‘A time of innocence.’ Two 90-somethings look back on lives filled with fun, love

Many years ago, Bill Ingram and I walked past a rustic little nightclub called the Purple Peacock. (Name changed to protect the innocent ... and the guilty.)

At that moment a slickly combed fellow wearing a white waiter’s smock emerged from the Peacock. He crossed the road and, following a little path, disappeared into a thicket of brush. Moments later he returned with something under his garment. How interesting!

So Bill and I steered off onto that path. Barely 10 feet into the thicket we confronted a staggering sight: 15, maybe 20 cardboard cases of booze, Jim Beam, Wild Turkey, Old Forester, Gordon’s and Beefeater Gin.

Oklahoma was a dry state then, supposedly allowing only 3.2 beer. So this was contraband liquor removed from the club in Creek County and stashed across the road in Tulsa County as an effort to baffle enforcers. By now, three or four big guys, all garbed in those white smocks, had popped out onto the Peacock’s front porch. They glared at us through the brush, aggravated that we preteens aspired to pilfer spirits the bootleggers had hidden from cops. So we popped out ourselves, back onto the road and lightly walked away.

We came back that night. I was too cowardly to pilfer, but Bill hung around while he sneaked up and took a couple of bottles. We walked back toward the neighborhood, sipping our first real liquor. Stealing whiskey, even from guys illegally selling it, is not right. I would like to think that’s the worst crime we ever committed.

Because ahead of us lay our broke but brilliantly happy teen years, our great era of pitifully paid jobs; swimming in ponds; hunting and fishing; wandering the woods; and camping with thrifty World War II Army surplus gear, pup tents, tropical hammocks with rain shelters and mosquito nets.

Never has outdoor equipment been so cheap. It’s just what homeless people need now, but don’t have.

“Time it was,” Simon and Garfunkel would sing many years later. “And what a time it was…a time of innocence, a time of confidences…”

What brings this all back to me now is an email I received last month.

“Hi Charles, my name is Mayson Brown (Evans) and I am reaching out on behalf of my great grandfather, Bill Ingram. He has gotten poor in health and wishes to contact you again before his time expires. He told me you were the best man in his wedding and a dear friend that he would love to speak to or see sometime soon!”

I am 90 years old, Bill a year older, both of us now widowers. That woman I watched him marry in the Rev. Patterson’s parlor those many years ago lived even longer than my wife’s 81 years and died only recently. Bill and I spoke on the phone for an hour, traded stories about what has happened since we last saw each other, and reminisced about our fateful encounter at the Purple Peacock. In that ancient era we had such good times.

Back then, farm pastures near our neighborhood held thickets of persimmon trees, useful not just for their edible fruit (don’t dare taste it unless fully ripe), but also for sport. We would climb a tree on the north side of a thicket and rock until we could seize a branch on the neighboring tree. Then we’d climb into that one and rock again to reach the next, and the next after that, until — triumphantly — we dropped to the ground on the south side and marched on to conquer the next persimmon thicket.

Near downtown we swam across the Arkansas River, bordered with oil refineries, and emerged with budding black mustaches, our little contribution to cleansing the water. We swam in Old Man Peevee’s pond, sometimes ducking to breathe through a plumbing pipe with the upper end in the air. Once we tootled away on that primitive instrument until, while we were submerged, Mr. Peevee nearly ambushed us, roaring: “Get to hell outta my pond!” We did.

That 1952 summer, after I graduated from high school, we both worked at the Percy Blair construction company, and it was the hardest work I ever did. It paid maybe a dollar an hour — not bad back then when a dollar was a dollar. We helped carpenters build forms that shaped pre-stressed concrete beams, which soon after supported freeway bridges.

I swear I did not go to the University of Tulsa just to get a student deferment and dodge the Korean War, which did not end until July 27, 1953. But it had that effect. I dodged and went to college (and got drafted later) while Bill fought and suffered wounds that still trouble him but never stopped him.

I became a journalist, 15 years as reporter for the Kansas City Star, then journalism teacher at UMKC and late-in-life columnist. Bill worked the trades, a roofer at one time, and finally at just the profession he strongly desired: as a paid fishing guide on Oklahoma rivers and lakes. We had OK lives, still do, lucky long ones with loving wives and me now with an 89-year-old lady I love, him with great-grandchildren, me with grandchildren (though with hopes for “greats”.)

How much more can anybody ask?

Contact the columnist at hammerc12@gmail.com.

This story was originally published January 22, 2025 at 5:00 AM.