The following manuscript was written by Rotha Lee Brooks Mackay (right) and was received on Christmas Day 1976 during a visit to her home in Arleta, California. Over the next couple of years she wrote more letters, which contained additional childhood memories and news of daily life. (The file of more letters from 1977 to 1979 is in pdf format which requires Acrobat Reader, which may be downloaded for free from Adobe.) Following receipt of this letter, Opal Brooks Rue wrote a brief autobiographical statement of her own a short time after this one.

When Opal was born, in the panhandle of Texas, in 1909, her mother was 20 and her father was 30. They were devout Christians, although reared in different denominations. Her mother was born and reared in the northeastern corner of Arkansas, near Piggott, and her father was born and reared in the panhandle of Texas. Her people were devout Southern Methodists, his as devoutly devoted to the Church of Christ, a very fundamental church which even prohibited music or singing in church.

Opal was a happy, laughing, loving child. She was her father’s pride and joy, and he would take her with him when we rode through the country on horseback. He was a lay minister, in addition to farmer, and at times a salesman. When she was two years old, her sister was born. This did not affect the devotion of the father for Opal, because he was not interested in the birth of another girl. He wanted a boy. When Opal was three she scalded her back badly by pulling a tablecloth and with it a pot of hot coffee on her shoulders and back. Her grandmothers and mothers and aunts nursed her back to health, but an aunt said later that she was no longer as happy and outgoing as she had been before the accident.

Shortly before Opal was four (she was four on the 26th, and her father was killed on the 13th of September,) her father was struck by lightning on the farm in Texas. He was alone in the field, plowing; his body showed no sign of damage. The only imprint left by the lightning was that the band of his hat had been ripped off. This was a traumatic experience to a little four-year-old girl who was just recuperating from an almost fatal burn, who was her father’s favorite, and who had a little sister who took the attention of the woman of the family away from her.

Six months later, a little brother was born. He was weak and sickly and the pet of all the adult members of both families. The little girls were certainly secondary. He was a sweet and biddable child, most of the time, and was pampered and petted and loved by an almost overwhelming family of women . . . the brothers of the mother and the father do not seem to have been in the picture too much, except uncle Fate, who adored the boy, and seemed to simply accept the girls.

When Opal was about six, her mother remarried. She married a man who was partial to Opal. He liked her spunk and the fact that she was not afraid of him -- the other sister and the brothers were afraid of him. Once, when he was working at something and needed a hammer, he said, “Who wants to get me a hammer?” and Opal replied, “Well, I won’t.” He thought that was great.

When Mama first married Mr. Miller, we lived in Atoka, Oklahoma, where he was involved for a year or more in oil. Aunt Eunice lived with us, and taught there. Opal and I went to school there -- Opal her second year, me the first. We had a big old house with a big porch around it, and it (the porch) was high and we could get under it and play. TW had rheumatic fever and spent much of his time in a chair on the porch with his bad leg propped up. He also had rickets, and as a result was spoiled by the family. He was still a loving and lovable child. When he was about three, he had a little friend down the street whom he called Ray Judy (the boy was Ray Jr.) and although Ray Jr. was a little older than TW, Teet thought he could do anything Ray Jr. said. So, one morning he said he would dress himself and, although he had never been allowed to do things for himself at all, he locked himself in a bedroom and dressed himself -- not by normal standards, perhaps, but he got his clothes on. On another occasion, when Mamma was particularly “distracted” as she was wont to say, by the children, she said, “I wish my name was ANYTHING but Mama. I am tired of Mama this, Mama that!” TW said, seriously and sweetly, “Mama, you want us to call you Mrs. Downey?” This was the mother of Ray Jr., Mrs. Downing. TW was spoiled, and when he did not get his way, he had odd ways of retaliating. A couple of times, when he was taken “downtown” and got tired -- this was before it was discovered he had rheumatic fever and rickets, and one leg was particularly affected so it was probable that his leg was extremely painful -- he once said that when he got home he was going to “pee in his hat” (a little white sailor hat.) He did not say anything more but trudged on home, scowling, and when he got home, took his hat out in the back yard and brought it back to show Mama and Aunt Eunice, “See, I told you I would.” Another time, it was his shoe. He also was a loving, giving little boy. He picked bouquets for various members of the family, he wanted to be told he was loved, and when he was not told, he asked to be told. Another time when he was being “distracting,” he walked along the street kicking at the sidewalk muttering, “Dammit, dammit, dammit, I’ll say dammit whenever I want to -- DAMMIT!” As swearing was unknown in our home, this was, of course, surprising, but also it was taken as funny.

Opal and Rotha were sent to Texas for the summer when we were about six and four, or maybe seven and five. We went by covered wagon, although cars were not unknown. (When Mama was married to Miller we had a Cro-Elkhart touring sedan.) We were with Aunt Ted (who lives in San Diego now and is in her 80s), and Uncle John, who has passed on. We would stop at night and cook over a campfire pork and beans, canned corn, bacon and gravy, and coffee. The stars were so clear and so near you could reach out and touch them, you felt. We slept in the wagon most of the time, although I remember Opal and me sleeping outside after we begged to. We would wish on the evening star every night. We returned with Uncle John and Aunt Ted at the end of the summer, again in the covered wagon.

While Mama and Miller were married, after the climate in Atoka seemed to be so disastrous for TW’s health, and Rotha had not only a tapeworm but a siege of diphtheria, Miller bought a sheep ranch just outside of Tucumcari. Mama’s family were all in that area, having been left there with the homestead they had filed earlier. At the time Mama and Uncle Fate had also homesteaded a farm near Endee, and had worked it together . . . she in the fields doing a man’s work. I remember once there was a rumor that a man was driving a herd of sheep through, and they were trying to grow wheat, so she took a shotgun and went out and guarded the boundaries of their section -- when the sheepman came, she ordered him around the area. They drilled for oil, but nothing came of it -- not even water. We still have the oil and mineral rights to that particular parcel of land. During this time, we lived in the “shack” -- two rooms with a dogtrot between (Mama and Uncle Fate, her brother, and us three kids) -- I remember making soda and vinegar to make “soda pop,” and putting lighted matches down the cracks in the floor, and in one instance, Opal and I got into the sugar and Mama gave us a teaspoon of sugar liberally laced with hot sauce, then made us go to the well for water. We stayed out of the sugar after that, but we must have made life difficult for them -- working so hard in the fields and wondering what the little demons were up to in the “shack.” During this time we set traps for quail, wandered through the hills and picked desert flowers, learned to tell a rattler from a kind snake or a garter snake, and also which lizards were potentially dangerous. We watched, and followed, or were followed by tarantulas. Opal was bitten by one, and still bears the scar. There were also desert scorpions, and other odd creatures which we found but could not identify. Mama taught us to read during this time. Both of us could read before we attended school. We also at one time, and I think this was at the “shack,” had an old horse we called “Old Kaiser” (this was right after the First World War) and the three of us rode him bareback around the countryside. Our grandfather and grandmother Morrow moved into the “rock house,” which was a deserted one-room house not far from us. We had lived in a dugout, before we moved into the shack, as I recall. They were, I am sure, a comfort to Mama and in some ways to us. Grandma had some odd ways. She would dress up in weird costumes, and at night run from window to window (we did not even have shades) and make horrible noises and faces. Opal and I would have our “treasure holes” where we stored our “treasures” (mostly bottle tops and spools, which we used as dolls.) I remember the relationship between Opal and TW and myself as being loving and close at that time.

It was after this that Mama married Mr. Miller and we went to Oklahoma. I think Mama was trying desperately to find some kind of security for us kids. We lived in Atoka for about a year or longer, then when Miller bought the sheep ranch we moved there, and it was when we were living there that Mama took us kids and went back to her mother and father (no, to her mother and brothers and sister, because Grandparents Morrow died while we were in Atoka.) After that, they all moved to Tucumcari, Mama got a job in a grocery store as a clerk, and we started to school. She met Mr. Nutt and married him. Both men were much older than she, and again, I feel she was trying to find security for her little brood. Instead, her marriage ended with another child, and a drunken husband. She did not know Mr. Nutt drank until one time after they were married, and she was pregnant, one of his sons (all of them older than she) brought him home, did not even knock on the door, but dumped him on the front porch and left. This marriage was dissolved when Eunice was about a year old, and it was then that Mama sold the house on Center Street, which I suspect she bought with the money she got from Miller, and bought the smaller house on High Street. Mr. Nutt was not a bad man. He was not abusive. He was as good to us kids as possible, but we had been allowed to run pretty wild most of our lives, and it must have been a big order for him. Also, from what I can remember and know now, I imagine he was an alcoholic, and deserved and deserves our pity.

Once, when we lived on the ranch, Opal and TW and I found a shotgun in one of the bedrooms and somehow managed to pull the trigger. It made a tremendous noise, scared us silly, and knocked us all down. When we got over the shock, we started to look for what we had hit and could not find any evidence of hitting anything. Nevertheless, we hid in the barn the rest of the day, and for a number of days after that we kept looking for something with a big hold in it which would indicate where our shot had gone. We played on the prairie and lived pretty “wild” lives.

When we were on the sheep ranch, I somehow got up on the old ram and took a ride, and got pitched off. Grandma got butted through the fence by the same old ram. When Grandma (your great grandmother Morrow) was butted through the fence by the ram, she had her wrist broken. But as there was no doctors for many miles, it was allowed to heal by itself. As a result, she had a somewhat twisted hand and wrist the rest of her life. She died in Tucumcari in 1925, of a heart condition. She was a courageous lady. She married a man much older than she at 19, who had children older than she and I think he had grandchildren at that time. She took in the youngest of the brood. This is information which would have to be gotten from either Aunt Eunice or from one of the first Morrow brood -- Uncle Moint, Uncle Herbert, Uncle Robert, and I think there were others. I believe one was still at home when he married Grandma, and she raised any child who need caring for in the family, and in the neighborhood. She worked hard, cooking, washing in the back yard over an open fire with a kettle on it, scrubbing by hand, boiling the clothes in a big old copper boiler, raising chickens and a garden, keeping a big house with a full brood of children of her own, and her husband’s first marriage, and even in-laws of the first marriage, hired hands, strays, anyone who came she took under her wing. She was odd in many ways, but she was a loving, caring woman. AND a good Methodist.

When Opal and I lived with the family on the sheep ranch, we herded sheep. We would go out in the prairie with the sheep, lie in the shade of a cloud (there were no trees other than mesquite) and tell each other stories of the pictures we saw in the clouds. This was a lovely, serene time, in many ways. It is still easy to remember that big, long, old style Spanish DeBaca place, as it was called. There were either five or six rooms, each the same size, with a huge hall in the middle. The house was built “shotgun” style, which is simply a long hall made of rooms. They must have been 24x24’, and the hall was probably 8 or 10x24’. There was a door placed exactly in the same place in each room, and you could stand at the end of the house, look down through it, if all the doors were open, and see outside at the other end. The rooms each had a fireplace, built into the corner, rounded off, and simply an integral part of the room. The inside was all whitewashed, and the house itself was made of adobe. There was a covered porch the length of the house on one side, and an uncovered porch on the other. I don’t remember any trees, shrubbery or flowers. There was a windmill, a tank for the cattle and sheep, and of course the regular barbed wire fence. The only side doors I remember were in the hall, one on each side, as in the remainder of the house, symmetrically situated, so you could stand in one and look outside form the other.

Tommy, this is not very well correlated, or coordinated, but it has been a hurry up job. I wanted to give you something personal and loving for your Christmas, this first Christmas I shall have met you, and perhaps a glimpse of the life of your grandmother as a little girl will help. We went to many churches, but our families on both sides were very religious. The Morrows were staunch Methodists and the Brookses were Church of God. Our youngest years, as I recall, were spent listening to various interpretations of passages from the Bible, [based on] a sincere and loving desire to guide us in the ways of God. Each of us has his own place in time, and his own path to follow. May God guide and bless yours, dear Tommy, and bring you joy and peace. I love you.

Great Aunt Rotha.

CLICK IMAGE FOR ENLARGEMENT
Opal B. Rue, 1974, in a New Jersey cornfield.

Opal Brooks Rue died on March 12, 1979 at age 69. Rotha Brooks MacKay died on June 21, 2005 at age 93.

FAMILY WRITINGS