by William Wayne Allen
My grandfather, James Morgan Allen, lived in Ashland, Illinois. He was a laborer and worked for the farmers during that period. My father, George Thomas Allen, grew up working for the same farmers.
My father had a cousin named Arthur Hiles. Arthur’s wife, Jenny Hiles, had asthma and the doctors in Illinois told them they would have to move west.
In 1907, when a person moved, they could put their livestock, furniture, and everything else they owned in a train car. This car was called a “Family Car,” and if there was livestock in that car, the person that was moving had to ride along in the car to take care of the livestock. So my father helped his cousins move by taking care of his livestock that was in the family car on the trip from Illinois to Carney, Oklahoma.
My father was around 22 years old when he came to Oklahoma, and there was a ranch in Ponca City called “The Hundred and One Ranch.” At that time the 101 Ranch had a Wild West show that toured all over the United States and Europe, putting on performances under the big top tent. They did trick riding and rodeo-type performances.
My father worked on the 101 Ranch for a while during the summers, then he would go on a wheat harvest into Kansas. In the winter he would go back to working on the big ranches in the Osage country and he would feed cattle and ride fences and stuff like that. He would work like that for a while, and then come back to Carney. So he was in and out of Carney quite a bit and that is where he met my mother.
Many people are familiar with the big Land Run of 1889 in Oklahoma. Well, it turns out there were actually six times that land was made available in Oklahoma. One of those occasions was in 1891 when certain land south of the Cimarron River became available.
My mother, Adaline Ellis, was born in Cisero, Kansas, before the Oklahoma Land Run of 1891. Austin Ellis, her father, made the run in 1891 and homesteaded 160 acres, three miles east of Carney.
My grandfather Ellis built a log cabin. He cut the shingles for the roof out of oak, then went back to Kansas to settle his business. He had a grocery store in Kansas. He sold his business and in August moved his family to Oklahoma. The first thing they did when he got back was to put those shingles on the roof. Of course, those oak shingles had cured and they were very hard to drive a nail into. He did mash his finger many times and Grandma had to carry the hammer back to him, after he kept throwing it away every time he would hit his fingers.
My grandfather was not a farmer; he was a businessman. So he didn’t farm his land very long. As soon as he got his crop planted, he went into Carney and opened a grocery store. At that time, they had to haul their groceries from Guthrie, Oklahoma, with a team and wagons. Every week he made a trip to Guthrie to get his groceries. And so, when they started talking about a railroad coming to Carney, he was real interested.
I have a list of names of the people that made a donation to a railroad company to help bring the railroad to Carney: Mr. Page, the man who ran the Cotton Gin: Ed Wilcox, the man who ran the Drug Store: and my grandfather gave $500 each.
My father and mother got married in 1910, when Mother was 19 and Dad was 24. With the type of work Dad was doing, he couldn’t take my mother to live on the ranches with him, so he went back to Illinois to work. They made the trip on the train and when they arrived back in Illinois, he went to work for some farmers. He helped them plow the ground in the spring. One farmer had a large farm with rows of corn two miles long.
They would plow that land and plant corn in the spring, and all of this was done with horses. Once the corn had been planted, they would cultivate the corn until it got nearly to the tossle stage. Then, in the fall, it had to be shucked. It had to be shucked by hand back then, and my dad was a good corn shucker.
During that time they had acquired a home, but they could never get enough money to buy machinery and rent a farm. It cost more money there to rent a farm than it did in Oklahoma.
My parents had five children, myself being the youngest. I have two brothers and two sisters. My oldest sister, Melba Wynona Allen, was born in Illinois. But when my mother was pregnant with George Ellis Allen, my oldest brother whom I call Bud, she came back to Carney, Oklahoma, to have the baby, then took him back to Illinois.
In 1917, my grandfather Ellis found an 80-acre farm in Oklahoma for my parents to rent, so they came back. They farmed out north and east of Tryon, Oklahoma – in the Sandyland Community – and raised a lot of cotton. After my parents moved back to Oklahoma, my sister Jessie Marie and my brother Robert Noel were born in Carney. Finally I, William Wayne Allen, being the youngest child, was born at Wellston Oklahoma.
Growing Cotton
Dad plowed the land, and once the cotton was planted, would cultivate it. When wheat harvest time came along, he’d help other farmers harvest their wheat and leave my mother at home, where she would cultivate and hoe their cotton herself. Then they would hire people to help pick the cotton by hand.
One would walk between the rows of cotton and stoop over picking the bowls of cotton off the stalks and put then into a sack that was dragged by a loop over the shoulder. Once the sack was full and brought to the wagon, somebody like my mother would be there helping to weigh the cotton. She would read the scales and write down how many pounds of cotton there were in each sack. Then the sack was dumped in the wagon and another sack would be started. At the end of the day, she would add up how much cotton each person had picked. If they wanted their money that night, she had to pay them so much per hundred pounds, or if they wanted to wait until they got through, she added it all up and paid them when the job was finished.
As the wagon started getting full, they would get in and tromp the cotton down so they could get more in the wagon. When the wagon was full, they would take it to the local gin.
In the fall, when he couldn’t make any more money in the wheat harvest, Dad would come back home and work in the cotton gin. He worked in the gins for 23 years. He was the ginner. The gin was powered be a steam engine and his job was to make sure the gins were working properly. The gin had a big suction tube that sucked the cotton out of the wagon and distributed it into these gins. The gins were box type machines with knives that shredded the cotton and cut the seed out of it. It was a real dangerous job because if a stick or foreign object was in there, someone would have to reach in and get it out, often tearing up a hand in the process. My father had scars on his hands where they’d been cut.
The seed would go off in one compartment and the lint would go into another area. The lint went into a baler and the cotton was baled and bands were put around them. Each bale weighed around 500 pounds. A netting was put around them, then they were shipped out on a horse and wagon until they got the railroad. It was real expensive to ship it that way; that’s why they were so anxious to get the railroad.
First Car
The first car they bought was in 1925. It was a 23 Model T Ford and they drove back to Illinois for a visit in 1925. It took four days to make the 600-mile trip. They would cover roughly around 150 miles per day and stay in camp yards because there weren’t even tourist courts back then. Every town had a park with a camp yard. They slept on Army cots or in the car. One time, my brother Bud made himself a bed on the running board of the car.
Later, they moved to a bigger farm in Carney that was owned by a banker. After working that farm for a while, my dad decided that he wanted a better place to farm and he was going to move to another location. The banker found out about it and he came to talk with him. He wanted to know why my dad was leaving. Dad told him that he just needed better land to farm. The banker said, “No you’re to good a farmer. We can’t lose you. My dad has a farm down at Wellston. You go down and look at that farm. You can have it. We don’t want to lose you.” My parents went down and looked at the farm and decided to move there. That was in 1929, because that was the same year Dad bought a new ’29 Model A Ford.
I was born in 1930, and most of the farm kids my age grew up using coal oil lamps and lanterns, but when my family moved to this farm in ’29, there was already electricity in the house and in the barns so I never knew what is was to live without electricity.
At that time, we were close enough to Oklahoma City that a milk truck came to town every morning from Oklahoma City to get milk, so my dad went to milking cows. Mainly, the crops that we grew such as corn, alfalfa hay, wheat and barley were fed to the livestock to help them produce milk.
My parents bought a farm about in ’32 or ’33, along in there, but they never did live on it. After they bought it, they decided they didn’t want to move on it and they rented it out to sharecroppers. I think the reason they didn’t want to live on that farm was because of the schools. It was too far from the schools and we would have been going to a little country school. They had that farm until about ’48 and they had renters on it all of that time. Then they sold it.
My grandparents later moved to California. They drove there in a Model T Ford and it took two weeks to make the trip. Grandma Ellis died in California. My grandfather couldn’t live there so he came back to Oklahoma. He opened a restaurant after he came back and worked in it until he lost his sight. Then he had to quit the restaurant and came to live with us.
I believe he was 81 years old when he died in 1937. He’d lived with us for two years. He was a real nice fellow. I liked him, but he was blind and we had to lead him everywhere. We had to lead him to the outhouse and to the old hand water pump where he would pump water for the livestock.
Water Well
Where water is shallow to the surface of the ground, there is a type of well tip made that has a point on it. It is called a Sand Point and you can screw a pipe into the top of this point. Then you take a sledgehammer and drive it into the ground. You drive it down, until you find water. There is a fine screen around the sides of this Sand Point and that lets the water into the pipe.
Our water was real close to the surface of the ground and a pitcher pump was set onto the top of the pipe. At sea level a pitcher pump will drew water 21 feet, so the higher you are above sea level, the less distance it will draw water.
A pitcher pump is a short pump with the piston in the head of the pump. It pumps just as much water as a large handle pump, depending on the size cylinder that you have on the pump. It was used quite often to pump water from cisterns and places where the water was shallow like there was down where we lived. Our water was within 10 to 12 feet of the ground. We had a big old box there for our hand pump to sit on and when we would take my grandfather out to pump water, he would sit on that box and pump the water for the animals.
The Depression
We had a dairy throughout the depression days, and because of where we lived, had the cows, and sold our milk to Oklahoma City. We had a milk check come in twice a month. Therefore, like my mother always said, “We never knew there was a depression except for the fact that we had so much trouble finding money to buy clothes.” They raised all of the food that we ate and my mother canned all of the time. We didn’t have any money, but we ate good.
We lived close to Highway 66, and during the depression I can remember seeing people walking down the highway pulling little red wagons or pushing wheelbarrows loaded down with clothes. These people would walk a half-mile from the highway to our house because they could see the house and barn. They would ask for food or something. Mother always fed them.
There were a lot of people. It wasn’t just once in a while, it was every day that someone would be there and there is no telling how many people walked by without ever stopping.
The men would come to our house at night and want to sleep in the barn. My dad would always let them, but he always instructed them, “There will be absolutely no smoking in the barn,” and they respected that. They were good people; they just didn’t have any way of getting around other than on foot. They all had a story that if they could get to Oklahoma City or some other town, they usually had a brother, cousin or some other family member there that had a job and if they could get there, they could feed them until they could get work.
There were individuals and families. I can remember young women coming to our house wanting to sleep on the porch. My mother had a washhouse just off the back porch and she always made a bed in the washhouse for the women to sleep, where they could lock the door and feel secure.
Seeing my parents take care of my family plus helping these people is one of the reasons I have always helped other people.
My birth name is William Wayne and in my early years they called me Bill. When I started school, there were three Bills in my first grade class, so my teacher went to calling me Wayne and that stuck.
While I was in school, some people came to the school and they measured some of the children for clothes. They would call them out of the room and take them to the office and measure them up and the boys all got Union Alls, (a pair of coveralls.) They didn’t call me in and I cried because I didn’t get any of those clothes. I went home and told my folks what happened and they explained that the clothes were being furnished by the Welfare for children whose parents didn’t have enough money to buy any clothes. Since my parents were able to but my clothes, we didn’t need the free clothing.
My dad bought a ’36 Ford for around $550 when it was 6 months old. It was a repo that someone had bought and couldn’t pay for. It was a two-door sedan. There were two models, a two door and a four-door. The four-door generally had a trunk on the back. The one that we had, the back was sloped down and had the spare tire on the back and it had a v-8 in it. It was one of the best cars on the road at that time.
It was considered a fast car. It had no radio but it had a hot air heater, and the only way the heat got into the body of the car was from the motor fan that cooled the radiator. There was a grill-type deal on the exhaust that pushed that air through and right into the cab of the car. Going down the road you had a real good heater, but you couldn’t idle because then you wouldn’t get ANY heat. The seats were cloth and the dash was all metal. It had a round place that you cold pop out and put a radio in, if you bought one.
I remember going to Illinois in that car after we got it. During the trip, it rained and the windshield wiper was a vacuum driven wiper but it wouldn’t work. So my dad got himself some heavy cord and tied it onto that wiper. He put one string through his door and the other string through the passenger side door. My mother would sit there and pull the string back and forth, to run the wipers while dad drove.
In 1938, my older brother Bud was in California, working in a garage for a car dealership and my father was wanting him to come back to Oklahoma. My dad promised my brother that if he’d come back and go to farming, dad would rent a farm and buy a new tractor to set Bud up farming. But my brother wasn’t much interested in farming, so two years later Bud ended up buying a truck and went into the trucking business.
I didn’t drive a tractor before ’38 because the tractor we had was an old Fordson that was made by the Ford Motor Company and it was terribly hard to drive. They were a real popular tractor back in those days, but they were a ‘man killer’ to drive because there were no rubber tires in the front end.
It didn’t have individual brakes to help you correct your steering and if you got it cranked too tight while making a turn, well, then you couldn’t straighten it up. Also, to drive it, you had to set down between them two fenders and you got all of the heat off that motor back on you and it that would get real uncomfortable.
They ran on gasoline instead of kerosene. It wasn’t until later when the new John Deere tractors came out that you could start them with gasoline, and then switch them over to kerosene. That was nice because kerosene was cheaper to run than gasoline was.
The first car I drove would have been either been that ’36 Ford or a Model A Ford that my brother drove back from California in ’38. That Model A sat in our barn for a while and my brother Bob and I, we would get it out and drive it once in a while.
My parents bought a farm in Perkins, Oklahoma in August of ’45. We had to give the people who were living on the farm, time to move out, so we didn’t get to move onto it until January of ’46. When we moved to the new farm, we didn’t have a dairy barn, so we didn’t get involved that much with milking cows. We did milk a few, and sold the cream that we separated from the milk. We grew more corn and went to raising hogs.
There is a log cabin standing on that farm that was built by a man named Drake who homesteaded the farm back in 1891. The Drake family lived in the log cabin for two years while they build the big house. When the new house was finished in 1893, they moved into it. We used that log cabin as a corn crib. That’s where we stored our corn. There was a shed on the north side of it, and back in the early days the gasoline that we used in our tractors was stored in barrels and we kept about three barrels of gas in that shed along with oil, tools, etc.
In 1946, when my brother Bob got out of high school, he went into the service. After he got out of the service, he got a job at Tinker Field Air Base in Oklahoma City and stayed there until he retired.
Shortly after my father bought the farm in Perkins, he was stricken with arthritis so bad that he could not work any more. Being the youngest child, fifteen years old and still at home and in school, I was responsible for milking the cows, feeding the hogs, and planting and harvesting the crops in order to make the payments on the farm.
When I started dating, there was very little to do in a little town. I have a real good friend named Walt Martin, and his father owned a theater that had a movie two days a week. So we always scraped together enough money to go to the picture show and buy a little popcorn. We also went to basketball games or other school activities during school season.
I had another good friend, Huston Neal, and his father ran the filling station. We ran around together a lot and double dated. We took turns driving. He had an old Model A Ford and I got to drive my dad’s 36 Ford. When we went far, we’d use my car and when we ran around in town, we would go in Huston’s Model A.
I was dating a girl named Geraldine Jeanette Lacy, and in 1949, we got married. My wife and I had a real nice church wedding. Our parents didn’t have much money, so we paid for it ourselves.
After we got married, we lived in the same house with my folks for five years. We lived upstairs and they lived downstairs. I continued to work on the farm and made the money to make the farm payments. My wife worked in the grocery store. She started stocking the shelves when she was 11 years old, and by the time we got married she was making $15 for a 6-day week.
We made the choice to wait before having any children. We didn't feel like we wanted to raise a family while living with my folks.
I was just about to buy a new hay mower and a rake what we got this letter from a friend that wanted to sell me a farm. It was a school lease. During the land rises in Oklahoma, each county had 1,280 acres set aside for schools. The land they did not use would be leased out. A school lease is land owned by the state, and by buying the improvements on the land, they would transfer the lease to you.
We put that hay baler on hold, and in the spring of ' 54 I bought the improvements from my friend that had moved away from it. I paid $8,500 for the improvements. The lease was $124 per year to the state, which was, at that time, about twice what taxes would have been. It was 160 acres. 102 acres were in cultivation; the rest of was then pasture.
The place was pretty run down and fences were terrible. There was a house on the land, but it wasn't much of a house and needed work. We moved into that house and lived there for 15 years. It was a good place to live and we had our babies there.
On January 29th, 1956, my wife went to the hospital to have our first child, Janice Marie. Everything was fine until we got to the hospital. They checked turnover and put us in a room by ourselves.
When I finally realized there was a problem, I got the nurses in there. They got my wife into the delivery room but the baby never made it. It was too late. She suffocated before she was born. Of course, we were quite inexperienced at this and I felt like it was just neglect on the hospital's part that caused us to lose our baby. If they would have been there, they would have discovered the problem before I did. That was the first real hurt that I ever knew.
My wife didn't cope with it very well. She didn't go back to work. She couldn't function; she would just cry a lot.
Our first wheat crop on the farm had been harvested, and we had a terrible drought too that year, so I went to work driving a truck for my brother. I was hauling produce from Oklahoma City to Denver and I talked to my wife but into going with me. She was so tired that I tried to get her into the sleeper to get some sleep. When she finally got into the sleeper and went to sleep, she slept for 15 to 18 hours straight, all the way to Denver. When she came home she was able to function again and she went back to work.
That rest is what she needed but we never have completely got over losing that baby. After losing our baby, we tried to have another child, but we had several miscarriages. My sister was a nurse and she ended up talking to us into see a specialist in Oklahoma City.
We went down there and he checked my wife all over and discovered that she had never been cleaned up properly after the first baby died. I fell like that was another problem with the original hospital that we went to. Anyway, they took care of her and it wasn't too long after that we had us a baby.
Janet Gale was born in '59. When she was about two years old, I was cleaning the wheat out of a grain drill. A wheat drill is it like a corn planter, but instead of having six rows like a corn planter it has holes every 8 inches. When you change the varieties of wheat or grain, you have to clean all the old a variety out.
I had a 5 gallon bucket setting on the ground, and Janet and her mama come out there to where I was at. Janet was a little thing and she played in that wheat in that bucket. That evening and we took her to the hospital with a terrible asthma attack. She could barely breathe. We'd never knew that she had asthma before that.
There were times in the past when I thought we were rich because I could afford to buy a new car or because I got a good price for some grain, but now I realize the true meaning of being rich.
We feel that the Lord has blessed us with three beautiful daughters and they have blessed us with three wonderful men in their lives. Together, they have produced four beautiful grandchildren. And to be blessed with the type of loving family that we have, we know that we have riches that cannot be bought or sold for any amount of money.
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