Guthrie
Politics and poker, politics and poker,
Playing for a pot that’s mediocre
Sheldon Harnick
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June, 2005
Brick is so strange to me now, having lived more than half my life in earthquake country. Northern California has some brick buildings – mostly old warehouses – but for the most part, they’ve either been retrofitted with giant steel trusses or have been abandoned as too expensive to save.
Oklahoma is a sea of bricks. I didn’t remember this. But it makes sense. There has never been much in the way of usable timber in Central and Western Oklahoma: some pine forests here and there, but mostly blackjack and scrub-oak, suitable only for stove wood.
But clay, now, clay the state has in abundance. You can make bricks from the clay in your own back yard, if you only had a kiln.
Practically the entire University of Oklahoma campus is built of brick, in a curious style dubbed “Cherokee Gothic” by architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Almost all of the state’s houses are brick. The older houses are red or russet, the newer developments tend to be gray. But brick still. Except for the commercial buildings.
Following fashion, most of the newer commercial buildings are stainless steel, marble, glass, sandstone – anything but brick.
But there are no such modern oddities in Guthrie.
*
Downtown Guthrie
In Guthrie – probably because there are no new commercial buildings – everything is brick and nearly everything evokes the past.
Except for the streets, which I distinctly remember as being either brick or cobblestone; but as I drive randomly around town, I can’t find a single street not paved with asphalt.
Guthrie was the first capital of Oklahoma. Its downtown brick buildings, dating mostly from the 1890s, once boasted a thriving community of banks, hotels, businesses and mercantile stores. But like all tourist destinations, Guthrie’s nicely preserved downtown today houses mostly antique shops and boutiques.
But if I squint my eyes, I can travel back in time a hundred years or more. No wonder Guthrie has become something of an on-location Mecca for shooting films set anywhere between 1890 and 1940.
**
Oklahoma’s government began here. And state government has always been as untamed as the state’s cowboy-and-Indian past, nearly always for sale, whether for cash or votes, nearly always beholden to special interests, be they oil companies, the Ku Klux Klan, cotton farmers or the Baptist Church, and always swinging wildly between corruption and reform.
Senator and former governor Robert S. Kerr, one of the most powerful men in the U.S. Senate in the 1950’s, and a strong force for bringing federal money to the state, once said, “I’m against any deal [my state] ain’t in on,” and also bragged that “any man elected to Congress who doesn’t become a millionaire must be a damned fool.”
And no governor was more colorful and controversial than “Alfalfa Bill” Murray, who personally drove the lead bulldozer when the National Guard blocked a toll bridge over the Red River. But Kerr and Murray were, in the end, merely ordinary players in the theater of Oklahoma politics.
*
The first act began with the first governor and set the scene for all successive administrations.
The Oklahoma Enabling Act of 1906, joining the Oklahoma and Indian Territories in preparation for statehood, had specified that the state capital would be at Guthrie until 1913. But the state’s first governor, Charles N. Haskell, a Democrat, disliked Guthrie and its local politics (a “Republican nest,” he reportedly called it), and definitely disliked the local newspaper which cut the Democrats no slack.
A strong proponent of the initiative and referendum systems, Haskell managed to have the Legislature place a referendum proposition on the 1910 ballot asking voters to choose among three cities as a permanent location for the state capital. There was no strong opposition in advance of the vote, as the proposition was silent on exactly when the relocation would take effect.
But when Oklahoma City won the vote handily, Haskell saw no reason to wait. The sheriff of Logan County, anticipating a coup, posted guards around the state offices to prevent the removal of state documents from Guthrie, but Haskell countered by ordering the National Guard to arrest him. The governor then directed his secretary to bring the state seal from Guthrie to Oklahoma City, reportedly in a basket of laundry.
“Basket of laundry” sounds more than a little embellished to me, but it does make a good story. Other accounts merely recite that Haskell “stole” the state seal and removed it thirty miles south to Oklahoma City in the middle of the night.
Regardless of how the seal came to Oklahoma City, Haskell proclaimed, two days after the referendum, that Oklahoma City was now the state capital and the Huckins Hotel, a downtown institution until Urban Renewal, was now the capitol building. Guthrie protested. Tulsa protested. A year later, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the move.
*
In the second act, notorious train robber Al Jennings ran for governor in 1914, and placed a respectable third in the Democratic primary. The Oklahoma legislature impeached and removed from office two governors (the state’s fifth and sixth) back-to-back in the 1920’s and a previous attempt to impeach the fourth governor lost by a single vote.
The fifth governor, John C. Walton, was a master of patronage, who even pressured the state’s two universities to place his friends on their payroll. Patronage was more or less a perquisite of office, however, and although it was the ostensible reason for his removal, the real reason was his war against the Klan.
In the early 1920’s, Klan membership in Oklahoma was estimated at upwards of 100,000 (or almost five percent of the total population) and its activities were growing more vicious and more open by the month. Walton, a Klan favorite when he campaigned for governor, first placed two counties, and then the entire state, under martial law, and suspended habeas corpus, the latter in direct contravention of the state constitution. When he called a special session of the legislature to draft laws to curb the Klan, it refused to act, but met in another special session a week later to draft articles of impeachment.
Walton served barely over ten months as governor.
*
Henry S. Johnson, the sixth governor, campaigned throughout the state for progressive Democratic (and Catholic) presidential candidate Al Smith in 1928. Republican Herbert Hoover won the election, carrying on his coattails a substantial number of Oklahoma Republicans, including state legislators, congressmen and justices of the state Supreme Court.
The Oklahoma Democrats blamed Johnson for the debacle and, less than a month after Hoover was sworn in, joined with Republicans to remove him from office.
The third act has been mostly a reprise of the first two: corruption and reform; buying and selling; corruption and reform, broken only by the occasional boringly honest administration.
**
If there is a single restaurant in downtown Guthrie, a sleepy farming community since 1910, and later an Oklahoma City bedroom community, I couldn’t find it.
But I did stumble across the Drugstore Museum. Located in an ornate brick building built in 1890 – just a year after the Run – it has been restored to celebrate not only a time long gone, but Guthrie’s first pharmacist, Foress B. Lillie. Lillie made the run, settled in Guthrie and received the second pharmacy license issued in the state, a license which hangs on the wall of the museum.
Straddling a careful line between a faithful reproduction of a statehood-era drugstore and a museum, the place has its original wood floors, an old-time soda fountain and authentic display cases, counters and shelves, all crammed floor-to-ceiling with bottles, tins, scales, mortars, notions and nostrums.
“We’re all volunteers, here,” the septuagenarian docent interrupted my study of hundreds of bottles of quack medicines and now-banned substances. “We’re grateful for your donations. Have you been to Guthrie before?”
“Yes…” but I had to stop and think. “But the last time was probably…1966? Wow, almost forty years ago.”
“From around here?”
“Originally, but I’ve lived in California for thirty years. My father’s family was from Guthrie and the Guthrie area.”
“Well, I’ve lived here all my life. Could be I knew some of them. What was their name?”
“Um, the family name was Dimick, Roy and Daisy. They farmed near here off and on. Then they divorced and Daisy married Dick Collins, who was a car salesman at the Chevrolet dealership in town. I don’t remember the name, but I’m pretty sure there was only one.”
“Austin Chevrolet,” the docent prompted.
“Austin Chevrolet. That’s right!”
“Oh, yeah. It was a big deal in town for a long time. Then, when the old man died, the boys tried to carry it on for a while, but you know how those things go. It’s not here any more. But I think I remember the name Collins.”
“My Grandma Daisy had several cafes in town over the years,” I said. “She’d get bored sitting at home. Or maybe they ran short of money – I don’t know. So she’d buy a café here or there and operate it for a couple of years. Then she’d get tired of that and sell it. I know there was one downtown somewhere at a hotel, but I don’t remember where.”
“And what did you say your family name was?”
“Dimick. You wouldn’t know my dad, because he left early. But my granddad was a barber who sold moonshine out of the back door of his shop. My aunt says the shop was across the street from the post office.”
“Well, hey, the post office is right over there. And I know there used to be a barbershop across the street, right by the alley. You can’t see it from here, but if you walk right around the corner, there, in front of the post office, you can’t miss it.
“And I can’t swear to it, but I think the name ‘Dimick’ is familiar, too.”
Across the street west of the post office, adjacent to an alley. That’s just what Aunt Verna said. I walked around the corner and found it, right beside the alley where Roy chased the kids out to play if they were being too loud, and where his customers would lurk for purposes other than a haircut. Today only an empty store front in a larger building, it had no stories to tell me.
But Verna had already given me the story. Now I had a picture to go with it.