Steve Dimick — Law 'n' Stuff

Intro to Mil & Steve

Why was I born?
Why am I livin’?

Jerome Kern

.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Up Next:  The Fun in Dysfunctional

Mil & Steve

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

Joe Young and Sam M. Lewis

.

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

So who did reject whom first?  And why?

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

We still are.

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

I think I would prefer to be Rick.

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except that it evidently didn’t happen.

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

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

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

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

So Hypothesis Number Three failed every test.

But still.

It would have made a damned fine theory.

*

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

*

Mildred, Steve, Rick, 1951

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

My brother was – is – a saint.

*

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

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

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

Inconvenient.

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

*

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

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

This was definitely not the Bob I remembered.

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cue the orchestra.

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

San Francisco, here I come.

*

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

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

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

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

Plus, I had opinions.

Bob disliked children with opinions.

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

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

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

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

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

*

With Kristi, age 10

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

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

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

*

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

Rule Number One:

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

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

Rule Number Two:

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

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

Rule Number Three:

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

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

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

“Steve, shut up!”

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

“Steve, SHUT UP!”

“But Mil, he’s trying to – “

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

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

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

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

*

With Kristi, age 18

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bob said nothing, but he beamed.

*

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I took a breath and chose Door Number Three.

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

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

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

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

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

I misinterpreted the silence.

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

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

Next up:  The First State Capitol

Tolerance and Intolerance

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

C. Herbert Woolston

.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

Did I forget to mention that this was Sunday School?

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

School            Negro    White

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

Who says Midwesterners are slow?

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

**

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

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

At least, that’s how we saw them.

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

*

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And eventually, it was.  And without violence.

**

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

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

Next Up:  Problem Puppies, Problem Children