Owens History 01

Owens History 01

My father, my dad, Harry T. Owens, Sr., was in the U. S. Navy as the chief pharmacist in World War I. He was also the heavyweight champion of the fleet, fighting off his ship. He crossed the Atlantic, I think, 17 times, and then he did something very unusual. He met a fellow he'd grown up with in school over in France who'd been shot up, who was a Marine. And he wanted to change places with the Marine to fight the Germans. So he took the Marine's ID and equipment, and the Marine took Dad's place on the ship going back to his chief pharmacist. Somehow they pulled it off, and Dad got gassed. In a German gas attack in the woods and was sent back. He was a character. Dad was a character.

And then after the war, he became a professional gambler. And his father, what I call Grandpa, practically raised me because Dad was gone all the time. He'd come home for about one month out of the year to Bedford, Indiana, and then he'd leave again. He'd get in so many fights with my mother, and he'd leave again and not come back for a long time. So my grandfather and grandmother adopted me, and I just practically lived with them all the time. I had the same name as my dad, Harry, and I looked like my dad, so my mother resented me, it seemed, very much when I was a child, and took out her frustrations on me, pretty much. My grandpa and grandma had a home on 1405 M Street in Bedford, Indiana, and my mother lived with her father.

I think it was 1116 16th Street, which is right next to the fire department. Now, the two homes were separated by many blocks, and I would just go back and forth and back and forth. My mother and her father opened. His name was Webb, Bill Webb. My other grandfather, the one mother lived with and us kids were supposed to be living with, had a dry goods store there. And he was a very fine old gentleman, but a very tough, conservative, straight-laced fellow. And my mother was in the same mold, very strict. No funny business, no fooling around. And they ran a very tight ship. Like, Queenie and Grandpa were just the opposite-they had been raised in from dirt-poor circumstances in a small, tiny country town, and uh, they just did whatever it took to make you happy; does that kind of give you a rough background there?

Yeah, now didn't you tell me at one time that your grandpa was himself a dowser? My grandfather was a dowser; um, he, he He taught me when I was a small child, about six years old, how to break off forked twigs. And he took me out in the yard. And when Grandpa finally became rich and built his own home, he located his own well built in the back of the home, enclosed in the back of the home. And he found it with a twig himself. And he'd go out and find wells for other people, friends of his, who wanted to. He also could talk to dogs and animals. He taught me how to talk to dogs and animals, to communicate with them. And he also was a healer.

A man called John Gassaway, he was an Indian. He would beat his wife every Saturday night. He married a white woman, and he beat her, and you could hear her screaming all over town. John Gassaway worked in the stone quarry under Grandpa. And he'd come in to cut Grandpa's grass once in a while. Grandpa would pay him. Anyway, Grandpa liked this John Gadsway, so he just took him off. Nobody knew where they went. They disappeared for a week. When they came back, John Gadsway was completely changed. He wasn't even the same anymore. He never did beat his wife again. He quit drinking. Oh, that was why he beat his wife. He'd get drunk every Saturday. He didn't drink anymore. You couldn't pry him away from Grandpa's house.

He couldn't do enough to help Grandpa cut the grass, whatever it got to be done. He did something there. Nobody ever knew how he did it, because Gassaway was just like two different people. Anyway, Grandpa had strange powers. And his mother, Grandma Ganey, lived in Olitica, a tiny town not far from Bedford. What's her name, Ganey? Ganey, uh-huh. G-A-I-N-E-Y. No, that was Queenie. Queenie's my grandma. That was Grandpa's wife. It was her mother. Was a terrific psychic with an Ouija board. And she didn't charge, but people would come from, oh, Lord, long distances around for her to find her lost diamond rings. She was immensely successful. And she always knew when somebody was going to die. If a dog howls, she'd say, uh-oh, Mrs. So-and-so isn't going to be with us very long.

Or Mr. So-and-so has no beauty this very long. Every time a dog would howl, and people got scared witless because sure enough, that person would fall over dead. So this was your first exposure to psychic phenomenon then as an infant almost or a young child? Yeah of course I had a lot of it happen to me. Queenie for instance one day took me to a house where she wanted to visit some woman. And I said I play out in the yard I don't know I was about four I think. And while I was just standing outside the house when suddenly I just began I can still remember this I began to float up the side of the house way up to the top of the house. And then I floated back down again.

Now, of course, that time, I was so young, I had no idea of time. So I don't know how long it took or anything. But it definitely floated in the air. When I got back down, I went and banged on the front door and told Queenie about it, and she laughed and thought I was making it up. Then this happened again. The same phenomenon happened again when I was about somewhere from 12 to 14 years old at the Country Club, which is just outside Bedford, where there's a swimming pool. And it was in broad daylight, and I climbed up on the 10-foot board and did a swan dive up in the air, spread my arms out, and then I didn't come down.

And I was so astounded and amazed, I couldn't believe it; but I kept my arms outstretched, and it was the most wonderful feeling I'd ever had in my life. Exhilaration or something. I stayed up there. It seemed like a long time. And finally down I went into the water. have thought it was my imagination because i couldn't figure it out i knew i knew what goes up comes down but i stayed up there and i climbed out of the pool and bob armstrong came up he's a redheaded kid with freckles and he says to me he says t they call me t in those days i knew you could do card tricks he said but how did you stay up in the air all that time he saw it so i knew it was for real it was very very interesting i had you know things like this happening When I was about six, my dad, who knew I was psychic even then, came home from one of his trips.

And remember, he's a pro gambler. And we were in the kitchen with my brother Jack. And Dad says, he says, I'm going to do an experiment with you. Now, you go over near the back door. And he says, Jack and I want to pick a card out of this deck of cards. He says, see if you can tell me what card we pick. So he takes a deck of cards. The distance is about 12 feet, I would ask, 10 to 12 feet between us. And Dad keeps the cards covered, and he slides one card out a little bit and shows it to my little brother Jack. And I said, Dad, that's the deuce of hearts, or was it the deuce of diamonds? I mean, I call it the deuce.

Well, he just turned absolutely pale. He said, well, you got the right card. He showed it to me. But he says, what scares me is you used the word deuce. He says, I'm a professional gambler. I'm a gambler. That's the word I use. That's not the word you use. You'd say two. He was double sharp. So even at that young age, I was immersed in psychic phenomena. And at the age of seven, eight, and nine, I was just absolutely gobbling up all the books at the Bedford Library there in Indiana. On hypnosis, witchcraft, juju, voodoo, everything I could get. And when I'd read it all, I had the librarian send to Indianapolis, Indiana, the state capital, for more books on the subject. Anything having to do with psychic phenomena.

To give you an idea of how many books I read, I would absolutely read three books every afternoon. Really? Yes. I'm talking about four books. And this is at the age of around eight years? Seven, eight, nine. Of course, I read more when I got to ten, eleven, twelve, and so forth. But I learned to read even from phenomena. Let's see here. I made a note on this here. There was a red-headed girl who would appear in the sleeping porch. Our home on 16th Street had a sleeping porch, and I had a bed in there, and I slept in there by myself most all the time. And my mother would put me to bed for a nap every afternoon while she'd go out and play bridge. She was a nut on bridge.

So to get us kids out of the way, she'd put us all to bed for a nap. Well, as soon as Mother would leave, a red-headed woman would appear. Here with beautiful long red hair and uh she'd talk to me and teach me and put her arm around me now of course you'd say well that's just imagination well one day grandma queenie drove out to oledic to see her mother gainey and while she did I found some stairs going up the back going up upstairs at the back of the house and went up these old dirty dusty stairs And in the room there, there was piles and stacks of old magazines Western magazines mostly And I for some reason I picked up a stack of them took them back down went outside the front door and sat in a swing Now I can remember this easily And when I sat in a swing this redhead girl appeared And she taught me to read instantly now let's see I was about four

And from that time on I could read And I did I read magazines magazines magazines My grandfather gave me a, it was so astounding, he opened an account for me at the local drugstore. I could go in there and get any magazine. So that when I got to school, it was either in kindergarten or the first grade, and the teacher gave us these alphabet chips, you know, with A on them and B and C on them. Hang on a second, Ted. I'm having problems with this. Yeah, it's okay now. Uh-huh. Maybe you could just go back a little bit. To where? Your grandfather gave you an account. My grandfather, yeah, gave me an account at the drugstore, a local drugstore there, and told them, give T or any books, put them on my bill.

And I'd go down there every day and get more and more magazines. We're talking about four or five years old. So when I got into school, it was either kindergarten or the first grade, I can't remember which. The teacher gave me these alphabet chips to give them to all the kids. We were supposed to study them and put them on the desk. And instead of that, now I'd been reading all these books on World War I flying aces out of the drugstore. So I took the chips and used them for airplanes in the sky: fell, twirling, and the other one could chase it down, machine guns blazing in my mind. And suddenly the teacher's feet appeared there, and she said, 'What are you doing?' And I said, well, I'm playing airplane with these.

It's World War I, she said. She says, well, they're rough in Bedford. The teachers are rough there. They're mean and cruel. So, most of them. So anyway, she really gave it to me. And I said, but I can already read it. I said, I don't need these things. This is funny. I said, you're giving us these to learn to spell words like E-A-T on our desk. I said, well, I can read your book. I'll read a book for you. And I said, give me a book, and I'll read it for you. She wouldn't do it. She said, you're lying. She says, now, get you to do what I tell you. Now, this is the way it went. But that instant reading that happened after the red-haired woman appeared was something else, something else.

See you. I don't know what else. This red-haired woman, do you think now that she was in some way connected with the size? Yeah, I think so, because later on at Duke, see, later on at Duke I had all this phenomenon happen. After, a spirit of a girl appeared at Duke. Of course, a long time later. And when I was 26 years old. And I even gave her a name, a Big Lorny. She said she had committed suicide. She was a beautiful girl. But not really. And in that room, I think we just moved across the table. The room light where I would study under would go on and off and on and off by itself. All kinds of weird things happened in there. You know, this is at Duke University.

Duke University when I was 26 is a long way along the way. But it's strange. But even when you were a student at Duke, you really didn't have any notion about the size, did you? Oh, no. Oh, heavens no. If anybody told me it could have been UFO cars, I would have told them they were absolutely crazy. As a matter of fact, later on, as far back as 1965, my boy Rick told me that UFOs were over our house in Washington, D. C. And he said, Dad, it's UFOs that are in contact with you, not nature. I said, well, Rick, you're out of your mind, man. You're crazy. It has nothing to do with UFOs.

I'll give you a little, you want more background on my small childhood? Well, no, I think we can move up a bit. Oh, all right. Let's, let's, is there anything interesting that happened in between your small childhood and the time that you spent at Duke? Oh, Lord, yes. Anything outstanding in your mind? Oh, yeah. In the way of phenomena. Uh-huh. Oh so much well or something interesting that might have showed when I was when I was 14, I became an expert hypnotist when I was 14. And I was hypnotizing the kids around Bedford, Indiana. Got a lot of trouble with it, and I was really good. Then when I got to be 18, I became a professional hypnotist, working part-time and giving deeper demonstrations, parties, and things like that. Also, a memory expert, mnemonics. Oh, so much happened. See, um,