Getting to Know: Jim Ables
--interview conducted and written by Kathy Hinkle

Our most recent Employee of the Month is Jim Ables. Jim is a Registered Nurse (RN) and one of the Charge Nurses in the Memory Center. He actually received two nominations. The first was for organizing and offering to foot the bill for a pizza party for the entire day shift in that unit and the second was for being a constant source of jokes and funny stories for the staff and residents. He makes all our days a little more enjoyable.

Before getting into nursing, Jim had received a degree in drafting and design from Eastern State College in Wilburton. He was a draftsman for 20 years with a local engineering company that suffered the effects of a down turn in the economy and had to cut back. At that time there just were virtually no full-time jobs available in his field. A neighbor who was a new doctor suggested that he go into nursing since that was how he had started his medical career. Jim started taking the necessary prerequisites at Tulsa Community College and then was accepted into a nursing school program, all the while working part-time in drafting and later as a Certified Nurse Aide in a hospital.

He got his nursing degree in 1989 and his license the next year. “I find nursing to be more demanding but also more satisfying than working as a draftsman. I enjoy working with people. As a draftsman I was confined to a room with the same ten people day after day with the stress of getting sketches completed by an ever-approaching deadline. In nursing I am dealing with a different set of people and problems every day.”

Jim was born in Hugo, Oklahoma. Hugo is not one of the largest towns in Oklahoma. The hospital that he was born in was over the town bank. Patients were raised and lowered by an outside “elevator” - pulleys actually. There were maybe all of four beds. Hugo's claim to fame, however, is that it is the winter quarters for several traveling circuses. In last month's “Quill” you saw a story and pictures that Jim provided about the circus.

Jim enjoyed riding his bicycle after school out to the circus grounds. On Sunday mornings the family would drive out to see the elephants that their handlers had staked out by the road. He could even feed them hay. I guess feeding our rabbits here hay isn't quite the same. “My favorite animal was the hippopotamus named Miss Oklahoma. Somebody must have had a sense of humor. I remember that she would usually be in a filthy, huge concrete tub and you could just barely see her nose and ears sticking up.”

Another interesting aspect of having a circus in town was that small as Hugo was -- the population then (probably dropped some) was around 4,500 - was that they had a zoo. Animals that no longer traveled with the circus lived there. “It was a rather primitive zoo but it was a zoo. I remember that folks would light cigarettes, smoke them and throw them to the monkeys who would return the favor -- they would smoke them and throw them back. Once a baby monkey picked up one of the cigarettes and his mama swooped down and knocked it out of his hands as if to say, “Don't you even think about starting that kiddo!”

Jim's dad was a building contractor and his mom was a housewife. His older brother John, who is retired from the military, now lives in Tacoma, Washington and his younger sister, Beverly, lives in Tyler, Texas where she is a home health aide in Dallas. They've both made Jim an uncle several times.

Growing up in the 50s made for simpler times. Since most folks didn't have any kind of air-conditioning they were outside more, sitting on the porch or going to the park for a picnic. “One of the highlights of my youth was the time that Roy Rogers came floating down the Red River with some Boy Scouts and camped by the bridge there that connects Oklahoma and Texas.” In case you're new to Oklahoma, the Red River is the border between the two states.

Even though Jim lived in town the family had a farm five miles out in the country with cows, horses, tractor, etc. and he spent his summers there and got to do a lot of what country kids do -- feed, water, and worm the livestock. “I got to hunt and fish a lot because we lived close to both the Kiamichi and Red Rivers. My dad and I used to net fish.”

Jim currently lives in a mobile home that he bought several years ago and moved to a small, quiet mobile home park west of Sand Springs. About eight years ago he discovered computers. Now he really enjoys his computer! He plays on the computer. He works on the computer. He does bookkeeping on the computer. The computer has really simplified his life but also made it more interesting.

One of his passions is genealogy and a computer certainly comes in handy for that. He also has trekked through more than a few cemeteries over the years trying to fill in the gaps of his family tree. “I have successfully tracked my lineage back to the 'boat'.” They all came around the early 1600s, mostly from Wales and some from Scotland.” He has met a lot of distant cousins through his research and now corresponds by E-mail regularly with some of them.

Jim's favorite pastime right now is learning to play golf. “My friends are learning patience at the same time,” he says.

Jim is not a big collector but his family seems to think that he collects M&M toys. “I made the mistake of once saying that I thought a particular toy was cute and so, by default, that's what I get every Christmas and birthday. What I really do like is anything old - and I especially enjoy restoring antique radios. My pride and joy is a 1931 RCA deco console.”

Jim thinks that the best kind of traveling is the spontaneous kind. “Like the time I just decided to go to Europe, so I bought a round-trip ticket and spent the summer over there traveling around with my brother who was in the military.” One of his fondest memories was getting to ride on a Russian-made Hydrofoil across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangiers in Morocco. Another time was in Spain with his sister. “My sister was a huge fan of the author, James Michener, - a huge fan. She insisted that we travel every place in Spain that he had described in his books, stay every place that he had, eat every place that he had, see everything that he had. They wound up in Toledo (Spain) at a restaurant, drunk on some banana flambé just because that is what James Michener had drunk there!