In the summer of 1938, we moved from Baltimore, Maryland to Woodville, Oklahoma. Baltimore is still where it was but I have heard that Woodville is under water because they built a dam which flooded the town. I suppose they did let all the people move before the flooding started.
We were living in a basement apartment on the southeast corner of North Avenue and Etting Street. The entrance was through a cellar door that you lifted to open and then you walked down some concrete steps to reach the apartment door. The sidewalk on Etting Street sloped downward going south away from North Avenue and past our kitchen windows which had deep sills that I would climb up onto and sit watching whomever came by. Now and then someone would look down and say hello to me.
As I was sitting there one day, a tall man whose thin face was covered with leathery skin, stopped and said hello. He asked if this was the place where Buie lived and I told him it wasn't, so he walked on down the sidewalk. I got down from the windowsill and went to tell my mother about the man. She ran out the door and up the steps with me tagging behind. She saw the man and yelled, "Poppa!" and ran to him, grabbed him and gave him a big hug. That is the first memory I have of my grandpa, my mother's father. I also learned that my mother's middle name was Buie.
My grandpa, A L Cornell had driven to Baltimore in a pickup truck with two of my mother's sisters. They had come to take us to grandpa's place in Woodville, Oklahoma. This was awful sudden for me; I had no idea we were going to move.
There was my grandpa, two aunts, mother, father, two sisters (4 1/2 & 8 months), a brother (2 1/2) and I (6 1/2). Our things other than furniture were packed into the back of the pickup with mattresses on top. The pickup had wooden bows over the bed and a canvas stretched over the bows making it look like a small version of a covered wagon. The mattresses were piled to, at least, two-thirds the distance to the canvas top. Two or three adults rode in the cab and the rest of us rode on top of the mattresses.
At night we stopped, unloaded the mattresses and slept on them on the ground off the road. The men, at least took turns staying awake as a security watch. I have a strong memory of the many different frog and cricket sounds I heard and grandpa telling me how the crickets rubbed their hind legs together to make their sound.
There was a stir one night when my father said that a mountain lion had approached our camp and he had made noise to drive it away. Since my father was often stretching the truth, none of the adults quite believed him. Noone but him ever knew the truth of it.
When we reached grandpa's place in Woodville, we moved into a very small building which I believe he called a summer house (my sister, Rosalie, tells me that it was a smokehouse). It had no plumbing and that's where I became acquainted with the outhouse. We stayed at grandpa's place a couple of months until our move to Rylie, Texas where I later met Shirley Ray Price and that's another tale.
©Copywrite May 1999; ALL Rights Reserved