So Long Tim Lannom

by Abby Wendle

09/13/2011

Tim Lannom loved big houses and historic houses. He owned multiple properties around Tulsa and spent his time restoring and renovating them with the help of his close friend and carpenter, Randy Holloway. In the early nineties, Lannom bought and began renovating the historic Brady Mansion. In this segment, Holloway tells the story of how he and Lannom brought the Brady Mansion back to its glory after decades of neglect. Lannom died in December 2007.

Transcript

Randy Holloway: When it snowed he’d wake me up in the middle of the night and take me over to the Brady Mansion to make me shovel it off the balconies because he was afraid the ceiling wouldn’t hold the snow in the middle of the night.  But I mean that was one of the things, you know, that I liked about him.

My name is Randy Holloway.  I worked for Tim for about, off and on, 15 years.  He would buy houses.  I would fix them up and he’d sell them.

I did all his carpentry work, painting and plumbing.  Well, I’m not really a plumber but he told me one time, “Don’t ever tell anybody but I’m a plumber.”  Plumbing can be really dirty.  You know, down and dirty.  You know, he just didn’t want anybody to know he did it. But there are some task like relining that can be done very easily, You just need to hop over to this website for more info.

He always ran around all the time with a suit jacket and then he had the blue jeans and a tie.  Tim had a lot of class, you know.  You know, he had a reputation.  Everybody knew Tim.  They all knew his houses.  In case like he’d buy a house to just turn and we’d just go in there and do the basics on it.  We didn’t do anything special.  But he really liked bigger houses.  He can expand his horizon and use his ability to be creative.  He would just sit there sometimes for hours just staring, cup of coffee in his hand, trying to figure out how they wanted it to look.

Late night he’s early 2000, he bought the Brady Mansion.  His girlfriend at the time talked him into it.  She says, “You’ll be a part of Tulsa’s history.”  The Brady Mansion’s pretty grand.  It has one, two, seven bathrooms.  It has four huge columns out front, this gray stone.  It has a nice balcony upstairs.  But I mean it was rough when he got it.  It was all sectioned off into apartments.  All the ceilings had been lowered.  It had no central heating air, plumbing problems; all the trim was caked, and caked and caked.  It was just – it was a dump.  It looked like a crack house inside.  I mean, it was that bad.  It was terrible.  And I couldn’t, I thought, “Oh man.  I can’t believe this.  I can’t believe he bought something like this.”  We dug and dug and dug and then tore stuff off the walls.  We tore out walls, tore out walls and tore out more stuff.  And I saw what was behind it and I thought, “Oh yeah, this is going to be all right.”

The crown on the ceilings is what was really amazing.  It had so many facets to it, it is just you don’t see anything like that anymore.  It is old.  You know, nowadays everything’s wham-bam hurry, you know, and it doesn’t have the uniqueness of that old crown.  You know, it was wild.  And he was proud of that, you know I mean, there’s a lot of history in there.  And he—Tim was, you know, proud of Tulsa.  He always wanted to make a – do something like the founding fathers.  You know, take Brady, he made the Brady Hotel, so Tim redid the Brady Mansion.  You know, that’s how he was.  He was a character.