Radio Daze

Being stuck is a position few of us like. We want something new but cannot let go of the old – old ideas, beliefs, habits, even thoughts.

Rush Limbaugh

June, 2005

Some things never change.

You can get a fair idea of the cultural climate of a region by listening to its radio stations.  After all, they know their market.

There are 33 radio stations in Oklahoma City.  Of these, only two play contemporary, non-country music.  There are five Christian stations, five oldies stations, four Spanish-language stations, four country music stations and seven talk stations – most of them spewing a constant stream of hate and anger.

The highest-rated talk station, and one of the top-rated stations in the market, is KTOK, “Oklahoma’s Information Source.”  Its daily lineup of nearly all syndicated broadcasts reads like Jerry Falwell’s vision of heaven’s radio band:

5:30 – 8:30: Reid Mullins.  Illegal aliens are planning to take over California, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas and southern Colorado and carve out a new state to be called “Aztlan.”  Watch ‘em swim across the border.  Watch ‘em breed.

8:30 – 10:30: Glen Beck.  Torturing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay is hilarious.  “Not letting them go potty” is good for 30 minutes of laughs.  “Here’s an idea: We should make them spend hours watching Oprah, or some other liberal show.”

10:35: Paul Harvey.  Bless the dear old fellow.  A conservative commentator with a sense of humor and not an ounce of hate.  I used to listen to him 40 years ago.  But can he really still be alive?

11:00 – 2:00:  Rush Limbaugh.  Love him or hate him.

2:00 – 4:00: Sean Hannity.  “Let Freedom Ring – Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism.”

4:00 – 6:00: Mike McCarville.  Local rantings, local call-ins, news, traffic and sports.

6:00 – 7:00: More Sean Hannity.

7:00 – 10:00: Tony Snow.  “The prisoners [at Guantanamo Bay] live in posher surroundings than their guards, who live in tents.  They get better meals, too.”

10:00 – 5:30: George Noory.  Mystery beasts in south Texas.  UFOs over Ontario.  Call in your favorite story told to you by a friend of a friend.

Naturally, I kept the rental car’s radio tuned to KTOK, and only occasionally shouted back at some of the commentators’ more outrageous pronouncements.  I have a feeling we’re not in NPR country anymore, Toto.

*

Coming Up Next:  Just Call Me “Scoop”

Middle-America in Middle-Century

Hey diddle diddle

The cat and the fiddle

Piggy in the middle.

Neil Innes, John Lennon and Paul McCartney

*

Mid-century was bad enough.  Married couples on television shows slept in twin beds and the “I Love Lucy” writers were afraid to use the word “pregnant” when Lucille Ball was.  CBS cropped Elvis Presley’s swiveling hips when he first appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and NBC censored an innocent Jack Paar joke about an outdoor toilet (“W.C.”).  Joseph McCarthy was a national hero and then a national disgrace, but the Red Menace was still real, as we learned every week while watching Herbert Philbrick lead his televised three lives: “citizen, Communist, counterspy.”

But Middle America was worse, and Oklahoma – the “buckle on the Bible Belt” – stubbornly dug its cowboy heels in and refused to be dragged into the 20^th Century until it was almost over.  Liquor was not allowed (except when it was), unpopular opinions were never allowed, divorced women were scorned by other women and considered fair game by men, and condoms were sold with the prominent warning, “For Prevention of Disease Only.”

Middle America in mid-century, then, was a melding of two dominant, but defective genes, producing a culture with the worst traits of both parents: a complacent middle class, laid back and smug – and on edge with fear.  Fear of Communists, fear of Negroes, fear of change, fear of dissent.  It was a haven for white values and white bread, filled with people trying to be upwardly mobile, but disdainful of education.

Lenny Bruce was abroad in the land, as were Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, but Middle America didn’t know them.  Middle America relished its insularity.

*

Oklahoma entered the Union in 1907 as a “dry” state, with laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol.  Granted, it wasn’t as dry as Kansas, where even beer was forbidden, leading to Bill Doolin’s outlaw career.  But ten years later, the legislature passed one of the strictest liquor laws in the country, making it a crime punishable by up to six months in jail to even possess any liquor “received directly or indirectly from a common…carrier.”

Although watered down by a state Supreme Court ruling in 1918 that allowed possession of liquor so long as it was not received by a “common carrier,” the law remained on the books until 1959, when the voters repealed prohibition and state-regulated “package stores” were allowed to sell not only liquor, but also beer with an alcohol content greater than 3.2 percent.

“Three-two beer” became a pejorative term after 1959.  Grocery stores were (and still are) restricted from selling anything more potent.  Folks still drank it, and still do, out of convenience, if nothing else.  But in mid-century, lots of folks drove six-cylinder economy cars, too, yet they were still referred to as “six-bangers,” in the same tone of voice as grocery-store suds were called “three-two beer.”

Interestingly, many people who voted for repeal later claimed to regret it.  Under Prohibition, you had only to call your bootlegger on the telephone and he delivered your order to your door at no extra charge.  Now, you had to drive to the liquor store yourself.  And pay sales tax.

The Oklahoma Taliban (the folks who want to, and traditionally have, run the state according to their own unique brand of Christianity) lost a major battle in 1959, but it was hardly the end of the war.  They succeeded in forcing the closing of liquor stores at 9:00 p.m. weekdays, all day Sunday and – until the ban was repealed in a general election in 2006 – on election days.

In 1990, on the way to a small party of speech and drama grads after the 25^th reunion ceremonies, my wife and I stopped into a liquor store to buy a couple of bottles of wine.  (New Yorkers bring pastry to a party and Californians bring wine.  I no longer know what Oklahomans bring.)  We looked for the refrigeration cases and found none.

“Where’s your cold wine?” I asked.

“Oh, honey.  We’re not allowed to sell cold wine or beer.  They’re afraid you’ll drink it in the car before you get home.”

When I drove into Midwest City fifteen years later for the 40^th reunion, I really wanted a drink.  But all of the bars and all of the liquor stores were closed.  There was a municipal election that day.  Darn it all to heck.  I had to drive two miles into neighboring Del City to purchase a bottle of warm Chardonnay.

*

Another skirmish won by the religious over the secular forces was the battle over Liquor By The Drink, which wouldn’t arrive until 1985, and even then only on a county-by-county basis.  But for the intervening sixteen years since repeal, this ban served only as a minor deterrent to drinking, by making it a bit cumbersome, and was generally enforced only for public relations purposes.

If we went to a generic bar or restaurant, we took our own bottle, upon which the bartender slapped a strip of masking tape and wrote our name in felt-tip marker.  The bartender charged about two dollars for a “set-up” (water or soda for our own Scotch, orange juice for our own vodka), the same as we would have paid for water plus Scotch in any other state.  But at least he wasn’t selling us liquor.

Middle-level bars and restaurants maintained a fiction known as the “private club.”  Private clubs were exempt from the prohibition on selling liquor by the drink.  The waitress or bartender would ask, with just the proper vocal inflection, “Ya’ll are members, aren’t you?”  Upon assurance that we were members in good standing, our cocktails or wine appeared without further fuss.

(The “private club” ruse was sometimes also used to exclude black patrons.)

Upper-crust bars and restaurants dispensed with the entire fiction, being frequented by the high rollers and influential politicians who had nothing to fear from Oklahoma County’s own puritanical high priest, District Attorney Curtis P. Harris.

*

Harris, who seemed to model himself after Girolamo Savanarola, the Fifteenth Century Dominican priest who attempted to cleanse Florence of all sin and vanity, crusaded from 1964 through 1976 against liquor and vice, with the latter sin including gambling, but more often involving feminine pulchritude and/or sex.

He once stopped an Amtrak train on the outskirts of Oklahoma City for daring to keep its club car open while crossing Oklahoma’s sovereign territory, and had his deputies smash all of the liquor bottles for the newspapers’ cameras.

*

While Oklahoma has always raised some of the finest Quarter Horses in the country, the Oklahoma mullahs would not allow gambling.  But what good is a horse race, if you can’t bet on it?  The horses generally had to be taken out of state – usually to New Mexico – to enter any kind of respectable race.

Horse breeders and trainers in mid-century regularly gathered at this farm or that, where a race track was laid out and they could pit their horses against others in what were known as “match races” or “training races.”  They really were training exercises, but naturally, a dollar or two changed hands on the sidelines.  And naturally, Harris and his contemporaries in surrounding counties would stage the occasional raid, usually after tipping off the press in advance.

It wasn’t until 1982 that an initiative petition legalized pari-mutuel betting, and today Oklahoma City boasts a first-class race track which has poured not an inconsiderable amount of money into the state’s coffers.  Residents tell me, though, that the money spigot has slowed to a trickle lately due to Indian casinos siphoning off the gamblers’ losings.  In response, the tracks now host casinos, too, with the catchy label of “racinos.”

*

With the entire country in a state of constitutional uncertainty over whether nudity was protected as free speech or could be regulated by local authorities, Harris took the harder line and announced that there would be no (0 – count ‘em – 0) topless dancers in his fiefdom.  Breasts he reluctantly allowed, so long as the nipples and areolae were covered by the skimpiest of pasties, and the skimpiest of g-strings he reluctantly allowed, so long as they covered the true naughty bits and the rest of the area was well-shaven.

When Bernardo Bertolucci’s film “Last Tango in Paris” was released to critical acclaim in 1973, Harris made it known that he would raid any movie house that dared screen it.  I doubt he had even seen the film before making this public pronouncement, but just his threat was good enough to prevent it from playing in Oklahoma City.  I had to drive 100 miles to Tulsa to see the film and to review it for the Journal’s readers.

That same year, a touring company of the Broadway musical “Hair” was booked for an OKC run.  Although the play had run for years in New York and toured for years all over the country – including the Deep South, with no problems – Harris objected to its final scene in which the cast sheds its clothes.

At a news conference, he announced that he would arrest the entire cast if they took off their clothes on stage.  Both the cast and the tour’s director told me this was a matter of artistic integrity, and that the publicity from being arrested would be invaluable to the tour.  Plus, they had lawyers on call.  I dutifully reported their posturing, as the City Hall reporter covered Harris’.

But on opening night, for the first time in umpty-ump-thousand performances, the cast left their clothes on.  Disappointed, I phoned in the story from the lobby of the Civic Auditorium.

I received a byline, Oklahoma City received a black eye and Curtis P. Harris received the unanimous support of the ultra-orthodox Christians in his next election.

*

And, speaking of hair, “Hi.  Can I talk to a reporter?”

“I’m a reporter, sir,” I answered.  Whoever was available at the Oklahoma Journal news desk was expected to answer the telephone.  You never knew when tomorrow’s top news story might drop into your lap.

“I think we oughta do something about all these kids a-wearin’ long hair.”

“Well, sir, what did you have in mind?”

“Huh?  Ah…I just think something oughta be done.  Buncha subversives, if you ask me.  We oughta make ‘em get a haircut.  Or put ‘em in the Army.  Or ship ‘em all out to San Francisco.”

“And why is that, sir?  Are they harming you?”

“Ah…”

“Are you a barber, sir?” I pressed.  “If not, why can’t a person wear a flattop or a Mohawk or hair down to his shoulders?”

“Say, now.  Listen here.  Do you have long hair?” the caller demanded.

“Oh, no, sir,” I lied.  “My hair is probably shorter than yours.  But all I’m asking is, how does long hair hurt you?”

“God-damned hippie trash,” the caller sputtered before slamming down his telephone.

Oh, well.  One fewer subscription for the Journal.  I’ll probably hear about it in the morning.

**

My lifelong prejudice against sports and sports fanatics breaks out occasionally in a soap-box speech about folks who can’t distinguish between Bosnia and Boston but who read the sports pages (and the sports pages only) avidly every morning, the parents who scream angrily at the coaches, referees and opposing team at Little League baseball games, the nuts who paint their faces or shave their team’s logo on their heads and the former part owners of the Oakland Raiders who once bragged to me about their “Raider Room,” a special room in their house with large-screen television, decorated only in black and silver and Raiders memorabilia.

I avoid all sports, including the World Series, the Super Bowl, Wimbledon, Olympic figure skating and even the annual Big Game between Stanford and Cal.  I did watch France win the World Cup in soccer in 1998, but only because my stepdaughter was then staying with friends in Paris.

This prejudice, I believe, is a reaction against my middle-America upbringing, and realizing that, I really should do something about it.

*

Much of the country looks upon Oklahoma as a third-rate state.  Unjustly so, but Oklahomans secretly fear this may be true.  That’s why they become so belligerent if you point out any of their shortcomings.  Texas is bigger, still has oil and has sent three presidents to the White House.  (In fact, for most Oklahomans, Dallas is the center of the universe and the only big city they would ever want to visit.)  Kansas has richer farmland.  Iowa has a catchier musical in “The Music Man.”

Arkansas…well, that’s a third-world state.  Everybody needs someone or something to look down on.

But everybody needs something to look up to, also.  In Oklahoma it’s the OU football team.

During the winning Bud Wilkinson years in the 1950′s, the football program was sanctioned time and again for illegal recruiting, such as paying players to enrol at OU.  The sanctions have largely ceased over time, but the underlying practices have merely gone underground, or become more sophisticated.

Or, more probably, it’s a case of “everybody does it, but just don’t go too far with it.”

*

The most celebrated football player when I attended OU drove around campus in his own flashy Cadillac, wore only the best clothes and had his own campus parking pass.  The star jocks, be they football or basketball players, never attended class on Fridays because there would usually be an out-of-town game on Saturday – yet, somehow, they miraculously managed to pass all of their classes.  The Athletic Department was awash with money, not only from alumni, but also from sports fanatics who had never even attended college.

And every Saturday in the fall, sleepy little Norman, Oklahoma, has always given way to madness, with a traffic gridlock worthy of Chicago or New York.  Choice seats in the stadium are still inherited, and it is almost impossible to move your seats to a better location unless somebody dies leaving no local heirs.

The landlady of the first apartment I rented as a senior informed me that I could not park in my driveway on game days, since her out-of-town family would require all of the available parking spaces.

And long-time OU President George L. Cross was quoted in Time as saying that he wanted to build a university “of which the football team can be proud.”  It was a tongue-in-cheek statement, but Cross knew his audience.

**

Oklahomans have long been known for what author and university professor Jack Bickham once termed their “outspoken anti-intellectualism,” their “general fear of anything or anyone ‘different,’” the assumption that anything different may be Communist, and a fear of Communism so deep that they will do anything to fight it, “including violation of personal rights, property rights, and the entire Constitution.”

As if to prove Bickham’s thesis, the state legislature adopted a statute in the wake of the 1967 Paul Boutelle flap at the University of Oklahoma, prohibiting controversial speakers from appearing in forums supported by state money, and especially including college campuses.  Fortunately, the state’s Attorney General found the law to be an unconstitutional restriction on free speech.

There has long been a cold war between the legislature and the state’s two largest public universities.  Oklahomans are distrustful of education in general.  Going hand-in-hand with their self-professed humbleness is their self-professed lack of education and suspicion of the same.  Education might be a good idea in the abstract, but it shouldn’t go too far, become too curious or too inquiring and should, above all other things, emphasize support for the status quo.

And support for sports, of course.

Any time a group of students, an instructor, department, school, college or university oversteps these bounds or explores the fearful concept of something “different,” state legislators respond with their time-proven tactic:  tightening of the purse strings.  And when any issue smacking of the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech threatens Oklahomans, the pressure can become unbearable.

*

"Cherokee Gothic" at the University of Oklahoma

George L. Cross retired in 1968 after serving 25 years as president of the University of Oklahoma.  Inaugurated to take his place was J. Herbert Hollomon, a former Undersecretary of Commerce who was described by one supporter as “a Massachusetts liberal” and by himself as “an eastern outsider.”

Hollomon was popular with students and faculty alike, but not with the state’s government.  With the country in turmoil over the Vietnam War, Hollomon not only allowed peaceful dissent, but championed students’ rights to express their dissenting opinions.

In May, 1970, in the wake of the killing of four anti-war demonstrators at Kent State University, OU students staged a large protest at the campus’ ROTC awards ceremony, and Governor Dewey Bartlett sent the National Guard to Norman.  In a telephone stand-off between the president and the governor, Hollomon refused to allow the Guard access to the campus.

Hollomon’s actions prevented a tense situation from degenerating into violence, but Bartlett was not pleased.  He demanded Hollomon’s resignation and, when that was not forthcoming, ordered the Board of Regents to censure the president.  Instead of censure, the Regents gave Hollomon a vote of confidence.

Bartlett, eligible to succeed himself as governor under a recent change in the state constitution, was running for re-election that year and latched onto what seemed to be a sure-fire platform.  He appointed one of his staff members to an empty seat on the Board of Regents and went on the attack in the press, accusing Hollomon of fostering un-Oklahoman activities and demanding wholesale changes at the university.

At the regular monthly meeting of the Board of Regents in July, 1970, Hollomon brought up a surprise item not on the agenda.  Believing that the university could only suffer if he allowed himself to become Bartlett’s main campaign issue, he tendered his resignation.  His resignation speech should be required reading for any midwestern state politician, for political meddling in educational institutions continues today.

In voting to continue me as president in June, this board acted for the best interests of the University after I had refused to resign under pressure.  Had I resigned in those circumstances, the University’s independence and academic freedom would have been jeopardized.  If you had dismissed me, your own constitutional independence would have been undermined.

…

The survival of these institutions [of higher learning] depends on the protection of values which, when threatened, pose the possibility of the demise of our society’s deepest tradition of liberty and free institutions.  Among these values are freedom of the university from outside political or ideological interference, the freedom of expression and dissent, the freedom to teach, to learn and to inquire without coercion, and the freedom of the academic community to govern itself justly under law.

…

The faith and trust I have placed in our students to govern themselves [and] to be responsible for their own actions…are now questioned as a result of fears incited by the media.  We seem to have forgotten that only faith and love in young people will build our future leaders.  The people of Oklahoma seem to believe that their sons and daughters are incapable of managing their own lives.  Do I, an eastern outsider, have more faith in the ability of parents to raise responsible, trustworthy young people than many parents here have themselves?

Citing the demands on the university, including a proposal that it deny admission to “undesirable characters” (an obvious reference to students of a leftward political bent), Hollomon said the “assaults by the governor on the president and values of the University make it abundantly clear that any member of the faculty, any student or any employee may be persecuted or threatened for his way of life or his beliefs.”

These threats to the integrity of this University and its members starkly represent the spirit of repression now running rampant without reason among us.  We find ourselves facing the prospects of an environment not free and joyous but stifling – one in which the right to think and act according to personal conviction, whether my own, the student’s or the teachers, is denied if it questions conventional wisdom.

…

I have done what I could to reach above narrow political interests for the common good of the University…  That community must insist upon those values of freedom from tyranny and seek to overcome the petty divisiveness of selfish political interest.  Your very dignity is at stake.

…

Let me add in closing that I have many friends and colleagues in this state whom I love very much.  To you and to the members of this board, do not give up our endeavor.  For it is for that endeavor that I must go.

*

Bartlett – not having Herb Hollomon to kick around anymore – lost the November gubernatorial election by the narrowest of margins.

*

Such educational insubordination doesn’t happen much anymore, partly because of Generation Y apathy and partly because the folks with the power succeeded in placing one of their own as president of the University of Oklahoma.

David L. Boren was a 27-year-old freshman state Representative just out of law school in1967 when he joined two other state legislators in calling President Cross on the carpet after “avowed Harlem Negro Marxist” Paul Boutelle appeared on campus.

Boren’s credentials meshed so well with Oklahoma politics that he served four terms in the state House of Representatives before being elected governor in 1975, and then U.S. Senator in 1978.  He was the first Democratic senator to represent Oklahoma in six years and the last such since he left office abruptly in 1994.

Boren had for years cultivated a close relationship with the Gaylord publishing family, a necessity for anyone who wants to advance in Oklahoma politics.  In the Senate, he was able to repay the Oklahoman for its continued support over the years.  The Columbia Journalism Review article on the Oklahoman quoted the Washington Post and the New York Times as reporting in 1986 that Boren, “had [co-]sponsored ‘a one-of-a-kind, multimillion-dollar’ tax break that would benefit only eight wealthy investors — one of whom was publisher Ed Gaylord.”

*

Although he rose to become chairman of the powerful Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and was elected to his third six-year term by a staggering 83 percent of votes cast, Boren inexplicably resigned his Senate seat in 1994, and was shortly thereafter appointed president of the University of Oklahoma.

Reportedly, Boren was about to be “outed” by a national homosexual publication.  Because of extensive anecdotal evidence, many observers fervently believe this to be true, although Boren swore on a Bible that it was not.  The same observers equally – and paradoxically – believe that the Gaylord family arranged for his appointment to the OU presidency.

Few doubt that the Gaylords hold such a power.  But why would such notorious gay-bashers so strongly support a public servant knowing – or even suspecting – that he was gay?

Nobody is quite sure, except that money is thicker than principles.  And the Gaylord-Boren mutual back scratching has continued at the University of Oklahoma.  Whether it is a benefit or a detriment to the University seems to be strictly a matter of opinion.

.

Next Up:  Fear and Loathing on the Radio Dial

Oklahoma Journal – Part 1

We are like dwarfs standing upon the shoulders of giants.

Bernard of Chartres

During the year I spent racing quarter horses, I was always given a leg up.

Literally.  A race horse is big: at least sixteen hands, or more than five feet at the shoulder; and racing stirrups, unlike western stirrups, are very short.  Even the most experienced jockey is always given a boost onto the horse by its owner or trainer.

Figuratively.  I so desperately wanted to race that a couple of owners gave me a break and a couple of jockeys gave me tips.

The myth of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps works only for the very extraordinary, one-in-a-million kid, which eliminates me and everyone I know.  Zorro might be able to leap into the saddle unaided, but the rest of us need a leg up.

I have been lucky in receiving many a leg up, from a lot of mentors and a lot of helpers.  Why they bothered, or what they saw in me, I never understood.

**

Three factors combined to push me into my first career as a journalist: a couple of teachers, one of many mentors and a system.  The most important of the three was the system, an educational philosophy known as “tracking.”

The practice of separating school classes by ability, tracking groups all A-level students together in classes that are more rigorous and which progress faster, the B-level students in classes a bit slower and less rigorous, and so forth.

The debate over tracking still goes on today, and will probably never be settled, any more than the debate between phonics and sight-reading, but the anti-tracking forces seem to be holding the high ground lately.  My stepdaughter’s fourth-grade principal (a frustrated, former underachiever who single-handedly managed to dismantle the Gifted and Talented Education [GATE] program in our school district) even wrote a position paper likening the practice to the “separate but equal” educational system struck down by Brown v. Board of Education.

The Midwest City School District tracked its students, and if it hadn’t I might be an auto mechanic today.

In junior high school nearly all of my friends were lower-scoring students.  They knew about cars: transmissions, horsepower, cubic inches, cubic centimeters, carburetors, dual carbs, camshafts, piston rings, overdrive, four-on-the-floor and hotwiring.  They had fathers who knew such things and passed them on.

I didn’t know a piston from a pothole, but I knew that I wanted to know.  With no father to teach me, how else was I to find out but by taking a class?  The junior high school offered a two-hour-a-day, trade-school class in auto mechanics.  I signed up for it and was rejected.  Mildred offered to help me out.  For the only time, she met with the school authorities on my behalf.  At least if I became an auto mechanic, I could earn my own living and would need no further help from her.

“Mrs. Pilkinton, this class is for the ‘C’ and ‘D’ students, the ones who are never going to college and who have no particular ambition other than to work on cars,” the vice-principal explained to her.  “I understand that Steve wants to learn how to repair a car, but he’s college material and would be wasting his time in auto mechanics.  He needs to concentrate on academic subjects.”

Bitterly disappointed at the time, I would hug the man today.

*

The head of the speech and drama department at Midwest City High School was a swelled-headed egotist who loved to hear himself pontificate.  Only in his early twenties himself, he stroked his ego by displaying his knowledge to teenagers.

Most of the students in his classes worshiped him.  Some of us didn’t, but that didn’t keep us from wanting to know what he knew.  Who was this Pirandello fellow, anyway, and why should we care?  Better find out.  Samuel Beckett?  Giraudoux’s “Madwoman of Chaillot?”  Don Marquis’ ‘archy and mehitabel?”  Better find out.

When I enrolled in my first journalism class my senior year in high school, he suggested to the instructor that I be given a regular column in the school newspaper, the “Bomber Beam.”

I was already writing, but I didn’t really want to be a newspaper reporter.  I wanted to be Scott Fitzgerald.  But from reading my own work, I finally realized that I was unlikely to write another “Gatsby” while in college.  Mildred was right in one observation:  I was going to have to earn a living somehow.  So journalism it was.

That semester, with my own satirical column, “Dimick on the World,” running bi-weekly, I decided I wanted to be humorist Art Hoppe, syndicated columnist from the San Francisco Chronicle.

I could change personas as often as I could change masks.

*

The journalism teacher helped me get a scholarship.  It wasn’t much: only $350 a year, but that still paid for tuition and left me almost $50 a semester for books.  Mildred was eternally grateful – or, rather, she was grateful for two years until I gave up the scholarship to change from a journalism major to a “directed studies” major in journalism, history and English.

*

It was Career Day, 1964, and I attended the journalism career class, where the speaker was a University of Oklahoma staffer who headed both the Future Journalists of America association at OU and the Oklahoma Interscholastic Press Association, which promoted, encouraged and critiqued high school newspapers.

Bill Atkinson’s Oklahoma Journal was still fairly new and I was still fairly conservative.  I had no idea that I would spend some years writing for the Journal. I only knew I was still burning from the front page of a few weeks before.  When the floor was opened for questions, I raised my hand.

“I’m wondering about a front-page editorial in the Journal,” I said.  “There was a huge color photo of Lyndon Johnson with a banner headline saying ‘The Journal Endorses Johnson For President.’  To me, that’s not journalistic responsibility.  News belongs on the front page and editorials belong on the editorial page.”

Later, I would hear Jim Paschl tell the story: “The kids were asking about wages, and whether they should take more English classes and how important it was to know how to type.  And all of a sudden this high school kid raised his hand and asked a question that I would only have expected from a third- or fourth-year J student.”

*

Jim was a journalist from the old school.  When told as a high school student that he couldn’t take a journalism class unless he could type, he spent a week or two teaching himself to type with the first two fingers of both hands.  Using only four fingers, he was faster than I was, and I was no slouch of a typist.

He became the first in a series of mentors, giving me a part-time job helping him run the FJA and the OIPA, showing me the campus hangouts, introducing me to all of the J-School faculty (and, more importantly, to the office staff, who would later turn their backs when I snuck in for unauthorized use of the mimeograph machine), and trying to get me to pledge a fraternity.  When the 4,000-odd incoming freshmen were gathered in the football stadium for the freshman convocation, we cruised around Norman in his car, drinking beer.

Jim was an irreverent smart-ass, like me, and we clicked.  He telephoned my dorm room one Sunday morning about ten.  “Where have you been?  Did you go to church”

“Church?  No, I didn’t go to church.  I just got out of the shower.”

“Oh, well, you know what they say,” he quipped.  “Cleanliness is next to godliness.  If you can’t go to church, take a shower.”

**

Of course, I liked Bill Atkinson.  Nobody in Midwest City disliked Bill Atkinson.  Founder of the town, churchgoer, Sunday school teacher, generous host and all that.  He may have controlled the city, but he did so with the soft words of a grandfather and he nearly always got his way.  Harsh words, if any, came from his lieutenants.

It was just that Mr. A and I got off on the wrong foot.  I didn’t know I would end up working for him.

My first real exposure to Mr. A. was his appearance at the City Council meeting to oppose the commercial rezoning of a tract of land which he didn’t own.  And then there was the stock offering for W.P. Atkinson Enterprises, Inc.  I was right about the former incident and wrong about the latter, but it still left me less than happy with the town’s godfather.

When Atkinson decided to start a newspaper to rival the Daily Oklahoman, he received almost unanimous support from Midwest City residents and not such a shabby showing by many Oklahoma City residents tired of living in a one-newspaper town.  OKC’s major players, naturally, could not provide any overt support for fear that the Gaylord machine would demote them from the majors to the minors.

The stock issue had pretty respectable sales, with thousands of little folks buying a few shares at a time.  The stocks were divided into “Class A” and “Class B” shares, each costing a modest $2.00.  The rules of the game were that only Class A stocks could vote, but you could only buy a Class A share if you also bought two Class B shares.  My single vote cost me $6.00.

Atkinson, however, was allowed to buy a freight-car load of Class A shares, unencumbered by the nuisance Class B baggage, at par value, which was set at five cents.  His controlling votes cost him a nickle each.

It would be many years before I learned that this is how millionaires are made overnight, and nobody thinks twice about it.  But still.

*

And then there was the sensationalism, as in the front-page editorial with full-color portrait of LBJ.  Atkinson had invested in an offset printing press – the first daily paper to do so.  Offset was a fairly new technology with definite advantages over the older “hot type” presses, for which each page had to be hand-built from lead slugs that were melted and formed, one line at a time, in a Linotype machine.  Offset printing produced darker blacks, more subtle shades of gray and beautifully focused color photos on cheap newsprint.

To show off its state-of-the-art printing press, and shout out the difference in printing quality every morning between The Journal and The Oklahoman, Atkinson’s paper tended to overuse its technology maybe just the slightest bit.

Dog Bites Postman,

a front-page headline might scream.  In fact, all of The Journal’s headlines tended to scream.  We high school journalism students began referring to the paper as “The Yellow Journal,” after the pejorative term coined to describe the over-the-top antics of the New York papers during the Hearst-Pulitzer newspaper wars of the 1890s, when the publishers’ political viewpoints and desire for increased circulation didn’t so much overshadow as became the news.

*

In a famous telegram to the fledgling illustrator Frederic Remington, who had failed to find any anti-American activity by the Spanish colonial power in Cuba in 1898, William Randolph Hearst decreed, “You furnish the illustrations.  I’ll furnish the war.”

Both Atkinson and Gaylord longed for such power.  But while Atkinson could scream louder, Gaylord had the staying power.

*

With a very few exceptions, a successful newspaper relies on two main ingredients: sports and advertising.  News coverage comes in a distant third.  In the Midwest and Southwest, especially, where Oklahomans and Texans are football fanatics and Hoosiers feel they have little to live for between basketball seasons, a paper must devote an outlandish amount of copy space to sports in order to snag a single paid subscription.

But the number of copies sold is only a roundabout way of generating income.  Subscription revenue and the newsstand price account for only a small percentage of total income.  There are many successful throwaways that exist on advertising revenue alone.

It’s the advertising department that makes any newspaper a sustainable business venture.  Advertising revenue makes possible the daily delivery of – in order of importance – sports stories, comics, crossword puzzles and advice columns.  And news, of course.

But ad rates are tied to circulation, so the theory goes that if a publisher pours enough resources into sports coverage, he’ll sell enough papers to raise his advertising rates high enough to pay for the sports coverage and to throw in some news as an added bonus.

On the news side, The Journal had no foreign correspondents and no Washington or New York bureau.  It didn’t even have a full-time staffer in Tulsa; only a part-time “stringer” paid by the article.  There was no national desk or national editor and no state desk or state editor, only a city desk, a city editor and a city staff.

The sports desk stopped barely short of having the same number of reporters and editors as the news department.

*

In addition to full-time staffers, the sports desk employed a large network of stringers:  high school or college kids who covered specific games and called in the stats, with maybe a bit of local color, or even a feature article, if warranted.  It was a plum job for a sports nut who might well be attending the games anyway, and a couple of my high school classmates landed slots as stringers.

*

In my senior year of college, I was stocking shelves in a mini-mart on weekdays and doing janitorial jobs on weekends.  And I was again writing a column for the campus daily newspaper, as I had for the high school paper four years earlier.  This one was called “Dear George,” and was written in the form of a letter to a fictitious friend.  It was biting and angry and satyrical and caused a couple of minor confrontations in the J-school, particularly when I once used the phrase “knocked up” and incurred the wrath of one of the senior professors.

We didn’t use such phrases in mid-America in mid-century.  Euphemisms Were Us.  I could have written sarcastically that if the university didn’t lock up its freshman women at 11 p.m. (which, incredibly, it did), ipso facto, none of these women would be found “in the family way.”

But I still think it was just the slightest bit more effective to write, tongue in cheek: “Lock up your daughters at 11 o’clock and they won’t get knocked up.”

It didn’t insult the students, who were much more worldly than the administration, the Oklahoma legislature or their parents were ready to admit.  But it sure insulted the administration, the legislature and the parents.

*

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Oklahoma students could have their draft deferments withdrawn for exercising their freedom of speech and spouting unpopular opinions.  But probably because my little transgression did not involve politics, I suffered no more serious consequences than nasty letters to the editor and J-school faculty disapproval.

But, despite it all – or maybe because of it all – when The Oklahoma Journal was looking for a stringer to cover OU campus activities, one of its sports stringers suggested my name to the city editor, who called me and offered me the job.

The city editor was Don Rice, the toughest and most acerbic son-of-a-bitch I’ve ever worked for.  Rice wasn’t even thirty years old then, but had already been a reporter, columnist and desk man for The Daily Oklahoman and The Oklahoma City Times, a journalism teacher at Oklahoma City University and was now the de facto editor of the Oklahoma Journal.

I was a long way from his star reporter, but I was treated no differently than the rest of the staff.  Rice treated all of his reporters the same: like shit.  But he challenged their assertions, made them justify their positions and – when he felt he had to – rewrote their copy.

Nobody complained.

Well, that part isn’t true.  We all complained.  We chafed under his tongue lashings and swore dire revenge.  But when he finished with our copy, whether by prodding us to rewrite it or by rewriting it himself, the story was clearer and more focused, and we were proud to see our byline on the piece the next morning.

Rice never let himself be caught mentoring anyone or visibly giving anyone a leg up.  That would have spoiled the tough-guy image he had worked so hard to perfect.  But any reporter willing to learn could improve his skills immensely under his caustic prodding.

John Clabes, the managing editor, was another story entirely.

Unlike Rice, Clabes was smooth and calm on the outside – and nestled comfortably in the back pocket of the advertising manager.  He viewed his job description as “manager in charge of ensuring that no advertiser or potential advertiser suffers hurt feelings.”

Next Up:  Middle America in Mid-Century