"COLUMN ONE"
By Mary Mayo, Editor

The month of January is already more than half over and up to now there seems to be a complete absence of moans and groans over its passing.

My grandmother used to contend the only nice thing about January was that it did eventually depart, leaving winter with its back broken. This remark always puzzled and shocked us kids a little but it sounded just exactly like something January would do.

But that was down in Houston where one St. Patrick's day Mama was highly incensed because a "blue norther" had come lolloping down out of Amarillo and nipped the geraniums she had painstakingly transferred from the dining room to the front porch just the day before.

"But I always move the potted plants out the middle of March" she lamented, poking dolefully at the dark, stringy stems that only a few hours before had been filled with crisp fragrance.

Mama never quite trusted Texas weather after that.

When my girl friends and I schemed to wear white short-sleeved dresses with bright red belts one Valentine's day, Mama callously broke my heart by making me wear the old blue sweater I'd worn all winter.

"Why, don't you remember how it FROZE that St. Patrick's day?" she scolded. "This weather can change so fast it may be snowing by the time you come home this evening!"

So I moved to Oklahoma where everybody's favorite joke is "Don't like the weather? . . . Wait a minute!"

By now I'm convinced that all weather everywhere is lousy except that which evolves from travel folders and Chamber of Commerce brochures. But somehow we all muddle through and we never lack for a handy topic of conversation.

And if we get too disgusted with the type of weather we have been experiencing around here lately, we can mull over the contents of a letter Mr. and Mrs. Earl Peters recently received from their son, Don Flores and daughter-in-law Fern, who is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. C. W. Weese.

Don and his family are stationed at the Roswell, New Mexico Air Force Base and in his letter to the homefolks, he mentions traveling out to the Base in minus 24 degree cold.

And that's SOUTH of Jenks. Think what it must be like up North!

While Earl was talking, he remarked that Mrs. Peters celebrated her birthday last Sunday, the 14th, and that on one birthday a few years back, she received one of the nicest of all presents . . . a grandson right on his grandma's birthday.

Frances Lawson, who brightens the corner at Gibson's Grocery (mostly with a certain luminous object on her left hand) celebrated her birthday last Sunday, too . . . by coming down with a rousing case of the virus.

And it was daughter Pat Sanco's birthday and she has already given the family warning we'd better really enjoy her next 3 or 4 because after that, she vows, there'll be no more birthdays for her.

That leaves me in a pretty peculiar spot because my birthday falls in January, too, and anybody can see I never was able to call a moratorium. Birthdays just keep piling up and piling up and every one of them obviously "took."

I'm not going to come right out and confess their total but I will admit my brothers used to call me "Bill" because old Kaiser Bill and I observed the same birthday date and he was prominent in the news those days.

Undoubtedly January runs February a close second where it comes to birthdays of brilliant, famous characters. Besides those of us I have already mentioned, Mrs. Julia Ishmael and Mrs. Molly Frailey note birthdays in this otherwise nondescript month and then there's Albert Schweitzer . . . and once there was Benedict Arnold.