Back home in Oklahoma, Choc Floyd was roosted on the edge of a storm. A ruckus was in the works. Almost as soon as he reappeared at the family farm, he was filled with anxiety. Nervous electricity, like heat lightning, seemed to raise the hair on his arms and neck. He became fidgety and felt taut, and grew wary of the folks he loved and trusted the most.
Choc told his pals about the swell times he had had in Wichita, and other stories about the shady side of Joplin, a wide-open Missouri city with its share of bawdy houses and watering holes for parched miners and railroaders in a hurry to part with their wages. He recounted some of his escapades and adventures alone on the dirt-road runs in southern Kansas: highballing it by the light of the moon through Galena, Coffeyville, and Independence; ducking the “laws” hidden in the brush in their shiny black Ford cars. Returning to the fields to work the cotton and corn, Choc told these stories to all who listened.
As he made an attempt to readjust to home life, Choc also had to cope with the growing strain between himself and his father. Walter Floyd failed to recall his own jumpy days and stormy nights when he was a young man in Georgia. He was not of a mind to recollect these tricks and capers. Walter had forgotten all the winter hunts and the evenings filled with fury and liquor. He was incapable of understanding a son who seemed unable to settle down and make a life for himself.
Others in the family also noticed some differences in Charley after he returned from the harvest circuit and the whiskey trails in Kansas and the borderlands of Missouri.
“That’s when he met the wrong kind of men,” Choc’s older sister Ruth Wofford said many years later when she reflected on her brother’s life. “They changed his ways of thinking and doing.”
When Mamie Floyd was asked about Charley, a look of grief spread over her face, but she stayed dry-eyed and nodded her head in agreement with her daughter.
“He changed when he came back from the harvest,” said Mamie of her son. “He changed.”
Choc was not the only one who had changed. So had a good many other farm boys, war veterans, and others. The social transformation that had helped propel Choc down the dusty harvest roads continued to reshape America’s fiber and fabric, as well. The unstable chemistry that resulted caused the frontier to disappear in Oklahoma and in other western states.
Thanks to Henry Ford—America’s new folk hero who had fooled around with machines as a kid because he hated working on the farm—and his new assembly-production techniques, people everywhere were able to shell out money for an automobile. That included farmers and ranchers, who could now go to town faster and more often. As more autos rolled off the lines, the federal and state governments started new highway construction programs that linked the cities with towns.
Between 1910 and 1920, the urban population of the country jumped by 29 percent. In Oklahoma, however, the increase spiraled to 69 percent. Huge oil and gas deposits created booms in Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Seminole, Cushing, Okmulgee, and several other cities. Many tenant farmers in search of a the living abandoned their land for jobs in the oil patch. Some sectors of the American economy recovered from the collapse that started in 1920, but for farmers in this region, economic depression began in earnest in the early twenties and never really stopped. They looked for other ways to keep themselves and their families going.
City dwellers made fun of the farmers, no longer regarding them as the backbone of the nation. Instead, they were branded as hayseeds and hicks. Rural residents, like the people in Sequoyah County, conversely considered the cities to be everything that was wrong about the country. City denizens were evil, or not worthy of trust. Cities were associated with prostitution and crime, Jews and Roman Catholics, big-time bootleggers, and conniving bankers. In the cities, people could buy Eskimo Pies, Trojan contraceptives, and factory-made cigarettes. Bathtub brandy, flappers, speakeasies, whiskey women, petting parties, bachelor girls in caftans, and jazz babies abounded.
The General Federation of Women’s Clubs, worried about the bad influence of popular music on young people, gave their stamp of approval only to old favorites such as “The Long, Long Trail” and “Keep the Home Fires Burning.” But the flaming youth of the twenties burned too brightly. They were more interested in singing along to “When My Baby Smiles at Me,” “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” “Ain’t We Got Fun,” or “The Sheik of Araby.” The lyrics made the proper ladies’ skin crawl.
On the silent screen were images of Latin lovers and vamps. In his book This Side of Paradise, the twenty-four-year-old novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of the new generation. He wrote that they were “dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”
The country folk may not have been reading Fitzgerald or watching the performances of Clara Bow and Rudolph Valentino, but they needed no further proof to believe there was nothing of substance in the cities. When boys and girls left the farms for the larger cities, they lost their values and became corrupted. The Floyds were convinced this was what had happened to Charley.
In the cities and country towns alike, there were those who fought the social movements and the shifts in lifestyle and culture around them. Among these people were some who were motivated by feelings of inferiority and ignorance. They reacted by turning to violence. Secret vigilante groups popped up like wild blossoms in a manure pile. In the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist organization that had pursued racist goals during the Reconstruction period, rose like a phoenix from the smoldering ashes of hate.
In the years when Choc’s grandparents were struggling to make a living in northern Georgia, the Klan had been a powerful force. The KKK had begun in 1866, in Pulaski, Tennessee, as a social organization devoted to countering the worst excesses of the federal Reconstruction. Klansmen were dedicated to restoring what they referred to as the “old order” in the South by intimidating Negro voters and dispensing their own brand of cruel justice. They emerged at night with their faces veiled and they carried skulls and rattling bags of bones. Besides ropes and guns, the grim riders relied on fear and superstition. They would ride up to a black family’s home, announcing they were Confederate ghosts returned from hell.
Federal laws and Supreme Court decisions eviscerated the power of the Klan. However, by 1915, after the appearance of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, a popular film that glorified the Klan as the protector of white supremacy and southern ladies’ virtue, a strong KKK revival had begun. That same year, an ex-Methodist preacher named William J. Simmons and his followers helped with the Klan rebirth during their meetings at Stone Mountain, Georgia, not far from Atlanta. Simmons and thirty-four others climbed the mountain on a Thanksgiving night and rekindled evil fires. Simmons liked to say their first gathering was held “in the bitter cold,” but the record indicated the temperature that night was actually about forty-five degrees. Exaggeration and deceit were the least of his sins.
The KKK took on an anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic thrust besides an inbred hatred of blacks. During the early twenties, Klan membership rose to more than 4 million. They were particularly strong in the Deep South but were also able to influence politics from coast to coast. In Texas, the hooded Klansmen preyed upon Mexicans and those of Hispanic descent; in California, the Japanese Americans were targets; and in New York and the larger eastern cities, the KKK harassed Jewish immigrants. In their continuing fight to resist the country’s changing mores and values, the Klan branded liberals as a menace to be feared almost as much as foreigners, socialists, or even the dreaded Pope. Further bolstered because of the newfound morality that resulted from Prohibition, the Klan gained strength in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Dayton, Indianapolis, Detroit, and other large cities.
Klaverns, or chapters, were formed by avowed God-fearing Christians who wanted to impose law and order on as many people as possible. Each klavern meeting was opened and closed with hymns and prayers. Klansmen even visited churches and Baptist temples during services. A whole klavern, sometimes consisting of as many as two hundred hooded men, would march boldly down the center aisle. They would halt before the congregation, give the minister an envelope filled with money, and then quietly do an about-face and leave. One writer of that period noted that these ecclesiastical visitations had the dramatic punch of a “hold-up in broad daylight.”
In Oklahoma—a relatively new state permeated with religious zealots who subscribed to a fundamentalist code of conduct—the Klan unquestionably placed blacks, Jews, and Catholics on their enemies list. Too many of these Klan victims ended up lynched, castrated, or branded because of color and creed—or simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The night riders also wished to enforce community morals and standards, however. In the cities and towns where this occurred, the Klansmen were ruthless.
They took it upon themselves to punish gamblers, bootleggers, and whores. They chastised wayward husbands. Physicians accused of performing abortions, suspected wife beaters, or shopkeepers inclined to shortchange customers were likely to be kidnapped and beaten or else tarred and feathered. Klan “whipping squads” from Oklahoma City boasted that they administered more than 2,500 floggings in a single year. Shawnee, Oklahoma, was the home of at least five whipping squads.
During the 1920s, the Klan was particularly active in Tulsa. Besides thousands of adult men and women KKK members, including clergy and teachers, Tulsa even had a Junior Ku Klux Klan, open to certain white boys from twelve to eighteen years of age. Bigotry and malice became a family affair. The Klan was so strong in Tulsa that in the November 1922 elections, both the Democratic and Republican candidates for sheriff and county attorney were Klansmen pledged to the Invisible Empire. A star-kissed city blessed by its proximity to the oil fields, Tulsa was also home for vigilante groups—the black-robed and masked Knights of Liberty, who had terrorized and tortured socialists, IWW members, and union organizers for many years. A switch to white robes proved hardly to be a difficult maneuver. The Tulsa World and much of the other local press referred to these vigilantes as true patriots and condoned their actions. For many years, Tulsa lived on the verge of mob rule and necktie justice.
Still, Tulsa’s darkest days occurred between May 31 and June 2, 1921, when one of the most disastrous race riots in the nation’s history exploded in the city’s streets. As hundreds of thousands of blacks fled the Deep South between 1916 and 1920, a series of racial disturbances broke out in several cities. There were lynchings and riots in Charleston, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Knoxville, Omaha, East St. Louis, and Duluth. The mob slaughter in Tulsa was especially brutal, however.
The rioting in Tulsa resulted after a young black man was wrongly accused and then arrested for having attacked a white woman who operated an elevator in a downtown office building. Rumors of a lynching raged throughout the city. These reports were fueled in large part by scurrilous headlines and biased stories in the local newspapers. Ninety-degree-plus temperatures did not help matters. Neither did an ineffectual police department and sheriff’s office. Furious mobs of opposing blacks and whites congregated around the jail. Their threats and accusations provoked violent action. Gangs of enraged whites, armed with guns and stones and goaded on by Klansmen, marched on the black neighborhoods and the thriving black business district in north Tulsa.
A nightmare of burning, looting, and gunfire followed. Finally, the National Guard was summoned and thousands of displaced black refugees were rounded up and kept under guard at Convention Hall, McNulty Park, and the county fair grounds. Red Cross workers doled out hot soup, bread, and blankets. Witnesses to the carnage, who had gathered on Standpipe Hill, said they observed total devastation as far as the eye could see. Black homes, businesses, and churches were torched. Black men, women, and children were attacked and brutalized. What white Tulsans disparagingly called “Little Africa” was a smoking ruins.
For the blacks, there was no place to hide. Airplanes scouted from overhead. There were reports that lighted sticks of dynamite were dropped on homes. The sound of machine guns punctuated the smoky night. An elderly black couple was murdered after offering their prayers in church. A prominent black physician was gunned down as he ran from his burning residence. White vigilantes patrolled well-to-do neighborhoods and apprehended terrified black domestic servants. Corpses of black victims were defiled; some bodies were even tied to car bumpers and dragged through the streets. Officials estimated that ninety blacks and ten whites were killed. Others said at least three hundred black citizens perished. Still others maintained the number of black deaths was many times that number. Seventy years later, murmurs still lingered about trucks that had left the city loaded with black bodies. Once-thriving neighborhoods resembled Atlanta after General Sherman’s visit. They looked like bombed battlegrounds with only brick shells left standing. The bustling business area off of Archer Street on Greenwood Avenue, formerly known as the “Negro Wall Street,” was devastated and would not even be partially restored for almost sixty-five years. At least a thousand blacks spent the winter of 1922 living in tents. A precise loss in property and lives was never determined.
White leaders vowed they would help rebuild black Tulsa. They lied. The stain that tarnished the city’s soul was never truly cleansed. Tulsa remained as segregated, and in many ways as racist, as any city in the Deep South.
In Oklahoma, crime prevailed in many of the towns and cities that were dominated by the oil industry. Violence and prosperity seemed to go well together. Although supposedly solid citizens condoned the moral crusade carried out by vigilantes and the Ku Klux Klan, these same “good Christian men and women” also looked the other way when it came to dealing with certain property crimes and acts of violence. This was especially the case in the rural areas.
Many criminal acts were considered to be almost a form of political protest. They served as a means of striking back at the establishment that dominated the lives of rural citizens. Starting as early as 1910, there had been a steady rise of what became known as “social banditry.” To the tenant farmers and sharecroppers scrambling to dig a living from the earth, there was little wrong with a man who had the guts to rob a bank. It was the ultimate expression of protest. Bankers, like the big railroad barons who had fenced off grazing land, were the enemy as far as the poor folks were concerned. They believed the banks cheated them every chance they got.
Oklahoma’s dirt farmers, descended from sons and daughters of the frontier South, upheld their outlaw heroes who robbed the banks and trains. Civil disobedience, once part of the agrarian southern way of life, was carried westward to former Indian Territory. Southerners, like the Floyds and their neighbors, adopted Confederate generals and wily moonshiners as their models. Those glorified ancestors and cherished rascals helped bind everyone together.
Wilbur Joseph Cash, a Piedmont Southerner and journalist, argued that southern cultural unity was created in part by frontier violence, climate, and clannishness. Cash labeled this flaw in the southern character “social schizophrenia.” For every hedonistic tendency, there was bound to be a corresponding puritanical bias. Unbridled force was always countered by the Southerner’s chivalrous code of conduct. A need to honor family roots and community ties was opposed by the burning desire to roam. Life became a precarious balancing act. According to Cash, the Southern social bandit especially epitomized this contradictory or split-personality lifestyle. These bandits took on several guises—the rebel guerrillas who became Missouri’s most successful outlaws, the Texas and Oklahoma cowboys who turned into vigilantes, and the farmhands of the prairies and southern plains who emerged as brigands.
Social bandits, in the best tradition of Robin Hood, or, better yet, Choc Floyd’s preferred idol—Jesse James—were the “good guys” according to a surprisingly large number of Oklahomans. As early as 1912—just a year after Walter Floyd’s brood arrived at the Hanson railroad landing—Oklahoma led the nation in bank robberies. The trend continued. A few of the robberies were inside jobs, with bank employees and even officers staging hoax holdups and making off with the loot. But more often than not, the banks were held up by bandits who were cut from the same cloth as the James boys and others who were glamorized by the dime-novel writers.
During the four-month period between September 8, 1914, and January 13, 1915, there were fourteen bank robberies in Oklahoma alone. They occurred in small towns—Carney, Tupelo, Prue, Owasso, Vera, and the like. The average take was about two thousand dollars. The smallest haul was a paltry seven hundred dollars snatched from the state bank in Byars on a crisp October afternoon. The largest amount seized was $6,400 from the Kiefer Central Bank on the final day of September. A January 4, 1915, robbery attempt at the Oklahoma State Bank of Preston in oil-rich Okmulgee County resulted in twelve hundred dollars’ worth of damages to the sturdy vault, but the bandits left town empty-handed. This sort of activity alarmed the financial community as insurance companies threatened to cancel bank policies. Enormous rewards were placed on the bandits’ heads and additional money was appropriated to hire a team of manhunters to track down the pesky robbers. Little if any reward money was doled out. Most folks did not wish to get involved.
One of the chief “social bandits” of this period was Henry Starr, who had been born in Indian Territory in 1873 and gave up the cowboy’s life about 1890 to go on the scout and launch a career of crime. Starr, who was a half-breed Cherokee and claimed kinship to Belle Starr, the old Bandit Queen herself, graduated from horse theft to bank and train robbery during his more than thirty years on the outlaw trail. After he killed Floyd Wilson, a railroad detective toting an arrest warrant near the town of Lenapah in the Cherokee Nation, Starr fled into the sprawling Osage country. Years later, when statehood was granted, this 2,264-square-mile region of lush bluestem grass and rich oil deposits would become the largest county in Oklahoma. Like the Cookson Hills to the south, the Osage was a favorite resting ground for desperadoes. Starr was not only familiar with the territory but he had many friends and acquaintances who were willing to hide him or provide food and cover. Because of pardons, including one from President Theodore Roosevelt, court dismissals, and some lucky breaks, Starr waltzed away from the hangman’s noose at Fort Smith and elsewhere. He used his Winchester to shoot his way out of several confrontations with law officers.
Other well-known bandits who emerged during this period included Al Jennings, a bungling train robber and notoriously poor marksman. Jennings learned the art of storytelling while serving a hitch in an Ohio penitentiary. It was in prison where Jennings befriended a Texas bank teller convicted of embezzlement. Named William Sydney Porter, this convict went on to become known as the celebrated author and short-story writer O. Henry.
After Jennings received a Theodore Roosevelt pardon like the one given to Starr, he settled down to do some writing of his own. He also became an adviser to some of the early Western motion-picture producers, and appeared in a few films himself. He briefly toured the state with a “crime does not pay” message and was even a solid contender of the office of governor. During the campaign, Jennings told some potential voters, “If elected I promise to be honest for a year—if I can hold out that long.” In the 1914 Democratic primary, Jennings boasted that the people of Oklahoma could trust a train robber far more than the dishonest politicians. That made perfect sense to some Oklahomans. Jennings wound up with a strong third-place finish, gathering more than 24 percent of the vote.
The comical Jennings may have commanded many of the headlines, but there was little doubt that Henry Starr was still the reigning champion when it came to lawlessness. Starr had also served some time in the Ohio penitentiary at Columbus and was later able to obtain paroles from prison after serving stretches in Colorado from 1909 to 1913 and in Oklahoma from 1915 to 1919. On both occasions, he immediately went back to his wicked ways. He used his time in prison to pore through law books and perfect his bandit skills. No one was about to reform him and he had no aspirations for political office. Starr was the undisputed king of bank robbers.
Choc Floyd was very much aware of Starr and his exploits. Anyone living in Oklahoma during the teens and twenties knew about the busy bandit. Starr, whose name was a household word, was an especially recognized figure in Sequoyah County. It was this same Henry Starr who had his saddle repaired by J. H. Harkrider, the Sallisaw merchant who had caught Floyd red-handed with the box of cookies swiped from a store shelf when Charley was just a kid. Choc also heard the stories that Starr had been a prime suspect in the series of bank robberies between late 1914 and 1915 that had the bankers so riled. Some state authorities were convinced that Starr had a hand in every single one of the robberies, including the aborted attempt at Preston, where the vault was badly damaged. For his part, Starr neither admitted nor denied his involvement in those particular holdups.
Despite all the hoopla about the robberies, Starr had many admirers. Most of them were like Choc, and believed Starr was a reincarnation of Jesse James. Rumor had it that when Starr robbed a train or bank, he never bothered the ladies. He refused to take watches and money from any working men. He was the classic social bandit—at least in the minds of his public.
So it was big news on March 27, 1915, when Starr and some others tried to rob two banks in Stroud, Oklahoma, and a seventeen-year-old kid named Paul Curry shot the bandit leader with a 30-30 rifle used to kill hogs. Starr’s goal to rob a pair of banks in the same town in a single afternoon—a difficult feat the Daltons had failed to do many years before at Coffeyville, Kansas—ended in miserable failure. The wounded bandit was apprehended, and during his trial several months later, he pled guilty to bank robbery and was sentenced to twenty-five years in the state prison at McAlester. Before Starr left the courtroom, he went over to the boy who had plugged him and congratulated him for his courage and sharpshooting ability.
As always, Starr was an exemplary inmate. He taught composition and spelling to the other prisoners, worked as a librarian, and won sympathy because of his game leg, which had been crippled from the wound he had received at the hands of young Curry. In 1919, after gaining another parole, Starr followed the lead of Al Jennings and Emmett Dalton and dabbled in the motion-picture business. He bought into a Tulsa film company and played himself in a film that was a reenactment of his daring double bank robbery attempt at Stroud. Starr employed Stroud residents, including bank employees, as actors and he even hired his youthful nemesis, Paul Curry, to reenact his role. The film, Debtor to the Law, was a success, but when no financial windfall resulted, Starr felt he had been cheated. He married a Sallisaw woman, moved to Claremore, and borrowed money for lawyers to win back the earnings he was swindled out of by his associates in the moving-picture venture. When those efforts failed and with his debts mounting, Starr had just the excuse he needed to return once more to his bandit ways.
On February 18, 1921, Starr and three companions drove into Harrison, Arkansas, in a high-powered automobile. They parked and entered the People’s National Bank with their weapons drawn. Customers and employees were held at gunpoint, and the robbers scooped up six thousand dollars in cash and ordered a teller to open the safe. Former bank president W. J. Meyers happened to be present, and he remembered that twelve years before he had hidden a rifle away in the vault. While the bandits were occupied, Meyers grabbed the gun and opened fire. A bullet struck Starr in the side and severed his spinal cord. He crashed to the floor, and the others fled without any money. They were soon captured.
Starr died four days later on a jail cot. At his side were his mother and his new wife. It was February 22—George Washington’s birthday and the Starrs’ first wedding anniversary. Also at the deathwatch was a son from his first marriage, named for Theodore Roosevelt.
“I have robbed more banks than any man in the United States,” Starr said the day before he died to Dr. J. H. Fowler, the attending physician. “It doesn’t pay. I was in debt two thousand dollars and had to have money, so I turned bank robber again. I am sorry but the deed is done.”
Henry Starr—who during an endless crime spree in the early teens became the first bandit to use an automobile in a robbery—had been a brazen criminal. He had made the transition from the old days when outlaws rode quarter horses and wore rough work clothes to a time when they donned business suits and neckties and came calling on banks in sedans. Starr was a pioneer in the world of desperadoes and his passing was noted with a bit of sadness even on the part of some law-abiding people who remembered when he was just a small-time cattle rustler.
Choc was probably on the road somewhere in Kansas when Starr met his end. He knew that Starr was a direct tie to the old boots and saddle days on the outlaw trail that Choc and his friends loved so much.
As the twenties proceeded, there were reminders, other than the demise of Henry Starr, that the times were, in fact, changing.
Down in the Cookson Hills, eighteen-year-old Choc Floyd was still trying to come to grips with himself. He was having little luck, but he did experience some good fortune when it came to the nightly dice games and poker parties held in the grove of huge shade trees behind one of the stores in the village of Akins. He could hold his own even with seasoned gamblers, especially if they got a little whiskey in them and lost their edge in a game of five-card stud with a respectable pot on the line. Choc had picked up a trick or two from Callahan and the fellows up in Wichita. He knew how to pace himself and how to bluff his way out of a jam.
However, no bold poker player’s bluff worked on a fair evening in May of 1922, when Choc and a couple of his friends jimmied a window at one of the local stores that also served as a post office. Once inside, they took several molasses cans filled with pennies collected for postage stamps. The cans were lifted out of the window and within minutes the thieves were gone. They had talked themselves into burglarizing the store. It was meant to be a lark. As if on a dare, the young men scrambled inside to steal some money to fuel their penny-ante card games.
In the darkness, they had no way to really tell just how much money they had stolen. The next day when the storekeeper found he had been victimized, the news quickly traveled around town and out to the farms and fields. More than $350 in pennies was missing. That was a mighty good sum to most folks, even city dwellers. At Renberg’s, a clothing store on Main Street in Tulsa, an all-wool boy’s suit could have been purchased for $8.95. Housewives headed to the Piggly Wiggly were prepared to shell out fifteen cents for a can of hominy and a dime for a can of Campbell’s baked beans.
By the time everyone figured out just how much was taken, however, it did not really matter. The pennies had already been dumped down a hand-dug water well on the property belonging to Choc’s grandpa, old Charles Murphy Floyd, situated near the post office store. The boys had reconsidered the situation, and in the light of the next day, when panic and perhaps some remorse set in, they had decided to get rid of any evidence.
It did not take a Pinkerton detective to figure out just who might be responsible for the store theft. Choc and his usual crew of pals were suspected to be prime culprits. This time, though, the boys had gone too far. There was more involved here than some purloined cookies or a mischievous baby swap at a revival meeting. This was a felony, and since the incident involved money taken from a U.S. post office, the local authorities had to summon federal men from Muskogee. They came down to Akins in their pressed suits and fresh straw hats to poke around and see what they could turn up. Fortunately for Choc, the men were also good Masons, and so they listened to Walter Floyd when he stepped forward and gave them an alibi for his son.
“Ol’ man Floyd talked to those feds,” recalled Marvin Amos, whose brother Cleon was one of Choc’s best running partners. “He managed to convince them that Choc was nowhere near that store. Back then the Floyds were living about a quarter mile south, and ol’ Walter Floyd told them that Choc was tucked away in bed at the exact time of that store robbery.”
Choc counted his blessings. He knew he was lucky. That same night of the post-office burglary, a band of masked men near the Oklahoma town of Kiefer took a twenty-two-year-old man from his home to a remote area where they gave him a severe whipping because they claimed he had been intimate with some of the local young ladies. Choc and his accomplices had no angry vigilantes to face. Walter Floyd was bad enough.
Not long after that incident, Choc and Cleon Amos and some of the other boys went over to Fort Smith and had a serious chat with the navy recruiter. They were all ready to join up on the buddy system and see the world.
“About four of those boys went to Fort Smith to join the navy,” recalled Marvin Amos. “But my dad found out about it and he went down there and got my brother Cleon and all the other boys backed out and came on home. Then later on Cleon slipped back all by himself and he joined up. He stayed in the navy and made it a career. He retired from the service. Charley Floyd was there that first time to join. He was ready to go. He would have, too, if they would have just left him alone. Makes a man wonder. Wonder how that would have changed things. Guess we’ll never know.”