Hal Farrell Remembers
Hal Farrell Remembers
I was a four year old boy from Overton, staying temporarily with my grandparents, George W. and Mazzie A. Lang somewhere around Selman City. Grandpa "took care of several oil wells" out there and pursued his hobby of making miniature oil wells in his shop behind the house. For the record, grandpa's miniatures ran off of their own steam engines (which grandpa made) and actually pumped oil from a resevoir in the base. Once a year he would take them to Kilgore for the show there and earn a little extra money by showing them.A very short time later, my uncle Lloyd Conrad, who was a lease man on a lease somewhere between Arp and Selman City, came by to pick up grandpa, who was a diabetic with other complications, to take him to New London for a doctor's appointment. I wanted to tag along but my uncle said I had to stay and help grandma. I learned later that he had heard about the explosion on the radio and didn't think I should see the carnage. As I recall, we didn't see grandpa or Uncle Lloyd until about noon the next day.
So, anyhow, back to the story. On that terrible day in March 1937, I had been out in the shop with grandpa but he sent me into the house to ask grandma for something (I don't remember what.) No sooner had I entered the house than we heard/felt what seemed to be a very thunderous noise, then the little shotgun house that they lived in started to quivver and quake. I remember that there were two large framed pictures on the wall just above their bed and both of them fell to the floor. I was scared out of my wits because I didn't know what was happening. It was something that I had never experienced before and it just didn't make any sense to me. Grandma assured me that it was probably an oilfield boiler that had exploded and everything would soon be okay. Grandma was busy baking a cake for supper and she was very agitated that all the shaking would cause her cake to fall.
