I REMEMBER...the smells of the fish bait shop in Oklahoma

...…the smells of the fish bait shop in Tishomingo, Oklahoma when I was a kid. I got to stay with my Grandmother Clara Whitlock and Grandfather Roy Whitlock in the summer time when I was between 5 and nine years old. My grandfather and I went fishing a lot (see post from April 23, 2009). My Grandfather was a cool guy. They say that if you are lucky, you will get your 15 minutes of fame in your lifetime. Some get more, some get less. My Grandfather, Roy Whitlock (my dad’s name was Roy George Whitlock) got five hours worth in 1928. He was a banker and was closing up one evening, got robbed, kidnapped, and was immortalized in this book about the notorious bank robberies in the twenties and thirties, as a means of income for the unemployed:

Page 103 from “Cabin in the Blackjacks – excerpts of Pretty Boy Floyd”:

…”Turn of the Stonewall First National Bank came the Following April, 1928. Three men found Roy Whitlock alone. They escaped in a roadster, taking Whitlock. They fled through the Allen oilfields and forded the Canadian River. When they stopped, Whitlock helped them divide the money, $691.70 in all. Each gave him $5.00, and they released him after dark to walk into Sasakwa. Before long the three were in the state prison.”

I remember the bait shop we stopped at before heading off to the fishing hold. That was a very long time ago (like 55 years or so), but I still have very vivid memories, complete with the sounds and smells of Lloyds Dry Goods & Bait Shop. We would drive there in a 1950 Plymouth. It had mohair seats and was incredibly itchy when you wore shorts (kid in the 50’s, summer time Oklahoma heat). We would walk through the main part of the store to the bait area in the back. You could smell it from the front screen door. It wasn’t a bad smell; it just had its own odors. For younger readers, think Disneyland’s ride - Pirates of the Caribbean, at the bottom of the lagoon where the boats launch...kind of damp, dank, musty and you are almost there. If you added dead crickets and crawdads, you would have it just right. There were two or three large concrete tubs (probably cattle water tanks) with aerators running constantly. You could hear the bubbling and motors running, smell the mixture of mossy fish tanks, crawdads, crickets, and earth worms as soon as you hit the front door. This was a great moment…it meant we were going FISHING!! I got a cardboard tub of red worms and my Grandfather got a dozen minnows. I got little hooks for bluegill & perch and he got big hooks for bass. I got a peppermint stick out of the big glass jar up front and he got a shot of something homemade from the back of the store. It was a man’s deal, I got the forbidden candy before dinner – he never mentioned it to Grandma and I never brought up his quick visit to the back of the store with Lloyd.

The afternoon was lazy, warm and forever etched in time down at the swinging bridge over Pennington Creek. It is good to have fond memories so deeply ingrained that the slighted sound or smell can instantly conjure up a 55 year old 15 minute experience.

"What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal." Albert Pine

I REMEMBER...my finger getting stuck in the kitchen table

…getting my finger caught in the tube leg of my parent’s new aluminum/Formica table when I was six. We lived in McAlister, Oklahoma. My mom owned and taught a private kindergarten in our converted garage and my dad was a mailman on the railroad (approx 1953 – the mailmen were on the train in a special postal car and picked up mail along the stops and sorted it as they went along to deliver to the next city down the line).

Like all kids, I had my favorite foods and non-favorite foods. Remembering that this was ‘50’s Oklahoma, some of my favorites were fried catfish with ketchup, ketchup [ketchup went on most everything] and white bread sandwiches [there was only white bread – no choices as I recall), lard and sugar on white bread sandwiches [if you like eating the white stuff –lard and sugar-out of the middle of Oreo cookies – then you would have loved those sandwiches, corn on the cob, fried chicken and hot dogs. There were a multitude of things I didn’t like, as my Mom and Betty Crocker [1953] conspired to provide recipes for such God-Awful dishes like Liver and cream sauce, spinach and vinegar, cottage cheese [ok with lots of sugar and pineapple – but not so much with pepper like my Dad preferred] and of course, the ever popular: lima beans with shredded carrots in lime jello.

It was one of those nights when I was pushing food around in my plate, hoping it would evaporate. [Note: back in the day, kids that didn’t eat their food were told that there were starving kids in China that would love to have it and that you would a) sit there until you finished it or b) go to bed right now and it would still be sitting there when you came back to the table for the next meal]. I almost got out of it once when I suggested that since my Dad was a mailman – why we didn’t just mail the liver and onions to the starving kids in China. Since I hadn’t seen buttermilk (with pepper for my Dad) spew out of an adult’s nose before, I figured I had hit on a solution. It, however, was just a temporary reprieve, until my parents quit laughing and choking. So, there I was one night pushing food around and running my hand around under the brand new, bright yellow, aluminum and Formica dining table my parents had just purchased. [Note: this was when perfectly good imported English oak tables were tossed out to the dump to make way for the sleek new aluminum and Formica furniture – wow – what a wise decision that was] So, finding a little opening in the end of one of the aluminum table tubes, I tried to poke my finger into it. As I had been stirring the cream sauce on the liver with said finger, it slipped right in. Therein was the problem. The finger wouldn’t come out. The more that I struggled with it, the more my finger started to swell making it impossible to remove.

The moment finally arrived when I had to eat or go to my room to await another chance to eat the liver another day, but couldn’t get up. I didn’t want to say why, so I just kept getting deeper in trouble for not getting up. Just as my Dad grabbed me by the arm to jerk me up from the table, I was forced to scream out “My finger's caught in the table”. My Mom and Dad tried squeezing, pulling, 3-in-1 oil (like WD-40), butter, lard, and prayer. Nothing worked. The more we struggled, the more my finger swelled hurt, and the louder I cried. Eventually, my parents had no choice, but to call the fire department. A big red fire engine with lights flashing arrived, attracting all the neighbors. After the firemen quit laughing, they proceeded to try all the firemen tricks, but to no avail. After much discussion, it was decided (over my Mom’s protests) to use a hacksaw and cut the leg off the table. At the time, I thought my Mom’s anguish and protests were for her fear of me getting my finger cut off, but I suspect now that it was truly in anguish over losing her brand new modern aluminum table to a hacksaw.

So, they cut the leg off my Mom’s new table and threw the junked remains into the backyard. They jammed my hand with the six inch aluminum pipe stuck to it into a bucket full of ice for a half hour and voilla’: my finger popped right out. I got to ride on the fire engine with all my friends and was the hero of the neighborhood. My mom eventually retrieved another oak table and mourned the lost “modern” updated model for quite a long time, and oddly enough, never fixed liver and onions again. Our family did, however, endure many more “jello with mixed vegetables” dishes. I have yet to see a Formica/Aluminum table on Antiques Road Show.