Lester Gonzalez is a city story all in his own right. He has been with the Ardmore water department 27 years, has never had a day of sick leave, and has had one vacation. Now superintendent of the water department at 50, he says he has no thoughts of doing anything else except to continue working as he has since age 23 when the tools of the department were a pick and shovel. Many changes have taken place since then, mobilized equipment has replaced many areas of the early tools.
Lester now has a class “A” certification in the department which requires either 8 years of service and study or a college degree before even beginning the series of tests for a class “A” rating.
Lester and his wife Martha, who has attended so many water meetings with Lester that she holds a membership in the A.A.W.A., a national water association, live in Town and country circle. They have three children, David Allen 24, Gerry Noah 18, and Linda Gail (Mrs. Jim McKown), and two grandchildren, Allen Ray 9, and Mike 5. -from the April 4, 1973 Ardmore Shrine Club Rodeo Program
Lester is buried next to my Bridges family in Ardmore’s Rosehill Cemetery.
Lester Gunsolus on Find A Grave
Ardmore City Employees – April 1973
Ardmore’s first band – 1896
Petersburg, Oklahoma is 15 miles south of Ringling, Oklahoma near the Red River. In 1965-1966, excavations at a site about 15 miles south of Ringling, revealed the Taovayas village detailed in the Spanish records of the Parrilla expedition. During the mid 1700’s when Oklahoma was part of Louisiana, the Taovayas (a tribe of Wichita Indians) made their home here along both sides of the Red River. Heavy trade was made with the French who made their way to this area along the Red River from Louisiana. Not much left of Petersburg today, just memories.
https://www.okgenweb.net/~okjeffer/petersburg.htm
Below is a 1905 photo of the Eakin store at Petersburg.
I hope the EPA don’t get me. I had nearly 3 gallons of old motor oil I been saving to coat my utility trailer. Would that quality for “disposed of properly?” Anyway, about 30 minutes later I thought, just great, its starting to rain. No, its just sweat dripping off me. So I stopped after an hour. Might finish it in December. TOO HOT! LOL
Tech Corner
My old Hewlett-Packard NVG510 laptop was manufactured in 2014. I have been keeping the spyware, malware and viruses off extremely well. But it still got to be as slow as molasses. I download from the HP website their HP Support Assistant and installed it. I ran all the parts to clean it up which included:
System file checker
Empty recycle bin
Clean web browser history, cookies and cache
Disable search indexing
Enable storage sense
It took the HP utility over 2 hours to perform all the above functions. It had never been done in 13 years. Now it did not make my old laptop super fast, but it sure did speed it up from what it used to be. I was about ready to throw it away.
Since I had a Hewlett-Packard machine, I downloaded their Support Assistant from the HP website. I bet other computer manufacturers like Apple, Lenovo, Dell Technologies, and Samsung Electronics have free Support Assistants for the asking to download. (I know Dell computers does.)
From This Weeks Mailbag
Butch: I thought you would enjoy this song because it is about an old bell. -Larry Paul
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q698qvIQEVo
It’s so hot, I opened the fridge just to get some emotional support.
See everyone next week!
Butch and Jill Bridges
Ardmore Oklahoma
580-490-6823
https://oklahomahistory.net
