Page 3 - Sanger Herald 12-21-17 e-edition

SANGER HERALD 3A THURSDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2017 EDITORIAL & OPINION
Random thoughts My early Christmas memories and an Okie idiom about my later ones ...
By Dick Sheppard
Merry Christmas
and best wishes
for a new year
filled with good
health, a warm
house and plenty
of divinity and chocolate fudge candy with walnuts.
The ghosts of Christmas past whisper to me this time of year.
•••
My mama's homemade divinity candy!
That's the best thing I remember about my childhood Christmases in Oklahoma before our family, with all its possessions in a circa 1930s Ford stake truck that leaked oil and water, headed for California.
In Oklahoma we lived in a little wood frame house held together by tar paper,
with no electricity or indoor plumbing. It was near the very small town of Macomb in Pottawatomie County. Macomb had a general store and a service station/garage where my daddy sometimes worked.
I recently saw by the census that the popu- lation of Macomb was 32 in 2010. It wasn't much larger when we lived nearby and if we counted, the population shrunk by six when we all climbed aboard the truck, my brother and me in the truck bed with furniture, bags of clothes and kitchen stuff piled around us, and set out for California by way of Texas where my married sister, Violet, lived.
My mama's divinity candy was a Christmas treat.
She didn't make it any other time of the year. Mama made the candy in the same cast iron skillet she used for almost everything else she cooked. Many, many years later I tried making divinity for Christmas using her recipe of sugar, corn syrup, egg whites and vanilla extract but it didn't taste the same. Must have been that old cast iron skillet.
She always made enough for the family and for gifts for aunts, uncles and cousins who lived nearby.
My brother, AB, was quite a bit older than me and he was always my hero. His name was just AB - some of my cousins were named JD and JR. I don't think the letters stood for anything. It was just their name. An Okie thing I guess.
My brother and I had an old .22 single shot rifle with a broken stock and it was our job to go into the nearby woods and shoot something for dinner. Mama only gave us a few bullets each day so we had to make them count. We nearly always brought home a rabbit or a squirrel. One time we shot a pos- sum but after we tasted it at dinner we didn't shoot any more possums.
Mama raised a few chickens and one time we had a mighty tasty pig.
We had a little cellar, just a big hole in the ground covered with boards that had red dirt heaped on them, where mama stored eggs and other food.
There were always snakes in the cellar and my brother and I would catch them and tease our sisters with them. One time we put a snake in my sister Lois's bed. When mama found out about it we didn't do that again.
Compared to what was to come we had a pretty good life and some good Christmases in that little house in Oklahoma.
My first memory of Christmas in California was when we lived in a 12x16 foot metal cabin in Linnel Farm Labor Camp near Farmersville in Tulare County. The cabin had no electricity and no indoor plumbing. Our drinking water was in a bucket we filled at a communal faucet and sink outside. We went to the bathroom and showered in separate buildings for men and women.
Mama gave me a shirt that first Christmas at Linnel. She somehow found time to make it out of a colorful flour sack. We had cold biscuits soaked in bacon grease covered with sorghum molasses. We sang Christmas and church songs and went to bed when it got
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divinity and choc- olate fudge candy with walnuts.
We were "living right high on the hog."
Life was good
and it got even better.
All us Okie kids turned out pretty good and our kids turned out even better.
For years we all, kids and grandkids, got together at Christmas time for mama's divin- ity and chocolate fudge candy and the fried chicken, corn on the cob, mashed potatoes and gravy she made for us because she knew we would be hungry - and there was always that bag of food for us to "eat on the way home."
The farm labor camp and the cold metal cabin, the little trailer houses, the teach-
ers who knew I would fail, the cold biscuits soaked in bacon grease and the bleeding fin- ger tips are just ghosts of Christmases past.
They whisper to me every new Christmas season about how lucky I am to be living high on the hog in a great town like Sanger.
My Christmas wish for you is that you and yours live high on the hog, even if you're not an Okie and even if you're not too sure what
it means to be living high on the hog. We, all of us here at the Herald, are
mighty glad you let us come into your home every week to share Sanger news and some- times our private thoughts like these whis- pers from the ghosts of my Christmases past.
Please stop by sometime and say hello. We nearly always have a pot of hot coffee and frequently a box of donuts we'd like to share with you.
Merry Christmas and best wishes for a new year filled with good health, a warm house and plenty of divinity and chocolate fudge candy with walnuts.
•••
This column was first published on Dec.
22, 2016 and since it says pretty much all I want to say about my Christmas recollections as a boy I decided to print it again.
For a Christmas message that covers the religious, historical and political aspects of Christmas please see the words on page 6A by chaplain Clayton Diltz of the 144th Fighter Wing who spoke so eloquently at this year's Trek to the Tree.
Comments or suggestions may be emailed to sangerherald@gmail.com or may be made by calling 875-2511 during business hours.
Dick Sheppard
A metal cabin for farm workers at Linnel Farm Labor Camp back when my family lived in one in the early '40s.
dark. There was no divinity candy and it was mighty cold in that metal cabin.
We all worked in the fields, vineyards and orchards, the whole family, mama and daddy, my sisters Lois and Betty and my brother and me. Mama made me a little sack for pick- ing cotton. We always tried to get to the field early because we got paid by the pound and the dew made the cotton heavier when we weighed it. The bolls cut my fingers when
I pulled out the cotton. I'm not sure which hurt more, finger tip cuts from cotton bolls or paper cuts between my thumb and first finger from putting down and turning grape trays later on when I was a freshman in high school.
Mama sang a lot, church songs mostly. Daddy drank a lot. I guess, looking back, California didn't turn out to be the land of opportunity he hoped it would be.
We settled for awhile in Exeter where we lived in a little trailer house that seemed like itwasalwayscoveredwithblack residue from the smudge pots farmers used to pro- tect their crops on cold nights in those days
Christmases were pretty much the same as they had been at the labor camp.
I didn't do well in school. Teachers acted liketheythoughtitwasimpossibleforOkie kids to learn anything and I certainly didn't want to disappoint them.
In one of the several fights I got into at school, a boy split open my scalp with a brick and I bled a lot. Mama said the school thought it might be a good thing if I just stayed home for awhile.
That turned out to be a good thing because that's when I learned to read. Thanks to what I had heard but not applied at school and the words on cereal boxes and in my daddy's Zane Grey pulp western magazines I became a pretty good reader.
I figured the teachers who expected so lit- tle of me would either be surprised or disap- pointed. I never found out which one because I never got to go back to school in Exeter.
My daddy got in a couple of bar fights and the Exeter police let mama know it might be good thing if we moved to another town.
That's when daddy got a job at a laundry and dry cleaners in Dinuba. We stayed for awhile in someone's garage and then lived in a little trailer house behind the laundry.
When mama also got a job we moved into a real house with electricity, indoor plumbing and a swamp cooler.
Mama said we were finally "living right high on the hog."
Mama, at Christmas time, started making divinity candy again in that cast iron skillet she had somehow kept with her.
The next Christmas she made divinity and fudge with walnuts and I got a store bought present and a pair of shoes that didn't fit my brother any more.
I guess we were considered to be a "needy family" because in addition to what mama put together for us, women from the First Baptist Church and men from the Dinuba Rotary club brought us bags of food and clothes. The Rotary men gave me a wonderful, warm, almost new coat. I loved it and wore it with pride.
We may have been considered poor by some people's standards but mama always found a way to feed anyone who visited from out of town and to pack a bag of food for them to "eat on the way home."
She always invited our out of town visi- tors to "stay the night." Many times we made pallets on the floor for our overnight guests. That was a time when there was plenty to eat and for Christmas we got store bought pres- ents and homemade - in that cast iron skillet -
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In my OPINION
Simplify your life while
reaching out to others with needs
By Fred Hall
The joyous thrall that
falls across the world each
Christmas season is best
epitomized by the glow that
emanates from two beautiful
sources; one of those being
the colorful aura from all the
exceptionally beautiful elec-
trically lit displays lights. As
lovely as that can be in eliciting joy from chil- dren or the elderly, it finishes a distant second compared with the anticipation of a visit from Santa when that child exists mainly on exag- gerated hope. Such is the beautiful world of a child!
There is nothing comparative to a laugh that can best be stated as akin to the water of a warm spring afternoon gently tumbling and polishing the river rock. Everyone knows that sound of a delighted child but is hard-pressed to definitively describe those warm, happy sounds.
This seemed to be an appropriate time to mention the deeply held hopes and joy which are stretched to the limits each and every day just to keep so many local families fed and sheltered. The California economy is so deeply bifurcated that under current circumstances, we have such wide and varied dispersal of capital that one county here in The Golden State can be one of wealthiest in terms of con- sumer spendable income. Fifty miles away—in another county—one may find economic depri- vation.
That's a formula for disaster. Cost of living standards are established by those of higher income and a way of living is forced upon the less fortunate who will never have a real op- portunity to compete in such an unbalanced economic structure.
The reality is far different in many parts of The United States and throughout the rest of the world. California is being touted by her governor and state politicians as having one of the largest economies in the world but ac- cording to WalletHub, the polling organization, there is a far different situation when exam- ined closely. It seems that the seventh neediest city in America is Fresno, followed closely by No. 8, Los Angeles.
I didn't have the pleasure of growing up here in California, but many of my relatives did experience the joy of being a neighbor to many of you who were locally grown. My experience has been limited to about 25 years where my family members were graciously
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Fred Hall
welcomed into the beautiful Central Valley. Unfortunately, the No. 1 subject starter at most family Christmas gatherings will be the consideration and need for significant mois- ture which will be first required if this rich Valley fulfills its promises of abundance for those who toil in her soils. Every single year a virtual handful of family farms shoulder the load of helping feed the ever increasing num-
bers
I've never been called a go-to person when
anyone was seeking career guidance or other information. Frankly, when I was first made aware of the fact that there was a reality television show, which was entitled “Iyanla,” about a life coach, I had no idea there was a job opening for a life coach. My advice this Christmas, and every ensuing holiday, would be to simplify your life while reaching out to others with needs and offer them help when possible. That's a can't fail formula.
Spend as much time as possible with the generations that comprise your own family and reach out to older friends and neighbors with a small act of kindness. A kind word, thought or deed can go a long way to brighten some- one else's darkness and costs nothing beyond the kindness with which it is delivered. Merry Christmas and the happiest of new years to each and everyone of you!
Now, that should not be the opinion of only one man.
In addition to the Sanger Herald, Publisher Fred Hall oversees three other
Mid Valley Publishing newspapers - Reedley Exponent, Dinuba Sentinel and Parlier Post. He can be contacted by phone at (559) 638- 2244 or by email at fred@midvalleypublishing. com.