Description:
James Port talks about his childhood in Iran and his adult life in Oklahoma.
Transcript:
Interviewee: James Port
Interviewer: Port’s Daughter, likely named Heidi
Interview Date: 8/10/2007
Interview Location: Ron J. Norick Downtown Library
Transcribed By: Katie Widmann
Proofed By: Alex Hinton
Daughter: If you could tell me your name, your birthdate, our relationship, and where we are?
James Port: My name is James Port. I was born in Oklahoma City on March 13, 1942.
D: And you’re my father, and we’re in the Downtown Library of Oklahoma City. The 13th was a Friday, too. You didn’t say that.
JP: That’s correct.
D: Tell me about – what hospital were you born in?
JP: Saint Anthony’s. (Transcriber’s Note: This is now known as Saints or SSM Health.)
D: Tell me your earliest memory.
JP: [pause] Well, I’m not quite sure. One of my earliest memories was I was sick around Christmas time, and my parents bought me the next-door neighbor’s used electric Lionel train. They set that up in the living room floor so I could lay there on the couch and watch it with the lights out. The train had a light on it and would go around and I really thought that was great.
D: Do you have any idea how old you were when that happened?
JP: About 3.
D: Let me back up just a little bit. Do you remember any stories about when you were born or around the time when you were born?
JP: No, don’t remember any stories about when I was born. Do you?
D: [laughs] I’m trying to get the story about when the doctor thought you were having – Grandma was having a girl so she made all girls’ clothes and you had to wear girl clothes until she could get some boy clothes made.
JP: Oh. Well, that’s not one of my kind of stories.
D: [laughs] Okay, we’ll stick to your kind. What else do you remember about your childhood?
JP: Two other events really – well, there are several events from my early childhood when I still lived in Oklahoma City. One was I was trying to help my mother do the laundry one time. She had an old wringer washing machine. I decided that I could run the clothes through the wringer for her while she was off doing something else. I got some clothes and start running it through the wringer, and the wringer caught my arm and went up to my elbow, and started going turn, turn, turn, and she came in and it wouldn’t go past the elbow so it tore off some skin right there and made a few little scars, but I lived through it. That was my washing experience. I don’t do much washing anymore. Another instance that I remember is when the war was over back in 1945. I was riding my tricycle and waving the American flag, saying, “The war is over! The war is over!” We’re talking about World War II. This lady came down the street and she thought I was being very dangerous riding my tricycle with one hand and waving a flag, so she took my flag and put it in my pocket and said that I should do it that way. I always thought that was a little rude or something. That stuck in my mind.
D: How old were you when the war was over?
JP: I guess I was about four years old.
D: [laughing] And you still remember the upset with her for doing that? Did you take it out of your pocket and wave it again or did you leave it in your pocket?
JP: Probably later. I think I told my parents on her too. Another instance, about the same time, is I went to the store. We had a corner grocery store about a block or so from us. I’d gone there one time and I found the plums, I believe it was. I was eating those and then throwing the seeds up in the air.
D: In the store?
JP: In the store. When I got home, or I guess the next time we went, the grocery told them about it or somehow my parents found out that I had done it. They made me go back and apologize to their grocery store person. I think I may have gotten a spanking or something. I don’t remember. Anyway, I learned early on that you don’t take things that aren’t yours.
D: Do you have brothers and sisters?
JP: Oh yes. I had a sister that was born in Saint Anthony’s also in Oklahoma City, and I have another sister that was born in Tehran, Iran. She’s eight years younger. The first one was two years younger. I had one brother that was born in Iran. He’s ten years younger than I am, and when we came back to Oklahoma, we lived in Edmond. I had a brother seventeen years younger that was born in Edmond.
D: You lived in Oklahoma City when all of these stories were taking place about the war and the grocery store and all of that stuff?
JP: Early on.
D: Where did you go to school?
JP: Well, we moved from Oklahoma City to Edmond when I was about five because my parents were very concerned – I may have been four. Four or five. My parents were very concerned. A car ran off the street and had a wreck there by our house, and they didn’t want me playing in a dangerous city like Oklahoma City back then, which now would be considered very safe under those same standards. They decided to move to Edmond, so we moved to Edmond and I started first grade there at Russell Dougherty grade school. Let me make sure that’s right. [pause] No, it was Cleghern. Russell Dougherty is where I went to eighth grade. It was Cleghern. When I went to Cleghern, I remember that I used to ride my bicycle to first grade because I was a good bike rider. I learned to ride my bike when I was five. The teacher didn’t think I should ride my bike to school. She thought I ought to leave the bike rack and everything for the people that lived farther away because I only lived a couple of blocks and I could walk to school. The kids that lived farther away used the bike rack.
D: Did you get to keep riding your bike or did you have to walk after that?
JP: I walked after that. I didn’t stay there long. I only went to school there a few months, three months or something like that.
D: Then what happened?
JP: My parents became missionaries to Tehran, Iran so I finished up through the sixth grade in Iran.
D: What kind of school did you go to in Iran?
JP: It was an American mission school run by the missionaries. They called it the Community School. People from – I think we had 30 different nationalities that were going there. Most of the people that had children from embassies, foreign students, that kind of thing. That was the school.
D: Do you think that that shaped your worldview at all, knowing all of these children from all of these different places?
JP: I think it gave me a lot bigger perspective of the world and nationalities and things than I see some people have that I talk to around here.
D: Any memories from living in Tehran?
JP: Quite a few. One thing was they had big, high mud walls around most of the places to keep the thieves out and things. That was kind of fun to climb up on those. There were several children we used to play with, some American and some Iranian. Anyway, we got up on those walls. They were about a foot wide at the top and made out of mainly mud and brick.
D: How tall were they?
JP: These were about ten to twelve feet tall, at least.
D: How did you get up there?
JP: We had a tree. We climbed up the tree and got up on the wall. We decided to have an adventure and see how far we could go around the city, so we’d walk around the wall. Sometimes it’d go through attics and we’d go through there, and more wall on the other side. We’d just kind of go around. We were coming back and it started raining, and that made the wall very slick on the top. We were kind of crawling along holding on. It was kind of rounded at the top. We hoped we wouldn’t fall off. I finally had to have – some of the ones that had gotten down first had to get my father with a ladder or something to help me get down so I wouldn’t fall off.
D: How old were you when that happened? Do you know?
JP: Probably eight or nine. Something like that.
D: What else happened when you were in Iran?
JP: Oh, I remember I was enthralled with Superman and I used to jump off the porch with my Superman cape hoping I’d take off and fly, but it never did work. We used to play games like marbles. They called them quile (Transcriber’s Note: pronounced “KEE-lay.”)
D: Is it different than marbles in America or is it the same?
JP: Marbles in America, usually they have a circle you shoot in. These had little holes and you tried to go from one to the other, that kind of thing. They shoot them differently, too. They kind of flip them with the finger. We flick them with the thumb here in the States, so that was a little different. We played a game kind of like baseball, except you didn’t use a baseball. You used a stick that we would put down between two rocks, and we would flick the stick up with another stick and hit it, kind of like a baseball, and then went around bases like you do here. We improvised a lot. We played cowboys and Indians and made our own bows and arrows and stuff like that. I remember we had a fig tree. I really liked fresh figs, and we had a fig tree there. I’d go over there and they also had a big compost pit. My dog and I used to like to jump in that compost pit and play in the leaves and all that kind of thing.
D: I’m sure your mom loved that. What kind of dog did you have?
JP: I thought it was a – I don’t really know. I always thought it was kind of like a Husky. It had a curved tail on the back and was a white dog. That kind of thing.
D: What was his name?
JP: I called him “Hoosie-Poochie.”
D: [laughing] Why’d you call him Hoosie-Poochie?
JP: I don’t know.
D: Was he your dog or was he the family dog?
JP: I guess he was more mine. He was an outside dog. My father didn’t like dogs in the house, so he was outside. Another incident was we had ponds all around so that you could – water came down from the streets and then you’d divert it into your yard and your pond so that you’d have water for watering your flowers and that kind of thing. My little sister, who was about three years old, was looking over into the pond and she fell in, so I jumped in and saved her. Pushed her out. That was exciting.
D: Was that Aunt Carolyn or Aunt Crystal?
JP: That was Aunt Crystal, the eight-years-younger sister.
D: She had been born there so you were ten or eleven when that happened. Where did you learn how to swim?
JP: I learned how to swim in the Caspian Sea. We went up there on a vacation one time and I got to swim there. An exciting thing – we saw some Russian ships while we were there on the shore because Russia is only three miles – about three miles into the Caspian Sea starts being Russia and not Iranian.
D: What else did you do on vacation? Do you remember?
JP: We ate strawberries. We went and visited a doctor in Crest and he had a big strawberry patch, and we went out there and picked strawberries. I ate so many of them I got a rash from eating so many strawberries. I remember that. We went to a place called Gachsaran on one of our vacations, which means Chalk Mountain. That’s where they used to mine chalk. They had these mines that would go down, so they had some old mining carts and things that we could ride in a bit, so we got to play in that. My little brother and sister at the time – we had a baby carriage. That’s when people still had baby carriages, at least over there. We used to like to run them up and down the hills. They almost got away from us sometimes going so fast.
D: This is you and Aunt Carolyn and Uncle John and Aunt Crystal?
JP: Right. We had a lot of enjoyable vacations like that.
D: What were your parents like?
JP: My father was very literary. He would work all day, and then he liked to come home and type stories. He wrote a lot of children’s stories and had a lot of them published. He worked on books. He never had a real book published, but he did have children’s science fiction and children’s – he did many, many for a Sunday School paper, writing short stories for those. He would do that a lot. He taught me how to type when I was in Iran. He wouldn’t let me use the typewriter until I learned all the keys, so I had to memorize the keyboard – A-S-D-F-G-H-J-K-L. That kind of thing. When I could do that, he let me type on his typewriter, so I learned to type. I actually wrote my first story. I raised silkworms while I was over there. We had a lot of mulberry trees, and silkworms like mulberry. That was fun, watching them make their cocoons and the silk and all that. I decided to write a story about it, so I wrote a story called “Joe’s Silkworms.” It was about a paragraph long, and I sent it off to Highlights magazine. They actually put that in their section, so I thought that was nice.
D: You were published when you were less than ten years old, huh?
JP: That’s right, or nine. Something like that.
D: What about your mom?
JP: My mother was a hard worker. She took care of the family and at the time in Iran, she worked in the Well Baby Clinic there to teach new mothers how to care for their children, cleanliness, sanitation, health type issues, that kind of thing. In Iran, that’s what she did. In America after my father died, she finished college. We graduated on the same year from the same college, Central State in Edmond at the time, which is UCO now. After she got her degree, she got a teaching job in Grants, New Mexico. She taught school for a while there and then came back to her hometown of Davenport, and taught Home Economics and English there until she retired.
D: Did any of you learn the language when you were living in Iran?
JP: Yes. Of course, I did because I played with the kids so I know a lot of –
D: Do you remember any of it?
JP: Some of it, but not as much as I’d like to. It’s been about 55 years ago. I’ve forgotten a lot of it, and I didn’t know an awful lot other than what children know. I had a child’s vocabulary, but enough to get along and enough that Iranians that hear me today speak think that I do very well and without an accent, so I speak it more like a native speaker than like an American or somebody else.
D: When it was time to leave Iran, how did you get back and forth?
JP: When we went to Iran, we rode a train to New York City. Then we got on a ship, the SS Excalibur, which was a steam ship, and we rode that across the Atlantic through the Mediterranean Sea and stopped at Beirut, Lebanon. We had made a stop in Marseilles, France. I remember we went to church there for Christmas Day. We were there on Christmas, which was another concern while I was young. How would Santa Claus come we were out in the ocean on the ship? He made it okay.
D: How did he do that?
JP: I guess he went through one of those smokestacks. Anyway, we still had some presents. We got to Beirut, Lebanon and we got cars. They were like station wagons, the old ones that look like they have wood sides. In fact, they might have had wood sides back then. We drove those across I think it was Lebanon and Iraq into Iran to Tehran.
D: Do you remember anything about that trip?
JP: I remember starting to try to learn the language on that trip. I was trying to figure out how they would say things. Maybe for a dog they would say “dag” or “doog” or something like that. I found out that their word for dog was “sag,” so I found out that they actually had different words. It wasn’t just a variation of what I had always known. I remember we stopped where the Tower of Babel is supposed to have been.
D: What did that look like?
JP: Rocks. Desert. It was pretty hot and dry. It was actually when we got to Tehran that it had been snowing, and they had pushed snow up on the sides of the streets to clear them like they do here. We still saw some snow when we first got there, so that was always exciting for little kids.
D: And then when you came back from the United States?
JP: When we came back, we flew on an airplane to Paris, from Tehran to Paris. From Paris we were supposed to go to London, but they were fogged in or bad weather or something, so we stopped in Iceland instead, and then went on to Boston. When I was in Iran, I got a little allowance but there wasn’t much to spend it on over there, maybe some candy or something like that but not a whole lot. When we landed in Boston, I saw my first slot machine. You know, where you can buy candy and things like that. I told my parents, “Oh boy! We can spend lots of money here!” That turned out to be true. You can.
D: There’s just not a lot of stuff to buy in Iran, then?
JP: There wasn’t then, especially not for a kid that didn’t have anything. I remember when we came back, we went to New York City and were staying in a hotel. I saw my first television set in a hotel lobby, which television, I’d heard about before we left for Iran, but I’d never seen one until we got back. That was the first one I’d seen.
D: You were 11 years old when you saw your first TV.
JP: Right.
D: What did you think about the plane ride? Do you remember anything about that?
JP: I’ve always enjoyed plane rides and liked them. We’d ridden a smaller plane from Tehran to Mashhad on vacation one time.
D: So you knew about flying?
JP: Yes.
D: When you got to New York, then where did you go from there?
JP: We lived in New York for about six months. I went to seventh grade there. I went to a private school, which was a good education. We learned about the stock market, and in New York that’s kind of a big thing. Then we went to Stony Point, New York, which is a little north up the Hudson River. I went to some more seventh grade there. Then my father found out that he wasn’t going to be a missionary to go back. That was our original plan, so he got a job at Western College for Women, which is now part of Oxford University in Ohio. We went there and I finished out my seventh grade in Oxford. Then after that, we came back to Oklahoma where I started the eighth grade.
D: Why did you go to private school when you lived in New York?
JP: My parents couldn’t really afford it, but they were concerned about the public schools and the violence and all that kind of thing in New York City at the time.
D: Didn’t you have to wear a suit and jacket?
JP: Oh yes. It was very, very different. I had to wear a tie to school every day and that kind of thing. I was being a missionary, and back then missionaries were supposed to be poor. I guess we were, so most of the kids that would go to that school would bring either steak sandwiches from home or they would eat at the cafeteria and buy the nice food there. I would have a little brown bag with a peanut butter sandwich and a banana or something like that for lunch. I didn’t know how those fancy kids ate a banana. I didn’t know if they peeled it and ate it like a monkey or if they put it on their plate and cut it up with a knife and fork. I just left mine in the bag and ate it when I got home.
D: That story always makes me want to cry. [sniffling] Poor guy. Bless your heart.
JP: I’ll eat about anything anywhere now.
D: That’s true. Do you think your Iranian experience shaped your palate of food as well?
JP: Oh yes. I really like rice, and the dishes “maast,” (Transcriber’s Note: pronounced “mahst”) which is translated as yogurt here. I would eat that on a lot of things that normal people wouldn’t think of eating it on, like shish-kabobs and all that kind of stuff.
D: When you left New York and Grandpa wasn’t going to be a missionary anymore, it was because he was – do you know why that was?
JP: He had kidney failure.
D: Did you know that at the time or do you remember when you found that out?
JP: I don’t know if I knew that specifically. I knew he was sick and couldn’t go back because of his health, is what they told me.
D: Were you worried about that?
JP: I wasn’t at the time. He always seemed normal. He kept his problems pretty private, so up until actually about a month before he died I didn’t know he had that big of a problem.
D: You moved back to Edmond, and then what? Where did you go to school? How old were you when you moved back to Edmond?
JP: It was eighth grade, probably, so twelve or something like that. I went to eighth grade there, and then went to the old high school for ninth grade. For the tenth grade, they built the new one, which isn’t a high school anymore. We were the first one to go through that all three years.
D: What school was that?
JP: I think they called it Edmond Memorial High School, but now they’ve built a new Memorial High School. It was the only Edmond High School at the time.
D: What do you remember about high school?
JP: I liked sports. I played basketball and ran track. I enjoyed that.
D: What position did you play in basketball?
JP: Center.
D: Because you were tall?
JP: Sure.
D: Why do you say that?
JP: That’s why.
D: Okay. Were you always tall?
JP: Yep. I looked like a 97-pound weakling when I was younger. The doctor told my mother to feed me more desserts and stuff like that so that helped build my appetite for things like that.
D: Did that fatten you up at all?
JP: No, not until after I got married.
D: Who did you hang out with in high school?
JP: I belonged to Boy Scouts. I was interested in Boy Scouts because I’d been a Cub Scout in Iran, and then when I was in New York I was Boy Scout. When we came back to Edmond, I stayed a Boy Scout. Anyway, there were five of us that hung out together and we all became Eagle Scouts together, so we did a lot of that. We went on a lot of camping trips. I got to go to the National Jamboree in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania in 1957. I earned the money to do that. That was a big deal and another little adventure.
D: How many guys went with you to that or were you just the representative?
JP: There were a lot of them. Oklahoma had a whole contingent. All the troops had people. I can’t remember exactly how many of the Big Five went, as we called it.
D: Who was in the Big Five?
JP: Most of my high school friends, like Eddie Pfieffer and Homer Piet and…oh, I don’t know. I’d have to think a minute. I can’t think of who all else.
D: That’s three of the Big Five.
JP: Roddy Reese, who goes by Kenneth Reese now.
D: Do you still know any of these guys?
JP: Yeah, Kenneth Reese goes to the Presbyterian Church in Edmond so I’ve seen him. The last high school reunion I went to ten or fifteen years ago, I saw Eddie Pfieffer and Homer Piet. Homer Piet moved to Arkansas about fifteen years ago or so. Bobby Nutt was the other one. He moved off to Texas and I don’t know where he is now. I think he’s probably moved to Amarillo, Texas.
D: Tell me a story about something that happened in high school.
JP: Would you like to hear about my love life while I was in high school?
D: Of course.
JP: They were having a Sadie Hawkins dance one time, so the girls were asking the boys out. I was the kind of boy that if I asked a girl out, they would always come up with something else they had to do during that time. I was kind of used to that. Anyway, I saw this girl that I considered – she may not have been, but I considered her the most undesirable girl in school as far as somebody to go with. I saw her going down the hall talking to one guy or another, and she finally got to me. She asked me if I wanted to go to the Sadie Hawkins dance with her, and I just remembered that my grandmother was getting sick or something and I had to go visit her. She said, “Aw, shucks. You’re the last one.” So I was the last one to ask.
D: But you did go to your prom.
JP: Yes, I went to my prom.
D: Did you have a date or did you just go?
JP: No, I had a date to the prom.
D: What do you remember about it? Do you remember where you got a haircut before you went to prom?
JP: [laughs] I remember I needed a haircut. Of course, I worked a lot.
D: Where did you work?
JP: During high school I didn’t, but during college I started working at Safeway. During high school, I’d mow lawns and throw papers and stuff like that. Anyway, I hadn’t had time or money or something to get a haircut, and my mother thought she could cut my hair. She got some scissors and made a little V on the top of my ears. It made it look like I was a pointy-haired something, so she took me across the street to neighbor who had more haircutting experience to round it out and smooth it out and everything.
D: Did it turn out okay?
JP: It was passable.
D: Did you have a date to your prom or did you just go?
JP: I believe I had a date. I didn’t have a lot of dates while I was in high school that I remember. I had, I think it was a girl named Carolyn Talley, and I think I took her. I think the reason why she went was she had a boyfriend who was older and you couldn’t take older guys so that made her available for this.
D: What subjects did you like in school?
JP: My favorites were probably recess and gym and stuff like that. I did well in English because it was easy for me. I’d been brought up learning how to speak correctly having a father that had been to college, and my mother. They spoke correctly and all that kind of thing, so that just kind of came naturally. I enjoyed science classes. They were interesting, doing experiments and things like that.
D: Do you remember any of your teachers?
JP: In eighth grade I remember Kirk Rice. He was a science teacher and he had a lot of interest in my stories. He’d lived in Ethiopia for a while, so he knew a lot. One of the things he used to say is when somebody would bring up a problem, he’d quote out of the Bible and say, “Sufficient is the evil – “[pause]. Something about the trouble for today is enough and don’t worry about what’s going to happen tomorrow. I can’t remember the exact quote right now that he used to do.
D: Today has enough troubles of its own.
JP: I remember he would do that. I had a teacher called Miss Hall. She taught history in high school. Colleen Kiplin taught Latin. I took a couple of years of Latin in high school. Mary Mahood taught journalism. I like journalism. In fact, I wrote a column for the school newspaper. I guess it was really a mimeograph newsletter or whatever. I was interested in sports, so I got to write the sports column, so I had my own little column, which not very many kids in high school had that. It was called “Port’s Sport Shorts.” It was little short excerpts about stuff that I would know from participating in things that nobody else would know that would make it interesting. I tried to make it funny and interesting and informative. A lot of kids, I think, looked forward to reading that.
D: I didn’t know that. Okay, so you graduated from high school. Did you make good grades?
JP: Apparently, I was a B or an A student.
D: And then you decided to go to college?
JP: Mm-hmm.
D: Where did you go?
JP: I went to Central State College, and I was majoring in math at the time because I wanted to take more journalism, but the person that I had that was counseling me thought that would be a waste of my talents since I made high scores in math and science and that kind of thing. My mother thought if I kept up with my math that it would stay current and I would do well, whereas if I went and did other things it would be hard for me to get back into it. That’s what I did. As it got near the end of school – well, I worked my way through school. I paid my own way through college. I was working nights and going to school during the day. As it got near the end, I was trying to look at how I was going to graduate in four years because I sure didn’t want to keep that up too long. I looked around to see what would be the best way to get out, and sure enough, a math major and a science minor would be the quickest way based on the courses I had taken, and to get a teaching certificate. I got a teaching certificate so I could teach those subjects.
D: Do you even like math? [metallic slamming sound – possibly a metal door opening and closing]
JP: I enjoy it.
D: But you like English better than math?
JP: I think – I don’t know that I like it better but it’s easier for me. It’s natural to me.
D: English was easier than math or math was easier than English? Which was easier?
[slamming sound again]
JP: I liked the literature part more on the English. I was pretty good on grammar.
D: When you were working at night, you worked at Safeway. Tell me about that.
JP: I started as a package boy carrying out groceries. I wanted to become checker because I only made 75 cents an hour and checkers got $1 an hour. I thought that would be a better deal. I asked the manager about it and he said, “I can’t make you checker. You don’t know how to check.” I started coming in and one of the checkers was a friend of mine. I asked her to teach me how to check. This was before you scanned groceries. You had to memorize all the produce prices. Most of the cans were marked at the time. You’d ring them up by hand on the cash register. I got really fast at it. They had the old cash registers, not like a ten-key but they had the numbers going from one to zero up at the top. With my large hands, I was able to reach the bottom and the top at the same time, so punching in numbers like 19 and things like that I could do with one stroke by hitting both keys at the same time, versus other people had to hit one and then the other. I was very fast at checking and I was very good at it, I thought. I did a good job on that. After I learned how to do it, I told him I knew how to check. He made me a checker and raised me to $1 an hour, so that was nice. Later on, as I started needing night hours so I could go to school more, I got to be a night stocker and worked at night. That’s how I worked through.
After I got out of school, I was going to teach. I did my student teaching in Midwest City at Carl Albert High School. I liked it there. I thought that was good and thought I could teach math there. In fact, I’d done a little tutoring in math and they said they didn’t need a math teacher at the time. I went back and got a job offer from Apache, Oklahoma. Apache, at that time, only paid $3,800 a year, which was the state wage for teachers. Carl Albert actually paid $4,300 because they got subsidies from the government since they were near Tinker Field and that kind of thing. I told Apache I wasn’t really interested because [coughs] excuse me. I didn’t want to do it for less than $4,300 a year. Lo and behold, they went to their school board and had a special meeting and came back and said, “Okay, we’ll give you $4,300 a year to come down here and teach.” I signed up and I was going to go there. Right after I did that, Safeway offered me a job. I was still a night stocker there. They offered me a job as an assistant manager for $6,300 a year or something like that. I thought to myself $4,300 versus $6,300. I think I’ll go with the assistant manager job. At the time, the way my mind was set, if it had been not Apache because I had gone down and looked the town over –
D: Where is Apache?
JP: It’s near Lawton. It’s a small, very small community. Nothing there, especially for a young single guy. It would have been a very different life if I had moved down there. I wrote and told the school board there that sorry, but I wasn’t going to come to teach and they could find another teacher. I decided that if Carl Albert had offered me the job when I first started, I would have done that and I would have been a teacher the rest of my life, but they didn’t. I went ahead and went with the Safeway. Apache let me out of their contact. In September, about the time that school was starting, Carl Albert called me up and said they had a position now, but I’d already gone to Safeway and I told them they lost their chance. I stayed with them and had a 35-year career with Safeway and Homeland. It went all the way from 75 cents an hour as a packing boy on up. When I left there, I was a director of buying and sourcing. I had a nice career there. I was Inventory Control Manager and Pricing Manager, which both utilized some of my math skills.
D: You started with Safeway the year after you graduated?
JP: The year I graduated. Well, I started with them in 1960. I became Assistant Manager in 1964. I worked with them the whole time, so I worked actually 27 years with Safeway. When they sold to Homeland, I worked eight years with them.
D: So you were living in Edmond? What kind of car did you have?
JP: When I started doing my practice teaching at Carl Albert, I decided I needed transportation. In March, I went down to – I don’t know if I quit temporarily or just took a leave of absence, but I wasn’t really working at Safeway at that time, or if I did it was just on weekends part time. I really don’t remember. I didn’t have much of a job or income at that time. I went down to buy a car and a friend of mine went with me. I saw a nice Plymouth sedan that looked nice, and we thought Chrysler engineering was really good in those days. That was the type of car I wanted to get, but there was this nice convertible in the showroom and he said I ought to get that. It cost a whole lot more.
D: Who’s he? Your friend or the salesman?
JP: My friend Kevin Adams. Bill Adams, rather. Kevin was his brother. Bill Adams. He thought I ought to get that and that would be better, so instead of $2500, which would have been closer to what I could afford, which was nothing, this one was $3300. I didn’t have it, but I went down to my friendly bank and told them I didn’t have much of a job but in the summer I was graduating from college and I was going to have a teaching job and I would just have money rolling in, so how about loaning me $3300? Well, I needed another $100 because I needed to get the tag and all that, so I borrowed actually more than the car was worth to be able buy it. I drove off with a brand new 1964 Plymouth Sport Period convertible. Nice car. I enjoyed it for many years. I was able to have lots of girlfriends then. I even got my wife.
D: How did you get your wife?
JP: I was the President of the United Campus Christian Fellowship there. That was organized while I was going to school there, which was a combination of Presbyterian and Christian churches. That’s Disciples of Christ Christian. She was teaching in Wichita and came down to Edmond to help her parents, who had just moved there. Her pastor said that she ought to go to this group and meet some kids her age so she’d have some friends for the summer. I was supposed to pick her up –
D: Why were you supposed to pick her up?
JP: Well, because the preacher had worked that out. He said that she was new in town and I was the President of the group, so he thought it would be nice if I picked her up. I heard she that she was an old maid schoolteacher, so I didn’t want to go waste my time with that and I sent my best friend, Bill Adams at the time. I sent him to pick her up, which he and his girlfriend did. They came to the picnic we were having that night, and she came to the picnic and I know she tells stories about that part of it.
D: What do you remember about it? She shows up at the picnic with Bill and his girlfriend and then what happened?
JP: [chuckles] I remember I thought I’d made a mistake. I should have gone and picked her up. She wasn’t as old maid-y as I thought she might have been. Anyway, after that I decided I would try to go out with her.
D: Did you take her home that night or did you send her home?
JP: No, I think they still handled it, but the next week I expected her to show up and she didn’t come. Then I think I called her up the next week and I don’t remember if I took her or not, but then I asked her to go out with me and she said she couldn’t. She had to go to a friend’s wedding up in Kansas. You’ll remember my previous story. I thought, “Uh-oh. Here comes another sick grandma or something, just coming up with her excuses.” But she added one statement that changed the whole thing, and that was, “But I’ll be here for the rest of the summer.” I took heart at that, and I asked her out when she got back. She actually did go to Kansas for a wedding. We went out with each other almost every night until she had to go back and teach school in September.
D: What do you remember about that time? Where did you all go when you went out?
JP: I worked down at the Safeway, so I’d usually go there and she would come and pick me up after work, and then we’d go to the Dairy Queen or McDonald’s or somewhere and get me something to eat. We’d talk and things like that and then I’d take her home. There wasn’t a whole lot of real going out. The first real date we had, we went to Sussey’s Pizza, which was a really fancy pizza place here in Oklahoma City at that time. We drove all the way from Edmond to Oklahoma City for a big date on that. We did other things too. We went to Red Rock with the group one time and got good sunburns driving with the convertible down and all that kind of thing.
D: So then she went back in the fall to Wichita and what happened then? Where did you go?
JP: I started working as Assistant Manager at Safeway, and then I got drafted in November and went to the Army.
D: Where did you go?
JP: I did my basic training at Fort Polk, Louisiana, and then they sent me to White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, which is where I spent the rest of my time. I volunteered to go airborne and go to Vietnam, but the guy that did the Army counseling or whatever you call that thought that with my math and everything that I might enjoy White Sands Missile Range more and talked me out of going airborne. That’s why I did that.
D: Are you glad he did that?
JP: I think it worked out fine because I was able to marry Tricia, my wife, and she was able to move out there. She got a teaching job in New Mexico while we were there, and we were able to live there for the time I was in the Army.
D: Tell me what you remember about being in the Army.
JP: It was an interesting time because we were at war with Vietnam at the time, so any of us felt that at any time we could be called to go over there. White Sands was a little bit different. It was basically a desk job aiming missiles and that kind of thing.
D: Did they shoot missiles?
JP: Oh yeah. We were testing missiles, testing new and different kinds. Honest John. Lance. Little John. Those kinds of missiles. We would test fire them and (unintelligible) while we’d do the aiming so they’d go where we wanted them to on the test firing range. Then once a month, we had firing practice and drills and regular Army type stuff. Most of the time on evenings and weekends I could be home. We lived in Las Cruces, which was close to the base, after we got married. I’d ride the bus from the range to Las Cruces and ride it back in the morning.
D: What kind of house did you live in?
JP: It was a little house that looked like an adobe-type house that used to be several things. At one time it was kind of the office for a filling station, and I think later it became a laundromat, and then the owner converted it into a couple of apartments or house-type places, so that’s where we lived. We’d go to El Paso once a month just to go to the big town and stay in a motel and that kind of thing, just for fun.
D: What else do you remember about that time? Anything?
JP: It was a good time together. We were newlyweds way out there away from most people. We did have some people come to visit us sometimes, like for Christmas and things. They had mountains around there, so we’d go to Ruidoso. We enjoyed doing that. We took an awful lot of vacations there. When our children Heather and Heidi were born, we went and stayed in the cabin there because we enjoyed it. Of course, they had the White Sands National Monument, which is a fun place to visit and see. Also, since my mother was teaching in Grants, we took a couple of trips to Grants but those were pretty good trips, as I remember. It was a five- or six-hour trip to get from Las Cruces to Grants.
D: And you moved. Where did you go when you left Las Cruces?
JP: We came back to Oklahoma City. We decided to move to Oklahoma City because we wanted to be away a little bit from everybody else but it was a lot closer to where I worked. I got a job back with Safeway again, and they wanted me to the Pricing Section Manager, so I worked in Oklahoma City at their office.
D: You moved back to Oklahoma City. When did you start having kids?
JP: Well, I found out the insurance would start covering them right away, so we moved back in November, and in October we had our first daughter Heather. That was in 1967.
D: What do you remember about when Heather was born?
JP: [pause] I remember we were interested in making sure that we could get to the hospital and all that. I remember I passed out cigars to my boss. I remember that she was having a kind of hard labor. I think she bent the metal poles on the bed hanging on.
D: Did she really?
JP: That’s probably just a story but she tried. Anyway, I don’t remember too much. I liked having a little baby at home and taking care of her a lot.
D: Did you think she was a pretty baby?
JP: Oh yeah. All of mine are.
D: Was she good? Did she cry a lot?
JP: Not that I recall.
D: I remember that when we were little, you were involved in Boy Scouts. When did you start doing that again?
JP: Our church had a Scout troop, so I decided I’d get involved because I enjoyed it. I became the Assistant Scoutmaster, and then the Scoutmaster quit and I became the Scoutmaster. I did that for about three years. Then you girls had started growing up enough that I thought I should start spending more time with you instead, so I went on some camps and quit the Scouts after that.
D: We skipped after me. What do you remember about when I was born?
JP: I think we’d already been through the routine so it was about the same thing. You were born at Deaconess Hospital. (Transcriber’s Note: This is now called Integris Baptist Medical Center at Portland Avenue.) We went there and as far as I know everything worked fine.
D: Then you had two little girls and tell me a story about that time. Do you remember when we were little?
JP: We had a – I tried to have things in the back yard for you to play with. I remember we bought the neighbor’s swing set. They had a nice, schoolyard-sized swing set so we bought that. You’d swing in that, and we had a little sandbox set up so you could play in the sandbox. I know you were not quite as neat as your sister. You’d get in and really play and she’d sit on the side and just enjoy it a little bit. I think we had all the usual stuff, tricycles and everything.
D: Do you remember teaching us to ride our bikes?
JP: Not a whole lot but I know you did. I know we enjoyed bike riding several years later and got into it more.
D: How did that happen?
JP: Homeland, who I was working for at the time, became a corporate sponsor for Multiple Sclerosis and a 150-mile bike tour. It was held out of Tulsa at the time. I actually saw a brochure for it when I was at the filling station getting gasoline and I noticed Homeland was on there and thought that would be neat. I went in and talked to my boss about it, and got money to start up a team and got uniforms for the team. I think the first year we had about 25 riders on the team. We all had our Homeland shirts and all that. It was quite a deal. Our team did really well. We raised a lot of money for Multiple Sclerosis. I think you and I rode five or six years in that thing, top fundraisers several years.
D: I think you were the top fundraiser for four years.
JP: Four or five years.
D: You won a trip.
JP: Several trips. I won a trip to – well, I won a new bicycle. I won a trip to San Francisco and got to stay at the Fairmont Hotel there, which was a very nice hotel and visit around there. I won a trip to France, which my daughter would have liked to gone on but I decided to take my wife instead. [both laugh] We went over there and actually it was a bicycling tour, so we toured France for about a week. That was a good trip.
D: In the growing up years of Heather and me, do you remember what was the worst time? Was there any difficult time that you thought why did I do this?
JP: We had one little girl named Heidi that –
D: [laughing] I didn’t mean that kind of story!
JP: It was kind of difficult in school so we had to work in the private school, and we found out she’s more of a people person than a stay-in-a-cubicle type person so that was an interesting time.
D: Challenged your parenting skills.
JP: One thing on the bright side, we decided while you were in school that we would take a vacation to show you some historical things and you girls rode your bicycles around picked up tin cans. We sold aluminum cans and we made planters with plants in them and went around and sold them to the neighbors and raised a lot of your money so that we could go. We also wrote letters to all the states that we were going to be visiting and many of them sent back brochures, maps, coupons, all that kind of thing, which helped us plan our trip. I remember we got some really good deals on hotels and eating out and that kind of thing on the way. We took a three-week trip and went through the north part of the United States. We stopped in Saint Louis and got to go up in the arch, and went to Indianapolis and got to visit the Children’s Museum. We went to Pennsylvania and got to see Valley Forge and a lot of things there. We went down to Philadelphia and got to see Independence Hall, and then we went to Washington D.C. and visited the Washington Monument and the National Aquarium, and the Treasury Department. The White House – we got to visit that. We thought for early teen girls that that was a good educational trip and a fun time. We went on south to Virginia and got to visit Norfolk and got to see some of the things that way, and then came back through Washington’s –
D: Mount Vernon.
JP: Mount Vernon, and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Different places like that. We came back through Tennessee and everything, though Arkansas and back to Oklahoma.
D: I remember lots of pictures that you took during that trip. When did you start being interested in photography?
JP: I had a friend that had a – that had taken really nice pictures on a trip to Hawaii that she’d been on. They were much better pictures than I ever got with my camera. I asked her what kind of camera she got, and she said she’d borrowed it from another mutual friend. It was a 35-millimeter Nikon camera and I’d never used one of those or tried one or anything. Anyway, I asked him about it and he said I could borrow it for that three-week trip, so he gave me about a five-minute lesson on what settings to set and what buttons to push, so we went on the trip and I got I thought many postcard perfect pictures on that trip of many things. I still have those chronicled in our album at home. It got me so interested in that that I went out and bought me a little Nikon camera and I’ve bought another nicer one since then.
D: Do you still enjoy doing that?
JP: Yes, when I have time. I actually got interested in photography a long time ago. When I was in Iran, I had a little camera. It didn’t take very good pictures at all. I remember when we were coming back from Ohio, we stopped at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and I tried to take pictures of the speed cars. I got to be on the inside oval of the track.
D: Really?
JP: Mm-hmm. I tried to take pictures of that. My uncle used to race cars, so I think –
D: Which uncle?
JP: Uncle J.L. I think he didn’t qualify for the race, but anyway we got to go so we were on the inside oval. We got to see it from where all the pits were. I was trying to take pictures of those cars going by really fast, but of my little camera didn’t get anything, just blurs. If I had had my camera now I could have.
D: Yes, you could.
JP: Anyway, I’ve been interested for awhile but just never knew enough about it.
D: As you look back over your life, what things stand out to you the most? What’s the best? What do you consider to be the best time?
JP: I’ve had a lot of good times. I think my best time was getting married to your mother. I really have enjoyed my married life. We’ve been married 42 years. I think our involvement with our church has been very rewarding because it, I think, gave us a basis to live the kind of life and do the kind of things that we wanted to do and raise the girls the way we felt they should be. I think they’ve turned out really well, so we’re glad for that.
D: Now you not only have two daughters, but you have three granddaughters too.
JP: Right.
D: Is there anything you would like for them to know that you haven’t had a chance to tell them or any words of wisdom you’d offer to your granddaughters?
JP: I can’t think of any right off the top of my head. I think if they continue to follow the things that they’re being taught, I think they’ll do fine.
D: Is there anything else that you’d like to add before we finish today?
JP: Not anything that I can really think of. I think we’ve covered an awful lot.
D: We sure have. You’ve done a great job, and thanks for doing this, Dad.
JP: You’re welcome.
End of interview