This Land

Founded in 1899, eight years before Oklahoma was even a state, the First Baptist Church of North Tulsa is one of Tulsa’s oldest places of worship and serves as a vital piece in the puzzle of our city’s history.

“We were the only church (in North Tulsa) to live through…

On January 29, 1903, an ambitious 29-year-old named Edward King Gaylord purchased interest in a struggling newspaper called The Daily Oklahoman.

Just two months earlier, the young newsman had left a cushy management job at the St. Joseph Dispatch in western Missouri. He didn’t want to work for a newspaper—much…

Kelli Mayo snarls into the microphone. The girl with fire-pink hair, turquoise leggings, a black skirt, and white tee furiously strums her guitar, repeating the same three-chord progression—a threatening, low-end drone—over and over as she growls the opening lines to her last song of the night:

“To what extraordinary lengths…

Her plump, cherry red lips are parted and gripping a beige, freckled butt. She smiles saucily at the camera, her hard eyes daring the viewer to break contact as she takes a drag and blows a white, cloudy plume into the ether. She wears a black bra and panties, nude…

Project Nim opens September 9 at the Circle Cinema, 10 S. Lewis Ave. Bob Ingersoll will do question-and-answer sessions following the Sept.9 and 10 screenings of the film, which begin at 7:30 p.m.

Today in Norman, Oklahoma, if you take Lindsey Street five miles east of the bustling University of…

On December 14, 1972, the New York Times ran an article with the headline, “Woody Guthrie’s hometown is divided on paying him homage.” It chronicled the battle in Okemah over Guthrie’s legacy—much of the town shunned the folk hero because of his ties to the Communist party, and political leaders…

There’s a field, straddling an invisible property line several miles east of the Hard Rock Casino, somewhere in the bucolic outskirts of Catoosa. Across the grassland to the west is a barn-shaped megachurch with a hunter-green rooftop. To the east sits a toppled, decaying, white trailer, weeds crawling up its…

The white ’75 Buick Regal races through the red light at 51st Street and careens left onto 129th East Avenue. Tulsa Police Officer Quentin Houck pursues closely behind, the lights and sirens of his patrol car piercing the night. It’s nearly 4 a.m. on May 20, 2000, and Houck’s dashboard…

When Johnny Polygon tells me that “being from Oklahoma is like having an asshole brother,” he’s not being pejorative.

“You know he’s an asshole,” he says, “but you don’t want to hear anyone talking shit about him.”

The Tulsa native, rising rap star and aspiring iconoclast doesn’t mince words,…

“Once I was on Air Force One,” says Joe Marquette. It’s a typical beginning to one of his many anecdotes.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist has spent his lifetime globetrotting with world leaders, snapping away for wire services like UPI, AP and Reuters. Today he sits in a recliner in his…