We’ve had wonderful autumn rain lately and it has been a blessing. This morning, I’m thinking backward about a hundred years and imagining what it might have been like at the Levi and Edna Latty Farm, my grandparents’ farm, in the early part of the twentieth century. It would be dark on the farm at […]
Oct 22, 2024
A Foreboding Time
By · 2 Comments
It was a dark and foreboding time, a feeling that something really bad was about to happen. I remember that feeling well. It was the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The United States discovered that Russia had missile bases in Cuba, with missiles fully capable of striking the United States. The two leaders of the […]
Jul 27, 2024
In the Untamed Woods
By · 2 Comments
This morning, I came across an account I’d almost forgotten about. It’s written by my grandmother’s uncle and came by way of the Indian Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma. What degree of an uncle would he be to me? I haven’t the slightest, but his grandfather would have been my third great-grandfather. I found this […]
Jun 13, 2024
The Old Oak
By · 3 Comments
A large oak stands in front of the house. It is so tall and its limbs spread so wide that anyone standing under it during a rain is sheltered, as if by a giant umbrella. The tree is old and has seen many changes. A busy street a few feet away was once a dirt […]
May 3, 2024
Help and Courage
By · 2 Comments
This is the second and final installment of my May 5, 1985 Daily Press article about the tornado which destroyed Peggs, Oklahoma on May 2, 1920. This was 104 years ago but it’s a part of history that shouldn’t be forgotten. In 1920, Walter Neel lived with his parents, brothers and sisters on the Gid […]
May 2, 2024
Remembering an Oklahoma Tornado
By · 5 Comments
Each year I re-print the story of the Peggs tornado that I wrote for The Tahlequah Daily Press in 1985. This story is important because it is a part of our history. It is a sad story, but it is also full of human compassion and courage. We should not forget the many whose lives […]
