Sherlocking in Durant, Oklahoma
By Don Hobbs

I travel a lot. I travel for work. I travel for pleasure. Sometimes I travel for funerals. This is what I had to do last, attend a funeral. My mother’s only sister died last week and I was asked to be a pallbearer. I hate funerals, I don’t do well at funerals, and now I was asked to perform at one.

Durant, Oklahoma is where my mother grew up. It is located less than one hundred miles north of Dallas. My mother’s family, including my late Aunt Vera, all lived about ten miles east of Durant on U.S. 70 in Blue, Oklahoma. As a kid growing up, our family never went longer than three weeks between visits. In the era before the Interstates, we trekked up U.S.75 through Richardson, Plano, Allen, McKinney, Melissa, Van Alstyne, Howe, Sherman, and Denison. All of these Texas towns are etched in my memories from riding through them untold numbers of times.

After Dennison comes the Red River and Oklahoma! Then it was Colbert, Cleara, and Durant. All of these towns are still there but seldom seen now days because the Interstate bypasses them.  In Durant, we’d drive through downtown following the highway sign as the road zigzags through the middle of town. U.S.75 continues north, out of town but we turn east on U.S.70 for the way to grandma’s house. We never once visited my grandparents without also going to see Aunt Vera and Uncle Arlen. Their son Tom is the same age as my brother who is five years older than me.

I usually spent several weeks with my grandparents each summer and used to love Saturdays because that was the day to go into town. Town in this case was Durant. Sadly as I grew older, I made the trip less and less frequently. By the time I was in high school, I would stay home when my parents drove to Oklahoma. Eventually my grandparents died and my visits to  my aunt and uncle became annual events until they ceased all together. In a wave of nostalgia, I arrived in Durant for my aunt’s funeral several hours early intentionally so I could drive around and remember a part of my youth that is lost forever.

Driving through Durant was like stepping back into the 1960’s. The buildings are exactly the same though many of the names have changed. Kenner’s Grocery Store where my grandmother shopped  now a computer service center. The town’s other independent grocery store, The Green Spray, was closed and had burned. The A-1 Liquor store was still next to the AAA-Bail Bond’s place. The drive out of town on U.S. 70 did not look any different at all!  The only noticeable difference was that now the single lane dirt roads all had names. Even stranger was when I got to the area where my grandparents lived that the road had been named after them. My mother was not aware of this factoid.

My grandparents were both born in 1895. So I guess one could say that my nostalgic reminiscing brought on by my aunt’s death was my remembering it’s always 1895!

Happy collecting!!