This Land

Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana bent over the library table and peered down at witness Harry Ford Sinclair, “I wish you would tell us about a contract you made touching the Teapot Dome scandal.” Sinclair whispered into the ear of his attorney, regarded his reply, and turned toward his…

The Tulsa Underground Circus fictitiously wrote that it was the work of a deranged Russian immigrant, a circus clown trained at the Moscow Circus School. The day before the catastrophe, during a routine inspection of the show’s equipment, the fire marshal found disturbing evidence that he felt required legal interrogation.…

The monstrous, three-story, steel reinforced, stucco building towered along the western edge of Greenwood. It dominated the landscape at the foot of Standpipe Hill, sporting a bright whitewash, the favorite color of its primary residents. Inside, its members vowed to protect their notion of “100% Americanism.” To become a guardian…

Sitting at the bar in Doe’s Eat Place, I gazed up Quincy Street daydreaming a nostalgic movie reel of an era gone by. The opening scene showed a daybreak shot along a dusty Tulsa street. The year, 1906. I order a Rombauer Zinfandel and a plate of six tamales and…

Dental records proved the badly decomposed body that washed up on the Crystal Beach shores of Ontario, minus hands and feet, to be twenty-nine year-old crime-boss physician, Joseph P. Moran, M.D. of Chicago.

So that one bad guy, Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, could not be traced to abandoned hotel rooms and…

Editor’s note: For years, this photo of a KKK funeral has circulated among several photography collections in Tulsa, but the identity of the person in the casket has remained a mystery. In this article, writer Steve Gerkin uncovers the identity of the man in the box.

Call it a death…

In the early 1970s, a twenty-two year-old Lebanese immigrant trekked down the sidewalks of Sixth Street from his West Tulsa apartment to the University of Tulsa. As he crossed Peoria each day, the student traveled where thousands of Tulsa pioneers had walked before. The decayed string of Plains Commercial-style buildings…

J.J. Conley lounges against the cushions of a private room at Lucky’s. He studies his glass of Syrah and takes a sip. He is a smallish man, elegantly dressed, looking something like an aging GQ model. He isn’t the scruffy commoner you would expect to be running a burger joint.…

Taken from the top of the Mayo of hotel, this 1929 photo depicts a 600-foot dirigible, the City of Los Angeles, as it floats over Tulsa at about forty miles per hour.

The America of the late ‘20s was a lively national community savoring a luxurious life between wars and…

When the tree leaves turn, some folks think of foliage tours. But Oklahoma foodies and chefs look earthward for the real fall treats: Mushrooms. Although examples of these edible fungi are available most of
the year, we tend to think of them as a fall sport. There are those…