Chapter One

Chapter 1
I Want My Own Planet

Frustrated by the lack of opportunity in southwestern Pennsylvania and drawn by the promise of a new job and a better life in Oklahoma–“Brand new state, gonna treat you great,” to quote the title tune of the Broadway musical, the official state song–Tom and Dolly Coyne loaded up the family car and set out on the seventeen-hour drive from Pittsburgh in the spring of 1961. Ranging in age from one to six, their four older children–Tommy, Kenny, Linda, and Marty–crammed into the backseat of the station wagon. Only a few months old, Dolly’s youngest son sat on her lap or perched on the dashboard, watching U.S. Route 66 unfold before them. “Maybe that is where I got my love of the highway,” Wayne joked forty-four years later.

Raised in working-class families of Scots-Irish, German, and Hungarian descent, Thomas Coyne and Dolores “Dolly” Jackson met and married in Pittsburgh’s Troy Hill neighborhood in the early fifties, and Dolly gave birth to their first son a short time later, at age seventeen. The family continued to grow after Tom returned from serving in Germany during the tail end of the Korean War. The couple’s fifth child, Wayne Michael Coyne, was born on January 13, 1961; their sixth and last, Wayne’s younger brother, Mark, arrived two years later, after the family had settled in its new home on the North Side of Oklahoma City.

Tom and Dolly both had watched their fathers work backbreaking jobs and die at relatively young ages. “My dad said that he didn’t want his kids growing up in the coal mines and steel mills of Pittsburgh, and