MOVED TO JONES COUNTY; PICKED COTTON IN OKLAHOMA
The dry weather still prevailed, and in spite of all our efforts
to earn extra money, we were getting deeper into trouble month by
month. By the summer of 1918 we were about finished in our new
venture. There was no grazing and no money for livestock feed.
Cows and horses grazed the short grass, taking in sand with each
bite. Sand clogged their stomachs and they died with sand colic.
Many died but a few didn't.
Something simply had to give. We just had to try something else.
After a long heart-breaking battle against the elements, we
rounded up the remaining cattle and drove them to the railroad
stockyards at Lamesa. That was a slow exodus. They were so poor
and weak some fell by the wayside and didn't finish the ten-mile
drive. Most of them did make it. I don't know where Papa sold
them nor what he got for them. I know he couldn't have gotten
much.
After that, we sold the smaller farm and got rid of the Buick
car. Susie and Dode moved onto the large farm, and the rest of
us moved to a farm near the community of Abbie, about nine miles
east of Hamlin. We bought out a crop from someone in mid-summer.
It, too, proved to be a failure--we made three bales of cotton.
In that year and a half we had lost most of our money, our
cattle, quite a few of our horses and our best car.
After the crop failure at Abbie we had to try something else
again. So we loaded the Reo car and went to Wichita Falls,
Texas, where the government was building an aviation camp to
train flyers for the war that was still going on. Papa hired on
as a carpenter at six dollars a day.
Let me tell you about one night when some of us green-horn
country boys went to downtown Wichita Falls with Papa. While he
was attending to some business, we boys got out of the car and
were looking at newspapers out in front of a drug store. It must
have been a Saturday night because the newsracks were full of
Sunday funny papers.
We were keeping hands off and just seeing what we could see
without touching the papers when a stranger came by and told us,
"You boys can have all the funny papers you want. They only want
the newspapers. Help yourselves to all you want."
Boy! We were sure pleased to hear that. I was beginning to
believe that city life was much more interesting than the country
life we were used to. The funnies were just what we wanted. And
we were getting more than our share when a friend, Harry Stacy,
came along and informed us that, "If you boys don't want to get
put in jail, you better put those papers back in the racks and
get in that car in a hurry." We did what he told us to do.
Harry was one of Frank's buddies. He and Frank were carpentering
out at the aviation camp. As far as I was concerned, I respected
Harry and I knew he had almost as much authority to spank us boys
as Frank had. At least he was concerned about our well-being.
We didn't know that a stranger would lie like that to country
kids just to see them get into trouble.
Anyway, while Papa carpentered we lived in a tent--and it rained
and rained and rained, week after week. Our tent didn't leak
from the top, but it might as well have. Water soaked the ground
and came up in our tent as out of an artesian well. Everything
was wet. You could almost wring water out of the air in our
tent.
Mama had taken about all she thought she could. She wanted to go
home to our farm at Abbie. So Papa loaded us all up and drove
all one Saturday night. We arrived at the farm about daybreak.
We hurried to get unloaded so Papa could drive back to Wichita
Falls Sunday and be there ready to work Monday morning.
But Mama didn't want to be on the Abbie farm without Papa there.
Of course he couldn't stay because he just had to make a living
for us. He had to go back. So we all loaded back into the car
and drove all day, back to the wet tent in a pasture about a
half-
mile from where Papa was carpentering.
When it didn't rain so much, we boys walked from our tent to
nearby farms and picked cotton. We got to making so much money
in the cotton patch that our parents reasoned that we all,
working together in the cotton patch, could do much better than
we could with the family split up, some picking cotton and Papa
carpentering.
Knowing that the cotton crops were good in parts of Oklahoma, we
got ready and headed for Duncan. Before we got there we saw that
the cotton was really good--fields were white beyond our
expectations. Many people were in war work and there was a
shortage of laborers for the harvest.
But before we got to where we were going, we lost a suitcase off
one front fender and hadn't noticed it was gone. The loss was
discovered by one of the older boys when we stopped for one of
the little ones to hide behind a bush. Naturally, we couldn't
just drive on and leave the suitcase. We had to go back and find
it. And about five miles back down the road we found it hanging
on a fence post.
It seemed we were always stopping for bushes and culverts. I was
twelve years old and there were three others in the car who were
younger. And no two little kids ever have to "go" at the same
time. So it was stop here for one and stop there for another
one. Lucky for us, we had to stop for another one before the
suitcase got many miles behind.
There were no service stations with fancy restrooms in those
days-
-only greasy garages with gasoline pumps out in front on the
curbs and two-holers out back by the alley, all of which were
dirty and smelly. Bushes along the road were much more sanitary.
However, I remember one garage that had indoor plumbing. Years
ago, when I was just a little kid nine years old, Papa had gone
to a garage to get the carburetor adjusted on his car. Joel and
I went with him. And since it took the mechanic more than 15
minutes to do the work it was a good thing there was a place for
little boys to hide.
The nice man working on our car must have been a little boy
himself at one time or another, or maybe he had little boys of
his own. At any rate, when he saw us whispering something in
Papa's ear, the man pointed to the stairway leading up to a
storeroom, in one corner of which was a little boy's room.
Yes, we found the room all right--and we used "the thing" in the
room. But then we had a little trouble figuring out how to
operate the thing. There was a wall-tank six-feet high on the
wall, with a lever extending outward from the top of it and a
long cord hanging down from the lever. We couldn't figure
anything else to do, so we tried pulling on the cord. That was
the secret--it worked. Water came down from the wall-tank into
the bowl with a world of fury and gusto and noise.
Now we had another problem--should we have pulled the cord? We
began to wish we had not. The bowl was filling up fast. We
couldn't stop the flow of water. True, we had pulled on the cord
to start it, but we couldn't push up on the cord to stop it. The
bowl was almost full now and the water showed no signs of
stopping.
Just before the bowl ran over we ran downstairs. We looked back,
expecting to see the water come flowing down through the upstairs
floor, or maybe down the stairway. But it didn't run over. We
had gotten scared all for nothing. It was years later that we
learned about indoor plumbing having automatic cutoffs on the
water supply to the bowls.
Now getting back to our trip--before we found a farmer who needed
us, one tooth broke off the ring gear in the differential of our
car. We were familiar with the sound--it had happened before.
But we drove on, listening to the click, click, in the car's rear
end every time the wheels went around. Soon it ceased to be a
click, click, and became a wham, wham. That meant there were two
teeth off. It sounded bad; we couldn't go on.
With the differential sounding like it might go to pieces at any
minute, we decided that perhaps this was the cotton country we
had been searching for. So we spotted a large patch of white
cotton and inquired about picking it. The man said he didn't
need hands, but he thought Mr. Hammond wanted some pickers. He
lived about three miles on down the road.
We phoned Mr. Hammond and found that we were in luck. He wanted
us, and we certainly needed him. He brought a team of mules and
towed our car to his place. We unloaded and began picking
immediately, and before nightfall we had gathered hundreds of
pounds of cotton.
Papa caught a ride to Durant the next day and ordered a ring gear
for the car. Before we had finished picking Mr. Hammond's cotton
the gear came by mail. Papa jacked up the car, crawled under and
made the repair right there in the cotton field by our camp.
When we finished that patch, there were other fields waiting for
us. We were making from $30 to $40 a day. The work was hard but
we didn't mind. We were finally getting a little money ahead.
I was twelve, and even at that age, I enjoyed helping the family
do what I knew had to be done. I was growing up. I was picking
more cotton in a day than I had ever picked before. I enjoyed
figuring how much I picked and how much money I was making. I
knew it wouldn't be my money, but I found pleasure in knowing how
much I was adding to the family income.
We quit picking cotton in time to get to Lamesa before Christmas.
We didn't go by our farm at Abbie, but went west into the Texas
panhandle. Then we turned south to our Lamesa farm.
All in all it was an easy trip. One stretch of road in Oklahoma
was through sandy post oak country. Some of the trees were
fairly large, otherwise the land was like Texas shinnery. The
county road didn't go through the worst of the sand but detoured
many miles out of the way to go around it. In some places the
sand was higher than our car top. One man who owned some of the
sandiest land had a road through his pasture so people could cut
through and save many miles. He had built wooden runways over
the sand hills so cars could travel easily. He charged a toll of
one dollar for each car. We paid the toll and saved a good many
miles.
And then, of course we came to the Red River that forms the
boundary between Oklahoma and Texas. Now, in that part of the
country there is just one way to get from Oklahoma to Texas and
that is to cross the river. And I don't know of anyone who would
choose to stay in Oklahoma if he had a chance to go to Texas.
And that included us. So we crossed the river.
I remember, there was a long, long bridge made of wood. It never
occurred to me at the time just why it was made of wood instead
of concrete, this perhaps because I had never seen a concrete
bridge, and didn't know at that time they would have such things
in my lifetime. Anyway, there was this nice bridge across the
big muddy river. And about 200 yards down stream from the
bridge, there was a road where people could cross the river in
the mud and shallow water if they wanted to.
Now the next thing I knew, we were down there in that muddy road
while all the other cars were zipping across on the bridge. I
wondered why we didn't ride across on the bridge. We didn't even
ride across the river--well, yes, the driver rode--that was Papa,
but the rest of us didn't ride. Papa was smart. He was not only
smart, he was the only one who could drive the car. The rest of
us didn't walk, either, we ran and pushed. Part of the time we
were running and trying to keep up. The rest of the time we were
pushing, trying to keep the car from stopping and sinking into
the quicksand.
I think the bridge we didn't cross on was a toll bridge. My
memory doesn't tell me it was a toll bridge, but by way of
reasoning I can only conclude that it was. Otherwise, why would
we Johnsons have been down there pushing in the mud when other
cars were crossing on the bridge? And why did that man at the
bridge show Papa how to get down to that muddy road? Why
wouldn't he let us cross on the bridge like the other cars were
doing? Yes, it all adds up, that must have been a toll bridge.
But we didn't pay the toll. And we had very little trouble
crossing on the low road. Matter of fact, we didn't even stop,
that is, Papa didn't, except for us to catch up and load back
into the car. We saved our money and lost very little time.
When we got into the Texas panhandle, we headed south toward
Lamesa. We stayed awhile with Susie and Dode and then went on to
the rented farm at Abbie.
It was the end of the year now, and time to re-rent the Abbie
place for another year or give it up. We gave it up and moved
back to the farm at Lamesa. We moved west the first time by
railroad. We went this time in two wagons. It was January, 1919
and the weather was cold.
If I had known then what I know now, I think I might have asked
my parents how this wagon trip compared with another cold January
21 years ago when the Johnsons moved back to Texas from Oklahoma
in wagons. At least this time we were not driving a herd of
cattle, only one old milk cow. And the weather wasn't all that
cold.
I guess the coldest night was the one we spent in an old rundown
schoolhouse, after chasing the skunks and roadrunners out. It
was somewhere in the bad lands near Gail. The next morning it
was almost too cold to travel. After going a few miles we
stopped and got around behind Gail Mountain out of the cold wind,
and built a fire to warm by.