Oklahoma Voices: Kenneth Watson

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Transcript:

Melba: Good evening. Judge Watson. How are you today?

Kenneth: I'm just fine. Thank you

Melba: We are just really honored that you would take time from your busy schedule to participate in our project called the Oklahoma voices. It's the Centennial project for the metro library. Okay, we're going to start with your name. Could you give us your name?

Kenneth: My name is Kenneth Watson.

Melba: And your birthday

Kenneth: I was born January 19, 1944 in a little town called Beggs Oklahoma

Melba: And where we're located.

Kenneth: We're at the Ralph Ellison Library at 23rd and Martin Luther King

Melba: You were born in Beggs, Oklahoma. Where did you grow up?

Kenneth: I grew up in Shawnee.

Melba: What was it like?

Kenneth: You want the full story? so I'm very lonely, but my dad after he graduated from Langston moved back home, which was Boley, Oklahoma and he took a job coaching football in Boley. That was during the time when Boley had a football team back in the back in the late 30s early 40s, and my older brother was born in Boley . My dad took another coaching position because I think Boley eliminated football. So my dad moved to Beggs to coach at Deck Wheatley High School and I was born in Beggs in 1944. At the end of that school year, my granddad was the principal of Dunbar High School in Shawnee, Oklahoma, so he offered my dad a job to come there and coach football. So we moved to Shawnee and my sister who is one year younger, so we were stair stepped. I was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma, I grew up in Shawnee with one thought in mind and that was to go to Shawnee Dunbar High School. That was what, but I had a detour along the way because of nepotism. My mom who was also a school teacher and a graduate of Langston could not teach in the same school as my dad because of the relationship. I never figured out how my granddad and my dad worked with the same school, but my mom could not teach there. So she took a job in a little place called Earlsboro which is about five miles from Shawnee and Earlsboro went from the first grade to the eighth grade. And after that was the consolidated school system then so Shawnee had Earlsboro, McCloud to come to Newalla and a little school called ? Tucker and if you ask me to for the spelling out I couldn't begin to do that.

Melba: But that's good history.

Kenneth: it was a little two room Schoolhouse and as my mom my mom taught grades Kindergarten through third and a lady by the name of Mary Anne Logan, Margaret Logan taught fourth through eighth grade and it's been that way for many many years. So my sister, my brother and myself, we rode with my mom every morning to Earlsboro, which is about a five-mile ride, and I went through one through three in her kindergarten through three in her classroom. There was a curtain that separated the two divisions and we had Christmas programs that we had Thanksgiving programs and my mom played the piano. We learned all the songs still coming around the mountain and all of that but as the as the kids graduated from Earlsboro they went to Shawnee High School, Shawnee Dunbar and it was it was a big thing because my dad was a coach there and everybody knew my dad and you know, because of his position he coached all athletics. My brother talked my mom and my dad into letting him go to Dunbar early before he finished eighth grade. So he got to go to Shawnee Dunbar when he got to the sixth grade, but my sister and I and our devotion was to my mom. We rode every day, day in and day out, rain sleet or snow we rode from Shawnee to Earlsboro and one of the persons that was there was Anita Orange she also went to school because her family is from down there and she's head of Black Incorporated now and she reminded me of that. My mother used to pick her up on the road to the school because all the kids rode before the school bus system. Well when I graduated the eighth grade all my dreams fell apart because that was in 1957 and all the schools in Oklahoma, integrated so I never I never got to Shawnee Dunbar. You know, my whole life was about Dunbar. My Aunt taught there. My grandfather was principal. My dad was a coach. All the people that lived around us taught there or went there. I lived across the street from Shawnee Dunbar. I never ever took a class in Shawnee Dunbar.

Melba: You need to name your relatives that worked there.

Kenneth: I haven't and I have an aunt who is still living who was about 95 years old and her name is Johnetta Barber. She was one of the Men Crown Queens. She taught there. I had another Aunt Myrtle Graham who also taught in the Dungee elementary schools there and my and of course my grandfather Emmanuel Watson and then my dad who was also Emmanuel Watson. We all live all their so school was just like home for me. I mean, but anyway and as life would have it I was I was given that one disappointment in life by having not being able to go to the high school. And so I've spent my high school years at Shawnee and Shawnee High School, which was in the middle of integration. But by that time half the kids that I went to school with had dropped out of school. So in my graduating class, which was probably about 380 people there were only six blacks. I started with 30 and have a six of us who graduated in 1961 the Shawnee High School, but my dad came, well, they eliminated football they eliminated at High School athletics at Shawnee Dunbar because of the integration they made Shawnee Dunbar grades kindergarten through sixth so my dad stayed there but he also taught. He was one of the assistant coaches at the high school. He was the only black on staff, you know, he was one of the tokens of integration. You he probably knew more and he had more knowledge of football and all the coaches put together, but I went to Shawnee High School and well, I went to Shawnee Junior High started Shawnee Junior has a 9th grader and it was a less than eventful experience because we walk to schools before bussing. They didn't bus any black kids back then. We live we live south of the tracks. So we all walk together and as we grow older we kind of fizzled and the black enrollment at Shawnee High School when I graduated was probably no more than 20 students. Where Shawnee Dunbar used to graduate somewhere between 30 and 50 students every year. Those numbers dwindle and one of the reasons that it dwindled is be because the kids that came from Mcloud left Dunbar to go to Mcloud high school and those kids at Tecumseh left to go to Tecumseh high school and then Newalla was taken into the Oklahoma school system. So I think most of those kids want to Star Spencer and so we lost enrollment that way and lost a lot of friends in that way, but Shawnee High School Made up of those kids from Shawnee and it didn't it didn't last very long there weren’t any black teachers at Shawnee High School, but we made it through. I made it through. My brother graduated the year before me. We were the three that my brother and myself and then a couple other guys were the only ones that participated in athletics and Shawnee High School history.

Melba: What did you all do?

Kenneth: We play football we, we ran track we played basketball we did it all I mean Shawnee, had a good program. It wasn't a winning program, it was a good program, but we didn't get the benefit of that home school, which is what was going on before segregation. You have any kind you didn't have anything close to the problems that you had now because some of the things that I run into today would have been just out of place in Shawnee when I was growing up because there's no such thing as not being able to discipline a child, you know, you got whipped in school and if you can you got home you got whipped at home, and it was no, there was no fear from the parents that they would be held accountable for disciplining a child. So you didn't have you didn't have problems the way you have them now, you know, I mean guns were unheard of back then handguns drugs were unheard of back then and we were a very close community in those on the south side of the Shawnee the black kids and we didn't we didn't mean you'll be and I we had our own little pool, We had our own little Community Center and we did well. We did well. Everybody that graduated from high school in Shawnee went on to do something, even went to the service. They went to Langston, or a predominantly black University and all did remarkably well. That whole thing fell apart after integration and that's not to say that integration is bad, but we lost something in the community that is never been reconstructed because when they talk about it takes a village to raise a child that was typical in the state of Oklahoma as well as probably the nation because adults took rearing and training a child seriously, whether it was your child, it was a next-door neighbor's child or it was somebody that you knew they all took a part in training a child. So you didn't have if you if you are out on the streets and you doing something wrong and someone saw it they were going to come and tell your parents and your parents were not going to be vindictive towards that person. They were going to accept that and discipline accordingly. So you didn't have you didn't have… there was a solution called bully the Boley training school for boys back then and was for black kids and nobody from Shawnee that I ever knew ever wound up at any of those facilities and I'm sure that there was some there because my dad was a very good friend of the head Master Wayne Chandler who probably know what everybody knows as the big politician in Oklahoma today and he has he has earned at the station, but he began his career in at Boley at the Boley training school for boys. But anyway.

Melba: This is important history. I never made that association.

Kenneth: Langston was the common thread in probably 90% of all the black Educators and Professionals in the state of Oklahoma because Langston was there when no one else, no one else was there for you, you know, if a kid had a little money they may wind up going to Howard or Wilberforce or one of the other black institutions, but for the most part Langston was there for those who wanted an education who didn't have the money or wanted to stay home, stay close to home. So what I lost with Johnny Dunbar by integration, I regained all again, when I went to Langston, because I was in a black setting. I was with people from all walks of life from all the cities in Oklahoma as well as around the country. Probably the best four years of my life were spent at Langston University. And ironically my granddad back in 1901 was one of the first professors who came to Langston from Texas to teach mathematics at Langston University, So I'm basically a third-generation Watson who was going to Langston University.

Melba: And your granddad.

Kenneth: My granddad is Emmanuel Watson. He came to Oklahoma from a place called Big Sandy, Texas. I've heard rumors that they were run out of town because my granddad was too uppity. My granddad's dad. And so they moved out of Texas Big Sandy, Texas, which is right outside of Marshall Texas back before the turn of the century my grand dad graduated from Wiley College, right there in Marshall, Texas? And he took a principalship there in Texas, but because of whatever this incident was they moved to Boley, and Boley was sending out flyers urging people, urging black people to come to Boley because this was a self-sustaining community. They had their own banks. They had their own supermarkets. They had people that were doing things, they had their own school system. They were self-sufficient. So my granddad seized upon that it was right after the Oklahoma Land Run and he moved his whole family to Boley. Well, my granddad being an educated took a job at Langston University teaching mathematics, and I think Langston University had been in existence about five years when he when he when he took his position there, but shortly after he was there he was called to come to Ardmore and my granddad was the first principle of Ardmore Douglas High School and that was back in the teens he taught there for a while and then he moved with my family my dad and his sisters, to Luther and he was principal of Booker T Washington High School in Luther Oklahoma and then my granddad moved to Boley and he was he was he was principal at Boley for one year that he moved to Shawnee and he was he was principal and Shawnee Dunbar from there the late 20s through the early 50s like ‘55, ‘56 when he retired so I had a connection I didn't have a choice when I'm not that I wanted one when I when I graduated from high school, my dad told me there's one or two one or two things that you can do. You can go to the Army which I knew I didn't want to do or you can go Langston and there's no other choices for me. And so I went to Langston and I walked onto the football team and I played football for four years at Langston and I was always a year behind my brother. My brother was always number he was 25 and I was 24 in high school. He was 15 and I was 14 and in college and so we were always together. I graduated Langston in 65 my brother graduated in 64 and my sister graduated in 66. Well by the time my sister graduated my parents had moved out to Langston and they were both teaching at Langston by the time my sister got to be a senior and they did that until my dad retired in 75 and my mom retired in 82 but I went on to Cleveland looking for adventure. I was going to play professional football, I thought and my brother went to medical school. He went to the University of Oklahoma. And at that time we are talking 1966. He was probably the second Afro-American that had gone into the University of Oklahoma medical school and he paid for it because rather than spending. For years, which was normal. They made him spend an extra year there at the University of Oklahoma,

Melba: Your brother’s name ?

Kenneth: My brother's name is Dr. John Watson.

Melba: Your sister’s name ?

Kenneth: Yeah my sister's name is Glenda Watson also known as Glenda Moss now. She's living in Cleveland. She and I went to Cleveland together. I went to play football. She went to teach school and that's where I wound up going to law school. I graduated from Cleveland Marshall High School, Cleveland, Marshall School of Law in 1976 passed the Ohio bar and worked for the District Attorney's Office in Ohio for about five years. My dad got sick and eventually passed in 1981. So I came back home to be with my mom and I began my practice here. I started with the public defender's office downtown. T Hurley Jordan who was the public defender at the time and I worked there for a year-and-a-half and in Ohio I worked in the prosecutor's office. So I saw the law from the side of prosecution, you know, when I came to Oklahoma I wanted to see the other side and so I went into the defensive end of practice and after about 18 months in the public defender's office and the handling so many different cases that I mean the really downtrodden those people who were just on the edge I wanted to do more I wanted to have some choices and I got an offer to come and work with the District Attorney's office, under Bob Macy but I've I felt an obligation more as a defense as opposed to prosecution. And so I went out on my own which was 1983 and I went into private practice and I stayed downtown from when I got here in 1981 until I eventually ran for district judge and I did that. I mean it was not an easy decision because one of the things that I knew is I was going to have to take a tremendous pay cut. And then the other thing that weighed on my mind is that I'm 63 years old now, you know, I've been practicing law for over 30 years and I thought maybe at some point in time I should think in terms of retiring as opposed to going to another profession, but I felt after all these years of practicing and seeing it and making money that I needed to give something back and I had a friend that used to say your usefulness on Earth is determined not by your accomplishments, but what your able to give back and give back to your community, so I took that and with a lot of convincing by my wife I decided to run and you know, it was a tough decision to make but I think it was the right decision and my Langston University family did not disappoint me.

When I ran and when I decided to run I had probably half of the East Side Community who had been Langston graduates and it was like there's no way I mean if you want this position you're going to win it because there's no way you can lose it. I was running against a guy who had just started and a really good guy by the name of Malcolm Savage who was appointed by the governor and I had come behind Judge Charles Owens who was the first black appointed judge in Oklahoma County and I think he was appointed in 1968 , the first black in the state of Oklahoma to ever to sit on the bench in Oklahoma and when in probably about 20 years later the legislature cut out judicial districts to get more blacks involved in the judicial system. So they created another judgeship and Major Wilson who was one of my classmates at Langston who had worked in the public defender's office ran for that office and won that office and So we had two blacks on the judicial bench. No special judges until judge Charles Hill came along and he was appointed to a special judge and for a short time but we worked with what we had and because that is such an experience downtown that everybody needs to at least be a part of once in their lives. And I found, and this is one of the other compelling reasons that I ran, I found that in trying a criminal case when they've got black jurors who are called in to come in and sit in judgment, to a person sixty to seventy percent can think of every reason in the world why they don't want to be there. And you really can't blame them because you got to take time out of your busy schedules, you take off work or you have to rearrange your plans and your schedules and you don't want to sit in Judgment of your fellow man. And you know, you're contending with a predominantly white society. You know, we need African-Americans to be represented. We need them, we need them so very very bad, but one of the things that a lot of people fail to realize is that we are as hard on crime African-Americans are hard on crimes as anybody, but we don't want to sit there. We don't want to sit in judgment. And so that's been that's been a major undertaking that I've done that, you know, we as African Americans meet the need to be more involved in what's going on downtown and that will help in seeing what's happening to our people who look like us people who have the same hue who have the same ethnicity, you know when you when you look at and this is my soapbox. This is my soapbox.

Melba: You really gotten on it

Kenneth: but people that don't realize that, you know, we are sent to we are sent... and I don't break up this this my thought pattern but I presented a speech to the National Black Association of social workers and there were a lot of representatives from the Oklahoma Department of Corrections there and the statistics that I was able to compile with staggering. We are 46 percent of the prison population where we are. We are only 17 percent of the national population. So we are over represented in the penitentiary system. We are so overly represented. And that’s part of my soapbox and part of my agenda is that we need more blacks involved in the judicial system. We we need to take back our communities and we need to keep our children out of jail. You know, it's almost impossible for a single black woman to find an eligible black man, because they are so, a lot of them are in the penitentiary. So that those eligible black men or you know, they talked about the marriage rate is down. Yeah, I've got a 30 year old daughter who can attest she will probably vouch for everything that I say. Is that there are no eligible men out here. I mean there are but it's hard to find them. And so those are the things that we need to do to take back our community. I moved to Oklahoma City from Shawnee during my first after my first year at Langston in 1962, and I've seen an Eastside that I could be proud of. We didn't have three and four police cars in line waiting for you to turn your music up or for you to mess up. The worst we had was the Bryant Center and you would have an occasional fight out there. We had two Blackhawk Park which was in the 23rd Street Circle. They had restaurants. They had clubs. They had they had businesses on the East side and we had people who were proud of the East side and there are people still that are proud of the East side but when you look at you know, I ride down I ride up and down 10th Street between Martin Luther King and Lincoln, and eighth, well actually fourth street to tenth street and you see the deteriorated homes in that in that area. Just you look at them and you can see the beauty that once was there. It's not there, I mean their neighborhoods or deserted the homes or in shambles people have moved out. I guess to better themselves. They move out they leave they leave the community to people who are not don't have the pride and I look at I look at Douglass High School and I remember back when I came here and how you would go down to... but I go even back further than that when it was a tradition on Thanksgiving day that Ardmore Douglas and Oklahoma City Douglas played down on 4th Street and Washington Park and you couldn't get down the street because there was so many people they are kind of like the Urban League Fun Fest. You couldn't ride up and down the street because it was a tradition people were proud of their community people were proud of Douglass High School people were proud of where they live and those are the things that I miss so bad, you know, and I don't blame it on integration. Where people have given the opportunity to move out and move up and better themselves. I blame it on our lack of understanding that we are still… We still have a history here to be proud of and unless and until we are able to just reach out and educate our children on what they have, what they have is right here and you can still be proud of them. We're going to be in this dilemma. But I am positive about the future. You know, I took a group of kids that were in the, you can you can tell me when I'm talking too much, but that will end the regiment and inmate discipline program, which is basically the penitentiary of boot camp. I took him to Douglass High School about eight months ago because I wanted the kids at Douglas to see what happens when you’d made bad decisions.

Melba: Yeah, I heard about.

Kenneth: The thought was good but they bought me the kids at Douglass, they brought me the ones who were in the accelerated Justice program and those are not the ones that I needed to see the other the ones that I needed were in the study halls being locked down because they were problems and those are the ones that I needed to talk to that I wanted to see what was going on. Mine was not for show mine was it this is the real world and this will happen, this is what happens when you make bad decisions.

Melba: I wanted to stop you right there.

Kenneth: Okay.

Melba: Thank you. I first met you as a student teacher at Douglas you and David Forest and your friend Timothy Wimberly I believe yes, and I first met your father as a student in Langston as he taught me and I worked with him and as you got really wound up as you were talking about these kids I heard about that visit that you made and it greatly impacted some people. I think with the background that you have with education I think you're in a unique position to think that through some more and be able to further develop that concept and make a difference with that. So I'm glad that you brought that out in this interview, but for the purposes of the research that I've been doing and strengthening families and strengthening marriages. I want to make sure that we name your mother in this interview, that we name your wife, that we name your children and we name your grandchildren that you have in this interview.

Kenneth: Okay. My mom is Dr. Alta Watson. She started out at, when we moved to Oklahoma City. She started out at Woodson on the hill down on 6th Street. She got her doctorate at a late age. She was in her early 50s. She got a PhD in education and went to Langston to teach. She was about education. She was a die hard AKA and she is, she was about, about education and I think her last assignment that she was in charge of the student teachers, but she taught tested measurements. She's taught philosophy of education at Langston on the undergraduate level and she had offers to go to OU but I think her heart, her heart and her soul was at Langston. You weren’t going to pry her out of Langston, since she was born in Langston. Her Mom and Dad grew and her sisters grew up in Langston. There was nothing that was going to remove her from Langston. So my wife is Rita James. She grew up in my neighborhood, in my neck of the woods. She is from Wewoka. I didn't know her when I lived in Shawnee. I knew her brothers. I knew her sister because we all kind of ran in the same circles. Then I met her here at a concert of the Ambassadors were hosting down at the Civic Center and Cab Calloway was the featured performer and they were singing behind Cab Calloway and I saw her and I asked someone with who she was and she went to St. John and I joined St. John when I first came to Oklahoma, but I missed her. And so it was already a new world when I got there. It's like I was meeting people that I had known before so we've been married almost 18 years now when I married her she had a daughter who is my daughter now and there's no step in this, she is my daughter. Her name is Shanna Baccus and I tried my darndest after she graduated from high school to convince her that she should go to Langston. Well Langston has a mystique in Oklahoma City that you either you if you're going to go to a HBC you need to go out of town because if you can't it, you know, you don't have that prestige going to Langston and if you're from Oklahoma City, so my message to her when she graduated was look you can go wherever you want to go in this life. But if I'm going to pay for it, it's got to be an HPC. So you can go to OU, you can go to UCO, you can go to Northeast and you can go to OSU. You can go to all those places, but my money only goes to the HBC. So when she was a 10th grader. We took a tour. We went to Tennessee State, we went to all the colleges, Clark Atlanta We went Tuskegee we went out we went to Spelman we must of went to about eight predominantly black HBC universities. We just we rented a van and drove all these we took three weeks in the summer and just drove and North Carolina A&T was our next to last stop and she liked North Carolina, but she is she didn't she didn't she wasn't big on history because Tuskegee Tuskegee and Spelman, they had those historical places. But after we left after we left North Carolina A&T we went we went up we drove North and went to Hampton and we didn't always all we had to do was get on the campus and she was sold on Hampton, it’s the Hampton on the lake. Anyway, she chose Hampton and after she graduated she went to Hampton and she’s back here now working at AT&T and not liking it, wanted to go back to Virginia. But that I don't know. That's a kind of far-fetched dream. But we have a grandson who is four years old. His name is Christian Charles Baccus and he's got my initials, my first two initials. That was a must

Melba: He is the baby of the family.

Kenneth: Yeah, and he is now at St. John Christian Heritage Academy as a Pre-K and he loves it and he loves it too much. So he's always on the punishment for some kind of discipline, but he's going to grow, he's going to grow out of that and that's where we are now. My wife works at AT&T and her name is Rita and her family goes all the way back to Wewoka, to Wewoka’s roots, and we have a good life.

Melba: We have enjoyed visiting with you and looking at your enthusiastic reflections about Langston about children and about young people we are nearing the end of your interview and I would like for you to recapture the passion that you spoke about during your interview and terms of the vision that you have concerning our young people and what we can do to try to get them on a course and set an example for them that will possibly stir them away from the statistics that you talked about. So many of our men ended up in prison so many of our young people ending up in trouble. What kind of advice based on that research, what kind of advice would you give? You come from a family of Educators. I first met you as an educator. What's really funny? We were in high school. And the three of you guys came from Langston and all the teenage girls just went, “wow“ that you all are well alive and energetic and to this very day. I haven't seen David Forest in many years, but I still see your dear friend. Dr. Timothy Wimbley and we just want to know something from you, from your perspective what you would like to see what you would like to I think education if you could... many of the children that we are looking at in the homes from the research. They are one family homes. They're not into family homes. But because you were in a two-family home, there were certain things that you learned and being in that home that helped you to learn a certain type of discipline and I'd like to know if you could if you can restate recapture some of that to share with some of our single mothers to encourage their children in the absence of a father being in a home as a male wanting to help, to solidify our families. What would be some of the advice you would give and we will let you close the interview in your own way after you make that statement, Judge Watson.

Kenneth: I’ll keep it short. I was raised. I was raised with a very very strong faith, religious faith. My grandmother was very active in church. I kind of got away from it as a youngster, came back home in ‘81 and reunited with St. John's. I'm a very very strong believer in faith-based education. I'm a very very strong believer in education. One of the first things that I generally ask a kid when they come into my courtroom, be they black, white whatever whatever color is how much education do you have you know, and almost to a person it's usually somewhere between the 9th grade and the 10th grade. And I believe that education is a key. But I also believe that you have to love a child. You have to be able to put your arms around a child you have whether it's a single parent family or two parents. I think children need love, they need encouragement. They need to know that they have support , they have family support and that's what I tried to give to my grandson. My grandson is growing up without a father. He is but he's not going to ever want for a father figure because I'm going to be there for him. And I would do that even if he did have a father because I think that we have to make a commitment to the children that are in Oklahoma that are in this country that and that commitment needs to be we understand we grew up with the same some of the same trials and tribulations, but the difference between what we did and what you do what you have done has been about the love and the caring of people not just family but people in general because you have to take the special interest and I say this at churches that, you know, it's not the ones that are in church that need to be that that need to be saved and not need to be hugged. It's those that are outside and you can take that church outside of those walls also all of those big edifices and go out to the streets and hug them and and say, you know get back in school get your education, You know, it's a struggle, you know, nobody ever said that life is going to be a bowl of cherries. Life is going to be tough, regardless of whether you've got your education, whether you got your Phd’s, life is tough and it's supposed to be tough. But toughness, that’s what I attribute to Langston because not only did they teach the disciplines. They taught how to survive that's true and you have to be able to survive out here and with times or bad, you know, one of the things that I always fall back on is that the Lord is never going to give you more than you can handle if you just get past this, just believe and persevere and that's and that's my thing. That's my message if you want to make it. You can make it. I mean it's going to take help, but it's going to take help from within as well as from without. You know, you’ve got to have it in your mind that nothing is going to be so strong that I can't stay on my course and just stay the course. So that's what I say. You know, that's what I say to kids, I said it’s going to take you doing something awful bad to go to the penitentiary from my courtroom because I'm going to give you everything, that you that I can possibly give you I'll give you 15 chances if it takes 15 chances for you to get your life straightened out, I don't believe in one or three strikes and you're out I think that as long as you got to respect other people's property, you got to respect other people's lives you’ve got to do unto people as you would want them to do unto you but in the end it's from within that you've got to be able to persevere and I'll give you the tools and I'll give you the resources, but still I can only give it to you. I can't make you, but I'm going to give you every opportunity in this world in the free world do it. I'm not going to use the penitentiary. I'm not going to use the jail to try to make you do something that you should want to do on your own.

Melba: Judge Watson. We just would like to thank you again for taking the time from your busy schedule to share your history, how you got from point A to point Z and to give the children who should hear this tape a word of encouragement and a firm position to take on how to make a difference. Thank you for being my Oklahoma voice.

Kenneth: Thank you very much. I enjoyed it.