Meador Manor

Fill ‘Er Up!

Posted on September 10, 2026 by Granger Meador

When I moved to Bartlesville in 1989, I started frequenting Phillips 66 stations when fueling my automobile. It made sense to me to support the company that provided the unusual demographic base that allowed me to teach high school physics all day in a small city of about 35,000 people.

I had grown up in metropolitan Oklahoma City, which had grown from roughly 575,000 when I was born to just under one million when I moved to Bartlesville. While driving in Oklahoma City and Norman in the 1980s, I had filled up at whatever station was convenient and had a good price.

My first car was a scrawny used 1976 Toyota Corolla that got about 25 miles per gallon, while my second was a beefy used 1978 Chevrolet Monte Carlo V8 that only got about 17. Its terrible mileage had me paying much stricter attention to gas prices, and I was glad to switch to a used 1981 Toyota Celica Supra. It will still lively, thanks to its low center of mass and straight 6-cylinder engine, and it got about 22.

Back in 1989, I was paying about $1 per gallon, which would be about $2.66 when inflated to 2026 dollars. As I write, however, Trump’s war against Iran has pushed local prices for regular unleaded above $3.75 while the national average is about $4.28.

Once I was working full-time, reliability was my top priority for a car, and I bought new 4-cylinder front-wheel-drive cars which I drove until they needed too many repairs for my comfort. My 1991 Honda Accord got about 23 miles per gallon, my 2001 Toyota Camry about 24 mpg, and my 2014 Camry is still getting about 28 mpg.

I’ve never been a car enthusiast, and I didn’t have the front of my current Camry repaired after a raccoon wandering out of the weeds onto Highway 60 east of town took out a front fog light and loosened the bumper cover years ago. The missing light and the big silver binder clip on the driver side wheel arch to secure the fender help me distinguish my boring silver car from all the others in a parking lot.

I have lived in southeast Bartlesville since 1989, and the gas station I most often frequented, until it closed in May 2021 amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, was on the southwest corner of Madison and Adams Boulevards.

The Phillips 66 station I frequented most until it closed in 2021

It had opened back around 1974 as an innovative corporate-owned experiment. It was Phillips’ first all self-serve station complete with a then-free automatic car wash. Bob Pomeroy, who had been a retailing executive for the company, told the Examiner-Enterprise in a September 2014 interview, “The attraction of that store was that it was all self-serve so there was a lower price on gasoline and we gave away a car wash with a fill up. It was really eye-opening and that’s when we started putting car washes in all our stores because we saw it attracted a lot of people to buy gasoline.”

When I was a kid, some stations still offered a choice between full service or self-service. Full service cost a few cents more per gallon, with an attendant who might also clean the windshield, offer to check the oil, and check the tires. Some would even offer to vacuum the car interior.

They would always ask, “Regular or ethyl?” Premium gasoline was usually called ethyl because of the added tetraethyl lead that boosted the octane to reduce engine knocking. My parents had a 1971 Buick LeSabre sedan that would knock without the lead additive.

However, lead poisoning prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to begin reducing the lead additives in 1973, catalytic converters made unleaded fuel mandatory for new cars in 1975, and leaded gasoline began to be heavily restricted in 1986 and became illegal in the U.S. for retail on-road sales in 1996. These days, premium unleaded fuels boost octane by blending in components such as ethanol, toluene, and xylene.

Full service also gradually disappeared, except in states where it was required by law. The first self-service station had opened in Los Angeles in 1947, but self-serve was still barred in 23 states in 1968, over ten years after the first automatic hold-open/shut-off valves were approved, which reduced the likelihood of spills pumped by untrained drivers.

The 1973-1974 oil crisis pushed stations to offer more self service to consumers who faced relatively high prices at the pumps. Credit card readers began to be integrated into new pumps in the mid-1980s, and by 1992, about 80% of the gas in the US was pumped via self-service. In my over 44 years of driving, I’ve almost never used full service stations, although I was forced to when visiting Oregon, which prohibited self service until 2023.

By the time I was filling up the car at the Phillips self-serve station at Madison & Adams, the car wash was no longer free. I would pay for an automatic wash on occasion, or wash the car with a handheld wand sprayer at a dedicated facility.

ASAP took over several former Kicks 66 locations in town. ASAP was founded in 1979 when 18-year-old Rick Koch opened a gas station in Weatherford. His business grew into a wholesale fuel distributor in 1985 as the Koch Oil Company, not to be confused with Koch Industries which is based in Wichita, Kansas. Koch Oil acquired ASAP fuels in 2010 and in 2011 became ASAP Energy Inc.

ASAP has about 20 general store locations across Oklahoma, including three in Bartlesville. After the old Kicks 66 at Madison & Adams was closed, I shifted to the ASAP General Store 307 at 3901 Nowata Road, which had a car wash. That location was recently closed, however, upon the opening of a new ASAP General Store 317 on the northwest corner of Madison Blvd and Nowata Rd.

When I am on vacation, I’ll go into service station convenience stores for drinks, treats, and a restroom break, but I seldom do more than pump gas at local service stations.

After learning to navigate the station’s new touch screen pumps and filling up there several times, I walked through the store, which was nice. I plan to keep filling up at the new ASAP, since the QuikTrips on US 75 are too frenetic for my taste, and access to the ASAP is more comfortable for me than the Casey’s across the highway, and I still like buying gas from Phillips 66.

I’ve never been a coupon clipper, and for decades I’ve ignored the various rewards programs. However, now that I’m retired and have more time and patience for such nonsense, I downloaded three different apps related to filling up at the station: Fuel Forward, KickBack Points, and ASAP Energy.

Three different apps were mentioned at the pump; the Fuel Forward one was the most useful to me

I figured out that I can pull up to the station, open the Fuel Forward app, type in the pump number, and get the pump to activate at a discounted price. If I were to link the app with a Phillips 66 credit card, I would get an additional discount for the rest of the calendar year, and that might save me roughly 4%, which is twice what I can get back with my Citibank Double Cash credit card.

However, the last thing I want is yet another credit card to track, so I’ve just linked my Citibank card to the Fuel Forward app, which I think should net me about 3.3% savings overall. If I were a regular visitor to QuikTrip or Casey’s, they have their own discount programs.

I could also try earning KickBack Points, which can’t be traded for cash, but can be used as penny discounts on in-store items, but that’s too much hassle for my limited patience with retail transactions. I also checked to see if my AARP membership could net me some savings, but it only links to Exxon Mobil or Shell for fuel discounts.

I have driven my latest sedan for a dozen years. While I put 236,000 miles on my 2001 Camry over 13 years, I’ve driven the 2014 model about half as much on average. After buying it, Wendy and I were married, we switched to using her 2019 Honda Odyssey mini-van for driving vacations, and I shifted to an administrative position with no summer break. But now that I’m retired, I know that I’ll put more highway miles on the car.

I also know that my second Camry will eventually wear out. Sedans commanded about 3/4 of the auto market when I was a kid. That fell to about half of the auto market by the turn of the century, and now they are less than 1/4 of the market. I see lots of pickups and both truck-chassis and car-chassis SUVs around me these days, but I much prefer a sedan for myself, and a minivan for long road trips.

I’ve considered getting a fully electric car, but I’m not satisfied with the available infrastructure for that when I drive somewhere quite rural to go on a day hike. So I’ll probably eventually just trade in the 2014 Camry for one with a hybrid powertrain.

If I were buying a car now, I’d be looking at another Toyota Camry

If I were forced to do that now, I’d be looking at the Camry XLE hybrid that pairs a 4-cylinder internal combustion engine with electric motors along with a continuously variable transmission and electronic on-demand all-wheel drive, and I would try to get a more unusual color than what I’ve been driving for the past 35 years. Such a car would travel about 46 miles per gallon, so I’d still be filling ‘er up, but not as often.

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The Long Aftermath of Corporate Raiders

Posted on September 7, 2026 by Granger Meador

The petroleum industry in the 1980s experienced a wave of multi-billion-dollar mega-mergers and hostile takeovers driven by a global oil glut, falling crude oil prices, and undervalued stock reserves. DuPont acquired Conoco in 1981, U.S. Steel bought Marathon Oil in 1982, and Occidental acquired Cities Service in 1982 after corporate raider T. Boone Pickens and Gulf Oil made previous attempts. Gulf was then acquired by Standard Oil of California in 1984.

My father was caught up in that merger mania. Cities Service Gas had left Bartlesville in 1948, moving its operations to Wichita and its headquarters to Oklahoma City. Dad was a field engineer for Cities Service Gas from 1951 to 1955, operating out of Garden City and Wichita, and then moved to Oklahoma City in 1957 when the company’s operations and executive offices were combined. He worked his way up to become the Manager of Gas Measurement in 1979, overseeing 89 employees.

Cities Service Oil had remained in Bartlesville until 1968, but it then departed for Tulsa, leaving Phillips Petroleum as the dominant force in the community. T. Boone Pickens launched a hostile takeover attempt on Cities Service in June 1982, which was fended off only for Gulf Oil to make its own bid. Occidental acquired the company in August 1982, selling off the natural gas company to Northwest Energy in September 1982, which was then acquired by Williams a year later. Williams offered incentive retirements to all employees who were 55 years of age or older, and my father retired at the end of 1983 when he was 58 years old.

I was doing undergraduate work at the University of Oklahoma when T. Boone Pickens launched another hostile takeover bid in December 1984 against Phillips Petroleum. The company took on immense debt to keep him at bay, only for Carl Icahn to launch his own bid in February 1985. While the company avoided being taken over, becoming “the company that stayed home”, it was burdened with an enormous debt, and its earnings plunged.

By the time I arrived in Bartlesville in August 1989, the company had downsized from 9,086 local employees in 1981 to about 5,300. That dropped to 2,400 by the year 2002, when Phillips merged with Conoco to form ConocoPhillips.

Many Oklahoma petroleum companies relocated to Houston

Conoco had been based in Ponca City until 1950, when its headquarters shifted to Houston. Now ConocoPhillips would be based in Houston, and while the company would maintain a sizable presence in Bartlesville, the information technology, finance, accounting, human resources, and legal services positions that remained did not command the top-tier executive salaries that shifted south.

Over the decades more Oklahoma petroleum companies left for Houston. Tulsa’s Citgo, a spinoff of the retail, marketing, and transportation assets of Cities Service, left the former Oil Capital of the World for the new one in 2004. Oklahoma City’s Kerr-McGee was acquired by Houston’s Anadarko in 2006, and both Devon and Chesapeake/Expand shifted from Oklahoma City to Houston in 2026.

I spent 37 years working in Bartlesville Public Schools from August 1989 through June 2026. So I witnessed firsthand the demographic changes in Bartlesville from a few years after the corporate raids through the merger and relocation as the city struggled to diversify its economy. I could share countless anecdotes about how much changed, as well as how much did not, in Bartlesville over those decades.

However, my retirement afforded me time to compile and interpret more objective data on how Bartlesville changed from 1980 through 2025, which I am sharing in the presentation below or which you can view here. I’m still happy to live in Bartlesville, which the MORE Agency says is the “Best Small City Retirement Option” in Oklahoma. However, I recognize the many challenges we face.

FULL SCREEN VERSION

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Going Belly Up with Trickle Down

Posted on August 26, 2026 by Granger Meador

Oklahoma is a poster child for the failure of trickle down economics. Mind you, few leaders in this ruby red state will admit that. In fact, many earnestly believe in that long discredited economic theory. Their policies have led to the state’s long slide toward the bottom of the barrel in its relative quality of life.

What is Trickle Down?

The idea is that tax breaks, financial benefits, and deregulation for corporations and the wealthy will stimulate the overall economy. By keeping more money at the top, the theory assumes the wealthy will invest in businesses, create jobs, and eventually “trickle down” prosperity to the working class.

The downsides include wealth hoarding, where top earners often use extra money for stock buybacks or savings, so it never reaches lower-income groups. Trickle down policies also tend to concentrate wealth at the top, increasing the income gap between the rich and the poor. In Oklahoma, it has gutted education and health care, leading to the state’s abysmal rankings in those areas.

Oklahoma Rankings in US News & World Report — [Source]

Mike Mazzei, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in the November 2026 election, squeaked by his more moderate opponent in a primary runoff in late August 2026. Mazzei ran on a platform of yet more trickle down nonsense while loaning around $12 million of his own money to his campaign. After being endorsed by Donald Trump, Mazzei received 186,678 votes versus 184,631 for Gentner Drummond, winning by a tiny margin of 2,047 votes, or 0.28%.

Bear in mind there are almost 1.3 million registered Republicans in Oklahoma, so less than 30% of them bothered to vote, and Mazzei’s primary runoff supporters represented less than 8% of the state’s registered voters. However, given the partisanship in Oklahoma and immense voter apathy, he could easily become the next governor if Democrats and Independents don’t show up at the polls in November.

Mazzei’s Farcical “Plan”

Mazzei touts a “plan” to eliminate the state income tax in three years while also phasing out property taxes for seniors and veterans. The income tax provides roughly $6 billion in funding, or about 1/3 of the state’s budget. In 2025, the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy found that eliminating Oklahoma’s personal income tax would provide the richest 1% with an average annual tax cut of $55,295. The middle 20% of Oklahomans would only get a cut of $1,500. The poorest 20% would actually see their taxes increase by $9, since that would eliminate tax code components that return money to low-income residents. Does that sound fair to you?

Cutting property taxes as Mazzei proposes would reduce revenues for local school districts and city and county governments by around $250 million each year. That would mean severe cuts for schools, career tech, county roads and city streets, police, sheriff and health departments, courts, public libraries, etc. Bear in mind that Oklahoma already spends far less per pupil than any other state in the region, which is a major factor in it being ranked 47th in the nation in education.

Regional per pupil spending — [Data source]

An important reality is that Oklahoma already has by far the lowest tax burden in the region, without any of Mazzei’s crazed cutting.

Mazzei and his ilk love to point out how Texas has no income tax, but they conveniently never mention how its overall tax burden is considerably higher than Oklahoma’s. How is that possible? Texas has extremely high property, sales, and excise taxes.

Oklahomans are already going to vote on SQ 843 in November, which would eliminate property taxes on homesteads. The concept is bizarre, given that Oklahoma’s property taxes are already 46th in the nation. The only state in our region with lower property taxes is Arkansas, which has a much higher overall tax burden thanks to sales and excise taxes that are even higher than those in Texas, and a higher income tax burden than ours to boot.

If SQ 843 somehow passes, that will eliminate somewhere between $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion in local revenues and simply pulverize our public schools, CareerTechs, county road and bridge funds, city street and park funds, local police, sheriff departments and courts, volunteer fire departments and ambulance services, public libraries, and health departments.

Mazzei’s overall plan is, incredibly, far worse than even that, yet he offers no reasonable method for making up the enormous deficits it would create. He claims without evidence that county governments can “afford a decrease in tax collections” and the state can “capture growth-driven revenue” while “local voters get to decide if they want to replace lost tax collections”. That last bit translates into forcing school districts and city and county governments to ask voters for enormous property and sales tax increases.

Mazzei Knows His Plan is Nuts

During Mazzei’s time in the state Senate from 2004 to 2016, Oklahoma’s top marginal income tax rate was lowered from 6.65% to 5.0%. That led to declared revenue failures in 2009, 2010, 2015, twice in 2016, 2017, and 2018. Funding for the public schools and other state-funded services were repeatedly cut.

It was already so bad by early 2016 that Mazzei himself tried, in SB 1073, to delay a cut in the state income tax from 5.25% to 5.0%. He stated at that time: “Since 2004, when I first came to the Senate, we’ve reduced taxes by about $1.5 billion, thanks to a 25 percent drop in the top income tax rate, the elimination of estate taxes, the increase in the standard deduction, higher exemptions for retirement income, fewer companies subjected to the franchise tax, and the 100 percent exemption for military. … We are facing a shortfall of $1.3 billion. If we don’t delay this reduction and adopt other reforms, education funding, which makes up some 50 percent of the budget, will have to be cut by approximately $400 million. Other core services will also be slashed. Ultimately everyone in the state will be negatively impacted. As a fiscal conservative, I would much rather delay a tax cut than vote to increase taxes and start new taxes.”

The situation deteriorated so much that, two years after Mazzei was forced out of the senate by term limits, Bartlesville Public Schools led a statewide effort that successfully pressured a 75% supermajority of both houses in the legislature to pass $520 million in annual revenue increases by increasing taxes on gasoline, diesel, gross production, and cigarettes while limiting itemized deductions, expanding collections from online retailers, and allowing dice and roulette games at tribal casinos. That was only time the legislature was able to clear the 75% supermajority bar to raise taxes imposed by SQ 640 back in 1992.

That heroic act finally stabilized the state budget, although since then the legislature has continued to erode the tax base through additional income tax cuts, eliminating state sales taxes on groceries, various exemptions, and the like.

Yet now Mazzei’s back, with a plan that would eliminate over $6 billion in state funding? The truth is that he knows that the legislature will never pass his ludicrous plan. He is just spouting nonsense to get elected, but do not doubt that he will promote policies and bills to further cripple the state’s public schools and other services across all levels of government.

Needless to say, I won’t be voting for Crazy Mazzei in November; Cindy Munson will get my vote.

However, over half of Oklahoma voters are registered Republicans and many Democrats and Independents are too apathetic to vote.

Oklahoma Voter Registration by Party — [Source]

We’re currently 47th in Education and 48th in Healthcare. Mazzei won’t help us improve in either ranking…and if he gets his way, we’ll be dead last, having gone belly up with trickle down.

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Thrilling & Manipulative

Posted on August 20, 2026 by Granger Meador

These days the U.S. adult genre fiction market perhaps breaks down into about 2/5 romance, 1/3 crime/mystery/thrillers, and 1/4 science fiction/fantasy. Within the second genre group, I’m much more interested in mysteries than modern thrillers.

Years ago I did enjoy a few of Thomas Harris‘s crackling thrillers, which translated easily into theatrical films. Occasionally a cozier classic mystery author like Agatha Christie or Edith Pargeter (writing as Ellis Peters) would bring thriller elements into their stories, and recently I’ve enjoyed the decades-old suspense romance books of Mary Stewart.

Having read so many mysteries from the 1890s to the 1960s, a recent thriller from 2019 was a jolt. Needing a break from my Kindle, I had sauntered into my office and opened the glass doors to the retirement reading bookcase. For some time I’ve collected in it various physical books to be read when my pace of life slowed. Many were purchased over the years at Barnes and Noble, while others are more obscure out-of-print works, unavailable as typical e-books, which I ordered from used booksellers. My plan had long been to start whittling away at that woodpile in my retirement. Now I was a few weeks into that new phase of my life, with the miserable heat and humidity of July in Joklahoma restricting my walking to early mornings, leaving afternoons free for reading.

On one shelf I spied Never Tell by Lisa Gardner. I had never heard of her, and the trade paperback had been published in 2019. I figured it was something I spotted at Barnes and Noble that got lost in the COVID-19 pandemonium that disrupted my life for several years.

It turned out to be #11 in Gardner’s series with Boston detective D.D. Warren, consisting of a dozen novels and four shorter e-books from 2004 to 2020. Since then, Gardner has reportedly shifted to focus on a new thriller series featuring an amateur investigator.

Never Tell consists of chapters that continually shift between first person narratives of three women: Detective Warren, past crime victim Flora Dane, and a pregnant woman who may have killed her father and then, years later, her husband. The changing perspectives helped make the set-up more interesting, and I was grateful to not be stuck for an extended period in the damaged minds of Dane and the apparent killer. The pace eventually began to drag, with too many unresolved mysteries piling up, but then Gardner hit the gas with some breakthroughs and action.

I haven’t really been interested in solving whodunits since I was a kid, instead enjoying the ride with the characters. In this case, my suspicions proved accurate, but were sufficiently delayed to prevent me from skimming. However, I didn’t think some episodes were believable, especially the climax, which featured a long-winded and overly composed confrontation in extreme circumstances that reminded me of some of the unrealistic TV thrillers of my youth.

It was nice to read a tale with modern technology, and the female characters dominated this tale, being far more active and commanding than those in the older genre works. I deemed this extraction from the retirement case a success, but I certainly wouldn’t want to follow it with another thriller.

So instead I picked up a Kindle science fiction novel from 2018 by Alan Dean Foster. He has written dozens of novelizations of science fiction television shows and movies, and as a kid, I devoured his Star Trek Log adaptations of that franchise’s animated series from 1973-1974. Now I was finally reading one of his dozens of books that weren’t media tie-ins.

Relic started quite strong, with elegiac chapters about a man believed to be the last surviving human on a distant colony world. His tale of survival and becoming a research subject for conservation-minded aliens was fascinating, and Foster drew from his extensive world travels to help him flesh out alien environments.

However, eventually other humans entered the picture, and the book ended with an unsatisfying deus ex machina that relied upon advanced technologies that miraculously survive long periods of neglect, rather reminiscent of the unrealities of Tim Huntley’s One on Me I encountered last autumn.

After cleansing my palate with the penultimate finished Blandings Castle book, 1965’s Galahad at Blandings, I read an Ellis Peters/Edith Pargeter novella and then took up the Kindle version of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, a tearjerker about an aged British pensioner who embarks on a long walk across that immense island to see a woman in a hospice. Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012, the book had several moving chapters, with poignant vignettes of lost souls. However, once the protagonist gained various repulsive hangers-on, I was far less enthused. Thankfully they were eventually shed, but the bleak end of his journey was shattering. Various mysteries, the solutions to which I had already guessed at, were finally resolved, but the renewal of his fraught relationship with his wife was perhaps a bit too realistic. It was an existential read with few guideposts.

I guess my primary objection to The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was how its manipulations did not feel organic to the story. The characters knew vital truths not shared with the reader for most of the walk, merely hinted at. I prefer characters who are as much in the dark as I am, lighting matches which they thrust into the surrounding gloom.

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Retirement HD Radio

Posted on August 17, 2026 by Granger Meador

Back in March 2026, I reviewed the various radio receivers I used from childhood through the early 2000s. I documented my failed attempt to revive my 2003 Cambridge Soundworks 730 clock radio, and how I eventually created automations for our Google Home devices to stream Tulsa’s KWGS NPR station or Bartlesville’s KWON.

I’ve been retired for six weeks, and I will confess that I have yet to use either of those automations. However, I do listen to KWGS in the car. My 2014.5 Toyota Camry has HD Radio, so by default it can pick up the station’s three digital radio transmissions along with the regular FM analog signal. However, the KWGS HD digital signals are so weak that they frequently cut out in my car as it goes up and down the hills of Bartlesville. When 89.5-1 cuts out, the radio switches to analog 89.5, switching back to 89.5-1 when it regains signal strength. The repeated switching creates hiccups since the two are not in audio sync.

Now, when the radio hiccups, I go into Options to disable HD Radio. Sadly, I have not found a way to make that setting “stick”, but in mucking around with the radio, I was reminded that KWGS also broadcasts Jazz 89.5-2 and BBC World Service 89.5-3. I tuned in the jazz station, and I liked it. Too bad for me, though, since it also kept cutting out as I drove up and down in hilly Bartlesville, and there is no analog fallback for it.

Toyota radio options — A weak signal led me to turn off HD Radio on my 2014.5 Camry

I’ll be fine without HD Radio in the car, and I could always pay to restore the car’s SiriusXM satellite radio service if I wanted more options. However, I realized that I would enjoy listening to Jazz 89.5-2 at home when Wendy is away at work.

I watch Techmoan on YouTube, and in a recent post for his Patreon supporters, Mat showed his efforts to upgrade his garden shed workshop building’s external antenna to improve his reception of DAB/DAB+ and his search for a good DAB+ receiver for his component audio setup.

Open this for optional DAB/DAB+ and HD Radio specifics

DAB stands for Digital Audio Broadcasting and is used in Europe and some other areas, but not in the USA. Original DAB has broadcasts using the MP2 codec, typically at a bitrate of 128 kilobits per second or less. DAB+ offers subchannels using the HE-AAC v2 codec and is often 64 kbit/s and thus of worse audio quality than analog frequency modulation signals.

In the USA, FM HD Radio adds digital carriers to traditional 270 kHz-wide analog channels. KWGS HD1 runs at 48 kbit/s with the HDC/HE-AAC codec while it runs HD2 Jazz and HD3 BBC World Service at 24 kbit/s.

That got me to thinking about convenient ways to listen to Jazz 89.5-2 at home. I could buy a nice HD Radio like the Sangean HDR-19. However, it costs $200 and when I’m at home alone I would prefer the background music to be playing in my office, the living room, and the kitchen.

So I created a “Manor” speaker group in Google Home for the Google Nest Hubs in the office and the kitchen and the Google Home Mini in the living room. I discovered I could say, “Hey Google, play Tulsa Jazz radio on Manor” and it would play Jazz 89.5 HD2 on the various speakers via TuneIn. To shut it off, I can just say to any of the devices, “Hey Google, stop.”

In 2018 I purchased Google Nest Hub, Home Mini, and original Google Home devices

However, the audio quality was unimpressive in my office. The Nest Hub is 13′ from my desk, and it has a 1.7″ speaker. I had an original Google Home speaker from 2018 stashed away, and it has a 2″ high excursion speaker with dual 2″ passive radiators that readily outperforms a Nest Hub. So I pulled it out, plugged it in at my office desk, reset it by holding down its mute button for 15 seconds, and then added it back into our Google Home using the app on my iPhone.

That provided much richer bass, and I can now happily stream Jazz 89.5 HD2 across our home. It’s a good life.