Description:
Virgil Cooper talks about his life growing up in rural Oklahoma, his time in World War II, and his career as an educator.
Transcript:
Interviewee: Virgil Cooper (with Gwenda Ann Cooper)
Interviewer: Jeanne Fields
Interview Date: 10/27/2007
Interview Location: The Village Library
Transcribed on: 2/1/2020— 2/26/2020, 66 minutes, 16 seconds
This transcription omits some crutch words, some connectives between sentences such as “and” and false starts.
Abstract:
Oklahoman Virgil Raymond Cooper was born in a log cabin in Okfuskee County and grew up in central Oklahoma where his family farmed several different tracts of land as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. After a stint in the Civilian Conservation Corps and beginning his education at East Central State College in Ada, he served in the army in World War II. While in college, he met his future wife Gwenda Ann Burch and the two were married shortly before he left the States for the war. Returning home, he completed his education and the couple served their entire careers as educators, primarily at Drumright, Oklahoma. Virgil Cooper was teacher and principal at Edison School in Drumright for 30 years. In 1994, Cooper entered politics as a candidate for the US House for Oklahoma’s 2nd Congressional District and unseated eight term incumbent Mike Synar for the Democratic nomination. Cooper was defeated for the Congressional seat by the Republican nominee Dr. Tom Coburn. Cooper attended the 2008 groundbreaking of Drumright’s new Virgil Cooper Middle School before he died later that year on December 15, 2008.
Virgil Cooper: My name is, full name, is Virgil Raymond Cooper. I was born March 19, 1923.
When you watch the weather news on Channel 9 in Oklahoma City, they’ll give the record low temperature for that date and the record high temperature for Oklahoma. The record low temperature in the state of Oklahoma for March 19 was the day I was born.
Jeanne Fields: What was the temperature?
VC: Ten degrees and it was blowing like a blizzard. My mother and father lived about eight miles northwest of Paden, Oklahoma in Okfuskee, County. Dr. John Rollins who had his office in Paden at the time was to be the doctor. They sent word to my grandmother. She lived about three miles north of where we did. She walked up there to be with my mother.
JF: Through all that cold.
VC: Yeah. But it was probably better. The only other way she would have had of getting there was in the wagon and that would have been colder yet.
It was a log cabin with a side room built on out of slab lumber. I was the youngest of three boys.
JF: Why don’t you give their names?
VC: Oldest one was Garvin Coy Cooper. The middle one was James Lowell Cooper. My father’s name was James Willoughby Cooper. My mother was Sarah Louvisa Smith. Course she married Willoughby Cooper.
I was the youngest.
In early childhood, they have a picture of me somewhere, I haven’t seen it recently, I was standing out in the yard and there’s a rooster, a white rooster. They told me for years, this rooster gave me a bad time because I’d come out with a piece of bread to eat it and this rooster would steal it [laughs].
Gwenda Ann Cooper: They called him “Toodler.”
JF: They called Dad “Toodler?”
VC: I don’t know where that nickname came from. I don’t know whether it’s a deviation from “toddler.” But that’s what they called me and some of my cousins still call me that.
JF: That is true.
VC: When I was just a child, a little one, my mother fastened me to her cotton sack. You know they had these cotton sacks that were about three feet wide. She’d pick cotton and she’d fasten me on that and drug me along.
JF: So it would be out long and you would just be on the end of it?
VC: Yeah, she put me out on the end of it that was just draggin’ along, fasten me to it so she wouldn’t lose me [laughs]. Or maybe she was wantin’ to lose me, I don’t know [laughs].
Then a little later, I went to the field when they were picking cotton and I’d pick a little ahead of them and pile it up in the middle and she’d pick it up as she came along. Then a proud moment was when I was given my own little cotton sack. It may have been a tow sack or a gunny sack.
In school, I started the first grade at Bethel School. Back in those days, they had schools about every three or four miles, elementary schools. Bethel was a two room school. A curtain was drawn across the middle of the room that separated it into two rooms. Otherwise you’d pull the curtain back to make it into one big room. The older children were in one end and the younger ones were in the other end of the building.
JF: Were there two teachers?
VC: Yes. Sometimes we had spelling bees and ciphering matches, that’s arithmetic. Everybody from the little ones on up to the eighth grade participated in those. It was quite embarrassing if some of the little tykes beat some of the older ones at spelling. It wasn’t totally embarrassing to the little ones. But, you learned a lot of things from that. You bore down and worked hard so you could participate.
When I was in the second grade, my mother and father separated, permanently separated. I think they had separated a time or two before that. We moved north near my grandmother and grandfather. In fact, they lived up on kind of a hill. We moved into a log cabin about two or three hundred yards from their house. It was down next to a little creek, a little stream that ran through there. It was spring fed. The cabin had no ceiling. It had walls and then it came up to just a roof. So it was a long ways up to the roof. It had one large room made out of logs that were notched and then filled in the spaces in between with chinking, they called it.
JF: What was that made from?
VC: Well, it might have had a little cement in it. It may not have had much.
JF: Could have been maybe just mud and clay?
VC: Yeah. They had a side room made out of— It was just kind of a kitchen. It was only about six feet wide and went the length of the— But that’s where we lived. Our water supply came from one of the springs. Somebody had gone down and chiseled out, it looked like a wash basin. The spring ran into that. We carried our water up there to the house from that.
I had almost forgotten that while we lived there, I went from the third grade— One of the interesting things, when I moved from Bethel School, then we moved down there, we were to go to Pettiquah School which was about a mile and half from us. When I moved to Pettiquah School, they had no second graders, so they put me in with the third graders. That kinda explains why I graduated from high school about eight weeks after my seventeenth birthday. They just never did move me back where I belonged, I guess.
We stayed there, but I had almost forgotten, sometime during the time we were there in this log cabin living there by my grandparents, we came up with two baby squirrels. We fed them with an eye dropper. We fed ‘em milk. They grew up and grew up there in the house with us.
JF: Up in the rafters?
VC: Well, they run around there all over the place. When summer came (we got them in the spring), then they got kinda grown. They left and we didn’t see ‘em. Then once in a while, we would see them come back. But in the fall of the year when it began to get cool, we came in one time probably from the cotton field where we were working or home from school and my mother worked out in the fields— My mother had a roll of cotton that they made quilts out of, you know the thin cotton that they’d make a quilt or comforter out of hanging on the wall and she noticed some of that was out on the floor. Looked around and on the bed where we had the quilt, there was a lump in the middle of the bed. There was one of those squirrels in that roll of cotton and the other one was sitting in the middle of the bed under the covers [laughs]. We thought that was kinda funny. The next day or so it warmed up and of course they disappeared for a day or two. They came back next time it got cold. Here they came back home, wintered up, getting ready for the winter.
My mother had perfume bottles that she had sitting around. These squirrels ate the corks out of those bottles. That didn’t sit to well with her, so she took the broom and took after ‘em [laughs]. They got out of the house in a hurry. They never did come back. I guess they figured their welcome was withdrawn.
JF: I was afraid you were gonna say she put ‘em in a squirrel stew.
VC: She probably would have if she coulda caught ‘em.
My mother remarried when I was in the sixth grade. We moved south of Prague, Oklahoma, down on the North Canadian River. We farmed. You’ve probably have heard of sharecroppers, that’s what we were. We were sharecroppers. We were working-- Usually the farmer, if he worked somebody else’s land, he may get three fourths of the crop and pay the fourth to the landowner. But as sharecroppers, they [the landowners] furnished the tools and so you [the sharecropper] only got half of [the crop].
JF: You mean the landowner furnished the tools and everything?
VC: Yeah. So you only got half of it. And that’s what they called “sharecroppers.” The others [who kept three quarters of the crop] were called tenant farmers.
We stayed down there and I enrolled in Keokuk School. Keokuk School was east of where we lived. We were six miles south of Prague down on the North Canadian River. Back east of there two miles was Keokuk School.
Keokuk has quite a reputation in Oklahoma, the town of Keokuk, because it was kind of an outlaw place. The main street of Keokuk ran north and south. On the east side of the road was the old Creek Nation, Creek Indian Nation. One the west side was Oklahoma Territory. If you went about a half a mile south and crossed the river, North Canadian River, you would be in the Seminole Nation. It was a handy place…
JF: For people to go back and forth.
VC: …for wild men. If the lawman came up here from Oklahoma Territory, all they’d have to do is walk across the street and they’d be in— They tell me that at one time Keokuk had eight saloons in it.
JF: Was the school in the town?
VC: When I was there, when we came there, it was in the 1930s.
JF: That was its past.
VC: That was its past. That’s some of the history of it [Keokuk].
The school— As I said, the road that ran north and south there was the division line between the old Creek Nation, Okfuskee County and Pottawatomie County over on the west. The school was in Okfuskee County. It was on the east side of the road.
I met my lifetime friend Henry Moidel there. We still get together, have breakfast at times. We lived next door to them.
We were there two years. The second year, they had floods on the North Canadian. There’s an upper shelf where you could farm and then there was a lower area next to the river. We had crops down in the lower area and had the alfalfa fields up on the upper area. We didn’t get much. Our part was the farming down below. It flooded so that there were fish swimming up and down the corn rows.
JF: Oh, gosh!
VC: Naturally, you don’t raise much corn and this was in June.
JF: So the water didn’t recede for quite a long time?
VC: Oh, no. Well, they had repeated floods. There were some of those old carp swimming up and down the middle of those rows weighed ten, twelve pounds.
JF: Good grief.
VC: Big ones. There was that much water.
So we didn’t get much from that. We gave up on that. We decided we wanted to farm in 1936—
JF: How old would you have been then?
VC: I was in the eighth grade at this time. So I would have been twelve. Maybe I’d finished eighth grade shortly after I was thirteen. We moved up north of Prague to Centerpoint School. That’s where I finished my eighth grade schooling.
You’ve heard these stories about people walking three miles or four miles to school up hill in both directions. Well, the school building was on the corner of the place we lived on. It was about 200 yards from where I lived. So much for all that long walk. I couldn’t tell that story then.
This was in 1936. Anybody that knows anything about the history of Oklahoma knows about 1936. That was the year all the record high temperatures were set and the number of days that it went over a 100 degrees. We started out the year, we had beautiful corn crops. Our cotton was planted and everything.
JF: Were you still sharecropping?
VC: No. We were tenant farmers at this place. We had rented a place and we had our own equipment and stuff. Boy, everything looked beautiful. The crops, everything was just fine. We were gonna do well. The hot winds hit the last of June, early July and went on through into August. We harvested nothing. There was nothing to harvest.
So, at the end of that year, we moved north of Deep Fork River over into Creek County. One of my great uncles had a farm over there. So we moved over there on his land. We were partially working for him and farming too some. But he insisted that we get rid of most of our cattle.
JF: What was his name?
VC: His name was Benton Walker. That was my grandmother Smith’s— My grandmother Smith was Frances Katherine Walker Smith. This was her brother. He had some nice land there. That first year there, we ate a lot of peas, dried peas. You wonder if we had a variety in our diet, yeah, we had different kinds of peas [laughs].
I’ll stop and say right now that I’m not gonna say that we had a tough, miserable life. We didn’t. I’ve never experienced being hungry in my life. We always had food. It might be cornbread and milk, but there was plenty of it.
GC: You always had beans too, you said.
VC: Yeah, we always had beans or peas.
JF: Didn’t you tell a story one time about having collard greens for a long period of time?
VC: Turnips and turnip greens. That was when I was in college at Ada.
JF: Oh, okay.
VC: But, I need to back up here and tell you about this log cabin that we lived in down next to—
GC: Don’t forget about shooting the-- and the stove and everything.
VC: I might shoot you [Jeanne, Virgil and Gwenda Ann laugh].
This is the log cabin where we lived next to my grandparents when we moved to where I went to Pettiquah School. We woke up one mornin’. I told you there’s no ceiling. We woke up one morning and we had about a half an inch of snow on our beds, on the floors, all over us.
JF: Half an inch is quite a bit.
VC: Well, it was pretty light. It had blown and drifted, came up under the eaves of the house and drifted across into the room. That didn’t create too much of a problem for me because I was under the covers. I was the baby of the family. So, my two older brothers Coy and Lowell, their job was to get up and start the fire. Well, they got in to some kind of argument and knocked the stove pipe down.
JF: Oh, no! Not a good day to do it!
VC: Not a good day to do it. So we couldn’t build a fire in the house because the stovepipe was out. We bailed out and went up to grandma’s [laughs]. I don’t know who ever fixed the stovepipe because it was about fifteen feet to the top of the ceiling where it went out.
But anyway, now where was I?
JF: You guys were living on your—
VC: Oh, on our great uncle’s place.
I had finished eighth grade. We lived six miles south and about three miles west of Milfay [Oklahoma], about 9 miles from Milfay, the high school at Milfay. By then schools ran school buses.
When my oldest brother finished the eighth grade, when Coy finished eighth grade, he couldn’t go to high school the first year. There was no way to get there. The next year there was a fella had a little ole pickup like thing with a bed back on the back of it. He contracted with the schools, I guess. That was the first school buses.
Coy went to school at Paden from Pettiquah. Anyway, we’ll get this all scrambled around. [We’ll] straighten it out sooner or later.
I walked about two and a half miles over to the place that’s six miles south of Milfay. Caught the school bus, rode it fifteen miles to school because we were the first ones on the bus. They ran all over the country and came back up there to Milfay. I didn’t think of that as being unfair because I had more fun than anybody else. I got all that long ride [laughs], playing and having fun with the rest of the kids. Then the same thing in the afternoon. There wasn’t any big worry about getting home because there was probably work to do when we got there.
We lived there ‘til I graduated from high school. We did move a couple of years later to another farm. While we were on this farm, there was a tornado came south of the farm. It came a big hail and ruined our crops again. There was hail about two and a half inches deep on the ground. We scraped it up and made ice cream with it, homemade ice cream [laughs]. Don’t want to have a total loss anytime.
JF: I was kind of surprised with all this bad luck you had in farming that you chose to have a farm. I know it was more a hobby farm, but to go back into farming as a hobby later [laughs]. I would have thought you would have had enough of it.
VC: Well, part of that was not my desire to farm necessarily. Ray was in FFA [Future Farmers of America]. I had a cousin that used some words of wisdom. He said one time, “It ought to be against the law to raise a boy in town.” [laughs] Ray was involved in all this— I could see Mike comin’ along and getting involved in it. He wasn’t quite as interested in it as Ray. And then, I enjoyed it.
JF: I think you said you were about to graduate from high school.
VC: Yeah. I finished my high school years at Milfay. This would have been in 1940. There wasn’t a great deal of employment opportunities for people then, not as many as you’d think, because we had just come out of the big depression that happened in 1936 and 7 and 8 and 9. So they had a program part of the— They called it Civilian Conservation Corps. They would sign up high school graduates or people about that age. You would go to camp and it was just like the army except there was no training with weapons or anything. There was none of that. But, you served in the army.
They went out and worked on people’s farms. They built roads and they built a lot of dams. They’d rip wrap dams. They’d carry a lot of rocks and put in the dikes of dams, on ponds. They built farm ponds. We cleared brush. I went to Guthrie. Henry Moidel, my best buddy, he went to join CCC camp too. He was sent to Colorado.
A part of that program is that when I was in camp, they paid me eight dollars a month and they sent 22 dollars home to my folks. My mother saved that. At the end of my term in the CCC camp, I had 77 dollars and 77 cents in the bank.
GC: You also went to college some then, didn’t you?
VC: That’s what I had then when I started to college.
JF: So what kind of jobs did you do personally do with the CCC, besides clearing brush?
VC: Well, that and you had KP like you did in the army. I got my first college credit when I was at Guthrie from Central State College at Edmond.
I want to go back to when after I left from graduating from high school. I went down to visit Henry. That was kind of a regular deal for me to go down there. I think it was thirteen miles down there. I would walk over to the highway and try to catch a ride. It didn’t slow me up much if I didn’t catch a ride. I’d walk down there. You can’t imagine somebody walking fourteen miles, but that was no problem. You was used to going places on foot.
Henry had a deal, they’d sold somebody some hay somewhere around Seminole. Henry had met his future wife. We’d haul a load of hay on a pickup down there to these people’s house. We’d stop at a little tavern there and buy a crème soda. Henry would play on the nickelodeon there “Good-bye Little Darling Good-bye.” [laughs]
GC: Which reminds me, when we were dating when I lived at the Harwells, when he was coming, I’d always know he was coming because he’d be either whistling or singing that same song [Virgil, Gwenda Ann and Jeanne all laugh].
VC: I think that was Gene Autry singin’ that song. Henry’d play that on the way down there and he’d come back, he’d play it again because he was goin’ to CCC camp in the next week or two.
Then when I got out of CCC camp, there still wasn’t much to do. Paul Vaught was a good friend of ours. He kinda suggested I go to school at East Central State College at Ada. So I went down there and enrolled.
We had a dean of the college down there, evidently remembered what it was like when he went. They’d take in boys or students. They had some girls that stayed up in their house. They had a cabin down back of their house and then in their basement. They’d take students in there. They didn’t charge us any room rent. They let us mow the lawn, wash the car. We’d drive ‘em places, you know. Mrs. Morrison didn’t drive, so we would take her places around town.
Later, I got a job with Mistletoe Express. People now a days don’t know what Mistletoe Express is. It was a subsidiary of the Daily Oklahoman. That was the company that took their papers all over the state. They also hauled other goods like UPS does today. At Ada I got that job.
The first job I had at Ada was, before I got my first date with my favorite girl friend here [Gwenda Ann laughs]— This was true that I did see her. There were some pictures hanging up over the teacher’s desk and I could see her. She sat up front. I was more of a back seat student [laughs]. I could see her and I thought, you know, that was a mighty pretty girl. Well, I still think she’s a mighty pretty girl [laughs].
GC: That’s funny.
VC: My first job was at Scotty’s, what we’d call a fast food place now a days. Their specialty was Coney Islands and I had a part time job. I worked eight hours a day, seven days a week. They paid me nine dollars a week. But I did get to eat. So they paid me more than nine. I ate probably more than nine dollars' worth.
JF: So you didn’t have a meal break? You could eat just while you were working?
VC: Oh yeah, but you could come in and eat. The guys that worked there could come in when they weren’t at work and eat their meal….
Later I got a job at Mistletoe Express. The agent there in Ada delivering the express around town. I didn’t deliver the papers because they were dumped off at the— Their main primary business, one of ‘em, was to deliver film to the movie theaters. I had keys to the theaters. You would go in and leave the film. That was probably midnight or after when it was delivered. The papers came in twelve to one o’clock, then you had a delivery at homes after. Another part of the job was later as somebody was driving the route from Ada to Hugo, the Mistletoe Express truck unloaded the material for all of the towns between Ada and Hugo. This fella that I worked for had a truck that loaded it up and hauled it all the way down there.
I had keys to all the theaters and the express agencies for the towns, Stonewall and Coalgate, on down through Antlers and all the way to Hugo. I drove that for a while. Then, the next morning, after it got daylight, I’d come back. At Ada, I’d pick up stuff as I came along….
Ann told you, we got married. She came up to Springfield, Missouri and we got married [June 5, 1943]. I went back to Camp Swift [Texas] and went overseas. I first went to North Africa.
JF: This was obviously World War II, right?
VC: World War II, yeah. We left the United States. We were supposedly going to Burma. But when we got landed in North Africa, they changed our orders and sent us back to England. We were in North Africa not too long a time. We were there at Christmas time.
Being a school boy, graduated from high school and being a pretty good student, I learned a lesson about Africa that I didn’t learn in school. You know, I always thought of Africa as hot. I got off the ship there. We went over in ships. At Oran [Algeria, in] Africa, they took us off the ship. We walked up and they loaded us on these open trucks, 2 ½ ton trucks. It was crowded as sin there and there we stood. We drove out to the top of kind of a knoll. It wasn’t a hill ‘cause it was next to the shore. They had tents already set up out there. They had the side rolled up. Evidently they’d had people there before.
We had one blanket. I found out that Africa wasn’t hot. It was cold and we liked to froze. The next day or two, we got some other blankets and we learned that sleeping on the ground is warmer than sleeping on a cot. The air comes up through the cot. We scrapped and grabbed. They had this insulated paper, it’s waxed so that the sea water wouldn’t get into the blankets. They had bundles of ‘em wrapped up. That was a better prize than getting a blanket, just to get a piece of that paper so you could lay it on your cot. We got more blankets, but it was a little warmer after that.
We stayed there for a while. Then we rode one of those little trains back to Casablanca [Morocco]. Caught a ship. Went around—
GC: Tell about the oranges.
VC: [laughs] Well, I’m not surprised that the Arabs over there don’t think too highly of us. I’m saying that in a joking manner. We were headed from Oran and we went into a little place and they had oranges just piled as high as this ceiling. They kinda sloped up. Boy, we hadn’t had any oranges for a while. Within about ten minutes there wasn’t an orange on that platform.
JF: Gosh!
VC: Went from about fifty, sixty bushels of oranges and boxes and sacks— There were sacks and loose oranges and ten minutes later you couldn’t see an orange. We got ‘em. The officers came back down the row and said, “Put those oranges back up there.”
There was a Frenchman out there. He was a little short fella. These guys grabbed up these huge sacks of oranges and they’d be staggerin’ along. He’d bump ‘em and knock ‘em over backward. He’d just bump ‘em, but he couldn’t catch everybody ‘cause there was a train load of us [laughs].
They said they were gonna court marshal--- They said put every orange back up there. Well, they didn’t get every orange back up there ‘cause [the] G.I.s, [the] American soldier has a knack figurin’ out how to keep things [laughs]. The little train… would toot their whistle twice and zip it was gone. You’d better get with it because when that whistle blew you’d better get on that thing.
GC: I thought those oranges weren’t any good.
VC: Well, I’ll get to that, if you give me time [Virgil and Ann laugh]. So we begun to peel and eat those oranges. They weren’t any good. They were bitter. They said they were marmalade oranges. So we got to throwin’ ‘em at people [laughs]. They made good weapons.
We went into the next town there was a couple of M.P.s ran out there [and said], “Hey give me an orange!” He didn’t have to wait very long, there was a shower of ‘em. As we got on close to Casablanca the oranges were good. They were delicious. The guys would trade ‘em, trade these Arabs and natives there things for their oranges.
Then when the little train would whistle, one of the soldiers would grab that basket of oranges [laughs]. I swear, I believe some of those natives there in North Africa they’d run thirty, forty miles an hour because they wouldn’t turn loose of their basket. They’d be runnin’ down the tracks with the train pickin’ up speed.
We were, you know, just the normal American boys havin’ a good time.
When I came home, immediately Ann was teaching at Centerview, living in Prague. I came home and I went back to Ada to finish school.
GC: They had a good time. Before we went back to Ada, you and my brother—
VC: Ah well, her brother and I, we were just out of the army and we were practicing being soldiers yet. We kind of wandered around. She was teaching school. Frank was there with us. We didn’t call him “Frank.” He’s always been “Buddy” to us. So we had a lot of fun.
GC: Didn’t you get your guns and go out there and pretend you were fightin’ or something?
VC: Oh, I guess some of the neighbors might have seen us with a gun or something, but we weren’t botherin’ anybody. They just weren’t used to having people wander around with guns in their hands, I guess [laughs]. But, we weren’t messin’ with anybody.
I went back to East Central and then Ray was born. We got our first job teaching school at Mason. I got my first job. They paid 1,900 dollars a year. Now we moved up there and I bought a car from Clifford Able. He had a car for sale. Well that was kind of an education.
I’d driven cars. I worked for Mistletoe Express. While I was working for Mistletoe Express at Ada, I had a wreck with the president of the college. Kinda had a fender bender. It wasn’t much of a wreck. I got on the good side of him because he told the fella I worked for how nice I was and how polite I was about it. It was really my fault, so it’s a good thing to be polite when it’s your fault.
We went to Ada. We got this car. We had this 1938 Ford, no air conditioning. The way you’d cool things is it had a handle down under the middle of the dash and it raised a scoop up on the front of the windshield and the air blew down through it. So we was real proud of that car, except this car I think was the last Ford or close to the last Ford that didn’t have hydraulic brakes. It had mechanical brakes. With mechanical brakes, the harder you push on the pedal the more stopping you did, only they got worn and they didn’t stop very good even at that.
Anyway, this car wasn’t sealed quite as tight as today’s cars. I remember that your mother had Ray dressed up in this nice little white dress and he was a little fella. We were drivin’ on the dirt roads and we went to Okemah. Well, when we got to Okemah, she could have taken Ray and dusted him out [laughs] because his little white dress was just as dirty as it could be.
As I said, the car didn’t have the air conditioning or anything like that. So we went to visit her brother Frank at Waco, Texas. He was in college at Baylor. Gosh, it was hot. This was in the summer time while we were out of school. We’d get a dishpan or something and put a chunk of ice under that scoop and let the air blow over it. We thought it helped, but I’m not too sure that it worked too good [laughs]. But, those were good days. We enjoyed ‘em.
But our first job at Mason, we taught there one year and she’s [Gwenda Ann] already told you about them firing us. But they offered us a good recommendation. I thought that was quite amusing. We went to Sapulpa and walked in to Jim Prince who was superintendent to apply for a job. He said, “Why are you leaving the job where you are?” I told him, “They fired us.” He said, “Well, you’re hired.” [laughs]
JF: He must have known about their situation.
VC: Well he knew what the story was in Mason [laughs]. I guess he appreciated our honesty.
JF: What did you teach in Sapulpa?
VC: I taught fifth and sixth grade science. That was a lot of fun…. I think the board of education building is where Highway 66 comes up there and turns north. That was where Woodlawn School [was] and that is where I taught.
I remember one morning, we had these old steam radiators…. When it got real cold, they’d collect water, water would accumulate and it would drip and had a pan sitting there. Ice froze on the surface [laughs]. It was a healthful situation there because you had plenty of fresh air.
I taught there three years. One of the things I remember most is the kids had so much fun building little electric motors. They’d use a pencil or a cork or a nail… and they’d use ‘em with batteries…. Your circuit would cause a magnet. You’d wrap a wire around a nail and it’ll make it a magnet. It would jerk it toward that, but would need to break the circuit so it would fly on by and contact again and jerk it toward the next one. So the secret was to get the timing on it so it would buzz. They had a lot of fun doing that.
But, money talks, so we moved to Drumright. My brother was over there anyway. My brother just older than me, Lowell, was over there working for City Service Gas Company. We moved to Drumright and I was the coach for basketball at Edison School, which wasn’t new because I coached basketball at Mason. Not that I was any great whiz at basketball.
GC: You were a good coach.
VC: I invented the girls’ zone defense while I was at Mason. I didn’t know that I’d invented it. I just figured out a way, I was tryin’ to stop a certain school’s team and the only way I could figure out to do it was play a zone defense with three girls. But it worked.
So I coached basketball and taught school. The second year I was there, I was made principal, but I was still teaching and coaching. Stayed at Edison school thirty years. We made some changes….
In 1994, when I was running for political office, I used to use the expression, I taught school back in the days when we had the “board of education” applied to the seat of knowledge [laughs].
JF: Yeah, I know what that means [Jeanne and Virgil laugh].
VC: So we spent three years in Sapulpa, then we moved to Drumright. In 1961, we bought the farm. In the spring of 1962, we moved out there on the farm. It was 160 acres, four miles east of Drumright.
We had a lot of stories, but I think you kids heard most of those wild stories mostly about you guys [laughs]. We had this little book that all the grandkids drew pictures about ‘em.
Since I retired, I was at Edison school thirty years, and I thought, well you know, maybe gettin’ along thinkin’ about retirement. I had a boy there come up one time call me “Mr. Edison.” [Jeanne laughs] I thought it’s time I got out this place.
Since I’ve been retired, I had the fun of running for political office. I ran for the House of Representatives, Congressional District number 2 in Oklahoma, which included practically all of Eastern Oklahoma. I won my primary election. I beat the congressman that had been there eight terms. But, I don’t think it was too much about my appeal to the voters, it was that they didn’t like him very well.
JF: And just for history’s sake that was Mike Synar, right?
VC: That was Mike Synar, yes. He’d been in the Congress for eight terms. I beat him in the primary. There was three people besides myself running against him in the primary. I came out with more votes than any of the other two did. Then on the runoff election, I won the runoff election.
In the general election in 1994, I was beaten by Tom Coburn who is presently the United States Senator from Oklahoma. He served six terms [in the US House of Representatives]. The interesting part of it is I’ve been a strong supporter of Tom Coburn’s since he won the first election from me. My grandson, Aaron Cooper, is presently Tom Coburn’s press secretary.
JF: Actually, after you ran you changed your party affiliation from Democrat. You ran as a Democrat.
VC: I ran as a Democrat. I’d been a Democrat all my life, but I kind of agree with Ronald Reagan. I didn’t leave the party, the party left me. I don’t agree with some of the things they stand for.
We didn’t immediately change our registration. I changed my registration when Tom Coburn ran for the United States Senate [in 2004] so that I could vote for him in the primary.
Since I’ve retired, I’ve spent a lot of time delivering meals on wheels, stayed busy working at my church, which is the First Baptist Church of Drumright.
GC: Take Lonnie to dialysis.
VC: For several years, I’ve taken people— We don’t have a dialysis operation in Drumright. They have one at Stillwater. They have one in Sapulpa and in Tulsa. I have taken people maybe once or twice a week to the one in Stillwater at times. There was one period of time when I took a lady to Tulsa to Hillcrest [for dialysis]. I think the name was changed from Hillcrest to something else now. I’m presently taking— I took the lady Thelda Baird. Now I’m taking her son to dialysis one day a week. So I’ve stayed fairly busy doing different things. But, I’ve had a great life, a great wife, great children…
GC: And you’re a good man.
VC: …really fine grandchildren. Now I have some great-grandchildren [Virgil, Gwenda Ann and Jeanne laugh]. A couple of boys.
There was an interesting thing about my family. My family were the Smiths. George Riley Smith was my great grandfather on my mother’s side. At one time, my grandmother Smith had twenty-four grandchildren and twenty-two of ‘em were boys. I’m not positive, but I think that this Dr. John Rollins delivered every one of them [laughs].
JF: That’s interesting.
VC: It’s possible there may be one or two black sheep in the family.
Dr. John Rollins practiced out of Paden, Oklahoma, and then he moved to Prague, Oklahoma. I believe his son became a doctor later. But, we didn’t spend much time at the doctor’s office except being born, I guess.
But, I wanted to tell you a story. Every Fourth of July, (we called it the Fourth of July), in Prague, Oklahoma, they had a picnic.
“Are you gonna go to the picnic?”
“Yes, I’m goin’ to the picnic.”
This was when we were children, youngsters. We didn’t go to town much. At Prague, Oklahoma, they had the picnic and down in the park, as you went in near the entrance to the park, they had a stock tank, normally a stock tank for cattle to drink out of. They had that and it would be sittin’ there and it was full of lemonade. It was open [Jeanne laughs]. This was years ago. It had hundred pound blocks of ice floatin’ around in it in this lemonade. Hanging on the side of the tank were dippers and you just walked up there and got you a dipper and drank all you wanted, any time you wanted. Hang your dipper back on the side of the tank. Can you imagine what the health department would say these days?
JF: They’d probably shut it down quick.
VC: And deprive all those people of that good lemonade.
I might say that we have Cherokee ancestry in our background from my grandmother Smith. I’m confident that we have Indian blood from the other side of the family, but it’s never been known because probably they came from Tennessee. My two grandfathers came from within twenty miles of each other in Tennessee, but they had no contact with each other. But they lived within twenty miles of each other in Tennessee. They took different routes coming to Oklahoma.
We’ve been back a time or two that’s at McMinnville, Tennessee and Manchester, Tennessee. We’ve been back a few times.
Go ahead.
JF: I was just going to draw it to a close, ‘cause I think our time’s up. I just wanted to thank you guys for coming to talk. I think we should do this again maybe at home or something.
VC: Yeah. It’d be great. I’m thinkin’ some things I’ve left out.
JF: Well, I can think of stories that I’ve heard that I think you should tell.
VC: [laughs]
JF: Okay. Well, we’ll continue it another time. Thanks.
GC: Thank you.
VC: I’ve always been proud to be an Oklahoman.
JF: Oh, well that’s good, especially in this year of the Centennial [of Oklahoma Statehood].
VC: Oh, yeah.
END