Mom’s Story, part 3, A Reading Education

Continuing in Betty Allison Moore’s own words:

When we moved into the one room log house that the rancher had loaned us, known as “the Johnson Creek Place,” we had all the beds, the cookstove and the dining table and chairs in that one room! Not much walking space.

That was in November and the first week we were there my dad drove us to Roach to go to school on a Thursday and Friday. When Monday came he said he couldn’t take us to school anymore because he had no gas and no money to buy any. So we stayed home from school for the rest of that year.

I didn’t have any books and even then I was an avid reader. Behind the house was an old bunk house with two bunks. Only thing in the building was a huge pile of paper back books, hundreds of them. Most of them were cowboy stories and I read all of them and dreamed of marrying a cowboy. When my dad found out my desire he squashed my dreams by informing me that cowboys were ignorant, uncouth, uneducated, uncultured, unchristianized nobodys. I was CRUSHED.

As I read those books I would throw them into another pile, and when I was finished I read the love stories, which were not nearly as interesting as the westerns. But at least I had something to read.

Someone loaned us the book, Swiss Family Robinson and All Quiet on the Western Front and my mother read them to the family. I learned about World War 1 from one of these books. It had ended four days before I was born in 1918. November 11 was called “Armistice Day” because it was the day the armistice was signed. The agreement ended that war. Years later it was changed to “Veteran’s Day.”  

Mom mentioned more than once in these memoirs how she graduated from high school two years late, due to all these exigencies. What she doesn’t mention, but was clear from her life, is that just learning to read, and that applied, is sufficient for all education to follow.  

(And thanks for reading these.)