Charley Floyd never really got over Ruby Hardgraves. They were kindred spirits—addicted to each other’s bodies and souls. It was an easy fit. Both were wild kids full of desire. Both wanted to shake off the dirt and soften their rough cotton-picking hands. They were caught up in their fantasies, with no fears except maybe getting stuck in somebody else’s cotton patch.
Choc’s quick temper and fists caused the sanctimonious churchgoers to think of him as something of a hellion. Ruby did not have a bit of trepidation, however. She had grown up around rugged country people who worked and played hard. Besides, she liked Choc’s easy laugh and the way he swaggered just a bit. When she and her girlfriends sashayed into the store down by the Akins cotton gin or went berry picking along the creeks, Ruby did not go unnoticed by the boys. Choc was aroused by this skinny girl. He soon came calling.
Ruby’s Cherokee eyes intoxicated Choc. His sister-in-law, Bessie, recalled that Ruby could captivate Choc with her sun-kissed hair and long, limber legs. Charley became as light-headed as when he was sloshed on home brew. Throughout the winter and spring of 1923 and 1924, the couple spent more and more time together. They made love every chance they got. When Choc got Ruby away from everyone else, he was all over her. They were barn cats in heat.
There was a touch of delicious insanity in them that only other lovers could recognize. Folks saw it in their eyes when Choc and Ruby, grass-stained and flushed, walked down the paths that fed into the thickets and weeds out toward the cemetery. They saw it when Choc galloped on a horse down the road through Akins with Ruby perched behind him. They were oblivious to the graver concerns of the world.
The night before Ruby helped Choc celebrate his twentieth birthday, wartime President Woodrow Wilson, whose dreams were shattered, died while he slept in his third-floor bedroom in Washington, D.C. A few days later, an audience heard for the first time George Gershwin’s innovative symphonic work Rhapsody in Blue, performed by the Paul Whiteman orchestra at Aeolian Hall in New York. The wailing clarinets kept the house spellbound. Elsewhere, jazz and big-band musicians like Fletcher Henderson, Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, and Earl Hines were also tuning up. One of the top records of 1924 was Henderson’s Tea Pot Dome Blues.
In the spring of 1924, an intensely ambitious young man in Washington, D.C.—despite having no Ruby Hardgraves of his own or even the hint of a sweetheart in his life—knew very well what he wanted to be. John Edgar Hoover was devoted to his job, his mother, and the welfare of the nation. He had no time for frivolity as he marched up the ranks at the Justice Department.
Three years earlier, on August 22, 1921, Hoover had been appointed assistant director of the Bureau of Investigation. He had already altered his name to the more formal J. Edgar Hoover. He thought it was more dignified; it also had a certain ring that fit him better. The chief reason he switched to the use of only his first initial, however, was because he found out that the other Washington resident named John Hoover was considered a poor credit risk by Woodward & Lothrop, a prestigious local department store. Hoover wanted to avoid even the hint of scandal. He had his reputation to consider.
Hoover’s appointment as second in command of the bureau came during the Harding administration when Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty, a presidential crony who ran Harding’s campaign, picked William J. Burns to succeed William Flynn as the bureau’s director. Formerly the head of the famous private detective agency known for its strikebreaking efforts and attempts to round up Oklahoma bank robbers, Burn’s checkered past reflected the corruption and opportunism of the Harding era.
The bureau under Burns sank to new lows. Agents were selected in a manner reminiscent of county sheriffs handing out special-duty badges to their supporters. Some of the agents even had served time in prison, including one who had been convicted of murder. One reporter called the bureau nothing but a “goon squad for the Attorney General.” To earn their keep, many federal agents relied on bribery and blackmail. They snooped into private citizens’ lives and burglarized—fifty years before Watergate—the offices of lawmakers who dared stand up to Daugherty or criticize the excesses of the Harding administration.
One of the most flagrant of Burn’s operatives was Gaston Bullock Means, a con artist who had been accused of everything from larceny to homicide. Reportedly a German agent during the war, Means was well connected to underworld figures and power brokers in major bootlegging circles. His job in Harding’s Washington was to act as an intermediary between cabinet officials and the big-business barons they cut deals with in exchange for payoffs. Means later admitted to a Senate committee that he delved into the private lives of congressmen and even broke into their offices to gain information to use against them.
The rigid J. Edgar Hoover found Gaston Means abominable. He may have been further disgusted by the antics of Burns and Daugherty, but he clearly did not totally disagree with their policies. Like any good bureaucrat on the rise, Hoover was smart enough to maintain his own counsel and not become linked to any misconduct. He kept his nose to the grindstone and diligently prepared a secret enemies list based on the data collected by Burns. Nonetheless, when the power structure underlying the federal bureau began to crumble with Harding’s sudden death, Hoover managed to stay clear of the allegations brought against Daugherty and Burns.
By March 28, 1924, with a reelection campaign ahead of him and in the face of the Senate’s probe into the Attorney General’s office, Calvin Coolidge demanded and received the resignation of Harry Daugherty. On April 2, Coolidge announced that in Daugherty’s place, he was appointing Harlan Fiske Stone as the new Attorney General. Stone had been a classmate of the President’s at Amherst College and was a prominent New York attorney.
The new Attorney General ousted Burns as director of the Bureau of Investigation on May 9, and the next day Hoover was summoned to Stone’s office. Following a famous conversation during which Hoover allegedly asked for Stone’s promise that the bureau would remain divorced from politics and that all future appointments would be based solely on merit, the job of acting director was offered to Hoover. He accepted. He was only twenty-nine years old. Eight months later the word acting would be dropped from his title.
The reign of J. Edgar Hoover as the nation’s “top cop” lasted for forty-eight years. During this time, he would overhaul the dishonored bureau as he built a force of clean-cut crime fighters. These handpicked special agents catered to Hoover’s shortcomings and allowed him to become one of the most powerful forces in the nation.
During this period, Choc and Ruby were occupied with their own frantic plans. During the fertile month of May, Ruby became distressed when her suspicions were confirmed: She was three months pregnant and there was no wedding band on her finger. She went straight to Choc Floyd with the news.
For the better part of the last year, Choc had lived at his brother Bradley’s place. Bradley, together with his wife, Bessie, and their twin boys had moved out of his father’s home at Akins into a small house with some land not far from the village of Hanson. Bessie, pregnant again, had found it increasingly difficult to get along with her mother-in-law, Mamie, and she knew she had to have a house of her own to raise her family. Bradley realized that it was a strain for his kid brother to live under his parents’ roof, especially since Choc had poked around the country and was now a grown man. The post-office penny caper had also put an added strain on the relationship between Charley and his father.
Although he loved and respected his parents, Bradley knew how stern they could be. Walter was bad enough, especially when he had a couple of belts of liquor in him, but even their mother could be overly strict. Bradley recalled the time he had been chopping firewood and accidentally brought the ax down on his foot. The blade sliced through his boot and nearly cut off his big toe. When Bradley dashed into the house to get some comfort, Mamie proceeded to give him a whipping for tracking blood all over her clean floor. As far as Bradley was concerned, Choc was more than welcome to sleep and eat at his house. In return, he would help out with the crops. There were no doubt better moonshiners in business, but the Floyd brothers made and sold a little whiskey to bring in some extra income.
“Choc told me that he’d rather live with us,” said Bessie Floyd when she was a ninety-year-old woman thinking about old times in Sequoyah County. “He told me that he liked the way I took care of his clothes for him. And I made sure he was cleaned up and fed. He was fun-lovin’, and I always thought of him as a good boy. I can still see Choc and Bradley out there farming. I’d be inside the house with my little twin boys and they’d be pesterin’ me to teach ’em how to wash dishes. They aggravated me until I put ’em up to the dishes and the pan of water, and let ’em go on and wash all they wanted. They were only three years old but they wanted to work like the men.”
When Ruby went to see Choc to tell him she was carrying his child, he did not flinch. He knew he was in love with Ruby, and he reasoned there was a decent chance that by becoming a husband and father, he would settle down. Ruby went with Choc to the Sequoyah County court-house, built in 1915, at the corner of Oak and Chickasaw streets in Sallisaw. They obtained a marriage license. Ruby would be a June bride and a December mother. The young couple broke the news to their families and friends. They took care of the few preparations required for the simple wedding.
The temperature on June 28, 1924, was expected to reach one hundred degrees in some parts of the state. In the small hours of the morning, several tornadoes had swept across the upper Midwest, causing thousands of dollars in property damage and leaving injured persons in Iowa. A twister took at least eight lives just to the east of Peoria, Illinois, as another funnel cloud cut a swath two miles wide through the coal black farmlands. Searchers were still on the lookout for an entire passenger train that seemed to have vanished during the storm.
The results of an intensive study of criminals just released in New York and published that Saturday in newspapers across the nation stated that “twenty years ago the bolder type of burglar known as a ‘Dutch houseman’ was often a man 35 or more; today he is almost exclusively a young man.” The report also suggested that “youth is eternally reckless and is prone to take chances that a man of 30, experienced in the ways of the world, would deliberate a long time before taking.”
Another prominent wire story was developed in sweltering New York City, where the Democrats had taken over Madison Square Garden for their national convention. They needed to come up with a candidate to challenge Coolidge and the GOP. In early July, after a record-setting thirteen days of fistfights between delegates and 103 ballots cast, they would eventually choose as their nominee West Virginia’s John W. Davis, a former U.S. Solicitor General and ambassador to Great Britain.
Out of Kansas City, urgent appeals were being issued for ten thousand harvest hands needed after rainy weather caused a sudden ripening of the Kansas wheat crop. Workers from as far as St. Louis were rushed to help out the panicky grain farmers.
In Oklahoma came the report of several hundred Klansmen heckling Jack Walton, the former governor, during a speech he made on June 27 in the town of Heavener. A candidate for the U.S. Senate, Walton had to delay his campaign talk for a half hour while the hooded men marched in circles around the platform, hooting and jeering and carrying a banner that read, WE’LL HAVE NO JACK IN THE SENATE.
A front-page article in the Tulsa Tribune that same June 28 revealed that the long-rumored secret wedding of Vol Whittmore, a life-insurance salesman, and Thelma Kennedy, heiress daughter of a multimillionaire Tulsa doctor, had actually occurred two months earlier. The shocked families were not talking to reporters, and the couple had slipped away to Kansas City for a belated honeymoon trip. This tidbit of romantic gossip was the talk of the city, especially among society matrons at afternoon bridge games.
Choc and Ruby’s rather ordinary wedding in Sallisaw hardly rated front-page coverage, not even in their own home county. As was the custom with the other Floyd children, the plain civil ceremony proceeded without any pomp. They were dressed in their best suits of clothes. Ruby held a bouquet of fragrant homegrown blossoms. There was a certain air of dignity about them as Choc and Ruby stood together with a couple of friends who served as witnesses.
Like most rural marriages, there was no honeymoon. Some old friends and relatives later remembered that there was at least some sort of shivaree. At these noisy mock serenades, traditionally given to country newlyweds on their wedding night, celebrants rubbed washboards and beat spoons on pots and pans. Sometimes the revelers even captured the groom, and while the girls and women gently teased the blushing bride, the men folk dragged the kicking husband to a creek and gave him a rude bath. The theory was that if a young couple could survive a shivaree on that first night and if they were still speaking the next morning, then surely the marriage would last forever.
In 1923, one year before Choc and Ruby’s marriage, the third-oldest of the Floyds’ daughters, Emma Lucille, took the matrimonial leap. Her husband was Samuel Lessley, a local fellow who preferred to go by his middle name, Clarence. He was the son of Samuel James Lessley, a native of Batesville, Arkansas, whose parents had moved there from Missouri during the Civil War. In 1889, Sam Lessley came to Indian Territory, and the next year, he married Sarotha Arbillia Wickett, daughter of pioneer Georgians who came to western Arkansas before settling on a farm northeast of Akins. Clarence, born December 15, 1901, was one of their eight children and spent his entire life in the Akins area. After he and Emma Floyd wed, Clarence took his bride to live at his widowed mother’s house about one mile east of town. There on Epiphany—January 6, 1924—Emma gave birth to a son she named Lawton. He was the first of her five children.
On July 4, 1924, less than a week after Choc married Ruby Hardgraves, another baby was born to Bradley and Bessie Floyd out at their place in Hanson. They named their third son Glendon. He was a healthy baby and became an instant playmate for twins Wayne and Bayne.
This bounty of grandbabies gratified Walter Floyd. He joked with his friends that soon there would be enough for a baseball team. Then Mamie surprised him and the rest of the family when she announced that she was also pregnant. It had been more than twelve years since her last child, Mary Delta, was born. Walter could hardly contain himself. He bragged that his children would not outdo him when it came to producing offspring.
By the mid-1920s, Walter had opened a small general-merchandise store in the town of Akins. The little settlement already supported the Wickett and Green Store as well as another store that was operated by the Mills family. Walter figured there was room for his establishment, however. It was a typical frame building like the others in town. Walter sold a few staples and kept a slim inventory of essentials for local customers. For a time, there was a barber chair, but no one could ever recall seeing Walter cut hair or shave any of the farmers.
Walter said he needed the extra money to plug the gaps that his cash crops failed to fill. The store was also a place to hold forth with his hunting buddies and lodge brothers. Once the afternoon sun started its slow plunge in the western sky, Walter rationed out select sipping spirits and his best tales of the hunt. There was another reason he liked having the store: Family would come there. With the possible exception of running his hounds and drinking whiskey, nothing brought Walter more pleasure than offering his children and grandchildren gumdrops and peppermint sticks from the big glass jars he kept on the store counter. Even an unbending pappy with an ill temper had his tender moments.
And, in the final months of 1924, a year when some American farmers cruelly realized that they were already suffering through a depression that the rest of the nation would not have to endure for another five years, those times were special. To a man like Walter Floyd, a handful of penny candy became priceless.