http://ozarkspub.vo.llnwd.net/o37/KSMU/audio/mp3/memoriesof_7107.mp3
In this month's installment of These Ozarks Hills, Marideth Sisco reflects on childhood memories of sweltering Ozarks temperatures, and how her family adapted...or didn't.
This is Marideth Sisco, for These Ozarks Hills. I don't know about you'uns, but I've just had about enough of this heat. It doesn't affect me as bad as it does some people, I guess, but it's plenty bad enough.
I've heard that the Indians told the first settlers here that they came here every year because it was so beautiful in the spring and for the nut harvest in the fall. They were only passing through, though, they said, because nobody would be crazy enough to live here through the summer.
Well, you know that saying about the addled and the English out in the noonday sun, we apparently took that as a challenge. For here we are, out going to Wendy's and Wal-Mart, (which a young friend of mine persists in calling Voldemart), any time of day, in any temperature.
It's crazy, in my humble opinion. And it makes some people crazy. With the advent of air conditioning, such long-used phrases such as "He went crazy from the heat," have more or less gone out of fashion.
But I'm old enough to remember when it was an every-summer thing. In fact I'm so old I can remember 1954, when the summer got so hot I remember coming in from exhausted play in the shade of our silver maples to find my mother on the secluded back porch, ironing, in her underwear. And I might add that she was not a woman given to such excesses (or would that be minimalism).
I remember another odd occurrence during that summer at home, when my father's father came to visit. Now it is true that years previously, this man had offended my mother so thoroughly over something that he had done to my father, that she had said he would never be a guest in her house again.
"Well, but that was a long time ago, he said, and for heaven's sake, woman, it's hot out here," and he tried to push past her and come in the house. A
nd when she attempted to shut the door against him, he wedged his boot in the door so she couldn't. And then he laughed at her.
Well, he must not have known the Gentrys, or he would have known that was a bad idea. Either it was the heat, or the laugh, but she decided it hadn't been long enough for her, and she reached down, all of her 4'11 self, grabbed the hammer that was behind the door because my dad worked nights, and brought it squarely down on the toe of his cowboy boot.
So he reconsidered, and found a place in the shade to park his car, and when my dad got home from the store, he took him to the cafe and they had a nice visit. We didn't see much of him after that.
That was one hot summer, all right. If I recall correctly, that was also the summer when we moved from Springfield to Washington State. I was just 11 years old, but I retain many short, but clear, memories of that trip. The large packing crates, two of them, that held all of our household goods, carted off by a truck to the train station, where they would be shipped out west. Then the drive down to my aunt Maude's in Barry County, where we were to leave the car.
I'm not sure, but I imagine that Uncle Gus bought the car, and that's where our trip money came from. One of those brief flashes of memory were from that leg of the journey, as we drove down to Maude and Gus's in our 1934 Ford. That was the one that came to be known as the Elliott Ness car for its running boards and front-opening "suicide" doors.
We had stopped for gas on the outskirts of Springfield next to the new Colonial Motel. There was a gas war on, and we laughed at buying gas for 19 cents a gallon, because usually it was 24¢. My grandmother was riding in the front seat, and she had opened the door to catch what little breeze there was.
The thermometer at the gas station read 104°. The man finished pumping the gas, my mother paid him his $2 and change, my grandmother called out, "Is everybody in?" and then shut the door on her foot. Crazy times, as I said. We must have laughed about that for a month.
Well, we stayed a few days to visit, as I recall, and then it was time to go meet my father. He had gone out earlier on the bus to Richland, Washington and got him a job on the Hanford Atomic Project. My aunt Juanita and Uncle Leonard were out there too, along with my cousin, Martonne, and her new husband, Danny.
They had been writing us about Washington and what it was like. They told us there were forests of asparagus along the irrigation ditches, free for the picking. And they had just gone out a picked gallons of Bing cherries, and made a huge cobbler, and ate the whole thing. Curiously, though, they said, there were no good apples. All of them had been shipped east.
Well, the day for departure came, and my Aunt Maude baked two loaves of bread and a big batch of oatmeal cookies, and fried two chickens. She wrapped each piece of chicken in a slice of buttered bread and packed it in a box along with the cookies and a couple of jars of pickles and some cloth napkins.
Gus drove us to Joplin, where we caught the 3 a.m. train to Kansas City.The conductor said he didn't want to disturb sleeping passengers, so would we mind riding in the lounge. We wouldn't, and we spent the rest of that night in large, swiveling arm chairs, the lap of luxury of that time.
We changed trains in Kansas City and spent two days and a night crossing Nebraska, Wyoming, and Idaho before arriving in Pendleton Oregon. It was sunny, dry and 80 degrees. Everyone was complaining about the heat.
This is Marideth Sisco for These Ozarks Hills. Thanks for listening.
