Description:
Carolyn Seaton talks about her life in Oklahoma City and on the east coast.
Transcript:
Interviewee: Carolyn Seaton
Interviewer: Madeline Weems
Interview Date: 7/30/2007
Interview Location: Ron. J. Norick Downtown LibraryTranscribed: Wednesday, 6/24/2020
File Name: Carolyn Seaton 7-30-07.wav
Madeline Weems: My name is Madeline Weems and I am sitting here at the Downtown Library on July 30, 2007 with my second cousin and good friend of mine, Carolyn Seaton. Carolyn, would you mind disclosing your birth date and your birth place?
Carolyn Seaton: I was born October 14, 1946 in Oklahoma City at Wesley Hospital. (Transcriber’s Note: In 1964, Wesley Hospital was renamed Presbyterian Hospital and moved to a different location. Today, Presbyterian Hospital is known at OU Medical Center.)
MW: What about your parents? Where and when were they born?
CS: My mother was born November 13, 1924. I believe her birthplace was Floris, Oklahoma. My father was born October 1, 1918 in Oklahoma City.
MW: What brought your parents together? What drew your mother to Oklahoma City?
CS: My mother was raised in Oklahoma and Kansas. She was, at the time of World War II, working in Wichita. She was working in the Boeing plant, like Rosie the Riveter. She was sorting bolts or something like that. As a young woman living there, she got a letter from her brother Ed Weems, who was in England in the war in the Army Air Force. One of Ed’s good friends – they were airplane mechanics, I believe – one of his good friends was Norris Seaton. Apparently Ed thought that Norris and his sister Eunice, my mother, should write to each other. They began to correspond, and I’m not sure how long it was after or how many letters had passed, but eventually he met her in Wichita when he came home on leave. He had also, by that time, had her go to visit his sister and her husband and children, who were living in Wichita. So even before he met her, he had become close enough to her that he sent her to meet his own relatives in Wichita. I believe they did not come to Oklahoma City until after they were married. I’m not sure, but they were eventually married in Wichita. Their wedding photo has him in his military uniform. Because he was from Oklahoma City and his family was living here, I think is why they came back here.
MW: How was your relationship with your parents? What were they like?
CS: My father is no longer living. My mother is. They are conservative people, hard working people. Both of them, I would say, fairly introverted. There was – the social life they had primarily revolved around family members, their brothers and sisters, my cousins, or the church. My mother had been raised at least part of her childhood as a Mennonite, a Dutch German Mennonite in Kansas, but at some point her parents had converted to the Church of God. Then there was some connection with the Church of the Nazarene there, and I believe my father’s family had some connection with both of those churches. I’m not sure how strong that connection was. My parents, by the time I was born, were members of the Church of the Nazarene, so that certainly was a primary focus of their lives. As I say, my father was a very, very hard-working person whose father had said that he would teach him to love work. I don’t know how well he succeeded, but my father certainly worked hard. I would say because of their conservative religious beliefs and their personalities and lifestyles, and perhaps somewhat the times, we did not go out a lot. Life was really very centered around the home.
MW: Where was home at that time? Where did you grow up?
CS: I believe when I was born, they lived very near my paternal grandmother. This would have been W.R. and Ofa Seaton, who lived near Midwest City. I think my parents lived on their property. I’m not certain yet if they had a house or if they were in a trailer there. One of my aunts and uncles owned a store in that part of Oklahoma City. When I was born, I believe I lived there. I’m not certain, but I think when I was about 3 we moved to a house in The Village. I’m trying to remember the exact address, but it was Downing Street. We moved there and then when I was in the second grade, we moved to a house that my parents had built on 58th Street, Northeast 58th Street, just off of Kelley. That was the house that I lived in until I went away to college.
MW: What about your fondest childhood memories from the period where you were living in The Village, the period when you were living on the north east side? Also tell us a little about your brother and maybe your fondest childhood memories together?
CS: I don’t remember a great deal about the house in The Village. I remember walking to school. It was – I forget right now what the name of the elementary school was. It may come to me. I remember that I was allowed to walk to school from an early age. My mother said she followed me the first few days. I remember that some.
I remember a good friend of mine, who lived up the street that I would play with. I remember – not so much, but I’ve heard this story so much that I probably don’t really have a firsthand memory of it but it’s a funny story that my family tells about me. We lived next door to some people whose last name should remain nameless, but their little boy’s nickname was Kimmie. Apparently, Kimmie and I often got on each other’s nerves even though we played together in the back yard. One day, my mother said I marched in the house, asked for my baseball bat, and went outside and konked Kimmie on the head with my baseball bat. That’s how angry he’d made me. I’m not sure she knew, except that shortly afterwards Kimmie’s mother turned up on the doorstep to tell her what had happened. I can’t exactly say that’s a fond memory but it is a sort of memory of something that happened to me at that house.
When we moved to the house on 58th Street, I remember some chores I had that were involved in building that house. I earned my first dollar, it must have been six or possibly seven years old, probably six, by being paid a penny a brick to carry the bricks. It was actually sandstone for the fireplace. I guess we were carrying that from one part of the property to another and my dad, who always insisted that we also be workers, paid me a penny a stone for this. I remember building that house to some extent. Fond memories there – my brother and I both really liked – we had an acre of land – really liked the kind of rural feel of that. It wasn’t totally rural but we certainly had neighbors on each side and up the block. It was a street that, at least for awhile, was not paved. It was very wooded, and about half that property was an orchard. We would go and play in the orchard. I remember for awhile there was a tractor sitting there. I’m not really sure why. I don’t remember if my father – it had probably been moved there in the building process or it was my grandfather’s. I don’t know. For awhile it was sitting there. We would sit up on that tractor. One day I was horrified to find I had started the tractor and didn’t know how to turn it off. We also rode bikes up and down that street endlessly. I remember evenings where you could hear the crickets and the air was starting to cool. I could smell the cedar trees. We would bike up and down, up and down that street. That’s where I learned to ride a bike. We used to have to go back in the house for a band-aid occasionally. We kind of enjoyed a sort of rural existence there.
We were talking just yesterday, my brother and I, about a family that lived up the street and kind of back in a house that had never been finished. It still had tar paper on the outside and some of the rooms inside had not been framed in. Kind of a chaotic place, a lot of cars in the yard and so forth. There were quite a number of kids and we would play with them and go – my brother and I were talking about there were lots of treasures on that property for us. Old cars to sit in. The mom was constantly screaming at all the kids and she’d scream at us too if we did something wrong. She was a very nice woman, actually. These were kids that he and I jokingly referred to them as the Herdmans. If you’ve ever read The Best Christmas Pageant Ever and they’re called the Herdmans. Well, he and I say that these children were like the Herdmans. We had times with them. There was a creek way back in the back of their property and we would wander down that creek and look at dead animals that were there and come home with rocks and treasures from that. Our wandering and wildness was done with these kids and the land around that, at the time, was wild enough that we had a lot of adventures there. I remember we picked persimmons one day. It was the first time I ever had a persimmon.
There was not any many injunctions on us to come home at a certain time or whatever. My mother was fairly strict about our scheduling and so forth, but we lived in what was considered to be a very safe place and so we’d be gone a few hours. She might call the other woman at some point and ask her where we were, but we were pretty much left on our own. It was kind of nice, even though I was born in the city and lived in the city limits, but that we had the pleasures of a rural existence too, and some elderly couples that lived around us and liked to talk to us and invite us to their house. We knew the neighbors. That was kind of nice.
MW: Definitely. Would you say that the Kimmie anecdote [CS laughs] is a good representative of what you were like as a child? [CS laughs] Were you more shy? Were you more outgoing?
CS: I certainly remember myself as being shy. From elementary school through high school, I certainly thought I was one of the quieter people in school. I was not part of a popular crowd, especially in high school. Looking back on it, I would say it’s because I just didn’t put myself out there. I was kind of afraid to answer in class, and that kind of thing. I certainly think of myself as having been a shy person. I think, however, under the surface apparently was quite a lot of aggression and I suppose we might as well say anger. I certainly, by high school and definitely by the later high school years, was plenty let the anger be seen at home. I was probably the most volatile member of the immediate family. I think underneath was – probably the Kimmie incident [laughs] foretold something, I guess. It was sort of kept within a pretty small circles, at least for a long time.
MW: You said that the church was always really important to your parents. Was the church always a big part of your life?
CS: Very much so for many years. We went to Sunday school and church on Sunday twice, one morning service and then back to church in the evening. We went to Wednesday night what was called prayer meeting. In my memory I think we went to that pretty much all those years of my years growing up, so you’re talking about at least three times a week. My father also was very instrumental in that church. This was First Nazarene Church in Oklahoma City. There were some neighborhoods around that at the time where children were living pretty unstable lives and the families were living in poverty. My dad, along with some other men of the church, got a bus and would take that bus around on Sunday morning and bring those kids to church. More interestingly perhaps, they began to take them on longer trips in the summertime out to Yellowstone and camping and that kind of thing because they had a great wish to help them, and also certainly within the scope of their theology and all, to see that they were saved. Church was a constant in my life. My best friends were there. I had a close circle of school friends, but also my closer friends tended to be at church. Perhaps I felt we all understood each other better.
MW: This was the Church of the Nazarene?
CS: Yes, First Church in Oklahoma City, which is now – I believe in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s it moved from Northwest 6th Street in Downtown to I think Northwest Highway out to the ‘burbs. At the time I was kind of against that and angry about that, but we can talk about that some other time or now or whatever. In high school, I certainly remember I was a big reader because my family was a quiet family and didn’t go out a lot. I read a lot, and perhaps because of the reading I did and thinking, I was always a thinker. Sometime perhaps later high school, I began to have doubts about my faith, questions about the denomination that I was growing up in. Before that, and even partly during that, I was singing in a trio, I liked music. I liked music and someone said we girls should get together. We sang in the church choir. We even began to sing at some other churches, so I certainly would have said one of the pillars of the youth group. My youth group friends were important to me. My youth directors were fun and important to me. I sort of had one foot in that, but another foot beginning to make steps toward leaving.
When I went to college at the Nazarene college, which was essentially across town, what was then Bethany Nazarene College and is now Southern Nazarene University. I did go there. It seemed more comfortable. I think the shyness that we talked about had to do with seeing myself as different from high school peers. They danced. They went to movies. You know, all those things that people enjoy in life that were against the rules for us. I think that I was always a little nervous about that or nervous about saying to them, “No, I can’t go to the movies.” I was a little but scared of dating, for instance, for some of those reasons. What if some guy asked me to go to a dance and I would have to say no. I was very self-conscious about that. Because I suppose I was more comfortable in that environment, I did go to college for a year and a half at that particular college. Even there began also to doubt, to look around, to think that not all of this theology made sense to me, or that some of the pietistic rules did not make a lot of sense to me. I started skipping church services, not going back into Oklahoma City to church every Sunday. I started visiting some churches a little bit with friends or a few people I knew that maybe suggested we go here. I’d talked to other people and I was always a minority within the culture there, that there wasn’t a group of Nazarenes at college who were questioning or wanted to be adventurous a little more. I’d had a couple of youth directors at Oklahoma City First Church that took us visiting to other congregations around town, which I think was a very valuable thing. I’m not saying that it influenced my opinions or theology that much, but I liked the fact that we began to look around a little bit. We were taken to a Catholic Mass. We were taken to a Jewish service. I’m not sure every Nazarene congregation would have done that, but they did. Anyway, when I was at that college for that year and a half that I was there, I remember visiting a Presbyterian church, an Episcopal church a couple of times, maybe a Methodist church as well with friends or maybe on my own. I don’t know that I ever went alone, but really being stimulated by the sermons. Some of the preachers, I think, were perhaps a bit scholarly and a bit more thoughtful than some that I’d been used to. We had some Nazarene ministers that I liked very much and one in particular whose sermons I thought were a bit more challenging and thought-provoking. I liked the relative formality of some of those other services, the liturgy, the music. I had studied piano for quite a few years by that time. I think that introduces you to classical music, liturgical music that’s a bit more traditional, classical, formal, so at some of those other churches I was really moved or interested in that. In those ways I began to certainly move away from that church background.
MW: In high school, was there definitely a difference between your church friends and your school friends? Was it kind of one or the other? Where did you attend high school?
CS: Northeast High School in Oklahoma City. Yes, there was a small – I was always a person with a small, close group of friends rather than masses of people. Yes, there was a few friends at high school that changed somewhat through the four years, and there was a group of church friends. There was one boy who came to my church and to the high school that I went to. He was a basketball star, and in my memory he’s the only one I ever knew who went to my church and to my school so there was that bit of crossover. In general, they didn’t. I think I asked one friend who was also a neighbor to come to church with me once or twice, but in general there was not a lot of overlap there. There was a Baptist girl or two that were friends of mine in high school who asked me to come to services at their church. There was a little bit of that but not too much crossing over of those groups.
MW: You graduated in what year?
CS: I graduated from Northeast High School in 1964.
MW: Were you into any of the Beatlemania at that time?
CS: A little bit because as I say my family was sort of separate from the popular culture.
MW: There was kind of rebellion aspect there.
CS: I’d listen to my transistor radio and listen to music. I certainly was aware of that and participated in conversations with other girls about which one was the cutest and which one is your favorite. That kind of thing. [laughs]
MW: Who was your favorite?
CS: I would say – I’m not entirely sure that I remember but I think it was Paul. I’m quite sure it was Paul. Ringo interested me a little bit too. That was a little bit a part of my life. I would say maybe in the East Coast cities where they toured where girls were going and screaming and that whole thing, maybe it was a little bit easier to be a part of that. Yeah, to some extent.
MW: Was there a major transition between your senior year and your freshman year of college as a student at Bethany Nazarene, or was it an extension of your Nazarene fellowship?
CS: To some extent it was an extension. My best friend was one of the girls who sang in this trio with me at the church was also going to Bethany and we decided to room together because we were good friends. I think, again, I had not been highly socially active, partly because of my family. I was somewhat nervous about college and as I think back on it now, I’m sure I thought it was the most comfortable thing to do to go to that school and to room with my best friend. It makes everything a little less scary or tense or whatever. I remember later visiting some of my friends who had gone to OU and just thinking I could never have done this. It’s big. Some people might drink and what do I say to that? Just feeling like I couldn’t have handled that sort of atmosphere. I now obviously feel sometimes frustrated and a little angry at whomever. I don’t know. About not having explored more college choices, but I just think for whatever reason my personality was to do this in somewhat of a manner where the comfort level stayed – so yes, I moved across town to live in the dorm but the person I lived with is my best friend. I kind of did start not attending church every Sunday and not attending always a Nazarene church, so certainly during the time I was there I began to make forays out of that. To a large extent, it was a kind of continuation.
MW: You didn’t attend BNC all four years then?
CS: No. No, I didn’t.
MW: You moved where?
CS: I moved to the outskirts of Boston to attend another Nazarene college, Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy. I had begun to think, and this is was the summer before my sophomore year, think about – I was a person who, I think because of my reading, was interested in lots of other places, was really interested in history and literature. I was a music major very briefly and then switched to English. Because of my reading, I’d always been interested in New England and never been there. Never been to the East Coast at all, but thinking about it, I remember asking the pastor that we did have at Oklahoma City First Church at the time, and who was the person I told you I felt was a little bit more scholarly, a bit more of a thinker, and was a very, very nice man. I remember asking him once that I was thinking about transferring and I don’t remember why, but he said right away that I think you should look into Eastern Nazarene. He himself was not from here. I think he was from Indiana or something, so he knew other parts of the country well. I said it was funny that you should say that because I’ve been thinking about myself. I think he wrote me a letter of reference or whatever.
I think it was largely my interest in that part of the country, and a kind of increasing wish to get away. Some things that I didn’t particularly like about the college that I was going to. Increasing questioning about lots of things that I decided to do that. I do remember that a girl I didn’t know very well came to my dorm room and said I hear that you’ve been thinking of transferring to that college and I just wanted to warn you against that. You shouldn’t do that. I felt like who are you because she wasn’t even a friend. I asked why and she said oh they’re spiritually dead. It’s cold up there in the north. She didn’t mean temperature. She meant emotionally and spiritually, and that this was not a place to be if you were going to continue in your faith life or whatever. I kind of thought, good. This will be good. I did want a bit more formality of worship practices and so forth, and a bit more place to be comfortable questioning. It’s interesting that I still chose a Nazarene college, I think because it was still in a certain comfort level. I knew that I would be understood or whatever. Looking back on it, I’m not sure why I did that but in another way I guess I do understand it.
MW: Was there something of a culture shock leaving Oklahoma for New England? Were you less sheltered? Did you feel immediately at ENC?
CS: Yes and no. Perhaps in the sense that when I went there I didn’t know anyone. Certainly knew the kind of habits and values of those people, but yes I would say I was less sheltered. I say I didn’t know anyone. I did know one person, a professor and his family who he had been a professor at Bethany at the time and was our music director at First Church Oklahoma City. I didn’t know him really well but I had sung in his choir. His wife had gone to my church and she was a few years older than me, so I didn’t know her terribly well but I’d known her and her family all my life. They had moved up there several years before my going up there for him to be a professor in the department of music there and get a graduate education at New England Conservatory. When I was to go up there, somebody in my family or whatever contacted him and his wife so they were a presence there. They would invite me to dinner. They had me babysit for their children. That was nice. She would drive me into the city sometimes and do things, and even though there was a difference in our ages, we understood each other as Oklahomans in Boston. We’d laugh about the way they said certain word versus the way we said them and things like that. That was nice, that there were adults there that I had some touch with. I almost immediately liked it there and was pretty soon, maybe within the first week or two, asking someone how to take the subway into the city and so forth. I was pretty happy there right away. I was homesick sometimes for certain people, certain things, but felt pretty happy. It was different. I’ve always liked novelty and always liked differences. It was fun.
I will say one funny thing about culture shock. I remember having a date with someone who said I dressed differently than the northeastern girls and that part of this was I wore bright colors. I noticed that too. I had pink sweaters, red sweaters, white skirts, prints. I was not necessarily a terribly adventuresome dresser, but we in the south at that time, and I still think it’s true, dress with more color. They thought that was sort of interesting. At least at that they were more into blacks and grays and beige and all that sort of thing. I think I began to dress more like them until a girl from California came and we were roommates the next year. She was really colorful from California and bleached her hair and all that. We had a little bit on camaraderie there and thought, “Who cares? We’ll dress like we want to.” I did see that I began to be a bit more like them.
MW: Did you feel that – was there any kind of ridicule towards you coming from the South, the Midwest, the middle of country, the Bible Belt?
CS: I didn’t feel ridicule. No. I think they were interested in me more than anything else. They didn’t know anybody from Oklahoma. I’m not saying that everyone at that college was from the northeast. There were a couple of Californians, but not much of anyone from far away. Maybe one from Florida. I’d say the largest number were from Pennsylvania, New York state to some extent, Massachusetts some, Indiana, Illinois may be the furthest west. So yes, I was different, but I never felt ridiculed really because of it. I probably got some attention because of it because they thought my accent was different or I dressed different so I’d get attention.
MW: Going to college during an era of a lot of social upheaval, everything from Vietnam protests to drug experimentation to the Civil Rights movement, there was a lot going on. Was there a lot going on in Boston more so than Oklahoma City? What was your experience with that?
CS: It was extremely interesting. After January 1967, when I went up there, let me think if I’m correct. No, it would have been January of ’66. When I moved up there, I wasn’t in Oklahoma enough to exactly know what was going on here in terms of activism. I came home most summers, but not every summer. There was one summer I didn’t at all. I remember that I read or saw or my mother told me about certain demonstrations against the way at the University of Oklahoma. I know there was some here. I certainly know that I began to differ in my views of many of those things from my family and Oklahoma friends, certainly about civil rights and things like that.
In Boston, yes. There was a lot going on. We would take the subway to Harvard Square. People who would call themselves hippies, maybe not quite in the sense of California hippies, but lots of dirty hair and more slovenly clothes than we were wearing. We began to be a bit more like them. There were lots of demonstrations in the middle of Boston by the time of my junior and senior year of college. Guys were burning their draft cards. The draft lottery was going on, so I remember attending some speeches by people like William Sloan Coffin and William Stringfellow, who were theologians of the time of the liberal side of Protestantism, speaking against the war. There was a part of that emotionally and intellectually on my campus. There was a small – we would have been in the minority – but there were a group of us, a couple of guy friends of mine who would set up a table when military recruiters came. We’d set up an anti-military, anti-war table. One day an angry right-wing kid at school turned the table over and we had a little excitement. [laughs]
Yes, probably there was more of that going on than there was here. I would say the numbers were probably larger there. It was still that you’d have to step off campus into Boston to be really a big part of that. That college, in many ways, was quite insulated from what was going on, but there were definitely some and I was part of that small group who were paying some attention and taking some action, at least on the fringes. A good friend of mine did burn his draft card and was really quite on the left wing side of things. A guy I dated was a good friend of his and so I was definitely in that part of things.
MW: Did your brother stay in Oklahoma for his college experience?
CS: My brother came one year to Eastern Nazarene College. I believe it was his freshman year, so we overlapped at that time there. Then he came back. I guessed we reversed it. He came back and finished his education at Bethany Nazarene. He was up there for a year and that was kind of funny seeing his reaction, interesting and funny, to see his behavior, to see how people reacted to him, to see how he reacted to the place and all.
MW: Were you parents both supportive of you and your brother leaving for the East Coast?
CS: Pretty much. I remember when I had gone to my freshman year at Bethany, I did have, in spite of the fact that I was right across town and was beginning to break away in some ways like I told you, I did have some times of homesickness or just feeling like I don’t want to be here anymore. Probably emotional growing pains or whatever. I’d go down to the pay phone down the hallway, calling my mother and crying and I remember my mother told me my father said he thought it would be good for me to be away from home and not be quite so emotionally dependent. He also was always a great reader. My father had only been educated through the ninth grade because of family and financial reasons, but he was a great reader and a self-taught person with enormous curiosity. He always wanted to travel more and so I think vicariously he thought this was kind of exciting and was excited about my traveling, going up there in that direction that he could come visit. I was pretty much supported in that and I assume my brother was.
MW: Where did you meet your husband, your current husband?
CS: I met him in the 1981 in Washington D.C. I was working at an art gallery at the time. I was in between knowing what I wanted to do. I’d gotten my Master’s degree but wasn’t working in that field at the time, and started working at this art gallery. It was a fun job. One of the women working there lived next door to this single guy and said maybe you should meet him, so she introduced us. He was sort of the boy next door – to her, not to me. That’s where that all got started. He was from Chicago and had gone to George Washington University in Washington and had just stayed there. I had gone to – I lived in Baltimore for a time getting my Master’s degree at Hopkins and I don’t know, I just kept gravitating towards Washington so I was living in Washington at that time.
MW: There were quite a few years in between your graduation from college and your move to D.C. and Hopkins. What about those years of your life?
CS: I was flitting around a little bit, and a little bit unrooted, unstable, whatever. Not unstable mentally. I think it was kind of indicative of the time. There were lots of people from my college who went back home and lived in one place the whole time. For me, I just had a little bit of wanderlust, a little uncertainty about what I wanted, where I wanted to be. I worked as a social worker in New Jersey for awhile in a state hospital. I worked for the Woodrow Wilson Foundation in Princeton, New Jersey for awhile. I went and got a Master’s degree in Mental Health Counseling at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. I also during that same time, a little bit before that and during that same time, did a lot of teaching, primarily teaching of inner city adults mostly, and some inner city college kids. I don’t really remember how I got involved in that but before I went to the Master’s degree program, and part of the time during that, taught a program called WIN. At the time I think it was called Welfare Incentive. It was one of the programs of the great society, I guess, to educate welfare mothers. I taught English and Humanities-related subjects to them for several years. I taught for a community college that had a special program for students in Baltimore who lived in sections of town that were not where people went to college. I taught in some programs for them. That kind of thing, which was most definitely an eye-opener, being in East Coast cities that had a pretty high rate of poverty and working sometimes in areas that people would consider dangerous and all of that. I guess I, even in my tossing about a little bit, had some pretty interesting experiences that were changing me.
MW: How often did you return to Oklahoma over these years of flitting around the East Coast?
CS: About – usually once a year, twice a year. There was a time or two there that maybe I didn’t make it. My parents visited me not often but occasionally. It could be during that particular year I didn’t come home, but it was generally at least once a year.
MW: Do you still consider yourself an Oklahoman?
CS: I don’t know. It’s an odd question but the answer that springs to my mind is I don’t know. Yes, partially, in a way. There’s the land when I come back. I love the sky. We have quite a lot of trees where I live, so I cannot look at the sky as much or as openly. Here, it just looks like the sky is from horizon to horizon and I just am very conscious of it and I like that, or before the plane touches down and I’m looking over the farms and the river and so forth. I certainly feel an affection for it and a nostalgic connection to that. I am kind of proud of the history of this place, interested in the Native American history of the place, which I don’t feel like I ever learned very much about or enough about. At the time I went to school, we memorized the names of the Five Civilized Tribes and that kind of thing. But it was a different time and I don’t think we were looking as closely at that. Yes, I am highly interested and proud of a lot of the history of it. I’ve been away so long and learned to love some other places. To be honest, I’m not sure that I would say I have a home in the sense that some people do.
MW: But you do have moments when you catch yourself and say, “Wow. That was an Okie thing.”
CS: Most definitely. Yes. I look at books or pictures or photographs through my friend who’s a librarian here and talk about Oklahoma history, or when my dad would take me around the city and talk about his memories. It was just him and me driving around he would say, “Look over there in that field. That’s where Charles Lindburgh landed one day.” Or “This is where our dairy was.” That kind of thing. My father’s family owned a dairy long ago when he was growing up. He also lived around Pauls Valley in a place called Pea Vine, and I loved for my dad to take us out to those places and tell us his memories. Then, yes, I felt a much stronger connection. I suppose one’s connection is ultimately with the people you love and have good moments with. I deeply loved my Grandma and Grandpa Seaton and their roots were in these places in Oklahoma and the states surrounding it. So yes, when I started to talk to them or my father would talk about his memories, I think I felt rooted and very definitely that this was my place, my connection and all. So it’s interesting. I kind of move in and out of that sometimes, I guess.
MW: Have there ever been any years when you were less proud of your Oklahoma roots?
CS: Yes, when they vote overwhelmingly for George W. Bush I’m less proud of my Oklahoma roots. There is a conservatism and an isolation, insulation, that I don’t care for very much and I think that’s changing. I think also talking to historians, again my friend who’s a librarian and a historian of Oklahoma, I see that –
MW: Buddy?
CS: Yes, Buddy Johnson. I see that there were certainly times in our history before I came along that we really were looking more at the plight of the poor, the drifters, the ones Steinbeck wrote about. Woody Guthrie sang about them. Buddy tells me that there were strong union people here, strong Democratic and even Socialist history so I think the times I was living through here, kind of those 1950s that were kind of complacent and a time when we looked to build ourselves into the solid middle class. Maybe those have hung over here a bit too long, so there’s that conservative trend that no, I’m not terribly proud of.
I’m a person that I don’t really care for labels and don’t really want to call myself a label particularly. The deep conservatism that perhaps does not pay enough attention to the plight of people in the world that are so, so, so, much less fortunate than we are, and the people in our own country who are, and who tend to isolate themselves from that and vote for people who do, and who are a bit too much warmongers for my taste. I’m not particularly proud of those things. I do come, as I mentioned awhile back, from Mennonite roots who were pacifists. By the time my mother raised me, she was no longer of those roots, but I feel connected to those when I meet extended family members who are back in that and still in the Mennonite fold and realize that pacifist history and all. Sometimes I say well I’m really connected to that or perhaps I wish I had remained a Mennonite because I just think we try as Americans to solve so many more things by weaponry than we should. I’m interested in the fact that Oklahomans, there’s kind of a growing look outward in Oklahoma City. When I look at Vietnamese community, or the large Hispanic population. I was aware of that to some extent, particularly in my later years. My father was working with Spanish-speaking people in this city and employed some and indeed, paid for the college of one Mexican young man. There was a tendency of mine to see that.
MW: And he continued those missions even throughout the last years of his life.
CS: Yes, to go to Mexican towns and do building construction, that kind of thing, to work with an organization called Feed the Children here in Oklahoma City to make sure that medical supplies, food and so forth went down to Mexico. I think it’s interesting that the more liberal, in quotes, part of me probably grew from the caring and concern and great work that he did, and his was motivated from a more conservative Christianity. Nonetheless, I feel mine is also motivated by Christianity, but the Christianity I’ve chosen would not be theologically conservative in the way his was. I admired and loved and probably tried to model myself some on his social or justice activism and so forth.
It’s a mixed background I have in that sense, because I remember members of both my father’s and mother’s families saying some things that I certainly would consider racist, certainly for our times and somewhat for those times too. As I got older – you talked about my anger – would fly into a rage over some of the things that they would say. I was the hothead who would argue with them about some of those things and they would all get kind of embarrassed and then I would get embarrassed. My anger, I think, came out sometimes when I saw ways that I was beginning to think about politics and about the larger world that they didn’t particularly share. We were of course going through interesting times then, when everyone was changing. When I was a kid if we drove through certain parts of this city, it would be Colored town. It was just Colored town and that was – I didn’t even as a child think about it that much. The Nazarene church in that part of the city, which was all Black of course, and we never even thought, or I didn’t and I suppose most people didn’t, about why our churches were not integrated. We would have them come once a year to our church and sing Black gospel music and spirituals, and oh isn’t this nice? I remember thinking it was quite earth-shaking when we actually served them dinner and sat down and ate with them. I am almost ashamed – I am ashamed to say that now. That’s how things stood.
MW: That’s the way it was.
CS: Yeah. We were patronizing, condescending, and worse.
MW: You have two daughters and you’ve taken them back to Oklahoma throughout their years and they’re now both of college age. Do you feel that they have fond memories here? What do they think about Oklahoma?
CS: I don’t think they understand it very well. They have been raised, and their childhood has been spent, in Maryland just outside of Washington D.C. We live in a suburb, I guess you would say. It’s not an all brand-new type suburb, but it’s about a 20, 25-minute car ride into Washington D.C. and they know the city pretty well with all of its interests and problems. They come on yearly, sometimes twice-yearly visits here. I think they only see a certain slice of it, partly because when we come we visit with my mother and my relatives. There hasn’t always been as much visiting around, getting to know the state and its history as I would like. That’s happening some but it hasn’t happened as much as I would like. I think they would need to spend more time here to learn, to know more about it. So yeah, it depends on their experiences here. Sometimes they’re bored, because who isn’t when they go visit all the relatives and sit on the couch all day? I think what they know of this place and what they like of the place comes largely through their cousins and the people that they know who are here, who are doing interesting things, who talk to them about interesting things, and they get certainly some more knowledge about Oklahoma as it is today. My older daughter, who’s a sophomore in college, the other day read an article in the New York Times about the Vietnamese restaurants and the community here in Oklahoma City. The New York Times had done an article about this and she’s very fascinated, and plans the next time she’s here to go down there and eat Vietnamese food, which she loves. (Transcriber’s Note: The article mentioned can be found at https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/04/travel/04frugalweb-1.html.) Through their cousin Maddie they talk about lots of things and Pam, their friend. They see the kind of interesting lives that a lot of Oklahomans are living now. They’re probably more – they prefer more East Coast landscape, the taller trees, the seacoast that we don’t live along but are not too far from. They love the history of that area, and they like cities. They like museums and that kind of thing. One’s an art history major now. Their tastes are somewhat different but I would like them to spend more time here, partly just because I think that we all, if we can, should try to live, or at least get to know, all parts of our country, and the world as far as that’s concerned, for lots of reasons.
MW: Thank you, Carolyn. It’s been great hearing your perspective of someone who hasn’t stayed in Oklahoma but still has roots here, and definitely strong ones.
CS: You’re very welcome. It’s been interesting and fun. Thank you.
End of Interview.