SOLOMON FAMILY HISTORY
Story and photos submitted by Carletta (Solomon) Keith, assisted by her nephew, Carl Solomon, on July 12, 2005.
There is nothing particularly unique about my family. We lived much the same as most families of the era and location in which we grew up; we were a large family but large families were common. However, my parents had 10 children who graduated from Vanoss High School and I think that is a record no other family who had children in that school has ever matched.
To go back beyond my parents, my grandfathers, Mark Harris and Aaron Solomon, were born poles apart but their paths crossed sometime between 1890 and 1900 in what is now Pontotoc County and this is how my dad and mother met.
December,1895. Mark Harris, Metcher, Birdie, and Delia Harris
Mark Harris was born in Southampton, England, in 1862 and came to the United States with his parents and other family members in 1869, settling in Missouri. At some point he made his way to Texas and married Cordelia Winn in Decatur in 1886. They had a son born in Texas in 1887. They then moved to Nebo, Indian Territory, where my mother, Delia Jane, was born in 1888, and her sister, Birdie, was born in 1892. In the early 1890's they moved to near Lightning Ridge. Cordelia Harris died in 1895, it is believed of tuberculosis, and she and their baby boy who was born in 1894 and lived only one day were among the first to be buried in Lightning Ridge Cemetery. My parents, some of my siblings, and numerous other relatives on the Solomon side of the family are buried there.
Aaron Solomon was born in Fentress County, Tennessee, in 1854 and due to the death of his mother in 1858 and the death or disappearance of his father in 1860, he and an older brother, Jeremiah, were raised by a relative, Robert Wood, in Clinton County, Kentucky. When he was about 20 years of age, Aaron was given a horse for his years of working for Mr. Wood and he went to Collin County, Texas, where Jeremiah and their sister, Winnie, were already living with their families. He married there and his first wife died shortly after giving birth to their son, William, in 1884.
The record of his marriage to my grandmother, Ida Lee Jones, has not been found, but it is believed that they married in probably 1885 or 1886. Family stories are that they met when the Jones family was moving from Texas to Indian Territory, camped on the side of the road, and Aaron was on a cattle drive. My dad, Carl Solomon, was born in 1887 in Fannin County, Texas, and there were 5 more sons and 3 daughters born, 5 being born after their move to Indian Territory.
Aaron made a living working in cattle drives from various points in Texas through Indian Territory to Kansas and possibly other states. In the 1890's, Indian Territory became more settled; people were buying land and erecting fences, making it difficult to drive cattle through that area. Also, cattle were being shipped on trains at that time so cattle drives were becoming a thing of the past. He left Texas and moved near Hart in the middle 1890's. In about 1907, he bought a small farm between Vanoss and Lightning Ridge and lived there until he died in 1920. After his death, most of the land and the house were sold. My grandmother lived in a small house on the remainder of the property until 1948 when she moved to Coalgate to live with a daughter and died in her sleep in January of 1949. She is the only grandparent that I knew. She was a very short woman, with some rather crusty language at times, and was nearly blind during the later years of her life.
A few years ago, I did a genealogical history of the Solomon family. After I finished school and left home, some casual acquaintance asked me if my family was Jewish. This thought had never occurred to me and I believe curiosity about this was one of the reasons I did the research on our family history. I found that as far as I can tell, although we may have descended from Jewish ancestors at some point, my great-grandfather, Moses Solomon, was a minister in either the Presbyterian or Baptist denomination in Tennessee. After several fruitless years of searching, I found that Grandpa Aaron Solomon, contrary to the fact that his tombstone says he was born in 1844, was actually born in 1854, a fairly serious discrepancy when you are looking for someone in the census records. I also determined to my satisfaction that we have no Indian ancestry and that Aaron Solomon did not serve in the Civil War, despite the rumors circulating in the family on both those subjects.
Both my grandfathers became members and eventually ministers of the Free Will Baptist Church. I have a collection of the minutes of the church meetings or services dating from the early 1900's through about 1950. Their names are mentioned frequently in church meetings in the early 1900's. The phraseology of the church minutes is a little confusing. On one page it states that they have been ministers since 1899. In minutes of a meeting in August, 1901, they are listed as licentiates. On August 23, 1902, at Union Arbor Church (which was near Dolberg), the minutes reflect that both were officially ordained in the same service. The district of the Free Will Baptist Church in which they ministered was and still is called the "Center Association." At that time it included the area of Vanoss, Center, Hart and Lightning Ridge and several other churches.
Most of the churches mentioned in those minutes no longer exist and actually the communities no longer exist. In 1903 Mark Harris is mentioned as being the pastor of the Old Moss Church, which I assume was at the same location as the Old Moss Cemetery located east of Vanoss. I believe that perhaps some of the church services were held during the warmer months at brush arbors rather than actual church buildings. I have an old newspaper article about Grandpa Solomon preaching at Union Arbor and it states that it was a brush arbor. Some of the other churches and/or communities mentioned are Hopewell, Iona, Little Vine, Mt. Olive and Mt. Gilead -- these I’ve never heard of. Other communities or churches are mentioned which I am familiar with -- Galey, Summers Chapel, Maxwell and others. Grandpa Harris is mentioned as moderator of many of the church services which took place in 1903 and it is my understanding that this was a position held only by those who were highly respected in the church.
I think that both grandfathers sowed a few wild oats back in their earlier days. There is a story (totally unsubstantiated) in the Solomon family that Grandpa Solomon rode his horse through the courthouse in Fannin County, Texas, because he was being chased by someone. According to my mother, Grandpa Harris was missing the end of one of his fingers. My mother’s brother, Metcher, told her after they were grown that he understood that Grandpa Harris had gotten into some kind of disagreement with a man who had a gun pointed at him and Grandpa Harris said, “Don’t shoot” and held up his hand but the man did shoot, obviously.
Mark Harris never remarried; he lived 40 years as a widower. After the death of his wife, his children moved in with a family named Osgood. Will and Kate Osgood were quite a bit older than he was and I believe that Mr. Osgood was probably in poor health at that time. He died in 1898 and is buried in Old Moss Cemetery. At that point, Kate Osgood and her two sons moved into my grandfather’s house. My grandfather helped raise the Osgood boys and farmed for a living, and Kate Osgood helped raise the Harris children. My mother thought of her and loved her as a mother and called her Grandma Osgood. The collective Osgoods and Harrises left Indian Territory in late 1904, along with other families from that area and moved just over the state line to an area near Waldron, in Scott County, Arkansas, probably hoping to better themselves financially. I have determined that the family of Joshua and Callie Roundtree was part of that group. In a recent conversation with a granddaughter of the Roundtrees, she said that the family stayed only a year or two in Arkansas before returning to the Lightning Ridge area. My mother said in a taped interview late in her life that there were 7 wagons which made the trip so I would assume that there were other families but I have no idea who they were.
Carl and Delia Solomon. Children: L to R: Archie, Addie, Eldred ca. 1914
In 1906, my father rode a train to Arkansas and he and my mother were married by Grandpa Harris at their home near Coaldale, Arkansas. They came back to live near Lehigh in what is now Coal County, where he was working in the coal mines. I never asked my mother if they exchanged letters or if she even knew he was coming before he showed up to be married. Their first child, Addie, was born at Lehigh. Sometime after Addie’s birth, they moved in with my Solomon grandparents and lived with them for a short time.
They lived in the Hart area for several years, and I know that they lived in what was described as a "dug-out house" somewhere near Coffey Corner -- I gather this was something like a combination cellar and house. I don’t know where else they lived, but in 1917 they bought a 110-acre farm one mile southeast of Vanoss from Jack Dunn and lived there until 1951, when they moved into Ada and sold the farm a year or two later.
The house in which they lived when they first moved there was a log house and not very large. In 1929, they started building a 6-room house and it was completed in early 1930. They used lumber which my dad acquired when they tore down the Lanham School which was northwest of Gaar Corner. The exterior of the house was built with concrete blocks which they made themselves. They dug sand from Sandy Creek, bought cement, and mixed them together with well water, and used forms to make the concrete blocks. The house is still standing and occupied today.
My parents had 10 more children in addition to Addie, 5 of whom were born after they moved near Vanoss. I will set out their names now so if I mention them in this story, you’ll know who I am talking about. The brothers are, in descending order of age, Archie, Eldred, Spurgeon, Melvin, Luther, Leonard and Raybert. My sister’s name is Marjorie. A girl, Cordia, was born in 1918 and lived one month.
L to R: Archie, Eldred, Spurgeon, Melvin, Luther, Leonard, Raybert. Ca. 1926.
Archie was born in 1910 and I was born in 1932. My very earliest memory is of being left with him while my mother was out of the house for a short time -- probably at the garden. His method of babysitting was to put me on the floor and set the corner post of the bed on the skirt of my dress. I think I was probably 2 or 3 years old at the time. He and the next 2 brothers were old enough to have been my father so my relationship with them down through the years was more like a parent-child relationship than a sibling relationship. Although by the time these brothers died I was married and had children myself, there is no doubt in my mind that for the entirety of their lives, they believed me to be eternally 5 years old and incapable of tying my own shoes. The younger brothers came to pretty much think of me as their equal. My sister was 6 years old and the only girl with 7 older brothers when I was born so I think she regarded me, among other things, as totally unnecessary.
In the days before Vanoss became a consolidated school, my older brothers and Addie went to Shady Grove School which covered grades 1 through 8 and was about a mile from our house. I can remember the old school building still being there and it was used to store hay for many years, until it burned sometime in the 1940's.
My dad, although well respected and known in our community and other areas in Pontotoc County, as a parent was a very strict disciplinarian. Actually, to say that he was strict is like saying that Hitler was overbearing. Whatever he told you to do, you did it without any argument and in a timely fashion. You also kept a pleasant look on your face so as to convey the impression that whatever he told you to do was what you had really wanted to do all along. He was not cruel, abusive or mean, but he was very, very strict with his children. He didn’t like a lot of extraneous conversation so we stayed pretty quiet when he was in the house.
My mother, who worked harder than anyone I’ve ever known, had a great sense of humor and passed that along to all of her children. Despite having gone through only perhaps 6 grades of school, she was a very intelligent person, liked to read, had very neat handwriting and was an excellent speller. I’m not sure my dad went any farther than the third grade in school. As one could understand, his spelling and handwriting left something to be desired. Despite his own lack of education, or perhaps because of it, he made sure that all of his children completed high school.
He was president of the Vanoss school board for various terms from the 1920's to the 1940's. These elections were always highly partisan and feelings ran high. Sometimes he won and sometimes he lost. My sister and I have discussed that aspect of our lives and we agreed that being the child of the president of the school board in that time was not a pleasurable experience. I think she and I were more sensitive than our brothers were, and I was probably bothered more than she was by things that were said. Kids can say things that hurt your feelings and I can remember accusations of "you’re the teacher’s pet because your dad’s on the school board" and in her case, "You just make straight A’s because your dad’s president of the school board." I’m sure my dad never knew how pleased I was when he lost the election because this meant that for the next 2 years, somebody else’s kids were going to catch the flak.
Front Row: Carletta. 2nd Row L to R—Marjorie, Carl, Delia, Melvin, Raybert.
3rd Row L to R: Spurgeon, Lucille, Luther, Leonard. Back Row L to R: Archie, Beatrice, Eldred, Leona.
Six of my seven brothers married girls whom they had met either in the Vanoss school or by going to church in surrounding communities. Archie’s wife was Beatrice Collins, whose parents lived in Vanoss for many years. Spurgeon married Lucille South, who grew up in the Egypt community. Melvin married Mary Troutman, whose family operated a dairy and lived about 1/4 mile south of the McCauley store location in Vanoss. Luther and Raybert married sisters, Vernie and Lorene Johnson, who grew up in the Wilson area. Leonard’s wife was Carolyn Phillips, whose mother and grandparents lived in the Old Midland area. My sister and I were not allowed to date while growing up, so it is understandable that we did not marry local boys.
This was another area where my father’s strictness manifested itself. When I was in high school, I was not allowed to go to the parties that were held at night at various homes in the community. These parties, I can assure you, consisted of playing games where you ran around in circles, and drank Koolaid for refreshments. My sister and I were not allowed to do anything other than exactly what he wanted us to do. This included driving a car. Women did not drive cars -- at least not any women under his direct control. I have somewhat facetiously thought of making this story’s subtitle something like: Growing up in a Protestant Convent in Rural Oklahoma.
While on the subject of cars, our family car was always many years past its prime. My mother told me, however, that in the late 20's or early 30's they did buy a new car. I found this mind-boggling because our finances during my growing-up years would have been strained by having to buy a new tire. She said that this was at a time when they had good cotton crops and perhaps other sources of income. My dad had a rather cavalier attitude about cars. It was not uncommon for him to take the back seat out of the car and haul baby calves or maybe even small pigs. Hauling hay and sacks of feed in the back was an accepted practice. I can remember one occasion when he went to pick me up at school on an especially cold, snowy day. We got part of the way home and he ran out of gas. He had a bottle or can of wood alcohol in the car which he burned in a little “lamp” affair to heat paraffin which he used when he grafted pecan trees. I can remember him saying “I have burned alcohol in this thing” so he poured it in the gas tank. I halfway expected an explosion but he started it up and we drove on home. I have to believe that this had a detrimental effect on the engine, fuel lines, etc.
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Music of various kinds was always a part of our life. In the 1920's my 4 oldest brothers had a string band. They played a type of music that is referred to today as “old-time music” and which was probably a forerunner of today’s bluegrass music. Since I was not yet born at the time this took place, I have to rely on stories that were told. The only thing of which I am sure is that Archie played the fiddle. To the best of my memory, the other instruments were guitar, mandolin and tenor banjo, played by the next 3 or 4 brothers. I am told that they played between acts at school plays, in Christmas parades in Ada and at other functions in the area. Family stories were that Luther got in on the string band when the older boys were leaving home. He could never figure out where to change chords so someone had to stand by him and stomp on his foot when it was time to change chords. A guitar was ordered by Addie from Sears Roebuck catalog in 1929 for her brothers and it is still in the family today.
As far back as I can remember, we owned an old upright piano. I don’t know when and where it was bought but I can remember it being tuned only once. My sister and I taught ourselves to play the piano and eventually I had some piano lessons after I left home. I think we all learned to read music by some form of osmosis as I can’t recall any actual instruction going on in our home, even though my dad taught singing schools -- just a lot of singing.
In the 1960's, there was a resurgence of interest among my brothers in the string band. Archie had always had a fiddle and some of the others once more bought stringed instruments and brought them to family reunions and played some of the old songs.
At some point my dad went to a singing school at Lightning Ridge - this was before 1920. He earned a certificate which entitled him to then teach singing schools. He taught some in the 1920's, I believe, but for some reason there was a period of time when he gave that up. I can remember him telling of teaching a "21 day normal" (which was a phrase used to describe the schools) in Guthrie. He did teach some singing schools in small communities near us in the late 1940's.
Throughout his life he remained interested in gospel music. We went to many singing conventions on Sunday and in those days, many small communities had their own "singings" on a night during the week. Vanoss, Gaar Corner and Lightning Ridge are those I remember which had their weekly singings at night. Those weekly singings vanished from the scene prior to 1950 for the most part, and today the singing conventions, while still in existence in other parts of the state, have not been held in Pontotoc County to my knowledge, for quite some time.
Most of us remained interested in gospel music in varying degrees after we were grown. Marjorie and I have both played the piano for churches and groups and two of my brothers directed the music at their churches at various times during their lives. When we were home for family gatherings as long as my mother still lived in her home, we always gathered around the piano, dug some old songbooks out of the piano bench and sang for an hour or two.
I can remember going with my dad to provide music for funerals of people that we didn’t even know. Before my sister graduated and left home, she would play the piano and after I got older, I would play the piano and he would get some people to go with him to help sing. I can’t remember anyone ever giving us any kind of a financial offering and one was not expected.
In addition to being very strict, my dad was also very hardheaded. I could read before I started to school and could probably do simple math and whatever else a child entering the second grade would be expected to know or do. Since my birthday is in December, making me 6-1/2 when I entered school, and since I could read, write, add and subtract, my dad just arbitrarily decided that I should enter school in the second grade. The superintendent of schools (who shall remain nameless) didn’t agree with this and each time I was taken by my dad to the second grade room, I was removed and taken to first grade, which was called the "primary" class.
After several occurrences of this, my dad’s solution to this problem was to take me to Wilson School and enroll me in second grade there. Clearly, this violated some rules. We lived in the Vanoss district, not the Wilson district. However, Annie Dunn was the teacher there and a friend of our family and I was allowed to start there in the second grade. This necessitated my dad taking me and picking me up every day because it was too far for me to walk.
Ultimately, after probably 12 weeks or more of going to Wilson and being able to do the second grade work, I was taken back and once more placed in the second grade room at Vanoss. I was allowed to stay there and continue in the second grade without further incident. The next time my dad was elected to the school board, he was instrumental in firing that superintendent at the end of the school year.
There’s more to the story. That man became head of the Rural Electrification program for Pontotoc County. Some areas of Pontotoc County had long had power lines run to the homes but the rural areas east of Vanoss and the areas near Wilson and Lightning Ridge, etc. did not. In the late 1940's, electricity was extended to those areas. Guess who didn’t get electricity run to their house? You guessed it. It was only after that man resigned from the REA and moved to another state that we were able to get electricity.
I remember taking my lunch to school and eating in the room and I think sometimes we ate outside. We had nothing to drink except water. I remember some girl in my class in grade school having a thermos bottle but what she brought in it I don’t remember. The fact that this sticks in my mind after probably 60 years should give you some idea of what a rarity thermos bottles were in that place and time. I had to take biscuits for my lunch and I considered this to be a caste mark of sorts since most kids (or so it seemed to me) brought sandwiches made of store-bought bread. I don’t remember what I took other than biscuits and sausage; probably there was often a piece of cake or some cookies and maybe some boiled eggs. Since the lunches had to sit on a shelf in the hall, nothing could be taken that would spoil in the heat. Luther once said jokingly in later years, "The kids that lived around Oil Center were rich. I know they were because they brought peanut butter and crackers for their lunch." Peanut butter was a luxury which we did not buy.
At some point in the early 1940’s meals were cooked at school in what was called the pump house. I can vaguely recall eating beans or soup in my room but I had to have a little help with this memory and I’m told that meals were cooked there and served through the windows of that little house. There was a long water pipe with faucets for drinking outside in that area also. In probably the mid-1940's the small house that originally served as the primary room began to be used as the lunchroom. I don’t know when lunches began to be cooked there but I can remember the cooks being Sarah Williams and Leah Abston. In the early 1940's fruit, such as apples and oranges, was given away by the school, and I don’t know the source of that. One man who went to school there told me recently that he could remember being given grapefruit and this was the first time he had ever seen a grapefruit.
The only jobs my dad ever held outside of farming were working in the coal mines at the time he and my mother married, and in 1950 he started work as a county jailer in Ada. He worked there long enough to become covered by Social Security and although the amount wasn’t much, my mother received Social Security checks until her death.
Carl Solomon at Oklahoma State Fair with Grand Champion Tom Turkey, Early 1940s
He had many other ways of making money. In the 1920's and 1930's, he made sorghum molasses. This happened too far back for me to remember anything involved with that. He could graft papershell pecan trees and did a lot of that for various people throughout Pontotoc County. I think he got a certain amount at the time he did the graft and if the graft lived after a year or so, he got an additional amount. He raised turkeys and sold them and used to take his turkeys to the state fair in Oklahoma City. He won awards and there is a picture of him with the grand champion tom turkey in the early 40’s.
We always had bees and he sold the honey and also exhibited jars of honey at the state fair and won prizes on that. I was pressed into service to help him nail the sheets of wax into the frames that hung in the hives. At the appropriate time when the honey was ready, my dad would "rob" the hives, as they called it, of the honeycomb, using protective clothing and a hood, and a smoker to lull the bees into a kind of stupor.
For a time he owned a hay baler and baled hay for other people, often taking part of the hay in payment for his services. By this time some of the older boys had left home but there were at least 2 or 3 of my brothers around and local men were hired to fill in. There were several different things involved in baling hay so you needed several people to fill all the roles.
We owned cows in varying numbers and through the years, I, along with other members of the family, milked a lot of cows. At one time when several of my brothers were still living at home, I am told that we milked between 30 and 40 cows twice a day. I once read an article about Webb Pierce, a country music star back in the 50's and 60's. He told about his life growing up on a farm and his comment on having to milk cows, which has stuck with me through the years, was that "milking cows is so daily." I agree with him there, but I also believe that milking cows is good for your character. If you can sit there and be hit in the face with a wet, muddy tail full of cockleburs, and refrain from hurting the cow, then you can take anything life hands out. On one occasion, a temperamental, overly maternal cow backed me up in the corner of the lot because she thought I was going to touch her baby calf, and was angling her long pointed horns at me. I was doing some fancy screaming and I really thought she was going to kill me before my mother came over and hit her with something and drove her away.
We had a cream separator and would run the milk through that, collect the cream and keep it cool by putting it in jars in the concrete tank surrounding the artesian well. There was a large metal bowl with a spigot which sat on top of the separator and the milk was poured into this. There were cone-shaped disks which sat beneath in a smaller bowl; my memory fails me a little at this point in the description. A crank was turned to make the disks turn and when they were turning at the proper speed, the spigot was opened to let the milk run through the disks. Centrifugal force separated the cream from the milk. The cream came out of one spigot or faucet and the skim milk came out from another spigot and ran into buckets set on the floor. These disks and everything else had to be taken apart and washed every time it was used - morning and night.
The cream separator sat in our dining room and I suppose a lot of families had a cream separator sitting in their house somewhere in those days but you wouldn’t have found these mentioned in any home decorating magazine. It was not a thing of beauty. If you were going to sell cream in any quantity, it was really a necessity, though, or at least a great asset because the cream was of a better quality than merely letting the milk set and skimming the cream off the top, which a lot of people did. We milked a varying number of cows down through the years -- more when my brothers were home -- but we always sold cream at Gaar Corner. I’m sure what we got for it was not much, but it helped supplement our scant income.
As most people did in that area and in that time, we raised most of the food that we ate. We bought only the basic things at the store -- flour, sugar, salt, baking powder and baking soda. We might occasionally buy something like vinegar and items used in canning vegetables and fruit, such as jar lids. My mother had a huge pressure cooker and it was used a lot in the summer, canning vegetables and fruits. It had to get up to a certain pressure which required that the wood-burning stove be kept fired-up for some time and I know the temperature in the kitchen on those occasions had to be at least 125º.
There are vegetables which I never tasted until I left home -- cauliflower, broccoli, asparagus and a few others. We grew the same things year after year and I imagine my parents had determined what would grow in that area and what wouldn’t. We always had white potatoes (which we called Irish potatoes), always planted on St. Patrick’s Day, black-eyed and crowder peas, green beans, tomatoes, corn, radishes, mustard, leaf lettuce, turnips, onions and several types of pepper, both hot and mild. We never grew sweet potatoes or carrots and although I loved them, my mother grew English peas only a few years; she said the plants suffered too much from mildew and didn’t do well. I can remember helping my mother set out plants in a newly-plowed garden in the early spring -- tomatoes, peppers, onion sets, etc. -- with the wind, ALWAYS the wind -- blowing the dirt in my face.
L to R: Leonard, Raybert, Melvin, Luther.
These 4 brothers earned the money to buy the wagon by picking up pecans. Ca.1926.
Breakfast consisted of homemade biscuits every day, eggs, usually some type of pork, and gravy. Hogs were killed in the latter part of the year and during the first months of the following year, we ate the better cuts, including ham. The quality and cut of the pork diminished as months passed and by August we were probably eating some really aged salt pork.
Killing hogs was done when a cold front was expected. The weather needed to be fairly cold but not far below freezing, so close attention was paid to the radio weather forecasts so as to choose an ideal time. Time has mercifully erased from my memory some, but not all, of the details of killing hogs. It involved either shooting or stabbing the hog and a relative reminded me that sometimes they were hit in the head by something heavy like a sledge hammer. Then the hog was hung from something like a strong tree limb so the blood could drain and it was cut open, and various unmentionable body parts were removed. I recall something about scalding water and scraping the hair off the hog. Then it was cut up into various pieces and there’s just no better way to describe it -- there was bloody meat everywhere. Then there was always some concern lest the weather turn too warm too soon before the meat had time to cure or be so cold that the meat froze, which wasn’t good either.
My mother always made pork sausage. The meat was ground in a hand operated sausage grinder, seasoned with sage and other things, and packed into casings made of old sheets or similar type fabric sewn together on the sewing machine. It was placed in the small house with the rest of the meat from the hogs killed every year. It was not really a smokehouse -- some people may have smoked their meat but as I recall, ours was just sprinkled with curing salt.
The fat from the hog was boiled in a cast iron wash pot and the lard was rendered out and saved to use throughout the year. Lard makes excellent biscuits and pie crusts. Lard, along with other staples of our early diet such as pork, eggs, whole milk and real butter, is probably responsible for several of my brothers’ having bypass surgery and other vascular and circulatory problems.
If we ran out of meat, then we ate biscuits, butter, eggs and gravy. We also ate oatmeal and rice a lot for breakfast. We had to stop milking the cows several months before they had new calves in the spring so unless we had a cow who had a calf late in the year, the diet got pretty boring with no milk or butter during the winter. In those cases, gravy was made with water. We always had some type of homemade jelly or preserves and usually bought sorghum or syrup.
Beef was an unknown. Because of no refrigeration, we couldn’t keep it for any length of time. Occasionally my dad would buy some round steak from someone who had killed a cow but this was rare. When I got married, I didn’t even know how to cook beef.
Speaking of refrigeration, we had an old-fashioned ice box and if the budget allowed, we’d buy ice. Philo McConnell, a longtime resident of that area, had a truck which he drove for years, delivering blocks of ice. The ice box kept milk and other things marginally cold. The ice sat in a somewhat insulated section and as it melted, it dripped into a drip-pan which sat beneath the ice box and overflowed with regularity because no one could ever seem to remember to empty it. If we had ice, we’d sometimes make Jello on Sundays, which was considered a treat, and we could have iced tea.
One of the diversions in our life was making homemade ice cream on Saturday nights. We had a two-gallon freezer and since we had our own eggs and milk, it was fairly inexpensive to make. Ice would be bought at either Vanoss or Gaar Corner, put in a gunny sack, as we called them, and crushed by hammering it with the flat side of an axe. Since we never had any fruit on hand, it was usually just plain vanilla ice cream. My mother had great disdain for any type of flavored powdered mix such as strawberry, which some people put in their ice cream -- she said it made the ice cream taste “chalky.”. I thought it would have been pretty nifty to have pink ice cream but she didn’t like the taste so we stuck to plain vanilla. Occasionally the store would be out of ice and this was always a disappointment not to get to make ice cream.
Dinner, as we called it, was eaten around noon and consisted of fresh vegetables in the summer, usually with potatoes of some form -- boiled, creamed or fried. We always had cornbread. In the winter months we would often have dried beans cooked with some salt pork. Supper was usually whatever was left from dinner and we always ate cornbread and milk to fill in. My mother rarely cooked a hot meal at supper. I still like and eat cornbread and milk occasionally and I still like pinto beans.
My mother was a great cook, given what she had to cook and the stove she had to use, and she was an expert at making something from nothing.
There were sumac bushes which had a berry covered with a tart white film. My mother would rinse the berries in water, strain it to get out all the foreign material and use this to make lemon flavored pies. If you didn’t know better, you would think real lemons had been used.
She made homemade yeast bread, cinnamon rolls, lots of cakes and pies and occasionally she made sourdough bread -- all of this in a wood burning cookstove. How she knew when to put something in to cook, I’m not sure but she just stuck her hand in the oven and judged if it was hot enough.
She would kill chickens and clean them and we had fried chicken a lot in the summer and occasionally chicken and dressing for holidays. I am truly glad that when I had children, we lived in the city and could buy chicken already cleaned. This was good because if I had had to clean chickens, considering what is involved, my children would never, ever, have tasted chicken. It didn’t hold a candle to hog killing as far as unpleasantness but I wanted no part of it.
Although my dad raised turkeys, we never had turkeys to eat. I used to wonder why we couldn’t have one of those nicely browned whole turkeys like they show in pictures. It finally occurred to me that to bake a whole turkey, the wood-burning stove would have had to be kept going for probably 8 to 10 hours and I can’t imagine the firewood it would have taken.
My mother made all the clothes for herself, my sister and myself, on a treadle sewing machine which is still in the family today, and in fact made overalls for some of the older boys when they were young. In the early days she washed all the clothes on a rub board. Sometime in probably the 1930's she got a gasoline-powered washing machine. It had a kick starter and was a little temperamental but much better than washing clothes on a rub board. I could never seem to remember that you couldn’t run the agitator and the wringer at the same time and was constantly causing it to stall and stop running.
Like most people of that time, we had a wood-burning stove for cooking and one for heating in the living room. For a time, we had running water in the house. At some point prior to 1930, a company drilled a well on our property, looking for oil. They struck water -- artesian water. It had a sulphur odor and taste, which we never noticed because we grew up with it, but others always commented on it. Sometime shortly after striking the artesian water, the story goes that Sam (Doc) Lowe, who at that time was a teacher at Vanoss, suggested to my dad that he get a ram pump and install at the place where the water came out of the ground. A ram pump is powered by water running through the pump -- no electricity or gasoline motors are involved, and it can pump water to a much higher elevation than where the water source and pump are located. Pipe was laid from that point up to the house which was up a small hill and water was available at a faucet in the kitchen. The pump grew old and temperamental and there were many times in later years when we had to carry water to the house.
We had kerosene lamps and at times, an Aladdin lamp which burned white gasoline and gave forth a much brighter light than kerosene lamps. In about 1939 we had a windcharger installed. It looked somewhat like a windmill and when the wind blew, the propellers turned and transmitted electrical power (for want of a more technical explanation) into some huge glass batteries which sat inside the house. We could use the lights and a radio but this type of electricity was DC which can’t be used for irons or other electrical appliances. The batteries got old and the system reached the point where it was of little use and we used it only for a radio. We ironed clothes with an iron which was heated on the stove but at some point we got an iron which had a burner inside and was heated by white gasoline.
Another item of “civilization” that we had was a crank type telephone -- the old fashioned kind you see in old movies, with the mouthpiece on front and the crank handle. Beyond our house to the east towards Wilson community, no one had a phone so if there was an emergency -- usually medical -- they had to come to our house. I can remember a neighbor’s son coming to our house in the middle of the night to call a doctor in Ada about his mother. There would be 4 or 5 families on a "party line" -- i.e., anyone on the line could pick up the telephone and hear what anyone else was saying. To be honest, I think that eavesdropping was fairly common. The Bakers in Vanoss owned the telephone system and they were "Central." The lines ran out of Vanoss in various directions and in order to talk to someone on a different line, such as people living west of Vanoss, for example, you had to call Central and have them connect you.
I have mentioned my mother’s sense of humor earlier. The older brothers were a little more sober than the younger ones but all of them shared in laughing and making jokes about things that happened in their lifetime. The three younger brothers had quite a reputation for their joke-playing and pranks they played on people. It would be pointless to try to relate any of the things they did. There are people still living who remember them and some of the zany things "them Solomon boys" did, but it’s a case of "you had to be there at the time to understand what was funny."
One example of some of their antics was told by my brother, Leonard, in a taped interview in 1984. Part of it is included below:
We’d been to church at Wilson and we met at Coffey Corner and built up a fire and waited on Jess Gurley and Barney Hall to come back from Vanoss. Well, it was in the spring - a balmy evening - and my brother, Luther, he says, well he said, "Why don’t when I hear ‘em coming, I’ll just pull off my clothes and I’ll go up the hill there" and they was driving about 10 miles an hour and he said "I’ll just jump out in front of ‘em and run naked in front of their lights" and he said "I’ll streak" and I’d never heard the term "streak." Now, you’re talking about 1939 - he said "I’ll just streak ‘em" - of course, we used to moon people, but I’d never heard of streaking. Well anyway, he pulls off his clothes and hangs ‘em on an old fence post down at the corner of Coffey Corner and he goes up there west about a quarter of a mile and we hear this old Model A - you could hear it coming a mile. He gets out about 30 or 35 feet in front of ‘em and comes running down in front of them for about a quarter of a mile and he was really speeding it up. He was just sure it was Barney and Jess Gurley but he turns off to the left and heads north and slows down and this Model A just keeps on going east and it turned out to be old - an old preacher that lived over there, Vander something - ‘ he’d been over to preach. Well, anyway, that was the first streaker we’d ever heard of - he was the original and that was in 1939.
Another thing which comes to my mind is their "watering the banks" of Sandy Creek. The bridge over Sandy Creek near our house was destroyed probably back in the early 1940's. There was no bridge there until after we left that area in 1951. There was what was called a "low water bridge" and if the water was low enough you could drive over the concrete slab that had been put there when they built the bridge. Some cars had trouble getting up the fairly steep muddy banks and often had to come to our house to get my brothers to come with a mule to pull them up the bank. The three younger brothers, being enterprising sorts, would go down and pour water on the banks when they showed signs of drying out, so as to be able to make a little extra money pulling people out of the mud.
I sometimes think Leonard was unconsciously humorous from birth. There is a family story told about my parents and some of the kids coming in at night and not being able to find a match to light the kerosene lamp. Leonard, who was about 3 or 4, inquired what they were doing and they told him they were trying to find a match and he said "Why don’t you strike a match and find one?"
Since Pontotoc County was part of the Chickasaw Indian Nation prior to statehood, I assume that the Indians who lived there were Chickasaw. North of Sandy Creek about 1/8 mile, on the West side of the road, we used to find numerous arrowheads and other Indian items in the field. Archie used to walk behind the man who owned the land when he plowed, unearthing arrowheads and other items, and he had quite a collection of arrowheads of all sizes. When he was still in high school, he loaned the collection to someone and never got it back. We used to find arrowheads, grinding stones and colored rocks which could be moistened to color your skin. The arrowheads were fairly commonplace to us and were thrown in coffee cans with nails and screws and other junk. Today, regrettably, I don’t have a single one.
We existed in our growing-up years with very little medical or dental care, but I imagine this was true in most families of that time. Injuries and serious illnesses fortunately were rare. I can remember going to the doctor only twice -- once when I caught the itch (that’s what you call in-depth reporting, I think) and another time when I developed an abscess in my ear and had to have it lanced. I recall that castor oil was the drug of choice for many things. I’m not sure why it was considered such a cure-all, but I can remember being given castor oil in a cup of coffee when I was about 5 or 6. The net result of that was that I didn’t drink coffee until I was 20 years old. Also I can remember being given kerosene with sugar for a cough or a cold and people soaking a foot that had been cut or injured in kerosene.
Home remedies were often resorted to. I can remember being stung on the arm by a stinging scorpion when I was quite young and having my aunt take a big blob of snuff out of her mouth and slap it down on the bite. I don’t know which bothered me more -- the bite or the snuff.
Others in their stories on this website have told of the businesses in Vanoss in the 1920's and 1930's. My memory encompasses a time when the only businesses were Dean McCauley’s store, the Berger store/post office, and the Standridge store. I remember the cotton gin being there but I don’t remember it being in operation. There were two churches, the Missionary Baptist and what I suppose was Southern Baptist. They were often referred to as the "church below the hill" and the "church on top of the hill" or as the "Bradley church" and the "Standridge church." When I go back to Vanoss now, I am somewhat disoriented without the landmarks of the Berger and Standridge stores. I keep wanting to get out of the car and walk to where I think they were and see if I can find some vestiges of their foundations. They’ve moved the road slightly, further confusing me, and the railroad tracks are long gone. As a side comment, in probably the early 1940's, I can remember seeing two men pumping a railroad handcar down the railroad track as we went from Vanoss to Gaar Corner. I think this was the only time I ever saw one of these outside of a western movie.
There is some question as to when or if my sister, Addie, finished high school. Records can be found for only three years of attendance, but I have to believe that my dad would have insisted on her graduating since all the rest of us did. I believe that she graduated in 1927 as the East Central College records show her enrolling there in May, 1927. Archie graduated in 1929, Eldred in 1931, Spurgeon in 1933, Melvin in 1935, Luther in 1936, Leonard in 1939, Raybert in 1941 and Marjorie in 1943. I graduated in 1950.
Addie got a 2-year teaching certificate and started teaching school at Happyland in 1928 and was the principal at the time of her death -- of course, there were probably only two teachers. She married Chesley Madden, who lived in Happyland, in 1929. In February, 1930, they were going to my parents’ house when they had a car accident just a short distance east of Gaar Corner and Addie was killed.
My dad died of a sudden heart attack in 1954 in Roff, where they had moved in 1952. My mother continued to live in Roff for some years, then moved into an apartment in Ada and ultimately to a nursing home in Ada. She was in fairly good health for some years but both her physical and mental condition deteriorated as the years went by and she died in June of 1975.
Through the years all of the brothers except Raybert have passed away, beginning with Melvin in 1981. Marjorie is still living and I have 3 sisters-in-law still living. My parents had 24 grandchildren and three of those have died in recent years.
When I went back for the alumni banquet in June, 2005, there were 7 graduates there, in addition to myself, from the class of 1950 which consisted of slightly over 20 graduates. I know that at least 4 members of that class have died in recent years. Although I try to go at 5-year intervals, I think this might be my last trip back for an alumni banquet.
If I allowed myself, when I stop and think about all the members of my family who are no longer living and all the other people from my days of growing up near Vanoss who are dead or that I won’t see again, I could become very sad. As it is, I resort to a phrase I use a lot in a joking way, which is the title of a book by Lewis Grizzard: Elvis is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself. You may not quite understand that but it says what I want to say.
Vanoss School Bus Drivers
From L to R: Otis Martin, Ed Little, Tollie Walker (one of Clyde Jr.’s relatives), Carl Solomon, Virgil Norvell, Jim Hickey, Sam Hunt and Mayberry Tilley.
Misc. email comments about this picture:
- …the (bus) seats probably faced each other and not towards the front because you can see on the sides of the buses where the seats are locked in Also the covers over the windows….I guess they rolled down…”
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