We have had a fantastic life, but it is quite different today than it was as I grew up. The world is so different now. We had nothing. I left home at age 17 and enlisted in the Navy during the Korean conflict (the forgotten war). When I came home at age 21, Dad was the pastor of a small rural church in Oklahoma. I met and about three months later married my beautiful, wonderful Billie Ruth. We married on my first payday from a new job, paying me $70 per week in 1955. Dad
was being paid $30 per week by his church and had the church provided a house to live in.
Billie's family sharecropped flood-plain land near a branch of the Red River. The landowner provided a three-room, frame home for them to live in. My father-in-law wired the house for electricity in 1954 when REA brought electricity to that area of rural Oklahoma. He wired one drop light fixture in the center of each room with the old yellow/black electrical wire. He ran one wire from the light fixture
in the kitchen across the ceiling and down the wall for an outlet for a refrigerator. He did another one in the living room for a radio power outlet. They had to draw water from a well with a bucket. There was no indoor plumbing; they had an outhouse. Their cook stove was butane. Their washing machine was an old gasoline Maytag machine with a ringer. My father-in-law replaced the gasoline engine with an
electric motor in 1954 after they had electricity and the gasoline engine gave up. They drew water from the well and heated it in a tub on the cook stove.
My father-in-law could not read or write. He had never attended public school. His father had kept him and his brother home to work the farm as they grew up. My mother-in-law could barely read and write. I helped them prepare their 1955 income taxes during the spring of 1956. Their share of the crop for 1955 was nearly $850. That is $850 for the entire year. My job paid annually over three times what they made. Of
course, they had a house to live in, two milk cows, some chickens, and a garden.
The US Government began a "soil bank" program in 1956. This new program paid farmers to not farm some acreage. The landowner came to my father-in-law and told him that he had put the land my father-in-law was farming into the "soil bank." He said that my father-in-law's share of the money from the "soil bank" would be $1,500, which would be nearly twice what he had made the year before. They could still live in the house they were in. My father-in-law thought about
it for a moment or so and said to the landowner, "But, what will I do?"
The landowner said that he could work by the hour for him on another farm and they could continue to live on the landowner's property, rent free. The landowner would pay my father-in-law 50 cents per hour, which meant that he would earn about $35 per week during the spring to fall working season. In fact, the land they had sharecropped did flood in the late spring of 1956, which would have really impacted any crop they planted.
My in-laws knew they were not rich, but never considered themselves poor. They never considered asking for help. They always worked for everything. When my father-in-law passed away, there was a
standing-room-only crowd at his funeral. The local Congressman, also a farmer, was present at the funeral. My father-in-law was well respected as a working farmer and as a person, regardless of the fact
that he had no formal education.
Even without any education, he was one of the smartest people I ever knew. He could figure math in his head to pay someone working for him
quicker than I could and I am good with math. He could repair almost anything. When his car with an automatic transmission quit, he pulled the transmission apart in the yard. He said, "Looks just like a Model T transmission." He took the worn and broken parts to the Ford dealer and bought new parts. Then he put the transmission together and it worked.
Jerry B.
My great-grandmother, Mary Jane, lived with her children after great-grandfather, John, died. Often she was dissatisfied because she had nothing to do. She wanted to keep house again. She longed to cook a meal.
In 1941, Mary Jane was 85 when she came to stay with my grandmother, Bessie, for a few months. Bessie had a new Frigidaire refrigerator instead of an ice box and a coal oil cookstove instead of a wood cookstove.
Mary Jane was restless after a few days. One morning about 10 o'clock, she complained, "I don't know why I have to eat what you fix. I can still cook."
Bessie said, "Mother, would you like to cook dinner today? You can use my kitchen any time." We called the noon meal dinner.
"YES, I will cook," Mary Jane replied. She rushed into the kitchen and put an apron on over her ankle-length dress. Mary Jane looked around the kitchen and opened first one cabinet and then another. She got out a pan or two and turned around several times without doing anything. She stared at the stove and refrigerator.
Suddenly Mary Jane yanked off the apron and swished back to her rocker. She said, "Fix your own dinner. I'M NOT YOUR SERVANT!"
Mary Jane didn't want to use the coal oil stove or open the refrigerator. She never did trust those "new fangled" gadgets and was always saying the day would come when we'd be happy to go back to cooking on a wood stove, cooling things in a window cooler or the well house, and washing clothes in a wash pot with a rub board!
Mary Jane never again asked to cook!
Jerry B.
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