To a very large extent I grew up on the down town streets of Hollis. From the vantage point of both a school child and a young man, I watched the seasons change on those streets. I witnessed the impact on Hollis' business of World War II, the effect of the spread of agricultural irrigation, refrigerated air conditioning, the governments Bracero Program, the mechanical cotton-picker and the manner in which Hollis' very existence changed in that short twenty-year period. I learned that the ability of a town to sustain itself depends directly on the business generated on its streets. It's business district functions as the town's engine and its anchor. Businesses can change. Names on the storefronts disappear to be replaced with those of other confident gamblers on the street's potential. The businesses thrived and failed, and the town boomed and dwindled reflecting the street's dynamic. I also learned of the fragility of a culture. The place remains both physically locked into the state’s Southwestern corner, and in the minds of those who continue to experience its uniqueness.
My dad, Paul Hart, came to Hollis in late 1940. Partnering with his father, who had a store in Sayre, located across several miles of dirt road to the North, he put a dime store in the middle of the south side of Broadway - a red-painted building recently vacated by a regional chain of dime-stores. I remember Ward’s Grocery on one side which I believe evolved into a short-lived bowling alley and where Watt Long installed the Watt Theatre, doubling the entertainment possibilities of the town. (From some time in the mid to late forties, I seem to recall the Brown Theatre on the east side of Penny’s, which for a while added to the kids’ Saturday venues.)
I don’t remember much about Dad’s little twenty-five foot wide store: oiled wood floors, daily swept clean with fragrant saw dust, a row of ceiling fans Dad turned on every morning with a slotted key on the end of a pole. Two rows of incandescent lights inside cream-colored globes dangling on black chains from the white pressed-steel ceiling. I remember the polished "cherry-wood" counters with glass merchandise separators. Each counter boasted its own register and clerk, who worked inside the counter’s long slot and earned about a dollar a day. We had a huge candy counter with jellied orange slices, candy corn, Boston baked beans, marshmallow "peanuts", hard mints, lemon drops, maple delights, licorice drops, salted peanuts, and a broad display of candy bars plus over a dozen varieties of gum (Spearmint, Double Mint, Juicy Fruit, Clove, Black Jack, Beamans, Teaberry....) and, in the fall and winter, chocolate candy. We had gum and chocolate as the government and war-availability allowed. Eventually, sugar rationing just about closed up the candy counter.
The War, obviously, caused a shortage of fathers. Moms started managing family businesses and filling other jobs outside the house, and someone had to do something about all the loose pre-school kids. Many of us attended an ad hoc kindergarten located in the basement of the Methodist Church. Our "school" let out at noon, as I remember, and the kids whose moms worked, held hands and marched the block past the post office to Broadway. Also, several of the kids’ parents or grandparents lived in apartments above the downtown stores. Traffic on Highway 62 must have been pretty slow, those days, because I recall that several of us crossed the street "unattended" to reach our destinations.
War’s end gave Hollis’ business district a short-lived shot in the arm. In 1946 Dad moved his store across the street to another twenty-five foot wide building between Matlock’s Barber Shop and Hills. Hart’s Variety replaced Luther Simmons’ furniture store which moved to the southeast corner of Broadway and Second. I think the winter-time north wind that often froze the street on the south side precipitated Dad’s move. As soon as I could capably count change, Dad installed some elevated duck-boards which permitted me to see over the double-decked candy counters and reach the candy scales. Dad also let me sweep out the store and wash the windows of a morning, then sent me to school by way of Carlton Green’s lunch counter (in the front of the Hollis Grocery) for breakfast - often a bowl of Carlton’s excellent chili and an orange Nehi.
By the late forties, farmers had begun drilling deep water wells, and gasoline-electric pumps threw fourteen-inch streams of chilling water eight or ten feet into irrigation ditches. Throughout the summer, twenty-four/seven, farmers, their families and hired hands moved aluminum suction pipes along the ditches, sending water down the rows of young cotton. We became used to the whine and growl of Steerman biplanes as they dusted the cotton with insecticide and fertilizer--and the sharp smell, as the chemical fogs seeped into the bowl in which Hollis sat. Health-minded city government also arranged for a "fogger" periodically to traverse the alleys throughout town in the summer, spraying DDT to kill mosquitoes. The brighter among us would chase the vehicle in order to run in the cool mist it left behind.
No longer did Southwestern Oklahoma’s often harsh climate hold cotton farmers in a death grip of drought and plenty. The county’s cotton production per acre exploded, and Harmon County, Eastern Oklahoma and Arkansas could no longer supply the number of people required to "pull bolls" in the new tall cotton. The government decided to help out with the boll pulling by implementing the Bracero Program. Truck loads of Mexican Nationals poured into the region, essentially trebling the county’s population from August through December. Gins in the town began building corrugated steel "motels" to house the seasonal workers, and a new sort of prosperity spread hope through the countryside. Things began looking up on Broadway, as well.
This initial influx of foreigners altered the town in ways few had considered. Saturday afternoons, Mexicans poured into the town from every direction. By dark the sidewalks teemed with an almost solid wall of humanity. The current of people oozed in and out of stores, crept along the broad sidewalk bumping and slipping around one another. Spanish echoed back and forth among young people who outnumbered the native population, and exotic musica ranchera blasted from speakers. Lit off by local wags, the occasional "ground rockets", with no longer politically correct names, whistled through the crowd, parting waves of humanity and eliciting screams, laughs and hollered threats after they popped. Fluorescent lighting had not replaced much of the incandescent variety, and consequently the store fronts and awning lights shone with a yellow cast on the shining brown faces and bright-colored clothes. Mexican girls flirted with their boys and the town’s, which their boys resented, eliciting scowls and often threats. Bur burners added smoke to the environment, circling the streetlamps with haloes; streamers of cotton collected from the air on electrical lines, awnings and signs, all adding additional strangeness to the street.
To move from one store to the next, one had to work his way into the street and walk behind the cars parked into the curb at an angle. Motor traffic moved in short jerks, its congestion exacerbated by the fact that cars, also parked down the middle of the street, left only one lane of traffic on either side. Locals, tired of shopping and fighting the current on the sidewalks, settled on car and pickup fenders or randomly opened vehicles’ unlocked doors and sat inside. Pickups and tractors pulling swaying chicken-wire trailers filled with unginned bales of freshly pulled cotton further frustrated traffic, as they attempted to turn south to the Farmers’ Gin. A driver had to enter Broadway from near Kirby corner or out west near Campbell’s station, but drivers had no chance of parking downtown. Strings of cars and bob-tailed trucks sat bumper-to-bumper against the curbs on all the cross streets, in the alleys and vacant lots. Cars and trucks packed the empty lot alongside the new skating rink. Perhaps not that first year, but every fall afterwards, the skating rink hosted a "Spanish Dance", which further encouraged the establishment of a totally foreign enclave of laughter, drinking and interplay in the vicinity. The year before, the stores had closed their doors at eight or nine o’clock on Saturday nights. That year, the businesses closed when the people left, often after one in the morning.
In that first year, Harmon County had changed. The Rio Latino had burst through its banks and crashed upon us. It brought with it new people, an altered mentality and money we hadn’t had before. That year, my father bought his first new car, a '49 Chevy coupe, which cost almost a thousand dollars, and he arranged for the purchase of the J.B. Ellis building where Gale Hollis’ grocery store sat in the middle of downtown. In the summertime, Dad moved the store, doubling its size and put refrigerated air conditioning in his office. During those first years, he didn’t change the building’s original façade, or lower the high ceilings. He did, however, take out the broad staircase that rose from the store’s center to make room for his new "self-service" operation and the two "check - out counters" near the front door. Globe-enclosed incandescent lights still hung over the counters, and ceiling fans attached to the pressed steel ceiling still circulated hot air.
We quickly had gotten accustomed to our schizophrenic life: Southern-American, English-speaking January to August and Northern-Mexican and Spanish-speaking from mid-August through December. We had learned enough Spanish to be friendly, to count money or make a sale. Many of us looked forward to the frenetic, exotic nature of autumn in Harmon County. And, many of us made most of our year's money then. We had begun to know the names of people, boss-men and their families and braceros, who came to live among us for part of the year. Some of them, better educated daughters mostly, worked fall-after-fall in stores and other businesses, translating for their compatriots who spoke little English.
Then, rumors of change began filtering through the community. A machine, they said, was going to pick cotton, gin it and punch out half-sized bales into the field. The farmer would only have to gather these bales and carry them to the compress. Many thought this sounded like a great idea, one whose time had come. Others, though, saw the hand writing on the wall. Another change for Hollis lay just ahead - and most of us were just getting used to the last one.
