Chapter 8 MOVED TO JONES COUNTY; PICKED COTTON IN OKLAHOMA

The dry weather still prevailed, and in spite of all our efforts to earn extra money, we were getting deeper into trouble month by month. By the summer of 1918 we were about finished in our new venture. There was no grazing and no money for livestock feed. Cows and horses grazed the short grass, taking in sand with each bite. Sand clogged their stomachs and they died with sand colic. Many died but a few didn't.

Something simply had to give. We just had to try something else. After a long heart-breaking battle against the elements, we rounded up the remaining cattle and drove them to the railroad stockyards at Lamesa. That was a slow exodus. They were so poor and weak some fell by the wayside and didn't finish the ten-mile drive. Most of them did make it. I don't know where Papa sold them nor what he got for them. I know he couldn't have gotten much.

After that, we sold the smaller farm and got rid of the Buick car. Susie and Dode moved onto the large farm, and the rest of us moved to a farm near the community of Abbie, about nine miles east of Hamlin. We bought out a crop from someone in mid-summer. It, too, proved to be a failure-we made three bales of cotton.

In that year and a half we had lost most of our money, our cattle, quite a few of our horses and our best car.

After the crop failure at Abbie we had to try something else again. So we loaded the Reo car and went to Wichita Falls, Texas, where the government was building an aviation camp to train flyers for the war that was still going on. Papa hired on as a carpenter at six dollars a day.

Let me tell you about one night when some of us green-horn country boys went to downtown Wichita Falls with Papa. While he was attending to some business, we boys got out of the car and were looking at newspapers out in front of a drug store. It must have been a Saturday night because the newsracks were full of Sunday funny papers.

We were keeping hands off and just seeing what we could see without touching the papers when a stranger came by and told us, "You boys can have all the funny papers you want. They only want the newspapers. Help yourselves to all you want."

Boy! We were sure pleased to hear that. I was beginning to believe that city life was much more interesting than the country life we were used to. The funnies were just what we wanted. And we were getting more than our share when a friend, Harry Stacy, came along and informed us that, "If you boys don't want to get put in jail, you better put those papers back in the racks and get in that car in a hurry." We did what he told us to do.

Harry was one of Frank's buddies. He and Frank were carpentering out at the aviation camp. As far as I was concerned, I respected Harry and I knew he had almost as much authority to spank us boys as Frank had. At least he was concerned about our well-being. We didn't know that a stranger would lie like that to country kids just to see them get into trouble.

Anyway, while Papa carpentered we lived in a tent-and it rained and rained and rained, week after week. Our tent didn't leak from the top, but it might as well have. Water soaked the ground and came up in our tent as out of an artesian well. Everything was wet. You could almost wring water out of the air in our tent.

Mama had taken about all she thought she could. She wanted to go home to our farm at Abbie. So Papa loaded us all up and drove all one Saturday night. We arrived at the farm about daybreak. We hurried to get unloaded so Papa could drive back to Wichita Falls Sunday and be there ready to work Monday morning.

But Mama didn't want to be on the Abbie farm without Papa there. Of course he couldn't stay because he just had to make a living for us. He had to go back. So we all loaded back into the car and drove all day, back to the wet tent in a pasture about a half- mile from where Papa was carpentering.

When it didn't rain so much, we boys walked from our tent to nearby farms and picked cotton. We got to making so much money in the cotton patch that our parents reasoned that we all, working together in the cotton patch, could do much better than we could with the family split up, some picking cotton and Papa carpentering.

Knowing that the cotton crops were good in parts of Oklahoma, we got ready and headed for Duncan. Before we got there we saw that the cotton was really good-fields were white beyond our expectations. Many people were in war work and there was a shortage of laborers for the harvest.

But before we got to where we were going, we lost a suitcase off one front fender and hadn't noticed it was gone. The loss was discovered by one of the older boys when we stopped for one of the little ones to hide behind a bush. Naturally, we couldn't just drive on and leave the suitcase. We had to go back and find it. And about five miles back down the road we found it hanging on a fence post.

It seemed we were always stopping for bushes and culverts. I was twelve years old and there were three others in the car who were younger. And no two little kids ever have to "go" at the same time. So it was stop here for one and stop there for another one. Lucky for us, we had to stop for another one before the suitcase got many miles behind.

There were no service stations with fancy restrooms in those days- -only greasy garages with gasoline pumps out in front on the curbs and two-holers out back by the alley, all of which were dirty and smelly. Bushes along the road were much more sanitary.

However, I remember one garage that had indoor plumbing. Years ago, when I was just a little kid nine years old, Papa had gone to a garage to get the carburetor adjusted on his car. Joel and I went with him. And since it took the mechanic more than 15 minutes to do the work it was a good thing there was a place for little boys to hide.

The nice man working on our car must have been a little boy himself at one time or another, or maybe he had little boys of his own. At any rate, when he saw us whispering something in Papa's ear, the man pointed to the stairway leading up to a storeroom, in one corner of which was a little boy's room.

Yes, we found the room all right-and we used "the thing" in the room. But then we had a little trouble figuring out how to operate the thing. There was a wall-tank six-feet high on the wall, with a lever extending outward from the top of it and a long cord hanging down from the lever. We couldn't figure anything else to do, so we tried pulling on the cord. That was the secret-it worked. Water came down from the wall-tank into the bowl with a world of fury and gusto and noise.

Now we had another problem-should we have pulled the cord? We began to wish we had not. The bowl was filling up fast. We couldn't stop the flow of water. True, we had pulled on the cord to start it, but we couldn't push up on the cord to stop it. The bowl was almost full now and the water showed no signs of stopping.

Just before the bowl ran over we ran downstairs. We looked back, expecting to see the water come flowing down through the upstairs floor, or maybe down the stairway. But it didn't run over. We had gotten scared all for nothing. It was years later that we learned about indoor plumbing having automatic cutoffs on the water supply to the bowls.

Now getting back to our trip-before we found a farmer who needed us, one tooth broke off the ring gear in the differential of our car. We were familiar with the sound-it had happened before. But we drove on, listening to the click, click, in the car's rear end every time the wheels went around. Soon it ceased to be a click, click, and became a wham, wham. That meant there were two teeth off. It sounded bad; we couldn't go on.

With the differential sounding like it might go to pieces at any minute, we decided that perhaps this was the cotton country we had been searching for. So we spotted a large patch of white cotton and inquired about picking it. The man said he didn't need hands, but he thought Mr. Hammond wanted some pickers. He lived about three miles on down the road.

We phoned Mr. Hammond and found that we were in luck. He wanted us, and we certainly needed him. He brought a team of mules and towed our car to his place. We unloaded and began picking immediately, and before nightfall we had gathered hundreds of pounds of cotton.

Papa caught a ride to Durant the next day and ordered a ring gear for the car. Before we had finished picking Mr. Hammond's cotton the gear came by mail. Papa jacked up the car, crawled under and made the repair right there in the cotton field by our camp.

When we finished that patch, there were other fields waiting for us. We were making from $30 to $40 a day. The work was hard but we didn't mind. We were finally getting a little money ahead.

I was twelve, and even at that age, I enjoyed helping the family do what I knew had to be done. I was growing up. I was picking more cotton in a day than I had ever picked before. I enjoyed figuring how much I picked and how much money I was making. I knew it wouldn't be my money, but I found pleasure in knowing how much I was adding to the family income.

We quit picking cotton in time to get to Lamesa before Christmas. We didn't go by our farm at Abbie, but went west into the Texas panhandle. Then we turned south to our Lamesa farm.

All in all it was an easy trip. One stretch of road in Oklahoma was through sandy post oak country. Some of the trees were fairly large, otherwise the land was like Texas shinnery. The county road didn't go through the worst of the sand but detoured many miles out of the way to go around it. In some places the sand was higher than our car top. One man who owned some of the sandiest land had a road through his pasture so people could cut through and save many miles. He had built wooden runways over the sand hills so cars could travel easily. He charged a toll of one dollar for each car. We paid the toll and saved a good many miles.

And then, of course we came to the Red River that forms the boundary between Oklahoma and Texas. Now, in that part of the country there is just one way to get from Oklahoma to Texas and that is to cross the river. And I don't know of anyone who would choose to stay in Oklahoma if he had a chance to go to Texas. And that included us. So we crossed the river.

I remember, there was a long, long bridge made of wood. It never occurred to me at the time just why it was made of wood instead of concrete, this perhaps because I had never seen a concrete bridge, and didn't know at that time they would have such things in my lifetime. Anyway, there was this nice bridge across the big muddy river. And about 200 yards down stream from the bridge, there was a road where people could cross the river in the mud and shallow water if they wanted to.

Now the next thing I knew, we were down there in that muddy road while all the other cars were zipping across on the bridge. I wondered why we didn't ride across on the bridge. We didn't even ride across the river-well, yes, the driver rode-that was Papa, but the rest of us didn't ride. Papa was smart. He was not only smart, he was the only one who could drive the car. The rest of us didn't walk, either, we ran and pushed. Part of the time we were running and trying to keep up. The rest of the time we were pushing, trying to keep the car from stopping and sinking into the quicksand.

I think the bridge we didn't cross on was a toll bridge. My memory doesn't tell me it was a toll bridge, but by way of reasoning I can only conclude that it was. Otherwise, why would we Johnsons have been down there pushing in the mud when other cars were crossing on the bridge? And why did that man at the bridge show Papa how to get down to that muddy road? Why wouldn't he let us cross on the bridge like the other cars were doing? Yes, it all adds up, that must have been a toll bridge.

But we didn't pay the toll. And we had very little trouble crossing on the low road. Matter of fact, we didn't even stop, that is, Papa didn't, except for us to catch up and load back into the car. We saved our money and lost very little time.

When we got into the Texas panhandle, we headed south toward Lamesa. We stayed awhile with Susie and Dode and then went on to the rented farm at Abbie.

It was the end of the year now, and time to re-rent the Abbie place for another year or give it up. We gave it up and moved back to the farm at Lamesa. We moved west the first time by railroad. We went this time in two wagons. It was January, 1919 and the weather was cold.

If I had known then what I know now, I think I might have asked my parents how this wagon trip compared with another cold January 21 years ago when the Johnsons moved back to Texas from Oklahoma in wagons. At least this time we were not driving a herd of cattle, only one old milk cow. And the weather wasn't all that cold.

I guess the coldest night was the one we spent in an old rundown schoolhouse, after chasing the skunks and roadrunners out. It was somewhere in the bad lands near Gail. The next morning it was almost too cold to travel. After going a few miles we stopped and got around behind Gail Mountain out of the cold wind, and built a fire to warm by.