He was the only child of
Mary Susan (Molly) and
Arthur George (Art) Clewell.

At the time of Clemon’s birth, his mother was 40 and his father was 50 years of age.

The family used the second floor as their home while half of the bottom floor was A.G.’s real estate office and the west half was for Molly’s used clothing store.

The Hopkins Hotel is known as one of the first buildings built in Watonga.

The building took up only half the lot; so there was a nice-size yard with a swing behind their home. 

This picture shows Clemon, about 4 years old, with his mother's mother, Mrs. McKenzie.

Clemon’s mother’s parents made the land run from Kingfisher and homesteaded on 160 acres near Omega. 

His father’s parents lived in Iowa; Clemon never knew his father’s parents.

Some of the other stores around him that he recalls were Bixler’s Clothing Store, Jimmie Minor’s Café and the Russell Barber Shop where Nick Kline and Sy Russell worked, (Sy was Shaver’s father and Mike’s grandfather)

Watonga State Bank was on the corner, Veatch Drug was next to that and then Garvey Dry Goods, and then Tyler’s Dry Goods. When they tore the Ann Theatre down, Tyler bought that lot and made his store bigger.

(the stores named were stores that were in Watonga when Clemon Clewell was growing up, not necessarily all there at the same time)

Clemon, Rita, Molly, A.G.

When Clemon and Rita got married they lived with his folks for a year.  They had their own little apartment in the back of the house.  Then they moved to N. Prouty into a garage apartment where their first son, David was born.

Then they moved across from Clemon's parents into a little two-story house that Don Johnson's parents owned.  He owns it still.  Then they moved up on Noble.  There are two houses that look just alike.  One has a red door and the other has a yellow door.  They lived in the south one.   Mrs. Rose had owned those houses.

Then they moved to the Circle.  There was a group of people that got together and got the Circle Drive construction going.  This is when they bought their first home.  They lived at 611 Circle Drive.  They moved in a week before Paul was born in 1952.  He was born on Rita's birthday, February 9th.  At that time, he was the biggest baby every born at Watonga Hospital.

Marcia and Don were also born when they lived on the circle.  In 1963, they built a house on N. Noble where they live now.

Clemon worked at the Safeway store the summer before his junior year in high school. Clemon still remembers how good the coffee smelled that was being freshly ground. He didn’t drink coffee; but he sure thought it smelled good. The summer before his senior year, was his first time to work at Rice Hardware.

The summer before he went to college, he worked at the Philips Grocery. On Saturday nights, the grocery stores would stay open until after the preview let out. People would either go shopping then or pick up their bag of groceries that they had purchased earlier.

He remembers once trying to pick up an 80 pound
sack of feed when he just weighed 125.
He counted to three and heaved the sack up in the air,
but not on his shoulder.
The sack landed on the ground behind him
and busted open.

It was a regular chore of his to fill and deliver the order that Mrs. Philips took over the phone. He did just fine except for not knowing one item on the list……..’xxx’. He had to ask Mrs. Philips what the ‘xxx’ stood for. She was surprised that he didn’t know that it stood for peppermint candy because the candy had an x impression on it.

Clemon graduated from Hill’s Business College in Oklahoma City in 1943. He worked at a restaurant east of the Big Red Warehouse which turned into Evans Furniture. He peeled potatoes for hours during the evening with another boy from Watonga, W. D. McPherson.

Another job was downtown on the corner of Katz Drug. (The Criterion Theatre famous for its big theater organ, was half of a block east of there; he saw Casablanca there!)  This job was selling tokens to people getting on the street cars on Saturday.

  Somehow, some way, in the middle of a busy street,
the bottom fell out of his pockets and quarters and
half-dollars fell everywhere.
People scrambled to help him pick up the money.
He doesn’t think he lost
any revenue that day!

After he graduated business college and moved back home, he worked for Ivan Kelley (he was an accountant), he also worked at the county clerks office for A. A. Spiece, and he worked at Watonga State Bank using shorthand and typing preparing correspondence for L. J. Barret and D.P. Karns. He eventually moved to the teller position. He remembers the day that Jack Barrett came home from the service. He was serving overseas as an Air Force pilot. Jack had prepared the visit as a surprise for his dad.

At Watonga State Bank, Clemon worked with one of the Compton twins, Marie Dixon. Both the Compton girls were very talented twirlers in the Watonga High School Marching Band; they went on to OU and performed in the OU Band.

 He also worked with Snooky Snyder, the daughter of Allan Faulkenstein, and he worked with Ben Shuber.  He was working at the bank when Mr. Rice came over, and wanted him to come and work at the hardware.  He did.  This was in 1946 before Rita and Clemon  were married.

He received $25 a week
and Clemon remembers thinking
the very first Saturday
when he was cutting a 2-inch galvanized pipe for Jess Butler,

“I could be back at the bank,
sitting at a desk,
instead of doing all this manual labor!”

Evidently Clemon was very important to the store.  The one time that he and Rita took the kids for a two week vacation, he had two weeks’ worth of posting to do when he got home!  He also remembers the bales of aspen wood that they would order in to pad the huge air conditioner units that cooled people’s homes.

When Mr. Rice died in 1967, there were a great number of employees at the store; a plumber, Harold Wilhite, two refrigeration men, Earl Pettit and S. Jay Tomlinson, a Maytag repairman, Earnest Shaw, a t.v. repair man, Tom Oler and an electrician, Dick Oler.  Ira Green worked at Rice’s also.  One by one they left the store to start their own businesses.

One day Clemon slipped on the ice in front of the Post Office and suffered a concussion; he was in the hospital for a week.  During this time Neil Haight was helping Rita at the store.  They had bought a new cash register then and Rita decided that the old cash register needed to be taken to the back to make room for the new one.  The old cash register was made of lead and very heavy. 

Rita did a lot of the bookwork.  In fact, Clemon says that she is a better bookkeeper than he.  She fell on the sidewalk one day outside Hoberecht Insurance; fell on her face and really banged herself up.  She even broke her right wrist. 

After getting medical attention,
she continued on with the records
‘left-handed’. 
And that was when you posted each sale by hand with pencil and paper.

In 1980, Clemon and Rita began talking about buying the store from Mrs. Rice.  Don had just graduated from OCU.  Their second son Paul was teaching band at the Junior High School in Kingfisher.    Don said that he would like to move back and work with his parents if Paul would come too.  They bought the store and ran it for four years under the name of Rice Hardware.  (Even after they changed the name to Clewell’s Family Hardware, people still made checks out to ‘Rice Hardware’ and a few people still called Clemon, Mr. Rice.)

After four years and a newly remodeled building on west main, they had a ‘name contest’ to see what the new store’s name should be and ‘Clewell’s Family Hardware’ was picked.   

When they moved from the old location to the new location on West Main, Rita wanted her own corner of the store for her restaurant.   Clemon thought that would be too much work on her, but Rita insisted, so the boys enabled the remodeling to include

                          Rita’s Kitchen.

There was seating for thirty.  After the first day, they knew they needed more help.  Jane’s mother, Aurora, started working and by the time they closed the store, they had nine full time or part-time people helping run Rita’s Kitchen.   

The restaurant was a lot of work!  She started cooking every morning by 5:00 a.m. making 12 pies and 3 dozen cinnamon rolls along with soup and chili. 

Rita says that she loves to visit Marci’s
farm; yet Clemon doesn’t care for all
those trees that prevent him from seeing for miles and miles!

All the boys got their degrees from Oklahoma City University.  Marcia went to school at SWOSU in Weatherford.  She taught school first at Rush Springs, then at Wilburton.  She came back to Southwestern to get her master’s degree in vocal music.  She now lives on a farm near Wilburton with her husband, Ben, and many horses, cows, goats, chickens and guineas.  Clemon can’t believe that his daughter loves the farm life so much since he has always been a city boy.  She even helps her husband cook the sorghum in the fall to make molasses.  First the horses walk around a contraption that squeezes the juice from the sorghum.  Marci’s husband is a very talented welder; he seems to be able to build anything!  He created the equipment that turns the sorghum into molasses.  He has also created a device that will pick up eight bales of hay at a time. 

June 9th, 1955 Watonga Republican

The caption in the paper to the left dated June 9th, 1955 tells that recording daily temperature highs and lows for this area was a process just then getting started.

Before equipment was installed, Clemon would have to measure the depth of the North Canadian River.  He would reel a weight down until it touched the water.  He did this on the narrow bridge west of town. 

"It was quite difficult and a little scary to get the reading and hurry back to the roadside and off of the bridge!"

Caption of this paper says:

"Silver Iodide Generators like the one being inspected by Clemon Clewell, local weather observer, was produced by Dr. Irving Krick of Denver, who does not lay any claim to making rain but does believe his generators will increase the amount of rain above that which would normally be received under certain conditions."

The headline implies that it worked.

Rita told me that they lived in the circle during this experiment of 'cloud seeding'.  They had to go outside when it was raining and light the fire that would release the iodized crystals.  She said that it was very difficult getting the fire to stay lit!

It was time-consuming and cold.  He would then record the high
and low and spin the thermometers down to a normal reading.

That was the old way of getting the high temperature and low temperature. Now, this beehive-looking instrument records the temperature.  Clemon looks at this device in the house and records the high and low for the day.

This is the rain gauge.  Inside the large container is a graduated cylinder, and inside that is a funnel.  If there is more than 2" of rain, the funnel overflows into the cylinder.  In that case, they have to empty out the funnel and then pour what overflowed into the funnel and measure that.

Precipitation and temperature data provided by Clemon is used extensively by the National Weather Service and other agencies in weather forecasting, river flow analysis, storm water management, and long term climate studies.

Clemon is one of 11,000 weather observers nationwide that give generously of their time and energy because of their interest in weather and dedication to our country.  The network provides daily air and soil temperature data, hourly and daily precipitation amounts, pan evaporation, and river height readings.

 
Clemon received the Thomas Jefferson Award in 2001.  The Thomas Jefferson Award was created in 1959 to recognize weather observers for outstanding achievements in the field of meteorological observation. Only five observers out of over one hundred nominees nationwide, receive an award of this stature each year.