"Little House on the Hart Ranch"
By Jean Houghton Brizendine 

I was five or six years old when we moved from the Old Curry Place to a small house on the Hart Ranch. It was just a half mile and across the highway from Grandma & Grandpa Houghton's. This was 1933 or 34, and this house was an oil field shack hurriedly built during the oil boom of the 1920's. It had three rooms, a rough plank floor, tin roof, no ceiling, no plasterboards, just the rough framework, rusty screens and screen doors. The outside walls had been made by nailing the boards vertically, with narrower board nailed over each crack. In the South, it would have been called a "shot-gun house". (You could fire a gun through the front door and it would go through every room of the house and out the kitchen door.) Often, when someone was sewing and dropped a needle, it would roll through a crack in the floor. Then it was Joe's job to crawl under the house and look for it. Sometimes a hen would lay an egg under the house and as she ran cackling out of the yard, it was Joe who had to crawl under the house and find the egg.  

The furniture consisted of a bed for the front room, some small steel cots for the kids, a table for the kitchen, two cane­ bottomed chairs, a small trunk, a small "camp" woodstove for cooking, and in winter, a wood heater in the front room.  The one amenity was a gas light in the front room. There were still two oil rigs remaining on the ranch, and the closest one, named Caddo 2, was about a half-mile.  The natural gas from the oil well was piped to the house and two other houses near by. Daddy ran a gas line through the kitchen stove, converting it to   could smell a new baby and as the sounds

Don was a "lap baby" at the time so he was time the only kid to have a place to sit at meal time.  Joe, Rosie, Bill, and I had to stand up to eat.  Aunt Florice, Uncle Charley, and Hugh lived in one of the near‑by houses for awhile. The other two houses were much better than the one we lived in. When Uncle Charley's father, Mr Gordon, came to visit them, he felt sorry for us kids having to stand and eat so he made a bench for each side of the table and we used them for years.  Mama nailed a broom stick across a comer of the middle room at shoulder level. Then she threaded some bailing wire through the hem of an old sheet and hung that in front on the broom stick to make a curtain and, voila! ‑ a closet. The only place to store things was in the small trunk, but it already    held some keepsakes like Daddy's leather chaps and arm guards, and spurs from his cowboy days. He was still wearing his Stetson hat but it was getting old. There was also a dried spray of ferns and rosebuds saved from Earl Benjamin's funeral. He was the first baby in the family and had died when he was a month old. Mama & Daddy mentioned him sometimes, but in later years they never did. Joe was a tiny baby when they lived out in the woods near the Brazos River. 

There was also a huge butcher knife that was used for chopping down corn stalks and other tough jobs. Daddy still teased

Life was tamer on the Hart Ranch. We just had rattlesnakes, chicken snakes that stole the eggs swallowing them whole, owls and chicken hawks that caught the little chickens, and Coons that caught big ones.

One of the highlights during this time was a trip to the Ft. Worth Zoo. Florice and Charley had a big brown sedan and we went with them. Mama woke us up before daylight to get us ready. We took a picnic lunch. The animals at the zoo were really impressive  lions, tigers, giraffes, elephants, monkeys, etc. Then we went to Lake Worth where there was an amusement park and a place to eat our lunch. I remember Don wearing a white sailor suit. He was probably under two years old.  

Another memorable time was when Rose and Henry Whitley came visiting and brought their radio. Henry put his car battery outside the window and hooked up the radio inside, and we listened to music until after midnight.  

About this time Joe and I had to start school. There was no bus service so Mama and the kids moved into Caddo in a tiny house right by the creek. Daddy stayed at the Hart Ranch because he worked on a ranch near Brad. Daddy had taught me how to read before I had started school but the teacher never knew that I could read. She would just call the kids to the reading table who were repeating first grade because they had flunked the year before. I wasn't too impressed by the Dick & Jane books anyway. Even then I was indignant by the sexist slant of the books. "No, no" said Dick. "You can not do that. You are a girl. Girls are silly." And Jane didn't even get a chance for rebuttal.

Mama got sick and Daddy decided to move us back home. School at Caddo would have been six miles away. There was a school at Brad that was just four and a half miles, so Joe and I started school at Brad. We had to walk. It was a shock to be given a reader and be told to have read it through by the next day. It had poems in it that began; "The moon is the north winds cookie... He eats it day by day" and "I wish I knew, I wish I knew what lies beyond they ocean blue" Quite a change from Dick and Jane, and at the end of the year, I won a hair ribbon for making the highest grades in the first grade.

About this time great Grandma Anderson came to live with us. She was living with Grandma & Grandpa Houghton, but she had become bedfast Grandma was n.0 longer able to care for her. Mama would carry her outside every day to sit in the sunshine. Gradually she was able to be up and around. She received an old age pension, but she didn't spend very much. She would buy some canned pears and bananas sometimes. She was in her eighties and had developed the habit of perseverating ‑ just repeating the same stories over and over. She would always say, as she went into the kitchen to get some milk, " I don't really like milk ‑ just the top" (cream). So the rest of us would get to drink skim milk for supper. Every so often she would go to Mineral Wells to visit her daughter, Aunt Mary. Daddy would drive her in our old truck and take her rocking chair, as she would stay several weeks.  

Then Mango and Granddad Anderson came to visit. They drove a fancy little roadster with Isenglass windows. I suppose it was a convertible.  Granddad had to go back to Nevada after awhile, but Mango stayed to help when Frances was born. We really enjoyed her visit. She paid a lot of attention to all the kids. She made a crib for Frances but she couldn't figure out how to make it stand without collapsing, so even though it looked nice, it was never steady enough to use. So Mama raised all the kids with no bottles, pacifiers, cribs, highchairs, play-pens, or baby food. Also no formula or canned milk. The rocking chair got a good workout though, and each baby got a good dose of castor oil. Mango dipped snuff and we collected the glasses that the snuff came in. They made good drinking glasses. Then one day she caught the bus and went back to Nevada.  

Frances had dark red hair, naturally curly, like Mama's. When Mama washed her own hair, she would comb it into long curls until it dried. We always hated to see her comb it back into a bun on the back of her neck. Rosie and I always wished we could have long hair, but most of the girls at that time had short hair. If you could afford it, you could get the back shingled by a barber. If you couldn't, you wore it straight all the way around, just under the ears. And of course, some bangs in the front. Every time our hair would grow a couple of inches we would get our hopes up, but then Mama would get out the scissors. I would usually keep quiet, but sometimes Rosie would wait till the cutting was all over, then mess her hair up and run crying out of the room. She finally got her wish as a teenager and let her hair grow below her waist. It was sure pretty! Who ever got a bath first was lucky. You got nice warm water in the laundry tub set on the floor by the kitchen stove. And even though the towel was thread-bare, at least it was dry. The second, third, or fourth kid didn't fair so well. Mama would keep adding hot water from the tea-kettle, but there wasn't much you could do about the towel, which by this time was getting pretty wet and cold. And the waiting kid would be heard to say to the first kid, "Be sure and don't you know what in the water cause I have to take a bath next."