Woodstock, Vermont, has quintessential charm and so very, very much more

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Ree Drummond’s website, The Pioneer Woman, recently showcased “30 Nostalgic Photos of Main Street In Towns Across America.” Mainly, the scenes feature smaller towns not unlike one I grew up in 60 years ago in northeastern Oklahoma. Nowata was more impressive then, newer, fresher, still living a two-pronged life—farming and ranching and oil extracted from some of the world’s most productive shallow-well fields.

Or, perhaps, Nowata just appears that way in my memory. Though I know what it is today, I still see it the way it was. And it isn’t just that it physically looked more like the main streets in the photo essay. One of them is a scene down the street from the Woodstock Inn in the town of the same name. We’ve vacationed there often over the years, drawn to it by its endless star-turn and quintessential New England charm, a village that refuses to fade and still could come from a Norman Rockwell painting. (Besides, the Prince & the Pauper, in an alley off the main drag, is a great restaurant.)

We have visited in all seasons but our favorite falls between the end of leaf-peeping and the beginning ski season’s whoosh, when life feels all downhill. It is quieter in early-to- mid-November, the fireplace roaring in the grand lobby of the Inn, not every chair taken. The chill is on the air and early-morning walks can be shared, if briefly, with the children who attend the Woodstock elementary school across one of the Inn’s side streets.

The goodness of the people, as much as Woodstock’s physical attractiveness, make it what it is, a commonality that seems universal to small towns. That left a lasting impression on me, one I sought to share in Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart. Of course, I know Nowata—especially the Nowata of 1946-62—in a way I could never know Woodstock nor even another Oklahoma small town very much like Nowata.

Ree and Ladd Drummond have contributed much to remaking Pawhuska into something of a Woodstock of the Tall Grass Prairie. Physically, The Pioneer Woman’s  Mercantile and The Boarding House, described as eight suites of “cowboy luxury,” has become a magnet for visitors and has turned Pawhuska into a must-visit destination. I can remember going to Pawhuska but it was to see two of state’s best basketball players in 1960-61—Carlos Gripado and Charley Bighorse—in a cracker-box gym from which Gripado emerged an All-American who starred at the University of Tulsa and played in the NBA. The late Bighorse was Gripado’s lightning-quick All-State running mate. Together, they propelled the Huskies to their first basketball state championship.

Ree Drummond and Carlos Gripado share a common bond besides Pawhuska. (She grew up in nearby Bartlesville). Both are or have been in the food industry. The Pioneer Woman is, of course, a mainstay on The Food Network, and the Gripados, father and son Karlas, created their own smaller legend in Claremore. From a donut store that Carlos opened in a Texaco service station, he grew the business to include a lunch deli and then added a building in which Karlas, who studied mathematics while playing basketball at Creighton University but “loves to cook,” ran the kitchen for dinners.

“Each dish,” once wrote Scott Cherry, an old sportswriting friend who became a crack food writer/restaurant critic, “had the touch of a confident and creative cook.” This is how small-town businesses morph into more than might have been originally imagined and help to set their small towns apart. The 45-year legacy that was Gripado’s finally succumbed when 10 years after recession chipped away at the business’s success, Carlos and wife Adrienne, approaching 80, finally closed. He told the Claremore Daily Progress: “We’re just wore out and tired. I just wanted to quit and ride off into the sunset but that ain’t going to happen.” When you have been part of a community’s heartbeat, especially in a smaller town, people feel loss and love.

This is the way of small towns and I love them, while suffering with each ending. The loss of a person, a business’s closing, any chink in already threadbare armor can feel as if it is too much to bear. That’s why the small towns in the Main Street photo essay, even those somewhat larger, hit me right where I used to live.

I had visited a number of the towns celebrated: Bar Harbor, Maine (on a honeymoon after marrying this beautiful woman from Connecticut and having to go East to meet the in-laws); Galena, Illinois (a phenomenon that no-longer-new-wife still wants to revisit); Placerville, California (can’t miss this if you are forced to move to Northern California in high school and graduate from California State University at Chico (more humbly known as Chico State College when I was a student), and Eureka Springs, Arkansas (nice place but not as hot as Hot Springs where as a Tulsa Tribune sports columnist I sometimes took in the races but wrote more about the track and its people than the horseflesh, even though I grew up the son of a veterinarian knowing one end from the other). I also have ties with another of the 30 small towns—Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, where famous former Akron and Hudson, Ohio resident, John Brown died.

It would be fair to ask the question I have asked myself so many times I have lost count: If you love small towns, especially your hometown of Nowata, why not move there? In previous years I had an excuse (or something I used as an excuse). No work for writers in Nowata that would provide a living. I would have had to own the Nowata Star, write every word, and deliver the newspapers as I had growing up in order to earn a living.

Theoretically, since I am retired and only putter around on my website blog, this would be an ideal time to return to Nowata. I have been outvoted one-to-one. In addition, though I moved many times—too many—seeking the right (perfect?) job, it now feels as if it is too much to get out of own way most days much less move half-way across the country. Again. This leaves me at loose ends but with one partial consultation.

Even the woman who went on a honeymoon to Bar Harbor, Maine with me— for excitement, we saw Jaws in a musty theater—appreciates that I have pre-arranged for what will follow our final demise. Our cremains will be shipped to Nowata, there to be placed in a columbarium that is already in place next to gravesites of Mama and Daddy.

This woman loves Oklahoma—hey, she met me there—just not my small hometown.