window on the past

Dorothy leaves Oz whispering “there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.” For the 80-year-old J. Lee Schaub of Cleo Springs, Okla., that same feeling is reflected in the short notes and letters I’ve received from him. He spent his childhood in the southside of El Dorado near the old Ouachita Refinery where he writes, “The streets were muddy before they were paved.”
He reminisces about an El Dorado with five pictures shows where for a nickel he could buy a mug of root beer from a big barrel and catch fish in the Ouachita River. The vision of a barefoot boy in bib overalls smacks up against the early impacts of water pollution when he records, “At one time the Ouachita River was a good river to fish in. I loved to fish. You could cach fish in the river. Then th Camden Paper Mill dumped their waste in the river and killed the fish.”
He doesn’t complain, but the stark reality of his childhood crosses the years as he writes, “My Dad passed away … the refinery told Mother to move so someone else could live in the house.” Schaub and his brother ended up in the Catholic Orphan Home in Little Rock. He skips memories of life at the orphanage and any notes of homesickness quickly following with, “my mother and her friend came up on Christmas and took us home.”
His relief was short lived: “After Christmas we were put on a train to Batesville” to live at the Oddfellow Orphan Home. That time ended “on Nov. 29 the Oddfellows ran out of money. This was a Depression time. Everyone ran out of money.”
Through all the changes his love for reading sustained him. Even today he says, “I think if a person can read and enjoys reading it’s wonderful.” When his mother worked as an office nurse for Drs. Munroe, Falvey and Fincher in the offices in the Armstrong building the doctors saved their books and magazine just for him. Across the years, the one loss he regrets are the books on the Civl War someone stole from his grandmother’s (Nora Long’s) house in El Dorado. Well, the books and the coal oil lamps his family used when they lived at the refinery before his dad died.
As a child of the Depression, Schaub fondly remembers President Roosevelt. “He made jobs for the young people and gave them a place to live and eat.” Today Schaub asserts “Roosevelt was my president for years. I was on the Island of new Guinea in the South Pacific when he passed away. I felt like I really lost a good friend.”
Of his military pay he succinctly declares, “as a private, I received $21 a month. It was a hell of a lot for you to put your life on the line.” he gets to the point of the bombing of Japan, “The first A bomb got their attention. The second one ended the war and we finally got to come home.” His remembrances end with the World War II.
Today at 80, he feeds the bird, watches the weather and thinks about his experiences through the years, especially his friends and childhood in El Dorado.


Posted

in

by

Tags: