A Mirror of Mid-America Is in Shards

They asked on downtown sidewalks heaped with glass shards, in plain view of the blasted edifice on Robinson Avenue. They asked in churches where strangers walked in anxious to volunteer. They asked in outlying shopping malls where life went on as it does anywhere in America the day after tragedy strikes somewhere else.

But somewhere else was here. And here, just as anywhere, they all wanted to understand: Why Oklahoma City?

“It just as well could have been anyplace, so why pick on us?” wondered Bonnie Harrison, whose Traveler’s Aid office was bordered with hastily installed plywood the day after shock waves from the explosion at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building carried four blocks, blowing out all her windows.

Oklahoma City is a mirror image of any small American city. With its highway fast-food oases and its Wal-Marts, its enfeebled downtown and its leisurely pace, it was a perfect target deep in the heartland. And on Thursday, its gathering shock reverberated through mid-America like a tuning fork’s lingering shudder.

“It sort of removes the veil of security that a lot of people in the central part of the country feel they have because of where they live,” said Milan Wall, an official of the Heartland Center in Lincoln, Neb., a group that promotes Middle-American values.

Oklahoma City has spawned baseball greats like Joe Carter and musical stars like jazz belter Jimmy Rushing and country mega-star Garth Brooks. Yet its umbilical cord to Middle America spurred another modern country legend, Vince Gill, to spend long minutes Wednesday calling into the void. Like thousands of other Americans, all he could reach were busy signals as he tried to make sure relatives at home were safe and sound.

They were, but Gill seemed no less shaken Thursday after a concert in Oregon. “It’s an attack on my home,” he said.

Yet even in its homey sameness, Oklahoma City offered unique advantages to those intent enough to cause massive destruction with a well-planted bomb.

Security in Oklahoma City’s few high-rises and sprawling downtown buildings rarely matches the bristling presence of guards and detection devices found in larger cities and even some similarly sized towns, said law enforcement authorities in the area.

“We have guards but they’re not going to eyeball you,” said an Oklahoma Highway Patrol official involved in the massive security cordon that ringed the blast site Thursday. “People can go almost anywhere they want around here and that’s the way citizens seem to want it. I don’t expect that will last.”

And despite the private prejudices of some residents, Oklahoma City has always tended to give breathing room to new arrivals, as it has since the Great Land Rush of 1889 created an instant city on the hard plains.

“The people here are good people and they like to help one another,” insisted Jerry Allen, minister of education at the First Baptist Church, a hive of relief work in the hours since the blast. “I’d hate to think of that as a weakness.”

Yet in the wake of the blast, there are some here who seemed to cultivate a new layer of suspicion, convinced that--as a population--they had been too lax. Almost anyone, some say, could have driven up to the federal building on that fateful morning and left a load of lethal cargo without provoking suspicion.

“Whoever did this was able to do it without anybody else batting an eyelash,” said Roger Lewis, 27, a rental car branch manager. “That’s what’s so scary.”

There are those, like William W. Savage Jr., professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, who believe that--despite its commonality with other small cities--Oklahoma City at heart is an uncommon city, different because of its origin.

Where most small American cities have grown “organically,” Savage said, Oklahoma City grew “instantaneously,” its vacant land claimed by lawyers, bankers, blacksmiths and saloonkeepers within hours of the city’s creation at the crack of a fired pistol on April 22, 1889. By the next morning, some attorneys were already installed at tables, settling land claims. By the end of the month, some roped-off lots boasted new buildings.

“The city sprang up just like that and it gave people a sense that they could do about anything, a remarkable spirit of optimism that still infects a lot of people here,” Savage said, adding: “Even when it’s not always justified.”

The city’s boundaries have continued to bulge, even though it has largely taken control of barren flatlands and scrubs. Oil wells still pump on the grounds of the state Capitol and more than a million head of livestock are slaughtered each year in the stockyards.

But like a number of other small cities near its size, this capital of 444,000 saw better days long before the explosion echoed through the morning air Wednesday.

It is an oil town where the derricks still work, but pump up nothing that resembles an oil boom. Its town fathers dream the pipe dreams of many stunted small metropolises, hoping that budding plans for construction of a scenic canal lined with shops and restaurants near the Canadian River might stimulate an economic rebirth.

“There’s always been a lot of optimism, a lot of cowboy spunk about the future. But things never quite seem to pan out,” Savage said.

Its negative lineage can be found in John Steinbeck’s Joad family and the derogatory air that still clings to the slur “Okie.” But a word that once connoted illiteracy and barefooted poverty (“Readin’ books don’t do you no good,” Tom Joad says in “The Grapes of Wrath”) may have found a “more noble” flip side in Oklahomans’ rallying together in the hours after the blast, Savage said.

Even as Oklahoma City residents overran their downtown Thursday, straining against yellow crowd control tape for a distant glimpse of the shattered federal building and the knots of rescue crews moving in and out of the rubble, city officials were already looking ahead.

“People will bounce back, people are working together, coming together at every level,” said Rick Moore, assistant to Mayor Ron Norick. “We will be back.”

On the radio, talk show hosts assumed the roles of preachers, psychiatrists and cheerleaders, goading the populace into blood drives and food donations as they counseled restraint to callers who demanded vengeance.

“I say, string ‘em up when we find ‘em,” one caller insisted, prompting a host to say: “I know where you’re coming from but we shouldn’t sink to their level.”

Elsewhere, there was an orgy of volunteerism, the sort of instant can-do spirit that has come to characterize Middle America’s response to crises. Yellow ribbons fluttered from car antennas. People drove with their lights on in memory of the dead. And all over downtown, strangers turned up at relief centers asking if they could do anything to help.

At the First Baptist Church, five blocks from the blast site, people were walking in off the street to volunteer to sweep up the hued glass pebbles left after the explosion shattered the 80-year-old stained-glass windows.

“The people of this city are angels,” said Minister Jerry Allen.

Pamela Baines, 37, a recently divorced waitress from the suburb of Edmond, walked along a stretch of downtown streets cordoned off by police tape, trying to find someplace where she could assist. Glass crunched under her feet and she paused where the orange chalk outline on pavement surrounded a crater caused by flying metal.

“I sat there all last night watching (on television) and I couldn’t sit any longer,” she said, before moving off. “It’s our job to help those people who are in trouble now. A town like this shouldn’t have to see this kind of suffering.”

Times staff writer J. Michael Kennedy in Los Angeles and researcher John Beckham in Chicago contributed to this story.