The Toughest Man In Oklahoma Territory

And now it's October of 2017, and I still can't.  Except that there's a deafening silence now.  Because it was a white guy, shooting white people?  Really?  Well yes, that's pretty much why.  I hope this is the last time I have to update this blog.
It's July 18th, 2016, and I just can't, anymore. Can't stay silent, that is. The violence perpetrated by police and against police, the mass shootings, the terrorist attacks, the innocent and the insane mixed together in the same bloodbath. I'm not saying that my words, my stories, my perspective is going to put the kibosh on this madness, for once and for all. AND I think the media because it's on nobody's side but it's own, is trying to drown out our stories. The more we try to tell our stories, on social media, blogs, whatever, the shriller their screaming gets. They have to do that, as George W. Bush famously admitted, "to catapult the propaganda." When we're being told lies that are patently false, and we can see with our own eyes that they're patently false, they have to repeat the lies over and over, louder and louder, until we believe them. Until we start seeing our neighbors as enemies because they have the wrong bumper sticker on their car.
 So here's my story, my view, my questions on all this gun violence in particular but just mainly- bloodshed.
 My grandfather on my dad's side was the Sheriff of his tiny town, Plankinton, the county seat of Aurora County in South Dakota. For a while. Off and on, really. Mostly during Prohibition and the Great Depression. He was also an unrepentant drunk. The joke was that he would have to throw himself in jail every so often. Arrest himself. During Prohibition, he was also making bathtub gin and corn moonshine with his buddies, so as Sheriff he would have to make raids on his friends’ outfits to keep the higher-ups happy- and he would always tell them way in advance so they could stash the good stuff somewhere else. He'd make a big show of smashing bottles that were probably full of watered-down piss, and some money would exchange hands, and he'd be on his way. Apparently, he kept getting re-elected Sheriff because of this friendly relationship with the bootleggers.

 The first time he got elected, I would bet money that he played up the story of his father, Bernard Koehler Sr., who was for a time known as “The Toughest Man in Oklahoma Territory.” Great-Grandpa earned that moniker honestly, as a young, maybe 21-year-old man who lit out for Oklahoma Territory along with 30 million other poor whites, blacks, and immigrants who had nothing to lose. The "town" he landed in consisted of a couple hundred squatters, and a lone building that served as the church, the school, and the town meeting hall. One night they held a town meeting where everyone had to be in attendance, or risk losing title to their land. There was maybe a pro-tem Mayor, but no Sheriff. A couple of equally young outlaws got wind of the meeting, knew everyone would be there with all their earthly possessions and pocketbooks, and decided to hold the place up. They had guns, and no one else had their guns with them because they weren’t allowed to. Apparently that was a pretty common rule in frontier towns, because fights broke out all the time, and escalated quickly. Anyway. There was young Bernard, just trying to keep his claim on his land and make something of himself. And these punks walk in, demand everyone put their cash and valuables in a pile or they’ll all be shot dead- women and children included- and I don’t know if he snuck up on them or what, but in the melee, he took their guns away. With his bare hands. Took them away. Saved the fledgling town. Just like that.

 Before my dad died, and I knew he was dying, I tried to get a real answer out of him, or more detail at least, about this family legend. He kind of shrugged and said, “Grampa was always really fast with his hands. Even at 90 years old, sitting on the porch, he could catch a fly – Fwoomp!- just like that. With his hands.” And apparently, he was like, redneck-ninja stealthy. Point being, he didn’t out-shoot them or out-gun them with superior firepower and brute strength. It wasn’t some silly goddamn John Wayne or Arnold Schwarzenegger-like movie rescue. He outsmarted them, and literally disarmed them. Of course, they made him Sheriff and gave him an even bigger plot of land as a reward- and I have a feeling he had a fine old time with the local Cherokee honeys that came around, as they are wont to do, with a man of prestige. The past four presidents of the Cherokee Nation have all come from a family named Keeler- which is how we pronounce our name- so you just have to wonder.

 Great -gramps didn’t stay in Oklahoma very long though. Farming proved too difficult there, even with gifted acres. So he lit out again for Iowa, whose rich topsoil even a drunk could make a living on, and he built his family there. I’m sure he taught all his kids to shoot properly, because that’s what you did back then, for hunting or whatever, but it was a never… a thing. As we would say today. Everyone knew how to use a gun, and probably owned several, but there was none of that braggadocio we see today. Guns were serious business- you didn’t fuck around with them too often and live to tell about it.

 Anyway, my grandpa, Bernard was evidently a dead shot, and when he wasn’t Sheriff he was personally escorting rich people from back East on pheasant-hunting expeditions in the area. But as Sheriff, apparently, and yes this is all from verbal anecdotes and the like- he pretty much never had to use his gun. The few times he used it, he was sort of ashamed of himself, like that was the least-possible-manly thing he could have done. More than likely, he was aiming at the tires of a fleeing vehicle, driven by some drunk jackasses that he probably helped get drunk, and he was trying to shoot out their tires so they wouldn’t wrap themselves around a goddamn tree or land in Shit Creek and get themselves killed. I can just see him shaking his head and cursing at the ground. “Dammit! I should’ve been able to stop them with my bare hands.”

 Again, I am not trying to paint him as a saint of any kind. He and my Grandma had 13 kids, 12 survived, and as I said he was drunk and progressively more abusive as the years went on. My dad was second-to-youngest, and by the time he was in high school, my grandma was using a gun to keep grandpa away from her. No slouch in the toughness department herself, she finally blacklisted him as a Communist so his sorry ass had to leave the state to find work. This was during McCarthyism of the ’50s. But they never got divorced because they were Catholic and that’s a sin.

 They and most of my aunts and uncles on that side had probably never seen a black person face to face until they left home, and they referred to the neighboring Lakota as “prairie niggers.” Not at all saintly. More afraid of what they didn’t know, and didn’t understand. My grandma came to visit us in Denver when I was 8 or 9, and I remember her asking me, “Do they let Black people live in the city here?” I was shocked and felt sick to my stomach because several of my school friends were black and lived right around the corner from us. When I answered Yes, she shuddered and clutched her purse closer to her.

 Then there’s my dad, who was a big guy. One of the biggest of all 8 Koehler boys and none of them were small. We tease my uncle Tom, the youngest, for being the “runt” and he’s six foot one and built like a little brick shithouse. He could kick your ass sitting down and not even break a sweat. He spent thirty-something years on the California State Highway Patrol and could probably count the times he used his gun on one hand. As far as I know, he was never shot, though he may have been shot at. As he explained to me one time, “We always try to de-escalate the situation. People are crazy enough without us adding to it.” In California, where almost all crime ends up on the highway, that’s saying something. Uncle Don followed Grampa into exile in Washington State, and also became a State Trooper, but he was a hothead, used his gun one too many times and got fired.

 My dad eschewed law enforcement, but as a big guy, former Navy lineman and college cornerback, he became the de facto security force at his favorite bar/pizza place, GeJo’s II in Aurora. My dad wasn’t a drinker, but he was a great storyteller around his friends, and 3 or 4 Miller Lites couldn’t do much damage to his immense bulk. His friend Jerry Jellison told us that one time, an ex-friend of theirs from the bowling league came into GeJo’s, bragging about how he’d just abandoned his wife and kids, and my dad set down his beer, punched that sorry sack of shit in the face one time, threw his carcass out the door, and went right back to his bar stool and telling stories. I think we got a free pizza that night.
 My dad had exactly one rifle and one shotgun at home, but I rarely saw them because they were locked up in their cases and stowed in the attic except for hunting season. He took them out to clean them before and after his annual pheasant hunting trip in South Dakota, and once I stood in the doorway of his office while he explained to me what the magazine was, the chamber, etc., but I didn’t even want to enter the room, and he didn’t make me. He kept the ammunition stored in a completely different place and neither my brother nor I learned to shoot until our 20’s. Looking back on it, he might have done that because our mother was mentally unstable and threatening suicide or homicide every other day, but I don’t think my mom could have fired a gun if she tried.

 You could say that naturally big, scary looking people don’t need guns because people don’t fuck with them in the first place. I could make the obvious observation that the fewer people actually know about how to handle themselves in a real fight, or a conflict situation, the more likely they are to turn to guns and violent rhetoric that reeks of false bravado. You usually don’t hear military guys and cops bragging about their guns. But in the wake of these police-targeted shootings and racially based panic that our officers are exhibiting- it seems something has changed.

 Another story- from someone else’s family. Author of several books on Celtic Spirituality, Frank MacEowen’s family in America hails from Mississippi, going back several generations. His grandfather was also the Sheriff of their small town and county during the ugliest, most Klan-infested years of the South: Prohibition and the Great Depression. Sometime in the early 1930s, there was a spate of lynchings in his county, and Frank’s grandfather actually had the temerity to prosecute the one he could find the most evidence around. Because that’s what Sheriffs are supposed to do. Prosecute murders. No matter who commits them. Well, the Klan was trying to take control of that county and put their Klansmen in as many public offices as possible- so as you might imagine, they didn’t take too kindly to being prosecuted. Since Frank’s grandfather was white, they didn’t kill him. They captured him and burnt his eyes out with some of their torches, and told him to back off or they’d do the same to his family. When the townsfolk found out what had been done, they were outraged. They got a fancy lawyer from Jackson to prosecute the lynchings, and they set about throwing the Klan out of their county for good. Frank’s grandpa was re-elected to Sheriff, as a blind man, TWO MORE TIMES. Until he retired.

 Again, I’m not saying those townspeople were saints, or that they instantly became BFFs with the black community. They were fed up with this gang of thugs called the Klan running around like they were above the law, terrorizing the entire town, not just the Black community. If you got on their bad side, you were labeled a traitor and you might lose your eyesight, or worse. Practicality ruled the day, in all probability. Maybe they only did it because one of their own got hurt, and the KKK finally showed themselves for who they are: unprincipled terrorists. People could at least agree on one thing- they didn’t want terrorists running their town. Maybe these horrific things have to happen in order to wake us all up. And when we wake up, we need to stand up.

 Also, guns are for cowards.