Halloween Memories

Halloweens were not a big holiday at our house.  We lived 12 miles from town.  I do know we celebrated it as a religious holiday by going to Mass in Woodward.  I remember one time a neighbor boy trick or treated us and not having candy Mother gave him a hamburger from our supper table.  Bet he was shocked.  I vaguely remember community Halloween parties.  One game I remember at a party was everyone was in another room and brought in one at a time and showed a row of raw eggs on the floor.  The person was blindfolded and the object was to step between the eggs.  Unbeknownest to him the eggs were picked up and replaced with sheets of potato chips.  Imagine their surprise when they crunched chips underfoot.  I remember this because us kids were put in a totally separate room so we wouldn`t spill the beans.

When a teen I stayed in town with friends and painted all store windows with bars of soap and shave cream.  I remember this because one teacher`s daughter not wanting to be left out but not wanting to disobey parents carried a sliver of soap but never touched a window.

We didn`t feel deprived of candy because every Sat. when we shopped in Woodward we were allowed to pick one bag of candy.  We had Halloween every week.

Juanita The Mother

Karen went to 1st grade at Dillon School, a one roomed country school.  She continued her elementary days at Freedom where she rode a school bus that was a pickup with a sort of camper shell the first year.  There were a few older boys that teased her to tears, tying her shoe laces together etc. nearly every day.  Mother helped milk twice a day.  She said she often returned to the house to find the baby had awoken and was crying in the crib.  She always regretted that.  Mother encouraged all her children in different areas of their lives.  She washed and rolled Karen`s and my hair every day from an early age.  I had a professional perm by age 3.  She tried her darndest to mold us into good cooks, housekeepers, and stylish dressers.  The law was enforced with a supply of tamerack switches from shrubs Grandma planted years before for that purpose.  It worked on Karen and Becky.  I was more like Grandma Balk(not so domestic).  Mother sewed many lovely school dresses for me.  I came home from school several times with the skirt torn off from catching it on the slide 'ops'.  She got a new zig-zag machine about the time I was in grade school and tried it out on me.  Grandma Phillips made me a quilt of the scraps of fabric.  Mother was active in her Home Demonstration Club "The Willing Workers" for 60+ years.  She enjoyed entering food in the fair nearly the whole duration.  She laughed about the year she ran short of time to can peaches and opened store bought ones and put in the canning jar.  She won grand champion on those and vowed never to do that again.  She helped form a Freedom PTA and helped wherever she could.  She hired a friend to make me the "perfect" First Communion dress.  She hosted Sat. night card parties that was the mainstay of their entertainment.  She hosted many slumber parties for us.  The girls loved the country and the hamburger picnics she cooked for us.  After Marty was born Karen and her friends surprised her with a baby shower slumber party.  She took the extra cooking and cleanup in stride.

TBC 

Juanita`s Young Adult Life

I think Mother met Daddy at a party or dance.  Her parents had recently moved from the farm to Freedom.  It presented the perfect opportunity for young want-a-be farmers.  So she proposed.  They were married June 10, 1939 in Enid in St. Francis Xavier rectory.  She was not Catholic so marriages in the church were prohibited at that time.  The only attendees were a couple of his sisters.  They went to an ice cream place called Weibels Home Dairy for banana splits and off to Freedom for their wedding night.  They spent that night in a detached room called "the little house" outside Grandma and Grandpa Phillips home.  She said Aunt Mattie had collected a set of cream color dishes with wildflowers on them from some retail business giving them as premiums for doing business with them as a wedding gift and had them on her cedar chest when she returned home.  Almost immediately after their marriage they spent wheat harvest near Bison helping his folks.  I asked her what it was like moving in with her Mother-in-law.  She said they liked her because she could milk cows.  She set up her bedroom suite in the littleused  livingroom.  She remembered spending time there when Grandma Balk took in her son Leo and his family after he could no longer teach because of a brain tumor.  They had a little mentally retarded boy named Clifford.  She recalled spending a short time over on another farm near Douglas cooking for Daddy and Grandpa Balk.  They slept on the grainary floor.

When they moved to the farm south of Freedom they felt like they were on top of the world.  Her folks gave them the farm for I think their business arrangement was her folks got 1/2 the profits after harvest each year.  A good start for young people and good retirement for the older folks.  She said they only had her bedroom suite, a round oak table (which she regettably sold in an auction for $3) and a few chairs in the livingroom.  They helped with widowed  Aunt Mattie`s 3 boys.  She was setting one of them behind the stove for some transgression when she heard about Pearl Harbor being bombed on the radio.  Patriotism ran high after that-tires,nylons,meat,gasoline for cars, probably other things were rationed.  If you were invited to dinner at someone`s house it was customary to give the hostess a meat coupon.  The mailman picked up any tin cans one might empty for the war effort.

Karen joined them 13 months after they were married.  She was born at home with a Dr. and Grandma in attendance.  She said maybe that`s why she didn`t have another child for nearly 7 years.

Mother cooked for and took care of the family and a  variety of hired farm hands.  At one point they kept Golden Belt`s school marm for a session.  She later married a widower neighbor and was one of Mother`s best friends.      

This is getting long and I was afraid I couldn`t come up with enough stories for Mother.  More next time

Juanita`s Teen Years

When Mother graduated 8th grade they could no longer go to the Normal School in Alva to take a test to more or less skip H.S. like her older sisters did.  They were able to teach school after passing the test.  So off to Enid to board with Aunt Mattie Harman to finish her education.  She attended Longfellow Jr. High a few blocks from her home on E. Chestnut.  The house is still lived in.  This was during the Depression so she, Milton, Mattie, Mattie`s husband Delbert, and Mattie`s children Leon and Lowell lived in the one bedroom house.  Must have been crowded.  I asked her what she thought going from only student in the class to a few hundred.  She didn`t remember it being a problem.  She walked to Enid High down on S. Jefferson.  The building is still used as a High School today.  I think it was over a mile and graduated 1937 at barely 17.  One way she earned spending money was to type other student`s typing homework.  One`s grade depended on how many mistakes on a page.  She got more money for an A paper.  Was this cheating???  I still have the red Royal typewriter Milton bought at a pawn shop for her.  Her brother Marlin was playing football at OU at the time and actually helped set a record that stood for many years.  He was listed mistakenly as Martin Phillips.  Anyway he would occasionally send his "little sis" a dollar to help out.  He mailed his laundry home to Grandma for her to do for him.  He went on to become a pharmacist in Mooreland.  Mother`s fond memories of H.S. were the May Fete held in Government Springs Park.  Girls wore spring dresses and wrapped May poles.  Another was the time she and girlfriends went to a very fundamentalist church for a lark.  They laughed all the way home.  Shortly after she graduated, they all moved to a much larger house across the street from the H.S.  after all that walking!  She stayed in Enid after graduation.  She worked in the office at the Nehi bottling company.  She said the fruit flavors were their finest right off the line.  She also worked as a Nanny for one of the large department store owners.  They didn`t believe in much discipline for the kids.  She and the cook laid down the law when the parents were gone.

Stay tuned for more tales of Mother.