WARTIME
Two of my best friends in Oak Ridge were Betty Lou Baker and Nancy Smith. Nancy lived out of town on a farm in a very large, beautiful house. Nancy's father owned a large number of hunting dogs, at least twelve to fourteen. This was in the late 1930's before commercial pet food was readily available, especially in rural Louisiana. Four great big rectangular pans of cornbread were baked, mixed with milk and fed to the dogs. By the way the dogs gulped the food down, I believe they liked it. We had many a meal ourselves on nothing but cornbread and milk, sometimes buttermilk.
We moved from Oak Ridge at the beginning of the U.S. involvement in the war. Daddy was too old by about a year for military service. He found work in a war-related industry, at an ordnance or ammunition plant between Minden and Doyline, Louisiana. Not long after that he was hired at Ark-La Gas Company's gasoline refinery.
On a shimmering hot summer day we arrived at our next destination, Haughton, Louisiana. Absolutely a dull, dead town, I thought, immediately hating it, but I learned to love it later on. Daddy had found a better job at the Sligo Gasoline Plant, owned at that time by Arkansas Fuel Oil Company, and later by Arkansas Louisiana Gas Company, Arkla, from which Daddy retired some 25 years later. I, too, was employed by Arkansas Fuel Oil for eight years from 1954 until 1962.
It was wartime in 1942, housing was next to impossible to find, and we had to make do with Mr. Jones' tumble-down shack with only one bedroom. Unfinished on the inside, we could see the daylight outside through holes in the walls and floorboards. Mother cooked on an oil-burning stove Daddy had rigged up from a gas stove. The fireplace was our source of heat, although we didn't live there through a winter. Four of us slept in two double beds in the bedroom, with Loretta in a crib. Nearly every night it seems Daddy had to discipline JW and me for fighting and pulling covers in bed. I can see Mother now doing the ironing and using flat irons she heated in the fireplace. She would iron with one flat iron while the other was heating, then swap them when the other iron got cold.
I loved to explore the countryside in Bossier Parish. In one of my wanderings I stumbled upon an old cemetery completely surrounded and overgrown in woods. Some of the graves dated back to 1800, 1802, 1810, 1828. That was early, even for Louisiana. I was able to piece together one family's tragic story from the tombstones. Two or three children had little headstones, dated a year or so apart, the mother's a couple years later. There was an unmarked grave, the father's maybe. Perhaps nobody was left to put a tombstone on his grave.
After a heavy rain, with flooding, while living at the gasoline plant, I loved to listen to the many choruses of frogs. Tramping around in the woods, I'd find jack-in-the-pulpits, huge wild violets, big American holly trees with bright red berries growing wild in the woods and many graceful stands of wild ferns with their fiddle heads, remindful of the scroll of a violin, along marshy places and creek banks. Transplanting ferns to my yard was never successful.