Today, I just finished reading a book, "Life in the Oilfields" and I know more about the oil fields than any of these folks.

I was born July 15, 1905 in the Ozark Hills of Missouri at the home of my Aunt Prudy (Her mother's older sister) because she had a baby girl on the 12th of July and my mother was there to take care of her and I was born 2 months early. At birth I only weighed 3 pounds, so my Daddy and Mother did not think I would make it. Actually Daddy wanted a boy. So since my grandmother was a doctor, she took me and raised me in a shoe box in a wood stove oven and fed me with a medicine dropper. I lived and stayed with her until I was 5 years old.

I always went with my Grandma to gather herbs. She would send them to St. Louis, Missouri and they would send back medicines for her to use in her practice. My aunt, Goldie who was only 3 years older than me, also helped her clean and pack all her medical tools. We washed some and others we cleaned and put in the oven to heat for sterilization. My grandma was Dr. Martha Doty the first woman in Missouri to get a medical degree.

When I was 5 years old, I went to stay with my parents near Cassville, Missouri and started to school. One day, I was going after the cows and it was storming. I was walking back close to a fence when lightening struck. I went in the house holding my tongue and told Mama the lightning hit my tongue.

But I only stayed 2 months with my parents before I went back to my Grandma's. I stayed with her most of the time until I was almost 12.

Mother and Daddy moved to Ranger, Texas on Dec. 14, 1918 and I moved with them. This was a "boomtown" of the oilfield. I started to school but my Daddy thought girls did not need to go, so I quit school and went to work in the oilfield company boarding and rooming houses for $5.00 a week sweeping, cleaning and helping around. I ran off in 1919 and went back to Missouri but they would not let me stay.

I had my own money. A friend who lived next to my parents there in the oilfield camp, Buddy Bunch, his wife and small boy took me back to Missouri with them. They lived in Springfield, but I got off at Aurora and rode the mail bus to Grandma's.

I came back to Texas and went back to work at a company boarding house. In November, 1920, I met the great Mr. Roy Collins and we married on January 9, 1921. I was only fifteen years old and he was twenty-two. In May, 1921 we went back to Missouri and started to farm but Roy did not like that. So we sold our wagon and mules and bought a Ford Model T pickup and started for the Texas oilfields. We stopped in Kansas and worked in the wheat fields and made some money. We started on to Texas. In Ponca City, Oklahoma, Roy had a bad heart attack and was sick for 3 days and I had to start driving the truck. In Sulpher Springs, he took some hot mineral baths and it helped.

We finally arrived at Aunt Ruth's (Ruth Daniels Royal, sister of Roy's mother. Molly Daniels Collins) in Forney, Texas and there we called her doctor and Roy's brother, Pat. He came over and we finally got him on his feet and we went to Breckenridge, Texas. There I went to work in a hamburger place. However, in a few weeks., Roy started driving a truck and I started working for the telephone' company. Also I started raising chickens for fryers. Then we had to go over to Eastland for Roy's work and I started work for the telephone company over there. Then we went out to a company that had a boarding house and worked there until things opened up in Corsicana. When we moved there, Roy started work with Humble, we traveled and made road maps; got the mileage and best places to eat. Later I went to managing all the Humble boarding houses, there were 5 out at Mildred, and Roy was driving a truck. In February, 1925, Gene was born. At about this time all the men with Humble had to take physicals and Roy could not pass, so they told him to go to West Texas and there they would re-hire him and we did. We went to Best, Texas and Roy was hired to drive trucks for Humble. But he only got to work 2 months and they started examining evervone again. So he went to work for Texon Oil Co. as gauger and worked about 1 year. We were saving some money.

Then we bought our first truck, a Wichita, costing $30,000.00. We had $4,000 and borrowed $6,000 from my stepfather. The rest was on a note. I worked at the boarding house in the camp for about 6 months but then Jack was on the way so I had to stop. When Jack was 10 days old, we moved to McCamey. Roy had not seen Jack because he was on a job up in the Panhandle near Pampa. So when he saw Jack with hardly any hair, he went out and bought a comb and brush set. He would get Jack up and hold him and brush his hair in hopes it would make his hair grow faster. At about this time, my brother Jay came to live with us. Then we bought another truck and hired two more men.

We had a 3 bedroom house. Gene and Jay had one room, Roy and I had one and Jack's crib was in our room. The two men had the other bedroom.

One night, we had trouble with the lights when Roy was gone and Jay tried to fix it. But he had no luck. He said to the other men that "the goddamn thing wouldn't work". So when Roy came home, he always went in to kiss Gene goodnight, and started to turn on the light and Gene sat up in bed and said, "Daddy, the goddamn think won't work." Roy almost dropped over because he had always tried not to use those words around him. We stayed in McCamey about 8 months. Then we moved to Wink.

We built-the first house in Wink. There were company camp houses but that was all. We had sheetrock on the inside but only studs on the outside. It was 7 or 8 months before we got outside walls. The roof was galvanized iron.

We bought water for $1.00 a barrel. We had 3 rooms and a tent in the back of the house for the men. Of course, we had an "outhouse" and it blew over in a sandstorm one time. Actually our house was better than most of the tents and shacks most people had to live in. Later on we bought an electric stove and an electric refrigerator. It was one of the first in town.

I was washing one day and Jack was in the wagon we had built out of some wheels and a box. He turned it over and fell out and was crawling on the ground and got in a big red ant bed. I grabbed a bluing bottle and stripped off-his clothes and poured it all over him. Then I wrapped him in a towel and ran to the Doctor. He said I did the right thing but I would have a blue boy for a long time and I did.

We lived in Wink from 1927 to 1929. Another time while we lived there, I looked outside and the boys were on a railroad boxcar close to the house and it got loose as Gene got the brake loose and it started rolling down the track. A man across the road and I both started running and he beat me to the car and climbed aboard and stopped it. After that, the boys did not want to get near a railroad track anymore. We owned a Buick roadster with a rumble seat. Once, while living here, we went to Pikes Peak, Colorado. Roy's cousin Lelia Royal went with us. We had a good time. We also went by Carlsbad, New Mexico and we saw the bats come out of the cave at dark. One day, I went to town and the boys rode in the rumble seat and just as I drove on the yard, Jay drove in the back. Out came both of the boys right on their heads to see who could get to Jay first.

So there went my roadster. The next day, Roy traded it in on a 2-door Buick and I was to keep the doors locked. But I did not have to worry. They always waited till I cut the engine after that.

This was in 1928 in December. We went to Dallas for Christmas. Then in April, 1929, we moved to Grand Saline. We landed at my mother's to wait for a house and in 2 days, Jack went outside to play and the first thing, picked up a paint brush with lye on it and right in his mouth it went. We had to rush him to the doctor. We put vinegar in his mouth. Another time here, he and Gene were playing on a parked road grader and Jack fell off and split his head on the blade. All the blood really scared Gene as they ran to house.

We got a small house east of mother's but then we moved to Mineola. We had a nice place but we had scorpions and tarantulas and also lots of tramps. This was in the depths of the 1930's depression. The first two we had, Jack ran to the door with his plate and told one of the men to eat this and then Gene told them I would cook them something good so we made some sandwiches and every time someone came to the door, you boys would go to the door and say, "Are you hungry?"

While we were in Mineola, Gene had a bad spell with his heart and we had to rush him to Dallas to see a doctor and he told Roy to take Gene and himself to the Mayo clinic. He and Gene went up there and Roy was examined by the Mayo doctor. When these doctors came to Houston, they would tell us and we would go see them. The last 3 years Roy lived, I kept for them a record of what he ate and drank and the hours he slept. He was told he was living on borrowed time because his heart was so bad.

We moved back to Grand Saline in a house on the north side of Mama's. Roy was having trouble getting a place in Kilgore to keep the trucks and drivers near the booming oil fields, so we started looking for a place to move and we found a lot at Arp and built a tent to live in and also one for the drivers. Of course, we had outhouse toilets. The lot had some big pine trees and we really enjoyed it there. One of the drivers could not back a trailer so he would honk the horn of the truck and I would go back it in for him. He was real good otherwise. There were 2 little boys in back of us on one side and a new married couple on the other. The bride was pregnant and Gene and Jack had never seen that before to talk about. The other boys must have though. One day, I walked up and the other boys were making ugly remarks about her fat belly. So I took all 4 boys in the house and told them all about the birds and bees and all about love. Their mother got mad and would not let the boys come back. We stayed there for about 9 months. Then we moved to Gladewater. Jay left just before we left Arp and went back to Missouri.

We got a house with 3 rooms and a big screen porch and Roy's daddy (James Baker Collins) came to live with us. We had a tent in the backyard for the drivers and not long after we moved, here came Jay with his new wife,Irene, and baby Cecile. The boys wanted to send Irene back but keep Cecile.

In Gladewater, we added another truck as one of the smaller trucks was not worth fixing up. We went to Tyler each week to do our main shopping and that is where I had a suit made for Roy and he loved it so much. I still have it. Also Aunt Bell (sister to Roy's mother) lived there and we would go with Uncle Joe Burke down to the funeral home to see his brother and do lots of window shopping. One day we passed a window with evening dresses and I said oh, how pretty one of them was. Gene ran back to where his Daddy was and said, "Oh, hurry, Daddy. Mama found a dress she needs." He cried because Daddy laughed.

We had a good time there. We stayed in Gladewater until December 1931. Then we moved to Cleveland. We had a nice house but the pigs ran loose all over town and at night they would get under the house and keep us awake. Gene and Jack were in a church play. Jack was a teddy bear. I made him a suit out of outing flannel and dyed it brown and while he was on the stage, he broke out with chicken pox and when we got home, Roy was breaking out too, so we called the doctor. He came and put a quarantine on the house, saying it was smallpox because the sores were so big and the next day, he came in and looked at them and laughed when he examined them because the sores had gone down and some had gone away.

The pigs were so bad. We moved to Huntsville and we liked it there. After a while, we moved to Houston on Peden Street and that is where Jack started to school. He got his first bicycle and Uncle Pat (Vernon Patrick Collins, Roy's Brother) and Aunt Irene came and lived with us a while. Uncle Pat then went to work for Humble (now Exxon) at Conroe. They moved to Conroe and we got a chance to rent a duplex in Conroe so we moved too. When we first moved to Conroe, we would get mail that belonged to another Roy Collins. We came to find out there was a colored man named Roy Collins who had a funeral home in Conroe.

We spent a long time there until about 1936. It was here that Gene started to learn to drive in our 1932 Ford roadster. He was only ten years old then. We made good friends with the Tarrants and there we found out Gene--and I had hookworms. We had picked them up in Cleveland. Gene got a horse as he could not ride a bike because of his heart trouble. Here Gene also took private art lessons.

Jack won a blue ribbon for public speaking because he recited the longest poem. The people around Conroe called all the kids in school who had parents in the oilfields white trash. You should have seen the scene when all of us poor white trash got up in the school and made our talk. Boy, that was fun. And the president of the PTA was the wife of the owner of the department store. No one else would talk, so I got up and asked her how she got to where she was. I told here the only reason she was there was by accident not because she worked for it. But every one of the oilfield people had to work for what they had and with the good Lord's hands, we had made the grade. The next year, she was one of my best friends. She even asked me to serve as president of the PTA. But I told them I had to be free to go with Roy any time he needed me. We did not want him in the car alone on long trips because of his bad heart. Later, Gene would sometimes go with him in the oilfields and do some of the car driving on the highway.

Also while we lived there, the school at New London, Texas blew up. They called and asked us to bring over 2 crane trucks as fast as we could. We got there before the trucks and the police did not want to let us in. When we told them our trucks were on the way they took off to meet them

We knew most of the children who were killed. We stayed up there for a week and went out to the cemetery and when 2 of the boys who Gene loved were being buried, he passed out and we rushed him in to Henderson and had him checked. It was not serious so we went back and helped some more. Then we went back to Conroe but we all had nightmares about all the things we saw.

Gene and Jack did well in Conroe schools. We had to have Gene's teeth pulled because his baby teeth would not come out. It was while we lived in Conroe that I developed bad sinus problems so Roy moved me and the boys to San Angelo so I would be better in a dry climate. This was only for a few months. Here Gene fell into a cactus patch while roller skating.

Then we moved to 300 Vincent in Houston and bought a new small truck. We kept the trucks parked on a vacant lot next to the house. Then it became time for us to renew our truck permits to get on the highway. So we went to Austin but we were 30 minutes late and someone else got the permits. That made it hard for us because we could only do work on the leases and couldn't haul on the highway. Roy sold the small trucks and made both of the big trucks into crane trucks and we made good with those as long as drilling was going on. But when drilling slowed down, it was hard, so Union City Transfer Company offered Roy a good job as Houston manager and he took it and sold the other 2 trucks. This was in 1938.

Roy went to work for UCT. He was able to get a lot of work from Humble. Union City enlarged their crews and then Roy became President of the Truckers Association. George Brown of Brown & Root was Vice President. They went all over Texas and Roy made several talks in Oklahoma. We lived at 300 Vincent until October, 1940. Then we built a new house in Garden Villas. That is where Roy died only a few months after we moved in. We had gone over to Pat & Irene Truhittes on the 8th of June, 1941 and had supper as the 9th would have been our 20th wedding anniversary. About 2 a.m. I woke up and heard Roy groan and felt of him and knew he was gone. I called the boys into our room and called the doctor. Gene called Uncle Pat and they were all there in a little while.

We had a funeral at Houston. Men from all over Texas and Oklahoma were there and there were 2 truckloads of flowers. We sent 1 truck to the hospital that was in Houston at the time. We also took a truckload to Forney where Roy is buried. Then I moved back to 300 Vincent because I could not pay for the new house. I do not remember who moved us or what happened. The lawyer for Union City handled all the papers. I then started working as a clerk at UCT and later worked at Wilson Electric Company where I met and married Denver Brashear, the only grandfather our grandchildren and great-grandchildren have known.

So I want all of you grandchildren and great-grandchildren to know about your Grandpa Collins and what a wonderful man he was. So, pass these papers to your grandchildren.

Your Grandma.

Copyright 1998-2005  Richard Collins, All Rights Reserved

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