Staring At Sound The True Story Of Oklahoma's Fabulous Flaming Lips

Chapter 1 I Want My Own Planet Frustrated by the lack of opportunity in southwestern Pennsylvania and drawn by the promise of a new job and a better life in Oklahoma"Brand new state, gonna treat you great," to quote the title tune of the Broadway musical, the official state songTom and Dolly Coyne loaded up the family car and set out on the seventeen-hour drive from Pittsburgh in the spring of 1961. Ranging in age from one to six, their four older childrenTommy, Kenny, Linda, and Martycrammed into the backseat of the station wagon. Only a few months old, Dolly's youngest son sat on her lap or perched on the dashboard, watching U.S. Route 66 unfold before them. "Maybe that is where I got my love of the highway," Wayne joked forty-four years later. Raised in working-class families of Scots-Irish, German, and Hungarian descent, Thomas Coyne and Dolores "Dolly" Jackson met and married in Pittsburgh's Troy Hill neighborhood in the early fifties, and Dolly gave birth to their first son a short time later, at age seventeen. The family continued to grow after Tom returned from serving in Germany during the tail end of the Korean War. The couple's fifth child, Wayne Michael Coyne, was born on January 13, 1961; their sixth and last, Wayne's younger brother, Mark, arrived two years later, after the family had settled in its new home on the North Side of Oklahoma City. Tom and Dolly both had watched their fathers work backbreaking jobs and die at relatively young ages. "My dad said that he didn't want his kids growing up in the coal mines and steel mills of Pittsburgh, and that's all there was in the fifties and sixties," Tom's son Marty said. "He wanted his kids to have a future, and he didn't know what Oklahoma would bring, but he knew it would be better than Pittsburgh." As is his style, Wayne put a more romantic spin on his parents' decision to uproot their lives, leave their extended families, and move across the country: "They were going to go out and have this adventure." A skilled cabinet maker, Tom had been offered a position with an office supply company, but he arrived in Oklahoma City to find that the managerial position he'd been promised had been eliminated, and he wound up loading trucks. "He had given up everything for this dream," Wayne said. "I always asked my mother, 'Why didn't you guys regroup and go back to Pittsburgh?' If things don't work out, so many people don't have the courage to face up to it, but she said, 'It sucked back there, too.' The struggle wasn't going to be any better anywhere else, so they stayed." Seventy years after the land run that attracted the "boomers" and "sooners" who settled the state, and two decades after the Dust Bowl migration of the Great Depression, Oklahoma City rapidly expanded in the late fifties, flush with money from the thriving oil industry. Between 1958 and 1961, its population increased by nearly a third, to four hundred thousand residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, but outside the capital, agriculture continued to form the backbone of the state's economy, and rural attitudes and a striking homogeneity prevailed. According to the 1960 census, despite sizable populations of blacks and Native Americans, 90 percent of Oklahomans were white. Many were also poorthe median income traditionally is 75 percent of the national averageprompting a derisive nickname that lingers even today, when strip malls and office parks far outnumber family farms. "ODeRogatis, Jim is the author of 'Staring At Sound The True Story Of Oklahoma's Fabulous Flaming Lips', published 2006 under ISBN 9780767921404 and ISBN 0767921402.