A few months ago, one of my distant cousins suggested my sisters and I nominate our dad for the honor of Parade Marshal for Pioneer Days in his hometown in Guymon, OK. The criteria included being a descendent of “No Man’s Land” homesteaders in the Panhandle, being a current resident, and had to have lived in one of the three counties that make up No Man’s Land for fifty years. He qualified on all counts and was delighted when we approached him with the idea.
I called him one day to quiz him about some of the “gaps” I knew of in my knowledge of his early life, and I learned things I’d never heard before. Precious stories. Funny stories. It’s what we do – tell stories.
To make a long story short (and it’s not short at all), I’m going to post the bio my sisters and I compiled which led to him being chosen as the 2012 Parade Marshal for the Pioneer Day Parade. We’re very proud and excited about celebrating a new chapter in my dad’s life. Since it’s rather long, I’ll post the first half today and the rest Friday.
Early Years – Genealogy
Marcus (Mike) Cordell Brune was born on July 14, 1926, the second of six children born to Oscar and Lydia Bertha Ruth (Gebhard) Brune. His grandparents, William Frederick and Pauline Wilhemenia Freie Brune came from Okarche, Oklahoma to the Panhandle in a covered wagon in 1902 when Oscar was a year old. William and Pauline were both born in Missouri. They homesteaded in the Optima area and lived at first in a dugout, then a granary that someone converted into living quarters. Mike recalls going in the granary years later and still seeing the wallpaper on the walls. Right after WW I ended, William built a two-story farmhouse northwest of Optima where Oscar and Ruth lived until Oscar’s death in 1960
Ruth’s parents, Ernst August and Hulda Mathilda (Reigelman) Gebhard were both born in Germany and immigrated to the US in their teens. They met and married in Racine, Wisconsin, but moved to the town of Optima in the early 1900s. Following Oscar’s death, Ruth married Paul Fechtler in 1962 and lived a quarter mile from the homestead until her death in 1978
Mike in middle. All of his sibs except Carolyn, the baby
Mike and his siblings—Evain, LaRue, Dall, Phyllis, and Carolyn—attended Optima school through the eighth grade and then graduated from Guymon High School. All the children were born at home except Carolyn, who was born in the Guymon hospital. Evain is the only sibling who is deceased. LaRue Kiser lives in Liberal, Kansas. Dall Brune is in Ridgecrest, California. Phyllis Crippen lives in Claremore, Oklahoma, and Carolyn Pearson Blair is in Tishomingo, Oklahoma.
Mike attended Optima schools through the eighth grade. Grades one through three were in one room, and Mike went from first to third grade without ever being in the second. He graduated at age sixteen from Guymon High School. He remembers the time in third grade when an airplane landed in a field east of the Optima school. The teachers marched the children out so they could see what an airplane looked like up close as none of them had ever seen one except in the sky. Another time in grade school, they heard that President Hoover would be passing through the area on a train. Again, the teacher took them out, this time to let them watch the train go by. President Hoover stood outside and waved at them from the back of the train as it went rumbling past.
Farm life in the summers was a carefree time. After their chores, the boys—Evain, Marcus, and Dall—would fill a canvas bag with water and spend all day looking for arrowheads in the buffalo waller or exploring the land around them. They didn’t have riches; indeed the Depression was hard for everyone with the drought and dust storms. The recent wind and dirt storms in the spring of 2011 in the Oklahoma Panhandle stirred those memories for Marcus.
He talked about those with his daughter Carla.
“My daddy went to bed and cried every night, wondering how he and Mother were going to feed and care for five kids. We had milk cows, but we couldn’t afford to feed them and times were bad for all of us so the government shot all but one of the cows. They let us keep the one so us kids would have milk. The dirt was so bad, though, that it caked up all over her body and crusted over, clogging all her pores. She couldn’t breathe, and got sick. We locked her in the milking stanchion and poured water on her, tried to scrub the built-up dirt off, but it didn’t help. Our one milk cow died.”
“We hung sheets and blankets over the doors when the dirt was blowing. Daddy caulked all around the windows so even on nice days we couldn’t open the windows and get fresh air. Even sealed up, the windows leaked dust, and us boys would take our little tractors and plow the dirt that settled on the window sills.”
“We had a dog named Jack. Just a non-descript mutt about knee high. We couldn’t feed him, so my brothers and I caught rabbits. You could walk right up to them and pick them up. So much grit had blown in their eyes, they couldn’t see. We slammed them against the oak wagon wheels and threw them over to Jack so he wouldn’t starve.”
“For some reason, a lot of the storms came on a Sunday, and Black Sunday was the worst. There was just a black line on the horizon to the north, extending to the west. It got wider and wider and as it got closer, birds started flapping overhead, flying higher and higher trying to get above the dirt cloud. The sky was black with the clouds and what seemed like millions of flapping birds trying to escape the storm. The birds were just about as spooky as the dust storm.”
“Back in those days they had rabbit drives. Since the rabbits were blinded by the dirt, a group of us would get together and round them up to sell them to mink farms, of all things.”
When Mike was fifteen, most of the available bus drivers were serving in WW II or had to run dairies so Mike got his commercial license and drove the Optima school bus route to Guymon.
After graduation, Mike stayed on the farm until he was drafted in 1945. He was inducted in Camp Chaffee, Arkansas, and went immediately to Harlingen Army Airfield for training as an aerial gunner. With the end of the war soon after, no more gunners were being trained, and Mike went to San Antonio, then to Geiger Field in Spokane, Washington. He served one and a half years as an aviation engineer at Ladd Field in Fairbanks, Alaska, where he attained the rank of sergeant. At the time of his discharge he went on inactive reserve duty.
Marriage, family, and a lifetime of adventure – Part II on Friday.
Do you know your family’s early history? Have you interviewed family members for “snapshots” of their childhood?