Damn. Just read my last few posts and all I’ve been doing is bitching about my money.
Fuck that.
It’s OK, you know.
I just like to bitch about it.
Since I’m going in a new direction, I’d like to tell a really great story, a recollection, about my Dad and how funny and cool he could be. I don’t tell many such stories about my father, but there are certainly some and I remember my Dad this way very fondly at times.
My Dad had a collection of friends he grew up with in Lawton, and Ed Dunn, God rest his loyal soul, was chief among them and there were many. Dad was senior class AND junior class president at Lawton High, so there was far more to him than just giving me and my sisters a whuppin’ every night at 10:18 p.m. for not going to bed promptly.
Then there were a few “army buddies”, guys Dad may not have actually served in the Army Air Corps with, but who somehow had World War II stories and such.
Finally, there was the oilfield crew. A mixed bag, to be sure, but often equipment salesmen and drillers and operators. Cigar smoking and poker playing and whiskey drinking boys — you have to remember we’re talking about the 1950s post war oil field. There were still wildcatters around in those days, if you can imagine that.
Red Adair and the oil firefighting business was born and I remember Dad coming home with a Red Adair Zippo, all painted red, from a gas well fire that lit up southern Oklahoma.
One of Dad’s great oilfield buddies was a guy named Tom Turk from Ardmore. He’s dead just like Dad and Ed Dunn, but he went first by a long way.
His wife, Arlena, lived in Ardmore until rather recently and Mom has stayed in touch and been down to visit her often over the years.
They had a daughter, Nancy, who was a black haired curvey beauty queen teenager when I was still quite small. I’m still drawn to brunettes (my daughter has beautiful brunette hair) and I’ve always suspected that it was Nancy who imprinted me. In my mind, she remains the most beautiful woman ever, rivaled only by my father’s cousin Judy Morgan, another Cadillac driving brunette beauty.
Tom Turk was a southern boy through and through and reminded me a great deal of my mother’s Mississippi brothers in many ways. He had wavy silver hair, a ruddy complexion and a cigar smoking out of his mouth at all times. A short, stocky and powerful man with a keen eye for a baseball game, he may not have missed a single baseball game played by Ardmore Hi for decades.
His drawl was positively “chawmin'”.
And I think he could have sold ice to Eskimos.
(Yeah, yeah, I know it’s Intuit, but this is a 50s reference dammit and the saying then was ice to Eskimos, so get over yourself you PC bastards).
(I hate these fucking asides, it breaks up the flow of the story and they are not all that interesting.)
(Shut the fuck up)
Well, Tom Turk and my Dad greeted each other like bears and laughed and enjoyed each other’s company.
They would “poor mouth” each other.
It’s kind of like those stories about walking 15 miles to school in the snow uphill both ways.
Each sort of bragged about how poor they were during the Depression growing up.
They maybe embellished the truth a small sliver of a bit now and again.
Like, I never once believed Tom Turk’s family put chewed tobacco in the coffee grinds to stretch them out for another week.
By all accounts, my father was something of a spoiled brat as a kid, never denied much of anything. You couldn’t tell it from the stories he spun around Tom Turk, though.
Dad did stoop labor next to freed slaves and Indians from “can’t see to can’t see”?
Nope. Not really.
Once Dad had a job out at Fort Sill along with Ed Dunn and they were set to digging a sewer line with shovels, but got fired when they couldn’t stop throwing dirt on each other.
Dad had another job at night (while going to Cameron in Lawton) working for a funeral home and one night had to go pick up a dead body that was on a second floor. On the way down the stairs, the corpse lost bodily function and covered the downside guy with … well … shit … you know … and Dad started laughing, couldn’t stop and dropped the body on the stairs and his covered buddy and it all got to rolling down the stairs and … Dad got fired from that job, too.
Anyway, my Mom, who was one of many children of a plumber in Mississippi and had to bleach out flour sacks and dye them colors for fabric to make dresses, just kept serving beer to the men by the barbecue in the back yard and rolled her eyes at Arlena rather than get involved.
The best part to me wasn’t the stories they told of the Dust Bowl and the WPA. The best part was the way that they would laugh at each other’s involved fabrications while trying to keep a straight face while telling the most enormous falsehoods.
Swearing of oaths on imaginary stacks of Bibles optional.
