Note 1 for Your Interest. 01032025
Dear Kim and Evan,
I read a Psalm today that prompted me to think about my failures and obligations as a father that I need to perform. I confess that I regret deeply some of the ways that I failed you as a father, and I would therefore like to begin trying to fulfill my obligations to you. So I propose to write a series of brief notes to you that would share with you my life, important experience, and current perspectives on my world. I want to tell you things about my personal struggles in the attempt to be a real Christian, but also I want to explain some secular issues that I realize now I should explain to you and hope you will think with me about.
So this is my first Note for Your Interest.
Psalm 78 begins:
My people, hear my teaching;
listen to the words of my mouth.
2 I will open my mouth with a parable;
I will utter hidden things, things from of old—
3 things we have heard and known,
things our ancestors have told us.
4 We will not hide them from their descendants;
we will tell the next generation
the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord,
his power, and the wonders he has done.
The Psalm rehearses the crucial events in the past that shaped the moral sensibility of the Israelites. I can only presume that the Psalm was written long after Moses, certainly after the time of David, so roughly 900 BC. and was meant to help that generation to be remined of the crucial events in earlier time that shaped the moral orientation the Psalmist wants his heirs to commit to as was he. I hope you will read through the Psalm, to get sense of its flavor and intention.
This passage helped me to think about my obligation as a father. I hope that by sharing my past struggles and lessons you will understand issues that to me are important to share with you as my children and heirs.
In fact, I feel I owe you more than I have left you with, so this is a late but earnest attempt to explain to you how God has worked in my life. Key to what I am told in this passage is to give you some sense of how God became real in my life.
It began when I was in the seventh grade. An evangelist had come to town with a series of “lectures” and evangelical appeals for us to be saved. In those days radio was becoming important. I remember listening to Roosevelt’s occasional “fireside chats.” The whole family gathered around the radio to hear him. I remember his declaration on December 7 1941 his declaration that that was a “Day of Infamy.” We were shocked to hear of the attack on Pearl Harbor by a country we barely knew anything about.
Anyway, Jackie Burris came to town and started a series of evangelical calls for us to repent and be saved. After going to his meetings for a while I went forward “to be saved.” Actually, I don’t know anything much happening to me when I did that. I was met by someone who prayed with me, and I prayed something like “I would like to be saved. Please forgive me of my sins.” I didn’t want to go to hell, and truly I wanted to live a good life. That was all I knew.
I don’t know what difference that act made. I do know that because of Jackie Burris our family began to go to a different church. We had been going to a big Presbyterian church downtown. And because I was urged to by my mother, I joined the church. My mother cried. I didn’t understand why. The episode with Jackie Burris was different. It was an act of intension. It meant something to me even though I didn’t really know much about the gospel.
Now, a matter of secular interest I want to bring up for you.
If I die today you two together will inherit about 4 million dollars. What will you do with it?
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Lecture 2. For Your Interest 01042024
I have passed over the life of our family in the 1930s. My father grew up in a family that was well off. His father, George Washington Canfield had somehow gotten himself into Oklahoma Territory even before the “boomer” period when the state would be opened to settlers, or at least I don’t know how he accomplished that. He came as a single man and staked out a territory that he knew would be right alongside the place where the railroad would be built. Eventually when it was built he used his location to get a wife. He named his tract of land and his trading post “Canfield” in the OK territory. When the railroad was eventually built he was better located than the nearest Post Office, which was some miles away in a place called Yale PO. AI happened that a young woman was working there named Roxy Wright.
What Jim tells me is that at one time she was being courted by one of the Dalton brothers. These men were law-abiding citizens in OK territory but they were known for doing what the Jesse James gang was doing: raiding the main railroad to the west. The Dalton brothers would sometimes ride up into Kansas to as far north as the railroad which ran (I think) from Kansas City to Omaha, and they would stop the train and loot the mail, then dart away. Anyway, George Washington Canfield was interested in Roxy. And she was working at the Yale Post Office which was several miles from Canfield, OK – I’m guessing more than 20 miles. So George rode up to Yale and proposed to them that they could have his land close to the railroad. If they would move, they could change the name of his land to Yale OK. His agenda was to get Roxy closer so that he could court her. So, as the story goes, they moved to George’s site, which became Yale, OK, and he married Roxy.
My father was born in another town, I think it was the town from which Roxy came, Jennings, OK. Eventually George and Roxy would have a daughter who died in infancy and six sons. I order they were: Jesse James Canfield, Ralph (father of Jean, whom you may remember), Roy (my father), Ira, Theodore, and Wright. The family prospered for many years. George and Roxy took three of their children (three children at that time) to the St Louis World’s Fair in 1904. My father was one year old. Eventually all of the sons would graduate from a new college being built near Yale, Oklahoma Agriculture and Mechanics College. It was the second land grant university in the state. Most of them majored in chemical engineering. Oklahoma was discovering oil. Eventually, Jesse (J.J) would get a PhD in chemistry from Iowa State.
My father, born January 3, 1900, would attend OAMC and graduate at 18 as a major in Chemical Engineering, but the main topic was, as WWI was going on, Chemical Warfare. I discovered by looking at one of his Year Books that he had been elected Vice President of his class in his last year. His education was funded by the Reserve Officer’s Training Corps, and as soon as he graduated, he was mustered into the army. But the war ended soon afterwards. My father told us that as soon as he joined the army the Kaiser sued for peace.
While he was at the college he met another student, and she was a music major, a soprano in the music department, Leona Dobson. She was the only one in her family who went to college and she did not quite graduate. I suppose that was because Roy and Leona married before she graduated and the depression would soon shut down her education. Anyway, her father was a full-time painter at the college during the years it was being built. He would die of lead poisoning from the paint he used. I never knew him, but Kim has in her house a table and matching chairs that he built. That’s the table that has claw feet. The chairs are still functional but fragile. I hear that you, Kim, want to get them all fixed. They have to be roughly a century old. You may not have noticed but my mother had one finger on her left had that had one link of her finger in her hand missing. That happened by an accident. Her cousin was shopping on something and somehow it sliced offer her finger at the first knuckle.
More later, on the depression era.
01062024 LECTURE THREE
The depression period, 1930s.
My grasp of the period of my parents’ marriage is only vague. I’m hoping Jim will know/ remember more than I know. I know that my father entered the army as soon as he graduated from Oklahoma A and M College (OMAC). I thought he served altogether 8 years. That means he was mustered out in 1926. But they were married in 1929, January 27 and he was in the army then. I was born a year and half later, 1930. I know that he told me that in that period, before 1929?, he was selling Ford cars. This was, I think, the Model A. The model T had come out earlier but by that time it was being upstaged by a GM car. Model A came out in 1928, and so it is likely it was model A’s that he was selling. However, the most significant event in that period was the crash in 1929. That means that hardly had they married when the bottom fell out of the economy. It was also a time when he father was pouring a lot of money into an oil well. I don’t’ know exactly where but it was in the area of Yale. Also, grandfather owned land that was contested by an Indian woman. The dispute was notable in Oklahoma affairs in the late 1920s. The way I heard it Grandfather made a deal with his lawyer that if they won the lawyer would get 1/8 of the money. I gather grandfather was pretty used to make deals on the basis of a handshake. In this case, the total amount awarded to the contestants was significant and grandfather’s amount was 1/8th of it. On this basis the lawyer took all of grandfather’s award. Grandfather of course thought the contract meant that the lawyer would get 1/8th of his share of the award, not 1/8th of the total. The lawyer took it all. I heard that he became a big oil man eventually.
However, about that time the oil business dipped and that may have been the reason my father did not get a job in oil chemistry. Actually, he seems to have mainly been trained in Chemical Warfare, which seems not to have been useful after the war.
So several crises seem to have happened soon after my parents were married. The stock market crashed, soon afterwards the banks failed—my grandfather lost everything—the oil business cratered, and Grandfather’s oil drilling project came up dry. This was the early period of the depression. Of course the car business collapsed also. So my father was left struggling for work.
One of his jobs was carrying ice. This was before people had refrigerators. What they had were ice-boxes. An ice box was a wooden box with thick insulated walls, a similarly thick door into which big chunks of ice were kept along with the food that needed to be preserved. That mean that a whole system developed for delivering chunks of ice to people’s door. My father’s job was to deliver the ice chunks to peoples’ iceboxes. It must have been early in their marriage that he was doing this to pay for his new wife and after July 1930 a new son. In any case, my father had a habit of putting his togue between his teeth when he was doing something that required close concentration. And one time when he was carrying ice he fell and bit his togue nearly off. Somehow it was sewed up and his tongue eventually was healed. It must have been a terrible moment in their life together.
This may have been the time that my mother was teaching music. She was the director for the music in a church. I was told that as my mother was directing the choir I also stood up behind her and tried to direct the music Music.as she did. Years later I would tell myself that I would like to be a great Conductor like, say, Toscanini. That was after I had been the student director of the high school orchestra for two years.
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01102025 LECTURE 4 FOUR
It would have been in these times that my father started studying accounting by long distance. Apparently, his degree in chemical warfare was useless and he had a growing family. I was born in July 5, 1930; Ben came in February 2 1932; Bryce in February 8, 1935. So in these years when the demand for money was rising Daddy was having trouble making a living. Just finding a job at all was difficult. Literally 25% of the workforce was out of work.
My father’s course was accomplished by long distance. You read an assignment and then answered questions, put them in the mail and in a few days you would get a grade on your answers. It must have been a long process. In the mean time he was working. The only job I heard about during that time was the ice-carrying job. I think they must have been living in Yale through this time and perhaps he got help from other members of the family, but as far as I know they were not doing well either.
It’s possible my mother made some money, I can’t believe it was much. But she directed the choir at a church and she might have gotten something for that. I was of course there, between 1-5 years old. But at some point after a program I started waving my arms like she did directing the choir, portending something I would be doing later on.
Anyway my father finally qualified as a Public Accountant and started looking for work. It seems that the jobs he found were in the trucking business, and those jobs drew him out of Oklahoma into Kansas. I don’t know the sequence but I believe he at various times he had jobs in Wichita and Arkansas City. But at least once when he came in and organized their records he discovered that they were broke and there was no money even to pay him. This was what it was like in the depression. I remember a time when we lived in Wichita. I was in Kindergarten. And the daughter of mother’s older sister Charity was living with us. Mary must have been about 15. I remember her as a red head and now I think she must have been pretty. Years later Rita and I met her when we were in Wichita (I think), and she was getting old, showing signs of dementia. It seemed such a tragedy, so different from when I knew her as a child. One event I vividly remember while were there was my experience when I stuck my finger into an open socket out of curiosity. That was a shock to remember. I never did that again.
One other memorable event took place during those years of may parents’ efforts to survive when there was hardly any money. They had a chevy at one point, perhaps left over from when the family had money. Anyway, one night as we were going home, the car was hit on the driver’s side. For me it was a terrifying instant. The other car came out of nowhere. I vaguely remember my father bleeding but apparently not very hurt. The car was totally demolished and I’m almost sure there was a loan on it. Thereafter I’m not sure how they survived. At least they had no car.
Anyway, in the late 1930s we moved into the Tulsa area. Actually to Sand Springs. I think the idea was to stay in that place while my father looked for work in the city. We lived in a little house on an oil reservation. That is, this was out in the country where a lot of large pumps were drawing oil out of the ground. All of them were operated by a huge diesel engine in a little shed near the house we lived in. The pumps, scattered far and wide even as far away I would guess now of a mile away across a barren land, driven by steel cables about two inches think that connected the power house with the pumps. Mr Martin’s job was to keep this system going. The cables had always to be kept taut and the diesel had to be kept going day and night. I remember following him around when the engine was not working. This system created a continuous sound, pump …pump …pump, in the ambience of the place day and night.
We were able to be there because my mother’s mother, Grandma Dobson, had married another older person named Martin. I must have been a marriage of convenience for both of them, and for my family it provided my father with an opportunity to look for work in Tulsa.
It was, as I now remember it, a pretty shabby place, although as a kid I had no sense of hardship. There as an out-house, where we used corncobs to wipe ourselves. No paper, as I remember.
My father found it hard going to look for a job walking the streets of Tulsa. He ran into an old friend and he asked if he could go up to his company and apply there. His “friend” said no. Jobs were precious to have and hard to find. Eventually he got a job with a shipping company, Parkhill Trucking.
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Lecture 5 On our situation in Tulsa about 1936 to 1940.
Eventually, my father found a job. I think it was with the Trip Trucking company in Tulsa. That made it possible for us to move out and move out. Away from Mr. Martins. Well, reservation. And move into a small apartment, A duplex, In Tulsa.
I went to Springdale school for the first and 2nd grade. I remember it as a fun place. I don’t think I was particularly notable in the class, but I remember playing soccer on the on the fields. Under the supervision of the. Have an athletic coach.
I also remember a terrible moment when Ben caught fire. He must have been four or five years old. And there was a. A gas stove situated in the wall 0f the kitchen. I remember being concerned about it for myself. I didn’t want to get too close last time, might get burnt. Ben was 14 months younger. And he backed up too close to that stove. He was wearing his pajamas. And his pajamas caught on fire. Of course the pain was terrible and he started running. My father chased him down. And. Patted out all of the fire with his own hands. I do remember that his hands were burnt. But Ben was badly burned. I’m sure that my parents had no money. And they did not go to the doctor. They did not take Ben to the doctor. My mother bought ancient unguentine Has a salve for burns and treat And treated him. For many weeks. I remember, I remember the terrible scar on the backside of his legs. But years later. They could not be found. He must have been in his 40s or 50s by that time. But Ben grew up. Some marks on his body and have this terrible burn. And I don’t know what it did to him to suffer such pain for so long. He turned out to be amazing adult. Favorite of my father.
The other family in the duplex in the other side of the duplex. Was a family of girls about the same age. I think the oldest girl was older than me. And we did play with them sometimes. But they were. Aggressive. Girls. And they were. You’re very hostile and. Eventually, a couple of the girls would ride their bicycles around the duplex. And when they came around our back door. They taunted us, the boys. I remember my mother. Carefully timed her. Just move out of the. Back door. To deposit some trash at just the moment when when the girl was coming around on her bicycle and mother pushed her down. This created the crisis between our two families and it was finally agreed. That we would not play together anymore.
Across the street was another family that had two boys about the same age. The oldest was a year older than me and the youngest was a year old year younger than me. About Bens age. You played this with the shell boys? And, uh, their father was a. Painting contractor. So that they had a double or triple garage with lots of painting gear and materials in it. I remember learning from them how to use a bandsaw, and with the bandsaw we were able to make some. Very interesting. Toys for objects. We also played hockey with them. And we thought we were pretty good. Remember, this is the first and 2nd grade.
Next door to our apartment was an Open field, mostly thick with cockleburs. Cockleburs stick to everything and it’s difficult to pull them out. They get in your clothes. They can get in your hair and we were playing in that field. We always can home with cockleburs in our clothes and something in our hair. If they get in your hair, you never get them out. You have to cut them out with scissors. It came out many years later that a man who child was getting tangled up in a cockleburs decided to try to invent a new way to bind things together by making strands of plastic to stick together. The idea I heard, came from cockleburs. He called his new invention Velcro.
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Next Lecture
After about two years we moved to a little better place, a house of out own. I wonder if the reason was to get away from those girls in the other side of the duplex. This house was on St Louis Street near Thirteenth Street. 1220 south St Louis I think it was. It does not exist now they tell me, since the Broken Arrow expressway runs through that area.
We stayed in that house. For several years. I remember being in the third grade there and we did not move until I was in the 9th grade. The house was built on a terrace. And I remember trying to mow that terrace. Pushing the lawn mower up. The Terrace. Over and over again. There was a big job for me in the third grade. We had a wonderful dog named Butch. He was a mongrel. But he at least had some terrier blood in him. He had one fault, which was chasing cars. And once he caught one the. Car ran over him. And crushed his back legs. We picked him up and. Carried him back into the house. And put him on a pallet. Very close to the back door. And every day. He dragged himself out. To go outside, to go to go to the bathroom and then drag himself back inside. Crying. With pain. The whole time. He was such a brave dog. Such a faithful dog, such. A reliable dog. We all loved him. We had just four boys in that house. I’ve been in price. It was during that time that our mother got pregnant. Quiz. The fourth son, Jim. He would be 14 years younger than me. And he would not have a last name that began with B. For some reason they named him Jim. I remember playing. In the front St. as they were repairing the street. There was a 2 trenches running. Through the street and I remember throwing clots at each other. U It was great fun. Until one of the clouds hit me in the face. After that it didn’t seem so much fun. I was a fat white boy and we lived in a white community. And I had virtually no contact. There’s people from the black community. But I remember 1 moment. When I was on the bus. When the bus driver told a black man in the back. To get back in the back because he was sitting in front of a white woman. The black man was a young, well dressed. Gentlemanly person. And he was infuriated. And he was ready and threatened. To fight him to react with fit with his fists. But he did go back. And I remember the bus driver asked me. If I live near. 13th St. And had a telephone. These were days when telephones. No one had a phone. There was no such thing as a cell phone.
One of the most memorable days in my life was Christmas morning. Leading up to Christmas. My mother had. Kept us from going into the basement. For some reason the rule was we could not go into the basement. What I did not know, what we did not know, was that my parents. We’re preparing our Christmas present there. Only later did we learn. That this first Christmas on Saint Louis St. My parents had no money. So they decided. To buy a board. And my father would cut up the board into blocks. And my mother would paint them. And then? They would put them up as a in a stack for us to play with. I remember getting up that morning. And we found. A stack of blocks. Carefully. Place one upon another into a tall Edifice that nearly reached the ceiling. I remember staring at it. And wondering what to do with it. Bryce. Solve the problem for us. He crawled up and hit the bottom. Row of blocks with his fist and the whole thing came down. And then what would we do with them? My father suggested we make trains with it and we did. We put the blocks together and we pushed those blocks around and organize them in new ways of made cabooses and, uh. Engine cars. And played with those blocks all day. Only later did we know. That this was a gift. My parents put together for me and for our for the three of us. Because they had nothing else. It turns out, as I remember those blocks, they were the nicest Christmas present I ever remember. We played with them for years.
Another serious development in the House was that had termites. Again, our parents had very little money. So my father somehow obtained a as device for spewing out liquids and he, along with me and Ben, crawled int to the crawl space to spray a chemical against the termites. It was a messy job and because Ben was a little smaller but also willing to crawl into the most inaccessible places he often did some of the most strenuous work in getting the poison deep under the floor of the house. As I remember it took a few days, but by the end we noted that there were no more bugs of any kind in the house. I have no idea what the substance was but it probably wasn’t good for us to be using it.
Ben was also much more aggressive about doing difficult tasks than me. I was offered the chance to dig a trench in the back yard to clean out the sceptic tank running toward the back. In the end he was more interested than me, and he did a wonderful job of digging the trench, which my father in the end cleaned out and replaced with new pipes. There was a reason that my father very much loved Ben. I was mostly lazy and self-centered. If you had gotten to know Ben you would agree that he was the one with the best qualities for success. Indeed, he was successful in his profession, something I was very late to understand.
In fact, Ben became a famous music teacher in Hobbs NM. He was famous for producing wonderful choral groups. He was names most outstanding music teacher of the year in New Mexico but the honor he was most proud of was his election by his colleagues as the most outstanding educator of the state.
Music
That musical tradition of course came from my mother. Often in those days she would sit down and play the piano and sing. She urged all of us to come and sing with her, which we did for a while but over time most of us declined to sing with her. It was Ben who kept singing and he would as I said, eventually (after his time in Korean war) make music teaching his career.
One important new development in my life was that my mother took me to a bank concert and afterwards asked me which instrument I would like to learn to play. I told her I would like to play the one where you seemed to swallow part of it. I meant the trombone.
The trombone became a powerful learning device in my life. I worked hard the learn to play. And after a while my parents found enough money for me to have lessons from a music school teacher named Duke Louks. When I started with him I told him I had already worked through the first book on my own and was now working in the second. I thought I was doing fine. But he had me play the first exercise in the first book, only much faster than I had ever done it. Of course I couldn’t keep up with him—he was playing a French Horn. That taught me that I need a teacher and he was in fact a wonderful teacher. I worked hard for him and I think I learned to play almost as well as I ever played under his direction. He put together some of his other students to create a trombone quartet. We really sounded good. I was the weakest player, so it was a kind of inspiration for me, fifth and sixth grader, to see these older guys, high school age, playing so well. One of them was named John Tipton. He had a pretty girlfriend. The other guy, the best player, had a beautiful copper bell trombone which he kept in immaculate condition. Whenever he was finished playing he carefully wiped it down with a chamois skin. I was enthralled to watch him. Strangely, I can’t remember his name.
Eventually, the trombone became a critical part of my identity. I eventually began playing during the singing part of my church. I wasn’t very good at first but the experience of having to play with someone else, the piano, and before an audience helped me to get better. In high school I would hold the first chair in the regional high school band.
In those days I took trombone lessons from the head music teacher at the largest high school in Tulsa, Central High. He was a very gentle and gracious man. Played trumpet and had as a young man been in touch with some players in the John Philip Sousa Band, the most famous and most successful band in the world at the time and I suppose ever. Mr Gates told me that in the Sousa band he always got the two best players for the top seats in the band. The top two trumpet players in the country plays in his band. The second had only to be on hand if something happened to the first chair player. Otherwise, had little to do. I assume he played with the whole section had a part but only when the first chair could not function did he take over the solos.
Lincoln School and the discovery of girls
During the years we were in that house I went to Lincoln School. I didn’t’ realize it at the time but it was a school in which handicapped kids were “mainlined.” We had two or three students in wheel chairs in my class, and I think someone who had trouble walking.
What I do remember was that I was just then discovering something very mysterious, girls. One of them was named Jean Rhoads. She was beautiful. I remember that for one school play (otherwise I remember nothing about it) she sang “I dream of Jeannie with the light brown hair.” She was so beautiful that I had a hard time being around her. I remember running away from a practice sessions when she was learning the song.
There was also Rosalee Weston. Rosalee was very prissy and always came to school in frilly dresses. I remember being revulsed by her, I and some other guys in the class. She was just too, too much. So girlish. I could hardly stand to be around her. That was when I was in about the 4th grade. It happened that I would see her several years later. It was during graduation from high school prom time. I graduated from Will Rogers High School, which at that time was only a few years old. Rosalee and most of the people I knew at Lincoln School went to Central High School, a much bigger school, the oldest high school in the city. I somehow escaped the prom at Rogers but I happened to go with a friend to crash the prom at Central High School. I’m not sure how I got in. But at some point as I was walking through the building before the official affairs of the evening began I happened to peek into a room that seemed busy. There was Rosalee, in a beautiful evening gown with, again, lots of frills. She was encircled by several guys dressed in formal clothes and they were obviously dazzled by her. In fact, she was gorgeous. I’m sure she didn’t recognize me but I recognized her, and this time I was stunned by how beautiful she was. Yes, she was still dressed in fluffy frills, etc. but this time I saw her from different eyes. We were both 17 years old.
Church
Going back to the time we lived on St Louis street, this was the time when we went to see the programs of Jackie Burris, which is where I started out. Before Jackie Burris I went to church because my mother took me. I wasn’t much interested in it. Because she encouraged me at about 12 I joined the First Presbyterian church. My mother cried; I had no idea why.
Anyway, as indicated earlier we attended the meetings of the Jackie Burris group and I was impressed by the appeal. I went forward. I didn’t want to offend God and I wanted to be saved. What I understood was that Christ died for my sins and I should make a commitment to him. What that meant was vague, beyond going forward and praying with someone. The one thing I know that act did was that it redirected us to another church. We were recommended to attend a church near us. It was an Assemblage of God churh. We were there for a while but we were never much involved but eventually we started going to the United Brethren Church. It was maybe 10 blocks away and I became used to walking it. The pastor was named Bob Young, very charismatic, attractive. He had a young family, and drew a fairly active congregation. He was a graduate of Moody Bible Institute. I suspect that was his education. At least I suppose that he learned to be a dynamic preacher there. I was in the 6th or 7th grade and was impressed with the gospel he was preaching. There was a small group of young people more or less my age, mostly older, and I was glad to be involved with them. As I say, they were mostly older than me, and the most notable of them was a girl named Ruth Warren. She had an older sister, Kathleen. Anyway, I was entranced by Ruth. She was poised, attractive with a huge small. Every year as I was in the group Ruth was elected President of the group. She was, maybe in the 9th grade when I first met her. She had a boyfriend but this was during WWII and he was a young officer in the army. I would eventually meet him, the son of the Tulsa Fire Chief. I think I only saw him once. He was of course with Ruth and meeting new people in the church. He never came home; I remember the news only vaguely. In any case, as a young child just growing toward adulthood I was in love with Ruth. I had long conversations with her and Kathleen after church. I don’t know what my relationship with her did for me, but what I remember was how important she was to me at that time.
Another person I came to admire was a young woman who presented herself as much older. Jean Lock was beautiful, said she was 21, worked as a secretary for a law firm. In retrospect I think she must have been quite bright. Jean as well as Ruth played the piano in church and eventually I began, at their urging, to play along with the music in the church. I wasn’t very good at first but I think that the more I played publicly in church the better I got. I didn’t realize how valuable it was to my playing skill but I now believe I learned more doing that than I realized at the time. Eventually I got pretty good on the trombone.
I’ve talked mostly about women, girls. I was deeply in love with Ruth and I much admired Jean and enjoyed time with her as well. Jean had a “sister” living with her named Betty; strangely I can’t remember Betty’s last name. It seemed strange to me that Betty was living with Jean because it turned out that Betty had a brother who attended the church also. He was an attorney. I felt comfortable in the circle of young people at the church, not so much in school.
I had a friend who’s first name I don’t remember but his last name was Sheperd [?]. He lived in a big house, much nicer than the one I lived in. What I most remember about him was his dog, a Saint Bernard. I encountered this giant dog on the sidewalk, standing in my way. We just stood there looking at each other. He was almost as big as I was, was not hostile. I had never seen an animal that big that wasn’t a cow. I wondered if he was a cow at first. Somehow I got around him, but the encounter unsettled me. There were two other guys in my class that I palled around with. Alvin Hoffman was probably the smarted guy in the class, and apparently in the past he had been a model student. But when I knew him he was always sabotaging whatever the teacher was trying to do. She was named Coonz and was the mother of a famous person on the local radio. But she could not control Alvin. The other guy I spent time with was Jack Voorhees. I remember going with him to his house after school and was stunned that there was no one in the house. It was so quiet, nothing like mine, where there were four noisy boys. And my mother was always home. Eventually I began to feel that Alvin and Jack became better friends than me. There was a kind of secret understanding between them that I didn’t understand. I now think they had some things in common that I didn’t understand. I think that their parents had divorced or were divorcing. Also, they seemed to be only children in the family, but much of the time in both houses there was no one there.I now think that may have been what was going on with Alvin’s causing so much trouble. Something going on in his life was inducing this wild behavior. Years later when I took a chemistry course at TU they both came to class together. I now wonder if they were both Jewish. In any case, they seem to have formed a bond that lasted through several years.
Move to Fourth Place and Gary
When I was in the 8th grade, I think, we moved to a new house on Fourth Place and Gary. It was nice, treelined street on the corner. Jim had been born I think while we were in the South St Louis house but this is where his earliest memories begin. He remembers when my father’s mother, Roxie, was staying with us. I don’t remember that she lived with us but he does. I have already said that grandfather Canfield lost everything in 1929-30 period and I think they were living on whatever their 6 sons would give them. I think that for most of them these were hard days, but my father was making more money, and I think the other brothers were doing a little better also. The one who was doing best was Jesse (J.J), the oldest. He had graduated from Oklahoma A and M College and entered graduate school at Iowa State, I think, before the collapse took place, so he was able to finish a PhD in chemistry. He got a job in Middletown, OH, near Cincinnati, in a steel making company. Eventually he would have a major role in the development of ceramic plating on steel. Anyway, I remember seeing my father giving his father a $20 bill. I could tell it bothered my mother because they were raising 4 boys on what was a limited salary. My father was still working, I think, for Parkhill Shipping company.
The house at fourth Place and Gary had some distinctive features. The most prominent feature was that it was made of granite. I remember pillars made of layers of granite at the corners of the house, and at either end of a large veranda that covered the front and the right side of the house (if you faced it). It was wide and I remember Jim riding his tricycle around that veranda. The interior of the house had a huge living room-dining room area, but the rest of the house consisted of small rooms, three bedroom, all of them very small, and a small kitchen. What we learned was that the house was built by an oil man who had struck it rich and started to build a large beautiful home when the bottom fell out of the oil business and he lost everything. So he had the unfinished part of the house finished at quickly and cheaply as possible. Evidence that he had exited quickly were the blocks of granite lying helter-skelter around the back yard. As I remember none of us could move them, so they remained in place. We just mowed around them. We mostly played ball in the street. I was pretty quiet so we were rarely disturbed by traffic.
Another thing notable about the house was the Black Walnut tree on the year. It was huge. And it produced nuts that we sometimes tried to eat. Black walnuts are different from the kind we find in the store– although recently I discovered small packages of black walnut nuts at Schuncks. The Black walnut nut is encased in an outer layer of wooden-like growth and once you broke into that you could get to the nut, but the interior of the nut is so convoluted that it is hard to get the edible part out without breaking up the whole hard cover into small pieces. You will never get a large piece of a Black Walnut nut. Also, the taste is different. What I most notice about those nuts is that they leave a bitter taste in my mouth.
Fro the first year that we lived in that house I went to Horace Mann junior high school, which was the one that graduates of Lincoln School went into at the ninth grade. I had to take a long bus ride to get there. The next year I went to Will Rogers High School, which was fairly new, maybe 4 years old, about a 8 minute walk from my house. We must have moved shortly after the end of World War II. The economy was doing better and as I say my father was making more money. The move into this house marked a notable change in my life and growth.
I must have been in the 9th grade attending Horace Mann when a young man named Ed Wicherin stopped by our house. He was new in town, had driven up from Dallas where he was a student in Dallas Seminary and he had come to town to start a unique ministry with high school kids. It was called Young Life. We learned about this from Ed in his first visit and because I was soon to go into high school he had been given my name to visit. My mother invited him to stay for dinner and I think he even stayed the night with us. Ed would have a profound influence on my life. He was tall, and I suppose he was good looking; he certainly was a great person to visit with and he became a staple visitor to our family.
I was present in the two early “meetings” from which Young Life was formed. One of them had been organized by a piano teacher who wanted to do something to encourge what Ed was doing and she asked all her students, high school age, to come to a party that Ed organized. It was in fact great fun and the woman was stunned at how much fun we kids could have. That was Ed’s introduction to the high school kids he wanted to work with. The other meeting that he organized was held in the home of a dentist who had a son a year older than me. His name was Jerry. This meeting was not mainly for high school kids even though I was there, and I think Jerry also. Mainly was the folks who might help support the program. The folks I remember being there were Ruth Warren, by that time a secretary for a law firm (I think), her sister Kathleen, Jean Lock and her “sister” Betty, and Bob Young. There were a few others but I don’t remember who they were. What now impresses me is something about the situation that I did not know at the time, but it turns out there was a kind of mystery in life of every one of those people I have just named. It would be years before I came to know some of the unstated details, but now in retrospect I realize how naive I was about these people whom I very much admired.
I was quite naive—maybe I’ve always been naive—so when I came to know these people more I realized that their lives, like mine were as broken and mixed up as mine, but in those days I took them at face value and thought they were all wonderful, living more complete and orderly lives than me. Only much later did I learn that Jean Lock was not 7 years older than me, which is what she had led me to believe. She was only 4 years older. She had dropped out of high school because of a problem she had controlling her urine. She was a bed-wetter. I think what we know now is that bed-wetting is mostly an inherited problem but in those days it suggested that she had not been raised right, or her parents had abused her: something. She had dropped out of school and took classes in short-hand and typing. I have no doubt she was very bright, and she got a job working for a lawyer and seems to have done well there. I’m not sure how I came to know it. I think her mother told my mother, etc. As for Betty, for some reason she was booted out of her house. There seemed to be an issue there and eventually she was taken in by Jean’s parents, who were indeed wonderful people as far as I could tell. I loved to play ping pong with her father as well as Jean herself.
So that was Jean and Betty. Ruth Warren and her sister Kathleen had a more strange background. When their father died it came out that they were both adopted. They had come from the same family–they were real sisters– but there was some kind of monetary dispute in the family. Apparently a lot of oil wealth was involved. And a contract had to be revised– something legal was at stake. Ruth never said anything about it to me. But the mystery showed up many years later when Ruth and her mother were sharing an apartment; by that time Kathleen had become a missionary and gone somewhere. One day Ruth came home and her mother had been beaten to death, clubbed as I remember by a vase or a metal object in their house. And some papers were gone. By that time I was not close to Ruth and so I learned nothing more of what happened. A mystery.
The other person I have mentioned about whom there was something that I did not know in the early years when I was just getting started going to the United Brethren church was Bob Young. As I said he was charismatic and very personable, clever, etc. I came to know that he had a problem that may not have surfaced in those days but became notable later: He seemed unable to keep from getting entangled with beautiful women. Because of problems with surperiors in his denomination he eventually joined the Southern Baptist Church. According to the gossip he developed relationships that required that he leave and start somewhere else. He had a sweet wife, Alma, who seems to have put up with the problem throughout many years of marriage. So that’s all the secrets I knew about some of the people whom I admired and who in some ways had an influence on me.
But of all those who shaped me, I think, it was Ed Wickerin. He became a kind of mentor for me during the formative high school years, although I didn’t realize it. I grew up participating in the Young Life meeting, and because Ed was invited to stay with us I came to know him. I now see mannerisms in myself that I believe I got from Ed. One of the most significant moments of my life came from a trip I and several other high school kids took with Ed to Star Ranch, a camp owned by Young Life in Colorado. We did things there at that time that I suppose would be against the law these days. The leaders of Young Life, Jim Rayburn, led us up the mountains into places were we could careen down the hill at break-neck speeds, sliding on the gravel sides of the mountains for hundreds of feet. It was great fun, but I believe that something terrible happened to someone doing that and that may have been the end of it. We played football and baseball and in the evening we had a meeting in which Jim or one of the other staff leaders spoke. I of course met new people and new friends. I got interested in a girl from someplace like Tennessee named Kubie, far from Tulsa. But it happened that when it was all over there were some things I did there about which I was deeply ashamed. So after the last night, as we drove home in the dark from Colorado Springs, a long night in the dark, with Ed driving, I came to face what I had done during this wonderful Christian camp.
I was mortified by what I had done. I had called myself a Christian, I had espoused the gospel, I had been a notable figure in our Young Life club—and at Star Ranch I had behaved shamelessly. I was so ashamed. And in that time as we drove through the night I had a crisis moment with Jesus. It marked my life. Even as I remember this moment and try to explain it I am weeping. I begged Jesus to forgive me and take me back. Yes, please forgive me, Jesus. I’m so ashamed. All that I had tried to be, had thought I was, was violated by what I did. And I was mortified, ashamed to my core. This was the moment for all that I had been learning, from the time I heard Bob Young preach, the times that I had heard Ed Wicherin explain what the grace and mercy of God was like when led our our Young Life meetings, all that I had been learning from my own fragmentary readings of the New Testament—it all came to bear on me. Now I knew that I was a sinner. I had always supposed so before, but now for the first time I knew what it felt like to feel like a sinner, to realize how grossly I had violated all that his love had called me to be. I lost control. I silently wept and wept through the night. I begged him to take me back. I felt that I had wrecked my life by that behavior, and I wanted so earnestly that he would not to give up on me. Things happened at that time, in that night in the front seat of the car, that I cannot tell. It was overwhelming. I learned then what the gospel was all about. It was for me, a sinner. I came away washed. Cleansed in a way I cannot describe. I knew I was forgiven. I came to realize in away I had never known before that Jesus loved me. Me, not just me as one among many but me personally. He knew me, he loved me, he knew all about what I had done. But he loved me anyway. I never got over that moment. For weeks on end I spent evenings sitting on the veranda looking at the stars, which seemed now to be a majestic display of Jesus’s love for me. It affected how I behaved with those around me. I became more open with my classmates in school, more free to be friendly, more able to love them. Somehow love for them became natural.
When I started classes at Rogers High School I took Orchestra, not band, throughout my three years there. During my second year in high school years at Rogers I became the student conductor of the orchestra. I had already been influenced by Ed Wicherin in another powerful way. He had no place to keep a wonderful set of classical records and so he asked if he could leave them with us. Those records exposed me to the wonder of Classical Music. He had a wonderful, highly sophisticated classical taste, and I soaked it all up. Because of those records, which I played over and over again, I came to love classical music. It was a fine collection and I began to fancy myself a possible professional conductor or a composer. That was the context in which I seized the first chance I had to direct the orchestra. In my sophomore year the orchestra was directed by someone I much admired, a violinist who I thought did a great job leading the orchestra. But once he was gone I was chosen for the job– actually, I’m not sure how that worked. So I had several years of listening to classical music at home and two years directing the orchestra at school. The reason I was able to direct the orchestra so much was that Buck Freeman, the music teacher, had asthma. It must have been very severe because he missed lots of classes. In those cases I ran the whole affair myself. By the time I got out of high school I thought of myself as a hot shot musician. That I won a competition to compose the Alma Mater for Will Rogers high school simply enhanced my musical pretensions. The award was worth a bunch of money but I can’t remember how much it was. I knew at least one of the other guys who submitted music for the competition. I also got a scholarship to Northwestern University to study trombone under ??(his name escapes me, famous trombonist for the Chicago Symphony). It sounded good but in fact was not nearly enough for me to attend a place like Northwestern. In fact, I was deeply fraught by an internal struggle and did not get over it until late in my senior year. I attended Tulsa University because it was the cheapest place I could go. I had a band/Orchestra scholarship to play my horn.
Now I want to try to explain what ruined last several months in high school and bugged me for years afterwards. As I said earlier I had a wonderful experience in the summer before my senior year at Rogers after I had had such a wonderful personal experience with Jesus in the trip by car from Star Ranch to Tulsa. The result for me was that I felt more free and joyful than I had ever been before. And it affected my relations with my friends in school. It was my last year and like so many seniors in high school I thought I was at the top of the heap. I thought I was very well liked and I basked in the sense of eminence among my classmates.
The way I tell this is a construction of my own to explain developments in my mid- senior year. At the time I was completely flumoxed. I had no idea why or how this happened, but I believe I now know why I had a serious problem. This is my story: At one point I was, as I remember it, showing off for some girls and not paying attention, and I ran into the sharp corner of a table. I hit so hard that I had the sense that the point of the table had penetrated all the way through the soft matter to hit the pelvis with a shock. I was startled, and wondered if I should go to the doctor about whatever had happened to me. In fact, I was able to continue on and I thought no more about it. However, in the period afterwards I realized that my breath was so noxious that people were turning away from my face. Also, I had black stools, but made no connection between that the problem of my breath. My bad breath became, I think, notable—of course I could be exaggerating but I certainly had the sense that my friends were trying in various ways to tell me that I had a problem. I finally realized what they were saying. I was humiliated. I did everything I could to cleanse my breath. Chlorophyll gum had just come out and I chewed Chlorophyll gum all day, every day until after a while one of my back teeth was getting rotten. Eventually it had to be pulled. The problem hit me as I was a proud, arrogant, high school student, and I became desperate to cleanse my breath. It never happened. I believe it was a problem that lasted several years. Of course, the way I have described event suggest what I think happened. The bump into the table broke the flesh inside of me possibly in several places. I think it did puncture my abdomen and that caused bleeding, which showed up as black stools for many months. I suspect it slowed me down; at least I felt slowed down, and dirty and ugly, and repulsive to the girls I wanted to impress. All of that forced me into a depression. This is how I left high school, and how I was when I entered college.
So my early months at TU were hard for me to cope with my father had belonged to the Sigma Phi Epsilon Fraternity and because of that they recruited me for the fraternity. The last thing I wanted at that time was to socialize. I went to some of their rush parties but declined to join, and with relief escaped all the social affairs they stood for. Now, I believed in prayer. I thought God answered prayer. So you can be sure that throughout this time I prayed. I took off long periods of time to be alone and pray. There was a little room attached to the garage of our new house—we had moved to the Quebec address—and there I practiced my horn and prayed. I noticed that it would have been easy to tie a noose to the rafters above me. I did not stop praying. I continued to feel dirty, offensive, undesirable.
In the mean time of course I was taking courses at TU. I had entered as freshman majoring in music in the Music School. But it didn’t take long for me to be unimpressed with my classmates. They seemed not to be very good at their instruments and not very sophisticated in music. Also, I had a newly-hired trombone teacher who for some reason never clicked with me. I was not very interested in his ability. He had been a baritone horn soloist for the Navy band. The baritone horn is essentially the same instrument as the trombone and he was at that time training himself to play the trombone. So the music scene did not impress me. I still had pretensions of being a conductor or even a composer. I saw no chance I would want to get training in conducting orchestral music there, so I backed away from the music program, at least mentally, even though I kept playing in the band and the orchestra because I got a scholarship for that. I still thought about myself as a serious musician, superior to what was being taught at TU music school (!). Anyway, those students were being trained, I realized, to teach music in public schools. I had already been directing the orchestra at Rogers High school and I didn’t want to go to school to do that again. Before my freshman year at TU was over I was lo0king around for a different major. I learned that I could be a music major within the Liberal Arts School so I made the switch out of the Music school and into the Liberal Arts school and then started looking for another major. I thought about chemistry but got a C in the course. I thought about sociology but backed away from it: I took an anthropology course with someone who admitted he knew nothing about it. We read through the famous old textbook produced A.L. Kroeber. entitled Anthropology. I don’t remember anything I got out of it.
Such was my drift out of music and into, well, something else, I knew-not what.
In the mean time there was my problem with God. He seemed real to me in many ways, and I continued being inivovled with Young Life, but if there were doors into heaven they were shut and locked. On the one matter that most grieved me I got no help. I still felt dirty in my mouth—I still do.