Morgan Hill is a wonderful small town.
And, this is a story of the home where I grew up in Enid,
Oklahoma, a small town.
Morgan Hill is a wonderful small town. And, this is a story of the home where I grew up in Enid, Oklahoma, a small town.
Nevertheless, that “white house” was built in 1907. In the late 1920s, my uncle purchased it for around $7,000. The house sported a marvelous front porch with four great white columns. As I remember, there were two bedrooms downstairs and three bedrooms upstairs. Moreover, this “white house” surrounded a living room, a gigantic kitchen and pantry, as well as a back porch with the washing machine, but only one bathroom.
Now, my “growing-up home” is 98 years old. God willing, in two years, it will reach 100.
As I remember the 1930s and 1940s, my family’s big “white house” always seemed to be filled with my parents, uncle and grandmother, who lived with us until she died at 92. Yet, my family survived hard times. Our home was always filled with love.
On the corner in front of my house was the bus stop. A sidewalk separated the grassy and tree-covered parking from our front yard. But my house, a great white two-story cube dominated the corner. The peaked roof formed a green pyramid over all and the green roofed porch stretched completely across the front, a touch of the ante-bellum South.
Above the porch stared the double windows of my room, like eyes looking out on the world. And, so they were for me, a child, as I approached the future.
The living room was just that. The family came together there, lingered there, related and lived there. My view of life in the 1940s came from my favorite place – prone on the rug in front of the RCA Victor console radio in the living room.
Here, I fantasized the radio adventures of “The Green Hornet,” “Captain Midnight,” as well as “Jack Armstrong, the All American Boy.”
Beside me, prone on the rug in front of the radio, snoozed my small black and white Boston bull terrier. Pepper was a pug-nosed, screw-tailed bull dog; her tail twisted up tight to her backside. She might chase a cat, but if mother clapped her hands sharply, Pepper would stop so fast she would skid on her back sides – and so would I. There was no doubt, mother was a dominant force in our family, a stern and strict disciplinarian.
On Sunday morning, mother, grandmother and I always went to Sunday school and church. Daddy never did. He searched for his bliss away from the tee-totaling women folk, out in the garage with a cigar and a nip from a half-pint.
After our Sunday dinner, our noon meal, the family relaxed in the living room reading the Sunday papers. I might ponder the “funnies” from the divan by the bay windows. Along the back wall of our gathering place, Grandmother, sitting in a massive old chair, might read a section of the local paper or her Bible. Mother might glance at the society pages from her occasional chair. But Daddy always sat in his big over-stuffed chair between the front window and the front door, reading news.
My years in the “white house” were termed by historians as years of the “Depression,” but I remember the era as nothing but “good times.” Probably not only because I was an only child, but also because my family was loving, coherent, positive, and a dynamic unit. Our family seemed to be immune to terribly hard times. Nevertheless, we could hardly claim riches.
My father worked as a surveyor for the WPA, President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. Mother no longer taught grade school, but, by some heroics, managed the “great white house.” Grandmother had her room next to mine and maintained her dominance in our family as “the cook.” And, Uncle Tubby had his own room upstairs on the right of my room.
Uncle Tubby was the vice-president of Hackney Iron and Steel. In the 30s and 40s, Hackney fabricated propane tanks for almost all the farmers in the northern half of Oklahoma. They jumped into the great farm modernization of the era. And, their sales flourished.
No matter, my room at the top of the stairs of the “white house” remained my haven through my childhood to my adulthood – a cocoon that fostered my metamorphosis.
