Category Archives: History

October Osage County – Camera Critters

Lets check out what is happening at the Animal Barn at Woolaroc. Frank Phillips‘ (founder of Phillips Petroleum Company) old ranch in Osage County about an hour north of Tulsa.

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Woolaroc has quite a few critters. They can be as fun as the art in the museum and grounds.

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Something about zebras? They are so graphic. That is actually a better quality in zebras than it is in people.Don’t you think?

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I love the animal barn at Woolaroc (Are there barns that are not animal barns). I don’t trust this pair of jokers.

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This little guy just wants back in with his mama. She is fine where he is. I know lots of human moms like that also. Love their kids

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Something about goats is comical.

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My favorite was this calf. It was major cute.

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It was kind of shy and flirting with me.

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Have you ever seen a cuter redhead?

Camera Critters

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October, Osage County – Signs

This past Saturday I traveled up to  Osage County, Oklahoma to run a race on Frank Phillips old ranch, Woolaroc (“Wood Lakes Rocks”). Afterward I drove over to the old oilfield town of Barnsdall. Turned out that Barnsdall had some nice old signs.

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Barnsdall is the birthplace of Anita Bryant. Everybody calm down, I know that she became controversial but she has been gone some time now. It always fascinates me where people come from. I’m always asking where people are from. Except for people from Texas. If people are from Texas that is pretty much front loaded in the conversation. They will not ask you where you are from though, they figure that if you are from Texas you’d of already told them, and they don’t want to embarrass you in case you are not from there.

Anyway, Barnsdall claims fame to the world’s only Main Street Oil Well. Here is the sign.

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And here is the well.

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I don’t want to burst anybody’s bubble. But I don’t think the well is operating any more. In fact it hasn’t produced in decades. I have access to databases that tell me that it is no longer an oil well. Also they say it is the only “Main Street” oil well. I worked in the San Andres field in the Permian Basin of Texas. They had wells drilled in several streets. That’s right, they just took over the whole street. None of the wells were on “Main Street” though.

Hey you know who else is from Barnsdall?

Yep, Clark Gable lived there for a few years when his father worked in the oil fields. I’m telling you Barnsdall is a good place to be from.

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Barnsdall turned out to be a good place for sign photos.

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The original name for Barnsdall was “Bigheart” it got changed about a hundred years ago.

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The downtown area had some old buildings and interesting signs.

Barnsdall is a nice little town with a lot of history. For one thing it is where my employer, ONEOK, got started way back on October 12, 1906 with a pipeline that moved gas from the Barnsdall area to Oklahoma City.  The company history is wild and wooly reflective of the booms and busts of the energy industry. I love it. Check out a slightly outdated version here.

Oh, by the way, Where are you from? I’m from Espanola, New Mexico originally. My parents lived closer to Santa Fe but Dad called around while Mom was expecting and Espanola was birthing babies cheaper. Kind of set the tone for my whole life. I’ve been looking for deals ever since.

Signs, Signs

Our World – Boston Avenue Church

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

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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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Claudette Colvin – Twice Toward Justice

I picked up Phillip House’s “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice” at SuperPizzaBoy’s book fair. Talk about a find! Claudette Colvin was a fifteen year old black teenager who was arrested for not giving up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery,Alabama on March 2, 1955 long before Rosa Parks was arrested for the same offense. Ms. Colvin was not celebrated like Rosa Parks was, Colvin was not considered a suitable  representative for the cause because she was so young and was not perfect.

She disappeared for a time until Phillip House heard about her story and convinced her to share it with the world. She was brutalized verbally by the policemen who arrested her and shunned by her community for causing trouble. She had other problems that made her less than the perfect representative for her people. She moved north and worked for years in obscurity, resentful of the attention that Parks got.

It is a great book about the Civil Rights movement but more than that it’s about life not being fair and perfect and how you have to persevere anyway.

I give this book four stars out of five.

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My New Boat, HMS Laconia, Citizen Science, and Global Warming

What do you think of my new boat? You have to admit it is pretty nice. It is the HMS Laconia a former passenger liner turned armed merchantmen built in the early 1900’s.

Photo fromOldWeather.Org

It’s a little big to launch a lake for bass fishing and it probably doesn’t have a live well for the fish we’d catch anyway. HMS Laconia is a little pretentious for a fishing boat anyway.

It does have a Dining Saloon however. I don’t know if chicken fried steak is on the menu or not.

It doesn’t matter because it was sunk by the German submarine, U 50, pictured below six miles off Fastnet, which I think is an island just of the southern Irish coast on 25 February 1917.

 (subsim.com) (I am not actually sure this is the right U50. There were three U50’s in World War I and one more in World War II).

Oh well, it would have been fun.

Why am I calling this boat mine? I found the coolest thing on the internet, second only to geocaching. It is called OldWeather.Org. It is a citizen science project to transcribe the old log books from all sorts of British Ships from the early part of the century and you can browse this site to know more about it. The books were written by hand in handwriting that is almost as bad as mine so they cannot just  scan them into the computer. They need people to transcribe them.

It’s easy and fun and doesn’t cost anything. They give you templates and instructions on where to enter the date and the location of the ship as wells as water, air, and dew point temperatures, wind speed, and direction, and sea state. Plus you can read the log pages as your ship goes into and out of ports and loads and unloads stuff. It really is fascinating. When they started the project they had a total of 750,000 log pages they need transcribed.  They also have other links involving citizen science if you want to do something else.

What is this data used for? It is for climate research to help calibrate and validate the weather models being developed today to help scientists determine just what affects are climate and how much. They didn’t have the network of weather stations back then with weather satellites. Plus Al Gore hadn’t been born yet and so they didn’t have the internet, that he built, to link all the data together. (Yeah I know, he never claimed that he built the internet.)
Go to OldWeather.Org to see how to get started.

Below is a video from their tutorial section to show how to get started.

Old Weather – Getting Started from The Zooniverse on Vimeo.

So what do you think? Give it a go. Don’t tell me you don’t have the time. You wouldn’t be reading this if you were busy.

Ruby Tuesday – The “Football”

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The Tulsa Historical Society has an exhibit on Jim Halsey, a legendary music industry insider who manages such acts as the Oak Ridge Boys, Clint Black, the Judds, and tons of others. Check the link. I had never heard of him before the exhibit.

Anyway, long before cell phones he traveled with the portable phone above. Supposedly it was the same phone, called the football, as what US Presidents were supposed to have available in case the Russians wanted to talk about something that was bothering them. The Presidents phone was called the football. Now I imagine its all done with cell phones.

Hey ever wondered what a triple platinum record looks like.

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There you go.

Ruby Tuesday

Ruby Tuesday

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Our World – Muskogee, Oklahoma

My Dad came for a short visit from Idaho for Thanksgiving. He likes historical type stuff and I wanted to show him something new so we headed down the turnpike to Muskogee.

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First we went to the Five Civilized Tribes Museum. It is not that big but it is powerful. It has displays on the five tribes that were forcibly resettled from the southeast USA to Oklahoma. No photos are allowed but they have a dynamite display on Native American Medal of Honor awardees from the Five Civilized Tribes. Upstairs they had an art show going on. Check it out when you are in town. Very inexpensive admission charge.

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The building it is housed in is the original Agency Headquarters from the 19th century. Very handsome in it own right. Gotta remember to stay off the grass if you go!

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Next we went down to the Port of Muskogee to check out the USS Batfish. The Batfish was a submarine that sunk fourteen enemy ships during World War II. Unfortunately the museum was closed but we could look at the vessel through the fence.

Batfish Submarine

There were some other things to look at also. Some anti-aircraft guns.

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And this. It looks like it could ruin somebody’s whole day downrange.

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And a little bit of humor.

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It was an overcast day with no color. So how about a photo of my Soul.

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Then we toured the port a little bit. I’m in the natural gas business. We are always looking for pipe. Our engineers can’t ever find any. We found some. Come and get it guys.

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We found this cool machine. Dad and I love looking at this kind of stuff. Sweetie and SPB can’t stand it.

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So, we had a pretty good road trip.

Our World Tuesday

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