Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of the Will Rogers Memorial Museum and Tomb at Claremore. Yesterday’s card was of his birthplace, so two of the twenty cards in the pack dealt with The Cherokee Kid.

That’s not surprising, given that just a few years earlier, in 1935, Rogers had died in the plane crash with Wiley Post. It is hard, at this distant remove, to grasp how popular Will Rogers was on the national stage and the “good press” that gave Oklahoma, a state that often only makes the national news when something disastrous or embarrassing has occurred.

One obvious change at the memorial, beyond the switch from a single U.S. flagpole to poles for the U.S. and Oklahoma flags, is that the museum has expanded on its east side, which is the right side in the photographs.

Less obvious is that back in 1940, Will Rogers’ remains were still in a holding vault in Glendale, California. The bodies of Rogers and his wife, Betty, were not buried at the tomb in Claremore until 1944. The tomb is inscribed with an abbreviated form of what Rogers had said should be his epitaph:

I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I didn’t like.

Will Rogers

One indicator of Will Rogers’ status to Oklahomans is in the U.S. Capitol. Oklahoma donated two statues, of Sequoyah and Will Rogers. Rogers made it a condition that his statue be placed facing the House Chamber, supposedly so he could “keep an eye on Congress”. It is the only one facing the chamber’s entrance, and staff sometimes direct media to be at the “Will Rogers stakeout” to catch House members during and after votes. The left shoe of the statue shines, and supposedly each U.S. President rubs it for good luck before entering the House Chamber to give a State of the Union address.

After Rogers’ death, Oklahoma commissioned Jo Davidson to sculpt it. Betty had recommended him, as Will and Jo had known each other for some time. Davidson had frequently attempted to convince Rogers to pose for him, and Rogers had put him off, referring to Davidson as “you old head-hunter”. Davidson screened a number of Rogers’ films and sculpted him in the nude in clay, and then asked Betty to send him some of Will’s old clothes, which he modeled on the nude clay. Two casts were made, one for the U.S. Capitol and the other for the Memorial in Oklahoma.

The Memorial Museum and Tomb are located on a site Rogers had purchased in 1911 for his retirement home. When it opened in 1938, FDR gave a radio speech.

President Roosevelt’s Dedication by Radio on November 4, 1938:

This afternoon we pay grateful homage to the memory of a man who helped the nation to smile. And after all, I doubt if there is among us a more useful citizen than the one who holds the secret of banishing gloom, of making tears give way to laughter, of supplanting desolation and despair with hope and courage. For hope and courage always go with a light heart.

There was something infectious about his humor. His appeal went straight to the heart of the nation. Above all things, in a time grown too solemn and somber he brought his countrymen back to a sense of proportion.

With it all his humor and his comments were always kind. His was no biting sarcasm that hurt the highest or the lowest of his fellow citizens. When he wanted people to laugh out loud he used the methods of pure fun. And when he wanted to make a point for the good of all mankind, he used the kind of gentle irony that left no scars behind it. That was an accomplishment well worthy of consideration by all of us.

From him we can learn anew the homely lesson that the way to make progress is to build on what we have, to believe that today is better than yesterday and that tomorrow will be better than either.

Will Rogers deserves the gratitude of the nation and so it is fitting that the dedication of this Memorial should be a national event, made so by the magic of radio. The American nation, to whose heart he brought gladness, will hold him in everlasting remembrance.

The Memorial was initially almost bare except for the Jo Davidson statue of the man. The crowds that came to pay their respects were large, motivating Betty to give a major portion of his memorabilia to the Memorial Museum. It now houses his entire collection of writings and is the largest collection of Will Rogers memorabilia. The expansion to the east was made in 1982, and it includes a theater where you can watch some of his movies. I have always enjoyed visiting the museum, and there is a virtual tour.

A Bartlesville Connection

Will Rogers was friends with Frank Phillips and several of his brothers, and he would visit the Frank Phillips Home in Bartlesville as well as the Frank Phillips Ranch which became Woolaroc.

Will and Betty would also get together with Frank and Jane Phillips in New York, and once spent a week in upstate New York with them and Henry Firestone and his wife.

If you make it out to Claremore, be sure to also tour the J.M. Davis Arms and Historical Museum. I’m not into guns, but it still impressed me. Have lunch or dinner at the Hammett House.

Tomorrow’s postcard will take us to a frontier outpost established in 1824 to keep the peace between the Osage and the Cherokee.

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of Will Rogers’ birthplace near Claremore. The home still stands, but it is now about a mile away from where it was located when the postcard was printed.

The Dog Iron Ranch in Oologah had to be moved in 1960 to prevent it from being flooded by the creation of Lake Oologah. The current property of about 400 acres is a fraction of the original 60,000-acre ranch operated by Will’s father, and it originally had up to 10,000 Texas Longhorn cattle. The two-story house was completed by Clem Rogers in 1875, four years before Will was born.

Will left the ranch around 1905 and pursued an entertainment career in Hollywood. He became one of the highest-paid actors in the 1930s, appearing in over 70 films, and had a syndicated newspaper column and made many radio appearances. He died in 1935 when he and aviator Wiley Post crashed in Alaska on what was meant to be a leisurely trip around the world.

The Dog Iron Ranch was opened to public in the 1960s after the move, and the Oklahoma Historical Society sold it to the Cherokee Nation in 2023. It has since closed the ranch for over a year for renovations. Both Will’s mother and father were Cherokees.

Below is a documentary short exploring the difference between the “Rogers Ranch” and the “Dog Iron Ranch”.

A Bartlesville Connection

In December 1859, James Leontine Butler, an intermarried Cherokee, established an early trading post and post office at Black Dog Ford just south of modern-day Oak Park Village in Bartlesville. Butler Creek is named for his family. During the Civil War, he recruited a unit of Cherokee Mounted Rifles that included Clement Rogers. After the war, Clem resettled his family near Ft. Gibson, saving for four years before returning to the Cherokee Nation to start building their new home in 1870. Meanwhile, Butler had departed for Texas, where he had died in 1866 at age 33.

The ranch house is just a couple of miles north of the Skull Hollow Nature Trail that I’ve hiked multiple times.

Back in 1995, fellow science teacher Lynne Shaw and I toured the Northeast Power Plant at Lake Oologah. I created a slideshow of our tour which I eventually turned into a video.

Since that tour, one of the two coal-fired generators has been retired, and the other is slated to close by the end of 2026. Public Service Company of Oklahoma might convert or replace some existing boiler units to add more natural-gas fired generators at the facility.

Tomorrow’s postcard will take a just a ways down the road to Claremore.

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is a depressing one, since it shows the Eagle-Picher Central Mill, of the lead and zinc mining district near Miami. If you aren’t already aware, Picher is now a ghost town that was turned by its own industry into an environmental disaster.

Decades of unrestricted subsurface excavation dangerously undermined most of Picher’s town buildings and left giant piles of toxic metal-contaminated mine tailings, known as chat, heaped throughout the area. The discovery of cave-in risks, groundwater contamination, and health effects associated with the chat piles and subsurface shafts resulted in the site being included in 1983 in the Tar Creek Superfund site by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The “Picher postcard” is something else, with its composition of the flower bed in the foreground while in the background looms one of the immense chat piles by the railroad and the mill.

The lead and zinc ore mined in Picher was concentrated in on-site mills and then sent out for final smelting and refining at the Eagle-Picher smelter in Galena, Kansas a dozen miles to the northeast as well as plants farther east and northeast in Joplin and Webb City, Missouri.

At its peak in the 1920s, Picher had over 200 mills. The one in the postcard was located a few miles southwest of the town of Picher, between the towns of Cardin and Commerce. Another postcard, not part of the souvenir pack, gives some perspective.

Below is an aerial view of the town of Picher in 2009.

A 1994 study found that 1/3 of Picher’s children had lead poisoning, and the EPA and state agreed to a mandatory evacuation and buyout of the entire township. A 2006 study showed 86% of Picher’s buildings were undermined and subject to collapse. In May 2008, 150 of its homes were destroyed by a tornado, and in 2009 Picher was dis-incorporated. A satellite view shows the scale of the mining mess.

A Bartlesville Connection

Bartlesville had its own past pollution from three zinc smelters which located there in the early 20th century because of the cheap natural gas from the Bartlesville and Osage oil fields. The smelters polluted the soil across southwest Bartlesville. In the period of 1988-1991, approximately 13% of Bartlesville children living on or near the old smelter sites had blood lead levels greater than or equal to 10 µg/dL, the concentration set by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control as the indicator for potentially elevated blood lead levels. None of the children in a control group from areas of Bartlesville not in the vicinity of the former smelters had levels exceeding that threshold.

That led to a cleanup from 1994 to 2001 across eight square miles. However, most of the ore brought into Bartlesville came from Canada and South America, and it reportedly did not process domestic ore. So it was not undermined by tunnels nor did it have huge toxic piles of chat.

Eagle-Picher was a merger of the Picher Lead Company and Eagle White Lead, with the former established by O.S. Picher. His namesake area was the most productive mining field in the tri-state area, producing more than $20 billion in ore from 1917 to 1947. More than 50% of the lead and zinc metal consumed in World War I came from the Picher Field, with it peaking in the 1920s with about 14,000 miners and another 4,000 people working in about 1,500 mining service businesses. An extensive trolley car system once brought in workers all the way from Carthage, Missouri over 30 miles northeast of Picher. However, perhaps 20 square miles around Picher became a toxic wasteland.

Other nearby communities like Cardin, OK and Treece, KS are also now abandoned. There are various videos of what remains of Picher; below is one.

Old towns sometimes die hard, and there is still a Christmas parade each year through Picher; at least 1,500 reportedly attended the one on December 5, 2025. If you ever have the strange urge to visit Picher, don’t be surprised if a highway patrol car or a car from the Quapaw nation force keeps tabs on you. Mind your Ps and Qs.

Tomorrow’s postcard will be on a happier note, showing a famous Oklahoman’s birthplace near Claremore.

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of the Creek Indian Council House in Okmulgee. It still stands, but oddly enough it wasn’t the property of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation from 1907 until 2010. That disenfranchisement is emblematic of how First Peoples were treated for much of written history.

By 1837, most of the Muscogee Nation’s members were forced out of the southeastern United States along a Trail of Tears to Indian Territory. They held a meeting at the historic Council Oak Tree in modern-day Tulsa, but during the Civil War the tribe divided over alliance with the Confederacy. Opothleyahola, as in Lake Yahola in Tulsa, led a group of thousands that refused to ally with the Confederacy and retreated northward. Confederate forces attacked them in the Battle of Round Mountain, which was possibly near modern-day Yale, the Battle of Chusto-Talasah 2.5 miles southeast of modern-day Sperry, and the Battle of Chustenahlah west of modern-day Skiatook.

After the war, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation was established in Indian Territory, headquartered in Okmulgee. In 1877, they appropriated $10,000 for the construction of a new capitol building, which had separate chambers for the executive and judicial branches of their government, with the legislative branch divided into the House of Kings and the House of Warriors.

The Five Civilized Tribes Act of 1906 ended their self-governance, and the federal government seized the Muscogee Nation’s sandstone Council House, leasing it to Okmulgee county for use as its courthouse. In 1919, Okmulgee purchased the old Council House and its grounds for $100,000. They later debated tearing it down or adapting it into a hotel, but Will Rogers intervened. While entertaining a crowd of 2,000 at the nearby Hippodrome in 1926, Rogers remarked:

They took me over to see your council house. I like that. They tell me some of you business men want to tear it down. I’d think twice before I did that. The folks that built that building were in this country quite a while before you oil men. I’m a Cherokee and proud of it. We’ve got our little council house over at Tahlequah, and we’re going to keep it there.

If you did tear down the old council house, what would you put up? You’d erect some business building. You don’t want this town like all the rest.

Don’t build a Ford town. Have something a little different. People can remember Okmulgee by that building. Every place I go, you see an Owl drug store on one corner, filling station on the other, hamburger stand and branch bank on the others. Don’t build your town that way.

Owl Drug, by the way, went bankrupt in 1934, was acquired by Rexall, and peaked at over 125 stores by 1937. Its last traces were sold to private investors in 1977. These days the two dominant pharmacy chains are CVS, with almost 9,000 stores, and Walgreens with over 8,000.

Okmulgee opted to spare its historic building and used it as a sheriff’s office, a Boy Scout meeting room, and a YMCA. In the 1970s, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation re-established representative self-government, and in 1989 a million dollars was raised to restore the Council House as a tribal museum. In 2010, Okmulgee sold the building back to the Muscogee Nation for $3.2 million.

You can take a virtual tour of the building. It is 100 by 80 feet, with exterior walls of quarry-faced sandstone in a coursed ashlar pattern. Quoins accentuate corner angles. The House of the Warriors met on the eastern side, and the House of Kings in a smaller room on the west. It replaced a two-story hewn log structure that had been erected in 1868.

The Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s modern headquarters is the Okmulgee Creek Nation Tribal Complex less than two miles northeast of the old Council House.

Wendy lived in Okmulgee as a teenager and graduated from its high school. The town’s name comes from the Muscogee oki mulgi for “boiling waters” and was taken from a town in their native region in present-day Alabama.

A Bartlesville Connection

Both Bartlesville and Okmulgee had oil booms in the early 20th century. Bartlesville had its own oil pool beneath it, plus it was near the fields of the Osage Nation, while Okmulgee boomed from the nearby Morris and Lucky oil pools developed at statehood.

By the 1920s, Bartlesville had three zinc smelters, while Okmulgee had five refineries, multiple glass factories, and claimed to have the most millionaires per capita in the nation.

The towns straddling Tulsa to the north and south had similar population sizes until the 1950s. However, after that, Okmulgee gradually declined while Bartlesville expanded, until the oil bust of the 1980s, thanks to it being the world headquarters to Phillips Petroleum. Frank Phillips’ and Boots Adams’ commitment to keep the company headquartered in Bartlesville, rather than moving to Tulsa or Houston, transitioned B’ville from a rugged drilling town into a thriving white-collar town of executives, accountants, and administrators. Phillips Petroleum also invested heavily in research and development in the 1950s, bringing an influx of scientists, engineers, and researchers to Bartlesville.

Changes in how oil was processed affected Okmulgee. As the petroleum industry moved toward economies of scale, smaller inland refineries like those in Okmulgee became economically unviable, stripping the city of industrial jobs. The glass industry also modernized with increased competition and changing logistics, hurting the plants in Okmulgee. Bartlesville’s zinc smelters consolidated and finally closed, but its economy had already been transformed.

After the 1980s oil bust, Phillips employment in Bartlesville shrank from over 9,000 to only 5,400 by 1989. Phillips merged with Conoco in 2002, and Bartlesville lost the corporate headquarters. Its petroleum industry employment has more than halved since 1989 to about 2,500 across Phillips 66, ConocoPhillips, and ChevronPhillips. The city has still managed to maintain slow population growth thanks to decades of taxpayer-funded economic development, while Okmulgee has slowly shrunk.

Western Oklahoma has long had a decline in population while the counties around the two major cities are growing. However, Okmulgee, like Bartlesville, is too far from Tulsa to act as a suburb. However, notice how the Dallas influence is now driving growth in far southern Oklahoma. If Tulsa ever experienced that kind of growth, Bartlesville and Okmulgee might benefit.

Tomorrow’s postcard will take us to Ottawa county, in the far northeast corner of the state, to see an environmental disaster that was still in the making back in 1940.

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of the entrance to the Parrington Oval on the main campus of the University of Oklahoma (OU) in Norman. The description on the card gives away its age, because another oval was developed to the south after World War II.

I attended OU from 1984-1988, earning my undergraduate degree there, and I worked for most of those years at Scholars Programs on the top floor of the student union. I spent most of my time in buildings along the south or Van Vleet oval, with fewer reasons to be up north at the Parrington Oval.

The prominence of the flower bed in the postcard reminds me of the many beautiful ones that were meticulously maintained at OU. Below is a recent shot from the same vantage point as in the postcard, albeit with a different lens.

I notice that they added a statue to the north Parrington Oval in 1992. May We Have Peace was created by Allan Houser.

The postcard is a bit odd to me, since only two campus buildings are visible in the background: Evans Hall at the center, and Monnet Hall on the left side.

Evans is the administration building that was built in 1912 and embodies what Frank Lloyd Wright coined as the “Cherokee Gothic” look of the campus: red brick walls featuring a Gothic facade with light-colored stone. It was the university’s third try at an administration building after earlier ones burned in 1903 and 1907.

Arthur Grant Evans was the university’s second president, and he reorganized it into colleges and schools and merged its medical program with a school up north in Oklahoma City. English professor Vernon Parrington, namesake of the Parrington Oval, pushed to have the new building constructed in a collegiate Gothic design.

Monnet Hall was named for Julien Charles Monnet, the first dean of the OU College of Law from 1909 to 1941. He was fond of recounting how he arrived in Norman by train in 1909 and the temperature reached 114°F. He stayed at the Hotel Agnes, which lacked ventilation, leading him to call it the “Agony Hotel”. Despite that negative first impression, he eventually decided to accept the job.

His namesake building is a more traditional all-stone gothic affair, known to us engineering students as the “old Law Barn” with owls high up on each end which the engineers periodically repainted green. That tradition reflected a rivalry that began in the school’s early days, when some tipsy engineering students stole a cannon from a local park and shot it on St. Patrick’s Day. That shattered windows in Monnet Hall, upsetting the future lawyers. The rivalry between the engineering and law students lasted into the 1970s, but it was pretty quiescent by my time on campus in the 1980s. By then the law school had moved far to the south, but the owls stayed green.

A Bartlesville Connection

When the College of Law vacated Monnet Hall in the 1970s, the Western History Collection moved into the building, remaining there until May 2026, when it was consolidated with other special research collections on the fifth floor of the Bizzell Memorial Library.

The Western History Collection was established in 1927 as the Frank Phillips Collection, gaining its current name in a consolidation in 1967. Phillips originally intended to build a massive repository of Western history in the Bartlesville area, but that changed after extended negotiations with OU President William Bizzell and history professor Edward Everett Dale — as an undergraduate, I was often in the Bizzell library, and I had many classes, and I saw some of my favorite classic films, in Dale Hall.

Phillips provided an initial $10,000 to buy a massive amount of rare books, manuscripts, and vintage photographs in the 1920s and 1930s which form the foundation of the overall collection. His donation would be equivalent of a quarter-million 2026 dollars. Dale curated the Frank Phillips Collection for decades; the photograph shows him at one of the collection displays in the university library back in 1940.

Funly enough, although I visited almost every building on campus during my time as a student, including visiting every campus classroom as a member of the university’s Academic Programs Council, I barely stepped foot in either of those buildings. You can take virtual tours of the campus and not only look around the north oval but peek into many of the campus facilities.

Tomorrow’s postcard will take us to a building I’ve seen but never entered, down in Okmulgee.

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of Murray Hall at the Agricultural and Mechanical College in Stillwater. Two of those three titles have since changed. Murray Hall was stripped of that name in 2020, and it is now the Social Sciences and Humanities building and its north addition is now the Psychology building. The Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College was renamed the Oklahoma State University of Agricultural and Applied Sciences in 1957, and that was truncated to just Oklahoma State University (OSU) in 1980.

The Stillwater name remains, unchanged since 1884 when a caravan of Boomers settled in dugouts and tents beside a stream just inside the future Oklahoma Territory. They called the stream the Still Water and their settlement Stillwater. Surrounded by the U.S. Cavalry and cut off from supplies, the Boomers returned to Kansas, and Stillwater was not permanently settled until the 1889 land run. The territorial legislature approved it as the land-grant college site in December 1890.

Back in the 1990s, I earned 12 hours of graduate credits from OSU, although my master’s degree was earned elsewhere. None of my OSU classes were conducted at its main campus in Stillwater, instead being transmitted to Bartlesville High School via compressed video.

However, I was on the OSU campus a few times back in the 1990s. I was a sponsor for Bartlesville High School at the annual Interscholastic Meet held on the Stillwater campus. A drafting teacher from the Mid-High and I would corral a group of smart students onto a yellow school bus early on a Saturday morning for the two-hour drive to the Student Union, which is northeast of Theta Pond, the body of water in the postcard view.

As for Murray Hall, that five-story U-shaped building opened in 1935 as a dormitory for over 400 female students. It was the second largest state owned building in Oklahoma at that time, and it was named for the infamous Alfalfa Bill Murray. He was President of the state’s Constitutional Convention, Oklahoma’s first Speaker of the House, one of its congressmen, and its ninth governor.

Murray was also a virulent and vocal racist who pushed for segregation and Jim Crow laws. So in 2020 OSU finally removed his name from its buildings. At least for now, we still have Lake Murray in south central Oklahoma, and it will appear in one of our later postcards. So Alfalfa Bill will appear again in this series.

Theta Pond was built in 1895. Once known as College Pond and Horse Pond, being near a horse barn, water was once pumped by windmill into the pond and then distributed across the campus. In the 1920s it became Theta Pond after the nearby Kappa Alpha Theta sorority house. Over the decades, trees have grown up and obscured the view of the former Murray Hall, which was closed to residency in 1971 and has served various academic departments over the years.

You can take a virtual tour of the campus.

A Bartlesville Connection

Frank Boardman “Pistol Pete” Eaton was eight years old when his father, an abolitionist, was shot in cold blood by six former Confederates. Eaton grew up to be an expert shooter and reportedly hunted down and slew all of his father’s murderers.

He lived and worked in future Bartlesville during his youth in the late 1870s, having a residence just south of the mound on Jessie Creek, and later moved in with Jasper Exendine’s family. Exendine became a famous athlete in football and baseball, and he and Pistol Pete visited each other in Bartlesville many times and made appearances at the once famous Dewey Roundup rodeo.

After the 1889 land rush, Eaton settled and lived as a sheriff and blacksmith in Perkins, ten miles south of Stillwater. After seeing Eaton riding a horse in a 1923 Armistice Day parade in Stillwater, a group of Oklahoma A&M students decided that Pistol Pete would be a suitable school mascot, replacing a tiger one they disliked. The school’s teams began being called the Cowboys as well as the Aggies, and they officially became the Cowboys in 1957, with Eaton’s likeness adopted as the official school mascot the next year when he passed away at age 97.

Stillwater is 65 miles northeast of Oklahoma City and 64 miles west of Tulsa. The town grew from 3,444 in 1910 to 16,007 in 1940 when the postcard was printed. Now it is over 48,000, while the home of its chief rival, Norman, has grown to over 130,000. The next postcard will take us there.

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of the heart of Oklahoma City. Only a few of the buildings are recognizable since my hometown underwent a savage urban renewal process in the 1970s.

The most distinctive surviving building is the tapered First National skyscraper near the upper center, with the tall Ramsey tower to its left. You can click to enlarge the comparison below of downtown Oklahoma City in 1940 and the 2020s.

When I was a child in the 1970s, entire blocks of downtown west and south of the First National (below and to the right of it in the aerial views) were cleared for what became the Myriad Gardens, the Devon Tower area, and the Myriad Convention Center, with the convention center demolished in early 2026 to make room for a new billion-dollar basketball arena. The old Colcord building is one of the few survivors in that area.

Let’s focus on the two giants of downtown at the time of the postcard: the First National and, just across the street, the Ramsey Tower or City Place. They are now dwarfed by the silly Devon Tower, but they still loom large in my memory.

Throughout my childhood, my father worked for Cities Service Gas Company in the First National building. After his retirement in 1984 amidst the fossil fuels turbulence of the great petroleum bust, he kept going to a barber shop high up in the building. So he witnessed how it slowly emptied out and was neglected after 1990.

It fell into bankruptcy, but thankfully Gary Brooks partnered with Charlie Nicholas to purchase and renovate it. It took them seven years and $287 million to rework it into a boutique hotel, upscale apartments, retail, and restaurants while converting an office annex into parking. The beautiful marble banking hall became Tellers restaurant.

A Bartlesville Connection

My father worked for Cities Service Gas, which had once had both its executive and operations offices in Bartlesville. In 1943, the gas company’s executive offices were relocated to Oklahoma City while the operations offices went to Wichita. In 1957, the two were consolidated in Oklahoma City.

Meanwhile, Cities Service Oil Company operated out of Bartlesville after a 1959 consolidation, but in the late 1960s and early 1970s left town for a new building in downtown Tulsa which I will talk about in a later postcard post.

The holding company of both entities was once headquartered in the iconic art deco Cities Service building at 70 Pine Street in New York City until operations relocated in the late 1960s and 1974.

My childhood familiarity with Bartlesville came from passing through to and from visiting relatives in Independence, Kansas. We would usually stop in Bartlesville on our way north to have lunch with Frank and Alice Rice, retirees who had once worked with my father in the Cities Service Gas offices in OKC. They all worked in the Gas Measurement division; the photo is from 1958.

Growing up, I was always fascinated by the top of the 1931 Ramsey Tower across the street from the First National. The Ramsey Tower is now known as City Place, and neither the postcard nor the modern aerial view provide a clue as to what about it interested me, but its newer name provides a hint.

The first picture below might lead you to think my memory is faulty, as that shows a Liberty Bank electrical sign atop the Ramsey Tower, but in the 1970s an electronic billboard atop the elevator box spelled out “City” in cursive and then flashed BANK before flashing the time and temperature. It always annoyed me if a noticeable number of the marquee’s bulbs were burnt out.

The Ramsey Tower/City Place has a more lasting claim to fame in its interior spiral slide that travels the full height of the building. The metal auger has door openings on each floor to allow occupants to slide directly to ground level. Later fire codes made it obsolete, but it was still used as a temporary gravity trash chute during renovations.

The neighboring skyscrapers went up simultaneously in 1931 during the Great Depression. That timing would seem odd, save that the discovery of a huge oil field below Oklahoma City insulated it for awhile from the national downturn.

Walter Ramsey was an oil baron and hired Walter W. Ahlschlager to design and Starrett Brothers, both out of Chicago, to build his 32-story building. The same firms built the rather similar 49-story Carew Tower in Cincinnati.

Ramsey had bought the land parcel soon after First National Bank had begun excavating the property to the south. A race for which tower would top out first began in January 1931, which Ramsey won. He spent $3,000,000 on his 440-foot tall 292,304 square foot building. It was the tallest in the state — for one month.

First National opened in November and became the tallest building at 493 feet from its antenna tip down to the street. It was over twice as large, with an initial floor area of 604,334 square feet, and cost $5,500,000. The top of the First National had the exclusive Beacon Club restaurant, named for the 25-foot tall aircraft beacon above it. The beacon’s red bulb was once visible for 100 miles.

When I was a kid visiting my father in the First National, I loved whizzing up and down in the express elevator. I ate in the Beacon Club with him once. The private club once boasted a membership of about 1,000 and civic giants like Dean McGee, First National CEO Charles Vose, and publisher E.L. Gaylord used to meet there weekly. The Club eventually faltered, and my father never went back after getting food poisoning there. With the First National occupancy in decline, in 1997 the club moved out of its iconic home on its top three floors over to the 24th floor of the Oklahoma Tower, and it finally closed in 2017 with just 200 remaining members.

Tomorrow’s 1940 postcard will take us to Stillwater. Care to guess the surviving but renamed building that will be pictured?

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of a scenic drive along the Cimarron River at Guthrie. What do you think of when you hear the word Cimarron?

I tend to think of the Edna Ferber novel that entered the public domain this year, but you might think of the Academy Award-winning film of 1931 or the 1960 remake with Glenn Ford, Maria Schell, and Anne Baxter.

I doubt you’d think of this view, especially if you’ve ever seen the actual Cimarron River, which is infamous for picking up lots of dissolved minerals and red soil, so I’m thinking the postcard artists might have taken some liberty with the water’s coloration.

There are three different Cimarron Rivers. The one pictured is a tributary of the Arkansas River that extends 698 miles across New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas.

Back in 2012, I was at the Cimarron at the very edge of the Oklahoma Panhandle, but it was bone dry. I wouldn’t expect that to make it onto a postcard.

My guess for the location of the 1940 postcard shot is Doolin’s Fishing Hole along US 77 seven miles north of Guthrie. The original photograph was taken by Guthrie photographer Al Bryan, while my shot is from Google Street View.

Back in 1930, The Daily Oklahoman had a shot from nearly the same vantage point:

Here’s a better version of the Oklahoman’s 1930 photograph:

Doolin’s Fishing Hole reminds me of 1952’s The Cimarron Kid starring Audie Murphy as real-life outlaw Bill Doolin. Doolin was a founder of the Wild Bunch, or Doolin-Dalton Gang, which specialized in bank, train, and stagecoach robberies in the early 1890s. Some speculate that Doolin was the sixth man in the disastrous attempt by the Dalton Gang to rob two banks simultaneously up in Coffeyville. He was killed by Deputy U.S. Marshal Heck Thomas in Oklahoma Territory on July 5, 1895, and he is buried in the Boot Hill section of Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie.

A Bartlesville Connection

Buried next to Bill is poor Elmer McCurdy, an alcoholic and outlaw. He tried to rob a train near Okesa, just west of Bartlesville, in 1911. However, instead of stopping the train carrying $400,000 in cash for the Osage Indians, he stopped a passenger train and got very little for his trouble.

He holed up in a hay shed on a ranch near Bartlesville, but a posse with bloodhounds tracked him down. He died in a shootout.

No one claimed his body, so the undertaker in Pawhuska embalmed it and charged people a nickel to view it. The body eventually was bought and sold to many different circus side shows. People eventually forgot it was a real body, and in 1976 it was on display in an amusement park in California. The television show The Six Million Dollar Man was shooting an episode there, and when a crew member moved what he thought was a mannequin, an appendage snapped off. The L.A. coroner’s office was contacted, the body was identified, and the remains were finally interred in Guthrie, 66 years after his death.

Guthrie is famous for being the original state capital in 1907. Oklahoma City business leaders soon campaigned to shift the seat of government, and an old saw is that in 1910 Oklahoma’s first post-territorial governor stole the state seal in the dead of night, drove from Guthrie to Oklahoma City, and stashed the seal under his hotel bed.

The reality is that by 1910 OKC had grown by 94% since statehood to over 64,000 people while Guthrie was stuck at less than 12,000. A special election was called in June of that year to choose between Oklahoma City, Guthrie, and Shawnee. OKC won easily, and it was actually W.B. Anthony, the first governor’s secretary, who smuggled the seal out of town. The governor came in to OKC by train from his home in Muskogee, and he declared OKC the new capital with the Lee-Huckins Hotel acting as a temporary capitol building.

Guthrie these days has an immense Scottish Rite Masonic temple. It was built in the 1920s on the 11 acres originally platted as Capitol Park. You can take a virtual tour, and if it is summertime, that might be best, given that the main rooms of the huge old building are not air conditioned. I was a DeMolay when I was in junior high, and my initiation was at the big temple.

The State Capital Publishing Museum downtown is a memorable structure that was once the largest dedicated printing facility west of the Mississippi. It was home to a newspaper and virtually all of the preprinted forms used by courts and county clerks throughout Oklahoma were once printed in that building. To this day, the first floor lobby has 620 drawers on its south wall that still hold many of the preprinted forms.

Well, Oklahoma City came up in this post, and that is where the next postcard will take us.

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of The Pioneer Woman monument in Ponca City. It was conceived, directed, and financed by Ernest Marland, an oilman, philanthropist, spendthrift, and politician. In 1928 he created a scandal by marrying Lydie, the biological daughter of his first wife’s sister, whom Marland and his first wife had adopted when Lydie was 16. Marland’s first wife later died, and he had the adoption annulled and then married Lydie when he was 54 and she was 28. Marrying his niece and former daughter didn’t prevent Oklahoma from electing him to Congress in 1932 and as governor in 1935.

In the early 1920s, Marland had been asked about commissioning a statue to the vanishing American Indian. Marland answered, “The Indian is not the vanishing American — it’s the pioneer woman.”

Ree Drummond came later.

Marland staged a design competition in 1926, paying a dozen artists to craft 3-foot bronze sculptures which were exhibited in a dozen cities. Bryant Baker’s model, Confident, was the most popular, and Marland commissioned a monumental version of it for Ponca City, which was unveiled in 1930.

The monument survives. The Pioneer Woman Museum says, “It is a heroic statue is of a young, sun-bonneted pioneer mother, protectively leading her son by the hand, striding confidently, head held high—a young woman of sturdy beauty and dignity whose eyes are fixed on the far southwestern horizon. Courage, determination, and humility in her face and a bible in her hand.”

The Museum adds that the statue is 17 feet tall, weighs 12,000 pounds, and sits upon a 16-foot-high granite base. It cost $300,000 back in 1930.

A Bartlesville Connection

In 1940, Marland faced financial ruin and sold the small bronze models from the competition to fellow oil tycoon Frank Phillips. The individual artists had each been paid $10,000 for their work, but Phillips acquired the bronzes from Marland for just $500 each. They are on display in his Woolaroc Museum near Bartlesville.

I’m not surprised that Faithful by Arthur Lee or Affectionate by James E. Fraser were not chosen for the monument, as Oklahomans might accept Marland marrying his adopted daughter/niece, but not public nudity. I’m truly glad that Trusting by Jo Davidson wasn’t picked, because her sun bonnet works too well, leading me to think, “Somehow Palpatine returned.”

If you ever go to Ponca City, you can take a look at the monument and its museum, but the town’s star attraction is the impressive Marland Mansion, which has an outbuilding with the contents of sculptor Bryant Baker’s New York studio with copies of many of his works. Marland’s previous home on Grand Avenue, Marland’s Grand Home, is also worth a visit. If you don’t make it to Ponca City, you can still enjoy a virtual tour of the Mansion and an interactive tour of the Grand Home. But you really need to go tour them in person, and be sure to eat at Enrique’s out at the airport and enjoy the puffy chips.

Tomorrow we go for a scenic drive along the Cimarron.

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of Oklahoma’s Capitol. It is the back cover of the pack and yes, the Capitol looks a bit different these days.

Most obviously, back then there was no dome, and it didn’t get one until the early 21st century. When I was a kid, I thought it appropriate that while the 1914 blueprints included a dome, budget shortfalls and a supply shortage from World War I led to that being cut from the project. The conspicuous absence of a dome decades later effectively symbolized my home state’s struggles.

I worked at the capitol complex in the summer of 1985 as a minimum wage office boy for the Oklahoma State Department of Tourism. On $3.35 per hour, even with free room and board from my parents, I couldn’t afford to eat in the basement cafeteria very often, but there were a few times when I walked along the tunnel from the Will Rogers building to the Capitol for lunch. Frosty Troy, the watchdog publisher of The Oklahoma Observer, could usually be spotted at one of the tables, regaling someone.

One day that summer, I took my lousy Kodak Ektralite 110 camera over with me and photographed the shallow stained glass saucer dome that used to grace the fourth level of the truncated rotunda. Decades after the real dome was added, the remnants of the old saucer dome were put on display in the State Capitol Museum.

Back in 1928, the discovery of the Oklahoma City Oil Field led to oil wells being scattered across the city. They were once so common that there were still stripper wells and tank batteries scattered about my neighborhood when I was a kid. Dozens of active oil wells were drilled near the Capitol.

A Bartlesville Connection

The wells on the capitol grounds included Petunia #1, which was drilled in a flower bed in front of the building in 1941. Fain-Porter Drilling company whipstocked the bore hole for Bartlesville’s Phillips Petroleum, making it a non-vertical directional drill that burrowed beneath the Capitol itself.

A year after my stint at the Capitol, Petunia #1 was plugged by Phillips, its operator and half-owner. That well alone had produced 1.5 million barrels of oil and 1.6 billion cubic feet of gas, providing the state with over $1 million in royalties and gross production taxes…and the Capitol still didn’t have a dome.

It was an oddball distinction. Governor Frank Keating spearheaded a fundraising drive to finally add a dome, and that work began in 2001. Phillips Petroleum was one of the sponsors, donating $3.5 million towards the project’s $22 million cost.

The dome is 157 feet tall with an 80-foot diameter. The outer dome is precast concrete and cast stone, with an inner coffered dome of cast gypsum panels. The gorgeous interior is an interpretation of the state wildflower, the Indian Blanket Gaillardia pulchella.

A 17.5-foot bronze statue of an American Indian warrior, called The Guardian, was created by artist and former state senator Enoch Kelly Haney. He refused the $50,000 commission for the piece. There is a 9-foot bronze replica of it inside the Senate Lounge.

You can view many of the artworks decorating the Capitol at the Oklahoma Arts Council’s Oklahoma State Capitol Art Collection website. That does it for this entry in the postcard pack. Tomorrow we head to Ponca City.