Dispatch, September 28, 2004: 
Brother Pickens Still Waving
by V. Lee Parker

O.C. Pickens is a fixture at the Sabineland Wal-mart.   A lot of y’all probably have been thinking he works there, but that’s not so.  He just waves.  Voluntarily.  Without pay.  All day.  Those of us old enough can recall a time before Wal-mart when Brother Pickens was a fixture at Roper’s Discount which went out of business shortly after Pudgy Roper determined that Wal-mart was eating his proverbial lunch. 

Brother Pickens has been greeting customers since the spring of 1976 when he was hired by Roper’s to wear an Uncle Sam outfit and wave at people outside the store in reverence for the bicentennial of our country.  When 1976 turned into 1977, Brother Pickens decided that he enjoyed howdying with people so much that he would continue waving at the folks outside Roper’s for free.  Then in 1983, Brother Pickens found that the Uncle Sam suit was getting threadbare, and, in fact, had a big hole in the seat, so the forces of nature and time required that Brother Pickens wear his regular clothes if he intended to keep waving.

In 1986, Wal-mart opened and by the winter of 1987, Roper’s closed its doors.  But Brother Pickens determined that the closing of Roper’s would not hasten an end to his waving days.  The manager of the new Wal-mart, Randy Wade Starkdale, was at first hesitant to allow Brother Pickens to stand outside Wal-mart and wave at people, especially since Brother Pickens was getting up in years and the heat is so hard on old folks.  Randy did his best to dissuade this behavior, even going so far as to have the Sheriff’s office send a deputy out to reason with Brother Pickens.  Despite all this, Brother Pickens kept showing up every day at 7:30 AM to wave at the customers.  So Randy decided to make the best of it and invited Brother Pickens to wave inside the sliding doors so as to spare him from the heat of the day, even providing him with an official Wal-mart vest to wear over his shirt.  Subsequent Wal-mart managers have continued the tradition, and today, Brother O.C. Pickens, now in his 90’s, is still waving, albeit from a plastic lawn chair situated by the gumball machines just past the sliding doors. 

Present Wal-mart manager Ryan “Cooter” Doyle reckons that Brother Pickens has only a few more waving days ahead of him seeing as he spends most of the workday asleep in his chair.  Cooter, however, is determined to let Brother Pickens see things through to the end and provided this writer with the following nugget of wisdom:  “Brother Pickens has made waving his life’s work so who am I to stop him?  Besides, we all ought to take a lesson from him.  If more people would stop waving their middle fingers at each other and start using their whole hand, Sabineland would be a totally different place.”