Those were stirring times out on that wild frontier- rough, dangerous times in many ways. But to young Will Rogers, growing up on his father's range,… - Harold Keith

Bud Wilkinson was a big, blond, articulate man with a soft, modulated voice and a smile that would charm the birds out of the trees. When he was standing talking with somebody, he would sometimes shuffle his feet, bob his head, and, clasping his hands in front of him, rub them softly together. You felt comfortable in his presence and drawn to him even before you were introduced.

The boy felt happy and excited. He liked the sweet air and the delightful chill of it at night no matter what the daytime heat had been. He would never forget his feeling of enchantment the previous afternoon when, seated on the prairie with a plate of food, he kept seeing the sky in all directions beneath his horse's belly no matter where the animal grazed around him. He was exhilarated by the lonely magnificence of the country, and the sense of freedom it inspired. It was like being in a boat on the ocean with no land in sight.

Some of Norman's old-timers still remember what the interior of Risinger's little shop looked like in early September, when the sun fried the Oklahoma prairie, meadowlarks sat around gasping with their bills open and cicadas chirred maddeningly in the dog-day heat. On the east wall swung a one-by-twelve-foot mirror where customers startledly beheld themselves emerging from furry anonymity into pale recognizability. On the west wall dangled an arresting picture of a barber innocently about to lop off a customer's ear with his shears while watching a dog fight across the street. There were three red plush chairs, a gallery of ornate shaving mugs for the town's more progressive merchants, and a large, white queensware bowl on a shelf. Only cold water shaves were purveyed. It was too hot to heat the precious water Risinger obtained for five cents a bucket from the softwater cistern back of what is now the City National bank. It was in this tiny crucible in September, 1895, that long-haired Jack Harts first proposed, "Let's get up a football team," and football at Norman was born.