The Story of My Life - Page 4
(by Loma (Groom) Harrison)

The next year, while dad and the rest of the family lived in Ft. Worth, Texas, so that dad could continue work on his degree in Theology at the Southwestern Baptist Seminary there, I lived with my dear friends the Haight family who had moved to Cheyenne, Oklahoma.  That was a very happy year for me.  They treated me as their own and Vera and I lived together as sisters.  I was only a sophomore in high school that year, but I was chosen to play the lead in the Junior-Senior play--a big honor!  Though of course, it might have been a desperation choice.  The only thing I remember about the play is that I learned how to walk in high heels.  Years later, in the 1930's, my Horace Mann Grade School forty voice choir from Pampa, Texas, went to Durham, Oklahoma to give a concert; I invited the Haights to come as my guests.  We dedicated one of our songs to them and they were deeply moved to be remembered with love.  I was glad that I was able to honor them in a small way and to again to thank them for their kindness to me, so many years before.

When the family came back from Ft. Worth that year, we moved to Hammond, Oklahoma where dad was again county missionary of the Baptist Churches.  I made good grades in school and took my first voice lessons.  I won several awards in competition and I remember how "left out" I felt that none of my family was there to cheer for me.  I had my first date with a football player and I got to wear his "Letter" sweater.  I felt that I had really arrived socially....

For two summers I went with dad and led the singing in revival meetings which were held in community after community.  At Leedy, Oklahoma, I made friends with a very successful farmer family the Craigs.  Their daughter Gladys and I became good friends. She and her mother invited me to help them cook for the threshing crew that came every year for two weeks to harvest the wheat. Gladys, her mother, and I did all the cooking (on a wood-burning stove) and all the dish washing (no dishwasher) for twenty-five men in the crew, which included her father and six brothers.  We got up at four o'clock every morning to begin our work for the day:  breakfast, mid - morning snack, (taken to the field), dinner, mid-afternoon snack (again taken to the field), and a big supper served about sundown.  Many evenings after dark, we young people slipped out, rolled the Model-T Ford down the road far enough that the motor could not be heard at the house when the engine was started, and we went about ten miles to Leedy for treats. We felt very daring that night, but four a.m. came around too quickly.  I had my first "crush" on Glady's brother, Paul Craig.  Years later, Paul and Gladys came to Mangum, Oklahoma (the first summer after my Freshman College year) and took me to their home for a nice visit.  In the summer of 1987, my brother Jim and I went to Leedy to look up the Craigs, but all of them except the oldest boy Earnest, were deceased..

My sister Lorena married Floyd Spence the summer of 1923 and went to live in Medicine Lodge, Kansas.  She had started to make me a beautiful blue messaline dress with a large silver lace bertha collar, and I had to get help from a neighbor woman to finish it.  Since Lorena could sew so well it never occurred to me that I couldn't.  Well, of course I had to learn to sew if I were ever to have nice clothes from that time on.

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