Interview With My Mom, Part 2

In this episode, Hadley and I listen to my mom talk more about her favorite Southern writers like Eudora Welty, segregation in Liberty, the death of her cousin Benny when she was in college (keep your tissues close at hand), and working at the State Hospital in Norman (aka Oklahoma’s Cuckoo’s Nest).

And by the way, we’re now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts!

Mom at OBU, 1968. ©Mom

Kate: Welcome back to the Pass It On podcast. And this is part two of the interview with my mother. And we're back! My mom's here and Hadley's here. So welcome back.

Mom: Hello, hi. I'm glad we're here.

Hadley: Hi everyone.

Kate: When we left off, you were talking about going to the library and looking up stuff about some of your favorite authors. I wanted to ask you what other books for you or made a difference in your life at that time?

Mom: Well, at that time, I did a lot of reading of Southern authors. I was very drawn to the genre of Southern literature. And I would say my favorite, I had three favorites, Steinbeck and Faulkner. Faulkner in particular, I was very drawn to because of all of the people he wrote about within Yoknapatawfah County. Because I loved that part that Southern writers will do where they write a lot about big families and also the intensity with which they can do descriptions.

It really reminds me many times of like you're just listening to a story being told on the front porch when you're reading Southern literature. And that particularly was kind of true for Eudora Welty, who I just fell in love with her work. And I fell in love with the book, Delta Wedding, I think was the one I fell in love with first. Then a lot of her others were really short stories. But Delta Wedding, because the girl, the little girl in the story, her name is Laura, and I think in the story she's about eight, I'm not sure. But she's put on this train called the Yellow Dog that rides through, I guess through Mississippi. And she's going down to her cousin's house for a wedding. They live kind of like in a plantation. She's going down there to attend the wedding of her older cousin, and she's put on the Yellow Dog.

Her mother has just passed away, so she's riding this train down and she's greeted by all of her cousins. And there's boy cousins and girl cousins, they're all different ages and she's absorbed into this big family. And the story mainly kind of takes place during the preparations for the wedding. And Laura is not allowed to be in the wedding because her mother has just passed away.

That was poignant to me to know that because that was kind of how my life was. It wasn't really that there were certain things I couldn't do because my mother was no longer living. When I did get married, and I got married in May, the first thing when we set the date for May, my grandmother, who's my mother's mother, the first thing she asked me, is that the date that your mother died?

Because, and it wasn't, I was conscious of that, but to think that grandmother was conscious of that too, you would not get married on the same day that your mother died. Like that day had to be set aside and reserved and honored. And knowing that about Laura, the little girl, that she couldn't be in the wedding because her mother had just died. So much about that book reminded me of how I used to feel.

When we'd take the Katy train down to Oklahoma and I would be absorbed by all of my mother's family that lived there. There were cousins, a great-uncle and his family and his children, my great aunt that lived up the street from my grandparents. And there were aunts, old aunts, and the story in Delta Wedding too. So, there were so many kind of parallels for what it felt like to be in Oklahoma, sort of a Southern state with some Southern atmosphere around it. You know we always had sweet tea and my grandfather would sit at the big table and shake the ice in his tea. When his tea got down, he would shake his glass so you could hear the ice shake, and that was the signal to pop up and get the tea.

Kate: Oh my god.

Mom: You know, but without, he didn't ask.

Kate: You just did it.

Mom: He just had to rattle the ice. That was the signal that he needed tea. The big Sunday dinners and there were protocols, manners that were always, always kept. When we lived there, it was just like expectations of being one of a member of this family when you were in that town. Your behavior was sort of modified maybe.

Kate: Was he from Texas too? He was, right?

Mom: Who's he?

Kate: Your grandfather.

Mom: No, he wasn't from Texas.

Kate: Okay, I thought he was.

Mom: Well, he went to Texas to work in the oil fields and that's where he met my grandmother.

Kate: Okay, I see. Okay. But he was from Henryetta?

Mom: He was brought up in a little town, I have to think of it, in Kansas. And in fact, I spent a long time on one of those newspaper databases where you can read articles online from the past in full text.

All I had to do, they had such an unusual last name, I just had to put in that last name, I learned so many things, intimate daily details about their lives. You know, when they went on trips, when somebody came to visit them, what things they entered in the county fair. Everybody entered something in the county fair, all the way down the family. Even my great-grandfather, always, each time, entered.

I guess it was apples, apple trees that had been grafted. His grafting on different fruit trees were always entered into the county fair. My great-grandmother and my great aunt had all kinds of entries in the food area for pickled this and canned that and pies and baked goods. It was just where you learn more about what they did in their daily lives in those old-fashioned newspapers like that.

Kate: Yeah. That's so cool.

Mom: Yeah, so those particular authors of Faulkner and Steinbeck, but especially Eudora Welty. She could describe every flower in a yard in detail. And it was just such a lush description to me.

Kate: The magnolias.

Mom: And Magnolias. She had one short story, “Why I Live at the P.O.” where they refer to their grandfather as Papa Daddy. And I just loved that phrase of Papa Daddy that's used all through that short story.

Kate: Yeah. Speaking of your dad, you also, you had wanted to talk about this and we forgot to touch on it, about your dad's opinions of the country club in Liberty when that started.

Mom: Yes, that little town I grew up in was so segregated and at times things went on in that town that I was totally unaware of, and is something that you don't realize until you look backwards to see. So, it wasn't just the schools, you know, when I was growing up that were segregated until my fourth-grade year. But our movie theater was segregated. The black children were only allowed to sit up in the balcony. And I don't recall that they ever could come down and purchase candy. Maybe they did, but I was not aware of that. But I knew that we didn't go up in the balcony. It was reserved for them. Because I remember the first time I went, I wanted to go up in the balcony. And somebody told me, “Well, we can't go up there. It's not for us.”

But my little town did not have a roller rink, and it did not have a swimming pool, and we had to go to other nearby towns to go roller skating or to go swimming in a public pool. Finally, I think it probably happened, I'm not sure exactly what year this happened, I probably was in grade school when some families, wealthier families in town, came together and built a country club. And it mainly, as a country club, all it had was a pool. It was like a swimming club. It may have been more, it had a pretty modern design for the clubhouse. So, it must have been maybe in the ‘60s. Well, it was in the ‘60s, I'm sure, very, very early ‘60s, maybe late s that that was created.

All my friends that I knew belonged to the country club and they had a swim club, and they went swimming there. The only time I could go swimming was if my mother took us over to this nearby town for that, to go to the pool. So, I remember begging my dad, “Why can't we join? Why can't we please join? Please, I'll be good. Please, let's join the country club,” so I could swim in the summer with my friends, and he kept saying no.

And finally, at one point, he said, “I will not join a club that is not open to everybody.” And that statement that he made, just really made me stop in my tracks and think, because that had not occurred to me that it wasn't open to everybody. I thought it was just strictly open if you could pay for it. But when he said, “I will not join a club that's not open to everybody,” it made a difference to me, sort of, in how I felt about it after that, you know. I realized it wasn't so much a financial decision as maybe a moral decision or stance that he was taking.

Kate: Yeah. Then when you, so you had a housekeeper who was black who helped out when your mother was sick. And then you were telling me that she invited you and your dad, was it just you and your dad to go to the AME church, or your sister? That was after your mom died?

Mom: I did, yeah, and my older sister. That was right after she passed away. It may have been weeks, within weeks, because I remember we still had people that were bringing food to the house and things like that. We hadn't gotten to the point where we were figuring out how.

Though, you know, she'd been sick for a long time. She was in a wheelchair, and he had made a little board that went across the arms of her wheelchair so she could do mixing bowls on that. She was shorter than the counters, so my sister would usually be in the kitchen with her and would be helping, but she could make salads, and she could stir things and give directions and all. It was a thing that they did, and I was never really much. I did dishes, but I didn't help cook.

So, it was another thing that I would sit in the living room and listen to them talking in there while they were preparing things together. But then toward the end, you know, she's very ill and in bed. And I don't even know what we did for eating during those days. Maybe people were just mostly bringing us stuff. But Mrs. Gans, who was our kind of housekeeper or house helper during those years, invited us to go to a dinner at her church.

That was a very big deal. My dad said yes, and I was worried about going. I kept thinking, “Are we going to be welcomed? Should we go?” And he was so open about it. Yes, we should go, and it's important to her that we do. And she was there waiting for us when we went. And I remember dressing up. We all dressed up for it. It must have been something special that her church was doing as a celebration, it would be my guess. It was why they had such a big dinner down in their church basement. But we were the only white people there. And I remember being so surprised at how many people there knew us and knew my dad.

Kate: Knew your dad!

Mom: But they knew us too because my mother probably had their children in school, because she taught music. And so, she would have had those children in school. it was such a clear memory for me when we did that.

Kate: Can you talk about at the courthouse in Liberty? There's a water fountain that's like a memorial kind of thing. Do you want to talk about that?

Mom: There is. Yes. There is a water fountain. That fountain was called the Freedom Fountain, except I think I always refer to it, I think most people refer to it as the Water Fountain Memorial. That's up at the courthouse, which is in the very middle of the square. And I was not living in Liberty when this was created, and the group that came together to create it.

I believe it may have been. The old school that I went to in fourth grade, the year that we integrated was called Garrison and I think it's possible that this idea for this fountain and support for it came from that school was turned into an African American museum and meeting spot too because it was no longer used as a school and it's a historic building. I'm pretty sure it was able to get historic designation. It would always be preserved and also then be eligible for probably different kinds of grants, also.

I think the idea for this fountain came out of that, but it was a fundraiser. You could buy bricks and have engraved around the bottom of the fountain. And it was a fountain that you could use from outside of the building, it's kind of on a little plaza area just outside of the door on the north side. But it was built because there was not a water fountain that I [remember], there may have been one in the basement, but I think the regular water fountains within the courthouse were not available to everybody else, were not available to all people, only to the whites and black people were not allowed to use them.

So, this was done as a memorial, though see, it took how many years because it didn't happen until around 2000 that this was done. Different people were buying bricks and having them engraved. I wanted to do a brick myself. And I can't remember now how much they were, but I got two other people for my class that I graduated with in high school.

Kate: Is this your two Rejects?

Mom: Well, it was one Reject. One Reject and one of my friends Danny. Danny who I ran around with in high school. He had a car, for one reason, but Danny was an artist and he would draw political cartoons for our little high school newspaper while I was writing my little free verse column.

The three of us went together and put our money in and we decided to dedicate it to Topsy. And Topsy had a different name than Topsy, though I don't know what that name was. I only knew it as Topsy. But he was our crossing guard, or one of the crossing guards that we had on one of the streets about a block away from the school. Topsy would cross the kids there.

Kate: This was the same guy who helped your mother with the piano? Or this different guy?

Mom: No, that was a guy named China.

Kate: Okay. That's right.

Mom: Like that was China Slaughter. This was a guy that went by Topsy in our town. And so, we went together and put in our money, and we were kind of doing it anonymously. I mean, a lot of people would say, you know, the family name of who put the, put the money in on the brick, but we, we dedicated the [brick] to Topsy. To Topsy from Liberty School Children, because he had helped so many children over so many decades that it just seemed right to me. And so, the three of us put our money together and that every time I go back, and now as Hadley said, she's seen it. I like for my grandchildren to go see that brick if I can.

Kate: If you could find it.

Mom: Always takes me a while to locate it, yes. But that was special to me that we did that. We didn't make a big deal out of it, we just did it.T

Topsy’s Brick, Liberty, Missouri, 2021. ©Kate Stewart

Kate: Yeah. I know we should also talk about the bench at the church that you got.

Mom: Well, we did have a bench put in at the church. My sister and brother and I put the money in together. It was dedicated to our parents. For me, it was a very healing act because my mother and father are buried in two different cemeteries. The plan was when my mother passed away in the ‘60s, my dad bought a plot for himself there. He bought three plots actually.

But then, later on, a year and a half later, he married my stepmother. And when it came time for them, I kind of always figured she probably was not going to want to be in that space, that near where my mother was buried. Because they built a new house because she didn't want to live in a house that we had grown up in and got all new furniture.

She wanted, but you know, I understand that. She wanted new things for herself that belonged to her. Create her own life. And so, she did. When he passed away, my dad passed away, she had him buried in a different cemetery, and actually in a different county. It did bother me that they weren't together. So, my sister and brother, who did not care as much as I did, far moved on in their lives, but we went together and had a bench created and dedicated to the two of them. And so that was a very, I guess, peaceful, peacefully felt like a healing thing to me to have a spot where I could see their names together.

Kate: And you told me that they were fundraising for the chapel at the college at OBU. And she didn't want her name on the pew or whatever it was, or the benches.

Mom: Yes, yes. She didn't, no. I've always kind of wondered how she would have felt about that, and in fact, well, the cemetery that she picked, the cemetery where she was going to be buried. She and my dad made that decision, and I think they rode around and looked at different locations, and she picked this when it was fairly new. It was real close to his office, but she picked it mainly because it was not a cemetery that had upright stones. They were all just kind of plaques that were flat to the ground. So, everybody's was the same size and kind of the same.

Kate: All modest.

Mom: There were no memorials. In other words, there were no memorials. And that's what she was very much against anything that would look like a memorial. She picked that, where she was. So, what was the question you asked me?

Kate: About when they were doing the fundraiser at OBU.

Mom: Oh, about how, so going back, years when I was young, and we were visiting my grandmother, we went over to visit OBU in Shawnee because they were building a new chapel there. My parents were very interested in seeing the chapel. So, we went through the chapel as it was being built and actually, we met with the president, Dr. Raley, I remember we all went into his office and sat in these green leather chairs, visited with him. And I was told before we went in that I was not to swing my legs when I sat in the chair.

Kate: Why?

Mom: Because I had a horrible habit of sitting down and immediately swinging my legs. I was not to swing my legs and sit very still.

Kate: Oh my.

Mom: But we went over and looked at the chapel, and it was just in the throes of being built and it was also going to be like an auditorium and used for different kinds of present musicals and guest lecturers and performance hall. So, it didn't have pews in it like I was used to. It had theater seats. They were, as alumni, they were invited to purchase seats and have their names put on the back.

And my mother, I remember them having a discussion about this and my mother agreed that she would donate money, but she did not want their names put on the back of the seats. They wanted it to be an anonymous donation. Just the whole idea of doing anything for show, she just was adamantly against.

Kate: Yeah. Yeah, what's that Amish word you were talking about, that Richard uses?

Mom: Hockmoot.

Kate: Hockmoot!

Mom: Hockmoot. He would say to me, would your mother say that was hockmoot? So, she was very much not--

Kate: Verboten.

Mom: Yes, being hockmoot was being verboten.

Kate: So, since you were just talking about OBU, let's go back to that and move ahead. And I remember this story about the very first day you were at OBU or around that time when you met this woman or girl when you were walking into the chapel, I think.

Mom: Yeah, when I, OBU had a really long, strong tradition of orientation for freshmen like we had to wear freshman beanies. I have a feeling we wore those for two weeks. It may have only been one, but it felt like maybe it was longer, but and during those weeks we had to defer to the upperclassmen, and you had to memorize certain things about the school. Cheers and songs and different customs and things, and it was a way that it was a very old tradition because I remember my mother talking about when she went to college there, they had the same a lot of the same things, many of the same things were still going on when I went how many years later.

We had to attend chapel twice a week, and this would have been during that freshman week, freshman orientation, that we were walking over to the chapel and the way over, and I had kind of made this decision. It was like a conscious decision when I went down to school that I was going to know, I was going to meet some black kids, and I wanted to be friends with them. I made that decision.

It wasn't a thing that you could really do in Liberty. Though, in my senior year, we did hang around some black kids and went to some barbecues at their homes and some parties. But we had to have permission from our parents. I knew that we were kind of on the cusp when we were doing that. It wasn't really a socially safe thing to do, though we wanted to do it. I mean, we were really, the three of us who called ourselves the Rejects, really had this sense of injustice, you know, toward the blacks in our town and really wanted to change that. We felt we were really taken up with the ideals of the ‘60s, I guess.

So, when I went off to college, I took those ideals with me and was going to do what I could to broaden my friendship circle, I guess is what I'd say. So, walking across campus, I saw a girl who also had, she was black, who had a beanie on. And I didn't, I really knew my roommates, and that was about, my one roommate, and that was about it because this was the first week. And so, I remember it being cold, though how could it be cold? Because we probably would have, maybe it wasn't cold. Maybe the wind was just blowing because I remember holding my books. We didn't have backpacks then. You walked around carrying five or six books wherever you went.

But anyway, I went up to her and just said, introduce myself and ask her what her name was. And she said her name was Parthenia. She was from Greenwood, Mississippi, I believe. That was the town she was from. And I was so amazed because she had come further than I had to go to college there, way out of state. And I thought at the time, I remember thinking, what a leap for her, to make a leap that far to go out of state to school and starting fresh with that. Anyway, we became fast friends and her name was Parthenia. She said her name was Parthenia, but at the time she said it, I could hardly understand the word, and I kept thinking, “How am I ever going to remember this name?” The only word close to what I knew was Parthenon so I thought I'll have to think of Parthenon whenever I see her. But it didn't take long, it was probably within a month she had been given a nickname of Polly.

So, the whole rest of the time I was at OBU, her name was Polly. But I just remember that friendship that I had with her. We were in the same dorm. And many times at night, I would go up to her room and sit. And we would work on our homework together and talk. And we did become really good friends. And I do have a couple of letters down in my big box of treasures because in the summertime, Polly would write, and I would write to her when we would go home over the summer breaks.

Kate: Was OBU segregated before or was it always integrated?

Mom: I don't know at what point it integrated. When I was there, it was integrated. They did not have a football team, but they had a very strong and active basketball team, and I'm sure, like Parthenia's older cousin, Polly's older cousin, was there on a basketball scholarship. And a lot of black kids were there on basketball scholarships. So, it would be interesting to go back and see. Or if you could find any documentation on how that decision was made and when it was made to integrate.

Kate: Yeah, that's interesting because it would have been like a private school.

Mom: It was a private school. I mean, that's why I could go there. I didn't have to pay out-of-state tuition, you know, even though I was out of state. And it had most of its funding came from the Oklahoma Baptist Association and other Baptist churches and such, I guess, donations.

Kate: And you, I guess this was your freshman year when you dated a guy who was black that you knew from college.

Mom: I did. I didn't, well, I would guess that was probably more toward the end of my first semester there. I met this boy named Paul, who was a friend of Polly's, and he was from Texas, College Station, Texas, and he was there on a basketball scholarship.

And I went out with him just a few times, not very much, but a few times. My father did find out about it and was upset about it. And he asked me to go to talk to the dean of women, who was somebody he knew from his, when he was a student there, a friend. I can't remember what she said. I do remember going to see her.

But my dad wrote me a letter, which I still have. It's down in the box along with my letters from Polly. That just was this long explanation about the crux of it was that we should stick with our own kind. The birds out, if I would pay attention and watch the birds, I would notice how they all came to the same feeder and they all came to the same birdbath but when it came time to make nests like went with like.

I remember being so angry and frustrated but, you know, it was. That relationship didn't really last a long time. And I think I had told you before about the deep division and change I felt when Martin Luther King was assassinated. That was just like a heavy, dark veil that just fell over our campus. Because up to that time, the little group of people that I ran with had really worked, I don’t want to say worked hard, but we had integrated. And we were, it was almost kind of seamless going in and out of each other's dorm rooms, sitting together when we ate, being in class together, making jokes together, and going out, doing things together on kind of our little area around the campus. None of us had cars. We could only walk where we went.

But, when Martin Luther King was assassinated, and I must have been in class when we heard about it, when it occurred. I don't even know what day of the week it was now when we would look back on it, but I do remember being out of the dorm and walking back into the dorm and there was a whole circle of kids, black kids, that were all sitting together. They all had their dashikis on. I remember that, too. And the sense of that circle, the way the circle was made, it was like there was no room for anyone else to be in it. And it was kind of like that grief, that experience belonged to them, though our school did have several kind of memorials where we all came together. But I remember that the sudden shift of feeling on the outside, not on the inside. You know, almost like it was their grief, not our grief, you know.

Kate: Yeah, everything changed. That was the spring of your freshman year.

Mom: I think it was my freshman, it feels like my freshman year when it happened.

Kate: Let's, do you want to talk about Benny?

Mom: I can talk about Benny.

Kate: Because that was the next fall, right?

Mom: That was the fall of my sophomore year. Yeah, my cousins, when I talked about my love of going to Henryetta, and you know, part of my going to college down so close to Henryetta was that I could on weekends go over and be with my grandmother and stay there, take my laundry. And it was like a sense of I had a place to go home like other kids had a place to go home. I did too.

At that time in my life, I felt more at home at my grandmother's than I did in my own house back in Missouri, you know, because it was a new house with a stepmother in it. So, I loved going to my grandmother's on the weekends. And there was a girl in the freshman class that went back who was from that town, and she had a car and would go back on the weekends. Often I could catch a ride with her if I arranged it early enough and would go back and forth. So, I was still very connected to that, family over there, even though I was a college student.

But the news, Benny was a senior in high school, and he was one of my cousins that I was very close to and had so many adventures with in the summers that I was down there at my grandmother's. And very close to that family, to my aunt and uncle, all of my cousins that were there. But I was in my dorm room, and I don't know why I was there on a Saturday afternoon. That was kind of unusual that I would have been there because I remember the rest of the dorm seemed empty.

But the phone rang, and I went out in the hall, and it was my Uncle Bill calling who was also an uncle to my cousin. He was the brother of my mother and the brother of my cousin's father. He called and he was, I could tell right away something had happened by the tone of his voice. And he just said that he had some really sad news to tell me, and that Benny had been killed that afternoon. He had died in an accident.

It was an out-of-body experience where everything around you stops, and you're listening, but the words don't quite make sense, and you don't know how to react to them. So, I don't think I hardly said anything back. I probably just kind of said, “Okay, okay, okay.” And we hung up. And you know, it may have been in the morning that he called. It could have been late morning when all of this occurred. Because my immediate thought was, “How do I get there? How do I get to Henryetta? How do I get there to find out really what happened and to be there?”

I went running over to the freshman dorm to find the girl that also lived there and had a car to see if she would take me over there. And it turned out when I got there, her roommate just almost kind of yelled at me and said, “She's not here! She's gone. One of her best friends just died, and she's gone.”

I just said, “Well, that's my cousin.” And then I felt so stranded, so far away. And there wasn't like a grown-up to say, “What should I do next?” But there was an older girl that I was very good friends with who had a car. And so, I went to her and asked her if I could borrow her car. And so, I did. I was able to borrow her car and drive over. And probably, I don't know how far away it is, but I'm going to guess an hour, hour and a half. I'd have to look on a map now and see how I got there, what the directions were. But I drove over there in this borrowed car that I'd never driven before. I remember being so nervous about that too. And it was the kind of drive where you can't make your brain work very well because you're like in a fog as you're doing it.

I went directly to my grandmother's house, and my uncle that had called me was there in the living room. My grandmother had been given a sedative. She had been put to bed and was given a sedative. And he said to me, “You need to go on over. Nellean would like to see you.” And that was Benny's mother. And to get from one house to the other, I just had to walk out my grandmother's through the house and out the kitchen door.

And through the backyard and over the alleyway and through his backyard and in his kitchen door. Their houses were just almost identically back-to-back. It was just this alley that separated. And I feel like when I got there, I knocked on the door and a stranger answered the back door. It was probably somebody from their church because the house was just packed, just filled with people.

And then I probably said who I was to whoever let me in the back door. And they guided me through the kitchen. They had these big swinging doors between the kitchen and the dining room and walked through the swinging doors and there was my aunt sitting in a chair. And she was just surrounded by all the women in her church had come and gathered there, just surrounded by people. And when I walked in, she just jumped up

out of the chair and walked over and just put her arms around me, you know. And I was just kind of in a state of shock, observing.

I don't know what happened after that, but I do remember going back to my grandmother's and going back in the house, and there probably was some food there. I don't think I spent the night there. I think I had to go back to the dorm, but I think I went over and probably ate something and my grandmother or somebody there in the house told me that Benny would be up at the funeral home and that I should go up and see him before I left.

Okay, I should probably interject here and let you know how the accident occurred. Benny was a senior in high school that year and these boys, my cousins, they had been working since they were like eight or nine years old on Saturdays either at my grandfather's wholesale grocery house, and then as they got older, their dad took over the family lumber yard in town. They started working at the lumber yard. So, they spent every Saturday working at the lumber yard. Benny was taking a load of wood in a pickup truck, making a delivery, and he had loaded the wood. And I don't know how much wood there was, anything like that. I just know that something happened, and the wood shifted. This is my understanding, my memory of, or what I think I was told was that the wood in the back of the pickup shifted. And as it shifted, it shifted the weight of the truck and it, I think an axle broke and like the wheel came off, and then the truck just rolled.

I think the person that had purchased the wood was following him in their car. So, they'd come into town to make the purchase, and they'd loaded the wood in the back of the truck and Benny was making the delivery and the person was following in the truck and saw the accident happen. And he was taken into the, probably was killed instantly from the, because this truck was at a time when very few cars really had seat belts and this was an old, old, truck, you know, probably from the ‘40s or ‘50s that wouldn't have had seatbelts in it anyway. But so he was, I think, probably killed instantly from the accident.

And he was taken into the hospital. His aunt from on his mother's side, his Aunt Bert, was the nurse on duty. So, it was really an awful thing for the whole town and for everybody involved. But when I had left my aunt and uncle's house in this kind of stupor and gone back through the backyards, back to my grandma's, and probably ate some dinner there, my grandma said, she said, “You should go up and see Benny. He'll be up at the funeral home.” It all had happened that fast.

Kate: Did it happen that day? Or the day before?

Mom: This is my memory that it all occurred, it all felt like it occurred. I know it was dark by then. So, he probably had gone. This is just how I remember it, though it could be that it was the next day. But I don't know how I would have gotten back there the next day. Though maybe I did. Maybe I drove back the next day. Maybe I drove back to the dorm and then came back the next day in the car because I do remember being in their home, my cousin's home on Sunday morning, and all of us still being gathered in the living room, but my uncle wasn't sitting with us. When I looked around for him, he was in this little room right off their living room that we referred to as the music room because it had a piano in it and bookshelves and a piano. It’s where my older cousin played the piano, and there was a huge, big radio in there. And I remember seeing my uncle sitting in a chair with his head down to the speaker of the radio. And when I asked, you know, what was Uncle Frank doing, somebody said to me, he's listening to the church service. So, at the time that this occurred, their church was broadcasting their services on the radio, and he was listening to the radio, and that had been on Sunday morning.

Maybe that is the day that then I went back to my grandmother's because I'd forgotten that I said she had been given a sedative and was sleeping, so she probably was not, probably was passed out when I drove back, and so I didn't see her that day. But anyway, the gist of the story is that my grandmother did not want to go up to the funeral home, and I went up by myself.

All of this town is so small. The funeral home was literally a block or block and half from my grandmother's house. It was in the block between her house and the church. That was how tiny this little town was. So, I walked up to the funeral home by myself, and I remember my grandmother saying, “Tonight is for the family to go.” And she did not want to go. So, I walked up, and the funeral home was open and there was somebody at a desk, sitting at a desk when I walked in, a woman. And when she said, “Oh, tonight is only for the family.”

And I said, “Well, I am family. I'm Benny's cousin.” She had thought I was somebody from the school, you know, like a classmate. So, she said, yes, I could go on in. And when I walked into the room, he was, there was a casket up on a platform, I guess. Felt like there were legs under it, but maybe it had some fabric around it, too. I just remember the casket being there, and nobody else was in the room. I was in there by myself, and thinking about, “Can I do this?” Thinking, “Can I walk up there?” You know, I had to do it, but I was in there by myself doing it. So, I walked very slowly, you know, up to see him.

His face was very changed because of the accident. It was not the same, but they put a lot of makeup on him, and he probably had a suit jacket on. I can't remember what he was really wearing, but probably a suit jacket. But as I was standing there, maybe I sat down on the front row after that, after I had looked at him. The door opened, and in came my aunt and uncle and my two cousins, Benny's brother and little sister. And I remember my aunt was so, I think, kind of surprised to see me there, thought they'd be there alone. But I think grateful too that I was there.

My uncle picked up my cousin, Jan. I don't know how old Jan was at this time, maybe nine or ten, but picked her up so she could see into the casket and walked her up to the casket. And I was sitting there in the front row kind of watching. And I remember Jan with her arms around her daddy's neck. And I remember how she looked down and she said, “Daddy, will he have a new face in heaven?”

And Uncle Frank saying, “Yes, he'll have a new face in heaven.”

And then my cousin, Jimmy, he and Benny were just like twins. They were probably less than two years in age, and they just were just like twins. And he had just literally had the stuffings knocked out of him. He would not look up, and he did not want to go up. He wouldn't say any words and my aunt put her arms around his shoulders and asked him, “Will you come up?” And he wouldn't answer and wouldn't come up, but I feel like she put her arms around him and brought him up, but he never said anything. And I just, I think I just stayed back during all of this. I was just kind of an observer watching.

Then I probably left them and drove back to the dorm, back to Shawnee afterward. That was my second experience with a very close death. And it took place within, I guess, four years, maybe, four and a half years. And it just seemed so unfair to me. And it was just a few years after this, then that my aunt, my mother's, my grandmother's second daughter passed away. And I remember all of this feeling like so much had happened to our family.

Kate: And she also died of cancer, right?

Mom: They both died of cancer, and they were both about the same age. They were seven years apart in age, but they both died, I think around, right in that age range, you know. And my grandmother outlived both of these girls, and that was so hard on her to have. And there was a whole shift, a whole shift, like an earthquake that went through my cousin's family, well, through our whole family, but theirs in particular, there within Henryetta and the town.

I came back, my dad came down, drove down from Kansas City to pick me up at college, whatever day the funeral took place, and I went over to the funeral and spent the day there with him, and then he drove me back. My stepmother was there, too, and then they went back to Kansas City. I don't think that they spent the night. Maybe they did. It would have been a long trip if they didn't, so they probably did spend the night somewhere. Maybe there in Shawnee, so I'm not sure how all of that worked.

I remember how packed the church was. It was just overwhelmingly packed. I have a copy of the newspaper that came out, where the little newspaper had published a whole page full of articles and letters that kids from the high school had written about the impact Benny had had on them and their lives. I remember going with maybe with my grandmother out to the cemetery where he was buried and this would have been or maybe it was I just remember going out to the cemetery that fall, and somebody had put a mum from homecoming on his grave. So, it would have been somebody from school that came out and brought a homecoming mum. That's how I kind of had the feeling that he died before homecoming, which probably was in November, though I'm not sure. I'd have to go back and look at dates to put my timeline in order.

But it was years, years before we could start talking about Benny and the memories that we had of him. That took a long time coming, because it was like the thing in the room that you walked around and nobody went close to. And it totally changed the personality of his brother, my cousin, who had been like the class clown and the funniest kid I knew.

Just totally changed his personality. But that's what death does. Death that comes so young, so out of sync, out of the timeline that it should happen.

Kate: It's such a shock, yeah.

Mom: It was a shock for the town and for the family. And now it's a thing that whenever we're together, we always talk about Benny. We always do. He's the thing that's, that we, whenever I'm with those cousins, know, we always, he comes up, we revisit it.

Kate: Yeah. Well, thank you for telling us all about that. So, at OBU, I guess at some point you started going over to Norman.

Mom: I did.

Kate: The cool town.

Mom: I did, yeah. Well, I had a friend that I had been close with at OBU, and she ended up transferring over to OU and I would spend some weekends over there with her. And there was one summer that she, I think it was called VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, or if it had a different name before it became VISTA, whatever that name was, kind of like the Peace Corps here in the United States. She worked for them one summer, and the summer that she worked for them, she had to sublet her apartment. And she found two girls to sublet it and told me I could come too, so I could also be there. It was a two-bedroom, and it was within walking distance of campus. And I wanted to spend the summer there. I did not want to go back to Liberty. And so, I did, but I had to get a job.

And I ended up being a nanny for an art professor who had two little children, Eric and Kirsten. And I got to drive their big white Toyota Land Rover around Norman. And it was a stick. And I think that was maybe part of, it was a big deal for me to be able to drive that. It was a stick shift. It was a big thing that I felt like the children just rattled around in.

But that was the summer I stayed in Norman, and then I made that decision then that I wanted to move there and graduate from that, graduate from University of Oklahoma and not from OBU. It's kind of funny, but I felt like I did not want to graduate and have a school on my transcript that had the word Baptist in the middle of it. So that was kind of a part of that decision.

And so, I did go home. I mean, I did go back to school that fall semester. And I talked to my dad about it over my Christmas holidays, if I could just not go back to school, but could maybe move to Norman and get a job and get an in-state residency so I could get in-state tuition. And he agreed. So I went.

I borrowed, they were driving Volkswagens by then. They traded their Chevys in for Volkswagens, and I borrowed my stepmother's fastback Volkswagen. It was baby blue. Drove that down. My first time to ever have a road trip by myself. I remember my dad explaining to me, “Now all you have to do is watch.” He said, “When you're on the highway, the signs will be over your head, and you'll look for I-35. And whenever they shift, follow the arrows and stay on I-35, and you'll end up in Oklahoma City.” And Norman was just south of Oklahoma City. It took me straight there and it worked.

I went back and I feel like I was kind of staying, I hooked up with one of the girls that had been there that I had shared the apartment with that summer. She'd moved to another apartment, and I moved in with her for a few weeks while I applied for a job, and I got a job at the state hospital there where I worked full-time. That was my first full-time job. And I worked there for a year and a half before I met your dad.

Kate: You were there a while, guess before you met him.

Mom: Yeah, I was there for about a year and a half. And it was after I met him and after he and I were married that then, I started back on my degree and finished my degree then. It took me a little longer to graduate, but I did it.

Kate: Yeah. So, what was the state hospital job? I know you said that that was a big deal for you to work there.

Mom: It was a big deal. It seemed to me like the employees were all either college students from the university or older divorced or widowed women. And then there were a few doctors that came and went. But it was like its own campus. if you ever saw the movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, that's exactly identical. It could have been the same. Could have been shot at the same hospital. They probably were built at about the same time and on the same sort of architectural plans.

Because when that state hospital was built, it was far out on the east side of Norman. But by the time I worked there, the main street just ran right to it, you know, and the town had grown up around it. So, it was no longer on the outskirts of town. But you did go through a big gate to get onto the campus with different buildings all spread out. They were called wards. The different buildings were called wards, and they were always referred to by their ward number.

It actually was a good job because it also had a component of education so you could sign up to take classes, which would get you out of working on the ward if you, and then they had a separate building for education where classes took place and you could go over there for a class that might last two to three hours during the workday. I took almost every class that came along that you could sign up for. And one of them was distributing medications. So here I was, probably 19 years old and giving out medications, and these were all prescription drugs.

Kate: You were like, what was her name? Nurse, Nurse Ratchet?

Mom: Yeah, like being kind of like a Nurse Ratchet. But the first six months I was there, I was working on the geriatric ward, which was very hard, very difficult, very labor intensive and very, very sad too. But our wards were locked. We would go in and an iron door would lock behind you.

At night, we'd sit and filled out the charts. You know, that was called charting. You spent the last 15 minutes or 20 minutes of your shift filling out charts. And I suddenly discovered that if you went to look through somebody's charts, there were the whole section at the beginning of the chart that would tell you about their history. It was called their pre-morbid history. So, the history that was taken before, was how it was, it was an actual designation as pre-morbid. So, it was before the history of their lives before they were committed to the state hospital. And I was so just, for me, I would spend a lot of my charting time reading those histories because it was like reading a short story.

You know, you were drawn into this person's life who, there were teachers there and people that owned businesses and all walks of life, you know, and I also remember that horrible feeling of that anybody could end up there. I could end up there. You know, I had no idea. It was such a peek into their past, but it also gave me such a different perspective over the people that I was taking care of to know that that they had had other complete and whole lives before something had happened that made them end up at the state hospital, especially in the geriatric ward. And after I completed my six months, your probationary period, then you could apply to work on a different ward. So, I did, and there was a vacancy on the TB ward. So, I worked the TB ward the rest, like maybe for another year.

But it was quite an experience. And the other thing that it was like going into another little town or another little world when you went to work because it was like its own community. The people who worked there, especially who had worked there for years, knew patients from all over the place. And I think they had their own newsletters where the patients might help write the newsletters. They had their own social life. They would have movies and dances on Friday night.

There was a building where dresses were made. They were kind of wraparound dresses all out of flowery material. But they all would wear these wraparound dresses, easy to put on and easy to get off. And the men all wore kind of khaki-colored shirts and pants. And there was a laundry. They could work in the laundry or work in the cafeteria, in the food service. There was a farm area where there was a garden. So it was, everybody kind of had a job to do that was there during the day if they were able to leave a ward. Not everybody was able to leave their ward.

That's the first place I saw a catatonic patient. I can remember that being, I think, when I moved over to the TB ward. There was a patient there that would just stand and say nothing. That's where I learned the word catatonic, catatonic state. We didn't work directly with the patients there. We were in an office area that had kind of a Dutch door where they came up to the Dutch door to get their food, their mail, their medicine, and their cigarettes because there were smoke breaks. So, they knew right when the smoke breaks were and the state provided them cigarette papers and little sacks of tobacco.

Kate: Wow, okay.

Mom: So, we passed those out. And they had little machines to roll their cigarettes. And there was a day room that we could see from the office that we were separated with a big plate-glass window. Maybe it wasn't glass. Maybe it was plexiglass if that had been invented by then. But we could see in there to see where they could play cards. But they were on some sort of medication that, my understanding was that for the most part, we didn't have to worry about catching TB.

And any time they sent mail out or received packages or things went back and forth, there was a thing called the autoclave that we would put certain items in that would then sort of sterilize them and sterilize the letters that were passed. If they had written a letter and wanted it mailed, we'd have to first put it in the autoclave before it could be mailed out. So, it wouldn't have viruses.

Kate: Germs.

Mom: I guess the virus or the germs on it.

Kate: Well, you really learned a lot there.