Story-Portal

The sign outside town on U.S. Highway 62 read: OKEMAH/ POPULATION 4,002. My grandfather, George NewmanPop to mesaid he and I made up the “2” and that without us it would seem odd that the town had an even four thousand people. I never questioned anything my grandfather said. In 1931, when many things were being examined in America, a nine-year-old boy had no reason to doubt his grandfather’s word.
Back in 1931, there was a great deal of certainty in America, in Oklahoma, and in Okemah. Okemah was still a community with a healthy outlook, even though there were a few empty storefronts on Broadway, the town’s mile-long commercial street. Oil, corn, and cotton were Okfuskee County’s staples, and until the depression struck, people talked more about the weather than money. The important things for a nine-year-old boy were ice-cream cones, ten-cent movies, bib overalls that seldom needed laundering, and plenty of sidewalks for roller-skating. Okemah had all those things in abundance, or so it seemed in 1931, when I became aware of worldly pleasures. To a boy born in 1922, none of the worries of the men who read the stock market pages with dread meant anything. My closest exposure to all this in 1931 was Pop’s remark that my dad had lost some money in a “bucket shop,” investing a few hundred dollars in something called “Cities Service.” At that time, the lack of cash did not mean a denial of the good things of life.
Five years earlier, in 1926, I had moved to Okemah, my presence there determined by a family conference after my father died. Circumstances decreed that I would be living temporarily, it was assumed, with my grandparents in Okemah. My grandfather had been bypassed by the prosperity of the twenties, but he still had a big house, an income, and a wife. Born in England, he was a toddler when his parents migrated to an Illinois farm around 1880. He left Illinois and moved to Oklahoma shortly after statehood in 1907. Oklahoma was hardly a decade old when he established a custom milling business near one of the county’s cotton gins.
Pop had buried his first wife in Illinois and remarried fairly soon after arriving in Okemah. His new wife was Chestina E. Gorman, and the marriage apparently went wrong from the start. My mother moved out of the house as soon as she graduated from high school, then taught school for a year and married my father late in 1921. She wanted to escape Pop’s drinking and her difficult relationship with Mom, as I called my stepgrandmother at her insistence. Born in 1900, my father left an Okfuskee County farm to work in an auto supply store in Okmulgee; he courted my mother while she taught school before they married. But in a few years my mother’s world collapsed. My father caught pneumonia late in March 1926, died within a week, and was buried on Easter Sunday.
My father’s life insurance barely paid for the funeral, leaving his wife with two babies (I was three, my sister, Ruth Ann, barely a year old) and no money. A hasty family conference settled thingsthe small frame house on North Taft was turned back to the mortgage company, and my sister was sent to live with my father’s childless sister and her husband on their farm near Okemah. I went to Okemah to stay with my grandparents until my mother was able to unite her family again.
Meanwhile, she went to work in an Okmulgee department store, as a five-dollar-a-week clerk in the dry goods department, and hoped to see her children often. The two-lane paved highway between Okmulgee and Okemah was a mostly straight concrete ribbon thirty-two miles long; or, as my grandfather said, ‘‘two gallons of gas and one flat tire” away from Okemah’s town limits.