MOTHER’S DAY

One of the pleasures of being retired and just writing a weekly column for the new Blue Paper online is being able to sometimes write about subjects that are personal. I rarely did that when I was editor. My page one commentaries were almost always about politics, the police and other “journalism as a contact sport” topics. My column this week is certainly not one of those controversial, hard-hitting topics. In fact, it’s sort of mushy. Not my usual style at all.

My mother’s name was Hazel– one of those wonderful old-fashioned names like Martha, Emma and Pearl. Hazel was born and raised in Wewoka, Oklahoma. Her father– my grandfather– was the station master for the Rock Island Line in Wewoka. Talk about a small town! When Oklahoma became a state in 1907 (only about 10 years before my mother was born), the population of Wewoka was only about 800. Originally located in Indian Territory, Wewoka was, at one time, the national capital of the Seminole Nation. Oil was discovered near Wewoka in 1923.

Hazel Hutchison was the prettiest girl at Wewoka High School. And like many small town girls, she wanted out. That dream started to develop when she met Cyrus Cooper, a young accountant who had been transferred to Wewoka by Shell Oil in Tulsa. They were married and Cy was transferred back to Tulsa and they had two children– Dennis and Sally. Life was good. But then Hazel’s dream fell apart. Cy contracted tuberculous and died. So, there she was, a pretty young woman with two kids and no work skills to speak of. So Hazel took us back to Wewoka to move in with her parents.

That had to be a difficult transition for my mother on a number of different levels. But those years were great for me. I was pretty young, but we lived close to Main Street and I was allowed to walk down to the drug store where my uncle was the soda jerk. I not only got free chocolate sodas, I also got to sit on the floor in front of the magazine rack and read the comic books without getting yelled at. Then, I could walk another couple of blocks down to the train station and hang out with my grandfather. Sometimes, when a train was coming into the station, my grandfather would walk with me down to the end of the wooden platform and, as the incoming train slowed, he would pick me up with one arm and, with the other arm, pull himself (and me) up to the step of the locomotive– and we would get a 30-second train ride. I probably had a big smile pasted on my face for the rest of the day.

We eventually moved to bigger cities– Tulsa, Baton Rouge and Ft. Worth. Those had to be hard times for my mother financially– nothing like the future she would have had if my father had lived. She became a good typist and, somehow, she was able to support her two kids by working as a secretary. But my sister and I never realized that she was struggling and that we were, well, “poor.” Regardless, she always told us that we could do anything we wanted to do in life– if we were willing to work hard to get a good education.

Still beautiful, Hazel was married twice during this period. And during the summers, she and her husband du jour would drop Sally and me off to spend several months with my father’s mother– our grandmother– in rural Arkansas. Late in her life, my mother told me that she had felt guilty for years for “dumping” us at Grandmother Cooper’s house (where my father had grown up). I was flabbergasted by that revelation– and I was able to tell her that those summers represented another wonderful time in my life– because many of my cousins were there, too, and we really had a great time. She actually cried when I told her that, as all those years of guilt melted away.

A few years later, I would not have been able to tell her that. She died of Alzheimers.

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