The Barracks

I suspect that few people of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I grew up, remember that the city once housed Italian prisoners of war during World War II. Most who do would be around my age of seventy or older. And even those, if they did not live on the southeast side where the prisoners were housed, might never have noticed. They were housed, (from what I remember you could hardly call them interred, incarcerated, or imprisoned) in a barracks community on the Tulsa Fairgrounds south of 15^th street between Quebec and the old Tulsa Oiler baseball park.

My memory of those prisoners is somewhat sketchy. The things that were on my mind in 1943-44 were the St. Louis Cardinals, doing Knights of the Round table sword fights with broken pieces of wood in scattered vacant lots, and waiting to grow up to fight the Japanese and Germans like my older brother in the navy.

I do remember occasions where I saw them having a soda at the Crown Drug Store at 15^th and Harvard. They all had a large POW stenciled on the back of their shirts, which caught the stares of all the youngsters that frequented the store to read the comic books and have a vanilla coke. Young men just six to eight years older than I, seeming to enjoy their circumstances.

Frequent events in my life have brought me back to Tulsa, and during my last visit, Will Rogers fiftieth reunion in 2002, I drove back through the fairgrounds to find that the barracks community was torn down, and I had difficulty identifying the exact location where these barracks once stood.

Despite my inability to find the place, the memory of those barracks remains fixed and vivid in my mind. You see, our family moved into one of those barracks late in 1944, shortly after the prisoners were shipped home, and we lived there until the summer of 1948.

When I was born, we lived on Gary Place, but some time in 1940 we moved to a white frame bungalow at 1523 South Harvard, another Tulsa residence that no longer exists. Our father never believed in owning. He had a good job as a freight and passenger agent for the Southern Pacific Railroad, officing in the Kennedy Building at Fourth and Boston, but with six children, and a live-for-the-day Irish-rogue outlook on life, we moved frequently, exhausting residences quickly and inhumanely.

Although I saw the POWs, I had never realized where they were kept since since the nine blocks from Quebec to Harvard was several blocks beyond the eastern expanse of weekend and summertime range of interest for me and my buddies. We did venture east to Marion to play war games in the large field just west of the Armory and east of Louisville, where housing stopped on the south side of Fifteenth street.

But when our father came home late in 1944 to announce we were moving to "The Barracks", as it came to be known to us, it sounded very exciting. Our family, with four boys and two girls, mom and dad, had simply worn out another house, and it was time to move. The owner wanted to sell it and my father wasn't interested in buying.

Housing was still very limited with no building going on during the war, and the city had just put the freshly vacated barracks up for lease, and dad rented one. In the complex that was spread across what was probably ten acres, there were three, maybe four, large barracks buildings, two smaller officers’ style large-house buildings, and a large mess hall. We got one of the barracks.

The first day he took us all to visit, even though I knew it was not the sort of place regular people lived, it was Yankee Stadium to me. Maybe best described with reference to an airplane. Two large wings, probably ninety by twenty feet, jutted out in opposite directions, perpendicular from a fuselage unit that was probably twenty feet wide and forty feet deep. The wings were completely open, but the central unit was broken up into one large room, two small rooms, one of which connected the wings, and the bathroom.

The bathroom was a kid’s dream. After many years of sharing a small bath with five siblings and parents, I walked into the bathroom to discover six toilets, ten wash basins with mirrors, and a shower room with six showers, and a small storage area. Best of all was the ten acres of ground to ride bikes, catch deep fly balls that my father would hit to me for hours on end, with a bedroom large enough to play catch, and other baseball games on rainy days, and we even had our own roller skating arena.

The boys lived in one wing, four beds in a ninety by twenty room, and our parents and the girls lived in the other. One of the small rooms in the central part was set up as the kitchen, the other housed my oldest brother, returned from the war, and his wife and new baby. The large central room was living and dining. Even the family, now 10 strong, hardly filled twenty percent of the space. However crude it seemed compared to where my friends lived, the richest family in town did not have the space we had.

It did have its drawbacks. The only heat provided in winter was by space heaters. They were gas burners with an asbestos backing that would glow and sparkle under the flame, and only heated the space around them on cold mornings. Since my father deemed it too dangerous to burn the stoves all night, the mornings found some very cold boys huddled in the small space of one of the heaters that our father would light upon getting us up for school. We would be draped in blankets until the room got warm enough to get dressed.

Summers were pretty uncomfortable, but with all windows open to catch any breeze, it was tolerable for me. It was extremely hard on our mother, who suffered terribly with the heat. I often found her in the afternoon lying on her bed with a wet towel over her and a fan blowing across for evaporative cooling.

I could sense that visiting friends were uneasy about my home, and sometimes this caused me to be embarrassed by our unconventional residence. But none of them could play baseball in their house, and their yards were hardly fit to set up biking racing tracks.

The location also led to my first job. In the summer of ’46, minor league baseball returned to Tulsa. Just a short walk to the park, I wandered over and landed myself a summer job as a scoreboard boy for that first season. Fifty cents a game. Without modern electronics it took three people to manage it. It was two stories and upstairs kept the line score of the Tulsa game with balls, strikes and outs on painted lights sticking out of holes in the front. Downstairs was the current scores of all other games in the Texas league. Numbers painted on metal squares for each inning were placed in small windows. A ringer phone passed all necessary information from the press box above the grandstand.

I worked there four years, eventually working myself up to the visiting team’s clubhouse boy and batboy in the summer of 1950. Remember, the Korean war started in June of that year. I remember because, when the Oklahoma City Indians came through on their first visit, the players were hardly older than I. The second time they were more grizzled baseball veterans. The draft had taken all the young players.

By 1950 the pay had gone up to a dollar a game, but I had the club house concession where I bought drinks for eighty cents a case and sold them for ten cents a bottle. A tidy profit of a dollar fifty per case. But the big money was the tips. I kept the clubhouse clean, hung out wet uniforms to dry, cleaned spikes, and shined shoes. When a visiting team left town there were some handsome tips on top of their soft drink bill for the visit.

In January of 1951, when I turned seventeen, I enlisted in the Navy. Since that day I served at seven duty stations in the Navy, and have lived in eleven homes and apartments since then, but no matter the size, location, or luxury of each of these, none soak into my memory like the Barracks. It still is what I think of as THE place to live in Tulsa. Too bad at least one was not saved for posterity. I would visit for real, not just in my memory, on every visit back home.