Will Welton

The overall stuff

Growing up during the 1940’s and 1950’s, in the Choctaw (McCurtain and Choctaw Counties) and Creek Indian (Okmulgee County) Nations of Oklahoma, with the spoken languages of Choctaw, Ojibwa, Spanish and English was an asset in my knowledge of story telling. A reporter for the McCurtain County Gazette told me, “Write down the stories and the things you have done in life for some day they would be useful in keeping the tales of the old folks alive after we all are gone.”

Working various jobs from cowboy and farmer to holding, the positions of Foreman of a bridge gang, with the Saint Louis San Francisco, Railroad and Command Sergeant Major in the Army, gave me the opportunity to meet a wide variety of people. Medically discharged from the military, I did construction work until finally being forced to retire completely because of my health.

Moving near Russellville Alabama because my children came to this area to work and raise my grand-children.

Now I live and play near the Crooked Oak community near seven of my grand-children. The older three grand-children have read all but four of my novels so there is not sexual intent or as much violence as on the evening news. I have written short stories, young adult books, free lance magazine articles, articles for several news papers and write novels about the tales of the old folks when I was growing up. In addition, to the twenty Western novels, I have written two mysteries of modern day times.

The real me

The name of Dumb Okie isn’t meant to defame, antagonize or as a derogatory remark to anyone. Because for the first ten years of my life I thought my first name was Dumb and my family last name was Okie.

I went to school my first year in a one room building. I found out in later years the reason the school was closed. It had two outhouses, one for girls and the other for boys, and no electricity or running water in the building. We got water from a faucet from out in the play yard. However the kids didn’t mind because it was as good as they had at home. None of us had the fancy indoor plumbing, running water or electric lights in our house at home.

The first home that I remembered seemed like it was a very large house. The front room had a bed, dresser with a mirror and a chest of drawers, there was a 4 legged stool setting at the dresser and a tall cabinet type of radio by the front door, which used a six volt car battery for power. In the back room was a cook stove that ran on coal oil with a table and chairs, also there was a wooden box that we put ice chunks in the top and it would keep the food cool. The lighting was a coal oil lamp that set on the dresser and one that set on the kitchen table.

About 20 years latter I went back over and measured the old house. It was only 15 feet wide and 30 feet long not counting the front porch that had been long gone. But the clothes line posts were still there with the remains of an old rope, which probably was mamas, tied to one of the post. She used to tie me to the post to keep me from slipping off to the creek to play.

The radio had a car battery for power. We would take the battery in a small wagon, which was mine, and pull it to town to Gene Folsom’s gas station. It was about 2 miles. He would charge the battery over night and we would come back and get it in a few days. After we dropped the battery of we would stop at the grocery store on the way home and pick up what we needed. Or if it was summer momma would go by the Ice House and get a chunk of ice. She would wrap it in an old quilt and we would take it home as fast as we could, to keep it from melting away.

After the battery had been gone for several days we would go back and get it. On Friday night we would listen to the radio and hear the Green Hornet, Gun Smoke. On Saturday night we would listen to the Grand Old Opera. That is the only times that I remember ever hearing the radio at that house.

There was a man that comes to see momma in the spring of the year. He rode the prettiest black and white paint horse. That is the first memory of Frank Wesley Johnson that I remember. After a while he would bring his grand son over. But that is neither here nor there but for over sixty years now, there is someone always calling me just a Dumb Okie. I guess it is nicer sounding then some of the names my wife, of forty years, calls me. Or what my grandmother Brown and sometimes mama called me by the snide comment of Nigger Indian.

Several years latter we moved about a mile closer to town. We lived in another two room house shotgun house. I know that momma put up wall paper inside the house to try and stop the wind from blowing through the crakes in the outside wall into the house. It was across the street from the Cheetah‘s big two story house. The old lady and her son that could not talk lived there. Our house was owned by Ma Watson. While we were living there Frank Johnson (we all called him PAPA), came to the house one night and he had been shot twice. I know that he bleed a lot and wouldn’t let mama get the laws.

I started school at Herndon Public School. It had 3 rooms and an auditorium, where the third grade class was taught. All the rooms were used for class. I remember the first spanking that the teacher gave me. It was a cloudy day and she turned on the light hanging from the middle of the room. I had never seen electric lights before and I would just set and look at the light. We always had coal oil lamps. The school bully and I had several fights. Mrs. Haskins finely figured out that spanking us did no good. She finely made us put on one of her old dresses and made us wear them all day.

I was in the second or third grade of the White man’s school before I found out that Dumb Okie wasn’t my name. Mrs. Pine, the teacher, came to my desk and asked my name. I told her it was “Dumb Okie” and that’s what everybody called me. She said, “From now on your first name is Will and your last name is Welton.”

Momma and Papa got married and we moved over to Jamaica Street (that was what it was later named). I still went to Herndon school which was over a mile to school. I would walk about 6 blocks to the railroad tracks then walk the tracks for about half a mile and then cut over two blocks to the school. In the middle of the school year I was sent to George School but it still was about a mile in the other direction from where we lived. There was no such thing as a school bus run in town back then.

At the time I didn’t know what a bootlegger was. I just knew that Eddie and I would help mix, cook, and bottle what we were not supposed to drink. We feed the mash or waste to the hogs and would try to keep the horses and chickens out of it. Once when I was in junior high we had a horse knock the top off of one of the mash barrels. That was a sight to see. One drunken horse trying to walk. He finally leaned up to the side of the barn until he sobered up. We use to hide the whiskey and the home brew under the house in the summer time to keep the home brew from blowing up. We all so hide several small kegs of whiskey down on the creek that was about 100 yards from the house.

The summer when I turned nine years old I was told that I had a father living near Henrietta Oklahoma. Until then I really hadn’t thought about a father for a lot of the other kids I knew in Little Italy, (Never figured out way it was called that because there weren’t any Italians living over there with us Mexicans, Indians, Half breeds or other folks), that didn’t have a father at home. From then own I would go up to see him for the Christmas vacation in school and during the summer months. Several times in the fall of the year during harvest break in school we would load up and go pick cotton (A story of its own).

The summer I turned twelve years old I remember the fall of the year most. That is the time I started going with my step-brother, he had kids older than me, and hauling fence post out of the mountains. The dried post was fine to handle but the green ones were heavy and at times I would have to drag one end up on the truck and then pick up the other end and shove it so my step-brother could settle the post on the truck bed. This hard work didn’t hurt me a bit for I grew to, at the age of sixteen, six foot four inches tall and weighted in at one hundred seventy-five pounds.

While I was in Junior High School, Papa quite making Spirits and stuck to doing a little horse trading. We killed hogs and would salt the meat and smoke a lot of it. We always raised a big garden and trained a lot of horses. Papa at one time in his early years did a lot of horse trading {that is a story by its self.

When I was starting high school I was getting thrown out of the State Theater about every time I went to see the show, for one reason or the other. Jessie Gore, the owner, finally gave me a choice. I could either work for him as a floor bouncer or not ever come back to the theater. I worked for him for several years doing odd jobs. I was still going to school. I would work as a bouncer, run the projection machines and even clean the theater. That is where I meet Len Green a reporter for the local news paper. Through them giving me a lot of advice, which helped me to become a writer, and what little guidance they could get through my thick skull, I am thankful to them.

Then came the time the judge offered me a deal, which I couldn’t refuse, and I accepted. Because of his deal, which is another story, I saw my first airplane on the ground and close up and personal. That was the start of my being around the Army. However after nine months and almost half a tour in Vietnam some one figured out I wasn’t seventeen and had a guardian sign for me to be in the Army. In later years I worked on the bridge crew of the local railroad. Drove long haul and short haul for the Express Company and later finished out my military career. I was kicked out of the Army on a medical discharge because of physically unfit for combat duty. Other word I was getting to old and encrypted to do my job of being in the military.

I hope that some day that I will be among them Dumb Okies that were famous in their own time. You probably know some of whom I’m talking about. The little red haired girl named Reba from near Atoka Oklahoma which has sold Billions of records and C.D. Or the gent from up near Choctaw named Garth which has recorded under two different names to see if his records would sell on their own merit and not because he recorded a song. He got fooled and sold over a million copies of that record album and when he told who had been the one singing was him, it sold a few more million copies.

But there are hundreds of stories about us Dumb Okies. Even a few got tired of looking at the moon and wanted to go there. They never made it to the moon but are among the Okies, which became Astronuts, so that got a closer look from piloting the space shuttle.

At my age I’m just glad that someone calls me a Dumb Okie for I’m proud to be one. In some of the stories from my books are how I came to be called that and the word I would use to identify the person that called me that name in a derogatory remark type of way. They just weren’t smart enough to realize how true that might be the case.

I’ll put some of the stories mentioned above at the tail end of some of my novels. In case you might want to catch up on some more of my stories.