Description:
Carol Moody talks about her family, growing up during the Depression and World War II, and more.
Transcript:
Interviewer: Carol Moody.
Carol Moody: Mother.
Interviewer: A little bit about the interviewer, I was born in the 50’s so I’m a baby boomer and have been raised in a two-parent household with one brother. I now can’t be beat more than I should’ve been beaten.
Carol: By him or me?
Interviewer: Well, either one. He was never there to beat me, so you did the grunt work of raising two sons over 18 months apart during the Doctor Spock generation.
Carol: Yes.
Interviewer: So my hat’s off to you.
Carol: Thank you.
Interviewer: My children have been raised completely differently. I hope you don’t mind.
Carol: I thought you meant Jimmy had beaten you, your brother.
Interviewer: No, my brother, he beat me once and then we quit fighting. Okay, tell me a little bit about yourself because you had an interesting childhood, I know. I know more of it than your parent’s childhood so I’d like you to start maybe your first recollection of being a Fagerquist.
Carol: Okay well my first memory is, I think we lived on northeast 11th street and my first memory was bleeding. Mother was an invalid before I was born, I was her third child and I messed up her kidneys or something when I was born. Anyway, I remember going to her and crying because I had hurt myself. I think we lived in northeast 11th street and we moved by to 23rd and Francis probably not too long after that. I don’t know how old I was. It was during the Great Depression. I was the third child.
Interviewer: So your mother, Cleo was her name. Your father’s name was Edward Rosine Fagerquist and Cleo Nelson, what’s her middle name?
Carol: She didn’t have one.
Interviewer: I wouldn’t think so. I don’t know, so she was bedridden?
Carol: Yes for about three or four years after I was born.
Interviewer: So you had to be in-
Carol: I was the third breach.
Interviewer: So that meant you had to be young when you went to her like that. So did she have anybody there in the house taking care of her and you like your big sister?
Carol: Well Greta was almost 7 years older than me so she helped a lot and we had a maid named Hilda that was at our house a lot.
Interviewer: Hilda.
Carol: But we couldn’t afford her, but mother and daddy couldn’t afford her because it was the Depression, but they didn’t charge much because it was the Depression.
Interviewer: So that was, you were born in ‘35?
Carol: ‘34.
Interviewer: ‘34, so that was in, just before World War II when your first recollections happened. So it was the Depression not the Dust Bowl.
Carol: Well, I don’t remember much about the Dust Bowl.
Interviewer: Yes, well the Crash, was it ‘29? So you missed the beginnings of the Dust Bowl days, but you for some reason, and Cleo, stayed in Oklahoma rather than go to a different state?
Carol: Yes.
Interviewer: And they stayed in Oklahoma City?
Carol: Daddy Ed didn’t move to northeast 11th before I was born.
Interviewer: Right, northeast 11th and what? That’s kind of north of Bricktown.
Carol: 1436 northeast 11th, I remember that, but I don’t remember what street.
Interviewer: Tenth street is where the hospital is and it’s kind of northeast...
Carol: It’s a parking lot now for the hospital.
Interviewer: It’s pretty close to the hospital over there, University of Oklahoma, teaching hospital.
Carol: It was down by Hubbard Hospital, if you ever heard of that. It was a few blocks from there.
Interviewer: I think that is kind of close to where Frank Boggs used to live.
Carol: Is that right?
Interviewer: Yes okay, so what was he doing? She was an invalid, what was he doing?
Carol: Daddy Edward? He was painting. They married really young and had Greta. Then they had Edward and there was always a misunderstanding about his first name. Mother wanted to name him Frank after both great grandfathers and Daddy wanted to name him Finus after Uncle Finus, so they compromised and called him Edward. He ended up being Sonny.
Interviewer: Sonny, so what year were your parents married?
Carol: 1926.
Interviewer: ‘26, okay so that was before the Crash. And he was fatherless?
Carol: Yes.
Interviewer: And had a mother and a new stepfather?
Carol: No, he didn’t have a stepfather for several more years.
Interviewer: And had a mother and several more sisters and he went out on his own early on.
Carol: He had a brother that died when he was about a year old. Dwight, he was named after Dwight Moody.
Interviewer: Oh that’s a coincidence.
Carol: Yeah, he was an evangelist like Billy Graham is nowadays.
Interviewer: I heard of him, I think they have a shrine of him built in Galveston.
Carol: That’s another Moody. It’s Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.
Interviewer: Chicago, okay. Let’s see, well-
Carol: Dwight was killed when he was 13 in a bicycle accident.
Interviewer: Oh Dwight was older?
Carol: He was born in 1890 and he was 13 when he was killed.
Interviewer: And how old was Ed?
Carol: Daddy Edward was about one.
Interviewer: Okay so he never really knew his big brother.
Carol: No.
Interviewer: And killed in a bicycle accident.
Carol: And that’s the reason my Daddy never let us kids have bicycles. Also they couldn’t afford them.
Interviewer: Right.
Carol: Greta never had one, I had one when I was nine, but he softened up and I was the baby.
Interviewer: Okay, so they got married and Cleo, how did they meet? At the parade, right?
Carol: It was 89er’s Day, in 1926 and Daddy and Charles Brown, his look-alike, got off the street car. Mother and her sister, Sarah, went to different high schools and each one of them thought the other one knew these two good-looking guys that had hair.
Interviewer: Right, and was Ed 16 or 15?
Carol: He was 16, I think.
Interviewer: 14?
Carol: And Mother was 18.
Interviewer: But he was on his own at the time?
Carol: Well he lived with his mother at that time.
Interviewer: Oh he did? Okay.
Carol: And he was still going to school.
Interviewer: Still going to school.
Carol: He went to Classen, same place.
Interviewer: Said he graduated from high school?
Carol: No.
Interviewer: Because they got married instead.
Carol: Because they got married.
Interviewer: Didn’t they work at the railroad or something?
Carol: No, he always wanted to, remember he had the model railroad down at the garage?
Interviewer: Right.
Carol: His Aunt Alma and Uncle Clarence lived in a little Swedish colony in Colorado and he would go up there in the summers probably because his mother wanted to get rid of him. But he loved to go up there and Uncle Clarence was the post master- his name is Eckland, Swedish. They would hook the mail bag onto the hook and the train would go by real fast to grab it so that’s where he kind of got his love for railroads.
Interviewer: Right, okay.
Carol: And back then, the engineers would wave at you.
Interviewer: Right, so he went directly from a high school student to being married and started painting for somebody?
Carol: Yeah.
Interviewer: Let’s talk about his painting for a second since that interests me. Did he go work for a house painter at the beginning?
Carol: You know, I don’t know. I know he and Gerald Pearson worked together. I thought Gerald Pearson worked for him but I found out before Gerald died that they worked together.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Carol: And I don’t know who they worked for first.
Interviewer: But they had the-
Carol: They had to apprentice.
Interviewer: And they had to paint the deals.
Carol: Paint inside the closet for, how many years.
Interviewer: Well his father was an architect but I wonder if that was because he called himself an architect.
Carol: Right.
Interviewer: or because he got a degree.
Carol: He called himself an architect. Back in those days, you could write plans and you could build buildings. He did, he built.
Interviewer: So it’s just like, now you can just call yourself a builder if you can draw something and build it.
Carol: Yeah, my grandfather Fagerquist built several buildings in Oklahoma City and there’s an apartment I know of that we go by every day. It’s an office building now on 36th and Classen that he built. He was supposed to build something in Bricktown.
Interviewer: He built those things before he died and he died...?
Carol: 1919.
Interviewer: 1919.
Carol: And he moved to Ringling.
Interviewer: So he built something out on 36th, that seems like something way out in the country.
Carol: It was 36th and Classen.
Interviewer: 36th and Classen.
Carol: Maybe 34th.
Interviewer: And was there a streetcar at that time? At Classen probably.
Carol: Probably, I’m not real sure.
Interviewer: Electricity had been invented in the-
Carol: Yes it had been.
Interviewer: In the teens. Cleo, why was she in Oklahoma City when she was a farm girl?
Carol: Well, she was a farm girl in Alfalfa, Oklahoma. My grandmother had named the town Alfalfa when it came to the state. It was Boise, Oklahoma territory and my grandma and grandfather Nelson were married in 1903 before it was a state. Granddaddy Nelson was the post master in Boise, Oklahoma and then it became a state. They could not have two Boises in Oklahoma, there was one in the Panhandle.
Interviewer: It couldn’t be Boise and the other be Boisee.
Carol: Yeah.
Interviewer: Couldn’t do it that way.
Carol: Well, one was in Caddo County and the other was out in the Panhandle, so they had to change the name of this little town. Boise in Caddo County, so Grandpa Nelson was the post master and my grandma was looking out the window and saw alfalfa growing. She said “How about Alfalfa?” and so he turned that in and that’s the name of it and that’s in Caddo County.
Interviewer: And is Bill Murray from around there?
Carol: No, he’s from Tishomingo, Alfalfa Bill yeah.
Interviewer: Yes, Alfalfa Bill. How did she get to Oklahoma City?
Carol: Oh mother was a farm girl and she and her brother went to high school in Carnegie and she loved it. But in 1924, Glen was her older brother and he had been wrestling and had a mat burn or something. He ended up dying of blood poisoning when he was in 1924 and he was born in 1906, so 17 or 18.
Interviewer: Right.
Carol: It devastated the family. Also my grandfather was a farmer in Alfalfa and he had a very bad heart. That coupled with losing his son. Devastated him, then he ended up in bed a lot and I wondered if maybe I didn’t inherit his heart disease. I don’t know because I had a valve problem. So they sold the farm and went to Oklahoma City when mother was a junior or senior and she went to Central High School. Daddy went to Classen. They had just recently changed Classen to a senior high. In fact, he went to Harding as a junior. The kids all went to Harding in Classen.
Interviewer: So where was their place?
Carol: The Nelsons? Well Annalita went to Roosevelt, so it would be about 10th street. Roosevelt is the board of education now.
Interviewer: Oh.
Carol: 10th and Klein, it would be a little numbered street.
Interviewer: So the high schools, I wonder how many kids they had in the high schools at the time.
Carol: I don’t know, because mother went to Central and then daddy went to Classen.
Interviewer: Which one was bigger, newer?
Carol: Classen was a lot newer.
Interviewer: Which is now a southwestern bell building.
Carol: Well, Central is.
Interviewer: And Classen is for advanced studies.
Carol: And all of us kids went to Harding and Classen. I’m talking about my siblings.
Interviewer: Right, and when you went to Harding, you lived?
Carol: At 23rd and Francis.
Interviewer: And Harding is at?
Carol: 33rd and Shartel. Now, we could walk but we could also ride the bus, but we could also miss the bus and say “Mother, we missed the bus!”
Interviewer: To digress a little bit, if you and I had lived one block south, I would have gone to Harding.
Carol: That’s right.
Interviewer: We Luther Bohanan decided that we had to reshuffle the deck.
Carol: That’s right, when we lived on 79th.
Interviewer: And it was just a junior high school. So Cleo and Ed, they got married and he started painting.
Carol: And they had Greta and then they had Sonny and then my favorite story about him other than the houses. Because he went on to paint.
Carol: Murals.
Interviewer: Murals in mega houses and Supreme Court buildings.
Carol: Oh yes, and Gold Leaf I remember that.
Interviewer: He was a true artist, artisan. But for extra money, I don’t know if it was a full-time job, was painting Model-As and Model Ts.
Carol: I kind of forgotten about that, yeah he painted a lot of cars. I think he said he used to paint Cleo’s relatives’ cars.
Interviewer: Oh yeah.
Carol: And a lot of times, they lived with us.
Interviewer: Oh okay.
Carol: They could come up from Carnegie or Alfalfa because of the Depression.
Interviewer: Yeah, they could live cheaper.
Carol: With us now, I don’t know how we managed that because it was a two-bedroom house and Grandma lived with us.
Interviewer: Well he hand-painted the cars for a dollar a car.
Carol: Oh you knew that? I don’t remember that.
Interviewer: Yeah, story Jimmy had told me, I mean that’s about the only way I would go about painting a car, by brushing it.
Carol: Yeah.
Interviewer: So he went to World War II, that happened. He had already had a family.
Carol: Three children.
Interviewer: So they didn’t make him 1A, they just join the service and paint dormitories for the troops, right?
Carol: No, I think it was just an infantryman.
Interviewer: Oh he was an infantryman?
Carol: He was stationed at Camp Hood and they changed the name to Fort Hood in Texas.
Interviewer: Oh okay.
Carol: And they said that Jimmy Fiddler and somebody said that Germany had concentration camps and the United States had Camp Hood. But it was, pardon the expression, a hell hole. It was a lot and you know, no air conditioning.
Interviewer: Yeah, supposedly I heard somebody say that it’s one of the largest government bases in square miles.
Carol: It could be.
Interviewer: Yeah it just goes on forever. So he was down there...
Carol: Yeah.
Interviewer: In infantry, but why didn’t he go overseas?
Carol: Well, they sent him to Fort Meade Maryland and that was the dropping off, you know, dropping off spot to go to.. He wouldn’t have been the first wave of D-Day but later on, he got out on a medical- mother was sick. Cleo was sick.
Interviewer: Which is a recurring theme in your story.
Carol: Yeah, if he had been overseas, it wouldn’t have done any good. But anyways, he got out on a hardship.
Interviewer: What year do you think that was?
Carol: 1944.
Interviewer: Oh, ‘44.
Carol: And D-Day had happened in June.
Interviewer: So how long was he in the infantry?
Carol: Just six months. I can remember his serial number.
Interviewer: So he did basic training.
Carol: He was sent to Fort Hood and somebody pulled him out of the infantry and had him send messages, run messages back and forth before email. I didn’t know whether it was just providential or whether somebody noticed he had three children and tried to get him from being sent overseas, but he was only 34.
Interviewer: Yeah, but he was a private.
Carol: Yeah, the reason he was drafted.
Interviewer: So he got drafted.
Carol: Yeah, and he would call it “Dit-Dot” at the time, it was Morse Code, but they called it “Dit-Dot” back then, not “Dot-Dash” like you’ve heard. But he did that, he could communicate with people.
Interviewer: So when Pearl Harbor hit, he wasn’t one to say “By God, I’m going. You can’t stop me. I have three kids” as a pragmatist.
Carol: No, he didn’t.
Interviewer: He didn’t say that.
Carol: He didn’t volunteer.
Interviewer: Well he wasn’t 18 either.
Carol: No, well. He was born in 1910 so he was 31.
Interviewer: 31 with three kids. I can see how that would curb your enthusiasm for going over and kicking butt.
Carol: Right, I remember when I heard the speech that President Roosevelt gave the day after Pearl Harbor, the day that would live in infamy, and I asked my mother, “What does ‘declare war’ mean?” That’s one of my early memories, so she told me.
Interviewer: Yeah, that’s early. That’s a good one. I remember, to digress, when it comes to war, your parents, you know how they used to have always a brand new car in the driveway.
Carol: yes.
Interviewer: The top of the line TV and so I got to watch the Vietnam War in color.
Carol: That’s right, they had the first television on the block. The neighbors would come over. In those days, you didn’t lock your doors, and so when I would come home at night, maybe the whole neighborhood would be sitting there at night watching TV.
Interviewer: And then when there’s an OU game going on, there it was on the TV. Was OU televised in the 60s?
Carol: It would be the 50s, I guess.
Interviewer: Yes, I’m talking colored television.
Carol: Yes, well I remember Jimmy, your brother Jim, sitting in the bathtub one time and saying, “Mom, I want to go to Meemaw and see the little green men.” And I said, “What?” and he said, “Yeah, you know the little green men at Meemaw and Pawpaw’s?” And I said, “What do you mean?” Brother was always afraid of little green men under the bed and he said, “You know, on the TV, the little green men.” That was before you could tune color in really good and the people looked green. So finally, we figured that one out, little green men.
Interviewer: Yeah, when the Vietnam War heated up, in the mid 60s, and colored TV came out, I was 10 and it was a little different than watching John Wayne in No Blood to go from No Blood to the real thing.
Carol: Yeah, I don’t like to watch that series they have on World War II. Ken Burns, because they use real blood.
Interviewer: The new Ken Burns?
Carol: Many of them.
Interviewer: Band of Brothers?
Carol: Any of the more recent ones, they used blood. You could see the blood and I didn’t like to see that. I can remember my mother taking me to the movies when I was little. It was Gunga din, Tyrone Power and Sam Jaffe. He was a doctor in some hospital program when you were young and mother said, “Oh the blood in this movie was just ketchup.” My brother and sister were in school and she had to take me and have babysitters in those days so anyways, I always remembered.
Interviewer: So Cleo, I’m trying to figure out how you all made it to Arkansas. That’s why I thought he was painting barracks there.
Carol: That’s right.
Interviewer: He was painting barracks but that was just a regular contract.
Carol: He worked for Ben Wittberg, he was another Swedish painter. So when the war started, the painting industry revved up and Mr. Wittberg had contracts in Arkansas.
Interviewer: And he mentioned something about mixing up white paint and a 55-gallon barrel, that sounded like a fun job for a beginner.
Carol: Yeah, I remember we lived in Stuttgart, Arkansas, I mean, daddy was working in Stuttgart. It was a glider base, you know the gliders that they had on D-Day.
Interviewer: Oh, the surveillance?
Carol: No, men rode in them and when they got out, they were probably killed immediately.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Carol: And we couldn’t find a house in Stuttgart, Arkansas so we went down the road a peace and kept going and kept going and we found a little town called Clarendon in White River.
Interviewer: Greta fell in love and got immediately pregnant.
Carol: No. I mean two or three years. Greta fell in love, she was 15 and he was 16. Maybe he was 18. He was 17.
Interviewer: Did Paul know everything then? I’m sure he was even more informed now.
Carol: Then we moved to Little Rock and he joined the Navy before he graduated from high school in 1943. He didn’t graduate from high school but he did get a college degree.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Carol: He was stationed in Norman, Oklahoma at the Navy base there, but we were in Little Rock. So anyways, she would write him letters and they weren’t too romantic or anything, but when- oh, and she was dating another guy that was stationed in Norman. So she had broken up with him and he kept calling her from the west coast and Greta would hang up on this boy she broke up with. So one time Paul called from Arkansas and she knew that was Paul, so she talked to him and he came to see us. I’m thinking about January, and they were married in March. She was an old lady of 18 and it was his 21st birthday and they have been married for 61 years, I think.
Interviewer: We don’t allow no divorces in our family.
Carol: No, nobody. Not mother or daddy.
Interviewer: Even if we ought to be divorced, we don’t allow it.
Carol: Mother and daddy were married at 16 and 18 and they were only married for 68 years.
Interviewer: Yes, well.
Carol: One of them died and the other one died of a broken heart a few months later.
Interviewer: Yeah, that’s the end of the story. Not necessarily the end, but yeah. So they moved back and he started contracting and his son, Sonny, probably chipped off... a whole lot like his son. He was accident-prone, right?
Carol: Oh yes. Mother had a standing appointment at the emergency room for Sonny.
Interviewer: Treehouses and saws and stuff like that.
Carol: Yeah, he built things all the time.
Interviewer: And he’s still probably building things out about now.
Carol: He’s out in New Mexico still building things.
Interviewer: And so he went to work for his dad and that would be when he got out of the service I guess.
Carol: Yeah, he was in the service twice. Once when he was 16 and then he got out and then he went back and when he was in the reserve, they called him in during the Korean War. So he was married to Billy by then, he was 19 when he married Billy and they were only married for 52 years. Of course, Billy died, Billy is a girl.
Interviewer: And then by that time, the painting business was kind of like being in the oil business, right?
Carol: Right.
Interviewer: You would use oil paint if you were organized and if you had crews, you would make some money out of it.
Carol: I remember one time, Daddy had lead poisoning.
Interviewer: Oh, I was going to ask you about the lead poisoning.
Carol: From lead based...
Interviewer: Because there’s probably a point in time when he probably did more of it and did a lot rather than supervising.
Carol: Right.
Interviewer: Back in the day, they had wooden floors that had to be brand new wooden oak floors that they filled with some kind of filler.
Carol: And he enjoyed painting.
Interviewer: Then they would wipe the wooden filler off when it was still wet with rags soaked in gasoline, and that’s how you’d get lead poisoning being on your knees and being-
Carol: On the paint.
Man: -So I was surprised when he died in his 80s that he had all his faculties.
Carol: Had lived, right.
Interviewer: He didn’t put up with much.
Carol: No.
Interviewer: At that point in his life.
Carol: He was very opinionated.
Interviewer: But he was. There wasn’t any sign of-
Carol: Senility? No, he died because he was so lonesome for Cleo, my mother, and he was having heart problems and they cardioverted him at the VA hospital. Anyway, one time, I’m not sure whether he had a stroke or how he died, but he died in the VA.
Interviewer: Right, I mean he was miserable.
Carol: But he was depressed because he lost his Cleo.
Interviewer: Well, and she had died in the nursing home or in the hospital, but she had been in the nursing home.
Carol: Yeah, she had a stroke and Greta wanted to go to Washington to visit one of her sons, Washington state, and then she put mother in a nursing home because Greta and I went down there every day. I wasn’t working and she wasn’t working so we would go down there and take our mother every day when she got home from the hospital. She lived two years after the stroke and then she had another one, the big one, and she lived about nine days after that. She always had heart trouble, but he was in a come for nine days and that hold heart just kept beating.
Interviewer: But she, like we said earlier, had a lot of health problems. But she was hit from behind in a car in her 50s.
Carol: Yeah, and I was with her.
Interviewer: And you were with her and had a whiplash injury.
Carol: And wore a neck brace.
Interviewer: And she had the very first fuse neck brace.
Carol: One of the first ones.
Interviewer: Well one of the experimental fusions and lived pretty well, disabled because of that, but she was still kicking butt if you did the wrong thing.
Carol: She was in a Pontiac Catalina before they fastened the seats. Daddy always had a new car and now they fasten the seats down so it doesn’t go up and hit in between the shoulders.
Interviewer: Right.
Carol: But she lived, well that was in ‘52 and she lived until ‘94.
Interviewer: Yeah, so many years with and without the neck brace.
Carol: Yeah, right.
Interviewer: She would go on Caribbean cruises.
Carol: Right, that’s right. You remember.
Interviewer: With her stole on and that always made me say, “Painting is not such a bad way to live if you can board one of those ships.”
Carol: Oh, I know it. And the person that did her fusion was daddy’s brother-in-law at Bone and Joint. Elias Margo, Aunt Caroline was married to Elias Margo.
Interviewer: Let’s see, before we delve off into relatives and relatives.
Carol: Okay.
Interviewer: So Sonny and him are partners eventually.
Carol: Right.
Interviewer: How long did technically the partnership last?
Carol: I don’t remember. They didn’t get along after a while and I don’t remember whether it was Sonny or Ed, same person, or I don’t know what happened, but they dropped everything.
Interviewer: They decided to split the blanket.
Carol: Split everything and her three children had moved to New Mexico.
Interviewer: Right. That’s a whole ‘nother chapter and then Ed slowed down at that point? Or did he-
Carol: No, he was always remodeling something.
Interviewer: He always had some guys.
Carol: The lodge at Red River.
Interviewer: No, not Sonny. Ed, his painting business had-
Carol: Oh Edward Rosine.
Interviewer: His painting business had stayed up and steady.
Carol: See, that was in-
Interviewer: ‘68.
Carol: ‘69, no he worked until-
Interviewer: No he worked until his 70s.
Carol: Yeah, he was in his 70s.
Interviewer: And what he had did was touch up the houses that he had painted.
Carol: 20 years.
Interviewer: 20 or 40 years old.
Carol: Lewis Mooch would come in here and we would talk computing with Diane, one of our tech people here in the Village Library, and he worshipped the ground that my daddy walked on. I said, “Well, you really kind of tippled it a little bit,” and he said, “Not that much” or “He was great” Then, he trained a lot of painters, you know, apprentices. Johnny Underwood and Lewis, and then after World War II, he taught classes and that's where he met Johnny and Lewis.
Interviewer: And he always tried to unionize.
Carol: No.
Interviewer: Not unionize painting but get certification.
Carol: He didn’t like the union.
Interviewer: Yeah, but he was probably in a union at one time or another.
Carol: Yeah, he may have been. He was a master painter, they called him, because he passed everything.
Interviewer: Yeah, all the way because usually, unions have all the hierarchy.
Carol: He always said that the stewards of the union would always be crawling. Daddy would be on the inside painting and the union painters would be on the outside and they were always crawling inside to see what was going on. He didn’t really care much for union painters.
Interviewer: Well, I know your father and I share one thing. Once you start the job, you get going and why take a break unless you got to go to the bathroom.
Carol: Yeah.
Interviewer: Or smoke cigarettes and then “Let’s go home early!” But then, at the union, 8 o’clock start, 10 o’clock you have a break and if you got to take 15 minutes, then that’s really hard to start and be going and then just stop because it’s 10 o’clock, so I understand.
Carol: And start one up.
Interviewer: Because, you know, you are always thinking “I can’t start this door, I’m going to have a break in 15 minutes.” So at the union, sometimes you are your own worst enemies and I was a member of one.
Carol: The teachers’ union, yeah.
Interviewer: So he was an OU fan and Cleo was an OU fan. I remember talking about stories about driving to Norman on what? Highway 77?
Carol: 77.
Interviewer: And it would take, because it was a gravel or whatever, it would take all day and all night just to get there. I mean, we would leave early and change, fix flats on the way down there.
Carol: Oh, that was before the OU days.
Interviewer: Oh, so they would drive to Norman for other reasons.
Carol: Well, he would drive to Ringling to see Aunt Margaret and they would have to cross the rivers on a dry river bed.
Interviewer: So no bridges.
Carol: There weren’t any bridges and there wasn’t any water in rivers anyway, so he would cross, there would be crossings and so the WPA built the bridges in the 30s.
Interviewer: And he never did anything for the WPA probably.
Carol: No, and Greta was little when they would go down to Ringland to see Aunt Margaret and Uncle Finus.
Interviewer: Well, I remember distinctly stories about OU and driving back from Norman.
Carol: This was later on.
Interviewer: And it would take us nothing about.
Carol: That might have been the traffic.
Interviewer: Yeah, could’ve been.
Carol: It was before I-35, way before the I-35.
Interviewer: Highway 77, back then. One lane or two lanes. How much time do we have? When is it one hour?
Carol: Wow, there was also the football road. It was Western, we would go down Western and then turn east to some place.
Interviewer: So Western was the football road?
Carol: The other football road.
Interviewer: And they had lived right next to, eventually lived next-door to the Split-T.
Carol: Right, that’s right. The Split-T was about two blocks from their house and then they had a creek behind our house. It was called Brookhaven. Then the builder had dammed it up, the developer had dammed it up. So we moved there when I was 15, Ed was 17, and Greta was already married and we had a rowboat and we would get in the rowboat and drive, oar-
Interviewer: Row.
Carol: -Paddle clear up to the shallow part of the creek. We couldn’t get to Belle Isles, it was too rocky.
Interviewer: But you lived right there, near the Belle Isle plant?
Carol: Near the shopping center, yeah. We were right down from the plant.
Interviewer: In the shadow of that electrical plant, which also was the site of all the amusement park.
Carol: Right, they used to go to the amusement park.
Interviewer: And was the amusement park still there when you all moved there?
Carol: No, it was a lake, Bell Isle lake.
Interviewer: Right.
Carol: And they would tell the stories about going swimming in there about the Aunt Sarah dived off the diving board and the lifeguard was too busy doing something while mother Cleao had to go save her sister.
Interviewer: Well, they had met, speaking of making this interesting, in Belle Isle with the night life there. I just heard on NPR a story that this guy wrote, he researched Oklahoma’s gay stuff. You know, all the history, and it mentioned some people that I remember like Harris, what’s his name, the DA back then?
Carol: Oh, Curtis Harris?
Interviewer: Curtis Harris and how just as the rest of the country was getting more liberal towards alternative lifestyles, Curtis Harris was voted in and one of the main things that he did wasn’t just liquor by the drink or bootleggers, it was getting rid of all the gay hangouts.
Carol: Oh okay, I got that. That’s interesting.
Interviewer: I think he wrote a book. He’s an OU professor. I guess the guy’s probably gay. He was an expert on things like the Tinker Field. It was wild in Oklahoma City back in the day.
Carol: I didn’t realize that.
Interviewer: Well not to gay, but prostitutes and things that your parents are trying to protect you from.
Carol: Yeah, and they did because I don’t remember anything like that.
Interviewer: I remember when they changed the name to Tinker Air Force Base from Tinker Field.
Carol: It was named after Clarence Tinker, that was an Indian killed in World War II.
Interviewer: Name a rock-star from the 50s that recorded one of his hits at Tinker Field in the officer’s club.
Carol: I was going to say the Beatles, that used to always work before.
Interviewer: It’s got to be the 50s. Influence on the Beatles.
Carol: Well, the guy that lives in Tulsa?
Interviewer: They made a famous movie out of him.
Carol: Elton John?
Interviewer: No, Buddy Holly.
Carol: Oh okay.
Interviewer: From Lubbock, Texas. For some reason, they were passing through Oklahoma City and recorded one of his songs.
Carol: Oh, is that right? I’ve seen the Buddy Holly story but I don’t remember that.
Interviewer: Yeah, I don’t think they mentioned the Tinker Field. So Cleo was into real estate, but her health kept her.
Carol: Yeah, she was a real estate-
Interviewer: -Broker.
Carol: -Broker.
Interviewer: But Ed was kind of conservative. She wanted to invest in real estate and he wanted to invest in Stag beer.
Carol: That’s right, you remember them well, the progress.
Interviewer: You know, Edward would say, “Oh, if I let her invest in real estate, we would be rich by now.”
Carol: Yeah, and she wanted to buy houses and have him fix them up and he wouldn’t do it. He was too conservative.
Interviewer: Well, he may not have wanted to work for his wife either.
Carol: With his money, that’s true. That was back in the days when ladies stayed home and took care of the kids.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Carol: But then later on, she got the real estate license and ventured out on her own.
Interviewer: Well, and they did a lot of traveling when they could but they had a little trailer, the Zero Scotty.
Carol: Oh that tiny little trailer and they would go down to Galveston and I think every winter they went to Galveston and they even went to, I can’t remember where, they went. Daddy always wanted to live in Washington state, the state of Washington. One of his grandsons lived there until just recently now.
Interviewer: See, you all traveled a lot growing up.
Carol: Yes, we went to Colorado a lot and we went to California twice. I believe mother had two sisters out there just after World War II so we would go see them and it was on Route 66. It wasn’t I-40 then.
Interviewer: And so you made it. Did you go all the way to Santa Monica? Remember that? Making it to the end of Route 66?
Carol: We went to San Francisco one time and we went to Los Angeles one time, but of course that in 1948.
Interviewer: But Santa Monica’s west of Los Angeles, the end of the pier, I guess.
Carol: We went on a boat to Catalina Island.
Interviewer: Yeah, which I think is near there.
Carol: Santa Catalina, I was either 13 or 14.
Interviewer: Right.
Carol: It was a couple years ago.
Interviewer: No air-conditioning, highways.
Carol: No, it was a 4 windows down.
Interviewer: 4WD, yeah 60.
Carol: They got a air-conditioned car when it first came out. Daddy was always getting new cars.
Interviewer: And they’re also friends with Jackie Cooper from Yukon.
Carol: Oh yeah.
Interviewer: So they would drive cars to Florida and fly back.
Carol: Jackie Cooper would have them deliver cars.
Interviewer: And he had a Ford Econoline that he liked, maybe because Jackie Cooper liked Oldsmobiles. Those are the days, right.
Carol: Yeah, I think he liked Oldsmobile before Jackie Cooper.
Interviewer: Oh, he did?
Carol: Because he bought a Pontiac, and he had something else before then.
Interviewer: And he had Cadillacs.
Carol: Yeah, he got the first Pontiac right after World War II, it was a 1946 Pontiac and he got that brand new and he switched to Oldsmobiles later on, but he liked General Motors products. I think he had a Buick too.
Interviewer: Yeah, and that’s why he and I couldn’t talk General Motor cars because I hated them by the time. It was an obvious thing.
Carol: You had a lot.
Interviewer: Good stuff.
Carol: You had a Volvo and nobody else had a Swedish-made car.
Interviewer: Yeah, it was a piece of junk too.
Carol: Was it?
Interviewer: I remember how much it cost to fix it.
Carol: Because there had not been any dealers.
Interviewer: Well, let’s see what else. Tell us about whose idea it was to build a hole in the backyard and hand dig a swimming pool for the grandkids?
Carol: I guess it was Daddy’s. There wasn’t any too much to dig because their house went back to the backyard and then there was a hill down at the creek so Paul was in on it, my brother-in-law.
Interviewer: And your husband.
Carol: And Daddy.
Interviewer: We left your husband out of this whole discussion. We’ll talk about them some other time.
Carol: Yeah, this is Fagerquist and Nelson, not Moody’s. They dug the swimming pool and it wasn’t very deep.
Interviewer: No, there’s scars all over Oklahoma City, from kids who have dove in when they shouldn’t have been diving.
Carol: That’s right, they made it out of concrete blocks and then they paved over it with-
Interviewer: Plastered over it.
Carol: And then they had flagstone around.
Interviewer: And when you wanted to empty it, you just went back in the back and-
Carol: Turn on the valve.
Interviewer: Turn the valve and emptied into Deep Fort Creek.
Carol: Into the Creek and they didn’t have a filter so they emptied it once in a while. They really didn’t have that much water because it wasn’t that big.
Interviewer: It would take about, depending on what the water pressure was, a couple days to fill it up.
Carol: And you kids all learned how to swim when you were-
Interviewer: -Two.
Carol: Yeah.
Interviewer: We had to and we also learned how to try to drown the siblings too.
Carol: Right.
Interviewer: And so you had to learn how to swim so you wouldn’t drown.
Carol: Mother and Daddy put this rope on the corner for the little kids to stay in the corner where the steps were, but we finally threw it away once the little kids all knew how to swim. I think Kim was the best, wasn’t she? Your cousin at your age.
Interviewer: Yeah, and every contest that could be had was in that swimming pool. That backyard.
Carol: Yes, I can remember everyone, all the young men, boys, standing on the pool to see how far they could-
Interviewer: And what about the time when I had, it seemed like $100 worth of fireworks in a bag, but it was probably $10 worth.
Carol: It would be about $100 now.
Interviewer: And we had been setting off fireworks down at the Creek and right back up to the back porch, flagstone back porch.
Carol: Oh and a little pump.
Interviewer: I took the pump, I didn’t know it pumped. They may have been off. I put it in the sack and the next thing you know-
Carol: I kind of forgotten about that.
Interviewer: -Exploded, and it was the same year Wedgewood...
Carol: Yeah, remember when we went to see the fireworks at Wedgewood? The first rocket landed and tall the rest of them. We had spent the whole afternoon at Wedgewood waiting for the fireworks show and they blew off the first rocket and everything else blew up, but no one was hurt like the more recent ones.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Carol: Fireworks and explosions.
Interviewer: Well, at Wedgewood, they had a swimming pool. Did you ever take a swim in there?
Carol: I think so, Wedgewood started out on May Avenue and then they opened-
Interviewer: Northwest.
Carol: Northwest highway. I’m sure I have taken you there, used to go there at Spring Lake. It was an amusement park.
Interviewer: I think once your parents had a swimming pool, that was like “Why pay?”
Carol: And your friends would come. Remember your, I have a picture of your birthday party with Bobby Eskridge and Jimmy Sammus.
Interviewer: And then we would say, “Why can’t we eat at Johnny’s, I mean Split-T?”
Carol: Split T. Johnny was the manager.
Interviewer: Johnny was the manager and we would go in and look at the prices, that’s why.
Carol: Well, we did every once in a while.
Interviewer: Yeah, I remember it was okay.
Carol: Yeah, Split T was what, two blocks?
Interviewer: And we just lived about two or three miles away and it seemed like it was too far to walk. When it was hot enough to swim, it was too hot to walk. It was too dangerous to ride bikes because there’s no sidewalks.
Carol: Western was busy. Mother and Daddy lived on 55th and we lived on 79th, which is a block north of Wilshire, but you didn’t ride bicycles back and forth, it was too busy.
Interviewer: Yeah, now the whole block area is Chesapeake Energy company.
Carol: Where we lived?
Interviewer: Well I mean across the way, starting at the creek going north.
Carol: Speaking of Chesapeake, when my grandfather died in 1919, he left my grandmother, the Fagerquist side, the Swedish side, he left my grandmother very well-off with insurance and palms and everything. They lived in Ringling and he bought two house in Oklahoma City and had them built by Mr. Edwin. But anyways, she got gipped out of her money by this old Swede, Mr. Edwin. I don’t know how he could never know about the mineral rights in Arkansas. My grandfather had bought this land in Arkansas in 1906, which would be two years before statehood. He lived in Shawnee and he bought it from a Swede from Moline, Illinois. That's where my grandparents had gotten married. My grandfather was born in Sweden and my grandmother was born in Rock Island, Illinois. Anyway, he had some time or another, bought this land in Arkansas and recently I got a $10,000 bonus for the mineral rights and there’s 10 of us cousins that got about that much from Chesapeake.
Interviewer: 10 of them? I thought there was just 8 of them.
Carol: Well, the heirs. There are three dead so there are heirs. I got more than Clem did because he was one of four, but I guess you better finish up, it’s getting kind of late.
Interviewer: Yeah it’s getting late. If I was going to write a novel and Ed and Cleo were going to be a part of it, I know there are some colorful characters that he worked with. Didn’t they meet Pretty Boy Floyd or Dillinger? There’s some kind of story there.
Carol: I don’t remember, he was killed a year I was born. Machine Gun Kelly or one of them.
Interviewer: Machine Gun Kelly, I think there’s something there.
Carol: I don’t remember that one.
Interviewer: I tried to read McMurtry’s, Pretty Boy Floyd. I couldn’t get past the first chapter.
Carol: Yeah, I was born in the era of gangsters and you know, we were a dry state when your dad and I got married. We had the reception in Mother and Daddy’s, Ed and Cleo’s, backyard. You could call on the phone and the bootlegger would deliver you whatever you ordered in a few minutes and your dad’s family were teetotalers and I remember Billy, my sister-in-law, was laughing because she ran into Uncle Flynn on the way to meet the bootleggers and he didn’t know the punch was spiked.
Interviewer: I was thinking about this today, and we will close with this story, I know your father liked detective magazines.
Carol: Oh yes, I forgot that.
Interviewer: And at first, as a young man, I thought it was because of the sexy covers or whatever but now that I get older and I’m reading fine novels, detective novels, I understand that he was actually reading and enjoying the life of crime without actually having to be a criminal.
Carol: Yeah.
Interviewer: We’ll talk about Eddie Gaylord and how he is a criminal and he’s the only person that cheated my grandfather that we know about later. The oldest Gaylord.
Carol: Because Daddy used to paint their houses.
Interviewer: Of course.
Carol: The original Gaylord.
Interviewer: The evilest Gaylord.
Carol: Might have to censor that.
Interviewer: Oh, that’s okay. He’s dead.
Carol; He only lived to 101, I think.
Interviewer: That’s right. Okay well thank you.