The North wind was about as strong as you can imagine on a bright January day, long ago on a hilltop called Highland Cemetery South of Stonewall. My wife’s Uncle Jack had died the week before and he wanted to be buried there in Stonewall. So here we all were. I had never met or seen this uncle before, but I noted he looked very respectable in his casket dressed in a fine cowboy suit.

I had never been so cold in my life as I wondered if the Criswell tent was just going to blow all of us away and take us all to Texas. Jack had always been a cowboy but had gained a little family fame when he migrated to Hollywood and teamed up with Tom Mix — a wellknown movie cowboy at the time. There he worked with Mix, hiring cowboy actors, buying horses, and doing odd jobs helping Mix produce his famous movies. A fellow stagehand Jack worked with was the then unknow actor, John Wayne.

When the money ran out the company collapsed, and Mix told Uncle Jack that they were all finished. “What do we do now?” Jack asked Mix. “Unless I can get my hands on a few thousand bucks, nothing. We’re finished.” Jack went back to his parents’ home about a mile east of Stonewall, Oklahoma to think. I guess that is where he got the idea. An idea that may have been well plotted out for him in the many western movies he had worked on. Rob a bank. Even they had money in the 1930s.

The two banks in Stonewall had already been robbed. One of them twice. After all it was in the 30s, a time that the likes of “Pretty Boy Floyd” roamed the back highways of Oklahoma. The banks in Ada looked tough but there was one little bank, First National Banks of Centrahoma, that looked easy enough. Owned by the Smith family which owned a good-sized general merchandise and grocery store plus the next-door bank. Vestal Smith ran the bank. It looked easy.

Robbing the bank also ruined the bank. The robbery, a perfect reflection of some movie bank robberies Jack had participated in, became an example of a solo bank robber being dressed up like a movie cowboy, escaping on a horse. The very last one to do so in Oklahoma.

Jack reappeared that day at the family farm near Stonewall where a relation, believed to be his brother drove him to Calvin, Oklahoma where Jack hopped the west bound Rock Island Rocket Train. He was never caught. I have no reason to think Jack was ever suspected of his deed.

What happened next? Well, he and Tom and his trick horse Tony resumed making those short black and white westerns. Until they ran out of the Bank’s money. What happened next? The bank went out of business, of course, and the damage to the little community of Centrahoma and its bank was probably fatal as it never seemed to recover from Jack’s dire deed.

Jack slipped back to Oklahoma, worked as a cowboy on a ranch in SE Oklahoma where he eventually died of old age. Many years later I was told this tale by a nephew of Uncle Jack. He swears it’s all true. From what I can find out, it probably is. Have a good week, wear your mask—not to rob anyone but to protect yourself from the Corona beast. Try to go to church Sunday and try to find one where each and all wear a mask.

Wayne Bullard, DPh

cwaynebullard@gmail.com