There was a short time in 1989-90 that Elaine and I lived in rural Oklahoma in the small (population 300 more or less) town of Butler, about midway between Oklahoma City and Amarillo, Texas. Elaine’s great grandfather had lived there during the Great Depression and had—through good business sense or skullduggery, depending on who was telling the story—amassed a good bit of dry farmland and mineral rights. Elaine had inherited some property and some minerals, and we went to Butler to see whether or not it might be a place we’d like to settle.
It wasn’t.
While we were living there—it was just before Christmas in 1989—I wrote a letter to my late friend the writer Bill Eastlake describing some of the downsides of life in rural Oklahoma:
. . . . I’m sitting here wrapped in blankets with all but one of our pipes frozen. It was 11 below when we woke up this morning—mind you, that was in the kitchen, god knows what it was outside—with a wind chill of something like minus 50 degrees according to the radio (that is, when these western Oklahoma dee-jays can stop braggin’ about how the only president we’ve got [Bush senior] even if he is from Texas stood up all macho-like to that dope-dealin’ acne-scarred commie down in Panama [Manuel Noriega] long enough to give a weather report!) Supposed to be even worse tonight. I should tell you that [when we left] Mexico we had determined that we would rent a house in either Bisbee [the town in Arizona where Eastlake lived] or here in Butler where Miss Elaine just recently came into some “acreage.” Seems that in the mañana lethargy induced by the warm tropics of Mexico we elected Butler on account of the cheap rent [a house for $50 a month] and the absence of distractions. Kindly do not laugh at us . . . .
While we were in Butler we tried to make the best of living in a place where we were sore thumb outsiders. For example, we liked to walk. People in Butler thought that was strange—us walking. In Butler, if you lived across the road from where you were aiming to go—your neighbor’s house, say, or the Baptist Church—you got in your car or truck and drove over. If you were spotted walking it was likely on account of your car had run off the road into a bar ditch or maybe you’d run out of gasoline. To walk just for the hell of it was . . . well, it was strange is what it was.
Most mornings one or both of us would walk the few hundred yards from our rented house to the post office where we could buy the Oklahoma City paper out of a paper machine. I read every word of every paper, so starved was I for news of the outside world. I even took to reading the want-ads and, especially, the “Personals” for entertainment.
On January 5, 1990—it was a Friday—there were at least four notices under the “Personals” heading. There was one for Confidential AIDS Testing, one for Prepaid Dental Insurance starting at $11 a month, an appeal for ladies clothing size 16-18, and—and it was this one that attracted my attention—a notice that read: “The Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is taking applications for membership.” A Post Office Box address was listed.
Right away I have to tell you that I was astounded to read this notice. I do not consider myself to be particularly naive, but I really thought the KKK was something out of the past—the not-so-distant past, to be sure, but not something that would blatantly advertise in the newspaper for recruits.
Naturally, I responded with a request for more information. I didn’t really expect to hear anything back.
Wrong.
Within a week I received a plain brown envelope with all matter of incendiary materials and an application form. A cover letter warned me of “thousands of organizations working for the interests of blacks” and that as a “white heterosexual Christian” and a “common working man [with a] common family” I could help! (I’m thinking that maybe my handwriting revealed me to be a “common white heterosexual Christian family man”—that, or else it was a litmus test.)
The letter was signed,
For God, Race and Nation
Marty Martin
Great Titan for the State of Oklahoma
Now, I know good and well that I shared with my wife the fact that I was just fooling around out of boredom and my surprise that such things were still going on. But Elaine told me years later that she worried herself half sick over the whole deal and that it was years before she quit thinking that the FBI would one day knock on our door and handcuff and lead me away.
In fact, she got on to me so much for having kept the Klan materials and for having included those materials in among the archives that I sent to San Marcos that when I visited with the Director and the Head Archivist for the Collection recently, I made a point of trying to reassure them that this was all a big joke, to me—that I really am the bleeding-heart, tax-and-spend liberal that I represent myself to be and that my curiosity about the Klan and Rednecks and Evangelical Snake-Handlers was and still is really just that . . . curiosity.
It wasn’t.
While we were living there—it was just before Christmas in 1989—I wrote a letter to my late friend the writer Bill Eastlake describing some of the downsides of life in rural Oklahoma:
. . . . I’m sitting here wrapped in blankets with all but one of our pipes frozen. It was 11 below when we woke up this morning—mind you, that was in the kitchen, god knows what it was outside—with a wind chill of something like minus 50 degrees according to the radio (that is, when these western Oklahoma dee-jays can stop braggin’ about how the only president we’ve got [Bush senior] even if he is from Texas stood up all macho-like to that dope-dealin’ acne-scarred commie down in Panama [Manuel Noriega] long enough to give a weather report!) Supposed to be even worse tonight. I should tell you that [when we left] Mexico we had determined that we would rent a house in either Bisbee [the town in Arizona where Eastlake lived] or here in Butler where Miss Elaine just recently came into some “acreage.” Seems that in the mañana lethargy induced by the warm tropics of Mexico we elected Butler on account of the cheap rent [a house for $50 a month] and the absence of distractions. Kindly do not laugh at us . . . .
While we were in Butler we tried to make the best of living in a place where we were sore thumb outsiders. For example, we liked to walk. People in Butler thought that was strange—us walking. In Butler, if you lived across the road from where you were aiming to go—your neighbor’s house, say, or the Baptist Church—you got in your car or truck and drove over. If you were spotted walking it was likely on account of your car had run off the road into a bar ditch or maybe you’d run out of gasoline. To walk just for the hell of it was . . . well, it was strange is what it was.
Most mornings one or both of us would walk the few hundred yards from our rented house to the post office where we could buy the Oklahoma City paper out of a paper machine. I read every word of every paper, so starved was I for news of the outside world. I even took to reading the want-ads and, especially, the “Personals” for entertainment.
On January 5, 1990—it was a Friday—there were at least four notices under the “Personals” heading. There was one for Confidential AIDS Testing, one for Prepaid Dental Insurance starting at $11 a month, an appeal for ladies clothing size 16-18, and—and it was this one that attracted my attention—a notice that read: “The Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is taking applications for membership.” A Post Office Box address was listed.
Right away I have to tell you that I was astounded to read this notice. I do not consider myself to be particularly naive, but I really thought the KKK was something out of the past—the not-so-distant past, to be sure, but not something that would blatantly advertise in the newspaper for recruits.
Naturally, I responded with a request for more information. I didn’t really expect to hear anything back.
Wrong.
Within a week I received a plain brown envelope with all matter of incendiary materials and an application form. A cover letter warned me of “thousands of organizations working for the interests of blacks” and that as a “white heterosexual Christian” and a “common working man [with a] common family” I could help! (I’m thinking that maybe my handwriting revealed me to be a “common white heterosexual Christian family man”—that, or else it was a litmus test.)
The letter was signed,
For God, Race and Nation
Marty Martin
Great Titan for the State of Oklahoma
Now, I know good and well that I shared with my wife the fact that I was just fooling around out of boredom and my surprise that such things were still going on. But Elaine told me years later that she worried herself half sick over the whole deal and that it was years before she quit thinking that the FBI would one day knock on our door and handcuff and lead me away.
In fact, she got on to me so much for having kept the Klan materials and for having included those materials in among the archives that I sent to San Marcos that when I visited with the Director and the Head Archivist for the Collection recently, I made a point of trying to reassure them that this was all a big joke, to me—that I really am the bleeding-heart, tax-and-spend liberal that I represent myself to be and that my curiosity about the Klan and Rednecks and Evangelical Snake-Handlers was and still is really just that . . . curiosity.
