AN HONEST MAN

A little story from long ago, submitted by NANCY THOMPSON BAKER:

"Back when Jake still had hair, he was sitting in the barber shop waiting for a haircut. A man came in looking for something he had lost out of his pocket -- his wife's diamond ring. After Jake got into the chair he spotted something outside that he thought looked like a Coke can tab. As he left he picked it up. It was the ring. He took it to a friend who worked nearby, and she located the man looking for it. 

(Nancy collects teddy bears.)

The following day I received a dozen red roses with a card attached saying, "To the woman who lives with an honest man!" This just happened to be my birthday, August 20, 1974. It was signed O.C. Davis.

I found the card in a drawer today."

I asked NANCY if she or Jake knew the man. 

"No. I don't think he was from Ballinger. He was visiting relatives or someone. He was taking his wife's ring in to have the prongs checked, and had put it in his pocket."

Not only is Jake an "honest man", but they have been married for almost 60 years! 

Roses to both of you, NAN!

Peace and love,

Marilyn

EARTHQUAKES, GOLF COURSES, AND MORE

"60 Minutes" did a segment last night on the rise in the number of earthquakes in Oklahoma over the past two years. There have been over 2,000  3.0+ magnitude quakes. They interviewed a couple of women from Edmond, which is where our classmate JUNE CURRY lives. When this was previewed, I contacted JUNE. This is what she had to say:

"That number doesn't surprise me at all as more earthquakes are announced almost daily. I live on the Northwest side of Oklahoma City with an Edmond address, on the outskirts of Edmond itself. It's very 

beautiful here, but there have been an enormous amount of homes badly damaged by these earthquakes, and the homeowners are up in arms at the local oil and gas companies that they feel are contributing to these events.

We have felt a few of these earthquakes, but we thank God that so far we have had no damage from them nor has my other son at his home. I feel so badly for the people who have had so much damage and almost no help from the earthquake insurance people in repairing their homes. It is almost impossible to prove to them that the damage is earthquake caused, according to the media reports.

I must say though that when you do not have an earthquake, tornado, hail, ice storm or blizzard, this is a truly beautiful place to live. (Ha Ha Ha)."

JUNE and I commiserate back and forth when weather threatens our safety. However, earthquakes usually give no warning. As I worked for FEMA several years through several earthquakes and their aftermath, I don't think I could show the sense of humor portrayed by JUNE. 

As the insurance companies will pay for "act of God" earthquakes, and they are refusing to pay off on the current ones, this means they, too, believe the oil and gas companies are at fault - not God. The technology certainly seems to show that their pumping all that waste water back into the earth is the cause of the recent earthquakes. As a homeowner, I think I would go after the oil and gas industry for damages to my property.

JUNE says her new knee is working like it's supposed to -- and no pain!

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(Pebble Beach Golf Course)

When I was putting together our autobiographical handbook, I often had to coax information from some of you. You are more interesting than you would lead us to believe. Such is the case with another of our classmates who emerged out of the past recently. I've got a few more items of interest from TRUMAN CONNER. One of which is his golfing hobby. My son Matthew was green with envy when I read him a list of golf courses that TRUMAN has played on over the years. "..They would include, Pebble Beach, Spyglass Hill, both on the California Monterrey Peninsula. Others would include Riviera CC (Los Angeles) Olympia Fields CC (Chicago) TPC Stadium Course Olympic (Palm Springs), Olympic Club (San Francisco) Kapalua, (Maui, HI).  Will not bore you with others, except to say that many or all of these golf courses held either US Open Championships or are regular PGA Tour sites.  I expect Matthew would recognize them.  Non-golfers wouldn't give a rip and can't blame them for that."

TRUMAN mentioned he liked to travel, but mostly in the U.S. "...NYC, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Miami, et al, many times on business.  Never wanted to go to Europe like Denny Hill though. The idea of a 14 hour plane ride was always a deal breaker for me. I am going to Washington DC next month.  It is the most interesting city I have ever visited."

The first information I got out of TRUMAN in the way of a biography, indicated he worked for Levi Strauss for nearly 40-years before retiring. I figured he might own the company in that length of time. Not so, he wrote:

"My degree from TCU was in finance.  There isn't a great deal of glitter in my life compared to others in our class. I had a great career at Levi's although not at the CEO level (thanks for the thought). I worked in Levi's financial division with a focus on financial analysis of some very large corporate accounts, and I occasionally served on Chapter 11 bankruptcy committees when things got really interesting, and it often entailed long and tiring cross country flights, sometimes weekly."

Come to think of it, TRUMAN, you were working for Levi's in 1989, when the huge San Francisco earthquake hit. That was the year I went to work for FEMA. I heard Dan Rather on the evening news say that FEMA needed help in Denton, Texas working with the victims of the quake. I thought I was volunteering when I went in that evening to sign up. They put all of us on the telephone that night after about a 30-minute training session. This was the first time they had tried telecommunications for aiding disaster victims. When I left 5-years later, they were in beautiful new quarters, and were in the process of going online with the applications for assistance.

Were you affected at all by the '89 earthquake, TRUMAN?

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Occasionally, I realize I haven't heard from one of my "regulars" in a while so I contact them. PATI COCKRELL PRITCHARD sent a photo of her new granddaughter a few months back, then dropped off the grid. Here is her reply when I inquired how she was doing:

"I'm still working full time (darn, the other grandmother gets all the drop off baby sitting) but, I can fund her college accounts better than I could if I DIDN'T work! Gene has finally cut back to working only 3 days a week. We're both in good health and I think it helps me to stay active.

GRANDbaby is just GRAND!!! She was 9 months old April 27th and running her big people ragged! Loving her to pieces and enjoy hearing my daughter say 'I never appreciated all you did'. Yahoo!"

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GLENN SMITH is still recuperating at home. He has a young friend from Uruguay staying with him and helping him. He said he can get around some with a walker. The last I heard from him was four days ago when he wrote, "..staples came out today. X-rays show that femur break 2 inches below left hip is repairing perfectly. No socket replacement was needed.

Several friends have visited. Some have brought meals." 

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NANCY THOMPSON BAKER wrote that she and hubby Jake are doing well at home, with Home Health assisting with Jake's recovery from the dreadful blood infection he suffered a while back. NANCY said her feet are healed as well.

You know, from the reports I've received from our "patients" both here and among my other friends, all of the requested prayers and good thoughts and wishes have been answered. Hallelujah!

Much love and peace to you all,

Marilyn

SMOKEY AND THE FARM BOYS

Editor: Going over some of my posts written on my personal blog, I ran across this one that was published 5-years ago. I got a kick out of reading it again, and thought you might, too. GLENN, this is for you! Marilyn



My next guest column is also written by a former classmate from Ballinger High School, Glenn Smith. I presumed to title it for him:

SMOKEY AND THE FARM BOYS

"June Hash Curry and Marilyn Moragne have reminisced about how each of them had auto accidents in the 1950s that they miraculously survived. That got me thinking about an incident in 1955 when I should have died but did not. All this has to do with growing up around Ballinger in Runnels County, Texas.

It was a Saturday. My father took my fourteen-year-old nephew, John, and me to a field where he wanted to construct an electric fence so cows could graze on a part of the five foot high sorghum there. We helped him stretch a single strand of new barbed wire which was anchored around a tall, creosoted power line pole about two hundred yards into the field. The wire sloped gradually from where it was tied around the high-line pole about forty inches above ground until it lay flat on the ground about fifty yards from the pole. From there it went to the edge of the field and joined another fence. The next step was to support the wire by attaching it to an insulated pole every ten feet.

John was driving my father's light blue F100 pickup. I was riding a mare named Smokey, trailing a lariat from the saddle horn. My father was at a pile of metal posts about a hundred yards from where the taut wire rested nearly buried in the loose dirt. The plan was for me to drag a post behind the mare from the distant pile to its place along the wire. My nephew's task was to back the pickup into place so my father could stand in its bed and sledge hammer each long post about three feet into the earth.

What happened next makes no sense, but for some reason it happened anyway. I had delivered two posts and was nearly back to the supply pile for a third. John was supremely bored waiting. I was bored myself. Smokey must have been bored also. Suddenly John leaned out of the pickup window and yelled DRAG! He tromped on the accelerator and without rational thought I touched my heels to the mare's flanks. Smokey's ears went flat and she shot forward, all her attention on winning. She beat the truck handily. We were in afterburner mode. No horse ever ran as fast or liked doing it as much as she did at that moment. Problem was we were headed toward the point where the tightly stretched barbed wire was still about three feet above the dirt. My eye caught a flash of the new wire. Time exploded and went to zero simultaneously. Smoky was upside down in a forward airborne roll. I consciously dropped the reins, pulled my feet from the stirrups. The lights went out.

I came to with my father kneeling over me. I had landed on my head, but Smokey hit the ground a little past where I hit. The wire had stretched impossibly but it did not break. Smokey had deep cuts on her upper shoulders. She stood still, bleeding.

My neck should have been broken. Instead I walked half a mile to the house. My father kept working. Frank Smith didn't leave work for anything.

By usual standards for treating horses, Smokey would have been put down that afternoon. But her owner, John's father, tenderly nursed her back to health. I never rode her again. I could have but didn't feel I had the right. I was ashamed of letting her get hurt for no good reason at all.

(Elm Creek at Ballinger, Texas)

Nearly four years later, Elm Creek (which ran through our farm) got up from strong rains. My dad and mother drove the Ford pickup to the bottom land to move cows to high ground. I was in Abilene at college. My father crossed a ravine that was where Elm Creek had once flowed before it changed course. He got trapped as a wall of water poured down in a torrent about ten feet deep. My mother had never learned to swim and my dad could only dog paddle. He was wearing work boots and overalls and was in the raging water while hanging onto a mesquite sapling. Mom drove as fast as she could and found my brother-in-law. He saddled Smokey, rode hard, plunged the mare into the fast flowing water upstream from where my dad was barely still hanging on. Dad said later that he had decided to turn loose knowing he would drown. As Smokey swam past him—the bank was too steep and too muddy for her to get out—my father grabbed on to the back of the saddle. Smokey swam with him and my brother-in-law downstream, then out to safety.

The spirited mare lived many years after that. She died in her mid-twenties.

I'm not sure what the moral is of these stories. We did things that kids today don’t usually do. But we weren't trying to be daredevils. If anything we were trying to live like the Cleavers, June and Ward and Wally and Beaver. Maybe our happenings got a little closer to the edge some times, but we didn't intend them to. As my father's mother always said of her Texas life, 'we done the best we could with what we had.' We did at that, didn't we?"

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A horse is a horse, a horse of course -- except when it is a means of transportation? Yesterday I laughed out loud when I read the following news item online. This was on Austin's KXAN.com news site, written by Pamela Cosel: 

"Is it DWI if you're on a horse?"

"It wasn't necessarily a scene from a movie, but it might have been. Two men, each dressed in cowboy hats and chaps -- one on a horse, the other riding a donkey -- were arrested for public intoxication on Friday just before 11 p.m. An Austin police officer saw Jose Federico, 33, on a brown mule with white spots, along with Samuel Olivo, Jr., 49, on a horse in Downtown Austin.

The two riders were stopped in the right lane of traffic, according to the arrest affidavit, and cars were having to drive around them. Police said the two men were calling pedestrians off of the sidewalk and into the street to take pictures and pet the animals. This endangered the pedestrians because the street was open to passing vehicles.

APD conducted a sobriety test on the men and determined they were drunk after seeing they had glassy, watery eyes; stumbling, staggering and swaying; couldn't turn properly; fell off the line and had an odor of alcohol about them. Rios said he'd taken antibiotics when asked about drugs, according to the report, and also said he drank two vodka-and-cranberry drinks. (Editor: THIS is a COWBOY'S drink?) The charge was first listed as driving while intoxicated (DWI), but changed to public intoxication, according to APD. Bail was set at $2,000.

It is not known how the animals responded to the hoopla."

I know how I responded .. gales of laughter at the imagery as I read this. I'll bet the animals were embarrassed.

Smile. It makes you feel better and look good!

Peace and love,
Marilyn