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Memorial Day weekend 1973: Saturday night in Tulsa
For fun, I decided to look up the local newspaper from 50 years ago this weekend. I was particularly curious to see what kind of live entertainment was on offer, and what people were watching on TV. (News clips below are from newspapers.com. Click the image to see the original...
Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi
We saw the new Star Wars movie last night. I'm glad we went, mainly because we finally found out a few answers to the questions raised by Episode VII. The Last Jedi had its exciting moments, a few funny moments, but overall, I found it unsatisfying. Like many Tulsans my...
April 21, 1914: Tate Brady offers to raise Indian cavalry for Mexico war
The Tulsa Daily World and the Tulsa Democrat both ran front page stories about Congress authorizing President Wilson to use the Armed Forces to intervene in Mexico. The World's front page was almost entirely devoted to the impending Mexico invasion. Above the masthead, a red banner headline read "LAND MARINES...
<em>Locaciones</em> and <em>Rumble Fish</em>
On Wednesday night, my wife and I went to Circle Cinema to see a double-feature: Locaciones: Buscando a Rusty James (Locations: Looking for Rusty James") followed by Rumble Fish, the 1983 Francis Ford Coppola film based on the novel by S. E. Hinton. The first film at the Circle Cinema...
Non-partisan elections: Can't tell the players
In this week's Urban Tulsa Weekly, Ray Pearcey deploys an apt analogy against the Save Our Tulsa non-partisan election proposition on Tulsa's general election ballot this Tuesday. If you are a baseball fan you've had time to recover from late night World Series games, so I want you to imagine...
Recreating baseball: Tulsa Oilers broadcasts in the '70s
I received an email of appreciation about the BatesLine entry on Radio's Online History Resource, and I was asked how I find this stuff. In this case, I had done a Google search for Hal O'Halloran -- his name had come up in an email conversation among a group of...
ONEOK Field: Only premium seating
After a brief visit to a nearby church's Easter egg hunt (where we bumped into Tasha Does Tulsa and her family, and where my four-year-old picked up only one blue egg and decided he was done, and my nine-year-old decided she was too old to participate), we headed downtown for...
Local link dump, 2008/10/29
There is so much happening and so little time to comment, so here are a few local links of interest: Bubbaworld has questions about the $135 million in unspent funds from past City of Tulsa sales taxes and bond issues: In what bank(s) are these surplus funds deposited? Are the...
Downtown Drillers review
I was in studio this morning with KFAQ's Pat Campbell to discuss the latest developments in the proposal to build a new ballpark for the Tulsa Drillers in downtown Tulsa, prompted by the announcement that the Drillers and the City of Tulsa are extending negotiations for 45 days. (Here's a...
Bixby Sixty-Sixers?
The Tulsa World is reporting that the Sixty-Sixers, Tulsa's entry in the NBA Development League, may play next season at the new SpiritBank Events Center in Bixby. The SpiritBank center will seat 4,000 to 4,500 for basketball, not much smaller than the Expo Square Pavilion and plenty big for a...
Roscoe Turner to Tulsa's "socially challenged"
Roscoe Turner, Tulsa's most believable city councilor, drills for the truth, in an open letter to bored Tulsa hipsters: Those who believe the Tulsa metropolitan area has nothing to offer and must spend tax dollars developing the river to keep our young professionals entertained must be socially challenged. There are...
Old arena to stay
First thought when I read this was, "This makes sense." Instead of demolishing the Maxwell Convention Center arena, they're going to keep it in place and instead expand the exhibit hall to the north into what is now a surface parking lot between 3rd and 4th, Houston and Guthrie. As...
Flunking the Yellow Pages Test
An edited version of this piece was published in the May 24, 2006, issue of Urban Tulsa Weekly. The archived version is no longer online. Posted on the web July 3, 2010. Flunking the Yellow Pages Test By Michael D. Bates When he was Mayor of Indianapolis, Stephen Goldsmith had...
Your tax credits send me to Shangri-La
(Added retroactively on June 3, 2006, to complete the column archive.) This week's Urban Tulsa Weekly column is about corporate welfare, connecting the dots between news that the Great Plains Airlines tax credits are being repaid with money that should be repairing roads and bridges, an effort to extend similar...
That's no bull
If you still have confidence in Tulsa Mayor Bill LaFortune's choices when it comes to our new arena and arena management, you need to head over to MeeCiteeWurkor's place and read how LaFortune punted away a major-league Professional Bull Riders event by insisting on scheduling a competing minor league bullriding...
Meaningless runoff averted by slim margin
New York City Democrats narrowly avoided having to go back to the polls for a runoff in their mayoral primary. Early counts showed Freddy Ferrer just shy of the 40% required to win the primary outright. The second-place finisher, Anthony Weiner, got about 29%, with the remaining 31% split among...
City names Vision oversight committees
This news is from early last week, but in the interest of completeness, here it is. The Mayor has named two oversight committees, with more to come. The first committee is for oversight of all Vision 2025 projects that will be built and managed by the City of Tulsa. The...
Another Ford Center event? Not exactly
In the interest of accuracy, I must inform you that Oklahoma City's Ford Center and Cox Business Center has added one more event to their sparsely populated calendar. John Mayer, a singer-songwriter, is on the calendar at the Cox Business Center (the old Myriad) for November 14. I guess the...
Is a new sports arena a need or a desire?
A reader of this site challenged me on several points. I won't name him, as I have no permission to do so, but I will quote his e-mail. I imagine his comments are widely shared among supporters of "Forfeit 4 Greater Taxes", so here is my reply. If the "downtown...
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