To her dying day, Mother had a terrible fear of “storms.” Soon after moving onto an oil company lease near Drumright OK, she gave my brothers Rudy, Willard and Gene the job of digging a storm cellar. It would be a refuge for her and her brood when the always-expected tornado or storm struck as well as a fine place to store home-canned vegetables, milk and other perishables.
The soil in that part of Oklahoma is mostly sandy loam. The digging went fast and easy and it wasn’t long before the boys had a pit the size of a small room with the floor about five feet below ground. They covered it with an arching, dirt-covered roof. It looked like a battlefield pillbox sitting in the backyard with steps leading down to the floor. The boys built shelves for canned goods with lumber they scrounged around the oil field It was a fine cellar and would have sheltered the family beautifully had the water table in our backyard not been only a couple of feet below ground level. Within days after the cellar was completed it began taking on water. Soon it was a below-ground, covered, water reservoir. Frogs, tadpoles, snakes, and spiders came to live in its dank darkness. I don’t know if Mother would have used it as a shelter had a tornado struck or not because she feared snakes and spiders as much as she feared storms. Fortunately the cataclysmic storm never materialized which saved her from ever having to face that terrible decision.
Nevertheless we used the cellar to store her home-canned vegetables. My brothers or Dad had built wide shelves on one side of the cellar before it became a covered pond. The bottom shelf was just above the water line with another shelf above it. At that time we had a double-sized, elongated wash tub that did triple duty: Mother used it on washday and we used it for our bathtub, and then one of my brothers discovered that it worked as a cellar-sized canoe. When it was time to get or store canned goods Gene or Willard would get into the tub, paddle over to the shelves, gather the canned vegetables and then paddle back to the half-submerged steps. I was too young to be trusted to paddle for canned goods but more than once, I snuck the tub into the cellar for an adventurous excursion. The elemental phobia I now have for spiders had not yet blossomed.
The earthen dome of that cellar also helped me develop a love for being on-stage. I found that if I climbed to the top of that dome I had a nice view of our back yard and the surrounding neighborhood. The showman in me began to bloom. That earthen dome made a good stage. I enjoyed climbing up onto it and standing there singing at the top of my lungs. No one ever applauded or threw things, but it created in me a budding love with being on-stage.