SAND SPRINGS -- About once a week, 78-year-old Ray Veteto stands beneath the hickory trees at a Keystone Lake boat ramp with tears dampening his tanned cheeks.
He directs his gaze across the choppy surface of the lake, but his eyes see none of the muddy water. His mind fills with the image of Keystone, the town that lived for nearly 60 years on a site now covered by several dozen feet of Cimarron River water.
"I cry because I can see every tree and every house yet," Veteto says.
He cries because he is still "homesick and mad . . . just plain mad."
Veteto was one of Keystone's 300 residents uprooted when the Corps of Engineers began building Keystone Dam in the late 1950s. The project was finished in 1964.
Other towns, Appalachia, Mannford, Prue and part of Osage -- also were abandoned, the homes and stores torn down or moved, the neighbors and friends scattered beyond reach of the rising water.
Mannford and Prue were relocated. Keystone was not.
"Keystone thought about putting up another town. Then they thought about going in with Mannford," Veteto says.
In the end, Keystone just died.
Memories of it will live again Saturday when former residents meet at Keystone State Park for the 15th time since their removal.
"I came to Keystone in 1911," Veteto says. "My mother died in South Dakota in '11. My dad was up there shooting (exploding dynamite) in the mines."
He moved in with an uncle and aunt who had lived in Keystone since 1903.
There was little in the town at the time. A few houses. A store or two.
"It was just laid out, waiting for people to build," Veteto says. "The people that moved in and built, they just stayed there."
In the oil-boom years following World War I, the town grew, eventually reaching a population of 800. By the time the dam came, it had dwindled to less than half that.
"There'll never be a town or people as good as the people in that little old town down there," Veteto says.
Veteto's late wife was born there in 1914. He has a picture of himself as a young boy holding his future bride in his arms. They raised three sons in Keystone.
When Veteto lived there he owned a couple blocks of property in the town and about 80 acres of farmland on the edge of town.
After the removal, he ended up with 2 1/2 acres of woodland south of the lake.
"For the town of Keystone, we got the biggest gypping in the world," he says. "I hired two lawyers and fought (the government) for two years and still got put over the barrel."
He wanted more money, but didn't get it. He says all he could afford after getting his compensation was the wooded lot. He moved the house to the spot in 1959. It remains his home.
"That house came from down there," he says, pointing at the lake from his yard. "There's four more over there that came from down there. There's three around the corner that came from old Keystone."
Veteto talks while sitting at a shaded picnic table outside his home. The bell from the old Keystone church is in his front yard.
Because the house is his old Keystone home, it has had painful memories, he says.
The memories have hurt even more since his wife died, cradled in his arms on the kitchen floor in September 1984.
So Veteto spends much of the day at the picnic table, watching the hummingbirds and missing his wife and hometown.
"In my mind, there's eight or nine people -- old people in their 80s -- who died because they had to leave Keystone. I know that's what killed my aunt, the woman that raised me."
Although Keystone Lake is one of eastern Oklahoma's busiest recreation areas, Veteto says he has had little to do with it in the 22 years since it opened to public use.
"I said to everybody in the world that I wouldn't get on that lake, that I wouldn't use it."
He was true to his word for about 12 years. Then he ventured out in his son's boat.
"I've gone fishing with him two or three different times," he says.
Talking about the old hometown brings tears to Veteto's aged eyes. He apologizes.
"I'm not that sentimental, but I can sure cry when I miss my hometown.
"I thought I owned something to live on the rest of my life. To me, that's where I wanted to die.
"If I do, I'll have to go down there and die in that lake, and I'm not fixing to do that."
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