Intro to Mil & Steve

Why was I born?
Why am I livin’?

Jerome Kern

.

Every litter has a pup nicknamed “Killer.”  Killer isn’t a bad dog, he’s just a bit of a bully.  He goes his own way, takes what he wants when he wants it, picks on his siblings and doesn’t cuddle well.

I have whelped and raised almost a dozen litters of puppies, including Dalmatians, golden retrievers, Labradors and mutts.  More than once I have spent 48 hours in labor playing doggie obstetrician.  One phenomenon always holds true: puppies leave the womb with their personalities fully formed.

By Day Two you can tell which pup will be the cuddliest, which will be the suck-up, which the complainer, which the loudest, and which one deserves the nickname, “Killer.”

Eight weeks later, when they’re adopted out, their personalities haven’t changed at all.  You can civilize and train them, and teach them to behave in an acceptable manner.  Within limits, you can change how they act, but you can’t change who they are.  “Killer” will always be a willful, loud tough guy.

So in the age-old debate about nature vs. nurture, I come down solidly on the side of nature as the primary shaping force of personality, with nurture running a few lengths behind.

I don’t like this observation.  It runs completely counter to my social and political philosophies.  But there it is.

My observations of human puppies have not changed my “personality-out-of-the-womb” theory. The fussy baby (absent any physical cause) becomes the fussy child and will, generally, become the fussy adult.  Subject, of course, to the nudging influence of nurture.

Sometimes, a large amount of puppy training, or a large amount of study, guidance, self-reflection and practice can so successfully apply a grease-paint gloss over the puppy/person’s true nature that it can actually seem to have developed a different personality.  In reality, it is but another mask.

Some religious sects believe that certain babies are destined, from the moment of birth, to go straight to hell, while others believe that we control our own destinies.  I can go either way: I believe we are born to be what we are, but we can be made better or worse by our nurturing and, in some instances, with a great deal of effort, can almost create our own lives.

Predestination?  That’s me.  Free will?  That’s me, too.

Up Next:  The Fun in Dysfunctional

Mil & Steve

How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm
After they’ve seen Paree?
How ya gonna keep ‘em away from Broadway
Jazzin’ around and paintin’ the town?

Joe Young and Sam M. Lewis

.

Which came first, my mother’s rejection of me or mine of her?

I have a snapshot in my head of Stevie sitting on a tiny suitcase. When my brother was a baby, Mildred told the story this way:

“I was on my way to the hospital to deliver Ricky,” she would say, “and we had Stevie all dressed up and in his little cap with his little suitcase packed and all ready to go to Ray and Alma’s.  He just sat himself down on his suitcase and refused to budge.

“I told him, ‘Come on, Stevie.  Mom has to go to the hospital to bring you back a little baby.  You get to spend the night with Phil,’ and he just sat there and folded his little arms and shouted ‘No! ’ ”

But there is no photograph in any of the family albums of Stevie in his little cap sitting on his little suitcase.  There are vaguely contemporary photos of me in my cap (men wore hats in 1950, and boys wore caps), but nothing with a suitcase like my memory snapshot.  I must have constructed the shot mentally after hearing the story too many times when I was quite young.

Later, she would say, “Rick was always the cuddliest little thing.  He would sit in my lap for hours and never fuss.  But Steve was always the wiggle-worm.  He didn’t want to be hugged and loved.  He liked me to read to him, but he never wanted a lap.  He always just wanted to get down.”

*

So who did reject whom first?  And why?

My Hypothesis Number One holds that I was a problem child from the moment of birth.  Like Oedipus, the Greek fellow who, had he been born in 1947, would have become a biker type with a tattoo on his arm reading “Born to Kill Dad.”  Or the puppy in every litter nicknamed “Killer.”  The differences between Rick and me were too great to attribute wholly to birth order or environmental influences.  Rick was always Rick from my earliest memories, as was Steve always Steve.

We still are.

Rick is still the family man and I am still the…the what?  Not the anti-family man, certainly, for Marianne and Kristi have taught me much about family.  The cynic?  Maybe: the guy who has to think about whether he will let you into his heart and make a conscious decision to do so.

I think I would prefer to be Rick.

*

Hypothesis Number Two says little Stevie felt rejected when the new baby came along.  In reaction, he rejected Mom, who, then feeling rejected herself, pinned all her love and hopes on the new baby, making Stevie feel even more rejected and round and round they went.

Number Two would probably be the more accepted theory in psychological circles, but I find it less likely.  There is something there that is deeper than that.

Hypothesis Number Three:  What if Rick were not really Dwain’s son?

Eureka!  Or maybe, “Duh,” as the case may be.  All is now clear.  Number Three explains everything better than One or Two, while being simpler in the bargain.  Occam’s Razor dictates that when multiple explanations are available for a phenomenon, the simplest version is preferred.

What if there had been a brief, doomed affair straight out of Hollywood with Mildred in a flowing dress blowing gently in the breeze and Him with black tie and cigarette nobly helping her into the taxi to go back to her husband and child – neither of them yet knowing that she was pregnant (or better still, perhaps He never would) – while Rachmaninoff played in the background?

This is the way Mildred would have romanticized it, even if the flowing dress were homemade from flour sack material, the black tie a pair of overalls or a seersucker suit and the nobility more a fear of social stigma.  She was, after all,  the one who wrote to Dwain during one of their first separations that “I sort of felt about you like I suppose a lot of girls feel about their favorite movie stars.”

Couldn’t she have been equally carried away with romantic fantasy for another man after learning the hard way that her Clark Gable/Randolph Scott/Alan Ladd husband was really Peter Lorre or Sydney Greenstreet?

What if Steve always reminded Mildred of the man who hurt her most, and Rick of the man she “loved” but couldn’t have?

Why do I look so much like Dwain and Rick doesn’t?

Except that it evidently didn’t happen.

A hypothesis has to be tested and re-tested against all observable facts before it can be promoted to the status of “theory.”  Counselor Mark, who first suggested the possibility, looked over my family photo albums and decided he’d been wrong.  Rick, he said, bears a strong family resemblance to the Dimicks, although I still don’t see it.

Not satisfied, I decided to go to the source.  “I have to ask you something, Mil, and I really need to know the truth.  Is Dwain really Rick’s father?”

Mildred was fairly gone with dementia.  She may not have remembered what happened twenty minutes – or twenty years – ago, but she seemed unable to dissemble any more.  Her world was a fantasy world and if the mystery man with tux and cigarette were part of that world, I believed she would tell me.

“Steve, how can you say that?  Do you really believe I was having sex with someone else while I was married to your father?”

So Hypothesis Number Three failed every test.

But still.

It would have made a damned fine theory.

*

So Hypothesis Number Three is out and I revert to Number One.  Just don’t call me “Killer.”

*

Mildred, Steve, Rick, 1951

“I think I always knew that I was the ‘favored child,’” Rick told me during the week of our stepfather, Bob’s, funeral.  “I never knew why, but I knew.”

The subject had been raised earlier by Rick’s mother-in-law, Rhette – Fleurette, that is, a lady of good French stock who had married a Western Oklahoma dentist and raised two daughters on a farm in Shattuck, Oklahoma.  Like Mildred’s memories of Prairie City, Shattuck will always be home and heaven for the Miller girls.

Bob had been in and out of the hospital for weeks, the positive prognoses (“we just have to tune up his pacemaker and he’ll be fine”), alternating almost daily with the negative ones.

Our telephone rang about 10 p.m.  It was Rick: “Well…this is the call.  Bob died about an hour ago.”

“Oh, shit.  My calendar’s so jammed there’s no way I can go back there now,” I started, before noticing Marianne’s gestures in the background.  “I’ll call you back.”  Five minutes later, I was on the phone again.  “We’ll be there day after tomorrow.  I’ll call you when we get in.”

*

It had long fallen on Rick to look after Mil and Bob.  He was happy to do it (up to a point, I’m sure), they were happy to have him and I was happy to let him.

Rick tried to include them in his family as much as possible.  The four of them (and then the five and then the six of them) took short vacations together despite Mildred’s constant sotto voce complaining about how “strange” Susan was.

(“If we stop at a filling station to use the restroom?  Susie always thinks she has to buy something to make up for it.  Now, isn’t that the silliest thing?  Those restrooms are for the public.”)

(“Don’t take it personally if she doesn’t even acknowledge you,” Susan warned Marianne the week of the funeral.  “She’s never liked me.”)

As the folks got older, family road trips became less and less frequent, until they were abandoned altogether.  But family gatherings continued on a major scale at every holiday and, on a lesser scale, weekly.  Rick and “the boys” took the folks out for lunch nearly every Saturday.  Mildred insisted on going to the same restaurant every week, and she and Bob ordered the same meal each time.

My poor nephews learned some of their etiquette from these get-togethers.  If adults can demand the same thing at every meal, then it must be acceptable.  There is, after all, little difference between “I’ll have the Number Three, but with only one waffle, margarine and strawberries” at every meal and “Chicken nuggets and a Coke” at every meal.

I never heard Mildred say anything derogatory about Grandpa Tom, Susan’s dad, but she was insanely jealous of Grandma Rhette.  I heard about it on the telephone almost every holiday.

“Well! I just don’t feel like we belong there.  Everybody dotes on Rhette and waits on Rhette and she’s the center of attention, and nobody pays any attention to me.  I asked Bob to take me home early.”

*

In an inverse repetition of her feelings about her sons, Mildred also had a strong preference between her grandsons, while refusing to admit it or recognize it.  Ask her and she would gush, “Oh, I just love those little boys!  Rick has done such a fine job of raising them.  They’re so well-mannered, and they love their little old gray-haired grandma.”

But I heard few details about Cabot, the youngest, from Mil.  It was Carson, the oldest, to whom she wrote the poems and about whom she bragged.

“Rick brought the boys over, and they sure are cute.  Carson is getting all A’s in school and will be playing football this year.  Carson told me…  Carson was so…  Carson said…  Carson will sit and play a board game with me, but Cabot is just so…fidgety.

“And Cabot wants to be just like his big brother!”

*

But week after week and holiday after holiday, Rick persisted.  After Bob died and Mildred was moved into assisted living, he kept faithfully to his Saturday visits, sometimes with the “little boys” and sometimes without, and without regard to his knowledge that an hour later she wouldn’t remember whether or not he had been there.

My brother was – is – a saint.

*

I had moved half a continent away and had no interest in returning to Oklahoma until, on a whim, I decided to return seventeen years later for my 25^th high school reunion.

Even then, things hadn’t gone all that smoothly.  For seventeen years, Mil had begged me at least twice yearly to come back to Oklahoma “to see your sweet old gray-haired mother,” – even offering to pay for the plane tickets – and I had continually put her off.  When I did decide to go back, I assumed she would be insulted if I didn’t stay at her house so that was what I planned.

Mil agreed, sounding thrilled, but less than a week later was back on the telephone.  “Uh…Rick and I have been talking, and we’ve decided you’re going to stay with him.  I’m having bridge on Wednesday night, and I just don’t think it will work out.”

Inconvenient.

I booked a hotel room the next day, which had been my preference in the first place.

*

What I found back in Midwest City was a Bob I hadn’t known before.  Rick and Susan had only one son at the time, and another one on the way.  Two-year-old Carson was a terror, but he loved his “Papa.”  And Papa evidently loved him just as much.

The kid played a round of golf in the living room, throwing a golf ball around to watch it bounce – nobody stopping him – while Marianne and I envisioned windows and china cabinets and lamps and vases being shattered.  Then it was “horsey” time: time for Papa to take Carson into the back yard, play the ancient “horsey” game, and be pulled around the yard in the special wagon.

This was definitely not the Bob I remembered.

*

First, however, we had to sit through a family meal: something involving watery boiled ham, white bread, artificial mayonnaise, margarine, vegetables boiled until practically puree, with no hint of flavor left…and Jello.

Southern cooking is based on English cooking, which means it is barely edible.  What a Southern cook can do to a vegetable is considered a Class A misdemeanor in many countries.  In France it is probably a low-level felony.

The Southern states annually consume approximately five gallons of ketchup per capita, the ketchup lubricant being necessary to allow the esophagus to accept what the cook has managed to do to the steak.

But even by Southern standards, Mil had always been a bad cook.  I pushed the food around on my plate, pretending not to be hungry and remembering my pledge of years before.

When I left Mildred’s house to go to college, I clenched my fist, shook it at the heavens and made a solemn vow: “Life is too short!  I will NEVER AGAIN eat Kraft Miracle Whip or any type of margarine!  I WILL have real mayonnaise!  I WILL have butter!  I WILL have REAL ice cream!

“AND I WILL NEVER AGAIN EAT ANY FUCKING JELLO!”

Cue the orchestra.

*

Almost 18, I left her house in 1965, never to return except for brief periods, including the next three summers, but even those were only visits.

My drinking buddy, Warren Henthorn, his cousin and I went down to the Oklahoma City produce market just before high-school graduation and lined up advance jobs picking produce in California for the summer.  “Fantastic contact,” each of us explained in turn to our parents.  “The man even gave us his card and a name and telephone number to call when we get to Riverside.  The jobs are guaranteed!”

But the jobs weren’t there, the contact was nonexistent and we were just three more Okie boys standing in line at a California labor office looking for piecework.

Hired on to pick oranges, we worked all of one day and later figured we had made maybe eight or ten bucks apiece.  Without waiting for our wages, we loaded the entire back floorboard of the car with stolen oranges and spent the next two weeks bumming around California, living on oranges and bologna sandwiches, siphoning gasoline in the middle of the night and sponging off relatives up and down the state.

Then we returned to Oklahoma, tails meekly tucked under our legs.  Warren could always work for his father, the printer.  Mike signed on with the wheat harvest crew which worked its way north from Texas to Canada, following the ripening grain.  I had given up a full-time job selling Kinney’s shoes and was taken back on a part-time basis.  With no other prospects, I spent the rest of my time that summer in the local pool hall, where a rack only cost a nickle.

I had been gone from Mildred’s house for less than three weeks.  When I returned, my bedroom furniture was gone, my desk and all my files were gone and what had been Rick’s bedroom was now a spare – and sparse – room with a daybed.

It reminded me of the day six years before when Mildred informed me, nonchalantly, after school that “Boots was very sick.  I took her to the vet and had her put to sleep.”

The spare room with the daybed would be my camping-out place for three-and-a-half summers, but it would never be home.

The summer of 1965 finally confirmed to me my place in the family, but that confirmation was overshadowed by an even greater discovery: There was a world out there.  Not just a magic-carpet world from my dreams or my books, but real.  You could leave Midwest City.  You could leave Oklahoma.

San Francisco, here I come.

*

Bob and I had never, what you might call, “got along.”   Nothing evil, just your typical, tired  stepparent story.

Almost as if consciously conforming to type, Bob wooed Rick and me the same way he wooed Mildred: “I’m not particularly exciting and the earth won’t shake, but I’m solid and dependable and I won’t challenge you.  Have some peanuts.”

He took Rick and me fishing in his boat.  Once.  But after the marriage, when he found himself living with two pre-teen boys every day of the week, he realized that this wasn’t quite what he had bargained for.  Luckily for Bob, only one of the two boys was much of a problem, the one who had previously been designated “man of the house.”

This was far from the stepparent relationships of fairy tales.  Bob never hit me, disciplined me in any way or tried to turn his wife against me.  He didn’t have the power to do any of those things.  He merely disapproved and mocked.  Probably out of helplessness, and certainly because he didn’t know how to deal with children.

Plus, I had opinions.

Bob disliked children with opinions.

I didn’t know when to shut up and was frequently rude and obnoxious.  Mildred certainly didn’t know how to deal with me.  Bob either wasn’t allowed to deal with me (I doubt I’d have let him, anyway) or had no interest in doing so.  It was easier to be sarcastic and to belittle everything I said or did.

One of my worst failings was that I kept eating the peanuts out of the container that he kept beside his easy chair.

Growing up with Mildred and Bob was certainly better than had I grown up with my father.  Dwain would have had an answer for me: brute force.  Instead, I grew up with mockery from one parent and “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you; you’re just like your father” from the other.

Nobody was capable of saying, “Kid, c’mere.  Sit down.  Let’s talk.”

When I became a stepparent, I remembered.  “Kristi, c’mere.  Let’s talk.”

*

With Kristi, age 10

Bob almost never spoke of his background, rather like Charlie Phearman’s father.  Had Bob been my father, I wouldn’t have known my own grandfather’s name, just as my Grandpa Charlie didn’t know his.  We knew Bob was probably born in Colorado, that he had had a fair amount of horse experience in the past and had gone through a very bitter divorce, which estranged him from his two daughters.

Bob dutifully paid child support, was glad when it ended, occasionally received a Christmas card or birthday card from Jan or Roberta, but never wrote back and never called.  But he started to soften the older he got, particularly after Rick’s first son was born.  Slowly, he reconciled with his daughters, even to the extent of visiting them in Florida and Texas, and allowing them to visit him.

This was the Bob I met – my nephew, Carson’s, proud “Papa” – when I returned to Midwest City for the high school reunion.  The Bob I had never known.  Or had I?

*

Mildred had three rules for how to tell people that her sons had done something nice or something not so nice.

Rule Number One:

A.  If Steve did something bad, “Steve” did it.

B.  If Steve did something good, “the boys” did it.

Rule Number Two:

A.  If Rick did something bad, “the boys” did it.

B.  If Rick did something good, “Rick” did it.

Rule Number Three:

A.  If the boys did something bad, “Steve” did it.

B.  If the boys did something good, “Rick” did it.

Bob did stand up for me on a couple of occasions, and one that I remember in particular.  I would have been about thirteen and Rick about ten or eleven and we were arguing, which was not all that unusual.  This time, at least, Rick had started the argument and was being the unreasonable one.  Bob had been there for the beginning, but Mildred walked in on the middle of the fight.

“Steve, shut up!”

“But I’m only trying to explain that – “

“Steve, SHUT UP!”

“But Mil, he’s trying to – “

“I said I don’t want to hear another word out of you!  Go to your room and shut up!”

I didn’t take “shut up” well when I was in the wrong, and I certainly didn’t when I was in the right.  It wouldn’t be too long until I got my own wheels, took over my own child-rearing and never stood for “shut up” again.  But for now I was stuck.

Bob took me aside a while later – out of Mildred’s earshot – and said, “I told her it wasn’t your fault.”  He seemed a bit embarrassed, or maybe he was only fearful of being caught talking to me.

I did thank him then, but never properly until years later.

*

With Kristi, age 18

During their California visit to attend our wedding reception (the same visit that gave rise to the family saying “They don’t even keep salt on the table!  I had to get up and get my own”), I had to make a quick run to the grocery store to pick up a half-gallon of milk, with Bob along for the ride.  It was the first time I had talked to him alone in more than twenty years.

Although he had been neither saint nor father-figure nor role model when I was growing up, I realized by now that he hadn’t been all that bad, given his own background and what he had to work with.  Our personalities had been bound to clash.

If apologies were in order, Bob and I both had a lot to apologize for.  But he was from a class and a generation who could never say, “I screwed up.  I was wrong.  I’m sorry.”

For me, a verbal apology wasn’t necessary.  He had already redeemed himself by becoming the doting (or rather, “ga-ga”) grandfather of my brother’s two sons, by reconciling with his own daughters and by striking up an instant relationship with my stepdaughter, Kristi.  “Krazy K,” he called her.

Nor would he have been able to accept an apology.  So I skirted around the subject.

“I love that kid, but we sometimes have our problems,” I explained.  “But you know?  No matter how much we may argue, there’s one thing she has never said to me: ‘You’re only my stepfather.’  And Marianne has told me, ‘She’d better not ever say that.’”

Bob said nothing, but he beamed.

*

The day before Bob’s funeral, Marianne, Mildred and I were eating lunch at the only restaurant Mil liked, the Del Rancho, or as she termed it, “the Day-all Rain-cho,” (you have to say it out loud to get the full Oklahoma flavor) and I was thinking out loud about the change in Bob over the years.  He did, as it turned out, have a soft underbelly; he just didn’t expose it very often.  He was usually so cold and caustic that Mildred had once visited an attorney with the idea of divorcing him.

“He was just such a different person in his later years,” I mused.  “Rick’s boys just loved him to death and I could tell that he felt the same way about them.  He was great with Kristi and he was the one who started calling to California every couple of weeks instead of you.  He actually ended up being a really nice guy.

“Strange.  I wish I knew what did it.”

“I’m sure he saw what a close, loving family we were and it rubbed off on him,” Mildred said, in all seriousness.

Marianne and I rolled our eyes in unison.  I made a pantomime gesture of sticking my finger down my throat.  Gag me.  Marianne tried her best to kick me under the table for this, but I knew the silent exchange had gone unnoticed by Mildred.  She was not the subject of the conversation, so it held no interest for her.

**

Over dinner at Rick’s house that funeral week, Rhette began asking about our relationships with Mildred and Bob.  She had only just met me, but had known Mildred and Bob since her daughter’s wedding to Rick.  I assume the opportunity had never before arisen for her to ask these questions.  Funerals do that to people.

“I have to say she was always there for me,” Rick said.  “She came to every one of my high school football games.  She…encouraged me in sports…encouraged my education and pretty much supported me, no matter what I did.”

“That’s so special,” Rhette said with the tenderness in her voice that only a mother can muster.  “I’m so glad you could have such a good relationship with her.  Steve?  How about you?  Did she support you that way, too?”

In barely a second or two, a person can have an entire discourse with himself, in mental shorthand.  It does, of course, go more quickly after a couple of glasses of wine.

– Uh, oh.  This is not the time to get into this.

– Why don’t you just tell them the truth?

– Because Mil is around the bend and her husband just died and Rick worships her and nobody really wants my view, or maybe they think they do, but they won’t after they hear it.

– So are you going to lie and say, Yes, she was always supportive?… I thought not.  Are you going to say No, and really believe the subject will be dropped at that?  Or are you going to answer the question?

I took a breath and chose Door Number Three.

“When I was in high school, I was very active in the speech and drama department,” I began slowly.  “We were always going out of town for tournaments and we always needed parents to drive and chaperone.  I asked her over and over if she would come along on one of the trips,  because it was the same parents always doing the work, and I wanted to be able to contribute something.

“She always said she couldn’t take off work because that would eat into her vacation time.  This was from a lady who got four weeks’ paid vacation every year and was able to carry over another 30 days from year to year.

“She couldn’t spare much more than pocket change when I was in college because she said she had to make double house payments and put another five hundred away every month for retirement.  And she had to be careful not to use any of Bob’s money for me.

“Every September, I had to scrounge the Salvation Army and the thrift stores for used furniture to furnish my apartment for that school year.  With money I had earned, by the way.  Every June, I had to give it away because she wouldn’t even store it for me.  It was…inconvenient for her.

“And the only time she ever visited me at school was when she wanted a free place to park because she had tickets to a football game.”

I misinterpreted the silence.

“Sorry,” I grinned, trying to change the tone I had brought to the conversation.  “I’m sure that was a lot more information than you wanted.”

“No, dear,” Rhette said.  “I’m sorry.”

Next up:  The First State Capitol

Tolerance and Intolerance

Jesus loves the little children
All the children of the world,
Red and yellow, black and white
All are precious in his sight
Jesus loves the little children of the world.

C. Herbert Woolston

.

Oklahoma City’s garbage collection was a municipal, not a private, operation.  Almost all of the garbage collectors were African-American, and all of them were paid on the bottom of the wage scale.

In 1969 the garbage collectors pushed for a living wage, offering negotiation, mediation and arbitration, but the city wouldn’t budge.  Whether it was or not (and it probably was), it soon became a racial issue, and Clara Luper stepped in.  A true believer in the non-violent principles of Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr., Mrs. Luper had for decades been the spiritual lighthouse and the backbone of the Oklahoma City NAACP.

For two days I had watched from the steps of City Hall as the strikers and their supporters, sounding as if they were in an African Methodist Episcopal Church service, swayed, clapped and chanted to City Manger Robert Oldland:

You better git right, Oldland, git right
You better git right, Oldland, git right.
You better git right, Oldland, git right
Before I git maaad.  Before I git mad.

But the first day or two of the strike looked bleak.  Oldland was standing firm and Mrs. Luper, at strike headquarters, was crying.

As a reporter, I was supposed to be an impartial observer, gathering facts and color to organize later into a few hundred clear words for the next morning’s readers.  I was not supposed to give in to emotion or insert myself into the scene.  But I did.

“It’s all right, Mrs. Luper,” I said, very gingerly touching her shoulder.  “It’s going to be all right.”

*

It had seldom been all right for blacks in Oklahoma, from statehood through Jim Crow and the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921, until well after the end of the Civil Rights Era years after the garbage strike.  It had been better once, and would be again, but “all right” was only a phrase used by an embarrassed young man watching a strong woman cry.

**

Most mid-century Oklahomans were either still on the farm or no more than one generation away from it.  Living close to the seasons, helpless in the face of the never-ending wind, yearly tornadoes, gully-washin’ rain, years-long droughts and an economy and governmental system that none of them understood or could ever hope to influence, the farmers could only explain their lives as the workings of God – and God and Saturday night were their only comfort.

Members of churches opposed to drinking and dancing didn’t even have the comfort of Saturday night to anticipate.

Oklahoma was overwhelmingly Protestant fundamentalist.  Most folks felt that if you didn’t go to church twice on Sunday and to Wednesday prayer meeting, you were going straight to hell.  The true believers didn’t worry too much about things beyond their control; they worried about sin and were always sniffing around for sinners.

They were little people and knew it, and so dealt with it in the way that people of the land have always done: they transformed their helplessness into a virtue.  If God had ordained their lives, then anyone who lived differently or believed differently must be a sinner.  Particularly those folks in New York City and San Francisco, the modern Sodom and Gomorrah.

And in a neat twist of logic, while proclaiming their pride at being small and insignificant (“poor old country boys,” as the song went), they found people more insignificant than themselves to look down upon, which gave them the further comfort of superiority.

We believed in the Bible, all right.  We also believed that Indians were best kept on reservations and niggers in segregated neighborhoods.  Queers were fair game – or would have been, had any of us actually met one.  Or, rather, known that we had.  The word “queer,” then, became a mere epithet; a word teenage boys wielded to insult each other.  But our parents sure did get a kick out of Liberace’s television show.

**

Mr. Ladd was our Sunday School teacher for at least two years in junior high school.  The lessons were, I believe, laid out in advance by the church authorities, complete with teaching manuals.  Usually, they were centered around Biblical stories and what these stories were meant to teach us.  Pre-planned lessons, however, didn’t preclude a bit of unscripted banter or a healthy dose of the teacher’s own beliefs.

When Mr. Ladd used the term “nigger knockin’” with a smile, it was the first time I had heard it, although it would hardly be the last.  It referred to the custom of middle-class white boys cruising down Northeast Second Street in Oklahoma City – the very heart of “niggertown” and former home of a lively jazz scene where Ellington, Basie and Ella Fitzgerald once appeared – and throwing eggs, bottles or worse at the black people along the sidewalks or sitting on their front porches.

One Sunday morning, during the height of the space race, Mr. Ladd couldn’t wait to entertain his religious charges with the latest jokes he had heard.

“You know what NASA said when they sent the first nigger into space?” he beamed.  “‘The jig is up.’

“And you know what they said when the first one landed on the moon?  ‘There’s a coon on the moon.’”

Did I forget to mention that this was Sunday School?

Jesus may have loved “all the little children” no matter what their color, but we didn’t have to.

*

Oklahoma had a history of racism and segregation dating literally to the instant after statehood.

The Five Civilized Tribes were considered “civilized” partly because, like the South from where they came, they held black slaves.  Ironically, however, from the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s until Oklahoma statehood, blacks were freer in Oklahoma than anywhere else in the south and thousands migrated to Oklahoma for the opportunities it seemed to offer.

A sizable contingent of blacks joined the Land Run of 1889. The Territories provided equal-opportunity hardships and black farmers homesteaded and busted sod just like the whites and Indians.  In Indian Territory, former slaves – freedmen – and their descendants were entitled to land allotments and to share in federal government payments to Indians.  They could vote, they could form their own all-black towns, they could become merchants, bankers and businessmen.  And they did.

Blacks not only voted, but held municipal offices.  The Republican Party for a few years controlled Territorial politics and blacks formed about a sixth of Republican voters.  With the arrival of statehood in 1907, Oklahoma’s population was about eight percent black.

Statehood’s arrival, however, marked an end to the black dream of a free and equal southern state.  In the few years just preceding statehood, another breed of immigrants, southern white Democrats,  swarmed into the Territories, equally determined to form a new state according to their own ideals.  The Republicans, with their large contingent of relatively newly enfranchised blacks, were evidently no match for the firebrand Democrats and of the 112 delegates elected to the 1906 Constitutional Convention, 99 were Democrats, virtually all of whom had pledged to make Jim Crow the cornerstone of the new state government.
Leading the convention was the champion of the little people and my former hero, Alfalfa Bill Murray.

*

The assembly drafted a proposed new state constitution mandating, among other Jim Crow provisions, “Separate schools for white and colored children.”  President Theodore Roosevelt slowed the Oklahoma Democratic plan down (for only a short while) by making it known that he would veto any statehood bill if the new state’s constitution contained any such language.

The Democrats obediently backed off and submitted a proposed constitution without any of the offending provisions.  The constitution was adopted in September, 1907, and statehood followed in November.  But before the year was over, the state legislature met for the first time to amend the constitution to make it virtually identical to the one Roosevelt threatened to veto, and then to pass laws in accordance with the amended constitution.

Until the 1960s, Article XIII, Section 3, of the Oklahoma Constitution (adopted at the very first legislative session) read as follows:

Separate schools for white and colored children. – Separate schools for white and colored children with like accommodation shall be provided by the Legislature and impartially maintained.  The term “colored children,” as used in this section, shall be construed to mean children of African descent.  The term “white children” shall include all other children.

Immediately after adoption of this section, the legislature passed a series of laws to enforce it.  Among them were Title 70, Oklahoma Statutes, Sections 5-1 and 5-2:

§5-1.  Separation of races – Impartial facilities. – The public schools of the State of Oklahoma shall be organized and maintained upon a complete plan of separation between the white and colored races with impartial facilities for both races.

§5-2.  Definitions. – The term “colored,” as used in the preceding section, shall be construed to mean all persons of African descent who possess any quantum of negro blood, and the term “white” shall include all other persons…. (emphasis added.)

The statutes went on to define as misdemeanors such violations as “Maintaining or operating [an educational] institution [which admits] both races” (§5-5), “Teaching [at] an institution receiving both races” (§5-6), a “White person attending [an] institution receiving colored pupils” (§5-7), and “Teacher permitting child to attend school of other race” (§5-4, which not only called for a fine but suspension of the teacher’s certificate for a year.)

Thus, an administrator, a teacher or a student could become a criminal for having anything to do with integrated education, and a teacher could actually lose her license.

Other laws passed in the same legislative session required racially segregated facilities in nearly all public areas, including transportation (buses and trains) and waiting rooms.
So much for the bright promise of the country’s 46th and newest state.

For some reason, the new order wasn’t welcomed by the black citizens of the new state, who demonstrated their displeasure in the 1908 elections.  Dozens of Democratic state legislators were turned out of office, along with three congressmen.  Worse still, a black man from Guthrie won a seat in the state House of Representatives.

If black voters could actually sway an election, then something obviously had to be done about allowing blacks to vote.  The Democrats retaliated with a 1910 ballot measure proposing a literacy test for voting.  Since such a test might well have disenfranchised the majority of the population, the measure exempted, or “grandfathered,” descendants of persons eligible to vote on January 1, 1866 – a carefully chosen date, as it was just shortly before the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Since the measure required voter approval, the ballot was pre-printed with a “Yes” vote, and voters had to mark through the words “For the Amendment” in order to vote against it.  More than a little ballot-box stuffing helped to seal the deal.  The amendment passed.  Illiterate whites could still vote; illiterate blacks could not.

In the 1908 election, approximately 30,000 of the voters were black.  Two years later, black voters numbered fewer than 1,000.  The grandfather clause worked.

Oklahoma thus became, for the South, the shining star on the flag.  It had accomplished in four years what it had taken the other southern states 40 years to accomplish: legally mandated segregation of the races and decimation of black voting power.

*

Five years later, the United States Supreme Court, in Guinn v. United States, struck down the “grandfather clause,” although it held that the literacy test itself was not unconstitutional, being merely an “exercise by the state of a lawful power vested in it, not subject to our supervision.”

But when one scheme failed or was ruled unconstitutional, another was already waiting to take its place.

Not to be outdone, the Oklahoma Legislature struck back.  Because the literacy test was not per se unconstitutional, a specially called session of the legislature passed yet another law in 1916, graciously stating that all citizens eligible to vote in 1914 (just before the “grandfather clause” was ruled unconstitutional) would remain eligible to vote.      The rest of the state’s citizens (nearly all illiterate blacks) were also cordially invited to register to vote – and given two weeks to do so.

Failure to register to vote between April 30 and May 11, 1916, would render them perpetually ineligible to vote.

This legislative scheme lasted much longer than the “grandfather clause” scheme, and it was not until a quarter-century later that the Supreme Court found it, too, to be in contravention of the Fifteenth Amendment.  Justice Felix Frankfurter summarized the history of Oklahoma’s attempts to prevent blacks from voting (Lane v. Wilson, 1939) and concluded that “The [Fifteenth] Amendment nullifies sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination.”

But the literacy test itself was still constitutional.  That test, fancy gerrymandering, coercion and a host of other tactics continued to limit, although not actually ban, African-American participation in Oklahoma politics until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  While Black voters increased after 1939, Blacks didn’t vote in great numbers for decades.  There were no black candidates and blacks had little interest in voting for whites.  They did make a difference in some county elections, however, since well-heeled candidates could round up black voters, haul them to the polls and pay then a dollar each to vote.

To Oklahoma’s credit, it never instituted a poll tax like many other Southern states, including Texas.

*

Voting was the smaller part of the Jim Crow plan.  The larger part was institutionalized segregation.  The first state legislature took on segregation of schools and public accommodations, but white citizens themselves accepted the job of segregating residential neighborhoods and restaurants.

One of the most useful segregation tools was known as “restrictive covenants.”  Either a housing developer would insert these covenants into deeds as he sold his new houses, or entire neighborhoods would agree to enter into a compact, such as the following, present in one form or another in every Midwest City deed and plat map:

No persons of any race other than the Caucasian shall use any building or any lot, except that this covenant shall not prevent occupancy by domestic servants of a different race domiciled with an owner or tenant.

Sometimes the “Negro race” was specifically excluded.  In other deeds, both the “Caucasian” and “Indian” races were specifically allowed.

The covenants were enforceable by each property owner against all of the other local property owners.  If a person tried to sell his house to a buyer of “any race other than the Caucasian,” any other party to the agreement could obtain a court injunction prohibiting the sale.

Thus, in addition to constitutional and legislative restrictions against integrated education, legally segregated neighborhoods (and, by extension, neighborhood schools) ensured that blacks would not be schooled with whites.

In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Shelley v. Kraemer that these covenants could not be enforced by state courts.  Being “private agreements,” however, they were not unconstitutional in themselves (just as literacy tests were not unconstitutional), and so they remained, their very presence having a chilling effect on the attempts of blacks to move into white neighborhoods.  Oklahoma’s reaction, anyway, was simply to ignore the ruling; laws allowing enforcement of the covenants remained on the books for years.

Shelley v. Kraemer was decided in the same year that President Truman ordered the armed forces integrated.  The country was changing, but the Midwest, including Oklahoma, wasn’t yet changing with it.

*

Not too many years later, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1955) did away with the doctrine of “separate but equal” education for whites and blacks.

Except that it didn’t.  That’s merely what the textbooks say.  All Brown really did was declare the doctrine to be unconstitutional.  For two decades and more the decision actually had little effect on public school districts in the metropolitan areas.  The continued presence of racial covenants and other restrictive practices ensured that neighborhoods –  and therefore neighborhood schools – continued to be segregated. Schools might no longer be intentionally segregated by law, but they were segregated, nonetheless.  (Ironically, small towns and rural areas didn’t experience the same degree of segregation as did Tulsa and Oklahoma Counties, probably for lack of funds to support separate schools for Blacks and Whites.)

The state’s constitutional provisions and statutes criminalizing integrated education remained on the books well after 1955.  Even though they had been found to be unconstitutional, the state couldn’t gather a legislative majority to repeal them or to put repeal to the voters.

It was, of course, nobody’s fault.  Homeowners bought their properties already encumbered by racial restrictions.  Few Oklahoma City real estate agents were followers of Supreme Court decisions and those who were even aware of Shelley v. Kraemer didn’t care; no decent white person would be the first in his neighborhood to sell his house to a Negro.   The politicians were likewise innocent – they no longer relied on statutes mandating segregated education.  Neighborhood schools were just fine and segregation was just…one of the facts of life.

*

Oklahoma City in the 1960s was a textbook example of de facto school segregation.  No longer mandated by law, but simply existing.  With no official board policy of segregating schools by race, everyone went to neighborhood schools.  Nothing could be fairer, according to the School Board.  But the only integrated neighborhoods were those from which the whites hadn’t completely fled as the upwardly mobile blacks moved in.

In the 1961-62 school year, the Oklahoma City School District consisted of 101 schools.  Only fourteen of those were considered to be integrated.  But the School Board evidently defined “integration” in the same way as the state statute (then still on the books) defined “Negro” (“all persons of African descent who possess any quantum of negro blood”), for one white student in a black school or one black student in a white school was enough for the board to boast of integration.

The eleven “integrated” elementary schools, according to the School Board, included the following examples:

School            Negro    White

Creston Hills          685        7
Culbertson           1018        8
Edison                    182        4
Longfellow                 1    359
Walnut Grove         138        3

As late as the 1971-72 school year, a full sixteen years after Brown v. Board of Education, 16 of Oklahoma City’s 86 elementary schools were nearly all-black and 60 were all-white.  Only ten were truly integrated.  Not, of course, including the five examples cited above.

*

Change comes slowly to Oklahoma unless there’s a challenge to the natural order of things. Then, just watch us old boys scramble.

My first elementary school was Creston Hills, which I attended from kindergarten in 1952-53 through second grade in 1954-55.  It was all white.

In the summer of 1955, some carpetbagging niggerlover down the street sold his house to a black family.  At least that was the adult view; I didn’t know what was going on, I just watched the neighborhood change almost overnight.

During that summer alone, our street changed color from all white to almost one-third black.  There were no white buyers, but middle-class black families were lining up to move into a better neighborhood – and at bargain prices to boot.  My parents applied for a transfer to the next-closest elementary school – in a neighborhood that had not yet been integrated.

Because I was white and wanted to transfer to an all-white school, the request was granted.
The interesting point to me, however, is that within seven years, virtually the entire neighborhood had moved out.  Creston Hills Elementary School went from all-white in 1954-55 to only seven white students in 1961-62 – barely one percent.

Who says Midwesterners are slow?

*

The School Board’s policy was to rubber stamp “minority to majority” transfer requests.  Transfer requests of a black student from his local integrated school to a more distant all-black school or of a white student from a local integrated school to a more distant all-white school were routinely granted.  The reasoning, as one high school principal explained at the time, was that “if a child is unhappy in a situation, his unhappiness is not going to make a contribution to his learning experience, and if he is unhappy then he should be permitted to seek a place where he can be happy.”

Black students, no matter how “unhappy” with an inferior education, were almost never permitted to transfer to the better white schools.

In 1961, a black dentist filed an action on behalf of his son in the U.S. District Court, challenging the pattern of racial segregation in the Oklahoma City Schools and the “minority to majority” transfer policy in particular.  The case was assigned to Judge Luther Bohanon, who continued to manage it for nearly twenty years, mostly because of the school board’s delaying tactics.  Judge Bohanon presided over many other significant cases during more than forty years on the federal bench, but his name will always be Mudd in Oklahoma City because of his supervision of school desegregation.

But middle Americans, for all their lazy drawls and mulish slowness, are practically hyperactive compared to the glacial pace of the federal courts.  In 1963, Bohanon found that Oklahoma City had deliberately segregated its students, relying on restrictive covenants (a full fifteen years after Shelley v. Kraemer), on state and local laws requiring residential racial segregation and on School Board policies regarding student transfers.

The school board argued that it could solve the problem by a complex formula of re-zoning neighborhoods, but two years later, Bohanon found that this plan had not succeeded.  It was not until 1972, however (11 years after the suit was filed), that Bohanon finally ordered a plan instituted to really integrate Oklahoma City schools.  It involved busing black students to white schools and vice versa.

The mechanism was known as the “Finger Plan,” after its author, Dr. John A. Finger.  Folks had a catch-phrase ball with this title, and “Bohanon has given Oklahoma City the Finger” was a quip which only became more witty with each repetition.

The case of Robert L. Dowell, et. al v. School District No. 89, Oklahoma County, Oklahoma was filed when I was in the ninth grade, in 1961.  Busing of students to achieve racial integration didn’t begin until after 1972, when I was out of college, out of the army, and back in Midwest City working as a reporter for The Oklahoma Journal.    But Midwest City was aware of it – and afraid of it –  from the day it was filed.

By 1963, we knew what was coming.  Judge Bohanon was clearly ready to rule that Oklahoma City’s de facto segregation was not in compliance with Brown v. Board of Education.

President Kennedy was dead and President Johnson was pushing the Civil Rights Bill, which would allow for actual enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
Midwest City was technically exempt from the school integration battle, there being no black students within our school district’s borders.  But while we may have been simple, we weren’t stupid.  We realized that racial covenants, legally mandated neighborhood segregation and what few other of the Jim Crow laws still remaining on the books were doomed.  If not today, then tomorrow.  Before you knew it, our kids would have to go to school with…them.

**

“I don’t care what the goddamned court says,” my friends all agreed, although it was voiced by my friend, Dwain, grandson and nephew of western Oklahoma cotton farmers.  “They better not let a nigger in this school.  If I see a nigger walking down the hall?  I’ll just walk up and bust him in the mouth.  I don’t care what they do to me.  But if everybody would do that?  There wouldn’t be no niggers in our high school.”

This was more than four years after the nationally televised integration of Little Rock’s Central High School, when President Eisenhower sent in an army division to force Gov. Faubus and the school administration to actually obey the law.

We weren’t really slow learners.  We were just all talk.  “My daddy,” said Dwain, “says he’ll support me and they won’t dare kick me out.”

**

There were white Oklahomans who worked tirelessly for integration and an end to racism, and whose children didn’t grow up with that disease.  I just wouldn’t know any of them until many years later.  And if any of them lived in Midwest City, they certainly kept a low profile.

I would not be honest if I did not admit to my own racism and to acting on it occasionally.  Blacks were such easy victims: they talked funnier even than whites, they drove Cadillacs when they could afford it, all of the men wore a “soul patch” on their lower lip.  The blacks who worked were garbage men, maids and waiters.

At least, that’s how we saw them.

(For this life, they came to Oklahoma City from the Deep South?  God, it must have been vicious down there.)

*

Mildred was only vaguely racist, not having met a black person until well after her thirtieth birthday, so I didn’t absorb race hatred with my mother’s milk, but only with every Oklahoma breath I took until college.

Mrs. Dishman (“Aunt Mary”), for instance, continued her hatred of Eleanor Roosevelt until her death.  It wasn’t so much the Roosevelt politics anymore (“You never met a person as opposed to socialism and the whole Social Security plan as Bob [Mr. Dishman, aka “Uncle Dish”], but you never met anyone so grateful to receive that first Social Security check”), as the memory of Mrs. Roosevelt reaching out to black soprano Marian Anderson: “She was the first one to invite niggers to the White House!”

Always an out-of-step teenager, I loved Frank Sinatra as much as I loved The Beatles and The Stones.  I thought Aunt Mary might also enjoy him, since he was closer to her generation, but she refused to listen to him.  “He hangs around with that nigger that married a white woman.”

**

But hiding behind the fear, insularity and bigotry was a growing, sub-surface desire among the urban population to shed the old ways, and it manifested itself in a remarkable and unexpected lack of violence in race relations dating back to the ‘50s, when Clara Luper first entered the picture.  She knew her oppressors and dealt with them more successfully than any young hothead could ever have done.

Certainly more successfully that I would have done, had I been in her place.

A high school history teacher, Mrs. Luper became inspired by the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, sparked by Rosa Parks and led by Martin Luther King, Jr.  During a 1957 trip to New York to present a play she had written based on King’s teachings of non-violent civil disobedience, she and her students found few places for a group of black children to have lunch.

Back home again, she and her students decided to integrate Oklahoma City’s lunch counters.  Peacefully, of course, in accordance with King’s teachings.  They began with polite visits to the owners and managers of the city’s major drug stores and department stores, and then to the mayor and city manager.  They wrote letters.  They contacted churches, but neither the white nor the black churches were receptive.

When negotiations failed, Luper and twelve of her students (one only six years old) headed for the downtown Katz Drug Store.  One of the children laid a five-dollar bill on the lunch counter and asked for “thirteen Cokes, please.”

The scene grew ugly but, strangely, never violent.  The young protestors suffered verbal abuse from the staff, from white customers and the police, but other than an occasional “accidental” bumping, no physical abuse.

The next day the twelve children had grown to twenty-four and, by the fourth day, they were served.  The Katz management announced that all of its stores in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma would immediately integrate their lunch counters.  It was August, 1958.

Although it received little national attention at the time, Luper’s effort was one of the first – and the first successful – “sit-ins” in the country.  The Katz success came fully a year and a half before the celebrated Woolworth’s sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina.

The day after the Katz victory, the group moved to the drug store across the street, where management informed them that the owners had already agreed to integrate their lunch counters.

Prior to the sit-in at Katz, there were reportedly only two eating establishments in Oklahoma City serving both blacks and whites, and both of them had segregated facilities.  Less than three years after Katz, the NAACP Youth Council had desegregated more than 100 of the city’s eating establishments.

I didn’t know any of this at the time.  I was not quite eleven years old.  It would be more than a decade before I met Clara Luper, during yet another of the battles that defined her life.  She was crying.

“It’s all right, Mrs. Luper,” I said.  “It’s going to be all right.”

And eventually, it was.  And without violence.

**

Midwest City was able to fend off segregation longer than many other communities.  In a town where all of the residents were white (or at least not black, there being a few Indian families) and all of the real estate agents were white, laws and written agreements were not required to maintain the status quo.  A nudge and a wink can serve as well as a law.

Eventually, even Midwest City bowed to authority and ever-growing public pressure.  If it failed to welcome its new black residents with open arms and Christian charity, at least there was no violence and there were no troops.  Only complaining and big talk.  When the first black student was enroled in Midwest City High School in the early 1970s, it occurred almost without incident.

Next Up:  Problem Puppies, Problem Children

Outlaws

My heroes have always been cowboys.
And they still are, it seems.

Sharon Vaughn

Now as through this world I ramble
I seen lots of funny men
Some will rob you with a six-gun
And some with a fountain pen.

Woody Guthrie

.

From at least the 1930s until at least the 1980s, cowboys and outlaws were Oklahoma’s fascination, culture and collective historical memory.

Where else but in Oklahoma City could there have been established a “Cowboy Hall of Fame?”  An embarrassingly provincial attraction when opened in 1955, the complex has evolved into a nationally recognized historical and cultural center now known as the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

Where else but in Oklahoma City would the first UHF television station in town be a “cowboy station,” broadcasting nothing but old cowboy movies and re-runs of TV Westerns?

Sure, the entire country may have been gripped with TV Western fever during the ‘50s and ‘60s, but only Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico felt they were still living in a western.  And only Oklahoma took the outlaw to heart almost as dearly as the cowboy.  Oklahoma even has a town named Gene Autry.

Ironically, very few westerns were filmed in Oklahoma and very few were filmed about Oklahoma.  But much of the western lore that developed into our collective myth of the Old West was born in Oklahoma.  And Oklahomans – feeling continually like the country’s ugly stepchild, and suffering from their Dust Bowl and farmer/share cropper/dumb Okie/hillbilly image  – lassoed that lore as their own.

*

Eight- or ten- or twelve-year-old kids are not likely to look a friend in the eye upon receiving a solemn factual pronouncement and say, “that’s bullshit.”

So I didn’t.  But by the time a third female classmate informed me that “I’m directly descended from Jesse James,” I began to wonder just how many direct or collateral descendants Jesse actually could have had.  I decided I didn’t believe any of these stories, but the larger truth behind them was in  Oklahoma’s love affair with its outlaws.

*

Woody Guthrie, the “Dust Bowl Balladeer,” has long been recognized throughout the country for his love of America and its people and as the godfather of all modern folk singers.  Yet he was scarcely acknowledged in mid-century Oklahoma because of his leftist, populist politics.  Guthrie wrote union hymns, labor songs and angry works about the “copper bosses” and the “mining bosses,” but he also wrote “This Land Is Your Land,” “Oklahoma Hills” (a love song to his home state), a paean to the Columbia River and her giant hydroelectric dams, and dozens of other songs celebrating the greatness of America and of Oklahoma.

He also wrote a passel of songs about outlaws, the most famous of which was “The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd.”  Woody’s songs painted the outlaws as modern Robin Hoods, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, or as poor innocents forced into a life of crime by an unjust system.  Or both.

They are all fiction, and maybe he never meant them as truth.  But Woody knew his audience, and he knew what he wanted to say.  His audience believed in the outlaw and Woody believed that society forced people into outlawry.

Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, for instance – a Sallisaw, Oklahoma, boy – was an all-around bad guy who first got into major trouble by robbing a post office at age 18.  A couple of years later, he was sentenced to prison in Missouri for yet another robbery.  Described by Time magazine as “a murderously cool shot,” he was accused of at least six murders and numerous bank robberies.

Every crime in Oklahoma
Was added to his name.

Woody’s version, however, painted him as a peaceful farmer who, defending his wife’s honor against a vulgar deputy sheriff, killed the deputy in an uneven fight and then fled to live the life of a reluctant outlaw who never forgot the home folks.

But many a starving farmer
The same old story told
How the outlaw paid their mortgage
And saved their little homes.

Others tell you ‘bout a stranger
That came to beg a meal,
And underneath his napkin
Left a thousand dollar bill.

It was in Oklahoma City
It was on a Christmas Day,
There come a whole car load of groceries
With a letter that did say:

You say that I’m an outlaw
You say that I’m a thief
Well, here’s a Christmas dinner
For the families on relief.

In truth, Oklahoma was rather wild and woolly during much of its short history, having spent much of that history as a sort of terra incognita surrounded by American states.

*

Beef, of course, gave rise to the cowboy, as the cowboy in turn would give rise to the early Oklahoma outlaws.  And for most of the Nineteenth Century, American beef was – almost by definition – Texas beef.  The northern and eastern states had suffered a lamentable shortage of steaks and roasts during the Civil War, but that didn’t mean the cattle had stopped breeding.  When the war ended, Texas was awash in cattle and the north was desperate for a good steak.

Oklahoma City would later become a major railhead, stockyard and meat packing location (with that vile-smelling part of the city being known as “Packin’ Town” until its name was gentrified during the city’s revitalization in the ‘90′s), but Kansas boasted the major railheads for most of the last part of the century:  Wichita, Newton, Abilene and, later, Dodge City.

The cattle drive, that staple of the horse opera, generally left Texas, crossed through Oklahoma and ended up at one of the Kansas railheads where the cowboys were paid and sated their pent-up thirsts with whiskey and whores.  Several major cattle trails crossed Oklahoma, but the only one glorified by Hollywood was the Chisholm Trail, which ran through Lawton, El Reno and Enid, pretty much straight north and only a few miles west of today’s Interstate Highway 35.  (The only other “famous” trail was the Santa Fe Trail, which went from Texas through New Mexico and up to Denver.  How many people, after all, would pay to see a movie called “The Western Trail,” “The Shawnee Trail” or “The Goodnight-Loving Trail?”)

More than a quarter-million head of Texas longhorns were driven up the Chisholm trail in 1866, and the numbers increased every year.  With the cattle came the cowboys, and the cowboy culture was largely developed in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas between 1866 and 1889.

Passing through Oklahoma, many ranchers noted that its vast stretches of grassland, on which the cattle grazed on their way to market, would be ideal for raising cattle – and were that much closer to Kansas.  Cattle ranches began to pop up in the sparsely populated Territories, particularly in the Unassigned Lands, but also on leased lands in the Indian nations.

*

Texas had cattle enough after the war, and little else.  But times were equally hard throughout the south: few jobs, few prospects, legions of rootless men who just happened to be fair horsemen.  Thousands of southerners drifted to Texas to work in the new profession of “cowboy,” earning $40.00 or less per month to round up, separate, brand and then herd a collection of stupid cows up to Kansas – a trip of six weeks or so at 12 to 15 miles a day.

First came the roundup.  Adult cows already had proprietary brands burned into their hides a couple of years before, but in the spring, their calves would still be trailing after them on the unfenced plains, while Mom grazed with cows from the neighboring ranches.  Brands allowed the ranchers to separate their cattle from their neighbors’ longhorns as they lumbered about in huge unsegregated herds.  A long nursing period identified whose calves were whose, so the calves could be branded each year as were their parents before them.

Cutting (the ability of a horse to turn on a dime at the rider’s slightest pressure to outmaneuver a contrary cow or calf) and calf roping, both favorite modern-day rodeo events, originated with the roundup.  (Don’t try to understand ‘em, just rope, throw and brand ‘em.)  Bull-dogging, or steer-wrestling, wouldn’t be invented until much later, on the rodeo circuit.  Bull riding also came along sometime later just for the thrill of it all.  Real cowboys didn’t ride bulls:  what would be the point?

Today’s real cowboys just as often use helicopters or pickups (the kind of pickup with the six-foot-diameter tires and oversized springs; the kind of pickup you need a step ladder to climb into; the kind of pickup you see all over, nearly always clean and waxed, not one in ten of them ever having actually gone off-road) as horses.  But there is no scarcity of wannabe cowboys in the country bars.

I live today in the suburbs of the San Francisco-Oakland metropolitan area, and just spittin’ distance from the small ranches in the Livermore Valley – those that haven’t been taken over for growing grapes.  In a local bar of a Friday night you can hear the call of the wild wannabe cowboy: “Boy, I busted that filly!”  “Shit, that ain’t nothin’.  I tooken that old blue stallion that couldn’t nobody ride and when I’s finished with ‘im, we’us haulin’ calves outa the creek.”

Sometimes, one or two of these barroom cowboys actually make it into the local annual rodeo.  For the most part, however, hanging onto a strap on top of a “buckin’ bronco” or a “Bramer [Brahma] Bull” isn’t quite as easy as hanging onto a bar stool and a glass of beer.

*

Ah, cowboys.  The last rugged individuals.  Our heritage.

Or, wait a minute.  The sodbusters were the last rugged individuals, holding their own against the ranchers dedicated to the open range.  All our folks really wanted was to have a milk cow or two, a truck garden and a cornfield or wheat field fenced in by barbed wire (“bob wahr”) against the ranchers’ cattle.

The dutiful family man drives to work every day in his Ford sedan but dreams of a fiery red Corvette.  Oklahomans have mostly adopted the values of their sodbusting ancestors, but they dream of cowboys.

And if there aren’t a lot of cowboys in Oklahoma any more (or at least not as many of them as there are farmers, businessmen, shop clerks, check cashing agents or pawn brokers), there are certainly enough cattle to satisfy anyone’s hunger for a taste of the Old West.  More than a million head a year pass through Stockyards City (the former “Packin’ Town”), which has led the country in cattle sales for more than thirty years.  Cattle auctions – open to the public and quite the tourist draw – are held twice a week and the boast is that the public can see “actual working cowboys” at the auctions.

The prime venue for seeing cowboy skills, however, is the rodeo circuit.  There are almost 100 rodeos annually in Oklahoma, including the junior ones.  Never mind that most of the participants in the qualifying rodeos are professional athletes and only a few are actually working cowboys trying their luck and skills against the pros.  These are cowboy skills – except, of course, for the steer wrestling and the bull riding.  But there is no scarcity of wannabe cowboys in the minor rodeos, either.

It’s easy for me to make light of rodeo contestants.  I’m about as non-athletic as it is possible to be.  I can’t hit a golf ball without an ugly slice; my ankles are too weak to play tennis; three bad disks prevent me from doing martial arts and general laziness stops me from taking up bulldogging or calf roping.

But I do recognize the skill it takes and the toll it takes to be a rodeo performer.  The sport is more demanding and more brutal than football, occasionally more graceful than ballet, less cruel but more dangerous than bull fighting.  And the glory moments are just that – being measured in seconds.  The performer’s professional life is short and even the best of them earn only a fraction of a professional ballplayer’s annual salary.

Just don’t call them cowboys.

*

Cowboys were hard-working men, twelve or fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, six weeks or more at a time.  At the railhead, they tended to become hard-drinking, hard-fighting, hard…well, we know…men.  Then it was back to Texas to start all over again.  All of this for a top salary seldom more than a sawbuck a week.  And when it wasn’t droving time, the ranches couldn’t keep all of the hands on salary, so the cowboy sort of drifted.

Some of them drifted into crime.  Some of them drifted in and out of crime.  As the herds passed through the Territories and the ranchers eyed the Oklahoma prairie as an ideal site for ranches, some of the cowboys eyed the area as ripe for pickings.

When the Unassigned Lands were opened for settlement by the Run of 1889, a huge part of Oklahoma’s open range became unavailable for cattle grazing.  Barbed-wire fences cropped up, ranches were abandoned and hundreds of cowboys were left without work.  Four years later, the Cherokee Strip, bordering Kansas, was opened by an even larger land run, with the same effect on cattle ranchers and cowboys.

While some outlaws chose their profession because it beat working, some took to robbing and stealing out of necessity.  Maybe Woody was right, after all.

*

Indian Territory was a patchwork quilt of separate governments and Oklahoma Territory had only municipal governments, if at all, making the future state not only vulnerable to lawlessness, but also an ideal base of operations for the lawless.  Some of the local boys confined themselves to stealing horses and cattle, or running whiskey to the Indians, but some took up robbing banks, businesses and trains.  Among the more colorful of them were Bill Dalton, Bill Doolin, “Tulsa Jack” Blake, John and Mack Glass, Bill, Henry and Belle Starr, “Little Dick” West, the Slaughter Kid, Jim, Pink and Tom Lee and Blue Duck (later fictionalized in Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove.”)

It came as quite a shock to many Oklahomans when research within the last couple of years revealed that Jesse James – ancestor of so many of my pre-pubescent girlfriends in the 1950′s – had never been west of the Mississippi River.  What is to happen to all of those stories about Jesse and Frank in Oklahoma and western Arkansas?

The occasional female also took up the outlaw trade, including Belle Starr and Tom King, the latter a skilled horse thief who was famous for her many jail breaks.  Although she dressed like a man and used a man’s name, one newspaper described her as having “a pair of eyes that would tempt a knight of St. John.”  She evidently flirted her way out of many a territorial jail, including once eloping with a deputy sheriff.  (The details of this last event read suspiciously like speculation by a sensationalist press.  If it happened at all, I haven’t found any records to indicate whether or not the love affair lasted much longer than it took Tom King to get the hell out of El Reno.)

*

Much like a Mafia family in the Twentieth Century, the most formidable Oklahoma outlaw gang handed down the reins of power from one family (the Daltons) to another (the Doolins.)

Bob Dalton was one of ten sons, four of whom became lawmen in the Territories.  Oldest brother Frank, a federal marshal, was killed in the line of duty during a shoot-out with a gang of whiskey runners.  Brothers Gratton, Bob and Emmett worked the right side of the law for a while, but decided that stealing horses and selling whiskey paid better.  More lucrative still was robbing trains, which they first tried unsuccessfully in California before returning to Oklahoma where the pickings were easier.

Train robbing in the Territories seemed fairly easy at first for a gang with guns, horses and ingenuity.  Trains carried the annual stipends promised to the Indian nations for relocating to Oklahoma, payrolls for post office workers and other federal employees and transfers between banks.  But train robbing quickly began to offer fewer rewards and more danger as federal marshals began to hide in waiting on particularly money-laden trains.

The Dalton Gang, after a couple of narrow escapes with trains full of armed deputies, decided it was time to retire.  In a real-life decision straight out of a thousand Hollywood movies, they decided to make one last big score before leaving the country for good.

Bob Dalton chose, as his farewell salute, to rob two banks at once – in the same town – something even the James Gang had never done.  I suppose he can be forgiven; he’d only been at the bank- and train-robbing business for a couple of years.  Maybe his success after the abortive California job had been mere beginner’s luck.  But of all the hubris, he chose his hometown, Coffeyville, Kansas, where his and his brothers’ faces were well known.

Five members of the Dalton Gang rode into Coffeyville on October 4, 1892.  When the smoke cleared after the shootout with law officers and local citizens, four were dead, including Bob and Gratton Dalton.  Only Emmett survived to go to prison and later write his memoirs.

Following Bob’s death, the man who would become the most notorious outlaw of his day took over leadership of the gang.

*

A sixth man had originally ridden with the Daltons toward their final shootout  that October, but turned back just outside of Coffeyville when his horse came up lame or threw a shoe.  He was never positively identified, but was believed to be Bill Doolin.

Bill Doolin was a peaceful cowboy until a misunderstanding with some Kansas lawmen over illegal possession of beer (Kansas was a “dry” state) left two of the officers wounded and Doolin a wanted man.  He had met some of the Dalton boys while he was cowboying and, since honest work was no longer an option he decided to throw in his lot with them.

Fortunately, he wasn’t with the gang that tried the double heist in Coffeyville the following year.

But during his one-year apprenticeship with Bob Dalton, he learned a good deal about the business of robbing trains.  After Coffeyville, he proved so successful as the leader of what was now the Doolin Gang that within a few months he had built his following up to possibly as many as ten or twelve other outlaws, not including the two star-struck teenage girls who called themselves Cattle Annie and Little Britches.  The girls ran errands, acted as spies and, nearly 90 years later, found themselves the title characters in a Hollywood western.

*

Until statehood in 1907, each nation in Indian Territory had its own legal system but was still subject to federal law (although tribal courts were abolished in 1898).  Oklahoma Territory’s only regional law was federal.  Oklahoma justice was handed out by the U.S. Court for the Western District of Arkansas, located in Fort Smith and personified, from 1875 to 1896, by Judge Isaac Parker, known as “The Hanging Judge.”

A former Missouri judge and two-term congressman, Parker was nominated at age 36 for the federal bench by President Grant, and charged with cleaning up the corruption of his predecessor’s tenure and the rampant lawlessness of Indian Territory.

Parker professed to be – and may well have been – opposed to the death penalty, and he was well-known as a champion of Indian rights and of women’s suffrage.    But his progressive views did not stop him from handing down the death sentence more than 160 times during his 21 years on the bench.  Accounts differ as to the number of the condemned actually executed, but it seems to have been somewhere between 75 and 90.

When the Supreme Court ruled that persons sentenced to death for federal crimes had the right to an appeal, almost 75 percent of the appellants had their convictions overturned by higher courts.  Parker was reportedly not pleased.

Parker earned his nickname during his first few months on the bench.  Incensed by the killing of so many of his appointed deputy marshals by outlaws, he ordered a gallows constructed that could hang 12 men at a time.  In the first four months after his arrival in Fort Smith, he presided over 18 murder trials resulting in 15 convictions and eight death sentences.

On September 3, 1875, six men were publicly hanged on Parker’s huge gallows, an event reportedly attended by 5,000 spectators and dozens of midwestern newspapermen.  Many accounts claim Territorial folks approved of Parker’s harsh brand of justice, but much of the rest of the country found it shocking and barbaric.  Nonetheless, it would be another 14 years before he was ordered to put a stop to public executions.

*

Almost entirely forgotten are the men who really made the state safe for sodbusting.  Only Oklahoma history buffs can rattle off the names of the “Three Guardsmen” and know who earned the title of “the man who drove the outlaws out of Oklahoma.”  Since lawmen are generally not as romantic as outlaws and cowboys, even many educated Oklahomans, who might be familiar with the legend of Bill Doolin, wouldn’t remember Bill Tilghman.

Judge Parker appointed upwards of 200 federal marshals to police the Territories and to bring outlaws (they are always referred to as “outlaws;” had the word “criminal” not been invented?) to justice at Fort Smith.  Several of these became locally famous in their day, but none more so than Bill Tilghman, Chris Madsen and Heck Thomas, the “Three Guardsmen.”

Tilghman, a former deputy sheriff under Bat Masterson in Dodge City, had already made a name for himself as an expert lawman when Parker lured him to Fort Smith in 1891.  Fearless and dogged, a sort of less-malign Inspector Javert, Tilghman dragged outlaw after crook after criminal to Parker’s court for trial.  And he brought more of them in alive than any other law officer of his time, killing only two men during his law enforcement career. He captured Bill Doolin without firing a shot, and later brought in Cattle Annie and Little Britches.

Tilghman later served in the state senate, as chief of police of Oklahoma City and as an advisor on an early motion picture, “The Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaws.”

Christian “Chris” Madsen was a soldier in the Danish Army before emigrating to the United States and enlisting in the cavalry, where he saw action in the mopping-up skirmishes with the Plains Indians for the next ten years.  In the early 1890′s, he accepted a post as deputy U.S. marshal for the Territories.  He was instrumental in tracking down members of the Doolin Gang, and there are many anecdotes (who knows how true, since they are mostly taken from newspaper reports of the time) about his skill and toughness.  Interestingly, he also later became a moving picture consultant.

The third of the “Three Guardsmen” was the only one to receive any modern recognition.  Henry “Heck” Thomas served as a deputy marshal for 30 years, and was credited with arresting more than 300 wanted men during that time.  It was Heck who killed Bill Doolin after Doolin refused his offer to surrender.  Although Tilghman was probably the better lawman, Thomas received more local acclaim and has had more books written about him.

In the 1972-73 and ‘73-74 television seasons, Heck Thomas was fictionalized as “Hec Ramsey,” played by Richard Boone in his post-Paladin days.  In the series (actually fairly good, since Boone was its star, but marred because it was produced by “Dragnet’s” Jack Webb) Ramsey was a sort of frontier Sherlock Holmes who used modern and not-yet-tested investigative techniques to solve crime in the Oklahoma Territory.

The fictional Hec Ramsey was based on a germ of truth, as Heck Thomas was noted for solving crimes by using stakeouts, logical deduction and playing one suspect off against another.

Folks who write about early Oklahoma history tend to gush a bit over “The Three Guardsmen,” but it does seem safe to say that they brought more than just a semblance of law and order to the Territories and made them a safer place to homestead.

*

Before Tilghman, Thomas and Madsen ran them down, the Doolin Gang spent five years robbing banks, trains and railroad stations in Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri, earning extensive press coverage and even more extensive rewards on their heads.  But while they had once been hidden and protected by some local families and communities, the men found their traditional safe havens no longer so safe when the pressure against them really began to build in 1895.

At Doolin’s suggestion, the gang split up, only to be killed or captured, one by one.  Doolin himself was finally captured, peacefully, by Bill Tilghman, in January, 1896.  Deposited in the Guthrie jail, he was later joined in captivity by one of his confederates, Dynamite Dick.

Doolin and Dick staged a successful breakout in June, freeing several other big- and small-time crooks awaiting trial for everything from murder to counterfeiting to selling whiskey to Indians.

Several months earlier, Doolin had sent proposals to the marshal’s office in Fort Smith, offering to surrender if promised a minimum sentence.  The offers were refused.  Less than two months after the jail break, Heck Thomas, with the help of some of Doolin’s former citizen protectors, caught up with him.  Thomas reportedly offered Doolin the chance to surrender unconditionally.  Doolin refused and was later buried in Guthrie.

With the crushing of the Doolin Gang, the day of the big-time Oklahoma outlaw was ended.
Wait.  That’s not true.  Rampant lawlessness was ended, but big-time outlaws would flourish again.  And mid-century Oklahomans always held a special place in their hearts for their outlaws.

And as through your life you travel,
As through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.

Up next, Chapter 15:  Jesus loves the little children (as long as they’re not black.)

Mildred

You’re a hard man, Magee.

Molly.

“They don’t even keep salt on the table!  I had to get up and get it myself!”

It’s a catch-phrase in our household.  In a roundabout way, it has to do with our wedding.

Marianne and I were married in Paris on Valentine’s Day.  It sounds romantic, but was almost anything but.  Six of us gathered at Notre Dame cathedral: Marianne and I, my ten-year-old soon-to-be-stepdaughter, Kristi, my good friend Chuck McLain, ready to perform his wedding number three-hundred-and-some-odd, and Chuck’s Parisian friends, Georges and Christine.

Notre Dame de Paris, Feb. 14, 1991

Christine had allegedly obtained permission over the telephone for the ceremony to be performed in the cathedral, but forgot to ask the name of the priest on duty that day who had granted the permission.

Some member of the angry crowd that gathered around us summoned the cathedral police and we were escorted out into the bone-numbing cold of France’s worst winter in years.  Who would have thought a cathedral would have its own police force?

Chuck finally performed the ceremony in our third-floor walk-up apartment, where the wedding music on the little radio was the habanera from Carmen: “If you don’t love me I love you, and if I love you, watch out.”

[Note: a more complete version of this story is filed under "Personal:  Le Mariage."  Click here:  http://www.dimicklaw.net/thoughts/2009/07/02/le-marriage/ ]

*

Since no family members were invited to Paris for the wedding, some close friends hosted a reception for us back at home two months later.  We invited Mildred and Bob to stay with us for a few days and to attend the reception.  Rick was to fly out later.

The four of us took a day trip to Napa Valley and points west.  Rode the funicular up to the castle-like setting of Sterling Vineyards, with its spectacular view of the valley from north to south.  Had lunch at a four-star bistro and later walked on the beach at Jenner, where the Russian River meets the Pacific Ocean.  It was a genuinely nice outing and Bob loved it.  Mildred said little.

After dinner that evening, Mildred decided she had to call Rick back in Oklahoma.  Having a pretty good idea of what was up, I stood around the corner and listened.

“You can’t imagine what they put me through today,” she said, almost sobbing.  “We had to go to these…wineries.  And you know I don’t like wine.  Then we had to climb all of these stairs at the last place just to look out over a bunch of grape fields.  Then, they served me some undercooked something, I don’t even know what it was, I mean the vegetables were so crunchy I could hardly chew them.  And then, they made me walk on the beach and I was so tired I could hardly walk.

“And then at dinner?  They served me more undercooked food.  And the worst thing was, they don’t even keep salt on the table!  I had to get up and get it myself!”

Yes, when I set the table, I had forgotten to put out the salt and pepper shakers.  I still do, quite frequently, and when one of us has to get up from the table to get the salt, we all chime in.

**

Mildred had two, and only two, real friends, in her entire life: Wilma and Norma, with whom she roomed in Des Moines during the war years when she was waiting tables and going to business school part-time.  Norma married and had children; Wilma didn’t.  But they visited when they could and faithfully wrote for 60 years.  They are the only two friends I never heard Mildred disparage.

Discounting Wilma and Norma, no friendship was ever unconditional enough for Mildred, no praise grand enough, no acceptance pure enough.  In her view, people tended to dislike her, discount her and conspire against her, and she never knew why.

Friends who took her under their wing when she left Dwain and became a single mother struggling to raise two boys on a small salary and even smaller child support later turned against her, for reasons unknown.  New friends made in Midwest City would last a while – sometimes years – but they would all betray her in the end.

“Mil, how’s Mary Hattendorf?” I asked her once on the telephone.  Mary was a widow who had become a friend of Mildred’s, and had actually come with Mildred to California to visit me on two occasions.

“Oh, I don’t know.  I haven’t seen her in a long time,” she replied.

“Well, why don’t you call her?  Maybe she’s sick.  You know, she’s always been your good friend.”

“Maybe she should call me.”

“Mil, that’s not the point,” I argued, and reaching back to my Mickey Mouse Club days, tried to cajole her.  “You know, ‘to have a friend, you have to be a friend.’”

“Oh, I’ve always been her friend.  But if she won’t even call me, what can I do?”

*

Unlike my Auntie Verna on my father’s side, no one is left alive on my mother’s side of the family to give me information about what formed her.  All I have are her writings and my memories – memories which don’t begin until she was around 35 or so.  I have scoured both of these for clues to why she became what she became, with only some success.

There are snapshots of Grandpa Charlie Phearman and Stevie walking in the garden, but I was probably two or younger.  My earliest memories of him are after he went blind, broke his hip and refused to ever try to walk again.

Charlie would sit in his easy chair in the living room, alternately smoking cigars and a pipe, and listening to radio dramas.  Many of the great old shows were still on radio in the ‘50s, including “The Lone Ranger,” “The Shadow” and “Ma Perkins,” but Charlie’s favorite was “One Man’s Family.”  In later years (he died at 90), age and sensory deprivation left him in a foggy world, and the grandkids would make shameless fun of him at dinner for telling the same jokes repeatedly.

I heard a few stories about Charlie’s early years.  How he took great delight in eating Limburger cheese while the very smell drove the rest of the family away from the table.  How he ate raw eggs as a joke and once conned a girlfriend of Uncle Leo’s into following his lead, whereupon she immediately had to rush outside to throw up – all to Leo’s mortification and Charlie’s great glee.  How Mabel, after he went blind, would serve him strawberry or cherry pie and only afterwards slyly tell him it was rhubarb, which he professed to hate.

Grandpa Charlie Phearman

But nothing about cruelty, coldness, selfishness or narcissism.  In fact, when eight-year-old Stevie and five-year-old Ricky would wander unsupervised around Prairie City and become lost, we could ask any passerby for directions back to Charlie Phearman’s house.  The whole town knew him and liked him.

*

There are many more pictures and mental film clips of Mabel, Mildred’s mother, who to me was a saint.  She did sigh a lot, so maybe Mildred received the martyr syndrome from her mother.  But Mabel, at 70 and 75, would gladly cook a complete meal for 10 or 15 when Mildred’s (meaning Mildred, Steve and Rick), Ruth Adah’s (meaning Aunt Ruth, Uncle Daryl, Linda, Shirley and Dale), Carl’s (Uncle Carl and Aunt Berniece), Aunt Lena and Aunt Nellie (Mabel’s sisters) came for dinner.  Never a word of complaint and the sighs were less exasperation than exhaustion.

Mabel was born to be a grandmother.  She had 12 grandchildren, loved each of them as her own, and somehow made each of us feel as if we were her favorite.  Mabel’s was a lap on which I could cuddle.

(Mabel’s sister, Aunt Lena, however, was another story.  Aunt Lena was mean as a snake.  And it certainly didn’t help any that she married a Dutchman (Prairie City was largely of Dutch descent and the German families were a minority), who died long before I came along.  So maybe there was a family gene which skipped Mabel, but became dominant in Mildred.)

*

So all I have is what Mildred was and not why.  What she was was suspicious, tight-fisted and convinced that nobody liked her, for no justifiable reason.

Mildred. Undated (probably early 1930s)

In 1940, Mildred was living at the YWCA in Des Moines, waiting tables and going to school at Capital City Commercial College (commonly known as 4Cs – “It Pays to Attend a Good School”)  and playing basketball for the Y.  She wrote her mother on December 7, 1940,

We played the employees of the State Farm.  The girls won and the boys lost.  I got to play almost the whole game again.  He started the other girl but only let her play about 2 minutes.  Gee!  I just love to play – don’t know why he doesn’t start me in the beginning.

I made a 10¢ tip today but was asked for a dime to buy Margaret a present so I handed it over.  Isn’t that bad?  I no sooner get money than I have to give it up.

An old gentleman who is either a lawyer or court reporter went to Chicago and sent cards to the waitresses who had served him.  I got one – with the picture of a Chicago hotel on it. He’s certainly a nice old fellow but rather queer.  He always wears a stiff white collar and a black bow tie.

**

When Mildred’s second husband Bob died, it fell to my wife and me to clean out the house to prepare to move Mildred into an assisted living facility.  Rick was supposed to keep her occupied by playing board games with her, otherwise we’d never have gotten anything done.  She would question everything that went into a garbage bag.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a 15-year-old bank statement, Mil.  You don’t need it.”

“Oh…What’s that?”

“It’s a 20-year old tax return, Mil.  You don’t need it.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure, Mil.  Rick does your taxes and he said it was OK.”

“Well… I guess it’s OK….What’s that?”

“RICK!!  Help me out here!  Don’t you think it’s time for another game of Rummy-Cube?”

We tossed dumpster after dumpster of old bank statements, old tax returns, old letters and notebooks; made many trips to the Salvation Army and sorted the rest in preparation for an estate sale.  That is when I found what I have come to call the “Dwain box.”  I also found, read and tossed two spiral-bound notebooks and have kicked myself ever since.

*

Bob Pilkinton

After retirement, Bob had taken up golf and played nearly every day.  When he wasn’t playing, he hung around the clubhouse, eventually becoming a de facto assistant and adopted grandfather to the owner’s young daughter.  Mildred played bridge, volunteered at her church’s retirement home and took the occasional adult course at the local junior college.  She took at least two “creative writing” courses during these years, in which the assignment was to keep a journal and to write a story or essay about things the students noted in their daily lives.

Interspersed among the overly flowery descriptive essays were several pieces about interpersonal relationships, including one about her bridge friends and two about bus excursions she and Bob had taken to Nashville, Tennessee, and Branson, Missouri.

I should have these essays to quote from.  At the time, however, I was more interested in documents about family history or family stories than family psychoses.  I dare not even try to reconstruct them, but the outlines were pretty much the same:

I.  A group of people meet in a social setting that has been, or is expected to be, repeated, whether over a period of years or merely days.

II.  Marvelous time had by all;  Mildred thinks of them as (old or new) friends.

III.  Group meets again; Mildred excluded; others continue having grand time without her,

OR

III.  Mildred overhears remark or someone makes public remark;  Mildred realizes she will never be true part of group.

IV.  Mildred hurt, cries, resigns self to inevitable.

I watched this pattern for 50 years, until she got too old to even try.  Just as she described in her Iowa poem written before I was born, people were always conspiring against her, snubbing her, rejecting her or at least not paying her proper attention.  And it never occurred to her that people avoided her because she was honestly, genuinely unlikeable.

*

Having none left of her own, she pinned all her hopes on me.  When I failed to work out to her satisfaction, she centered on my brother, Rick.  There must have been a period of rootlessness before Rick’s wife had their first child and Mildred could dote on him, write poetry to him and believe he was the most perfect grandchild in the world.

There was some small room left in her heart for Rick’s second child and she would vehemently deny any favoritism between them (just as she would vehemently deny any favoritism between her sons), but nobody was fooled – not my brother and not my nephews.

There was no room left for anyone else.

*

The day after Bob died, Marianne and I arrived at the Oklahoma City airport around midnight.  Rick was exhausted from the hospital visits of the last several days.  When our plane was delayed in Denver, I told him to go to bed; we’d find our own way there.  We caught the last shuttle from the airport before it closed for the night and were taken to Midwest City.

The next day, to everyone’s surprise, Mildred’s older sister, Ruth Adah, and her daughter Linda, appeared at the door, down from Iowa.  “Don’t you remember, we called you last night and told you we were coming?”

Marianne remembered the phone ringing in the middle of the night.  Mildred, much further gone into dementia than I had realized, didn’t even remember the phone call.  Out of earshot of her sister, but not of Marianne, Mildred hissed, “I hate her.”

*

Ruth Adah and Mildred, after Bob's funeral, 2000

Funeral over, the family gathered at a local café for a last meal together before the Iowa contingent headed home.  Mildred had already made several comments about her “real” grandchildren (as opposed to my stepdaughter, Kristi, whom I raised from a pup and adore, and whose doting biological father even admits that it is proper that she refer to Mom and Steve as “my parents”), but was particularly offensive at this lunch.

“I always wished I had a real granddaughter,” she lamented, and was immediately attacked from all sides.  Cousin Linda was the leader.

“Aunt Mildred, I have children and stepchildren and grandchildren and adopted grandchildren, and Cal has children and adopted children and grandchildren, and to us, they’re all just…grandchildren.  We don’t make any distinction.  The kids are all family.”

But Mildred wouldn’t let go.  Advancing dementia had stripped most of her pretenses away, and  little more than an hour later, back at her house, she was at it again about her “real” grandchildren.

I could no longer hold myself back.

“Don’t you ever say that again,” I snapped, pointing a rigid index finger not a foot from her face.

“Why?”

Why?  WHY?  What the hell kind of answer was that?  I had expected something more along the lines of “Don’t say what again?”

“Because I’m goddamned sick and tired of you treating my family like shit,” I said, my voice rising and starting to sound frighteningly like Dwain.  “Marianne came out here and worked her butt off to clean out your house and help find you a place to live.  I’ve always asked Kristi to talk to you on the phone and to call you ‘grandma.’  But all you can do is snub my wife and complain because my daughter isn’t your real granddaughter.”

Neither Rick, who worshipped her, nor his wife, Susan, who didn’t, said a word.  This was between Mil and me, and I credit them greatly for realizing it.

“Steve, I don’t treat your family like shit,” she whimpered, all innocence and tears.

“The hell you don’t!  You embarrassed the hell out of a whole table full of friends and relatives at lunch.  I thought maybe Linda got through to you, but obviously not.  You haven’t let up on Marianne and Kristi since I got here.  I have one thing to tell you now, and you’d better get it straight: I changed my plane ticket to stay another three days to help get you settled, but if I hear you ever – ever – say that again, I’m out of here.  Do you understand that?”  The finger was still pointing.

“…Yes,” she said weakly.  “I’m sorry.”

This was no time for graciousness.  “You’d goddamned well better be,” I said, before slamming out of the house, walking around the block three or four times and spending the next half hour sitting on the curb waiting for my shaking to subside.

My nephews who, luckily, had missed this entire exchange, having been playing football in the back yard, found me on the curb later and asked if I would play with them.  After a three-man game, in which I switched sides depending on which nephew was on offense, we returned to the house and a world in which the scene had never happened.

*

“So the whole thing was just a waste of breath and I ended up looking bad in front of my brother and sister-in-law,” I told my counselor a couple of weeks later.  “She doesn’t remember anything that happened more than a few minutes ago.  And I certainly should know better.”

“Did she ever say it again?”

“No.”

“How long had you been there?”

“About five days.”

“And how many times had she made these comments during those five days?”

“Oh…two or three times a day, at least.”

“How long did you stay after this…incident?”

“Three more days.”

“Did she ever say it again?”

“Um…no, actually, I guess she didn’t.”

“She heard you,” said Mark.  “She heard you loud and clear.  She understands a lot more than you realize.  Don’t beat yourself up.  It’s OK.”

Next up, Chapter 14:  Tales of Oklahoma outlaws