In the rousing title song of the 1930’s musical “Oklahoma,” the cast sings of corn waving as high as an elephant’s eye - growing “right up to the sky.”  They conclude this joyous testimonial by exuberantly shouting “Oklahoma. . . .  OK!”   Good theater, and it may even have been true in the horse and buggy days in which this musical was set.  Anyone, however, who would have described Oklahoma as “OK” during the 1930’s is a person who would swoon at the thought of whips, chains, leather, and other Sado/Masochistic pastimes. The twin devils of dust and economic depression had decimated the state during the early “thirties.”   A prolonged drought came to the Great Plains.  Rain clouds passed overhead but spilled not a drop of water.   Droughts had come before but this time it was different.  Farmers had sunk their plows deeply into the rich, fertile ground breaking up and destroying the sod whose long roots had held the sandy soil in place for centuries.  Where long stem grass had once fed buffaloes they had planted corn, wheat, oats and other grains.  When the drought came, accompanied by the relentless wind of the plains, the fields that had produced an abundance of crops dried up and cracked open like an overcooked hot dog.  When “the wind came sweeping down the plain” it lifted that dried up soil and turned it into huge clouds of gritty dust.  It was an extremely fine dust that found its way through the tiniest cracks in houses, cars and barns; spreading a patina of what had been fertile topsoil onto food, furniture, and the shoulders of discouraged people who could no longer harvest crops.

Not one to play favorites, the 1930’s provided another kind of misery for those whose livelihood had not been blown away by the hot, dry winds.  This horror became known as “The Great Depression” and it wiped out jobs as relentlessly as the wind scrubbed the soil.  Jobs became as scarce as crops in the devastated fields.  Thousands of one-time Oklahoma farmers Oklahomans, who soon came to be known as “Okies”, filled the westbound lane of Route 66.  They were filled with both despair and hope.  Despair for what they had lost and hope for a new, prosperous life in the verdant fields and orchards of California”.   It was true that a few thousand workers were needed to harvest the bounty of California’s fields and orchards but it was equally true that those California landowners had printed hundreds of thousands of “Help Wanted” posters with which they flooded Oklahoma.  Within six months there were a thousand men, women and children for every one hundred jobs in the so-called “Promised Land.”  These “Okies” found that their “Promised Land” was actually just a different version of the hell they had left in Oklahoma.  And they soon learned that Californians curled their lips in derision when they said the word “Okies.”

Other Oklahomans stayed put.  My parents, Willard Samson, better known as “Jack,” and Adeline Carriker were among those.   They weren’t surviving any better than the “Okies” who went to California but they preferred the familiar devil in their kitchen to the strange one in the front yard.   Dad had spent his teens and twenties working as a blacksmith, teamster, and tank builder in the Oklahoma and Texas oilfields.  He understood and enjoyed working with grease, draft horses, hammers and chisels and would have been totally unsuited and terribly unhappy picking fruit and vegetables in California.  So he stayed and became one of millions of men who were chronically unemployed.  By this time he was trying to provide for a wife and five young children.   He tried valiantly.  He looked for work constantly but could only pick up occasional one-day odd jobs.  Mother was doing as well as any wife and mother could do.  She washed and mended threadbare, often hand-me-down clothes, cooked whatever was available and kept her five children secure in the knowledge that they were loved.   There were many times when there was nothing in the cupboard for her to cook. They were mired deep in poverty without benefit of food stamps, ADC benefits, earned income credits, or any other type of government dole.  The little money Dad occasionally earned was supplemented by charity from friends and church people, and by vegetables from a small garden. Going to bed hungry was common.

That was the grim situation into which I was born on a crisp fall night in early October 1932. We were living at that time in a sparsely settled part of Creek County somewhere between Oilton and Drumright Oklahoma on a piece of land known only as “Section 14.” When Mother told Dad she was once again pregnant it surely was not a happy announcement.  They were already beside themselves trying to feed and clothe four boys and one girl.  The fact that I am here today makes the bumper sticker slogan  “I Survived Freedom of Choice” a profound truth to me. To my family’s credit, I not only survived it, I was welcomed into the world. In fact, as I was told many times in later years by my older brothers and sister, not always in a pleasant tone of voice, I was “spoiled”.

When darkness fell on that October evening it became obvious to my parents that I was about to leave the warm nourishment of my Mother’s womb and enter the cold desolation of the world in which they were living.  The nearest physician was a Doctor Phillips who practiced out of his home in the little town of “Oilton,” which was between five and ten miles cross-country from where we lived on “Section 14.”   He had not provided any prenatal care to my mother and was, in fact, completely oblivious to her existence. Obviously Dad had to stay with Mother as she went into labor but the doctor had to be summoned.   Telephone?  Not even a dream for the Carriker family at that time, and there were no close neighbors with or without a telephone.   Dad told my oldest brother “Robert,” who was 12 years old to go to Oilton and tell Dr. Phillips he was needed.  By this time it was full dark and there was no moon to light the sky.  As almost any boy that age would be, Robert was a very scared little boy as he climbed over fences, walked through the woods, and ran across pastures towards Oilton.  When he got there it was past midnight.  The doctor told him to just make himself comfortable and that he would go to Mother’s bedside first thing in the morning. He arrived long after sun-up on October 4th, put drops of "Silver Nitrate" in my eyes (a common procedure in OK in those days), filled out my birth certificate and left

His lack of immediate concern led to a situation that created a nuisance problem for me late in my life.  When I applied for Social Security I had to provide them my Birth Certificate.  Only then did I discover that when Doc Phillips filled out my birth certificate he wrote that I was born October 4th.  Not true.  He ARRIVED on October 4th but my dad had delivered me well before midnight.  As my Mother quipped many times as I was growing up “You were born before midnight.  I know.  I was there.”  My true birthday is October 3rd.  The Veterans Administration and all my school transcripts use that date.  Government bureaucracy being what it is, Social Security and Medicare could only accept what was on my birth certificate.  Thanks to ol' Doc Phillips lack of concern I have spent the last several years of my life constantly wondering which person or agency I had to deal with has which birthday.