JM: What was your reaction to the photograph? Were you surprised by what your father was doing at that age?

TK: Oh, no. They grew up poor. They were poor before the Depression, but the Depression really knocked them off their feet. They had to get out there and find out how to make a dollar.

JM: How did they do that?

TK: For the most part, the boys didn't finish school and had to work. My dad dropped out in the tenth grade and started selling tires at a tire store, Dunlop Tires in Lawton. He was working 10 hours a day, six days a week.

JM: When did he start doing that?

TK: He went to work at Dunlop Tire in 1931. He married my mother, Alice Lenore Wilson, also in 1931. As far as I know, my father was born in Comanche County, February 16, 1910. My mother was born on the same date in 1911. I was born in 1933.

JM: In the 1930 census, your father was listed as living with his parents and working as a laborer in a poultry house.

TK: I did a little bit of that myself. There was a place in Lawton where we bought chickens from the farmers, fryers primarily. And all day long they sit there, kill them, strip them down, gut them, and get them ready to go to market.

JM: How long was he with Dunlop Tire?

TK: He was still with them when he got drafted into WWII, about 1944, about a year before we defeated Germany. He used to tell everybody, ‘When Hitler found out that I was in the military, he decided to go ahead and surrender.' He had a good sense of humor. When he came back, he bought a feed and seed store in Lawton. At that time, most people still had chickens in their back yard. And if they could afford it, they had a cow. And then things got better, supermarkets developed, and it was cheaper to buy your milk than it was to buy a cow, and it was cheaper to buy your eggs than to raise chickens. We still raised a few chickens and sold them. People would call my mother and order chickens that they wanted for dinner. She would call Daddy and tell him that when he came home at five o'clock, she would have some dead chickens in the back yard. She'd have the water hot, and he and I would strip their feathers, and he'd gut them, and she'd cut them up. By seven o'clock, people would come by to pick them up.

I got out of high school in 1951. At some point, he built my mother a small greenhouse so she could raise flowers. I went into the military in 1953. That's about when he sold the feed store to my uncle, and he started growing tomato plants and pepper plants, by the thousands. He would pull them up when they were about an inch tall and replant them in individual containers, and he and my mother worked late at night doing that. He would go out the next morning with his truck and go around to supermarkets selling them.

JM: That must have been a very competitive business.

TK: It was, and it was very demanding. He was working seven days a week, and my mother was working, too. They were on their feet all day long, but they made some money out of it. Then Daddy sold that business and went into the floral business selling flowers for weddings and funerals and things like that. He made lots of money on Mother's Day and other holidays. The rest of the time, he just tried to break even. During the spring, he still did his tomatoes and peppers, and he did alright.