I crisscrossed the Permian Basin in an effort to trace my childhood footsteps from classroom to classroom.
Every grade, every year was in a different school, a different town as we moved from oil field camp to oilfield camp.
That’s the way it was back in the ‘50’s when your father worked for a big oil company.
First grade...Odessa, second grade...Stanton, third grade...Wink.
I have some very vivid memories from my time spent in Odessa’s San Jacinto Elementary School and Humble Oil’s white slate house. But the challenge was to locate the very spot and all I had was a first graders sense of direction.
My sister, three years my senior (a forth grader at that time) didn’t know either but her life long, horse crazy friend lived in Odessa all her life. One phone call later I had the exact house address.
After several wrong turns I was standing in front of the house on 12th street. The typical white slate house identical to all the other houses in the camp was now wearing a dingy blue color, had a tree in the front yard and that little garage was about to fall down. I paused for a picture then headed off in the direction that I would pedal to school. And there it was...San Jacinto Elementary School...eureka, I found it.
First grade was very stressful. The first day I remember being in line to register all by myself. Mom stayed home to take care of the younger children and my older sister, a fourth grader, just stuck me in line and left me. When it came my turn I was asked, “First name?” I got that one right; but then they asked, “Last name?” I was stumped …no one had ever explained that part I didn’t know I even had a last. “How do you spell it?….????” From that moment on I knew school was not for me. Luckily my across-the-street neighbor, George, piped up. He spelled my last name without as much as a stammer or stutter. I was impressed. How did he know that? He explained it was written on the front steps of my house; as was everybody’s last name who lived in the company houses of the oil field camp. I thought that was extremely astute of George and thought that he was going to be somebody someday. I think his last name was “Dubyuh”.
Needless to say first grade was a rude awaking. When I was a kid they didn’t have kindergarten, pre-k, pre-k-1, 2, 3, etc etc. 1st grade was where it all started. I had no idea there was an alphabet and the written word was news to me. It might as well have been hieroglyphics and for the most part still is. Now days teachers have labels for all sorts of learning disabilities--AD, ADD, ADHD, MR, OCD, and on and on. Back then there was only one S-L-O-W, and that’s what I was labeled. To make matters worse they thought it could be my eyesight so with only a mild optical problem I was given glasses to wear. I can assure you glasses will not fix “stupid”. Glasses will only slow the social development of a child.
As if all this was not enough my father, the engineer, being extremely practical and having a baby girl following my younger brother acquired a 20” girls bicycle and crafted a section of ½” rigid plumbing pipe to serve as a center bar disguise making the bike a “convertible” so to speak. Still in my heart of hearts I knew the truth…it was a girls bike and that played heavily on my mind. Then there was the “lunch box” issue. My parents wouldn’t let me carry a brown sack lunch like all the other kids. It had to be a lunch box. I’m not talking Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck lunch box. Oh! No! It had to be a black workman’s lunch pail like all the construction workers carried. To make matters worse I broke the thermos bottle. In the old days thermos bottles were made with a glass envelope...the same theory used in double pane windows. They had excellent insulating qualities but were extremely delicate and could not survive the fall from a 20’ girl’s bike as it crossed over the railroad tracks. My father, undeterred, purchased a “Stanley Stainless Steel” thermos with an unbreakable envelope and matching screw-on stainless steel cap/cup. There was only one problem. It was one inch taller than the lunch pail was long. Again undeterred, Dad neatly machined out a hole in the end of the lunch box. Voila! This allowed the thermos to be secured in its designated spot with the gleaming stainless steel cap protruding from the gable end of the lunch box and giving it the appearance of a miner’s flash light.
So there I was peddling my girl’s bike across the R.R. tracks to school wearing glasses and carrying a miner’s flash light…hoping against hope that the center bar would not pop out and expose me to the ridicule of my fellow classmates.
And there were other difficulties in that sixth year of life, For some unknown reason I decided to scribe a line around the entire outside circumference of our house’s white slate walls with a red crayon. Our house was one in a row of many identical houses that made up the oil field camp. I really think the red line gave our abode a certain notoriety that set it off from all the rest. It looked kinda like a high water mark…ironically in the middle of West Texas. Needless to say…this unleashed a tsunami of wrath and rage from my father. The fury of which was so powerful that I can recall the exact consequences of my actions to this very day.
Stanton, TX
Now second grade in Stanton, TX was even more of a blur. The only memories of that time period were not the most pleasant. I still bare the scar on my index finger as a reminder to keep my hand out of the moving parts of a garage door. Then there were the mandatory naps Mrs. Gray imposed on us second graders...she apparently needed a break. I’m not sure why I remember the naps maybe because it was the only time I was awake during class.
By chance I came across the Stanton museum and hoped they might have some historical maps or something that would assist me in my hunt for the house or school house for which I was looking. Turns out the enthusiastic museum curator...apparently excited about the fact that anyone wanted to know anything about Stanton’s history...pulls out a ‘52-‘53 school annual. And there it was...documented proof...I did in fact attend 2nd grade. Fortunately, report cards were not on file.
She also put me in touch with Sara (7th grader at that time) a life long Stanton resident. Sara had a wealth of information actually more than I wanted to know. She described the exact location of the old Humble camp which had been bulldozed and now a trailer park occupied the property. The elementary school was still in the same place but new buildings made it unrecognizable.
Wink-city limits, population 1006 according to the sign. The word “city” seems to be misused.
The single structure school house has grown into a massive complex. The football field with it’s wooden bleachers now looks like a professional stadium apparently a testament to Friday night football. In West Texas, Friday night football is a religion and attendance is mandatory.
Fond memories of recess, red rover, tops and marbles overshadow classroom activity...the teacher must have realized any attempt to raise my academic acuity was a waste of her time. I did enjoy the traveling science guy who froze a banana in liquid nitrogen then used it as a hammer to drive nails then at the end of the demonstration ate it. He also had a Van De Graaff generator...perhaps that’s what sparked my interest in electricity and physics.
That was the year I got a real boys 26” western flyer bike. I remember good times at the camp playground. There was a slide that must have been three stories tall. We would sit on a piece of wax paper and careen down the polished stainless steel slide in attempt to reach warp speed and then plow into the ground with absolutely no concerns for our safty. Yes, those were good times, we rode our bikes without helmets, we drank from the water hose and traveled in cars without seatbelts.
The electric train we got for Christmas was probably because Dad wanted it. He even mounted the track on a huge board and installed it in an old oilfield shed. I spent hour after hour playing with that American Flyer train.
Then there was the car air conditioner dad built. His design was a ram-air plenum that extended over the top and spanned the entire width of the car. It stood nearly 12 inches high and the inlet, the entire front side, was opened and fitted with a porous pad.
Built from galvanized sheet metal the long box, with a “u-turn” shape at one end, brought the ram air from the outside of the car down and around into the passenger side front window.
At highway speed the oncoming hot dry air would be forced into the box though the inlet passing over a wet mat…which cooled the air by the evaporation process…then into the car.
It was held on the top of the car with four pairs of suction cups and straps with hooks...borrowed from his car-top luggage rack. Everybody had a car-top carrier back then and every car had rain gutters (drip rails) to hook onto.
The water reservoir, for wetting the pad, was a 5 gal can located in the trunk and somehow through an elaborate system of piping, plumbing and pumps it got to the box on the roof.
Evaporative type coolers work well in dry climates. The larger the spread between the wet bulb (dew point) and dry bulb temperatures the better they worked. And it worked great in the dry West Texas air.
There were a few drawbacks. First, it only worked at highway speeds because the air supply stopped when you stopped. This made sitting at red lights problematic. Second, in my father’s massive design, it allowed water to collect in the large roof top plenum. During a left turn the same forces that opened doors...flinging the unsuspecting out into the street...acted upon the lake of water producing a tsunami that would surprise and almost drown the front seat passenger. What memories.
There’s not much left of the Humble oil camp in Wink. The camp’s water tower still stands exactly where it did but all the houses are gone. You can still make out the two abandoned streets that served the camp. Our house sat at the end of the first one, the back yard adjacent to the pipe yard where the water tower still resides.
And so it is.
How blessed I am to have such wonderful memories.
When you live in the land of plenty and are lacking in the self-denial department it is impossible to maintain a normal body weight.
