TWILIGHT in Tar Creek
For some, Picher is just a faded love, but at Hoppy’s place, life still has rhythm

By John David Sutter
Staff Writer

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Sunday, October 15, 2006
Edition: CITY, Section: NEWS, Page 1A

ORVAL “Hoppy” Ray gingerly places his bass guitar back on its stand, welcoming a chance to rest his frail fingers. On this, his favorite song, he will sing — if only his troupe of scrappy musicians can agree on a key:

“C.”

“G? What?”

“C.”

“G?”

“You do ‘Faded Love’ in D.”

“OK, well, ‘Faded Love’ in D then,” 81-year-old Hoppy says with a grin.

It’s Monday night at the Pastime Miner’s Museum in the dying town of Picher, located in far northeastern Oklahoma, two miles from the Kansas border and beyond the reach of cell phone coverage. The federal government is paying people to leave this former zinc and lead mining town, which is considered one of the worst environmental and health disasters in the nation by most everyone but Hoppy.

Hoppy says he will die before he leaves his hometown — even if his electricity and water are turned off.

His museum, at the north end of Picher’s ghost town of a main street, doubles as a family pool hall but looks more like a bar than either. Inside, about a dozen amateur musicians — “pickers and grinners,” as Hoppy calls them — sit in a circle of dented, metal folding chairs and stools. A dusty ceiling fan whirrs off axis and hanging fluorescent lights buzz as the music starts.

A harmonica whines. A small drum kit kicks in.

Hoppy’s black sneakers begin tapping the beat shortly after 7 p.m., just as the sun begins to crawl toward the marigold horizon.

HOPPY clings to an era that has passed Picher by.

Between the 1890s and 1970, bustling ore mines churned zinc and lead out from under a town that boasted crowded sidewalks, movie theaters, bars and shopping centers. Homes in the early mining years were built with just 10 feet of space between them because demand for land was so high.

Now, Picher’s buildings are sparse and largely abandoned. And they sit on hollowed out ground. A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study shows much of the town and surrounding area could drop into the underground mines. Chunks of land collapsed in the past, leaving trees and homes nearly intact at the bottom of gaping earthen holes. From their epicenter near Picher, the subterranean mines stretch like tentacles into Kansas and Missouri. A car could drive between Picher and Kansas — underground.

All around Hoppy’s tiny museum, toxic lead and zinc gravel is piled into gray mountains far taller than the town’s proudest elm trees. Government studies have revealed high lead levels in area children’s blood, and an informal local environmental survey shows rates of cancer and kidney disease much higher than national averages.

Inside the pool hall’s narrow room, black and-white photographs of sober-faced miners are nailed to particleboard walls. Its ceiling is propped up by two wood pillars; nailed to one pillar is an enlarged picture of Hoppy, his brother and his father, wearing dusty gray clothes and miner’s caps.

“Oh hell, they’re all gone. Everybody in my group is gone,” Hoppy said when asked who of the hundreds of men is living.

But he looks on the era fondly, as do many remaining residents.

“Picher’s mining area supplied 75 (percent) to 80 percent of the lead for the bullets for two world wars. We were the largest lead and zinc operation in the world. Not just in the United States and in Oklahoma — in the whole world,” he said. “They ought to be putting a monument up there, out here, about the old miners (who) died here to get the lead out for the Army and Navy. But all they want to do is shut the place down. They don’t care squat about anything around here.”

‘Faded Love’

A harmonica player wearing a black chauffeur’s cap sits near the only window to the Pastime Miner’s Museum. Deep yellow sunlight makes a closed set of dusty blinds glow behind him.

“Kenny, you’ll do it?” Hoppy says to the harmonica player.

Without a word, Kenny Starling begins a slow and pained introduction to “Faded Love,” a song that, despite its longing and lonely lyrics, is set in a major key and skips along at a cheerful gait when sung by Bob Wills — the song’s author and father of a rebellious jazz blues-country fusion called Western swing.

But emotion claws through the air as Kenny bends his notes.

“You’ve done it,” Hoppy says.

Four guitars and a muted drum join in. Hoppy begins to sing, his voice constant as it trickles from one note to the next — shaky, as he applies thick vibrato to the end of the lines:

As I look at the letters that you wrote to me

It’s you that I am thinking of

As I read the lines that to me were so sweet

I remember our faded love

I miss you darlin’ more and more every day

As heaven would miss the stars above

With every heartbeat, I still think of you

And remember our faded love

As I think of the past, all the pleasures that we had

As I watch the mating of the doves

It was in the springtime that you said goodbye

I remember our faded love

First encounter

Sitting on a curb across from Picher’s Roxy movie theater in late 1941, Hoppy, then a scrawny but fearless 16-year-old, tapped his buddy Bill’s arm as a young woman with “jet black” eyes walked by.

“How would you like to have a picture of that?” Hoppy asked his friend.

From the other side of the street, the woman overheard. She quipped back.

“There’s a photo studio right here,” she said. “We’ll just go and have our pictures taken.”

“That started the whole shebang,” Hoppy said, remembering his first encounter with his wife, Rita, to whom he was married for almost 50 years. “Oh, I tell you, she was just a living doll.”

Hoppy keeps a cross-stitched square that reads, “Rita’s kitchen” above the sink in his home. He spends most of his time watching old movies from a recliner that’s draped with a blanket she knitted. He keeps a copy of that photo from their first date at the pool hall.

Soon after Rita’s death 11 years ago, Hoppy started the Monday night music group.

“You get down here, and you start playing music, and you forget all your troubles,” he said. “I think it’s a cure for alcoholism, because you can get into music and you can play for hours at a time and you don’t think much. The only thing you can think of is whether you’re going to hit that next note or not, you know.”

It’s his escape.

Slow fingers

Hoppy buries his chin in the chest of his plaid buttoned shirt, bass guitar on his lap. His slow fingers move fret to fret. He has no feeling in his thumbs or index and middle fingers. When the mines began closing, Hoppy started working on the factory line at BF Goodrich in 1947.

He pinched a nerve, and his fingers went numb; they aren’t nimble enough to play a six string guitar.

It’s just after 8 p.m., and the coming night pulls a cloak of twilight over Hoppy’s pool hall and the town of Picher. The neon “Open” sign in the window glows red on a misty blue backdrop as the hall’s heavy wood and iron door ekes open.

A bell hanging above it rings, and in walks Mary McCarty.

“Mary, we haven’t seen you in two or three months,” one person says.

“Mary, we missed you!” calls another.

Guitar case in hand, Mary is greeted and quickly ushered to the microphone. She’s one of the group’s best singers.

“What key?”

“G, I believe,” Mary says.

Hoppy nods and adjusts the microphone, which is tied to its stand with brown masking tape.

Mary stands next to Hoppy. He grips the microphone in his right hand and starts the first verse, playfully looking into Mary’s eyes and grinning:

Your cheatin’ heart will make you weep,

You’ll cry and cry and try to sleep.

But sleep won’t come the whole night through,

Your cheatin’ heart will tell on you.

Mary sings the second verse. Hoppy echoes.

At the end of the song, Hoppy smiles as Mary kisses him on the cheek.

Ruth Robinson starts to pick up the microphone to move it on to another singer.

“You gonna do another one?” she asks.

“No,” Hoppy said, cracking a smile. “I’m glad her husband’s not jealous.”

“Husband?” Mary says, cocking her head back in a laugh. “I ... got no husband. That’s my boyfriend!”

Town ‘cheated’

Hoppy started working in the mines after he dropped out of school in eighth grade. After several months of labor, he and a buddy tried to enlist to fight in World War II at age 16. After a failed attempt, Hoppy lied about his age and succeeded at entering the war on the Pacific front at 17. Upon his return to Picher, he went back to the zinc caves.

He later finished all his high school education in 18 months.

Aside from his war service, Picher is the only town he’s ever known.

All but one of his family members who are still alive — including a son who has an unexplained kidney ailment — reside in town.

The mortgage is paid off on his one-bedroom home. His business is here. So are the memories of Rita.

Why would he leave?

Hoppy is angry at residents who pushed for the buyout. Either they want money for property they should hold dear, he says, or they want to swoop in after the town has vanished and take rich ore deposits he’s certain still remain.

They’ve sold out a town he loves — cheated it, he says.

He keeps newspaper records of what he says are skyrocketing ore prices; and he wants an investigation into corruption that he says led up to the buyout.

He does not believe science about lead poisoning and says lead in his town’s soil came from lead paint used on houses, anyway.

He finds it hard to believe a sinkhole could swallow his pool hall or home now, since that hasn’t happened to him in the 81 years he’s been living.

That youthful sense of invincibility has made him some enemies in Picher.

For years, Hoppy ate breakfast most every day at the Country Girls Cafe, across the street from his pool hall.

He recently had a spat over the buyout with its owner — and now drives to nearby Miami for breakfast.

His theories and reactions seem irrational to many in town.

But it’s hard to trust the government or even your fellow townspeople, he says, if you blame them for trying to steal everything you have left.

The last to go

The sun has set, and half of the musicians have gone home. Only Mary and fiery mandolin player Paul Rowden perform while Hoppy and the rest sit and watch.

“The bottle is almost empty. The clock has just struck 10,” she sings.

The bluegrass melodies bounce off the hard walls and ceiling — contained, insulated, sacred. There are no buyouts, no diseases and few worries in this small room. It’s as if the outside world doesn’t exist.

At 11 p.m., the music session ends, and they all exit with hugs and embraces.

Hoppy, as always, is the last to go. He turns off the fluorescent lights, locks the heavy door and steps out. A black sky and an empty street greet him.

Above the entrance, he leaves a single light on.

He slowly climbs into his pickup and drives home.

They’ll be back next week.