Leonard Whitcomb is a Gunnery Instructor. He works for AMSG on a contract to instruct young Lieutenants who are going to be artillery officers in the Army on how to hit what they are aiming at. It sounds simple, but it’s not. He teaches Gunnery at Fort Sill, about 25 minutes away from his home.
“If you think about throwing something through the air, and everything that would affect where it lands – the air density, pressure, rotation of the earth, temperature of the propellant,” he says, “angle of fire, all kinds of things. I teach them how to put that into mathematical expressions so that they can predict where a round will land when they fire it from one point to the other, with up to 18 miles in between the two points.”
Leo knows that the earth is not flat, “When we talk about the mathematical calculations I say, ‘We got any flat earthers in here? I’m about to prove you wrong.’”
Leo also has a side gig. He is the newly elected Mayor of Faxon, Oklahoma, Population 113. He doesn’t officially take office until August, but he is the Mayor-elect, kind of. He didn’t receive any votes.
The outgoing mayor is Leo’s Father-in-Law. He’s been the Mayor of Faxon for 30 years, and is in declining health, so Leo offered to step up and take over as Mayor because no one else in town wanted the job. But there are nepotism laws in Oklahoma, so there had to be an election.
“Because I’m related, I had to file for an election,” he says. “I had to put my name on the ballot. I had to actually get voted in. And I won my election.
With zero votes and no challenger.”
A little bit about Faxson. “We don’t have any businesses. Our sole income is the water bills everyone pays and the sales tax that we get if people purchase online and have their orders shipped to their house.”
The job also carries some responsibilities. “Our town is so small that when the temperature gets low, when it gets too cold, our water system quits filling the water tower and I have to go out and manually turn on the valves and fill the town water tower.”
Faxon has no police officer, no stop light, no gas station. “We literally live in a rural community where trade and barter is still very much alive. People trade vegetables out of a garden for meat during hunting season,” he says. “One of the coolest things about my particular piece of property is that it was the old wagon yard, where people would come in to town and tie up their horses and wagons, and then conduct their business, back when Faxon used to have a grocery store. And now, whenever I go to put in a flower bed or something in my garden, I’ll hit something metal, and pull it up, and it’ll be an old piece of a wagon wheel. It’s like history that comes out of the ground.”
Leo was a Marine. He was injured and had to retire so he went to college and earned a Master’s Degree. His plan was to pursue a career teaching public school, when he came across a job listing for people to teach artillery. In the Marines he had been an artilleryman, but he was only trained to load and fire the weapons, not aim them. He met the minimum requirements for the job, but they gave him six months to learn everything he hadn’t learned in the Marines about the finer points of high-level gunnery.
He learned it all in two months.
Leo sees his upcoming tenure as Mayor as a transition period for Faxson. “We have to evolve right now,” he says, “I’m in the process of learning this archaic system so that I know how to morph it into what it needs to be for today. When it comes to traditions, we do to keep a lot of things around the town. Our old school bell is still there.”
If you are planning to head out that way, let Leo know. “If you are visiting Faxon the one thing you should do, this is going to sound country is all get out, you should find someone that has a four-wheeler or a Jeep. You should drive down to West Cache Creek, and you should noodle a catfish.”
Whether you take Leo up on that offer or not, rest assured that Faxson is in good hands. Congratulations, Mr. Mayor from your colleagues at AMSG.
Written by: Jeffrey Dewhurst