Recently I took my 88 yr old Mom for a drive in the country to the gas plant I was raised at, called Fain. It's approximately 30 miles north of Amarillo on the Dumas highway and 2 miles east of the road. We drove into the plant without having to check with anyone and drove around where the houses use to be. The garages are still there, but without doors, and they store junk in them. Storing junk everywhere! Where my house use to sit and where our park use to be. And to top it off - the basketball/volleyball court where I spent thousands of hours shotting and playing around the world, now has an office building sitting on it. Just broke my heart. Mom said that it seemed like a dream that we ever lived there.
I remember moving there when I was five, and I was standing outside on the sidewalk by my house when 3 or 4 kids came up and started talking. They turned out to be my future best friends and family, as all 16 families became one big family. No one locked doors and everyone was in and out of each other's houses. The ladies got together each morning to "drink coffee" but we kids knew it was to watch the soap operas and gossip, but we kids loved that, it gave us an hour or so to play together inside. The rest of the day was spent outside, either playing in my front yard which was the largest, or the park, or at the basketball court. Needless to say with our own court and being 30 miles from town, we formed quite a team, boys and girls, and almost everyone of us made the school team. I actually won the school's best athelete award primarily for basketball, but I was also the setter on the volleyball team and did a little softball although we didn't have a softball school team.
At night the parents would get together at the courts to place hours of volleyball, while us kids played around the fringes, and as we got older, they allowed us to sub in once in a while. I know I made the school team because of those nights.
But us kids played so many things as a group. We had work-up baseball games in the park, and I remember swinging real hard once and the catcher was too close and I bashed his mouth. Boy, it was bad. Problem was, he was my off and on again boyfriend. Maybe that accident was the reason we never got serious.
We also had awesome football games, and I use to love to kick that ball as far as I could. Yes, I'm a girl, but none of us "Fain campers" realized we girls were different from the boys, and we just all played as equals.
We had a cellar for storms and it was huge enough to hold 16 families; and we turned the top into our skating rink, stage, and later dance area. It was next to my house, which was very convenient.
There was only one house phone at Fain, and it was in my house. It was a dousy. If you wanted to make a call, you turned a handle for two longs and two shorts, and a dispatcher in Amarillo would answer. You would give him the number, and he dialed it from in town. Talk about an open sytem. Every phone on that network could be picked up and listened in on your calls. The Turkey Creek Plant between Amarillo and Borger had a line, the plant where I lived had a line, and no telling how many other places could listen in. We hated to get the dispatcher named Jim, as he was grouchy as could be. You could not make a call 15 minutes before or after the hour as that was when the plants called in their pressures. So if you wanted to make a call, you had 30 minutes maximum. Jim was not opposed to butting in and saying, "Hey, you kids, get off the line. I need it." One time my godmother who was in her late 50's was using our phone - her husband was daddy's assistant superintendent at that time, and Jim got on the line and said, "Hey, if you kids at Fain would stay off the line, we could get some business done." By that time, we only had two families at Fain, us and the Hunts. Mildred, my godmother, never let anyone step on her, and she said, "I'll have you know that this is a 50 year old woman talking, and about all those kids at Fain, there is only one kid lives here, and she isn't using the phone." He shut up, hung up, and we all laughed.
But from the age of 5 to 7th grade, we had 16 families. I can still name each and every member of every family and tell you where they lived. I was especially close to the Lewis family and after they moved to town, their home was my home when I needed to stay in town due to school or extracurricular activities.
Due to a change in tax laws, the company was going to have to start charging the employees for their homes, and of course, people gripped that they were required to live there and would have to pay for the houses. So they decided to let people move to town if they wanted to, and slowly, but surely, people started moving to town. Some of the moms had begun to work outside the home and that daily trip to town for them was getting hazardous, and before long we had only 2 families left, the two that the company required, the Superintendent (my dad) and his assistant. Eventually when I was in my 30's the company changed that rule too and Mom and Dad moved to town also.
Before all the houses were emptied, and it was a slow process, we would have 2 houses, and then an empty, and then more houses, and then an empty. We used the first two empties (the Words and the McGills houses) to hold sleep over, at least us girls did. Those turned into perfect opportunities for the boys to sneek up to the empty houses after dark, which was kind of spooky, scratch the walls outside, throw ketchup on the windows, and send us girls into screaming ninnies. Oh, but it was fun.
We rode a school bus to school and home driven by Mrs. Waters. Her daughter Sandy also rode the bus, and they lived at a nearby ranch. Our route to school included several ranches, which changed from time to time. I remember going to Mrs Fain's Ranch and picking up Susie who was our age, but she moved in 2nd grade. There was another ranch way off the right and a precious little blonde my age lived there, but only for one year. Then there was the Kritser Ranch to the west just before the Canadian River and we went down a cottonwood lined road to get to it to pick up a young boy. He was several years younger than me, but I don't remember his name. He lived there several years. After the plant was emptied and Mrs. Waters had retired, my mom drove her car one year and a short bus until I graduated. We went north to the Dunn Ranch and picked up the 3 Felts kids, and for a while up close to Masterson and another part of Fain where these families had several kids. But it was weird, the ranch kids came and went and never stayed too long, except the Felts, who one girl in their family, Phyllis went thru graduation with me.
Those were long bus rides, taking up to an hour and a half each way. When school let you, the bus had to pick up the kids at the high school,, then the jr. high and then to our elementary school. So Fan Campers at the elementary level stayed until 4 when the bus arrived, and each week a different teacher was assigned to watch us. I read thru the first, second and third grade libraries after school my first grade year. We had alot of bonding time with these teachers who rotated to keep us, and we were accused many times of being the school's favorites - honestly I think we were. We were all good students, conscientious, smart, caring, honest, and who wouldn't just love to have us!!
LOL One of the teachers I had for 3 years as home room teacher, was Mrs. Kate Waters, the sister-in-law to Mrs. Waters the bus driver. We called her Battleaxe Waters behind her back, but I really did like her. She was a great teacher and I can conjugate verbs and do my pronoun boxes to this day because of her.
I use to love to write books, stories about love (I was in middle school by then) and I'd cut out pictures from catalogs to illustrate them. They were continuing stories, and each morning when I got to school, the girls would be waiting for that day's installment. All day my book would make the rounds of all the girls in my class. Mrs. Waters knew this and never conviscated it, but encouraged me constantly to keep writing. We need good teachers like her, even if us kids called her names. She was tough!! But she could teach like no one else I've ever known. Years later when she went to the same beauty shop as my mom, she told my mom that she thought I was the best writer and possibly best student she'd ever taught. That really, really was a compliment, because she had taught alot of kids. She was always adjusting her straps inside her neckline - and today I do the same thing. It must to postmentopausal lack of shoulders or something. She also had a little mustache, and you got it, I have to fight that too. But we thought those were just "her" problems, and now I know its an age thing. She wore her hair up in a bun, wore long dresses, high heels and commanded her classes. She never lost control.
I went to River Road School for 9 years, as an elementary and later junior high, and I loved every single minute but my last year. By then the area had grown, my camp friends were gone, the new kids were a different breed, and I knew I would be going to a different high school from the other kids, so I was sort of left out of some things. Being the star of the basketball team put me on a little pedestal for part of the year, but after basketball season, all anyone talked about was high school, and I felt left out. I was going to another school where I'd know no one, and it was a little scarey. But River Road was a great school for my first 9 years of education, and it is still there. My son actually coached his team through a tournament there last year!! Oh the memories, and yes, I took my mom there on our little journey down memory lane. She said, it didn't look the same and that those memories too seemed like dreams.
This will end this chapter of remembering those days, but I plan to add other stories later. Those were truly "the good ole days.".
No comments:
Post a Comment