Jewel Moore Gresham's Junior High Years in Oklahoma, 1926-1929

Sometime before she died in 1994, my mother-in-law, Jewel Moore Gresham, either wrote down or dictated some memories.  This is the fourth part of those memories, after the Moore family made another move in the Marlow area, from about 1926 until Jewel's graduation from junior high school in May 1929. 

Part one (near White Settlement, Texas, 1914-1918) is here:  https://abt-unk.blogspot.com/2021/08/a-mother-in-laws-early-memories-abt.html

Part two (near Bray, Oklahoma, 1919-1922) is here:  https://abt-unk.blogspot.com/2021/09/jewel-moore-greshams-early-years-in.html

Part three (near Marlow, Oklahoma, 1922-1926) is here:  https://abt-unk.blogspot.com/2021/09/jewel-moore-greshams-early-years-in_01612288476.html

Jewel's May 1929 diploma from Marlow Junior High School.  Note that her first name is spelled with two Ls, although she always used only one L on all other documents.

 

We made another move, and somehow, I can't remember the exact year.  But it was 1927 or 1928, or maybe 1926.  We traded at a grocery store run by Mr. Talley².  He liked Papa¹.  Mr. Talley's wife³  had a brother⁴ who owned some land, 120 acres, north of Marlow (the place you remember).⁵  The family living there wanted to move, because their boys had all left home, and they couldn't handle that much land.  So he offered the place to Papa.  We must have had some money, because they bought a new bed and a rug for one of the rooms.  Mama⁶ even made some curtains.  This room was our "parlor". 

 

Ad for an oil cook stove similar to the one described by Jewel, from the January 29, 1921, Country Gentleman magazine, via https://www.flickr.com/photos/dok1/17104875289/

We left the old wood stove behind, and bought an oil cook stove.  It had four burners.  Two heated the oven, and two were for top heating.  It had a glass jug at one end.  You filled the jug from a 50-gallon barrel.  Then you screwed a funny top that had a valve on it.  Then you put it in a bracket, and fastened it down, and then you inverted it into a oil pan.  As the stove burned the oil, that valve in the jug would "glug - glug" and the oil would run out of the jug into the pan, and down a pipe to the burners.  If you turned the wick too high, the burner would smoke like crazy.  It wasn't the greatest invention, but it was better that the old wood stove.  We used this stove many years.  Years later, Audie⁷ and I had a broom corn crop, and we made about $200 on it.  We took $80 and bought a new stove.  It was a beauty.  It was ivory enamel.  It had five big burners.  Three for top cooking, and two for the stationary oven.  It even had a temperature gauge on the oven.  They had improved the product quite a bit.  

After we moved there, Papa planted 60 acres of cotton.  It was a good year "weather wise," and since everyone else in the county had planted cotton, we had a bumper yield -- and guess what!  Cotton prices fell to 5 cents a pound.  That was about 1928, maybe 1926, and it was the beginning of the depression for the farmers.  We tightened our belts, and life went on almost as usual.  It took another year for the stock market to fall, and then things really got bad.  

Separating the milk [cropped] / Dennis Jarvis / CC BY-SA 2.0

 

We would supplement farming income with cream and egg sales.  Papa bought a cream separator.  After milking, I think we had three jersey cows, we would strain the milk through a cloth into a big bowl at the top.  This device had a crank, and two spigots along with some inner thing the milk passed through in order to separate the cream from the milk.  First you had to turn the crank until you got it so fast - it would have a hum when it was fast enough.  Then you would turn a spigot, and the milk would flow down through this machine.  The cream came out one spigot, and the milk came out the other.  We had no refrigeration, so this process was fine in the winter and cool weather.  But in the summer, we would have to take the cream off every few days to the creamery.  With the sale of cream and eggs, we would have some cash.  In the winter time, the oil in the separator would get stiff.  When Papa renewed the fire in the wood heating stove, he would put some of the hot ashes in a metal pan, and set it on top of the metal housing that held the oil.  By the time he brought the milk in, the oil would be warm enough to let the crank turn easily.

We had a big garden, and we planted lots of tomatoes, cantaloupes and watermelons.  Papa would peddle them up and down the residential streets, and the little old ladies would come out and buy fresh things.  He would get so mad at some of them, because "they stick their thumbnails in the tomatoes."

I don't really know how the labors of the farmers ended up cold cash in the pockets of people in Chicago.  Every year just before cotton harvest, the government would put out a report on the cotton crop - just like they do here in Washington on the apple crop.  If the report said there was a big crop, the price would start dropping, and continued to drop all during the harvest.  After the harvest, the price would stabilize and then start rising.  By spring, when the farmers had none to sell, the price would go way up.  Then the farmers organized a co-op.  If they didn't need to sell their bales of cotton to pay their bills, they would store at the co-op.  Then, in the spring, they had a little money to buy more seed and plant more cotton.  

Sometime in 1926, Grandma Moore's⁸ estate was settled.  Papa got $1,000.  Just about that time, he got word that Aunt Sue⁹, who was Grandpa Moore's¹⁰ sister, had died over at Lawton.  I remember Papa on the phone telling ever who was calling that we would be there.  He took $485 of his money, and bought a 1926 Model A Ford car.¹¹  We went to the funeral.

Ford Model T, 1926 [cropped] / 

National Museum of American History Smithsonian Institution / CC BY-NC 2.0

When I was in the eighth grade, we were moved into a new junior high.  It was a nice building.  The classrooms were on the outside perimeter.  The center was a big auditorium with a stage and everything -- even had a balcony.  At one end of the building was a large study hall and library, plus the bathrooms.  The principal's office was in a room at the entrance.  We even had an art teacher.  I guess in the eighth grade, I started having trouble with math.  I remember one problem of how much water could run through a pipe if it was going so many feet a minute.  Also, I was beginning to play and have fun.  One day, my girlfriend and I were tossing paper airplanes across the aisle in history class. The teacher sent us to the principal's office.  I don't remember what happened.  Our principal's name was Mr. Williams.  When I was in the ninth grade, Mr. Williams chose me to be his office girl.  I had to answer the phone, and record all the attendance records.  The only subject I had trouble with was algebra.  I graduated in 1929.

Above and below - From a Marlow Junior High School Class of 1929 program.  Note her first name is spelled with two Ls, although she always used only one on all other documents.

NOTES

1.  Papa is Jewel's father, Tandy Clayton "Clayton" Moore, 1878-1964.

2.  Charles Anderson (C. A.) Talley is listed as the owner of a grocery store in Marlow on the 1920 and 1930 censuses.

3.  I believe this is Charles Talley's first wife, Nora Long Talley.

4.  I believe the brother referenced is Thomas Albert Long, whose daughter, Ola Long Smith, apparently inherited the land.

5.  Clayton and his family lived on this property at least until his death in 1964.  On the 1950 Census, it is referenced as being in the NW 1/4 (northwest quarter) of Section 5, Township 2N, Range 7W, and "proceeding south on S Road" with the entry just before having the directive "proceeding east on county line to S."  The county line (with Grady County, to the north of Stephens County) is at Stephens County Road 1610 (also called N Countyline Road), and I believe the "S Road" is today's N2820 (or CS 2820).  I think the land Clayton rented and farmed was on the southeast side of this intersection.  A known neighbor, M. C. Hallmark, is described as living in the NE 1/4, Section 6, Township 2N, Range 7W, off this same road 6 - which would be to the west, across the S Road.  A 1941 Oklahoma state highway map (used to map the enumeration districts for the 1950 Census) shows one house on the east side of this road, in the northwest quarter of Section 5.

6.  Mama is Jewel's mother, Nancy "Nannie" Flora Jones Moore, 1882-1969.

7.  Audie is Jewel's older sister, Audie Ruth Moore Cook, 1911-1969.

8.  Grandma Moore is Clayton's mother, Angeline Elizabeth “Lizzie” Peach Moore, 1859-1924.

9 and 10.  Aunt Sue was Clayton's aunt, Susan Nancy Moore Dinkins Robertson, 1867-1926, the younger half-sister of his father, Thomas Jefferson Moore, 1852-1904, who was Grandpa Moore to Jewel.

11.  Jewel probably meant that her father purchased a 1926 Ford Model T.  The Model A was not introduced until December 2, 1927.

© Amanda Pape - 2021 - e-mail me!

Jewel Moore Gresham's Early Years in Oklahoma, 1922-1926

Sometime before she died in 1994, my mother-in-law, Jewel Moore Gresham, either wrote down or dictated some memories.  This is the third part of those memories, from the family's early years in the Marlow, Oklahoma, area, from sometime in 1922 to about 1926.  

Part one (Texas, 1914-1918) is here:  https://abt-unk.blogspot.com/2021/08/a-mother-in-laws-early-memories-abt.html.  

Part two (Bray, Oklahoma, 1919-1922) is here:  https://abt-unk.blogspot.com/2021/09/jewel-moore-greshams-early-years-in.html

Jewel's oldest sister Ivis Moore played on the 1922-23 Marlow High School girls basketball team.  Image from the 1923 Tepee yearbook at Ancestry.com.

1922 was the year we moved back close to Marlow. … I don't really remember moving, but I do know I started to school in the third grade in Marlow schools.  Papa¹ and all the older kids would go back to the old place on weekends and finish harvesting the crops.  I had to stay with Mama² at the new place.  I remember wanting to go back with them, but "no," they wouldn't let me.  Then, one time, Papa said I could go back.  I remember returning to the old place and going to all my play places and feeling sad.  

When I started to school, I remember sitting at my desk and my legs were shaking like a leaf.  But things got better.  My teacher's name was Vella Frazee.  She really liked me - in fact, you could say I was the teacher's pet.  I think she liked me because I was smart.  I got to be the Christmas angel.  Mama would make me an angel costume, and I got to sing songs and flutter my wings all over the place.  Mama had taught me songs, and I always got to sing my songs to the class.  The third grade passed, and I was promoted to the fourth grade.  My teacher went home to a small town in the Panhandle.  I got a beautiful card from her.  It had a picket fence covered with roses.  I wrote her a card.  She never came back to Marlow.³

Papa had much work to do on this new place.  He put a drainage ditch through the "willow flat," and the soil was rich.  We always had a garden there.  He had to cut all the black jack trees down, and grub out the roots.  I'm sure it was hard work.  He was about 44 years old at the time.  He rented other land from someone, and we planted corn and cotton.  We had a barn, but I can't remember when he built it.  And we dug a storm cellar.  A cellar is a "must" in that country.  We all worked in the fields.  I got the measles, and all the other childhood diseases.

We had some neighbors.  To the north were the Carsons.  He had race horses and he peddled moonshine.  To the south were the Stewarts.  They had three kids; J. D., Edward, and Jean.  Mrs. Stewart possessed great "powers," or so she claimed, and was very religious.  She and Mama became good friends - each helping each other when trouble came.  I remember Jean had typhoid fever one summer, and both Mama and Papa helped nurse her.  To the east were the Cosseys⁴.  They had three kids, Kenneth, Bryce, and Mary Kathryn.  We didn't get to know them too well, but later, they moved by us when we made another move.

The fourth grade was a real nightmare.  My teacher was an old maid named Henry McMurry.  She only liked the children whose father was on the school board.  One time I recited the poem, "Excelsior," and she did give me a gold star - and that was it.  There was a happy memory in the fourth grade.  There was a boy, his name was Glen Rubendall.  He liked me, and he gave me a valentine.  The verse was: "My heart is as big as the ocean, and if I had the sand, I would ask you for your heart, and ask your father for your hand."

Things got worse in the fifth grade.  Another old maid - she looked like Dixy Lee Ray - grey hair, short and pudgy.  She had a rubber hose to whale the little boys with, and she used it often.  But it was here that I learned long division.  One day the principal came and got me out of the room.  He told me I could not go to Marlow schools, because there was a grade school close to where we lived.  It was called East Ward.  It was a one room school.  It seemed that the Cossey's son, Bryce, was in the fifth grade, and he was going to East Ward.  When they found out I was going to Marlow, they told the principal and that was why I couldn't go to Marlow schools.  So I went home and told Mama and Papa.  Papa went in to see the principal, and the principal told him that he could pay $149 a semester as tuition.  So I continued on with the fifth grade under Mattie Kincannon.  

I never had any trouble with my classes.  The sixth and seventh grades are all just a blur.  We had a big school ground, and we played games at recess.  Our favorite game was "pop the whip".  You put a bunch of kids holding hands together, and you made a short run and then started whipping each child.  The kid on the end got turned over and over.  We played baseball, and we had swings.

In 1924, Grandma Moore⁵ died.  Papa and Ivis⁶ went to her funeral in Lewisville [Texas] on the train.  Ivis was a senior in high school.  She was on the basketball team.  I believe she played guard.  The team was pretty good.  They would play different schools.  One year they won the championship, and Ivis was one of the reasons they did.  A businessman decided to take the team out to dinner.  The principal, a Mr. Gray⁷, was their coach, and for some reason, he didn't include Ivis in the dinner.  She was very hurt, and when he had the gall to ask her to help the team play an exhibition game, she just told him, "You didn't have the courtesy to tell me about the dinner.  I don't want to play on your team.”  

I realized early on that farm kids were discriminated against.  Of course, most of the town lived off the raw materials we produced, but that made no never mind.  One time Mabel⁸ was in a spell-off.  There were just two girls left.  The principal's wife was giving out the words.  Mabel missed a word, and when the other girl very slowly started spelling the word, the woman would shake her head "no" if the girl made the wrong selection, and when she made the right selection, the woman would nod her head "yes".  So, guess who won.  Marlow is such a tacky place.

Full page from the 1923 Tepee yearbook at Ancestry.com with the 1922-23 Marlow High School girls basketball team.  You can see their record was 7-2.

NOTES

1.  Papa is Jewel's father, Tandy Clayton "Clayton" Moore, 1878-1964.

2.  Mama is Jewel's mother, Nancy "Nannie" Flora Jones Moore, 1882-1969.

3.  Vella Frazee was only 19 and probably starting her teaching career when she taught Jewel in the third grade in 1922.  It appears she left Marlow to attend Northwestern State College in Alva, where she apparently graduated with a B.S. in 1925, and became superintendent of a consolidated school in Watonga, Oklahoma.  She went on to teach mathematics at various high schools in the state, earn a master's degree at University of Oklahoma, and was an assistant professor of education and supervisor of mathematics at Northeastern State College in Oklahoma in 1951.

4.  On the 1930 United States Census, the Cossey family is listed just before the Moore family in enumeration district #26, Wall township, Stephens County, Oklahoma.

5.  Grandma Moore is Clayton's mother, Angeline Elizabeth “Lizzie” Peach Moore, 1859-1924.

6.  Ivis is Jewel's oldest surviving sister, Ivis Moore Mew, 1905-2004.

7.  Mr. Gray is the Reverend James Volley Gray, who earned a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Oklahoma in June 1918.  He became principal of Marlow High School in 1921, and went on to become a Baptist minister later.

8.  Mabel is Jewel's older sister, Beulah Mabel "Mabel" Moore, 1910-1932.

© Amanda Pape - 2021 - e-mail me!

Happy Birthday To My Aunt!

My aunt, Jo Ann (now Sister Jean Marie) Guokas, while a student at Incarnate Word Academy in Houston, Texas, about 1945-46.  She is 91 today.

© Amanda Pape - 2021 - e-mail me!

Jewel Moore Gresham's Early Years in Oklahoma, 1919-1922

Sometime before she died in 1994, my mother-in-law, Jewel Moore Gresham, either wrote down or dictated some memories.  This is the second part of those memories, from the family's early years in the Bray, Oklahoma, area, from early 1919 to sometime in 1922.  Part one (near White Settlement, Texas, 1914-1918) is here:  https://abt-unk.blogspot.com/2021/08/a-mother-in-laws-early-memories-abt.html

Above:  Tandy Clayton Moore (on ladder) helping to build a house, unknown date and place

The war was over November 11, 1918, so I am guessing that when we got to Marlow, it was in the early months of 1919.  The soldiers were coming home and bringing all their germs.  I don't remember much about living in Marlow, and I don't remember anything about moving to Bray.  Bray was about 9 miles east of Marlow.  The house had two big front rooms, and a shed room for the kitchen.  It had no fireplace, just a woodstove.  I don't remember too much.  I think we all had the flu.  Mama¹ was very sick.  I do remember the doctor coming in a buggy to see her.  I was four years old at the time.

My next memory was Mama teaching me to read.  I was reading from Aesop's Fables.  "The sun and the wind had a quarrel," and "The crow and the pitcher."  Those were the ones that kept me under the table, because I couldn't remember some of the words.  It must have been the fall of 1919, because I remember Mama and I were alone; so I guess everyone else was in school.  School was about 2 miles away.  This house was on a creek -- I don't think it had a name.  The farm houses were widely scattered.  The Burns lived north of us.  To the east lived the Davises.  To the south lived the Jacksons.

I remember being the "water boy" during the summer when everyone was in the field.  I know Gurth² was still at home because he let me ride on the cultivator with him when I took him a drink.  I don't remember when he went back to Fort Worth, but he didn't like Oklahoma.  

I must have started to school in the fall of 1920.  I don't remember my first day at school.  Everything must have gone smoothly.  My teacher's name was Augusta Montgomery.  Mama must have prepared me well for school, because I could read and spell all the words in my primer.  I had gold stars everywhere.  Can't remember much about the first year.  Augusta Montgomery was also my second grade teacher.  I think I was the teacher's pet.  I remember being in little plays and singing songs Mama had taught me.  And so the second year passed.  

During the summer months, we all worked in the field.  By that time, I was big enough to help with the hoeing.  Papa³ cut a hoe handle off and made me a hoe I could handle.  He also had to follow the turkey hens when they went off to steal their nest out on the creek.  We would have to get their eggs and take them home for Mama to save until the turkey hen started setting.  Then Mama would make them a nest which would be safe from the animals, and let her hatch her eggs.  I remember Mama would always cook some clabber milk until all the solid parts became cheese, and I would have to feed the little turkeys.  The little turkeys liked it and so did I.  When the turkeys got larger, we would drive them out into the pasture so they could feed on the grasshoppers.  I remember Ruby⁴, Mabel⁵, Audie⁶ and I spending nearly all day herding the turkeys.  Late in the afternoon we would herd them back home.  Of course, we did a lot of playing while the turkeys ate grasshoppers.  

The creek was also a source of play.  We used to swim and play in the deep holes.  In the summer time when the creek ran slow, we would make dams across it so we could have some water to play in.  We had play houses on the creek.  All in all, it must have been a good time of our lives.  

We always had to stay out of school to pick cotton in the fall.  Most all families kept their kids out during cotton picking time.  So it was no big deal.  When we had picked a bale, Papa would haul it to the gin in Marlow to get it baled.  It would usually take him all day to go and come.  I remember waiting at the road for him to come home.  We could recognize the rattle of the horse's trace chains, and we would know it was him.  He always brought us a sack of candy.  It would take us about 6 weeks to harvest the cotton.  All the bolls didn't open at the same time, so would have to go over the field again.  

I guess we had a little money at that time of year.  That made it nice, so at Christmas time, Papa and Mama would go to town and get us some Christmas presents.  We never had a tree.  No one else did either.  The only tree was at the school house.  The kids always got a net bag with an apple, an orange, some nuts and candy.  At home, we hung up our stockings, and I mean the stockings we wore every day.  Of  course, we always washed them.

We always had a garden.  We had chickens and hogs.  In the fall, after a good frost, Papa would kill several hogs and cure the meat.  We never ate beef.  In the spring, Mama would raise chickens, and we would eat chickens in the summer.

Mama had to wash clothes on a rub board.  (Mama made lye soap from cracklins from the hogs.)  Then she would boil them in a pot, and then she would rinse them twice.  The last rinse would always have bluing in it.  Mama made quilts, made our clothes.  I remember one dress she made me.  It was pink Peter Pan and she cross-stitched a row, or maybe lots of rows of cross-stitching in black thread at the bottom of the skirt.  We had a Montgomery Ward catalog, and I guess she must have ordered our coats from it.  I don't remember buying anything at a store.

1922 was the year we moved back close to Marlow.  I have no childhood memory of the move.  But from family talk, I think the reason was Mama didn't think the school at Bray was a very good one.  The story was that some of the older boys at school had got into some kind of mischief, and the principal had given them a whipping.  The parents got involved, and the principal was fired.  So we moved.  

Papa bought twenty acres of land just outside the city limits of Marlow (what was called East Ward).  Some of it was hillside.  The top soil had all washed away.  There was some wet land that we called the "willow flat".  The rest of the land was in black-jack oak.  Sometime in the summer and fall, he built a two room house.  Later, he added a kitchen.  

Girls' coats on page 26 of the 1921-22 Montgomery Ward catalog.

It's possible the photograph at the top of this post is of the very house Jewel describes her father building.  The photo is unlabeled and undated.  Jewel's nephew Tom Moore thinks it may actually have been taken when the family was living in Fort Worth, Texas, between March 1903 and March 1904.  Clayton worked as a carpenter's helper on the many houses going up in that city.

Future posts will have more of Jewel's memories.

NOTES  

1.  Mama is Jewel's mother, Nancy "Nannie" Flora Jones Moore, 1882-1969.

2.  Gurth is Jewel's older (and only) brother, Thomas Gurth Moore,1902-1935.  Sometime after the 1920 Census was taken in Marlow on January 26 (probably after graduating from high school that spring), Gurth moved to Fort Worth, Texas.

3.  Papa is Jewel's father, Tandy Clayton "Clayton" Moore, 1878-1964.

4.  Ruby is Jewel's older sister. Ruby Clayton Moore Albillar, 1908-1967.

5.  Mabel is Jewel's older sister, Beulah Mabel "Mabel" Moore, 1910-1932.

6.  Audie is Jewel's older sister, Audie Ruth Moore Cook, 1911-1969.

© Amanda Pape - 2021 - e-mail me!