn’t get under the wheels.  On one occasion we were so absorbed in trying to turn the vehicle around, that we didn’t see the kitten as he had wandered away from the barn and toward the moving wheels.  Suddenly we hear a cry and saw the kitten just as a wheel ran over his back parts.  We grabbed him up and hurried with him to the house to see if Mama could do anything for him.  When Papa returned from the field, he told us nothing could be done as he was broken down in his back.  He dragged himself around for a few days, Billy and I fed him apart from the other kittens, and he would eat and seemed healthy, but Papa and Mama were sure he was in pain, so Papa took him behind the barn and killed him to take him out of his misery.  Billy and I were sad about the kitten’s death, of which we had been the cause, and I don’t recall that we played with the old buggy chassis again.

We saw our cousins, Cecil and Bob Hatcher, quite frequently.  They would mount their horses and ride over to visit us.  I especially remember Bob as he would tease Papa about anything he could think of; Papa was a good match for his antics.  Bob, then ten, would sit on Papa’s knee and taking Papa’s hat off he would reset it on one side of his head, making him look very “dudish”.  Then Bob would say, “That’s the way Uncle Pete wore his hat when he was courting Aunt Betty!”  This would produce a big laugh among us.  The wearing of the hat on one side for a young fellow was a sign that he was courting some young lady he was in love with in those days.

        The summer of 1914 marked the year we first saw a comic strip.  I believe the “Katzenjammer Kids”, “Mutt and Jeff”, and possibly others were in existence, but we had not been introduced to them.  Papa subscribed to the Burkburnett Star, a weekly newspaper, and the very back page, half of which, was devoted to “Buster Brown”, advertising Buster Brown Shoes, to be sure, but a story in picture, none the less, which Billy and I devoured each time it came.  Our mailbox was some one quarter mile south of our house at an intersection, and it was our task to go to the mailbox each day to pick up the mail – if there was any.  As I recall, the newspaper came to our box on Saturday, so on that day we joyfully went to the mail box.  Many times there were letters as Papa’s and Mama’s family members wrote quite frequently.

        Billy and I would take our little dog “Cricket” to the mailbox with us, usually at around the noon hour when then postman would pass by.  One hot day he was going with us and we, barefoot, were quite aware of the heat of the sand to the feet and to the dog’s feet, too.  Billy, realizing this picked the dog up and said, “Cricket’s little trotters are getting hot!”  We had heard Mama call our pets’ feet “trotters”, and probably ours, too.  I told Mama and Papa of the incident when we returned, everyone thought it was cute, so it became a family story, repeated many times.

         A wild, stray cat “holed up” under our house that summer.  Mama wanted her to get out so we could close up the man hole which opened up in the foundation on the south side of the house.  Mama took Billy and they stationed themselves on the north side and banging on the lower wall frightened the cat out the man hole.  I was standing a little too close to the hole and had just stooped over to peep under the house to see if the cat was coming when she shot out and away she fled!  My bare feet were in her path and as she accelerated her speed, her claws caught the top of my right foot, just above the toes.  I hurried crying to Mama to tell her about the incident, she cleansed the wound but after it was healed there were three distinct lines across my foot which can still be dimly seen nearly eighty years later!

         I recall Mama’s subscription to a magazine “The Woman’s World”, in that era.  I was impressed with an advertisement of “Colgate” tooth paste, which I had noticed for the first time.  Mama and Papa had probably been induced to buy the magazine by some door to door salesman that had stopped by our home in a horse drawn buggy.  The “drummer”, or pack peddler as they were commonly called, made frequent visits to our home there in Cotton County as they traveled the country roads that crisscrossed the area.  The drummer usually arrived at our house around noon, for two, quite probable, reasons:  Mama would have a good meal prepared and Papa would invite them to eat with us.  Another good reason was that Papa would be at home and, if he could, by chance, sell Mama some of his wares, Papa would have money in his wallet.  Of course, the peddler always gave Mama some item from his pack to pay for his meal.  We kids were always anxiously awaiting the opening of the pack which had many interesting items for the kitchen plus sewing needs such as thread, lace and embroidered trimmings.  Ready to use dresser scarves, pillow cases and table cloths, both for stand tables and dining tables.   (Some of these items can probably still be found among other antiques in Mama’s trunk.)  Nothing the peddler sold was of particular interest to Billy and me, but we were excited at any purchase Mama would decide upon.

             Mama’s oldest brother, John, and his wife Annie, and two children, Mable and Hubert, had moved to Walters, Oklahoma, about the time we moved near Randlett.  Through correspondence, they had invited us to visit them, so Mama and Papa decided to make the twenty mile trip one Saturday morning, to return home on Sunday.  Aunt Dove’s sons would ride over on horseback, some five miles, to feed the livestock and milk the cow.  This was to be a trip that Billy and I looked forward to with great expectation.  The visit was probably an uneventful occasion, but the children were near mine and Billy’s ages, with whom we became acquainted, during our brief stay.  The parents were all happy to meet; Papa, for the first time, was to become acquainted with Uncle John and Aunt Annie.  Mama and Uncle John would reminisce old times back in their Tennessee home!

My only lasting impression of the trip, the one and only reason that I am sure that we children made the trip with our parents (we could have stayed with Grandma Thornton at home), was that as we drove along the road approaching Walters, the county seat of Cotton County, billboards began to appear advertising the various mercantile business located in the city.  Many of the advertisements were self-explanatory, but the one that listed, Smith and Jones, Undertakers, was puzzling to me.  It suddenly occurred to me to ask Papa this question:  “What do undertakers do?”  He explained to me their work of preparing bodies of persons who had died, and conducting the burials.  This was a depressing revelation to me.  

In a quite natural way I had learned the general meaning of “undertaking” as doing a task that was difficult.  I mulled over the use of the word in this particular sense for many days.  Ever think “I wish I hadn’t asked?”  That was one time that I had that very thought!  But now I knew!  The services of preparing the dead for burial were done by neighbors who lived close by in our way of life.  Actually, I had not come in contact with a mortician’s service in my short lifetime.  My folks didn’t use this service when my sister died five years earlier; neither did the Roark family in Fannin County when Mr. Roark died.  So the service of the “undertaker’ had taken on an entirely new meaning for me.

        Mama was quite vocal in recalling deaths and burials of older relatives back in Tennessee which was always sad to me.  On the other hand, Papa was of an entirely different temperament.  He appeared to abide by the adage found in the Bible, “let the dead bury its dead”.  A year or so later than this event, on a dreary rainy afternoon, a horse drawn hearse passed our house.  Mama explained the use of the long, black vehicle, and she supposed that a man had died who lived a mile or so up the road.  He was very aged and had been seriously ill.  Papa was acquainted with Mr. Runnels, I believe, but they were not acquaintances of our family.

         Cecil Hatcher, Aunt Dove’s and Uncle Elias’ oldest son became very ill in that summer of 1914.  He had an extremely high temperature, and, as I recall, almost unbearable pain in his head.  Doctors couldn’t seem to come to a satisfactory diagnosis of his case; only seeking to reduce the fever and the pain by administering medication.  The family members were all troubled and fearful.  Neighbors visited frequently offering their help in any and every way possible, so Papa, Mama, Billy and I drove over one afternoon in the wagon to visit the family to offer our love and support in their time of suspense.  I remember our family all standing together in the front room and Papa and Mama began to inquire where Aunt Dove was.  Uncle Elias said she had gone off down into the pasture alone some time before our arrival.  Papa appeared quite agitated about her going alone into the sand hills and sage brush, indicating that he should go and find her, when I recall hearing Mama quietly say, “She has gone off by herself to pray.”  Papa nodded his agreement, and after awhile Aunt Dove returned, appearing quite peaceful within, wearing her usual smile as she greeted our family.  I believe Cecil’s malady lasted for some two weeks, when the pain began to diminish, without a known reason for the illness.  After a few weeks of recuperation he recovered completely.  Cecil was never as playful with our family as Bob was, but he rode his horse over to our house occasionally to fish in our stock pond back of the barn.

So, we look forward to Pearl’s next chapter in her young life at age nine. Several interesting occurrences in their family, including frightening illnesses and some adventures of childhood are described. Stay tuned. RAN