BRICE COLEMAN REVISITED by JOSH HARRINGTON
Brice reached the rank of Major during his time in the Army, and he was “always looking for a better way to get around other than walking.”
Brice is pictured here in a U.S. Army chopper. 6 THE CORRIDOR MAGAZINE / JULY 2020
This Patriotic Edition of The Corridor Magazine marks the one-year anniversary of my first opportunity to write for them. It’s truly been a treasure to use this platform to write about some of the people in my life that I care for the most. Joe Gooch and the gang have been documenting the stories that are all too often left unheard, and we have plenty of tales upon which to shed light. Moreover, as the avid reader I am, the best part about writing for The Corridor Magazine team is the chance to go back and comb through the articles that have been written for the publication. As such, I recently got the chance to read a lovely piece on my co-worker’s grandfather, and I wondered if there was anything else we could share with our readers on this humble but all-too intriguing figure who made his home in Bristow. I sat down with the Coleman family to find out more. Donnie Schroeder’s article for the March 2017 Home Improvement Issue of The Corridor Magazine touched on the life and times of one of Bristow’s many decorated veterans, Brice Coleman. He not only served his country for nearly 30 years, but on top of that, Brice has the distinction of also serving as the Creek County Sheriff for 14 years. I spoke with his son Michael (referred to as Mike in this interview,) as well as his grandson Larry, Jr. who are rightly proud of their patriarch’s rather esteemed reputation in his ventures. Leading off our interview, I asked about some of the ways that they were most proud of him. “I always looked up to him; when I was going through some training during Operation Iraqi Freedom, he was always eager to ease my mind. He’d say, ‘Believe it or not, all the training you did will kick in, and it’ll just be muscle memory at that point,’” Mike answered. “It did the trick and calmed me down pretty well for the time being. He instilled a sense of peace for me from his experiences. I mean, he was a junior in high school when he went to Korea to fight.” “I remember other times when he would fly overhead in his Huey when he was with the 45th in Tulsa. He would circle the house three or four times, which was really neat. The Huey has a really distinctive sound when it flies overhead, and we were all quite fond of hearing it when he would fly over,” he continued. Larry, Jr. and Mike also spoke about one of his accomplishments, which was when he piloted the vessel that held VIP’s that included astronaut and senator John Glenn and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vice President Hubert Humphrey to the Paris Air Show; Glenn and Humphrey were titans of the era, both culturally and politically. In this gesture, it shows the significance of the rapport he
