Wilbur and I were born at Brooken. They named me Arthur Gibbs. Gibbs was the doctor’s last name. They said when Dad asked Granddad Fowler for Mamma’s hand, he told Dad he didn’t raise his girls to give away. I guess he consented.
The first place I remember living was 2 miles south of Jennings and 1 ¾ miles west. It was the Fox place. The house set up on a hill. There was a man named Cougar on the creek. He pumped water to the railroad. The hole was known as Dead Man Water Hole. Old man McElroy got soaked and killed some man and put him in it. The hole was south of the field.
I was four years old and Wilbur three. I remember I picked up a pipe and went out the south door and down the west side of the house. I kept the pipe in my mouth and stooped down when I went by the window. Mom saw me stooped down. She went out the north door and caught me with that pipe in my mouth. My britches got a good tanning.
This Mister Cougar had a goat. He told Dad if he would furnish the food when it got fat he could butcher it and give him half which he did. Mom put part of it in the oven. Just bemore noon she opened the oven door and you never smelled such an odor. She shut the door and at noon Dad came in looking to eat goat for dinner. When Mom opened the door that terrible odor came out. They had to throw it away.
The next place we lived was the Strode place. It was two and a half miles west of Hallet and the house was north of the road and the barn was east of the house. Dad had an awful good cotton crop across the creek northwest of the house. He had some oats west of the cotton field. Someone cut that with a binder. That’s when I saw my first steam engine thrashing machine. The cotton crop was extra good. The price was so cheap they couldn’t afford to have it picked. They picked what they could and Wilbur and I stayed with the wagon. We had two dogs to guard us. They were black and white. One of them was named Francis. One of them was afraid of lightening. If we didn’t let him in, he would tear the door down. So when it stormed they would open the door and he would get under the bed and stay there until the storm was over.
It was snowy and blowing when D.B. decided to arrive. We had a telephone. Dad called the doctor and told him to come two miles north of Jennings and two west and that he would meet him there with a team and wagon. Dad had a team of little red mules. A guy by the name of Jess Coffman came from Brooken and stayed with us. When Jess got the doctor there those mules were sweaty. Dad told him (Jess) to take the harness off and use sacks to dry them off. We stayed in the smoke house while D.B. was coming. It was pretty cold in there. After D.B. was born, Jess harnessed up the mules and took the doctor to his car. He didn’t have to rush that time.
We next moved to the Eades place. It was east and south of the Strode place. I don’t remember when Jack was born. He was bowlegged so Mom got him some high topped shoes and laced them up tight. Dad chewed Brown Mule Tobacco. Jack would get it and lick it. Sometimes he would have a fit and lay down and bang his head and heels. Mom would let it gon for awhile then the switch came into play.
The morning Loweta was born, Dad called the doctor and Mrs. Carney. She lived east of us. It started raining and hailing. There was a feed house on the road so Mrs. Carney got in it. D.B. had been keeping one of his feet off the ground. Mom asked the doctor to look at it. He pulled out what looked like a piece of bone. He got all right.
A lot of section lines weren’t graded. You just cut across somebody’s place. George Shenold came by our house on a grey pony leading one hound and the other following. He was going to Lee Trimbles south and west. The first night we had moved in it was rainy and Frank Baker cam and wanted to stay all night. He had the place south of ours. It was all grass. He hired Dad to look after his cattle. He called Dad, Keilly. He had two sons, Ralph and Carl. In later years I did dozer work for them both. He also had several daughters. He owned a lot of land. The Beaver and Redburn boys would come to our house and get Dad to tell some windy story. He told them he had a bell on one of the cows. It was brushy so he hopped up on a log to hear better. The bell kept getting fainter and fainter. He looked down and he was standing on a big snake and it was crawling on him. That was just on of many stories. He would keep those boys speechless for hours.
In 1922 I started to school. The name of the school was Silver Creek. The teacher’s name was Arthur Alonzo Gray. He stayed in Maramec. He rode a bicycle when it was pretty and drove a house and buggy when it was bad. The first day of school at recess time I thought it was noon, so I got my lunch and started out with it. They said it wasn’t time to eat. I had my reader down by heart. I was reading ahead of the class, just cutting it off. The teacher stopped me and said, “Which line are you on?”. I couldn’t tell him. Mom had read it all to me and I knew it by heart. That night he sent another book home with me and put a note in it telling her just to help me with the words I didn’t know. There was a boy by the name of Clarence Lewis whi was in the 8th grade. He saw that the bigger kids didn’t pick on me.
D.B. had a walker. He got so big in it, he would pick it up and carry it and walk. If you took him out he wouldn’t walk. One day Wilbur and I went into a plum thicket east of the hen house. D.B. couldn’t follow us in there with his walker. He got out and walked in to follow us. He walked from then on.
Beaver’s lived west of us about one half mile. Mr. Beaver’s name was Jake and his wife’s name was Bell. They had four boys: Walden, Donnie, Bill and Claude. They had a daughter who married Harvey Hoke. He milked cows for Jack Crocker until Jack passed away. He then went to a weigh station west of where Fred lives now. He was just south of the intersection. He weighed me twice. The weigh station is gone now. Getting back to the Beaver’s. The boys caught two coyotes in traps. They had them chained in the yard. It was the first on I ever saw up close. One halloween night Walden and Donnie Beaver and Dick and Dan Redburn went to the Hallet school and roped the teeter totter and the basked bakk goals and pulled the all up. Somebody saw them. The sheriff came to our house to find where they lived. I saw his gun on his hip. It sure scared me. He took them to Pawnee. I don’t know what happened – they weren’t gone long.
My second year school the teacher let Wilbur start when he was five. Our barn was about two hundred feet north of the house. It set east to west. It was about 25 feet long. I climed up the ladder on the west end. I saw a hen on the east end. I just had room to crawl back to her. There was a yellow-jacket right over her. She flew up and hit its nest. I got stung real good. I backed up a bawlin’ and squallin’. I don’t know what happened to the nest.
I was standing behind the cook stove. My underwear was one piece and had a button flap in back. It was down. Mom jerked out a hot bread pan from the oven and spanked me with it because I didn’t get dressed like she said to. It raised a blister.
To get to Hallet in a wagon, you had to go almost to the northeast corner of the place, then you went through a gate and went southeast by Bob Carney’s house and south to the road. It was graded up. The first house east was Gripes. That was Millard’s folks. The next house was Fleming’s. There were a lot of cedar trees south of the house. He had one of them trimmed out in the shape of a chair. You went on east to the railroad track. Next there was a two-story building. Two men stayed in it 24 hours a day. That made six men to switch the trains the way they were to go. One went west toward Pawnee, the other toward Cleveland. They had a long siding where they could park a train and let another one pass goind in the other direction.
Wilbur and I would pour hydrogen peroxide in a crack in the floor and watch it boil. Mom caught us. A switch stopped that.
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