Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-Class Metropolis by Sam Anderson 4.8
Freaked out chickens, Billy the Kid, one half bitten off ear, and the meaning of life.
It would be easy to decide not to read Boom Town because it’s about the Oklahoma City Thunder and chances are you don’t care that much about OKC’s basketball team. But Boom Town is also about, well, almost everything else. If you’re only going to read one book this year about the world’s greatest weatherman, sonic booms, dinosaurs, integration, the Flaming Lips, and why Billy the Kid’s killer’s killer bit off someone’s ear, well, this is the one.
Take sonic booms. In 1964, people thought supersonic flights would revolutionize air travel. OKC was determined to be an important city, so officials lobbied the U.S. to make OKC the nation’s official sonic boom testing area. Citizens were filled with civic pride. Fighter jets were brought in to create thousands of sonic booms. The future was coming!
It did not go well. Constant sonic booms left people and chickens unhinged, which left a lot of chickens smacking into a lot of people. But to understand why OKC volunteered for that, you have to know about how the state began with a starter’s pistol announcing a sanctioned land grab with people claiming acreage in a frenzy, including a guy who’d been hovering overhead overnight in a hot air balloon. It was awful and it was remarkable and a feeling of both pride and embarrassment about the place set in. Going supersonic was meant to validate the pride and solve the embarrassment.
It's not all just hot air balloons and crazed chickens, though that would have been fine. There’s also Clara Luper, a Black woman who decided, “we love these white people so much that we are going to make them do right.” Luper sat at segregated restaurant counters while people spat and poured coffee on her. When officials told her not to organize a march, she said, “no small, little, bow tie wearing mayor is going to destroy the U.S. Constitution.” Luper took on a city and won and anytime anyone wants to replace one of the 50 million statues we have of soldiers on horses and put up a few of her, I’ll be glad to help. And of course, Luper’s legacy is still a part of how OKC’s population felt about the team’s players. Of course.
Boom Town isn’t brilliant because Anderson writes about so many things, but because he connects them. There’s a moment where two players on the Thunder are having a conflict about…dribbling, or something, and I swear I found myself thinking, ‘well, obviously given the topography of the city and tensions created when a community is tightly knit but also worships individualism, you’re bound to have problems figuring out who takes the shots in the 4th quarter.’ Duh.
In some ways, Boom Town is a Buddhist book even though Buddhism is one of the few things Anderson never mentions.
There’s a joke about how a Buddhist monk orders a hot dog: ‘make me one with everything’. Part of the reason Buddhists believe we are all one is because they believe everything is connected. My father’s father’s decisions impact my life all the time. Everything does.
That’s why the world’s dumbest cliché is, “we’re born alone and we die alone.” I don’t know about dying, but being born alone is literally impossible. I’ve seen two people be born and both were literally attached by a long cord to their mother. There were doctors and nurses there too. Plus me, the guy in charge of telling their mom to breathe, because you always have to give men jobs that make them feel important.
Boom Town is about a million different things but most of all it’s about how a million different things flow together to cause new things. That means, if you really want to understand basketball or anything else, you have to start with the dinosaurs because we are all connected to everything all the time. And once you understand that, the world becomes less lonely and far more interesting. If only because of all the freaked out chickens.