Steve Castleman was born in Mena, Polk County, Arkansas. His parents had bundled their five children into a covered wagon (the R. V. of the day) and left their home in Pella, Wise County, Texas in late 1887 to join the upcoming rush for land in the opening of the "Cherokee Strip".
Nicia Ann was "with child" and gave birth to their seventh child Stephen, my father, not long after their arrival in Western Arkansas where they stayed with or near relatives in Mena, just across the Arkansas border from "Indian Territory, and not too far from the land rush starting place.
By the time of the first "Rush" on 22 April 1889, Stephen was fifteen months old and they were able to participate in the opening, claiming land in what is now Cleveland County, Oklahoma. The land was not very productive and Steve's father "worked himself to death" trying to make a living for his family.
After the death of John Louis Castleman in 1894, times became very difficult for Nicia Ann, trying to raise eight children on the unproductive farm. As the boys became older, one by one they left home to find "outside work", in order to help support Nicia and the younger children. By the time Stephen reached the age of fourteen, the older boys were getting married and starting their own families so it became his time to leave and seek work elsewhere. (1901 Family Photo)
Over the next twenty years he traveled with threshers, harvesting grain all the way from Oklahoma through Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas and into Canada following the harvesters. On off season, the winter months, he found other types of work. One winter in Minnesota he cut ice from the frozen lakes and delivered ice to homes , other times he picked corn in Iowa, delivered milk to homes with a team and wagon, in Oklahoma City, and he was working as a street car conductor in Oklahoma City when he took time off to visit his younger brother Walter, who had married and was farming near Lookeba, about forty miles west of the city. There he met my mother, Wanda Louise Brokaw, almost eighteen years his junior, but it didn't matter; they married there in Lookeba on 18 November 1923; he was nearly 36 years old, she almost 18.
Steve and Wanda settled down as share croppers, raising cotton and goobers (peanuts), on the McSparin farm a couple of miles North of Lookeba, not far from her parent's cabin home in the "Dogpatch Area" of Lookeba. They had a small cabin and about 80 acres of land to farm. McSparrin owned the land and furnished the seed and Steve planted and harvested the crops on half shares. There they started their family and there they stayed until the drought of 1926 to 1930, uprooted them along with thousands of others,
While they lived there on the farm, they had four children, Bethel Nadine, a boy was a still birth and was never named, LaNita Marie and a girl named Odessa who died young. Those two children are buried in the Brokaw burial plot in the Binger Cemetery, Caddo County, Oklahoma.
The drought that led to the Great Depression, caused the families to leave the "Dust Bowl" in 1930 and travel west, first taking up homesteads in Arizona southwest of Phoenix in Rainbow Valley, where they worked the cotton fields. Wanda's parents eventually "proved up" on their claim but Stephen and Wanda with their two girls moved on to California, working the harvest in the Salinas Valley and eventually the Sacramento Valley.
Bethel had begun her first year of school in Lookeba, Oklahoma before the exodus west, the family starting on the journey during her first grade Christmas recess. They arrived in Arizona in time for her to finish that grade at Liberty Elementary School at Liberty, a small community near Phoenix, Arizona. After the school year ended they packed up their belongings and continued the trip to California in search of work and a permanent home.
After picking fruit in the Hollister, California area in the Summer of 1930, they traveled North to the Sacramento Valley where after participating in the peach and prune harvest, an opportunity arose for Steve, using the meager wages they had earned picking fruit, to purchase a small rural gas station & grocery store combination at Lomo Crossing, about forty miles north of Sacramento, between the towns of Yuba City and Live Oak in Sutter County, California.
Over the next few years, during the waneing years of "The Depression", Lomo store became the unofficial gathering center for many "Dust Bowl" refugees including many friends, and some relatives, from the Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Missouri area. There, Steve and Wanda's last child was born, a son, Asa Lendil Castleman (me) at a small private hospital in Gridley California, the first of the family to be born in a hospital.
The three children completed their eighth grade educations at Encinal Elementary School, a rural school in the Live Oak Unified School District, then went on to attend Live Oak High School. Bethel and LaNita both completed high school there before Steve and Wanda closed the store at Lomo in 1947 and moved into Yuba City where "Lendil" continued his high school at Yuba City High School. Stephen and Wanda remained in the Sutter County area until their deaths.
Both died in the Rideout Hospital in Marysville, California. Stephen on 22 August 1970 and Wanda less than two months later on 17 October 1970 (she didn't want to go on alone), they are buried side by side at the Sierra View Memorial Park at Olivehurst, California. Their mutual headstone reads; under Stephen " I shall pass through this life but once. Therefore, if there be any service I may render my fellow man etc. etc.", and under Wanda " Where HE goes, I will follow, through this life and beyond.
©2001 by Asa Castleman, Webmaster