Statehood

WEE yah, HEY yah,
WEE HEE yah HEY yah.
HEEEY yah.
HEEEY yah.

Indian Gibberish Wedding Song, 1957.  Author best forgotten.

1907 – 1957

“Uncle Joe!  Uncle Joe!  Tell us a story!”

It took me months in the fourth grade to live down the nickname of “Uncle Joe.”  Mrs. Melton, the music teacher, a budding theatrical impresario, had prepared a “pageant” for the kids to present to the student body and parents.  It was a lovely story and a well-known one to Oklahomans, losing little of its glory for being basically untrue.

We believed it, and proudly, and probably Mrs. Melton did, too.  It was, after all, in all of the history books.

I was chosen as the narrator.  At nine years old, I had only to look about 59 or 69, this being the 50th anniversary of statehood.  So with string-mop beard and deep wrinkles drawn on my face with eyebrow pencil, I held my arms out in a symbolic embrace of my large stage family.  Eager children were in front, soon joined by ghostly noble Indians to stage right and ghostly noble (white) settlers to stage left.

“I shall tell you the story of the Wedding of the Oklahoma Territory to the Indian Territory.”

“Oh, yes, Uncle Joe!  We love that story.”

“Well, my children, as you know, Oklahoma was the 46th out of the 48 states to be admitted to the Union.  But fifty years ago, Oklahoma was still only a territory, like Hawaii or Alaska today.  Right next door was Indian Territory.

“And the Great White Father in Washington decreed that there could be only one State of Oklahoma.  And thus it came to be that the Indian maiden was married to the white settler in a ceremony symbolizing the union of their two territories.”

Ceremonial music played on a scratchy hi-fi in the elementary school “cafetorium” as the Great White Father pronounced his blessing on the young, innocent couple.

Fifty years later, I remember the chant sung by the fourth-grade Indians, the white robe worn by the symbolic Indian maiden and the noble and conflict-free way in which the love story was presented.

Except it didn’t happen that way at all.

*

In 1800, Oklahoma was home to approximately 60,000 Indians.  By 1889, there were 80,000.  The Territories’ total population in the 1900 census was 400,000 and was estimated to be 700,000 in 1906 – Indians to the east and the settlers to the west – with more than 300,000 of these inhabitants claiming membership in the Five Civilized Tribes.

The pressure from settlers made statehood inevitable, but in what form?  One large state?  Two small states?  Oklahoma Territory becomes a state and the landlocked Indians are left to their own devices?

As always, the civil servants (bean counters, chart makers and plan formulators) had their way, but how to break this to the Indians?  For reasons obscure to me – given that Louisiana had become a state with a set of laws based on the Napoleonic Code and not on English Common Law – Washington insisted that real property law in the new state must conform to Common Law, which was the basis for the laws of all the other states, save one.  Title must be held by individuals, and must be capable of being passed down to heirs.

But Indians did not own land.  They had never owned land.   Land was for all; it was incapable of being “owned.”  Mankind merely occupied it, or the tribe controlled it, but the idea that “these acres are mine and those are yours” was more than just a foreign concept: it simply made no sense.  Even after Reconstruction stripped much of their lands from them – relegating reservations to 160 acres per tribal member and opening the surplus lands for settlement – the tribes had continued to hold their lands in common and without survey or private title.

The Great White Father therefore established the Dawes Commission, whose mission it was to survey the Indian lands, to decide who was an Indian and who was not, and to “allot” parcels of land to the qualified, including the Indians and – in some instances – their slaves.

The Dawes Commission compiled the Indian Rolls – which my great-grandmother Susie Crick refused to sign – establishing just who was full-blood, three-quarter blood, half-blood or less than half-blood, and therefore, who was to be allotted a parcel of tribal land.  These parcels ranged from as small as 40 acres for Cherokee minors to 320 acres for certified Choctaws and Chickasaws.

As early as 1898, the GWF (always planning ahead) abolished all tribal courts, and decreed that all of Indian Territory was subject to federal jurisdiction out of Fort Smith, Arkansas, notorious for its recent overlord, Isaac Parker, the “hanging judge.”  The Dawes Commission, among its many other accomplishments, stripped the last bit of sovereignty from the tribes by “negotiating” that all Indian governments would cease to exist in 1906.

As usual, the Indians sent delegations to Congress, protesting the allotment scheme and promoting an Indian state to be called “Sequoyah.”  As usual, the Creeks rebelled.  As usual, the Indians were given no choice in the matter.  The Oklahoma Enabling Act was passed in 1906, decreeing that the two territories would be joined into a single state, setting forth the parameters for a state constitution and authorizing a constitutional convention of delegates from both territories.

*

My fourth-grade Indian pageant should have had a weeping bride being brought to the altar in shackles, forced to marry her uncouth suitor.  And she should not have been wearing a virginal white robe, having been repeatedly raped by the white man over the centuries.

But given our inferiority complex, our next-to-the-last-state, dirt-poor, dust-bowl history, we had little to be proud of other than Indians and oil.  And, as folks said in those days, “why dwell on the unhappy part of the past?”

*

William H. “Alfalfa Bill” Murray was elected president of the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention.

Alfalfa Bill had always been something of a hero of mine, based on what little we had been taught or I had heard. President of the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention, first Speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, two-term congressman, ninth governor, presidential candidate, firebrand and all-around colorful character.

And, oh, that marvelous droopy, soup-strainer moustache.

I knew people who used to eat breakfast at the same Oklahoma City restaurant every morning as Alfalfa Bill.  He would order a whole, sliced, raw onion and munch it down with his steak and eggs.  You evidently didn’t want to get into too intimate a conversation with Bill Murray.

A life-long agrarian, Murray contended that “Civilization begins and ends with the plow.”  In the early 1930′s, he organized an unsuccessful colonial expedition to Bolivia, hoping to found an agrarian utopia based on cotton.  Later, after returning to Oklahoma and being elected governor, he became a pint-sized Huey Long, publicly championing the little man while making sure that his patronage powers did well for him.  He promoted free textbooks, secured an appropriation to provide free seed for kitchen gardens for destitute people and allowed citizens to grow vegetables on state property.

Murray used the Oklahoma National Guard as his own personal police force, including ordering them to collect tickets at University of Oklahoma football games and to take over thousands of oil wells to slow down the excess production that was glutting the market and causing prices to plummet.

His most famous exploit, and the one which first brought him to my attention, involved several toll bridges built by the state of Texas over the Red River, which separates Texas from Oklahoma.  Murray was fervently opposed to toll bridges and ordered the Oklahoma state highway department to construct a free bridge on a different state highway crossing the river.  When Texas obtained a court injunction ordering the free bridge closed, Murray summoned the National Guard, blocked access to the toll bridges and forced the reopening of the free bridge.

Prominently driving the lead bulldozer blocking the major toll bridge was Alfalfa Bill Murray.  That’s my kind of governor.  Or he was, until I began my research for this book.

*

Nearly twenty years before his bulldozer heroics, my erstwhile hero’s first proposed constitution for the new state contained such severe restrictions on the civil liberties of black citizens that President Theodore Roosevelt threatened to veto it.  The convention delegates simply shrugged their shoulders and drafted a squeaky-clean constitution which, no sooner than it was ratified by Congress, they proceeded to amend in their first legislative session.

Alfalfa Bill was Speaker of the House when state constitutional amendments were passed mandating segregated educational facilities for whites and blacks, segregated hearses, segregated water fountains and segregated transportation facilities.

We didn’t learn this in school, any more than we learned about the shotgun wedding between the Territories – with the shotgun paradoxically pointed at the bride.

*

Murray’s second draft of the Oklahoma Constitution (minus the racial restrictions which were later re-inserted) was actually pretty progressive, compared to most other state constitutions. It prohibited child labor and convict labor, mandated an eight-hour work day on public projects and established an initiative process whereby citizens with enough signatures could place a petition on the ballot for approval or rejection by all of the voters.

The initiative process was referred to as “direct democracy” when it was proposed in California four years later, but Oklahoma got there first.

It was a progressive and reformist time in the country, except for the White House.  Roosevelt didn’t like the state’s second proposed constitution either, but felt politically unable to veto it.  Instead, he sent his hand-picked presidential successor, then-Secretary of War William Howard Taft, to Oklahoma to campaign against its adoption by the citizens.

The Democrats countered by inviting the country’s most famous speaker, William Jennings Bryan, to stump the state to urge adoption of the proposed constitution and support for Democratic candidates in the upcoming election.  Bryan declared the constitution “the best…of any state in the Union,” and “one of the great documents of modern times.”

The proposed constitution was ratified overwhelmingly by Oklahomans in 1907, as was a separate constitutional amendment for prohibition.

Equally overwhelming was Bryan’s loss the following year in his third presidential bid.

Bryan’s final defeat wouldn’t come for another 18 years yet, with the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in 1925, and the “silver-tongued orator” would continue to help shape progressive (for those days) American politics until that time.

A bigot, braggart and blowhard, but a champion out-of-step with his time, Bryan not only lost a handful of presidential elections, but saw the free-silver monetary policy for which he fought for decades (“You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold”) defeated or ignored, again and again, in Congress.

Bryan just might be the most famous loser in American history.  Yet it can be argued that, for all his failures, he ensured the passage of the most progressive state constitution of all the forty-six, and that he closed the American frontier and placed the hasp on its gate.

Give Bryan his due: the closing of the frontier was no mean feat.  And a glorious feat it was…if you were European…as was Bryan.

But if you were Native American or African American, the clanking sound of that gate signaled the end of any hope of freedom or dignity for the best part of the rest of the century.

Next up, Chapter 11:  Prairie City, Iowa.  More home than home.

Little Shit

If I dood it, I get a whuppin’.
I dood it!

Red Skelton

1952 – 1961

I was a little shit and no doubt about it.

I have no personal memory of the earliest story.  Only of Mil throwing it in my face when she would accuse me of being “just like your father.”

Phil Fields was my best friend since we were babies and his aunt and uncle rented half of the 22d Street house from Dwain.  Mildred and Alma, Phil’s mother, remained friends until my teenage years when Mildred decided that Alma no longer wanted to be friends with her.

Phil and I were placed in the same morning kindergarten class at Creston Hills Elementary School.  As the story goes, we spent too much time playing and giggling together and not enough time paying attention to the teacher.  The teacher decided to separate us, and transferred me to the afternoon class.

According to Mildred, I threw a tantrum worthy of Dwain, threatening the teacher that I would “take a knife and cut you up in little pieces!”

Well, we all have our bad days.

But I can’t vouch for the total accuracy of the story.

All I remember from kindergarten is a slight difficulty in learning to distinguish blue from purple and a refusal to skip.

You’d think I couldn’t tell black from white (and actually, I wouldn’t learn that until the “block busting” days in our neighborhood two years later) the way they went on over the colors.  Nowadays, I am able to distinguish among robin’s-egg blue, Navy blue, royal blue, indigo blue, “Blue-blue-my-world-is”  blue, “Blue Velvet,” “Blue Moon” and “Deep Purple.”  But as far as I’m concerned, they’re still all shades of blue and you just have to memorize the names.

My stepdaughter, the fashion queen, who claims you can’t wear this shade of off-white with that shade of off white, because they don’t match would violently disagree with me, but really.  Is it worth having parent-teacher conferences over?  I’m a future member of Mensa, for Chrissake, I thought, and you’re treating me like an idiot.

I think that must have been when I discovered the Great Kids’ Secret.  Idiocy can be a very useful thing.

Kids aren’t allowed to say “I don’t want to,” or “that’s fucking silly and I’m not doing it.”  The Great Kids’ Secret, therefore, is “Gee, I’m trying my best, but I just can’t do it.”  Or, “I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t understand.”  Or, “I really am trying, but I guess I’m just too clumsy or too stupid to get it.”   Adults always buy “I’m too stupid” or “I don’t understand” from a kid.  They may not like it, but they believe it.

The Great Kids’ Secret saw me through skipping, which I found to be an incredibly juvenile waste of time when we should be learning to read or having stories read to us.

“Of course I know how to skip, dummy,” I thought.  “I can skip you under the table.  I was skipping in the womb.  But I was much younger then.

“Besides, skipping is for babies or girls and I ain’t gonna do it.”

“Mrs. Dimick, Stevie can’t seem to learn to skip.  All of the other children can skip around in a circle, but he just can’t seem to make his feet go the right way.  Have you considered having him tested?”

Now there was a teacher with a finely honed understanding of children.

Dr. Spock wouldn’t be invented for a couple of years yet.  I still don’t know if that’s a good thing or not.

*

Two years later, Negroes began moving into the Creston Hills neighborhood.  One family, then three, then five, as housing prices plummeted because white folks couldn’t get out fast enough.  It all happened in the space of one summer and before we knew it, white people were a minority on 22d Street.  Dwain refused to move, but did have to admit that if “they” actually were planning to go to school at Creston Hills, measures must be taken.

I was enrolled in the third grade (and Rick started in kindergarten) at the next nearest school, north of 23d Street, in a neighborhood that hadn’t yet been “ruined.”  The third-grade teacher spent as much time teaching us to sing “Oklahoma” and promoting her side job, selling World Book Encyclopedias, as she did teaching reading, spelling and arithmetic.

When we relocated to Midwest City the following summer, Mildred discovered that fourth-graders were expected to know their multiplication tables and how to do short division.  I knew neither.

Maybe that summer wasn’t as idyllic as I remember.  Evenings, after supper and before television, were like summer school.  Rick got to play and I got to drone “two times two is four.  Two times three is six.  Two times four…”

*

I left Midwest City in 1973 and didn’t return until my 25th high-school reunion in 1990.  Surprisingly, my classmates – even the ones I would have bet wouldn’t remember me at all – seemed genuinely happy to see me.  Then I ran into Sharon.

“Sharon!  Steve Dimick.  What was the name of that play we were in in high school?  You were the princess and I was the prince and we both got our servants to stand in for us.  Remember?”

“Steve Dimick.  Steve Dimick.  Oh, God.  You made my life a living hell in fifth grade.  Sitting behind me and punching me in the back all the time.  I actually hated going to school because of you.”

“Oh, shit, Sharon.  You don’t know how sorry I am.  I could give you the long story, but the short version is, there was no excuse for what I was.  I was awful and you just happened to be the nearest target.  But I’ve learned a lot since then and I really, really hope you’ll accept my apology.”

“I don’t know.  Maybe,” she said reluctantly.  “So…ah, what do you do now?”

“I’m an attorney.”

“I should have known it!  So am I, and I knew you’d beat me to it.”

“No, no.  I didn’t go to law school until years after college.  I’m sure you got there first.”

“What year did you get out of law school?”

“Uh, 1979?” I ventured.

“OK, you still win.  I had to wait until I was finished having kids and they were settled into school.”

The only curious thing to me about this exchange was that it didn’t happen with more regularity that weekend.  I had been a little shit and no doubt about it.

*

Being appointed “man of the house” made me cocky.  Being extremely shy meant that I couldn’t really deal with other people unless I could hide behind a mask.  It didn’t matter much which mask it was at the moment: the mask of the obnoxious adolescent, or of the rebellious teenager, the mask of the know-it-all student, the mask of the highschool student giving a speech.  I had a closet full of them.

I could deal with the world just so long as it wasn’t me dealing with the world.

In fifth grade, I sat behind Sharon all year.  Seats were assigned and that was that.  In the Midwest, things are the way they are.  You can complain about other people and you can complain about the government, because government is always bad.  Matters, however, such as the weather or seating charts, are ordained, and there is no sense in complaining or trying to change them, even if you were the one who had done the ordaining.
So it never occurred to the teacher to change my desk to the front row, so I would sit behind nobody.

*

The Dutch twins, Adri (“Archie”) and Tao (“Ted”) joined our class mid-year, after the curious incident of the girl breaking her neck in gymnastics class at another elementary school.  They hadn’t been in the United States a year yet, their English was barely functional and they were incapable of conforming to the norms of the Midwest City School District – they simply didn’t understand.

The Oklahoma solution was that the teachers or administrators should beat them into submission with wooden paddles and, by high school, these mischievous Katzenjammer kids had become surly, sullen and delinquent.  Like my half-brother, Dwain Lee, they were also poor mutts who never had a chance.

*

Pigtails were out and inkwells had been traded in at least twenty years before in favor of pencils.  So we didn’t get our knuckles rapped for blotting our copy books and young girls’ long hair was certainly safer.  Not that the girls themselves were, if they sat in front of me.

Just for something to do, or maybe because I liked her, or, more likely, to get attention, I would punch Sharon in the back with a pointed knuckle.  Not hard, but certainly enough to be annoying.  Ten, fifteen, maybe twenty times a day.  When she finally worked up enough nerve to complain to the teacher, we were ordered to switch places for a week, and she was invited to punch me as many times as she wished.  At the end of the week, we resumed our former seats.

A week.  I mean.  Get real, teacher.  The girl is suffering, here, and a week’s turnabout is the best you can come up with?

My reaction was a bit different from what teacher was expecting.  I counted every punch, marked in a notebook in groups of five: four “IIIIs” and a “/.”  The next week it was payback time, and she got two punches for every one I had received.

I was a little shit, and no doubt about it.

*

The fifth grade was when I learned to smoke stolen cigarettes, sitting on the railroad trestle a hundred feet from the ground, and for some reason decided to see how far I could push my new-found manliness.  As an “A” student (although we didn’t yet receive “A’s,” “B’s” or C’s,” but only Excellent, Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory), I had been awarded the coveted position of a Junior Policeman.

The Junior Police wore a canvas version of a Sam Browne belt with “Jr. Police” lettered on the diagonal portion.  They served as crossing guards at stop signs and intersections near the school, saving the district I-don’t-know-how-much money through not having to pay mommies or retirees to serve this function.

I got caught smoking on duty and was drummed out of the corps.

“Why?” asked Mr. Huffman, the principal.

“I dunno,” I said, and I didn’t and I don’t.

I first went to summer camp between fifth and sixth grades.  The camp was run by the Church of Christ – not our family’s church, but a fun experience nonetheless, except for all of the Jesus stuff and singing the books of the Bible like Muslim students memorizing passages of the Quran.  After my third summer, I was invited not to return. Something about a cursing match with a camp counselor.  I told Mildred that after three years, it wasn’t fun anymore, and I didn’t want to go back.

“Funny,” she said.  “Alma says that all of the other kids thought this was the best year ever.”

*

I rather liked the learning, but hated the schooling:  Mrs. McCauley, luckily not my teacher, who, just before the class bell rang, required her students to line up by blowing a whistle and shouting “My People!”  The edict that came down in mid-fifth grade that recess would thereafter be a time for group play.  Everyone would play tetherball or jump rope or some other organized activity.  Two friends sitting on the sidelines and just talking would not be allowed.

I didn’t do organized activities.

In college, I finally read T.S. White’s “The Once and Future King.”  The totalitarian ant society, in which “everything not forbidden is compulsory” reminded me certainly of the stifling bureaucracy of the University of Oklahoma as imposed by the Oklahoma Legislature, but more immediately of Glenwood Elementary School.

*

I was never disruptive in the classroom (well, except for the fistfight in highschool geometry class), but neither was I all that cooperative, and I suspect my contempt for the entire process showed.

There didn’t seem to be much homework in grade school; certainly not what my step-daughter faced forty years later.  Most assignments were done in class, leaving me with plenty of spare time.  But I caused no commotion.  Rather than throwing spitballs or sitting calmly with my eyes glazed over, I did what I did best.  I read.  Voraciously.  A volume from the small bookshelf that served as the classroom library would last me only a day or two, while all but the two smartest girls were still working on their assignments.

The girls, much more adept than I in the ways of getting along, pretended to be diligently working, while actually passing notes in the alphabet they had invented, based on the Phoenician.  I, meanwhile, got in trouble for not attending to business.

“Steve, why are you reading a book again?  What about the assignment?”

“It’s finished, ma’am.  It’s right here.”

“I can’t read this.  I think you should do it over.”

“But…”

“Just go back to your desk and do it over.  Neatly.”

*

WHO in HELL was she to be telling me that right answers weren’t good enough unless they were also neat?  Sometimes she would make me do the assignment over four or five times until I was almost in tears, each version becoming more illegible than the previous one as I grew angrier and more frustrated.

*

Reading aloud was just as bad.  As the class took turns reading a page or so, I would be several chapters ahead, or reading another book entirely.  When it came my turn, I had no idea where I was supposed to start.  Punishment – and it was punishment indeed – usually meant I was skipped over and not allowed to read aloud.

“Mrs. Dimick, Steve seems to have a real problem paying attention in class.  Have you thought about having him tested?”

*

Mildred could have said, “I certainly share your concern, but how are his grades this term?  That good?  Well, then I don’t think we have anything to worry about.”

But she didn’t.  She may have chafed under the imagined lack of adulation by her friends, but she always bowed to authority.

**

At thirteen, I was racing quarterhorses, which I did for about two years, until the day I was unable to force the horse to make a sharp turn.  The horse jumped the railing. sending me flying.  Racing saddles are not made for jumping.  Wholly inept at sports but fairly agile nonetheless, I landed on my feet, breaking my left ankle, spraining my right and marking the end of my racing career.

I sold my saddle and, as a consolation, Mil sprung for the second item on my wish list (the first was to be a jockey): a Cushman motor scooter.  It wasn’t long, though, before we were standing in front of the judge in night traffic court.

It started with Phil and me cruising around tossing fireworks in our wake.  Who should pull us over but Grady, the one officer on the Midwest City Police Force who was held in joking contempt not only by the town’s teenagers, but even by most of their parents.  Grady moonlighted, in full uniform, at the Skytrain movie theater on Friday nights and Saturday afternoons to keep the rowdy kids in line and eject those who caused too much disturbance.

*

The Skytrain was a combination community day-care center and teen hangout for the under-sixteen crowd.  Parents parked their pre-teens there for four hours on Saturday afternoons and allowed their young teenagers to hang out there on Friday nights.  There being no shopping mall in town yet, the Skytrain was the only place in town for young kids to meet.  Hormonal teens went to meet their friends, cut up and make out.  Pre-teens went to meet their friends, cut up and maybe watch a movie.

Management was Mrs. Coxey, whom we all felt bore a striking physical and attitudinal resemblance to Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West.  Mean as sin, we thought, since she would have us ejected for the slightest little offense, such as smoking, spitting, climbing on the seats or talking too loud.

Still, at the end of the double feature, kids would line up at the ticket booth where management allowed each of them in turn to use the theater’s telephone to call their parents to pick them up, and Mrs. Coxey never received a word of thanks.

Had I, at my age now, been manager of the theater then, I would probably have carried a bullhorn in one hand and a cattle prod in the other.

*

The theater was a training ground for future anarchists, terrorists and engineers.  We vied to see who could come up with the best disturbance while maintaining innocence.  I am proud to say that I invented two of the best.  Maybe I should have been an engineer.

One of my group raised pigeons and three of us each smuggled a pigeon into the theater under our jackets.  At the signal, we each carefully placed our pigeon on the floor, where they proceeded to walk underneath the seats for several rows until seeing a clear spot from which they could take flight.  Girls screamed as the pigeons brushed by their ankles.  Once aloft, the birds first flew toward the light of the movie screen, then catching sight of the narrow beam of the projector, flew toward it, then back to the screen and then back to the projector.

It was beautiful.

*

From my familiarity with stolen cigarettes, I realized they made the perfect delayed fuse for fireworks.  And somebody in our crowd always had access to illegal cherry bombs and M-80′s.  It was such a simple matter to stroll into the bathroom, light one end of a cigarette, insert the cherry bomb fuse into the other end, place the contraption behind the toilet and return to my seat and the movie.

The sound of a cherry bomb exploding in an enclosed stall in a small, tiled bathroom in the middle of a Doris Day movie was as welcome and fulfilling to us as the smell of napalm in the morning would be to Army brass not so many years later.

Officer Grady was livid.  And helpless.

*

Everyone called Grady “Barney,” after the Don Knotts character on the Andy Griffith television show.  Wits that we were, we never failed to ask him, on our way into the theater, “Hey, Barney!  Did Andy give you your bullet today?”

“You damn kids sit down and shut up or you’re out of here,” he would bark, impressing nobody.

I speculate today that Grady probably had nine kids at home, a wife too ill to work and no choice but to suffer helplessly at the best moonlighting job he could get.  Unless, of course, he really was the fool that we all thought him, but that would be too easy.

*

After the motor scooter fireworks prank for which I did get busted, Grady made us follow him to the police station where our firecrackers were confiscated, we were lectured, cited and turned loose.

“Have fun with my firecrackers,” I said with a cheery wave as we prepared to ride away.

Damn poor judgment for a kid as smart as I thought I was.

Hauled back into the station, I was given two more citations and we were forced to call our parents to come retrieve their little darlings.  The Watch Commander at the police station apologized to Mildred for the inconvenience, but explained that it was for my own good.

He wondered if she had considered having me tested.

In night court, I was still feeling that only one of the three citations was fair and the other two were punishment for being a smart-ass, which was not against the law.  Mildred kept elbowing me and whispering for me to shut up.  The woman whose friends never showed her proper respect always showed proper respect toward her superiors.

Phil, a pampered only child who always had his eye out for a con, who later made something of a hobby out of sneaking his mother’s car out for unlicensed joy rides with his friends, and who would shortly be nailed as the kid who had been helping himself to his church’s collection plate for several months – but who was smart enough not to smart off – was the apple of his mother’s eye.  She refused to let him ride on my motor scooter again.

*

It can’t have been the Skytrain pranks, or breaking into the drive-in theater during the off season when it was closed, or shooting up the water tank with a .22 – I didn’t get caught for any of those.  It might have been for walking through the State Fairgrounds parking lot randomly breaking off radio antennas (for which I was caught.)  Or just general surliness and my smart mouth.  I don’t remember the precipitating factor, but Mildred finally heeded the advice teachers had been giving her for years and decided to have me “tested.”  Convinced that I was a “troubled child,” and well on my way to a life of crime, she sent me to a child psychologist.

I participated willingly – if not always honestly – finding the process fascinating, if a bit of a joke at the same time.  Torn between really wanting to know more about me and the feeling that the whole process was a sham, I gave honest answers half of the time and (what passed in my mind for) witty answers the rest of the time.

There were standard multi-phasic tests, essays, word associations (“black: purple;” “up: giddy;” “stop: no;” “new: do;” “old: McDonald”), and the Rorschach test.

I had always wanted to do a Rorschach ink-blot test.  When I could think of a smart-ass description of a particular blot, I gave it.  When I couldn’t, I was honest.

One pattern left me with trouble expressing myself.  “It’s a person carrying a shopping basket.”

“Can you tell me anything about the person?”

“It’s female?”

“And how do you know it’s female?”

“By the…uh…the bustline?”

In mid-America in mid-century, we didn’t speak of sexual matters or body parts except in Victorian euphemisms.  My first mother-in-law probably never uttered the word “breast” in her life, although hers were something to be proud of.  Her oldest daughter, my first wife, after spending two decades and more in California, might occasionally say “breast,” but felt much more comfortable with “bosoms.”  This was very late 20th Century, and she informed me testily that she would never refer to them as “boobs.”

And so I was tested.  Once a week, week after week.  Both of us waited for the results, for different reasons.  When they arrived, we were both disappointed: Mildred because of the bottom line, me because of the lack of details.  If there was a written assessment, I never saw it.

“He says you’re normal,” Mildred said, with more than a hint of disappointment.  “Abnormal” would have meant that it was out of her control – the diagnosis for which she hoped – while “normal” implied that she either shared in whatever problems existed or was overreacting.  “He says you’re a teenager.”

Well, damn.  And after all the trouble I had gone to.

*

In elementary school, tired of being one of the two or three smartest kids in my class – especially since there seemed to be no percentage in it for me – I tried my best to get a “U” (Unsatisfactory) in some subject.  Any subject.  It was a personal goal I set for myself.  But worthless kid that I was, I couldn’t even do that successfully.  The best I could manage was an S minus in music.  Jeez!  I couldn’t even fail P.E., and Mr. Faudree knew I never paid attention and never joined in unless forced to.

And now, in junior high school, I couldn’t even be a successful juvenile delinquent.  I couldn’t even be a “troubled child.”  If that shrink is still practicing, he should have his license pulled.

**

There was little socio-economic class overlap in Midwest City elementary schools, there being one such school for each square mile of town.  Class status in the junior high schools, however, was broader, with John Jarman (10-term congressman) Junior High School having students from middle-lower to upper-middle class and Mike Monroney (three-term senator) Junior High School teaching students from lower-middle to upper-upper class.  (All rankings have been unilaterally adjusted to Midwest City standards by the author.  On an absolute scale Midwest City’s highest class would have been upper-middle.  And damned few of those.)

Jarman had a two-year trade course in auto mechanics.  Monroney didn’t.

I attended Jarman for the first two years and then, because Mildred and Bob had moved across town, transferred to Monroney for the ninth grade.  Jarman, the Monroney vice-principal explained to me, had “a lot of problems, because they have to take the foster children and the Air Force kids and the farm kids.  That’s why they have so many hoodlums.”

Many of those “hoodlums” were my friends, and I sought them out, at both junior high schools.  They were also angry and surly, with giant chips on their shoulders, looking for a place to fit and, not finding it, making a place of their own.

At the same time, I was a part of another group: the “A” students, with whom I spent most of my classroom time.
I didn’t fit well with either group.

The hoods were a little too ready to fight and a little too proud of receiving “C’s” and “D’s.”  They talked a lot about cars, about clutches and carburetors and engines and tires and other things wholly foreign to me.  They also liked to lie and brag.

“Man, I know this ol’ boy has a 427 Chevy engine that’s been bored and stroked ‘til it’s a mean mother and he’d let me have it for only about three-fifty.”

“Shit, that’s nothin’.  My uncle’s rebuilding a GTO for me.  It’s gonna have 450 horses, four-on-the-floor, dual carbs, a racing cam and racing mags.  I’m gonna get it for my sixteenth birthday.”

The “A” students had parents who took them to plays and museums.  Their parents actually welcomed other students to their houses to study or work on extracurricular activities.  Most of them actually liked their parents.  During summers in high school, while I worked to save money for college,  they went to band camp or math camp or debate camp at out-of-state universities.  Most of them knew where they wanted to go to college, and it usually wasn’t the one that was cheapest.

If the “hoods” seemed too unhappy, the A’s seemed too happy.  Even through my senior year in high school, I never completely solved this internal problem and never felt that I fit in, even when I found a place where I did.

One thing I did not do was blame the group because I didn’t fit in.  That would have been too Mildred.

Dwain

I built the Rock of Ages, it was in the Year of One
And that’s about the biggest thing that man has ever done.

The Bragging Song, Traditional

1947 – 1972

There was another man in my early life, a man much more intelligent than even he knew (certainly preferable to the converse), who had little formal education, but never ceased exploring and educating himself and asking questions and challenging authority and occasionally taking the time to try to teach me to do the same thing.

His name was also Dwain Lee Dimick, Sr., and he was also my father.

I remember surprisingly little of life before I was nine.  Mildred was always surprised at how little I remembered.  I suppose I either blocked most of it out or, off in my own fantasy world, wasn’t paying any attention in the first place.  I remember selected scenes like movie clips I occasionally play.  On balance there are probably more pleasant memories than unpleasant.

*

While Mildred didn’t always have money for groceries, or even a dime to give to Dwain Lee for school lunch, Dwain always had money for toys.  We had the first television in the neighborhood, the set itself almost as big (in my memory) as today’s giant-screen TVs, but with a round screen not more than eight or ten inches in diameter.  From the time it arrived, Sunday evenings belonged to Dwain’s friends and Milton Berle.

But televisions were temperamental, tubes were fragile and wiring could overheat and short out.  As TVs became more common, so did the need for television repairmen, who were few, overworked and evidently fairly expensive.  Dwain ordered a home-study course courtesy of the G.I. Bill and taught himself electronics.  The oversized garage on 22d Street was transformed from auto repair to television and radio repair, not on any large scale, but for friends, neighbors and friends of friends.

I assume he did it to earn extra (non-reportable) money on the side.  I would be surprised if he earned much more money than it took to purchase the testing equipment and supplies before becoming bored and moving on to something else, but to me, that’s not the point.  He could do it; he did it, and he did it by himself.

Dwain and toy

I think he moved back to cars for a while after the television phase, converting the fuel system to make the family Chevrolet run on butane rather than gasoline.  Maybe butane was cheaper, but all I remember it accomplishing was diminishing the trunk space by about 75 percent to make room for the butane tank.  Oh, well.  We never went anywhere but Guthrie or Stillwater, anyway, and the frosty butane tank was handy for keeping the groceries cold.

(We always drove Chevrolets.  In the quiet, prosperous post-war years, when there really was a car in every garage – except those garages filled with dismantled radios and televisions – there were several makes of automobiles (all American makes, of course), but only two types of ordinary guys: the ordinary guy who drove a Chevrolet (“Chivolay” it was and “Chivolay” it remained even in national advertising  until at least the 1980s, showing the brand’s strong identification with the heartland: “Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chivolay”) – and the ordinary guy who drove a Ford.

(The Chevy folks thought the Ford folks were simply a little slow.  Buy a Ford and a Chevrolet on the same day for the same price, and two years later the used Ford would be worth half as much as the used Chevy.  “And then dayum!  That fool went out and bought hisself another Ford!”

(The Ford folks didn’t care.  They had a love affair. And, hell, you didn’t trade in your Ford every two or three years, anyway.  You could keep that ol’ car a-runnin’ with balin’ wire, electrical tape and bubble gum long after that dern Chevy had gone to the junkyard.)

Then it was motorcycles, including a huge Indian.  At five, I didn’t understand the allure of the Indian.  I was probably fifty-five before I read a feature article about the Indian being revived and what a cult bike it had always been.  But it certainly impressed the neighbors and my uncles.

Guns: collecting, buying, selling, trading.  Fishing: different rods, different reels, different lures, the best places to go for black bass, the best times of day to fish.  Taught himself (and later me) to use a fly rod, a talent which looks deceptively simple, and was damned good at it.

The most fun was when he decided to turn our tiny basement into a full-sized basement.  It had a concrete-block wall on three sides, and bare dirt on the fourth, and the original portion of the basement was only about a third the size of the footprint of the house.  In came section after section of conveyor belt and a large portable engine to pull the contraption.  Unfortunately, the basement only had a couple of narrow windows to the outside and a standard-sized door to the inside of the house, so there was no getting a backhoe down there.  Had there been, Dwain would have bought one.

Shovel and pick and sweat loaded yards and yards of dirt up the conveyor belt and into the back yard, where it had to be shoveled again into the pickup to be hauled off to a landfill.  Naturally, it wasn’t long before he became bored with this project and moved on to another.

But with something of the child left in him, he took a ten-foot section of conveyor belt (without the belt – just the rollers), attached one end to a welded ladder about four feet tall and invented the world’s greatest slide.  We would take a piece of cardboard or plywood, place it on the rollers at the top, sit down and head for the ground faster than any playground slide ever.

As Dwain had been with his new television, I was the hero of the neighborhood kids with my new slide.  In time, I learned to stand on a piece of plywood, balancing myself all the way to the bottom, much like surfing.

*

And music.  On a whim, he traded some old boy at work a pistol for a violin, and only afterward realized he would have to teach himself to play.  He did.

Guitars, a steel guitar and a mandolin all passed through the house and as soon as he learned each one, he would trade it off for a different instrument.

Hat, tinted glasses, pencil-thin mustache

In the second grade, I decided I wanted to take piano lessons.  Dwain was delighted.  It was an excuse to buy a piano.  Never mind that you could rent one for five dollars a month.   While the piano teacher, Mrs. Short, who was about three feet tall and at least 100 years old, was still struggling to teach me about “Every Good Boy Does Fine” and “All Cows Eat Grass,” Dwain skipped the reading part altogether and started playing Fats Waller by ear.

In his 40′s he was living in a two-room house on about an acre of ground in the poorest part of Midwest City, some two miles from our house.  I saw him a few times a year, usually by riding my bicycle to his house.  He decided to buy a saddle horse.  And then another one.  And then another one.  Each one, of course, had to have its own set of tack and who knows where this money came from, since he was constantly complaining about the $50 per month he had to pay in child support for each of his sons.

Then came the library of books on breaking horses, training horses, jumping horses, cutting horses, gaited horses, shoeing horses, horse anatomy, horse diseases, veterinary treatment for horses.

(On one of the few occasions he was in a generous enough mood to let me take one of the horses out, I rode over to visit an adult friend who had two pre-teen daughters.  The horse was a retired cutting horse who, although a bit sway-backed and a bit arthritic, could still do a 180-degree turn on a dime at the touch of the reins on her neck, and could leave an unsuspecting rider still going in a straight line, sans horse.

(A few weeks later, I was back at my friend’s house and his oldest daughter asked me, “Steve, is that horse really 21?”  I didn’t know where this conversation was going, so I answered carefully, “No, I don’t think she’s quite that old.”  “Well, Daddy said she’s old enough to vote.”)

I didn’t get to ride all that much, but I learned by watching and listening.  Boy, did Dwain like to talk.  He taught me how to saddle a horse, the proper way to tie a cinch, the uses of different kinds of bits and different kinds of shoes, how to approach a horse, what not to do around a horse, how to clean their feet, how to cool them off and groom them after riding, what do to if the horse had the heaves or the colic, what a “cribber” was, how to tell a horse from a mare by looking at their head, instead of underneath.

**

After I was maybe 12 or so, Rick and I had no more set visitation schedule.  We didn’t want to see him all that often.  So we were allowed to go when we wanted.  I would visit regularly for a while, he would turn ugly for no apparent reason, and I wouldn’t go back again for weeks or months.

During my visits, he seldom had any real time to give me; he was always working on one project or another.  But if he was in a good mood, he would allow me to tag along and would explain why he was doing each step: why the fence post had to be set this way, why he put old rugs down over the fresh concrete and wet them down while it cured, why you planted the new tomato plants so deep and why you didn’t do it that way with flowers.

Then, in his 50′s, it was airplanes.

“I should have known,” Gerri, his fourth wife said drily, “that if he got one airplane he would eventually have two.”  He started with a two-seater (no idea what kind – that’s outside my area of expertise, and I wasn’t keeping notes in those days) and then added a four-seater.

Ground school, flight school, instrument flying, the mnemonic “May I Go Flying Today, Peter Rabbit, Sir?”  I heard it all.  Look at this: take this strip of paper and blow over the top.  See?  It’s the wind on top of the wing and the low-pressure area underneath the wing that gives the lift.  He was so eager to explain and to share.  I was so eager to fly.  I had always wanted to fly, but was having trouble enough paying for college, let alone a minimum of 40 hours of flying lessons, pre-solo, at 50 bucks a pop.  I ate it up.

However, like the horses, who always had an excuse for not being saddled up, the airplanes always seemed to have an excuse for not being flown – at least when I was around.  Gas was expensive.  100-hour maintenance was coming up.  He didn’t have time.  “You don’t come out here to see me?  You only come for me to take you flying?”

But still.  Credit him for doing it at all.

I went up with him two or three times in the two-seater, so he could show off his new skills.  Once, or maybe twice, in the four-seater.  Airplane fuel was expensive.  Today, I would pull out my wallet in mock disgust and say, “For Crissake, don’t be so goddamned cheap!  Here’s a hundred bucks for gas.  Let’s go flying.”  Then, all I could do was think Why don’t you sell the goddamned thing if you can’t afford to fly it?

**

In the late 1960s (Dwain’s 50′s) he also became a nutcase.

Perhaps that’s not wholly accurate.  Nutcase?  OK.  Age?  Maybe it started almost 20 years earlier.

When we lived on 22d Street, the neighbors behind us were Gertrude and George, sister and brother-in-law of Dwain’s fourth wife many years later.  George was a deputy sheriff for Oklahoma County who earned extra money on weekends by driving prisoners from the Oklahoma County Jail to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester.  Good money, too.  The rules were that there had to be two deputies for each transport, for safety.  The transport was private automobile: George’s.  So two deputies sat up front and three handcuffed prisoners sat in back.

On many weekends, no sworn deputies were interested in the overtime, and George could deputize any respectable citizen to accompany him.  That’s where Dwain came in.  Pretty good money for pretty easy work.

But on one ill-fated trip, another car cut in front of the prisoner transport on the two-lane road, and George’s car swerved, went off an embankment and overturned.  With no seat-belts, some of the passengers were trapped in the car and some were ejected.

Dwain was stuck in the car until a stranger, dressed all in black, carefully pulled him out (he had several broken ribs), carried him to the slope of the embankment, gently took off his jacket, folded it for a pillow and made Dwain comfortable.  The stranger then left, without waiting to be thanked.

None of the other four passengers – neither George nor the three prisoners – saw any of this.  To a man, they swore there was no stranger.  It never happened.

The experience bothered Dwain so much that he went to church with Mildred for…oh, three or four weeks.  To this day, he swears by the stranger in black.

*

Years later, he began reading, and then collecting, all the printed works by and about Edgar Cayce, the mystic psychic who read minds, diagnosed and cured illnesses from thousands of miles away, connected daily with the Godhead, explained Atlantis and who could cure anything from heartburn, hangnails and halitosis to fits, farts and freckles.

Dwain had treatises explaining that the Earth was hollow, shaped like a donut, and that a superior species, the descendants of Atlantis, lived in the interior.  The “proof” was in Admiral Byrd’s journals of flying over the North Pole.  UFO’s in New Mexico?  He had the proof.  Where he got this stuff, I don’t know, but he had piles of self-published pamphlets on every mystical, mysterious or paranormal phenomenon imaginable.  No doubt he could have dug through the piles and come up with articles explaining the disappearance of Judge Crater and Jimmy Hoffa.

It’s a shame he never came to California to learn about the Lemurians, from the lost Pacific continent of Lemur, who live inside Mt. Shasta and who are occasionally seen by those brave enough to try to climb it.  I actually know one.  (One such brave soul, that is; I didn’t meet the Lemurian – he did.)

Introduction to Oklahoma

Just like Rising Moon, Falling Pants, Running Nose
Like those Indians, I’m an Indian too:
A Sioux.

Irving Berlin.

1540 – 1900

The 89ers Day Parade always began with the Shriners on their white horses – at least a dozen of them, prancing proudly down the cobblestone streets of Guthrie.  Later would come Shriners on their white motorcycles and later still more Shriners in their white Cadillacs.  Guthrie, then only incidentally the former capital city of Oklahoma, was more importantly the proud home of a Masonic Temple.  All Oklahoma Masons made at least an annual pilgrimage to this sleepy little town on the Cimarron River.

We made at least a bi-weekly pilgrimage.  Except on 89ers Day, Guthrie to us was the home of Grandma Collins: Daisy, formerly Dimick, nee Crick; daughter of Susie Crick, three-quarters Cherokee and whom I knew only as a tiny wrinkled woman, hardly five feet tall and bearing a funny (to a six-year-old) resemblance to an Egyptian mummy.

Susie passed for white.  Being an Indian then was hard work.  Ethnic pride had yet to be invented – or if it had, it was reserved only for Anglos.

On a Sunday afternoon, the whole Dimick “tribe” (not my word, but my Aunt Verna’s, and used only in such phrases as “I swear, I don’t know what’s the matter with this tribe”) gathered at Daisy’s house.  Women cooked and did the dishes.  Men smoked, watched television and churned ice cream.  Children, whom everyone professed to love but nobody really wanted hanging around, were at least useful for sitting on the freezer container while the men cranked.  After dark, the women drank coffee in the living room, the men smoked and played poker in the dining room and the kids caught fireflies on the lawn.

But on April 22, or the nearest weekend day to it, the town belonged to the 89ers.

Not far behind the white horses were the American Legion troops.  Their horses were just horses. Nobody had money like the Shriners.  Then came buckboards, horse-drawn carriages, the occasional sulky, clowns, flag carriers, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, 4-H-ers, floats, walkers, riders, bicyclists, stilt-walkers, penny-farthing riders, unicyclists, school children.

And then the 89ers themselves, survivors of the great Land Run of 1889.  Usually in buckboards or carriages, but some in convertibles.  Most in period costume:  flowing dresses and large-billed sunbonnets that looked like upside-down coal scuttles.  Most of them were interchangeable with Grandma Crick–small, toothless and shriveled–but beaming for the cheers and whistles of the crowd.

Every year, of course, there were fewer of them.

(Why do I only remember women?  Because men’s costumes haven’t changed all that much since the 19th century or because, sixty-plus years after The Run, few but women were left?)

In the age of television and airplanes, these living relics linked us to our roots, to an age when folks were self-sufficient and didn’t answer to bosses, when people made their own destinies and the government was no more intrusive than the occasional mosquito, when comfortable cotton farms were wrested from rock-hard former buffalo grounds.  They were our spirit.  They were our inspiration.  They were what we thought we were and longed to be but weren’t and wouldn’t.

They were the relics of one of the grandest High Adventures of all time:  in audacity second only to the Crusades; in scope, third behind the Crusades and the California gold rush.  But beyond the borders of Oklahoma, few people have even heard of the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889, and fewer still have more than a vague notion of what it was or what it meant.

What it was was the penultimate betrayal of the country’s original inhabitants by the conquering hordes.  It was the beginning of the end of an age; the first rusty squeaks of the closing of the frontier; Manifest Destiny fulfilled.  It was sea to shining sea and it signaled clearly that the frontier wars were over.

What it meant was that the white man had won.

**

Actually, there were no “frontier wars.”  At least not west of the Mississippi.  The big Indian wars occurred much farther east and a century before.  By the Nineteenth Century, the struggle between whites and Indians had been reduced to the occasional skirmish or the occasional massacre (of whites by Indians; of Indians by whites), with seldom more than a very few hundred dead.

Custer’s doomed Seventh Cavalry numbered only slightly more than 200 men when it was wiped out at Little Big Horn in 1876.  One hundred and fifty Indians were killed at the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890.  Not to make light of these tragedies, but the numbers pale by comparison with almost any battle of the American Civil War.  The Battle of Gettysburg, for instance, resulted in more than 51,000 casualties.

What the frontier had, and what the real Indian “wars” lacked was public relations.  The tragic King Philip’s War (1675; long, cruel, crushingly expensive and resulting in at least 4,000 deaths) received scanty coverage, if at all, in colonial newspapers.  But by the last half of the Nineteenth Century, the railroad, the telegraph, a growing sensationalist press and an increasingly literate populace made frontier exploits almost a national pastime.  Heroic cavalry and ruthless, scalping Indians were daily fodder for the East Coast press.

A dumping ground for America’s unwanted savages, a lawless outpost in the middle of a “civilized” country and the next-to-last contiguous state admitted to the Union, Oklahoma became the archetype for the movie and television myth of the “Old West.”

*

The first European to explore Oklahoma was Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, who passed through in 1540 on his fruitless search for the Seven Cities of Gold. In 1682, France claimed the province of Louisiana (which included the future Oklahoma) from Spain, but it was not until 1719 that Gaston du Rivage made a more extensive exploration of the future state.  Du Rivage reported visiting an agricultural tribe, the Wichitas, and noted a fierce band of nomadic and warlike tribesmen, the Apaches.

The Wichitas, whose tribal structure was organized into what were essentially city-states, seemed to be born diplomats, enlisting other tribes to carry out their warfare for them.  French traders and trappers began filtering into Northeastern Oklahoma and the Red River area farther south and the French did their best to establish trading treaties with the Oklahoma natives, particularly the Wichitas.

By the Treaty of Paris in 1763, ending the French and Indian War, Spain regained control of Louisiana, but lost it to the French again in 1800, during the Napoleonic Wars.  Not particularly interested in the swamps and deserts of the Louisiana Territory, France sold the province to the United States in 1803, in what has become known as the Louisiana Purchase.

As an opera lover, I used to be mildly amused when viewing or listening to Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, in which the title character and her lover, Des Grieux, are “alone, lost and abandoned” in the Louisiana desert just before they die in the final scene.

I’ve been to New Orleans and to barren northern Louisiana, wherein is located Fort Polk, site of my Army basic training and of my greatest humiliations.  “The armpit [or worse, even] of the planet,” we used to call it.  But it still would not qualify as a desert.

At the time in which the opera was set, however, “Louisiana” stretched from New Orleans to the southern parts of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, and from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains – almost a fourth of the contiguous states’ land area, and definitely including such desert states as Oklahoma, North and South Dakota and Wyoming.  So who knows which of the many available Louisiana deserts saw the end of Manon and Des Grieux?

*

After the Louisiana Purchase, American trappers and traders began replacing the French, dealing largely in beaver.  When the beaver were all trapped out they turned to other fur-bearers and finally to buffalo.

Buffalo – an estimated 15 million of them ranging from Canada to Mexico – were the lifeblood of the plains.  Much more than a source of meat, their hides made clothing and teepees, their hair made rope, their bones made tools and their sinews bowstrings.  Plains Indian culture was more than dependent upon the buffalo; it was centered on the buffalo.

The buffalo and most of the traditional culture would disappear before the century was out.

*

The country’s northeastern Indians had been largely tamed or exterminated by the nineteenth century, and now the tribes in the southeast were beginning to feel the pressures of advancing European settlers.  The Indians, the settlers and the government were all aware of the rising tensions.

Some government officials began promoting the idea of devoting land west of the Mississippi – well beyond anybody’s dreams of American expansion at the time – as a permanent homeland for the Indians.  And some of them even believed it would be in the best interests of the tribes to be free from white encroachment.  In negotiating the Louisiana Purchase, one of President Jefferson’s goals was to establish an Indian homeland.

In 1804, Congress authorized the executive branch to begin negotiating with the Indians for relocation to “Indian Country,” a vaguely defined area from the Red River (the present Oklahoma-Texas border) on the south, up through Kansas and part of Nebraska.  Factions of some tribes voluntarily agreed to relocate, believing it desirable to escape the encroachment and vicious harassment of the white settlers.

Although the state was later home to more than 60 Indian tribes on more than 25 separate reservations, Oklahoma history from this period usually focuses on the so-called Five Civilized Tribes: the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles.

The Five Civilized Tribes occupied huge ancestral lands in the southeast United States.  Unlike the Plains Indians, they were settled, largely agricultural people, with towns, permanent housing and organized governments.  They adapted more easily to the white man’s ways than did the nomadic tribes, and intermarried easily.  The mixed-bloods frequently became almost a separate caste and, in many cases, a superior one – although no caste was superior to the whites.  My great-grandmother, Susan Thornberry Crick, was an example.  Passing for white was superior even to being a mixed-blood Indian.

*

The removal of the Indians from the southeast is usually illustrated by the story of the Cherokees.  This tribe was not the most numerous, did not receive the largest slice of Indian Territory, nor did it endure the greatest hardships of any tribe.  But it was, in the eyes of the whites, the most “civilized.”  It intermarried more than the other tribes with the Scotch and Irish settlers of the South, it had an advanced system of government and its people lived (for the most part) in houses.

In addition, from about 1821, it was literate. Sequoyah, a half-blood Cherokee, spent twelve years developing a Cherokee alphabet, which he called “talking leaves.”  It was so simple and effective that anyone who spoke Cherokee could learn to read and write in two weeks and the Cherokee Nation became literate almost overnight.

The Cherokee thus became the Noble Indian – in a sense the white man’s pet – its removal from its ancestral lands to the hills of Oklahoma all the more tragic because its people were almost like civilized folks.  The annual “Trail of Tears” pageant at Tahlequah, Oklahoma, wouldn’t draw nearly so many tourists if it featured the nomadic and warlike Comanches or Apaches.

*

And who am I, condensing 350 years of history into a single chapter, to take issue with this viewpoint?  After all, I’m an Indian, too.  A Cherokee.

*

In the early nineteenth century, about 20,000 Cherokees occupied ancestral lands in North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia and Alabama.  They have been divided by historians into those more European-oriented, the “Upper Cherokees,” and those more tied to the land and the ways of their ancestors, the “Lower Cherokees.”  The Lower Cherokees met with President Jefferson’s representatives in 1808 and voluntarily agreed to move to Arkansas, believing they would then be free to continue their ancient lifestyle.

In 1817, the Upper and Lower Cherokees met with U.S. representatives (including future president Andrew Jackson) and negotiated an exchange: the tribe would cede approximately one-third of its holdings in the east in exchange for title to the Arkansas lands where their relatives were already settled, free transportation to the west for the rest of the tribe and other minor considerations.  Three years later, almost a third of the Cherokees had voluntarily moved west.  But by 1828, white settlers were already encroaching on the Arkansas lands and white hunters were poaching its game.  Another treaty – and another move – was in order.

The government then granted the Cherokees a large tract of Indian Territory (Oklahoma) land, payment for improvements made on their Arkansas land, an annual stipend, further payment for the eastern Cherokees who agreed to move to Oklahoma and free access to any hunting grounds west of their Oklahoma lands, an area which became known as the Cherokee Outlet.
The treaty, as solemn and binding as any other treaty negotiated with an Indian tribe, recited that

it being the anxious desire of the Government of the United States to secure to the Cherokee nation of Indians…a permanent home, and which shall, under the most solemn guarantee of the United States, be, and remain, theirs forever— a home that shall never, in all future time, be embarrassed by having extended around it the lines, or placed over it the jurisdiction of a Territory or State, nor be pressed upon by the extension, in any way, of any of the limits of any existing Territory or State…

[Therefore]…The United States agree to possess the Cherokees, and to guarantee it to them forever, and that guarantee is hereby solemnly pledged, of seven millions of acres of land…

In addition to the seven millions of acres thus provided for…the United States further guarantee to the Cherokee Nation a perpetual outlet, West, and a free and unmolested use of all the Country lying West of the Western boundary of the above described limits, and as far West as the sovereignty of the United States, and their right of soil extend.

All the way to the Pacific Ocean, if you read it literally.  But the guarantee wouldn’t last.

*

Also in 1828 the skilled Indian fighter Andrew Jackson, was elected president.  Jackson was not unsympathetic to the plight of the Indians; he simply felt they were in the way of progress and that they had only three choices: relocation, assimilation or annihilation.  In his first State of the Union Address, he noted that while they had once been “uncontrolled possessors” of “vast regions,”

By persuasion and force they have been made to retire from river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants to preserve for a while their once terrible names. Surrounded by the whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroying the resources of the savage doom him to weakness and decay, the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware is fast over-taking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek. That this fate surely awaits them if they remain within the limits of the States does not admit of a doubt.

Jackson promised that the tribes’ southern land should be purchased from them, rather than simply taken, and suggested that the “emigration should be voluntary, for it would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land.”

Congress adopted Jackson’s removal plan for the Indians in 1830, but in his second State of the Union Address in December of that year, he was already waffling on his lofty assurances of the year before.  “Doubtless it will be painful to leave the graves of their fathers,” he said, “but what do they more than our ancestors did or than our children are now doing?”

While again expressing sorrow over the extinction of many northeastern tribes, Jackson this time likened it to the perpetual “extinction of one generation to make room for another” and commented that in the larger context, there was not “any thing in this which…is to be regretted.”

Philanthropy could not wish to see this continent restored to the condition in which it was found by our forefathers. What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?

*

There should be a very lengthy pause here to give President Jackson’s question the weight and consideration it deserves.

*

While the government was negotiating with the Indians, white settlers were doing their part to make removal more desirable – or at least to make it less desirable for Indians to stay on their own lands.  Whites squatted on Indian lands, stole Indian livestock and shot Indian farmers down in their fields for sport or for spite.  Individual resistance was met with arrest; group resistance was seen as savage Indian attacks.  Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi abolished tribal governments and made the tribes subject to an unequal system of state laws.

At the same time, the federal government kept increasing its offers to purchase the Cherokee lands.  Despite this carrot-and-stick approach, the majority tribal faction held fast, demanding a sum of money far beyond the means of the government.  In frustration, federal agents simply turned to the minority faction, negotiating an 1835 treaty which purported to sell all remaining Cherokee lands for $5 million and allowed the tribe two years in which to move to Indian Territory.

By the end of the two-year grace period, relatively few Cherokees had moved, and federal troops and the Georgia militia were ordered to round them up and march them to their new “home.”  While they were being gathered up and placed in stockade forts before the march, white settlers were frequently burning their homes and pillaging their livestock.

The Cherokees were herded almost 1,000 miles, with only such possessions as they could carry, and with little or no provision made for protection from the blistering summer or the freezing winter.  Finally, John Ross, the leader of the majority band of Cherokees, gave in to the inevitable and begged Gen. Winfield Scott to allow him to supervise the removal of the rest of the tribe.
Under Ross’ supervision, the rest of the “removal” was not quite as harsh.  Still, approximately 25 percent of the Eastern Cherokees died on the “Trail of Tears,” mostly the young, the elderly and the infirm.

*

The story of the other four “civilized tribes” is but a variation on a theme, with the Creeks suffering the most.  A faction of the Creeks, known as the “Baton Rouges,” or “Red Sticks,” allied with the British in the War of 1812, and a later group of Creeks staged an uprising against their treatment by the whites in the 1836 “Creek Rebellion.”  For these acts of insubordination, they paid dearly, being treated more harshly during their “removal” than any of the other tribes.

The Choctaws, Chickasaws and Seminoles each also had their own “Trail of Tears.”  In 1855, the Chickasaws were moved from Kansas and Nebraska into Oklahoma, the northern portion of the former Indian Territory was opened for homesteading and the borders of Indian Territory became the present Oklahoma borders.  All of Oklahoma except the Panhandle was divided among the five tribes, where they were expected to live “free and undisturbed forever.”

*

For a very few years, life in Oklahoma was probably better than it had been at any time since the white man arrived in the country.  Largely protected from encroaching settlers, the tribes settled in to establish towns, governments and educational systems, to write constitutions and, in some cases, to build prosperous plantations.

But a movement was afoot in Washington as early as 1854 to assign each tribe member a plot of farmland and to open the remaining land for white settlement.  After all, if a white settler could only homestead 160 acres, why should the Indians be allowed more?  Unsuccessful at first, this plan needed only an excuse for implementation, and that excuse arrived with the Civil War.

The Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws, Chickasaws and Cherokees were not nomadic tribes like their cousins on the plains, but were a settled people, who for more than 200 years had lived adjacent to the southern whites, had intermarried with them easily and had adopted many of their ways, not the least of which was the practice of slavery.

The tribes not only identified strongly with the South, but festered with years-long resentment against the federal government for their resettlement and for the union’s general laissez-faire attitude toward treaty obligations.  It didn’t help matters that many of Abraham Lincoln’s campaign staff (including later Secretary of State William H. Seward) recommended, during the 1860 presidential campaign, that the Indian lands be taken and opened up for settlement.

Indian Territory was considered strategically important by both the North and the South, as it controlled access to the western states and territories, which both sides hoped to sway to their own cause.  The Creeks, Seminoles and Cherokees were at first reluctant to align themselves with the Confederacy, but a significant Confederate victory in 1861 in Missouri seemed to indicate that the South would control the West.  Although far from unanimously, the tribes allied themselves with the South and began supplying regiments to the Confederacy.

The Oklahoma campaigns, like most Civil War battle theaters, were brutal, confusing and ever-shifting.  The state received but one positive thing from the Civil War: a new hero.  Stand Watie, a Cherokee and something of a military genius, rose to the rank of brigadier general in the Confederate army, becoming the only Indian general on either side of the conflict.  He was also the last Confederate general to surrender.

**

If relocation was the first major blow against the tribes, Reconstruction was the second.  The Oklahoma tribes had committed treason against the United States and had, themselves, broken all of the treaties.  The government informed them that the treaties were nullified and that the Indians, in future, would have only such rights as the United States chose to grant them.  While once they had negotiated from a position of strength, the Indians were now no match for the post-war military might of the United States.  They had no choice but to agree.

First, their governments were dissolved.  Next, their lands were reallocated to make room for another dozen or so tribes being relocated from Kansas.

Later, more plains and western tribes were forcibly removed to Oklahoma.  The Osage, the Kaws, the Sac and Fox, Potawatomies and Iowas.

The Kickapoos, the Poncas, the Pawnees, Otoes, Missouris, Shawnees and Nez Perces.

The Tonkawas, Quapaws, Senecas, Wyandots, Peorias, Miamis, Ottawas, Modocs.

To mention a few.

*

Pacification and relocation of the plains and western tribes was brutal and ruthless.

And, as Jackson had pointed out, inevitable.

*

By the time of the first land run whose anniversary parade I attended in Guthrie for years, the Five Civilized Tribes now occupied only the eastern half of the state, 21 reservations occupied the western half, some tribes now lived in Oklahoma without a reservation and a two-million-acre parcel of land in central Oklahoma, the “Unassigned Lands” was still left over.

Most of the usable public land in the country having long since been homesteaded, the Unassigned Lands were the last and best free land believed to be available to settlers.  A faction which came to be known as the “Boomers” worked for ten years to promote the opening of the lands, and frequently sneaked in to establish overnight settlements before being chased out again by federal marshals.

In 1889, President Grover Cleveland signed a bill authorizing the opening of the territory to settlement.  Because of the huge interest (only about one in three would-be settlers would successfully stake a claim), the civil servants in charge of the opening decided on an approach which had been used a few times years before in Iowa:  the land run.  The date was set for a scant thirty days after the president signed the enabling legislation.

On April 22, 1889, an estimated 50,000 to 75,000 people – farmers, tradesmen and merchants, and including an estimated 10,000 blacks, many part of a movement which hoped to found an all-black state – lined the starting points arranged around the borders of the territory.   Although the territory was patrolled by U.S. marshals, people of course tried to sneak in ahead of the starting time to claim a prime spot.  They became known as “Sooners,” and the state later honored this band of cheats and scofflaws by adopting their nickname as its own.

*

The starting guns were fired at noon and the crowd set off, by buggy or wagon, on horseback and by train: the Santa Fe Railroad already crossed through the territory.  Each eligible family could claim either a 160-acre parcel or a lot in one of the designated town sites, such as Guthrie or Norman.

By nightfall, the population of Guthrie was estimated at 10,000 to 15,000.  Oklahoma Station, a whistle-stop on the Santa Fe line which would later become Oklahoma City, had 10,000 new citizens.

Many children, and even young adults, who made The Run were still alive in the 1950′s.  As they rode the streets of Guthrie in the annual 89ers Day Parade, they were honored as living links between the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.  Or, as the official slogan of the state’s semi-centennial celebration in 1957 put it: “Arrows to Atoms.”

*

Even as the Run of ‘89 was happening, government agents were negotiating with the tribes to carry out the plan first proposed 15 years earlier: the tribes would be allowed to keep 160 acres of land for every adult member on their official rolls (lesser acreage for minors) and the government would buy the rest of each tribe’s land – land that had been promised to “be, and remain, theirs forever” – and open it up for settlement.  Along with this plan came even further resettlement of many of the tribes.

After long and acrimonious negotiations between the Cherokees and the U.S. government over slave rights, the Cherokee government was dissolved and the Cherokees forced to give their former slaves the same rights as Indian tribal members – land and a share of the money from the feds, including the $6 million paid for the Cherokee Strip.  Today, descendants of these freedmen are working to achieve full tribal membership.

Thus, in 1891, 900,000 acres of “surplus” land in the Sac and Fox, Potawatomi, Shawnee and Iowa areas were opened by another run.

In 1892, 3.5 million acres of the former Cheyenne-Arapaho lands were opened.

In 1893, the six-million acre Cherokee Outlet (“a perpetual outlet, West, and a free and unmolested use of all the Country lying…as far West as the sovereignty of the United States…extend[s]”) was the site of a run by nearly 100,000 settlers.

Other Indian areas were settled by runs, lotteries and auctions.  By 1900, the present Oklahoma was divided roughly in half diagonally: Oklahoma Territory in the northwest and Indian Territory in the southeast.

(Egad, I can’t believe I posted a chapter out of order.  Can you develop dyslexia later in life or was it just another example of ADD [Adult Attention Disorder]?)

Dimicks

My brother Bill runs a still on the hill
Where he turns out a gallon or two

Bascom Lamar Lunsford and Lulu Belle Wiseman, “Mountain Dew”

1630 -1940

Nobody came to Oklahoma from the west.  Like all Oklahomans then, my father’s folks came from all over the southeast and northeast: Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, Connecticut, Massachusetts.  Add Kansas to the list, but Kansas was only a place to stop and rest before moving on.

Thomas Dimick (Dimmock, Dimock) emigrated to Massachusetts from England in the late 1630′s, first residing in Dorcester and finally settling in Barnstable, where he became a founder and selectman.  He served as a judge, town officer, and, in 1650 was named Elder of the church of Barnstable.  He was also on the Plymouth Colony Council of War and a Lieutenant of Militia in 1642.  According to Dr. Alan R. Dimick, now retired from the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, and the leading Dimick scholar in America, “The early history of Barnstable and Thomas Dimick cannot be separated….He was the leading man and in some way connected with all acts of the first settlers.”

Some researchers assert that Thomas was the son of Edward Dymoke of Pinchbeck, England, who was the hereditary King’s Champion at the time.  The King’s Champion, a post largely ceremonial but occasionally very influential, would ride, fully armored,  into the coronation banquet at Westminster Hall after the crowning of a new king, toss down his mailed glove and challenge anyone to deny the right of the new king to rule.

The post dates to William the Conqueror, and for the last several hundred years has been the hereditary right of the Dymokes of Scrivelsby, Lincolnshire.  The last time a Dymoke actually rode his white charger into Westminster was at the coronation ceremony of King George IV in 1821, but the post still exists and a Dymoke still holds it.  A Dymoke carried the Royal Standard in the coronation procession of Elizabeth II, and doubtless will do so for the next king following Elizabeth’s death.

According to this theory of lineage, Thomas married a Puritan before emigrating to Massachusetts.  As a Puritan, he would not want his name connected with the Champions of the titular head of the Church of England, nor would he want his family in England to suffer politically because of his religious conversion.  The Dymokes, although they managed to maintain their hereditary position, had been on shaky political ground and ever-lessening influence since the reign of Elizabeth I, which was not all that long before.  Thomas, therefore, would have severed all ties with his family, creating the lineage gap so frustrating to us amateur genealogists.

This theory may, in fact, be true, but Alan Dimick finds it more wishful thinking than actual fact.  “This line is mentioned and questioned in several sources, none of which offer references of documented vital statistics to definitely make [Thomas Dimick] a descendant of this family.”

*

The Dimick family, with its various spellings, lived in Massachusetts and Connecticut for nearly 200 years before beginning their journey westward.

The older sons were landholders and officeholders.  The younger sons didn’t fare so well, tending to leave for greener pastures and tending not to find them.  My father’s lineage was mostly from young son of younger son of youngest son.

Timothy Dimick (Dimmock/Dimmuck/Dimmick), great-grandson of Elder Thomas Dimick, married Ann Bradford, great-granddaughter of William Bradford, a Mayflower passenger and the first governor of the Massachusetts Colony.  I’m sure that qualifies me for an expensive membership in some exclusive club, but if it’s not San Francisco’s Bohemian Club or the President’s cabinet I’m probably not interested.  Fascinating, nonetheless.

(After spending a couple of years playing amateur genealogist, I discovered the family is linked to Charlemagne, William the Conqueror, Eleanor of Acquitaine, lots of English Henry’s, a few French Louis’s and most everybody else of any importance in European or Eurasian history save Vlad the Impaler.

(In my research, I discovered that Charlemagne, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire,  was my 35th, 36th, 37th, 38th, 39th, 40th, 41st, 42d, 43d, 44th, 45th and 46th great-grandfather.  I also discovered that everybody of European ancestry is descended from Charlemagne through at least half-a-dozen lines, his children and grandchildren having been so prolific.  Mathematics wouldn’t have it any other way.  The great trick is to find the links.

(And, given wars, conquests, dissolution of the English monasteries – where the birth, death and marriage records were kept until 1538 – and our ancestors’ tendencies to want to wipe the slate clean when they came to America, there are lots of missing links.)

*

Elder Thomas Dimick was my ninth great-grandfather.  As uncommon as the name is, his offspring now number in the scores of thousands all across the country.  I hardly know any of them.

(As an aside, I can’t help but be fascinated by the early Dimicks’ given names: they seem straight out of Hawthorne or Cotton Mather: Adolphus, Cordial (several of these), Thankful (a couple), Asa, Charles Cordial, Sylvanus (also several), Amasa, Miriam, Ephraim, Abner, Josiah, Simeon, Ebenezer, Shubael (a handful), Temperance, Theophilus and Mehitable (another couple.))

*

Albert (GGF), Roy (GF) and Isabel Dimick

Timothy Dimick and Ann Bradford’s great-grandson, Cordial Dimick, moved to Indiana in the early 1800′s.  Cordial’s son, Adolphus, went from Indiana to Iowa to Kansas.  Adolphus’ grandson, Roy – my grandfather – left Kansas as a teenager and headed for the new state of Oklahoma, where he hoped to make his fortune.  He never found it, but he did find Daisy Crick and my father was born when she was sixteen.  None of the extensive family records indicate a marriage date – probably with good reason.

*

Susan Lucinda Thorneberry (GGM)

Daisy was born in Tennessee and her folks also set out for the Union’s newest state.  Her mother, Susan Thornberry (or Throneberry), was three-quarters Cherokee, but her name wouldn’t appear on the official Cherokee Rolls:  she refused to sign.  She was light-skinned and wanted her children to go to the white schools.  Being a Native American was nothing to be proud of then.  Now, of course, everyone likes to brag about their Indian heritage.

Green and Susan Drake Thorneberry (Great-great grandparents)

Dwain was born in 1918, the oldest of nine, on a rented farm in Logan County, Oklahoma, just a few miles outside of Guthrie.  Not much of a farmer, Roy moved his family back and forth between little hardscrabble farms in Kansas and Oklahoma.  The other children, in order, were born in Kansas (Verna, Roy and Warren) and Oklahoma (Bonnie, Norma June and Lawrence Allen.)

Two children died young, one of diphtheria, one of whooping cough and pneumonia, and both less than six months old.

“I don’t remember Verlin, but I remember Twila dying,” says my Auntie Verna.  “Grandma and Grandpa Dimick was there for the funeral and Grandma, mom, Dwain and I were sitting in the back seat.  I had whooping cough, too, and I coughed until I vomited on Grandma’s black dress.  Oh, I just wanted to die, and she was mortified.  She didn’t have any use for grandkids, anyway, and I sure fixed my chances.

The Dimick "tribe" (with inlaws): back row: Mildred, Bonnie, Verna, Daisy, Virginia (Warren's wife); Rick (with camera); front row, center: Warren, Dwain, Dick Collins

“Anyway, Norma and Bonnie were born in Guthrie when we still lived in the same house, which was unusual for us.  I was with mom when Lawrence was born [Verna would have been 17 then], and that’s when I decided I would never get married: that was not for me!

“Of course, it was Mom’s fault they had so many kids.  Roy just couldn’t take care of that many, so she shouldn’t have gotten pregnant.

“It takes two to tango, though.  Ha!”

Roy drifted from farming into barbering, becoming, along the way – if he wasn’t, already – alcoholic and tubercular.  He lived with us for a time in the early 50′s, giving me a mild case of TB.  I was too young to remember him though, and by then Daisy was married to Dick Collins, a Chevrolet salesman in Guthrie, and had finally reached the middle class.

On one of my occasional visits to Dwain during the 60′s, he had a visitor: an elderly man still wearing a hat, twenty years out of style.

“This is your grandpa.  My dad.”

“Hi,” I said, not really having a frame of reference, and the conversation didn’t go much farther.  Damned shame.  If he was anything like his oldest son, I could have gotten him to talk about himself all afternoon.

*

Roy also made moonshine.

“I can’t remember when Dad went to barbering school, but I remember we lived in Cambridge, Kansas, when Warren was born and Dad was gone,” says Verna.  “I think he went to Leavenworth [the federal penitentiary in Kansas].

“He made whiskey and the feds came one day and they didn’t find the mash.  It was under about a foot of dirt which was in front of the hothouse where Mom started her plants.  I remember sitting there on the steps and watching them take a shovel and run it into the ground.  They did find the still out in the trees behind the house where Dad cooked it off.

“I used to have to take care of the kids while Mom helped Dad at the still.  Some life.

“Anyway, they took him with them and broke the still all over the ground.  So much for new shoes for a while.  I think he got a year or two; I really don’t remember.”

**

The Depression and then the war virtually redesigned the country.  By 1948, so much had changed in twenty years that people looked upon 1918 or 1928 as ancient history.  And it’s tempting to argue that America has reinvented itself every ten years since: television scrapping the new design for an even newer one in the 1950′s, the space race doing the same thing in the 1960′s, the Vietnam War, ditto in the 1970s and continuing through the fall of Communism, the so-called “peace dividend,” the silicone chip and the dot-com bust.

But at least one constant has remained:  people formed during the Depression and war years were never really re-made.  No matter how comfortable they might later have become, the Depression and the war remain in their souls.  This is particularly true of farmers, even more particularly true of Okies and most of all true of Okie farmers.

“Steve, I have nothing but bad memories of growing up and I don’t think anyone would want to hear it,” Verna continues.  “Like standing in line at the courthouse with a gallon pail to get soured milk?  Mom would make cheese out of it…we couldn’t drink it.

“I remember dust storms so bad you couldn’t breathe.  How much more do you want to know?”

Verna finally cools down a bit and goes on: “We never did own anything.  We rented the farm, and mom went to the field with a team of mules and worked the ground.  We lived on Grandma and Grandpa’s farm for a while when the boys were little.  I was in the third grade.  This was at Cedar Vale, Kansas, and we walked 2 ½ miles there to school.  The teacher would drive right by us and never let us ride.  Seems she couldn’t play favorites, and that’s a sorry excuse if I ever heard one.

“We went to the cotton field when we lived at Crescent and Guthrie, and Mom pulled a cottonsack, and after she would breast feed the baby she would put it on her cottonsack and let it take a nap.  I kept the kids at the wagon where they weighed up and tried to stay in the shade of the wagon.  I baked bread with everlasting yeast on a wood stove when I was nine years old.  I always had to have the meal ready when they got ready to eat, noon or night.

“I think we lived in Crescent when Roy went to barber school and Mom learned from him how to barber, then we wound up in Guthrie later where he rented a small building and put in his own shop.  Haircuts were 15 cents.  No one ever got a shave.

“Then he went up to a quarter after a long time and we nearly starved to death – everyone just put off getting a haircut.  Bread was a nickel a loaf and I had to go to the store every day, barefooted, to get a loaf of bread.  I can still remember how hot the dirt and rocks were on my feet.  Why didn’t Dwain ever have to go?  Beats the hell out of me.

“Oh, and one more thing: Dad made whiskey and bootlegged the whole time he barbered, and was always drinking.

“We lived in the back of the barber shop when he had his shop across the street west of the post office, and we couldn’t make any noise or Dad would come to the door and tell us to cut it out.  We usually tried to play in the alley, or go about three doors on west behind the mission and play.  Before that, we lived on the west side.  The house has been torn down, thank God for small favors!  I don’t have to look at it when I go up there.  I don’t like the town; never did and never will.  I’ll hush now.”

I can get Verna to open up if I only ask her a few questions at a time and not bother her again for a week or so.

“I know that Grandma Crick graduated from college in Tennessee.  What year, I don’t know, but it’s good to know someone in the family got to go to school.  My dad thought I didn’t need an education; I would just get married and it wasn’t necessary.  I told him I wanted him to buy my books so I could go to high school, but he wouldn’t do it.  I had gone all the way through school so far sitting with someone and sharing their books, and I had had enough of that.  So no high school for me.

“I wish now I had kept going.”

*

Dimick Boys: Waren, Gene, Dwain, Lawrence

Girls weren’t important, but if Roy had had anything to give, the boys would have gotten whatever they wanted.  Since, as Verna says, “we never owned anything,” all Roy could really give them was fantasy.  If I had only been one week earlier at that oil patch, we’d be rich today.  I was just starting to bust through on that rented farm when the drought come.  I was all set to be foreman of that crew, but this other old boy told some stories to the owner, and I got fired.  I told them how they could increase the yield by half, but they wouldn’t listen to me, so I quit.

These refrains are the leitmotifs of the Midwest:

1.  I could have, but luck was against me.

2.  I could have, but outside forces intervened.

3.  I could have, but there was a conspiracy against me.

4.  I could have, but decided not to, based on principle.

I grew up with these stories and this attitude, coming at me from all directions.  All of Dwain’s friends “coulda” made it big but for someone else’s doing.  My school friends all had stories about how their fathers “coulda,” – but for.  Put them all together and you begin to think, “Damn.  If it weren’t for a little bit of bad luck, a conspiracy or their high moral values, everyone in the state of Oklahoma would be filthy rich.”

And that’s pert’-near exactly what they believe.

*

What Roy was able to give to his boys, and particularly to his oldest son, Dwain, was the lesson that they were talented (as Roy believed he was talented, with no evidence at all to back up this claim) and could do anything they set their minds to (as Roy coulda), provided, of course, that factors 1 through 4 didn’t intervene.

Failure was, therefore, not only an option, but was more or less to be expected, although failure would never be their fault.

And two more things: women are only for cooking and sex, and children are only for helping you in the field or reflecting glory on you.

*

Roy was evidently a role model for Dwain as Dwain was for me.  Was Albert the same for Roy?  Or Adolphus the same for Albert?  And what about Elder Thomas Dimick?  Did he beat his animals?  Beat his wife?  Beat his children?  Or does poverty and the prairie do that to a man?

*

“I could take those mules and make ‘em put up with the harness,” Dwain said.  “I’d cut a branch and get a piece of line and by the end of the afternoon, they’d be pulling that plow just as pretty as anything…I mean straight rows.  Not even my dad could work those mules the way I could.  You just have to show ‘em who’s boss.

“One day I come home and saw my dad drunk and slapping my ma.  I grabbed a two-by out of the barn and said, ‘You son of a bitch.  If you ever hit her again, I’ll kill you.’  I don’t think he ever did.”

Dwain failed to learn from experience – or maybe he learned all too well.

*

Around age 18, Dwain’s life-long fondness for pussy first got him in trouble.  His first child, Dwain Lee Dimick, Jr., was born in 1937.  Dwain was 19.  Before the war broke out, he was divorced.

Phearmans

Oh, there’s nothing halfway
About the Iowa way to treat you,
When we treat you
Which we may not do at all.

Meredith Willson, “Music Man”

1850 – 1946

Mildred was born in 1916, the youngest of five, also on a farm, just outside of Prairie City, Iowa, only a few miles north of Des Moines.  Her father, Charles Phearman, was of solid German and English stock.  His father, Joseph Phearman, who was probably Jewish, came to the United States in the late 1850′s and settled in Monmouth, Illinois, where northern and eastern European immigrants were preferred soap factory workers because they were used to wearing wooden shoes, which protected their skin from the lye used in the soap-making process.

Nobody knows what made Joseph so bitter about the Old Country – whether it was anti-Semitism, poverty, politics or maybe just a falling out with his family.  With one exception he never –  ever – spoke of his past.  Charles was never even able to find out the names of his paternal grandparents.

The only thing Joseph ever told his family about Germany was that he left to avoid the draft.  This seems odd because in July, 1862, he joined the 83d Regiment of the Illinois Volunteers to fight in the Civil War.

Unfortunately, a case of dysentery laid him low and he was discharged that December.  Ten years later, he moved to Prairie City, where he met and married Sarah Jane Rigby, a first-generation English-American born in New Jersey who never lost the English accent inherited from her mother.

*

Joseph Phearman (GGF)

Joseph didn’t marry until he was in his 40s, and Sarah (Sadie) was 20 years younger than he.  Perhaps that (and perhaps, also the fact that he was taciturn and German) explains the strange relationship between them.  Mildred remembers it as a “battle of the sexes,” with Joseph and son Charlie on one side and Sadie and the two daughters, Aunt Ella and Aunt Emma, on the other.

At one point, after some sort of a falling-out, Joseph and Sadie stopped talking to each other for the conveniently Biblical period of seven years.  Nobody knows what caused the rift, only that they would communicate through the children: “Tell your mother to pass the salt.”  “Tell your father it’s right under his nose.”

I’m not so interested in what caused the little spat.  It could have been anything.  Farm life in those days was pretty stifling.  With no electricity, no car, no telephone, television or radio, with weekly baths in a washtub in the kitchen, a “two-holer” outhouse and a bedpan under the bed so you didn’t have to trudge through the snow to the privy in the middle of the night, couples were pretty much stuck with each other all day, every day, every year.

No, what I want to know is: after seven years, what made them start talking again?

*

“My Dad,” Mildred wrote to me, “probably as a natural reaction to the rift, thought Grandma wasn’t capable of making any kind of a decision.  She lived with us for a year after Aunt Ella died, then went to live with the other daughter and died there.   She did tend to leave the decisions all up to Dad and Aunt Emma – as I don’t remember hearing anything about what she wanted to do – she just stayed where they told her to stay.

Charles Henry Phearman - 1901

“But I do remember that she could be stubborn if it suited her.  She refused to go any place, which meant someone had to ‘grandma sit’ with her whenever we were going out.  And going out was a special occasion to us then, whether because I was very young or whether it was even to my parents, I don’t know.  On Old Settlers’ Day she could be persuaded to go to the afternoon festivities, but in the evening, she just wasn’t up to going again, so someone had to miss and stay with her.”

*

Joseph’s only son, my grandfather Charles, was 28 when he married 18-year-old Mabel Jones.  There is a definite pattern, here.  A girl would be a spinster if not married by 21 or 22, but a farmer couldn’t marry until he could afford to support a family.  This age difference would not apply, of course, to hired hands, clerks or other wage earners.  Roy and Daisy Dimick were only three years apart.  But it seemed to be fairly typical among the landed folks.

My mother’s and father’s secret beliefs about their respective class status probably had a great deal to do with their total incompatibility.

*

Life on the Iowa farm was paradise.

Or, if it wasn’t, it was at least remembered as such.  I never heard my mother or any of my four aunts and uncles speak about “the farm” with anything but wistfulness.

It was a time that was “lost” in March, 1935, when Charlie and Mabel loaded the last of their possessions into their wagon and their car, said their goodbyes to their neighbors and their hired help and drove – one last time – to town where Charlie, at 61 years old, tried to start over by doing odd jobs, being a handyman for the Odd Fellows Lodge and mowing lawns at the cemetery.

It was also a pre-war time.  We always look back with nostalgia at pre-war times.  Usually, we’re right.

*

Charles & Mabel Phearman -- Wedding Day, 1902

Charles Phearman was not rich, by any means.  But while topsoil in most parts of Oklahoma was almost nonexistent, and the subsoil was hard-packed, sticky, clayey red mud, Iowa topsoil was almost two feet deep with rich, black loam.  A careful and hard-working farmer could make a comfortable living and raise a family on a modest farm.  And that’s what Charlie did.  Until he got too ambitious.

Carl, the oldest child, became a farmer for love of the land, even though he had other opportunities, and even though Charlie’s dreams of a land legacy for each of his children fell through.  None of the other children took to farming.  Roy became a successful salesman, Leo a college professor and Ruth Adah a housewife.  And Mildred?  She became a chapter or two in a memoir.

Anyway, Mildred wrote to me, the family was very “lucky.”

“We had a power washing machine – used a gasoline engine with a belt which powered the machine.  When I was small, I always knew it was wash day as I’d wake up in the morning and hear that gasoline engine putting along turning the wheels on the machine.

“We heated the water in a big iron kettle (don’t you remember the iron kettle the folks had by the barn at their place in Prairie City?)  It was dipped out and poured into the machine and the clothes run through.  Very seldom was laundry done oftener than once a week.  You can see why, if they had to plan that far in advance: to get up early, build the fire, fill the kettle and then go through all the gyrations of cranking that gasoline motor to get it started to run the washer.”

*

Years ago, I asked Mildred for memories of life on the farm.  A frustrated writer herself, she sent me several short essays.  None except “soap making” were anything other than nostalgic.

“Our day started at dawn.  I remember my father getting up and going down to the kitchen to light the fire.  First, he would shake down the ashes from the grate.  When they were all shaken into the ashpan, he would use corncobs soaked in coal oil to kindle the fire.  You may think all the older generations used kindling, but we were in the middle of the grainbelt and there was no room for trees to use for wood – all our land was for growing crops and grazing animals.  Once the cobs were lighted, more dry ones were added and when they were blazing good he carefully poured small lumps of coal over the fire and it soon began to burn slowly.”

Mabel and Leo at 4 mos.

The Prairie City house in the 1950′s still had a coal stove in the kitchen (no longer used) and a corn crib in the barn (just next to the two-hole privy) nearly full of dried corn cobs.

“By then Mom was up and she put on the tea kettle and the coffee pot.  Then it was time for the rest of us to get into our work clothes, which smelled like the last job we had done, like milking in the barns, cleaning the horse stables or the chicken house.  All of us went to the barn except my sister, and her job was to take care of the chickens.

“My dad would already have the cows in their stanchions.  These were home made ones – two upright pieces of wood worn smooth with time, and a piece on a hinge across the top.  When this was raised the two pieces were parted and the cows came in and put their heads through in order to feed.  Then we would push the wood together and let the top piece come down and they were locked in place.

“Lots of people used one-legged stools, but we were really uptown.  We had factory-made stools:  one side to sit on and connected to that was a rack that we set the milk bucket in so we didn’t have to hold it between our knees.”

While the kids milked, Charlie tended to the eight horses, which were kept in double stalls and worked in teams together.

Milk was something of a byproduct.  What the farmers used for themselves was cream.  Twice daily, the milk buckets would be carried to the house and down to the cellar where the milk was strained and then run through a separator.  When cranked by hand, cream ran out one spout and skim milk out the other.  The cream went to the kitchen for cereal, coffee and cooking.  Skim milk was for the hogs and calves.  High-density lipoproteins hadn’t been invented yet.

Roy (standing), Carl, Leo, ca. 1912

Sour milk and sour cream, although they were readily available, were not considered a delicacy.  “My mother would have been repulsed if you had asked her to eat sour cream on her baked potatoes,” Mildred remembered.  “Sour milk was to use in cornbread, biscuits, cakes or to make cottage cheese.  Sour cream was used in baking and to churn butter.”

By the time the milk was separated, Mabel would have breakfast ready:  bacon or sausage (or both), eggs, toast, biscuits and gravy.  In the fall, pan-fried steak was a common breakfast. In fact, steak two or three times a day was not uncommon during butchering season.  “But by the end of summer, when it was still too warm to butcher and cure our own meat and we had run out of our supply, breakfast might be dried codfish gravy, biscuits and fried potatoes.  It didn’t taste as bad as it sounds, and certainly not as bad as it smelled.”

After breakfast, the kids would wash up in the kitchen to get rid of the splattered cow shit and the barn smell and head off to school (about two miles) with the lunch pails Mabel had somehow found time to pack.

**

Food and dietary requirements have had dramatic effects on human history.  Our word “salary,” for instance, refers to the Roman custom of paying soldiers an extra stipend to allow them to buy salt, which was virtually the only flavoring and only preservative available at the time.  Gandhi’s Salt March of 1930 helped unite the Indian populace against the ruling British, who had a monopoly on the salt trade.  Goiter, an unsightly neck growth usually accompanied by a measurable lowering of mental capacity, was endemic in the United States until the introduction of iodized salt in 1924.

Every school child knows the lucrative spice trade and the search for a shorter route to the Indies led to the discovery of America.  Spices were highly coveted for their ability to conceal the taste of spoiled meat, there being but limited ways to store it.

Historically, there was no real way to store fruits and vegetables, short of drying them, and no amount of spices will save a spoiled peach.  Vegetables being impossible to keep for any length of time, British sailors on months-long sea voyages during the Napoleonic Wars tended to develop scurvy from their limited diet of dried or salted beef and hardtack, and no vitamin C.

Napoleon Bonaparte, fielding massive armies which had to be provisioned, announced a prize of 12,000 francs in 1795 for the discovery of a way to preserve food in sealed containers.  Coincidentally, in the same year, the British Navy began provisioning its ships with lime juice.   The juice was acidic enough to keep for long periods of time, eradicated scurvy and gave British sailors their nickname, “Limeys.”

Napoleon’s prize was claimed in 1809 by a French chef who invented the process of canning, which was adopted immediately by the French and gradually by other governments.   Widely used by the North during the American Civil War, it would be another 50 years or more, however,  before it had much of an effect on the general populace.  It wasn’t until 1858, when Adolphus Dimick and Joseph Phearman were young men, that the Mason jar was invented, and it would be many more years before it was refined into its present design and accepted by farmers across the country.

*

Mildred, 7 1/2 yrs

When my grandmother, Mabel Phearman, was young, around the turn of the century, she used to help dry apples and corn in the summer against the coming winter.  By the time Mildred was a girl, canning in Mason jars had finally reached Prairie City.

“We canned green beans, sweet corn, tomatoes and green peas,” Mildred wrote.  “They made their own Kraut and I think kept it in one of those stone jars.  I know they kept pickles in the stone jars when I was quite young.  As I grew older, they started making the pickles and putting them in Mason jars and sealing them with the regular jar lids.  We had a barrel buried at the side of the lawn where we stored heads of cabbage, onions, carrots, turnips and parsnips.  This was covered with straw to keep it from freezing.  We kept potatoes and apples in the cellar.

“Also, we ate canned fruit in the winter time: peaches, pears, plums, grapes and berries of several kinds, strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, blackberries, mulberries and elderberries mixed with apples.”

Charlie both smoked and salted meat.  In later years, he relied more on salt and smoke-flavored salt to preserve the meat.  This seems to me to be going backwards, but I suppose smoking is much more labor intensive than salting.  Later still, they discovered they could can beef.  That, of course, would be woman’s work, so Charlie probably opted for canning exclusively.

Pork, however, was “fried down:” cooked, placed in a stone jar and completely covered with melted lard.  If kept in the cellar, the lard congealed and formed an airtight coating around the meat, preventing it from spoiling.  The same process is still used today in France to preserve duck (“duck confit,” one of my favorite dishes) and goose.

The family made their own root beer from Hires Root Beer Extract, placed the batch in a jug and lowered the jug into the well to cool.  In the fall, if there were any nice watermelons left, they would be burrowed deep into the oat bin for storage.  Some years they had watermelons to eat as late as Thanksgiving.

There was no electricity on the farm.  Charlie had a windmill that pumped water for the stock, but the women weren’t as important as the stock, so all the water used in the house had to be pumped by hand and carried in buckets.  Later, the waste water had to be carried out again.

The Phearmans didn’t even have an ice box, there being no public icehouse in Prairie City.  But when Mabel traveled the 25 miles into Des Moines to see the doctor for her undiagnosed “condition,” and if they felt there were a few coins to spare they would buy a 50-pound block of ice, wrap it in newspapers and carry it home on the running board of the Model T.

Then it was ice cream time.  Eggs less than a day old.  Milk less than an hour from the cow and thick, yellow, rich cream.  Add some sugar, some Watkins vanilla extract and a little salt and it was ready to be cranked.  One of the kids always had to sit on the container while the older folks cranked, to keep the cooler submerged in the salty ice.

The greatest treat was to lick the paddle.  Or, maybe the greatest treat was, with no refrigeration, the family had to eat all of the ice cream by the end of the evening.

**

Charlie Phearman had two obsessions:  education and land.  Joseph had pulled him out of school after the sixth grade to work in the fields.  Charlie was adamant that none of his children would be field hands.

All of Charlie’s children finished high school.  His third, Uncle Leo, went on to get his PhD and to teach at California State University at Long Beach.  His last, Mildred, was graduated from high school two years early, received a two-year degree and, after a stint working in Des Moines, returned to Prairie City to teach in the town’s one-room school.

Mildred hated teaching.

**

The Phearman farm, ca. 1914

Land.

It drove the Oklahoma pioneers who had none, and it drove the midwestern farmers who did.  It certainly drove Charlie Phearman, who had a comfortable farm, with no mortgage, but who wanted the best for his boys.

The farm down the road was for sale, and Charlie was doing fine.  Wheat and corn were bringing bounty prices and Charlie wanted to ensure that each of his three boys had a sustainable farm.  He went to the bank and took out a mortgage on his farm to buy the farm down the road.

*

In medieval England, the source for all American property laws, a “gage” was a challenge, a pledge or a security for a pledge.  Land being the source of all wealth and, therefore, almost sacred, the last thing a gentleman would pledge as security for a loan or a gambling debt was his property.  Such a pledge was known as a “mort-gage” or “death pledge.”

Many a midwestern farmer discovered the true meaning of the death pledge in the 1930′s,  Charlie Phearman among them.

*

Mabel Phearman kept diaries for most of her life.  On Mabel’s death, Mildred tossed all of them save one:  a tiny two-by-four-inch book for 1935 provided free by Edwards Coal Company (“Phone 20″), with room for a week’s entries (five lines each, if you wrote quite small) on each double page.  1935 was when the Phearmans lost their farm, and the tragic shows up amid the mundane in Mabel’s brief diary entries:

January, 1935

Friday, 4: Went to Newton, got 2 every day dresses for 85c.

Monday, 7: Dad went to Newton.  I was alone all day.  Cut up a hog & made sausage.  Worked on rug.

Friday, 11.  Dad went to D.M. [Des Moines].  I baked cookies 2 pine apple pies & a mince pie.  Mildred come home.

Saturday, 12.  I made ice cream.  Mildred went to Dentist.  It rained off & on all day.

Sunday, 13.  Went to church.  Bally died. [Bally was a horse.]  Miller skinned him.  Vernie had new calf.  Our pond was froze.

Friday, 18.  Ironed.  Miller helped Dad roll up Okies fence.  Dad washed his face & shaved.  Cloudy all day. [The emphasis is Mabel’s.]

Saturday, 19.  Dad went to Newton & took exams for P[ost] O[ffice]. It rained nearly all day & was icy.  Turned colder & snowed a little toward evening.

Sunday, 20.  Cold, 4 below zero.  Dad & I got 2 cart loads of fodder out of the field.  It was so icy & slick.  Wayne & Wendell helped us with one load.  Ramona calf was dead.

Monday, 21.  16 below zero this morn.  Sun shone but didn’t warm up much.  Dad bought a ton of alfalfa hay for $30.  Jersey had a calf it was dead.

Tuesday, 22.  Hauled in 3 shocks fodder with Henrys team.  I made me 2 aprons out of old dresses.

*

The next day, Mabel and Charlie’s world collapsed around them.  It wasn’t unexpected, but a haunting dread became a dread reality.  Mabel summed it up in only ten words:

Wednesday, 23.  The sherriff was here & read our paper to us.

Charlie was 61 years old, unemployed and landless.

*

Thursday, 24.  Dad went to town.  Hauled in more fodder.

Friday, 25.  Henry & Andrew were here & got a old bob sled to fix theirs up.

Saturday, 26.  Dad butchered a beef.  Miller helped.  Went to town in P.M.  Got $1.14 for hide.

Sunday, 27.  Lenas [Mabel’s sister, Aunt Lena,  and Uncle Lester], Nellie [another sister] and R.A. [daughter Ruth Adah] were here.  I didn’t go to church.  Dad went to Charlie Shaffer’s funeral.

Monday, 28.  Canned 4 qt. beef baked 2 berrie pies.  Bess fell & couldn’t get up.

Tuesday, 29.  Canned 14 qt. more beef.  Dad went to D.M.  Had Bess killed when he got home.

February, 1935

Friday, 1.  Mildred come home.

Saturday, 2.  Leo come.  We washed & ironed.  Roy & Frankie come & stayed all night.

Sunday, 3.  Leo left on 10 o’clock buss.  Mildred went to S.S [Sunday School].  Carls [son and daughter-in-law] come.  Mildred went back with Hollises.

Monday, 4.  Getting ready for the sale.  Sun shone.  Thawed a good deal.

Tuesday, 5.  Canned 7 qt. beef.  Gerdena come to help get ready for sale.

Wednesday, 6.  Sale day.  Womans council served lunch.  Very cold.  I was sick & called Dr. Van.  Throwed up & run off.

Thursday, 7.  Carls left.  I was some better but felt miserable.

Friday, 8.  Cleaned up in here & went to D.M.  Not very spry yet.  Got Mildred.

Saturday, 9.  We went house hunting.   Not very successful.  Dad went to see Neal Dickenberg.

For the next month, it “snowed and blowed.”  When it wasn’t freezing, it was muddy walking to Prairie City from the farm.  (It was only three or four miles, and the car was used only for long distances.)  Mabel continued her farm chores, packed, cleaned the house and washed the curtains for the new owner and still found time to help out her neighbors and to help Miller, the hired hand, pack.  Charlie looked for work and for a place to live, but also found time to help the neighbors.  That’s what farm folks do.

Mildred came home from Des Moines every weekend.  She would return to Prairie City later that year to teach school and help care for the folks.  The other kids visited weekly to help can, clean and pack, as did sisters Nellie and Lena.

Tuesday, 12.  Went to Steenhoeks to butcher our hog.  Stayed all day.  Walked home.  It sure was muddy.

Wednesday, 13.  Worked at our meat. Made sausage.  It rained.

Saturday, 16.  Dad helped haul in some fodder for Neal.

Sunday, 17.  Walked to S.S.  Still awfully muddy.  Croziers come over in wagon in P.M.

Thursday, 21.  Went to Colfax with Lena.  Looked at some houses.  Dickenbergs were here in Eve.

Thursday, 28.  Helped Mrs. Crozier.  Ironed & mended & packed a box of dishes.

March, 1935

Friday, 1.  Helped Mrs. Crozier.  I ironed, baked bread.  We packed 3 or 4 boxes of clothes & pictures.

Monday, 4.  Still blowing.  I washed parlor & bedroom curtains.  Ironed them all too.

Tuesday 5.  Helped Mrs. C.  Got home late.  Dad went to Newton.  Got notice to leave.

Wednesday, 6.  Helped Mrs. Crozier.  Got home late.  Dad went to D.M. with Fred.

In early March, they found a house in Prairie City, and struck a deal.  Just two blocks from downtown and the town square, the place was just shy of a quarter-acre, with a two-story house, two wells (one drinkable, one only good enough for washing and watering the garden) and a barn.  The purchase price was $900 – $600 down and $50 a month until paid off.

The kids chipped in the money for the purchase, with Mildred, unmarried and frugal, providing the lion’s share.  Mildred also co-signed the purchase contract and agreed to pay the yearly taxes.

According to the purchase contract, the house was subject to a lease to a Tom Timmons.  Mabel’s diary indicates a problem with getting Timmons to vacate, and it is unclear whether Charlie and Mabel had to find temporary lodging.

Thursday, 7.  Dad went to town to make a deal with Martins.  Thinks it will go through.  I packed pictures & books.

Friday, 8.  Helped Mrs. Miller pack.  Dad got Mildred.

Saturday, 9.  Walter Telfer & wife looked at place.  Walter bought it.

Tuesday, 12.  We packed all day.  Everything up stairs.  The crowd come by in waggons to bid us goodbye.  22 were here.

Wednesday, 13.  Took 2 loads to town.  I cleaned the east room up stairs & put up 2 beds.

Thursday, 14.  Took another load.  Mr. T. said he wouldn’t get out for 30 days.

Thursday, 21.  Cleaned attic.  Baked cookies.  Mopped.  Took bath.  Worked on rug.

Thursday, March 21, is the last entry in Mabel’s tiny 1935 diary.

*

Mildred taught in Prairie City’s one-room school in 1935-36 and 1936-37.  Children, however, held little interest for her.  Also, she was only 19 and 20 years old and some of the farm boys may well have been almost as old as she, probably as large and more rambunctious, and certainly less tidy.  Despite her chuckles over being splattered with cow shit while milking, Mildred did not like untidiness.  This feeling extended to pets, children and life in general.

After two years of teaching, she headed off for the big city — Des Moines — to wait tables and attend business college.  It was 1937, the year Dwain’s first child (my half-brother, Dwain Lee Dimick, Jr.) was born.  She was not quite 21 and had never had a boyfriend or been on a date.

The next eight years would be the happiest years of her life.  She met and roomed with the only two real friends she would ever have.

**

Dwain in India

Dwain somehow found a job with the Santa Fe Railroad and by the time he was drafted had worked his way up to fireman.  In the days of steam locomotives, the fireman was the fellow who kept the fire stoked with wood or coal – even, at one time, with surplus Egyptian mummies.  You could look it up.  But that’s another story.

With the introduction of the diesel locomotive, the job of fireman became a safety backup for the engineer and an engineer-in-training (according to the union) or a wholly superfluous position (according to management.)  In the 1950′s, when the union movement was still strong and the country hadn’t yet abandoned its railroads, “featherbedding” was the word used by management to describe the union’s insistence that there be a fireman on every locomotive.

Luckily, Dwain never got anywhere near combat, but was sent instead to India.  The “Burma Hump,” a treacherous flight over the Himalaya Mountains, supplied oil, gasoline, troops and supplies to the American Volunteer Group (the “Flying Tigers”) who were fighting the Japanese from bases in China.  All of these troops and supplies were moved to Assam, India, from Bombay by rail, and Dwain found himself an engineer.

It may well have been the happiest time of his life.  There was no danger and no shooting – just driving a train and having fun.  So what if a GI only earned $30 a month. Women were cheap and a dollar would buy a woman for a week, a meal for the entire enlisted company or, probably, half a farm.  Dwain had dozens of stories about off-duty exploits in India, but I was too young when I heard them to remember them now.

What he didn’t have was a girlfriend back home to write to.  Almost everybody else had a wife or girlfriend back in the States.  One of Dwain’s Army buddies was from Iowa and was writing to a girl in Des Moines who happened to be an acquaintance of Mildred Phearman.  Buddy asked his Iowa sweetie if she knew anybody who might like to write to a lonely soldier.

Mildred, then in her late 20′s, more than a little shy and becoming desperate because of the lack of men at home during the war, agreed to begin writing to India.

*

Wedding Day, 1945: Dwain, Mildred, Warren

Dwain was evidently as charming and persuasive in his letters as he could be in person.  During one of their many, early separations, less than a year after they were married, Mildred wrote to Dwain from Iowa that “I always sort of felt about you like I suppose a lot of girls feel about their favorite movie stars – you were the ideal of my dreams.  I still can’t quite conceive how it all came about.”

Dwain was among the earliest of the U.S. troops to be demobilized, and was home in Oklahoma by at least November, 1945.  On a whim, as he later told Mildred, he telephoned the Iowa girl he had corresponded with for the past two or three years.  She invited him to come to Iowa, and he arrived in Prairie City on December 10.  They were married three days later.

Mildred didn’t admit this last to me until I was almost 50, and she only reluctantly confessed it even then.  Sixty years later, people seem to do this with some regularity: exchange e-mails for a time, finally meet the other side and marry him/her three days later.  In 1945, it wasn’t something you admitted to just anybody.

Had it worked out, I suppose she would have come to be proud of the three-day courtship.  Unfortunately, she married Dwain.  Not quite equally unfortunately – but bad enough, nonetheless – Dwain married Mildred.

Mildred and Dwain

O, to be in England
Now that April’s there.

Robert Browning

1946 – 1956

“God-DAMNED, burr-headed son-of-a-bitch!” I remember Dwain screaming as a black motorist cut him off at an intersection, neatly distilling Dwain himself and race relations in Oklahoma into one profane sentence.

To Dwain, no slight was unintentional, no comment or action without ulterior motive and no setback not deserving of a royal cursing.  The words themselves were pretty mild by today’s standards, and I don’t remember him ever using any of the “Seven Dirty Words.”  Midwestern farm bringing-up, I suppose.  The only sexual reference I ever heard him make was describing a horse as “wild as a peach-orchard whore,” and even then it turned out I was wrong.  The phrase which I misheard turns out to be “wild as a peach-orchard boar,” and, boy, was I disappointed when I learned this.

I find myself using profanity much more than I should.  I really try to use it only deliberately and only for effect – much as I have tried to rid myself of my Oklahoma accent (but with much better results) – but it slips out constantly.  “I swear to Christ.”  “Christ on a crutch.”  “Jesus Christ, Lady, get off the fucking telephone and drive.”  I even use the “f-“ word, the long “c-“word and both short “c-“words in casual conversation, which Dwain never did.

Dwain only cursed when he was angry.  But then Dwain was nearly always angry.

*

I was 50-ish when I went through therapy for the second time, this time with an MFCC (Marriage, Family and Child Counselor) with a background quite similar to mine, and who specialized in “men’s issues.”  He liked me and thought I was worth saving.  I had had many mentors in my past who liked me, saw my potential, and tried to help me realize it.  Trouble was, I didn’t feel like I could really trust any of them.  Why would they like me?
Mark, the counselor, however, saw through all of that.

“What are you so angry at?” he asked.

“Remember the movie, ‘The Wild One,’ with Marlon Brando and Jean Simmons?” I asked, in return.  “She asks him what he’s rebelling against.  He says, ‘Whaddaya got?’”

Good answer for the Brando character, and good answer for Steve.  What it really means is, “I’m angry at everybody and everything but mostly at myself and I don’t know why and I can’t imagine why you’d even be interested and maybe someday I’ll let you in just a little but probably not and right now if I tell you to fuck off, then I’ll hurt you before you get a chance to hurt me.”

**

My dad could dig a ditch, drive a train, repair a transmission (hell, tear the whole car apart and put it back together better than when it came off the Detroit assembly line), lay concrete, build a barn, break a pony, shoe a horse, repair your television, drive a team of mules, fly an airplane and discuss pop philosophers – all without the benefit of a highschool diploma.

He could charm you out of your last dollar.  If you were a kid, he could charm you into believing you were the second most important person on earth.  If you were a woman – married or not – he could charm you out of your pants.  And did, on a regular basis.

Dwain (undated)

He had the good looks of a movie star from the days when stars were men, instead of boys: a lot of Clark Gable, a little Randolph Scott, a small bit of Alan Ladd.  With his hat on, there was a bit of Belmondo.  No Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise looks for Dwain.  No wonder Mildred fell for him immediately.

Unfortunately, my dad was also a violent, uncontrolled sadist and the biggest asshole in Central Oklahoma.

*

Dinners on 22d Street in Oklahoma City were an ordeal.  Dwain was angry because the groceries cost too much.  Dwain was angry because dinner was late or the meat was overdone.  Dwain was angry because the kids (meaning Steve and Rick, but sometimes our half-brother, Dwain Lee) were being kids.

“GODDAMNIT!  Can’t I at least Can’t you at least Why the hell won’t they How many Goddamned times have I told you Why the hell How in hell Where’s the Goddamned right I’m Goddamned sick and tired of this Goddamned take the Goddamned thing and throw it out the Goddamned window Burn the Goddamned thing down Jesus Christ this is more than I can put up with Why are you always giving me the Goddamned….”

Sometimes (sometimes?  Hell’s bells, most of the time), Dwain was just angry for no discernable reason.  But it was never his fault.  Nothing was ever Dwain’s fault.  When he had no other excuse for a tantrum, then you must be angry at him and he by-God wanted to know why.

“Just what the hell is eating at your craw?  You’re really down on me for some Goddamned reason.”  [Well, maybe because you came home from work mad and have been yelling and stomping around ever since?] This was a favorite tactic.

*

I must have been only six or seven.  It wasn’t an unusual meal.  Dwain was ranting and cursing and Mildred was crying and scratching at his soft spots.  Maybe it was something I saw on television that made me pipe up; I don’t know.  But I took a chance for the first and only time.

“Please,” I said.  “You’re spoiling the dinner.”

Well.  The wrath of God would have been preferable.  You’d have thought I’d announced I was turning Catholic, or gay, or wanted to go to an integrated school.

Children were made to worship and obey their father, and not to be heard.

*

I suppose he must have been happy with baby Stevie at first, if only because I never heard any stories to the contrary.  But he had been “trapped” into marriage the first time by a woman who got herself pregnant and when Mildred announced her second pregnancy just about the time of my second birthday, he accused her of doing it deliberately.

A part of me can’t quite put it past Mildred to have arranged a deliberate pregnancy.  People do, stupidly, tend to think that a child, or another child, will save a doomed marriage.  And Mildred always thought she wanted children to love and coo over and display with pride, not realizing until too late that they are  so…inconvenient…once they outgrow the cute stage.

But logically, I realize that contraception was the man’s responsibility in 1949, as it remained even into the ‘60s, when I was in school and birth-control pills were available but Oklahoma college girls were too shy and modest to ask for them.  Can’t we just do it once without this damned thing?

*

Dwain thought of himself as a family man, and well into his 40′s made the Sunday pilgrimage to Guthrie at least twice a month when the Dimick clan gathered at Daisy’s.  But he saw his brothers and sisters infrequently away from his mom’s.  Daisy was the bond Dwain had with the family, and when she died in 1966 he drifted away.  Other brothers and sisters saw each other, but Dwain seldom bothered.  They could come to his house…he supposed.  He had no interest in going to theirs.

I thought there might be some redemption available for him when his fourth wife came along with two young girls, whom he raised, and who began calling him “Daddy” not long after the marriage…and who seemed not to be afraid of him.  Thirty-or-so years later, I asked him how the girls were doing.

“How about the oldest one?  What’s her name?  Jerri Lee?  She probably has grandkids by now.”

“I don’t know.  She might.”

Oooookay, then, I thought.  “What about Thelma?  How is she doing?”

“Oh, she’s off somewhere.  I don’t rightly remember when was the last time I saw her.”

**

Dwain Lee Dimick, Jr., ten years older than I, was what we would call today a “troubled child.”  “Juvenile delinquent” was the nicest of the names used for him in his teens.  His mother couldn’t control him, so he would periodically be sent to live with his father, who would attempt to beat him into submission.

On one of his extended visits, I playfully shot him with a homemade slingshot, not meaning it to hurt, but it did.  He slapped me on the face in retaliation.  A bit later, Mildred saw the red mark on my cheek, and I had to confess.  Resenting his presence anyway, she made no attempt to talk to the two of us, to find out the whole story, to explain or lecture or scold.  She merely waited until Dwain, then working the swing shift, came home about midnight and reported the incident to him.

I woke up to Dwain Lee’s screams as Dwain pulled him out of a sound sleep and pounded him with a belt.

Dwain Lee was the same age as our uncle Lawrence Allen, Dwain’s youngest brother, who was also a rootless hooligan in his teen years.  They seemed to bring out the worst in each other and were constantly in trouble.  Among other exploits, they once stole a car and made it all the way to California before being caught.

Dwain Lee tried to turn himself around, but lacked the tools to do so.  He joined the Navy, got married, had a couple of kids and died at 55.  I heard rumors that his death involved drugs.

The poor mutt never had a chance.

**

What was Dwain so angry at that violence – verbal and physical – was his only answer?  Did he simply suffer from the sins of his father?  And if so, did Roy suffer from Albert’s sins as I have suffered from Dwain’s?  How many generations?  Why can’t a man say, “Enough, already.  I will define myself without your help, thank you very much”?

I’ve tried.  I can only hope that I’ve succeeded, but other people get to judge that.

*

When I was eleven or twelve, Dwain had two boxer dogs, a brother and sister.  What the male did to displease Dwain I probably didn’t even remember the next day, overshadowed as it was by my father’s response.  He kicked the dog several times and then beat it viciously with a heavy rope.  I was too big to cry, but I was crying when I went home, cried when Mildred pried the story out of me and cried when I went to bed that night.  I cried for the dog, cried because I couldn’t understand such primitive violence and cried because I had been too afraid for myself to even try to stop it.

And yet that anger boils up in me at times and if it frightens those around me, it frightens me even more.

*

I spanked my step-daughter once – and only once – during a large family fight over some serious misbehavior.  In the middle of all the yelling, she told her mother to “shut up.”  I pushed her onto her bed and whaled her behind with my hand before it dawned on me what I was doing.

I left the rest of the fight to Marianne, rushed out of the bedroom and out into the garage, no longer angry at my baby, but furious at myself and aghast at what I – for just a moment – had become:

My father.

*

Less than a year after their marriage, Mildred fled back to Iowa, a pattern she repeated for a minimum of twice yearly throughout the ten years of their marriage.

Mildred was unhappy in Oklahoma.  She had never been more than an hour away from her parents in her life and missed them terribly.  She couldn’t understand Oklahomans and didn’t much care for them.  In her mind, none of them liked her, and they tended to conspire against her by having fun without her.  And for this 30-year-old ex-spinster, married life was…different than she had dreamed.

Mildred and Dwain, 22d St., Oklahoma City

Reading between the lines of the skimpy correspondence she saved, the first separation probably involved the house on 22d Street in Oklahoma City.  It was a three-bedroom brick house with two parlors, large lot and oversized, detached garage.  Dwain fell in love with it, but even with a VA loan it was more than they could afford.  They had to rent out part of it to another post-war couple for the first year or two in order to afford to make the payments – something Mildred never forgave.

Dwain wrote to Mildred in Iowa in August, 1946 (they had only been married eight months), that he missed her so much he couldn’t stay alone in their apartment but was staying with friends.  Also, “We got the deal closed or it will be closed tomorrow.  I gave him the contract and wrote a check for the closing costs, all but $39.  It was $172.62 so I gave a check on the saving acct. for $82.62 and a check on the checking acct. for $50.  that leaves a dollar and some cents in the savings and $22. in the checking, rough isn’t it??

“I also signed an I.O.U. for $250 to Finstermaucher due two years from now with no interest and no security.

“So – the deal is closed!  Happy??”

*

Mildred wrote him a love letter during this same separation and sent him a poem.  The letter shows more insight into another person’s problems than was usual for her, although the sentiments also could easily have been lifted from a romance story in a women’s magazine: “If I were to leave you…it would not mean I no longer loved you….If, by leaving you, I could make you happier, give you success and contentment, believe me, dear, then I would leave you.”

The poem is an embarrassment, but is the earliest record I have of her narcissism and growing paranoia.  Mildred wrote poetry all of her life, all of it dreadful.  But she grew up with poems in the tradition of the Chautauqua Circuit and was nurtured with the simplistic poems of “The Hoosier Poet” from Iowa’s next-door state, James Whitcomb Riley.

You can sing Oklahoma’s praises from early morn ‘till night
But I’ve tried to see ‘em fairly in every kind of light
If I didn’t love you, darling, ‘twould be less to bear
I’d just pack up and take myself way back up there
To Iowa

I’ve tried a thousand ways to make new friends down here
But guess I just don’t mix with those people that I’m near
I’ve tried to find someone else who was lonely too
But somehow it doesn’t work, that’s why I’m so blue
Ah, Iowa!

I’ve met a lot of people and know their faces well
I’ve tried being friendly and it works for just a spell
Then someone who was a pal of a pal of theirs, years gone
Appears to see that they have fun and that leaves me all alone.
Except for Iowa.

I get so lonely just for a friend who cares when I’m blue
Who will call me on the phone to say “Well, how are you?
I thought today you might need me.  Is there something I can do?”
Or “I’m going on a picnic now but it’s no fun without you.”
But that’s Iowa.

No matter if I try and try and do my level best
Each person that I chance to meet is exactly like the rest.
They have a friend who is a wow over in Indiantown
They’ll let me know when they get back or else they’ll have me down
From Iowa

**

Some people argue; some people fight.  The purpose of an argument is to establish a proposition or defend a position, with a vague attempt to arrive at the truth.  The purpose of a fight is to hurt.

Dwain was a fighter.

He told her he never loved her, even when they got married.  He told her he didn’t believe she had been a 30-year-old virgin and knew she had faked it.  When questioned why he wasn’t wearing his wedding ring (likely, he had removed it while working on a car), he told her he had thrown it away.

“Honey,” she wrote to him, “you say you didn’t love me when we were married, but if not, how could any power in the world have influenced you to marry me?  Why did you make that phone call?  I’ve asked myself that over and over again.”

*

Mildred returned to Oklahoma from Iowa, as she would again and again.  She received a letter dated July 8, 1947, from Agnes McCreery, Executive Secretary of the Family Society of Des Moines, apologizing for the belated reply, which indicates that Mildred must have written to the Family Society some weeks before.

She was pregnant with her first child: me.  She had been married less than two years.  She had also evidently sought advice from Dwain’s closest friend at the time.

“It looks to me, though,” wrote Ms. McCreery, “as if you had both been trying in your own way to make things work out….Probably what your husband told Roy about what he wants is nearer to the truth than some of the things he says to you.

“If you are still together could you, when he tells you something particularly upsetting, remember such an incident as his telling you he had thrown his wedding ring away.  Perhaps you would not feel too badly each time if you could remember those times when his hurting statements were not true.  Could you try to study what it is in both your own behavior and his that precipitate these difficulties.”

**

A letter from Daisy Collins (Dwain’s mother) to Mildred in Prairie City, Iowa, postmarked April 15, 1948, when I was less than seven months old:

Dearest Mildred

Got your card shure was glad.  Well I shure have been over worked this week.  The [ ? ] has come in all ready and they have been eating their with us.

Well Dwain came up and I asked him what was the trouble he didn’t want to talk.  Well I didn’t scold him any.  he all most cried he said Mom she made me strike her the things she cald me and then I was sorry after I did he said I know she gets home sick he said he hoped you didn’t stay long I know we have to give & take.  dwain may wait for you to make up your mind to come Back

So why don’t you just tell him to send you a pass and come back we cant do with out you and Steven

With Lots of Love

Mom

**

Steve, with "Joe"

Like her mother, Mildred kept a diary for years.  Her writing was a bit more flowery and self-conscious than her mother’s simple notations.  Like the letters she saved for posterity, she carefully cut out and saved only 17 days from her 1949 diary.

Jan. 6, 1949 – Well, Dwain was very angry with me.  I buy too many groceries.  Poor Stevie got spanked several times for climbing up on the dining room table.

Jan. 13, 1949 – We have been married 37 months but Dwain talked awful to me because I didn’t have as much money left as he wanted.  He knows I only bought groceries but cussed & swore & said I’d kept some back.  I cried.  He took Mr. Dimick home & came back after we’d eaten supper.  I fixed his & he was in better humor.

Jan. 14, 1949 – Dwain went somewhere & didn’t come home until late for supper & was mad all evening.  He’s mad most of the time anymore.

Jan. 15, 1949 – We went to Guthrie tonight for a short while.  I got my watch.  It had been in the shop.  D. was peeved because Mom sent me the $5 to get it fixed – the only way I ever could have gotten it fixed.

Jan. 16, 1949 – Stevie & I went to S.S. this morning and spent some time over at the Dishman’s.  Dwain left mad again.  He’s like a bear with a sore behind.  I can’t even joke with him or baby him and keep him good-natured.  Another big fuss tonight over money.  I cried & cried.

Jan. 17, 1949 – I went down to pay bills.  Dwain gave me even money to do it – not even bus fare.  I charged a braziere (sic) for 89¢ & bought a $3 pair of shoes.  Will pay for these Thursday.  Mrs. Dishman kept Stevie & said he was awfully good.

The letters, a few odd poems, a couple of snapshots and the diary pages were kept in a well-worn fake leather glove box, separate from all of Mildred’s other collectibles.  Even her grandfather’s discharge papers from the Union Army and the deed to the Prairie City house (in her name) were kept elsewhere.  There was something special about this box, and I puzzle unsuccessfully over the items in it that don’t connect to its main story.  I’ll probably never have all the answers to the box, but I know two things: she hoped it portrayed her as a martyr and she hoped it would be found.

Introduction to Midwest City

I’m free.
I’m free.
And freedom tastes of reality.

Pete Townshend

Summer, 1956

The first thing I did in Midwest City was to get lost.

It was summer in Oklahoma and, even better, it was Saturday morning.  A day to sleep late and a morning to spend on the living room floor in pajamas watching cartoons.

If we got up before 6 – and this did sometimes happen, given that bedtime was 8 o’clock or earlier – all we would see on the television screen was the test pattern.  Just in case we didn’t know what this dart-board-styled graphic was, the overlaid caption, in large white letters, told us it was the “Test Pattern.”

But this Saturday we hadn’t gotten up early.  Rick and I had to be shaken awake.

“Mo..o..om.  It’s Saturday.  Why do we have to get up so early?”

“We’re moving.”

“Huh?  Whaddaya mean, ‘we’re moving?’  Moving where?”

“Get up, Steve.”  She was impatient and I eventually discovered why.  “You know what’s happening.  We’ve talked about this for weeks.  We’re moving to Midwest City.  Now get up and get dressed.”

*

In truth, I had no idea what was happening.  And if we had talked about it for weeks, the we certainly didn’t include me, because they never actually talked to me.

And if we meant Mom and Dad, then I had probably tuned them out.  I was almost nine years old – ready to start fourth grade – and my invisible friend had left me before kindergarten.  But I didn’t live in their world.  I might stop by to say hello once in a while, but their world was not even a nice place to visit, let alone live.

*

But we were moving, although I remember none of the move itself.  I seem to blink and it is then Saturday afternoon – or more probably, Sunday afternoon – and we now lived in a 600-square-foot, asbestos-shingled house by the railroad tracks.  Four tiny rooms – five, if you count the bathroom – for the three of us.

Midwest City!  The entire town was newer than our house in Oklahoma City had been, even if our new neighborhood was already becoming a little frayed around the edges.  No trees, no fenced yards, no flowers in this poorest part of town; only the red dirt, the horned toads and the Johnson grass.  And the freight trains running not ten feet from our back yard (not from our back fence: there was no back fence) every three or four hours.  And the cargo planes flying directly over our house as they approached the landing strip at Tinker Air Force Base only half a mile away.

The planes were so low as they approached for landing that you could practically hit their bellies with a well-aimed rock.  Not that we ever tried: we were much too patriotic and in love with the military in 1956.

When a plane flew over, dishes and window panes rattled and the sub-bass growl of the jets was almost visible, almost palpable.  All conversation stopped, which wasn’t so terrible; but what was terrible was that all television reception was interrupted until the plane had passed.  We all knew that eventually one of these giant planes would come too close.  But it’s hard to turn down a thirty-dollar-a-month mortgage.

It was, however, ours – Mildred’s and mine and Rick’s.  We could do what we wanted and be what we wanted and have calm family dinners and maybe a dollar or two left over at the end of the week to giggle over and decide how to spend.  And if Dwain wanted to visit, that was OK, because he would go home at the end of the evening and we were free.

*

Midwest City, we never ceased being told by the school district and the city administration, was carefully planned as an entire city before ground was broken for the first building.  The finest architects, engineers and city planners were recruited from around the country to plan the world’s most perfect city.

Major arterials with strategically placed shopping?  We had them.  School sites and enough of them?  We had them.  Carefully planned street layouts to accommodate thousands of Baby Boom children?  We had them.  Centrally located civic center?  Long-range plans for the civic center expected to be needed in forty years?  Space for future golf courses and housing a bit more upscale?  We had them all.

I wouldn’t meet W.P. “Bill” Atkinson for several years yet, but his palm prints were all over the city he had molded from nothing, and he cast an even greater shadow across the city than the ubiquitous Oklahoma municipal water towers.

As every resident is expected to know, Midwest City, Oklahoma, was honored in 1951 as “America’s Model City.”  Except that you have to hunt like hell to discover exactly who bestowed this honor.  City Hall doesn’t know and the Chamber of Commerce has forgotten.

*

As I said, I proceeded to get lost immediately.

“This is sooo neat, Mom,” I said, dancing around.  “Look at that hill.”  The only hill we had had in Oklahoma City was our driveway, a good two-foot rise.  “Can Rick and I ride our bikes?”  We were no longer only one block away from busy Northeast 23d Street.

Mildred turned us loose and we rode for an hour along the twisty streets, not having any idea where we were.

The philosophy of the “Model City” was that there should be as few straight streets as possible.  Anticipating a payroll of some 40,000 people at nearby Tinker Air Force Base (about 20,000 military and about 20,000 civilians), each with 2.3 children, Atkinson figured the town would soon be knee-deep in kids.  Kids on foot.  Kids on bicycles.  Kids in strollers.  The curved streets were meant to slow down the auto traffic for the safety of the children.

The neighborhoods with the curlicue streets weren’t all that difficult to learn once you got the hang of them, but they were hell on newcomers.  (And they were hell on me when I returned to Midwest City after an absence of nearly twenty years and attempted to re-establish my bearings.)

It’s easy to get around in the Oklahoma City area, where all of the major streets are “section lines,” x-many miles east or west of Santa Fe Avenue and y-many miles north or south of Reno Street.  Inside these one-mile squares, most streets also run north-south or east-west, forming a neat grid, twelve blocks to the mile.

But still, a one-square-mile area is a lot of ground to cover for an eight-year-old and a six-year-old, and when no two streets are parallel and no two streets intersect at right angles, the uninitiated can become totally confused.

We did.

At some point I realized that not only was I lost, but I had lost my little brother.  I circled and backtracked in only a semi-panic.  Freedom, after all, was brand new to me.  I was high on it and, had I really stopped to think about it, knew that Rick could be no worse off than merely misplaced.  I passed the school for the third time, turned up Indian Drive (which hadn’t worked before), and suddenly found myself looking at Mildred standing in the front yard on Ferguson.  I must have passed the house several times and not recognized it.

“Where’s Ricky?”

“I don’t know, Mom.  I’m sorry.  We got lost and I got lost and the hills are so steep and I couldn’t find the house and….”

“Get out there and find your brother.”

Slow learner that I must have been, I forgot to pay attention to landmarks and shortly became lost for the second time.  Much later, exhausted and dejected, I re-re-discovered the house.  Rick and Mildred were in the living room watching television.

*

Mildred had taken the Civil Service exam and snared an entry-level job as a clerk-typist at Tinker Air Force Base a few months before.  Whether the divorce was a result of her realization that she could actually support herself or whether the job was in preparation for the divorce, I don’t know.  The three of us celebrated the receipt of her first paycheck by actually going out to eat at a Mexican restaurant.  Both Mexican food and restaurants being entirely new to me, I talked about it for weeks, to the obvious boredom of my more experienced friends.

Once settled in Midwest City, we made a pact: we would Eat Out every Friday night.  In the early years, Eating Out might mean the A&W drive-in or a greasy spoon café, but Rick and I, not knowing any better, considered it heaven.  The symbolism of dining out on Friday nights was so strong that it continued after Mildred’s second marriage and lasted until her second husband died, more than 40 years later.

We also divided up the chores.  Mildred cooked and the boys did the dishes, taking turns washing and drying.  This was uncharted territory for Rick and me, since Mildred had never worked before and we would put off our chores as long as possible because something “neat” (which may have been the catchword of the ‘50′s) was always on television.  But we didn’t argue about the concept because somehow Mildred made it a shared responsibility to go along with the shared freedom.

And we were, after all, finally free.

Mildred designated me the “man of the house,” a position which brought with it later consequences she couldn’t have imagined at the time.  I could do it, though; after all, I was almost nine.  The immediate consequence, unfortunately, was that I was in charge of mowing the lawn.

*
In most parts of Oklahoma City, the grass has been tamed.  Underground sprinkler systems with automatic timers may still be relatively rare compared to Northern California, but through generations of homeowners the nastier grasses have been beaten back.  Midwest City was too new to have made much headway in these turf wars and, curiously, didn’t seem to care all that much.  The school district was awash in federal, state and local funds, but couldn’t seem to find room in the budget to seed or sod or water the school grounds, which were bur-infested and dead in the summer and muddy swamps in the winter.  (The high school football field, of course, was a totally different matter.)

Johnson grass is a milky weed that can grow an inch in a day with the proper rain and can bring a push mower to a complete halt, when it doesn’t just roll right under the blades and pop back up again after the mower has passed.  The endemic sandburs must have been the inspiration for Velcro:  nasty little brown things about the size of a pea, produced by low-growing vines, covered with sharp spines and clinging to anything.

And then there were the goat-heads.

The goat-head is not even a native plant, hailing originally from the Mediterranean area where it was used in folk medicine for centuries.  But it has adapted like a trooper all across the plains.  About the same size as a sandbur, its spines are fewer but stronger, it’s tough as a nut and it has at least one spine not less than 3/8″ long that can puncture a bicycle tire like a nail.  Bare feet were out of the question in the countryside around Midwest City as well as on the playground of Glenwood Elementary School.  All the kids kept a supply of Camel bicycle tire patches handy.  Nobody thought of sniffing the glue, but I can still smell it in my memory.

Across the street on Ferguson from our row of two-bedroom houses were the duplexes, nearly all for married airmen, their 18- or 19-year-old wives and one or two babies, all trying to live on a $75 monthly salary.  The duplexes were the same size as our house, except they had two front doors and two families.  Here, Mildred usually found babysitters to watch over Rick and me before and after school.

Just behind our barren back yard were the railroad tracks leading directly to Tinker, bringing in supplies and taking out repaired airplane components.  Tinker was a major supply hub and major repair station for the Air Force and was Midwest City’s only reason for being.  If a plane could limp in and land, it could be completely refurbished and fly out again as if new.  If not, its component parts could be shipped to Oklahoma by rail or air, rebuilt and shipped or flown out again.

We played on the tracks and laid pennies on the rails to be flattened when the next train came along.  No one worried about safety.  In our “section” (meaning our square mile) and just a few blocks away, the tracks crossed a ravine and seasonal creek where we could catch the occasional crawdad.  Over the ravine, the tracks were supported by a trestle made of redwood 8×8′s on which boys could clamber far above the ground a hundred feet (or at least twelve or fifteen feet) below.  This was where I learned to smoke and where I scampered like a monkey until the day I discovered I had a fear of heights.

Because we were very shortly post-war and many of the Air Force non-commissioned officers had brought home war brides, the Midwest City schools had an eclectic mix of ethnic backgrounds: German, Dutch, French, English.  We also had one or two American Indian families in town and exactly two Jewish families.  There were no African-Americans.  The black airmen who lived off base all lived in Del City, the even-lower-scale bedroom community immediately next door, and their children all went to Del City schools.

Every square mile had an elementary school.  Every square mile represented a different and distinct rung on the class ladder.  The elementary schools funneled into two junior high schools which, themselves, represented the two sides of the socio-economic spectrum.  When the junior high students all merged into Midwest City High School, they looked down on the neighboring high schools of Del City, El Reno and Choctaw, and on almost all of the Oklahoma City high schools save one: the equally white, monied, far northwestern Oklahoma City enclave whose high school was Northwest Classen.

Because of federal funds, our school district had as much money as theirs, but our parents didn’t.  We called them “Silkies” for their imagined silk underwear, and they were our only real rivals in football, basketball, baseball and forensics.

It wasn’t the Oklahoma State Chamber of Commerce that awarded Midwest City the title of “America’s Model City,” but it easily could have been.  Midwest City was, after all, a microcosm of Oklahoma: the landed gentry and conservative churches called the shots, growth of any kind was good, building of any kind was good, the little folks were alternately courted and discarded and people of color were relegated to separate geographical areas.

Gertrude Stein once revisited her former Oakland, California, neighborhood only to discover that her childhood home had been torn down, which resulted in her famous lament that there was “no there there.”

Stein’s observation is frequently taken out of context and used as a slur against the city of Oakland – which was not at all the way she meant it.  But except for the high school – the sole unifying element in Midwest City – our town never had a “there.”  Even the memory of my first house, in a neighborhood which no longer exists, a fenced-off square mile of land full of overgrown weeds and overgrown trees, owned now by the United States Air Force, evokes no sense of a former there-ness.

Leaving Oklahoma

Well you go through St. Louis,
Joplin, Missouri
And Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty

Bobby Troup, (Get Your Kicks on) Route 66

December, 1973

I gave a whoop as my U-Haul truck crossed the border from Oklahoma into the Texas Panhandle.  Oklahoma City looks even prettier in the rear-view mirror and here I come Amarillo and Gallup, New Mexico.

It was less than a week before Christmas when I left Midwest City, driving Interstate 40 between Oklahoma and California for the third and final time, my whole life jammed into the truck, neatly at first and not-so-neatly toward the end.  What my wife and I couldn’t pack we sold at bargain prices.  Washer and dryer, $50.  Oldsmobile, $100.  We considered the sales a good deal for all concerned.

The two families muttered, made doom-filled predictions and found their only comfort in the fact that “the two of them have always been a little strange.”

“Shouldn’t you have a job lined up first?” my mother, Mildred, asked accusingly.  “Can’t you at least stay until after Christmas?  Aren’t you going to miss your little old gray-haired mother?”

No, no and no.

No, I’ll wash dishes in California if I have to.

No, there’s a storm predicted in a couple of days and the last thing I want is to be stuck in a snowstorm in Cline’s Corners, New Mexico, a hundred miles from anywhere and surrounded by Elvis paintings on velvet.

And no.  I won’t.

I didn’t say this last out loud.

*

We had saved for nearly three years, planning our escape, starting within six months of my triumphant arrival back in Midwest City after leaving the army.  Being entertainment editor of a minor daily newspaper in a minor town in a minor state wasn’t at all what I envisioned when I accepted the job.  Big fish, little pond and all that.

It was more like being a little fish in a mud puddle, struggling for breath.  It was more like going backward in time to the stifling mid-century that spawned me.  Probably because the town and state had never left mid-century.  And in my less generous moments I sometimes wondered just which century that would be.

So we eventually quit our jobs, bummed around Europe for three months, swooped into Midwest City, packed our things and were gone in less than a week.  And as we crossed each successive state line, running just ahead of the snowstorm that really did nearly trap us in Cline’s Corners, our whoops grew louder and more numerous.  Oklahoma to Texas: Whoop!  Texas to New Mexico: Whoop, WHOOP!  New Mexico to Arizona, Arizona to “Cal-i-for-nia, open your Golden Gate!”

We were determined to be free.  Free from the ‘50s and ‘60s.  Free from the cowboys and Indians and Oklahoma outlaws and the oil derrick on the Capitol lawn.  Free from the suspicion and the bigotry, the anti-intellectualism and the perennial suspicion of education.  Free from the iron rule of the fundamentalist churches’ self-appointed morality police, always sniffing around for sin.  Free from the parents who gave me life and then tried to suck it out of me.

Free, in short, of my entire past, which – if such a thing were at all possible – would have left a 26-year void and would not have produced a person sentient enough to try to escape it.

Ironic, I think now.  Isn’t “free” what my mother, brother and I thought we would be when we first moved to Midwest City 17 years earlier?

It hadn’t worked then, either.

But if “free” wasn’t the word we wanted as we followed thousands of Midwestern refugees along what had once been the great U.S. Highway 66 – Steinbeck’s “mother road” – if “free” wasn’t the word, what was?

Rain

June, 2005

Standing in a sheltered doorway outside the Holiday Inn in Midwest City, I watch a thunderstorm building.  Almost continual lightning, first from the north, then the south, the west, the north again, the south again, the east finally and then a bright burst directly overhead, making the car alarms chirp.  Every third or fourth lightning flash is bright enough to blot out the street lights.  A real prairie storm.  It blusters and threatens for almost half an hour, trying to rain, but without success.  Then comes a tentative drop, another and another and now it rains as if to make up for lost time.

I miss thunderstorms.

Unlike the San Francisco Bay Area, where it pretty much rains from mid-fall to mid-spring and pretty much doesn’t the rest of the year, on the plains it rains intermittently all year long.  Usually not this much, I’m told: they got seven inches just last weekend, and the wheat harvest has been delayed until further notice.  The cutters should be in Kansas by now, but they haven’t even been able to start in Oklahoma.  The wheat is too wet to cut and that red clay is unforgiving when it’s soaked.  Their giant combines would bog down in no time.

In the Bay Area, we sometimes get a soaker of a rain, but it’s more usually day after day of drizzling.  In Oklahoma they get “gully washers,” or, as Carl Deen, who owned the quarterhorse I raced as a teenager, once commented, “It’s rainin’ like a cow pissin’ on a flat rock!”

Every ten years or so, the Bay Area might get a thunderstorm.  Scares the hell out of the natives.  The storms are so rare that they’re not a comfort to Californians, but a threat.  How, I ask my family and friends, can you be afraid of a thunderstorm when the lightning and thunder only come every two or three minutes?

You should see what a real thunderstorm is like.

*

In the last fifty years or so, Oklahoma farmers have adapted to irrigation, particularly for cotton –  if water is available locally, that is.  If it isn’t, they still practice dry farming, which works pretty well in wet years and not so well in the dry ones.  When you fly across middle America and see the square farm plots, each with a perfect circle of green inside the square, that’s irrigation.

(There are also the aluminum pipes on giant wheels that can be rolled across a field and the light-weight, three-inch, snap-together pipes in twenty-foot sections that have to be hand-carried from row to row.  These make green squares rather than circles, using the land more efficiently, but requiring more labor.)

The old-time farmers didn’t believe in irrigation.

Rain makes the crops grow, and we get plenty of rain in Oklahoma.

In a good year.

If we’re lucky.

Mr. Dailey, a farmer’s son and retired butcher, who lived across the street from me during my last stay in Midwest City, grew tomatoes in his back yard, but wouldn’t water them from a garden hose.  “Tomatoes don’t like city water,” he explained.  “Makes ‘em taste funny.”  In a dry spell, he had no tomatoes, the same as his father before him.

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This week in Oklahoma has been full of thunderstorms, but on average, few Oklahoma rainstorms are thunderstorms.  Mostly they’re just rain.

My second favorite type is the lazy summer rain, coming from (I believe) a single cloud, with the personality and all the energy of Eeyore: “I’m sooo tired.”  The drops are huge and widely spaced, as if breaking up into regular-sized raindrops would be too much effort.  This is a storm in no particular hurry, producing not all that much water before it mopes on along.

My brother and I once ran laughing down Grandma Collins’ street in Guthrie just ahead of one of these lazy rains.  It was raining only half a block behind us, and moving in our direction, but not fast enough to catch us until we stopped and let it.

Despite myself and all my efforts to forget, some things I do miss, after all.