Meador Manor

Getting the Scoop from Evelyn Waugh

Posted on June 22, 2026 by Granger Meador

I flit across familiar genres of fiction, occasionally dive into a literary work, and maintain an interest in a variety of nonfiction. Recently I had a bit of mystery, a light adventure, an old science fiction novella, and a depressing yet engrossing literary visit to Winesburg, Ohio.

Needing a break from fiction, I embarked upon listening to 14 hours of erudition from the always-reliable Simon Winchester with The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of Wind. Normally I would balance that by reading fiction on my Kindle or as a physical book.

However, in researching a previous post about a novella by Lester del Rey, I enjoyed an insightful article by Dan Sinykin. I liked it so much that I purchased and read the first chapters of Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature which dealt with mass market paperback. He lost me when he went on to write about trade paperbacks, as I haven’t read most of the famous authors of the 1960s onward that he droned on about.

I abandoned that book and considered what fiction I might pick up next. That drew me back to the Modern Library’s self-serving 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century, and I began running down its unread entries, cross-referencing them with the meta-analysis of The Greatest Books of All Time. I noticed a pattern in them.

One of Sinykin’s premises is that in the era of publishing conglomerates, book awards like the Booker and Pulitzer have heavily favored historical fiction. I see a similar focus on the past, with a decidedly downbeat tone, in many of the entries on Modern Library’s 20th century list. Here’s just a handful of the highest-ranked unread entries:

Catch-22: 1961 critique of military bureaucracy, set in World War II
Sons and Lovers: 1913 novel of emotional conflicts and suffocating relationships from 1885-1911
The Way of All Flesh: 1903 posthumous publication of a multi-generational tale, written in the 1880s and satirizing Victorian hypocrisy, spanning 1765 to 1863
An American Tragedy: 1925 critique of the American Dream, covering 1897-1908
Native Son: 1940 story of a black youth living in poverty in the 1930s

I wasn’t attracted to that laundry list of depressing critiques of society set a century or more in the past. I thought of the Saturday Night Live fake commercial from 1976, and how I needed a Puppy Upper instead of all of those Doggie Downers.

Fun vs. depressing books graphic — Can you spot whose mid-20th-century style I told Gemini to emulate?

So I asked Gemini, “What are the most joyful and optimistic books in the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century?”

It replied, in part, “When the Modern Library compiled its famous list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century, the editorial board clearly leaned into the era’s signature literary moods: existential angst, dystopian dread, psychological disintegration, and tragic disillusionment. Finding a book on this list that leaves you genuinely uplifted and smiling requires some careful planning…”

It then identified A Room with a View and The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which I’ve already read, and I wouldn’t call Wilder’s novel a happy one. It also recommended The Adventures of Augie March, which I had previously rejected as yet another bildungsroman. That was followed by Kim, but the imperialism of Rudyard Kipling is hardly to my taste.

Thankfully, it then spat out four works I was unfamiliar with: Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever, Loving by Henry Green, and Under the Net by Iris Murdoch. Knowing AI’s tendency to hallucinate, I first verified those were actually on the Modern Library’s list, and then I put them into an online spinner, flicked the virtual dial, and…my next read was Scoop, which has been described as “Waugh’s exuberant comedy of mistaken identity and brilliantly irreverent satire of the hectic pursuit of hot news.”

However, Seth Meyers wrote, “Its timelessness is both hilarious and depressing.” Depressing? Oh, dear, let’s hope not.

It is #75 on the Modern Library list, #84 in BBC’s 2015 ranking of 100 Greatest British Novels, #60 in the Guardian’s 2015 ranking of the Best 100 Novels in English, and was ranked the 433rd Greatest Book of All Time in that meta-analysis in late May 2026. It was published in 1938, so it won’t enter the public domain in the U.S. until 2034. The Kindle version cost me $9 after I redeemed $3 in “points” I had somehow earned, although I could have scored a paperback copy for $7.

My updated tracking of the Modern Library 100

I knew little about Waugh, save that he was from an era when men were named Evelyn and that he had written Brideshead Revisited, although I hadn’t a clue what that novel was about. I see Brideshead ranked the 141st greatest book versus 433rd for Scoop, but on Modern Library’s list Brideshead was #80 versus Scoop as #75, and it has A Handful of Dust as #34.

Waugh was known for satirical novels and “considered one of the great prose stylists of the previous century”. However, I found his Wikipedia biography rather repulsive. I could only hope that the unpleasant person’s book was more appealing than he was, but I am not altogether surprised when a satirist is an unhappy human being. One biographical detail I enjoyed was that his first wife was also named Evelyn. Unsurprisingly, he-Evelyn and she-Evelyn did not stay together for long. He-Evelyn later converted to Catholicism, thus securing for himself, in keeping with the stereotypes, a second wife (after the convenient annulment) who was unlikely to divorce him as well as a considerable number of offspring.

I found the book a quick and fairly painless read. There were some brief funny sketches, such as:

The widowed Lady Trilby was William’s Great-Aunt Anne, his father’s elder sister; she owned the motor-car, a vehicle adapted to her own requirements; it had a horn which could be worked from the back seat; her weekly journey to church resounded through the village like the Coming of the Lord.

I particularly enjoyed Waugh’s description of a milch-goat that made a few appearances:

The Pension Dressler stood in a side street and had, at first glance, the air rather of a farm than of an hotel. Frau Dressler’s pig, tethered by the hind trotter to the jamb of the front door, roamed the yard and disputed the kitchen scraps with the poultry. He was a prodigious beast. Frau Dressler’s guests prodded him appreciatively on their way to the dining-room, speculating on how soon he would be ripe for killing. The milch-goat was allowed a narrower radius; those who kept strictly to the causeway were safe, but she never reconciled herself to this limitation and, day in, day out, essayed a series of meteoric onslaughts on the passers-by, ending, at the end of her rope, with a jerk which would have been death to an animal of any other species. One day the rope would break; she knew it and so did Frau Dressler’s guests.

I also enjoyed how the pompous newspaper executive Lord Copper thought of his banquets:

Lord Copper quite often gave banquets; it would be an understatement to say that no one enjoyed them more than the host for no one else enjoyed them at all, while Lord Copper positively exulted in every minute.

The humor was clearly influenced by P.G. Wodehouse, Waugh being a fan and modeling his Lord Copper after Wodehouse’s more hilarious Lord Tilbury, with Waugh acknowledging the debt with a mention of a “Bertie Wodehouse-Bonner”. The daft Boot family in the novel are a variation on the Blandings of Wodehouse, and so forth, but we don’t spend enough time with the various characters for their charms to become more than set dressing.

The novel was fun, but its humor was Wodehouse-Lite, and its satire quite colonial and imperial. Waugh targeted everyone, but I never understood his deus ex machina character of Mr. Baldwin. I see that Herbert Lom played the character in a 1987 television adaptation, and that strikes me as good casting based on the description of the character in the book.

I think I would have enjoyed the novel far more if I had not already listened to over a dozen Wodehouse novels. The final section, after the long middle spent in Africa, felt too contrived, and the novel left me not unhappy yet underwhelmed. I certainly wouldn’t rate it as highly as several of the novels by Wodehouse.

I had not given up on something light from the Modern Library’s list, but I was tired of reading about Great Britain, so I passed up Under the Net and Loving for now. Instead, my next read was The Wapshot Chronicle by Cheever.

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1940 Postcard: Down in Oklahoma

Posted on June 20, 2026 by Granger Meador

The final postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack has the words to “Down in Oklahoma” surrounded by 14 tiny images of oil field equipment, mostly derricks. The internet might confuse that with a “Down in Oklahoma” song from the 1949 film The Prince of Peace, but that is not a match.

I found the postcard’s text in the February 1921 issue of Capt. Billy’s Whiz Bang, a humor magazine published from 1919 to 1936. It appears to have just been some doggerel, and the state is not nearly so lawless these days, and most girls no longer wear their dresses to their knees. However, we can still identify with “Where you get up in the morning in a world of snow and sleet, and you come home in the evening suffocating in the heat.”

We’re down here in Okla.,
Where you never have the blues;
Where the bandits steal the jitneys
And the marshals steal the booze;
Where buildings horn the skyline;
Where the populace is boost;
Where they shoot men just for pastime;
Where the chickens never roost;
Where the stickup men are wary
And the bullets fall like hail;
Where each pocket has a pistol
And each pistol’s good for jail;
Where they always hang the jury;
Where they never hang a man;
If you call a man a liar, you
Get home the best you can;
Where you get up in the morning
In a world of snow and sleet,
And you come home in the evening
Suffocating in the heat;
Where the jitneys whizz about you
And the street cars barely creep;
Where the burglars pick your pockets
While you “lay me down to sleep”;
Where the bulldogs all have rabies
And the rabbits they have fleas;
Where the big girls, like the wee ones,
Wear their dresses to their knees;
Where you whist out in the morning,
Just to give your health a chance,
Say “Howdy” to some fellow who
Shoots big holes in your pants;
Where wise owls are afraid to hoot
And birds don’t dare to sing—
For it’s hell down here in Okla.,
Where they all shoot on the wing.

A local connection to that mess was the incredibly rowdy boomtown in Osage County that was named Whizbang after the magazine. The timing is right for it being called that because of this bit of verse.

Whizbang, which was also known as Denoya, was a few miles southwest of Shidler. One of my uncles was once the superintendent of schools at Shidler. One clear indication of how rough Whizbang once was is that over a century ago it had a Waffle House. IYKYK!

A Waffle House? Yep, that was a rough town. [Source]

I’ll close out this series with a map showing the locations highlighted in the 18 traditional postcards in the souvenir pack.

Boy howdy, northwest and southeast Oklahoma were non-existent in that pack, and southwest Oklahoma only had one out of almost 20 cards. If I were to revise it, I’d drop the horseshoe curve near Turner Falls, the Will Rogers birthplace, the Picher mill, and this bit of doggerel. I’d then swap in Quartz Mountain near Altus, Roman Nose State Park near Watonga, Alabaster Caverns near Freedom, and Robbers Cave near Wilburton. Those four were all operating by 1940, and they would provide a bit more balance, geographically.

I hope you enjoyed this 20-day series. Once I got my driver’s license back in 1982, I took advantage of living in central Oklahoma by making excursions all over the state for several years, taking in the sights. It interested me how the highlights in 1940 changed over the subsequent 85 years.

Happy trails!

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1940 Postcard: Quanah Parker Dam

Posted on June 19, 2026 by Granger Meador

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of the Quanah Parker Dam in the Wichita Mountains near Lawton. Parker was a war leader of the Kwahadi Antelope band of the Comanche Nation, the son of Kwahadi chief Peta Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker, who had been abducted as a nine-year-old child during the Fort Parker massacre in 1836 and assimilated into the Nokoni Wanderers tribe.

Quanah was a dominant figure in the Red River War of 1874. In 1867, the U.S. Army began hunting bison to sabotage the food sources of plains Indians, and after a new technique for tanning their hides became available, commercial hunters reduced the tens of millions of bison to near extinction. The War marked the end of free-roaming Indian populations on the southern Great Plains.

Quanah surrendered in 1875 and led the Kwahadi Comanche to a Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation at Fort Sill, which is just outside the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge where his namesake dam and its lake were constructed in 1935 on Quanah Creek in Comanche County.

The images below were taken at roughly the same time, showing Quanah in traditional Comanche and then European-American business attire, 15 years after his surrender.

Parker’s home in Cache was called the Star House, and he went on hunting trips with President Theodore Roosevelt, who often visited him. He rejected both monogamy and traditional Protestant Christianity in favor of the Native American Church movement.

Quanah Parker Monument — Monument near Cache

The wildlife refuge is over 59,000 acres and began in 1901 as the Wichita Forest Reserve. President Theodore Roosevelt made it the nation’s first big-game animal refuge. In 1905, the New York Zoological Park offered the federal government fifteen American bison to begin a herd for the refuge if it would agree to fence it.

Quanah Parker led a First Peoples contingent greeting the newly arrived bison, and the preserve went on to successfully preserve elk, wild turkey, and a herd of Texas longhorn cattle in its prairie environment. Unsuccessful programs included pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, and the prairie chicken. The refuge also features deer, prairie dogs, raccoons, bobcats, coyotes, and rabbits. I’ve hiked all of the trails at the refuge, and I have seen most of those animals there, and I can personally attest that it also has rattlesnakes.

Quanah Parker acted in several silent films, and he died at Star House in 1911 at age 66. His remains are in the Fort Sill Post Cemetery, where his tombstone reads, “Resting here until day breaks and shadows fall and darkness disappears is Quanah Parker, Last Chief of the Comanches.”

I first visited the refuge in 1989 with my late best friend, and I returned to Quanah Parker Lake in 2011 and took Wendy there in 2013. In the summer of 2019, I had to attend a training for public school administrators in Lawton, and I took the opportunity to visit the lake again, having been impressed by the pretty little lake and its old dam with a walkway across the top.

Company #859 of the CCC built the dam, about five miles north of Star House, as a miniature remembrance of the larger dams of the west, such as Boulder Dam, now known as Hoover Dam. Oklahoma’s dam rises 52 feet, while Hoover Dam rises 726 feet. The Oklahoma lake covers 89 acres and has three miles of shoreline, with a capacity of 905 acre-feet, while Lake Mead once covered about 158,000 acres with 759 miles of shoreline. However, drought and climate change have reduced it to almost one quarter of its capacity.

A Bartlesville Connection

The obvious link between the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge and Bartlesville is that they have each played a role in preserving the American bison. In 1926, Frank Phillips established the Woolaroc Museum and Wildlife Preserve, starting with a herd of 90 bison. 183 bison came by rail from the Scotty Philip estate in Pierre, South Dakota and were split among Woolaroc, Waite Phillips’ ranch in New Mexico, and the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch mentioned in an earlier postcard post. The 3,700-acre Woolaroc ranch remains a major sanctuary for bison, elk, and longhorn cattle.

P.S. If you noticed I keep using the term bison instead of buffalo, that is because bison and buffalo are distinct species, and what many of us in American colloquially call buffalo are actually bison.

Tomorrow’s postcard is the final one in this series, and it has 14 tiny images on it surrounding some doggerel about, you guessed it, the Sooner State.

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1940 Postcard: Tucker Tower

Posted on June 18, 2026 by Granger Meador

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of Tucker Tower at Lake Murray. That is east of I-35 way down south of Ardmore, only thirteen miles from the Texas border. It was a boondoggle rising 65 feet above a bluff that was in turn 65 feet above the surface of the lake. Construction began in the 1930s on a visually impressive but impractical building.

Lake Murray was built by the National Park Service and various New Deal agencies of the Great Depression, including the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Two main group camps were created, plus a separate “Negro” camp. Lake Murray State Park became the only state park built by the National Park Service to provide permanent camping facilities for African American youth, which I suppose was progressive in some sense but also reflected the virulent racism of Governor Alfalfa Bill Murray and the Oklahomans who elected him.

"Alfalfa Bill" Murray — “Alfalfa Bill” Murray

The Lake and park were, of course, named for that notorious governor, who was also the namesake for the former Murray Hall in Stillwater from an earlier postcard. He was a former farmhand from Toadsuck, Texas (I’m not kidding) who grew alfalfa and could rhapsodize about the crop at length. He became a self-educated lawyer in Tishomingo, the capital of the Chickasaw nation. Years before his governorship, he presided over the writing of the Oklahoma Constitution, the longest governing document in the U.S. when it was ratified in 1907. Murray strongly supported white supremacist and segregationist clauses in its draft which President Teddy Roosevelt thankfully had stricken before ratification. However, Murray became the first Speaker of the House in Oklahoma and made sure the first law passed by the new state was a Jim Crow one, the infamous Oklahoma Senate Bill One.

During the Great Depression, Murray was elected governor with a campaign slogan that is shockingly offensive today: he railed against “The Three C’s – Corporations, Carpetbaggers, and Coons.” Murray used the National Guard on 47 occasions and declared martial law over 30 times in four years, for everything from policing ticket sales at university football games to patrolling oil fields. One wonders if Oklahoma will eventually decide to strip his name off the lake, the state park, a state college, and Murray County. I don’t hold out much hope, but it could do so while letting the more ambiguously named Alfalfa County remain.

The tower was named for Fred Tucker, a state senator, who was instrumental in obtaining funding for the dam and lake. Tucker said they had trouble getting Governor Murray to go along with the lake idea, and Murray only agreed to support it if they would name the lake after him. Given what is happening at the federal level these days, some things never change.

The tower was based on photographs of a European castle that Fred Tucker had taken in World War I. Limestone was quarried on site to build the five-story tower with observation deck, including a two-story section intended as a living area. It seems that the tower might have been intended as a summer vacation home for governors, but work progressed slowly, and its exterior was completed by 1940.

However, its rocky peninsula projecting out into the lake made sewage disposal problematic, as pipes would need to extend to cesspools far enough from the lake to avoid pollution. The unfinished and unplumbed structure was used in the early 1940s for some University of Oklahoma (OU) summer geology camps.

The tower’s interior wasn’t completed until the 1950s, when the paleontologist Dr. John Willis Stovall of OU worked with the state parks and recreation division to convert it into a geology and natural history museum, which opened in 1954.

Tucker Tower interior — Inside Tucker Tower’s “living area”

That seemed fitting since in 1933, on a farm that was sold to the state for the park, a huge meteorite was discovered. It weighed 560 pounds, and it was later cut up for analysis, with one of the pieces displayed at Tucker Tower.

By 1987, rotting floors inside the building led the park naturalist, Mark Teders, to close off the tower end of the second floor. The iron window frames were so rusted that new panes of glass just fell back out, and there was still no sewage system, with visitors having to use a portable restroom in the parking lot. Despite its shortcomings, the tower drew 36,000 visitors that year.

In 2011-2013, a $3 million 4,000-square-foot Nature Center was added, with the old tower receiving a $500,000 makeover. The funding was raised by the state park’s oil and gas trust fund, and Mark Teders was still the naturalist. He noted that the tower had 25,000 visitors between that March and September.

I hoped to tour the tower with Wendy back in 2019 during a stay in Sulphur, but I underestimated to time it took to get there on back roads while diverting through the tiny town of Gene Autry. So Tucker Tower remains an unfinished piece of business for us.

Tomorrow’s postcard will take us to a spot I have enjoyed on multiple occasions: the Quanah Parker Dam.

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1940 Postcard: Bear Falls

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Granger Meador

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is from what was once Platt National Park. The image is of Bear Falls, a surprising choice to me given the other opportunities there of Sulphur’s artesian Vendome Well, the old mineral water fountains, or Lincoln Bridge. I believe that flood damage eroded away some of the upper layers of the falls dam over the decades since the postcard image was taken.

I have been to the park many times, but I don’t recall ever photographing Bear Falls, which vary seasonally with the level of Travertine Creek. So I draw upon the photographs shared by others in recent years.

The park was pretty small in 1941. Those who study the map below will see that a State Tubercular Hospital used to be adjacent to it; that 1921 facility is now the Sulphur Veterans Home. It is about 3,000 feet southwest of Bear Falls.

When I visit the area, I’m much more likely to visit Little Niagara farther upstream, which has upper and lower falls. When I was a kid, my parents usually camped in their Yellowstone trailer over in the Rock Creek campground at the west end of the park. It was near the Buffalo Pasture, which had a small herd of bison brought over from the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in the 1920s. In 2023, the recreation area shifted the small herd from the 84-acre pasture used since 1934. The old pasture had built up too much woody overgrowth, and a new 42-acre one offered better grazing. There are plans to use both pastures over time to allow for prairie restoration and maintenance.

When I was an adult, my father and I once camped at the park in one of his Volkswagen campers. We rode our bicycles eastward for miles along Perimeter Road to visit Little Niagara. I have fond memories of a local bluegrass instrumental group performing at the Travertine Nature Center at the east end of the park.

The CCC at Platt constructed five dams along the creek, including one at Bear Falls and the lower dam at Little Niagara. One of the falls at Bear Falls and the upper dam at Little Niagara appear to have been natural features, although there is evidence of some concrete work at the upper dam of Little Niagara.

Little “Niagra” – the boy couldn’t spell back in 2010

Farther downstream along Travertine Creek, just before it empties into Rock Creek, is Lincoln Bridge, which was built in 1909 on the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth as the first major improvement in the park, seven years after the federal government purchased 33 mineral springs from the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations to create the Sulphur Springs Reservation. It was renamed Platt National Park in 1906 in honor of Senator Orville Platt of Connecticut, who had helped establish the area.

Platt was not a very big national park, but it attracted people with its “healing waters” which came out of the ground cold at about 63 degrees Fahrenheit. A 1941 park booklet, published about the same time as the postcard, addresses Pavilion Springs, Bromide Spring, and Medicine Spring. The most significant sulphur springs in the park are Hillside, Pavilion, and Black Sulphur Spring, which still flow, although Hillside and Black Sulphur have bacterial contamination and are no longer safe to drink. The major bromide springs were Medicine and Bromide, but those have stopped flowing.

After World War II, Platt became more popular, hitting one million visitors for the first time in 1949 as people were now more attracted to recreational and outdoor opportunities than water cures. The Lake of the Arbuckles was constructed in the 1960s in the Arbuckle Recreation Area, and in 1976 that and the old national park were combined into the Chickasaw National Recreation Area that is mapped below. To get your bearings, Cold Springs Campground at the upper right is where Bear Falls is located.

The water cure movement was long gone, vanquished by modern medicine, and Platt was demoted since it was small and lacked scenic grandeur. The act was part of my education in the frequent humbling of my home state.

My favorite attraction is Bromide Hill near the Rock Creek campground where my parents often camped. That long mound of conglomerate rock rises 140 feet above Sulphur and the park. For millennia rivers washed rocks down from the Arbuckle Mountains and lime in the water cemented them into what is now Bromide Hill, which is tall enough to transition from oak, ash, and elm trees into short grass and prickly pear cacti. An overlook provides a great view of Sulphur and is called Robbers Roost since local legend says outlaws once used the location.

Granger at Robber’s Roost on Bromide Hill in 1977 and 2023

The Vendome Artesian Well was drilled in 1922 about eight feet outside the park’s main entrance, and it produced 2,500 gallons of water per minute from the Arbuckle-Simpson aquifer due to hydraulic pressure. It became part of the recreation area in 1979, and in 1998 a new well was drilled about 20 feet west of the original one, featuring a steel casing to resist corrosion. Visitors may safely drink from it, but most of my friends have declined to do so thanks to its distinct aroma of hydrogen sulfide.

Interestingly, the chloride-to-bromide mass ratio of its water suggests that the 1% of its output that is brine is a product of evaporated seawater from ages ago. The groundwater flowing from the well is about 10,500 years old by Carbon-14 dating, which is quite different from the freshwater springs and wells flowing from unconfined portions of the aquifer.

Wendy and I enjoy visiting Sulphur, where we stay in one of the special suites at The Artesian Hotel, which is run by the Chickasaws. We eat in its Springs at the Artesian restaurant and browse its shops, purchasing some of the tribe’s Bedré Fine Chocolate treats.

Tomorrow’s postcard will take us much farther south, to Lake Murray.