Welcome, Nancy Calhoun, Librarian

Nancy Calhoun knew that her love was leading her down a road less traveled. For thirty-five years she researched her ancestry with determination. She just never expected to marry her love with her career.

Then one day she heard about the job opening in Muskogee. Undaunted by the possible damage to her ego if she was not accepted, Nancy submitted her resume anyhow. When she learned that the job was hers, Nancy made all of the adjustments Americans are famous for. She was changing her career, her home town and her co-workers.

Nancy's interest in family history came easily. Her father was born in Virginia and everyone knows that Virginians take great pride in their history. After all, Jamestowne just celebrated 400 years of settlement. Nancy heard her father frequently talk about history and the people who made it. From an early age she took it for granted that history was everywhere.

In college, Nancy majored in English and history. She worked twenty years in the newspaper industry and raised a family. During this period she worked for both of the Chickasha newspapers.

Her favorite work was the summer she helped the US Department of Commerce take the census in 2000. The experience was invaluable later when she would be searching for an ancestor on a much earlier enumeration. She came to understand the problems census takers must have faced one or two centuries ago here in America. She said she was thankful that she didn’t have to conduct the census from horseback!

Nancy worked two years in the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. She was an evening supervisor in the library located in Chickasha. She vividly recalled the night a student came to her with the news that there was a drunk asleep in the flower bed outside. Her first thought was "Now what?"

Nancy has walked the rows of Muskogee library's shelves containing genealogy and local history. She keeps discovering new volumes or magazines that she wants to explore for her own research. Her excitement picked up when she saw the Texas birth and death indexes on microfiche. She used to drive to Austin to look at them.

Nancy's great-uncle conducted years of research on her father's side of the family. This beginning gave Nancy a head start.

Muskogee library patrons also get a head start. They will be able to benefit from Nancy's experience of thirty-five years of research and writing.

Going Off Base in World War II

In the 1940's there were two local US Army bases outside of Muskogee: Camp Gruber near Braggs and the Muskogee Army Air Field south of town. The latter is now called Davis Field.

Getting off base was every soldier's ideal weekend. Being the largest town in the immediate area, Muskogee was the logical destination for these men. As a consequence soldiers constantly walked the streets of Muskogee during World War II.

The number of soldiers coming into town overwhelmed Muskogee's pre-war population. One measure of this is summed up in the following statement. The frequent query for directions, especially to bars, began to go unanswered during the last years of the war. The 1940 telephone directory listed six bars in town. By 1946 the number grew to thirty-three. The Brown Derby bar at 300 West Broadway was a favorite watering hole for the Camp Gruber crowd.

John Keisler was a Philadelphia-born soldier stationed at Camp Gruber. John felt like he had hardly left the base when he traveled to Muskogee. The son of a beat cop, he was not interested in drinking beer. The Muskogee Hotel always had coffee brewing. John said the waiting line was usually about fifteen soldiers long because the coffee was free.

One weekend he went to Checotah in order to avoid all of the GI's in Muskogee. John traveled to Checotah by hitch hiking. During the war, citizens in America gave GI's rides as their contribution to the war effort. When John got to Checotah, he found a lot of other soldiers had the same idea.

Trying to avoid Muskogee was a fateful decision for John. While in Checotah, he stopped at a hamburger stand during his walking around town. Shortly afterwards, he met his future wife.

Bob Bell was stationed at the smaller base called the Muskogee Army Air Field. As a Military Police officer, he was issued a jeep for transportation on base. With a wife in town, however, he looked for someone who was selling a car.

One day Bob bumped into a soldier who had just received orders to ship out. The GI had an automobile with three tires. There was a fourth tire, but it was flat and beyond repair. Because of wartime rationing, the soldier was not able to get another tire. Bob paid $200 for the car. Then he went to the Muskogee rationing board which approved his request to buy a tire. The car came in handy when air field called him about unexpected emergencies on weekends or at night.

Mostly men took a bus into town. The Breeding Company depot was located at 108 South 4th Street. It operated the Victory Lines that connected the Douglas Aircraft Co. in Tulsa with Muskogee’s bases. Buses also ran to Fort Smith and the munitions plant in McAlester.

John Keisler said the Victory Lines mostly operated worn out school buses in 1944 and 1945. Soldiers regularly placed bets about whether the bus they were riding would break down before arriving back at Camp Gruber. He said he never saw buses like the one pictured in the accompanying photo. He also said that the bridge across the Arkansas River was not wide enough for two passing vehicles when one of them was a bus.

There were more risky ways of getting off base. As documented in the "Muskogee Times-Democrat" in mid-December, 1943, three non-commissioned officers hitched a ride in a laundry truck. The driver was just completing a delivery to the Muskogee Army Air Field and was headed back to town that Saturday evening.

When the truck engine quit on US 64 Highway after crossing over a hill four miles south of town, the soldiers jumped out to give the truck a push in hopes the engine would restart. A drunk driver ran into the back of the truck killing two of the GI's.

The war ended the Great Depression and created a sudden expansion in the number of the soldiers. The end of the war saw the disappearance of these soldiers and a return to more normal times.

Elizabeth Williams Cosgrove, Muskogee Writer and Poet

Elizabeth Williams was born in Sedalia, Missouri, on March 22nd, 1878. After completing the local schooling, her parents enrolled her in the Monticello Seminary for Young Ladies where she completed her formal education. Her father served as a judge and she had an uncle who became president of the University of Missouri.

Elizabeth married James Cosgrove in 1905 and bore two daughters, Caroline and Jessie. She stepped off the train in Muskogee during a howling blizzard in January, 1910. Discontent broke apart the marriage in 1923. Tragedy struck again when her oldest daughter, Caroline, died unexpectedly from a fall in 1932. Thereafter, Elizabeth lived in her adopted community raising young Jessie.

Writing came easy to Elizabeth. It was more than an exhibition of good grammar and syntax, it was the message. Her ideas and forms of expression jumped from the page to the reader's mind.

Elizabeth Williams Cosgrove wrote for both major Muskogee newspapers, the Tulsa World, and the Dallas Morning News. Her articles were published in Virginia and Missouri newspapers as well.

Elizabeth may have picked the traveling bug from her friends, Grant and Caroline Foreman. (Grant Foreman was a prominent Muskogee historian. He died in 1953.) Like the Foremans, Ms. Cosgrove traveled around the world. That explains why one of her writing credits includes the "Times of India" which was published in Bombay.

During the late 1930's Elizabeth worked with Grant Foreman editing interviews for the Works Progress Administration. The exact dimension of her contributions may never be fully known.

She published her first book of poetry, "Scrub Oak and Mistletoe," in 1934. One poem from this appears below. It was penned on the heels of her daughter's sudden death and after a decade of grieving over the end of her marriage. In this brief ode, Elizabeth succinctly describes how incomprehensive the loss of love can be.

In 1943, her musings on life and family appeared in "An Old House Speaks." This was followed ten years later by her "narrative poem" about Oklahoma's history. It is entitled "From This Red Earth."

Elizabeth Williams also wrote a biographical sketch of Mrs. C. N. Haskell, wife of the Governor of Oklahoma. She promoted local authors through her regular involvement in the Muskogee Writers Guild. She passed away in 1975 and is buried in Missouri.

When we three together walked
You and Love and I,
I used to think I could not live
If you should die!

I never thought--how could I then?
So close were you and I--
That we would ever walk apart
And Love could die!

Helen Lemley, Historical Indexer

Helen Lemley walked into the Muskogee Public Library in 1999 in search of new opportunities in volunteering. That first day, she simply offered to "do whatever was wanted done." Now, as we look back over her eight years of labor, we see her huge contribution.

She initially took on the task of checking each roll of microfilm in the Grant Foreman Collection. Most of the film consisted of census and newspaper reels. If the leaders or trailers were short, she spliced on more film. It took months of work to accomplish the goal of putting the collection's microfilm into first class shape. As that project was finally winding down she asked for a new task.

One idea that soon seemed interesting to Helen was the need for an index of biographical sketches found in the state-wide and local histories. Many older publications lacked indexes. Other books in the reference collection had indexes. However, many were not well known for containing biographies.

Helen undertook to check each volume. When she found biographical sketches, she started indexing them in a database. Altogether, Helen identified more that 15,000 citations in this project. These references to sketches or photographs were compiled and published in the "Oklahoma Biographical Index."

Helen asked again for another assignment. After discussing the choices, Helen selected the project of abstracting the Pioneer newspaper. Published between 1898 and 1905, it served African-Americans in Indian Territory. Day after day, she came in and made notes on the topics she found. In the end, Helen's abstracts became 145-page book.

The next project Helen undertook required her to become an expert in one hundred year old penmanship. Handwriting was different a long time ago. There were more flourishes then. Furthermore, some of the ink became faded or blurred. All of these problems melded together to make reading the text of that period difficult.

Helen's project was the indexing of the incorporation records. The U.S. Federal Court created them during Oklahoma's territorial days. Her work opened up the wealth of regional business history. This material is still unpublished, but available for patron use at the library.

In 2005, after working on the business incorporations, Helen worked on indexing the Mayor's Court records. These records span the years from Muskogee's incorporation as a city in 1898 to 1906. During that period, the Mayor adjudicated misdemeanor cases. Criminal history is now more accessible.

Helen then undertook indexing more court records. The first records of the trials of the US Federal Court were recorded in only one ledger regardless of the type of entry being written. This ledger was called a "Common Record" book because it was used for every type of court activity. Entries appeared simply in chronological order. When one case was finished, the clerk started making notations for the next case.

Helen indexed the Common Record volumes from 1889 to 1906. Included in her index are the names of individuals and firms that were involved in lawsuits, assaults and larcenies and other legal actions.

Due to Helen's dedication, researchers are able to easily access a lot more information about Muskogee. Thank you, Helen, for helping to unlock Muskogee's history.