(1) Old American Dream. Was born into a poor family. Part Native American, all American & Christian. Tough land in Oklahoma. Choctaw. I grew up in parsonages in OK-told people “I live near the church where my father works.” It was slow but decisions considered & we were happy...
(2) My grandma taught school on the reservation. I spent a lot of time in that schoolhouse. On reflection that was a wonderful time in my life. My dad bought a dairy farm. It struggled. He prayed often. Like all of us, for success. For direction in life.
(3) A big influence on me was my grandma, Ishlea Grass. She taught me to accept that good and evil are easy concepts to pick out in proverbs but difficult to identify in real life. She taught school in and around Delaware County, Oklahoma, in rural Oak Mission...
(4) The schoolhouses were wooden creaky boxes hastily assembled to a standard of adequacy. Most of her students like us were poor. I remember that ramshackle schoolhouse well. Grandma Grass cared for her students the same way she cared for us...
(5) BTW - I don't care if you think my thoughts don't matter. This is Twitter. I'm an old man who's lived in this world, and I'm thinking tonight about where all of it started. And it's a world, an America, people forget. So I'm going to keep going Trolls...
(6) Folks passing through the open plains couldn’t figure what was inside of grandma, why she taught school on the periphery of civilization to kids born into the margin of civilized peoples. They’d never guess that this was home. That she had Cherokee in her blood & heart...
(7) We sang My Little Red Wagon w Grandpa Joe who told us stories about the level land surrounding the porch. How the place was stuck between the Cherokee & Creek Nations. We laughed when he told us “Oklahoma” meant “red people” in Choctaw. We KNEW who we were and from.
(8) Here I discovered a fierceness of human nature buried inside us. On these plains, among sinners real & imagined, I became well acquainted with the bad things in the world & the pain of experience played back in the eyes of those who really suffer @SenWarren
(9) When I graduated high school I didn't have grades to go to college. I knew the oil men had money; by their boots I couldn't buy. I spent the summer after high school graduation 330 miles from Tulsa working in the oil fields near Guymon, on Oklahoma’s panhandle...
(10) Tough. Not romantic. We woke early with hands torn and had to work until the sores compounded into calluses. They were hard men and I was a boy. Men always were fighting. Fists in the blood & the dirt. I learned to do my job and keep my head down. No Harvard @SenWarren...
(11) I'd stay up all night looking at that sky on the panhandle. Then, if no stars it was pitch black. You could stay until the morning turned red at dawn. When I returned to Tulsa I found out my wife, Carolyn was pregnant. Everyone assumed I'd follow my dad's footsteps...
(12) I'd grown up on the church revival circuit. Witnessing my dad preach at roadside revival tents, & I sang on KROS revival hour. But I wasn't fit to be a preacher. In mind or spirit. I had other things in mind...
(13) My father was offered a job as pastor of a small church in Ceres CA (Modesto). Carolyn & I had just had the baby so we loaded up the car & followed my parents. Why: CA had community colleges. I knew I had to get a college degree. THAT was the American dream. That simple.
(14) Thank you for listening. Lots of info that is overblown or false comes out about me. Recently, I've had a lot of discussion w friends about being Native Am & Rep in light of today's false narratives. I figured best way to address that honestly is to tell you my experience.
