Way back in 1975 I learned that Oklahoma had just opened a new dental school, so I flew in from a U.S. Public Health Service assignment in Maine looking for a job. I expected to find a depressing place with lots of downcast people wishing they had enough gas in their pickup trucks to make it all the way to California—or at least as far a Texas. If I got the job, I figured it would be a start in academics but I probably wouldn’t want to stick around.
The state turned out to be nothing like I imagined.
For one thing, Oklahoma Native Americans don’t look or act anything like the ones I watched in western movies as a child. There are no pure-blooded tribal members. Perhaps there never really were. Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek, European, African, Jewish, Asian, Middle Eastern and Hispanic are blended together into a very special kind of human being. The Native Americans have moved on in the last hundred plus years, and everybody else has moved on with them.
Okies are a work in progress.
You’re allowed to call us that. We’re easy going people with a unique brand of humor, music, and philosophy. We have Oklahoma literature too.
My stories will be mostly what this site is all about. Every thing I write, whether it is non-fiction or fiction is saturated with as much Oklahoma as it will hold.
There will be other things as well:
Places I go—and I go a lot of places.
Things I think are interesting.
Whatever strikes me at the moment.
The world is a fascinating place when you look at it from an Oklahoma point of view. Give it a try.