The VanBuskirk Boys: The Saga of an Okie Family

In this funny, sometimes serious memoir, VanBuskirk takes the reader along for the ride as he tells of his, and his five brother's adventures. From chasing drops of mercury with their fingers in the "quick-silver" mines of the Mt. Diablo area of Northern California, to riding a wild coyote in the countryside of Oklahoma, the reader gets a hilarious glimpse of the life of these six rambunctious brothers.

Set in rural Oklahoma during the forties and fifties, with a pinch of city life in the dusty streets of the "Little Oklahoma District" of Stockton, California where his father's extensive work in the oil fields landed him a job in the shipyard.

After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Sunday, December 7, 1941, like every angry red-blooded American, the author's father tried to enlist, only to be turned down by the recruiters because his job in the ship-yards was considered a critical civilian occupation, and crucial to the war effort. A year later the family migrated back to the oil fields of Oklahoma, where the bread winner of the family is eventually drafted into the Army Air Corps on June 28, 1945, leaving his wife and six boys alone, and without a neighbor for miles.

While the father is away serving his country, the adventures of the VanBuskirk boys includes one of them riding the back of a wild coyote that was trying to eat their chickens, and unintentionally setting a pasture on fire. The oldest boy was the leader, the protector of his little brothers, and the inventor of the family, on one occasion using one of the family's bed-sheets to make a parachute for one of his younger brothers. He was trying to coax him to jump out of the barn loft when their mother saw what was happening, and vetoed the idea. He also made a "crystal set" from a square piece of wood, a round Quaker Oaks box, a role copper wire, and a "crystal" wired to earphones so his mother could listen to her favorite programs on the radio.

One of the boys almost loses his life by drowning, twice - once in a rain swollen creek, but was rescued from the rushing water of a rain swollen creek by the boy's faithful K9 companion, Tippy. Years later the same son came close to drowning again, this time in an irrigation canal while on a family fishing trip, but was rescued by his father.

The family moved back to Stockton in 1948, where the boys get into more mischief, and VanBuskirk gets into his first fight. A little over a year later the family moved back to Oklahoma, where the boys, along with Tippy, ride in the back of a three-quarter ton truck, stacked to the top with the family's furniture and other belongings, covered with a tarp, for the nearly sixteen hundred-mile three-day journey. VanBuskirk tells of the six boy's shenanigans as they travel U. S. Route 66, also known as "the Mother Road", made famous by John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, on their way back to the oil fields of rural Oklahoma.

The family eventually plant their roots in Elmore City, a small town of about eight hundred people, about sixty miles south of Oklahoma City. There are more stories of adventure, and tomfoolery in the country where they raise, and butcher their own chickens and hogs.

The positive feel of the story, despite the very troubled times surrounding this family, is a unique story, told with many detailed events with a sense of grace.