This Land

Kathy Todoroff took the phone from her husband. She remembers asking into the receiver: “What would you like to eat, Leon?”

Kathy loved to cook. She’d been doing it every day since she was 13, when her mother became too sick for kitchen duty. She was brought up to think…

The artifacts arrived in a truck at the back door of Gilcrease Museum, shipped there in cardboard boxes. They’d been chosen from a 200-page list sent by Nora Guthrie, the longtime custodian of her father’s archives, for Woody at One Hundred: The Woody Guthrie Centennial Celebration 1912-2012. When purchasing the…

At the front of Meeting Room A at the Case Community Center in Sand Springs sat a projector on a metal stand, humming as it warmed up, like an old station wagon on a frosty winter morning. Talking like old friends at a foldout table just inside the door were…

We’re excited to announce that This Land Press devotees can now pick up the latest copies of This Land at Whole Foods Market in Tulsa, at 1401 E. 41st Street. The bigger-and-better Oklahoma City issue (Vol. 3, Issue 8, released April 15) is on stands at the store now.

Find…

“You lose racers in crashes,” he said. “What happened today, this morning, is different.”

I’m talking to Tim Kent, and he’s towering over me as we stand by the fat, back tires of his midget car, painted red, white, and blue. Earlier he’d smiled and yes-ma’amed me when I asked if…

Here it comes, I’d tell myself. I’d know it was almost time by the way my parents’ car would begin to wind along Charles Page Boulevard toward downtown. I’d crane my neck so that I could get the longest possible view of the craggy house tucked into the crook across…

For someone who’s not from here, it must be eerie to head out for breakfast on a Sunday morning and discover the roads deserted, only to realize on the drive to the café that all the cars are stowed in church parking lots, as if swept there by some giant…

The billboards go up in early November: the flushed cheeks of a Coca-Cola- reminiscent Santa Claus rendered 10 feet high. The words, the call to action, read simply, “RideTheChristmasTrain.com.”

In less than two days, the 50,000 tickets available for the 2011 season of The Christmas Train in Dry Gulch, U.S.A.—the…

About 20 years ago, a group of students at Rhema Bible Training Center met in secret, somewhere under that spinning shield emblazoned with the word “Faith,” before the annual display of Christmas lights could be hung from the trees and buildings and gardens on campus. They’d come up with plan…

J.M. Hall, the often-called Father of Tulsa who partnered with his brother H.C. in the early 1880s to build Tulsa’s first wood-frame mercantile on the northwest corner of First and Main Streets, talked in a Christmas Eve, 1933 Tulsa Daily World article about Tulsa’s first Christmas. There was just one…