The River Bend

Book excerpt: The River Bend is a collection of fifty-six boyhood reminiscences about growing up in the River Bend country of south-central Oklahoma, in the first decades of the Twentieth Century. These little stories first appeared as a weekly column in the Konawa Leader, a Seminole County, Oklahoma, newspaper owned and published by Ed Gallagher. This book is my response to the mountain of correspondence from readers of the column who almost invariably began their letters with: "Have you written a book about this wonderful place?" The "Bend" is twenty-five square miles of rolling hills, scrub oak, and briar patches separated from the rest of the world by the wide and sometimes cantankerous South Canadian River. The nearest town, located in the mouth of the horseshoe bend, is Konawa, which has one paved street and whatever was left standing after the tornado of 1966. The eleventh and last child of a very poor dirt farmer, I grew up thinking I was rich. My family owned a one-hundred-sixty-five-acre farm in the center of the Bend, and on all sides of us were neighbors who seemed like kinfolks. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl were words no one ever used in my presence.