The Centennial Project
Esther Catlege, age 15, about a decade after she made the Land Run, and Walter Hoofard
Old Grandma. That’s what my father called her. His grandmother, and the woman who raised my beloved Pawpaw, was so old that simply calling her grandma wouldn’t do. She was called Old Grandma, and she was 101 years old when she died.
I was nine, and the math nearly blew my mind. She had been alive for more than a century, ten times as long as me. I knew this because the year before my father had whispered it into my ear, in that low and fascinated voice he used for story-telling.
“Did you know Old Grandma is 100 years old?”
My dad always called her Old Grandma, and Pawpaw called her “Mama,” but her given name was Esther. She was named after a character in the Bible, which I discovered one day while flipping through the giant gilt-edged book my parents got when they married. I liked the name Esther. I’d never heard it before.
I only have one memory of her — a very specific memory — of her sitting at the table during Thanksgiving dinner at my grandparents’, wearing a calico dress and her thin white hair pulled back in a bun. She was in a wheelchair, a blanket on her lap, and my Pawpaw was feeding her mashed potatoes with a spoon.
I was only seven or eight at the time. Later in the same evening she threw up the food she’d eaten, and I pretended not to watch out of the corner of my eye while my Pawpaw cleaned her dress with an old towel. In the car on the way back to my mom’s house, my dad said something I would never forget. “Old Grandma is old. Did you know she was in the Land Run?”
At Red Oak Elementary, Land Run Day was practically a holiday.
Every year on the morning of April 22, all the students and teachers in the school would line up on the soccer field we shared with the YMCA, and at the sound of the whistle, we were off, bagged lunches in hand, to stake our miniature claims.
The younger kids had learned about Boomers and Sooners, prairie houses and pioneers, and got to choose between Indian costumes with construction paper feather headdresses, or Cowboy costumes with boots, hat and spurs. The older kids built miniature covered wagons out of Radio Flyers, and used wooden stakes and lengths of twine to section off their “plots.” The teachers manned land registration stations, and once lunch was over, games would commence on the field — wagon races, gold prospecting, prizes for the best outfits. Pistols and arrows, even toys, were specifically forbidden by the school, but some kids snuck them in anyway.
I remember sitting on an old blanket in the grassy field next to my school. I was wearing a dress my mom had made, blue with silver thread and silver rick-rack, like the Native American girls who performed at the cultural center. I sat, eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and watched as the other kids dragged their covered wagons around and ran from square to square, laughing and playing. And for some reason this memory is always connected to my memory of Old Grandma, blanket across her lap, and my father whispering her life story in my ear.
Old Grandma, circa 1970s, with my aunt Suzanne
I never appreciated Oklahoma until I left. As a teenager, I found it stifling, though my friends and I joked that we were the only 16-year-olds in the country who paid less than a dollar for gasoline, and who could attend late-night parties in abandoned pastures without curfew or concern. As a young adult, I dreamed of other places, of living a life better and more exciting than my parents. It was only after college, after I moved away, that my visits home revealed to me an Oklahoma I’d never known. The dilapidated motels along every highway were actually shining examples of mid-century architecture, and the Stockyards downtown were the last remaining icon of Oklahoma’s pioneer days, where you could get a 10-ounce steak for under $20 and a home-brewed beer on the side. I often asked myself, “Does everyone feel this way about the place they came from, or is it being thousands of miles away that makes me sentimental?”
My family has plenty of stories. Who knows how many are true. They were real Okies, like the Steinbeck novels, leaving the dust bowl for California and returning generations later. My favorite involves Bonnie and Clyde, who sought refuge one night at a farm house belonging to a distant relative of ours. The next morning the couple was gone, but they left a bundle of money on the table to express their gratitude, and it was only then that the relative realized who they were. Another tale involves the spelling of our German last name — now Anglacized after my great-great-grandfather killed a man and fled the law.
True or not, these stories fascinated me as a child, which is why at Thanksgiving two years ago, when I was handed a booklet of eight densely-typed pages, stapled in one corner and photocopied to distortion, I was immediately engrossed. The pages, originally dated May 29, 1944, provide a first-hand, first-person account of my paternal family’s journey into Oklahoma by way of the 1891 Land Run. It was the story of how my Old Grandma, Esther Hoofard, three years old at the time, made the journey with her family into the territory that later became the nation’s 46th state.
November 16, 2007, marks Oklahoma’s Statehood Centennial. I had been trying to think of ways to participate in the celebration from so far away, and was considering writing about the land run story when a strange coincidence occurred. Just a few months after I received the first narrative, I was sent a second first-person account in the form of an email from my maternal grandmother, which included nearly 30 pages detailing the life story of a relative on that side, his family’s involvement in the Civil War, and ultimately, their settlement in Oklahoma.
Reading through both stories, with a hundred years of hindsight at my disposal, I sometimes feel a sense of sadness at the way history unraveled. I’m often torn between pride in the pioneer spirit Oklahoma is so famous for and shame in the knowledge that my beloved homeland was taken and “reassigned” from the people who rightfully owned it so that my own relatives could make use of it instead. But that’s the beauty of history — it is neither made nor lived in hindsight. And if ever there was a good reason to keep a journal, it’s accounts like these. An average person’s story — the physical hardships and financial struggles, as well as the successes — give us a glimpse into what life was like for the many Okies 100 years ago. Here’s a hint — it wasn’t all gunfights and cowboy ballads.
Over the next several weeks, to mark the celebration of Oklahoma’s 100th birthday, I will be posting excerpts from both biographies, in the hopes that not only my family’s story can be preserved, but also that the story of everyday Oklahomans, the one few people hear, can be shared. To read Part 1 of the Centennial Project, start here.
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