OKOklahoma Famous People

Oklahoma's closest brush with the presidency

Oklahoma entered the Union in November 1907, after forty-five other states, and no president has ever been born inside its borders. Its nearest miss was Carl Albert, a coal miner's son born in 1908 in a Pittsburg County hollow called Bugtussle. He worked his way through the University of Oklahoma, won a Rhodes Scholarship, and served as Speaker of the House from 1971 to 1977. Twice in those years the vice presidency sat empty and Albert stood first in the line of succession: for two months after Spiro Agnew resigned in October 1973, and for four months in 1974 after Gerald Ford moved up and before Nelson Rockefeller was confirmed. Albert stood five foot four. Around the Capitol he was the Little Giant from Little Dixie.

Will Rogers, Wiley Post, and one crash in the Arctic

Will Rogers was born in 1879 on a ranch near Oologah in the Cherokee Nation, twenty-eight years before Oklahoma existed, and he was a citizen of that nation all his life. He built a vaudeville rope act into a newspaper column carried by hundreds of papers and then into film. Wiley Post grew up near Maysville, flew the Winnie Mae around the world in 1931 with a navigator and again alone in 1933, and worked out an early pressure suit for high altitude flight. On August 15, 1935, the two men died together when Post's float plane stalled seconds after takeoff from a lagoon near Point Barrow, Alaska. Oklahoma City named its main airport for Rogers and its second airport for Post.

Woody Guthrie, Ralph Ellison, and the ones who left

Woody Guthrie was born in Okemah in 1912 and pulled out with the Dust Bowl migration. He wrote "This Land Is Your Land" in 1940 as a reply to "God Bless America," cut Dust Bowl Ballads the same year, and later lettered a slogan about killing fascists across his guitar. Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1913, played trumpet, went to Tuskegee on a music scholarship, and published Invisible Man in 1952, taking the National Book Award the following year. Both towns claimed the men back eventually: Okemah runs a Guthrie festival every July, and Oklahoma City put Ellison's name on a library branch. Charlie Christian, born in Texas but raised in the Deep Deuce blocks of Oklahoma City, worked out how to play single note lead lines on an amplified guitar and had reshaped jazz before he died at twenty-five in 1942.

Clara Luper, Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher, Wilma Mankiller

On August 19, 1958, Clara Luper, a history teacher at Dunjee High School, walked thirteen children from the NAACP Youth Council into the Katz Drug Store in downtown Oklahoma City and sat them at the whites-only counter. The counter was desegregated within days, and Katz opened its counters across several states. That was eighteen months before the Greensboro sit-ins. A decade earlier, Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher of Chickasha had sued for admission to the University of Oklahoma law school and won a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in January 1948. Wilma Mankiller, born at Tahlequah in 1945, was elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation in 1985, the first woman to hold the office, took the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, and appeared on a United States quarter in 2022.

Jim Thorpe, Mickey Mantle, and the athletes

Jim Thorpe was born in 1887 near Prague in Indian Territory, a citizen of the Sac and Fox Nation, and won both the pentathlon and the decathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. His medals were taken away in 1913 over small payments for semi-professional baseball, and the International Olympic Committee finally restored him as the sole champion of both events in 2022. Mickey Mantle was born at Spavinaw in 1931 and grew up in the lead and zinc town of Commerce, which is where sportswriters got the Commerce Comet; he hit 536 home runs for the Yankees and won three MVP awards. Johnny Bench grew up in Binger, caught for Cincinnati's Big Red Machine, and went into the Hall of Fame in 1989.

Oklahomans people file under other states

Brad Pitt was born in Shawnee in 1963 before his family moved to Springfield, Missouri. Ron Howard was born in Duncan in 1954. Sam Walton was born in Kingfisher in 1918, long before Bentonville and Walmart, and the oilman T. Boone Pickens was born in Holdenville ten years later. Chuck Norris came from Ryan, James Garner from Norman, Alfre Woodard from Tulsa, and Wes Studi from a Cherokee County settlement called Nofire Hollow. Garth Brooks grew up in Yukon, Reba McEntire in Chockie, Vince Gill in Norman, and Carrie Underwood in Checotah. The state has also put a striking number of people into orbit: Gordon Cooper of Shawnee flew Mercury and Gemini, Thomas Stafford of Weatherford commanded Apollo 10 and then the Apollo Soyuz docking of 1975, and Shannon Lucid, raised in Bethany, spent more than six months aboard the Mir station in 1996.

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