| Migrant Farm Workers page 3 |
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| We traveled looking for work. Making camp behind billboard signs, or under bridges crossing a stream. Many times other displaced farm families would join us behind the billboard or under the bridges. |
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| This type of activity continued for the next couple of years. We eventually returned to the Granite, OK area. JT joined the Civil Conservation Corps, or the CCC's (10) as they were called. My father, mother, and I continued with the struggle for provisions. For a period of time each weekend we traveled to different churches in the southwestern corner of Oklahoma. We would spend Sunday attending the churches' service. A special collection would be asked to pay my father for tuning their piano. We usually arrived at the church Saturday in time to start tuning the piano. Then, sleep on the floor in the church Saturday night. After Sunday morning services we would drive back to Granite, getting home late Sunday night. |
| By 1939 we were working a farm for Keener Lee four miles north of Granite, Oklahoma. We lived in three different locations around the north of Granite over the next year. I returned to the Lake Creek School where I started back in 1934. During the intervening years I had attended many different schools around Texas. Missing one year of school altogether. Needless to say, my knowledge of spelling suffered to such an extent that I have never recovered. I was always one of the first to be seated during a spelling bee. I can still hear the class laughing at me in a school across the tracks from the brickyard in Athens, Texas when I couldn't spell the word "use." After a while one gets use to the humiliation of being considered the dunce of the class. |
| By the fifth grade we were living inside the town of Granite. I went to the Granite School. I also got a job at the skating rink that had taken over the location of the movie theater. I would put skates on the customer's shoes. Because of the late hours I worked, again my schooling suffered. However, I do remember naming all the presidents, and all forty-eight states and their capitals. By early 1940 it was time to move again. Papa made some kind of deal with a couple who owned a car to take us with them to California. I was ready to go. I had had enough of farm life. |
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