Photo by Stephen Pedersen on Unsplash
Daddy would hate my most recent book, Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart, and he would have cause. It isn’t about him. He takes a backseat to Mama. Worse, I didn’t treat him well as I might have.
Consider this a mea culpa, though being the subject of a blog post is not tantamount to being the protagonist on the pages of a full-blown book. This is not my attempt at the literary equivalent of make-up sex, which may exist only in movies and the minds of wishful-thinkers. The closest this comes to that is an acknowledgement that I had my way with Daddy as once he did with me. The difference is I used words and he a razor strop. The former may have hurt more had Daddy been alive to read them.
How Daddy comes off in the book is not an inaccurate portrayal. His decision to uproot me from the place I loved caused me pain far worse than any stropping I endured. But what I wrote was not payback. I know I was luckier than most to have a father who tried in many ways to make my life better than the one he had had in his large family.
Though I tried to balance our conflict with a portrait of a man who taught me how to center a football better than I could have hoped to without him and did not stop there. He could fix most anything and was almost as smart as he thought he was. I wish I had listened when he tried to teach me how to repair the car he bought me before I could drive legally. Such a thing was not uncommon in rural small-town Oklahoma.
He was attempting to address a concern Mama had from the time I was young. “If you don’t learn how to repair what goes wrong,” she often told me, “you had better make a lot of money because you are going to always be giving it to someone to do that for you.” I was 0-for-2. I didn’t learn to fix things, and I did not make a lot of money.
I was stubborn little cuss, too busy playing whatever sport was in season, to take a longer view of what might be important. My parents bought a piano on which I learned to play but, as with car repair, I dodged out whenever a ball bounced my way. Eventually abandoned for good, the piano made a nice conversation piece in our modest home. I wish I had stuck with that piano but there were lessons I learned.
When I was not satisfied with a used Cushman Eagle motor scooter that I think was a first attempt to interest me in learning to repair what went wrong with things, I went to work to buy a new one. I delivered newspapers from an early age and banked the money. I followed the example of my father’s hard work as a veterinarian and Mama’s careful way with money to save enough to buy a new Cushman Eagle. Hot pink. It was something of a fashion statement in 1950s Nowata, Oklahoma. It and I got attention.
Attention, of course, is what Daddy wanted. OK, not attention, exactly, but a means to bond with his son. He never quite found it, and that was more son’s fault than father’s. Mama had the perfect means: football. She used it to forge a bond with her “little Stevie.” She knew what the game—all games—meant to me, and she was my biggest cheerleader. My father was proud, too, but sometimes he got carried away. I explain this in some detail in the book, and even that took a bad turn when we moved to California and my father oversold my abilities to my new football coaches.
He made me out to be the hero that he always thought himself to be—and, in truth, sometimes was. When my Oklahoma girlfriend visited a sister who lived in California, I drove to the sister’s home to see her. Love sick puppy that I was I locked my keys in the car when I arrived. Instead of seeking a locksmith—or cop with a tool to pop the lock open—I telephoned home and my father drove quite a distance with a spare set of keys. He could be like that, and I suppose I took advantage of it, if uncalculatedly.
When I became a writer my father, both indirectly and directly, informed me I should write a book about him. He had known Will Rogers and worked as a driver for the famous Oklahoman who was born not far from where my father grew up. Rogers, of course, was a famous raconteur and humorist. Daddy fancied himself as Will Rogers and James Herriot all rolled into one. I demurred, because I doubted Daddy’s favorite topic—How He Quashed an Outbreak of Brucellosis in Oklahoma Moo-Boogies with His Bare Hands—would be as appealing as Herriot’s book All Things Great and Small.
Brucellosis, for those who did not grow up in a veterinarian’s household, is a “contagious, costly disease of ruminant (e.g. cattle and bison) that also affects humans.” That would be Daddy and, by extension, Mama and Little Stevie, and the manifestation in humans is known as undulant fever. Infected cattle can suffer “decreased milk production, weight loss, young infertility, and lameness.” In other words, it can wreak havoc on herds and thus agriculture economies. There is no known cure.
My father, by this time a vet with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, led a team in Northeast Oklahoma in a Cooperative State-Federal Brucellosis Eradication Program. They worked out of Vinita, less than 30 miles from my home in Nowata. Daddy became a stranger during this period in order to protect us from the disease. As a sidelight, we got along better than ever and I was proud of him for what he was doing.
Toward the end of his career, back in Oklahoma from California, he helped to protect magnificent buffalo in Southwest Oklahoma from the same disease and others. It always struck me as odd, Daddy, older and not as strong, had to work with animals even larger than those that had once convinced him private practice was for younger men. To hear Daddy tell it, though, the bison let him skate right through taking care of them, and Country Music Hall of Famer Roger Miller, born in Texas but Oklahoma reared, was a little off key with his wonderful You Can’t Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd. Miller obviously had not had the pleasure of listening to Dr. Clarence A. Love’s exploits.
