Bessie Huff's Early Education, Part 1

The photograph above is of Bessie Maree Huff. William P. Greene's Studio took her picture when she was a junior in high school.

Bessie was born in Hancock, Iowa on December 4, 1892. She was the only child of James Lewis Huff and Laura Dell Newman. Her mother was a stay-at-home housewife while her father worked as a butcher in 1900. The family came to Muskogee during the new century's first years, arriving in 1904.

Bessie's parents immediately enrolled their daughter in the foremost school in town. This was the Spaulding Institute located on the east side of town. She was an outstanding student in Mrs. Onis Jones' Expression Class. She was among the children chosen to participate in the school's recitals in March, 1905. Her performance, at age 13, of a "reading" at the recital is the first record of her public speaking.

The following November, Bessie participated in another recital at Spaulding. This time her reading was entitled "Orphan Annie." Her reading predates by two decades the first appearance of the popular comic strip.

Bessie's next reading was part of another recital. In early December, 1906 she read "The Slow Race" at the Henry Kendall College, located on Kendall Hill west of downtown Muskogee.

In the fall of 1907, Bessie entered Muskogee High School. The school was founded two years earlier with eighteen in the student body.

At the annual election of teachers at the end of the 1908 school year, the Muskogee school board chose Miss Alice Myrtle Newman as its high school history teacher. Miss Newman was Bessie's aunt, but also a roomer with Bessie's parents throughout the rest of Bessie's years in high school.

Xenophon was a Greek historian. This explains why Bessie was a Xenophonian in high school. In Bessie's senior year, she was one of nine members of the school's History Club.

The following fall, Bessie and her classmates enjoyed the luxury of studying in the brand new Central High School located on Dayton Street.

Then in December of 1909 the new high school began publishing a school newspaper. Some of the mastheads under consideration included the "Bumble Bee," the "Tumble Weed of Dry Gulch," the "Pride of the Arkansas" and the "Rah, Rah, Rah." The winning name was "The Scout."

The Scout sold advertisements and subscriptions to pay for the printing costs. A year's subscription was twenty-five cents. Seven issues appeared the first year.

The newspaper had a full staff from an editor to a business manager. Bessie Huff was the first "Literary Editor." Though a monthly, the first issue appeared before the Christmas holidays. Thus began Bessie's association with school publications.

Though the May issue of The Scout survives, it is not possible to identify any contribution written by Bessie's hand. It is disappointing that no record survives that caries her creative spirit from this period.

There is so much more to be told about Bessie Huff. Stay tuned for more!

A Womanless Wedding

"Minister: We are all do come here this day for hitching." Such is the first line in a West Virginia version of a play entitled "A Womanless Wedding."

This folk drama swept across the country with an all cast just as the play's title describes. It is believed to have been initially a favorite of soldiers a long way from home and family.

Mollie Allen filed an international copyright in 1917 for her version of the script entitled "Womanless Wedding." The first newspaper account for the play under this title was for a performance in 1916 in Gulfport, Mississippi.

Despite the "Womanless Wedding" being copyrighted, Ms. Allen did not demand royalty payments. This resulted in many scripts incorporating variations in dialog and characters.

Such was the case when the Presbyterian Church Men's Class in Haskell chose to host the play in 1921. In addition to the bride, groom, ministers and the usual attendees of a wedding, the Haskell script contained the following characters.

The character "Senator Harold" was a takeoff for US Senator John W. Harreld who served Oklahoma from 1921 to 1927. "Miss Alice Robinson" was a character modeled after Miss Alice Robertson. The current Governor and Mrs. James Brooks Ayers Robertson are also characters in the Haskell script.

Another character was named Belva Lockwood. The real Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood died in 1917. She was a feminist attorney and politician who supported suffrage. We may surmise that she (cast in the role of a African-American nurse) and the Miss Alice Robinson character disagreed on a woman's role in life just as they would have if the two would have had they met in real life.

One character was named after the real Amelita Gallli-Curci, an operatic singer. It is assumed that the unfortunate man portraying her presented a solo aria in a squeaky voice.

The local playwright also wrote in characters based on comic strip personas. Mutt and Jeff appear along with Maggie and Jiggs from the "Bringing Up Father" cartoon.

Physical humor appears in a West Virginia script. When the father bragged about how beautiful the bride was, the best man said he was "glad you ain't picking [a wife] for me!!"

He said this partly because judging beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. The play's script amplified this theme in recommending that a tall and large man be cast in the role of the bride. At the same time, the groom was to be just the opposite.

The Presbyterian Men's Class performed their play on February 25, 1921 in the Haskell High School auditorium. There was such a crowd present that Friday night that even the standing room was all taken. The free admission helped attract viewers.

With the rousing applause from the approving audience, the cast agreed to perform again two weeks later on March 11. This time attendees paid an admission of fifty cents.

Half of the admission went to cover the expense of putting on the play. The other half went to the Haskell Board of Charity to benefit the needy in town.

The following October, the members of Fort Gibson's American Legion post put on the same play. With continuing favorable reviews, the play was performed in Boynton in 1923.

The Boynton cast contained some of the same characters. Their bride was named "Miss Getta Mann." The groom was "Mr. I. B. A. Runt." The bride's parents were Am A. Mann and Mrs. Hava Mann. Miss Wanta Mann was the old maid aunt to the bride. Mr. and Mrs. Goldrocks were the rich uncle and aunt on the bride's maternal side of the family.

Call it folk drama, a farce or a comedy, the "Womanless Wedding" provided lively entertainment in Muskogee County following World War One.

Muskogee's First Cemetery, Concluded

This article is a conclusion to the effort on October 6th at identifying the possible location of Muskogee's first cemetery. Recapping, here are some of the points in that article.

Muskogee had a cemetery before 1888. That year there was a call for improving the burial grounds. Obviously burials had been going on for years if some of the graves were now considered unkept.

One generalization was that Muskogee's first cemetery was adjacent to the town's first church. However, no newspaper reference could be found that supported or refuted this theory.

An effort was then made to examine all of the surviving insurance maps dated between 1886 and 1907. There are no images, markings or writing indicating the presence of a cemetery anywhere in or near Muskogee.

There was yet another map of Muskogee drawn from memory. On it the author identified and located many of the residences and businesses in town as they were in 1890.

While this map is not drawn to scale and clearly has errors, the author draws property boundaries of the Presbyterian Indian Mission School adjacent to the Presbyterian Church.

Because this map is a "property" drawing, and not a map of buildings, it logically would have shown the cemetery if it nestled near the church. Surely the cemetery and the school could not occupy the same location at the same time. But this was also not proof one way or the other.

Sanborn insurance maps for Muskogee never reached far enough north to include the area near the Sixth and Fondulac Streets until 1907. That year the area is marked "vacant," though the area was then subdivided with streets.

After searching maps for an answer of the cemetery's location without success, it was time to turn back to the newspaper files. Unfortunately, no clues surfaced in an earlier search. But weeks of additional searching finally turned up a newspaper reference that provided the answer.

The location of Muskogee's first cemetery was atop a hill northwest of town according to an 1890 article. The town's small size put this location for the cemetery in the vicinity of Sixth and Fondulac Streets. This article conclusively pinpoints the location of Muskogee's first cemetery.

The article in 1890 lamented that the cemetery on the hill was "too near the city." By February of that year, land for a new cemetery had already been acquired that was located east of the railroad tracks in an undefined location. One suspects it was in the vicinity of the present Green Hill Cemetery on York Street.

The new site offered more space. And burials began there. However, not every burial thereafter was in this new cemetery. Many people continued burying their loved ones on the hill.

This state of affairs lasted for fourteen more years. By 1904, it was clear that the cemetery on the hill at Sixth and Fondulac Streets would soon become landlocked.

The city's "boot hill" was the location of Muskogee's first cemetery. It was on the low hill west of the pond located at Main and Fondulac Streets. This site was used from the early 1870's until after the turn of the century.

Local Newspaper Humor

A hundred years ago in the days before radio and television, storytelling was everyone's business. All that one needed was a keen eye to see the laughable situations around them.

Here is a case in point. In 1908, there was a legal squabble. These are the details covered by a Muskogee newspaper.

"Serious trouble threatens the city. A local news item says that there is to be war between the city and the electric traction company [that runs the local trolley line]. We do tremble in anticipation of what will happen when N. A. Gibson, attorney for the traction company, attacks N. A. Gibson, attorney for the city, in legal battle. We bet Gibson will win."

Sometimes a newspaper writer was faced with a sheet of blank paper he was assigned to cover in ink. This was especially hard to accomplish on slow-news days. It may not have been raining, but at the same time the clouds might as well have emptying buckets of water outside as far as the local news was concerned. Here is one copywriter's line.

"A heterongeneous [sic] huddle of hefty hitters, a group of has-beens, a beautiful bevy of brutal batsmen, a weighty, wingy, watchful whole of wiry windjammers, a pertinacious, pugnacious aggregation of pie-eaters." Thus was described the team of baseball players formed by the employees of the Dawes Commission in 1906. One wonders, was this writer paid by the word?

Man also has a way of causing laughter at his own expense sometimes. When that happened many an old time newspaperman just could hardly contain themselves long enough to get back to their writing desk.

Writers hung around the police station to pick up crime news. Here is a true story as told by one of the participants on one day, also in 1906. Let me repeat: this is a TRUE STORY from the Choska Bottoms.

One farmer testified "I was holding the kitten when Wade ordered me to lay it down. I refused and he started in to blaze away with his six-shooter. I didn't like that much, so I laid down the puss and grabbed a shotgun and returned his compliments." Believe it or not, neither shooter was harmed by the other in the gunfight!

Here is another one from a Muskogee newspaper. The editor reports a farmer "is starting a fresh egg farm at Enid. Now if he can only make those eggs stay fresh until they reach the consumer who wants two soft boiled of mornings!"

Just as Paul Harvey used to tell stories during his radio broadcasts, newspapers brought relief to area readers down on life. Life was about more than just the news. News was about how people lived. Then, as now, life and news tickled the proverbial funny bone.