Chapter 10: Who do you consider your icons, and why?
Originally written February 22, 2021
Growing up in Oklahoma in the 1960s I had three major home-state heroes, who I still idolize today:
Mickey Mantle
Leroy Gordon Cooper
Roger Miller
In recent years I’ve referred to this trio as the Holy Okie Trinity.
As most my friends and loved ones know, I’m not a big sports fan. But when I was a kid just about everyone I knew loved Mickey Mantle, as well as his team, the New York Yankees, who always seemed to make it to the World Series back in the 1960s.
When I was in second or third grade, my family vacationed in San Diego and one night we got to go to Dodger Stadium to see the Yankees play the Los Angeles Angels. (That was my first Major League Baseball game I ever saw, and, for decades, my only Major League Baseball game, until I took my son, Anton, to see the Colorado Rockies in Denver a couple of times in the late ‘90s.) I was somewhat disappointed that neither Mickey nor Roger Marris hit a homerun that night. But good old Yogi Berra did.
Though my love of baseball didn’t endure, my affection for Mickey never died. Toward the end of his life I got in an argument with an editor who thought it was shameful and unfair that Mickey got a liver transplant -- for the cirrhosis he was suffering after years of alcoholism – cutting ahead of others, who had been waiting years or a transplant. “But he’s MICKEY FUCKING MANTLE!” I countered. Seemed like a good argument at the time.
But I’ll never sum up my feelings about Mickey like songwriter Tom Russell did in his song “The Kid From Spavinaw.”:
I don't miss the lights of Times Square
I don't miss Toots Shore's bar
I miss my old man pitchin' baseball
Near the shed in our backyard
I wish that he were still alive
To see these trophies on my shelf
If I'd known I was going to live this long
I'd have taken better care of myself
[
]
As for Leroy Gordon Cooper, he was the first Okie in space.
“Gordo” Cooper was the youngest of the seven original astronauts in Project Mercury, the country’s first human space program. In May 1963, in a space capsule known as the “Faith Seven” Cooper became the first American to spend an entire day in space, the first to sleep in space. Lots of us lazy Okie kids were proud of that last achievement.
There were lots of serious problems toward the last of that flight. There was a power failure. The heat inside the capsule got up to 130 degrees. Carbon dioxide levels rose. And Cooper, who had been a fighter pilot, had to manually guide the Faith Seven back to Earth.
Three years later, Cooper became the first astronaut to make a second orbital flight. He was command pilot of Gemini 5 traveling with fellow astronaut Pete Conrad. The two orbited the Earth for nearly eight days – a record at the time – proving that Earthlings could survive in space for time necessary to go from here to the Moon and back.
I was disappointed that Cooper retired before he could go to the moon in the Apollo program.
People younger than me may have no idea how something like the space program could be so uniting, as well as exciting. True, it was pitched in a jingoistic way (“We can beat them Russians!”) but it was truly a time of marvel, an era before crippling cynicism and hyper-partisanship was the way of the land.
By the end of the Apollo program, things were changing for this country. Liberals wrung their hands about money “wasted” on the space program while there were so many problems here on Earth. Conservatives were far more interested in tax cuts, helping the oil industry and fighting abortion than spending money on space. Advancing science, especially when there wasn’t a quick pay-off, was low on their list of priorities.
And I was surprised [here in 2024] to find a song about Gordo on Youtube. It’s a band I’d never heard of called The Spooky Ooos:
And then there’s Roger Miller.
There’s a cliché that you should never meet your heroes. But I did get to meet Roger, whose string of hits in the late 1960s – “Dang Me,” “King of the Road,” “You Can’t Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd,” “One Dyin’ and a Buryin’ ” -- was a source of Okie pride. And I have no regrets about that at all.
Years before I met him I got to see Roger, during the height of his popularity, play in Oklahoma City. It was at Springlake Amusement Park, the same place I saw so many wonderful shows including The Everly Brothers, The Beach Boys (which was my very first rock concert), Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs, The Righteous Brothers.
And Roger Miller.
Christ, every chance I get I still tell one of the jokes Roger told that night. (He pointed to a kid in the audience saying, “How old are you, kid?” The child answered “Nine …” Roger replied, “Why when I was your age, I was 14.”)
In the late 1970s, years after his stream of hits had dried up, Roger moved to Tesuque, just north of Santa Fe. In the summer of 1980, I was covering a Michael Martin Murphey concert, for the Santa Fe Reporter at Santa Fe’s Paolo Soleri amphitheater. Murphey also was living in New Mexico at the time.
After a few songs, maybe halfway through his set, Murph announced, “We have a very special guest tonight …” and sure enough Roger Miller took the stage.
“Howdy folks” he said. “I live just down the road apiece …”
He strummed one chord.
And then there was thunder.
And then, a violent rain.
Roger had to scurry off the stage, which wasn’t covered. The seats of the amphitheater weren’t covered either. Eventually Murphey came back out and announced the rest of the show had been cancelled.
But before the rains, I had been backstage at the Paolo and had seen Roger standing around. We talked a bit and I had set up an interview. A few weeks later my first wife and I went to Roger’s home in Tesuque. The most impressive thing I remember about his house is that he had, under glass, right by his Grammy Awards, his first draft of “King of the Road.” It was written on a credit card application.
The first verse on that version was:
Trailer for sale or rent
Rooms to let, 50 cents
And I ain’t got no money for a room.
That last line, of course, was dropped by the time he recorded the song. (Hear for yourself, below)
Through the years I’d run into Roger every now and then around Santa Fe, and once at a Willie Nelson show in Albuquerque. One memorable night in the early ‘80s, while covering a Hank Thompson show at the Line Camp in Pojoaque, I ran into Roger, who promptly took me backstage to meet Hank. “Steve here is from Oklahoma,” he said. “He grew up on Reno Street …” which was OKC’s Skid Row. All three of us laughed.
And the last time I saw him, in the early ‘90s, was at the Shohko Café in Santa Fe. There he introduced to another local celebrity, “Dandy” Don Meredith, who was living here at the time. He and his wife Mary were eating Japanese food with the Merediths. Roger said something about doing another interview sometime. Alas, that never happened.
Sometime in the early ‘90s I got a call at my office at The New Mexican from someone at The National Enquirer. He told me that they were chasing a story about Roger dying of cancer and that their publication would pay me $100 to go knock on his door in Tesuque to get a comment from him or his family.
Now I could have really used that $100 at that point in my life. But I felt dirty just talking to this National Enquirer ghoul. I declined.
But in a few months, I learned the rumor was true. Roger died from cancer on October 25, 1992. That was shortly before another local hero of mine, artist Tommy Macaione, died.
I felt at the time that losing both Roger and Tommy about the same time that Santa Fe was losing its soul.
I’m still not convinced I was completely wrong.
Maybe that’s why you should never meet your heroes. When they die, it hurts a lot worse.
One last song for my old friend …
]
Awesome Steve! Good for you for not selling out. You've had some cool experiences with your music heroes.