The King of Oklahoma City

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world

Like a Colossus

Julius Cæsar. Act 1. Sc. 2.

Edward King Gaylord scouted out Oklahoma City in 1902 and returned for good in 1903 – four years before statehood and a bare two years after the death of Queen Victoria.  He carried with him three things much more important than his luggage: a bankroll, Victorian sensibilities and a desire to own his own newspaper.  He would spend the next 71 years as social, moral and political arbiter of Oklahoma City (almost as many years as his spiritual mentor had ruled England).

Gaylord had been business manager of his brother’s paper, the St. Joseph (Missouri) Dispatch, but chaffed under his brother’s leadership.  A chance comment by a colleague led him to Oklahoma City, one of the last frontiers in America, and where a man of substance, pluck and ambition might start a successful newspaper.

Established almost a decade before, The Daily Oklahoman had gone through a series of owner-publishers and was a struggling paper relying on social columns and wire services for most of its content.  Gaylord and two partners bought a 45-percent interest.  The other daily newspaper in town at the time, the Times-Journal (along with every other general-interest paper to be founded in Oklahoma City during the next century), Gaylord would eventually manage to ruin and then to absorb.

In 1907, for instance, a pair of free newspapers were established, the morning Pointer and the afternoon Examiner.  “Throwaways” or “shoppers,” we call them nowadays – papers that depend solely on advertising revenue (in turn based on circulation) although being more than a bit light on the news side.

As the new papers drained revenue from The Daily Oklahoman, Gaylord decided to offer free classified advertising and even started his own throwaway evening paper.  Within four years, the Pointer and the Examiner folded.

The Oklahoma City Times (successor to the Times-Journal) was bought out by Gaylord in 1916.

The Oklahoma City News, a Scripps-Howard paper, began publication in 1906 and folded in 1939.  Shedding crocodile tears, Gaylord wrote in an editorial that

With the Oklahoma News gone, we feel an emptiness as real as if a human being with whom we had labored for many years had died an untimely death…The Daily Oklahoman and the Oklahoma City Times will try harder than ever to print the best newspapers circulated in any community of 250,000 in the United States.  They will provide a forum for all shades of opinion.  They will try to print all of the news and both sides of every story.

Many considered it an empty promise.

Other newspapers would come and go over the next decades, the most recent serious challenger being The Oklahoma Journal, founded in 1963 by W.P. “Bill” Atkinson as an alternative to The Oklahoman’s strident, ultra-right politics and blue-nosed moralizing.  Atkinson’s paper, by then owned by a California company, folded in 1980.

Along the way, E.K. – always the business manager – discovered that not only does advertising revenue drive newspapers, but advertising could also be used as a bludgeon to crush competitors or enemies.  He would use the power of advertising in his papers (such as running free classifieds to crush the Pointer and the Examiner) or the withholding of the same (including refusing to sell ads to merchants who also bought ads in opposing papers) with ruthless efficiency and to great effect.

Just as he forced all other daily newspapers out of town (he never bothered much with the weeklies serving a niche market), Gaylord forced a buyout of the remaining 55-percent interest in The Oklahoman in 1918, making him the majority stockholder in the paper and the sole voice of Central Oklahoma.

*

E.K. established the tone for his newspaper early on: Christian prayers were printed on the front page and Christian sermons on the editorial page.  As late as the 1970’s, his front page featured a column labeled “Sooner Stanzas” – sappy 19^th Century-style poems written by his staff poet laureate.

The paper crusaded against liquor, gambling and prostitution, both before and after statehood, although these campaigns were tempered for a while early on following a visit by a delegation of the town’s most influential businessmen.  (This temporary retreat led to an amicable falling-out between Gaylord and one of his two investors, resulting in E.K. buying out Roy McClintock’s fifteen-percent interest.)

A staunch foe of organized labor, Gaylord inveighed for decades against “labor racketeers,” once even going so far as to declare that “most union members are under the thumb of union bosses.”  His glory days were during the 1940’s and 1950’s, when no civil liberties were too dear to sacrifice for the war effort and Communists were to be found skulking behind every tree.  When a bizarre series of bombings accompanied an effort to unionize the state’s barbers (I certainly didn’t understand it at the time; barbers have never been my image of “racketeers” or bombers) The Oklahoman had a field day.  When the railroads were still thriving, but trying to break the back of the unions, “featherbedding” was the word of the day and E.K. used it often in huge, bold headlines.

*

Nor was Gaylord any too fond of Indians or Negroes, but he loved protectionism and isolationism.  A selection of headlines and bon mots from the early years:

September 25, 1907

INDIAN DRINKS, GAMBLES, FOR-

GES CHECKS, AND IS NOW

IN JAIL

May 7, 1907:

DARKTOWN POKER

PARTY DISTURBED

October 14, 1910:

FRUITS OF FALSITY SHOWN;

FALSITY STILL SURVIVE

The pages of the Guthrie State Capital [newspaper] during the campaign …constitute a political criminal record, devoid of a single virtue of a decent fight and rotten to the core with putrid, contemptible falsehoods that reek in their own puddle of filth and send out a sickening stench that stagnates to this day in the nostrils of some…

November 7, 1910:

Jack Johnson, negro pugilist, was hit on the head by a thrown brick in Chicago, but not much hurt.  Just think!  it might have struck his shin.

November 7, 1910:

…”Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute,” was an expression when there was more patriotism than commercialism in this nation.  The sentiment today seems to be, “Millions for foreign loans, but not one cent for western investments.”

…Possibly a central bank might serve to expedite those $50,000,000 loans to build Chinese railroads, while business at home might be carried on by the employment of asset currency or wampum.

*

E.K. was terrified that his own employees might want to organize and might want to be paid a living wage.  When the Oklahoma City Press Club, which had been active in the ‘teens, finally folded, he spent decades fending off every effort to revive it, fearing that, if they had a warm place to congregate, newspaper reporters might try to organize.  A new press club was eventually established, but it was dominated by advertising salesmen and public relations types and had few actual members from the working press.

In Gaylord terminology, there was no such organization as a “labor union,” except as a part of the phrase “labor union goons.”  Union representatives were always described as “labor racketeers.”  According to E.K., these racketeers were only out to collect monthly dues and line their own pockets, at the expense of the poor working man.  In the forties, he claimed they were all but in the payroll of the Nazis.

Labor Racketeers Enemies of America

*

Government a Partner With Racketeers

*

Rick [Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker] Blasts

Out at Labor

Racketeers

*

No Goon Squad Wanted Here

THE GOOD PEOPLE OF OKLAHOMA CITY may as well recognize the fact that there is danger in the air.  If the labor racketeers get an inch they will take a mile.  The ultimate aim of such racketeers is to put every city in the United States under their thumbs and rule every industrial plant by brute force – by terror and intimidation….

*

Congress Can Stop This Racket

The racketeer who collects $16 from a common laborer is taking the bread out of the mouths of workers’ families….

*

Pastor Says President Is

Mouthpiece of Racketeers

*

Labor or Extortion, Which?

*

Tax Exemptions for Racketeers

*

Labor is Warned

Of Racketeers

*

And in what must have been one of his proudest achievements, E.K. ran a weekly anti-labor editorial in the spring of 1942 under the standing headline Idle Machines Work for Hitler:

Admittedly there are those who have exploited labor in the past, who are exploiting labor today, and who will continue to exploit labor until the universal acceptance of the Golden Rule shall purge selfishness from the hearts of men.

But no exploitation in our annals has ever surpassed in amplitude or obliquity the hijacking of hundreds of thousands of American workers by the high toll takers of labor’s exploiters.  No harder fight has ever been waged than the fight of the press to relieve citizens from the shameful necessity of paying racketeers for the privilege of working for their country….

Dwain, my father, a Santa Fe Railroad engineer, proudly paid his union dues every month without coercion by “goon squads” or “racketeers,” and was quick to acknowledge that his life was better off because of the sacrifices of the workers before him.  But Gaylord’s constant harping finally had its desired effect on the majority of the state’s citizens, and since 2001, the state’s constitution prohibits union-only, or “closed” shops.

*

In the fall of 1967, Gaylord briefly interrupted his campaign du jour (convincing Oklahomans that Vietnam War protestors were all dupes of the International Communist Conspiracy¹) to engage in a successful, full-frontal attack on the free-speech policies of the University of Oklahoma.

A junior at OU that year and a journalism major, out of curiosity I accompanied a friend of mine to the Student Union one evening to hear a speech by Paul Boutelle, someone I had never heard of.  The friend was a half-hearted member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).  Paul Boutelle was the vice-presidential candidate for the Socialist Workers’ Party.

I went to the speech expecting the usual tired radical rhetoric and came away deeply moved by a man who spoke to the pain and longing of the black and the powerless.  My family, being neither, gave little thought to these issues.  Like many in the audience, I raised my hand and argued with him, but the speech was the first of many awakening shocks I would receive over the next several decades.

“Black Power,” Boutelle said, “simply means GET OFF OUR BACKS!  Quit trying to keep us down and let us succeed.”

On American institutions: “There are more crooks on Wall Street than anywhere else in the world.”  An exaggeration, perhaps, but only a slight one given the revelations of the last twenty years or so.

On the Vietnam War: “They say we’re fighting for the self-preservation of the Vietnamese?  Nonsense….I’ll be damned if my son will go to fight the white man’s war.”

The appearance was co-sponsored by the SDS, but that group’s OU chapter was a small one, and the majority of the audience was, if not completely hostile, at least not very receptive.  The foreign students gave him the hardest time, but he fielded every question calmly and sincerely.

*

The firestorm hit the next day and continued to grow over the next several weeks.  Gaylord’s papers raged against the appearance on campus of a man variously described as a “Harlem Negro,” “Harlem Negro taxi-driver and avowed Marxist,” “a Harlem Negro militant,” “an avowed Negro Marxist” and “an avowed Harlem Negro Marxist.”

It was important, of course, to make the point to those readers not familiar with either the man, his politics or his speech, that Boutelle was a “Negro.”  Gaylord seldom went in for the subtle code words or phrases used today.  Worse, still, Boutelle was an “avowed Negro,” which one can only assume must be the worst kind.

A scheduled Boutelle speech in Oklahoma City was cancelled.  Lecterns were pounded in the two houses of the Oklahoma State Legislature.  University funding was threatened.  A legislative investigation was called for.  Angry meetings were held between state representatives and the university president, led by Reps. Texanna Hatchett and David L. Boren.

Heads rolled.  Well, one head rolled.  A staff member with the university-connected Southwest Center for Human Relations Studies, who had helped arrange the Boutelle appearance, became the sacrificial lamb, being “relegated to full-time office work rather than being available for speaking engagements representing OU.”

Some months later, the executive committee of the Center issued a policy statement upholding its decision to allow a credentialed candidate for Vice President of the United States to speak on campus:

The public at large and members of government must realize that a major role of a university is that of creating conditions which will permit important controversial problems and issues to be discussed and analyzed in a climate conducive to their understanding and resolution…[We] insist upon the right and responsibility of the center and other recognized segments of the university to sponsor or invite any person to participate in planned educational efforts at this institution.

But the statement was too late.  Neither the university nor the legislature agreed that a person out of touch with Oklahoma politics – even if he were a vice-presidential candidate – had any place speaking at a public institution.  Weeks before, university president George L. Cross had already apologized profusely, terming Boutelle a “rabble rouser” and stating that “[w]hen you jeopardize the freedom to explore ideas by inviting a person like that to our campus [ ! ], I can see being undone what I’ve tried to do over the years.”

A few days later, a university official indicated that he did not consider the Boutelle speech to be an issue of “academic freedom” and, according to a representative at a closed meeting with legislators and university brass, reportedly said the appearance “was the basis of a clinical experience for students to see how such people talk, look and behave – not an example of academic freedom.”

Such people.  The Oklahoman didn’t bother with code words, but the university did.

The university official was, again, president George L. Cross.  One of the small group of legislators calling him onto the carpet was David L. Boren, later governor of Oklahoma, later U.S. Senator from Oklahoma and currently, thanks to his decades-long relationship with the Gaylord family, president of the University of Oklahoma.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

*

While assaulting unions, the minimum wage and any legislation more favorable to the working man than to the employer, Gaylord was himself becoming rich.  During the Depression, he faced a delivery problem throughout the state when several passenger train lines were eliminated.  E.K. started his own truck-based delivery service, Mistletoe Express, which became a successful and profitable regional carrier for decades before sliding into bankruptcy in late century.

In 1928, he bought one of Oklahoma’s earliest radio stations, WKY, a station established so early that it was one of only a small handful of stations west of the Mississippi River whose assigned call letters began with a “W” instead of a “K.”  (In the 1950’s and ‘60’s, the station was one of only two pop music stations in Oklahoma City and teenagers were divided (much like Ford drivers and Chevrolet drivers) into those who favored WKY and those who only listened to KOMA.)

In 1948, Gaylord founded WKY-TV, the first television station in the market, and a very few years later bought yet another television station in Florida.  Although long affiliated with NBC, well into the 1970’s  WKY preferred to devote large chunks of its daily schedule to locally produced programs – farm news, children’s programming and home-grown country-and-western shows, especially those featuring the owners of local furniture stores, who were their own sponsors and whose programming represented practically pure gravy for the station.

(“We plow 9 to 9 weekdays and 9 to 5 on Sundays.  Come on down and see these ol’ country boys!”)

After the old man’s death, his son established a Los Angeles television production studio, which provided such entertainment as “The Glen Campbell Show” and “Hee Haw.”  Branching out into Nashville in the 1980’s, Edward Gaylord first bought Opryland and, inside of only a few years,  owned the Grand Ol Opry, Opryland Hotel, Opryland Theme Park, The Nashville Network and Country Music Television, although most of the “Opry” empire has since been sold off.

*

E.K. only lost one race in his life: the race to establish an Air Force base controlled by Oklahoma City and the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce.  W.P. “Bill” Atkinson got there first but E.K. never forgot, never forgave, and ensured that his fame would far outlast that of the former pupil turned biggest enemy.  The Gaylord name lives on and is honored today in Oklahoma, while Atkinson is all but forgotten except in Midwest City.

*

E.K. Gaylord died on May 30, 1974, at the age of 101.  Waiting in the wings to turn a mediocre newspaper into a national joke was son Edward L. Gaylord, whom everyone referred to as “Eddie.”  Knowing he would never command the same respect as his father, and would never be known as “E.L.,” Eddie settled for making himself more feared than his father ever had been.

“E.K. wasn’t really all that bad,” a former Oklahoman employee, later an editor at the paper’s last serious competitor, told me. “He was actually very soft-spoken and gentlemanly.  And at least he was a newspaperman, unlike his son or Atkinson.  He always came down on the side of the news department, even if the advertising department didn’t like it.

“In the 5 ½ years I worked for him, he never once pulled a story or killed a story or asked a reporter to change a story.  He had a lot of real old-time, professional news people working for him.  People from the old school who had been in the business for years.  They wouldn’t have put up with anything other than honest journalism.  And he knew it.

“Eddie, now…Eddie was another thing altogether.  He was a vicious little bastard. All the things you think you’ve heard about The Oklahoman ignoring news that didn’t fit its own politics, and all the things you’ve read about how terrible the newspaper was – those were all when Eddie was running the show.”

*

Walter Harrison, a former Oklahoman editor, included a short, unofficial biography of E.K. Gaylord in his 1954 book, “Me and My Big Mouth.”  He contrasted father and son like this:  “Pere Gaylord’s domination of his highly successful empire has been so ruthless, that some in the know wonder whether Eddie will be capable of making his decisions when the boss finally takes his hand off the tiller.

Harrison needn’t have worried.

*

If E.K.’s Oklahoman was occasionally strident and biased, Eddie’s Oklahoman was downright vicious.

The senior Gaylord, surprisingly enough, seemed to have no great agenda against homosexuals, at least compared to his son.  There were incidents, of course.  One of E.K.’s most talented deskmen was let go by the managing editor when it was discovered that he was gay.  When friends attempted to intercede, E.K. reportedly told them he thought the former employee was “a nice young man” who had simply fallen in with bad companions, but that he left staffing decisions to his department heads.

And when an Oklahoma City mayor became a bit too notorious in his search for pretty boys, Gaylord calmly informed him that he could serve out his present term but it would be very unwise for him to seek re-election.  The mayor heeded his advice.

The stridently anti-gay editorials, however, didn’t begin until Edward Gaylord assumed control of the paper.  Eddie was hell on homosexuals and assumed the rest of the state was, also.  And his editorials were straight out of his father’s book of vitriol:

What Is to Stop It?

A society conditioned to believe that homosexuals are normal folks with equal protection under the law should have no problem accepting society’s blessing of…that minority of homosexual men whose preference (orientation?) is for young boys….We won’t even mention those whose sexual preference runs toward the non-human….

*

‘Non-Discrimination” Act

Is Gays’ Stealth Bomber

*

Homosexual Issue Signals

Divorce of Law, Morality

*

The Hate Card (July 5, 1997) used the phrase “homosexual activists” four times in an essay of less than 200 words.

*

Homosexual ‘Rights’ Based

On Propaganda, Pandering

A case could be made that more people are denied jobs because of acne and tattoos than because of sexual preferences….

*

Something to Talk About

Please don’t tell us that people once used the Bible to justify slavery.  That old dog won’t hunt any more….Unless one is Bibliophobic (afraid of what God says about this), one must agree that homosexual behavior is sinful….

*

Conservatives Must Speak Out

Against Politics of Intimidation

Men may alter laws to say that homosexual couples must be treated the same as married couples….But changing man-made laws does not change the laws of God that are written on the human heart….

*

Homosexual Agenda Trying

To Declare Flaws as Virtues

A cultural war is being waged against moral codes, traditional values and standards of common decency….

*

Eroding Core Values

Get Ready for Same-Sex Marriages

*

Another False Notion

Doctors Cave in to Homosexual Rights

Homosexual activists say two men or two women can be good parents, no different than heterosexual parents.  Yet that notion runs counter to intrinsic values of human behavior….

The foregoing represent only a small sample of the editorials railing against gay rights for only six years, 1996 through 2002.  The total number, from the beginnings of the gay rights movement in the 1970s through today, would fill a book.

Perhaps they already have.

I can’t leave this subject without quoting a couple of favorite headlines placed over letters to the editor: Homosexual Activity a Sign Of Society’s End and Gays Are Own Enemies.

*

James V. Risser, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and director emeritus of the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists at Stanford University, wrote a lengthy feature article on the country’s few remaining family-owned daily newspapers for the June, 1998, issue of the American Journalism Review, published by the University of Maryland.  The first newspaper featured was Edward Gaylord’s Daily Oklahoman, which Risser generously termed “a journalistic underachiever.”

Contrasting the newspaper itself with the money poured into its lavish new headquarters, Risser wrote that “It’s not clear, though, that enough Gaylord money has been spent to make a better newspaper.”  The news staff was skimpy for a paper of its size, but, after all, what “would (the paper) do with additional reporters, given its relatively small newshole”?

“The Oklahoman’s selection of foreign stories is quirky at best,” he wrote.  And “the problem with the Oklahoman editorial page is not that it’s conservative but that it’s blindly so, simplistic and loose with the facts.”

The focus of Risser’s article was not on the quality of the “independents,” but mini-portraits of the largest ones.  But the following year, the Columbia Journalism Review, the most respected periodical in the country on matters journalistic, dropped a bombshell in the form of a five-part article entitled “The Worst Newspaper in America.”  The series may be the first time that the term “The Daily Disappointment” made it into print, but many Oklahomans, liberal and conservative, who have never heard of the Columbia Journalism Review continue to refer to the paper by that nickname.

“Where else can you find a big-city editorial page…that not only demonizes unions, environmentalists, feminists, Planned Parenthood, and public education, but also seems obsessed with lecturing gays?…Want lots of enterprising, in-depth stories with plenty of world and national news…?  How about praline recipes instead?”

Or a daily front-page prayer.

And despite the fact that six out of ten Oklahoma City households don’t even bother to subscribe to The Oklahoman, its captive advertisers pay more than double the rates per 1,000 households reached than do advertisers in The New York Times, making for a pretty tidy profit.

Once a Democratic newspaper, The Oklahoman changed with the Southern times to become not only Republican, but more conservative than the Republican National Committee.  Columnists during Eddie’s reign were uniformly right-wing, without one single balancing voice.  In October, 1998, alone, the paper printed 57 anti-Clinton editorials, sometimes as many as three per day.

Oddly enough, Eddie was a registered Democrat.

Editorial page editor Patrick McGuigan proudly proclaimed, “We’re trying to change the political culture; we’re trying to make Oklahoma a conservative bastion.”  Funny.  That’s not the mission or calling of a newspaper that I recall being taught in journalism school.

Most respectable dailies catch regular hell from both sides of the political spectrum.  Liberals write to complain of the papers’ “obvious” conservative bent and conservatives write to complain that the paper is “obviously” part of the liberal media conspiracy.  These papers must be doing something right.

The Columbia Journalism Review piece termed Eddie Gaylord’s Oklahoman “a partisan bully,” although it did quote staffers as saying that, since Oklahoma has been an historically Democratic state (forgetting that Oklahoma has not been “Democratic” in the national sense of the term for more than forty years), it is only natural that Democrats come in for close scrutiny more often than Republicans.

The Oklahoman was silent about the CJR portrait, leaving it to a suburban weekly to call the series “gutter journalism” and to claim that “the lying, prejudicial, trashy article [would not have been printed had The Oklahoman] been a newspaper with a liberal, left wing editorial policy.”

*

Four years later, in 2003, Eddie died, after having turned over control, some months before, to his son, E.K. Gaylord II.  Christy Gaylord Everest, one of Eddie’s two daughters, became publisher.  The Oklahoman was gushing in its tribute to Eddie’s passing.  Others were not so generous, including lobbyist Keith Smith, who praised the “new” Oklahoman:   “There used to be an anti-gay editorial every week, and I probably haven’t seen one in six months.”

Former Oklahoma governor David Walters noted:

A paper can either highlight your negatives or accentuate your positives, and that paper had developed that into a fine art form.  Well, actually, at times it wasn’t even a fine art form – it was just a kind of bludgeoning exercise.  But they were effective at it, because you only have to bludgeon every 10^th person, and the other nine get the message.

But Frosty Troy, editor of the liberal weekly Oklahoma Observer, and a highly popular national speaker, said it best:

Thirty years ago, he took what was one of the best papers in the Southwest and turned it into what would become known as one of the worst newspapers in America.  I don’t want to say anything bad about the man now that he’s dead, but I hope if he’s in heaven, they teach Journalism 101.

Another critic much later observed that a year after The Oklahoma Journal folded in 1980, Eddie’s newspaper’s circulation figures had hardly budged, “suggesting that there were forty thousand people in town who would rather read nothing than read The Oklahoman.”

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¹“The darkest aspect, and the greatest danger to the nation, occurs in evidence of a conspiracy.  There is far too much coordinated action for all these anti-war demonstrations to be spontaneous.  There are too many global overtones for them to be entirely indigenous to their various locales.”

Next Up:  The Leopard’s Spots

FIRST CONVERSION

For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.

Isaac Watts, Against Idleness and Mischief

Devil’s gonna get you
Devil’s gonna get you
Oh, the devil’s gonna get you
Man just as sure as you’re born.

Porter Grainger

.

When I reached high school, I discovered that I had less and less leisure time to get into much trouble.

Except, of course, for the World’s Largest Pipe Wrench and the fire hydrants in the new housing development.

“The Wrench,” as it came to be called, couldn’t possibly have been nine feet long, or it wouldn’t have fit in the trunk of a car.  It only looked that long.  And it can’t have weighed as much as I remember, or it would have taken two of us to carry it.  As it was, it only took a minimum of two of us to enjoy it.

James or Frankie or Bill would ask Warren or me (after all, “the wrench” was ours) on a Thursday or Friday afternoon, “Are you guys gonna use ‘the wrench’ this weekend?  Can we borrow it?”

*

Yet another square-mile section of Midwest City was being developed for tract houses.  Probably according to The Master Plan.

Underground utilities always go in first in a new development; then roads are graded; then building pads are graded and stakes with colored flags planted at the corner of each surveyed lot.

But this development was not your small-potatoes operation by a home-boy contractor who scraped together enough money to buy an acre or two and put in ten or twenty houses.  This development was almost an entire section, a square mile, the best part of six hundred and forty acres.  At least 2,000 homes, allowing for streets, another school site and space along the four section lines for strip malls and other commercial development.  All of the twisty streets for which Midwest City was famous were graded before a single concrete pad was poured or a single frame went up.

And within a few hundred feet of each other along those graded dirt roads were scores of fire hydrants, already connected to the municipal water supply.

All of them just waiting to do what fire hydrants were designed to do.

*

I stole the pipe wrench from a construction site and tossed it into Warren’s trunk.  It may have taken us a week or two to realize that its entertainment value was worth its own weight, but then good fortune is not always accompanied by knowledge of good fortune.

The new housing development was deserted when the contractors and workmen went home every afternoon, and was a great place to drive with your girlfriend after a movie for what was then known as “parking and petting.”  Well… “parking and/or petting,” since you could park without petting but it was difficult to pet without parking.  These are quaint concepts today, when fifteen-year-old girls are only too anxious to make their boyfriends’ dreams come true.  But in mid-America in mid-century, they were serious concerns for adults.

One church even published a series of pamphlets about the evils of “petting,” coyly never spelling out what the vile deed consisted of, but leaving no doubt that it led to pregnancy and social ostracism, with Ingrid Bergman as a prime example.  As if any of us knew anything about the Bergman-Rosselini scandal, which had occurred when we were about three years old.

But boys will be boys, girls will be girls and hormones will out.  Sooner or later, nearly all of the girls found themselves with their bras unhooked and wondering just how firmly to fend off the hand now fumbling at the button on their pants.

We still operated on the baseball analogy in those days: kissing was first base, petting above the waist was second base, petting below the waist was third base and “going all the way” was a home run.  Useful euphemisms in a more innocent age, they have since gone the way of “23 skidoo” and “cut a rug.”  I actually had to explain them to my stepdaughter.  God, do I feel old sometimes.

Today, according to Kristi, virginal girls don’t mark their progress in such slow and defined steps.  If you’ve been “going with” a guy for a couple of months, and you’re at least fourteen or fifteen, you don’t waste time on second and third bases.  You just stroll casually from first base to home plate.

*

I’m not a prude, nor am I a sexual hypocrite.  I bought Kristi her first condoms when she was fourteen, and she has repaid me by being sexually responsible, by not being promiscuous and by being open and honest with me.

Today’s kids have much healthier sexual attitudes than we did, but I can’t help feeling that they’re missing a hell of a lot of the fun, without “parking.”  Adolescent sex is supposed to be a little furtive, a little dirty, a little like the world’s longest foreplay, with each successive step savored for its delicious naughtiness.  The girl goes home to bed with an exaggerated swoon, reliving again and again the feel of her love’s hands on her body.  The boy goes home to bed and masturbates.

Once when Marianne and I were reminiscing about our teen years, Kristi could hardly believe we were serious.  “You mean you did it in a car?” she asked, aghast.

*

The embryonic subdivision could also be used for killing off the last few beers of the evening when you’ve failed again to score, or for sleeping it off in the car before driving back home the next morning to change clothes and go to work (each of you, of course, having spent the night at the other’s house…).

(Unless, of course, you were me, who came and went as I wanted and who was only moments away from realizing that I needed to get into the child-rearing business and start rearing myself.)

“Sleeping it off” was probably how Warren and I discovered what a city planning commission would have termed the “Highest and Best Use” for the World’s Largest Pipe Wrench.  The wrench was still in Warren’s trunk one night when we pulled into a hidden cul-de-sac of the new Meadowood subdivision, not quite too drunk to go home, but intending to remedy that fact right there.

Instead, while polishing off our dessert of cherry brandy, our attention kept coming back to the fire hydrant.  And then to the heretofore worthless piece of stolen equipment in Warren’s trunk.  And then back to the fire hydrant.

You don’t open the cap on a fire hydrant with just any old tool found in your average garage workshop, or, for that matter, in your average neighborhood hardware store.  Firemen have a hydrant wrench.  Lacking that, two guys can open a hydrant with a giant pipe wrench.

In all fairness, it did take us a couple of attempts to iron out the bugs.  When we first got the large cap unscrewed, we were puzzled because there was no water.  One of us eventually noticed that maybe you had to turn the faucet on?  You know, that thingee on the top?

Loosening that “thingee on the top” eventually freed a four-inch-diameter gush of water capable of gouging a trench two feet deep and at least twenty feet long across the dirt roadway.  It would have been as much fun as the cherry bomb in the Skytrain bathroom years before, except for the fact that we couldn’t hang around to see the reaction.

Of course we were careful.  Warren and I were much too smart for the adults in town, and were never caught at anything.  We weren’t dummies.  We didn’t open hydrants on any regular or predictable basis and we only told about and/or loaned the “The Wrench” to our dozen or so closest personal friends.

And it continued to be great fun for several months, until the night Frankie Kincaid dropped his wallet at the scene.

Policemen (and I’m sure they didn’t include Grady) know how to con teenagers, so Frankie ratted.  Luckily, neither Warren nor I had been along that evening, so we escaped any punishment.  But we lost the “The Wrench,” and if Frankie were alive today, I would tell him he owes me two hundred bucks for voluntarily surrendering my wrench.

*

And except for the master key to the school.  I honestly don’t remember how I scored this treasure, but it opened every lock in the entire building.  I used it for purposes both good and bad, including opening the door to home room when the teacher was late, and later passed it on to Rick as a legacy.  Rick, unfortunately, was too honest to use it for its intended purpose – mischief.  Despite my request that he pass it on to a deserving sophomore or junior upon his graduation, it probably rests today in a junk drawer at Rick’s house or in a landfill somewhere just outside of Midwest City.

My friend, Dwain, and I used it at 2 a.m. one night so he could change his English grades in one classroom while I wrote “FUCK HARMS” in felt-tip pen on the movie screen in Mr. Harms’ chemistry lab.

*

And except for Friday nights, which were still reserved for cruising and drinking beer with Warren and sometimes banging the bimbo across town while her mother was passed out in bed.

And except for being the keeper of the communal alcohol supply because I had a lockable cabinet in my bedroom.

Well, reformation was a slow process for several years, and not visible at all to Mildred, who focused solely on the family dynamics to the exclusion of my grades, my activities and the fact that I hadn’t been arrested in some time.

**

I worked after school to earn money to repay my mother for the loan she had made to me to buy the hupmobile (actually a 1954 Studebaker, but so nicknamed by one of the cooks at the cafeteria where I worked), to pay for gasoline, insurance and repairs, to pay for beer and hamburgers on Friday nights and hamburgers and movies on Saturday nights with a date.

One of my first jobs was at a discount department store called GEX (Government Employees’ Exchange), part of a chain whose gimmick was that you had to be a member, and in order to become a member, you had to be a government employee, or be related to a government employee, or know someone whose house cleaner also cleaned the house of a government employee.

“Government employees are not like the rest of the working force,” Mr. Cico would explain at the interminable employee rallies.  “Their salaries aren’t competitive with the marketplace, and it literally takes an Act of Congress for them to get a raise.  That’s what we’re about.  We were established to give an even break to our civil servants.”

It was bullshit, and the employees knew it.  But still.  A job was a job.

Like today’s discount warehouses, you had to show your membership card to gain entrance.  And employees were required to show their badges.

*

I had taken up smoking at about age seventeen because Warren smoked.  Having an addictive personality, it took me forty years to finally quit, while I suspect that Warren probably quit on a whim in his thirties.

I was technically not allowed to smoke in Mildred’s house, although Bob smoked both cigars and pipes.  But I did occasionally smoke in my bedroom (what the HELL right did they have to tell ME what to do?  I was the one rearing Steve by this point, and my boy was getting good grades, earning his own money at the rate of $1.25 an hour and beginning to plan his future.)

Big set-to one evening about the smoking:  Mildred lecturing, Bob walking through the house dramatically spritzing room deodorizer.  I grabbed another spray can and played “dueling deodorants.”  “Mine is unscented,” I challenged with a smirk, before slamming out the front door to go spend the night at Warren’s house.

Thirty minutes later, I was back, feeling incredibly stupid, not exactly knowing how to deal with the situation, but willing to take my lumps like a proper adult.

“Uh…this is a little bit embarrassing, but, uh…I forgot my employee badge.”

**

Not long before, I had discovered the high school’s speech and drama classes, and learned that my smart mouth could be used to win praise instead of to reinforce my outward image.  And I discovered that I was a ham at heart.  My occasional outbursts had always tended to be a bit histrionic.

Midwest City High School was appropriately noted first for its football team and second for its basketball squad.  But a distant third was the speech team, which always qualified several students for the state speech tournament each year at the University of Oklahoma.

So, what with speech activities, working part-time and girls (who were so much more fun after you got wheels of your own), I found myself with very little time left over for mischief.  If I changed course, it really was at first a matter of time management and only later a conscious choice.

I don’t at all think of speech class as a Monument to My Reformation, but rather as a footprint. Faulkner wrote that a monument only says, “at least I got this far.”  A footprint says “here is where I rested for a while before I started off again.”

*

Loving to read was my salvation, and Damon Runyon was the fuse that sparked my reformation.

Runyon was a New York sports writer in the 1920s and ‘30s who became famous for his comic short stories about Broadway night life and lowlifes.  The musical “Guys and Dolls” was made from bits and pieces of his stories.  I discovered an old copy of a Runyon anthology in Mrs. Dishman’s library and fell in love.

One sophomore day, a junior student came into English class to present his “humorous interpretation” event, an abridgement of Runyon’s “Rusty Minds the Baby.”

I would love to do that, I thought, and the next week switched one of my elective classes for Speech.  I wasn’t really very good at it, but I did try my hand at humorous interpretation, dramatic interpretation, writing speeches (Original Oratory), delivering other people’s speeches (Interpretive Oratory), debate and acting.  During the next three years I became a card-carrying member of both the National Forensic League and the National Thespian Society.  (Not that I could resist the humor of it.  I felt like the young George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” telling pre-teen Mary that “I’ve been nominated for membership in the National Geographic Society!”)

Contrary as always, when the class produced the musical, “Li’l Abner,” I asked for the part of Evil-Eye Fleegle.

*

Debate taught me to think. The subject my first year was “Reciprocal free trade with non-Communist nations,” a big item on the Kennedy agenda.  Each year’s subject was chosen by some national organization or other, and was the same for high schools across the country.  The second year, we debated the pros and cons of extending the Social Security system to include medical care for the elderly, a concept which later became Medicare.

This was a whole new world.  This was no longer getting in trouble at school for the sin of being bored or at home for the sin of…what?  Being a child?  Not being an adult?   For being in the way or inconvenient or for not being warm and cuddly enough?  I didn’t have to hit Sharon any more to get attention?  I didn’t have to live down to expectations?

It was maybe just the slightest bit more interesting than “I know this old boy with a blah-de-blah engine and a hoo-de-doo carb and he’d let me have it for about a buck ninety-five,” or “there was this big-ol’ buck about a hunnerd yards away, and I drawed down on him with the thirty-ought-six and dropped him with one shot.”  Or Mildred’s philosophical musings about whether Mitch Miller or Lawrence Welk was the better musician.

This was almost like accomplishing something.  It channeled my skepticism into an attempt to convince, rather than my usual half-conscious attempt to alienate, feeling that I had lost before I ever spoke.

I had a chance to win, for a change.  Not that I did win all that often, my cockiness frequently leading to sloppy research and my sloppy research to getting my butt kicked.

But I didn’t need to learn that if I got my butt kicked it was my own fault.  I had always known that.  But at least now I was evenly matched.

Most importantly, it gave me a fresh mask to wear.

Sometimes almost tongue-tied in one-on-one conversation (it would be years yet before I could look another person directly in the eyes), I could give a presentation to a group and talk, perform, “act” natural.  Just so long as I had a role to play.

Suddenly, for debate research, I was reading Time and Newsweek and studying charts in the Statistical Abstract of the United States.  I discovered not only that I should, but that I really wanted to go to college.  I discovered that I liked having good grades, but even more than that, I wanted an education.

Damn.  Better not let the folks find out about this.

But I needn’t have worried.  They weren’t interested, assuming that my new fixation was probably as unsavory as all of my other activities and letting me know, when I lost an after-school job for taking too much time off for speech activities, that maybe I should re-evaluate my priorities.  How was I going to get ahead in life, how was I going to go to college, if I couldn’t even keep a job?

*

When I was a junior, Mildred asked me to ask my senior friends if it were possible to go to college for $100 a semester, which was all she felt she could afford, what with making double monthly house payments, saving heftily for retirement, and all.  My friends laughed at me.

Tuition at the University of Oklahoma was an incredibly low $7.00 per semester-hour.  A full-time student (i.e., a male wanting to postpone being drafted) carried at least twelve hours per semester.  Serious students took sixteen to eighteen hours per semester, meaning tuition alone was around a hundred bucks, give or take.  The cheapest dormitories were $90.00 a month, and then there were the books.

Mildred had been working on me to apply to the Air Force Academy.  After all, I had always wanted to fly.  And the tuition would be free.  I did apply, and didn’t make it.  So she decided I should become a barber.

“Barber school is only nine months, and then you would have a trade and could put yourself through college,” she suggested.  “You know, your grandfather was a barber, and your Uncle Lawrence is a barber.”

“But Mil, I don’t want to be a barber.  Don’t you understand that the ambition of half of the girls in my class is to go to cosmetology school so they can spend the rest of their lives doing beehive hairdos?  I want an education.”

Wrong argument.  From the time of her divorce in her 40’s to her abandonment of most personal hygiene in her 80’s, Mil had only washed her hair once a week.  She went to the hairdresser every Saturday for a shampoo, a cut, a style and half a can of industrial-strength hairspray, and slept on a silk pillowcase to prevent her hair from being mussed in between beauty parlor appointments.  And besides, was I implying there was something wrong with beehive hairdos?

“You want a journalism degree,” she snorted.  “How do you expect to make a living?”

“I’ll make a living.  And besides,” I added, foolishly thinking that I could trump her, “if I don’t go to college straight out of high school, I’ll be drafted.”

“Well maybe the Army would pay for your college then.”  Queen of trumps.

“I am not going to barber school.  That’s it!  End of discussion!  You have the money!”  King of trumps.

“Well,” she finished icily.  “You know what my monthly obligations are.  You know I can’t spend Bob’s money for your education.  I just don’t know how you’re going to do it.”

Ace of trumps.

Next Up:  The Man Who Owned Oklahoma City