Claude Harrison Abbott (1915-1978)

I don't remember meeting my husband's Uncle Claude (although I suspect that he was at our wedding), but when I look at family photos from my husband's family, I sometimes catch my breath for a moment - in some poses, he looks exactly like an earlier copy of Greg. Several months ago, as keeper of the family history memorabilia, I received a box of bits and pieces from his life....

Oldest brother of my husband's father, when Claude was born, the family still used horses for labor on the farm. Women still wore floor length dresses. This picture, taken when he was almost 4 1/2 years old, feels like it's definitely out of another time and place.

Since Claude was over a decade older than my father-in-law, there aren't many stories of his childhood floating around any more. By the time Bill was old enough to really get to know him at all, Claude had left home to join the military.

Only one small story, of an incident in his high school years, has survived. As I related in "Tough Times Helped Shape Tough People in Depression-Era Oklahoma," Claude had gone to a meeting one night in a near-by town, driving the family's only car. When he returned, he forgot to drain the radiator. The water froze in the radiator, the car engine was ruined, and the car remained unused and unusable in the barn for the rest of the Depression. I can barely imagine how upset his parents were....

That story almost seems like an anomaly, since most of the other things I know about Claude point to a highly responsible person - but, then, it was from his high school years!

The photo below is Claude's senior picture from Shamrock High School. He was the vice president of his graduating class...of 19 students.


In 1935, about a year after he graduated from Shamrock High School, Claude joined the U.S. Army Air Corps at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, where he served in the 1st Balloon Squadron for 3 years as a truck driver and mechanic. During this time he met, and became best friends with, a young sailor named Tom Graham.

As his obligated time began to wind up, Claude fell in love with and married Virginia Ruth Jones. The marriage occurred in May, 1938...but Claude and Virginia kept the marriage a secret from his superiors in the military. He wasn't planning to re-enlist.

Plans changed, though, and when Claude did try to re-enlist 6 weeks later, he tried to do so as a married man, which required written permission. His commanding officer, Maj. Ira R. Koenig, of 1st Balloon Squadron, supported his application, listing 20 points related to why Claude should be allowed to re-enlist. Among the points made were Claude's "excellent" service, "excellent" character, his "excellent" probable future value to the service, his "exceptionally good" ability to handle his own finances, the "excellent" standing in the community of the applicant's wife, and his "apparently far above the average" sense of responsibility (as it would apply to a family). Claude's military pay was listed as $30/month. Virginia Ruth was said to be making $90/month as a public school teacher and she had no dependents.

A brief reason was given for the clandestine marriage, "Private Abbott did not contemplate re-enlisting and made this fact known to the undersigned [Maj. Koenig]. He was expecting connections with the Cameron College Athletic organization which did not materialize." (Cameron University is in Lawton, Oklahoma. Presumably this is an athletic organization of the precursor to that school.)

Major Koenig sent the request up the chain of command. The commander of the School Troops Division, Lt. Col. D. B. Howard, approved the petition and passed it on again.

However, the Commandant of the Flight Artillery School did not agree. Based on the fact that Claude's monthly pay was less than $50/month and that he had married without permission, his request was denied. "The fact that the wife is working and receiving compensation should be considered, but experience has shown that such compensation can not be counted on as continuous and permanent." It was expected that Virginia Ruth would be getting pregnant and would not be able to continue working as a school teacher, since in those days teachers were not allowed to continue working once their pregnancy began to "show."

After being unable to re-enlist, Claude worked for several years in the Lawton, Oklahoma, area at the Stephens brothers' Texaco filling station and at Ozmun Wholesale grocery. Lawton, Oklahoma, was the area where he and Virginia Ruth had met and married, and her parents lived very nearby in Cache.

There's another brief story I like about Claude and his young wife from this time in their lives. Vergie, Claude's mother, had been very deaf since she was relatively young [18 or 19 years old? or in the Flu Epidemic of 1918? There is debate on the subject.]. At any rate, Vergie caught the flu and the resulting infection caused her eardrums to perforate and her hearing to become quite poor. For Mother's Day in 1941, Claude and Virginia Ruth gave Vergie a hearing aid and, for the first time in over 20 years, she could hear reasonably well again. This hearing aid had a huge battery pack that Vergie had to strap to her leg, while the receiver was on her chest. For most of the rest of her life, it was common to see Vergie answer the phone "upside down," with the mouthpiece at her mouth and the speaker aimed downwards at her chest. Although she eventually tried to transition to more modern types of hearing aids, she always came back to the type with the chest receiver, as these seemed to work best for her.

On October 14, 1942, with the U.S. fully committed in WW II, Claude re-enlisted in the Army Air Corps. Shortly thereafter, he became an aircraft mechanic after completing training at the Enid Army Flying School.

A sign of VERY different times: On March 16, 1943, Claude received written permission to spend one night (5 p.m. to 6 a.m. the following morning) in a local hotel with his wife of almost 5 years, Virginia Ruth. I'm not sure I would have believed it if I hadn't seen the paperwork to prove it!


According to a small newspaper clipping from the Lawton Constitution, dated October 28, 1945, Claude received his wings and the rank of flight officer after completing 6 months of training as a B-29 engineer at Hondo, Texas. The photo below is from this general time frame.


To the left, the snapshot shows Claude and Virginia Ruth in Sacramento, California, in 1947. I don't know why they were there, but presumably it had something to do with Claude's career, as he is in uniform. It's one of the few photos that I have of the two of them together.

Eventually Claude completed a career with the Air Force, retiring in 1962 as a Master Sergeant. During his years with the Army Air Corps/Air Force, he served in Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, and West Germany. Virginia Ruth worked as a school teacher, but they were unable to ever have children of their own.

Virginia Ruth wrote poems to "her Claude" occasionally. One was in his wallet when he died. I have few photos of the 2 of them together, though. I suspect that Virginia Ruth kept most of those after Claude died. She lived many more years and our family was not notified right away when she passed on, so I have no idea where those photos have gone. I do really wish that I had one.

After his retirement, Claude joined Graham, Inc., a pest control company owned by his old best friend, Tom Graham, in Oklahoma City. He served as a corporate officer, being assistant vice-president when he died of esophageal cancer in 1978.

Since Claude H. and Virginia Ruth (Jones) Abbott left no children of their own, I wanted to share what I know of their story with others. Their names bring a smile to the faces of those who knew them - and I can't think of a much warmer legacy than that.

Tough Times Helped Shaped Tough People in Depression-era Oklahoma

With the economy still struggling these days, my thoughts have turned to how some of our ancestors dealt with tough times, especially with the great Depression of the 1930's.

I have gleaned a few vignettes from talking with family members who either remember the Depression themselves, or who remember the stories their parents told about the Depression.

Photo: The Luther Abbott family in front of their Oklahoma farmhouse, approximately 1937.

On the Abbott side, we have classic "dust bowl" stories. Bill Abbott tells of how he and his father, Luther A. Abbott, were hoeing peanuts in their northwest field near Shamrock, Oklahoma, when two of his mother's brothers drove by in their cars with their families, on their way to California. Alby Woody and Walter Woody stopped in with the family to spend the night and say goodbye, then they all got back in their cars and drove west. Walter had owned a grocery store in Tulsa; Bill doesn't remember what Alby did for a living. Both felt that they needed to move to California for the opportunities there; later another brother, Oscar Woody, joined them.

Luther himself had (in modern parlance) been downsized. He had worked for Long-Bell Lumberyards for many years, first in Quapaw, Oklahoma, next as a bookkeeper in Cushing, Oklahoma, and then as a general manager in Shamrock, Oklahoma. Each new position had been a promotion, but the tough economic conditions and the switch from wooden oil rigs to steel oil rigs eventually caused Shamrock's lumberyard and many of Long-Bell's other Oklahoma operations to be closed down. While Long-Bell had offered Luther a bookkeeper position again in Cushing, he figured that it was just a matter of time until that lumberyard closed, too, so he opted not to move his family away from Shamrock.

Instead Luther rented a farm just outside of town and bought the "farmhouse" that went with it. He figured that on a farm he could at least always feed his family. The house was very small and pretty primitive (sometimes referred to as "a converted chicken coop"). Bill's older sister Virginia remembers their mother, Vergie, standing in the middle of the room that was to be hers and L. A.'s bedroom, looking around, and saying sadly, "Oh, Luther! How could you?"

The original house was two rooms and a lean-to. As they got ready to move into the house, Virginia remembers that they discovered the lean-to was full of bedbugs. She remembers her mother down on hands and knees with hot water and disinfectant, scrubbing every surface as hard as she could to get rid of those awful insects. They ended up tearing down the lean-to and building on 2 new rooms, then later adding 2 more.

The house was heated by a single gas stove and lit by natural gas lighting in all the rooms. There was a well, but the water wasn't fit to drink, so the family hauled drinking water from a spring 3 miles away. (They kept a barrel on a wagon reserved for that purpose.)

When they first moved out to the farm, they still had a car, a 1920's vintage, 4 door Chevy. Unfortunately, son Claude drove it to a meeting one night and forgot to drain the radiator when he got home. The radiator water froze and broke the radiator; the car became a fixture in the barn until, eventually, they sold it. There was no money to repair it. For the rest of their time on the farm, they relied on horses and a wagon for transportation.

Bill was a young boy in those days (about 5 when they moved to the farm), and he doesn't remember his family as particularly poor. They were just like everybody else in town...and better off than some. His mother got to keep and sell the cream from their milk cows, using the money for whatever special household expenses she (and most surely the kids) had. Both Bill and Virginia tell of Vergie walking the half mile from their house into town, approximately twice a week, lugging the full, 5 gallon cream can so that she could sell the precious cream. (When you realize that Vergie was very small, only about 4' 10" tall, this becomes an even more incredible feat.)

The family may not have had many possessions during the Depression, but they always ate. They raised "HyGear" (a hybrid sorghum similar to milo) and maize as crops to feed their livestock and peanuts and cotton for cash crops. They had 2 horses for riding (one of whom also doubled as a work horse), 2 mules for plowing, about 5 or 6 milk cows, generally a few pigs for meat, and chickens for meat and eggs. They also had a huge garden every year, raising all sorts of vegetables, as well as watermelon and other treats.

Cotton and peanuts were two of the few crops that did quite well during this time, but they were doing very well for a lot of people. Consequently, FDR's government had limited the acreage of each that any one farmer could plant and sell. The reasoning was to keep the market from getting glutted by too much of either product, causing the prices to bottom out. Government agents would literally come out to the farm to measure and make sure you hadn't planted too much land in cotton or peanuts. If you had, you had to plow under the excess. Luther did not understand the rationale behind the restrictions that kept him from planting more land in these cash crops, and he chafed at not being allowed to plant them. He resented FDR and the Democrats for the rest of his life.

Luther and his family lived on that farm, in that "converted chicken coop," for about 11 years from 1931 to 1942, until they left Oklahoma and moved to the Wichita area during World War II. At that point, Boeing needed workers, so Luther went on ahead and got a job, leaving Vergie with her two youngest, Bill and Betty, to sell off their equipment and close up the farm. About six months after Luther moved to Wichita, Vergie, Bill and Betty were able to join him. Wichita was overcrowded with workers, though, and undersupplied with housing, so for the first year and a half, the Luther Abbott family lived with Luther's parents in Conway Springs, southwest of Wichita. The Depression was over, the kids were almost grown up, and life moved on to a new phase. They had survived the Depression with the family intact - the tough times had tested them, but they had survived.

The Brazil - 1942, by Margaret Essebaggers Dopirak

This autobiographical story comes from Margaret Essebaggers Dopirak and describes her family's nerve-wracking trip back from India (where her father was a missionary) to the United States after World War II had broken out. The photo above is of her family with her mother's brother and his wife, after their safe arrival back in the U.S. (Back row: Homer Shafer; Second row: Jannette Shafer, Ted Essebaggers; Third row: Helen Shafer Essebaggers with Teddy Essebaggers on her lap; Front row: Margie Essebaggers, Dorothea Essebaggers.)

The Brazil - 1942

"Daddy, who dug the hole for the ocean?" I asked, as I sat perched on the ship's railing securely encircled by my father's arms. We were looking out over the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean on board the troopship Brazil. I was 5 years old and had lived in India all of my young life. The largest body of water I had ever seen was a talaab - a hand-dug lake which caught the rain water during the monsoons and served as the water supply for the local villagers. My father chuckled and explained that God, not people, made the ocean - and that our ship would take us on a long journey across it to our homeland of America.

Only a month before, my mother, sister Dorothea, brother Teddy and I had been vacationing in the hills of Kodai, South India. I wasn't aware of it then, but there was a World War going on. The Japanese were threatening to invade India as the British retreated. It was not a very safe place to be. Mother had received a telegram from my father which urgently instructed her to pack up our belongings and travel the 1100 miles back to Raipur, the mission station on the plains.

It was a horrendously hot and humid time of year to travel - May being the hottest month of the year, with daily temperatures climbing into the 100's. My mother didn't take well to the tropical climate and suffered from the heat, sweating profusely. Dorothea was nine and, being the oldest, was assigned to look after me. This enabled our mother to devote her attention to one year old Teddy, who had just learned to walk and consequently bore close watching. Travel by train was tedious, sooty, and somewhat dangerous - the open windows inviting hot little heads to lean out into the wind rushing by. The trip took longer than the usual three days. Instead of traveling along the coastline of the Bay of Bengal, where two air attacks had recently occurred, our train was rerouted via Nagpur, an inland rail junction. This brought us safely into Raipur from the west, but added a day to our already long and tiresome journey. What a hapy feeling it was to see our father waving to us on the station platform as the train screeched and hissed to a stop!

My parents had been given a choice by the Mission Board to either stay in India or to take their chances making a trans-Atlantic voyage to the United States while a war was going on. They decided to take their chances. They had been in India for seven years - since 1935 - and their furlough was due. A furlough, which was earned after seven years of foreign service, was equivalent to an eighteen month vacation.

The ship we were able to secure passage on was one which had just brought American soldiers to India, and which would now return to the United States and take passengers to New York. Under the blisteringly hot Indian sun, the ship with its one thousand passengers - or refugees, if you will - set sail in late May. The Brazil was a military troopship, but at one time had been one of the most luxurious passenger liners to leave a United States port. It had been converted into a troopship by stripping it of all its frills and luxury, gutting the cabins and retrofitting them with military-style furnishings. [Note: The picture below shows the SS Brazil in her days as a luxury liner, before she was converted to military service.]

Our accommodations on the Brazil were adequate, but not comfortable, and far from luxurious. Our family shared a cabin with another family who were strangers to us. Four tiers of canvas bunks lined two walls, a wash basin jutted out from the wall near the entry door. On the other side of the sink was a tiny toilet room. A single light bulb hung in the middle of the room. There was no porthole. It was dark most of the time. At night, when the ship was in total darkness for security purposes, we used our flashlights to find the way to our bunks.

My mother was seasick much of the time, and when she wasn't, she had laundry to wash out in the little basin. Clotheslines were strung the length of the cabin, wet clothes and diapers draped over them, adding moisture to the already humid, dark air we breathed. It wasn't a pleasant place to be, and I didn't spend any more time in the cabin than I had to, and that only for sleeping.

There were some other kids around my age to play with, but most of the children were older. The deck at the bow of the ship was our playground. Deck chairs stacked in piles, chains & huge ropes wrapped around iron pinnings, and hatchdoors jutting up from the deck provided places for us to hide. We sat in the shade under the lifeboats, which were suspended close to the railings, to get out of the sweltering sun. The rolling of the ship didn't deter us from playing jacks and looking at picture books. We played Hide and Go Seek, Red Rover, and Capture the Flag. For me, the ocean voyage was an adventure, and we children were, for the most part, oblivious to the dangers that wartime presented.

I had a sense of what war was, but only from things I had overheard the grownups talking about. I knew it was a bad thing, and that we should be afraid if airplanes flew overhead. On one occasion, two or three airplanes flew quite close to the ship - close enough so we could see the pilots waving to us. "Hey, look, those are our boys!" People on the ship cheered and waved back, and I knew those airplanes were nothing to be afraid of. It was all very exciting, and everyone seemed happy and relaxed for a while following that event.

Every night, after the evening meal, I accompanied my family up onto the deck to congregate with the other passengers for a hymn sing and prayer service. "Nearer My God to Thee" was one of my favorites, and whenever I hear it or sing it today, it brings back memories of those nights on board ship. The service always ended with the fervent singing of "The Star Spangled Banner." Not fully appreciating the meaning or significance of the song at that time, I recall associating it with the star-studded night sky.

We thought we had lost Teddy overboard one evening. Mother was seasick and remained in the cabin after the evening meal. My father was in charge of us kids. During the prayer service, Teddy toddled off, and by the time my father noticed he wasn't with our family, he was nowhere to be found. Word spread that a child was missing, and everyone dispersed to search the deck. I stayed close to my father as he frantically looked in the nooks and crannies that a baby might crawl in to. I heard someone say, "He might have fallen overboard!" I recall feeling great anxiety that this might have happened, and that meant that I would never see my cute little brother ever again. It was a terrible, sad feeling. But then, a cry went out - "Here he is!" There he was - sitting under one of those suspended lifeboats, about six feet from an open railing - and from sure death, had the seas been rough and caused the ship to roll. Everyone was jubilant over little Teddy's recovery. That night when my father was saying my bedtime prayers with me, I added a "thank you" for finding my little brother.

And so the days and nights passed during our six weeks' voyage. The ship made two stops along the way: first, in Capetown, South Africa, as we left the Indian Ocean and entered the south Atlantic; and second, in Bermuda, where we picked up crew members of boats that had been torpedoed. They had just been through the terrifying experience of staying alive and afloat in the ocean until rescued. Our ship did not have extra life jackets for these newest passengers. They approached my father, as well as others, with offers to buy their life jackets. But my father did not sell them, knowing that we were in submarine-infested waters and that his family might still need life jackets.

There was an air of excitement - but also anxiety - on board as we approached the end of our journey. Excitement, because we would be in New York the following day, and anxiety, because we still might encounter enemy submarines, as had the sailors we picked up. That night and over the next day, I heard strange sounds coming from under the ship. "Daddy, are the submarines under our ship?" I asked him in terror, imagining a huge monster under the ship. "No, honey. As long as we hear those noises, we know our ship is safe." He went on to explain that the noise was our ship firing depth charges, and that it was a way to protect the ship from being torpedoed. I didn't really understand what all those words meant, but I could tell that my father wasn't too worried right then.

Early the next morning my parents awakened us and took us up on the deck, where crowds were already gathered at the railing. People were cheering and waving. I wondered what they were cheering about. We found a place at the railing, and that's when we saw the Statue of Liberty come into view. My father started singing the Doxology, "Praise God from whom all blessings flow...," in a jubilant voice and everyone joined in. As I looked up at my mother and the other people around us, I saw that she and others had tears streaming down their cheeks. I was perplexed and wanted to know why people were crying. "Sometimes we cry because we're happy, Margie dear," Mother said, wiping away a tear with a handkerchief she always carried. "We're happy and thankful that God brought us home safely." I was happy, too.


Author's notes:
1. The resource for many of the details described herein was my father's autobiography: Theodore Essebaggers 1902-1995.
2. Troopships used during World War II included passenger liners, Liberty and Victory ships, and foreign ships taken over by the U.S.A. Beginning in June, 1941, the U.S. took over various flag ships which were in U.S. ports for use as troopships and cargo ships.