The  Day  I  Met  Dwight  Moore

May 20, 1949   -->   Sep 1, 1973

I was glad to hear it when somebody told me “There’s a new kid on the block.  He throws a curveball.  I told him about you, and he asked me if I thought you could catch his curveball.  I said I thought you could.  Do you want to do that?”   And I said  “Yeh, I do.”

So, I was more than ready to meet the new guy, especially one who could throw a curveball.  So I met him and was intrigued to find out that he could indeed throw a real curve ball.  I had been skeptical up until the point where he actually threw it, because I knew preteen boys so often don’t tell the truth about hardly anything.  (If you don’t know how I knew that, you must be a little slow — it’s because I was one.)

This is the first of several stories I’ll tell about Dwight Moore, because:  (1 As you can see from the then to now dates above, the time span of this writing is quite large — 60 plus years.  2)  Dwight was a remarkable person.  3)  Dwight was a multi-faceted individual — so it seems like each of these stories will tend to carry a slightly or sometimes completely different theme from the one before.

That day was about the middle of July, 1962, I think.  Dwight had just finished the sixth grade in, I think, Norman Oklahoma, and would be heading into the seventh grade at the end of the summer.  He, his sister, Marla, one year younger than either of us, their mom, Cordelia, and their dad, Haskell, had just moved their trailer into the mobile home park on 13th Street in Woodward, Oklahoma, owned by my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Freed  (a name you will see again on some of my other writings).

I lived at 1711 12th street in Woodward, just a block away from their trailer, so it was inevitable that we would run into each other in short order — which we did.  I also had just finished the sixth grade — at Oak Park elementary school which was just another couple of blocks north and west from the trailer park.

Due to the migratory nature of the oilfield industry in western Oklahoma, it was not uncommon for kids to move in or out of town at any time of the school year.  A couple of years before this there was a family, the Stuarts, I believe, with three or four boys around my age who lived a block north of there and who moved to Prescott Arizona.  (I never saw them again.)

The year after that there was a guy from Louisiana who was, like me, a baseball player, who lived a block south of there.  (I remember his first name was Gerald, and his family name is right on the tip of my tongue — but for the life of me, I cannot remember what I ate yesterday.)  Note: I wrote the previous sentence sometime back, and just the other day, this kid’s last name popped into my head.  I’m pretty sure his name was Gerald Cornwall or Cornwell.  I’m also pretty sure he came from Louisiana before Woodward.  Gerald and I had played baseball together a lot;  but then, about a year later, he moved out again.  (And I never saw him again, either.)