Book Notes: No 1

If you went to elementary school in Oklahoma City in the 1960s, you learned three important items.
1. Football was very important, particularly OU football. When I was in seventh grade, the principal interrupted morning classes to announce over the loudspeaker that Steve Owens had won the Heisman Trophy. Cheers rang out through the school.
2. How to sing the state song. My husband didn’t believe me when I said everyone in Oklahoma knows the state song. He still tests it out with every person he meets from Oklahoma. It certainly helps that the state song was written by Rogers and Hammerstein and is very singable.
3. April 22nd is 89er Day. I don’t know what they do now but, in the 60s, 89er Day was a big deal. We dressed up in appropriate attire: jeans, cowboy hats, boots, etc., for the boys; prairie-style long cotton dresses and bonnets for the girls. I don’t remember much else but I suspect we ran across the playground at some point to stake a claim.

My family moved from Oklahoma  to Texas between my seventh and eighth grade years. That meant I missed both Texas history, taught in seventh grade, and Oklahoma history, taught in eighth grade. In other words, what I learned was mostly the lore of both states. I don’t know how they taught state history in those years or how they teach it now, but on the official website for the 89er Day Celebration, I was surprised by the current laudatory description of the first settlers.

“What is a Boomer vs a Sooner?”
“The 1889 Oklahoma Land Run was a thrilling race against time! Boomers were those who had long dreamed of settling in Oklahoma, patiently waiting and advocating for its opening. They were the seasoned veterans, eager to stake their claim on the fertile land. Sooners were the audacious risk-takers, those who defied rules and secretly snuck onto the land before the official starting gun. They were the rebels, the ones to dared to seize opportunity ahead of the pack.” https://89erdays.com(opens in new tab)

By the time I returned to college where I sang the school song “Boomer Sooner” with everyone else, even I knew that settlers were claiming land that had been promised to Native Americans and Sooners were cheating.

This past spring I visited the Oklahoma History Center and the First Americans Museum. Both were interesting, but the First Americans museum is particularly fascinating and well-designed to tell a complicated history. After those visits, I wanted to learn more on Oklahoma’s history and  found several excellent books in an independent bookstore. I’m still working my way through them, but the two I’ve read so far are entertaining and informative. Just the titles provide more nuance than the land run page.

Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-Class Metropolis by Sam Anderson. Anderson, an outsider and reporter says, “I have come to believe, after my time there, that Oklahoma City is one of the greatest weirdo cities of the world – as strange in its way, as Venice or Dubai or Versailles or Pyongyang.” I don’t know about that, but I learned a lot about the city I claim as my hometown. There were things I did know, the tornadoes, the airport named for someone who died in a plan crash, that it was not the original capital of the state. And much that I didn’t know: it was the site of an early lunch counter sit-in, before the more famous sit-ins in Greensboro (there’s now a monument to teacher Clara Luper and the students who participated in downtown OKC. See picture below.), that I.M. Pei was the designer of the city’s urban renewal effort in the 60s, or just how and why such a football crazy state managed to support a professional basketball team.

The Great Oklahoma Swindle: Race, Religion, and Lies in America’s Weirdest State by Russell Cobb. Cobb was born in Oklahoma and is now a college professor in Canada. His book tells the story of Oklahoma with a focus on the other city in the state, Tulsa. This book taught me even more than the first about the history that was hidden beneath the stories of plucky settler. It’s told in the voice of a family member wanting his relatives to know better so they can do better (to paraphrase Maya Angelou.) Therefore much of it is difficult reading since the stories of the early years of Oklahoma are sordid and heartbreaking. He writes about growing up in Tulsa not knowing about the Tulsa Race Riot (now called The Tulsa Race Massacre by some historians). He shares stories of evangelical religious leaders over years and of the socialist thread that runs through history, showing up in the songs of Woody Guthrie.

There is much to learn, enjoy, and deplore in the history found in these books. If you are interested, as I am, in learning more nuanced history of the state of Oklahoma they are worth reading. They are also worth reading if you are interested in US history in general. Both authors in their different ways make the case that this state’s history serves as a microcosm, in the words on the back of Cobb’s book, “a laboratory for all kinds of social, political, and artistic movements” for the history of the larger country. Both use the term weird as a descriptor. Both make the case that there are lessons to be learned from this state and these cities for all of us. I’m glad to recommend them both.

Take care,

Gage

Clara Luper National Sit-in Monument, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma