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Back in the 1940s I went to a place we called Victor. Like so many places in rural Oklahoma, Victor has completely faded away. Oh, there are still a few people strung up and down Highway 270 just East of the Big Caston bridge but the only place left that I know is my Uncle Herman’s place. Herman was a brother to Dad. He operated a grocery-gas-station there. A pretty nice one, too. Did a good business. Victor had a school nearby and there was a church and Maxie Cemetery just south of the junction. My grandparents lived just north on Goat Ridge Road, and the road to Wolf Mountain.
Read moreWalker Ray (Corky) my wife Pat and I made a drive down to Eastern Oklahoma some years ago. Our destination was Maxie Cemetery, about a mile off US- 270 a few miles this side of Wister, Oklahoma. We went there to place some new gravestones — the main one marking our grandfather George Washington Boyd’s grave. He was my mom’s dad and he died young in the great pandemic of 1918. May 17 of 1918 to be exact. There was the grave of my great Uncle there too and his was illegible too. So we replaced his too. His name was Mike Boyd. The old sandstones had faded away so bad you could not read the hand chiseled names and dates on them. Corky believed, as did I that families should see to things like this. Neglected graves can become “lost.”
Read moreMay we always remember the long 17 days we just endured. It may not have been as entertaining as the winter of ’48 but so far it sure has my attention. It has been a time of something just getting worse. And yes it could have been worse. For many others it was. For me it started out on the 5 . I took Pat to the doctor up in Tulsa that day. It was rainy and cold and when we arrived it was slick, icy and 23 degrees F. But we made it home okay only to watch our weather just grow colder and colder.
Read moreIt was said, more out of hope than reality back during the election, that Joe Biden was a centrist not a radical. Sounded good. But about what? Being a centrist. he would pay less attention to the extreme right wing. And is Biden “one of them?” Did we at last elect a Truman Democrat? And what did the “warmers” really want? After day one we found out. The Keystone. The pipeline that passed just east of Allen and attracted so much attention from the metro press. How? Because a small band of protesters met the pipeline workers at every convenient highway crossing. They chained themselves to bulldozers, ditch digging machines after calling the TV stations. Hmm.
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Of the Five Tribes, the Cherokees were the largest holder of Africans as chattel slaves. By 1860 the Cherokees had 4,600 slaves. Many Cherokees depended on them as a bridge to white society.
Read moreAll of us are ready for a new year. Goodbye 2020, Hello 2021. A new start. An end to the Covid-19 Pandemic. All of us by now have seen friends and family hit or even now struggling with this deadly virus.
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