1929 I was 14.
We were 'fattening' 80 head of hogs for market and were going to really have a 'good year'. We used the wagon and team to bring corn in from the field to fatten them. We brought stalk and all.
If the corn was really dry, we shucked it.
We went to the saw mill and bought ‘first cut’ boards, they still had some bark on the edges. We built a platform in one corner of the hog pen. We would put the corn on the boards, and the hogs could get it better.
Bill remembers that sometimes two hogs would get hold of the same ear of corn and try to shake the other one loose.
"It was a sight---how they would shake their heads and squeal."
They liked watermelons to eat too. Watermelons would 'hold them' but not fatten them. We had big plans made
Suddenly the depression---the stock market 'crashed'.
In New York, men who lost all their money, some jumped out their office windows. No one could get any money, all the banks closed when people ‘run on them’, to get all their money out. Uncle Charlie had about $800 in the bank. It was his money and he was going to take his gun and make them give his money to him. Uncle Burl had some too. They finally got a few cents back, on every dollar that they had in the bank.
Our money was in our hogs, and our hogs were worthless.
The few that we did sell, so big and fat, we got a dollar a head for them.
There was no place to sell them, we couldn't afford to feed them.
One day we killed 9 and salted down the meat.
We gave away meat. There wasn't anything for us to do.
DIGGING COAL
After that, Poppy would work digging coal--- to make money to buy groceries. A man could bring his teenage sons. I dug too, and sometimes Lawrence. I hated to miss school, but there were 8 of us in the family. No one cared how many hours or what time you went to work. Some went in at two or three a.m. Sometimes we did, so we could get our plowing, or cotton picking done during the day. We farmed our land and worked at the coal mines, too. Usually there wasn’t much over a dozen men working.
Bill remembers that the McAlester Coal Company “saved a lot of lives.” It was just west of Briartown. There was 5 or 6 small mines. At the foot of the mountain is an outcropping of coal. It is about 18 inches thick, never over 20, just that one layer of coal, all spread out. It had the best grade of 'blacksmith coal'. Solid rock or sometimes shale, is above the coal.
Four inches of "mother coal" is just under the good black coal. Mother is about the color of slate. Mother, would burn, but iron 'clinkers' would melt out and stick to the stove or grates.
You couldn't bust a clinker with a sledge hammer, any way that you hit it.
We started digging the coal where it 'cropped out', above the ground, on the outside of the mountain. That was the entrance of the mine. It sloped out in certain directions. We would lay on our side and dig the coal out.
We bought our own clothes, tools, carbide and black powder.
Chip a little off, and tapping on the overhead rock would tell you, by the sound, if it was a big loose rock, or solid enough to put a prop under it. Use a pick to peck at the coal, a short handled pick. Dig a little coal and then tap an iron wedge between the coal and the rock and break the coal off in chunks. Get an opening and set a short tree-trunk-post under the rock, to keep it from settling.
We put the props pretty close together. Usually they were just 18 or 20 inches high. That was just enough room for us to scoot along on our side and shovel the waste out of the way, up around the posts. When the tunnel was wide enough, dynamite was carefully used to make a deeper path and lay some tracks. A straight track would be dug back a block or so.
You could nearly stand up in some of the tunnels, it was 'back breaking
A flat coal car would run on the track. It was a little bigger than a house door. You laid chunks of coal around the edge and then piled it on. John Howard was a big old Indian. He could load a lump of coal nearly as big as a coal car.
A loaded car weighed about a ton. I think a ton was $1.75. Maybe you would work all day and not get a ton, 2000 pounds.
Some people could get two tons, some days, that was 'good money'.
‘Rooms' went off the main tunnel. You always worked with a partner in 'your room'. The only light was the carbide light that hung on your soft cap 'Hard-hats' had not been thought of. It was as 'black as a cat'. If you lost your light, you were in trouble. There was no electricity.
Carbide looks like little gray gravel. We used it in a little metal light that hang on our soft caps. When water was dripped on carbide, it put off gas that burned. A tiny flame burned in front of a curved reflector, that focused a bright beam. When we laid on our side where the water couldn't drip down on the carbide, the light got dim. We knew to sit back up, and the light would get brighter. It made a good light for fishing or frog hunting. We used it for digging coal. It was always as black as a cat where we were, underground. We tried to dig just five days a week, we were farming too.
But if the company needed coal, we worked more.
LAWRENCES EYES One Saturday morning, me and Lawrence were digging coal in 'our room'. His light slowly got dimmer, he knew it would soon go out. He crawled out of the crack where he had been laying on his side, digging. He got to where he could set down, to refill his light. We bought carbide in 20 pound cans. Our can was about empty.
Lawrence loosened the lid before he put out his light. That was against safety rules. The can must have had moisture in it---because it exploded and flashed up in his face. He got his eyes closed, but it burned his eyelids. Unguentine, a salve for burns, had come out. I had a tube and rubbed it on his eyes and all over his face. I put him in my car and took him to Doc Val in Porum. He said there wasn't any thing else he could do and he didn't even charge us.
A lot of time was spent moving the mother and rock, back out of your way. We shoveled a lot of shale. There was plenty of room to put it around the braces. You always left some strips of coal that you did not remove, or the mountain would settle down. Then peck on the rock and tell if it's solid and put up posts to hold the top rock up. Sometimes thin rock would fall.
One man was tapping on the ceiling and his leg got caught under a rock that fell. Men got around him and dug nearly all night and got the big rock off of his leg. He come right back to digging, his family had to eat.
We used a 3-foot long auger, to drill by hand in the hard coal.
Then put about a half cup of 'black powder', tightly wrapped in paper, in the hole. Put a fuse in and caulk it with clay or dirt. We always drilled about four places in 'our room'.
About three or four o'clock every day, we all come out and a special licensed man went down and set off the powder. We told him how many, and where we had put the charges. He went in at quitting time and lit all the fuses and he got out from under ground, before they started going off. If a fuse wasn't two foot long he wouldn't light it, because he might not get out of the mine in time. The dust was settled, by the time we come back to work.
A state inspector come out every once in a while and tested for gas. There never was any gas where we worked, that I knew of.
'Damps' was stale, bad air. You didn't go very far back without an air shaft. The company dug a shaft from above, to get air to ventilate. They would put fans at the exits to move the air. Engines would run the fans, there was no electricity. Every day the air shafts was inspected to see they were open. Curtains were hung, to direct air into the rooms that were being dug in.
It was cooler underground. Even when the hot outside air circulated, it never was hot under ground. When you would dig up over your head, pry down and shovel and set up posts, you got to sweatin’ from working.
We would lay on our side, wedged up in a crack, eighteen inches high--trying to reach that one more lump of coal, to get our coal car loaded.
Thirty years later, I was having a physical and the Doctor had his stethoscope on my back. He asked me about a little knot there. He said he could see 'black' down in it. I told him that I didn't know, unless it was coal. He dug the black lump out, that had been ground in years ago.
Baldy Adams was the boss, he had a new 1932 V8 Ford. I wanted to set in it so bad. I was glad when he had me drive it to town to buy 'first one thing and then another', that he needed.
I had a car, and if I was working on Saturday, I would go out of the mine, and listen to the radio. Lee’s girls, Orba Lee and her sister Ovilla, were real good singers. Brother Dave Harris preached on the radio on Saturday morning. For two years he took them to Tulsa and they sang on his program. They had a good time, and we were all proud of them.
They went with him and sang at funerals, too. Sometimes it would be an Indian funeral. They weren’t all buried in a cemetery. Sometimes it was in their yard or out under a tree.
Orba Lee’s ‘8th grade trip’, they went to the prison at McAlester.
She won’t forget that as they were leaving, the Warden grabbed her arm,
“You didn’t come in with them, you stay here.”
Any time we went to Muskogee, old ‘Jew Charlie’ had a store where we liked to go and eat, he made his own chili. There was a counter with about 10 stools, no tables. A big hamburger was a dime and a big bowl of chili for 15 cents. We ate it together and thought that was a real good meal. We always drank water.
(2007, I went into the eating place, Chilli’s. I set down and asked for a bowl of chilli. The waiter set down a bowl of chili, smaller than I used to get for 15 cents, and the ticket for nearly $4.I looked at it and got to thinking about it. I told him that I didn’t want it.
I walked out and him follerin’ me, “You ordered it, you have to pay for it.”)
Harley Varnel and an old guy were fighting at the mine. He hit him over the head with a shovel and the blood was running. I was the only one there and I was smaller and couldn't stop them. "Don't hit him again,
You're gonna kill him." "Well that's what I want to do."
In a little while, both of them headed to town, to the Doctor.
A bath house was at the mine. A coal fire kept it nice and warm and heated water. A five gallon can of water was set up high. I would ease the wooden peg out of it and let out just enough water to get me wet and I could 'soap up'. Then take the plug out of the bottom again, to rinse off. Five gallons was plenty to take a good bath.
We put on our clean clothes and shoes to go home. We would leave our dirty clothes there at the mine and take them home ever few days to wash them.
We knew Clarence Gillis, Mommy and Poppy had known his parents. He had stayed at our house and went with us to the mine and got a job. He worked with us for two or three days. While we were down in the mine, he come to the bath house and stole all of our good clean clothes and Lawrence's shoes. Lawrence has been looking for him ever since.
It was right at quitting time, me and Poppy had a car nearly ready to come out. When a man filled a car, he pushed it out to the scales. The weigh-master pitched out any mother left in it. He weighed and recorded it and pushed the empty car back to the man's room.
The weigh master come by pushing an empty car and I asked him how much our last car 'come out', weighed. He said that we hadn't had one earlier that day. I got a club and chased him. Poppy was trying to stop me. The weigh master hollared, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I forgot, I put your earlier car in that other man's name." After that, I got the weigh master job. I got $2 a day, that was extra good pay. The men trusted me.
McAlester Coal Company sent the coal that we dug, all over the world. It was the very best blacksmith coal, the best grade of coal.
A student at Turpin school got sick. His Dad worked at the mine. An older student, Bobby Long, was sent to the mine to get the Dad. He couldn't see anyone outside the mine. He walked inside, to some lights and said, "Hello". The men were nearly scared to death. They didn't know there was anyone around. They told that boy to never walk into that mine again, he would get lost and couldn't be found.
SOCIAL SECURITY STARTED they come out and talked to us. They explained that it would take care of us when we got old. 1% of our wages to go into a fund to take care of us. We thought it was a good idea.
Then John L Lewis, the President of the Coal Miners Union come and talked to us. I went to the meetings. It sounded good---that we could get more pay. We went on strike and that was a mistake. The McAlester Coal Company closed the mines down. The only coal that ever come from those mines, after that, was from individuals. They dug it and sold it on their own.
I SHIVER to think about digging that coal now. I wouldn't go back down into one of them for nothing. I wouldn’t show the mines to my boys.
As far as I know, there never was any one lost their life there.
Since before I was born, coal was dug, around in the flat land in the community. A strip of dirt, about fifty foot wide, was moved from off the coal and it was dug out and sold. It was about 10, or 15 foot underground. Then dirt was moved over, onto where the coal had been removed---and another strip of coal uncovered and removed. The old ‘strip pits', and the dirt beside them,still curve around in the fields and pastures,over the community.
They all filled with water and there are good fish in them. Somebody must have stocked them, or maybe not. A few times, after a storm and big wind, we would find a little fish, laying off out in the pasture, water nowhere close. The water is crystal clear and it is quiet around them, you really had to be quiet when you 'fished the strip pits'. I liked to fly fish there, for perch and big mouth bass. I never saw a catfish caught out of a strip pit.
During World War II, heavy equipment was used to 'surface mine' that ‘strip pit coal.’ It was very dusty, workers and their clothes were black. Truman worked there some.
When the mines closed, there were no jobs, no one had any money. We raised and saved all that we could. We had to have food.
CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS One of the first things that Franklin D. Roosevelt did after he became President, was to create the Civilian Conservation Corps. 3.4 million men, joined the CCC---out of necessity. Young men 17 to 33, lived in tents and barracks, they wore green or khaki fatigues left over from World War 1.
In some places, sewing rooms were set up, for young women to work. One sewing room, in Granbury, sewed curtains to be used in CCC barracks.
I sold my Model A Ford and went to the CCC. Poppy was sent $25 a month, I got $5 to keep. Lawrence soon went too. A whole train of us boys from Oklahoma went to California. It was exciting to us, that had never been any place before. Carl Shoemake and Bill Whitley, went at the same time. We stayed together and ended up at Lassen Forest, in northern California.
They never mixed 'Yankey boys’, with us from the South. There would be fights. The young men were always with those from surrounding states. We slept in buildings, when there was bad colds or sickness, sometimes they would put curtains between our beds.
We built roads and telephone lines for the Forest Service.
I had never been away from home, I was lonesome.
I remember hurting and wishing I would get a letter from home.
There were classes for learning and recreation. Some boys that had an 8th grade education, they helped teachers, teach. Some of the other boys had never been to school. They hadn’t had shoes to walk to school in the winter. They were hungry to learn. They said I had a 'gift' for arithmetic I could get the answer, in a hurry--but not the way they wanted it figured.
There were spelling bees, we were taught to 'sound', the word. I could spell with high school graduates. I took dramatics and was in several plays.
We put them on in different places.
I was on the basketball team for the Lassen Forest Service. During basketball season, that's about all that we did, play basketball. Once I was mad, I turned around and gave the ball a fling, from way at the back of the court. It went straight through the hoop, without touching the metal. In 1936 we played in a big basketball tournament in Portland Oregon that lasted several days. I had ‘popped off’, some smart remark, and the coach wouldn’t
let me play at all. Our team lost, we were all sore about it.
WE SLEPT IN TENTS in the side camps. I cooked there for a while. We run short of food most of the time. When we cooked beans, we cooked them real juicy, to make them go further. There was canned fruit and pork and beans. We ate all that we could get, as a general rule. Once we got real low on food. A park ranger told us that if we would keep it quiet, he would kill a bear or a deer. There were quite a few brown bear, more deer. He killed a bear and cleaned it for us. Some people liked it, but I wouldn't give you a 'nickel for a carload of it', it was real greasy. You couldn’t cut all the fat out of it.
There was a bluff, straight up and down, a quarter mile from our kitchen. We dumped our trash over, bears would come and root around and eat the garbage. We were warned to never go down there. You don't run from a bear, he can run faster than you can. There was one old boy that would take a long sharp pole and tease a bear. He only went down there when there was a single bear. When a bear runs up to fight, they set down on their 'hunkers', back feet, and put up their paws to strike. Bears 'box' each other like men. Then the boy would punch with his long stick. I expected him to get hurt, he didn't, that I know of. The bears would hibernate in the winter, and we didn't worry about them then.
Carl Shoemake, Bill Whitley and I had been off somewhere and missed our supper. I was a cook and had a key, I went in the kitchen and got us some food. We were eating it in our tent. Bears like to eat the same food that we do. A bear come sniffing around and we threw him the food.
All food was to be kept locked up in the kitchen.
Deer eat bread like a dog. You could stand on a stump and hold a slice out high. There is a picture of me feeding bread to a deer.
He was stretching up real high to get it.
ARMY TRUCKS took us to town and places. I didn't go much because I was afraid of the roads, there were lots of switchbacks and steep hills. The trucks, they had to be 'double clutched'. If you missed that low gear, you couldn't get it stopped.
One driver of an empty truck, pulled to the right, just a little to much, and the truck went down the side of the mountain. He opened the door and jumped out, 'just in the nick of time'. The truck went a long way and lodged on a big tree. They climbed down and tried to get it loose from the tree. They couldn't dislodge the truck and just left it hanging there on the side of the mountain in Lassen Park.
I drove one of the trucks for a while. Bows and a tarp could be put over the top, in bad weather, for us to ride in. I stayed there a year. That winter, there were real blowing blizzards. Up on the high places, it piled the snow deep. The telephone lines would break or a wet limb get across them. A limb across the line would make a hum on the telephone, and no one could hear. We wore snow-shoes, it was hard and slow to walk in them. We 'walked the lines', using our maps. When we come to a break we would repair it, or maybe cut the limb or the tree and get the wet line off of it. Then we would climb the pole, hook onto the line and use the little phone that we carried, to call back to the office. If the line was still 'out', ahead of us, we would walk on down the line, and keep on looking for the problem.
It looked like smooth country, with the snow covering it over. We did not want to walk off into one of the gullies and canyons. We could fall through the snow into one of them and be lost. We would use long vaulting poles, to punch ahead of us, to be sure of solid footing.
We might walk all day and get to a place on a road, where they could pick us up for the night. And start 'walking the line' again the next day.
That summer we built a lot of new lines across country, for the Forest Service. We built them as straight as we could. We would go around a peak or cut the tops out of trees and go over it, crossing those long canyons.
TREE CLIMBING they were pretty particular about who they let climb the trees. Some of the trees that I climbed were 18 foot through, it was hard work. We used two safety belts to climb the big trees. When I come to a limb, I would undo one of the belts and put it over the limb. The belt had rings to take up the slack. When I climbed a tree, I didn't come down, if I could finish it in a day. You had a helper that tied tools or a canteen of water, or your dinner, onto a rope, and you pulled it up to you. Some of the trees were tall, maybe 100 feet or more.
There were no chain saws, no electricity. You kept a sharp hand saw and sawed under the bottom of the limb to keep it from splitting, If you sawed to much, the limb would sag down, and you would pinch your saw. Then you had to throw a rope over another limb and pull up and loosen your saw, it was slow work.
One climber, we called ‘Cowboy’. He was real high in a tree and cut one of his belts and fell. He fell across a limb on the way down. He managed to hang on, until we got him down. He wasn’t hurt much, but he never would climb another tree.
Once I was up in a tree and I heard a loud crash. A car had hit a deer on the road. I could hear all the talking. I had more work up in the tree and I didn’t climb down. My helper saw about it. When I first started climbing, every night, I dreamed that I was falling from a tree. It seemed like I fell
a long way down. I always woke up, before I hit the bottom.
A BIG FIRE on Mount Lassen was real close to our camp. There was about a foot of old pine needles on the ground. We cleared strips to the bare ground, bulldozers were helping roll them back. We got ‘ahead of it’ and set a 'back fire' on the other side. When we set them on fire, they really burned. We constantly sprayed water on the leaves that we had rolled back, so they wouldn't catch fire. A bunch of us had been on duty for 24 hours, wearing respirators. We were on the 'down wind' side. It was real smoky, my eyes were swelled shut, I could barely open them to see. The back fire that we set, it stopped the big fire. Some CCC boys got trapped behind the fire line.
They were trying to get to a hole of water, 8 or 10 of them died.
That was a close call for me, that I wasn't with them.
Sometimes there would be a 'crown' fire. In a high wind, just the tops of the trees would burn and it went fast. Very seldom was there a crown fire. without all the under-brush burning too.
A few times, I relieved the forest ranger. I set in a lookout station and watched for smoke. The stations were put on the highest points. There were lots of switchbacks in the roads going up to them. There would be 2 or 3 other fire stations in view, a long way off over the valleys. Sometimes a thunderstorm would pass over. I could watch and see the lightening hit the ground and set two or three fires. You would pull a string, on the map, to the other towers and pen-point the location of the fires. Helicopters would fly out and drop water on them, and put most of them out.
Mount Lassen was formed by a volcano. A few of the rocks were lava rock, real light. Some one has the picture of me, holding up a great big rock.
A bunch of us were up there on Mount Lassen, looking around. We were told not to go into any caves, they were dangerous. I wanted to see for myself. I took me a light and a ball of string and I went back into a cave, unwinding the string, the footing was bad. I come to a big deep hole. I could not see the bottom and I didn't stay long. I shiver to think of the danger.
After a year at Mt Lassen, we were sent back to a camp in Checotah.
I was glad to be around my folks again.
We surveyed the road from Checotah to Eufaula. I worked with a crew, using a 'dobbie gun' and a transit. We would go along and set stakes at the right height. Men, working with horses, were moving the dirt with a 'slip', a scraper, they could pull the dirt and dump it. A 'fresno' was bigger and held more dirt. It was a gravel road at first. There was a side camp in Stigler. There was a limit of eighteen months, that anyone could stay in the CCC.
There were few jobs when I got out of the CCC. I worked at The Severs hotel in McAllister, in a restaurant. I cooked hamburgers and chili. There was a more experienced cook there too. At a big banquet, we ordered 2 or 3 extra steaks. They were all drinking and didn't notice it. I stayed in a private room, upstairs, in a hotel. I got clean sheets once a week, when I paid my $1.25 a week rent. That was a lot of money then.
I was living at home when World War II problems were starting.