Category Archives: Our World

Our World – Idaho Falls Temple

The Idaho Falls Idaho Temple is located right on the east bank of the Snake River in Idaho Falls, Idaho. It is a beautiful gleaming white structure constructed of reinforced concrete. The exterior is covered with a cast stone of quartz aggregate and white cement which gives it the bright white appearance.

It is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the “Mormons”).

Construction was started in 1939. Completion was delayed by World War II and the building was dedicated in 1945. It was the first Temple in Idaho, and only the tenth ever constructed. The church now has 138 worldwide. It was the first Temple built with a single spire design.

I’m going to venture off and display my architectural ignorance and say that the church has a vaguely art deco design. Given that, the building was inspired by a vision of an ancient Nephite temple by architect John Fetzer, Sr., who had prayed for guidance.

The Temple spire is topped by a statue of the Angel Moroni.

Temples are not used as churches for regular worship. They are considered to be a house of the Lord, and a place to make covenants, receive instructions, and perform special ordinances. After dedication, they are open only to members of the faith in good standing. Before dedication they are open for a few days to the public. This is called “Open House.” I toured the Oklahoma City Temple in 2000 during its Open House. I was very impressed with the building and the care that went into its construction.

Although the Temple itself is not open to the public there is an adjacent visitor center. We were on a family walk up and down the river so we didn’t go through the visitor center or view the adjacent gardens and water features. (We missed out!)

Our World

Our World – Oklahoma Centennial Botanical Garden

We got a little break ffrom our 100+ temperatures on Saturday so we loaded up and went to see the Oklahoma Centennial Botanical Garden about ten miles northwest of downtown Tulsa.

It covers about 170 acres located in the Osage hills with a variety of terrain from a small lake to meadowland to lots of woods.

We had never visited the gardens before. I had run a couple of trail races through it but I was more interested in not tripping and falling on my face than looking around and seeing what is going on.

It is a work in progress but they have built nice trails with benches, the lake and a small visitor center overlooking the lake.

The Gardens have been a long time in coming and I think it is already a great asset to Tulsa. As they install the gardens it will become even more valuable.

Meantime, I’ll just poke around way behind Sweetie and SuperPizzaBoy taking my pictures and seeing what’s what.

In deep summer the colors are mostly gone, except for the greens, but if you look you can color here and there.

It seems like you are never very far from an oil well in Oklahoma.

Right now it is only open on Saturdays from April to October. They will expand the hours as they expand the facilities.

It’ll be fun to watch this play grow as the years go by.

Our World

Our World – Boston Avenue Church

Boston Avenue Church is one of my favorite subjects and used to be the Yogi family church. It is an art deco design structure completed in 1929. The architects of the church are Bruce Goff and Adah Robinson. The interior is just as beautiful as the interior. If you want to see it the Church offers tours after the 11 AM service on Sundays.

Our World Tuesday

Our World – Stoneburg, Texas

Sweetie and I have been traveling down to north Texas a bunch lately. We passed the house below four times in Stoneburg, Texas, on the fifth time I told her that I was taking a photo of it on our way back. Stoneburg is so small that even if you don’t blink you might miss it.

It is an old stone building and I think it is beautiful.Surely there should be something on the world wide web about it, right? That is why Al Gore invented the internet, to satisfy our curiosity without actually having to do much work, right?

Well, it is on the web alright, but just photos. No information about what it was although one source says it was a gas station. May be, I don’t know. It is made out of melted glass, old bricks, stones, and locally sourced petrified wood. All of which is cool.

So I didn’t find out much about the building. I think it is great all the same.

It turns out though that Stoneburg, Texas has made the news for other reasons. Most recently it was burned over in a horrific wild fire of 25,000 acres back in 2009. The other reason that Stoneburg made the news is the notorious serial killer Henry Wayne Lucas. He lived for a while at a religious commune near Stoneburg. He confessed and later recanted to killing thousands of people. It was enough of a mess that the then Governor of Texas George W. Bush commuted Lucas’s death sentence to life. He is dead now. If you lived in Texas back in the 80’s as I did you should remember the name. I remember that he confessed to a murder committed near where I lived in Conroe, Texas just north of Houston.

Our World

You Know, You Actually Can Go Home Again…

Thomas Wolfe was wrong, you can go home again, you might get a little dizzy though! The week before last me, my Dad, my Sister Ellen, and Brother Bob went to Payson, Arizona for a church reunion that my parents helped start back in the early 1960’s. We lived there back then you see, Ellen doesn’t have any memories but that is where she was born. Dad was the Payson District Ranger on the Tonto National Forest.

Back then Payson was out in the sticks so the government provided us a house. This is where we lived. It was exactly like the house we left in Coyote, NM where Dad was a Ranger for the Santa Fe National Forest. I remember every detail about the houses. Or at least I think I do. Now it is a storehouse for the local parks department.It is just exactly like I remember except it was yellow when we lived in it.

Here we are, Ellen, Brother Bob, Dad, and yours truly. Best BIL in the world, Irv took the pic. (Sister Ellen’s post on this trip.)

This is Dad’s former office. Now part of the Rim Country Museum in Payson. It was closed the day we were there but the nice people at the museum opened it up for us.

A listing of the Rangers. Dad is listed as the Ranger from January 1960 to July 1962. We were proud of him then, and we are proud of him now.

The getting dizzy swooning part is when we went into the main part of the museum. It used to be the Assistant Ranger’s house. I hadn’t been in it for about 50 years. The details I remembered were overwhelming. It is bizarre to go into somebody’s house that you knew very well and it is now a museum.

The biggest shock and vertigo was the next door elementary school. I went to First Grade there and now the brand spanking new school is named after my first grade teacher. I had her in her 45th year of teaching. Everybody now speaks of her in reverent terms about how great she was. Maybe so but from my first grader’s perspective she invented shock and awe. Have you ever been slapped out of your seat and onto the floor. I have!! I have to tell you though that doing some research on Julia Randall I have some newfound respect for her. She started teaching at age 17 in 1916. She taught first grade from 1923 until she retired in 1969. The Payson Roundup website has a great article on her. She really was a true western pioneer teacher.

The old Ranger Station is now a very nice park with ponds and fountains and such. This used to be where the Forest Service had the helicopter landing pad and close to the warehouse where the guys who worked for Dad used to work when they weren’t out fighting fires. Brother Bob and I told him how we used to go pester his guys and he was shocked.

You see the Forest Fire fighters nowdays may train by playing frisbee football. The guys we knew way back when trained on whiskey, cigarettes, and poker. Dad was a little shocked that we hung around them. He got doubly shocked on this trip when Bob and I told him about jumping off the platforms they used way back when to teach the firefighters how to jump out of hovering helicopters. Of course brother and I were shocked that he was shocked. He wanted to know what else we did. We think we may have told him too much already.

Anyway, I have to tell you I was very happy over going back to Payson. The woods that brother Bob and I roamed are now there for everybody to enjoy, Dad’s work, and the work of others like him is honored, and everything looks great!

Our World

Our World – Seeing for Miles and Miles

Fellow Blogger and Geocacher Baloney of That’s Baloney and her husband Doc invited Sweetie and I to a fundraiser on the 60th floor of the Citiplex Tower in south Tulsa.

CityPlex Tower (Photo credit: alnbbates)

The building is 60 floors tall. One of the tallest buildings in the state and there is nothing really close to it anywhere close.

Cityplex Towers started out as Oral Robert’s medical school and hospital. Now it is a huge office building with a banquet room on the top floor. You can literally see for miles from up there. You can see for yourself just how flat Oklahoma is.

The big round building is the Mabee Center where the ORU basketball team plays. Sweetie and I saw Huey Lewis and the News in concert a few years back. There is a plaque in the lobby that talks about Elvis playing there once.

There is the famous Praying Hands. Sorry about the blurry picture. I thought it would be too nerdy to take my brand spanking new “nice” camera to the event. So I took my point and shoot.

ORU was playing baseball Friday night.

And my favorite, the Prayer Tower. Whatever you think of Oral Roberts you have to admit that the prayer tower is a striking building. It is basically a three dimensional modernistic cross. I didn’t realize that on my own, I had to read it before it sunk in.

Our World

Our World – New Orleans

I’m in New Orleans on a business trip attending the Gas Processors Convention. I haven’t been here since right before Katrina in 2005 when Sweetie came along.

The town was jumping Sunday afternoon with the French Quarter Festival going on. Tell you what New Orleans knows how to party. There were lots of bands in lots of different places. The place was packed.

But people were under control. Apparently I dropped my cell phone. A lady chased after me for two blocks she said until she caught up with me to give it back to me (I move fast when I’m walking.)

People were major chilling to the music.

New Orleans reminds me a little of the Santa Fe of my youth before the billionaires crowded out the millionaires. Santa Fe has the public party side especially during fiesta (like I know what I’m talking about, I
haven’t been to the fiesta in 35 years) but also a very private side in private courtyards and closed doors.

Both New Orleans and Santa Fe give hints of ordinary people who actually live and work there. But an outsider never sees these people.

New Orleans in the South but it is different from the rest of the South. I think that is why I love it.

It is more than just a town to party in, it is a town with soul. There has been inroads by the developers who bring in the expensive condos with high gates, security, and chain restaurants and “high end” retailers.

I don’t think they will ever completely take over.

Our World

Thanks Sylvia, Sandy, Arija, Lady Fi, and Gattina!!

Our World – Leedey, Oklahoma Tornado Monument

Work took me way out to western Oklahoma last week to the oilfield and ranching town of Leedey. I got there a little early and so checked out the local city park.

In amongst the war memorial and playground was a seemingly friviolous steel structure. It was twisty and turney (that is a word here in Oklahoma) and had Christmas lights on it and several everyday objects.

It turns out that it is not frivolous at all. It is a memorial to the six people who died in a tornado that hit Leedey on May 31, 1947.

What a memorial. Apparently it was built by school children aged seven through eighteen during art classes. I think the monument is a tribute to the kids as well as the victims of the storm.

And guess what there was a geocache hidden right nearby named “Leedey Park” placed by kbaldeagle and Jeritexas.

(I actually don’t think this is the real jail.)

Another sight in town is the Jail. It seems pretty secure although they have a little work to do to get it up to standard. If you are a person that likes to engage in criminal behavior, western Oklahoma is not the place for you to be.

Our World Tuesday

Frisco 4500 – Route 66 Village

True Confession Monday today. Mine is, I have a thing for trains. Route 66 Village in west Tulsa has just the one for me. The Frisco 4500.

Built by Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1942. It is huge! 500,000 pounds! I found this locomotive during a geocaching expedition three years ago. It was parked in a remote area north of downtown as it was being restored by volunteers. It has since been moved to its present location for display. It is a long term project of the Sertoma Club of Tulsa. See SuperPizzaBoy? He is almost 5’11” (I can still take him though!) and is dwarfed by the wheels of the locomotive.

They also have the Murray Hill, a solarium lounge car built in 1929.

They have an oil tanker and a caboose.

And what they claim is the world’s largest oil derrick.

Route 66 Village is a great stop on old Route 66.

Check out Our World Tuesday

Our World – Continuing the Adventure

Son and I went geocaching Saturday afternoon on Turkey Mountain here in Tulsa.

The plan was to find several caches, but we only found one, and it was a great one. It was “The Adventure Continues to Continue – RGZ.” It is near the site of an another cache that has since been archived. I’m not going to show you the container nor it’s placement. I don’t want to give away the secret to this tricky cache. It is placed by a cacher who goes by the name M5. Finding one of his caches makes for a great day. Do you think he would sue me if told everybody that he has a twisted mind? Such a mind makes for great geocaches.

Anyway there was a lot of old man style grunting and cussing going on the mountain yesterday. I dropped my walking stick and it slid a long ways down the mountain. So I had to get my big ole butt down there and back to retrieve it. SuperPizzaBoy thought it was pretty funny.