The Good Old Days by John Greiner

This was taken from the newsletter published by John Greiner.  I added my comments in red.


In the 50 years since we graduated from high school, Henryetta has changed in ways and not changed in others.


The places we shopped and the adults we knew are mostly gone.


Remember Williams Shoeland?  The store had an x-ray machine to help find your correct shoe size.  Some of us went in there and just looked at our feet, actually our skeleton feet, through the machine.


We had lots of drug stores: Greens, Judy's, Post Office Drug and Berry's Drug.  They had comic books and phosphate sodas.  (And cherry cokes!)


We had a hotel, the Georgian.


We had car dealerships.


We had movie theaters, The Morgan, The Blaine and the Drive-in.  They are gone.  Each theater had different movies during the week.  The movies ran Sunday, Monday & Tuesday; Wednesday & Thursday; and Friday & Saturday.  The Morgan had plenty of Cowboy movies on Saturdays: The Durango Kid, Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, Tim Holt, Dale Robertson, Jimmy Wakely, Red Ryder and Allen Rocky Lane.  (I remember the serials....you had to go back the next Saturday to find out what happened!)  The movies are gone.


We had a great, modern restaurant on the corner of 6th and Main.  It was the Patty Ann.  (Remember buddy-burgers?)


Our high School Building on 2nd Street between Cummings & Gentry is not there anymore.  HHS is out on the west side of town now, carved out of the hill where young boys hiked and sometimes camped.


But when you come into Henryetta, it's still the pretty town in the valley with a long Main Street and residential areas everywhere, including houses clinging to the side of the big hill that overlooks much of our town.


Our graduating class was smaller than the number of students we had in our freshman year when there were 130.  We graduated 85.


In the past 50 years many of our classmates have died.


We had six grade schools, strategically placed around our town.  There's just one grade school now.


When we grew up, Henryetta was a small industrial town of probably 8,000 plus.  We had many ethnic groups.  Including Oklahoma's Native Americans, our melting pot included Italians, Welsh, English and Greeks.  A black family, the Grundys, came to Henryetta High School in the 1950's.  One of that family, Anthony Grundy, who was younger than we, died fighting in Vietnam.


In Henryetta in the days we grew up, you could walk down the street in the spring and summer and know what someone was having for dinner.  Air conditioning was rare, so everyone's windows were open and you could smell the food cooking as you walked by.


Boys played kick-the-can, cowboys, soldiers, football, baseball and basketball.  These games were played on the Girl Scout lot on 5th and Gentry, in the many backyards of Henryetta, at the baseball park and on the Well's lot up on the hill, just to name a few.


Girls, too, played kick-the-can: and they were experts at jacks, hop scotch and dress up.  (I remember playing hide-and-seek in the evening, and catching fireflies in glass jars.)


Many of the guys were Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts and Explorers.  The girls were Brownies and Girl Scouts.


The six grade schools had friendly competitions from grade school football to fund raising for the March of Dimes.  There were grade school musicals performed in the high school gymnasium.  (Do you remember the "land rush" enactments at Webster?  And the Halloween parades up the hill and back to the school?)


Just about every adult in town knew every kid.  So a kid better beware of doing something wrong.


Things have changed and they haven't changed.  Henryetta still is a pretty town, and the people are nice and friendly.  During an all-school reunion, I once asked someone from a class ahead of us if he still lived in Henryetta.  "Yes, I guess I never got away from here," he replied.


"I think you are lucky," I said.

Thanks, John for this great article.