Friends forever

Painting memorializes Paw Paw Bottoms site

Move over Monica, Rachel, Phoebe, Chandler, Joey and Ross, Sequoyah County has its own group of real-life friends that mirrors the fictitious TV series Friends.

But while the TV friends frequently gathered on a couch and high-back chairs at New York City’s Central Perk coffee shop, the 10 Sequoyah County friends gathered around a campfire in front of an abandoned church located in the Paw Paw Bottoms, usually sitting on the tailgates of pickups “outside under the stars, and talking about God, and talking about everything. When you’re young, everything’s black and white. Now when you’re older, it’s grey,” said Kathy Needham Walker, one of four from the group still living.

“I was usually dancing, because that’s just who I am,” Walker recalls. “We’d have that music going — we listened to music, Meat Loaf, “Bat Out of Hell” tape. We wore I don’t know how many of those out. Them boys would be talking politics, and me and Gail would be singing and just jumping around and dancing and being silly. It’s being young.”

That was in the 1980s. “We were starting our lives out, thinking about how we were gonna change [the world],” reminisces Walker, a 1980 graduate of Muldrow.

“I know, all of who all of us evolved into was from that time we all spent together. It truly was who we ended up being later in our lives and how we raised our children and how we went on from there was from that.

“You don’t have to have a lot of friends, you have to have good friends,” Walker said.

Walker remembers the circle of friends gathering “and just hanging out when we had a minute” at least three or four nights per week. “We would be down there, especially in the summertime — we’d be down there in the wintertime, for that matter — it was a lot. It was enough that that was just such a special place to me.

“It seems like once we got together, we just clung together, we just stayed,” she said.

“As a young woman, that was a very, very special place to me and my friends. We would go there, build a fire, look at the stars and talk about life — where we’re going, what we’re doing. We had such an eclectic group.

“We had very big political differences — some Democrats, some Republicans. I remember they would get into some really serious debates about politics and life and whatever was going on in the news at the time. They might argue a little bit, but they didn’t get the way people get now. That’s the way it was [back then]. You had your opinion, and it was OK. But now, if your opinion doesn’t match somebody’s, they want to hurt you,” Walker said.

But as with the TV series, after spending almost a decade together, life took over and the county group began to splinter.

“After ’88, ’89, people had kind of started to go in other directions. You didn’t see each other on a daily basis or talk on a daily basis, but when you did, it was valuable,” Walker said.

That’s why in 2020, Walker, who now lives in Fayetteville, Ark., commissioned Sequoyah County artist Daniel Walters to paint a picture of the Paw Paw church with a campfire beneath a night sky of stars, memorializing the years the group spent talking, dreaming, bonding and solving the problems of the world as only a 20-something adult can. In the night sky are nine stars that twinkle brighter than the rest of the heavens, along with a shooting star through the heart of the star clusters. The brighter stars represent members of the group, and the shooting star is for Walker’s best friend, Gail Blake Flaunts, the most recent casualty of the group.

“It’s the tie that binds us. It’s what’s left of us,” Walker said of the oil painting that Walters updated earlier this month.

“[The painting] is going to stay in my family. My daughter understands what it means to me. Short of my children and my family, it’s probably one of my prized possessions,” Walker said.

The group of friends was comprised of:• Kathy Needham Walker, now 61, the daughter of a sharecropper, who describes herself as a fledgling novelist, a novice painter, a blogger and an advocate for learning and retaining the history of the county and the Paw Paw community.

• Thomas (Tom) Robinson, 59, who was a policeman in Muldrow and then Fort Smith before he retired to “way out in the boonies” in Mountainburg, Ark. “Tom’s the kind of guy who’ll do anything for you,” Walker said.

• Rodney Prewitt, 58, lives in Muldrow and works at Roland’s Cherokee Casino. “He is very, very quiet, and extremely intelligent. He has a very, very good heart. He’s very, very witty, very funny,” Walker said.

• Richard (Rick) Mize, 58, who lives in Edmond, is a long-time newspaperman for The Oklahoman, having also worked at the Times Record News in Wichita Falls, Texas. He is also an ordained minister. Walker doesn’t know why the group gravitated to the Paw Paw Bottoms, but decides “it had to be the Mize brothers, because they grew up and farmed there. Also, Rick rode a school bus that went almost all the way to the church. When he could drive, he went there and loved it.”

• Carl Leo Mize Jr., who was three days short of his 68th birthday when he passed in January 2020, was a former Muldrow policeman and business owner. He retired from Whirlpool and was a member of the Muldrow Town Council at the time of his passing. “Carl was a dear, dear, dear friend. He was extremely intelligent, but at the same time he was very practical,” Walker said. Mize and Walker were virtually inseparable, but not a couple. “He told me, ‘You are my best friend, and if it didn’t work, I would die if I lost my best friend’.”

• Allen Pewitt, who was 59 at his passing almost a year to the day after his wife’s passing, “was the most honest, hardworking person I ever met in my life,” Walker said. “He was just a neat guy, and [he and Morgan] were such a sweet couple.”

• Morgan Kemper Pewitt, who was 64 at her passing, “was a very straightforward woman, a very, very pretty woman — she had the most beautiful eyes. She took a liking to Allen and she just told him, ‘We’re gonna be together.’ When they passed, they had been married close to 35 years,” Walker said.

• Gail Blake Claunts, who was 61 when she passed in July, was a registered nurse in Norman, who trained for a climb of Pike’s Peak, but after scaling about two-thirds of the mountain, was forced to abandon her climb due to approaching darkness, and had to climb back down — all with a thigh muscle injury sustained early in the climb. “She was the most driven person I’ve ever known. She really wanted to make a change in America,” Walker said. “She and I had been friends since junior high. She was a devoted mother and a very quiet person, and she observed a lot. She wasn’t very loud or boisterous, like me, so we were an odd pair.”

• Kent Edwards, 52 when he passed, was a Muldrow businessman, and later was a district manager for Travelers Insurance. “Kent was a true Southern gentleman. He was the man that, if you went to get up, he pulled your chair out, he gave you his arm,” Walker recalls. “He wanted to be in politics, but I don’t think he ever got to be. He wanted to be in politics because he wanted to make a change. He wanted to be important.”

• Bryon Shamblin was the first of the group to pass when he was 45. “One of the stars [in the painting] is the love of my life, who was Bryon Shamblin. It just wasn’t meant to be, but he truly was the love of my life,” Walker confesses of their unrequited love. “He was that one person in your life that, the minute you laid eyes on them, that was it. Through the years, he and I married other people, but it seemed like every time anything big happened in his life, I knew. I have a feeling that there were things he knew about me as well. We said our piece to one another before he passed, which I’m very thankful for. Also, I had given him a gold nugget hat pin with his BS initials on it. His parents brought it back to me when he passed. He still had it on his hat when he passed. It made me smile.”

Walker originally commissioned the painting after Carl Mize’s passing, which had five bright stars in the sky representing those friends lost. But it was the group’s latest casualty that spurred Walker to add a star for each friend along with the shooting star to ensure the memory of the friends and what they meant to each other does not disappear.“ “For whatever it was, we clung together over all of these years,” Walker said of her friendship with Claunts. “When she passed, it just really, really started bothering me that we have so much history and families that were raised here. I had asked [Walters, who has painted several murals on downtown Sallisaw buildings] to make this painting, I wanted someone other than me and my children to know the history of [the gathering place],” Walker said.

“As we get older, we need to make sure we keep history. We don’t sit on the porch and talk anymore like people used to. We don’t share like we used to. My children know a lot of stories, but every once and awhile I’ll tell them something, and they’re like, ‘You never told me that.’ There are so many things I wish I could ask my mother now that I never did, so I want to try to make sure my children and my grandchildren know, I want them to be able to know where their heritage came from.”