Toodie T**scher was born amid flames and hellfire. As her mother, Ethel T*ton, struggled to give birth to Toodie, her first child, the town of Arcadia was going down in blazes and up in smoke. Now President of the Arcadia Historical Society, Toodie spoke with me about the day Arcadia burned and the unusual circumstances under which she was born.
“Honey,” Toodie announced proudly, “I was born while the town was on fire! Miss Fanny, one of the old-time black ladies that was here when I was born said, ‘You could sho’ hear Ethel holler!’ She tells me now, ‘You can’t fool anybody out here when you were born!’”
The afternon of June 5th, 1924 draped the town of Arcadia with a quiet laziness. Toodie’s parents owned the Tuton Drugstore and lived on the second floor of the rugged, stone building. Toodie’s mother was due to give birth toward the middle of the month, and had spent hours preparing delicate clothes, linens, and drapes for her new baby’s nursery. Suddenly, a large boom! rocked the building, and the grocery store down the block was swallowed up in a ball of flames.
On that particular day, a fellow in the grocery store spilled some kerosene near an open flame and thus set the store on fire. It didn’t take long for the frame building to become a raging inferno—along with most of the other buildings on that side of the block.
All this commotion naturally put a tremendous amount of stress on Ethel. “Honey, I wasn’t supposed to have been born until about the middle of the month,” Toodie told me, “but all the excitement rushed things up a bit!” So then, not only did Arcadia have a fire spreading out of control, but also a young woman going into labor across the street. To add to poor Ethel’s stress, her husband had gone to the nearby town of Edmond to fetch a doctor.
Afraid the fire might jump across the street to where Toodie was struggling her way into the world, some neighbors moved all the furniture and baby things from the drugstore to a neighbor’s yard away from the flames, leaving Ethel with few comforts as she agonized through her delivery.
Toodie giggled while thinking about it. “As Miss Fanny described it, she said, ‘Ol’ Ethel didn’t have nothin’ but a bed an’ a pot!’”
“Toodie,” I said, “I’ll bet all of that commotion made your poor mama pretty nervous!”
“Yep, wow!” she said grinning with sheer pleasure for the story. “That’s the way it was, honey.”
