Description:
Jack Wooden talks about his life growing up in Oklahoma in the 1930s and '40s, his career with the postal service, and his time in World War II.
Interviewer: Phyllis Davidson
Interviewee: Jack Wooden
Interview Location: Oak Crest Church of Christ
Interview Date: 8/16/2007
Phyllis Davidson: My name is Phyllis Davidson. I work at the Downtown Library. We’re here at the Oak Crest Church of Christ, and today is August 16, 2007. Would you please tell me your name and birth date?
Jack Wooden: My name is Jack Andrew Wooden. I was born November 13, way back in 1925.
PD: How do you spell your last name?
JW: W – double O – D – E – N.
PD: Where were you born and where did you grow up?
JW: I was born in a town called Clarksville, Arkansas, which is about 40-some miles east of Fort Smith on Interstate 40. We moved from there when I was about a year old to Tulsa. Do you want me to continue?
PD: I want you to just keep going.
JW: Okay. We moved from there to Tulsa, and in 1935, which is when I was nine years old, we moved to Oklahoma City. I’ve lived here since 1935. So I pretty well started in Tulsa, came to Oklahoma City and started in the fourth grade when school started in the fall of 1935.
PD: Tell me about your parents. Who were they?
JW: My father’s name was Bob. My mother’s name was Maude. What else do you want to know?
PD: What was her maiden name?
JW: Wakefield.
PD: Wakefield?
JW: Yeah.
PD: What about your grandparents?
JW: Both of my grandfathers were born during the Civil War. Both of them were born in 1862. On my father’s side, my grandfather died in 1932 in Tulsa. On my mother’s side, my mother’s father died in 1937 in Arkansas.
PD: Do you know your grandmothers’ maiden names?
JW: That’s a toughie. Um…I did at one time but off hand I can’t think.
PD: That’s okay. How did they end up here after living in Arkansas?
JW: My mother, who was born and raised in Arkansas – my dad was born in Texas in Terrell, Texas. How he came to be in Arkansas, I don’t know. They met and married in December of 1923. I don’t know why he was there or how he happened to be in Arkansas. My mom lived there all her life until then, until we moved to Tulsa.
PD: How was your relationship with your parents?
JW: Okay. I was closer to my mother. She was a member of the church. My dad wasn’t, unfortunately. He didn’t attend church.
PD: He never did, huh?
JW: I don’t remember him attending church.
PD: What about siblings? Do you have siblings?
JW: Two sisters. I was the oldest one. My older sister was born in May 1928. The younger sister, January of 1930. My older sister died in her 50s of heart trouble. My younger sister is still living in Oklahoma City.
PD: What are their names?
JW: She married Ronald Allen. They’ve been married since…let’s see…since 1950.
PD: This is the one who’s still living?
JW: Yes.
PD: What’s her first name?
JW: Her name is Erlene. Erlene Allen, and her husband’s name is Ronald Allen. She retired – wait a minute. Maybe I shouldn’t say any more than what you’ve asked me.
PD: Oh, no. I prefer that you go ahead.
JW: Okay. She retired from AT&T out here, you know, [unintelligible]. Ron, he worked for the school board, mainly in the maintenance department. Electric motors. Anytime anything came up where they needed help with any of the electric motors in the Oklahoma City school district, he went out and fixed it and took care of the problem. He was good at it too.
PD: Do you have any special stories that you remember of your parents?
JW: Special stories?
PD: Things they used to tell about their childhood or anything like that.
JW: Offhand I’m afraid I don’t know anything special that they might have told me. I’m afraid I’ll say no on that one.
PD: That’s okay. Do you have any favorite relatives?
JW: All my relatives have pretty well passed on except my sister. I’ve got some cousins that live in the Tulsa area on my mother’s side, but they’re just about all deceased. All my aunts and uncles have passed on because I’m 81 years old. They were all considerably older than me, so they’ve all passed away.
PD: Do you have any nieces or nephews?
JW: No. My wife and I didn’t have any children, and my sisters didn’t either. My older sister never married, and my youngest sister and her husband didn’t have any children.
PD: It’s not a very big party at Christmastime then, I guess?
[both laugh]
JW: No, not really.
PD: What was it like growing up with your sisters? Did you enjoy being with them? Did you fuss and fight like normal siblings?
JW: Yes, I enjoyed them. We never had any problems. I’ve heard all kinds of stuff about sibling problems, but no. Everything was great with us. Never did we have any disagreement, even, that I can think about.
PD: That’s amazing. What did you do together?
JW: I was pretty much a loner. I didn’t go places with them particularly. They were behind me in school. I don’t remember if we did anything special together except we lived in the same house and ate the same meals.
PD: [laughs] What were your meals like?
JW: The meals?
PD: Mm-hmm.
JW: Mom was a good cook. She made good cornbread and pineapple upside down cakes and things like that. Mom was a good cook. In our day, everything was pretty well from scratch. You know how they were back in those days. You didn’t go to the store and buy it ready-made. I don’t think we even had ready-made back in those days. We always ate well, but we came from a very poor family. We were very poor at the time. My dad didn’t have much education and he was more or less a common laborer type. My mom stayed home. She didn’t work. My dad made the living for the family. We didn’t miss any meals. We never owned any property. We always rented, like most poor people did back in those days. Most people didn’t own their homes. There was a lot of people renting back then.
PD: Do you have an earliest memory, like some people say, “My oldest memory was…”?
JW: My oldest memory is when my younger sister was born. I was four going on five at the time, and I do remember when she was born. That’s about my earliest memory. That’s kind of vague but I do remember when she was born.
PD: Do you remember was the winters were like growing up and how you stayed warm?
JW: Summers were when we were trying to cool off! Winters I don’t remember. I do remember a summer of 1936. I was 10 years old, and it was one of the hottest summers. We didn’t have air conditioning, but we had a fan just about this size right here on the table. Mom put a can of water in front of it to try to cool us down a little bit. That one, 1936, still breaks records on particular days for heat.
PD: What do you remember about Christmas when you were a child?
JW: Well for a long time I believed in Santa Clause. One year, my dad – I guess he figured I didn’t believe anymore. My sisters went to sleep and I was still awake, and he started putting little gifts or something in the stockings. I thought I was old enough to realize there’s no Santa Clause anymore. I guess we all believed at one time.
PD: What part did music play in your life?
JW: Nobody that I know of played any musical instruments or sang, except in church. It didn’t really play much of a role.
PD: What were your responsibilities as a young person? Did you have chores you had to do every day?
JW: I remember one place where lived where we had just wood stoves. As my chore, filling the wood boxes. We had a king heater in the living room and of course Mom had her cookstove, and I had to fill both of the wood boxes every evening after school. Didn’t enjoy it too much, but that was my chore.
PD: So even in the hot summer of 1936, I guess you still had to do that?
JW: Well, I still had to do it for cooking.
PD: Can you describe a typical day of your life when you were a child?
JW: Going to school, and then…Oh, I don’t know. I remember as a kid playing with the neighborhood children, the kids my age. We’d play in the vacant lot and play baseball. No such thing as soccer moms in those days. No money involved. We made homemade scooters and skates and we’d go up and down the street. Didn’t cost anything to make them. It was all homemade. I had a good time playing with the neighbor kids.
PD: What about school? Where did you go and what did you do?
JW: Well, when I came to Oklahoma City, I went to Washington School. It was on South Walker between 2nd and 3rd Streets. That’s gone. Right now, I-40 goes directly over where the school was. I don’t know whether you remember that or not, being a young person. I spent about three years there, fourth, fifth, and sixth. Then I went to Roosevelt Junior High School. The building is still there, but I think it’s the administration building for the school board. I guess it still is. I went there through seventh, eighth, and nineth grades.
PD: How did you get to school?
JW: I rode my bicycle. It was about two miles.
PD: Where were you living?
JW: I was living in one of the underpasses on South Walker, on 7th and South Walker. Do you know where the underpass is?
PD: Yes.
JW: I lived right there by the underpasses. 807 South Walker. The underpass was in our front yard. I went to school between 7th and 8th Streets on North Western, which is probably two miles. I’d ride my bicycle and I would try to go all the way up there nonstop without touching the handlebars. Sometimes I could, but sometimes traffic got in the way.
PD: And you lived to tell the story, huh? [laughs]
JW: Yeah. When you’re young you can do a lot of things you couldn’t do now.
PD: Did you enjoy school?
JW: I enjoyed grade school. I didn’t enjoy the other part of it.
PD: Neither did I. [both laugh] Did you take your lunch to school with you, or how did you eat?
JW: I came home and ate lunch. I lived close enough there in elementary school. Afterwards, I ate in the cafeteria, and also when I went to Central. Central was bought out by Southwestern Bell later on, and the last year, by coincidence, I had a mail route downtown as a mail carrier. The last year that Central High School was a school, I was their postman. I would never, never have dreamed that I’d be carrying to Central High School.
PD: Do you have any best or worst memories of school?
JW: I can’t think of anything special that’s best or worst. I didn’t miss much. I was always there. I didn’t have any problems and I never was sent to the principal.
PD: Did you have any particular friends at school?
JW: Yeah. I don’t really remember their names, particularly. That’s a long time ago. They moved on afterwards, you know. I had good friends there. I might mention during grade school, I was a marble player. Do you remember playing marbles?
PD: I’ve heard of it.
JW: I was the champion of the school. I’m bragging now. I could always win. I never lost and I always won these kids’ marbles. I never bought a marble in my life. At home, I had boxes and boxes – cigar boxes – of marbles.
PD: Where are they now?
JW: I have no idea. I don’t know, but either way that was fun. I enjoyed that. That was during recess. You draw a circle.
PD: Go on.
JW: (unintelligible) how to play marbles.
PD: What part did religion play in your family’s life?
JW: Very much so for my mother. She always went to church, and I always went too. I was baptized when I was 13 years old. That was in the spring of 1939. We always went to Sunday School and Church. My mom – her parents were very religious too. They were Church of Christ. That’s where she got her training and that’s where I got mine.
PD: Which congregation did you go to?
JW: Where she was born and raised, which is Mountain Top, Arkansas, which is seven miles north of Ozark, Arkansas, which is a small town on I-40, they didn’t have a Church of Christ up there, except sometimes they’d be traveling. People would come and hold a tent meeting. They had to attend some other congregation, but they were always members of the Church of Christ. As we still know, it today, generally. They’ve changed over the years. The Church of Christ, as you know, isn’t exactly like we used to be some years back. I think we’re getting a little more liberal in our way of doing things. We were very, very conservative some years back. Times are changing. I probably didn’t tell you anything you didn’t know there.
PD: Well, that’s good. Other people need to know that too. Which congregation did you attend when you were young and living here in Oklahoma City?
JW: You remember 10th and Francis?
PD: Yes.
JW: We used to go all the way up there to 10th and Francis, and then we went to Capitol Hill at 28th and South Harvey. Do you know where that is? The building is still there. That’s where we went when we moved over to South Walker in the early ‘70s. You remember that now, don’t you? In the early ‘70s we from Capitol Hill went over to the church on South Walker, which is 52nd and South Walker. From there, we came over here. We bought these 20 acres, built the building and moved here in October of ’83.
PD: What a memory you have!
JW: Well, it was the first Sunday in October of ’83. That was our first Sunday here in this building.
PD: Do you remember anything in particular about that day?
JW: Yeah. Actually, I remember very well it was on a Wednesday night, over on South Walker. They said, “We’re moving.” So, we had the services over there and they said to everybody in front to grab a song book. We’ll go over to the new building and we’ll have our service there. That’s on Wednesday night. The first Sunday was the first Sunday in October as far as Sunday services. I remember that real well and I thought it was great. Everybody brought a songbook and everybody came in and put the songbook in front of them, and there you go. I remember that but I don’t remember too much other than we drove over here. We knew where it was. We came in the building, sat down, and had our services.
PD: Wasn’t there something about a helicopter? Scott Bulmer maybe being in a helicopter?
JW: They did that when Scott went to Portugal. I don’t remember what year he went over there or just how long. It was about 8 years or something like that. I don’t remember. How long have you and Marvin been worshipping here?
PD: We started going to the one over on South Walker. I don’t know what year that was, but we were over there for two or three years before we moved over here.
JW: Do you remember the songbooks?
PD: Not really. It sort of sounds a little familiar, but I don’t know if I do or not.
JW: (unintelligible) That’s smart. Somebody thought that was a smart deal there.
PD: Since you tell me that you went to school at Central, you probably passed through Downtown a lot, right? You also delivered mail Downtown.
JW: Yes, I had a route down there, route 205.
PD: Did that include the library?
JW: No. As a matter of fact, I started on 5th Street and went north through 9th Street, from the Santa Fe tracks to Harvey. It wasn’t very wide, but it went from 5th Street. It didn’t get 10th. I went up to 10th Street, but I didn’t get 10th.
PD: Did you walk? Was that a walking route?
JW: Yeah. I didn’t have a vehicle. I got the Journal Record building. I had a mail room in the Murrah Building. Of course, that was blew up. I retired in ’86 and that blew up in ’95 so I was long retired then. I worked by myself in this mail room. The mail was brought to me by trucks, and I worked it and serviced the boxes in the wall at the Journal Record, but I carried the mail across the street to the – I mean the Murrah Building. I carried the mail across the street to the Journal Record building. It was five stories to carry that. Then I carried the businesses on the street. I only had about five or six residential houses on the whole because of the businesses. There was about a half a dozen residential houses. But I had an apartment house for old folks on Robinson and 9th Street. They had four different groups of boxes that I had to deliver. I believe it was about three stories, if I remember correctly. I had to service those.
PD: Did you have to continually go back to the Murrah Building to go get more mail? How did you -?
JW: They had boxes on the corners. I’d carry mail to a certain place, and they had storage boxes that the truck put mail in for that particular part. I’d put it in my satchel and carry that until I came to another storage box. They’re green in color, not the color where you drop the mail in. You can’t drop the mail in. They’re what’s called a storage box. I didn’t go back to get it because when I ran out of mail, there was another box to go get more mail. There were four boxes like that, on the streets.
PD: That sounds like a good plan. Do you have any particular memories of shopping Downtown back in those days, or spending any time Downtown?
JW: I remember going down Downtown on Main Street to Cress’ and all those other places. Can you remember Cress or Grant’s?
PD: I remember the Cress in Capitol Hill but not downtown. I didn’t spend much time Downtown.
JW: I’ll have to interview you one of these days!
PD: Yes, I guess so. Let’s go forward to the time when you met your wife.
JW: She was introduced to me by my cousin. They both worked for Lee Way Motor Freight. Remember Lee Way?
PD: I’ve heard of it.
JW: Okay. They had the main office at Reno and May Avenue, and they both worked down there. My cousin lives in the Yukon area, just south of Yukon. I see her quite often. I met my wife through her. We dated several years and were married in April of 1962 when I was 36 years old. I didn’t jump into it real quickly.
PD: No, you didn’t. That’s sometimes wise. You’ve only been married –
JW: Forty-five years.
PD: Seven years longer than I have.
JW: Well, you started early. You weren’t nearly as old as I was.
PD: Marvin robbed the cradle. What kind of activities did you participate in together when you were dating?
JW: Going to the movies. We’d go to the movies on Saturdays. We’d stop by and get a hamburger and Cokes. Then I’d go over to her house and we’d watch TV. She lived with her mother. That’s just about it, I guess.
PD: Was she much younger than you?
JW: She was a year older. She was born in 1924. I was born in 1925.
PD: Do you remember when you proposed to her? Do you want to remember when you proposed to her? [laughs]
JW: I’m thinking! I’m thinking! I guess so. Yeah, I think I remember that. I think so. There’s nothing that’s exciting about it. She said yes.
PD: That’s the important part.
JW: I guess.
PD: Do you have any favorite stories about your wife?
JW: Yes. When we first met, I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to do this, so I asked her how old she was. She told me she was a certain age. Later on, after we got married, I found out she was a year older than she said she was. Her mother was there at the time, and I said something about Berniece, and I were both married in 1925. She says, “Wait a minute. Berniece was born in 1924.” That’s when I found out. I remember that.
PD: She was doing everything she could to get you, wasn’t she?
JW: Well, I don’t know about that.
PD: Well, she said yes so that must be the case. Do you have any advice for young couples today about marriage?
JW: Yes. For boys, don’t try to marry the prettiest girl in town. Get somebody with a good disposition, a good attitude, and a good person to get along with, because this pretty girl when you’ve been married 50 years, she’s not all that good-looking anymore.
[PD laughs]
JW: But still you live with her, so it’s very important to get someone who’s compatible, more than looks.
PD: Do you think you understood that at that age or not? Is that something that came later?
JW: I think that probably came later.
PD: So, someone should have been passing that information on a long time ago, right?
JW: I think so.
PD: What about for girls? Do you have any information for girls?
JW: Yeah. Quit putting tattoos down here on their ankles! I think that would be a good idea. I heard a joke. Can I tell a joke?
PD: Sure.
JW: This joke was that how can a red-blooded American boy find a girl to marry these days that isn’t tattooed? There’s a lot of this going on. I don’t know why they do this. It turns you off, I think. Of course, I’m not interested in teenage girls but it kind of turns you off even then.
PD: I agree. Maybe that’s a sign of our age, though. Where did you and your wife live when you first got married?
JW: I moved into her house. She bought a house earlier and she lived with her mother. I moved in with her in her house and her mother lived with us. Her mother passed away in 1980. Just before she passed away, we moved to the place where I live now, which is 1309 SW 43rd Street. We moved there in January of ’79. I’ve been there about 27 years or so.
PD: Was your wife an only child?
JW: No. She had five sisters and two brothers. The two brothers have passed on but her sisters are still living.
PD: Did things work out well with having her mother living with you?
JW: Yeah. We got along great. She’s a real nice lady. She wasn’t a member of the Church of Christ. She was a member of the Pentecostal church. She went to her church. Berniece at one time went to that church when she was growing up, but when we got married, I said, “You’ll be going where I go.” She said fine and did.
PD: How would you describe a typical week in your life today?
JW: You mean besides going through McDonald’s and getting a cup of coffee?
PD: Well, yeah. [both laugh]
JW: Well, as you know, I volunteer at the library.
PD: Tell me about that.
JW: I go on Tuesday and Thursdays. I went this morning since it’s a Thursday. I get there around 7:30 and I stay until around noon, so four to four-and-a-half hours. Right now, I work in audios and videos. For 15 years I was in charge of paperbacks. That’s quite a chore, especially at the sale. Have you gone to the book sale?
PD: Yes.
JW: So, you know how many there are out there, and they don’t give you enough tables to put them all up. There’s the boxes lined against the wall that you have to put on the tables while people are buying, and you can’t hardly get up to the tables to put them there before you sell them. It’s a real chore. Anyway, after 15 years I gave it up. There’s a couple doing it now. Real nice folks. The lady that’s in charge of videos and audios, I asked if I could help her. She’s getting up there in years and she needed help and she said yes. I did that last year and also this year. I like it very well. We get along great. I seldom miss. I’m there nearly every time. We have about 30-something people that volunteer. Being volunteers, you don’t have to be there. If something comes up, like a vacation, or you don’t feel like it, you can do something else. A lot of people come hit and miss, but we get it done. There’s always enough people there that it goes pretty smoothly. We’ve been raising a lot of money for the library, and we work all year long for one weekend sale. It’s always the last weekend in February in the Made in Oklahoma building at the Fairgrounds. I think that pretty well covers that. I meet a friend of mine on Fridays. That’s tomorrow. He and I both retired from the post office. We’ve been getting together for 20 years. We get a hamburger and a cup of coffee at noon at a fast-food place on Fridays. So, there’s Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday that I go out. My sister and her husband and our cousin, and the wife when she feels like it, meet over at McDonald’s on Mondays. We get a cup of coffee and visit. That’s kind of my routine. I don’t do anything exciting, but I enjoy what I do.
PD: It sounds like you’re doing great to me, like you’re doing the sort of things make people live to a good old age. It seems to be working.
JW: I’ve already reached that point.
PD: Did your wife work while you were married?
JW: I had an agreement with her and I think that’s why she said yes. I said I wanted her to stay home and I’d make the living at the post office. You just stay home. Boy, she really went for that. She never worked, never had a paying job. She took care of the house, and we never had any children to take care of, so that worked out.
PD: Did you ever serve in the military?
JW: Yeah, in World War II.
PD: Can you tell me about that?
JW: It’s not very exciting. It was exciting at the time, but it won’t be exciting when I tell you about it. I was drafted when I was 18 years old. I got on a train and went to Fort Sill on the 24th day of January in 1944. I stayed there about a week, and then got on another train and went to Camp Roberts, California. I started basic training there and stayed there until April. I got on another train and went to Camp Carson, Colorado. I finished basic there, and I spent a little time at Camp Gruber, Oklahoma. From there, it was kind of a stopover. The first day of December of 1944, in Boston, I got on a troop ship and went to England, Southampton. I’m always getting on trains. I got on a train there, passed the outskirts of London and went up to a little village called Stone in the middle of the island. I stayed there during Christmas. It took 11 days to cross the ocean, with all this bouncing. Henry J. Kaiser – it was a small ship that I was on. We stayed there until probably the last of January. We went across the English Channel at night to Le Harve, France, and stayed in tents there for a week or so. We went up to southern Holland, and that’s where we got in the fighting part of it. I was in a mortar battalion, 4.2 mortars. The barrel is about 4.2 inches and it stood up about this high. I was in C Company, and that’s where we were in battle. I might have mentioned this. The night before we went up to the front, I was on guard duty. There was two of us on guard duty at the time. You don’t walk around. You pretty well hid. This kid, his name was…it escapes me. He was a Mexican boy. He was my age – 19. Molanedo – Theodore Molanedo was his name. We talked about it. In the distance, you could see flashes of fire, big guns firing back in the distance. He and I’d talk about going up there. He was excited about it. About two weeks later, he was killed. A 19-year-old boy. Here I am, 81.
PD: That’s terrible.
JW: But anyway, we went over into Germany, and you know Holland is right next to Germany. They gave us some days there. We crossed the Rhine River. We fired nearly all night long and crossed over into – these mortars weren’t far, about a half a mile, maybe a little more, maximum. We went across the Rhine River the next morning in those amphibious trucks that float on water. We kept moving. The Germans were retreating. We knew we were going to win the war, but it wasn’t over. People still got hit. Finally, we met the Germans, partly because of the Russians coming the other way. They took Berlin, if you remember the history there.
PD: No.
JW: You don’t? Well, the Russians took Berlin, and they came on towards us and I met them. They’re a pretty crude bunch of people. They looked worse than the Germans! The Germans looked pretty neat! But what really struck me the first time I got into combat – we set up our mortars, kind of like behind in the little, small town. Somebody hollered that the Germans were in a pillbox around the corner there. Everybody grabbed the carbines, and the two Germans came out and gave themselves up. We took prisoners the first day, but we didn’t do any firing. The Germans had left. They’d gone home. We packed up. We pulled trailers behind our Jeeps. We had the mortars and the ammunition in these trailers. We headed out of town in a convoy, so we’d stop and go. Well, it stopped and several dead Germans lay around there. I saw one right there where I stopped. His eyes were open, just a young man. I could see dirt under his fingernails. I thought, “I’m in the war. This is it.” Anyways, time went on, and everything was pretty well the way it was. I saw a lot of dead Germans. There were very few dead Americans. We picked them up real fast. The Germans, the American forces would pick up, but more slow-like. They took their time picking up the dead Germans. I can’t tell you much more than that.
PD: Do you think that experience has had a continuous effect on your life?
JW: Not really. The thing is, we were in a mortar battalion, but the infantry was in front of us. They were very important. We fired over their heads at the Germans, but we were real close. We could hear the burp guns that the Germans fired. That’s about it, I guess.
PD: Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you would like to add?
JW: I’ve enjoyed my retirement from the post office.
PD: I’ll bet.
JW: I always appreciated it, but I never was really in love with the post office. It got kind of routine, carrying the same route. Good points and bad points – on our residential route, you’re outside. You take the cold and the heat. Downtown, I was in and out of those office buildings and things like that. The weather didn’t bother me particularly, but there’s good points and bad points about either one. I had a whole lot more mail downtown because of the businesses. I did a lot of mail, a lot of mail. I don’t recall anything special.
PD: Do you have any words of wisdom you’d like to pass on to future generations?
JW: Go to church on Sundays.
PD: Okay, well if that’s all you’ve got –
JW: Is that it?
PD: Then I want to let you know –
JW: Hey, that didn’t take – oh, it did too! It’s 5:30.
PD: See? I told you you’d have plenty to say.
JW: Only thing is I was about ten minutes late coming in.
PD: Yeah, but still you did great, and we appreciate you.
JW: [to someone else] Did you get all that?
End of interview