They're Still Proud in Muskogee : But 20 Years After Merle Haggard Song Put Town on the Map, Residents Wish the Rest of Country Would Just Forget About It

By JULES LOH

May 7, 1989 12 AM PT

Associated Press

MUSKOGEE, Okla. —

According to Police Chief Gary Sturm, most of the robbings and thievings and shootings in this town, as in towns large and small across America, are accountable to the drug trade.

Whoa now, chief. Haven’t you heard The Song?

Anyone over 35 who owns a radio and has an ear for country music has to believe that if there is one drug-free zone anywhere in the land it has to be Muskogee, Okla.

Twenty years ago--has it been that long?--Merle Haggard, the songwriter and guitar picker, put Muskogee on the map as a place where true Americans lived and had their red, white and blue values well in hand.

Muskogee, he sang, during that era of protest, was where nobody smoked marijuana, burned draft cards or wore hippie sandals. Instead they waved Old Glory, pitched woo and wore manly leather boots.

Those Time-Honored Lyrics

Sing along with ol’ Merle:

I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee,

A place where even squares can have a ball....

What went wrong, chief?

“Well, the song didn’t describe Muskogee then or now,” Carl Sturm was saying the other day. Sturm and has lived here all his life. He was just out of high school when The Song was sweeping the charts and making everybody in town a bit dizzy.

Sturm is indeed proud of his hometown and believes its people are as true-blue as any Americans.

But he shakes his head at the irony that Muskogee, of all places, would be singled out for the sake of a clever rhyme as the sort of town that might inspire a Norman Rockwell.

“Of course people smoked marijuana in Muskogee,” he says.

“I didn’t, but I knew you could buy it in bars and nightclubs around town. It was sold in matchboxes, $5 a box I believe. You could also get amphetamines and barbiturates.

“But marijuana wasn’t grown around here. All that stuff was imported.

‘Haggard Understood’

“I think Merle Haggard understood that Oklahoma has always been slow about picking up on trends from the East and West coasts. Even something as innocent as the price of gasoline. When gas went up to $1.25 in L.A., it was still 80 cents in Muskogee. When it got to $1.25 in Muskogee, it was back to 80 cents in L.A.

“Today they’ve gotten around to growing some of the best marijuana in the United States near here--now that cocaine is big everywhere else.

“We busted some guys recently with some crack that the Los Angeles Police Department identified as coming from there. So now we have crack here in Muskogee, and it has become a major problem. We’re catching guys setting up laboratories out in the backwoods.”

“Gary’s right,” says Jim East, a boyhood friend of the police chief. “What we resented was being pictured as behind the times, although we were. We hated that song.”

Jim East graduated in 1972, two years after the town fathers, perhaps sensing a national trend, finally merged the all-black Manual High School with the all-white Central High School into one, Muskogee High School. Jim East now is a reporter in Tulsa.

“Back then,” he says, “the term Okie was a put-down, like hick or redneck. Merle Haggard changed that, I’ll say that for him.

“But at the time, people taunted us with the song. I was on the Muskogee High wrestling team. I remember one out-of-town match that wound up in a fistfight when the other guys called us Okies from Muskogee. Sang it at us.

“When they put the damn song on the cafeteria jukebox, we yanked the cord and shoved the box down a flight of stairs. When we heard that Merle Haggard was coming to Muskogee for a performance, we plotted to hide in the bed of a pickup and waylay him on Highway 69. We didn’t, but I didn’t go to the performance, either.

“We were prouder of Muskogee being the one-time stomping ground of Ma Barker and Pretty Boy Floyd and other bad people. That was its real heritage.”

After 20 years, any bitterness over The Song seems to have mellowed.

Now Muskogeeans traveling out of the state smile benignly when a desk clerk says, “Oh, a real Okie from Muskogee.”

“I used to tell people I was from Tulsa,” says Jim East.

Now Muskogeeans regard The Song as something best forgotten from long ago, like a broken Indian treaty. It was, after all, just another episode in the life of a town that doesn’t require a catchy country tune to define its personality and style.

Was Muskogee really the stomping ground of desperadoes?

“Yes it was,” says Chief Sturm, “and take a look at this.”

He took from a file cabinet a copy of Men magazine with a feature titled “Muskogee: Sin Mill of the Southwest.” The story detailed wide--open gambling, bootlegging and prostitution.

The edition was dated 1953. That would have been four years after the feds put away Muskogee Sheriff Eddie Briggs, known as the kingpin of Muskogee’s bootleggers, and two years after Leslie Scott was elected constable despite three arrests for running gambling operations.

Even during the ‘60s, Muskogeeans didn’t seem to have much truck with reformers. In 1964 somebody dynamited Police Chief Earl Newton’s car. In 1968 somebody shot up Police Chief George Spence’s home. He quit and his successor was chased out of town along with the city manager and a reform-minded city councilman, whose music store was bombed. That was the real Muskogee.

Gambling-Days Keepsake

“Here’s another keepsake,” Sturm says, fetching a device with dice enclosed in a plastic bubble. “It’s called a jiggler. Hundreds of them were made in a garage here in Muskogee. We raided one place that had a 300-pound magnet under the dice table. Jigglers made sure that nobody could switch the dice or even touch them.

“There’s no more regular back-room gambling now, though. Too risky.

“Our criminals are more inept too. Not long ago a couple of guys lay in wait for a big winner in a poker game, shot him, and got away with about 20 bucks. They reached in the wrong pocket. He had several thousand in the one they didn’t turn inside out.

“As for prostitution, we closed down our last brothel last year. It was run by an old classmate of mine, John Lyman--a massage parlor in the Bambi Motel. Since then the motel burned down. I think the neighbors . . . probably are glad.”

Moonshine? A Muskogeean, then-Gov. J. Howard Edmondson, put an end to it by persuading Oklahoma voters to legalize liquor in 1960, the second to last state to do so, a step ahead of Mississippi.

“There’s still a little moonshining going on,” says Chief Sturm, “but just for home consumption. You know, for tradition.”

Is Muskogee finally catching up to The Song after 20 years, getting strait-laced? “A nice thought,” says Sturm.

Proof of Pot

Even at the time of The Song, at least one potential pot purchaser didn’t believe the business about marijuana.

As Lonzo (Slick) Smith recalls it, a kid came into his barbecue joint and asked where he could get some grass.

Slick has been in business at the same spot on Shawnee Boulevard for 28 years. His barbecue can hold its own with any in the Southwest, but it is his only product.

“I had some old ratty Mexican cigarettes somebody had given me,” he recalls. “They were terrible to smoke and worse to look at. I handed the kid a few of them, and he handed me $5.

“He never came back, but the word got out that I was dealing the stuff.”

Over the years, Muskogee’s politics have been as rollicking as Muskogee’s vice. On one Election Day a ballot box was tossed into the Arkansas River lest it be counted.

Of all the town’s politicians, John Monks would win the prize, although the vote would be close.

Other candidates would include, for example, a Muskogee watchmaker named Wilbur Wright. Not a bad name for a politician.

Grabs Obscure Office

In 1970, the year The Song was at its peak of popularity, Wilbur paid the filing fee and entered his name for labor commissioner, an obscure state office long since without purpose but somehow left on the ballot.

Wilbur won unopposed.

Soon he was caught padding his expense account. He pleaded guilty and resigned.

Not to be dismayed, next election he filed again. His primary opponent this time was a former state trooper named Will Rogers. Not a bad Oklahoma name either.

In a battle of names, the revered airplane pioneer, dead 62 years, won over the sainted humorist, dead 39 years.

At length, Oklahoma voters found a sensible solution. They abolished the job.

Incidentally, if you should notice an elderly gent wheeling around Muskogee in a blue pickup with a big yellow palomino horse for a hood ornament, that will be Wilbur Wright’s brother, Orville.

John Monks is a horse of another color.

Monks is a big man with a big voice, square jaw, rusty hair, flashing eyes. He laughs easily and loud. He believes that he represents a majority of Muskogeeans. “Hell, they elected me 10 times, didn’t they?”

He’s Consistent

Voters have never had a doubt where John Monks stands on issues. He’s against.

He’s against the feminists, against their equal rights amendment, against the seat-belt law. “I know seat belts save lives, but people should have the freedom to choose.” He’s against “perverts” and “pantywaists” but insists that he is impartial. “I include both sexes.”

Above all, John Monks, a member of three veterans’ organizations, is against communism.

His brightest moment in 20 years in the Legislature--his hazel eyes light up when he recalls it--was his speech against a bill to outlaw cockfighting in Oklahoma.

After expounding on the history of the manly sport, he paused for effect and delivered his peroration:

“The first thing the communists do when they take over a country,” John Monks thundered, “is to outlaw cockfighting.”

Simultaneously, he switched on a tape recording of roosters crowing. In the gallery, his Muskogee supporters waved little American flags on sticks and crowed along, cock-a-doodle-do.

The bill went down to hilarious defeat.

Should Imitate Art

“No,” John Monks confesses, “Muskogee wasn’t the way the song said it was, but that was the way it ought to have been.”

While Muskogeeans were sending John Monks to the Legislature they were also sending Democrat Mike Synar to Congress. Synar is rated by Americans for Democratic Action to be the most liberal of the nine-member Oklahoma delegation.

“If you try to categorize our voters, you’re on a fool’s errand,” says Gene Wallace, Synar’s aide in Muskogee.

“Ninety-something percent of the voters in this district have lived in the same house for 20 years. Home ownership here is higher than in most places in the United States. Our people understand their values if others don’t. They like where they live and how they live and see no contradictions in the way they vote.”

Muskogee, at the confluence of three rivers, grew out of one of the territory’s oldest trading posts. It was the agency for the Five Civilized Tribes--the old building still stands, now a museum--when the U.S. drove those hapless souls out of the East, gave them the eastern half of Oklahoma, then took great chunks of it back, including Muskogee. The town’s population of about 42,000 hasn’t changed much in decades.

The state’s first governor, whose name, Charles Nathaniel Haskell, is largely forgotten here, was from Muskogee. Merle Ronald Haggard, whose name is widely remembered, was not.

Little Time in Town

In fact, Haggard, an orphan at 9, spent more time in his youth in San Quentin (two years for armed robbery; pardoned by Gov. Ronald Reagan) than he ever spent in Muskogee.

Haggard’s father was born in Checotah, 20 miles south of here. He was a Dust Bowl refugee, and his son was born in 1937 in a boxcar in Bakersfield, Calif.

The songwriter, vacationing aboard his houseboat on California’s Lake Shasta, was unavailable to talk about Muskogee. However, his road manager and drummer of the last 21 years, Biff Adams, recalls well the origin of The Song.

“Merle had the idea in his mind, a song practically written, about small-town America and people who were not hippies or protesters,” Adams recalls. “It might have been any town, and it didn’t have to be literally accurate.”

‘A Place Where Even Squares Can Have a Ball’

From Associated Press

MUSKOGEE, Okla.

Here are the lyrics to the song “Okie from Muskogee,” written by Merle Haggard in 1969:

We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee;

We don’t take our trips on LSD.

We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street,

‘Cause we like livin’ right and bein’ free.

We don’t make a party out of lovin’,

But we like holding hands and pitchin’ woo.

We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy

Like the hippies out in San Francisco do.