Littlejohn was active in just about every historical club in Tulsa and was often recognized as the go-to guru of North Tulsa history. He hosted tours, advised documentary filmmakers and presented new views on the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot.

The widely-accepted belief was that the Race Riot began as a commotion on an elevator. Dick Rowland, a black man, had allegedly “assaulted” seventeen-year-old elevator operator Sarah Page. The police were called, and the resulting newspaper headlines heightened tension between the black and white communities. The incident was believed to be the final straw that sent rioters into chaos and left Greenwood burned to the ground two days later.

But Littlejohn insisted that the elevator episode never happened. His evidence revealed that the building where the incident allegedly occurred was closed for Memorial Day.

His theory—accepted by many of his colleagues, including Dr. Olivia Hooker, the late Dr. John Hope Franklin and the Tulsa Race Riot Commission—goes so far as to claim that the Race Riot was not a spontaneous mob, as previously recorded, but was actually a planned scheme to take valuable land from black property owners.

Littlejohn also argued that Rowland was in a romantic relationship with Page, and that she was likely a prostitute working for Rowland.

In spite of his stance, none shied away from his funeral service, as the church was full and parking was scarce. On a warm Thursday morning, proud friends and family members flocked to Morningstar Baptist Church in North Tulsa.

Not a soul in sight was donning anything less than their finest black suit, most women in bedazzled, feathered Sunday hats. A choir sang beautiful renditions of “Marvelous” and “Total Praise,” and politicians sent statements of sympathy. Speaking at Littlejohn’s funeral were representatives from the Tulsa

Archeological Society, the North Tulsa Historical Society, the Schusterman Foundation and many admirers.

Ron Graham, listed in the program as “one who Bob mentored and counseled,” said he followed Littlejohn and his historian colleagues everywhere, eager to hear their stories.

“If they went somewhere, I’d want to go too,” he said. “But he always told me, ‘You do your own research. See what they have, then go do your own research.’”

Note: This article was originally published June 11, 2011

“Jim loved to shred documents,” curator Kim Jones said with a grin. “He’d have done well with the CIA. I’m not sure why, but he was always eager to shred paper for us. We’d set him up with a stack of old internal paperwork, and he could just shred for hours.”

The museum named Parkinson “Volunteer of the Year” in 2008, and again posthumously this year. Having retired from a career at United States Aviation, Parkinson showed up in his badge, lanyard, and logo-embroidered shirt to volunteer at least eight hours a day, three to five days a week.

“He was a great guy who would do anything for us,” he said. “He loved aviation, and just wanted to help out. Most days he was running the show behind the desk, but there wasn’t anything he was above doing. For a little while, we were between bookkeepers and needed someone to do it. He made it clear that he didn’t want to be our bookkeeper long term, but happily took the position until we could find somebody else.”

Every Monday, when the Air and Space Museum is closed, there is a bustle of volunteers cleaning, repairing, and maintaining the exhibits. They call them “The Monday Boys.” They even wear t-shirts proudly bearing their moniker. While Tom didn’t work on Mondays—he volunteered all week while the museum was open—that didn’t stop him from being a Monday Boy.

“It’s our tradition to go down the street to Evelyn’s for lunch, and Tom would always join us. We looked forward to having him around. He was a tall man with stark white hair and a big white handlebar moustache, and always a huge grin. He was quite a joker.”

Even after Parkinson’s health took a turn for the worse, Jones said he continued to come to their Monday lunches as long as he was able.

“It was hard for all of us to see this vibrant, vital man wither away. We had really grown used to having him smack in the middle of our loud, energetic crowd.”

Possibly the biggest champion and admirer of Tulsa’s iconic art deco buildings, Joe Coleman saved structure after structure from demolition, convincing citizens, lawmakers, and architects to renovate and repurpose instead of destroy. Over the course of his fifty-year career, he redeemed classics like Tulsa’s old City Hall, Central High School, and the Adams Hotel.

“It was a time when most of the United States was tearing down its older structures in the name of urban renewal, but he didn’t want to do that,” Zeigler said. “He had the vision to keep the older structures and repurpose them for modern use. The biggest challenge you face is vision, because you’re working with someone else’s design and preserving important work—while getting it up to the right codes. If you’re building something new from scratch, you can do anything, but the kind of work Joe did was much more creative.”

In 1970, after having become the first architect to be elected commissioner of streets and public property, Coleman went beyond buildings to save the Council Oak Tree—an old Burr Oak tree under which a Creek tribe first established Tulsa in 1836. He coordinated an unusual land exchange between the private owner and the city to acquire and preserve the area, which had been put up for sale. Thanks to Coleman, the Council Oak Tree sits safely on a hill in view of the Arkansas River.

“He understood that it was all about relationships,” Zeigler remembered. “He was easy to get along with, and had an uncanny ability to see both sides of the coin.”

In addition to his efforts in preservation, Coleman was a celebrated lay preacher for his Baptist church. His anticipated sermons led him around the world: He was invited to speak at religious events in Asia, Europe, South America, and Africa, including a special invitation to present Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer a humanitarian award.

In 2004, the Tulsa Foundation for Architecture awarded Coleman its Lifetime Achievement Award, commemorating his accomplishments in the adoption of new city building codes and numerous public improvements.

In 1959, they moved from New York City to Tulsa, to be more comfortable. As backward as it sounds, Ferguson says they made the right choice.

“We took a trip to a number of different U.S. cities, to decide where we wanted to live. We considered Youngstown, Ohio, and some others. But we liked Tulsa most and decided to move here.”

Ferguson remembers late-‘50s Tulsa as a small city with a lot of farmland, and kind people. Still, he and Matarazzo felt they couldn’t be very open about their sexual orientation.

“We were still living in secret,” he said. “We were still technically ‘in the closet.’We considered ourselves a couple, but didn’t go out of our way to let people know. When they asked, we were honest, but we only discussed it with people we became close to. It’s just that it was 1959.”

Together with a few other partners, Matarazzo and Ferguson opened Frame of Mine Gallery in Brookside. It was an art gallery, gift shop, and do-it-yourself framing boutique all-in-one that lasted 26 years.

“The company George worked for moved to Houston,” Ferguson said, “and we weren’t sure what we were going to do. We had visited a little framing shop that we liked some time earlier, and we considered doing something similar ourselves. It was nice to be able to work together for so many years.”

They eventually sold the gallery to retire. Matarazzo took up charity work, volunteering for Our House, an organization that supports AIDS patients.

“A very good friend of his—a lady who went to our church—had a son who died of AIDS. She fixed up a rundown house and used it for the patients. They provided a meal, a game of cards, a place to sit and watch television, just whatever they needed that day. George got involved with the cooking, because he really loved to cook.”

Toby Jenkins of Oklahomans for Equality said that Matarazzo and Ferguson were “the oldest long-term gay couple in Tulsa,” having been together 55 years.

“I’m not sure how he even knows that,” Ferguson said with a laugh, “except that he knows every gay couple in town. If anybody would know, he would. And I’d imagine he’s right, because we’ve known older couples who were together longer, but they’ve since passed away, and I can’t think of anyone else who would’ve beaten us.”

When Hewitt was between jobs and needed to dig up some money, he went at it literally. He got a prime piece of land through a friend and spent the following summer in the mountains of Oregon mining for gold with equipment he made himself.

In a blog entry entitled “Tough,” daughter Esther Cummings said her dad “made Chuck Norris look like a cream puff,” citing her admiration for her father’s famous mining journey. “He built a stove for my mom to cook with, and they slept in tents and bathed in the river … with 5 kids in tow.”

Decades later, Hewitt made Cummings her dream wedding cake, with no prior understanding of baking. He studied with determination, practicing with varying recipes and ending up with a gorgeous and flowery treat surrounded by an edible “garden fence” constructed with ladyfingers he made from scratch.

Hewitt’s wife Sharon describes her husband with a tinge of awe:

“I don’t know exactly how he did all the things he did,” she said. “He always said it was God’s help, that he wanted to please God by helping others. He also read a lot of books and talked to the right people for advice.”

Advice came in handy when Hewitt delivered four of Sharon’s children.

“We had been going to a doctor who delivered babies the old fashioned way, right in his office. Our oldest three children were born there. When I became pregnant with our fourth, that doctor had retired, and we were disappointed. So Rich decided that he could do it at home. He had this ‘I can do it’ mentality. He talked to the retired doctor to get some pointers, and read and studied, and just did it. He delivered our last four children at home that way.”

Hewitt started his mushroom business in 2000, when he was diagnosed with skin cancer.

“He was looking into natural remedies to build his body up and fight the cancer, which is how he came upon mushrooms,” Sharon said. “He had been wanting a business of his own for a long time, and he wanted something that would be beneficial to people, not just for the purpose of making money. So he went to a seminar that showed the basics of growing mushrooms, and then he got the book from the person who gave the seminar, and he started experimenting.”

They called the business Mushroom Planet, indicative of their work environment. Hewitt transformed his basement into a farm, complete with a laboratory, growing rooms, and sterilization rooms. He started selling at the Cherry Street Farmer’s Market in 2003, then opened up to local restaurants and sold through the Oklahoma Food Cooperative.

“We were growing golden oyster, gray oyster, king oyster, lion’s mane, shiitake, maitake, and others— like reishi, which is a mushroom that is used for making tea, not for eating. It’s for medicinal purposes, for the immune system.”

Sharon says mushroom farming is a job for someone with split talents: part engineer, part scientist. The perfect role for her husband.

“He would search out biology classes to learn more. He was always interested in learning how to do things on his own, so he could share his skills with others.”

Ernest Wiemann grew up in Bramsche, Germany, where his father was a political figure at odds with Hitler’s rule. At 17, Wiemann’s parents sent him to live with family in Chicago to avoid the traumatic political fallout to come. Having already become a licensed journeyman machinist, Ernest quickly found work at Finkel’s Machine Shop in Chicago.

Wiemann moved to Tulsa in 1930 after marrying an Oklahoma native. As his custom gates, furniture, and garden ornaments became popular, he began to focus on them solely, opening Wiemann Ornamental Ironworks, now called Wiemann Metalcraft. The company’s work was featured in numerous national publications, including a gate Wiemann had designed for a home at 61st and Harvard that was featured on the cover of Better Homes and Gardens. In other articles, Wiemann had earned the nickname “Tulsa’s Man of Iron.” He received custom orders from Napa Valley, New York City, Chicago, and other cities, but was most proud of his accomplishments in Tulsa, like the gates to the Philbrook Museum of Art or the gazebo at the Thomas Gilcrease home. Wiemann was given over 160 awards for his metal craftsmanship—more than anyone else in the country.

“He was known for quality work and always giving the customer more than what they expected,” Bracken said. “I didn’t come on the scene until the early ’90s, but even though he was older, he still stuck to his old-fashioned values and ways of doing business.”

Wiemann was 83 years old, still working six days a week and keeping to a strict code of old-school frugality.

“If he was walking through the shop and saw a stray washer on the floor, he would pick it up and say, ‘If this were a nickel, you’d stop and pick it up!’ ”

Over the next three years of working together full-time, Wiemann and Bracken became friends.

“He told me a lot about his past,” Bracken said. “He had lost a son to polio, and a brother-in-law who was also an employee. And way back when he was trying to get his citizenship, it was very difficult for him. They used to hold public hearings, and if even one person showed up to say something bad about you, that was it. Ernest had made some accidental enemies at a previous job, and they were always showing up to defame him. Eventually somebody with a lot of power—I think it was either Skelly or LaFortune Sr.—had to intervene, and he finally got his papers.”

Bracken eventually bought the ironworks company from Wiemann, who was remarried at 90 to a woman he met in the rain during Macy’s Christmas Parade in New York city. They moved to her home in Arkansas, but Wiemann still checked up on his old business.

“It took a lot for Ernest to give away his name,” he said. “Even after he left, he would still call me up and make sure his name was respected and we were handling everything well. He used to say in his thick german accent, ‘always protect your reputation, ’cause it’s one thing you can trade on.’ ”

McDaniel was still living in Tulare, California, where her family had relocated to find work in the 1930s, and where the Tulare Advance-Register newspaper had first published her work. Harris, a mail carrier new to the area, didn’t realize who McDaniel was at first.

“I delivered mail to the senior complex where she lived, and I noticed that she was always receiving packages that were too big for her inbox. I started hand delivering her mail as a courtesy, and we would always chat for a moment. I learned all about her family and her poetry. Over time, we were friends—then I had to move away.”

Harris had a long-harbored desire that she had only shared with McDaniel: she wanted to write.

“I confided in her that I wished I could write like she did, but felt I couldn’t because I didn’t have a college degree. She just squinted at me and said, ‘That’s what’s stopping you? If you want to write, write!’ I found out later that she didn’t have a degree either.”

Harris moved away from Tulare, but kept in touch with McDaniel by writing letters. She remembers receiving notes that were covered in handwritten text from top to bottom, and looped around the edges.

“Her letters were so exciting to read,” Harris said. “She was always encouraging me to go further with my writing. I started getting some work as a freelance journalist, and realized I could really do it.”

One of Harris’ proudest moments was her feature spread in Highlights for Children magazine, about a young girl who grew a 900-pound pumpkin. Still, Harris had her eye on a bigger story.

“The more I got to know about Wilma’s childhood, the more I realized what a great story she had lived. I knew I wanted to turn it into a book.”

Harris worked on the project for several years, and released it with McDaniel’s publisher, Back40. The novel Chasing Fireflies follows McDaniel’s actual childhood, growing up in Dust Bowl Oklahoma.

Harris writes, “Lately, she’d been scavenging inch-long pencil stubs because she liked to sneak off by herself and put words together to make up little stories of her own. She didn’t dare write on her good school tablet, but she squirreled away other bits of paper she found, and was thrilled the day she discovered that Mama forgot to throw out last year’s calendar. Wilma had written a few lines under the year 1925. Her strings of words became more and more like poetry, though they didn’t rhyme like poems should.”

Though Harris is no longer a mail carrier, she fears for her former colleagues, with the postal service in financial dire straits.

“Mail carriers have always had reliable, steady jobs. They’ve not yet been affected by the economy, so it’s scary to think that they could be. I think the first thing to go will be Saturday delivery, then they’ll close down the rural post offices. It’s sad, but I doubt if the American public will even notice much.”

The art of writing letters may be on the decline for most of the country, but not for Harris.

“I like to correspond,” she said. “There are people I met decades ago that I still keep in touch with. A handwritten letter just means more. People keep them and cherish them, unlike emails and texts. I don’t think most people are thinking much when they send something online. When you write a letter, you sit and chew the end of your pencil and worry about how your thoughts will look on paper, because 100 years later, their grandchildren might still have it.”

Chasing Fireflies is available at back40publishing.com.

Set in midtown Tulsa, Davis’s 2004 thriller novel The Red House (published under maiden name Elizabeth Anne Ashwood) is a horrific account of a young woman’s traumatized state of mind. Through haunting sexual traumas and a mysterious murder, readers slowly discover what kind of past protagonist Cera is running from—a character that husband Deric Davis says is loosely based on his wife.

“I don’t know how many of the specifics are true to her life,” he said, “but the character is clearly a fictionalized version of herself.”

The book includes references to Tulsa landmarks, including the Remington Tower, Golf Ball Hill, and the Woodland Hills region of south Tulsa.

“She doesn’t shy away from graphic descriptions or obscenities,” Deric said, explaining that Davis was honest and adventurous from the moment they met.

“I met her in high school,” Deric remembered. “She wrote me secret admirer letters and covered for me when I skipped class. But we didn’t date at the time.”

Years later, after publishing her novel The Red House, Davis found Deric online.

“She had been married twice before, and I was currently married,” Deric said. “But we fell in love, and ended up moving in together. We basically did the common law thing and were already technically married, but I wanted to make it official.”

The Sunday before Davis passed away, Deric called her while she was out for groceries, and suggested they have their “wedding” that weekend.

“I told her I wanted to be with her for the rest of my life. I reminded her that the coming Friday would be Good Friday and Earth Day all in one day—which I knew she would love—and it was Easter weekend, her favorite holiday. She got really excited and we made the plans official.”

Early Friday morning on the day of their wedding, Davis woke up suddenly to a strange feeling that something was wrong.

“I turned over and found her dead in the bed next to me,” Deric said. “She had pink foam coming out of her mouth and was still warm.”

The exact cause of death is still uncertain, but Deric said he has become aware of some possibilities. “It seems that she wasn’t taking all of the medication she was prescribed, and was skipping her doctor’s appointments,” he said. “I don’t know why, but I think she was just scared. She didn’t want to hear about what else was wrong with her. She felt she had a lot of inner demons, from a traumatic childhood and what she told me was a difficult past, although I never knew the exact details.”

In the weeks following her death, Deric described his grieving process as “hard,” but his mood becomes lighter as he remembers her personality.

“She was not the 8-to-5 cubicle dweller. Most people work jobs they hate and come home and complain about how they wish things were different, but they don’t know how to get it. Elizabeth knew how to get it. She could find and express happiness in the smallest things, like the little love notes she would leave me— sometimes cute and romantic, sometimes triple-X filthy and absurd.”

Also a professional chef, Davis was shopping for a publisher for a recipe book at the time of her death, as well as a children’s book and a second novel. The Red House is available for purchase online via Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Every warm-enough Tuesday night for two decades, Peake suited up in dainty white from head to toe and honed proper posture, vying for a trophy in one of the many croquet tournaments she played with the Tulsa Croquet Club.

The club was founded in 1988 by a group of enthusiasts, and Peake joined with her husband—a Harvard-trained minister who had established several congregations in Tulsa—a few years later.

“She was playing a bunch of different sports at the time,” club member Bob Baker said. “She was very competitive and active. Sometimes there were conflicts between croquet tournaments and other competitions she was supposed to be at, but she became very committed to croquet.”

Peake stuck with croquet and became one of the club’s most beloved members. In the tournament following her death, she was awarded the first place trophy posthumously. But Baker says she was no stranger to winning.

“Harriet got a lot of good practice in,” Baker said. “Here in Tulsa, we have one of the best croquet facilities in the country. We’re at LaFortune Park, which actually had a built-in croquet area from the beginning, in its original plans. We didn’t know about it until we started looking for a space, but it’s ideal.”

Club members consist largely of senior citizens who enjoy reminiscing about the simpler days, when every American lawn was decorated with colorful metal arches. But Baker says it’s an open club.

“Our club is not for children, but other than that, we’d love to have all ages, genders, and backgrounds. The nice thing about croquet is that there are no distinctions in the sport. Everybody plays together. There are handicaps to make it fair in many cases, but we’re all equal athletes.”

Baker says they play croquet “the England way,” with a traditional grassy set-up, high-quality mallets, and a strict dress code.

“Yeah, we still wear the traditional white. It’s the rules. Tennis used to be that way too, but they sold out. They got fancy.”

Peake’s enthusiasm was a hit with club members. Often, she’d bring her family and friends out to watch, or even participate.

“She brought out a lot of newcomers, and liked to welcome them in,” Baker said. “She was definitely outgoing and a lot of fun to have around. We threw her a birthday party not long ago.”

Croquet mallets can cost up to $1,000 or more, but that didn’t stop Peake from ordering a brand new one from New Zealand just last year, personalized with her name on it. She hoped it would become an heirloom for future generations.

“The club was really proud of her,” Baker said. “She was a big part of us.”

She opened Skilly’s School of Social Dance in 1941, at just 19 years old. Student and longtime friend Marcus Makar remembered, “It was really the only studio. I don’t remember hearing of any others. And anyway, it was the only one studio I ever wanted to go to. She was just so cool, so modern, so fun.”

What stands out to Makar most is Forsman’s teaching style: a focus on music rather than moves.

“She would stand in front of the class and close her eyes. Then she would tell us to side step, getting us stepping to the rhythms. She would start swinging around, snapping her fingers, getting us all to join in and learn about interpreting music into dance on our own. She didn’t drill specific routines very hard, it was mostly about getting people together to mix and enjoy music. The way she taught us, anybody with an ear could get it.”

Another favorite memory of Makar’s is Forsman’s lavish year-end celebrations thrown at Philbrook Museum of Art.

“It was always an amazing, crazy party. She had classes performing all kinds of group dances or routines she had taught them, some they probably made up on their own. Lots of music and people mixing. It makes me laugh, but I also remember a group of Edison kids downing hard liquor there—and probably a lot of other stuff I didn’t know about as a seventh grader. She was just so loved, and that party was where everyone wanted to be.”

Online tributes are everywhere. Former students remember her unique teaching style and personality with so much fondness, they started a Facebook fan page called “Skilly Forsman taught me to dance” years before she passed away. Tulsatvmemories.com also hosts recollections, including this one by Frank Morrow:

“Skilly’s School of Ballroom Dancing was part of the passage from the awkward, inexperienced junior high years to the senior-high social scene. Skilly taught you not only how to dance, but what to do on a date, something that helped young boys gain confidence in their struggle to develop skills to deal with their new urges and the strange, new creatures that were called ‘girls.’

“If I remember correctly, the cost of the series of lessons was something like ten dollars. It might have been more, but in the late 40s, ten dollars was a lot … Skilly’s legacy lives on. When you go to high school and college reunions, you continue to see old geezers still doing the swing dance the way Skilly taught us.”

Just a few months ago, Makar ran into Skilly eating Mexican food at Elote. A friend he was with “recognized her from a night club he used to go to.”

They reminisced about how he used to give her rides home on the back of his motorcycle, without a helmet, even though she was in her sixties. He said she just laughed it off, looking fashionable as ever.

“She was double fun. Ageless. We went on like that for two hours.”

“I’m not just saying that because she was my wife,” he said, “but there were a few details that I didn’t think were—well, how can I say this kindly?—I felt as though the officiating could have been a little fairer.”

Elmer, 92, says the competition was mostly based on whether a woman could be a good influence, bake outstanding desserts, and look good while doing it. It was the 1950s, after all.

“I don’t remember all of the details, but I remember this: Dottie deserved to win. She was by far the prettiest and the best baker.”

Still sore about it decades later, Elmer and Dottie wrote a comedy sketch about the pageant, and performed it at First Baptist Church during a seniors’ meeting.

“This is something we did a lot,” he explained. “We wrote skits about local events or politics or sports and performed them for our friends. Dottie was the best performer I ever saw.”

Elmer says the skit was full of boffolas that poked fun at the Mrs. Tulsa pageant, like when Dottie performed her “talent” by dancing horrifically on purpose.

“Of course, she was really a great dancer, but it was funnier for her to fumble around. And she had on this silly hairpiece, too, so that helped.” Later in the skit, Elmer interviewed Dottie about the swimsuit competition, and held up a skimpy bikini that sent the audience into immediate guffaws because “it clearly wasn’t sufficient size.” Ultimate vindication came when Dottie announced that all of the other contestants were killed in a terrible bus accident, making her the winner by default. “It was just a lot of fun,” he said. Inspiration for their skits came primarily from famous comedian Phyllis Diller, whom Elmer got to meet when she was traveling through Tulsa.

“I was working at a local television station, and she was there to do an interview,” he said. “I introduced myself and told her how much Dottie and I just loved her. She took me up on my offer to drive her around and show her the sights, and we talked about each other’s comedy styles.”

At the end of their tour, Diller gave him two of her comedy records and wished him well with his skits.

“We listened to them all the time, and drew a lot of ideas from them. In fact, Dottie worked on an impression of her that was just perfect.”

The collection included starkly vivid and colorful pieces by artists like Will Shuster, Maynard Dixon, and Leon Gaspard. In addition to the more than 1,000 paintings— many of which are accompanied by original sketches and thumbnails—there are also hundreds of fine pottery pieces and over 1,600 pieces of jewelry and ornamental silver, among other valuable odds and ends.

Adkins’ collection is awe-inspiring, not only in grandeur but in diversity—art by both male and female artists, varied cultures and subcultures, modern and traditional. A painting by Rebecca Salsbury James utilizes “reverse painting on glass,” a challenging and tedious technique in which she painted on the back side of a sheet of glass to form a reverse image on the front. A Leon Gaspard painting was completed on silk and, after Adkins bought the piece, it traveled to Moscow for an exhibit before he welcomed it home.

Adkins ventured across the Southwest for more than four decades to search out the art of his dreams and celebrate Native American culture. In Santa Fe, he found a treasure trove: a stirring assemblage of artists called the Taos, and their modernist cousins, Los Cinco Pintores, “The Five Painters.” With an intense penchant for travel that dated back to Brady family road trips he’d taken as a child, Adkins developed a habit of writing postcards to himself as a way to document his travels and findings.

In May 1989, he wrote, “The beautiful Fremont Ellis show went down today at Santa Fe East. Now, I’m waiting in anticipation to see if I will be the one to purchase Fremont’s wonderful oil ‘Winter Afternoon.’ Home tomorrow, hasta la vista. Hopefully, Gene.”

“Winter Afternoon” did become part of his collection, the entirety of which has been left to the Philbrook Museum of Art and The University of Oklahoma.

Then gone.

Raffe—that’s what everybody called him—came to Tulsa around the time the Cain’s Ballroom exposed its rafters, added real bathrooms, and entered a renaissance. Then, Raffe was living in the apartment over the Hunt Club at Main and Cameron, a block from Cain’s. Like any serious photographer, he took his turn documenting its neon and nostalgia.

So, when the time came to memorialize Raffe, his people booked the Ballroom. They issued Pro Tix at the gate with Raffe as the headliner. There was acoustic support: a duet with Ben and Noelle Kilgore, and a spiritual by Isaac, Taylor, and Zac Hanson, just the three voices around a mic. In between, Art Garfunkel, there in spirit, belted “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” cued to a photo timeline of Raffe’s brief life.

Sail on Silver Girl,
Sail on by
Your time has come to shine
All your dreams are on their way.

Raffe came here by way of Denver, St. Louis, and Chicago. He brought with him a trained, professional eye and a back catalogue.

“Scott was so focused,” said his friend Noah Roberts. “He did one thing exceptionally well. He knew exactly what he wanted to do and he did it every day.” Raffe shot circuses and cemeteries, baseball fields and backroads. His portraits enhanced understanding, his landscapes inspired action. He was in the middle of photographing burial plots of the deceased American Presidents when he got sick.

“He shot 34 of them,” said Roberts. “It’s really shocking, the gamut of the way these men were honored. They’re the most beautiful images.” Raffe’s wife, Jerilyn, will complete the project.

“Scott loved to shoot cemeteries. He shot cemeteries everywhere—Milan, Paris, New Orleans, New York, Russia, Ireland, everywhere in Oklahoma.

“My dad is not a photographer, but he’s a huge history buff. And he said to Scott, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to have a book of all the Presidents’ graves?’ So, we all decided Scott would photograph, my dad would write and I would design.

“You know when you’re sitting around and say, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to do this,’ but then it never happens? Scott always made things happen.”

Jerilyn is photographing the remaining sites herself, and is also working with a publisher on a collection of Raffe’s circus photos, which she hopes to publish in early 2012.

Raffe’s legacy in these parts will undoubtedly be his collaboration with Libby Bender and Carl Brune, Oklahoma: A Portrait of America. Three-hundred sixty images on nearly as many pages, it’s a big, bold volume that took three years to shoot and produce. Cain’s plays heavily in it, as do Muskogee’s Renaissance Faire, Guthrie’s 89er Days, Pawnee Bill’s Wild West Show, Oklahoma City’s Red Earth Festival, and Comanche County’s Holy City of the Wichitas, a nether-worldly view of a lost-in-time place.

“He was a driven man,” said Bender, who wrote the text and was going to shoot Oklahoma anyway, and who thought Raffe might like to tag along. The road was long—all 77 counties came under his gun—and the effort, like the man, relentless.

“It took him five trips to get an image of the Admiral Twin that he liked,” Bender said. “And now it’s gone.”

Raffe and Brune, who designed the book, flew to Belgium for a press check. Prior to taking off, Brune asked Raffe to take a last look at the pages before they landed, to see if any of the photos needed tweaking. Raffe tweaked 226 of them.

“We crossed the Atlantic on our laptops,” Brune said, noting his colleague’s penchant for changing out entire images. “We weren’t allowed to crop. He composed in the camera. He’d quote a former teacher of his and say, ‘Cropping is for farmers.’ ”

Raffe’s camera caught Giovanni Zoppe—alias Nino the Clown, with whom Raffe shares a birthday—in more moods than a circus clown should have. Raffe shot Circus Flora and Circus Zoppe on and off for 15 years.

“Each year with a different camera,” said Brune, “from a 5-by-7 portrait to an iPhone.”

“Besides having an eye for art, he was a wonderful, generous man,” Zoppe said, adding that Raffe even took time to get the clowns, acrobats and ringleaders copies of their portraits. “People had photographed us before. But nothing like Scott.”

Zoppe said his friend was drawn to the color and the drama, in the beginning.

“Then he connected with the people, which doesn’t happen automatically. He saw that we were real people. Not some circus illusion.”

Scott Lawrence Raffe died July 4, Independence Day.

On the first floor, a one-room schoolhouse environment displays dolls seated calmly at desks, their vintage books and papers proudly surviving in front of them. The walls boast war memorabilia and snapshots of long-gone townspeople performing their various trades: a pharmacist tinkering with his glass medicine bottles, a homemaker preparing meals. In the center is a tribute to Okemah- born Woody Guthrie, his personal letters and photographs strewn about behind glass. Next to one of his old guitars sits a stack of records and a signed copy of his autobiography. Eager tour guides include descendents of Okemah’s founders, whose ancestors came to town in covered wagons.

While the museum is special, the real heart of the building is upstairs, where Masons held induction ceremonies and decided how to spend their dough.

“As a longtime member of the Okemah Masonic Lodge, I held many positions,” Bill Elliott said. “For many years our lodge provided a wide range of community support … We provided

Okfuskee County schools with scholarships for graduating seniors. We assisted the American Legion with funds for local students to attend functions at the state Capital. The Lodge was one of the major contributors to the building of three baseball fields.”

The Lodge also lent a hand to neighboring towns, providing financial assistance for the Sunrise Fire Department when they needed a new fire station, and to the town of Paden to help restore a nearly 100 year-old school auditorium.

But when enthusiasm began to fade, the Lodge was forced to close. “The reason our lodge failed was due to lack of attendance and support from our members,” Elliott explained. “You need a minimum of five members present to hold a meeting, and we could only attract three or four.”

The Grand Lodge of Oklahoma requested that the Okemah Masons turn in their charter and move the remaining members to a nearby town.

Abandoned, the empty upstairs rooms gather dust. Piles of Okemah’s history lie around haphazardly, stirred together with hints of modern life. In the former bathroom, a blinking internet modem sits next to a rusty toilet. In another room, injured mannequins lean up against the walls. An antiquated sewing table sits lonely in a small space strangely labeled “Pastor’s Study.”

But while Okemah’s financial support club has closed, it has not shaken the town’s spirit.

“Okemah changed after the I-40 was built,” said resident Roger Thompson, explaining that there are at least eight new businesses in town to support a community that has not dwindled. “Okemah has remained around 3,000 people for the last 25 years. We’re small compared to a number of surrounding cities, but we’re fiscally solid and looking forward to the future.”

Except for a little construction—a new McDonald’s being built on the corner—the streets of Okemah are calm, occupied only by a small helmeted boy driving a four-wheeler. Some businesses are clearly new, while others are boarded up or seemingly abandoned, with signs like “FALL SALE” hanging in the spring windows. But there are flashes of excitement, too, like the Crystal Theatre, once Oklahoma’s premiere movie house, being restored to its original glamour, or flyers for the Woody Guthrie Free Folk Festival, where hoards of fans descend on the town each year to see members of Guthrie’s family perform alongside other folk musicians.

“We weren’t on the same team,” Toni Hill explained. “I was guarding first base, and she came running towards me with a big grin. I started laughing because of her pigtails. She was clearly not the type of girl that wears pigtails. We were both chuckling for a while before she ran off to second.”

Hill and Mansell became romantic and bought a house together, where they lived for several years.

“The law enforcement stories she told me in those days were so inspiring that she made me want to become a police officer myself. So I did.”

As coworkers in the Tulsa Police Department, Hill remembers Mansell’s dedication.

“People in this profession can always default to using force, but the truth is that it doesn’t work well. You have to get on their soft side. Jennifer was street smart and knew how to use humor and kindness to determine the situation.”

Mansell passed away in January following a battle with breast cancer, but left behind reminders of her thoughtfulness.

“After she died, I found a pack of cigarettes in her car. She had bought them to give away to someone who needed them. I know it sounds odd that a police officer—especially one with cancer—would buy somebody cigarettes, but she knew what she was doing. For homeless people who don’t have anything, cigarettes can be the highest luxury, and they would be very touched. Or for someone who is shaken up from trauma and can’t talk about it until they relax, cigarettes can be the one thing that helps the person calm down and give the information we need. That kind of thoughtfulness was Jennifer’s strong suit, and it’s what helped her talk people out of jumping off of bridges and buildings, which she did at least twice.”

Though Hill’s romantic relationship with Mansell ended in 1994, they remained close. “It turned out that we were better friends than girlfriends. She went on to find a perfect partner.”

Mansell passed away in January, just shy of her 14th anniversary with partner Cathy Baker.

Dana and Lynne met when he spotted her at a restaurant, but was too daunted to make a move. “So he followed me home,” she said with an amused chuckle. “And got pulled over by the cops.”

But it led to a conversation that spawned their relationship. “He was the wittiest person I’d ever met. Anyone who had one conversation with him wanted to be around him again.”

His clowny, daredevil tendencies were only sharpened after their marriage. “He would start getting ready for Halloween on the first of October. He decorated the lawn every year to look like a realistic cemetery with tombstones, a fog machine and a real wrought iron fence.”

LeMoine dressed up in ghoulish outfits and devised flabbergasting scares, including a thunder and lightning machine he built himself. Their house greeted over 600 trick-or-treaters each year.

“His sons loved it. They knew Dad was just having fun.”

His sons also enjoyed LeMoine’s game room hobby—that is, his penchant for collecting arcade games and turning his home into a funhouse. “At one point,” his wife recalled, “we had seven pinball machines, two jukeboxes, a photo booth and three arcade games.”

Shortly after being diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, LeMoine began to lose functionality in several parts of his body and taught himself to type with his feet.

Lynne said, “The first thing to go was the use of his hands, so he started using his feet to do things. He designed and updated the Broken Arrow baseball team’s website—and did it so well that the other athletic departments asked him to run their sites too. He did it all with his toes.”

In addition to websites, LeMoine began to write autobiographical short stories about growing up in Tulsa. One story is a tribute to his beloved Walter Reed elementary school:

“Just the threat of a paddling helped to keep us on good behavior. I remember sitting in class and hearing the sound of a kid getting licks echoing in the hall. That sound sent shivers down every kid’s spine. Being one of their own, you couldn’t help feeling sorry for the kid, but still felt it was better them than you. Not that I didn’t get my fair share of paddlings over the years. Mine were usually due to talking out of line, or for my uncalled for (but timely!) comments.”

Hadavi recalled his mother’s daily prayers, but said that she did not subscribe to every expectation of Islam. “She was a woman of faith, but when she started playing cards, she had no mercy for anybody.”

Azizeh Jazayeri Tehrani-Hadavi was born in Iraq and lived in Iran most of her life. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 eventually forced her to escape with her family, in order to keep her grandsons from being forced into the military. She was 57 years old.

“They traveled by camel and sometimes hiking, sleeping in caves,” Pat said. “They snuck into Pakistan, and from there went to Greece. After some time they were given visas to come to the United States.”

Cashing in on a Texas real-estate investment they had made years earlier, Tehrani-Hadavi and her husband Nooredin bought the Loaf and Ladle Restaurant on South Main Street in Tulsa.

“My parents had no idea what they were doing,” Hadavi laughed. “They learned everything from scratch. It was 1984, and their customers were mostly people from the church across the street, employees from big office buildings downtown and university students.”

The Loaf and Ladle was a successful lunch-only deli for more than a decade. Its secret ingredient: Tehrani-Hadavi’s good memory.

“She remembered what customers liked, and the next time they would walk in, she would start making it for them again, before they got through the door.”

When she realized that homeless people were going through the restaurant’s trash to eat their leftovers, Tehrani-Hadavi started wrapping the food up nicely and leaving it out beside the garbage cans.

“She didn’t want them to have to eat dirty food,” Hadavi said.

In Tulsa, Father Robert Pickett championed Neighbor for Neighbor, an organization founded by a friend that served the poor.

John’s brother Richard remembered, “In the beginning, they started a dental clinic, which was a big deal in those days, for poor communities to have access to dental work. Later they had a medical clinic, a legal clinic and provided every service they could manage.”

Rather than solicit government funding, Father Pickett helped Neighbor for Neighbor raise money by hosting “Give a Damn Sunday” at LaFortune Park, where he collected money that would keep the organization going.

“The number one mission of his church, Resurrection, was to help the poor by supporting Neighbor for Neighbor,” Richard said.

An early adversary to the war in Vietnam, Pickett was invited with other clergymen to discuss the matter with President Johnson in the White House, a meeting that was broadcast on network television.

“I remember watching the tube with my mother and seeing a lot of men with the President,” John said. “There was my uncle in the front row.”

When plans were devised to build a nuclear power plant in eastern Oklahoma, Pickett joined protesters in opposition to the complex.

“There were frequent demonstrations, and there were occasions when he and some colleagues were taken away,” Richard recalled. “It was a way of getting attention on the issues.”

The plans for the power plant were eventually scrapped, due largely to citizen action.

“He was very, very happy to be a priest,” Richard said. “He never thought of not being a priest. It’s something a lot of people wouldn’t understand, but he really loved what he did.

Charlesetta Walker started clogging in the 1980s as a form of exercise. As her dancing interest intensified, she went alone to clogging classes and conventions all around the country, learning and performing with myriad clubs.

“Clogging is not a mainstream thing,” Charles said, “but as with any subculture, there are people participating if you look hard enough.”

The traveling in particular was a major perk for Walker. “She loved to travel,” Charles remembered. “Even when I was kid, she made a point to take me somewhere every summer—Detroit, Oakland, New York City.

Traveling was her favorite thing to brag about. And she felt that young people should be exposed to it too.”

A public school teacher, Walker began to pass her clogging expertise on to her students. She put them into performing groups and would organize performances at communities events like the Bluegrass and Chili Festival and Mayfest.

“She realized it was something different for them, something they wouldn’t normally be introduced to, and she realized it presented them with opportunities to travel. You have to understand that for some of these kids, their clogging trips were their only trips out of town, ever.”

Hands-on from start to finish, Walker went to thrift stores for costume materials and would sew and alter them herself. “Parents really admired her for being so involved, and for getting the kids excited about it.”

Walker trained dozens of students over the years, and she loved to watch them clog. Charles said, “I think she liked watching them dance more than she enjoyed dancing herself.”

Though Charles remembers his mother as a happy woman, he admits that she had a complaint or two. “Towards the end of her life, she voiced frustration with the lack of interesting activities and events for seniors in Tulsa. She wanted there to be more community-based events that were accessible and enjoyable for older people.”

Walker continued to clog as long as she was able. A true traveling fiend, she passed away at age 75 and was buried beneath a gravestone that reads: “On the road again.”

The Enger Brothers were intensely creative and worked in many media: sculpture, painting, silkscreen printing, woodcut printing. Early in their artistic career, in spring of 1989, Mark and Matt held a joint show at the IAO gallery in OKC featuring their art along with that of OSU art professor John Hancock. The refreshments served were a somewhat disconcerting mixture of sauerkraut, an unknown variety of meat, unidentifiable bits and excessive amounts of pepper sauce, a combination dubbed “rotten-mouth salad.” The beverages offered were pearl beer bottles with custom Enger-designed woodcut-printed labels with lurid images that aptly illustrated the brand names: Gun Fighter Ale, Whore Monger Brew, etc. The War Hippies, the Enger brothers’ atavistic art-terrorism ensemble, did an unannounced set that electrified gallery patrons.

One of their more exciting art concepts was the idea of the “New West Medicine Show” which was a total vision involving costumes, room-sized murals and props that featured The War Hippies and other like-minded groups—ensembles for which hugeness of sound, ridiculous volume and a quest for musical extremity were distinguishing characteristics. The War Hippies were the centerpiece of the New West Medicine Show.

“The New West [Medicine Show] started when we were four or five years old and has continued for 47 years,” Matt Enger said. Their father, who was an artillery officer, would take the brothers to museums, and Matt remembers seeing western art and Indian artifacts on trips to museums in Oklahoma. “After we moved to New York we realized how cool and unique it was (in Oklahoma). You don’t realize it until you’re gone from there—it’s a very spiritual state though it seems redneck on the outside. People don’t try as hard to be hip there.”

The Medicine Show was like an old west Nuremberg rally, cowboy-booted desert rats lost in a datura trip—psychedelic televisionaries meets the Italian futurists, but with brighter lights and louder amps. Highly ritualized but chaotic, a War Hippies performance could polarize an audience so that some were in an ecstatic frenzy and others were merely afraid.

During the Medicine Show years, the Engers were living in Stillwater but had many friends in Tulsa.  They were very involved in the underground scene of the day. They designed the ubiquitous “exploding buffalo skull” shirts, which reflected their obsessions with old west Americana, native America and its art, the Confederacy and civil war, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Custer. The ones who wouldn’t bow down. The freaks, the failures, the other. The Engers celebrated a totally American otherness, reveling in and celebrating the dispossessed, the misfit, the outsider.

“The new west idea was all about pop culture, Clint Eastwood, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the Civil War,” says Joe Stone, drummer for the War Hippies. “A lot revolved around that and still does.”

Stone and the Engers lived in and shared a studio at sixth and Main in Stillwater, which was the venue for many art shows and musical performances in the late eighties. Prior to that they had participated in a cooperative gallery in Stillwater called, appropriately enough, “Art Gallery” with a logo designed with a generic product’s lettering. The art gallery featured performances by many bands including an early performance of the Flaming Lips.  Matt and Mark’s fascination with the icons and symbology of the old west and the south and the drama and tragedy of their respective legacies was deeply felt from an early age.

After years of partnered projects, it’s hard to think of the Engers as anything but a unit, though they are distinctive personalities and styles. Matt said that it’s as if Mark isn’t really gone.

“I feel like he’s still here in some ways. I feel like he’s inside of me because of our DNA.”  Matt said that he felt such a close connection with Mark that he could finish a painting of Mark’s and sign Mark’s name and it would be Mark’s.

In 1990, the brothers moved to New York and started Exploding Sky Worldwide Studios and then went on to collaborate with Robert Rauschenberg, Kiki Smith, Donald Baechler and Josh Harris. They also created an extensive body of their own work, individually and collaboratively.

In May of 2011, the Christopher Henry gallery in New York will hold a showing of the Engers’ brothers work. The show, which was arranged before Mark’s death, will feature a plexiglass case with Mark’s face silk-screened on the top with his signature on the sides. The box will contain his ashes. This is possibly the first time that an artist’s remains will be part of a work in his own exhibition. Mark Enger died in January of 2011, after a prolonged affliction of cancer.