She was my aunt, cousin, sister, and best friend all in one person. Clare was really my aunt, who was 1 year older than me. We grew up in South Texas, both born on a farm in the depression days, a mile from each other. Clare's family moved to San Antonio when she was 6 years old, but we had many adventures together on the farm when she came to stay during the summer, and when I visited her one summer in San Antonio. This is the story of Clare Goode (Sheena) and me, Lois Zook.
SHEENA, QUEEN OF THE JUNGLE
By Lois Zook Wauson
My aunt Clare was my idol. I always wanted to be like her. She was my mother’s baby sister and one year older than me. Clare was more like a cousin than an aunt. She would come visit us every summer on our farm in south Texas. I looked forward to those visits. Clare lived in a city. She would light up my life when she came to visit.
Just her sparkling presence in our family put some excitement in our dreary days. It was the summer of 1944 that she helped change my whole life.
Daddy was a struggling farmer living on 100 acres during the 1930’s and ‘40’s. We were poor during those years, and in 1944 there were seven kids and I was the oldest, 12 years old. Times were hard, and there were nine of us living in a small gray weather beaten old house sitting on the edge of a cornfield. I had done farm chores like milking cows and feeding chickens and slopping the hogs since I was 8 years old. All of us kids worked the fields besides doing the chores. I went to a small country school. We either went to school or we worked in the fields. There wasn’t a lot of time for play. But we were a happy family. I didn’t know any other kind of life.
Clare was a “city girl”. She lived in the big city of San Antonio. When she came to visit, Clare would talk about her life in the city. It was another world to me. She lived near to the downtown area, and was close enough to walk to go to movies and to Sommer’s Drug Store down on Houston Street. I envied Clare and she was my role model. I wanted to be just like her. She knew about famous movie stars, and the way she talked I sometimes felt she might even know them personally.
Clare and her parents, my grandparents, visited us during the summers and at Christmas. I copied every thing she did. I tried tossing my hair back like she did. I tried walking like she did, swinging my hips. She had long, dark, naturally curly hair, and mine was thin, mousy and straight. She was tall, with long legs and with what everyone called a “nice figure”. She was also very pretty. Oh, how I wanted to be like Clare. I was jealous of her.
One night that summer, we put on a variety show for the family out in our front yard. We hung two blankets up between two trees and that was our stage curtain. We came out and sang and danced - pretending we were movie stars. Clare was THE star. Betty Grable was the person I wanted most to be like. She sang and danced to “Pretty Baby” and “Cuddle Up a Little Closer”, and my sisters and I were the chorus girls. Clare knew all the words to the songs. She was the leading lady and the star. She loved to dance. She was the best jitter-bugger I ever saw. And, she was the boss! When she was there, she was in charge. And we didn’t care because she just had that air about her! Clare could be who ever she wanted.
Some days if we were not working in the fields, like on Sundays and after rainy days when it was too wet, we kids played a game called “Sheena, Queen of the Jungle”. Of course Clare was always Sheena. We played for hours in the big old thorny mesquite tree out back, climbing on the limbs up high and swinging from limb to limb, trying not to get stuck with the thorns. Sometimes she was Jane, and I would be Tarzan. After all Jane was more glamorous. The other kids would be the monkeys or other animals or the bad people who were always after Sheena, or Tarzan and Jane. No matter what we were pretending, Clare was always “The Star”, either Betty Grable or Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.
At night, under the dark sky heavy with twinkling stars, and the Milky Way hanging low, Clare talked about the movies she had seen and the movie stars she knew about.
She could go to movies during the week. We had to work out in the fields. Even when the temperature got to be 100, we were working. But, Clare told us about how she could sit home and read comic books and hang out with her friends and get an ice cream from the ice cream man pushing his little cart. Oh how I envied her life. I could just imagine what it would be like.
Later that summer in 1944, I went to visit Clare for a few weeks. My grandmother had died suddenly the winter before, and Clare was left at home with her father, my Grandpa to take care of her. She was pretty lonely that summer. I got to go stay with her in the big city, and not work in the fields. I couldn’t believe I was so lucky. I knew I would miss my grandmother not being there. It wouldn’t be the same without her. But, I was anxious to see Clare and to keep her company and see my Grandpa.
Those few weeks in the city changed my life. I found out what “city life” was like and I loved it. Clare had a boy friend. She introduced me to his best friend. He was 15 years old, blond headed and nice looking. And he liked me! His name was Douglas. Lazy summer days were spent walking to the little corner grocery store, buying soda pop and chewing gum, or just hanging out, or walking around the neighborhood. At night, we sat on the front porch steps giggling and talking in the dark, away from the streetlight. I could hear the sound of the trains chugging near the roundhouse, close to their street, crickets chirping in the bushes and the sound of the baseball game coming from the radio in Grandpa’s room.
One Saturday Clare and I went downtown on the bus to see a stage show. She was telling me about how she would sometimes go down and see these vaudeville shows at the Prince Theater. Little did I know this theater had shows at night that were a little naughtier than the afternoon shows.
We went into Woolworth’s on Houston St. and sat on the stools at their soda fountain sipping sodas. Later we sat in the darkened theater and watched a short stage show before the main feature. A beautiful girl came out on the stage, and as a man played the piano down in the orchestra section, a girl in a gorgeous red gown sang “Put Your Arms Around Me Honey”, and I could almost imagine this was Betty Grable. Later we saw a movie with Tom Mix, and I wanted that day to never end. I wished I could live in the city forever, where I could go to into Woolworth’s or Sommer’s
Drug Store and sit on stools sipping sodas. My life on the farm seemed a million miles away.
There was a war going on somewhere in the South Pacific and Europe, but for me and Clare, it too, seemed too far away to be real. I was in heaven during those hot sticky summer days and nights. I can still smell the honeysuckle blooming on the vines on the porch, and sweet aroma of the Evening in Paris Cologne that Clare’s friend Betty wore as we sat on Grandpa’s front porch at night. Betty had a boy friend too, and all of us were together a lot that summer. I had never had a summer like this. One day drifted into the next and I sure didn’t want to go back to the farm.
The best night of all was the night we all sat on the front steps and there I was, with a boy - sitting next to me - his warm clammy hand holding mine. Once he put his arm around me and sneaked a quick shy kiss, and I was scared to death. It was my first kiss by a boy! I heard the sound of Hank Williams singing on a radio somewhere, and as his nasal voice sang out in the night, I shivered with the thrill of it all. Douglas asked if he could write me when I went back home. I gave him my address. I actually had a boy friend!
A few days later, I had to go back to the farm. Back to six brothers and sisters and farm chores, and hot days working in the fields, and hot nights trying to get cool in our house that was like an oven, with the heat blowing in until near midnight, when it finally cooled off enough to sleep.
The summer day’s drug by, I kept wishing I were back in the city. I hated the farm and the poverty and the dust blowing and the heat and Daddy and Mother arguing, and my sisters and brothers squabbling, and the endless chores that never seemed to get done. Every morning I was up early right after daybreak, and out to the fields with my brothers and sisters. As I worked in the sun, I daydreamed, and thought about those lovely days with Clare in the big city. It helped to make the days go by faster until school started. I savored every moment of that summer vacation in my memory. I wanted that kind of life. Some day, I too would live in the city.
Later that summer Clare came to visit us before school started. She went out to the fields to try her hand at working in the sun, but she was allowed to go back in the cool of the house, complaining of feeling faint and dizzy and sick. I was jealous because that never kept us from working out in the hot sun. Clare got extra privileges. She was a delicate city girl. Frail, Mother said.
I went back to the little country school in the fall, and those glorious days in San Antonio faded from my memory. I got a letter from Douglas, but by then I couldn’t even remember what he looked like. I never answered the letter. I settled back to the life of a farm girl. That summer with Clare became only a memory.
Clare went back to school in San Antonio, trying to adjust to a life without her mother.
After my Grandma’s death, in her grief and loneliness, Clare became a rebellious teenager. She missed her mother. She was Grandma’s favorite every said, because she was the baby of the family. She didn’t get along too well with Grandpa. My Grandpa was cranky and sickly and couldn’t work. He needed someone to care for him and could not care for Clare. All her older brothers and sisters had left home. Finally Grandpa decided to send her to live with another sister and her husband who lived in the Valley.
Aunt Ellen came to get Clare and they came by to visit us on the way back down to Kingsville where they lived. I remember that day. Clare was 14 years old and I was 13. Clare never let on how she was really feeling. She was joking and tossing her head and making us all laugh.
I thought, “Gee, here she goes off on another adventure. I sure wish I was Clare.”
It was only recently that I found out what really happened. When Clare found out she was going to have to go live with her sister down in the Valley, she told her daddy that even though she loved her sister Ellen and liked the idea of living with her, she would rather be on the farm with our family. She wanted to live with us!
Clare told him she loved our family and she loved the farm, she liked the country life, and this is where she wanted to be. Grandpa talked to my mother about Clare living with us. That night, Mother talked it over with Daddy. The next morning, she told Grandpa they just couldn’t do it. They already had nine people living in a four-room house. They were having a hard time supporting us all, and times were rough. Besides my mother was certain that Clare would hate the farm after she lived there awhile. She was, after all, a city girl. She was frail and not used to hard work and the drudgery of farm life. They had to say ‘no’. Clare went to live with her other sister down in the Valley.
I didn’t see much of Clare for many years. Her sister Ellen was a good mother to her, and she was happy, but headstrong. That was Clare. She always had to be the boss!
Clare and I went our separate ways. She got married as a teenager and moved to Georgia. She moved to a small town almost in the country. She had four children. She was left a widow 15 years ago. She has not had an easy life. She has had lots of tragedies but she is an over comer and strong. She has lived in the country since she left high school.
When I graduated from Poth High School a tiny consolidated school 20 miles away, I left the farm, and moved to the big city of San Antonio. I got married at 18. I had four children. I have been married for 55 years. I, too, have had tragedies in my life. I have lived in large cities since I left the country.
Clare and I talked recently about what life would have been like if she had come to live with us on the farm in 1945. We decided we couldn’t second-guess what would have been. We both believe God had a plan for our lives.
She said she never got over the disappointment of not being able to live with our family on the farm. I was always jealous of her and found out she was jealous of me!
I wanted to be Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and dance like Betty Grable, and she always wanted to be that little country girl who had both a mother and a father and a family of brothers and sisters who all seemed to have so much fun together.
Clare now lives in a small country town in Georgia, and I live in a big in Texas. Clare became that country girl she always wanted to be, and I became a city girl. In the passing of time, we changed places.
We talk on the phone and laugh and giggle just like we used to. And it seems just like yesterday that we were young barefoot girls sitting up high in a big mesquite tree in the summer heat, pretending we were someone else.
She will always be Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and that is how she signs her letters to me today.
SHEENA, QUEEN OF THE JUNGLE
