The Life of Me: An Autobiography

by Clarence Edgar Johnson

My working away from home never amounted to much. However, I wouldn't take a pretty penny for the educational benefits I gained from my traveling around. It increased my desire for more learning, and it gave me confidence in my ability to do more things. It made me more mobile and took away my fear of strange places.

In fact, I thought so much of my education gained through travel that I wanted us to travel a lot with our children. But we were poor and couldn't travel first class, which would have pleased some members of my family. As for me, I would have been glad to travel second class or third class rather than not travel at all. As is evident, I have roughed it much of my life. Later, when I wanted to travel with our kids, I would have gotten a lot of pleasure from roughing it again, going places and seeing things, camping out, and visiting the wild. Some of our traveling proved to be a big failure because some of the family didn't especially care to put up with some of the roughing they had to go through with at times.

For instance, we drove up Pike's Peak once in our Dodge Command car. There was nothing wrong with the car. It was built capable of traveling across the Sahara Desert trouble-free. It was Army surplus, four-wheel drive and as solid as they come. Many cars get too hot climbing the Peak, but this one didn't, although it was in the heat of summer. It had an army canvas top and curtains to match. But since it was beautiful weather, we had the curtains packed away under the back seat. And although it was summertime at the foot of the mountain, it was not summer on top.

The weather on Pike's Peak can change from sunshine to snow and from snow to sleet quicker than perhaps anywhere else in these United States. And the sky can pour out the abundance of her elements faster than is sometimes enjoyable to those upon whom she so recently spread her sunshine. And that is just what she did to us that day. Her elements were in the form of rain, snow, and large sleet. The sleet was sort of a cross between pure white sleet and large, soft hail.

Now, the road up Pike's Peak is, for the most part, void of suitable parking places, even for emergencies. And all this sleet and ice falling suddenly out of the sky did create an emergency. However, before we arrived at an emergency parking place, Ima was very unhappily sitting in a puddle of snow and sleet and ice that had fallen into the front seat and had worked its way down to the back side of her lap.

When we found a little place to pull over and stop, we put up the curtains. But Ima's unhappiness remained with her much longer than I had hoped it would. The truth is, she carried a large portion of it, as well as a little bit of dampness, all the way back down the mountain to Colorado Springs. And there, we found the same type of slush curb to curb four inches deep.

I never quite forgave the weather for that little stunt it pulled on us. It was a long time before I could get the family to go with me again anywhere outside our home county.

Time not only "waits for no man," it seems to go faster and faster. We were getting older and our kids were growing up. Dennis finished high school in Hamlin in June of 1949. In the fall of that same year he began to hear advertisements on radio about cheap farm land in Arkansas, and he sent for a catalog of listings. When it arrived, I had to admit there were some interesting bargains offered in it. The more Dennis read the catalog and listened to the radio, the more he was convinced that out there somewhere in this big country of ours, there was something we had been missing. Then one day he said to me, "Daddy, let's go look at some of these places. All we are doing here is working ourselves to death and getting nowhere."

We talked it over and I agreed that, if it suited the rest of the family, we would go look. Dennis and I went first, not to buy, but only to shop around. We went to Ft. Smith, Arkansas, and looked all the way from 60 miles north of there to 60 miles south of there. We liked what we saw and the prices were right. Then we returned home, and Ima and I went to Arkansas, this time not just looking; we were buying. After looking a few days, we found and bought a small farm three miles south of Mansfield.

We moved onto the place in the early spring of 1950. Anita stayed with the Tarlington Willingham family to finish out her Sophomore year in Hamlin High School. She joined us that summer and spent her Junior year in Mansfield High School. Then she did some special work during the next summer and, in the fall of 1951, instead of entering Mansfield High as a Senior, she entered the University of Arkansas as a Freshman.