Northwestern had a great men’s gymnastics team in the 1960s. That’s why I was on a dark road in Oklahoma in the middle of the night facing jail time.
The team was competing for a national championship in Bartlesville, Okla. I did sports information at Northwestern then and was covering the event.
All the gymnastics meets I had attended in the crackerbox men’s gym on the Northwestern campus had just two or three teams and lasted a couple of hours.
The national competition in Bartlesville attracted dozens of teams. Each event took hours, and the meet went on for several days. When it finally ended late on a Saturday night, I headed home.
Not far into the 450-mile trip, I missed the turn to Tulsa in the little town of Collinsville. Realizing I was off course, I turned around at the end of the main street and headed back toward Tulsa.
In a few minutes, I noticed in the rear view mirror a small red flashing light far behind me.
It took a while for the Collinsville policeman to catch up with me in his black Ford even after I stopped. His red blinking light was on the dashboard plugged into the lighter.
He aimed a flashlight at my face and informed me that I was speeding, made an illegal U-turn, ran a stop sign and was driving recklessly. Then he searched the vehicle.
There were some questions about paperwork for the car that was leased by the university. I had no idea where it was.
He told me to get in the patrol car on the passenger side but yelled “Look out” as I was about to sit down. “You nearly sat on my sandwiches,” he said.
Talking through static, he radioed the sheriff’s office in Tulsa to send some deputies to get me. The officers on the other end called him Tommy.
Tommy rolled his window down to spit tobacco juice and said I would have to go before a judge for all those violations. Since it was a Saturday, I would probably have to stay in jail until Monday.
After threatening legal action, begging for mercy, and trying to cry to get sympathy, I finally just sat back and tried to get mentally prepared for jail.
We talked about his grandkids and my sons and discussed bream fishing, frog hunting, mayhaw jelly, Oklahoma football, backyard gardens and growing up in small towns.
He handed me one of his sandwiches. It was a homemade chicken fried steak sandwich like my mother made. I told him how she pounded the round steak with the rim of a saucer to make it tender. His mother and wife did them the same way.
Tommy sliced a whole fresh tomato with his pocketknife, and we ate it with our sandwiches.
Two sheriff’s cars arrived with red lights flashing. Tommy said he was hasty in calling them and that I was not going all that fast. He said I slowed down at the stop sign and might not have made an illegal U-turn. He didn’t mention the paperwork for the lease car.
Tommy said he would like to forget the whole thing and just issue me a warning. The deputies said that was fine with them.
When Tommy asked what took them so long to get there, they said they had been dispatched to an unruly party where Coors beer was flowing freely.
Coors was not widely distributed from its Colorado brewery in those day and was often bootlegged to other states.
The deputies had stacks of confiscated Coors in their cars. I told them Coors was hard to come by where I lived, and they put two cases in my trunk.
The next weekend when we were playing golf and sipping cold Coors between holes, I thought of some nice folks in Oklahoma and fried steak sandwiches.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES