THE EARLY YEARS

Perryton was the most northern place that I lived. Butch had decided to stay in Gainesville with Grandma so he would not have to change schools and because he did not like Dutch. More than likely it was because he did not like the rules that Dutch had made. We lived in two different places but the only one I remember well was on Colgate Street. It was a white house made like a building you would see in the desert. It looked a little like a fort. My bedroom was in a little camper attached to the back of the house. It was great. I played cowboys and Indians with my toy Winchester saddle 30-30.

My first experience with a cigar was while we lived on Colgate Street. Dutch had gotten some King Edwards cigars as a Christmas gift from someone he worked with on the rig. I took one and snuck around the side of the house and pulled the wrapper off and stuck it into my mouth. Since I had no matches, I pretended to puff away. Mama caught me and brought me into the house where Dutch decided to let me smoke it. He lit it and made me smoke it. I inhaled a big lung full of it and started coughing. I decided I didn't like it and told Dutch that he could have it. Well, he said that I had to finish it. About halfway through, I was pretty much sick. I knew I didn't like cigars. I didn't touch another one until my 21st birthday.

The first place we lived was a trailer house behind the landlady's house. During the winter of 1963, Mama had taken Leiellen back to Gainesville for some operation on her stomach. Dutch was working on the rig and Luann and I went to school. The snow started and school closed before noon. Luann and I walked through snow that came up to my knees. When we finally got home, we found out that Dutch was stuck at the rig and could not make it home. So, here was a 4th and 1st grader on our own. Fortunately, our landlady was compassionate and let us eat dinner with her. She let me try some of her artificial sweetener and it had the bitterest taste I could imagine. The snow continued throughout the day and night and by the next morning the entire northern side of the trailer was covered in drifts. They were so high that I climbed up the drift and stood on top of the trailer house. Luann kept telling me to get down because she couldn't climb up the drift. Anyway, we did not have to go to school the next day and Dutch made it home the following day.

Soon after moving in, I met a rough and tumble boy who was willing to show me the ropes of survival in Perryton. He told me there was an easy way of getting money to buy candy by selling coke bottles to the grocer next to the school. I got some bottles from Mama and went to sell them. Since we didn't have enough bottles to buy candy for both of us, he went around the back and got some of the grocer's bottles. We sold them for two cents a bottle, bought our candy, and went on our merry way. A couple of days later, we decided to buy some more candy. We went directly to the rear of his store and got some more of his bottles. As we were selling them, a man walked into the store and told the grocer where we got the bottles. He yelled at us and told us never to come in there again. Needless to say, I never went in there again and decided that I would rather find another friend than learn how to live in Perryton his way.

Leiellen was only a toddler when we were living on Colgate. One day she was in Mama's bedroom and I went to find her. She had found a bottle of aspirin and had eaten every one of them. I yelled for Mama and she had a panic attack. We called the doctor and Mama took her to the hospital. Leiellen had her stomach pumped and, to this day, gets physically sick when she takes aspirin.

When Dutch hurt his back at the rig, he was home for several weeks and could only move around on his hands and knees. He was in obvious pain but after a few days, no one wanted him in the house. He became real irritable and nasty tempered. Especially after Leiellen decided that she wanted to play horsey with her daddy and climbed on top of his back when he was on all fours. The language he used was particularly nasty and Leiellen got pretty upset.

My best and only friend was a full-blood Navajo Indian named Johnny Rock. We played on the same baseball team and generally hung out together all of the time. Our baseball team was the Giants and we lost every game we played. When I joined the team, I wanted to play catcher because he had all the neat stuff to wear. But my coach made me a pitcher. I took an old tire and some rope and tied up a target to practice my throwing. I had high hopes of making the all-star peewee league team. However, I was a pitcher for only one game. Then I moved to every other position on the team, except catcher, and did not make the all-star team. Johnny and I played on a flag football team that went undefeated and won the city championship. I played defensive line and only got to touch the ball once and that was on the opening kickoff of the first game. I didn't get very far before my flag was pulled.

I had a fascination with maps, particularly in the 4th grade. I would study maps all of the time and spent most of my study periods looking at them. Here, I told my teacher (Mrs. Pearsall?) that I thought that the world had gotten larger because it looked like South America would fit nicely onto Africa and that North Africa came out of the Gulf of Mexico. I even went so far as to cut out the continents and put them into the places I thought they came from. Obviously, she was behind on current thinking because she told me that continents do not move and if what I said was true meant that there should be blacks living in South America as natives. I had no proof so I dropped the theory. Later on, in the 5th grade, my teacher was reading some magazines to us on geography and geology and mentioned that current thinking was that landmasses have moved over the years and that the Atlantic Ocean is getting bigger every year. I was vindicated.

While in the 4th grade, two tragedies occurred within a short time of each other. The first was the JFK assassination. Our teachers were all shocked because they were watching it on the TV. We all had a government lecture and were told how tragic it was to lose our president. Some teachers were consoled by the fact that LBJ, a Texan, was now the president. Others knew his background and weren't quite as happy. The other tragedy was closer to home for me. One of my classmates was killed on her dad's airplane during the holidays. She was the most popular girl in the class and she was the first one to welcome me to Perryton. She was my girlfriend.

During the 5th grade, I entered a Spelling Bee competition at my school. I practiced every day and night and was spelling words that I didn't even know the definition of. I won the Bee and was scheduled to enter the city-wide Bee. As luck would have it, I came down with the measles and had to miss it. The alternate, Gene, went in my place and won the city competition easily. He went to additional competitions and my chance for glory was gone.

During this school year, one of my classmates and I had to write and perform a one-act play. We were limited to only two characters (him and me) and had to come up with an original idea. My partner was, to be kind, slow and I had to write the entire script. I decided that he was to be Frankenstein's monster, raised from the dead (he was the biggest and ugliest boy in the class). I, as the central character and the mad scientist, would build a rocket ship and transport my creature to the only place where other people would not want to hurt him - the Moon. We got to the moon after building a rocket ship and we had to walk like gravity was light. My teacher was not too impressed with the topic but was pretty happy about the acting and the script writing. She thought science fiction was not literature and barely tolerated any story with monsters. In fact, if it wasn't written before 1910, she thought it was commercial trash. She thought great literature was The Scarlet Letter and Great Expectations. I know that my script was greatly influenced by three things: one, President Kennedy's speech about landing on the moon before the decade was out; two, the Mercury, Gemini, and the up-coming Apollo missions; and, three, all of the science fiction that I was reading at the time. Most of my reading at this time was science fiction because there was little or no fantasy available to me. The authors I primarily read were Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, and John Campbell.