WPA: The Road to Recovery

I've been having some hard travel, and I thought you knew I've been having some hard travel in the way down the road. I've been having hard travel, hard travel. Sometimes we coasted along sluggish brooks whose feebly trickling courage just served to link together a succession of glassy pools, embedded like mirrors and a quiet bosom of the forest, reflecting its autumnal foliage and patches of clear blue sky. Writer Washington Irving so loved this part of Indian territory that he swore, if he were ever to settle in this part of America, it would be here, the only place in the United States which he said offered a romantic way of life plus absolute independence.

Irving was not the first person to be drawn to this part of the country. Osages, Cherokees and Creeks were living in this area long before Irving's visit. Both the Creeks and the Cherokees were said to have been visited by Irving himself. Surprisingly, there is a little written about this early period in Oklahoma's history. Fortunately, there are some accounts among the Indian pioneer records. These oral histories of early Oklahoma pioneers in Indians were transcribed and preserved during the 1930s as part of the Works Progress Administration. The WPA was a part of the National Recovery Act, Franklin D. Roosevelt's effort to give people work during the Depression.

After the stock market crash of 1929, the nation was gripped by a depression that crushed the poor and spared neither the rich nor the educated. Oklahoma felt the full weight of the Depression. The state's dwindling cotton industry, along drought and falling oil prices, proved to be too much causing a mass exodus of okies toward greener pastures. Especially hit hard were working-class Tulsons living along the West Bank of the Arkansas as oil prices plunged so to the number of jobs. During the first six months of 1933, the industry had fired half its labor force. Tulsa Methodist conducting door to door surveys of the living conditions of West Tulsons found a quarter of the residents living in tents with only outdoor plumbing.

The incidence of disease and death among the children were as high as one would expect to find in any third world population. By 1932, the forces of the economic depression had all Tulsons praying for relief. No one expected it to come in the form of publicly funded programs, but in the first 100 days of his office, Roosevelt formed the first national relief agency ever of its kind in the nation's history. Often called the alphabet program, workers progress projects nationwide, whereas varied as the kinds of people working on them. That was the WPA, the civilian conservation corps or the CCC, the public works of the PWA and the PWA painters and many more. Never was a country in the throes of more capital letters than the old USA wrote will Rogers.

On any given day during the New Deal era, more than 18,000 workers could be found working for the WPA in Oklahoma. The New Deal was a godsend for those families who were hit hardest by the depression. The national NRA began its Blue Eagle Drive, gaining the people's support with a nationwide radio broadcast, starring such speakers and entertainers as Will Rogers, Bingen Crosby, Eddie Cantor, Kate Smith and Al Jolson. In spite of Governor Al Falfa Bill's opposition, Oklahoma responded favorably to the Blue Eagle Drive. Oklahoma quickly began to use the federal funds available under the guidance of Grant Foreman, director of the WPA workers and the federal writers program. Ten Tulsa interviewers hit the dirt roads collecting stories, but not without some difficulties. Oftentimes it was hard to get in the home to get these stories. If they didn't know you, they often thought you were some peddler going through the country selling them something.

It was hard to get pioneer families to open up and tell us the condition of their early life. Anna Arbery. Questionnaires were sent to members of Oklahoma Historical Societies and settlers organizations. Before the program ended in April 1938, more than 25,000 questionnaires have been received by aged pioneers and Indians. Grant Foreman often reviewed these responses. I received this morning a questionnaire from a woman who arrived in Oklahoma in 1885. For a while, her and her husband slept in their wagon bed and then cut down trees to make a frame for a house, which they covered with a wagon sheet. After trying and vain to find other employment, I got some washing to do but had starched the clothes and hung them out on limbs and grass, so the grasshoppers ate holes on the clothes, so I didn't get any more washing. This woman became the mother of 11 children born in adversity, all but two are still living.

They doubtlessly possessed their mother's sturdy character, character that made this great state what it is, Grant Foreman. Interviewers were given prepared sets of questions, one for Indians and other set for pioneers. Workers asked people to recollect famous people that they had known, such as bell star and the Dalton brothers. They asked about the locations of cemeteries and civil war battle sites. Workers also recorded Indian cooking techniques, ask about secret societies, and recorded pioneer and Indian folklore. Early Tulson Pioneer, Ella Paraman. I was born in 1876 in the Old Range House. It was on what is now 34th Street, about halfway between Peoria and Lewis. As many as 15 cowboys often stayed there, my father was always taking in some homeless boy or girl to raise. Fire spread through Tulsi town streets in 1897.

Starting in the dry goods house of Gillette, the flames spread until every building in the block was destroyed but the lyric. The use of a fourth pump in Mr. Arthur's store and a two-inch hose, we saved the lyric building. Warfield Phillips, West Tulsa. In 1882, the Frisco Railroad began to extend its tracks across the murky, unpredictable Arkansas River. Vera Blanz was born in 1888 in the back of her father's store near the Frisco tracks. First licensed medical practitioner in Indian territory. He graduated from St. Louis Medical College in 1883, I believe, came to Tulsa in 1885. I think had a pharmacy at that time. And then, sometime after that, he moved to Redport. He met his wife, who was Sue Yehola Davis. And I don't know when they were married, sometime in the late 1880s because I think their oldest child was born before 1890.

And Vera, I think, was born before 1890. My paternal grandmother was born in 1878, and I think Vera was born in 1888. I think she was 10 years younger. At the time of the drilling of the oil well, the retail activity was down around the railroad, and almost two blocks west of the railroad down there on 40th Street. Hall's store was across the railroad on where 40th Street curved round and where the overpass is. And people named Brooks, who built a two-story house. This catacorner from the lot where my grandparents lived, had a store. They had a retail store down there by the railroad at one time. Granted, baked bread every morning, got up early and baked bread every morning. Sold, breaded by the loaf.

Sold sandwiches at noon. All-field workers came from where they were working on the rigs. They bought sandwiches. I don't think they served any hot food, but they served sandwiches. I'm sure they had a few canned goods in there, but it was not a regular grocery store. It was just a lunch room where they served lunch, and so bread. And as far as I know, that's all they sold out of there. The discovery at Sue Blan number one, and the Ida Glen Gusher in 1905, soon changed the complexion of Tulsa's commerce across the Arkansas River. Wagon trains would come here and load up the goods. They would take them on to other cities west of here. Chandler, Pawnee, Oklahoma City, and others on west. The wagons would come in here coated with red mud. That was why I think they called the place red fork, Fanny Castle Smith.

At the time WPA workers were collecting interviews, the 1921 race riots were still a living memory, and were rarely even whispered about. Fanny Smith had vivid recollections of what happened in red fork. There was a burning of crosses on the red fork hill, and that was a warning to someone in red fork. When word came to red fork about the race riot, I went over to see my sister and niece. They were hiding under the window sill. Her husband had called home from where he worked, and told them to hide. There was shooting in the street. But in the 1930s, Tulsa had become home for many ex-slaves. I can sit on the gallery where the sunlight shines bright, and saw a powerful fine scene when my grandchildren wanted to dress for the school doings. But I wasn't worth much for nothing else, I reckon.

I was one of them little sleigh girls my own self. And I never seen nothing but work in tribulation until I was a grown-up woman just by Katie Roe. In the spring of 1937, Robert Lackie interviewed Katie Roe, as she sat on the front porch of her west side home. Lackie, who later wrote for the Chronicles of Oklahoma, was an interviewer for the Oklahoma Slave Narrative Project. Under the guidance of the folklore division of the writers' program, interviewers recorded remembrances of African Americans who were born into slavery. In total, there were 18 states who gathered nearly 2,500 oral histories. Although many Tulsons experienced hard times, they still found ways to have fun. Radio Wave magazine ran a daily schedule of Tulsa Radio programs. Bob Will's and KVOO entertained many out of work Tulsons. Musicians played down at the Mark Twain Community Center.

Craig Don Hatt, strummed his banjo, as neighbors gathered on his front porch drinking lemonade and keeping cool. Cab Callaway played at the Colosseum, and the Bay Block Orchestra could be heard at the Topaz Room in Tulsa. But some of Tulsa's WPA workers had no time for entertainment. One WPA program sought to restore the Earth, becoming one of America's first attempts at an organized environmental conservation plan. Affectionately called Roosevelt's Tree Army, the Civilian Conservation Corps, was one of the least criticized programs of the NRA. Workers dressed in uniforms and stayed in camps with barracks and dining halls. These camps had dispensaries, camp newspapers, and some had organized boxing matches for the boys' entertainment. Many veterans of World War II remarked that they got their first taste of military life while working in the CC camp.

The CC was also responsible for building over 800 state parks across America and numerous others on the local level. With as many as 64 camps in Oklahoma in 1942, this state had more camps than any other in the nation. Tulsa workers laid stones for Tulsa's Rose Garden, dug trenches for the new Block Park and built Oklahoma's largest municipal park, Mohawk Park, covering nearly 2,250 acres. Mohawk Park was the largest urban project in Oklahoma. The CCs drained land to form a recreational lake, built fireplaces, picnic tables, bicycle trails, roads, footbridges, and sewer lines. Stone mason's moved huge boulders to form two outdoor picnic shelters. African Americans were eligible to enroll in the CCC after an amendment was made to the original New Deal Bill.

Mohawk Park camp became officially designated as a mixed camp, but was strictly segregated. According to the camp inspection reports, nearly 70% of the men at Mohawk were blacks as they were called back then. This type of mixed camp was an exception rather than the rule. They usually had their own CCC camps, such as the Fort Sill Military Reservation which was designated for black and rollies. Indians participated in the CCC having their own Indian core, but they were run differently than the others. Oftentimes, entire families lived in the camp. At Bull Hollow near Tulsa, Indian and rollies were taught black smithy, shoemaking, and carpentry. Many young men were sent to the CCC camps outside of Oklahoma. John Gordon remembers his train trip to his CC camp. So one day, somebody come down and said,

hey, we need some people to go to the CCs. I said, oh, well, I'll go. He said, how long take you get ready? I said about 15 minutes. So they put five of us in the car and took off from Anadarko went up to Clinton, who went through there in the next day, about four o'clock. They put us on a train, went up through, and I kept a diary as I went up, went up through Thomas and up into Kansas, and then parallel to Kansas, up through Lahada to Colorado Springs, and they're down to Denver and into Wyoming. Young men like John Gordon worked for about a dollar a day,

building roads, bridges, fighting fires, assisting with emergency disasters. They also supported their families by sending a required $25 home each month, leaving only $5 a month for their own personal expenses. Life at the CCs often meant time away from loved ones. Darling, I wrote an inspiring poem that I wrote for the camp paper a few nights ago. I wrote it while I was looking at your picture. Here it goes. With her picture here before me while I'm writing this, I get enough inspiration to hold life's sweet bliss. When I hold her in my arms, I ask no more of life, then to have this little lady for my own charming life, your future husband, Doc. Dad joined the Conservation Court of CCs and was sent to Durango, Colorado, and I believe he went in 35, and then came back to Tulsa in 36.

I know they did a lot of conservation work in Oklahoma, planting trees around the sections of land to conserve the land that keep it from deteriorating with the winds and all. Of course, that was the big problem. And with the death storms, that dad's crew, or the company he was with, they were doing something in the mountains there in Durango. I know in some of the pictures in his little album here, it shows a crew with, they were stone nasons, and it looks to me like they were cutting their own stone. Manual as parents were Ruth Walton and manual coffee. They first met at a church gathering. At that time, Ruth sold pecans and apples and downtown Tulsa for extra money. She received five cents a day for her lunch at Central High School, which she often saved to buy herself a senior ring. The camp was quite large, and they had a spencery. And of course, when you have men working on construction

or a young man, they were going to be entries. And they had a doctor assigned here. It was just like an army base. And dad was a physician's aide. I forget what the term was and one of the papers it tells exactly what his title was, but he even got the nickname Doc. And he would sew up the boys if they had cuts that need stitches. Darling, I had a pretty messy job yesterday, and it was terrible. One of the boys in this camp was killed in a landslide yesterday morning, and I had to work with him. He had his neck broke, back broke, and a bunch of ribs crushed into a hundred pieces. So Darling, this is kind of a sample of the work that I have to do. Darling, I love you. The thing that really surprised me was how romantic daddy was. I never saw that son of dad. He was always busy working, but it was a tender, sweet thing to discover at this time. We lost dad two years ago, and Mom's 85 now has Alzheimer's and nursing home,

and it was just a beautiful experience to find these and to find this out about my parents. Known as the father of good roads in Tulsa County, Cyrus Avery was the district director of WPA District number one. In 1935 and 1936, Avery's district spent approximately $6 million for roads, water supply, dams, schools, disposal plants, city halls, courthouses, armories, and various other projects. Perry Chapel and Jack Covey were two West Tulsons who worked under Avery for the WPA. They were small, but we landed right there just south of the old Leavenstreet bridge on the west side of the river and moved into it eight by ten-tenth, the whole family. And my father had came down a little earlier and went to work at the old, causative refinery.

But there was nothing there to mount anything, and of course it was called West Tulsa and the southwest boulevard was Kwanah Street. These West Tulsa families decided to stick out the Depression years in Oklahoma. Maybe their families' roots were just too deeply embedded into the hardened Oklahoma soil. Jack Covey's family came to Tulsa by covered wagon. He was born in 1914, and his childhood days were happily filled with riding horses and milking the family's cows. But times changed, and during the thirties, he married and found he was the sole provider for his extended family. I bought a house for $25 and moved it in, three miles, and they had the southwest children. And my father wasn't home too much at the time. So it was left kind of left up the stepmother and I, and my wife to keep things going.

And sometimes it'd be pretty good and sometimes it would. I always said, we had time to just walk around and say one thing. Paracapal, age 17, and Covey, 21, signed up for WPA work. Working can see to ya can't see days from dawn to dusk for $2.40 since a day. WPA workers built Jinx football stadium. The sand springs dyke and moves sand near the 11th street bridge. Paracapal remembers a run-in he had with a foreman while hauling sand on one job. So many people said it was a WPA. We peddle around. Now, we didn't work hard, but we kept busy. And one day the foreman, like I say, he was a large fellow and he looked every bit of a colonel.

I guess one of the higher government paid and wasn't on the WPA. And some reason or other, I was standing there while the boys was a shoveling. And pretty soon he hollered at down there. He said, all right, sure he has to get going there. And they never had it half loaded. And I said, well, they haven't got it loaded yet. I said, come on up the hill here with it. So I picked it up, kind of green and one off up the way. And I got up there, he was standing up there, just off of the tuba. And he stopped, dropped my wheelbarrow down to see what he wanted to say and the guys down and the bottom began to holler. Don't hit him shortly, don't hit him. But you know, I've got to tell you this. He had nothing against me. It was just a matter that he wanted me to move. And he's all right, go on.

And he came down there. It wasn't 30 minutes until he came down on where it was. And he said, come go with me. And a shade tree, digging the dirt out around from the roots to where we could get that tree down. And that's my WP story there. Jack Covey hauled rocks from around 71st in Union for the Jinks football stadium. They had a regular rock chisel. And they would take this chisel and mark that stone all the way across there. And then they'd keep cutting on it and put it in. It would snap off. Sometimes they'd have turned the stone over. You know, if it was real tough, they'd turn the stone over. And they had solved who we had. Working for the WPA also had its lighter side. I'll tell you one little hard time. If you want a hair of a hard time, it was working there on 71st Street.

And like I said, it was cold. I am definitely afraid of snakes. I just don't understand them. And they had dug up a snake. It was still too cold to move. And as a big boy, the name of Jack James, he was a grown man. And quite a bit larger than I was. They kind of picked on me. As people were younger fellows. And he got that old snake up. There's a big ring of people. It would be 20 feet across around that fire. And he said, I'm going to throw this snake on a old chapel. And I said, no, Jack, don't. I said, I cannot stand snakes. I have never touched a snake. And please don't. Well, I'm going to. And he started forming. And I round around the ring two or three times. And it got rather tiresome. I'm going to be a bigening. Not too. I finally grabbed up a pick handle. And I said, now, Jack,

I'm going to hit you if you get close. And here you can. And I swadded him upside the head of that lightly. And that ended the snake fight. And it made him mad, of course, that I had the pick handle. I was 17 when Webster High School was built. And I used to sit and watch some work on it. Most of the foundation was dug out by hand. But they used a gas powered shovel to dig out the boiler room. Mule drawn dump wagons were used to haul the dirt out. All the mules were kept in a pin near where the athletic building is now. Walter Carpenter. Southwest Tulsa's Webster High School is an excellent example of the kind of WPA, which can be seen throughout Tulsa. Other WPA work is the Tulsa Union Depot, the Fairground Pavilion, and Tulsa Fire Alarm Building. At that time, it had an indoor swimming pool. And this was back in 1939.

And it had two-way intercoms so that the teacher could talk to the people in the office and vice versa. And it had a elaborate child care center here because the mothers were working and working in the defense drives. And so our homic students and child care students actually had children that they fed, dressed, clothed, and everything in this building. The artistic grandeur of the building is well represented in the modern deco elements used in the auditorium. And this auditorium are the original clocks. They were put in in 1938-39. The deco design that you see in the framework of the clocks matches the deco work in the windows. It's a very unique situation. But the clocks being, as old as they are, you can no longer buy parts for them. And consequently, parts have to be made in the maintenance machine shop to keep the clocks operating.

Meanwhile, other WPA workers were paid to move large quantities of dirt on archeological sites in La Forre County. Supervisor Ken Orr wrote this amusing account of their feudal attempts to record their findings. First attempt is set up a makeshift 20-foot ladder to get good photo angle of the site ends in a disheartening collapse of the whole affair. Luckily, our photographer was not up in the air at the time. Much pulling of hair and nails, also some patching and a little cussing, finally found a safe, though swaying structure, jutting definitely once more in the clouds. The locals will probably now swear that we are drilling for oil on their land, as well as for buried gold. Phil Newcometh says he believes he had one of the most exciting WPA jobs there was to have. His hobbies included archaeology, studying Indians and collecting arrowheads. The WPA turned his hobby into his job.

Newcometh was one of four supervisors hired to excavate Oklahoma's archaeological sites. He soon found himself supervising some of the excavations at Spiral Mounds. Basically, the WPA gave the archaeologist the first chance in history as I know out to move a lot of dirt because they were able to hire these people to excavate and do other jobs with shovel picks, needles, brooms. And as they went on, they learned other skills that were needed in excavating work. So the normal procedure before that, as far as I could see, was for an anthropology or archaeology professor to go out for a couple of weeks or a month during the summertime with a few students and move a few yards of dirt and then go back and work on all of this material that they had found. It was made for the local people to try to make a little living during hard times.

They were farmers, mostly farmers, laborers and others, cross-section of the whole neighborhood. And those who could not find other paying jobs were eligible for a WPA work. And they could, at that time, I believe, be lower than them and on it was 18 months at a time and then they had to go off and try to look for another job or other work, which put a little pressure on the supervisor in a place like this. You would have had a man on the job long enough to learn some of the procedures that are needed, such as making writing up data sheets and taking measurements and other information as digging progress and taking charge of the other man. And here comes 18 months long.

You lose some of your best men and have to start all over again with some new ones. Luckily, it was a gradual change. And if it was a good man, there was always another one who could take his place. newcomers work was part of a WPA program supported by the University of Tulsa, University of Oklahoma, and the Oklahoma Historical Society. Under the supervision of Dr. Forest Clements, the University of Oklahoma leased the spiral mounds for excavation. Frank Phillips helped to obtain the lease and provided money for the excavation. Others, such as the fields of Tulsa, contributed and often made day trips with friends to visit the sites. Local workers went home after a hard day's work, but supervisors camped on the site. Wednesday nights at 11.30, they tuned in their favorite radio program, Lights Out. Thursday, March 24, 1938.

Nerves a bit on the ragged edge this morning. Due to the best or worst, Lights Out program, it has been our pleasure to hear in a month of Wednesdays. Even the cook had a slight tremor in his coffee pouring this morning. Unfortunately, the WPA workers were not the first diggers at spiral mounds. In the 1870s, the spiral mounds area was farmland for Choctaw former slaves. These slaves had come to Indian territory with the Choctaws. After the Civil War, they were given their freedom and later the Arkansas bottom allotment lands. They farmed these fields only to the edges of the burial mounds and ever disturbing the mounds themselves. But in the early thirties, the Pakula mining company, looking for gold, leased the burial grounds from the owners. Instead of finding gold, they found precious artifacts. And they discovered that selling sacred artifacts could also make them rich. From 1933 until 35, they destroyed about a third of the burial mound, probably around 400 burials.

And so literally hundreds of thousands of items from those burials. Back in the thirties, it was called the King Tut of the West. Because there was so much and so highly preserved materials found with those sets of burials. It's actually one of the reasons why Oklahoma in 1935 passes laws to protect the prehistoric sites in Oklahoma. One of the reasons why the WPA was here was to recover materials before it was destroyed. This is still private land. And private land rights in the U.S. are very grey areas when it comes to regulation. The University's excavations, which used the WPA or Works Progress Administration to do the excavation part, was really a salvage operation. It allowed for large areas of land to be excavated scientifically using the skills and the abilities of the time. And really be able to see a slice of history that we'd never seen before, to be able to glimpse into the past where before it had been just artifacts. Artifacts are neat, but they look great on museum shells, but they tell you almost nothing if they don't have the context.

And the work that the WPA did was provide some framework, a context for those artifacts that were amazing the world. People think about WPA and they think about the classic idea of leaning on shovels till they break. The archaeology part is a little bit different than the Rhodes program. It was more thought, and it also seems to have been more discovery. And I think in any career, any kind of job, the more you have of that, the better you like it, and the more interest you are in doing the work. And I didn't live back then, but from everybody I've ever talked to that had folks that worked here or had worked here themselves, and that's a big part of why this site, this kind of WPA excavations in archaeology and painly entology, because OU has a lot of paleontological collections that were excavated by the same kind of groups. Those people may not have had a big formal education, but because of the work here, they were employed, and they were employed in a way that was interesting.

As opposed to building a road or bridge, which was okay, but it wasn't quite the same way. It wasn't as challenging. Well, relative to what had gone on before the WPA work, it definitely was a positive event. Contrast that with untrained people who were digging tunnels into the mounds, looting burials, selling the goods, and most of which we will never see again. We don't even know where they went in most cases. Certainly the WPA excavations inspired over a very positive event. By today's standards, they were not that well done, the WPA excavations, but still they did the best job they were trained to do. We're learning to study and do a better job of interpreting what they found.

Once the WPA workers recovered artifacts, they were sent to a special department where artists spent long hours putting together what one described as a thousand jigsaw puzzles. Artists also drew sketches to preserve accurate records. Artists such as AC Blue Eagle, Stephen Mopop, Woody Crumble painted murals for many of our public buildings and post offices. Other murals depicting the American scene were created by artists like Tulsa's Mary McCray. Mary McCray had vivid memories of her earlier years in Tulsa. Back then, 15th Street was a dirt road, and the streetcar line went out to Quincy Avenue. McCray knew Grandma Perry, who she said could speak English but wouldn't. While a student at Tulsi University, she painted a portrait of her 10-year-old neighbor.

This young woman later became one of Oklahoma's Indian ballerinas, Muslim Larkin, who along with her husband founded the Tulsa Ballet Company. During the 30s, Mary studied with artist and designer Ada Robinson. She was a teacher. More than anything, she could make you think and make you see. She thought the main thing as being an artist or teaching art was teaching people to see. You look at things but you don't see them. Mary McCray hoped to win a WPAP contract when she submitted two small oil paintings in a competition to decide who would paint the Berryhill School murals. McCray's designs were chosen because of their unusual treatment of subject matter and the beauty of their execution. Located in southwest Tulsa, Berryhill's murals are the only PWA paintings made for a rural school in the United States. McCray faced many challenges painting the murals.

In a building of my dad's shop, he built the frame for me and I stretched the canvas. Where did I get the canvas? It's hard to get canvas that big, but in a place where they did, I think laundry, things that I could buy. They had big rules of canvas and I could get a piece of, you couldn't just buy it by the yard that it was seven and a half feet wide and that you could get it as long as you wanted without a seam in it. I've forgotten where I got it, but at some place like that. Inspired by Washington Irving's visit to the Tulsa area, McCray decided to base one of her murals on Irving's Ikabat crane character. The other is of Uncle Remus telling his animal stories. For Uncle Remus, Mary asked a friend of the family, Uncle Lodge deposed. Mary had known Uncle Lodge for most of her life. He lived in a little cabin with a dirt floor down by Riverside. Uncle Lodge said he had come to Tulsa down the Chisholm Trail. Once here, he found work on a farm and stayed on as a sharecropper.

We used to go down there to get apples or my brothers would go down there for a summer job when they do hay. That's why we knew them because they went to the same church. I just knew Uncle Lodge and I wanted a colored man that was an old grey-haired colored man. The Uncle Remus things was to be for kids up to from one to sixth grade. That's why I chose that. I thought that was something they'd understand. And there were lots of stories then. They ran on the paper all the time. Every week they'd run a story about a burr rabbit or a burr fox or the tar baby or some of those things. They were published. They ran as a serial in the newspapers then. You won't have too much of job on this. Elsie Stairs taught three generations of children at Berryhill School.

But she retired in 1971. She was teaching the grandchildren of some of her very first students. During those 35 years, Mrs. Stairs held various positions at Berryhill School. She not only taught classes but filled in his basketball coach and even principal for a short time. Mrs. Stairs remembers the sheer excitement of having the McCray murals hung in the auditorium. I thought how wonderful it was to be able to have those paintings in our auditorium for our children. You could see them. They loved them. They really loved the children. They were so happy about them. And I think it was a wonderful thing as she did. When Elsie Stairs first came to Berryhill, it was mostly farming country and oil rigs. The acreage for the school was donated by Mr. Thomas Berryhill. Soon the land was divided up and families began moving in. As the population grew, so did their need for a larger school building. It was just a frame building. Then they built.

I came in 27 and 27 and started teaching in this two-room school. In that next spring, they built the four rooms. The just four rooms. That's all. We thought it was just wonderful. We had four nice brick rooms. They were covered in brick, you know. And there were frame buildings. We were so pleased. And then they kept adding and adding too. And this is what happened. But in the 1930s, Berryhill, with the help of the WPA, added on the gym and more classrooms. At that time, Mrs. Stairs was teaching fourth grade and watched through her classroom window as WPA workers laid the stone walls. Most of them were community people. I would say most of them may have been some that came from Red Fork and West Also. Perhaps they did. But a lot of them, many of them, were from Berryhill in our community.

It was a hard time, my friend, because the depression had been so difficult for people. And they didn't have jobs. They didn't have lots of money to even live on. And that was really something good that came along, I think. Although there are memories of hard times as people struggle through the depression years, they've not erased the good memories. That's how it is when Elsie Stairs visit her old classroom. Yes, it has changed a little bit. I wonder if there's a light that can be turned on. All of my little darling kids, they were in their favorite memories. My name would come and tell me they love me. When they would start to leave me, leave, I would always stand at the door and they would hug me before they leave. New Deal legislation is still a part of our lives today in the form of those capital letters that will Rogers commented on.

SEC, FHA, and the FDIC. Many Americans are involved in AmeriCorps, a 90s modern counterpart of the WPA. The National Civilian Conservation Corps's alumni is 160 chapters with over 9,000 members. These CCC veterans are dedicated to the preservation of American pride, principal, purpose, and progress. One of the most interesting things I like about this job was always doing something that was beneficial. Another thing, people that had money, you know, they'd say that we'd put it around. I'll tell you, we'd done work and it'd knock something in the mouth.

When we worked, when we worked, it was hard for the WPA to get in about a couple of guys to get in. You