I was born in a village, in Rentiesville, Oklahoma, on the second of January, 1915. My mother was a schoolteacher and my father was a lawyer. They had met in Tennessee, where they both were in college, and after a period of time they married and moved to Oklahoma. It was still Indian territory, of course; it became a state in 1907.
My father sought to practice law in Rentiesville, but in a village that had not much more than a hundred people, the practice of law was not a very viable and promising profession. And so, in 1921, after consultation with my mother, he decided to move to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he could perhaps attract more clients and make a decent living for us. He moved there in February 1921.
We were to move in June after school was out, after my mother completed her teaching and my sister and I had finished our school year. We were all packed and ready to go, and then we didn’t hear from him. And we didn’t hear. And we didn’t hear. Eventually, after several days, my mother read in the newspaper that there was a terrible race riot raging in Tulsa and that there were many casualties. She was not certain that my father had survived.