A New Start on Newcastle

New Start on Newcastle

Mom and Dad started life together in a trailer on Newcastle Road on the South side of Oklahoma City.  Dad was working at the Steel Mill on SW 15^th and May Avenue and mom took a job as a waitress at the Cattlemen’s Steakhouse in the Stockyards.    The Cattlemen’s Steakhouse is still open today and is touted as Oklahoma’s Oldest Continually running restaurant.

As with any young couple things are tight in the beginning.   Dad had a group of friends that have ended up being family friends for both my parents lives.  The Wilsons (Ray and Emma; Jim and Anita), the Leaver and Hoster’s.   This group of friends circled mom and dad with the support they needed.  All have their own stories. 

My middle name is from his best friend Ray.   He lived with Ray and Emma for years before he and mom met.  They were the family we lived with years later when we returned to Oklahoma City in 1976.  They always had plenty of pets.   Poodles and Siamese cats were always a memory from those days. Emma was an old school cook, and she always boiled chicken and shredded it for the dogs.   It was always a running joke everyone wanted to come back as her dog.  Emma’s mother was the first person I personally knew that lived to 100 years of age.

Jim and Ray Wilson were brothers.  Jim’s wife Anita used to cut hair in her garage for extra money.  Ray and Jim’s mother lived in a trailer in Jim’s backyard for many years.  Mom got pregnant with me shortly after Anita gave birth to her son Curtis (Curt as we know him).  Mom used some of Anita’s maternity clothes while she was pregnant with me.   Anita was the last friend from Oklahoma City living other than mom when we went back four years ago.   We had not seen each other in years, and it was the last time we would ever see each other.   I was blessed to be able to take mom on that trip.   It was a picture from that dinner that I had printed on glass of mom and me.

The Leavers were also friends of my dad’s from the steel mills.  Mr. Leaver had cancer or something serious wrong with him.  I can’t remember what it was.  I know his wife Ernestine was from somewhere in Chili, South America.   Mom and Dad took them to New Orleans so he could be treated at Oshners which is the Mayo Clinic of the South.   Ernestine ended up living in Magnolia where mom was from for many years.  I remember her working at Kroger’s and us going over to her house to see her and her grandson who I believe now has a high up position at Tyson.

Bill Hoster was my dad’s boss at the steel mill.   I just knew him as Mr. Hoster all my life.   For years mom said he was my dad (because he sent mom and dad on the trip where she got pregnant).  Good thing I look just like my mom and dad or that might have created some confusion years later having two daddies right?  Mr. Hoster played some big roles in my life too.  I used to mow his lawn as a teenager for money, then mom and I would go eat a nice meal at my favorite restaurant Applewoods.    I remember going to work with Dad through the years when I was younger and it was there I saw my first computer, and it had punch tape that it ran on.  Who knew years later that’s the industry I’d be working in.   I worked for Oklahoma Steel cleaning ditches and picking up in the summers as a young teen, then eventually I went to work in the machine shop making nuts, bolts, turning rolls and learning what real labor was.

Mom and dad lived a short time in Oklahoma City, from the last week of December, 1963 through 1965 shortly after I was born.    Just like today I was early.  I was supposed to be born in December but being impatient I decided to come in early November.   Dad was bowling on a league at Meridian Lanes and mom just thought she had a bad case of gas.  They went home and eventually she told dad she needed to go to the hospital.   The man who had impeccable sense of direction and never got lost, nearly didn’t find Capital Hill Hospital where mom was supposed to go.  They got to the hospital shortly before midnight and within an hour I was born.  I guess I was too much for this little hospital because they closed it a month later.

I was a struggle right from the start.   In my first few months I had double pneumonia. Mom and dad had to take shifts watching me for fear I’d stop breathing.   The selflessness of both my parents was apparent in the first few months of my life.

Dad had a job offer in California in 1965.  Mom and dad would move to California that summer.