Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers [Hardcover]

Ron Padgett (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2003

Wayne Padgett was a colorful, charming, and generous man. He was also one of Oklahoma’s most elusive bootleggers and career criminals. From the 1960s into the 1980s, he operated out of Tulsa as a high-ranking member of the outfit known as the Dixie Mafia. In "Oklahoma Tough," poet Ron Padgett tells the inside story of his notorious father and of how he earned his reputation as a Robin Hood "King of the Bootleggers."

"Oklahoma Tough" is also a history of the distinctive mid-twentieth-century Oklahoma milieu that made Wayne Padgett’s life story possible. Ron Padgett brings this vanished world to life with candid and sometimes comic descriptions of criminal life. Particularly insightful and entertaining are interviews in which former bootleggers, family members, friends, and enemies speak openly about their lives.

Combining biography, personal memories, and a history of the times, Ron Padgett bases his story on interviews with police officers and with those who knew Wayne Padgett, whether friend, foe, or family. He also bases it on newspapers and library, historical society, school, medical, and police records (Wayne Padgett’s FBI files run to 1300 pages), as well as on his own vivid memories of growing up with his charismatic criminal father. Twenty-one period photographs enhance the story of "Oklahoma Tough."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"I was hit with an intense sensation, the pang of loving someone I don't really know," recalls poet Padgett, of a night nearly two decades ago, which sparked the writing of his father's biography. Alternately describing his bootlegger dad, Wayne Padgett, as a dutiful son, wheeler-dealer, womanizer and hero, the author brings to life the paradoxical spirit of a generous, resourceful man, deeply affected, at the tender age of 11, by his own father's murder. Wayne Padgett, as his son describes, was a longstanding member of a Tulsa, Okla., bootlegging outfit known as the Dixie Mafia. Offsetting any tendency toward sentimentality, Padgett (You Never Know) substantiates with personal interviews with his father's peers, newspaper articles and police records, portraying an outsider and outlaw whose ventures included gambling, cars, stolen merchandise, nightclubs and phone scams, and whose customers extended to preachers, cops and the mayor. Childhood memories and an eye for aesthetic detail bring an immediacy to the era and locale in this beautifully written memoir-accompanied by photographs and personal letters.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Contemporary New York poet Padgett has written a remembrance of his own father, an infamous bootlegger who operated within the criminal framework of the so-called Dixie Mafia in the 1960s and 1970s. Faced with the realization that he never really knew his father, the author has reached back into the past to resurrect a man whose life was essentially a mystery to him. Utilizing Tulsa, Oklahoma, as his starting point, Ron Padgett conducted a host of interviews of the friends, relatives, and enemies of his often-elusive father. He also combed through police, court, and FBI records to underscore fallible human memories with hard-and-fast facts. As the colorful story of a classic small-time operator and wheeler-dealer comes to life, another story, that of a son in search of a hero--albeit a flawed one--to worship, also emerges. This vividly detailed chronicle works well as both a straightforward understanding and as a cathartic memoir. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press; First Edition edition (April 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0806135093
• ISBN-13: 978-0806135090
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,340,921 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent story that brings history alive., April 7, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers (Hardcover)

A very well written story that depicts an unique individual living in an intriguing time and place. Wayne Padgett is a compelling and contradictory man, some one I would like to get to know. Reading this book is like having a conversation with this powerful figure.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What a GREAT story!, April 3, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers (Hardcover)

This gripped me from beginning to end: a very finely drawn portrait of a man of unusual quality. Anyone who's ever been drawn to the "outlaw" mystique will appreciate the opportunity to see how it begins, lives, and ends in Wayne Padgett, the author's father. A terrific read.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tulsa 'tween Boom & Bust, Bootleggin' & Beats, May 20, 2003

By 

Mitch Ritter "Mitch Ritter" (Po' Land, Or-Wa USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers (Hardcover)

Absurd Realist poet, translator, and memoirist Ron Padgett, long ensconced in New York's East Village boho Beat & Existentialist milieu, turns to his roots in this tale of Tulsa folklore circling around his father, Wayne Padgett; King of the oil town's bootleggers. The Tulsa time of this wiley tale is somewhere 'tween boom & bust. The earliest reaches extend back two generations to Padgett's granddad Grover, though only briefly touching upon Teddy Roosevelt's trust busters and the populist ferment brewing against BIG OIL. Padgett barely mentions the Tulsa race riots in passing.

Oklahoma was a "dry" state when it came to hootch, but oil lease rigs were still dripping when Wayne Padgett came of age. Though there isn't much of Osage tribal flamboyance on display, as Ron Padgett hews closely to his dad's immediate territory. Terry Wilson's book on the Osages and their visibility in and around Tulsa during the boom years can fill in some of the local composition. Ironically Wilson deploys an absurdist deadpan in chronicling the Osages, close as an academic can come to the style Ron Padgett pioneered earlier in his career writing Beat memoirs & punchline poetry. Wilson cinematically captures the new oil heirs on their joyrides into town having assimilated silk top hats, tux and tails into their tribal regalia. Padgett is challenged with a central subject dry as the Protestant work ethic he embodied, illicit work notwithstanding. Despite the Dixie Mafia contacts and some compulsive gambling that plays out in tragic ways a bit up the family tree, the Padgetts seemed to be straight shooters, with only narrator Ron betraying much of an appetite or curiosity for life lived on the wild side.

The contrasts found within the House of Padgett are the stuff of cross-pollinated literary dreams. Imagine Elmore Leonard or his fictional hardboiled characters holed up in a tornado alley Plains safehouse with Burroughs adding-machine heir and stiff-lipped Wild-side explorer William Burroughs, as this Tulsa teen scene deftly sketches in. Ron Padgett recalls his fledgling effort at publishing an underground lit journal while still in high school and working out of bootleggin' dad's house:

"But the oddity of the larger situation dawned on me only years later: at one end of our house was the office of one of the biggest whiskey businesses in town, while at the other was the 'office' of an avant-garde literary magazine. Really, though, I was simply imitating my dad: I had my office desk, I operated a cottage industry, and I pursued a project that most people would have considered bizarre. But what was truly bizarre was that Daddy was reading Beat and Black Mountain poetry." Wild-eyed ecstasy chasing visionaries such as Ted Berrigan, er rather, a private eye hired by Berrigan's squeeze's proper parents, might stop by the house looking for the literary mentor, only to be gruffly chased off by Big Daddy. How did a high school junior out in the oil & red dirt provinces manage to net a cast of literary luminaries like LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Paul Blackburn, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Ron Loewinsohn, Clarence Major, Gilbert Sorrentino and Berrigan for his WHITE DOVE REVIEW 5x8 1/2 staple job? Just neighborhood luck to have buddy Joe Brainard hangin' out as Art Director. The same Joe Brainard whose too short career retrospective was being exhibited at top tier museums of modern art from Boston to Berkeley a year or so ago. But this is Wayne's story, a different sort of exemplar of Junior Achievment in action.

Don't be put off by the title OKLAHOMA TOUGH. Turns out the subtitled: "My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers" is a tender and flavorful slice of regional folklore. Virtually every minor character does a star turn, burning some bit of colorful essence onto a reader's retina. From the penitentiary cameo by old school toughs like Jew Snyder, to the more fully fleshed out complex shades of modern men-in-the-making like Bobby Bluejacket, the bedrock matriarch Verna Padgett, and the younger generation roadhouse loves from whom off-the-cuff wisdom literature flows in Ron Padgett's interview tapes, one only wishes this memorable Tulsa tale included an index. If this ever makes it to the big screen I have no suggestions for the casting of King Wayne or Boho Scribe Ron. But the soundtrack wouldn't be complete without some ol' J.J. Cale-Leon Russell seductive shuffles, Jimmy LaFave dustbowl retreads and the Red Dirt Rangers' roadhouse stomps.