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FOR
FUN
Nola Sheldon
as told to Louise George |
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Author:
Personal interviews with Texas Panhandle men and women born in the early years
of the twentieth century rewarded me with hundreds of stories illustrating their
everyday life. I like to share those stories just as they were told to me.
Nola Sheldon told me her story during interviews that took place over several
weeks in 1996. Nola was born twenty-two miles northwest of Texhoma, Oklahoma on
September 27, 1911. She and six sisters and a brother were raised in a two room
dugout until shortly before the birth of a younger brother. She said, “There isn’t
anything exciting about living in a dugout, I’ll tell you for sure.” In her own
words she shares memories of what she and her siblings did for entertainment.
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“I
don’t remember when I got my first doll. We tied things up and made dolls out
of it, like an old sock or things like that. Me and my sister just younger, we
played paper dolls a lot. We’d cut them out of Sears and Roebuck and Montgomery
Wards catalogs. We had whole families.
“When we could play outside, we
built playhouses. Who set them out I wouldn’t know, but there was a row of black
locust trees, and we had a playhouse at one end of them and one at the other end
of them, so we could visit back and forth. We didn’t let a tin can go to waste
‘cause we’d make pots and pans out of them. Cut them down the edge of the seam,
and how we kept from keeping our hands all cut up I don’t know. Don’t ask me that.
Every box we could find, we’d make cupboards out of, and every piece of broken
dishes, well, that was some of our dishes. For furniture we rigged up a lot of
different things – any old piece of a stove we could find or just anything. At
that time, there were deserted places up there where you could go and pick up
a lot of different pieces. People had filed, but they didn’t prove up on their
places.
“Some of the people who filed on land couldn’t make a living
for their family any other way and went to running stills and hauling bootleg
whiskey out of there and selling it. There were stills all over the country up
there in the Panhandle of Oklahoma, and especially in Texas County, for quite
a little while. I was a pretty small kid at that time, but I can remember my folks
talking and whispering around about it. This is just hearsay, but I’ve heard it
through the years, that some of them were paying off the sheriff. When a new sheriff
was elected, why, he came in and cleaned up the stills. I was very good friend
with this one guy’s daughter and we played together and went on playing together,
but he was in the business. The new sheriff raided his still and poured out all
his mash. They had to have mash to make the whiskey and they dumped all that out.
I don’t know whether he stayed in business after that or not.
“Mother
read to us in the evening. That was our entertainment at night – her reading to
us. We all preferred Zane Grey books. They were our favorites. And there used
to be a magazine that came out that they called Good Stories. It always had a
bunch of stories. My grandmother must have subscribed to it and we got it later.
My Uncle Gus was a bachelor and he bought a lot of books. That was where we got
our books. I still have some of his books. Some of them are pretty well wore out
but I keep them anyway. We only had those kerosene lights to read by, but somehow
we studied and Mother read to us by it. She’d want to stop, but we’d say no and
beg her to go on.”
© Louise George
History
by George
Nola Sheldon is featured in Louise George’s book, Some of My Heroes Are Ladies,
Women, Ages 85 to 101, Tell About Life in the Texas Panhandle. Louise can be reached
at (806) 935-5286, by mail at Box 252, Dumas, TX 79029, or by e-mail at lgeorge@nts-online.net. |
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