Soper, Oklahoma

Soper is on U.S. Highway 70 between Hugo and Durant. The 2010 population was 261. The largest-ever population was 538 in 1920. It hasn’t come close to that since then.

Sometime in the late 1990s, I wrote a newspaper story about a woman who had a doll house on the eastern side of Soper. The business was a retail store, in a small converted wooden house. After interviewing the woman, I drove into Soper and stopped at a convenience store/hamburger joint. The day was near enough lunch for me to have a burger.

There were eight or so other people having lunch and talk. I started listening closely when somebody talked about a chase the night before by two or three deputies from Choctaw County Sheriff’s Department. The chase ended in Soper when the fugitive ran off the road and into somebody’s yard. As I recall, the fleeing man did not give up easily. I took notes on what was said, as well as a couple of other interesting conversations – the kinds of things often heard in small towns when people get to talking about who’s doing what.

The story on the doll lady, with pictures, ran in the next day’s Paris newspaper (Paris, Texas).

A couple of days later I wrote a column on the goings-on at the convenience store/hamburger place. The day after that, phone calls came in to the newspaper. You’d have thought I tossed an unwrapped Baby Ruth into the city pool. Soper did not have a city pool, but the image is the same.

The callers went on and on about how I had made Soper sound like some backwoods place filled with ignorant people.

An older man said his son told him about the story, and it was a terrible thing I had done. After he was done ranting, I said, “Did you read the story?” He said he had not. Apparently he was not a subscriber of the newspaper. I asked him if he had read the story I wrote about the doll lady. He said he had not. I asked him, “If you had read that story and liked it, would you have called me and said so?” He said it was likely he would not. “Well,” I said, “thank you for calling.”

According to data from the 2010 Federal Census, Soper’s demographic population breakdown was 74.3% white, 19.3% Native American and 6.3% two or more races. Also, 35.1% of families and 44% of overall population live below the official poverty line, including 45.1% of those under the age of 18 and 50.8% of those 65 and over.

Poverty or near-poverty is not an indication of intelligence. But one's intelligence does not increase unless challenged by different ideas and surroundings. Most of the time, those challenges come only if one moves, at least for a time, from the easy and familiar.