Lottie Margaret Atkison was a twin, she and her brother Bill being products of Grandmother’s next to last pregnancy. She became the musician of the family, the only one to stick with the piano until she had mastered it and the one who would branch out to other instruments. “If it had strings, Lottie could play it,” her sisters said, but I somehow doubt that she ever tackled the banjo. She was also the math whiz who dedicated herself to coaching the sisters just older and just younger than she in arithmetic. She was later to attend Southeastern Normal School (now Southeastern State University) for two years and complete at twenty-one the “Academic Course,” which included a “Life Certificate to teach in the public schools of Oklahoma.”

That fall (1921) Lottie and her younger sister were employed by the Calvin Independent School District--my mother to teach first grade and Thelma the second. Both would find their husbands in Calvin. The Blackwells (Robert’s parents) took them in as boarders and, of course, invited them to attend the Methodist Church. (The young women had been Presbyterians in Durant.)

No doubt, many of Calvin’s young bachelors made a point of looking over the crop of new teachers each fall, and some may have been enterprising enough to meet the trains the week before classes and assist the new teachers with their baggage. I believe, however, that my father actually got his first glimpse of Lottie at church. Anyway, it wasn’t long before something about her attracted him. So far as I know, she never had a date with anyone else in Calvin (although her sister Thelma did have one date with Ott’s brother George before settling on Bob Daniels).

Eventually, Ott proposed, but Lottie insisted upon going to Mesilla Park, New Mexico to teach until her “bronchial trouble” improved. Apparently she had had a cough for some time and was delayed in finishing high school because of illness. Her health did improve in the West, however, and she finally returned to marry in 1924. I came along in 1927 after they had bought a house a block west of the Baptist Church.

Unfortunately, Lottie’s health again began to decline after that pregnancy, and before I turned one, my father hired a high school student, Phoebe Strickland, to care for me and the house so that my mother could spend more time resting in bed. By then some physician had correctly diagnosed her condition as tuberculosis, and every TB specialist knew that pregnancy was one of the conditions that contributed to reactivation of the disease. (She had been exposed to an aunt in Durant who had died of the disease earlier.)

Despite the bed rest (the only treatment known at the time), her condition continued to worsen until shortly before I reached two and a half she died. My father didn’t marry again until I was turning five. Meanwhile, he and I went to live with the Morse grandparents while George and his new wife were glad to leave that inconvenient Bentley building behind and take over our house.

I have only three memories of scenes near the time of my mother’s death. One was of standing in the doorway of my mother’s room and speaking with her as she lay on her bed. (I was not allowed to get any closer than that.) Another was of my mother lying in her open casket with flowers all around. The third, probably from a few weeks later, was of watching from my father’s arms as a carpenter hammered on the frame for the floor of the little house my Uncle Kize was building next door.

People around Calvin who contracted tuberculosis usually went to the state sanatorium in Talihina. Alonzo Kay’s first wife died there. Roy Oliver, Sr.’s mother died there, and Roy himself was a patient there for a time. Obviously, the public health authorities were trying to limit the spread of what was then a virtually untreatable disease. Bed rest was considered to be very important, and hospitalization facilitated that (especially for housewives who must have found it hard to stay in bed when the house around them was in a mess). I suspect my mother resisted staying at the sanatorium and promised to rest and remain isolated if she could just stay home.

The real tragedy in the history of tuberculosis treatment in that era is that while isoniazid, the first really effective drug for the disease, was first synthesized in 1912, it sat on the shelf unused until 1945 when scientists first began to suspect that it might possibly have an effect on the tuberculosis organism. It was first tried in human beings in 1951 and came on the market in 1953, twenty-five years later than when at least three mothers in Calvin desperately needed it. (Actually, without a second drug such as streptomycin to accompany the isoniazid, only the mildest cases would have yielded to it before the germs developed resistance.)

All four of the Atkison daughters taught school early in their lives (as did the two Morse daughters), but in all except one (Iva Mae Morse) their careers were derailed by matrimony. Cammie, my mother’s oldest sister married a printer, and before long the pair took over a weekly newspaper in Kerrville, Texas. After her husband’s death a few years later, she managed it alone until her son returned from World War II.

Don and “Skeet,” the two older Atkison boys, fought in France in World War I. Bill, Lottie’s twin, was awaiting a place in the Army’s flight school when the Armistice was signed. Don and Bill were later mobilized with the National Guard for World War II, but Don probably gained more recognition for his part in an incident that took place some years earlier (and is sometimes called, “The Last War Between the States.”)

In July 1931 a new bridge jointly financed by Texas and Oklahoma was to open over the Red River to allow traffic on U.S. 75 and U.S. 69 to pass freely between the two states. Texas had agreed to pay the operator of the toll bridge at that site (which was apparently only a modification of the Katy railroad bridge) for his losses but had still not done so when the new bridge was ready to be opened. The toll operator got an injunction from a judge in Texas that prohibited the free bridge from opening until he was paid off. The governor sent a group of Texas Rangers to enforce the order.

Oklahoma’s Governor Bill Murray, on the other hand, insisted that since Oklahoma had completed its part of the bargain, it was going to use the bridge anyway. He ordered the approach road to the toll bridge torn up and, to see that his wishes were carried out, sent National Guard troops from Durant with Uncle Don in charge of straightening out the matter. The troops even brought along a machine gun and a French 75 artillery piece to impress the Texans.

According to a New York Times story of that week, one of the first things Captain Don Atkison did was cross the bridge and have a talk with the Rangers. I suspect he said something like the following: “Listen, guys, let’s not do anything foolish here. If you don’t shoot at us, we won’t shoot at you.”

The tense standoff lasted a few days until an Oklahoma lawyer pointed out to the judges concerned that according to the treaty made when France sold the Louisiana Purchase to the United States, the boundary between the two states was not, as many had assumed, the middle of the Red River but instead the south bank. The bridge, therefore, sat entirely on Oklahoma land. The barriers were removed, and traffic has flowed freely across that bridge (or its more modern replacement) ever since.