Description:
Garvin Isaacs talks about growing up in small town Oklahoma.
Transcript:
Interviewee: Garvin A. Isaacs
Interviewer: Nancy A. Zerr
Date of Interview: 11/20/07
Zerr: My name is Nancy Zerr and I am interviewing Garvin Isaacs who is a lawyer in Oklahoma City. You're from Oklahoma, why don't you tell me a little bit about where you're from.
Isaacs: I was born in Carnegie, Oklahoma, April 3rd, 1945. I lived in Caddo County until I went to college. My grandparents, my mother's family, lived over in Kiowa County. They lived in a little town—Gotebo.
Zerr: What were their names?
Isaacs: C.W. Holdin and Verna May Holdin. My dad's parents lived in Garvin County--south of Oklahoma City about 65 miles. Their names were Joe Isaac and Cora Isaac.
Zerr: How did the name get changed from Isaac with no 's' to Isaac with an 's' at the end, Isaacs?
Isaacs: Before I was born, my dad went into the army in the Second World War, in 1941, and when he went into the army they put an 's' at the end of his name so on my birth certificate I became an 'Isaacs.' Dad never changed it and so now we know that we're not related to anybody with the last name 'Isaacs.'
Zerr: Was there a time, when you told me before the names were switched, was Isaac Garvin?
Isaacs: That was my great-great grandfather who was a Choctaw Indian, and somewhere in the Indian records, the Dawes Commission Rolls, the family name was turned around to Garvin Isaac, after whom my dad was named.
Zerr: And what Tribe affiliation did the-
Isaacs: Choctaw.
Zerr: And this is your father's side?
Isaacs: My father's side.
Zerr: Tell me a little bit about Joe and his wife.
Isaacs: Joe and Cora lived on a farm south and west of Pauls Valley about eight or nine miles, near what today is known as the Batey(?) Community. There was a one room school house just over the hill from their farm where my dad attended school from grades one to probably eighth or ninth grade. And then, after having attended school at Batey(?) School, his father died when he was three years old, so my grandmother Cora was left with a family of six children to raise. My dad dropped out of school and worked for three years before he went back to school at Elmore City High School and graduated from Elmore City.
Zerr: How was it that Joe died, do you know?
Isaacs: Joe died in the great flu epidemic of 1918. He's buried in the Klondike Cemetery near Pauls Valley.
Zerr: Did Cora keep the family together, all six children?
Isaacs: She did. It's an amazing story that all six kids stayed together with Mother--all of them worked. My father is the only member of his family to graduate from college, which was really an amazing feat when you consider all the obstacles that he overcame. After high school he went to Cameron Junior College for two years and then went to Oklahoma State University and while he was at Oklahoma State he worked in the history department as one of their 'runners,' or assistants, and he graduated from Oklahoma State.
Zerr: What did Cora do, how did she feed the kids after Joe died?
Isaacs: They had big gardens, they canned food, they had a lot of livestock out there--chickens, cattle--and I'm sure that the livestock provided some income.
Zerr: Did your dad talk about those times much?
Isaacs: He just talked about how hard they all worked and how during the Depression when everybody was stressed financially he worked in the hayfields and worked helping with cattle and worked harvesting pecans. They had a huge pecan orchard down in the bottom of a creek.
Zerr: Is your mother from the Pauls Valley area?
Isaacs: No, she's from Kiowa County over there around Hobart(?).
Zerr: Tell me about your grandparents on your mother's side.
Isaacs: Both sides of the family were people who made their living off the land. My grandfather had originally a family that was involved in cattle and they were down in Texas near Mahaya(?), Texas.
Zerr: Which side?
Isaacs: Holdin. Grandfather's Holdin's side.
Zerr: This is your mother's?
Isaacs: This is my mother's father. They came up to Oklahoma around the turn of the century. I'm not sure exactly which year. I heard my grandfather talk about being in the Lawton/Apache area in 1901. I heard him talk about the family having financial difficulties and how when he grew up everybody was expected to make their own way.
Zerr: How far did he go in school, do you know?
Isaacs: I think the sixth or seventh grade, but he was self-educated, self-taught. He was a very good speaker, usually short and to the point. He later became the Justice of the Peace in the small town of Gotebo. He always said that, he wished that he had gone to school so that he could be a lawyer. I think he had a big impact on me as a kid.
Zerr: Tell me about your mother's mother.
Isaacs: She was seven years younger than my grandfather.
Zerr: What's her name?
Isaacs: Verna May Lamb(?). They came from Texas also. Muleshoe, Texas.
Zerr: How old was she when they got married?
Isaacs: I think my grandmother was fourteen and my grandfather was twenty one, which would be an issue for the courts these days.
Zerr: How many children did they have?
Isaacs: They had two. I had one uncle who was older than my mother by about two years. His name was Eugene Debs Holman(?). My grandfather named him after Eugene Debs. I think that'll tell you a lot about my grandfather's politics.
Zerr: Do you know how far Verna Holman went in school?
Isaacs: I don't. I think she maybe went to the tenth or eleventh grade. She was not as articulate as my grandfather. My grandfather used to read to us when we were kids. He read short stories, he read Robinson Crusoe to us, he read Sherlock Holmes stories. I'll never forget those Sherlock Holmes stories that'd he'd read to us. Books like that.
Zerr: What stood out about your mother's childhood?
Isaacs: I think that she was a good all-around person as a girl. Both my mother and my uncle were tennis players, and my grandfather--this is back in the '30s--built a clay tennis court beside the house on a hill that overlooked the Rainy Valley Creek there east of Gotebo. I still have my mother's tennis racket.
Zerr: Where did that come from?
Isaacs: I have absolutely no idea. None.
Zerr: These are farmers in Gotebo.
Isaacs: But they played tennis every day.
Zerr: Did Gene get a scholarship?
Isaacs: Gene got a tennis scholarship to Oklahoma State University. He got the only tennis scholarship then went up there and flunked out the first semester. My grandfather was mad about that. I think he and Uncle Gene never got over that.
Zerr: So he just spent one semester in college?
Isaacs: One semester in college and came back and worked there in Kiowa County. He was a farmer and had cattle and had a hay business where he would cut and bale hay for other farmers. He always had hay to sell.
Zerr: The younger child is your mother, his sister?
Isaacs: Yes.
Zerr: What was her name?
Isaacs: Ellen May Holman.
Zerr: She played tennis as well?
Isaacs: Yes. She was the Kiowa County tennis champ a couple of times. I'm sure that she really liked tennis. Even when we were kids my mother used to race my brother and I when we were about nine or ten years old. We would have foot races and she would say, "I can beat you boys the length of a basketball court, watch this."
Zerr: Did she get a scholarship?
Isaacs: No, she went to Oklahoma College for Women and graduated and then went to the University of Tennessee and got a master's degree in education.
Zerr: Was this all before she married your father?
Isaacs: Yes.
Zerr: Did she work her way through?
Isaacs: Yeah, she put herself through college.
Zerr: When did she meet your father?
Isaacs: My father graduated from Oklahoma State and got a job as the high school principal and was the boys' coach at Ninnekah, a little town south of Chickasha. My mother was teaching home economics at Oklahoma College for Women. They met, had a courtship, got married, and Dad went into the army--Second World War.
Zerr: What year were you born?
Isaacs: I was born in 1945--April 3rd.
Zerr: Was your father home when you were born?
Isaacs: No, Dad was overseas. He had come home between the German conflict and the end of the war in Japan. While at home, my mother often told the story that she decided that it was time for her to have children and she told my dad it was time for her to have children so she made a trip down to Louisiana to Ft. Poke and somewhere in the area at Ft. Poke I was conceived.
Zerr: Was she living with her parents when you were born?
Isaacs: Yes, in Gotebo.
Zerr: You were born in Gotebo?
Isaacs: No, I was born in Carnegie, a little town.
Zerr: Was that the closest hospital?
Isaacs: I don't know if Hobart had a hospital. It probably was.
Zerr: Do you know how old you were when your father first saw you?
Isaacs: I was less than a year old. I'm not sure. I have pictures at home that my mother sent to my father when I was about six months. It was sometime after I was six months old. I have the pictures and the letter that she sent, "Here is the latest picture of your son." I had a nickname. Everybody called me, "Gabo." One of my aunts gave me that nickname. That was the only name I answered to until I went to college and didn't even really identify with my real name until then.
Zerr: You're Garvin Isaacs Jr.?
Isaacs: Yes, I'm Garvin Jr.
Zerr: And so Gabo?
Isaacs: Everybody called me that, teachers and people that knew us.
Zerr: When your father came back after World War II where did they settle?
Isaacs: They settled in the town of Hydro. Dad was the high school principal and mother taught. Dad was the high school basketball coach. In 1948 they won the state championship in girls' basketball. The town of Hydro, in appreciation, bought Dad a new 1948 Chevrolet. That’s one of those family stories everybody still talks about.
Zerr: When was your brother, Phil, born?
Isaacs: Phil was born February 2nd, 1948.
Zerr: You said your mother continued to work?
Isaacs: Oh yes.
Zerr: Did she work all during your childhood?
Isaacs: She did.
Zerr: As a teacher?
Isaacs: Yes.
Zerr: After Hydro where did they move?
Isaacs: We moved to the small town of Alfalfa. What a place to grow up. Alfalfa is about seventeen or eighteen miles south of Hydro in between Hydro and Carnegie. If you go out on I-40 West about thirteen miles east of Weatherford is the town of Hydro. It’s on the north side of the road and if you got off the highway and went south toward Eakly and then back a little bit west and on further south you would come to the town of Alfalfa. It’s a town of about one hundred people, has a post office, small high school, grade school.
Zerr: Did you start grade school there?
Isaacs: I did. I went grades one through eight at Alfalfa.
Zerr: Did they have kindergarten then?
Isaacs: No, we didn’t know what kindergarten was.
Zerr: Was your mother a teacher at Alfalfa?
Isaacs: Yes. Mother taught sixth grade at Alfalfa and home economics, and I don’t know what all. Maybe some science classes. Dad was the superintendent of schools and was the basketball coach.
Zerr: So was she your teacher?
Isaacs: My sixth-grade teacher. I have carried that with me ever since.
Zerr: You ended up playing basketball at TCU, but your first game you remember quite well?
Isaacs: Oh yeah. My mother was also my first basketball coach. That was a mistake. I think maybe we played two games that year. The sixth grade Alfalfa team went down south of Carnegie and played this little team Alden. Which I don’t even think they have a school there anymore. We went down there and the game started at like, two o’clock. At halftime we were twenty points ahead of Alden so Mom, being the good sport, said, “We can’t beat these children that badly.” She made us sit down and played the second string and Alden caught up so she put as all back in the game and we never could get ahead. Finally, the principal of Alden school came out and blew the whistle and said, “The game’s over. The buses are here to take the kids home.” My first basketball game ended in a 33-33 tie.
Zerr: How far did you go through school in Alfalfa, eight grade?
Isaacs: Eight grade and then we moved to Apache. Dad became school superintendent at Apache.
Zerr: And your mother was a teacher in Apache?
Isaacs: She taught sixth grade in Apache the whole time we were there.
Zerr: You graduated from Apache High School?
Isaacs: I graduated from Apache in 1963.
Zerr: Tell me the story about the snails. Was that in Alfalfa?
Isaacs: That was in Alfalfa. You know how kids sell lemonade or snow cones or whatever? We went over to a horse tank that was east of Alfalfa school a couple of miles and we harvested a couple of buckets of snails. We thought that the rest of the world needed snails. We were fascinated by the snails. We took them back and we set up a stand beside the road there just beside the high school and near the Church of Christ. We were selling snails. I think we sold one snail the whole day. Some truck driver couldn’t believe it so he stopped and looked at the snails. After he bought the snail we went over to Whitley’s Grocery and got us a Coke and some peanuts.
Zerr: How much were you selling the snails for?
Isaacs: I don’t remember. Enough to buy a Coke and some peanuts. Clyde, Bennett, and I were selling snails.
Zerr: I heard you tell a story about the bats.
Isaacs: Well, we had bicycles and these are dirt roads I’m talking about, not paved roads, and we would ride our bicycles all over the place and we would go exploring. I used to make maps, that was my hobby. I had an army pack that Dad gave me and I had some colored pencils and so we would make maps of the creeks that we played on or the places we went. There were some caves in Cowden, Oklahoma. Cowden was west of Alfalfa a few miles. Cowden is probably nine or ten miles over there and south of Highway 152 if you’re on the road to Cordell from Binger. If you’re going from Binger to Cordell and you come to the intersection where you go north to Weatherford, if you go south there you’ll hit Cowden Caves, and these are a series of gypsum caves out in some hills out in a pasture. We had transportation over there so we went in and explored these caves. While we were in the caves, it was maybe in October, it was cool, we had on jackets, we trapped bats. We had hundreds and hundreds of bats. The bats were in the cave so we had all these bats and we brought them back to the Alfalfa school and turned them loose. There were bats in the school, bats in the trees, bats in the hedges around there for days. Everybody used to talk about the bats.
Zerr: Did they find out who did it?
Isaacs: Everybody knew who did it.
Zerr: They got inside the school?
Isaacs: Yeah, they went down the chimney and got in the school. They went in windows, I don’t know how they got in. The bats were in the school, the bats were in houses.
Zerr: Did you do this to scare girls or just for fun?
Isaacs: No, we just did it for fun. We just decided we better let the bats go.
Zerr: Tell me about the Pow Wows that went on in Apache.
Isaacs: Apache is really a unique place. I did not realize how lucky I was to grow up in that environment and be around those people. At the Clark-Bohart Community Building in Downtown Apache they have the Rotary Club on Friday and they’ll have meetings of the Chamber of Commerce there. But every Friday night, when I was growing up, they had an Indian Pow Wow. You could always hear the drums at night and I still hear the drums from the Pow Wows. We’d walk by there and it was just an experience where if you hear that Pow Wow music it sticks with you. These were Kiowa and Comanche Pow Wows. We had Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe Indians that all lived in Apache. Homer Flutes is Cheyenne, Dennis Tate is Doc Navaquoia(?) Tate’s brother, Dennis was one of my friends. I grew up with those guys. Doug Werwackwee(?), we called him Doug Wyooki Big Indun’, he grew up there with us. Doug’s a Kiowa Indian. Max Silverhorn is a descendant of a famous Kiowa artist. Max was one of my best friends growing up in high school.
Zerr: In addition to the Pow Wow drums, you told me about the sound of the artillery.
Isaacs: Yeah we were close enough to Fort Sill that when they were down there having training, artillery training, the shots from the cannons would rattle the windows at home and you’d hear the cannons whoop whoop whoop and then the windows would shake. That’s another sound.
Zerr: Did you play baseball in Apache?
Isaacs: Oh yeah, oh yeah. I played baseball, basketball, ran track, played football two years, and then concentrated on basketball.
Zerr: Tell me a story about your baseball team.
Isaacs: The funniest thing, I guess, and a good learning experience was when I was a freshman in high school. We had a real good baseball team. Probably the reason we were so good is a lot of those guys on there did not have birth certificates. I’m sure some of them were twenty-one years old.
Zerr: Why didn’t they have birth certificates?
Isaacs: They were born outside of the hospital. Nobody knew how old they were.
Zerr: Native Americans?
Isaacs: Yes. I don’t know, Doug Wyooki, Dennis Tate, Max Silverhorn, and Doug was about 6’3”, weighed about 250 pounds, and Silvester Williams—a black guy we went to school with—Silvester was in this group. I was a freshman, I was fourteen years old and we went to the OU baseball tournament and at that time they didn’t have class A, AA, AAA, 5A. At the OU baseball tournament they didn’t care what size your school was. Every school competed against everybody else so we went over there. When we got there, I think we won the first couple of games, we were doing alright, we go over there one morning, we get there early about eight or nine o’clock and out on the mound there’s this guy, left hander, warming up who is throwing some smoke. I’m telling you, this guy was a pitcher. Had fastballs. We never had much experience with left handed pitchers so we got off the bus and we’re all looking at this guy like, “Wow, he’s really good.” It was an intimidating moment because the town of Tribbey, where our opponents were from, just a wide spot in the road . We thought, “This’ll be no problem. We’ll beat the heck out of these guys.” But we watched this guy and there were all these scouts from the St. Louis Cardinals and the Brooklyn Dodgers and you name it. They were behind the backstop watching this guy warm up. I remember we didn’t even, we had our uniforms but I don’t think we had a full set of extra uniforms, these guys looked like the New York Yankees. Probably their school spent more money on uniforms than we did on the entire athletic budget. But when we got off the bus I don’t think I had a top and I will never forget one of those guys from Tribbey said to us, “Where are you cornfed mothers from?” Dennis Tate said, “Apache, can’t you read?” Dennis is the only one who had a uniform with Apache on it. It was about intimidation. They kinda scared us. I guess that pitcher struck out two or three guys in the first inning and the second inning he was still intimidating but Leon Sawyer, who was one of the guys I remember at this event…Leon chewed tobacco and Leon had about half a bag of Beechnut chewing tobacco in one of his jaws when Silvester Williams walked, Leon was our second or third hitter in that line up, and so Silvester was real fast and the coach gave ol’ Sil the steal sign and gave Sawyer the take. Everybody knew that Sawyer was going to take, or we thought he was. A take means let the pitch go by so the runner can, anyway. Silvester took off and Sawyer was too busy chewing tobacco and he swung away and tripled and the ball went way in the outfield and bounced out there off the fence. Silvester scored and everybody went nuts. We batted around on the heralded, scouted pitcher two or three times. We beat Tribbey like 10 or 15 to nothing. That’s just one of those experiences that sticks out in my mind about intimidation. Things aren’t as bad as you sometimes think they are when you’re in the moment.
Zerr: That reminds me of the story you told about the pea shooters and the school bus.
Isaacs: Oh yeah, that’s another baseball story. We were on the bus going to Carnegie, I think, to play Carnegie, and we had pea shooters. That’s a mouth full of peas and a big straw. We were west of Apache going over the foothills and we hadn’t turned north to go back to Carnegie when we passed a guy in a truck who was driving too slow. Our coach was driving the bus and the assistant coach was upfront. This Indian guy, Lincoln Cadesso, he and I were in the back with pea shooters when we passed this guy in the pickup. He had his window down so pt pt. One of the peas hit him in the cheek, he swerved off the road, went into the ditch, thank God he didn’t have a wreck, but after he went off in the ditch he got back up on the road and followed us all the way to Carnegie. He was right on the rear of the bus. When we get to Carnegie we go into the Sinclair station. The Sinclair station is right there off Main Street near the Liberty Theater. The coach got out to get some gas for the bus and when he did this guy gets out of the pickup. He was a real small guy about 5’6” or 5’5” and he had on pointy toe cowboy boots and a cowboy hat and he came onto the bus with us and he said, “I’m a mean son of a bitch and I don’t mind dying.” We all started laughing and then Coach Devine came back and got on the bus and said, “You get out of here and leave us alone.”
Zerr: The coach didn’t know you’d been shooting peas?
Isaacs: He doesn’t know to this day that we shot at the guy with pea shooters.
Zerr: Was this the time of Mutt’s Club(?)?
Isaacs: Oh yes. Mutt’s Club was the pool hall we used to all go to. There were two pool halls in Apache—Mutt’s Club was for the kids and then the Apache Club was for the older men in town. Women didn’t go in either one of them. Mutt’s Club was a hangout for a lot of the kids, myself included. Mother used to say, “Don’t go into that pool hall, you’ll wind up like your Uncle Jim. Don’t go in there.” Of course that’s the first place we went. One thing about Mutt’s Club that I remember was there was an old, old Indian guy who used to come into Mutt’s Club and shoot pool with us. He was in his 90s. He had crooked fingers. Those fingers were so crooked from arthritis and hard work that instead of using a bridge like most of us did with our fingers, he would just shoot off the top of one of his crooked knuckles. He was a real good ‘snooker’ player. There were snooker tables at the front of the pool hall. That Indian guy, I used to shoot pool with him a lot and had a lot of laughs with him. He used to make fun of me because I would put peanuts in my Dr. Pepper. I used to make fun of him because he didn’t have any teeth or enough teeth to eat them. That Indian guy was Geronimo’s cousin. His name was Jason Betzinez. Jason, I didn’t know that then, I did later when Jason’s friend William S. Nigh, a captain at Fort Sill came out and took notes from Jason, talked to Jason, and helped Jason write a book—I Fought with Geronimo. Jason was around there and a couple of years later he had an automobile wreck driving into town after he was 100 years old. He was driving to town and he was left of center and two older guys coming out of Apache southbound to Lawton hit him head on. Jason went to the hospital and he died after some months in the Indian hospital but I always think about Jason and Jason’s buried down there beside Geronimo in the Fort Sill Apache Cemetery.
Zerr: Was Jason the one that called out at your mother across the street?
Isaacs: Oh yeah, we were in the pool hall and she was coming in there to tell my brother and I it was time to go home and somebody said, “Your mother’s coming.” Everybody started laughing. We went out the front door and Jason is with us. Jason had a crutch, one of these crutches like you see Long John Silver with.
Zerr: A single crutch?
Isaacs: A single crutch. Mom’s coming down the street and I’ll never forget this. Mother had on a red and white polka dot dress. Mother was kind of dark skinned and dark haired. When she got close, Jason said, “Gypsy! Gypsy!” and scared the heck out of her. She didn’t know what to think. We used to laugh about that.
Zerr: Did you learn from a relative that your mother may have been part Cherokee?
Isaacs: Somebody wrote us a letter about that, and I have no idea. Some person in Kentucky.
Zerr: When did the two-year-old end up missing where the town searched?
Isaacs: That was when we were in high school. That was one of the Cadessos. A relative of Lincoln Cadesso. Lincoln was a pitcher on the baseball team. Lincoln and I were in the back of the bus shooting pea shooters. This was a relative of his. This small child ended up missing. We turned out school and went arm to arm down across the Cash Creek. My brother and another boy found the body in the river.
Zerr: They used schoolchildren to search for a body?
Isaacs: Missing person, yeah.
Zerr: You told me about the scariest time when you were growing up when you thought there was a killer loose.
Isaacs: Apache was one of those towns where nobody locked doors and everybody knew everybody else. I’m sure there was crime there but if there was there wasn’t much. People would drink too much. I think that’s the most common occurrence in Apache, Oklahoma, was public drunkenness. There in Gotebo near my grandparent’s house down the alley lived Harvey Ingall, who was the principal of Gotebo High School. He had a daughter that was probably ten years older than I was, and he had a daughter that was a year younger than I was at that time. His daughter, the oldest girl’s name was Pat Ingall. The younger one was Judy. I used to play with Judy when I was a little kid—9, 10, 11, 12. I knew Judy all through high school. Pat graduated from high school and went to Southwestern State Teachers’ College and while she was there she met this guy, Jim Davis, who had been a professional baseball player in the Dodgers’ organization minor leagues. He didn’t make it. He came back to Southwestern and was going to get a degree and become a coach. They got married. He got a coaching job over there at Colony, Oklahoma, which is south of Weatherford about twenty miles. One game that I think they had at Burns Flat for some reason—Well let me back up. Pat and Jim had a daughter. After they had the baby they lived real close to the school.
Zerr: And he’s a coach?
Isaacs: He’s the girls’ and boys’ basketball and baseball coach at Colony. At the halftime of a basketball game Pat hadn’t come to the game so Jim Davis, her husband, said to two girls, one of the girls I knew pretty well, Darlene, “Go down and see what’s taking Pat so long.” So they go down there and Pat had been murdered. Somebody had hit her in the back of the head and killed her and the baby still in the crib. There was a manhunt. Law enforcement were everywhere. Even though we were about fifty or sixty miles since we knew Pat everybody was scared to death. For the first time we thought about people among us, somebody killed Patty, going, “Who would kill Pat?” She was good looking, blonde headed, good person, everybody liked her…
Zerr: Did you say that she was playing the piano at the time someone surprised her?
Isaacs: She was playing the piano is what I was told when someone hit her in the back of the head and killed her. About two weeks later we find out Harvey Ingall, her father, and Jim Davis, her husband, had gotten into a car with some state investigators. I’m not sure but I think it was probably the forerunner of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. While they’re driving around talking about who could have done this, Jim Davis says, “Stop the car, I think we need to have a word of prayer. We need to pray about this.” So they stop the car over there in Washita County somewhere around Colony and Jim starts offering up a prayer in which he confesses to having murdered Pat. They charged him with murder, put him in jail at the top of the Washita County Courthouse in Cordell. They were going to seek the death penalty, and then Jim decided he would plead guilty. He pleaded guilty and the judge sentenced him to life in prison. I don’t know where he is or what he’s done but that was the first time I ever really thought about how dangerous it is and how people can be murdered. I guess the second time that happened was when I was in college. We were given a reading list and the reading list included In Cold Blood. I will never forget I decided to read In Cold Blood and you can go look at a paperback copy right now and page 222 it says, talking about the killers, “The killers passed through the towns of Apache…” and goes on and names a bunch more towns in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. When I read that I thought, “My God those guys were here I wonder where they were in town, I wonder if they went to Mutt’s Club, I wonder if they went to the Southend Beer Joint, I wonder if they went to McNight’s Café.” I was never the same after that.
Zerr: Was the murder of Pat Ingall, was that what changed you, or guided you to become a lawyer?
Isaacs: No. I don’t think so. I think it shocked me. When I was about nine my grandfather was summoned for jury duty in Kiowa County. This was before I played Little League Baseball because my memory is that it’s in the late summer but I’m not sure about this. I’m kind of fuzzy on the time. So I go with him to jury duty. He takes me and I don’t know where my brother Phil was, he would have been five or six. We go there and the case, as I remember it, was a rape case where a black man is accused of raping a white woman. We sit in the audience, well, they picked the jury all morning and at noon my grandfather was still in the panel of prospective jurors. He hadn’t been ceded. Court recess, we went across the street and there was a hot dog/hamburger stand and I remember we were there and so were a whole bunch of jurors. Then we went back in and they called him as a juror. He went up and sat in the jury box. They questioned him and I remember at that point I realized how serious the whole thing was. I think then I understood in my own perception that this was not something that was a game and I remember the look on the judge’s face and I remember the look on the defendant’s face, the black man, and he had a white lawyer. At the end of the day they excused my grandfather. I don’t know if it was a challenge for cause or he said something that would cause one of the sides to object to his qualifications or whether it was a peremptory challenge where somebody just says, “We don’t want him on the jury,” but no one that my grandfather named, my uncle Eugene Debs Holman, that probably, if they knew that they’d know a little bit…but it was a big impact on me as a kid and I think sometime in there I knew I was going to be a lawyer.
Zerr: There were no lawyers in your family?
Isaacs: No.
Zerr: Was there a lawyer in Apache?
Isaacs: No.
Zerr: Your grandfather didn’t like banks, your grandfather Holman.
Isaacs: No, they foreclosed on him back in the Depression. When that happened he loaded the family up and they went to Trinidad, Colorado, and lived in a basement up there. That’s what they told me. I don’t know where the basement was, I don’t know what he did when he was up there, but he went up to Trinidad, and when they didn’t make a go of in Trinidad they went to Santa Fe, New Mexico. While they’re in Santa Fe he was trying to find work or catch on to something. I have at home two purses my grandmother bought—one for her and one for my mother—that must have come from under the (unintelligible) is what my mother said. My mother’s purse is about as big as this address book and my grandmother’s is about twice that size. You’ve seen them, Jennifer’s seen them. That didn’t work out so they went to Fort Sumner and my grandfather worked on the railroad in Fort Sumner for a couple of years and then about the time my mother’s school age they go back to Gotebo, Oklahoma, and they bought the family place which is still in the family there east of Gotebo about one mile.
Zerr: Did he teach you and Phil about guns?
Isaacs: Yes, he did. My grandmother on my dad’s side, Grandmother Cora, was the first person to ever take us out with shotguns. She took the shotguns out, had her bonnet on, and said, “Come on, I’m gonna teach you boys how to hunt quail (or whatever it was).”
Zerr: How old were you?
Isaacs: Probably 10. 10, 12, you know. My grandfather he used to take us. We’d go out with guns.
Zerr: You’ve told me when you would come to Oklahoma City to shop for clothes you all would go to Montgomery Ward’s.
Isaacs: We would go to Montgomery Ward’s and John A. Brown’s. John A. Brown’s department store is right here where the library is today. We used to go in there. I loved going to Montgomery Ward’s because we’d go look at the fishing equipment and the guns. There weren’t restrictions on firearms. You would go in to a place like Montgomery Ward’s and they would have shotguns and rifles.
Zerr: Would they let children handle them?
Isaacs: Oh we wouldn’t handle them, we’d just look at them. They wouldn’t let you handle them.
Zerr: Did you come up to Oklahoma City a lot? Did you go to Lawton as a kid?
Isaacs: Oh, we went to Lawton more than we did Oklahoma City. We came to Oklahoma City two or three times a year. We used to come to the All College Basketball Tournament—that was an annual deal from the time I was maybe 10,11,12 until I got out of high school. It was the best college basketball tournament in the country.
Zerr: How has downtown changed?
Isaacs: Well, where we are was John A. Brown’s. Over here west where the Oklahoma City Art Museum is, was a movie theater that was always…I can’t remember the name of that one. The Criterion Theatre was back over here a couple of blocks. The Criterion would have been somewhere in the neighborhood of where the Cox Convention Center is now. It faced north. The Huckins Hotel is down where Liberty National Bank is. The Huckins was in that area. There were restaurants. The most famous restaurant here in Oklahoma City at that time was Anna Maud’s Café downtown. All the business people and people who came here to shop would go into that cafeteria and eat. The food was great. I don’t know what happened to it. They closed it and moved and now we’ve got a food court over there. Beverly’s Chicken in the Rough, there’s still a few of those around, there were three or four in Oklahoma City. There was one back over here just north of where the Sheraton Century Center is. So it was a big deal for us to come from Apache to Oklahoma City.
Zerr: There were no malls at the time?
Isaacs: No malls.
Zerr: All your shopping was downtown?
Isaacs: Yes.
Zerr: You’ve told a story before about Lawton and the young lady that walked up to you.
Isaacs: Oh yeah, that’s Lawton. Fort Sill was there. When I was about 16 years old we were down in Lawton just walking around. I can’t remember who I was with—my brother and couple of other guys. I don’t remember where we were going but this girl about our age, or I thought she was, said, “Hi how are you guys? Did you get one of our cards?” She gives me a card and it’s a jewelry store card and I looked at it and thought, “She’s pretty good looking, I maybe have to go back to the jewelry store.” Went back and she was working in a house of ill repute. They said, “Oh, she’s upstairs.” We figured that out and got out of there.
Zerr: Tell us about the swimming lessons you took in Lawton.
Isaacs: The swimming lessons were at Dodo Park. The Red Cross lifesaving thing. The woman that taught them, Pat, she was good to us. We had a lot of fun. Learned how to swim. We went to the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge and had all kinds of fun jumping off the cliffs there on the southside of Lake Elmer Thomas. Jump in the water and swim over. It’s about a half mile or more to swim over the cliffs, climb up on the cliffs, and dive off. It’s about 30 feet deep.
Zerr: How far was Lawton from Apache?
Isaacs: Eighteen miles. Anita Martinez grew up at Richard Spurr, which is south of Apache about halfway to Lawton. I’ve talked to Anita about growing up at Richard Spurr.
Zerr: What’s the hill? There’s a story you told about—
Isaacs: Porter Hill. Porter Hill was about six miles south of Apache, or seven. At that intersection is Turn Bull’s Filling Station. At that time the Spanish Inn, which was a bar with motels, and that’s where a lot of the women of the evening hung out in Fort Sill. Soldiers would come up there.
Zerr: This was just well known in the town?
Isaacs: Everybody knew it, nobody did anything.
Zerr: Even the kids?
Isaacs: Oh yeah. I remember Mom’s sixth grade class. One of the students, I won’t mention her name because I know her and I don’t want to embarrass her, she came to class late. My mother said, “Well why is it you’re late?” and she said, “We didn’t have money for gas so Mom had to stop off at Porter Hill to turn a trick.”
Zerr: You said when her mother died the funeral was nobody?
Isaacs: Yep, nobody went to the funeral. That was really a sad moment. Crew’s Funeral Home did the funeral and the hearse went through town at Drag and Main in Apache, which was Evan’s Avenue. I remember seeing that.
Zerr: Describe the racial and ethnic mix of your town.
Isaacs: Apache was a town that had blacks, Native Americans, and white people. Few Hispanics, not very many. Nobody had any money. There was no socioeconomic division between any of us. It was a unique situation because we all went to the same school. This was before integration. I don’t think integration or segregation was ever an issue in that town. It wasn’t the whole time I was there. I can remember when we went to play Blanchard in football one time there were all sorts of racial epithets hurled at Sylvester Williams. I can remember when we were at Anadarko to go to a track meet one time we were in a restaurant at noon and a guy came and told us we’d have to leave because Sylvester and John and Mac Williams were with us.
Zerr: What year would that have been in?
Isaacs: That would have been in ’61 or ’62.
Zerr: Didn’t the same thing happen in Sapulpa?
Isaacs: Oh yeah, in Sapulpa. We had the American League of Baseball team. We went over to play in the Sapulpa tournament and while we were there…Landers Odom was black and Bobby Joe Perry was black. Bobby Joe was the pitcher and Bobby Joe Perry is in Oklahoma City right now someplace. I don’t know where. Landers Odom and Bobby Joe Perry and Gary Gray, who’s Native American, were with us. We went into the Golden Frog Pool Hall to shoot pool and the guy came out and—Bobby Joe and Landers Odom were with us and Gray and Goopidge(?), who was Caddo Indian, and myself and Ricky Brewster or maybe Jon Finney—and we were there and he said, “You guys can stay but they gotta go.” So we left.
Zerr: You told me about one of your friends who was Native American and his father made him a tea when he was sick?
Isaacs: Yeah that’s Gene Soodle. Soodle was my role model growing up. Soodle was a basketball player at Fort Cobb and played basketball at Oklahoma City University. Soodle is one of the best guys you’d ever want to meet. So Gary Gray and I became Soodle’s proteges. We’d shoot baskets with him at Fort Cobb and Apache. Dad brought us up here to Oklahoma City University when Soodle went to OCU on a basketball scholarship. We’d come up and scrimmage with the college guys and stay with Soodle in the dorms. Soodle had all these records. He had a foot locker, a military foot locker, full of these 45s of Bo Diddly and Chuck Berry and all those guys. Soodle’s dad was a Methodist Minister at the Hog Creek Methodist Church, which is a church halfway between Fort Cobb and Anadarko. One time when he was in college and Gary Gray and I were with him we’re at the Fort Cobb gym shooting around and playing basketball. Soodle says, “I don’t feel good I need to go home.” So we go to his house which is four or five blocks from the gym. We go in and his dad says, “Gene, what’s wrong?” Gene says, “I don’t feel good, Dad I think I’ve got the flu.” Soodle’s dad went over and got a leather bag out of a cabinet and came back and put something out of the leather bag into a kettle on the stove and boiled it for a while then poured it in a glass and said, “Here, Gene, drink this, it’ll make you feel better.” Soodle drank it, went in the backroom, and went to sleep.
Zerr: Did you find out what it was?
Isaacs: If it wasn’t peyote [laughs]... It smelled bad I don’t know what it was.
Zerr: Did it make him feel better?
Isaacs: Oh yeah the next day he was feeling a lot better. Anyway, one of the best stories about Soodle was when he came to OCU to play basketball. Soodle didn’t tell me this, Abe Lemons did. Abe said that when they had freshman orientation that the president of the university would get up and speak to the kids, and that when he got up to speak he would say to some freshman, “Young lady why is it that you came to OCU?” Abe tells it like this that the girl said, “I came here because they have a great fine arts department.”
“And young man why did you come to OCU?”
“Well I came here because my father and grandfather are Methodist ministers so that’s where they went to school.” Soodle was sitting in there somewhere and he says to Soodle, “Young man why did you come to OCU?” Soodle said, “I came to Oklahoma City University to learn the ways of the white man.” That’s Soodle.
Zerr: Did you grow up hearing about medicine men or Indian tonics?
Isaacs: The Indian tonic deal was all later and medicine men were not…that’s not something people just go around talking about in Native American culture. You know who the medicine man is but one of the funniest things I ever heard was after I became a lawyer I was going to Lubbock to do a deposition. I stopped to stay all night in Vernon, Texas. I don’t remember the name of the hotel but there was a restaurant that was right outside the door of my room and if I walked out of the motel I’d walk right into the restaurant. I went in there and it was seven o’clock at night and two guys were seated in a booth. It was one of these places where you pay and eat everything you want to off the buffet. I went over and got some food and these two women, it was a mother and daughter who were the waitress and the cashier for the restaurant, were there. These guys are sitting there talking about a truck wreck and one of these guys has on a baseball cap and overalls. The other guy is sitting there in a cowboy shirt and they’re talking. He starts in: “You know I was going across that bridge crossing that Red River down in Juana, Texas, and I had a truck loaded with fryers. I’d carried them fryers all the way from northern part of Kansas all the way down here. Some damn shitkicker pulled out in front of me in one of them pickups. Shitkicker’s going about thirty miles an hour. I tried to slow it down and I couldn’t slow it. I had to take to the ditch. Next thing I know I’m hanging upside down in my truck. Couldn’t feel my feet. They brought the jaws of life out…cut me out of my truck. ” The best part was he said, “They took me to that hospital in Wichita Falls and they had one of those Korean doctors.” He went on about the Korean doctors. I looked over at these two women, the mother and the daughter, and the mother’s smoking a cigarette and she looked at me and she just rolled her eyes to the back of her head like, “I’ve heard this before.” This guy keeps going on and on about how he went to rehab and he said, “My feet wouldn’t work, my legs wouldn’t work,” so they discharged him and sent him home and he didn’t get any better and he said, “The old lady’s on me all the time, she wants me out of the house and on the road and keeps moaning and groaning about me not making any money. I was talking to Ol’ Jim Bob and Jim Bob told me to go up to Anadarko and see Gene Pokia, that medicine man. He said he’d get me some of that Indian tonic.” So he went to Anadarko and he got whatever the tonic was and brought it back and tells this story of the Indian tonic and how when he got home he said, “One teaspoon of that every morning and one at night. You know, it brought it all back. It healed me so if you’ve got a problem you go see that Indian medicine man at Anadarko. He’s a Kiowa he’ll take care of you. That Indian tonic is good stuff.”
Isaacs: So, I don’t know about the [unintelligible] but I’m... that was good.
Zerr: I think that’s a good place to end.
Isaacs: Okay.
End of interview