A Few Favorite Halloween Memories in 1963 Oklahoma & Alaska from 1996 to 2002

     Halloween has been always one of my very favorite holidays. When else can one go to someone’s door that they don’t know, knock on it and hope it opens and to be given something for nothing, just to make you go away? Granted one does have the obligation to dress for the occasion, either by making an investment in time and or money to create a costume. However, if a trick or treating soul plays their cards right, the initial investment will more than pay off in pounds and pounds of candy and goodies for their efforts and the candy can last well into the Christmas season and longer.

      My first memorable Halloween was when I was 14 in 1963 in Chelsea, Oklahoma. I was living for the third extended time with my grandparents. After six years bouncing from place to place between Missouri and California with my parents and four younger siblings, two years of which were in a foster home in Artesia, a suburb of Los Angeles where I attended 7^th and 8^th grade, I was more than ready to be “home” again. That fall Grandma Alta who was almost 60 and myself in 9^th grade decided to go “trick or treating”! I never gave a thought that perhaps we were both too old. Maybe because I always liked getting free stuff and being genetically related Grandma must of too. I dressed as a gypsy and Grandma a pirate with a black eye patch. We made our costumes and headed out, going door to door in the small NE Oklahoma town of 1,600. Most people had no idea who we were until at one house they asked if they could see Grandma Alta‘s, the pirate’s hands. Grandma had vitiligo, a common autoimmune skin disorder in which white spots appear on the skin usually occurring on both sides of the body in the same location. The disease has been around for thousands of years and occurs in 1-2% of the population. Unfortunately, for my Cherokee Grandmother with dark skin, these white patches were a dead give away who she was, once her hands and arms were revealed. Nonetheless, we had a great time, got lots of freebies, fooled many folks and I learned that one is never too old to go door to door begging on Halloween as long as you can still get up and go.

Our niece, Ariana in her witch's costume - Halloween 1996

     It would be 30 plus years before I would continue this tradition in Alaska. In 1996 my brother Abe’s children, a niece and nephew came to live with my husband Joe and I for the year so their Mother could return to school in Oklahoma to study to be a nurse. She had enough of my brother’s laziness and living off the government and divorced him a year or two earlier. Joe and I took the two, Ariana and Ben, door to door on Halloween in the old established part of Anchorage, Turnagain.. The two siblings did well and gathered about 5 pounds of candy each. That year we learned where to go for the best treats and who to avoid.

 Ariana, Ben &
Mt. Mckinley, Talkeetna, AK
October 1996

Ben, Aunt Mary & Ariana - Halloween 1996

Uncle Joe & Ariana with their carved pumpkin

     Half way through the year my poor fragile niece decided she had enough of my rules and regulations. She was depressed and although we tried to get her the psychological help she needed, it wasn’t enough. She returned half way through 7^th grade to Oklahoma to live with my younger sister and that didn‘t work either. Ben, my nephew was another story. He lasted the year, made straight As in sixth grade at Turnagain Elementary and was a true joy. After Ben left in the summer of 1997 we decided to give another shot at adopting an older child. It would turn out to be pretty much a nightmare with a few good memories and consequences intermingled. It did keep the Halloween tradition of old folks trick or treating with the young alive, especially for my husband Joe that brought in 7 pounds with our adopted son John when he was in sixth grade. That was the year, 2000, when we had the “haunted bookshop” during the Turnagain School Carnival with many of the leftover books donated from our former bookstore, the Alaskan Renaissance.

     We met John in Aberdeen, Washington September 16, 1998 and within a week he returned to Anchorage with us. He was 9 years old and living in foster care for a couple of years in multiple foster homes. John was artistic but he couldn‘t read or count to more than 10 on his hands. We fixed this problem and he was on the honor roll eventually while with us, but the emotional damage he suffered we couldn‘t fix or anyone else including a multitude of psychologists and therapists.


     He, his brother and two sisters were taken away from the biological father and his girlfriend after his Mother left them with him. John came from a long line of petty criminals and was an example of ignorance breeding ignorance. His Mom decided to take back the two girls and give John and his younger brother up for adoption because she wasn‘t up to raising boys. Guess she should have thought of that before she had them, but ignorance is bliss. On the other hand I knew from the start John and I just didn‘t click. We tried and I knew what my Grandparents had done for me and I wanted to pass it on. Little did I realize that I had bonded with them as an infant living there my first two years and again in first and second grade. However, once a child is nine years old it is next to impossible to bond with them, especially if the parents are still alive as in John‘s case.

     Now if there is ever one thing that will help a person bond with a child, it is probably candy and its retrieval. John had not been here much longer than a month when Joe, John, Moonshine and I went on our first Halloween trick or treating event. John wore my nephew’s costume from 2 years earlier the first year. He collected enough candy that he was happy temporarily. The next year we continued the tradition and John entered a Monster drawing contest at Great Harvest Bread Company and won free cookies for his entire 5^th grade class at Turnagain. John however wasn’t too comfortable being a success, but he was from time to time whether he liked it or not. After that, Great Harvest Bread Co. became part of our Halloween tradition up until John was in 8^th grade and he outgrew it and us as well.


     These days we still frequent Great Harvest. There is a one cookie per Halloween drawing entry now, no mega winners like in 1999 when the bakery was still a newbie in Anchorage. Great Harvest is an exceptionally generous business, giving out huge slices of bread to all visitors since their inception, no purchase required. They even try to return your money and give you a new loaf of bread if you aren‘t satisfied with a selection. That is over the top for even tight wad me and where I draw the line on something for nothing.

Memoir - Mary Alta Buckingham - October 29, 2012

Looking Back at My First Wedding, September 4th, 1971

Tuesday night, September 4^th 2012, a Hellish unusual fall wind storm hit Anchorage and south central Alaska. It also happened to be the anniversary of my first ill begotten marriage September 4, 1971, 41 years ago that was a disaster from the get go.

We, Paul Linden Spess and I had just graduated from Oklahoma State University that May. His major was Electrical Engineering and mine was Secondary Education with a major in Social Sciences and a minor in Spanish. However, living in Oklahoma during those days’ folks did not ask a young woman when they were going to complete their college degree, but when they were going to get their MRS. and start breeding politely know as having a family. In a sense I was sucked into that time warped culture, because I too went along with the first part.

One problem was I never really wanted to be a married person or have a traditional family. As a child I always consider myself an aspiring intellectual, a wanted to be “beat” in some sort of deformed poor white trash way. At the age of ten I preferred ballet to rock and roll, loved books, knowledge acquisition and as a teen would have probably preferred death to being just a housewife. Wow, to me, to get to give birth, change diapers and cook meals was a life sentence in H E double hockey stick. But life does have a way of trapping us in to what we least expect or want at times. It seems the Creator has a sense of humor and the joke is on the human race, me in this case.

After graduation in May 1971 Lindy worked temporarily for his family’s small oil company in Cleveland, Oklahoma while looking for a job free of family ties. I moved nearby to Tulsa with a college acquaintance and got a dead end job at Oklahoma Natural Gas working in Collections. After working my butt off for four years, I was in trauma, discovering too late, while practice teaching, my degree to be a high school Spanish and Social Science teacher, was not much more than a high paid baby sister of mostly disrespectful teenagers. So I gave office work a shot desperate for a job. It was almost as bad as teaching, The real disappointment was when President Nixon froze wages in the fall of 1971 and I was due for one. Fortunately I was able to give notice after six months. Lindy and I decided to go back to Oklahoma State and work on graduate degrees in January 1972. My plan was to teach college Spanish and Lindy thought about being an environmental lawyer, neither of which ever happened.

Now back to our wedding day September 4^th, 1971 at the First

Christian Church in Chelsea. It was Oklahoma; it was miserably hot, in the days before air conditioning. I wore a high school friend’s wedding dress and my maid of honor, my cousin Judy, wore a gown she had worn in another friend’s wedding. We were thrifty, as in waste not want not. We did have flowers, cake and a worthless photographer whose name I can’t remember. I can’t even remember the name of the best man. Anyway, the photographer took the pictures in black and white not color.

Dad had brought my biological family from Illinois down for the wedding. He happen to be late to our wedding saying he got ”lost“ and he‘d been a cab driver in Chicago. I don‘t think so. I figured it was because I asked Grandpa Robert, his father in law, who raised me for the most part, to do the “giving me away“ part of the ceremony. My sister Angie says it was because Dad was busy making plans to burn their house down in Southern Illinois for insurance money. Dad was pretty unhappy that I was marrying into a rich Republican oil family, being a dyed in the wool New York labor union man and Democrat. Either way Dad got there in time to eat cake and to have his picture taken, but the photographer neglected to take my Grandpa’s picture. The Great Spirit‘s sense of humor? Or the Devil at work?

Reverend Billings performed the wedding ceremony and 17 years later in February 1988 in the same church and he would perform my Grandfather Robert’s funeral. The day we married was a bit better day, but not much. We made the mistake of trying to open all the gifts we were given in the unforgiving heat. We opened gifts for two hours until we finally gave up sweating like hogs. Lindy’s folks, Paul and Wilma Spess, eventually gathered our gifts together for us. We took off for my least favorite place, Dallas, Texas and Six Flags. We spent the first night in my second least favorite place OKC. Nothing was right about our wedding, except we did care about one another. He was a good person and in a sense I loved him and always will, but we were a mismatch. He was raised as a conservative and myself a nonconformist to the core. My plans for life were to see and experience the world and it seemed to me Lindy thought Oklahoma was the world. His idea of a good time was playing basketball and watching football, the later which I detest; mine is cross country skiing, listening to music, being with my dog and anything but organized sports.

After my sister Angie, who came to live with us in 1974, completed high school in Sapulpa in 1976 we moved to Shawnee, Oklahoma. Lindy had gotten a promotion with Oklahoma Gas and Electric. Meanwhile, for a year I attended Graduate School at Oklahoma University in Norman. Not being satisfied with life there and having wander lust, I decided to pull out and headed for Niagara Falls, NY in the summer of 1977, then back to Oklahoma where I met another Joe, (not the Joe I married) and headed to Alaska, landing in Anchorage, August 19, 1978, the best day of my life!

Eventually, after a year working for the Anchorage School District bilingual education program and spending the summer of 1979 helping chaperone Anchorage Bartlett high schoolers in Valencia, Spain, I went back to Oklahoma to get officially divorced. We both cried at the hearing, but we were not cut from the same cloth. Our situation was like the movie, “The Way We Were”. I settled for a meager $5,000 divorce settlement, my sister Angies still tells me I was crazy but I felt a great sense of guilt which I no longer feel, now I just feel crazy. (The money went toward my first piece of Alaska real estate in Rabbit Creek Heights which I owned 25 years and sold and invested in a lifetime annuity in 2005.) After the hearing, my sister, Angie, Lindy and I went out for coffee and desert. We took pictures and said our goodbyes. I’ll never forget the desert menu said “happy endings”. The Creator’s sense of humor at work again?

A couple of years after our divorce Lindy’s parents would have a bitter divorce after a lifetime together and four kids. Fortunately Lindy and I didn’t breed, something his folks always were pressing us to do. Today Lindy is following in my footsteps trying to raise two older adopted boys, one of which has left and wants no part of the adoptive family. No surprise, as adoptions seldom work out unless an infant is adopted. I had hoped it would work out better for him and his wife than it did for me and my new husband of 30 years, Joe, but it didn‘t.  The Devil at work again or maybe, just maybe the Creator's sense of humor at work again?

September 9th, 2012

Most Likely & Graduation 1967



Graduation May 1967



Yesterday, May 26th, 2012 was the annual Chelsea, Oklahoma Alumni Celebration and Banquet and also 45 years since my class passed through those ivory green high school graduation doors.  My thoughts turn to reflections of those blissful hopeful days not so long ago.  Life was much simpler then. Boys were boys and girls were girls and opposites married, the way I feel the Creator intended. Now that being said this isn’t a sermon, but just a remembrance of the way it was and what I liked about it.

That last year of high school in the fall, our senior class elected the “Ten Most Likely”. The categories included:

“Best Athlete“: Ruth Schwaesdall & Robert Garis, deceased 2 years now after teaching Pharmacy at the University of Nebraska. Rob was short like me, about 5’4”, but a phenomenal football player in high school. We both went to college at Oklahoma State. He was a frat rat (in a fraternity) and I was a GDI, but when he needed a date that first year, he would often give me a call. After that destiny called and we went our own way.

“Best Figure & Physique”: Janice Cowan & Tom Rue, needless to say, not me.

“Most Active”: Jack Stinnett, also deceased 2 years, retired as a pipe fitter, and Barbara Axley, a nightclub singer and comedian for several years in Oklahoma so I heard.

"Most Humorous": Jack Stinnett & Barbara Axley, incidentally I was runner up in this category.

"Most Dependable": Ronda Hunt & George Baker. George also lives here in Southcentral Alaska since 1976 and has adopted several children through the state.

"Best Citizen": Ronda Hunt & Robert Garis

"Best All-Around": Ann Jennings & Mike Morrison

"Best Dressed":  Roy Best & Patty & Becky Sears, twins and daughter of our high school science teacher that my boyfriend Wayne once tried to punch in the face, another story for another memoir. In this category I again was runner up, only  because I learned to sew.

"Best Personalities":  Patsy Carmack & Leon Bible: 

Last but not least “Most Likely to Succeed“:   Mary Phillips (me) & John Hunt.  Rhonda (“best citizen and most dependable”) and John Hunt got married while still in high school but eventually divorced. John went into tribal law in Tulsa and was quite successful and approximately 10 years ago retired to Hawaii with his second wife and family of many years. I moved to Alaska in ‘78, became a a Jack of all trades, master of none and am still quite happy here since it is rarely hot. Now I know most of my classmates must think John is the greater success since he wound up living in Hawaii but I have to say living in Hawaii is my worse nightmare. I don‘t even want to visit there. The only thing of interest In Hawaii is the fond memories of my old “most likely to succeed” classmate John who help me get my high school nickname, Mickey, long before he got married. When I found out the other “most likely to succeed” John in Hawaii was going to forgo the reunion this year I decided that I would skip it too. Especially since one could not bring their spouse unless it is their 50 reunion. Fortunately this archaic rule was changed by a vote of 155 for to 58 opposed last night. Maybe now  Joe and I will go next year when my first serious ex boyfriend Wayne Treadway that happens to live in Sitka, Alaska,  (800 miles south of Anchorage) has his 45th reunion. I want to find out once and for all, why he took a swing at our Mr. Science teacher other than to get kicked out of school for a week to hunt and fish.

With graduation in 1967 came awards and accolades. I was Salutatorian, an academic title given, in the United States, Philippines, and Canada, to the second highest graduate of the entire graduating class, all 59 of us. The class started out with 69 of us, but due to unforeseen pregnancies before the days of birth control it dwindled down to 59. We were Chelsea‘s largest graduating class at that time. It was a disappointment not to be Valedictorian but I realized the person that was, took no classes that were not easy As and had moved into Chelsea during her senior year. It seemed she, as many other young women classmates, aspired to be nothing more than a secretary and housewife. This was another worse case senario, like that of living in Hawaii. Eventually I discovered not everyone wants a college education as bad as I did then; and as my Mom, Bobbie Jean use to say it, would be a boring world if we were all alike.



Me, Becky Sears & Valdictorian without her rope?



Dr.  Frank Hester presenting me my diploma.





Wayne and my Aunt Bootsie at my graduation.







As class Salutatorian I was requested to participate in the commencement and give a speech. The best part of my speech was that it was short, a page and a half double spaced. I still have 3 type written copies of it that traveled across country with me in 1979, 12 years later. Part of that speech from 45 years ago follows below.

“As you all know before long we shall be out of school, away from home and before a critical and appraising audience--the world. The pen still behind our ear, the ink stains on our fingers, and innocence in our eyes we shall find ourselves surrounded by a vast amount of different ideas and morals. Then will come the trial. But the goals that you hold high in your mind and the morals that you believe in--this you should build your life by, live by, and this you will become.

There is one last thing I’d like to add to my speech; it is a saying that I feel holds some excellent advice. “yesterday is already a dream, tomorrow is only a vision; but today, well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and tomorrow a vision of hope.” (May 1967)

　

　

　

　

　

Two Proms and One Prom Dress



In 1966 and 1967 the president was Lyndon B. Johnson and the VP was Hubert Humphrey. A loaf of bread cost 22 cents, a gallon of gas 28 cents, a new auto $2,425, a new home $40,000 in New Jersey and probably $12,000 in Chelsea. The average income was $6,120. So in short the cost of a prom dress was of utmost relevance to a working class youth making 50 cents an hour plus tips. My way of cutting the cost was to wear the gown two years in a row, to both my Junior and Senior Proms. Being a thrifty skin flint I had no shame. Going with a different boyfriend each year perhaps helped make it less embarrassing, not that guys cared less about a twice worn prom dress.

My dress was bought in Tulsa a few weeks before my Junior Prom in April 1966. My Grandfather Robert took me and a couple of my friends 50 miles south for a day of shopping at Tulsa’s new Southland mall. We girls found our dresses while Grandpa waited patiently in the car smoking his Swisher Sweet cigars while we shopped the day away. On the way home we all stopped and ate our first ever pizza at Tulsa’s new Shakey Pizza Parlor. Again Grandpa opted to stay in the car and smoke and we brought him  a slice to go. Grandpa was special, a true work of art.

My first prom, the Junior Prom was held at Alvin Gledit’s Café on Highway 66 in Chelsea. As Juniors it was our mission to prepare the prom for the senior class of 1966. We earned the class money throughout the year washing cars among other typical activities to put on the prom and put on the prom we did. We decorated the event with a Roman theme in purple and gold, complete with columns and a mini fountain. Gledit’s Café was familiar stomping grounds for me. It was the home of my first job as a waitress a year before where I earned a whopping $3 plus tips for an 8 hour shift until lucking out and getting a better job of $4 plus tips for 8 hours at Marie‘s Café. At any rate the menu at our Junior Prom was fried chicken with mashed potatoes, etc. It was messy as all get out to eat, especially with all of us teens dressed in our Sunday plus best “go to meeting” type clothes, but we survived. Ironically a couple of years later the dark dreary Gledit’s Café was converted into a funeral home. What significance that has God only knows.

At our Junior prom there was a local band that played some of the popular songs of 1966 that included: “Good Lovin” performed by The Young Rascals; “Paint It Black” by the Rolling Stones; “We Can Work It Out” by The Beatles; “When a Man Loves a Woman” by P. Sledge; and the ever popular “You Can’t Hurry Love” by The Supremes. In 1967 the hot songs of the day that we would hear and dance to were “Daydream Believer” performed by The Monkeys; “Happy Together” by the Turtles; “Light My Fire” sung by The Doors; “Penny Lane” by The Beatles; “Respect” by Aretha Franklin; and the ever popular “The Letter” by The Box Tops.

 Our Senior Prom was held at the McIntosh Grade School cafeteria. It seemed to be a bit more enjoyable than the first, perhaps because we were the invitees and had nothing to do but be there, see and be seen and enjoy the party. However as Juniors it was rewarding being able to get out of class to decorate the dreary Gledit’s Café and future funeral parlor site. That preparation for the prom between buying a dress and decorating is what remains most memorable.

Memoir - Mary Alta Phillips Buckingham, 4/25/2012