DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
The Childhood Years
DONALD GENE “Don” DAVIDSON,1 third child, son of William Edmund “Bill” and Mary Pauline (Roller) Davidson, was born 7 December 1928 at Oklahoma City, Oklahoma County, Oklahoma. He married Patricia Sue “Pat” Paschall 1 June 1950 at the First Baptist Church in Ardmore, Carter County, Oklahoma. Pat was born 6 January 1932 at Oklahoma City, Oklahoma County, Oklahoma. Pat’s parents were John Bertrum Paschall and Mable (Patrick) Paschall. They were married 18 August 1928 in Norman, Cleveland County, Oklahoma.
John Bertram Paschall was born 27 February 1908 in Henry County, Tennessee. He died 11 February 1977 at Marietta, Love County, Oklahoma, and is buried in the Marietta City Cemetery. His parents were Pleasant “Pled” Wade Paschall (1882-1921) and Estella (Crowder) Paschall (1888- 1923). Pled Wade’s parents were John Dill (1833-1898) and Malinda Jane (Nantes) Paschall (1845-1912). John Dill served the Confederacy as Captain of ‘K’ Company, 46th Tennessee Infantry Regiment.
Mable (Patrick) Paschall was born 21 August 1909 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She died 11 February 1975 at Marietta,
1 (NOTE: Don’s name on the birth announcement was Donald Jean. He went by Gene most of his childhood. He started going by Don when he entered junior high school.
(264) William E. “Bill” Davidson Family (265) DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
Love County, Oklahoma, and is buried in the Marietta City Cemetery. Her parents were Edward Arthur Patrick (1885-1976) and Susie Charlotte (Watters) Patrick (1889-1968). They are buried at Rest Haven Memory Gardens Cemetery in south Oklahoma City. Edward Arthur’s parents were Jesse (1860-1947) and Susanna (Wilder) Patrick (1862-1900). Jesse is buried at Rose Hill Cemetery, Oklahoma City. Susana is buried at Laurel Cemetery, Pine Knot, Kentucky. Susie Charlotte’s parents were Henry James (1853-unk) and Cynthia Jane (Hayes) Watters (1855-1910).
Don and Pat have one child. Gregory “Greg” Scott Davidson. He was born 27 December 1957 in the Deaconess Hospital at Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Greg married Donna Elva Garcia 20 March 1982 in Austin, Travis County, Texas. Donna was born 3 February 1960 in Mission, Hidalgo County, Texas. They have one child (adopted), Mary Grace Davidson born 16 October 2001. Donna’s parents are Ignacio Garcia, Jr. (1932-1973), and Josefina (Garza) Garcia (1932). Her grandparents are Ignacio and Francisca (Rodriguez) Garcia; and Julian and Isabel (Bazan) Garza.
Gene’s parents, Bill and Pauline, lived in a small non-descript white frame house at 3204 NW 13th Street, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, when he was born. It set on the back part of a city lot. It actually was a garage converted for bare essential living. It was one room with no inside facilities. Pauline cooked on a small oil burner stove.
It was an unusually cold December when Gene came into the world, and the winter continued to be colder than normal. Pauline had already birthed two boys, but Gene’s was an unusually difficult birth. The old family doctor for Pauline’s family was summoned, but arrived too late to assist.
The doctor completed the state-required form showing “Davidson male” in the space for Name of Child. He entered “Mary Jones” in the space for the mother’s name. Jones was the maiden surname of Pauline’s mother. For whatever unknown reason, Gene’s parents named him “Donald Jean.” This was not without its problems. An official birth certificate was not obtained at the time.
Pauline already had two youngsters in diapers and now a new baby that was sickly from the first day. Things did not get much better. ‘Baby Jean’ was constantly sick and this was worrisome for Pauline. So worrisome that at age eleven months she took him to a professional photography studio to have a portrait made because she thought he would not live to be a year old. She had photographs taken of the other two children on their first birthdays.
The family did not live at 3204 NW 13th very long. It was much too small and inconvenient for a growing family. Within the year Bill and Pauline moved to 2709 NW 40th Street in what then was far north Oklahoma City. It was a wood frame house, but much larger. It had a living room, dining room, two bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom, front porch, and a screened back porch. It had hot and cold running well water and inside plumbing connected to a septic tank.
The house set on half an acre on the south bank of a small creek. It had a detached one-car garage, chicken house, and a place to keep a cow. There was plenty of room for a garden.
Bill’s mother loaned him the money to buy a cow. He bought a half Jersey half Guernsey milk cow with a calf. She was named Bossy. She was a gentle cow. Bill and Pauline planted and tilled a sizable garden. The family had plenty of fresh produce and milk. Bill made a large box in the garage and filled it with sawdust so canned goods could be buried in the sawdust to keep through the winters.
This is Gene’s account of his very earliest memories when visiting his Grandfather and Grandmother Roller, at their farm on Panther Creek.
My earliest memories were in February 1931 following my third birthday in December. I was at my Grandma Roller’s 266 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 267 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
house on Panther Creek. I remember looking out the window and seeing thousands of large snowflakes floating down on the snow covered ground. Everything was laden with a heavy covering of fresh white snow. I also remember it was warm and cozy behind the huge wood burning cookstove Grandma used to prepare meals. She used corncobs and kerosene to start the fire each morning. I remember Grandma and me playing in the kindling box making a ‘log cabin’ of corncobs–some were white, some were red.
Days later when the snow was mostly melted Grandma wanted to get out of the house. She took me for a walk along the creek. She took some tallow to feed the birds. I remember we were down in the creek bed. I helped Grandma tie tallow to the limbs of bushes for the birds. I remember I saw a red bird and how it excited me.
Years later as a young adult I was reminiscing with Grandma. I told her about seeing the snow and building the corncob log cabin. I told her about seeing the red bird. She filled me in on the details. She told me it was the February following my third birthday. She told me about our walk in the creek bed. She said she had cabin fever after so much snow and the first nice day she took me for a walk. She told me she took some tallow and we tied it to the bushes for the birds. She told me the red bird I saw was a cardinal. She said I was so excited that, to use her words, “You popped your little hands together and held your breath.”
Grandma’s one pleasurable vice was snuff. She dipped Garretts from a brown jar with a peach tree twig for a swish. Many a time she sent me to one of the two peach trees on the north side of the house to cut her a twig. I sometimes had to run to the old country store about a mile south to buy her a jar of Garretts.
Also, one of my earliest memories is of my grandfather Roller when he came to visit. He brought a small box as a gift for his grandchildren. In it was an adorable little baby squirrel. We had a great time playing with it and feeding it raisins.
I went running through a swinging door into the kitchen to get more raisins. Unknown to me the baby squirrel came running behind me. The swinging door caught and crushed the life out of it in a matter of seconds. I was heart broken. I cried and cried. I felt like I had killed it.
I have memories of only one of my great grandparents, Mary Ann (Osborn) Roller. I met my great grandfather, C.C. Jones, when I was only about a month old. Mother took me to visit him in January when he was in failing health. He died February 12, 1929.
I remember Great Grandma (Osborn) Roller because she lived with Grandpa and Grandma Roller. She was elderly and mostly sat in a chair on the porch. Two things I remember most about her. One day she threw a dipper of water in my face because I sassed her. The other was her funeral. She died April 5, 1935. I remember her casket was brought to the Antioch Cemetery on a flat bed truck. It was draped with a beautiful quilt. I remember how my cousin, Vida Roller, cried. She is three years older than I am.
Many of my very best childhood memories are with Grandma and Grandpa Roller on Panther Creek at the foot of The Table Hills. Those were some of the greatest days of my life.
Meta Luvida (Ann) and Marvin (Sam) were born while Bill and Pauline lived at NW 40th Street. Gene was five years old when Marvin was born. He remembers the day his mother came home from the hospital with baby Marvin.
It was a nice day for late January. I was playing in the front yard. I saw a tan ambulance trimmed in white with orange wheels come into our driveway. I watched as the attendants took Mom and Marvin on a stretcher into the house.
Mom”s sister, Beatrice, a young sixteen year old, was there to help Mom while she recuperated. I didn”t know then that Mom not only had a baby but also had a hysterectomy.
Aunt Bea stayed with us the next two years to help Mom and look after us kids. Though she was only a teenager and the three older boys were five, seven, and eight she gained an insightful perspective of each of the boys that many years later she artfully articulated that was realistically descriptive of them as adults.268 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 269 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
There was a large front yard with plenty of room for the children to play. Summer evenings it was great fun to run all over the yard catching lightning bugs and putting them in glass jars to make a constant light.
On weekends when Bill wasn’t otherwise occupied he sometimes played with the boys. One such occasion he made a huge kite. At least it seemed huge to the boys who were little kids.
Dad made a huge kite and we had great fun flying it. We played out lots of string and sent paper messages up the string. One day a biplane flew through the string and broke it. The kite went spiraling away. Dad with my brothers, William and Bobby Joe, jumped in the car and went to look for it. They spent hours looking. They finally found it torn, tattered, and broken. They brought it home and Dad fixed it to fly again another day. Years later Dad told me the kite was actually a little over five feet tall.
Though the Crash of ’29 had occurred and the Great Depression started, Bill had a fairly good job for the times. He worked for the Oklahoma Railway Company at the Streetcar Terminal on Grand Street between Hudson and Harvey Streets in downtown Oklahoma City. He was a ticket seller and sold streetcar tokens and bus tickets to the thousands of riders passing through the turnstiles.
Later he was promoted to Ticket Agent. He was responsible for several ticket sellers. He was also responsible for the operation of a small newsstand. They sold newspapers, magazines, candies, gum and tobacco products as well as streetcar tokens and tickets.
The Interurban riders and the Streetcar Terminal with all the hustle and bustle of hundreds of people coming and going, and all the shops and sidewalk vendors stirred an excitement in that little towhead kid, Gene. He remembers Leo Winters, Johnny Sasser, Louie Stalken and Johnny Hightower worked in the newsstand with Dad.
It was during the Great Depression. Bill occasionally was able to get show passes to various local events.
Dad sometimes took me to the traveling tent shows erected on the vacant lots on the south side of 39th Street with vaudeville comedy acts and the Dance-A-Thons. These were contests where couples had marathon dances. The last couple dancing won the contest and the grand prize money. They also had comedy dance acts for which the dancers won lesser prize money It was inexpensive entertainment and great fun.
Occasionally when Bill and Pauline had an evening out without the children they got a neighborhood teenage girl, Maureen McCaskell, to baby sit. Maureen was about fifteen years old, had flaming red hair and was amply endowed with freckles. She had a broken leg. Her left leg was in a cast and she was on crutches. She was a lot of fun. Gene was amazed at how agile she was with her cast and crutches when playing with them.
There was a family owned grocery store two blocks west on May Avenue. It was not uncommon for Pauline to send one of the children to the store to buy items she needed for the household.
One day Mom gave me some money with instructions to go to the store and buy oatmeal cereal. When I got to the store I saw a box of new cereal with the cartoon figures Crackle, Snap and Pop on the box. I was so enthralled with the figures that I bought the box of Kellog’s Rice Crispies instead of the oatmeal.
When I got home Mom was angry with me. She made me take the cereal back to the store and get the oatmeal. I cried all the way to the store.
Hide ’n seek was a game the neighborhood kids often played.
One summer afternoon a bunch of us kids were playing hide ’n seek. It was great sport to find a place to hide where no one could find you. I found just such a place.270 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 271 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
A neighbor man kept rabbits. He had several hutches secluded in his backyard. One of the hutches was empty. I just knew I had found the right place where I could not be found. I unlatched the door, climbed in and pulled the door closed behind me not realizing the latch locked into place.
As I had planned I could not be found. The other kids called out “Ollie, Ollie, all outs in free” over and over, but I never came in. I couldn’t. The latch was locked. I couldn’t open the door. The other kids gave up and went home for supper. I was still in the rabbit hutch. I began to worry. Then panic. It began to get dark. I couldn’t get out. I cried.
Soon I heard people out looking for me calling my name. None came close enough to hear me cry out. It was dark. I was fearful I would be there until I died. Panic. I cried and cried to no avail. I wailed until after what seemed an eternity a man, I don’t remember who he was, came to the hutch and opened the door. I’m not sure, but I think I was sent to bed without supper.
Gene attended Sequoyah Elementary School on 36th Street. Mrs. McBrayer was his kindergarten teacher. Mrs. Endicott was his first grade teacher. This is when Gene had the first difficulty with his name, Jean.
The first day of school Mrs. Endicott asked if any one could write their name. I raised my little hand because Mom had taught me to write J-e-a-n. Mrs. Endicott asked me to go to the blackboard and write my name. I very exactingly traced the letters J-e-a-n with chalk on the blackboard. Mrs. Endicott was skeptical but accepted my explanation that it was my name.
It wasn’t long though before the kids on the playground were teasing me about my sissy name and sent me crying more than once to Mrs. Endicott. She taught me to spell my name G-e-n-e. I went by Gene the next eight years. I began to use Don in the ninth grade at Taft Junior High School.
The Summer of 1935 Will Rogers and Wiley Post started on an around the world flight in a new experimental airplane–not the famous Winnie Mae Wiley Post flew to set high altitude and speed records. They crashed on takeoff near Point Barrow, Alaska, shortly after a refueling stop.
I remember they brought Will Rogers and Wiley Post back to Oklahoma for burial. They lay in state in the rotunda of the Oklahoma State Capitol Building.
I remember standing in our front yard looking toward the capitol. We watched as dozens of airplanes flew in a large circle passing over the capitol. They dropped huge bouquets of flowers as they passed over the capitol building.
Bill and Pauline had a 1928 Chevrolet sedan. On a November evening after dark Pauline was returning home with all five kids in the car. They were northbound on May Avenue south of 10th Street.
When Mom approached the unprotected grade crossing for the Rock Island Railroad she slowed to look for oncoming trains. A car driven by an employee of Baash-Ross Tool Company suddenly crashed into the left rear of the Chevy and knocked it over an embankment.
I was in the left rear seat. The impact knocked me over the back of the front seat and onto the floorboard. I had no idea what was happening. I was panic stricken.
The car rolled over one and a half times. It lodged on a large tree stump else it would have rolled into water. Fortunately none of us kids were seriously hurt. Mom’s back was hurt which caused her a lot of pain later in life.
After the accident Bill bought a 1929 four-door Windsor. It had wood spoke wheels and a flat-head straight-eight engine. It had hydraulic brakes with the master cylinder on the firewall under the hood, battery under the hood, and electric windshield wipers. All were ahead of their time innovations. It had a separate trunk attached to the back. It was a ‘running jessie.’272 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 273 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
In the summer of 1936 Bill, Pauline and the family with Pauline’s father, Dill Roller, went on vacation to Ava, Missouri, and Hardy, Arkansas. They got in the Windsor and left for Ava where Dill had relatives he had not seen for a long time.
We were traveling on U.S. Highway 62 in northern Arkansas. It was a gravel road in those days. We were ‘ginning’ right along in the Windsor when a man in a truck overtook us. He frantically waved at us to stop. He told us our trunk lid on the back was open and we were scattering clothing all along the road the last several miles. We thanked him and spent the next few hours back tracking about ten miles to gather up the clothes from alongside the road.
We went to Ava for a few days and stayed with grandpa’s relatives. I remember Mom visited an old Roller Family cemetery and someone made a photo of her with her father in the cemetery. I remember Mom made a photo of us kids with great great aunt Eve (Roller) Bunyard. She was ninety years old. I have the photo.
We left Grandpa Roller at Ava and went on to Hardy to visit Grandma and Grandpa Davidson. Enroute we stopped at Yellville for dinner (noon day meal) at a local cafe. I left a ten-cent tip for the waitress. My parents berated me for wasting my money. I thought. “But it was my money which I had earned. Why did it matter so?”
When we reached Hardy we drove several miles over a very rough country road to a high bluff overlooking South Fork River. We parked the car at the top of the bluff and walked down. It was steep and very rocky. When we reached the edge of the river at Cow Ford Grandma was at the other side. She heard the car and came down to the river to greet us.
My brothers and I took off our shoes, rolled up our pant legs, and waded to the other side. It was great fun for kids–not so much for grown-ups.
At the height of the Great Depression in 1936 Bill lost his job at the Oklahoma Railway Company. He was caught up in Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act (the NRA blue eagle) which the Supreme Court declared illegal two years later. This was catastrophic for a man with a wife and five growing kids. With so many people out of work the prospect of a new job was practically nil. Bill was unable to make the mortgage payments and the mortgage company foreclosed.
Bill used some of the settlement money from Baash-Ross to buy a smaller older house at 3608 NW 13th Street. It had a living room, dining room, one bedroom, and kitchen. It had an outdoor toilet and a detached one-car garage.
Bill moved Old Bossy and made a lean-to shed for her at the back of the garage. He used scrap lumber. It was a daily chore for William and Bobby Joe to milk her and then lead her two blocks east to the creek between Grand Boulevard and the railroad tracks. There they picked a spot with grass and staked her with a long rope. After school they brought her back to the shed and milked her.
Gene was in the second grade when they moved. He transferred to Linwood Elementary School on 16th Street. Mrs. Kendell was his teacher. She was a kind grandmotherly woman. For whatever reason she took it on herself to spend extra time helping Gene learn to read. Did she detect a talent, or did she feel sorry for this little kid that couldn’t read? Gene stayed after school every afternoon usually for an hour with Mrs. Kendell. She sat next to him as he read aloud to her. She had a shelf full of primer books.
Mrs. Givens was the librarian. She had an abundance of three dimensional stereographs and several stereoscopes which the kids loved to look through. She had been to Europe and many of them were from her travels. Miss Tally was the gym teacher.
Thirteenth Street was a dirt street when Bill and Pauline first moved there. It turned into a muddy mess when it rained.
One summer day when it rained, my brothers and I made a dirt dam in the street in front of our house. We were having a 274 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 275 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
great time playing around that muddy water hole with some of the neighborhood kids, including Shorty Ridgeway.
Mr. Bannon lived across the street. He was an old man but was the famous Kid Bannon boxer in his youth. He didn’t like Shorty. He called me over and gave me a nickel to push him into the muddy water. I earned the nickel, but Shorty never liked me after that.
The Joe Yarbrough family lived next door east. Joe and his wife were older than Bill and Pauline. Their son was in college at Oklahoma A&M studying aeronautical engineering. He was building a two-seater biplane in Joe’s garage. Gene had great fun playing in the fuselage and pretending he was flying.
Joe Louis and Max Schmelling first met in a boxing match in 1935. Schmelling won by a knockout in the twelfth round.
Dad had a dollar bet with Joe Yarbrough. We listened to the fight on the old RCA radio we had. I don’t remember how Dad bet, but he won. I remember he ran off the front porch, dashed across the driveway, jumped a three-foot high picket fence, ran onto Joe’s front porch pounding on the front door to collect his dollar.
The return match was in June 1937. I was staying on the farm with Uncle Bryan and Aunt Blanche. Uncle Bryan was a gambler and had some serious money bet on the outcome.
The evening of the match Uncle Bryan came in a little early from the fields to listen to the fight on the battery radio. He had to take care of the mules then hurry to feed the hogs and milk the cows. It was fight time and he wasn’t finished. He told me to go to the house and listen to the radio. At the end of each round I was to run back and tell him who won the round. Then run back and listen to the next round. “Okay, Uncle Bryan,” and off to the house I ran.
I was back in less than three minutes. I breathlessly shouted, “Joe Louis won, Joe Louis won.” Uncle Bryan didn’t believe me. In fact he thought I was being a smart aleck kid playing games with him. He shouted at me, “Get back up there and listen to the radio and quit fooling around.”
“But, Uncle Bryan. It’s over. Joe Louis won.” He still didn’t believe me and threatened to spank me if I didn’t get back to the house and listen to the radio. I began to whimper, “But, Uncle Bryan, it’s over. Joe Louis knocked him out in the first round.” He finally believed me. I think he had bet on Schmelling.
Uncle Bryan also had an especially good racehorse. Her name was Nell. He took her to local races and she won most of the time. In fact she won convincingly at the Anadarko Indian Exposition one year with Floyd Brookshere up.
The next year Uncle Bryan took me with them when he entered Nell in the race at the Anadarko Indian Exposition. Floyd was again the jockey. The only thing is Floyd got to drinking liquor big time with some of the others. When race time came he was skunk drunk. Uncle Bryan was angry with him but had no other choice than to boost him up.
In those days at country horse races they did not have starting gates. They drew a line in the dirt. A starter dropped a red flag when all the jockeys got their mounts to the line at the same time. A split second before the starter dropped the flag Floyd turned Nell around to get a better position at the starting line. The other horses were off and Nell was facing the wrong way. By the time Floyd got her headed the right way the other horses had a thirty-yard start. Floyd was barely able to stay on Nell. He flogged her for all he was worth, but she finished a dismal last. It was not pretty. Uncle Bryan was furious. I actually feared for Floyd’s life.
The Roosevelt administration implemented the Work Projects Administration (WPA), a make work program to provide jobs. One of the many projects was to put in a sewer line down the alley for the houses on NW 13th Street. Before that we had outdoor toilet houses.
Bill used the rest of the settlement money from Baash-Ross to hire a neighbor carpenter, Mr. Alred, to convert the bedroom to a bathroom and closet, add two bedrooms and a closet to the back. 276 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 277 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
The family now had more sleeping room, hot and cold running water, and indoor plumbing.
After an attempt at selling life insurance and several other ill-fated jobs Bill finally landed a job as a milk route deliveryman with Meadow Gold Dairy. Pauline’s uncle, Claud Roller, worked at the company barn. He cared for the horses, harnessed, and hitched them to the milk wagons. Bill loaded his wagon with bottles of milk, cream, chocolate milk and orange juice as well as cartons of butter and eggs. He iced it all down before he left to deliver his route.
Bill’s horse was named Sonny. He was an old retired circus horse. Bill’s route started at Indiana Street and extended west on 19th Street to Portland Avenue. Then back east on 18th Street to Indiana Street. A total distance of a little over four miles. He also serviced 17th and 16th Streets from Portland Avenue to Grand Boulevard, a distance of about a mile. Sonny knew the route so well he didn’t even have to be reined. Bill could stop, deliver several houses, and then whistle. Sonny would come to him.
I sometimes walked the few blocks to 16th and Portland and waited for Dad to come by with the horse drawn milk wagon. He serviced a little Mom ’n Pop grocery on the southeast corner.
Though money was in short supply Dad almost always managed to find a nickel for me to have a small bottle (no cartons in those days) of chocolate milk. He let me ride in the wagon two or three blocks. Then I had to get off and walk home.
Times were not easy. Bill and Pauline had difficulties meeting their financial obligations. They decided to move to the country where they could better keep a cow, plant a garden, and raise chickens. They rented the house at 3608 NW 13th and moved to the Johnson Place on Highway 74 (Western Street) south of Oklahoma City and northwest of Moore.
The house was a small two room wood frame house located on forty acres with a small barn. It was heated with a pot-bellied stove. It did not have running water or indoor plumbing. Household water was hauled from town or carried from a well at the cemetery caretaker’s house nearby. Pauline cooked on a three-burner kerosene stove. Gene had a very unpleasnt experience while they lived on the Johnson Place.
My older brothers and I were at a neighbor’s house just south of us. They had a problem with a skunk that had been getting into their chicken house. The neighbor’s teenage boy earlier saw the skunk go under the chicken house. He and my two older brothers were trying to make the skunk run out so he could shoot it with a .22 caliber rifle.
They stationed me on the other side of the chicken house to watch and see if the skunk came out. I stood back what I thought was a safe distance of about fifty feet. I had a sizable stick in hand watching for the skunk.
All of sudden here came the skunk. Right at me. I shouted to the others. They raced around to my side to see the skunk running toward me. They shouted, “Hit it! Hit it!”
The skunk apparently didn’t see me as I stood there frozen. It came closer and closer. It was only about ten feet from me.
“Hit it! Hit it!”
Dumb me! I drew back my stick to whack it when it came close enough. My movement caused the skunk to see me as a danger. In a heart beat he came up on his front legs, aimed his tail at me, and let go.
Wow! Did I ever get it–all over me. I stunk like a skunk. It was sickening. I heaved my guts up. No one wanted close to me. I went to the water trough and jumped in. Still I stunk. I rolled in the mud. Still I stunk. I went home. Mom made me go to the barn. She brought me some fresh clothes. I still stunk.
I stayed at the barn for over a week. Mom brought food, lye soap and hot water. Several weeks passed before I was completely rid of the smell.278 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 279 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
Gene, his brothers and sister attended the Moore Consolidated School in Moore, Oklahoma. Gene was in the third grade. His teacher was Miss Platt. They rode a school bus. The driver was Tiny Spencer, a local six feet four inches tall farmer. He used his farm truck for the bus. During school he removed the truck bed and set on his home made bus body. It had side seats and a straddle seat down the middle for the little boys to sit on.
It was in the third grade that Gene first met some classmates that became life long friends. Jack Dreessen, a long time prominent citizen of Moore and former bank president who now lives in Port Aransas, Texas. Richard Snook, a retired minister, that lives in Moore. Wilma (Snook) Thomas, retired from federal government service, lives near Sulphur, Oklahoma. Oleta (Jury) Tolen, retired from Tinker Air Force Base, and lives at Moore. Arbrey Lee Davis was a neighborhood boy and Gene’s classmate. He drowned in a nearby farm pond.1
About this same time Gene had an accident that caused him great pain. He fell and totally dislocated his left elbow separating the larger upper bone from both the lower smaller bones.
Mr. Johnson, the landlord, hauled a lot of reclaimed lumber and stacked it west of the house. He used it to build a larger barn. Gene’s Dad and his older brothers, William and Bobby Joe, helped with the construction in return for rent.
There were several stacks of lumber and piles of wood scraps scattered around. Some of the scrap was laths. These are pieces of wood 3/16 inches thick by 1-3/8 inches wide and four feet long used to hold plaster to the wall. They made excellent play swords.
A neighbor friend, Don Stevenson, and I cut short cross pieces and nailed them to two laths. We were playing sword fighting. In the style of the renowned movie swordsman, Errol Flynn, I leaped onto a stack of lumber about two feet high. My
1 (This tragic accident is described in the CHAPTER on Gene’s father.)friend charged with his sword and I danced backwards–too far.
I fell backwards off the stack. I had my ‘sword’ in my right hand. I threw my left hand back to catch myself as I fell. I landed full force on my extended left arm snapping the elbow out of joint. My left elbow was completely dislocated. The pain was excruciating.
I was stunned. I looked at my left arm. I can still see it clearly. There was a huge bulge just below my shoulder and a gap underneath. I was in a panic. All I could think was my arm would have to be cut off. Dad drove me to the hospital. The doctor gave me a general anesthesia to set my arm.
Years later I have thought I had an ‘out of body’ experience during the time I was unconscious. I still vividly remember floating above looking down at myself on the operating table with the doctor, nurse, and Dad gathered around. I had a serene sense of ease and well being. Then I heard the doctor say with great urgency, “Oxygen. Give him more oxygen! More oxygen!” I came around feeling very dizzy and sick. I vomited.
I carried my arm in a sling about six weeks. It swelled to twice its normal size. It was very sore to the slightest touch.
The Gambles lived on the farm west of the Johnson Place. The Lagali family lived on the farm west of the Gambles. Vincent Lagali and Gene were friends though Vincent was a little older.
Vincent had a bicycle and he let me ride it. He bought a small crystal radio set and put it together. We took turns wearing the ear phones to listen to the radio. We palled around and did all the crazy things young boys do.
One day we ran across a rather large snake with a bulge in its middle. After we killed the snake we turned it over to see what the bulge was. It was a golf ball. It had worn a hole all the way through its belly. It must have thought the golf ball was an egg and swallowed it. That snake must have had a terrible bellyache.280 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 281 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
The Gambles were neighbors. They had two sons, Arthur and George. Both were in high school. For some reason George, the youngest, took a liking to me.
On an April Fool’s Day George and I sat on their back porch reading the Farmer’s Almanac. It was a warm sunny day without a cloud in the sky. The almanac predicted snow for Oklahoma that week. We laughed and thought it must be an April Fool’s joke. Four days later we had a ten- inch snowfall.
After we lived on the Johnson Place a few months Dad bought a mare horse. Her name was Ribbon. She was used to pull a small plow to till the soil for a garden and to cultivate a small patch of cotton and feed. We also rode her.
After two years on the Johnson Place Gene’s Family moved two miles south to the Turk Place. It was a larger house with a large front porch and a back porch. It had a kitchen with pantry, dining room, living room, and a bedroom downstairs. It had two small bedrooms upstairs. It did not have indoor plumbing. However, it did have a well and a windmill. It had a reasonably good barn.
This house was a vast improvement over the house on the Johnson Place. It was much larger. We no longer had to hand carry water from a neighbor’s well for drinking and household use. We had more room for the livestock, chickens, and turkeys. We also had space for a garden.
A wealthy doctor from Oklahoma City owned the farm across the road. Kelsey Davis was the caretaker. His daughter, Wanda, was in my class at Moore. The doctor was into dog racing. He had Greyhounds. A Sunday afternoon of sport was for him and some of his friends to bring their Greyhounds to the farm and race them. I’m certain they probably gambled on the outcomes.
They needed jackrabbits for the dogs to chase. The doctor said he would give us twenty-five cents for every live jackrabbit we could bring to him in a ‘tow sack.’ Dad showed my brothers and me how to make a box trap to snare live rabbits. We had several traps set around the farm. We caught only a few rabbits. My older brothers got the money.
While they lived on the Turk Place Gene, his mother and siblings had a traumatic experience from a tornado.1
Gene was in Mrs. Varndell’s fourth grade class. It was there he first met Buford Young, his lifelong good friend. Mrs. Varndell was a very good no nonsense teacher. She emphasized reading, writing, and arithmetic. She encouraged her students to read and read well. She also made sure we learned to spell. Buford and Gene became very close friends.
Buford’s parents for whatever reason decided to hold him over in the fourth grade. His birthday is in October and he started school early, thus he was one of the younger kids in his class. My birthday is in December. I started a year behind Buford.
When I started the fourth grade Mrs. Varndal already knew Buford was having a trouble with his reading. I was a good reader. I was fortunate to have a teacher in the second grade that took great pains to teach me to read well. My Grandmother Roller was an avid reader. She often read to me and helped me learn to be a good reader.
One of the teaching techniques of the day was to pair up the better readers with the students who were having trouble with reading. Thus, by fate, Mrs. Varndal paired Buford and I together. Thus began a long and enduring friendship.
Buford was my very best childhood friend. We were pals. We were buddies. We were together as often as we could be–in the classroom, on the schoolyard, or roaming the back dirt roads, creeks, and hillsides.
When our playmates chose sides to play a game or sport on the playground, it was unthinkable among our peers that we would not be chosen to play on the same team. It was only when we had to go home for the night that we were apart. Even then I slept over at Buford’s house as often as I could.
Buford and I were almost opposites of one another. He was a lefty. I was right-handed. He was an only child. I was the third kid in a family of five children. I had three brothers,
1 (This is described in the CHAPTER on Gene’s father.)282 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 283 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
two older. Buford had none. Buford was a nice looking usually well groomed kid. I was a tow headed unkempt sort of kid. He was a tall, slender well portioned kid. I was a scraggly runt of a kid. Buford had that serene self-assurance that most only children have. I had a sense of fiery insecurity that drove me to take risks and do and say things that often got me in trouble. Buford seldom got into trouble. In other words, Buford was a nice kid. I was a brat for the most part. Unlike a lot of only children, Buford was not selfish. He was sharing. I tended to keep and hide what was mine for fear someone would take it away from me.
Buford had a bicycle. I had a horse. Buford wished he had a horse. I wished I had a bicycle. So, it was not an uncommon sight to see Buford on my horse, and me on Buford’s bicycle going down some country road happy as two larks.
Buford and I lived at opposite sides of Moore. We were about as far apart as we could live and still be in the same school district. Buford lived about three miles northeast of Moore in a small urban like community of oil field houses provided by the oil company that employed Mr. Young. My family lived about three miles southwest of Moore on a rent farm in an old run down house. My Dad worked at a laboring job in Oklahoma City.
Times were tough for us. My Dad left home about 4:00 a.m. and drove to Oklahoma City to work. Sometimes he got home in the afternoon in time to help work the farm. Most times he didn’t. He depended mostly on Mom, my older brothers and me to care for the animals and work the farm. Dad didn’t always bring home a full paycheck. There was a lot of ranting and raving in our household. My parents had their problems with a lot of fussing, arguing and hard feelings. I lived in an environment best described as chaotic and combative with fierce competition.
I was at constant odds with my two older brothers, especially Bobby Joe. He delighted in subjecting me to all manner of torment. We fought a lot. Since he and William were older and bigger I was always on the short end of things. I took a lot of mental and physical abuse, and at every opportunity I schemed covert ways to get even.
But, when I was around Buford, especially when we were together alone, I didn’t feel that I had to prove anything to him or his parents. They accepted me for what I was with no criticisms and treated me in a friendly and congenial manner. I had more of a tendency to emulate Buford’s behavioral mannerisms when I was around him and his parents. We played well together always sharing with each other. I can’t remember that Buford and I ever spoke a cross word with each other, or that his parents ever spoke a cross word to me.
I loved to stay over with Buford. He had a BB gun and we would go along the creek south of their house and shoot at all manner of things. Best of all Mrs. Young always fixed a real nice lunch for us to pack to school the next day.
Our school didn’t have a cafeteria. We didn’t even have a lunchroom. We sat at our desks and ate our lunches. My lunches from home usually consisted of a biscuit with a piece of fatback meat or something equally unsavory. The lunches from Mrs. Young’s kitchen were something to behold. We always had a nice sandwich on white bread, a piece of fruit, usually an apple, and a sweet treat, like a cookie or a small piece of cake. I know there were other times when she packed a little something extra in Buford’s lunches so he could share with me at school.
I was the brother Buford never had. Buford was the brother I wished I had. Buford lived a quiet peaceful home life. I lived an existence of chaos at our house. My parents had all kinds of difficulties–financial, social and emotional. Poverty, ranting and raving with occasional fighting prevailed in our household. My parents argued a lot, and sometimes came to blows. William and Bobby Joe fought a lot, and frequently took their frustrations out on me in a physical way.
Bobby Joe was not only older than me but was a big ox of a kid, and a bully. He teased and taunted me unmercifully. My parents either didn’t know or didn’t care, but more likely were too engrossed with their own problematic relationship and were unable to deal effectively with the situation.
Buford’s dad had a good job for the times. They lived in a modest, but very nice house. As often as I was in their household I can’t remember a cross word ever between Buford’s parents. I 284 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 285 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
remember only one time Mr. Young kind of lost his cool. It was at a cow that walked in front of his new 1939 Plymouth when we were traveling about sixty miles per hour on a highway in New Mexico.
I stayed over at Buford’s house as often as our parents permitted. I can recall Buford staying over at our house only one time. I was embarrassed to have him stay over with me and my family. But my Grandmother Roller’s house was another thing. Buford and I would spend two or three weeks each summer at Grandma’s house. Grandpa was a farmer. They lived in the country about sixty miles from where we lived. Grandpa had mules, horses, cows and pigs. Grandma had chickens and turkeys. They lived way in the country on Panther Creek near The Table Hills .
Grandma was kind and loving. Grandpa was a hard working no nonsense guy. But he had lots of patience with Buford and me. He let us drive the teams of mules. He saddled the horses for each of us to ride. He let us work with a broomcorn thrashing crew for two days and paid us as though we were regular hands. I don’t remember the exact amount, but it was something like about thirty cents an hour. It was after all the 1930’s. It amounted to about three dollars apiece. We thought we had a lot of money.
The broomcorn seed flew everywhere and would get down the inside of our shirts and caused a stinging and itching sensation. At the end of the day we went to the creek, stripped off and swam in the water to soothe the stinging. Buford commented to me in our much later adult years that he still remembered how bad the broomcorn seed stung and made us itch.
We roamed the creeks catching crawfish. We swung on the grapevines and did all manner of things that ten, eleven, twelve year old boys do. We rode the horses over and around the mountain area and went exploring among the huge rocks and cliffs. We stopped at a neighbor’s house one day. They had killed several large rattlesnakes that they laid out in front of the house. Buford and I examined them very cautiously, even though they were dead. It was a great time for two young boys.
One day Buford’s parents came to visit Mom and Dad. They asked if it would be okay for me to accompany them on their vacation trip that summer. My folks agreed. I was elated. Mr. Young had recently purchased a new 1939 Plymouth. It was green as I recall. I had been out of state only a few times when we went to Arkansas to visit Dad’s parents.
Buford and I had a great time on vacation. It was the most memorable highlight of my childhood. We traveled across Western Oklahoma, through the Texas Panhandle and into New Mexico. We stopped at several roadside curio shops common in New Mexico. One had a donkey that drank soda pop from a bottle. Buford and I must have given that donkey a belly ache from drinking so much soda pop. Mrs. Young took a photo of Buford and me feeding that old donkey soda pop.
We went to White City and Carlsbad Caverns. We arrived late in the afternoon. A little after sunset we went to the entrance of the cave and watched the bats swarm out to go foraging for nighttime insects.
The next day we went through the caverns. It was a magnificent sight to behold for a couple of wide-eyed kids. We did a lot of walking. At the end of the tour we had the choice to either ride an elevator 750 feet to the surface, or take an hour to walk out. Of course, Buford and I wanted to walk out. Mrs. Young rode the elevator. Mr. Young probably wished that Buford and I would ride the elevator, too, but he was very accommodating and walked out with us. The entrance to the caverns faces west and long before we got to the entrance we could see this long brilliant shaft of sunlight streaming into the darkness of the cavern.
The next day we drove to El Paso. We walked across the bridge to Ciudad Juarez. It was a big thing for Buford and me when we crossed over into Mexico. We could tell everyone at school we had been out of the United States.
We mostly just went sightseeing. We shopped in a few of the shops and bought trinket souvenirs. Buford and I wrote on picture post cards and mailed them to the United States to friends and family. Mrs. Young enjoyed the shopping and the low prices. I can’t remember anything specific she bought, but 286 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 287 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
we did carry some packages across the bridge with us when we came back into the United States.
We drove all the way across New Mexico from south to north. It was a long drive, but Buford and I found ways, with Mrs. Young’s help, to entertain ourselves.
We crossed Raton Pass into Colorado and went to the Royal Gorge to see the world’s highest swinging bridge. Buford and I walked across the bridge. Mrs. Young took a photo of us standing in the middle of the bridge.
Then we went to Colorado Springs where Mrs. Young had relatives. We stayed with them for several days. The lady’s husband had died since we left Oklahoma. The funeral was the day before we arrived in Colorado Springs. It was a sad time, but everyone was intent on making sure we were made to feel welcome and at home.
We went to Manitou Springs. Buford and I tasted the effervescence of the mineral spring water and thought it tasted like soda pop. We visited an amusement park where Buford and I drove little midget gasoline powered cars on a small track.
We went to Cripple Creek and saw one of the silver ore trains hauling the ore to the smelter. We went to the Garden of the Gods and Buford and I tried to push over The Balanced Rock.
We drove to the top of Pike’s Peak. It was a gravel road most of the way. When we got to the top Buford and I jumped out like two wild goats running around looking at this and that. Then, all of a sudden we pooped out and couldn’t hardly get our breath. The high altitude lack of oxygen did a number on both of us and we got kind of sick. That really slowed us down. I remember how cautiously Mr. Young drove down. The road was twisting and very steep and narrow in many places.
From Colorado Springs we went to visit Mrs. Young’s relatives in Western Kansas. I remember there was a boy about our age whom we played with. They lived in a white frame oil company house near a gas compressor station. I remember going into a nearby large building which had a very large engine that drove the compressors.
From there we went further east into Kansas and spent part of two days and one night visiting a relative. They lived in a small house only about fifty feet from the Santa Fe Railroad dual track mainline from Chicago to California. The steam locomotives and occasional diesels roared by almost every half-hour day and night. Buford and I sat near the tracks and waved at the train crewmen when they went by. Once in awhile one would blow the whistle just for us and that thrilled us.
From there we went to a farm somewhere near Emporia, Kansas. It was way out in the countryside. I seem to remember it was Mrs. Young’s brother and his family. They also had a boy about our age whom we played with. An elderly woman also lived with them. I think she was Mrs. Young’s mother, though I’m not sure. I remember she really scolded me one day. It had rained and the weather cleared off. Buford, the other kid, and I went bare foot wading in the water. We caught crawfish and generally just played in the mud.
We came to the house about supper time all muddy. Buford and the other kid were at the water hose cleaning up. I saw an earthen crock in the yard with about two gallons of water in it. I was standing in it washing my feet when the elderly lady saw me. She was very upset with me. She kept saying the water was for the car which didn’t make sense to me. It kind of embarrassed me, and later it was mentioned at the supper table. Buford’s uncle said not to worry. It was rainwater he used for battery water in the car.
We went to Cottonwood Falls. Buford and I played along the banks of the Cottonwood River. Someone had a small .22 rifle. We stood at the railing on an old bridge and took turns plunk shooting at turtles in the water below.
From there it was home to Oklahoma and return to my family. Of course, everyone was interested in hearing all about the trip and my adventures. I told all about it. I reveled in my little moment of notoriety within the family group. But all too soon life at home returned to normal.
Buford and I got to tell all the kids in our class at school that fall all about our trip and our adventures. It was great fun and an exciting time for two young boys. That vacation trip with Buford and his folks was the highlight of my childhood. 288 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 289 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
I still remember it with fond memories. Our friendship was nothing but the best and greatest right through grade school and into the eighth grade.
Gene’s home life was such that he often pursued other diversions to establish himself as a person and not a down trodden kid at the whims of his older brothers. This sometimes got him into trouble. One of these diversions was he played marbles–for keeps.
I made it a point to be good at marbles. I spent hours by myself shooting and shooting in a ring drawn in the dirt. I spent some of my meager money for good marbles and spent a lot of time selecting some really good taws.
I played marbles with the other boys at school. At first I cautiously entered into games of ‘keepsies.’ I soon saw that I was much better than my competition and though it was frowned on by the school administration I frequently played for ‘keeps.’ I accumulated quite an inventory of good marbles that I kept in a large jar at home. I never played ‘keeps’ with Buford.
One day Bobby Dunlap got in a game with Danny McCroy and I. Danny and I cleaned Bobby out of all his marbles. That wasn’t the end of it. He went crying to the teacher. Danny and I were sent to the principal’s office. We had to give back Bobby’s marbles. The principal confiscated ours. We were strongly rebuked and forbidden to ever again play marbles of any kind on the school grounds.
Mom kept my jar of marbles for years and years. I wish I knew whatever happened to them. From time to time when going through some of Mom’s things I found a few marbles here and there. To this day I can identify my marbles on sight.
Gene sought other means of solace. He often secluded himself in out of the way places and secretively under took other satisfying activities.
I wanted a camera. There was no way I could come up with the money to buy one much less buy the film and pay for the processing. So, I undertook to make my own camera. I used two cigar boxes and tape to make a light tight box. I made a swinging lid at the back for a place to hold film. I found a magnifying glass about the size of a half-dollar.
I went into the barn loft where it was semi dark and spent hours trying to focus an outside image on the back inside of the box (focal plane) to determine how long (focal length) to make the box. I finally settled on a distance of about eight inches. I used my oldest brother’s pocketknife to cut a hole in the box end and wedged the magnifying glass (lens) into the hole for a tight fit. I cut a piece of cardboard from the back of a tablet. I cut a slit in the top of the box and behind the magnifying glass. I attached a clothes pin to the cardboard (shutter) so I could pull it up to let light in through the magnifying glass and push it down to shut light out. I was never able to buy film to try and see if my contraption (camera) actually would make a photograph.
One of the first things I bought after I finished my army basic training was a 35mm Argus C3 camera. I later developed a keen interest in photography. After I was an adult I made a box pinhole camera and actually made some photographs with it–just to prove I could.
Another thing I did was play phonograph records. Not quite the way you may think. When Uncle Jim and Aunt Mary moved from Oklahoma City to Kansas City they gave us an old used hand cranked phonograph player and some seventy-eight rpm records. The only problem was the spring mechanism was broken. I soon learned to hand turn the records at exactly seventy-eight rpm’s. I played the records over and over. I remember some of the lyrics and tunes to this day.
Some of the titles were: The New River Train, Hand Me Down My Walking Cane, Barnacle Bill the Sailor and Jailhouse Blues. The Big Rock Candy Mountains was a popular song during the Great Depression. It was a song I knew and sang as a youngster. It is the opening theme song for the movie, “O Brother, Where Art Thou” with George Clooney. The lyrics are:290 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 291 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
One evening as the sun went down,
And the jungle fire was burning,
Down the track came a hobo hiking,
And he said, “Boys, I’m not turning.
I’m headed for a land that’s far away,
Beside the Crystal Fountains,
So, come with me, we’ll go and see
The Big Rock Candy Mountains.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
There’s a land that’s fair and bright.
Where the handouts grow on bushes,
And you sleep out every night.
Where the boxcars all are empty
And the sun shines every day
On the birds and the bees
And on the cigarette trees.
The lemonade springs
Where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
All the cops have wooden legs,
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs.
The farmers’ trees are full of fruit
And the barns are full of hay.
Oh, I’m gonna go
Where the rain and sleet don’t fall
And the wind don’t blow
And it do not snow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks,
And little streams of alcohol
Come trickling down the rocks.
The brakemen have to tip their hats
And the railroad bulls are blind.
There’s a lake of stew
And of whiskey, too.
You can paddle all around ’em
In a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
The jails are made of tin
And you can walk right out again
As soon as you are in.
There ain’t no shorthandle shovels,
No axes, saws, or picks.
I’m a going to stay
Where you sleep all day,
Where they hung the jerk
That invented work.
I’ll see you all
This comin’ fall
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
One of the fun things we did during the school lunch hour was go to the train depot two blocks away. We watched the post master hang the outgoing mail pouch on the ‘snare frame.’ Then we waited to watch the twelve fifty-five northbound Santa Fe Flyer steam locomotive roar by as a mail pouch was tossed onto the depot platform and the metal arm on the mail car snatched the mail pouch on the fly. Then we ran like the dickens to be in class when the tardy bell rang.
One night I went into the downstairs bedroom at the Sullivan Place to look for something. I had a match to light a lamp in the room. In the dark I struck down the wall to light the match. I shrieked out in pain. Mother had stuck a needle in the wall next to her treadle sewing machine. That was the precise place where I struck down with the match. It drove the needle into the end of my index finger on my right hand and into the bone. It snapped off. It was painful.292 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 293 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
Dad took me to Dr. Reichert in Moore. He had a fluoroscope device. He knew how painful it was. He tried to be very delicate and careful, but every time he touched the broken needle with the probe I jerked and let out a yell. After a while Dad had all of it his patience could stand. He held me tight as he could and told the doctor to get it out of there. I yelled but it came out. To this day the end of that finger is sensitive. I shudder every time I think about it.
In the summer months the open space between the First National Bank building and the drugstore was used as an outdoor movie theater. A man brought a 16mm projector and after dark showed movies on the back side of the Platt Lumber Company building which was painted white. It cost a nickel to see the movie. Years later my good friend, Jack Dreessen, was president of the First National Bank of Moore.
Miss Womack was Gene’s sixth-grade teacher. He liked her very much. She was a great teacher. She encouraged reading and free-thinking. She was a stickler for reading, writing, arithmetic and speaking the English language. Her students spent hours learning to diagram sentences.
She had forty-four students. One of her teaching techniques was in some small way to reward the entire class when we achieved certain levels of performance. This encouraged the better students to help the slower students to bring them up to par or better.
Several times when the class did exceptionally well she rewarded us by taking us to a matinee movie. She would arrange for one of the school bus drivers to drive us to the Redskin Theater in south Oklahoma City, and have us back in time to catch our buses home.
It was one of these outings that we saw “Destry Rides Again” with James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich. I think she may have had some kind of connection at the Redskin Theater to get us in free or at a greatly reduced group price.
Gene’s parents were friends with Dwight and Ruth Davis. They met when Bill and Pauline were students at Oklahoma Central State Teachers College at Edmond, Oklahoma. Dwight became an English professor at the college. Dwight and Ruth had two children. The oldest was a girl about Gene’s age and the other was a boy. Bill and Pauline sometimes would take the family to Edmond to visit.
When Dad and Mom were visiting Dwight and Ruth the other kids were outside playing. I liked to hang around and listen to the adults talk, especially Dwight because he seemed to be so well informed about so many things.
Once Dwight was expounding about the lack of beneficial quality of soldiers. He said only men with little or no ambition became soldiers. He said, “In fact, soldier is the only noun in the English language that is also used as a verb.” That struck me as peculiar, because since we lived on a farm I knew that the noun ‘farm’ was also used as a verb. The noun ‘milk’ was used as a verb as ‘milk’ a cow. I further reasoned that I used a hoe to hoe cotton. I quietly wondered why an English professor would make such a statement.
As I became a little older I began to challenge people of authority, i.e. my parents, teachers, preachers, etc., when they made unequivocal incredulous statements beyond the realm of factual reasonableness. This often got me into serious trouble.
Gene’s family were members and attended the First Methodist Church in Moore. The Reverend W.T. Pugh was the pastor. He had a fabulous cursive script signature that Gene greatly admired.
The family also attended the occasional revival meetings conducted by various traveling evangelists. Gene had a life defining moment with one such evangelist.
He was an old man with a full flowing head of gray hair. He had a booming voice that spoke with the authority of God. He was a “hell fire and brimstone” preacher.
It was the last night of the revival. He demanded everyone come forward to re-dedicate their lives to Jesus else their 294 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 295 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
souls would be forever committed to the fiery furnaces of hell. Everyone, including all my family, except me, arose from the pews and went forward. As he pleadingly prayed for the salvation of their souls he suddenly noticed this lone little kid sitting in a pew of an otherwise totally empty sanctuary.
He prayed to the Lord to take my hand and lead me forward. I didn’t budge. Still praying he walked down from the pulpit. He walked down the aisle praying and stopped at the pew where I sat. I didn’t budge. He prayed for the Lord to take his hand and place it on my hand to lead me to my salvation, else “…this child of God will burn forever in the bowels of hell.”
I thought, “How do you know I will burn in hell?” He kept praying as he swiftly grabbed me by the arm. I thought, “God didn’t make you grab my arm, you made you grab my arm,” as he jerked me to my feet to drag me to my “salvation.” I twisted loose, ran down the aisle and out the back door. I walked home.
I caught ‘hell’ when my parents got home. I never returned, not without retribution, to church until well after I was an adult.
It’s not that I’m a non-believer. I’m probably a stronger believer than most of the people who beat it to church every time the doors are open. I think ‘church’ is a man-made social institution with all the frailties thereof.
I believe with all my heart there is a Creator of all things–God, if you please. It’s all too perfect to just happen. I also believe mortal man hasn’t the faintest notion what God’s purpose is. If He ever reveals it to us it will probably be so complex we can never understand it, or so simple we can never believe it.
Going to ‘church’ is not going to expunge me of all my sins. That’s between God and me–no one else.
Sunday, December 7, 1941, the ‘Day of Infamy.’ The United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor by Japan and propelled into World War II. Everyone was asking, “Where’s Pearl Harbor?” The next day President Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress and war was officially declared against Japan, Germany, and Italy.
Gene’s family lived on the Sullivan Place southwest of Moore. They did not have electricity. They did not have a radio. A neighbor family, the Prices, had a battery radio. They also had a son, Willis, who was Gene’s age. Gene often visited his friend in the evenings and listened to the radio.
The Price Family lived a quarter of a mile north of us. They didn’t have electricity, but Mr. Price rigged up a wind charger using a car generator. It was connected to a wet cell car battery. When the wind was blowing it charged the battery. They had a radio that connected to the battery.
Willis and I were friends. I often went to his house in the evenings to listen to the radio. We listened to Fibber Magee and Molly, Amos’n Andy, Baby Snooks, Gildersleeve, Mystery Theater, Inner Sanctum, Lux Theater, Bob Hope and Jack Benny.
It was early Sunday evening and we were all listening to the radio. I don’t remember the program, but it seems like it was the Lux Theater. An announcer interrupted the program to announce the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, but gave few details. Then the program resumed. We didn’t know where Pearl Harbor was.
I went home after the program and told my parents the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. They didn’t believe me. They thought I was joking around. It was the next day before they knew I wasn’t.
In the seventh-grade Gene was installed in the Junior Honor Society and was elected Student Council Representative by his classmates. He had a ‘puppy love’ infatuation with Eleanor Ann Jones, a nice girl with flaming red hair. Buford Young and Jack Dreessen were his two best friends.
Some of Gene’s other classmates at Moore were Wanda Davis, Betty Fox, Stephen Box, Billy Dale Jones, Herman Butler, Margaret Knight, Bobby January, Letha Bruce, Stinson Orr, Geneva Janko, Hubert Tuefel, John Gumm, Danny McCroy, Nita Norton, Lida Belle Burrell, Marilou Sala, Norma Thompson, Billy Teasley, 296 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 297 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
Oleta Jury, Willis Price, Emma Jean Cunningham, Jane Story and Jerry Foster.
In November when Gene was in the eighth grade his famly moved from the Sullivan Place southwest of Moore to the Cochran Place three miles north of Evening Shade, Arkansas. Buford and Gene were no longer separated by just a few miles; they were separated by over two hundred miles. A wonderful childhood friendship came to an abrupt and sudden end.
We had a couple of fairly good years financially on the farm at Moore. The country was coming out of the depression. World War II loomed ever larger. Dad took what little he had accumulated and we moved to Arkansas. He entered into a farming arrangement with his father.
A few months after we moved to Arkansas Mr. Young got a promotion and transferred to another part of his company. Buford and his folks moved to Drumright, Oklahoma. Thus, a great childhood friendship came to an abrupt end. I’m not sure Buford nor his folks ever fully understood the significance of the impact they had on my life during those so critically formative years.
I experienced compassion, patience, understanding and tolerance. I learned there was something more than fighting with my brothers and the bitter after feelings. Though I carried my sense of insecurity and need to constantly prove myself well into my adult life, I learned from Buford and his folks how to live and cope with it, and how to make it work for me and not against me.
I served in the Army Paratroopers during my military service and that was partly to prove I was as good as the next person. But, I never felt I had to prove anything to Buford and his folks. They were a refuge of friendly kindness, thoughtfulness, and caring consideration. I shall be forever grateful. Thanks, Buford. You were a great friend. And, thanks Mr. and Mrs. Young. You were great people. I forever love you for it.
Something else that portrays some of Gene’s early life is a treatise he started to honor his Aunt Jewel on her eightieth birthday celebration May 4, 1991 after he received a letter from her daughter, Norma Ivey. Much to his dismay he did not finish it until several years after she died. It gives a glimpse into some aspects and events in Gene’s early life and his long and loving relationship with his Aunt Jewel. She was his mother’s younger sister.
When I first received Norma’s letter I thought long and hard trying to come up with something clever and witty that would express something of my affection and love for my Aunt Jewel. The longer I thought the more I became convinced that what I wanted to say was from the heart, and the heart doesn’t have to be clever or witty to be expressive.
I decided to write in the first person because she already knew all the things I could possibly have to say. So, I wrote this for other people to read so they will have the pleasure of knowing Aunt Jewel as I knew her.
First, Aunt Jewel was a beautiful lady in every sense of the word. She was loving and caring. She was thoughtful and kind. She was generous and giving. She was fun-loving with a sense of humor. She was one fine cook. What great biscuits she could bake. I always knew I was in for a real treat when I sat down to her breakfast table and a heaping platter of her biscuits.
There were so many things I could relate, I hardly know where to start. When I was about eighteen months old mother and I took a train trip all the way from Oklahoma City to Dallas to visit Aunt Jewel, but I don’t remember that trip.
There were the numerous summers I spent with Grandma and Grandpa Roller on Panther Creek and the many, many times I would go up on The Mountain to see Aunt Jewel. She and Uncle Tom lived in a little one-room house with a lean-to on the back that served as the kitchen.
As a kid I remember early one morning when Uncle Tom stood in the front door and shot a wolf southwest of the house about seventy yards away. The wolf jumped when shot and made claw marks on the large sandstone rock he was standing on. Over the years I would look at those claw marks and marvel at the strength of the wolf to have made such scratch marks on the rock.298 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 299 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
Years later when I was an adult and the old house was long gone I returned with Uncle Tom and Robert, his son, one day to see if we could find the claw scratch marks in the rock. Time and erosion had long since erased them.
As a kid I also remember that Uncle Tom and Aunt Jewel had a large solid black dog. He was a magnificent animal and very smart. He was a no nonsense dog. His name was Dare, as in “I dare you to mess with me.” In fact, I was a little scared of him. He would just sit or lay there and stare at you. He was very protective of Uncle Tom and his family. He didn’t take very kindly to strangers. He would mind Uncle Tom and would obey several voice and hand commands.
Years later one day I said to Uncle Tom, “I’m going to say one word and I want you to tell me the first thing that comes to your mind.” Uncle Tom said, “Okay.” I said, “Dare.” Without hesitation he said, “Best dog I ever had.”
One of my most memorable visits with Aunt Jewel was the summer Norma was born. I spent most of that summer on The Mountain with her and my cousins, Jimmy and Robert. Norma was a tiny baby only two or three weeks old. Uncle Tom worked somewhere away from home. I’m not sure where.
Mother sent me down to The Mountain to help Aunt Jewel. Uncle Tom had a Model-A Ford coupe. It had rained heavily and the roads from Purcell to Panther Creek and up onto The Mountain were muddy and slick. We spent almost all night slogging and grinding through the mud finally arriving in the wee hours of the morning.
The next two months I fetched water from the well, split and brought in firewood for the cookstove, and helped Aunt Jewel however she needed help. One of my main duties was to entertain Jimmy and Robert to keep them out of her hair while she took care of Norma and did what household chores she was able to do.
One thing I had to do each morning was hustle up to the Gardner house about a quarter of a mile away and let Mrs. Gardner, Uncle Tom’s mother, know that Aunt Jewel and Norma were okay. I don’t know that she ever knew Mrs. Gardner had admonished me to do so.
I played games with Jimmy and Robert, read to them, and generally palled around with them. I recall one day we went down on the creek east of the house and I taught them to smoke dried grapevine. Our tongues and mouths were sore for several days.
One morning Aunt Jewel didn’t feel like getting up and she asked me to fix oatmeal for the boys. I stoked up the fire in the cookstove and soon had a boiling pot of water. I dumped some oatmeal into the boiling water, but the fire was too hot and I didn’t stir fast enough. I scorched the oatmeal.
The boys turned their noses up at the prospect of eating my oatmeal. They said, “It doesn’t look like mama’s.” I told them their mama didn’t know how to fix oatmeal and I would show them. I heaped sugar on the bowls of oatmeal, poured on a lot of cream, mixed it up and ate some to show them how good it was. I must have been convincing, because they ate it like it was good.
Years later when Jim was a naval aviator officer he, Laquetha and their girls visited my wife, Pat, and I in Huntsville, Alabama. They spent the night with us. The next morning Pat fixed oatmeal for breakfast. Laquetha remarked that she always had to scorch Jim’s oatmeal a little because he liked it that way. I broke out in a big laugh. They all thought I was a little “tetched.” I then told the story of the scorched oatmeal.
One day I would have beat Jimmy and Robert to within an inch of their life if I could have caught them. I slept outside on the west side of the house on an old iron frame metal spring bed with a few quilts to make a pad. I was gone most of that day down on Panther Creek to Grandma Roller’s house (about three miles) to report to her how Aunt Jewel was getting along and to gather some things I needed to bring back.
We didn’t have telephones, or electricity for that matter, so communication was to send someone (usually one of the children) to see the other person. While I was gone Jimmy and Robert took the quilts off my bed and dragged them through a sand-burr sticker patch. They then made my bed up very nicely for me.300 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 301 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
It was late when I got back and I was tired. I laid down on my bed only to leap up shouting with pain. I had a miserable evening trying to pick all the stickers from the quilts on my bed.
In a few weeks Aunt Jewel was feeling much better and it was getting time for me to return home and get ready to start school that Fall. Uncle Tom took me home in his Model-A Ford.
Gene spent part of the next summer on Panther Creek with his Grandma and Grandpa Roller. He doesn’t recall that he was on The Mountain that summer to see his Aunt Jewel, but he probably did because he remembers he worked broomcorn that year in a field just north of the Gardner home place on The Table Top.
Gene spent many summers during his childhood and early teens with his Grandpa and Grandma Roller on Panther Creek. These were some of his happiest days.
Grandma loved to read and listen to soap operas on the battery radio. When Grandpa went to town he usually went by the library and checked out a book or two for her to read. One summer she and I read “Gone with the Wind.” She read a page out loud and then I read a page out loud. We would shell peas or snap beans and listen to Ma Perkins.
I had a small set of artist oil paints with a few brushes. She encouraged me to paint. She got some pieces of pebble cardboard for me to paint on. I painted several pictures. She admired them. I wish I still had them. I don’t know what happened to them.
Grandma cooked on a huge wood burning Kalamazoo stove with an oven and a water reservoir for heating water. It was amazing. She could stoke the fire, shake that grate, adjust those dampers and maintain the heat at just the proper temperature for whatever she was cooking or baking.
She baked bread every few days. She rolled out the dough, kneaded it, placed it in pans and let it rise. Then she plopped them into the oven. The whole house smelled wonderful with the odor of fresh bread baking.
Sometimes she made doughnuts. You can’t believe how good they were. She rolled the dough out with a huge wooden rolling pin. She used a doughnut cutter to deftly cut out the doughnuts flipping each in the air catching it on her other thumb. When she had a half dozen on her thumb she carefully dropped each into a boiling pot of lard. She turned them with a wooden ladle. She used a crooked wood stick to fish them out and place on a cloth to drain while she sprinkled sugar on them. They were wonderful.
I also remember hog killing time. Grandpa never slaughtered just a hog. It usually was three or four. The day of the killing was a full day. Everyone, including a few neighbors, worked from early morning till late evening. That was just to kill, scald, scrap, gut, quarter and hang to cool.
The next several days were just as busy. Rendering lard in a huge black pot over a fire in the yard and making chitlins. Grinding and making sausage. Cleaning and scraping intestines to use as cases for the sausage. Rubbing the slabs of bacon and hams with a mixture of brown sugar and salt getting them ready to hang in the smokehouse.
Grandpa was a hard working no nonsense guy. He was about six feet tall but I don’t think he ever weighed over a hundred and fifty pounds. He had a ferocious appetite. His idea of a hearty breakfast was a bowl of oatmeal swimming in pure cream and brown sugar, four fried eggs, a big thick slice of ham, several large biscuits with butter, and two mugs of hot coffee.
Gene’s family arrived in Evening Shade, Arkansas, in November 1942. They lived temporarly in a house two miles southwest of Evening Shade. In January they moved to the farm known as the Cochran Place three miles north of Evening Shade on Strawberry River. The children attended school in Evening Shade. The family attended the First Methodist Church in Evening Shade, except Gene. He refused to go to church. He had an unpleasant experience at the church in Moore.302 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 303 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
Gene and his two older brothers made extra money cutting down hardwood trees, hand sawing short eighteen-inch logs, and splitting them to make firewood. They hauled the firewood in a mule drawn wagon to Evening Shade and sold the wood to town residents who still used wood for heating and wood burning cookstoves. They got seventy-five cents a rick stacked at the back door. A rick is four feet high by four feet long cut to cookstove length.
There were few money earning opportunities for teenage boys in and about Evening Shade. Thus, they had very little discretionary money to spend on the few things they wanted. William, Gene’s oldest brother, bought a small radio. They all listened to it, but it was his radio and it was only with his permission. Gene’s next older brother, Bob, saved enough to buy a nice pair of cowboy boots. He was proud of those boots.
From age eight to age fourteen my family lived on several different farms. We were poor and we moved several times to farms where we could keep a few cows and chickens, have a garden, and plant some row crops.
I had two older brothers, a younger sister, and a little brother. From about age twelve we each were expected to start becoming self-sufficient. Our parents provided meals such as they were and a place to sleep such as it was.
We were expected to work on the farm and when we could to work for neighbors and earn our own money. We were expected to buy our own shoes and clothes with an occasional assist from the folks. We had to buy our own schoolbooks and supplies, and we were certainly expected to earn our own discretionary money for fun and extraneous things.
My brother, Bob, is nineteen months older than I am. He was a big ox of a kid. I was a little skinny runt of a kid. Not only was he big, but he was a bully. He delighted in aggravating other kids, and me in particular. He teased and aggravated me to no end. He would hold my skinny little wrists in his big fist and with his other hand use a grass foxtail to tickle under my nose, in my ears, and poke at my eyes. All I could do was scream epithets at him and try to kick him on the shins.
He managed to save enough money to buy a nice new pair of cowboy boots. He loved those boots. He brushed and spit polished them all the time. He wore them only on special occasions and on Saturdays in town. He would swagger around town Saturday afternoons in those precious boots. He was so proud of them.
Like all growing boys the day came when he could no longer get his big feet into his precious boots. I’m sure Mom cut a deal to pay him something for his boots so they could be handed down to me. I could never visualize him just voluntarily out of the kindness of his heart allowing me to wear his precious boots.
I could hardly wait to put them on and parade around in front of him showing off my new boots. He let me know in no uncertain language that those were still his boots. I was just getting to wear them. I delighted in wearing his boots knowing full well he was watching me most of the time.
Several days later I was at the barn in the cow lot. I thought Bob wasn’t anywhere around. Like any thirteen year old kid would be so inclined, I started stomping “those precious boots” in cow manure piles all the while saying to myself, “There, take that!”
I stomped about four cow piles when suddenly I was hit with a flying tackle. Unseen by me, he had witnessed my grievous acts of retribution on his precious boots. He literally flew over the gate, tackled me to the ground, and forcibly pushed my face into a fresh pile of cow manure. He yelled at me, “Take that! That’s how my boots feel.” He made me take the boots off and clean them till they shined like a six-bit shoeshine. I hated those boots and never wore them again.
Adjustment to the new school at Evening Shade proved to be a trying challenge for Gene. At Moore he was a straight-A student, member of the Junior Honor Society, student council representative for his class, and well liked by his teachers and fellow students. 304 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 305 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
The change to Evening Shade was a cultural shock for Gene, but nothing he couldn’t adjust to, or a least that was what he thought.
In November 1942 we moved from Moore to Evening Shade, Arkansas. I changed schools in the middle of the semester. The school at Moore had almost five hundred students first through twelve grades. There were forty-four students in my eighth grade class. The school at Evening Shade had a few less than a hundred students first through twelve grades.
The entire school infrastructure at Evening Shade consisted of the main building, a gym building, an old house converted for home economics, a metal building for vocational agricultural and the old original school building converted to serve hot lunches. The main building, the old house, and the gym were of stone construction. The main building had a large room with a raised floor in front that served as a stage, two individual classrooms at the back, and two classrooms at the opposite end for grades one through six. All the buildings except the gym were heated by wood burning stoves. The gym was not heated.
Grades seven through twelve were in the large room. Each grade was arranged in a single row of desks. The seventh grade was on the right side, the twelfth grade was on the left side, and grades eight through eleven were in between. There were ten students in the seventh grade, thirteen in the eighth grade, nine in the ninth grade, eight in the tenth grade, seven in the eleventh grade, and six in the twelfth grade. The eighth grade class of thirteen students was the largest ever eighth grade class.
The entire faculty was two elementary teachers and five high school teachers. Mr. Watson, the principal, taught history and kept the study hall in the large room. Mrs. Watson, his wife, taught English in one of the back classrooms. Their son, Ray Bob, taught math and coached the basketball team. Miss Sullivan taught home economics in the old house and social studies in one of the back classrooms. Mr. Cherry taught vocational agriculture.
The various classes rotated the use of the classrooms in the back for English, math, and social studies. When not in one of the back classrooms the students were at their desks in the appropriate row for their grade in the large room supervised by Mr. Watson. He also taught history in the large room.
I was in the eighth grade. My first day at school a mid-semester exam on American History was scheduled. Mr. Watson told me that since it was my first day in the class I didn’t have to take the test. I told him we had been studying American History at my old school and I would go ahead and take the test. I scored a hundred. The next highest score was in the seventies.
The next day Mr. Watson took the occasion of an all school assembly to use me as an example to shame the entire school for their lack of scholarly performance. He said my performance was the level they should all achieve. He extolled my scholarly abilities as the best. He heaped praise on me which made me feel good about myself. Little did he or I know the problems he had just created for me. I immediately became that “new smart aleck know-it-all kid.”
The remainder of the school year I was from time to time subjected to taunts and torments most of which erupted into fisticuffs on the schoolyard. I had to fight a number of the boys in that school. I was able to make a significant impression on most of them because though I was small I was a tough scrappy kid. After all, I had been fighting two older brothers all my life.
Mr. Watson and the teachers came to look on me as a disciplinary problem child with serious antisocial tendencies. It never occurred to them it wasn’t me. It was an indictment of their teaching abilities. The frequent fights were always my fault. Of course my ‘smart mouth’ often exacerbated the situation. The confrontations almost always started with the exchange of harsh words. When I would reply, “I can’t help it you’re dumb” or “Its not my fault you can’t add two plus two,” the fists started flying. Sometimes older kids from the high school took me on which really caused me problems. I got beat up real good several times by kids four years older than me. Still it was always my fault.306 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 307 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
One day a particularly dumb fifteen-year old kid in the seventh grade decided it was his day to beat up on me. I stomped the devil out of him. Just as I was finishing him off ‘lightning’ struck. The kid’s seventeen-year old cousin, Millard Qualls, blind-sided me with a solid blow to my right temple. I fell to the ground in a stunned daze. He kicked me in the side as I struggled to get on my feet and stagger away.
It was bad enough to get the hell knocked out of me, but worse yet my big sixteen-year old ox of a brother stood by and did nothing to come to my rescue. I became very defensive and approached every situation with a great deal of caution and apprehension.
I managed to gain the friendship of a few students at Evening Shade. David “Pug” Kunkel was a neighbor and friend. M.A. Graddy, Carl Shaver, and Billy “Moose” Atkinson became friends.
The end of the school year gave me a summer reprieve. I longed for my friend, Buford, and missed him and his folks very much. I wanted a more peaceful existence.
Things did not go well in Arkansas for the Bill Davidson Family. The farm crops were flooded out, not once, but twice. The crops were totally lost. It was a financial disaster for Gene’s father and grandfather. This only added to the burden of family disunity, chaos, and problems. When the next school year rolled around, Gene refused to go back to the school at Evening Shade and all the problems. He convinced his parents it would be much better for him to go to another school.
When school was about to start in August I was fourteen years old. I refused to go back to that school and all the problems. I told my parents there was no way I would go back to that school. I had to find a change of direction because even at my tender age I could see I was on a collision course with disaster. Someone was going to get badly hurt or worse yet, killed. I wanted no part of it.
I convinced Mom and Dad it would be much better for me to go to another school. They arranged through a relative for me to go to Thayer, Missouri, about forty miles north of Evening Shade. I was to live with an elderly couple that lived in and managed the YMCA. I was to work for my room and board and a small weekly allowance, while I went to school.
I wanted to go to school. I liked school. I wanted a good education. I saw it as a way out of poverty. But, I also knew it had to be an environment condusive to learning.
The ‘YMCA’ at Thayer was not a true YMCA. It was actually a large rooming house for the train crewman on the Frisco Railroad. Thayer was a railhead junction and crew changeover point.
I made the beds, cleaned the rooms and bathrooms, swept the floors, and fetched this and fetched that. I was expected to respond to every menial request regardless. I was primarily an indentured servant to the elderly couple who ran the ‘YMCA.’
What little spare time I had in the evenings I went to the bowling alley across the street and set pins to make extra money. The old man and woman thought the bowling alley was a sin den because they sold beer and gambled there. When they talked to me about it I said it was on my time off and I should be able to do what I could to earn extra money. They didn’t like that. The arrangement didn’t last long.
The old man wrote a letter to Mom telling her the day to meet the train in Hardy. He bought a train ticket for the designated day for me to be on the train the next morning and back to Hardy and on to Evening Shade. I wanted no part of it.
That evening I used part of my earnings to buy a small ditty bag. I packed my things. Dawn the next morning I was on the highway hitchhiking to Oklahoma City. The old couple probably never knew, or cared, what happened to me. Mom probably cared, but had no idea where I was.
A farmer in a truck picked me up and took me to West Plains. A woman with two kids took me to Cabool. A salesman took me to Springfield. I stayed the night at the YMCA in Springfield.308 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 309 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
Early the next morning I was on Highway 66 with my thumb up. A navy officer in a Ford sedan picked me up. He was being transferred from the Great Lakes Naval Station to San Diego. I rode all the way to just east of Edmond with him. He ran out of gas and we slept that night in his car.
The next morning he got a farmer to sell him a few gallons of gasoline. We drove to Oklahoma City. He dropped me off at NW 23rd and May Avenue.
I didn’t know where else to go, so I caught a bus and went to the YMCA. I had a little money I had saved. I knew I could get a bed at the YMCA for very little money.
In a couple of days I got a job working at the YMCA cafeteria washing pots and pans. It was hard, hot and steamy work. However, I was fortunate. A man, Louie Stalken, that worked at the YMCA had worked for Dad when he was Ticket Agent for the Oklahoma Railway in Oklahoma City. He recognized me as one of Bill Davidson’s kids. However, I did not know that at the time. I went to work for him in the gym and steam rooms picking up towels, handling the laundry, cleaning the showers, and sweeping the floors. He let me live with him at the Travelers Hotel on North Robinson. The YMCA had a bowling alley and I set pins to earn extra money.
I met a young man, Bill Schlager, who often came to the YMCA gym. He took a liking to me, probably out of pity. He showed me how to lift weights and a few pointers on wrestling. He invited me to his home one evening to meet his folks and have dinner with them. They lived in a nice brick house on NW 22nd Street. They had an aquarium with live fish. I had never seen such in a home. His parents were very nice to me. It was an atmosphere more like Buford’s home life. I enjoyed it immensely.
One evening Bill took me to a party at his girl friend’s house. Her name was Mona Roberts. They lived in a nice two-level house on NW 24th Street. Mona was a very good-looking blonde about nineteen years old. She had a younger sister, Marilee, about my age. She was my date for the evening, but I’m sure it was only out of deference to Bill’s request.
We played the usual young peoples’ games, such as spin-the-bottle. When the bottle pointed at you your date walked around the house with you. My walk around the house with Marilee was just that, a walk around the house. Mona sensed that. Later, the bottle pointed to Mona. She picked me to take a walk around the house with her. I was apprehensive about going around the house in the dark with Bill’s girl friend. She planted a kiss on me unlike anything I had ever experienced.
A week or so later Bill reported for military service. I never saw him again. I’ve often wondered whatever happened to him. Years later I tried to locate him or his family, but unsuccessfully. I also tried to locate Mona to maybe find out about Bill, but that too was unsuccessful.
It was late August and I wanted to return to school. Since I lived with Louie on North Robinson Street I resided in the Roosevelt Junior High School District, thus I pre-enrolled at Roosevelt
In the meantime Mom and Dad left the farm in Arkansas and came to Oklahoma City where they still owned the small house at 3608 NW 13th Street. World War II was fully engaged and jobs were plentiful, though housing was scarce with rent controls. They lived with friends, Alvin and Wilma Teel, on NW First Street for a while until they got their house available to move into.
Louie somehow contacted my parents and I was reunited with them. I went to live at the Teels with Mom, Dad, Meta Lu (Ann), and Marvin (Sam). Bob came home later to live at 3608 NW 13th Street. William lived at Moore with the Morrow Family.
I went the first day of school to Roosevelt. I met with the principal and explained that though I was living in his district my family would soon move to the Taft Junior High School District. He was very understanding and wrote out a transfer slip for me which I took that day to Mr. Gilbert Robinson, principal at Taft. He eyed me with a jaundiced eye of suspicion. He thought I was up to no good. It took some amount of explaining and a phone call to the principal at Roosevelt before he reluctantly accepted my transfer. This however was not my last encounter with the ever-suspecting Mr. Gilbert Robinson.
In September I started in the ninth grade at a new school, Taft Junior High, which was a large modern educational 310 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 311 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
facility unlike Moore or Evening Shade. I was just another kid among hundreds, so I was able to leave all my ‘baggage’ unnoticed at the front door. Since I was making a new start in life I quit using the name Gene and went by Don the rest of my life, though for years many of my old friends and relatives continued to call me Gene.
Don had two other unfortunate experiences with Mr Gilbert Robinson, the principal. At the time Don entertained the ambition to be an architect. He knew he had to have a foundation in math and looked forward to his upcoming algebra class.
I was assigned to Mrs. Daughtery’s algebra class. I looked forward to the class with great anticipation. Little did I know. A mere two weeks into the class I knew it was not for me. Poor Mrs. Daughtery. I think she had recently lost her husband and had just returned to teaching that semester. Two guys in the class made it their mission in life to disrupt the class. Several times they reduced Mrs. Daughtery to tears. I knew this was no environment for me to learn algebra.
I went to the principal’s office to request a transfer to Mr. Mathews’ algebra class. I had heard he was tough and most kids dreaded his classes. Again, the ever-suspecting Mr. Robinson knew I was up to no good. He scolded me and told me to get back to class and apply myself and I would learn algebra.
I decided to simply fail the class and maybe next semester I could get in Mr. Mathews’ class. Not so. Mrs. Daughtery gave me a ‘C’ grade though I did nothing to earn it. And, wouldn’t you know it. The next semester I was assigned to Mrs. Daughtery’s class. Thanks, I’m sure, to the effort of ‘Gilbert the Great.’ I did nothing to earn the ‘C’ grade I received the second semester.
Several years later when I was in college I drove a delivery truck for Kerr’s Department Store during the summer months. I made deliveries to the residence of Mrs. Gilbert Robinson always on Thursdays. The following Monday I always had a pickup-ticket for return of merchandise. I asked the sales manager in the ladies ready-to-wear department about it. She said, “Oh, she hardly ever buys anything. She just orders them to wear for weekend functions and then returns them.” I thought, “That figures.”
It was about this time Don first really became acquainted with Patricia “Pat” Paschall. She was a neighborhood girl who lived at 3608 NW 11th Street, just a couple of blocks from where Don and his family lived. Pat and Don became good friends and ran around together though nothing very serious. They were just young kids out having a good time together. Don was three years older than Pat, and though he liked her he was romantically more interested in girls his own age, or older.
My parents first bought the house at 3608 NW 13th Street in 1935. Pat’s family lived in the neighborhood at 3813 NW 13th Street, only two blocks away. We were just kids then, but surely our paths crossed a few times.
We moved to Moore in November 1937 and to Evening Shade in November 1942. I returned to Oklahoma City in August 1943. Dad, Mom, Ann and Sam returned to Oklahoma City in September 1943. They lived with Alvin and Wilma Teel on NW 1st Street. Mom and Dad knew the Teels from our days at Moore. Wilma had lived at home with her father, Mr. Stevenson, on the next farm east from where we lived on the Johnson Place. Wilma was in high school then. After she married Alvin Dad helped him get a job where he worked.
I quit work at the YMCA to go to school. In the meantime I got a paper route to make a little money. My first route was Linwood Boulevard, NW 5th and NW 4th Streets between Blackwelder and Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a long route and I did not have a bicycle. It was a long walk twice a day.
In November 1943 Mom and Dad were finally able to vacate the renters at 3608 NW 13th so we could move back into our house. I kept the paper route on Linwood Boulevard for a while, but it became so far for me to go to throw the route and go to school that I got a paper route close to home. I also bought a used bicycle.
In those days the paperboys folded the newspapers in a three-corner fold which made it easy to ride down the street 312 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 313 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
on a bicycle and throw the papers onto the porches. Sometime the papers ended up on the roofs, in the shrubs, and other places.
Some paperboys became good at this and could hit the porches most of the time. Some never could get very good at it. I got pretty darn good. I could put the paper right where I wanted ninety-eight percent of the time. I was so good I was cocky about it. Often times the paperboys at the paper station would fool around and have newspaper-throwing contests while waiting for our paper bundles to arrive. We bet pennies on the outcome. I won most of the time.
A nice warm spring day in 1944 I pedaled down NW 14th Street in the 3600 block throwing my papers. I saw Barbara Moore and Pat sitting on the Moore’s porch. They were facing each other about four feet apart. They were playing ‘jacks,’ a girls’ game played with a small rubber ball and several small metal cross pieces called ‘jacks.’
Cocky me! I thought, “I’ll throw this paper right between them and scare ’em.” I let fly. The three-fold newspaper hit Pat squarely in the side of her head. I’m sure it hurt. I turned my bicycle around and pedaled back to the porch. The Pat was fighting to keep back the tears. I felt bad. I apologized profusely. I don’t think my apologies were too well received. Six years later Pat become my dear wife.
Don fit in well with his new classmates at Taft and was well liked. He didn’t have to fight other kids to gain their respect and acceptance. That was a great relief for him.
He was a good student and aggressively athletic in the gym classes. The other boys recognized his athletic abilities as did the gym teachers. They recommended to the high school football coach that he be allowed to go out for spring football at the high school in lieu of gym class. Like most young teenage boys Don and his friends were not above a few occasional hi-jinks.
Taft had an enclosed swimming pool. It was used for both boys and girls gym classes. Held separately, of course. The girls wore swimsuits. The boys swam nude. The locker room for the boys was at one end of the pool and the girls at the other end. The door to the girls side was kept closed and locked during the boys’ classes and likewise the boys side was kept closed and locked during the girls’ classes. The doors were heavy and about forty inches wide. For easy maintenance and cleaning there was a crack of about two inches under each door.
The gym teacher almost always allowed about twenty minutes of free swim time where he left and the boys were on their own. When in the water at the far ends of the pool you were about eye-level with the crack under the doors between the locker rooms.
One day during free swim time one of the guys noticed three pairs of ‘little eyes’ peering under the opening of the door to the girls’ locker room. He quietly pointed this out to several of us. We went in the water at that end of the pool and casually looked at the opening under the door. Sure enough, ‘little eyes’ were peering under the door. We didn’t do anything about it that day. However, after school we got together and plotted our revenge.
The next day some of us secretively brought bottles of Pine-Sol disinfectant to gym class which we concealed in the locker room from the teacher. There were already two three-gallon buckets in the locker room for maintenance use. When the teacher left and we had free swim time we nonchalantly checked to see if the ‘little eyes’ were peering under the door. Sure enough, they were.
We mixed the entire contents of the Pine-Sol with water in two buckets out of sight from the ‘little eyes.’ Two of us took a bucket each of the Pine-Sol mixture and stationed ourselves on each side of the door. One guy positioned himself in the pool to where he could see when the ‘little eyes’ peered under the door. On his signal the two of us sloshed all six gallons of the Pine-Sol mixture under the door.
We spent the rest of the school day going around looking into the eyes of all the girls to see who had red bloodshot eyes and who smelled like Pine-Sol. We smelled so much from Pine-314 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 315 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
Sol ourselves we couldn’t tell, or else they washed it off in the shower.
This didn’t stop the ‘little eyes’ from peering under the door though we did the Pine-Sol thing several more times to no avail. When the ‘little eyes’ were peering under the door we would sometimes put on a show for them. I suppose that sometime during the school year most of the girls got an eye full more than one way. I guess that was sex education the old fashioned way.
Don and Pat became more than casual friends. Her family had moved to 3608 NW 11th Street. Though not romantically involved they were good friends. After all, they were just early teenage kids. They met often at the Wes-Ten Theater on Saturdays to sit together through a movie. Pat had a pair of shoe skates and was a good skater. They sometimes went to the Uptown Skating Rink. Don liked to skate with Pat because she was good enough that she made him look better than he actually was.
Pat had a badminton set in her backyard. She played very well. Don would pedal his bicycle over to her house and park it with a kick-stand in the driveway. He and Pat would play badminton until her father came home. He always delighted in giving Don a bad time about parking his bike in the driveway.
Don and Pat well remember the first time they kissed. It was a summer evening. They and several other friends were fooling around in Dr. Coley’s peach orchard near Grand Boulevard and 11th Street. Pat recorded the event in a small diary she kept at the time. She still has the diary.
In the meantime Don learned of Buford Young’s address at Drumright through mutual friends at Moore. They exchanged letters several times. Buford would tell about the fun things he and some of his new friends would have and especially about riding their bicycles down a long hill in Drumright. Don missed his friend and longed for the day they could get together again.
I continued to go to school. I set pins weekends at the Plamore Bowling Alley to earn extra money. I got a job working at the Union Bus Station in Oklahoma City as a baggage checker and handler. It was a source of satisfaction. I worked from midnight until seven o’clock in the morning. I had to be in class at eight-thirty. I was making good money for a high school kid and for the times. I made the minimum wage of forty cents an hour. I had little idle time.
My cousin, Vida Roller, worked as a waitress in the coffee shop at the bus station. She started work at six o’clock in the morning. I sometimes stopped to get a cup of coffee and chat with her.
I got friendly with several of the bus drivers most of whom were older men because all the young men were in the military for the duration of the war. The MKO (Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma) Bus Line went from Oklahoma City through Drumright to Tulsa and points beyond.
On an off day I got one of the MKO drivers to let me ride to Drumright with him. I hadn’t had a letter from Buford for quite a while and I wanted to pay him a surprise visit. When I got to Drumright and found the right address, Buford no longer lived there. Mr. Young had again transferred to another location. I had no idea where they were. It was a great disappointment for me.
I stood a long time at the top of that long hill. I could visualize Buford and me having a great time bicycling down that hill. I walked all the way, and it was a long ways, down that hill and looked longingly back up the hill. Then I went to the bus station and caught the next MKO bus back to Oklahoma City.
The last two weeks of school in May Don became very ill. He had terrific headaches that reached down the back of his head into his spine and between his shoulders. The pain was excruicating for more than a week. He continued to go to school, but often sat in the cafeteria all afternoon with his head resting in his folded arms on a table.316 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 317 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
It was war time. Don’s parents worked. Don had been working but had to quit. No one seemed to have the time to be concerned about him or his illness. He didn’t press the issue. He figured he could just “tough it out.” In retrospect, he thinks maybe he had a slight case of polio, because afterwards his left foot was a full shoe size smaller than his right foot, and his left leg was always a little smaller than his right leg. Also, he was five feet six inches tall. He never grew any taller afterwards.
When Don was in high school he played on the football team. Pat was in junior high at Taft. It was a prestige thing for a junior high girl to be seen running around with a high school boy, especially one on the football team.
Football was a source of fun therapy for me. I could physically take out my pent up frustrations on other guys in an acceptable manner. Though I was small I was tough as an old boot heel and the most aggressive player on the team. The coaches loved it.
I played blocking back my sophomore year on the “B” Team. We played from a double-wing formation. Near the end of the season the coach moved me up to the Varsity. I got to make a road trip to play Enid though I did not get to play in the game. I mostly sat on the bench. After all, the team had a championship in the making. The team was state champions that year.
Next Spring in spring football practice I was still playing blocking back and not getting much playing time. One day in a tough scrimmage George McKean, the starting guard from the year before, bloodied a guy’s nose. We didn’t wear nose-guards. The coach called for a guard. One of the guards jumped in and George promptly took him out. This occurred another time. Then when the coach called for a guard no one moved. He called, “Gimme a guard” again. No one moved. I ran forward from the group of backs and yelled, “I’m a guard.”
I knew it was now or never to show my true mettle. When the center snapped the ball I hit George with everything I had which took him by surprise. I got past him and tackled Ray Plumb behind the line of scrimmage for a loss. For the next fifteen minutes of scrimmage George and I had at it. I beat him every time. I had three factors in my favor. First, George was tired. I wasn’t. Second, I was quick and fast. Third, George was overly confident. That will get you every time.
George and I ended up in a slugfest. He was frustrated and I was determined to prove myself. The coach let us have at it for about a minute then stepped in and broke it up. He ended the practice. On my way to the locker room Coach Higbie told me, “Stop by and get a pair of cleats.” A sure sign I had made the Varsity Team.
As Don grew a little older he became interested in girls more his age or older, though he still liked Pat very much. After all, she was a kid three years younger than he was. One evening Don had a date with Pat that went awry very badly.
It was the summer of 1944. World War II was in full force. Everyone able was either in the military or employed. I was fifteen and worked on the loading dock at Joe Hodges where Dad was the dock foreman.
The young eighteen and nineteen year old ladies of the neighborhood where we lived were all employed. There were no young men their age to date. They were all in the military service. Their choice was either go for a pick-up date with a serviceman in downtown Oklahoma City that was flooded on weekends with sailors from the Naval Station at Norman and airmen from Will Rogers Field southwest of the city. Or, they could date a neighborhood boy too young for military service. That was me.
I dated Joy Mae, Estelle, and Ruby. Joy Mae and Estelle were eighteen. Ruby was nineteen. Pat was thirteen. She was a nice kid and I liked her. But, nice as Pat was, I was not romantically inclined toward her. I was more interested in the older girls.
Pat was a Rainbow Girl, a youth group associated with the Eastern Stars, the ladies auxiliary of the Masonic Order. One day Pat asked me to go with her on a Rainbow Girls evening 318 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 319 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
outing for a hayrack ride and wiener roast. She asked several weeks in advance of the event. I agreed and then promptly forgot about it.
I later made a date with Ruby for the same night of the hayrack ride. It was only at the last moment that mother reminded me I had a date with Pat for that evening. What to do? I reasoned, “This hay ride is for seven o’clock. It won’t take more than a couple of hours. Then I can have a late date with Ruby.” I called Ruby and told her something unexpected had come up and I would meet her at nine-thirty. She grumbled but was agreeable.
I went on the hay ride with Pat. Pat’s friend, Betty, was also a Rainbow Girl and she was on the hay ride with a date. Betty was my age and I was interested in her, but she didn’t care one whit for me. Her parents thought I was a great kid, but Betty didn’t share their sentiments. The hay ride took longer than I thought it would.
At nine-thirty Ruby called the house and mother answered the phone. When Ruby asked where I was mother said, “Oh, he went on a hay ride with Patsy Paschall.” That made Ruby angry.
So, here it was ten o’clock and I was still on the hay ride with Pat. At this point I decided to stand-up Ruby and make some lame excuse the next day. Well, Ruby was so angry she hit the local bar and proceeded to get boozed-up.
Wouldn’t you know it? This darn horse drawn hay ride went right down the street in front of the bar at 10th and Portland where Ruby was soaking up beer. She heard the cloppity-clop of the horses’ hooves and the clankity-clank of the harness chains. Here came Ruby out the barroom door like she was shot from a cannon. She bailed onto the hay wagon and laid her head in my lap. She was foaming at the mouth and reeked with the smell of beer. This made Pat angry.
I felt helpless. What to do? I tried to smooth things over with Pat to no avail. Ruby was smooching all over me. Pat turned her back, tightly folded her arms and became mum. Betty said, “If you don’t get rid of her I’ll never speak to you again.”
Decision time. I pushed Ruby off the back of the wagon. Then, I tried to make amends with Pat and Betty to no avail. They wouldn’t even speak. I finally gave it up and jumped off the wagon and walked home.
By now it was eleven-thirty. When I got home who was sitting on the curb in front of the house? Ruby. She read me the riot act. I tried to quiet her down but she would have no part of it. Mother opened the door a crack and quietly asked, ‘Don, is that you?” I replied, “Yes, Mother.” She said to be quiet. Ruby finally let me walk her home. I never had another date with Ruby.
The Marconis lived next door west at 3612 NW 13th Street. Mazio was an Italian immigrant. He served during World War I and had gained citizenship. He spoke very broken English. He ran an upholstery business in the shed behind their house. Don thought Mazio was an interesting old character.
I sometimes went next door to Mazio’s shop just to talk. He always had some philosophical story to tell that usually had a moral to it. He always put me to work helping him to hold this and to hold that while he hammered upholstery tacks in a piece he was finishing. He always had a mouth full of tacks that he applied to the magnetic end of his small tack-hammer from his mouth. I marveled that he could talk with a mouth full of tacks while putting the hammer in his mouth to pick up tacks and not swallow any of them.
One day I told Mazio the Haggard boy across the alley had been drafted into the army. Mazio didn’t like him because he had a BB-gun and would shoot out the small glass panes in the back of his shop. Mazio said, “Good. I hope he comes back like a new moon.” I thought surely Mazio had a change of heart until he added after a pause, “A quarter at a time.”
Don sometimes did yard work around the neighborhood to make extra money. He had an unpleasant experience with one neighbor. He did yard work for Mr. and Mrs. Hill, Betty’s parents. Mr. Hill was gone a lot working in the war effort. Don cut their grass, trimmed the hedges, and generally kept the yard looking 320 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 321 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
nice while Mr. Hill was gone. He didn’t ask to be paid. All this was to gain Betty’s favor. Her parents thought he was a great kid. Betty didn’t give a whit about him. She tolerated him only to appease her folks.
The lady across the street had observed me working in the Hill’s yard. Her husband was gone to the army. She asked me to work an entire Saturday helping her with yard work. I agreed and she paid me fifty cents an hour. We worked from sunup and until after sundown. She paid me and I went home.
The next day the police knocked on our front door. They wanted to talk to me. The lady I worked for the day before called the police because her garden hose was gone. She accused me of coming back that night and stealing it.
The police talked with Dad and interrogated me. I insisted that I did not take the hose. They looked around the house and garage and didn’t see anything to indicate I took it, so they left. That was the last I heard from the police. I went to the lady’s house and told her the police had been to see me and I did not steal her hose. She was haughty and still convinced I took it. That really irritated me.
World War II raged almost four years. Things on the battlefield went badly for the United States while the country mobilized for all out warfare. The Battle of Midway was the turning point in the Pacific. The invasion of Italy was the start of the turning point in Europe. Don’s cousin, Joe Clarke, was one of the many heroic combat soldiers in Italy. The D-Day invasion of France at Normandy was the turning point in Europe. Don’s friend, Bobby Greenlee, from Moore was injured on D-Day and lost his left leg but survived.
Everyone physically able and between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six was drafted into the army. Many volunteered. Others fought the war on the home front. Everyone physically able worked, mostly at defense jobs.
Alvin Teel, the friend of Don’s parents, was drafted into the army. His wife, Wilma, lived alone in a small garage apartment behind the house next door to Don’s parents. Wilma was a very attractive woman. She worked while Alvin was gone to the army. She loved to roller skate, but did not like to go skating alone with so many servicemen on the loose in Oklahoma City during the war. So on Saturday evenings she would take Don as her escort.
I loved to skate with Wilma. She was so good she made me look a lot better than I actually was. Also, what fifteen year old boy wouldn’t love to be seen by his friends skating with an attractive thirty-year old woman?
My friends were all very curious and anxious to know about my “date” they saw me with at the roller rink. I never said very much. I let their imaginations run amuck. I silently reveled in it.
Years later I saw Wilma at a Moore reunion. She was seventy-five years old but still an attractive woman. I told her about how I played my friends along about our roller skating together. Her comment was: “Oh my goodness. I hate to think what was said about me.” I assured her, “Not to worry. It wasn’t any thing to be concerned about.”
Many women took jobs normally held by men. They became known as Rosie the Riveter. Don’s Aunt Marge Weldon was a welder in the Kaiser Shipyards. His mother worked in a plant sewing army tents. During the football off-season Don worked a short time as a jig rigger and later as a spot welder making bomb racks for B-25 bombers. He went to school from eight-thirty until two-thirty, then worked the swing shift from three until eleven o’clock. He got home about eleven forty-five and had to be at school eight-thirty the next morning. He usually was late or missed homeroom. His first class was history at nine. Mrs. Gibson was the teacher.322 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 323 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
I usually barely made class on time. I often would doze off in class. Mrs. Gibson chastised me several times about sleeping in class. She must have checked with the principal’s office to see if I had some problem. Somehow she found out I was working a full eight hours on the swing shift in a war plant. She took me aside and told me it was okay if I sometimes slept in her class.
Bless her heart. She gave me a ‘C’ grade in history. She would be proud today to know that over the years I developed a keen interest in history, especially American History.
In the spring of 1945 the war was in its final stages. The war in Europe ended April 25, 1945. Not so many bomb racks were needed so production schedules were drastically cut back and Don was out of a job. The war with Japan raged on with the invasions of Okinawa and Iwo Jima. The B-29’s bombed Japan around the clock.
When I got out of school in May 1945 I had no job. A neighbor, Otto Pemberton, had a small independent ice delivery business. I went to work for him delivering ice.
Each morning we picked up a load of four hundred pound blocks of ice at Lieberman’s Ice Plant at 10th and May Avenue. The big blocks were picked into smaller blocks of one hundred pounds. These were further picked into fifty-pound blocks which was the most common size for home and apartment delivery.
Most of the people who used ice instead of refrigerators were located in the poorer area of South Oklahoma City between Western and Broadway from Grand Street south to Fourth Street including Reno, California and Washington Streets. This area was mostly cheap walk-up flats and apartments and low-income houses. They put ice cards in their windows to tell us they wanted ice and how much they wanted.
Otto drove the truck and made deliveries. He had me make the third floor deliveries. It was no easy job toting fifty pounds of ice on your back up three flights of stairs.
One day as I shouldered a fifty pound block for the third floor Otto said, “She owes me eight dollars and fifty cents. If you see her ask her to pay up.”
I trudged up the steps to the landing for the door of her tiny three- room apartment. The door opened into a small living room. Believe it or not, people did not lock their doors. I turned left and went into the small kitchen. The bedroom was to my right. I placed the ice in the icebox. I turned to leave and there she stood in the living room wearing a thin loosely fitting housecoat of sorts.
I said, “Mr. Pemberton said you owe him eight dollars and fifty cents. He said for you to pay up.”
She coyly replied, “Would you take it out in trade?”
I was dumbstruck. I stuttered and said, “I’ll have to ask Mr. Pemberton.”
She laughed as I went out the door. Back at the truck I told Otto what she said. He said, “Okay. I’ll take care of it.”
I worked only four weeks with Otto. It was heavy work. I was exhausted every evening when I got home. In the meantime I decided to work with Uncle Henry on the farm on Panther Creek.
Uncle Henry married Catherine Blackwood in December 1941. He was classified 4-F thus physically unfit for military service. He worked a while in a war plant in California. He and Catherine came back to Oklahoma. Grandpa and Grandma Roller had retired and moved to Maysville. Since he had no other means to support his family Henry decided to farm the Roller place on Panther Creek.
Since I had no job I decided to go to Panther Creek and help Henry raise a crop of corn, peanuts, and cotton. We spent hours tilling the soil using mules to draw the farm implements and our hands on long-handle hoes.
The farm was twenty miles west of Pauls Valley. The house was situated such that to go anywhere, even the mailbox, required crossing Panther Creek that normally flowed a small stream. There were no paved highways–just red dirt roads.324 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 325 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
Henry and Catherine had a small tabletop radio that used a dry cell battery. We listened to it for entertainment and news about the war. But, early July the battery went dead. Batteries were difficult to get because of the war shortages. Henry had not had the time to go to town to see if he could find a new one. We were without a radio, but continued to receive the daily newspaper a day late via U. S. Mail rural route delivery by Mr. Pike Paul. There was no telephone.
August first it started raining and rained for the next three days. Panther Creek flowed bank full. The next several days it was impossible to cross the creek, even to go to the mailbox a quarter of a mile away.
By August seventh the creek was down enough that Henry and I decided to go to Davis, the nearest country store about four miles away, but on the other side of the creek. Davis was a small community with a church, a rural schoolhouse, a small country store with one gasoline pump, a blacksmith shop, and three houses. We could pick up a few items for Catherine, but most importantly we could catch up on the latest community gossip and find out the latest war news.
Henry and I saddled our horses, mounted and swam Panther Creek. We made our way cross-country about a mile to the nearest road to Davis. It was very muddy and slow going. When we finally got on the road we saw an unusual number of wheel ruts and horse hoof prints in the red mud. We sloughed along speculating why so many people were out on a muddy road making so many tracks.
As we approached Davis about a quarter of a mile away we saw several vehicles and trucks parked near the store. We also saw an unusually large number of horses and wagons with teams hitched in front of and near the store. As we slogged along in the mud we speculated about what was going on to cause so many people to be there. The only thing we could think of was that someone must have died and they were having a funeral. But, why all the activity at the store and not the church?
When we got within about a hundred yards we saw a number of people standing on the store porch and around the steps all excitedly talking. We still couldn’t figure out what was going on. We rode up to a hitch and before we could dismount one of the several men standing there said, “The war is over! They dropped ‘uh a-tom bomb’ on Japan.” I thought, “What the hell is uh a-tom bomb?” Another man said, “It wiped out a whole city in Japan.” As I dismounted I thought, “These guys are nuts. They can’t make an airplane big enough to carry a bomb big enough to wipe out an entire city.”
Once inside the store was abuzz with everyone listening to a radio. The news announcer said something about the total destruction of a city in Japan. I thought, “They must have flown a thousand B-29’s over that city.” But everyone kept talking about “uh a-tom bomb.” I then saw a newspaper headline in big bold letters: ATOM BOMB DESTROYS JAPAN CITY. A sub-heading read: “Hiroshima Destroyed.” It finally began to sink in as I reflected: “The war really is over. But what the heck is an atom bomb? How could it destroy an entire city?”
It was several hours before we mounted up to go home. Much too long. We were gone so long Catherine was worried sick about us. She just knew we drowned in the creek.
Late August Don went home to Oklahoma City so he could return to school. He started training for football and played on the Varsity.
I played left guard and George McKean, my old rival, played right guard. During the Henryetta game in mid-season Jim Murphy, our left end, injured his knee and was out for the next several games. The coach put in the backup end. The first play he let a Henryetta back get around him for a long gain. It happened a second time. The coach yelled, “Davidson! Get in there at end! Don’t let ‘em around you! Turn ‘em inside!!”
I played left end the next several games. Then back to guard when Jim Murphy was able to play the last regular season game. We won our district title and met Ardmore in the quarterfinals in the State Championship playoffs.326 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 327 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
We were beset by more than our fair share of injuries. Sam Burnnel, our star fullback, was out with a broken arm. Jim Murphy, our outstanding left end was playing with a bad knee. Ray Plumb, our quarterback, was ailing with a sick stomach.
We traveled to Ardmore the day before the game and spent the night at a hotel in Ardmore. By game time (afternoon game) the next day half the team was sick with gastroenteritis symptoms (vomiting and diarrhea). We always thought it was a conspiracy to serve us bad food at the hotel restaurant.
Anyhow, near the end of the game we needed a touchdown to win. Jim Murphy gave it his best but his knee gave out. Coach Higbie moved me to left end to replace Murphy.
We were mid-field and getting a little desperate as time was running out. Ray Plumb threw a pass deep to the right side incomplete. Back in the huddle he asked me, “Weren’t you open on that play?” I said, “Yeah.” Ray said, “Well, get open again!,” and called the same play. The quarterback called the plays in those days. The defensive back was on me like a cheap suit, but I managed to come down with the ball on the seven yard line. At this point I thought we would pull it out.
The next play Ray called for the running back, Merrel Harrel, to sweep the right end. Merrel could run like a scared deer, but had the bad habit of sometimes dropping the ball for no apparent reason. We nicknamed him “Thumbs” Harrell. True to form, Merrel dropped the ball for no apparent reason. Ardmore recovered. Even though J. C. Evans, our backup fullback, turned in a stellar performance, we lost. Our hopes for a repeat State Championship were dashed.
It was a great disappointment for me. I so much wanted our team to win State because my older brother, Bob, played the previous year on the team that won the State Championship. I knew he would never let me forget it. Coach Higbie sensed my deep disappointment. He knew I had played my heart out to win that game. He made it a special point to put his arm around me and console me.
Donald Gene Davidson – age 17
At the end of each football season it was customary for the girls pep club at Classen to hold an appreciation banquet for the team. It was also customary for individual members of the pep club to ask one of players to be her escort to the banquet. There was great competition among the most popular girls to ask and receive dates with the most prominent players on the team. There were more girls in the pep club than players on the team. Many went without a date.328 William E. “Bill” Davidson Family 329 DONALD GENE DAVIDSON
I was not an outstanding star on the team. I was not a flashy player. I was an aggressive hard-hitting technician. I was a good steady reliable performer. I played in the line, part of the time as a guard and the last part of the season as an end. Coach Higbie once complimented me on my steadfastness and reliability.
I was not popular in the halls at school. I was a kid that mostly went about my own business. Only a handful of students recognized me off the playing field as a member of the team.
I dated only four girls at Classen. One was Janet Ellison. I had one date with her. I didn’t have a car. Another was Esther Reno. I had two dates with her. She was more interested in my older brother, Bob. Another was Jane Harding. I had four or five dates with her. I had two dates with Betty Hill. Her folks liked me but she didn’t want anything to do with me. I mostly didn’t have the time or money to go out on dates. I mostly worked in my spare time. Pat, who did not go to Classen, was mostly my steady reliable date. She was still in junior high school at Taft.
The last day came for the girls to ask the players for a date. I had not been asked. I decided I would not go to the banquet. That very afternoon a young lady approached me in the hallway and embarrassingly asked me to be her escort to the banquet. I was flabbergasted. I scarcely knew her. She was in one of my classes. I didn’t even think she knew who I was. I had to think hard to recall her name–Margaret Wilkens.
I sheepishly accepted. Margaret was not outstandingly popular. She was not one of the school beauties that flitted around the halls. She was rather plain and overly endowed with ample freckles. But, she was a very nice and pleasant young lady. She had that quiet inward beauty that graciously radiated outwardly.
I went home and told Mom. She went to great lengths the next few days to scrounge up some of Dad’s clothes to alter and fit to me. I had a nice shirt, a jacket and a necktie to wear with my nicest pair of pants.
The afternoon of the banquet I caught the Nichols Hill bus in plenty of time to go to Margaret’s house to pick her up. I’ll never forget. She lived at 6608 Hillcrest in Nichols Hills, a most prestigious address. The bus driver let me off at a corner and gave me directions to the house.
I had never been in such a luxurious home–rugs all the way to the walls. Curtains hanging all the way to the floor. I later learned they were carpets and drapes. Margaret’s mother was most gracious. I had a small inexpensive corsage for Margaret.
I took Margaret on the bus and streetcar to the Skirvin Tower Hotel in downtown Oklahoma City. My place setting was not even next to Margaret’s. I sat at the end of one of the tables.
A man, I think it was an uncle, picked Margaret and I up at the hotel after the banquet. He dropped me off at the 17th Street Station on Classen Boulevard where I caught a late bus home.
I never had another date with Margaret, but I’ve always had a warm spot in my heart for her. I’ve always thought she asked me to be her escort because no one else had. Thank you, Margaret!
Later, I learned her father was a famous and wealthy surgeon in Oklahoma City. I think they thought I was not of proper standing for their daughter. I knew for sure I was out of my element.
Years later I saw a small notice in the Classen New-Life alumni magazine that Margaret had died. It saddened me, but I will always have that warm spot in my heart for her.
I was not an outstanding star on the team. I was not a flashy player. I was an aggressive hard-hitting technician. I was a good steady reliable performer. I played in the line, part of the time as a guard and the last part of the season as an end. Coach Higbie once complimented me on my steadfastness and reliability.
I was not popular in the halls at school. I was a kid that mostly went about my own business. Only a handful of students recognized me off the playing field as a member of the team.
I dated only four girls at Classen. One was Janet Ellison. I had one date with her. I didn’t have a car. Another was Esther Reno. I had two dates with her. She was more interested in my older brother, Bob. Another was Jane Harding. I had four or five dates with her. I had two dates with Betty Hill. Her folks liked me but she didn’t want anything to do with me. I mostly didn’t have the time or money to go out on dates. I mostly worked in my spare time. Pat, who did not go to Classen, was mostly my steady reliable date. She was still in junior high school at Taft.
The last day came for the girls to ask the players for a date. I had not been asked. I decided I would not go to the banquet. That very afternoon a young lady approached me in the hallway and embarrassingly asked me to be her escort to the banquet. I was flabbergasted. I scarcely knew her. She was in one of my classes. I didn’t even think she knew who I was. I had to think hard to recall her name–Margaret Wilkens.
I sheepishly accepted. Margaret was not outstandingly popular. She was not one of the school beauties that flitted around the halls. She was rather plain and overly endowed with ample freckles. But, she was a very nice and pleasant young lady. She had that quiet inward beauty that graciously radiated outwardly.
I went home and told Mom. She went to great lengths the next few days to scrounge up some of Dad’s clothes to alter and fit to me. I had a nice shirt, a jacket and a necktie to wear with my nicest pair of pants.
The afternoon of the banquet I caught the Nichols Hill bus in plenty of time to go to Margaret’s house to pick her up. I’ll never forget. She lived at 6608 Hillcrest in Nichols Hills, a most prestigious address. The bus driver let me off at a corner and gave me directions to the house.
I had never been in such a luxurious home–rugs all the way to the walls. Curtains hanging all the way to the floor. I later learned they were carpets and drapes. Margaret’s mother was most gracious. I had a small inexpensive corsage for Margaret.
I took Margaret on the bus and streetcar to the Skirvin Tower Hotel in downtown Oklahoma City. My place setting was not even next to Margaret’s. I sat at the end of one of the tables.
A man, I think it was an uncle, picked Margaret and I up at the hotel after the banquet. He dropped me off at the 17th Street Station on Classen Boulevard where I caught a late bus home.
I never had another date with Margaret, but I’ve always had a warm spot in my heart for her. I’ve always thought she asked me to be her escort because no one else had. Thank you, Margaret!
Later, I learned her father was a famous and wealthy surgeon in Oklahoma City. I think they thought I was not of proper standing for their daughter. I knew for sure I was out of my element.
Years later I saw a small notice in the Classen New-Life alumni magazine that Margaret had died. It saddened me, but I will always have that warm spot in my heart for her.
The Army and College Years
The Growth Years
The Mellow Years
The Retirement Years
Don and Pat had one son