Tuesday, December 10, 2024
It was kinda like a play. Reminded me a little bit of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” Kerry Peacock served as stage manager and related stories about Notrees and then called on various members of the audience to share some of their experiences growing up in the small oil field town with an unusual name. As more stories were told, the years rolled back to a simpler time.
My favorite story was from Betty Lovell. “When we were in the fifth grade, a boy named James Orr brought a magnifying glass to school. At recess, he somehow pinned a grasshopper to the ground so it wouldn’t move, shined the sun’s rays through that magnifying glass, fried that grasshopper, and ate it.” You just can’t find stories like that every day.
It was a congenial group. Many of the 40 in attendance had remained friends since attending the six-room schoolhouse in Notrees. The school had one grade per room. After the sixth grade, the students were bussed to Odessa for junior high and high school.
There were stories about Jerry, the school bus driver, about Chief, a ranch foreman and about Charlie Brown, who named the town and was its first postmaster when the post office was established in 1947. Oil activity had picked up in the region and oil companies established groups of houses called camps for employees and their families. The houses were on blocks so they could be easily moved from one location to another. Some windows were painted shut to keep out the blowing sand but some still sifted through. Soon Notrees had a grocery store, a welding shop, two churches, a gas station and a couple of cafes. Shell Oil had a gas plant that started the growth of the town. At its peak Notrees had 700 residents. As the oil companies began to leave the school started using only three rooms, with two grades per room. Now the school and post office have closed, there are no stores and only about five people live there.
Summertime, girls would leave home with a sack lunch and be gone all day walking around the fields, laughing and playing, coming home in time for supper. Boys hunted jackrabbits and sold them for fifteen cents each to companies that made mince meat. There were stories about horned toads, coyotes, rattlesnakes, tarantulas, and other critters. They told about going to popular landmarks: Shiprock, Blue Mountain and The Willows. The more stories, the more laughter. This was genuine entertainment, better than some shows that charge admission.
The daylong event (10 a.m.-5 p.m.) took place at Odessa’s Kellus-Turner Park in a building that once served as the Notrees Community Center. The walls seemed to reverberate from the howls of laughter the audience provided while listening to the storytellers. It was so much fun and an enriching experience. People came from all over Texas and beyond to attend. The gathering reminded me of a line from “Our Town: “This is the way we were.”
