Clem McSpadden gave fellow Oklahoman Reba McIntire a leg up as a rodeo National Anthem singer

oklahoman.com Photo

When they auction off the flotsam and jetsam of a life, especially an important one, the memories that come with the items can prove not only personal but also existential. If I were not at a stage of life when I should be discarding rather than collecting, I might have bid on any number of things from the Clem McSpadden Collection.

By both birth and accomplishment, Clem Rogers McSpadden was important to Oklahomans in almost too many ways to enumerate. Beyond the state, he was known as the Golden Voice of Rodeo. Much of his memorabilia comes from more than six decades of association with the sport, including running the National Finals Rodeo. He announced rodeos—including on national television—in 41 states and was the first American voice of the most famous Canadian rodeo of them all, the Calgary Stampede.

As if to prove that he was not all voice and no cowboy, Clem announced the stampede from horseback after, I’m sure, first reading “A Cowboy’s Prayer” which he wrote and liked to recite to open each session. We Oklahomans, especially those of us who grew up in the northeast part of the state, like Clem, listened to one of our own not because he spoke melodiously or inherited from his grand/great uncle Will the Rogers name but because he spoke for us. He spoke first in the State Senate, then briefly in the United States House of Representatives, and, if it hadn’t been for David Boren he might also have become governor. Boren, governor, U.S. Senator, and longtime president of the University of Oklahoma, was an even greater Okie political force than McSpadden.

I doubt, though, that Boren could sit a horse like Clem.

As reminders, there were saddles, spurs, and other rodeo paraphernalia aplenty among the 800 lots from the McSpadden Estate that Chupps Auction and Real Estate in Inola, Oklahoma, has been putting the finishing touches on auctioning online. Dale Chupps told The Oklahoman’s Ed Godfrey that his firm was auctioning more than 7,500 items and perhaps as many as 10,000. That’s a lot of memories, and included were political books and other items such as a Rogers County History with Will Rogers on the cover. Clem grew up on humorist, writer Will Rogers’ ranch near Oologah which Clem’s father, Herb, managed. There was even a Rogers family photo in the collection.

That would not only have had monetary worth but also personal value to me. My father knew the McSpaddens well and often drove Will Rogers to off-ranch obligations he had when he returned home. That was before Daddy worked the oil fields and became a veterinarian, first in private practice and then with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Daddy had been born in Chelsea, where Clem kept an office in retirement and from which most of the items not retained by his family came. I had my eye on some spurs with the initials CM on them, but I don’t have a horse, and they might not fit our décor.

I don’t need spurs to remember Clem. I have my battered, been-through-the-washer Social Security card. He died in 2008 from cancer at age 82, and his wife, Donna, died in 2020, which is the reason that Chupps has been auctioning parts of their estate. What Clem McSpadden left me might not fit into any of the lots. It is a lifetime interest in the political process, something I witnessed long before I became journalist who would ended a more than 40-year career by writing editorials and a weekly column for the Akron Beacon Journaleditorial page, which is a long way from Nowata, Oklahoma.

It was, I think, 1958—I’m not quite sure of the year or exact date—when Clem gave two kids from Nowata, Steve Lieb and me, the opportunity to serve as pages in the Oklahoma Senate. We carried messages from one Senate office to another and onto the floor of the Senate chamber, because, I guess, they had not yet heard of the Internet, email and text messaging. If I have the year 1958 correct, I deduced it from a two-paragraph item in the then Nowata Daily Star. The yellowed clipping announcing that Steve and Steve were pages, was among others from that year in a scrapbook that Mama kept of her only child. I would have been 12 years old, which seems young to be flitting about the State Capitol in Oklahoma’s largest city and capitalbut then, Mama prized and taught independence. (Right up until I became a little too independent for her taste; read more about that in Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns.)

To work in this big-boy job for which Little Stevie would be paid money that would be reported to the Internal Revenue Service, I had to have a Social Security number. It did not matter that the position was mostly educational and ceremonial and lasted for only a week. Rules are rules. I’m sure Clem or one of his better paid (than pages), older staff members explained this to us. So Steve Lieb and I filled out the forms to receive the number that will follow us till death us do part.

I can’t, of course, share that number with you because I don’t know you and you might try to steal my identity, though heaven knows why anyone would want it. I’m nobody. I am, though, the only person with the number I received before returning to Nowata Junior High. But for Clem, I might not have it and be able to recite it so readily even though I have gotten old and cannot seem to remember what I ate for dinner last night.

Mama and Daddy had been dragging me with them to the polls so they could vote for Clem McSpadden since at least 1954 when he first won an Oklahoma Senate seat from one of the two Senate districts he served over 18 years, including two terms as Senate president pro tempore. Even after he left politics, he remained a part of it as a legislative consultant and lobbyist. I’m not sure what his Uncle Will would have thought about Clem’s political and post-political career, given his stinging criticism of the profession, but I do think he would have appreciated his great nephew’s ability to use the English language in comparing his life’s most important pieces—rodeo and politics. Clem sounded like Uncle Will when quoted by the Tulsa World as observing that  “there’s an amazing correlation between the two arenas, in that there is bull in each profession.”

That’s no bull, and neither is what Clem Rogers McSpadden left behind, and I do not mean the memorabilia that Chupps has been auctioning off to the highest online bidders. Roads and buildings are named after him in my neck of Oklahoma, and he was awarded practically every rodeo honor anyone ever conceived. No one will forget Clem and certainly not me as long as people keep asking for my Social Security number.