Oral History: Mick Cornett

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Transcript:

Interviewee: Mick Cornett 

Interviewer: Wendy Gabrielson 

WG: My name is Wendy Gabrielson and I am here to interview Mick Cornett for the Metropolitan Library System Oklahoma Voices project. Today is April 7, 2010 and Mayor Cornett could you please state your full name and birth date? 

MC: My name is Mick Cornett and I was born July 16, 1958. 

WG: And where were you born? 

MC: I was born in Oklahoma City. 

WG: Excellent, um so you grew up here in the city and what actual area did you live in here in the city? 

MC: I grew up in what we now call the near northwest. I was born in Deaconess Hospital and uh the first house I lived in was very close to there it was 5304 N. Sapulpa which is just about a half mile west of Deaconess Hospital. We lived there until I was about 6 years old and then we moved about a half a mile away and that’s where I started grade school in the house my mother still lives on 58th Terrace and I lived there until I went away to college. 

WG: Wow and so what are your parents’ names? 

MC: My father’s name was Carol Earl Cornett and my mother’s name was Nona Evelyn Sweeny Cornett. My mother grew up on a farm in western Oklahoma in the town of Thomas. It was a wheat farm, cattle country. She grew up in a large family in kind of a depression era hard tough life. They probably had it better than most because they had land and she had a very strong-willed mother. Her father died when she was 14 and her mother raised the family by herself from that point on and educated the bulk of the family and produced you know quite a bit of commerce in the area. The family did quite well whether they branched out in to things and most of them got an education. My mother’s grandparents had migrated from Ireland in the 1850’s during the potato famine and wound up in Oklahoma soon after the land run. My family has been here since pretty much the beginning on my mother’s side. My father’s side I believe he was born in Ingalls, Oklahoma. His father was in kind of the oil business he went around from well to well. He was an oil field worker when it was a brand new industry here in the 1920’s in Oklahoma. My father was born in 1922 and they moved to Oklahoma City in the late 1920’s when my father was in grade school, and they lived in a house very near the state capital on 13th street. So he grew up in Oklahoma City went to Central High School. Ultimately went into World War II. Where his best friend growing up turned out to be the cousin of my mother and so they met during the latter stages of the war and were married soon after the war and were married until my father passed away until my father passed away in 1997 and my mother is still alive as of this day. 

WG: You say that they are for Ireland, do you know any of the specifics of how they actually got to Oklahoma, how they ended up here? 

MC: I don’t, I don’t know. 

WG: What elementary school did you go to then? 

MC: I went to Coronado Heights Elementary School from 1964 to 1970 and then I went to Hefner Middle School and then I went to Putnam City High School and graduated in 1976 and then went to the University of Oklahoma. 

WG: Excellent. When you were growing up and thinking back to your grandparents, were there any interesting stories that your parents told you about? 

MC: You know I was quite a bit younger than most of my cousins and brother and sister. I had an older brother and sister who were 10 and 8 years older than me and I believe that I was the 21st grandchild on each side of the family so I don’t know I had over 40 first cousins but the bulk of them were quite a bit older than me. My grandparents were quite a bit older than me, in fact I only have one grandparent that I even remember, my father’s mother was alive until I was a teenager and you know when you are one of twenty something grandkids on that side you don’t get a whole lot of special attention especially when you are the 21st it was hardly new to her at the time. I have fond memories of her but no real special connection, I mean there was a lot of us, and I had wonderful parents who gave me, among a lot of positive attributes, a great work ethic. I don’t ever remember my father or mother ever missing a day of work and that’s one reason that I pride myself and I have never missed a day of work as an adult either, and I know I got that from them and there is a certain amount of genetic that goes with never getting sick. But here is a certain amount of execution that you know someone is counting on you, you are supposed to work and so I think of all the things my parents gave me the two things stand out the most, one is the work ethic, and secondly, it’s that you can become and do whatever it is that you choose to do. This is America where people have opportunities, and you are limited only by how you choose to limit yourself. 

WG: Excellent. So would you say that, that is probably the most profound way that they influenced you? 

MC: Well I don’t think they did that knowingly. I think as an adult looking back because I can remember you know I was kind of a very in to current events when I was a kid. I watched news casts and ultimately wound up in that business, but you know I studied the Presidents and I studied history and I remember thinking that anybody could become president of the United States if they put their mind to it and in the way that I kind of looked at it in those grade school years I kind of thought that everyone was trying to do that I thought that was the goal. That every kid was goal oriented, that every kid wanted to be President of the United States and that only one was going to succeed in any four year period. That was kind of the way that I viewed the world and obviously looking back that seems kind of silly you know as an adult but none the less whatever kind of culture, whatever kind of surroundings were placed in my household that’s what I grew up thinking and ... 

WG: So are you still heading towards that goal? 

MC: No, I somewhere along the way I got very aware of my limitations but nonetheless I think that I benefited from the idea that I could accomplish things and sought to whether it was athletics or in business or ultimately in politics. I mean I think that you can do things is the first step in getting things done certainly I have had set backs but I think the idea that, I have met people along the way who had felt like they had limitations and I was brought up to believe that I had no limitations other than a lack of effort on my part or a lack of preparation on my part but whatever limitation that I had was from something that I had failed to do I mean there wasn’t anything that I couldn’t do if I put my mind to it and set out to do it. My mother I remember in retrospect her telling stories of her days on the farm that may have kind of set that in my mind. 

WG: Sort of inherited? 

MC: Well specifically if you are wanting to hear one specific story, my mother was she was probably 14 years old and she on a farm in western Oklahoma and for whatever reason the boys who were her brothers were all away. Maybe they were out in the fields maybe they were in town I don’t know why but my mother my grandmother instructed my mother that she needed to go out and bring in a chicken for dinner which meant that she had to kill the chicken so the family could eat dinner that night. Which I guess was a daily occurrence on the farm, seems hard and in 21st century America to actually think of killing your own food for that night but that’s what she did, that’s what they did in that family. And my mother told her mother that she couldn’t do it I mean that was something that the boys did maybe and maybe her mother could do it and she made it clear that, that was one of the things that she was not capable of doing, going out and killing a chicken so that they could eat it for dinner that night. And her mother told her that you can do anything you want when you put your mind to it and that was the end of the conversation and my mother went out and killed the chicken and they ate it for dinner. And it was the hardest thing she ever did and to this day I think it makes her queasy to think about it and I think to a certain extent she doesn’t know whether to thank her mother or to curse her mother for making her do that because I think that she thinks that it was an awful thing to make a child do but none the less you know when I hear that statement that you can do anything you want to if you put your mind to it I think well that’s kind of the message that I got somehow indirectly from my mother and I wonder if it wasn’t passed on to her from her mother in that one story is a hint that maybe there was some of that in the culture of our family that you had to get out of your comfort zone if you are really going to advance in life and I have as an adult tried to push myself out of my comfort zone because I think that’s how you grow. You know it’s real easy to stay and do things that you are accustomed to and you feel safe. 

WG: Right. 

MC: I feel like if I’m going to grow as a person and become a stronger person then I have got to push myself out of my comfort zone and do things that I really don’t like to do. 

WG: That’s excellent, I... 

MC: I know my personality is attracted to things that are hard. I read a speech from John Kennedy and I think that since then I have watched an old film footage of it but he was addressing an group of students at Rice University and he was explaining the need to build rocket ships and fly towards the moon and one of the things he said in the speech and I’m paraphrasing a wonderful speech into my own awkward sentences, but I’m sure he will forgive me. He said we choose to do these things oh he says it will not be easy it will be hard we choose to do these things because it is hard. And I thought what a great message and a message that I try to bring up to young people when I speak to them to choose to do things that are hard, and I think that resonates with me because when you become Mayor one of the things that you realize is that hey all of the easy stuff hey it’s all been done before you got here. If there was any easy task to do the day before you got there then somebody else has already done it. The only things left for you are the hard stuff and I think that people should choose to do things that are hard. I think that John Kennedy’s message was right on and I think that the fact that we would tax ourselves and build rockets and go to the moon because it was hard I think was put in a way that I had never imagined before. That as Americans we tend to want to do things we want to explore. We want to produce more we want a better way of life for our kids than we had for ourselves and we are only going to do that if we push and push and try to do things that are hard and we are not afraid of failure or we accept that failure is one of the possible outcomes but the only thing worse than failure is not trying. 

WG: Exactly. So let me take you back then, let’s go back to school here in Oklahoma City. What was that like? Were you a driven student based on…. 

MC: I wouldn’t say that I was a driven student was an average student I tended to do what was expected and what was accepted and a little more. I loved life and I had such a good time outside of school and very early on I played a lot of sports and by the time I got into middle school I had started to play golf a lot and I was playing at the public golf course and got a job picking up golf balls at night where they would let me play free and so my those years from like 12 to 18 revolved around the sport of golf and trying to push myself to be better and better at it. And I think that one of the reasons it attracted me is that it’s a really hard game and I didn’t realize at the time but I had chosen a game that is very personal there is a score so you can weigh yourself so you can measure how you are doing. It is competitive and I am competitive by nature so I think it was a sport that I was attracted to for all these reasons that are very obvious to me now but at the time I just thought it was fun and liked doing it and was willing because we could afford for me to play golf everyday you know we couldn’t afford green fees but I got a job at the golf course which allowed me to play free. And that made all the difference for me to be able to do that and so when I think back on my childhood it’s typically memories of playing golf on those public golf courses or playing competitive with people from around the state or in school or in high school but academically I was not a strong student at the time I didn’t appreciate the values of math and science for instance, loved history, loved social studies, civics, loved those classes but didn’t necessarily want to push myself to get into advanced levels of math and I was attending a school system that was really pushing students to do well. Putnam City was kind of a high achieving school of its era, it was a high achieving suburban school where typically by the high school level you look back and you know that we were winning more than our share of state championships and academically we had students not necessarily me but we had students that were succeeding at the state wide level and went on to do wonderful things get advanced degrees and I’ve been going through some of that lately because I realize that those kids that were my class mates those high achievers academically, they are all gone now they are not here and my goal is to create a city where those high achievers are going to choose to live here. That we are going to create a city that has jobs for those types of kids. I’m starting to ramble here but thinking back on those days and those other kids and how they didn’t leave because they hated their parents they left because we didn’t have jobs in Oklahoma City that measured up to their academic performance. 

WG: Well and I am actually glad that you mentioned this, and this is really way on in my questions but since you brought it up, I mean that was something that I wanted to ask you is, so many people do leave and you haven’t so why... what so you think has kept you here? You seem to really love the city. What is it about Oklahoma City that keeps you here? 

MC: Well first off right out of college I was a broadcast journalism major at OU. I wanted to be a television sportscaster more than anything else and I was driven to get a job in a very competitive business where it’s tough to get a job especially that first one and so since Oklahoma City was a fairly large sized city I couldn’t start here so my first job was in Texas I worked in Bryan, Texas for a few months and then I got a job in Eugene, Oregon so I actually worked there for a few months. So in a year and a half I was back and at Channel 5 KOCO where I worked from 1981 to 1999 so I spent 18 years as a t.v. sportscaster and ultimately as a news anchor. So I was gone just long enough to get home sick and to appreciate the fact that I really liked Oklahoma. That’s not to say that through the years I wasn’t sending out resumes and trying to get noticed by bigger stations and bigger markets but it never really worked out and somewhere along the line I finally came to the conclusion that the type of job that would entice me to leave was not likely to come. In other words it would have to be a great job or pay me a lot of money or something have some great benefit to it and I probably wasn’t good enough to get that job. If I just wanted to leave I could probably get a job somewhere else but I didn’t just want to leave. I was only going to leave if it was a great job. And that job never came knocking on the door and in the meantime, I realized that there was value to planting yourself in a city, especially your hometown. Developing a name i.d., developing a level of trust with people and regardless whether I intended to continue in journalism or ultimately in politics, all of that, you know, was a value and so when I left television and weighed my options going forward that television career is kind of what I had to base my future on. I had name recognition and I had some level of credibility built into that that I could use you know in ways that I had to determine on my own. 

WG: Why do you think you were so driven to do sports casting aside from golf where you…… 

MC: I loved sports you know I wasn’t great athletically I had some fairly good hand eye coordination that allowed me to endure golf but I had mentioned I went to a very large high school so although I loved to play baseball, football, and basketball I wouldn’t have been good enough to start or be a major factor on any of those teams. And since it was such a large school just for me to play golf it almost required me to play year-round just to be able to compete you know and at a high enough level to beat out all the other kids on our team. We had a really good team. We were the state champions and if I tried to play in other sports, I would not have been able to succeed in golf and I probably wouldn’t have starred in those other sports either. In retrospect I probably made the right decision but I just love sports and you know and watched a lot of sports and like the communication aspect of being able to call play by play sports and that was really what kind of drove me to the marketplace to begin with and ultimately, I found out that you can make a living working for t.v. stations doing the nightly news. It’s not play by play but still you can make a living doing it and it’s fun and I enjoyed it, but I was driven like you say I remember a freshman class at Oklahoma where the teacher actually said how many of you expect to be sportscasters and there was a bunch of people I mean it was a popular degree as a freshman a lot of people wanted to be t.v. sportscasters. A lot of people raised their hand and the professor said well I hope you all have back up plans because only one out of every ten is going to get a job and I remember looking around the room and I counted out nine other people and said well they are not going to make it. I don’t have a backup plan I’m going to become a sportscaster. And looking back I kind of remember those other nine kids and they didn’t make it and the professor wasn’t wrong but I just wasn’t going to let that message stop me from what I intended to do I just couldn’t imagine failing at something that I wanted so badly. And ultimately it turned out you know getting that first job is the key. I got that first job and it led to the next one and that led to the next one and you know if you work hard the rest of it kind of starts taking care of itself. So through the years in that business I saw a lot of interns come through and a lot of kids you know waiting for that first chance and you know, I wasn’t ever very good at picking out which ones were going to succeed and which ones weren’t you know. It’s a business and it’s always fair to people but it was very good to me and that t.v. station KOCO was very good to me. I can’t say that I thought they treated everybody well, I can’t say that that business treated everyone fairly but it always treated me well and I have nothing but positive things to say about that station and that industry it really set me up to do these other things that I wanted to do. 

WG: So when I looked you up on YouTube there is kind of a famous well I don’t know if it’s famous so I’m asking you about it. There is an incident where you are doing a play by play of a baseball game and you run out on the field and high five the guy coming in for the home run or what not. Would you say that was one of your more exciting moments or…….. 

MC: Well it’s exciting because of YouTube and other I don’t know other people’s memories. That’s probably one of the more well known things that I did. That was the Oklahoma City 89ers were in the play offs and it was a very exciting moment. They hadn’t been in the play offs in a long, long time and that particular game it was in extra innings and we were live and breaking into what would have been a M*A*S*H rerun which was a highly watched show. So we had a fairly live audience. Dean Blevins and I were doing some banter back and forth killing time when he hit the home run and I wasn’t planning on running on to the field I was just trying to get close enough to where I could get an interview as soon as he crossed the plate. I realized as I was walking out there I realized that he’s coming around third he’s right here so instinctively I said give me 5 and he gave me 5 as he came across the plate. Then I interviewed him and it ended and it seemed like... well I’ll tell you this. It was exactly the type of television that the people that I worked for were looking for. It succeeded in fulfilling what they had hired me to do. I was there to do stuff that was out of the ordinary, out of the box, and I was well paid and they expected those things so I was fully aware of what I was doing. I know that some people said that I had just kind of lost control and didn’t know what I was doing and that I went crazy on the field but I knew what I was doing the whole time and I knew that the people that I worked for would appreciate it. So you know one way to judge a story, is it a story that people still talk about the next day, and here we are still talking about it, and it’s been nearly 20 years. 

WG: That’s right. 

MC: And so the story succeeded on that level obviously. 

WG: W ell are there any other stories from that time period that um your time at KOCO that maybe we wouldn’t know about that you might like to share with us? 

MC: Well I think I had some wonderful opportunities to be around some highly successful people. Some coaches like Barry Switzer and Billy Tubbs. I did the Billy Tubbs Coaches Show and the year they went to the National Championship game I was in the locker room with the team, before the team, on the bus. I mean I lived and breathed every game with that team and I got to see college basketball played at the highest level by one of the most winning coaches around. I got to see them prepare and I really learned a lot about success and what it takes to be success and how you prepare. I learned things form those coaches in those days. Those highly successful coaches that have helped me today to inspire other people to work harder and to realize that you know, how you get people to not accept a lower level of success, let’s seek a higher level of success, let’s raise the standard, let’s push ourselves, let’s see how good we can be and I find myself using a lot of talking points and ideas that I grabbed from that culture of sports. I was able to go to Final Fours in 1988 then again with Oklahoma State in 1995. That was a very inspiring team with Bryant Reeves and Randy Rutherford 2 over achieving Oklahomans playing against some extremely talented teams and players from other parts of the country, some of them are still playing in the NBA but in that season in that tournament you know our young aspiring well coached Cowboy Basketball was just beating them at their own game and you know that and I am still inspired, when I think back I am still inspired by those kids and that coaching staff and Eddy Sutton and  what he was able to accomplish with that team. And I realize the value of teaching and the older I got the more I appreciated the coaches as opposed to the players and the older I get outside of sports the more I appreciate teachers and I realize that teachers are highly valued and I learned all that by watching these highly motivated and highly talented coaches who succeeded at the highest level and it wasn’t an accident that those coaches were able to separate themselves from other coaches. So the work ethic that it requires to succeed in that business is not totally unique, but it is demanding. When you are in television at least in that era but maybe hopefully it’s different today, in that era it was your life and although I had a wife and I had a wonderful family it all revolved around my job. And you know I loved doing it and I think if you hadn’t then you probably wouldn’t be able to survive in that industry because it’s really, really hard. 

WG: Well is there one thing you know you spent all this time around these teams and what not is there one coach that really maybe stands out and maybe how they influenced you or you know... 

MC: Well I would say a small handful. Barry Switzer. Billy Tubbs, Eddy Sutton. 

WG: And what was it about them? Not just their winning but the way they coached, their ethic... 

MC: Well it was a combination of things. It was the way they conducted themselves, it was what they demanded of their players, and um you know you could see a little bit of the teams, you could see in their own personalities a little bit of the team’s philosophies. And I saw in Billy Tubbs, a person who had never been given any advantage in life and we don’t have time here to go into Billy Tubbs’ biography but basically he fought for everything he ever got and his teams reflected that and so it allowed me by getting to know him so well it allowed me to see how people’s lives, how they grow up, the way that they view the world reflects on how they act inside the world and a lot of times in trying to deal with other people you kind of need to know their background, where they are coming from, why they view the world in a certain manner. And if you can successfully do that then you have a much better chance of helping them be successful or to help them be successful in a way that in my case helps the city or helps something else. I think that watching that commitment to excellence was advantageous to me. Seeing how, how hard the level of preparation was and how important it was to prepare and prepare because you never really knew what was going to occur, and then at the same time how to react when you lose. You know there are good ways and bad ways I saw really good examples and I saw really bad examples and along the way you know I guess you stock things in the back of your mind, that was a good way to handle that and that was not a good way to handle that. And you know that hopefully I am ever in a situation that means something that I will react favorably. You know I think when I left sports casting in the late 1990’s and in the mid 1990’s started covering City Hall, I was starting a life transition. I was I was at some point had become burned out on sports and my energy and my focus started moving toward more national interests, more news oriented interests, current events, and really the world as it survived. And I think the bombing had something to do with that. I think I started viewing the world differently after the bombing that took place at the Murrah Building. 

WG: So would you say that and other things is what led you to politics? How exactly did you make that transition? 

MC: Well I had always been interested in politics and I guess in the back of my mind if you had come up to me in the 1980’s or early 90’s and said you know what do you think you will do when you are through with the news or sports business, you know I might have said that someday I might run for something I might have said that because I realize that when you leave television that name i.d. is of value and maybe you can do something positive with it. But I guess I was going through some level of a mid life crisis in the 1990’s I guess I was in my 30’s at the time, late 30’s and when the bombing occurred it affected me in ways that I couldn’t necessarily see at the time but looking back I just felt like that one thing it just shows, it shows how hatred can impact a community and just how overbearingly sad that moment was. And I got me to looking at my life and am I really doing with my life everything I can do or everything I want to do and I loved every moment of being on television, you know, I didn’t necessarily want to leave it when I left it but I knew it was time. I didn’t know what I was going to do next. I wanted to do something significant with my life. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was time to move on and figure that out and I think going through the experience of the Oklahoma City bombing changed me psychologically and it kind of changed my direction about what I needed to start pursuing. 

WG: So just so that people will understand kind of how that progressed how did you get started then? What exactly, were your steps and how did you get to be Mayor? 

MC: Well there is to the extent now that my life is interesting to people there is a very interesting moment in my life, I had a boss who you know we had our ups and downs together. But I went in and I was anchoring the morning news and noon news casts so I had left sports casting and was now a news anchor and I really enjoyed doing it but I was also being pulled and pushed they were wanting more material out of me and they wanted me to cover stories but it was really hard because the schedule was so conflicting. It was hard to schedule a story around anchoring those other programs and so I went and asked for a beat. I wanted to be assigned something that I could kind of sink my teeth into and in the same time I really didn’t need direction I just wanted to be working on it and I would produce material and I would tell them what I was doing but I didn’t want to wait for the next assignment because generally it was at a time where it was not convenient for me to try to have to figure out how to get it done. So anyway I went to her and this is a long story to say that I went to her and was hoping that she would allow me to go cover the State Legislature and I explained why I thought that was I good idea and I just knew she was going to say yes because it seemed just like a natural and she said no I want you to go cover City Hall. And I’m not sure I even knew where City Hall was you know I knew the Mayors and I knew the Mayors pretty well because I would see them at events. But I really didn’t know much about city council. I really didn’t know much about city government. I was you know my whole adult life had been involved in sports and that’s what I knew. I knew the news business but I didn’t really know that much about local government although I did enjoy the Federal Government and to a certain extent the State Government but the local government is what I knew the least about at that stage so none the less it’s typical when you disagree with your boss you lose and I lost and went to go cover City Hall and found out where it was and came down and in that first meeting I just fell in love with the process. I remember going to that first meeting and seeing citizens standing in front of their elected officials and discuss things in their neighborhood and I thought man this is where the action is. Look at this they are standing 15 feet away and I thought you know that Federal stuff you never get to see the citizens standing in front of their elected officials when they are actually deliberating an issue. The State level you don’t see that you know. Here at the city level you can actually make a difference and I thought man this is great and I loved the city council meetings and I was a big note taker at the time too and anyway I would go back to the station and they were televised of course on days that I didn’t get to go down there and I would watch them and other people would come up with caustic comments like oh you are having to cover the city council meeting and I thought this was the greatest show in town what are you talking about. I would talk about the personalities of the different council people and the different issues that they were dealing with. I was fascinated by it and got to know the council people and was interested in the process and no one could see that exciting, no one could figure out why I thought that city government was so interesting but I did. So I did that for about 2 years and at that point it had come time for me to move on so Channel 5 and I parted ways and within a year I had decided that I was going to run for city council and the problem was that I had a 2 time incumbent who was running for a third term and that’s not going to be easy to do it’s hard to beat an incumbent. What I had going for me was that I had some name i.d. and was able to find some people that wanted a change at City Hall you know. So we kind of found each other I was looking for people who thought that was a good idea and they were looking for good candidates and we merged. And so I had some people trying to help me win and had good consultants because I didn’t know a whole lot about the process. I worked really hard and I called 2,000 people who were likely to vote in that ward 1 city council election. The 2,000 most likely voters, I called them and tried to talk to them and maybe I just left them a message but I made an attempt. Raised about I don’t know 60 or 70 thousand dollars you know enough to send out a couple of mailers and I won and I got to City Hall and it you know it kind of uh fulfilled I guess a chapter in my life that you know that this is, at that point I had I think I made the transition from television, I was doing something else even though it wasn’t a full time job. I was at a video production business where I was making my living and I kind of felt like I had new direction and I didn’t know what it would lead to but I thought that I might run for something beyond city council, then once I got on city council I realized that Mayor was really the job I wanted and of course the mayor at the time had just started, in the midst of getting re-elected for his 2nd term. He was elected in 98 but what it allowed me to do, I decided that when I got to City Hall that I really wanted to be the next Mayor but I thought that it would be years and years away and that I would have time to study the issue, learn about it you know learn all the things that were necessary because at that time I wasn’t prepared, I wasn’t ready. But I was able to watch then Mayor Humphreys you know from a very close up position being in city council and at a lot of meetings elbow to elbow with him watching as he conducted himself as he conducted meetings, dealt through issues, and talked with him and generally I started to pick up concepts and I read a lot about it, and as it turned out basically I spent 3 years 2001 to 2004 preparing to be Mayor. Studied it, read about it, watched Kirk, studied the city, looked at the city form a whole new angle as the potential Mayor. And I thought that I had many, many years I thought that Kirk would serve probably 8 or 12 years and he came to me in the midst of that 2nd term and said that he was seriously thinking about running for the United States Senate and that if Don Nichols didn’t run that is what he might do and you know no one really knew this and he was kind of letting me know because he thought that I might be interested in that, and I was and you know it allowed me psychologically to prepare if this domino started to fall if he didn’t run and Kirk jumped out I would be ready. I had been on city council just almost 3 years. It was 2 and one half years basically when Kirk announced and then I jumped in and announced that I was running for Mayor. I was 45 years old and looking back you know I had prepared really, really hard but probably didn’t know as much as I wish I had but I felt like I was ready. 

WG: That’s excellent. So what do you think has impacted you the most being Mayor then? 

MC: Well its first of all the previous Mayors did a wonderful job in setting me up to have a level of success. Now I will let others judge whether or not I have been successful but it was certainly no fault of the predecessors that I had they had built up the office of the Mayor as a position that people acknowledged favorably. People liked the Mayor. So in other words you know if you are elected Mayor in Oklahoma City people like you until you give them a reason not to and so that’s an advantage over some of the other political positions, where just by the nature of what you are doing people don’t like you and I mean that can happen. The position of Mayor in Oklahoma City was on good footing when I came in and it’s because of the Mayors before me. The past several Mayors had done such I think an admirable job. But what I was trying to do initially, my early thoughts were that we have to get Oklahoma City on the national map. People weren’t thinking about Oklahoma City. We had basically no brand and what brand we did have was because of our tragedies. It was because of the bombing and because of tornadoes. We hadn’t been protective of our brand and I would drive around the city, and this was when I was on city council going through those 3 years of preparing for what I hoped to be was Mayor and I would just notice we didn’t put the words Oklahoma City anywhere. It was hard to know what city you were in just driving around looking. We were obviously weren’t very proud of the name of the city because we weren’t trying to brand it at all and then when I decided to try you know that I could use my knowledge and interest in sports to try and get us a professional sports team and improve the brand. Looking back I had a couple of other struggles with the branding. When I was on the city council the idea came to sell the naming rights to what’s now the Ford Center, the sports arena. And I was hoping that we could not sell the naming rights and instead call it the Oklahoma City Arena and put Oklahoma City on the side of the building to improve our brand. And to a certain level I was trying to prove a point. It gave me an opportunity to talk about the lousy brand that we had as a city, and that you couldn’t find our name on anything why not use these naming rights that obviously have value for ourselves, and I lost that 8 to 1 on city council so we sold the naming rights and it’s the Ford Center, and I knew the money would be well spent. I didn’t necessarily think I was going to win that argument but I felt better about voting no on it. I was just nauseated knowing we were going to sell the naming rights to that building when we had so much to gain when keeping the naming rights for ourselves. I just didn’t feel like anyone in the city appreciated the fact that we needed to be protective of our brand, that cities had a brand. I don’t think that it had even fully sunk in here. So then the next one came up when the Civic Center Music Hall was getting ready to be remodeled and it was going to be reopened and I decided that it would be a good idea to rename it and put Oklahoma City in the name because we are basically opening up a new building, so maybe the Oklahoma City Performing Arts Center. I didn’t care what it was called just as long as it had Oklahoma City in the name. Well, that created a furor. I ended up taking on some of the most prominent civic leaders in town. I was able to persuade some my city council electorate to vote with me but at the end of the day there were 8 of us that showed up that day to vote and it was 4 to 4 so my motion failed, so I had lost again on the branding. So I was 0 for 2 when I was elected Mayor, but I had raised awareness. People knew that’s what I was passionate about, that we have got to improve our brand. So when I became Mayor I started going to New York and visiting with the NBA and the NHL about getting a team and ultimately it worked out for us. But those early failures I think were, kind of an eye opener for me but I clearly saw something that we need to be clearly working on and I’ve always thought that a leader needs followers but I didn’t seem to have many followers. It was just me talking about how important this image was. That we needed a brand and we can't let these tragedies determine our brand, that it matters and if people thought that it mattered then they didn’t seem to be doing anything about it and I kind of felt like a one-man side show on a lot of those issues. 

WG: There again you were kind of doing what was hard maybe going against the grain a little bit. 

MC: Yeah it was something that I was passionate about and willing to speak about yeah I guess so. I believed in it strongly and wanted others to believe it. 

WG: I can appreciate that and I have to say that the thought of moving when I moved here I didn’t have a very, let’s say a very high opinion of what Oklahoma City was. 

MC: You had no reason to. Here’s where that plays out, if one of our CEO’s is talking to someone on the east or west coast offering them a job here, are they going to be thinking to themselves I get to live in Oklahoma City? Or if I take this job then I have to live in Oklahoma City. I just felt like they have no reason to think anything positive about us. We haven’t protected our brand we have nothing positive to associate the city with. There are some positive things about the state, you know football and the Broadway play and things like that but you know Oklahoma City, what have we done to promote Oklahoma City in a positive manner. What are we associated with that’s overwhelmingly positive. I thought we had a great story to sell, a great product to sell but we weren’t selling it and to a certain extent I felt like I was the person that could get out and sell it. 

WG: Nice, and I think that you have done that so let’s talk about a few things that you have done as Mayor and maybe let’s talk about first the city is going on a diet. 

MC: Ok. 

WG: Honestly I was kind of wondering why that was important to you and maybe…… 

MC: Well uh I can literally speak on this for an hour and I have. And speak nationally on this issue because people ask me about it so, I’m going to paraphrase it to the extent that I can so we can succinctly get into that, but around that time when I was elected Mayor was about the time that Oklahoma city started showing up on a lot of lists. Best place to get a job, best place to start a business, and you know at that time we weren’t at the top of the list but at least we were on them. And so I was able to go out and speak nationally and speak positive things about Oklahoma City. I was trying to improve the brand, I was trying to talk positively about the city, get our own citizens excited about Oklahoma City and the future of this city because I really believed that we were about to accomplish great things. And then the list of the most obese cities in the country came out, and there we were. You know that we weren’t number one on the list, but I thought man I don’t even want to be on there at all, and you know that we were on there with a lot of really cool places. You know Houston is on there, Dallas, Atlanta, so it wasn’t like the world’s worst list of other cities to be associated with but, I thought to myself, my priorities as Mayor, I have announced them, I believe them, and I will tell everyone that will listen. My priorities are job creation and education. How can I say that job creation is my priority because if I am a job creator and I’m looking at Oklahoma City and see that they are on a list as one of the most obese cities in the country, how am I going to create jobs there if my health care costs are going to be higher than other places? What’s my absenteeism rate going to be if I create jobs in Oklahoma City, and so I felt like there was going to be an economical development issue that needed to be addressed with the obesity issue, and so I then got on the scales one day, kind of about the same time, not directly related but at the same time. I put in my height and weight on a website and realized I was obese and it surprised me. See I thought that it was everybody else, I knew that we had an obese city but I didn’t think that it was me, I thought that it was everybody else in the city, and I have had kind of a life long struggle with weight, always felt like I was on a diet. We gain 2 or 3 pounds a year and take off 30 pounds, and so my whole life had been kind of that yoyo of dieting like so many people. And finally one day I said you know the real problem in Oklahoma City is that we are not talking about it, no one is talking about obesity and I just decided that was going to try to figure out a way to try to start a conversation. So I came up with what I realize is kind of a zany idea of the Mayor putting the city on a diet and announcing that we are going to lose a million pounds. But really though those were two talking points that were designed to create a conversation, create a stir and it created a world, wide stir is what it did. I mean the Mayor of a major city actually put his city on a diet and so I mean people were talking about it, so it was exactly what I wanted to happen. I wanted to raise the awareness. We created a website where people could go on there and kind of document their success or their lack of, and as we are recording this 41,000 people have gone to the website and we have lost 540,000 pounds, 13 pounds apiece. You know it appears that we are having some success with actually losing weight but, what I feel really comfortable in talking about as the success of this program is the awareness side. Obesity is now something that this community is very well aware of and how dangerous it is, and it’s about what you eat and how much you eat and I think that talking about it is the first step towards turning it around. I can’t tell you whether we are skinnier or fatter than we were when we started the program but, I can tell you that we know a lot more about the issue than we did before and I would like to think that we have turned a corner and that we are heading in the right direction but, that is tough for me to sit here and say with a great deal of certainty. 

WG: Sure, well would you that part of that is also some of the motivation for MAPS and the trails and these kinds of things……. 

MC: Yeah it is because when we were putting it together and trying to, basically what we are trying to do is create a cultural shift away from the automobile and towards a city that revolves around people. And you know we had developed kind of a fast food culture because we are in our cars so much and the city is spread out. You know there are some advantages to sprawl, you know you don’t have much traffic congestion, you don’t have much air pollution, land is cheap. I mean there are advantages that we have taken advantage of through the years, there is reasons that spreading out can build your quality of life but, it leads to a very sedentary lifestyle and it creates a culture where you live on fast food and you tend to drive places instead of walk. And we hadn’t built streets that were pedestrian friendly and so we kind of, I say we kind of felt like MAPS 3 was an opportunity to kind of bring some of that in there. So sidewalks were certainly an important part of MAPS 3, it was the most popular one when we poled ideas. Finishing out the bicycle trail master plan was important to us, building a central park was always a key feature in MAPS 3. Again I think that is a healthy aspect of it. Senior health and wellness centers were something that I really wanted to try and plug in there, and ultimately we got it in there and got it passed. And so all of that is based around trying to change the culture of a community and so now we have a conversation going, now the city is doing its part, we are redoing all of our downtown streets to be more pedestrian friendly and so the infrastructure changes are taking place and I would like to think that long term we are going to go into a cultural shift and this community is going to place health on a higher level of priority than it does today. We certainly have a long way to go and these cultural shifts don’t happen very quickly, we know that but I think that we are doing our part. 

WG: I do too, it’s exciting to see. So let me take you away from politics a little bit and just say so in your own experience in trying to lose weight and things when you are not working hard, what do you do for fun, how did you lose the weight, what do you do for exercise, what do you do when you are not working? 

MC: Ok. I played competitive golf in my teens and then also in my 30’s so I did that in the 1990’s and then I started running and lost some weight. At one point I lost 30 pounds through exercise and I kind of gained it back. When I became Mayor I gained 10 pounds a year for the first 2 or 3 years I was Mayor. And everyone wants to feed the Mayor and so I guess I was eating it. I lost weight by simply reducing the amount that I ate. It’s that simple I would always exercise. I tried to play tennis and enjoy playing with my sons and lately I have been trying to take some classes trying to improve my education level and one of the things that I have noticed is that I’m playing tennis less. So I really need to get out there but I see where my time goes and it has been going towards studying as opposed to exercising. But yeah I am still passionate about sports and I love to work and that’s either good or it’s bad but it’s me and I am happiest when I am busy and I enjoy working. And so when people what do you do in your spare time, gosh I love working more than I like spare time so I don’t necessarily know how to answer that question. I try to spend more quality family time when I have a limited amount of hours to spend with my wife and my family so I try to make it count and the older I get the more I think that that is important and so it’s another reason that I don’t spend time doing things that might seem fun or going out with the guys. I just don’t do those things. I am either working or I am at home you know trying to cement relationships and stuff with my own family. 

WG: So tell me a little bit about your family, you have a wife……. 

MC: I would love to. I married my high school sweetheart and we got married after our second year of college and we have been married 31 ½ years it will be 32 this summer. We have 3 boys who are grown and who are all living in Oklahoma City. And we have a granddaughter and step grandson. And I think that they have been very patient with me you know being the spouse or being the son of an elected official is not all good and I have noticed through the 10 years that I have been doing politics, city council and Mayor and running for other stuff that it’s harder on the family than it is the candidate. I mean I can put up with it you know I know that people are going to throw darts at me and say things that aren’t rue especially in this blogesphere world people are just going to make stuff up and they can be really mean and I couldn’t imagine people doing that to people that cared about you know and it would really make me mad. And I know how much it must weigh on them to have me in such a public position and taking stands on sometimes controversial issues. So, I have always felt like being in politics is hard on the candidate but for me I like that. I enjoy the fact that it is a challenge but it’s really hard on the rest of the family and they didn’t have any say about it you know. They just found out that this is where I was headed and I recognize that and I appreciate them for it. 

WG: That’s excellent. I just have a couple more questions and then we will wrap it up but, are there any ways that your life has been different than you imagined it would be? 

MC: I wouldn’t say that it is much different than what I hoped. I wanted, when I was a kid I enjoyed politics and thought that it would be great to be an elected official someday and I would like to have been a television sports caster. I have gotten to do the things that I wanted to do so I can’t say that I have any regrets or that it’s turned out differently. I think it has turned out the way I hoped it would you know at least so far. 

WG: What kind of city do you hope to or what kind of city do you see your grandchildren living in? 

MC: Well one of my goals is to build a city not only to keep its young talented educated people but to attract others. I really believe that the future of job creation is about creating a workforce and a city where people want to live, that if you create a quality of life where people want to be then jobs are going to come and I think that is kind of a fairly new perception and I think that traditionally people went to where the jobs were. I think that in the future the jobs are going to go to where the people are and so for us to be successful in job creation, for us to live happier, wealthier lives what we have to do is create a city where people want to live and I think that we are doing that and I think that we are going to be successful for those reasons and jobs are going to continue to come and educated people are going to want to continue to live here and all of that is going to help raise the education level of the city and the state and create a higher quality of life. I mean you know that this has always been a great place to live and raise a family, it hadn’t always been a great place to visit and so we have amenities now to show off and, I’m always reminded that there is no one thing that creates a great city, you have to have a lot of things and you can’t be short of any of them. It takes a vibrant arts community, it takes you know for some people sports are important, for some people you know it needs to be the quality of the schools, and places to exercise, and having a church that you are comfortable with. There are a lot of elements to having a quality of life that people appreciate. And you can’t do all of that in a day and you can’t work on it all at the same time, and so as Mayor what you are trying to do is look after all of these elements and try to see how you can use your position or your abilities to try to strengthen that quality of life aspect. And so your question was about what kind of city do I want to create for my grandkids. I want to create a city where no matter how high a level of education you get, get the best education you can find in the world and then you come to Oklahoma City to work. That’s the kind of city I want to have. I want to have a city where the smartest and brightest and happiest people choose to live. 

WG: Excellent. So you have kind of already answered this last question then but how do you want to be remembered? 

MC: You know I don’t like that question. 

WG: I’m sorry. 

MC: I understand, I used to ask it. I was a journalist and I used to ask that question and think that it was so pertinent. But I tend to think that in the way that you are asking about how do I want to be remembered as Mayor, what I have come to learn is that Mayors in Oklahoma City and it’s because we have the city management form of government largely, if you are doing your job right then you are working on stuff that 5, 10, 20 years from now is either going to or not going to work, be appreciated or cursed.  And it doesn’t do much good to sit around and judge Mayors while they are in office in Oklahoma City. You need to really look back 10 years ago and say who was Mayor then. You know look at all the stuff that they were able to help accomplish. And so from that stand point I think it’s premature to develop any sort of opinion on me, pro or con. You know let’s wait 10 or 20 years and then see how the city is doing and then if a small part of that can be attributed to me then fine, and if it can’t then I know I did the best I could and I try to work hard and I love it and I have a passion for this job but, whether or not it has been successful that is for others to determine in a distant day. 

WG: Do you, just one last thing, do you think it’s been a little bit harder, I mean certain cities you go to and they have kind of a natural calling that people want. They have beautiful mountains or they have the ocean or something, and Oklahoma doesn’t really have any kind of natural draw like that. 

MC: That’s true but we also have one thing that they don’t have and that’s unity. People in this city get along for the most part, they put the city before their own self interest and when I go around the country and I explain Oklahoma City’s success and talk about what the previous Mayors have been able to accomplish, especially with MAPS for KIDS and getting all of the elements together to push that concept, people in other cities just shake their heads they can’t do these things. Their city is too splintered, there are too many people looking after their own self-interest, their own special interest group. In this city if you put yourself or your business ahead of the greater good then you are an outcast. That is not acceptable, it is not acceptable to put yourself ahead of the city's interests and that’s the way it should be, but I inherited that and I’m hoping it’s still that way when I leave. But that’s the amenity that we have and sure I would love to have mountains and love to have an ocean and have a beach that would be great things to put on our tourism brochures I get it. But when you are the Mayor and you have a city that has a high amount of unity, oh that makes all the difference I mean we can get things done because everybody is pulling on the same rope. 

WG: Excellent. Mayor Mick Cornett thank you so much for your interview today. 

MC: You are welcome.