Larry had a regular baby bed and he also had this habit of never going to sleep without his bottle. Even when Larry woke up during the night, Ima would have to get up and get his bottle and then try to rock him back to sleep. But when Ima started working at Lockheed, we stopped all that monkey business.
I put a pull-chain switch in the light fixture in the middle of the ceiling. Then I put a long pull-cord that would hang loosely across Larry"s bed and I tied it to the far corner of his bed. He could reach the cord easily while lying on his back in bed. Then I put two of his bottles in two corners of his bed, down by the mattress so they couldn"t fall out or turn over. One was for going to sleep and the other was for going back to sleep after he woke up during the night.
He must have been fascinated by the newness of the whole thing because he listened well as I explained it all to him and showed him just how to reach up and turn out the light before he finished his bottle, and how to wave his hand sideways to find the light cord in the dark, how to get his second bottle when his first one ran empty, and how to be quiet and not wake me up.
After that first night I would merely say something like, "Goodnight, Larry, I"m going to sleep. You can go to bed when you want to." Most of the time I went to sleep while he was still playing in the floor. I often woke up with him lying in his bed nursing his bottle with the light on, but not one time did I ever wake up to find the light on after he had gone to sleep. And he never cried.
Larry was 18 months old in May. When he made up his mind to go some place, he didn"t fool around. He didn"t walk, he ran. He learned to run about the same time he learned to walk. At our trailer court he was known as Cyclone Johnson.
During the summer of 1944, by correspondence, we made a deal with Uncle Jim to buy the Royston farm from him. So we began thinking about when we should be getting back to Texas. Benny Carriker was living on the farm at that time and when I let him know that we were buying the farm, he wrote that he wanted to move to town by the first of September and we could move onto the place at that time. So we loaded up and moved back to Texas in the latter part of August. But we didn"t hurry right straight back to Royston.
We reasoned that we might never be in that part of the country again and I wanted to see a part of Death Valley. I had read quite a bit about it and it fascinated me. So we drove about three hundred miles out of our way that trip just to see the valley. But when we came near it, we learned that the touring season in Death Valley was in winter time. In August it was really a valley of death and almost void of people, especially tourists-and more especially, during the war. Okay, so I goofed again.
At least we were not bothered with traffic. And since we were about the only ones using the road, and since there were some long downhill slopes, and since Dennis had his bicycle in our trailer, he wanted to ride it down at least one of those long slopes. So we got his bicycle out and he got on it and he must have coasted for miles, I don"t know how far. We saw one highway sign that read, "Next seven miles downhill."
Then coming up out of Panamint Valley our car had a vaporlock in the gas line. I could blow hard into the gas tank and blow gas into the carburetor. Then the motor would start but by the time it got the car and trailer going up the hill, the carburetor would be empty again.
Now, we had quite a few tools in the car and I always carried some emergency repair parts. A good supply of survival items was a "must" with me. I was sure I would need them some day. And this looked like a good place to use some of them. We drilled a hole in the gas tank cap, cut a valve stem out of an old inner tube and fitted it into the hole. Then Dennis sat in the back seat with a tire pump, pumping air through a long hose into the stem in the gas cap. He pumped and I drove. We came right on up out of the valley without any more trouble. After we reached the top, he quit pumping and we had no more vapor lock. This goes to show why I never throw anything away. Even today I still carry a good supply of old tire tubes, valve stems, lengths of rubber hose, and plenty of hay wire.
We stopped for gas at Stovepipe Wells and the man there seemed to think we would make it okay. The temperature was only 113 degrees. I"ve seen it hotter than that in Phoenix and they thought nothing of it.
We arrived at Royston only to find that Benny Carriker had changed his mind. He wanted to stay on the farm until the first of the year, and of course we couldn"t move in. So, now what? It would be four months before we could get possession of the farm. So we moved in with Mama and Papa in Hamlin and I looked for a job. I thought just about anything would do for four months. I signed on at the Gyp Mill and went to work making wall boards. I worked just one day at the mill, the hardest work I had done in years.
When the alarm clock sounded the next morning, it was raining all over the place. It took me about five seconds to decide what to do. Of course I had been thinking quite a bit about it before. The rain merely pushed me over the line of decision.
The road was not paved from Hamlin to the mill. It would be a mess every time it rained. What"s more, the work there was four times as hard as building boxes in California. So I shut off the alarm and rolled over to go back to sleep. Ima asked me what I was going to do. I told her I was going to get some sleep and then go to California. And as usual she thought I was crazy.
Well, I sort of agreed with Ima, but not altogether. This job would just barely pay for rent and groceries. Out west we could live on half my salary and save the other half. So, Burbank, we"re coming again. But this time I had an additional problem.
For the first time, I was about out of gasoline ration coupons. And when I went to the ration board in Hamlin, the lady told me I would have to work at least six months before I could get gas coupons to go somewhere else. I was in trouble and I could see that I was going to have trouble convincing her. But I told her the whole story. I really spread it on thick and made it sound rather pitiful-at least I thought I did. I told her I knew I was needed on the farm here, but the other man had changed his mind and I couldn"t get on the farm. It was not my planning nor my fault that I couldn"t move onto the farm. I couldn"t help it. And now I was needed in war work in Burbank.
After all my pleading she had the same answer, "No gas coupons."
Well, I could see that I was getting nowhere with the lady. I figured I had to change my approach or I would never get to Burbank. So I stopped begging and pleading with her, and with a little more firmness in my voice, I said, "Now look, Lady, I"m going to California and I am going to get gas coupons one way or another, and however I get them, it is going to take the same amount of gas to make the trip, and if you will just issue me the coupons it will save me an awful lot of trouble and I will get on out there faster and get on the job sooner."
Well, I could hardly believe my ears. She asked me how much gas I needed. I told her and she gave me the coupons. We were on our way west again.
If all Americans had helped out as much as I did during the war, I know we would have lost to the enemy.
Ima cried off and on all the way out there this trip. It had been hard to find a place to live the first time. She just knew we couldn"t find a place this time. And it proved to be just that way-that is, for average people. But I wasn"t going to settle for being just average. I knew there was a place for us to live somewhere in California. I simply had to get busy and find it.
When we finally got to California, we heard the same story everywhere we tried, "No vacancy." Real estate firms gave us the same answer. But I reasoned that, if you go fishing and don"t catch a fish the first hour, you don"t just lie down and cry; you fish some more. There"s got to be a fish somewhere in the lake. You just go find him.
After a few hours of the same kind of disappointment a realtor had a listing, "Garage apartment for rent."
The lady asked, "Do you have children?"
I replied, "Yes, three."
"Sorry, no children allowed."
"Would you give me the address?"
"There"s no need, no children allowed."
"Would you just give me the address and let the owner tell us, "No children allowed"?"
By this time I knew she was anxious to get rid of me, so she gave me the address. It proved to be quite near, so we drove out to the place and talked with the woman about twenty minutes. Then we parked our trailer beside the apartment and moved in. Then Ima really cried, but for a different reason. She was so happy. This proved to be the best place we had ever lived while in California. And our landlady was a queen.
I went back on the same job, building boxes. Vega had sold out to Lockheed but the change was not noticeable. Lockheed was looking forward to the time when the war would be ended and the company would have to operate with more efficiency. They encouraged employees to submit ideas that might save the company money and speed up work. If an idea was good enough to be adopted and put into use, they would pay for it. I submitted a few ideas, some good, some bad. In all they paid $72 for my ideas.
Much of the time I was at Lockheed I worked in a department where we coated aircraft parts with oil and other coatings for their protection against rust and salt water. The oil was heated before it was applied to the parts. Then when it cooled it became a tough, durable coating. Electric heating units heated the oil, and it got to where the units were not working right. So I asked the electricians to remedy the problem. They mostly ignored my request. After all, who was I, certainly not a bigshot. They didn"t have to obey my request. They treated me as though I were a rug for them to wipe their feet on. And after having trodden me under foot they walked away in a manner altogether unmannerly in the eyes of a Texas farmer. I don"t think they were really a bad sort, maybe just native Californians acting natural. And maybe they were not quite at home when dealing with a Texas farmer who was also acting natural.
Now, I thought I could repair the heating units, but I knew that a country boy like me might get into trouble with the union if I did anything except just what my card said I could do. So, one day when no one was looking, I repaired the units and got the thing to working like it should work. Then in about three weeks the unfriendly pair of electricians came and notified me that they were ready to repair my hot-oil bathtub. When I told them it had been repaired, they were surprised. They didn"t know there were other repairmen around. They asked who did it and I told them. But they didn"t believe me. They left quietly, acting as though they thought I was pulling their leg.
One month the box-building crew was packing airplane nosecones for shipment. They had two men, each working ten hours a day, sawing plywood lumber into oddly shaped pieces to fit snugly against the fragile parts to protect against breakage. I was working in the hot-oil department and I had improved the efficiency of the department to the point where my job was easy and I had a lot of time to loaf.
Many of the boards the men were sawing were inaccurate and had to be thrown away as sc.r.a.p lumber. I recognized their problem and set about to find a solution. Then, working in my spare time one afternoon, I built a jig, made of plywood and fitted onto a sawtable, that enabled me to saw out the pieces accurately and fast.
The next day I used two hours of my spare time and sawed more pieces than the other two men had been sawing in 20 man-hours. Not only that, my pieces fitted better and there were none to throw away. From then on, I sawed out all the pieces in my spare time, and the two sawmen went back to packing nosecones.
One of the Lockheed supervisors saw a lot of the little efficiencies in my work and he told me that, after the war, if I would team up with him, we could make a million dollars. He said that with my brain and his "gab" we could improve the efficiency of factories all over America.
For an example, they gave me charge of the hot-oil department which had been keeping two men busy. I soon had it so I could handle it alone. Then I made more improvements and could loaf half the time. When I took over the job of sawing the plywood pieces, I was doing the work that four men had been doing, and still had time to loaf and see who else needed help. Lockheed was paying me $12 a day and I was saving them the other $36 a day.
During those four months that fall, there was an awareness in the back of my mind that the day was coming when we would need gas to get back to Texas in December. I had saved all the coupons I could, but it looked as though we might be about 25 gallons short. And since I hadn"t worked six months at this job, I knew I wouldn"t be able to get coupons this time. So, I asked my straw-boss, "Don"t you have a gasoline camp stove up overhead in your garage?"
He said, "Sure have. You can use it any time you want to."
I said, "I don"t want to use it, just want to borrow it."
We left it up in his garage. But now that I had one, I went to the ration board and applied for gasoline coupons for it. The lady at the board told me she thought 50 gallons would last six months and she issued me coupons for that amount. And so, in just a few minutes I walked out of there a lot happier than I was when I walked in.
Now we had plenty of coupons to take us to Texas. But we still had a little problem. The coupons each called for two gallons and each one had "stove" printed across the front. Some service station workers might frown on the idea of pumping stove gas into Buick automobiles. So we bought our stove gas in five gallon cans and then poured it into the Buick"s tank after we got away from the station. The Buick liked it. It didn"t know the difference.
Now, you can be sure I didn"t enjoy doing these little things which were maybe just a little bit outside the rigid rules laid down by Washington. Of course I didn"t. And I"m sure Moses didn"t enjoy seeing the waters of the Red Sea close in and engulf thousands of Pharaoh"s soldiers. But we both did what we had to do. I was crossing a Red Sea 1200 miles across-and I made it, just as he made it. I"ll admit there"s one little difference here, G.o.d told Moses to do what he did. I"m not quite sure G.o.d was the one who told me to do what I did. Maybe the devil made me do it.
Anyway, we got back to the Royston farm that last time and stayed until we moved to Arkansas five years later. It was the first of the year of 1945 and Uncle Jim had not yet started to have the papers fixed up for me to buy the farm. I asked him to go ahead and get the abstract in shape for me as agreed. But three months later he still had not begun. It looked as though he had decided not to let me have it. I couldn"t buy it without his cooperation. So I finally made a deal with him to operate the farm on a percentage basis.
CHAPTER 18
BACK AT ROYSTON, WORKED AT GIN AND FOR NEIGHBORS
Throughout all these years, as our children were growing up, we tried to train them to work out their own problems, answer their own questions, and make their own decisions. One Sunday afternoon when the Willinghams were visiting us, Mary and Anita came skipping around the house to ask me if they could go to Hamlin in our car and get some ice to make ice cream. Anita was probably fifteen years old and Mary fourteen. I asked Anita if she had a driver"s license. Of course she didn"t have, but she could drive on back streets and be okay. Then I asked her, "And where is the ice plant?"
"It"s on Main street, but we could walk and carry the ice to a back street."
"It"s 14 miles there and 14 back. You still think it"s all right?"
"Sure, that"s not far."