Description:
Iris Lochner tells the story of her life from the Dust Bowl to NASA.
Transcript:
Interviewee: Iris Lochner (IL)
Interviewer: Sheldon Beach (SB)
SB: Today is August 21, 2018 and I’m here in Edmond, Oklahoma with Iris Lochner and we’re just going to get your life story.
IL: Okay.
SB: So tell me a little about yourself. Where were you born and when?
IL: I was born at Liberal, Kansas because in those days Beaver County didn’t have a hospital. And most deliveries were in the home but they knew I was going to be a breech presentation. So it was the first part of November and my dad had decided to go back to school and finish up his degree in education over at Alva. He had started at Kansas University but had not finished. And so we knew that there was bad weather coming in. Back in the old days when we didn’t have, you know, all this stuff on TV, why the sheriffs and people like that from the northern United States, they would call ahead on telephone and tell people where the storms were coming in. And so, Dad, because he was going to start in school--he was a teacher’s assistant. And that was a pretty good job to have back in those days. Of course, he and his dad raised cattle and they also raised wheat. The first two years of my life were at Alva. In those days you only had seven months of school because of the way things were in those days. And so he got this job as a teacher’s assistant and then I spent my first two years of life in Alva while he finished his degree in education. And that was when times were getting pretty tough. The Dust Bowl was just starting to get started. Now my mother’s folks had come there and had homesteaded in 1902. They were from northern Missouri. They put all of their cattle and all of their furniture and farm equipment on a boxcar and the fathers and the older boys, they rode with the cattle there. They came down there they landed at Liberal, Kansas and we already had some of the family members living there in Beaver County. They sort of hovered around Floris, Oklahoma. Now that may not mean anything to you but later on I’ve got a story to tell about that. Anyway, they got into Liberal, all those family members that were already there down around Floris, old Floris, were there to meet them and they brought them down into the Oklahoma Panhandle which was really not a state, it didn’t belong to anybody at that time. They unloaded all of their equipment and came down into Oklahoma and there used to be a town called Floris between where Turpin and Forgan are now, it was about half way. That’s where my mother grew up. Her father died when she was eight years old, leaving her mother with her and two other daughters and her family to help her. My mother was cooking for harvest hands by the time she was nine years old. They lived in, what they had was a half dugout sod shanty and she was born in one of those, You don’t see those anymore but they were quite common back in that day. One of her friends growing up was one of the Munchkins, if you’ve ever seen the Wizard of Oz.
SB: Really?
IL: Yeah, I have the story about the Munchkins that tell all of that. And Hazel Derthick’s father had the store there at Floris, she was a midget, and she went to Hollywood. And guess what movie she was in. But that was something. And then also in that town…well that comes a little later. Mother was born there and her father died when she was seven years old. So, Grandmother Hutchins had quite a time trying to raise three daughters and Mother was cooking for harvest hands by the time she was nine years old.
Now my father’s family, my great grandfather, Elijah Rogers, was a major in the Home Guard of North Carolina during the Civil War, and they were quite prosperous. And my dad’s family came to the panhandle by way of North Carolina. His family had come to the United States in 1745. He served In the first war in the United States. They lived in western North Carolina and it’s not far from where that beautiful estate is there…
SB: The Biltmore?
IL: Yeah, Taylorsville is the name of the town where they…and you go there, the name Harrington is much more common than Jones or Smith or anything like that. Later on in years we went to Taylorsville and I can even see where I could see where my great grandfather who was in the Confederate army lived and at some point after the Civil War was settled, he sold, he was able to sell out. The house that he was living in, that he built and was living in was still there the last time I was through North Carolina. It’s north of where the big Biltmore is. It’s very interesting land, I mean it’s the only place I’ve ever been that Harrington is more common name than Smith or Jones. But that’s the way it was. I used to have a phone book from there. It’s true they were virtually all Harringtons there. I still have…my mother and father, when my dad retired from the state...he finally retired when he was 72. They did a history of the family and I have all that information together so that if my grandchildren are ever interested well, they have that. OK? So, both sides of my family homesteaded. My mother’s side of the family was out of Floris, my dad’s side of the family is in Forgan. I got this out in case you needed to see where Forgan was, it’s north of Beaver.
SB: Ok, it’s just right by the Kansas border?
IL: Uh huh, uh huh. Our north line, we’re on a draw. We’re three miles from the state line, four miles north of Forgan and half of the people used to be in my family, half of the people used to be related to me. It’s not that way anymore, but back in the dirty 30’s it was. My dad’s mother died when he was twelve and he ended up doing the farming because my grandfather, R.B. Harrington felt that he, he had two daughters, he felt like he had robbed his daughters of their mother because she died quite early. She just didn’t want she was to have a hysterectomy, she didn’t want to have it at the last minute and that was it. So, Dad finished as much high school in Forgan as he could. Then he went up to Wichita, and a distant aunt and uncle lived in Wichita and the winter Dad was sixteen he stayed with them and worked at the old Wolf cafeteria to pay his way. The next year he was going to go to Kansas State University but when he got on the train to go up there here was a friend of his and he was going to Kansas University so as a result my dad went to college there.
So then came the Dust Bowl days. I can still remember that dust blowing. From the time I was born in ’29 it deteriorated until the black blizzard of April 14, 1935. My dad was big and tall and the school board was looking for somebody who could manage the kids, the boys in particular. Cause we didn’t have the organized sports at that time like we have now. So dad finished his degree and his first place he worked as school superintendent was down at Vici. You know where Vici is?
SB: I do not.
IL: You know where Woodward is.
SB: Yes
IL: Ok. If you go two miles east of Woodward, then go straight down you come in to where Vici is. And Vici is still a school. And when I watch the weather, I always can see that. And he worked there, he was school superintendent there for two years. Well in those days, of course Oklahoma when it entered the union came in as a dry state. And of course, everybody had a still. He had to put up with that type of thing. And at the end of the second year as school superintendent in Vici, the school board said that he had better move because the bootleggers didn’t like him at all. Now we were a little bit more educated out at Forgan because we had Orb Cooley and he was the best bootlegger that they ever had. We didn’t have too many of my dad’s family living there but there was one, there was his father, and his father Robert Burette or RB as they called him, after his wife had died, he felt like he had stolen the mother away from his two young daughters who were younger than my dad. And so Dad was just sort of, if it hadn’t been for another teacher there, Mrs. Groves and her husband had some land right next to us there on the draw into the Cimarron River north of Forgan. Mrs. Groves not only saw it that he got to school and was taken care of but also she would cook for the hands who came in to threshed the wheat. That was the day before the combines. So we got the dust storms to start. It wasn’t too bad until about 32, and that’s when the storms really, people had gone one and done all this deep plowing, and of course the soil was very loose. And a little bit of breeze will start it up and you will have dust storms coming in. I very definitely remember the day of the Black Blizzard which was April 14, 1935 and we were out at Hardesty because my dad was school superintendent out there at one time. And when those blizzards came in and I remember that particular day because within 15 minutes you could not see your hand in front of your face.
SB: Wow.
IL: And the coyote and the jackrabbits in particular, now there are no jackrabbits left out there anymore. But they were a very tall rabbit and they had turmalenia , they eventually died out because of that. We used to have on Sundays afternoons after church, we used to go out and the people didn’t have money to buy bullets and stuff. Neighbors would surround a quarter of land with gunny sacks and they would chase those rabbits to the center and then they would just hit them over the head. And that’s the way they got rid of them. That was really something during the warmer weather was that you went and killed the jackrabbits. Then Dad, let’s see, the first two years Dad taught was down at Vici. He came back the next year and just taught and he taught things like typing and bookkeeping and all of that stuff there at the Forgan High School. That was when he got into politics.
SB: Before we get started with the politics can I ask real quick, what did you all do when the storms came in?
IL: We went to the cellar. And we had it set up so that old things like old blankets or covers or something like that, all the upholstered furniture we would cover with those because we couldn’t get the dust out of them very well so we would cover them and then we would have to take them outside and put them on the clothesline on clear days and get all the dirt out of the covers that we put on the furniture. It would just pile up when it was blowing like that it would just pile up in the corners. And of course, we didn’t have electricity then and it, we did have electricity at Vici, well Alva and Vici, but Forgan didn’t get electricity and then of course out on the ranch, which we were basically a ranch and everything. The dirt from the storms would just pile up in the corners and you would have to sweep it up with a broom. It was not a very nice life.
On April 14, 1935, we went to the storm cellar, we covered up the furniture. We had friends over from Forgan. They had a little boy that was a little younger than I was, and Dean and I played together a lot. And I can remember that particular storm. We were playing down in this little storm cellar underneath and we used to have little burners, they were little stoves and they were a blue cylinder with a flat top black and we could heat water on top of that and it would just get muddy. I mean it was that bad. We were down in the cellar that day and as I can say it got real cold as those storms came in. When we came back out, we didn’t really realize what the storm had done to us but the next morning there were dead jackrabbits, there were dead birds, there were dead coyotes that had died in trying to get away from that black blizzard, they called it the Black Blizzard. We sort of, we remember that very well.
Then eventually, well, so Dad got into the legislature in 1936. That was when Governor Marlin was serving his last two years in office. See it used to be a governor in Oklahoma only served for four years and then they couldn’t do anything ever again. It’s not like now and the legislature was only in session every other year, not every year and they sat around and twiddled their thumbs all year long.
SB: What was your dad’s name?
IL: Floyd Harrington. The next year he ran again and that’s when Red Phillips became governor. And Dad was his floor man; he was the one that pushed all the bills and stuff through for Governor Phillips.
SB: What made him get into politics; being a teacher did he just say something needs a change?
IL: Some, some…for some reason or other… well one thing at that time Forgan had the Cafky family living there and they had the bank down at Beaver and they had the first…and then they had the bank there at Forgan. My father did not know how to write a check or get a loan until after he retired from work at the state capitol. He would just, if he needed money, he’d just call John at the bank and tell him to put the money in his (laugh), I mean it was just wild. But that was about it.
And uh, then of course the dust bowl sort of started drying up. And uh at that time in 1940, see Dad had served two sessions in the House of Legislature in 1940 he ran the third time but he got beat. That was ok because he was already enrolled down at OU to get a master’s degree in accounting, which he did. And that was when WWII started. That was quite an era.
SB: Do you remember any interesting stories from when he was in the legislature; did he ever talk about anything like that?
IL: Well, I think one of the most interesting things; Dad had, as school superintendent there at Forgan, he was a disciplinarian; and two of the boys of the junior class in high school stole a tire and sold it for five dollars and split it so that each one of them had two dollars and fifty cents and they got caught. The one whose father had deserted the family, he was in the Lane family, and he went on into the Marines and he served forty years in the Marines. Coming back to Forgan but he married a girl from California, the whole bit. But the other one this was the T.D. Suttle, his father was the town tinkerer. He could fix anything. They played with radio, little crystal sets and stuff like that. So, Dad gave the two boys, and the Sheriff, gave the two boys their choice. Ok, so the Lane boy went into the Marines but T.D. went into the Navy. He was sixteen years old and his dad, being the town tinkerer, had always played around with radio sets. Ok, fast forward to December the 7th, 1941. Who is the guy in Pearl Harbor who alerted the world that the Japanese were doing that? It was T.D. Suttle, from Forgan, Oklahoma.
SB: Oh really.
IL: And he saw that one day of battle when he alerted the world of the fact that the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor. He…that was the one day he was under fire. The rest of the time all he did was bond drives, enlistment rolls, stuff like that. He served in the…he served as the nation’s hero in the Navy. And even after he came out of it, he worked on duty all over the world. Married a girl from New York City who had never seen a jackrabbit in her life and didn’t know what she was getting into when he half way through WWII he brought her back to Forgan and she had never used an outhouse. Which was most of the houses in Forgan at that time still had outhouses. And her stories that she tells about trying to go to the outhouse and a coyote yelling off in the distance and scaring the hell out of her (laugh) it was just hilarious. But then when he finished forty years in the Navy that’s when he went to work for the Post Office department and worked another twenty years.
SB: Well, where were you during WWII?
IL: We were at Oklahoma City in Edmond. We moved into Edmond on D-Day. We had an old Zenith portable radio with the battery because of the place where we bought, we had to end up and buy. We didn’t have the electricity turned on yet so we could listen to the invasion over that portable radio with the battery in it. And then we got the electricity turned on the next week and everything. But those were very strange times.
SB: What was it like in Oklahoma during WWII, because I know you were right in the middle of America but you still know there is a war going on?
IL: Oh, Oklahoma, the central Oklahoma became sort of the nation’s, uh well... In Edmond in particular because we had…we had four Navy bases down in Norman, Tinker Air Force base was being built and then some of the big airplane building people were moving into here and it was during WWII and it turned out one of Dad’s relatives was from up in Kansas he was a General for the Air Force when they started it. And so it was, you know, if you could find a chicken coop to rent you were doing good back in those days. But if when it was over, I can still remember we drove down into the city, they cordoned off the main part of Oklahoma City the downtown part and I can remember we got in the car and drove down here and then the next day you could buy gas. (Laugh) So everybody was filling up their tank with gas. Which they… see you only got four gallons a week unless it was something special. Even the highway patrol could only drive so far.
But Dad served two sessions there and then he went back to school. And he, he had served in the legislature with a doctor from over at Sallisaw. And he had become the assistant commissioner of health for the state of Oklahoma and so he’s the one that said “Floyd, I need you to come to work at the state health department. So, Dad took that job...just as a standby and twenty-seven years later he decided he wasn’t going to make a permanent job out of it. And so, he retired from that and then he went on over to the state capitol. And of course, the facts he’d served two terms in the legislature helped. And we kept our land out in Beaver County for a long, long time and one of my aunt’s husband did the farming but he was an alcoholic so that finally went by the wayside. And she worked at the hospital there in Beaver for over twenty years. The other sister’s husband worked at the...out at Los Alamoso, Colorado. There’s quite a veterans place active place but at that time it was a very active hospital for service men and now they use it for old solders and stuff like that there; it’s still functioning and that’s where my other bunch of cousins were. OK?
SB: So, after the war you were getting out of school and everything, did you go to college?
IL: I went to Oklahoma A&M College. I actually, the last year I was in, I only needed one class to finish up over here at Edmond High School, the old Edmond high school. So, I was going to take some fun classes and my father said “no, we’re living here where there’s a college you’re going…so I went to college in the morning and then I graduated in 1947. We were the largest class they’d ever had at Edmond, Oklahoma, 62 seniors. (Laughter).
SB: I believe it’s bigger than that now.
IL: Yes, just a little bit. But anyway, we used to still get together quite a little bit but there’s not many of us left. So, in fact we, and then even out at Forgan one of the kids that was in the class that I’d been in out at Forgan he died this last year too. His wife was two classes behind him. But, but my, I have a better than a sister, Pauline Hodges, and uh she and I have been best friends since we were seven years old. and she’s at Hefner Mansions over here she can’t drive anymore so I usually go over once a week and take her over to the liquor store and grocery store, all the essential things you know. And then we like to go to Full Circle bookstore a lot too. And of course, the second Thursday of every month we have to be down at the Full Circle bookstore because we, well, I just belong there. It’s interesting to see the people who come and go in those meetings.
And I after Frosty Troy died, well when his wife first died, we dated for a long time and then he had dementia. I married very terribly and moved back east, and my son Curt was born at Fort Wayne, Indiana at the Lutheran church, I mean Lutheran Hospital where I worked and when he was three years old, I decided that that marriage was for the birds. And if I got a, I found out that if I got a divorce in Indiana, I had no control over where my son would grow up. So, I managed to leave Fort Wayne, Indiana with my two-year old son, met my parents along the way and they brought me on back to Oklahoma. And I went to work for the State Health Department on a special grant that would provide help to the food services in small hospitals and nursing homes, and I became, that was quite a, quite a good chapter in my life and everything. I’d not remarried, and I still have a granddaughter and her mother that live here in Fort Wayne up at our bigger house which we had. And then we had, Mother and I had built this house for Curt, my son and he loved this house, but I made him move after she died. I didn’t want to rattle around in a four bedroom house. So, I made him move over there and so his wife and his daughter still live there. And then my grandson Kyle who is you know, my darling he married a girl, you won’t believe this. Now see his origins are from Beaver County, Forgan. And the girl that he married her family is from…they grew… they homesteaded half a mile from the Harrington’s and he, Kyle ended up marrying a great granddaughter of that family. And they were married last May. And if you ever want to go and have another wedding that place up in Guthrie is wonderful to have it in. So, and I don’t have any grand…I mean I don’t have any great grandchildren yet. As far as…he works for a catering company and they… he’s in…he actually is managing two sorority houses and uh and he sees that the girls get fed, I think both of them; are about 90 or 95 in each place. And he’s busy all the time. And my granddaughter Kendra she lives here with her mother and they’re back and forth and I’m trying to sell a house if you want a big house.
Does that give you kind of a taste of things?
SB: Yeah that’s uh.
IL: If you could imagine back before long ago during WWII we, we were just sort of isolated out there in the panhandle. Now Liberal, Kansas had a port there, it was an airport and we had…they brought in planes from all over that part of the country. And then of course that’s close to Boise City where they had the famous bombing.
SB: Yeah, do you remember when that happened? Did you hear about it?
IL: Oh yeah, oh yeah, in fact I think they still have the bombs there where they were dropped. But that was hilarious when…I mean it happened at a time when we really needed something to amuse us. That was just hilarious. They tried to get the…there was one of the pilots that were with them that dropped the bombs. They’ve tried to get them to come back to Boise City to do that, but they’ve never been able to get them to come.
SB: When did you hear about that? What was the story with that when you heard about it?
IL: It was during WWII. And uh they still had the bombs. The last time I went through Boise City we stopped to see and they still had the bomb shells there. They’re still standing outside at the county seat, well its where the courthouse is; it’s a square and you have to drive around it to get through the town.
SB: Yeah I remember hearing it. Wasn’t that the only time in WWII we were bombed?
IL: There was an airport and a training place down at just over the line, Dalhart I think it was close by. And needless to say those pilots were not, didn’t like to be reminded of it.
But the bomb shells were still there at the uh by the courthouse. And there’s that one little lady that as long as she lived, she went in and had a fit about those bombs. They wanted to put them in a museum; she wanted them out where people could see them. She finally died and the… I have a George, George Nigh joke about that because he got involved in it later on. (Laugh).
SB: Interesting. Sounds like you’ve had a pretty colorful life.
IL: Huh?
SB: Sounds like you’ve had a pretty colorful life.
IL: Well yeah, and uh it’s been a…well when I came back to Oklahoma in 1962 with Kyle, I had…I took this job with the State Health Department there were twenty-eight states in the United States that got extra money to get dieticians into small hospitals and nursing homes. It was quite an educational program that went on and I was with that uh three years and then it just grew into that and I ended being a consultant dietician and doing all sorts of things and stuff like that for a long, long time. I even was in business for myself on selling food, you know. And uh, then I in retirement and this would have been in the 80’s I went to work as chief dietician for mental health, and I had three hospitals and I had the six centers for that and I had, I was the chief dietician over all of that. And in those days, we had about 4000 patients. Now then there’s no place for mentally ill except the streets. So that makes it kind of bad.
SB: Before I forget, I want to ask, the person that put us in contact said that you had done, did you work on as a dietician with NASA?
IL: Uh-uh.
SB: What was that? What did you do there?
IL: Well, Stouffer Foods we had done, they had had me and I had done some special work for them about building hospital kitchens that were new and different and used more frozen foods and stuff like that. And so, I went to work for them. And a result of that I was hired to work Mission 11 down at NASA and I, my stipulations were I would not take any money but they would pay my room and board for me and my son. Kyle was elated that he could be at Mission, you know down there. And they did a mockup of the landing thing because they didn’t know whether those, they’d be able to get those guys to come out or not. But there’s the mockup (showing mockup) of the landing on the moon. And my son was there when it happened.
SB: Well, that’s really cool.
IL: Huh?
SB: That’s very cool.
IL: Well, the night of the mission before they came down out of the module to walk on the surface of the moon, because they didn’t know what was going to happen or what was going to be there. The people who had built the landing thing had no idea whether or not they’d be able to get that module up off the surface of the moon. The guys that built it was there at mission, at the main mission and the owner of that company paid my eleven or twelve-year old son to make sure that if they got a lift-off and could bring the module back that he would see to it that that guy had the biggest celebration that anybody ever had. And sure enough, here it was that my son was hired for a dollar an hour to sit there and make sure that guy’s wine glass never went empty. (Laugh) And there were some other children that were there too. The guy that owned the Vick’s cough thing he was there with his family so there were probably about half a dozen kids that were there in the room. And uh, you know the Japanese guys came through and tried to land, they had a mock-up of a suit they that they were wearing on the surface of the moon. They tried them on you know and stuff. It was a fan, I got to see Charles Kurault. It was just, it was just an unbelievable experience, that was all there was to it. And I still eat Stouffer foods.
IL: Is that sort of what you want to know?
SB: Yeah, that’s a great story. Well thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me.
IL: Well, you’re very welcome.
SB: I really appreciate that. And thanks for the coffee.
IL: Huh?
SB: Thanks for the coffee.
IL: OK