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Oklahoma Made Me This Way
I love Oklahoma, the land of the improbable. The shape doesn’t even make sense.
I was rummaging in my skull and pulled a few dusty bits about Oklahoma out. Some will shine up real nice, some we ought to put back and never mention again. Forgive the randomness and raggedness of this post.
Let’s face it, Oklahoma was originally foisted off on the Indians because of the awful weather and the red clay that bedevils farmers. I won’t mention tornadoes and dust storms. Oops.
Speaking of Indians, in school we learned about General Stand Watie, a Cherokee from Indian Territory who served as a General in the Civil War. His statue has been removed and placed in storage somewhere. He was a Confederate. Oh, and he was supposedly responsible for the slaughter of some black farmers in a town called Waggoner, so yikes.
The state Capitol of Guthrie was “kidnapped” by a Governor, who basically just moved the state seal overnight to Oklahoma City, where his party (Democrats) was in charge. As you know, it stayed. Weird.
There are oil wells at the state Capitol.
In Oklahoma, the weathermen are local celebrities. They create new weather jargon yearly: gustnadoes, dustnadoes, thundersnow, thunderboomers etc.
Oklahoma towns claim the invention of two foods – the onion burger and Frito chili pie. I find both claims dubious. And they say the parking meter came from OK, so sorry about that.
The astronaut who docked with the USSR’s Soyuz in ‘75, General Thomas P. Stafford, built a must-see air and space museum…but it’s over one hour away from OKC, in his small hometown called Weatherford.
I think Edmond, OK was the site of the first post office shooting.
There are 77 counties in OK, and none of them voted for Obama…or Biden.
The Oklahoma University sports teams are called Sooners, named after the 1889 settlers who cheated and took land before it was officially available to non-Indians. So basically, they are the Oklahoma Cheaters.
My mom is from a town in western Oklahoma called Berlin. Back when WWI came around, they decided to change the stress and make it sound less Kaiser-y, so from that time, it has been pronounced “BURlin.”
When I was growing up, one of our ex-Governors was in prison, one appeared on a daytime soap, and another made a midnight plea deal to avoid prison. All Democrats. Things have changed.
I grew up in a town founded by Czechs called Yukon. (They had unrequited Gold Rush fever and liked to name stuff accordingly.) The little creek nearby was the North Canadian River. In places, it can be forded by an action figure. Yukon is in Canadian County. Just think about the Great White North in that virtually treeless plain when it’s been over 100 degrees for three weeks straight… Those settlers and land-grabbers had a SICK sense of humor.
When I was growing up, the license plates in Oklahoma read, “Oklahoma is OK.” I think that’s where a lifetime of underachievement began for me. (Well, it hasn’t been a lifetime YET.)
Our school district had every color of the rainbow, except for blacks. The first black guy I ever saw was in seventh grade. That dude was a celebrity in our school. He was only there one year, I think. By high school graduation, there were no black kids in our school. To this day, I honestly can’t use the “some of my best friends are black” line.
In the OKC area, to get to the main airport, take Amelia Earhart Drive. The name of the airport is Will Rogers World Airport. It is, in truth, a domestic airport. Oh, and the great Will Rogers? He died in a plane crash. By the way, if you’re taking a shorter flight, Wiley Post Airport is not too far away. (He was the pilot flying the plane he and Will Rogers crashed in.) Two unsuccessful flights and four deaths are commemorated as you prepare to take your chances in the air.
Notorious Oklahoma alcoholic and baseball great Mickey Mantle has a bar named after him in downtown Oklahoma City.
And, although we used to puff ourselves up as kids by making fun of Kansas and Arkansas, we had a huge inferiority complex when it came to our neighbor to the south. So, when the Sooners beat Texas in ANYTHING, it was cause for celebration. Even though we beat them with a lot of players recruited out of Texas.
To be an Okie, you have to take the good with the bad, the outlaws with the in-laws, state seal thieves and Indian chiefs. I look forward to going back every year to what inexplicable things are going on, such as the plan to build the tallest building in America in downtown OKC (approved, but why?) and plans for a $2 billion, 1,000-acre theme park, which will probably never happen.
I’d love to hear some odd bits about where you come from.
Published in General
I liked your style. This piece was easy and fun to read. Although it was sad to find out Mickey Mantle was an alcoholic.
You left out how Oklahoma is still a place where someone with just an average job can afford a home. This no-longer-typical housing advantage more than makes up for the fact that the state seal got burglered.
Texas claims the Frito Pie.
Oklahoma City is in Oklahoma County, which is in Oklahoma state. A triple! That is unique for a state capital.
Mickey Mantle has a bar named after him but I know there’s a statue of the “Binger Banger” outside the ballpark. God, said Sparky Anderson, touched a woman in Oklahoma and told her he was going to give her the greatest catcher the game had ever known.
They could have saved themselves the trouble. Berlin is thought to have its origin from an extinct Slavic language, the word meaning “swampy place.” I’ll bet there isn’t a town in western Oklahoma that is a swampy place.
That line cracked me up. As did the entire post – well done.
I did visit the Cowboy Hall of Fame in OK when I drove across country. Looking at its location – Oklahoma City – I must have driven across quite a bit of the state but I can’t recall any other details of my time there. Nevertheless, for many years I could sing “Well I’ve never been to Spain, but I’ve been to Oklahoma” with complete sincerity. Unfortunately, I’ve now been to Spain so I am no longer sincere.
I never lived in Oklahoma but have wonderful memories of flying madly across the Red River in the pink Lincoln my Aunt Aletha (with the lead foot) from Mississippi drove every summer. She always drove a bunch of us cousins from Vernon, TX where my grandparents lived to Olustee where her sister, my Aunt Mary Helen, lived for visits. As the only kids from UP North (the wilds of NJ) it was the only place and time we experienced anything so exotic as the pink Lincoln. And the hot dry summer backyard family picnics. 4 of the 5 sisters came every summer, overlapping weeks with each other and went back and forth to Olustee. I still remember how the dry summer grass smelled. And stopping at the ice house for more ice.
Oklahoma has a great musical named for it. Few, if any, other states do.
I lived in Oklahoma for six months on contract to an outfit at Tinker AFB. One week, we had two tornadoes, a flash flood, a wildfire, and an earthquake.
Why does TEXAS not float off into the Gulf of Mexico?
Because oklahoma SUCKS.
A dart to the heart!
You got off easy.
Must be a Johnny Bench statue somewheres around too, but the only other statues I remember are of Vince Gill and James Garner.
I remember the story about the OU recruit who thought that the “N” on the Nebraska helmets stood for “knowledge.”
I can see that I am caught in a trap. I can’t walk out.
Not as long as you can call up some of that Sooner Magic.
You must be talking about Johnny Bench?
I glossed right past that myself, and I KNOW I must’ve seen it.
Thank you for reading, CarolJoy. I do appreciate your time.
Whenever I used to hear the song “You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma,” I would briefly wonder who HE made it for. David Frizzell? Shelly West? Someone else?
I always think of the magical beauty of the “Wishbone” offense under Barry Switzer when I think of Oklahoma. Jamelle Holloway was a magician and was probably the best I’d ever seen running it. He knew exactly when to tuck and run or pitch it to the running back running along side him. It was art.
Switzer was trying to run more of a pro offense with Troy Aikman at QB. When he went down, they reverted to old ways and just killed it with Holieway. As you said, a magician.
I’ve never spent time in Oklahoma, but when passing through, I did go out of my way to see the James Garner statue.
James Garner statue in Norman, OK.
Oh, and I also wanted to say this is a delightful post!
Thank you sir.
Don’t forget about Pioneer Woman in Pawhuska! My wife made me go to her store last year on our way to the Cowboy Hall of Fame. And Garth Brooks is from OK.
Oh, and the city with best name: Bartlesville.
And aren’t they going to build the tallest skyscraper in OKC?
They’ve yet to erect a Garth Brooks statue in my hometown, or a Sean O’ Grady, for you ‘80s boxing nuts.
Supposedly they have the permits for the skyscraper, and yet everyone I know back home STILL thinks it must be an internet hoax.
And GAP Band was from Tulsa:
It’s right outside the ballpark. The line from Sparky Anderson is paraphrased from the postgame press conference after the Reds sweep of the Yankees in 1976 and a NY writer asked him to compare Bench and Thurman Munson.
If can add another sports PS, when I worked at Borders Books in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, two of our regular guests were Barry Sanders, who always brought a briefcase and stayed in the cafe, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who was, of all things, coaching a USBL team in Enid. I think it was Enid. Boy, did he tower over the bookcases.