Riffraff and Other Stories About the Nomadic Life of a Texas Oilfield Brat.

By Carol Mogensen

Carol Mogensen begins a chronicle of her nomadic life by describing her family's wandering from one Texas oil boom town to another during the 1940s. These wanderings over the dry Texas plains instilled in her a thirst for adventure and led to living in Puerto Rico and, ultimately, on a small island in Alaska. She titles her book Riffraff as that is the way many residents of the small Texas farming communities whee cotton fields sat stop oil fields viewed the influx of nomadic oilfield workers into their communities. Although some may consider her early years a hard scrabble existence, she describes a childhood of being led into mischief by an older brother with humor. Other stories describe the experience of being the first woman to parachute with Sky Divers in Potter County in 1960, a car trip through Mexico in 1961 with her college roommate, an unpleasant incident at the notorious Jack Ruby's nightclub in Dallas, the pathos of loss of a loved one to suicide, and starting a new life with a new love in southeast Alaska, delivering supplies to remote island locations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503572508

Carol Mogensen

As of the writing of this book, Carol has resisted the urge to roam and is settled down with her husband Clarence, in Oregon. She can be reached at P.O. Box 727, Yoncalla, OR 97499.

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Riffraff

AND OTHER STORIES ABOUT THE NOMADIC LIFE OF A TEXAS OILFIELD BRAT

CAROL MOGENSEN

Copyright © 2015 by Carol Mogensen.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-5035-7251-5

                eBook           978-1-5035-7250-8

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.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 06/16/2015

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CONTENTS

Hard Times and War

Thea’s Story

Post, Texas

A Good Smoke

Riffraff

Putting on the Ritz

Horror Movies and Other Scary Stuff

All Guns are Loaded

The Mink Coat

Langtry, Texas

Boy in a Coonskin Cap

Flapping Mouth Opens Chute

Pearls in the Hands of Swine

When You Lie with Dogs, You Get Fleas

The Hunter

The Suicide

New Beginnings

A Boat is a Boat is a Boat

Transitions

Southeast Winds to 15 Knots Seas to Three Feet

The Ice Cream Delivery

Up Close and Personal

Water Wings

Rescues

Goodbyes

Peggy

The Old Coot

Loss

Migrations

These stories are dedicated to my wonderful husband and sons who shared many of the experiences with me, especially those in Alaska. I can’t thank my husband, Clarence, enough for the many times he read them and the satisfaction he gave me when he laughed out loud where I hoped he would or sometimes silently read with tears in his eyes.

When I was a child, I thought my grandparents had always been old. I could not imagine a time when they were not, and I certainly never considered that they might have once had an interesting life. After I became an adult and wanted to know more, it was too late. They were gone. I hope that my grandchildren, through these stories, will come to know us better and realize that once upon a time, Papa and Gram were not old and had adventures.

Carol Mogensen

Image36052.jpg

Family photo of Roy Lynn, Roy, Helen,

and baby Carol in 1938.

Image36059.jpg

Carol’s mother, Helen Wright Barnes,

early 1930s.

Image36068.jpg

Carol and Roy Lynn in South Texas

HARD TIMES AND WAR

Daddy’s parents owned a small farm near Dexter, Texas, which is now a ghost town, and Daddy said the farm lies at the bottom of Lake Texhoma. He left the farm long before that happened. Being the second oldest of ten children during the Dust Bowl days and dirt poor was all the incentive he needed to quit school as soon as he finished eighth grade and find work in the Oklahoma oilfields. It was the middle of the Great Depression when he met and married my mother in Oklahoma City. Although Daddy always found work as a roustabout in the oilfields during the depression, Mother told me that money was so tight that their first home was a shack with a dirt floor. She said a movie in those days only cost ten cents, but attending one was a rare occasion as even ten cents was hard to come by.

Roy Lynn and I were born in Oklahoma City. He was three and I was six months old when Daddy packed us into his Ford and drove to the Texas panhandle to search for oil near the boom towns of Pampa, Borger, and Dumas, as in the honky-tonk tune, I’m a Ding Dong Daddy from Dumas. This was the beginning of our nomadic lifestyle.

I am able to count 16 towns that we lived in between 1938 and 1948, moving to several of them more than once. The moves include a short sojourn in Vancouver, Washington during World War II. I was only four when we made that trip with Mother – too young to understand why Daddy didn’t come with us. Mother had relatives working in the shipyards at Vancouver who assured her she would find work there.

Mother’s friend, Bernice, traveled with us, and I vaguely remember hearing the two of them talk about a murder that had occurred in the Amarillo hotel where we had to overnight. Yet, Mother left us alone in the hotel room with a warning to leave the door locked and to open it only when she and Bernice returned from buying sandwiches. I remember being very scared and crying until Mother returned. The rest of the long train ride from Texas to the west coast was much more pleasant due to the attention I received from the soldiers and sailors who were packed into the train, attention which, I’m sure, had a great deal to do with having an attractive, flirtatious mother.

An amazing twist to this phase of my life happened many years later when my husband, Clarence, and I had retired and moved to Oregon. We were visiting friends at their home near the Umpqua River south of Elkton. After I commented on the attractiveness of their spacious home, the hostess led me to the recreation room and told me that this relatively small room was once their original house. She explained it had been one of the many two-room cabins the government built to house shipyard workers in Vancouver during World War II. It blew me away to think that this room possibly could have been the very cabin we lived in during our short interval in Washington.

Because Mother took a job working nights in the shipyards, Roy Lynn and I had to sleep at a government sponsored child care center. For the first time in my life I was separated from my brother, who was sent to the boys’ section while I had to stay with the girls. Confused and unhappy because we couldn’t be together, I cried myself to sleep and wet the bed every night until finally I was taken to the boys’ section and allowed to crawl into bed with Roy Lynn.

It didn’t take Mother long to tire of her shipyard job that required entering cavernous hulls of ships at night to retrieve discarded tools. After a few weeks we were on our way back to Texas. My only memory of the return trip is of the happiness I felt when I saw Daddy.

Daddy’s work in the oilfields exempted him from military service. Apparently the government considered him more useful pumping oil out of the ground than pumping cartridges into a rifle Even with two young children, a wife who likely put pressure on him not to go, and a government that said it needed him on the homeland, it’s likely that not serving in the military caused Daddy some discomfort. This may have been particularly true considering that he had five brothers who served, two of whom were seriously injured.

Roy Lynn remembers an incident that happened while on a trip from Texas to Oklahoma during the war. We had stopped at a service station when two soldiers noticed the gas-rationing exemption sticker on our car windshield. They approached the car, one leaned into Daddy’s window and asked if he was in the military. When Daddy told them no, he was exempted because he worked in the oilfields, the soldier called him a yellow-bellied draft dodger. Just as the soldier reached for the door handle, Daddy put the car in gear and sped out of the station driveway.

I suspect being called yellow-bellied and running away from a fight was particularly galling to Daddy as I never knew him to be afraid of anyone or anything. His bravery was testified to in a yellowed newspaper clipping I found among Mother’s memorabilia. It described how Daddy had prevented an oil well explosion when a rig started to collapse into a sinkhole. After he and the rest of the crew evacuated the rig floor, Daddy ran back onto the rig’s platform and shut down the engines. Another time, I watched him scale a drilling rig to settle a bet with one of the roughnecks as to which one would be first to reach the monkey board" located near the top of the derrick. Their only rule was that neither could use the derrick ladders and had to climb on the steel crossbars. I don’t recall who won, but remember holding my breath wishing the race to be over.

When World War II ended, Roy Lynn and I were sitting on the back seat of our car eating hamburgers at a drive-in on that hot August day in San Benito, Texas.

What in the world’s going on? asked Mother when the sirens began to blare. The carhop ran outside shouting, The war’s over! The Japs surrendered! Throw your trays on the ground! We’re closed!

That evening I thought my parents looked like movie stars when they left with friends to celebrate. Mother’s black dress, accented with sequins, clung to her slender frame, and her auburn hair was styled in a fashionable pompadour. Daddy had exchanged his usual khakis and Stetson hat for a pinstriped suit and fedora. I thought he looked like Clark Gable with his wavy, black hair, dark brown eyes, and high cheekbones. Their friends, Flash and Opal, were both in the military and had changed from uniforms into civilian clothes at our house. I spent the evening marching around the house proudly wearing Opal’s over-sized WAC uniform jacket.

Whenever we visited Daddy’s parents during those war years, I spent long periods staring at pictures of my five uncles, fantasizing about their bravery. My grandmother proudly displayed their photos in military dress, along with their medals, in a glass case in her living room. I had a crush on all of them and couldn’t decide which one was the handsomest. The war ended before I met any of them.

When Arley, Daddy’s older brother, came home from Germany, he brought his new war bride with him. I was beside myself with excitement when Mother told me we were going to Oklahoma to meet them. I thought Thea was very nice and really funny, especially the way she talked. The second day of our visit, our parents left Roy Lynn and me with our grandmother while they took Arley and Thea shopping. Upon their return, it was obvious they had a great time. Mother and Thea giggled at everything, and I knew Daddy was in a really good mood by the cocky angle of his hat. I heard Thea whisper, Helen, I don’t vant Mrs. Barnes to know I had some beers. Maybe she von’t approve. Do you tink she’ll know? Mother assured her she had nothing to worry about.

Grandma came into the room, and Thea became very serious and proper. Oh, Mrs. Barnes, look vat I bought, Thea said as she picked up a shoe box. Look at dese beautiful high hool shees.

What did you call them?" asked Grandma.

"High