The Rossmoor Fox: Works of the Rossmore Writers Group

By David Hawke

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 18, 2002
• ISBN: 9781469111506

David Hawke

David Hawke is a retired Engineering Materials Specialist, and Co-editor with Norman Perkus and Akiko Seitelbach of a semi-annual magazine, The Rossmoor Fox. The editor is regularly defeated in golf matches, by octogenarians and knows the value of the wisdom that often accompanies advancing age. The Fox is named after several members of the genus Vulpes fulva, who resided in this community until recently, when their own wisdom dictated flight to a place less crowded by humans.

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Copyright © 2001 by David Hawke.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-7-XLIBRIS

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Contents

Acknowledgements

CHAPTER I:

RECOLLECTIONS OF

THOMAS E. DAVIS

What a Woman! My Mother

Joining the Labor Force, Jenks, Oklahoma

Before Toilet Paper

Retribution

Ain’t Stealing a Crime?

Haute Cuisine-Early 1930’s in Oklahoma

Moving On-Cut Bank, Montana

Eva Alive

The Grizzly

CHAPTER II:

RECOLLECTIONS OF AKIKO

SEITELBACH

Nagasaki

Hinamatsuri (Doll ’s Festival)

August 9, 1945

Something Was Working For Me

The Third of September

War Bride

The Journey

CHAPTER III:

ESSAYS/ SHORT FICTION/ MEMORIES

Pet Cat Lost… . Family Heartbroken

Comfort Years

Drama at the Flea Market

I’m Not a Girl From Leesburg

On the Stoop

Divorce

The Burden of Truth

Crossing the Bridge

Cyclone

Ransom Money

A Simple Adjustment

Fireflies

Chinese Medicine

Zimmerman’s Ride

CHAPTER IV:

SHORT STORIES

Warm Zone

There’s Somethin’ In This Team That Ain’t Visible to The Eye

The Decline, Fall, and

Possible Redemption of

Otto Klitsch

The Fortune Teller

The Biggest Undertaker in Bayonne

DEDICATION

To our living families and friends and to beloved ghosts.

Acknowledgements

This book was made possible by the support and contributions of the members of the Rossmoor Writers Group, founded by Norman Perkus. We are indebted to Associate Editor Akiko Seitelbach for her hard work and word processing skills in producing this book. Helen Hawke played a key role in establishing and producing the first issues of the Rossmoor Fox.

Cover art was created by Graphic Artist Barbara

J. Aulicino.

Don Reese and Tom Davis rendered valuable assistance in correcting computer glitches.

The editor also acknowledges the late night support of his green feathered companion Alfred, who after 31 years is still waiting for his ten percent.

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CHAPTER I:

RECOLLECTIONS OF

THOMAS E. DAVIS

What a Woman! My Mother

At the ripe old age of six months, I took my Dad and Mother to live as tenant farmers on a 160 acre dirt farm near Jenks, Oklahoma, which is a few miles south of Tulsa. The farm was what was commonly called a row farm, i.e. crops were planted, cultivated and harvested in rows. A major crop was corn. Some was plain old seed corn, some for animal feed and some for human consumption. Fruit trees, pecan trees, walnut trees and berry bushes added to the crop selection. Along and within the corn rows were planted various types of melons such as watermelons, cantaloupe and honeydew. A small area was utilized for many vegetables.

The farm was also home to about a dozen dairy cows, a necessary bull and two big , red Missouri mules to provide tractor power for the heavy farming. Human hands took care of everything else.

When I think back to those early days, I still find it difficult to imagine how any woman was able to survive such hard times. We had no electricity, no gas, no running water, no hot water heater, no washing machine, no sewer, no disposal, and no air conditioning or central heating.

Imagine, if you can, getting out of bed at four in the morning in July in Oklahoma. It is still hot and humid just like the day before. It’s already 80 plus degrees and the humidity is pushing 70 percent. Mother performs her necessary morning ablutions consisting of a trip to the outside toilet and washing up in a basin of cold well-water pumped by a left handed pump at the kitchen sink which was a shallow wooden box covered in galvanized iron. The excess water drained into a container which was emptied onto flower and vegetable plants.

Next she built a fire in the wood-burning cookstove and started breakfast for the family which grew by one each year for the next three years followed by two miscarriages. Those first three years were probably idyllic for a first-born child unaware of the hardship of backbreaking dirt farm living

By 1928, at age of three, I was included in the first call for chores and breakfast. Dad had first call on the toilet and the wash basin. I had seconds and then headed out to round up the cows for milking. Meanwhile Mother had a pot of coffee brewing and was preparing a substantial breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast, scrapple, home fries and anything else appropriate to the season and the circumstances.

Sometimes the milking was done first and sometimes breakfast came first and the real day began. Mother helped Dad with the milking which was of necessity done by hand. The cows were watered at a trough filled with water from the well by means of a gasoline powered pump. While this was going on, Mother had started the day’s baking, washing or canning if appropriate. These tasks involved a lot of heat in addition to that provided by the weather.

Washing clothes was a never-ending task. Farmers get real dirty and their kids even more. Washing clothes required hot water, usually rain water collected in a rain barrel, heated on the stove top and poured into a large washtub sitting on a stand outside the backdoor. The clothes were placed in the hot water along with granulated or shaved soap. Each garment was scrubbed vigorously on a corrugated scrub board, placed in another tub with clear cool water for rinsing, wrung by hand and hung on an adjacent clothes line.

While Mother was laboring over her many jobs, Dad was either plowing, cultivating, weeding, harrowing or repairing tools or equipment (he had to be, of necessity, a blacksmith, harness maker, tool sharpener, carpenter, plumber, etc.) or delivering milk to the dairy in Tulsa or one of a hundred other things a dirt farmer does routinely.

Oh, yes, I had my chores after bringing in the cows. I slopped the hogs, gathered the eggs, fed the chickens, weeded the garden and by age five, was weeding the corn rows with my very own, custom-sized, designed-by-Dad, garden hoe.

By this time it was noon and Mother had prepared a meal for three (and then four, five and six) over that same hot stove. She had washed all the dishes from breakfast and now had more to wash. There were no paper plates and no automatic dishwater.

Back to work until evening and then supper prepared by Mother over that selfsame hot stove. She washed the dishes, brought in the dry clothes, remade the beds, laid out the clean clothes for tomorrow and gathered some of the day’s soiled clothes for the next day’s washing.

At last, evening. Mother was a well-educated woman, a graduate of Colorado Normal School, and a prolific reader. Since there was no electricity, she had to read by the light of a kerosene lamp and taught me to read while we both lay on the floor with the Tulsa Tribune or the Tulsa Daily World. When I went to bed, she was still reading.

At some early hour the next morning, the routine started all over again. What a Woman! My Mother.

Joining the Labor Force, Jenks, Oklahoma

In the early summer of 1930, at the advanced age of 5 years and a couple of months, depression-times unemployment passed me by and I found myself fully employed, at least for the summer.

We lived on a 160 acre dirt farm near Jenks, Oklahoma. We included Dad, Mother and 4 younguns with me as the oldest. We did what was called row farming and most of our rows were a couple of hundred yards long. There were 50 or 60 of them and corn was the crop.

In those days, there was no mechanical corn cultivator available to poor people. Weeds had to be chopped out of the corn rows by hand using a common garden hoe.

I was generally awakened by my mother before sunrise so that I could go fetch the milk cows to be milked by my mother and father. While I brought in the cows from pasture, my mother started breakfast and my dad started the gasoline driven pump to fill the water tank for the livestock. I put the cows in their milking stalls and then went to the house where we all ate breakfast.

After breakfast while the milking was being done, I slopped the hogs, fed the chickens and gathered the eggs. I was given other chores to do, but on this one particular day, my dad put his hand on my shoulder, handed me a hoe with a boy-sized handle and told me, Son, we don’t have money to hire help so you’re my hired hand. At the time I’m sure I thought having my own hoe was almost as good as having a car.

The very first day cured me of ever wanting to be a dirt farmer. Those rows got longer, the sun got hotter and the day went on and on. Lunch was a very welcome respite and sleep came easy at night. Sunburn on naked shoulders was routine as were stickers and ant bites on bare feet. Ain’t life grand? 73 and going strong.

Before Toilet Paper

Living on a dirt farm in Oklahoma in the 1920s and 30s was a whole lot different from living in urban America during the same period. I know for a fact that they had flush toilets in Tulsa.

I took my Dad and Mother to live a few miles outside Jenks, Oklahoma, 3 or 4 miles south of Tulsa around late summer in 1925. I was about 6 or 7 months old at the time and had a couple of months to go before I was toilet trained.

There is nothing in this world quite like the aroma of an old-fashioned outdoor toilet. In those days it was called ‘The John’ or ‘The outhouse’ or ‘A chick Sales Special’ but not ‘toilet’ which as we all know means a place to wash oneself. That’s another story.

Our outhouse was a fancy two-seater with lids to cover the holes. Dad had built it and really outdid himself. He decorated it with a half-moon and a star and furnished it with two small crates to hold the ever-present corn cobs. Corn cobs you say? Yes, corn cobs. One box, the bigger one, held dark colored cobs; the other held really light colored or white cobs.

There was also room to lay either a Sears-Roebuck or Montgomery Ward catalog nearby. There was no fancy roller to dispense ‘soft-as-silk’ or ‘quilted’ or ‘cushiony’ toilet tissue. The catalogs in that era were printed on newsprint, not that slick stuff which didn’t work worth a hoot as ‘toilet tissue’.

As I grew older, I was joined by 2 brothers and a