Oklahoma Voices: Betty Hollingshead

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Transcript:

Amanda Dalrymple: I am Amanda Dalrymple, and this is my grandma. What’s your name?

Betty Hollingshead: Betty Waymon Murray Hollingshead.

AD: Okay. Where were you born, Grandma?

BH: I was born in Goltry, Oklahoma. That is located up by Enid.

AD: And, where were you born at in Goltry?

BH: I was born in Dr. Shannon’s office.

AD: Where was his office at though?

BH: It was in his home. He had it built up like a little hospital in his home, and so I was born there.

AD: What about--didn’t he give you some money?

BH: Yeah, he gave me a twenty-five dollar gold piece and I was the only one in the family that got that. I used it when I got ready to go to college. I took the gold piece and cashed it in and used it for part of my tuition for college.

AD: How much is twenty-five dollars worth nowadays?

BH: Quite a bit more than what it was then. [laughter]

AD: Like about, what, two hundred dollars?

BH: I have no idea. I have no idea.

AD: Okay. Well, how many brothers and sisters did you have?

BH: Well, there was twelve in our family and I was number nine which means I had nine brothers and two other sisters.

AD: Were they older or younger than you?

BH: My oldest one in the family is a girl, a sister. And my youngest one was five years younger than I was.

AD: What were they like when you were younger?

BH: Ornery. I mean--we did normal things like fight and yet we’re one of the closest-knit families of anybody I have ever known in my life.

AD: Well, that’s good.

BH: Because our love for each other is tremendous and we really care about each other, what happens to them. When a person is sick, we send a prayer chain all over the United States where everyone is, and everyone sends flowers and cards and really make sure that they are involved.

AD: What were your parents like?

BH: What were my parents like? Well, my mother was a schoolteacher and she came from a strong conservative background, and they came from Kansas. My dad came from Nebraska and they were in the run of the Cherokee Strip in 1893 and they both lived on farms and both sets of parents were noted for hard work and made a living out of their hard work and the things that they do, and even though they were very poor, we were very rich because of food. We had food for everything because you know all of the animals they raised and the farm grain and everything, like making your own bread and everything because of that. So, I came from a marvelous family, a very caring family.

AD: How old was your mom when she had you?

BH: Goodness, honey, I don’t know. They were married in 1914 and I was born in 1927. She was born in 1893 so that would be seven and, which would be 30?

AD: So, she was in her 30s when she had you?

BH: She would have been 34 years of age, I don’t remember.

AD: Didn’t we add it up once and was she pregnant, like a total of 20 years or something?

BH: Yeah. Probably. [laughter]

AD: Okay. Well, what was your dad like and his brothers? What were your uncles and your extended family like?

BH: Well, they were hard working people. They were different in a lot of ways. They had a situation in their life that made them have a different philosophy because when Grandpa Waymon, and his family grew up in Nebraska. They had attended a church and at this church the minister of the church and the organist ran off with the money that they were saving for a new piano or new organ. And it turned the family bitter in a lot of ways against religion and they consequently, it was hard for them to come back. However, a lot of his sisters were, some of them were even our Sunday School teachers when we grew up and when they came to Oklahoma they lived just a few miles from each other probably the equivalent of about six, seven miles. One was at Nash and the other one was between Goltry and Nash.

AD: Okay. Well, what was your mom’s family like, her extended family?

BH: They were good strong Christian people and Grandpa Secord was one of the founders of the Free Methodist Church in the state of Oklahoma, and he was determined his kids were going to have music and all this type of things and get an education. He was very strong in education and music and his religious belief, and he insisted that mother gets an education which she got some, not like what we talk about education today, but kind of like what I call a junior college.

AD: Oh, did she?

BH: It would be kind of like that, yeah.

AD: I didn’t know she went to like a junior college.

BH: Yeah, she went to Tonkawa, some college in Tonkawa. I don’t remember the name of it, honey. And then she went a year or a summer over to Alva College and that was where she got enough education that she could go back and teach. She taught eight grades at once in the school.

AD: Well, did your mother’s mother have college education?

BH: Grandma Secord was rather young. There was probably 17 years difference between she and her husband. I knew that would throw you, and I really don’t remember as much about Grandma because she died when I was just a little girl and in fact, when I started working at Deaconess Maternity Home and going through the records we had to separate the people who had been in the hospital from the girls who were in the maternity home and I ran across my Grandmother Secord and she was one of the first patients at Deaconess Hospital and she died at Deaconess Hospital and that was in I think in 1932. I can’t remember now. I think a year or two ago I could have told you all of these things, but now I can’t remember them quite as well.

AD: What kind of food did you guys eat on the farm?

BH: What kind of food did we have?

AD: Yeah.

BH: We had the best. My folks raised all of our grains and everything. They even raised wheat and we had our wheat ground into flour of course and we had . . . I remember a five-acre patch of garden out west of our home and we had that and then with our fruit around, and we had fruit trees. And one of the things that probably people today don’t realize or know that we had a lot of mulberries that was on a long row down around by the drive and we would take a big sheet, put it down on the ground and take a fishing rod and hit the tree and the mulberries would come down. I am talking about a mess to clean up. I mean we would get all of the leaves and bugs and everything. You had to clean it all up and everything, but it sure made good eating and we had a lot of those for breakfast many times.

AD: Did you make jelly out of them?

BH: No. We never did sell. Everything we pretty well kept everything. The only thing mother ever sold was some cream from that and the eggs, and this is what she used for her spending money as well as her tithe money.

AD: Did you guys raise your own animals to eat?

BH: Yeah. We had . . . my brothers were known as the Waymon Brothers. They had strong and Poland Chinas, won a lot of ribbons in that area and we raised, I had my own lamb one time for 4-H Club. I was very active in 4-H Club as well as all my family, and in this 4-H Club I raised a lamb and my brothers raised pigs and cattle and a number of things like that and then we would use those of course for our food, but one of the things that is interesting I think was the fact that mother when they butchered would take the fat of the rind and we had this great big black pot that you put all this fat in and it would dissolve and all of that and then she would add lye or something else I can’t remember and make homemade soap, and she didn’t use all of it for homemade soap. She used a lot of it like you would go buy oil or lard.

AD: Baking oil or something?

BH: Yeah. Like baking oil or Crisco or something like that today. We would use that for all frying purposes which was not healthy but at that time we worked hard and probably it didn’t do us too much damage.

AD: Right. Well, did you guys raise your own chickens to eat?

BH: Oh, yes. They started from very scratch. Mother would go get these baby chickens and she would raise them and they would fix up a big chicken house for the little baby chickens and then as they grew older they went into the older chicken house, and we used a lot of chickens, especially in the summer time when we had harvest crews on the farm and I can remember and I know this is hard for anybody to believe, but I can remember dressing 12 chickens an hour and getting them ready so you know we could fry them, and that means I took the feathers off and cut them up, 12 chickens in one hour, and then we took those 12 chickens, that is how many we would cook at one meal. It would be 12 chickens and then we would feed all those boys and all the helpers that we had in the threshing crew and we had . . . it was just kind of . . . it’s different, honey. In fact, it is kind of a community thing. You had uncles come in and help. You had maybe some neighbor boys helping or something like that and then all of your brothers would pitch in and help and you would think, well, that was great, but you know what I had to go out and do a lot of that too because when the war started, World War II, I had to go out and milk cows, plow, pitch hay. The sickest I ever got was pitching hay one time up in the hayloft. It was a real hot summer day and I was up inside pitching the hay back and I wasn’t getting any air coming through and I just got deathly sick. When I came down, I drank some ice cold lemonade and I found out that when you are real hot like that and tired you don’t drink something real cold because it will make you sick.

AD: Did you guys fight over the pieces that you got? The chicken pieces?

BH: Yeah. She has read a lot of this I can tell because . . . Yes, the older boys, I was reading in Phil’s book yesterday where the older boys would make a big fuss over the chicken legs or the chicken feet. Don’t you younger kids take those feet. Those are my feet, and of course the kids would just grab them before the big guy, and of course the big guys liked that because then they would get all the good pieces. And my sister and I, we would cook in the kitchen and we would hardly ever get a decent piece of chicken and so we learned before we would put it on the table as we got a little older to take out the breast and the side and put it back and we got to eat it that way. But yes, they are very good and they always liked to tell the story about the preacher that came to visit and there was only one piece of chicken left and how he said he would like to have chicken so he put his fork and put it in the chicken and when he took his hand back there were nine forks in his hand. But we know that isn’t true, but they told that so many times as a way that they did things.

AD: Well, I hope that is not true. How much was gas then?

BH: Gasoline was 17 cents a gallon when I had my first car.

AD: Are you serious?

BH: Yes. I paid $1,700 for a Chevrolet that belonged to a representative of the Oklahoma, Mr. Hamilton. He was one of our representatives at that time and I got it when I was living up at Glencoe because I didn’t have a car until I started to teach school. I did drive cars, but they were in the family and I didn’t have my own until then, and I paid $1,700 for it and then 17 cents a gallon and when I worked I made 25 cents an hour and I worked one year after I got out of high school at a filling station, and this filling station was . . . I did gas and changed tires and do all of the things that you would possibly do in a filling station they don’t do today as much as we did back then. We washed the windshields and everything and I worked hard for 25 cents an hour and when I went to college I also worked at 25 cents an hour babysitting and working in the dining hall at college and that was the way I made my way of spending money as well as actually putting myself in a lot of ways through college.

AD: How old were you when you learned to drive?

BH: How old was I what?

AD: When you learned to drive?

BH: When I learned to drive I probably was, I imagine I was 16 because out on the farm I had driven tractors and things like that you know for years and so like all of the boys everybody learned to drive probably when they were ten, 12 years of age. And I noticed in Phil’s book where he was talking about Dean was 12 years of age when he pretty much drove and teach dad how to do it because dad didn’t like the machinery.

AD: All this technology?

BH: He liked horses and dad was one of these kind of people when the machine would get going too fast he would holler whoa, and it wouldn’t stop and he couldn’t understand why, and there is an interesting story about dad in that book about a Model-T without a top, and that is when they bought a new car, a new Model-T, and he was so proud of that Model-T he wanted to go over and show his brother. You see, back then they put the car together by themselves. They didn’t buy it all together. They put the car together. And so he went to show Uncle Richard all about his new car. And he got going over and went up a hill and then when he got ready to go down it was kind of slippery and muddy that day and the car kind of slid over into the ditch and dad was sitting there pulling whoa and the steering wheel came off and the car turned over on its side and ruined the top so they didn’t have a car, and that happened two different times. Once dad had the car parked in the barn and he knew how to drive forward but he didn’t know how to drive backwards and so he put the car in the barn the night before, but when he got ready to drive it out the next morning the car . . . he didn’t know how to reverse it. Finally, it went into reverse and he came back and knocked the barn door off and all kinds of things I mean. And then of course we had . . . the next car that he had was without a top because he wrecked it the same kind of a way.

AD: Really? I bet that made him mad.

BH: Yeah. But anyhow the kids all remember riding in the car without a roof on it.

AD: Right. How much did he buy the car for?

BH: I don’t remember, honey, but it was real cheap compared to what it is today. I can’t remember what the price of it was. I remember hearing them talking about it, but I would say it was in the hundreds. Just below a thousand.

AD: Okay. Well, what was the war like?

BH: What was the war like?

AD: Yeah.

BH: Well, when the war came on December 7th, 1941 I was in school when President Roosevelt made the announcement that we were going to war. I think it was a Monday morning, it seems like that is when I heard about it. And when that happened of course we were all concerned because they had bombed Pearl Harbor and we were younger. We didn’t know what war was going to be like even though my dad had lived through World War I and some of the boys. I hadn’t. It was my first experience and in the long run I didn’t know how it was going to affect our family, but I ended up having five brothers or I should say we ended up having five boys go to war. My five brothers, and because of the war, their being away to war, there wasn’t anybody to work on a farm, that is when I had to do more work on the farm, and we got up early in the morning and milked the cows, came to the house, eat breakfast real quick. Mother was making sure everybody had a prayer. She would kneel in prayer with every one of us before we left, and then we went out and got on the bus and drove four miles to school, came home at night and put on our…and what was so cute, Amanda,

we got to wear overalls. You see when I was out of school, but we had to wear dresses to school, and see I would get to come home, put on the boys’ overalls and go out and work on the farm and so forth, and then come in at night and come in and help do the dishes and things like that.

AD: Okay. Well, do you…what was it like when your brothers went off to war? I mean, when they actually left.

BH: When they actually left? Very sad. We always had aunts and uncles come over for a big dinner and we celebrated a lot in that way so whenever one of our boys left we would have a big dinner for them to come in and celebrate with them, and then of course one interesting thing was about my brother, Phil, when he was called into the ministry dad was very upset because of the relationship between him and that minister up in Nebraska, and dad didn’t want any of the boys to be ministers, and poor guy, here he ended up with five boys in service and five minister sons. But anyway when Phil was to go, Dad thought well I don’t want him to go so Dad went with him to the Board where they register and when he was called to come in and he told the head of the Board he said my son shouldn’t have to go because he is going to be a minister. It about blew Phil’s mind because right then and there, Dad had approved him being a minister for the first time. But the man says well, you can’t use that for an excuse now because he had not been saying about being a minister. He wasn’t studying for the ministry or anything, and so Phil still had to go and all of our boys our brothers, were in the southwestern parts of the war, over where Douglas MacArthur and some of those were in that area. And three of them were in the navy. Clarence, James and Byron were all in the navy. But Phil and Jay were in the army, and Hugh didn’t have to go. He couldn’t pass his physical even though he was very . . . we don’t understand why, but he had a hernia at that time and they wouldn’t take him and because of that he was taking ROTC at Oklahoma State University, what it is called now. It was Oklahoma A & M then. When we all went to school it was called Oklahoma A & M, and he didn’t go, but then later Jay, who is the youngest of the family, went into the army also and he was stationed up in Missouri, near Rolla, Missouri.

AD: He was too young to be in World War II, wasn’t he?

BH: Yes, he wasn’t in the actual war, but he was called into service.

AD: Okay. Well, how did you meet your first husband?

BH: How did you know I had a first husband?

AD: Well, I have known you for a little bit.

BH: Oh, you have? Okay. When I was supposed to go to school my mother had been praying that I would go to Central, which is our church college, and I had five friends, we were all named Betty, and we were all going to go to Enid, which was 25 miles away, and we were all going to go into the nursing service and what is so funny just before we were ready to go and everybody else went, I got sick and during that sickness the doctor told me I had to stay in bed and he gave me a lot of . . . had me eat a lot of different types of food that were supposed to be real healthy for me, and then as

soon as all of the girls had gotten into their business and I couldn’t go any longer because it was too late, I got well. And that was in June and July. Well then in August I went away to college, at Central College in McPherson, Kansas. Of course, mother was very happy about that and while I was there for two years and graduated from Central College, a junior college, and then I went to Oklahoma A & M for one year and I didn’t like it at all. It wasn’t the kind of life that I was used to at all, and then my last year I went to Greenville College, which was our church four year college up in Greenville, Illinois, and after I graduated from college I thought well I didn’t know what else to do, so I guess be a teacher. You know how people think, well . . . I don’t know whether I was really called to be a teacher or not, but I felt like I should be a teacher and so I went to school also during the summer of 1949 because I didn’t have enough credits when I graduated in May 1949 and then when I came home in August I started looking for a college, I mean a school which was very late, and I had a chance to teach at one in the northern part of Oklahoma, south of Enid. I had a chance to teach there, and then there was an opening up at Byers, Kansas and I had a chance to teach there. So I taught at Byers and I then taught at Partridge, Kansas and while I was teaching at Partridge, Kansas there was a young man who was . . . he was the head of it.

AD: Was he a principal? Like the principal of the school?

BH: No. A lumberyard. He was the main head of the lumberyard in that town even though he didn’t own it. It was owned by D.J. Fair in Nickerson, Kansas, but Dean was running the lumberyard there in town and we would go down to the restaurant there in town and I looked at people I knew there and they kept telling me I needed to meet Dean and they would tell Dean he needed to meet Betty and all this and they kept pushing us together, so finally one day he had nerve enough and he asked me and we started dating and that was in March, that was after I was there about two years or three, I can’t remember, but anyhow then because it was 1953 I think when we got married. I didn’t look up my life. I looked up everybody else and we wrote together all that summer when I came home and then when I came back in September he met me at the home where I was staying and had a dozen roses for me and then in October or November he asked me to marry him.

AD: How did he ask you to marry him?

BH: Well, I don’t remember. We are driving along, we were going to an ice show over in Wichita with another couple from Partridge and there was a big sign up on the roadside, a bulletin board, that said something about a diamond, showed a picture of a diamond or something, and he reached over and grabbed my hand. He said would you like to have one of those?

AD: Ah, that’s cute.

BH: I didn’t say anything. And then my first response was I won’t marry you as long as you are smoking, and so he had only smoked once around me and that was the first time he asked me out and he offered me a cigarette and I told him no, I don’t smoke. And so, then that night he knew what I said and he kept saying well I would like to marry you, and I said, no, I will not do it. There is just no way I am going to marry you as long as you smoke because I can’t stand tobacco and I don’t think it is healthy. So anyway that was in October and then we went together all the rest of that

year and in that spring when school was out I came back to Oklahoma and we were married then in June 1953 and moved back to Partridge where I taught school a few more years and then he passed away ten years later from Bright’s disease, and before he had passed away we had tried for ten years to have a child and couldn’t have one and we were trying to adopt one from Deaconess Home and we were going to get a little boy and his name was Mark Edward. We were supposed to pick him up on Friday, February 14th. On Monday before that we found out that my husband had seven years, I mean seven days to five years to live. Dean had that long to live and so Deaconess Home wouldn’t let us have a baby because they thought the baby should have both a father and a mother. Well, that like to tore us apart because I had already called him Mark Edward. I was just so thrilled to have this little boy. Well then a year before he died the Lord gave us Kelly and that is a miracle in itself, probably the most wonderful thing that ever happened to us and he really loved her and all that, but it was hard to let him go but I just saw him suffer from that kidney disease because you knew it was best in every way. Well, when he died, at his funeral, but people think I am crazy when I say that, but that was the most beautiful thing there was. It was just beautiful. Well, I saw him suffer so many hours and days that I was glad to see him have relief, and he didn’t talk to me from Saturday night until he died on Monday morning. He went into a coma and that was how long he didn't talk to me. He was in a hospital two weeks before he died. And the hospital let Kelly come in and see him because they knew he was going to die and so she got to sit on his lap a lot of time in the hospital and after a while he said, please don’t bring her any more. I can’t handle it. He got to where he couldn’t take it.

AD: What mom like when she was little?

BH: What was she like when she was little?

AD: Yes.

BH: Well, she was precious. She never did anything wrong in my sight. She was just great. Her daddy thought she was wonderful and he always held her on his chest, you know leaned back and everything and she always wanted a daddy and any man that came into our home, whether it was a brother or who it was she wanted me to marry them because she always wanted a daddy. And we did a lot of things together. I made it a point to be a good mother as well as teach school. I was teaching school at Central Christian High School in Hutchinson, Kansas at that time and I made sure that she was . . . that we would do things together. We went bowling a lot and just played games and did all kinds of things together. Every Saturday I made a point to be with her only if I possibly could.

AD: Right. I forgot what I was going to ask you. Oh, how did you meet Grandpa Ralph?

BH What?

AD: How did you meet Grandpa Ralph?

BH: After my husband died, I had three offers for jobs, and just before he died I went to the Mitchell Grade School there in Hutchinson and taught school in the third grade which was so different because I had been teaching home ec, English and home ec in high school, you know, and when I tried to teach the third grade and then all these people kept inviting me you know to do these things, I really didn’t know what to do. I loved where I was. I knew the people. I loved to stay. I knew the Hendrys. They were like adoptive parents to me and they were precious people and I didn’t want to go. But one day I went into the kitchen where the cooks were and up on the wall they had a sign that says put your hand in a bucket of water and when you bring it out the hole that is left is how much you will be missed when you are gone. I said that’s my answer. I am going to Oklahoma, and so I left and went to Glencoe, Oklahoma where we built our own home and Kelly and I lived there in our home for five years. We had a great big garden. We were right next to my parents and my parents had given us the land and we were right next to them and Kelly loved her Grandpa. He was the greatest thing for her. He loved her. She followed him around everywhere and one of the things that is very interesting about your mother was the fact that we had an old buck by the name of Susie, no a lamb by the name of Susie, it wouldn’t be a buck. It was a great big old lamb. A big sheep you know and she always liked to out and put her hands in the fence you know and play with Susie. One day she was standing too close right up against the fence and Susie came up and just bam and knocked her clear over. She came running in and said Susie butt, Susie butt and she didn’t like Susie after that naturally, but anyhow then when we were at Glencoe I started the senior citizens center which was the first one in the State of Oklahoma to be given a grant by the government and while I was there at Glencoe I also started teaching five years after I moved to Glencoe at Deaconess Home because that is where I finally ended up going because Reverend Butterfield kept asking me to come, he kept asking me to come and I didn’t want to go up be a housemother at Central College. I didn’t want to go be a housemother over in Kentucky. Those were the other two places and so I drove back and forth and got my master’s degree. It took me seven years working a full-time job and going back and forth to Stillwater because we moved to Oklahoma City in 1967. Well, like I said, your mother wanted a daddy, and she kept at it. I had dated another man that I liked real well, but I didn’t think that he should be the one because when I met Ralph and I met him through another man by the name of Robert Johnson who introduced us and Grandpa Ralph had the very same philosophy in a lot of ways that I had. He came from a farm life. He was a good man in every way that I could tell, but he loved my daughter I think more than he did me. I have always told him that and I have always told Kelly that, and he worked at the . . .

AD: Wasn’t it Gold Seal?

BH: Gold Spot in Enid, Oklahoma and while he was working at Gold Spot then he would come on Sunday and bring Kelly ice cream bars, and of course she thought Grandpa Ralph was just great, you know. She just loved that man and he loved her and he spoiled her ever since. But we did meet through a friend and we got married when Kelly was nine years old of age and when we got married we promised her that, he promised her he would get her a horse and so we moved out of the home we were living in over to a larger acreage, over two acres over where we live now, and put the horse 

there and she grew up loving that horse which you kids are having a fit because we don’t get you one, but that is the way it is.

AD: What was the horse like? Didn’t you guys get rid of it?

BH: Yeah. Well the horse, he was a little Shetland pony and he was just an ornery little old character and to explain what he was like it is hard to understand because you know if you love a horse you can’t imagine anything being wrong with them you know, especially if you love him as much as he was. He was fed well. He had done everything, but just to explain some of the ways that horse was. One time I had a friend who was one of the social workers at Deaconess Home and he was from New York. He had never ridden a horse, you know, and he wanted to ride a horse so I told him I had this horse out in the backyard, so I said, Don, you come down you and your family will ride the horse. And so they came down one Sunday afternoon. I was going to teach Don how to ride the horse. That silly horse, when I got on, he decided he didn’t want to be ridden. He went under a tree and knocked me off. Well, Don just laughed and laughed. He never forgot that because here I was going to teach him to do something and . . .

AD: Right.

BH: But I couldn’t do it myself. But finally, he got on and he finally got to ride, but he would get out and eat too much leaves off our . . . we had a lot of fruit in our backyard. We had all kinds of fruit, pears and apples and boysenberries and peaches, some peaches, and he just kept eating all of the leaves and causing trouble but we had a 12 foot swimming pool in the backyard for Kelly and her friends so they could go swimming a lot. Well, that horse I don’t know what his problem was, but you know how they have those plastic liners in your swimming pool?

AD: Yeah.

BH: He got out there and started chewing the plastic liners off of that swimming pool on the outside of it and we had to get rid of him and so we gave him to the minister that used to be where we went to church here in Stillwater. We gave him to Brother Keegan and his family. He had a little girl that needed a horse and so they lived up on a farm up in Kansas so they took the horse up there.

AD: So where were you working at that time?

BH: When? What?

AD: Like through the 70s?

BH: Well I started working after I got my degree in 1971. I started working in 1967 at Deaconess Home and it is a maternity home for unwed mothers. And I worked there from 1967 to December 31, 1989, and then I worked for two other lawyers as a social worker, so my total social work was 30 years. And 16 years of teaching.

AD: What made you choose that job?

BH: What made me choose what?

AD: That job? That career?

BH: That job. Well, like I said when Dean died, your grandpa I had three offers to teach because people I guess thought well you needed help, probably needed something, and I was teaching at that time right there at Central Christian High School before and I had quit just before Kelly was born because I wanted to be a stay at home mother and work with her and so when I did that then these other offers came because I was sitting there at home and the Central Christian asked me to be a housemother, a Kentucky Christian school over in Kentucky wanted me to be a house parent and teacher and Reverend Butterfield who had a granddaughter that had been in the campground when we go to the campground for meetings and I was a counselor, a youth counselor then and Reverend Butterfield’s granddaughter was one of my counselees and she told her grandma about Betty, how Betty would be good to work with the girls, and I told Reverend Butterfield I didn’t want to go to work yet, and this was back in like I said in 1963. I wasn’t ready to go anywhere yet because I wanted to be with Kelly, and of course like I said I started the senior center. I started work on my master’s degree and things like that, but later I started teaching in 1967 and I said, Kelly was five and I said okay I am going because he kept calling me all the time in-between wanting me to come. And so I decided to go and I went down to, moved to Oklahoma City and my mother went with me because dad was in the nursing home and he couldn’t be around at all at that time and so she went with me and we worked down there and then of course two years later I met Ralph and we got married and mother stayed with us off and on some, but she ended up buying her own home and living with some of the other kids, and then before she died she was back in a nursing home and she passed away just a few days after she went to the hospital in 1977 but she was living with us.

AD: Why did you choose to . . . what did you do when you were working with the girls?

BH: Well, when I first went there I was activities coordinator and counselor and I did a lot of the giving tests and then working with the girls and then I gave a lot of tests. Most of us did our own testing and each one of us had our own individual girls that we worked with. Well then two years later the Butterfields made me the assistant superintendent, they called the assistant superintendent, and then later in 1975 when the Butterfields retired they made me a director of home services is what they called it, and during that time then I became director of social services and had 17 employees underneath me, and my book Love Ever Flowing tells all about that work and the girls and the people I worked with and it has all their names in it.

AD: What did you do with the girls? What kind of thing would you do with them?

BH: We took them out quite a bit. You know it was interesting back when we first went to the home they had this great big wooden fence around the area where the girls would go out and sunbathe or play games or something and it was more private. They didn’t let anybody see you know anything. And so we started taking . . . we had a lady that had been teaching bible study that gave us a van and we took the kids in the van to shop. We had one lady who was a housemother whose daughter who had a big swimming pool and we went to that swimming pool and Dr. Hough, he and

his wife had been working with us in bible study and so they lived clear out in the country out by Yukon, south of Yukon on Northwest 10th Street and they invited us out to swim so we would take the girls out there and go swimming a lot with them, and then we had a lady south of us that was in a wheelchair that did a lot of knitting there right on the street right south of me there a ways, and this lady taught the girls how to knit, and then when I was working at the senior center, when I started it up there, I had never done crafts. I wasn’t a craft person. I was a crafty person, but I never did crafts and I learned to do a lot of crafts up there with them, and played dominoes, and quilted, all of those different types of things that we did do in there. Well, when I went to Deaconess Home then all of this prepared me to go ahead and we made a lot of crafts, especially the little balls where you make them and put them into a big chunk of wood and make it look like a big grapevine, and then we made lamps, we put a big chain on it that hangs down from the ceiling. You see you put a big chain on it, you know so it would hang down and they were pulled and different things and so we did a lot of that and then later as I say I became the director and then I was over all these 17 people. We had school there, a big school, and we taught every subject the kids needed in high school and if the kid was in grade school well then we took them to private teaching. We didn’t teach them. The teachers did. I taught one year family relations and child development to the girls because I didn’t have a teacher at that time. And then later I got a lady, I found a lady that could teach that and so she taught that. In the meantime I would just supervise her.

AD: How old were the girls?

BH: Well, the youngest one that I remember, Amanda, was about nine and the oldest one I think was about 30. That is what I had written in my book, but I was thinking later that we had some probably had some older than that because then after . . . a lot of these young girls, some of them were divorcees and a lot of them had a boyfriend you know and things like that and just got themselves pregnant, and I have an interesting story if you would like to her them about my philosophy about a girl that gets herself pregnant. Would you want to hear that?

AD: Sure.

BH: When I was working at the senior citizen center there in Glencoe, Oklahoma I had go get a staff and people to help me work and we found this old school house. We fixed it all up and there was a young girl that was had just graduated out of high school that I had had when I substitute taught an English class there at Glencoe and she was a straight A student, a very smart little gal and I got her to be my secretary because we had a lot of book work and stuff to do and a lot of advertising we did and we had to go to Oklahoma City from Glencoe and get us some furniture and get some things that we needed so on the way down I was telling about people wanting me to come to work at Deaconess Home, it was an unwed mother’s home, and I said I can’t imagine anybody stupid enough to get pregnant. And you know . . .

AD: That was sweet of you.

BH: And you know it wasn’t very long out there one of the ladies at the agency after we got going for about two to three months came to me and talked to me. She said, Betty, so and so is pregnant

and she is scared to talk to you about it. I said, well, I know she is pregnant but I don’t know why she is scared to talk to me about it. She said because she knows how you feel about them, and I learned to love that little girl. I never felt that way again about anybody being pregnant because she was beautiful. She was sweet. She was everything you wanted, just that boyfriend of hers he wasn’t ready to get married because he was a farmer and he wanted to make sure he had all his crop in, all this stuff done before he wanted to marry her. But they ended up getting married and have a good relationship today. But that is how I learned to love the unwed mothers.

AD: That is good. What else do you want to tell me about?

BH: I don’t know.

AD: Let’s see. I am not sure. Are you glad that you . . .

BH: Am I glad that what?

AD: I don’t know. I am trying to think of something to say. I’ll tell you what, we can make a quick cut here while you figure out how you want to wrap it up. Well, that’s okay.

BH: It is time. It has been too long.

AD: Yeah, it is time to wrap it up. I think you are trying to ask her if she would change anything and then maybe what would the present or the future hold for her, something like that. Okay. We will wait for Jesse to give us a nod and then . . . Are you glad that you did all of these things in your life?

BH: I feel like it has been a blessing because I was allowed to do it because I didn’t feel like I had the talent and the ability you know when it all started. I just . . . Someway things opened up for me and the Lord gave me the strength to do it. I didn’t know what I was doing most of the time, but I did it. And . . . what else?

AD: Are you glad with your life?

BH: Yes. I am very happy with the life I live. I am retired now and when I first retired it kind of killed me because I don’t like to sit still, but finally I have gotten now where I am just very happy to sit and work on crossword puzzles, and I have done a lot of picture albums, put things together for you kids whenever you get older you will have them. You are already old enough to have them but when you know you want to know more about your heritage, and I am also very happy to be in my church. I am the president of Women’s Ministries International. I am also the head of the Senior Citizens Living group and we are a group that meets with MacArthur Free Methodist Church, Edmond Free Methodist Church and First Church, and we meet once a month, WMI meets once a month and then I am also teaching a bible study on the Book of Romans which is really difficult. But I keep busy besides the little dab of work I do at home, and we have a lot of pears, we had a lot of strawberries this year, a lot of pears, a lot of apples and a lot of fruit. We have two freezers and we keep them full all of the time with different things from our garden.

AD: Who made you retire?

BH: Who made me retire?

AD: Yes.

BH: I retired from Deaconess Home because I was starting to have heart trouble and it was starting to give me you know a lot of problems, and then I worked for these other two lawyers and I had a breast cancer and I had to have surgery and all of that, and I decided it was time for me to quit and take life easy, and I wrote a book called Love Ever Flowing and when I wrote that book in the back I have asked that any money that we get from selling the book go to Deaconess Home to help with the girls and their program.

AD: Good.