Most folks do not know who Ed Sullivan is or was but those who grew up in the 60's know him as the Johnny Carson of Sunday evening. He was the guy who brought the Beatles to America. I remember the uproar about their long hair and crazy music. Today their music seems calm compared to some of the stuff I hear on the radio. I will have to admit that when I say on the radio, I mean while passing through the stations. And quit frankly with radios today jumping direct to stations we don't even dial through those stations. Who remembers that? Well anyway, things have sure changed and some for the better and some for the worse. I always loved my mom's perspective, "I am glad the good old days are gone". She grew up during the depression and remembers how tough life was living out on the hill west of Grainola where I think Bob Jackson lives today. I have always joked about mom saying she walked to school barefoot and uphill both ways to school which was about 2 or 3 miles. I should point out that Margie Jackson lived on that hill while I was growing up and she was babysitting us while mom went to the doctor. I ran away and Margie caught me about 1/2 mile from her house.
OK, back to Ed. Well, I was taking my first big trip of my life and was 17 years old flying to Amsterdam on a 747!!! (a really big deal for a farm kid) to live for about 4 months and I was in the New York airport eating and at the table next to us was Ed Sullivan. I did not recognize him but he heard us talking (us was a group of 4-H kids, 10 of us) and asked me where we were from. Of course I told him Oklahoma and we proceeded to have a discussion. He was very inquisitive and asked me a lot of questions about where we were going and who we were. He seemed very interested in our lives and was very encouraging to me. To say the least I liked him but what surprised me was how nice he was but most of all how small he was. He was 5'7" and even smaller than my dad. I did recognize him when he started talking because his voice was so familiar, he just did not look the same in real life as on TV. By the way, our TV was always black and white. We never had a color TV even though after I was gone from home mom and dad purchased a TV and appliance store in Perkins, Oklahoma. I have always thought that strange but if you knew my folks or about any farmer or rancher you know they are risk takers. You may have heard the phrase 'to make money farming and ranching you need a good oil well'.
I guess Ed was about the most famous person I had met at this point in my life. It was between my junior and senior year of high school. I left immediately after school was out and came back almost to the day that school started. I worked on two different farms in Holland or the Netherlands. You may not know it but Holland is part of the Netherlands not all of it. Actually I worked in what is known as Friesland and in Holland. One of the farms I worked on was in the polders which is reclaimed land from the North Sea. It was a farm with a small dairy and we had neighbors that raised tulips but our focus was onions and barley and the dairy.
Well, (you know what is funny to me is that I write pretty much like I talk and think and Mrs. Head my English and literature teacher from Shidler says that is ok, so leave me alone on my writing skills) I love writing these little stories and hope that some day my kids will read them.
So what do you learn in the Osage?
- big people can come in small packages, like Ed Sullivan and Hugh Allen and Jon Tanny and Jimmy ( you gotta read the old stories to get it)
- what you choose to do with your experiences and memories can give you a wonderful life or a life of being down in the mouth, I choose to feel blessed and thankful
- being poor or wanting more can make a person a better person, adversity is good for the soul
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