“Oh,” said Carl, “then you need to talk to Wayland Bishop.”
Wayland Bishop! The name I’d written down but lost and then forgot.
“He’s right over here. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”
What luck! We’d been in town all of five minutes and I’d already found the man I would have been looking for had I remembered his name. Without my realizing it, we were standing practically in front of the Historical Society and Wayland was right there, out front on the sidewalk.
“This fella’s looking for you,” Carl said to Wayland. I introduced myself and Wayland immediately apologized for not getting back to me. He’s a tall, trim man in his late sixties, raised in Okemah and now retired there after a career in the tire industry in Oklahoma City. He’s been back for ten years.
Wayland invited me into the Historical Society to see a treasure trove of Woody memorabilia on display: record albums, a guitar, family photos, high school yearbooks he had signed, and a partial reconstruction of the London House made from wood salvaged from the original structure.
“Woody left town is his mid-teens, but he often came back here whenever he was close,” Wayland told me. “He’d be riding the rails or hitchhiking and usually came to a bar owned by his childhood friend, Colonel Martin. That was a nickname. No one knows why he was called Colonel. Woody would sleep in the back of the Colonel’s garage, have breakfast with the Martins, and move on. He would just walk off. He just came and went.
“My dad says he thinks Woody never bothered to bathe,” Wayland added. “Some folks would invite him for a meal but insist he bathe first while they washed his clothes.”
Wayland was the first of many people we met in Okemah who would recall the time the actor David Carradine came to town; he played Woody Guthrie in the 1976 film Bound for Glory, based on Woody’s autobiography. It was a big deal.
Wayland told us we’d arrived in Okemah on Pioneer Day, a celebration that’s the biggest event in town all year except for the annual Woody Guthrie Festival (referred to as Woody Fest), a multiday music festival held on the July weekend closest to Woody’s birthday, July 14. The first Woody Fest was held in 1997 to commemorate the life and music of Okemah’s most famous native son. Pioneer Day also coincides with a multiyear class reunion for graduates of Okemah High School. This year it included, among others, the classes of 1968 to 1972, and hundreds of people who now lived away were here for the homecoming. I’m a 1971 high school graduate myself, and many of the people out and about on Broadway this day were my contemporaries. Before the day was out Albie and I would practically become honorary members of the Okemah High School alumni association.
Okemah didn’t always celebrate Woody Guthrie’s legacy; far from it. When the idea first surfaced in the late 1960s that Okemah should recognize Woody’s life and music there was powerful opposition. Business leaders and local politicians thought the town’s association with a man who embraced aspects of socialism and communism, and once wrote for The Daily Worker, a publication of the Communist Party USA, would be a stain on the community; that far from drawing tourists and their dollars, good people would shun Okemah and only hippies and “undesirables” would come to see a Guthrie memorial. Woody’s political leanings were so toxic that when he died in 1967, the Okemah Public Library refused a gift of his songs and writings. Woody wanted to be buried in the town where he’d been born but his widow, Marjorie, angered by the library’s refusal, had his ashes scattered in the Atlantic instead.
The controversy over Woody’s legacy attracted national media attention. A 1972 article in Rolling Stone quoted the then president of the local chamber of commerce, Allison Kelly, as saying the paramount issue was whether “Okemah should honor a communist.” That same year, a service station owner in town told the New York Times, “Woody was no good. About half the town feels that way. I knew him, went to school with him, used to whup him. He doesn’t deserve to have his name up there.” “Up there” referred to a water tower that had recently been painted with the words, “Home of Woody Guthrie.” It still stands today.
But there were others, who were also powerful people in town, and felt Woody had, through song, made a huge impact on the world and ought to be recognized. One was Earl Walker, a leading officer in the Oklahoma/Texas chapter of Kiwanis, who bought the old London House in 1972 for $7,000 with plans (never realized) to rebuild and restore it and turn it into a center for displaying Woody’s writings and music. It was Walker who successfully led the effort to get the water board to honor Guthrie on the water tower,†† and, thirty years before the first ever Woody Fest in 1997, Walker traveled to visit Woody in the hospital in New York to see if he would approve of efforts Walker and others were making to honor him in Okemah. He did, and gave Walker a signed copy of his autobiography, Bound for Glory. Woody died shortly thereafter.
“People fear that putting up a memorial to Woody would attract hordes of motorcycle riders who would cruise through the town and threaten everybody,” Walker told Rolling Stone in 1972. “But for every motorcycle rider, there would be 50 or 100 other persons who would stop and maybe bring a little business our way.”
But Walker’s motivation was more than financial. He was, perhaps, just slightly more progressive than many of his neighbors. In 1972, the year he bought the London House, he helped found the Woody Guthrie Memorial, Inc., a nonprofit organization.
“This time,” he told Rolling Stone, “we are going to get some muscle behind us and make sure we get a memorial to Woody. Woody was no communist, he was an individual who believed strongly in some things. I don’t necessarily agree with everything he did, but I don’t question his right to do so. Hell, look at what Hannibal, Missouri, did with Mark Twain, and he was an atheist.”
“Were it not for Earl Walker,” the New York Times reported in 1972, “the memories [of Guthrie] might have lain dormant.”
Still, it took more than two decades for Okemah to come around to fully embracing its native son. Wayland Bishop was one of several people we met in Okemah who told me that as the older generation aged and died off and a younger generation came of age, attitudes softened.
“Woody’s politics are not important to people here anymore,” Wayland told me. “They just know he was for the people. People here were oppressed, and they’re still oppressed. They just care about the fact that Woody was for the people and they respect that he became a renowned songwriter, though when he was young and playing the guitar on the street here for change, hardworking ranch folks didn’t think that what he was doing was work.
“I was a union man,” added Wayland, perhaps thinking of Woody’s commitment to the working man and the labor movement. “I worked for Firestone Tire and was a member of the Rubber Workers Union, which became part of the Iron Workers. This is a poor town, but when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties, every storefront was occupied. Then the interstate came through in 1963 and later Walmart and it killed all the retail. We don’t even have a clothing store in town anymore.”
As we talked inside the Historical Society a friendly, nice-looking man in shorts, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap approached us, and Wayland introduced me to Kurtis Walker. Kurtis is the grandson of Earl Walker. Wayland introduced me as “a Woody fan.”
“We can tell,” Kurtis said good-naturedly. “Like you, people come here, not just from the United States but from all over the world, because of Woody, and they are just looking around trying to take it all in.”
Kurtis is an open, gregarious man in his midforties and now owns the lot where the London House once stood, the lot his grandfather bought in 1972. He offered to walk us over there after the Pioneer Day parade that was scheduled for midday.
Albie and I continued hanging out on the sidewalk in front of the Historical Society; it seemed to be the center of a lot of the action. Just in front of us, on the street, Kurtis was one of several volunteers working a table set up to publicize and raise funds for a project to restore three old water towers that stand side
by side in town. One is painted with the words “Hot Okemah,” another “Cold Okemah,” and the third is the one his grandfather succeeded in having painted “Home of Woody Guthrie.” Like his grandfather Earl before him, Kurtis is doing his part to honor Woody’s memory and better the town.
Wayland and Kurtis kept introducing Albie and me to people, some current residents, others back from afar for their high school reunion, explaining that we were on a cross-country car trip and had come to Okemah because of Woody. And those folks, in turn, introduced us to still others so that before long it felt like we’d met half the people who had ever lived in town in the past sixty years or so. Everyone greeted us with genuine kindness.
Some even heard about us and came over because they had something they wanted to tell us, like 87-year-old Mary Coleman, walking with the help of a cane and wearing a purple cowboy hat, a purple vest, and an ankle-length black skirt. She told me there’s an open mic event at the start of every Woody Fest and that she and her 90-year-old brother, Earl “Buddy” Williams, play together, she on guitar (she’s self-taught) and Buddy on fiddle and mandolin.
“I can’t imagine who wants to hear a nearly 90-year-old woman play,” she told me, “but Buddy never misses a note!”
“What kinds of songs do you play?” I asked.
“Oh, ‘San Antonio Rose’ and other old songs,” she replied. “‘This Land is Your Land’ is my favorite. My mother knew the Guthries, but we lived in the country eight miles from here by Buckeye Creek, so I didn’t know them.” Almost everyone we met in town had ancestors who knew the Guthries.
“I went to a one-room school there,” she continued. “We came here riding the Greyhound bus; nine kids in our family. We sold eggs and cream out of the back of a horse-drawn wagon. You’re from Boston someone said?”
“Yes,” I answered, “near Boston.” Word of our appearance had apparently spread like wildfire.
“My granddaughter teaches at MIT!” she proclaimed proudly. Then she came back to Woody. “Woody was always carrying his guitar, so my brother and I did the same, so we could play whenever. I teach guitar. Have a Gibson and taught all four of my kids music. I’m part Cherokee, you know.”
“How much Cherokee?” I asked.
“Very much!” Mary replied. “My hair was so black it was blue!”
And with that she started to amble away, but not before turning around to say one more thing. “Thank you!” she called out. “Thank you so much! Come back for the Woody Guthrie Festival!”
Wherever I looked there were old friends, many seeing one another for the first time in years, greeting each other, slapping backs, and embracing. Their warmth and affection for one another were palpable. All had the dust of this town in their bones.
Ed Stokes grew up here, but lives now in Katy, Texas, near Houston. He’s a year older than me and had come home for the class of 1970 reunion. He was wearing jeans and a collared shirt and a baseball-style cap. He has a huge smile, an easy manner, and is the kind of guy you can’t help but like from the moment he introduces himself and gives you a firm handshake and a laugh that seems to come from somewhere deep inside him. I took him to be a rancher, but he has spent his entire career with Conoco as a petroleum engineer. He lived and worked in Europe for fourteen years and spent considerable time in the Middle East, as well.
As he looked down Broadway he used exactly the same word to describe modern-day Okemah as Wayland Bishop had earlier: “disappointing.” He was referring to what’s happened to the thriving town of his childhood.
“There used to be ten supermarkets right here on Broadway,” he told me. He, too, mentioned the adverse impact of Walmart on the town. Then the talk turned to Woody.
“Used to be Pioneer Day was everything in this town. Now it’s the Woody Guthrie Festival,” Ed said. Earl Walker’s vision of an Okemah that fully wrapped its arms around Woody had come to pass.
“Back in the early 1970s, people here didn’t want to have anything to do with Woody Guthrie because he went to New York and became a socialist,” Ed, a self-described libertarian, told me. “When Arlo [Woody’s son, the singer Arlo Guthrie] came here in the late sixties to try and get the town to honor Woody, the older generation had a lot of bad feelings. But he wrote more than five hundred songs‡‡ and had a great influence on music and affected so many lives. He was world-renowned.”
As we talked Ed saw a classmate named Ginny to whom he quickly introduced me. “This here is Peter and Albie,” he said. “Traveled all the way from Boston.” Ginny is part Creek and part Cherokee and she and Ed spoke briefly in Creek.
“A lot of people here are part Indian,” Ed told me after Ginny had gone off to greet some other friends. Many of the people I met in Okemah, like Mary and Ginny, were either full-blooded Native Americans or of mixed white and Indian ancestry and everyone seemed to treat each other with kindness and respect. There’s been so much intermarriage over the generations that racial divisions between whites and Native Americans have ceased to be an issue here.
Pretty soon Ed was like my best old friend in this town.
“Hey, Pete, have you met Nokey?” There was also Bubby, Bobby, and Nubbin.
“I don’t even know some of their real names,” Ed said, his laugh nearly swallowing his words. “And I’ve known them all my life!”
Back inside the Historical Society there was a table set up with some cookies and soft drinks, and we fell into conversation with three women who were sitting inside. All appeared to be in their sixties or seventies. As usual, it was Albie who caught their eye and started the conversation among us. All had grown up here. In addition to Woody, they told me, Okemah had produced some other notable people. William Pogue became an astronaut and piloted Skylab 4. Larry Coker was once the head football coach at the University of Miami. His sister was one of the women I was talking with. DeLoss McGraw became an artist of considerable renown.
Pat Soledade, like Ed Stokes, was back in Okemah for the reunion. She, too, lives near Houston now. She attended Oklahoma University and later graduate school at Columbia. She joined the Peace Corps in the 1960s partly because the three-week training session was held in New York City and she wanted a look at the bright lights.
“I didn’t really intend to go into the Peace Corps,” Pat told me. “I just wanted to go to New York City. Imagine coming from here to New York City! I was out all the time.”
Pat did enter the Peace Corps and served in Brazil where she met her husband, a Brazilian man, while “dancing on a table during Carnival.” They raised their children in Brazil.
All of this surprised me, which tells you something about the biases I brought to Okemah with me. Here was this demure woman in her late seventies from Okemah, Oklahoma, and her life sounded like something out of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. Many of the people I was meeting were more worldly than I expected.
“I first came back to Okemah for my high school reunion in 1990,” Pat told me. “The entire town had become decrepit. It was a shock and I didn’t come back again for ten years. This is our sixtieth reunion and our class has stayed close. Some of us even travel together.”
I asked Pat about the town and its relationship to Woody and she echoed what others had told me.
“Woody Guthrie was persona non grata here for a long time,” she said. “This county lost a lot of people during the Korean War and people couldn’t stand the idea of this left-wing person being honored. But time passes.”
The front door to the Historical Society opened and Ed Stokes took a step inside.
“Hey, Pete!” he called out. “Come on, the parade is starting!”
Kurtis Walker had come inside, too, and as Ed headed back out for the parade Kurtis said to me, “You see how friendly people are here. There’s no reason to be friendly unless you care about people. People here really care about each other.”
It’s true. Everyone had a nice word for Albie and for me in Okemah. They also seemed to appreciate that we’d stopped to see their
town and that I knew a lot about Woody. I had expected to come into town, walk some relatively abandoned streets, take a few pictures, and leave. By late afternoon we were still there.
Back out on Broadway, Kurtis introduced me to Lance Warn, still youthful-looking at almost eighty years old, who used to own Warn’s, the furniture store I’d seen earlier. Warn had been president of the chamber of commerce during some of the years when the controversy over Woody raged in town.
“The older generation, the city fathers, the bankers, they just put the kibosh on it,” Lance told me. “They just shut it down. A generation passed, and the younger generation didn’t care about Woody’s politics. They saw the potential of honoring his legacy and then things really moved.” Warn pointed across the street toward the Citizens State Bank.
“There used to be a supermarket next door,” he told me, “and between the market and bank there was an alley where my father used to shoot marbles with Woody.”
Lance mentioned that up by the fire station there was a section of sidewalk where Woody had carved his name while the cement was still wet nearly a century ago. Kurtis was about to walk me over to the London House property, but I wanted to see if we could find Woody’s name in the sidewalk first. Albie and I walked the few hundred yards up to the firehouse and paced up and down the sidewalk but saw nothing. A few of the firemen had a grill going outside and I asked if they knew where Woody had etched his name in the sidewalk. One of them led me inside the firehouse and called for a colleague. A young, solidly built man came to the front. As I explained what I was looking for, he turned and lifted a large piece of old cement sidewalk off a shelf.
The Dog Went Over the Mountain Page 14
