NORMAN — Fred Scott gets out of bed early each morning to get out in his garden. There are tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and more to pick, potatoes and beets to dig and maturing onions to pull.
Having just celebrated his 99th birthday, he intends to stay busy “as long as there is work to be done.”
There is spring in his step as he takes a visitor to his outbuilding to see the day’s pickings … onions and beets and tomatoes just turning the bright red that signals the sweetness of homegrown produce.
He knows the secret for picking tomatoes as they begin to turn and letting them ripen in newspaper pages.
“They will taste as good as vine ripened,” he said. When he delivers them, they are clean and virtually blemish free. “I don’t use fertilizers or insecticides,” he said.
Scott’s produce mainly goes to Legend’s Restaurant, where the staff recently surprised him with a birthday cake. It is a relationship of mutual respect and results in the sale of hundreds of pounds of Scott’s fresh vegetables each summer.
“She (Rebecca Sparks) buys everything I bring her,” he said proudly, enjoying a relationship that has lasted several years. Sparks is even the source of seed for his basil patch. “She brought me the seeds and asked if I would grow this for her.”
He takes pride in being a part of the high-priced herb market. “Do you know how much basil sells for?” he exclaimed in disbelief.
Seeing a small bottle of basil on a grocery shelf for three or four dollars is shocking to a man who was born in 1911, when you could get a loaf of bread or a slab of cheese for less than a dime. He is one of Norman’s longest living residents, beginning life on a farm northeast of town, Franklin Road and 60th Avenue. It has been quite a journey.
He survived typhoid fever when he was four, an epidemic that took his mother and grandmother. He was raised by his great-grandmother.
Weakened by typhoid, “I had to learn to walk again,” he said. He was barely able to walk the mile and a quarter to Pleasant Hill School to begin first grade with his life-long friend, Norman resident Otto Hansmeyer.
Life was tough, and conditions were sparse, he remembers. After an uncle was named his guardian, he began working in the fields. By the time he was 12 years old he could harness a team of horses and work the field.
In 1926, he remembers, “we had 90 acres cultivated. We got 1,700 bushels of corn, 30 bales of cotton and enough hay to feed the stock through the winter. We raised horses, cows … I loved it.”
He recalls visits to Norman on Saturday, arriving by wagon hauling a bale of cotton to sell.
The horses and wagon were parked in the wagon yard that occupied nearly one-half of a city block at Porter and Main.
“That’s how many horses and wagons there were in town on a Saturday,” he said. He still marvels at the sight.
He and his wife Lula — they had 67 years together — worked together at a number of different things, including a dairy located north of Moore where he earned $10 a week milking 54 cows twice a day.
“He had one of the first milking machines,” Scott said, but there was still lots to be done to care for the animals and get the milk ready for delivery in Oklahoma City. For a time they farmed.
“My uncle helped me get started. We had hogs, and grew corn,” he recalled. Robin Hill School sits on the land he farmed for several years.
The time came when he couldn’t maintain the farm by himself, cultivating the land with a team of horses.
“Tinker Field was open and all of the men were going there to work. There was no help to bale hay, no threshing crews. I had to quit,” he said.
Not wanting to make the investment in a tractor that would have solved some of the labor problem, he accepted an offered of a job at OU. He worked as a butcher there for 20 years.
“I knew all the football players by name,” he said with a smile.
The Scotts moved into Norman, purchasing a house on North Jones for $4,000. “A two-bedroom home. I sold it 20 years later for $8,500.”
After retirement from OU they moved to Madill, where he got into real estate.
He made enough of a name for himself that he was elected as Marshall County assessor. Retiring in 1976, they moved back to Norman to the house he lives in by himself today.
“I have four city lots here,” he said, more than enough for a huge garden that backs up to Bishop Creek.
In the early years he had access to natural fertilizer from his son’s farm, but now he says that the ground is getting depleted of nutrients.
Gardening has always been a part of his life, as has preserving vegetables to eat throughout the winters. It wasn’t unusual for he and his wife to work together and can 300 quarts of vegetables.
“We once canned 43 quarts of beans in one day,” he said, proud of the teamwork he enjoyed with his wife.
His garden is neatly laid out, with rows five feet apart to allow plenty of room for the irrigation hoses, the eight horse-power tiller that he operates and the wheelbarrow he pushes as he gathers his harvest each day.
More than 200 tomato plants — Better Boys and Celebrity only — are planted 30 inches apart.
“I am particular,” he said.
He is seeing the end of the garden for this year.
“Some things are already through,” he lamented. “This year, the bugs have been bad and raccoons ate the corn.” But he is going to keep at it “as long as the good Lord gives me the strength,” he said.
It is a “God given privilege to work,” he said, and he has returned the favor by teaching the men’s Sunday School classes since he was a young man, having only retired from teaching because he was having trouble remembering some of the names and stories that he had taught about for decades.
