Introduction to Midwest City
I’m free.
I’m free.
And freedom tastes of reality.
Pete Townshend
Summer, 1956
The first thing I did in Midwest City was to get lost.
It was summer in Oklahoma and, even better, it was Saturday morning. A day to sleep late and a morning to spend on the living room floor in pajamas watching cartoons.
If we got up before 6 – and this did sometimes happen, given that bedtime was 8 o’clock or earlier – all we would see on the television screen was the test pattern. Just in case we didn’t know what this dart-board-styled graphic was, the overlaid caption, in large white letters, told us it was the “Test Pattern.”
But this Saturday we hadn’t gotten up early. Rick and I had to be shaken awake.
“Mo..o..om. It’s Saturday. Why do we have to get up so early?”
“We’re moving.”
“Huh? Whaddaya mean, ‘we’re moving?’ Moving where?”
“Get up, Steve.” She was impatient and I eventually discovered why. “You know what’s happening. We’ve talked about this for weeks. We’re moving to Midwest City. Now get up and get dressed.”
*
In truth, I had no idea what was happening. And if we had talked about it for weeks, the we certainly didn’t include me, because they never actually talked to me.
And if we meant Mom and Dad, then I had probably tuned them out. I was almost nine years old – ready to start fourth grade – and my invisible friend had left me before kindergarten. But I didn’t live in their world. I might stop by to say hello once in a while, but their world was not even a nice place to visit, let alone live.
*
But we were moving, although I remember none of the move itself. I seem to blink and it is then Saturday afternoon – or more probably, Sunday afternoon – and we now lived in a 600-square-foot, asbestos-shingled house by the railroad tracks. Four tiny rooms – five, if you count the bathroom – for the three of us.
Midwest City! The entire town was newer than our house in Oklahoma City had been, even if our new neighborhood was already becoming a little frayed around the edges. No trees, no fenced yards, no flowers in this poorest part of town; only the red dirt, the horned toads and the Johnson grass. And the freight trains running not ten feet from our back yard (not from our back fence: there was no back fence) every three or four hours. And the cargo planes flying directly over our house as they approached the landing strip at Tinker Air Force Base only half a mile away.
The planes were so low as they approached for landing that you could practically hit their bellies with a well-aimed rock. Not that we ever tried: we were much too patriotic and in love with the military in 1956.
When a plane flew over, dishes and window panes rattled and the sub-bass growl of the jets was almost visible, almost palpable. All conversation stopped, which wasn’t so terrible; but what was terrible was that all television reception was interrupted until the plane had passed. We all knew that eventually one of these giant planes would come too close. But it’s hard to turn down a thirty-dollar-a-month mortgage.
It was, however, ours – Mildred’s and mine and Rick’s. We could do what we wanted and be what we wanted and have calm family dinners and maybe a dollar or two left over at the end of the week to giggle over and decide how to spend. And if Dwain wanted to visit, that was OK, because he would go home at the end of the evening and we were free.
*
Midwest City, we never ceased being told by the school district and the city administration, was carefully planned as an entire city before ground was broken for the first building. The finest architects, engineers and city planners were recruited from around the country to plan the world’s most perfect city.
Major arterials with strategically placed shopping? We had them. School sites and enough of them? We had them. Carefully planned street layouts to accommodate thousands of Baby Boom children? We had them. Centrally located civic center? Long-range plans for the civic center expected to be needed in forty years? Space for future golf courses and housing a bit more upscale? We had them all.
I wouldn’t meet W.P. “Bill” Atkinson for several years yet, but his palm prints were all over the city he had molded from nothing, and he cast an even greater shadow across the city than the ubiquitous Oklahoma municipal water towers.
As every resident is expected to know, Midwest City, Oklahoma, was honored in 1951 as “America’s Model City.” Except that you have to hunt like hell to discover exactly who bestowed this honor. City Hall doesn’t know and the Chamber of Commerce has forgotten.
*
As I said, I proceeded to get lost immediately.
“This is sooo neat, Mom,” I said, dancing around. “Look at that hill.” The only hill we had had in Oklahoma City was our driveway, a good two-foot rise. “Can Rick and I ride our bikes?” We were no longer only one block away from busy Northeast 23d Street.
Mildred turned us loose and we rode for an hour along the twisty streets, not having any idea where we were.
The philosophy of the “Model City” was that there should be as few straight streets as possible. Anticipating a payroll of some 40,000 people at nearby Tinker Air Force Base (about 20,000 military and about 20,000 civilians), each with 2.3 children, Atkinson figured the town would soon be knee-deep in kids. Kids on foot. Kids on bicycles. Kids in strollers. The curved streets were meant to slow down the auto traffic for the safety of the children.
The neighborhoods with the curlicue streets weren’t all that difficult to learn once you got the hang of them, but they were hell on newcomers. (And they were hell on me when I returned to Midwest City after an absence of nearly twenty years and attempted to re-establish my bearings.)
It’s easy to get around in the Oklahoma City area, where all of the major streets are “section lines,” x-many miles east or west of Santa Fe Avenue and y-many miles north or south of Reno Street. Inside these one-mile squares, most streets also run north-south or east-west, forming a neat grid, twelve blocks to the mile.
But still, a one-square-mile area is a lot of ground to cover for an eight-year-old and a six-year-old, and when no two streets are parallel and no two streets intersect at right angles, the uninitiated can become totally confused.
We did.
At some point I realized that not only was I lost, but I had lost my little brother. I circled and backtracked in only a semi-panic. Freedom, after all, was brand new to me. I was high on it and, had I really stopped to think about it, knew that Rick could be no worse off than merely misplaced. I passed the school for the third time, turned up Indian Drive (which hadn’t worked before), and suddenly found myself looking at Mildred standing in the front yard on Ferguson. I must have passed the house several times and not recognized it.
“Where’s Ricky?”
“I don’t know, Mom. I’m sorry. We got lost and I got lost and the hills are so steep and I couldn’t find the house and….”
“Get out there and find your brother.”
Slow learner that I must have been, I forgot to pay attention to landmarks and shortly became lost for the second time. Much later, exhausted and dejected, I re-re-discovered the house. Rick and Mildred were in the living room watching television.
*
Mildred had taken the Civil Service exam and snared an entry-level job as a clerk-typist at Tinker Air Force Base a few months before. Whether the divorce was a result of her realization that she could actually support herself or whether the job was in preparation for the divorce, I don’t know. The three of us celebrated the receipt of her first paycheck by actually going out to eat at a Mexican restaurant. Both Mexican food and restaurants being entirely new to me, I talked about it for weeks, to the obvious boredom of my more experienced friends.
Once settled in Midwest City, we made a pact: we would Eat Out every Friday night. In the early years, Eating Out might mean the A&W drive-in or a greasy spoon café, but Rick and I, not knowing any better, considered it heaven. The symbolism of dining out on Friday nights was so strong that it continued after Mildred’s second marriage and lasted until her second husband died, more than 40 years later.
We also divided up the chores. Mildred cooked and the boys did the dishes, taking turns washing and drying. This was uncharted territory for Rick and me, since Mildred had never worked before and we would put off our chores as long as possible because something “neat” (which may have been the catchword of the ‘50’s) was always on television. But we didn’t argue about the concept because somehow Mildred made it a shared responsibility to go along with the shared freedom.
And we were, after all, finally free.
Mildred designated me the “man of the house,” a position which brought with it later consequences she couldn’t have imagined at the time. I could do it, though; after all, I was almost nine. The immediate consequence, unfortunately, was that I was in charge of mowing the lawn.
*
In most parts of Oklahoma City, the grass has been tamed. Underground sprinkler systems with automatic timers may still be relatively rare compared to Northern California, but through generations of homeowners the nastier grasses have been beaten back. Midwest City was too new to have made much headway in these turf wars and, curiously, didn’t seem to care all that much. The school district was awash in federal, state and local funds, but couldn’t seem to find room in the budget to seed or sod or water the school grounds, which were bur-infested and dead in the summer and muddy swamps in the winter. (The high school football field, of course, was a totally different matter.)
Johnson grass is a milky weed that can grow an inch in a day with the proper rain and can bring a push mower to a complete halt, when it doesn’t just roll right under the blades and pop back up again after the mower has passed. The endemic sandburs must have been the inspiration for Velcro: nasty little brown things about the size of a pea, produced by low-growing vines, covered with sharp spines and clinging to anything.
And then there were the goat-heads.
The goat-head is not even a native plant, hailing originally from the Mediterranean area where it was used in folk medicine for centuries. But it has adapted like a trooper all across the plains. About the same size as a sandbur, its spines are fewer but stronger, it’s tough as a nut and it has at least one spine not less than 3/8″ long that can puncture a bicycle tire like a nail. Bare feet were out of the question in the countryside around Midwest City as well as on the playground of Glenwood Elementary School. All the kids kept a supply of Camel bicycle tire patches handy. Nobody thought of sniffing the glue, but I can still smell it in my memory.
Across the street on Ferguson from our row of two-bedroom houses were the duplexes, nearly all for married airmen, their 18- or 19-year-old wives and one or two babies, all trying to live on a $75 monthly salary. The duplexes were the same size as our house, except they had two front doors and two families. Here, Mildred usually found babysitters to watch over Rick and me before and after school.
Just behind our barren back yard were the railroad tracks leading directly to Tinker, bringing in supplies and taking out repaired airplane components. Tinker was a major supply hub and major repair station for the Air Force and was Midwest City’s only reason for being. If a plane could limp in and land, it could be completely refurbished and fly out again as if new. If not, its component parts could be shipped to Oklahoma by rail or air, rebuilt and shipped or flown out again.
We played on the tracks and laid pennies on the rails to be flattened when the next train came along. No one worried about safety. In our “section” (meaning our square mile) and just a few blocks away, the tracks crossed a ravine and seasonal creek where we could catch the occasional crawdad. Over the ravine, the tracks were supported by a trestle made of redwood 8×8’s on which boys could clamber far above the ground a hundred feet (or at least twelve or fifteen feet) below. This was where I learned to smoke and where I scampered like a monkey until the day I discovered I had a fear of heights.
Because we were very shortly post-war and many of the Air Force non-commissioned officers had brought home war brides, the Midwest City schools had an eclectic mix of ethnic backgrounds: German, Dutch, French, English. We also had one or two American Indian families in town and exactly two Jewish families. There were no African-Americans. The black airmen who lived off base all lived in Del City, the even-lower-scale bedroom community immediately next door, and their children all went to Del City schools.
Every square mile had an elementary school. Every square mile represented a different and distinct rung on the class ladder. The elementary schools funneled into two junior high schools which, themselves, represented the two sides of the socio-economic spectrum. When the junior high students all merged into Midwest City High School, they looked down on the neighboring high schools of Del City, El Reno and Choctaw, and on almost all of the Oklahoma City high schools save one: the equally white, monied, far northwestern Oklahoma City enclave whose high school was Northwest Classen.
Because of federal funds, our school district had as much money as theirs, but our parents didn’t. We called them “Silkies” for their imagined silk underwear, and they were our only real rivals in football, basketball, baseball and forensics.
It wasn’t the Oklahoma State Chamber of Commerce that awarded Midwest City the title of “America’s Model City,” but it easily could have been. Midwest City was, after all, a microcosm of Oklahoma: the landed gentry and conservative churches called the shots, growth of any kind was good, building of any kind was good, the little folks were alternately courted and discarded and people of color were relegated to separate geographical areas.
Gertrude Stein once revisited her former Oakland, California, neighborhood only to discover that her childhood home had been torn down, which resulted in her famous lament that there was “no there there.”
Stein’s observation is frequently taken out of context and used as a slur against the city of Oakland – which was not at all the way she meant it. But except for the high school – the sole unifying element in Midwest City – our town never had a “there.” Even the memory of my first house, in a neighborhood which no longer exists, a fenced-off square mile of land full of overgrown weeds and overgrown trees, owned now by the United States Air Force, evokes no sense of a former there-ness.