We've heard a good bit about the Oklahoman in recent months and years — most recently that its chief editor, Ed Kelley, is leaving (and by now that's past tense) to become editor of the Washington Times (which item has been roundly discussed in this thread at OkcTalk.com). During the past two or so years, the Oklahoman has let go many of its employees due to economic reasons, but, more recently, scuttlebutt is that some Oklahoman employees are leaving by their own choice for reasons other than being let go by the paper. Like most locked secrets, the public will probably never know for sure what's going on at the Oklahoman, or why — or, at least, it may take some time for that kind of thing to hash itself out.
But there is a time in the past that such matters may not be quite as obscure — or, at least, some gleanings of the inner sanctum might be gleaned and evaluated.
In this regard, I'm pleased to present this guest article by Jim Kyle and also a brief interview at his home in Oklahoma City on June 15, 2011. Mr. Kyle was a reporter at the Oklahoma City Times and then the Daily Oklahoman from 1955-1959, and, if I get lucky, I'll hopefully have another interview and another article (hence my optimistic title) before this is all done.
Note: Jim has now done 3 articles. Click here for his second on prohibition repeal and click here for his third on the Korean War.
INTRODUCTION. Jim is a 1948 graduate of Classen High School and a 1952 graduate of the University of Oklahoma, School of Journalism. Before presenting Jim's article, I'll make a few comments of my own based on my review of the Oklahoman's archives from 1950-1959. At the right is the first piece that I found, describing awards that Jim received at the annual convention of Kappa Alpha Mu, an honorary photo-journalism fraternity, during his senior year at the University of Oklahoma — doubtless a good way to start a career in journalism. However, as you will read below, there was a war on then, too, the Korean "Conflict," as it was called, and that took his initial attention upon being graduated from O.U.
My review of the Oklahoman's archives during his tenure with the Oklahoma City Times and then the Daily Oklahoman show a fairly wide diversity of subjects that Jim would be asked to cover. It appears that he was the principal reporter on seriously bad weather stories both locally and around the state — tornadoes, floods, severe winds, heat waves, and the like, but the stories I found most engaging were on other topics, and I've copied a few representative articles for your perusal — the Aurora Borealis/Northern Lights being visible in the city and state and its effects upon telecommunications; a pair of articles in December 1957 about how the Soviets use chess as a means of developing its scientific community (very important in the post-Sputnik technological push in this country) and another reporting on the U.S. State Department's refusal to allow a Russian chess champion to participate at a tourney in Dallas, the entire city apparently being deemed off-limits to Russians; local high school rocket clubs in 1958; feature article on a local short wave radio fellow and his listening in round-the-world in the pre-internet era; a major piece on the 30th anniversary of Oklahoma City's 1st humongous gusher; and, near the end of his tenure at the Oklahoman, a February 1959 piece about a local pastor's criticism of proponents' tactics concerning the repeal of Prohibition. Good reading, all.
I don't know Jim well enough to hazard an educated guess, but my gut reaction from meeting with him and reading his piece below is that Jim Kyle, first and foremost, considers himself a journalist through and through and that his stint with newspapers during 1954-1959 evidences where where his heart really lies, life and economic choices notwithstanding. Actually, one might say that this article constitutes a piece of Jim's re-entry into the journalism world, to the extent that can legitimately be said about publishing in a citizen blog. But, if I owned a newspaper, I'd surely want to include the fine article below.
JIM KYLE'S 1ST ARTICLE. Without further ado, below is the (first) guest article by Jim Kyle. I didn't change a single word — no need existed since it was immaculately put together from start to finish. (I confess to having the need to look up the word, "miscreant" toward the end of the article — and of course its meaning was a perfect fit.)
June 19 edit: without withdrawing in any what I just said, on a closer read I did come across a few content errors and, upon asking Jim how he would like such things to be handled if at all, his suggestion was, "I learned more than 50 years ago that every writer needs a good editor in the shadows, to pick up such mistakes and fix them without changing the basic meaning or writing style. I use the 'ed note' often in the magazine, to add commentary and make corrections. I embed them in the story, but put them in parentheses and as separate paragraphs, all in italics, starting with 'Ed. note:' and ending with my initials, all to make it obvious that it's not part of the original article. I think it adds a personal touch to the whole thing without impacting the integrity of the article itself." This approach will, therefore, be followed below, and with no disrespect to the author intended.
MEMOIRS & THOUGHTS OF A 1950s
OKLAHOMAN REPORTER — PART 1
By JIM KYLE
Doug has asked me to help record some of the history of Oklahoma City's newspapers, since I was a small part of that industry for a few years in the mid-50s. From 1955 to 1959, I was an employee of OPubCo; for the first year I was a copy editor "on the rim” at the Oklahoma City Times, which was the afternoon edition. At that point I moved to The Daily Oklahoman, first as their rewrite man but later became a general assignment reporter, and for the last year of that stay had the police beat. To misquote Charles Dickens, it was the best of times and the worst of times.
To put it all in perspective I have to tell you a bit about myself. While in high school (Classen) I fell in love with photography, and set as my life goal becoming a magazine photographer. To this end I majored in journalism at OU, and while there served as the Oklahoman's "campus correspondent” photographer. Upon graduation in 1952, I almost immediately went into the army as a second lieutenant of artillery, and thence to Korea. When I came home in 1954, I worked for a few months as a retail camera salesman and then got a call from The Daily Ardmoreite, Ardmore's daily newspaper. They needed a reporter who could also handle a camera. I got the job. After a year, I returned to Oklahoma City.
A reporter's life on a small daily newspaper in the mid-50s was much like military service in Korea during the truce talks: days of boredom punctuated by moments of extreme excitement. While at Ardmore, I discovered my love of active reporting — and also learned the seamy inside aspect of the publishing business. First and foremost, it is a business, and the purpose isn't to serve the public, but to make a profit for the owners.
That often leads to compromise of one's conscience. It's not very much like the image presented by Perry White of The Daily Planet in the Superman strips. I learned early that my profession was not "saving the world" but instead "creating tomorrow's garbage wrapper." Some information that would have embarrassed "important people" never saw print; some arrests went unreported. Still, we loved what we did.
Speaking of Perry, while at Ardmore I had a summer intern from OU follow me around for a couple of months. His name: Perry White. He later became editor of The Oklahoman, but only after I had been long gone from there, and sadly, he died just a few weeks short of his planned retirement date.
Newspapering would do that to you. Once it got into your blood, there was a degree of joy mixed with stress that became habit forming. Not too many of us see long years of retirement.
Notice that I used the past tense here. That joy seems to have disappeared in the past few years, and that's partly why I'm writing this piece. Our city — nay, our world — needs to recapture it, or be much the worse for its loss.
Enough philosophy for now. Let's look at the history of newspapering in OKC, with special emphasis on OPubCo as I saw it both from the inside and from the outside today.
My knowledge of it starts in 1903, when the gold rush at Cripple Creek, CO, began to play out and a young promoter named Edward King Gaylord moved from there to Oklahoma City. Like many other civic minded folk in many other pioneer towns, he established a newspaper to express his views.
(Ed. note: EKG did not establish the newspaper. Instead, he purchased a minority interest from the then owner, Roy E. Stafford, the Daily Oklahoman itself having been established by Rev. Sam W. Small in 1894. Note, too, that the "Oklahoma City Times" Jim references in the next paragraph is not the paper by the same name which was initially published in Wichita before the April 22, 1889, Land Run. Instead, the paper he is referencing is the paper initially named "Oklahoma Times" owned by Angelo C. Scott and his brother W.W. Scott, it being first published on May 9, 1889, but which paper was soon renamed to be the "Times-Journal" and, some years later, the "Oklahoma City Times." See Angelo C. Scott's "The Story of Oklahoma City" for more. DL)
There was already a thriving newspaper here, though. The Oklahoma City Times had been serving the area since the Run of 1889. First published from Wichita (as I recall from my long ago history lessons) it had moved to OKC soon after the first permanent buildings were erected, and was well established. Its publisher and Gaylord battled for survival for several years.
Eventually, Gaylord won, purchased the Times, and made it the afternoon edition of the Oklahoman. This allowed him to claim that his company had served OKC since 1889 — a boast appearing on the front page of every issue of both papers so long as the Times existed (it ceased publication several decades ago), although I've not seen it lately.
As OKC grew with the oil boom of the 20s, so did OPubCo. The Daily Oklahoman became recognized as the almost official newspaper of the state (although Tulsa's two papers hotly contested the claim) and its circulation reached out into adjoining states. This growth did not escape the notice of the major national newspaper chains, and in the early 30s the Scripps-Howard organization created The Oklahoma News, attempting to take over at least a part of OPubCo's power.
(Ed. note: Edward Willis Scripps founded the "Oklahoma News" in 1906. The publication group was renamed as Scripps Howard in 1922. See Scripps Group Chronology. The "Oklahoma News" ceased publication in 1939. DL) As had happened with the Times so long before, the two organizations battled fiercely for a time. OPubCo finally forced the News to close its doors, by the simple process of refusing to accept advertising from any merchant who dared advertise in the competing publication. While Scripps-Howard took the matter to court, and won a permanent injunction against such a practice, the damage had already been done and the News failed in the mid-30s.
As the OPubCo empire grew, with establishment of one of the first commercial radio stations west of the Mississippi (WKY) and a delivery service (Mistletoe Express) that covered the state, the company remained a private corporation. Originally most of the stock was retained by the Gaylord family, but some was made available to senior employees. One of those was the Oklahoman's managing editor, Walter Harrison, known to one and all as "The Skipper.”
When Pearl Harbor catapulted the nation into World War II, The Skipper was one of many men who left civilian life behind and joined the military. Opinions vary as to what happened to him during his military service.
It's indisputable, however, that upon his return to civilian life, he and Mr. G (as Gaylord was known to all his employees) parted company rather acrimoniously. OPubCo is said to have attempted to reclaim his shares, but he succeeded in retaining ownership of them and for the rest of his life, published detailed accounts of every OPubCo stockholder meeting in the small Nichols Hills weekly he created.
I've been told by a former employee of The Skipper that he also kept a dossier on every editorial employee of OPubCo (including me), and a set of files that would "blow this city wide open” if ever made public. He used the threat of such publication, I was told, to keep the power at least partially leashed.
The Skipper died while on a business trip in the early 60s. His secret files, if they existed, never saw the light of day.
So what was it like on the rim of the Times in 1955-56? The "rim” refers to the large horseshoe-shaped desk that was a fixture in every newspaper city room in those years. The news editor sat in the center and copyreaders sat around the rim. As I recall there were four of us. The assistant city editor also had a spot on the rim, as did the makeup editor. It was the nerve center of the publication.
Copy boys would bring print from the teletype machines to the news editor, who would select which items he wanted to include, and assign headline sizes to each. He would then toss them to whichever copyreader had nothing to do at the moment; we were encouraged to work crossword puzzles when not actually working, so that the news editor could see who was available for the next article.
The headline sizes were coded by number. Over the years I've forgotten most of the codes, but one sticks in my mind: the 11 head. An 11 head meant three lines of type, one column wide, with each line sized to come within one or at most two characters of the right side of the column. These size requirements made headline writing a fine art; we had to show the meaning of the article and still fit it perfectly.
Sometimes, we goofed. I still remember an 11 head that I put on an article for the market page, about a sudden rise in the price of soybean futures as traders scurried to cover short sales: "Beans Spurt/As Traders/Cover Shorts” were the three lines. Not until city editor Ralph Sewell posted it on the bulletin board the next day did I realize all the multiple entendre in those three lines of black type — but I wondered why somebody had changed it for the second edition!
Writing headlines was only a minor part of the copyreader's duties. We checked the spelling of every word, made sure that capitalization followed the rules set forth in our style book, and on occasion trimmed articles to make them fit into their allotted space. All articles were written with the most important content at the front, and importance diminishing with length, so that they could be trimmed to fit without requiring rewrite. Such attention to detail is one of the things that seem now to be missing!
Since the Times was an afternoon paper, my working hours were 6 a.m. until 2 p.m. Monday through Friday. It didn't publish on Sunday, and I had one other day off during the week. As I recall, it was Tuesday. Our first edition of the day would come off the presses about 10:30; it was the one shipped to outlying areas and made available for street sale, but had very little local content. Most of it was feature material — we called it boilerplate — meant simply to occupy the space between the ads. The Home edition came out around noon, allowing time for distribution to all the carrier stations. It contained real news. The final edition of the day was the Blue Streak, intended primarily for street sales, and its stories tended to be more sensationalized than those in the Home edition. As each edition came off the presses, we on the rim got some of the first copies and we immediately went through them looking for errors so that they could be corrected before the bulk of the press run was done.
After about a year on the Times, I was told to move over to the Oklahoman. That was the position I had yearned for since leaving Ardmore, so I had no hesitation at all about accepting the transfer.
My initial assignment was as the rewrite man. The hours were 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. I had a desk immediately behind city editor Chan Guffey's spot at one end of the rim (the fourth floor of the old OPubCo building held both papers in the same huge room, and each paper had its own copy desk). My job was to handle any assignment Chan gave me, but primarily to take incoming phone calls from the field reporters, and type their stories. To take dictation by phone, I had one of the two electric typewriters in the room, and it became a sort of game for us to see how fast I could do it without asking the other fellow to pause while I caught up. Eventually this got me up to around 120 WPM typing speed — but that speed is gone forever.
I also had to write the obituaries every evening. In those days, the Oklahoman and the Times both published obits without charge to the families. About 4:30 every afternoon, I would call all the local funeral homes and get the names and phone numbers of the families for that day's deaths. I hated to invade their privacy, but soon learned that in most cases the families really wanted to talk to me, and that made the job easier. I did, however, have to beg off on two obits during my time at that task. One was of a young co-worker with whom I had shared a 10-day Air Force junket to Europe while I was at Ardmore. The other was the baby son of close friend and fellow staffer John Gumm (John himself died in a house fire less than a year ago).
In addition to doing the obits, I also got the job of writing the daily weather story. This, in turn, led to some of my first outside assignments, when severe weather hit early enough in the evening to give us a chance to cover it. I recall one night doing a wild drive from OKC to Ada to cover such a storm; it didn't hit until after 6 p.m. and I had a 10 p.m. deadline. By all rights I should have wound up in a tangled mass of wreckage somewhere along the way, but I made it and got the story called in on time.
Chan had one policy that I loved: one of the first things he told me when I started working for him was to bring a book with me every day, and to read it when I had nothing else to do. Under no circumstances was I to look busy when I wasn't. His reasoning was that he wanted to be able to tell instantly if I were ready for an assignment, at any time during the evening. I did a lot of reading during the years I was on the rewrite desk!
After a couple of years on rewrite, Chan began giving me outside assignments from time to time. Most were feature stories, such as interviews with Jimmy Stewart, Jock Mahoney, and Lucille Ball. Then police reporter Jack Jones decided to get out of the business, and I was tagged to become his replacement.
I rode with Jack on the beat for a couple of weeks before taking it over in full, and learned more about the underside of Oklahoma City at the time than I really wanted to know. However it was exactly the kind of reporting I had learned to love at Ardmore. My daily routine was to go to the police station, check the blotter, write up a dozen or so one-paragraph items about arrests and minor things, and then stay alert for anything that might happen.
As police reporter, I had a special auto in the OPubCo fleet. It was a Ford Interceptor (the police model) equipped with two-way radio to the city desk and a monitor for the police band. I would check out the car from the garage first thing, go to the "cop shop” next and then to the sheriff's office in the courthouse, and from there things would vary depending on the activity each day. I often stopped for supper at Priddy's Diner; any time I left the car, I would radio Chan and tell him where I was so that he could get in touch with me.
One evening I was at Priddy's and about to carve into my cheese steak when the phone rang and Mr. Priddy handed it to me. There had been a murder-suicide in Stockyard City. I left the steak on the counter and took off. The story turned out to be trivial from a news point of view: a domestic dispute gone violent, and the man killed his wife and then himself. I got the facts, drove back to Priddy's, finished my steak, then went to the office and typed the story up.
During my time as police reporter, a close friend introduced me to his fiancé, asking me for my opinion of her. I liked her from the start. The friend, on his way to becoming a full-fledged alcoholic, would disappear from sight for a couple of days at a time. His fiancé, worried, would enlist my aid to search for him. She and I became close friends, and then more. In February of 1958 we were married. It was years before the ex-friend and I spoke again.
Chan gave me an extra day off for my wedding, but I then had to go back to work. I put my new bride in the car alongside me, and almost immediately after the initial routine the police dispatcher issued a "man with a gun” alert for an address on the southeast side of town. Naturally, I took off for it. When I got there, I parked about a block away, handed the radio mike to my bride, and told her to contact the office if she heard any shots fired. Then I headed for the action.
Fortunately, there was none. It had been a false alarm. However she had gotten a great initiation into the life she had chosen to spend with me! It wasn't the only time we went into potential danger together.
She rode with me often, until becoming pregnant. Even then, she was with me the night I got an "officer needs help” report while at the sheriff's office in downtown OKC. I took off following a deputy, riding on his red lights and siren. We were doing a little over 90 MPH up Walker at 9 p.m., and the speedometer was pegged at 120 when I crossed Eastern on NE 23, blasting through a red light as I did so.
When the deputy pulled out to pass a long line of traffic, on an uphill stretch of the two-lane highway, I dropped back. At Ardmore, I had covered the three-fatality result of such a head-on crash and had no interest in becoming part of another one. When I finally reached the scene of the action, near Spencer, it turned out that a miscreant had bitten the officer who "needed help.” No story at all.
After that, my wife didn't ride with me much. It was a difficult pregnancy, too, and she spent much of the last couple of months lying on the couch. Finally about midnight one night in early April 1959 she told me "It's time” and we set out for the hospital. I called the police dispatcher (by that time we all knew each other; I even had the call number "Unit 231") and told him I was leaving and had no plans to stop for any traffic lights. On the way I drove sensibly, for a change, and we hit all the lights on green. There were no problems, and her labor was blessedly short.
With a new family, I found the pay of a reporter, even one near the top of the scale, woefully inadequate. I had been moonlighting for a year or so, writing articles for ham radio magazines, but that income was too irregular to depend upon. When a recruiter from RCA Service Company came to town looking for potential electronics technical writers, I went to see him, showed him my qualifications, and took his exam. A few days later I got a call inviting me to Los Angeles for an interview. I went, got an offer, and that was the end of my career at OPubCo.
I should say a little about the physical plant during those years. In addition to the main building that still stands at NW 4 and Broadway, there was a second larger building to the east, adjacent to the railroad tracks, that housed the presses. Those presses were huge machines that used cast rotary images of the pages to put the ink on the paper, and giant rolls of newsprint to feed them. That's why the building was next to the tracks; paper arrived by the carload!
The type for each story was cast into lead by Linotype machines; the headlines were similarly cast by devices called Ludlows. (While I call the metal ”lead” it was actually an alloy of tin, lead, and antimony, designed to maintain crisp edges when cast into molds. Once it had served its immediate purpose, it went back into the vats to melt down and be used again.) Printers arranged the lead into page forms called chases, under direction of the makeup editor. Strict union rules forbade editorial employees from even touching the type itself; to identify a problem area to a printer, the editor had to point to it with a pencil. Not long before I went to work there, the company had a run-in with the pressmen's union that caused a walkout by all union members; however when the picket lines vanished the printers returned to work.
When all the articles and ads for a page had filled a chase, the printer pulled a full-page proof from it and sent it to the proofreaders for a final check. Once the proof had been okayed, he placed a paper-mache sheet called a "mat" (for matrix) on it and put the sandwich into a steam press to transfer everything to the mat and form a mold. The mat then went into another machine (the name of which I've forgotten, if I ever knew it) that wrapped it into a half-cylindrical shape and made a lead casting of the whole thing. That casting is what went onto the press to do the actual printing.
The process for each page took several minutes, and we usually had from 32 to 64 pages in each edition of each paper. Attaching the plates to the presses was a slow job, as well, so the press room was always a beehive of activity to meet all the deadlines.
An elevated and enclosed catwalk or skyway that we called "the tunnel” connected the two buildings, running from the third floor of the main building to the second floor of the pressrooms. The ground beneath the tunnel formed an employee parking lot for those of us on the night side; executive vehicles occupied it during the day.
Copy went from the city room to the press area through pneumatic tubes, the same sort now found at bank drive-thru areas but in those days only used by newspapers and some retail outlets such as the downtown J. C. Penney store.
The night that Sputnik appeared in the sky, in November of 1957, the front page was replated more than a dozen times during the run of the final home edition between midnight and 4 a.m. Each time a new dispatch came in on the AP wire, we would stuff it into a carrier and put it into the tube. The editors were in the press room directing changes to the chase for the front page. As each new batch of material arrived, a new mat was created, the presses stopped just long enough to change the plates, and then they rolled again. Only a few homes got the final version, but we all considered the effort as nothing more than what the job required for a fast-breaking story of such significance.
When I went to RCAS, my starting salary was $125/week plus overtime. That was more than Chan was getting as city editor, and $30/week more than my pay as police reporter. It turned out that the overtime involved minimum 100-hour weeks, so the dollars were great — but so was the cost of living on the west coast. That, plus homesickness, brought us back to OKC in 1962 and we've been here ever since. After a year as editor of three trade journals, a stint with University Loudspeakers, and two years of free-lance writing, I went to work at the then-new G-E plant and spent the next 24-plus years there (through three successive owners). Then came two years at Norick Software (one of Ron's lesser-known projects) before I finally retired.
So what has caused the obvious decline in stature of print journalism in Oklahoma City over the past fifty-plus years?
The low pay, traditional in the newspaper business for as long as I've known anything about it, is probably one of the reasons for the decline. The absolute need to cut costs to a minimum is undoubtedly a more major reason, though. The use of proofreaders seems to have become outmoded, so spelling and grammar errors abound — things that people like Ralph Sewell, Dave Funderburk, Chan Guffey, and even Mr. G himself (who was still running things during my years there; he died at the age of 103 leaving the business to his son Edward) would never have tolerated. A decline in advertising revenue is also an important part of the picture, together with a general drop-off in literacy of the younger generations — not that they're unable to read or write, but that they don't particularly want to.
So there's my contribution to the history of Oklahoma City's newspapers. Definitely incomplete, but at least it's a start...
I was especially pleased to read that last part ... "it's a start." Here's hoping that Mr. Kyle will have much more to say on the city's journalism or other history and thoughts about the same in the very near future!
JIM KYLE VIDEO INTERVIEW #1 — June 15, 2011. Again, I'm being optimistic that there will be at least one additional video interview. I did this first one at Jim's home in northwest Oklahoma City with my cell phone so that accounts for the poor video quality. I'll see if I can find better equipment for the next. Although the video quality leaves much to be desired, the audio should come through just fine.
I call your attention to Jim's comments beginning around 2:32 about the "seamy side" of the newspaper business.
But, I also learned the seamy side of the newspaper business ... found out how often we had to compromise with our consciences things that might embarrass an advertiser frequently didn't get reported and if "important people" would be offended, again, the story would not see the light of day.
***
I'd been there [in Ardmore at the Ardmoreite] about a year when there was a showdown between my managing editor who I considered to be my boss and for that matter my mentor at that time, and the owner of the paper, and it ended up with the editor getting fired. Our city editor was promoted to the managing editor's spot. They offered me the city editor's spot, but being young and idealistic I decided I didn't really want to have any more to do with them. So I hightailed it up to Oklahoma City and visited the Oklahoman.
Interesting recollections they are that you have about the dark side, young Skywalker.
This isn't about Oklahoma City history or even its politics ... not even Oklahoma or the United States of America. It's about a 22-year old Korean boy whose story, if we are willing, can capture the most jaded part of us all, that being the story of Choi Sung-Bong.
Do you know him? No. Would you like to? Yes, I'm thinking.
This has got to be one of the rare "feel good" moments not only in Korea but around the world. I thank my good friend Dean Schirf for making me aware, as he always does ...
There really isn't any more, but if you like the above, you might like his Fan Facebook Page.
May you and I enjoy all genuine good feelings wherever they are to be found.
Originally published July 30, 2006; updated June 12, 2011, on the event of her death
Looking at old and new parts of Oklahoma City is certainly fun – for some. Segregated public and private facilities of all types prevailed during most of the time those old movie theaters downtown were still in place. This 1939 image from an Oklahoma City street car terminal shows what I mean:
During 41 years as an award winning Oklahoma educator, Mrs. Clara Luper taught history and made history. Born in 1923, Mrs. Luper grew up near Hoffman, Oklahoma. She graduated from Grayson High School and matriculated to Langston University where she earned a B.A. degree. Mrs. Luper received her M. A. degree from the University of Oklahoma and taught school at Taft, Pawnee, Spencer and Oklahoma City Public Schools.
Many know Mrs. Luper as the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement. She began the Oklahoma Sit-In Movement, August 19, 1958 when she led a group of students in a sit-in at an Oklahoma City lunch counter. This effort and continuing efforts resulted in restaurants in Oklahoma City and across the state opening their doors to African Americans. This was the first publicized sit-in in the nation. Mrs. Luper led the Oklahoma City Public School integration fight, participated in the historic March on Washington, D.C., Selma, Alabama and every major march in America. She was arrested 26 times in Civil Rights activities. She led with courage and persistence and taught that non-violence activism was the way to freedom.
"I though about my father who had died in 1957 in the Veterans' Hospital and who had never been able to sit down and eat a meal in a decent restaurant. I remembered how he used to tell us that someday he would take us to dinner and to parks and zoos. And when I asked him when was someday, he would always say, "Someday will be real soon," as tears ran down his cheeks. So my answer was, "Yes, tonight is the night. History compels us to go, and let History alone be our final judge."
Shortly thereafter, Luper and 12 members of the NAACP Youth Council, ages six to 17, walked into the Katz Drug Store in downtown Oklahoma City and ordered 13 Coca-Colas. A typical response from Luper's fellow white customers was, "The nerve of the niggers trying to eat in our places. Who does Clara Luper think she is? She is nothing but a damned fool, the black thing." Thanks to patience and persistence, Katz, a major drug store, eventually desegregated the lunch counters in all of its 38 stores in Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas and Iowa.
That action led to similar sit-ins in Oklahoma City and across the South. Luper eventually became known as the "Mother of the Civil Rights Movement." Luper is well-known in Oklahoma, but isn't a household name nationwide. Today 82-year-old Luper speaks about her work to groups across the country and is involved with the NAACP, Miss Black Oklahoma and her church. I recently spoke with Clara at her home in Oklahoma City.
And so it came to be that Ms. Luper and many others started their walks to downtown from was then called the Calvary Baptist Church at Calvary Baptist Church in Deep Deuce, 300 N. Walnut, walks that would be joined by E. Melvin Porter, Charlton Heston, and many others.
Fast-forward to 2006. Professor Bob Darcy, Regents Professor of Political Science and Statistics, Oklahoma State University 1991-present, wrote this to the school's newspaper, The Daily O'Collegian, March 3, 2006 – http://www.ocolly.com/read_story.php?a_id=29479. Calling her "A hero of our generation", the professor said this:
We live in an age barren of heroes.
I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s. We had great people, good and bad. There were Hitler and Stalin, Churchill, DeGaulle, Franklin Roosevelt. We had generals Eisenhower and McArthur — the like of which we have not seen again. It was not so only in politics and war.
Painters? Who can name a painter living today? In my day we had Picasso and Chagall. All of us had their prints in our dorm rooms. We knew Picasso and Chagall and talked about their comings and goings.
Poets? Who can name a living poet? In my day we had T.S. Elliott, Langston Hughes, Robert Frost. We could recite their lines and discuss them — and we did.
Writers? How about Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck? Those men spoke at our schools.
Philosophers? Who can name a living one? In my day we had Bertrand Russell leading anti-nuclear demonstrations and Jean Paul Sartre critiquing U.S. foreign policy.
Scientists? Who can name a living one? We had Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, Francis Crick and James Watson.
Humanitarians? We had Albert Schweitzer. Who do we have today?
Great leaders for human freedom? We had Mohandas Gandhi, Carrie Chapman Catt and Martin Luther King. Do we have their equal today — or do we have only actors who play them? I lived in such times, among such people.
I was wrong when I said we live barren of heroes. You have one of that generation. Clara Luper, mother of the Civil Rights Movement, last of the heroes who redeemed Oklahoma and showed the way for the rest of the country.
Luper was born in Okfuskee County and was educated in the segregated schools of Hoffman and Grayson in Okmulgee County. Her early memories include the sign in nearby Henryetta that said “Negro, read and run, If you can’t read, Run anyway.” She recalls using discarded white-school textbooks with missing pages, sitting at the back of trains, not being allowed to try on clothes in stores, and exclusion from restaurants, libraries, bathrooms, and phone booths. Among the first African-Americans admitted to the University of Oklahoma, a professor told her “I have never taught a nigger and never wanted to.”
That evil world was created by a few Oklahomans led by Alfalfa Bill Murray. Writing Oklahoma’s Constitution, Murray said, “We should adopt a provision prohibiting the mixed marriages of negroes with other races in this State, and provide for separate schools and give the legislature power to separate them in waiting rooms and on passenger coaches, and all other institutions in the State ... they are failures as lawyers, doctors and in other professions. He must be taught in the line of his own sphere, as porters, bootblacks and barbers ...”
Murray took the vote from African-Americans, denied them the right to study in libraries with whites, ride on trains with whites unless they were shackled, and denied them the right to shower, fish or swim in the same water as whites.
On Aug. 19, 1958, Luper began Oklahoma’s civil rights movement with a student sit-in at the Katz Drug Store in Oklahoma City. It took years, but she and her students integrated Oklahoma City eating establishments. The same tactic integrated white-only churches. Luper successfully turned to fair housing. The destruction of Murray’s Oklahoma had begun.
Oklahomans have a hard time recognizing their heroes. A student this week told me the first sit-ins began Feb. 1, 1960, when a group of black college students from Greensboro, N.C., began a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter. Luper’s sit-ins began here, a year-and-a-half earlier.
We diminish ourselves when we fail to recognize the great among us. Oklahoma sit-ins began our national salvation and Luper led the way. Luper, the last of my generation’s heroes.
Oklahomans — know her and know yourselves. Remember and share the story of when Luper redeemed us.
While it might be a bit much to say that she "redeemed us" – we'd probably need to do that for ourselves – she certainly showed us how we might get started doing so! Mrs. Luper and Professor Darcy are pictured below at OSU on March 2, 2006:
In another Daily O'Collegian article, July 5, 2006, Professor Darcy makes a proposal, particularly given that two women's dormitories at OSU are named for the patently racial and religious bigot Alfalfa Bill Murray – http://www.ocolly.com/read_story.php?a_id=30215
In his 1947 self-published “Palestine,” William H. “Alfalfa Bill” Murray, former president of Oklahoma’s Constitutional Convention, Speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, congressman and governor, honored with Murray Hall and North Murray Hall by Oklahoma A&M College, wrote “Deal with the Jewish problem by giving them ... Madagascar Island ... on condition that all Jews shall become nationals of such Jewish state (with one exception, that Jews and their families who came to America prior to 1900 shall retain, if they desire, their American citizenship).”
Murray advocated not allowing Jewish refugees, or “Refu-Jews,” into the United States, and Jews in the United States, citizens or not, be rounded up and shipped to Madagascar. Palestine should be reserved for Christians and Muslims. “Mohammedans are Pro-Christ.”
The Madagascar idea did not originate with Murray. It can be traced back to 19th century French and Polish anti-Semites. The Nazis adopted and elaborated the idea.
In the 1930s Hermann Göering, Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht and foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop all circulated it. But Madagascar was French, not German, and it went nowhere.
Then, in 1940, France fell and it seemed to the Nazis that Great Britain would soon follow. The plan became feasible.
Franz Rademacher, head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Jewish Department, proposed to divide Europe’s Jews into two groups. The eastern Jews were to be held in Poland, the western Jews deported to Madagascar, desirable for its isolation.
In Rademacher’s plan, defeated France would give Madagascar to Germany. Europeans living in Madagascar would be removed. Defeated Britain would transport the Jews. Jews would be responsible for local government in Madagascar under a German SS police governor. The operation would be paid for by Jewish property confiscations.
“This arrangement would prevent the possible establishment in Palestine by the Jews of a Vatican State of their own, and the opportunity for them to exploit for their own purposes the symbolic importance which Jerusalem has for the Christian and Mohammedan parts of the world. Moreover, the Jews will remain in German hands as a pledge for the future good behavior of the members of their race in America.”
Hitler discussed the plan with Mussolini in June 1940. On Aug. 15, 1940, Adolf Eichmann released the draft “Madagaskar Projekt” to implement the design. But Britain did not fall and Madagascar itself was in British hands by 1942. Nazis turned to the Final Solution.
Murray thought the Madagascar Plan could be adapted to America’s “Jewish Problem.” He did not need to go into logistics; Eichmann and Rademacher had done all that.
But Alfalfa Bill Murray was no admirer of Adolf Hitler. To the contrary, Murray ranked Hitler with Stalin, Mussolini and Franklin D. Roosevelt as an “international outlaw.” But, at least in 1940, he was not troubled one bit by a German victory.
This colorful Oklahoma anti-Semite was also a race bigot and architect of Oklahoma’s segregation and Jim Crow. For several decades he did his best to give the nation the idea Oklahoma was a place of ignorance and intolerance.
Murray was no friend of OAMC. He came up with the Murray Foundation to help poor students with loans. The revenue for the foundation would come from taking OAMC faculty’s book royalties. And he managed to get rid of OAMC’s best-ever football coach, Pappy Waldorf.
Murray Hall and North Murray should have permanent interactive exhibits highlighting Alfalfa Bill Murray’s contributions to race bigotry, anti-Semitism and his ongoing feud with OAMC.
Or we should change the name and honor Clara Luper, who dedicated her life to dismantling Murray’s racist institutions.
To: Oklahoma State University Administration and Board of Regents By signing this petition, I understand that I am pledging my support for the initiative to rededicate Murray Hall to Clara Luper and the Oklahoma City Sit-in Movement. I think Murray Hall should be renamed Clara Luper Hall.
Sincerely, The Undersigned
So, who is Clara Luper? Among her many other titles, she is an Oklahoma City Hero! Why not think about signing that petition?
June 12, 2011, Update: Clara Luper Dies on June 8, 2011
The front page of the Oklahoman carried the story on June 10 (click the image for a large view of Clara Luper's image):
The long story which accompanied that headline can be read below. The small sized views of the article appear below but are difficult to read. Click on either image for a readable and printable view.
I've included extracts from Oklahoma City Council meetings before but they've focused upon particular hot-topic issues when I have. This article is different — it's more akin to the theme, "a day in the life" of city council. While certainly not touching upon everything that occurred in the 4 hour 11 minute council session, it does give a broader view of the sorts of things that can and do occur from time to time — you might call it, "City Council 101." So, get your popcorn, put your feet back, and enjoy this eclectic assembly of videos from the May 31 council meeting. Taken together, they show that it's not always "serious" at City Hall and that it's not just the "hot topic" matters that can be interesting as well as educational.
THE OVERTURE. Overtures pretty much went out of style with a number of long blockbuster movies in the 1960s, right? Wrong, at least, not in Oklahoma City — the May 31, 2011, city council meeting began with a musical prelude by the Morris McCraven Trio which treated the audience to mellow tunes as they came in and found their seats with a little more than 20 minutes of jazz.
The Morris McCraven Trio was present to kick off and publicize the 26th annual Charlie Christian International Music Festival sponsored by the Oklahoma City Black Liberated Arts Center (BLAC), this year's events being on May 31st – June 4th.
McCraven's trio has been opening the festival since its opening year, 1985, and this year was no different. Credit for the above photo belongs to Oklahoma City Music: Deep Deuce and Beyond by Anita G. Arnold (Arcadia Publishing 2010).
To be sure, not all such city council events are as pleasurable as was this overture, but they are all important and, to lesser or greater degree, entertaining, as will hopefully be observed by the above and that which will shortly follow.
THE SETTING. Today's art deco City Hall was part of the Civic Center projects built during the Great Depression in conjunction with and assisted by the federal Works Projects Administration and meetings of City Council, along with many other elements of city government, have been conducted in that building since 1936 or 1937 (I'm checking for the exact opening date). The City Council chamber is a high-walled room located on the second floor. The images below show the "horseshoe" at the north end where city council members, the mayor, and city manager, municipal counselor, and city clerk sit, as well as a view looking south at the back of the chamber, both taken from the May 31, 2011, city council video.
THE REGULAR CAST. Oklahoma City is divided into eight wards each of which has a council member. With the mayor, these nine people are the elected officials of our city government, each having one vote (the mayor did not always have a vote unless a tie was present among council members, and I don't know when that changed). With them, three seats are present on the horseshoe for non-elected positions in city government, they being city manager, city counselor, and city clerk. From left to right on the back row, are Gary Marrs, Ward 1; Ed Shadid, Ward 2; Larry McAtee, Ward 3; Pete White, Ward 4; Kenneth Jordan, Municipal Counselor; Jim Couch, City Manager; Mick Cornett, Mayor; Frances Kersey, City Clerk; David Greenwell, Ward 5; Meg Salyer, Ward 6; Skip Kelly, Ward 7; and Pat Ryan, Ward 8.
Mick Cornett Mayor
Gary Marrs Ward 1
Ed Shadid Ward 2
Larry McAtee Ward 3
Pete White Ward 4
David Greenwell Ward 5
Meg Salyer Ward 6
Skip Kelly Ward 7
Pat Ryan Ward 8
James Couch City Manager
Kenneth Jordan City Counselor
Frances Kersey City Clerk
SUPPORTING CAST. Several other city employees regularly appear at council meetings, many others than I'll name here. At this particular meeting, these were two who appeared: Russell Claus, Planning Director, and Craig Freeman, Budget Director.
Russell Claus
Craig Freeman
TECHNICAL CREW. Today, we enjoy having the opportunity to watch city council meetings on Cox Channel 20, both live and in at least one repeat on Channel 20. As well, video recordings are made and can be played on your computer at any time. Saving, and editing, the May 31 meeting video is where the snippets came from in this post.
But, that wasn't always possible. Back in the days of a fractured city council, on January 10, 1962, the Oklahoman reported that city council voted 5-1 to "hazard the political liabilities" of proceedings being recorded by a tape recorder [audio only]. "The vote was a victory by William C. Kessler, Ward 1, who has been campaigning for recording of council proceedings for some time. ¶ The project has been delayed by objections from some members that the tape recordings might be tampered with by someone engaged in political skulduggery." Judging by the tenor of relationships of and actions by some of the councilmen in that time, good reason might exist for such suspicions.
In any event, it is different today, and to the unknown and unnamed city employees who make the television and digital presentations available, we owe our thanks. To view City Council (and other) agendas and, where/when available, videos of the proceedings, go to http://www.okc.gov/AgendaPub/meet.aspx and you will see a page something like that shown below — I've cropped and edited the screen capture for better presentation here. Click the image for a larger view.
Notice that I've highlighted a couple of videos available there right now. Just click on such an icon and another window will open in which you can observe the video, as shown below. Click on images below for larger views.
In Internet Explorer, the "● Normal, ❍ 2x & ❍ 4x" enlargement radio buttons below the video work. In Firefox and Chrome, they don't.
SHORT SUBJECTS. Oklahoma City Council meetings always begin with a prayer by a local minister and the Pledge of Allegiance. Commonly, that is followed by various announcements, proclamations, and honors bestowed, and May 31 fit that pattern. Here, I've severely edited that phase of council proceedings to show all such honorees.
In this instance: Danita Hundley a resolution approving the Rotary Club of Oklahoma City's teacher of the month was approved; the Oklahoma City Boathouse Foundation was acknowledged and commended as having received a community leadership award from the President's Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition; Anita Arnold and Rhonda Mitchell were honored for their involvement with the 26th Charlie Christian International Music Festival; Lt. Commander Mike Urton was present to receive the mayor's proclamation of Navy Week in the city; and the city received its second consecutive Phoenix Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for environmental excellence, that being for the conversion of a land fill area which became the Dell campus in Oklahoma City.
ROUTINE BUSINESS. Without intending to minimize or trivialize the importance of the less dramatic types of council business, every agenda has numerous items which are non-controversial and are often dealt with by a single vote on an entire list of items, and that's fair. Sometimes brief discussion occurs even if disagreement is not present. Sometimes non-city-wide contested items draw numerous citizens to speak. Some of each of these non-city-wide issues were on the May 31 docket and the following 23-minute video collage presents seven (7) exemplars of the types of things that the city council must decide.
A Potpourri. (1) Skip Kelly makes sure that new golf club software management is included for a course in his ward; (2) Pat Ryan is given an explanation by Laura Johnson, Finance Director, about how purchases are decided; (3) Meg Salyer discusses two developments in Midtown; (4) David Greenwell and others discuss a new sign for a church;
(5) On a disputed item, Pat Ryan and several citizens discuss whether a neighborhood easement providing access to an undeveloped common area should be closed; (6) Gary Marrs makes comments upon changes made to the city's electrical code for new homes which will raise construction costs on a new home by around $600; and (7) a citizen presents a serious problem with the empty house next to his which is used for prostitution and drugs.
Another Example: Union Bus Station's Abandonment and Future Use. This brief video clip shows that Greyhound will shortly be moving to different quarters, at least temporarily, on Martin Luther King & Reno.
Pete White and lawyer Roland Teague discuss the reasons for the move, and Pete White hopes that Greyhound will become involved in the planned intermodal transportation hub ... and, at the end, both go public about historic preservation of the Union Bus Station property and saving it from the bulldozer in the future.
THE DRAMA BEGINS. What to name the city's new boulevard which will replace the existing I-40 when the new I-40 crosstown opens in 2012 consumed a fair amount of discussion, but not much dispute.
Although a good bit of discussion has occurred elsewhere which disfavored naming the new boulevard, "Oklahoma City Boulevard" (see this post and comments at OkcCentral.com and this thread at OKC Talk.com), not much of that opinion showed its head in the council meeting, Pat Ryan merely taking the position that the name was too long. In the end, the mayor's proposal carried by a vote of 8-1.
THE PLOT THICKENS. Did you know that a "smoking room" still existed in the City Hall Building? Who knew! Ed Shadid proposed that it be shut down.
Despite a good bit of posturing by several council members, in the end, the proposal carried by a vote of 8-1, only Pat Ryan voting no. Some worried about the image presented of city employees standing outside and smoking. Some said we should have an overall wellness plan before approving Shadid's proposal.
SWORDS ARE CROSSED. The greatest amount of council debate, more akin to swashbuckling, perhaps, occurred with regard to Ed Shadid's proposal, co-sponsored by Pete White, that a 3-hearing process/procedure be adopted by city council concerning certain types of contracts which deal with development of real property owned by the city as well as a few other matters. Some council members showed every appearance of being defensive and offended by Shadid's proposal (Marrs, Ryan & Salyer), and even Pete White didn't think that the proposal went far enough. In the end, the proposal was deferred (continued) until July 19. The full 25 minutes of council discussion appears below.
Basically, Shadid's resolution would require three hearings: (1) First, for a proposal's presentation and council discussion; (2) Second, a public hearing in which citizens and council members would discuss, but not vote upon, the proposal; and (3) Third, a hearing wherein council would vote upon the matter. For more about this, see this thread at OKC Talk.com.
Interestingly, if the procedure which in-fact resulted in the earlier hearings on the then proposed Alliance entity would serve as an example, Shadid's proposal would only add one hearing to the procedure used for that proposal since, with the Alliance matter, the 1st hearing did occur — the one in which the proposal was presented and discussed by council members but no vote taken — and a second hearing occurred two weeks later with further discussion and vote. The only element missing in the Alliance proposal's procedure was the hearing sandwiched between those hearings which would provide for discussion, but no vote, by citizens and council members. See this earlier article on Alliance and this earlier one, also.
Oddly, this middle element of Shadid's proposal, the hearing designed specifically for citizen input, was hardly mentioned during the 25 minutes of debate.
CLIFFHANGER ENDING. At the end of council meetings, members are given an opportunity to make closing remarks, and council member Ed Shadid gave a dandy — he called the topic a tsunami about to hit the city.
Shadid said that in July several members of city council and business leaders would travel in July to Minneapolis, a city ranked #1 in wellness compared to Oklahoma City's last place ranking. But, the opportunity to study Minneapolis' situation concerning its convention center provided the potential fireworks. He indicated that the timing of the convention center would be on the June 14 docket.
Council member Shadid referenced an article which appeared in the Boston Globe which presented information questioning the economic benefits of convention center expansions, particularly convention center hotels. The April 22, 2011, article said,
In a meeting last year with some of Boston’s most influential business leaders, a consultant grimly warned that the city’s new convention center is losing millions of dollars a year because it can no longer compete with the nation’s largest venues. The Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, opened just seven years ago, is so short of exhibit space and hotel rooms, the consultant said, that officials need to consider a mammoth taxpayer-funded expansion. To some, the consultant’s conclusion was shocking. But to others, it rang familiar. Over the past decade, the same firm, Convention Sports & Leisure International, has produced similar findings to support expansions in Philadelphia, San Antonio, Washington, New Orleans, and other cities. Despite finding widely different conditions from city to city, in nearly every circumstance the firm’s recommendation was construction of bigger exhibition halls and hotels. A second convention center consultant for Boston, HVS International, has made similar findings around the country. But many of the cities that subsequently expanded are not seeing the predicted economic benefits, and some of the facilities are struggling financially. In Minneapolis, a center expanded at the advice of principals from Convention Sports is beset with low occupancy and huge deficits. Convention hotels built in Baltimore, Austin, and Phoenix based on HVS findings are doing so poorly their public managers suffered hits to their credit ratings. And in Washington, D.C., a center that opened in 2003 is producing much less hotel business than Convention Sports had predicted, according to the city’s convention agency. "These consultants always say there is this untapped potential out there," said Marc Scribner, an analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute. "But they are consistently wrong."
If the convention center's timeline does receive discussion on June 14, it should be a very lively discussion, indeed.
This concludes my summary of what one might expect at any council meeting. It is plainly obvious that all members are earnest in their work and take it seriously. Regrettably, it can, from time to time, be just as obvious that council members sometimes have thinner skins than they should and take proposals personally and not on their merits. If everyone would lighten up just a little (including writers like me), that would be a good thing to do.
I'm very pleased to present the guest article below which was written and assembled by Glen V. McIntyre based upon content in his new book, Guthrie and Logan County (Arcadia Publishing 2011).
Click on either Mr. McIntyre's photo or the book cover image for larger views.
Mr. McIntyre recently retired as archivist at the Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center in Enid, Oklahoma. He has family ties to Logan County and spent much of his youth visiting Guthrie and eastern portions of the county in particular.
Although I've not seen the whole book yet, the parts of it that I've reviewed on-line are exceptionally well done and I'm looking forward to owning a copy — it presents very significant information relevant to Oklahoma City history in the past as well as in the present (Logan County being part of the present day Oklahoma City metropolitan area defined by the federal census). Other than formatting and the addition of a few links and a wee bit of punctuation, the text below is almost exactly as was submitted to me — although, originally, I was sent two articles and I've combined them into one piece. Heck, but for events described in this article, Oklahoma City might arguably have become a part of the Guthrie metropolitan area instead of the other way around! Who can say for sure?
In this article, Mr. McIntyre presents the historic rationale underlying why Guthrie might say, "We wuz robbed," (even if Oklahoma Citians might lay the same claim for not being named the territory's capital in 1890, but that's another story). Regardless, this is not only a story about Guthrie, it is a story about Oklahoma City, as well. Without much further comment, other a bit of an introduction and some additional references at the end, read on and enjoy the story!
Part 1 describes some history of the Unassigned Lands Land Run of April 22, 1889, and how and why Guthrie became the territorial capital of Oklahoma Territory which initially consisted only of parts of what would become Logan, Kingfisher, Cleveland, Canadian, and Oklahoma counties, and the Oklahoma Panhandle (which was not part of the Land Run but which was part of the initial Oklahoma Territory), and by the time of 1907's statehood, the initial capital city of Oklahoma. Part 2 presents some inside history about how it happened that Guthrie lost its pinnacle status. Part 3 presents some internet links for further reading about this fascinating period of Oklahoma history.
THE MAKING OF THE CAPITAL, 1890 PART I
By Glen V. McIntyre
First Territorial Legislature, 1890 Click the above image for a larger view
The central part of Oklahoma, typically called the "Unassigned Lands," was opened by the Land Run of April 22, 1889, and this area included the towns of Kingfisher, Oklahoma City, Guthrie, Yukon, and Norman, and it included most but not all of what would eventually become Kingfisher, Oklahoma, Logan, Canadian, and Cleveland counties. Sometimes, this area is called, “Old Oklahoma.” The original laws opening the land to settlement did not have any provisions for a territorial government, or for the organization of towns, so each town formed its own government and lobbied the Federal Government to organize the area into a Territory. Their efforts paid off and on May 2, 1890, Congress passed the Organic Act which called for the formation of the Territory of Oklahoma. The new territory included all the lands opened by the Land Run of 1889 plus the Panhandle (then sometimes called No Man’s Land.) The Organic Act called for Guthrie to be the Territorial Capital until the Territorial Legislature met to decide otherwise. Two other cities wanted the capital very badly-Kingfisher and Oklahoma City. Kingfisher was the location of the second of the Land Offices where settlers in the western part of the Unassigned Lands went to register their claims. Only a mile west of Kingfisher was the Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservation which would be opened to settlement sometime soon, making Kingfisher more centrally located for a capital. Oklahoma City already looked to be the financial center of the new Territory and was anxious to become the Territorial Capital and hopefully, after that, the State Capital. Stakes were high and on August 27, 1890, the Territorial Legislature met in Guthrie. The lower chamber was called the House of Representatives and the Upper Chamber was called the Territorial Council. Delegates from Kingfisher and Oklahoma saw that they did not have enough strength in the legislature to win on their own, so they made a deal. The men from Kingfisher agreed to vote for Oklahoma City as capital, the first time it came up for a vote. If, for some reason, that was not successful, the legislators from Oklahoma City agreed to vote for Kingfisher as the capital. And so it played out. With their votes combined, Kingfisher and Oklahoma City voted for Oklahoma City to become the Territorial Capital. Then the delegates from Kingfisher played dirty. They went to the first Territorial Governor, George Washington Steele, a career politician from Indiana, who did not know the deals that had been made. People from Kingfisher presented a petition to Governor Steele asking him to veto the bill making Oklahoma City the capital. This pressure, combined with lobbying from the people wanting Guthrie to be the capital, was enough to cause Steele to veto Oklahoma City as capital. Then the delegates from Kingfisher approached the delegates from Oklahoma City and said, “You promised to vote for us if you failed to become capital.” The people from Oklahoma City did not know the double dealing of the people of Kingfisher, and so voted with the representatives from Kingfisher to make Kingfisher the Territorial Capital. That’s why you will hear some people from Kingfisher say that the town was Territorial Capital for a couple of weeks. What actually happened was that it did not take long for someone (presumably someone from Guthrie) to go to Governor Steele and tell him what had happened. On November 10, Governor Steele then vetoed the bill making Kingfisher the Territorial Capital, leaving Oklahoma still without an official Territorial Capital. Thus the capital remained Guthrie by default. Governor Steele’s wife had never liked the raw new territory of Oklahoma, and so he resigned and left to go home to Indiana. His successor as Territorial Governor, A.J. Seay, who was from Kingfisher and so presumably would be expected to renew the push for Kingfisher to be the Territorial Capital. He discovered that was not possible. The Territorial Legislature had somehow forgotten to pass a bill calling for regular elections. So Governor Seay made a deal that he would not bring up the subject of moving the capital if they voted to allow themselves to have elections. So, Guthrie remained the Territorial Capital for all of the territorial period. Guthrie then was the first State Capital until the first State Governor, Charles Haskell, decided to move the capital away from Guthrie because of his feud with a newspaper editor, Frank Greer, but that is the story of Part 2, below.
(For the details of the fight for the Territorial Capital see part 3 of the article, “The First Two Years” by Dan Peery in Volume VIII, No. 1, March 1930 issue of The Chronicles of Oklahoma, pp. 94-128. The Chronicles article is available online at this location.)
OKLAHOMA CITY VERSUS GUTHRIE – 1910: PART 2 (Frank Greer Versus Charles Haskell)
Frank Greer
Gov. Charles Haskell
Click on either Greer's image (left) or Haskell's (right) for larger views
For a variety of reasons (see Part 1, above), Guthrie had remained the capital of the Territory of Oklahoma since its beginning in 1890. The people of Guthrie naturally hoped that this situation would continue once Oklahoma became a state. However, party politics and a feud between two men determined otherwise. The first of the two men was Frank Hilton Greer (1862-1933). He established a newspaper in Guthrie, one of the first newspapers in Oklahoma territory, the Daily State Capital. In those days, newspapers did not pretend to be objective, but strongly supported one party or the other. The Daily State Capital strongly supported the Republican Party. The newspaper which opposed him and strongly supported the Democratic Party was the Guthrie Daily Leader run by Leslie Niblack. On June 16, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt signed The Enabling Act which created the mechanism for Oklahoma to become a state. Oklahoma would be divided into districts to choose delegates to a Constitutional Convention which would meet at Guthrie to write the basic foundations for a new state. Once the constitution had been written, there would be an election to approve the constitution and at the same time there would be elections for Governor and congressmen. As it turned out, only 12 of the 112 delegates to the Constitutional Convention were Republicans. They were nicknamed the twelve apostles. So, the state was strongly Democratic from the beginning. On September 17, 1907, the Democratic candidate for Governor, Charles N. Haskell (1860-1933) was elected Governor by a margin of over thirty thousand votes. Haskell had been born in Ohio where he first practiced law and then became involved in construction and building, especially of railroads. Haskell moved to Muskogee, Oklahoma in 1901 and was very active in developing that town into a hub of commerce for eastern Oklahoma. In 1905 he served as a delegate to the Sequoyah Constitutional convention, an unsuccessful attempt to bring in eastern Oklahoma as a separate, Indian State. In 1906 he was elected a delegate to the constitutional convention at Guthrie and was majority floor leader of the Democratic Party. Oklahoma became a state on November 16, 1907, with Guthrie as the state capital. Once Governor, Haskell enthusiastically endorsed many of the populist policies which the Democrats had written into the State Constitution. Unfortunately, he also enthusiastically adopted the Democratic party’s policy of segregation. That’s when Frank Greer started to attack Haskell in his editorials. Haskell had some dirty laundry connected with the building of railroads which made him vulnerable to Greer’s insinuations. So, there was no love lost between the two men and, by 1910, Haskell determined to move the State Capital to a friendlier environment, Oklahoma City. The Enabling Act stated that the state capital would remain at Guthrie until 1913 and thereafter be located at a site chosen by a statewide election called by the legislature. Haskell decided to move things along more quickly. The new state constitution allowed an initiative petition to call for a statewide vote on a particular subject. So, representatives from Oklahoma City circulated a petition calling for a statewide election to select either Oklahoma City, Guthrie or Shawnee as the state capital. Presumably Shawnee was presented as a third alternative to split the anti-Oklahoma City vote. Because the filing of the petition was not publicly announced for six days – one day after the official protest period had ended – people were not able to protest this petition. Thus people from Guthrie claimed their rights had been violated and took Haskell to court. The Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled in Haskell’s favor and he issued a proclamation setting the date for the special election. The original proclamation had called for the election to be held on Tuesday, June 14, but Haskell had penciled in a date for the election to be held Saturday, June 11. Haskell probably changed the election day knowing the courts would be closed on a weekend and could not issue an injunction preventing the removal of the capital to Oklahoma City. Evidently he was very confident that Oklahoma City would win. Oklahoma City did win. Haskell was in Tulsa the night of the election and called his private secretary to go to Guthrie on a special errand. W.B. Anthony went to Guthrie accompanied by Secretary of State, Bill Cross, and newspaper reporter, Luther Harrison. They drove to Guthrie by night to bring the state seal to Oklahoma City. Haskell met Anthony and Cross at 6:00 a.m. the morning of Sunday, June 12, at the Lee-Huckins Hotel in Oklahoma City. There, Haskell declared Oklahoma City to be the State Capital with rooms in the Lee-Huckins hotel to serve as the first state offices. Guthrie naturally fought back in the courts, arguing that the Enabling Act had called for the State Capital to remain in Guthrie until 1913. Eventually the case worked its way up to the United State Supreme Court which ruled that once a Territory became a State, it was sovereign and could decide for itself where the capital city would be. Property values in Guthrie fell by around 80% once the capital had been moved. Frank Greer moved to Tulsa in 1911 where he was active in real estate and oil investments. Guthrie citizens, to this day, say they were robbed.
For an outline of the lives of Frank Greer and Charles Haskell, consult the entries on them in the online Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture. For a detailed narrative about Charles Haskell as Governor see the article, Charles Nathaniel Haskell, 1907-1911 by James H. Howard II in the book, Oklahoma Governors, 1907 – 1929: Turbulent Politics, Edited by Leroy H. Fischer, published by the Oklahoma Historical Society in 1981.
Additional Resources. To order Guthrie and Logan County from Arcadia and save 20% on the book, click on the book cover at the right and enter the code GUTHRIE at checkout.
Operation Scissortail - Our Latest Book!
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[image: devon book cover]
We are very happy to announce the release of our latest book, "Operation
Scissortail," a narative history of the construction o...
Saturday in the Park..on a 113 degree day
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For those who don't know, there is a reason I've gone very quiet at such a
pivotal moment for Downtown OKC. I accepted a position in Cleveland, Ohio
and I...
INTRODUCTION. Jim is a 1948 graduate of Classen High School and a 1952 graduate of the University of Oklahoma, School of Journalism. Before presenting Jim's article, I'll make a few comments of my own based on my review of the Oklahoman's archives from 1950-1959. At the right is the first piece that I found, describing awards that Jim received at the annual convention of Kappa Alpha Mu, an honorary photo-journalism fraternity, during his senior year at the University of Oklahoma — doubtless a good way to start a career in journalism. However, as you will read below, there was a war on then, too, the Korean "Conflict," as it was called, and that took his initial attention upon being graduated from O.U.
I've included extracts from Oklahoma City Council meetings before but they've focused upon particular hot-topic issues when I have. This article is different — it's more akin to the theme, "a day in the life" of city council. While certainly not touching upon everything that occurred in the 4 hour 11 minute council session, it does give a broader view of the sorts of things that can and do occur from time to time — you might call it, "City Council 101." So, get your popcorn, put your feet back, and enjoy this eclectic assembly of videos from the May 31 council meeting. Taken together, they show that it's not always "serious" at City Hall and that it's not just the "hot topic" matters that can be interesting as well as educational.
THE SETTING. Today's art deco City Hall was part of the Civic Center projects built during the Great Depression in conjunction with and assisted by the federal Works Projects Administration and meetings of City Council, along with many other elements of city government, have been conducted in that building since 1936 or 1937 (I'm checking for the exact opening date). The City Council chamber is a high-walled room located on the second floor. The images below show the "horseshoe" at the north end where city council members, the mayor, and city manager, municipal counselor, and city clerk sit, as well as a view looking south at the back of the chamber, both taken from the May 31, 2011, city council video.
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