Norman Oklahoma is just a little south of the center of Sooner Land, and also one state south and a little east of the geographic center of the U.S. (Lebanon, Kansas). Norman is at the western edge of the Bible belt, just below the western edge of "the Midwest" and at the upper west edge of "the South".
Sooners is the name given to settlers in the Midwest of the United States who entered the Unassigned Lands in what is now the state of Oklahoma before President Grover Cleveland officially proclaimed them open to settlement on March 2, 1889 with the Indian Appropriations Act of 1889. The name derived from the "sooner clause" of the Act, which stated that anyone who entered and occupied the land prior to the opening time would be denied the right to claim land.
Sooners were often deputy marshals, land surveyors, railroad employees, and others who were able to legally enter the territory early. Some Sooners crossed into the territory illegally at night, and were originally called "moonshiners" because they entered "by the light of the moon." These Sooners would hide in ditches at night and suddenly appear to stake their claim after the land run started, hours ahead of legal settlers. For anyone who doesn't follow college football, Sooners is also the name of the University of Oklahoma football team.
When we moved to Norman late in the summer of 1951, the population was around 28,000. Today the population has grown to 115,000. The city is named for Abner Norman, who headed a federal work crew surveying the empty lands along the Arbuckle Trail (a feeder route to the Chisholm trail along which cattle were driven from Texas to Kansas).
As a child growing up in Norman I learned many things about the town and the area. Coming from Kansas and Ohio where the soil is black, the red soil of Oklahoma was a new experience, and I think also a new experience for our mom doing laundry. Oklahoma soil is red because it contains iron minerals such as hematite and ferrihydrite which oxidize or rust creating the distinctive color.
Dust from Oklahoma during the 30s was blown as far north as Canada and as far East as the Atlantic Ocean. Although Oklahoma is often associated with the Dust Bowl, it actually only affected the Oklahoma Panhandle. Drought in the years 1934-37 occurred on grasslands that had been plowed and planted with wheat to meet the demands of World War I. With no grass root system to hold the soil in place, it simply blew away. My most prominent memory of the red dirt was in fourth grade when I attended a new Madison elementary school. On windy days we would come in from recess and have to take wet paper towels and clean the red dust off our desks before we could use them. I can also remember driving with my family when the red dust was blowing so severely in places along the highway that it was almost impossible to see.
Another thing in Norman that was red (besidesthe colors of O.U., which are actually crimson and cream) was the color of rose rocks. I can't remember where we found these but I am pretty sure I still have one in one of my boxes of childhood rocks.
Rocks resembling full-grown roses were formed by barite rock crystals during the Permian Age and are found in a few rare places around the globe. In Oklahoma, the distinctive red soil colors them in hues ranging from reddish brown to cinnamon. According to an old Cherokee legend, the rocks represent the blood of the braves and the tears of the maidens who made the devastating "Trail of Tears" journey to Oklahoma in the 1800s. Rose rocks are aggregates of barite (barium sulfate) crystals and sand whose iron content gives them a reddish hue. The barite crystals form a circular array of flat plates, giving the rock a shape similar to a rose blossom. Rose rocks appear either as a single rose-like bloom or as clusters of blooms, with sizes ranging from pea sized to four inches (20 cm) in diameter. The rose rock was selected as the official state rock of Oklahoma in 1968.
For a growing child, Norman had lots of advantages (ranked no.6 on CNN Money's Best Places to Live in 2008). There was plenty of empty land just across the street from the edge of any of the housing areas and plenty of places to ride bikes and dig forts in the trees and johnson grass. As a boy scout, we only had to drive a few minutes outside town to get to places to camp and hike.
We lived in a new area close to the University of Oklahoma where there were tons of young kids to play with.
Even though the wind blows a lot in Oklahoma and it gets freezing cold in the winter and hot enough to fry eggs on the sidewalk in the summer, there were lots of beautiful days to play and ride to the university or to friends houses. It was considered safe at the time for kids to ride several miles from home. We only had to let our parents know where we were going and when we would be back. And of course, there was always something going on at the university, especially football.
Norman was also centrally located and just south of the state capitol, Oklahoma City. We went to the capitol city many times through the years for shopping excursions, scout expositions, band competitions, tennis matches, state championship football games and numerous other reasons. The central location also made it easy to take family trips to many of scenic state parks of Oklahoma.
Travelling though the state made it obvious that there is much Indian heritage in Oklahoma. The "Trail of Tears" ended in Oklahoma. The Five Civilized Tribes were the five Native American nations: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole who lived in the Southeastern United States before the government forced their relocation under Indian Removal to other parts of the country, especially the future state of Oklahoma. The tribes were relocated from their homes east of the Mississippi River over several decades during the series of removals, authorized by federal legislation.
They moved to what was then called Indian Territory, now the eastern portion of the state of Oklahoma. The most infamous removal was the Cherokee Trail of Tears of 1838, when President Martin Van Buren enforced the highly contentious Treaty of New Echota with the Cherokee Nation to exchange their property for land out west. Once the tribes had been relocated to Indian Territory, the United States government promised that their lands would be free of white settlement. Some settlers violated that with impunity even before 1893, when the government opened the "Cherokee Strip" to outside settlement in the Oklahoma Land Run. In 1907, the Oklahoma Territory and the Indian Territory were merged to form the state of Oklahoma. All Five Civilized Tribes continue to have a major presence in Oklahoma today.
When we moved to Norman, we had never experienced a tornado. While we were there we had the privilege of living through several, but none ever caused any damage to anything close to us. When the weather warnings would suggest a tornado coming, we would quickly gather a few essentials and head for the basement of the Education building at the university. I remember three stories about tornadoes.
When we started attending the University laboratory school on the "north campus" (former naval base), we saw that there were quite a few foundations where buildings had been. These naval base buildings had actually been leveled by a previous tornado.
The second story occurred on one of my grandmother Edward's visits. We heard that a tornado was coming and scurried to go to the university, but were delayed while my grandmother had to put of her new girdle. She couldn't be seen in public without it.
The final story was when I was in high school. We had been in Oklahoma City playing a tennis match and returned to the high school just as it was starting to rain and the tornado sirens were sounding. So we just stayed at school and played basketball till it had past. Oops, forgot to call the parents and tell them where we were. Of course they were happy just to know we were OK, and as always anger is preceded by fear and once the fear was over the anger didn't last long.
My father's association with the college of education at the university gave me a life-long respect for teachers. It turns out that he a faculty member in the early 50s when the college played a supporting role in one of the U.S. Supreme Court's most important rulings.
In 1950, the Supreme Court ruled that George McLaurin, an African-American retired educator, had the right to pursue a graduate degree at the College alongside white students. McLaurin had been admitted to the College but had to attend separately from white students, as required by Oklahoma's "equal-but-separate" law, which he successfully challenged.
McLaurin’s case was the climax of the NAACP’S campaign between 1930 and 1950 to overturn the separate-but-equal doctrine in graduate and professional schools. This laid the groundwork for the landmark 1954 decision, Brown v. the Board of Education, which ended school segregation. My father was faculty advisor to multiple graduate student during his time at OU and I remember that a number of them were African-American.
Norman was hard to leave, especially between sophomore and junior year in high school. My mom says in her autobiography that I cried most of the way as we drove to New Mexico.
But as always is true, the turns in the road lead to new adventures and to new times of life that continue to add to our history and our knowledge of the world and our self.
