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Smoky Dacus: Texas Playboys drummer remembers his work with Bob Wills
A little diversion from all the political stuff: I just came across a fascinating unpublished 1981 interview with Smoky Dacus (1911-2001), the original drummer for Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. The interview was conducted by Scott K. Fish for Modern Drummer magazine. Dacus tells of his early days growing...
"There is no Negro business district anymore"
Relevant to yesterday's post on the Smithsonian Channel documentary that misrepresented the history of Greenwood, Tulsa's historic African-American neighborhood that its residents rebuilt after it was sacked and burned in the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. The rebuilt neighborhood thrived and prospered for decades, becoming known as Black Wall Street, before urban renewal and expressway construction destroyed it again in the late 1960s. Here is a news story from the time that illustrates the social and financial impact of the decision to route the expressway through the heart of the Deep Greenwood commercial district.
James Garner's "hometown": Denver school and Denver Corner near Norman
Actor James Garner, born James Scott Bumgarner near Norman, Oklahoma, died this weekend at the age of 86. Articles about James Garner and his brother Jack report that their parents ran a general store at Denver Corner. The area is now within the city limits of Norman, but it was...
KAKC top 30 hits, September 8, 1971
Randy Brown has been posting Top 30 hit lists from his days at Tulsa's legendary rock station KAKC (he called himself Bob Scott on the air) on Tulsa Memories from the 60's and 70's Facebook group. The lists were based on surveys of sales at local record stores. He posted...
Run for school board! Oklahoma filing underway
Even though it happens every year, it always seems to sneak up on me, coming as it does between Thankgsiving and Christmas. The filing period for the Oklahoma 2011 public school board elections is underway. It began today and will continue through 5 p.m., Wednesday, December 8. Filing takes place...
Kansas is committed to historic preservation
Wichita has a downtown grocery store. I came across it while out for a walk in the eastern part of downtown, near the recently opened Intrust Arena. (Some people go to the Y or the hotel exercise room. I walk through downtowns and historic neighborhoods.) The store would be easy...
Wichita WiFi and coffee
Business has had me in Wichita fairly often over the past few weeks. I was telling a friend about my recent sojourn, and she replied that she'd driven through Wichita a few times and couldn't "get on board with the whole Kansas thing." I'll admit that I didn't have a...
A corner grocery for Brady Heights
There's an exciting article in the latest Urban Tulsa Weekly about an effort by my friends Justin and Leah Pickard to establish a small neighborhood grocery in the Brady Heights neighborhood in a 1920s building on Latimer between Cheyenne and Denver Aves. (So strictly speaking, it's not on a corner.)...
Pictures of old Amarillo on Route 66
I was googling for a restaurant sign in an old photo of Bob Wills' tour bus, the restaurant turned out to be the Old Tascosa in Amarillo's Herring Hotel. The Herring Hotel, like Tulsa's Mayo and Oklahoma City's Skirvin, is still standing but has been closed for over 30 years,...
"The good times never end when you're in Busytown"
A few days ago, Jon Swerens posted an entry at The Good City called "Politics can't save urbanism." Jon's point, in a nutshell, was that we can't use legislation and regulation to impose high-density urban living on a populace that believes it to be undesirable. The culture has to change....
The north Tulsa food desert
Those who've accused Councilor Roscoe Turner and north Tulsa residents of unjustifiable complaining about the closing of Albertson's at Pine and Peoria need to listen to the podcast of Saturday's Darryl Baskin show. The guest at the beginning of the show was Steve Whitaker of John 3:16 mission, and the...
Greenwood 1957
This entry was inspired by a recent comment by the president of Langston University. I'll say no more now, as I will address the comment in this week's Urban Tulsa Weekly column, but here are some interesting facts I gleaned from analyzing the 1957 edition of Polk's City Directory. For...
Rolling and bouncing; remembering Bartlesville
Our little one is now six and a half months old. At his six-month checkup back on July 11, he was 17 lbs. 6.5 oz., 26" long, and a 45 1/2 cm. head circumference. It was about that time that we started him on some solid food: oatmeal and rice...
A Tulsa mom writes about the impact of suburban sprawl
Found on a MySpace blog during a Technorati search for "Tulsa", this is from Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck: Another word for dependent is burden, and that term better describes these parents' perception of...
I hate mini-bars
In my last day or two at FlightSafety, I was going through my old engineering notebooks and remembering some of the projects I worked on. Occasionally some non-engineering thoughts were recorded on the page. During a business trip to Montreal in the summer of 2001 I came up with an...
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