Bayne and Wayne, Bradley Floyd’s twin sons, saw the figure of a man walking toward them. When they first noticed the stranger, the little boys were wrestling in the middle of the oil field road, a few miles east of the boomtown of Earlsboro, that ran in front of their house. The twins stopped playing and watched him come closer to them.
“This guy came down the road carrying a small suitcase, and we saw that he had on a straw hat,” recalled Bayne more than sixty years later. “He walked right on by, and then he turned around and looked at us. My brother Wayne, ever since he was a baby, always had this funny eye, an eye that would get all squinty from the sun. It was sort of like his trademark.
“Well, this fella looked right at him. He grinned and said, ‘You’re Wayne, aren’t you?’ It was our Uncle Choc. He had remembered that ol’ squinty eye of Wayne’s, and he knew he’d found where he was lookin’ for. We were goin’ on nine years old later that year and hadn’t seen Choc since we were about five, when we still lived back in Sequoyah County. We had really forgot about him, and now here he was standing right in front of us.”
Bradley and Bessie welcomed Charley into their small home, already crowded with the twin boys, five-year-old Glendon, and a fourth son, Cleatus, who had been born in Earlsboro in 1928 when Charley was still in prison. Bessie’s parents, Sam and Ellen Watson, and two of her brothers had moved from Sequoyah County to the Seminole oil fields in 1926, and Sam became an engineer in a gasoline plant. They encouraged Bessie and her husband to leave the corn and cotton fields behind, too, and join them.
“My daddy went on out to those oil fields, with one of my cousins, and so Bradley went out to look it over,” said Bessie Floyd. “Bradley got himself a job, and I stayed and finished getting in the cotton, sold my cow, and packed up. Then my daddy came and loaded us on his truck and we all moved there.”
Bradley took a job as a truck driver. He hauled work crews and equipment back and forth from the rigs that sprouted throughout that country in a Mack Bulldog truck equipped with tire chains and winch. Bessie did her best to make their modest oil patch house into a pleasant home for the family. At one point, Bradley broke down and bought her a trusty Singer sewing machine. With it, Bessie made curtains and sewed for the other folks. She patched, darned, and recycled the boys’ shirts and overalls until they wore out. She canned everything edible, from wild berries to garden vegetables. She also canned fresh meat after Bradley and the neighbors killed a hog or calf. On cold winter nights, the Floyd boys licked their lips when their mother retrieved a jar of veal from the cellar across the road and cooked up some biscuits and gravy on her wood-burning stove. Those were usually special meals or at holidays, for even with the wages Bradley made as a truck driver, there were lean spells and some nights the boys went off to bed hungry as boxcar hoboes.
Now and then, Bessie took in a few boarders and put them on mattresses that covered the rough wooden floors. She also sold sandwiches and made up lunches for roustabouts, bored with standing in line for hours at the Oil Flyer Cafe, who stayed down at the Magnolia Oil bunkhouses. Making room for Choc and having one more mouth to feed did not bother a workhorse like Bessie Floyd. She thrived on labor. She did not mind the filthy work shirts and drawers that piled up next to the tub and washboard. There was not enough time to fret about much more than keeping Bradley fed and the men’s dinner buckets filled. She felt lucky if she was able to get her boys clean and march them off to prayer meeting and church every week.
An ample dose of good old-time religion was a necessity for a God-fearing woman like Bessie Floyd. The oil fields of Oklahoma during the twenties and thirties were not a place for the faint of will, back, or mind. A spell with the Bible did much to soothe troubled souls.
For the Greater Seminole Oil Field, as it was known, was not just the world’s chief producer of petroleum from 1923 until the oil play petered out about 1935, it was also unquestionably one of the most violent and squalid areas in the nation.
Located to the east of Oklahoma City and the city of Shawnee, in an area that included the entire county of Seminole as well as parts of Pottawatomie and three other counties, the oil field covered about thirteen hundred square miles. More than sixty ripe pools were developed over the dozen or so boom years. Before the discovery of oil, it had been one of the poorest sections of the state. Most of the territory was situated in sandstone hills covered with post oaks, blackjacks, and some stands of black walnut. When the oil wells began gushing, tenant farmers and sharecroppers from that area, as well as others like the Floyds and Watsons, deserted their fields to take jobs with oil companies as unskilled workers.
The heart of what was once the Seminole Indian Nation, this area was most proud of six of its largest pools—Earlsboro, Bowlegs, Seminole, Little River, Allen, St. Louis. Each of these pools produced more than a million barrels of oil before they played out. The heavy flow of crude oil predictably brought about both growth of towns and communities and also an explosive increase in criminal activity.
After oil was found, the Seminole County seat of Wewoka doubled in size. With the sudden swell in population came problems caused by poor roads, inadequate telephone service, and a serious shortage of facilities to receive and store freight. Merchandise being shipped to the town was often waylaid or wound up sitting in a boxcar at the Wewoka siding waiting for someone to claim it. Merchants told their customers that they had the item they wanted but it was “in the Wewoka switch.” Oil field workers who colored their language with slang coined a catch-phrase that fit the situation. To get “caught in a Wewoka switch” meant that a working man found himself in a sudden dilemma. It became one of the most oft-used expressions in the oil patch.
Despite the mayhem and chaos, populations jumped sky-high in towns like Earlsboro, Seminole, Maud, and Bowlegs. In 1926 alone, well over one hundred thousand persons moved into the Greater Seminole area. Overnight they slapped together sheet metal, cardboard, and packing crates and called them houses. Hotels and rooming houses were booked solid, and men slept under the tables in the pool halls or curled up around bonfires at the railroad yards. Groups of shacks and tents became “rag towns.” Some even rated names, such as Warmego, Weber City, Wilsonville, Snomac, and there were many others.
There was also Cromwell—called the “meanest town in Oklahoma.” Cromwell was founded in 1924. That same year, the town’s seventy-one-year-old police chief, who had been the former chief of Oklahoma City’s police force, Bill Tilghman, was shot and killed by Wiley Lynn, a drunken Prohibition agent. The evening following Tilghman’s murder, every single dance hall and back-alley gin mill in town was locked up in tribute to the legendary Old West law officer who had once ridden for “Hanging Judge” Parker. They all opened the next morning, but oil field history had been made—a law officer finally got a town’s dives to shut down, if only for a day.
Another by-product of the Seminole oil boom was Bowlegs, a town created around 1926. Bowlegs was home to scores of dance hall girls, and a large number of bootleggers, gamblers, and automobile thieves. The more high-profile characters in Bowlegs were Wingy McDaniels, operator of a boardinghouse that was a favorite location for knife fights and shootings; Spanish Blackey, a Mexican bootlegger skilled at heisting motorcars and throwing daggers with deadly accuracy; and Big Nell, an uncouth oil field gypsy considered the queen of the Bowlegs bootleggers and as good a shot and street fighter as any roughneck in town.
Seminole, one of the largest oil centers in the area, was never the same after that July afternoon in 1926 when the famed well called Fixco No.1 blew in about a mile and a half east of town. By 1929, more than ten thousand people lived there. When the boom hit Seminole, the muddy streets stayed filled with wagon teams, automobiles, trucks, and masses of people after jobs.
Those who did not take legitimate positions set up shop in Bishop’s Alley, an unsavory section of town that covered about four square blocks and attracted dope peddlers, pickpockets, whores, bootleggers, and thieves. Field hands just off a twelve-hour shift came to the alley to drink and gamble their woes away. They found all the amusement, as well as trouble, they wanted at dance halls and clubs such as Mule Skinners, Mother Murphy’s, Wintergarden, or the Bucket of Blood. To discourage acts of violence, one bellicose Seminole club posted a sign that put it politely: NO FIREARMS OR KNIVES ALOUD [sic] HERE. When the Daily Oklahoman dared print articles that criticized Seminole for the excesses of Bishop’s Alley, the mayor and other city leaders piled all the newspapers they could gather in a prominent downtown intersection and burned them in protest. Nonetheless, undertakers were making top wages and stayed as busy as the harlots on payday.
Although smaller than Seminole and a smidgen less savage, Earlsboro, the nearest town to Bradley Floyd’s place, had a mean streak of its own. Founded in the early 1890s, the town was right inside the old Oklahoma Territory, where saloons used to be legal. As a result, residents from nearby Indian Territory went to Earlsboro to buy liquor. Earlsboro became known as a “whiskey town.” About twenty-five hundred people, many of them solid citizens and dues-paying Methodists, resided there when Charley Floyd first showed up looking for a job, but the population was already beginning to decline from its peak numbers during the zenith of the boom. By 1930, there were nineteen hundred residents. Still, the downtown main street was sometimes so crowded, it took a half hour to drive two or three blocks. All the streets were lined with drugstores, dry-goods stores, pool and dance halls, and rooming houses. Earlsboro also retained its hurly-burly side, and even federal grand jury investigations into the rampant bootlegging business did not crimp the illegal liquor trade.
Lee Thompson’s dance hall was a big contributor to Earlsboro’s villainous reputation. Thompson’s was one of the town’s three principal “evil haunts.” It was right up there with the Forty-Niner Club, which was razed in 1929, and the Green Lantern, which was headquarters for some local thugs fondly known as the Earlsboro Mob.
In January 1932, workmen finally ripped down the clapboard walls of Lee Thompson’s. Survivors of the vice-infested landmark that had sheltered dope peddlers and white slavers told D. M. Fox, a Tulsa World reporter sent to cover the demolition, that they recalled “memories of nights when jazz dance bands moaned out their racous [sic] melodies to the accompaniment of the weird throbbing of pumping oil wells.”
Bradley’s sons remembered just how difficult Earlsboro could be—in those days when men lugged dinner pails in one hand and kept a club at the ready in their other. “Everybody had to be tough just to make it back then,” said Glendon Floyd. “You could walk down the streets of oil field towns like Earlsboro, and if you wanted a fight, then you would easily get one. They’d be lined up and ready.
“I recall my father coming home one night, and he damn near had one of his fingers sliced off. He had gotten into a fight, and the fella who jumped him pulled a knife and tried to stab him. My dad had to wrestle that knife away from the guy, and he got cut real bad. But he got the knife and then he picked up a two-by-four and he beat the hell outta that man.”
Bradley was happy Choc had come to Earlsboro. He felt sure he could find some sort of job for his kid brother in the oil patch. But first things first. There was still some family to see. After a few days of feasting on Bessie’s good home cooking, Choc was ready to visit the other Floyds.
“We had an ol’ Model A touring car, and my parents loaded all us kids in it,” recalled Bayne. “We took Choc back to Akins to see Grandma Floyd and the others. We went to the house they had then, back off in a field. There was mud hole after mud hole, and we didn’t get all the way up there. We had to get out by the gate.”
Mamie Floyd saw Bradley’s touring car coming. She was out of the house and running toward them before the automobile doors were closed.
“I remember Grandma was so excited to see Choc,” said Bayne. “It had been some time back when he had left for prison. I can still hear her words when she got down there to us. She said, ‘My boy! My boy! I thought I’d never see ya again!’
“And, of course, then she grabbed him and hugged his neck and knocked off that straw hat he had, and the wind got hold of it and blew it away. We chased it down for him. Then we all went to the house and had a high time, visiting and eating.”
Mamie proudly showed Charley the jewelry box he had made her in the prison workshop. The box had a place of honor in the bedroom. It was made to look like a tiny divan, with padded cushions, and there was a mirror inside the lid. His mother cherished the box. Everyone could see that it was special to her.
“Later on, Choc went on down to Grandpa Floyd’s store to see him,” said Bayne. “I recall Granddad was kind of cold toward him. Some other men were at the store, and one ol’ boy asked Choc to come on down after supper and tell them all some stories about what it was like in the pen. My grandpa frowned at that suggestion and wasn’t too sold on the idea. We all thought he’d be happy to see Choc, but he just didn’t seem too thrilled.”
Walter prepared no fatted calf for his prodigal son. He did not even break out any of his good whiskey. Instead, everyone settled for a potluck dinner at Mamie’s table. Choc and the Earlsboro band of the Floyd family stayed on in Akins for a few days. Choc caught up on family news and visited with his sisters and brothers. He saw the new nephews and nieces who had been born while he was in Jefferson City. His little brother, E. W., and the youngest Floyd sibling, Mary, were still living at home with their parents. Both of them seemed very grown-up. Mary even had a trophy to show off, which she had won as a member of the girl’s high school basketball squad at Sallisaw.
Choc did some asking about the whereabouts of Ruby and his son. He found out that her folks had moved up north to sharecrop some land near Bixby, a small community on the south bank of the Arkansas River just below Tulsa. Folks told him that since divorcing Choc earlier in the year, Ruby had taken up with another man. Perhaps she had even married this other fellow, but no one really knew.
As usual, the big topic of discussion on the front porch and down at Walter’s store was politics. Choc heard all about Henry S. Johnston, yet another Oklahoma governor, who had angered the legislature and survived one impeachment attempt, only to end up getting booted out of office following a six-week trial on charges of incompetence. The truth of the matter was, Choc was told, that Johnston, a conservative Democrat, had angered his political enemies, including prohibitionists, Ku Klux Klanners, and members of the Protestant clergy who had supported him.
Besides political hearsay, there was also still some substantial talk about George and Matthew Kimes, the notorious bank-robbing brothers who had plagued Oklahoma in the 1920s. Choc was all ears.
The Kimeses were farm boys who became bootleggers and car thieves, and, just like Choc Floyd, they had become smitten with tales about the James brothers, Henry Starr, and Al Spencer. The authorities believed that it was a former associate of Spencer—a skilled bank burglar named Ray Terrill—who encouraged them to try banditry as a way of life. During the first half of the twenties, and throughout the time Choc was in prison, the Kimes brothers robbed banks and raised hell.
Included in their tally of successful robberies in Oklahoma were stickups at the towns of Depew and Beggs, and, on the afternoon of August 25,1926, the holdup of two banks in Covington. The Kimes boys managed to elude the posse, and on August 27, they were headed for western Arkansas when they encountered a roadblock about four miles west of Sallisaw. A gun battle commenced and Sequoyah County Deputy Sheriff Perry Chuculate was shot and killed. The Kimeses took Sallisaw Police Chief J. C. Woll, and Will Ross, a civilian member of the posse, as their hostages and fled the scene. Woll and Ross were released unharmed that evening in a wooded area in the north county and the Kimeses hightailed it to a hideout in the hills near Van Buren, Arkansas. Other law officers pursued them, and although the Kimes boys tried to escape on foot, they were both captured and returned to Sallisaw to be tried for Chuculate’s murder.
Matt Kimes was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. George Kimes was also convicted and was handed a twenty-five-year sentence. Neither the prosecution nor the defense was pleased with the results, and Matt was granted a new trial, while George was transported from Sallisaw to the state pen at McAlester. On November 21, 1926, while he was waiting for the next trial to begin, Matt was freed when a band of six men, with guns blazing, overpowered a jailer and broke Matt out of the Sequoyah County jail. During the nationwide manhunt that followed, Matt Kimes, Ray Terrill, and some accomplices struck at banks in Pampa, Texas, and Sapulpa, Oklahoma, where they made off with $41,953. On May 18, 1927, the bandits robbed two banks in one afternoon—Farmers National and the First National—in Beggs, Oklahoma. As they escaped, they also killed Chief of Police W. J. McAnally.
Always on the run, Kimes was finally captured on June 24, 1927, in Flagstaff, Arizona. He was returned to Oklahoma in manacles. Matt Kimes was convicted of murdering the two law officers, Chuculate and McAnally, and was given two life sentences. He joined his brother George behind the walls at “Big Mac.”
Although Choc never ran with the Kimes boys, he was interested in hearing the stories of their exploits, particularly about the shootouts and the jailbreak in Sequoyah County. After listening to such accounts, Choc returned with Bradley and family to Earlsboro. Following his return, Choc went with Bradley to meet some of the men doing the hiring in the oil fields.
Choc was ready to do anything. The oil companies needed tool pushers, mule skinners, and others to work their rigs and wells. He hired on right away as a roustabout, and began to get used to a daily work routine. It seemed like old times—living with Bradley and having Bessie there to take care of his clothes and cook up a storm.
“Dad got him a job but, as I remember hearing about it later, Choc didn’t last too long,” recalled Glendon Floyd. “I think what happened is the ol’ boss found out, or someone told him that Choc had been to prison, and they had to let him go. Back then they were trying to clean things up out in the oil field, and they wanted to keep convicts out. So the rule was that if you’d been to prison, and they found out about it, they fired your ass.”
Glendon’s mother, Bessie, also had vivid recollections of Charley trying to make a go of it and having little luck. “Choc was out there stayin’ with us near Earlsboro, and he went down and Bradley’s boss gave him a job,” said Bessie. “It was over soon enough and Choc came on back to the house. He said, ‘Well, Bess, don’t that just beat all? Here I go and get a good job and they won’t let me keep it.’ And then right after that he took off and he headed straight back to Kansas City. I felt bad for him. He had an awful lot laid on one soul.”
The job he held briefly in Earlsboro was Choc’s last attempt at honest labor. He wanted nothing more to do with farming, but he did consider doing something he had actually been taught by experts—bootlegging. If he wanted to make any real money at bootlegging, it meant he would need to establish ties in a larger base of operations. Charley knew just where to go.
Choc’s second visit to the Kansas City area did not go much better than the first. He had a difficult time making the right connections. He felt a bit out of his element. On May 6, 1929, he was picked up by the police in Kansas City, Kansas, and was jailed on charges of vagrancy and suspicion of highway robbery. He was booked in as number 3999, and thrown into a jail cell. Whenever the police wanted more time to run down records and grill a suspect in the hopes that he would confess to unsolved crimes, they charged him with vagrancy. In the street parlance, such a sentence was known as “vag.” Charley made no such confessions, but the police did take a mug shot that showed Charley dressed in a dark striped suit, shirt, and tie. His hair was oily and was combed straight back. He looked agitated.
The following day, May 7, Choc was released from custody by the authorities. He immediately headed west. Only two days later, on May 9, 1929, Charley was again arrested. This time, he was all the way out in Pueblo, Colorado. He was charged with vagrancy, and was hustled right off to jail. Just exactly what he was doing out in south-central Colorado was never made clear. He always said he was innocently looking for work when the law decided to roust him once again. There were some jobs to be had in the city. Located on the Arkansas River, Pueblo had become the industrial center of the southern Colorado piedmont and was even called the Pittsburgh of the West.
It would seem more likely, however, that he was running bootleg liquor from Kansas City to the joints in Pueblo that served the drinking needs of the steel plant workers. When he was arrested, booked into the jail as number 887, Charley was not in work clothes but, instead, had on a suit and big bow tie. The Pueblo authorities came down harder on their “vags,” and Charley was fined fifty dollars and was sentenced to sixty days in jail. Within two months after his release from the Jeff City pen, Charley had managed to get arrested three times in three states—Missouri, Kansas, Colorado—and also get hired and fired from a respectable oil field job.
After he served his brief hitch in the Pueblo pokey, Choc made a beeline back to Tom’s Town. By late August 1929, he had rented a furnished room at 1400 Troost Avenue in Kansas City, a marginal address in a shady part of town. He was intent on continuing serious efforts to penetrate the invisible shell that protected bootleggers and others from police harassment. Without Johnny Lazia’s blessing, he had little success.
On September 2, Charley was arrested by the Kansas City police. This time, he decided to use an alias and he identified himself as Joe Scott. He was detained only briefly, and then released. About two weeks later, on September 17, Choc was apprehended yet again by the Kansas City authorities. They took him and some of his friends downtown and questioned them at length concerning the recent robbery of the Sears Roebuck plant. No links could be established, and when Choc’s alibi checked out, he was finally set free. That now meant he had been arrested on five separate occasions in only six months. A pattern was clearly developing.
While Charley sought to get rich through bootlegging, get-rich schemes of a different sort had captivated the interests of investors, large and small, throughout the nation. About the only group that seemed unaffected by the dizzying climb of the New York Stock Exchange that September was rural farmers, who already were in terrible shape. The distribution of wealth was appallingly uneven. In 1929, the annual per capita income of an American farmer was only $273 compared to the average for all other Americans of $750. Farmers had no spare money for their kids’ shoes, let alone for speculation on the market.
As the widespread practice of buying stocks on credit or margin escalated throughout the nation, many investors found themselves greatly overextended. The Federal Reserve Board raised its rates in an effort to curb some of the stock market activity, but in no time, speculators were back stronger than before. No one paid attention to the danger signs—such as the rapid decline in construction, industrial production, and employment—as a disastrous situation continued to take shape.
Finally, on October 24, the New York Stock Exchange experienced what was undoubtedly the wildest day in its history. The market opened moderately, but the rate of sales gained speed and prices dropped faster than ever before. Some 13 million shares were sold by day’s end. This day would go down in history as Black Thursday. The passage of time did not help. A sudden flood of selling created fear and panic and marked the beginning of a five-day cycle of rapid collapse.
The following Tuesday, October 29, was far blacker. It was the most catastrophic day in the 112-year history of the New York Stock Exchange. Well over 16 million shares of stock were sold at declining prices. Most closed at half the value they had showed when trading had started that morning. The Crash of 1929 ushered in a grim period of unemployment and a generation of bad times familiarly known as the Great Depression. For the farmers of Oklahoma, however, economic hard times had begun at least five to six years before.
Fortunes that are lost can always be regained. Any shrewd investor subscribes to this maxim. Lives, however, can never be replaced once they are lost. The disaster that traumatized the nation that October 1929 paled in comparison to the personal loss experienced by the Floyds sixteen days later when the world crashed around them.
November 14 was a freezing cold Thursday all over the state, with at least a light snow predicted before the week was out. Filling stations reported brisk sales of radiator alcohol. Home owners in the cities worried about the possibility of frozen water pipes for the first time that season. Out at the village of Akins, business was slow at Walter Floyd’s store. He had sold a few items in the morning, a little bit of axle grease and a few sacks of Bull Durham. A couple of ladies came by and bought crackers, salt, and coffee. He gave some boys playing hooky a handful of horehound candy to suck on while they tracked rabbits. A fire burned brightly in the wood stove. By early afternoon, Walter was taking long tugs on his jug of whiskey.
That afternoon, Walter was not a happy man. He had lived with a burr under his saddle blanket ever since he had found out that Jim Mills, a local competitor, had taken the shingles and some lumber from the old Akins cotton gin. When the gin was torn down, Walter had been told by the owners that he could have the material for his own use. Mills had gone and beaten him to the punch. After much deliberation, Walter could not stand it any longer. He took one last swig of moonshine. Then he stalked out of his store, crossed the dirt road, and walked right into the general store the Mills family maintained.
Mills could see from the start that Walter was not paying a social call. The two men squared off. Walter accused Mills of walking away with what was not his to take. Mills thought Floyd was calling him a thief. The confrontation soon deteriorated to a shouting match and was on the verge of turning into a fistfight when Walter stormed out of the Mills store and headed back to his place. Later, Jim Mills said that Walter had not only become abusive but had pulled a knife and threatened him with it. He claimed he was fearful that Walter was going to get a gun. Walter’s kinfolk and others who knew him said that Walter would not have pulled a knife and not used it.
What later became clear was that Jim Mills picked up his gun—a .410 shotgun cut down to a pistol—from behind the counter and followed Walter outside. Mills shot him point-blank. The slug tore through Walter’s body. He got to his feet, staggered into his store, and collapsed over the counter. Then he fell to the floor. Within minutes, he was dead. The sheriff was summoned, and Jim Mills made sure to be right there. He swore up and down that he had no other choice but to use his gun.
“Grandpa was feudin’ with Mills about those shingles from the gin, and Mills claimed Grandpa pulled a knife on him and said he was going to kill him.” said Bayne Floyd. “Mills claimed it was pure self-defense.”
Clayton Burns, the director of the Wheeler-Stephenson Funeral Home in Sallisaw, took care of Walter’s body. He saw to the burial, too. He embalmed Walter, dressed him in his only church suit, and combed his dark hair. Walter had marked his fifty-first birthday only twelve days before his death. Mamie and Walter’s parents, his brothers, and the Floyd children and grandchildren sat with the body and mourned Walter’s passing.
Choc, having been summoned by telephone, slipped down from Kansas City to be there. The family took Walter out to the Akins cemetery. They buried him near his baby boy, Chester Lee, who had been lying under the sod for four years. Some of Walter’s old hunting pals showed up. They stood behind the Floyds and chewed tobacco. They listened to the preacher and the wind rattle the branches in the oaks. Over Walter’s grave, they put up a tombstone. Cut into the face of it were the words and numbers:
Walter Lee Floyd
Nov. 2, 1878
Nov. 14, 1929
Our Loved One
Choc stayed until the last shovelful of earth was patted on his father’s grave. Walter had been a hard father to please but he had done the best he could for his kin. After a few days of mourning, Choc helped his mother pack up her belongings. She, E.W., and Mary moved into Sallisaw to live with Mamie’s oldest daughter, Ruth, and her husband, Tom Wofford. Walter’s beloved hounds went to good homes. Choc saw to that. He knew that every fox in Sequoyah County was breathing a sigh of relief now that Walter Floyd was gone from the woods.
Later, when Jim Mills went to trial down at the old Sequoyah County courthouse, Choc sat quietly in the courtroom. He listened intently to every word of the proceedings. Mamie took the stand and testified about seeing her husband run into his store with blood streaming from the wound. Mills came forward in his own defense and presented his side of the story. When the jury acquitted Mills and ruled he had acted in self-defense, Choc did not have much to say.
Jim Mills stayed around Akins for a short time, but then he left and never came back. The popular story was that Choc Floyd killed Mills to avenge Walter’s death. One version had it that Bradley helped his brother get rid of Mills. For years to come, some folks in those parts would even point out the abandoned well where Choc supposedly put the dead body. They said the skeleton of Jim Mills was at the bottom. This was, in fact, all hearsay. Mills was not the victim of a backwoods vendetta. He showed up many years later out in California and Oregon, and he was even seen by friends of the Floyd family. And it was on the West Coast, thousands of miles from Akins, where he died of natural causes when he was an old man.
“That story about Choc killing Mills got around, but that’s not what happened,” said Glendon Floyd. “Now I’m not saying that Choc or my father may not have wanted to kill Mills, because I think they would have killed him if they would have had the chance. Fact, I think they even looked for him. But the point is that Mills left town, and Choc and my father never touched him. That’s just one of the legends that came about, but there’s not an ounce of truth to it.”
Choc returned soon after his father’s killing to Tom’s Town. He could not stay away from the lure of the lights and good times, not to mention the promise of bootleg profits. In Kansas City, life was rosy. Pendergast and his boys were doing a pretty fair job of keeping the Depression at an arm’s length—at least for a little while.
As he made the rounds of clandestine clubs and warehouses that fronted illegal liquor operations, Choc renewed relationships that had been formed in the penitentiary. He also listened to a hot new song. It first appeared in late 1929, a year already famous for a parade of hits, and it would stay on the top-ten list for several months during 1930. Called “Happy Days Are Here Again,” the tune, simply put, offered hope. Those who hummed it while they rode the streetcar believed the melody was good medicine for dealing with the bad times that were yet to come.
It was a sunny tune for a nation that was doomed to spend a long, long time “caught in a Wewoka switch.”