MY MEMORIES

Chapter 5

Leaving the White House

During the last year we lived at the White House we were having a hard time financially. My parents were very relieved when a friend helped daddy get a part time job with the Highway Department. It made it much easier for my folks. A fringe benefit was that we got to visit more with our friends in El Dorado Springs. I really enjoyed playing with the town kids.

I had realized that there was something wrong. I could feel the undercurrent but didn't know the cause and why Daddy was so anxious to have a job. I later learned that a banker had encouraged Daddy to buy the White House place. Mama thought it was priced too high and she begged Daddy to think about it a little longer. She didn't think they could pay for it. He thought they could and that it would be nice to have a place of their own. Renters moved a lot. Our family had already moved once after I was born on the Griffith place. Farms were rented from March First to March First, time for early spring planting. Some communities would change every March when renters moved away and others moved in.

Daddy had bought the White House place in spite of Mama's objections and was getting it paid for until the Bank he was dealing with closed suddenly and the man he had dealt with left town. None of the money Daddy had paid had been used to pay off the note on the farm. There was no recourse but to pay it again. That was why Daddy took the job with the Highway Department. The White House place was eventually sold but I don't know any of the details. I do know that every payday for many years Mama made a sad trip to El Dorado Springs to make payments. At that time it was not unusual for a bank to close forever and for the depositors to lose everything. Many people buried money in jars in the back yard or hid it in secret places because they didn't trust the banks.

When I was nearly four years old the new job moved us to a house just west of Cedar Creek between Stockton and El Dorado Springs. Daddy was working for the highway department full time now and they sent a dump truck to move us. After the first load Mama and I stayed at the new house to get a few things unpacked and make lunch for the men who were helping. Mama made coffee and fried bacon over an outside fire. She had cooked pies and chicken the day before we moved. I immediately named our new house The Bungalow.

I was quite excited about moving but the thought of leaving our home in the White House tempered it a bit and I didn't realize how isolated we would be from my grandparents and other relatives. Our new home was about twenty miles from our relatives and in 1924 that was a big trip. Some of them had automobiles and Daddy had bought a car when he got the full time job but travel was slow and left little time to visit. Most cars were open touring cars. Side curtains with isinglass windows were used in winter but it was still a cold ride. Grandpa Elliott had an enclosed automobile with outside coach lights, probably fueled with carbide, on either side of the windshield. It was much warmer in the winter. Flat tires were common and cold patches and a hand tire pump were necessary parts of every tool chest. Cars had to be cranked and sometimes the engine would "kick," (fire backwards,) and injure a wrist, hand or arm. Windshield wipers were worked by hand.

Mama was homesick and so was I. One day Grandma Jones called to see how we were and she asked Mama to ask me how I was. I told Mama to tell her that I was okay but my conscience hurt. Grandma asked me where it hurt and I said, "It was a big knot in my throat when I thought of her." She got a big laugh from that and came to see us the next day.

All our homes had names: The Griffith Place, The Tull Place, The White House and now the Bungalow. I was born at the Griffith Place, learned to walk at the Tull Place and started remembering and learning while living at the White House and now I was entering on a new adventure.

The Bungalow was a nice house and a joy to explore. It was on the south side of the road about a mile west of Cedar Creek Bridge on what is now highway 32. There was an open field behind it. It was the nicest house we had lived in but something about the place bothered me. The owners had reserved a large front room to store some of their furniture and I didn't know what else. My bedroom was directly across from the locked door of that mysterious room and my imagination worked overtime. This was also the first time I had slept in a bed away from my parents bedroom. I heard many strange noises in the locked room. I just knew something was moving in there. I kept begging my mother until she finally opened the door and let me look. I don't know that it helped a great deal. There was the biggest stuffed bird I had ever seen or could have imagined. I don't remember what it was and that is strange for Mama and I spent hours in the White House looking at an old geography book that showed pictures of the native animals down the side of the page. I could identify most of them. Perhaps I was just too scared to see straight.

We didn't know any of our neighbors so Mama and I played together. We played store, school, made doll clothes, cut out paper dolls and Mama read to me. I am so grateful for the love of reading she nurtured in me. Our reading material was very limited but it was nice to hear even if I had to hear it again and again. After supper we would all sit around the table where the good lamp was and Mama would read to us while we ate popcorn and munched apples. My mother didn't go to school past the eighth grade but she was a very intelligent woman.

We eventually got acquainted with a very nice family just west of us and visited back and forth. I had seen my daddy throw large rocks out of the road since he started working for the highway department. This motivated my actions as Mama and I were walking to see our neighbors one day. There were two or three rocks in the road, rather small I suspect, and I started to throw them in the ditch. I whirled around to put some power behind my pitch and slipped and fell. I had pierced my lower lip completely through. My two front teeth were hanging loose. My mama pushed them back into my gums, took me home and put a cold wash cloth on my mouth. I don't remember any cleansing but she surely did some. She used a lot of peroxide on abrasions so that could have been the treatment that time. I remember rinsing my mouth with water. There wasn't much bleeding but I did have pain and layed around a lot. I had to drink my food and the highlight of it all was when Mama would cut an apple in half and scrape the pulp out with a dull knife so I could eat that. It was like raw applesauce. I really made the most of the attention and went through this experience with no doctor and no medicine, just my Mama.

While living here I coined a phrase we continued to use for many years when we had more on our plate then we could eat. I loved the dried corn cooked. I wanted more that day and none was left. The fire was about out in the cook stove but I pestered Mama till she said she would cook some more. She restarted the fire with corncobs soaked in coal oil and kindling and cooked the corn which takes quite a bit of time. By the time it was done I was full and no longer hungry. Mama dished up my corn, sat it down before me and told me I'd better eat it. I played with it, ate a little and pondered what I was going to do. Finally, when I though I was going to be sick if I ate more, I said sadly, "Mama I can't eat any more corn, it tastes kind'a coal oily," insinuating that she was responsible. Mama was pretty aggravated with me and was as cross with me as she ever got but the excuse worked. We used the phrase for a long time after we no longer had a wood-burning cook stove.

I ask my mother a hundred questions a day. If I ask her why about something and she answered, "Just because," I'd follow her around asking, "'cause why, Mama?" To shut me up she had to answer me. One day I started asking her when they were going to get me a baby sister to play with. She put me off as long as she could and finally said, "Oh, probably a year from now." This will present itself later in my memories and to her embarrassment--again.

I was happy most of the time we lived in the Bungalow but at times I longed to be back home in the White Hose. This was a nicer place but it never really felt like home. I had two things I treasured and thought were mine alone. One was my dog Chubby and the other was a neighbor boy about eleven years older than I was. He was my hero and I thought I was in love with him. He had even given me a stuffed doll for Christmas. (These "sock dolls" were made from men's new brown and white work socks.) I had brought Chubby with me when we moved but my friend was left behind. I later found out he had moved also and he had given some other little girls "sock dolls" that Christmas.

One evening, about 5:00 PM, the highway department dump truck pulled in to move us to Deerfield, Missouri the next morning. There had been no warning and my mother had to cook supper for two men, make a place for them to sleep and pack in one evening.

She hurried into the kitchen with me trailing and threw coal oil into the stove on the kindling wood not realizing there were a few coals of fire left from noon. There was an explosion that blew the stove lids into the air. Flames shot everywhere. Mama got a small burn on one hand and it was amazing that there was nothing worse. I cried out, "Mama are you trying to burn your baby?" Later we could joke about it but not for awhile.

With Daddy's help, (and mine,) and the understanding of the men with the truck we managed to get on our way to Deerfield. The house had already been rented for us. I took Chubby with me. It wasn't hard for me to leave the Bungalow with its locked room. We hadn't lived there a year but through the years we kept in touch with our good friends and neighbors who had lived just west of us.