My  First  Memory

( 1952  or  1953 )

I was born in May, 1950.  This is a photo circa 1951 or 1952 of our older sister, Deanna (right) my older brother Rusty (left) and me, baby Wendy, in the middle.  Four years before I was born, our Dad, Ivan (Ike) Riseley, in the spring of 1946, had returned from Europe where he had pretty much single-handedly whipped the bastardly Germans.  Oh, he had some help from the British, the Russians, and some others, but I'm pretty sure that if I ever get over there on a vacation or something, and they find out who I am, they'll insist on wining and dining me to pieces.

These days I'm really interested in WWII hstory, but I wasn't growing up, and I never bothered to ask either of my parents much about the war, which is a shame.  Especially if you consider that the war was really a defining episodic chapter of their lives.  I did learn  a lot  about it from them though,  just  by listening.

And, since their passing, there's been a huge deluge of readily available history about their generation, the dust bowl, and, especially the war, that seemed to prod me to follow that era's history.  As a result, you would be hard pressed to find anyone who's more, let's  say "opinionated" about  some of the historical events surrounding

that era — opinons that I'll be happy to share with you in some of my other stories.

WWII swept them both out of Western Oklahoma.  At war's end, they spent a couple of years picking apples, or something, in Oregon, and then came back home to try their hand at farming.

In the early 1950s, before we moved to Woodward, we lived on this as well as a series of other farms, all equally squalid.  This one was on a hill a couple of miles north of Webb, Oklahoma.  That’s right, I said Webb, Oklahoma.  Look it up.  It’s halfway between Taloga, Oklahoma and Camargo, Oklahoma.  [It’s on my birth certificate;  I’m the only one in the world whose birth certificate shows Webb, Oklahoma.  More on that in some of my other stories.  Our dad had grown up on a small farm near Camargo, our mom grew up on a farm near Taloga.]

The photo itself is a real dust bowl style photo showing us in what could easily be mistaken for a tropical garden, but if you look closer you’ll realize it is just weeds.  (I’m soon going to place that photo near the front page on my web site, if nothing else as an example of the squalor of the Oklahoma dustbowl era.)

The photo shows us in our front yard.  There was no back yard; the dust bowl had no back yards.  The photo includes a really, really, cold looking outhouse in the background.  Our house itself was off the photo to the left, but you’re not missing much by not seeing it in the photo.  The house was about the same size and quality as our outhouse.  This was not the place where I was born.  Turns out we moved around a lot just like the Beverly Hillbillies — except we didn't have a cement pond.