March 28, 2006

• eighth grade, age twelve, Texas Panhandle

  Events in this entry occurred in springtime,
  forty-nine years ago.   My mother and I had survived our first winter in the Panhandle
  in a little former chicken coop with tattered tarpaper siding that let
  in the wind.  We had gotten out of there and into a cozy little house,
  where we spent almost all our time when she wasn’t at work and I wasn’t
  at school, watching TV or working on my homework.  Social life, at that time, was non-existent.

  Mama had always avoided any kind of public charity or government
  welfare programs.  That stemmed partially from the sort of “pride”
  her parents had programmed into her, and partially from fears born of
  stories she’d heard in California of single mothers having their kids
  taken away from them if they couldn’t support them.  In Vernon, we
  had no family to fall back on and she unbent far enough to start making
  monthly trips to the county fairgrounds on “commodity foods day” to get
  the surplus food donated by the U.S. Department of
  Agriculture.   It became my job to plan menus to use those
  foods and to try to keep the supplemental grocery shopping lists as
  short and cheap as possible.  That’s the kind of challenge I have
  always enjoyed.

  One Saturday that Spring, the tornado sirens sounded.  While Mama
  and I were grabbing our sweaters and putting on our shoes the landlady,
  Marie, pounded on the door and yelled, “hurry up!”  Mama yelled
  back that we were on our way, and we followed her into her storm
  cellar.  The dirt walls were lined with sagging wooden shelves full of jars of
  tomatoes, peaches and other home-canned foods.  There were three
  old canvas folding army cots set up on the dirt floor.  Another
  family of neighbors, the Howells, were already there.  Once we
  were all inside, and the door shut, nothing happened.  We sat and
  talked a little.  Mr. Howell (the town’s fire chief, called
  “Sparky”) decided the danger wasn’t immanent.  He climbed out to
  go back to his house for a bottle of something, alcoholic I assume.

  When he came back and lifted the door, a gust of wind yanked it out of
  his hand.  It took three other people to help him get inside and
  shut the door.  That was when the hailstorm hit.  The wooden
  door
  was faced with corrugated metal, and the hail beating on it made so
  much noise we could just barely hear the wind howling and couldn’t hear
  each other talking, so we just sat there quietly.  I covered my
  ears and closed my eyes.  Soon the noise died away, and then we
  heard the “all clear” siren.  When we opened the door, we found
  the yard flooded ankle deep, with hailstones floating in the
  water.  Some of the hail was about as big as golf balls.  We
  took off our shoes and waded through the ice water back to our
  house.  I was shivering and immediately ran a hot bubble bath to
  warm me up.

  I was settling in at school, but it would be inaccurate to say that I
  fit in.  I wanted to fit in, and hadn’t a clue how to do
  that.  I have never been comfortable putting myself forward in
  social situations, introducing myself, making small talk, asking
  innocuous questions to start a conversation.  At the age of
  twelve, I not only lacked those skills, I wasn’t even aware of that
  aspect of social life.  If someone said hi to me, I said hi
  back.  If someone asked me a question, I answered… and after
  that the conversation fizzled.  My curious and searching questions
  often repelled people.  Now that I think about it, I
  haven’t changed much these last fifty years, except that I have fewer
  questions.

  Differences in the curricula between Kansas and Texas made it necessary
  for me to work to catch up.  Math was taught by a different
  method, and suddenly I had to memorize all the “times tables”,
  multiplication, through X-twelve.  Seven was the only one that
  gave me any trouble.  I made a set of flash cards and Mama drilled
  me for hours on seven times this or that.   I’ve already mentioned
  the state
  history.  I had spent enough time in Kansas to learn who Wyatt
  Earp was (“white urp” was what I thought the kids were saying at
  first).  The local Kansas history I’d put so much effort into
  learning when I moved from California was of no use at all in
  Texas.  I began learning in school about Sam Houston, Stephen F.
  Austin and other great Texans.  Outside of class, I also started
  picking up information about the local folk of past and present.

  I
  learned that the town pretty much belonged to E. Paul Waggoner, whose
  father Tom had founded the biggest ranch in Texas.  The King Ranch
  covered more territory, but it was broken up, not all in one contiguous
  geographic piece.  The Waggoner spread is spread out over a big
  chunk of Wilbarger County and the county to the east of it, between
  Vernon, Seymour, and Electra, which had been named after old Tom
  Waggoner’s daughter.  Electra had been called Beaver Switch before
  Tom drilled some disappointing salty and oily water wells for his
  cattle near there, then leased them to Texaco.

  
  The oilfields were the biggest employer in the area, and the Waggoners
  ran Hereford cattle (pronounced HUR-furred) and bred champion
  quarterhorses.  Poco Bueno was one of those horses, and more
  famous than old Tom and E.Paul put together.  I recall seeing him
  demonstrating the speed and agility for which quarterhorses are famous
  at the Santa Rosa Roundup, my first rodeo. 
  Rodeo was big stuff in Vernon, as was the parade that preceded the
  Santa Rosa Roundup.  The town has a famous mounted drill team, all
  mounted on golden palominos.

  Another
  famous local boy was Quanah Parker, last chief of the Comanche, never
  defeated or captured by whites, leader of the last band of Comanches
  from the Llano Estacado to go into the reservation.  Quanah’s
  mother, Cynthia Ann,
  had been kidnapped by Comanches in a raid on Fort Parker when she was
  about ten years old.  She was adopted by the tribe and her family
  had refused, at her request, several attempts by whites to ransom
  her. 

  When she was in her mid-thirties, she and her baby daughter were captured by Sul
  Ross and a bunch of Texas Rangers and U.S. cavalrymen on a retaliatory
  raid.  She was returned to her white relatives, escaped several
  times, and was recaptured.  Finally, after her daughter died, she
  refused food and starved herself to death.

  The Texan folklore was lots more interesting and exciting to me than
  the stories of Kansas lawmen and railroad moguls.  One of my
  teachers recommended J. Frank Dobie to me.  I read Tongues of the Monte
  and it seemed as if some of those stories were as familiar to me as the
  tales my father had told me, although I knew I’d never heard or read
  them before.  At the time, it just seemed eerie and
  inexplicable.  Now I recognize it as a fairly typical bit of
  past-life memory leaking through the veil.

  All through the rest of eighth grade, I struggled to catch up in
  school.  I did fine with some of my teachers.  I thought I’d
  found a sure-fire way to score some points with one old lady who seemed
  to have taken an immediate dislike to me.  In Halstead, spelling
  bees had been mandatory for the entire class.  In Wichita,
  spelling bees didn’t happen in junior high.  In Vernon, the
  spelling bee was an optional after-school activity, a competition for a
  spot in the regional competition for the national spelling bee.  I
  figured I’d wow her with my spelling prowess.

  She eliminated me in the first round, a written test.  I was
  stunned.  I looked at my paper and saw that she had marked three
  words as wrong.  I knew they were spelled correctly, so I
  challenged her on it.  Great way to score points, eh?  She
  said that she “couldn’t read [my] writing,” that the squiggle at the
  end of each of those words didn’t look like an “e” to her.  She
  insisted that the letter “e” on the end of a word had to be finished
  off with an upward stroke.  My eees ended at the line, and still
  do, as I was taught in California.  That style had been acceptable
  in Kansas, and was probably acceptable to other teachers in Vernon
  Junior High. 

  I later learned from other kids that G.G.Garrett, the only other kid
  who showed up for the spelling bee, was that teacher’s pet.  G.G.
  was one of the cutest, most appealing boys in school.  He had
  older brothers who pretty much wore out his clothes before they handed
  them down to him..  He also had a deep voice, a shy grin, and a
  forelock of sandy dark blond hair that always hung over one eye. 
  He’d toss his head to get the hair out of his face.  He went on to
  be eliminated in the regional spelling bee.  I heard from another
  classmate that G.G. stayed in Vernon and became a mail carrier.

  There was a record store in town run by a friendly man who never seemed
  to mind if people just came in and browsed without buying.  At the
  back of the store were several enclosed booths for listening to
  records.   He’d put the disks (they were black vinyl 33 1/3
  RPM albums, except for some kids’ Little Golden Records that were
  yellow and played at 78 RPM, and a few 45 RPM singles with big holes in
  the center) on a turntable behind the counter and the music would come
  through stereo speakers in the booth.

  One Saturday afternoon, I went in there looking for something
  specific.  I had heard some flamenco music and it really grabbed
  me.  I had made a mental note of the guitarist’s name, Carlos
  Montoya, but when I got to the store I couldn’t think of it.  The
  man asked me if I was looking for anything special, and I said there
  was a guitarist, but I couldn’t recall his name….  He suggested
  Chet Atkins, somebody I’d never heard of.  I was still doing my
  usual trying-to-remember scowl, and eventually the word, “flamenco,”
  came to mind.  When I said “flamenco,” he suggested Sabicas and I
  said that wasn’t the one.  Before I was out of there that day, I’d
  heard some Montoya, some Sabicas, Chet Atkins, and some Les Paul and Duane Eddy for
  good measure.  I think the old guy was having as much fun
  broadening my musical education as I was having listening to all those
  guitars.

  One day on the way home from school, I heard a PSA on the car radio for
  a free American Red Cross First Aid training course being offered at
  the fire station.  I asked Mama and she said I could go. 
  Classes were two nights a week.  I loved it, even though I was the
  only kid there.  As usual, the adults treated me with amused
  tolerance until I demonstrated my ability to learn quickly and grasp
  complex concepts.  First aid in that era was a lot closer to what
  paramedics do now. 

  CPR wasn’t part of it, because nobody was doing that back then. 
  There was a technique called “artificial respiration” that more or less
  served the same purpose, but not as effectively.  I had a Red
  Cross course a few years ago, a refresher, and it was nothing but CPR
  and some superficial stuff about stabilizing, immobilizing, avoiding
  contamination with bodily fluids, and calling 911.  I’m glad I
  have the skills I learned fifty years ago, and some books such as Where There is No Doctor and The Barefoot Doctor’s Manual, because paramedics’ response times out here aren’t very fast.

  We learned how to splint broken bones, reduce compound fractures, stop
  bleeding from wounds, treat burns, and a lot of other useful
  skills.  I don’t recall in which course I learned what. 
  After I finished the Standard course, I signed up for the
  Advanced.  That was so much fun that I went ahead and took the
  Instructor’s training.  By the time school was out and Mama and I
  were ready to leave for our annual California road trip, I was a
  certified Red Cross First Aid Instructor.  When we got back to
  Vernon later that summer, Sparky Howell apologetically informed me that
  Red Cross had informed him that because of my age I wasn’t even
  qualified to attend the advanced course.  My instructor’s
  certification wasn’t valid because I wasn’t 21 years old.
  

  Google provided all the images in this entry.

  • 10:48 pm
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