The Land of Enchantment

     Today's bolg is a walk down memory lane.  My motivation for writing it is two-fold.  First they are my memories and I love them and second, they are a slice of American history that will give you a rare glimpse into a time and place that helped make up the American experience.  Probably, not all of you will appreciate it, but some will and that's all I can expect.  If even one of my readers like it, I'll consider it a success.
     I grew up in southeastern New Mexico, mostly in oil camps.  Now an oil camp is an outdated thing so it warrants some explanation.  My dad worked for Gulf Oil Corporation and at that time they provided housing for their employees in the field.  There were no big corporate offices there where men and women with brief cases filed in every day.  This is where men worked on the wells.  They maintained them, guarded them and serviced the industry that provided oil from the fields to the refineries.  My dad was a "switcher".   I'm not sure of the particulars of his job but I do remember that he traveled across the dessert in a jeep or a pickup and did something  to the many wells that dotted the New Mexico landscape.
     The "camp" where we lived consisted of a row of six modest homes, which housed the families of the employees.  Most of my childhood memories centered around the camps and the people who lived there.  We lived in two different camps while I was growing up.  One was south of Eunice, New Mexico and the other was north of the town.  When I reached high school age Gulf Oil got out of the employee housing business, we all bought the homes we lived in and had them moved to a lot in Eunice. Ours still stands on the same lot today.
     In 1944 we moved to our first camp south of Eunice.  I was six years old and just beginning elementary school.  To put the time in perspective, we lived there at the end of World War II and during the time when Roosevelt died.  My mom and dad were Democrats when Democrats were still conservative, so they mourned the President's death like he was a member of their family.  One of Daddy's friends who worked in the oil fields with him was a German man whose mother was in a concentration camp in Germany during the war years.  I don't know why she was there.  Perhaps they were Jewish.  I just remember the man crying as he talked about her.  It left a strong impression on my six year old heart to see a grown man cry about his mom and I would go to bed at night and pray for them and cry when I did.  I've never forgotten his face although I can no longer remember his name.  I don't know what finely happened to his mom.
     We had a barn that Daddy built a distance away from the camp.  Daddy was always a farmer at heart so he kept a pig, some chickens, and a cow at the barn.  I raised rabbits and pigeons to sell.  People in New Mexico ate them and sales were always good.  I sold them for a dollar a piece and I remember one month I deposited sixty dollars into my account.  At that time that was a lot of money for a eight year old kid.
     The families in the camp were our friends and neighbors.  I'll not name them all because I'm sure I'd miss someone, but as a child some of them made distinct impressions on me because they had kids who were my friends.  We visited back and forth between our homes.  We played together, rode our bikes out across the prairies, and played croquet at the camp croquet court till our moms called us in for supper.       
     In the summer when the weather was too hot for us to play outside, Mrs. Sanders would occasionally call us all to her house where there was a big air conditioner in the living room.  There she would read us the children's classics.  We'd spend many hot hours of the afternoons listening to Bambi, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Heidi, The Bobsy Twins, The Secret Garden, just to name a few.
     There was an old sway backed mare who lived at a nearby ranch.  Occasionally she would come up to the fence around the camp to graze.  When she did one of the kids would yell, "Black Beauty is here!"  We'd all run to the fence to pet her and feed her apples or carrots and climb up onto the fence then onto her back, where we'd take turns riding her while she grazed.  On the back of that trusty steed, our imaginations carried us away.  We would look out across the prairie landscape and see tumbling tumble weeds, cactus and mesquite bushes and imagine being chased by a band of wild Indians or a posse.  To us she was Trigger, Champion and Black Beauty all rolled into one beautiful, majestic, animal.
     One morning one of the Sanders boys, while gathering radishes from his mother's garden, felt a sting on his bare foot.  His toes were protruding just under the plants.  He jerked  back
and when he did there was a rattle snake connected to his foot.  He jumped and shook it off.  The snake slithered away and the boy ran screaming into the house.  Someone administered first aid then took him into town to the E.R.  From that day on, we were not allowed to leave the house without a "snake bite kit" which consisted of a belt, to use as a tourniquet, a small pen knife, for cutting an X over the bite and a small bottle of alcohol to sterilize it with.  We were given careful instructions about how it use it and it became part of our lives.  Thankfully I never had to use it, but I was prepared.
     Later that year another of the Sanders boys found a 22 bullet and decided to stick it into his dad's ciggarette lighter in his pickup. then look at it to see what would happen.  Well it shot him but fortunately just grazed the side of his head.  My dad said it probably wouldn't have penetrated his skull anyway.  I guess the Sanders boys were a constant source of excitement for us all.
      One of my favorite memories of the camp was when one of the neighbors would decide to make homemade ice cream and send the word out through the neighborhood and invite us to bring our bowls and spoons and "come on over".  We all took turns doing this on those hot summer evenings and it was a wonderful time.
      At some point during these years, my mother went to work in the school lunch room.  She then became the alternate "bus driver" for all the kids in camp who missed the bus.  I think some of them did it on purpose because they hated the bus ride.  On those mornings someone would inevitably read us a story while we traveled the 20 miles to school.  Usually it was a fairy tale which was short and interesting.  If there was no fairy tale reader then Mother would turn on the radio and we'd listen to "Don McNiel and the Breakfast Club".  I don't know which I liked more.  They were both fun and made going to school something we looked forward to every morning.
     I was a pre-teen when we moved to the second camp, north of Eunice.  I hated leaving my friends in the first camp but quickly made new ones there.  That's where I met the Kemps, the Tates, the Browns and the Hunters.  All of these families had multiple children.  There we ran and played hide and seek and tag on the lawns between our homes till 8:30 or 9:00 p.m. when we all had to go in.  We rode our bikes, explored the prairie, wrote plays and performed them in some one's garage or home.  I was the story teller of the group and sometimes we'd just sit in a circle on the lawn while I spun a tale.  Or we'd challenge each other to "make up a poem" about something or other. 
     Christmas time was always an adventure.  We'd open our gifts at our homes in the morning, then roam the camp, going from house to house to see what our friends got for Christmas.  We'd play the games, try on their new clothes or ride their new bikes.  It was a shared holiday on so many levels.  I was never hungry for Christmas dinner because by the time I got home I was filled to the gills with the neighbor's Christmas goodies.
     We didn't have Televisions in our homes, so in the winter time we listened to the radio.   We had tele without the vision.  The visions took place in our heads as we laid on the floor or a couch or sat cross legged in front of a big mahogany radio and listened to Fibber Maggee and Molly, George and Gracie Allen, Digger O'dell, The Friendly Undertaker, The Jack Benny Show,  The Bob Hope Show, The Green Hornet, The Squeaky Door, Our Miss Brooks,  I'm sure there were a hundred of them of which these are only a few.  They provided hours of entertainment on the cold winter evenings and I looked forward to them and hated missing even one.  We listened until we had to go to bed and sometimes I went to sleep still listening to the music coming from that radio.
     About age sixteen or seventeen, I was allowed to date twice a week on Friday and Saturday nights.  I had to be in the house by eleven and my Mother was very cleaver about it.  As soon as my boyfriend would pull up into the yard at 10:30 and turn his car lights off, our porch light would go on.  Soon Mother would poke her head out the front door and call out to us, "I just made a big banana pudding.  If you kids would like some just come on in and help yourselves." or, "I have a fresh freezer of homemade ice cream in the sink, if you'd like some, come on in."  She always enticed us inside with something because she wisely knew that teenage boys were as driven by their stomachs as any other part of their anatomy.  I probably owed my purity when I married, more to my mother's banana puddings, homemade ice cream, apple pies and prune nut cakes than anything else. 
     One of my favorite memories of my childhood was going hunting with my dad.  As I said before, his job took him out across the New Mexico prairies in a jeep or a pickup.  As he drove along on or off a dirt road, he took his twenty-two rifle and sometimes a shotgun.  He was always coming upon jack rabbits, doves, quail or some other edible critter and they often were our supper for the night.  So at age 12 he taught me to shoot a gun.  I got quite good at hitting something with the rifle.  I could hit a jack rabbit on the run from a moving truck.  But I hated the shotgun.  It kicked me and bruised my shoulder and besides I hated shooting doves and quail because they were such beautiful, gentle creatures.  He had trained our cocker spaniel, Charlie, to retrieve the birds and taught me to shoot them in flight, but dove hunting was not my favorite.  This led to his teaching me to drive the pickup so he could hunt.  So by age twelve I could shoot and drive. I remember begging him every year to take me deer hunting with him in northern New Mexico but he wouldn't take me.  He always went with a group of men so it was a man's trip.  I doubt that I could have shot a deer anyway, after being brain washed by Mrs. Sander's stories of Bambi and  The Yearling. Hunting was a wonderful bonding experience with my dad.  Mother said one time that Daddy was very dissapointed when I reached age 14 or 15 and he found out I was a girl!  As a young wife stationed with my Airman husband in Constantina, Spain, I entered a shooting contest on base during the Feria celebration.  In the contest there were G.I's, Spanish guards, me and our commander's wife.  She and I were both from New Mexico.  She came in first and I came in second in the contest.  Our husbands never lived it down.
     Now perhaps this hasn't been one of your favorite blogs, but I felt it was important for people to know how it was being a kid growing up in the West in the '40's and '50's.  When I look back on it I realize how blessed we were to have grown up in The Land of Enchantment!