I did wander into the Southwest over the holiday weekend. I flew into Grapevine on Thanksgiving Day and headed for Norman on Friday with my brother and his Black lab Jake. We were pulling his caravan, a huge camper with pop outs that sleeps about 8 and is fully loaded for non-primitive camping with the big screen TV and all. Mike and my sister in law go to all the OU Football games in it. So we pulled in to Lloyd Noble and I slept out there on the wind swept parking lot with the rest of the Sooner Nation. We Boomer Soonered all day Saturday down on campus corner in the morning and the game in the afternoon. They played Ok State and of course I felt guilty wearing red being an alumni of both but hey I have always rooted for the Sooners even though I take grief from both sides as a Benedict Arnold. I had a pizza at the Hide Away down on Campus Corner. I lived on Hide Away Pizza in Stillwater on the weekends and I delivered pizza for them for a while in Norman. I, being GDI, had never been in a Frat house before then and was thoroughly grossed out by the way those frat boys live after delivering pizza to them for a bit. I never once got a tip the whole time I drove those stupid broken down VW’s (they had a fleet of bugs for deliveries back then). It was fun though when we would lock down the place it pizza, drink a few beers and play music all night through the sound system though. I remember I had a rocking rendition of the Rumen Fluid Blues. I used rumen fluid to grow the bacteria that I did my PhD on. To get the fluid we had to drive to Stillwater because that is the only place close enough to collect the fluid. It was like a field trip and since I new my way around OSU, I was like the ring leader. We would drive up to the Vet School and carry our 20 liter carboy up to the cow barns and ask those old boys to fill ‘er up. I had been up their for 5 years so I was used to that whole aggie / cowboy thang. This fellow would walk back to the fistulated cow, open up the whole on the side, stick his arm up into the fluid and mix the rumen contents like it was second nature. He would always have that Copenhagen smile and he could mix, talk and spit all at the same time. Now I have stuck my arm in a cow a few times but I always used one of them big gloves but this cowboy didn’t seem to mind a stained arm and the pungent odor and he was a smilin’ big when he said, “ bring that carboy over here and we’ll fill ‘er up!” I remember I took my buddy Neil the first time and he grabbed that carboy and ran up to the side of the cow all manly and stuck the carboy opening right under the fistula and the cowboy and I pushed on the side of the animal and this vapor, this rumen fluid vapor escaped from the hole and hit Neil in the nostrils first and then it permeated his entire head as the fluid started running out into the carboy with a small line following the outer surface and dribbling out on his shoes. He got a bit testy about the ordeal! Once we collected about ten liters it was off down the hiway back to Norman for processing. Now rumen fluid is life itself! It is full of some of the most interesting bacteria on the planet and sometimes these critters, when left in a carboy warmed by the Oklahoma sun, well sometimes they can get what you call gaseous. The gas, a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide, can build up and if the fluid has a lot of solids (partially digested grass and corn) well, the gas can get trapped. Trapped gas usually results in pressure and pressure is no good. One time we were between Guthrie and OKC and, well, the gasses escaped in a great carboy belch which blew the aluminum full of the top and about a liter of rumen fluid slopped out onto the ceiling of the car and splattering all in the direct fire just generally making the ride unpleasant. Once back in Norman, the fluid is processed into 500ml centrifuged tube and the solids removed then the liquid is bottled and sterilized in autoclaves, great steam pressure cookers. The bottles are pressure cooked vented so that when you open the autoclaves great clouds of steamy brown vapor pour out, collect on the ceiling tiles and a brown rain falls on the room filling nostrils and staining clothes. Anyway, this made for a great song I used to play to the melody of It takes a lot to laugh a train to cry:

Well I woke up this morning with the rumen fluid blues
Well I woke this morning, with rumen fluid for me and you
I opened up the autoclave and the brown rain covered my shoes.
Well dont be gettin self concious, when that rain falls on you

Sorry I wandered off again . I also went to the Red Dirt Bar. When I was there it was VZD’s. I saw a lot of good music there. I remember seeing Gatemouth Brown (an old black blues guy from Texas), and Marcia Ball (a tall lanky Cajun woman who sits at the piano sidesaddle with her legs cross and pounds out New Orleans R&B in the style of Professor Longhair. And others, it was a fun place. It looks fun now and I like some of that “Red Dirt” music these days. When I was in Stillwater I used to hang around in this little hole in the wall dump called the Bar Ditch and all the so called God Fathers of Red Dirt Music were hangin out there at the same time. So I like that music OK. I also lived across the street from Eskimo Joe’s back before it became the phenom it is now. “Skimo Joe’s was great back then when I was just a young college kid lookin’ to have me some fun.

Any ways I went to the game and sat in my Red among fans wearing burnt orange and had a generally good time. My brother got me a ticket in the OSU section (had I known I might have worn my burnt orange stuff) but I had a good time. Then I went and rented a Uhaul and packed up stuff for my momma and drove it to Grapevine on Sunday. God it was windy and occasionally, although I saw no flames, I was driving through smoke. I always have memories fly through my brain when I go driving through Oklahoma. You cross the Washita three times on that trip and I can always remember Pop (my Grandfather) telling me how that river is more crooked than a bucket full of guts. Driving past Davis I remember a place Pop used to take me camping when I was a kid, Prices Falls (sort of a smaller version of Turner Falls). It was a little falls that was damned up into a swimming pool coming out of the Arbuckles and draining into the Washita. Pop used to go there in the twenties when they would have shows in the wilderness and the old stage was still standing back when we camped there when I was a kid. We used to climb up one of the peaks nearby before sun up and watch the light fill the sky. It created some awesome memories. I remember one of the last times we went as a family and my brothers and cousins (five boys in all) were down by the river inhaling evil weed and taking in the sunset. We had finished and it was dark as we were walking back to camp when down the road came four, count’em, four police cars. And they lined us up and they went to my oldest brother for ID (he had just got a drivers license and I was 9). The cop shined his light in my brothers eyes then back to the license then back to the eyes and he said in a smart alecky tone “Says here your name is James Beaty, is that so?” Well it was dark and silent and I was scared when my brother says in a sure fine Okie drawl, “It’s Michael James Beaty, but you can call me MIKE!” Well the evil weed got the best of me and I lost it, I was cracking up and then everybody else started laughing, it just broke the tension. We had no more of the “stuff” and they realized they weren’t taking us to jail so eventually they let us go. The next day we were eating biscuits and gravy with eggs over easy down in Davis for breakfast when two of the officers from the night before walked in. my cousin Greg out of the blue jumps up looks right at them and shout “up against the wall” and turns with his hands on the wall spread eagle. I remember cracking up again. The cops didn’t like it and Pop was a bit confused (as he had known nothing about none of this) but we survived.

!

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THat Washita river, that is the river that runs through much of my life. It starts way over on the high plains of New Mexico and flows as a creek across the Texas panhandle mostly as a dry sand crease in the earth. It emerges as a crawdead creek out in western Oklahoma and out there in a partially sod cabin Pop was born on the banks of that river in may 1901. The river then courses through a sandstone rise known as the Antelope Hills into what is now Cheyenne County. THis is where in November 1868 Custer first learned how to make war on Native Americans killing about 200 people on a snowy morning for no other reason than they were probably related to a few raiders in Kansas or at least they gave them safe passage. The soldiers took the naked corpses of the men and women and posed them in different acts of copulation before they shot 400 ponies, filling the river with blood, and burned the village. The river then flows on east to Fort Cobb and then south through the area where Pop actually grew up. the old Butler farm was south of Blanchard and north of the Washita and Pop remembered spots where you could go down to the river in that country and see wagon ruts left by the '49'ers who took a short cut through Indian Territory on there way to California less than 70 years before the time Pop was a kid and found the tracks. Pop could also be driving around in what seemed like the middle of nowhere and turn down a dirt road and there would be a grove of pecan trees where he had harvested pecans as a kid. We would stop and he would pull a basket out of the trunk and off we would go lookin' for pecans. The Washita turns south from there and courses across the north face of the Arbuckle rise and then back south again into the Boggy country. This is the area where my Grandmother Mom Mom's (Willa May, what a great Okie name)family resided. We would drive endlessy down backroads and end up at a place called Nixon. A post office stood here from about 1885 to 1920 and members of my family worked it. We would stop at the deserted town now with only an old one room school house standing and Pop would open the trunk and out would come a shovel a rake and a trough. In the cemetery, he would manicure the graves of long dead Sullivans and Sims most of whom seemed to die in 1919. The last pandemic flu. I would chase the lizards who had holes all over the place and wonder in amazement at the old Indian graves with small brick walls surrounding them and covered with broken plates and pottery. I would ask Mom Mom about the graves and all she would say was they were Indians and they had peculiar ways.

What is GDI?

God Damn Independent!

About 'Skimo Joes!

Eskimo Joes is Stillwaters Jumpin' Little Juke Joint. It was established in 1974 or so as a little hole in the wall bar in a little hole in the wall college town on the Cimarron River in the middle of the Cherokee Strip. The original building itself is just a block away from campus and was built of stone wall construction as a dry goods store around the turn of the century (19th to the 20th) prior to the assgnment of the nearby land as a Land Grant school called Oklahoma A&M (from what I understand). IN '76 when I began my tenure as a regular at skimo's, it was the only bar in Stillwater that served the Bohemian crowd (a small but tight knit community in a redneck world like Stillwater). I spent many an hour in the upstairs "living quarters" of the old building drinking beer and trying to convince some young hippy type college girl (usually from Tulsa) that she really needed to experience an intimate encounter with me if she were to live life to its ultimate potential. I always found the design of the upstairs facilities interesting, A diagonal partition, women got the side with the throne and the guys got the tube. It was a unique bar at the time because it had a really excellent sound system and they played tunes i liked. Not only the bigtime stuff like John Prine and Emmylou and Gratefull Dead and stuff like that but even some more eclectic stuff like Arlo, Byron Berline's group Sundance (they used to crank "Thunderstorm Over Oklahoma" on occasion and they would play John Hartford and a band called Cornbread (a band of some exceptional talent that played the Louisiana to Colorada music corridor, I once witnessed an exceptional banjo / scrubboard duet at the Bar Dirch by these guys ('skimos had no live music). Anyways, the 'skimo's phenom came about because of an excellent logo of an eskimo and his dog with big grins which led to a popular apparal line in Oklahoma (I have seen Joes shirts in California, New York, London and Prague worn by people I didn't even know!) It was a sad day back in '88 when GW's father campaigned in Stillwater and announced to an enthusiastic crowd in what is now T Boone Picken's Stadium (he was an Okie Aggie) that he came to Stillwater just to go to Eskimo Joes. On a humorous note, back a few years ago old T. Boone hisself donated a million or so to renovate the old Football Stadium (thus the name). The renovation included a new Brick Facade as a center piece entrance. Well, the bricklayers weren't screened very well for such a delicate job and low and behold when they were done and the crowd stood back and took a good look there was a giant brick facade that had intricate brick work that spelled in rather large letters OU. Ya gotta be careful in a land of bedlam! The brick layers were summarily dismissed but there is a rumor they got the job to complete the State Capital Dome (which had not been completed on account of the great Depression and the dust bowl hit the state at an inoppurtune moment way back when)!

PS: not to be outdone, OU's Football stadium was renovated by its conservative millionaire benefactors, and it is now called The Gaylord Family Stadium as you well know one of the Families that brought us GW through there rehabilitation efforts by making him the front man of their Texas Ranger baseball team. But i will say I do thank the Gaylord family for preserving the Ryman in Nashville, for without their efforts, they were going to tear down the Grand Old Opry, they were gonna tear down the sound that goes around the songs. But I would have been even more grateful if they would have left GW as the poor inept oil tycoon (son) he was before they got a hold of him!

I know I am a bit chatty this morning but I got to thinkin about that unfinished dome and that reminded me of a story about politicians and Pop. BAck at the time of the great dustbowl, them dirty thrities brought a demagogue to power in that capital with the unfinished dome. He was a cosmic mix of Huey Long and Will Rogers named Alfalfa Bill Murray. Old Pop never talked about politicians much, but he did tell a story of old Alfalfa Bill. It was down at Blanchard at the Walnut Creek Park that Pop and family were down for a watermelon feed. The whole town had turned out and there was banjo music in the park and fried chicken on the ground and plenty of watermelon. In a well orchestrated planned happenstance (this is Pop talkin') a group of three or four shiny black cars came down the highway and parked right upfromt and out of the lead car popped Alfalfa Bill himself with the press boys in tow (somebody had to fill them other cars). Well they just happened to be driving by and old Bill thought how much he would like a nice juicy piece of watermelon. According to Pop, Bill took off his coat, rolled up the sleeves on his fancy city shirt and proceeded to cover himself in watermelon juice, seed and pulp. Why he was just a normal fellow just like the rest of us. He wasn't there to campaign but to be a member of the community (with a personal press corps to snap the photo's of everyday Bill). He washed up and told all those people that he was there friend and if there was anything he could do to help them, all they had to do was take a trip to the capital and he'd talk with them and sort it out! Well there came a point where the dirty thirties was hard and civic pride was low and things weren't workin' out so well. A contingent of folks from Blanchard was selected and sent off to the Capital to sort it out with Bill. Apparantly, so the story goes, they sat in his office foyer for sometime with Bill wondering in and out of there view giving them an agitated eye. Finally thay heard Bill explode, "get them god damn Okies outta my office for I have no time, no time at all to talk to them. I am a busy man!"

That was his windiest opinion of politicians I ever heard Pop express (he had only to others he expressed, as I might of said before, he didn't like Lincoln (obvious reasons) and he didn't like FDR because he lost his job Grating roads (and the money it ment to support his young family seeings my mom was born in 1930 and her sister in 1928) to young single boys in the WPA!

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is there aNyBoDY OUT THERE? AHHHHHGGGGGG!!!

Oh Sorry I uh I uh
Oh,
Nevermind

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<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by PSBeaty:

is there aNyBoDY OUT THERE? 4

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Yeah, we're just GDI!

William "Alfalfa Bill" Murray was born in Toadsuck, Texas in 1869. (I am sorry...I can't make this stuff up)

Toadsuck Texas, where the hell is Toadsuck Texas?

From the Handbook of Texas

TOADSUCK, TEXAS. Toadsuck, originally called Toadsuck Saloon, later became part of Collinsville in western Grayson County. Settlers arrived in the area in the late 1850s, and in 1869 a townsite was surveyed near Toadsuck Saloon, then located a half mile southeast of what is now the site of Collinsville. The town of Toadsuck took the name of the saloon. It may have been named by John Jones, an early settler and mill owner, after the city of Toadsuck, Arkansas. According to legend, the name was originally a reference to men consuming liquor until they swelled up like toads. In 1869 William (Alfalfa Bill) Henry David Murray,qv who later became a notable Oklahoma governor, was born in Toadsuck. The Texas and Pacific line was built within three quarters of a mile of Toadsuck in 1880, and by 1887 most of its businesses and residents had moved to the tracks. The railroad town was named Collinsville when it was incorporated in the 1890s.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ancestors and Descendants: Grayson County, Texas (Sherman, Texas: Grayson County Genealogical Society, 1980). Frank X. Tolbert, "Tolbert's Texas" Scrapbook, Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Lisa C. Maxwell

Are you sorry you asked, PSB?

Wow.....is that anywhere near Frogfart Oklahoma?

you been to Frogfart Larry? THat aint nowhere near Toadsuck Texas. Frogfart up by Lake Eufala in the Boston Mountains and it was immortalized in True Grit as the place where Glen Campbell fell into the Rattlesnack pit in the imaginary Snow capped mountains of Eastern Okla. Speakin' of Judge Parkers court, how can you respect an outlaw by the name of Blue Duck! But that Ned Christie was one badass hombre! But thats what happens when you get caught stealin' chickens and such by the time that you turn ten! but when i left McCulloch before pea ridge I still kept the gun!

Let's see if someone can figure a thread through that?

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No, never been to Frogfart, but I have visited Mindfart plenty of times. That's how I know about Frogfart. Most folks don't even know that frogs do fart, but if you think about it, how else would you explain all those little bubbles that pop up in ponds?

this a set up Larry, I am a microbiologist with a history in geomicrobial ecology, do you really want an answer?