Last Stop on Vacation: Tulsa Town

June 12-15--We finished our vacation trip in Tulsa, visiting with cousins Mike and Debi, hanging out with some members of the Will Rogers High School class of 1961, and seeing a special exhibit at our favorite museum, Gilcrease. The sculpture above at the main entrance to the museum is "Sacred Rain Arrow" by the Apache artist Allan Houser. It is now featured on Oklahoma license plates as well.

We went to Gilcrease on the closing day of an exhibit I had long wanted to see of sculpture in wood by the late Cherokee artist Willard Stone. It was a wonderful retrospective of works from many collections including Gilcrease's own; unfortunately no photos are allowed in special exhibits. However, you can see some examples of Stone's work (mostly bronze reproductions of the original wood pieces) and read about his life at the Willard Stone Museum site, maintained by his son Jason, a rising sculptor in his own right.

Another highlight of the trip was a three-hour lunch gathering of some 30 members of the Class of 1961. Our high school, Will Rogers, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007. It opened in 1939, being constructed by the WPA. It is an outstanding example of Tulsa's Art Deco heritage, and the inside has beautiful murals and granite floors. Starting in September, the building will be open for public tours on the second Monday night of each month at 6:30 p.m.

The school complex occupies several square blocks, from 4th to 5th place and from Pittsburg to Knoxville streets in East Tulsa. All of the additions have been in the same buff brick, and a new athletic complex has decor that echoes the original design as well.

One of our most determined class members, Mary Ann Caldwell Hargrove, has set up a web site for our class at ClassReport.Org and she convened a series of pre-reunion planning meetings. This one, on June 14, was at the Promenade Mall at 41st and Yale. Our reunion will be held in 2011, the last weekend of September.

It helps that we wear name tags, because after almost 50 years, some changes have taken place. Charles Schwabe has retired from careers in the military and from ranching, and is writing books. Those junior English classes come in handy. His latest book, Cedar Box Memories, is a work of fiction based on the pioneer life of his grandparents. As we talked, we discovered that we have Sayre in common. His great-grandparents are buried there, too.

Frank Marcum and Margaret Rule Farris have also volunteered to help organize our reunion, as they have the previous ones. Turns out my cousin's sister knows Frank, from his years of teaching at our old high school after he "retired" from teaching at another one. Frank was a finalist for the Teacher in Space program a few years back. Margaret and I lived one block from each other and attended the same grade school and belonged to the same Brownie Scout Troop.

Molly Lambert and Jim Clark (left) are two classmates who married each other. Molly keeps up our class data base and has placed all of our yearbook pictures on the web site. This gathering was a tantalizing sample of the kinds of stories we will all be able to recall and relive when the reunion comes around. Norm was waiting for me in the food court outside the room and kept wondering what we were all doing in there!


Another highlight, as we drove around some of my old neighbor- hoods and the high school taking pictures, was this view of the church I grew up attending, Rogers Heights. I wrote about its closing two years ago, a service that I got to attend almost by accident. At the time, there was a lot of uncertainty about the building. Would it be sold? Who would buy it? I was happy to see that a new church has been started by the Oklahoma Region and it is using the building. I think that In the Spirit Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) was begun in the fall of 2008. May these folks grow and prosper according to their motto from Second Corinthians: "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."