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.