|
a.
|
Note: Beulah was born in a log cabin built by her father on the Choctaw land allotment of his wife Warneta. Beulah attended school at Ward's Chapel, Atoka and Tishomingo. She was born three years before Oklahoma became a state. When I was a youngster she told me about seeing cattle drives passing their home. She said she and the other kids would climb on top of the barn to watch the herds pass.
The log cabin where she was born sat beside the old road where the St. Louis to El Paso Butterfield stage coach line used to run. Traces of the road can still be seen though it was abandoned many years ago.
Beulah recieved some money from the sale of her allotment land. While she was still in school she bought a Willys-Overland auto.
After she and Hartwell married, she helped finance a grocery store that Hartwell operated. Times were hard and most business was on credit. Many people could not pay their bills and the store eventually went broke.
When we lived at Tushka, Mom joined a quilting club and enjoyed the social interchange with the other women. Her best friend was Pauline Meeks who lived across the hiway. Pauline and Orville owned a store and gas station.
After the family moved to Antlers, Beulah took a part-time job selling Cudahy cheese and margarine. In those days the makers were not allowed to color the margarine but included a small pack of coloring with each pound of margarine to make it look like butter. When we used it, it was my job to knead the color into the margarine.
On Halloween day 1942, we loaded up our 1937 Chevrolet and headed for California as the defense plants were pleading for workers. John Steinbeck's 'Grapes of Wrath' had just hit the theaters and 'Okies' were not welcome in California. The old cars and trucks piled high with household goods was a symbol of the poor Okies and Arkies that headed west. Hartwell did not want that stigma attached to his family so he proclaimed that anything that would not go into the car was not going. Some of our furniture was left with relatives for safekeeping and some of our belongings were disposed of. Marilou had to part with her precious books and I had to sell my Radio Flyer wagon and my most prized possession, my Red Ryder BB gun. (At the age of 66 I got me another one).
Four months after arriving in California, Hartwell contracted pneumonia and passed away at San Jose. Beulah, who had never worked outside the home other that the Cudahy route, had to support a family. She went to school to become a metalsmith as they were in great demand in the aircraft industry. She worked in sheet metal and plexiglass until she retired from the NAS Alameda.
Beulah remarried after she retired but she was soon diagnosed with leukemia. She passed away on Labor Day, 1961. She and Hartwell are buried together at Westview Cemetery in Atoka, Oklahoma.
|
