Meta Sager's 1936 Speech in Minco, Oklahoma

On Tuesday, December 15, 1936, Meta Sager spoke during a large banquet held in Minco. The occasion was the laying of the cornerstone for the U.S. armory, which stands to this day. It was built on the land where El Meta Bond College had stood not many years before. Local men, employed by the Works Progress Administration, a popular jobs program in Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, built the armory. Perhaps the organizers of the day's festivities decided that a speech from the president of the old school might give the place a greater sense of history. Whatever their reasons, they had asked her to speak. She delivered a gem of nostalgia, patriotism, and religion.

She began with a commonly-known couplet, the first two lines of "Rock Me to Sleep," an 1859 poem by Elizabeth Akers Allen: "Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight. Make me a child again just for tonight!"[1] From there, she told of Silver City on the Chisholm Trail and the town's move several miles west, to the site of Minco, founded in 1890. This was where for thirty years she operated her academy, a school that "carried all the grades and some Junior College work." She decided to have a little fun. A number of the men in attendance had been her students, she noted, and they were not always well-behaved. In fact, she said, "in almost any audience I can look around and see men whose pants I tanned when they were little boys. Some were not so very little either."[2]

Meta recalled that during the Great War, "there hung in the window of El Meta Bond a flag with thirty white starts on a blue field. They were our boys . . . for all we knew, then asleep on Flanders Field." Yet, they all came back "from somewhere in France." Sometime in 1919, after their return, "under the shade of the trees of the college campus," the school had hosted a picnic for all sixty-five service men from Grady County and their families. The day's festivities had been complete with "a brass band, a big barbecue, and hearts full of love for our boys and gratitude to the Prince of Peace for their return." With great satisfaction, no doubt, she claimed that El Meta's 2,500 alumni were then sustaining "the better institutions of learning in the greater Oklahoma of today."[3]

She concluded with a toast: "So now with abiding love to that which was, and with all honor to that which has come to be, I lift my glass and drink to the last drop--then 'Fold my tent like the Arab, and silently steal away.'"[4]

Notes

[1] Allen's poem "Rock Me to Sleep [, Mother]" appeared in Hazel Felleman, ed., The Best Loved Poems of the American People (New York: Doubleday, 1936), 371-73.

[2] Meta Chestnutt Sager, "A dinner speech at the Banquet given in Minco at the Laying of the Corner Stone and Dedication of the U.S. Armory, Dec. 15, 1936," MCSC, box 5, folder 17.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.