Description:
Jerry Barton talks about his childhood, his memories of 1940s-era Bethany, and more.
Transcript:
Interviewee: Jerry Barton
Interviewer: Buddy Johnson
Interview Date: 4/27/2009
Interview Location: Bethany Public LibraryNote: There is a persistent sound of a metal door slamming throughout the interview.
Buddy Johnson: Today is April 27, 2009, and we are at the Bethany Public Library speaking with Jerry Barton as part of the Bethany Centennial Program. Welcome, Jerry. I want start out and ask where and when you were born.
Jerry Barton: I was born December 9, 1939, at 209 South Donald, about three blocks from here. All of us were born at home.
Buddy: That’s in Bethany, right? Bethany city limits?
Jerry: Yes.
Buddy: Who were your parents?
Jerry: My father was Joseph Elvert Barton, and my mother was Clessy Sylvia Barton.
Buddy: What was her maiden name?
Jerry: Her maiden name was Young.
Buddy: What did your dad go by? Joe?
Jerry: Everybody called him Evert. I don’t know where they got that. Or Eb.
Buddy: When did your parents move to Bethany?
Jerry: I don’t know the exact date my mom and dad moved there. My grandfather, I have a picture here. These are all aunts, uncles, and cousins. There’s 70 in this picture.
Buddy: Seventy? Yeah, I was going to say there’s a lot of people.
Jerry: My grandfather came here in 1935. He owned a service station, or a filling station as they were called in those days, at the corner of 39th and Donald. That building still exists today. It’s a key shop. I remember the station had the old ten-gallon tanks on top. You had to pump them up by hand. They were all gravity flow. They didn’t have electricity. Grandpa had a big pot-bellied stove sitting in the middle of the station there that burned coal. That was a frequent spot for most of the brothers and sisters. My dad was one of eighteen kids.
Buddy: Wow. That’s how you’ve got so many.
Jerry: There’s nine brothers and nine sisters. Most of them ended up settling in this area eventually. This was a picnic that occurred on a Saturday afternoon, which was common for us in the summers. Usually we’d go to Spring Isle the zoo or Will Rogers Park for an all-day picnic and we’d play horseshoes and have a big family softball game. This picture was made today. As I said, there are 70 in this picture. Those that are surviving and that existing generation would total a little over 1,000.
Buddy: Wow. That’s amazing, and that you’ve been able to keep track of all of them, too. My mother had 11 brothers and sisters, but I don’t think I could get more than 50 of them together in one place.
Jerry: You can’t today. You can’t do that. Don’t have any sense for families to [trails off].
Buddy: Was that where your grandparents lived too, around 209 North Donald?
Jerry: They lived in the back of the service station at 39th and Donald. There was a living facility back there, so the front was the station and the back was the living quarters.
Buddy: The address struck me because now Bethany is on the Oklahoma City numbering system, so where was 209?
Jerry: 209 would have been – this is 36th, so it probably would have been 3809 or something like that. [paper rustling]
Buddy: Did Bethany number off? Was their streets on zero on 39th or - ?
Jerry: Yes. Here’s a 1940s map of Bethany. Also, this is a 1940s directory of Bethany that lists whether they had a phone or not. It lists the parents, the father’s occupation, and all the siblings that lived there at that time from 1940. This whole street here, this is the 200 block. This is how the blocks were numbered. This is 39th Street, so you would find 209 South Donald – it’d be right here. This is 36th Street out here right now.
Buddy: So it’d be like 37th and Donald?
Jerry: That’s right.
Buddy: That house was big enough to get all of you kids in there, huh?
Jerry: Well, I had three sisters. We had a very small –
Buddy: Oh yeah, it was your dad that had the very large family.
Jerry: Yeah. I had a relative on nearly every block in town. When I was a small kid, I could leave home in the morning and not come home until after dark and my mom never worried about me. We didn’t have a phone, which you never locked your house in those days.
Buddy: That’s what I was going to ask you. What kind of a neighborhood was the neighborhood you grew up in? What kind of jobs did they have?
Jerry: My father and most of his brothers were milk haulers. They was the term they used, and what they did, they had a non-contractual agreement with farmers in surrounding areas. They would go out and pick the milk up in these five-gallon containers and take them to the dairy where they would be processed. In that process, they would leave empty cans for the next day’s milking, so it was a seven-day-a-week job they had to fulfill because the cows would be milked every day. Most of us in poor, but we didn’t know it because it was in the war years or shortly thereafter as I was growing up. We had a small, four-room house, probably less than 500 square feet. We had one closet and all of our clothes fit in that closet because you only had one or two changes of clothes. My sister slept in one bed, the three of them. I slept at the foot of my parents’ bed. On the couch was either an aunt or uncle, and in the floor was the kids. We always had somebody that lived with us because Dad always had a job. A lot of them didn’t. We raised chickens in the back yard. We had a cow occasionally. We’d always raise a pig that we’d butcher in the fall. We did have indoor plumbing, but a lot of houses in Bethany didn’t have indoor plumbing. They had outhouses in alleyways. The only paved street in town was 39th. All the other streets were dirt.
Buddy: Even into the ‘40s?
Jerry: Yeah. 36th Street and south was black jacks and sand hills. 50th and north was farmland.
Buddy: So Bethany was really just kind of carved out of the –
Jerry: Right. We were really a separate town, not integrated like we are today with Oklahoma City. Rockwell Avenue was called West End Avenue and it was a gravel street. The airport out here was really a ghost airport except for bootleggers that used it at night.
Buddy: Interesting. Especially for a place like Bethany, that’s very ironic, I guess. Do you remember people talking about the 1930 tornado? I guess that would have been before your family was there.
Jerry: It was before my time, but my dad was coming home from the route and it came across and I remember Mom telling me in later years that he had to get out and lay in a ditch as it passed over, so he survived that but that’s the only thing I know about it.
Buddy: Yeah, I read about it almost killed – well, not the people but it wiped out a lot of buildings and stuff, so the town had probably been fairly new by your memory, a lot of the buildings and things. I wondered – Bethany is known for being very religious, for people who live outside of Bethany. Do you remember having any – was your family religious or were they connected with the college or the church?
Jerry: We were all brought up Church of Christ. We went to church every Sunday, Wednesday, Sunday night. Every time there was a meeting, every time the church doors were open, we were there.
Buddy: Did you think of it as a Nazarene town as a lot of people do?
Jerry: Not at the time, but I didn’t really think about that. Most of our friends were Nazarene. There was a lot of Baptists here at the time. In school, I remember we didn’t have the problems they have today. We had prayer every morning. We had the Pledge of Allegiance and a Scripture reading over the loudspeaker system. It was kind of an honor if you got to be the one selected to read the Scripture that day. A lot of the kids in high school, it was not uncommon to see somebody carrying a Bible. We didn’t have the gangs. We had a few kids who smoked, but you didn’t have the problems you have today.
It was a really unique town. The school was really unique. I just came from breakfast with guys I played ball with 50 years ago. We meet every Monday for coffee at 39th and Council. There’s probably 20 or 30 of us that show up. You can’t explain this community to anybody if you haven’t lived in it because it’s a really close-knit community, the school included, especially the school. My wife had never been to one of her reunions and I have something going on every other year, it seems like. The kids – we still call them kids – we still all run around together. We still all get together periodically. It’s just a really close-knit community. You didn’t lock your doors. During the war years, I had three older sisters. Because there wasn’t money and there wasn’t gas for cars, everything was being rationed. You had ration stamps you had to go buy stuff with. The kids went to each other’s houses, so everybody knew everybody’s kids and everybody knew everybody’s parents, so you didn’t get in trouble because everybody knew everybody. You even got a really close relationship with all of the kids’ parents, you know? Still today, even though most of them have passed on. It was really a unique situation. Kids are really missing out today.
Buddy: I didn’t have anything quite like that, but even now, my children don’t play out on the street or anything like that. It’s just totally different.
Jerry: We would get up in the morning and not come home until dark. We would play. All of our games were either homemade games or made up things. Kick the can, pitch the washers, Piggy wants a signal. Hopscotch. Things kids don’t even know how to do today.
Buddy: Did you just play out in the street?
Jerry: We played in the street. As a matter of fact, roller skating was really a challenge because we had those old roller skates that you use a key and strap around your ankles, but there were very few sidewalks and no paved streets. What you would do is the streets, when they would grade them, were really hardened clay. You’d skate on the hard clay pieces and jump over the sandy spots to the next clay spot. You actually could skate on the street on the clay.
Buddy: I never heard of that.
Jerry: Yeah, it was kind of fun.
Buddy: That’s pretty cool. You mentioned school. Was the school still in the same location it is now? Has the school always been there?
Jerry: Yes. There were two buildings at one time where the Earl Harris Elementary is. Earl Harris was my principal while I was in school. The building on the east side was the grade school, one through eight, and the building on the west side was nine through twelve. Then they eventually built the junior high and high school where the (unintelligible) church has the auditorium now. At one time there was an auditorium there built during WPA days. That was our high school auditorium and gymnasium, and of course they built the new high school and auditorium where it is today. That particular area all belonged to the school, those two blocks.
Buddy: Did you walk there?
Jerry: Yes. Of course the school district is only one mile square, so with school being in the middle of that, nobody was much further than six blocks away. We had no cafeteria, so we walked back and forth. Very few kids would bring their lunch because very few kids had mothers that worked, and those that ate there, their mother worked. I always envied them because I always wanted to take my lunch. I thought that was kind of neat.
Buddy: To get to pack your own lunch?
Jerry: Yeah.
Buddy: What about crossing 39th? Was it pretty trafficky then because it was Route 66?
Jerry: It was only two lanes at that time, and when we moved from the south side of 39th to the north side when I started in school, so I never had to really cross it. We had one policeman, which was Fletcher McClain. He used to sit there in his little green Ford and help kids cross the street there.
Buddy: That’s pretty neat. You moved to the north side when you went to school, so where did you move then?
Jerry: 611 North Willow, which was about 46th and Willow. We were the last house on the street. Willow Street was vacant all the way over to Rockwell at that time. There was big fields and farmland out there. There was a pond out there. I remember one time when I was a kid, I was playing with matches and caught the whole field on fire. It didn’t hurt anything, but it scared me. I didn’t play with matches anymore.
Buddy: That was all farmland beyond 50th you said, up until the airport?
Jerry: Right. There was a strip out there at that time.
Buddy: But it wasn’t developed?
Jerry: No. I think there was a paved strip there. I’m not sure what it was. I remember at one time there was an oil well in the middle of the airport. It blew up and caught on fire and killed somebody there. I remember going by there and seeing the flames shooting up.
Buddy: Did Bethany have a lot of oil? There wasn’t any drilling in town, but was there much drilling activity around?
Jerry: I don’t recall. That’s the only thing I remember being associated with the oil.
Buddy: Was your dad still delivering milk the whole time?
Jerry: No. In 1953, the farmers started going to the refrigerated-type storage facilities because it was more sanitary and it kept the milk cold. When you went there, they kept them in coolers that had ice in them, and these five-gallon cans would be lifted out and you lifted them out and put them in the truck. The trucks were not cooled or anything, and you’d take them to the dairy, which took about an hour to get there.
Buddy: Was that in Oklahoma City?
Jerry: In the surrounding areas. My father’s route consisted of about Northwest Highway up to about 150th, which is now 150th with all those farms out in that area. Some of my uncles had routes that went up around Okarche and Kingfisher and that area.
Buddy: Okay, so it would take them awhile to get in. Okay.
Jerry: When that came about, it kind of forced them out of business. My dad bought this station at 6705 Northwest 50th, which was my grandfather’s station. 50th is a dirt street. When my grandpa left the station on 39th, I had an uncle that had a barn that they tore down and they used the blocks to build him a station. It was a very rustic old station. They lived next door in a farmhouse. They had a little orchard behind and they had a lot of chickens back there. Of course, that eventually went away. When he passed on, two or three uncles had the station and a cousin, and my dad finally bought it in 1953. My grandfather passed away in 1950. Dad had that station until the time he died.
Buddy: Did you work there?
Jerry: Yeah, as a kid I worked there every – I remember having to play football on Friday night and having to get up early the next morning and going out there on Saturday to work. We’d be all bruised and tired and he’d tell everybody to get out there and go work, but it was good for me.
Buddy: Was it pretty busy? Was 50th very well-traveled then? It was still on the edge.
Jerry: Dad had come from a large family. Most of his brothers were in some type of construction. They either had dump trucks or they did yard grading. Someone was in the asphalt business. Some of them still had the milk trucks for awhile. He had a lot of truck business. I fixed a lot of truck flats. (unintelligible). For 50 cents a flat, you earned your money. They didn’t have the tools to do that. It was all manual. You had to get out there and beat on the –
Buddy: With the jack. Yeah, no air jack or anything like that. I wanted to ask you about the – you said that you couldn’t really get into too much trouble because of your parents, but did you ever get into trouble other than your field experience?
Jerry: No I didn’t ever want – kids didn’t usually get in trouble but you were kind of ornery. You didn’t do anything malicious. You might during Halloween turn over a few outhouses down the alleyway at night, but you didn’t do anything really malicious. For one thing, I wouldn’t do anything embarrass my parents. You had a family obligation to do that, but you also felt morally to not get into a situation where you were going to embarrass them. You didn’t dare because everybody knew everybody. All the businesspeople knew everybody. All the kids knew all the parents. It was just one of those deals. It was really neat.
Buddy: How often did you go into Oklahoma City? Did you visit Oklahoma City very much?
Jerry: Every Saturday was our trip to the city. That’s where we did our shopping, in Downtown Oklahoma City, and you had the Inter-Urban Railway you could take to the city. I think it cost a quarter to ride into the city. We drove because it would be an all-day affair. We’d go early Saturday morning and spend most of that day and come back in the afternoon. We’d eat lunch down there, go into the drugstore and have a malt. It was a fun time.
Buddy: It was all Downtown?
Jerry: Yes, all Downtown. That was the only place to shop. There was no place to eat or restaurants around here. Well, there were two or three cafes here on May because my aunt and uncle happened to have one at that time.
Buddy: That’s what I was wondering. How much of your shopping or daily needs could you get in Bethany?
Jerry: For our groceries, we bought what we didn’t grow. We always had a garden. Mom canned, and she washed on scrub boards with lye soap and we hung the clothes out on the line. We always had a garden and we grew a lot of our food.
Buddy: For things like flour and things like that, you could get that kind of thing here?
Jerry: Yes.
Buddy: Where were some of the grocers around?
Jerry: There was an IGA grocery store on Main Street. We had a locker to freeze things. We didn’t have a refrigerator. We had an ice box. The ice man would come by and you’d put this little card in your window. You turned it four ways to tell you how many pounds – a five-pound block, a 25-pound block, a 50-pound block. You’d put that in your window and on ice day when the ice man would come by, he’d see what you had in your window and he’d chip it off and bring it in to put in your ice box. There was a place called Barnett’s. (unintelligible) Funeral Home, there’s a little strip area there. I can’t remember what it’s called today, but anyway, they had some freezers there you could rent to store meat. We’d have a hog and we’d cut that up and we’d store meat there.
Buddy: What other businesses were along Main Street?
Jerry: Linhart Lumber had a lumberyard there at [pause] Penial. Across the street from my grandfather’s service station, there was an ice dock. My dad’s youngest brother was electrocuted there on his 21st birthday. He just got married three days before, and he was working on the dock in the summertime. He was working without his shirt, and his feet were wet and he raised up under a bare wire and it electrocuted him. I remember that. I was about four years old when that happened. That was there. There was a little shoe shop. There were several cobbler stores there where you could get your shoes repaired. There were about four or five barbershops, one or two restaurants. There was Winberg Drug Store. There was a bank on the corner, the college there where the law offices there today. Bright Bill’s had a place there that was the local hangout for all the high school guys. There was where the youth center is – we called it the youth center but I don’t know what it’s called today. The church owned it. It’s a little gymnasium there on 39th Street across from the children’s convalescent home.
Buddy: Oh, right. It was the Fred Floyd Center, I think they called it for awhile.
Jerry: Right by the railroad track there was a flour mill.
Buddy: I can’t even picture where that would have been.
Jerry: It was right square in front of where the gymnasium would be, right on the tracks. It backed right up to the track. It had a tall -
Buddy: That would be the Inter-Urban track?
Jerry: Yeah.
Buddy: Okay, because I didn’t think the railroad came through. I wondered about the other thing that Bethany is famous for, which is the brew laws. I’ve heard some people say there never were laws and it was just something that the city council kind of got over on people. Do you remember anything about that?
Jerry: Yeah. I never really knew if it was true, but the story I was always told, and I don’t know how they can make that be legally binding, but the fact that the original 40 acres for the township was deeded by someone from the Nazarene church. I think I went to school with a girl who that was her uncle. The name was Vaughter.
Buddy: Oh yeah. Okay. I’ve heard that name.
Jerry: Anyway, on that 40 acres, we were always told that there could never be any alcoholic beverages or tobacco sold on those 40 acres. If it ever occurred, the land would automatically go back to the heirs. That’s the story I always heard. You never could buy anything for all those years, and you look at it today and I’m not sure.
Buddy: That’s probably the case and it was probably just kind of something that was never actually on the books but yeah. The way you made it sound, it really wasn’t that much of a problem anyway. Probably nobody really wanted to partake in too many vices anyway.
Jerry: Not myself, but a lot of my cousins by the time they were 18 years old were dipping snuff and smoking. A lot of kids smoked. I never smoked, but my dad did. He died of emphysema. For that reason, I never did smoke, thank goodness.
Buddy: So you just had to go out of town to get your stuff?
Jerry: Yeah. You could get it at 50th and Mueller. Bill Hussey had a grocery store there and it was just across the street from Bethany city limits.
Buddy: So the north side of 50th was out of the city?
Jerry: Yeah, and on that 40 acres, I think that’s really just where the college is in the downtown area of Bethany. I think you could also – across from Erick’s Funeral Home on Hammond there was a little store on 39th. I think you could buy – as a matter of fact, there was a liquor store there when I was in high school.
Buddy: So it wasn’t like it was too restrictive? Things were still available if you wanted to. It wasn’t possession. It was just the sale.
Jerry: Yeah.
Buddy: I see. What was the name of the police officer, again?
Jerry: Fletcher McClain.
Buddy: Okay. He was a one-man police department?
Jerry: Yes.
Buddy: What do you remember about him, other than helping children cross the street?
Jerry: That’s about it. I knew his son. His son went to school with one of my older sisters.
Buddy: Was he a pretty good guy? Sometimes the one-man police department is –
Jerry: He was also an uncle of a good friend of mine, which D.D. McCoy, his son was a good friend of mine. That was his uncle.
Buddy: Everybody kind of knew everybody in Bethany.
Jerry: Oh yeah. I did have a cousin get a speeding ticket for racing his horse down the street over there by the college one time.
Buddy: Wow. A speeding ticket on a horse. Okay.
Jerry: My mother got run over by a bunch of boys. I had three older sisters and they were all cheerleaders. Bethany used to be a big basketball town. They were always going to state and so forth. Coming home from one of the games one night, Mom always had a load of kids in the car. You had to do that because there was a gas shortage and everything. I think the girls had hollered at some boys on horses, and they came running. Mom had let somebody out and these guys couldn’t stop the horses. They came flying and a couple of them hit the car and rolled over the top of the roof. Didn’t hurt anybody too bad, but she got run over by a herd of horses.
Buddy: Wow. Yeah, you don’t see that every day. I wondered. You went to high school at Bethany High School. Just doing the math, you would have been in the mid-to-late ‘50s. Is that right?
Jerry: I graduated in ’58.
Buddy: Okay. That was kind of the heyday of American youth and all that. Rock n’ roll came along and Elvis and things like that. What was the Bethany experience like with that era?
Jerry: I never knew how to dance because we didn’t have dances or anything at the school. Camp Ioan [“eye-own”] had a place on Friday nights you could go dance.
Buddy: Where was that again?
Jerry: Camp Ioan.
Buddy: Oh, that’s the Ioan Y or whatever.
Jerry: About 58th Street, west of MacArthur. Putnam City had sock hops, and we ran around with a lot of people at Putnam City. Our hangout was 23rd and MacArthur. That’s where we all went. It was called the Dairy Snack. We all bet Bethany-Putnam. We all went over there and kind of mingled together. Like I said, I never danced but I’d go over there on Friday nights because that’s where everybody was. I’d just kind of sit there and visit, and then maybe we’d go out cruising. Our cruise was down Classen and Main Streets of Oklahoma City. We’d go cruise down Classen.
Buddy: Wow. That’s pretty far away.
Jerry: Well, all the drive-ins were there. Bixter’s and some of those, in those days.
Buddy: At Classen and Main. Okay. Wow. I never really knew that. Okay, so the drive-ins were there, so you would hang out at 23rd and MacArthur at the Dairy Snack. Was that a drive-in?
Jerry: Yeah, it was a drive-in. You could go inside or sit outside. You’d go inside and get hamburgers and stuff. There were two young guys that owned that. They were in their 20s. I can’t remember their names, but it was just a neat place to hang out.
Buddy: What was 23rd and MacArthur like at the time?
Jerry: It was kind of out there by itself. The Dairy Snack was the only thing on that particular corner. There’s a shopping center there now. Paving was starting to come in. 10th Street was paved out to I think Western Avenue at that time. May Avenue was a two-lane, and it went up to 63rd. 63rd was dirt.
Buddy: So you didn’t cruise 39th Street like the later kids did? It was only two lanes and nothing there.
Jerry: No. There was nothing there.
Buddy: Once you left Bethany, you had Putnam City High School on 39th, but then you really didn’t have anything until you got to like May or so.
Jerry: Wasn’t anything at May, then. At the corner of May and 50th, there was a little driving range out there and a little restaurant. It sat out there by itself.
Buddy: Wow. That’s pretty far out. Bethany really was its own little town.
Jerry: Yeah. There was no place to eat except for the two little cafes here in the middle of town. They were closed on weekends, on Sundays.
Buddy: Right. Everything was supposed to be closed on Sunday. I read a story. Maybe this involved your father or uncles, but I read a story about a guy who tried to keep his gas station open on Sunday. This would probably have been in the ‘30s or ‘40s. He kept getting in trouble with the city council and the police because he would be open on Sunday, and he said he was on a major U.S. highway and people need gas. He used the dairymen as his defense because they worked on Sunday, and they didn’t let him do that. He had to move over by the Catholic facilities over there. He had to move just outside of the city.
Jerry: I don’t remember who that was unless it was Haley’s.
Buddy: I’m not sure. I just thought that was kind of funny because he kept moving it and they kind of chased him out. They were pretty strict about those Sunday laws.
Jerry: You mentioned a Catholic orphanage. That was out there when I was a little kid.
Buddy: Right. What do you remember about that? Was there – did you mix with those children very much?
Jerry: No. I remember you’d go by there and those little kids would be out there looking through the fence watching the cars go by. There was one theater, the Coronado Theater, and I know every weekend the guy that owned that would let those kids in free. They would bring them by the carloads and they’d go to the movies every Saturday.
Buddy: Wow. There were quite a few kids there. I never really knew –
Jerry: Yeah. We got a quarter to go to the movie. It cost a dime to get in. You got a nickel for a candy bar, a nickel for popcorn, and a nickel for a Coke. You saw two movies, two short subjects, probably tw continued pieces, three or four comedies, for that dime.
Buddy: That’s a pretty good bargain. The Coronado Theater – was that over where the Coronado neighborhood is now?
Jerry: No, it was at 39th and MacArthur. There’s a drugstore there now. There was a little theater there.
Buddy: That was probably off by itself, too, then.
Jerry: Pretty much.
Buddy: That was about the limit of the experience you had with the Catholic group there?
Jerry: Mm-hmm.
Buddy: Then you had the Nazarene college. Did you ever encounter that? Do you have any memories of that?
Jerry: Well, we used to have altercations with some of the kids.
Buddy: I was about to ask if you had town and gown fights.
Jerry: We had a few fistfights there, nothing serious. Mainly when it would snow, our gym sat right there catty-corner to the campus. At that time, it was called Bethany Penial [“Pen-EYE-all”] College. They changed the name from Penial because people thought it was Bethany Penial [“PEE-nee-all”] College.
Buddy: Where prisoners go, yeah.
Jerry: So anyway, they would drive by and we’d all stand out there and they’d snowball our cars That would cause an altercation. So sometimes you’d have to –
Buddy: You’d have to go take matters into your own hands.
Jerry: Yeah, go out there and somebody’d start a fight. That was about the extent of it. Nothing serious. No big deal.
Buddy: When you grew up there, what was your outlook on your place in Bethany or on the world? What were your goals and things like that for your life? Did you have dreams that you wanted to do, or was Bethany enough?
Jerry: I never really thought about it. I did go to college. I liked sports. Of course, I was a little bitty runt. I wasn’t any good, but Bethany was such a small school that’s what makes it unique. It was so small that everybody had to participate in everything for it to work. I played four sports. I was in the band. I was in the mixed chorus. I was on the student council. Most kids were in everything. That’s what makes it unique from the big schools today. You’re just a number and you’re in a class with a thousand kids. You’re just a number unless you’re really outstanding. The small school with everybody – you got to know everybody because you were involved in every aspect of what was going on in school, which was a really neat deal.
Buddy: I heard you were president of the class. Is that right?
Jerry: I was vice-president of the junior high student council in eighth grade, and I was president in my freshman year. I was president of my class sophomore year and my senior year. I was president of the mixed chorus, student director of the band.
Buddy: You were a leader.
Jerry: No, it’s nothing.
Buddy: Did all the jobs get traded around anyways?
Jerry: Yeah. It just – I don’t know. I liked to be active and I liked people. I liked to talk to people. I always tried to speak to everybody and not snub anybody. We didn’t really have that type of environment anyway.
Buddy: Sometimes the smaller schools or a smaller group, sometimes it works against you because you do get cliques and things like that. It’s not so easy to move from one group to another. Did Bethany not really have problems with the upper class? You know, a small town like the banker and the funeral home guy and the car lot owner that kind of run everything? You have the merchants that kind of run everything. Did Bethany not have classes?
Jerry: No, not really. We had a couple – I won’t mention names – during football that was always showing up down there trying to tell the coaches how to coach games, but that was part of it.
Buddy: So you didn’t really have classes like upper classes or anything like that?
Jerry: We did, but you know, in my case we didn’t have very many boys in my class. I think there was five of us that played sports, so I ran around with everybody from the class above or below me. We had several years’ span there, so there was no “I’m a senior and I’m better than you are,” type thing. There was no animosity. It was just a really neat environment. Like I said, you can’t explain it if you didn’t get the opportunity to live it.
Buddy: Did you stay in Bethany after high school?
Jerry: Well, I did until 1960. I got married. I worked two jobs and went to college at night. I got my degree from OCU. I started at Central State. I wanted to play football but I wasn’t good enough or big enough, but I went up there anyway. They used me for a dummy, so I thought, “This is not really what want to do.” Like I say, I got married and worked two jobs. I joined to Oklahoma Air Guard when I was seventeen. By the time I got out of high school, I got a year out of the way. Three or four of us did that. We thought it’d be a good way to get in shape for football for our senior year, to go down to basic training and come back, so we did that. I ended up staying in for 38 years. I got a commission after I was enlisted for eight years, commissioned for 30.
Buddy: What drew you to the Air Guard instead of the National Guard? Did you have any flying experience?
Jerry: I wasn’t even thinking about it. One of the guys that got us together on this said he had a couple of captains that were going to come over there and talk to their parents about being in the Guard and said would you be interested? I said I didn’t know anything about that, so we went over there and of course my parents went. I thought that might be a pretty good deal. I’d never been away from home. We did that. Most of them got out after. We had a six-year obligation, and by the time I got out of high school I had a year out of the way. I started (unintelligible) rank and then when I graduated college, I got a commission. I retired as a full bird colonel. I ended up in the reserves. I went from the guard to the reserves. It was a good move for me, especially in the days I got all my prescriptions and insurance and stuff. I never thought about that at the time. It was just one of the things that came with it, and I really enjoyed it. I wasn’t ready to get out.
Buddy: What was your MOS? Did you fly?
Jerry: I was comm computers. I went to pilot training. I got my commission to go to pilot training and I went to Leedey Air Force Base flying the T-37 jets. I had never flown before, didn’t know anything about it. I started having optical migraines, and it was really based upon pressure. I would have the gray out in the eye and it would cost my depth perception, so I washed out. It was the first time I’d ever failed at anything and it was a real blow. I didn’t know how to handle that. I didn’t know what to do, and they said I could go to navigator school if I wanted to. I said, “If I can’t fly, I don’t want to mess with it.” They allowed me to keep my commission. I started off in supply and I had a math degree, so I got to move over to comm computers. I ended up in an electronic installation squadron as a vice commander. I left there and got in the reserves and ended up retiring at Randolph Air Force Base where I was made a commander of comm computers.
Buddy: That was pretty early for computers. You probably dealt with some of the –
Jerry: ’93 is when I retired.
Buddy: Oh, so you covered a whole wide area there.
Jerry: Yeah. I started in computers out at Tinker back in the punch card counting machine days where you had the 407 wide boards and stuff like that. I did follow the whole gamut. Of course, I don’t know anything about PCs today. I didn’t want to after being in it for 30-something years. I didn’t want to. I knew email and I knew Excel and Word and stuff like that.
Buddy: You don’t need to get inside the case.
Jerry: I don’t know how to do any of the auto-exec and bat files and stuff like that. I don’t mess with that.
Buddy: Now you’re back. Are you back in Bethany?
Jerry: I live over by Mercy Hospital, but I’ve always lived in this area. I lived in Yukon for a number of years. I got the opportunity to coach Garth Brooks’ little league football. [laughs]
Buddy: Oh cool. That’s pretty neat.
Jerry: He lived across the street from us. My daughter dated him in high school a couple of times. He wouldn’t know me from Adam today, but it was kind of unique and interesting to see somebody that rose up.
Buddy: I guess you got married. Was your wife not from Bethany?
Jerry: She was.
Buddy: She was. Okay. Did you meet in high school?
Jerry: Yeah, we were high school sweethearts. We were married for 19 years and then we split. I remarried and I’ve been married 30 years next month. I have four kids, two boys and two girls.
Buddy: Did they all grow up in Yukon?
Jerry: The girls grew up in Yukon and the boys grew up in Putnam City. We’ve always lived in this area, somewhat.
Buddy: What kind of – what did you – I’m sorry. I’m reading my question here. Were there any other ethnic groups or anything in Bethany that lived here? Indians or African Americans?
Jerry: No, there were no African Americans. There used to be a sign on the west side of town. I’m not going to tell you what they had on it.
Buddy: [slowly] Okay. [speaking normally] Oh, I see. Yeah, that’s what I wondered. Was it a sundown town, they called it?
Jerry: Yes, it was. They had a sign there that said, “Black men, don’t let the sun set on your head.” I remember that. I really didn’t know what that meant because I didn’t know any Black people. My kids grew up there. Matter of fact, my son’s best man at his wedding was a Black kid. He’s a really successful kid today. I don’t have any qualms with that.
The first time we played with any ethnic group, we played Dunjee High School when I was a sophomore. We never had played any Black athletes. At that time, they really didn’t have any rules. One of the guys that played was in his 20s. It’s like you’re kidding me. I think I was 15. A funny thing happened. We were out there and they said, if the lights go out, you guys get to the bench because these guys carry knives and stuff like that. They had us all scared. I kid you not, we got out there on the opening kickoff and the lights went out. When the lights came on, we were all in a circle with out backs like this looking around. It was stupid things in those days. We didn’t know. Some of my best friends are Blacks today. It was just a deal from old ways. My parents were never – we went to church in Yukon at the time when we had that law here. We had a Black family that used to worship with us, and Dad would always pick him up and take him through town.
Buddy: Yeah, people didn’t really have any problems there. Who were some of the notable figures that you remember from Bethany? Mayors or do you remember Allie Reynolds the baseball player? He was probably before your time.
Jerry: I didn’t know Allie personally, but I met him a couple of times because his son went to school there. His son was a year younger than mine.
Buddy: I didn’t know he stayed around town.
Jerry: His son went to school here for a year or two. I can’t remember his name, but at that time I didn’t know who Allie Reynolds was. I went to school with Shannon Lucid. Shannon Wells. She was a sophomore when I was a senior. We were in the band together
Buddy: We were just talking about her earlier. We wondered – I’d heard that she was a missionary child first.
Jerry: Her parents were missionaries in China. I think that’s where she was actually born.
Buddy: What was she like? Was she a science kid still, even then?
Jerry: She was a very quiet kid. I played the coronet and she played the coronet. Band was the only time I had any relationship with her, but she was very quiet. I really didn’t know her that well except from that experience. We’d go on band trips.
Buddy: Cool. What kind of things did I not bring up that you think are important to know about Bethany or the Barton family?
Jerry: I’m not sure anything I told you is important. [laughs]
Buddy: I think it is.
Jerry: It just – I don’t know. It’s just a unique community, and really a close-knit community. It was a great place to grow up as a kid. We never locked our house. We’d go on a two-week vacation and never locked the doors. Summertime, we didn’t have air conditioning when we were young. Sometimes we’d take the beds and put them in the back yard to sleep because it was too hot in the house. Other than that, I don’t know. It’s just a great living experience.
Buddy: How did you feel – I guess maybe you’d already left by then – but how did you feel when Bethany started to grow beyond those early limits? Were you around when they went out to 63rd? I don’t know if they were fighting against Oklahoma City or something like that, but did you feel like you were losing some of that?
Jerry: Well, yeah, you do. The school today, they had a long waiting list to get into that school. There’s a lot of people that come in that really don’t live in that community because the school is really getting to be academically well-known. I still participate in a lot of things at school. We go to the fundraiser things they have. You still see – the kids there today don’t have the relationship with each other and with the community that we had at the time we went. I think it’s lost, but it’s still a great school.
Buddy: Do you think it’s still a great town?
Jerry: Yeah. It’s a great place. It’s changed. Of course, that’s the way life is. Things change. Families aren’t like they used to be. People don’t get together like they used to. You don’t see this anymore. I’ve got a niece that lives probably a mile from me, and I see her once every five years or something like that. If I’m lucky, I’ll run into her somewhere. I saw her at a funeral today. It’s the first time I’ve seen her in a long time. Her kids are grown and I didn’t know it.
Buddy: Yeah, they don’t seem to be too connected anymore.
Jerry: They’re missing a valuable link there.
Buddy: Yeah. Well, if you don’t have anything else to add, I guess we’re about finished.
Jerry: Okay. Well, I appreciate it.
Buddy: Thank you very much.
[rustling noises]
Buddy: I hope that wasn’t too painful for you.
Jerry: Oh no, I just ramble around. I could talk all day because there’s so many things around this area. The neatest thing was the old Arnett Building. You ever hear about the old Arnett Building over here?
Buddy: I’m not really sure. We can turn on the thing again if you want.
Jerry: Oh, no. It was just the fact that –
Buddy: Oh, yeah, I know that. Now it’s in Putnam City.
Jerry: It sits there on 39th. The east building is still in existence, but that thing was a horseshoe. We always called it the Arnett Building. There used to be a lot of tunnels in that building. My cousins used to live in building. Spooky place. They were the only ones that lived –
Buddy: Your cousins lived in that?
[talking over each other]
Jerry: There was one other family and the proprieter that lived in that thing. The rest of them just – all broken windows and things. Spooky. I remember there was a tunnel you could go across underneath 39th Street and come up over at the headwaters over there at the Deep Fork at that creek there.
Buddy: That’s a long tunnel.
Jerry: There was a pump. That’s where they got their water. You had to go over there and there was a hand pump over there. It was spooky at night. I think that was built – somebody said that was built [pause] as a forerunner or a place that they wanted to put the Capitol there. I don’t know the history about that but I just remember that was kind of neat.
End of interview.