Cole Brooks (left); wife Pam (left) receives a stuffed EMS insignia bear from Lindsey McClain

Nowata Star photo by Mike Bryant

Even before the name Cole Brooks fully registered from the PBS NewsHour’s “In Memoriam,” a weekly segment that honors some of those lost to COVID-19, his hometown and mine thundered from the television and struck as if a bolt of lightning.

It is not a hometown often heard on a national news program:

Nowata, Oklahoma . . . setting for a part of my book Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart and center of Mr. Brooks’ life.

Judy Woodruff, anchorwoman and managing editor of the NewsHour, pronounced the name of the small town in northeast Oklahoma with a little too much emphasis on the second syllable—no-WAT-ah—but it hardly mattered. The town’s name is pronounced with a gentler, softer lilt and it helps to get it right if you have an Oklahoma twang. Nowata has always confused people a bit. County seat of the like-named county, Nowata is situated in the Cherokee Nation. See, I told you: confusing.

Multiple stories exist concerning the origin of the town’s name. It probably is a bastardization from the Delaware word—no-we-ata—which means “welcome,” but there are taller tales. One is that someone posted a “No Wata” sign as a warning after coming across a dried-up spring. And, a favorite but surely apocryphal, is that a painter screwed up the name he plastered on the town’s railroad depot. In any case, Nowata is special.

It certainly was for and to Cole Brooks.

I did not know Mr. Brooks, but I have known others like him from Nowata—those who loved this little town in a big way and devoted themselves to it beyond all expectation. That was Mr. Brooks, who was 60 when he died January 4 from COVID-19 complications. He had worked as a paramedic with the Nowata Fire & Emergency Services Department for eight-and-a-half years. He did have to take time off in 2018.

Mr. Brooks had cancer and spent two months at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Even as he was enduring chemotherapy and radiation treatment, he spent time cheering up other patients and sharing with them his great faith. He might just have mentioned he was a cowboy, as well as a paramedic. How could he not? As Judy Woodruff told the nation, “He was a cowboy through and through” and three photos of Mr. Brooks that appeared on the screen during her voiceover made that obvious.

There was a younger Mr. Brooks, big, dark cowboy hat on his head, lasso in his right hand as it rested on his knee, left thumb hooked through a belt loop above his chaps. In a second photo, Mr. Brooks, sunglasses-cool beneath a brown cowboy hat as he sits astride a chestnut horse, chaps on, looks as if he is ready to wade into the middle of cattle herd, which is what he did for numerous ranches before he became a paramedic. His obituary in the Nowata Star noted that Mr. Brooks was a “rough around the edges cowboy” but his softer side appears evident in the third photo and in how he lived.

In that third photo, decked out in a dressier black cowboy hat, brim fashioned upward, Mr. Brooks is sitting with sons Seth and Kaleb. His shirt, open collar, is also black but, typically Nowata, over a white T-shirt. Anyone might see in the photo how much Mr. Brooks wanted to get home from Houston, not only to be with his entire family but also to take care of those he called “his people.” That included whoever who needed him.

Nowata EMS Director Nancy Brooks (no relation to Cole) told the Star’s Denton Thomason that one of those who needed Mr. Brooks had turned out to be Rick Brooks. “He saved my husband’s life in October,” she explained to the weekly newspaper. “He had a heart attack and Cole was there and did what he had to do in the back of the ambulance. He is a hero to me. He saved so many lives, and we couldn’t save him . . . ”

The EMS Director said Mr. Brooks, “came back to work after having cancer treatment because somebody might be sicker than he was. We’d tell him to go home and he just wouldn’t.” Nowata, like many small towns, has problems it did not have when I grew up there from 1946 to 1962—less money and more crime to name two. But Mr. Brooks proves that some of the people are similar to those who made me feel so loved.

He was hospitalized on a ventilator in December at nearby, larger Bartlesville for 18 days before succumbing, according to the Nowata Star. In a small town one death can weigh move heavily on those left behind than it does in the anonymity of a big city. That was Mr. Brooks’ death. “It has brought us to our knees,” his boss said. “It’s a horrible loss for our department and a horrible loss to the community. He was true and dedicated.”

Even in death he was still giving. Cole Brooks’ life, so well lived, brought not only himself but his small town to the attention of the nation. The PBS NewsHour shined a spotlight on Mr. Brooks and “his people” and the goodness of both. Nowata’s first responders, led by Mr. Brooks’ ambulance, formed a convoy of vehicles that ended with two fire engines to, as Judy Woodruff put it, “bring him home one last time.” He may have returned as cremated remains but Mr. Brooks will live on in Nowata’s big heart.

In May, the Nowata Area Chamber of Commerce honored Cole Brooks posthumously as its Hero of the Year and it did so, I believe, not only for the lives he saved, such as that of Rick Brooks, but also for the everyday ways in which he was there for “his people.” “He always volunteered to work rodeos,” his family explained, “local football games, fireworks displays, and any other community event that might need medical backup. That’s the kind of man he was: Nowata’s Humble Hero.”

Nowata, on January 16, 2021, celebrated the life of Cole Brooks at the Nowata Fire & EMS Annex Building in Jack Gordon Park. The annex, once the National Guard Armory, is located a half block from the house where I lived. Some of us wayward kids used to sneak into the Armory because we liked to check out the goodies the Army kept there. I don’t ever remember seeing a hero but perhaps I did not know what one looked like.

Now, I do.