A Fighting Chance

In the 1920s, my daddy had big dreams. He wanted to fly airplanes. I grew up hearing about how he was barely out of high school when he rebuilt a little two-passenger, open-cockpit airplane and taught himself to fly above the prairies of eastern Oklahoma. I always pictured him landing and taking off in vast wheat fields, a tiny plane in an immense blue sky.

But there was something he loved even more than an airplane: he loved my mother. She was fifteen when he noticed her, a whisper-thin, dark-haired beauty who was lively and funny and whose beautiful low voice made her a favorite to sing at weddings and funerals. She would sit for hours in an empty room and play the piano and sing. My daddy fell completely in love with her. His parents bitterly opposed the match because my mother’s family was part Native American and that was a big dividing line in those days. But that didn’t stop my parents. They eloped in 1932, when Mother was nineteen and Daddy had just turned twenty.

They survived the double blows of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression in the small town where they had grown up. Half a century later, both my parents still talked of bank failures and families who lost their farms.

By the time World War II came along, they already had three young boys. Daddy tried to enlist to be a fighter pilot in the war, but the Army Air Forces (as it was known then) said he was too old, or at least that’s the explanation I heard. Instead, they took him on as a flight instructor, so the family moved from the little town of Wetumka, Oklahoma, to the bigger town of Muskogee. When the war finally ended, Daddy desperately wanted a job flying the new passenger planes for one of the fast-growing airlines like TWA or American. But that didn’t work out either. My mother told me that those jobs also went to the younger men.

After the war, my parents wanted to go back to Wetumka, where they had grown up. But now that my mother and daddy had been away, my grandfather said that my daddy no longer had a job in the family store. He would have to find work somewhere else.

So my daddy scraped together what cash he could and joined up with a partner to start a new business selling cars in Seminole, another small town in Oklahoma. Daddy had always been handy, so he did the car repairs, while his partner worked the front office and handled sales. But the partner ran off with the money, or so the family story went—maybe he just ran the business into the ground. My parents had to start over again.

After that, Daddy moved from one job to another and my parents moved from one little rental house to another. My three brothers grew up, and I was the late-in-life surprise, born in 1949. Daddy used to say that after three boys, I was “the cherry on the whipped cream.” Mother used to say that she was a member of the PTA “longer than any woman on God’s green earth.”

By the early 1950s, our family landed in Norman, and my parents put a down payment on a tiny tract house on a gravel street at the edge of town. It had two bedrooms and one bath, with a converted garage where my three brothers slept. One by one, each of my brothers headed off to the military—the air force for the oldest two, Don Reed and John, and the army for David.

The summer I turned eleven, we moved the twenty miles to Oklahoma City. Mother had lobbied Daddy to move to the city in the hope that I’d be able to go to a really good school. By then, Daddy was selling carpet at Montgomery Ward, and eventually my parents found a house that they liked. Daddy kept his tired old Studebaker, but he bought a used station wagon for Mother. To me, that station wagon was luxury itself: it was a glowing bronze color, with leatherette seats and an automatic transmission. It even had air-conditioning.





Book of Colleges


Like a zillion other families, we got by.

My family had been through plenty of ups and downs over the years, and after Daddy’s heart attack, it took both my parents’ paychecks to manage. But things steadied out over time and we regained our footing. They kept the house and I got to stay in the same public school. I took on babysitting jobs, waitressed in my aunt Alice’s restaurant, and made money by sewing dresses for my aunts. I even sold puppies: Daddy borrowed the neighbor’s little black poodle and introduced him to Missy, and the result was a litter of adorable puppies that I sold in a single weekend.