Prairie City

Would you like to come over for tea
With the missus and me?
It’s a real nice way to spend the day
In Dayton, Ohio,
On a lazy Sunday afternoon
In Nineteen Hundred and Three.

Randy Newman

1947 – 1967

Mildred tried to vacation in Prairie City every August for Old Settlers’ Day, and once or twice a year she would flee Oklahoma to return to Prairie City.

Until I was in high school, we always took the train to Des Moines.  Even after the divorce, Dwain could still get rail passes for Rick and me, and Mildred buying a ticket only for herself was cheaper, and certainly easier, than driving 600 miles.

I loved trains; loved the soothing click of the wheels on the rails, the gentle sway of the coach, the dining car with its starched linen tablecloths (where we almost never had enough money to venture), the black porters, the conductor with his magical ticket punch, the expansive leg room, the seats that folded all the way down for sleeping.  Once, we even rode in a Pullman car with real upper-and-lower beds and curtains, just like in the movies.

We would leave from the Santa Fe station in downtown Oklahoma City.  The station was nice enough, but nothing like Union Depot in Kansas City, where we frequently had to change trains.  Union Depot was larger than my elementary school playground, with a ceiling a mile high, all sculpted and rounded, with tiny helium balloons way up there, loosed by tiny children way down here.

Sometimes, if the layover between trains was long enough, the Dishmans would pick us up and take us home with them, so the adults could catch up and the kids could sleep.  The Dishmans were former next-door neighbors in Oklahoma City, who had moved to a suburb of Kansas City.  As a baby, I couldn’t say “Dishman,” so it was settled that I, and later Rick, would call them “Aunt Mary” and “Uncle Dish.”

Driving through downtown Kansas City at night revealed a magical world compared to Oklahoma City.  Huge buildings, all lit with giant neon advertising against the night sky.  (“They went and built a skyscraper seven stories high/That’s just about as tall as a building oughta grow…”) When I first saw Times Square it had nothing on my memories of downtown Kansas City.

Charles & Mable Phearman, 1940s

Later, it was back on the train from Kansas City to Des Moines, where someone would pick us up and drive us to Prairie City.  Usually Uncle Carl or Aunt Ruth Adah.  My memories of visits with Grandma and Grandpa Phearman are just as warm as were Mildred’s, with the exception that I don’t believe that all of the world outside of Iowa is full of hateful people.

But for a two- and three- and ten- and fifteen-year-old Oklahoma boy, Prairie City was gentle and calm, a world out of time and nothing like Oklahoma City or Midwest City.  I would go back if I could, but I can’t.  It wouldn’t be the same.  Everybody I knew back then is now long dead and I prefer the town of my memories to what I fear I would find today.

In the 1950’s and 1960’s the population of Prairie City was pretty stable at about 700 to 750 people.  I used to quip to my friends that its population had remained steady for forty years: “Every time a baby is born, a man leaves town.”  Later in the century, it became something of a bedroom community for Des Moines, and its citizenry almost doubled.  The 1990 census gives its population as 1366; the 2000 census puts it at 1365.  Maybe there was a woman in that decade who was uncertain of paternity.

*

The streets were wide and tree-lined, the lots were large and no one wanted fences.  The city lots flowed into each other like a town commons.  The Phearmans were among the poorest people in town, yet their lot directly abutted that of Mr. McKlveen, owner of the lumber yard, and the richest man in town.  As a very small child, I would “recite” for Mr. and Mrs. McKlveen, and he would give me a dime.

The Phearman house was two blocks from the town square in one direction, and two blocks from farmland in the other.  Charlie and Mabel, ever the farmers until they became too feeble, rented a plot of land just at the end of their street for a truck garden, where they grew corn, tomatoes, melons and strawberries.

There is probably a strip mall in the Phearmans’ cornfield now.  Then, however, the commercial district was solely the four streets surrounding and facing the town square.  The grocery store and hardware store still had worn wooden floors.  The weekly newspaper was on the square, as was Travis Walters’ furniture store and the funeral home, also owned by Trav Walters, a high school classmate of Mildred’s.

Dr. Ella’s office was in her home, where she treated me for various problems, including a concussion (from falling off of playground equipment at age eight) and a horse kick to the groin (during my 13th summer which I spent on the dairy farm of my great-aunt Lena’s son, Dale).  Dr. Ella was a fixture.  One of the first women doctors in Iowa, she had delivered most of the babies in town and had practiced there for just about as long as anyone could remember.

**

Forty-some years later, I had a client with some legal dealings in Iowa.  To my surprise, a recent letter to her was from an attorney with two offices in central Iowa – one in Prairie City.

This was worth a phone call.

No, he didn’t remember the Phearmans, but many of the same names were still there: Walters, McKlveens, Jarnigans.

“How about the Berkenbosches?” I asked.

“Would that be Dale or Beryl?”

“Either one,” I said.  “They’re my mother’s cousins.  Their mother was Mabel Phearman’s sister.”

“I’m in the Lions Club with Beryl,” he said.  “Have you read ‘Prairie City, Iowa?’”

“No…never heard of it.”

“Find a copy.  You’ll like it.”

I did and I did.  Douglas Bauer, a Prairie City boy who went off to Chicago to become a Playboy editor, returned years later to chronicle a single year of prairie life and to prove, as one review put it, that “you can go home again.”  Bauer captured the soul of the small midwestern farmer and the small midwestern town with respect, skepticism and humor.  I am, of course, prejudiced.  Even so, I have to discount the glowing reviews in Playboy and The Des Moines Register.  But The Washington Post also loved it, as has everyone to whom I have loaned my copy.

**

Mildred referred to her frequent visits as “going home” – a curious word usage to me until I went away to college and found myself referring to my college apartment as “home” and Mildred’s house as “Mildred’s house.”  I realized then that Iowa would always be “home” to Mildred, “home” being not a place, but a concept.  Home is a security blanket, a place where you go for safety and healing.  Home is where the heart is and I can’t believe I just wrote that, except that it’s true.

Grandma always cried when we arrived and cried when we left, even though they wrote each other two or three times a week and seldom went six months without seeing each other.

*

The Prairie City house had a kitchen sink by the time I came along, and an electric range, installed in what had been the pantry, although the huge coal stove would still stand in the country kitchen at long as the Phearmans lived.  The indoor toilet, however, didn’t arrive until 1952, when the kids chipped in and had it installed for the folks’ 50th wedding anniversary.  Until then, the facilities consisted of a two-holer outhouse in the barn, a good thirty or forty feet from the house.  Understandably, each bedroom had a chamber pot tucked underneath the bed.

Dimly lit, smelly, dusty and full of spiders, the outhouse caused me to develop voluntary constipation each time we visited.  I simply wouldn’t go until I couldn’t help it anymore.  I also learned early that I could pee through the window screen of the upstairs bedroom out onto the porch roof, and it would drain down the gutters.

*

Every August the town celebrated “Old Settlers’ Day,” commemorating its founding in 1856, with the festivities centered around the town square.  The festival itself probably hadn’t changed much in a century:  picnics on the square, John Philip Sousa blaring from the bandstand, patriotic speeches, introduction of the town’s oldest and youngest citizens, and an amateur talent competition after dark.  I once won two dollars for singing “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “How Much Is That Doggie In the Window.”

It was the biggest event in town, and the only thing that came even close was the Odd Fellows annual clam chowder feed.

Old Settlers’ Day, 1956, was more festive than usual, it being the town’s centennial, and the Old Settlers’ Association made money by selling cast-iron doorstops in the shape of oxen pulling a covered wagon, with hand lettering reading “Prairie City – 1856 – 1956.”  This too, had once been Indian land and then the white man’s frontier.

Grandma Phearman’s doorstop stayed in Prairie City until her death in 1967.  It then moved to Midwest City for more than 30 years and now sits atop a bookcase in a law office in Castro Valley, California.

**

When the Oklahoma branch of the family was in residence, Sundays were family day, when the house would overflow with Mabel’s sisters, nieces and nephews, children, grandchildren and not a few great-grandchildren.  Mabel wouldn’t stop from morning until well after dark and no amount of “Mom, please sit down and let us do that” would make her rest.  Even as a five-year-old, I couldn’t see how she kept it up.

Being underfoot anyway, the children would go outside to pump water from the wells (just for the novelty of it) or wander down to the schoolground to play, or out into the cornfields just two blocks from the house.  You could walk anywhere in Prairie City since it was (and still is) only about one square mile in area.  And you could do it unsupervised; there was no crime in Prairie City.

On weekday evenings after dinner, we played games.  Mabel taught me Acey Deucey (twenty years later, I learned it was Backgammon).  Or the four of us would sit in the porch swing for hours until bedtime playing “I’ve Got a Secret,” or I would listen while Mabel and Mildred gossiped and Rick slept.  Charlie, of course, was back in his easy chair, nursing his pipe and listening to the radio.    What are “Amos and Andy” doing on the radio? I thought at the time.  It’s a television show!

Everyone who walked down the street waved and spoke, and Mabel had a story about each one.  Whose son almost lost a leg in a tractor accident; whose husband had taken to drinking; whose father just died; who was expecting her fourth grandchild; who told her that a “darkey” was going to move to town.

Sometimes the village idiot – Garrett, I think his name was – would shuffle by.

There would have been ugliness there, too, and some unhappiness and occasional violence and general intolerance of anything different.  They were people, after all, and farm people, and midwestern people just two generations away from the Indian wars and half a generation away from the Depression.  But I was too young then to know it and am old enough now to be thankful that I didn’t.

When I first heard singer-songwriter Randy Newman’s song, “Dayton, Ohio,” I thought immediately of Prairie City and I wished I could take my wife and daughter back there, and I still think of Prairie City and of the old house with its long-unused barn and two-holer privy and of the town square and Old Settlers Day and reciting for the McKlveens and of the rich black dirt in Charlie’s leased cornfield and of Grandma Mabel’s hugs made of genuine, unqualified love and of the warm summer nights on the porch swing playing “I’ve Got a Secret,” and I no longer find it strange that Mildred always called it “home.”

Old Settlers' Centennial memorial doorstop

Next up, Chapter 12:  A couple of narcissists

Statehood

WEE yah, HEY yah,
WEE HEE yah HEY yah.
HEEEY yah.
HEEEY yah.

Indian Gibberish Wedding Song, 1957.  Author best forgotten.

1907 – 1957

“Uncle Joe!  Uncle Joe!  Tell us a story!”

It took me months in the fourth grade to live down the nickname of “Uncle Joe.”  Mrs. Melton, the music teacher, a budding theatrical impresario, had prepared a “pageant” for the kids to present to the student body and parents.  It was a lovely story and a well-known one to Oklahomans, losing little of its glory for being basically untrue.

We believed it, and proudly, and probably Mrs. Melton did, too.  It was, after all, in all of the history books.

I was chosen as the narrator.  At nine years old, I had only to look about 59 or 69, this being the 50th anniversary of statehood.  So with string-mop beard and deep wrinkles drawn on my face with eyebrow pencil, I held my arms out in a symbolic embrace of my large stage family.  Eager children were in front, soon joined by ghostly noble Indians to stage right and ghostly noble (white) settlers to stage left.

“I shall tell you the story of the Wedding of the Oklahoma Territory to the Indian Territory.”

“Oh, yes, Uncle Joe!  We love that story.”

“Well, my children, as you know, Oklahoma was the 46th out of the 48 states to be admitted to the Union.  But fifty years ago, Oklahoma was still only a territory, like Hawaii or Alaska today.  Right next door was Indian Territory.

“And the Great White Father in Washington decreed that there could be only one State of Oklahoma.  And thus it came to be that the Indian maiden was married to the white settler in a ceremony symbolizing the union of their two territories.”

Ceremonial music played on a scratchy hi-fi in the elementary school “cafetorium” as the Great White Father pronounced his blessing on the young, innocent couple.

Fifty years later, I remember the chant sung by the fourth-grade Indians, the white robe worn by the symbolic Indian maiden and the noble and conflict-free way in which the love story was presented.

Except it didn’t happen that way at all.

*

In 1800, Oklahoma was home to approximately 60,000 Indians.  By 1889, there were 80,000.  The Territories’ total population in the 1900 census was 400,000 and was estimated to be 700,000 in 1906 – Indians to the east and the settlers to the west – with more than 300,000 of these inhabitants claiming membership in the Five Civilized Tribes.

The pressure from settlers made statehood inevitable, but in what form?  One large state?  Two small states?  Oklahoma Territory becomes a state and the landlocked Indians are left to their own devices?

As always, the civil servants (bean counters, chart makers and plan formulators) had their way, but how to break this to the Indians?  For reasons obscure to me – given that Louisiana had become a state with a set of laws based on the Napoleonic Code and not on English Common Law – Washington insisted that real property law in the new state must conform to Common Law, which was the basis for the laws of all the other states, save one.  Title must be held by individuals, and must be capable of being passed down to heirs.

But Indians did not own land.  They had never owned land.   Land was for all; it was incapable of being “owned.”  Mankind merely occupied it, or the tribe controlled it, but the idea that “these acres are mine and those are yours” was more than just a foreign concept: it simply made no sense.  Even after Reconstruction stripped much of their lands from them – relegating reservations to 160 acres per tribal member and opening the surplus lands for settlement – the tribes had continued to hold their lands in common and without survey or private title.

The Great White Father therefore established the Dawes Commission, whose mission it was to survey the Indian lands, to decide who was an Indian and who was not, and to “allot” parcels of land to the qualified, including the Indians and – in some instances – their slaves.

The Dawes Commission compiled the Indian Rolls – which my great-grandmother Susie Crick refused to sign – establishing just who was full-blood, three-quarter blood, half-blood or less than half-blood, and therefore, who was to be allotted a parcel of tribal land.  These parcels ranged from as small as 40 acres for Cherokee minors to 320 acres for certified Choctaws and Chickasaws.

As early as 1898, the GWF (always planning ahead) abolished all tribal courts, and decreed that all of Indian Territory was subject to federal jurisdiction out of Fort Smith, Arkansas, notorious for its recent overlord, Isaac Parker, the “hanging judge.”  The Dawes Commission, among its many other accomplishments, stripped the last bit of sovereignty from the tribes by “negotiating” that all Indian governments would cease to exist in 1906.

As usual, the Indians sent delegations to Congress, protesting the allotment scheme and promoting an Indian state to be called “Sequoyah.”  As usual, the Creeks rebelled.  As usual, the Indians were given no choice in the matter.  The Oklahoma Enabling Act was passed in 1906, decreeing that the two territories would be joined into a single state, setting forth the parameters for a state constitution and authorizing a constitutional convention of delegates from both territories.

*

My fourth-grade Indian pageant should have had a weeping bride being brought to the altar in shackles, forced to marry her uncouth suitor.  And she should not have been wearing a virginal white robe, having been repeatedly raped by the white man over the centuries.

But given our inferiority complex, our next-to-the-last-state, dirt-poor, dust-bowl history, we had little to be proud of other than Indians and oil.  And, as folks said in those days, “why dwell on the unhappy part of the past?”

*

William H. “Alfalfa Bill” Murray was elected president of the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention.

Alfalfa Bill had always been something of a hero of mine, based on what little we had been taught or I had heard. President of the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention, first Speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, two-term congressman, ninth governor, presidential candidate, firebrand and all-around colorful character.

And, oh, that marvelous droopy, soup-strainer moustache.

I knew people who used to eat breakfast at the same Oklahoma City restaurant every morning as Alfalfa Bill.  He would order a whole, sliced, raw onion and munch it down with his steak and eggs.  You evidently didn’t want to get into too intimate a conversation with Bill Murray.

A life-long agrarian, Murray contended that “Civilization begins and ends with the plow.”  In the early 1930’s, he organized an unsuccessful colonial expedition to Bolivia, hoping to found an agrarian utopia based on cotton.  Later, after returning to Oklahoma and being elected governor, he became a pint-sized Huey Long, publicly championing the little man while making sure that his patronage powers did well for him.  He promoted free textbooks, secured an appropriation to provide free seed for kitchen gardens for destitute people and allowed citizens to grow vegetables on state property.

Murray used the Oklahoma National Guard as his own personal police force, including ordering them to collect tickets at University of Oklahoma football games and to take over thousands of oil wells to slow down the excess production that was glutting the market and causing prices to plummet.

His most famous exploit, and the one which first brought him to my attention, involved several toll bridges built by the state of Texas over the Red River, which separates Texas from Oklahoma.  Murray was fervently opposed to toll bridges and ordered the Oklahoma state highway department to construct a free bridge on a different state highway crossing the river.  When Texas obtained a court injunction ordering the free bridge closed, Murray summoned the National Guard, blocked access to the toll bridges and forced the reopening of the free bridge.

Prominently driving the lead bulldozer blocking the major toll bridge was Alfalfa Bill Murray.  That’s my kind of governor.  Or he was, until I began my research for this book.

*

Nearly twenty years before his bulldozer heroics, my erstwhile hero’s first proposed constitution for the new state contained such severe restrictions on the civil liberties of black citizens that President Theodore Roosevelt threatened to veto it.  The convention delegates simply shrugged their shoulders and drafted a squeaky-clean constitution which, no sooner than it was ratified by Congress, they proceeded to amend in their first legislative session.

Alfalfa Bill was Speaker of the House when state constitutional amendments were passed mandating segregated educational facilities for whites and blacks, segregated hearses, segregated water fountains and segregated transportation facilities.

We didn’t learn this in school, any more than we learned about the shotgun wedding between the Territories – with the shotgun paradoxically pointed at the bride.

*

Murray’s second draft of the Oklahoma Constitution (minus the racial restrictions which were later re-inserted) was actually pretty progressive, compared to most other state constitutions. It prohibited child labor and convict labor, mandated an eight-hour work day on public projects and established an initiative process whereby citizens with enough signatures could place a petition on the ballot for approval or rejection by all of the voters.

The initiative process was referred to as “direct democracy” when it was proposed in California four years later, but Oklahoma got there first.

It was a progressive and reformist time in the country, except for the White House.  Roosevelt didn’t like the state’s second proposed constitution either, but felt politically unable to veto it.  Instead, he sent his hand-picked presidential successor, then-Secretary of War William Howard Taft, to Oklahoma to campaign against its adoption by the citizens.

The Democrats countered by inviting the country’s most famous speaker, William Jennings Bryan, to stump the state to urge adoption of the proposed constitution and support for Democratic candidates in the upcoming election.  Bryan declared the constitution “the best…of any state in the Union,” and “one of the great documents of modern times.”

The proposed constitution was ratified overwhelmingly by Oklahomans in 1907, as was a separate constitutional amendment for prohibition.

Equally overwhelming was Bryan’s loss the following year in his third presidential bid.

Bryan’s final defeat wouldn’t come for another 18 years yet, with the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in 1925, and the “silver-tongued orator” would continue to help shape progressive (for those days) American politics until that time.

A bigot, braggart and blowhard, but a champion out-of-step with his time, Bryan not only lost a handful of presidential elections, but saw the free-silver monetary policy for which he fought for decades (“You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold”) defeated or ignored, again and again, in Congress.

Bryan just might be the most famous loser in American history.  Yet it can be argued that, for all his failures, he ensured the passage of the most progressive state constitution of all the forty-six, and that he closed the American frontier and placed the hasp on its gate.

Give Bryan his due: the closing of the frontier was no mean feat.  And a glorious feat it was…if you were European…as was Bryan.

But if you were Native American or African American, the clanking sound of that gate signaled the end of any hope of freedom or dignity for the best part of the rest of the century.

Next up, Chapter 11:  Prairie City, Iowa.  More home than home.