The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project RALPH MILTON BUCK Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial Interview Date: August 18, 2008 Copyright 2014 ADST Q: Let’s start at the beginning. When and where were you born? BUCK: I was born November 1944 in Oklahoma in the Baptist Hospital in Muskogee, Oklahoma. My parents lived in Stigler, Oklahoma, a small town in the eastern part of the state. Q: Let’s talk about your father’s side and sort of back up. Where did they all come from, what do you know about them? BUCK: My father was born in Missouri in 1894 but his family moved to Oklahoma when he was about two years old. My mother was born in 1905 in Oklahoma before statehood. She was born in Keokuk Falls, a place that according to her had three or more saloons on every block, but which no longer exists. It was also the birthplace of Jim Thorpe, the world famous Native American athlete. Q: What do you know on your father’s side? What were they, the Bucks up to? BUCK: The Bucks’ original ancestor came from Germany about 1730. His name was Christian Buck. He was a Lutheran minister, and he lived in Wytheville, Virginia, which is in the far western part of the state. His German name is believed to have been Buch. He first went to Pennsylvania, then to Virginia. The Buck family lived there for three generations. Some Bucks apparently still do. Eventually, one of the Buck boys, about the time of the Civil War, left and went to Texas where he married and had a son in 1865. His son, James Buck, moved to Missouri and then to Oklahoma when it was opened up to settlement. My grandfather was a Deputy U.S. Marshall in Oklahoma Territory, near what became Oklahoma City. For years my father had his gun, a 32 caliber Iver-Johnson revolver, but a niece of mine has it now. His wife was worried that he was going to get killed in a shootout with outlaws. She was also worried about dangerous wild animals. They lived in a wooded area and she was afraid a mountain lion would get one of the children. She begged him to quit law enforcement and to move. Eventually he did and they wound up in the town of Gotebo in the western part of the state. That’s an area with very good black soil, very productive farming. It was a growing area at that time, so my father lived there for over forty years and all his other five children were born there. It’s now almost a ghost town [Ed: Gotebo population in 2010 was 226]. 1 Q: We are talking through the turn of the century? BUCK: Well, my father lived there up until the early 1940s. After his father died, he and the other children sold the farm. But my father owned several other farms, a gas station, and an automobile repair shop. I went back there a few years ago and visited the gas station he built. It still has the name he gave it, “the Blue Goose Station”, above the door. Somehow he lost a lot of money and there were hard times in Oklahoma, because agricultural prices had dropped in the 1920s. Eventually he got a job as a contract rural route mail carrier for the Post Office Department. Then in 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt came in, he was able to get a full-time job with the post office. He wound up transferring, he switched jobs with another employee over in eastern Oklahoma, to the town of Stigler, in Haskell County. He did that to be closer to his children. His wife had died, leaving him with five children to raise, and he was sending them to a private boarding school in Arkansas. That’s where he met my mother. She was working in Stigler. He saw her at a gas station. He asked someone “who was that cute chick”. They got married in 1942 and I was kind of an unexpected result of that. Q: OK, how about on your mother’s side? BUCK: Her family came from Tennessee. Her father and his brother moved from Tennessee to Oklahoma seeking to get rich as the town of Paden grew and developed. He owned a drugstore and also was the principal of the local high school. Both he and his wife were college educated. They took turns being the local postmaster. Paden no longer exists. Q: Were any of these what are called “Sooners”? BUCK: No, my parents came in after that. The Sooners were people who came in ahead of the time they were supposed to and grabbed the best land. Since the Sooners became some of the most prominent people in Oklahoma, they naturally made themselves out to be heroes, while actually they were a bunch of cheaters. Q: Where did you grow up? BUCK: My early years were in Oklahoma, until about the age of twelve. We lived in in Stigler, then in Edmond, which is now a suburb of Oklahoma City. We moved to Florida because my father had retired and my mother got a job in Florida as a school teacher. She completed her master’s degree at the University in Edmond in psychology and special education, which was a very unusual field at the time, but she was unable to get into a special education program in Oklahoma. We went to Dunedin, a town in Pinellas County, Florida, north of St. Petersburg, where one of my brothers was working at the time as an engineer with a company called “General Nuclear”. Pinellas County was 2 a pioneer in setting up special education for handicapped and slow learning children, and my mother founded the special education class at Dunedin Elementary. Q: Up to the age of twelve, what was it like growing up in Edmund as a kid? BUCK: It was very nice; I had a great childhood, both in Stigler and in Edmond. We owned a large house and I had a lot of friends and basically had lots of things to do, especially camping and so forth with the Boy Scouts. I earned the Eagle Scout rank, actually completed it at the troop in Florida. I went to the special Jamboree of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Boy Scouts in 1957, in Colorado Springs, and saw President Eisenhower there. Q: Where did your family fall politically? BUCK: My father, William L. Buck, was a staunch Democrat. He blamed the Republicans for the Great Depression and warned they would do it again. He was a strong supporter of Roosevelt, but his greatest hero was Harry Truman, whom he identified with (Missouri, small businessman, etc.). He loved “Give ‘em Hell Harry”. My mother, Doris-Ann, often voted Republican. She voted for Dwight Eisenhower partly because he had promised to end the Korean War. Her other son, William, was in the 45th Infantry Division in the Korean War and she was worried he would not be coming home. He almost didn’t. She did not like Ronald Reagan. Q: How about religion? Was that this an important part? BUCK: Very important. My parents founded two Baptist churches in their lifetimes. There was a split in the Baptist church in Stigler. A big dispute had erupted over the pastor. One Wednesday “prayer meeting” night a group in the church brought in secretly a whole bunch of people who usually never came but claimed to be members and voted to fire the preacher. My parents loved and admired their pastor, whose major defect in the eyes of this other group was that he had a college degree. That was just unheard of in the Baptist church in rural Oklahoma and he just did not deliver the kind of “fire and brimstone” and “you are all going to Hell” kind of sermons they expected. These were the same people who voted for prohibition (and kept prohibition in Oklahoma) but Saturday night were out drinking moonshine and giggling about it. So my father went out and bought the land and found an abandoned church building outside of town and had it hauled in by an enormous truck (the biggest truck I had ever seen) to be put on the site. And that was the church I mostly grew up in. He had a beautiful voice and he was also the music director of the new church. My mother taught Sunday School. Later, they helped found another new church in the town of Spring Hill, Florida, where they lived, because there wasn’t any Baptist church there. Q: Were you much of a reader as a kid? BUCK: Yes, one of the great things my parents did was they bought me an encyclopedia 3 set, the Britannica Junior, and I actually enjoyed reading it. So I would just sit down and read the encyclopedia for hours. Q: Do you remember any books as a kid that particularly grabbed you? BUCK: No, the usual kinds of things. I read books by Jack London and other adventure books. I was interested in science and they got me a chemistry set and microscope. Q: How about elementary school? BUCK: When we moved to Edmond I had the good fortune of going to what was called the Campus School, on the campus of Central State University. That was because my mother was a graduate student there. This school was primarily for student teachers to gain teaching experience.