Wayne Fleming lived quite a few years before he became an Okie from Muskogee.

He has lived quite a few more since then — he and his wife, Mamie Fleming, bought their home here 54 years ago.

Fleming, who spent many years working on farms, said work brought him to Muskogee in the mid-20th century. Fleming went to work for a local feed mill when he first arrived here, then later worked at a poultry processing plant located where Arrowhead Mall stands today.

“Me and another guy would kill 45,000 to 50,000 chickens a day,” said Fleming, who earned about $1.28 an hour for his efforts. “I’d pick up every other one, cut their throats and they went on to the scalding tanks.”

Years later, Fleming went to work for Dr. Eugene Henry, doing maintenance work at his local medical clinic and lots of other work on the doctor’s farm near Taft.

“I cut his hay and baled it,” Fleming said about the job. “I did everything but haul it — twice a year. I really enjoyed that work.”

All those years of work, Fleming said, finally took a toll on his physical abilities. He spends his time now doing what he can in the garden and coming up with ideas for his handicrafts.

“I just let my imagination run away with itself sometimes,” Fleming said.

Okie moved east in Dust Bowl days

Wayne Fleming was born in 1922 “out around Elk City.” He drifted east as a teen with the dust kicked up by storms that uprooted hundreds of western Oklahoma families — and the topsoil — during the depths of the Great Depression.

“It was rough back then,” Fleming said about growing up during the 1930s. “Those old dust storms would come up and just level the dirt pulled up around the cotton rows. I guess we just got tired of it and moved.”

Fleming said his family landed for about a year at Lincoln, Ark., where “it rained almost every day we was down there.” Fleming said his stepfather and another man would go out at night and steal apples to keep the family fed.

“That was a rough situation, but I believe people enjoyed it more than they do nowadays,” Fleming said about life in Arkansas. “Back then, if you couldn’t earn it, you had to steal it just to stay alive.”

The Fleming family pulled up stakes again and eventually sank roots near Checotah, where he sharecropped some Canadian River bottomland now buried deep beneath the surface of Lake Eufaula.