Steve

*

Well I never been to Heaven

But I been to Oklahoma.

Well they tell me I was born there

But I really don’t remember…

Hoyt Axton, “Never Been to Spain”

*

1961 – 2005

*

Of course it was going to happen.  Everyone knew it and everyone refused to think about it.

The approach to Tinker’s main landing strip was dead center between the railroad track behind my first Midwest City house and Ferguson street, where we lived at 608.  We were less than half a mile from the beginning of the runway just inside Tinker’s security fence south of 29^th Street.   The planes were already so low as they passed over our back yard that you could count the rivets on the wings.

The nearly twenty years between the city’s founding and its first traffic fatality were due to planning.  Atkinson and Stewart Mott were right: those short, windy streets discouraged speeding cars.

The ten years between building the Glenwood Addition in 1951 and the first plane crash in 1961 were nothing but luck.

In mid-afternoon on August 25, 1961, an F-100 Supersabre jet fighter was making a landing approach when the engines died and the pilot could not make the controls respond.  A fire in the fuselage reportedly burned out the jet’s hydraulic lines.  The pilot ejected, landing himself safely, but the plane crashed into the 300 block of Ferguson, just three blocks from the house where Mildred, Rick and I had fled to be free and safe.

Seven houses were destroyed; a two-year-old and a four-year-old from one family were killed and seven other persons severely injured.  Had the crash occurred two hours later, when folks were home from work, the dead could easily have numbered in the dozens.  It was the worst tragedy ever to strike Midwest City, but it wouldn’t be the last.  The lucky charm was broken.

Not quite three months later, a C-131 cargo plane ran out of fuel, came in too low and its landing gear clipped a security fence on the Tinker perimeter, not 100 yards from the Glenwood area.  The craft crashed and broke in two, injuring eight of its eleven passengers but sparing the civilian population.

In August, 1962, a Tennessee Air National Guard cargo plane limped in for a landing on a runway covered with foam.  A month later, the pilot of a troubled B-57, rather than ejecting, stayed with his craft and  managed to guide it away from a direct path toward Midwest City housing and into an empty field.  Both pilot and co-pilot were killed.

From 1961 onward, the Glenwood area was a homeowner’s nightmare.  People tried to sell and couldn’t.  There were almost no buyers for the neighborhood directly in the flight path of Tinker’s main runway.  Just like the Air Force planes, property values crashed.  Those who could afford it took the financial hit and moved out.  Those who couldn’t stayed put, trapped.

The skies were calm again for a while until December, 1968, when an Air Force Phantom jet attempted an unsuccessful landing at Tinker, lifted off again and came in for a second try, trailing behind it a safety cable and webbing mechanism it had snagged on the runway on its first attempt.  On the plane’s second approach the steel cable and 3,000 feet of webbing snapped off utility poles and trees along ten blocks of Ferguson and neighboring streets, the falling poles and trees smashing cars and houses.

No civilians were injured this time, either.  At least not physically.  But the lower-middle-class housing addition began to be known as “Crash Acres” and property values, which no one thought was possible, fell even further.  People began abandoning the area, leaving their empty houses behind.

In a refrain that would be tiresome were it not so welcome, no civilians were injured when yet another F-100 Supersabre wiped out three houses and severely damaged two more in October, 1969, plowing first into an empty house at 716 Ferguson, just a block from 608.  A neighbor across the street told the press the house had been for sale for more than two years.

“The problem is, you can’t sell these houses,” he said.  “As a matter of fact, it might be hard to give them away.”

Finally, in 1973, county voters approved an $11 million bond issue to buy up nearly all of the land in the Glenwood area and turn the section into a green belt.  Some 836 homes were purchased over the next three years, sold at more than seventy auctions and then slowly moved out of the area.  It must have been a lucrative time for house movers.

The houses brought winning bids ranging from $250 to more than $4,000, with the little cracker boxes on Ferguson Drive fetching the smallest prices.  The Daily Oklahoman printed the prices for some of the houses but not all of them and I couldn’t find the price for 608 Ferguson where I dug my first fort beyond the back fence and flattened pennies on the railroad track.

**

I suppose you can call it a “green belt” if by that term you mean more than 300 acres of overgrown trees and bushes.  In California we generally think of “green belt” as more or less synonymous with “open space,” which Glenwood is not.  I wanted to walk the streets looking for old landmarks and old memories, but it is nearly entirely fenced off and posted with ominous signs:

WARNING

U.S. AIR FORCE INSTALLATION

IT IS UNLAWFUL TO ENTER THIS AREA WITHOUT

PERMISSION OF THE INSTALLATION COMMANDER

*

Glenwood Addition, Midwest City

I walk the abandoned railroad track from Reno Avenue, paralleling the security fence, for maybe a quarter mile before the fence crosses the rails, blocking further access.  My friend Dwain Webb’s house should be over there somewhere, but where?  Where was the house with the concrete fallout shelter underneath the front yard?  Have I gone far enough to be just behind Ferguson?

I can’t tell.  Through the fence nothing is familiar.  Just a tangle of weeds, bushes and giant privet hedges, once planted and trimmed by folks who probably worked at Tinker.

Once this was buffalo territory, home to the nomadic Comanches who hunted the buffalo on horses whose ancestors had been stolen from or abandoned by Spanish explorers long before the plains saw a fence.  The Seminole Nation called it home after their removal from the Southeast, and until their land was again taken from them after the Civil War.  As a part of the Unassigned Lands, it was opened for settlement in the Run of ‘89 and became wheat fields, divided into tidy 160-acre parcels.

We learned about the Run in school and I helped celebrate it every April in Guthrie.  They didn’t tell us that the fathers of the farmers who sold their land to Bill Atkinson probably galloped across the future grounds of Glenwood Elementary School to stake their claims.  They didn’t tell us that a Kiowa hunting party might have pitched camp on the very spot where a plane crash would later kill two toddlers.  Or perhaps along the creek under my railroad trestle.

They taught us history as a justification for what our grandfathers had done, not because it has any relevance today.

My railroad trestle -- 100 feet to the ground

I walk back along the tracks in the direction I had come.  As I cross my railroad trestle, I can’t resist sitting down to dangle my legs over the edge one last time as I had done with friends at nine and ten and twelve to smoke stolen cigarettes and share secrets and dreams.  I thought about the stages of my life and my own history – also defined by fences, but marked more by opening gates than closing them.

*

Not becoming a juvenile delinquent or hardened criminal didn’t stop me from turning from a little shit into a big one.  My first wife never ceased reminding me what an obnoxious husband I had been in the first few years of our marriage.  And my former bookkeeper, no longer an employee but now a social friend, still ribs me about how tightly wound I was until after my divorce in the late 1980s.

“You walked around with a stick up your ass,” says Roni.  “We’d occasionally see this soft side of you show through and we’d all be surprised.  Mostly you just had this big chip on your shoulder.”

“Okay, Roni,” I sigh.  “You don’t have to hold back.  Tell me how you really feel.”

“It’s true.  Joyce [my then-secretary] and I used to talk about it all the time.  She felt just the way I did.”

“Great.  I thought she was my friend,” I grump.

“She was, Steve.  She loved you.  Damned if I know why, though.”

*

I haven’t engaged in any of Dwain’s Olympian temper tantrums since kindergarten, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel like it sometimes.  Instead, I usually become arch and superior, for I, too, am a narcissist, with six of DSM-IV’s criteria to my name, including some of Mildred’s persecutory delusions and “a grandiose sense of self-importance.” This latter trait isn’t helped by things sometimes coming too easily to me, but is tempered by the common fear that someday “they” will find me out and take those things away.

PR Days: with Esau

Back in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1974, after my second stint at The Oklahoma Journal, I refused to consider a spot on one of the many suburban dailies, although I was more than willing to do secretarial or mail-room work through a temporary agency.  After four months of unemployment interrupted by occasional temp work, I finally agreed to take a job doing public relations even though as a “real journalist,” I felt it was beneath me.

Two years later, I couldn’t take it anymore and was pacing the living room floor complaining and wondering what I was going to do with my life if I ever grew up.

“Well, when you were in college you sometimes talked about going to law school,” Cherylle offered.  “Have you thought about that lately?”

“That…is an excellent idea,” I snapped my fingers and pointed in approval.  The next day I called the admissions office at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and asked for an enrollment packet.

“How are your LSAT scores?” the admissions director asked.

“What’s that?”

“The Law School Admissions Test.  Everybody has to take it before they can even apply to a law school.”

“Okay,” I said jauntily.  “When can I take it?”

“Call this number and see if there are any more tests scheduled for this year,” she said.  I’m certain she thought someone so simultaneously cocksure and ignorant wouldn’t stand a chance at Boalt.

When I telephoned the testing service, I was told the last test which would qualify me for a fall admission was the following Saturday, but reservations were closed.  If I walked in with twenty dollars, though, and if they had an empty seat and an extra test, I just might be able to sit for the exam.

So, twenty bucks in hand, I showed up on Saturday for the test, was allowed to sit for it and scored in the top two percent of all test-takers nationally.  It wasn’t until I was in law school that fall that I discovered that my classmates nearly all took expensive classes to prepare for the LSAT and actually studied for it.

How was I to know?  I was just a dumb 28-year-old kid from an educationally deprived family in an anti-education state.

I applied only to Boalt and to the other local UC law school, Hastings School of Law in San Francisco.  I had no real intention of going to Hastings – except that’s where I was admitted, while only making the waiting list at Boalt.

What’s the matter?  Don’t they recognize my special qualities?

*

I had probably done much more growing up since I was sixteen than most of my contemporaries, but only because I started so late and had so far to go.  But I still had a lot to learn.

I was near the top of the stand-by applicants for my top law school choice thanks to a criminal law professor who had been imprisoned during World War II as a conscientious objector and who argued strongly for me in the admissions committee.  So when a Boalt admittee or two either dropped out or were admitted to Harvard or Yale, I moved up the list and became one of 350 first-year law students at Boalt Hall.  I was the second or third oldest student in my class.

Because of my self-perceived worldliness and experience, I felt myself to be a cut above most of my classmates, but that attitude only lasted for three or four weeks.  These kids were sharp and I was overmatched.  They went on to become judges, professors, poverty lawyers, environmental activists and partners at major law firms.  I went to work for an attorney who had been a judge but who was removed from the bench for his gross improprieties by the Commission on Judicial Performance.

I graduated somewhere in the top fifty percent of my class, but nowhere near the top ten percent.  LSAT scores are evidently only a rough measure of a student’s ability.

Although I received an excellent education, the most valuable lesson I took away from Boalt was not law, but how to apply it and why.

Professor Kessler, a jovial man with a thick German accent, had spent a lifetime studying and analyzing contract law.  Retired from Yale Law School, he spent his last years teaching contracts to first-year students at Boalt.  Most of the hypothetical situations he posed to us seemed to involve orphans and “vidow ladies” who had gotten themselves into unfortunate contracts.

“I feel sorry for her too, sir,” the designated student might answer.  “But it’s fairly clear from the cases we’ve read this week – and particularly Smith v. Jones – that she entered into the contract freely and voluntarily.  She’s a big girl and the law presumes she knew what she was doing.”

“Ah,” Kessler would pounce.  “But vhat about ze doctrine of economic vaste?  Or vhat about Section 90 of ze Restatement of Contracts?  Can you use vun of zese to give me a theory zat vill do justice?”

We thought The Law was The Law.  Kessler taught us that our job was to use The Law to argue for a correct result.  There’s always a good argument, he drummed into us.  You may not always win, but you should always try.  The Law is imperfect and it’s up to you to protect the “vidows and orphans.”

*

My first boss, the defrocked judge, was a laughing, back-slapping, hail-fellow-well-met type.  He was also a liar, a bully and a man who never did a good deed unless people were watching.  He knew little law, but was one of the county’s most successful bullshit artists.   And he knew how to get and keep the clients.  I had nothing but contempt for him.

“Okay, six o’clock tonight we’re going to the grand opening of So-and-So’s Auto Glass.”

“Whaddaya mean ‘we?’”

“He’s a client.  That’s where the money comes from.”

“He’s not my client.”

“Steve, you have to like people in this business.”

“So being a good attorney isn’t enough?”

“You have to like people.”

He didn’t, of course, except as an audience.  But you can learn from anybody, if you pay attention.  Over the years, I’ve come to realize how much I learned from him – however slowly – and wish I had been a bit more appreciative at the time.  Not much, mind you, for he reamed me royally just before I left to go out on my own.  But if I hadn’t been such a slow learner maybe it wouldn’t have taken me so many years to finally earn a decent living and to be named “Best Attorney” for nine of the last ten years by the votes of scores of loyal clients in my local newspaper’s annual poll.

*

The divorce was bitter and brutal.  Nine years of doing family law still hadn’t taught me enough about understanding and empathizing with my clients’ pain.  But a close friend who let me camp out in his spare bedroom when I was homeless and rootless told me “If nothing else, this is going to make you a better divorce attorney.”

It did.

“You’ve been so different since your divorce,” Roni, my former bookkeeper said.  “You know, you’ve actually turned into a nice guy.”

Roni vaguely echoed what a high school classmate had told me forty years earlier at one of those small parties where the kids are trying to be adults and are talking about adult themes.  We were “psychoanalyzing” each other.

“You’re just all bluff,” she said.  “You’re so insecure that you think people aren’t going to like you, so you put on this gruff exterior to make it come true.  The people who really know you realize it’s not true.”

But it was counselor Mark who finally got it through the thick Dimick skull, although it took a couple of years.

“I know Steve,” he told Marianne in my presence.  “He’s a good person.  He really is.  He takes care of his retired partner.  He feels his clients’ pain.  You and he have sort of adopted your friend Chris with Asperger’s Syndrome because he doesn’t have anyone else.  He would die for Kristi.  He does volunteer work without asking for thanks.

“And he cares.  He really cares.”

When I stopped counseling, Mark told me I should never say I was “cured.”

“Let’s just say you’re in remission,” he said as we hugged goodby.  “Try to stay there.”

*

I had been sitting on the edge of the trestle for a good half hour.  I hadn’t told anyone in the family that I was coming back to Midwest City for the 40^th reunion.  I had too much to do and too much to see in only five days.  I got what I came for, although I still don’t know quite what it was.

It’s time to go home.

A Tale of Two Parents

*

This is the man all tattered and torn

That kissed the maiden all forlorn

*

1972 – 2000

*

“So tell me just what is it you have against me?”

The accusation came out of nowhere and I had no idea what Dwain was talking about.

Since we had moved back to Oklahoma so I could resume my career at the Journal, my wife and I had tried to include Dwain and Gerri in our lives.  We visited them and listened to Dwain brag incessantly.  They came to our house for dinner (more than once, which I felt was a major accomplishment).  Dwain took us flying once or twice.

We were almost like adults, if possibly not close friends, and I was still learning from him and enjoying it.  Until he started in again.

“You wanna tell me what’s going on?  What you’ve got against me?” he demanded one afternoon, apropos of nothing.

Just what is eating at your craw? I remembered from my childhood.  And I was instantly a child again.

“Uh, nothing.  I don’t know what you’re talking about.  Ah…what are you talking about?”

“You’ve got something against me,” he accused.  “You’re playing so nicey-nice, but you’re holding something back and it’s obvious.  You wanna tell me what it is you think I’ve done to you?”

Do not challenge The Man.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dad.  I thought we were on a pretty good footing here.”  The more nervous or angry I become, the better my English.

“I can just feel your disapproval.  And I think you should tell me about it.  Let’s have it out right now.”

I couldn’t get out fast enough.  I don’t even remember how the conversation ended, but I drove away, saying to myself for the twentieth time, “That’s it, cocksucker.  I really don’t need this shit.  How much do I have to try?  Of course I have issues with you, but I’m trying to work through them.  What are you trying to do?”

That was 1972.  I next saw him 28 years later.

I told myself that I had just shrugged my shoulders and walked away.  C’est la vie; c’est la guerre. What, me worry?  I could give a shit.  I raised myself with no help from either one of you, thankyouverymuch, and particularly you, bucko.

Actually, I did shrug my shoulders and walk away.  Actually, I did take my future into my own hands from high school onward.

Actually, I did fool myself that it was OK.

*

When I returned to Oklahoma for my stepfather’s funeral, after several years of counseling, I asked Rick if he would come with me to visit Dwain.  Since I was there, it seemed very important to me to make one last effort.

“I’m in the phone book,” Rick began.  “He knows how to reach me.”

“That’s not the point, bro.  He’s our father, and he’s an asshole, but he needs to know your boys, and you and I need to make the effort because obviously he can’t.”

“I wrote him a letter,” Rick said.  “I told him I wanted him to meet his grandsons.  He never even replied.”

“Goddamnit, he can’t!  You and I have to be bigger than that!  Please come with me.  I’m thinking of going out there in the next couple of days.”

“Not unless you call first and ask if it’s OK that we come.”

“No, I don’t intend to call first.  That won’t work.”

“Then I won’t go.”

So I went alone.  I didn’t tell Marianne, who had already returned to California.  I didn’t tell Mildred.  I told Aunt Verna, because I needed an address.

*

I parked Bob’s Explorer at Dwain’s gate, opened the latch and started to walk up his driveway.  A suspicious old man sauntered towards me, his expression equal parts hostility and distrust.  About five feet apart, we both stopped.

“Are you Dwain?” I asked.  People change a lot in nearly three decades.  He no longer had the moustache that I had thought he was born with.

“Yee-ah.”  Nothing more.

“I’m Steve,” I said, and there was a good five seconds’ silence, which felt like five minutes.

“Well…I’ll be damned!”

*

“I always wanted to see you boys, but your mother–“ Dwain began as we settled on a porch swing to talk.

“Ah!” I held up my hand in a traffic cop gesture.  “I didn’t come here to talk about that.  I came to try to mend some fences.”

“I know.  I really wanted to be a father to you boys, but your mother–“

“Dwain, I really can go there if that’s what you want.”  And I could have.  “We can get into that.  But that’s not why I came.  I came here to talk about you and me.  Nothing more.”

“But your mother –“

“Dwain,” his wife, Gerri, broke in.  “Leave it alone.  Why don’t you listen to Steve?”

His last challenge to me, nearly thirty years earlier, had been, “Let’s have it out right now.”  I couldn’t have done it then.  This time, I was calmed by the knowledge that, yes, I could do so, and I could best him at his own game.  Bring it on, Ace, one part of my brain was saying.  You’re easy meat.  But, at the same time, I had told him the truth: I voluntarily chose the more difficult path.  Let it go; mend fences; move on.

*

For the next two hours, he talked.  About his parents, Daisy and Roy.  About working the mules.  About the “major heart attack” he had had and didn’t know it until the doctor told him.  About being unable to eat anything except bananas because his esophagus had “turned inside out.”

“I didn’t know what it was until I remembered this old boy whose esophagus had turned wrong-side out, and I realized that’s what was happening to me.  So I laid down on the floor and taken a tennis ball and worked it up my front from my waist to my throat ‘til I got it back in place again.  Gerri wasn’t home, and it must’a took me a good two hours, with sweat just pouring all over me.”

The giant, bellowing man who gave me a childhood stutter, whose answer to every slight or setback was verbal or physical violence, the man I couldn’t stand up to even as a young adult, was no longer a threat or a dread.  He was a nutcase.

Still so fascinated by his own reflection in the pool that he couldn’t see anyone else, he wasn’t capable of realizing how shallow his pool had always been; how like a fun-house mirror, reflecting now giant, now dwarf.

The threat had gone out of him.  Or out of me.

And every few minutes, he tried to bring the conversation around to Mil.  I finally let him do so for a while.  It seems that nothing was ever his fault.

*

“You know, I coulda seen you on the street and I wouldn’ta recognized you,” he said as we walked back to Bob’s car.

“So, tell me.  Why don’t you go see your grandkids,” I asked as we hugged goodby.  Californians know the value of hugs, and I was hugging my past, hoping it was finally behind me.

“Well…Rick wrote me a letter.  Said I didn’t know what I was missing…”

“You don’t,” I interrupted.  “They’re a couple of great kids, and if you don’t get to know them, it’s your loss.”

“So he says I haven’t been a good father, and maybe he’ll give me a chance to be a grandfather, but only on his terms.”

“Go see your grandkids.  They need to know you and you need to know them.”

“Well…I don’t know.  You see – “

“Goddamnit, Dwain, go see your grandsons.”

Dwain, 1957

We hugged a last time and I drove away, only slightly angry at him for this last exchange.  I suspect I will always be angry with him for what he was and for what he did, not only to me but to my mother, my brother and that poor boxer dog.  There was no happy ending, no reconciliation, no forgiveness.  My past was not behind me.  Nothing had changed but recognition.

He was, after all, right: there was – is – something sticking in my craw.  But it can only control me if I forget that it’s there.  So, sorry pops, but I’m in control now.  I just did things you could never do:  I reached out; I calmed your anger and, more importantly, my own; I acted like a nice guy.

*

I wrote him a chatty letter a couple of weeks later and sent him a Christmas card that December.  He responded to neither.

Nor did he ever make contact with my brother’s sons.  He did, a couple of months later, show up on Verna’s doorstep, looking a bit confused.

“I guess I just wanted to see if I could still find my way here and home again,” he told her.  “I reckon I better be going now.”

*

I periodically grow a beard, which never looks very good, my Indian blood and my premature gray combining to make it scraggly and motley.  I had a beard at Bob’s funeral, which I had worn for not quite a year.  The morning after my visit to Dwain, as I prepared to leave for the airport,  I shaved it off.

**

“Remember when Mil was here and threw such a fit because we left her alone?” I asked Marianne.  “The fascinating thing about the whole conversation with Dwain was that, evidently, she’s always been that way.

“Dwain told me ‘Every time I picked you boys up or brought you back to your mother’s, she would cry and say, “I’m so lonesome without the boys, I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”’

“Remember?  That’s the exact same thing she said the last time she was here!”

*

Mildred was on the shady side of 76 when she made her last trip to California.  Bob had only visited once, for the wedding reception two years earlier.  That was the they-don’t-even-keep-salt-on-the-table visit.  She’d gone downhill since then, but I hadn’t realized how rapidly.

Mildred, 1960

She didn’t seem that old to me – just a little aged and slow.  We made the mistake of taking her to an upscale Italian restaurant, where the service was excellent, but tables were at a premium.  It wasn’t at all like the “Day-all Rain-cho” back home.

“Aren’t they ever going to give us a table?” she moaned as we sat at the bar at 7:45, waiting for our 8 p.m. reservation.

“Aren’t they ever going to come take our order?” she asked, when we were finally seated.

“Are they ever going to bring our food?”

“Where’s the check?  Are they ever going to bring the check?”

“You’ve had quite a bit to drink, Steve.”  Gee, I wonder why! “Are you sure you’re OK to drive?”

“You can drive, if you’d like,” I offered through gritted teeth.

This was Friday.  She’d arrived that morning.

*

Marianne founded our local handicapped soccer league, which has grown from three teams the first year to eight-plus teams recently.  The players might have Down Syndrome, autism or Asperger’s Syndrome; some are paraplegic, some quadriplegic.  There’s a place for everyone in this league.  Her Saturdays are taken up with practices and games for her special kids.

She had a team practice the next day, which we explained to Mil, thinking she might want to watch.  She didn’t.

At the same time, a long-time client of mine was in a convalescent home, dying.  She left a message at my office that she wanted to see me to talk about her will.

This was Saturday.

Edna died the following Tuesday.

*

Marianne went to her soccer practice.  I tried to explain to Mildred why I had to leave briefly, but that I would be back as soon as possible.

I was probably gone less than two hours.

When I returned home, Mildred was hysterical and hyperventilating.

“Marianne not back yet?” I asked.

“No!  Nobody’s back!  Everybody left me here all alone,” she wailed.

“Mil, I told you that a very close client of mine is dying,” I tried to explain.  “She wanted me to go to her apartment and find her ‘gift list.’  I really didn’t mean for it to take that long.  But what could I do?”

“You left me here all alone.  I’m just so lonesome, I could die!”

Ungenerously, I thought of the Hank Williams song.  Bad me.

“Mil, calm down,”  I tried, in my best soothe-the-client voice.  “It’s okay.  I’m sorry we left you.  But you used to be able to entertain yourself with a book.

“And it really hasn’t been all that long.”

“You don’t understand,” she sobbed.  “I’m just so lonesome I can’t stand it!  I called the airline and changed my tickets to go home tomorrow.”

Once again, I had not tendered the proper deference.  Once again, I was the wiggle-worm child who didn’t want to be hugged.  Once again, I stole attention which rightfully belonged to her and spent it on someone else.

Ah, yes: how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a child who is just like his father.

*

Next:  Finale

A Tale of Two Cities

In 1929 the factory output was 43 million dollars.

Wholesale trade proper amounted to

seventy-one million,

five hundred and ten thousand,

five hundred and seventy three dollars.

Retail trade: ninety-two million….

But as far as I’m concerned,

I don’t care if I ever set foot there again:  in Salt Lake City.

That town is a nemesis to me.

Leon Rene and Johnny Lange, I Lost My Sugar in Salt Lake City

*

Downtown Oklahoma City was deserted, decrepit and dusty when I left in 1973, looking much as it must have during the first few months after its founding in 1889, only without the bustle.  Lyndon Johnson’s Urban Renewal program had provided enough money to demolish a good part of the downtown buildings but not enough to replace them.  What private money there was had all but abandoned downtown in favor of sparkling new developments to the north and northwest of town.

I next saw it in 1990.  It was a little cleaner, but still as empty.  The state’s second oil boom had come and gone almost overnight.  Gone were the hordes of Houston oil boys in their fancy suits and ostrich boots who had flocked to Oklahoma City when OPEC lowered production and oil prices shot up.

The boom was all illusion, anyway.  Mark Singer, in his book Funny Money, quotes an observer noting that “You’ve got thirteen thousand oil and gas companies in Oklahoma; maybe fifteen hundred are looking for oil and gas, the rest are looking for investors.”

Or as another resident told me in 2005, “The problem was that everybody was busy making deals and nobody was drilling or pumping any oil.”

“But oil is $65 a barrel now,” I protested.  “That’s more than double what it was during the 80’s.  Where’s your third oil boom?”

“You have to have oil to have a boom.  We’re tapped out.  Most of our wells are lucky to pump three to five barrels a day.  There won’t be another oil boom.”

*

The meltdown of Penn Square Bank in 1986, the FDIC’s largest bank failure to date, with its massive  ripple effect on major banks on both coasts, had devastated the city’s economy.  There was still no activity, and certainly no building, in downtown.

The 25^th reunion committee suggested that out-of-towners stay in one of the newer and cleaner hotels on the northwest side of Oklahoma City, dozens of miles away from Midwest City, which is to the southeast.

There was only one hotel left in all of downtown Oklahoma City and it was scheduled to close soon, but we elected to stay there after being disinvited to stay with Mil.  Downtown hadn’t changed much since 1973, except that even more buildings were missing.

It had never been very big to begin with – maybe 20 or 30 square blocks – but Urban Renewal had left the downtown skyline looking like the smile of a snaggle-toothed nine year old.

We arrived at the hotel sometime around 6:00 p.m.  After checking in, I asked the desk clerk if there was someplace I could have a couple of pairs of shoes shined.

“Boy, I just don’t know,” the desk man admitted.  “No place downtown, that’s for sure.  It’s after five o’clock, you know.”

*

I was back again ten years later, once for a visit and a scant two weeks later for my step-father’s funeral.  Oklahoma City had begun to clean up its act.  It had built a new civic complex downtown, the centerpiece of which was the Crystal Bridge, a seven-story glassed conservatory spanning a two-acre lake and almost rivaling the Victorian conservatory in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

But downtown was still deserted.  We drove around looking for the Oklahoma City Memorial, the monument to the 1995 bombing of a federal office building in which 168 people were killed.  When we found it, we were silenced by its simultaneous audacity and simplicity.  But at two o’clock in the afternoon, the business district was eerily empty.  The office buildings were there, but there were few cars on the street, fewer cars at the parking meters and no pedestrians on the sidewalks.

“Jesus, it looks like a ghost town,” I muttered.  “Who works in all of these buildings?”

*

Separating northern from southern Oklahoma City is the South Canadian River, a river hardly worthy of the name anymore, and whose water flow most of the time barely reaches that of a large creek in other parts of the country.  But it has wide banks and, about ten feet above them, the 100-year flood plain and then, about ten feet or so above that is ground level for Oklahoma City.

Back in the ‘70’s, the city administration first raised the idea of building a series of dams along the river to create a string of small lakes, dubbed the “string of pearls.”  I applauded the idea in my weekly column in The Journal’s Sunday entertainment section, wondering in print why other large cities could have concrete or stone embankments for their rivers, with pedestrian walkways along them and, sometimes, shops or cafes.  Why, I asked, if we wanted a vital downtown, could we not run with the “string of pearls” idea and build embankments and walkways along the river?

Nothing came of the administration’s idea or my suggestions, but twenty years later Oklahoma City voters approved probably the most ambitious civic project since shortly after statehood, the Metropolitan Area Projects (MAPS) plan, a combination of public and private financing that has transformed downtown.

A large former railroad supply and warehouse district immediately east of downtown proper – renamed Bricktown for its typical Oklahoma brick buildings – has since been developed into the state’s largest tourist attraction, boasting nearly ten million visitors a year, and a bustle of activity day and night.

After a fitful start, Bricktown by 2005 boasted a AAA baseball park, shops, businesses, a trolley system, pedicabs, a multi-screen movie theater, a river canal system running through it with water taxis leaving from various taxi-stops every fifteen minutes, and a broad walkway along the canal, called Riverwalk.  And just upstream, on the re-christened Oklahoma River, the city has built a series of dams forming a series of lakes through downtown.  The river has water once again.

Downtown Oklahoma City went from four or five shopworn hotels in 1950 to one hotel in 1990 to four major hotels by 2005; from one convention center and almost no downtown restaurants (and none open for dinner) in 1990 to three convention centers and more than a dozen restaurants in 2005.  Bricktown alone now boasts more than two dozen nightclubs and restaurants.

Not only can you finally get a meal after dark in the immediate downtown vicinity, but I suspect you can also find a place to get your shoes shined after five o’clock.

Oklahomans – and I include myself – tend to be slow learners and very single-minded.  We don’t so much resist change as take arms against it.  But when we decide change is inevitable, whether it be turning hard prairie sod into fertile wheat and cotton farms or resurrecting a dying downtown, that same single-mindedness serves us well.

*

A friend told me during my visit in 2005, to my great surprise, that Oklahoma City has a thriving gay community and even has its own Gay Pride Parade.  He later sent me a clipping from The Oklahoman featuring a non-judgmental story about the June, 2006, parade.

“The festive atmosphere [at the 19^th annual parade] was far different from the city’s first gay pride parade in 1988,” The Oklahoman reported, “when about 400 marchers expected to be attacked at any moment by Ku Klux Klansmen.”

But, just as in the city’s successful lunch-counter sit-ins in 1958, there was no violence and the parade has continued to grow until the 2006 event featured 58 different groups “queued up for an event that is equal parts celebration and civil rights march.”

**

The radio news says these are boom times again in Oklahoma, with unexpected tax revenues, huge state surpluses and a balanced budget – unlike California, which has been mostly awash in red ink since the dot-com bust in 2001 and where we passed a state budget on time in 2006 for the first time in human memory.  Most years, there are threats of state employees going unpaid every July because the Democrats, the Republicans and the governor (be he either Democrat or Republican) can’t shed their posturing.

*

But if Oklahoma City looked booming in 2005, Midwest City looked distinctly shopworn.

I recognized almost none of the commercial buildings.  Most of the ones I remembered from thirty years ago have since been torn down and replaced, only to be already showing signs of age.

If there was ever a center of town, it was Atkinson Plaza, gateway to the original tiny civic center complex and home to the Skytrain Theater, the town’s baby sitter.  But Atkinson Plaza has been razed.  In its place will be a Lowe’s and a Target – just the sort of stores any upscale downtown needs.

The rest of the town’s commercial development is spread along the section lines, and even they are full of vacant lots and vacant buildings.  What there is in abundance are fast-food joints, pawn shops and instant loan businesses.  Fast food and quickie loans seem to be directly connected to each other.

*

Midwest City is less than thirty square miles in area, with a population of about 55,000.  More than a third of its total area is designated as an Oklahoma State Enterprise Zone, qualifying for tax incentives and low-interest loans because more than thirty percent of the zone’s residents are at or below the poverty level or the zone’s per capita income is fifteen percent or more below the state average.

Another (overlapping) one-third of the city qualifies for special federal contracts for small businesses because it has either a very high unemployment rate or a very low median household income.  And nearly one-tenth of the city qualifies for yet another federal program to stimulate financial institutions which serve “distressed” communities.

Driving, shopping and eating in my hometown, I do take a bit of comfort at first from the unexpected diversity.  There are lots of black and brown faces and I hear Spanish spoken everywhere.  Unfortunately, these faces and voices nearly all belong to workers in the service industries, earning only minimum wages.

There do seem to be plenty of service jobs to go around, particularly in the fast-food business.  Midwest Citians surely must like to eat.  Although I could only find one actual restaurant in town (or, if I am generous, two), I counted 92 (or, if I am ungenerous, 93) cafes, diners and fast-food joints – one for every six hundred residents.  One mile-long stretch alone has 22, and another has 20.

You have your Boomerang, your Chicago Grill, your Sonic Drive In, Taco Bell, Chiu Wu, Hunan Express, Fazzioli’s, Wendy’s, Appleby’s, Golden Corral, Cocina de Mino, King Wa, Chequers, Furrs, Something Barbeque Burgers, Deli & Dogs, Los Vaqueros, Little Caesar’s, Subway and yet another Chinese restaurant.  Around the corner you have another Sonic, a McDonald’s and another and another, another Wendy’s and another, a Burger King or three, the House of This and the House of That and my mother’s favorite, the Del Rancho (Day-all Rain-cho.)

Doesn’t anybody cook anymore?

Why do I not doubt that it’s the employees from all these eateries who support the 24 pawn shops, EZ Loan and paycheck advance businesses in town?  One single mile has eight of these.

Maybe the Chamber of Commerce has the answer.  Midwest City’s C of C, like Chambers everywhere, loves statistics.  Its published stats show that the city’s average household income is less than 84 percent of that of the Oklahoma City Metro area and barely 90 percent of the statewide average – which would include subsistence farmers and impoverished Indian tribes.  I am left with no conclusion but that the distressed, poverty-level citizens of one-third of Midwest City’s residential neighborhoods are probably working full-time at minimum-wage jobs, yet are still under the poverty level.

*

There is an impressive new conference center, an expanded junior college, several newish office parks and a fair amount of building going on, although it isn’t immediately clear what the construction is for, except for the Chamber’s two proudest crowing points, a new strip mall and a Wal-Mart Supercenter.

Some towns, protective of home-grown businesses, actually try to keep Wal-Mart out.

But, as always, and to the city’s credit, the schools look to be in good shape.  Schools have always been Midwest City’s pride, which could explain why most of their graduates leave town.

*

Yet for all of the new construction, the town’s infrastructure is in sad shape.  In the better neighborhoods, the streets look like they may have been resurfaced in the past ten to fifteen years, but in the older areas the streets are full of cracks and potholes sprouting Bermuda grass, and the concrete curbs are rotting and degrading, with large chunks falling into the gutters.  When it rains, the red Oklahoma dirt washes into the streets from front lawns only partially maintained.

Midwest City seemed to have had a chance once, when it had a newspaper.  Now, it has lost its voice and its center.  Now, with freeways making for an easy commute to posher neighborhoods, it is no longer a necessary bedroom community for Tinker Air Force Base.  While Oklahoma City seems to have found its new identity, Midwest City – with its nebulous slogan “East Is In” – is still searching.

**

There is still a street named after Bill Atkinson in Midwest City, and his house has been turned into a museum.  But there are no parks, no schools and no public monuments bearing his name.  The family members who inherited his fortune are mostly developing land elsewhere.  But in Oklahoma City, a major thoroughfare separating downtown from Bricktown has been renamed “E.K. Gaylord Boulevard.”

Less than a mile north, at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center campus, is a new clock tower dedicated to Gaylord – a gift from E.K. and Eddie’s friend, University of Oklahoma president David L. Boren.  And barely more than 20 miles south of Bricktown is the university’s main campus, where the Gaylord name has become omnipresent.

Gaylord Family Memorial Stadium, OU

Never as respected as his father, Edward L. Gaylord not only succeeded in making himself more feared, but in accumulating wealth far beyond anything E.K. could possibly have dreamed.  Eddie first endowed a chair at the OU journalism school, the “Edward L. and Thelma Gaylord Chair in Journalism and Mass Communications,” and in early 2000 announced a gift of $22 million to the university to found a college in his father’s name.

The largest single gift in the university’s history, the money not only helped establish the E.K. Gaylord College of Mass Communication, but also built Gaylord Hall, a state-of-the-art facility emphasizing audio, video, multimedia and computer labs, and containing within it the Edith K. Gaylord Library and Resource Center.

Gaylord Hall sits directly across the campus’ South Oval from – and Gaylord College has absorbed – the H.H. Herbert School of Journalism, named after the university’s first journalism professor, and the school where I learned to be a reporter.  Even a quick tour of both buildings makes it clear that none of the Gaylord money went into the J-School, and it looks as if not much money at all has been funneled in that direction since I left in 1969.

And football being the university’s most important product, just north of Gaylord Hall is the impressive new football stadium.  For more than 75 years it was known as Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, honoring students, faculty and Oklahoma citizens who died in World War I.  Today it is known as the Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, a gift from a grateful President Boren at a cost to students – in debt service alone – of more than five million dollars a year.

Now, how much would you pay?

*

Coming Next:  Old Folks at Home

Back at The Journal

Keep a clean nose

Watch the plain clothes

You don’t need a weather man

To know which way the wind blows.

Bob Dylan

*

I seem to have done a good job as a stringer covering the University of Oklahoma for The Oklahoma Journal.  I called in several stories that made the front page and, on a few occasions, rocked the boat and made the waves that a good journalist should be making.

I earned the wrath of a former English prof of mine who was the faculty advisor for the campus poetry magazine.  When he attempted to censor the magazine, I got wind of it and wrote a story which earned me a byline.  He cornered me in the grocery store the following week and, after informing me that “you don’t have any understanding of Shakespeare at all” (I had received an “A” in his class), complained that “I was called on the carpet by the chairman of my department because of your story.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, looking for a way out.  I was only a college senior, and this fellow, although not much more than ten years older than me, was not only a former instructor of mine, but a full professor, and a Yale graduate who spoke through his teeth.  I finally said, “If you got in trouble, it was because of what you did.  I only reported it.”

But he didn’t and never would understand, in the same way that politicians always blame the press for exposing their wrongdoings and peccadillos.  I walked away shaking from the ugly confrontation.  But that’s one of the glorious things about being a newspaper reporter: if the bad guys blame you for exposing them, you must be doing your job.

*

Sent to discover what had happened to the Students for a Democratic Society following the events of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention (out of which grew the Weathermen,  later to become the Weather Underground), I discovered a non-story.  “There is no SDS,” its former campus president told me.  Instead, leftist students were turning their attention to a new cause, known then as the WLM.  I wrote the first story published in Oklahoma about the goals of the fledgling Women’s Liberation Movement.

*

A star player on the OU basketball team leveled charges of racism against the sports department and the editor of the campus daily newspaper made a big show of secrecy while he huddled in his office with the player.  Emerging from his conference, he ordered everybody in the newsroom to keep quiet, promising a huge scoop for the next morning’s paper.

But back in my apartment, I looked up the jock’s telephone number, got the whole story, and called it in to The Journal.  Don Rice wrote the story; I only supplied the details.  But my byline appeared on the lead front-page story the next morning, scooping the campus paper and resulting in its editor punishing me by ripping my name off of my newsroom mail slot.

I loved it.

*

And to my considerable surprise, I loved being a newspaper reporter.

This wasn’t what I really wanted to do.  Like every J-major in history, I wanted to write the Great American Novel.  But as an English and history major, also, and a stickler for details, I was suited for newspaper work.

You don’t last long as a newsman if you don’t have an excellent grasp of the English language, a pretty broad-based education, an ability to cut through the B.S. and spot the important facts, and be more than a little skeptical about anyone’s explanations.  Be it the average citizen or big-deal public figure, explanations are always self-serving.  I found the company of newsmen to be stimulating and each morning’s product to be a source of pride.  Mostly.

*

The Journal newsroom wasn’t much bigger than the family room in an up-scale house.  Crammed with metal desks and manual typewriters, flanked by a large, ever-clattering teletype machine and anchored by the city editor’s desk, it resembled a Breughel painting by 10 or 11 p.m.  The noise alone could send a vulnerable person into complete autistic withdrawal.

I might be working on a piece of my own, only to hear Rice shouting, “Dimick!  Pendley’s on the phone with a police shooting!  Take the dictation!”

Short-staffed as we were, we all had a common goal: to beat The Oklahoman and put out the best damned newspaper we could.

(Well, all of us except management, which was concerned less with quality than with the bottom line.)

So I would take dictation.  Sometimes the reporter on the other end of the line spun the story off the top of his head and I merely typed.  Sometimes it was only the facts, and I would put them together into a coherent story to appear under his byline.  It didn’t matter to me.  The Journal was generous with bylines, which helped compensate for the lousy pay.

And somehow, amid all the bedlam, a product was created every evening that would hit the metro doorsteps before daylight.

*

We were young, we were idealistic (and, at the same time, cynical), we were educated, well-read, and we fed off of each other.  We viewed ourselves as a modern reincarnation of the Algonquin Round Table, although our bon mots never made it outside of the newsroom.

Once we wrote a round-robin novel about the newsroom.  Jack Bickham, prolific author and later a  professor of creative writing at the OU J-School, wrote the first chapter and passed it on to another staffer.  Nobody knew where the story was going, as each succeeding author added his own twists to his chapter.  But nobody was spared, and we were careful not to let management see it.

A running joke throughout the novel involved reporter Rhoda Clary, sharp as a scalpel and just as sharp-tongued, and known for her expletive outbursts.

“Goddamn it, Rhoda!” Rice screamed.  “We’re sitting on deadline and you hand me copy like this?  Who said this quote?  What’s his first name?  Who the hell is he?  Why do I care about his opinion?  How old is he?  What’s his mother-in-law’s name?  What’s his collar size?”

“Shit!” Rhoda said.

*

We loved the paper and we hated it.

We loved it because we were covering stories The Oklahoman ignored: civil rights stories, police brutality, new-Democratic politics, the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate scandal.  These stories didn’t find their way into the Gaylord papers.  Or if they did, it was a watered-down and heavily edited version.  According to The Oklahoman, there was no Watergate scandal until the impeachment proceedings began and it could no longer be ignored.

We hated The Journal for its hokeyness.  It’s motto was “The Paper That Tells Both Sides” (and for the most part, it did), but it’s sub-motto was “Your Have-A-Good-Day Newspaper,” complete with vapid smiley face and a joke column on the front page.

It was embarrassing and it made us cringe.

We resented it because it paid its reporters almost nothing, while its advertising salesmen drove company cars and wore Gucci shoes, costing more than a reporter made in a week, along with their race-track checkered sports coats.  And because, just once in a while, the ad salesmen arranged to have a story quashed or re-written.  Usually by the Managing Editor.

The advertising manager did so well for himself that, when the paper folded, he landed a position as publisher of a Hearst newspaper and today, with no journalism experience other than forty years as a salesman, is a well-respected member of the Texas journalism community.

Frightening as hell to me, but then I’ve always been a bit behind the times.  It’s happening all over the country.  Liberals don’t control the media.  Conservatives don’t control the media.  Advertising salesmen control the media.

*

If I thought I received an education at OU (actually, I didn’t think that at the time, although I was wrong), I learned even more by working with professional newsmen.  J. Nelson Taylor, for instance, had been on speaking terms with Ma Barker, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd and other Oklahoma outlaws.  Jack Bickham wrote the novel on which the Walt Disney movie “The Apple Dumpling Gang” was based.  Bickham once asked for a long weekend off – Friday through Monday – because he had a contract to write a novel.  He finished it in three days and it was published.

But mostly, it was the free flow of ideas from curious and well-rounded people that impressed me.  I was still struggling to break free from my family and societal notion that “every man for himself” was not only the code of the frontier, but the basis of civilization.  Rhoda set me straight one evening when a group of us were having dinner at a local slop-house and I had been spouting Ayn Rand philosophy about the virtue of selfishness.

“You know, there’s an apocryphal story about archeologists discovering the skeleton of a prehistoric man, maybe only thirty or forty thousand years old, who was missing his right arm,” she said.  “But he had evidently died of old age.

“The story goes that this was the beginning of modern civilization.  He obviously couldn’t live on his own with only one arm, so the group had to take care of him.  Isn’t that what makes a society?  That everybody sacrifices something for the good of the tribe?

“Otherwise, we could never have a police department, build a highway or have public education.”

Shit, as Rhoda might have said.  It’s damned uncomfortable when somebody destroys all of your preconceptions with one speech.  This wasn’t the first time it had happened, nor would it be the last.  But still.

In 2005, the story ceased to be apocryphal, when a 1.77 million-year-old fossil was discovered in Georgia, in the former Soviet Union.  The old man had lost all of his teeth but one, yet died of old age, indicating he had been cared for by his tribe.  Other fossil evidence suggests that the Neanderthals practiced a similar charity toward the less fortunate.

*

I worked for The Journal full-time from May through October, 1969, when I had to report to

Journal Days: with Speaker of the House Carl Albert

the Army.  As the youngest kid on the staff, I got all of the grunt work:  writing obits, covering tea parties and charitable events (and learning to write a story when there was absolutely nothing newsworthy to write about), as well as being sent off to political speeches, corner-stone layings, gallery openings and the like.  I also occasionally filed in for the beat reporters, including police and City Hall.

Rice gave me another of his rare compliments my last day on the job: “You’ve learned well, Dimick.  I feel like I can send you out to cover almost anything and you’ll do a yeoman’s job.”

You’d have to know Don Rice to know how much his praise meant to me.

*

I was discharged from the Army in Oakland in January, 1971, and intended to stay in the Bay Area.  Its diversity, its tolerance and its tolerance for diversity were like oxygen to me when I remembered the stifling atmosphere of Oklahoma City.

When I applied to law school five years later, I set my sights on Boalt Hall, the law school at the University of California at Berkeley, the top public law school in the state and one of the best in the nation.

Similarly, I only wanted to work for one of the two top San Francisco newspapers, either The Chronicle or The Examiner.  But then, half of the reporters in the country want to work in San Francisco, and the city’s market for reporters was still glutted from the 58-day strike three years earlier, when the third daily newspaper, the News-Call-Bulletin (successor to three previous dailies) folded.

But unlike my later admission to Boalt Hall, I failed to gain entry in the world of San Francisco journalism.  I received a cordial welcome by both major dailies and compliments on the contents of my stringbook, but no job offers.  I did get an offer from The Richmond Independent, a gutsy little daily on the east side of San Francisco Bay, but was ambivalent about taking it.

I begged a few days to think about it, and while I was thinking, Oklahoma called.  It was my old city editor, Don Rice.

Under the G.I. Bill of Rights, I had ninety days in which to demand my old job back at the Journal.  It was my hole card, and I didn’t intend to turn it over until Day 89.  But a college friend let slip to Rice that I was out of the Army, and there I was:  forced to make a choice even though I had another month to go.

Rice: “Steve?  How the hell are you?  I hear you’re out of the Army.  Clabes wants to talk to you.”

Clabes: “We’d like you to come back and work for us again.  Don thinks a lot of you, and we think you could be a great asset.”

Me: “John, I just don’t know.  I really want to stay out here.  I’m trying to get on at one of the Bay Area papers.  Actually, I got an offer just day before yesterday, and I’m trying to decide whether to accept.

Clabes: “We’ll make you entertainment editor.”

*

Damn!  The job I wanted.

My high school involvement in speech and drama had given me a love for the performing arts, and I had been entertainment editor of the OU daily newspaper my senior year, in addition to writing my column and stringing for The Journal. I didn’t know a thing about music, dance or opera, but at least Oklahoma was too far in the hinterlands to have much in the way of dance or opera.

(My fanatical obsession with opera wouldn’t arrive for some years yet, but even today I wouldn’t feel qualified to write an informed review of an opera performance.)

During my brief stay at The Journal between graduation and the Army, I was sort of a second-string critic, covering in my spare time what the entertainment editor (and sole entertainment staff) had no interest in or time for.

And now they were offering me the job of entertainment editor (and, needless to say, sole entertainment staff.)  That other paper in Oklahoma City had three people doing this job.

But still.

*

“What will you pay?” I finally asked.

“What did we pay you before?”

“A hundred and five a week.”

“What have they offered you out there?”

“A hundred sixty.”

“Ohhh, that’s pretty steep.  The cost of living is a lot less back here, you know.  We might be able to go a hundred and a quarter, but that’s really stretching things.”

Granted, this was 1971, and figures from then make no sense at all today.  Gasoline cost 33 cents a gallon in the Bay Area and about 27 cents a gallon in Oklahoma City.  Folks would drive ten miles to save a penny a gallon.  But while reporters were earning salaries in the mid-four figures, the suede-shoe ad salesmen were into the mid- to upper-five figures.

*

My wife and I debated almost continuously over the next two or three days.  We made lists of pro’s and con’s; we drew charts; we tried assigning different weights to different factors.

No matter what measure we used, the answer remained the same: stay in the Bay Area.

Except for the big-fish-in-the-little-pond theory.  Career-wise, wouldn’t it make more sense to make a name for myself and then hope to move up to a more respectable paper?

No; according to all of our charts, it did not make sense.  And, yes, we did it anyway.

*

“I need at least a hundred sixty, John.”

“Ohhh, boy.  I can go a hundred forty, but that’s it.  And you have to promise not to tell anyone else in the newsroom what we’re paying you.”

It was sometime later before I realized that Clabes exacted this same promise from all reporters.  I shouldn’t tell anyone else what I was making for fear that they would tell me what they were being paid, which was generally more, although it might be less if he could get away with it.

And a kid with no better negotiation skills than this later decided to become an attorney?

Never argue with The Man, Mildred drummed into my head.  Trust the people with the power.

And so, Mr. Bigfish headed back to Oklahoma’s little pond.

*

Life was good and Bigfish had it all: Theater tickets.  Movie tickets.  Symphony tickets.  Rock concert tickets.  The occasional junket to Los Angeles or Dallas with other critics to interview movie stars and directors – all paid for by the film industry.  (We had no pride.  Even The Oklahoman refused to let its staffers accept free junkets from the very people they were paid to critique, but The Journal couldn’t afford to be particular.)

I met scores of singers, actors, directors and producers, although few that most folks remember today: Barbra Streisand (the world’s most beautiful complexion), Robert Preston (who fondled my wife’s knee during our interview), Carol Channing (ecch), Roy Rogers and Dale Evans (double yecch), Yul Brynner, Darren McGavin, Don Ameche, Lauren Bacall, Burt Reynolds, George Peppard, Mark Rydell, Ida Lupino, Ben Johnson, Roscoe Lee Brown, composer John Williams, Gene Autry, Alice Cooper, Jack Benny, Johnny Carson.

When a new film was released (usually a second-rate film, as otherwise, the Hollywood PR department wouldn’t have bothered with Oklahoma City), actors and directors would do “the tour,” appearing in backwater towns to give interviews in hopes of drumming up business.  The studio releasing the film would split the cost of the promotion with the local theater-chain operators.

It was first-class all the way: the best restaurant in town, the best prime rib (no chicken ala king on these tours) and the best wine.  Many years later and a world away, I realized that the Chateau Lafitte Rothschild I drank with George Peppard was still way beyond my budget.  I charge more for half an hour of my time now than I earned in a week at The Journal, and I still can’t afford it.

Worse still, I didn’t even appreciate the finest of Bordeaux at the time.  I had been the swine in front of which the money guys had cast their pearls.

*

It was a plum of a job, if ever a plum-of-a-job there was.

I grew to hate it.

*

The people with the money give favors, and they expect favors in return.  And the Journal was all too willing to be a lapdog.

*

While I had been in the Army, The Journal’s long-time critic moved on, and the editors tried a variety of replacements.  For a while, there was no regular entertainment staff, so general-assignment reporters covered concerts, plays and movies.  For a while, the job was held by a graduate of the OU Drama School, a very talented actor, director and promoter, but just too “artsy fartsy” for the Oklahoma City readership.  The readers seldom understood what he was writing about.

When I returned, subscribers were still steaming over two reviews printed in the last year or so, one of Elvis Presley and one of Tom Jones.  Both reviews were brutally honest, describing the performers as fat, fatuous, tired, over-the-hill, and, especially in the case of Jones, with his wipe-my-face-with-your-panties schtick, pretty insulting.

You’d have thought the Journal had attacked Jonas Salk or Mohandas Gandhi.

Or Alfalfa Bill Murray.

It wasn’t only the subscribers who were steaming.  Clabes hadn’t gotten over it.  Evidently Russell Vaught, president and CEO of the corporation, held the managing editor personally responsible for every angry letter to the editor or angry telephone call.

I don’t know; maybe every lost subscription came out of Clabes’ hide.  I do know it didn’t come out of Russell’s paycheck or considerable perks.

My second or third day back on the job, Clabes told me the story about the hate mail the paper had received for daring to print anything negative about Presley and Jones.  I thought it was just an anecdote, and smiled appreciatively.

It wasn’t.  It was a warning.  But I’m a little slow sometimes.

*

Tom Jones came back to Oklahoma City while I was there.  By this time, I had learned what The Journal’s parameters were, and sometimes knew how to get around them.  I reviewed him as a cultural phenomenon – reviewed the audience, actually, with hardly a word about the performance – made my point, at least to my own satisfaction, and got away with it.  I think the review was over Clabes’ head.

I took the same approach with Engelbert Humperdinck, whose career is still going strong today among the polyester crowd.  Thirty years ago, he was already a ten-year has-been – except in places like Oklahoma City, where he still had masses of lonely, overweight women joining his fan club and crowding his performances.  I deliberately avoided reviewing the singer in favor of reviewing the scene.  Deadpan, as it were.  If you knew what I was writing about…well, then you knew what I was writing about, and were properly appalled.  If you were there screaming until you were hoarse, I didn’t do any more than report the facts, and you didn’t understand enough to be insulted.

*

But what do you do with the hometown theater groups whose productions are generally only passable and which are dreadful much more often than great?  I never really came to terms with this uneasy question.

Influential British actor and director Tyrone Guthrie, founder of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and inspiration for many other local theater companies across the country, was a one-man crusade for regional theater.  He viewed it as a venue where actors and directors could do productions impossible to mount on Broadway or London’s West-End, enriching the public while honing their own skills.

I supported the philosophy (where else could you see a production of Krapp’s Last Tape or an early Edward Albee play?), but there was always the nagging problem of pedestrian productions.  And the vast majority of Oklahoma City theater productions were nothing if not pedestrian.

Voices from the audience as we leave the theater: “Wasn’t that just great?  My husband and I have actually seen Broadway plays that weren’t nearly as good.”  “Honey, you’re gonna be reading about that actor out in Hollywood in a year or two.  Wanna bet?”

Ladies, I want to shout, there’s a lot of drivel produced in New York, but the worst of it is better than this turkey!  And “that actor” only has two expressions in his repertoire and stumbled over half his lines.

Then, of course, I would have to write a review while trying for two irreconcilable goals: 1) to be somewhat honest and not turn into a complete whore, and 2) to not get fired or ridden out of town on a rail.

Damned hard job for a hundred forty a week.

*

Oklahoma City University and a couple of the town’s theater groups sponsored a round-table discussion on the subject of theatrical criticism.  The panel included me, the Oklahoman’s critic and Brendan Gill, long-time film, drama and architectural critic for the New Yorker.

Naturally, the moderator’s first question was whether critics should grade on a curve – treating local productions more generously than professional touring companies or Broadway productions.  Did we?

Gill went first, explaining simply and eloquently that a group which charges money for admission must be judged against any other group which charges for tickets.  The critic owes a duty to his audience to tell them whether the production is worth shelling out for, and a critic who misleads his audience is not doing his job.

The Oklahoman went next.  This was a critic who never had a harsh word for any show.  He would have given two thumbs up (had thumbs been invented yet) to my fourth-grade pageant about the marriage of Oklahoma Territory to Indian Territory.

“I don’t see my job as pointing out the failings of a regional production,” he said.  “Number one, I don’t want to scare people away from the theater, or we won’t have any theater.  Number two, I’m not sure that my opinion is any better than anyone else’s.  I may not like a show, but you may love it.

“And I don’t think you can hold a local production to the same standards as a Broadway show.  So I view my job as telling the readers what the production is about.  And if a semi-professional group puts on a good show for them, I’m going to give them a good review.”

Now why hadn’t I anticipated this as the most logical first question and had an answer prepared?

“Umm,” I said.  Good start, Steve.

“I…do…cut some slack.  While I basically agree with Mr. Gill?…I just can’t apply an absolute standard to any and all theatrical productions.  I go a little easier – but not much – on shows at the Oklahoma Theater Center, because they’re not Broadway.  But they are an Actors’ Equity house, they bill themselves as a professional theater company, and they charge a pretty fair price.

“I’m a little easier on Lyric Theater?  Because they’re all local actors, they don’t get paid scale, and it’s only summer stock.

“If you move down a bit, I might be slightly easier on each…lower level?…of productions?

“But if a show is bad, it’s bad.  And if it’s bad, I have to say so.  And believe, me, a lot of them are bad.”

*

At least, that’s what I said.  The audience believed it, accepted it, and I even got a few compliments afterwards, including from the director of the University of Oklahoma Drama School.

And when I left Oklahoma City, one of the local actors whom I admired and respected the most told a mutual friend that I was “the best critic Oklahoma City has ever had.”

What I did, though, was a few degrees less noble.  At least in my mind.

*

“Give it a good review,” Clabes smiled and slapped me on the back as I headed out one evening to a performance by the Lyric Theater, Oklahoma City’s summer musical venue.

Lyric by-and-large did a pretty good job with local talent.  I usually did give it fair reviews.  This production didn’t deserve it.

Backstage, after the performance, I talked with one of the performers who recognized how shallow the production was.  “I told the cast ‘just wait ‘til Steve Dimick gets finished with this show,’” she said.

I got finished with the show about midnight, handed in my copy and went home.  The next morning, there were two glowing reviews in the two morning newspapers, one under my byline.  A word had been changed here, a sentence rewritten there, and it was no longer my review.

I could bitch and complain to Don Rice.  If he thought I was wrong, he would just out-shout me.  But he was never vindictive.  So I did.

“Clabes changed it,” he said flatly.

“Oh, fucking great!  What am I for?  You want me to be like the guy at The Oklahoman, or you want a real critic?  Hell, you could get a high school kid to write a puff piece about every amateur production in town!”

“Talk to Clabes,” he shrugged.

“Goddamn it!  I’m paid for my opinions!  What the hell good are my opinions if you won’t print them?”

“Talk to Clabes.”

Did I?

Of course not.  If I had talked to Clabes the way I talked to Rice, he would have fired me in a minute, and jobs were damned scarce in OKC.  You don’t challenge The Man.  I was trapped.

*

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