My Portfolio

In my Freshman year I took Latin.  Teaching Latin to teenagers in Southeastern Kansas in the 1940’s had to be one of the most challenging jobs in Christendom.  The Roman Empire was farther from our world than the star Betelgeuse.  The school board, however, decreed that one year of Latin was...

Shrinks say that war heightens a man’s desire to be near a girl: As near as “possible”.  They say it comes from a primitive desire to preserve the species, to live beyond one’s own life, and from a war induced sense of our mortality.  Maybe that is what caused me to...

I passed easily into second grade, but shortly after school began, we moved again.  This time onto a large tract of land about three miles east of Drumright that had oil wells scattered here and there on it. It was called the “Thomas Long Oil Lease.”    I don’t know why we...

We were now living in the fourth house we had occupied in the same number of years of my life.  This house sat on a dusty unpaved road on the eastern edge of Drumright, Oklahoma.  Calling it a “house” is a compliment. It was little more than a shack.  My Grandma...

In the rousing title song of the 1930’s musical “Oklahoma,” the cast sings of corn waving as high as an elephant’s eye - growing “right up to the sky.”  They conclude this joyous testimonial by exuberantly shouting “Oklahoma. . . .  OK!”   Good theater, and it may even have been true...

I was seven years old.  My family and I were living in the fifth house we had occupied since I came as its sixth and last member.   The house, located on the Thomas Long Oil Lease, east of Drumright OK had been built as a temporary, “company” house for oil field...

Love Lifted Me In the late 1930's , when I was somewhere around seven or eight years old I had a friend named Jimmy Cargill who had an older sister about the same age as my sister Frances. Her name was Neva and, like Frances, she played the piano. But unlike...

The “Cat” climbed the steep West Virginia mountainside as effortlessly as if it were cruising across the plains of Kansas.   Its builders called it a Model D-8 but to the pipeline construction crews it was just a “Cat”.   Whatever it was called it was the most powerful crawler tractor made by...

The spirit of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn was alive and well in my small hometown of Caney, Kansas during the `40's.  We boys wandered the woods, shooting at, but seldom hitting, small animals with our .22's.  Or, we climbed the “Shale Pit"; skinny-dipped in "Smelter Pond", and tested our courage...

I entered First Grade in September of 1937.  I skipped Kindergarten.   Not because I was precocious.  Such an educational luxury wasn’t offered by Drumright’s schools.   The Board of Education apparently didn’t favor naming schools in honor of presidents or heroes.  They just named them according to where they were located in...