Barry Switzer This Football Legend Rose from an Unconventional Childhood to Super Bowl Royalty
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Barry Switzer This football legend rose from an unconventional childhood to Super Bowl royalty. Chapter 1 – :30 Introduction John Erling: Former Oklahoma University football coach Barry Switzer has one of the highest winning percentages of any college football coach in history. He is one of only two head coaches to win both a college football national championship and a Super Bowl. In this interview he talks about his life growing up in Crossett, Arkansas. His father was a bootlegger and his mother took her own life. His college career started with a football scholarship to The University of Arkansas and his coaching career placed him in the College Football Hall of Fame. Now Barry Switzer tells his own story, underwritten in part by The Helmerich Foundation for VoicesofOklahoma.com. Chapter 2 – 4:27 The Beginning John Erling: This is August 17th, 2009. I’m John Erling. Barry Switzer: My name is Barry Lane Switzer. I was born October 5th, 1937. I am 71 years old. I live in Norman, Oklahoma near the University of Oklahoma campus. I live here with my wife Becky Switzer and my two stepchilden. JE: We are here in your home doing this interview. Where were you born? BS: I was born in Crossett, Arkansas. It’s a small, textile paper products community. It’s located in the piney woods of south Arkansas. It’s in the central part of the state, between two cities probably more known El Dorado, Arkansas and Lake Village, Arkansas. It was a town of about 3,000 or 4,000 people at the time. It’s very close to the Louisiana line. My first home after being born was I lived on a houseboat. My daddy was a tollkeeper on the Arkansas River that was named the Ouachita, spelled differently than what we have here in Oklahoma. It’s spelled with an “O” O-u-a-c-h. He was a tollkeeper for the state and we lived on a houseboat underneath the bridge. BARRY SWITZER 2 JE: Your parents’ names? BS: My father’s name was Frank Mays Switzer. He was born also in Crossett. My mother was Mary Louise Wood, also born in Crossett. My father was born in 1908 and my mother was born in 1914. Both are deceased today. JE: Do you have a brother? BS: I have a brother named Donald Kent Switzer who is five and half years younger than me. He was born in Long Beach, California during the war years when there were all of those people from Texas and Oklahoma and Arkansas going to California to make a living during the war working in aircraft factories and shipyards. My daddy was 4F. He wasn’t eligible to serve. He was partially deaf and he worked in the shipyards at Terminal Island in San Pedro, California and my mother worked in a cafe called Arky’s Café.We lived in Long Beach about four or five blocks from the ocean. JE: In Crossett, you lived in what they called a shotgun house? BS: Yes, truly it was a shotgun house because it was built up on stumps and logs and bricks. It was at least three feet off of the ground. I always thought shotgun houses were built so the dogs, cats, hogs and chickens, had to have a place to live. But it was called a shotgun house because you could shoot a shotgun through the front door out the back door, and you wouldn’t hit anyone unless someone happened to be walking across the house from one room to another room. JE: How spartan was that? Did you have electricity? BS: No, but that was typical at the time. When you grew up in rural Arkansas, or the rural south, I think Arkansas was no exception to just the rural south. This was in the ‘30s and ‘40s. There was no electricity. There were no amenities like today that we take for granted. Everyone lived in shotgun houses. We grew our own gardens. We had our smokehouse. There was no plumbing and no electricity. You got up in the morning in the winters and you go back and you break a thin layer of ice on a bucket and dip in it a porcelain pan that you’d go put on a wood stove to heat it up. Daddy would do that every morning and I would do that to wash my face and to brush my teeth. Then you would rush to the fireplace or to the wood stove in the kitchen because that was the only means of heat. So, it was a totally different era. You took a bath in a No. 3 washtub, seriously, you really did. You bathed from a tub and you heated your own water and you didn’t bathe as much as you do today I can promise you. JE: Your elementary schooling that started obviously in Crossett? BS: Actually, it was in California. When we went to California, it was in 1941 when the war broke out. My Dad was a ship painter in Terminal Island in the San Pedro shipyards. I started attending grade school a couple of blocks from the little rented home we were staying in. It was about 600 square feet. It was called Horace Mann Grade School. It still BARRY SWITZER 3 exists today. I drive by it and see it every once in a while when I am out in California, I’ll take an opportunity to go down and revisit the neighborhood. But I went to first, second and third grade there. Then after the war was over in 1945, we moved back to Crossett, Arkansas and I continued my education in the Crossett elementary schools in the fourth and fifth grade. Chapter 3 – 4:22 The Neighborhood John Erling: In Crossett, was that a mix of blacks and whites that lived in that area? Barry Switzer: It was a large white and black contingency, it as equal, probably about 50/50. Crossett was a mill town, a sawmill town. People worked in the woods. They cut pulpwood. They cut trees for timber and to produce paper and charcoal. Every home in the city, black and white, was painted Crossett gray. They were all shotgun houses. They all looked alike and were owned by the company and rented to employees. JE: Chances are most of your friends were black and white or mostly black, or? BS: Well, my Dad being a bootlegger, his profession of being a bootlegger, when he came back from the war he couldn’t get a job. But prior to going out there (to California) he had various jobs with the state government. As I told you he was a tollkeeper on the bridge between Crossett and El Dorado. It was on the Ouachita River and it separated the two counties, Union and Ashley County. When we came back after the war in 1945, there were no jobs. There was an influx of people coming back to Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma and they were all seeking employment and there just weren’t enough jobs. So Daddy started bootlegging whiskey to make a living. He had six or seven black gentlemen in the black quarters that worked for my father that were agents for my father I guess, selling and bootlegging whiskey in the community. And I was known as Mr. Frank’s boy in the black community. So we lived way out in the country past the black community and down a gravel road and then about 100 yards off a dirt road. It was one home up on acreage and that’s the way daddy wanted it so that’s where we lived. JE: You even picked cotton for a black man? BS: Well, yeah I did. In my book I wrote about it. There was a lot of sugar cane raised for molasses. People had mills that would grind the sugar cane that would make the liquid form that was used to make molasses and sugar. They would have one single mule in a circle pulling and grinding, as you would feed the stalks into the mill. The black gentleman also had the cotton and he would pay us, or a few of the boys, black and white to help pick cotton. So I picked cotton early on, it wasn’t like a full-time job, it was just when we BARRY SWITZER 4 could help out. I did it and he would pay us for doing it. I think it was 35 cents an hour or something like that. JE: Back in those days, for you to be with blacks and whites, that combination was a very natural thing for you? BS: Oh yes. JE: Probably some of your better friends even were black? BS: Well sure, up the road the closest community was a black community and down past me was a ground hog sawmill that contained about 20 families and there were some young children there that I could walk down to the mill that I could play with them. But less than 100 yards from where I lived was a black community. Sam Lawson had a black store and what you’d call a juke joint and on Saturday nights there was partying and dancing there and most of them were drinking daddy’s whiskey. They would have bands come in and play and I would listen to the sounds of the music at night travel through the woods. I lied many a night in my bed and listened to the music coming from Sam Lawson’s Cafe up the road.