Edmond: Where a Phrase Was Born in Tragedy

Edmond, Oklahoma was the site of two firsts in Oklahoma Territory history, one hopeful and one that became one of the darkest chapters in American workplace history.

The hopeful one came on November first, eighteen ninety-one, when twenty-three students gathered in an unfurnished Methodist church to take the first classes at the Territorial Normal School of Oklahoma, now the University of Central Oklahoma. Although the Oklahoma Territory Legislature had chartered three universities simultaneously in eighteen ninety, the Normal School in Edmond was the first to actually open its doors, making it the oldest public institution of higher education in Oklahoma.

The darker chapter came on the morning of August twentieth, nineteen eighty-six. Patrick Sherrill, a forty-four-year-old postal carrier who had been reprimanded by supervisors the day before, arrived at the Edmond post office before seven in the morning carrying three semiautomatic pistols. In less than fifteen minutes he killed fourteen coworkers and wounded six others before taking his own life. It was at that moment the deadliest workplace shooting in United States history.

The Edmond massacre set off a national conversation about workplace violence that had no established vocabulary at the time. A series of similar incidents at postal facilities over the following decade, more than forty people killed in postal workplace shootings between nineteen eighty-six and the late nineteen nineties, gave rise to the phrase going postal, an expression that entered the American idiom so thoroughly that many people who use it today have no idea it originated on a summer morning in this quiet Oklahoma City suburb.

Edmond rebuilt around its grief. Today it is one of the fastest-growing cities in Oklahoma, anchored by the university Patrick Sherrill's coworkers had no idea would outlast the pain of that August morning.