O-Kay!

A few days ago, hearing about the storms raging over the midwest, I heard that Oklahoma was hit as well.  There was news of traffic fatalities there blamed on the snowy road conditions.

Since the Oklahoma City bombings, we don't really hear much from the Sooner State.  Think about it- do you ever hear of anything much happening there?

Many people don't realize that Gary and I lived there for just over a year.  It left a big impression on me and indirectly on Gary, although he probably never realized it.

I was working for Southwestern Bell in Austin, Texas and Gary was working on a framing crew for Centex Homes back in 1981 when I got the desire to move back north to be just a little closer to family in Sioux Falls. The oil fields were booming in both Texas and Oklahoma at the time and many people were being hired to work as service reps in the business offices of Southwestern Bell throughout its 5 state territory.

I landed a job within a week of submitting my transfer.  I made the eight hour drive up to check out our new city, Enid, Oklahoma.  Enid was and still is a town of around 48,000 people. I stayed one night in a motel while securing a duplex for us to move into.  I visited my future workplace and found out I would be training for six weeks in Tulsa which was somewhat of a shock.  It was a logistical nightmare, with Gary and Nathan staying in Austin and me in Tulsa, while we tried to get our belongings up to Enid somehow.

For a couple of months Gary drove his Toyota truck the eight hours up each Friday night after work with a load of our furniture and little Nathan (or as the Texans pronounced his name, Nye-thahn) up to Enid where I waited for them after driving three hours in on the turnpike from Tulsa myself.  Finally after getting everything moved, we settled in and Gary went to work for Southwestern Bell as a term frame attendant working nights. We both earned so much in overtime and differential that we could put whole paychecks into the credit union because we did not need the money to pay bills. Those were the oil boom days for us!

I met so many honest-to-goodness nice people in Enid that I am still convinced there are no people kinder as a group than Oklahomans. I was pregnant with Forrest when this song by Alan Parsons Project played on the radio in 1982. Hearing it puts me back into that place in that hot summer and fall.

It takes me back to our days living in the smallest town we ever lived in. I vividly remember getting off work at 6pm and walking to the parking lot in the summer heat, which at the time I thought was the worst heat ever imagined(I hadn't been to Arizona). Hearing the cicadas' constant buzzing and seeing the surface of the parking lots covered with the flower droppings from the Mimosa Trees that were everywhere.

Enid is near the Kansas border and is topographically like Kansas. Flatter than flat.  I remember one slight incline in town is all. Great place to ride a bicycle, I guess. At the time, the air smelled like oilfields and the town had lots of alley ways with oil barrels that were used as trash receptacles. Enid also had many very beautiful streets of one level brick homes and expansive lawns.  Vance AFB is still there and serves as a flight training school.  I am reminded of the days near Vance now because this house in Peoria is on the flight pattern path of Luke AFB, also a flight training school.  The jet noises are familiar.

We all learned that Oklahoma is/was all about not only oil, but wheat.  We saw many custom combiners whose livelihood was traveling with their enormous expensive machinery up and down US Highway 81 starting in spring in Texas with cotton heads, switching to wheat heads and finally to corn heads as they wound down in late fall in northern South Dakota or North Dakota.

 

Enid has one of those southern style central squares in its downtown.  It is quaint and elegant with a park and trees flanking the government buildings for Garfield County. Gary and I enjoyed Enid and I think Nathan did too. We once went with him to a nicer restaurant called Nathan's.  On 4th of July, we all sat near the lake in the park with Grandpa and Grandma Hopper and Linda and Margaret to watch fireworks and see the reflections in the water. Dean and Cherie made the drive down to see us there too, because it was only an eight hour drive from Sioux Falls.

The overtime for me eventually ended.  Then Gary's ten month term job ended in December and he said he had had enough of working for a large corporation with all the layers of managers who didn't often know squat.  Still, his time there and the hierarchy and rules he was exposed to at Southwestern Bell served him well many years later when he got his jobs at Summit Group and then Heartland Industries.  He learned that corporate survival is playing the game with the right people.  It is always being available for customers because they are always right even when they aren't. Years later, Gary understood that management still doesn't know squat about your job, but you still do what you're told agreeably.  He was a good manager and I think he was a good guy to work with, even though he could be very inflexible when he didn't feel a person was working as well as they should. He could be a hardass sometimes, which he even admitted to me.

Forrest was born at Bass Baptist Hospital in Enid on December 30, 1982 and he came home to a daddy who got to stay home for a few weeks while caring for him. Then Gary decided that he wanted to start his own business doing what he loved, building cabinets.  We waited until our lease ended and in March 1983, called up brother Dean to come help move us back up to South Dakota where we knew our sons would get a good education in public schools.

I still think fondly of Enid and of Oklahoma.  Sometimes I also think of it as a possible contender for a place I may someday want to call home again.  As usual, I'm still uncertain, but its nice to know that  "OOOOk-lahoma, where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain"(yeah, in the form of a tornado!) is still there smack dab in the center of the country.