Excerpt from “Growing Up with Real People”

When back in the Thirties people in McAlester talked about famous prisoners in their penitentiary, they would usually mention the German butcher who in a fit of anger had killed his wife. That might have been understandable, but what offended the public most was that he had allegedly mixed the better cuts of meat from his late wife’s body into the sausage. Most folks didn’t appreciate his having made inadvertent cannibals out of a number of his customers and felt that even life imprisonment was not a severe enough punishment for that crime.

About the same time, a farmer over in the Spaulding community fared even better after strangling his nagging wife. He would probably have escaped even the ten years he did serve had fate not intervened to spoil his cover-up plan. He had driven his Model T Ford up onto the railroad tracks at a farm road crossing, sat the dead woman in the driver’s seat, then retreated to the woods to await the arrival of the afternoon train. Ordinarily, it would have come around a curve and burst out of the woods with too much speed to permit it to stop before smashing into the vehicle.

Unfortunately for the scheming husband, that day the train had to slow up because of cows on the track and had not yet resumed speed when the Ford came into view. Consequently, the engineer was able to stop short of a collision, but when the crew rushed out to push the car off the tracks, they were surprised to find a dead driver behind the wheel. The coroner felt the cause was obvious. The jury felt the perpetrator was also. Nevertheless, the widowed husband was required to serve only ten yours. Perhaps the jury knew how hard it had been for him to live with that woman as long as he did.

If the McAlester butcher and the Spaulding farmer had not escaped the death sentence, they would have met their end in Old Sparky, Oklahoma’s venerable electric chair. Although I never saw it, by the time I was six I had developed a great respect for the power of that contrivance and considered it to be the ultimate bulwark against all kinds of evildoers.

It even ranked ahead of Mack Hardwick, the nightwatchman and usually the only person in town who openly packed a pistol. Still, the only time I can recall seeing him fire it was the night Lee Clayton’s barn burned down. We were at a dance in the American Legion’s building (a few doors to the north of the bank) when the crowd heard a commotion and rushed out to see Mack running down the sidewalk up in the next block and firing his pistol into the air as a sort of fire alarm.

Lee’s place was a block to the west and had a water tower beside the barn. By then the flames appeared to be reaching the wooden tank. Mack reloaded and fired several shots into the tank itself. It was fascinating to watch the streams squirting out the holes, but even as a six year old I wondered how any adult could think such a piddling amount of water would make any difference to the fire. It didn’t, of course, and Mr. Clayton later had the structures rebuilt. A lot of people suspected that young Billy Lee must have been sneaking a smoke in the barn (as they again warned us children about the dangers of smoking).

Possibly the most prevalent (but least punished) crime in Hughes County during the Twenties and Early Thirties was the manufacture of moonshine whiskey. As tenant farming collapsed and many eastern Oklahoma counties had more than half the population on welfare, it provided jobs for some people. If you couldn’t sell the corn you grew, you might convert it into whiskey and sell that. Any country home in need of paint that also had a well-worn dirt driveway leading around to the back porch was a likely outlet. I believe a quart could often be purchased for less than two dollars. I remember arguing with my father that a whole case of strawberry soda pop didn’t cost that much and tasted a whole lot better.

Bill Gaddy, a conscientious deputy sheriff, spent some of his time searching for stills, and after prohibition was abolished in other states, he was always on the look-out for unfamiliar cars that appeared to be riding unusually low on the tail end (as might be expected if they were carrying a trunk load of whiskey in from Kansas). Anyway, by late 1934 some bootleggers had grown tired on his interference, and one day when a carload of them encountered Bill’s Ford V8 on a country road, they set out to teach him a lesson. When they opened up with a machine gun, Bill headed toward Holdenville, hoping to outrun them. Meanwhile, he shot out his own rear window as he fired his pistol back at them. Once he was inside Holdenville, his pursuers broke off the chase and disappeared.

When he arrived back at the sheriff’s office, they counted twenty-two holes in the trunk of that sedan. No problem, his associates insisted. The fellows at the body shopcan fill in those holes and make it look like new. (In those days they were still using lead for that purpose rather than plastic, and such repairs could be expected to last for the life of the vehicle.)

As it turned out, there was a scheduling problem, and it affected our family. My father had arranged earlier to buy Bill’s car about two weeks from that date. (Bill thought he was justified in getting a new car every year so that he would always be prepared for incidents such as the one that had just occurred.) The fellow who was buying our old car was expecting to pick it up on that same day. Unfortunately, the body shop in Holdenville was behind in their work and wouldn’t even be able to start on Bill’s car for another two weeks. The buyers and the sellers finally reached an agreement whereby my father would take the Ford right then and have the body work done in Calvin (at Bill’s expense). The other person involved would take the Dodge from my father at that time as well. I presume everyone got paid on time.

There was still a minor problem. The body shop in Calvin also was unable to get to the job for another two weeks. Nevertheless, we could drive the car just as it was during that time and even later with the trunk lid off while they worked on it. What greater distinction could a seven-year-old boy hope for than to ride around town in such a famous vehicle that still carried on itself the evidence of a famous gunfight?

The other big event of my seventh year had nothing to do with crime, I suppose. One Sunday afternoon a car rolled into our front yard, and I rushed out to see who it could be. I could tell that Tommy Duncan, a popular singer, was driving, and in the passenger seat sat Bob Wills, the Father of Western Swing. They were on their way back to Tulsa after playing a Saturday night dance somewhere in that area. One of Wills’ trumpet players had been hanging around my stepmother’s sister Rachel since then, and they had swung by to reclaim him.

One morning in the mid Thirties the body of Harvey Bryant, a local barber, was found beside the railroad track with a caved-in skull. Among the prime suspects was another brother-in-law of Lee Clayton. It seems that he and an associate had lost big in a poker game with Harvey the evening before. The two claimed, of course, that Harvey looked well as he walked away from them and that they had been concerned to see a suspicious looking hobo in the vicinity. Fortunately for Ancil Huffman, Lee hired a hot-shot criminal lawyer from Oklahoma City who was able to convince the jury of the men’s innocence. Still, Ancil took no chances and left for California soon afterward. Whoever was guilty, it appears that Harvey would have been luckier if he had just lost the poker game.

Unfortunately, in March 1936 Bill Gaddy, the deputy, and Luke Chadwick, the constable, were not as cautious as Mack Hardwick had been during the 1931 bank robbery. Having identified a suspicious vehicle parked at Pogue’s cafe as belonging to Pete Traxler, a notorious bandit, they planned to capture him as he came out from eating supper. As it turned out, there were two other bad men with Traxler, and they quickly shot their way out of the ambush, leaving Bill with a broken arm and Luke with serious abdominal wounds, which he barely survived. Juanita, my first stepmother, had picked the wrong time to stop in for a snack and had to observe the shoot-out while lying prone on the floor of the cafe.

Unlike two of his brothers, my father was more likely to drink home brew than whiskey, especially when we made our own. We had a ten-gallon stone jar covered with a clean white cloth sitting on an old stove frame down in our cellar. It only took some malt (which George sold along with the other canned goods in his store), some sugar, some yeast, and some good well water (without chlorine, of course) to get the process going. A kerosene lamp below the jar helped. There was even a hygrometer to measure the density and tell us when it was time to stop the process and pour the mixture into bottles. My job was to put the bottle caps on. At six my ration was one six-ounce bottle a day, and I came to prefer it to soda pop most of the time.

All that ended when Roosevelt was elected and 3.2 beer could be bought in some restaurants. To me it just didn’t taste like real beer, however, and I went back to soda pop. Perhaps, legalization was what saved me from becoming a serious drinker.

Fortunately back then despite all the above crimes, most of the people in that town remained law-abiding even during the Great Depression, and there was usually no need for anyone to lock their house doors or remove the keys from their motor vehicle.