Part 50, page 186

Transcript

The scan is the source; the transcript is machine-generated from it.

"There's a somebody I'm longing to see . . . Someone who'll watch over me." —Ira Gershwin

Jack Coffelt proudly called himself a "Jay- hawker" after a fictitious bird imagined by the Indians to possess the haughty pride of a Blue Jay and the cunning determination of a hawk. But in truth he was a Caucasian harboring an ornery supply of Cherokee blood which made his nature turn restless and rebellious.

He was born in that part of the Midwest known as "the Badlands" because of the robbers who have blossomed there like weeds in mud-filled creek beds. Jesse James and the Dalton Boys and Billy the Kid are only a few of the colorful criminals who once plundered this dust-ridden locale, which is also the major home in America of the proud Cherokee Indians — the bitter end of the Trail Of Tears. According to Jack Coffelt and my father, who wrote a book about the place while in Atlanta Penitentiary together, life there in the 1920's was picturesque but also incredibly bleak. I quote from their book:

"Stranger, you are entering the Tri-State District, a mining patch covering the corners of three states — Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas. The land is a flat stovelid. The sky is a pale blue liquid. Clouds drift in circles. Rays of the sun bounce and play tricks on the eyes. And in mid-July dust is instep deep and the creeks are shallow and ugly.

"The town of Picher is the hub of this district. Powder-monkeys send groans and rumbles through the earth and view with suspicion any man who receives more than two letters a week. Sidewashed lead and zinc glitter bold across jig tables. Mines and chatpiles crowd each other around the town. On the chatpiles children scavenge for empty bottles and used condoms. Renniker the junk dealer pays two cents each for short pints and half pints, a cent for beer and home brew, thirty cents a pound for washed rubbers. Vern Wilders runs the big game. A whorehouse sits on Main Street. That's it, Stranger. Picher, Oklahoma, has been sent for, went, and qualified."

Coffelt was born under an ill-star on Febru- ary 20, 1916, to a poverty-stricken family. In this inauspicious environment he quickly learned the benefits of a fast tongue and a slip- pery hand as he worked the booming lead and zinc mines by day and hung around the gam- bling halls and brothels at night as a mere youngster. When he was eight years old his father, Walter Coffelt, who had once owned a mine but lost it to booze, died of alcoholism, leaving his widow Ottie and Jack and his two sisters destitute. Ottie took up with another man called Ben Wooldridge who, according to Jack's sister, "was horribly mean to us kids." The children fled. The two young girls — ages sixteen and fourteen — married off as soon as possible. Jack continued in school, according

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LAS VEGAN MAGAZINE/NOVEMBER 1983 37

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