The transcript has been edited for read ability. Some of what I said was redundant or of no consequence and has not been included. See Part 2 for the second half.

David T Ratcliffe:
...background information that we can glean in an ongoing process of—

John W. Ratcliffe:
—well family history, and then coming up to my own experience.

DTR:
So maybe one place to start, and can start in many places, would be your remembering after the fact of how your parents met, where they came from, and some of that.

JWR:
My father was born in Olney, Illinois, which is in the southeastern part of the state. And he was born in 1892, just a hundred years ago this year; in fact, a hundred years ago, last month. He grew up and had a wonderful, small town boyhood with none of the things that we associate with growing up these days because they had none of the—they didn’t have movie theaters, they didn’t have radio, they didn’t have anything except the entertainment that they had for themselves, which involved having chamber music in the neighborhood, and boy-like things, probably more like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn than anything that we ever experienced ourselves.

He went to Olney High School and actually played on their baseball team. We were very proud of him as little boys. We were very proud of the fact that he played left field for Olney High School. When he grew up, he went on to the University of Illinois and became a, a mechanical engineer. And then he got a job with Fairbanks Morse in Beloit, Wisconsin.

DTR:
That was upon four years of higher education right into work, after that he got hired as soon as he graduated?

JWR:
He got a job as an engineer with Fairbanks Morse, undoubtedly at a very junior level. But he was that’s where he went. So that’s how he got to be in Beloit.

And our dear old family friend and a girlhood companion of my Mother’s was Viola, we called her Aunti Vie, and she was a very dear friend of my Mother’s, and they went to the Christian Endeavor at the church.

DTR:
What’s that?

JWR:
Christian Endeavor was a kind of a young people study group that usually met on a Sunday night. Much of life in those days was built around the church: in the morning, Sunday school, Christian Endeavor, and probably a Wednesday night social or something like that. So this is Old America.

DTR:
And so Christian Endeavor sounds like a Bible study or religious studies kind of format?

JWR:
That’s right. It was not probably very heavily structured. We had Christian Endeavor when I was a boy too, though. So it’s not something that was way back then altogether. And my father went there because he had a church upbringing, Presbyterian church. So he went to the Christian Endeavor.

Viola told us a couple of years ago—and I have that on videotape—of telling about how Mother and Dad met. and it might be fun to put that little interview—we had a wonderful interview with her. She was about 94 years old and subsequently died last year. But this is a wonderful account of how Mother and Dad [met]—things I didn’t even know until I heard by Vie tell us. That Mother and Dad met at the Christian Endeavor, and I guess they started dating and, Dad took Mother and Vie out to get some Chinese food after Christian Endeavor, according to Vie. So they got to be acquainted and they became engaged. But in World War I, in 1917, Dad went in the Navy.

DTR:
Let’s get a message of years here. He graduated from—

JWR:
In 1915.

DTR:
It was in Onley that the university was?

JWR:
No, that’s in Champaign, Illinois. That’s the University of Illinois.

DTR:
Okay. In 1915. When he was 22 years old.

JWR:
Approximately. Probably so. Then he went to Beloit and they got engaged, and then he went to war and was overseas in the Navy.

DTR:
In the Navy, starting in 1917.

JWR:
Yeah. He spent probably the best part of two years in the Navy overseas. He was an engineer on a naval repair ship called the Prometheus. And that ship was in the European theater. And he told us about how he actually played his flute, he was a wonderful flutist. And his brother Allen, was a violinist. There’s an awful lot of information here. But Dad played the flute in the Paris Opera House, according to him, and had some memories of that time, which included being in Paris at the time that the Krupp canon, Big Bertha, shelled Paris. I don’t think it did much damage. It was—I think the projectiles were fired 76 miles or something like that. That was unheard of at that time.

When he came back to the States after being mustered out of service, Mother and Dad got married on the 15th of March, 1919.

DTR:
Now, he was in the Navy, but how was he then in Paris during the war?

JWR:
On leave. They would get a shore leave.

DTR:
And so somebody, somehow arranged for him to have an opportunity to play as part of a—

JWR:
Military, probably some USO or something like that that they had then, or the Red Cross or something.

DTR:
And the Paris Opera House was available.

JWR:
Oh, yeah. So that was an experience that he had. And then they got married in Beloit. And then I came along at the end of 1919, just barely got under the wire at quarter after 11 on New Year’s Eve. So I started on the second decade of this century.

Mother came from the Thompson family, and she had a sister Betty and two brothers. Waldo Junior—my Grandfather Thompson’s name was Louis Waldo Thompson—and so Louis Waldo Thompson Jr., we called him Wally, was my uncle. And also an Uncle Winslow Thompson.

So they set up housekeeping in Beloit. I think that Dad stayed in the Beloit factory where they made diesel engines and heavy diesels and pumping devices for oil fields and so forth. He stayed in that office until about 1924 when he was transferred to the St. Louis office of the company. We moved down to Olney his hometown, because it would be a place where we could be, where a young family could be with my father’s parents and he could commute to St. Louis.

DTR:
How far is that?

JWR:
Well, it’s pretty much across the state. He would go off on Sunday afternoon and come back Friday night.

DTR:
So he was gone through the whole week?

JWR:
Yeah.

DTR:
Starting in 1924?

JWR:
1924, and then we were there until about 1926 when he was transferred to the Tulsa, Oklahoma office of the—no that’s wrong. We went to Springfield, Missouri, where he worked in municipal power plant power.

DTR:
Starting in 1926.

JWR:
Yeah. So we moved to Springfield and we were there about a year, I guess, when he was transferred to Tulsa for the oilfield division. And we went—the family—the three kids, my brother and sister—Allen and Nancy—and Mother went back to Olney for the interim until he could get established in Tulsa. And I should say that Allen was born on the 23rd of January, 1921, just a year and a little bit after I was born. And Nancy came along two years later on the 9th of January, 1923. I think that’s the same year that Lepai was born.

We had a very nice small town life. I think that my earliest memories—it’s interesting how children don’t remember anything first—certainly the first two years of life that they have on a conscious level. And not very much for the first four years. I think you can almost count on the fingers of two hands the events that you can recall that must have occurred before you were four years old, or when you were four years old. I can remember some of those things we might discuss later, but I’ll go to my Mother’s side of the family.

I should say first that my Grandfather Ratcliffe was named John Ratcliffe. And he was a banker. He was the president of the Olney Bank. My Grandmother was of course, housekeeper. She was a wonderful dear lady who, when I knew her, was blind from glaucoma. Her name was May.

Allen Ratcliffe was my father’s brother, and that’s where my brother Allen got his name. He was a dentist and he practiced down in Grayville, Illinois, which is a short distance south of Olney. They had a daughter, his wife was Essie, and their daughter was Suzanne, my cousin, who’s now living in, in Sun City, Arizona.

My father’s family were there. On my paternal Grandmother’s side, May, there were two, there were three siblings. One was Uncle Jim, whom I didn’t know very well, but he was a veteran of the Spanish American War. And then there was my Uncle Will and Aunt Marg, and they lived in another house in Olney. They were very dear to us because we spent that year when Dad was in Tulsa, we spent that year lived in their house. I can remember the old Franklin stove in the living room. It’s kind of a rambling house all in one story except for an upstairs bedroom where Allen and I stayed. I remember the shelves of that wall in that bedroom had all kinds of preserved vegetables, tomatoes, and all sort of things, pickles [in] glass jars. I can remember that. And Uncle Will was a great farmer. He had a long, deep lot, and he grew everything out there. He was a wonderful vegetable and flower man.

DTR:
Now, this is when you first arrived in Tulsa?

JWR:
No, this is when we were in Olney before we went to Tulsa.

DTR:
From the period of 1924 to ’26?

JWR:
The first time we were there we lived in our own house in Olney the first two years. This would be the 1927 and 28 period when we went to Tulsa. We went to Tulsa in May of 1928. And that’s another story. My you want me to

DTR:
No, I’m just, you go wherever you want to go,

JWR:
Free associating, because one thing leads to another. I don’t want to get ahead of myself too much, but we can always recap. I remember some very nice things about—well, going back to early childhood memories when we were still in Beloit. The reason I know that this was before I was—when I was three and up to four, was that we moved away from Beloit to Olney in the winter of say, January or February, 1924. So that’s when I would be four years old.

I remember a number of silly little things in a way, but these are what you do remember. One had to do with a sled. We had a nice coasting hill outside of our house. And one time there was some kind of a thing that was put on the rear runner of the sled so it wouldn’t go. I don’t know, to this day what it was. It looked like some metal that somebody might have played a prank or something and put something on so the sled wouldn’t go. End of that story.

Another time I remember I would get up early in the morning and go out and we had a, a beautiful lane behind our house that ran down along trees on one side and big corn fields on the other side. And I remember the kind of a rosy dawn in my mind with, with the morning doves and sunshine and kind of a

DTR:
What time of year was it?

JWR:
Oh, this would be in the spring, probably, or summer, could have been probably summer. And that’s another snatch of memory. And then

DTR:
Do you remember where you were going or what you were about?

JWR:
Oh, just walking in the lane. Nowhere, not going anywhere. I don’t remember. There wasn’t any place to go. I was probably three years old.

DTR:
And you’d just gotten up early and were out and about.

JWR:
Yeah. Just the memory of a kind of a glorious sunny dawn or something like that. And then there was a time when I went to kindergarten. I started kindergarten in Beloit. And I remember the fragrance of apples. We had chocolate milk at recess. That was a pleasant memory. I remember also at one time, I went to my—we lived across the street from my Grandparent Thompson’s house, which was quite a large, very wonderful place that we had a lot of pleasant childhood associations with. Christmases and so forth. And I got out of—when I went home from kindergarten, I went to their house for lunch, and I had a cold. I remember how a cold modified the taste of mashed potatoes.

DTR:
In what way?

JWR:
Well, you know, you can’t taste them. But I discovered that at that point, that a cold knocks out your taste. So that was another big deal.

DTR:
All you could do is feel them.

JWR:
Yeah. Well, you know how it is, a cold. You can’t taste, you lose your taste when you have a cold.

So when we moved away from Beloit, I remember we had a maid, I guess, and I remember her getting us all dressed and ready to go on the trip. And Dad and Allen and I went down to Olney together. We drove down. And I remember stopping in a restaurant somewhere in Elgin, Illinois or someplace on the way. And I had iced tea for the first time, and I spilled it. And that’s the kind of things that people remember in their earliest life. Great career shaping and so forth.

Then of course memories flood in on you when you start thinking about everything else: life in Olney and later in Springfield and back in Olney, and then going to Tulsa, I’m writing right now a very detailed account of all of these memories that I will have as a way of an autobiography. And all these things are covered in that, so I won’t need to go into those details here. But it’s amazing how your memories grow in tremendous, almost geometric, proportions as you get on past that four or five year age. But it’s it’s amazing how important those early years are. Even the years before memory.

DTR:
I didn’t know that—you’re saying that in 1924 to ’26 timeframe, Frank was transferred to the St. Louis office starting in 1924, and that he would commute One day a week, Sunday night, and come back Friday. What was your, your memory like of missing him, of looking forward to Friday when he was coming home? What, what was that like?

JWR:
We were very close, and we certainly—I remember I have a quite a vivid association of railroads because we lived in a house in Olney called the Nipe [sp?] House, somebody else. That’s the way they did in the old days. If somebody built a house 20, 40, 50 years ago, the first people that built that house, it’s the nipe house. I don’t even know how to spell nipe, but we lived in a—it was a big house and a very pleasant place. We had a beautiful garden. I remember gooseberries and currents growing out in the backyard.

But just beyond the backyard was the Illinois Central Railroad that came through Olney on its way to St. Louis. And there was a kind of an iron and wooden bridge that went over the highway—the road that went over the tracks. I remember how we were so enamored of railroad trains. We’d just loved to see and we’d wave with the engineers and so forth. They would keep coming through very slowly, slowing down and I don’t remember that it was particularly noisy or anything that bothers. We loved the trains and they were so big, you know, for little kids looking up at these big steam steamer locomotives. And then we would take Dad down to the station on Sunday afternoon and meet him at the station when he came back. And I don’t think that—I’m sure we missed him a great deal. But we were starting school. I went to the Cherry Street School, start about the first grade. I mean, probably 1926, I started that school. And

JWR:
It would’ve been earlier than that, though.

JWR:
I just know it was Cherry Street. It might have been more Kindergarten, because I probably left Beloit at the middle of the year and went on into it. But it was an old time school. It was multiple rooms, I guess, but it was just a small town school. But I remember we used corn kernels for learning how to count, which was a nice way to do it.

Read, write, and arithmetic it was all our—my whole schooling experience was old time three R type of education, which I think is awfully basic anyway. But it was good. And there was a little candy store across the street and later on, I guess when we were in the time before we went to Tulsa in say ’27, we would have a nickel and go over and they had candy counters in those days in little mom and pop type—we’d call ’em mom and pop type stores now. Just little, very small general store with basic household canned foods and so forth. But they also had a candy counter with all kinds of trays of little thises and thats that were really enchanting for children. And for a nickel, you get a bag full of candy, you save some of these and some of those and so forth. And that was thrilling to have a nickel and be able to go over and buy a bag of candy.

DTR:
You get more than one thing for 1 cent.

JWR:
Oh, yeah. You’d have quite an assortment of things for a nickel. So that was fun. And I remember the—this is really free association, I’m not sticking to the line of family history so much—but we would, on Mayday, they had the old fashioned Maypole. And the kids all got dressed up and, and we had a Mayday Parade, and we had little baskets of flowers and that sort of thing. I don’t think they do that any place anymore.

DTR:
I remember the Maypole myself as a child, but not, I don’t see it these days.

JWR:
But the little baskets of flowers and so forth. And when it got warm—of course they had real winters there—when it got warm in the Spring, the greatest treat for us was to be able to go to school barefoot. So there were lots of things. This was a small town of 6,000 people, maybe less, and maybe fewer than that. Then we were quite close to the—out in the country and everything. And it was a very pleasant place for a child to start out life, I think.

DTR:
How far away was the school from where your house was?

JWR:
Two or three blocks or something like that.

DTR:
Always walking distance. Everything was walked.

JWR:
Yeah. You didn’t have any cars.

My Mother, coming back to her side of the family went to a finishing school, Milwaukee Downer. It’s apparently still in, in existence. Milwaukee Hyping [sp?] Downer. It was a finishing school for girls. Then she went to Beloit College and graduated there. While my father was away there was a terrible flu epidemic in 1918-19 that killed thousands and thousands of people. It’s a famous—it was a plague of some sort. It swept the world. It was a terrible flu. And my Mother worked as a kind of a nurse, kind of a candy stripe girl. They didn’t call them that, but all volunteered in the Army hospital at Camp Grant. Down at Rockford which was a town about 18 miles south of Beloit. She volunteered there, and she didn’t get sick. But I always wondered if her late life and finally fatal illness might have been due to a slow virus that might have been contracted in that time.

DTR:
You think there’s a possibility of that?

JWR:
There is, yeah. We didn’t know, they didn’t know anything about slow viruses or viruses for that matter, in those days. But there have been a lot of speculation about what a lot of diseases are caused by what they call a slow virus that doesn’t act up. Actually there’s probably a great deal of truth in that. We know, for example, and this is getting clinical, but since there aren’t any boundaries to this discussion, shingles or herpes is a condition that comes from chickenpox, but many years later. In other words, that virus is living in those nerve fibers for maybe 50 years. And then it activates. So probably lowered resistance, or you can only speculate about it, lower immunity. something lets it out of the box. But this is something that is well recognized today.

Anyway. My Mother did die at the age of 69, of a lingering illness that consumed at least seven years. She died in this house, and she lived here from the time they came here in ’56 and built this house until she died in ’65. But she wasn’t, well, she really turned ill shortly after they came here. It was an almost imperceptible onset.

Going back to her schooling, she had a degree in home economics, in management of food processing and so forth. And she actually, as we will come to later, and I described this in my quote, autobiography, unquote, that she actually took over the management of a public school cafeteria in Tulsa. This was during the depression that started in 1928.

So I think that my family memories going back to the earlier childhood, once we got to Tulsa, we would have our vacations by driving up to Olney to visit the Ratcliffe, Allen’s side of the family, or go to Beloit for the Summer or Christmas, and go up and visit all the relatives there. And my Grandparents Thompson had a wonderful rustic, two-story lakeside house up in place called Lake Waubesa, near Madison, Wisconsin. We had some very pleasant memories of that. Grandfather was a great cook. He loved to cook meat. He was a great sportsman too. He was a fisherman. He wrote articles for Field and Stream Magazine and so forth. But he loved to specialize. He really specialized in cooking the fish or the meat and so forth. My first memory of barbecues was when he would put charcoal out and cook some steaks outside right on the lake. It’s the evening and so forth. It was very pleasant.

DTR:
They lived on the lake.

JWR:
Yeah. They had a boathouse with a couple of wonderful rowboats. They were just old lap strike [sp?] boats. Allen and I would go out and and row around the lake and so forth. It was great. We did some fishing and it was a very pleasant spot to be in. We also had Christmases up there with really a tremendous—I described some of those in this writing I’m doing. Other times we went to Olney for Christmas or summers and so forth. Allen and I were always very proud that Dad could drive 600 miles in one day. He did. Yeah. We’d drive from Tulsa to Olney in one day.

DTR:
How long would that take?

JWR:
Well, it took quite a while. It would be an early morning start and the late night arrival. But he was a real driver. He loved to drive. But I can remember Highway 66, you probably have heard of Highway ... the song

DTR:
Route 66.

JWR:
Yeah, that’s right. Well, at that time, it wasn’t even a complete highway. One time we had to take a ferry boat across a river to get on

DTR:
Because there’s no bridge.

JWR:
Yeah. Of course. That’s all superseded by freeways now.

DTR:
Would you average for speed in something like that? Any idea? 45, 50 miles an hour?

JWR:
Well, probably on good roads, we’d probably go 60, 55 or 60 or something like that. Cars would go fast in those days. But it was such a thrill to go on these trips to Beloit, or Olney. We were so excited, we couldn’t sleep the night before. And sometimes we did stay in motels on the way, but they weren’t like the motels today. They were little rustic wooden cabins. They didn’t even have, you know, they wouldn’t even have finished walls inside. They would be just kind of exposed frames and so on.

DTR:
So there’d be the whole family of you driving through this whole period of a day’s journey. What would you do to occupy yourselves in the car? What were the kinds of things you remember, to pass all those hours?

JWR:
Just watching everything go by. We would count the different state licenses and see how many states we could collect and things like that. But that was a lot of fun. And we really enjoyed travel like that. But we never went on trips. Nobody went to Europe or hardly anyone went to Los Angeles. That was kind of an impossible dream for some people to go out to California or something like that. You wouldn’t usually—people who did that would go on the train usually. They had very good trains. Later on, of course, in the thirties, they got the streamlined stainless steel trains. You know, the things that you think of as traveling more like today’s—the first time that Allen and I saw one of those trains was when we were on a trip. In 1936, Dad was up in the Colorado oil field area and we went to a couple of towns up there called Wray and Yuma, where they were drilling some test wells. On the way up there, we went to Colorado Springs and saw the Garden of the Gods and Pike’s Peak and everything. It was a great memory for us and then went to Denver and then finally out to Eastern Colorado where these wells were being drilled.

The Burlington Zephyr was the one of the first streamlined hotshot trains that went blasting through. One time, Al and I put a penny on the track and watched this train come through, came through right close to where we were. And so we got to see it. We were up there for a couple weeks, and they had a big wooden tank, like a big gigantic barrel with staves filled with water for their use on this drilling site. And we’d go swimming in that. It was just water for the drilling process. They have to wash out the cuttings from a drill bit; slush pit. But seeing the trains, what made me think of that was thrilling to see those fast trains. And that’s when they started to supersede the steam trains. That was 1936. And it was just four years before we got into World War II. We were teenagers then.

DTR:
You traveled up into those areas in Colorado via train? Just the two of you?

JWR:
No, we didn’t go by train. We were driving then.

DTR:
And that was during your summer times?

JWR:
Yeah. And then we went on through to Kansas City where we saw some friends who were very dear friends of our family in our Springfield years. Bill and Betty Hughes and Amy, their mother. I fell in love with Betty. I was 16, she was 13. She was very pretty, cute kid. And then we went on to Beloit for our vacation after that. That was the biggest travel we did. Otherwise, our travel was pretty much limited to home visits or going to camp.

We went camping with a scout troop. The scout troop was the troop in Tulsa. Our place was, the meeting of the scout troop was down in the basketball court. They had a nice big church and basketball court down in the basement. And we, our troop, met down there, and we went up to the scout camp at camp Kemp in the summer for two weeks, for $25. And that was fun. We had a good time.

We had an excellent boyhood in Tulsa. In fact, I think I was lucky all the way with the opportunities to go to good schools and have good friends and lots of sports. We played everything in season. We played sandlot football, baseball, when the pond froze over, we played hockey on ice. We also had an ice skating rink, indoor skating rink, the Coliseum. We skated a lot and went to baseball. We had a baseball school in junior high school in the summer. Allen and I remembered the coaches there so well, they were great guys: Red Downs and Carl Sears. They were good baseball men and we really enjoyed that baseball school.

Of course, Allen went ahead to become a very good baseball player. He was allstate, Oklahoma high school catcher. He was also on the Cincinnati University baseball team. But then with the war—when that war came along—he went into the Navy as a flight cadet and went to Chapel Hill pre-flight school where he played on a baseball team with Hall of Famers like Ted Williams and Bobby Doerr and so forth. There was old Allen playing baseball with these big shots. Well, he went ahead to be the Battalion Commander of 2000 Cadets there. He was a very successful guy. And then he went on to fly and flew combat—he didn’t fly in combat—but he learned how to fly the Corsair. And also finally ended up, down in Florida flying submarine patrols in the P B Ys.

DTR:
What is P B Y?

JWR:
It’s a flying boat that they used to have. It was a naval aircraft that was used for patrols and so forth.

DTR:
So you’re staying in the sphere of the continental United States as far as protection or defense?

JWR:
Well, they’re just coastal, they had German submarines out off the coast, they were sinking ships off the east coast all the time.

DTR:
But down by Florida. Were they in that area as well?

JWR:
They came through from the Gulf of Mexico. From the oil businesses in Texas and everything else. There was a very much threatened shipping lane and they had wolf packs of submarines out there, so that they had to have a constant vigilance looking for submarines.

DTR:
So you were two years apart from each other, and clearly you spent a great deal of time—

JWR:
Allen was just one year. Yeah.

DTR:
Excuse me. 1-23-21. Okay. One year and a month, practically. So you were pretty close buddies, from the things that you were doing together.

JWR:
Very, yeah. When we were quite young, we were inseparable. We played ball together, we did everything together. We had a wonderful neighborhood in Tulsa. A bunch of kids about our age, and we played every sport. It was great. I remember in 1932, the Olympics were held in Los Angeles, and of course we were all excited about that. And there was no TV of course. But we followed that avidly. And so one hot summer night, we decided we were going to have a marathon, just the kids. I was 12, and the kids were anywhere from 10 to 14 or something like that. A good bunch of, good neighborhood of kids. And we decided to have a marathon. So we ate supper and then went out and started running around the block. We just ran around the block. We started about seven o’clock. And I kept going. Everybody else dropped out pretty soon.

DTR:
From, from aches in their stomach? I mean, if you had eaten recently...

JWR:
Yeah. They weren’t going to—I don’t know whether they had—maybe they did. But I kept running and finally at 9:30, two and a half hours later, Mother came out and took me off: “That’s enough.” But that’s when I really fell in love with running. Because I got that runner’s high, I guess, but that second wind, or whatever you want to call it. I’m sure I could’ve run all night. There wasn’t any question about it. I was just going like the wind.

DTR:
Had you run much before that, in that kind of endurance?

JWR:
Well I hadn’t done that kind of a thing before. Although we were running all the time. I was always running around doing this and that, but I hadn’t actually gone out and done running as running. But it was a discovery, and it certainly has stuck with me because I’ve loved running ever since. And I ran in high school, in college.

DTR:
Do you remember any kind of soreness after that? Or just picking up and running for two and a half hours? That must have

JWR:
Nothing.

DTR:
Really.

JWR:
Yeah. there was sheer delight.

DTR:
That sounds like quite a revelation.

JWR:
Yeah. It was fun. But that was a kind of the boyhood we had. And we could go hiking out in the country and looking at birds and just

DTR:
Just taking it in.

JWR:
Yeah. When we went to Tulsa in 1928, we went down by train and Dad met us, but I’m not sure whether my Mother really thought that there would be Red Indians on the platform or not. But I think she kind of thought there might be. In those days, you know, Oklahoma was Indian territory, before it became a state, and there were still lots of Indians. But she, maybe she was joking, but she kind of acted as if she thought that there would maybe be trouble.

DTR:
What, do you remember specifically what, she intimated or what she said?

JWR:
That was just the impression. I think she was probably joking, but we weren’t frightened at all. We were looking forward to seeing the Indians. And then Dad met us, and we stayed in a hotel the first night or two. He had bought a house, a brand new house out in a new subdivision outside of Tulsa. Tulsa’s, a town of 130,000 people, something like that. And we stayed in a hotel, and Nancy got sick with a flu or cold or something. She was really sick. In those days, this was 1928, there were no antibiotics or anything like that for a strep throat or anything like that. And it was serious. And so we felt that I was—I know we were all concerned, but she got over it. And so we moved into our new house, and that was a great place.

Joanne and I went to see that house when I was back for my 50th high school reunion. It’s still there looking good. Tulsa’s a great place. They keep their—everybody takes good care of the houses and yards, and everything was neat as a pin.

DTR:
Did you go inside of it recently?

JWR:
No, I didn’t. We didn’t go into it, but I just walked down the street and looked at it and the old neighborhood and brought back a lot of memories of all the people that we had there and so forth. House looked fine. And so we moved in there and it was called Avondale. That was the name of the addition. And the houses were all different. But they’re all the same three bedroom, one bath. Most people didn’t have two baths or three baths in those days. So it was three bedroom, one bath. We had a breakfast room, kitchen, dining room, living room. And that was it.

DTR:
So you and Allen would share the same room?

JWR:
Yeah, we had a bunk and Nancy was in the next room. Mother and Dad had the front bedroom. Had a lot of very pleasant memories of that place. Some not so pleasant. I go into that in my account of my father’s hundredth anniversary.

JWR:
Now, this was starting in 1928. You said May.

JWR:
Yeah. End of May ’38 [must be ’28]. After we got out of school in Olney, we went down to Tulsa.

DTR:
And you were there until you went off to college

JWR:
In ’38, yeah. So that was 10 years there and I think very good 10 years. We had, schools were excellent. We really had—I remember many of the teachers, even now with their influence on all of us. I remember many of the classmates. And of course I saw some of them when we went back for the 50th reunion of the high school. And it was a real break to be able to grow up in a place—we had wonderful attractions. In the summer there would be what they called the Tulsa Starlight Symphony. And they had an open air, sort of a shell, at the football stadium where they played classical music, very good music. It was probably, you’d probably call it kind of a pop concert in the Boston Pops sense. Very substantial music. And sitting out there under the stars, the night skies in Oklahoma in the middle West are really beautiful. Sitting out under the stars in that stadium and listening to these concerts really put me over the line as far as classical music appreciation is concerned.

DTR:
How often would they be? Every once a week or?

JWR:
I don’t recall how frequent they were. They had a season in the summer, and it might be maybe four or five concerts or something like that. But we went to those. When Joanne and I were back in Tulsa, we visited all around town, of course, and we went to Skelly Stadium and of course, it’s very much changed now. This is so many years ago. But the basic stadium is still there. It was a modern, it was a concrete stadium, but now it’s been extended. And because the city’s larger and the university’s larger. And of course, they played their football there and so forth. So, but that was a good experience.

DTR:
When you had those, would they start after it was completely dark or as the sun was going down?

JWR:
Well, no, these would be in twilight. It would be, say eight o’clock or something. It wasn’t quite dark yet, or something like that. And during the football season, we were crazy about the Tulsa University Golden Hurricane football team. I see. And we could go to their games for nothing with 10 cents or something like that because we belonged to something called the Knothole Gang. We had an oval football pin that we could wear that would get us into the football games. And those football players were great heroes of ours. In the baseball season, we would go out and see the Tulsa Oilers play in the Texas League. But when we first started well, this baseball story started back in Springfield when Dad used to take Allen me and Bill Hughes over to Phelps School, which was right behind our house.

DTR:
Bill Hughes was a colleague of and friend of yours at that time.

JWR:
Yeah, he, they were the Kansas City people that we visited in ’26. And Dad started us playing ball and throwing, tossing to us and batting and all that sort of thing. So we started, I was six years old when we were doing that so had an early start. And we loved baseball all the way. When we got to Tulsa, Tulsa was in something like the Western Association, a very minor league at that time. We would go down to Old McNulty Park downtown, which was a wooden stadium or stands, painted green. We just loved that place because Dad would take us down, we’d go to the ballgame and get great pop and peanuts and popcorn. So that was a great event to go to the ballgame.

Then when Tulsa got a little bit more sophisticated, they went into the Texas League, which was a AA league, and we saw many great ball players either on their way up to the majors or on their way down from the majors. The whole family loved those baseball games. When the team was out of town, we would all huddle around the radio and listen to a simulated broadcast of the game. It would come into the local radio station by telegraph and then the guy that was giving would put in all the color. He would say, Strike one, or something like that. But he would make it sound as if he was at the game.

DTR:
Would it come in real time on the telex, on the telegraph?

JWR:
Yeah. He would give it as it came in. And he would

DTR:
So it was blow by blow,

JWR:
Blow by blow. But he would kind of flush it out so that it sounded if he were actually there. And they even had some sound effects, like cheering and all that sort of thing. So you could really—I think that in the days of radio, you had much more play of the imagination. You would have programs which would have characters in them, and you would imagine what they looked like and they had sound effects like the creaky door in a spooky sort of mystery program they would have [sound effect] as the door opened and so forth. So it was fun to have that. I think that in a way that did more for the imagination than looking at a picture on the tube today. For a lot of people. So it wasn’t adult— [tape ends]