Frogville, one big deer and Oklahoma for Bernie

Even with four years at the Paris, Texas, newspaper, I never made it to Frogville, Oklahoma, just across the Red River and a few miles down a state highway. The newspaper's IT guy said an aunt and uncle lived in Oklahoma's oldest occupied house, but I just never made the trip. Frogville remains one of those places I wish I had visited.

A satellite photo shows a few houses, but nothing else. Barns, outbuildings, round bales of hay.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Frogville,+OK+74743/@33.8988592,-95.3293846,4959m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x864a922993d7a691:0x5d07b1f94c624791



Here is a 5-year-old running commentary on a huge deer killed, apparently out of season, near Frogville.

http://discussions.texasbowhunter.com/forums/showthread.php?t=209146

Scroll down just a little ways for a picture. Looks like a 24-point buck. I didn’t know they grew that big.

Turns out Frogville is Bernie Sanders country. Well, sort of, says a native son who backs the Vermont socialist.

“It was déjà vu all over again, at least for me, when my wife and I joined the multicultural, multi-generational crowd cheering Bernie Sanders.

“On Sunday, Feb. 28, at Sanders’ OKC rally, it felt like we’d been teleported into the dynamic center of Brooklyn, in touch with the avant garde of the creative class leading the reinvention of the world. Born in the middle of Pax Americana, I was like many Baby Boomers: raised to believe that all things are possible. Being older and, perhaps, a little wiser than I used to be, I won’t jump to conclusions and claim Oklahoma City is entering a brand-new, 21st-Century frontier, but dang, we’ve done it before, and maybe Oklahoma can feel the Bern in a deeper, more long-lasting way beyond the presidential election.”

https://nondoc.com/2016/03/08/sanders-reawakens-oklahomas-socialist-roots/

(Anything not “multicultural” these days is not legitimate.)

Apparently, Southeast Oklahoma has long been a hotbed of socialism.

“Up until World War I, however, Oklahoma had the largest Socialist movement, per capita, in the nation. But it was destroyed by perhaps the worst political oppression (of white people) in American history. When I was writing Closing the Frontier, an award-winning history of frontier socialism, I had a telling conversation with my Aunt Edna on the porch of our family homestead in Frogville. The far-southeast Oklahoma town (just north of Paris, Texas) had had a dynamic socialist community, but my aunt first refused to talk about it. Then, “Edna muttered, ‘Eugene V. Debs, Eugene V. Debs, I’ll never forget that name.’ Asked why she brought up the four-time Socialist party candidate for president, my aunt denied having any other memories; she just liked that name.

"Frogville’s socialists"

"Throughout the day, my seemingly fearless great aunt kept repeating, ‘Eugene V. Debs, I’ll never forget that name.’ Then Aunt Edna volunteered, ‘Lots of folks down here are named Eugene. You have kin folks named Eugene.’ With the cat out of the bag, she explained that Frogville’s sharecroppers — the ‘good decent folk’ — were socialists. They were driven out of the state by those ‘KKK thugs’ in the city, which in this case was Hugo.” (Same link as above.)

(Kind of sad, in a way, that old-line liberal/Socialists do not realize the days are gone of meat packing exposure and tenement slums and Woody Guthrie’s rail ridings. In 1994 at a national collegiate event in San Antonio, I noticed several pony-tailed men my age, college teachers. I considered approaching them and reminding them: “War’s over, dudes. Your side won, so relish whatever you can from the victory of ‘the people.’” I didn’t. It would have been bad manners and might have started too intense a debate, which would have kept me from the free beer.)