Kathy loved to cook. She’d been doing it every day since she was 13, when her mother became too sick for kitchen duty. She was brought up to think that a way to a man’s heart is through his stomach—“It was very important to know how to cook, and for the ones you love to enjoy your cooking,” she remembered.

But as she listened to the familiar voice on the other end of the line—the voice that had been part of her life since she started dating her husband, Steve, the self-appointed Leon Russell archivist who’d had the idea for this birthday bash concert for which she hadn’t thought twice about cooking a feast—her mind reeled. She grew up to be a dental assistant, a cheerleading coach, a wife, a mother. It was spring, 1986, and she was talking to Leon Russell on her home phone in south Tulsa. His request was ringing in her ears. She did a mental search of a recipe for a dish that she’d never made, nor even considered eating. But he knew exactly what he wanted: Steamed mussels. A dish for which the Tulsa-raised Lawton native had acquired a taste during his time in California, she guessed. “Whatever he would have chosen, I would have figured out a way to do it,” Kathy said.

Kathy’s not much for seafood—even now, she rarely cooks what swims. She got her recipe from a chef at Bodean’s and returned the next morning for her mussels, as many of the palm-print-shaped bivalves as she thought a man could eat. It was almost more than Kathy could handle, standing at her kitchen sink, using her fingertips to rip the beards from the live animals concealed inside the smooth, black shells—“That was one of the grossest things I’ve ever done in my life,” Kathy said. She popped them into a steaming broth of butter and herbs, and they sighed and opened under the lid of her big stockpot.

Kathy enlisted her mother to help her cook Leon his dinner and feed his crew before the show (except for Leon—he never eats until after he performs). The duo conspired on a slew of dishes, created Thanksgiving-style, Kathy and her mother doing most of the preparation the day before the concert and rising early to finish the cooking. The trip to deliver the mussels to the bus in the parking lot at Brady Theater was the last of the many Kathy had taken that day, sustaining the crew on a steady rotation of chicken, potatoes, Texas lasagna, Bixby corn, and broccoli casserole, served up in Crock Pots.

When Steve and Kathy moved to Texas, they opted to hire a caterer for Leon’s birthday bashes, putting in orders for barbeque at Wilson’s and the now-defunct Pampered Pig (Leon loves barbecue, Kathy said). The desserts were the exception—she even flew from Dallas to Tulsa with a homemade chocolate tunnel cake on her lap once. Her mother made Leon banana pudding, cooked the old-fashioned way on the stove, none of that instant stuff. She’d slice the bananas paper thin, which she’d tell her daughter was the secret to the whole thing. On top was a cloud of hand-whipped cream, already six inches deep before that crowning moment.

She couldn’t bring herself to wrestle a mussel for even one taste before she schlepped the dish across town in her Chrysler minivan. She wanted to serve Leon herself, “to make sure everything was fine, that it tasted like it should.” She boarded the bus and made her way to where Leon was waiting, making sure not to spill the broth that shimmered like the walls of those shells. In the darkness, she tripped. The liquid sloshed onto Leon’s shirt and into his lap.

He was startled at first, Kathy said, “but he kept telling me, ‘It’s going to be fine.’ ” He ate them all up, her husband likes to report— “we almost had to hose him down afterwards.” She never made steamed mussels again.

He’s on the cover. A shirtless skinny young man sits crossed legged with his left knee drawn up toward his body and cradled in his left arm. He is perched on an unmade bed with plain white sheets tousled in the background. With a subtle smirk on his face, he grips a 32/20 revolver in his right hand and loosely points it upward. There is a cool steadiness to his demeanor with an undertone of wild rebellion. The photo is reminiscent of James Dean’s bad boy in Rebel Without a Cause, but the man in the photo is no actor. I scour the picture with a magnifying glass, desperate for any detail that might reveal something about the man. He is wearing a wedding ring. The picture must have been taken before 1964, unless he continued to wear his wedding ring after the death of his wife, which is unlikely. If the photo were taken around 1964, it would make the man’s age close to 20. His name was Billy Joe Mann, born in 1943, the same year as his friend, Larry Clark. Billy Mann, iconic cover boy of Tulsa, was my father.

Larry Clark is a Tulsa native, and a controversial photographer, writer, film director, and producer. Drugs, teenage sex, and violence are reoccurring themes in his work. Some of his film titles include Kids (1995), Bully (2001), and Ken Park (2002). Clark’s first success, Tulsa (1971) is a black and white pictorial of the drug scene in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Larry photographed his friends shooting drugs over a period between 1962 and 1971, but Larry wasn’t just an innocent bystander, he indulged in shooting drugs too. The book was raw and disturbing, especially for the time. The pictorial exploits the recklessness of youth, the turning point of naivety, and the utter abandonment of self-respect. It inspired such films as Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish (1983), and Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy (1989). I haven’t seen these movies in years, but I remember a raw grittiness and undercurrent of desperation in some of the characters in those films, similar to the characters in Tulsa. However, the characters in Tulsa were real people— desperate, indulgent, and addicted. Some of those people, to this day, are friends of my family. And some of those people were my family.

In the spring of 2009, a gnawing feeling began to fester in my gut. It occurred to me that Larry Clark and the people who might be able to tell me something about my father were, like me, getting older. If they die, I thought, I’ll never know anything about my father and my roots. I searched the internet for information about Larry Clark, then posted a comment on his MySpace page and other blog sites with links to Larry and Tulsa. No one responded. One night in March of 2009, I ran across one particular website that had several postings about Larry and his work, but mostly his debut piece, Tulsa. There was a phone number, so I called. I knew it was a long shot but I didn’t have anything to lose. I told the site owner my story and he said that he would get my phone number to Clark. Soon after, Larry called me. He knew who I was and seemed sympathetic to my plight. He promised to look through old boxes located in his basement in New York as soon as he could; Clark was in LA at the time. Larry is a very busy man and we have been in sporadic communication, with long silences in between, ever since. I expressed my concern about his old gang of friends and their age.

“Larry, if you guys die, I don’t know how I’ll ever learn about my father,” I told him. “The things that I want to know, only you can tell me.”

Clark recalled that he had old 16mm footage of Billy and he had a reel-to-reel tape recording of an interview with him, as well. I think the year of the interview was around 1969 or 1970. My father died in October of 1970. The fact that the tape recording exists torments me. His words are so close, yet achingly out of reach. Does my father reveal any redeeming qualities in that interview? What did he say, feel, and believe about life? What was the purpose of the interview anyway? The thought of viewing images of my father alive and animated, and hearing his voice for the first time since I was an infant, caught me off guard. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I hushed a gasp under my breath and tried to keep my composure. I didn’t know that I had so many emotions about my father. I want to see his face, his eyes. I want to read his body language. I want to experience him living and breathing. I want to know him too. When I talked to Clark on the phone and asked him about my father, he didn’t share many personal details about Billy Mann, but I believe that his creative property can tell me volumes about my father. In early 2011, after his Paris showing of “Kiss the Past Hello,” Clark said that he had put together a book of pictures for me of my family: my father, mother, sister, and me, that he had taken back in the day. He said that we would get together, just he and I, to watch the film and listen to the reel-to-reel. That was over a year ago; I am still waiting. I believe that he is in France working on a new film. He is a very busy man. The photos are important to me because I don’t have any family pictures of me with my mother and father. Not one. After my mother’s death, Billy refused to give any of the photos that they had to my grandparents. After my father’s death, they were lost forever. It won’t change the past, but at least I’ll know.

I remember the first time that I laid eyes on Tulsa. Larry’s artistic portrayals of his friend, Billy Mann, are the only pictures that I have ever seen of my father. If it were not for Tulsa, I would not even know what my father looked like. It was 1972. I was living with relatives in California, and while they were at work, my sister had been rifling through their closet and found Tulsa hidden away in a box on the top shelf. From the second floor of our brand new two-story home, I heard urgent yelling beckoning me to come.

“Shaaan! Come quick! Hurry, it’s a picture of our father!” she bellowed.

“Huh? Whaaat?” I yelled as I raced up the stairs and into the master bedroom. “Let me see! Where?”

“Auh,” I gasped as I knelt down in front of the book.

“Look, it says, ‘Billy Mann.’ That’s our father’s name,” she said as she looked at me and then pointed to one of the only pictures in the book tagged with a name.

I sat on the royal blue shag carpet on the floor in the walk-in closet mesmerized by the photos in Clark’s book. There were clothes and boxes all around me, but the only thing that I saw were the dark images of Clark’s black and whites. I sat there staring, trying to make sense of a book that is not fit for a child’s gaze. I wanted the pictures to reveal something about this man that was supposed to be my father. Did I look like him? Was he famous? Why was he in a book? As I flipped through the pages, I saw nudity, people shooting drugs, and a dead baby in a casket. There was a photo of a man with a gunshot wound to his upper thigh, his face flushed with agony. Another picture showed a man gripping his knee and writhing in pain. I looked to see if he was shot too. He was, but it was with a needle, not a gun. The pictures scared me. I didn’t know what it meant. I wondered if I was the one on my father’s belly in the picture of him lying in bed smoking a cigarette while clumsily holding a baby. I wondered who took these pictures and why. Was the lady in the housecoat my mother? I didn’t understand. I was nine years old.

By the time my relatives returned home from work, our little minds were full of questions. We told them what we had found and asked them to explain what it meant. They scolded us for getting into their stuff and made their bedroom off limits. That night I learned a little about my father, and they confirmed that the picture of the woman in the housecoat was indeed my mother. I suspected it but wasn’t sure because there was no name to accompany the “dead” caption under her picture. They told me that my father was a drug addict and that he was not very nice to my mother. There wasn’t much more to tell a 9-year-old little girl. Even then, it was clear to me that they were trying to be diplomatic but there was definitely bad blood between them. I grew up knowing that my father was a drug addict who did bad things. I just didn’t know how bad. I remember asking if my mother did drugs too. They answered, “No.”

As a child, I labeled my father as bad and I didn’t want to have anything to do with anything bad. I was more interested in my mother and curious about how she died. I wanted to know what really happened to her. All my life I was told that I looked like my mother and that I acted like her too. I found comfort in those words.

I have researched and questioned my family history since as far back as I can remember; Tulsa lingers in the background. In the early eighties, and my early twenties, I found myself living in Tulsa, Oklahoma once again. Eager to know something about my mother, I looked up the man who found her dead on St. Patrick’s Day, 1964. The first time I met him, Roger Johns had nothing to say outside of the official story, which was not very pretty. 25 years later, I spoke to him again and asked him the same questions about my mother. It was 2011, he was nearing his 69th birthday, and his answers were very different.

Johns appears in Tulsa in one of the filmstrip segments. His back is to Clark’s lens so he is not easily identifiable, but in a phone conversation, he recalled the scene to me as if it were yesterday.

“They were wild times, man,” he reminisced.

Johns confessed that he is grateful that his identity was concealed. He’s not proud of the fact that he appeared in the book.

“My life is different now. Most of the people I know don’t even know that shit about me and I’d like to keep it that way,” he huffed.

He was a friend of my father’s; they met shortly after Johns was released from Granite in December of 1963. Four days prior to his release, he had his 21st birthday. He had been locked up since he was 16 years old.

“Your dad helped me out when I really needed it,” he added. “I never had a beef with Billy. He was a good friend to me.”

Because of their close friendship, my father asked Johns to check on my mother while he was out of town “working.” Mann didn’t have a regular job. Rumor has it that he was selling stolen goods to a fella down in Texas. According to a family source, it was three days before the police could question him about my mother’s death. He was out of town.

Johns described that horrible day my mother died in vivid detail. I’m sure that he thought my questions were odd.

“Where was the gun? Where were her hands? What was the position of her legs? It’s important,” I almost pleaded.

I wanted to know everything. I wanted the raw uncensored truth and nothing less. I wanted to see the scene as he saw it. Still, hearing his account was surreal. Johns said that he would never forget that day for as long as he lived.

He came over to the apartment after school, around 5 p.m., to see if my mother needed anything. He climbed the stairs to the second story apartment and knocked on the front door. There was an old quirky furnace in that apartment on 5th street. Often it would make loud banging noises until someone adjusted it. From the stairs, he heard the furnace clanging and babies crying, so he waited patiently for my mother, Deanna, to answer the door. The furnace kept clanging and Deanna never answered. He tried the doorknob—it was locked. He made his way around to the terrace to investigate. Johns climbed through the bedroom window of the tiny apartment. He noticed Deanna lying on the floor next to the bed. Her hands were above her head in a stick up position. Her legs were tangled; one was awkwardly bent backwards and squirreled underneath her, the other leg was bent with the knee facing away from her body. He reached for her hand, grabbed and shook it and said, “What are you doin’, sucker?” He had not yet realized what had happened. He thought she was kidding around. Johns sprang into full panic when the coldness of her hand registered and he looked at her face, visually taking in the bullet’s entrance wound—near the midline, just above her right eyebrow.

“Did you see the gun? Where was the gun?” I queried.

“Yeah, it was just above her hand on the floor,” Johns explained.

“Which hand? Do you remember?” I became more intense.

“I think it was her right hand, yeah, it was above her right hand. Boy you’re askin’ me to remember stuff that I haven’t thought about in years,” he confided. “Then I went into the other room to check on you kids and you were okay, just crying hard,” Johns continued. “I knew it was a bad deal and I had just gotten out of prison … Man, I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

I didn’t tell him that my mother was left handed, I just listened.

Adrenaline charged through his body as Johns raced out the front door, down the stairs and a couple of blocks to a phone booth on the corner. He dialed “O” for the operator (that was what we did before 9-1-1). He told the operator that a woman was dead, she’d been shot. When he hung up the phone and turned to exit the phone booth, the police pulled right up in front of him.

“I don’t know how they got there so fast. Man, I was scared! I couldn’t tell you how long I was on the phone with the operator, I just turned and they were right there,” he explained.

Back at the apartment, my sister and I were in a crib in the next room. My 19-year-old mother’s time of death was estimated between 8 a.m. and 12 noon. I was 17 months old, my sister was 6 months. According to Johns, the officers conducting the investigation found a closet full of stolen merchandise and credit cards. When the police were finally able to question Billy about the stolen property, he blamed it on Deanna, telling them that she had a problem. It was a lie.

On March 18, 1964, on the front page of the Tulsa Daily World, above the weather report, the story headline reads, “TULSA WOMAN FATALLY SHOT Victim’s Husband Hunted by Police.” The article went on to explain some of the details of the scene. “Police said a single bullet had been fired recently from the gun. The woman, clad in baby doll pajamas, was struck between the eyes. An autopsy was ordered.” The article also revealed, “…a piece of the gun handle had been broken off.”

I have a copy of my mother’s autopsy reports, newspaper articles, and death certificate. There are a few inconsistencies made about her death. In a document signed by the state medical examiner, there is a section at the bottom with the directions, “Please check MANNER” (short for manner of death), the six choices included Natural Cause, Suicide, Accident, Homicide, Other, and Undetermined. The examiner typed an “x” for Undetermined. On page one of the autopsy report, the “probable cause of death” states, “Bullet perforation of brain with basal skull fracture and massive blood aspiration into lungs.” On the “Comments And Interpretation” page of the autopsy, the second paragraph reads, “The direction of the shot is from front to back, in a horizontal level, and slightly from left to right. It is perfectly compatible with a bullet wound self-inflicted by a left hander (as the victim was).” On her death certificate, the “Cause of Death” section has the words, “Laceration of Brain … Gunshot” hand written into the space. Three boxes appear below that section: Accident, Suicide, and Homicide. Accident is checked.

The next day, March 19th, the same newspaper printed, “Police said Wednesday Mrs. Dianna Mann, 20, of 823 E. 5th Place, apparently fired the shot which took her life on Tuesday.” Her name was actually Deanna and she was 19 years old, not 20. The story continued, “Officers said a polygraph test supported her estranged husband’s story he was not home at the time of the shooting, and paraffin tests showed Mrs. Mann had recently fired a gun.”

In March of this year, I met with Dr. Michael Dobersen, the Arapahoe County Coroner, Medical Examiner, and Forensic Pathologist located just outside of Denver, Colorado. I wanted a professional opinion on my mother’s 1964 autopsy report. Dobersen was warm and welcoming. I braced myself for what he might tell me. I wanted the truth, a modern interpretation of the 48-year-old documents. I wanted to know if he thought that, scientifically, suicide was the only plausible interpretation.

“I’m impressed with the thoroughness of the report.” Dobersen commented.

I wondered if the scientific procedures had changed all that much. I imagine that they have. Dobersen pointed out the three conflicting comments, “accident,” “self-inflicted,” and “undetermined.” We spoke for almost an hour. He concluded that, all things considered, if it were him, he would have no choice but to characterize the death as undetermined. I agree that there are too many unknowns to sign off on suicide. Due to the question concerning my mother’s cause of death, the Catholic Church would not allow my grandparents to bury their daughter in the regular part of the cemetery. She was banished to the back row. I guess with the other perceived sinners.

There is one more thing that I need to tell you about my mother. When I heard it, I was grateful that it was not revealed to me 25 years earlier. Deanna entertained a guest the evening prior to her death. The young man was her lover. He was also a good friend of Billy Mann. He spent the evening with her well into the night, he told me it was probably between 12 and 1 a.m. when he left. His name was Roger Johns. He mentioned something very strange that happened the eve of my mother’s death.

“Your mom did not shoot drugs,” Johns insisted.

He did mention that once in a while she did barbiturates with the common street names of red birds and yellow jackets. That night she had taken a couple of red birds. There was a gun laying on top of a tall chest of drawers. Deanna picked up the gun and walked over to Johns, who was lying on the bed. She pointed the gun at his face.

Very calmly she said, “I ought to shoot you.”

Johns was adamant that he did not get angry about her behavior.

“Why would you want to do that? I haven’t done anything,” he replied to Deanna.

She paused as if thoughtfully considering his words. “You’re right,” she said and put the gun back on the chest of drawers.

Johns had never told a soul about his relationship with my mother in nearly 50 years. He told me that it felt good to get it off his chest. He was hesitant to tell me though, because he didn’t want me to think that my mother was the type of girl that ran around. He insists that she was not. Johns cared for my mother. He said that she was beautiful and that he was crazy about her. Johns also told me that Deanna was depressed about the situation with Billy. He said that my father used to run around on her a lot.

A family source remembers Billy bringing a girl over to the apartment where we lived to show his new lover his children. Of course, my mother was there caring for my sister and me. What kind of man has the audacity to do something like that?

“Billy was shooting dope and runnin’ around with that girl,” Johns informed me.

Johns wanted me to understand that my mother was a good person and that she loved my sister and me very much. She wasn’t like all the rest. She was different. Johns was concerned that I might lose respect for my mother.

“She was just in a bad situation. She was 19 years old and she had two kids. Her husband was a doper, a thief, and he ran around on her,” he preached.

Two weeks before she died, Deanna asked one of her sisters to take her family to California. Her sister said no because she didn’t have the money. My mother was trying to get away and make a new life for herself and her children, away from the destructiveness of her current life with Billy.

Around March 20th, my father made a phone call to the parents of his dead wife. My aunt answered the phone.

“If any of you black-ass Mexicans want a piece of me, you know where to find me!” he told her, then hung up the phone.

What motivates someone to be so cruel and insensitive to others? I don’t know how to justify that comment in my mind. I guess I can’t. People that knew Billy said he was a drug addict, an armed robber, a thief, and, at times, a pimp. Rumor has it that he trafficked stolen goods for associates that I can’t mention. It is hearsay that he was in the pocket of a disreputable attorney and may have been a snitch as well. He was cruel and abusive toward women. He didn’t seem to have any self-respect or respect for life. That is the way Billy Mann lived and died.

In order to try to piece together who my father was, I’ve had to poke around and ask a lot of questions. Around 1992, I met David Roper, a dominant figure in Tulsa, on the docks of a produce warehouse on North Trenton. Roper told me that my father was a good guy. I think it was the first time that I had ever heard the words “good guy” associated with my father. It gave me hope that maybe he wasn’t as bad as I had believed all my life. I pressed for details about what happened back in the ‘60s but he said that he didn’t know anything. I could tell that he didn’t want to rehash this part of his life, and who could blame him? Still, there’s a strange code of silence between the fellas that ran in that crowd. I wonder what they are protecting. I shifted the conversation to my father. I asked him to tell me about Billy Mann. Roper did share a memory of himself and my father sitting in a car in the ally across from where I lived when I was little. They parked, lit a cigarette and then watched me and my sister play in the front yard. Roper told me that my father loved me. My heart softened a little as I imagined that my father cared.

For most of my life, Billy Mann was just a story to me. I never felt any connection to him because I didn’t know anything about him or his side of the family. Over the years, I have spoken with several of his friends, two of his lovers, and some of his criminal associations. I still don’t feel a connection to him, but I’m beginning to understand the kind of man he was. He lived a terrible, addicted, lawless life. He used people and people used him. I’ve combed through public records and found that he was charged with armed robbery and numerous other crimes, but for some reason, the charges were often dropped.

In 2008, I sent away for Billy Mann’s military records. It took some time but I finally received them in April of 2009. When I read his History of Service and his Psych Eval, I cried. According to the records, my father stole his first car in 1956, at the age of 13. He did it again in September of 1960, while AWOL from the Marine Corp. Mann did not join the military out of duty or the desire to serve his country, he joined to avoid punishment for a crime committed in May of 1960—reckless driving and destruction of public property. He managed approximately one year of service, most of which was spent in military prison or AWOL. Mann was court martialed, May 22, 1961. The records reveal dimensions about his character and his family history that no one else has been able to tell me. The documents explain that Billy’s father died when he was about 9 years old. He was very close to his father. Billy had four older half- sisters; one committed suicide around November 2, 1960. Another sister attempted suicide by way of overdose of pills when Billy was 10. Billy confessed that prior to his enlistment with the Marines he had thoughts of suicide. At the age of 17, he said, “I would not mess around trying to cut my wrists, I would cut my throat.” In another section of the bulky file on my father, there is an evaluation made about his mental status. It states, “He is emotionally unstable, immature, insecure, resents authority, is suspicious and seclusive [sic], lacks the ability to exercise sound judgment…” It goes on, but you get the idea. There is a little girl inside of me that wants to look up to my Dad or to be proud of him in some way, but virtue is scarce by Billy Mann. From the military records, I did learn that my father had green eyes. I didn’t know that.

I located the woman that was the last person to look into his green eyes. We spoke on the phone a few times. I will call her Angelina. She told me that Billy admitted to beating up his wife, my mother, just for the fun of it. I have no way of knowing if that is true or not. She told me about her life with Billy, about their shady dealings and drug use. She said that Billy had punched her in the stomach once while she was pregnant with his child. They were together for a couple of years, right up until his death. She was his lover and the mother of his youngest child. She was also his niece.

Angelina recalled the events of October 7, 1970, in a phone conversation with me in February of this year. Billy and Angelina were staying in the country, at her grandfather’s house in Kellyville, a small town outside of Tulsa. They decided that they wanted to get clean, get completely off drugs. Billy wanted to marry her and try to get custody of his children, my sister and I. On that fall day, they planned to leave the state so they could get away from the local drug scene, which they knew all too well. Inconsistent with their plans, they took one final ride out into the woods to shoot up; that’s just what addicts do. They had moved from California in July in an attempt to kick heroin. Trying to get clean, they replaced heroin with Demerol that Mann stole from a drugstore. Billy tried to give his girlfriend her shot but her fragile veins wouldn’t take another hit. Billy took her shot. They drove back to the house and parked the car in the gravel driveway. Still hungry for a fix, Angelina slipped into the house to cook some drugs. Billy stayed outside to work on the car. From inside the house, she heard her grandpa yelling at Billy, “Hey, are you okay?! Hey!” She looked up and saw Billy still sitting in the driver’s seat with his head flopped backward over the headrest, his mouth agape. She ran. She ran as fast as she could and pulled Billy from the car. Once on the ground, Angelina began to beat on his chest, trying to do chest compressions. Frantically she called for someone to help her. People came, but no one in the crowd stirred to help the dying man and the frantic girl, they only watched.

Billy’s eye’s caught Angelina’s and he softly spoke his final words… “Not so hard.”

The young 18-year-old girl begged at the crowd for someone to go call an ambulance but no one responded to her pleas. Finally, she ran to borrow a neighbor’s truck. They put Billy in the back and her grandfather drove them to the hospital, which was located about 10 miles away. She did mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions all the way to the hospital.

“I was working on a dead man,” she recalled.

Billy Joe Mann died that day of a drug overdose; he would never see any of his children again. He was 27.

When I heard the news of my father’s death, I was eight years old. I was in Tulsa at the time, visiting sick relatives. My aunt came out to the front yard where I was playing with cousins and showed me the newspaper article. She told me that my father was dead. At that age, I didn’t know what to do with the information. Dead? Who was Billy Mann? He was my father but I didn’t know him. What was I supposed to do? I remember thinking it was creepy that he died two days after my birthday. I shrugged it off and continued playing with my cousins. I never shed a tear.

Larry Clark’s Tulsa has tormented some, and others have narrowly escaped its wrath. It nestles up to some of the worst parts of humanity. It’s difficult to look at lost souls squandering the potential of their precious lives and inadvertently the lives of others. It is even more difficult when they are your parents. I have spoken with several of the people that appear in the book. I listened to them tell their stories and remember a time in their lives that was caught on film, a time that most are not proud of. I listened to them tell me what they remembered about their relationship to my mother, but mostly my father. One woman from the book seemed shaken that I found her. We spoke only once, but I will never forget the shame that I heard in her voice. She was just a teenage girl when those pictures were taken and at 60-something, she still carries shame. A couple of the boys from the later photos revealed that police harassed them. They said it was because of Tulsa. I wonder what it must have been like for those that survived the inauspicious lifestyle of drugs and crime. What about their families? Those that lived, what did they grow up to become? How did they explain Tulsa to their kids?

I grew up but I did not walk in my father’s footsteps. I didn’t become a junkie or a criminal or a social outcast. I walked a different path. In the early ‘90s, I owned and operated a health food restaurant and juice bar in Tulsa, on the corner of 51st and Yale. It was a lot of hard work, but the reward of doing what I loved was worth it. My lease came up and I made a decision to close the restaurant while I looked for a new location. Things didn’t work out the way I planned and I was not able to get it up and running again. In 1996, I took a road trip to Colorado. 11 days later, I stuffed a U-Haul full and moved to the Rocky Mountains. I’ve been here ever since.

Some of my friends and family members don’t understand my interest in this early part of my life. They say things like, “It was so long ago … just let it go!” or “Don’t live in the past.” Last year, I went through a period of weeping and sobbing, but strangely, I didn’t even know the reason why. I was purging. I’ve felt anger toward my father and confusion about my mother. I have felt anger over the stupidity of it all. I dove deep into the dark abyss of my past and reaped what was there. I don’t fear it anymore, I just feel it.

Tulsa was the way my life began. I am still in the process of discovering who I am and learning about my roots, but I know so much more now than ever before. When I flip through the pages of the book, I don’t just see nameless faces anymore. I see real people, some who are alive and some who are not. I know many of their names and I hear their stories. The people that gave me life are on those pages. I have learned details about my mother and my father that have turned those flat one-dimensional photos into complex multi-faceted human beings. It is their humanity that compels me.

Like my mother, my father is also buried on the edge of a cemetery. Billy Mann’s grave lies in an open space and sits on top of a hill outside of Tulsa. The view is expansive. The sun was shining and it was unseasonably warm that day in January when I visited. His headstone reads “At Rest.” I wonder if that’s true. I knelt down beside my father’s grave just like I had my mother’s grave, earlier that day. With my fingertips, I swept the debris from the face of his headstone and stared into it as if it might respond. There was only silence.

I drove by The Church Studio on Third Street one morning in 2006 and found that its then-owner, musician Steve Ripley, had a hand-made “For Sale” sign stuck in the yard of the legendary recording studio he had owned for the last 20+ years. He had written his cell phone number on the sign.

As a musician and fan of the studio, I put my car in park outside of the building and dialed the number on my cell. Ripley answered. I said I was outside and would love to see inside. He said, “I’m here. Come on up.”

I skipped up the stairs to the double doors. Steve let me in and for the first time, I peeked around at what was any musician’s dream-come-true recording studio: a school gym-sized recording room that looked like it hadn’t been touched since the ’70s, a luxurious control room with exposed brick walls and a Neve board, and rock memorabilia lining the walls. Music equipment dotted the floors—items Steve was moving out.

“So, what do you do?” Steve asked me. “Oh, I play violin, write songs,” I said. “Well, I have one piece of advice for you,” Steve said.

“Get out of the music business.”

Despite the warning, Ripley and the building charmed me, and I wasn’t the only passer-by to notice the historical site for sale. Within months of my 2006 studio visit, local attorney Randy Miller saw the sign and called the number, getting the same response from Ripley. Miller made an offer to buy the building—and got it.

In 2010, I learned that Jacob Miller, the red-headed son of Randy, was running the building. My future husband, Mark Kuykendall, and I became friends with Jacob and we moved all our recording equipment into the Church Studio. I became enamored with the building’s history and its role in the community. We all became well acquainted with the building: the knotty pine staircase, the quirky cowhide wallpaper in the bathroom, the old hitching post outside where you could tie up your horse back in the day, the original church windows. It’s easy to fall in love with the place.

The Church Studio rests within the Pearl District, a neighborhood whose association had been working tirelessly for years to develop their community—and they had been quite effective at making things happen. They had gotten a park created, a community center built, sidewalks laid, and excitement stirred all around the studio. I began attending the neighborhood meetings and at the mention of my Church Studio involvement, countless Leon memories surfaced from the neighbors.

“I saw Bob Dylan on the stairs outside one day in the ’70s.”

“I heard Eric Clapton recorded in there.”

“I think George Harrison was there too, he was definitely in Tulsa while it was open.”

“The Gap Band made their Magician’s Holiday record there.”

“We need to do something to honor these memories.” As soon as it was brought to the table, the Pearl District Association pounced on the Leon Russell Road project.

As The Pearl District board began to plan the honorary road sign details, Leon’s popularity began to surge. In 2010, he made a joint record with Elton John called The Union. With popularity comes tension; anyone who heard about the honorary street naming had an opinion about where the road should be and what it should have been named. At one particular meeting, someone even suggested naming the street “Studio Row” or “Music Row.” Longtime Tulsa musician David Teegarden, formerly of Bob Seger’s Silver Bullet Band, was in attendance and he piped up.

“What are we talking about here?” he asked. “I came to this meeting to talk about Leon Russell Road.” And it was pretty much settled.

Because of the Pearl District’s strong track record working with the city, the Leon Russell Road project was approved by the City of Tulsa almost immediately with the help of city councilor, Maria Barnes. Even prior to the official naming, however, there was some confusion as to whether the road would be located in Downtown Tulsa’s Blue Dome district, or in the Pearl. In the end, the Pearl District prevailed.

The official location of Leon Russell Road became Third Street between Utica and Peoria avenues, hugging the Church Studio doors where so many musical memories were made.

The Pearl District Association put together a Kickstarter.com page to raise funds for the creation and installation of street signs as well as a sign unveiling ceremony. The financial support for Leon Russell Road was near instantaneous with 20 private donors in less than 3 days.

A week after the road sign unveiling ceremony, Leon Russell was set to play a concert at the BOK Center with Elton John. The day of the show, Russell himself appeared at a celebratory luncheon at the Mayo Hotel.

I asked Leon if we could get a photo together with the road sign, and Leon replied, “I’ll keep taking pictures if it means I don’t have to get a real job.”

When I showed him the street sign, he looked at it carefully. “What’s it say on the other side?” Leon joked.

“That’s just how he is,” Margee said. “I’m content and he’s always wondering how I can be so content. I told him, ‘I have what I want and I don’t have what I don’t want.’”

A week later, Margee’s mantra was about to be put to the test.

Scott was doing his usual core strength training in the gym at Tulsa Community College. The exercises included rounds of lifting weights, pushups, and jumping rope. Bending down to replace his weights, he got lightheaded and sat down. He began to sweat profusely, then vomited on the floor of the gym. Some friends saw his body going into seizure; one of them called an ambulance, and then Margee. He was rushed the two miles to St. John Medical Center.

It was Valentine’s Day, 2012, and Scott’s heart had given out.

Margee remembers she was in a great mood that morning, headed to her adult painting class at TCC’s west campus and looking forward to seeing her students. A colleague approached her in the hallway with a note to call the metro campus immediately concerning her husband.

She and their two sons, Jesse and Dylan, beat the ambulance to the hospital. Scott was looking worse than hospital staff expected. Surgery was imminent.

Margee prayed for Scott in a private hospital waiting room as two stents—mesh “pipes” that inflate like a balloon—were placed inside of Scott’s heart to remove the blockage. The surgery was a success. A few hours later and Scott was recounting his near death with his wife and kids.

“All I really thought about was Margee and my boys,” Scott recalled. “I didn’t want to leave them. But, I was stable. The main feeling I had was gratitude.”

Once released from the hospital, what Scott needed was a dose of mood medicine. He and Margee stopped by Church Studios where their oldest son, Jesse, was putting the finishing touches on his song called, of all things, “Love is Life and Life is Love.”

“We spent a couple of hours listening to the guys put the finishing touches on Jesse’s amazing song,” Margee said. “It was magic and healing for Scott.”

Scott is currently “taking it easy,” no easy task for a man whose many hats include songwriter, poet, family therapist, and radio host. Margee continues to teach art at the Gilcrease Museum, Kaiser Rehab, and the Tulsa Art and Humanities Council, but never strays too far—just in case Scott’s heart needs her again. She welcomes even the brief respite.

Scott still gets antsy from time to time, opting to sit through mental health workshops to further one of his careers, instead of resting in his pajamas and lounging in bed.

“To be honest, it has been tough,” he said. “Not every day is happy. But, every day is good.”

Scott and Margee will celebrate 33 years of marriage together this year.

There were a number of obstacles to my experiment: First of all, I wanted to survive, so this precluded certain parts of the city where pedestrians are routinely mowed down. In fact, the very day I set out on my journey, an elderly woman was struck by a car while trying to cross 21st Street. If a walk to Med-X could kill you, I might want to take some precautions, like seeking out neighborhoods with ample sidewalks.

Just off Cherry Street, there were unbroken sidewalks for blocks. Then, they randomly ceased in front of some houses in Maple Ridge, only to resume a couple of houses later. Who maintains these sidewalks? Why do some houses have them and others not? The patchwork of sidewalks resulted in a sort of hopscotch in and out of traffic. At one point, I nearly hopped on a decomposing squirrel that must have been rotting on a 19th Street sidewalk for days. The only other person I saw on this particular stretch of the walk was a 30-something monk—at least he was dressed like a monk, wearing an ankle-length, hooded black habit and rosary beads—walking a Jack Russell terrier.

Another obstacle was determining a final destination. Every journey implies a starting point and an ending point. Where was I going? I traced old streetcar routes, courtesy of Michael Bates, who has mapped Tulsa trolley lines onto a Google map. I thought about walking one of these lines, but most of them ended after a mile or two. I wanted something with more of an epic sweep to it. I considered walking the old Sand Springs Interurban line, but this prospect depressed me, thus predetermining my psychogeographic experiment.

I threw out all these options and opted to become a flâneur in the drift of the city. The flâneur is a bit like the American buffalo: a creature who moves randomly across the landscape, picking out bits of food here and there, digesting on the move. Unlike the buffalo, though, the flâneur usually inhabits the densely packed streets of the big city, moving against the grain of a consumer society. Nobody really thinks of Tulsa as a big city, but a quick glance at Wikipedia reveals that the Tulsa metropolitan area has a population of just under one million souls—about the same as mid-19th century London and Paris, the cities that gave birth to the modern flâneur in the works of Charleses Baudelaire and Dickens.

“An idle man-about-town,” Merriam-Webster defines the word, perhaps with a note of disdain. The flâneur is, after all, a French creation, a by-product of Parisian splendor and squalor. He is one who strolls about the city not looking to acquire knowledge or consumer goods, Walter Benjamin once wrote, but to experience a city as a work of art. Most people interested in pedestrian issues want to get from point A to point B without getting run over or mugged on the way to work. I was more interested in loafing, seeing what secrets the city might reveal to me that I never noticed in three decades of car travel.

•••

The voyage started out with promise: a mild, bone-dry December day just after Christmas, the kind of day that brings the earmuffs off the dog walkers and prompts the joggers to doff the leg warmers for sporty shorts. A day, in sum, that should have pushed the citizens off their couches and into the streets. Cars swarmed around the Brookside QuikTrip, but I was on foot. Crossing 36th Street, humanity disappeared. I walked for two blocks, waiting for my first encounter with a fellow pedestrian.

There’s a website that has developed an algorithm for walkability—walkscore.com—and it claims that Brookside is one of Oklahoma’s most walkable neighborhoods. Walkscore.com talks a big game: walkability is not only the answer to climate change, it says, but the ability to walk your neighborhood also corresponds with a longer lifespan, a smaller waistline, and higher property values. In fact, Brookside is supposed to be Tulsa’s model for pedestrian-automobile encounters, with what urban planners call “textured crosswalks” that “make the pedestrian space easy to determine for a motorist.”

A stylish shop on the west side of Peoria caught my eye. Scandinavian-looking kitchen instruments posed in the windows, urging this buffalo-flâneur across one of these model crosswalks made of bricks.

In Canada, where I live, cars screech to halt whenever the pedestrian dips his toe into the river of traffic. Pedestrian right-of-way is a sacred concept, even in suburbia. I waited patiently at the crosswalk, trying to catch the gaze of motorists, hoping to shame them into stopping for me. As I do in Canada, I stuck a foot in the street to let people know I was serious about getting across the road, but no one stopped. I started to count the cars blazing by me and got to 28 before a pick-up truck stopped and gave me a finger wave, urging me across. But then I was stranded in the right hand lane, with the left lane still buzzing with traffic. I must have looked like one of those squirrels that can’t decide whether to dart across the road or retreat to the curb.

Hey lady in your green Volkswagen bug with a daisy in the flower vase, surely you will stop for me? No. You, the bearded Volvo driver with the fading Obama/Biden bumper sticker, surely you will help a brother out? If I am regarded at all, it is as a crazy person. I am positive that a stray dog would have had more luck crossing Brookside than me on its model, textured sidewalks.

Finally, I am across, but there is little to keep my attention. It’s almost noon and I want to at least make it downtown. I pick up my pace and walk for almost a mile before I encounter my next pedestrian, the monk (Is he Benedictine? Eastern Orthodox? What is doing here?), who gives me a wise nod, just past the decomposed squirrel. I catch a glimpse of a lowrider on a bike struggling up the hill on 21st street, and that’s about all the humanity I see for the next half hour.

“I am moving to Tulsa from Denver and am wondering if it’s safe to walk the streets,” someone on city-data.com posted. Someone else replied with this warning: “I think the biggest hazard of walking repeatedly to and from work in downtown Dullsa (oops, I meant Tulsa) is getting killed or injured by boredom.”

•••

I am at 18th and Boulder at 12:43 p.m., but there is still no sign of life on the streets. I am getting hungry, so I stop in The TreeHouse for some barbeque. It’s toward the end of the lunch rush, but I am the only diner in the place. My journey is starting to take on a Twilight Zone quality. Three employees hover around me, making idle talk about the weather.

I pick up the old Main Street trolley line and spot my first post-lunch pedestrian outside New Age Renegade, a gay bar that seems much less formidable in the bright, early afternoon sunshine than it does at 2 a.m. I shuffle along behind my fellow walker for a few blocks before he stops to examine the stranger following him downtown. I consider catching up with him to explain my experiment and possibly interview him, but he sets off in a sprint across the street. Now we are walking parallel to one another down Main Street. We make it to Ninth and Main before he is sufficiently freaked out to take off running again, this time in a westerly direction down Ninth Street. This is also where I see only the second pedestrian since lunch, a homeless woman who stops me to ask for some change.

“Do you do a lot of walking around here?” I ask.

“Naw,” she says, “I’m just trying to get some change to get the bus back to my apartment.”

In the heart of downtown—“The Deco District” they have apparently rebranded it—I spot a few people actually walking places. One guy stumbles down a staircase adjacent to Orpha’s Lounge and nearly falls on top of me. Now I am a true flâneur, I think. I am anonymously adrift in the big city with its big buildings. But the thing that really appealed to the flâneur par excellence— Charles Baudelaire—is nowhere to be found:

The street about me roared with a deafening sound.
Tall, slender, in heavy mourning, majestic grief,
A woman passed, with a glittering hand
Raising, swinging the hem and flounces of her skirt.

Where are the “agile and graceful legs” that obsessed the Bad Boy poet? “The sweetness that enthralls and the pleasure that kills” is nowhere to be found. A half a mile north, I encounter a couple of teenagers making out at the Center of the Universe, but that’s about as sensual as my voyage gets. The City of Lights, Tulsa is not.

I’ve made it downtown by 3 p.m. so I set off for Greenwood, imagining the blaze of madness that engulfed Tulsa ninety years ago. There are plaques on Archer Street commemorating the businesses and residences destroyed in the Riot, sometimes three per block. How long have these plaques been here? Once again, I am the only pedestrian in sight, raising the question of who ever reads or notices these small plaques in the sidewalk. I walk up and down Greenwood, my head buzzing with noise of I-244 and thoughts of the Riot. A man with a three-legged dog is talking on his cell phone.

I cross back over the track and spot a couple of pedestrians heading into McNellie’s. It’s almost 4 p.m. and my legs are weary. The drift is pulling this buffalo-flâneur towards the bar, so I follow the couple inside. I take a seat by the window, watching for others caught in the drift of the city. After a few minutes, the Edward Hopperish loneliness wears off and I am simply bored. I check my iPhone and text my wife. I need a ride home.

When I met my wife, Louise, I was a long-haul truck driver, and I’d been on the road long enough that my connections in Tulsa had grown tenuous. I’d been living in the cab of my truck, and all the people I’d once known so well had begun to feel remote to me. Truck driving will do that to you after a while. You spend all your time on the road either completely alone or in the company of strangers you’ll never see again. I no longer had a place to stay in Tulsa, or at least it felt that way. By the time I quit trucking, I’d been seeing Louise whenever I’d pass through town, but staying at her place was out of the question, so I’d been sleeping in the truck when I stopped in Tulsa, just like I did in any other city. So, when I parked my truck for the last time in the Oklahoma City truckyard, drew my final pay, and drove my beloved old saab back to Tulsa, my first stop was an army surplus store. It was July—hot and humid.

I bought a sleeping bag, mosquito netting, insect repellent, a coffee percolator, galvanized plates and cups, a couple of lightweight tarps, a backpack, and other supplies, including a very cool pith helmet (the only hat I’ve ever looked good in, although Louise has a different opinion about this). Then I stopped at a liquor store and got a pint of W.L. Weller bourbon. Lastly, I stopped at Walmart and bought a rod and reel and some tackle. Then I drove up north, past Skiatook to Candy Creek.

Candy Creek has wallowed out a wild valley from the prairies of the old Osage Nation. Over the years, I’ve hiked every one of the valley’s 25 or so miles, and fished much of the creek, from its source to its mouth, through the wild horse pastures in the upper end, down into the broader, partially wooded lower end where it feeds into Bird Creek. Candy Creek Valley formed the back pastures for a series of large ranches along its course, so virtually no one lived in it. The lower end had been acquired by the Corps of Engineers for a dam project. The project was abandoned while still on the drawing boards. Once this happened, the valley became orphaned land—owned by the public but managed by no one. It had always been wild, but in its abandonment, it began actively returning to an earlier, wilder state.

I knew of some limestone springs that never went dry, out there deep in the valley. The water was cool and sweet. I drove as far as I could down the  abandoned valley road, hid my car behind a sand plum thicket, and then hiked to the springs with my gear. The first thing I did was dip my cup into the spring and drink, again and again, until I could feel the water’s weight in my belly. I spent the hot, humid July afternoon setting up a lean-to camp in the deep shade near one of the springs. I caught a couple of bass out of Candy Creek which I filleted, wrapped in foil, and cooked in the coals of my small fire, next to the chiming streamlet that tumbled out of the stone.

As the sun went down I sprayed myself with mosquito repellent, arranged my small fire so that I’d have something to look at as it slowly burned down, and sipped on Weller’s and spring water from my tin cup.

“You need to make a plan,” I said to myself. “Yeah, but not right now,” I replied.

Summer nights in the wild, tanglevine Oklahoma bottomland are noisy. All around me, near and far, all the creatures of the world, it seemed, howled, bellowed, and screamed all night long. Packs of coyotes on the move howled back and forth to each other, cattle bellowed on the distant upland pastures, dogs on the hunt yelped for joy, hoot owls and whippoorwills sang to themselves, frogs rang together like a thousand stuck doorbells, and countless species of insects created a collective, high-pitched drone. There was also the tormenting whine of mosquitoes probing around me for a way past the DEET.

The Weller’s and the campfire diminished at about the same rate. By the time the bottle was empty and the fire was out, I’d added my own voice to the chorus. The first time I howled, every other creature stopped to listen. After about thirty seconds, the insects could stand the silence no more and started up again, quickly rejoined by the frogs, and then all the others. At my second howl, they all quieted down just for a moment and then carried on.

By the third, my voice just blended in.

* * *

In the bright morning sunlight, I pulled the coffeepot off the fire. Once it stopped perking, I could hear the little stream tumbling away from the limestone spring. I poured a cup of coffee and sat with it in my hands, looking at the blue smoke rising like a genie. “You know what your problem is?” I asked myself.

“No, but I have a feeling you’re going to tell me,” I replied.

“You need more ritual in your life.”

A long-haul truck driver is a human pinball, bouncing randomly all over America, never knowing where or how far you’ll bounce next. I thought about that for a while as I drank my coffee.

“Maybe you’re right,” I replied, once I’d emptied my cup and stood up to break camp. “And I still need a plan, too,” I said.

Well, my plan was simplicity itself. I packed out, drove the old Saab to Tulsa, got an apartment by noon, and a job by the next day. Louise and I married and bought a house, and she and I and her son, Robin, whom I came to call my own son, moved into the house, and then he grew up and moved out. Then it was just the two of us in our small home, which we’d filled with books, music, and art. Much of the art is of her own creation. She is a brilliant and passionate painter.

Over the years, I remained a frequent visitor to Candy Creek. Sometimes, I camped close to its banks and fished its deep holes. Other times, I rambled the meadows, glassing birds, and  sometimes I just walked, exploring the rocky side streams that tumbled down from the surrounding uplands. Occasionally, I mused about the lack of ritual in my life. I’d wonder what it was like to take comfort in ritual. If you perform an act over and over again, an act that may otherwise be meaningless—that would almost certainly be meaningless if done only once—and you perform it in the same way each time, and at specified intervals, what do you get from that? Why is that attention to form so comforting to so many, so central to their identities? I felt that I must be missing out.

One day out there, I looked across the valley from the eastern ridge and noticed on the opposite ridge, about three miles distant, an isolated knob a little higher than the surrounding terrain. It had a pleasing curve and a copse of blackjack oaks on the crown. As I dropped down into the valley, it disappeared from view, so I walked across the valley floor, and then up the opposite hill, sensing my way toward it by dead reckoning until it re-emerged above me. Before long, I was standing on top of it. Just as I’d known I would, I had a clear view of the distant horizon in all directions. Looking east over the valley to the opposite ridgeline from where I’d come, I decided to build an observatory on the spot, where I could witness the sunrise on the first day of spring and the first day of autumn every year. I would make it a ritual and see what came of it.

I stacked fieldstones, ruddy sandstones, into a cairn about a foot taller than myself. At eye-level I left a window about six inches square, for a viewfinder. In the base of the window I placed a flat stone that protruded out from the cairn and came to a point that pointed due east, according to my compass. In the stone I cut a groove in a straight line as a sightline that ended at the point. Standing up to the cairn on its west side and looking into the viewfinder and following the sightline groove, my eye landed on the spot on the far horizon where the sun should pop up on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.

I admired my observatory from various distances as I hiked the several miles back to my car. Its form and function were pleasingly mysterious. Once the grass had covered my footsteps around its base, and healed the scars where the stones had been removed, it would be difficult for anyone to know how old it was, which also pleased me.

* * *

Fall approached and I took three days off from work. The last day of summer, I packed up and went out there. I found a pretty site in the edge of the woods at the base of the observatory hill and set up camp in the afternoon. I built a hearth and a lean-to and gathered firewood. Then I searched among boulders in a shady draw until I found the right one and, using a chisel and hammer, cut an image of a horse into its side. I’d stolen the design from a centuries-old Chinese drawing. I returned to camp and got a fire going. I heated up some beans and made coffee. After supper I climbed up to the top of the observatory hill.

First I inspected the observatory, but avoided looking through the viewfinder. It was unchanged in the months since I’d erected it. Then I found a good place to sit and faced west, where I watched the sun lower itself down to the horizon and melt like butter on a griddle. Once the first star came out, I walked back down to camp. I stared into the fire for a while without thinking. Then I stared up at the Milky Way for a while, and scanned it with my binoculars, not looking for anything but beauty, which was there aplenty. I didn’t have a watch, but I imagined it was still pretty early when I crawled into my sleeping bag and fell asleep.

When I woke up it was cold and deep dark. The Big Dipper had spun around the sky. I stoked up the fire and fell back asleep. When I woke again it was still dark, but it felt like morning inside me. I dressed, banked up the coals in the hearth and put on coffee. While the coffee perked I grew alert to the changing light of the sky. I hadn’t overslept and missed my first observation. I took my coffee and drank it standing out from under the trees, in the chilly wind, watching the sky closely as the stars dimmed.

I climbed to the top of the hill and stood around the observatory watching the eastern horizon. I felt more like a kid at Christmas than a man in September. The sky grew lighter until finally the sun was seconds from rising. I took my position and looked down the sightline and waited. There he was! My sightline was off a couple of degrees, so I quickly adjusted it with a few nudges. It was now empirically correct. Once the sun had cleared the earth I stepped back from the viewfinder, having completed my first observation.

I felt as if I hadn’t merely witnessed the turning of the earth, and swinging of the seasons, but that I had actively participated in these. After savoring the experience for a good long while, I went back down the hill to camp and had a leisurely breakfast in the crisp fall sunshine. Over breakfast, I pondered how the sunrise swings back and forth along the horizon between the spring and fall equinoxes. It behaves like a pendulum.

A pendulum’s speed varies constantly during its stroke, reaches maximum velocity at the bottom, and slows to a stop at each turnaround point, before reversing direction and accelerating back to the bottom. The sun’s apparent speed, as measured by its changing day-to-day position on the horizon, as it swings out the seasons, also varies constantly and in the same manner. Around the equinoxes, the sunrise positions change most rapidly. Approaching the solstices, the position changes slow to a stop, reverse direction and begin accelerating back to the next equinox.

Why should the sun behave like a pendulum? It seemed like a clue to something.

* * *

I spent that fall day exploring the woods and prairies around me. Just before sunset, I climbed back up the hill and observed the sunset by looking back through the viewfinder from the opposite side. I spent another night, and the next morning I broke camp after breakfast and walked down the valley to my waiting car. I got back to Tulsa mid-afternoon.

That became my twice-a-year ritual for the next several years. It was important to seal off a full 24-hour period on-site, in order to fully inhabit the place. I remember waiting atop the hill near the observatory, in the chilly pre-dawn, sometimes wrapped in a blanket, sipping coffee, my heart pounding, and my smoke-stung eyes riveted on the horizon beyond the valley as the sky grew lighter and lighter. I remember a feeling of victory as the top rim of the sun shimmered into view right at the end of my viewfinder sightline.

Leading up to each spring and fall season, as the pivotal day grew closer on the calendar, I became more and more restless in the city. By the time I headed out, I’d been thinking of little else for several days. When I came back from out there, I felt satisfied and serene for days afterward, so it seemed as if I’d found what I was missing out on.

One late afternoon out there I looked up at the hill from the edge of the woods by my camp and saw that one of the hilltop oaks was on fire. Studying it, I saw that it wasn’t really aflame but was glowing strangely, unlike any of the trees around it. Unlike anything I’d ever seen. I climbed up for a better look and, to my wonder, discovered that it was covered with monarch butterflies, thick as leaves, thousands of them basking in the late-afternoon sunlight. They’d stopped to spend the night during their migration to Mexico. I laughed out loud, and thanked God for the gift.

After several seasons of not allowing anything to get in the way of my semi-annual three-day ritual, one spring I let something stop me from going. I don’t recall what it was. My usual feelings of mounting excitement and restlessness had been muted that year. I witnessed the equinox sunrise from the driver’s seat of my car on my way to work. I couldn’t have missed it, actually, since Tulsa streets lie on a cardinal grid, and the sun rose right out at the end of the street, blinding all eastbound drivers. I’d be willing to bet that auto accident records for Tulsa would show a spike on the equinoxes.

I was so disappointed in myself that, the following fall, I set everything else aside and went out to the observatory. I had a fine time, as always, but my observation felt rote, my emotional involvement forced. The following spring was similar. And then I missed the following fall and subsequent spring.

I went out one last time the following fall but the spell had been broken. I sat on the hill and pondered it. I realized that I’d put the cart before the horse by trying to manufacture meaning out of ritual. Rituals arise out of pre-existing meaning. They confirm something meaningful. That’s what I learned about the power of rituals. Since then, I’ve returned to my old ritual-free way of life.

Although I continued to occasionally hike, fish, and camp in Candy Creek Valley, it was several years before I trekked back up to my observatory hill. I was surprised to find that my cairn had collapsed into a random pile of rubble. I blamed it on cows, those dumb agents of entropy. The only remaining signs of my having been there were the crude hearth at my old campsite, and the images I’d pecked into certain boulders.

The government, of course, had every reason to be defensive. The ATF had had a pair of eyes and ears in Elohim City and pulled her1 out, not because she was failing to pick up indications of serious criminality—she was—but because the agency was too afraid to act on them. It adopted a posture of studied ignorance and hoped for the best.

After the bombing, the ATF wanted desperately to avoid talking about Elohim City. Even after the FBI was given the Carol Howe file, [agents] Bob Ricks and Danny Defenbaugh never quite believed they had the full story. “Shame on them,” Defenbaugh said. “In upper case—SHAME ON THEM. Sometimes dealing with other players in this is like pulling teeth from a toothless tiger. Ask them why [they didn’t tell everything they knew]. They didn’t ever give me a good reason.” A contrite Magaw2 did not say a lot in the ATF’s defense. “He’s right,” he responded when Defenbaugh’s words were read back to him. “If we did know something and didn’t bring it forward, then shame on us.”

The FBI was far from blameless itself, having avoided looking into Elohim City for years. The decision to expend only token energy on the community after the bombing was the bureau’s alone. That mystified some of the FBI’s old pros, none more than Danny Coulson, who had spent his career chasing right-wing radicals and found the idea of shying away from Elohim City offensive and ridiculous.

“You still do your job, I’m sorry,” Coulson said. “You’ve taken an oath. You’re a professional, you figure out a way to do it. They’re afraid of another Waco … If that’s your attitude, get out of the business. Go into the shoe business. Be a chef. By its nature it’s risky. You’ve got to be smarter than that.”

***

Late one night in February 1995, Tim McVeigh was walking across the Colorado River bridge from Nevada to Bullhead City, Arizona, when a man in a Ford Mustang slowed down and asked if he wanted a ride. McVeigh had no better idea how to get back to Kingman, which was thirty miles away, and offered him $5. The man, whose name was Richard Rogers, laughed off the offer; he was looking not for payment but for casual sex. He had spent the evening at a casino in Laughlin and, as he later told the FBI, was feeling “a little horny.”

McVeigh’s camouflage fatigues and combat boots did not exactly fit the sexpot mold. But Rogers recognized him from an earlier hitchhiking encounter and remembered how McVeigh played with his penis and asked if he wanted to party. Rogers hadn’t been interested at the time, because he was on his way to meet another friend.

The conversation quickly turned to sex, and McVeigh asked Rogers, as he had six months earlier, if he wanted to party.

Rogers responded: “What do you mean?”

McVeigh spread his legs and groped himself. “We could have a really great time,” he said. McVeigh started rubbing Rogers’s penis through his clothes.

An hour later, the two of them were in Rogers’s trailer ten miles north of Kingman, sizing each other up and half-wondering if this was really a good idea. McVeigh talked about Waco, nobody’s idea of good foreplay, and peppered Rogers with questions about an airstrip in the desert hills. At 3:00 a.m., McVeigh grabbed his crotch again and said it was time for bed.

They took their clothes off and went at it. McVeigh’s tongue and throat action, Rogers later told the FBI, was “incredible”: “He was good at what he did.” McVeigh expressed an interest in anal sex, but Rogers turned him down, because he didn’t have a condom. According to Rogers, they were both too tired to reach orgasm. In the morning, Rogers made McVeigh eggs and bacon, and drove him into Kingman. Apart from brief sightings in the grocery store, they never saw each other again.

Assuming this story is broadly true—the FBI found Rogers credible enough to interview him seven times—it suggests that McVeigh, like Pete Langan3, had some personal baggage he was not in a rush to share with the rest of the Patriot Movement. Rogers thought it unlikely he was actually gay, just fooling around. He told the FBI McVeigh was most likely bisexual.

Intriguingly, this is the one intimate encounter of McVeigh’s anybody has ever come forward to describe—either in the graphic detail offered by Rogers, or any other way.

Of all the mysteries surrounding Elohim City, none is more vexing than the question of whether McVeigh visited and, if so, whether he derived any part of the bomb plot—inspiration, training, manpower—from the contacts he established in the community. Nobody has come forward with definitive evidence that McVeigh spent time at Elohim City. On the other hand, a large number of people—from law enforcement, the federal prosecution team, the radical far right, and even Elohim City itself—have dropped hints that he was there, that the government either knew or strongly suspected he was there, and that the information was kept quiet to prevent the criminal case spiraling out of control.

We know McVeigh called Elohim City for just under two minutes on April 5, 1995, because there is a record of it on the Daryl Bridges4 card. Millar’s daughter-in-law took the call and later said the young man on the line was looking for Andi the German5. McVeigh told her he was thinking of visiting in the next few days, and Joan Millar replied that, as a friend of Strassmeir’s, he was welcome any time.

The timing of the call was interesting: McVeigh had just spoken to a Ryder truck rental agency in Lake Havasu City, not far from Kingman, and was presumably making his bomb delivery plans. Was Strassmeir, or his planned visit to Elohim City, part of the calculation? Was he, as an FBI teletype later surmised, looking for new recruits because he did not think he could count on Nichols or Fortier?

The FBI files contain a reference to a second call from McVeigh to Strassmeir at Elohim City, this one on April 17, the day the Ryder truck used in the bombing was rented from Eldon Elliott’s. The information on this call is sketchier, because it was never linked to a specific set of phone records. According to an FBI teletype discovered in 2003, the bureau heard about the call from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the anti-extremist campaign group, but the SPLC has been reluctant to vouch for its authenticity ever since. Richard Cohen, the group’s president, said it was possible that the line in the teletype referring to a call “two days prior to the OKBOMB attack” could have been a clerical error and that the line should have read “two weeks.” In other words, just another reference to the April 5 call.

Over the years, the SPLC has backtracked from a lot of information connecting McVeigh with Elohim City. Twice in the 1990s, the group’s founder, Morris Dees, was quoted saying that he had information that McVeigh visited numerous times. He said it in answer to a reporter’s question at the Denver press club in May 1996, and he said it in an interview with the Indiana State University criminologist Mark Hamm in 1999. But when he addressed the issue again during a talk at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in 2004, he played down his previous statements. “McVeigh probably was at Elohim City, based on evidence we’ve been able to pick up—stuff I really can’t go into,” he said. “But I don’t think the entire connection is really there.”

If Dees was suddenly tentative on the question, other SPLC officials were emphatic: as far as they knew, McVeigh never went to Elohim City. “[Dees] may have said it,” a surprisingly dismissive Mark Potok, editor of the SPLC’s Intelligence Report, said in 2010, “but I very much doubt it’s true.” Both Potok and Cohen sought to minimize Dees’s role in the organization’s intelligence-gathering, and refused to make him available for interview.

All of this was starkly out of character for the SPLC, which usually broadcasts any sinister connection involving the radical right as loudly as it can. One possible reason for its reticence was its close relationship with the Justice Department, which had every reason to play down links between McVeigh and Elohim City. (Its official position throughout the federal trials was that no such link existed.) If the government had information, even secondhand information, placing McVeigh at Elohim City, failing to hand it over to the defense teams could have constituted a serious violation of the rules of evidence.

Did the government have such information? Bill Buford, the former ATF chief in Arkansas, said he was briefed on both verbal and written reports putting McVeigh at Elohim City. The material was not handed over in discovery, he said, but was put into a summary report written by the FBI and sent to the Justice Department. “I’d heard it by word of mouth and it was also in the report,” Buford said. “There’s a lot of information in there that has not been made available to the public.”

Buford could not remember the specifics, but the information referred to an actual visit, not just the April 5 phone call. How sure was he about this clamorous revelation? “I’m sure,” he said.

A number of other senior law enforcement officials were approached about Buford’s information, and none denied it. Bob Ricks said the FBI had found no evidence that McVeigh spent evenings or nights at Elohim City, but acknowledged: “He was always passing through.” Danny Defenbaugh said he could not remember what was in the FBI reports sent up to the Justice Department, but did not exclude it. Perhaps the most revealing line came from Scott Mendeloff, one of McVeigh’s prosecutors, who sought to argue forcefully that Elohim City was irrelevant to the investigation. “It’s not like we didn’t think he was there,” he said testily. “So he visited, but so what?”

When McVeigh’s own legal team asked about Elohim City, he did not acknowledge having been there, but he seemed to know all about Strassmeir patrolling the perimeter and standing guard in the driveway when visitors pulled up. McVeigh told his defense lawyer Randy Coyne that Elohim City was “pretty fucking hard- core.” And he said that Strassmeir and he were “brothers in arms.”

When would McVeigh have been at Elohim City? He received a traffic ticket just over the Arkansas state line in the fall of 1993, and spent the night in a nearby motel on September 12, 1994. Those have to be strong possibilities. Another intriguing date is November 1, 1994, when Tom Metzger, one of the godfathers of the radical right, paid a visit to Elohim City with Dennis Mahon. As Metzger remembered it, he spoke for half an hour in the church, watched the kids perform a dance, shook a few hands, and left again. But he also dropped a hint of more. “Those stories about sitting in another room and talking about stuff,” he said, without prompting, “that didn’t happen.” Was this Metzger pointing to the very thing he sought to deny? It is tempting to think McVeigh would have been there to take lessons from the master, and it was not far out of his way—he was driving from Kansas to upstate New York at the time. It would also have been an opportunity to meet Strassmeir, McCarthy, and Brescia.

The last time McVeigh could have visited—following the intentions he announced in his phone conversation with Joan Millar— was during the two weeks before April 19. This would put Elohim City at the center of the bomb plot. The timing would have been tight: McVeigh checked out of the Imperial Motel in Kingman on April 11, bought an oil filter in Arkansas City, Kansas—just over the Oklahoma state line—on April 13, and arrived at the Dreamland in Junction City on April 14. But it is also possible that he made a quick trip to the Midwest between April 7 and April 11. He was checked into the Imperial Motel on those dates, but the owner later said he did not see him, he used no towels, and his bed was undisturbed. There was a flurry of Daryl Bridges calls from the Imperial up to April 6, then nothing. Would McVeigh have wanted to keep paying for an empty motel room? He might have done if, say, he was transporting blasting caps, or the second Ryder truck seen by Lea McGown and her son on Easter Sunday. It was one way to cover his tracks and minimize the risk of exposure.

If all that sounds speculative, it is. The first two weeks of April are a big mystery when it comes to McVeigh’s movements, activities, and associations. On Saturday evening, April 8, a dancer at the Lady Godiva strip club in Tulsa was told by someone she later believed to be McVeigh that on April 19, 1995, she would remember him for the rest of her life. He was with two other men. Did they travel from the club to Elohim City? Kirk Lyons, of all people, did not exclude it—and he would have had an opportunity to know, because he was Strassmeir’s lawyer and confidant. “It’s possible he went through there on a weekend before the bombing,” Lyons said of McVeigh. “That’s possible.”

Grandpa Millar also did not exclude that McVeigh had been to Elohim City. A defense investigator who spoke to him in 1995 reported Millar saying “it was possible that he could have met Mr. McVeigh once or twice and that it was also possible that Mr. McVeigh could have visited Elohim City.” Millar was fiercely protective of his community, more interested in damping down speculation about criminal associations than in talking them up, so the indiscretion was unusual. In 1997, he was strikingly forthcoming once again when asked by the journalist Jonathan Franklin if any Elohim City residents were involved in the bombing. “There are legitimate questions to be asked, though I don’t know the answers,” he said. “I don’t mind an honest investigation.”

By that point, of course, Millar knew that no investigation had taken place, and after the trials there was little danger of one starting up. He had played the government masterfully for more than a decade. Jim Ellison’s disenchanted former deputy Kerry Noble summarized it neatly. “Two things the government doesn’t want,” he said, “another sedition trial that fails, and another Waco that fails. What have you got with Elohim City? A possibility of another sedition and conspiracy trial that fails, and another raid that fails. That makes Elohim City, unfortunately, have the upper hand.”

Find This Land at even more of your favorite Tulsa businesses, here.

Two hours earlier, during a special session of night court, Tulsa judge T.D. Evans had declared them all guilty of the crime of not owning a war bond—a conviction that smacked of political and ideological retaliation. All defendants but one were members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a worker’s union. The “Wobblies,” as they were commonly called, were opponents of the war effort and of capitalism. None of the men had a criminal record, but all men were fined a hundred dollars. [1]

They weren’t expected to pay for their crimes, at least not in money. Once the trial ended, policemen rounded up the seventeen and loaded them up in squad cars. Instead of jailing them, the police delivered the convicted men into the custody of the black-robed Knights of Liberty, [2] who were waiting for the Wobblies at the railroad tracks near Convention Hall. [3] The Knights kidnapped the Wobblies at gunpoint, tied them up, threw them into their cars, and drove them into the area west of town. [4]

“We were ordered out of the autos, told to get in line in front of these gunmen, and another bunch of men with automatics and pistols,” Joe French, one of the Wobblies, would later testify. One by one, they were pulled from the lineup and tied to a tree a Knight then approached each man with a double piece of hemp rope and whipped the victim’s back until blood draped his skin. Another man stepped forward and slathered boiling tar on the victim’s back with a paint brush, coating him from head to seat. In a final act of humiliation, the Knight then padded the victim’s back with feathers from a down pillow. [5]

“I’ve lived here for 18 years, and have raised a large family,” pleaded an older man in the group. “I am not an IWW, I am as patriotic as any man here.”

The man’s cries were ignored; every man was whipped, tarred, and feathered. The incident became known “The Tulsa Outrage,” and was reported in the national press. According to multiple interviews conducted by National Civil Liberties Bureau investigator L.A. Brown, two men were repeatedly identified as perpetrating the torture: Tulsa’s Chief of Police, Ed Lucas, and W. Tate Brady, one of Tulsa’s founders. That’s Tate Brady, as in Brady Theater, Brady Arts District, and Brady Heights. [6]

The following day, November 10, 1917, the front page of the Tulsa Daily World would make an announcement to the city regarding the flogging of the Wobblies: “Modern Ku Klux Klan Comes into Being: Seventeen First Victims; [7] Black Robed ‘Knights of Liberty’ Take Prisoners from Police to Lonely Ravine.”

THE SEGREGATION OF HISTORY

According to the Oklahoma Historical Society’s Encyclopedia of Oklahoma, Tate Brady was a “pioneer, entrepreneur, member of the Oklahoma Bar, politician, and early booster of Tulsa.” The Brady Heights Historic District website calls him “a pioneer Tulsa developer and entrepreneur, who was a powerful political force in the state’s early years. He was Oklahoma’s first Democratic National committeeman, and he built the Cain’s Ballroom and the now extinct Brady Hotel.” Tulsa World wrote: “Brady, a pioneer merchant, was an incorporator of the city, as well as a political leader at the time of statehood.”

All of these accounts exclude any direct mention of Brady’s less-than-honorable traits: his violent behavior, his attempts to segregate Tulsa, his deep involvement with the Klan and affiliated organizations, and his abuse of power.

“Well, it’s political,” one employee of the Oklahoma Historical Society said, when asked about the gaps in Brady’s biography.

Despite the widespread segregation of memory surrounding Brady, a rounder, more accurate portrait of the man emerges when all of the history is taken into account.

THE MAKING OF COMRADE TATE

Wyatt Tate Brady was born in Forest City, Missouri, in 1870, and moved to Nevada, Missouri, when he was 12. By the time he was 17, he had taken up work at W.F. Lewis’ shoe store, where he encountered his first brush with real terror—as a victim.

In the early morning hours of March 3, 1887, a customer unfamiliar to Brady entered the store. The stranger asked to see samples of shoes and offered to pay for them. Suspicious of the customer, Brady slipped his revolver from under the counter into his pocket. When Brady went to the safe for change, the stranger rushed Brady and shot at him, sending a bullet through Brady’s left ear. Brady fired a shot back, missing the robber. A disoriented Brady was then pistol-whipped and the robber made his getaway.

Undeterred by the assault, Brady set out for a new frontier.

Three years later, in 1890, the young bachelor headed toward the Creek Nation, Indian Territory, to make his mark as a merchant, providing goods for the established cattle trade and railroad. By Brady’s arrival, Tulsa had a cemetery, [8] a Masonic lodge, a post office, a lumberyard, and a coal mine.

Five years after his arrival in Tulsa, on April 18, 1895, Brady married Rachel Cassandra Davis, who came from a prominent Claremore family. She was 1/64th Cherokee, which gave her new husband special privileges among the Cherokee tribe. [9] Together, the Bradys had four children: Ruth, Bessie, [10] Henry, and John. Three years later, January 18, 1898, Brady and other prominent businessmen signed the charter that established Tulsa as an officially incorporated city. Tate Brady was now a founding father of Tulsa.

“Indian and white man, Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Protestant, we worked together side by side, and shoulder to shoulder, and under these conditions, the ‘Tulsa Spirit’ [11] was born, and has lived, and God grant that it never dies,” Brady wrote in a Tulsa Tribune article.

Brady was operating a storefront by this point and preparing to expand his operation when an event occurred that would forever change Tulsa’s history.

In 1901, the Red Fork oil field was discovered, which catapulted Tulsa onto the scene of world commerce. As the city began to swell with oil-minded entrepreneurs and workers, Brady saw an opportunity: the visitors needed a place to stay. In 1903, he opened the Brady Hotel, located at Archer and Main street, just a short walk from the railroad tracks. It was the first hotel in Tulsa with baths. By 1905, with the discovery of more oil in the Glenn Pool south of town, the Brady Hotel found itself with a rush of clientele. [12]

With his hotel and mercantile businesses thriving, Brady began broadening his scope of influence. He lent financial support to an early paper called the Tulsa Democrat, and he began to buy and develop land near his businesses. [13] along the way, Brady became a true Tulsa booster. In March of 1905, he, along with a hundred civic leaders, a 20-piece band, and “the Indian” Will Rogers, hired a train and toured the country to promote Tulsa as a city with unbound potential.

Brady’s Confederate sympathies ran deep—sympathies that would steer his actions in later life. His father, H.H. Brady, had fought as a Confederate soldier in the Civil War. By 1912, Tate Brady’s name had already appeared in Volume 20 of the Confederate Veteran. The magazine listed him as the commander of the Oklahoma Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. In 1915, Nathan Bedford Forrest, General Secretary of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, visited Tulsa. In the Confederate Veteran, Forrest wrote that he consulted with “Comrade Tate Brady,” and together they made plans for “an active campaign throughout Oklahoma.”

Forrest, it should be noted, was the grandson of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a pioneering leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

Nathan Bedford Forrest II, General Secretary of Sons of Confederate Veterans and a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Click thumbnail for larger image.

THE TULSA OUTRAGE

Tulsa’s oil was an important national resource during World War I. By 1917, the city was selling a tremendous amount of Liberty Bonds, a type of war bond that helped bolster the USA’s financial position during the war. Because the war effort consumed so much oil, however, Tulsa stood to gain massive economic benefits. Any opposition to the war was  viewed as a threat to personal prosperity and success.

To help support the war effort, the national defense act established the state Councils of Defense. In Tulsa, the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce fulfilled that role. Its members were asked to report any seditious activities, including statements of dissent, acts of industrial sabotage, or “slackerism” (the refusal to participate in work or war). In Tulsa, this essentially put business leaders in charge of finding and reporting anything or anyone they found threatening to the war effort.

No group was more hated or feared in Tulsa than the IWW. As individuals publicly opposed to the war effort, wobblies felt compelled to dampen industrial productivity by encouraging workers to strike. If such a strike were to occur, it could impact oil production and threaten the supply of oil to the military campaign. Tulsa’s economy was vulnerable to an act of worker sabotage.

On August 2, 1917, a sharecropper’s uprising in southeastern Oklahoma resulted in the arrest of several hundred people. The Green Corn Rebellion, as it came to be called, essentially ended the socialist movement in Oklahoma. It also proved that anti-war sentiments had not only reached a wide level of social acceptance among working-class Oklahomans, but had escalated to the point that many were willing to take up arms in opposition to the war.

Brady held a particularly strong antipathy for the Wobblies. Just a few days before the Tulsa Outrage, on November 6, 1917, Brady saw a rival hotel owner, E.L. Fox standing at the corner of Main and Brady streets. A year prior, Fox had leased an office to the IWW, unaware of the Wobblies’ mission. Their presence in the neighborhood infuriated Brady.

“When are you going to move those IWW out of your building?” Brady yelled at him.

“There’s no North Side Improvement Association anymore,” Fox replied, implying that Brady had no authority over Fox’s business affairs. [14]

An aggravated Brady punched Fox, knocking him to the ground and beating him into the gutter. dozens of people witnessed the assault, which was reported in the Tulsa Daily World the following day.

The Council of Defense had no better ally or mouthpiece than the Tulsa Daily World, Tulsa’s largest newspaper. Historian Nigel Sellars called the World “the most pro-oil industry, pro-war, racist, anti-foreigner and anti-labor paper of them all.” [15] Throughout 1917, most of the paper’s vitriol was aimed at the IWW, whom the World accused of being a German-controlled organization.

In what is arguably one of the lowest points in the paper’s history, Tulsa Daily World published an editorial titled, “Get Out the Hemp.” [16]Glenn Condon, a managing editor for the World, wrote that “the first step in whipping Germany is to strangle the I.W.W.’s [sic]. Kill ’em as you would any other snake. Don’t scotch ’em; kill ’em. And kill ’em dead.”

The day after the article was published, the seventeen Wobblies were convicted of a minor charge and handed to the Knights of Liberty by Tulsa’s own police. Brady was a ringleader in the kidnapping and ensuing torture in the woods west of town. Only two people in the mob were not robed—a reporter and his wife. The reporter was Glenn Condon, [17] who at the time was also serving as a member of the Council of Defense.

A month after the incident, in the December issue of their magazine Tulsa Spirit, the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce included this note:

“The Tulsa social event of November to attract the most national attention was the coming out party of the Knights of Liberty with about seventeen I.W.W. in the receiving line. As is usual in such social functions, a pleasant time was not had by some of those fortunate enough to be present.”

Glenn Condon, Managing Editor, Tulsa Daily World. Click thumbnail for larger image.

DIXIELAND

Terrible as it was, the Tulsa Outrage foreshadowed an event that would soon eclipse it in violence and notoriety. By 1918, extralegal violence, including lynchings, had spread throughout the state and had appeared to gain a quiet acceptance and collaboration among law enforcement, politicians, and business leaders. during this heated period of racial tension, Tate Brady and the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce brought the Sons of Confederate Veterans 28th Annual Reunion to town. [18]

Back then, the Sons of Confederate Veterans wasn’t merely a benign Civil War re-enactment club, as it is so often portrayed in today’s media. One of its organizing principles was, and remains, “the emulation of [the Confederate veteran’s] virtues, and the perpetuation of those principles he loved.”

As the largest gathering of Confederate veterans since the Civil war (more than 40,000 attended), the 1918 Tulsa convention celebrated Southern nostalgia and ideologies. Tulsa leaders banded together to raise over $100,000 to cover the cost of the event. Reunion visitors were treated to the best of Tulsa’s marvels: tours to the oil fields, free trolley tickets, and lodging with modern-day heated quarters. Although Tate Brady was the primary organizer of the reunion, its committee members included judges, ministers, and influential names that are still widely recognized in Tulsa: R. M. McFarlin, S. R. Lewis, Earl P. Harwell, Charles Page, W. A. Vandever, Eugene Lorton, and J. H. McBirney.

The event was so popular that it took up several columns on the front pages of the Tulsa Daily World, which helped promote a number of other ancillary events happening across the city. While the reunion was largely received as an economic boost of Civic Pride, history won’t excuse the darker attitudes that motivated the organization and its leaders.

The reunion’s figurehead, Nathan Bedford Forrest, served as the KKK’s Grand Dragon of Georgia, and an “Imperial Klokann” for the national Klan. [19] The Klan actively recruited its members from the Sons of Confederate Veterans. A few years after the convention, Forrest served as the business manager of Lanier College, the first KKK college in Alanta. “our institution will teach pure, 100 percent Americanism,” Forrest told the New York Times.

The 28th annual Sons of Confederate Veterans Convention demonstrated that Tulsa’s most powerful and influential leaders at the very least tolerated—and at the most promulgated—the beliefs and biases that primed Tulsa for its most violent display of racial tension, the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Publicly, there was no dissenting voice, no expressed opposition to the Tulsa Outrage or the reunion.

Many prominent Tulsans helped promote the Reunion, which was officiated by Nathan Bedford Forrest, a KKK leader.  Sons of Confederate Reunion letterhead courtesy Eddie Faye Gates. Click thumbnail for larger image.

BRADY AND THE RIOT

Tate Brady’s prominence and wealth increased with each passing year. In their tenure, his retail stores sold some $5 million worth of goods (60 million in today’s dollars), and the Hotel Brady did $3 million in business. He began to invest in coal mining operations and farming interests. In the early twenties he began expanding his property holdings, spending $1 million in property acquisitions— some of which was in Greenwood.

In 1920, Brady built a mansion overlooking the city and modeled it after the Arlington, Virginia, home of one of his personal heroes, General Robert E. Lee. The home contained murals of famous Civil War battle scenes favorable to the Confederacy. Brady and his wife held galas celebrating Lee’s birthday.

By 1921, Brady was a recognized city leader and a tireless booster of “Tulsa Spirit,” a term he coined. Yet despite his position at the top of the town’s social circles, he managed to find time to volunteer when civic duty called.

When the Tulsa Race Riot occurred on May 31, 1921, mayhem broke out in Greenwood, with buildings catching fire just two blocks from the Hotel Brady. During the early morning hours of June 1, white mobs numbering in the thousands were spotted on each major corner of the Brady district. [20] They headed eastward, invading Greenwood.

Brady and a number of other white men volunteered for guard duty on the night of May 31. During his watch, Brady reported “five dead negroes.” One victim had been dragged behind a car through the business district, a rope tied around his neck.

The following week Brady was appointed to the Tulsa Real Estate Exchange Commission. The Exchange, created by the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce, was tasked with assessing the property damage. [21] The loss was estimated at $1.5 million. In conjunction with the City Commission, the Real Estate Exchange planned to relocate black Tulsans further north and east, and to expand the railroad’s property over the damaged lands.

“We further believe that the two races being divided by an industrial section will draw more distinctive lines between them and thereby eliminate the intermingling of the lower elements of the two races,” the Exchange told the Tulsa Tribune.

The Exchange then created new building requirements that made rebuilding in the area difficult. The Exchange reasoned that if residential property could be inhibited, commercial property would take its place, increasing its value by over three times its original cost. Greenwood’s property value could skyrocket, and the races could be separated. To the Exchange commission, it must have seemed like an ideal plan.

Accusations of land-grabbing tormented Brady so much that he publicly issued a $1,000 reward to anyone who could prove that he benefitted from the Tulsa Race Riot. Brady, incidentally, owned rental properties that were destroyed in the riot, and tried to collect insurance on them, but did not succeed.

Despite the Exchange’s efforts, Oklahoma’s Supreme Court overruled the proposed ordinances, allowing Greenwood citizens to rebuild. [22] Black Tulsans were left to rebuild their homes without any aid from the city or from insurance companies. [23]

BRADY’S CURSE

Following the riot, Klan activity increased. A large parade of Klansmen, women and youth was organized in the months following the riot. In 1923, the Klan, established as the Tulsa Benevolent Society, paid $200,000 for the construction of a large “Klavern” or gathering hall that could seat 3,000 members. Beno Hall, as it was known, was located at 503 N. Main St., on land owned by Brady. [24]

Brady’s prominence in Oklahoma politics suffered a setback when Oklahoma Governor John C. Walton targeted the Klan. In August of 1923, Walton put Tulsa under martial law to investigate Klan activity.

During a related Oklahoma military tribunal in September 1923, Brady admitted his membership in the Klan. [25]

“I was a member of the Klan here at one time, “ Brady said, claiming he resigned his membership by October of 1922. “I have in my home the original records, some of my father’s membership in the original Klan, and I think that you [the current Klan] are a disgrace.” he didn’t like the Klan telling him how to vote, he explained. [26]

Brady’s testimony hinted at a larger social predicament. Oklahoma’s Democratic Party was losing its dominance to the republicans, putting Brady, a committed democrat, in a weaker position politically. Nevertheless, he still appeared outwardly hopeful.

“As I look about me during this my thirty-fourth year in Tulsa, I see locks, once raven, sprinkled with snow, and life’s fires burning low in the eyes of pioneers once bright,” Brady wrote. “As we start this new year of 1924 may the spirit of the pioneer—the spirit that built Tulsa—prevail as of yore. Cursed be he, or they, who on any pretext try to divide our citizenship and destroy this spirit.”

While he saw a sunny future for Tulsa, Brady’s own situation did not appear as golden. By 1925, his considerable holdings had been reduced to about $600,000, according to a Tulsa Daily World estimation, which also suggested that he was indebted on those holdings. [27] In the spring of that year, his son John Davis Brady—a promising law student at the University of Virginia—died in a car accident.

Lacking the political power he once held through both the Democratic Party and his Klan affiliations, diminished in his fortune, and aggrieved by his son’s death, Brady began to fall apart. Tulsans reported seeing him dining at his hotel alone, staring into space and leaving his meals untouched. Gone was the steeley-eyed entrepreneur. A portrait published in the Tulsa Daily World around this time shows an aged Brady looking weary and morose.

In the early morning hours of August 29, 1925, Brady walked into his kitchen and sat down at the breakfast table. He propped a pillow in the nook of one arm, and rested his head upon it. With his right arm, he took a .44 caliber pistol, pointed it at his temple, and pulled the trigger. [28] Brady, who worked to divide Tulsa along racial lines, died a victim of his own curse.

John Davis Brady. Student Photo, Central High School, 1921

THE BRADY DISTRICT TODAY

Today, the Brady Arts District is the focal point of multi-million dollar developments involving local organizations such as the George Kaiser Family Foundation, the Oklahoma Museum of Music and Popular Culture, the University of Tulsa, Gilcrease Museum, Philbrook Museum, and the Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa. Local businesses also thrive in the district: numerous bars and restaurants, [29] the family-owned Cain’s Ballroom (which once served as Brady’s garage), and the Tulsa Violin Shop, to name a few. A large new ballpark separates the Brady district and the Greenwood area. [30]

In 2005, the National Park Service/US Department of Interior published The Final 1921 Race Riot Reconnaissance Survey commissioned in 2003 by the Oklahoma Historical Society and the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Memorial of Reconciliation Design Committee. The purpose was to determine if Greenwood possessed enough “extant resources” to merit national significance. The survey concluded that the Tulsa Race Riot is significant because it is “an outstanding example of a particular type of resource,” and “possesses exceptional value or quality in illustrating or interpreting the natural or cultural themes of our national heritage.” In addition to the findings, the report explained Brady’s role in segregating not only Tulsa, but Oklahoma. [31] Despite these findings, the Tulsa Race Riot area, including Greenwood, remains unregistered.

Preservation consultant Cathy Ambler stated, in a February 2010 PLANiTULSA proposal: “Today, there is a faction of Tulsans who take issue with some of the associations and choices that Tate Brady was involved with, but there is no denying that he was a huge supporter of Tulsa and played a very big part in its early development.”

In September 2010, the Brady Arts District was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, owing to its significance as a place of commerce. It enjoys the full benefits allotted under the designation.

This article was originally published on Sept 1, 2011

Footnotes

1. Five men present were witnesses for the defense. Judge Evans convicted these men, along with the men charged, stating, “These are no ordinary times.”

2. Referred to as a “faction” of the Klan, the Knights of Liberty were a short-lived secret order with cells throughout the nation. In Oklahoma, they carried out extralegal action on behalf of the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce and its Council of Defense, in the tradition of the reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, the “Invisible Empire.” After the end of the war, the Knights of Liberty, in some areas of the country, turned against the Klan.

3.The Convention Hall building is now known as the Brady Theater.

4. The area where the Tulsa Outrage tortures occurred was then known as Irving Place Editions, an area today understood as a combination of the Crosby Heights and Owen Park neighborhoods.

5. The act of tarring and feathering is a medieval form of torture, dating back to the 12th century. The application of hot tar burned the skin; the inclusion of the feathers added insult to injury. The most recent case of tarring and feathering occurred in 2007 in Ireland.

6. The L.A. Brown Papers were acquired by This Land Press from the New York State Archives. L.A. Brown was the investigator of the Tulsa Outrage for the National Civil Liberties Bureau (now the ACLU).

7. According to the Oklahoma Historical Society, the Klan did not officially arrive in Oklahoma until 1920 when the Invisible Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Inc. registered in the state. However, as far back as 1907 there were reported incidents of extralegal activities by “white cappers.” The existence of a Ku Klux Klan prior to 1920 is well-documented. For instance, altus organized its own KKK in 1917, around the time of the Tulsa Outrage.

8. The cemetery was located at 2nd Street and Frisco Avenue—underneath the western half of the BOK Center.

9. Brady served as the General Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Cherokee Nation. According to Kiowa County’s Mountain Park Herald, Brady sought to recover lands and money given to Cherokee freedmen since 1866, which were then valued at $30 million.

10. Bessie Brady would eventually marry Eugene Sloan Adkins, father of art collector Eugene Brady Adkins. Philbrook Museum of Art and the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art share the $50 million Eugene Brady Adkins Collection.

11. This term was adopted by the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce and can be seen in use today on Tulsa Police Department patrol cars.

12. Not all of the clientele were oil-based. The Hotel Brady also served as a meeting place for Democrats. According to A Century of African American Experience (Don Ross, 2003), the hotel was “where Democrats headquartered, laid plans to control the Constitutional Convention leading to statehood that barred blacks, and also designed plots for segregation after statehood.”

13. Around this time period, in 1908, Brady sustained a serious—perhaps life- threatening—injury when he fell from a streetcar. It’s unknown whether he sustained any ongoing complications from that injury.

14. According to the Tulsa Daily World, Brady founded the North-Side Improvement Association, which “combined some of the functions of Civic Club and Chamber of Commerce on the north side.” Brady wanted Tulsa to develop toward the north into the Cherokee Nation.

15. Oil, Wheat and Wobblies: The Industrial, Workers of the World in Oklahoma, 1905-1930.

16. The editorial “Get Out the Hemp” appeared without a byline on the op-ed pages. The managing editor at the time was Glenn Condon. According to Sellars, the editorial may have been written by editor Eugene Lorton.

17. The year following the Outrage, Condon left Tulsa on a secret mission on behalf of the Council of Defense. He eventually settled in Tulsa in 1926, becoming a founder of the radio station KOME, “The Magic Empire.” He was also a well-known radio personality for KAKC and later KRMG. Condon was an early member, then president of the Tulsa Press Club and Benevolent Association. He died in 1968.

18. Merritt Glass and Tate Brady founded the Tulsa Chapter of Sons of Confederate Veterans in 1908, at the Hotel Brady. During the convention of 1918, the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce provided meeting rooms for Forrest, who was headquartered at Convention Hall. Following the reunion, the Chamber of Commerce wrote that Tulsans had raised a considerable amount of money toward the event, and that it was “the best investment in friendship and hospitality ever made by any city in the South.”

19. An “Imperial Klokann” was one of four positions known as an auditor; together with other administrators of the KKK, the Klokanns acted as an advisory cabinet to the Klan. Grand Dragons were leaders of state Klan organizations that were supported by 11 cabinet members. At the time of Forrest’s leadership, Georgia had about 156,000 members in the Klan, which earned Forrest an estimated 2.5 million annually in today’s dollars.

20. The pogrom consisted of Oklahoma National Guard units, Tulsa home Guard units under the command of Patrick J. Hurley, and various whites who were armed.

21. The real estate exchange was established by the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce.

22. The ordinance was overturned by the efforts of B.C. Franklin, father of noted historian John Hope Franklin.

23. By the summer of 1922 an estimated 85 percent of the Greenwood area was rebuilt.

24. Today, the location is an empty lot owned by the Oklahoma State Department of Highways.

25. The Klan played a role in impeaching Walton.

26. John C. Walton Papers, Box 14, folder 27, Proceedings of the Oklahoma Military Commission in the Matter of Klan Activity of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries, Norman, Oklahoma. Read and listen to the full transcript here.

27. A former owner of Brady’s mansion, Tim Lannom, told Tulsa World that Brady “committed suicide so his wife could collect a million dollar insurance policy … That was back in the days when you could get away with that.” In a follow up editorial, Lannom apologized for the statement, writing that he had done research and could not substantiate the rumor, and added that he could not find any evidence linking Brady to the Klan. Lannom died in 2007, the victim of a gunshot wound to the neck.

28. Tate Brady was laid to rest in Oaklawn Cemetery. Dr. Clyde Snow, a forensic anthropologist who consulted for the Tulsa Race Riot Commission in 1999, believes that a mass grave of Race Riot victims is located at Oaklawn. The City of Tulsa prohibited the Commission from excavating the site.

29. Disclaimer: Vincent LoVoi, publisher of This Land Press, is a partner in the McNellie’s Group, which operates The Brady Tavern restaurant.

30. The ballpark was originally to be located at 3rd Street and Greenwood Avenue, outside the areas identified in the report. It was relocated to its current location, which rests upon those lands designated as historically significant.

31. The report stated “a Tulsa city incorporator, and one of its first alderman, Brady built the first hotel in the city in 1903, where Democrats headquartered and laid plans to control the constitutional convention leading to statehood that provided the legal foundation for segregation.”

The title of this work comes from the Dreamland Theater, located in Greenwood.

Editor’s Note: Following the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995, The New Yorker editor Tina Brown assigned reporter Gerald Posner to investigate the possibility that there was an additional suspect in the bombing. Posner traveled throughout Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Texas gathering interviews, and accessed a large cache of FBI 302 files. In time for the second anniversary of the bombing, Posner filed the story with The New Yorker, but Brown never published the piece, fearing the FBI could release information that would sabotage the article.

While shorter excerpts of this article have appeared in TIME and The Daily Beast, it has never before been published in full. Posner has updated portions of the article to reflect new findings. In This Land Digital for iPad, you can read the entire 9,000 word article as written in 1997. Included with this exclusive work are 7 pages of discovery timelines and 20 pages of Posner’s notes from the field–notes that he took from internal FBI files that remain sealed to this day.

The article is only available in This Land Digital for iPad, which is available for download in the iTunes app store. Each edition of This Land Digital costs $3.99.

Excerpt from the article:

The Dreamland Motel, in Junction City, Kansas, beckons drivers along Interstate 70 with its large red, star-shaped sign, its name in flashing lights, underscored with the motto “Clean, Quiet, Reasonable.” All twenty-four rooms in the 1960s-styled one floor stone building face the highway. On Good Friday, April 14, 1995, Lea McGown, the 44-year-old German-born owner glanced up from the wooden counter in the motel’s main office as a battered, rusty yellow Mercury drove slowly down the driveway’s steep incline. She was tired after spending the day celebrating her son’s seventeenth birthday, but as she did seven days a week, she rose to meet her new guest.

She was accustomed to all kinds of visitors at the motel she had owned since 1988. Left with two young children ten years earlier by the American soldier she had married in Germany, she had created a successful business. McGown had also earned a reputation for her fierce independence, including personally protecting her property with her double-barreled shotgun to running off drug dealers who frequent small Midwest motels that line major interstates. When Timothy McVeigh walked into McGown’s office that Friday, of course, he would have judged her incorrectly—by her appearance she seemed merely a petite, pretty blonde, with kind, blue eyes. The inquisitive mind that developed as the daughter of a policeman, or the fearlessness with which she conducted her own late night security checks in a town with one of Kansas’s highest crime rates, was not immediately evident.

“I am quite isolated,” McGown told me in the Bavarian-style apartment she lives in behind the motel’s office. “We are way out in the middle of nowhere, and he sees a single woman, and a foreigner at that. He probably figures it’s the perfect place to be nobody.”

Read the rest of the article in This Land Digital for iPad, or subscribe to our print edition today.

Bad men are drawn to the City of God. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls it the meeting ground for America’s most sinister extremists. Many Oklahomans regard it as the most dangerous and mysterious place in the state.

For 30-plus years, a small, isolated community in Northeastern Oklahoma has been the subject of endless scrutiny. Law enforcement agencies and conspiracy theorists insist that Elohim City is a breeding ground for neo-Nazis and anti-government militias hell-bent on overthrowing the “Zionist Occupied Government” (ZOG) of the United States. The most damning accusation suggests Elohim City played a central role in the planning and execution of the Oklahoma City bombing.

When asked if she’d ever had the chance to visit Elohim, a woman with the Stilwell Democrat Journal deadpanned, “No, we like to breathe.”

* * *

“I find them to be quite upstanding citizens of my community,” says Adair County Sheriff Austin Young.

A sharp, stern man with a military presence, Young has the towering, no-bullshit persona of a Clint Eastwood character. His white hair is neatly cropped, his eyes maintain contact and rarely blink.

“What I read in the papers, I never experienced that with them,” he says.

Young says that, as game warden of Sequoyah County (just south of Adair) in the early ‘80s, he once received a report of poaching that ultimately led him to Elohim City, where the suspect resided. As he approached the entrance of the community, he was met by Elohim City founder Robert Millar and several armed guards. Young politely told Millar that the weapons made him a little nervous.

“Robert said to me, ‘Well, you have a firearm, don’t you think that makes us nervous,’ ” the Sheriff remembers. “So I unholstered my weapon and placed it in my vehicle. And then he sent the armed guards away.”

This encounter began a 30-year rapport between Young and Elohim City. Young ran for sheriff in the mid-‘90s, when neo- Nazis, a German Nationalist, the Midwest bank robbers, and Timothy McVeigh were supposedly frequenting the compound.

“I campaigned in all parts of the county, including Elohim, and as far as I know, they supported me,” Young says.

Shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing, a rumor spread that members of Elohim were planning a terrorist attack in Stilwell during the town’s annual strawberry festival. Young called and asked him point blank if the rumor was true. Millar answered, “Of course not. We would never do that.” The strawberry festival went off without incident.

After offering his opinions (“they’re not violent, not resistant, not how the media paints them”), Young suggests we go straight to the horse’s mouth.

He dials up John Millar, pastor and de facto leader of Elohim, and son of the community’s late founder. When Millar picks up, he explains that he has a couple of journalists from Tulsa who wish to visit Elohim. But instead of waiting for Millar to respond, Young offers the receiver to us.

“You’re not interested in repeating all those lies that were told about us?” Millar asks. And then he invites us for a visit.

* * *

Stephen Jones is a towering figure in Oklahoma’s legal community. Over his 46-year career as a defense attorney, the Enid native has represented a slew of high-profile pariahs and controversial characters, including anarchist Abbie Hoffman, serial killer Bobby Wayne Collins, suspected SLA radical Harawese Moore [1] and, most recently, indicted Tulsa Police Officer Jeff Henderson. But it was his work as Timothy McVeigh’s court-appointed defender for which he’s best remembered.

“When the Oklahoma City bombing happened, it didn’t surprise me at all,” Jones tells us one Saturday afternoon in his Enid office. “I was shocked that it was Oklahoma City. But that somebody would blow up a building and kill a lot of federal employees? That wasn’t a surprise at all. I had sensed for some period of time that there was a significant alienation of people in the Great Plains. There was a genuine hatred of the federal government, a hatred of the Clintons. I had not seen anything like it since I worked for the republican state committee in Texas when the Kennedys were in office in the early ‘60s.”

Jones believes that this anti-government sentiment reached a tipping point on April 19, 1993, when ATF and FBI agents assaulted another eccentric religious community: the Branch-Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. When the siege was over, 81 men, women, and children were dead.

“You have the primitive evangelical community,” Jones says. “And the defining moment for a lot of those people—and this narrows down to Elohim City—was the assault on the Branch-Davidians … Tim McVeigh told me that he sat in a Bradley tank; he knew what those tanks could do. And those images of that tank punching holes in that building, for several million people, probably more than 10 million people, that was a Biblical prophecy come true.”

McVeigh watched closely, first on television and then in person, as the nightmare at Waco unfolded. This proved to be his breaking point. Disturbed by what he witnessed, McVeigh began to plot his own revenge on behalf of the Branch-Davidians. Two years later, his vengeance became a reality when 168 people, including 19 children, died in the Oklahoma City bombing.

It’s well documented that Jones did not buy the government’s conclusion (re-enforced by McVeigh himself) that McVeigh conceived and executed the bombing almost entirely alone, with only the most minimal assistance from Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier. Jones believes the government was desperate for swift, quantifiable justice and chose to focus only on developing an airtight case against McVeigh and Nichols rather than fog the issue of their guilt by fully exploring the possibility of a broader conspiracy. Jones does not believe the evidence against Elohim City provides a sufficient answer.

“There is no smoking gun that shows involvement of any of the people in Elohim City,” he says. “There is certainly, in two or three instances, against the backdrop of this, a pretty convincing case that some people in Elohim City may have been involved.”

For the man who spent years studying every tiny pebble of the mountainous evidence, Elohim City is just another “what if?” scenario, doomed to float in the ether, a question mark whose answer is forever unknowable.

He agrees, though, that Adair County is a poetic fit for the community.

“Throughout the history of (Eastern Oklahoma), there has been more chicanery, isolationism, parochialism, xenophobic attitudes, distrust of outsiders, ‘We settle things our way,’ ” he explains. “So Elohim City, yes, is comfortably located. Very comfortably. Historically, it blends in.”

* * *

You won’t find Elohim City on any map. The FBI has dedicated an incredible amount of time, money and manpower to investigating and monitoring the town’s activities. Yet, this idyllic hamlet (known to its residents as “God’s City,” the Hebrew translation of Elohim) remains well hidden, impossible to find without the assistance of one of the few people in the world who’ve actually been there. Some reports reference Fort Smith as the nearest town, others Sallisaw, Muldrow, or Stilwell. They’re all more or less right, but also dead wrong: Elohim City is not “near” any town; its 400 acres are situated as far as possible from nearby civilization.

The western edge of the Ozarks begins here in Adair County, a sparsely populated spread of bucolic communities with a mere 22,000 residents (43 percent of whom claim Native American blood) over 577 square miles. The pastoral beauty of the majestic, unpredictable terrain stands in stark contrast to the rural poverty that plagues much of its population. Roadsides are often littered with garbage—discarded, empty cans of Busch beer, cast-off plastic grocery bags, cigarette butts—and road signs are peppered with bullet holes. Gutted shotgun shacks and ramshackle houses with landfill front yards rest precariously next to forests of resilient pines and dead, twisted post oaks. Multitudes of modest white churches adorned with hand-painted signage offer a point of communion for residents to congregate and socialize.

Underneath the surface malaise and natural wonder of Adair lies an explosive history, one that informs Elohim’s existence. This is the heart of the Cherokee Nation, the last stop on the Trail of Tears where 11,000 Cherokee Indians were forcibly relocated. The area’s history is America’s history, fraught with instances of revolt and rebellion, of fierce individualism repeatedly clashing with a government status quo. This is the territory where Cherokee general Stand Watie held out against Union troops, making him the last Confederate general to surrender at the end of the Civil War, thus ending the South’s campaign for secession. It’s the home of Ned Christie, a Keetowah Cherokee traditionalist falsely accused of killing a federal marshal. When he wouldn’t surrender, a posse of hired guns from Fort Smith pushed a burning wagon into Christie’s fortified home.

The James Gang hid out here, as did Belle Starr and her bunch, the Dalton Boys, and Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd. In 1977, Gene Leroy Hart, a Cherokee, was accused of the brutal rape and murder of three girl scouts in Mayes County. Hart was a violent local fugitive who’d previously been convicted of raping two Tulsa women. Despite the public outcry, a Mayes County jury acquitted Hart.

Today, the Cherokee Nation is humble home to small-town Oklahomans, many of whom are largely untouched by 21st century development. The landscape is wild and primitive, and self-governance is necessary for day-to-day survival. And the area’s legacy of isolationism and individualism continues, carried on in large part by Elohim City.

* * *

For five miles, a dirt path snakes alongside a mountain. Then suddenly you see it: a poster featuring the Ten Commandments tacked to the silver gate of a barbwire fence. Nearby, a mangled, abandoned mailbox limply hangs, begging to be put out of its misery. Several hundred yards later, the incline abruptly levels as the trail penetrates the outskirts of Elohim City.

Serenity permeates the village. The day is bright and sunny, and the view of the Ozarks is breathtaking. For all the violence and racism assigned by outsiders, the town feels more like a spiritual oasis than a terrorist compound. There are no armed guards waiting. A small terrier roams free while children play in the road. A quirky collection of huts, trailers and cottages spread across the property intermingled with several hulking, alien-like stone structures whose bubbled, dome roofs betray the off-kilter eccentricity of their builders and inhabitants.

A modest cottage rests on the side of the town’s only artery, its Main Street. A tattered, faded American flag waves in the front yard not far from a child’s jungle gym.

The portly, white-haired man on the porch is John Millar.

“Y’all get lost?” he asks, smiling, in a country drawl. His tone is relaxed and friendly and he invites us in.

Millar’s home could be a model showroom for Pottery Barn— simple, clean, and elegant, with hardwood floors and a modern kitchen furnished with contemporary appliances. The décor is exact and unobtrusive. On one wall hangs a large digital clock, on another a faux-rustic bronze piece etched with the phrase “The Destination is the Journey.” Framed photographs of family on coffee and end tables are given ample room to breathe. You could mistake the locale for middle-class suburbia.

Millar settles into his chair. “So, what do y’all wanna know?”

* * *

In 1973, an ex-Mennonite pastor from Canada named Robert Millar, acting on what he believed was a vision from God, moved his family from rural Maryland to a large patch of land nestled high in the Ozarks, a mere stone’s throw from the Oklahoma-Arkansas border. Elohim City was conceived as a spiritual city of refuge for followers of an obscure offshoot of Protestantism called Christian Identity, which teaches a racialist, Eurocentric take on Old Testament fire-and-brimstone piety. Though the elder Millar’s vision that prompted the move could be called “apocalyptic”—he claimed to see future wars, natural disasters and civil unrest—John Millar maintains that Elohim was not created to be a spiritual bomb shelter.

“We didn’t come out here to escape like some people do,” Millar tells us. “They think the world’s going to explode or fly away or something, and that’s their right to believe that. But that’s not our vision. Armageddon is not our vision. We came out here to express what we feel the Holy One, or God, is wanting to express through us. And so our hearts are turned towards the heavenly spiritual realm.”

The pastor insists that his community is focused on heaven alone. Not the government, not a race war, just peaceful communion with the Creator. He cited factoids—“None of us have ever been convicted of a felony”—and repeatedly renounced the idea that they’re a hate group. “People think that because we believe in Christian Identity that we hate other races. We don’t teach hate. We don’t put up with that.”

Millar is polite, generous, and accommodating throughout the interview, never once taking the hardline on any issue. The idea of a “white separatist compound” conjures images of a completely autonomous community forbidden from interacting with mainstream society; this is not Elohim City. When Millar speaks of politics and morality, his ideas have a surprisingly Libertarian, live-and-let-live bent to them.

Many of Elohim’s residents, for instance, hold jobs in town. The children are homeschooled in communal fashion—most of the parents take an active role in the education of not just their own kids, but in their neighbors’ as well; it’s Hillary Clinton’s “It takes a village” concept realized in the most literal sense. Weekly trips to town to eat at local restaurants, visit the library or see a movie are not uncommon. The homes even have Wi-Fi. There’s little difference in living conditions between Elohim and your typical Edmond or Moore outliers.

Millar does acknowledge that Christian Identity’s racially charged theology is at odds with modern notions of equality and color blindness.

“We teach that the scripture is against intermarriage with other races,” he confesses. According to the Oklahoma Department of Commerce, 26.3 percent of marriages occurring between 2008 and 2010 were between two people of different races, ranking Oklahoma second in the nation for interracial couples. “[Intermarriage] is a big issue; most of your churches want to promote that. We think that’s totally unscriptural. That doesn’t mean we hate them, not at all. We think you destroy both races when you marry in.”

The core philosophy of Christian Identity is an uncomfortable mixture of traditional Judeo-Christian mythology and a passive form of modern white supremacy. Elohim residents observe the Sabbath on Saturday, and many adhere to the ancient dietary restrictions of the Old Testament, though Millar is careful to point out that it’s not a requirement. According to Identity, when ancient Israel fragmented, the tribe of Judah, “God’s chosen people,” migrated to northern Europe and eventually the U.S. In other words, the true Jews, according to Millar and Identity followers, are Caucasians. [2]

“That might sound really strange to you,” says Millar. “But we believe that your Scandinavian, your Germanic, your Anglo-Saxon, your Celtic people, are different waves of immigration that came through. They’re really all cousins and they’re part of the same people from ancient Israel.”

Since the OKC bombing, three things fueled suspicion about Elohim’s complicity: the company Elohim founder Robert Millar chose to keep, the testimony of a government informant named Carol Howe who infiltrated the community, and circumstantial evidence suggesting that Timothy McVeigh may have been in contact with Elohim residents in the months leading up to the bombing.

“For over a year we were scrutinized by the FBI,” Millar tells us. “We didn’t like it, but we thought it was the duty of the federal government to chase down whoever did that. So we were scrutinized sideways, every which way you could think.”

Millar maintains that the residents of Elohim never held a violent agenda against the government, nor any desire to participate in some apocalyptic religious battle. But according to Mark Hamm, a professor of criminology at Indiana University, in the early ‘80s, the peaceful residents and elders of Elohim became radicalized as they developed a rapport with a similar white Separatist group from the northern Ozarks called The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord (CSA). Unlike the benign Elohim City, the members of CSA didn’t just passively distrust the U.S. government—they were stockpiling weapons and conducting rigorous military training in order to overthrow it. Furthermore, CSA had close ties to the Order of the Silent Brotherhood, a shadowy organization of bloodthirsty neo-Nazis who fashioned themselves as Aryan Warriors in the tradition of the Phineas Priesthood. [3]

From Hamm’s 2001 book In Bad Company: America’s Terrorist Underground:

Originally a pacifist community, Elohim City began a long, slow tilt toward militancy following Millar’s 1982 address before another far-right group’s gathering—the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord’s national convocation at CSA headquarters in nearby Bull Shoals Lake, Arkansas. It was there that Millar met CSA founder James Ellison, a militant neo-Nazi who would later join forces with Robert Mathews’s Order in what was to become what is called the War of ’84—a campaign of terror against ZOG including a series of assassinations, fire-bombings, and robberies. “Millar taught CSA about God, and they taught Millar about guns,” said a former CSA member to a reporter.

The FBI considered the CSA to be the “best trained civilian paramilitary group in America,” and was closely monitoring its activity.

On April 19, 1985, exactly ten years prior to the Oklahoma City Bombing, the FBI surrounded CSA and demanded the surrender of Ellison, who was wanted for conspiring to acquire automatic weapons. For four days, a tense cold war ensued as Ellison refused to surrender. Robert Millar traveled to the compound under the guise of negotiator, but according to Ellison’s right hand man Kerry Noble (who ultimately renounced the CSA and now writes and speaks on the dangers of right-wing extremism) Millar was actually there as a witness in the event that the government drew first blood. Later, the newly militant Millar bemoaned the fact that Ellison ultimately surrendered peacefully.

“Jim was wrong to surrender,” Millar told Noble while visiting him in prison. “He should’ve shot it out with the feds.”

Millar also served as spiritual adviser to Richard Wayne Snell, one of CSA’s most violent members, who was put to death for the murders of a black state trooper and a pawn shop owner whom he believed to be Jewish. [4] During the trial, Millar testified as a character witness on Snell’s behalf. Snell was executed on April 19, 1995 in Ft. Smith Arkansas, twelve hours after the Oklahoma City Bombing and ten years to the day after the FBI’s siege of CSA. Millar and his son John later retrieved Snell’s remains from the state and ultimately buried him in Elohim City.

When asked about his father’s relationship with Snell, Millar’s tone becomes sharp.

“Snell’s body is here,” he says. “I went to pick it up with my dad, his remains, at the request of his wife, okay?”

By forging a relationship with Ellison, Snell, and the CSA, Elohim City effectively laid the foundation for the scrutiny, suspicion and rumors that would plague the community in the years to come, reaching a fever pitch in the mid-‘90s.

* * *

“We didn’t know Timothy McVeigh,” Millar insists. “Never heard of him until the bombing. No connection whatsoever.”

In the grand jury indictment of McVeigh, the government alleged that the plotting of the bombing began in early September of 1994, while McVeigh was staying at a motel in Vian, Oklahoma, less than an hour away from Elohim City.

“It is true that Tim McVeigh was there that day, that’s what the hotel registration shows, and it is true that that’s off the beaten path for him,” Jones acknowledges. “Tim McVeigh almost never went to Eastern Oklahoma via Western Oklahoma.”

It’s believed that during this time, McVeigh was in contact with members of the Aryan Republican Army (ARA), a ragtag group of white supremacists who executed a series of bank robberies in order to fund anti-government activities (earning the media nickname “the Midwest bank bandits”). Evidence suggests the ARA was in Elohim City at the same time McVeigh was in Vian. The exact nature of McVeigh’s relationship with these men (Pete Langan, [5] Richard Guthrie, Scott Stedeford, Kevin McCarthy and Michael Brescia) and, by proxy, Elohim City, is foggy. People like Mark Hamm hypothesize that the ARA helped to fund the bombing with their loot and used Elohim as a sort of safe house, an idea known as the “theory of multiple John Does.” In Hamm’s book, ARA leader Pete Langan, who is currently serving a life sentence plus 35 years for his role in the robberies, is interviewed extensively and appears to be honest and forthcoming about his criminal activities. But he denies any connection to the bombing, and he minimizes Elohim’s significance as anything other than a spiritual refuge. McVeigh denied the existence of accomplices to his dying breath. It’s argued that there are a multitude of potential reasons for both men to lie, but the fact remains that nothing has been proven.

* * *

In March of 1995, the government had planned to raid Elohim City based on ATF informant Carol Howe’s allegations.

Howe, a 24-year-old Tulsa debutante-turned-skinhead trophy queen, was brought to Elohim City by her boyfriend, white supremacist and would-be celebrity of the militia movement, Dennis Mahon. A former Imperial Dragon of the KKK, Mahon was now leader of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR) in Tulsa. [6]

Jones calls Mahon a “freakshow,” a “burlesque figure of comedy,” a man prone to “making extreme statements and engaging in extreme acts of self-promotion.” John Millar calls him a friend.

“I don’t know what he’s done in his life,” Millar demurs, when asked about Elohim’s relationship with Mahon. “He seemed like a decent man to me. I agree with some of his thoughts. Not all of them, not by a long shot, but I do agree with some of his thoughts.”

Mahon had plucked Howe from her privileged existence and taken her as a lover and protégé. He delivered her to his friends at Elohim for spiritual indoctrination, but she’d already been contacted by the ATF and turned into an informant. Upon her arrival, she began reporting her findings. She claimed Millar and company were stockpiling weapons, preaching increasingly aggressive anti-government rhetoric, and, most importantly, discussing plans for an attack of some sort. This seemed to confirm the government’s worst fears: Elohim City was a powder keg of anti-government rage, a place where, in Hamm’s words, “every resident down to the smallest child was armed and dangerous” and “underground bunkers held vast stores of ammunition, grenades, and explosives, even chemical and biological weapons.”

Howe’s was one of the more sensational puzzle pieces of the bombing case. When investigative reporter J.D. Cash broke her story in the McCurtain Daily Gazette during the Terry Nichols trial, a national media feeding frenzy ensued. She was profiled in numerous magazines and newspapers, interviewed by Diane Sawyer, frequently referred to by reporters as “glamorous” and “beautiful.”

In linking Elohim to Oklahoma City, many conspiracy theorists point to Howe’s testimony in the Nichols trial, in which she claims to have witnessed Timothy McVeigh’s presence at the compound. From the court transcript:

Q. Now, are you familiar with what Timothy McVeigh looks like, Ms. Howe?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. Have you seen photographs of Timothy McVeigh?

A. Yes, I have.

Q. Did you ever see Timothy McVeigh at the Elohim City compound?

A. I believe I did.

Q. All right. When did you see him?

A. It was in July of 1994.

Q. Okay. And where did you see him?

A. He was at a section of the compound walking across a lawn near the church building.

But Howe was problematic. She had a history of lying. Her stories were inconsistent and contradictory, and with more attention each story grew more elaborate.

“Like many former Soviet spies that come to the United States, Howe’s story tended to get better over a period of time,” Jones says now. “And then there’s always new revelations as [informants] think they’ve been abandoned or forgotten or they want to increase their stipend or whatever. They remember something new.” Jones says he discounted everything Carol Howe said after she acquired an attorney and was thrust into the spotlight.

The FBI’s March 1995 planned raid against Elohim never materialized due to growing doubt on the government’s part over Howe’s credibility. Furthermore, Howe was ultimately deemed unreliable and her testimony in the Nichols trial was thrown out, making it unavailable for consideration to the jury. Mention her name to Millar, and you can almost see the blood boiling beneath his skin.

“They wouldn’t even use her testimony,” he says with incredulity. “She’s so unstable they wouldn’t even use her testimony. That’s one of the things we don’t appreciate about our government. They use people who are unstable, give them money and finance them to do unethical things. And that’s what they found—she was so unethical they wouldn’t even use her as a witness, okay?”

* * *

Another difficult question regarding Elohim’s connection to the bombing centers around Timothy McVeigh’s relationship with a German Nationalist named Andreas Strassmeier. Strassmeier wore fatigues and a swastika, was obsessed with firearms, and lived in Elohim City. McVeigh met Strassmeier at a Tulsa gun show in 1993.

“There was a lot of speculation on how they made contact,” Millar says. “We don’t know. We have a little over a hundred residents, and if they go to a gun show or a movie or a restaurant, I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I’m not interested. But I don’t want them doing anything illegal, okay? And we make that very clear.”

In Kingman, Arizona, shortly after he’d rented the Ryder truck he would eventually convert into a weapon of mass destruction, McVeigh used a calling card to dial Elohim City. McVeigh asked the woman who answered if he could speak with “Andi the German.”

According to Howe, Strassmeier was the community’s head of security, though Millar vehemently denies this.

“Never—he was here, but he wasn’t head of Elohim City security,” says Millar. “He liked playing with guns, so maybe he thought he was head of security and wanted to walk around with that. We let people think what they want, we believe in freedom. But we never gave him that position of authority.”

The question of plausible deniability looms large over Elohim. The racialist ideology of Christian Identity and the geographic seclusion of Millar’s community no doubt attracted men with agendas, but are the community’s elders responsible for the behavior of every guest that passes through? For his part, Robert Millar quickly expelled Andreas Strassmeier from Elohim City soon after he became aware that the FBI was looking at Strassmeier for possible ties to McVeigh and the bombing. Strassmeier ultimately fled to Germany and was never prosecuted.

* * *

“I have a niece who’s going to a local college,” Millar tells us. “She wants to be a lawyer. Her criminal justice professor was talking about terrorists and the Arabs and the Muslims, and then he said, ‘Well, we have [terrorists] right up our hill from here, and if you go up there, they hate other races and they’re liable to just shoot you for anything.’ And my niece raised her hand and said, ‘I live up there! That doesn’t happen!’ ”

Millar is clearly vexed by this judgment. He points out that in the 38 years of Elohim’s existence, nobody’s ever been shot on its property, unlike the surrounding communities. “But because of the stigma and because of us not being politically correct in the eyes of the media, we have a professor in the Criminal Justice class who throws us in with the terrorists. I don’t appreciate that, and he will hear from me. That just happened two weeks ago, okay?”

He pauses, then adds: “You can write that: ‘We’ve never had anyone killed here.’ ”

Before we depart, Millar gives us a tour of Elohim’s new sanctuary, still under construction. The Reverend leads us into the beautiful, cavernous chapel, built with the hands of the residents. He apologetically explains that he would normally show us their current church, but the community has no doubt already congregated, and reporters aren’t allowed to sit in on their services. Outsiders still make the community uncomfortable.

After the tour, we say our goodbyes and Millar leaves us to find our own way out. With its residents all gathered for service, Elohim City is a ghost town. The air is still and peaceful. The warmth of the sun, the soothing hum of the natural ambience, the majestic view of the Arkansas wilderness—in this moment, it’s obvious why these people are here. On the way out, we notice a primitive, white sign mounted on the side of the road, adorned with a bright red spray-painted phrase: “Jesus Saves.”

* * *

After decades of scrutiny and mountains of circumstantial evidence, the government has still found no cause to take action against Elohim City. A second Grand Jury investigation of the bombing, convened by State Representative Charles Key to examine loose ends Key and others believed the government did not address to satisfaction in its initial investigation, came up empty-handed on the community.

“We have made every effort to try to identify any plausible connection between [Elohim City] and the bombing,” it concluded. “In spite of a possible telephone call from Timothy McVeigh to Elohim City in April 1995, we have been unable to find such a connection.”

Does God’s City deserve to be granted peace? The questions raised by its proximity to violent right-wing extremism will likely continue to haunt the town for the span of its existence. Image rehabilitation is hardly an option, considering the endless documentation devoted to impeaching the community’s collective character. It doesn’t help that Millar’s own sympathies to violent men ensure that Elohim City will continue to attract them. Then again, Millar and his community aren’t seeking social acceptance; they want the right to exist peacefully, outside the parameters of mainstream society. Whether or not society allows that is another matter.

Footnotes

1. Coincidentally, like Jones’s most famous client, Moore was also accused of bomb- ing the Murrah building. In 1998’s controversial tome on the OKC bombing, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, author David Hoffman writes, “In the mid-‘70s, Oklahoma resident Harawese Moore was convicted of planting an incendiary explosive device outside both the federal courthouse and the Alfred P. Murrah Building.”

2. References to the Christian Identity belief can be traced as far back as The Declara- tion of Arbroath on April 6, 1320 in which 37 Scottish Chieftains wrote the Pope asking for assistance in Scotland’s battle against England.

3. In the book of Numbers, upon discovering an Israelite man and a Midianite woman copulating, the Jewish warrior Phinehas bludgeoned the couple with a spear as pun- ishment for the interracial relationship (race-mixing was expressly forbidden by God). For the execution, Phinehas was rewarded by God with “an everlasting priesthood.” Many militant white supremacists believe that they are called by God to carry on this legacy and it’s been speculated that historical figures such as John Wilkes Booth and Jesse James considered themselves to be Phineas Priests. Robert Mathews and his organization the Order of the Silent Brotherhood are among the most violent recent examples of men committing heinous acts of murder and mayhem under the banner of the Phineas Priesthood.

4. In 1983, Snell, Ellison, and Noble traveled to Oklahoma City to case the Murrah Federal building as the potential target of a CSA attack. However, during preparations, the men interpreted a weapons malfunction as a sign from God and the plan for
attack was canceled. There’s been some conjecture that the Murrah building may have been chosen as the target of the April 19 scheduled for execution the same day.

5. Langan was the ARA’s unofficial leader and a self-proclaimed mem- ber of the Phineas Priesthood. Upon Langan’s arrest in 1996, authorities discovered that his toenails were painted pink and his entire body was devoid of hair. It later came out that Langan was a pre-op transsexu- al who, when not robbing banks, cross-dressed and lived as a woman named Donna.

6. In February, 2012, Mahon was convicted in federal court of a 2004 bombing in Scottsdale, Arizona that injured Donald Logan, a black city official. Mahon’s sentencing hearing is May 22; he could face up to 100 years in prison. Evidence against Mahon was produced in large part through information provided by Rebecca Willams, a government informant who met Mahon and his twin brother Daniel (who was also tried but acquitted) at a Catoosa, Oklahoma trailer park in 2005.

And it was normal to have a father who made his living in the backyard, in a three-car garage he converted into a studio, where he painted pictures all day and people came over to buy them. One day I was mowing the backyard when a car pulled up and out stepped a mountain of a man. I stopped the mower and the man asked where my father was. When I said he wasn’t home, the mountain thundered, “Tell him Sampson came by. Will Sampson.” Of course you can sell artwork from your backyard to people, including famous actors, and make enough to send five kids through private schools and college. This didn’t seem strange. I mean, no stranger than a rock star moving onto my block.

I grew up in Tulsa, in Sunset Park, which is somehow located within Maple Ridge South. Neighborhood divisions barely make sense to me now, and definitely didn’t when I was a kid. Growing up I had no idea that my neighborhood had an official name. I simply lived on Sunset Drive, a street that is only four blocks long and travels parallel to numbered streets, which I now realize is not normal for Tulsa. People asked where I lived and I said, “Sunset Drive.” No one knew where that was, so I clarified: “It’s by Woodward Park.” Everyone knew where Woodward Park was.

In the early ’70s the predominant neighborhood topic was Dutch elm disease, which was destroying our elms—at the time the overwhelming majority of our mature trees—at an alarming rate. We lost seven trees on our property alone, and the introduction of sunlight where there had once been unrelenting shade transformed the whole look and feel of the neighborhood. Then something else quickly changed the topic of conversation and psychologically altered the neighborhood: a rock ’n’ roll legend at the apex of his fame had decided to move into the old Aaronson mansion at 21st Place and Woodward Boulevard, a monstrous Georgian-style home on two acres, built around 1917 by oilman Lionel Aaronson.

Leon Russell was coming back to Tulsa one more time.

***

The teenagers in the neighborhood were flipping out. The parents, even if they didn’t know who Leon was, heard “rock star” and saw the writing on the wall: every kid in the neighborhood was about to get hooked on heroin.

I was 10 in 1972, so the name Leon Russell didn’t ring a bell. I was into rock music as much as a 10-year-old could be. I had started playing the drums around that time, was already listening to the records my older siblings played— Beatles, Stones, Doors—but Leon’s music had yet to trickle down to my ears. It was about to.

My brother, my friends, and I used to roam freely together throughout the neighborhood, and one of our favorite hangouts was the backyard of the Aaronson mansion, although we didn’t call it that. It was simply the big house with the empty swimming pool and the beat-up tennis court. Next door to the west was my friend Jeff Heckenkemper’s house, and next door to the east of Leon’s future home lived the Shackelford family, where Ted Shackelford of Knots Landing fame grew up. My house was around the corner from Jeff’s, two doors away.

Jeff’s side yard offered easy access to the Aaronson property, via the vine- and weed-covered tennis court. There wasn’t a fence, so in our minds that was permission to trespass. I don’t remember ever seeing anyone in the house or on the property before Leon moved in. If it was occupied, the owners (the Mathews family last lived in the home before Leon) couldn’t have easily spotted us in one of our favorite hideouts—a bushy area at the corner of the property by Jeff’s front yard, hidden from the street by a brick wall, where we liked to hide and lob snowballs at cars going up and down Woodward Boulevard. During the summer it was our station for shining flashlights in the eyes of the drivers. Anything to make a car stop and chase us. But that little hideaway was no more after Leon moved in.

The first sign of a rock star in our midst was the massive brick wall being built around the property. One day we were outside playing football in Jeff’s front yard when we saw the new owner walking the perimeter, inspecting the wall’s progress. The image of God in our young minds was like that of most people: an old man with long white hair and a beard. Suddenly there was a slightly younger version of God walking among us, only he wore teardrop mirrored sunglasses. Mrs. Heckenkemper was outside and went over to Leon to introduce herself. We interrupted our game and followed her. Leon was friendly, right neighborly, and shook all of our hands. He had a very weak grip and a puffy, ashen hand.

“Any of you guys play music?” he casually asked.

“I play the drums,” I squeaked. The other guys giggled. Leon then said one of two things to me: either “All right” or “Right on.” I can’t be sure; all I knew is he was saying something directly to me, in reply to something I had said to Him, I mean, him. And he said it with a hint of encouragement, of mild enthusiasm, which led me to believe that Leon would be asking me to come over and jam with him sometime. Sure, the guy who had recently stolen the show in a concert with George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Ringo Starr would simply die to have a 10-year-old kid lay down the beat for him. This would have made perfect sense in my perfectly normal childhood. But, inexplicably, Leon never called.

***

I saw Leon again a few months later when I went with my mother to buy tennis shoes. Leon was there, shopping where all the great rock stars shop for shoes: Kinney Shoes at 51st & Peoria. He was by himself, and my mother approached him to introduce herself and then me, which made me roll my eyes and shake my head because Leon and I were already well acquainted, had musical kinship. But Leon acted like he’d never met me! Man, these bigshot rock stars.

During the legendary Tulsa residency of Leon Russell, everyone who was anyone stopped in to visit the Master of Space and Time. Joe Cocker graced the ’hood, J.J. Cale paid visits, Clapton and his bandmates dropped by—sightings reported by every kid in the neighborhood. From his attic window, Jeff Heckenkemper spied on Leon, and one day he’s pretty sure he saw Leon and George Harrison ambling through the backyard. It’s highly plausible, since George played his first and only concert in Tulsa in 1974, and would have surely looked up his old bandmate from The Concert for Bangladesh while in town. Other sightings strain credibility, like the time we were sitting on Jeff’s front steps when we think we saw Paul and Linda McCartney drive up in an old white Cadillac. Whether my imagination was working overtime or not, this was the day it really hit me that our new neighbor might be somebody pretty important.

In the summer of 1973 an invitation came in the mail to all of the neighbors: Leon was having a party to meet everyone—or so my parents interpreted the invitation. The catch was it would cost $7 per person to attend. “What kind of crazy thing is this, charging neighbors to come over to your house?” exclaimed my parents in words to that effect. So, my family didn’t go, and for years I was under the impression that you had to pay to not only see rock stars perform, but also to visit with them in their homes. In reality, the event was a fundraiser by the Maple Ridge Association to help pay for legal action against the building of the Riverside Expressway (successfully opposed, thank goodness), and Leon had graciously allowed the Association to use his house as a meeting place. He was on tour at the time so he didn’t attend, which further rankled my parents.

My chance to establish a long-lasting friendship and working relationship with Leon finally came, I thought, when I inherited my friend Bobby Alexander’s paper route in the fall of 1973, when I was in sixth grade. Bobby was starting high school and wouldn’t have time for his afternoon delivery of the Tulsa Tribune anymore, so he bequeathed to me the route that included my friend Leon’s house. Because the house sat way back from the street and was hidden from view by brick, the routine was to simply heave the paper over the wall in the direction of his front door. Every day the routine included hearing the paper land on the ground with a thwap, followed immediately by the sound of guard dogs barking and ripping the paper to shreds. Every day I wondered why Leon took a paper.

Because my route had only 54 houses, I collected the $1.95 monthly subscription from each customer in person. Tips were better that way. But collecting from Leon always required at least two or three attempts. Sometimes the doorbell went unanswered. Sometimes a voice came over the intercom saying to come back because nobody had any money, which even a naïve 10-year-old didn’t buy. Then, just before the 15th of each month, the mandatory deadline before paper service was suspended, somebody finally came to the door and coughed up the dough.

But it was never Leon. Every month during my two and a half years on the route—or several times a month, in this case—I would ring the doorbell and hope Leon would be there and have a free minute to pay his paperboy and maybe give me some insight into life, wax nostalgic about his days as a lad in Lawton and an adolescent in Tulsa, those carefree times when the world wasn’t so demanding of his talents and forcing him to live in a fortress. Maybe some tips for an aspiring drummer. But no. Every month it was someone different who finally came to the door, more often a young woman than a man—groupies, perhaps, or relatives, or backup singers. The one I vividly remember was a tall, skinny woman with long, straight hair who sniffled a lot and asked me if I would like a brownie. “They’re freshly baked,” she added. I considered it for a second, but then imagined my mother’s reaction if I told her I had eaten a brownie from Leon Russell’s house. “No, thank you,” I said, feeling suddenly, intensely nervous. But it was nice of the girl to offer.

***

When I started high school, I turned the route over to the next kid, and a year later, in 1977, Leon sold his place and moved to California. Tulsa was great for Leon when he was an anonymous high school kid at Rogers, but being a celebrity here proved to be a burden. The police suspected Leon of being connected to “local drug activity” and questioned (some would say “hassled”) him about it. He was sued for allegedly backing out of some investment deals. Then he almost burned his house down.

I remember the night the fire trucks came screaming down Woodward Boulevard to Leon’s house. A blaze had damaged part of the second and third floors, and opened a hole in the roof. The neighborhood assumption was that Leon and his friends were having a pot party and caught the house on fire. Pot was the only drug my friends and I had any concept of at the time, and a vague understanding at that, so our logical minds concluded that pot was to blame, what with all that lighting of the reefers and the bongs that those pyromaniac potheads are always doing. But I don’t know what really happened. Probably not that.

Charlie Holmes, a local attorney, bought the house from Leon and owned it for about ten years. It was acquired by a real estate developer who tore it down one early morning in November 1987 to the unhappy surprise of the neighborhood. According to John Brooks Walton, resident authority on Tulsa’s historic homes, among Leon’s many modifications to the house was the installation of a recording studio in the basement that caused some structural damage to the home. Some say the damage was irreparable and razing the mansion was the only solution, but others disagree.

Either way, it’s gone now, and four large homes occupy the property that was the focus of the neighborhood’s attention for many years.

In all of our discussions about Leon while he lived in the neighborhood, the subject of why he moved there never came up, at least that I can remember. I mean, of all the mansions in Tulsa, why that one? My crazy artist father, at age 84 still working every day in the backyard, indirectly provided the answer years later, when I was in my 20s, by taking me to the Celebrity Club at 31st & Yale to see Tommy Crook play. Dad said, “You’re not going to believe this guy.” And for once the old man was right: I didn’t believe it when I saw Tommy then, and I still don’t believe it now. The Buddy Rich of the guitar—that’s the best way I can describe him. It was during one of the many evenings I returned to marvel at Tommy and his magic fingers that he, in between sets, told me this story:

In the late 1950s, Tommy was in a band with Leon, then known by his real name, Russell Bridges. In 1958, Russell Bridges and the Starlighters were booked to play a private party at the McClintock home, 1151 E. 24th Place in Tulsa—also known as the future home of Leon Russell. The band’s lineup rotated on occasion, sometimes including guitarist J.J. Cale and/or bassist Carl Radle. For this gig, the band’s namesake was accompanied by Tommy, drummer Chuck Blackwell, saxophonist Johnny Williams, and bassist George Metzel.

They were teenagers, fresh off of a tour with Jerry Lee Lewis, so they had reason to be full of confidence when they rolled in the driveway right up to the front door in their big, black, ’53 Chrysler “funeral car,” as Tommy put it, with the band name emblazoned on the side in big white letters—you know, like they owned the place. The party’s host was aghast that the group had the nerve to arrive at the front door, being hired help and all, and directed the boys with a few harsh words to go around to the back. This didn’t sit well with any of them, particularly Leon, who vowed aloud to show those rich bastards someday by coming back and buying the place.

Thanks for taking revenge on the establishment, Leon. It made my childhood pretty special.

Looking at the crime scene, Nashville Metro Detective Pat Postiglione thought: serial killer. Postiglione, a small, wiry man with black hair, nearly black eyes, and the trace of a Queens accent, had encountered them before, and he saw several things that said “serial killer” to him here. Hulbert was naked and carefully posed, the soles of her feet pressed together so her legs made a diamond. There was no sign of a struggle. And there appeared to be little or no physical evidence. In fact, Nashville police really had only two things to go on: a sneaker-like footprint, and a grainy T.A. surveillance tape showing trucks streaming in and out of the lot all night. One truck—a yellow cab pulling a white trailer—had stayed only 16 minutes. As a lead, it wasn’t much.

Postiglione knew that another prostitute had been killed just a few weeks earlier in Lebanon, Tennessee, about 30 miles east on I-40. That woman had been shoved butt-down in a truck stop trash can, garbage piled on her stomach. The detective contacted the FBI’s Violent Criminals Apprehension Program (ViCAP) and asked them to query their national database for similar crimes along highways connecting to the Nashville region. An FBI analyst confirmed that there were cases that looked similar, including a prostitute killed at a truck stop in Alabama. Postiglione and his partner, Lee Freeman, decided to ask for every credit card receipt from the T.A. on the night of the murder. They figured they had a trucker to find.

At least twenty-five former truckers are currently serving time in American prisons for serial murder. There’s Robert Ben Rhoades, who converted his truck cab into a torture chamber, now serving a life sentence in Illinois. There’s Scott William Cox, a trucker who pled no-contest to two murders in Oregon. There’s Dellmus Colvin, who pled guilty in five murders to avoid the death penalty in Ohio; Keith Hunter Jesperson, serving life sentences from four different states; and Wayne Adam Ford, who finally got sick of killing and walked into a California sheriff’s office carrying a woman’s breast in a plastic bag. When trucker Sean Patrick Goble was arrested in North Carolina and confessed to several murders, ten states lined up to question him about their cold-case highway homicides. It seems our interstate highway system has become our Whitechapel, with truckers its roving Rippers.

A soft-spoken woman from Oklahoma City first saw the pattern. Terri Turner is a Supervisory Intelligence Analyst with the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation. In September of 2003, a homicide case landed on her desk: a body found along I-40. Turner immediately put out a teletype seeking other female bodies found, like hers, nude, near interstates, and with signs of having been bound. Within 72 hours, two responses came back from Arkansas and Mississippi. At that point, Turner knew she might be looking at linked crimes. She had her communications specialists monitor the teletypes for further cases. In seven months, they had seven homicides. She calls them “my seven girls.”

Eventually investigators identified two of the women. Both had worked as truck stop prostitutes. This was the breakthrough moment for Turner.

“The vast majority of truck drivers are good hardworking people and without them our nation would come screeching to a halt,” she told me. “But there are very few who have found that that particular job is very suited to this particular type of crime.”

In the spring of 2004, Turner decided to have a meeting in Oklahoma City for all the investigators working on her seven cases—and any others that might be related.

“I anticipated maybe 20, 25 individuals,” she told me, “but by the time word got around about the kind of cases we were going to be talking about, I ended up having 60 investigators from seven different states show up for that meeting. That was really the beginning of the initiative.”

FBI Analysts at ViCAP had even more surprising news. When they queried their database, they found more than 250 homicides connected to I-40 in the existing files, spread out across Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Texas. John Walsh’s show America’s Most Wanted broke the case. It aired the story of an Oklahoma City prostitute killed and thrown from an overpass in Texas. A woman called in and reported that her nephew, already in jail, had bragged about doing something similar. She gave police his name:

John Robert Williams, a 28-year-old long-haul trucker. “We had never considered the interstate highway system as a common linkage system,” ViCAP head Mike Harrigan told me. “We know now it’s been going on for years, but we had never picked out the pattern.”

* * *

“Are there more serial killers out there today than there ever have been?” Jim McNamara asked. “No. It’s just that there are units that specialize in helping catch and identify them, and through the increase in communications and technology, linkage is better.” Jim is a Supervisory Special Agent in the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit—the profiling unit made famous in The Silence of the Lambs. We were sitting in a windowless conference room in a nondescript office building near Quantico, Virginia. There are no signs outside the building, just a sea of very clean cars; no name on the front door, just a buzzer commanding “Press here.” This is the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, where FBI agents wearing business attire and sidearms attempt to connect the dots between some of the nation’s most inexplicable crimes.

In early 2009, the FBI announced the Highway Serial Killings Initiative, focused on killers who choose their victims and dump their bodies along highways. Some of the victims are hitchhikers and stranded motorists, but most are truck stop prostitutes. In the 1980s, the FBI was accused of inflating the numbers of serial homicides, fomenting a serial killer “panic,” so they are careful not to overstate their case today. But recent studies suggest that the numbers of serial murder victims have continually been underestimated—even during the serial murder “panic.” The undercounting is because the vast majority of victims have always been prostitutes—as many as 75% according to one scholar. Research into prostitute mortality suggests that the homicide rate for prostitutes is 229 out of every 100,000. The U.S. national average is five. Press releases introducing the Highway Serial Killings Initiative included a frightening-looking map pinpointing more than 500 bodies found on or near highways and already in the ViCAP database. Represented by red dots, the bodies cluster around major transfer points in the interstate network: Oklahoma City, Los Angeles, Nashville, Indianapolis, Chicago, Atlanta, Pittsburgh. But no state is immune: the red dots spread along every interstate highway like a pathogen carried by car.

In 2007, its first full year of operation, the HSKI assisted in the clearing of 25 murders committed by three truckers. Excitement grew among law enforcement agencies about clearing a backlog of unsolved murders. Massachusetts has never cracked the case of nine prostitutes discovered dead along highways near New Bedford. Miami has 31 murdered prostitutes with unknown perpetrators on their books. San Diego has more than 40, all of whom vanished from truck stops. A series of bodies found along highways in four southern states is known as the “redhead murders,” because several victims had red hair. The list of around 200 suspects, the FBI press release bluntly said, was mostly long-haul truckers.

“No one here is saying. ‘Well, they’re obviously truck drivers,’” FBI Supervisory Special Agent John Molnar told me. “No, the only obvious assumption you can make is that it’s somebody using that road.”

* * *

A few weeks after Sara Hulbert’s murder in Nashville, Pat Postiglione and his partner Lee Freeman arranged to meet at the T.A. and go through the receipts. As Postiglione was driving over, he noticed a yellow truck with a white trailer cruising slowly down the Cowan Street “stroll.” It looked like his suspect vehicle. With Postiglione following, the truck passed the spot where Hulbert was last seen alive and then entered the T.A. and parked.

Postiglione radioed Freeman his whereabouts, then approached the truck and knocked on the door. After a few moments, a heavy man with stringy brown hair and glasses opened it, yawning as if he’d just been awakened. Postiglione said he was working on a murder investigation and asked to see the guy’s license. The trucker handed it over: Bruce Mendenhall. The detective noticed what looked like spots of blood on the inside of the cab door—and on Mendenhall’s thumb.

It’s a detective’s job not to jump to conclusions. Postiglione told Mendenhall that police were asking drivers of yellow cabs with white trailers to volunteer DNA samples. Mendenhall agreed to do so. Lee Freeman had arrived by this point, and he got out a consent form. Mendenhall came out of the truck to sign it. As he did, a voice in Pat Postiglione’s head told him to look inside that cab. He asked Mendenhall for permission to search his truck.

“Are you going to tear it up?” Mendenhall asked. Postiglione said no, he just wanted to look around. Mendenhall agreed, and Postiglione climbed into the cab. He was surprised at how spacious it was. He edged between the seats and into the living area behind. The top bunk was folded up; he sat down on the bottom bunk. Nearby, he could see a pair of black shoes. He picked them up. The tread looked a lot like the cast made of the shoe tread at the crime scene. There was a garbage bag near the bed, and Postiglione pulled it to him. It was filled with paper towels, women’s clothing, and shoes, all of it soaked with blood.

Mendenhall had jumped onto the running board and was watching Postiglione with an inscrutable expression. Postiglione asked him about the bloody paper towels. He had cut his leg, Mendenhall said. He pulled up his pant leg and displayed a smooth calf. Postiglione pointed out that it didn’t seem to be injured. Mendenhall switched his story. He’d had a girl from Indianapolis in the cab, he said, and she had cut herself. Postiglione asked if he had any women’s clothing in the truck. Yes, the trucker answered, his wife and daughter had some clothes there. Postiglione looked in the bag again. There was a lot of blood. Later DNA testing would link it to at least four women, all of them missing or dead.

“Bruce, am I sitting in the right truck?” he asked. Mendenhall shrugged. Postiglione asked again. “Is this the truck we’re looking for?”

“If you say it is,” Mendenhall replied.

“Are you the guy we’re looking for?” Postiglione asked.

“If you say so.”

* * *

To someone like Detective Pat Postiglione, it makes a kind of intuitive sense that long-haul truckers might be behind many of the highway killings. There were roughly three and a half million truckers on the road as of 2006, and the work force has changed along with the job.

“I’ve dealt with truckers a lot and truckers are a different breed,” Pat Postiglione told me. “A lot of them are regular good family people, but a lot of them are not.”

In the years since the interstate era began, the proportion of freight going over the road has steadily increased. After the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 deregulated trucking, the number of trucks on the road shot up even more. In the last 20 years alone, there has been an increase of 44 percent in registered large trucks and a leap of 86 percent in how many miles those trucks travel. Today, roughly 70 percent of all domestic freight goes over the road. To survive cutthroat competition, trucking has become leaner and more efficient. Unionized trucking companies have dwindled while smaller, low-wage ones have multiplied. Trucks have become “sweatshops on wheels,” with truckers driving harder, longer, and faster, for lower relative pay. Like pieceworkers, most are paid by the mile—on average around 39 cents.

As the need for drivers has expanded, the bar to entry has been lowered. Today, neither a high school diploma nor a clean criminal record is required to drive a truck. In fact, beginning with welfare reform in 1996, employers could get a federal Work Opportunity Tax Credit for hiring convicted felons, and many in the trucking industry did. Most trucking companies don’t care if drivers have a permanent address. It’s possible to drive a truck with drunk driving convictions on your regular license. Annual employee turnover at trucking companies is around 100 percent.

As trucking has changed, it has attracted a new demographic: less educated, less stable, less tied to unions, less rooted in family life. Has it also begun attracting a criminal element?

* * *

“At the end of this testimony,” declared deputy district attorney Tom Thurman, “there will be no doubt that there is a cold-blooded killer in the courtroom.” It was May, 2010, nearly three years after the murder of Sara Hulbert, and day one of Bruce Mendenhall’s trial.

The accused sat impassively between his lawyers. Mendenhall is no Dexter. In fact, even as real serial killers go, he gets low marks for mediagenics—he isn’t dashing like Ted Bundy, passionately deranged like Charles Manson, or eerily normal like John Wayne Gacy. He is 59, and not a youthful 59. He has a cartoon trucker’s body—beer belly, sloping shoulders, trudging gait. He is diabetic. His cheeks sag in deep hollows and his limp hair could use a trim.

The prosecution and the defense agreed on the basics. Sara Hulbert was killed in Bruce Mendenhall’s truck with Bruce Mendenhall’s gun. But they took differing positions on who had done the killing. Mendenhall claimed it was someone else. Two guys followed him around, he said, killing women in his truck, with his gun, and leaving him to clean up the mess. That was the story he had told Detective Postiglione immediately after his arrest.

* * *

Pat Postiglione had little doubt, when he sat down to interview Bruce Mendenhall, that he was dealing with a serial killer. “We seem to have more than our share of them in Nashville,” he told me. “I think it has to do with the interstates.”

Or with the truck stops. The back row at truck stops is known as the “party row,” because it’s typically where the truckers who want sex or drugs park. Private security guards attempt to stop the sex trade with varying levels of enthusiasm, but prostitutes—“lot lizards”—arrive in cars or slip onto the property from the back, then move unseen between the trucks, rapping on doors. Truckers who don’t want to be awakened by unceasing knocks post a sign in their window—a drawing of a lizard with a circle and a bar through it.

“You go to the truck stop and you stand there and 100 percent of the girls who come around there have a pimp within 20 feet,” Postiglione told me. “The girl’s so strung out you can spot it 100 yards away. And she’s ready to get into the truck with Ted Bundy, Bruce Mendenhall.”

It clearly bothers Postiglione that young women become so vulnerable. It bothers him that he arrested Bruce Mendenhall on July twelfth. Had he arrested him one day sooner, another young woman might still be alive.

“What made this case unique,” he said, “is we were chasing him as he was killing. Because he killed a girl June twenty-fifth and a girl July first … so it wasn’t like he’d killed and he stopped. When he came back to the truck stop that night he’d killed a girl the night before. We were kind of chasing a phantom.”

* * *

Clark Fine has chased the same phantom. Fine is a classic cop’s cop, a detective in the Sheriff’s office in Hendricks County, just west of Indianapolis. Even over the phone, you can hear the ghosts of thousands of cigarettes in his raspy, unfiltered voice.

In 2004, Fine had a cold case involving a murdered prostitute named Buffie Brawley, found dumped in an abandoned truck stop on Indianapolis’s south side. She had been beaten up, strangled, and run over with a truck. Fine attended Terri Turner’s Oklahoma City confab on the I-40 killings. Indianapolis is on I-70, but truckers frequently travel up from the southwest to the midwest via I-44 out of Oklahoma City, intersecting with I-70 at St. Louis. Anything going on in Oklahoma City could easily find its way to Indy. At Turner’s meeting, Clark Fine became friends with a police sergeant from Grapevine, Texas. Like Fine, the Grapevine sergeant had a case similar to Terri Turner’s—a truck stop prostitute who had been killed and thrown from an overpass.

“It’s kind of mind-boggling how many girls get killed every year doing that,” Fine told me. Eventually, John Robert Williams—the suspect in Terri Turner’s series—confessed to the Grapevine crime from prison in Mississippi. The sergeant called Clarke Fine and told him he ought to talk to the guy too.

“Myself and a partner drove down to Mississippi and we had specific things about our case—she had certain tattoos on her—to see if this might be the guy,” Fine recalled. At the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, John Williams told the detectives he remembered Buffie Brawley. Fine asked a few questions about the crime scene, and Williams got some right and some wrong. Fine asked him if he remembered a tattoo on the woman’s buttock.

“You have to remember, I don’t have sex with them, I just kill them,” Williams said. Fine was losing interest in Williams fast. He figured he had a serial confessor on his hands, someone who got a thrill bragging to cops about all the murders he’d gotten away with. But then Williams volunteered that he did remember a tattoo on Brawley’s leg. It said Ebony, he recalled. He told the detectives he thought that was funny, since “Ebony is usually a black girl’s name.”

“But the thing is,” Fine told me, “that girl had a daughter named Ebony, and so she had that tattoo. And then I knew this asshole was the guy that did it.”

For Fine, it closed what had been a long, sad case. At the start of it, he had gone down to the local truck stop to talk to other prostitutes who might know something. One woman he spoke to was Carma Purpura. “I interviewed her down at the truck stop and I said ‘This is dangerous life.’ And she said ‘I know, but I gotta make a living.’”

On July 11, 2007, Carma Purpura got into Bruce Mendenhall’s truck at a Flying J in Indianapolis. Her cell phone and clothing were in the bag of bloodied items discovered by Pat Postiglione the very next day. Some of the blood in the truck matched DNA provided by her parents. Her body has yet to be found.

* * *

For most of the trial, Bruce Mendenhall sat impassively. He showed no emotion as forensics experts recounted Hulbert’s injuries and held up the weapons found in his truck. Then the prosecution played the video in which he told Pat Postiglione the story about the “real” killers. As Postiglione, onscreen, deftly maneuvered him into waiving his right to have an attorney present, Mendenhall shook his head slightly, then hunched down in his seat, one hand pressed to his sagging cheek. It was the only show of emotion from a man who otherwise sat very still and stared straight ahead, concentrating on where this very large machine was taking him. It seemed appropriate that his prison nickname was “Truck.”

The tape had an electrifying effect on the jury. On it, Postiglione moves quickly to the events on the night of Hulbert’s death. Mendenhall describes driving all night, coming down from Indy. He stopped to fill up and get a sandwich at another truck stop, the Nashville Pilot. But in the fuel lane, two men he knew walked up.

“Where you going now?” they asked.

“None of your business,” Mendenhall told them.

“Well, we’ll make it our business,” they said. One of them got in his truck, determined to ride with him. Mendenhall relates all of this to the detectives with the kind of over-emphasis four-year-olds use when talking about their imaginary friends. It would be disarming if the man weren’t talking about a murder.

Mendenhall says the two men then followed him to the T.A., where he went inside for a sandwich. When he came back out, they were in his truck with a dead girl. She was sprawled out in his bed, naked, a bloody plastic bag over her head.

“I said ‘You guys, what the hell …?’ ” he continues. “And they go, ‘It’s your problem, not ours.’ And they got out and left.” He figured they had killed her with his gun, he says, because “they’ve did it before.” Mendenhall describes cleaning up the mess and putting the body on the grass for the grounds crew to find. As Postiglione presses him for further details, Mendenhall interrupts.

“They do it all the time,” he declares. “I don’t know …”

“Okay,” Postiglione says. He was born in Queens and raised on Long Island, but he has picked up the southerner’s way of saying “okay,” gently, the last syllable rhyming with “lie.” “You don’t know these guys.”

“Yes,” Mendenhall says, “I know one.”

“How did they know you were at the Truck Stops in Nashville?” Postiglione asks, and Mendenhall says, “That’s what I don’t know. They … they meet me everywhere.”

Postiglione is a deft interviewer. He plays along with Mendenhall’s story like a parent indulging a child. When Mendenhall tells him that the other two men had sex with Hulbert, Postiglione carefully puts the next question in the third person: “Did Bruce have sex with her?” Bruce insists that Bruce did not. Finally Postiglione asks Mendenhall for the men’s names. Mendenhall then makes his big mistake: he names two men he really knows, men with alibis two states away, men against whom he holds grudges. In the part of the tape that the jury was not allowed to see, Mendenhall goes on to describe a number of other incidents involving these fantasy killers. They caught up with him at a Flying J on I-465 in Indianapolis the night before, he says, and just as in Nashville, they killed a girl in his truck. He ran into them in Birmingham, Alabama, and he suspects they killed someone there because his gun was gone for a while, and “wherever them two are, them, they like killin’.” And, when Postiglione prods him to think about whether he’s ever been on I-40 east of Nashville, he recalls running into the killers again at the Pilot in Lebanon, Tennessee—where the girl in the garbage can was found.

It’s the lamest story imaginable, and Postiglione plays along gently, without ever really indicating whether he believes it. Finally, he tries to get Mendenhall to back off from the lie. “We’re not going to treat you any different now,” he says “if you tell us you were the one who actually did it. And these guys … they really had nothing to do with the homicides. If you’re the guy that did these killings …”

He leaves it hanging and in the pause, Mendenhall seems to realize the jig is up. “Get me a lawyer,” he says.

* * *

On the trial’s third day, the state brought out a long line of experts from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to introduce the evidence found in Bruce Mendenhall’s truck. This included fingerprints, blood and semen evidence, a nightstick, a collection of knives, and the murder weapon, a .22 rifle. It also included the sex toys.

The defense objected before the prosecution could even mention the sex toys. The jury was sent out of the room and the haggling began. As the witness was questioned, the lawyers argued over each item. First up was the penis pump. The assistant prosecutor, a striking woman in dramatically high heels, insisted the penis pump was relevant because of the kind of genital damage the victim suffered. The judge examined the photos over his bifocals. “What does one do with a penis pump?” he demanded. “Does anyone know?”

The trial then entered a zone so darkly comic that no one dared look at anyone else. The court officers stared straight ahead, stone faced. The reporters looked intently at their notebooks. The lawyers hovered helplessly over their files. The one person in the room who could surely explain how a penis pump was used, Bruce Mendenhall, kept his eyes on the table in front of him. The prosecutor explained that this was why the jury needed to see the packaging: so they could read the instructions.

“Which box is it?” demanded the judge.

“The one with the baseball player.”

The judge read the box aloud: “Rookie of the year pleasure pump for the novice enlarger.” No one laughed, but the invisible vapor of self-control that always fills a courtroom wavered briefly into view.

The sex toys were ultimately allowed, but in truth they proved nothing. There was no DNA evidence on them. Like much of the prosecution’s evidence, they served a different purpose: to help the jury reconstruct the story. The prosecution introduced the items to make Mendenhall seem like a person who would kill, though none of these items is unusual for a trucker to have. Truck stops almost invariably sell the exact type of nightstick he had in his truck, and they frequently have large glass cases displaying an astounding array of hunting knives. Being ready to defend yourself is part of the ethos of the independent trucker. It is not unreasonable. The combination of on-the-job violence and vehicular accidents makes truckers six times more likely than average to die on the job. Driving a truck is among the top ten most dangerous jobs you can hold, according to the Department of Labor. Presumably, the statistics don’t include prostitution.

As for the sex toys, they might be seen as proof that truckers are a tribe of sex-crazed perverts, but they can also be seen simply as testimony to the fact that, after a long day of grueling driving, some kind of unwinding is desired. The defense could have pointed this out. But to do so would have asked the jury to imagine the difficult, damaging lives of long-haul truckers. And that is something almost no one wants to consider.

Consigned to the stressful world of the interstate, known to their dispatchers as a number, to the law as a license plate, and to their clients as a set of GPS coordinates, truckers are the gears that keep the machinery of global commerce running. But what’s going on in their heads? There has been almost no work done examining the mental health of the nation’s truckers. The only paper I could find on the topic was deeply disturbing. In a qualitative survey, truckers reported very high levels of stress related to time pressures, loneliness, bad health, and separation from their families. They described anxiety about their public image, and reported that the loneliness of the road led them to risky encounters with sex workers and to drug use. Some said they felt they were going insane.

I asked Pat Postiglione if he thought there might be something about trucking that could push some violently predisposed people over the edge.

“Sure,” he said. “You’re on the road for hour after hour after hour and all you’re doing is thinking. You’re not communicating with anybody. If you’re that type of person, it could evolve out of you. But it might also be that you’re a trucker because you are a serial killer type person.”

* * *

For the closing arguments of Bruce Mendenhall’s trial, Carma Purpura’s family came to Nashville. Purpura’s sister was small, with short, straightened brown hair and an easy smile. In the hallway outside the courtroom, she embraced Sara Hulbert’s like long-lost family, bonded by an unspeakable sorrow. Then they all hugged Pat Postiglione, who had also come for closing arguments. He and Lee Freeman, sharply dressed, bristled with controlled anticipation. In the courtroom, the Purpura relatives sat in the front row with Sara Hulbert’s family. The detectives sat a couple rows behind, on the same side. They had all been waiting for this day for three years.

The prosecution’s closing argument, accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation, outlined the most complete circumstantial case imaginable. It added up to a complete story. But—and this is one of the places where real trials differ from the ones in movies and on television—it didn’t tie up every loose end. There were gaps in the testimony, witnesses who hadn’t appeared, a tire track and a second footprint at the crime scene that had never been explained. The defense, in their summation, highlighted every loose end, then pounded the idea of reasonable doubt. Even if the jury believed Bruce Mendenhall to be guilty, it was their obligation to acquit. As the attorney spoke, you could see Hulbert’s family growing noticeably upset. Before he began talking, acquittal was like a ship sailing by on a distant horizon. As he talked, it turned and headed for shore.

“I’m asking you to do something difficult,” he told the jury in closing. “I’m asking you to follow the law.”

The prosecutor, on rebuttal, asked them to do the exact opposite. He offered them a story that made sense. He referred to the truck as a “killing chamber.” He told the jury Sara Hulbert was “doing the only thing she knew to do to support her habit.” In the final moments, he put up a slide of Sara Hulbert, a hopeful young woman, her brown hair restrained by a headband. “She had a right to live,” he declared. “She had a right to change her life and raise her children.” Sara’s relatives, and at least one juror, silently wept.

Once the jury had been charged and retired to their deliberations, the family was whisked off to the room set aside for them. The detectives headed out to get things done. The lawyers vanished into other parts of the courthouse. Only the reporters hung around outside the courtroom, unwilling to risk missing the verdict. I sat on the bench before the plate glass windows, watching the never-ending stream of cars and trucks flow around Nashville on its way toward St. Louis, Indianapolis, Chicago, Oklahoma City.

This is the world we have made. It’s worth asking what effect it might have on people who spend a long time in it. In the late nineties, an outbreak of interest in “road rage” and aggressive driving led scientists to research what happens to people at the wheel. Driving, they reported has psychological—even physiological—effects on drivers. This is your brain on the road: you are rendered anonymous, deprived of verbal interaction, body language, eye contact, your identity reduced to a make and model. Frustrated in your innate desire to be perceived as human, you become paranoid, attribute hostile motives to oblivious others, see them as objects. How many times have you found yourself screaming something in your car that you couldn’t imagine saying to a live human being?

Behind the wheel, we are all psychopaths. Around 3 pm, a runner burst from the courthouse conference room. Suddenly, everyone reappeared: the families, the detectives, the attorneys, thronging down the hallway into the courtroom. The forewoman read the verdict. She paused slightly before the word “guilty.” The judge stated that Mendenhall would receive a mandatory life sentence. The trucker gave no response as he stood to leave. For Bruce Mendenhall, this was only trial number one. He has been indicted by Tennessee for another murder, as well as by Indiana and Alabama. Sara Hulbert’s family looked relieved. For them, at least, this ordeal had reached its end.

Impertinent, maybe, but the Senator held the cards. It was March 1924, and Sinclair was sitting before the Senate Committee on Public Lands. They asked ten questions regarding his suspect behavior uncovered during his acquittal in an earlier fraud trial involving a felonious Secretary of the Interior. Harry remained smug, knowing that back home, all those oil pumpers in the Midcontinent field were making him millions. Sinclair was equally at home doing vodka shots with Russian czars and strolling oil derrick grime. But he did not coddle or cotton.

His respect for the United States Senate was contentious. A year earlier, a New York Times front page headline in January, 1923 declared, “Sinclair Refuses Records to Senate; Oil Man Defies the La Follette to Delve into His Private Affairs. Fine and Prison Possible.”

“Will you produce the records and books called for?” demanded Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin. “I will discuss the matter with my counsel and let you know later on,” replied Sinclair, who was smiling despite the tenseness of the situation. He told the legislators, “I will go to the Supreme Court, if necessary,” before submitting information about transactions he held personal and beyond the committee’s interest. Sinclair walked out of the committee room, suddenly ending the investigative session.

After two hours, Sinclair remained sequestered in a private room of the Senate wing with his attorneys—chief counsel J.W. Zevely of Washington, G.T. Stanford of New York, and Judge A.N. Chandler of Tulsa. With time approaching the five o’clock bell, committee chairman La Follette issued a subpoena via the Sergeant-at- Arms. Sinclair and his legal team returned to the chambers shortly after the committee adjourned. La Follette “refused to say whether Mr. Sinclair would be judged in contempt and thus made liable to fine or imprisonment or both.”

Sinclair was willing to roll the dice.

Harry Sinclair gambled the family drugstore to finance an oil lease and lost. Penniless, he shot his toe hunting rabbits, had it amputated, and collected $5,000 from an insurance claim. Some say he did it on purpose, while Harry said it made for a good yarn.

Oil derrick foundations needed timber. Sinclair used his coverage proceeds to buy lumber, selling it to the wildcatters who constructed pyramid-shaped structures on the oil patches springing up in the Mid-Continent fields of southeast Kansas. He learned that, with little risk, he could turn a small investment into a big dividend. With that, 21-year-old Harry Ford Sinclair was in the oil business.

Early in his career, Sinclair attracted the attention of wealthy speculators like Chicago meatpacker J.M. Cudahy, Pittsburgh capitalist Theodore Barnsdall and James F. O’Neill, president of Prairie Oil Company, a subsidiary of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of Kansas. Unlike his backers, Sinclair came from humble beginnings.

Sinclair was born in 1876 near Wheeling, West Virginia. The federal census of 1880 lists his father, John Sinclair, as a druggist and his mother, Phoebe, a housewife. The family headed west when Harry was young, settling in Independence, Kansas. John opened a drug store intending that his son become part of the family business. To that end, Sinclair graduated from The University of Kansas with a pharmacology degree. But oil proved to be a more seductive drug.

Banks more familiar with farmers, ranchers, and merchants were reluctant to fund black-gold prospecting. Sinclair realized that, at least in the short run, he needed to finance his own deals. After a decade spent prowling for undervalued oil leases across Kansas and Indian Territory, Harry hit it big with a strike in the rich Kiowa field that made him a millionaire before his thirtieth birthday.

When oil blew in 1905 at the farm of Ida Glenn south of Tulsa, Sinclair raced there from Independence and snatched up premium leases before prices rocketed. News spread of the bountiful Glenn Pool, and the place grew thick with wells and “corner shooters” who leased up property adjacent to a producing lease, usually on the corners, in order to leech from the known pool or formation. The magnitude of oil that arrived at the surface presented huge storage issues. “Get it fast and get it first” was the mantra—and figure out what to do with it later. Lease operators like the Sinclairs pumped crude into hastily constructed storage tanks and large, earthen, environment-be-damned lakes. Oil fouled streams and underground aquifers. Tank farms frequently burned, creating Red Adair-style fire hazards. Corner shooters and the “rule of capture” reigned—seven years later, the Glenn Pool was dry. But not before Harry Sinclair made millions.

The territory gushers ushered in an era of big banking. Lew Wentz, the Phillips brothers, Harry Sinclair, and a host of other wealthy oilmen believed banks to be sound investments. The effect of the oil industry working in concert with financial institutions was to create staggering economic growth. Yet there were periods of banking turmoil.

The young, restless Oklahoma economy rose and fell with the volatile price of crude. Lax regulations permitted banks the risky business of acquiring smaller banks. If economic conditions or poor management caused a subsidiary bank to suffer from depositor panic, mass withdrawals were a deathblow, resulting in a negative ripple effect on the consumer confidence of the owner bank. Wildcatter E.F. Blaise formed the oil-industry- friendly Farmer’s National Bank of Tulsa in 1903. Subsequently, Farmer’s bought the Kiefer State Bank that sprung up close to the Glenn Pool.

The Kiefer bank failed in February 1910. Feeling the onslaught of withdrawals from the Exchange stimulated by the Kiefer collapse, Blaise and his wildcatting business partner, Tulsa attorney C.J. Wrightsman, called an emergency, nighttime meeting of selected Tulsa oilmen for later that day. No sooner had the men exited the room did Sinclair, P. J. White, James Chapman, and Robert McFarlin buy Farmer’s, changing its name to Exchange National Bank and installing Sinclair as the new president. Harry Sinclair was now a bank owner. The chief counsel for the Exchange National bank was Joseph L. Hull Sr., the grandfather of Tulsa entrepreneur and attorney Joe Hull III. His office on Cheyenne Avenue sits across the street from the site of Sinclair’s Tulsa residence. “The interesting thing about grandpa,” Hull said, leaning back into his leather chair, looking out his office window, “was that he was blind, blinded by an optic nerve disease that today would easily be treated with antibiotics. He had a reader and learned Braille.” His grit was a perfect match for Sinclair.

As Farmer’s National, it was the most influential bank in Oklahoma; under new management, Exchange survived from an unprecedented policy of personally guaranteeing each dollar deposited. But the challenges of the Great Depression brought hard times. Thankfully, the onus of guaranteed deposits ended with the passage of the far-reaching Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 that, among other things, protected depositors and restricted the speculation arm of banks from owning other financial institutions. (The act was ultimately repealed in 1999.)

Undeterred, Sinclair, Chapman, and others reorganized the Exchange National Bank as the National Bank of Tulsa in 1933, establishing its global reputation as the “The Oil Bank of America.” Enlarging the 1917 construction of the ten-story Exchange building, the elaborate National Bank edifice included a dirigible mooring at the top of its middle section. Years later, the landmark building at 320 S. Boston became the Bank of Oklahoma. One block east of the Exchange was a luxurious counterpart.

Any deal worth doing was done in the Hotel Tulsa built in 1912 at 3rd and Cincinnati. The fifth floor was Sinclair’s lair. He commuted daily via train from Independence for all-night poker games, whiskey drinking, and deal making—including the formation of the Sinclair-White Oil Company. But the Exchange Bank and the Oklahoma oil fields proved too small for the big nature of Sinclair. He headed for New York. Firmly planted, his new address granted him immediate access to the power brokers.

In the fall of 1916, after meeting with Wall Street investors and attorneys, Sinclair announced a $50 million deal: the consolidation of 500 miles of pipelines, big-capacity refineries, the Cudahy marketing facilities, and personal control of 532 wells with the potential to produce 5.5 million barrels of oil a year. Sinclair borrowed another $20 million to procure undervalued assets in the Mid-Continent. Sinclair Oil and Refining Company secured a charter “in perpetuity” from New York State on May 1, 1916.

Sinclair maintained his presence in Tulsa by building the eight-story Sinclair building at Fifth and Main streets, circa 1919, plus the brick home at 1730 S. Cheyenne for his wife Elizabeth and two children, in the shade of the Creek Council Oak tree.

Located just outside the surveyed city limits of Tulsa on what was formerly Lochpoka’s ceremonial square, Sinclair, his brother Earl  who handled many of Sinclair’s business finances—Josh Cosden and others made quick order of greatly undervalued lots of a former Creek allotment purchased by important Tulsa real estate developer Grant Stebbins from the heir of Wehiley Neharkey. Years later, his multi-story mansion would fall to make way for an upscale condominium complex, but in its day Sinclair was big—big enough to threaten Rockefeller.

Oilman Edward Doheny became his intimate friend. He shared with Sinclair the mechanics of doing business in New York and Washington D.C. In 1921, Doheny confidentially bragged he had his son deliver $100,000 in a little black bag to Interior Secretary of State Albert Hall, greasing the awarding of a no-bid lease of the fertile Elk Hill, a wealth of California oil reserves owned by the federal government.

The success of Doheny’s business tactic encouraged Sinclair, who learned of a no-bid lease opportunity for the federal Teapot Dome in Wyoming, a federal reserve set aside for use by the United States naval fleet. The reserve was named after a desolate, windblown expanse in Wyoming whose landscape featured a rock vaguely resembling a teapot. Sinclair sent a deliveryman to Secretary Fall’s office armed with $200,000 in a handbag, along with his best regards to the 1920 presidential campaign of Warren G. Harding. The lease went to Sinclair, and his company spent $35 million dollars on the operation.

Interior Secretary Fall had been indicted for fraud as a result of his black-bag transactions with Doheny and Sinclair, who were subsequently and similarly charged. Fall was convicted—the first felony for a public federal official while in office. After a lengthy trial, Doheny was acquitted. During the three years between being charged with fraud and his trial, Sinclair continued directing his empire.

His first trial was declared a mistrial when it was exposed that Sinclair had hired detectives to follow jurymen. A second trial resulted in his acquittal, but a United States Senate committee would not let go of the jury-shadowing incident. The entire ordeal dragged out seven years. Not one to hide behind the Fifth—the due process amendment to the Constitution regarding self-incrimination—Sinclair testified before twelve separate legislative committees. On advice of counsel, he failed to answer one question—they reasoned it irrelevant regarding another man’s testimony concerning the Teapot Dome investigation, which was already in the Congressional records—and it cost him.

That omission landed Sinclair in the Washington D.C House of Detention, guilty of contempt of the Senate. With subsequent appeals to the Supreme Court unsuccessful, Sinclair served six and a half months in 1929.

Robert L. Owen, a Muskogee native, served Oklahoma as a United States Senator during the time of the Teapot Dome lease and investigation. Responding to a written request by Harry Rogers of the Exchange National Bank, asking for his views on the merit of the suits brought against Sinclair, the Owen wrote a lengthy review in the equally lengthily titled Remarkable Experiences of H. F. Sinclair with His Government: Some Dangerous Precedents:

“As a witness, Sinclair had been denied the right to have the constitutionality or pertinence of a question determined before punishment can be imposed upon him for refusal to answer. He was given six months in jail for criminal contempt of court, for an act in which he violated no law of Congress, no law of the United States, no existing rule of court, for an act, which had been practiced by the government and private individuals for 30 years.”

Sinclair got out in November 1929 just in time for the advent of the Great Depression and a tempest in Oklahoma. “I was railroaded to jail in violation of common sense and common fairness,” he shouted, storming out of the detention facility, continuing, “I cannot be contrite for sins for which I know I have never committed.”

An early post-detention business move involved Sinclair selling his pipeline subsidiary to his rival, Standard Oil Company, to have ready cash for buying flagging companies. The Sinclair group grew substantially during 1930-1936, acquiring companies and properties for pennies on the dollar.

“Oklahoma oilmen avoided control by the government which was seen as unwarranted interference with their liberties,” said Bruce Niemi, author of The Greatest Individual Act, with Sinclair squaring off against Governor “Alfalfa Bill” Murray in 1930-1931. The oil industry overproduced the Mid-Continent Oil Province during the 1920s in an atmosphere of inter-industry cooperation or “associationalism,” thus depressing petroleum prices.

As the issues became worse, the governor took dead aim at Sinclair and his fellow producers, threatening to shut down most Oklahoma wells so that production would cease for a period of time, allowing for prices to improve, and creating more tax money for the state’s education program. Challenged by the threat of an oilmen injunction, Murray erupted, “It’ll be like a jackrabbit trying to tree a wild cat.”

Niemi claims, “Alfalfa Bill drove Sinclair out of Oklahoma,” chasing him to his mansion on Long Island. Undaunted, his uncompromising spirit continued to drive his company in new directions with continued success. He was a walking poster child of American business swagger.

Sinclair netted $81 million in 1948, producing nearly 40 million barrels of crude. It was time to rest. He retired in 1949 at the age of 73. Never relinquishing his personal or corporate independence, he walked away from an enterprise worth $700 million dollars, nearly 100,000 stockholders and 21,000 employees. Sinclair died in Pasadena, California seven years later. Many were surprised at the death notice of the legend. They thought he was already gone.

When Osama Bin Laden was killed in May 2011, bald, bearded eighty-something Charles Gasko knew he was in trouble. With Bin Laden gone, Gasko became the most hunted man on America’s fugitive list thanks, he thought, to those rich cake-eaters in Tulsa.

It wasn’t much of a life anyway, if one of the Gasko neighbors could be believed. He couldn’t even lift a laundry basket or keep up with Carol on the Santa Monica boardwalk nearby. Charles and Carol lived like lower middle class pensioners getting by on next to nothing, trapped in four small rooms with bare, bashed-in walls that hadn’t been painted in years. They walked around on dirty gray carpet installed in the Eighties.

At least the price was right, thanks to rent control. The Gaskos paid only about nine hundred dollars a month, a bargain in pricey Santa Monica. The place was dark most of the time, thanks to the black curtains covering the windows facing a nearby luxury hotel, when Gasko wasn’t window peeping. But unlike most pensioners, the Gaskos had nearly a million dollars in cash hidden away in their apartment at the Princess Eugenia.

They came for him on June 22, 2011, two days after the FBI rolled out a $2 million reward for the old man’s arrest. Gasko had been ratted out by Miss Iceland 1974, a neighbor who noticed how well he had cared for an abandoned cat named Tiger. She’d called the authorities the day earlier from her summer home in Reykjavik the minute she recognized the Gaskos on television. But the tired old man who pretended to be losing a battle against dementia wasn’t Charles Gasko after all. His real name was Bulger, which sounded vaguely German or Polish, but was really Gaelic. It meant “yellow belly.”

Back in South Boston, they called him Whitey.

* * *

James Joseph “Whitey” Bulger grew up “in the shadow of Yankee Babylon,” gazing at pale, distant towers that marked the boundaries of an ebbing Protestant ascendancy. Downtown Boston was bordered by mostly Catholic Poles, Lithuanians, Italians, and his own troublesome Irish. Close friends in “Southie” called him Jim. “We were in a neighborhood, an enclave, [from] which a trip downtown was considered ‘going to Boston,’ ” Whitey’s younger brother William M. “Billy” Bulger, remembered later.

Whitey was born in September 1929, the month before the Great Depression began. Billy came along less than five years later. Their old man worked as a railroader until two freight cars collided in a train yard with him in between. One arm was so badly mangled that a doctor barely looked at it before he started cutting. In those days before workers were compensated for on-the-job-injury, the Bulger family of eight was now condemned to poverty.

Young Billy loved books and politics. He became a university president, but his white-haired older brother preferred bookies and larceny. At first, Whitey worked alone. He eventually joined a minor street corner gang called the Shamrocks. After some time in a reformatory and the Air Force—from which he was honorably discharged in 1952, despite a spotty conduct record—Whitey took a federal fall for hijacking and armed robbery. During a nine-year sojourn through three federal prisons, he became a life-long friend of “The Choctaw Kid,” Clarence Carnes—the pride of Daisy, Oklahoma, and youngest inmate ever sent to Alcatraz. Whitey was released in 1965.

He returned home and became an enforcer for the Killeens, the premier Irish mob in South Boston. Six years later, in 1971, the Killeens tangled with their rivals the Mullins in a deadly conflict prompted by a random, drunken brawl in which Donald Killeen bit off the nose of Mullen factionist Michael “Mickey” Dwyer. Although Killeen had the nose scooped out of a gutter, packed in ice and rushed to the Boston City Hospital where Dwyer lay moaning, the Second Irish War was on.

Whitey’s first assignment during the second war was a disaster. He killed Mullen enforcer Paulie McGonagle; only it wasn’t Paulie who ended up on ice. By mistake, Whitey (or his designated hitter) drilled Paulie’s look-alike brother Donald, who some say wasn’t even in the rackets. This got Whitey’s boss, Billy O’Sullivan, killed in late March, 1971, prompting Whitey to make his move.

According to most accounts, Whitey approached Howie Winter to make a deal. Winter was the leader of the mostly Irish yet commendably diverse Winter Hill gang, named for a section of Somerville, a blue collar Boston suburb with the ambience of Sand Springs. Winter (his name is pure coincidence) became leader of the Winter Hill gang in 1965, during the First Irish War, when gang founder James “Buddy” McLean was killed. That conflict began on Labor Day 1961, when McLaughlin gang luminary Georgie McLaughlin made a subtle pass at a girlfriend of Winter Hill gang associate Alex Rocco by pinching her breast. The casualties resulting from that flirtation included sixty dead mobsters and hangers-on.

But in mid-May 1971, the traditional tale relates, Whitey killed his own boss, Don Killeen, to end the second war, survive, and move up. Other sources insist that Killeen was done in by the Mullins. Whoever pulled the trigger, Howie Winter and the Mafia, represented by the Partriarca crime family, soon mediated a merger of the Mullins and the Killeens into the Winter Hill gang.

Beginning in 1973, despite a declared moratorium on violence, Whitey and his associates killed a number of old Mullen rivals now operating within the newly merged Winter Hill gang, notably including Paulie McGonagle, the rival Whitey had tried to kill two years earlier. The next year, Whitey began regularly teaming up with Stephen Flemmi, another associate of the Winter Hill gang. Five years later, in 1979, Flemmi and Whitey ascended to Winter Hill leadership when Howie Winter and his entire management cadre were rolled up and jailed for fixing horse races, with charges against Whitey and Flemmi quietly dropped. This was no coincidence, since Flemmi and Bulger were FBI informants.

Whitey may have been a lucky charm, but a problem was brewing 1600 miles away in Tulsa that required his attention. And that problem was another hard-charging Boston native three years older than Whitey who ran the Telex Corporation.

His name was Roger Wheeler.

* * *

Even today, litigation-prone Roger Milton Wheeler is remembered in Tulsa as a brash, bold innovator. Stories of his rise from salesman to top-shelf executive—accounts of hallway firings, urban legends of altered contracts, and recollections of bluffs Wheeler ran against the Securities and Exchange Commission—are still told in midtown places where Tulsans of a certain age gather for morning coffee or evening grape.

Yet there is also his compassion for the most obscure Telex employees and the quiet generosity that prompted to him to rehabilitate a camp enjoyed by generations of Tulsa children, once his fortune was made. Wheeler and his employees transformed Telex from a hearing aid and stereo equipment manufacturer into a computer peripheral powerhouse. The trim, volatile tycoon even challenged IBM in court and won $353 million at trial (although IBM won an $18 million counterclaim for industrial espionage). Eventually, the award to Telex was reversed and the case was settled with no cash changing hands in mid-October 1975, seventy-two hours before the Supreme Court in Washington was scheduled to announce whether or not it would hear a Telex appeal.

Since Telex admitted four months earlier that it did not have the cash to pay IBM the eighteen million, some in the business press speculated that Telex had been on the verge of bankruptcy. Later, Wheeler had to be ordered to pay his own attorney about $1.3 million dollars for litigating the losing case. But within months of the IBM deal, prospects for Telex began to improve.

Now a Fortune 500 CEO, Wheeler began buying and selling other successful businesses on the side. In the market for cash-generating gaming operations, in 1979 he purchased World Jai Alai Inc., a privately owned corporation founded by Bostonians in the Twenties, with operations in Connecticut and Florida. Jai Alai resembles racquetball, with players wielding a long, funnel like scoop to catch and then release a ball into play. The teams are professionals paid out of the betting proceeds, making the sport perpetually ripe for “the fix.” The Jai Alai ball travels with such dizzying speed that career-ending injuries are not unusual. At least four players have been killed playing Jai Alai since the 1920s.

First National Bank of Boston had recruited Wheeler for the deal. The descendants of the World Jai Alai founders were looking for a buyer just at the time Wheeler was in the market for businesses that threw off cash and lots of it. World Jai Alai was all of that, spewing out about six million dollars (today $14 million) over operating expenses every year.

In theory, once the loan was paid off in little more than eight years, the six million dollar annual cash boodle would all belong to Wheeler. The Boston bankers even offered to finance the whole $50 million deal themselves, with one catch. Current management, including one Richard Donovan, and John Callahan, a former banker at First National, had to remain in place. Callahan was a certified public accountant with Winter Hill connections.

Acquaintances and family members opined years later that Wheeler may have known about the connections between organized crime and World Jai Alai before he made the deal. After all, it was unlikely that an astute businessman like Roger Wheeler could somehow miss or ignore how close his Connecticut Jai Alai operation was to several organized crime centers— places like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, all less than 250 miles away. Newspaper and magazine accounts published years later would conclude that Wheeler did not understand or appreciate the risk of mob interference in World Jai Alai until it was too late and he was on the hook for the fifty million. And, according to these accounts, it was only then that he discovered that his profits were being skimmed daily.

However early Wheeler learned the full extent of mob involvement in World Jai Alai, by late 1980 he had discovered the size of the skim and began taking actions to protect his investment. According to one account, in February 1981, John Callahan called in Winter Hill assassin Johnny Martorano to deal with Wheeler.

There are several underworld versions of how the Wheeler assassination was arranged. If Martorano is to be believed, it all began over dinner with Callahan at Yesterday’s Restaurant in Fort Lauderdale. Callahan complained he had a problem in Tulsa and needed help from Martorano, who owed him for favors done years before, although Whitey Bulger had to approve the action.

Martorano claimed in his memoirs that he hadn’t been offered any money for the job, although he eventually received $50,000, which he split with Winter Hill associates. According to Martorano, Wheeler was killed because he would not sell World Jai Alai to Callahan. Eventually, Martorano claimed, Callahan offered Bulger and Flemmi a bonus skim of $10,000 a week to get rid of Wheeler.

A Winter Hill veteran named Joe McDonald agreed to drive the getaway car as a return favor to retired FBI agent H. Paul Rico, a World Jai Alai security man who was also allegedly part of the skim. According to Martorano, Rico provided the background information necessary to track and kill Wheeler.

Northeastern Oklahoma was not the hot, dry desert full of cowboys or hostile Indians Martorano or McDonald might have imagined back in South Boston. And, in late May 1981, Tulsa was flush with money. New power couples, some in their thirties or even younger spent, dressed, bought, and built with lavish abandon. Tulsey Town was jumping all over again. The latest oil boom, then barely five years in the making would never end, or so it seemed. And one big prize was membership at “the Hill.”

Of course, you couldn’t simply buy your way into Southern Hills Country Club, not without the necessary connections, manners, and social graces. At one time, you had to be white and Christian, although race and religion restrictions were eventually eliminated. Southern Hills, then scarcely forty years old, was and is considered a monument to old Tulsa money. Although he came from “nothing,” Roger Wheeler—by then a twenty-year member—easily qualified as old money, having made his first big business deal in Tulsa thirty years earlier.

* * *

The assassins drove past the white 61st street gatehouse as if they owned the place, meandering up the oak-lined roach which climbed gently leftward past the championship golf course Tiger Woods would praise years later, as had Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer as young men.

Martorano and McDonald probably didn’t notice the polo fields, skeet shooting range, or the bare grass where first-class stables and a riding arena had been before a tragic fire five years earlier. They were far too preoccupied with the assignment to appreciate the tidy gardens or the children at the pool basking in the sunlit spring afternoon.

Martorano had killed at least eighteen people by then, many of them with a quick pistol shot to the back of the head in cars, trucks, bars and alleys, often in the company of the victim’s friends. Most of the men Martorano killed never knew it was coming, but Roger Wheeler would be different.

A few days before, Martorano and McDonald had flown into Oklahoma City as “Richard Aucoin” and “John Kelly.” They rented a car, drove the 120 miles or so to Tulsa, and stayed in a series of mediocre Tulsa motels. Their last stop was the aging and neglected Trade Winds West, which had once hosted Presidential candidates. While they waited for the “hit kit” containing weapons, bullet proof vests and assorted goodies to arrive from Southie, they used detailed information provided by former FBI agent H. Paul Rico to determine where best to assassinate the target.

They also looked for a good fast car to steal. The ideal “boiler” could be quickly driven away from the hit and dumped elsewhere to distract authorities while Martorano and McDonald highballed to Oklahoma City in their nondescript rental car. And when the bulky hit kit arrived at the downtown Tulsa bus station, the killers moved their plan forward. It had been shipped to “Joe Russo”—another prolific assassin then working in Boston, perhaps to deflect attention to the Mafia later.

Martorano had already decided they could not kill Wheeler at his mansion. The house, located at 1957 East 41st Street, is now hidden by a development, but was then fronted by a largely open, seven-acre estate that would have revealed the direction of their escape to witnesses. Nor was it practical to take him out at the Telex headquarters, high atop a hill surrounded by acres of bare ground some three miles east of the Wheeler manse. So they decided to kill him where Wheeler likely would be most relaxed and least on his guard—after his regular Wednesday afternoon golf game at Southern Hills.

Ordinarily, Wheeler played with a foursome and capped the game with a Scotch and milkshake in the clubhouse. But today, he quickly showered and joked with golf shop manager George Matson about his score on the way out. He shot an 88 and lost five bucks. “These boys are killing me,” Wheeler carped in jest, according to one news article.

Earlier, that Wednesday afternoon, May 27, Martorano and McDonald acquired a stolen Pontiac left for them at a large apartment complex near the country club and doffed disguises purchased at a Tulsa theatrical shop. They scouted the parking lot just behind the swimming pool, found the Cadillac they were looking for and waited for Wheeler to appear so they could finish the job and fly back to Florida. That day, Wheeler had parked on the far southern edge of the asphalt next to a light pole, facing a small, placid pond surrounded by willows. They didn’t have to wait long. Soon, the trim figure in a pin-striped business suit walked briskly out of the clubhouse past them towards the Caddy, already late for a meeting back at Telex.

Wheeler opened the door and climbed in, oblivious to Martorano rushing from behind on his left. Martorano testified a quarter century later that he grabbed the door to keep Wheeler from closing it and shot him between the eyes with a .38 snub nose pistol just as Wheeler jumped or fell backward into the seat. The pistol fell apart as it fired, dropping four bullets, but Martorano didn’t stop to pick them up, although he managed to retrieve the cylinder. Or perhaps he left the bullets on or near Wheeler as a stark warning to others—a not uncommon occurrence in such a hit.

Once Martorano was back in the Pontiac, McDonald careened eastward out of the parking lot in a counterclockwise semicircle, passing the party barn called Snug Harbor and the tennis courts. Finally, after a sharp right turn, they sped beyond the eleventh hole of the golf course on their left and slipped out the country club gate into Harvard Avenue traffic. Although newspapers reported the pair promptly disappeared, within a few days an anonymous caller told police that they stopped long enough to pick up a second car on the residential road paralleling the winding contours of 61st Street to the north a few minutes after the killing.

Of course, Wheeler never knew he’d been taken out on the orders of Whitey Bulger, a thug for all seasons who came of age less than fourteen miles from where Wheeler began his wheeling and dealing on the streets of Reading, Massachusetts. Nor would he know of his own grieving daughter, standing watch alone in the dusk at Southern Hills as detectives investigated her father’s murder.

Wheeler braved through those last seconds of consciousness comforted by club manager Dean Matthews but surrounded by curious kids in swimming suits, his head leaning against an old gym bag. He may have wondered how he ever thought he could buy a cash-business ready made for mobsters, say no to the skim, and live to tell the tale.

Yet, the fate he unwittingly fashioned for himself had been there all along, obscured by the brightness of a late spring afternoon, but mostly hidden by his own unbridled confidence: the specter of violent, lonely death and destiny in a cheap fake beard, with sunglasses hiding lifeless eyes, rushing into his face from out of nowhere, from behind his own blind spot.

I want you to pay a lot more attention to all my words longer and deeper and quieter and louder than I ever could. You’ll get more out of them than I did around here.

— Woody Guthrie, 1954

What we have here is a whole lotta fuss about some stuff. Stuff, just like your stuff. Notebooks, journals, pictures, records — it’s witty stuff, poignant stuff, moving stuff. But it’s still stuff.

Look around you, look at your stuff. Let’s say one day you get famous, maybe even infamous. All that stuff — the papers on your desk, the books on your shelves, the bric-a-brac on your knick-knack table — that stuff’ll be worth something. Collectors will want to horde it. Academics will want to examine it. Fans will seek to draw inspiration from the glory of your scribbles and doodles and incidental jottings. Stranger things have happened, or been suggested. Read Walter Miller Jr.’s great sci-fi novel A Canticle for Leibowitz; people build a whole religion founded on a scrap of someone’s shopping list.

Two months ago, the Woody Guthrie Archives, the New York-based repository of the Oklahoma-born folksinger’s stuff, announced the sale of its collection to the Tulsa-based George Kaiser Family Foundation. They paid $3 million for this stuff, and the foundation is building a center in downtown Tulsa to house and display it. We’re talking about more than 10,000 artifacts from Guthrie’s life and creative output — lyrics and poems, scrapbooks, photographs, artwork, home movies, albums, tapes, letters, and effects. The first draft of “This Land Is Your Land,” newspaper columns suggesting ways to help working Americans, essays about the power of music, cartoons about the evils of Hitler, endless jottings, and quotable quips, like this one: “A phonograph record is a funny thing. You talk at it only once and it talks back at you for several years.”

But long before it was protected and enshrined — and before and after the ideas contained within it circled the globe, made Guthrie a household name, and arguably changed at least a few pockets of the world — this was just stuff.

“It was stuff around our house,” says Nora Guthrie, Woody’s daughter and the creator of the Woody Guthrie Archives. She’s remembering growing up in the 1950s, just as Woody was hospitalized with Huntington’s disease.

“It’s the stuff I knew from our house in Howard Beach [in Queens, New York City]. It was on bookshelves and in drawers. My mom had put his writings into cardboard boxes and stored them in a little room in the house, a little office there. But for the most part it was still lying around the house. The records were on the record shelf with the others we listened to. It wasn’t like it was separated. I remember playing as a kid with the metal plates they used to print Bound for Glory. I used to roll paint on them and make stamps. All his pens he did his illustrations with, they were on the desk and we all used them and broke them. His clothes — I wore his pea jacket that you see in pictures, then I lost it. I left it on the IRT.” She chuckles. “We’ve destroyed as much stuff as we’ve saved.”

This is the story of Woody’s stuff, the stuff that’s survived — how it went from boxes in the basement to a filing cabinet full of things that, well, shouldn’t maybe be thrown out, to an acclaimed professional archive in New York City and, finally, all the way back home to a permanent center in Oklahoma for perpetual safekeeping and continuing discovery.

AFTER THE DELUGE

Woody died in 1967, but the corralling of his stuff began years earlier. He’d been institutionalized for his degenerative illness for more than a decade. As it became clear he wouldn’t be coming home again, his second wife, Marjorie, began collecting the papers and notebooks and boxing them up.

Harold Leventhal, Woody’s manager and friend during his last several decades in New York, reported that the effort to build what is now the archives began in 1957. In his foreword to Pastures of Plenty: A Self-Portrait, a collection of material from the archives edited by Leventhal and rock writer Dave Marsh, published in 1990, Leventhal writes that Marjorie not only boxed up what was in the house but sent out a form letter to Woody’s friends and acquaintances, soliciting artifacts.

The letter, Leventhal wrote, stated: “The first phase of this project, as you can see, is to collect all the material that we can, from wherever it may come, no small task considering the extent of Mr. Guthrie’s travels and writings. … We ask your help in bringing to light any letters, stories, articles, etc. that you may have or know the whereabouts of, so we may thoroughly go over all his writings.”

“Friends, relatives and coworkers all responded, and continue to do so,”Leventhal wrote.

That helped fuel the growing mass of papers that filled the boxes at the Guthrie home. Nora remembers that eventually the cache was stored in the basement of the Howard Beach home — where the whole batch was nearly destroyed.

“Mom originally had the writings and notebooks in file cabinets in the study,” she recalls, “but the turning point came when we grew up and mother left that house and moved to Manhattan. That’s when she put all those things in boxes and stored them in the basement, and then rented the house to another family. She didn’t want to take all that with her, and the family lived there for years with this stuff in the basement. There was a bad rainstorm and the basement flooded. Luckily, the stuff wasn’t on the floor or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

After that, in 1961, Marjorie moved the boxes to Leventhal’s office on the 17th floor of a midtown Manhattan office building (Nora remembers her mother saying, “Well, we don’t have to worry about flooding here”). The papers remained in cardboard boxes and filing cabinets, and there they existed for two decades.

THOSE ‘70S SHOWS

But shortly before Woody’s death, someone in Oklahoma made a suggestion — the first of three — to bring his papers back home.

A story in Oklahoma Monthly magazine from February 1977 (“Was This Your Land, Woody?” by Bob Gregory) reports that in 1967 Marjorie Guthrie briefly considered sending at least some of the papers to the Okemah Public Library, in Woody’s hometown. The idea was proposed by Okemah resident and library board member Lelia Chowning, then 86, who wanted simply to establish a “Woody Guthrie Corner” in the library with his writings and music.

Chowning is quoted: “Mrs. [Marjorie] Guthrie told me she would send all those papers Woody had under his bed and that she would have those headsets installed so people could listen to Woody’s music without interrupting anybody else. She even said we could have his instrument if we promised not to let it change hands. But then they started all that talk [about Communism] and the board voted against it.”

The board shot down her proposal, 4-1.

(In 1971, Okemah, with a population then around 3,000, was divided by a Hatfield-McCoy-level furor. Another proposal was made to create a permanent memorial to Woody. “Everyone got so upset,” another resident reported. “Good friends and even families fell out over it.” Opposition was based on allegations that Woody was a communist and was led by Okemah banker Allison A. Kelly, who returned to action years later to fight against the town’s now annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival.)

In 1972, Marjorie established the Woody Guthrie Foundation. Nora says the foundation existed to handle day-to-day tasks dealing with royalties and permissions, but its genesis was as a repository for proceeds coming from two albums, A Tribute to Woody Guthrie, Pts. 1 & 2, recordings of two concerts — at Carnegie Hall in 1968 and the Hollywood Bowl in 1970 — featuring Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, and others singing Woody’s songs and reading his prose.

“All the proceeds from those recordings went to the foundation, and the main purpose of the foundation was to pay [Marjorie’s] expenses as she went around working for Huntington’s disease, giving lectures and talking to researchers,” Nora says. “That became the way she was able to start the Committee to Combat Huntington’s Disease.

“But — you know, the things your parents don’t tell you — in the third sentence of the constitution and bylaws for the foundation, she mentions the word ‘archives.’ She hoped things would be collected for an eventual archives where people could come research.” And here, Nora is open-mouthed, dumbfounded. “I just discovered that language 10 years ago! I went, ‘Mom, I can’t believe it! I didn’t know, but it happened!’ It was so spooky. No one in her lifetime had ever mentioned any desire like that.”

When Joe Klein sifted through the collection in 1978- 79, while writing the first biography (Woody Guthrie: A Life), he says Marjorie was referring to the collection as “the archives.”

“I think I was the first outsider granted access to the trove,” says Klein, now a political columnist for Time. “It was all in metal filing cabinets in Harold’s office. She said, ‘You’re not going to believe how much stuff is in there. It’ll take you a year to read it all.’ And she was right. I read every letter, every word that he ever wrote, every song he ever wrote.”

Klein wasn’t the first to dip into the trove, though. Some material from the archives first eked its way into the market with the 1965 publication of Born to Win, a thematic collection of Woody’s stories, drawings and poems edited by Robert Shelton. A decade later, a roundup of his daily column for The People’s World newspaper was published as Woody Sez, with a preface by Studs Terkel. The next year, 1976, saw the publication of a manuscript from the archives, Seeds of Man, Woody’s autobiographical account of a 1931 expedition with family members to south Texas to hunt for a silver mine.

“THIS LAND,” AHOY!

After that, a second plan was hatched to bring the archives to Oklahoma.

Guy Logsdon, now a renowned expert on cowboy music and Woody Guthrie, became the director of libraries at the University of Tulsa the year Woody died. Through the ’70s, his study of Woody led to an acquaintance with Marjorie. In 1981, he pitched the idea to bring the collection to TU.

“I said, ‘Hey, we would like to have the archives here,’ and we started negotiating,” Logsdon says. “We had a contract in the mill with TU’s attorneys. … The figure was $175,000 or $180,000. At the time, part of the collection was still in Marjorie’s home; not all of it was at the New York City office. She had the permission of all three children, and we were writing up the contract when the idea was killed.”

Logsdon cites a conflict with TU administrators as the reason for the deal falling through. Neither Nora nor Thomas Staley, then provost at TU and currently director of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, say they can remember hearing about this proposal, but neither do they think it might not have been in the works.

The very idea was doomed shortly thereafter as Marjorie contracted cancer. She died in 1983 at age 65, and was survived by her three children with Woody: Nora, Joady, and Arlo, a famous folksinger in his own right. The two sons opted out of shepherding Woody’s things and moved away from New York. Nora recently told the New York Times, “[Arlo] was filled up with being Woody Guthrie’s son, so he was glad the responsibility moved to me.” (Arlo, though, briefly considered making some kind of archives part of a facility he acquired in 1992 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, that housed his record label, among other things. Arlo possesses Woody’s collection of 78rpm records and some of his annotated books.)

Nora, however, still in New York, eventually succumbed to the gravity of the filing cabinets.

“I came along in 1992, and I’d been raising kids for 10 years,” she says. “Harold called one day and said, ‘Nora, I’m thinking about retiring, and there’s a lot of stuff here that belongs to your dad. Maybe you should come take a look at it.’ … I started going once a week. I wasn’t on salary, just helping out. The first job: he gave me all these interview tapes of Joe Klein’s and said, ‘We need labels typed up.’ So I typed up all the labels. The more I did, the more my curiosity was piqued.

“These were all people I’d grown up with but as a child had never talked to them. I was 42 now, and I said, ‘I wonder what Will Geer said.’ Or, ‘I wonder what Bess Hawes said.’ I started going in twice a week. Harold said, ‘I’ll give you a little desk.’ He’d walk by and just throw something on my desk. ‘I just found this in a file.’ A letter or a notebook. They were scattered all over his office. So I’d read. One day he put a box in there. I was browsing through and found this envelope that said Lennon Music Publishing. I unfolded it and there was a letter from John Lennon that said, ‘Woody lives, and I’m glad!’ — from 1975. I went to Harold. He said, ‘There is?’ Nobody knew it. Mom read it and probably smiled and put it in the box. Another day, I’m turning pages and it’s song lyrics — and there’s ‘This Land,’ written out. I said, ‘Harold, have you ever seen this copy?’ ‘No.’ ‘This is kinda cool, right?’

“So I called the Smithsonian and said, ‘Hey, I just found the original copy of “This Land Is Your Land.” Should I put it in plastic or something?’ ”

PUTTING STUFF IN PLACE

Fortunately, the folks at the Smithsonian connected Nora Guthrie and Harold Leventhal with someone who could help. Jorge Arevalo was, at the time, an archivist at Queens College working for the Louis Armstrong Archive. They met at an event, and Arevalo agreed to come by Leventhal’s office and take a gander at Woody’s stuff.

“It was appalling,” Arevalo says, laughing. “As you can imagine, this stuff was crammed into cabinets and boxes — assorted boxes, shoeboxes, all kinds — and it needed a lot of work.”

“I showed him this and that, and I said, ‘I should probably do something to protect this, right?’ ” Nora says. “I’m with my coffee and bagel, with ‘This Land’ in my hands. I’d grown up with this stuff. No one ever told me, ‘Move the coffee away.’ Jorge very, very sweetly said something like, ‘Can I do something?’ He took my coffee and moved it away.”

“Within five minutes, I was like, ‘Holy moly!’ But I didn’t say ‘moly,’ ” Arevalo says. “It was just beyond what anyone ever imagined. … Right away, I knew this was a collection that spoke volumes about music, folk music, American life, American history and attitudes. It’s become that, too, a source of not just music performances but volumes of literature and scholarship.”

Arevalo agreed to a one-year contract to inventory the material. One year turned into two, then three. That was in the early ’90s, and he’s still the archives’ curator.

With a $100,000 donation from recording artists and companies, Arevalo and an assistant, Amy Danelian, sorted, organized and placed into protective archival boxes the mass of now decades-old, delicate, brittle papers. In April 1996, the archive — still housed in one room of Leventhal’s office on West 57th Street — opened to the public.

“Once it was organized, [Jorge] said, ‘It would be really nice if people could come and look at this,’ ” Nora says. “I said, ‘Yeah, I guess. Do you think anyone would come?’ He said yes, that it wasn’t just dad’s stuff anymore, it was part of American history. So I thought, well, we’ll need a table where people can sit.”

BRAGG-IN’ RIGHTS

Four years later, in 2000–2001, I spent three days a week for nine months sitting at that table. On leave from my post as a music critic at the Tulsa World, and on a fellowship with the National Arts Journalism Program, I wrote research for the archives (“Tracking Woody’s HD: From Instinct to Institution”) and collected my own seedlings from the newly planted garden. Many of those sprouted in further journalism at the World and in my current post as a critic at the Chicago Sun-Times, as well as stories for this publication (“Woody Guthrie and Unions, Amen,” July 2011) and a play (“Time Changes Everything,” co-authored with John Wooley).

When you say the word “archives,” sometimes people conjure up images of heavy vault doors and museum-like pristineness. But during its tenure in New York

City, the Woody Guthrie Archives existed very much as its namesake did. It was just a three-room office in a nondescript building. The documents were kept in acid-free boxes on a series of shelves, like those in your doctor’s office, that slide on tracks against one another. It was free, and open by appointment.

People often dropped by, though. Famous people — I remember Lou Reed and Pete Seeger — but ordinary folks, too. Writers, professors, students. A lot of hands in white cotton gloves began plucking notebooks and song lyrics from the shelves. Projects began pouring forth, and Woody once again found himself and his ideas touring the land he loved.

The most publicized project was Mermaid Avenue, an album by British folk-rock singer Billy Bragg and Chicago roots-rock band Wilco. They started what would become a trademark for the archives—they selected song lyrics and, since Woody wrote down his words but never his tunes, wrote and recorded new music for them. Other artists to do the same include Jonatha Brooke, Joel Rafael, Slaid Cleaves, even the Klezmatics (Woody wrote a lot of music with Jewish themes), plus a great new album of reinterpretations by Jay Farrar (formerly of Uncle Tupelo), Will Johnson, Anders Parker, and Yim Yames, New Multitudes.

Books, too — This Land Was Made For You And Me, by Elizabeth Partridge; “There’s a Better World a-Comin’: Resolving the Tension Between the Urban and Rural Visions in the Writings of Woody Guthrie” by John S. Partington; Ed Cray’s biography Ramblin’ Man; Will Kaufman’s great Woody Guthrie: American Radical; and the beautiful, wondrous scholarly coffee-table book, Woody Guthrie Artworks.

BRINGING WOODY HOME

Not long after Leventhal died in 2005, Nora moved the archives out of his old office to a site in Mt. Kisco, New York, deep in the suburbs north of the city. There, she started to think about the future.

“For years, Jorge kept trying to talk to me, asking, ‘What are you going to do?’ ” Nora says. “I knew my limitations. I’m not a fundraiser. To raise a million dollars, you’ve got to schmooze for years. I’m just a jeans girl. I can’t do this by myself. … People don’t really think about the future. I thought, I’m not going to be like that. While I still have my brain, body, some intelligence and discrimination, I’m going to make the very important decisions that need to be made about the future of this archive. You want to have all your marbles for something like this.”

The Kaiser Foundation, an organization with a $4 billion endowment dedicated to helping Tulsa’s disadvantaged, contacted Nora a couple of years ago — just by way of introducing themselves to a like-minded organization — and a slow courtship began. As she began speaking with executive director Ken Levit and senior program officer Stanton Doyle, she realized she might have found the right caretakers.

The third time Oklahoma reached out for Woody’s stuff was the charm.

“I’m not even going to call it a courtship,” she says. “We just got to know each other a couple of years and tried to figure out if, when, how we could belong together in any way. It wasn’t impulsive. … I went out and totally fell in love with Tulsa. It reminded me of SoHo in the ’70s when I was dancing there. We went to the Brady district and saw the violin makers and artists working in old spaces of old warehouses, and met all these really good people doing really wonderful things. But it’s different from New York in that not only do they have the literal space for something like this, they have the psychological space for it.”

The multimillion-dollar deal, which Nora says hinged on the idea of creating a facility for the archives, will result in the Woody Guthrie Center at 116 E. Brady St., in the former Tulsa Paper Company building. The site will house the collection, display exhibits and include educational and performance spaces. Work on clearing and rehabbing the site has begun, and the collection is expected to be moved from New York and installed in its new Tulsa home within the next year.

“I’m working with the Tulsa people for a year or two on the design of the interior of the building,” Nora says. “I wanted Woody on the main floor where people have access to him, not up in a tower in a hall of fame. There are some institutions like this where you have to climb stairs and show a pass. Woody should have ground-level, easy access. There should be stages to the relationship. You walk in and there will be an exhibit, some interactive things. If you’re interested and want to engage further, then you climb some stairs to the archives. You can get to know him on many levels.”

This is where Oklahomans find themselves: getting to know Woody again. The different levels of engagement — the howjadoos, the next steps — may be crucial to a difficult homecoming that probably started with, and now is somewhat realizing, Mrs. Chowning’s library crusade.

“In a way,” Nora says, thoughtfully, “Oklahoma was like Woody’s mother. He roamed and rambled, and always will, but it’ll be nice for him to be back in mother’s arms.”

The lawsuit was filed, in part, on behalf of Madame Agathe Habyarimana, the widow of Juvénal Habyarimana, the former President of Rwanda. It alleged that in 1994, Kagame, a Tutsi, assassinated former president Habyarimana, a Hutu, by ordering his jet shot down as it approached the runway in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. The suit claimed it was Kagame’s intention to spark an outbreak of widespread violence, which ultimately resulted in genocide, by ordering the shooting of the Falcon 50 that carried Habyarimana and the president of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira, whose widow is also a plaintiff in the suit.

The two presidents were flying back to Kigali from neighboring Tanzania after signing a peace accord between exiled Tutsi forces and the Hutu-led government of Rwanda. The jet was struck by two surface-to-air missiles fired from close range. All aboard were killed. In retaliation, Rwandan Hutu extremists unleashed one of the deadliest acts of genocide the world has ever seen, systematically killing Tutsis and anyone sympathetic to them.

The lawsuit states, “General Paul Kagame deliberately chose a modus operandi that, in the context of the particular tension pervading both in Rwanda and Burundi between the Hutu and Tutsi communities, could only bring about bloody reprisals against the Tutsi community, and which offered [Kagame] a veneer of legitimacy for his renewal of hostilities and his seizing of State power in Rwanda by criminally violent means.” In the lawsuit, the widows of the dead presidents accused Kagame of wrongful death and murder, crimes against humanity, violations of the rights of life, liberty, and security, and torture, among other things, and requested damages against him in the total amount of $350 million.

•••

The plaintiffs had to clear two procedural hurdles before the lawsuit could even begin in earnest. The most daunting issue was the question of service and notice to Kagame. Before a judge can make any order affecting the rights of a particular defendant, a defendant must be given notice. It is usually accomplished by a process server physically handing a copy of a filed lawsuit and other legal documents to the person being sued.

The other hurdle was jurisdictional. American law dictates that there must be a substantial connection between the person being sued and the place they are sued. In the case of Habyarimana v. Kagame, attorneys for Habyarimana would have to show that Kagame had substantial connections and contacts with the federal jurisdiction of the Western District of Oklahoma in order to maintain the suit there. It was the OCU-Kagame connection that the lawyers were counting on to fulfill the jurisdictional requirement.

In accordance with the Rwandan Presidential Scholars Program, scholarships funded by the Rwandan government are awarded to 10 Rwandans each year to attend OCU. Upon graduation with either bachelor’s or master’s degrees, the graduates are required to return to Rwanda to “help develop their country,” according to OCU’s website.

While lawyers negotiated with the Secret Service and Kagame’s entourage, Kagame addressed the assembled graduates: “I am sure you know that among the distinguished [graduates] today are the first cohort of Rwandan scholars at OCU. Their graduation marks an important milestone in the partnership, and indeed, friendship between OCU and Rwanda.” Extolling the necessity of an educated citizenry, Kagame said, “You need no reminding that in Rwanda, one of the long-lasting consequences of genocide was the decimation of the educated class.”

Of the “decimation” of 1994, Philip Gourevitch, author of the book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, wrote, “Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. Although the killing was low-tech—performed largely by machete—it was carried out at dazzling speed: of an original population of about seven and a half million, at least eight hundred thousand people were killed in just a hundred days. Rwandans often speak of a million deaths, and they may be right. The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Ron Frost, Vice President of Communications at OCU, said that some of the first Rwandese students to attend the university were orphaned by the genocide. Some were old enough in ’94 to have visible memories of family, friends and neighbors being murdered by machete.

•••

Rwanda’s intertribal animosities began with their colonial occupiers, the Belgians, as early as 1919. Through a mixture of biblical myth and Nazi-style eugenics, the Belgians decreed the Tutsis to be one of the lost tribes of Israel, and inherently superior to their countrymen, the Hutus. Tutsis took the flattery to heart. The Belgians placed Tutsis in middle-management roles overseeing and directing the hard and forced labors of their designated inferiors, the Hutus. The Belgians even went so far as to issue identification cards labeling a person either Hutu or Tutsi. Though there exists so much intermarriage between Hutus and Tutsis to blur any genealogical difference between the two, it was considered a high distinction and prize to have the word “Tutsi” printed on your identification card.

Rwandan history after the withdrawal of Belgium is pocked by a series of uprisings and clashes between the two tribes. In 1961, when Paul Kagame was three, he and his family fled for Uganda during a revolt that left as many as 150,000 Rwandans dead, with Tutsis taking the largest number of casualties. Kagame was raised and schooled in exile. As a young man, he became involved in military operations as a guerilla fighter in the Ugandan National Resistance Army that eventually overthrew the Ugandan government in 1985.

Shortly thereafter, Kagame helped to form the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF), which was comprised of both exiled Hutus and Tutsis in Uganda. From the start, their aim was to seek re-entry to Rwanda for its exiled population and to gain involvement in Rwandese governance.

In 1990, Kagame was the second in command of the RPF while he was undergoing special military training at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in the U.S. Army Command and Staff College. The training was offered to Kagame by the President of Uganda who had the backing of the U.S. Government after having overthrown the brutal regime of Milton Obote. Kagame quit his training early to return to Uganda when news reached him that the leader of the RPF had been killed in combat by Rwandese forces.

At about the same time, peace talks began between the RPF, with Kagame at the helm, and the Rwandan government, headed by then-President Habyarimana. By all accounts, Habyarimana was less than enthusiastic about the proposals being generated in the peace talks. The talks revolved around proposals that would substantially diminish Habyarimana’s influence as head of state.

Peace talks notwithstanding, a vicious propaganda machine was busy cranking up Hutu hostility towards Tutsis within Rwanda, with the apparent blessings of Habyarimana and his wife. A widely read newspaper called Kangura, founded in part by Agathe Habyarimana in reaction to a moderate periodical critical of her husband, became the daily digest for the “Hutu Power” movement that was picking up steam. One edition ran with an article entitled “The Hutu Ten Commandments.” The eighth commandment stated, “Hutus must stop taking pity on the Tutsis.”

The commentators at radio station RTLM, based in Kigali, and whose signal reached across Rwanda, began to refer to Tutsis as “cockroaches,” and warned them to watch their backs.

The dreaded interahamwe was formed. Interahamwe means “those who fight/attack together” in the Rwandese African tongue. The interahamwe consisted of groups of young machete-wielding Hutu men who would be responsible for most of the 800,000 Tutsi dead by the end of the summer of 1994.

Interahamwe groups would regularly have rallies “where alcohol usually flow red freely, giant banners splashed with hagiographic portraits of Habyarimana flapped in the breeze, and paramilitary drills were conducted like the latest hot dance moves,” writes Philip Gourevitch. “The president and his wife often turned out to be cheered at these spectacles, while in private the members of the interahamwe were organized into small neighborhood bands, drew up lists of Tutsis, and went on retreats to practice burning houses, tossing grenades, and hacking dummies up with machetes.”

•••

“Hutu Power” Radio RTLM reported to Rwanda that Juvénal Habyarimana was dead. Its commentators encouraged that “the tall trees be chopped down,” code for “kill the Tutsis,” and began almost exclusively referring to Tutsis as “cockroaches.” According to multiple sources, commentators at RTLM would read out names of Tutsis and Hutus sympathetic to Tutsis, and give directions as to how to find them. In turn, RTLM would announce the news after someone on their list had been killed by the Hutu interahamwe.

At the outset of the genocide, Agathe Habyarimana flew to Paris, where she lives in exile to this day.

Some have speculated that Hutu extremists were responsible for shooting down Habyarimana’s plane in retaliation for signing the peace accord with the RPF, and as a pretext for sparking the genocide that resulted. Others believe that the orders to shoot down the plane were given by the RPF, and specifically by Kagame himself, also as a pretext to spark the genocide and justify an invasion into Rwanda from the northeast in Uganda, which is exactly what happened. Kagame steadfastly denies the accusation that the RPF, and he, had anything to do with the shooting down of Habyarimana’s jet.

Lt. Col. Charles Vuckovic, a U.S. defense attaché for the Defense Intelligence Agency, was in Kigali when the president’s plane was shot down. He told reporters for PBS’ Frontline, “There are many theories as to who shot down the plane. I don’t know if anybody has the answer to that. Was it Hutu extremists or was it Tutsi extremists? Was it done by the Tutsis as an excuse to begin the movement south by the RPF and take control of the country? Hard to say. Or was it used by the Hutu extremists to begin the genocide that took place? I don’t know the answer to that.”

After the RPF took over Rwanda and quashed the Hutu-led genocide, the French Government produced a report that concluded the genocide was intentionally sparked by the RPF and Kagame. The plaintiffs’ case in the Oklahoma lawsuit relies heavily on that investigation conducted by French authorities.

An investigation was also undertaken by the Kagame-led Rwandan government. Not surprisingly, the report concluded that President Habyarimana was assassinated by members of his own inner circle. Kagame’s report concluded, “The attack was a deliberate attempt by Hutu extremists close to the president to scupper an imminent peace agreement with the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebels.”

A new investigation by the French corroborates Kagame’s version of what happened, and directly contradicts the previous French investigation championed by the plaintiffs in the Oklahoma case. On January 11, 2012 two French judges announced that based on their investigation into the matter it is their belief that the missiles were fired from a Hutu military base by Habyarimana’s own soldiers. For the foreseeable future that is the narrative the French government and Kagame’s Rwanda have settled on, thereby thawing what had been a contentious relationship between the two countries.

In the commencement speech given by Kagame at OCU, he also said, “The ills that have characterized our country … such as conflict, poverty, disease, and corruption are in many ways a result of lack of value-based leadership. In Rwanda, we learnt that lesson the hard way …” He ended his speech by saying, “Congratulations again to you all, and may God bless you.” Kagame left the OCU campus, surrounded by his bodyguards, without papers being served on him. University officials escorted the lawyers for Agathe Habyarimana off campus grounds.

Peter Erlinder, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case and an international law professor at the William Mitchell College of Law in Saint Paul, Minnesota, said, obviously disgruntled, “Rather than accept service, members of [Kagame’s] staff refused to accept documents and the university ordered process servers and lawyers to leave campus … which is interference with service of process, a misdemeanor under Oklahoma law. … [B]ecause the university has now involved itself in the conspiracy to cover up Kagame’s crimes, they have exposed themselves to liability.”

According to university officials, there has been no legal retaliation on the part of the plaintiffs in the Oklahoma City case to date, and there is none expected.

Ron Frost of OCU said with a chuckle, “There was no way [process servers] were going to get within 20 feet of President Kagame.” According to Frost, Kagame’s bodyguards numbered close to 30 and were armed with automatic weapons.

•••

After months of legal wrangling between the plaintiffs’ lawyers and Kagame’s over the procedural issues of whether Kagame was properly given notice of the law suit, and whether the Western District of Oklahoma was the proper court to hear the case, the U.S. government stepped into the fight.

The Department of Justice (DOJ), at the behest of the Obama administration, filed a “Suggestion of Immunity” in September 2011. The DOJ’s Suggestion of Immunity urged the court to dismiss the suit against Kagame citing international law, foreign policy and precedent. In the history of American jurisprudence a suggestion of immunity filed by the DOJ on behalf of a sitting head of state has never been rejected.

The Oklahoma City federal judge, Lee West, dismissed the suit against Kagame on October 28 of last year. The lawyers for the widows are appealing the Oklahoma judge’s ruling.

In September, a French court rejected a case filed by the Rwandan government against Habyarimana to have her extradited to Rwanda to stand trial for the planning and execution of the genocide, an accusation she has always denied. A Rwandan official said that the French ruling would be respected “for whatever it is worth.”

Rwandan students enrolled at OCU declined to be interviewed for this article. When asked why, Ron Frost said, “We asked a few of our Rwandan students if they would like to be interviewed. They would just rather not talk about it.”

Maybe their silence is rooted in a pragmatic wisdom. That the blame for the genocide that occurred over a decade ago in Rwanda, leaving close to one million men, women, and children dead, can finally and legally be assigned to one person or another, to the satisfaction of all, seems as improbable and as unhelpful as the case against Kagame moving forward in Oklahoma federal court.

A frustrating question occasionally popped up between me and a co-worker in the early to mid-1990s: what was that crazy theme music from Fantastic Theater? Fantastic Theater was a 1960s Channel 2 weekend late-night TV program featuring old sci-fi/horror movies.) Having become a fan over the years of musically challenging groups such as Weather Report and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, it came over me at some point that, in retrospect, the weird, energetic electronic music had been something special. We attacked the question in several ways, including calling the station and talking with the former host of the show, Josef Peter Hardt, but failed to unearth any useful information.

Yet another local sci-fi/horror late-night show had caught my fancy in 1971: The Uncanny Film Festival and Camp Meeting on Channel 6. I was so eaten up with it and its hilarious host, Dr. Mazeppa Pompazoidi, that I had audiotaped many of the host segments. Those tapes were still in my possession in late 1998. I also had a postcard photo of local weatherman/ventriloquist Lee Woodward and King Lionel, a witty lion puppet who bantered audaciously on-camera with the news team. When the Fantastic Theater theme music question surfaced again, I realized that I had my topic: Tulsa TV.

Once I got a rudimentary “Memories of old Tulsa TV” site launched, I got serious about tracking down the weird music. I recorded myself warbling the oddly time-signatured instrumental tune and emailed the embarrassing WAV file to a couple of experts on older electronic music. Both identified the tune as “Sonik Re-Entry,” performed and recorded by Dutch composers Tom Dissevelt and Kid Baltan in 1957. What a relief it was to finally hear it again! I immediately shared it with the readers of the site, by then renamed “Tulsa TV Memories.”

Since then, the readers and I have talked about famous and obscure personalities of Tulsa TV, from both in front of and behind the camera. The scope of the site quickly expanded to include Tulsa radio, drive-in theaters, counterculture of the 70s and other locally-related pop culture. There are two “Channel Changers” loaded with site topics. TTM now contains thousands of images, many YouTube clips and sound files and nearly a thousand individual pages.

Many of those who were part of Tulsa TV history have participated over the last twelve years and many still do. Anyone can join the running conversation—I have no background in media other than the site.

As Uncle Zeb always closed his show: I’ll be lookin’ fur ya!

Mike Ransom is the webmaster of Tulsa TV Memories.

Note: This article was originally published on January 17, 2011

It’s been nearly two decades since the world said goodbye to Hee Haw. The show ran from 1969 to 1992. At the height of its popularity, the show was a fixture in over 15 million homes. Throughout the 70s and 80s, Hee Haw was to American television what Paul Harvey was to radio: a dependable voice in the traffic of popular culture. It’s common practice in television programming to follow the current trends and provide content that complements the time. Both Star Trek and Lost in Space appeared at the zenith of the space race, while Jack Bauer and 24 debuted in the post-9/11 world. Yet Hee Haw, with its country twang and family-friendly humor, stood out in the sea of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll that dominated the era. Hee Haw was unlike anything else on television, with one exception.

On September 9, 1967, near the end of the “Summer of Love”, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In debuted on NBC. Originally intended as a one-time special, the program struck such a chord that it was rushed into production as a regular series. Less than six months later, on January 22, 1968, the show was in weekly rotation. With its unapologetically political agenda and finger placed firmly on the zeitgeist, Laugh-In quickly transitioned from a funny and entertaining program to something “important” in the eyes of viewers and pundits nationwide. Nowhere was this growing influence more apparent than on September 16, when Richard Nixon made a cameo appearance less than two months before the 1968 Presidential Election. Looking out of place and pandering the way only true politicians can, his utterance of the catchphrase “Sock it to me” is now in the canon of memorable television moments, if only for his stylistic alteration which changed the statement into a question. In the midst of this radical change in the cultural landscape, two Canadians were watching closely and plotting their next move.

John Aylesworth and Frank Peppiatt met in 1950 in Toronto while working as copywriters at the MacLaren Advertising agency. The two quickly formed a close friendship and soon realized their talents might be better-suited elsewhere, and that “elsewhere” was radio. In the early 1950’s the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, or CBC for short, was transitioning into the new realm of television. When the time came to debut their first comedy show for television, the CBC turned to Peppiatt and Aylesworth. The duo would go on to perform skits and become Canada’s first TV comedy team. This two-host variety format would serve them well in later years, but by the late 50’s, both men were growing tired of performing. Missing the writing side of the business, the two parted ways. On the recommendation of his good friend and fellow Canadian, Norman Jewison, Aylesworth relocated to New York City for a job onYour Hit Parade at CBS. In a strange bit of serendipity, Peppiatt also ended up in the Big Apple, working on a variety series for Steve Lawrence and his wife. But, just a year after cutting their creative ties, in the spring of 1959 Peppiatt and Aylesworth were together again. The brass at CBS tasked the team at Your Hit Parade to create something for Andy Williams—a variety show. It was Norman Jewison, a savvy director and future Oscar nominee (Moonstruck, Fiddler on the Roof), who initiated the reunion. The Andy Williams Show was a smash. The boys were back together and the future was wide open.

A multitude of show and specials came and went as Peppiatt and Aylesworth’s stock continued to climb. Crooners including Bing Crosby and Perry Como were among the headliners they had the opportunity to work with. But it was the duo’s first contact with the “country” side of showbiz that would go on to have the biggest impact. In today’s world, the name “Jimmy Dean” rarely evokes more than a Pavlovian response to the thought of breakfast sausage. But, 50 years ago, Jimmy Dean was a bona fide star, having attained fame as both a television host and the singer of hits like “Big Bad John.” After Perry Como’s retirement, Peppiatt and Aylesworth accepted an offer in 1963 to write for The Jimmy Dean Show.

Brought in to surround this “country boy” with their signature brand of northern sophistication, Peppiatt and Aylesworth were expected to create a well-rounded show with something for everyone. With guests ranging from opera stars to political comedians, the show certainly wasn’t going for a purely “country” vibe. This didn’t sit well with Dean, who was unfamiliar with many of his own guests and lobbied hard for the likes of Buck Owens and Roger Miller. Dean was adamant that these country stars would have wide appeal and tried his best to find ways to spotlight their talent. When Dean was tapped to be the very first guest host for The Tonight Show, one of his first orders of business was to bring on a young musician named Roy Clark whom he’d known since Dean’s days hosting a local variety show in Washington D.C. The appearance marked Clark’s first exposure to a national audience. But Dean was never fully able to convince the network. The tension between management and Dean proved too much for Peppiatt and Aylesworth. Just five weeks in, they left the show. By 1966 it was off the air completely.

In the nomadic tradition they’d been practicing for years, Peppiatt and Aylesworth returned to working on specials for Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland and Groucho Marx among others. Just as they’d made the transition from writer to performer while working in Canada years earlier, the time soon came for another role change. Jonathan Winters, the noted comedian and monologist, hadn’t had his own television show since the late 50’s. His crazy brand of humor, a heady mix of the absurd and the intellectual, certainly wasn’t for everyone. His fans were devoted in their praise of his unpredictable antics, perhaps displayed best through his LP’s. But his detractors–and there were many–found him more confusing than funny. In 1967, CBS gambled on Winters and recruited Peppiatt and Aylesworth to guide the ship. Only this time, their services as writers weren’t needed. For the first time in their career together, the duo would be producing. They hoped for the best and tried to introduce Winters to a mass audience, but in the end their efforts proved unsuccessful.

Mike Dann, then-president of CBS’ entertainment division, flew to Los Angeles from New York to deliver a somber message. The plug was being pulled. In his memoir about the show, The Corn Was Green, published just months before his death this year, Aylesworth recalls the conversation with Dann that changed everything. “It’s not that it isn’t a good show, fellas,” Dann said. “We’re very happy with what you’ve done with it. The problem is that Jonathan is just too special for a mass audience.” This revelation was nothing new. Praising their work and tenacity, Dann closed one door and opened another. “Instead of working for other people all the time, why don’t you create a show of your own?” It wasn’t as if the idea hadn’t crossed their minds. “If you can come up with a good idea, I’d be happy to give it a shot. I’ll be in town for the next two weeks. Think about it.”

The stage was set.

ON, OFF, ON AGAIN

With a golden opportunity to finally do something of their own making, Peppiatt and Aylesworth, working with their manager, Bernie Brillstein, began to lay the groundwork for what would eventually become Hee Haw. Country music was selling better than ever and non-variety shows like Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies were performing well in the ratings. When the time came to pitch the idea to Dann and others at CBS, the response was generally positive, but mostly in the abstract. There was no good time slot for such a show in the current lineup. Not to mention the fact that a movie star was waiting in the wings. None other than Doris Day was making her move to television and she was in need of producers. No longer interested in working on yet another show built around one person, Peppiatt and Aylesworth passed.

In the late 60’s, few television programs were as controversial as The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Openly and vocally opposed to the war in Vietnam, the brothers, Tommy in particular, had been making the brass at CBS nervous for quite some time. A battle ensued over what should and shouldn’t be censored. The network requested pre-screening of all Smothers Brothers shows in order to vet what they deemed “inappropriate.” The brothers resisted. On April 4, 1969, the show was abruptly cancelled. In need of a quick summer replacement, all eyes turned to Hee Haw. Not only was it ready to go, there was little danger of any further controversy.

“The first thing you need to know,” says Sam Lovullo, associate producer of Hee Haw. “Roy and Buck got along.”

Rumors swirled that Clark and Owens, representing the comedic and musical parts of the show, feuded and were never close. Lovullo is also quick to point out that Hee Hawwas not a replacement for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. “We weren’t replacing the Smothers. We were actually replacing Glen Campbell’s show, which aired in the summer when the Smothers were off.” The first episode of Hee Haw made its CBS debut on June 15, 1969. Guests for the first show were Loretta Lynn and Charley Pride. The media’s response to the show wasn’t entirely welcoming in those early days.

We were criticized an awful lot,” says Lovullo. “Those first couple of episodes, (the media) really picked on it.” Proving true the old adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity, this piling up only helped the show. “This helped, because people wanted to find out how bad (the show) really was.” Lovullo is both adamant and tickled as he reflects on this time. “Turns out, some people actually liked us.”

Country music, though quite popular and growing more so by the year, didn’t have a great amount of exposure on national network television. While Hee Haw was in its infancy, Johnny Cash was starting his own show over on ABC. Though it certainly had many country elements, including Cash himself, The Johnny Cash Show was more of the moment, featuring the likes of Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson and Neil Young. In some circles within the country music establishment, Hee Haw was viewed as a mockery.

“I’m embarrassed to say this,” says Lovullo. “But some of the biggest names wouldn’t appear on the show. They just didn’t want to wear straw hats and overalls.” There’s no arguing that the show didn’t try to take itself too seriously. This lack of pretense, this unwillingness to comment on the topics of the day, made Hee Haw an escape of sorts in a turbulent time. Every week, viewers across the country could take an hour-long trip to “Kornfield Kounty”, the imaginary setting of the show. Sam Lovullo readily acknowledges the conscious attempt to create something borderline fantastical. “We made it a cartoon show. It wasn’t the real world.”

Hee Haw’s profile and audience continued to grow through over 50 episodes between 1969-1971. After struggling to find a proper balance, the show finally settled on being 50% comedy and 50% music. And the crew, viewed as outsiders in the capitol of country music, began to be accepted.

“It took a couple of years,” says Lovullo. “But eventually we were accepted in Nashville and the south.”

Just as the show came in during a time when many sitcoms were rural in their settings, the show was caught up in a purge. In what John Aylesworth referred to as “The Great CBS Country Massacre,” in spring of 1971 CBS cancelled The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Mayberry R.F.D and Hee Haw. Some producers might be daunted by such a move, and, while Peppiatt and Aylesworth were concerned, they worked with Lovullo and others to transition the show into syndication. The second coming of Hee Haw premiered on September 18, 1971 and would remain on the air until its last episode in 1992. After over a decade of playing the game and moving from show to show, Peppiatt and Aylesworth had finally created something that would endure.

EVERYTHING IS OK

Throughout its run, Hee Haw was infused with Oklahomans. Though not a native Oklahoman, Roy Clark has made Tulsa his home for several decades. There is an elementary school named in his honor and he is widely accepted as “one of us.” The banjo-picking funnyman has been on the musical scene since his first big hit in 1963 with “Tips of My Fingers.” In 2009, Clark was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Just this year, Roy Clark signed on with manager Jim Halsey, another Oklahoman and industry icon. The event made news across the country. Jim Halsey had previously been Clark’s manager when he started on Hee Haw and throughout his legendary tour with the Oak Ridge Boys in 1976 as the first country music act to perform in the U.S.S.R. In the early days of Hee Haw, when Buck Owens and Clark were fighting over name placement in the credits and other trivial details, it was Halsey who worked as mediator. Clark, 77, still tours frequently and knows that Hee Haw will be his biggest legacy. “Hee Haw won’t go away.” said Clark. “Everywhere I go, people talk about it.” While the show was separated into two sections, music and comedy, with Clark in charge of the comedy and Owens handling the music, Clark was a genuine double threat. But making people laugh was a specialty. “It brings a smile to so many faces.” said Clark. Though mostly apolitical throughout its quarter-century run, Hee Haw oozed a kind of populism, a mood and movement also steeped in Oklahoma history. “The viewers were sort of part-owners of the show,” said Clark.

Other Oklahomans made the cast, including Tulsa’s own Gailard Sartain, hot off his classic turn on local television as “Dr. Mazeppa Pompazoidi.” Perhaps you’ve heard of it. But the biggest impact Oklahoma had on Hee Haw came from the performers, the amazing roster of musicians and singers offered up by the Sooner State. Merle Haggard, Wanda Jackson, Reba McEntire and Vince Gill are among the luminaries to grace the Hee Haw stage numerous times. In the last few seasons of the show, as the light began to fade, country music’s biggest name lent the show some of his undeniable star power. Between 1990 and 1992, Garth Brooks appeared on the show four times. In 1992, Sam Lovullo was trying to get a hold of Brooks to ask him to appear on the final show. His attempts were unsuccessful. As the show neared airtime, Brooks showed up. “I was surprised to see him,” says Lovullo. “But he just came up to me and said ‘I’m here, Sam. Give me my overalls.’” At the height of his popularity, Brooks put his career on hold for a moment in order to help bid farewell to a show that had been on the air since he was a child.

Hee Haw is an institution,” says Lovullo.

John Aylesworth died this year at the age of 81. Frank Peppiatt, Roy Clark, Sam Lovullo and many other cast and crewmembers are still carrying the Hee Haw torch. When asked if he sees or hears the influence of Hee Haw and traditional country music in today’s performers, Lovullo is upbeat and optimistic.

“I feel good about it,” he says. “Whatever country music was back then, there are people still doing that today. The instrumentation has changed, not the songs.” In search of a specific performer that embodies the Hee Haw ideals, the answer comes quickly. “You look at someone like Brad Paisley,” says Lovullo. “He gets it. He has created this whole movement.” Paisley, arguably the biggest male star in modern country music, has long professed his love for Hee Haw and Roy Clark in particular. In a recent concert stop at Tulsa’s BOK Center, Paisley brought Clark onstage for a duet on guitar. “I learned to play guitar with a Roy Clark songbook, so I blame all of this on him” said Paisley to the crowd.

When Hee Haw went off the air, reruns began almost immediately. In the years since, there has been nothing to take its place. Its story is our story. Where else could a bunch of Canadians and Californians go to Nashville, Tennessee and create one of the most indelible portraits of the American south?

With its traditional roots and mainstream appeal, Hee Haw stands as a prophetic example of what American country music has become.

Note: This article was originally published January 15, 2011

“We may be indifferent to the death penalty and not declare ourselves either way so long as we have not seen a guillotine with our own eyes. But when we do, the shock is violent, and we are compelled to choose sides, for or against.”

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

Within the maze of oppressive gray halls of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary’s H unit, the door that leads to the death chamber seems as out of place as a birthday balloon. It is yellow. Bright, daisy yellow. The color is unnerving.

It’s almost 6 p.m. when I cross the threshold with six other media witnesses. Gary Roland Welch already lies strapped to a gurney a few feet away behind the window of the adjoining room. He’s hidden from view by a closed shade. We take our seats on a row of metal folding chairs and listen for lingering signs of death row’s sendoff. The sound began 10 minutes earlier, a forceful clanging and rhythmic tapping that echoed through the concrete corridors. CLANG. CLANG. Ping. CLANG. CLANG. Ping. This is how other condemned men pay their respects—by slamming their cell doors with their feet or tapping their commodes. Death row’s goodbye sounds like someone trying to break out.

Six stone-faced men—prosecutors, law officers, and a state official—take seats in front of us. Behind us, behind one-way glass, sit three family members of the man Welch killed. No one is here on Welch’s behalf. My stomach churns as we sit in silence, waiting for the mini blind to rise.

When the shade finally goes up, Welch is looking at us. His thick body is bound to the gurney—legs, arms, chest, shoulders. Tubes run from his arms and disappear into the wall behind him. I glimpse a colorful tattoo on a forearm. A graying ginger beard covers his jaw and chin. He turns his head and his eyes meet mine.

In a matter of minutes, the 49-year-old will choke on his last word and die, marking the nation’s first execution of 2012. For now, he lifts his head, straining to see each witness through the glass. His eyes reach the row’s end, and something unexpected happens.

The condemned man suddenly smiles. And then, he winks.

* * *

I am here to witness a homicide. Not a murder, which is a crime. Even the governor is in on this death. I’ve been here before and this is what I’ve seen every time: A brightly lit room. A clock on the wall. A warden standing with clasped hands. A prison official on a black wall phone with a long coiling cord, ready in case the governor hands down a last-second reprieve. What I’ve never seen: a reprieve. Or the three executioners hidden behind the wall. No one sees them. They arrive wearing hoods on their heads and faces to cloak their identities.

I am told that some people see the face of Jesus in the pattern of the concrete wall next to the yellow door, but I’ve never seen that either.

* * *

Sometime before Welch’s January 5 execution date, I realize that I have lost track of how many men I’ve seen die here. Since 1915, Oklahoma has executed 177 men and three women. The oldest was 74. The youngest, 18. Ninety-seven died by lethal injection, 82 by electrocution, and one by hanging. Most of the executions I witnessed took place in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a time when Oklahoma’s death chamber was one of the nation’s busiest. Welch’s execution, I later learn, is my 16th.

More than 60 percent of Americans favor the death penalty. But very few people actually have witnessed a modern execution.

At one time, executions in Oklahoma were public. A crowd of 30 or 40 onlookers crammed into the penitentiary known as Big Mac to watch the warden flip the switch on Old Sparky, the heavy wooden electric chair with its leather straps and helmet. Newsmen and sightseers, even children, were there, says Dale Cantrell, a 28-year Big Mac veteran who serves as the prison’s de facto historian. A 1934 story by The Associated Press described what they heard and saw—“a sudden hum of a motor, a violent stiffening of the body.” A crackdown on the circus-like atmosphere ultimately brought a section of law entitled “Persons Who May Witness,” which largely slammed the door on public access. It did provide that “reporters from recognized members of the news media will be admitted upon proper identification, application, and approval of the warden.”

Sister Helen Prejean, the death penalty abolitionist whose book Dead Man Walking spawned an Oscar-winning film and an opera that will open in Tulsa this month, predicts more Americans would turn against the death penalty if executions were more open. Responding to arguments that public executions could “coarsen” society, she wrote:

“An execution is ugly because the premeditated killing of a human being is ugly. Torture is ugly. Gassing, hanging, shooting, electrocuting or lethally injecting a person whose hands and feet are tied is ugly. And hiding the ugliness from view and rationalizing it numbs our minds to the horror of what is happening. This is what truly ‘coarsens’ us.”

Witnessing executions did start to feel like ugly business to me—but not at first.

It was part of my job as a reporter for The Associated Press, the one organization Corrections Department policy guarantees by name to claim one of the 12 seats reserved for the media. I was surprised to discover that I could witness a man’s dying breath, write about it in detail, and later drive home, with my eyes on the road and my mind on dinner. Only once did a dead man haunt my sleep. I opened my eyes and saw him hanging by a meat hook above my bed. When I awoke fully, I was sitting up, staring at the ceiling fan.

With every execution, however, came a family’s story of deep and lasting loss. The victim’s survivors told me again and again how their lives had been shattered by a single act of violence. Dusty Miller, who was left to raise three children alone, marveled that a killer “could meet somebody like Gwen [his wife] and still make a decision that the world didn’t need her anymore.” The parents of Michael Houghton and Laura Lee Sanders, who were burned alive in the trunk of a car, endured more than 15 years of court proceedings before witnessing the lethal injection of one of the killers. The niece of Muskogee grocer Claude Wiley described his smile and kindness. He often delivered food to the poor and homebound, until the day he made a delivery to a home where a man was waiting for him behind the door with a baseball bat.

Sometimes an elderly woman, the mother of the condemned, sat in front me, clutching a tissue and weeping with loss, too. Jim Fowler, himself the son of a murder victim, saw his son executed for killing three people in a botched robbery, saying afterward in a shaking voice, “It makes your gut sick to see your boy die.”

Some people call capital punishment justice. Others call it barbaric. In the death chamber, I feel a pervasive sadness and sense of futility. When people ask me what I’ve learned about the death penalty, I tell them the only thing I know conclusively: It doesn’t take away the sadness or bring anyone back. But it does shut a person up.

What I have heard:

• A cop’s killer begging his victim’s family, “Forgive me as the Lord has forgiven me.”
• A woman’s weeping for her condemned son, whose crimes included the murder of his sister.
• The warden announcing, “Let the execution begin.”
• Victims’ families clapping after a five-time killer is declared dead.

What I have never heard: a condemned man cry.

* * *

Welch turns his scraggly bearded face toward the ceiling and speaks. “I was just going to ask everybody if they could hear my brothers out there,” he says, referring to death row’s clanging. “I know it’s kind of quiet now, but I want to acknowledge that my brothers are here for me to send me off on my journey. They are here on my behalf.”

Welch claimed he killed Robert Hardcastle in self-defense on the evening of August 25, 1994. He said he went to the 35-year-old’s Miami home in pursuit of drugs and ended up fighting for his life after Hardcastle came at him with a knife.

“My intentions were never to kill him,” he told a McAlester News-Capital reporter during his clemency hearing in December. “But I also didn’t intend for him to kill me either.”

The jury believed the prosecution’s story—that Welch assaulted Hardcastle in his home and then he and co-conspirator, Claudie Conover, chased him into a ditch. There were multiple witnesses, including a family taking their 11-year-old to football practice, who saw Welch stab Hardcastle repeatedly with a knife and, when it broke, slash him with a broken beer bottle.

The first police officer on the scene, Officer Jim Gambill, found Hardcastle covered in blood sitting up in the ditch with his clothes in shreds. The officer recognized him. He and Hardcastle had grown up playing Little League ball together.

“Jim,” Hardcastle said, “Gary Welch did this shit to me. Get that motherfucker.”

Hardcastle then asked for some water and soon after fell on his back and died. He left behind 2-year-old twin sons.

“A big hole remains in our hearts that will never go away,” Hardcastle’s parents wrote to the Pardon and Parole Board, which rejected clemency by a vote of 3-2. “To know justice has been served gives us some closure to the agony we have had to endure.”

“Closure” is a word that means different things to people whose lives have been turned upside down by crime. Grieving families after the Oklahoma City bombing described it as justice or, in some cases, vengeance. For some, it meant the end of round after round of court appeals or at least the silencing of the killer. Some described closure as relief from intense grief. Brooks Douglass, the man who authored Oklahoma’s law allowing victims’ families to watch executions, told me for an AP story that he did not find immediate solace after watching one of the men who killed his parents die for the crime. But, he said, the execution did restore his faith in the justice system.

The Supreme Court struck down the death penalty in 1972, finding that the power of juries to decide whether a defendant should live or die for a crime resulted in arbitrary and capricious sentencing. States brought capital punishment back, rewriting their statutes and giving judges and juries new sentencing guidelines.

But Lyn Entzeroth, who teaches a course on capital punishment at the University of Tulsa’s law school, believes the system remains flawed.

“To me there is no way of discerning what murder case gets death and what murder case doesn’t,” she says. She notes a report by the Death Penalty Information Center that shows county-by-county discrepancies in how often the death penalty is sought.

Fifteen counties, including Oklahoma County, were responsible for 30 percent of the nation’s total executions since 1976. Exclude Texas (with nine counties on that list), and Oklahoma County tops the list with prosecutions resulting in 36 executions since 1976. Tulsa County was 14th with eight executions.

“The discretion of that prosecutor in that county can have a huge effect,” says Entzeroth, who also co-authored a death penalty casebook used in law schools. “When Bob Macy was the DA in Oklahoma County, there were a large number of death sentences sought. That’s changed since then.”

Support for the death penalty remains high—61 percent, according to a 2011 Gallup poll. But that number represents the lowest level of support since 1972 and a significant decline from an all-time high of 80 percent in 1994.

A spate of exonerations tied to DNA evidence may account in part for the decline. Evidence of innocence has brought the exonerations of 140 people on death row since 1973, with 66 of those occurring since 1999, according to the DPIC. Four states in four years—New Mexico, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois—have effectively abolished the death penalty. And late last year, Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber declared a moratorium on the death penalty, saying he refused “to be a part of this compromised and inequitable system.”

Along with concerns about wrongful convictions, the option of life without parole sentencing is changing the debate, Entzeroth says.

“Because someone has committed a horrible murder, we as a society would like that person incapacitated, not back out on the street some day,” she says. “The option of life without parole gives that option, that security.”

* * *

What no one saw(other than the robbers): Who pulled the trigger that fired bullets into my friend, Michael Fifer.

Mike left college to stay home with his terminally ill mother. Years later, he ended up working the graveyard shift at a Circle K in Tulsa to pay the bills. He didn’t get to choose his final words on November 30, 1991, the night the gunman pulled open the convenience store door. He died facedown on the floor, shot in the neck and back. Two teens, Johnny Davis and Eric Johnson, each accused the other of being the shooter. Both received no-parole life terms for the killing, though Johnson’s was later reduced by an appeals court. A prosecutor said the jury gave then 17-year-old Davis the no-parole term to ensure he “didn’t get out.”

But he found a way out.

In 1996, Davis slid through 6-inch bars and climbed four stories down a homemade rope to escape the maximum-security floor of a private prison in Texas. He was on the run for four days.

Davis is now 37 years old. Mike died at age 25.

A murder that touches your life changes you forever. I still carry the weight of it. At some point, I stopped using the word “closure” in news stories.

* * *

Hours before I’m in the death chamber, I stand in the threshold of my closet. It sounds frivolous, but deciding what to wear to an execution is worse than deciding what to wear to a funeral. I reject the new black-and-white striped shirt that my kids dubbed “the burglar shirt.” The sweater I got for Christmas seems too bright. I end up in a white shirt and black pants. When I stop for a soda to carry me to McAlester, the store clerk comments, “Black and white? You must be a waitress.” I shake my head. He tries again. “Band leader?” I leave him squirming. How do you tell someone you dressed like this to watch a man be put to death?

Freedom meets its end on a long winding road at McAlester’s edge before I even get to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. If there’s a road to perdition, it’s this one.

I pass a minimum-security prison, the county jail, a juvenile detention center, an animal shelter, and a street named Electric Avenue on the way to the prison gate. Built in 1904, Big Mac rises like a medieval fortress behind 30-foot, whitewashed walls topped with coils of razor-tipped wire. I glimpse armed guards watching from a prison tower as I drive through the gate, past the warden’s house where Christmas lights twinkled one December when I came here for two executions in seven days.

Executions used to take place at midnight. That meant that after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an inmate’s final appeal, we had time to eat dinner. While the condemned ate his last meal, journalists, photographers, prosecutors, and visiting law officers rushed to Pete’s Place or some other Italian eatery in Krebs for heaping plates of pasta and lamb fries. In the late-night darkness, I scurried back to the lockup, burdened by too many carbs and the dread of what was to come.

I was at the prison as a student journalist on September 10, 1990, when Charles Troy Coleman became the first man executed in Oklahoma following the reinstatement of the death penalty. It was the inauguration of lethal injection, too. Reporters, TV crews, and photographers jammed the prison’s visitation center—a one-room building that converts to a media center on execution nights. These days, often only two or three reporters come to witness. TV crews make rare appearances.

This time, when I pull open the door to the media center, more than six years have passed since I last saw an execution. Jerry Massie, the Corrections Department’s public information officer, is inside waiting like always. He’s been the media wrangler at every execution I’ve witnessed, and there’s something comforting about finding him here, sitting in front of a tray of chocolate chip cookies and bottled waters. More than once after an execution, I’ve heard him quietly ask some reporter, “You doing okay?” But Massie is also the gatekeeper to getting inside and tends to give the impression that causing him trouble is a bad idea.

Tonight, there are seven media witnesses, four of whom have never seen an execution. Massie goes over the rules. We can’t take anything in. No recorders. No notebooks. No pens. No cell phones. (The phones, we’re later told by prison spokesman Terry Crenshaw, can sell for $1,000 inside the lockup.) And if we need to go to the bathroom, we better do it now “because once you get to the H unit, it’s almost impossible to use a facility,” Crenshaw says. We pile into two vans that drive to the back of the prison where the modern H unit crouches in the earth like a bunker. Inside, a female guard tells me to take off my shoes, turn around, spread my arms and turn my palms up. She pats me down, first from the back. “Coming around,” she says, as her hands glide over me searching for contraband.

We put on our shoes and enter a barred holding area. The heavy cell door behind us slowly rolls shut and locks with a reverberating KUH-CHUNG. In a prison, you wait for doors to open, and slowly the one in front of us does. We are led to the law library, a rectangular room where inmates can work on their cases enclosed in small cells with desks.

“Do you have the notebooks?” I ask Crenshaw.

The prison usually provides us with notebooks and pencils, but this time they’re missing. He sends an officer in pursuit of them. The clanging from death row begins, and Crenshaw notes that it is louder than usual. The notebooks arrive. There’s a knock at the library door. It’s time.

* * *

What we report: No one says much of anything on the ride back to the media center after Welch is dead. I look out the window and notice the moon, a five-eighths moon, shining on prison buildings. The seven of us reassemble in the media center to piece together what we saw and heard.

Who did he wink at? “Was he winking at the DA?” I ask, thinking of the case’s prosecutor who was sitting at the end of the row where Welch directed his smile.

“No,” says the reporter from the McAlester paper, who had previously had a lengthy interview with Welch. “I smiled at him.”

Massie, overhearing, puts his head in his hands.

“Should I not have done that?” she asks.

“Probably not,” Massie sighs.

Over the next few minutes we scan our scribbled notes and contribute bits and pieces of Welch’s last statement. None of us got it down in its entirety.

The reconstruction goes like this:

Me: “I had, ‘I want to acknowledge …’ Um.”

Second reporter: “ ‘… that my brothers are here with me …’ ”

Third reporter: “ ‘here with me to send me off on my journey. They’ve already given me my sendoff …’ ”

Me: “I heard ‘my little sendoff.’ ”

A fourth reporter questions the order of sentences. We reexamine our notes. We move a sentence. Everyone works to get it just right, although it’s doubtful anyone will ever question those final words. You can’t libel a dead man.

* * *

 The clock on the death chamber wall reads 6:04 p.m. Welch finishes his last statement saying, “They’ve already given me my little sendoff. So let’s get it on because that’s what we’re here for.”

Each of the three executioners injects a different drug. The first, pentobarbital, is the same sedative used to euthanize pets. It causes unconsciousness. The second, vecuronium bromide, a paralyzing agent, halts respiration. The third, potassium chloride, stops the heart.

“Let the execution begin,” says the warden, setting off the process.

Immediately, Welch launches into a chant, his chest heaving against the straps:

“Valhalla. Odin. Slay the beast!” he says rapidly, almost shouting. In Norse mythology, Valhalla is the great hall in which the one-eyed god Odin receives the souls of slain warriors. The hall has 540 doors. “Valhalla. Odin. Slay the beast! Valhalla. Odin. Slay … the … beast. Valhalla.” He slurs and chokes. “O….”

The next several minutes are awkwardly silent as we stare into the sterile room. My thoughts turn to the details of the crime that was so heinous jurors thought a man should die for it. I picture Robert Hardcastle lying slashed along a road, bleeding from nine stab wounds and a dozen other serious cuts. He died eyes open, his head on green grass, no chance to say goodbye to his sons. I see Welch, his eyes closed, releasing a slight snore and then going still. His face slowly changes from pink to purple to gray. There is no terror in this quiet scene, except for the fact I know this man is tied to the bed and his life has just been taken.

The physician steps forward, checks for a pulse and finding none, looks at the clock. “Time of death,” he pronounces, “6:10 p.m.”

The mini blind goes down. The door opens. We file out into the darkness.

* * *

I’ve walked through death’s yellow door 16 times to see 16 men die. They were Benjamin Brewer, Michael Edward Long, Stephen Edward Wood, Scotty Lee Moore, Bobby Ross, Gary Alan Walker, Charles Adrian Foster, Gregg Francis Braun, Mark Andrew Fowler, Vincent Allen Johnson, Alvie James Hale, Daniel Juan Revilla, Scott Allen Hain, Robert Don Duckett, Kenneth Eugene Turrentine, and Gary Roland Welch. The crimes that brought them here claimed 30 innocent men, women, and children. Every story has two sides and, in the death chamber, I’ve sat sandwiched between them.

Here’s what else I have seen: When the execution is over and the mini blind goes down, you still see a face looking at you from the window of the death chamber; the other part of the story.

That face is your own.

I was twelve years old and, in the world I was living in, this wasn’t as unusual as you might expect. There was a rhyme and reason to everything in God’s world–if you had a question, the Bible always had the answer. So when my grandfather climbed into that tower, I randomly opened the Bible for guidance and my fingers landed on this passage from the book of Isaiah:

Behold, I have given him for a witness to the people, a leader
and commander to the people. Behold, thou shalt call a nation
that thou knowest not, and nations that knew not thee shall run
unto thee because of the Lord thy God, and for the Holy One of
Israel; for he hath glorified thee.

I was twelve years old, and this tower business didn’t really make sense, but then again, there was that passage from Isaiah, with God seeming to speak directly to me.

At night I had dreams that the eight million dollars in donations wouldn’t come in, and my grandfather would be taken up to heaven in a fiery chariot like Ezekiel, another Old Testament favorite of mine. Once at school I overheard two teachers talking about how Oral was a Cherokee Indian, and how it was a longstanding tradition among Indian chiefs to declare the day of their death as a way to get the tribe to do something drastic it didn’t want to do, and the teachers said that if the tribe didn’t cooperate, the chief literally fell over and died on the promised day. Turns out there is no such tradition, but even so, I imagined my grandfather, who at 70 years of age, with his long-hanging ears and bulbous, impressive nose really did look the part of an Indian chief, sitting up there in the Prayer Tower one day and suddenly expiring on his prayer rug. I imagined a lot of things, all far-fetched seeming now, but at the time completely in line with the culture I lived in, a culture in many ways shaped by the teachings of my grandfather.

Oral began “preaching the Word” in the late 1930s as a nineteen-year-old during the Great Depression–my grandmother Evelyn told me that food was often scarce, and Oral would sometimes go out and shoot “swamp rabbits” which she would then dutifully clean and bring downtown where you could rent communal freezer space. Oral’s ministry grew slowly, reaching its prime in the sixties and seventies when he built Oral Roberts University and pioneered the “electric church,” becoming the first television evangelist. His television programs came out of studios in Burbank, California, and his message was simple, and contrary, to what priests and preachers had been telling us for thousands of years: God, according to Oral, wasn’t very interested in punishing us. In fact, God was just dying to heal us. All we needed to do was stretch out our hands in faith and believe, and God would bring healing. Healing to our bodies, healing to our marriage, healing to our loved ones and, yup, healing to our pocketbooks. It was a revolutionary message and one that hadn’t really been heard before in quite the same way.

“God is a GOOD God,” Oral intoned on national television. “Something GOOD is GOING to HAPPEN to YOU!”

By January of 1987, when Oral climbed into that tower, donations had been falling off for years. The fall of Jim Bakker, the fall of Jimmy Swaggart, and the failure of the City of Faith, Oral’s 60-story hospital complex (much of it still sits empty today, 23 years later) were all part of the reason for the decline in revenue, as well as an ebb in popularity for the brand of televangelism Oral helped create. His efforts to bring in the money to keep his empire afloat became more and more ridiculous, but he continued using that feel-good phrase, “Something GOOD is GOING to HAPPEN to YOU!”

Even now, as a 35-year-old gay man whose church and family has rejected him, I can see the appeal in those words. “Hope is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson once wrote, “that perches in the soul, and sings the tune–without the words, and never stops at all.” These days selling hope is a well-worn path, and Barack Obama, for whom my grandfather voted, inspired the nation by blanketing walls and subway stations and billboards with this one powerful word. It’s surprising, I’m sure, that Oral voted for Obama, but given a choice between a man selling fear–fear of nuclear weapons, fear of the black man, fear of change, fear of Muslims, fear of a bright, sunny future–and a man who simply said “Yes, We Can,” it must have been an easy choice for Granville Oral Roberts, who grew up in a shotgun shack in an impoverished corner of Oklahoma. He ended up building a 500-acre kingdom on the banks of the Arkansas River, a kingdom funded by faith, and faith alone. “Something GOOD is GOING to HAPPEN to YOU!”

But I digress. I’m not 35, an out-of-the-closet gay writer happily raising his kids in Dallas, Texas; nope, I’m just twelve years old, and my grandfather just climbed into a 200-foot-tall tower, and the whole city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the evangelical reaches of the entire world (which numbers, perhaps, in the hundreds of millions) were holding their collective breath awaiting the outcome. And me? I wasn’t so worried about Oral. I figured either he would get the money and come down, or he wouldn’t and God would take him to Heaven–either way, if you believed the hype, it was a win-win situation. When you’re twelve, you buy just about everything your family tells you, so I really didn’t worry much at all. About Oral, that is.

What I did worry about, and continued to worry about for at least the next 15 years, was the condition of my soul. While everybody else was worrying about Oral, I was worried that Jesus would come down, perched on a cloud in the sky, and whisk all the Christians up to Heaven in “the twinkling of an eye,” as the Bible says. Like the title of the popular evangelical novel blares loudly from its cover, I was worried about being Left Behind.

Why choose 1987 to start worrying about the rapture? It wasn’t, after all, until 1989 that Oral first said Jesus was coming back and the world was going to end, when I was in ninth grade attending Jenks High School. Nineteen eighty-seven made sense because Oral was up in that tower, and that tower, for me, was a symbol of the Second Coming of Christ, and this is exactly how Oral planned it. The Prayer Tower was built, along with most of the other buildings on the Oral Roberts University campus, in the late 1960s as a symbol of hope. At that time, on college campuses across the nation, students were sitting in groups by the thousands, smoking pot, drinking, swearing, having sex, wearing their hair long, and spending a lot of time saying “No!” to The Man.

Parents were scared, and Oral had an idea: why not build an evangelical university, where the students keep their hair short, their faces shaved, and their skirts long, and rather than saying “No!” are instead taught to say “Yes!” to the calling of God on their hearts? And in the middle of this campus, why not build a tower, constructed in such a way that, from any angle, it represents the image of the cross? In this tower he installed two things: a phone bank manned by faithful, little old ladies who would answer your call, day or night and pray with you on a toll-free number; and a gas flame, installed on the top of the tower, manned at all times, day and night, by a born-again Christian whose heart was “right with God.”

This tower became the focus of my fear of the rapture. In 1987 I had a dog, a scruffy, old, monstrously-huge Irish Wolfhound, the kind of dog you see in movies about medieval England sitting calmly at the foot of the king in his castle. His name was Samson, and because he was such a big dog, I had to take him on a long walk every day or he would go stir-crazy and eat the cushions off our couch. We were living on the Oral Roberts compound off of 75th Street, in South Tulsa, just north of Lewis Avenue, a three-acre piece of land surrounded by an eight-foot stockade fence and a chain-link topped with barbed wire and electrified. I would walk down my 50-yard-long driveway, out the first gate, and out the second gate (always waving to the security guard in his little hut) and across 75th Street to the campus of ORU. There was another gate, and as soon as Samson and I went through, there was the Prayer Tower in the distance, that gas flame shining brightly on the top.

Or, at least, I hoped it was. On bright, sunny days it was almost impossible to tell, and that’s where the fear crept in. The whole point of having that gas flame manned by a born-again Christian whose heart was “right with God” was this: if Jesus were to come down, perched on a cloud, and whisk away all the born-again Christians (the Catholics, and probably even the Episcopalians, were not really included in this group), that gas-flame operator would also be whisked away, and the flame would go out. That flame, perched on top of a 200-foot tower at the center of campus was both a promise and a threat–Jesus is coming back, but he’s not here yet, so if you’ve sinned, get your heart right with God, because He might come at any moment.

Well, how do you know if your heart is right with God? Even at 35, I still haven’t figured that one out.

So while everyone else was worried about Oral in that tower, I was worried about that gas-flame operator, looking every day to see if the flame was still there. On weekends, the campus could be awfully still and quiet, and if the sun was at just the right angle and I couldn’t quite tell if the flame was still lit, chills would go down my spine. In fact, sitting here writing this, they still do. Some things just don’t go away. I’m not scared of the rapture anymore, or the boogie man, or going to hell because I’m gay, but some nights when the house is too quiet I almost wish there were a tower across the street to remind me that all is well.

I was twelve, my grandfather was in a tower, and I was worried about the rapture, but I was also a seventh-grade gay kid in an evangelical Christian middle school, trying my best to develop crushes on girls. There was one girl I asked out every single day for a month and she said no every time, until it became a sort of joke and I asked her the way I scratched my nose, that is, quickly and sharply. And why did I ask her every day? Because my best friend at the time, a boy I haven’t seen since 1988 but still remember his full name and telephone number (918-528-0897), had kissed this girl. I think I was hoping that, if I kissed her too, I would somehow get some of his germs. Or something like that. None of this was conscious, but looking back it’s the only way I can make sense of it. Because, looking back, while I romanced the girls I ended up being nothing but a pest, stealing their lunch bags, undoing their bra as a joke, etc.–all I was really interested in were boys.

In seventh grade, I went through a series of crushes on boys, five of them to be exact, each one more painful than the one before. I would fall for them, spend a lot of time around them, and then, realizing eventually that they would never feel for me the way I felt for them, would suddenly stop talking to them. The last of the five, in April of 1987, called me up, mad as a hornet, asking why I wouldn’t talk to him anymore. “You just go through boys like Kleenex,” he said, “you blow your nose on them and throw them away.” Neither of us understood what the hell he was talking about, not literally, but we both knew he was right. I swallowed, hard, and quickly hung up. I swore off boys then and there, and didn’t really have close friends (other than girls) for a long, long time.

When I was 18, I met a girl the first week I arrived at the University of Oklahoma, and she reminded me of my grandmother Evelyn–graceful, witty, intelligent, and always free to say exactly what was on her mind. I told her I liked men, but that I didn’t want to be with one, which was exactly how I felt about things at the time. Two years later we were married. Six years later we had our first daughter on Father’s Day, and five years after that, after having three kids and trying our best to build the perfect little picket-fence family, we were divorced after 11 years of marriage. I cried, for at least a year and a half, at this great, great loss.

There was nothing I wanted more on earth than to give my children a loving, happy, stable home comprised of a Mommy and a Daddy and a dog and a garden and the whole nine yards. But like in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, sometimes in a relationship between two people a ghost from the past intervenes, and starts shaking things up, and sometimes in the aftermath there’s nothing left but a wrecked marriage and a chance to start all over again.

There were several ghosts that wrecked our marriage, things that happened in the Pentecostal compound I grew up in that came back to haunt me, and one of them was the ghost of a man who shot himself in 1982. That ghost would be the presence, in my mind, of my uncle, Ronald David Roberts, Oral’s eldest son, and at one time the man Oral had hoped would inherit his kingdom. “Ronnie” to the family, he was, by all accounts, one of the most brilliant men anyone who came across his path had ever met; at Booker T. High School he taught English as well as Russian and Chinese. Nancy McDonald, who worked with him at the time, told me he was not only one of the brightest teachers she had ever met but also one of the most loved by his students. In his mid-thirties, Uncle Ronnie was divorced and committed suicide soon thereafter, six months after coming out to Troy Perry, founder of the first gay-friendly congregation in Los Angeles, and four months after he was arraigned in court on prescription drug charges–leaving his two children, ex-wife, and extended family to bear an unbearable burden.

Growing up, I didn’t know any of this about my uncle, but I always wanted to be like him. Every time my mother mentioned him I noted two things: one, that she had loved him more than she had ever loved anybody else; and two, that the memory of his path brought more pain to her than any other memory.

I suppose it makes sense I wanted to be like him. I didn’t know, when I was a kid, that the “path” my mother said brought him down consisted of being gay, intellectual, and godless. All I knew was, I wanted my mother’s eyes to light up like that when she talked about me. Having ended up on this same “path” (gay, intellectual, godless), her eyes don’t light up anymore, and haven’t in years–for the last five, at least. And that’s a shame, because I really do think that if she got along with Uncle Ronnie she could find a way to get along with me. But we were talking about ghosts. The first time the ghost of my Uncle Ronnie entered my life was in the Spring of 2002, at Mayflower United Church of Christ in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

My wife and I were in transition–having both rejected our Evangelical past, we were trying to find a way to still be Christian but also true to our intellect, and we found ourselves attending Robin Meyers’ church, Mayflower. We were there when Carlton Pearson, founder of Higher Dimensions (at one time one of the largest evangelical churches in the nation), came to speak to our liberal, almost-Unitarian Christian church. My family and I had attended Carlton’s church in middle school and high school and, in fact, my parents went to Oral Roberts University with him in the early 1970s. At one time, Oral had publicly referred to Carlton as his son, so you might say he felt like an uncle to me, even though I hadn’t seen him in years.

Carlton preached an amazing sermon that day, one that brought me to tears. Hearing him was like hearing my grandfather all over again. Here was a man who, instead of preaching that God was sending gays, and communists, and Catholics to Hell, said there was no Hell, and no mean, angry God dying to punish us. He might as well have said “GOD is a GOOD GOD” or “Something GOOD is GOING to HAPPEN to YOU!” I had finally admitted to myself a year before that I was homosexual, but being gay, Christian, and married with children does not give you many good options. During that year I had often wished I would die, but Carlton’s message gave me hope.

After the sermon, my wife and I waited in line to get a chance to talk to Carlton. It had been a long time since we’d seen each other – I probably hadn’t been to his church since I was 15 or 16, and here I was a full-grown man of 28 with his own children in tow. We waited about ten minutes as Carlton greeted each person who wanted to tell him how much his sermon moved him, and finally there we were, my wife and I, standing about three feet directly in front of Carlton. I smiled, big, and moved as if to hug him, but his face darkened immediately, and I hung back, and a chill passed through my spine. We might have only stood there for 20 seconds, but it felt like an hour – me looking at Carlton with a silly grin pasted on my face, and him looking back at me like he’d seen a ghost. He clutched his Bible tightly and his face went white, as white, anyway, as a black man’s face can go.

“Which one are you?” he finally asked, barely breathing, still looking scared. After another long pause, he said “You’re Ron and Roberta’s son, aren’t you?” and I nodded, “I’m Randy,” I said.” He nodded back. “I thought you were Ronnie,” he said. And we both stared at each other, and then, finally, hugged. It was a big bear hug, a reunion of sorts, and we were both misty-eyed as we talked that day.

Sometimes, a particular mantle is thrust upon you, whether you like it or not. My grandfather, with all his faults, was at heart a man who wanted to spread a message of hope. While it’s likely that many of the decisions he made later in life were motivated by money or at least the desire to keep his ministry afloat, it’s not my impression that’s what he was thinking when he was 20, 21, 22 years old and standing in healing lines and touching, for hours upon hours, people with tuberculosis and cerebral palsy and cancer. It’s not my impression that he started out to make a quick buck. Oral started out as a preacher, in tiny towns in southeastern Oklahoma, convinced that the mantle thrust upon him was to encourage the poor Pentecostals around him that God was a good God, that God did not want them to be poor, that God did not bring on diseases (as some evangelicals have suggested that God brought HIV to kill off gay men). Oral’s mantle was one he felt thrust upon him, and his message of hope transformed the evangelical church.

A year ago I took my children to Los Angeles for Spring Break; for them it was a chance to go to Disney World, to Universal Studios, and to see movie stars, but for me it was a chance to pay my last respects to a man who had overshadowed almost every memory from my childhood. Oral spent the last 20 years of his life living in a home on a golf course in Newport Beach, California, and while this sounds ostentatious, his home was fairly simple, a 1,000 square-foot condominium, the dining room table covered in water rings, the living room small and cramped, and the sixty-year-old home smelling vaguely of mold. I hadn’t spent more than five minutes with him in the previous ten years, and a man changes a lot from 81 to 91. I felt sorry for him. Without my grandmother by his side, he seemed lonely.

Oral never could remember my name when I was growing up; even though I lived just down the hill from him and ran up to see my grandmother several times a week, “boy” and “son” were the only things he ever called me, if he called me at all. But in the Spring of 2009 he eagerly played at great-grandfather, showing off that he had done his homework by greeting each of my three children by name, and, because he was no longer the scary grandfather I remembered but, instead, a 91-year-old man barely able to hear and completely unable to leave his chair without assistance, I gladly played along. Although we never spoke of it, Oral knew I was gay, and yet that day, it didn’t seem to matter–he signed a copy of his newest book for my children and gave them each a twenty dollar bill, and our hour-long visit passed quickly.

I’m grateful for that afternoon with my grandfather because, frankly, the man I grew up with in the compound was not a kind, warm grandfather. He was a driven man, one who slept four hours a night and the other twenty working. Even while “relaxing” on the golf course, Oral would be processing his next sermon in his mind or networking with business partners who might be able to help keep his ministry alive. There was always another tower to build, or another tower to climb up into; that mantle burdened his soul and there was never any time for children. But this day was different. Oral seemed at peace, happy to sit in his armchair and play great-grandfather.

He looked at me several times during that visit and sighed, and I almost felt that he was looking right through me. Before we left he asked me to come over to his chair; the children were watching a cartoon in the spare bedroom and the living room was quiet as I knelt down beside him and held his hand. Oral had large hands–the 60-foot bronze sculpture of hands clasped in prayer which stands at the entrance to the university are modeled after his–and I noticed that day that they also looked a lot like mine. I was a little shaken up–we both knew this was likely to be our last visit. As I stood up to leave, he held my hand tightly, looked up from his chair with that characteristic twinkle in his eye, and said “Son, something GOOD is GOING to HAPPEN to YOU!”

Note: This article was originally published May 25, 2010

As you enter Tulsa’s Booker T. Washington High School, the eyes of history are upon you. The portraits of women stretching back in a line to the 1930s form a gauntlet, the faces staring slightly down at passersby. Each one was named “Miss Hornet” for her class, as the embodiment of virtue and school spirit. The tradition is nearly as old as the school, founded in 1913.

As you walk the main hallway, a culture of inclusion unfolds. Hair styles change to reflect the ideal of glamour for a young black woman of a bygone era. In the 1970s, the afro suddenly asserts itself, loud and proud. In 1979, the first Asian face appears: a young émigré of Vietnam. That’s a good story. A few steps beyond and a white face appears among more black ones. In the last decade, the pattern portrays an explosion of diversity: South Asian, African-American, Caucasian, Hispanic. A reflection of the new America? Perhaps.

Then the last face: a smiling young woman, her hair covered in a resplendent white hijab.

Welcome to Booker T.

The same year the voters of Oklahoma approved a measure banning the practice of Sharia law in the state—a practice I am sure few of us understood and even fewer of us actually witnessed here—the voters of Booker T. Washington high school chose as their Miss Hornet a woman who wore head scarfs and practiced a different religion. If you believe in the power of education to promote appreciation for cultural diversity, individual expression, and freedom of choice, then the appearance of Fareedah Shayeb on the Miss Hornet wall is an American success story. But, as is usually the case, a story offers as many angles as a portrait.

To run for Miss Hornet, you have to fulfill certain basic qualifications: GPA, attendance record, other measures of participation. You also have to pass peer review—selection by a number of homeroom classes. The real showdown takes place at an all-school assembly. The young women and men (there is also a Mr. Hornet) appear onstage and each takes a few minutes to leave lasting impressions on the student body.

Maxine Horner, a member of the class of 1951 and one of the first black women to enter the Oklahoma legislature, once said about BTW: “That school put a shine on you. You walked out of there and you didn’t know there was even such a thing as segregation. They put a shine on you and you felt like you could do anything.” Looking at the faces on that wall, you see pride, confidence, poise, and power. In those Baby Boom days, the ceremony was arranged by a teacher everybody called “Mama” Bratton. You did not cross Mama Bratton. The ceremony had all the trappings of a royal coronation.

In 1979, Thu-Hong Tran appeared onstage with a bundle of balloons of different colors. Losing one, she said, “This is what happens when you let one person rise.” Opening her hand, she released the rest of the bouquet. “And this is what happens when you let everyone rise together.” The student body, which had been integrated in 1973, got the message. She still relates with pride her time at Booker T., though she now lives in Boston, where she teaches science.

“Booker T. has a special place in my life,” she told me in a 2009 letter about how she tries to emphasize the value of education and discovery to her own children.

Today, the winner of the Miss Hornet contest is one who can turn unknowns into friends. The candidates usually sweep their peer groups, the people who know them best. The freshmen are the largest bloc of students with no real knowledge of any of the seniors, so they form a key swing constituency. To win their vote, candidates usually dance, sing, or perform something silly and outrageous. Raps and funky moves are common. It can be a fun show, and the September 2010 competition was no exception.

Until Fareedah approached the podium.

She’d been a student in one of my social studies classes every year for four years. You couldn’t miss her: She always sat in front, always asked questions and follow-ups, was happy to give you plenty of sass. And, of course, there was the hijab. Rather, many hijabs—she was no stranger to fashion, and could go a whole month without repeating her choice of scarf. “You will never see my hair,” she told me once, though on occasion I had noticed her scarf slipping a bit.

She was Booker T. through and through. Her mother, an alumnus of the school, teaches in the English department. Fareedah, who is African-American on her mother’s side and Palestinian on her father’s, was active in student organizations and took the most rigorous classes. She loved the pep rallies and the games, and she was always beaming. Her smile lit up any room. She had experienced some challenges as a Muslim girl in a Midwestern state—stares, awkward questions—but in general she had found a happy home for herself in our diverse student body.

But, could she be elected Miss Hornet by a body of 1,250 students?

I think she remembered the story of Thu-Hong Tran when she prepared her speech. When she reached the podium, she smiled broadly and said:

“Hi, my name is Fareedah Shayeb, also known as the girl in the scarf or as Ms. Asad-Pratt’s daughter, and I just want to start out by saying thank you so much for nominating me for Miss Hornet! I am going to start by explaining what I think Miss Hornet represents, then the good stuff will come later…

“So, basically, Miss Hornet is the girl in the senior class that embodies everything that is Booker T. So I am here to tell you why I think I could be that girl:

“Number 1, I love Booker T. so much. I know everyone on this stage does, too, and I am honored to be up here with all of them. I also think I represent how diverse BTDub really is. My name is Arabic and it just so happens to mean ‘unique.’

“So how many Muslim Miss Hornets have you heard about? Well, I am about 100 percent sure that I would be the first. And, honestly, how many Muslims do you know to begin with? All right, well, how many black, Arab, Native-American Muslims do you know? I know some of you wanted me to rap but I’m not sure that would have worked out very well so I am going to do something else. Because we all have to work with what we are given in life.

“You know some people wonder whether or not I could even fit a crown on my scarf and let me assure you that I can. And I am sure that every single person in here has, at least at one point or another thought: What does her hair look like?”

And then, before a hushed student body, she began unfastening the scarf. Hair tumbled out. She did not sing, or dance, or perform a rap. But she held that audience in her hand.

I was as transfixed as anyone else. It was a beautiful moment. The students voted over lunch and she won, of course. But then something else developed. Fareedah had been wearing a wig! She hadn’t actually revealed her natural hair.

The rumor mill had already been turning, of course. Some students had wondered whether her unveiling had meant she was no longer a Muslim. A few were upset, feeling that they had voted under misleading conditions. It’s hard for a teacher to sample student opinion on a point like this, so I’m sure I don’t understand the public mood completely. But I do know that Fareedah bore the questions with her usual character and courage. She wore the scarf again every day and went about her business.

Talking to Fareedah, I knew that she had given the matter a great deal of thought. Growing up in Tulsa, she had endured the looks and questions for a long time. Her scarf was an endless source of speculation. Coming of age after 9/11 didn’t help, of course. And while she is classified as black or African-American, she didn’t always fit in with black culture here in Tulsa. She had grown up living in multiple worlds. Maybe this is what had prepared her for the event. When you consider the row of Miss Hornets from the last decade, it becomes clear that the winners are the ones who can cross cultural lines. I think Fareedah was having a bit of fun at the expense of anyone who had ever questioned her: If you think there is something magical about my scarf, or that it defines me as a person, then you deserve to be fooled.

It was as though Andy Kaufman had been elected prom queen.

That was in September. The year wore on and Fareedah was crowned in a beautiful ceremony and her picture was added to the wall. She busied herself with her studies and high-school life. She wrote papers, took exams, applied to schools and hung out with her friends. She was very much the ordinary, if over-programmed, modern American teenager. Life continued, and it turned out that most people didn’t really care about the scarf. It’s a diverse school after all: We select students on a geographic basis and there is no racial majority on the campus. Since there is no one dominant group, students have traditionally felt freer to express themselves as individuals. They learn to make choices about themselves. In general, the students accept and move on. In many ways, I think they are better than adults at accepting change.

Finals came with a rush, and the year raced to an end. Then, in May, during the Senior Farewell Assembly, Fareedah closed the story. Amid the testimonials and the farewell performances, Miss Hornet 2010 appeared on the stage to say goodbye—in curls. No scarf this time, no wig, and no gimmick, just a bright teenager with a gleaming smile. As she said later, “Why should something as insignificant as a scarf matter? The Qur’an doesn’t say that women must cover their heads. It just says to be modest.

“Plus, it’s not that great for my hair.”

In her own terms, Fareedah revealed herself to a school she had grown to love over four years. She had grown from a precocious freshman into a more mature young woman, capable of making her own decisions about her identity. She was happy and ready to take on the world. Last month, Fareedah wrote to me reflecting on the event.

“People fear what they don’t understand and I live amongst people that are chronically misinformed. And that not only does that make my life more difficult because of cultural misperceptions, but it adds another strike against me in a male dominated society.”

Ironically, I barely noticed the event. Like most teachers, I was standing in the back of the auditorium talking about schedules or some other minutiae when she appeared on stage. It took me a minute to realize what was going on. Maybe that was because of the student reaction. Some of them already knew what was going on, and some of them didn’t particularly care. In the end, the story was not that a Muslim girl was elected Miss Hornet, or that this proved that the school was culturally tolerant. Students don’t think like educators, and teenagers don’t think like their parents. For them, the scarf was ultimately no big deal.

That’s the lesson.

Note: This article was originally published September 26, 2011.

In the news in Tulsa, Oklahoma:

“Rotarians change laws to allow black members.”
“She doesn’t like going steady rules.”
“Gelatin salads add pizzazz to meal.”

This month, E.T., Poltergeist, and Blade Runner are in the theater; on Dynasty, Steven is in the hospital with Alexis and Blake at his side, and Krystle feels left out.

Your horoscope: “Emotions tend to dominate logic. Applies especially in romance department. Young persons, including children, figure prominently. Temptation is to speculate.”

It is Wednesday morning and, 1,914 years ago, Nero committed suicide.

And so, incidentally, did you.

* * *

Dear Uncle Ronnie,

    I haven’t written in a few years. I’m sorry. I’ve been busy. Busy living, busy keeping on, busy loving and raising my kids and working and dreaming.

    Maybe you can remember what all that was like? I still miss you. I’m the same age now that you were when you did it. The weather at Will Rogers World Airport, June 9, 1982:

 High of 91 degrees, low of 75.
Dewpoint, 69.1F.
Snow depth, N/A.
Observations: Rain/Drizzle.

I was only 7 years old, living in Denver, and we were up in the mountains because school was out and we had a home up there. I still remember that my dad and mom and brother and I were taking a walk on the side of Buffalo Mountain and our friends, the Laceys, saw us. Their faces looked worried, and they told us the Roberts family had been trying to reach us, and then my dad sat with me and my brother while my mom went into another room to use the phone, and when she came out you could see she’d been crying.

But that’s the thing, Uncle Ronnie. My mother doesn’t cry. Not for you, and especially not for me. She just doesn’t do that. I was 7 and I’d never seen her cry but there they were, those streaks messing up her makeup. It would be ten years before I’d see those tears again.

I guess I’m still angry with you. I was really angry 6 years ago, the first time I wrote you. Back then, in December 2005, just before Christmas, I was moving out from the home I’d shared with my wife and Brokeback Mountain was playing in the theater and I was crying over the loss of my first boyfriend, the first man I loved. I know. It’s backwards, moving out from your soon-to-be-ex-wife and already losing your first boyfriend, but then, I’m a Cancer, not a balanced Libra like you; they say we live life backwards.

Maybe it’s true. While I was married, that’s when I dated the most men, if you can call arranging hookups a date, and it was after the divorce that I really tried to love a man. First this one, then that one. Finally, just a few weeks ago, I got engaged to my boyfriend.

Have I told you about him? He’s really handsome. He helps do the dishes, and he’s great with the kids. We’re going to get married in May of next year. We’ll have a big party here in Dallas and then we’ll fly to New York where, well, you’d be shocked to know that it’s legal—we can legally get married in New York. Imagine that. Following the ceremony, we’re going to Spain for our honeymoon to hike around the Pyrenees. It’s legal there too, by the way. No joke.

Did you know that Nero was married, too? To a man? Or, rather, to his puer delicatus, which means essentially his younger love slave, a guy, a really handsome one apparently. First Nero had him castrated and then, then he fell in love with him (I’m thinking you don’t fall in love and then decide to castrate someone, after all). Nero loved Sporus and married him in public, with all the same rites and everything, like everybody else. It was a huge public ceremony, with dances, feasts, the usual.

Maybe you knew that. You might have. You did, after all, know 5 languages fluently and several more you could “get around” in. You did, or so I hear, get around, didn’t you? That’s what I’ve heard. I’ve talked to a lot of people in the last 6 years, interviewed your old friends, your minister, your ex- wife. I talked to guys online who say they knew you. From what I gather, you were a lot like me.

It was, after all, 1982. The country was in a dark mood. The New York Times, a year after our own recession hit in 2008, said that it was pretty bad but not as bad as 1982. And, come to think of it, those movies playing weren’t so hopeful either—ghosts haunting a little girl through a television, a movie where Harrison Ford’s best shot at love is with a robot. When the “hopeful” movie is E.T.—which suggests that humans are so cruel to cute extra-terrestrials that they have to employ gangs of children to rescue them—you know you’re hard up. I’ve often thought gays are like little extra-terrestrials, growing up in human homes, finally realizing there are others out there like us, and, finally, one day, we decide to phone home. Is that what you did on that country road? Is that what that gunshot wound was? A phone call?

“Roberts’ body was found early Wednesday in the front seat of his car near old Barnsdall 55 school about five miles northwest of Tulsa in Osage County.

* * *

I read a little pamphlet the other day that my grandmother Munna (Evelyn), your mother, wrote about the day you died. She got the date wrong. I’m sorry, Uncle. Your mother, my mother–they’re not exactly attentive to their gay kids. In the pamphlet, “Suicide: A Double Grief,” she said it was June 8, a Tuesday, and that Oral and your brother Richard told her around 11 a.m. So she got the date wrong; I can forgive that. I forget my own birthday sometimes. She also wrote something else, though, which is harder for me to forgive: “For years Ronnie had been on drugs. We knew that. We had tried every way we knew to get him off. We had prayed with him and for him. We had sent him to a place where they tried to get him off drugs.” But, in fact, they didn’t send you anywhere, did they? You asked them to help you, and they sent you away with a $100 bill. They didn’t want you in rehab. It would get in the paper. They didn’t want scandal. Or that’s what I was told anyway, by several family members.

What’s the truth? There’s no record you were ever in rehab, but there’s no record of that $100 bill either. There used to be a record of Munna’s pamphlet—it was once a part of the ORU website— you could search the title on Google and it would lead you to a webpage with the full text. And then, after I broke the news that your suicide was much more complicated than merely “drug-related,” that webpage disappeared.

I had to get my copy off eBay for $25; some little old lady was going through her attic and selling off stuff like that, and I bought it. Pretty expensive for a 15-page pamphlet, but it’s a piece of you, after all, so it was worth it.

“Certainly, no child was ever raised in a stronger atmosphere of moral exhortation and religious preachments than Ronald Roberts.” That’s what the Tulsa Tribune said, on Friday, June 11, the day after your funeral, in the editorial page. Local papers were pretty quiet about the whole thing, even though Munna wrote that “every newspaper from coast to coast carried the story.” I love my Munna; she was one of my favorite people on Earth, and I miss her terribly, but you and I both know she had a persecution complex, like much of my family. People were after us; if the news wasn’t kind then it was the liberal media savaging us for reasons we couldn’t fathom. Anyway, I was in Tulsa last summer and I got out the old microfiche files of the Tulsa World and the Tribune (that’s gone now, by the way, if you haven’t heard) and they didn’t say much. The World had a half-page piece on the 10th, and the Tribune waited until you were buried, then ran a four-paragraph editorial on the 11th:

“But these things happen, as one says, ‘even in the best of families.’ There will be those who say that the very prominence of the father may have contributed to Ronald Roberts’ despair at his self-worth. Perhaps, but prominence is not a crime and there are dark compulsions and motives that amateur psychiatrists little understand.”

Indeed. Dark compulsions, you say?

Did you actually know that the date you decided to do it was the same day Nero offed himself? Or was it just coincidence? You were a really bright man, well-read. A teacher, you loved English and linguistics and history. You read about Nero.

The Roman Senate, according to Seutonius, had declared Nero a public enemy, and condemned him to death in the “ancient style.” Seutonius continues with the tale:

“Nero asked what ‘ancient style’ meant, and learned that the executioners stripped their victim naked, thrust his head into a wooden fork, and then flogged him to death with sticks. In terror he snatched up the two daggers which he brought along and tried their points; but threw them down again, protesting that the final hour had not yet come. Then he begged Sporus to weep and mourn for him, but also begged one of the other three to set him an example by committing suicide first.”

Poor Sporus. Nero eventually had a servant help him stab himself in the throat, and died shortly thereafter, and we hear all about how he was buried, even what clothes he was buried in, but Seutonius didn’t seem very interested in Sporus—the story on him remains untold. We know hardly anything about him.

I’ve talked to several of your lovers, Ronnie, and none of them would even give me their name. One of them agreed to meet me in person at a diner and then, at the last minute, bailed. Then he wouldn’t answer his phone. Family members mentioned some guy named Paul, saying he lived with you that last year you were alive, but that was before I was writing about you and now they, too, have clammed up.

Me, I’m gay, and it’s 2011, and there’s nothing indecent about being a man in love with a man, and polls say, get this, that over 50 percent agree that love between two men or two women is the same as love between a man and a woman. These days, my lovers would probably talk.

Of course, there are still wide clusters of people who don’t accept homosexuality. My marriage won’t be legal in Texas, where I live with my three children, so it’s a sticky situation. My ex-wife has always threatened to sue if I decided to live with my boyfriend or get married … she started throwing that threat around six years ago, and mentioned it again just a few months ago on the telephone. In Dallas, thank God, family law judges have been dealing with gay couples for decades and you really can’t sue to take children away from their father just because he’s gay. Or, correction, you can sue, but you won’t win, and no lawyer worth their salt will even take the case.

* * *

Dear Uncle Ronnie,

Let me start over. First, I want to apologize. When I first started writing you—six years ago, if you can believe that—I was really pissed off. I don’t think that I really believed that things would get better. I was getting divorced and coming out because my marriage had fallen apart, and I was gay, and there didn’t seem any other honest option, but I wasn’t happy or at all optimistic about it.

I was still unable to step outside of that world you and I grew up in, that world where the idea of two men or two women falling in love and raising children and spending a life together not only seems impossible, it seems completely unimaginable. I came out, I was single, and I was determined to be a good father, but the rest, well, let’s just say I assumed the worst.

And I got a pretty nice surprise. Things finally did take a turn for the better but I guess, as usual, they had to get worse before they got better. In some ways, I had to experience the passing of both your parents, my Andy and Munna, aka Oral and Evelyn Roberts, before I could really let it all go.

My Munna died in 2005. It was spring, I remember well. I cried for about a month. And, after that, well, that’s when my wife and I separated. I went to Munna’s funeral and there was a tent for the family and an armed security guard refused to let me in. It kind of reminded me of the angel that bars the gate to paradise, because there I was, teary-eyed, and wanting to sit with my family and close to my Munna’s casket, and there was this guard, telling me, “No.” That’s probably what pushed me over the edge, that’s probably why I came out, that’s probably why, six months later, in December, I was moving out and starting over.

A few years later, in 2009, Oral died. Yeah, your dad. He died and I went to his funeral and it was pretty miserable. At the graveside service my mother (your sister, Roberta) said that her dad was basically an awful father but that she appreciated the fact that he helped a lot of other people out with his ministry. I can’t blame her for that assessment; you probably wouldn’t have been as kind. And then Uncle Richard got up and talked about how he had this pair of Oral’s boots in his closet and how they didn’t fit him, and then his wife Lindsay (did you ever meet her?) said “Richard, try on those boots!” and, sure enough, they fit. When you were in high school, Oral used to bring you up on stage and tell everybody you were going to be his successor, but then, yeah, you kind of screwed up his plans. Richard wore your boots, until a scandal with the university’s finances forced him to step down.

When Oral died, I came up for the funeral. At the public ceremony, in front of 4,000 people, my mom told me I was going to Hell. No wonder you’re not around anymore. She always said you were her favorite and I was just like you. I think she has some resentment issues.

The good news is that, about a year after Oral died, this guy named Dan Savage created something called the “It Gets Better” project. I decided to make a video, and I read my first letter to you, out loud, on YouTube (it’s kind of like the TV of the future, or pretty close anyway) and I had about a week of panic attacks, I was terrified, putting something like that out there. Since then, gay teenagers across the country have been writing me and Dan Savage and the thousands of other people who’ve made these videos. There’s an It Gets Better book now, and I just heard from an 18-year-old at a Catholic college who was given a copy by one of the priests. The It Gets Better book is in every big bookstore in America, displayed prominently. I doubt you can really imagine that.

So, yeah, things are getting better. It’s slow, and, well, a lot of it might be hard for you to understand. But men like Oral Roberts are just not that big anymore. Jerry Falwell died, too. All the guys who were big in your day, going off about homosexuality, well, they’re losing it. Most people laugh at them now.

It’s been six years since I came out, and I’ve been through hell since then, but I’ve made it. I’m engaged. My kids are doing awesome. My boyfriend (oops, fiancé, I mean) is great, and his whole family loves me, and they’ve all embraced me as a family member. I’m out at work. I’m out on television, and when I go to my youngest daughter’s softball games, sometimes some of the moms come talk to me about my advocacy work.

I love you, Uncle Ronnie. Times are different now, and I wish you could have stuck around, but I’m not angry anymore. I know it was a lot harder for you than it was for me. I’m now the same age you were when you took your last breath, so I’ve been thinking about you a lot. And, when I do get married, this May, it’ll be 30 years since you left us, almost to the day, and on June 9th I might be in New York or Spain, somewhere where my marriage to the best man I’ve ever met will actually be legal, and then I’ll come home and kiss and hug my kiddos and we’ll all live happily ever after. Or something like that. If you had a Facebook page I’d show you pictures. You can look over my shoulder anytime you want. You can live vicariously through me, it’s OK. I think I always wanted that.

I think I have everything I’ve ever dreamed of, and I think you’re right here beside me. I know it, actually. Thank you for standing by me. It helps.

Your nephew,

Randy

So it was a revelation to learn that when McBride put on some boring OETA documentary, I could simply climb down out of the desk and sprawl out on the short-pile Berber carpet of Cascia Hall. It was a wonderful arrangement for all parties: attentive students got to re-watch movies like The Outsiders, McBride could draw up basketball plays, and I could nap on my back, hands folded across my stomach.

One day, McBride put on a documentary about the formation of Oklahoma statehood. It involved an old reel-to-reel projector, something that was going the way of Betamax in the late 1980s. The images started to flicker, and it was as if the entire class of sophomores was transported back to pre-school. By the time McBride left for his coffee break, almost everyone was on the floor napping. When the narrator got to the role of the Five Civilized Tribes in the Civil War, I was asleep.

Then, out of nowhere, a swift blow came down on my head. At first, I thought it was McBride taking his revenge on the somnolent mutiny that accompanied his documentary on Oklahoma statehood. Perhaps I was having an aneurysm. The projector still flickered. Above me, the worried face of Ryan Hackler appeared. He had brought down a metal chair with full force on a spot above my left eyebrow. I touched the spot and noticed blood.

“What the hell?” I muttered, blood trickling into the eye.

Hackler had intended some harmless prank that had gone horribly wrong. He had accidentally dropped the chair on my head while attempting to throw it out a window. He gave me a dirty t-shirt to staunch the bleeding, and I sat up. My first instinct was to punch Hackler, but I was too dazed to do anything but stare at the screen.

So, there I sat, listening to the story of E.P. McCabe and waiting for the bleeding to stop. For those of you who also slept through Oklahoma History, McCabe was an obscure Kansas politician with a vision of Oklahoma as a refuge for former slaves. McCabe had an idea that Oklahoma could become the nation’s only all-black state. As the State Auditor of Kansas, he lobbied President Harrison to appoint him as territorial governor and, when that didn’t work out, he headed down to Langston, which was already a haven for black settlers in 1890.

If the U.S. government wasn’t going to make Oklahoma an all-black state, McCabe would take matters into his own hands. The Sac and Fox Nation opened up their lands for settlement, and McCabe recruited ex-slaves and tenant farmers from Mississippi and Arkansas to out-Sooner the Sooners. They staked their claims outside Langston but found themselves in shootouts with white cowboys. On one occasion, McCabe dodged five or six rounds of gunfire on Sac and Fox land from a group of Boomers. In the 1890s, he ran for state office and got beat by the Democrats, who soon took over the territory’s political scene.

I sat there in McBride’s classroom, entranced by the parallel universe in which Oklahoma was an all-black state. Tulsa–my little slice of it between Utica Square, Cascia Hall, and Riverside Drive–was so white. There was one black family in all of Maple Ridge. There were two black students in my graduating class of 1992. Cascia didn’t recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a holiday. And here was this story of an alternate reality that could have been: had McCabe succeeded, maybe I would be the only white kid in an all-black class right now.

Twenty years later, the question of Oklahoma identity still preoccupies me. Although I now study and teach Latin American culture and history in Canada, my pet obsession remains Oklahoma. Where is Oklahoma? The Midwest, the South, the Southwest? What does it mean to be an Okie? These are questions of vital importance to me and countless other Oklahomans, although I’m not sure why. Texans, Kansans, and Arkansans don’t have this problem. We Okies, on the other hand, have no fixed identity, just a set of obsessions – football, fundamentalism, and tornadoes — that define us.

The day after the injury, fully recovered from the blow to my head, I stole a book from the classroom: Oklahoma: The Story of its Past and Present by Edwin C. Reynolds. I stuck it in my backpack like some sort of contraband. Being interested in Oklahoma history was, for a high schooler, possibly one of the most uncool things one could be interested in. At lunch, I opened the book to learn more about McCabe and his plan to make Oklahoma a black Promised Land. Nothing. The book–I still have it today–only mentions Langston University as one of Oklahoma’s many fine institutions of higher learning.

It is an uncomfortably warm and humid evening in Clearwater, British Columbia. In a place where an August snowstorm is not uncommon, the smoke from forest fires combines with the heat to make for a smoldering afternoon. I am at the Wells Grey Diner plowing through a plate of French fries and a watery Canadian lager when Rick Jamerson comes through the door. Somehow, he knows I am the person who has been persistently dogging him via email about meeting him and his gospel-revival group, the Black Pioneer Heritage Singers. I am here to watch his group of gospel singers, descended from Oklahoma immigrants, headline a Christian music festival up the highway. This Canadian group is the living legacy of McCabe’s dream.

Jamerson is a handsome man with the look of someone two decades younger in appearance than real age. He is followed by his equally striking wife, Junetta Jamerson, the lead singer of the group. I wipe off my ketchup-stained fingers to shake their hands.

We are all Okies of a sort, I tell the Jamersons. I explain to them what a weird coincidence it is that we are meeting here, in middle-of-nowhere British Columbia when we all come from Oklahoma.

But Junetta Jamerson isn’t having it. Saying she comes from Oklahoma is “a bit of a misnomer,” she says.

“If you flew here and changed planes in Denver, would you say you come from Denver?” she asks me. Oklahoma was just a stopover, she says, to their ultimate destination: Northern Alberta, the northernmost edge of farmland in North America. I persist.

“Everyone knows about the Okies from the Great Depression,” I say. “It’s part of the American national mythology. Dirt farmers pulling up stakes and heading West: the Grapes of Wrath and the music of Woody Guthrie.”

You guys, I tell them, were the original Okies, but no one in Oklahoma knows your story! They look back at me quizzically. It occurs to me that they’ve probably never heard the word “Okie” before.

In the early 1900s, Oklahoma seemed like the promised land for Black Americans suffering through Jim Crow in the South. E. P. McCabe’s solution, resettling former slaves on Indian lands, seemed promising. McCabe’s plan was to have black settlers gather in Langston and then fan out across the state, gaining majorities in most counties. He needed to give people real incentives, so he devised a plan. In pamphlets sent out across the South, McCabe told prospective settlers that the values of the land would soon double and massive profits could be made. More importantly, though, was the idea of a self-governance. McCabe wrote:

“At the present time,” McCabe wrote in one pamphlet, “we are Republicans, but the time will soon come when we will be able to dictate the policy of this Territory, or state, and when that time comes we will have a negro state governed by negroes. We do not wish to antagonize the whites. They are necessary in the development of a new country but they owe my race homes, and my race owes to itself a governmental control of those homes.”

With statehood, however, Oklahoma started repeating the tragedy of the rest of the South, only in fast-forward. Within a couple of years, Oklahoma had turned from Canaan to Egypt, and blacks lost the vote and all power in state politics. Farmers like J.D. Edwards--one of the 1,000 or so who eventually left for Canada--paid the price. Roving bands of white mobs, known as “white cappers,” terrorized small towns in the early years of statehood. They rode out the entire black population of Sapulpa during a single day in 1909. They lynched a man in Henryetta from a telegraph pole and then riddled the corpse with bullets. They chased an entire all-black town to Muskogee and then burned down buildings where they thought blacks were hiding. A race riot broke out in Okmulgee.

The mobs were egged on by the editor of the Daily Oklahoman, Ray Stafford, an ardent racist who wanted the new state to be a part of the “Solid South.” This meant purging Oklahoma of Republicans, a party that, at the time, was a biracial coalition whose platform consisted of Civil Rights and equal protection for all citizens, regardless of color, under the law. Stafford taunted Republicans for not backing Jim Crow amendments to the state constitution. For Stafford, Oklahoma had a choice: it could take the Texas road or the Kansas road toward race relations. When Oklahoma enacted laws segregating everything from street cars to schools, as well as instituting a Grandfather Clause that disenfranchised virtually every black voter, Stafford got his answer. Texas, he wrote, should be proud of Oklahoma that it didn’t follow the path of Republican Kansas. In the end, he wrote, “a Republican politician cannot be separated from the nigger.”

Black Americans were in a panic. McCabe disappeared from the scene. Some accused him of creating a land bubble under the guise of a black homeland. A mysterious man named “Chief Sam” arrived in Oklahoma in 1913, promising a bright future along the Gold Coast of Africa. After one ill-fated trip in 1914 in which the migrants almost died of starvation, Chief Sam disappeared as well.

Canadian immigration agents started recruiting in Oklahoma. After the many land rushes in the late 19th century, Oklahoma had become overcrowded. Western Canada, on the other hand, had nothing but land. With the continental United States settled, Canada promoted its new provinces of British Columbia and Alberta as “the last, best West.” Land could be had for pennies. Pioneers were even granted subsidies for rail travel on the Canadian National. Somehow, word got out that Canada was warmer than Oklahoma and that Canadians had no racial prejudice at all. Glowing reports of Canada started appearing in the newspapers of all-black towns in Oklahoma.

Henry Sneed, a man from Clearview—one of Oklahoma’s dozen or so all-black towns, decided to go scope out this place called Canada. He traveled by rail from Tulsa to Winnipeg and from there on to Edmonton. Sneed must have liked what he saw, because he returned, this time with company. Among his companions was Jefferson Davis Edwards, a cotton and tobacco farmer originally from Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Edwards, then 21-years-old and single, made the trek from Tulsa to Winnipeg, where he had his first taste of whiskey at a saloon. In Edmonton, the men, in the words of one Alberta historian, “were seen more as curiosities than as threats.”

Sneed again went back to Oklahoma and gathered up 194 men, women and children. They sold their houses and their farms and filled 200 rail cars with their horses and livestock. Weeks later, they arrived in Edmonton where journalists from the local paper covered their arrival.

To a newcomer, Edmonton feels like a frontier town on the northernmost boundary of civilization. At least, that’s what it feels like in 2010. One hundred years ago, it must have felt like another planet. But the Okies didn’t stop in Edmonton. Canadian officials gave them land far from the city in settlements that didn’t appeal to white immigrants from Britain, Germany and the Ukraine. The most notable settlement, Amber Valley, was even further north than Edmonton, and it took weeks to get there. Edwards landed in Amber Valley and set about clearing land, mostly by hand. In the course of a week, he later estimated, he cleared a space of land for farming that was about the size of a living room.

Despite the hardships, more black Oklahomans fled to Canada. Another group of 200 people followed Sneed’s party but was detained in Emerson, on the Minnesota-Manitoba border. Canadian officials had begun to doubt whether blacks were suited to the climate of Canada and administered medical exams. When all the Okies passed the exam, the Canadians demanded a head tax. In Edmonton, where they had once been seen as curiosities, locals started to organize against further immigration. Black settlements were popping up all over Alberta, and local officials feared that Alberta would become a haven for the entire South.

A petition by the Edmonton Board of Trade was circulated throughout town addressed to the Prime Minister:

“We, the undersigned residents of the City of Edmonton, respectfully urge upon your attention and that of the Government of which you are the head, the serious menace to the future welfare of a large portion of western Canada, by reason of the alarming influx of Negro settlers. This influx commenced about four years ago in a very small way, only four or five families coming in the first season, followed by thirty or forty families the next year. Last year several hundred negroes arrived at Edmonton and settled in surrounding territory. Already this season nearly three hundred have arrived; and the statement is made, both by these arrivals and by press dispatches, that these are but an advance guard of hosts to follow. We submit that the advent of such Negroes as are now here was most unfortunate for the country, and that further arrivals would be disastrous. We cannot admit as any factor the argument that these people may be good farmers or good citizens. It is a matter of common knowledge that it has been proved in the United States that Negroes and whites cannot live in proximity without the occurrence of revolting lawlessness, and the development of bitter race hatred.”

About one quarter of the city’s 24,000 residents signed on. The Minister of the Interior, who happened to be from Edmonton, drafted an Order of Council and sent it to Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier for his signature. Laurier declared that, “For a period of one year from and after the date hereof the landing in Canada shall be… prohibited of any immigrants belonging to the Negro race, which race is deemed unsuitable to the climate and requirements of Canada.”

Before the Black Pioneer Heritage Singers take the stage on a little farm outside Clearwater, the group gathers for a prayer in a tent. They are sweating through their crisp Sunday whites, in stark contrast to the shorts-and-tanktops crowd that mills about eating popcorn. The band on stage before them serves up soft, sincere Christian pop, and the crowd seems distracted.

Junetta Jamerson doesn’t seem all that thrilled about the venue, but once the group takes the stage, it’s as if this bucolic farm in B.C. suddenly becomes a black Baptist church in the South. Jamerson, who mostly speaks in a lilting Canadian accent punctuated with the occasional “eh,” has the entire crowd on its feet by the end of the first song, “On the Wings of Heaven.”

Between songs, Jamerson’s voice changes. She becomes a black preacher from the South. “We don’t have to wait til we get to heaven, we can shout now!” she says to the crowd. “I’ve got my shouting shoes on now, so y’all better watch out.”

By the second song, the Edwin Hawkins Singers classic, “Oh Happy Day,” the crowd is stomping and clapping, not quite in rhythm with the gospel soul of the Pioneer Singers, but enthusiastic nonetheless. It is a remarkable show, despite the fact that there was not even time for a sound check. The next morning, back at the Wells Grey Diner, Jamerson says that the group is often seen as a “curiosity” when they travel in the U.S.

“The first time I went to D.C., I spoke at an event at the Smithsonian Folkways Festival,” Jamerson says. “Some black gentleman who was an African-American history professor listened to me tell our story. Later, he came up to me and said, ‘young lady, are you sure that what you’re saying is true? In all his learned studies, he had never heard of the Black One Thousand.”

The Black One Thousand, Jamerson says, was a term that stuck for the Oklahoma Pioneers. Once a thousand black settlers crossed into Canada, the government went on an anti-immigration campaign, sending agents back to Oklahoma. A black physician from Chicago, C.W. Speers, was hired to tour Oklahoma and spread the bad news about life up north. In churches and newspapers, Speers told African-Americans that Canada was much colder than Oklahoma. So cold, in fact, that many immigrants were freezing or starving to death. Canadians, it turned out, were just as racist as Oklahomans. The land was terrible and there was no guarantee blacks could even secure a title to the land they struggled to clear and farm. By the outbreak of World War I, black immigration to Alberta had stopped completely.

Some of the Alberta pioneers went back to Oklahoma, while others moved on to greener and warmer pastures in California. Jefferson Davis Edwards, after he had carved a prosperous farm out of the pine forest, went back to Oklahoma City to visit his brother, who had become a self-made millionaire selling scrap metal during World War II. Edwards tried to get around segregation on the trains by claiming he was no longer an American and wore a Union Jack in his hatband to prove it. Quenten Brown, one of Edwards’s great-grandsons and the keyboard player in the Heritage Singers, tells me that Edwards wanted to return to Oklahoma for good. “Towards the end of his life, he was talking about going back,” Brown says.

The exodus of African-Americans from Oklahoma created a static historical memory that remained stuck in the minds of the descendants of the settlers until recently. The Oklahoma settlers gradually gained acceptance and became fully Canadian. They moved from farming settlements to cities: Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver. But, says Junetta Jamerson, their vision became provincial. Because Canadians came to treat them like just another immigrant group, they missed out on the cultural movements of Civil Rights and Black Power. When Jamerson’s father, a Californian escaping the Vietnam War, came to Alberta, he found a community that hadn’t changed in its values or beliefs in half a century.

Now, as she sees it, the threat is too much assimilation.

“The new generation of African-Americans here doesn’t know where they come from,” she says. “They don’t know what kind of black they are. If you ask them where they’re from, they say, ‘Nowhere.’”

Part of the problem is that, despite a sizable community, there is no black neighborhood in Edmonton. For years, the community revolved around a Shiloh Baptist Church, but now, even that institution is thoroughly integrated into mainstream white Canadian society.

Fearing a loss of African-American culture in Alberta, Jamerson and her husband started the Black Pioneer Heritage Singers in the early 2000s. They play Southern Black Gospel, a sound that is rarely heard in Western Canada. Gauging from their reception at the Christian music festival in Clearwater, B.C., there is a hunger among Canadian audiences for the music. Still, the Pioneer Singers are as much a cultural mission about a lost chapter in American history as a they are a musical group.

Jamerson tells me that the first time she went to the South for a family reunion near Dallas, she was scared. The memories of violence had been passed down two or three generations and she still feared the worst. What she found in Texas, however, shocked her. “The infrastructure there was light years beyond what we have in Canada. We seemed like the hicks.”

The older generation doesn’t like to talk about what happened in the South, Paul Gardener, another member of the Black Pioneer Heritage Singers, tells me. Gardener says that, for the older generation, Oklahoma represented Egypt and Alberta was Israel. Once they were freed from bondage, they didn’t look back.

“Some of them are afraid that they’ll be sold back into slavery if they ever go back there,” Gardener says. “This was the promised land.” On their CD, the experience of the Black Oklahoma Pioneers is captured in a sung poem, “Amber Valley Pine”:

Overcrowded wagons songs in every mouth
Out of Oklahoma and places in the south
Southern voices singing at northern windowsills
Cabins cradled in the pines ‘neath the Athabasca hills
Coal oil lamps to light the way for a hungry man
Headin’ home from dusty fields to biscuits in the pan
Built us a homestead your kinfolk and mine
Put down some roots in the Amber Valley Pine

I had imagined the Black pioneers of Alberta as the original Okies, a group rooted in Oklahoma who set out West to improve their lives. To them, however, Oklahoma was simply a stopover from the Deep South to the Far North. But maybe this is at the heart of what it means to be an Okie, to be in constant movementtoward a home that is always just over the horizon.

Russell Cobb is a native Tulsan and professor of Spanish and Latin. American Studies at the University of Alberta. His work has appearedin Slate, This American Life, The Nation, and elsewhere.

Originally published November 17, 2010.

I was the smallest boy in my school. That, coupled with a lifetime struggle with allergies, has rendered me a lifelong non-athlete. I was a kid who lived in his own imagination, and, to a lesser degree, in his own NES. I couldn’t be bothered with playing shortstop when there was a princess that needed saving – be she 8-bit or entirely imaginary. She was out there, and she needed me.

Oh, wait, was I supposed to catch that? Whatever.

That said, I enjoyed the last little league team I played for. My mom was one of the coaches, and we won second place in the league tournament that year.

We were the 89ers.

After we won our trophies, all the coaches and parents chipped in to take us to All Sports Stadium in Oklahoma City to watch our namesakes, the Oklahoma City 89ers.

That night stands out in my mind as a highlight of my childhood; it was one of the first times I remember truly enjoying sports. Every time I hear the Don Henley song “Boys of Summer,” I think about that night.

In high school I knew someone who worked at All Sports Stadium, on the grounds of the Oklahoma State Fair in Oklahoma City; it was not a great facility. Since then the stadium has been razed, its glorious replacement erected in Bricktown, and the team’s name changed from the 89ers to the Redhawks.

I know the Oklahoma Land Runs inspire memories of Manifest Destiny and broken treaties; Oklahoma City singer-songwriter K.C. Clifford wrote a whole song about it, titled “Redman.” But whatever the implications, the team name, The 89ers, was reminiscent of something very specific to Oklahoma City – the way and the time in which it was founded, a way that is unique and weird among American cities. The “Redhawks” name for me sounds a little generic.

Don’t get me wrong – All Sports Stadium was nothing compared to The Brick; love sports or hate ‘em, that this city is moving up in the world in terms of its professional teams and facilities has done wonders for it. I’m looking forward to a summer full of games downtown.

Maybe it’s just nostalgia; I think, in the end, most of what Americans love about baseball – especially in this age of endless steroid confessions – is about nostalgia, about a simpler time. For me, the name – The 89ers – it evokes that.

Photo courtesy Flickr user eschipul.

In this photo by John Vachon, we see four employees of the Mid-Continent Refinery, which was located in West Tulsa. A few years earlier, in 1938, the refinery was the scene of one of Oklahoma’s most violent and long-lasting strike.

Jeremy Luther is This Land Press’s Art Director/Illustrator. This “slashy” sort of title only hints at the extensive amount of art, design and visual delight that he delivers in every issue.

For example,  in the current issue “This Machine Suits Up” (Vol.3, Issue 2), Jeremy (who is featured on the inside front cover) crafted a portrait of Mr. Sherman Ray (of “Mr. Ray Fits a Suit“) out of fabric remnants, thread, buttons, spools, and a vintage thimble. He then proceeded to shoot the image on film and used Photoshop to add in the text and other graphics.

Jeremy  joins This Land’s crew by way of Kansas City, having studied at the Kansas City Art Institute.  He is obviously an asset to This Land for his conceptions as an artist, ease in working with multiple mediums and his wizardry in ye old Adobe Creative Suite. We’re glad to have him on board.

Here are Jeremy’s answers to our MEET & GREET questions:

1. What influences you? (alternately, what are your “Must Read/Listen/Watch” items? Print or online). 

I have a wicked addiction to the encyclopedia, and I spend far too much of my free time with my nose adhered to those hallowed seams. Really, whose hobby is reading the encyclopedia? C’mon. I get a lot of influence by just being aware of what’s out there: following other artists and designers from around the world has never been easier and I relish in that. Check out great other creatives like James Jean, Eric Fortune, Jon Foster, Daniel Rozin, Chris Ware, Derrick Dent, Bee Johnson, and my good friend John Lee. There’s too many to list really, and they’re all more intense than a campsite. Really.

Also, I have a strong Norwegian connection and my inroads there allow me to follow closely what’s going on in European design and culture, something which I enjoy greatly.

2. Who or What inspires you to do the work that you do?   

I am inspired by pretty much anything and everything. I love seeing patterns in the surrounding world, and that excites and energizes me. I get very charged by mathematical expressions like fractals and the things going on at CERN. Nikola Tesla rules the roost.

I like to jaywalk through the intersection of mathematical, technological, political, cultural, artistic, and scientific history whenever I can.

Specific to art, I’m a big supporter of knowing the rules before breaking them, and so I have a lot of respect for and admiration of the classical masters from the Greeks to Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, and Bernini; to the more recent Sargent, Rozzi, Jean, Rockwell, Fortune, Ware, Leyendecker, Mucha, Lautrec, and so on.

3. What is your favorite piece you’ve done for The Land Press?  
On the Charles Smith cover (Vol.2, Issue 14) I was faced with finding an elegant place to put our issue number and price tag; against all odds I managed to figure out it should go right above the UPC. IT looked great there, and it was a real moment for me.

A lot happens on my desk in two weeks, so much to the point I tend to forget most of what I’ve done here. I can tell you that I love working on the covers every single time, although sometimes I practically have to kill myself to get it just the way I want it. My favorite interior illustration off the top of my head was the Faulkner Love piece, of a girl sitting in a giant red ampersand. Being a designer, you’re pretty much required to have a licensed typography fetish with a Certification in Ampersands- so any time I get to integrate type into an illustration, especially a great big “&”, I’m a happy camper.

My favorite issue visually speaking, is the upcoming February 1st issue, which I spent a lot of time re-designing and creating illustrations for.

4. What do you love about Tulsa and/or Oklahoma?   
Oklahoma at large is generally new to me and so aside from the pleasing assortment of straight lines and gnarled coils that make up the silhouette of the state, I haven’t much place to say. I’m still learning it. I can say that Tulsa is a lot like a huge little town: Small enough to pretty much know everyone but big enough to always meet someone new. There are truly exceptional people here, and they would be reason enough to stay.

5. What is your drink of choice? Alcoholic or otherwise?

~~~

For more about Jeremy, check out his bio and for more of Jeremy’s work,  feast your eyes on the Past Covers Board on This Land’s Pinterest board. Catch his latest masterpiece, on the front of the latest issue of This Land, found at any of our 50+ distribution spots or via Subscription.

I’m gay too. And my mother, like her father, does not want a gay son. My mother made a point to tell me, only a year ago, at my grandfather’s funeral, in front of 4,000 people, that Hell does exist and I’m going there. My uncle and I were raised in a world dominated by Evangelicals who taught, and still teach, that the fires of Hell await all gay men and women. This is the Evangelical “Christian” legacy for gays like my uncle and me: Threats. Bullying. Damnation. Death.

But for me, and many others, the story doesn’t end here. Five years ago, when I was divorced and came out, I found myself, like my Uncle Ronnie, in Oklahoma, in my thirties, and terrified of losing my children because I was gay. I was regularly called a faggot, both by strangers and by my ex-wife, and, like my uncle before me, reached a point of despair. Suicide among gay men and women in Evangelical communities is still prevalent. Evangelicals may not be killing gays outright—the police report suggests my uncle killed himself. However, while the Evangelical community might not pull the trigger when one of their gay members commits suicide, they provide the ammunition.

When I came out, I started writing a letter to my Uncle Ronnie, a letter meant for me, for my uncle, and for friends I have who are still closeted—terrified their family will reject them. Five years later, I’m still writing this letter—it’s become a way for me to record this experience.

It all started for me one summer afternoon when I was twenty-seven years old, and I stood in my kitchen and said to myself, out loud, that I was gay. It was the most liberating feeling I’ve ever had, and for the next three days I was on top of the world. But then reality came crashing down on me—I was married, with children, and I didn’t know what being gay would mean in terms of my family, my wife, my children. It was a horrible place to be. It took a few more years of being scared to death and going to two different therapists before I finally decided that the best thing for everyone involved was for me to get divorced and come out. I had been suicidal for years, and I eventually realized that my children needed a father who wanted to live, who looked forward to tomorrow, and the only way I could be that man was to get divorced and come out.

That’s when I started writing my letter to my uncle, because I felt like he was the only one who would understand. My parents didn’t understand, most of my friends didn’t understand—it was something I didn’t know how to explain, so I started writing.

Coming out was TERRIFYING. I remember going to gay bars and standing against the wall like a thirteen-year-old kid at a middle school dance. I was awkward and shy and didn’t have a clue how to talk to people. I drank a lot; it would take two or three drinks just to get the courage to step away from the wall and actually talk to people. And the feeling of talking to a guy who seemed to like me was great, and scary, and nerve-wracking, and amazing, all at the same time. I’d spent my whole life aching to find a nice guy who wanted to hold my hand so the first time I went on a date and held a guy’s hand was AMAZING. I’d never felt happier.

But I was living in Oklahoma at the time, and someone driving by yelled “faggots!” at us. A couple weeks later I was in line at a bar with my boyfriend and two tough guys in front of us said they hoped “no fucking fags” came into their bar tonight. My boyfriend and I were both over six feet tall so I tapped one of the guys on the shoulder and said, “Hey, you’re looking at two fags right now. What do you want to do about it?”

I had never been in a fight in my whole life, but I was ready. I wanted a black eye. I wanted everybody to know I was out, that I was a fag, that I was ready to fight for the right to be who I was. The owner, Edna, leaned over the bar and said “Nobody’s gonna fight about something that stupid in my bar! Free round for the four of you as soon as you hug each other. Do it! Now!” And so we all awkwardly hugged each other and drank Tequila together.

Even a year after coming out, I can’t say things had really gotten better. My ex-wife was still calling me a fag in front of my children and screaming all the time. So, I eventually took her to court for that and other custody violations, spending $50,000 I didn’t have. But it was worth it—she hasn’t called me a faggot since, and my children haven’t heard their mother or new step-father talk disparagingly of gays in their presence either. My ex-wife and I share our children equally, and the kids are doing great. We get along just fine now.

And me, I’m doing great. Finally. I’ve had a lot of different boyfriends. I’ve fallen in love a couple times. I’ve felt that wonderful, giddy feeling you get when someone you like likes you back, and the gut-crushing feeling you get when that same someone lets you go. I’m finally not desperate anymore. I’m just me, happy, and gay, but not defined by my sexuality. The best thing about coming out has been to watch myself go from someone terrified of being gay, to someone willing to fight for my right to be openly gay, to, finally, just another guy living his life who happens to be gay. That’s the best thing of all. I had to fight hard for it, but it finally happened—the freedom to just be myself, no apologies, no fighting, no drama. The day I thought would never come finally snuck up on me and surprised me. My grandfather was famous for telling people, “Something good is going to happen to you!” And, it’s strange to admit it, but he was right.

That’s what I’d like to tell my Uncle Ronnie today: It really does get better.

Randy Roberts Potts is the gay grandson of televangelist Oral Roberts. He has worked with juvenile delinquents on the East Coast, was a social worker in Oklahoma City and spent five years as a middle-school English teacher.

This article soon to be appearing in It Gets Better: Coming out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living. Edited by Dan Savage and Terry Miller, published by Dutton Adult.

“That’s the old Trader Vic’s room,” he said, handing his keys to a parking attendant. “It’s now a pretty popular Vietnamese restaurant.”

Le Colonial, it’s called, and it manages to fit. When it was Trader Vic’s, the area known as Cosmo Place, between Downtown and Little Saigon, was a nightlife destination. According to a website that tracks tiki culture, Queen Elizabeth II experienced her first- ever anywhere restaurant meal at Vic’s in 1983, as a guest of the Reagans, no less. She drank a Tanqueray martini. That Vic’s closed in the early ’90s.

We walked up Taylor Street to the Bohemian Club. It was Thursday—bohemians’ night out. Before dinner, we drank a No. 209 martini at an oak bar long and polished enough to have 10 pins at the end of it, surrounded by large oil paintings and the soft roar of men not at work. I stole a couple of paper napkins off the bar, the club’s owl logo teetering across them.

I’d spied the No. 209 tucked among the other gins. It’s a newish brand, produced locally in a distillery down at Pier 50, very near the spot where Barry Bonds Jr. used to plunk homeruns into the bay. A couple of sips in, I spotted the bottle next to it: Junipero, a small-batch offering from the folks who also brewed Anchor ale, another San Francisco product.

“Hmm,” I said. “Maybe we ordered in haste.”

“I know Fritz,” Barnaby said, referring to Fritz Maytag, who’d resurrected the old Anchor brewery and then sold it after an award- winning run. “He’s 75 and in great shape. Beefy, not obese, you know? You know, like he could have played quarterback at Cal-Berkeley back in the day.”

He suggested a trip up the coast to meet Maytag, but I suggested we drink a Junipero instead, as an after-dinner nightcap. The club ranks were beginning to thin and last orders were being taken. I wondered if anybody would awaken the older gent I saw napping earlier in the library, his body sunk into the puffy, tan leather of a club chair. I thought of him being left there, like Corduroy, to be discovered in the wee hours by a security guard making rounds.

“Next time,” I said about Fritz, sipping the Junipero and making a mental tasting note I soon forgot.

“Anyway,” Barnaby said, chinking glasses, “welcome to San Francisco.”

* * *

He’d grown up here, in the shadow of his writer saloon keeper father, drinking ginger ale at one end of the bar while the likes of Tyrone Power and Ava Gardner drank gin at the other. Dad Conrad named his bar El Matador, after a novel he wrote on bullfighting called Matador became a surprise bestseller. He chronicled those days of wine and roses in a delicious tell-all, Name Dropping: Tales From My Barbary Coast Saloon. (A dozen years before, though, he’d published a memoir of a different sort—Time Is All We Have: Four Weeks at the Betty Ford Center.)

With writers and drinkers, the olive often doesn’t fall far from the tree. Conrad III followed in his father’s footsteps with a fistful of books. One of them, The Martini, published in 1995, caught the front end of the wave that stranded ’tini menus across American bartops, recipe books in the stacks at Borders, and faux-vintage cocktail shakers on the shelves of Pottery Barn. It was my martini manifesto, a reference guide and devotional in ice-cold words and pictures. Its cover—a tightly cropped photo of a martini glass, its bowl glistening with the droplets of mid-chill—was the model of perfection I pictured when shaking at home during what historian Bernard DeVoto called, and Conrad quoted, “the violet hour.”

The same year he published The Martini, Conrad met Maurice Kanbar, who couldn’t drink more than two martinis without getting a headache. (Conrad’s own theory, from page 120: “Even if there’s no driving to be done, two’s a pretty good limit.”) Having the wherewithal and now the need, Kanbar invented SKYY, the quadruple-distilled, blue-bottled beauty that overran the vodka market in the 1990s, in large part because of that cobalt bottle, which he had to get produced outside the country because, he explained, “making glass is a dirty business. You have to have smoke and glass and ovens. Americans don’t want to do that. They want to sit at a computer.”

But the SKYY wasn’t the limit. With his non-compete clause expired—he’d sold SKKY off to spirit conglomerate Campari in 2001—Kanbar now peddles Blue Angel (in a clear bottle of brushed glass), another ultra-distilled spirit in a market he helped saturate.

Kanbar’s inventiveness manifests itself in all manner of productions— Hoodwinked!, the animated hit film; an 85-cent pair of eyeglasses he wants to distribute pro bono in third-world nations; Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil; Zip Notes, in which he put the adhesive in the middle so the paper wouldn’t curl—but, in 2005, it ran to a few square blocks of downtown Tulsa. Kanbar now owns 16 buildings worth of it.

Always a bookish sort, Kanbar’s properties have included, almost since its inception, Council Oak Books, the Tulsa publishing house struggling to make it in the world of Kindles and downloads. (As of December, the firm had relocated to San Francisco.) With Conrad, he’d launched a new imprint on Council Oak, Kanbar & Conrad, though he couldn’t remember when or how he met his new partner.

“San Francisco is basically a small town and he’s a writer. I like writers. If Barnaby Conrad is a writer, then I immediately have a compatibility with the man. Writers are my guys.”

Mine too, especially when they fall in with guys who buy up downtowns in their spare time. You know, when they’re not distilling spirits and publishing books. I’d been looking for a reason to get back to San Francisco. Now I had a couple.

* * *

“You know he was a tumler?” said one-time columnist Bruce Bellingham.

I pictured Maurice in circus tights, floating beneath the big top. I wouldn’t put it past him. I shook my head.

“Not a tumbler,” he said, reaching for something to write on and finding it in his breast pocket in the form of a sealed envelope.“It’s one of my many medical bills. I had a heart attack in June 2010 and now I have $94,000 in medical bills. And there goes one of them.”

Bellingham took another sip of wine, scribbled something on the envelope, then handed it to me.

“A tumler, for you Gentile boys, is a man who’s hired in the Catskill Mountains to break up the party before an opening act. So, he’s really like a clown. Like Jerry Lewis. It’d be like me going from table to table, ‘Hi, ya, how ya doin’!’ It’s a Yiddish term for a troublemaker. Someone who stirs it up.”

Barnaby took a sip of his Blue Angel martini—a gin man seguing into vodka out of homage, I assumed, given that we were in Perry’s on Union Street, Maurice’s favorite spot, and he was to have been here with us. Kanbar calls a Blue Angel martini a “BAM,” believing that a drink without a name is a bottomless well. (“The key to the business is a call,” he said. “Like a Cosmo.”) Barnaby downed his in an effigy-like salute to its absent inventor, while I paced myself with a Sierra Nevada.

“He wasn’t a kid—maybe 19 or 20—and he’s been a tumler ever since,” said Bellingham. “But, he’s cultivated tumling into a finesse. Of course, no one around here knows what a tumler is.”

Bellingham wrote columns for the San Francisco Examiner, and with San Francisco newspaper icon Herb Caen.

“I wrote jokes for him. I’d send him jokes everyday by fax. Puns, political metaphors. I sat in Herb Caen’s office while he was ill and went through 59 years of his column, all gathered in leather-bound books. The Chronicle owns them. I thought, ‘Where am I going to begin?’

“They had so much fun. You and I cannot imagine. Barnaby can tell you.”

Caen and Conrad Junior inhabited a time in San Francisco when the word saloon was a term of endearment. When books were books and men were men and martinis were gin. You can still get a drink there, but the way the old boys—and their sons—tell it, things have all but dried up.

“Single women with dogs and fast-food restaurants and nothing else,” Barnaby says of the future city by the bay.

Writer Rebecca Solnit, in her Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, plots 21 bars on a map of the city’s legendary “6 a.m.” saloons, so named for the hours they kept in order to better serve the dock workers leaving the graveyard shift. Service and software have replaced shipping, but the bars remain.

Beyond the living proof, there are the dead. Novelist Jack London had a San Francisco saloon mix vast quantities of martinis and ship them to his getaway in Sonoma. “Professor” Jerry Thomas, hands-on author of The Bartender’s Guide—an 1862 classic that predates them all—made his mark at the Occidental Hotel on Montgomery Street. Thomas makes a good case (particularly for a deceased) for inventing the martini, or at least being its missing link.

Bellingham was in purgatory when Kanbar bailed him out. A local charitable house received a big gift for taking care of Bruce between gigs, courtesy of the man with the golden arm.

“I’ve not been upset with one gift that I’ve ever given,” Kanbar told me. “But if you asked me about business deals, oh God, have I met snakes.”

* * *

We left Bruce and Perry’s for Bix, next stop on the “martini safari” I’d been promised and was doing my best to make a good show of. We drove up Laguna, jumped over to Broadway, and headed downtown.

Gold Street hides between Sansome and Montgomery, a few blocks in from the Embarcadero. It was called Gold Alley back in the day, when the burlesque clubs and watering holes of nearby Broadway teemed with all that was then rustic and possible about San Francisco. When Streisand was playing the Purple Onion before she was Streisand, and newsmen like Caen had the equivalent of 10,000 Facebook friends, all of it earned in the saloons and restaurants and nightclubs within earshot of here. It’s around the block from City Lights Bookstore on the diagonal at Columbus. Chinatown is near, as is American Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppola’s headquarters, where the ground-floor café proffers Coppola’s own wines at a relative steal, and tempting plates of radicchio Treviso, spaghetti carbonara, and pizza quattro formaggi.

“This is Gold Alley,” Barnaby said, pulling into a lane too tight to turn around in, and promising to tell me later about the time he shot a .44 out into the bay standing right here. I looked up over a warehouse roof to see the white apex of the TransAmerica Pyramid. That, the neon of Bix, and the headlights of the sedan were the only lights glowing.

We crowded around the bar at Bix, a restaurant I’d known only from an image in The Martini—of other people crowding around the bar at Bix. In the book, author Conrad, proprietor Doug “Bix” Biederbeck, painter Mark Stock, art dealer Martin Muller, Herb Caen, and others smile over a caption labeled “Neo-Martini Culture in San Francisco.” In the foreground sits a very large bowl of crushed ice sprouting chilled cocktail glasses like so many spring crocuses.

Biederbeck likes his martinis cold, versus large, and to that end he serves them in small, tulip-shaped glasses, the gin cold enough to induce shock. “Here,” he said, retrieving my cocktail from the bartender. “Drink that and I’ll get you another.”

I sipped, squinting at the peal of competing conversations, and a piece of the city’s still-strong drinking culture revealed itself to me. Towering shelves of spirits glistened from the backlit bar. Fit, robust men in white jackets shook and poured in a dizzying blur of glass and ice and steel. The musty smell of Argentine Malbec forced its two scents—strawberry and spice—on an air already perfumed with heavier tincture. Older, moneyed-looking women brushed skirt hems with young, honey-eyed vixens while their collective men pushed empty glasses back for refills.

“You about ready for another?” Biederbeck asks me. “No, wait … Let’s have a punch!”

Like a good barman, he’d recently found Amer Picon through a London purveyor and purchased a case. Its orange essence and dry bitterness begged for a punch, the definition of which varies, even among liquid historians. Two non-wavering components tend to be the presence of fruit, and the mixing of batches versus glasses at a time. (Esquire drinks writer David Wondrich outlined all the tasty possibilities in his 2010 book, Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl.)“When the case showed up,” Biederbeck said, “there were only 11 bottles in it. My tariff, I guess. Here …”

He handed me a glass of punch and I turned to watch the band, all ivory pings and bracing snares and throat. The bigshots of old- school jazz play here, not that I’d know them by sight or sound. But Biederbeck, true to the name, is a student of both jazz and the drinks that tend to mingle in its presence.

Over the piano, singing a tune of its own, is a painting from Mark Stock’s “The Butler’s in Love” series. It’s the first thing you see when you enter Bix and the last thing you take in before you pass the velvet curtain on your way out. It dominates the space the way the Eiffel does Paris, no matter the vantage point.

In “The Butler’s in Love–Absinthe,” the butler—a barely veiled Stock—leans into a jade-green wall, gazes at the lipstick staining an empty absinthe tumbler, and resigns himself to a life of subjugation and unrequited love. He hangs with his back to the crowd, which likewise pays him little heed.

Between Picon punches, Barnaby showed back up from somewhere down the busy bar. I’d been trading John McEnroe stories with a tennis fan named Renee Richards (not the U.S. Open Doubles finalist of sex-change fame)—she knew him in high school, I peed next to him in a New York theater. Anyway, I’d lost track of him.

“Here,” he said, handing me yet another punch, “I got you another drink. We should probably eat something. I realized I hadn’t eaten anything all day except a piece of lemon meringue pie for lunch.”

I stood two-fisted with my back against a marble pillar that stretched to the second-floor ceiling. A single window in a whole ceiling of them was opened to the late-January night. Oh, to be a bat in that belfry. Caen is dead, and Biederbeck a little thicker through the middle, but Bix is about as much like a photograph in a favorite book as a place can be, meaning every bit as good as you prayed it would be lest you feel your faith wavering. Of course, it could have been the cocktails. It always can.

Earlier, I’d asked Barnaby where Team Martini held court before the days of Bix. It was Alfred’s.

Forgotten, but not gone—having moved from its original location over the Broadway Tunnel to Merchant Street, in the shadow of the Pyramid—Alfred’s is a steak joint in the pre-Fleming’s sense, meaning ripe, aged cuts smoked over mesquite and big martinis and Manhattans cold and keep-’em-coming. Kerouac ate there (and knowing him, drank) and wrote about it in The Subterraneans. Among old souls, Alfred’s was the nostalgic choice in an environment of New Age imbibing.

“Everybody was drinking white wine and then going to the bathroom to do cocaine,” Conrad said. “Well, we didn’t want that. We wanted to do our thing out in the open.”

There was a time when Barnaby Conrad III was among San Francisco’s most notorious bachelors, eligible and elusive at once, as likely to be in his attic painting, or at the bar drinking, as he was being seen on somebody’s arm. (A lot of that time is scheduled to come out in April, in a book titled The Bachelor’s Progress, which his editor called “a sort of Tom Jones romp.”) But then he married Martha Sutherland, an authority on contemporary Chinese art and a CIA operative of 18 years—two passions that must have played out strikingly when she found herself in the midst of Tianmanmen Square in 1989. But then she married Barnaby Conrad.

Of the lumber Sutherlands, she is, whose TV ads once employed country comic Jerry Clower in all his big-bellied bluster. Playing the Kevin Bacon game, that put Clower and Conrad at too close a remove for my comfort and taste. Yes, I had done the fanboy thing and chased my favorite writer (on ice-cold gin drinking and absinthe’s “green fairy” wings, anyway) all the way to the top of Pacific Heights, sometimes called “Specific Whites” for the exclusive group that dwells there.

I’d chased him to a watering hole in a book where writers and drinkers mixed like vermouth and gin (or more likely vodka) in my mind. Yes, I was ashamed. But I was also on assignment.

“San Francisco is a drinking town,” Conrad said, balancing a glass of Amer Picon as he might a combustive nitrate or some tonic of eternal youth.

I drank to that.

Although Harjo has some serious artistic cred under his belt, with films such as Barking Water earning Sundance attention, and a Tillman Award to his name, at This Land he’s able to showcase a broad range of skills.

What influences you? (alternately, what are your “Must Read/Listen/Watch” items? Print or online).  

I have too many “must watch” movies to list… at the moment I’m in love with this documentary called Heartworn Highways, about “Outlaw” country music in Texas in ’76.  A friend sent me a link to it but you can only watch 70 minutes before you have to pay for it.  I decided to just order it on Amazon.  Can’t wait to watch the rest of it.

Who or What inspires you to do the work that you do?   

I’m really inspired by people and their stories.  The work that I’ve been doing for This Land has been great because there’s a lot of pride in telling stories about your community and showing the amazing people and stories we have here in our back yard.  I’m also really into the fact that people can rediscover some of the stories many years after we are gone.

What is your favorite piece you’ve done for The Land Press?  

I would say a three way tie between We Are Still Here, Indian Elvis, and Anton Von Ostendorf.  I think they represent the possibilities of what we can achieve with the short doc format.

With Anton it’s a cool blend of visuals, interview, and a beautiful score by Costa Stasinopoulos.  ”We Are Still Here” is a good example of how we make people aware of something going on right in their back yard.  I don’t know how many times people told me that they didn’t even know Yuchi people lived here until they watched the video.  It makes people aware of the diversity of our community and also the importance of language revitalization in native communities in Oklahoma.  It’s sad and hopeful at the same time.  ”Indian Elvis” seems like a good blend of all that but with humor as well.  I have too many favorites… Public Secrets as a series is a lot of fun to make.

What do you love about Tulsa and/or Oklahoma?  

I love all the stories in Oklahoma.  It’s overflowing with unique history.  I love dirt roads and the countryside.  Tulsa is perfect because it’s not too big and it’s not too small.  You can get a good cup of coffee,  but you can also get to the country pretty fast if you need to.

What is your drink of choice? Alcoholic or otherwise?

My drink of choice would be coffee.  All day long.

For more information about Sterlin Harjo, check out his bio and browse the “Watch” section of This Land.com.

Stay tuned for an exciting announcement about the future of This Land films from Sterlin and Matt in the coming weeks!

“We were the only church (in North Tulsa) to live through the 1921 race riots,” says Pastor Anthony Scott. “It was the only church that was not destroyed. It looked so nice that the rioters literally thought that it couldn’t be a black church. So they bypassed it.”

Almost forty years after its miraculous survival, First Baptist’s spiritual connection to the plight of African-Americans in Tulsa and beyond came full circle. On July 28^th, 1960, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke from the pulpit of First Baptist to an over-capacity audience of 1500. Fresh off the success of the Montgomery bus boycotts, the 31-year-old minister had recently positioned himself as the voice and face of the rising civil rights movement and was on a cross-country mission to mobilize black communities, encouraging them to vote in the imminent Presidential election. One of those communities was North Tulsa.

Scott says that Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall also visited the church.

“The church, in its heyday, was a stopping place for a lot of national figures,” he mused.

“We are a historic church. But we need to transition that into being a leading church once more.”

Joshua Kline is a writer based in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

He runs the thimbled hand over impeccably slicked back hair and looks me over through large-framed glasses that magnify his eyes, which knowingly search for details that often go unnoticed in casual conversation: Does one shoulder hang slightly lower than the other? Does my neck crane forward to make my spine curve? Does a 30-year habit of standing into my left hip make the left leg slightly shorter? All of this occurs instantaneously as I introduce myself. He’s not sizing me up for a mano a mano fistfight. He’s measuring me.

I tell him that I’d like to have a suit tailor-made, and that I was interested in gray tweed or a suit with a similar texture. He tells me that he stopped building suits because of the amount of energy it takes, but he’d be happy to alter a suit for me. He chuckles and riffles through a manila folder full of photos, newspaper articles, letters, and trinkets. Ray pulls out artifacts that show me the man he has become: champion weightlifter, avid rower, accomplished tailor.

“I’ll tailor the suit so good for you, it’ll fit you like a glove,” Ray says in a thick Polish accent.

I ask him what kind of suit I should get and he sets down his folder and takes his measuring tape from around his neck and guides me so that my back is facing him.

“Drop your arms,” he says. He measures me with lightning speed. “42 is too tight, and 43 they don’t make. You’ll have to go to a 44. 44 might be a little bit too large but it’ll have to be tailored.”

He grabs my hand and energetically guides me to the stepstool in front of the mirrors. He checks my inseam and then whips the tape around my waist. “You need about a 351⁄2 or 36 pant. Don’t get 34, 36 on the pants. Go to Woodland. Then tell them, ‘I will buy it but I will take to my tailor for approval.’ See, when you cut it up then you cannot take it back. Then just come over. I’m always open.”

Before I leave, Ray shows me one remaining photograph. It’s a picture of director Steven Spielberg with his arm draped affectionately over Ray’s shoulders.

“See,” says Ray, “I was in the concentration camps. Not just a tailor.”

* * *

A week later, I return to Ray’s Tailor Shop with a gray wool suit bought from a department store at Woodland, as he instructed, and I made sure to get a suit that met the size specifications he recommended.

Ray says, “Let me see it.”

I pull it out of the bag. Before he even looks at the tag he tells me he can’t work on it. He goes over and grabs a suit jacket he’s been tailoring.

“You think anybody in this town can do this?” he says, holding up the jacket front. “This is a hand-sewn buttonhole. See? Everything now is made by machine. From China.”

Ray takes the newly bought suit from my hands, looks at the tag, and laughs. “China.” He takes the jacket off the hanger and hands it to me to try on. We walk over in front of the mirror and shows me how it needs to be adjusted.

“The shoulders are too tight. I have to let out the shoulders but look—” He shows me the inside of the jacket. “Not enough material

here. How’m I gonna let out the jacket with no material? Suits like this don’t give me anything to work with.”

He has me try on the pants. He points to the front pockets, and I see that the outside seams pucker out as I walk. The crotch sits too low. When I raise my arms, the jacket sleeves are too short. Suddenly, a suit that looked slick, modern, and slim-fitting on the rack looks dollar-store cheap. Ray works the material of the suit adroitly, sliding material through his fingers and stopping at all the imperfections: not enough material to let out the sleeve; frayed material on the pants leg; lapels that, because of mass manufacturing, sit unevenly on my chest. He’s the doctor and I’m the patient. I ask him how he learned to become a tailor.

“I was trained in Europe,” he says. “My grandfather was a tailor. My father was a tailor.”

In 1938, when Ray was 12, Russia occupied Poland. Ray lived in a small village near Bialystok, and because of the widespread poverty in Poland, his family survived through bartering rather than money. At 13, Ray began to apprentice under his father after showing that he had mastered a hand-sewn buttonhole. His skills ultimately saved his life.

“When I went to Auschwitz, what would I do?” he asks.

Before I can respond, before I can ask, he tells me to take off the suit and take it back. He helps me out of the jacket, but when he hands it to me, doesn’t let go. He looks at the cuff of the sleeve and begins to finger it, turning the sleeve inside out to reveal what seems to me now poorly sewn stitching. The stitches tack back and forth sloppily, string ends hang haphazardly, exposing precariousness where one thread, pulled the wrong way, leads to disintegration and ripped seams. Not the arrow-straight line that suggests good workmanship.

“You see?” he speaks softly, hanging onto the arm. “Before Hitler came we were under the Russians for 18 months. Russia took over half of Poland and Germany took the other half. The Russians told my father he had to do hard labor and I said, ‘Dad, you stay home because you got to provide and make a living. I will go.’ I used to come home with my hand bleeding. I was not used to the work they made us do: shovel mountains to make a road. During wintertime we would go to the forest to cut wood they sent to Russia. But that was not so bad. When the Germans came—that was impossible. They hardly gave you anything to eat. I never dreamed I would come out alive.”

That, according to Ray, was in 1939, and was the beginning of the end. Hitler and Stalin agreed to share Poland but, without warning, Hitler forced the Russians out in three days. It happened with lightning speed.

Ray manipulates the jacket sleeve as he talks, exposing its inferior construction. He lets loose the sleeve.

“Well, you take this suit back and get a new suit. A Hickey-Freeman. Or Jos. A. Bank,” he says.

* * *

I return the following week with a gray pin-striped suit from Joseph A. Banks: A Signature 2-Button Wool Pinstripe suit with plain front trousers. When I remove the garment bag, Ray’s eyes light up. He shows me the strength and intricacy of the stitching. He sets it down on his material table and shows me the extra material, left for the express purpose of tailoring.

“This I can work with,” he says.

I go into the changing room and put on the suit. It swallows me. The jacket fits more like a cloak, and I feel like a young boy playing dress-up with his father’s clothes. The pant legs puddle at my feet and if I don’t cinch the waist, the pants fall straight to the floor. Ray has his work cut out for him. He has me stand in front of the mirror on the stepstool and sizes me up.

He braces himself to bend down—a wide stance, then bending at the knee while resting both hands on the other knee. He lowers himself slowly until the first bent knee rests on the floor, will-you-marry-me style. He works at the cuff using pins and chalk, marking at the material. I ask him how he was taken to Auschwitz and he stops.

Ray’s shop is in the center of a strip mall, and when nobody’s talking and the radio’s not on, it’s pin-drop silent. He looks at the ground without really looking at it. He drops his hands to his side and he’s thinking, thinking. It’s him and me and the crackly buzz of fluorescent lights that burn color away into dull monochrome. Under this stark whiteness, he schools me in history.

* * *

Ray had lived under the forced labor of the Russians, but the Germans were not so accommodating.

“The Germans put me and my family on a train to Auschwitz,” he says. “I was 15 or 16 so that was ‘41 or ‘42.” Ray had heard rumors that Auschwitz was a death camp, but his family refused to believe him. He begged his family to jump with him from the train.

“They said no,” he tells me. “All the time I begged them. They thought they were going to the resort. Every time I think about it I wanna kill myself.”

Ray stops talking. He raises his arm. He moves to the other leg and the chalk draws a trail of slash marks on the material to be eliminated. He pauses, hanging onto a piece of loose pant leg.

The Germans, Ray says, left the boxcar unattended because most Poles thought the train led to an interment camp where they would be kept for the duration of the war. They accepted their fate as prisoners of war. No one imagined the human capacity needed to carry out Hitler’s die Endlösung: the Final Solution.

Ray and four other boys on his boxcar suspected the worst, and they wanted off.

“There was a little window on top of the boxcar of the train,” Ray recalls. He had tried to squeeze through it, but his heavy fur jacket wouldn’t allow it. He crawled back down, then tried again, this time making it out. A friend threw his coat out after him. Ray and four other boys escaped the boxcar and ran into the wilderness. He didn’t realize then that it would be his home for the next year.

“You know, in Poland it gets cold like it’s Canada,” he says.

He takes pins and begins stabbing at the chalk marks. Purely. Precisely. He pulls the material close to his face. Stab. Instinct kicks in while his mind traces outlines of the past he’d rather not recall. Stab. He tells me it’s a lot to talk about: the farmer who saved his life by providing a single spade but refused any other assistance for fear of retribution. Stab. I resist the instinct to flinch as he pulls needles from the pincushion. Stab. I trust in his experience as he sticks the pins and tells me more about the year in the forest.

“We took the spade and dug into the ground—about two feet down and then two feet horizontal into the ground,” he says. “We make a little place in the earth where we can lay down but we can’t sit up. At night, you know, we could get out. But in daytime it was us, staying underground. When the snow comes, we thought it was bad. But then later the rain came and we wish we could have the snow.”

He stops stabbing and examines the material closely, running his fingers along the metal dashes that force the pant leg to conform. The pinpoints that poke and scratch stay safely concealed just beneath the surface of the material.

“One of the boys couldn’t walk because his leg was frozen,” he says. Ray begged him to walk to find food, but the boy’s leg had turned gangrenous. Ray and the others eventually took the boy to the ghetto at Bialystok, where the boy’s leg was amputated.

“There was no medication. No penicillin. Nothing. Not even aspirin. For Jews, they say let ’em die.”

Ray stands back up. First the hands braced on the knee, then the push that shoots the upper body up. He’s righted himself and he concentrates his chalk and pins on my shoulders.

“They shot him.”

According to Ray, all of this occurred around the beginning of 1943. The Bialystok ghetto was close to his uncle’s hometown, and when he and Ray found each other in the ghetto, he convinced Ray to remain there rather than attempting to escape back into the forest. Ray had lost his immediate family and his uncle’s presence comforted him, briefly.

The Bialystok ghetto housed around 50,000 Polish Jews laboring under the Germans. In Bialystok, Ray began to realize the extent of the Nazi cruelty. Even physically challenged Germans wound up in the camps and then, not long thereafter, disappeared.

“The trains, the boxcars, was carrying the people to the gas chambers day and night,” he says. “Women, young girls—they shaved off their hair and they was wearing wooden shoes. They put potato sacks on them to wear. They looked like monkeys. Killed them all.”

It was during this time that Ray was separated from his uncle and shipped to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. It was 1943, when Ray was just 17.

* * *

Ray maneuvers himself behind me and I feel the weight of his hands on my shoulders. He pinches the shoulder material and lifts up. He holds the material from each shoulder between his thumbs and forefingers.

“Too much space, you see?”

I see my reflection in the mirror. He’s lifted the shoulders of the jacket so that my head sinks.

The second train to Auschwitz was a different story. “Before, I was from a smaller town so it was easy to escape from the train. This time the Germans was starting to lose the war, so it was worse. You couldn’t jump because on every boxcar was the SS with a machine gun.

“At Auschwitz they brought you in … to vanish,” he says. At 15 square miles, Auschwitz was the largest concentration camp, and the Nazis divided it into three sub-camps: Auschwitz I acted as the base camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau was the main extermination camp, and Auschwitz-Monowitz enforced hard labor. In all, Auschwitz housed a total of 1.1 million Jews, 960,000 of whom were killed. Ray was one of the few who survived the second camp, Auschwitz Birkenau.

“OK. Now you can step down.”

I step off the chair. Ray grabs the back of the jacket at my lower spine and pulls the jacket tight against me. I fall back because I’m not ready for the force of the pull, the firmness with which he holds the coat. In the mirror I see him hunched over, marking the coat with his chalk. Lines and Xs, from the base of my neck to the small of my back.

“When I got there, in Auschwitz, they asked for tailors, shoemakers, bricklayers,” Ray says. “I was making uniforms for the SS—you know, the riding breeches. Everything had to be tailor-made. Everything had to be done perfect. You had to do it right or boy, watch out. And when we got through with the uniforms we were making civilian clothes. I was 16 or 17 by then. If I wouldn’t have been a tailor they would’ve killed me, too.”

The lump in my throat prevents me from swallowing. I look at him in the mirror, bent over, measuring, marking barbed-wire Xs down my back with the hands the Germans forced him to use 67 years ago on the back of an SS officer. One who killed the elderly, who gassed the women and children and gypsies. His meticulous hands make the same Xs on me now as they did back then and I wonder at the weight of his hands, at how much they endured, and I wonder if the SS officer really believed in the solution to the Judenfrage—Hitler’s “Jewish question”—or if he defied the illogic and appreciated the precision of the hands making Xs on his back, and I imagine each X marks another day of life for Ray in a place where a wasted day is another day of gained breath.

“Auschwitz was big,” he recalls. “It was an old Polish cavalry camp. And the barracks they changed for the prisoners. Put some beds in that we lived in. Three-story beds. Everybody engraved their names and their town in the wood of the bed. On every bed you saw it. Everybody would take a little knife and engrave or they’d do it with little pencils. And every time I get up in the morning I wake up praying, and when I go to bed, too, if I’m still alive. I never dreamed I would make it 90 years.”

It’s the carved name that recalls his identity, and the commitment to prayer to a God against whom he can measure himself, that kept Ray going. His main drive, his mantra even today is, “Never give up.” When others succumbed to their despair, Ray encouraged them to reject the anguish that paved the way for death. Hunger propelled the despair, and Ray never gave up finding various sources for food. In the middle of the night he’d risk certain execution and creep out of his bunk and sidle alongside the barracks until he reached the kitchen, hoping to see the window cracked with food on the sill or nearby counter. Numerous times, he’d filch a potato or two and make his way back to his barracks. Hunger pervaded each breath, and Ray says during the day and all night everyone dreamed about food, which meant that food was the goal, that hunger trumped risk, that life without food couldn’t be living.

“You have no idea what hunger means,” he says. “The biggest punishment if you want to punish somebody: Don’t feed ’em.”

He grabs the pants at either side of my waist and tugs. More chalk stitch marks moving down my hips. More pinning.

“Auschwitz was nothing but killing. When people went in, the music was playing because people was screaming. You know, in the barracks the walls was thin and you could hear the screaming. So the music was playing so you couldn’t hear the voices. You saw in the chimneys not smoke, but flame—like they were shooting fire. And a lot of times they was making—from the flesh of humans—soap. The called it reden Juden fat: RJF. From human flesh. When you went to take a shower they gave you something that looked like a rock. But it was made from humans. They’d shave off the hair to make mattresses.”

The pincushion he wears around his wrist has moved its way up his arm. As he moves to take another pin out to stick into the suit, I see, perched on the elastic band that inches up, on the soft inside of his forearm, a bird that looks like Tweety crossed with a macaw.

“Everybody used to ask me about the numbers,” he says. “I got sick and tired of it, so I covered it. It didn’t matter what in the hell it was because it wasn’t doing me any good.”

When he tells me B2526, he lets me look close to try to see it, but the tattoo artist executed his job perfectly. No trace of the number. When the Germans began losing ground in Poland because of the advancing Russian troops, the SS implemented a plan to move healthy prisoners to Dachau, a concentration camp located in Bavaria, Germany. In order to keep the prisoners from escaping during the transportation, the Germans told the Jewish prisoners they were exchanging them for German prisoners held by the Russians. It was a lie, of course. The ruse worked.

Some of the railroads to Dachau had been bombed into disrepair, which forced the Germans to take longer routes.

“It was three or four days on those goddamn boxcars,” Ray recalls. “You have a bucket if you want to take a leak. You cannot describe it. Ninety, a hundred in a boxcar like sardines. It was packed. Had to stand you know? You cannot forget. Never. Never. You talk about punishment. In an American jail it’s a pleasure. They got a television, they got a bed. They’re treated like a human. But over there? They didn’t give a damn. They wanted you to die.”

Eventually, Ray made it to Dachau, where he was assigned a new number: 19465. They put him to work making parts for the Luftwaffe. He was assigned an impossible work shift of heavy manual labor: 12 hours for the day shift, and 12 hours for the night shift.

“In case you run away they looked right away on your arm,” he says. “But we didn’t have civilian clothes. Everybody was in blue and white stripes so that nobody could run. They had electric wires, and outside the wire was ditches with water. Nobody could escape. If you would escape they would catch you.”

In Dachau, the slightest physical ailment meant certain death. On a regular basis, the SS inspected the prisoners’ bodies by calling them out of bed in the morning and forcing them to assemble, naked, and stand motionless for 30 minutes. The winters proved most detrimental because those who exhibited any symptoms of a cold or flu were dealt with severely. After the liberation of Dachau, Ray asked his doctor how he survived, and the only explanation the doctor could provide was, “You was young.”

In the mirror, I’m all white-dashed stitches held together with pins. The tailor gives me one more going-over, carefully examining how he’s refigured and put the suit together. He steps back, satisfied with his work.

“I never dreamed I would come out alive,” he says. “I weighed 75 pounds. Skin and bones.”

May 2, 1945 changed everything for Ray.

“That’s when there were white flags in the villages, hanging from the rooftops,” Ray recalls. “It was snowing in Bavaria in the forest. They was marching us through the forest. They were trying to get rid of us. Russians and Jews in the thousands. And all of a sudden we look, and nobody’s there. The SS is gone. The Russians were running to the dead horses along side of the road and cutting the meat and eating it. You have no idea what hunger means.”

I take the jacket off. First one arm, then the other, carefully slipping the material off my body to avoid the potential pinpricks while at the same time maintaining the newer, more formfitting shape of the jacket crafted by Ray. He takes the coat and carefully hangs it, then the pants.

“You know, when the war started, I had a family. They went to Treblinka in the beginning. But young and old, they got killed. When it was over, I was all alone. I was hoping maybe I will find somebody. After the war I went in the German museum and looked at the booth for Poland. The walls in the room were covered with lists of who was left alive and who is gone. I never could see anybody from my family. All of them gone.”

He takes the hung suit and places it on a rack next to a row of similarly pinned and white-dashed clothing, all standing at attention and waiting for Ray to reshape them permanently. He tells me to come back next week for the finished suit.

When I thank him, he replies, “Who shall ask, shall receive. Whatever you need, I will give it to you.”

In this ongoing  feature, our social media editor Vicki May Thorne meets and greets the staff and contributors of This Land Press.

Matt Leach is one half of the This Land film crew, the observant eyes and ears counterpart to boisterous, public  Sterlin Harjo. Leach & Harjo have produced dozens of short films and documentaries for This Land in the year or so they’ve been working together. Leach’s camerawork has resulted in beautiful tributes to the city he grew up in- Tulsa- and the many different stories that fellow Oklahomans have to tell.

1. What influences you? (alternately, what are your “Must Read/Listen/Watch” items? Print or online.)

There is a whole sea of movies to push you or pull you in one way or another and make your work feel inferior but I love documentaries like Grey Gardens and Salesman that have something so real and raw that it couldn’t be faked and are so in-depth and spend so much time with someone they catch the magic of what makes a person truly unique.  Then there’s something like Orson Welles’ F for Fake that is very playful on a conceptual level but also amazes you with its extremely low budget technical wizardry.

2. What inspires you?

I’d never really given the documentary form a lot of thought until I started doing them myself and have really fallen in love with the idea that you’re not making something up in your mind but uncovering an incredible story that’s already happened  and saving it from fading into obscurity or being lost with time.  So many times the stories we do are about someone you wouldn’t give another look walking down the street but I’m constantly fascinated by people’s stories and personalities and just the weirdness and greatness in stopping for a moment and capturing their story.

3. What is your favorite piece that you’ve done for This Land?

I think Indian Elvis is still probably one of my favorites because it seemingly had music, showmanship, oddity, tenderness, joy and sadness all at the same time.

4. What do you like about Tulsa & Oklahoma at large?

I love how unpretentious this city and state is.  I love that for the most part, if someone walked into a bar with their nose up talking about how much they have in the stock market they would be laughed out of the place.  There’s so much I would love to change about Tulsa, but the people here who are passionate about something are as genuine and “real” and talented as you could ask for.

5. What is your drink of choice? (Alcoholic or non)

Coca-cola.

It’s true, I participated, but it wasn’t what I did that’s worth rehashing. It’s what I witnessed. The incident went like this: Two swimming pools situated in the entryway of the church, four dunkers, four dunkees, and a camera man piping all the action into the main sanctuary. Seems relatively harmless and fun, until one of the dunkees tries to get away.

Everything was running so smoothly, one devotee right after another. It was a beautiful thing until the last victim stepped down and into the pool. She did this of her own choosing, what they call free will. So when I say victim, I’m not implying one being taken advantage of, but rather one whose fear permeates so deeply that it evokes an awkward situation and she becomes one. A victim, that is.

The terror on her face seeped through her pores until I could feel it pulsing in the water. She was about 40, thin, and as her feet hit the water her whole body stiffened just like a board. I quickly opted out of this one and stood back to watch the professionals.

Pastor Todd Roy was no beginner at baptizing. With hundreds—maybe even thousands—of baptisms under his belt, he stepped up to the plate quickly and confidently without skipping a beat. He moved toward her gingerly with his hand out-stretched. She took his hand almost out of desperation. Calmly and compassionately, Pastor Todd debriefed her and tried to alleviate some of the terror on her face, but it didn’t seem as if any of the words could even slightly dissolve the fear. With no time to waste and a thousand people watching in the auditorium, Pastor Todd knew intimately that the show must go on.

This is how it all went down:

He proceeded, in the scripted text, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” then began the process of easing her gently into the water. Only, she’s not going down. And not only is she not going down, she is fighting for her life, bobbing up and down, backwards, flailing arms, fighting like a drowning victim, trying to keep her head afloat before she is preyed upon by the Master Baptizer.

Todd follows her every move, then swiftly and at the right moment, he lurches into the air taking her with him, and like a killer shark feeding on a helpless seal, he fully immerses them both successfully into a thundering, tandem splash.

When Todd surfaces, he looks straight at me with victory in his eye, and says, “No one gets away from me!”

I eat meat, but I had never killed an animal to eat its meat. I had always relied on other people, strangers, to kill and process and package my meat for me. Until I killed that little goat in November with a few of my girlfriends. We left Tulsa at night and drove the winding roads into the prairie forest of Lake Tenkiller near Tahlequah, to camp and take classes on outdoor living. The classes were offered by an organization called Women in the Outdoors, which is a part of the National Wild Turkey Federation. Their goal is to teach outdoor skills to women, and their mission is to conserve the wild turkey and to preserve hunting heritage. The target demographic is the Sarah Palin type.

The night before the killings, we had set up our tents in the face of a freeze warning. It’s cold near the lake in the middle of November. Black night with stars clear and perfectly spaced, like tiny white polka-dots on black velvet. We built a fire, sat in folding chairs, and talked. About jobs, about personal philosophy, about food, about eating meat, about parenting, about boys, about girls. We drank Coronas and ate sunflower seeds.

We were there because we had signed up for classes like Primitive Cooking, Blacksmithing, and Pine Needle Basket Weaving. We wanted to know how to make utensils and containers that weren’t shoddily mass-produced. We wanted to be ladies in possession of practical knowledge and survival skills, with iron sporks doubling as weapons, just in case the need for such an item should arise.

We had also signed up for a class called Field Dressing, where we would learn how to cut meat from animals without puncturing intestines, to learn how to cut off hides for clothes and shelter in the most efficient way. This is where we would confront our complicit role in the slaughtering of cute animals. If we couldn’t deal with the meat from its source, we were thoughtless carnivores. We wanted to be thoughtful carnivores.

Not one of us slept an entire hour, mostly because we were so, so cold. I tried curling up in a fetal ball to conserve heat. I wished I had fur. I wrapped things around my head and ducked into my sleeping bag. Then my toes got cold, so I covered them with my quilt and a small pile of clothes I couldn’t identify in the dark. Then my butt got cold, so I wrapped a scarf around my hips like a bandage. Dozed off. Then wild dogs started barking.

In the morning, I drank shitty coffee and ate a bite of a store-bought muffin and went to the Field Dressing workshop. When I signed up for this class two months prior, I imagined that there would be a dead but fairly clean deer hung up in a warehouse, and the instructor would have a knife that s/he would pass around and give each of us a turn cutting something.

But when our group arrived at the designated meeting spot, there was a trailer full of 10 live, cute goats. Their owner, a 40-year-old rancher who had descended from generations of Oklahoma ranchers, used them to graze her pasture as living lawnmowers. Goats are prized because they eat a quarter of their weight in weeds and brush—vegetation that cows snub—daily. She appreciated the goats for their low maintenance, easy demeanor, and appetite. She explained how to kill, skin, and butcher them. She explained the technique humanely, assuring us the goats wouldn’t suffer.

Her firm hand steadied the gun between and slightly above the goat’s eyes, and she shot the first one through its head at a slight yet precise angle so the bullet would sever the spinal column. The goat immediately crumpled. She asked for volunteers to wield the knife, to cut open the jugular vein then the carotid artery to allow the blood to escape the goat’s body. I waited.

One portly 60-something lady turned her head away from the killing scene and toward me and commented that she “didn’t realize how much this would affect her.” I tried to look strong, but I couldn’t help but hug her. I tried to distract her with awkward interview questions. She told me she had been a school teacher but was now retired. She wore a fanny pack and a fluorescent baseball cap, and she appreciated the small talk.

Meanwhile, more shots. Their owner shot them one by one. After each shot, a thud, then a student took the knife. When it was my turn, I grabbed the knife from my friend’s blood-caked hand. The knife was bloody, warm, and sticky; clumps of fur stuck to the blade.

We cut 10 jugular veins and 10 carotid arteries. Then we carried the goats by their feet, one lady on the front legs and one lady on the back legs, to a pile of wood so their bodies could finish bleeding out, a process that took about an hour.

We then loaded the carcasses in the truck and rode with them to the place where we would field dress and butcher them. Once they were all unloaded, we scattered out on the lawn, each of us students paired with a goat. I cut my goat open delicately, as instructed, so as not to puncture his stomach or intestines or bladder because I wouldn’t want to taint the meat. Then I lifted out his hot, heavy bowels. I set the heart and liver aside. The portly lady called them the “best parts.” I began to cut the hide away from the muscle. I spread the goat body until it resembled a snow angel, and then quartered it. Leg meat, neck and shoulders, back, then ribs. This meat went directly to the kitchen. I sawed off the feet and head. These parts went to farm dogs. Done.

That day, my friends and I didn’t become super human. But we felt like better humans. It felt better knowing how much energy goes into bringing one pound of meat to a kitchen, and providing that fuel with my own hands and heart. It felt good to have my friends helping me cut away connective tissue and saw through bone. It felt good to be able to take over the butchering for my breastfeeding friend when she needed a break to go pump milk for her baby back home with the father in midtown Tulsa. It felt good to see all types of women: one who had to use a fake name because she was in a domestic violence protection program, a mother convinced to come live in the outdoors for a few days by her gutsy 11-year-old daughter, retired women, city women, straight women and lesbians, religious women and non-religious, conservatives, liberals, and near anarchists.

Our meat—my meat—would be the main course at a final group dinner of roughly one hundred hungry ladies, including instructors and other students. A handful of cooks cubed and fried the goat meat and prepared a buffet of side dishes: cornbread, pinto beans, cheesy macaroni, salad, mashed potatoes. I looked forward to enjoying this meal; I couldn’t help but feel like a pioneering husband, proud of his kill and swollen with his family’s dependence upon him for survival. I filled my plate and took a seat near the portly lady and my friends. I went straight for the goat meat, pushed a pile of it onto my fork with my knife. As I chewed, my nose instinctually wrinkled and my eyes partially squinted, and a small chunk of guilt settled into my stomach.

After boiling the head so that its skin was supple and pliable, he sliced into the back of the man’s neck, gliding his knife along its nape, from the decapitation wound to the crown of the head, pulling skin away from skull and removing the hard white shell that encapsulated the man’s brain. That, too, was removed, along with everything else that once served to give the man life, and the Jivaro then filled the cavity with hot sand and pebbles, slowly and persistently rotating the head to ensure even drying, He repeated the process for days, until the head was completely dry and had shrunk about five times its normal size, until it was no bigger than the Jivaro’s fist—though its features remained remarkably intact.

He used cotton to sew the head’s eyes and lips shut. When he’d finished, he presented his trophy to his tribe, and his people celebrated his victory with a bountiful ceremony of dancing, drink, and orgy. He displayed the head in his hut until a buyer—some Westerner fascinated with his tribe’s headhunting tradition—offered him a musket in exchange.

Eventually, the trophy—and others like it—would find itself on a shelf in Tulsa, in a museum owned by a world-traveling evangelist. Children visiting the museum on school field trips would wander its halls, oohing and aahing at the thousands of artifacts on display, but invariably they would return to the three shrunken heads. They’d stare collectively in grotesque wonderment, unsure if the faces were real or manufactured for the explicit purpose of scaring the hell out of them.

Tommy Lee “T.L.” Osborn opened The World Museum in 1963 to display the art and artifacts he’d spent 15 years collecting while on mission trips in other worlds, where he preached the gospel and healed the sick by the thousands. Housed in the T.L. Osborn Evangelistic Association’s headquarters—a white, domed structure that stood just east of Peoria Avenue and south of Skelly Drive until 2007, when it was torn down to make way for the Highway 44 expansion—the Worlditorium displayed Asian and New Guinean tribal art, African and Native American tribal art, Oriental art, European porcelain, collectors’ cars, and European and American furniture, clocks, and musical instruments.

The building had seven arched alcoves; inside each was a map of a continent,composed of faces of people from that land, and a collection of artifacts associated with that place.

The center’s lobby contained, at the time, the “world’s largest vinyl carpet,” according to a Tulsa World article, which represented the Earth’s surface and carried the message: “Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to all creatures.” It was what Osborn had done nearly his entire life.

Born in 1923, Osborn was one of 13 children raised by poor parents near Pawnee. Born again at 12, he hit the road three years later with evangelist E.M. Dillard, eventually landing in California, where he met a woman with a similar background. Daisy Washburn, one of 11 children born to poor California fruit farmers, received her salvation at a young age. The two married on Easter Sunday 1942—he was 18, she 17— and they began traveling the American West preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ.

In Portland, the Osborns met a missionary who told them of the great need for the gospel in India, and so they sold all their possessions and moved there, determined to win Indian souls for Christ.

“They were not prepared,” said LaDonna Osborn, their daughter, an evangelist who followed in her parents’ footsteps. “They didn’t have a clue about India. They thought India was full of pagans, and that’s the last thing that’s in India. It’s a nation of devoutly religious people; we know that today. They went and had a very disappointing experience. They were doing all they were taught to do: praying, fasting, loud preaching. And nothing worked, and they did not know how to convince people of other faiths that the Bible really was the word of God, that Jesus really was the son of God and that he gave his life purposefully for the sins of people and that he’s alive today to continue his work through believers.

“So my father and mother did a very smart thing. They came home.”

They continued their U.S. ministry until they met a missionary who inspired them to return overseas, this time to Jamaica, where they spent 17 weeks preaching and praying. The Osborns healed 90 blind people and cured countless others from deafness, deformation, cancer, and other diseases, LaDonna said. She was 9 months old then, traveling with her parents and older brother from country to country.

Their philosophy was simple: “Just teach the people the promises of God, explain to them why they can expect to be healed, and pray for them—and let Jesus do the rest.”

The native missionaries they supported were so grateful that they would bestow on the family their most precious art and artifacts—and Osborn would use his “collector’s DNA” to purchase and commission art.

“I think he had such a eye for art—he’s a real artist. He has lots of talents in that way,” LaDonna said. “I think, because of that, many of the things that were given to us were really quality. In later years, they would purchase things that needed restoration.”

One of Osborn’s commissions still stands in LaDonna’s office at the ministry’s current headquarters near Fifth Street and Memorial Drive in Tulsa. The statue is life-size and standing on a pedestal and depicts a man with a wood bit in his mouth, held in place by chains wrapped around his head. Even more chains entangle his hands and feet, and he wears no clothing save a loincloth.

“The purpose of this was to typify humanity in the bondage of sin if they do not have Christ,” she said. “Now, I can tell you that when I have African-American friends who come here, that is very offensive. I need to put a plaque on it or something. We are not affirming slavery. We are making a spiritual statement.”

***

Osborn expanded his museum in 1972, adding a second floor, thousands more artifacts, and renaming it The World Museum/ Art Centre. Oklahoma Governor David Hall and Tulsa Mayor Robert LaFortune spoke at the facility’s ribbon cutting. The 50,000-square-foot museum housed more than 5,000 artifacts from 100 nations.

A Tulsa Tribune reporter called its contents “a collector’s fantasy of global memorabilia” that included “totems, gongs, swords, drums, fetishes, talismans, graven images, idols, and grotesques; music boxes from Bavaria, Black Forest mechanical villages, monster African and Burmese statues carved from trees.”

“And temple lions with rose quartz eyes, and instruments for a Siamese orchestra Compleat, and chandeliers from palaces in Spain; a faun discovered in the rubble of Pompeiis [sic].”

There were also boats—a 57-foot long New Guinean war canoe and a 37-foot New Guinean banana fleet boat—that required partial dismantling of the museum to get inside the upstairs gallery.

Each artifact was accompanied by a placard that described it and its origin and also included some tidbit that, LaDonna said, “would inform people about the cultures of the world or about the religions of the world or about the need for help, for hope, for rescue.”

Osborn told the Tulsa World before the opening: “It has long been our contention that many of the world’s fears and prejudices among people of different nationalities could be alleviated, if not eliminated, by bringing artifacts from the different cultures of the world together, so that we might study them and learn to understand and sympathize with people who have outlooks and backgrounds different from our American and European heritage.”

The museum received 6,000 visitors a month, but its founders, and the ministry that made them jet setters, remained a mystery to most Tulsans. Osborn, though comfortable in leading thousands of foreigners to Christ, remained a recluse in his hometown, often refusing media interviews.

“It was a paradox to have such an amazing collection in the hands of simple missionary kind of people,” LaDonna said. “The art community could not understand how we got a hold of these things, how we were able to restore them and present them in such a way.”

She remembered visiting France with her family and wandering the courtyards outside of the museums, where her parents would find “marble statues that were cracked or growing moss” and buy them at a “reasonable” price, restore them and display them in Tulsa.

“Now, coincidentally, after the museum was liquidated, France actually passed laws disallowing the export of their fine art pieces. They came and took a lot of their things back.”

But she said the family never ran into any legal issues when exporting or importing fine art or artifacts—including the shrunken heads and ivory tusks so huge “you couldn’t believe that an elephant could be big enough to carry them around.”

LaDonna said the purpose of the museum was to endow the ministry. “In my father and mother’s logic, in times to come it might be difficult to finance the evangelism programs or to make payroll or to add on to a building—to do anything necessary, so they thought, we could sell a piece of art. So that was a good idea at the time.”

The ministry was—and is—financed through private donations, which were, until the late 1980s, solicited through a magazine the Osborns published titled Faith Digest.

But T.L. was always tight-lipped about his ministry’s finances. In 1977, two Tulsa Tribune reporters wrote: “Not even Osborn and his associates claim to know how much the museum and its displays are worth. They do know, however, how much money is solicited by the foundation. But they refuse to make that figure public. In fact, due to the foundation’s ‘church’ status, not even the Internal Revenue Service can find out. Osborn’s foundation has been estimated to receive $6 million-$8 million per year, but officials would not confirm that figure.”

“We’ve never had debt; we’ve never gone into debt for anything,” LaDonna said. “We have survived. I should say thank you Jesus. I believe if you do what God wants done, he helps you.”

***

In 1981, T.L. Osborn closed The World Museum and liquidated most of its assets. The museum had become more than just a set of curios inside ministry headquarters; it had a full-time staff, guards, guides, and a curator. It was a major tourist attraction for the region and had garnered notable national attention from folks in the art world.

“One day my mother and father had lunch with the head of the Oklahoma Tourism Council—whatever the proper term is— and she was just commending the museum, expressing what an attraction it had become in Oklahoma, and that it was the finest collection west of the Mississippi—next to the Smithsonian, the finest world art collection. And she looked at my father and she said, ‘You have spent this portion of your life collecting these amazing artifacts; now you must give the rest of your life guarding and preserving it.’ ”

Deciding they weren’t willing to give their lives for their collection, the Osborns called a meeting of the museum’s board of directors following their lunch and announced their decision to liquidate it and put the proceeds earned back into the ministry.

They spent months preparing their collection for auction by Christie’s, an event that lasted three days in September 1981. Collectors from Tulsa and elsewhere pored over the collection, its contents ranging in price from $20 to $100,000.

A tag sale on the museum’s first floor was opened to everyone and offered knickknacks and smaller items—chopsticks, cow skulls, an elephant’s foot, old engine parts, plaster statues—at attractive prices. In the upstairs gallery was what the Tulsa Tribune called “an exhibition so classy that the catalog required for admission costs $20,” where a painting by Gustave Dore, bronze and marble sculptures, and a bronze Louis XIV clock were auctioned at prices in the tens of thousands.

The auction fetched $2 million and was followed by another a year later with Dean Kruse, famed antique car auctioneer from Dearborn, Indiana—who, in 2010, had his license suspended and his auction house revoked on complaints of fraud—at the helm.

“Auction day begins and strangers come,” LaDonna said, “art lovers, people who have no interest in humanity per se, certainly not the work of God … and to just watch those things that have been gathered over a lifetime be hauled out, piece by piece, piece by piece. That was not easy.”

The building was gifted to Victory Christian Center, which housed its Victory Bible Institute there, though the ministry retained a portion of it for storage space.

Daisy Osborn died in 1995. LaDonna acts as vice president and CEO of Osborn Ministries International and is founder and overseer of the International Gospel Fellowship. Her father, at 88, is still active in the ministry, traveling regularly until just last year.

The ministry continues to publish literature in 132 languages and films in 80 languages. T.L., Daisy, and LaDonna “have probably reached and led more unreached souls to Christ in non-Christian lands, and may have witnessed more great healing miracles, that any other family in history,” their website claims.

The hallways at Fifth and Memorial are plastered with photographs that document the far reaches of their ministry and its every capacity—except for The World Museum. There are a few remaining pieces of art in the office, but most of what the family reserved from the auction—some paintings by Dore, marble sculptures, Oriental art—remains in the Osborns’ home.

Even the building that once housed the place has been covered up by concrete and steel. Nearly all that remains of the Osborns’ World Museum are the Christie’s auction program, a couple of newspaper clippings and the memories of Tulsa kids—vast student bodies of them—who recall visiting the place and gazing in amazement at its treasures—including three tiny, hollow heads with sewn-up eyes and mouths.

“It’s a little gross, but we never were ashamed to show what really is humanity,” LaDonna said. “We live in a culture that protects us from anything ugly, anything oozy, anything crazy, anything that’s vile. We’re protected from it …

“We’ve never tried to shelter particularly the Christian community from those things because they need to be reminded: This is what people do who are lost, who are hopeless. They’re trying to make appeasement for whatever’s going on in their lives—the evil, the hatred, the cruelty people will do to one another.”

Holly Wall, most recently of Tulsa Business Journal, is This Land Press’s news editor. A working mother of two, Holly writes daily content for “The Roundup,” which, on any given day, will feature discussions of other local media, local events, national events concerning Oklahoma, and other assorted items that pertain to This Land’s audience. Holly has also developed a weekly interview segment called “This Land Live,” which streams at 10 a.m. on Thursdays. She also writes for the print edition.

She unflinchingly faces down the 24-hour news cycle and digs out the good stuff, parsing and presenting the choicest tidbits for you. We’re pleased to have Holly capably handling the breaking side of This Land’s journalistic endevours and eager for another helping of The Roundup, This Land Live and more.

What influences you?

In college, I read this book—Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. For 11 years, LeBlanc engrossed herself in the ugly, dangerous, drug-addled world that is inner-city life in the Bronx, New York. What resulted from that, though, is anything but ugly; it’s a beautiful, striking, engrossing book. It’s brilliantly written, but more than that, it just about perfectly tells the story of life in one of the most deprived places in the U.S.—and the surprising amount of hope there. It’s sensitive without being sentimental, and it’s exhaustively researched and reported.

After I read it, I thought, “This—this is what I want to write.” I haven’t written it yet, but it’s what I aspire to. That book is as fresh in my mind now as it was in 2003, and it continues to influence my writing every day.

What are your “must read” items? Print or online.

I always read The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Atlantic and The Daily Beast. I also keep an eye on Poynter to stay in touch with what’s happening in the industry. Though I don’t visit them regularly, I stumble upon a lot of other great news sites and blogs in my daily search for Okie-related news for The Roundup. I just read everything. I get paid to read every day. It’s a great gig.

Personally, I love to read memoirs, essays, and other prose. I like true stories. I like to read work that will make me a better writer.

Who or What inspires you to do the work that you do? 

Other journalists—like LeBlanc (above)—whose work I admire inspire me to work harder, write better. Conversely, bad journalism inspires me, too—there’s so much of it out there; I want to make sure I’m doing it right.

And, of course, my kids. I want them to have a mom who’s passionate, inspired, informed, and well read. I want to be a good example for them.

What is your favorite piece you’ve done for The Land Press?  

I’m still fairly new to the job (I was just hired last September, and I’d only been freelancing for a couple of months before that), so I don’t feel like I’ve got a huge cache to choose from. However, my first assignment for This Land, “Lost Olinka,” about Prague, Oklahoma, artist Olinka Hrdy, definitely stands out as a favorite. I loved visiting Prague and experiencing the Kolache Festival, as well as delving into the mystery of her lost Riverside Studio murals.

I liked the piece I wrote about Joe Brainard, too, but I think that was mostly because I liked Joe so much. He was a really likeable guy, even though the only way I was able to get to know him was through family and friends and his art/writing. I wish I had had the opportunity to know him in person—or to interview him, at least.

What do you love about Tulsa and/or Oklahoma?   

My family is here; there’s great art here; there’s a ton of stuff to do; it has fascinating history; it’s a great place for kids. I love to travel and experience other places, but Tulsa is definitely home.

What is your drink of choice? Alcoholic or otherwise?

Diet Pepsi. I know it’s rotting my insides, but I love it so much. It’s kind of a problem, actually.

~~~~

For more on Holly, check out her bio and follow her on Twitter @hwall.

There are several ways to narrow gaps that have formed in fracturing discourse and to stop the tendency for various groups to draw fixed battle lines in the fracturing debate. The first, as I argue to my students, is to largely shift our focus away from burning water. Don’t get me wrong: The potential for methane to contaminate water wells (many of them poorly constructed), soil, and other resources is an important problem and should not be ignored. And any potential for chemical contamination of underground resources, no matter how remote, should be carefully avoided; it’s very difficult to reverse or clean up some aquifer contamination. But focusing so heavily on the dramatic events distracts us from the many other potential effects— at all stages of the development process—that are important and can be avoided, often at low costs. Take surface spills. Recent research into environmental violations at shale gas and tight sand sites around the country shows that in some states, many violations involve spills of drilling or fracturing materials on well pads and occasionally off well pads—into ditches and swamps, for example. With better spill prevention measures, such as a policy of placing drip pans beneath the transfer points for fracturing fluids and requiring that tanks with chemicals have secondary containment, we might have avoided these incidents. Another potential risk associated with fracturing is the transportation of fracturing chemicals. A variety of federal hazardous transport regulations apply, but they sometimes fail to prevent accidents. In an incident that may have been entirely unrelated to fracturing (I have not heard any reports about where the truck was headed), a truck full of hydrochloric acid started leaking on a highway in Oklahoma last week. Even if this truck had no association with oil and gas development or fracturing, it provides an example of what can happen when trucks transporting chemicals to fracking sites don’t have proper equipment.

Focusing on burning water distracts us from the potentially more prevalent effects that are fixable. Let’s look more broadly to all stages of the well development process and work toward collective solutions. Let’s also continue the recent trend toward chemical disclosure. A better-informed public will have more valuable knowledge when working toward collective solutions with industry and regulators. Texas’s sweeping requirement for disclosure—which even allows certain surface owners to challenge claims for trade secret status—is a good example of a relatively broad disclosure rule. And industry’s participation in FracFocus, a voluntary chemical disclosure registry, has helped states that are working toward similar disclosure rules; states with increasingly empty coffers don’t have to create their own online registries when requiring that operators disclose fracturing chemicals.

Finally, let’s not forget that natural gas is a bridge fuel. Despite the concerns about methane leakage from pipelines, it still appears to be our cleanest fossil fuel, and it’s incredibly important. But let’s look to the other side of the bridge and not forget that we’ll need something on the opposite shore. One hundred years seems far away now, but as we develop natural gas and focus on developing it well, let’s not forget about the renewable alternatives that are equally important. There is no one energy fix. We’ll need natural gas, renewables, and a range of other options. That’s why we can’t afford to allow the gaping divides in the energy debate to continue expanding.

Footnotes

1. Ground Water Protection Council Congressional Testimony, May-June, 2009.

2. Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, Stray Natural Gas Migration Cases Associated with Oil and Gas Wells, Draft, Oct. 28, 2009. The documents underlying this report, which I obtained through a public records request, suggest that poor casing during the drilling process and historically occurring natural gas contributed to some of the incidents described in this report.

3. New York State Department of Environmental Conserva- tion, Revised Draft Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement on the Oil, Gas, and Solution Mining Regulatory Program (Sept. 2011).

Hannah Wiseman is an assistant professor at the University of Tulsa College of Law.

Was fracking to blame? There are really two questions in that one: first, can fracking cause earthquakes? And second, was it the cause of Oklahoma’s swarm of temblors? A quick survey of the scientific literature, and question one seems a bit silly. Journals like Geophysical Prospecting and Journal of Geophysical Research B: Solid Earth offer dozens of minutely detailed papers on the topic of what geologists call “induced seismicity.” Not one of them ever questions the fact that hydraulic fracturing is one of the things that can induce seismicity.

“The rock in the earth is quite close to a stress situation everywhere, and everything you do can affects it,” Serge Shapiro told me by phone from his office at the Free University in Berlin. “It is compressed, and if we change something in this compression, the stress will be released and it will leap to a kind of small earthquake.”

Professor Shapiro, a seismologist and geologist, co-authored many of the papers I found on seismicity and fracking. But even “drill baby drill” types who mistrust scientists don’t have to take Shapiro’s word for it: they can hear it from Schlumberger, the world’s largest oilfield services company. In the summer 2000 issue of Oilfield Review—its magazine for energy clients—Schlumberger ran a piece titled “Seismicity in the Oil Field,” detailing how to forecast and monitor for seismicity resulting from hydrocarbon extraction and waste injection. And in England, a drilling company, Cuadrilla Resources, commissioned a report that last month concluded their drilling operations had caused two earthquakes, one magnitude 2.3, near Blackpool.

So fracking can cause earthquakes. But that’s not the whole story. Professor Shapiro explained that the seismic events that drilling produces are tiny—most of them undetectable without highly sophisticated equipment. Even where they can be detected, they almost never cause an earthquake above magnitude two.

After Oklahoma’s quake swarm, the more rational media outlets—Scientific American, Miller-McCune, Nature—quickly pointed this fact out. They quoted seismologists, who reported that the quakes happened along a natural fault deeper than the deepest wells. But that didn’t stop newspapers, bloggers, and activists from connecting the dots, citing the number of drilling platforms in the state and posting maps of Lincoln County’s gas wells. Few of these outlets went to the trouble of pointing out the difference between a quake of magnitude two (barely detectable) and magnitude five (can topple your chimney). An unscientific poll on the Daily Kos even asked readers whether fracking was responsible for the increase in large earthquakes—a conclusion every seismologist who spoke publicly had already rejected. Nevertheless, by far the most common answer was yes; a month after the quakes, only 12 percent of those polled had said no.

From inside the circled wagons of the energy evangelists, this looked like yet another fantasy cooked up by Earth-First anarchists intent on killing jobs. But the oil and gas industry folks brought this level of public paranoia on themselves. Their M.O. throughout the hydraulic fracturing debate has been deny, deny, deny. Fracking can never contaminate drinking water. Fracking can never pollute the air. When residents near drilling operations complain of health woes and ruined wells, the gas companies deliver them water in cisterns—as long as they sign non-disclosure agreements. So it’s no surprise to hear from the frackers that fracking does not induce seismicity. On its website, the Barnett Shale Energy Education Council cites a study from SMU to declare that “the drilling process does not cause earthquakes.”

Note the phrasing: “the drilling process.” It’s this kind of rhetorical move that has caused the industry to lose so much credibility. Because as Professor Shapiro explained, while drilling causes only tiny temblors, more significant seismicity results from a by-product of the fracking process: fluid re-injection. Fracking involves blasting subterranean shales with huge amounts of water laced with sand and chemicals. The water creates cracks in the shale; the sand holds the cracks open so natural gas can be drawn out. The water used in the process is recovered—the industry calls it “produced water”—and must be disposed of safely, since in addition to the chemicals in it, it can collect salt, methane, and other toxins underground. This usually means injecting it into very deep wells. If the injection wells are near fault lines, the introduction of huge volumes of water can produce significant seismic activity.

In the most famous incident of induced seismicity, the government stopped disposing of chemical weapons in deep injection wells at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver, Colorado, after determining that they were producing dangerous earthquakes. And that SMU study that the Barnett Shale Energy Education Council cited to assert that fracking does not cause earthquakes? It did indeed say that drilling did not seem to be connected to a swarm of earthquakes near the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport—but it also reported that fluid re-injection near the site was correlated with the quakes.

Separating the wastewater injection process from fracking itself in order to disavow its effects is a slippery rhetorical move. It’s not honesty; it’s spin. When I contacted the American Petroleum Institute, the largest oil and gas industry trade association, to ask about earthquakes and fracking, I was quickly emailed some boilerplate: “The extent to which there is any correlation between hydraulic fracturing and reported seismic activity is not known. There are various potential causal factors that could play a role in this small scale seismic activity and we are not aware of scientific research that ties hydraulic fracturing to seismic activity, or that suggests there is any risk to human health or homes or structures.” When I wrote back, however, to ask if by “hydraulic fracturing” they mean re-injection wells, too, I got no reply. When you can’t spin, stonewall.

Stonewalling—as in the refusal to list the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing— has not bought the industry public confidence. Perhaps habitually, it seems incapable of being straightforward in its communications, which tend to have a “you can’t handle the truth” tone. Now shale-gas boosters have backed themselves into an “it’s all lies” corner from which they cannot even acknowledge what objective scientists—and their own literature—readily admit: that fracking induces seismicity.

Nor does it help that many of the scientists trotted out to discuss the issue have financial connections to the natural gas industry. In Tulsa, for instance, local news stations brought in Dr. Bryan Tapp to declare Oklahoma’s quakes unrelated to fracking. Tapp is a professor at the University of Tulsa, but he has also worked as a consultant to several oil companies; fracking is his academic subspecialty. That’s not to say he’s been bought off—most seismologists end up working for the industry at some point—but his commitments don’t build confidence in his objectivity, particularly when all he did on the news was deny that the latest batch of earthquakes could be caused by fracking without ever acknowledging that induced seismicity is real.

But if you’ve been following me with righteous indignation—those frackers are not to be trusted!—here’s where it gets uncomfortable: The greens are not being entirely straightforward either. In their eagerness to discredit fracking, they have leapt from induced seismicity to the conclusion that fracking causes huge, destructive earthquakes—a causal connection that science simply has not established. And the activists ignore the fact that—as Herr Professor Shapiro pointed out to me—all kinds of human action, including building reservoirs and developing geothermal energy, induce seismicity. Some environmentalists can even play as fast and loose with the facts as the American Petroleum Institute. Citing an August report by the Oklahoma Geological Society, the eco-blog RedGreenandBlue.org asserted that the report “concludes that recent quakes could have been caused by fracking.” This was downright misleading: The “recent quakes” the OGS report studied were much smaller earthquakes in Garvin County, not the recent rash-including one 5.6 magnitude earthquake the blog was reporting on.

The only irrefutable conclusion about fracking and earthquakes is that the data are not definitive. But that means completely opposite things to those on different sides of the fracking smackdown: To greens it looks like a big red stoplight, and to the energy industry it looks like a flashing neon sign: frack, baby, frack. With localities from Michigan to Arkansas to New York already at war over fracking, the Oklahoma temblors were bound to be seized upon by folks looking for signs of a frack-up. And the shale-gas industry honchos—recently caught on tape calling anti-frack activists an “insurgency” and describing the military psyops methods needed to fight them—were bound to scream “eco-terrorism.”

The whole issue of fracking has become intractable, largely because it plays so perfectly into the master narratives that drive those on both sides of our energy economy’s ideological divide. For the energy industry, the idea of vast shale reserves sitting right there, under states like Arkansas and Pennsylvania and Oklahoma, is not just exciting; it’s downright redemptive. It provides a homegrown antidote to the unhappy vision of vast fossil fuel reserves sitting under nations full of ideologues who hate us. “We have the equivalent of two Saudi Arabias in natural gas,” Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon told 60 Minutes. What could top that for flipping OPEC the bird?

Even better, the image of a vast, untapped reserve resurrects the fantasy of national abundance our rampant energy consumption has drained dry. Pennsylvania is out of coal; Oklahoma’s gushing oil wells are a distant memory; even Texas is running low on gushers—but thanks to hydraulic fracturing, those once-boundless reserves may not be exhausted after all. Oh, Exxon! Oh, America! Just when we thought we might have to accept the notion of limits to our resources, the City on a Hill returneth; the infinite bounty of the New World born again in the high-velocity water of the fracking pipe.

Environmentalism’s master narrative is no less dramatic and is equally well-served by fracking. If man is the metaphoric rapist of Mother Earth, what more apt symbol than the long nozzle of the hydrofracturing well, shoving its fluid-filled head into the depths of the planet and fracking away until it gets the booty it wants? Hydrofracturing is practically the reductio ad absurdum of the notion of “extractive”: a process that literally fractures the bedrock on which we live to slurp up its filthy hydrocarbons. Any attempt to defend such a thing must be the work of industry shills bouncing from strings that lead right back the tuberous hands of Dick Cheney.

Given the deep roots of these extremes, is a pragmatic middle-ground even possible?

“We actually think if done right there are really good potential benefits to natural gas,” Jim Marston told me. Marston is vice president for the National Energy Program at the Environmental Defense Fund. To my surprise, he was not anti-fracking. He pointed out its main benefit: burning natural gas in a new combined cycle power plant reduces greenhouse gases by 60 percent over burning coal. Unfortunately, that benefit is frequently cancelled out by “fugitive emissions”: methane leaks from the wells, another problem the industry doesn’t like to discuss. Marston believes the problem can be solved efficiently and would be if regulations were in place to demand it. So too, he thinks the seismic activity needs monitoring and all deep-well drilling should be subject to real regulation.

“What we need to do,” he said, “is get the progressive parts of the industry—and the part of the environmental community that understands the potential benefits of natural gas to reduce local air pollution as well as the problem of global warming—to come together to produce some regulations that the industry can live with and bring along the outliers that give them a bad name.”

Come together: Aye, there’s the rub. Marston was proposing an honest conversation about fracking between the industry and those concerned about its environmental effects. But such a conversation is made impossible by the stark, take-no-prisoners dogmatism of those on both sides of the debate. For environmentalists, the fracking platform has come to epitomize our hydrocarbon-fuelled rape of the planet. And for the frackers, any attempt to impose restrictions, regulations or even reporting requirements on their Wild West gas rush is so anti-jobs, anti-capitalist, and anti-American it’s tantamount to treason.

Sadly, the fracking stand-off reproduces in microcosm the breakdown of our national conversation—and the political stultification it has spawned. As the ideological divide grows wider, those on each side retreat into the closed feedback loops of their targeted mediascapes. Fox News with a cup of Tea; MSNBC as you Occupy the couch—it’s all so downright comforting. People like Jim Marston are asking the hard questions, and trying to formulate the best solutions, but they might as well be spitting in the wind. And while we all lull ourselves to torpor with the stories we already believe, one more national dialogue that we so desperately need—this one about energy sources, energy production, and energy use—will continue to fall on deaf ears.

In December of 1906, Boyle convinced Dr. Kennedy to loan him $500 (nearly $12,000 in today’s money) [2] so that he could pay off debts to local businessmen; Boyle then promptly disappeared from Tulsa. Nine months later, however, he resurfaced. The Daily Oklahoman informed readers that Kennedy had tracked down Myron Boyle to Eureka Springs, where he had recently married the daughter of a prominent Tulsa druggist. Kennedy telegraphed the authorities in Arkansas to petition for an arrest, but Boyle had already skipped town.

Boyle was wanted on a charge of flim-flammery, an early term used for con artists. It was a rather ignoble moment for the man whose newspaper would someday evolve into the Tulsa World.

Unlike Boyle, J.R. Brady seemed to have a knack for the newspaper business. In 1905, while he was publishing the weekly Indian Republican, Brady also began publishing the Tulsa Daily World, and, for a brief period, perhaps to take advantage of the upcoming announcement of statehood, the Oklahoma World. [3]It became a successful enough venture to lure the interests of George Bayne, a mine owner from Missouri. Bayne and his brother-in-law Charles Dent managed the World for five years before a young man showed up who would forever change the paper’s course. [4]

Eugene Lorton was a printer’s devil from Missouri. He had managed newspapers in the Washington state area, where he was also heavily involved in Republican politics. He successfully managed political campaigns for a governor and a senator. Lorton was lambasted and celebrated in Washington papers, at times being accused of shady transactions, criminal behavior, and being a dictator; at other times being called a sagacious and clever politician and a talented newspaperman worthy of the state’s gratitude. Although he enjoyed tremendous success in Walla Walla, Lorton felt there was more opportunity for him in Tulsa. “Business is picking up all over the country,” Lorton explained to the Seattle Republican in 1911 soon after he sold his newspaper stake for a healthy sum. “For some persons, you bet your sweet life business is picking up.”

In 1911, Lorton moved to Tulsa and bought a third interest in the Tulsa Daily World, and then a half-interest in 1913. By 1917, Lorton had teamed up with Harry Sinclair, an oil tycoon who also ran Tulsa’s banking industry. With Sinclair’s money, Lorton established himself as the paper’s sole publisher. Big oil and the GOP became major influences that shaped the growth of the paper that would become Northeast Oklahoma’s legacy paper, the Tulsa World.

Today, the Tulsa World remains a family paper. Since Eugene Lorton’s ascension in 1917, the Lorton family has maintained publishing and editorial control of the paper. Its current publisher is Eugene Lorton’s grandson, Robert Lorton, and its editor is Robert “Bobby” Lorton III. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations September 2011 report, it had an average circulation of 97,580 daily subscribers (it had 101,000 the year before), making it roughly 75% the readership size of The Daily Oklahoman.

“We believe in quality journalism and continue to feel that we are the best at producing news and information in our region,” Lorton III said in an April 2011 article in Tulsa World. “My family and I have always been committed to Oklahoma, to Tulsa and to each of the communities in our circulation area.”

Footnotes

1. The Indian Chief,Tulsa’s first newspaper, was established in 1884 by a soldier named J.L. Winnegar. The Indian Chief ’s reputation for yellow journalism was supported by a 2004 interview with Tulsa historian/collector Beryl Ford.

2. Kennedy had already loaned Boyle $500 previously and Boyle had been unable to pay it back, so this second loan constituted a total debt of $1,000 to Dr. Kennedy.

3. According to historian L. Edward Carter, author of The Story of Oklahoma Newspapers (Oklahoma Heritage Association, 1984), J.R. Brady funded the Indian Republican with the assumption that Republican leaders would shield him from financial troubles. The Tulsa Daily World reportedly suffered financial challenges in its early years as well.

4. It’s worth noting that Tulsa World reporter Randy Krehbiel’s account differs from that of this article. In his book Tulsa’s Daily World: The Story of a Newspaper and Its Town (World Pub. Co. 2007), Krehbiel writes “Some sources indicate the World and the Republican were affiliated, but the contemporary record suggests they were in fact competitors.”

Special thanks to Cecil Cloud for sharing his Beryl Ford interview notes.

“You know, I always thought the Tribune was the better paper.” It’s been almost 20 years since Tulsa’s evening paper folded for good. These whispered words served what I knew, even then, was their intended purpose. They were a consolation and a bit of empathy in the face of loss. I—and many other people far more experienced and talented—was suddenly out of a job, in an economy that sucked in general and, even then, had few options for professional journalists.

The truth is that the Tribune may or may not have been the better paper, but it certainly made the Tulsa World, and the press in Tulsa in general, better.

For the better part of 80 years, Tulsa’s two dailies chronicled the events and personalities of a city and a state still in its infancy. Both papers won awards, both did investigative reports that exposed corruption, both advocated for improvements in the community and both were the primary media for local businesses to advertise their wares.

While it was comforting to know that some people thought the Tribune the better paper, the circulation told the real truth. At its end in 1992, the Trib had half the number of daily subscribers of the World and had nothing to compete with the Sunday World circulation of more than 200,000. All things being equal, the Tribune lost out because it was an evening paper.

* * *

A brief history: The Tulsa Tribune was founded in 1908 as the Tulsa Democrat, before being purchased by Richard Lloyd Jones in 1919. His sons would be editors and publishers, and his grandson would be the editor on the masthead of the paper until it closed.

The Tulsa World first published in 1904 and was purchased by Eugene Lorton in 1913. The publisher’s grandson Robert Lorton learned the news side of the business and took over as publisher in the 1960s. Robert Lorton III is now publisher of the Tulsa World.

The World hit readers’ doorsteps in the morning; the Tribune was the evening paper. Politically, the World was thought of as the more liberal paper, though both papers were conservative by any coastal, blue-state standard.

The two papers entered into a partnership called a joint operating agreement (JOA) in the 1940s whereby they shared presses, advertising sales, delivery and some administrative functions. JOAs were common in two-paper towns, and they made sense. Newsgathering and editorial content remained separate, while everything else (printing, distribution, sales, and operations) was shared. Importantly, the two shared a circulation department, the department responsible for building readership.

JOAs were fine arrangements before TV became a fixture in every home, before cable created the non-stop cycle, before anyone had ever heard of the Internet. Newspapers were the sole purveyors of news, of opinion, of icebox cake recipes. Freed from the costs of duplicated efforts, the two papers thrived for the next 40 years.

* * *

Competition defined the two newsrooms. They occupied floors five (World) and seven (Trib) of the World Building. They competed for newsroom talent. The newsrooms drank together and often slept together. They fought for the same parking spaces and rode the same elevators. They competed for scoops day in, day out.

Jerry Pogue spent 50 years in the news business and is one of many who experienced working at both papers. He recalls that his boss Bill Connors, bastion of the World sport desk for 35 years, didn’t want his reporters even talking to their Tribune counterparts, lest they accidently spill some juicy sports detail. The competitive fire diminished somewhat during the 1980s and before the closing, Pogue said, but it was the Tribune that put a higher premium on getting the story first.

Getting it first wasn’t just about seeing it in print first; it also meant you got beat to a source. A scooped reporter often had to go to the same source—who may not have been happy about the initial story—and ask the same questions and somehow get a different, better story the second time around. It was a constant pressure for the reporters on the city beat but it also extended to business reporting, the health and education beats, and, of course, the sports section.

“I’d come in at the Tribune before the sun was up and find stories from that morning’s World on my desk, sometimes clipped to a nasty note from my editor,” said David Fallis, a former Tribune beat reporter who joined the World after the closing.

I was a writer on the entertainment beat, but I wasn’t a journalist. David Fallis was a journalist, with a square jaw, spiked hair and dressed like Clark Kent minus the fedora, Fallis was, and is, a reporter’s reporter. Hard news was literally in his blood; his grandfather, James Downing, was a columnist at the World, and his father Buddy Fallis was a longtime Tulsa County DA. Fallis knew all the ropes in the ring.

Reporters at both papers used banks of antiquated green-screen terminals to log their stories. The rows of common terminals looked like Mission Control in Houston and reporters would drop into any available space to work. Fallis seemed to have a blur behind him; he was never sitting still for long, always trying to put the finishing touches on today’s story and get a head start on the next.

I recall being completely disheartened when he flew in beside me one day, police scanner squawking. He started typing out a story, picked up the phone and talked to grieving parents who’d just lost their son in an accident of some sort, hung up, called a police detective to pump him about a stalled murder case, hung up, banged out a story about a robbery, and then flew out of the room, probably done for the day. In the same span of time, I had misquoted a forgotten pop star visiting the Mabee Center.

For newspaper readers, the way you read a paper is a ritual that says a lot about who you are and what you value. If you were a sports nut, you read Mike Sowell in the sports section first. If you were a political junky, you checked out Dave Simpson’s cartoons first. If you were in business, you looked for D.R. Stewart’s byline. If you wanted to know more about Springer spaniels or gambling or how bad movies and television are these days, you read columnist Jay Cronley. (You still read him for that, only now in the World.) The Tribune just seemed more folksy, while the World was distant. The Tribune was local; the World was global in a boring soup-to-nuts way.

Hard local news and investigative reporting were the Tribune’s hallmarks. “Tribune” derives from the Latin for tribunus, or tribe. A tribune in ancient Rome protected plebeians from the petty whims of their leaders. A tribune is also a raised platform. The Tulsa Tribune held itself up as a defender of the little guy and a voice for the people.

* * *

Both were family-owned, but the Tribune was the “family” paper. Robert Lorton certainly knew the newspaper business and chose dedicated newspaper people to run the World, but the Tribune newsroom was seemingly full of Joneses. Publisher and editor emeritus Jenk Jones Sr. put his sons Jenk Jr. and David, and daughter Georgia Snoke, through their paces teaching them the business from the ground up.

Jenk Jones Jr., is the kind of newsman who would visit employees in the hospital, regardless of where they worked in the organization. At the same time, when you were on the outs at the Tribune, it didn’t take much to get fired.

Pogue worked at the World from 1960-1968 before joining the University of Tulsa’s sports information department. Then he joined the Tribune in 1972, primarily as a copy editor, until it closed in 1992. He had attended school with Robert Lorton and worked with him when Lorton was learning the news game. Lorton hired Pogue after the closing and put him on the copy desk full time until 2002 and then part time until 2008. While neither paper lavished extravagant salaries on employees, the World was known to pay less for its talent than the Tribune, Pogue said. It wasn’t uncommon for a talented writer or editor to leave the World and make more money at a smaller community paper. The Tribune gave out Christmas bonuses every year, a practice the World stopped in the 1960s.

Although both families were dedicated to the business of the newspaper, the Jones emphasis on newsgathering was clear.

“Jenk Jones [Jr.] had a desk out in the middle of the newsroom, whereas the Lortons, you never saw them,” Pogue said.

* * *

“We were always playing with a short stick,” said sports editor and current OSU professor Mike Sowell, of being the evening paper. Surveys indicated that if people were going to read the paper, the majority of them wanted it in the morning, Sowell said.

The shared circulation department part of the JOA wasn’t motivated to increase the Tribune’s readership, Sowell reasons. When someone moved to town, they were given the option to choose one paper or the other. The World had both the morning slot and the Sunday paper. The Tribune never stood a chance.

Society changed, technology changed, and the JOA that helped both papers for so long became a critical lifeline for the Tribune and a lead anchor for the World. The agreement was set to expire in 1997, but negotiations had to begin five years prior.

The World’s management did its homework, saw the same surveys that showed that people had begun to depend on the local paper for the local story, preferring to get national news from cable programs and evening broadcast news. To face the competition, new computer systems were required, modern presses were needed to bring photographs and graphics to life. Changes had to be made and the Tribune was in no position to dictate conditions.

“The World said, ‘We have no intention of negotiation,’ ” said Pogue. “You can close up shop now, or you can wait and die.”

At the time of the closing, in September 1992, I was annoyed that my journalism career had been derailed. Suddenly there were dozens of professionals in town, virtually all with more experience than I had, competing for the few open slots at the World. Time to get a corporate communications gig, or find a non-profit that was hiring.

For the 11 months I was at the Tribune, a full three months of that time was spent knowing I’d be out of a job. I was a kid then, and I don’t pretend to know all of the players and all of the reasons why the Tribune had to be bought out.

But I believe that the Tribune ownership saw the writing on the wall. An evening paper might have a dedicated following, but never enough to compete head to head in the market. And the start-up costs (financial and emotional) were too high for the Jones family. In the end, the World won out, because the world runs on money, not truth or anyone’s version of the truth.

The Jones family—dedicated news people who worked side by side with the reporters, editors, photographers, and designers in their hire—was genuinely concerned for the people in the newsroom and made a difficult decision that gave the staff time to say goodbye, time to find new work elsewhere and have a little severance to make the transition easier.

The Tribune closing did me a favor, forcing me to evaluate my career. I realize that for many at the Tribune (those who had mortgages, mouths to feed, college semesters to pay for), the folding of the paper was catastrophic. I know of a few who never fully recovered. But for me the closing was a first hard slap of economic reality, and the lesson learned that good guys don’t always win.

After the Tribune closed, with its main rival gone, there was a void at the World. Fallis, one of about 10 newsroom staffers who made the jump, wrote, “I think there was a noticeable vacuum in Tulsa news coverage, like all the air had gone out of the room. But I think as months stretched into years, the World embraced its role as the only print game in town and in turn recognized its greater responsibility to readers.”

The World, responding to competitive forces bigger than the Tribune, expanded its investigative coverage. Fallis worked at the paper from 1992 to 1999 and he said the lack of a direct competitor gave him breathing room to explore stories in-depth.

Unable to compete with the TV stations for breaking news, the paper expanded in other areas. It had been a rather dry paper, and the flashy full color photos and graph-heavy look of McPapers like USA Today were looked upon with its disdain from more traditional publishers. But eventually many of the visual advances that the Tribune attempted in dying days were implemented and expanded at the World. The paper invested heavily in the development of distinct community editions published weekly, which eventually were shuttered.

It hired Simpson and Cronley, and the immensely talented arts writer James Watts. It launched an ambitious effort to serve the local arts and entertainment with the Spot, which for a while became must-read content you could get nowhere else. After some false starts, the World’s online presence is solid, though the effectiveness of its online subscription model—which gives print subscribers free access and offers tiered pricing for non-print audiences—remains to be seen.

“Having two respected Tulsa daily papers publishing at the same time gave readers a rich, pushy coverage that only comes from newspaper-war type competition,” said Fallis. Each paper was forced to cover—and beat if possible—the other’s stories that otherwise might have been ignored or missed.”

Was the Tribune really the better paper? In the end, it doesn’t even matter. Actually, the when and the way it folded were perfect.

The folding of the Tribune was a blessing of sorts. The World let its intentions be known that it wanted out of the JOA agreement. Whether the Tribune could have survived on its own, with the millions of dollars that would have been required to start a “new” paper, it’s impossible to know. When the Tribune closed, local television stations had been winning the breaking news game for a long time, even if they did it sloppily or by scanning the newspapers for clues. Research clearly indicated that if they read the newspaper at all—people wanted that news in the morning and didn’t make time to read in the evening.

When the Tribune closed, there wasn’t the Internet to compete with for eyeballs and ad revenue. The Tribune staff didn’t have to endure the round after round of layoffs that would have been inevitable. It never fumbled with clumsy online versions, trying to mash a square paper in the round hole of the Internet. Its standards for journalism, story telling, accuracy, and adherence to style were high until the end. It won awards and it revealed crooks and it made a difference in the community. What more could you ask from a local newspaper?

My grandfather is a spry 85 years old. He was a dream subscriber for the Trib and then the World for many years, reading every single page, every single day: the obituaries, the sports scores, even the ads. He’s still a huge Cronley fan. He’s retired and he lives alone. He exercises regularly and he’s active in his children’s and grandchildren’s lives. He watches a lot of sports and cable news programs now.

I recently found out he’s cut back on his subscription and is only taking the paper on the weekends. I asked him why, after all these years, he’s not taking the daily paper anymore.

He said, “I don’t really have time to read it.”

The Village Voice expanded its coverage area to the rest of the city a few years later and, in its long history, has published ground-breaking and award-winning journalism (including three Pulitzers), covering hard news, politics, arts, and culture.

Soon, other papers sprouted up in the style of the Voice, to rival their conservative daily counterparts. Today, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia—formed in 1978 with 30 newspapers, including San Francisco Bay Guardian, Creative Loafing, Phoenix New Times, Willamette Week, and the Chicago Reader—counts 130 alt weeklies as members and acknowledges that it only accepts about 30 percent of those that apply. The number of newsweeklies that have come and gone is impossible to count.

Sufficient start-up capital was a challenge, as was securing advertisers, many of whose political views aligned closely with those espoused by the editors of the dailies. Oklahoma is home to two alt weeklies—the Oklahoma Gazette in Oklahoma City and Urban Tulsa Weekly in Tulsa—both of which are members of AAN. Their predecessors are hard to trace (some of them only lasted a couple of issues) and include monthlies and bi-monthlies. But here are some highlights from what we found while digging through the annals of Oklahoma’s alt publishing history.

Text from timeline above:

Harlow’s Weekly
Published 1912-1941
Victor E. Harlow, Editor and President

“A journal of comment and current events for Oklahoma,” Harlow’s Weekly published news and political commentary in Tulsa. It was tabloid size and text heavy, with just a few black-and-white photos, and its content was thoughtful, intelligent, and insightful. According to the Oklahoma Historical Society, “The Weekly claimed to provide ‘logical thinking and accurate information’ about major state events and to offer news that Oklahomans could not read in other newspapers. With an uncanny sense of happenings at the state capital, Harlow often reported his predictions of important political decisions before other newspapers printed their accounts of the events.” Harlow also published news pertaining to women and minorities, as well as poetry and short stories by local and regional writers. It was circulated both regionally and nationally.

The American Indian
Published 1926-31
Lee F. Harkins, Editor and Publisher

The American Indian was a Native American-focused news magazine written in large part for and by natives. Harkins had Chickasaw and Choctaw blood, and his paper delivered news pertinent to local tribes but without the editorializing—sometimes negative; sometimes ill-informed—of its white-owned counterparts. For its time, it pushed the envelope of how tribal news was reported, and it also made it pertinent and relevant to whites. That it always featured a pretty maiden— sometimes in modern dress, sometimes in traditional native dress—on its cover certainly helped its sales.

Tulsa Downtowner
Published 1942-58
Published by Walter C. Cox and Jack W. Long

Using the tag line “Who Did What, Where and When in T-Town,” Tulsa Downtowner was a weekly, pocket-sized directory of events and entertainment in downtown Tulsa. Its content was mostly ads for area restaurants, bars, and nightclubs, as well as photos of notable Tulsans out and about. Filler content, written by “Wally” Cox, provided commentary on various social events. The cover featured a photo of a pretty girl, and on page 2 was a letter from home to a Tulsa military serviceman, called “Letter to a T-Towner.” There were usually a few pages of sports-related editorial, and on the back cover was a pencil drawing of an unnamed man, different each issue and likely recognizable to the readers at the time, dubbing him “Mr. Downtowner.” In 1950, Tulsa, This Week, published by Jack Ellison, emerged as a competitor to the Downtowner. Ellison published similar content in a similar-sized magazine with a similar pretty girl on the cover, but his book was glossy and its cover in color.

Oklahoma Limited
Published 1969-Unknown
John Woodie Jr., Publisher & Managing Editor
Robert E. “Bob” Roberts, Editor-in-Chief

Oklahoma Limited was founded in Tulsa in 1969 (though its first issue says the year is 1968) and published as a tabloid-sized rag with local social and political commentary, especially as it pertained to blacks, minorities, and segregation. Its founders were recent college graduates who, taking their cues from the Village Voice, set out to “change the world” with their paper, Bob Roberts said. Its contributors included current and future activists and politicians, like Finis Smith, Julian Bond, and Don Ross. It circulated about 25,000 copies every two weeks and “aspire(d) to make it one of the best newspapers of its kind in the country,” John Woodie told United Press International. Financial woes did the paper in, even after its headquarters moved from Tulsa to Oklahoma City. It’s unclear when publishing ceased. Roberts estimates there were about seven to 10 issues.

The Oklahoma Observer
Published 1971-Current
Frosty Troy, Founding Editor (retired)
Arnold Hamilton, Editor

The Oklahoma Observer was first founded in Oklahoma City by Father John Joyce as the Southwest Courier, a liberal political rag funded by Catholic Archdiocesan Council. The council yanked their support, though, when Joyce came out as an opponent of the Vietnam War, so he sold the paper to Frosty and Helen Troy, who used it to publish independent, left-leaning political commentary from the state capital. In 2006, Arnold and Beverly Hamilton came on board to “help transition the Observer into the state’s second century,” its website states. Troy retired in 2007 but remains on the board, and the paper continues to be published every 10th and 25th of the month.

The Tulsa Settler
Published 1973-Unknown
Randy Morton, Editor

The Tulsa Settler published its first issue July 23, 1973, printing poetry, arts, and music news, an events calendar, astrology, and comics. Stories in issue No. 6, dated Oct. 5-19, 1973, which is available at the Tulsa Library, include the art of tie-dyeing, Tommy Hager’s fowl farm and a study on vegetarianism. In that issue, editor Randy Morton announced a three-month publishing hiatus to allow the paper to regroup and refocus, and while it did publish an issue in December 1973, it’s unclear whether or not publishing continued after that.

Oklahoma Gazette
Published 1977-Current
Bill Bleakly, Publisher

When Bill Bleakley, an Oklahoma City lawyer, founded the Oklahoma Gazette, his intention wasn’t to publish left-of-center political commentary or arts and entertainment news. Instead, he founded it as a bi-monthly preservation periodical, inspired by the historic neighborhood where his law office was located, Crown Heights. Cynthia Emrick, now Cynthia Archiniaco, who was the director of the Oklahoma Office of Historic Trust, was the paper’s volunteer editor. Bleakley published in that vein for a couple of years, and then someone showed him a copy of Gambit, New Orleans’ alternative newsweekly.

“It had all this arts and entertainment coverage in it and calendars,” Bleakley said. “I thought it was wonderful.” Oklahoma Gazette started adding similar content in the early 1980s, and in 1985 was accepted into the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. Today, the paper’s circulation is 52,500 and aims to recognize both the good and bad of OKC and to improve the city through the stimulation of ideas and information.

Info
Published 1989-92
Mark Matthews, Publisher
Mark Brown, Editor

Mark Matthews first founded Info magazine as a promotion vehicle for one of his nightclubs, the Beat Club. A full-page ad in the alternative paper of the time, Uptown News, cost $1,500, Matthews said, but publishing his own rag would only cost $800, so that’s what he did. With This Land’s Mark Brown at the editorial helm, Info modeled itself off of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, publishing short interviews, profiles, and biographies of notable Tulsans every other month, soliciting contributions from some of the city’s best writers and photographers. Model and actress Amber Valetta, 14 and living in Tulsa at the time, was Info’s first cover model. After 12 issues, Info hit a plateau, Matthews said, and stopped publishing. He went on to open several popular restaurants and bars, including Tucci’s, Cellar Dweller, and Crystal Pistol.

Infinity Press
Published 1996-2001
Published by William Brewster, Christopher Schmieg, and Steve Beard

Founded by three friends as an “alternative to the alternative,” Infinity Press was a monthly publication similar to Urban Tulsa Weekly. Schmieg and Beard first set out to publish a poetry rag, an admittedly self-indulgent feat, Beard says, but Brewster came on board with the marketing expertise to compete with the only alt pub available on stands at the time. Infinity Press published poetry, interviews with local musicians, and stories relating to politics, environmental issues, sciences and social issues. “We didn’t just focus on Tulsa,” Beard said. “That’s one of the reasons we named it Infinity Press.” Its liberal slant was “extremely refreshing” to readers used to the conservative Urban Tulsa, and Beard contends that the competition between the two papers had the effect of improving their overall content. The paper stopped running when its founders disbanded in pursuit of individual endeavors.

The Current
Published 2004-Current
Tom Barlow, Publisher

The Current is a music- and entertainment-focused magazine circulating in northeastern Oklahoma and northwestern Arkansas. Features include entertainment, green and sustainable living, healthy living, dining out, entrepreneurship, the outdoors, art, theater, music, and editorials.

It was 1997 when I met him. He was a holdover tenant at the duplex I purchased. Pat hadn’t paid rent in over a year, and I needed a place to live.

The process of evicting Pat was problematic because Pat was never sober. I figured him for a drunk and a loser. One day in October, I was able to catch him before he was pickled, and drove him to a storage business so he would have a place to stash the mountain of furniture and other stuff that was crammed into his side of the duplex.

It was a little awkward, but I tried to make small talk in the car on the way there. “So what do you do?” I asked, and then thought that was a stupid question. What he did was drink— every day, long and hard. “I mean, what have you done?”

“I’m a musician,” he said tersely.

“Oh, yeah? What do you play?”

“Winds.”

“Winds?” I asked

“Saxophone,” he said more tersely than before, in a way that conveyed that the conversation was over.

I paid for the storage unit, and he signed for it. The plan was that I would be at the duplex the following day with a U-Haul truck to help him move his belongings.

That next morning, I knocked on the front door, but no one answered. I unlocked the door and let myself in. Pat was on the couch, passed out or sleeping it off, I couldn’t tell. Nothing was packed, or gathered to make the move easier.

I brought a friend to help and we began the long process of moving out all of Pat’s stuff, while Pat laid on the couch snoring. He did eventually wake up, grumbled something, and left on foot.

My friend and I took the first load to the storage place. By late afternoon we had finally emptied the house. “You know what?” I asked my friend. “Pat told me he was a musician—a saxophonist. Did you see a saxophone in there?” My friend said he hadn’t.

When we returned, Pat was lying in the middle of the floor. I nudged him with the toe of my shoe and told him that he had to leave. He stood uneasily. He walked up to me and gave me a shove, and continued to advance, though mightily off balance. It wouldn’t be a fair match, and I told him so. I told him that we wouldn’t fight. He grimaced and staggered out of the duplex, down the street and out of view as my friend, old Mrs. Bradley, who resided in the other side of the duplex, and I watched.

I asked Mrs. Bradley what his story was. Had he always been an alcoholic? She said no. “He had a girlfriend and her son living with him. He was very in love with her, and loved that little boy, too. And then she left him, and he’s been drinking ever since.” Wiping tears away, Mrs. Bradley said, “Pat is like a son to me,” and she went inside.

I felt rotten.

Pat did return a few months later. I saw him walk in to the front yard from the living room window, where I sat. Remembering that the last time I saw him he was drunk and offering to fight, I met him in the front yard to head off any trouble. He was sober and healthy looking, and nicely dressed in cowboy boots, jeans, a button-up shirt, a blazer, a scarf around his neck, and a cool looking wide-brimmed hat from under which long black hair hung to his shoulders. Pat looked like a musician. Pat looked like a guy ultimately at home on the stage or in the studio.

“What’s up, Pat?”

“I’ve just come to see Mrs. Bradley.”

“Oh, OK, no problem,” I said, feeling a little dickish, and went back inside.

A few months later I read in the newspaper that a man had been hit and killed by a driver on a poorly lit stretch of street on the East side. Later it was reported that the dead man’s name was Pat “Taco” Ryan. Another article appeared, by John Wooley, a few days later. It was titled, “Late saxophonist left a legacy of his music”:

Sometimes, life was a struggle for Ryan, as it often is for artists and others who, as (Brian) Thompson says, “always take that chance.” As (Jim) Karstein puts it, “like all of us, he fought personal demons in his life.” But, like most first-class musicians, what he’ll ultimately be remembered for is his dedication to his art, and for the beautiful notes he left behind to resonate in hearts and minds and souls.

“Pat wasn’t a stockbroker going out and playing the Warren Duck Club for two hours and then going back to the day job,” Thompson says. “There was no golden parachute for Pat. He never had a house; he never had a really nice car. He lived the artist’s life. He gave it all up for the music.”

Some of his stuff was still in the garage. I needed the space and was clearing it out when I found his yearbook. I thumbed through the pages of the yearbook, and read the comments that people had written.

He was truly a loved individual, and no doubt popular beyond belief. He had graduated from Tulsa Edison High School, as had I, but many years earlier in 1970, when I was not even a year old.

Though the article I had read in the paper mentioned it, it was there in the pages of the yearbook—a verified, and arresting fact. Pat “Taco” Ryan was voted most talented his senior year. I also found a framed photo. In it was a beautiful young woman with long fair hair, a little boy and Pat. They looked very happy.

From now until Dec 24th subscribe to This Land and you’ll be entered in the drawing to win a prize package that includes:

• A brand new IPad 2! 
• This Land mug with logo
• This Land travel mug
• An original, framed photograph by Lindsay Parks courtesy of Richard Neel Home
• This Land buttons
• A box of signed This Land back issues
• This Land shirt
• This Land zip-front hoodie
• This Land cycling hat
• This Land canvas tote
• A copy of The Onion‘s Christmas Exposed signed by editor Joe Garden

You can buy a subscription for yourself, your worldly aunt, your precocious nephew, or even your surprisingly well-read cat. Every subscription is another chance to win. And with a value totaling over $1,000, we think you’ll agree, it’s money well spent either way. If you have any questions, send them along to subs@thislandpress.com.

Join us as we countdown to Christmas, and be sure to tell your friends!

But in the circle we do tell
and listen to the variety
of ways we struggle to be ourselves.

The wax runs down the candle,
thickens, resolidifies.
I keep one hand up as if
half-praying to shield the flame—
to keep it going. I don’t

have a story like the others.
I’m not there to remember
the day I declared, This is me. Deal with it,
to people who would cry
or beat me or tell me that I am
an embarrassment to the family.

It is getting cold. The mist drips
off the brim of his fedora.
He is completely at ease.
My candle goes out and he relights it.
I return the favor in time,

and I think of the day
I stared into my own eyes
in the mirror in the blue bathroom
on Eleventh Street. I was nine.
I said, That is me. That person in there
is me. I move those lips. I turn that head.
I blink and breathe.

Matt Hollrah is an assistant professor of English and Director of First-Year Composition at the University of Central Oklahoma. He was a finalist for the in 2005, and his poetry has appeared most recently in the anthology Ain’t Nobody That Can Sing Like Me: New Oklahoma Writing. Hollrah lives in Edmond, Oklahoma.

“To what extraordinary lengths would you go to avoid your head? They asked me why I dye my hair and I said, ’cuz I am red.’”

She commands a rapt crowd of maybe sixty. Most are college students and über-hip 20-somethings who occasionally tap their foot or nod their head in cautious approval. Mostly, they just watch, enthralled.

The bright, multi-colored little fireball can’t be taller than 50 inches, and the large outdoor stage that she helms in the parking lot of the University of Oklahoma student union only serves to further dwarf her. Her voice is all high-pitched, quivery squeak-and-squeal, suggesting a pre-pubescent Karen O or Kathleen Hanna—the flamboyant elfin goddesses of perennial post-punk act Yeah Yeah Yeahs and riot grrrl pioneers Bikini Kill, respectively.

Kelli is one half of the duo Skating Polly, a band whose biggest obstacle may be its adolescent moniker, a forgivable caveat when you consider that the raging colorful little punk rocker convulsing on stage is only 11 years old. Her other half, 16-year-old Peyton Suitor, is regrettably absent on this particular night, held hostage in Texas by her father on the order of a custer county judge, while the band opens for indie darlings Twin Sister and Pains of Being Pure at Heart. Kelli’s white tee shirt is tagged with black marker to read “We Heart Peyton! Free her now!”

In Peyton’s place is Kelli’s 14-year-old brother Kurtis, who trades instruments with his sister every few songs, toggling between guitar and drums. Unaccustomed to performing for crowds of poker-faced Norman hipsters, he seems nervous and a little stiff, and occasionally makes the small mistake. Kelli, on the other hand, is well acquainted with her audience, having opened for Norman punks-du-jour Broncho several times, and played a CD release show for Polly’s debut Taking Over the World at Guestroom Records. She appears incredibly comfortable on stage—a natural, commanding presence whose ferocity and edge is matched by a charming tween bounciness.

Kelli approaches the chorus, screams “Mr. Proper English Man,” throws her head back and jump-shakes in an epileptic fit while running her pick across the guitar’s neck, creating a screeching, high-pitched wail of thrashing electric dissonance. “You make me blow off my hand!”

she’s a blur of pink and turquoise. she screams and flails and beats the shit out of her guitar until the song falls into a rhythmic grunge-glide with a melodic wail straight out of Nirvana:

“Noo more PUNCTUATION! Noo more ABBREVIATION! Noo more CAPITALIZATION! Waay more EXCLAMATION!”

As the song crescendos, the drums cease and Kelli falls over the mic, thumping her guitar and yelping a crackling “Now get out of my head!” several times, her voice suddenly throaty and tired, guitar fuzz and feedback swirling around her and eventually falling to a resting hum. She throws her guitar down and hop-skips off stage. The show is over.

* * *

A week before the Norman performance, I spent a rainy Saturday afternoon with the girls at their practice space—the living room of Kelli’s home (I should say, her father’s home) in North Oklahoma City. When I first arrived, through the blinds of the glass door I spied a pint-sized silhouette hop towards me. The door flew open, and a mock-serious/ suspicious Kelli stared at me for a second before asking “Heeelllloooo?” in her best baritone. Before I could respond, she broke character and giggled, stepping aside to let me into the living room. I was greeted by Peyton, who sat on the couch cross-legged, smiling and zen-like, and Peyton’s mother, Amber (in a Pixies tee and OU hoodie), chaperoning while Kelli’s father was at work, tending to a toddler and generally maintaining the chaos of a house occupied by hyperactive teenage girls.

In contrast to Kelli’s manic pixie persona—the red hair, the bright clothes, the extroverted personality—Peyton seemed comparatively reticent, if not downright conservative. Her hair, though dyed, is its natural brunette color, she prefers tattered Nirvana tee shirts over multicolored costumes, and she exudes a tomboyish awkwardness on stage. She’s the Kim Deal, the big sis, to Kelli’s Kathleen Hanna.

Multiple guitars hung on the wall behind a pristine drum set and various pieces of recording gear. I asked the girls if the instruments and equipment were their own. Amber cut in and answered, smiling, “They’re ours.” she laughed, “We let them use them.”

Kelli’s father, David, and Amber have known each other for some time. They developed a friendship while attending law school at OCU, bonded over a shared enthusiasm for music, and eventually became involved romantically. Kelli and Peyton are from separate previous marriages, but over the years have become like surrogate sisters.

They played their first show as Skating Polly on Halloween in 2009. Kelli, on guitar, was nine and Peyton, on drums, was 14, and they had written one song—“Don’t”—which they performed at their own house party for a group of 30 underwhelmed kids.

“They didn’t actually know how to play anything,” Amber recalled.

Kelli cut in, “No matter how lame this sounds, I don’t know how to play a single instrument. I just mess with it, really.” She thought about this statement for a moment and backtracked. “I mean, it’s not like i’m just making random noises on the guitar, ya know.”

Kelli plays what she calls a bassitar, a guitar body holding two lone bass strings tuned to C# and G# her dad rigged for her. “I hold the string anywhere and it plays a chord. Our whole band is pretty simple. We never do something extraordinary. We just have so much energy in it, and we can write melodies that are catchy.”

Indeed, the secret weapon of Skating Polly is an incredibly sophisticated sense of melody and good taste beyond their years. Though inexperienced as musicians, the skill of their songwriting often elevates their technical shortcomings to a level of generic purpose that begs to be justified with apologist adjectives like “Raw,” “DIY,” or “Lo-Fi.” And it’s earned them a far-reaching fanbase that includes producer Chris Harris and his regional label Nice People (which released Polly’s first record), programmers at OKC’s the Spy FM, virtually every musician in the Norman-Oklahoma City area, and alternative rock royalty like The Breeders (who’ve tweeted their adoration) and, perhaps most significantly, Exene Cervenka, vocalist for Los Angeles punk legends X.

“They both are very unspoiled by the world, by the culture,” Cervenka told me. “They haven’t been corrupted by the culture. And I love that about them.”

Cervenka first met Skating Polly two years ago, when Amber took the girls to see her perform a solo gig in Oklahoma City.

“There weren’t a lot of people there,” Cervenka remembered. “It was cold. It was a dark little punk club and these two little beams of light showed up who were so excited to be there. They made the night really special.”

After the show, they all exchanged e-mail addresses. Peyton and Kelli were soon sending Cervenka Skating Polly demos. This is something of a pattern for the girls—they may be the most guileless networkers to ever work a room. They’ve gained the ear and support of other notable artists like the Dollyrots and Holly Golightly just by approaching them after shows.

Cervenka, a 35-year veteran of the music industry who came of age in the early L.A. punk scene of the late 70s, has since taken on a mentorship role with the girls, and is very protective (“I am here to keep them from getting caught up in things that will ruin them in the music business,” she said). Formal agreements have been made for her to produce Polly’s next record.

“I hear a lot of music by a lot of people, and theirs stands out because it’s so good. They’re great songwriters and arrangers. They are very, very talented.”

Naturally, the intelligence of Skating Polly’s music is due at least in part to the influence of the girls’ parents.

“There’s a certain quality that they have as artists that I think sets them apart,” Cervenka observed. “It’s a nod to the parenting.”

David and Amber have no hand in the songwriting but the two attorneys are pro-active as cultural educators, and they’ve instilled in their girls a sense of appreciation for the music they grew up listening to—the alt-rock giants of the late 1980s and early ’90s. Every week, the two families come together, usually at David’s house, for a meeting that consists of listening to an album and then deconstructing it in a roundtable discussion—a family of music critics.

“It’s funny, I saw a headline on the Onion that reminded me of me and Kelli,” David laughed when we spoke on the phone. “It said ‘Cool Dad Raising Daughter on Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out of Touch With Her Generation.’ It’s a picture of this guy with gray hair giving his daughter a Talking Heads vinyl and she’s looking at it like, ‘What the hell?’ ”

No doubt because of these “cool dad” tutoring sessions, when you ask Kelli and Peyton to name their influences and favorite bands, you get a cliffs notes lesson on the best pop music of the last 25 years. Peyton’s favorite band in the world is Broncho, Kelli’s is Nirvana. But they both love Hole, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Smiths, Pixies, Bikini Kill, The Dresden Dolls, Elliott Smith, Tori Amos—an encyclopedic rundown of would-be hits, critical favorites, and under-the-radar essentials. Kelli is on a hip-hop kick and has been listening to Eminem, Kanye West, and Wu Tang Clan. At a Tulsa show, she covered ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” to wild applause.

During our visit, Peyton sang the praises of the new Girls and St. Vincent albums, but she was most excited about the prospect of opening for New York indie rock act Pains of Being Pure at Heart, whose latest album Belong she claims as one of her favorites of the year. Though scheduled to visit her father in Texas just days before the show, she was confident she’d be back in time for the Norman performance.

* * *

An hour after Kelli and her brother barreled through “Mr. Proper English Man” on stage, Pains of Being Pure at Heart lead singer Kip Berman asks the audience to applaud Skating Polly. “We want to dedicate this song to Peyton, who’s being held against her will in Texas. We’re sorry we missed you. To Peyton, in absentia.”

Later, he tweets, “oh, seriously, @SkatingPolly was awesome! #freepeyton!”

A modest hashtag meme is born. Peyton picks up on it, and starts tweeting from Texas: “I’m protesting by never getting out of bed until I get home. #freepeyton”

Broncho and Depth & Current (Harris’s band) follow suit. “#freepeyton!”

Kelli then tweets from her personal account: “For those of you freeing earl it would be nice if you could also help FREE PEYTON!”

The “Earl” Kelli refers to is the 16-year-old hip hop prodigy and Odd Future member whose mother plucked him from a bourgeoning career and forced him into boarding school just as his music was becoming wildly popular. Members of Odd Future often perform wearing “Free Earl” tee shirts.

On Skating Polly’s Twitter, Peyton alludes to legal issues—“#freepeyton court date was moved to November 30th. Anyone else feel like crying?”

I spoke with her on the phone several days after the Pains show. “I’m being forced to be here against my will,” she lamented. She couldn’t talk about the details, but explained to me that her dad and mom are in a custody battle, and the judge has ordered her to live with her father in Stamford, Texas until a late November court date when her fate will be determined. Because her parents were divorced in Custer County, Peyton’s future rides on an embattled county judicial system in Western oklahoma that has endured accusations of corruption and incompetence. Most recently, Sheriff Mike Burgess was sentenced to 79 years in prison for running a sex slave ring out of the county jail. In explaining how something so depraved could be allowed to happen, the attorneys involved pointed to incestuous, good ol’ boy relationships between the sheriff ’s office, public attorneys, and judges.

Peyton seems well aware of the fact that her chances of getting a fair shake—that is, a judge who fully examines and considers her situation—in Custer are 50/50. “I’m down here because people have been lying a lot. The attorneys have been lying… I just wanna go home. it really blows down here.”

She told me she’d intended to run away from Stamford for the last Polly show, but couldn’t because a bus ticket “costs like a million dollars.” She’s nervous about her situation. She said she loves her dad, but her heart belongs in Oklahoma City with Amber, David, Kelli, and Skating Polly. “I hate not living with my mom. It’s pretty miserable down here.” She’s also acutely aware of how much the future of the band depends on her getting back to Oklahoma. The girls are riding a wave of momentum from their last several shows (including multiple sets at last July’s FreeTulsa), and Cervenka is scheduled to start production with them this December. I asked Peyton what she plans to do if the judge rules against her wishes or the court date is delayed again. She immediately answered, “There’s this kid who’s, like, a pretty bad person. I’m gonna see if he can give me a ride.”

I warned her to be careful, and she backtracked. “He’s not a bad person, he just skips school all the time.”

The fledgling punk rocker has enacted another plan of rebellion in the meantime. “I’m protesting by going on a homework strike. I figure if I do bad enough down here, they’ll let me go home in November. But it’s been killing me because I hate getting bad grades.”

“There aren’t a lot of obstacles between who they are and what they do that prevent them from being honest,” Cervenka said. “There’s a genuine quality that comes straight out of them. And part of it is because they are so young. But they can keep that quality. I am here to help them.”

X is currently on tour with Pearl Jam in South America. Cervenka plans to start production along with Harris, who will co-produce, and Polly in December. Once finished, the album will be released through Cervenka’s own Moonlight records, a progressive-minded indie label that uses a fluid, out-of-the-box strategy to market and promote its artists. But Peyton has to get back to OKC first.

As the end of our rainy Saturday afternoon approached, Peyton and Kelli volunteered a living room performance. After five minutes of giggly set-up involving false starts, faulty power cords, uncooperative snares, and an increasingly impatient mother, the girls launched into, what else, “Mr. Proper English Man,” the show-off song, the show-closer, the interview ender, and the song that most impresses live.

The house transformed into a wind tunnel. Peyton furiously punished the drum kit, Kelli screamed her little head off and hammered her bassitar. By the time Kelli commanded, “Now you leave, now get out of my head” for the last time, they were both visibly worn out. As the song closed, the girls smiled sheepish, proud and self-conscious.

“My eyeballs are sweaty,” Peyton offered. “We always have to play that one last.”

Stuart Hetherington is a committed Distribution Manager. He proudly rattles off numbers about his 58 distribution spots and growing mail subscription list. He also brainstorms regularly with the merchandising, sales, and editorial staff, contributing his “man about town” knowledge to the overall workings of This Land. But, when asked why he’s so good at his job, he will cheerfully admit he likes crunching the sales numbers and plotting distribution expansion (OKC in 2012?).

He’s not just the muscle of This Land distribution, he’s the brains too.

Here’s what Stuart had to say in answer to the 5Qs:

What influences you; i.e. what are your ‘must-read items? (print or online); must listen to, etc.?

Well, I definitely have some must-reads online, most notably OnThisDeity.com, which is a day-by-day underground history blog for social and political events and personalities.

I’m also into DangerousMinds on facebook, which kind of deconstructs all of the cultural happenings and current events, although it does have a decidedly socio-liberal tone to it.

I also listen to a lot of radio when I’m out of the office, I find myself switching back and forth between NPR and KRMG, I love listening to crazy right-wing propagandists just to keep a vector on the whole political structure. I also keep up with the cycling world through prollyisnotprobably.com, which is my total hipster guilty pleasure.

What inspires you in your work?

Working at TLP is just so collaborative. Although I’m the Distribution Manager, I still feel like I can chime in on an Editorial or Sales issues, and I will be heard and my opinion will be considered valid and welcome. That sense of mutual respect for each others’ roles is inspiring.

Also, I believe in This Land, in its role in Tulsa. I think an important part of that role is its ability to display a new perspective in the city and give “ex-pats” a way to connect with what is going on in Oklahoma on a cultural level, not just a political one.

What’s your favorite thing you’ve worked on for This Land?

Well, I certainly get attached to every issue, but the Tate Brady issue has probably been my favorite. Everything just blew up so quickly, It was the right topic at the right time for us.

I remember putting together a mailing list and cover letter for some comp issues that we were sending out to all of the most notable people in our state political system, as well as the nations top civil rights and reparations people. It was cool to be taking such direct action with those figures.

What do you love about Tulsa?

I like how Tulsa is so accessible. In Tulsa, if you want to make something happen you can just do it. I work with Tulsa Hub Bike Co-op too. We’ve been building it up for over 2 years, and it just keeps getting bigger. We have a great support network here. We have two programs right now, one geared at adults who are car-free, and one for school-aged children, more of a safety thing.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that in my opinion, Oklahoma has some of the best food in the US. Specifically, I like the meat scene here: BBQ, Mexican, soul food, all that. My favorite spots to eat are Burn Co., Stutts House of Bar-B-Q, the Knotty Pine (RIP); SMOKE on Cherry Street… If I’m after Okie gourmet food, Sweet Lisa’s for soul food and of course, El Rio Verde for Mexican.

What is your favorite drink?

Well if you ask the bartenders at Soundpony, they would probably say HighLife with lemons, but that is a matter of price and not adoration. I would drink Bulleit Bourbon and water if I could afford it. Also, Blue Raspberry Lemonade Kool-Aid is pretty bangin’ too.

For more on Stuart, check out his bio here; and be sure to say hi if you see him out on distribution day- 1st and 15th y’all!

A leader of Pastors for Peace, McAnally’s fearless dedication to the common man is as strong as ever. It was first unearthed after Martin Luther King Jr.’s appearance at the University of Tulsa, when McAnally rallied fellow students in a civil rights protest. Leading a group to Montgomery, Alabama, then 20-year-old McAnally was arrested for disturbing the peace. It set in motion a “lifetime of going to peace marches and protests and working in various kinds of projects for peace and justice,” she says.

To McAnally, “criminal” does not equal “villain”— if it did, Oklahoma would be downright evil for its amount of prisoners. According to the United States Peace Index, the state’s incarceration rate is the third worst in the country, ahead of only Mississippi and Louisiana. Though this makes convicts increasingly commonplace, Oklahoma civilians keep their distance, leaving the imprisoned to remain outcasts despite their ubiquity.

McAnally insists the state was not always so indifferent. In 1978, the Oklahoma Arts Council commissioned her to teach creative writing in local prisons.

“That was in the days where they cared about prisoners, and prisons tried to offer educational kinds of opportunities to help prisoners rehabilitate while they were incarcerated,” she says. “Unfortunately, things haven’t stayed that way, and prisoners are now incarcerated as punishment and punishment alone.”

While teaching behind bars, McAnally edited an anthology of poems by Oklahoma prisoners. It was published in 1981 under the name Warning: Hitch Hikers May Be Escaping Convicts, a title inspired by signs McAnally used to see on her way to work. Call it an attempt at prison reform, but McAnally claims she was just trying to give inmates an outlet for expression.

“In my creative writing classes, the students themselves are not the ones with the power or the money to make the necessary changes,” she says. Instead of focusing on the feeling of powerlessness this knowledge could inspire, McAnally emphasized the freedom that lies in writing.

“I told the prisoners, ‘You can murder someone in a poem and it can be applauded and praised! If you can do it in a poem, then you don’t have to do it in real life!’ So it’s a way to express your feelings and your deepest thoughts and inclinations, but it’s creative rather than destructive.”

McAnally was awestruck by her students but undaunted at the prospects, however challenging, of finding the poetry in Oklahoma’s prisons.

“I, out of my religious and philosophical mindset, have always thought of all people as equals, whether they’re prisoners, or Negros in the ’60s, or gay, or lesbians, or whatever,” she says. “They’re all equal. So I’ve always respected being able to go into their communities and provide something that inspires and helps them.”

Warning provides a testament to this sense of equality. Its catharsis served not only as an outlet for the fifteen prisoners represented in its pages, but also as proof of their latent humanity. This is all McAnally really wanted from the project.

“Prisoners are people too,” she says. “It could happen to you.”

But behind the façade of her bricked estate lies an anomaly: first a cluck, then a squawk, then time and place suddenly revert. Past the drive, through the breezeway that currently sports mud boots encrusted with fertilizer and a container of meal worms, the farm noises increase.

Thankfully, Monnet lives in Tulsa, a city that has openly embraced her passion for backyard chickens. But fellow chicken enthusiasts in Oklahoma City are labeled as “outlaws” and fines of up to $500 are often issued for their violations. The concerns over fecal waste and an increase in insect population are the most commonly used arguments by those residents opposed to urban chicken farms. Currently it is illegal to raise chickens within the Oklahoma City limits, if the lot is less than one acre (according to the Oklahoma City Municipal Code). With most city lots averaging 1/2 acre or less, this law prohibits the typical urban chicken farmer’s dreams for life, liberty, and the pursuit of backyard eggs.

But no one seems to be complaining about the flocks in Tulsa. The farming lifestyle can be had while the “farmer” enjoys a metropolitan lifestyle. Monnet takes advantage of Tulsa’s acceptance of chickens, housing six hens at her residence just short of a mile from the nearest Starbucks.

Emphatically, Monnet throws open the backyard gate into her other world. No golden Labs placidly bark a greeting, nor do koi ponds request the pondering of life. Instead, a flock of chickens scratches at a patch of dirt widening beneath the turf.

Monnet grabs a hen and cuddles it against her body. Chicken poop makes a talon-to-clothing transfer. Avian flu springs to mind, but she brushes the dung from her shirt as she’s done a hundred times before and picks up another hen to pet. Every hen in the brood gets a sit-down. She tosses out grapes— what she calls “chicken crack”—laughing hysterically as the birds climb over, around, and on top of each other vying for the ripest fruit.

There are people with chickens and then there are chicken people. Lauren Monnet is undeniably the latter. With a dozen eggs costing less than three dollars from the local store, she’s not doing it for thrift.

Hoping to regulate her sunnyside up food source, Monnet spends an inordinate amount of time and energy on her supply of fresh eggs. But the “food source path” seems a weak and illogical excuse. Monnet doesn’t seem illogical, stating her primary motivation “lies within the coop.”

“They are excellent companions. I think having backyard chickens is a great beginning to laying down roots—it’s kind’ve a practice run before the husband and the house,” she said. “We grew up in a large urban environment—one under a constant barrage of stimulation. So, maybe I’m seeking to rebel against that a little a bit and go back to a slightly simpler time when your evening’s entertainment is watching the chickens hunt and peck for worms.”

With her jet-black hair, fuchsia silk shirt and designer jeans, she doesn’t fit the stereotype of a chicken and garden enthusiast, if such a passion can be typecast. The only tip-off to her obsession is her gravitation towards the local chicken farmers at the Cherry Street Farmer’s Market. Amid the live music and red-faced children scarfing cinnamon rolls, Monnet seeks wisdom on eggshell thickness, feather coloration, and the proper composting methods. She arrives early, just as the vendors throw open their tents, in order to swap hen stories.

Her enthusiasm for chickens is obvious, her thoroughness for animal husbandry less so.

She lives her life around her chickens, dismissing a Saturday night out with friends in favor of a glass of wine, a sunset, and hours of chicken observation off the back porch. Her Sunday plans include tending to the “chicken salad bar”—a variety of greens being cultivated in her garage in preparation for the long winter months— and raking the compost from the chicken pen.

“My friends kind’ve make fun of me,” she said, laughing. “Elliot Nelson’s father lives behind me and he said, ‘I don’t like this chicken idea. I see you out here on Saturday nights and you need to be at McNellie’s and Dilly Deli and El Guapo. I see you out there way too much young lady.’ ”

Monnet inspects the chicken wire for holes. Cats, hawks, and foxes hide in the shadows. Lately, a neighborhood hawk has been eyeing the youngest of her brood. At such times, she admits a dog would have been a great companion and much easier to manage. But a dog doesn’t produce what Monnet pulls from the coop each morning.

“I just prefer pets that can make my breakfast for me.” She smiles and waves to a neighbor attached to some sort of collie. He asks when “omelet Sunday” will be. Lauren smiles and says, “As soon as these chicken butts lay some eggs.”

The collie neighbor strolls off, stopping a short distance away to retrieve dog poop with a plastic-bagged hand. As he moves on from the now-desecrated sidewalk, Monnet wrinkles her nose. At least the poop she retrieves can be composted.

Within minutes another neighbor peeks over the separating wooden fence to admire her coop. With the help of her like-minded grandfather, Monnet designed and built the coop out of mostly recycled and donated materials in the corner of her backyard, across from her garden. She welcomes the neighbor and leaves him there, then escorts me inside for refreshments. We scrape poop from our shoes before stepping onto the tiled floor and into her designer kitchen.

It occurs to me that Monnet is something of a celebrity in her community, though she humbly brushes off the adoration out of habit. Her knack for urban farming has a trendy feel to it, but she naturally blends this idealism to the sustainability of such a venture, and has fun doing it. Where once she might have hidden behind her impressive mansion, she’s now out in the open, her chickens providing the impetus for unannounced visits from neighbors she never knew.

Like Monnet, urban planners are realizing the nutritional, social and emotional aspects of funding urban gardens and farms.

Governmentally funded programs that repurpose vacant downtown lots into community gardens are drawing generations of urban occupants together. These metropolitan areas have seen a dramatic reduction in poverty by providing nutrient rich produce for the needy, a decrease in the city’s waste by composting, and a decrease in crime by providing farming occupations.

Ayschia Saiymeh wanted to change that, starting in her own midtown backyard. “People are rethinking what it means to live in the city. It doesn’t mean a freshly cut lawn and manicured hedges,” she said. “It can be your own little farm, even if it’s a quarter acre.”

Saiymeh, her brown curls tamed by an unseen barrette, ushers me from the shaded front porch to inside her quaint home. The walls have been painted one soothing shade after another. Lamps and candles are lit, but not a single overhead light is on. Her home is what a coffee shop felt like before they started selling Sheryl Crow CDs.

She leads me to the kitchen where, thankfully, a coffee pot gurgles, announcing the end of its cycle. Ayschia offers me a cup on our way out to the back porch, but not before I notice the empty egg cartons stacked on top of her refrigerator. They await eggs that might never come.

She points out the vacant hen house in the corner of her backyard, recalling hours spent with her hands buried in the dirt, watching the chickens snatch up the uncovered earthworms. The coop, however, is strangely quiet.

She explains that recently, her hens were lost to Marek’s disease, a common ailment due to improper vaccinations.

“Their names were Eloise and Jewel,” she said, quieter than I had anticipated, and I had to ask her to repeat the names. “They both had great personalities, but I have to say my favorite was Jewel.” Clearly, these were more than just egg producers to Saiymeh—they had become a representation of something more to her.

A life of sustainability spurs her on—sustainability based on food source, not trendy discovery—even when she’s had to bury a part of that dream. She tucks a disorderly brown curl behind her ear and speaks softly, describing the permaculture lifestyle that allows everything in her backyard to work in harmony. Her chickens would peck at the bugs, offering a pesticide-free vegetable garden. And the hens supplemented their diet by free ranging on her grass, while simultaneously fertilizing their own food source.

She will be incorporating her vegetable garden into the front yard eventually, allowing this symbiotic lifestyle room to expand. Saiymeh’s neighbors don’t mind, as long as they can share in the harvest. And the support from her neighbors, no matter the purity of their motives, preserves the urban farmer within.

The hours of tireless work experienced by the urban farmer is forgotten once they pull hormone-free eggs from the coop and pesticide-free zucchini off the vine. But following World War II, Americans had yet to be romanced by the word “organic”; the manual labor associated with a working farm was despised. Baby boomers fled the country life, migrating to the city with expectations of living a life of ease.

In 1950, 16 percent of Americans were small farmers, subsisting primarily on what they could grow or raise. The “American Dream,” promising an effortless life with the latest technologies, all but vanquished the working small farm. The boomers willingly exchanged their barns and tractors for attached garages and sedans. And by 2007, a mere half percent of us considered ourselves farmers. [1] But with an estimated readership of 44,000 subscribers to Backyard Poultry Magazine, the interest in the urban farming lifestyle is on the increase.

Today, summers once spent browning by the pool are being traded for afternoons devoted to weed extraction. Often, the first shared egg or ripened tomato are likely the only motivation a sidelined neighbor needs to begin growing their own food source—even if it’s just a front porch pot filled with basil.

“The city doesn’t have to be a barrier to having that piece of sustainability. I had been really inspired about things going on around the country. There was something so beautiful, so moving, and impacting about gardening,” Saiymeh recalls. “And not just gardening, but also being sustainable. Not for the sake of individualism but knowing the whole chain of what happens from your food to your table.”

Perhaps this younger generation is seeking a reconnection with a simpler time they’ve not yet been exposed to. However, this reconnection isn’t reserved only for those twenty- and thirty-somethings. And since the inception of modern suburbia, this back-to-land movement has been gaining momentum by those who hope to live off and preserve the land.

In 1954, Helen and Scott Nearing penned the book Living the Good Life, which has been recognized as a main contributor for the back-to-land movement beginning in the 1960’s. The Nearings moved to a small Vermont farm after Scott had been accused of being a communist and subsequently fired from his university job as a professor. The couple practiced organic farming and self-sufficiency, while the rest of the farming world focused on pesticides and hormonal treatments that would lead to a bigger harvest.

Inspired by Living the Good Life, Jeff Siddons was determined to make the most of his midtown quarter acre. I bike to Siddons’s Lortondale home, and parked up beside a meager RV, a sailboat in need of repair, a motorcycle or two, and a gold minivan. The 59-year-old librarian and self-described “hippie boomer,” is dressed in Carhart pants and red suspenders and is waiting for me in the driveway. Jeff praises me for my mode of transportation but points out the darkening sky and offers me a ride home if “things turn ugly.” I ask him just what kind of an interview was he expecting. He doesn’t miss a beat and heartily laughs, testing the elasticity on the suspenders.

Thus far, all interviewed chicken owners have sequestered their fowl to the backside of their home. But Siddons, forever the rebel, does not follow this protocol. A chain-link fence surrounds the entirety of his property, allowing the chickens to hunt and peck front yard or back. It’s not a farming strategy; it’s a world view.

“When I was six, I raised two little chickens in an incubator that looked something like a flying saucer with a plastic dome and a light bulb,” he recalled. “I got a rooster and a hen and raised those two eggs myself. That’s what got me going.”

We push past overgrown bushes and other sundry items to what might be a backyard. The chickens take me for a predator and scatter in random directions as Siddons tries to introduce them.

“That one there…,” he pauses, looking around. “Well, where did she go? Oh, well—they’re crazy chickens.” I was never properly introduced.

Two cats, several barking dogs, a raised garden, and bee hives round out the menagerie. But the bees are back-ordered.

“I know several people in the neighborhood that have chickens. I do it because once hens don’t lay they butcher them and make them into pet food,” he said. “I can’t do much, but at least I can do the chickens and they provide enough eggs for me. Plus, I’m going to be retired in the next couple of years and I basically want some stuff to do.”

Wanting “stuff to do,” companionship, a harvest, and some solid entertainment, Siddons has transformed his backyard into his own urban farm. “I really wish I would have done this with my kids,” he said. As the dogs continued to bark while the chickens ran around my feet being chased by the cats, I couldn’t imagine introducing children into the chaos I was already experiencing. But Siddons disagrees, “My kids would have really enjoyed this.” Perhaps his children weren’t as uptight as a certain interviewer.

Siddons’s chicken coop is surrounded by a protective barrier of recycled department store shelves. He sucks in his breath and squeezes between the barrier and the actual hen house, making his way to the back of the coop to show off fresh eggs. Siddons shoots me a look of relief.

“I’m glad you’re so skinny,” he said. “My wife was worried you’d be hefty and couldn’t fit back here.”

I prefer being called “thin”, but I don’t argue with a man offering free eggs.

Opening the back door to the hen house, we interrupt a napping chicken, which he shoos off the nest. Siddons lifts up his glasses to eye a pile of brown eggs. “I’m sending you home with some eggs. I’ll try to find the ones that don’t have a lot of crap on them,” he said. He scrapes on the shell with his fingernail, chipping away a sizable amount of chicken poop. Dreams of sunny side up eggs for lunch dance through the mind, but I remind him I’m on my bike. “Well then, you’d better be careful,” he smiles and grabs two handfuls of eggs.

We squeeze back out of the coop and Siddons excuses himself to grab me an egg carton. I amuse myself with the variety of life found in his midtown backyard. In the distance, a rooster crows and the hens take notice of the sudden male presence.

Returning with the eggs, Siddons pulls on his suspenders a couple of times before informing me of yet another piece of his farming puzzle. “So, I’ve got the chickens and the other animals, the garden, the bees, and I just recently got a book on fish farming,” he said. “You can grow fish right in your backyard with the right equipment. What else would you need?”

Apparently more. With a goal to live off his land, Jeff has plans to expand his urban farming ethic by purchasing a piece of lake front property. He wants a dairy cow—a throwback to his Wisconsin roots.

After attaching the egg carton securely to my bike, Siddons sends me on my way, but not before inviting me back any time I feel the need. It’s a genuine invitation, one not usually associated with a first and very brief encounter with a stranger, but one I felt with the other urban farmers I’d met.

Pedaling towards home, I slowly weave through the unceasing parking lots of Sears, Reasor’s, and Target, babying my precious cargo. Amidst the concrete and stoplights, I felt a city trying to maintain as much country as it could.

1. According to the USDA “State Fact Sheets” of May 2011. In the Detroit area alone, the Garden Resource Program provided seeds and plants for more than 875 urban gardens within the city and surrounding areas. Crime has been noted to be lower in Detroit’s urban farming areas than in those downtown areas not participating in urban farming. Other cities following suit include Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Seattle, Chicago and Austin. On the list of cities focused on repurposing vacant lots into thriving gardens and small urban farms,Tulsa was nowhere to be found.