How Green was my Valley

As a child I spent countless hours roaming the fields that were across the street from us. I played cowboys and outlaws, or cowboys and Indians. I hunted with my bow and arrow. Mostly I just roamed around the small stream that led to a small pond, and beyond.

Today we visited those fields. They exist no longer. Buildings have replaced the grass, streams, and cattle that used to share the fields with me. No more will young boys tie raw bacon onto strips of string, dip them into the stream, and pull up crawdads that grabbed at the bait. No more will boys hunt 15-inch bull frogs, or shoot arrows high in the sky, run to where they think they have fallen, and sometimes find them…..and sometimes not.

Do boys still do that, anywhere? Or is it as much a relic of the past as is Davy Crockett on Disney’s World of Color, Father Knows Best on TV, cap guns that shot “real” plastic bullets (no toy was as fun as a Mattel Shoot-n-Shell gun, even if somebody, somewhere got one in their eye—tough luck kid, but you took one for all of us), NEHI Grape, Wonder Bread, and normal Republicans?

Speaking of “no more,” is pulling your golf clubs on a cart “no more,” replaced by electric powered golf carts?

Another of my childhood memories was being my father’s caddy. I would accompany him to the local golf course and pull his clubs on a cart. To play 18 holes meant many hours of pulling the cart in the hot Oklahoma sun, but I don’t ever remember feeling uncomfortable. I enjoyed it. After the “front 9,” I would get my choice of a NEHI Orange or NEHI Grape, usually choosing the Grape. It was sooooo good.

My father would “pay” me, but only sort of. I don’t remember the exact exchange but it was something like when he got an eagle I got 10 cents, a birdie 5 cents, and when he got a bogey, I’d lose 5 cents, or a double bogey I’d lose 10 cents. I’d usually end up with a few cents. I really didn’t care. I don’t ever remember hoping he’d do well so I’d get more money—it was just fun.

Today we went out to the golf course. It is remodeled and spiffy. The clubhouse, instead of being a small shack, was new, large, and modern. I went in to see if they had photos of the old course and, in talking with the people, found that they were happy to loan me a golf cart so we could drive around the course.

WELL! A golf cart!

In the 1950s golf carts were just being introduced. I remember seeing a couple of them, and was so envious. I so wanted to ride around in one, but of course we never rented one. So, here I was, today, riding around on the course that I spent so many hours walking on with my father. I wished he could have seen me. Or been along for the ride.

I saw nobody pulling a cart. I wonder if it is even allowed on most courses any longer. I wonder how often someone sees a 10-year-old boy with his father, pulling a golf cart in the hot sun, counting strokes to see if he would end up the day with 5 cents or 10 cents, and drinking a delicious 10 cent NEHI grape after the front nine. I think the answer is: “no more.”

This morning I went to a McDonalds to work on our blog while Vicky went across the street to a grocery store to restock our supplies. What is interesting is that this grocery store sits in the place where the school I attended in the 6h grade once stood--53 years ago. It was Eugene Field school, one of dozens of schools named after this writer in the early part of the 20th century. His most famous poem, one if my favorites, is Wyken, Blyken, and Nod.

I attended this school in the 6th grade, when all of the 6th graders were moved out of Westwood Elementary School and sent there. It was the final year of the school—it was to be demolished the next year. A sturdy brick two-story building, a solid structure that represented the solid structure of our educational training.

The street was re-routed during the demolition. Today, while walking to the McDonalds, I realized that the original street was still there! It was made into a frontage road. So here I am, in the photo above, standing on the original 6th street that went by my school some 53 years ago, with the IGA that is there now (it was originally a Piggly Wiggly I believe).

Later we walked to the Student Center at Oklahoma State University. On Sundays we would go there for lunch after church. I would always get a chicken breast, and put catsup on it. Now there is a large eating area, with many chain restaurants selling food. My Sunday noon cafeteria—no more.

We tried to find my father’s office building, but I wasn’t exactly sure which one it was. This coming weekend is homecoming, always a big day for my family. My father would park his car across the street from his office building, and we would get donuts—the only time of the year we would get donuts. We would walk to the car in the morning, eat donuts, and watch the parade. Now, there is no parking there. In fact, it is an area that is blocked off from traffic. I wonder if the homecoming parade still uses this route. What a joyous memory that was.

Two days earlier we visited another place that meant a lot to me—Couch Park. My family went for picnics there at least once a week for as long as I can remember. When visitors came, we went there. Our church often had picnics there. It looked a lot the same, except that it appears as if it has been safety-ized.

There was a small stream in this park that once held a suspension bridge where it was a gas to jump on it and watch it bounce everyone around. There was a small, four-person “ferris wheel,” (for lack of a better term) where someone could turn a wheel and people would spin around. There were huge slides where we would roar down on top of wax paper that we’d always bring with us. The road originally went around the small stream, which meant going through it—it was so fun for my father to drive us over the spillway, through the water. There were picnic tables close to the stream (they have all been safely moved to the other side of the road now).

Here is the spillway now--no more will kids feel the thrill of their fathers driving over it.

Golly. It’s a wonder we survived the 1950s with all of the dangers there were to us.

Our church would also hold dinners on one of the Quonset huts that were on the grounds. I saw one was still there, but wasn’t sure if it was one of the ones we met in. The park was originally called Fair Park because the fair was held there. Our church had a small food stand there during the fair, and I remember going there with my family for this event.

One of those memories that you wonder why you had: One morning, almost 60 years ago, when I was probably five or so, I went to our fair booth early in the morning with my father, for reasons I no longer know. I was so hungry, so he gave me a piece of cherry pie that one of the church women had made and that was still there. I can remember that it tasted so very good, even though I didn’t like cherry pie, and didn’t for several years. I want to ask my father if he remembers this. What a silly little memory, yet I would feel so bad if I lost it. I wonder how many other silly little memories I have lost that now I would give anything to retrieve.

The park looks different now. More tired. Newer equipment in some places, but oddly enough, even on a Sunday afternoon, it was empty. I never remember it being empty. Where are the families? Where are the church groups? Where are we?

I called my mother to tell her I was there, in the same place where dozens and dozens of times she, my father, Kathy, and I had picnics. How many days of our present would we trade in for one single day of our past? What a question.
But our picnic tables, our slides, our bridge, our drives across the spillway, our times there together as a family are no more, except in our memories, and even those will be lost in a few years.

An important part of my family’s life in Stillwater in the 1950s was our church. At first we rented the upstairs of the Katz Department Store. When I was very young (e.g., 5 or so), I would go the this place with my father, early on Sunday mornings, and help him clean it out. On Saturday nights it was a dance hall, so we would pick up the beer bottles and trash. Sometimes there were so many dead crickets on the stairways that we would scoop them up with a dustpan.

Later we rented the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. This is the building that I remember so well—where Jimmy and I would perform the collection every Sunday, where we would have church “sings” on Sunday night (a small congregation that would raise the roof with its songs), where I was baptized into the RLDS Church, and where I tried unsuccessfully to sing once in awhile for church.

We tried to find this building, but all we found was where I think it used to be. It is “no more.” An empty lot.

Yet, in my mind, that building is still there, along with the picnic tables at Couch Park, and the fields where I roamed as a child.

My father, as young man, left a movie theater in 1940, to hear paper boys walking up the street announcing that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. The film he walked out of was “How Green was my Valley,” one of my very favorite films.

There is a line from it:

“It is with me now, so many years later. And it makes me think of so much that is good, that is gone.”

That is the feeling I took with me as we left Stillwater this morning. I know that if I ever return here, my childhood home will have been torn down, the park resembling even less what it does now, and my precious fields even more taken over by the buildings of progress.

Yet it will not matter. What a gift it is to have wonderful memories of the past. As Huw Morgan says at the end of this fine film, exactly what I feel:

“How green was my valley, then, and the valley of them that have gone.”

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