Louis Mitchell "Bud" Peters

RS: This is Regan Siler with the Bristow Historical Society in Bristow, Oklahoma. This interview is part of the Historical Society's ongoing oral history project. The date is May 7th, 2024, and I'm sitting here with Louis Peters, which I call you, Bud.

LP: Yeah.

RS: If that's okay.

LP: Yeah.

RS: At the Bristow Library Annex. He's going to tell me a little bit about his life and his history living in the Bristow area.

RS: All right. Can you please state your full name?

LP: Louis, L-O-U-I-S, Mitchell Peters.

RS: Okay. And you do go by Bud or Buddy?

LP: My sister got that done. She was trying to, when she was learning to talk, she was she would, she couldn't say Louis, so she called me Buddy. But when I got it, everyone started calling me Buddy then. 00:01:00And then, except for my Grandpa Peters. And he called me, he called me Junior. And when I got old enough, I said, why do you call me Junior? He said, Louis, your dad is senior. You’re Louis, Junior. Okay!

RS: Okay, that makes sense.

LP: Okay, okay. I know.

RS: All right, so I have to ask, do I have permission to record this interview?

LP: Yes.

RS: Okay. All right, let's get started. Can you tell me when and where you were born?

LP: I was born, my grandpa Newell [Clarence Newell], we call him Papa. All of us kids called him Papa Newell and Mom Newell [Celeste Leona Goodmon Newell], his wife. And, they 00:02:00had a dairy one mile east of Bristow. And you turn south and it goes right up in to their farm. They had a, at the time back then, they had 160 acres and they… RS: And tell me again which direction was this?

LP: Go south, go one mile east and turn south.

RS: Okay.

LP: And, the last living son is living there. He's never left it.

RS: Okay.

LP: He built his own home. Their home got so dilapidated, and it was built from way back.

They used to grow cotton out there, even, and my mom was a baby. They would take her along and set her in in a row, and people picking cotton. And they paid her to pick it. And so, but they wound up all that went away, and they wound up getting a dairy farm and a lot of dairy cows.

And him and my Mom Newell, my Grandma Newell, had certain cows they milked, and they knew he would let in two at a time and put some shorts, I think he called it, some kind 00:03:00of flake stuff in a feed trough. And they had them little three-legged stools, and she would sit her on hers and you’re sitting almost on the floor. And she put her head in the flank of the cow and milk the cow by hand. And wasn’t no machines. And he did, too. And once in a while you had a cow, you knew which one it was, would tend to move their feet. And, that that didn't work well, so he put shackles on them where they would stand still. And they did that for years and years and years.

RS: So, this is Papa, and you called her… LP: Mom Newell.

RS: Papa and Mom Newell.

LP: Yeah, my mom’s mom and dad.

RS: Your mom’s…okay. And, so you told me you were actually born at this farm?

LP: We was born, almost all of us kids were born at that farm.

RS: And what was your date of birth?

LP: June 25, 1950.

RS: So almost all the kids were born at the farm?

LP: Almost all of them.

RS: So did you… LP: All my cousins.

RS: So, did they have like a doctor come out or did you just?

LP: Yeah, yeah. There's another story. My mom was, went 00:04:00into labor… RS: With you or with your?

LP: Yeah, with me.

RS: Okay.

LP: I was, I was, I was fixing to be born here at some point. And, my dad didn't have his car, so, and it’s almost a mile, close to three-quarters of a mile at least, south, down that road to their house. And, he had to run. There was no car there. He had to run to Bristow on foot. And he ran down that road and ran down the highway going toward Bristow. And someone finally stopped and picked him up before he got all the way. And he wound up getting Dr. Coppedge, was one of the old doctors that came in to Bristow, you know, when Bristow was starting.

RS: Dr. Coppedge?

LP: Yeah.

RS: Coppedge, okay.

LP: And he had to pull me. I was too big. And, so he had these, some kind 00:05:00of tongs or forceps or whatever they are, and pull me. And, so he had he had good strength in his hand because they wound up my head was like. And, so he wound up, there would all gather up out there at my Grandma and Grandpa Newell’s farm, and the sisters and brothers, and they ended up rubbing my head, until it’s round. It was like everybody else ought to be. But anyway… RS: They were trying to smooth your head out?

LP: Yeah, yeah. And it worked.

RS: Oh, my goodness.

LP: And then, Dr. King [E.W. King or Emery Wilbur King], I don't know if you ever heard him?

RS: Yes, yes I have.

LP: Dr. King was an amazing guy, and he he came out and I was jaundiced, I guess you call it jaundice or something like that. You’re kind of yellow.

RS: When you’re yellow.

LP: And, so, he said, well it’s June. He said, I tell you what you do, you take a diaper or something or tea towel or whatever, roll it up and put it over his eyes. Lay him in the sun. And don’t let him cook. 00:06:00Just lay him out there for a little while, and it pulls it out. And it did.

RS: It worked.

LP: It was amazing. Yeah.

RS: That's awesome. So, can you tell me, you called them Papa and Mom Newell, but do you have, what are their actual names?

LP: It was Thaddeus, no, his name was, no, his name was, Clarence.

RS: Clarence?

LP: Clarence.

RS: Okay.

LP: And I'm trying to think of her name. I never knew, I don't know if...

RS: Because you always called them Papa and Mom.

LP: Yes, she was Mom Newell. You didn't say anything else. It was just Mom Newell.

RS: Well, that's okay, we can we can get that information later. So, let's back up a little bit. Can you, in still talking about your family, can you tell me about your parents? So, what are your parent’s names? And if you had any step-parents, what, what are their names?

LP: My dad was Louis, 00:07:00same name as mine, Joseph Peters.

RS: Okay.

LP: And hers was Rita Fern Newell before she got married.

RS: Rita Fern Newell. And then didn't you have a step-dad?

LP: Yeah, I wound up, dad got his back broken. He was working for Oklahoma Natural Gas and had some kind of an accident and his back was broken. It was really bad. Real bad. And they were, of course, the doctors were, to do anything, was in Tulsa, so they’d have to drive to Tulsa. They had a little Ford Falcon, and they thought they were getting somewhere with his back. And they drove 66, when the turnpike had been put in, and someone come down off the turnpike and, and hit, hit them in the side, passenger side… RS: Oh no!

LP: Which was where my dad was sitting because he couldn't drive. She, my mom drove. And rolled them over, and, there he was in such a bad state again. And, so, they did surgery.

RS: So, he had a double, he had a double whammy, then with having an accident at work and then a car accident?

LP: Yeah. 00:08:00And, didn't, thank God it didn't kill either one of them, but just messed him all up. He was wearing back braces and all kinds of primitive back braces. I mean, they were… RS: Not like it is now.

LP: Not too good. Yeah. And, so he was such a mess, and so wound up having to move to Tulsa and, course she had to get a job. He could he could not work. And he was wound up being unable to do anything. And, he did finally get to where he could walk. But, she was working and, and so wound up she, she could kind of see the writing on the wall. That life was not going to be the same and, so she, one of her sisters had moved up to Tulsa. And, so and she was single. So, my mom, you know, with her, and she met someone else, turned out to be my step-dad.

RS: And what was his name?

LP: Gene, Gene Vernon Pierce.

RS: Gene Vernon Pierce. Okay.

LP: He was, he did, eyeglasses 00:09:00and stuff, like optician. And he had a business.

RS: So basically, your mom remarried, and you had to move to Tulsa?

LP: We moved to Tulsa with him and his kids. His wife had took off.

RS: And how old where you? How old were you when that happened?

LP: Oh gosh, I was… RS: I think Scott had told me maybe around 00:10:00 14?

LP: Well, no, I wasn't that old at the time.

RS: You weren’t that old?

LP: I was about ten years old.

RS: Okay.

LP: And, luckily for me, his two sons were younger than me, and, and they had one daughter and their mom had took off and, and left them, so he had his three kids, and then me and my sister moved in.

RS: Tell me about your sister. What is her name?

LP: Barbara Jean, J-E-A-N [Barbara Peters Maroon].

RS: And is that your only sibling?

LP: That's my only sibling. Yeah.

RS: So, Barbara Jean. And so, was she older or younger?

LP: No, she's younger.

RS: Younger.

LP: Yeah.

RS: So, you and Barbara and your mom moved to Tulsa. Okay. And your mom got into secretarial work at that time, is that what… LP: She was working for, I can't think of the name of, I can't remember the name of the place, but it was, it did technical equipment, and she 00:11:00was, she was actually one of the people that checked all the equipment that was being built down the line. She was over a line of women that was working there. And, so she would check everything, make sure everything was right.

And, they wound up, we had kind of a, a two-story house, and they, they went to, to picketing, and they were wanting something, whatever they were wanting… RS: Where she worked at they were....okay?

LP: Where she worked at, and she couldn't afford not to work.

RS: Right.

LP: So, she would cross the picket line, and we wound up, someone drove down the street and threw a bomb at our house.

RS: Oh, my goodness!

LP: And it just missed going through a window and hit the, just beside the door in a in a bedroom window or it would have been catastrophic.

RS: And this was because of the picket line?

LP: Yeah. She crossed the picket 00:12:00line so she could work.

RS: And because she crossed the picket line.

LP: We had to have food and pay the rent.

RS: So, if you don't mind, can we back up just a little bit, because I want to capture your time before you moved to Tulsa as a younger person. So, did you, before you moved and before your parents divorced, did you live near any of your family? And, can you tell me…I know that you spent a lot of time with Mom and Pop Newell.

LP: Oh, yeah.

RS: And at their dairy farm. Can you tell me about that? Can you tell me about your experiences there? Like what they were like. What were your favorite things to do?

LP: Oh, they were, they were, they were country folks. And they were, they were all about country. They had horses, and the dairy farm. And they had a lot of, a lot of chickens.

RS: I have one story I want to ask you about. You know, I did my research, so I talked to Scott a little bit before this interview. He wanted me to ask you about the neighbor lady's flower bed.

LP: Oh, jeez! Yeah, I wound up loving her.

RS: He said you became good pals.

LP: Yeah.

RS: But it took a little getting there.

LP: She was such a wonderful lady. We, I'd be outside playing and, of course, rough and rowdy, 00:13:00she would come out of her house, her name was Mrs. Donovan.

RS: Mrs. Donovan.

LP: And that's all I knew, that’s all I knew her by is Mrs. Donovan.

RS: Okay.

LP: And, she was, way up in years in, about like me now, and but she was her health wasn't good. And, I remember she had flags or flag flowers that stand up real tall. And a big stem under them. And she had them all the way around the house, all different colors. And I was doing something over there, I'm sure that I would to be doing, and she, she hollered at me and scolded me, thought I might get hurt. And, and 00:14:00so I didn't like that. And, so I quit and stick my tongue out and I quit. And when she went back in the house, I got me a stick and broke all her flags. They were all like this.

RS: Oh, no!

LP: And, and, she she'd seen me out the window - too late. And it was, it was [undecipherable] hollered at my grandpa, and I got a swat. And they had one of them old bathtubs with the claw foot sticking up…said you bend over. You did wrong. And, so he told me, he said I got, I just got one swat, and it wasn't all that bad. Grandpa was not a meanie, you know.

RS: Right.

LP: And, so I wound up carrying groceries for her. There was a store down the block, and she would call it in, and they would tell her how much, and she…I would go down here, had to carry her groceries back to her house. Well, she was making cookies while I was gone and told me, come on 00:15:00in, and we sat down and talked, and see here, I love chocolate. Well, chocolate chip cookies, so she had me come in and sit down. Got me some juice or something or other. I don’t remember what it was. But I was eating really good chocolate chip cookies. And we sat and talked. And, so I wound up loving her.

RS: You ended up getting to know her and having a good relationship with her.

LP: Yeah, yeah.

RS: So how old do you do you have any idea how old you were?

LP: I was probably about eight.

RS: Eight.

LP: Somewhere around eight years old. And, and had a mean side.

RS: But isn't it funny how it works out?

LP: Yeah.

RS: You know, you be an ornery ended up giving you a good relationship with her.

LP: She was a wonderful lady.

RS: Right.

LP: She really was.

RS: That's awesome.

LP: So, I'd help her do anything, you know?

RS: Right. So, another thing Scott mentioned, was your Grandpa Peters known as Em, I guess.

LP: Yeah.

RS: Was famous for making homemade tamales.

LP: Oh, my gosh, yeah, yeah. He had an old grinder that you could clamp on the edge of a table and grind it. And, so he’d do that, he didn't 00:16:00do it all, all the time. He did it just once in a while. And, so I got to turn the grinder.

RS: Oh.

LP: I said let me help, so I could turn the grinder. He'd get the, I went with him one time, and he would get pork and beef. And I used to get my sister, too. We'd take off, he'd go down by Slick. I think it was, I don't remember if it was Fisher’s Farm or who it was. Juedeman’s had a farm, too, there. And, but he got corn shucks. They raised big, gigantic gardens and stuff, and sold all that. And, so we’d go out and he’d pick out a whole bunch of corn shucks and take them home and put them in a big, big ol’ pot and, and get it hot water and boil them and he'd get them and they’d lay flat. He’d lay them all out flat, let him dry, and then cut them and make just nice square ends on it. And he’d want one about that long, 00:17:00and he’d cooked all that meat. And he'd get all that stuff and some kind of a, corn meal or something like that. He’d put it on there, a layer was a big, big tablespoon and smear it out, and then stack all this meat up, and had a little bit of spice to it. And, he would roll them up, crimp the ends and set them in this, steamer, some kind of steamer pot or something. He had to put some water in the bottom and had a tray put in there, metal tray, to hold them up out of the water and cook them. And, boy, people… RS: Best tamales ever?!

LP: From all over the place, oh my gosh. Yeah. He was famous for tamales. And my Grandpa Newell delivered milk.

RS: So, so both of your grandparents, your the your Newell grandparents, they lived on a dairy farm and then so you had, Grandpa Peters [Ira “Em” Emerson Peters], who 00:18:00was known as Em, what was what was your grandma's name, or what did you call her?

LP: Just grandma [Cora Grace “Gracie’ Peters].

RS: Just grandma? Okay, and so they lived on a farm also?

LP: No, they lived at 420 South Chestnut.

RS: Oh, okay.

LP: Yeah. Right there on Chestnut.

RS: So, they lived in town. Okay.

LP: Right on the corner.

RS: Okay.

LP: And, their uh… RS: So, did you spend a lot of time with both sets of grandparents or one more than the other?

LP: Well, both of them because, they were going back and forth to doctors with dad, and when I was little and, he was just having a bad time. They ain't got the doctors we have today. And, so we wound up staying a lot of time them. Well grandpa, here’s another story, grandpa would take us, he had a… RS: And this is Grandpa Peters?

LP: Grandpa Peters, he had a little shed, just big enough for one. He had an 00:19:00old Ford, and he parked that thing in there, but he made his own fishing poles. The cane poles. And he had throw lines in, like, you know, about ten or twelve feet long and put a piece of chain on the end of it. And he had got all his own hooks. He made everything himself. And we’d go down there, well, he would he had a, like a big tub, metal tub upside down with the open end down on the ground. He'd take coffee grounds, he had me follow him. He said, I want you watch me what I do, and it was just dirt. There were no grass or anything under it. He would spread out these coffee grounds and sometimes some kind of scrap foods and stir it in, and you put that tub back down, upside down with the open end on the ground and put a rock on top of it. He had one rock, he had put it on top, so wind wouldn’t blow it away. And you could go out there and turn that, move that rock and turn that tub over, and you could get a shovel and stick in there, and you had worms, fishing worms just galore.

RS: I’m going to make note of that!

LP: It was amazing. How many worms you could get out 00:20:00of that thing. And, so we'd put them in a big can and he'd take me and Barbara Jean, I always called her Barbara Jean, we’d take Barbara Jean, he'd take us out to the city lake, and he’d go up there where the armory is and kind of right there where you could park, and they got parking spots up there now. You could go down and go down the bank, and there was a, a tree down there that was in the water, usually be turtles on it, and they liked to have a place to sit. And, so we sit down there. Barbara Jean was a lot smaller than me, and he’d put a worm on the hook, so she wouldn't stick her finger, and I did my own. We'd 00:21:00pitch it out there and, he said, she caught a fish and it was about to take her pole away from her, and she was trying to hold on to it, and he seen her. He said, let me help you. He said, you've caught that dog-gone turtle. Well, it wasn’t. It was the biggest catfish I'd ever seen.

RS: Oh my gosh!

LP: Yeah. It's huge.

RS: And she was a little bitty, right?

LP: Yeah, she was a little bitty thing. And, so he let me have that girl. He took that pole and pulled it in. It was huge catfish. Well, he said, okay, let's let's go home. We can show this to grandma. And we went, well, he was gonna, he had a post that held up the carport that he parked under, and he would always drive a big nail through a catfish head and then skin it and gut it and all that stuff, get ready to eat. And, she was having a fit and she said, no, no, you can't do that. Mom and dad's in Tulsa. They got to see this fish I caught. 00:22:00You can't do that. You have to wait.

RS: She wanted to show it off.

LP: Put it in that bath tub. It had the claw feet thing on it. It was a long bathtub. He had put water in the tub and leave it dripping. And the catfish’s head was at the drain and a tail went around and curved back around and it was so big.

RS: Oh, my goodness.

LP: And I don't know what that thing weighed. He didn’t have his scales. But it was huge.

RS: So, would you say that fishing was one of your favorite memories… LP: Oh my gosh, yeah.

RS: …that you had with your with with that set of grandparents?

LP: What he’d do when was just usually doing that and didn't have a big fish like that, we'd get a whole bunch of perch, catch a bunch of perch, we'd take him down to Deep Fork at Three Bridges, and we'd put out lines. And, he and I’d sit down there sometimes we'd, he'd build a little fire, and we’d cook some bacon or something on a stick and have something to snack on.

RS: Those are some of probably some of the best times 00:23:00ever, wouldn’t you say?

LP: Oh, yeah.

RS: I feel like we missed, missed that a lot in today’s times.

LP: I'll never forget it.

RS: Do you have, like, a favorite memory being at your Papa and Mom Newell’s farm? What were some of your favorite memories from there?

LP: Oh, yeah, riding. They had a creek down there that went through their place. Was a little ways from the house. And all us, all his cousins, we'd all go down there, and a little hole you could swim one part of it, a little bit deep enough but you couldn’t drown in it. But, unless someone held you under. We didn't fight, so we didn't fuss and fight. So, we'd go down there, play in the water and get all messy. She told us, when we honk that horn, you come a running. And, so we knew that the women were all in the house and the guys were, of course, they played music, and in the living room. And I had one uncle, 00:24:00that was married to one of my mom’s sisters. He played the steel guitar. Oh, he could really play it. And, my uncle Mike Newell played the guitar and sang, and my dad played harmonicas. And, so… RS: I bet that was awesome.

LP: Oh, they had an awesome deal going every time where we would just sit and listen and they’d sing a lot of cowboy songs, a lot of church songs that they knew, and they all knew that. And, so we'd sit there and just soak it all up. And, we had horses, too. We had horses, and when I got old enough, they, going to let me pick out a horse and, and I picked out this one horse. He was mean! He turned out to be real mean.

RS: So, you picked a mean one?

LP: Yeah, I guess I didn't know he was, but he, my uncle Mike, and Clarence Earl, his brother, older brother, and, they were both big. Mike was a rodeo guy. He was a rodeo, he was in a lot of rodeos. And they just 00:25:00couldn’t throw him off. But they sure did me. They had a, he had a great big, right out in front of the house, arena, built out of big, like, big railroad ties and stuff, and it was real big wood. And it hadn’t been used in a long time, so sticker bushes had grown up in there. And they got this horse, caught it, and we had all the kinfolk out there. There was a mob of us, and it was like going to a rodeo, and told me, I never been in a horse like that. He told me, said, hold this. Hold his reins real tight and one circle, and he’d go in a circle. Well, that didn’t last very long. You trying to hold on to the saddle.

RS: Right.

LP: Yeah. Never mind the reins, and just hold on. And I got stickers.

RS: Oh no!

LP: He threw me off and they caught him, caught him again.

RS: Were you, how old were you around this time do you think?

LP: Oh, I was probably, probably 00:26:00about 13 or 14.

RS: Okay.

LP: And, so it wound up I got back on him again, and of course, it was bad again. I went right down, pull more stickers out.

RS: Oh no!

LP: And one of the other boys, who was older than me, he thought, I could ride that horse. They took him to the doctor.

RS: Oh no!

LP: Yeah, yeah, he didn’t, he didn’t ride nothing but the ground. And, so, he was in bad shape. Well, not real bad, but he needed help. So, Mike caught the horse and his brother, older brother, Clarence Earl, had his horse saddled up, and so they took off. He couldn’t throw Mike, and so, they rode all over the place, all over the acreage 00:27:00and came back, and the horse was kinda, he thought it was wore out. He wasn’t causing any problems.

RS: And this was while Mike was on him?

LP: Yeah, yeah, yeah, he could just ride ‘em.

RS: Right.

LP: So, they came back in, finally, and tied it up, and he was kind of lathered up, too, so the horse was. So, he said, you can ride him now. So, I got on the horse by the house and we started south toward the, and the wind was out of the south, and I was wearing a cowboy hat. Well, the wind blew a pretty good gust and blew my hat off and hit him on the rump, and away we went!

RS: Oh no!

LP: He turned and went toward the pond just all of the sudden and turned like pointing with my right hand, and he turned that way real sharp, but I hit the ground and knocked my thumb out of joint trying to catch myself. So, they caught him, again, Clarence Earl 00:28:00and Mike did, and he got my thumb back in place, and it was terrible.

RS: Did you give up horse riding after that?

LP: Yeah, I said I am done with that horse. I’ll ride one that’s old and feeble and won’t want to throw me.

RS: Right. Oh, my goodness.

LP: It wound up, but it was a lot of good memories and stuff and, so, it didn’t hurt me or anything.

RS: Right. Well, I think growing up on the farm, that always makes for good memories. There’s lots of things, especially when you have your cousins and everyone’s there to hang out with.

LP: I found a story out about my mom, too, when they were little, her sisters, she had sisters, and they were down by the barn and they had some calves.

RS: And this was at the Newell’s?

LP: At the Newell Ranch, and they had one big stall down there when you walked in the barn, and it had fence around. And they had some calves in there, and this calf, they were down, the girls were down there playing around, 00:29:00and this calf stepped on my mom’s foot. She said a dirty word. S-H-I-T, I think, and pushed it off of her. The other girl went up and told Mom Newell. She washed her mouth out with soap.

RS: Oh no!

LP: They actually do that. She said she was mad at her sister then for a while. She couldn’t get mad at Mom Newell because she would get everything straightened out. You know not to say anything. You don’t talk like that. It was a big laugh, anyway, when I heard about it.

RS: That’s funny. So, during childhood, say, when you still lived, you know, around Bristow, do you remember having any favorite toys, or any particular games that you played as a young child?

LP: Well, I played, 420 S. Chestnut is the house that’s got, they lived there for, I think, somewhere close to 40 years.

RS: Oh my!

LP: Rented, rented, all that time.

RS: Oh, my goodness.

LP: Of course, it was a really meek rent. It wasn’t hardly anything, but anyways, 00:30:00he has a screened in porch, and it still does. But the people that live there now has got so much stuff all around, that it’s just like a jungle to me. I hate to look at it when drive by. I go by it all the time.

RS: Right.

LP: I say, man, what a mess. But anyway, I was sitting out there under a tree playing, and a bunch of big ants was going up one side of the tree and got on me and was giving me a bad time. Grandma got some kind of stuff and rubbed it on my back. I got over all okay, but, we had a lot of fun going fishing, and he’d get, I think there where Mrs. Lawson used to have a store there.

RS: Yes.

LP: He stopped somewhere along there. We’d stop 00:31:00and get some Bama pies and, you know.

RS: Oh, yeah.

LP: He’s always got cherry pies.

RS: Right.

LP: We’d go down there and sometime take some bacon, and he’d put a fork and stick on there and we’d cook some bacon and eat bacon. Had a ball.

RS: That sounds fun. Did you have any particular chores that you were expected to do as a, as a young person?

LP: No. When I got old enough, you know when she met my step-dad 00:32:00[Gene Pierce] we wound up moving to Tulsa, and so… RS: I gather moving to Tulsa was a hard situation for you.

LP: It was a hard deal. Yeah, it was a hard deal. It’s moving in with some kids that, in a small bedroom, we had bunk beds. Luckily for me, I was the oldest and the biggest and the meanest. I didn’t like the situation.

RS: Right.

LP: I didn’t know him. I mean, you know… RS: Did that keep you from getting to see your grandparents as much, too?

LP: Oh, yeah.

RS: Yeah, I can see where that would be hard.

LP: Yeah, that changed everything.

RS: Yeah.

LP: And, so, you’ve got to enroll in school. You gotta go to school. And, so, wound up doing that. But, I was, my dad would buy me stuff, and like model airplanes and little cars and stuff, and you put them all together, glue ‘em.

RS: Glue them, uh-huh. 00:33:00LP: And everything. Well, when I would dish out some badness to the boys, the two boys, one was little bitty. He was a little guy, but the other one was younger than me, but he was not quite as big as me, but almost. They would break my models, tear them all up. I’d dish out a lot of meanness for that. There would be blood. Of course, I’d get, he would never touch me, but my mom did. Yep, she’d go after ya.

RS: Was it hard on your sister, too?

LP: Yeah. She got to where she made it for quite a while.

RS: What is the age difference between you and your sister?

LP: Oh, let’s see…two or three years.

RS: Two or three years.

LP: Or something like that. She still little. She has another story about 00:34:00that. We were at Grandma and Grandpa Peters’ house and had cornbread. She had made, I think, beans or cornbread, and I don’t know what all. I was, she was little bitty. I was giving her cornbread. I had her mouth packed full.

RS: Oh, gosh.

LP: We still laugh about it. They didn’t see me. I was stuffing her. We still laugh about it. She said you were, you had me choking! I was choking! They couldn’t hardly get their finger in there to get it out.

RS: Oh no!

LP: I said, I was sharing. I wasn’t trying to hurt you.

RS: That’s funny.

LP: I was just sharing.

RS: So, you’re pretty close with your sister.

LP: Oh yeah, I love her to death.

RS: Yeah. Well.

LP: Yeah, we see her all the time.

RS: Well, that’s awesome. So, whenever you were still here, before you moved away, did you have friends that come over and played, or did you mainly play 00:35:00with your cousins? How did that usually work?

LP: Oh, when we were at the Newell Ranch, it was all cousins.

RS: All cousins.

LP: We were… RS: That’s the best built in friend, isn’t it, is to have a cousin?

LP: Oh my gosh, yeah. We had so much fun. It was so much fun. And my dad had built up some posts, one on each end and put some rope out there and put a barrel on that thing and we’d ride this, and… RS: Try to buck you off?

LP: Buck you off. Try to buck you off, and see who could ride the longest.

RS: See! That’s the good ol’ days. That’s when playing outside was fun.

LP: We had so much fun. And then we got in trouble, because we got down in grandpa, Papa Newell’s barn, and sometimes we’d go get a lot of hay. They had all their cows and horses. And we was rearranging the, the hay in the barn. And it was pretty tough to do with our size. We would rearrange those where we could hide behind some bales, 00:36:00and we was throwing nuts off a tree. You get together a bunch of nuts.

RS: Like hickory nuts?

LP: Yeah. They hurt! So, we were throwing at each other. Gotcha! I gotcha! Well, you’d have a little blood right there. You did. They hurt.

RS: I’m not even gonna ask you if you had any hobbies because it sounded like your time was full just… LP: We got in so much trouble. Grandpa come down there and seen that hay. Papa Newell… RS: Because you rearranged his hay?

LP: Said okay, get back down here. You put it back just like it was and get them nuts out of the hay.

RS: Oh no! Did you, so you said, I was going to ask if you collected anything as a child, but I guess you had your model cars and airplanes and stuff that you liked putting together.

LP: Oh yeah. Yeah, I tried to repair them but, and then my Uncle Mike was playing the guitar. He had got me a guitar. I was trying to learn how to play it, you know, 00:37:00to make it sound okay. They broke that, too.

RS: Oh no!

LP: So, yeah, just stomped on it.

RS: So you were, so you were in the Bristow area until the age of about 14?

LP: Pretty close, yeah.

RS: Around 14. And then you moved to Tulsa and then you came back to Bristow your senior year. Is that correct?

LP: Yeah, yeah.

RS: Okay.

LP: Yeah, I went to work, I started work when I was 14. We lived on, we had lived on Latimer, and I was going to Hamilton Junior High School. It’s on Sheridan and you go north a pretty good ways. So, I wound up going to school at Hamilton. When I turned 14, we had been to the Tulsa Zoo, and 00:38:00it’s up that same way. Went up there, my friend right around, he lived on Latimer Place, just right around the block. Our backyards almost intercepted at the corners. He was a big guy. He was a big old boy. He was a real good friend. Mike O’Neal (ph) was his name. We, for my 14th birthday, I got a, it was kind of like a Honda 50, but it was a Jandebeurs motorcycle, a little one. And I rode that back and forth to school. Well, him and I both went out to the Tulsa Zoo and put in for a job. I didn’t have a social security card yet, so I had to go get a social security card to do that. And they hired me to run the merry-go-round. I wasn’t very tall. Mike, he was big. He ran the paddle boats and stuff in the little pond they had out there. So, I wound up running, I showed them I could do the merry-go-round. I could pull the ropes up and pull the all the great big screens that come down. 00:39:00You pull them up and tie them off. And they had a record player in the middle, and you could turn that record player on 45’s and play a song and turn the switch on, and it would go. And you had to help hold the little bitty kids on the horses.

RS: Right.

LP: There was a couple women that come out there a lot. I don’t know how they afforded it, but there were, I don’t think they were all their kids, but there was several kids, little bitty ones. They’d sit on with the babies on the bench and go around, and I had to help hold, get between two horses and I’d help hold the little ones on two of the horses. I had to, I told them, I said, now when this record quits, I’ve got to turn it off, and everyone gets off. Then we can do it another deal. More tickets.

RS: Right.

LP: I did that for a year, or all summer. And then I wound up got 00:40:00me a job when I was 16, I got a job at Morton’s Cafeteria, and I was a dishwasher.

RS: Dishwasher. Now, Scott had also mentioned that you worked at Bristow Ice Plant for a short time.

LP: Well, just for a little while. Well, it was the Tulsa City Ice Plant.

RS: Oh, it was in Tulsa?

LP: Yeah, Bristow Ice Plant, you know, had right there where the bank is now, Community Bank.

RS: Yes, uh-huh.

LP: That’s where it was.

RS: So, you worked at the Bristow one or the Tulsa one?

LP: I worked at the Tulsa one.

RS: Okay.

LP: I did work up there and wound up working taking ice to the fair even and putting them in, climb way up and put ‘em in them big tanks and stuff, and delivered ice. They had a machine that when you put it in the paper bags, you run it through a thing and it was a sewing thing runs across. You crimped the bag up and get it started and it pulls it through. It would shock you.

RS: Oh no.

LP: Yeah, you had to watch what you were doing. It would 00:41:00make you say a dirty word.

RS: So, being that you were so young when you started working, did you, were you able to learn any lessons from your jobs being that young and starting that young? Did you take any lessons away from that?

LP: No, well you learn to do what you’re supposed to do. You do it and do it right.

RS: And do it right.

LP: Otherwise, it’s just not gonna work.

RS: And that’s something you carried through your whole life, basically.

LP: Yeah.

RS: Okay, well let me ask you, I know we’ve talked a little bit about like you have some interest in genealogy. Can you tell me about your family’s ancestry at all? Like where did they come from? When did they come here? Do you know any of that information?

LP: Yeah, I started, I got into that genealogy thing there for a while, and Scott’s really good at it. 00:42:00But there… RS: So, do you know when your family came here and where they came from?

LP: Thanksgiving Day.

RS: Thanksgiving Day.

LP: In 1898.

RS: So, they came before Bristow was Bristow.

LP: What happened, how come they come to Bristow, was him and Joseph Eli Peters was the great-grandpa.

RS: Joseph Eli Peters was your great-grandpa?

LP: Yeah.

RS: Okay.

LP: And they lived in Texas, him and his brother and his family. There was a, what I found out about, there was a doctor down there that had, I don’t remember the name of the town, but the doctor lived down there, and he had his own drug store. He did all that.

RS: Right.

LP: And, so, but he was a, found 00:43:00out that he was messing with my [great] grandpa’s brother’s wife. He wound up confronting him. They got into it. He shot him.

RS: Your great-grandpa did or the brother did?

LP: No, the brother.

RS: The brother shot him.

LP: Grandpa’s brother. Yeah, he shot him.

RS: Killed him?

LP: Shot him. Killed him.

RS: Oh.

LP: So, they had court and when all the story came out and what all was going on, it was protecting himself… RS: Self-defense.

LP: Yeah, self-defense, so he got out of it. Well, my [great] grandpa, the town was upset, so they left. But my great-grandpa left. He went to Rush Springs [Oklahoma].

RS: Okay. And this was Joseph that went to… LP: Joseph Eli [Peters].

RS: Went to Rush Springs 00:44:00[Oklahoma]. Okay.

LP: And he was drilling water wells. And he could do carpenter work, so he was busy. So, they wound up somehow or they heard something about Bristow. I don’t know how they heard about Bristow, but they loaded the wagon, a covered wagon, and just like you see on wagon trains.

RS: And can you imagine trying to travel via wagon?

LP: All that way, I can’t even imagine.

RS: Oh, my goodness.

LP: I can’t even imagine. I just can’t even grasp it.

RS: I know, I know.

LP: How they would do that. But they were… RS: They we tough.

LP: They were tough.

RS: They were tough.

LP: Well, and as a matter of fact, a lot of the women chewed tobacco and spit.

RS: Oh, my goodness.

LP: I couldn’t believe it. Even my Grandma Peters, she did, too. I lost a photo. Bristow Library, I was kind of doing the genealogy thing, and I was looking through, before they remodeled it, you could walk in the front door of the library, 00:45:00next door and walk in, and there was…if you looked straight through, you could walk out the back door.

RS: Right.

LP: Well, just before you get to the hallway to the back door, there was a table sitting there with a, with a binder, one of them binders with the little hook things, and it was a big one. Little bit bigger than that. I wanted to look and see what this is, so I flipped it open and there was pictures. I turned a few pages, and there it was, a picture of my great-grandpa.

RS: So, how did you know it was him? Did it say it on the picture?

LP: Well, it had the names on there.

RS: Oh, my goodness.

LP: And it said A.H. Purdy. Was the one that took the picture. And they had just come to town on the wagon. There was a picture with my great-grandpa driving, holding the reigns and my great-grandma sitting next to him. They had my grandpa’s 00:46:00older brother was sitting next to her. His name was Joseph Alfred Peters [1888-1958].

RS: So, Joseph Alfred Peters was your grandpa’s brother?

LP: Great-grandpa’s brother.

RS: Your great-grandpa’s brother.

LP: Or, no, my grandpa’s brother.

RS: Your grandpa’s brother. Okay.

LP: Lizzie Mallory [Elizabeth Peters Mallory 1885-1975], she wound up marrying a man whose last name was Mallory. She lived long enough that my wife met her.

RS: Really?

LP: Yeah, it was just amazing.

RS: My goodness.

LP: She had a little bitty house right behind Dub Bolin’s Ford dealership. Just right there. So, I took Rita up there with her and she met her and she was a little rough looking. And he was one rough gal. She could, she could fight like a man. She was something else.

RS: Well, I think you had to be to survive.

LP: She was sweet as she could be, yeah.

RS: You had to be to survive. 00:47:00LP: She could box your ears down. So, she was really a sweet lady.

RS: And tell me what her name was again?

LP: Lizzie.

RS: Lizzie.

LP: Mallory.

RS: And Mallory was her last name.

LP: Yeah, from her husband.

RS: Okay.

LP: He had died.

RS: So, back to the covered wagon, was A.H. Purdy, was he traveling with them?

LP: No, he was here in Bristow.

RS: And, so he just happened to take their picture when they got here.

LP: And he’s one of the founders of all the stuff in Bristow, everything that was going on, and books of it. Next to Joseph Alfred was Lizzie and next to Lizzie was my grandpa. He was three-years-old.

RS: Your grandpa was three-years-old.

LP: Three-years-old.

RS: That is so amazing. So, 00:48:00were you completely shocked when you saw this picture, because you weren’t expecting that.

LP: Oh yeah, I was just shocked. I said, wow! Look at this! And, so I got a picture of it, and I one, it wasn’t really good. Not as good as the picture they had in the book. But it was pretty good. So, I had that. I made a mistake, of course, my daughter is not going to own up to it. She lived in, she bought a place in Nuyaka.

RS: I knew you said that it got misplaced. You wanted to have… LP: It’s gone.

RS: Have you discussed with the library or asked the library what happened to the book?

LP: Over and over. I went and they said… RS: And they don’t know?

LP: They said, well, what happened was when they were doing the remodel, some of the… RS: So, the remodel, like years ago?

LP: Like, now.

RS: Oh! Recently.

LP: Yeah, it wasn’t like that back then.

RS: Right. So, so like how many years ago did you find this picture, approximately?

LP: Oh, gosh, it’s been several years.

RS: And, so they don’t think they, don’t think they have it?

LP: They don’t have it. 00:49:00RS: They don’t have it.

LP: Someone was allowed, two or three different people… RS: Oh, no!

LP: Famous for the town of Bristow, Krumme’s, and I don’t know who else… RS: Right.

LP: And got the, were able, were okay’d to take that whole book and took it, and it’s gone.

RS: It’s gone.

LP: Something like that you let them take copies. You don’t let them have the book.

RS: Right. Well, it’s kind of like at the historical society, we try to preserve everything so everyone can, can see it and enjoy it.

LP: Everyone can see it.

RS: Right.

LP: I went back to see if I could get another picture of it. No, it’s gone! You mean the whole book? It should be here in the library somewhere. Not there.

RS: Oh, I hate to hear that. So, to clarify, your family ended up moving here because they kind of got in a scuffle in Texas, 00:50:00but was there any other, like, economic reasons why they came? Was it for farming or?

LP: They heard Bristow was, it wasn’t even Bristow then.

RS: Right, right. It wasn’t Bristow yet.

LP: So, they were coming in, and it wound up so amazing that Joseph Alfred was the oldest boy sitting next to his mom and dad, and he wound up, they were things were growing.

RS: Before you go on with that, so your great-grandpa was Joseph Eli Peters [1856-1931]. Do you great-grandma’s name was?

LP: Mary [Mary Margaret Richardson Peters 1865-1936].

RS: Mary Peters?

LP: Yeah.

RS: Okay. So, go ahead. I just wanted to make sure I have that down.

LP: Well, it wound up that things were growing. You know, at one time, and I’ve still got some of the paperwork on it, telling about Indians were out here around Bristow.

RS: Oh, yeah.

LP: And they sent 00:51:00a couple Indians in to tell the town, the people…you’ve got a certain amount of time, I forget how much time it was. It wasn’t a lot. The town got together, they all pulled in and got together, and so they sent sentries out all the way around town. The Indians were going to kill anyone that’s left here.

RS: I’ve heard some of that about that story.

LP: Yeah, and, so it wound up that nothing happened. It was just a scare tactic.

RS: Right, a scare tactic.

LP: And it didn’t work.

RS: And it didn’t work.

LP: But Joseph Alfred wound up, Slick and Beggs were people starting to build up communities out that way.

RS: Right.

LP: And, so, they had a little post office out there, somewhere between Slick and Beggs, and they were taking bids for like a Pony Express for someone to ride, get the mail and bring it back to Bristow.

RS: Right.

LP: He wanted to be it. 00:52:00Joseph Alfred wanted to be it. So, he met this post-mistress in that little post office thing and they got married. He wound up with, I think it was five kids. They had a little house they had built and had five kids, and she was pregnant again. She was, you know, not too far away she thought, and, so, him and the kids took off and went somewhere doing something or other. I never did find out what it was. When they got back, she was laying in the kitchen floor dead.

RS: Oh no!

LP: And lost the baby, and there was a pool of blood.

RS: I mean, I just can’t even imagine trying to live in those times, and the, I mean it’s easy for us to say now, oh, you know, we miss the good old days or whatever. But, my goodness, they had it SO hard.

LP: SO bad.

RS: Yeah.

LP: Had it so bad. And, so, he wound 00:53:00up placing the kids here and over there, and he wound up meeting a young lady that was traveling through Bristow. They were going to Pryor. They knew someone up there. The dad did. And they were going to try to do some farming or something. He married that girl, and got his kids and took off up there. He wound up with 16 kids, 16 kids all together.

RS: Can you imagine feeding that many mouths?

LP: Oh my gosh! You better be a good farmer!

RS: I know!

LP: Of course, when we bought our place out here, I had the kids out there. We built a big garden. I had a big tiller, and I’d till. I worked for Haliburton then, and I’d till up a whole bunch of stuff, and Rita was the garden girl. She planted every kind of stuff. She grew up like with her mom and dad. So, the kids were throwing rocks out and get the rocks over here, and… RS: They knew how to do it, didn’t they?

LP: Yeah, they knew how to do it. 00:54:00They learned how to do it. They didn’t want to do it, but they did.

RS: They didn’t have a choice, huh?

LP: Do you like to eat?

RS: Yeah.

LP: This is going to be food.

RS: Well, that’s a very interesting, I have enjoyed hearing your very, very early ties, your family’s ties to Bristow. That’s pretty cool. So, your grandpa’s brother was part of the Pony Express.

LP: There was another deal that I got. My grandpa, when I was a little guy, we walked, he walked. He didn’t drive very often.

RS: And, who was this? Your?

LP: Ira Emerson [Ira “Em” Emerson Peters 1895-1966].

RS: Okay.

LP: On Chestnut.

RS: Okay, uh-huh.

LP: And he had me, and of course, summertime, he and I’d take off and Barbara Jean would stay there with grandma. And she was a little bitty gal. She was real short. She dipped snuff, too. She was just as sweet as she could be, though. 00:55:00Never heard a bad word or anything. Grandpa wound up as the senior Sunday school teacher for the Free Holiness Church, south end of town.

RS: Right.

LP: But anyway, him and I would walk up, and I was wearing these little strappy t-shirts with little strap across, white t-shirt. And walk with him. Walked up and we’d walk up Main Street. Walk up one side and down the other side. There was Theodore Abraham 00:56:00[1903-1980]. I don’t know if you ever heard of him.

RS: Yes, I think so.

LP: He was a police officer for quite a while, and he wound up being, like the judge, you know of traffic things of Bristow.

RS: Right.

LP: Well, I would, everyone would call grandpa Em. And he worked at the post office for a long time. We would run into Theodore Abraham, and him and grandpa were friends. And Theodore would say, who ya got here? And, grandpa would say, well, that’s Louis Mitchell. I call him Junior. He said, you look like a pretty good-sized boy. He said, let me see your muscles. I would take a big breath of air and big chest and put my muscles up like that. He said, here, Em, you give this boy, take him up there to get a big ice cream cone. You know they had Glen Cliff had an ice cream store on the north end of main. We’d go up there and sit down and get me a big ice cream. I always called it White House Cherry is what they called it. It had cherry bits in the ice cream. I always got that. I wound up, later on, thankful for Theodore Abraham, because when I got older, 00:57:00I had a Mustang. My mom and step-dad… RS: Did he help keep you out of some trouble?

LP: Oh my gosh! Yeah, yeah.

RS: It was good to have him as a friend, huh?

LP: Well, my uncle was a policeman at the time.

RS: Oh, gosh!

LP: They had one guy that worked, they did shifts, my Uncle Mike would come in and he got in there about 7 o’clock or something like that. At the time, I was working at Liberty Glass in Sapulpa, until that day. I had this Mustang. The Fords, I don’t know if you ever knew any of the Ford family. They lived out north of town right in the curve. That was an uncle. That was my Grandma Newell’s sister and her husband lived out there. He was a mechanic. I had this Mustang, I went and got it. It was a hot rod car. 00:58:00His boys were good mechanics. We took the head off and put two four-barrel carburetors on there and shackles on the back end. You could almost do a wheelie.

RS: Oh, my goodness!

LP: That car would almost do a wheelie. Of course, we’d go out around Heyburn Lake and some boy from Kellyville had a ’57 Chevy and has his car hopped up pretty good. We had one part of this road out there we could race on.

RS: I feel like a race is fixing to happen.

LP: Yeah. And we’d race. Sometimes he’d win and sometimes I’d win. Well, one day… RS: So, was it paved or was it gravel.

LP: It was paved.

RS: Okay.

LP: One day, I was coming down main street, and I was going south, and this ’57 Chevy pulled up next to me from Kellyville. Well, the light was red. He revved his engine up and I did 00:59:00mine. We took off and raced to the next stoplight. It was pretty even.

RS: And this is on main street?

LP: On main street in Bristow.

RS: Oh, yeah, this is on main street.

LP: It was not like it is now.

RS: Right, right.

LP: We took off again, and right there where the Subway sandwich shop is, there was a building that sits out, and you could park there by the sandwich shop and people coming down from the north of main couldn’t see a car. My Uncle Mike was sitting there in the police car.

RS: Oh, no!

LP: Well, we come down through, we caught the stoplight green. We were flying down main street! He turned his lights on and took off. We turned out going up where the pecan plant used to be, and we went up that hill over the railroad tracks air born. 01:00:00RS: Oh, no!

LP: We kept control of the car and got to the next stoplight. Johnny Spencer used to live in that two-story house on the left side. He’s one that had the store up on the north end of town at that time. Anyway, we stopped there, we stopped and took off again. Here come the cop car. Well, the ’57 Chevy didn’t stop, but I pulled over. It was my Uncle Mike.

RS: Oh, boy!

LP: He said, what are you doing?! What are you doing?! You can’t do that down main street in Bristow. You know better than all that, you know. He said, well, I got an idea that I can take you home. We lived, my step-dad and mom had bought some property out west of town. Not quite. There was a road that goes off the highway 01:01:0016, and it goes over the railroad, over the bridge, over the turnpike. So, we had to land all the way out there by the turnpike, but anyway, he took me in and said, okay, so my mom got mad. My step-dad would hardly ever say anything, you know better than that. Yeah, I did, but I did it.

RS: So, was this when, were you in high, were you, like, a senior or was this… LP: I was a senior.

RS: Okay, you were a senior, okay.

LP: Yeah, and so I said, well, he said I’m going to ground you from your car. You’re not going to drive that Mustang for a couple weeks. Well, my step-dad would come in. They had an optical shop and he would drive back and forth. He come in an put on his bib overalls, you know, like a farmer. Mr. Barnett had a store, I don’t know if you remember him. There used to be a store when you come off that road 01:02:00goes straight over past the where the city lake is and the armory.

RS: Uh-huh.

LP: That same road that goes straight west. We lived out there a ways. And, so, he said, I don’t want to go and get [indecipherable]. Mr. Barnett’s got some really good beef bologna and cheese in big blocks. He said, give me some money. Give me $20 and said go in and get some bologna and spend the twenty and get some bologna and cheese and bring it back. Well, hey, I can’t drive my car. He said, well, take my truck. So, he had a Ford truck, of course, they were friends with the Ford dealership…and, so, Dewade (ph) and Majel. So, I got his truck. It was running pretty good. I got in a race with my cousin.

RS: Oh, no! 01:03:00LP: I beat him. So, he got mad and told them.

RS: Oh, no!

LP: You got a hot truck there. What do you mean a hot truck? Bud and me was racing. He said, he beat me. Okay. You got mad and you got even with me, didn’t you, didn’t you, yes, for beating ya.

RS: That was your second strike!

LP: Yeah, it worked out okay. It worked out okay.

RS: Oh, that’s funny! So, was the Mustang your first car?

LP: Yeah, well, no. No, now my first car was a car from, my step-dad had an optical shop in a building with other businesses in there, and there was an eye doctor right across the hall from his door. My 01:04:00mom was running the secretary. She did all the paperwork and all that kind of stuff, and he did all the measuring and everything and lenses and stuff. So, this guy across the hall, the eye doctor’s mom had been over in England and had some old car. And I don’t remember if that’s where he was from or what, but they brought the car back, too, on a ship. Her and the car, and I don’t know what all kind of a ship it was, but anyway, they come in, he said, she’s gotten too feeble to drive the car, so I bought it. It was my first…I had saved money from working and doing odd jobs and stuff. And, so, I bought that car for $90.

RS: $90?! What kind of car was it? Do you even know?

LP: It was an old clunker, but it run, it run okay.

RS: So, I guess it was a foreign car?

LP: No, it was a…it seemed like it was a Plymouth 01:05:00or something like that.

RS: Oh, okay.

LP: Kind of a junky, but it was… RS: Well, for $90 I think that’s a bargain!

LP: The only seat that was worn out was the driver’s seat where she’d sat.

RS: Right.

LP: She didn’t haul anybody around. Practically like new. So, I bought it and put gas in it and it’d run. So anyway, I wound up getting rid of that thing. Emmett Dykes had a car lot. I don’t know if you remember him?

RS: Emmett Dykes was my great uncle.

LP: Oh, I thought the world of him. He was so good.

RS: Yes, we grew up by where he lived, and so we had the run of his land as kids and loved it. I know he always had his car lots or whatever.

LP: Emmett was such an awesome guy.

RS: Yeah.

LP: I’d go by and he said, well, now, you don’t like that one, so you brought it back, so he said, and that’s okay. He said I’ll sell it. Somebody will buy it. He said, well, pick you one out. So, I’d pick one out and try that.

RS: It’s not like that these days! 01:06:00LP: No, huh-uh. So, I was dating Rita, and I had gotten into with the school guy here at Bristow and walked out. So, my dad had to go get signatures from city council members or something so I could go to Depew. We were only a half a mile inside Depew’s range.

RS: Right.

LP: So, he got signatures. Everybody knew him. So, I wound up in Depew. I’d drive that car back and forth to over there. Well, they had a, I can’t remember that cop’s name, but he was mean.

RS: Well, it sounds like you should know ALL the cops with the way you drove.

LP: Yeah, yeah. He, I can’t think of that guy’s name. He wound up…he was a mean dude. He stopped me one day right around in at lunch time. He said, he stopped 01:07:00me one time. I wasn’t doing anything, and he stopped me, and I pulled over, and he was really hateful. He said, I heard about you been hot-rodding around town here. I said, no. Have you seen me hot-rodding around town? No. He said, well, I’m going to call…you hot-rod around Bristow? I said, no. Well, he called over. Well, my uncle was a policeman. He said my name. You got anything to say about this young man? No, everything is fine.

RS: So, he vouched for you?

LP: He didn’t tell him anything, yeah. And, so, he said, okay, he said, I’m going to let you go. Get back in your car and drive slow. Don’t be hot-rodding around. If I catch ya, I’ll get ya. So, I got out and slammed his door and got back in my car and wound up he never did…wish 01:08:00I could think of that guy’s name. He was mean as a snake, a two-headed snake. He was mean. Anyway, but he didn’t ever get anything with me.

RS: Well, that’s good.

LP: I come out of it alright.

RS: So, you had, so you had the car from the old lady was your first car. And, then, I guess you had several cars from Uncle Emmett [Emmett Dykes].

LP: Yeah, he would say, well, what was funny, Rita lived, if you go toward Depew and you kind of go up a hill, there’s a curve there, and you go up a hill, and then you go down the hill and you turn into Depew. Well, she lived in that farmhouse up on that curve on the right-hand side if you were going west. Her, her sisters and brothers…I was riding the school bus because I had gotten my car took away from me, and I had to ride the school bus, and I watched, 01:09:00and instead of the bus stopping on the highway in front of the house, which would be a bad deal, they pulled up on that gravel road right behind it. So, she had to walk out of the house, across the little bit of the pasture and then crawl through the barbed-wire fence. So, I was sitting on the bus watching her, and I said, oooo. I said, oooo. I’m going to have to learn who she is. And, so, I did. And, we started dating, and yeah, said okay, I said this is, this is it. This is who I’m going to marry. I know I’m going to marry her. Well, she was still a senior, and I was out of school then.

RS: You were out of school?

LP: Yeah, and working. It turned out to be, I said, we loved each other so much, we wanted to get married. She’s still in school. 01:10:00She could still go to school. I mean, her legs are fine. I mean, she can go to school.

RS: Right.

LP: We’ll get a house. We’ll find something to live in here in Depew and be right there close. And, so, we had to really, both of us, really promise, because her dad was a, you know, pretty…big, rough, rowdy guy, Lorn Reed [1921-1988]. I don’t know if you ever heard of him.

RS: I haven’t.

LP: Yeah, he was a big old boy.

RS: So, you knew you better keep your promises.

LP: Yeah, you keep, I told him, I said, we PROMISE, we PROMISE, cross my heart, hope to die. I will make sure she goes. Well, it wasn’t very long, she was getting sick, pregnant.

RS: Oh, gosh.

LP: You get up and wash your face and you get your clothes on. You are going to school.

RS: Because I’m not going to break my promise to your dad.

LP: I’m not going to get beat up by your dad.

RS: Oh, my goodness!

LP: We promised. We promised to do it. And 01:11:00it worked out fine.

RS: Well, so I was going to ask you, like, when did you meet your spouse and what was your first impression, but I guess you told me. You… LP: I watched her crawl under that barbed-wire fence, and I said, I’m going to know her! She got on the bus and I kept looking at her. I said, okay! I’m going to meet you!

RS: So, did you get engaged or did you just get married or?

LP: Yeah, we got married.

RS: So, you didn’t even really have an engagement period?

LP: No. Well, I wouldn’t allow her out with anybody else. She wasn’t going anywhere.

RS: You had her on lock down, huh?

LP: Yeah. Yeah, she’s mine.

RS: So, where did you, where did you get married?

LP: We got married in Depew.

RS: You got married in Depew.

LP: Yeah, right there in Depew.

RS: Were you at like at a church or a house?

LP: Oh, it was a church.

RS: At a church.

LP: I can’t remember his name. But, Rita remembers everything, thank God. I’ll ask her, who’s that? Well, another thing, 01:12:00we got in the store after Haliburton closed. I had worked my way up to a supervisor driving a car. I moved myself up the line. You have to learn how to do everything on every truck, so I wound up learning all of it. There was one guy named, I don’t know if you ever heard of Jack Vickers [Jack Wesley Vickers 1927-2012]?

RS: I, I know Jack Vickers, and he was a wonderful man. Yeah, wonderful man.

LP: He took care of ALL that, all the parts, all the, everything we ran, everything we used. He had part numbers. Some of them several digits long, and he said he’d order on, it was all spent when he’d inventory, you’d count everything. And the big tanks, you had to run a plumb bob down and measure how much feet 01:13:00of this you’ve got.

RS: He was on top of all of it.

LP: Oh, he was so good at it. I told him, I said, when the oil field slowed down, they were importing oil and everything was going bad, we started laying off. And I was still driving a car, selling jobs. Every time I could find a rig, I was rushing in trying to get something going. I come in one day and he said I’m going to retire. I said, we were laying off people. I would come in…we had one office in Haliburton’s building, and one big room like this, and we had desks on both sides of the wall and a walk way in the middle. I said, their stuff’s gone. He said, they’re gone.

RS: Oh, no.

LP: I’d come in a couple weeks later, and I said, now he’s gone. Ohhhkay. 01:14:00So, I must be doing something right. I’m still here. Some of the others had more time than me and they were gone.

RS: Right, but, obviously, times are tough, and it makes you a little nervous.

LP: Yeah, you’re worried.

RS: Yeah.

LP: I said, oh my gosh. I wanted to stay here until I had to retire. Well, I wound up asking Jack Vickers, I said, can you teach me how to what you do?

RS: Which was smart.

LP: Yeah. He said, you would want to learn this? I said, yes sir, I do. I said I could see the writing on the wall. I can see what’s coming down.

RS: You needed to be valuable, didn’t you?

LP: Yeah.

RS: Yeah.

LP: So, I needed…I got all this going for me here, so I’ve got good parts with the main man is in Oklahoma City [Oklahoma]. He was over the whole division. He and I were pretty good buddies. He knew I worked hard, so he taught me how to do that. I was afraid that, I was afraid to do the button. 01:15:00He said, you ain’t gonna blow it up. You ain’t gonna hurt it. You’re okay. Just make sure when you put your numbers in, you look at it, and yeah, that’s the number I got. You had ten. You used three. You need three back. And we keep ten on this, because we have enough to get by and maybe one or two extra. So, I said, I understand. I learned all that. One day, the big boss come down because things were just going bad. We had lost a lot of people that were just workers. They didn’t run trucks.

RS: Right.

LP: ‘Cause we had all had to learn how to run trucks before we could do anything. I wound up getting that job. And Leroy Shirley (ph) was the guy’s name, and he come down from Oklahoma City [Oklahoma], and he would tell us what all was going on with the company. You know, there was some bad things going on. 01:16:00The oil field is going down hill. So, I asked him one day, I said, can I talk to you for a little bit? He said, yeah, he said let’s walk down the line where all the trucks are parked. That’ll get something going, me walking with the big boss.

RS: People are going to be talking.

LP: And it did. I told him, I said, have you found anybody to take over Jack Vickers place? And he said, no, he said I’ve looked over the whole division. There’s no one anywhere that I think is capable of doing it. I said, I can do it. He said, you learned how to do that? I said, yes sir. He’s been training me for quite a while now, and I said, I’ve got it. I’ve got it down.

RS: That’s awesome.

LP: And he’s wanting to retire, and I don’t blame him for that. He had, like, forty years in, I think. So, he said, you got it. I said, now, well, wait a minute. The boss here, we had our boss had retired, 01:17:00and we had a new guy come in, an engineer, and he and I had bumped heads a few times. I said, he might not want me to have it. He said, well, guess what? He works for me. Okay. Okay then.

RS: I’m good with it.

LP: I’m good. I’m good. I can do it. I promise, I can do it. So, he talked to Jack Vickers. He verified. He said, yeah, he’s got it down. It wound up, he retired, I wound up having to do the inventory and the dispatching, just the phones. Of course, they wasn’t ringing us like they used to be when it was busy, so.

RS: Right.

LP: It wasn’t bad.

RS: It wasn’t bad. Well, let me back you up just a little bit, because when you and I had talked before, as far as concerning your work life, you said worked on a pulling unit for Bristow Well Service, but then, I want you to tell the story about HOW 01:18:00you got your job at Haliburton, because I thought that was kind of neat.

LP: You see, we wound up, we wound up her and I did, her brother, she has an uncle, she has kinfolk in Wichita, Kansas. Her brother, Junior Reed, and he’s just like a brother almost. We were so close. We’d play card games and all kinds of stuff when they were down here. He up and moved up there. One of his uncles up there worked for Love Box Company, was the name of it.

RS: My dad worked for Love Box.

LP: Did he?

RS: Yes!

LP: Well.

RS: Isn’t that something?

LP: Yeah, he told me at the time, I was working for the highway department in Chandler. Me and Rita and we had Susie. She was the only one we had at that time. He come down, 01:19:00of course, we missed each other being able to, we’d hunt and fish together and everything. I really missed him bad. You ain’t got nothing like that in Wichita, Kansas. We wound up, he said, he come down, he said, you need…they’re hiring. They’re paying good money, good money. And, he said, so you ought to come up here. You can get on just like that. Well, they wound up getting a corrugator, that’s the one that makes the paper. It’s a city block long, that whole things is. Well, I wound up on the end of it where you do all the, they’d already made the paper complete.

RS: So, this was in… LP: Wichita, Kansas.

RS: So, you went to Wichita?

LP: Yeah, he talked me into it, so here we went.

RS: So, wait, so you had…I thought you went from Bristow Well Service to Haliburton. Did you do that in between?

LP: Well, I wound up leaving the…no, 01:20:00when I came back. I had worked on Bristow Well Service for a while and Leon, I can’t remember his last name, he ran the deal.

RS: Because I thought you had told me whenever you worked at Bristow Well Service that you had…would go over to Haliburton for coffee.

LP: Oh, I did. Yeah.

RS: And that that’s…I wanted you to tell that story of how you ended up meeting the boss there and getting on there.

LP: Oh, yeah, Wink Almond was his name. He was such a great guy. He would…and my brother-in-law, married my sister, Leroy Maroon [Melvin “Leroy” Maroon 1947-2022], married Barbara. He wasn’t working there at the time, but Melvin was, his dad. He was a dispatcher. So, 01:21:00if it rained or anything, they wouldn’t hire…the wells were just making small amounts, so they couldn’t afford to get a dozer and stuff and pull them in and back out. It cost a lot of money, so wound up just shutting down. No day, no pay.

RS: Right.

LP: Haliburton wasn’t that way. Come to find out. I didn’t know it, but I’d go by there and drink…Melvin Maroon was dispatching. They had them half doors with the one part you could push open and kept the other one shut. And they had a big chalk board there, and you’d write down so-in-so was at this place or that place. And he sat there and run the phone lines. He could transfer to the boss upstairs or where ever. So, I was there leaning 01:22:00on that bottom half door with it shut, talking to Melvin, and the boss come down stairs. He had an office right up over head. He come down and said…I had to move out of his way, so he could see the board and stuff and talk to Melvin, and said, who are you? He said, I’ve seen you in here two or three times drinking coffee and talking to Melvin. So, I introduced myself, and I said, I want to work here. This is where I want to be. He said, well, he said we’re actually not hiring right now because the oil was still not doing so good. So, we talked a while and he asked me about my family everything, and he said, well, come on upstairs and we will talk a little bit. Went up there, and he told me…he spent a long time telling me how bad it was. He said, the divorce rate is higher here at Haliburton than in any other job you can find in America.

RS: Oh, my goodness.

LP: It’s that bad. He said because… 01:23:00RS: You’re never at home.

LP: I said, how’s that? He said, well, if we get busy, you’re working. There’s no time clock. You’re working. You may be no telling where. He said, if we get another job, we’re going to be move you over and you’re going to that, and you’re not coming in. He said, so, she’s gonna…you got kids? Yeah. He said, well, you tell your wife all this because I’m going to ask her if you told her. So, I said, well, I’ll tell her. He said, you better, because I’ll ask her. She wasn’t wild about it. I said, well, it makes a lot more money. They buy my food and everything. Uniforms, everything. They do everything.

RS: Because, I know you’d said when you were working for Bristow Well Service you were ruining clothes every day and… LP: Oh, I didn’t have any good clothes left. Yeah, they was all nasty.

RS: Yeah. Right.

LP: And we didn’t have a lot of money, because if you weren’t working, you couldn’t pull a well.

RS: Right, 01:24:00you didn’t get paid.

LP: You’d sit at home doing nothing.

RS: Right.

LP: So, I wound up talking…about a month after he hired me, she wanted me to quit and go back, and I said, I’m not doing it. I’m not doing it. You’re gonna have to get tough. We gotta have this money.

RS: Right.

LP: Okay, well. She wound up appreciating it, but every time the phone would if I was home, I’d jump.

RS: Because you just never knew.

LP: Yeah, you just know, you’re gonna be gone.

RS: So, then from there, you ended up with your store, which was Bud’s Mini Mart?

LP: Yeah.

RS: And you were there for how many years?

LP: Seventeen years.

RS: Seventeen years.

LP: A little bit over seventeen, not but seventeen… RS: Did you enjoy, enjoy having your store?

LP: Well, yeah, we did. We had, I think, a lot of friends.

RS: Yes. Everybody, that’s how I, you know, really got to know you. 01:25:00LP: A lot of great people.

RS: I grew up through my high school years going to your store.

LP: Yeah, we had one, I got tickled at some them would come in and be in their fuzzy house shoes and pajamas. I said, I don’t care where you’re from. You look comfortable to me!

RS: Whatever works!

LP: Yeah, you’re covered up, so, if you’re comfortable, that’s good.

RS: But it was a lot of work and took a lot of your time to run it, right?

LP: We’d get up at 3 o’clock in the morning and take a shower and get dressed and hustle to the store. By the time we got everything…I did all the cooking, a big broaster they had back there, boy, it was amazing. Did all the stocking and that kind of stuff. All the labor fixing things, and that kind of deal. It wound up, Rita was really good with numbers and people and registers and stuff. I wound up having fourteen cameras. 01:26:00RS: Oh, my goodness.

LP: When my daughter joined the Navy, right out of high school. She went down to Florida, and she wound up working in a, in Florida, underground, you would never know they were working bombs and stuff in a huge thick door. She was in there with that, and she wound up with MS [multiple sclerosis] from all the stuff that she did.

RS: Oh, I didn’t know that.

LP: She was good at what she did, and got married to a marine. Had marines there that were guarding the whole thing. He lived in Washington state, and so, when she got out, they went to Washington state. Had the kids, a little girl 01:27:00and a boy [Cody Austin Everett, Courtney Sue Everett]. And she lost one boy. He was a miscarriage. Then she had another boy, and he’s with us now.

RS: Oh, so, while we kind of transitioned back to your family, let me ask you about your children. How many children do you have?

LP: We’ve got three.

RS: You have three. And tell me what their names are.

LP: Susie, Barbara Sue [Barbara Sue Peters].

RS: Barbara Sue but goes by Susie.

LP: Yeah.

RS: Okay.

LP: Then we had Scott, Mitchell Scott [Mitchell “Scott” Peters].

RS: Okay.

LP: And then we had Brian Joseph Peters.

RS: Okay and, then, how many grandchildren do you have?

LP: Six. A boy and a girl in each one. [Cody Austin Everett, Courtney Sue Everett, Joseph Eli Peters, Elsi Ruth Peters, Cameron Joseph Peters, Macy Ray Peters] RS: A boy and a girl in each family. And I, actually, know all of your, I know all of your kids. I think in high school, I think I played one year of softball with Susie.

LP: Yeah.

RS: And, then, of course, I know Scott and know Brian as well. So, 01:28:00what would you say was your biggest challenge as being a dad to your kids when they were growing up? What was the biggest challenge?

LP: Oh, they were, they were all three of them so good that I didn’t have, we didn’t have any problem at all.

RS: What a blessing.

LP: There was no problems at all.

RS: So, you enjoyed being a dad.

LP: Oh, yeah, they were just wonderful.

RS: Wonderful kids.

LP: Just wonderful.

RS: And, then, what do you think about those grandkids?

LP: Oh! They are so amazing! Scott’s boy [Joseph Eli Peters], of course, I knew, before that…Karah, his wife, Karah, she’s amazing, too. They are really into church. She teaches, now, she’s a school teacher, has been for years. We sat out on the patio, behind their house there, you could open the Bible 01:29:00up and he could recite verse for verse.

RS: And this is Scott’s son that can do this?

LP: Yeah.

RS: Oh, my goodness.

LP: And the daughter [Elsi Ruth Peters] is learning to do it, too. She can quite a ways, too. And never miss a word! You can just read it. He just went on and on. Well, now, we just recently, we went to a reunion. I had never been to one in Pryor.

RS: And that’s where the, was it the Alfred family had… LP: That’s where he moved to, started that whole thing.

RS: Where he had the 16, ended up having the 16 kids.

LP: He started the whole thing up there.

RS: So, you went to a family reunion in Pryor? Okay.

LP: Yeah, it was about 200 of us.

RS: Oh, my.

LP: It was just amazing. I just couldn’t understand how in the world they all had a lot of kids!

RS: Right.

LP: All of them.

RS: So, probably impossible to even talk to everybody.

LP: Yeah. Oh, I didn’t 01:30:00get to talk to everybody. I didn’t get to meet a bunch of them. Going to the seniors, what I wanted to do was have, I wanted to make copies of that photo and didn’t have it.

RS: And you didn’t get to do it.

LP: Because, man, I would have been a, I’d a been a big hit. They didn’t have that.

RS: Right.

LP: I told them about it, but Scott’s trying to find who took that book, who took that book with that photo.

RS: To get the picture.

LP: To get a picture. Just one copy of it.

RS: So, did you, at your family reunion, did you learn any interesting new facts about your family?

LP: No, I pretty much knew.

RS: Or, were you the one that had all the interesting facts?

LP: I had a lot of interesting facts. Of course, we knew all their bunch, and all their stuff. I don’t know what all they did in newer times here. I remember the old ones. 01:31:00Scott remembers, he knows all this. And he knew, and he had studied genealogy. We got it all the way back to England. Their names. He actually went up, he’s taken trips. He’s doing pretty good. So, he went up all in the northeast where all the people were back then. Our kinfolk come over from England and started business. He, actually, got to go to some of the old cemeteries and look at their markers and everything. It was all so cool.

RS: Yeah, that’s very cool. Well, let’s see. Let’s talk a little bit more…I wanted to ask you a couple of other questions. So, when you were growing up, did you get to watch any TV, and if so, 01:32:00what were some of your favorite programs?

LP: Red Skelton.

RS: Red Skelton, okay.

LP: Yeah. You ever hear of him?

RS: Yeah…oh yeah!

LP: He was, my grandpa was real religious, and grandma. We sat there, he had a… RS: So, now did you say your Grandpa Em, did you say he ended up being the preacher at the Holiness Church?

LP: Yeah, he was the senior’s preacher.

RS: The senior’s preacher. So, do you feel like, I’m getting a little off track, but I meant to ask you this earlier. Do you feel like, because it sounded like you were, maybe a little bit of an ornery youngster, did he help keep you in line? Did he help instill good values? Do you feel like you got a lot of that from him?

LP: Yeah, yeah. He was amazing.

RS: So, you watched Red Skelton.

LP: And baseball. 01:33:00RS: And baseball, of course, baseball. So, do you remember seeing any pivotal moments in history that you watched on TV? Can you remember anything that stuck out to you growing up?

LP: I’m trying to think of anything. I can’t think. This dementia’s got me… RS: That’s okay. That’s okay, we can move on. So, did you end up going to church with your Grandpa Em?

LP: Oh, listen, the preacher’s name at that time when I was going there was Brother Perry.

RS: Brother Perry.

LP: That’s what they called him. That’s all I knew. He would come out, I mean, he would be hollering. He would come out and he’d walk around… RS: And it’s the same building that’s there now?

LP: Yeah, except they’ve got it so nice now. It’s really good. And I’m glad to see that there’s that many people.

RS: Right.

LP: But he would, I would sit by grandpa and grandma, Barbara Jean sat by grandma. He would 01:34:00be going hitting the deal and start walking around and get loud, and I would try to get up behind grandpa. He’s gonna get me!

RS: Was it a full contact service?

LP: Yeah, he’s gonna get me!

RS: Do you remember singing any particular songs or having anything like?

LP: Jesus Loves Me.

RS: Jesus Loves Me.

LP: This I know!

RS: Well, I also wanted to ask, in your family, you know how you talk about like, especially at your grandparent’s, Newell’s, what were holidays like for your family? Was Christmas a big deal? Like what was Christmas like for your family?

LP: Oh, Christmas was amazing. We’d all be out, usually we’d go to the Newell’s and have a big time. The food 01:35:00was… RS: That’s what I was gonna say, like what was the food like?

LP: Oh my, everything is homemade. You just couldn’t get there quick enough. There was, I didn’t like, I wouldn’t eat hominy. I would not eat grits. I didn’t like green beans.

RS: Oh, no. You didn’t like green beans?

LP: Yeah, and I really don’t know why. When they honk the horn, if we were out playing, here we come. We all come in lined up. One thing, Mitch Glisson, I don’t know if you ever knew him?

RS: I did not.

LP: Yeah, he was an ornery sucker. He was a cousin. And one of my mom’s sisters, Jimmy. They were all, they were all…everything was homecooked. I mean, you didn’t buy a pizza or anything. You cooked. 01:36:00He was so ornery. He’d get, used to be, horny toads or lizard or any kind of little thing. My mom would jump up on this table and scream. She couldn’t deal with it. She was just scared to death. But any kind of little bug…I do that to my wife once in a while, I’ll get a June bug…Look! Look!

RS: So, you’re still ornery. That’s what you’re saying?!

LP: Don’t do it. Don’t do it.

RS: That’s funny.

LP: I’d get a locust is what I’d like to get, but I hadn’t caught one yet.

RS: Well, so thinking back to, like, your town life when you were here, not necessarily while you were in Tulsa, but, like, say, before you left and when you came back your senior year…were there any favorite, like, community activities that you remember doing? Say, like, maybe, Western Heritage Days, day camps, 01:37:00county fairs?

LP: Oh, Western Heritage Days, they had rodeos and stuff going on. Uncle Mike and Clarence Earl [Clarence Earl Newell 1936-2011], his brother, big brother, were always in the rodeo. And, then, my cousin, Dwight Pilant, he was a clown. He would do the clown thing out there, get all goofy looking.

RS: Right.

LP: Run behind the barrels and stuff. And it was a lot of fun. Just so much fun watching the rodeos. Mike got thrown one time and got hurt, I think, and Clarence Earl, he was on the ground and a bull, and Clarence Earl jumped over the fence and got him. And got him out of there before the bull could get him. You never know what they’re gonna do. It was scary.

RS: So, you got to, you got to partake in all the Western Heritage Days activities.

LP: Yeah, yeah.

RS: Seemed like a really, I mean, they’ve tried to revive it in recent years, 01:38:00but it seemed like a REALLY big deal, like, you know, back when you were younger.

LP: Oh, it was just packed out.

RS: Yeah.

LP: It was just packed out.

RS: All the festivities, the parade, the rodeo. They said they had dances and all kinds of fun stuff.

LP: Yeah, it was amazing.

RS: So, do you recall, like, what were the biggest or most popular businesses around town when you were growing up? Like, did you have a favorite place to eat out? Or did you get to eat out very often when you were younger?

LP: We almost always ate at home, but we used to go up, me and grandpa used to always like to go up to the north end of town. We’d walk up there and, I can’t remember the name of the place was, Frosty Free…no, it wasn’t…that was my sister’s… RS: It seemed like there was a Frosty Freeze, there was a Tastee Freeze.

LP: It was a Frosty Freeze was, they had a business, my 01:39:00brother-in-law, he’s passed away now, Leroy Maroon. His mom and dad had a business right across the street from where the ice plant was. Where the Community Bank is now. They were across the street right there at the railroad tracks. I think that was a Frosty Freeze. And they had food, hot dog, corn dogs and that kind of stuff there.

RS: And you like going there?

LP: They had it for several years.

RS: So, where was your favorite, like, hang out as a teenager? Other than racing down main street.

LP: Yeah, yeah pretty much we’d go to, they had a skating rink.

RS: A lot of people talk about the skating rink.

LP: Had two, had two movie theaters. Princess and the Walmur, I think was the name of it.

RS: Yes, yes.

LP: I think that’s right.

RS: So, you enjoyed the movie theaters and skating.

LP: Oh, yeah. We’d go watch a movie.

RS: So, was the skating rink down here on, what would that be? Sixth Street, 01:40:00I think? Like, down in the basement of the one building.

LP: Yeah, uh-huh.

RS: So, whenever you were growing up, and I don’t know if this would have been more at your, your house or maybe more at your grandparent’s house, what were meal time, meal times like in your family? Did everyone sit down at the dinner table and eat together in the evenings or?

LP: Well, me and my sister…Bobby, Donnie and Glenna [Pierce], my step-sister and step-brothers, their mom had gotten remarried. The guy was in the army. They wound up, what happened is they wound up going overseas to Okinawa. So, she had, 01:41:00of course, the boys were glad to get away from me, because I was mean as a snake.

RS: So, do you feel like you were, do you feel like maybe, so were just ornery from the beginning or do you feel like that come from, maybe, some of your circumstances?

LP: Just the circumstances.

RS: The circumstances.

LP: And what they did.

RS: Right.

LP: Tearing up everything I had that I valued.

RS: Right. That kept you pretty unhappy and frustrated.

LP: I was, yeah, I was just mean. I, actually, defended him once because we lived on Latimer. It was kind of funny because, my mom and dad, at one time, lived on Latimer of Sheridan, north Sheridan. We was in a house on the east, it would be the east side of Latimer, or Sheridan, I mean. East side of Sheridan. And they wound up buying, owning a house across 01:42:00on the other side of the street, Latimer. Wound up kinda weird. We had a garage on end of the house, and they made it into a bedroom. Had bunk beds again. The boys slept up there and I slept down here by myself. Of course, we’d get into it about every day. I got even once. I took them snipe hunting. They come back in bad shape. Briars down there and I pushed them off in it. They were all littlblood spots here and there. Throwing rocks at me, and I said, if you hit me, you’re gonna pay. You better think about it.

RS: So, with knowing that you were kind of in turmoil when you moved to Tulsa, 01:43:00what was your school life like here before you left. Did you enjoy school?

LP: I can’t remember a day of it.

RS: You don’t remember any of it?

LP: Not one day of it. I told Rita, we got this store here right beside Washington School, used to be.

RS: And you don’t remember.

LP: I’m almost sure I went there, but I can’t recall one day!

RS: You don’t recall any of it.

LP: Not one day of it.

RS: And, then, I know you said, you know, you went to school in Tulsa for a while, then you moved back to Bristow. You tried to go to Bristow High School, and that didn’t work out, so then… LP: Yeah, that didn’t work out at all.

RS: You ended up going to Depew, but then you, also, told me that it kind of didn’t work out there either and you ended up leaving before, like, the end of the school year?

LP: Yeah. I got mad.

RS: You got mad and you just… LP: Of course, he stuck behind his teacher, you know. She would, it was a sewing class. 01:44:00Okay, they tried to put me in something here in Bristow that was early hours. He said you’re going to do it. I bet I don’t. These are my legs.

RS: I have a feeling you don’t tell Bud Peters what he’s going to do.

LP: Yeah, if I think it’s reasonable, I’ll do it. If it helps something, I’ll do it. But you ain’t gonna tell me. It’s not gonna happen. ‘Cause I’m MY boss.

RS: Right.

LP: If it’s something that does good, well, I’m not going get up and do good, so I’m just not going to do that. But I wound up over there. She didn’t really like me, anyway. There was two other boys in there that was kind of prissy, and I said, okay, that’s not me.

RS: And, was Rita going to Depew, also?

LP: Yeah.

RS: Okay.

LP: Yeah, she said, she told her, I drove off. Had to go back and get her. Yeah, 01:45:00I’m not doing this. She said, you want me…I made this shop apron with pockets. You could put nails or screws or whatever and a hammer holder and all that. And it’s good. Yeah, it’s okay. No, it’s good. She said, well, you are going to model it because that’s what we do. I’m not prissing across the stage. Not gonna happen. I made it. Here it is. It’s good. She said, I’ll flunk you. Okay then. So, I walked out.

RS: And that was that.

LP: I grabbed it and walked out.

RS: So, did you not…so you didn’t actually end up graduating?

LP: No.

RS: You didn’t graduate.

LP: So, I wound up going over across the hall, across the street. You know, they had the little buildings over there. I went across the street and went in there and talked to him and said, I said, of course, I was mad. I don’t think I said any dirty words, 01:46:00but I said, I am NOT a girl. You’re gonna put a skirt or something, I said, not gonna do it.

RS: Not doing it.

LP: I won’t do it. I made it. It’s good. And it’s fine. But she said if I won’t do that, I’m done. I said, okay.

RS: You were done.

LP: I’m out of here. I just went on.

RS: So, in your, in your early married life, which I know you guys were young, and, obviously, Rita was still in school, what was your early married life like? Was it a struggle, like where did you live? Where did you work at that time?

LP: Well, it was the funniest thing, because when I worked at the, I got on at the Chandler, the highway department. So, we lived in a little bitty thing in Stroud that was… 01:47:00RS: Like a little shotgun house?

LP: Yeah, well, it was like apartments.

RS: Oh, okay.

LP: And, we lived there. My mom had raised Pomeranians, so we had this one little dog. She gave us a dog. Well, it yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, and the people next door poisoned it.

RS: Oh no!

LP: Yeah, they killed it.

RS: Oh no!

LP: So, we wound up, I wound up finding the, there’s a guy that worked for the highway department in another city, another town, out west, and said, for rent, there’s one driveway, and there was a house…a pretty good-sized house across one side of the driveway. And on the other side of it had a small house. It was like two bedrooms. A nice enough living room and kitchen, and had a little back yard. 01:48:00It was fenced. There’s an old couple that lives in the big house, older couple. So, we rented, this guy worked for the highway department. He said, I’ll rent that to you for $35 a month.

RS: Oh, wow!

LP: And, so, here we went and gathered up our stuff and left Stroud and got in that house. We went to finally, you didn’t make a lot of money with highway department, but we got paid on the last working day of the month is when you got paid.

RS: Right.

LP: And, so we’d gather up stuff and make a little grocery list and go do stuff there. We had Scott and Susie were both little. We didn’t have Brian then. So, we’d get a shopping cart and a list and go do this and that. It was funny. Them kids, them kids…she’d call him “Cotty”, not Scott, 01:49:00it was “Cotty”.

RS: Oh, “Cotty”.

LP: And he called her “Dookie”. Hey “Dookie”. We’d be, people are smiling. I’d have one sitting in the little seat and pushing the buggy and she had the other one. Said, “Cotty”, “Cotty” where are you? I’m over here “Dookie”. People laughing. I’ll never forget it.

RS: Oh, that’s so cute!

LP: It was so funny!

RS: That’s so cute!

LP: Oh, we had some good times.

RS: Well, as we are wrapping this interview up, I wanted to ask you a couple of, a couple of more questions, and these you might have to think about. If you don’t have an answer, that’s fine. I was just curious, are there any historic events, say like the Oklahoma City Bombing, 9/11, any particular natural disasters, world wars, Covid…we’ve had all kinds of stuff, that have affected you? Or did any of those, 01:50:00in particular, affect you or?

LP: No, the one thing that got me one time was when I was with Haliburton. You know what a blender is? A blender, well, we have frack trucks that did the pumps. They would get the fluid from the blender with all kinds of chemicals things mixed up in it and all kinds of stuff. I learned how to run, I learned how to run all that. I was really good on the blender with the V12 is a truck that had two big V12 engines. It’s a long trailer. It’s a big muscle pump. Those engines, there’s stacks off the, not mufflers, but stacks off the outlets on the motors right behind, you had a seat up here like this, and you’d sit in that seat and you had 8-speeds, 01:51:00like four in the high range and four more on both sides. Both pumps were going. Big, big engines. Roar like you couldn’t imagine how they’d roar. And, sometimes, we’d have more than one V12. You’d have more. Around this part of the country, you just had one, and a blender that mixed all the stuff up and pumped it to the V12, and you pumped it down the hole.

RS: Right.

LP: To make a better oil well. So, I had that, I lost, my ears would ring when I ran the V12 clear up until nighttime, and then you’d get up the next day. They didn’t have hearing things for us back then. So, I lost my hearing. All of a sudden, they had a fire in Rock Springs, Wyoming. 01:52:00They had big wells and big jobs out there. They had a lot of gas wells and oil wells. They had a fire. They were actually fracking the well with gasoline, and they had gigantic tanks of gasoline out there. It’s what they called the Red Desert area. You drive a long ways from Rock Springs to just, just to get there. They have a big van and set it up way up a long ways from where the trucks were, and you had to, anything that could cause a spark, you put it in that van. And you could put it a box or whatever you had that was yours. Cigarette lighters and things and matches, anything like that. You could not do it. And you had to use brass hammers because they wouldn’t spark. They had all these tanks, 01:53:00and they had two guys on the ground. They were running hoses to all the different tanks so that you could pull the fluid. They could open the valve and let the fluid go to the blender, and you’d mix it all up and stuff, and then pump it back in. Then they’d move to another tank. Somehow, someway, somebody didn’t have a flapper. They pulled the bull plug out. A bull plug is just something you could cap it off, like its, you’re not going to use it. And it shouldn’t have been out there. But someone took a bull plug off and all this gasoline started rushing out, and it caught fire. The guys were on the blender and the other guys that run the V12’s were up on the hill by the safety zone. It killed the guys, all the guys down there, the four guys.

RS: And this was Haliburton?

LP: At Haliburton.

RS: Okay.

LP: And, so, they, it burned up the trucks. 01:54:00All the trucks were just, you couldn’t tell they were trucks. So, they got all that buried in the Red Desert. They got big dozers out there and buried everything. Nothing was worth saving. The guys were, there was nothing. So, they wound up getting a blender from our place here in Bristow.

RS: Really?

LP: One guy named, Steve Smith, Smitty we called him, he drove it to all the way up there. The thing would only run about 45 mph.

RS: Oh, my goodness.

LP: It was a LONG road to drive.

RS: Yeah, that’s a long trip.

LP: He got up there, stayed two weeks, and then they come and said, we’re going to have to replace Steve, so they picked me. Here I got on an airplane in Oklahoma City [Oklahoma]. They drove me up there with a suitcase. There was two other guys that were going. One was going to be the 01:55:00out-of-state boss, like a foreman. He had been working for us. He had never been on an airplane at all. Me and this other young guy from Enid and this guy, we got on an airplane. It was a big plane. We was supposed to fly to Wichita and then to Denver and then get on a smaller plane because Rock Springs didn’t have an airport for a big plane, just a small plane. So, we got on there, and this guy had never been on an airplane. He had white knuckles. He was scared.

RS: He was nervous.

LP: Yeah, and his old, live out in the country cowboy. He said, oh my God, and we’d taken off. We got up, started going up, and I would have thought it would be pretty quick to get to Wichita [Kansas] and it’d take, we had to pick somebody up or something and then go again to Denver. We was going up like that, and all of the sudden, he turned like this, and like that, and like that 01:56:00and it’s starting turning around and going back. Said ladies and gentleman, we gotta return to the Oklahoma City [Oklahoma] airport. We’ve got a problem. He said, we’ll be landing there in just a few minutes. They come in and checked the airplane out, and said, ironically, the part that we need is in Denver, so any of you that have to go to Rock Springs [Wyoming], there’s another plane going to be leaving here in just a few minutes. So, if you can hustle over there, they had some seats open. Here we went. We don’t want to be on this plane anymore.

RS: Yeah. For real!

LP: We got on there with, same thing, but we got on that other airplane, the waitress or whatever, what’d they call her? Stewardess.

RS: The flight attendant?

LP: She was carrying some drinks along through there. People had wanted a Coke or this or that. The plane took a hit of wind 01:57:00turbulence and everything went everywhere. We wound up doing that, and we got up there and we went back and fracked that same well, got everything covered and buried and new tanks out there full of gasoline. We were going back out there to do it, and they told me, come and told me, said, your blender has got a little leak on it, so we aren’t going to use it. I said, that’s good. That’s good. But we need you to drive one of the trucks of extra stuff and materials and stuff. So, if you could drive that, because a couple of the other guys had lost their buddies that were in that fire.

RS: Right.

LP: And they just call in sick. And I can kind of understand that. So, I said, okay, I’ll drive that. There was another guy that was going to run the blender, he was from Louisiana, all the way from Louisiana up there. 01:58:00He said, hey, he said, you’re a blender operator, aren’t you? I said, yeah. He said, well, you might want to get up here and help me on my blender. I said, NO. I’ve got my job to do. You do yours. I’ll do mine. I said, I’m not getting on a blender with you. I said, you know they gotta use brass hammers around here? He said, aw, you don’t have to do that. I’m going to be watching you. Yeah. I’m going back to Bristow.

RS: Right.

LP: I’m watching you dude. And if I see you doing something wrong, I’m gong to holler. We wound up getting this guy’s, the older man was kind of our boss at the airport and sat around. He, his wife came up a couple days before we were going to fly back. So, she come up and be with him for a little bit. We got on that airplane, and the other guy stayed, so he didn’t come back 01:59:00with us, so it was just me and the older guy and his wife. And we are sitting there in the three seats, and there was an older lady that her kids had sent, her husband had died, so she was by herself, so they sent her a ticket to fly down and stay with them here in Oklahoma. She was a sweet old lady. I can’t remember her name now, but she was a sweet lady. She was sitting right there, so we was talking, we started to take off, and he got the white knuckles again. He grabbed that chair. His wife was okay. He was tense. You could see his neck all tied up. He said, oh my God, he said, we started raising up, and boom. It was like the back wheel hit went up and then hit. Oh my God we’ve lost a wheel or we’ve run over somebody. Don’t say that! 02:00:00Don’t say that! You’re scaring me! I don’t [indecipherable] on an airplane. We talked. We chatted all the way back. I mean, all kinds of stuff. He said, we were getting ready to land. We were approaching the Oklahoma City [Oklahoma] airport, and someone was supposed to be picking me up. He said, listen, you forgot about this, but I haven’t. He said, we either run over somebody or lost a wheel. We’re not down yet. I said, oh, come on! There wasn’t nothing.

RS: It was nothing?

LP: We all landed okay.

RS: Oh, gosh.

LP: It was so funny.

RS: Well, my final question for you, because we are about out of time, is there anything else you’d like to tell us about or any wisdom that you would like to share for future generations?

LP: Just do what you know is right. 02:01:00Just be good and do right.

RS: I agree with that.

LP: Everything will be fine.

RS: Everything will work out.

LP: Yeah.

RS: Well, Bud, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to interview with me today. This is going to be an important part of our oral history archives for the museum. We really appreciate you. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed visiting with you today.

LP: Well, you’re welcome. You’re very welcome.