Arriving home

As we continued on our way to Oklahoma, surprisingly enough we had no more real problems. We crossed through Wyoming and turned south into Denver. When we got onto I-70 we had a very strong head wind. I was driving the dune buggy pulling the boat. The wind was so strong I couldn’t get out of third gear. I would gain some speed and shift into fourth and I would lose power and have to shift back into third. This went on all the way across Kansas. I don’t remember when or where the wind finally calmed down. We finally made into Holdenville on a Thursday. We had left Salem on Sunday. So over all it took us almost five days. We must have looked like a carnival pulling into town.

Gary and Ricki had bought a house in Holdenville so they had a home to go to. We, Susan , Shannon and I on the other hand had to stay with my mother until we could find a place to rent. Being back home was fun in a way but very humbling in another way. We had always been certain we would be a success in the music business and would remain in the business. On the other hand it was nice to live like other people. Work in the daytime and be home at night. Now the finances were quite a cultural shock. We had been making good money and suddenly we were working for Gary’s dad not making a whole lot of money. He tried to give us all the hours he could and to pay as much as he could but that wasn’t a whole lot. Susan got a job at the city clerks office and Ricki got a job somewhere but I can’t remember where. It was hard to get by. There was an active chapter of The Jaycees in Holdenville at the time so Gary and I got involved with that. It was a great group of guys and we had a lot of fun with them. We built a float for the peanut festival parade and won first place. Some of the guys talked me into running for school board and to say I was soundly defeated is an understatement. Talk about humiliation. We tried our best to keep up with our bills, to keep our head above water as they say but sometimes we just couldn’t do it. I remember one time I was down on my knees painting the window frames at the New Hulins quick stop when his daughter, the wife of one of my old class mates, came out and said. “Allen we really need you to pay that bill you owe us at the drugstore”. Just a few weeks ago I was on stage at one of the largest casino show rooms in Nevada and now I’m on my knees painting a window frame in my hometown being dunned for a bad debt. I guess humiliation makes you strong because it did me. Not to say I recovered overnight because I didn’t, but I never forgot that moment and I vowed that somehow I would crawl out of that hole and thank god I did. Slowly we began to make some headway but it seemed to take forever. By the way I was able to find a way to pay the drugstore bill.

During that era dance halls were kinda the going thing. Gary and his dad Kenneth came up with the idea of opening one. So we began to look into it. There was no suitable building available in Holdenville but we did find one in Wewoka. We were able to rent the building and began working nights and weekends to do the work necessary to make it fit our needs. At the same time we needed to find a couple of musicians to join us to form a group. We hired Gerald Roberts for guitar and Gary Anderson for a drummer. So now we were working days and nights and weekends we were remodeling a building and practicing with the band. It was a lot of hard work but it finally began to pay off.

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