Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

388 Pages·2018·32.41 MB·English

by  Sam Anderson

Copyright © 2018 by Sam Anderson All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin
Random House LLC, New York.
crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Be Free, A Way
Always There…In Our Hearts
Look…The Sun Is Rising
Try To Explain
Words and Music by Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd Copyright © 2013 Lovely Sorts Of Death All Rights
Administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC
All Rights Reserved Used by Permission Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Name: Anderson, Sam, 1977– author.
Title: Boom town : the fantastical saga of Oklahoma City, its chaotic founding…its purloined basketball
team, and the dream of becoming a world-class metropolis / Sam Anderson.
Description: New York : Crown, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017054583 (print) | LCCN 2018011488 (ebook) | ISBN 9780804137324 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780804137317 (hardback) | ISBN 9780804137331 (trade paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Oklahoma
City (Okla.)—History. | Oklahoma City (Okla.)—Social life and customs. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE /
Sociology Urban. | HISTORY United States State & Local Southwest (AZ, NM, OK, TX). | SPORTS &
RECREATION / Basketball.
Classification: LCC F704.O41 (ebook) | LCC F704.O41 A53 2018 (print) | DDC 976.6/38—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054583
ISBN 9780804137317
Ebook ISBN 9780804137324
Cover design by Michael Morris Cover images: (skyline) Katherine Welles/Shutterstock; (cowboys)
Oklahoma Land Rush, 1889, oil on canvas, by H. Charles McBarron Jr./Peter Newark American
Pictures/Bridgeman Images; (stamp) astudio/Shutterstock; (basketball) Lightspring/Shutterstock; (hoop)
MilkBottle/Shutterstock; (tornado) ArtMari/Shutterstock v5.3.2
To Sarah
from math class
and
our two good-for-nothing children
It seems unnecessary to define an explosion, for everyone knows
what it is—a loud noise and the sudden going away of things
from the place where they have been.
—TENNEY L. DAVIS, The Chemistry of Powder & Explosives Some things are
simultaneously too boring and too exciting to write about.
—JOHN ASHBERY, “Valentine”
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE: KILLER OF THE KILLER
PART ONE: TIME
A VISITOR’S GUIDE TO OKLAHOMA CITY
BEARD
MIDDLENESS
IN THE BEGINNING
EWING
OPERATION BONGO
MICROWAVE POPCORN
SONICSGATE
NOONERS
THE FIRST PLAYER
IN PRESTI WE TRUST
PRAIRIE CHICKENS
NO BEARD
PART TWO: SIZE
OUR HOLY CHIEF METEOROLOGIST AND SEVERE WEATHER SAVIOR
THE SCARS OF A BLOODLESS CONFLICT
1 & 3
THE DEATH OF MAYOR COUCH
KD IS NICE
THE GRAND CANAL
ALWAYS TRYING
YOU DON’T GET TO BARGAIN WITH ME
FEDERAL LARCENY
GAME 1: THOSE WHO SIT BESIDE YOU
ETERNAL PRESENT
PART THREE: COLOR
GOLDEN GRENADE
GAME 7: MR. OKLAHOMA CITY
NEGROPHOBIA
EVERYTHING WHICH MAKES LIFE MORE LIVABLE
KALEIDOSCOPIC SPERM EXPLOSIONS
KISS
TAPS
RAINBOW
IN THAT HAMBURGER, THE WHOLE ESSENCE OF DEMOCRACY LIES
UNIVERSAL CITY
PRETTY MUCH CENTRALIZING EVERYTHING
GAME 16: CIVIL WAR
BLACK FRIDAY
PART FOUR: DISTANCE
THE GRANDEST STREET THIS GENERATION HAS EVER SEEN
GAME 31: KD IS NOT NICE
BLESSED ARE THE PLACEMAKERS
CONTROLLED PROGRESSIVE COLLAPSE
GAME 46: THE NEUTRALITY OF THABO SEFOLOSHA
I LOVE CAPITALISM
GAME 70: WESTBROOK, WESTBROOK, WESTBROOK, WESTBROOK,
WESTBROOK
THE EAST
GAME 83: FIVE AGAINST ONE
WE WHO HAVE LONG BEEN DUST SALUTE YOU
ALL YOUR BAD DAYS WILL END
THE TERROR
PART FIVE: MOTION
BUFFALO
OUR LIFELINE IS CONCRETE
GAME 84: THE AWFUL HAZARD
ARE TORNADOES NECESSARY?
SOLO
TOGETHER
GAME 85: STORMS
9:02
JUSTICE
GAME 93: THAT ARM BECAME A HEAVY ARM
THE AIR SMELLED ALMOST LIKE FISH
THE LOWERINGS
THE SPEED OF SHADOWS
THREE EPILOGUES
BUT STILL
AND THEN
WHY NOT?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES ON SOURCES
PHOTO CREDITS
PROLOGUE
KILLER OF THE KILLER
Red Kelley was the man who killed the man who killed Jesse James. That is: in
1892, ten years after Jesse James was shot in the back while dusting off a picture
frame, Red Kelley hunted down his killer, Bob Ford, and shot him in the throat
with a double-barreled shotgun. This did not happen in Oklahoma City—the
famous events, the front-page news items, rarely ever do. It happened in Creede,
a silver-mining boomtown in Colorado. Ford was running a saloon in a tent.
Kelley walked in, said, “Hello, Bob,” and shot Ford as soon as he turned around.
He expected to be celebrated as a national hero for this—Jesse James, after all,
was a legend whose righteousness had only grown and grown in the years since
his death, and Bob Ford was (as the folk song says) a “dirty little coward.”
Instead, Red Kelley was sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison. He did not
get the star treatment he felt he deserved. Kelley was not a first-tier outlaw—one
of those infamous, larger-than-life antiheroes who robbed the robber barons and
blurred the boundaries between good and evil. He was not Billy the Kid or John
Wesley Hardin or Ned Kelly or Smokin’ Royce Young. He was not Butch or
Sundance or—obviously—Jesse James. Red Kelley was a D-list outlaw, very far
down the folk-hero food chain. He was a vigilante vigilante, the backup to the
backup.
Kelley ended up serving ten years of his sentence before he managed to get
himself released. He left Colorado and headed down to Oklahoma City, where
the outlaw action was rumored to be hot. It was 1904 by then, the start of a new
century, and the Wild West was shrinking. Some vestige of it had survived,
however, in Oklahoma. Oklahoma City was only fifteen years old and, after a
brief lull, booming again. For a criminal, its red-light district was a safe haven of
arson, murder, gambling, drunkenness, bribery, and prostitution. Shoot-outs
could be enjoyed indoors or out. Around the time of Red Kelley’s arrival, a man
called the Armless Wonder, whose arms were reportedly five and seven inches
long, cocked his gun with his chin and shot a man who owed him money. There
were riots so wild that whole buildings were left permanently infused with
bullets. In a popular saloon, someone poured alcohol into a man’s boots and lit