First

The new kid on the block walked across the street to the front yard where a boy was playing with a toy truck and said, “Hi, I’m

Dickie” and the boy said, “I’m Ronnie.” Thus began our seventy-year friendship.

Tulsa. About a year after my family moved into our brand-new ranch-style house, the Gallup family moved into theirs, directly

across the street from us, probably in very late 1950. We Padgetts were at 2733 East 4th Street, the Gallups at 2734, in a middle-

class housing development called the Daniel Addition. The addition had been platted in 1923, but most of the housing

construction hadn’t begun until 1947. The groundwork—sewers, drains, gas lines, paved streets, driveways, and trees, everything

except the houses—had been completed long before, so that by 1950 the forty mature elms lining the street of our block gave it a

comfortably settled look.

The Gallups, from Greenfield, Massachusetts, were different from us. For one thing, their accent sounded odd to our Oklahoma

ears, and they used unfamiliar words, referring, for example, to trash as “rubbish.” Added to this was our initial difficulty grasping

what Dickie’s father (John) said at all, as he had a hare lip and partially cleft palate. Otherwise he was quite normal, friendly and

sociable, as if unaware of his impairment. Dickie’s mother Edna wasn’t as outgoing as mine, who had given birth to me when she

was eighteen and at times was like a playful big sister, but Edna wasn’t unfriendly, she was cautious and socially restrained.

Dickie’s sister Mary Jane was just a little kid, two years younger than him, so initially her presence hardly registered on me.

The Gallup family found Tulsa emotionally dislocating but at the same time rather exotic: “We had never seen a southern Baptist,”

Dick later recalled. John (1913–1997), around 37 at the time, had never lived anywhere but Greenfield, and Edna’s life had been

circumscribed by the Greenfield region. The two of them had left behind their home, their neighbors, most of their relatives, their

whole New England culture. Later in life Dick expressed admiration for his parents’ courage in daring such a deracination.

On more than one occasion, he told me how wonderful it had been to be a child in Greenfield. His family had lived about a mile

outside of town, at 144 Shelburne Road, in the two-story New England farm house where he was born. It was the oldest residence

on what used to be called the Old Mohawk Trail. Nearby was a wood with a stream, where he spent many happy hours on his own,

just wandering around, looking at things, and daydreaming. He was particularly fond of his maternal grandfather, who lived

nearby and whom Dick visited often after school: “His virtues were humility, compassion (above all!), curiosity, and empathy. He

gave me strength.” [Diary, December 1, 1968] Leaving Greenfield was a bit like being expelled from the Garden of Eden, but the

young Dickie enjoyed the long, exciting train trip to Tulsa—the roomette, the dining car, the towns and landscape flowing past.

John was leaving behind a steady job working for the town of Greenfield as the foreman of the street crew, the guys who drove

sweepers during the warm months and snow plows during the winter. John liked the work well enough and got along with

everyone, but there was no room for advancement: the man above him, in the top position, was going to be there a long time.

Besides, the pay was skimpy, even for his boss.

Back in the late 1930s John’s father Frank and wife Ida had moved to Tulsa, where he started an industrial laundry called Reliable

Wiping Cloth Company, which rented, laundered, and delivered overalls, fender covers, and wiping rags to service stations,

automotive garages, and other industrial shops. Long before Frank and Ida left Greenfield, John, age nine or ten, had gone across

town to live with his grandparents. There had been an ongoing problem between father and son. About thirty years later, from half

way across the country, Frank offered John a job in the laundry, though making it clear he would have to start at the bottom, with

no favorite treatment. By all accounts Frank was a stern, humorless, private man of few words. When John and his family arrived in

Tulsa they stayed with Frank and Ida while looking for a house of their own. According to Dick the temporary stay was not a happy

one.

Over the years, Dick and his family visited Frank and Ida on Sunday for dinner, at John’s insistence, though the gatherings were

joyless. Mary Jane remembers her grandmother as someone who shuffled around silently in the kitchen, spoke little, and hardly

ever left the house. She had her groceries delivered to her. Frank never set foot in John’s house, though he lived only a few minutes

away.

Accepting his father’s emotional distance, John became a model employee, as reliable as the company’s name. He was the

epitome of the hardworking, uncomplaining, blue-collar guy, salt of the earth. His natural congeniality was beautiful, no doubt a

gift from the grandparents who raised him.

Edna (1917-2010) adjusted to Tulsa more tentatively. Devoting her attention to Mary Jane, she seemed uncomfortable with the

duties of raising a boy. She was neither emotionally nor financially generous toward Dick, and could be disapproving, even in trivial

matters. (It drove her to distraction that he didn’t turn off the light every time he left his bedroom.) Part of her parsimoniousness

probably came from the New England tradition of thrift (“Waste not, want not”), but in my family’s unsophisticated eyes she came

off simply as tight. My parents, in the lucrative bootlegging business, had all kinds of cash on hand, so when it came to going to a

movie, for example, my mother thought nothing of paying for Dickie. Edna’s strict frugality aside, she was a model housewife of

that time, though years later it became clear that privately she had been unhappy in that role.

It’s likely she cast a wary eye on me, as I, the son of a criminal family, might be the kind to lead Dickie astray, but my parents were

so friendly toward the Gallups that at first Edna didn’t quite know what to think of us. Eventually, as she adapted to her new

environment, she accepted my parents as who they were, but as Dick and I grew into adolescence she became increasingly

uncertain of what she saw as our unsettling behavior. However, the fact that both Dick and I were smart boys who did well in

school and stayed out of trouble with the law kept her wariness of me in check.

Blooping and Blapping

Flashback: Edna has settled into the living room couch, watching her favorite weekly TV program, The Lawrence Welk Show. The

Welk orchestra is playing his signature “champagne” (bubbly) music. Dick and I, junior high school boys, appear in the room and

start prancing around in front of the TV and singing “Bloop-de-bloop-de-bloop, de-bloop,” a mockery of the Welk theme song.

Edna scolds us, “Stop that! Get out of the way! Be quiet!” and we bloop-de-bloop out of the room, cackling. She takes the bait

every time.

In addition, around the age of fourteen Dick and I invented something we called “blapping.” To blap someone, you gently slapped

them with the palm of your hand on their upper chest while saying, slowly and thickly, “Blap!” We never tried to blap anyone but

each other. Doing it successfully required stealth and surprise, and the blapee invariably burst out in mock horror, exclaiming, “Oh,

I’ve been blapped!”

Neighbors

The Clarks—Raymond, Louise, and their son Steve—lived next door to the Gallups. The Clarks were paragons of quiet domesticity.

Raymond’s blue-collar job (electrician) gave him and John a certain affinity. The modestly genteel Louise was someone Edna

could chat with over afternoon tea, perhaps like someone back in Greenfield. The Clarks’ handsome and athletic son was about

five years older than Dick and therefore not quite a suitable buddy for him, but he was as cordial and neighborly as his parents.

One day I was out in our front yard when I noticed that the Clarks’ garage door was opening—by itself! Then Raymond’s car came

down the street and drove into the garage, and the door closed just as magically. Raymond had installed a remote control

garage door switch, a device still unknown to the public, which he could activate from several hundred yards away. When our

garage door opened (manually) it was often to make way for a car loaded down with whiskey. I can imagine Edna’s different

reactions to the two doors.

Dick never expressed an opinion of my parents’ illegal business (or that of my bootlegging uncle, who lived next door to my

family). He simply liked my parents. My dad would joke around and wrestle with us, my mother often invited him for dinner or a

movie. She would even scold him the same way she would scold me: “Dickie, don’t you come tromping in here on my new carpet

with those muddy shoes!” She was a second mother to him, but without the emotional baggage.

How Are You? 

There was only one person in my life to whom I could say “Ha lee toe, chin chick-a-ma” and know he would understand me. As

children Dick and I had learned this sentence from Native American artist Acee Blue Eagle on his local TV show. It means “Hello,

how are you?” in Cherokee. At least that’s what he told us.

Carnival in the Garage

The handwritten circulars that announced “Games! Fun! Prizes! Free movie! Refreshments! Admission only 2 cents!” invited children

to the garage of the Gallups’ house on Saturday from 3 to 5. Dick and I handed out the flyers in our neighborhood, and at 3 p.m.

the kids began to arrive.

Inside the garage Dick and I had arranged a series of games, in the style of a carnival midway. The children could play each one

for a nominal fee, usually a few pennies. On the wall we had taped inflated balloons, inside of some of which we had inserted a

small piece of rolled-up paper that bore the name of the prize to be won if the player managed to pop the balloon with a dart

thrown from a distance of six feet. At another station was a wooden case of empty Coke bottles, most of whose bottoms bore a

piece of paper naming a prize. Then came a card table with three inverted paper cups—the traditional shell game. We also

performed magic and card tricks, to keep the crowd in a state of dazzlement. Dick and I were eleven and ten, and it was easy to

hoodwink the kids, who ranged from four to eight. He and I had figured out that a carnival midway prize usually has a commercial

value of less than what you paid to win it. Our profit would come from the fact that the prizes we offered—a marble, a stick of

chewing gum, a toy we no longer wanted, a used comic book—were things we were ready to discard anyway, and the

refreshments we served consisted of a small cup of lemonade that cost us virtually nothing to make and a chocolate chip cookie

that the customers had to pay for. The children loved playing the games and winning prizes. Some, after spending all their cash,

even went home to get more.

When we had taken in as much money as possible, we sat everyone down and turned on an old 16-mm Keystone movie projector,

and a village in the 1920s Argentine pampas flickered to life, in black and white, with peasants walking to and fro and engaging in

various activities to the sound of the film clicking in the projector. Then one of the villagers called out, in a subtitle, “The gaucho is

coming! The gaucho is coming!” and the black-and-white scene was suddenly overlaid with a deep blue as a distant gaucho

atop a white steed came sweeping down a long plain at night, approaching us and then galloping past, and then the blue was

replaced by an emerald layer, and once again the villager cried out, “The gaucho is coming! The gaucho is coming!” Again came

the same galloping gaucho, right up to the point where the film fragment—a fragment was all we had—would have ended, and

Dick stopped the projector and set it into reverse motion, so that the gaucho galloped away backward into the night. No one,

including Dick and me, had any idea of who the gaucho was or why he was galloping, but the film’s brief action was so marvelous

and hypnotic that no one cared.

Clutching their prizes, the children went home satisfied, and Dick and I counted the day’s take, a surprising haul of something like

$3.25, which in those days bought you something. We congratulated ourselves at having bilked the children, but our cleverness

might have brought with it an undertow of guilt, for we never held the event again.

The Finger

I must have been around eleven, Dick twelve. We were in my parents’ garage, doing what I don’t know. A dispute between us grew

extraordinarily intense and Dick abruptly walked out of the garage, took eight or ten steps, turned, and, to my absolute

astonishment, gave me the finger. In those days the finger was the ultimate insulting gesture, unthinkable. A hot rage surged into

my head and I bolted toward him, fists clenched. He took off running across the street, with me in pursuit, and he dashed up his

porch steps and disappeared into the house. A few seconds later I ran right up to the door and melodramatically slammed into it.

From inside, Edna turned a puzzled look on me. I glared for a moment and started back toward my house, fuming.

Even then, though, I must have felt relieved that I hadn’t caught him, for in truth I had no taste for fist fighting. Yes, I chased him

because I felt grossly insulted, but also because that’s what guys do, they defend their honor, right? The movies had made that

clear, as had my father.

For several months Dick and I avoided each other, then gradually the bad feeling wore off and we were friends again. The incident

has never been mentioned until now, almost seventy years later, perhaps because we were both so ashamed of it. I just

remembered: as I chased him across the street I was struck by how much faster he ran than I.

Mary Jane

Mary Jane was in some ways his opposite. She was happy to be part of groups such as the Bluebirds and Tri-B (a social club for

girls); she had a lot of friends, with whom she talked incessantly on the phone; she embraced conformity as a desirable way of life.

Dick and I thought of her as superficial, never entertaining the possibility that she might simply be better socially adjusted than we

were. The other thing that set her apart from Dick was her status as their mother’s favorite. In short, in their childhood years Dick

and Mary Jane seemed to have little in common, but he showed no jealousy and, as far as I know, never treated her badly.

Eventually she married and had children who turned out to be talented nonconformist artists with a taste for aesthetic risk.

Bikes

At a certain point our parents gave us permission to ride our bicycles out of the neighborhood. Our first destination was an ice

cream parlor about a mile away, a cinderblock building (with a sign that said simply “Milk Depot”) where a middle-aged, chunky,

dour man made the best malted milkshakes (called “malts”) in town. We noticed that when the blender was in operation he

grasped the metal canister and subtly rotated his upper body in short movements back and forth, which seemed unusual for

such a stolid man. We each paid a quarter and took that first heavenly gulp, then drank the rest as we rode home. Afterward,

when one of us had the idea of going to get a malt, he would look at the other and make that little shaking body movement, and

off we would go.

Another bicycle destination was Ike’s Chili Parlor, a local cafe where we would sit at the counter and wolf down our chili, into which

we crumbled saltine crackers, just like the adults around us. Then we paid our checks, also just like the adults!

Sports Cars

In junior high school Dick and I were besotted with sports cars and grand prix racing. Sports cars in Tulsa were rarities and the

nearest grand prix race was in Europe, but we closely followed the international racing world in magazines such as Road & Track.

Our passion compelled us to have Dick’s father hinge a large fold-down sheet of plywood to the interior wall of their garage, and

on it we painted superimposed curving race tracks, marked at intervals so we could advance our toy metal cars according to the

roll of a die. We painted the cars silver, red, blue, and green to match the colors of the Mercedes Benz, Ferrari, Maserati, and

Jaguar racing teams, and we kept detailed records of the races, assigning points to the various finishes. At the end of the “season”

we crowned the winning team and best driver. Our real-world favorites were Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirllng Moss of the

Mercedes team, but we also admired other drivers, whose names resonated with adventure and speed: the dashing Marquis de

Portago, the tragic Alberto Ascari, Maurice Trintignant, and Hans Hermann, along with the names of the courses in Buenos Aires,

Monaco, Spa, Aintree, and Monza, and the mysterious Mille Miglia. When the 1955 Hollywood film The Racers came to Tulsa, with Kirk

Douglas (as Gino Borgesa) and Gilbert Roland (as Dell’Oro), Dick and I were in heaven, no matter how melodramatic the story. For

the rest of our lives, when one of us would imitate the drunken Dell’Oro’s saying “But Gino, the young ones . . .” we would burst out

laughing.

Movies

Another unforgettable cinematic moment came in Rio Bravo, when John Wayne approaches a ranch house and calls out the

villain’s name, “Burdette! Nathan Burdette!” Something in that moment struck Dick and me as hilarious. About fifty years later I

phoned Dick and, after he said hello, I intoned, “Burdette! Nathan Burdette!” and he knew exactly what it referred to.

Not all our movie experiences were enjoyable. Dick was so terrified by the face of Victor Jory, particularly his eyes, that when Jory

came on the screen in The Fugitive Kind Dick got up and fled the theater.

Sports

Dick was a pretty decent athlete, with good eye-hand coordination and timing, as well as foot speed. Around the age of twelve he

was named the starting pitcher and cleanup batter for his little league baseball team, positions that always went to the best

athlete on the squad. He was modest about this distinction, explaining that his teammates were hopelessly unathletic. Despite his

efforts, the team lost game after game.

He and I spent many hours in our yards and in the street, playing catch, shooting baskets, and trying to throw a perfect spiral

pass. In high school we taught ourselves tennis, playing late into the summer nights on the public courts. (At one of them if you hit

the ball over the fence it would bounce across the street and end up in a cemetery, the same one where later it was suspected

that blacks killed in the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 had been dumped into a mass grave.) After playing tennis for hours in the

heat of the day, we would drive to a nearby root beer stand and gulp down around six mugs of cold root beer each.

We financed such binges partly by collecting empty bottles from the bushes on the campus of nearby Tulsa University and

cashing them in for two cents apiece, and later by hawking soda and beer at athletic events at the university’s stadium. We

quickly learned, though, that our slender frames were unsuited for carrying a heavy metal tub filled with ice and bottled drinks up

and down the stadium’s steep steps.

Dingly-Dangly

We gave a name to our recurrent lassitude: “I’m feeling dingly-dangly.” We even invented a weird dance to describe this state.

With eyes rolling and our tongues lolling to one side and with idiotic grins, we wiggled our legs and let our arms dangle and

wiggle, as if we were made of jelly. Sometimes we added, in a high, breaking voice, “Dingly-dangly!” All of which made us feel even

more . . . dingly-dangly!