Category Archives: Buildings

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.

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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? 

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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.
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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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ORU was playing baseball Friday night.

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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

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Signs – Delacroix Corp.

I’ve been walking a lot around New Orleans the last couple days. I found a few caches and took lots of photographs.
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I noticed that on consecutive days I took photographs of this building, labelled Delacroix Corp.,

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I just love the building. First the green color. I love that green, and the big windows. Second the silvery letters for the sign with the two different fonts, part script and part block letters, and the rakish angle in the Delacroix. It’s written with flair, and then the down to earth Corp.

Third, the mysteriousness of it, Who knows what Delacroix does? I mean its not a restaurant, nor a tshirt shop. They don’t have a web site but they have a some sort of mysterious connection to the oil and gas business. The president of the firm is a third degree connection to me in Linked In. The ground floor windows are glass blocks.

What’s going on in there?

I just love the French Quarter. It has its secrets.

Signs, Signs

Perfect Pairings – Tulsa’s Temple Israel

Temple Israel is a reform congregation in midtown Tulsa just off Utica Square. Their synagogue is a beautiful midcentury modern building. Check their web site. They have a virtual walk through of their facility. They also have a very active congregation. Lots and lots going on there.

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(Great rules of life, regardless of your beliefs.)


I love their depiction of the Ten Commandments. From their website; “This sculpture of the Ten Commandments by Bernard Frazier shows the commandments superimposed on twin pillars to symbolize “The Pillar of Cloud by Day and the Pillar of Fire by Night.” This concept comes from Exodus, Chapter 13 Verse 21-22:”

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(Sorry for the bad photo, me and my camera are having issues)

They have a beautiful Menorah also. I am going to quote again directly from their web site:
This menorah was designed by Calvin Albert and takes the form of a pedestal with seven unfolding limbs in the form of a Tree of Life (Proverbs 3:17 — “It is a Tree of Life to them that hold fast to it.”). Part of the sculpture shows a circular binding piece symbolizing the universality of God’s presence. The menorah is fueled with a specially prepared oil.

Even their sign out front is beautiful.

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(I’m just hoping the mid-century modern mafia doesn’t hammer me).

Perfect Pairings