Nowata, Oklahoma’s Cherokee Avenue—Heart of a Small Town and Memories

Screen Shot from Nowata.gov

When I wrote Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart, I omitted a word from the title—journalism. I wasn’t trying to deceive readers but in these days of deep distrust and even hatred for the news media, it seemed the judicious choice. Besides, journalists per se were not the target audience.

The title felt loaded—perhaps overloaded—with explanatory words. It didn’t need another. In more recent days, however, Juanita Clark, who once lived in the small town about which I wrote, reminded me that one never knows what will capture the fancy.

Juanita posted on Facebook a list that prompted an immediate and heartfelt response. It was a simple list: The names of streets in Nowata, Oklahoma. Her late husband Richard who owned and ran one of the purest examples of a small-town institution—Clark Hardware—had carried this list that longtime Nowata County Commissioner Orie T. Price titled simply “Street Guide, Nowata, Okla.”

Price handed out the guide to constituents, my parents among them. If the list was half as well received as I think it was, politician Orie was slicker than the oil beneath the best shallow fields anywhere. Ol’ Orie, who owned the John Deere dealership, when even a small farming country town that ran out of oil was big enough to own a Deere of its own.

The county commissioner made his guide useful by listing streets not alphabetically but according to their proximity to the major east-west and north-south thoroughfares that everyone knew. Maple and Cherokee—i.e. “East of Maple” and “West of Maple”, “North of Cherokee” and “South of Cherokee”—offered touchstones that even those who didn’t get to town much knew. “I lived in the country,” Pat Kelley Vaughan replied to Juanita’s post, “so didn’t know many street names until I was older.” Pat was taken by what I think Juanita knew would “sell” to those who have touched and been touched by Nowata.

Price’s practical tool remains just that, but it also—all these years later—has become a piece of nostalgia that sparked memories in many people. I’ll bet ol’ Orie never thought of that and was just being helpful to his constituents. He surely didn’t spend four years researching and writing his list and another year trying to interest people in its memories as I did with my book which the “Street Guide” left in the dust. It is a lesson that I am not too old to learn but one I am probably too old to apply to a next book that will be.

If I can’t add another book about my beloved Oklahoma to my resume, I can recognize what Juanita accomplished by passing on to her social media audience Orie Price’s Street Guide. She rekindled the spark that has always been in the minds of Nowatans. The response proves that. It also makes me a little jealous.

As Juanita pointed out in the back-and-forth with those who responded to her post—when I wrote this, 85 people had responded in one way or another, 57 comments had been posted and the post had been shared seven times—the “pattern (of) Indians and trees” had guided those who named streets. It might have been more a subconscious acknowledgment of principle influences on our lives. Only in recent times has everyone, at least in Oklahoma, come to understand that Nowata is a part of Cherokee Nation lands, important to its members and to non-indigenous people such as myself because of what the Cherokee Nation does to support not only its community but also its cities— education, health services, community projects that affect people from cradle to grave.

I lived on Cedar Street, East of Maple, and one of the fast friends about whom I wrote—the late, great Bucky Buck—lived on Hickory, West of Maple. Bucky was a devoted member of the Delaware Tribe so I know it pleased him that one of the streets North of Cherokee was Delaware. And, north of Nowata a few miles, is Delaware the town.

While I acknowledged in a response to Juanita’s post how being a paperboy for the Nowata Star in the 1950s had provided me a familiarity with the streets (especially in southeast Nowata), Jerry Stevens wrote that he and Clyde Ogden delivered the  Coffeyville Journal and “learned quite a bit of the streets,” including that on a long hill on South Hickory he had better keep his feet on the handle bars or lose them to a German Shepard. Perhaps my veterinarian father once kept that dog bitingly fit for the chase.

Ah, the things that we remember.

When Janet Cantrell read through the list of streets, she acknowledged there were some of which she had never heard—South Victoria, East Pocahontas, and Gott. To which, Juanita, always the teacher, replied that it is a “good idea to go down memory lane and envision people in their houses.”

April Dively, who is Orie Price’s great granddaughter, not only confirmed that Orie had owned the John Deere dealership but also posted a photo of a coffee mug inscribed: Price Implement Co./John Deere Sales and Service/Phone 233 NOWATA, OKLA. To which Juanita Clark replied about the three-digit phone number. When Mama taught me to make phone calls our number was 635. It, like 445 South Cedar, is embedded so deeply in my mind that it will forever be a touchstone of the place to which I will return when I die. Juanita, of course, can top that: Clark Hardware’s number once was 77. To which April Dively responded [edited]: “I’m loving so much that you posted this.”

Juanita even solved mysteries for those who contributed to her post. When Judi Strain Vanet lamented … “I guess I lived on an invisible street . . . Sunset Drive. Not on the list! LOL,” Juanita added context about Sunset Drive that should remind us not to make unnecessary changes for esthetics: “It at one time was Davis and then houses were built in your area, it became Sunset Drive and then when they were trying to make it more understandable for emergency personal it became Davis Drive.”

My childhood home no longer is listed as 445 S. Cedar St. The number must have been changed for a good reason—the tenant of the apartment which once was Daddy’s animal hospital bought our house when we moved and perhaps that might be an explanation—but my old, deteriorating mental faculties cannot accommodate this. My memories are my memories and, apparently, so are those that Juanita evoked.