Updated
March 1, 2015 0:18 AM
From: Larry Wilcox
- click here for photos of Larry and his family.
When I was about nine months old, my father
find out about work to be had for a farmer/rancher in Johnston County
in a little community called Russett.
I once knew the details of how he found
out about this work, but I have forgotten. (A lesson here. Better ask
those questions and write down the answers while there are still people
alive to give the answers).
The farmer/rancher was Fred A. Chapman
whose family owned most of Johnston County. The Chapmans were a wealthy
family that barely survived the depression.
My mother and father did not own any private
transportation and public transportation was practically non-existent
in rural Oklahoma. My grandfather Weber agreed to transport them and
their meager possessions from Cache, Oklahoma to Russett, Oklahoma in
his Model A Pickup.
Mr. Chapman (everyone called him Mister
Chapman) had a large farming and ranching enterprise. He had hired hands
to do the ranching and some of the farming. Sharecroppers performed
most of his farming activities. He actively recruited sharecroppers
with large families to populate the community and to maximize enrollment
at the Russett public school.
He generally furnished housing for the
sharecroppers and his hired hands. My father had been a cowboy on a
ranch near Cache, Oklahoma before he ended up as a floor bouncer at
the Medicine Park dance hall. His cowboy background made him well qualified
for his first job as a muleskinner.
Mister Chapman was mechanizing his farms
and ranches as best he could. However, a lot of the farm work was still
done with mules. Not only did they plow, plant and harvest crops with
mules, they also did other projects with mule power. Using a tool called
a Fresno, they dug a lot of stock ponds as well as other earth moving
projects. Interesting sidelight. The movie industry almost always shows
farm and ranch work being done with horses. Most agreed that mules were
stronger and more intelligent than horses and were the preferred work
animal. Their main negative characteristic was their stubbornness. Many
stories have been told about getting a stubborn mule to do what the
muleskinner wanted done and not what the mule wanted done. One of my
favorites is the story about the muleskinner that hit his mule upside
the head with a wooden 2X4. When asked why he did that, he replied,
“Well if you want them to do something, first you have to get their
attention.”
Although I was too young to remember our
first home in Russett, I was told later and shown where we first lived.
It seems that Mister Chapman had acquired a number of old boxcars from
the railroad that used to run through Russett. He used these old boxcars
as barns; storage sheds and even modified some for people to live in.
That was our first home in Russett. It was a cargo boxcar with a hole
cut in one end for a wood stove pipe to extend out. As I recall it had
a few windows that had been built in. Of course the sliding cargo door
had a regular door built into it.
I don’t know the exact length of time we
lived in the boxcar, but we were still living there when my brother
Thomas was born. He was born on June 10th, 1936. So, we lived in the
boxcar at least nine months.
We later lived in a house just north of
the boxcar and it is there that I have my first memories when I was
about two years old.
To the west of the house there was an old
depot that Mister Chapman had moved into Russett from I don’t know where.
We later lived in the east end of this rather large building. On the
west side of the depot was a sawmill. I used to play in the huge piles
of sawdust produced by the sawmill. One day after it rained, I played
in the sawdust piles and got my brand new shoes wet. I recall my mother
being quite perturbed with me getting my new shoes wet and told me to
put them under the oven in the wood cook stove so they would dry out
from the mild heat generated from her cooking. I misunderstood her and
thought she said to put them in the oven. Well, the next morning she
fired up the wood cook stove to cook breakfast and when she opened the
oven door to put in the breakfast biscuits, she found my brand new shoes
had been baked rock hard and ruined of course. Needless to say she was
very upset with me.
One other thing I remember while living
at this house was seeing a steam locomotive going through Russett. It
wasn’t long after that they abandoned the railroad and pulled up all
rails and cross ties leaving a right-of-way that I was to spend many
a day playing in and living near by. Why we moved from the house, a
real nice house with a well and a windmill in the backyard to the old
depot nearby, I don’t know. I am told a story about me while we lived
in the house that I don’t recall except for it being told to me. The
windmill had a ladder bolted on the side to allow people to climb to
the top of the tower to service the windmill. My father was concerned
that even though he had told me not to climb on the windmill, he removed
two rungs off the ladder. Even so, one day my mother walked into the
back yard to find me calling to her from the top of the windmill tower.
One other event that I recall occurred
at this house. Evidently my mother and father had a rather prosperous
year or had decided to spend well for my brother’s and my Christmas
toys. The story that my mother loved to tell was after we played with
the toys for a while, my brother went behind the wood heater and got
the old stove poker and used it as a “stick-horse”, a story that would
be repeated many times at many following Christmases.
I recall a couple of more things that happened
while living at this house. My father had a Colt Six-shooter that he
had inherited from his uncle. He kept it loaded and under his pillow.
I am told that he carried pistol in a shoulder holster back in Medicine
Park and that I used the holster as a teething ring. The story is that
he had been working nights and was sleeping when he awoke to be looking
down the barrel of the pistol that I was pointing at him. When he told
the story, he always said it was like looking down a 55-gallon barrel
with tombstones floating all around. I don’t recall this incident, but
I do recall my father’s constant advice about guns. “Guns are dangerous,
lock, stock and barrel. An old lady beat her old man to death with a
ramrod.” I picked up this cue from my father. I used to ask my children
if a gun was loaded. When they would reply “no”, I would admonish them
that a gun is always loaded, even if you just unloaded it. And, you
never, never point a gun at anybody or anything unless you intend to
shoot whomever or whatever you are pointing the gun at.
aged 3 to 4 years. As I began to think
about the next location we lived at in Russett, it had to be the old
depot. I tried to remember why we moved from the very nice home to the
end of this old dilapidated building, it occurred to me that my father
and Mister Chapman had a "fallen out" and my father quit and we moved
to a small house near Lawton, Oklahoma. I recall several things while
living in this small shack that was in the middle of a cow pasture.
The year was approximately 1938. Although I don't recall it happening,
but it was here on December 7th that my sister Helen Juanita Wilcox
was born.
...After a year or so living in Lawton
my father and Mister Chapman must have come to amicable terms and we
moved back to Russett...
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