a memoir
Linda S. Bingham
Sometimes, to know where you are, you have to look at where you’ve been.
Chapter One
The Red River carves a jagged and ever-changing border between Texas and Oklahoma. Mother was born north of the Red, Daddy south. Before my Daddy went to the Pacific as a sailor in the US Navy, he rode his horse over to a neighboring farm and courted a country beauty named Doris Perry. His father Henry Franklin Glass was a tenant farmer who moved from year to year. Mother’s people owned their land, giving us a homeplace, an anchor, a claim to that little corner of Pushmataha County, if only in our minds. The land was sold years ago after my great-grandfather’s stroke, yet even now, sixty years later, my sister drives out and takes a picture of the house to send to me. I set my novels there. We have our memories.
Mack and Doris married in June of 1946, the year that marked the beginning of the Baby Boom generation, the year the boys came home from the war. I was born a scant seven months later at Inspiration Hospital, Miami, Arizona. Mother wrote a tearful letter to Grandma saying that she had been a good girl, little Linda Sue was just premature. She offered as proof that I spent several days in an incubator. There was controversy about Mother’s own birth, which might have made her sensitive on the issue.
My Uncle Leonard helped Daddy get on at the copper mines. Wikipedia describes Miami, Arizona as a classic Western copper boomtown: Inspiration was among the first to employ vat leaching in 1926 and precipitation plants to recover oxide minerals. Copper was mined underground until after World War II, when the first open-pit mining began. Daddy’s job was hoist engineer, basically an elevator operator. The mines had lovely names, Sleeping Beauty, Inspiration, Old Dominion, named for the mountains they replaced. In later years the whole town became a Superfund cleanup site for asbestos contamination.
Our first home was in a former barracks quickly reassembled along Route 60 that connects Phoenix and Globe. The view from my bedroom window was the tailings, a pale manmade ridge. From time to time a miniature engine chugged across its flat top hauling two large black vats of molten slag. The train would stop, the vats would tilt, and red-hot slag would spill down the face of the white mountain. The red would cool and fade, look sullen and finally turn black, then bleach out to match the rest of the mountain. We used to wake up and find our bedroom filled with red light. “This is how Hell looks,” Mother told us. My school, Lower Miami, was built at the foot of the tailings. Recess, we played outside in air gray with sulfur oxide.
Mother hated Arizona. Oklahoma, the state she had been so eager to leave, became Eden. We left Daddy over and over, crossing half of Arizona, all of New Mexico, the panhandle of Texas, and almost the full width of Oklahoma—twelve-hundred miles—to reach Pushmataha County in the southeastern corner of the state, only seventy miles from the Arkansas border. I was surprised to see in Mother’s scribbled notes that she and I spent my third birthday in Antlers, which means she left my four-month-old sister at home with Daddy. My mother was ill-suited to look after two children.
Globe-Miami is dry and hot, surrounded by desert. A street we used to live on was lined with deep box culverts. Walkways overhead offered shade. We used to play down below the street where it was cool and private. When it rained in the Pinal Mountains, water came sluicing down those culverts and caused flash flooding in the towns. Daddy took us to Globe once to watch the water rush under the bridge we were standing on. A house came tumbling down the river. We moved often, in and out of the federal housing project, in and out of rent houses in Claypool, Miami, and Globe. My mother was a restless soul.
We had family at both ends of our twelve-hundred-mile range. Uncle Leonard, sixteen years older than Daddy, was the first to settle out West after the war. His older children, my cousins Gladys, Gerald, and Glenn were young teens when Uncle Leonard married his second wife Elizabeth Ann—Aunt Betty, who lived to be 103. Her older children Betty Joan and Jay didn’t live with them, but visited from time to time, and she and Leonard had a baby girl named Lanabeth who chewed her fist. Aunt Betty put nasty-tasting ointment on the little hand and covered it with a sock, but still the baby chewed herself.
When Aunt Blue and Uncle Paul settled in Miami, Mother also had family in the area, and more cousins quickly joined me and my sister. Stevie and April Cunningham. My baby album is filled with snapshots of family get-togethers, me catching a raindrop in my mouth at a church picnic, Stevie and me wearing hooded snowsuits and probably seeing our first snowfall up in the mountains, mother and daddy mugging under the arms of a giant saguaro in the desert. Mostly, we posed for pictures against the backdrop of the one status symbol our family owned, our most valuable possession, our car. It made us mobile. It made us Americans.
Daddy was a Studebaker man. We had a Commander, a family sedan fitted out to look like a sports car, with a distinctive little propeller on its nose. Daddy worried they would stop production when Packard bought them out. We briefly owned a maroon-colored Packard before Daddy switched his loyalty to Buick, a green one with three holes in 1955, a blue four-holer in 1956. GMAC financed the loan and I remember Daddy signing his name MM Glass, making six numeral sevens for the capital M’s. We drove the new car home from Phoenix and Daddy honked the horn as we went through the long tunnel in the mountains.
Claypool Assembly of God Church was in a building that had previously been a bank. Behind the pulpit was the old bank vault. Uncle Paul and a crew of husky young men spent a Saturday trying to dig the vault out of the mountain but had no luck. I don’t know how my parents discovered the church, but the style of service exactly suited my mother, and church became the center of our lives and defined for me what church was, emotional, noisy, wonderful music.
When Brother Owens preached, he brought the congregation along with him, working them and himself into such a state that women began to stand up and speak in tongues. There was shouting and ecstasy, glory hallelujah, praise the Lord! Brother Owens’ wife played the piano, her hands flying over the keyboard in a style called stride. He would call people forward, the sick, the unsaved, anyone facing a crisis, anyone who needed a blessing. People would surge around the person and lay on hands. The very act of being touched by others was part of the healing. I can hear it now, the hum and murmur of voices growing louder, pitched toward heaven, calling on Jesus to heal this person, save this soul, bless this child. I saw a woman faint once and fall backwards on the concrete floor. She was unhurt. Jesus kept her from concussing. Getting out of your chair and walking to the front of the church was answering the call. It meant you had accepted Jesus as your personal Savior. You were going to heaven. You were among the blessed. You were saved.
Daddy wasn’t saved. He wouldn’t go down front and accept salvation. He sat on the back row where he couldn’t be accidentally pulled into the blessed circle. Daddy smoked on the sly and played in a honky-tonk band. He was a sinner if only for being in a place where there was dancing and drinking. One night during prayer service a tarantula walked across the floor in front of Brother Owens, who gamely carried on, determined to ignore it, but the ladies on the front row had other ideas and began to cry out and climb up on their chairs. Nobody could think what to do, and suddenly my father did answer the call. He walked to the front of the church and stepped on the giant spider. Returning, facing the congregation, he walked like he had something on his shoe and set off peals of laughter, something you didn’t hear very often in an Assembly of God church. We call that family story the time Daddy stepped on the tarantula.
Music was one of the few activities my parents enjoyed doing together. They could both carry a tune, Mother singing the alto line. She had never had access to a piano before. Now she went to the church when it was empty and taught herself to play like the preacher’s wife, Pentecostal style. Neither of them could read music, but they could play anything they heard. A man named Tom Rose came to our house with recording equipment and made records of their duets, Daddy playing accompaniment on guitar.
My mother’s hands were fast and nimble. She played piano and made her own clothes. Later she would work as an optician and make glasses in her own lab. She made dresses for my cousin Gladys when she and Uncle Tommy were courting. Her cabinet model Singer sewing machine had a door that opened out to support an extension. I used to play in the little hidey-hole beneath while she sewed.
Doris and Mack’s second child, my sister Betty Kay, was born four months before my third birthday, September 2, 1949. I had been a red wrinkled preemie. My sister was a blue-eyed full-term child, a beautiful baby. I hated her on sight and did my best to get rid of her. She survived all my attempts on her life and I later made up for my savagery by saving her from drowning.
My mother kept giving Betty away. They said it was because I had TB. In the 1950’s penicillin and streptomycin had conquered the disease, but only fifty years earlier, 450 Americans a day died from tuberculosis, most of them children, a pandemic people still remembered and were afraid of. One of the families Betty was sent to live with was an older couple in our congregation named Henry and Delpha Brown. He was a night watchman at Copper Hills, the mine where Daddy worked. The Browns, perhaps sensing that my mother was not to be trusted, sent Betty back to us. Undeterred, Mother sent her to Oklahoma to live with Grandma by way of unsuspecting relatives who happened to be passing through. I remember being taken out of school to make an emergency trip to Oklahoma to fetch my sister when Grandma called to say she was in the hospital with appendicitis. So much was made of my health as a child, but it was my robust-looking little sister who kept getting sick.
One night, Betty and I were roused from our beds by Mother’s screams. She was having a nervous breakdown. Daddy took us next door where our Mexican neighbor graciously got out of bed to make us fried eggs and tortillas. Brother Owens came to cast out demons and a doctor put Mother on Milltown, an early class of anti-anxiety drug.
My father had no appetite for confrontation. Mother goaded him into whipping me once. He swatted my behind, then grabbed and consoled me, and yelled at Mother for making her whip me. The Pentecostals preached an extreme form of child correction. When Uncle Paul went into the ministry and became an Assembly of God missionary, Aunt Blue, whose real name was Helen Juanita, felt she had to set an example with her own children. We saw my cousin Stevie in the bathtub once, his back bruised from a recent belting. Not to be outdone, Mother pulled a switch off a peach tree and lashed me and Betty till our legs were covered in red welts. Years later, Aunt Helen suffered terrible guilt thinking she had caused the alcoholism that killed her son at the age of 57.
Back on the farm, Grandpa Perry lathered up himself and Uncle Bud once a week and shaved their faces with a straight-edge razor. Grandpa honed his razor on a double strip of leather attached by an eyebolt so it could hang on a nail. Mother inherited that strop and it became her preferred instrument of correction. With each whack against a backside or bare leg, the two straps slapped against each other, magnifying the sound. One day while Mother was at work, my sister found the strop and we set off for Beaver Creek and threw it over the bridge.
Our unit in the Federal Housing Project was an end unit. The floors were painted concrete. Mother cooked on a kerosene stove. There was an evaporative cooler in the living room that dripped cold water into a gravelly basin below the window. The water looked so inviting, so clean and delicious, but we were forbidden to touch it because it might give us polio. We were given a card at school to fill in with dimes to raise money for the search for a cure. Two of the girls in my fifth-grade class were lamed by polio.
In the first grade, we lined up to get our arm scratched to prevent smallpox. A big scab formed on my arm and it took a long time for it to fall off. Mother noted our inoculations in the baby books, whooping cough, tetanus, diphtheria, later a vaccination for polio when the Salk vaccine was developed. Despite these protections, I nearly died of whooping cough, and Betty and I suffered several varieties of measles. We also broke out at the same time with chicken pox, the childhood illness that fifty years later manifested in a case of shingles for me. We got sunglasses and Mother took our picture wearing them. The disease was said to weaken the eyes.
Mother worked at various low-paying jobs around Miami, checker at Safeway, waitress at Copper Hills Motel coffee shop. When we lived in Oklahoma, she couldn’t find even low-paying work. As often as we packed up and left Daddy, so did we make the long trek back across the desert to Globe-Miami to reunite with him. “Your daddy is taking us back!” I remember her crying before one such reconciliation.
Getting a job put Doris out in the world among men who weren’t part of the extended family that included our congregation. Doris had a peculiar unawareness of the impact she had on others, an artlessness that was genuine and very appealing, but which made her insensitive to the feelings of others. Now men were telling her how beautiful she was. It probably didn’t hurt her self-confidence that she was earning money and not dependent on my father for every penny.
She fell in love with her store manager, Richard McLendon, a married man who lived in Superior. That summer when school was out and we prepared to go to Oklahoma, Mother drove twenty-five miles west out of our way to say goodbye to Richard, hoping that he would beg her to stay. Instead, we drove away with his dog, a collie we named Lassie and took to Oklahoma with us where she joined the other dogs that lived under Grandma’s house. Mother was afraid the collie’s extravagant fur made her suffer in the heat, so she took the scissors and sheared Lassie’s fur down to the fine white undercoat. Grandpa said the dog looked embarrassed.
In Grandma’s living room, you could hear the dogs under the floorboards scratching their fleas, raising the alarm if they heard a car in the lane, Grandpa’s squirrel dog Chi-Chi Tishomingo, Buck who was second in command, and the least one, Grandma’s dog, Snowball, a white chihuahua mix with liquid black eyes. Only Snowball was allowed inside the house.
In 1955, during one of the many time-outs in my parents’ marriage, Mother rented Earl Labor’s house on Ethel Road, the finest house we had ever lived in, with white clapboard siding, a porch that wrapped around two sides, and a garage with an attic above it. Betty and I ventured into that attic and found wonderful toys that had belonged to the Labor children, a Chinese Checkers board with four colors of marbles concealed in its rim, a black doll.
Ethel Community, named for Ethel Labor, had seen more prosperous days. At the turn of the century, when the area was still Indian Territory, there was a post office and general store. In 1933 the post office and nearly everything else moved six miles west to Antlers, county seat and stop on the St. Louis and San Francisco Railroad, known as the Frisco line. Ethel School survived into the mid-50’s, one of hundreds of two-room “common schools” that offered an 8th grade education. After World War II rural schools consolidated to offer a high school education that could lead to college. Today there are fewer than a hundred common schools left in isolated communities of Oklahoma.
Our house sat at the intersection of two county roads, facing Ethel Community Church, which is still there today. A fence ran around our yard with a wide gate you could swing open to let cars park in the yard. The first time my college roommate’s parents came to visit her in Houston, her father drove up on the St. Augustine turf in front of her fancy new west Houston townhouse. Phillis said, “Daddy, we don’t park in the yard here.”
One day we came home and found a dog in our yard. We had been taught to be wary of strays because they might have rabies, but this dog was so obviously well-cared for and tame, approached us so trustingly, so urgently. He seemed to be having trouble breathing. Betty and I clamored to keep him and my fingers encountered something in the fur around his neck, twine drawn taut. He was choking to death. Mother cut the string and we gave him water. He was ours now. We had saved his life. We named him Pepper because of the dots over his eyes.
We soon found out who he belonged to, Cheryl Bell, who lived on a ranch further out Ethel Road and rode her horse past our house. She came by looking for him and said he was always running away. She had come across him while out riding and only had a piece of string with her, but it broke and he got away. She took the dog home, but he came right back and she didn’t bother after that.
We found out why Pepper was prone to wander. He chased cars. We had a fence and he couldn’t chase them far. One Wednesday evening I saw Grandma and Uncle Bud arrive for church and I opened the gate to run across Ethel Road to say hi. Pepper was at my ankles, frantic to get past me. I didn’t hear what he heard, a car coming. We always said that Pepper returned the favor of our saving his life by saving mine.
The church still stands, but Earl Labor’s house was destroyed in a fire years ago. Even the corner is gone and the road reshaped to make a sweeping curve to the south. Half a mile from our house was Ethel School and Ethel Cemetery. My grandfather Frank Glass’s second wife, Nettie McAtee Reynolds Glass (1877- 1961), is buried there next to her first husband Ebenezer Reynolds. His daughter Erie was the mother of Labors, Jacksons, and Bells, our neighbors and classmates, making us related by marriage, although we didn’t know it. We felt like outsiders, not even Oklahomans, since we were born in Arizona.
The other kids walked to school, but Mother drove us, which caused some resentment when we went flying by raising dust in our new Buick. Always the new kids, we were the butt of jokes and subjected to teasing, although I wouldn’t call it mean. It didn’t help that our mother, who had no boundaries herself, didn’t teach us not to blather family secrets. We told the kids about leaving Daddy in Arizona. We thought it worth mentioning that Grandma dosed us with turpentine for pinworms, setting off a worried conference between Mrs. Berryhill and Mrs. Taylor. We talked about the electric blanket we slept under which raised speculation about what would happen if we peed the bed. I had a crush on Mary Lawless’s brother Curtis and my sister told his sister that when we played house, I made her pretend to be Curtis and they wondered if I ever kissed my sister.
Three generations of Perry children attended Ethel School. Beautiful Mrs. Jimmie Taylor taught the younger kids on our side of a foldback wall, Mrs. Berryhill taught the older ones on her side. My row, fourth grade, was the largest class, all of us born right after our fathers got back from World War II. The entire student population could be loaded into two cars and taken to the Cooper Theater in Antlers to see Johnnie Tremaine, Old Yeller, and Bambi.
Out in the lunch shack, Larry Ford’s mother cooked for us. Two long tables with benches ran along either side and you had to slide down to your place. At the afternoon recess, Mrs. Berryhill sold penny candy. There were swings and a merry-go-round in front of the school, but in the heat of the afternoon, we played under the pine trees out back where the privies were located, one for girls, one for boys. Ours was stocked with newsprint or, less effective, a Sears Roebuck catalog.
The library was a single row of books that we could choose from when we were finished with our schoolwork. I went to Mrs. Taylor once with a word I couldn’t sound out. “How do you say this word?” It looked like the past tense of the verb “nake.” “That’s naked,” she said, giving me an indulgent smile.
Aunt Helen said that our grandfather George Alva Lee Perry (1882-1959) was “the original hippie.” I doubt that Aunt Helen, a preacher’s wife, knew any hippies. She probably only meant that the Perrys left an area that was beginning to get crowded, Drew County Arkansas, and moved 250 miles west to a sparsely settled region of Oklahoma, a state that had only entered the union a dozen years earlier.
Mother used to take us for walks across the fields that surrounded the Perry farm and point out an abandoned house where some aunt or sister had been born. The area was sparsely settled then and even more so now. In 1960 when I lived in Pushmataha County, the population had fallen to 9,088, from a peak of 17,514 in 1920 when my great-grandfather took his family to live there.
The Perrys left kinfolks and collective memory behind and gave in to the irresistible lure of newly opened territory. Aunt Helen told me with pride in her voice that “Grandma was a Hooker,” which made me laugh. She didn’t know any hippies or hookers, but she had a sense, as Grandma herself must have had, that the Hookers had done something important, though we no longer remembered what it was.
The Hookers married in Mississippi where William Hooker’s family settled, themselves having moved west out of the Colony of North Carolina. The Hookers were an illustrious Colonial family. Thomas Hooker (7 July 1586- 7 July 1647) was a Puritan minister and the chief founder of the city of Hartford, Connecticut. He was one of the drafters (in 1639) of the Fundamental Orders, by which Connecticut was governed for a long time. He was born in Leicestershire, England, and his father John Hooker (1524-1601), was an English constitutionalist from Devon, England, a writer, antiquary, administrator and advocate of republican government. From 1555 to 1601, he served as chamberlain of the city of Exeter. He also served for short periods of time in both the English and Irish parliaments. (The Descendants of Rev. Thomas Hooker, Hartford, Conn. 1586-1908; by E. Hooker, 1909)
Grandma Perry’s parents William Richard Hooker (1846-1921) and Sally Ann Beard (1856-1904) also married in the state where they were born, Mississippi, sometime between 1873 and 1876. Hellen E Hooker (1886-1959), as my great-grandmother’s name is written in old documents, was their middle child. Older siblings Zula, Maude, and Nathan were born in Mississippi. Anna Mae, Hellen, Maude, Lois, Mary, and Belle were born in Arkansas, 135 miles to the west. Arkansas achieved statehood in 1836. And, yes, two daughters were seemingly given the same name, Maude, though with different middle names.
William Hooker was sixteen when the Civil War broke out and he joined Company “I” 12 Mississippi Volunteer Infantry. His grandfather Richard Hooker is listed as the owner of fourteen slaves, ages 3 to 50 years, in appropriately named Dark Corner Beat, Mississippi. William signed on for another two years and didn’t get married until he was thirty years old. Sally Ann bore him nine children and died at the age of 51 when her youngest child was only six. Although William was ten years her senior, he outlived her by seventeen years and was counted in the 1910 Census with their daughters Maude E., 18, and Belle, 12. Sally Ann Beard Hooker died the same year her daughter Hellen married George Alva Lee Perry.
George and Hellen married on June 6, 1904 and made their home in Drew County Arkansas for the first eighteen years of their marriage. Their first child, my grandmother Carrie Ecil, was born on May 28, 1905. She did not have a sibling for six years. Then Hazel Idell was born, followed by Mary Ruby and Helen Hermione. The Perry’s only son, George Alva Lee Perry, Jr., was born September 23, 1920. Junior would have been a baby or a toddler when the family left Arkansas. Their last child, Twila Louise (1923-2013), was born after the move, making her the only native Oklahoman in the family. Grandma Perry was 37 years old when she had her last child and by then her oldest daughter Carrie Ecil was nineteen.
Grandma never commented on the age difference between her oldest and youngest, nor did she mention the six-year gap between Ecil’s birthday and Hazel’s. One day my sister, rummaging around in Grandma’s closet, found some baby clothes and thought it would be a good idea to add them to the give-away bag. Grandma said firmly, “No, we won’t be giving those away.” We later learned from Aunt Hermione that our grandparents had lost a baby boy. For their time, six children was a small family, but the Perry family was about to grow.
Almost as soon as they arrived in Pushmataha County, Carrie Ecil met a man from Tennessee named Charles Elmer Robnett, seven years her senior. They were married in Sequoyah, Oklahoma on July 11, 1924. Ecil, as she was known in the family, gave birth the following spring to Audrey Mae (May 28, 1925 – February 7, 1984). The marriage did not last and Ecil moved back home, bringing Audrey with her.
Carrie Ecil, the oldest and boldest of the Perry daughters—and the least attractive—was nevertheless the family adventurer. Over and over she left Pushmataha County in search of jobs, adventure, romance, yet kept coming home bringing another mouth to feed. Grandma Perry, whom everyone agrees was a saint, raised all four of Ecil’s daughters, each one sired by a different father. My mother was the second of those girls.
With Audrey not yet three, on January 5, 1928, Carrie Ecil remarried. Her new husband was Joseph Livecy, at 27 already a divorced father of two. His father Albert E. Livecy (1863-1909) staked a claim in the Oklahoma Land Run of 1891 in Lincoln County fifty miles northwest of Oklahoma City, the same distance southeast of Tulsa. Albert died at the age of 45 when Joe was eight years old and his brother Tony twelve. When Ecil joined the family, her new mother-in-law, Missouri Anna Potter Livecy (1865-1938) was 63 years old and alone except for her son Joe. It’s likely that he was farming his father’s 160 acres. Likely, too, that Mrs. Livecy was present at the birth of her granddaughter, my mother, on August 13, 1928. Just a bit early, Mrs. Livecy thought, and yet she looked like a full-term baby. Perhaps she reserved judgment until her son came in from the fields.
Carrie Ecil named the baby Doris Louise Livecy, not formally, as there was no birth certificate until my mother applied for a “Delayed Certificate of Birth” 43 years later. Ecil’s younger sister, Hermione, who was eleven at the time and who rarely told an unembellished truth, takes up the story. “Joe was out working in the fields when Ecil went into labor. He came home and looked at the newborn and said, ‘I wish she was mine but she’s not.’”
It is somehow fitting that my mother, by merely entering the world, wrecked lives. She was not a sickly little preemie as Ecil tried to pass her off, and whoever fathered her bequeathed features that cast doubt on Joe Livecy’s fatherhood. Grandpa Perry called her “my little papoose,” which tells you all you need to know about her appearance. They sent Ecil packing and once again my grandmother found herself moving back in with the people who never turned her away.
It’s tempting to speculate what might’ve been had Joe Livecy accepted Doris as his child. Maybe he wouldn’t have died just two years later, leaving two wives and three children under the age of six. Maybe Carrie Ecil would have settled down. But the Livecys were not a lucky family. Albert and Missouri Annie’s first child Olive died in 1896 before her second birthday, which must have broken their hearts, for they erected an elaborate headstone that stands next to theirs in Black Cemetery outside of Stroud, the only one of their children to get a marked grave. Their second child Tony, a boy, died in 1921 at the age of 23, seven years before Joe and Ecil met. The remaining son, Joe Livecy, who was probably not my mother’s biological father, died February 15, 1930 at the age of 28.
Stroud area newspaper accounts from the 1930s are full of lurid accounts of violent death. There were murders—generally from a gunshot, but also a surprising number of poisonings. There were accidents, some as prosaic as falling out of bed, which happened to one unfortunate woman who broke her neck in the fall. Or weather-related tragedies, such as the case of a family who attempted to flee an approaching prairie fire, the same fate that befell members of Grandpa Perry’s family. In this case, the woman, realizing her danger, gathered her children and ran to a neighbor’s house which was consumed by the blaze and killed everyone in it, while the woman’s own house, surrounded by a plowed firebreak, survived.
I don’t know how Joe Livecy died, or the terms of his brother Tony’s death, whether from accident or illness. Typhoid fever is frequently cited in the local news. Typhoid is caused by a salmonella bacterium growing in the intestines and blood and spread by eating or drinking food or water contaminated with the feces of an infected person. Risk factors include poor sanitation and poor hygiene. Today, visitors to backward areas of the world are vaccinated against typhoid, but when Joe, Tony, and Olive Livecy were growing up, sanitation was as primitive in Lincoln County as any developing country today.
Life expectancy for males during the 1920s and 1930s was fewer than sixty years and probably fewer still among farmers of Lincoln County where land that had been so eagerly claimed by white settlers in 1891 turned out to be thin and easily eroded, not the cotton country they had hoped for.
During the seventy years between the end of slavery and the beginning of mechanized farming, Albert Livecy and his sons plowed the fields with mules. Families with an insufficient number of children had to hire hands to pick their cotton. By the 1930s, nearly seventy-thousand acres in Lincoln County had been abandoned. But the land had something else to give. After the Depression, oil and gas accounted for one-third of Lincoln County’s tax revenue, followed by cattle and pecans.
The newspaper also offers a glimpse of the Livecy family’s social life. “Mrs. Livecy spent Friday with Mrs. Geo. Clark. (Chandler Tribune, Feb. 1916) From The Davenport New Era, Stroud Route One News (1917): “Mrs. Livecy spent the day with Mrs. W.H. Young Sunday…. W.H. Young is some better at this writing…. Tony Livecy had the bad luck to let the team of mules run away one day last week. No one was hurt…. (Tony would have been 19, four years before he died.) Mrs. Livley (sic) and Mrs. W.H. Young made a business trip to Stroud Saturday…. Tony Livecy attended the show in Kendrick Friday night.… Argle Livecy and wife and Clifford Florer called at the Claude Edwards home Sunday evening…. Jim Gatlin was out breaking his team of little mules Sunday…. W.H. Young is worse at this writing…. Mrs. W.H. Young has sold her team and other things and intends to move to town right away…. Elmo, the small son of Argle Livecy (Argyl), has been quite sick for the past week…. (He survived and lived to be 83.) Oscar Edwards spent Saturday night with Tony and Joe Livecy…. Leona Crites is still very sick with typhoid fever….”
The May 31, 1907 edition of The Chandler Tribune (Chandler, Okla.) reports that candidates in the Democratic primary election for North Fox township included A.E. Livecy. And the same newspaper, on May 6, 1915, contains the following ad: Missouri A. Livecy offers to sell to the highest bidder for cash in hand at the County Court of Lincoln County, on the 11th of May 1915 an oil and gas lease covering the following (160 acres)…. All the interest of Tony and Joe Livecy, minor heirs of Albert E. Livecy, deceased…”
In rural Oklahoma at the beginning of the century, the first official record of a person’s existence was the school census when a teacher for the first time gave notice to the state of the newest citizen’s name, date of birth, and responsible parent, often making a wild stab at the spelling of his or her name. This head count happened every year until the young person left school. Marriage created another official record. The federal census of 1930 offers a final glimpse of my presumed great-grandmother Missouri Anna Livecy. She lived alone in a house valued at $600 which was not on a farm. When she died in 1938, she joined Albert under a shared headstone. No one carved the date of her death.
In 1940, the census of Lincoln County includes new Livecys, Argyl and Anna Virginia. He’s listed as owning a plumbing business. My mother referred to their children Donald and Patricia as “cousins,” but other than a brief flurry of interest between Doris and her Stroud relatives in the mid-1950s, there was no communication. I don’t know what the exact kinship was between Albert and Argyl Livecy. A full generation separates them. Argyl’s people were from Kansas. Albert’s were from Meigs County, Ohio, John C. Levasy and Rebecca Sidenstricker Levasy. “Livecy” is spelled Livesy, LeVacy, Levassey, depending on the creativity of the recorder. Even brothers couldn’t agree on how to spell their name. Lee Roy was sometimes LeRoy. Billie was sometimes Billy. In their first official documents as adults, one is “Livesy,” the other “Livecy,” and that spelling followed them through life and is now etched in stone.
Naturally there was speculation about the little papoose’s parentage. In the absence of fact, myths were born. A persistent theme, particularly after Doris’s own predilections emerged, was that her father died of alcoholism, but Joe Livecy was too young to die of drink, which usually takes at least four decades to kill. Or, it was said, Ecil was impregnated by a half-breed Stroud lawyer. This man, too, was said to be a drunk who either died of alcoholism or in a house fire.
There’s no record that Joe Livecy divorced Carrie Ecil. When he died intestate, it was left to the court to divvy up his estate among his heirs, which included his three children and every lawyer in Lincoln County who could provide any kind of counsel, some seventeen claimants in all. One of my mother’s earliest memories was sitting in the courtroom that day, counting the lights overhead, a dazzling sight to a child who had never seen indoor lighting brighter than a kerosene lantern. Mother was still getting small oil royalty checks when I was in college, but at some point she must have felt that holding title to such nominal property was of no use to her and she took a cash buy-out. Today, fracking technology has made it newly productive to revisit old fields and in the past ten years, 9,965 wells have been drilled in Lincoln County.
It was only after Mother’s death that my sister took a DNA test and learned that we’re 88.0% Northwestern European (mostly British and Irish) and 10.6% Native American. So, it’s true. Our grandfather was half Native American. One in ten Oklahomans claim Native American ancestry.
The parent listed throughout Lee Roy and Billie Livecy’s school years was not their mother Thelma Mildred McElhaney, but their grandmother Lillie Brace. (Not to be confused with another Lillie Brace living in the Stroud area at the time, a Kiowa woman buried in the intertribal Samone Cemetery.) Billie was so young when he got married that his mother had to sign for him, “Thelma Mildred Reed.” Thelma Reed died in 1977 in Lincoln County at the age of 72. Her mother, Lillie Delosier McElhaney Brace, was born in 1880 in Missouri and was widowed at the time of the 1920 Census. Her three children were born in Oklahoma, Lee Brace (1903), Thelma Mildred Brace (1905), and Lottie Brace (1909). The record shows that Thelma had a five-year-old daughter when she married Joe Livecy. The girl’s name was Mildred Mendenhall and she spent her adult life in Oregon. Mother’s half-brothers Billie and Lee Roy were orphaned a second time when their grandmother Lillie Brace died in 1936 when they were twelve and nine.
Both boys joined the Navy and after his stint, Lee Roy stayed in the military and joined the Air Force and fought in both World War II and the Korean conflict. He lived to be 91 years old, dying in 2018 in Dublin, Georgia. I regret that I didn’t know him, didn’t get to ask about his father or other family in Lincoln County. His brother is buried in Stroud and his headstone reads “Billie Livesy” and includes his US Navy marker and the word “Brother.” There’s also a stone for Lillie Brace. Hers says “Grandmother.” There’s no record of final resting places for Joe Livecy, his brother Tony, or for Joe’s first wife Thelma Reed.
It’s likely that I’ve pieced together more information about the Livecys than Carrie Ecil ever knew from her brief kinship with the family. She wasn’t one to dwell on the past, but shook the dust of Lincoln County from her skirts and headed to Pushmataha County where, on the 25th of August, 1930, almost exactly two years after Doris Louise’s birth, Carrie Ecil bore her third child. This daughter she named for her mother, Helen Juanita. Ecil declined to name a father and Aunt Helen took the Perry name. It was no secret that Aunt Helen was illegitimate, but not a lot was made of it either.
If she gambles and loses, a woman can’t hide the fact that she’s had unprotected sex. The man who impregnates her only has to deal with his conscience, and Frank Dunn, a local Baptist preacher, apparently carried his secret for fifty years. In his seventh decade, Reverend Dunn set out to make amends to his daughter, if not his maker. He was so thorough in making amends that he even entered Helen Juanita’s name as “daughter” on his social security application, legitimizing her after the fact, and listing Ecil Perry as “spouse,” although there’s no record they ever married.
The woman Frank Dunn did marry and live with for fifty years died in 1987, the same year Ecil died. Apparently, the last constraint to claiming his daughter fell away and Frank Dunn could step forward and claim her. He would’ve been twenty years old when Aunt Helen was born, five years younger than Carrie Ecil. He lived long enough, another eleven years, to get to know his daughter.
Carrie Ecil outlived her oldest daughter Audrey by three years (Audrey Mae Walker, May 28, 1925 – February 07, 1984). Audrey was only 58 when she died. Aunt Helen was next to go, in 2003 at the age of 72, then Anna Maude the following year, also at the age of 72. My mother suffered each loss, all the while warning us of her own imminent demise.
Even though the two middle sisters were as different as night and day, they were the two who stayed in touch over the long haul. Like the fairy tale sisters Rose Red and Snow White, Doris and “Blue,” as my mother called her little sister, were a study in opposites. Aunt Helen was a natural blonde, deliberate in action, thoughtful, romantic, never made a fuss, not even when desperately ill. My mother’s complexion was olive, her hair black, her eyes cinnamon colored. She lived by her instincts and emotions. Making a fuss was her standard mode of operation.
Surprisingly, though, it was my aunt who had the more unconventional life. Her one and only husband (compared to my mother’s five) was a preacher in a conservative fundamentalist sect, but as missionaries they lived abroad and seemed more tolerant and cosmopolitan in worldview than the congregations back home that supported them.
My grandmother married again, a man named Rolen Phillip Woods (1906-1958). Her fourth and last daughter, Anna Maude Woods, named for two of Grandma Perry’s sisters, was born on April 20, 1937. This marriage, too, was doomed and ended in 1940. Like her sisters and aunts, Anna Maude spent her early years on the Perry farm while her mother wandered far afield in search of work and, it must be said, adventure. Ecil joined the army and was photographed in her WAAC uniform. She published country-western songs. She sent money home, Aunt Helen said, that enabled Grandpa Perry to buy the land east of Antlers. And she got married again.
Carrie Ecil’s fourth husband, John Godwin Anderson (1912-1994), seven years her junior, was from Thermopolis, Wyoming. Finally, my grandmother seems to have found a man she could tolerate, as she lived with John G., as we called him, for the rest of her life in a big house in Denver on Iliff Avenue. Anna Maude went to live with them and took her stepfather’s name, Anderson. When I was little, Anna Maude rode a Greyhound bus down to see us in Miami. She had a career on the East Coast with IBM and I only met her as an adult at Aunt Helen’s funeral in 2003. She died the following year in New Haven, Connecticut at the age of 67. Her name at the time was Anna Maude Rabiner. A cousin tells me that she had many husbands. The acorn doesn’t fall far from the oak.
Audrey Robnett Walker, Ecil’s oldest daughter, settled on the West Coast and was likewise unknown to me. However, I’ve been in touch with the genealogist among her children, Cathie Renard, who has also been frustrated by the false starts and dead-ends in the life of Carrie Ecil Perry Robnett Livecy Woods Anderson.
I never heard Aunt Helen express anything but bemused tolerance for the mother who married often, had love affairs with younger men, gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, and dropped off four kids for Grandma Perry to raise. My mother resented the hell out of Carrie Ecil and pointedly referred to her as “Mrs. Anderson.” She and Aunt Helen both called Grandma “Momma.”
Carrie Ecil’s apparently robust libido might seem scandalous, but if she only had five lovers in the span of fourteen years, she was a wallflower by contemporary standards. When I was growing up in Oklahoma thirty years later, it was still illegal for an unmarried woman to buy a contraceptive device, and whether she was married or not, the only devices available were the condom and the diaphragm, which didn’t become widely available until 1938. The diaphragm was the first device that allowed a woman to control her own fertility.
Census data collected in 1928 lists ten people living in the Perry household, including the two older of Ecil’s children. Somehow my grandfather supported them all seining catfish from the Kiamichi River, hunting and gathering, selling moonshine whiskey, and above all, farming their fertile land.
The Territory of Oklahoma was an organized incorporated territory of the United States that existed from May 2, 1890, until November 16, 1907, when it was joined with the Indian Territory under a new constitution and admitted to the Union as the State of Oklahoma. The 1890 Oklahoma Organic Act organized the western half of Indian Territory and a strip of country known as No Man’s Land into Oklahoma Territory. Reservations in the new territory were then opened to settlement in land runs later that year and in 1891 and 1893. —Wikipedia
“Okie” came to describe not just people from Oklahoma, but all Dust Bowl farmers of the Midwest who abandoned their farms during the droughts of the 1930s and headed to California and Oregon. I can track the steady progression of my own people westward from their birthplaces in England, Scotland, Ireland, crossing the Atlantic to enter what was then Virginia Colony, and pushing ever westward through successive generations to Kentucky, Arkansas, Oklahoma. Uncle Leonard drew his brothers further west still, to the copper mines of Arizona. My maternal branch, too, headed west. Grandpa Perry’s sister Mary Ona raised her family in the Los Angeles area where I spent the summer of my fifteenth year in the home of her son Perry Blankenship.
Early settlers were unaware of the cyclical droughts that come to the Midwest roughly every twenty years. Pioneers mistakenly believed that “rain follows the plow” and exacerbated drought conditions by busting the sod, breaking up the native grasses that kept the soil intact. Topsoil is a precious and finite resource that runs only a few inches deep over most of the planet and doesn’t exist at all in many places. But prairie grasses in the American Midwest locked down the sediment of millennia. You can see Lubbock’s famous topsoil in the sod house exhibit at the National Ranching Heritage Center at Texas Tech. My daddy took me there and pointed with pride to the deep dark loam. In some places, the soil runs twenty feet deep. Early plows made of cast iron were almost useless against it and development had to await the steel ploughshare, invented by a blacksmith named John Deere. Steel is smoother and harder than cast iron, able to bite deep and turn over sod that had lain undisturbed since the last ice age.
Land that ultimately became Oklahoma, given to white settlers in increments of 160 acres, had been reserved as hunting grounds for the Cherokee, although the story is a bit more complicated than I was taught in 8th grade Oklahoma History and depicted in films like Edna Ferber’s Cimarron. Traditionally, Comanche and Kiowa had claims on the territory, but it was given to the Cherokees to compensate for land taken from them in Georgia.
No one lived in No Man’s Land. The Cherokees hunted the land, and ranchers, organized as the Cherokee Strip Livestock Association, grazed herds there and shipped cattle to market from three railroads that crossed the Strip. The ranchers tried for years to buy the land, and drought-starved farmers from the Midwest eyed the land longingly from the Kansas border.
Pressure to open the Strip to settlement became so great that the U.S. renounced its treaties with the Indians, virtually forcing them to sell, arguing that the Five Civilized Tribes had owned black slaves, supported the Confederacy, and thereby abrogated the treaties made with them. The Indian appropriation bill of March 3, 1893 approved the payment of eight million dollars to the Cherokee Nation, and would-be landowners in the thousands gathered on the 37th parallel awaiting the mid-September signal to surge forward and stake their claim. Some didn’t wait. Sooners they were called.
The campers were so thick along the border, and the weather so dry, that the soil was eventually churned to dust. Water was soon very scarce; wells were pumped dry, and streams and water holes dried up. Washing was almost an impossibility. Water sold for a dime a cup. —Jean C. Lough, Gateways to the Promised Land, The Role Played by the Southern Kansas Towns in the Opening of the Cherokee Strip to Settlement.
George Alva Perry was not the first of our family to settle in Oklahoma. His mother’s people, the Thomassons, staked their claim in the Land Run of 1893, though it came at a cost.
Mother Thomasson came from Mississippi, but her birthplace is unknown. The family settled in Arkansas. She and Father Thomasson married near Monticello, Arkansas. They were living in Ringgold, Texas in 1893 and decided to make the Cherokee Run, Oklahoma. They left Ringgold in a covered wagon in July or August, 1893, with Leon, Lou, Preston, and Edward.
They arrived near Hennessey, Oklahoma a while before the Run, and camped there. On September 16, 1893, they made the Run and on September 17 claimed a 160 acre site near Enid, Oklahoma.
On that day, a prairie fire destroyed their belongings and MOTHER THOMASSON, LOU, AND PRESTON, suffered fatal burns, from which they died. Lou and Preston died September 19, and MOTHER THOMASSON died September 20th. The three were buried in a common grave at the Hennessey, Oklahoma, cemetery.
All that was left of their belongings was the charred remains of a small leather coin purse and a few scarred coins, now in possession of their son.—Edward B. Thomasson
One summer we watched Grandpa build a boat out under the big pine tree in the front yard, the same tree he hung catfish from to gut and skin with pliers. After days of sawing and planing on the curved hull, he painted the boat green, and he and Uncle Bud—George Alva Perry, Jr.—loaded the boat with nets and fishing gear and headed off on foot to the Kiamichi River, half a mile away.
My grandfather claimed the record for biggest catfish ever caught in an Oklahoma river and many a photo was taken of him and Uncle Bud posing with dead fish. Aunt Helen was the only girl who enjoyed this activity and one photo shows her dressed in overalls and a straw hat looking proud. Selling catfish steaks earned my grandpa valuable cash. He used to sell moonshine whiskey, too, but when he sampled the goods and terrorized the family once too often, my mild-mannered grandmother dumped the sour mash in the pig trough. George came home to find the pigs reeling.
Much of the effort of subsistence farming went into tending cattle. Uncle Bud and the dogs rounded up the cows in the evening, kept them penned up till they were milked in the morning, and let them out to graze and wander. The lead cow wore a bell. In the old days Grandma processed the milk in the smokehouse, running it through a cream separator. With electricity came refrigeration. Big crocks of milk cooled in Grandma’s refrigerator, thick yellow cream forming a skin on its surface. Grandma skimmed the cream off for the churn and we ate our share dribbled over berry cobbler. The churn was another big crockery piece, this one with a hole in its lid for the wooden dasher. I wanted to make the butter but my arm always gave out too soon and Grandma would finish off the batch with a few quick kerplunks.
Milk didn’t come in waxed half-gallon cartons or plastic jugs. Betty and I wouldn’t drink it skimmed, bluish, and in the springtime bitter from the weeds the cows ate. In Arizona, our milk came home in a wooden crate from the company store. The crate would hold four heavy glass bottles stoppered with a round cardboard seal. Betty and I put the wooden crates to good use in our games.
We arrived in Oklahoma undernourished from our poor diet in Arizona and slathered butter on everything, even red beans, which was part of almost every meal, if not the meal itself. Mother would bring toast back to bed and the three of us would gobble it up and go to sleep with an upper lip smelling of butter. Sometimes Grandma left a crock of milk out on the counter to spoil. She called it clabber milk and Betty and I wouldn’t touch that either. Today I spend good money on Bulgarian yogurt, essentially the same product.
Grandma made biscuits in the morning and Mother split and toasted them for our breakfast. The noonday meal was “dinner” when Grandma made bread again, this time cornbread. If they had butchered a pig recently, she would add cracklings to the batter, pork rinds. Leftovers of the meal were covered with a dishtowel to keep the flies off and that was supper, along with “bread and milk”—cornbread crumbled in milk. Uncle Bud called his “mush” and sometimes that was all we had for supper. I added sugar to mine.
Uncle Bud was a creature of rigid habits. His place at the table was the rope-bottomed chair next to the wall. We set his place with his special spoon, silver plated and embossed with an image of Mount Rushmore. If a meal didn’t appear at the appointed hour, Uncle Bud took out his pocket watch and frowned at it like the White Rabbit. We learned to read his mood from his body language and to avoid upsetting him. Uncle Bud wasn’t quite right, a condition I’ll explain presently.
The Perry farm was strewn with broken machinery, abandoned in the place where it died, including Grandpa’s last car, a Model T that sat in the side pasture where we pretended to drive it, making appropriate noises for gear shifting. One year, my parents went to Oklahoma City and bought a replacement for that car, a Model A, which itself was an antique by then but the only kind of car Grandpa could imagine himself driving. I rode with Daddy as he drove the car to Antlers, with Mother and Betty following behind in our Buick. Daddy had brought along a jerry can of water and every ten miles or so, when the radiator clouded the windshield, he would pull off the road and top off the tank.
There was only one seat in the Model A, but a child could sit up between the adults on a little ledge that wouldn’t pass safety muster today. I rode to town with my grandparents once and Grandpa spit his tobacco juice out the open window and it flew back and hit me. “Did that git you, Sue Bird?” he said, laughing. My grandpa had a lovely chin dimple that our cousin Steve inherited, the Perry chin.
George Madison Perry (1854-1889) to Carolina B. Thomasson (1861-1935):
Ever dearest Carrie
I reckon you fancy I have forgotten you. If so you must disspose of all such thoughts for I have not forgot you, nor never will, while reason holds her majesty. I know all about the little talk in the dining room and what bro Dave said at Mrs. Sanderlins. I hope you will never be entertained with such thoughts against one who loves you as I do, for when I remember that sweetness of disposition which incircles its possessions with ethereal beauty, and those bright smiles which shed the ray of sunbeam in the midst of gloom and that voice which is sweeter than the songs of birds to me…the one whose eyes are now wet with tears as he pencils you these lines… George M. Perry
They were married January 3, 1883 in Drew County, Arkansas and had five children together, only two of whom survived, my great-grandfather George Alva Lee Perry and his sister Mary Ona Perry. George Madison Perry was only thirty-five when he died. His widow married Felix W. Doster, a man who had also lost a spouse. He had four children, and he and Carolina had three more, making them a blended family of eleven.
My great-grandmother Helen Perry was four years younger than George, but outlived him by only 54 days, a statistic that Uncle Bud recited when he met people, reeling off the years, months, and days since their death as if they were never far from his thoughts.
Grandma wore her hair long, plaited in two braids crisscrossed over the crown and anchored with large hairpins. She wore chunky heeled black lace-up shoes with an X slashed in the leather over her bunions, lisle stockings knotted just below the knee. She saved calico print muslin feed sacks to stitch into dresses, aprons, and sun bonnets. My grandmother probably never wore a pair of pants or jeans in her life. She and Grandpa both wore wire-rim spectacles and soaked their dentures in a glass on the windowsill overnight. There was no indoor plumbing and bedrooms were furnished with slop jars, an enameled metal pail with a wide rim, a lid, and wire handle. Every morning it was a child’s job to empty the slop jars, carrying the pail as far as the fence and flinging its contents.
My grandparents’ beds were set at right angles to one another. One winter I slept with Grandma and I remember how freezing cold that front bedroom was, how I burrowed into the feather tick wishing she would come to bed and get me warm. My grandma snored and caught her breath. I would begin to think she wasn’t going to catch it again and I would have to save her. It was a terrible responsibility but one that Betty and I were used to performing for Mother when she napped.
My mother expended energy in bursts of activity and then just as suddenly needed to lie down, although sleep was not always restful for her. Sometimes she was awake inside her body, wanting us to touch her so she could escape. We would know somehow. Doris was both terrified of and fascinated by death, and possibly it was the terror that dictated how her remains were to be treated. She donated herself to OU Medical School, cheating the grave by an extra few weeks. We do not have a grave to tend for our mother.
Her sister Blue said that when they were growing up, Doris was like a general marshaling the troops, ordering her aunts and sisters to take this, put that, a human dynamo. I never saw Aunt Helen excited or fearful. She left all the drama to Doris and set an example of how to love one’s sister no matter what. She and Uncle Paul attended the Assembly of God language school in St. Louis, then went to convert the natives of Columbia and Guadalajara. Their children arrived in two clusters with several years in between. When the Cunninghams came back to the states on leave, they brought a Mexican teenager with them to help look after the younger children. Stevie and April taught us Spanish Sunday school songs. Cristo mayama, Cristo mayama… The whole family was bi-lingual.
My earliest memory of Oklahoma was the Christmas we arrived from Arizona to find snow on the ground and Uncle Bud hitching the team to take the children on a hayride. I didn’t want to go and was afraid of my strange fey uncle. In those pre-TV days, the family sat in the living room around a wood stove waiting for bedtime. My grandfather read the Oklahoma Stockman, my grandmother pieced a quilt top or mended, Uncle Bud shelled pecans, black walnuts and hickory nuts that were like stones and had to be cracked with a hammer. Only Uncle Bud had the patience to pick out the tiny bits of flesh between the intricate whorls.
Tending the Franklin stove was Uncle Bud’s job. We used to have him roll up his sleeve and show off the muscles he developed splitting logs. He cut sticks of hickory and post oak to the right length to fit through the opening in the top of the stove. Betty and I liked to feed pieces of fat pine and newspaper through the little hatch above the bucket of ashes. Grandma kept a pair of sadirons heating next to the stovepipe that ran up through the ceiling. There was a damper in the pipe you adjusted to make the fire draw. Uncle Bud would get a fire going so hot the belly of the stove would glow and your face would burn, but your backside would not warm up at all.
