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OKLAHOMA CITY – When Herb Gilkey was growing up, Pawhuska was a hard place to find the wrong path in life.
Black or white or Indian, it was like kids back then had 100 moms looking over their shoulders, making sure they did right.
It was a tight community, where basketball was the entertainment before school, during two recesses at school, at lunch time and after school until dark fell.
No time for hanky panky.
"Very few kids I went to school with got in trouble," says Gilkey. "And back then, getting in trouble was getting caught with a beer."
And if kid did get in trouble, like a scuffle in the halls of the old high school, the principal wasn't done for the day until he personally went to visit the errant child's parents at home.
"It wasn't over with until the principal was done talking to your parents right in front of you," he says.
"Talk about humiliating!"
Earlier this month, Gilkey made one of his rare trips back to Pawhuska, a town that is banding together again to haul itself out of what Gilkey and his wife, Tamara – whom he met in high school and married in 1973 – see as a sad state of decay.
"What floored me was driving in and seeing the Greek's," Gilkey says. "That thing was old when I was in high school."
Adds Tamara: "You go now and it's kind of sad. The Tastee Freeze isn't even there any more."
Gilkey's purpose in making the trip from his home near Oklahoma City: To be inducted into the Pawhuska High Basketball Hall of Fame.
The Hall of Fame will probably be heavy with members of the team from Gilkey's era as it fills up with Coach Dale Christenson's picks each year.
Back in the early 1970s, starting with Gilkey's team in 1970, the team was fierce. It won state championships in 1970, 1971 and 1973, with Coach Max Shuck taking kids like 6 foot 7 Kent May, who had never played basketball until his junior year, and turning them into hardwood powerhouses.
Gilkey wasn't a newbie, however. He lived to play basketball growing up on the black side of Pawhuska, a neighborhood that was once crowded with life that is now largely abandoned and run down. Gilkey's own home no longer exists.
He was so keen on hoops that he studied at Oklahoma City University and Northern Oklahoma University (where teammates Ron Brown and Burnus Boylan also played) to become a teacher, an avenue to coach high school ball.
But when he graduated, he faced a harsh reality: Teachers were earning $7,700 a year in 1975.
"I thought 'My goodness!' It was pretty sad," says Gilkey.
An OCU booster called one day after Gilkey, who was married to Tamara by that time, had that realization. The booster suggested going through an three-day on-the-job evaluation at McDonald's.
Gilkey gave it a try that Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
It was brutal.
"I came home thinking these people are crazy. This fast food, fast pace.
"There's no way I'm going to work for these people.
"Then they told me what they'd pay me. Three times what a teacher was paid!
"And I said, "When do I start?'"
His relationship with McDonald's for-profit side continued for 25 years. In 1995, he and Tamara bought the McDonald's in Guthrie, then they moved to Tulsa, where they owned three franchises.
They built their dream house, sold the restaurants, and decided they were going to form a company that would consult with would-be franchisees, coaching folks how to succeed in franchised restaurants of all sorts.
But basketball intervened in an odd sort of way. In 2004, Oklahoma City was to host the McDonald's All American Basketball Tournament, at which pro scouts would be scoping out high-school players from across the entire nation. The event was to benefit the Ronald McDonald House in OKC, and McDonald's needed someone to spruce up the house and get it ready for visitors. The director had left three months earlier, and the situation was getting a tad desperate.
The Gilkeys were leery, but took the interim job.
"We said we'd do it for 90 days. That was in 2004. Now its 2008 and we're still there," said Gilkey.
The reason they both stayed on – he as director, she as development director – is pretty simple. Job satisfaction.
"We absolutely love it," Gilkey says.
The house is home to up to 15 families whose children are in the hospital in OKC for any reason: cancer, burns, and other serious troubles.
"Going from for-profit to non-profit was like going from people who expect help to people who need help."
And volunteers, both Gilkeys add, turn out to be flabbergastingly good workers.
"It just blows us away," Gilkey says. "We have volunteers who come in every week and have been coming in for three, four years, and never miss a day. It is utterly amazing. It's like they're paid."
And in a way, they are: By doing good.
After the fast-paced fast-food business, the Gilkeys get the same feeling:"We have a good feeling every day."
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