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The conversations with Uncle Melvin were recorded in June 1989, when Melvin was in the terminal stage of a wasting heart disease. It tired him to speak more than a few words at one time, but he would listen and correct Hazel. The conversations in which he does not appear were recorded with Hazel in August 1992, after Melvin's death.
Grandpa George
Hazel: Sarah said the reason I know it was May of '41 when Grandpa George died, I was graduatin from high school, and she said they was havin a parade up town, and Mamma and Daddy wouldn't let me go because Granddad was dead. I know he died in April or May and I'll tell you why--because on Bessie's front porch there was a honeysuckle vine, and it was in bloom, and it permeated that whole house. You know how sweet honeysuckle is.
Debbie was born in February 1939, and I remember when Hank and Cora came for the funeral. It wouldn't have been that April or May it would have had to be the next April or May.
He loved to play straight pitch. Him and Dad and Uncle Hank and Aunt Cora used to have some big big pitch games when they would come up if he was there.
Vern Strong after the funeral mentioned the fact to Debbie how he and Grandpa George used to sit and play pitch by the hours.
Melvin: Yeah, I sometimes wonder where they did this [laughs]. I didn't ever know they ever did anything like that.
Wayne: Did Grandpa George go down in the park to pitch horseshoes?
Melvin: No, he pitched at home.
Hazel: Now when Grandpa Tom and Roxy lived there in Chandler, every Sunday when we had a family get together, as soon as dinner was over with the men would all head for the park to pitch horseshoes. Grandpa Tom's favorite place to hang out was at the pool hall. He loved to play dominoes, and Melvin liked it just about as well. And Archie played too on Saturday.
I was aggravated the day Grandpa George was buried. Because we came home from the funeral, your daddy, Andrew's daddy, my husband, they all went up and played dominoes all afternoon. I didn't think that was very respectful. They'd just buried their father.
Grandpa and Grandma Stidham
Melvin: Grandpa was rather peculiar. He was...rather selfish.
Hazel: Very much so.
Melvin: I used to live with them quite a bit and work when I was a young. We'd go to town on Saturday morning, or around noon, and he'd pay me for workin that week. I'd hunt up Dad and give it to him. Far as I know I never did keep any of it for myself.
Wayne: Aunt Bessie said he was mean to your grandmother.
Melvin: He was the boss. That was all there was to it.
Hazel: He was boss and he wouldn't let her forget it. I didn't know him all that well, but I wasn't all that fond of him either.
Wayne: I don't think Aunt Bessie has forgiven him yet. "He was mean to Grandma," she would say. And, I loved my grandmother."
Hazel: So did Melvin love his grandmother.
Melvin: She was great. She was good in every way you could think of--free hearted, worked all the time. I remember we used to go down there to see them on Sunday after church. We'd eat lunch with them. We'd get ready to go home, Grandma would always bring out something to eat to give to Mom, but she had to slip around to do that. He didn't want her to give anything away.
Hazel: Just like one time after Melvin and I was married. He'd worked there for his grandpa that day, and he got ready to go home. Grandma had made her sausage when they'd butchered, this good homemade sausage she'd put in a little sack she had made. She'd stuff the sack with sausage and tie off the end with string and they hung it in the cellar or smokehouse. She'd slipped around someway and gave Melvin one of these little bags of sausage, and she told him whatever he did not to let Grandpa know that she had done it. He had his bluff in on her, or I guess she just loved peace.
Melvin: She was great--I remember that.
Wayne: Her maiden name was Robinson, wasn't it?
Hazel: Yes, and you know that's a coincidence. My mom's maiden name was Robinson.
Melvin: I know you'd ask her what her nationality was and she say she was Dutch, hog, and Negro.
Hazel: When Grandma and Grandpa Stidham lived right there where you remember them livin, Grandma would sit out on the front porch in the summer time in her rockin chair smokin her corncob pipe. But you let some woman go down the road in a car with a cigarette, Grandma would sit there and say, "Look at the floozy!" [laughs]. And here all the time she was smokin her corncob pipe.
Melvin: She used to chew tobacco in the summer time and smoke a pipe in the winter time.
"Fourth of July only comes once a year!"
Then there was the time Grandpa Stidham and Tom got drunk. I never will forget--let me see, what was the name of that County Commissioner there in Lincoln County for so many years? Oliver Ingenthall? He gave all the family work on the road. It was always so important that we vote for him. Election time was comin up. It was there where your grandparents lived, where Melvin and I was married, where your dad and your mother were married--Tom had told this County Commissioner he'd work for him, campaign for him a little. Out there it wasn't like it is here in California. Every time you got a new County Commissioner everyone who worked under him was fired and he brought in his own bunch.
But anyhow Grandpa Stidham and Tom--that was the time they got drunk. You thought they didn't like each other? Oh, you betcha they didn't. But that night they got to drinkin together and they liked each other pretty good.
I know without a doubt that you've heard your dad say, and probably your Uncle Melvin say, "After all, Fourth of July only comes once a year." Well, it wasn't even Fourth of July. It was election day in November. They got drunk, and they was on the court house square there in Chandler. I don't know who in the family ran across them, but there they were just stoned to the gills and they was laughin and holdin on to one another and sayin, "Well, after all, Fourth of July only comes once a year!"
The Suttons
Hazel: It was Pleasant Ridge School, because I remember that Lavon's folks, the Grahams, lived right close to the side of it. We moved into that area in '36. I graduated from high school just out of Maude, Oklahoma, a little ol' town called Harjo. Mama and Daddy moved up there on Wagner Lake, just down from where Aunt Sarah and Uncle Jesse lived. Mama and Daddy moved there in September. Well, Daddy and I went up to Chandler, and I couldn't have graduated that year because they weren't teachin the subjects that I'd gone six months into, you know. So they boarded me out, and I stayed at Harjo with the family that lived on a farm. I stayed and graduated and then come on up to join Mama and Daddy. At that time they lived just out of Chandler--it was the only place they could rent. That's why we called it the nigger house, because it was owned by a negro man. He had two of these little ol' houses a mile west of town--Sparks's store and fillin station was over here. You crossed the highway south, and Jess Alsip and his wife lived right on the corner, and you went on down and there was these two little ol' houses sittin in a sand pile. Mama and Daddy lived in the first one.
Then we moved there on the Wagoner Lake because the house was bigger.
Melvin: The old Seadore place.
Childhood Play: Scaring People
Melvin: Mom and Sarah gone outside to potty before they went to bed, and I'd gone out the front door and come back around the side of the house. It was winter time with dead leaves all over the ground. We had oak trees around you know so there was gobs of leaves around, some of them piled up probably a foot and a half high. I waited until they finished and started back to the house, and I let out with a panther scream and started kickin those leaves around [laughs]. Sarah beat Mama to the kitchen door and got the screen door open and got in, and then Mama couldn't get the screen door open. She was so scared she couldn't find the handle.
Hazel: It's a wonder your dad hadn't whipped you over that.
Melvin: He laughed. It was funny.
Hazel: Well, I know how Melvin's mother got on him. We'd been married long enough that I was pregnant, but I just barely was, and Melvin and I were livin upstairs --that was before we moved out on our own. Melvin had sat there and watched me and Grandma Pounds do the ironin, and as we ironed I stacked mine and Melvin's things up. He sat there and he watched, and he timed everything just right, and I had mine and his ironin in my hands goin upstairs with it. Well, he disappeared. In this house where we lived the backside of the stairway wasn't closed in. There was storage space back in there. He waited until he knew I was on my way upstairs, and he went in there and got underneath these stairs. Along here on the wall was where Grandma Pounds hung Tom's overalls when she washed them and ironed them and hung 'em by the suspenders on these here nails. Well, I might have been on the second or third step when Melvin reached in between the steps and got ahold of my ankle. There was a south window open right there, and the overalls were already driftin around there on the wall. Lordee me!
Those clothes went up in the air and all holds was turned loose, and I didn't know what had got hold of me. Bump, bump, bump, down the stairs I come and fell right there at his feet, or where his feet would have been. Grandma Pounds come a-tearin in there, and I tell you I thought she was goin take his head off of him. "Melvin Pounds! You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You'll make that girl lose her baby!" She just went on and on. He could never get enough of scarin people.
Melvin: Those were the good ol' days.
Hazel: [laughs] They might have been for you, but they weren't very funny for some of the rest of us.
Melvin: Yeah, I scared Sarah one time when she was just a kid. Dad had his tools lined up around the house, parked in different places, The mowin machine had a pretty high seat on it, and it was a fairly strong spring that held it up, like an automobile spring used to be, spring steel. She was out there goin through all her rituals. She'd pretend she was some movie star, out there dancin and stretchin and goin around. I slipped up behind her and screamed, and she swears that it hurt her back. She says she's still got it where she fell out across the seat of that mowin machine.
Music
[Music in the background from a tape of Melvin playing the Hawaiian steel guitar with a family group.]
Wayne: What were you playing when you were nine or ten?
Melvin: Just standard guitar, singin and chordin. I never did learn to play any tunes, never did try.
Hazel: Who taught you how to chord?
Melvin: Taught myself.
Wayne: Did Aunt Bessie or Aunt Sarah ever have lessons?
Hazel: Now Bessie took organ lessons from a lady up there in Upper Lake.
Wayne: I mean when you were kids around Oak Grove.
Melvin: Sarah learned to play the piano there, but I don't know whether she had lessons or not.
Hazel: I think they just taught themselves.
Wayne: Grandpa played the fiddle--didn't he teach you anything?
Melvin: He didn't know anything about a guitar or a piano or anything.
Wayne: Whatever happened to his fiddle? Why'd he stop playing?
Melvin: I don't know. Reason could have been when Mom joined the church or something. She wouldn't play with him, and probably didn't want him to play. That'd be my guess. I guess he used to be pretty good on the violin.
Hazel: I know one time we was up to Bessie's and she was a playin the organ, and she was on a real fast tune. Tom jumped up out in the middle of the floor and you talk about it! He jigged him a tune about right--which surprised the daylights out of me. Grandma just stood back and laughed at him. She even thought it was funny. He danced. He just downright jigged, or whatever they called it.
Melvin: Jig dance.
Hazel: Tom really enjoyed a good time. I bet he was a gay ol' blade as a young fella.
Wayne: Aunt Bessie said they used to play together when they first got married.
Melvin: Yeah, they used to play for dances.
Hazel: That's something I didn't know till I heard you tell Wayne that yesterday. I never say Grandma Pounds sit down to an organ. I had no idea she played.
Wayne: Wasn't there a music teacher who came through once and a while and gave music lessons?
Hazel: Singin school, they called it.
Melvin: Yeah, that was Mr. Condry. I studied over there with him and learned to barber. He taught me how to barber. He had a barbershop over there in Stroud, and I went over and stayed with him and sang bass for him.
Wayne: Was there a quartet?
Melvin: Yeah, me and him and his son and one of his cousins.
Hazel: I tell you your Uncle Melvin used to have one of the most beautiful bass voices I ever heard.
Melvin: We used to sing all kinds of songs at singin conventions. Went to one about every week.
Hazel: All day singin and dinner on the ground.
Melvin: If I'd stayed with Condry, we might have gone somewhere.
Hazel: Wayne, I remember one time--what was that commissioner's name there at Chandler? He wanted Melvin and Sarah and I--I don't remember who the fourth person was-- to go back there in the hills in the negro district and get those negro votes. I don't think I'll ever forget that. All we had was a [unintelligible ] and a coal oil lantern and it was black inside and we sang acappello. No musical accompaniment whatsoever. Now you talk about a bunch of happy black people. We were pretty good.
Anyway, that election I was tellin you about when Grandpa Stidham and Tom got snockered together sayin "Fourth of July only comes once a year." That was the time Tom volunteered mine and Melvin and Sarah's talent to sing for the negroes. Lord a mercy, I never went to such an out-of-the-way brushy scary place in all the days of my life. From where you grandparents lived [on the Owens' place south of Oak Grove], we went due west back in there around Sweet Home, where the colored people lived. Yeah, that's what it was. And you know negroes are so black anyway, and it was kerosene lamps. That was the eeriest, spookiest, creepiest place for an oilfield girl to ever be found. There we went, and we had to make our own music because Tom wanted these negroes to vote for Ingenthall!
* * * *
Wayne: Uncle Ira played the guitar?
Melvin: Yeah, he used to second with Brian all the time. They played at Bessie and Earl's chivaree. That Brian could flat eat up one of those Hawaiian guitars.
Wayne: Well, I guess you could too. When did those guitars get popular?
Melvin: They been that way for a long time. Hawaiian music--for a lot of people that's just about the only kind as far as they're concerned. That's just about me. I like good country-western but I still like Hawaiian music real well.
Wayne: When did you first hear it?
Melvin: I don't know. When I was young--probably eight or ten or twelve years old. Once in a while you'd hear it on the radio, or somebody'd come through.
Wayne: You could have heard it on The Grand ol' Opry. But you couldn't have seen many instruments out there at Oak Grove.
Melvin. Nope. Brian Howser had a standard guitar, six strings.
Wayne: How many does your Hawaiian steel have?
Melvin: I've got one that has fourteen. Six on one neck and eight on the other. And a lot of people have 'em tuned to a different tune that they can play on. Like a six string guitar, they have tunes they play on that one, and they have tunes they play on the eight. So the way they're tuned, I guess, there's a lot of difference in 'em.
Wayne: You mean one neck would be in one tuning, and the other would be in a different tuning?
Melvin: Yeah. Just like that "Steel Guitar Rag." A standard guitar has to be tuned different to play "Steel Guitar Rag." And if you don't know how to tune the steel--your fingers have got so far to travel it's almost impossible to play it. If you know how to tune it, it isn't so bad. You see these guys playin in bands, they barely move their hands.
I love to hear Merl Haggard pick the guitar. You very seldom hear anyone play like he can.
The Stidham Temper
Hazel: Yeah, Melvin had that Stidham temper. Your brother had some of it too, at least when he was a kid. What a brat that A.M. was. I've seen Melvin walk out of house, when we'd be over visitin, so mad at A.M. he could have killed him. And it was all over you, something he was doin to you. Melvin looked at me and said [she imitates his gruff voice], "Let's go home." A.M. knew he'd pissed his uncle off, so he said something to him as we went out the door, and Melvin turned and looked at him, as only he could look at somebody, and he said, "What you need is about fourteen feet of a good razor strap." That was his farewell speech to A.M. The thing that Melvin never did understand was why your dad or your mother never could get the best of him where discipline was concerned. I remember once you all had some candy. You and A.M. and Genie had all started out with the same amount of candy. Well A.M. had eaten his and then he wanted yours, and you didn't want to give it to him but eventually he took it. You were cryin and A.M. was sittin over there and no one was sayin or doin one thing to him. That sure didn't set well with Melvin. He looked over at me and said, "Let's go home."
Whipping a Child
Grandma Pounds told me this story when Melvin and I hadn't been married very long. She and I got very close, and she confided a lot of things to me. Now if the girls ever knew about this they forgot it, but God knows it's not in my imagination. But she was tellin me one time about an aunt of hers--the best I remember it was an aunt--that was baby-sittin some one of their relatives' child. I forget now how old this child was, but this aunt she was whippin it, or beatin it or something, out of temper, and she killed this child. I can't remember now what the outcome was, but Grandma Pounds told me about that aunt. I think it was on her mother's side. It was in Kentucky. She was never brought to trial or anything, it was just something the family wondered about and talked about among themselves probably because they knew she had a violent temper.
I shouldn't tell you this story because other family members will ask themselves, "Why did Roxie only tell Hazel?" Good question. I did ask Bessie if she was ever told about it, and I asked Sarah about it. They didn't either one remember ever havin heard it. That made me feel like, Well do they think I'm tellin them a fib? But it was right there where they lived when Melvin and I was first married--we were alone probably telling each other little family bits of gossip--when she told me about that.
Father Love
Hazel: Poor little Melvin grew up with the idea--and I guess he went to his grave with it--that his dad never loved him like he loved Archie. He always claimed, in his mind--this was his childish version of it--that it was because Tom disliked Grandpa Stidham and that Melvin was too much like him. That was Melvin's idea. I remember after your Grandpa Pounds was dead and gone, Melvin a-sayin to his mother. And I don't know, in a sense, seems like Grandma Pounds kinda sided in with Melvin. In other words she was tryin to make--do I want to say excuses?--for some of the things that Tom did where Melvin and Archie were concerned.
I'd have a hard time tryin to tell Melvin that it wasn't so. I tried to make him feel that it wasn't that way. But he had got that in his head, and he had a right to his opinion. I never did quite sell him on the idea, but it seems to me that in the latter years of their lives he and Archie got a long much better than they did when they was kids.
Chandler and Chandler High School
Wayne: You used to go to movies in Chandler?
Hazel: Melvin wasn't a movie goer. Debbie and I went. He went to the pool hall --with his brother. Opal and I'd go to the show.
Melvin: Used to be the old H & S Theater, across the street from the courthouse.
Wayne: What'd you do in the pool hall?
Melvin: Play dominoes. Bridge.
Wayne: Bridge? with cards?
Melvin: Well, they were dominoes--like dominoes.
Wayne: Did you play for money?
Melvin: No, I didn't. Dad did, I think.
Hazel: They probably played for a whole nickel a game.
Wayne: Did they serve beer or anything in there?
Melvin: No, you couldn't buy beer. All you could buy was 3.2 --at the tavern. You couldn't buy it anywhere else. It was so weak I don't know whether you'd ever get any feel-good out of it or not.
When I quit high school it was in the spring of the year, and we had quite a bit of farm land to take care of, two teams--a team of horses and a team of mules. While Archie and I were goin to high school. He should've quit instead of me, because I was older than he was. He should have been the one that quit and stayed there and helped with the farmin till school was out, but he didn't. I quit.
Wayne: Why were you the one to quit instead of Daddy?
Melvin: I don't know. Then I think it was the followin year that I went to the CC camp.
Wayne: How'd you get back and forth to high school?
Melvin: There was a school bus. We had to walk three quarter of a mile to get the bus.
Hazel: Now Melvin, if your folks lived out there in the country when Sarah was in high school, and the bus run, why was it she stayed with us her last year in high school?
Melvin: I don't know.
Wayne: There doesn't seem to have been a school bus when Aunt Bessie finished at Oak Grove. She wanted to live in town with her teacher and go to high school, but Grandpa said No.
Hazel: She was another hand to do chores.
Melvin: She never did do any chores. She might have fed the chickens or something, but that was about all. I got up around five o'clock in the mornin. Dad'd call me, and I'd have to go bring the teams in from the pasture, get 'em ready to go to work.
Maybe at that time she might a helped Dad milk, I don't know. You realize she got married when she was awfully young.
Hazel: Maybe I've got that all wrong. Maybe she had already graduated and had a job. Seem to me like she had something to do at the high school in the line of a job that she lived with us. Cause you remember she lived the last year before her and Ira was married with you and I. There where we lived behind where her and Ira eventually bought and then rebuilt the house.
Now here I was thinkin she was still in high school, but apparently she was not. Seem to me like she had a little jerk-water job of some kind was how come her to be livin with us.
Melvin: Well, how'd she get back and forth to work?
Hazel: I don't know. She probably walked.
Melvin: That was a long way to walk.
The Sam Buford Family
Hazel: I remember the negro family that lived across the road from the Owens place. That was Sam Buford. They had three girls that was the biggest girls I ever saw in my life. I can just hear them hollerin at that mule. Them negro girls picked cotton for your grandpa. After Melvin went to work for the old Taylor Honey Company and we moved to town, Mrs. Buford--and she was a good lookin nigger gal... I'll never get away from sayin "nigger," I guess, and I know it's wrong. I shouldn't do it, and I don't mean it in any slangy disrespectful way.
But anyhow they would have a pea patch looked like an acre to me though I know it wasn't that big, and they would plant these cream crowder peas, which I loved. They were kind of a yellow pea. There was a blacked-eye pea, then there was a yellow one. Grandma Pounds sent me pea seed after we came out here, and we'd get a lot of vines but never no peas. They didn't like it in California. But anyhow, this Mrs. Buford and those girls would pick those peas, and of a night they'd all sit around and shell peas and then she would peddle them in Chandler on Saturdays in these pound coffee cans. She'd peddle them around, ten cents for a coffee can full of peas. I was one of her pea customers.
But I can just hear those girls. We couldn't see them, but we could hear them. They worked just like men, and there wasn't a one of them that weighed less than I'd say 225 pounds. They were big.
CCC Camp
Wayne: Uncle Melvin, I didn't know you were ever in the CC camp. Isn't it "3C's"?
Hazel: Civil Conservation Corps.
Melvin: 1930's, yeah. '36, '37. We were farmin and Dad didn't know whether he was gonna have money enough to get the crop in, so I went to CC camp.
Hazel: He dropped out of high school and went to CC camp.
Wayne: What year would that have been?
Melvin: '35 or '36.
Hazel: Was it that late, honey? cause you and I met in '38.
Melvin: I hadn't been home from CC camp very long when we met. Dad got twenty-five dollars a month and I got five. I made thirty dollars a month.
Wayne: What sort of work was it?
Melvin: Oh, we did everything. Built bridges.
Hazel: Reforestin.
Melvin: Cleaned walkways--course this was all out in the country.
Wayne: Why did you have to go to Wyoming? Wasn't there a Camp in Oklahoma?
Melvin: They took the boys from Oklahoma and sent 'em to Wyomin, and they'd take the ones from Wyomin and send them to Oklahoma, so you wouldn't be wantin out to go home all the time.
Wayne: How long were you in?
Melvin: Three or four months. When they started takin the ones from the CC camp puttin 'em in the Army, I decided that was not for me, so I got out. It was just voluntary. You could leave when ever you wanted to. Folks would write 'em a letter, say you were needed at home, and they'd discharge you.
Courtship: Version 1
Hazel: That's the way I met him was at church. He lived in Oak Grove and my folks moved into Pleasant Ridge, and our community was dead. There was no young people. Somebody somehow someway or the other --I got acquainted with his twin aunts [Gertie and Gladys Stidham], and they said, "why don't you come up to our district?" So I got to where on Sunday I would drive up to Oak Grove on Sunday night to church. I got to where those twins would come down and spend Sunday with me, or I would drive up and spend Sunday with them, which would be about how far, Honey,...
Melvin: Three or four miles.
Hazel: ...five or six miles? Anyway, all I heard out of 'em, "You just go to meet our nephew Melvin." I said, "Well, where is he?" "Well right now he's in Wyomin, but he's comin home on a certain day--he was in the CC camp. So anyway lo and behold I saw 'em and they were all excited. "Melvin got in last night, Melvin got in last night. He's gonna be playin ball Sunday at Gladdens' Corner. You've just gotta be there, you gotta meet him." So I went to the ball game on Sunday, and I met Melvin. I thought, "Tha-at is Melvin." He didn't ring no bells with me.
Anyway, though, time went on, and I went on up to church, and in the meantime there was another guy that had got sweet on me, and Melvin and this guy was up in the choir singin. And Winston said to Melvin, "I'm gonna sit with the new girl," and Melvin said "If you do you're gonna have to hurry." The race was on, and Melvin beat him, and he sit down with me. I thought, "well, so there's Melvin." So anyway, church progressed and at the end of church the minister--she was a lady--said, "Melvin, will you dismiss the congregation in prayer?" Melvin stood up--and now this was all beyond me. I was accustomed to goin to church, and my Dad was a real Bible student, and all that stuff, but I hadn't gone with any young men like that. So Melvin stood up to his feet and he gave the dismissal prayer. It just so happened that at our house one of Mom's sisters and her family was there visitin. Now I guess that was about the second or third time I'd seen Melvin. I'd seen him at a funeral, and he was sittin in the back seat and we didn't even talk. I was talkin to the gal in the front seat. That was down at Pleasant Ridge. When I went home that night from church, Mama and my aunt sittin there in the livin room, I walked in and I very casually remarked, "I met the man tonight I'm gonna marry." My aunt says, "Have you told him yet?"
Three months later Melvin and I were married.
Courtship: Version 2
That's where I met Melvin, at church, and that's where I married him. I tell you, we had such a long courtship. I saw him the first time in early spring at a baseball game. He'd just got out of the CC camp. And I thought, "and that is Melvin?" All I'd heard out of Gladys and Gertie was "you have just got to meet our Uncle Melvin. Our Uncle Melvin's goin to be comin home. You've just got to meet our Uncle Melvin."
Melvin: I wasn't their uncle.
Hazel: Well, you were too.
Melvin: No, they were my aunts.
Hazel: Well, however. Anyway, once in a while Grandpa Stidham would let them come down to my house, though for the most part I had to go up and get them. I think I was a very sinful girl because I drove a car! I just tore up the highway, you know. I went where I wanted to. But I went up and got them that Sunday, I think, and brought them down to the ballgame. The whole thing was I was supposed to meet Melvin. And I did. But it was quite a long while after that before we ever had our first date.
I remember goin up to church. That's how come me to get started goin up there--there were no young people down in my neighborhood. So I'd go up there to Sunday school and church, and I walked in up there one night and I sat down. Their seats'd hold three people. I sat down with Gladys, I think it was--I didn't know this was a-goin on. But Melvin was up in the choir, and so was Winston Wilson, and Winston Wilson says, "I'm goin go sit with the new girl." Melvin told me this later. And Melvin said, "You're gonna have to outrun me" [laughs]. And Melvin beat him back there and sat down by me. Well, my aunt and uncle had come from Cleveland to see Mom and Daddy, and they wasn't there when I left to go to church but they was there when I got back. Mama and Aunt Pearl was sittin in the livin room, and I walked in and said, "Well, I met the man tonight I'm gonna marry" [laughs]. My aunt says, "Have you told him yet?" I said, "No, but I will."
Three months later we was married.
Early Married Life
Hazel: Melvin, you remember how we went down and crossed the canyon? Debbie and I walked it all the time. I would presume that's exactly what she did. We'd go down Dewey there a ways, then down on the next street. We went down and crossed this canyon. We didn't think that much about walkin in those days.
Remember how far you walked to work? We lived out there in hoot owl canyon, whatever you called that place. To me it was the jumpin off place of the world.
Melvin: The McCuen place.
Hazel: The first place Melvin and I lived when we married. I was mortally scared to death. He'd leave before daylight and come in after dark, and I'd be out there all day by myself.
Melvin: Three or four miles northwest of Chandler.
Hazel: I never had lived in a place like that and I was scared.
Melvin: A mile north on Eighteen Highway and then two miles west.
Hazel: You couldn't call me a city gal--but I hadn't ever exactly lived on the farm. I sure didn't know how to milk a cow. It was amazin what I had to learn the first year Melvin and I was married. Grandma and I was just about the first up. Melvin would usually would be doin something with the horses. Tom would holler his head off to try to get Sarah and Archie out of bed. He'd have been out in the barn maybe thirty minutes when they come draggin out of bed out there to help us with the milkin. Cause they was in school, and they was partyin around. Tryin to burn the candle at both ends. We were married in February and we lived with Melvin's folks until the first week in July. Grandma and I put in a garden, raised chickens. Even your mother and daddy lived with them a while after they were married. That seemed to be the norm. Wayne: How old was Aunt Bessie when she got married?
Melvin: I don't know--fifteen or sixteen. I think Mom and Dad were married when Mom was --I think she was fifteen.
* * * *
Hazel: I remember when I was about seven months pregnant, Melvin was a-havin this dream. Man alive, he must have been fightin all of Chandler, and he was a-frailin and a-thrashin, and I raised up to see what was goin on. Just as I raised up, he caught me with his fist right in the eye, rocked my head back and it hit the old iron bedstead, and I started cryin, woke him up. He reached up and grabbed me, went to pettin and a-lovin, laid right back down and went to sleep [laughs].
Hazel's Fight with Fern Suggs
Hazel: For the life of me I can't figure out what it was all about, but Grandma Pounds and I--it was early, say around eight in the mornin. She and I were in the garden makin garden, and I don't know what it was I was supposed to have done, but Fern came a-walkin down the road. I don't know where she was goin, and she accosted me. I remember the garden fence was between she and I, and she accused me of something which was just a bald faced lie. Anyway, we stood there and fussed and squabbled for quite a while, and I had a little aluminum pan in my hand with a handle on it, and as I recall Grandma was droppin seed and I was ladlin water. That pan was the only thing I could reach Fern with, and I reached over that garden fence and ka-wowwed her on the head with that pan. I was a temperamental somebody, it didn't take much to ignite my fuse.
And she was a witness at mine and Melvin's weddin. She certainly was. Her name's on our weddin license. Well, I cannot remember what she accused me of, and I tried to tell her. Anyway I wasn't gettin anywhere, so I thought I'd hammer it into her head. It wasn't with a fryin pan. No, it was a little granite cookin pan with a handle on it. Right now I can't even remember what we were discussin, but she was on one side of the fence and I was on the other. Now I don't remember what it was she said to me that made me so mad. Boy I just took that little ol' pan--and of course Grandma Pounds wasn't long on cookin utensils--a little quart pan about like this, blue granite. Man I whopped her across the fence on the side of the head with that pan. I knocked a little granite off of it. I think your grandmother was really ashamed of me because I did that.
Getting Zonked
I got a-tell you a funny one on your daddy and Uncle Melvin. Melvin was drivin the gasoline truck for Claude Jondahl, and Archie I guess at that particular time was peddlin gasoline around Chandler for Claude. Well anyhow here I sat out in the country on the farm a mile south of Chandler on the old Nichols' place--with eight cows to milk, and Melba was just a baby. Well I never really knew when Melvin would be in on this big gasoline transport, and I was just flat workin my buns off out there on the farm. I was havin to carry all this milk, feed all these calves and all these pigs, and your Uncle Melvin wasn't there to help me. I was gettin my dandruff up, I don't mind tellin you. Then your mother calls me. She says, about half a-laughin, "I think you better come into town." I couldn't understand why. So I get into town, and here Melvin is sittin on your mother and dad's front porch--now this was just before Christmas--so it was winter time and doin chores and things weren't all that easy. That was probably another reason why your Aunt Hazel was just a little miffed.
Bless his heart. He hadn't had anything to eat. He'd just hit town, and Archie and Claude Jondahl and his brother, they were down to wherever he had to unload his gasoline and leave his truck. So they got to havin a Christmas drink, and Melvin was on an empty stomach and he wasn't a drinker in the first place. Man did he get zonked! Your dad did too.
Debbie
Melvin: When Debbie was little we had just a kerosene lamp on the table at night, and she would put on some long clothes, I don't know whether they were her mother's or what, and get out there and dance and move around. She could see her shadow on the wall.
Hazel: Honey, if you'll remember, her favorite trick was--we had to take a bath in an ol' number three washtub. I'd give her a bath, and she'd get out of the tub and wrap the towel around her like a Dorothy Lamour sarong, but she'd always manage to have one thigh out, and she'd see her silhouette on the wall. Melvin would get behind the paper, I'd be behind a book, and she'd watch her shadow on the wall. Man she would gyrate. She'd seen a lot of movies--the Zigfield girls at the Chandler theater, and she was one of them. That was our TV. We'd sit there and crack up. She'd never know we was watchin.
Childbirth
Hazel: Your mother called me and said she was in labor, wanted me to come over, so I came over. Yeah I caught a taxi. Wasn't too long then till we called Dr. Smith and he came along toward evenin.
Yeah, I helped bring you into this world. I remember your birthday's April 2nd, isn't it? I'll never forget that part. I was Johnny at the rat hole.
Yeah [laughs], I remember. Your daddy would get so engrossed in your mother's pain that he'd forget what he was supposed to be doin. Dr. Smith, he'd say "Archie!" and Archie'd come out of his daze. He was supposed to be holdin your mother's knee. And I was holdin the other knee. She was delivered at home. She wasn't in the stirrups and all that stuff they put you through in the hospital. And Archie would get so carried away with concern about your mother's plight that he'd forget and not do what he was supposed to. Dr. Smith would have to bring him out of his trance.
I remember when I got in the cab and come back home after you were born, Wayne. You know, after watchin your mother. I remember walkin in--Melvin and I was livin in that little two-room house back behind Grandpa and Grandma Pounds's--and I think it was gettin on toward daylight by then. Melvin was layin on the bed and he had Melba holdin her up in the air over him playin with her. She was less than two years old. I remember walkin in and sayin to Melvin, "Oh my Lord, I think I'd just die if I had to go through that again."
None of my kids were delivered at home. I almost died with Debbie, and after that they was all born in the hospital.
Lake County, California
Wayne: Who came out here to California first. Was that your family, Aunt Hazel?
Hazel: Yes, my folks run back and forth to California. They first came to California in 1923. They went down around Los Angeles, Whittier, down in there. Daddy went right to work drillin oil wells. Mamma let him land down there for ten whole days, and then we were on our way back to Oklahoma. She cried day and night, so Daddy just quit his job and back to Oklahoma we went. That was 'long about the time The Grapes of Wrath come out, and Oklahomans were just about as welcome as a bad case of the itch. Mama just couldn't take that--crap that we had to put up with.
Wayne: Surely not in 1923, Aunt Hazel. That's a little early for The Grapes of Wrath. Though the feeling you mention may already have been here.
Melvin: Oh, it was. It was even here in '46 when we came here. They just referred to you as trash.
Hazel: You know your Uncle Earl [laughs] hadn't been here very long and he was a goin down the street over here from the dairy in town. It was a Sunday afternoon and I can still show you the house--we knowed the people real well. They were all havin an ice cream social on the front porch of the house. Earl went by and somebody threw up their hand and hollered, "Hi Okie." Didn't mean a darn thing in the world about it, I don't suppose. ol' Earl he just put his ol' Pontiac in reverse, and he backed up. He stepped out of the car, and he said, "I can whip the s.o.b. that said that." He didn't have any takers.
Wayne: Did you ever have any trouble that way, Uncle Melvin?
Hazel: No.
Melvin: Yeah, I told some of 'em if they called me an Okie they'd better be smilin [laughs].
Hazel: Yeah, I've told a few of 'em that too. I said, "I don't object to be called Okie as long as it's in a jokin way, but you want to make sure you're smilin when you say that or be prepared to whip my fanny.
Melvin: I've been ribbed a lot about bein from Oklahoma.
Hazel: Well Pete Leuzinger who was from Switzerland--I guess Melvin said something one time or the other to him about bein called an Okie, and Pete told him "you got the wrong slant on that." People here in Lake County call anybody that, you know, is a little trashy or something. They were Okies, whether they was from Oklahoma or not. It all started with the dust-bowl days.
Melvin: Pete said most of the Okies were native Californians.
Wayne: Sure. A hundred years ago weren't any white folks here, where there?
Hazel: Yeah, Lake County itself is over two hundred years old. I've read the history on it. Two hundred years ago there wasn't a pear tree in Lake County, they was all grapes, and there was lots of grapes, and there was lots of grape wineries. They deteriorated, and everybody went to pears. Now they're all pullin out the pears and goin back to grapes.
Wayne: What kind of work was here when you came in '46?
Melvin: Walnuts, pears...
Hazel: Prunes, dairyin , lumber, tourists. When we came out Debbie was seven and Melba Ray was seventeen months old. We worked for Pete Leuzinger. Grandma Pounds worked for the Bensons. They were pear growers. In fact, Alita Benson has got a book on Lake County history. She gave me an autographed copy, and like an idiot I loaned it to someone, never could remember who I loaned it to, and never did get it back.
Dancing
Your Daddy liked to dance. Oh, you betcha. He and Sarah danced all the time. But Melvin didn't learn to dance until Debbie was in high school. We sat up one whole night teachin him how to dance. Then the very next Saturday night we went to a dance and he danced up a storm.
No, he wasn't a very quick learner, not if we had to stay up all night to teach him. You ought to have seen that. It was right down here on Church Street, when Debbie was about 14 or 15. The kids had a little ol' record player. Right out of a clear blue sky, he said, "Hurry up and get the dishes done," and we wondered why in the world he was in such a hurry to get the dishes done. Then he had Debbie help him, they moved the table. Moved it over in one corner of the house, and he said, "Now you guys are goin to teach me how to dance if we have to stay up all night." What made it nice was Debbie and Melba could dance together, the twins could dance together, and Papa and I could dance together. Well we started out tryin to dance that a way. Debbie'd say now Daddy you do this, you do that, you know. Well that didn't work. So we all got in a line, like a bunch of ducks. She got in line first, and her daddy got right behind her. And she said, "Now put your hands on my hips, and you move your feet just like I move mine." We went around and around the room that a way, and finally he got the gist of how to do that. Then we coupled up, and I'd dance with him, or Debbie'd dance with him. I'm not lyin to you, Wayne, that went on all night. Because the next Saturday--
We were havin little neighborhood dances. We weren't goin out so much. No, I can't say that because we rented the Veterans' hall down here for our big parties. But we knew that there was gonna be a little dance the next Saturday night. I was workin at the hospital, and I didn't get off till eleven o'clock. When I got to the dance, I went down there in my nurses's uniform and joined the dance because I knew it wasn't goin to last much longer, boy here your Uncle Melvin was, he was swingin them right and left! It was all our neighbors and their wives. He was about half snockered. We had a lot of fun.
Cousin Andy
Uncle Hank said Andy started drinkin because of the paint fumes, to get the taste out of his mouth after he worked all day. Uncle Hank and I did a lot of talkin, back and forth when we'd go shoppin. He had his own ideas about why Andy drank.
Now when we first landed in California and we learned where Bend Oregon was, Melvin had me write and ask Andy about directions. Sometime when we had some time off we'd drive up and see 'em. Melvin was very hurt and offended to think that they didn't even answer our letter. Uncle Hank said it was because Andy was so far into drink they didn't want us to know.
Years later I wrote him and he answered. This was when he was already divorced and livin in Ada.
Bessie and Earl
Hazel: We were out here, and Bessie and Earl were the last people on earth that we expected to come to Lake County. We were just shocked. I don't know whether Earl still had his job there at Tulsa, but the next thing we knew they had sold out lock, stock, and barrel. I remember it was in April, and when they come out they had Grandma and Grandpa Pounds with them. We thought of it you know as bein a visit. I don't remember how long Grandma and Grandpa Pounds stayed. That would have been April of '47, and they moved up on the Benson ranch. They lived in a cabin--later on Grandma and Grandpa Pounds lived in the same cabin. I guess they all moved up there together, the four of them and lived together. I don't think they'd ever have come to California if we hadn't been here. They were lookin for new horizons, I guess. Anyway, they were very very happy here. They liked the climate. They went back to Oklahoma quite often, but I don't remember' em ever sayin that they wished they hadn't a come to California. Because they seemed to be perfectly content here. Then they bought the dairy and your dad worked with them for quite a long while when they were out here. Then Bessie and Earl sold the dairy, and there on that strip of property where Bessie and Earl now live--it was an old prune orchard. Aunt Bessie bought that. And when I say Aunt Bessie I do mean Aunt Bessie. Earl didn't have a bloomin thing to do with it. She was the manager. Just like Carol remarked to me before the funeral, her and Verdon don't call Earl "Earl" they call him E.A. She said, "E.A. as far as I know has never even written a check.ck. Bessie took care of all that."
E. A. stands for Earl Amon Strong, and there's another story behind that. Boy I tell you he hated that name. One day Bessie and I was just jokin--I'd asked him what that A stood for and he told me--and Bessie and I got to gigglin, and he got so dadburned mad. To turn it into a joke we told him if he didn't shut up we was gonna pants him. They lived then out there on the dairy and we lived in Finley. And he dared us. So I motioned to Bessie and I said, "Let's just show the old boy we can pants him." We threw him down in the floor--he had on overalls--and Bessie she got up astraddle of him. Lord only knows where I had him. We had his suspenders unfastened and about that time LaDon walked in the door. She was just a young girl, but she was strong as a bull. And of all things here all three of us was down in the floor takin that man's pants off when there was a knock on the door, and somebody just thoughtlessly hollered "Come in!" And who was it but the insurance man! And here us women was, had this big ol' man in the floor takin his pants off.
But Bessie bought that prune orchard. There must have been a good--I'm afraid to say twenty acres. I'm not very good on acres. Ten or fifteen, but it took in the house that was the boardin home. Well it went down that road far enough that my baby brother J.P. and his wife--I don't know just how much land they bought off of Bessie. But she sold that off, she broke it up. At that time you could break it up in smaller parcels than you can now. But she broke that up in these small parcels, and she sold it to people--like my brother and his wife. Anyhow Bessie worked out a deal with them where they paid on it over ten or fifteen years.
Bessie was clever enough that she collected this interest. That's the way she sold all that off--at a low down, low monthly, to get the interest. Aunt Bessie was a manager. She wasn't a person for a lot of style, a lot of class. She was just a down-to-earth ol' country girl, and she enjoyed makin a buck. She really did. And she absolutely deprived herself of a lot of the luxuries she could have enjoyed, but that wasn't her style. She wanted security. She wanted to know it was there. She wasn't a woman to put a lot of money in clothes, furniture, you know, showin off, tryin to catch up--that just wasn't her style. I said to Melvin the other day, "You know Melvin if your sister had a-had--she didn't even have a high school education. If your sister had a-had just a business-college education, you know Bessie would a been a multi-millionaire. It wouldn't surprise me a bit." It was amazin what she knew. I don't know where she learned it, how she got it. She was just gifted in that way. And she had a heart in her as big as all outdoors.
Wayne: She taught herself a lot, I guess. She told me she wanted to go to high school, but to do that she would have had to leave home and Grandpa wouldn't allow it.
Hazel: Well, you didn't disobey your dad. He was the man of the house and he was law, you know. Just like Melvin droppin out of high school. Now I think Melvin may have built up a little resentment there, because he was the oldest and his folks was desperate, didn't know how they was gonna put in their crop. So Melvin he ups and goes into the CC camp to make it easier for his Dad that particular year. He wanted to play football so badly. But to play football you had to stay after school, and here they were something like four and a half miles. He couldn't stay for football practice and get home in time to help with the chores, so that was nixed, you know. Course I don't think Melvin was overly fond of school anyway.
Games and Sports
Melvin: I didn't like dominoes as well as I did bridge.
Hazel: I can't imagine Melvin playin bridge.
Melvin: A good game. . . . But horseshoes was my best game. I could beat all of 'em put together.
Hazel: He was pretty salty, believe you me. When we lived out here in the country he had me come out one time and keep score, and out of a hundred pitches-- I forget how many ringers it was he strung.
Melvin: I used to throw about eighty percent.
Hazel: Every year they have a big horseshoe tournament down at Santa Rosa, and he had thought seriously about gettin into it. That's why he had me out keepin score for him. He used to take our son-in-laws out there, and he'd pitch all three of 'em. Just him against all three of 'em. Isn't that the way you did it?
Melvin: Yeah. They never did beat me either. I'd even give'm five for a ringer, and for me it was only three; and for them leaners was three, and close ones was one, and I didn't count anything for myself but ringers [laughs]. I didn't have any problem beatin 'em.
Hazel: I think that was one reason Melvin was such a good bowler, pitchin all those horseshoes.
Melvin: It's all part of the same thing.
Hazel: Honey, did you pitch horseshoes right-handed or left-handed?
Melvin: Right.
Hazel: It's funny how Melvin eats right-handed, he writes right-handed, he chops wood left-handed . . . . Did you play baseball right-handed?
Melvin: Batted baseball left-handed. I threw the ball right-handed.
Hazel: He golfs left-handed.
Wayne: Where did you play baseball?
Hazel: Mostly out here.
Melvin: Used to play at Oak Grove all the time every summer.
Hazel: He played a lot of ball here in Lake County.
Wayne: I've heard a lot of stories about good ball players around Oak Grove, but in other stories it sounds like you guys never had a baseball, so I've never gotten this straight.
Melvin: No, we couldn't afford a baseball or a good glove or anything.
Hazel: Probably you couldn't afford the time. Sunday afternoon, or was it a Saturday afternoon thing?
Melvin: It was Sunday afternoon when we played baseball.
Churches and Religion
Hazel: Well I'll bet your mother never went, did she?
Melvin: No, but Dad...
Hazel: Because that's the thing I can't understand about religion. The very same churches out here in California, your Nazarenes and all them that were all so straight laced in Oklahoma, now no way were they gonna sit down and watch a baseball game on Sunday afternoon. Now it was alright if you wanted to watch it on Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday or Saturday, but you just didn't do it on Sunday. Even when it was your own kids playin.
But out here the minister is just as gungho on Sunday football, if it's football season, or baseball. Sure, they get up and go to church on Sunday mornin, but on Sunday afternoon they want to know how that ball game's a goin. It's like your Mother said to me: "Why didn't they have Bessie's funeral on Sunday?" I said, "Opal, they don't have funerals in California on Sunday."
Wayne: Aunt Bessie told me her father was a religious man. I never realized that. She said if he didn't go to church it was because every time he went down there they preached at him about smoking cigarettes.
Melvin: Yeah.
Hazel: That was poor ol' Grandpa Pounds's alibi. Now he did have his church, and he told her if she'd go to church with him he'd go to church with her. But she wouldn't go to his church, so he wouldn't go to hers.
Wayne: But wasn't that late in his life he found that church to go to? I remember for along time he didn't go at all. He'd stay home Sunday morning and read the Bible. What do you think, Uncle Melvin? Was your father a religious man?
Melvin: Well, to an extent, yes. When we were kids he went...
Hazel: Oh yeah, he was goin to church when Melvin and I got married.
Melvin: He'd go to Sunday School and church every Sunday evenin.
December 7, 1941
Hazel: December 7, 1941. It was a Sunday, and we were out to your Grandpa and Grandma Pounds's on the farm. We knew nothin, absolutely, about it till Monday mornin. Melvin had gone to work. He went to work at the old Taylor honey plant, where he and Earl worked there in Chandler. I already had my ironin board up and was ironin. I was one of those people that when I got out of bed the radio was turned on and it wasn't turned off until I went to bed that night. But that Sunday we was out to Tom and Roxy's and they didn't even have a radio.
The first thing I heard when I turned the radio on Monday mornin--the first words that I heard was, "I now declahh a state of wahh on the Japanese Empaihh." It was ol' Roosevelt. That was the way he talked. I thought, "What am I hearin!" I called Gladys Freeman and said, "Lord, what will we do? Melvin's goin to have to go to war." It scared the shit out of me.
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Goodnight Uncle Melvin
I no longer remember exactly what the date was I said goodbye to Uncle Melvin. I only recall that Aunt Hazel had me carry him into the bedroom and put him on his bed. What I remember most vividly is how little he weighed. No more than a boy of twelve. I’d like to think I said a little prayer for him: “Goodnight sweet Uncle, and flights of Angeles sing thee to thy rest.”
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