More Memories of Heavener

I remember:

--playing in a tree house over the shed behind the Davis home.  We watched the neighborhood girls playing in the shed across the alley.  One of the girls was Darlann West (now dead) who went on to marry Ronald Standridge.

 --being amazed in Nina Dozier’s classroom (sixth grade) one day by the contrails visible out the west windows.  At the time we thought that was a sure sign that they were evidence of jet airplanes although I now know that any high altitude airplane produces a contrail.

 --having a crush on Georgie Mitchell in the second grade.  She was the greatest thing I had seen to that point in my life.

 --walking down from the Blue Mountain Forest service tower one day with Billy Brazil when Bob Giesentanner’s Cadillac (Bob was pastor of the Heavener First Presbyterian Church) had a flat and he had no spare.  He remained on the mountain with the girls (Alma Brazil, Ansalee Pilkington, and one of the Carl girls—Shirley, I think) while Billy and I walked to Hodgens.  We were picked up by Chief Heavener and driven to Heavener.  Boy, were the folks angry at Bob for not taking better care.

 --mowing the yard on Saturday morning so I could go to the double feature matinee at the Liberty.  I earned a whole quarter which was enough to get into the show (10 cents) and buy a Coke (5 cents) and a big Baby Ruth candy bar (10 cents).  Typical shows were the likes of Roy Rogers’ wholesome, good-guy-always-wins full length movies and serials like Rocketman.  Other cowboy heroes were Lash LaRue, Gene Autry, and Hopalong Cassidy.  I later met Roy Rogers and Dale Evans on an airplane out of Nashville when I was over forty years old.

 --football practices that began at 2:30 and lasted until 7:00 and during which we received no water.  The common wisdom of the time was that it would give us stomach cramps and, besides, real men didn’t need it.  Pete Davis used to bring a lemon or two which we would pass around and suck on to alleviate our thirst.

 --being the first boy in my class to have his voice change.  And boy did it change—all the way to a deep bass!  When I would answer the roll call in a class everyone would giggle.

 --sitting in Sunday School class and holding hands with Margaret Carl.

 --sitting in Luther Woolbright’s mathematics classes (we were seated by level of demonstrated proficiency—i.e., average grade) and playing “hands” behind my back with Jessie Williams who became my wife some six years later.

 --having Mama take me to Howe one Saturday in the tenth grade to show Luther Woolbright a particularly elegant solution to a geometry problem he had worked out the day before.  His solution was brute strength and not elegant like mine.

 --taking Jessie home in Conser and then really burning up the road to get back to my home before my curfew which was an hour earlier than hers.

 --going to Westminster Fellowship meetings at the Presbytery level.  We went to places like Muskogee, some times the second car was a really dilapidated 1941 Pontiac coupe that Daddy owned.  We have piled as many as nine people in that old car and driven the full 80 miles all jammed up together.

 --playing at the Fox house on the corner catty corner from the Gartner house almost every evening during one summer.  Lots of evenings we tried to knock bats down by waving a white cloth on the end of a long fishing pole.  It was there (at the age of ten or less) that I kissed the first girl in my life.  It was as the result of a “walk around the house” in a spin-the-bottle game.  In this game we could either tell something secret about ourselves or take that walk.