MEMORIES OF DOYLE’S
EARLY LIFE
[DOYLE J.
RUSSELL]
By Mary Russell Simms
Foreword: The information in Doyle's story came from several sources:
1) As a little kid, I used to love to listen to Doyle tell his tales about his life in Arkansas. I was fascinated by all of his adventures.
2) Also, I was very close to Doyle's mother. Even though I only visited at her home in Arkansas three times, Addie and I exchanged letters for over thirty years. She shared many stories with me about Doyle during his early years in Arkansas.
3) Perhaps my greatest source of information about Doyle's life came from being Doyle's daughter. I knew Doyle personally for over sixty years.
Unfortunately, Doyle did not leave any written memoirs for us. Hopefully the following account will leave a permanent record of a most remarkable man.
* * *
Doyle was truly a self-made man. He was quite
unlike his parents and siblings. Doyle must have inherited his drive and
determination from his favorite Grandmother, Mariah Tennessee Turner
Russell. Grandma "Tennie" was far ahead of her times back then. In fact, back in the late 1800s, after birthing eleven children and being pregnant with number twelve, Doyle's Grandma "Tennie" had the courage to divorce her abusive husband! Divorce was totally unheard of back then in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. I always believed that Grandma "Tennie" was Doyle's role model.
Doyle’s early years in Arkansas were truly sad. Born in 1907, the fourth child
of twelve offspring, his mother was always overworked and had little time to
give her many children individual attention that they needed. When Doyle
started to school his mother gave him a McGuffey’s Reader and a cold sweet
potato for his lunch and sent him off to get his education. At other
times he carried a chunk of cold cornbread for his lunch.
All of the siblings went barefoot to school back
then. They had to wade across a small creek on their way to and from the
school house which was about two miles away. In the winter months there
were chunks of ice in the creek. Wading barefoot across that creek and
having nothing to dry off with must have been very painful for those young
children.
In the early part of the twentieth century, teaching
at the local school left much to be desired. After completing eighth
grade, a student could take a teaching test and become a licensed school
teacher in Arkansas. The school house was also very austere.
It was a one-room wooden building with a dirt floor. Very little heat
came from a fireplace set into one wall.
During his first year of school Doyle, was never
called on in class. The teacher never spoke to him or gave him any
instruction. Doyle was a shy little kid and sat quietly chewing on the
corners of his McGuffey’s reader and swinging his feet back and forth beneath
his desk. Since the one-room school house had dirt floor, Doyle’s
toenails dug two trenches beneath his desk. All Doyle had to show for his
entire first year at school was a round-cornered reading book and two deep ruts
beneath his desk.
From early on, Doyle was different from the rest of
his family. Doyle was determined to make his mark in the world. He was
willing to work and plan and was determined to have property of his own and
provide well for a family. Doyle wanted independence and security. He was
determined to rise above his own raising. The good news was that
Doyle was willing to work for what he wanted.
He was very much like his Grandma “Tennie” in many
ways. He did his own thing. In 1929 when the great depression hit America, many people seemed content to sit on the front porch
and watch an old hound dog scratch its fleas while they wished for better
times. Not Doyle. Doyle hitch-hiked to Kansas and followed the wheat harvest going west. His
family needed the money.
Doyle was 22 years old in 1929 when he left home
to find work. He was willing to work long, hard days and give an honest
day’s work for his pay. Doyle was able to cover his living expense and
managed to send money home to his mother to help out with paying the tax bills
and other outstanding bills.
Doyle continued to do this for several years.
His cousin Archie Turner accompanied him on one of these jaunts to Kansas. At first Doyle hitch-hiked or “rode the rails”
of the freight trains to get to Kansas to seek work in the wheat harvest. In
later years he was able to buy a bus ticket to travel safely back and forth
from home to the harvest area. He was still faithfully mailing money back
home to his mother. Otherwise the Russell family would most likely have
lost their home and farm due to delinquent taxes.
Doyle encouraged his siblings to find work. He
sent some of the boys off to the CCC Camps to work. He encouraged others to join the Army.
Every sibling he could put to work elsewhere made one less mouth for his mother
to feed.
Doyle’s father was a delightful, lovable person whose
greatest pleasure was doing volunteer work in the community. He was an
unpaid deputy sheriff and was always available to escort prisoners between Arkansas and Texas. The deputy and prisoner always rode horseback
and camped out several nights during these trips. While this was truly a
noble task, it did not put any food on the table at home or help pay the
bills. Also, when anyone in the community died, Doyle’s father would
volunteer to build them a nice casket—no charge. This was admirable but
did nothing to pay the bills for a family of twelve offspring plus two
parents. Doyle’s dad was the poster boy for volunteer work.
Doyle was determined to be nothing like his father
when it came to providing for a family. Hard work and responsibility
ranked very high with Doyle.
For several years Doyle followed the wheat harvest
from Kansas through into Colorado each summer. After a few years he decided to
put down roots in northern Colorado.
He liked the land there. Colorado farmers did not have the same problems that the
farmers in Arkansas faced. Grass did not grow wild in the fields of
Colorado. Rocks did not constantly work up into the
plowed land in Colorado. Unwanted vegetation did not consume the farm
land in Colorado. Becoming a farmer in Colorado sounded like a good idea to Doyle.
Doyle leased a small farm with an old barn, corral, a
well, and a two-room shack from Mrs. Entwhistle. He began farming with a
horse and plow and worked long, hard hours. His determination paid off
and he made a success of dry-land farming.
In 1934 when a night course in college level
accounting was offered in the local town, he saw the opportunity to further his
education. Doyle would work a ten-hour day in the fields, come in, wash
up, eat some supper, saddle his horse and ride five miles to town to attend
accounting classes.
Doyle loved the learning experience but it was short-lived.
Doyle had an eighth-grade education and was doing well understanding
accounting. The problem occurred when the other students—all high school
graduates and several college-educated students simply could not comprehend the
basics of accounting. The teacher told Doyle that only two people in the
room understood what was going on—Doyle and the teacher. Unfortunately
for Doyle, the course was cancelled before they reached mid-term.
In 1935 Doyle got married to a local sixteen-year old
school girl. Doyle was eleven years older than his new bride and
faced quite a challenge. The new bride knew absolutely nothing about
cooking, sewing, raising children, or keeping a house! Fortunately, Doyle
was patient and a good teacher. Eventually Frances learned to do routine housework and cook edible
meals. She even eventually learned how to sew. With the birth of
four children and much coaching from the neighbor across the road, Frances learned child care.
Meanwhile back in Arkansas, Doyle had become a local legend in his own
time. Doyle was looked up to and admired by his friends and family
remaining in Arkansas. It became the goal of every young man in Cass
to one day go visit Doyle in Colorado and see their hero in person.
During the early years of their marriage, Doyle and
Frances entertained many of the Arkansas bunch. Some slept on the floor in the kitchen
while others bunked out in the barn. One couple even stayed at the local
hotel. Most of their visitors stayed for a few weeks. Some stayed
for a few months. Others stayed for a year or more. Most of the Arkansas friends and relatives could not tolerate the cold Colorado winters. Doyle’s youngest brother Harold was
the only friend or relative from Arkansas to choose Colorado as his permanent home.
Every one of Doyle’s seven brothers visited Doyle at
his various farms in Colorado. Two of his four sisters came to see him.
Everyone who visited and returned to Arkansas had nothing by praise when telling of Doyle’s life in
Colorado. Doyle remained the village hero.
Doyle moved forward with his farming, increasing his
plowed acreage from time to time. He got a tractor and upgraded his
source of farm power. He bought 320 acres of farm land and in 1938 moved
his wife and two children to a different house. The new home had
four small rooms, a barn, pigpens, and workshop with attached chicken
house. From G P Brandner Doyle had leased 960 acres of
farm/pasture land plus access to another 320 acres of pasture land. He
then leased another 160 acres of farm land from Fred Walker. By 1946
Doyle was farming and/or grazing over 1400 acres of land in Weld County. He was running about 100 head of
whiteface Hereford cattle and owned about twenty head of
horses. He also had numerous hogs and chickens.
Just before World War II began, Doyle’s mother begged
Doyle to send a bus ticket for Doyle’s youngest brother to come to Colorado and live with Doyle. Harold was about fifteen
at the time. Seems Harold had been caught one time too many shooting game
out of season. The authorities gave Doyle’s mother three choices: 1) send
Harold to jail, or 2) send Harold to the CCC Camp, or 3) get Harold out of Arkansas permanently. Addie did not want her baby to go to
jail! She also did not want her 15-year old son living in the CCC Camp with the rough workers. Addie could not afford a bus ticket
for Harold to Colorado, so she begged Doyle to send a ticket so Harold could
leave Arkansas and avoid jail or the CCC Camp.
Doyle ended up raising his younger brother. In
Colorado Harold continued to hunt game out of season without a license;
however, Doyle had so many acres of private land that Harold was never bothered
by the Game Warden. Harold joined the Navy shortly after the War broke out.
At the end of the war, Harold returned to live with Doyle. In 1949 Harold
married a local girl and finally moved out on his own. Harold remained in
Colorado until his death many years later.
Everything went sour in 1946 when G P
Brandner double-crossed Doyle and secretly sold the 960 acre farm.
The land owner then tried to cancel Doyle’s ten-year lease. The lease had
not yet expired. This caused many hard feelings. G P Brandner’s
foul act cost Doyle 1,280 acres of farm/pasture land plus his home.
Doyle still owned his 320 acres of farm land nearby
but this property was without a house to live in so Doyle purchased a 160-acre
farm with a large house on it. Doyle moved his family into the larger
house in March 1947. His two farms were now separated by thirteen miles
of dirt roads. The new farm was located seven and one half miles from the
nearest town, driving on dirt roads all the way.
With the loss of over 1,000 acres of land, Doyle had
to downsize his livestock situation. He sold all of the horses but two
and sold about eighty head of cattle leaving twenty cows. He had limited
water and pasture at the new farm.
In 1952 Doyle sold the 320 acres of land he owned in Nunn Township. In 1953 he bought a 600 acre farm in Larimer County. He moved his family to the new property which
was not as isolated as the house in Weld County. The house was much smaller, and water was even
scarcer. For about twenty years Doyle tried to work both farms that were
fourteen miles apart. He eventually sold the 160 acre farm in Weld County and concentrated his farming and junk yard in Larimer County.
While trying to farm two places fourteen miles
apart, Doyle was plagued with thieves. The thieves would strike in the middle
of the night with a cutting torch and chop up his machinery left in the field,
and sell the pieces for junk. If Doyle left a tractor and plows in the
field overnight and returned the next morning, he was likely to find the
machinery stripped. This problem caused a lot of trouble. He
finally solved the problem by selling the 160 acre Weld County farm.
Doyle also had a huge junk yard. He bought and
sold junk cars, tractors, trucks, heavy machinery, and other things. He
was a very astute business man with his junk yard. Many times
people would give Doyle their ailing cars and trucks and even pay the title
transfer fee! Doyle would then keep the free vehicle a few years and
someone would come along and pay him several hundred dollars for the vehicle
that Doyle acquired for free. Doyle was quite the wheeler dealer.
Doyle and Frances were married for fifty-five years
when Frances died with a heart attack in 1990. Then in 1996
Doyle suffered a near fatal farm accident when he and his tractor caught
fire. Doyle was severely burned and not expected to live, but he pulled
through only to spend his final four years in a nursing home.
In January 2000, at the age of 93, Doyle died quietly
in his sleep. A truly self made man who will forever remain a local
legend in Cass, Arkansas.
Rest in peace, Daddy.
Note: My story about Doyle covers his earlier
years of life. It does not cover his later years because an excellent
account of this period was written by his daughter-in-law Pam Russell.
Hopefully she will include this story about Doyle in her blog.
Doyle Russell
by his daughter-in-law Pam Russell
Doyle
was sixty-four years old the first time I saw him, that spring day in 1971 when
Bob took Patrick and me up to meet his folks. I was
nervous about the meeting and remember getting that sinking feeling in the pit
of my stomach as the Volkswagen bus made the final curve on the road leading
up to their house. Bob hadn’t told me what to expect, didn’t try to tell me
what his folks were like or whether they would approve of their younger son’s
new girlfriend and her 2-1/2 year old son. Minutes later we were all seated in
the living room looking at Doyle’s whittlings and homemade puzzles, relaxed and
smiling, starting to get to know one another. Doyle and Frances accepted both
me and Patrick, and from that day on treated us like
family.
Doyle
was born in 1907 in Cass, Arkansas, the fourth of twelve children born to
Addie Jane and Elias Russell. Doyle learned
blacksmithing and farming before he left home to travel west working with wheat
threshing crews, following the harvests. He was an ambitious young man with
big, strong hands and a good head on his shoulders. He realized that he his
future was not in Arkansas where his less ambitious brothers took
advantage of the gains he made, holding him back. After a few trips west to
work the wheat harvest in eastern Colorado he decided to stay.
When
Doyle first laid eyes on Frances Smith she was only thirteen years old but he
liked her flashing eyes and shy smile, and he was smitten. For the next few
years Doyle worked on farms near Purcell, Colorado, where Frances lived with her family, and in May of 1935
they were wed. Doyle gave Frances money to buy her wedding clothes and many
years later she liked to recall exactly what she bought for her trousseau.
I’ve
heard the stories of how Doyle worked and saved to buy his first tractor, and
then his first piece of land, and then the next, but the details are fuzzy now.
I know that he worked hard and was frugal, not one to splurge on a night on the
town or a new car or any of those things that tempt young men. Doyle placed a
high value on land ownership and step by step, year by year, he bought farm
equipment then land, never running up debts for these purchases but paying cash
whenever possible.
I’ve often wondered what motivated Doyle, what
forces shaped the man. He talked about his family a lot and there were two
people in his past he seemed to truly admire, his paternal grandmother, Mariah
Tennessee Turner, and Mariah’s youngest son, Doyle’s Uncle Sam Turner. I
believe he not only admired them but learned from them and patterned his life
after theirs. Doyle was a very intelligent
man but with only an eighth-grade education he would never become a lawyer or
legislator, careers in which he may have excelled. He was a shrewd businessman,
though, and rarely made mistakes which set him back.
Doyle
started out in eastern Colorado farming rented land and using decrepit
farm equipment. Dryland farming is a risky business relying on the whims of
Mother Nature for rain needed to germinate the wheat seed then praying she
doesn’t drop the late summer hail that can turn a thirty-bushel an acre crop
into a worthless field of stems and mud in minutes. Rain is scarce in Colorado and hail all too predictable. He was
hailed out so many times in Weld County that in 1953 Doyle moved his family a few
miles west to Larimer County to a 340 acre farm, not all of which was
tillable. Here he pulled more profit out of the land than any other man I know
could have accomplished. He not only raised seed wheat and cattle, he dug for
gravel and established his own gravel pit. And when Interstate 25 came through
separating his grazing land from his water holes and making raising livestock a
difficult proposition Doyle started a junk yard, buying and selling (mostly
selling) used automobiles, tractors, machinery, scrap wood, and much, much
more.
When someone wanted to dispose of an old car, Doyle didn’t buy it from
them, he charged them to leave it at his place and then he sold parts off of
it. He frequented farm auctions and had a knack for buying low and selling
high. Doyle was a born salesman. He charmed his prospective buyers with stories
about “down there in Arkansas”, and his no-pressure approach gained him
a pocketful of cash most every day of the week. Doyle’s customers became
life-long friends.
His proximity to I-25 brought a steady stream of customers
from all across the county, vacationers with their families, tractor buffs with
their empty trailers hoping to find a rare jewel to take home to the Midwest, and a lot of “looky-loos”, those who were
intrigued by the mounds of junk but who didn’t spend a dime. Colorado’s dry air
means a tractor which has set out in the sun for thirty years has very little
rust. Had it been in Illinois it would have crumbled into the earth
leaving a pile of worthless junk. Doyle’s place became a junk lover’s paradise.
Frances
and Doyle found a ready market in the sale of Siamese cats, a commodity rare in
their part of Larimer County. Each kitten was worth $20, so a litter of
six was very valuable and they often had several litters living in the house at
the same time. Doyle was patient in training the little kittens to perform
endearing tricks so that prospective buyers couldn’t resist taking one or two
of those little kittens home with them.
See what I mean about Doyle pulling money out of his farm that others
wouldn’t consider? He had a good reputation in the community for castrating
hogs, dehorning cattle, witching for water, and butchering animals, all useful
and sometimes profitable skills.
Frances
and Doyle brought four children into this world, two boys and two girls. I know
those four children well enough to know that they each had a very different
childhood from the others. Perhaps that’s the case with every family. Education
was a priority. Although all were expected to participate in chores and farm
work the kids were never kept out of school to help Doyle with the farm. I have
my own opinions about Doyle’s parenting skills based on my husband’s
recollections of his youth, but I will not judge him too harshly. As a parent
myself I know that most of us “shoot from the hip” with our parenting,
combining what we learned from our parents with a few ideas of our own to form
the basis of our own parenting style. Doyle could be strict and heavy handed
but Frances handled most of the day to day
disciplining of the children. Competition between the kids was greatly
encouraged and not tempered with kindness and concern for one another so that
the relationships which formed between the kids were never warm and supportive
of one another.
Although
Doyle never returned to Arkansas to live and only visited there on rare
occasions his family ties remained strong. At different times all of his
brothers came through Colorado to visit and some stayed for weeks and
months especially before WWII. In later years many of them returned with their
wives and children to visit Frances and Doyle and the kids on the farm. Doyle’s
sister Bertie came many times and Nan
just once. The other two sisters, Nellie and Bonnie never made it out to Colorado, to the best of my knowledge. Doyle cared
very much for his mother and father and all his siblings and tried to help them
out in many ways.
I
didn’t know Doyle to be a religious man but his hard-shell (Primitive) Baptist
upbringing had its effect. Doyle didn’t drink or smoke and rarely cursed. He
hated gambling and felt that card playing could lead to trouble. There wasn’t
much of the poet in Doyle either. I doubt he lay awake nights contemplating the
meaning of life. Neither did he enjoy music or have any musical talents. He did
like to square dance and he and Frances were members of a square dance club in Wellington for many years. No, Doyle was not a mystic. He was a
practical man who looked at life from the perspective of a farmer, a man of the
soil. Man (and woman) were higher forms of animals but responded to the same
training and discipline and were just as predictable.
But
that’s not to say that Doyle wasn’t talented because he was. Like many of his Arkansas friends and neighbors he learned early how
to use a knife with the skill of a surgeon, whittling toys and puzzles with
patience and finesse. He was also quite a magician and used sleight of hand and
other techniques not understood by me to create illusions and more concrete
tricks like carved wooden arrows in bottles that no one could figure out how
they got in there. He liked to tell stories and jokes but Frances outshined him in this category. He liked
her jokes, too, and laughed along with the rest of us. Doyle could fix all
sorts of farm machinery and equipment with a minimum of tools and techniques –
baling wire being one of his favorites. There was not a lazy bone in the man.
He worked in all kinds of weather from morning until night.
There
were two areas of business that Doyle dealt in that fascinated me. He bought
and sold land for other people and wrote his own contracts keeping meticulous
ledgers of all the transactions. He also loaned money to people – lots of
people – and kept the same careful records. Most of those ventures were
profitable for Doyle and on those rare occasions when someone tried to abscond
with Doyle’s money or refuse to pay what was owed he consulted a lawyer. There
were several relatives who took advantage of Doyle’s personal loans and never
paid him back. He didn’t sue them or pursue them much but he also never forgave
or trusted them again.
I
got to know Doyle best after Frances died in 1990 and Bob and I took meals to
his dad each day at noontime. It was not easy on him, losing is wife of
fifty-five years. He continued to work outside each day and sell to those who
came for car parts or other items in the yard but it was many months before he
regained his vigor and laughter. I asked him to tell me about his family back
there in Arkansas and I took a lot of notes but mostly I
listened to an old man reflect back on a life I could only imagine. I came to
respect him for his fine memory, his fair treatment of his relatives, and his
work ethic. I learned about the jobs he took in the lean times, climbing oil
derricks and taking any odd job he could find. We had some fine conversations,
not always agreeing, especially about politics, but he treated me with respect
and I believe I reciprocated.
On
that fateful January day in 1996, Martin Luther King Day,
when Doyle’s tractor caught on fire and he was burned over much of his body I
rushed to his house and was there in the kitchen when the firefighters took him
out to the helicopter that would whisk him away to the burn unit at the Greeley
hospital. He handed me his wallet and gave me a look I’d never seen in his eyes
before – Doyle was scared. I drove to the hospital and went into the room where
they were removing his shirt from his back and arms and when the doctor ask,
“Mr. Russell, if your heart should stop during this ordeal do you want us to
restart it,” he said, “Well shore (sure),” as if to ask, “What kind of a stupid
question is that?” Of course the doctor knew something that Doyle didn’t know
and that was the next few months would be full of pain and agony for Doyle. He
survived, slowing coming out of a medically-induced coma to find that his hands
were severely scarred and had lost much of their strength and agility. Those
hands that could wrap around an anvil and lift it high, could whittle a
delicate wooden scissor connected to another scissor and another, could handle
a meat cleaver with precision and cut perfectly sized pork chops one after
another, those hands that were a work of art, blackened with grease and dirt from
working with oily machinery. Those hands could barely hold a fork even months
into his recovery. It was because of the damage to those hands that Doyle
couldn’t live on his own again without assistance, a reality that broke his
heart.
I
find my eyes filling with tears as I remember those last four years of Doyle’s
life. We tried, we all tried to treat him with respect and kindness but the
only thing Doyle wanted was to go back home, something we, his family, didn’t
think was wise. I really don’t want to rehash the decisions that were made; it
was painful enough going through it the first time. It took many long months
but I believe Doyle finally came to accept the nursing home in Windsor as his home, or maybe his home away from
home.
Doyle
had a strong will to live; a lesser man would not have survived those awful
months right after the fire. I remember the day he could no longer remember his
brothers and sisters’ birthdates. He became very sad. Watching someone you love
die is a painful process. And yes, I loved Doyle. I didn’t realize it until those
last few years. He and I hadn’t always seen eye to eye. There were times when I
was very angry with him, and I know he thought I betrayed him when I agreed
that he couldn’t return to the farm to live after his accident, but in the end
….. we were family.
