Years ago (and seeming another life) ago, I lived in Oklahoma. Fresh out of college, it was the best job I could find.

So I’m down there one night covering a town council meeting in the heart of the Little Dixie section of Oklahoma, a village whose sole claim to fame is that it was the site of the last surrender by Confederate forces at the end of the Civil War. Of course, they prefer to phrase it as the site of “the last Confederate holdouts in the war of Northern agression,” but I digress.

So I’m there, covering this meeting, during which the dirt-covered, overall-wearing head of the public works department lobbied to buy a new oil pump for the “village truck,” and the clerk had to stop several times while reviewing the previous months’ minutes because she couldn’t read her own handwriting out of the official village spiral notebook. So really, for small town Oklahoma, nothing out of the ordinary happened. Of course, I hadn’t yet talked to the mayor, and I had no idea that I was in for down home, ignorant, but at the same time warm welcome to the area.

So after standing there chatting with the guy for a little while, I hand him my business card. He takes one look at it and says “Rusty Shackleford, well that’s a polack name,” I just stand there for a second, not sure of what to say and he continues. “Where are you from, you don’t talk like us.”

“Detroit,” I reply.

“Dee-troit?” he asked. “Well shit, I used to work in a Packard plant during the war. I lived in Hamtramck, that’s how I knew you was a polack.”

Well, it’s hard to argue with that kind of logic.