(From 'MEMORIES 3') The Giant Slide on Lindsey Street, by the Taco Bell, was unanimously voted “Entertainment Facility Most Likely to Snap Your Spine and Smash Your Head Like a Coconut.” It towered over everything and stood as testament to two basic truths. First, hordes of class-action lawyers had yet to descend on Norman. Second, […]

(From 'MEMORIES 3') Getting up to “no good” used to be a whole lot of fun, and it didn’t hurt anyone. Making prank telephone calls was the easiest, cheapest, and “funnest” mischief you could get up to, at least from inside your own house. You just needed an extension phone and parents who were playing […]

(From MEMORIES 3) Rounding up prehistoric horny toads was a rite of passage for all Okie boys, but you only became a man when you looked death in the face and didn’t flinch. The North Base swimming pool was where many of us Nebraska Street boys became men. It was the perfect testing ground. After […]

(From 'Memories 3') By the time I was 12, I don’t think Mom was ever really shocked by what she found when emptying my jean pockets. Still, she might have raised an eyebrow the time she found half a dozen rolls of caps, a spent .410 shotgun shell, a 5-cent pack of BBs, some Black […]

(From 'Memories 3') It was May 8, 1970. Somehow, I’d managed to fly under the parental radar. Nothing to worry about. Just an eighth-grader going to see freaking Jimi Hendrix! Epic, I know. I was actually more into Chicago and Creedence Clearwater. But, even at 14, I sensed that the Hendrix concert in OU’s tiny […]

If your Mom loved you when you were very little, she would bathe you with Ivory soap, because it was made by angels or something. If your Mom was mad at you, maybe because you and Steve had given each other awesome moustaches using a black Magic Marker, and you had Church tomorrow, she would […]

(From my first "Memories" book, originally blogged May 27, 2013) I’ve been overseas for decades. But last week, in an instant, I felt Oklahoma red dirt in my veins as Mother Nature’s fury destroyed Moore. I was surprised and shaken by the intensity of emotions in my gut. I felt terror and helplessness as I […]

(Book 2) I was just a gleam in my Dad’s eye when he started at the Norman Fire Department, maybe a decade after he did his stint in the Navy during WWII. I didn’t get to bask in the glory, as did my older sisters, when Dad and other firemen visited grade schools to teach […]

(Book 1) The world was a better place when Wacker's, not Walmart, was the place to buy your stuff, especially at Christmas! The Wacker's in Norman was on the corner of Crawford & Comanche, sort of round the back from Main Street, in the low rent part of downtown. It was always busy. You had […]

(Book 2) When I wasn’t being a sheriff-cowboy, kicking Black Bart’s buttooskies and roping stampeding cows, I was showing off my Potawatomi heritage. That meant roaming the vast prairie at 851 Nebraska Street, wearing my Indian headdress and killing buffalo with my trusty bow and arrows. I think bow-and-arrow sets cost less than a dollar, […]