Take Them Back to Tulsa

Take Them Back to Tulsa Russell Cobb (bio) Russell Cobb was Tulsa's police and fire commissioner from 1940 to 1942. He resigned from the post and signed up to fight in World War II. The US Army sent him to Alaska to retake two small islands occupied by the Japanese, the only battles fought in North America. I have a portrait of him at the time. He sits in a white parka with a fur-lined hood, his blue eyes and tight lips registering something of a smirk. Sent to coordinate bombing runs over the islands of Kiska and Attu, he ended up flying dozens of missions himself. "Life here is rough but it seems to agree with me," he wrote to a friend in Tulsa. He returned to Tulsa as Captain Cobb, a wealthy oilman and decorated war veteran ready to take the fight to Roosevelt's New Deal. Captain Cobb detected a whiff of Bolshevism in the New Deal and took it personally. He had met his wife—my great-grandmother—while coordinating famine relief in the Soviet Union. Lenin conducted an experiment in collectivist agriculture that he came to regret in the early 1920s. The result was widespread starvation and violence. Cobb's father-in-law had been assassinated by the Revolutionary government. During the Cold War, journalists would come to the Cobbs' house to write profiles on my great-grandmother Elena, a formerly aristocratic girl whose family had been wiped out by the "red menace," a warning to any fellow traveler toying with the ideas of Marxism. Elena and Russell Cobb constituted a new form of aristocracy in Tulsa, one tied to the fortunes of the oil and gas industry. In the 1950s Tulsa still held fast to its claim as "The Oil Capital of the World." Captain Cobb died in a bathtub in the Tulsa Hotel. He ended his life with a single shot from a .38 caliber revolver. His son, Russell Cobb II, became convinced that the world's next great oil boom was in Cuba. He started a grandiose-sounding oil company, Western Hemisphere Petroleum Corporation, that poked around the marshes of central Cuba, sinking a modest fortune into drilling operations. The Cuban poet Virgilio Piñero, has a line about Cuba as cursed by the "damned circumstance of being surrounded by water everywhere." Plenty of water, virtually no oil. Fidel Castro nationalized the entire oil and gas industry. Russell Cobb II died penniless in a Veterans Administration Hospital a few years later. He blamed Fidel Castro for his failures, but there was much, much more to the story. That brings me to Russell Cobb III, a charming lawyer who counted the televangelist Oral Roberts among his clients. People around Tulsa [End Page 235] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Captain Russell Cobb, stationed in the Aleutian Islands during World War II. Author photo. [End Page 236] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 2. Tulsa Hotel. still remember my uncle. They drank with him on Saturday night at the Brookside Bar and then prayed with him on Sunday morning. He had a special sign he gave to the bartenders at Southern Hills Country Club to pour just enough Coke in his vodka that his wife assumed it was soda. Rusty had a huge, booming laugh that I inherited. He, too, met an early demise, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes. The televangelist Richard Roberts directed Rusty's funeral. I remember Roberts looking at me and saying, "With the water, you get the wet." I'm still not sure what Roberts was trying to say, but I have always loved the poetic resonance of that phrase. Did the water represent the wealth all these Russell Cobbs enjoyed, and the wet the consequences of their moral failings? Possibly. Maybe the "wet" was the karmic blowback from the oil money they harvested from little actual labor. That would be a quasi-Marxist understanding that would turn the first Russell in his grave. I have an aunt who believes the "wet" is a sort of intergenerational curse upon the family. I have come to agree with her...