Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of a scenic drive along the Cimarron River at Guthrie. What do you think of when you hear the word Cimarron?
I doubt you’d think of this view, especially if you’ve ever seen the actual Cimarron River, which is infamous for picking up lots of dissolved minerals and red soil, so I’m thinking the postcard artists might have taken some liberty with the water’s coloration.
There are three different Cimarron Rivers. The one pictured is a tributary of the Arkansas River that extends 698 miles across New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas.
I starred the likely location of this photo [Map Source]
Back in 2012, I was at the Cimarron at the very edge of the Oklahoma Panhandle, but it was bone dry. I wouldn’t expect that to make it onto a postcard.
The Cimarron was dry when I visited it in 2012 at the far edge of the Oklahoma Panhandle
My guess for the location of the 1940 postcard shot is Doolin’s Fishing Hole along US 77 seven miles north of Guthrie. The original photograph was taken by Guthrie photographer Al Bryan, while my shot is from Google Street View.
Google Street View of US 77 along the Cimarron near Guthrie in 2021
Back in 1930, The Daily Oklahoman had a shot from nearly the same vantage point:
Here’s a better version of the Oklahoman’s 1930 photograph:
Buried next to Bill is poor Elmer McCurdy, an alcoholic and outlaw. He tried to rob a train near Okesa, just west of Bartlesville, in 1911. However, instead of stopping the train carrying $400,000 in cash for the Osage Indians, he stopped a passenger train and got very little for his trouble.
He holed up in a hay shed on a ranch near Bartlesville, but a posse with bloodhounds tracked him down. He died in a shootout.
No one claimed his body, so the undertaker in Pawhuska embalmed it and charged people a nickel to view it. The body eventually was bought and sold to many different circus side shows. People eventually forgot it was a real body, and in 1976 it was on display in an amusement park in California. The television show The Six Million Dollar Man was shooting an episode there, and when a crew member moved what he thought was a mannequin, an appendage snapped off. The L.A. coroner’s office was contacted, the body was identified, and the remains were finally interred in Guthrie, 66 years after his death.
Guthrie is famous for being the original state capital in 1907. Oklahoma City business leaders soon campaigned to shift the seat of government, and an old saw is that in 1910 Oklahoma’s first post-territorial governor stole the state seal in the dead of night, drove from Guthrie to Oklahoma City, and stashed the seal under his hotel bed.
The reality is that by 1910 OKC had grown by 94% since statehood to over 64,000 people while Guthrie was stuck at less than 12,000. A special election was called in June of that year to choose between Oklahoma City, Guthrie, and Shawnee. OKC won easily, and it was actually W.B. Anthony, the first governor’s secretary, who smuggled the seal out of town. The governor came in to OKC by train from his home in Muskogee, and he declared OKC the new capital with the Lee-Huckins Hotel acting as a temporary capitol building.
Guthrie these days has an immense Scottish Rite Masonic temple. It was built in the 1920s on the 11 acres originally platted as Capitol Park. You can take a virtual tour, and if it is summertime, that might be best, given that the main rooms of the huge old building are not air conditioned. I was a DeMolay when I was in junior high, and my initiation was at the big temple.
That’s no capitol building, that’s a Masonic temple!
The State Capital Publishing Museum downtown is a memorable structure that was once the largest dedicated printing facility west of the Mississippi. It was home to a newspaper and virtually all of the preprinted forms used by courts and county clerks throughout Oklahoma were once printed in that building. To this day, the first floor lobby has 620 drawers on its south wall that still hold many of the preprinted forms.
Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of The Pioneer Woman monument in Ponca City. It was conceived, directed, and financed by Ernest Marland, an oilman, philanthropist, spendthrift, and politician. In 1928 he created a scandal by marrying Lydie, the biological daughter of his first wife’s sister, whom Marland and his first wife had adopted when Lydie was 16. Marland’s first wife later died, and he had the adoption annulled and then married Lydie when he was 54 and she was 28. Marrying his niece and former daughter didn’t prevent Oklahoma from electing him to Congress in 1932 and as governor in 1935.
In the early 1920s, Marland had been asked about commissioning a statue to the vanishing American Indian. Marland answered, “The Indian is not the vanishing American — it’s the pioneer woman.”
Marland staged a design competition in 1926, paying a dozen artists to craft 3-foot bronze sculptures which were exhibited in a dozen cities. Bryant Baker’s model, Confident, was the most popular, and Marland commissioned a monumental version of it for Ponca City, which was unveiled in 1930.
The monument survives. The Pioneer Woman Museum says, “It is a heroic statue is of a young, sun-bonneted pioneer mother, protectively leading her son by the hand, striding confidently, head held high—a young woman of sturdy beauty and dignity whose eyes are fixed on the far southwestern horizon. Courage, determination, and humility in her face and a bible in her hand.”
The Museum adds that the statue is 17 feet tall, weighs 12,000 pounds, and sits upon a 16-foot-high granite base. It cost $300,000 back in 1930.
A Bartlesville Connection
In 1940, Marland faced financial ruin and sold the small bronze models from the competition to fellow oil tycoon Frank Phillips. The individual artists had each been paid $10,000 for their work, but Phillips acquired the bronzes from Marland for just $500 each. They are on display in his Woolaroc Museum near Bartlesville.
Some of the Pioneer Woman sculptures that didn’t make the cut
If you ever go to Ponca City, you can take a look at the monument and its museum, but the town’s star attraction is the impressive Marland Mansion, which has an outbuilding with the contents of sculptor Bryant Baker’s New York studio with copies of many of his works. Marland’s previous home on Grand Avenue, Marland’s Grand Home, is also worth a visit. If you don’t make it to Ponca City, you can still enjoy a virtual tour of the Mansion and an interactive tour of the Grand Home. But you really need to go tour them in person, and be sure to eat at Enrique’s out at the airport and enjoy the puffy chips.
Tomorrow we go for a scenic drive along the Cimarron.
Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of Oklahoma’s Capitol. It is the back cover of the pack and yes, the Capitol looks a bit different these days.
Most obviously, back then there was no dome, and it didn’t get one until the early 21st century. When I was a kid, I thought it appropriate that while the 1914 blueprints included a dome, budget shortfalls and a supply shortage from World War I led to that being cut from the project. The conspicuous absence of a dome decades later effectively symbolized my home state’s struggles.
I worked at the capitol complex in the summer of 1985 as a minimum wage office boy for the Oklahoma State Department of Tourism. On $3.35 per hour, even with free room and board from my parents, I couldn’t afford to eat in the basement cafeteria very often, but there were a few times when I walked along the tunnel from the Will Rogers building to the Capitol for lunch. Frosty Troy, the watchdog publisher of The Oklahoma Observer, could usually be spotted at one of the tables, regaling someone.
One day that summer, I took my lousy Kodak Ektralite 110 camera over with me and photographed the shallow stained glass saucer dome that used to grace the fourth level of the truncated rotunda. Decades after the real dome was added, the remnants of the old saucer dome were put on display in the State Capitol Museum.
Back in 1928, the discovery of the Oklahoma City Oil Field led to oil wells being scattered across the city. They were once so common that there were still stripper wells and tank batteries scattered about my neighborhood when I was a kid. Dozens of active oil wells were drilled near the Capitol.
Oil wells around the state capitol in 1936 [Source]
A Bartlesville Connection
The wells on the capitol grounds included Petunia #1, which was drilled in a flower bed in front of the building in 1941. Fain-Porter Drilling company whipstocked the bore hole for Bartlesville’s Phillips Petroleum, making it a non-vertical directional drill that burrowed beneath the Capitol itself.
A year after my stint at the Capitol, Petunia #1 was plugged by Phillips, its operator and half-owner. That well alone had produced 1.5 million barrels of oil and 1.6 billion cubic feet of gas, providing the state with over $1 million in royalties and gross production taxes…and the Capitol still didn’t have a dome.
It was an oddball distinction. Governor Frank Keating spearheaded a fundraising drive to finally add a dome, and that work began in 2001. Phillips Petroleum was one of the sponsors, donating $3.5 million towards the project’s $22 million cost.
The dome is 157 feet tall with an 80-foot diameter. The outer dome is precast concrete and cast stone, with an inner coffered dome of cast gypsum panels. The gorgeous interior is an interpretation of the state wildflower, the Indian Blanket Gaillardia pulchella.
A 17.5-foot bronze statue of an American Indian warrior, called The Guardian, was created by artist and former state senator Enoch Kelly Haney. He refused the $50,000 commission for the piece. There is a 9-foot bronze replica of it inside the Senate Lounge.
The Guardian atop the dome; the Will Rogers building where I worked in 1985 is at lower left [Source]
You can view many of the artworks decorating the Capitol at the Oklahoma Arts Council’s Oklahoma State Capitol Art Collection website. That does it for this entry in the postcard pack. Tomorrow we head to Ponca City.
One of the YouTube creators I support on Patreon is Henry’s Dime Store Adventures. At the start of 2025, I joined his Postcard Club, so he sends me a handwritten vintage postcard each month. For May 2026, Henry outdid himself, sending me a linen postcard pack with 20 images from Oklahoma, circa 1940.
So on each of the first 20 days of June 2026, I will share with you a postcard and expound about the pictured location. We’ll start with an image shown on the address side of the pack.
A Burning Oil Well…in Texas?
The cover shows a burning oil well. Well, gee, welcome to Oklahoma!
I found separate linen postcard reproductions of that image by the Oklahoma News Company which captioned it as being near Tulsa. However, the original photograph was actually taken by Jack Nolan on April 26, 1930 of the Skelly-Amerado University No. 1 well in Ector County, Texas. Nolan had been informed that the well, just west of the Concho Bluffs, would be shot with 420 quarts of nitroglycerin at 3,723 feet to increase its production. The typical gusher became a fire when the shot came in contact with the steel crown block, sparking the explosion. It took over 25 hours to control the fire.
So right off the bat we have an anomaly. The attention-grabbing cover image of the Oklahoma souvenir folder was a burning oil well that wasn’t even located here, but instead in our much larger and flamboyant neighbor to the south.
A Bartlesville Connection
I will bring out some Bartlesville connection to each of the postcards, and of course in this case I can’t help but think of the Nellie Johnstone #1 well in Johnstone Park, which was the first commercial oil well in Oklahoma.
The Nellie Johnstone blew in on March 25, 1897 as a wildcat well named for the six-year-old daughter of community leader William Johnstone. Wildcatter Michael Cudahy made a deal with George Keeler, William Johnstone, Frank Overlees, and other community leaders to drill the well. Keeler’s stepdaughter Jennie Cass dropped the Go-Devil to blow in the well, and thankfully it gushed without igniting.
It was producing 30 barrels a day in 1903 when it became commercially viable, thanks to the Santa Fe railroad reaching Bartlesville to transport its output. During its productive life, it produced over 100,000 barrels of oil. It was plugged in 1947, and replica rigs were erected over it in 1948, 1964, and 2008. You can learn more about it in the Block 2 lot 7 slides of my Historic Downtown Bartlesville series.
Oh, and the original Nellie Johnstone derrick was destroyed by fire, but not due to a bad shot. Rather, after it blew in, the well was capped to await the arrival of the railroad. However, oil seeped from it and pooled. During a cold winter in the late 1890s, a group of children ice-skating on the frozen river built a bonfire which accidentally ignited the seep, and the fire tracked back to the well and destroyed the derrick.
The kicker? One of the young people in that skating party was little Nellie Johnstone.
Linen Postcards
I am not a postcard aficionado, so I had to look up what a linen postcard was, given that the ones I have been sent were clearly not printed on fabric. Instead, they are inexpensive, high-rag cotton paper embossed with a textured crosshatch pattern that only mimics the feel of linen cloth.
During the Great Depression and World War II, standard cardstock had trouble absorbing newly introduced brightly colored ink dyes. So Curt Teich & Co. in Chicago and other postcard printers embossed the paper, increasing the surface area so ink would dry much faster. The images often started as black-and-white photographs that artists heavily covered and retouched.
Teich pioneered the offset printing process in which an inked image is transferred (or “offset”) from a plate to a rubber blanket and then to the printing surface of the paper. Teich began using a five-color process in 1931, adding a darker blue color to the usual CMYK palette of cyan, magenta, yellow, and the “key” color of black.
Offset printing presses at Curt Teich Company [Source]
Linen postcards were phased out after World War II when the realistic, glossy photochrome printing process became the industry standard.
The Sooner State
The inside of the pack cover had some text about the state. It is a dry-as-bones summary of the early days of white settlement which I can’t recommend you bother reading. It certainly doesn’t read like a tourist tract to me.
Pseudonyms are invented for various reasons. Edith Mary Pargeter became “Ellis Peters” to separate her mystery stories from her other work. Samuel Longhorne Clemens experimented with the pen names “Josh,” “Sergeant Fathom,” and “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass” before hitting upon “Mark Twain”. The cousins Frederic Dannay, birth name Daniel Nathan, and Manfred Bennington Lee, birth name Emanuel Benjamin Lepofsky, adopted the “Ellery Queen” pseudonym for the detective character they crafted, who supposedly wrote his own books.
Pen names sometimes disguised gender or ethnicity, in an attempt to boost sales, but Leonard Knapp evidently used them, along with some fictional biographical details, to seem more exotic. Born in rural Minnesota in 1915, he re-invented his father as a poor sharecropper of part-Spanish extraction and became best known as Lester del Rey. The mischievous man would sometimes claim his actual name was the ludicrous Ramón Felipe San Juan Mario Silvio Enrico Smith Heathcourt-Brace Sierra y Alvarez del Rey y de los Verdes. He also published works as Philip St. John, Erik van Lhin, John Alvarez, Marion Henry, Philip James, Charles Satterfield and Edson McCann, with the last two pen names sometimes also used by Frederik Pohl. There were reportedly eight additional pen names over the years.
Attempts to ascertain factual information about his early life run into obstacles. Reportedly records showed his birthplace as Clydesdale, which might have referred to a community in the Saratoga Township. Wikipedia offered this interesting tidbit: “He also claimed that his family was killed in a car accident in 1935. In reality, the accident only killed his first wife.”
Well, gee, what’s the story behind that? I ordered an old paperback copy of the referenced source, Sam Moskowitz’s Seekers of Tomorrow of 1965. It was a collective biography that profiled 22 authors of classic science fiction, and consisted mostly of reprints of Moskowitz’s articles in Amazing Stories from 1961 to 1964. I also ordered the January 2008 issue of Locus, which had a brief item on his background.
Moskowitz was clearly just retelling some of Lester/Leonard’s yarns, and he wrote that Lester was working with some bootleggers in a New Mexico town in 1930 when he met a girl and proposed to her that same day. The boy was supposedly only 15 while the girl of legal age, and supposedly three months after their marriage she was thrown from a horse and died from her injuries. Later in the tales is the claim that his family, save for one full sister, died in a car accident in 1935.
Well, it seems there was a mysterious first wife, but Leonard’s sister, Sara Knapp, said he broke all ties with his family after leaving home in 1931 and that he “seemed to be ashamed of where he lived and of his folks”. She also said the 1935 car accident killed his first wife, not his blood family, when he would have been about 20 years old.
By the mid-1970s, del Rey included autobiographical comments throughout his collection Early del Rey, mentioning reading various literary classics as a boy in a little farming community of southeastern Minnesota, and in high school discovering science fiction magazines. He acknowledged attending George Washington University in the District of Columbia in the early 1930s on a partial scholarship while living with an uncle, dropping out after two years, and doing various odd jobs. However, he made no mention of his first marriage nor a car accident, although he did say he was in poor health for awhile before 1937.
del Rey’s 1948 collection of short stories, And some were human, had this nerdy blurb on the back of its dust jacket:
Lester del Rey in the 1940s
Lester del Rey’s first wail of protest against a life-sentence to Earth sounded in 1915 under the dual-personality sign of Gemini. In this case, astrology was correct. His nature was divided between magnificent laziness and hopelessly insatiable curiosity. As any scientist knows, after laboring ten years to learn one subject, the two are incompatible, and sure to lead to early schizophrenia. But he was saved from this by his own astounding discovery that a net weight of 105 pounds was barely enough to support a single personality, and utterly inadequate for the development of two. He promptly ceased growing, and only the dominant laziness remained.
Thus a writer was born! There is no easier way to earn a living — provided three skipped meals a day form a satisfactory diet; and no surer preventative against adding enough weight for that dread split in personality. After his discovery of a 1929 Gernsback magazine, it was perhaps inevitable that his frustrated desire for knowledge of all things should lead him into dream-worlds of fantasy and the bright Utopias of tomorrow. As some of the meek who shall inherit the dirt turn to poetry, so he turned to fiction. The result is inside.
Statistics: Tired of college after two years; tried office work, metal forming, restaurant work, bibliographic research, etc., but found they interfered with loafing and cheerfully abandoned them. Interests run from archeology to zoömorphisms; and chiefly run from labor. Ambition — to sell enough copies of this book to retire.
In my younger days, I bought several paperbacks with the Del Rey imprint, which “Lester” had established with his fourth wife. Already a friend of del Rey, Judy-Lynn Benjamin married him after the death of his third wife, and she was a respected editor, born with dwarfism, whom the gifted author Isaac Asimov described as “incredibly intelligent, quick-witted, hard-driving” and “generally recognized (especially by me) as one of the top editors in the business” while the troubled but talented Philip K. Dick called her a “master craftsman” and “the best editor I’ve ever worked with”.
My first del Rey book
I read a few of his short stories, but the only del Rey novel I had read was not part of their imprint, but rather authored by Lester del Rey as part of the John C. Winston Company’s 37-volume series of juvenile science fiction novels published in the 1950s for teen-aged boys.
I came across that 1953 book, Attack from Atlantis, on the shelves of the Leo C. Mayfield Junior High library in the late 1970s. Having enjoyed the movies Run Silent, Run Deep and Ice Station Zebra (a few years before the incredible Das Boot was filmed), the cover art of a submarine making a steep dive into the deep compelled me to read it. It was memorable, but its science was so goofy that I did not read more of his work. One online source claimed the quality of his work declined once he began writing full-time in 1950, as he increased his output to stay afloat. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes him as “a versatile but rather erratic writer who never fulfilled his early promise”.
There were crystals in del Rey’s 1953 novel that formed force field bubbles, and George Pal‘s worst movie, Atlantis, the Lost Continent of 1961, had volcanic power crystals that were used to create a death ray. However, that is about the only overlap, and the movie’s scriptwriter Daniel Mainwaring had unfaithfully adapted a 1948 play by Gerald Hargreaves, Atalanta: A Story of Atlantis: A Fantasy with Music, which itself had been partly based on Ignatius Donnelly’s pseudoarchaeological book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World of 1882. As Kirby Ferguson says, “Everything is a Remix.”
When I was a teenager, one of my uncles gave me a slew of science fiction paperbacks. The most physically intriguing ones were Ace Doubles, which were little tête-bêche format books published from 1952 to 1973. Each contained two novellas, with the front cover and interior of one novella rotated by 180 degrees and bound back-to-back with the front cover and interior of the other.
The most memorable of those which I read was Ted White’s Android Avenger. I judged the Ace Doubles by their covers, and for me, that was a clear winner over Lester del Rey’s The Sky Is Falling.
Which of these would you rather read?
Adam & Eve from The Bible Story
As a childhood fan of The Six Million Dollar Man television series, a man with a metal skull was far more appealing to me than artwork that reminded me more of something from a The Bible Story sample book that always graced the waiting room of my pediatrician. Was that Ace cover supposed to depict Adam & Eve in hell? I’ll admit that I never got past that, given my ambivalence about Lester’s earlier Attack from Atlantis for kids.
It originated as the short story “No More Stars” by “Charles Satterfield” in BeyondFantasy Fiction‘s July 1954 issue. The man who was actually Leonard Knapp expanded that into a novella and it was joined with his novella Badge of Infamy in 1963’s Galaxy Magabook #1 and finally reprinted as one of the last Ace Doubles in 1973.
Galaxy Magazine, sometimes known as Galaxy Science Fiction, had published companion novels in the 1950s, but then sold that line to Beacon Books, which specialized in softcore pornography. When Galaxy decided to try to get back into the book business, it was with the Magabooks, each consisting of two novellas by the same author. However, only three of the Magabooks were released, featuring Lester del Rey, then Jack Williamson, and finally Theodore Sturgeon.
The story opened well, with a man being brought back from the dead via an odd combination of scientific and seemingly magical methods.
“Dave Hanson! By the power of the true name be summoned cells and humors, ka and id, self and—”
Dave Hanson! The name came swimming through utter blackness, sucking at him, pulling him together out of nothingness. Then, abruptly, he was aware of being alive, and surprised. He sucked in on the air around him, and the breath burned in his lungs. He was one of the dead— there should be no quickening of breath within him!
He caught a grip on himself, fighting the fantasies of his mind, and took another breath of air. This time it burned less, and he could force an awareness of the smells around him. But there was none of the pungent odor of the hospital he had expected. Instead, his nostrils were scorched with a noxious odor of sulfur, burned hair and cloying incense.
He gagged on it. His diaphragm tautened with the sharp pain of long-unused muscles, and he sneezed.
“A good sign,” a man’s voice said. “The followers have accepted and are leaving. Only a true being can sneeze. But unless the salamander works, his chances are only slight.”
This Dave Hanson was not a hockey player, playwright, roboticist, jazz pianist, or investment advisor. He was a computer repairman who had been crushed by a bulldozer, and mysteriously revived in the alternate world of Terah for a mission: prevent the sky from falling.
The story was fast, and while it had some funny inventiveness, I think it probably worked better as a short story than as a novella. Del Rey just wasn’t that great of a writer, although he certainly proved his worth as an editor of mass-market paperbacks.
The success of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings led del Rey to realize there was demand for an unformed genre that would become known as “fantasy”. He published Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara, a ripoff of Tolkien but a page-turner that my best friend of the 1980s read again and again. The del Reys also published Stephen Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane, unworried about a protagonist who was incredibly unsympathetic, and my friend also read that multiple times.
Lester understood how to sell to that era’s mall bookstores of B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, and fellow editor David Hartwell delineated del Rey’s formula for success: “The books would be original novels set it invented worlds in which magic works. Each would have a male central character who triumphed over the forces of evil (usually associated with technical knowledge of some variety) by innate virtue, and with the help of a tutor or tutelary spirit.”
Del Rey hit it big with these fantasy books
That certainly worked for Piers Anthony, a forty-something science fiction author, who followed it to write his first fantasy novel as a mass-market paperback original in 1977. By 1994, Anthony had published seventeen more of his “Xanth” books, and by 2026 there were a whopping 49 of them, although he has moved from one publisher to another whenever he felt editors were tampering too much with his work. The guy is still churning them out in his 90s!
My late friend also read Xanth, and he convinced me to try a couple of them, but they quickly wore thin for me. I was more impressed with Anthony’s first Apprentice Adept trilogy, which mixed science fiction with fantasy, although I didn’t read the next phaze (pun intended) of that series featuring a later generation of protagonists.
Both Piers Anthony and Lester del Rey were creatives who found success in their writing, but Lester truly came into his own, with the help of Judy-Lynn, as an editor. In the future, I’ll be far more likely to read an author’s works that he edited than Lester’s own output.
Meador Manor 
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