My hometown was a little place in central Oklahoma called Seminole. Though I was born in Duncan, Oklahoma, we moved to Seminole the summer I turned six. In fact, we celebrated my birthday sitting on drawers turned on their end around a big cardboard box with the ONLY store-bought birthday cake I ever had on it.
Seminole was an “oil boom town” that, at one point, produced more oil than anywhere else in the world. But in the beginning, When Oklahoma Territory and Indian Territory merged to become the U.S. state of Oklahoma in 1907, there were 206 residents. But with the discovery of a high-producing oil well in the city in 1926, Seminole transformed from a town of 854 to a boom town of 25,000 to 30,000 residents. (Wikipedia reference.)
The streets were so muddy, travel was hard, but they managed. Finally, they paved the streets with bricks—and those bricks are still there to this very day! As you can see, this mud was something else, and it was not going away.
Seminole was in competition with Wewoka to become the county seat of Seminole County, but Wewoka won out. They were our arch-rivals in high school sports competitions, too. Here’s a picture of the high school where I attended—we were the Seminole Chieftains, and at every sporting event, one of the town elders said a prayer over the loud speaker in English, and then repeated it in the Seminole language, as well, before we started. This lovely old building was abandoned for many years, but has recently been bought and is under renovations. The newspaper clipping shows the school in 1930, when it was new. See the architectural arrowheads around the top? These were later removed as they had begun to crumble and fall. I was in school there in the 1970’s, and by then, the arrowheads were gone.
I was so lucky to get to move there just as I turned six and start school at Woodrow Wilson Elementary School. The school was only a couple of blocks from my house, and I could walk or ride my bike, most days.
Our neighborhood was filled with kids, and as luck would have it, another little girl, only one year older than I, moved in about three houses down on the opposite side of the street the very same week we moved. Her name was Jane, and she and I became fast friends. Both of us had much older siblings and were so lonely for a playmate—and now, we had one another! Here we are in my sandbox on a fall day, when I was 8 and Jane was 9.
The principal’s assistant at our elementary school, Mary Jo Edgmon, was the sister of folk singer Woody Guthrie. One of my enduring memories was how, in the mornings, sometimes our teacher would put the intercom on so it could be heard in the office, and our class would start the day with a couple of songs—we’d sing a lot of Woody Guthrie songs. So many times, at the end of our song performance, Mrs. Edgmon would say, “That is so beautiful! I wish my brother could hear you all singing his songs. It would mean the world to him.” Sadly, by that point in time, Woody Guthrie was in the final stages of Huntington’s Disease that eventually claimed his life. So often, I’ve wished I’d looked her up as an adult and spoken with her about him.
Growing up, going to the movie theater was a huge part of our entertainment. For a while, we had three movie theaters, but by the time I was old enough to go by myself, there was only one. This was such a small, safe town, our parents would take us down and drop us off at the theater with money for a snack (usually about $1.00–you could get a huge dill pickle for $.10, popcorn for $.15, or a candy bar for $.25, and cokes were about $.25, as well) and $.10 for the pay phone at the nearby drugstore when the movie let out. We were all about 9 or 10 when we were deemed old enough to behave ourselves without parents along, and what a milestone that was! Can’t tell you how many James Bond movies we all went to watch (none of us understanding what in the heck was going on, it just meant a lot to all be together and say we’d seen that movie!)
As we got older, the theater would close in the summer time and ONLY the drive-in theater would be open. BOO-HOO! What did we do? We drove over to nearby Shawnee, which was a little bigger than Seminole, and went to the movies there. But sometimes, of course, the drive-in movie was the best option.
Time passed, our lives taken up with school activities, band, piano lessons, dance lessons, and lots of socializing, of course. In the summers, Seminole merchants hosted a CRAZY DAYS sale, where they put out their sale goods on the sidewalk and we could all just walk and look to hearts’ content, with a bit of money in our pocket to buy something we might not be able to live without.
The library was another wonderful haven–it was housed in an old building that was accessed by a stairway. The head librarian was an older woman named Miss Goldie. She climbed those stairs every day and always had a smile for us kids. It was cool in the library and a wonderful place to be able to go and spend time while our parents were shopping or at the beauty shop or the do-it-yourself dry cleaners.
In August 1970, Seminole hosted its first All-Night Gospel Singing. During its heyday an estimated twenty-five thousand people attended the annual event. I honestly do not remember this–probably because we were caught up in so many other activities. By that time, I was thirteen years old. The Viet Nam war was raging and both my brothers-in-law were in the service, so we did have our worries.
One of our exciting hobbies on those Friday and Saturday nights was to borrow the family car and “make the drag” downtown. This included driving past our NEW SONIC DRIVE IN, where we could pull in (if there was a parking space available) and order the most wonderful food and drinks ever. The founder of the Sonic Drive-In chain, Troy N. Smith, was from Seminole.
This was our view of Main Street, Seminole, Oklahoma, during the ’60’s – ’70’s. All these stores are gone now, with the advent of malls within driving distance, and of course, Amazon. I have not been back to Seminole in many years, but from what I hear, there are few of these individual stores left operating.
In the summer of 1974, my dad got transferred to West Virginia, and we had to move. I was very lucky–most oil field engineers got moved around a lot more often, but I had been able to go to school in the same place ever since first grade through my junior year. Now…we had to go. To say I was heartbroken is an understatement. I loved my life there–my school, my classmates and friends, all the local “haunts” we’d frequent, and I knew moving for that last year of school was going to be horrible. I was not wrong. LOL But I got through it, and still have so many good friends from my growing up years in Seminole.
I think the biggest “hoe-down” times must have happened back in the 1920’s and 1930’s, on into the 1940’s–when Seminole was a huge, prosperous oilfield town. There are so many stories of things that happened back then –it had to have been such a raw and wild time, especially coming so soon after statehood (1907).
A short “aside” story: Our house in Seminole was between two HUGE mansions that were built back in the heyday of the oil boom. In one house lived the widow of a prominent attorney, and in the other, the widow of one of the oil tycoons. They were in their late 80’s when we moved to Seminole in 1963–and were probably two of the only people left who could remember Seminole as it was in those old days. They would not speak to one another! I’ve so often thought about how hard it must be to have someone who had shared knowledge and memories of a time and place no one else around you had, yet, dislike them so that you wouldn’t even talk to them or reminisce with them. A real pity! But perhaps those oil boom “hoe-down” days were too much, too painful, to remember for them somehow.
By the time we moved there in 1963, there were still many operational rigs nearby, but those wild and woolly days of the “boom town” were over. This is a picture of the train depot for the Rock Island line. It was at the end of Main Street. Just look at the throngs of people here–this was during the oil boom.
Do you have any particular childhood memories, good or bad, that stand out for you to this day? One of mine was learning to ride a bike BAREFOOT and cutting my foot open so that I had to go get stiches! My dad couldn’t stand the sight of blood and he was driving like crazy to get us to the hospital. It was a holiday weekend–4th of July, I think. My mom was trying to just keep calm for everyone. I was 6 or so. what do I remember most? The tension in that car. LOL What about you?
(NOTE: I do not own any of these pictures other than the one of me with Jane in the sandbox. All credit to the respective owners and I’m not sure who they are.)
I suppose everyone is “strange” in their own weird ways, aren’t they? But I was definitely “the one” in my family! We all have a tendency to be “the oddball” or “the black sheep” or the one who is somewhat “different” in one way or another. So instead of just naming 10 things you might not know about me, I thought I’d talk about this phenomena of being “the weird one” in the family.
Did you know (I bet you didn’t!) that I started my published writing career as a short story author for Chicken Soup, Rocking Chair Reader, and also a feature writer for our local newspaper? I had been working on the “great American novel” for quite a while, but I had to “break in” somehow—and this was it. Here’s a picture of the first anthology I ever had a story published in. It was called PENNY MEMORIES. What a thrill!
