About the Author | Mike Wofford

I was born near the tail end of Harry Truman’s presidency in Heavener, Oklahoma, a place of about three thousand railroaders, merchants, teachers, light industrial workers, and farmers and ranchers, located at the foot of the most westerly of the Southern Uplands. These are the old mountains that run from almost the east coast of the United States to western Kentucky and Tennessee, there eroding into a gap allowing the Mississippi River to pass them by. West of the big River they reappear as the Ozarks of southern Missouri and northwest Arkansas and the Ouachitas of western Arkansas and southeast Oklahoma. These were formed by the ancient collision of North America with the South America Tectonic Plate, so it is called and so it is said. It produced a crack deep in the earth about three miles south of town named the Ouachita Fault, where you might say Venezuela crashed into Oklahoma about five hundred million years gone by.

I was raised there on the west side of the mountain named the Poteau. That one rises in Arkansas and runs some thirty miles westward into Oklahoma, where it turns north and forms a hook at the base of which the town of Heavener sits. Inside that hook there is a runestone that was scratched by Northern Europeans either in the eleventh or the nineteenth century of the Christian Era. My grandfather was one of the first of the whiter men to bear witness to what for decades was called by the local people “Indian Rock”. Everyone has an opinion about which of the two represents the true date of its carving. The old mountains don’t seem to care.

When I was three years old, our frequently but not always employed father, Connie Watson Wofford, took a job as a construction surveyor of the Will Rogers Turnpike, now a part of Interstate Highway 44 between Tulsa and the Missouri line. He moved the family successively to Vinita and Miami (Oklahoma), near to the project. As my older brother approached the age for entering elementary school, they moved us back to Heavener but soon our father died. Our mother Ruth finished raising us mostly as a single mom until we each graduated from high school. Then she started making paintings and writing newspaper columns about the history of the area and especially about the Choctaws of Oklahoma, some of whom were our relatives, until the day after she entered the intensive care unit. There at the beginning of the year 2011 she spent her last three days between the mountains.

In 1971 I went off to the University of Oklahoma and majored in politics because I thought it was interesting and a doorway to a career in the practice of law. My interest in that type of life was engendered in part by a young attorney named James Hamilton who helped my family weather the storms associated with the automobile accident that led to my father’s death. Jim Hamilton became the most verifiably incorruptible President Pro Tempore in the history of the Oklahoma State Senate. Down in a beautiful spot in the Ouachitas there is a prison named after Senator Hamilton, the type of place that many other Oklahoma politicians would inhabit over the years and which others are soon sure to follow.

During law school I worked for the Governor of Oklahoma, David Boren, whose trust I suppose I had gained while working ineffectively but enthusiastically in his campaign for that office. I thought I would probably move back home after Governor Boren was elected to the U.S. Senate. But, failing in my informal application to serve as an assistant district attorney of LeFlore County, I was offered a job in Oklahoma City. This one would allow me to become trained in the rapidly growing profession of environmental law, and I couldn’t turn it down. So, after Carol consented to marry me, I went to work at the State Health Department. Here in Oklahoma City our daughter Lydia was soon born.

Ten years later, in the late 1980s and early 90s I found myself in court defending mostly unwinnable lawsuits against the State of Oklahoma, filed by rural and small-town folks who were wanting to prevent the construction of waste disposal facilities in their areas. So, I made myself available for what I hoped would be more rewarding work elsewhere. In 1991 I was employed as an environmental attorney at Phillips Petroleum Company in Carol’s hometown of Bartlesville. About another ten years further on I was transferred to Alaska by the same company into a project environmental management role, and it was in Anchorage where Lydia discovered our son-in-law Henry. That position also had me working with several Alaska Native communities and many peoples of the First Nations of western Canada, which was one of the most edifying experiences of my lifetime.

Almost another decade passed, and I accepted an offer to join the very fine law firm of Doerner, Saunders, Daniel and Anderson back in Oklahoma City. Ten years and five months after that, I retired from the practice of law and started writing stuff unconnected with the imperative of convincing anybody of anything, or of being paid for the effort. It seems that any single decade running across the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, and into the 20-teens was the limit of my interest in or tolerance for the work I was doing, or of those who consented to pay me for such, or of their tolerance for me, and sometimes all the above. At bottom, I and my family have always managed to be well fed and sheltered, and doctored and nursed when necessary, and vaccinated from time to time, for which I am grateful.

Carol and I live in Oklahoma City, which is a very nice place if, like the rest of the earth, you are close to loving and supportive family or friends. Moreso, of course, if you have enough resources to be able to enjoy the City’s attractions, as well as those of the more sparsely settled parts of the State, even while hiding or running from violent thunderstorms and tornadoes during a short yet exceptionally notorious part of the year around here.

All of which and more I expect to be writing about from time to time and placing on this site—the history of places and the experiences of people I have known or know about. Maybe I will title one of them “The Ouachita Fault.” All kinds of stories might be hidden in the cracks of that place.