When My Hometown Played Cupid

Cupid

6:33

I’ve spent a lot of time writing about growing up in the then-new Oklahoma town of Midwest City. My family moved there in 1949 when I was only 3 and the town was 7. Maybe, I thought, the town could be like my big brother. Maybe I could learn from it.

My guiding question in those written reflections has been this: How much of who I am today, is where I’m from yesterday?  

I’ve realized one challenge memoirists face is the question of just how much they can actually remember from those young years?  And then there are those things that you do remember, some of which were so foolishly dangerous that you wonder how you survived those times at all.

 I’ve learned that at least four things help open more closed-door memories than I thought possible when I began this book: First, writing about one event often triggers a dormant memory about another. Second, going back to my hometown and seeing where I grew up and the places that made up my world help tremendously.

Third, talking with childhood friends, most of whom I have not seen since school days, brings other memories back to life. And fourth, remembering feelings instead of trying to remember events, often leads me to those incidents and/or people who inspired those emotions.

Take, for example, the last of these triggers: Can you remember when you first thought you fell in love and why? For me, I was 13 years old and in the 7^th grade when I walked two blocks to the Skytrain Theater one Saturday afternoon to see the 1959 Disney movie, Parent Trap.  

It was hard enough for me to keep my eyes off its 13-year-old unknown British starlet, Hayley Mills, but the fact there were two of her in the film made it doubly hard.

If you know the plot, you know she played identical twins named Sharon McKendrick and Susan Evers. The sisters’ parents were divorced, and the two mischievous sisters devised a plan to reunite them. I must have used up two weeks’ allowances going back to see the movie several times, each time falling deeper into puppy love with that blonde, smiling Hayley Mills with the cutest upturned nose imaginable.

The featured song that the twins sang in the film instantly soared to No. 1 on my personal best song of the year list. It was called, Let’s Get Together, and I thought, “Sounds right to me!” And, being an aspiring writer myself and in love with the singers, I thought the lyrics reached the heights of great English literature. Especially all the” yeah, yeah, yeahs!” I mean, I did find myself repeating that line over and over watching the twins.

To be honest about my rating system, though, I should mention I’m still awaiting my own first Nobel Prize for Literature, as if my opinion of Let’s Get Together doesn’t suggest why it hasn't come yet.

Back to my town's influence on me, I would say this: If founder Bill Atkinson had not included a movie theater in his plan for the Midwest City’s Original Mile, there would have been no Skytrain. And that would have been bad for Hayley and me. That movie house was a prime example of how Atkinson was thinking about servicing the entertainment needs of children and teens, as well as their parents when he began building the town.

I just always assumed he built the Skytrain for me personally.

This theater opened its doors in November 1944 and was an instant hit with us kids. It was built for $95,000 and featured first-run films, a modern sound system, air conditioning, padded seats and paved parking.  It showed five different movies each week, and Saturday morning matinees were designed for young children. 

But here's the point: Had I not lived there, where the Skytrain was in walking distance from everyone’s front door, I might never have seen that film at all, or at least not until I was older. If so, Hayley Mills would probably not have been my original love and, somehow, that doesn’t seem right.

Probably, like the butterfly effect of chaos theory, it would have changed the whole trajectory of my life. But I did grow up there, I did see the film, and I did fall in love with this young British starlet.

A couple years later, when I started dating hometown girls, I remember being disappointed that they didn’t look or sound like Hayley. Until, that is, I met a blonde band majorette in my sophomore year of high school named Margaret Palmer.

Maggie was a baton twirler, and her uniform was tight, white, and slight. If you’ve ever seen pictures of twirlers from the 60s, you know they were the first of the schoolgirls who had permission to wear miniskirts. And the white parade boots only added to the fantasy.

To say the majorettes were popular with us guys at MCHS would be an understatement.

More importantly, though, I felt Maggie could have been Hayley Mills’ second sister, they looked so much alike. While she wasn’t British and didn’t have Hayley’s accent, she did speak with what I found to be a happy, lilting voice, spiced at times with a charming lisp when she got excited.

Maggie proved to be a great substitute for Hayley in the times we dated, since the gods of fate seemed to dictate I would never meet my true, secret, screen love. Hollywood was a long way away from Midwest City, Oklahoma.

As it turned out, Maggie and I became lifelong friends, although we lost track of each other for some 40 years before our paths crossed again in our senior years via high school reunions.

Nor, as it turns out, was I done with Hayley. In the year 2008, I was living in Southern California and realized I had yet to bump into any movie stars. Then one day I was standing in the checkout line at a Chico’s store in Manhattan Beach when I turned and noticed the woman right behind me. It was Hayley Mills.

 She smiled at me and, before I could engage my mental filters and say something like, “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?” I let fly with, “You don’t know this, but I fell in love with you when I was 13.” 

Her smile broadened, she winked and said how sweet I was to say that. Then we went our separate ways out into the Southern California sunshine. I could almost hear Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday saying to Wyatt Earp about the actress Josephine, "And so she walked away and into a dream."

Although The Parent Trap was about the two young Hayleys ensnaring their onscreen parents, Miss Mills had unknowingly lured me into a different kind of trap. I’ll never forget how good it felt when it snapped shut.

But here's the irony, and I'm open to reasons why it's worked this way: In all my decades of dating, courtship, and marriage, there were only two blondes. The other 95 percent of the women were not.

And the one I've been lovingly married to for almost 26 years is the one I would not trade for Hayley Mills.

Annie is a very striking brunette with the cutest Kentucky accent.

(In part, adapted from material in my 2024 book, Tinkertown.)