Kevin Costner Panhandle Roots
One of Hollywood’s megastars traces his family to the Oklahoma Panhandle with stories of the Dust Bowl.
Had it not been for the Great Depression, he would have been born in Guymon where three generations of his family lived. He grew up as an “Okie” in California in the 1950s.
KEVIN COSTNER, known for his starring role in many incredible movies and as John Dutton in the Netflix series, “Yellowstone,” has spoken poignantly about his Oklahoma heritage. The Costners migrated from North Carolina to Texas County, Oklahoma, about 1900.
Kevin’s great grandfather, Moses Costner, and his wife, Maude, raised 11 children in the Oklahoma Panhandle. Kevin’sgrandfather, Walter Costner, was born in Guymon in 1905 before Oklahoma statehood. He married Lillie Mae “Tig” Reno in 1927. He was 17, she was
14.
In 1929, Kevin’s father, William “Billy” Costner, was born in Texas County. It was about the time that the Great Depression, the largest economic downturn in modern history, hit the Great Plains. In addition to low commodity prices, searing heat and dust storms devastated the Oklahoma and
Texas Panhandles.
In the good years, Kevin’s grandparents had sold cattle and wheat and had enough cash to last four years. At 11:00 a.m. one day in 1931, Walter went to the bank in Guymon to deposit money from the sale of cattle. The clerk, who he knew, did not give him any warning. An hour later, the bank failed, closed forever, and Walter’s money was gone.
That was before the federal government guaranteed bank deposits to a certain limit.
Faced with a drought and no way to grow grass or wheat, they held on to 50,000 bushels of wheat grown during the good years, waiting for the price to go up. It never did.
So, Walter and Tig and their children joined thousands more headed for California. They left with whatever they could carry. Moses Costner and many of Kevin’s uncles and aunts stayed in Oklahoma. Kevin still has cousins in the Panhandle.
Costner said, “California wasn’t always very welcoming back then. Making a go of it wasn’t easy if you were an Okie.”
Kevin was born in 1955 in Lynwood, Calfornia. He grew up with very little money, but he had much more.
He said, “I had the love and the attention of parents who met in the ninth grade.” His father worked for an electric company most of his life.
When Costner was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers at the
National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City in 2019, he wished that his parents and grandparents could have been present in “this special, special place.”
Decades ago, after Kevin completed filming a movie in Texas, he drove to Tulsa to the Gilcrease Museum. He was fascinated with the work of Frederic Remington and Charles Russell and the Old West.
He was not disappointed. In an interview, Kevin also talked about a trip he took to the Oklahoma City National Memorial to honor the victims of the 1995 Murrah Building bombing. He said, “Oklahoma is a good place for me.”
Over the decades, Kevin, as an actor, producer, and director, has won two Academy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards. He earns $1.3 million per episode of “Yellowstone.”