The Christmas Gregg Doyel learned the truth about his Grandma

Editor's note: This story originally ran Dec. 20, 2017. We are republishing it as part of our Christmas coverage.

Christmas 1987

It came in the mail, one of those sweet Christmas cards with a cartoon on the cover. I don’t remember the cartoon, but I remember what she’d tucked inside: A $5 bill. And I remember the signature:

Grandma.

Most of all, I remember what happened when I called my dad and told him what his Mama, my Grandma, had given me for my 17th Christmas. I remember the silence. And then I could hear him.

I could hear my dad crying.

Christmas 1949

My dad doesn’t know how long he lived in that chicken coop.

It wasn’t too terribly long, three or four weeks at the most, and to be honest it wasn’t much of a drop-off from his previous home: a one-bedroom house with no running water, electricity or gas. That’s where Dewey and Ruby Doyel had most of their 10 children in the small Oklahoma town of Shawnee, named for the Native American tribe that had settled there. They gave their children names like Marvin and Weldon, Juanita and Peggy, and eventually Dewey left for good. A despicable man, Dewey had left Grandma once before, left her alone with nine kids, only to return long enough to have a 10th.

They named him Robert Leon Doyel.

I call him Dad.

Ruby Cannon Doyel was raising her youngest seven kids in that pitiful house when it burned to the ground. She was a washer woman with no water of her own, so she’d fill buckets at a neighbor’s outdoor faucet and heat the water on the coal oil cookstove in her tiny kitchen. Then she’d dump the water into a metal washtub and use a washboard to scrub the clothes. At night she’d get more water and heat it and dump it into that same tub, where my dad took a bath.

Grandma was cooking with kerosene on that cookstove on Dec. 18, 1949, when a gust of wind exploded through that wood house at 603 W. Farrall and blew the fiery oil all over the walls. The thin strips of pasteboard nailed to the walls was a ramshackle form of insulation, and textbook tinder. One of the few things Grandma managed to save was the toy fire truck she’d wrapped up for Christmas for my dad. The Shawnee News-Star has a picture of him playing with the fire truck, shortly after the fire left my dad homeless. He was 4.

This is a Christmas story, not a sad story, and it was the generosity of that small town 40 miles east of Oklahoma City that put Grandma and her seven kids into another house. Calvary Baptist Church gave $100 in seed money for a fund whose goal was $1,000 for a down payment on a $2,800 home on Park Street. Churches all over town took up special offerings for the Doyel family, and donations were made to the local newspaper and to county commissioner A.C. Stapp’s office at the Pottawatomie County Courthouse.

The paper printed names of donors: A car dealer gave $5. The children’s Sunday school class at Wesley Methodist donated $4.82. The Shawnee Planing Mill gave $2, and the Aldridge barber shop $1. A man named Bob Tyler gave 50 cents.

Within a day the town had raised $365. By week’s end the total was $1,126.47. The newspaper reported that the Doyels could move into their next home in a matter of weeks.

Until then, they lived in the chicken coop. Grandma’s best friend owned the structure, a small house until it was condemned and Old Lady Penix – that’s what everyone called her – put chickens in there. My dad used to gather eggs for Old Lady Penix, who gave my family some of those eggs for food and later let them move into the chicken coop.

It was cold that Christmas, Dad remembers that. He remembers the blankets they hung over the hen house’s broken-out windows. And he remembers the way the good people of Shawnee kept showing up with plates of food. He remembers how those cakes and pies smelled, delicious above the odor of chicken droppings.

Christmas 1962

College? It never occurred to my dad. Nobody in the family had gone, and he figured he’d do like his older brothers and enlist in the military so he could help support Grandma. He’d already been helping as a student at Shawnee High, working nearly full-time hours bagging groceries at Buchanan’s IGA. His first salary was 50 cents an hour, but my dad was earnest, running those carts back from the parking lot, and he soon got a 10-cent raise.

It was during his senior year when the guidance counselor asked Dad why he hadn’t applied to any colleges, and he told her the truth: He couldn't afford college, and besides, he was too busy working. The counselor requested a meeting with Grandma and told her, literally told her, she needed to get a regular job so my dad could stop working so much and prepare for college.

Delivering 10 children at home without a doctor and raising them with no running water or electricity had taken a toll on Grandma, whose husband Dewey was a mostly useless sort who sold bootleg whiskey when he decided to work. Grandma would later qualify for disability, but she’d always done what she could: babysitting, washing clothes in that tub, cleaning houses for other families. Grandma, who had washed the elementary school’s dishtowels so my dad could eat in the cafeteria years earlier, did what the guidance counselor said in 1962. She became an aide at a nursing home.

Without telling my dad, the guidance counselor had already gotten him into Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee. He went there for a year, then transferred to OU in Norman. He graduated, went to law school and was managing editor of the Oklahoma Law Review.

After serving in the U.S. Navy, my dad came home from Vietnam and became a lawyer, then a law professor at Ole Miss and Mercer, and then went into private practice in Winter Haven, Fla. In 1994 he ran for election and became a judge in Florida’s 10th judicial circuit for 16 years. Imagine that: From a chicken coop to a judge’s chambers. He didn’t do it alone, and he knows it. His older brothers and sisters looked out for him in Shawnee. My mom dropped out of college to work as a bank secretary and put him through OU law school.

And around Christmas of 1962, Grandma gave him the gift of a college education by cleaning bedpans in a nursing home.

Christmas 1978-83

By the time I was born in 1970, Grandma was living in a one-bedroom house on Center Street, which her kids had stocked with a refrigerator, stove and and washer-and-dryer. Every December my parents drove my sister Kathryn and me from Oxford, Miss., to Shawnee for Christmas. Mom and Dad stayed with her parents, while my sister and I got the bedroom at Grandma’s.

If Grandma was poor, I had no idea. Her TV picked up a few channels from Oklahoma City, and her house had pictures of Jesus and her grandchildren on the walls and a den she’d converted into a bedroom for herself. That home on Center Street had all the scents of Christmas, pine mixed with cinnamon and turkey and thyme.

Happiness was my Grandma’s currency, and she seemed rich to me. Nobody had ever told me about the chicken coop or the bedpans or the government distribution center in Shawnee, where she stood in line every week for cheese and a Spam-like canned meat product.

Nobody told me about the hoboes.

That house on Park Street, the one the town had raised $1,126.47 to help the Doyel family buy in 1949, was near the Choctaw Railroad tracks. Hoboes passing through town learned to check with the “widow woman,” as they came to call Grandma, for leftovers or whatever she could drum up in a house with no refrigerator. Beans and potatoes were the staples of her kitchen.

“Mama always, and I mean always, gave them something to eat,” my dad was telling me last week. “I sometimes sat and talked to them while they waited or while they ate. It is awe-inspiring to me that a network of hoboes around the country spread the word that if they were in our neighborhood, they could get something to eat from my mother.”

As a boy my dad always had a nice Christmas gift from Grandma, a football or basketball, a BB gun or baseball glove. The Otasco store let her pay in installments, and she’d babysit or do laundry and drop off a quarter or 50 cents until it was paid off and Grandma could come home with the gift.

For adults she baked enormous batches of the fudge or divinity she’d learned to make at her dad’s candy shop in Idabel, Okla., and gave them as Christmas gifts in small tins. But for her son Robert, and later for me and my sister, she always had something more. One year she gave me a toy tractor. Another, several decks of football cards.

Nobody ever told me what it meant, how she was giving everything she had. Not until that Christmas in 1987 when she mailed me a $5 bill, and my dad told me everything I needed to know by crying softly into the phone.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter: @GreggDoyelStar or at facebook.com/gregg.doyel.