Meador Manor

Lessons for the Novice

Posted on July 1, 2026 by Granger Meador

One of the melancholy François de La Rochefoucauld‘s many maxims that he shared over 400 years ago can be translated: “We arrive at the various stages of life quite as novices.”

I have concluded 40 years of work, 37 of them for Bartlesville Public Schools. As a relatively fresh-faced and inexperienced retiree, I think back to when I was a novice in the world of work: my jobs before I began working for Bartlesville Public Schools.

Tourism Department in 1985

My first job was in the summer of 1985, at ages 18-19. I had applied for a few minimum-wage jobs at local businesses, but a family friend was a Bethany city councilman who knew a state senator who recommended me for a job at the State Capitol Complex.

The first offer came from the State Tourism Department to be a minimum-wage office assistant at $3.35 per hour. I accepted, and a few days later the Tax Commission next door offered me a job at $3.45 per hour. But I’d already accepted the position at Tourism, and I was never into accounting, so I didn’t pursue that.

I was shuffled around to help out in personnel, accounting, payroll, and data processing as needed. I was grateful to have a variety of experiences, never getting stuck in one position for more than a couple of weeks.

OK Capitol office buildings — Over 40 years ago, my working life began on the 5th floor of the Will Rogers Building

My favorite memories there are of technologies that even at the time were antiquated, such as punch card checks that were sorted by a huge mechanism, housed in a 12-foot-long alcove, that was so old that repair parts had to be custom-manufactured by a local machinist to keep it going.

Xerox Auditron Cartridge — A Xerox Auditron

The Xerox copy machines only worked when you plugged in a mechanical counter called an Auditron so that the appropriate department could be billed.

I used an old dedicated Wang word processor terminal hooked up to a noisy 10-megabyte hard drive about the size of an apartment-size washing machine, along with mainframe purchase order terminals. I also used a remote data entry terminal at another facility, working with two fellows for a couple of weeks keying in all of the subscriptions to Oklahoma Today magazine after the manager of the department’s mainframe, who had failed a certification test for a higher-level computer position multiple times, accidentally wiped out its database, leaving only a subscription printout intact.

For awhile I worked with a lady in accounting who had been convicted of embezzlement. But she was still working in accounting and having her pay garnished to pay back what she had absconded with. That was an eye-opener about the strange logic regarding accountability and consequences in some workplaces, especially state government.

While processing purchase orders, I followed procedures and flagged ones that appeared to be in error. On one occasion, my administrator ordered me to override my flag on what I calculated to be a ridiculous number of ceiling fans being ordered for one of the lodges, without a reasonable explanation. I wondered what that was about. A few years later, she was fired, then rehired, then demoted for failing to deposit checks and warrants found in her office, and eventually promoted to revise policies and procedures. The logic of it all again escaped me, but the shenanigans were far above my pay grade, as the expression went.

I learned that I disliked repetitive office procedures like data entry and processing purchase orders. One solace on such days was that in the Will Rogers building they piped in Muzak, and I could think about where we were in the service’s 15-minute cycle of Stimulus Progression. It was also evident that it was programmed to play foxtrots — smooth, melodic instrumentals with a consistent 4/4 time signature and a slow-slow-quick-quick rhythm — after lunch when the workers tended to get sleepy.

Transistor radio — The kind of cheap transistor radio I used to survive data entry

Some found the Muzak annoying, but when I spent a couple of weeks at the remote site keying in Oklahoma Today subscriptions, I missed it and resorted to listening to tunes via a cheap earpiece on a transistor radio.

For a couple of weeks that summer I was trapped in a windowless interior room with a lady who always ate a smelly lunch at her desk. I never ate lunch in the office, taking advantage of my 30-minute lunch break to escape the building. Sometimes I walked through a tunnel to the capitol cafeteria, where I might be lucky and get to sit near the venerable and colorful Frosty Troy, a firebrand journalist who was acerbically funny.

But I couldn’t afford to eat in the cafeteria every day, and at the time I had an ingrown toenail that made it painful to walk. So other times I would go out to my car and eat a sandwich, reading historical novels set in ancient Crete and Greece by Mary Renault, which I had to complete by the end of the summer in preparation for a seminar on ancient Greece at the university. I was an Engineering Physics major at the time, but I could count it toward humanities credits.

A low point was coming back in from lunch one day to work in the stinky interior office and, just as the smell from my office mate’s lunch was dissipating, having the door guy come in. He was a fellow with limitations whose job was to cycle through the entire capitol complex with a wire brush, scrubbing the ventilator grills in the countless doors. He appeared every couple of weeks, and he was rank. He was never around for long, but his scent lingered.

High points were any out-of-the ordinary missions. One I enjoyed was when the state had instituted changes in its liquor licenses, and everyone had to come to the capitol to get a new license. I was sent over to the Alcoholic Beverage Laws Enforcement Commission to get new licenses for each of the state lodges. There was a line of dozens of restaurant and bar owners stretching way down a long corridor outside the commission office, resigned to a long and tedious wait. They watched incredulously as I limped past, too young to buy a drink, gained immediate entry into the office, and came back out shortly afterward with a bunch of licenses. What a jerk!

Insider advantage — Breezily passing the discouraged folks waiting for liquor licenses [Image generated by ChatGPT]

Another time I was told to go pick up some boxes being delivered from the lodges via the bus. I was told to take a delivery van to the downtown bus terminal, but I discovered in the parking lot that the van had a manual transmission, and my only experience with a clutch and gear shift had been half an hour in a driver’s education simulator. I went back in and shared my dilemma. The lazy guy who had given me the task then came out with me and drove the van downtown, and we unloaded boxes out of the cargo bins of a passenger bus into the van. He was a funny and effeminate fellow who complained about my work ethic. “Jesus! Don’t you know that if you finish a job quickly, they just give you more to do?”

Another time a senior accountant asked me to create a table summarizing some data. They had no personal computers with spreadsheet software, and the Wang word processor was busy, so I sat down with a pen and ruler to create a table, and then I used a calculator and electric typewriter to arrive at and type in the many figures. When I gave it to him, he was so impressed that he wanted to hire me at a higher wage as his assistant, but I demurred, noting that I was heading back to college in a few weeks. I couldn’t imagine working in that inefficient and technologically outdated office for more than a few months.

Lessons for this novice:

It is sometimes not what you know, but who you know, that matters.
Antiquated methods can still work and may be preserved by people who prefer comfortable routines to efficiency or improvement.
Accountability is often lacking, so set your own standards high and live up to them. Prepare to be disappointed, but not surprised, when others don’t meet your standards, but never let them talk you down to their level.
Variety is the spice of life.

Scholars Programs in 1986-1988

Steve Sutherland and I at OU — Amy was not my girlfriend, but we were all in Scholars Programs

My next job was as a National Merit Intern at the University of Oklahoma from 1986 through 1988. Dr. Steve Sutherland led Scholars Programs and had recruited me to OU.

My girlfriend and I were both in Scholars Programs, which had monthly events throughout our freshman year, and I enjoyed visiting with Dr. Sutherland and his colorful secretary.

One day Dr. Sutherland was griping about a fancy plotter he had purchased which neither he nor his secretary could figure out. I offered to take a look and created some transparencies with nice graphs and charts for a recruitment presentation. Steve was so impressed that he asked me to work for him part-time, arranging for me to receive a stipend each semester from the OU Foundation. Knowing my work ethic, he left to me the timing and frequency of my appearances at the office. I rewarded that trust by helping reprogram databases, creating charts and graphs with the fancy plotter, checking grades for scholarship renewals, and eventually serving as an enrollment advisor to members of the President’s Leadership Class and some of the incoming National Merit Scholars.

Oklahoma Memorial Union — Scholars Programs occupied a floor of old apartments at the top of the student union; after my time that floor was gutted and remodeled

A former graduate student had set up a dBase III database of scholarship information, but he had left the university. Steve asked me to reprogram it. I had never used a database, so that was an interesting challenge since the world wide web didn’t exist as a resource. He was delighted that I figured it out.

Mainframe terminal — Scholars Programs had a personal computer, but it eventually added a mainframe terminal

A year later, he paid the university’s computer gurus a great deal of money to have a new database programmed on the university mainframe, which needed a four-letter acronym. He named it MERT, saying it stood for “Merit”, but I knew that Steve’s middle name was Merton, so he was having some fun.

Later, when he needed a health fee waiver database, he refused to pay for what he called “the Cobol priests” to create it, saying they drove him crazy charging him exorbitant fees to just make a tiny edit here or there. I remember him exploding, “Adding one @#$%ing field on that screen costs me $500!”

So he offered me an extra stipend to program a database for him, which he wanted to run unattended in the main library for students to access. I knew that would require something quite robust, so I subcontracted my best friend, a computer science major at OSU Tech in OKC, to help me create one. Steve bought a Compaq Deskpro computer, and we set it up on a table in the library. A decade later, when everyone was worrying about Y2K bugs, I realized our database would have been broken by the turn of the century, but I trusted that it was long gone by then!

Steve was a smart and funny gourmand with an outsize personality. He made a point of hiring the first man to ever be a secretary at the university, accepting that fellow’s sexuality, and when he was a student, Steve had been the first white member of the historically black fraternity, Omega Psi Phi, at his university, risking a much-needed scholarship. I always admired his acceptance and support of the socially marginalized.

One of the perks of being in Scholars Programs was getting to enroll before everyone except the football team. I never had to worry about a class being full, and in my internship role I guided new scholars through the enrollment process. Right after being named the Outstanding Sophomore in Engineering Physics I had changed my major to science education, and that would have meant losing access to the engineering computer network. However, with my mastery of enrollment, I was able to override the system and enroll in a zero-credit-hour Engineering Computing course and retain access.

One of the longest legacies of my time at Scholars Programs came about when the secretary was out and I had to type up some of Steve’s dictation. The secretary used WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS, and I found I loved the precise control it gave with its hidden codes. WordPerfect grew to have 50% market share by 1995, but it was then rapidly eclipsed by the inferior Microsoft Word for Windows. While I learned Word as well for when I needed to collaborate, I stuck with WordPerfect for my own documents for three decades, up through version 17.

Lessons for this novice:

Try to hire smart self-starters who are intrinsically motivated and will independently do good work. When they’re performing well, stay out of their way. You don’t need to micro-manage people unless lived experience shows they need guardrails or guidance.
Be real and have fun at work.
If the system is biased, bend its arc toward justice. If it won’t bend, stop asking permission and just break it if that is what it takes to do what is right.

Work Lessons: Substitute Teaching in 1989

Putnam City high schools — I substituted at all three of the high schools in Putnam City in the spring semester of 1989

For the first five months of 1989, I was a substitute teacher at the three high schools in the Putnam City school district while searching for a full-time physics teaching position. I never knew if I would get an early-morning call to go sub, so every weekday I got up early, showered, and waited.

I’d had a marvelous student teaching experience in physics at Norman High School, but substituting in a variety of high school classes was quite different. I had to learn how to deal with students who had zero interest in a given lesson and acted out, being confronted hour after hour by classes with students testing how much mischief I might tolerate.

I had great success substituting in physics and calculus, and of course enjoyed various honors classes. I remember filling in for one of my former English teachers, who had no idea I was substitute teaching. I handed out various sample essays the students were to read and analyze as models of exemplary writing. I was surprised to see one of my own essays in the mix, and wondered if any of the students might recognize their substitute teacher’s name on it and inquire. I was amused that no one did.

The worst classes were the ones where a teacher left no lesson plans. I had never liked physical education, and I remember subbing in that one day with a gym full of kids and no plans. I gathered them together, stood up to my full 5’8″ height, squinted at them, and pointed at a rack of basketballs, the only thing in the gym with us.

“You’re going to play with those balls today, and the rules are: no bathroom visits, no hurting anyone with a ball, and if a ball even gets near me, you’ll all end up sitting silently in the stands hating me.”

I was pleasantly surprised when the entire day went by without incident, but I made sure to never sub in PE again.

Lessons for this novice:

Be upfront about expectations and the consequences if they are not met, and always follow through.
When a student acts out, isolate them from an audience and provide options.
When you’re being challenged, try to stay calm, polite, and firm.
Always leave a substitute with a good seating chart and clear lesson plans, and be thankful if they are followed.

I was glad to land a full-time physics position at Bartlesville High School in August 1989, and I learned plenty of additional lessons over my 37 years in the district, but what I learned from those first three jobs served me well for four decades.

Now I am a novice once again, so let the lessons begin!

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A Bit Gamey for My Taste

Posted on June 28, 2026 by Granger Meador

I have never been much of a video gamer. I remember playing Pong on a 1976 Coleco Telstar console at a friend’s home in junior high and rapidly losing interest. I played a few games on a friend’s early 1980s Atari 2600 console, most memorably Pitfall. While many boys my age loved to play video games at arcades, I didn’t like spending money on them since my plays never lasted for long.

I did play a few imitations of arcade games on my 8-bit TRS-80 Color Computer at home in the early 1980s, such as Joust/Lancer, Zaxxon, and Pooyan. If I were mentally ill, I could play some of them again in a web browser. I would have enjoyed them more if they had offered more plays before resetting.

The only arcade game I played more than a handful of times

The only real arcade video game I played more than a few times was Ms. Pac-Man, but I don’t think I ever cleared more than a couple of screens in the game.

The clearest memory I have of an arcade game was when my late friend Jeff and I went to Turner Falls in our teens. When it was too rainy to hike or swim, we would take refuge in a room there with a Wizard of Wor game.

That game had a speech synthesizer, allowing the Wizard to taunt the players throughout the game. His taunts didn’t apply to me for long, as I would quickly lose all of my plays, but he would often remark, “Another worrier for my babies to devour” in response to Jeff earning a bonus player. I doubt he ever said that to me!

I lived in the Walker Tower dormitory during my freshman year at the University of Oklahoma, and on the ground floor they had a couple of video games in a side room. One was Spy Hunter, and I remember how every time I was in the foyer I would hear its low-quality take on the Peter Gunn theme.

I remember thinking, “I wonder how many of the guys playing that game have even heard of Peter Gunn or Henry Mancini?”

When I was young, there were no video games yet, but there were pinball machines on the porch of the old CCC lodge at Roaring River State Park in southwestern Missouri. I would beg a quarter off my parents when they were shopping in the park store that was in the lodge at the time. They would fund the distraction to get me out of the way in the crowded store.

In junior high and high school, while my friends would be playing Defender, Space Invaders, Asteroids, or Pac-Man at the local bowling alley, I would venture over to the back by the restroom to play a neglected pinball machine. Its gameplay was far less frustrating for me, and I liked its clunky electromechanical mechanisms. I was one of the first Patreon supporters of the YouTube channel Technology Connections, and I loved seeing Alec Watson analyze the old Aztec machine from 1976. That is the type of game I remember.

I played three-draw Microsoft Solitaire on Windows computers from time to time, but almost 30 years ago, I was delighted when I found 3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet in the Microsoft Plus! 95 add-on. I played it on occasion in Windows 95, 98, 2000, and XP. Dave Plummer tells about how he programmed the game port for XP and he got the straight scoop from Raymond Chen about why it disappeared from later versions of Windows.

Happily, awhile back I found a port for the iPad. I don’t play it often, but I’m glad to have it. Once I switched to a Mac mini for my home desktop computer, I tried that port out on macOS despite it not being tested for that environment. On my Mac mini M1, the game looked grainy and shifted to a weird position on the screen, but I figured out how to launch the ball, operate the flippers, and tilt the table, so it did work…but it looked pretty rough. I’ll stick with the iOS version.

I do have a subscription to Apple Arcade through the Apple One Premier account, so I downloaded a couple of pinball games from it for my Mac mini M4. One app was crummy, but Zen Pinball Party had decent reviews, and I’ve enjoyed playing Peanuts’ Snoopy Pinball on it, although I was better at playing the Williams Bally Attack from Mars machine.

I’ve enjoyed playing *Peanuts’ Snoopy Pinball*

Another YouTube channel I have long supported is TechMoan, and I was fascinated to see the AtGames Pinball Micro that Mat reviewed a year ago. It was eerie how realistic it looked on screen.

It’s the losing that turns me off on most video games. It always feels to me more like a disappointing defeat than a satisfying end. I found I liked the action games more if there was an infinite lives mode. I relate to the melancholic tone of Lana Del Rey’s Video Games:

I found some interest in the 1986 computer video game Starflight, which was more open-ended.

That led me to seek out other open-ended games. Decades ago I played Railroad Tycoon, SimCity and SimCity 2000, along with Myst. I later played the Myst sequels Riven, Exile, and Revelation, although I had to rely on the internet for clues to complete any of the Myst games, and I lost interest before Myst V: End of Ages was released.

I played *Myst* and three of its sequels

The computer in my physics classroom which allowed me to finish playing *Riven*

I remember playing Riven in late 1997, and how it came on five compact discs. My 1993 Gateway 2000 486 had been upgraded with an 83 MHz Pentium Overdrive processor and 40 MB RAM, but it struggled to handle that game. I made it to the final sequence, and was frustrated that my computer would hang at that point.

To finish the game, I took it to school, of all places. I had written an Advanced Placement grant for a Gateway 2000 Destination system that had a huge CRT monitor hanging from a high corner of the classroom. I used it to run Interactive Physics simulations, show videos, and train students on doing graphical analysis and using probeware.

I stayed after school one day and loaded the game on the computer and played it in the classroom to the end. It felt very strange to be playing the game at work!

While I once enjoyed getting immersed into a Myst game, I found that hiking on a new trail in real life was far better for me, both mentally and physically. There are a multitude of activities I prefer over video games: watching a YouTube video, reading a book, taking a walk on the Pathfinder Parkway while listening to an audiobook, and…writing a blog post.

Posted in history, Mac, technology, video | Tagged Mac, technology | Leave a comment

Getting the Scoop from Evelyn Waugh

Posted on June 22, 2026 by Granger Meador

I flit across familiar genres of fiction, occasionally dive into a literary work, and maintain an interest in a variety of nonfiction. Recently I had a bit of mystery, a light adventure, an old science fiction novella, and a depressing yet engrossing literary visit to Winesburg, Ohio.

Needing a break from fiction, I embarked upon listening to 14 hours of erudition from the always-reliable Simon Winchester with The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of Wind. Normally I would balance that by reading fiction on my Kindle or as a physical book.

However, in researching a previous post about a novella by Lester del Rey, I enjoyed an insightful article by Dan Sinykin. I liked it so much that I purchased and read the first chapters of Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature which dealt with mass market paperback. He lost me when he went on to write about trade paperbacks, as I haven’t read most of the famous authors of the 1960s onward that he droned on about.

I abandoned that book and considered what fiction I might pick up next. That drew me back to the Modern Library’s self-serving 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century, and I began running down its unread entries, cross-referencing them with the meta-analysis of The Greatest Books of All Time. I noticed a pattern in them.

One of Sinykin’s premises is that in the era of publishing conglomerates, book awards like the Booker and Pulitzer have heavily favored historical fiction. I see a similar focus on the past, with a decidedly downbeat tone, in many of the entries on Modern Library’s 20th century list. Here’s just a handful of the highest-ranked unread entries:

Catch-22: 1961 critique of military bureaucracy, set in World War II
Sons and Lovers: 1913 novel of emotional conflicts and suffocating relationships from 1885-1911
The Way of All Flesh: 1903 posthumous publication of a multi-generational tale, written in the 1880s and satirizing Victorian hypocrisy, spanning 1765 to 1863
An American Tragedy: 1925 critique of the American Dream, covering 1897-1908
Native Son: 1940 story of a black youth living in poverty in the 1930s

I wasn’t attracted to that laundry list of depressing critiques of society set a century or more in the past. I thought of the Saturday Night Live fake commercial from 1976, and how I needed a Puppy Upper instead of all of those Doggie Downers.

Fun vs. depressing books graphic — Can you spot whose mid-20th-century style I told Gemini to emulate?

So I asked Gemini, “What are the most joyful and optimistic books in the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century?”

It replied, in part, “When the Modern Library compiled its famous list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century, the editorial board clearly leaned into the era’s signature literary moods: existential angst, dystopian dread, psychological disintegration, and tragic disillusionment. Finding a book on this list that leaves you genuinely uplifted and smiling requires some careful planning…”

It then identified A Room with a View and The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which I’ve already read, and I wouldn’t call Wilder’s novel a happy one. It also recommended The Adventures of Augie March, which I had previously rejected as yet another bildungsroman. That was followed by Kim, but the imperialism of Rudyard Kipling is hardly to my taste.

Thankfully, it then spat out four works I was unfamiliar with: Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever, Loving by Henry Green, and Under the Net by Iris Murdoch. Knowing AI’s tendency to hallucinate, I first verified those were actually on the Modern Library’s list, and then I put them into an online spinner, flicked the virtual dial, and…my next read was Scoop, which has been described as “Waugh’s exuberant comedy of mistaken identity and brilliantly irreverent satire of the hectic pursuit of hot news.”

However, Seth Meyers wrote, “Its timelessness is both hilarious and depressing.” Depressing? Oh, dear, let’s hope not.

It is #75 on the Modern Library list, #84 in BBC’s 2015 ranking of 100 Greatest British Novels, #60 in the Guardian’s 2015 ranking of the Best 100 Novels in English, and was ranked the 433rd Greatest Book of All Time in that meta-analysis in late May 2026. It was published in 1938, so it won’t enter the public domain in the U.S. until 2034. The Kindle version cost me $9 after I redeemed $3 in “points” I had somehow earned, although I could have scored a paperback copy for $7.

My updated tracking of the Modern Library 100

I knew little about Waugh, save that he was from an era when men were named Evelyn and that he had written Brideshead Revisited, although I hadn’t a clue what that novel was about. I see Brideshead ranked the 141st greatest book versus 433rd for Scoop, but on Modern Library’s list Brideshead was #80 versus Scoop as #75, and it has A Handful of Dust as #34.

Waugh was known for satirical novels and “considered one of the great prose stylists of the previous century”. However, I found his Wikipedia biography rather repulsive. I could only hope that the unpleasant person’s book was more appealing than he was, but I am not altogether surprised when a satirist is an unhappy human being. One biographical detail I enjoyed was that his first wife was also named Evelyn. Unsurprisingly, he-Evelyn and she-Evelyn did not stay together for long. He-Evelyn later converted to Catholicism, thus securing for himself, in keeping with the stereotypes, a second wife (after the convenient annulment) who was unlikely to divorce him as well as a considerable number of offspring.

I found the book a quick and fairly painless read. There were some brief funny sketches, such as:

The widowed Lady Trilby was William’s Great-Aunt Anne, his father’s elder sister; she owned the motor-car, a vehicle adapted to her own requirements; it had a horn which could be worked from the back seat; her weekly journey to church resounded through the village like the Coming of the Lord.

I particularly enjoyed Waugh’s description of a milch-goat that made a few appearances:

The Pension Dressler stood in a side street and had, at first glance, the air rather of a farm than of an hotel. Frau Dressler’s pig, tethered by the hind trotter to the jamb of the front door, roamed the yard and disputed the kitchen scraps with the poultry. He was a prodigious beast. Frau Dressler’s guests prodded him appreciatively on their way to the dining-room, speculating on how soon he would be ripe for killing. The milch-goat was allowed a narrower radius; those who kept strictly to the causeway were safe, but she never reconciled herself to this limitation and, day in, day out, essayed a series of meteoric onslaughts on the passers-by, ending, at the end of her rope, with a jerk which would have been death to an animal of any other species. One day the rope would break; she knew it and so did Frau Dressler’s guests.

I also enjoyed how the pompous newspaper executive Lord Copper thought of his banquets:

Lord Copper quite often gave banquets; it would be an understatement to say that no one enjoyed them more than the host for no one else enjoyed them at all, while Lord Copper positively exulted in every minute.

The humor was clearly influenced by P.G. Wodehouse, Waugh being a fan and modeling his Lord Copper after Wodehouse’s more hilarious Lord Tilbury, with Waugh acknowledging the debt with a mention of a “Bertie Wodehouse-Bonner”. The daft Boot family in the novel are a variation on the Blandings of Wodehouse, and so forth, but we don’t spend enough time with the various characters for their charms to become more than set dressing.

The novel was fun, but its humor was Wodehouse-Lite, and its satire quite colonial and imperial. Waugh targeted everyone, but I never understood his deus ex machina character of Mr. Baldwin. I see that Herbert Lom played the character in a 1987 television adaptation, and that strikes me as good casting based on the description of the character in the book.

I think I would have enjoyed the novel far more if I had not already listened to over a dozen Wodehouse novels. The final section, after the long middle spent in Africa, felt too contrived, and the novel left me not unhappy yet underwhelmed. I certainly wouldn’t rate it as highly as several of the novels by Wodehouse.

I had not given up on something light from the Modern Library’s list, but I was tired of reading about Great Britain, so I passed up Under the Net and Loving for now. Instead, my next read was The Wapshot Chronicle by Cheever.

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1940 Postcard: Down in Oklahoma

Posted on June 20, 2026 by Granger Meador

The final postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack has the words to “Down in Oklahoma” surrounded by 14 tiny images of oil field equipment, mostly derricks. The internet might confuse that with a “Down in Oklahoma” song from the 1949 film The Prince of Peace, but that is not a match.

I found the postcard’s text in the February 1921 issue of Capt. Billy’s Whiz Bang, a humor magazine published from 1919 to 1936. It appears to have just been some doggerel, and the state is not nearly so lawless these days, and most girls no longer wear their dresses to their knees. However, we can still identify with “Where you get up in the morning in a world of snow and sleet, and you come home in the evening suffocating in the heat.”

We’re down here in Okla.,
Where you never have the blues;
Where the bandits steal the jitneys
And the marshals steal the booze;
Where buildings horn the skyline;
Where the populace is boost;
Where they shoot men just for pastime;
Where the chickens never roost;
Where the stickup men are wary
And the bullets fall like hail;
Where each pocket has a pistol
And each pistol’s good for jail;
Where they always hang the jury;
Where they never hang a man;
If you call a man a liar, you
Get home the best you can;
Where you get up in the morning
In a world of snow and sleet,
And you come home in the evening
Suffocating in the heat;
Where the jitneys whizz about you
And the street cars barely creep;
Where the burglars pick your pockets
While you “lay me down to sleep”;
Where the bulldogs all have rabies
And the rabbits they have fleas;
Where the big girls, like the wee ones,
Wear their dresses to their knees;
Where you whist out in the morning,
Just to give your health a chance,
Say “Howdy” to some fellow who
Shoots big holes in your pants;
Where wise owls are afraid to hoot
And birds don’t dare to sing—
For it’s hell down here in Okla.,
Where they all shoot on the wing.

A local connection to that mess was the incredibly rowdy boomtown in Osage County that was named Whizbang after the magazine. The timing is right for it being called that because of this bit of verse.

Whizbang, which was also known as Denoya, was a few miles southwest of Shidler. One of my uncles was once the superintendent of schools at Shidler. One clear indication of how rough Whizbang once was is that over a century ago it had a Waffle House. IYKYK!

A Waffle House? Yep, that was a rough town. [Source]

I’ll close out this series with a map showing the locations highlighted in the 18 traditional postcards in the souvenir pack.

Boy howdy, northwest and southeast Oklahoma were non-existent in that pack, and southwest Oklahoma only had one out of almost 20 cards. If I were to revise it, I’d drop the horseshoe curve near Turner Falls, the Will Rogers birthplace, the Picher mill, and this bit of doggerel. I’d then swap in Quartz Mountain near Altus, Roman Nose State Park near Watonga, Alabaster Caverns near Freedom, and Robbers Cave near Wilburton. Those four were all operating by 1940, and they would provide a bit more balance, geographically.

I hope you enjoyed this 20-day series. Once I got my driver’s license back in 1982, I took advantage of living in central Oklahoma by making excursions all over the state for several years, taking in the sights. It interested me how the highlights in 1940 changed over the subsequent 85 years.

Happy trails!

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1940 Postcard: Quanah Parker Dam

Posted on June 19, 2026 by Granger Meador

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of the Quanah Parker Dam in the Wichita Mountains near Lawton. Parker was a war leader of the Kwahadi Antelope band of the Comanche Nation, the son of Kwahadi chief Peta Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker, who had been abducted as a nine-year-old child during the Fort Parker massacre in 1836 and assimilated into the Nokoni Wanderers tribe.

Quanah was a dominant figure in the Red River War of 1874. In 1867, the U.S. Army began hunting bison to sabotage the food sources of plains Indians, and after a new technique for tanning their hides became available, commercial hunters reduced the tens of millions of bison to near extinction. The War marked the end of free-roaming Indian populations on the southern Great Plains.

Quanah surrendered in 1875 and led the Kwahadi Comanche to a Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation at Fort Sill, which is just outside the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge where his namesake dam and its lake were constructed in 1935 on Quanah Creek in Comanche County.

The images below were taken at roughly the same time, showing Quanah in traditional Comanche and then European-American business attire, 15 years after his surrender.

Parker’s home in Cache was called the Star House, and he went on hunting trips with President Theodore Roosevelt, who often visited him. He rejected both monogamy and traditional Protestant Christianity in favor of the Native American Church movement.

Quanah Parker Monument — Monument near Cache

The wildlife refuge is over 59,000 acres and began in 1901 as the Wichita Forest Reserve. President Theodore Roosevelt made it the nation’s first big-game animal refuge. In 1905, the New York Zoological Park offered the federal government fifteen American bison to begin a herd for the refuge if it would agree to fence it.

Quanah Parker led a First Peoples contingent greeting the newly arrived bison, and the preserve went on to successfully preserve elk, wild turkey, and a herd of Texas longhorn cattle in its prairie environment. Unsuccessful programs included pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, and the prairie chicken. The refuge also features deer, prairie dogs, raccoons, bobcats, coyotes, and rabbits. I’ve hiked all of the trails at the refuge, and I have seen most of those animals there, and I can personally attest that it also has rattlesnakes.

Quanah Parker acted in several silent films, and he died at Star House in 1911 at age 66. His remains are in the Fort Sill Post Cemetery, where his tombstone reads, “Resting here until day breaks and shadows fall and darkness disappears is Quanah Parker, Last Chief of the Comanches.”

I first visited the refuge in 1989 with my late best friend, and I returned to Quanah Parker Lake in 2011 and took Wendy there in 2013. In the summer of 2019, I had to attend a training for public school administrators in Lawton, and I took the opportunity to visit the lake again, having been impressed by the pretty little lake and its old dam with a walkway across the top.

Company #859 of the CCC built the dam, about five miles north of Star House, as a miniature remembrance of the larger dams of the west, such as Boulder Dam, now known as Hoover Dam. Oklahoma’s dam rises 52 feet, while Hoover Dam rises 726 feet. The Oklahoma lake covers 89 acres and has three miles of shoreline, with a capacity of 905 acre-feet, while Lake Mead once covered about 158,000 acres with 759 miles of shoreline. However, drought and climate change have reduced it to almost one quarter of its capacity.

A Bartlesville Connection

The obvious link between the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge and Bartlesville is that they have each played a role in preserving the American bison. In 1926, Frank Phillips established the Woolaroc Museum and Wildlife Preserve, starting with a herd of 90 bison. 183 bison came by rail from the Scotty Philip estate in Pierre, South Dakota and were split among Woolaroc, Waite Phillips’ ranch in New Mexico, and the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch mentioned in an earlier postcard post. The 3,700-acre Woolaroc ranch remains a major sanctuary for bison, elk, and longhorn cattle.

P.S. If you noticed I keep using the term bison instead of buffalo, that is because bison and buffalo are distinct species, and what many of us in American colloquially call buffalo are actually bison.

Tomorrow’s postcard is the final one in this series, and it has 14 tiny images on it surrounding some doggerel about, you guessed it, the Sooner State.