Two Sweethearts on a Rock
As I recently said, I’ve blogged about everything under the sun, and now I’m starting with my family. This is my grandfather, George Sidney Smith, and my grandmother, Sophia Kathleen Chastain Smith, sitting on a giant granite boulder at the Wichita Wildlife Refuge north of Lawton, Oklahoma. This picture was taken in the spring of 1916 when my mother graduated from Porter High School, just north of the Smith farm, and just south of Altus, Oklahoma. They loaded up the senior class (all 6 of them!) in the buckboard and drove the team to the Wichitas for a picnic. Grandmother fried the chicken and made the potato salad the night before. I’m sure Grandaddy took along a dutch oven and baked some sourdough biscuits. He was the master of sourdough biscuits, having begun his cowboy career as “Little Mary,” the cook’s helper. You can see they took their shoes off for the climb. Grandmother grew up wearing high button shoes and always had to have something with a bit of a heel. Grandaddy grew up wearing cowboy boots and had the same problem.
They met at the annual May picnic at the Doans Store, pictured above. The Doans crossing is where the cowboys forded the Red River to take their herds up to Dodge City, Kansas, to sell. Grandaddy had many stories to tell of the wild and wooly days of Dodge City. He didn’t like Wyatt Earp, having watched him pistol whip a cowboy nearly to death on Front Street. He didn’t like Bat Masterson either. The kindest thing he had to say about Masterson was that he was a whoremaster. He did have a great deal of respect for Marshal Bill Tilghman of the Oklahoma Territory.
The picture above was taken on the Smith farm, probably by my mother with the red Brownie box camera Grandaddy gave her for graduation. You can see Grandaddy was happy holding his fat grandbabies in his lap in his old wooden rocker. That solemn critter on the left is me. The happy lad on the right is my cousin Billy (William Charles Smith, Jr., named after his father, third of the Smith children. My mother was the second, and Aunt Opal the first.) Opal was the only one born in Texas, at the home of Grandmother’s parents, William Edgar Chastain and his second wife, Rosa. At the time, Grandaddy was the foreman of J. R. Sumner’s Rocking Chair ranch.
That’s all for now. I won’t bore you with more, because I’m writing their life story, and I’d like you to buy the book.
Karen Mabry Rice
Author of Ghost Walk
Soon to be published by
4rv Publishing, LLC
Of Edmond, Oklahoma
Isn't it great to have picture like these of your grandparents?
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