Meador Manor

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of the heart of Oklahoma City. Only a few of the buildings are recognizable since my hometown underwent a savage urban renewal process in the 1970s.

The most distinctive surviving building is the tapered First National skyscraper near the upper center, with the tall Ramsey tower to its left. You can click to enlarge the comparison below of downtown Oklahoma City in 1940 and the 2020s.

When I was a child in the 1970s, entire blocks of downtown west and south of the First National (below and to the right of it in the aerial views) were cleared for what became the Myriad Gardens, the Devon Tower area, and the Myriad Convention Center, with the convention center demolished in early 2026 to make room for a new billion-dollar basketball arena. The old Colcord building is one of the few survivors in that area.

Let’s focus on the two giants of downtown at the time of the postcard: the First National and, just across the street, the Ramsey Tower or City Place. They are now dwarfed by the silly Devon Tower, but they still loom large in my memory.

Throughout my childhood, my father worked for Cities Service Gas Company in the First National building. After his retirement in 1984 amidst the fossil fuels turbulence of the great petroleum bust, he kept going to a barber shop high up in the building. So he witnessed how it slowly emptied out and was neglected after 1990.

It fell into bankruptcy, but thankfully Gary Brooks partnered with Charlie Nicholas to purchase and renovate it. It took them seven years and $287 million to rework it into a boutique hotel, upscale apartments, retail, and restaurants while converting an office annex into parking. The beautiful marble banking hall became Tellers restaurant.

A Bartlesville Connection

My father worked for Cities Service Gas, which had once had both its executive and operations offices in Bartlesville. In 1943, the gas company’s executive offices were relocated to Oklahoma City while the operations offices went to Wichita. In 1957, the two were consolidated in Oklahoma City.

Meanwhile, Cities Service Oil Company operated out of Bartlesville after a 1959 consolidation, but in the late 1960s and early 1970s left town for a new building in downtown Tulsa which I will talk about in a later postcard post.

The holding company of both entities was once headquartered in the iconic art deco Cities Service building at 70 Pine Street in New York City until operations relocated in the late 1960s and 1974.

My childhood familiarity with Bartlesville came from passing through to and from visiting relatives in Independence, Kansas. We would usually stop in Bartlesville on our way north to have lunch with Frank and Alice Rice, retirees who had once worked with my father in the Cities Service Gas offices in OKC. They all worked in the Gas Measurement division; the photo is from 1958.

Growing up, I was always fascinated by the top of the 1931 Ramsey Tower across the street from the First National. The Ramsey Tower is now known as City Place, and neither the postcard nor the modern aerial view provide a clue as to what about it interested me, but its newer name provides a hint.

The first picture below might lead you to think my memory is faulty, as that shows a Liberty Bank electrical sign atop the Ramsey Tower, but in the 1970s an electronic billboard atop the elevator box spelled out “City” in cursive and then flashed BANK before flashing the time and temperature. It always annoyed me if a noticeable number of the marquee’s bulbs were burnt out.

The Ramsey Tower/City Place has a more lasting claim to fame in its interior spiral slide that travels the full height of the building. The metal auger has door openings on each floor to allow occupants to slide directly to ground level. Later fire codes made it obsolete, but it was still used as a temporary gravity trash chute during renovations.

The neighboring skyscrapers went up simultaneously in 1931 during the Great Depression. That timing would seem odd, save that the discovery of a huge oil field below Oklahoma City insulated it for awhile from the national downturn.

Walter Ramsey was an oil baron and hired Walter W. Ahlschlager to design and Starrett Brothers, both out of Chicago, to build his 32-story building. The same firms built the rather similar 49-story Carew Tower in Cincinnati.

Ramsey had bought the land parcel soon after First National Bank had begun excavating the property to the south. A race for which tower would top out first began in January 1931, which Ramsey won. He spent $3,000,000 on his 440-foot tall 292,304 square foot building. It was the tallest in the state — for one month.

First National opened in November and became the tallest building at 493 feet from its antenna tip down to the street. It was over twice as large, with an initial floor area of 604,334 square feet, and cost $5,500,000. The top of the First National had the exclusive Beacon Club restaurant, named for the 25-foot tall aircraft beacon above it. The beacon’s red bulb was once visible for 100 miles.

When I was a kid visiting my father in the First National, I loved whizzing up and down in the express elevator. I ate in the Beacon Club with him once. The private club once boasted a membership of about 1,000 and civic giants like Dean McGee, First National CEO Charles Vose, and publisher E.L. Gaylord used to meet there weekly. The Club eventually faltered, and my father never went back after getting food poisoning there. With the First National occupancy in decline, in 1997 the club moved out of its iconic home on its top three floors over to the 24th floor of the Oklahoma Tower, and it finally closed in 2017 with just 200 remaining members.

Tomorrow’s 1940 postcard will take us to Stillwater. Care to guess the surviving but renamed building that will be pictured?

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of a scenic drive along the Cimarron River at Guthrie. What do you think of when you hear the word Cimarron?

I tend to think of the Edna Ferber novel that entered the public domain this year, but you might think of the Academy Award-winning film of 1931 or the 1960 remake with Glenn Ford, Maria Schell, and Anne Baxter.

I doubt you’d think of this view, especially if you’ve ever seen the actual Cimarron River, which is infamous for picking up lots of dissolved minerals and red soil, so I’m thinking the postcard artists might have taken some liberty with the water’s coloration.

There are three different Cimarron Rivers. The one pictured is a tributary of the Arkansas River that extends 698 miles across New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas.

Back in 2012, I was at the Cimarron at the very edge of the Oklahoma Panhandle, but it was bone dry. I wouldn’t expect that to make it onto a postcard.

My guess for the location of the 1940 postcard shot is Doolin’s Fishing Hole along US 77 seven miles north of Guthrie. The original photograph was taken by Guthrie photographer Al Bryan, while my shot is from Google Street View.

Back in 1930, The Daily Oklahoman had a shot from nearly the same vantage point:

Here’s a better version of the Oklahoman’s 1930 photograph:

Doolin’s Fishing Hole reminds me of 1952’s The Cimarron Kid starring Audie Murphy as real-life outlaw Bill Doolin. Doolin was a founder of the Wild Bunch, or Doolin-Dalton Gang, which specialized in bank, train, and stagecoach robberies in the early 1890s. Some speculate that Doolin was the sixth man in the disastrous attempt by the Dalton Gang to rob two banks simultaneously up in Coffeyville. He was killed by Deputy U.S. Marshal Heck Thomas in Oklahoma Territory on July 5, 1895, and he is buried in the Boot Hill section of Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie.

A Bartlesville Connection

Buried next to Bill is poor Elmer McCurdy, an alcoholic and outlaw. He tried to rob a train near Okesa, just west of Bartlesville, in 1911. However, instead of stopping the train carrying $400,000 in cash for the Osage Indians, he stopped a passenger train and got very little for his trouble.

He holed up in a hay shed on a ranch near Bartlesville, but a posse with bloodhounds tracked him down. He died in a shootout.

No one claimed his body, so the undertaker in Pawhuska embalmed it and charged people a nickel to view it. The body eventually was bought and sold to many different circus side shows. People eventually forgot it was a real body, and in 1976 it was on display in an amusement park in California. The television show The Six Million Dollar Man was shooting an episode there, and when a crew member moved what he thought was a mannequin, an appendage snapped off. The L.A. coroner’s office was contacted, the body was identified, and the remains were finally interred in Guthrie, 66 years after his death.

Guthrie is famous for being the original state capital in 1907. Oklahoma City business leaders soon campaigned to shift the seat of government, and an old saw is that in 1910 Oklahoma’s first post-territorial governor stole the state seal in the dead of night, drove from Guthrie to Oklahoma City, and stashed the seal under his hotel bed.

The reality is that by 1910 OKC had grown by 94% since statehood to over 64,000 people while Guthrie was stuck at less than 12,000. A special election was called in June of that year to choose between Oklahoma City, Guthrie, and Shawnee. OKC won easily, and it was actually W.B. Anthony, the first governor’s secretary, who smuggled the seal out of town. The governor came in to OKC by train from his home in Muskogee, and he declared OKC the new capital with the Lee-Huckins Hotel acting as a temporary capitol building.

Guthrie these days has an immense Scottish Rite Masonic temple. It was built in the 1920s on the 11 acres originally platted as Capitol Park. You can take a virtual tour, and if it is summertime, that might be best, given that the main rooms of the huge old building are not air conditioned. I was a DeMolay when I was in junior high, and my initiation was at the big temple.

The State Capital Publishing Museum downtown is a memorable structure that was once the largest dedicated printing facility west of the Mississippi. It was home to a newspaper and virtually all of the preprinted forms used by courts and county clerks throughout Oklahoma were once printed in that building. To this day, the first floor lobby has 620 drawers on its south wall that still hold many of the preprinted forms.

Well, Oklahoma City came up in this post, and that is where the next postcard will take us.

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of The Pioneer Woman monument in Ponca City. It was conceived, directed, and financed by Ernest Marland, an oilman, philanthropist, spendthrift, and politician. In 1928 he created a scandal by marrying Lydie, the biological daughter of his first wife’s sister, whom Marland and his first wife had adopted when Lydie was 16. Marland’s first wife later died, and he had the adoption annulled and then married Lydie when he was 54 and she was 28. Marrying his niece and former daughter didn’t prevent Oklahoma from electing him to Congress in 1932 and as governor in 1935.

In the early 1920s, Marland had been asked about commissioning a statue to the vanishing American Indian. Marland answered, “The Indian is not the vanishing American — it’s the pioneer woman.”

Ree Drummond came later.

Marland staged a design competition in 1926, paying a dozen artists to craft 3-foot bronze sculptures which were exhibited in a dozen cities. Bryant Baker’s model, Confident, was the most popular, and Marland commissioned a monumental version of it for Ponca City, which was unveiled in 1930.

The monument survives. The Pioneer Woman Museum says, “It is a heroic statue is of a young, sun-bonneted pioneer mother, protectively leading her son by the hand, striding confidently, head held high—a young woman of sturdy beauty and dignity whose eyes are fixed on the far southwestern horizon. Courage, determination, and humility in her face and a bible in her hand.”

The Museum adds that the statue is 17 feet tall, weighs 12,000 pounds, and sits upon a 16-foot-high granite base. It cost $300,000 back in 1930.

A Bartlesville Connection

In 1940, Marland faced financial ruin and sold the small bronze models from the competition to fellow oil tycoon Frank Phillips. The individual artists had each been paid $10,000 for their work, but Phillips acquired the bronzes from Marland for just $500 each. They are on display in his Woolaroc Museum near Bartlesville.

I’m not surprised that Faithful by Arthur Lee or Affectionate by James E. Fraser were not chosen for the monument, as Oklahomans might accept Marland marrying his adopted daughter/niece, but not public nudity. I’m truly glad that Trusting by Jo Davidson wasn’t picked, because her sun bonnet works too well, leading me to think, “Somehow Palpatine returned.”

If you ever go to Ponca City, you can take a look at the monument and its museum, but the town’s star attraction is the impressive Marland Mansion, which has an outbuilding with the contents of sculptor Bryant Baker’s New York studio with copies of many of his works. Marland’s previous home on Grand Avenue, Marland’s Grand Home, is also worth a visit. If you don’t make it to Ponca City, you can still enjoy a virtual tour of the Mansion and an interactive tour of the Grand Home. But you really need to go tour them in person, and be sure to eat at Enrique’s out at the airport and enjoy the puffy chips.

Tomorrow we go for a scenic drive along the Cimarron.

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of Oklahoma’s Capitol. It is the back cover of the pack and yes, the Capitol looks a bit different these days.

Most obviously, back then there was no dome, and it didn’t get one until the early 21st century. When I was a kid, I thought it appropriate that while the 1914 blueprints included a dome, budget shortfalls and a supply shortage from World War I led to that being cut from the project. The conspicuous absence of a dome decades later effectively symbolized my home state’s struggles.

I worked at the capitol complex in the summer of 1985 as a minimum wage office boy for the Oklahoma State Department of Tourism. On $3.35 per hour, even with free room and board from my parents, I couldn’t afford to eat in the basement cafeteria very often, but there were a few times when I walked along the tunnel from the Will Rogers building to the Capitol for lunch. Frosty Troy, the watchdog publisher of The Oklahoma Observer, could usually be spotted at one of the tables, regaling someone.

One day that summer, I took my lousy Kodak Ektralite 110 camera over with me and photographed the shallow stained glass saucer dome that used to grace the fourth level of the truncated rotunda. Decades after the real dome was added, the remnants of the old saucer dome were put on display in the State Capitol Museum.

Back in 1928, the discovery of the Oklahoma City Oil Field led to oil wells being scattered across the city. They were once so common that there were still stripper wells and tank batteries scattered about my neighborhood when I was a kid. Dozens of active oil wells were drilled near the Capitol.

A Bartlesville Connection

The wells on the capitol grounds included Petunia #1, which was drilled in a flower bed in front of the building in 1941. Fain-Porter Drilling company whipstocked the bore hole for Bartlesville’s Phillips Petroleum, making it a non-vertical directional drill that burrowed beneath the Capitol itself.

A year after my stint at the Capitol, Petunia #1 was plugged by Phillips, its operator and half-owner. That well alone had produced 1.5 million barrels of oil and 1.6 billion cubic feet of gas, providing the state with over $1 million in royalties and gross production taxes…and the Capitol still didn’t have a dome.

It was an oddball distinction. Governor Frank Keating spearheaded a fundraising drive to finally add a dome, and that work began in 2001. Phillips Petroleum was one of the sponsors, donating $3.5 million towards the project’s $22 million cost.

The dome is 157 feet tall with an 80-foot diameter. The outer dome is precast concrete and cast stone, with an inner coffered dome of cast gypsum panels. The gorgeous interior is an interpretation of the state wildflower, the Indian Blanket Gaillardia pulchella.

A 17.5-foot bronze statue of an American Indian warrior, called The Guardian, was created by artist and former state senator Enoch Kelly Haney. He refused the $50,000 commission for the piece. There is a 9-foot bronze replica of it inside the Senate Lounge.

You can view many of the artworks decorating the Capitol at the Oklahoma Arts Council’s Oklahoma State Capitol Art Collection website. That does it for this entry in the postcard pack. Tomorrow we head to Ponca City.

One of the YouTube creators I support on Patreon is Henry’s Dime Store Adventures. At the start of 2025, I joined his Postcard Club, so he sends me a handwritten vintage postcard each month. For May 2026, Henry outdid himself, sending me a linen postcard pack with 20 images from Oklahoma, circa 1940.

So on each of the first 20 days of June 2026, I will share with you a postcard and expound about the pictured location. We’ll start with an image shown on the address side of the pack.

A Burning Oil Well…in Texas?

The cover shows a burning oil well. Well, gee, welcome to Oklahoma!

I found separate linen postcard reproductions of that image by the Oklahoma News Company which captioned it as being near Tulsa. However, the original photograph was actually taken by Jack Nolan on April 26, 1930 of the Skelly-Amerado University No. 1 well in Ector County, Texas. Nolan had been informed that the well, just west of the Concho Bluffs, would be shot with 420 quarts of nitroglycerin at 3,723 feet to increase its production. The typical gusher became a fire when the shot came in contact with the steel crown block, sparking the explosion. It took over 25 hours to control the fire.

So right off the bat we have an anomaly. The attention-grabbing cover image of the Oklahoma souvenir folder was a burning oil well that wasn’t even located here, but instead in our much larger and flamboyant neighbor to the south.

A Bartlesville Connection

I will bring out some Bartlesville connection to each of the postcards, and of course in this case I can’t help but think of the Nellie Johnstone #1 well in Johnstone Park, which was the first commercial oil well in Oklahoma.

The Nellie Johnstone blew in on March 25, 1897 as a wildcat well named for the six-year-old daughter of community leader William Johnstone. Wildcatter Michael Cudahy made a deal with George Keeler, William Johnstone, Frank Overlees, and other community leaders to drill the well. Keeler’s stepdaughter Jennie Cass dropped the Go-Devil to blow in the well, and thankfully it gushed without igniting.

It was producing 30 barrels a day in 1903 when it became commercially viable, thanks to the Santa Fe railroad reaching Bartlesville to transport its output. During its productive life, it produced over 100,000 barrels of oil. It was plugged in 1947, and replica rigs were erected over it in 1948, 1964, and 2008. You can learn more about it in the Block 2 lot 7 slides of my Historic Downtown Bartlesville series.

Oh, and the original Nellie Johnstone derrick was destroyed by fire, but not due to a bad shot. Rather, after it blew in, the well was capped to await the arrival of the railroad. However, oil seeped from it and pooled. During a cold winter in the late 1890s, a group of children ice-skating on the frozen river built a bonfire which accidentally ignited the seep, and the fire tracked back to the well and destroyed the derrick.

The kicker? One of the young people in that skating party was little Nellie Johnstone.

Linen Postcards

I am not a postcard aficionado, so I had to look up what a linen postcard was, given that the ones I have been sent were clearly not printed on fabric. Instead, they are inexpensive, high-rag cotton paper embossed with a textured crosshatch pattern that only mimics the feel of linen cloth.

During the Great Depression and World War II, standard cardstock had trouble absorbing newly introduced brightly colored ink dyes. So Curt Teich & Co. in Chicago and other postcard printers embossed the paper, increasing the surface area so ink would dry much faster. The images often started as black-and-white photographs that artists heavily covered and retouched.

Teich pioneered the offset printing process in which an inked image is transferred (or “offset”) from a plate to a rubber blanket and then to the printing surface of the paper. Teich began using a five-color process in 1931, adding a darker blue color to the usual CMYK palette of cyan, magenta, yellow, and the “key” color of black.

Linen postcards were phased out after World War II when the realistic, glossy photochrome printing process became the industry standard.

The Sooner State

The inside of the pack cover had some text about the state. It is a dry-as-bones summary of the early days of white settlement which I can’t recommend you bother reading. It certainly doesn’t read like a tourist tract to me.

Thankfully, the 19 remaining images were more interesting than that! Tomorrow we’ll visit the State Capitol.