Day 14 - October 15 - Day Spent at Perryton, Texas

           I was up bright and surly this day, ready to go into Perryton which is a mile or two north of my hotel. The most prominent physical feature of Perryton is the gigantic, and unused grain elevator which looms over the downtown area (as seen in yesterday’s photos).  Ten miles out of town, the elevator and water towers tell the traveler the town is ahead.

Perryton has characterized itself as the “Wheatheart of the Nation.”  In years past, the production of wheat was the economic engine which drove this city. Now the grain elevator sits unused beside the former right-of-way of the Santa Fe railroad. The tracks are gone, but the remnants of the past remain. I think the wheat is still important, but there’s plenty of gas and oil activity around now.

            Perryton is the county seat of Ochiltree County. That said, there are 254 counties in Texas, and Ochiltree consists of four communities, with Perryton as the largest and the county seat.  In terms of party politics, Ochiltree County, Texas has the distinction of giving George W. Bush the highest percentage of votes in any county in the US.

            Back to the day…   I really had two goals: 1) to try and find any reference to a place where my father, his siblings, and my grandparents lived in Perryton, and 2) to see those properties and hope to get some feeling about my father’s life there in the early 1900s (he was born in 1903). 

            I began my search at the Perryton Library.  A very helpful librarian let me read copies of a history of the city, but the index had no reference to any Gamels. That said, there was a wealth of photos of Perryton in the time my father would have been a teenager. Dirt streets, a few vehicles, and all the structures were made of wood. It looked bleak, to be candid.

            The librarian gave me microfilms of the “Ochiltree Herald” for the dates surrounding Oscar’s Perryton High School graduation (1924), and the deaths of his father (10/1939) and mother (1/1950).  All I could find here was a fragment of my grandfather Robert H. Gamel’s obituary.

            Well, I knew that there was probably a copy of the Ochiltree Herald somewhere, so I went to the source. Gwen at the present-day Perryton Herald showed me to a room filled with bound copies of old editions, and told me to go at it. I took her advice and came upon the one nugget of the work, a physical copy (with photo!) of my grandfather’s obituary

            I was then off to the County Courthouse to look for property records for the Gamels. Reduced to its essence. No luck here.

            On to Perryton City Hall. Very nice people here tried to help me find anything from the early part of the last century. The marveled over my trek, and said the man to see was Terry Simons at the County Tax Appraisal Office.

            Four blocks of riding put me into Terry’s office (he was out on his lunch hour getting a tire fixed), but Denise Davis there took me in hand. Seems Denise worked on the history of the First Baptist Church (FBC) in Perryton, and began calling people who might have known any of the Gamels as part of the church. Terry returned from his mission, listened to my story, and took me back to a cabinet where the pre-WWII records were stored. He and I went through huge bound volumes of records, filled with hand-written accounts, and could find no reference to any property owned by the Gamels. After I helped Terry stow about 200 pounds of books, Denise suggested I go to the church, and take a look at the history book there.

Soon, I was sitting in the office of Dee-Anne Dear at the FBC. Dee-Anne called three church members who were in their late nineties (all women), and she talked with three.  Long story shortened, she never found anyone who could say where the Gamels lived, but one remembered my Aunt Minnie as “part of a fast crowd.” Another (ten years younger than my father) recalled him as a “big, handsome guy.”  And that was it. I had done what I could.

Now the hardest part (it turned out) was ahead. Some readers of this may know that my father Oscar was never much of a presence in my life, nor in the life of my sister Mary-Kay. He was a very troubled man, with many flaws. He died when I was 13 and Mary-Kay was 16. I think she and I share the view that he never really wanted to be a father. With this history, I still don’t know exactly why I made this journey.  In my own naïve way, I thought that seeing the place where he lived, looking at the land of the Texas Panhandle, smelling it (as one can only do on a motorcycle) would somehow give me some insight into him and what formed him. Well, I didn’t have a house to look at, or a street on which he lived, but at least I had the graves of my grandparents Mary Lou and Robert to see.

The cemetery in which my grandparents are buried is about nine miles south of the City of Perryton.  I rode down there, and almost missed it. I guess a group of trees rising out of the prairie should have been a clue.

Perryton people had told me how I could easily find Mary Lou and Robert, and there was a map of the cemetery plots. I found my grandparents, side-by-side in Section C, Row 260, Plots 17 & 18.  Ever the reporter or recorder of facts, I made photographs of their headstones, the general area, and rode out to the main road to make some photos of the context, and the cemetery. As I stowed my camera, and looked around, I started to cry, and did for a little bit, standing beside a road in Texas, thinking about people whom I had never known (and never could have in Robert’s case), and thinking about how important my children and grandchildren are to me. This is so difficult for me, but in its own way, is a good thing.