By Emma Rowland, Gaylord College Class of 2026
The Oklahoma City bombing was an event covered by multitudes of reporters. But out of all of them, Nolan Clay had a particularly vital role: he was writing for the victims.
Clay graduated from OU in 1982 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism and earned his master’s from the University of Missouri in 1984. Clay immediately went into the field reporting for the Oklahoman beginning in 1985. He has provided Oklahomans with essential news for 39 years through his stories, but there was one pivotal story in particular that he would spend 10 years of his career reporting on.
“The day of April 19th my bosses told me and few other reporters not to go down there,” Clay said. “They told us we couldn’t have everybody go down there in case they capture the person who did this. Which was smart because as we know now, Timothy McVeigh was arrested that day.”
Clay spent the majority of that day making phone calls to find out where the trial would be held.
He spent 1996 traveling back and forth between Denver and Oklahoma City for the pre-trials. Clay lived in Denver from March of 1997 to mid-January of 1998, where he covered both Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols’ trials. He mentioned that because of the amount of coverage these trials were receiving, he became very close with the other reporters who also were living in Denver.
Clay returned to Oklahoma, where he would cover Timothy McVeigh’s execution in 2001 and Terry Nichols’ state trial in 2004.
“It had a ripple effect on journalism,” Clay said. “It was a deal where you don't think something like that could happen here, but it can.”
The people of Oklahoma relied on Clay for every detail of their information regarding the aftermath of the bombing. He served the community through the stories he provided in The Oklahoman.
“This represented a shift and a realization within the public and the media that we can have “home-grown terrorists,” Clay said. “You just have a realization that the unthinkable could happen.”
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