I'M BACK

Hello All, I returned safely last night. I seem to still be very sleepy. I don't feel so tired, just sleepy. So I'll just let you know, I'm back. I'm doing well. The trip was oh, so good! Lydia sang so very, very well. We should all be so totally proud. We flew from Bergamo, Italy, about 2 hours for Gabriel to drive us on Thursday morning, Feb. 5th. We flew on RyanAir. The oneway tickets for each of us, each way, were 5 euros. We landed at Breman, Germany. We had a little time to walk around seeing sights and having lunch. We visited an old Lutheran Church. A branze statue of the Musicians of Breman, were near the entrance. We went from there by train to Bremerhaven, Germany. Lydia sang Friday night in the beautiful opera house. I better tell you more later when I'm more alert. I've been wondering lately, what a lert is? Where do lerts live? What do lerts eat? Much Love and Many Prayers! Carlton!

OUT OF BOUNDS

Hello One and All,

This is not a memory. It is a future event. I suppose several of you know that I'm in Italy with Lydia, Gabriel and their girls. Lydia and I will be flying, the Lord willing, tomorrow morning to Bremerhaven, Germany, where she will be singing in an opera Friday night.

We won't have computers with us. So I won't be blogging. I hope you all keep well. I'll sign in again sometime next week, the Lord willing. We are scheduled back on Monday night and I'm flying out from Torino, Tuesday morning.

If you really need me, call or e-mail Joanna. She will have Gabriel get word to Lydia, probably by phone. What an amazing age. Pray for us. Pray for Lydia's throat.

Love and Prayers,

Carlton Easley

SISTERS TO THE RESCUE!

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU! Donnie and Pallie!

pse said:

I remember hearing one time when in the feed bin part of the barn that it was one time Grandma's "old" house. Do you think they first built and lived in those two rooms before adding on to it?

Well, thanks Pallie! I never thought of their building those two rooms first. They did have to build something first. I'm willing to accept the possibility. All I do know, it was always said they built the house in 1900. I just thought that meant the whole thing. And I remember Daddy telling who lived in those rooms (I thought it meant when he was growing up and / or even later). I believe he mentioned Uncle Melburn and his family.

Uncle Melburn and Aunt (I think her name was) Minnie were at the barn choring one morning. Their daughter was in the house. I believe she was 12 years old. She was trying to get the wood stove started. Whatever she had started kept going out, so she poured in a splash of kerosene. There must have been smoldering embers from the night before, because it exploded and she caught fire. She died from the burns and was buried in the beginnings of a small family cemetery in the pasture south of the house about a quarter mile. She and another young boy cousin, son of Uncle Zeb, who died from dephtheria were latter moved to the Odema Cemetery. Their bodies were moved after we moved to the farm. Uncle Lawton recently told Keith that soon after he helped with moving those bodies, Edwin got sick with diphtheria.

All of that to say, I don't know were Uncle Melburn was living when that tragedy happened. I'm thinking they may have been living in those two rooms, rather that the main house.

Thanks, I appreciate your raising the questions. This project has sure stimulated my brain. I wish I would have asked more questions of more people. And I wish I would have written down what I might have learned.

Donnie said:

This weekend I was reading in one of the Family Chronicles, Volumes 8-9, Feb. 1997, page 80.
Mother wrote, Our Life Story, Part 1.
Papa, Gordon,Lawton Easley and Dillon Shumaker had formed the Shumaker Easley Company. (She didn't say what year), but in 1936 Daddy, Gordon and Lawton were batching and taking care of the 650 head of sheep at a camp about a mile of so from where Granddaddy and MotherShumaker lived. They lived in an old abandoned house. Lawton took care of the sheep the day Mother and Daddy got married, Dec. 19, 1936 and a few days afterward until the new Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Easley arranged to go the the sheep camp. The sheep went to market in April, 1937.
The big blizzard came April 8, 1938
The next time she told about being in the tent at the sheep camp was January and February of 1940 they had bought 900 head of sheep and had them on pasture near Duke, Ok. So Daddy, Carlton and I lived in the tent and camp to care for them. It was cold, cold those days, but nice and warm in the tent. We had snow during that time and lost several head of sheep. I should ask Carlton how much of those days he remembers.
January 31,1941 we moved out of the little two-room house to the Easley farm on Red River. How pleased we were to have a large three-room house with a side room.
Our Life Story, Part 2 is on page 113
How interesting your memories are. Maybe some of these dates will help with the timeline of some of the stories.

Let me make a few comments here:

A few weeks ago I was talking to Uncle Elbert about the sheep range era. He first told about that old house. And I remember Mother saying there were goats living there. I've written about that before. I didn't know, but Elbert said there were 200 sheep. I don't remember hearing about 650 sheep.

That blizzard in April 1938 may have been the one where Daddy got stuck in the road by our mail box, and later that evening was walking to Shumaker's. I would have been little less than 4 months old at that time.

Uncle Elbert didn't remember so much about the sheep range, where we lived in the tent. I think that was because he was already in or about to go to college at OCU in Oklahoma City. I do remember hearing there were 600 sheep. I don't remember any thing about 900 sheep. I remember Daddy's story about the snow storms, the sheep being hungry and the weather finally cleared one morning. He opened the sheep pen and they rushed out into the pasture. Almost immediately the weather turned bad again.

He saddled the horse and began trying to bring them back. It was an impossible job. Finally he roped one sheep at the time and tied it onto the horse. At one point he led the horse into the pen and untied 20 sheep from hanging onto the horse. I don't remember hearing how many died, but I do know they lost a lot of them to that storm. He unsaddled the horse and closed up for the night after the moon rose about 10:00 that night.

So we were supposed to go take care of Grand Pa by January 1, 1941. But due to his dying "prematuraly" we relaxed (?) and made the move January 31.

Ca n you imagine trying to write a history about Homer's eating habits, or Chief Joseph's views on space travel?

WE NOW HAVE MOVED: A CONTINUATION

Wouldn't it be good, if we found some old diaries or letters? If there are any, I don't remember hearing about it. How much money would it take to make that kind of move, with that many people and all their animals? Maybe they had to hang on with their toe nails until they got some crops planted, harvested, and sold. It wasn't until 1906 that they built the house. I don't know if they did it all at once, or in segments.

They must have pretty soon dug up the stones from the old dugout and built the stone building that sets there now. When we got there, the barn was down the hill south of the house. I remember it seemed pretty complex (to a boy of three). Under the stanchions and mangers I found a goose nest. It was full of feathers. The deeper I dug, the more eggs I discovered. I don't remember a flock of geese, but I know there was a flock. Maybe family members took them away, more likely the coyotes dined on them. There was one old gander who lasted a long time. He was a character we'll talk about later.

Thanks to Pallie! She has news from the past. Daddy told her that he and Mother, "were to move there and take over the duties of Grandpa, January 1, but Grandpa died prematurely on Christmas Eve." Pallie thought "prematurely" was a strange word to use for a man who was already 92 years old. I tend to agree. January 1, 1941, makes sense to me, because I always thought Donnie was not sitting alone -- the reason I needed to hold her as we drove. She would have been about 3 months, three weeks old.

When we moved in, Grand Ma's old black cast iron wood burning cook stove set at the east end of the long room in the main house. We had a four burner kerosene cook stove. They were all in a row. At the right end of those burners was the oven. I think Mother cooked on the wood burner for a while after we were there. Probably for heat in the room. But the first remodel job as spring came was to move the cast iron stove out and to cut a window opening directly behind where that stove has set. I remember how dark it was in that part of the room. The south wall of that room had two doors onto the porch with a window between them. So the window of the east door was the only light for that end of the room and there was a roof out over the porch to cut off some of the light.

The next project was to tear the porch off the two-roomer that set east of the cistern. Then that two room section was jacked up and sets of truck wheels were rolled under the building. The rooms were lowered onto beams attached to the frame work holding the wheels in place. The rooms were pulled a little distance to the southeast. There they were set down on foundation posts and stones, to become the feed bins for a new barn that would be built on in the near future.

It didn't occur to me at the time, but as an adult I finally realized that Daddy never did have just one job. He was a farmer with dairy cows. He had a four man shearing crew. They were gone about 4 weeks every spring shearing flocks of sheep on ranches through the Texas panhandle, the northeast corner of New Mexico, the southeast corner of Colorado, the southwest corner of Kansas, down across the panhandle of Oklahoma and home again. Then we had Papa's flock of 200 ewes to shear, the fleeces to tie and tamp into bags and ship to market. On the farm we had a feed binder and hay baler. In addition to our own work, we did custom work with those for neighbors and family. Daddy was also the finest of carpenters and cabinet maker. There were always outside work of that type calling him. And the constantly expanding projects of building improvements on the farm. And the bee hive inside the kitchen.

FINALLY: WE MOVE

Grand Pa Easley was bedfast for five years. Aunt Pearl was his youngest daughter. She and her husband, Uncle Everett Davis, agreed to take care of him and manage his farm. By December 1936, Mother and Daddy were married. A few weeks before that, Grand Ma Easley had died. I don’t know how long they were married when they arranged with Grand Pa and / or his estate to buy his farm. Sometime in 1940 Uncle Everett and Aunt Pearl requested to be relieved of their assignment. He wanted to move to the State of Washington to take a job in defence work. So it seems that Mother and Daddy agreed to move in ahead of whatever the original plan had been. They would assume the responsiblity of Grand Pa’s needs. And since they may have already been making payments on the farm, everything should move along smoothly.

Grand Pa died Christmas Eve, 1940. (The next day I was 3 years old.) He had one brother, Uncle Burnett Easley, a Baptist Preacher, in Texas, who was two years younger. Uncle Burnett died two days later, December 26, 1940. That resolved any problems related to Grand Pa's care and Uncle Everett and Aunt Pearl's move. I always thought it relaxed the need of our imminent move. I remember the move. I don't remember the when. It might have been early in January or as late as March 1941.

We had a 1937 pickup. We didn't have much. I think someone had already moved some of the stuff. There were things in the pickup bed. The part I remember most, Mother had me climb onto the passenger side of the seat. She sat Donnie between my legs. I held around her middle while Mother drove us to our new home.

Wow! What a big wonderful place. I think of the house as having two fronts. The front on the west faced the road. That part was a "two-roomer," north to south. Centered behind those two was a room about as wide as those in front, but probably half again as long. It's front faced south. On the north side of that room was a lean-to about 8' wide and the same length as the room. The shape of the whole was a "T" with the lean-to filling out the width filling out on the north so that was all one straight wall, front to back. A porch ran the ful length of the front, turned and ran around the "T" part of the south and continued along to the back wall. A cistern had been dug at the back southeast corner of the house. Then just beyond the cistern another "two-roomer" had been built in the same architecture as the rest. All exterior walls were board and batten, except the north wall of the lean-to had a type of clap board. The porch ran right on past the cistern and along the front (south) of those two rooms. So there were six large rooms with a lean-to.

The barn was dpwn the hill straight south. Then behind the two rooms that were separated from the main house, there was a square stone building, a small window in the back and one door in the front. It had no roof. But had an octaginal hall about 6 to 8 feet wide with a roof over the whole.

An old man had staked a claim on the property in 1895. Grand Pa and / or family bought it from him. When they moved there in 1900, there was a stone building about 10' by 15'. It was a good 100' east of the stone house behind the cistern and big house. That stone house to the east was roofed with a very sharp peak over the stone walls, then the pitch became much less steep and continued out for at least another 6' or 8' on the sides and the ful style extended out to the south also 6' or 8'. Those other buildings were not there and the stone house with octaginal walls was not there in that form. It has been a simple half dugout just to the east of it's present location.

I think the old owner had built and been living in the dugout. The family: Grand Ma and Grand Pa with 6 sons and 3 daughters, and at least one daughter-in-law, most of them approaching adulthood, had to make-do with those two stone rooms, the wide roofs and what ever covered wagons they had.

To Be Continued.

STILL PLANNING TO MOVE. BUT FIRST...

GOOD GRIEF! How can we move on under conditions like these? Karla has almost swallowed her teeth. [Now a separate story. ] She also knows something about Uncle Dillon, Aunt Thelma, Mother and Daddy double dating down by the railroad track with marsh mellows, a bond fire and "love making" mid-century style, of course. And Dori, who is hanging you up and going off and leaving you? I thing this blogging is a great way to bait the lake. As soon as the bobbers begin to switch about, you know an unknown tale is about to surface. Thanks to all of you.

And by the way, I've tried to respond to some of your comments. But I'm not sure they're ever leaving my computer. Or they maybe just falling into the Grand Canyon.

I should explain. On the north side of the Shumaker farm, the Santa Fe Rail Road track ran along parallel to the highway from Eldorado to Olustee. That may have been the scene of the dating, to which Karla refers.

We may not get moved this trip either. There are still tales of amazement in the air. In his teens, Daddy bought an "Indian" motor cycle. (There's a great movie on DVD about one. It's called "The Fastest Indian on Earth.") When I was young it was rusting out by the trench silo west of Papa's barn. They, the Indians, are very heavy and the wheel base is rather long.

On a late Saturday afternoon, Daddy was riding his Indian on his way to "court" Mother. There had been a rain earlier in the week. Someone had been driving their car on the road in the mile that runs north to south along the side of the Shumaker farm. Because of the wet muddy conditions the car wheel ruts slid along from side to side of the road as the vehicle progressed in it's journey. By the time Daddy and his Indian came rolling along the path to courtship, the road had dried. He drove along the right side, as the ruts were taking up the left half of the path to future plans. But alas, the earlier car had begun to slide toward the right and came very near the bar ditch. The rider in wisdom told the Indian to leap the rut and take the path between the two ruts. No sooner was the thought conveyed to the machine than it made the manuver. However, what was supposed to have been a leap became something of a sag. The wheels of the heavy means of transport sunk irretreavably into the rut. For all the cleaver heaving of the driver on the seat of his engine, it refused to leave it's track and so was propelling, pelmel toward the ditch. With another fervent and earnest heave to the left the Indian simply lay down on its owner as they speed northward on a dirt road of disaster. They finally came to a stop.

Daddy dragged himself out from under the motor cycle to survey the damage. All was well..with the cycle, that is. But he had been rolled and ground into the dirt. To add insult to ingury, every button of his shirt had been popped off. He was too near the goal to turn back now. With the Indian upright, he eased it out of the rut and rode on. With an approach well anounced, he arrived in something less than dapper attire. He brushed the dirt off his jeans and shoes, took off the shirt and shook it out. While his future Mother-in-law began sewing new buttons onto his shirt, he borrowed the wash pan and cleaned up a little. His pride was the most wounded part of all.

Not to be out done, he took the horse next time. She was famous for shaking her rope knot loose. But Daddy knew what to do. He tied her securely to a misquite tree. I really don't know if they walked around the farm, ate supper, sat in the corner of the living room whispering, or what. Anyway the courting of the evening finally came to a close. The fine young dandy went out to mount his riding mare, but......... she was not there. He felt around in the tree, but the rope was not knoted where he had left it. Nothing to do but walk the 5 miles home in the dark. Moon light would have helped. But there was no moon that night. After walking a while, he heard his horse. She was grazing along the side of the road. He spoke to her in a soft and coksing voice. She moved on. He began feeling for the rope dragging on the ground. After a long while, he was finally able to grasp the rope. He climbed in the saddle. I think the story ended with the moon finally coming up a little before he got home.

DONNIE IS BORN

The "Poor Little Chickie's" story most probably happened in the spring of 1939. I think the "Visit to Aunt Lou" story was later that year. I only remember a few times Arnold Ray and his family coming. It seems the Mother and sister were there more than the Daddy. There are faint thoughts that others of our parents families were there, but I'm not sure who they might have been.

During the years at the "Two-Roomer" and "The Morgan Place" there are stories I remember being told after the fact. Those years were still in the Great Depression, The Dust Bowl Years. When the dust storms begin to blow in, Mother dipped sheets and blankets in a tub of water and hung them on nails over the windows and doors, to keep out some of the sand and dirt. When morning came one could see the imprint of each persons head on the pillow, surrounded by dust. Those storms of wind and dirt did not come just in the night. They sometimes blew for two or three days without letup. The dirt came in through every crack in walls, windows, doors and roofs.

The walls, both exterior and interior, were generally made of one inch by twelve inch boards standing on end, nailed at top and bottom to a two by four inch plate. Up and down studs to support the plate were two by fours at corners and each side of each door and window. The cracks between the exterior boards were covered with a two inch wide strip nailed in place. That style of wall was called "board and batten". As people were able financially they bought rolls of felt paper and tacked that to the inside. It helped keep out some of the air. If they got a news paper, after it was read, they glued it to the felt paper with a thin mixture of flour and water. Later they applied wall paper.

Daddy said the house walls shook so hard at times during those winds, they thought the house would collapse. They often pushed furniture against the walls hoping to stabilize the structure. But more often the shaking of walls and floors, jiggled the furniture out into the room.

Water was scarce and had to be drawn from a cistern or halled from somewhere. So to conserve, Mother often left her dish water from the breakfast dishes to use again for the dinner (noon lunch) dishes. On Christmas Day we unwrapped our gifts. Out of a nicely wrapped little cardboard box I retrived a little cast iron truck. I drove it into the other room, then came back and played with the box the rest of the day. When dinner time came, Mother went into the kitchen to prepare the food and found the dish water had frozen in the pan.

Time and thoughts began to lap over into 1940. I remember seeing Daddy out on the tractor at the Morgan Place plowing the field. I remember going to visit Grand Pa Easley. He was bedfast. His bed was to the west of the double windows looking out to the south and his old barn down the hill. A mile south was the Red River he had crossed in wagons pulled by teams of horses with his family in 1900 when they moved to Oklahoma Territory. On that day of our visit I don't remember seeing Aunt Pearl and Uncle Everett who took care of him and farmed his land. His farm was about 5 miles southeast of the Morgan Place.

I remember one morning when we got up, Mother was not at home. Daddy got me dressed in a pair of little brown riding britches Mother had made for me. We stood outside the house ready to get in the car. He looked me over to see that my hair was combed and everything else was in place. He said, "We have a new little sister at Dr. Crow's. Let's go see her." That seemed fine with me. The next remembering after climbing the staris to the doctor's clinic, was going into the room where Mother lay in bed, and there in the cruck of her arm was a little baby sister, "Donnie Carolyn Easley". Wow! What a fine feeling that was, to have my very own sister. It was September 7, 1940. So far as I knew, all was fine with the world...how little did I know!