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Hello. I’m nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody too? Then there’s a pair of us. Don’t tell. They’d advertise you know, and we’d be on FaceBook. I believe that’s from a poem by Emily Dickinson, but being dead a half century now I sometimes forget things. I still remember the McGuffey Readers, though, that carried that Dickinson poem. Not that I don’t know what goes on in the world around me. My spirit stays informed by lingering around the old familiar places. I’m blessed in this afterlife by having a few grandkids who still talk to me. I’d be happy to talk to you too, but you need to visit my grave. It’s in the cemetery here in Stroud, Oklahoma, where they deposited my bones in 1971 at the age of 75.
The Stroud cemetery has been good to me since I gave up the ghost. The afterlife turns out to be something like “virtual reality,” a place where many people nowadays it seems choose to spend their here-and-now life. What this means, to give a simple example, is that I have instant access to the internet, which explains why I am so well informed and yet remain so ignorant. It also explains why an uneducated countrywoman like myself can write proper English. I it also helps that I have a bookish grandson who’s editing these pages. Me, I always liked to read, and now I’ve got the time. To quote Archie the cockroach, “time time said old king tut / is something I ain’t got anything but.” No capital letters in that sentence because the original is written on a typewriter, and a cockroach can’t hold down the shift-key and strike a letter at the same time.
As the author of this narrative, it’s surely about time for me state what I’m going to write about. I’m going to write about my two sons Ernie and Wendell, both of them decorated soldiers in World War II. At the outset let me say this is no Cain and Abel story. My boys never fought or feuded with each other. They were separated by six years and two sisters. Maybe that had something to do with it.
It also about time to review the history of my family. I’ll be brief, because the Epistle of Timothy warns us “Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies.” The further back a person goes the more the information becomes mythological. My dad’s name was William Cornelius Flatt, and for the Flatts our immigrant ancestor was Dirckse Van Der Vliet, born in Holland in 1660. You can see that the Vliet part of his name has settled down to Flatt, and the “Van Der” has gotten dropped. It was probably phony anyway, a pretense of belonging to the aristocracy, like Beethoven adding the “Von” to his surname. With the first American generation the name changes to plain Flatt. Their earliest records are found in the Dutch Reformed Church, which was the original denomination of the Dutch royal family and the foremost Protestant denomination until 2004. These were the people who in South Africa were called Afrikaners and who gave the country apartheid. Some very nasty people, contributing their share to racism and slavery in the USA. If they’d had their way the future state of Oklahoma would have joined the Confederacy during the Civil War.
My mother’s name was Mary Elizabeth Neff, and the Neffs were a little bit nicer than the Flatts. They originated in the Palatinate region of western Germany and landed in Pennsylvania where Heinrich Neff got married about 1710, finding a home in Lancaster County among the Pennsylvania Dutch people. Needless to say that in the period before the War of Independence both the Flatts and the Neffs had shaken hands with George Washington and wintered at Valley Forge like all the rest of the Continental Army. Then, as the poet says, “Thames and all the rivers of the kings / Ran into the Mississippi and were drowned.”
This side the Mississippi, my parental family lines crossed and tied the matrimonial knot when Bill Flatt met Mary Neff in 1881 in Buffalo County, Nebraska. In such a cold empty county like they have up there in Nebraska, they were probably happy to meet each other if for no other reason than to keep their hands warm.
This old couple were the human timber that provided a home for me and my ten siblings, and I could write a book about the two of them. That’s the trouble--it’s hard for a body to write about his or her parents because they are too close. I’m going to let my daughter Opal tell this story, because she always liked to write. It’s from a letter to one of her kids:
I remember Grandmother (Neff/Flatt) as a short, maybe 5 ft., a little on the obese side, blue eyed and wearing her hair in a bun on top of her head. She was jolly, laughed a lot, although her lot in life was not easy. She bore 11 children.... One place in some of this material says she was German-Dutch, but Grandpa always called her his "little Dutchman". (This is where the idea that she was Dutch comes from. I think it must've just been an affectionate term between the two of them, not that she was actually Dutch.
Opal doesn’t seem to realize that “Dutch” in 19th century America referred to anyone who was white but not Anglo-Saxon. Swedes, for example, were often nicknamed Dutch. I’ve learned that much, at any rate, since I died.
I married Hughie Earp in 1916 and eight years later (about a year after our youngest boy Wendell was born) he came into some good money when his dad died, money from that gusher they got when old William Earp drilled on his homestead. Like all his ten siblings, Hughie got a new A Model and $20,000 to buy a farm, but I have to tell you I never saw much of it. He was the tightest and most skin-flinted human that ever drew breath on God’s green earth. The only generosity I ever knew him to show is that he would give all his grandkids a silver dollar for Christmas. He’d go to the bank and buy them, and give one to each of his ten grandkids. Little kids loved the weight and shine of those big coins, but he stopped doing that after they got a little older.
Hughie bought himself a new pickup truck every few years, which his wife was not allowed to drive, and he put in a well to water this cattle while I was still carrying water for the kitchen and our once-a-week baths from a well down the road a quarter of a mile. Many years later, one of my grandsons wrote a poem about this and he called it “Arlie.” After Hughie died, they threw all his old papers and negatives in the trash can to be burned. Grandson salvaged the negatives, printed one, and made this poem about it.
It was north of Chandler 1939,
My granddad with the blue killer eyes
Hughie Earp reading by kerosene lamp light
A shoot'em-up dime-store western
Much to the surprise of the brown-
Eyed farm lad come courting
Later to be my father
And recall to me that scene
Glimpsed through an opening door.
And even then he not fooled by such
Display of weakness for the word
In this known hardshod
Horse trader who still had
The first nickel he'd ever made,
This pale-eyed reader
Rocklike in washed out overalls
Whose livestock had a new windmill
While Arlie carried water
Up the hill and longed for town.
What Grandson writes is true. I did long for town. I loved nothing better than putting on a pretty dress and going to town, but with Hughie we just went to the feed store. I liked going to church on Sunday much
About 1940
better, but I usually had to beg a ride. Hughie wasn’t much of a churchgoer. Over the years, I guess I did build up some resentment about him treating the livestock with more consideration than he had for me. You can see it in the way I’m turned away from him in the photograph above.
In the photo I have of them, made
From a discarded negative after Grandpa died,
Hughie looks straight into the lens.
Arlie wears a black church-going hat,
Her gaze gone out grimly away from his.
Arlie daily carried the water
For the kitchen and table and bath
Up a hundred-yard slope
Of red-clay rocky Lincoln County hill
Silently by hand.
I’m no judge of poetry, but Grandson has a least told the truth about us. I like writers who try to tell us something truthful. If it’s me writing, that’s what I try to do.
I’m no writer, of course. I don’t have enough education to try. That doesn’t mean that I’m a dummy, though, I don’t mean that. My mother taught us kids to read and write, and I’ve always enjoyed reading when farm chores would relent and allow me. I even taught Sunday school for some years. If anyone was a dummy it was Hughie. Though he was always shrewd at trading horses and mules, he couldn’t read more than a piss ant crawling across the page. I taught him to read after we got married and started having kids old enough to learn. I taught him from the Bible, and he liked that, but after some years he graduated to westerns--”shoot ‘em ups,” I called them--like Zane Gray and Louis L’Amor, and that’s what he read the rest of his life. My youngest boy Wendell late in his life wrote an autobiography in which he talks about me. I haven’t seen it because his smarty kids suppressed it for fear that people would learn their mother was a drinker. That’s what a family secret is, you know: something everyone knows about but nobody talks about. Wendell said of me that he felt like his mother was a woman out of her time, meaning instead of a farmer’s wife, I should've been the wife of an educated man in a different culture. Yes, I cast my pearls before the swine I married--he was half hog--but I had no choice. As a Christian, I believe that everyone has a cross to bear. Hughie was mine.
But to give him his due, he gave me fine children, and on that score I make no complaint--two boys, Ernie and Wendell, two girls, Opal and Veradean, and a step-son Kenneth. The last is the only one that didn’t have a happy ending, but I’m not going to tell his story here because Hughie’s mom, Mary Frances Earp, has already told it at length in her autobiography. The long and short of it is that Hughie had Kenny by his first wife, who died in childbirth. I should have fought harder to keep baby Kenny so he could grow up with his siblings, but Hughie insisted that we give him to Hughie’s mother, who had all that oil money. So that’s what happened. That selfish old woman took him, and little Kenny grew up feeling like an orphan so much so that in later life he took to drink and drank himself to death. That’s what happens when you put money above love. Fortunately, Kenneth married Laura, an excellent woman who gave him two beautiful children--but that story’s already been told by Mary Frances Earp. I want to talk about my own children.
My two sons were my youngest and oldest, and they made the bread for the sandwich with the two girls in between as filling. Two of those kids wrote autobiographies, Wendell and Opal, and the curious reader should be able to find them. Veradean had the misfortune to be beautiful--misfortune because all her life she relied on her beauty rather than her brains. Her insecure boot-wearing macho husband liked that about her so much he never even let her learn to drive a car. Which leaves Earnest, the oldest and the one most able to write an autobiography, but he probably never did. Being a school teacher, coach, preacher, principal, and later superintendent kept him too busy, I suppose--and all that was before the scandal of the Big Bible Bustup tore into us like a hurricane, and Earnie’s wife put him in lockdown and wouldn’t let him talk to his own siblings. To me, that was the most shameful thing that ever happened to our family, but I’m not an Earp except by marriage and I’m not going to tell about it. At least not blow-by-blow.
The best introduction to Earnie comes from his sister Opal. They were the first two born of my children, with him the elder by three years, so of course they grew up playing together. Opal begins A Tale That Is Told by talking about the old homestead, which would have been the first home she remembered.
My first memories are of the home northwest of Stroud, which was the first home of all the Earps in Oklahoma Territory, called now the “Home Place.” I understand that my Grandfather didn’t win it in the great land run of 1891 but purchased it soon afterwards from a man who had staked a claim on it. The farm is located three miles north of Stroud and about two and a half miles west and then north again for half a mile.
I remember a cement porch on the east and a screened in porch on the west. Just outside on the west was a dirt covered cellar. I remember a little stream that ran along the east over rocks where my older brother Ernie and I played and waded in the cool clear water. Also a red barn with a loft full of sweet smelling hay where we romped. Many times I fell out of the loft and thought I was going to die because I couldn’t get my breath. Why didn’t I learn there was a hole there by the ladder where Daddy threw down hay for the horses?
Then there was the day that Ernie and I killed a big black snake. We left it by the side of the barn but when we came back a few hours later to exult over our kill, the snake had disappeared. We puzzled about that for days. But in later years we realized we must have only stunned the snake.
They stunned it or the hogs ate it. A hog wouldn’t hesitate to eat a snake. In Opal’s account, we pick up Earnie again some pages further on:
Ernie was the dreamer. He was always dreaming about exotic places and faraway lands that he was going to visit someday. He was always good natured and helpful. I can never remember quarreling or having a fight with Ernie, though he liked to hide around the corner of the barn and let you have a surprise corncob on your head, and he liked it even better if the corncob was wet. But it was always in fun. Ernie hated the farm so when he graduated from Agra High at eighteen, Dad decided to send him to Hills Business School. Of course, he had to get a job to help out.
He got a job “busting suds”--washing dishes in a cafe. He wasn’t happy at that so he took a job as a traveling book salesman and headed toward California. He arrived broke and no job so he worked picking fruit and picking up almonds while pawning his clothes to live. He did that for a few months, and then one day we looked down the road and saw this dirty, ragged tramp-looking fellow with worn out shoes coming in at the gate. It was Ernie. Hungry and broke, but he had seen some of the world, even to getting himself locked in a freight train boxcar and stranded on a railroad spur. By good grace someone came along and heard him yelling and pounding inside the car and let him out. He had been asleep when he was stranded. After that he joined the Army.
By this time there was a war going on. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Roosevelt immediately declared war, and four days later the Army called Ernie for active duty. I still have the clipping from the Chandler newspaper:
Opal continues the story by mentioning the birth of her first son. That son just happened to be the first grandchild of Hughie and myself, a fact which Opal forgets to mention. Let it go. She’s telling her story, not mine. The boy’s full name was Archie McClellan Pounds, named for his dad, but they always called the poor tyke by his initials:
A.M. was about eight months old when Ernie came to tell me good-bye. He was home on leave but as war was declared on Japan his leave was canceled and he had to report back to base immediately. He was sent immediately to Alaska as they expected the Japanese to try to get through to the States from there. They did bomb Alaska but didn’t do a lot of damage. From there he was transferred to Walla Walla, Washington. While there he wrote to Christine Hurst and asked her to come to Walla Walla and marry him. She did and they were married. She and [my sister] Dena had been employed in a plant building airplanes for defense. They had been rooming together.
That name Walla-Walla used to tickle me and make me wonder how the fathers of that town came up with it. They probably originally called it just Walla, but then they liked the name so much they said it again. Oklahoma doesn’t have a town with a double-name like that. Best we can do is there’s a town up by Lake Eufaula called Lottawatta.
But here’s Opal again, now talking about the years after the war.
The boys were home from the wars. Wendel was home again all intact except for scars on body and soul. He married Lavonne Graham and used his G.I. loan to go to Hills Business College. Ernie made it home safely except for battle scars. He also went back to school and became a teacher. He and Chris had two lovely daughters, Ernestine and Elaine. He was also called to preach, so he worked as well in the ministry in the Church of God, affiliated as pastor and evangelist.
An obituary adds some detail to this account. Ernie was a decorated WWII veteran having served in both in Alaska and the European Theatre. He was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge in Feb 1945. He was a Squad Leader and a Platoon Sergeant.
Ernie received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Western State College in Gunnison, CO. He taught school in Carney, Agra, Cheyenne Valley and Canadian, Ok schools. During this time he completed a Master of Arts degree from Northwestern State College in Alva, OK. during the last years of his career he served as Superintendent of Schools. Ernie was a Christian who joined with the Churches of God in Stroud, OK when he was 16 years old. He was licensed to preach in 1961 and ordained in 1962. He pastored the Stroud OK Church of God for seven years and other churches in Oklahoma and Iowa.
He also put in a lot of time and work on family history. I think he was looking for some connection between our Earp name and Wyatt Earp, but if so he never found anything exciting. He did, however, drive all the way to Cherokee County, Alabama, to look for records of our Earp family. Cherokee County was where his granddad Earp had come from originally, back in the days right after the Civil War. I believe he finally decided that his grandad and Wyatt had been something like fourth cousins. That wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t any reason to call out the cavalry. We all have distant cousins, but we wouldn’t recognize a fourth cousin if he walked up and introduced himself to us. We couldn’t tell him from Adam. The Bible teaches us that all men are brethren. Maybe it should have said cousins.
Above I mentioned the Church of God in Stroud. That was the church that Hughie’s mother built out of her oil money (they used to call it the Earp church). When I could get Hughie to take me, that’s where I’d attend, and in the 1950s I heard Ernie preach there a few times. Bless the boy, but for all his talents he wasn’t a preacher. He was more of a teacher, which makes sense since teaching had always been his main occupation. He preached like he was teaching a classroom of students, explaining the scriptures to them. He was serious, educated, and well spoken, but he didn’t have the fire and the anointing of a real preacher. He didn’t reach people’s hearts.
A paragraph above reported on Ernie’s education and ministry. That came from the internet, mostly from an obit posted at Find-a-Grave. But I’m not ready to bury the boy yet. I’d like first to remember the good conversations we’d have at our house when the kids would come to visit us where we lived in Stroud in the 1950s, bringing their families. After the children were in bed, suddenly a mild infection would seem to move in the air, and the men would begin to cough and wheeze. Two of them would say they believed they had a touch of flu, and Hughie would go into the bedroom and get the pint of whiskey he always kept in the upper drawer of our dresser. From that point on, the stories were pretty much confined to the men, and they became more interesting as the liquor warmed their bellies. Ernie and Wendell didn’t talk about the war. The three of them talked about old times on the farm, and Hughie became inspired as the topic inevitably moved to horse trading, at which craft he had at one time been very shrewd. He’d done plenty of that before the kids were born, and with the liquor prompting him he became an apt narrator of his skill in setting less wily men afoot.
I believe my grandkids enjoyed having me for a grandma. I loved to have fun with them. I‘d play games with them like Chinese checkers, dominoes and softball. Hughie, he didn’t know how to play games. He’d sit in his easy chair and watch. One time when we were all outside I hiked my skirt up a couple of inches and showed them how the Sac and Fox danced. I’d learned that going to the big powwows held at the reservation just north of Stroud.
Now it’s about time for me to tell the story of what I like to call the Great Family Bible Bustup. Grandma Earp had a big Bible, and that was the thorn in our side and the object of contention. I used the adjective “Great” because, in laymen’s terms, it was a great big Bible and the tribulation is brought us was also great. As she approached the end of life’s journey, Grandma had to dispose of her worldly goods, and among her ten children everybody expected to get something. The good news was that apart from her house, she didn’t own much. The bad news was the Bible.
Most of the family thought of that book as an heirloom, especially because several pages of it were given over to a family genealogy of begats, but I’m here to tell you for a fact that whatever it was it was not an heirloom. It was not an old Bible handed down from generation to generation. Grandma had bought that Bible herself with her first oil money, so she bought it after her husband’s death in 1924. The family-history pages had been filled in by her oldest daughter, a good-hearted widow named Coy who lived with Grandma and took care of her. Oh it looked great--a big black thing with board covers too heavy to hold in your lap. You couldn’t read it. You could only refer to it. It was all show, the perfect example of what the Apostle Paul calls “sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.”
Grandma’s children, who knew the Bible’s history, didn’t really want it because they knew it would be sitting on a lectern in their parlor and gathering dust. The ones that wanted it were the grandkids who could forever thereafter call it “Great Grandma’s Old Family Bible,” blow the dust off the cover, and bequeath it to their own children. Of Grandma’s ten children, Hughie was elected to get the Bible almost by default. Coy had lived with Grandma for a decade and more and so stood first inline, but Coy wasn’t interested in it because she knew how much dust it collected. Next in line was Hughie, because he’d lived in Stroud with her since he was a boy and he also took care of her by visiting her every week and doing the male-type chores. He wasn’t worried about dust because that was for me to take care of, not him.
How the family squabble began is easy to figure. Bear in mind now that as her train approaches the terminus, Grandma is in her 90s and can’t keep the cheese on her cracker. Every Sunday brings an array of visitors--kids, grandkids, and great grandkids. Once inside the front door, they enter the parlor, and there they see that great black leviathan sitting freshly dusted and gleaming on its lectern. So they’d ask her about it. “Grandma, what are you planning to do with that family bible?” And she’d reply, “Nothing special. I guess I ain’t thought about it.” The adult in the group would say, “Grandma, we might like to have that when you’re gone,” and she’d promise it to them.
She must have promised it to several of them, but it was Hughie who got it first. He maneuvered around and picked it up before Grandma was well settled in her coffin. That was where it stood (in my small house) until 1975, when Hughie died. He had an old .38 hogleg pistol that Ernie and Wendel wanted, but Ernie wasn’t going to be allowed to get the gun and the Bible both. It was finally decided that the gun would go to Hughie’s grandson little Kenny, because the boy’s dad Kenneth (by then deceased) was Hughie’s oldest son. The Bible would go to Ernie because he was a preacher. That was the ostensible reason, but the real reason was Chris. She was more mulishly stubborn and bad tempered than anybody else and nobody wanted to fight her. She locked that Bible down in her house and Ernie with it. She wouldn’t even let him talk on the telephone with his brother and sisters when they’d call.
That’s what I mean by her mulish ill temper. She was mad, and she stayed mad. Not only that, it looks like she handed down her anger to her two girls as an heirloom. Elaine and Ernestine, poor things. They were as sweet and as dear to me as my other grandkids, but after the Bible Bustup my other grandkids stopped hearing from them. Well, I’ve been dead near half a century now, so I may not get the latest news nor know what’s happening among all my grandkids. This suggests to me I’d better stick to my own four kids and be happy with what I know of them. I’ve talked too much and probably said more than I should, so I’ll close with Wendell and Ernie.
Let me remind you that my family name is Flatt. I can’t explain why but three of my four children were bitten by the autobiography bug, and they got that from the Flatts, not the Earps. Three of my four kids wrote autobiographies, the one exception being Vera Dene, who reserved her head as a perch for her Easter bonnet. It’s true we don’t have what Ernie wrote, but I think a lot of his scribbling went into a big family history, which never emerged into daylight after his wife put him in the darkness of lockdown. That may have quelled his autobiography bug.
We do have Opal’s A Tale That Is Told and we have Wendell’s The Autobiography of Wendell Wiles Earp. I’m satisfied with Opal’s book, for she had no ax to grind, and in fact I’m satisfied with Wendell’s for the same reason. Wendell’s, however, turned out to be a belated bombshell--the Great Bible Bustup write small, as it were, small as the waists of his two daughters. They effectively silenced the book by taking it off the market and trying to make sure no copies were sold. Well, phooey on them. I don’t think they had any right to do such a thing, and I’m going to pretend they didn’t do it. Censorship of books takes us right back to the Reformation when the Catholic church burned the Protestant bibles, which had translated the Latin into English so that the masses of people could read and understand it. The whole history of censorship is a shameful one, and I don’t want anyone to ever by able to say that I ever accepted that kind of blackout of knowledge. No real danger in this case because most of my grandkids have copies of the book.
Did I say “shameful”? In the case of Wendell’s girls, it all comes down to their feelings of shame. I understand that but I do not accept it. True, for some years their mother Lavon was an alcoholic, but alcoholism is a disease and no more a cause for shame than pneumonia. I have no personal knowledge of problem drinkers (apart from one stepson), so I have to rely on my grandson, who has studied the matter.
Alcoholics nowadays, he says, get help from an organization called Alcoholics Anonymous. AA started in Ohio back in the 1930s and today its worldwide membership is estimated to be over two million with 75% of those in the US and Canada. It’s chief message to the sufferer is that alcoholism should be considered a disease or an allergy, and is no more a matter of shame than an ingrown toenail. The solution is a religious one, involving the surrender of the self and the discovery of the spiritual life and its discipline. AA's Big Book calls alcoholism "an illness which only a spiritual experience will conquer.” William James, the psychologist who about 1900 wrote Varieties of Religious Experience, has a similar viewpoint.
It’s very well for me to talk about AA, but Wendell and Lavon would reply there was no AA available in Russell Kansas, a town whose population in their day didn’t exceed 5,000. That being the case, they had to rely on their medical science and the churches, neither of which had a cure. This left Wendell, as the head of the family, in a very difficult position, because he felt responsible for his family.
Wendell’s autobiography has a chapter on the 1960s and another on the 1970s. In both of these he frequently expresses his difficulties. In the earlier chapter, he writes:
In the early 1960's Lavon began to nip at the bottle. When I asked her about it she always very vehemently denied it. She would swear by all that was holy that she never touched it. I always knew it was true because I could tell by her voice, her actions, and the slightly dazed look in her eyes. I begged and begged her on several different occasions to please, please, please not do this. It would destroy our family, our children, our love, and all that we held dear. All of my pleading had no effect on her. She just denied, and denied, and denied that it was happening.
My grandson says that denial is always the first phase of a person’s fight against alcohol addiction, so Wendel’s last sentence above is fitting. But let’s hear some more from his autobiography:
In September, 1975, Dad died. The whole Earp family gathered for it
at Ted and Dena's home in Chandler, Oklahoma. Ernie had handled Dad’s affairs until he moved to Iowa and I had taken the job. All that Dad's estate consisted of was about $12,000.00 and one old car which Ernie had been trying to sell and couldn't because of a bad noise in the rear end. We later valued the car at $300.00 for estate purposes. Ernie had the car with him in Iowa and it was a good thing he did because his car quit a few miles from home and they were forced to drive Dad's old car. Not one of us cared but someone, I think Lavon, when she saw the car remarked, "Oh, you drove Dad's car down." From this innocent remark came many years of ill will, even hatred between Ernie's family and the rest of us.
After Dad died we, his direct descendants, were determined not to drift apart with the years. We began an annual reunion to be held each summer at Chandler, sometimes in the park and sometimes at Ted and Dena's. These continued until 1987. Ernie continued to be estranged from us although he was always informed and invited. In 1986 he just showed up at the reunion. We had not seen him for eleven years. Needless to say we all grabbed him and showered him with love and affection with never a word about our problem. He must have enjoyed it for he came again in 1987. After that his health failed and he died in November, 1992.
The copy of the autobiography which my grandson provided me had several pages missing, but enough remains to show the story had a happy ending. The last chapter is called “Our Leap of Faith and the Yucatan”:
We returned to Brownsville and finished a very wonderful trip by way of Houston where Rhonda [the younger daughter and her family] resided at the time.
Perhaps it will be well to finish this chapter with the thought that both Lavon and continued to grow in our Christian lives as we worshipped and studied and prayed both alone and together. The most wonderful change was in Lavon's drinking habits. She never touched a drop from the time she was converted until she died. I could wish the Lord had taken her cigarettes away also. She would have lived much longer.
We have just taken a detour for Lavon but I make no apology for this swerve. Daughters-in-law are precious too. We’ll now return to my two boys. I’ve already given the sons’ stories pretty much, including their careers in the military in the big war. I’m proud of all four of my children, but I pay special regard to Ernie and Wendell because they went overseas and fought our enemies in World War II. In the foregoing I’ve said little of my two girls. That’s fine for Opal because she has written her own autobiography, but it’s not fair to Dena, who didn’t. Veradean, to my way of thinking, suffered from two misfortunes: first she was born beautiful, so she never had to study to make good. All she needed to do was smile. Her second misfortune is she married Ted Phillips, a macho male of the worst stripe. He was a gung-ho military type, got his tech-sergeant stripes in Big Two without ever seeing combat, and became a domestic tyrant. He had two boys, made them call him sir, and never let
Dena and Ted, 1945
his wife learn to drive. He laced them all up tight in a shoe and never let them breath or so much as say Achoo! Though growing up it was well known the Phillipses never had a pot to piss in (according to Opal’s husband, who knew the family when they lived around Chandler), when Ted got out of the Army in 1945 he wore hand-tooled cowboy boots with one turn in the cuff of his jeans. He thought that turned-up cuff was a sign that he owned land. He got that habit in New Mexico after the War where he bought a big spread he could never pay for.
They put Ted into an old soldiers’ home in Sulphur, and for Dena getting him into that home was a blessing and a liberation. He had developed Alzheimer’s, and I wasn’t sad to see him go. She got Archie, Opal’s husband, to teach her to drive, she bought a car, and she became the belle of the geriatric balls around Chandler. Archie had to take care of her car, as Dena had no clue about it. She was a happy orphan, and Archie never complained.That was my pretty Dena. A real beauty as a girl and young woman, but she never learned to use her head for anything but a place to put her Easter bonnet.
It’s a sad turn of affairs when a mother has to supply her own sons’ obituaries, but i bring you this offering posthumously. Somebody needs to do it, if only for the sake of our earthly immortality. By that I mean that the one immortality we can be sure of is that we live on in the memories of those we loved on earth and were loved by. Emily Dickinson probably wasn’t a Christian, but she liked to contemplate the Christian mysteries, chiefly the one she called Immortality, which she said was for her “the flood subject.” By that she must have meant that the thought of meeting again those she had loved on earth flooded her with feelings. So you needn’t weep for me. I’m safe in heaven dead.
Ernie, 1945
OBITUARY FOR ERNIE:
Ernest Fay Earp is the son of Hugh and Arlie Flatt Earp. He was born near Kendrick, Lincoln Co. OK and passed away Nov. 25, 1992 in OK State Veterans Home in Sulphur, Murray Co., OK. Ernie was a decorated WWII veteran having served in both in Alaska and the European Theatre. He was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge in Feb 1945. He was a Squad Leader and a Platoon Sergeant.
Ernie received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Western State College in Gunnison, CO. He taught school in Carney, Agra, Cheyenne Valley and Canadian, Ok schools. During this time he completed a Master of Arts degree from Northwestern State College in Alva, OK. During the last years of his career he served as Superintendent of Schools.
Ernie was a "born again" Christian who united with the Churches of God in Stroud, OK when he was 16 years old. He was licensed to preach in 1961 and ordained in 1962. He pastored the Stroud OK Church of God for 7 seven years and other churches in Oklahoma and Iowa.
Ernest married Christine Hurst, the daughter of Milton and Marilla Hurst on April 9, 1944 in Walla Walla, Washington. He and Christine had two daughters Elaine Christine Earp Dunkle and Ernestine Faye Earp. He will be remembered as a kind and gentle man who loved to serve people.
* * * * *
OBITUARY FOR WENDELL:
Wendel W. Earp, 77, of Oklahoma City, died Thursday, May 24. He was born July 10, 1923 in Chandler, to Hugh and Arlie Flatt Earp. He was a veteran of WWII serving as a U.S. Marine. During WWII he served in Vella Lavella, Bougainville, and Iwo Jima. He was awarded a Purple Heart medal and a Gold Star in lieu of a second Purple Heart. Survivors include his daughters, Sharon Brown and husband Stewart, Overland Park, KS; Rhonda Rinehart and husband William, Oklahoma City; 5 grandchildren; 1 great-grandchild; and his sisters, Dena Phillips, Chandler; and Opal Pounds, Tulsa. Services will be held 10:00 AM, Tuesday, May 29, at the Bill Merritt Memorial Chapel. Interment will be 2:00 PM, Tuesday, May 29, in the Stroud Cemetery.
THE BIBLE IS AN ANTIQUE VOLUME, by Emily Dickinson
The Bible is an antique Volume —
Written by faded men
At the suggestion of Holy Spectres —
Subjects — Bethlehem —
Eden — the ancient Homestead —
Satan — the Brigadier —
Judas — the Great Defaulter —
David — the Troubador —
Sin — a distinguished Precipice
Others must resist —
Boys that "believe" are very lonesome —
Other Boys are "lost" —
Had but the Tale a warbling Teller —
All the Boys would come —
Orpheus' Sermon captivated —
It did not condemn —
Sources
Earp, Wendell. Autobiography of Wendell W. Earp. Ring-binder format, unpublished. Unavailable in bookstores. It’s thought to have been censored by his daughters, and removed from circulation. I have put up a Want Ad on ABE Books, 8 Dec. 2023.
Pounds, Opal Earp. A Tale That Is Told: The Autobiography of Opal Earp Pounds. Edited Gerry Pounds Robideaux and Wayne Pounds. Columbia SC: Kindle, 2017.
Pounds, Wayne. The Autobiography of Mary Frances Earp: Memories, Reflections, Dreams. Columbia SC: Kindle Books, 2018.
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