Published: August 16, 2007 10:54 am            

She’s a living reference section

• Billee Fisher born in Stillwater in 1915

Imagine downtown Main Street in Stillwater with three department stores, three theaters, a couple of dime stores, a drugstore with soda fountain, a grocery store and even an opera house around the corner for good measure.

While you’re at it, imagine the street lined with big, tall trees providing shade against the hot summer sun. Billee “Babe” Fisher does not have to imagine it — she remembers it.

Born in Stillwater in 1915 on Duck Street – “right next door to Grandpa and Grandma Duck’s house,” she says, Billee is a walking, talking history book. To her grandchildren and “almost 300 kids” who have enjoyed her stories over the years, she is known as “Granny Babe.”

Back in those days, downtown Stillwater also had a big barn where people who rode their horses or horse-drawn wagons to town could stable them while they shopped. It was right across the street from the opera house and the fire station, on Ninth between Main and Lewis, she recalls.

Billee loved coming downtown with her mother and four sisters to shop in Katz department store, where they would pick out dress material from the fabric store. The clerk would put the material in a wire basket and crank it up a wire to another lady on the balcony at the east end of the store who would wrap their purchases and make out a sales ticket.

“We girls would draw the designs we wanted and go with our mother to Katz’s to buy the material, and then she would come home and start cutting, without any pattern, and when the dresses were finished, they looked exactly like what we had drawn!” she says.

The youngest of five daughters, Billee says her next oldest sister was a “flapper” who liked to wear her skirts well above the knee, and once, when their mother was hemming up her sister’s dress, Billee asked her mother to hem her’s up short, too. She still laughs when she remembers her sister’s reaction: “You silly little thing, you’re too young to wear short skirts!”

Every Saturday, Billee’s parents, Albert and Bertha Winona Davis, would give her 15 cents so she could go to the movies and see Hoot Gibson, Tom Mix, Greta Garbo or Al Jolson at the Leachman, the Aggie or the Mecca theater for 10 cents and then buy a “great big ice cream cone” afterward for a nickel.

For a special treat, she and her sisters or friends would go to the Candy Kitchen restaurant on Main, just south of Ninth, where the walls were covered with beautiful marble and the wrought-iron tables had marble tops.

When Billee was growing up, Duck Street had a parkway down the median that was covered with colorful flowers, but Lewis Street, just one block east of Main, was still unpaved. In the 1930s, when she was a student at Stillwater High School, which is now the annex to the Stillwater Public Library, Billee recalls the population was about 4,750.

In those days, she says, boys couldn’t get married until they were 21, and girls had to be 18, so as soon as her sweetheart, Wilbert (Bill) Henry Fisher, turned 21, she ran away with him to Chandler to get married.

“We didn’t know anything about getting married — we didn’t even know we had to have witnesses — but we knew were doing the right thing,” she says. And apparently it was the right thing, because they were married for more than 60 years and had three boys and “three wonderful daughters-in-law.”

Still, she says, her daddy cried when the couple came back from eloping, because Billee was his “Baby.”

Bill went on to become a civil engineer, working on the Tulsa airport and the OSU Student Union, among other things, and Billee later got her Realtor’s license, becoming the first woman in Stillwater. They lived in other places for short periods when Bill was on a job, and for awhile after retirement, but when her 92nd birthday comes at the end of August, Billee expects to be right here at her home in Stillwater, the town where she was born.

        

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