Three days after the fall of Fort Sumter, a small, lively man with stick-out ears, cowlicked brown hair, and a shy, enchantingly sweet smile, sat having supper in the shanty-like hotel of a new oil settlement that would one day be named after him. Henry Rouse was thirty-seven years old, a bachelor, with the biggest following of children of any man around. The pockets of his rumpled suit bulged stickily with licorice and peppermints, and small friends surrounded him like the Good Humor Man. They scrambled up for rides on his big black mare, tagged him on foot, and listened saucer-eyed to his stories. With grownups, he was still bothered sometimes that had made him give up a law career, but with children it vanished magically.

-from The Great Oildorado (1959)

Owing to one of those mysterious social changes that come on as suddenly as elm blight, almost every hostess in Wingate was serving sandwiches for cocktail hors d'oeuvres that summer. No cheese. No nuts. No crunchies. Just dainty little sandwiches, very thin, water cress or cucumber or ham or some such. And that's how the vounteers at the local charity thrift shop, the Second Run, happened to inherit sandwiches for their tea that Friday afternoon. (Usually they had cookies from the supermarket.) Barbara Finney, the yongest volunteer, had brought sandwiches left over from the night before when she'd entertained her husband's boss.

As soon as Lucy Ramsdale bit into one, she knew why they'd been left over. "My God, what's in this?" As the oldest volunteer there, she was freer to say what she felt.

-from To Spite Her Face (1971)

The man responsible for the school's tithe of royalties, Levi Dodd, was one of the most fiercely moral men who ever settled their families in Franklin. He started the first Presbyterian Sunday School and poured large, forcible doses of religion into his children like castor oil. His son Sam was one of the brightest pupils in the public school-- ten years before his father drilled for oil in the playground there. I doubt if Sam ever played even Blindman's Bluff, because he was a dud at sports and games. What he did best was debating. After graduating from Jefferson College below Pittsburgh (now Washington and Jefferson) he had studied law with James Kerr and been admitted to the Venango Bar just in time for the oil boom, at the age of twenty-three. He was a big, clumsy, overgrown bear-cub of a man with a funny little mustache that would have better fitted a poodle. Townspeople agreed that he was smart as a whip, but too free-thinking, and at first they felt safer giving their business to old, established law firms like Church & Heydrick.

...

He was odd for sure, by town standards. When a fellow lawyer ran into his office to tell him jubilantly that Cyrus Field's transatlantic cable had been laid successfully, he was startled at Sam's bitter reaction. "Life's already too harried," Sam said. "It won't be worth living unless we stop making inventions to annihilate time and space. Why do we have to tie continents together with electric bands? Why can't we get along the old way?"

Even his most clacking critics agreed that he didn't care a hoot about money, and he practiced law and took all kinds of cases for the sheer love of it. When the big railroads began to move in, to carry oil freight, and took right of way through farmers' property willy-nilly, Sam Dodd handled so many cases for farmers that he was called the Poor Man's Friend. Just the same, his practice swelled so lucratively that while he was still paying $8 a month rent for his house, he paid six times that for a new office to hold his onrush of clients. Frankliners always called him by his first initials-- S.C.T., Esseetee-- which ha d a hissing sound in the mouths of those who considered him too radical. I mention this because later Sam Dodd became the head counsel for Standard Oil, and drew up Standard's first trust, on one sheet of paper.

- from The Great Oildorado (1959)

It was two years after the Armistice when Mother saw The House. My Grandmother Brown , a lively, beautiful old lady, was visiting us at the time, and she and Mother discovered it one afternoon when they were out walking. At dinner that night, they tackled my father.

The House was not only for sale, they said, but would cost even less than the one we now owned, so that it would actually be a saving to move. They described how it sat on the hill at the top of Buffalo Street, and Mother kept stressing the view, and how important it was to have room to breathe. Whenever my father asked what the house was like, both my mother and grandmother would say, "Oh, Cliff, it's so original."

My father, being a man, found the description rather ominous, but he consented amiably enough to go and see the house that Saturday afternoon. Bobby and I were to stay home and "amuse" our little sister, but we wanted to see the house too, so in the end even Sally came along. A few weeks before, father had bought our first automobile, a Ford sedan. After taking an half-hour driving lesson from the salesman, he had brought it home proudly to show Mother, and said he was going to take it out on a country road and practice turning around and backing. Mother was charmed and wanted to go along, but Grandmother Brown wouldn't let her. "Nonsense, Kitty," she said. "You have three little children and you can't afford to risk your neck. I'll go with Cliff myself." She came home very bouncy and gay, describing how they'd even missed hitting a cow, and said it was perfectly safe for Mother or any of us to ride with Father. So on that Saturday afternoon, we all piled into the Ford and chugged up the steep Buffalo Street hill to see The House.

--from We Shook the Family Tree (1946)

People who say that so-and-so is "in a rut" and that something should be done about it are often the sort who will watch an ant working contentedly and then devise cunning obstructions to throw it off the track. Their idea that being in a rut is automatically terrible, either frustrating or deadening, is nonsense. There are good ruts and bad ones, and to an outsider they may look as alike as two pea-pods, but the person in the rut knows the difference. Those of us lucky enough to have fallen into the right rut-- compatible in shape, scenery, direction or lack of direction-- don't take kindly to change. In my own case, my surroundings and methods of working suit me so exactly that once when a prop was changed, the result was disastrous.

-- from "Pack Your Troubles and Sag"

Gradually, we began to think our new sister wasn't too bad. It's true that she was awfully dumb about talking-- at twelve months Bobby and I had given her up as a moron-- but she cooed prettily when she wasn't screaming or sleeping. When the baby was about eighteen months old, Paige and I were allowed to wheel her down Buffalo Street every afternoon after school. It got to be quite a game, after we had worked out three speeds for pushing the carriage. Speed One was sedate, a slow crawl , and used exclusively if our mothers happened to be sitting on the front porch. Two was brisker, but Speed Three was really a honey.

"Now Three," I would yell, and we'd charge downhill with the baby carriage at break-neck speed, like runaway horses. My little sister seemed enchanted with this, and when Paige and I would stop at the foot of the hill panting, she'd gurgle for more. However, for several years after this, she was an extremely nervous, high-strung child, and sometimes I think I know why.

--from We Shook the Family Tree (1946)

At thirty-three, she had pushed herself into thinking like a wryly amused spinster as part of her careful pattern of convalescing, of making sure she'd never be struck down again by youthful emotions. But even when she had first come to New York and moved into the brownstone on Ninth Street, she had never identified herself with the girls in the apartment upstairs. They seemed to her as flighty and chattery as starlings.

There were always three of them in the floor-through apartment, but never the same three for long. Every time one got married and moved out, another one moved in. Most of the newcomers would come to her door smiling prettily, wanting extra ice cubes, or to chat with the only other tenant near their own age. They go the ice cubes and pleasant words, but they never got beyond the foyer. The way she turned herself off was a subtler form of the householder's dousing all the lights as a caller comes up the walk.

from Open the Door (1966)