Meador Manor

Finding Forster

Posted on October 28, 2023 by Granger Meador

In 2011, I perused the Modern Library’s listing of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. Upon finding that I had only read 10 on the board’s list, I decided to read Nabokov’s Lolita and Lowry’s Under the Volcano. In 2019, I returned to the listing to discover and read McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I returned to the board’s listing today, rightly convinced that my latest read would be on it; my tally is now 17.

#17 for me was #79 on their list: A Room with a View by E.M. Forster. Since it was published in 1908, it was a free download from Project Gutenberg. Forster has two other novels ranked higher in their list: A Passage to India at #25 and Howards End at #38. So what prompted me to read my first Forster novel and make it A Room with a View?

The Machine Stops, Merchant Ivory, and Julian Sands

Director James Ivory, his business and life partner Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala gave us movie versions of Forster’s A Room with a View in 1985, Maurice in 1987, and Howards End in 1992. I saw each of them years ago, but I hadn’t considered reading the Forster novels they were based on.

Years later I came across Forster’s science fiction short story of 1909, The Machine Stops. The story is set in a time when humanity lives underground and relies on a giant machine to provide its needs. It predicted technologies similar to instant messaging and the Internet, and I found the prescient and chilling tale quite stunning. While that primed me to consider reading one of his novels, I took no action.

Julian Sands played George Emerson in the 1985 version of *A Room with a View*

Back in 1985, at age 27, Julian Sands starred as George Emerson in Merchant Ivory’s A Room with a View. He shared the screen with a bevy of talented actors, including Helena Bonham Carter, Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliott, Daniel Day-Lewis, Judi Dench, Simon Callow, and Rupert Graves. In January 2023, at age 65, Sands went hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles and disappeared. In June his remains were finally discovered.

When I read about his death, I realized that I remembered little from the movie, which I hadn’t seen in almost 40 years. Thus a seed was planted in my subconscious.

Skip ahead a few months to when I finish reading Mercury Pictures Presents on my Kindle. As I had encountered with The Lincoln Highway a year earlier, the prose was truly impressive, but the plot failed to engage me, and I found myself distracted by other pursuits after each chapter. I knew there were books waiting on my Kindle with more gripping plots, but less skilled prose. I yearned for something that would excel on both fronts.

That gave my subconscious the opportunity to surface A Room with a View. It whispered, “You liked the plot of A Room with a View when you saw the movie adaptation in 1985. Why not download the book, read it, and then rewatch the movie?” So I downloaded the novel, used Send to Kindle to load it onto my devices, and sampled the first chapter.

Highlights

I was immediately struck by how rapidly and skillfully Forster created a milieu for female characters whose repressed manners were happily reminiscent of the best of Jane Austen’s work. The tone reminded me of the humor I found in Emma, which I read in 2012 after enjoying the 1996 movie version with Gwyneth Paltrow. So I read on.

Chapter 2 rewarded me with this:

The chapel was already filled with an earnest congregation, and out of them rose the voice of a lecturer, directing them how to worship Giotto, not by tactful valuations, but by the standards of the spirit.

“Remember,” he was saying, “the facts about this church of Santa Croce; how it was built by faith in the full fervour of medievalism, before any taint of the Renaissance had appeared. Observe how Giotto in these frescoes—now, unhappily, ruined by restoration—is untroubled by the snares of anatomy and perspective. Could anything be more majestic, more pathetic, beautiful, true? How little, we feel, avails knowledge and technical cleverness against a man who truly feels!”

“No!” exclaimed Mr. Emerson, in much too loud a voice for church. “Remember nothing of the sort! Built by faith indeed! That simply means the workmen weren’t paid properly. And as for the frescoes, I see no truth in them. Look at that fat man in blue! He must weigh as much as I do, and he is shooting into the sky like an air balloon.”

He was referring to the fresco of the “Ascension of St. John.” Inside, the lecturer’s voice faltered, as well it might. The audience shifted uneasily, and so did Lucy. She was sure that she ought not to be with these men; but they had cast a spell over her. They were so serious and so strange that she could not remember how to behave.

At that point, I knew I was in good hands and would happily read multiple chapters at a sitting.

Forster’s Novels

E.M. Forster only produced six novels. Although he lived from 1879 to 1970, all of them were published by 1924, except for one which he held back for posthumous publication since it was a tale of homosexual love. Forster lived in the closet, since homosexual acts were still grounds for imprisonment in Britain until 1967. I wonder how many who enjoyed the romantic tale of heterosexual love in A Room with a View without realizing it was written by a gay man. Probably a similar proportion to those who see and hear the songs of Curly and Laurey in Oklahoma! without knowing the story of Lynn Riggs.

Forster’s novels repeatedly address issues of class in Edwardian England, with Howards End notably revolving around social conventions, codes of conduct, and relationships among three families representing the upper, middle, and working classes. I am certain that I shall read it some day, but first I must revel in A Room with a View.

The character of Mr. Emerson, the liberal father of George, provides some of the best lines. Early on, he remarks:

We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice. I don’t believe in this world sorrow.

Forster also wonderfully evoked what playing the piano once meant for me:

It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave. The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom. Lucy had done so never.

I particularly enjoyed the character development of Lucy, the protagonist, who matures through the book from a confused girl into a self-directed woman. Here is an adept passage about her struggle in which I have emphasized a key insight Forster had about human foibles:

The contest lay not between love and duty. Perhaps there never is such a contest. It lay between the real and the pretended, and Lucy’s first aim was to defeat herself. As her brain clouded over, as the memory of the views grew dim and the words of the book died away, she returned to her old shibboleth of nerves. She “conquered her breakdown.” Tampering with the truth, she forgot that the truth had ever been. Remembering that she was engaged to Cecil, she compelled herself to confused remembrances of George; he was nothing to her; he never had been anything; he had behaved abominably; she had never encouraged him. The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul. In a few moments Lucy was equipped for battle.

And that is soon followed by:

She disliked confidences, for they might lead to self-knowledge and to that king of terrors—Light.

My highlighted passages conclude with two, again from the character of Mr. Emerson as he prods Lucy to stop lying to the world and to herself about her love for his son, George:

It isn’t possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

When I think what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love—Marry him; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.

Forster embues his novel with such humanity, such tender understanding and forgiving regard for human nature even as he points out our failings. It helps me understand what Lord Annan meant when he spoke about the novelist after his death:

…his friendship was one of the things that one could never forget, because he was both very loyal to his friends and also very critical, and you had to keep up the mark. You were frequently deflated if you appeared to be insensitive, because that was the thing that he cared about so much…he had a greater sensitivity to the complexities of life and the complexities of morality, and that is why I think he will live as a great force in our literature.

I was touched by how the novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Christopher Isherwood spoke about his late friend:

Forster once said, “I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I’d like to be.” My guess is that Mr. Emerson is a person Forster would have liked to be, that Lucy’s fiancé, Cecil, represents Forster in some ways, and cousin Charlotte would have irritated him. Yet a careful reading shows Charlotte to have been instrumental in eventually uniting Lucy and George. There is something profound in that.

A Beautiful Adaptation

After finishing the novel, I immediately rented and watched the movie on my iPad. It was delightful. Here is a glimpse of the start, which illustrates screenwriter Jhabvala’s skill at adapting the book:

It is a beautiful film:

Hence I am grateful to Merchant, Ivory, Jhabvala, and the other talented professionals, including the poor late Julian Sands, for helping me find Forster. More treasures await.

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Westward Ho! Manitou Springs

Posted on October 21, 2023 by Granger Meador

June 17-20, 2023 | Photo Album

Manitou Springs, Colorado is a two-hour drive north on Interstate 25 from Trinidad. Our journey was enlivened by storms.

We zipped through Walsenburg, where we have stopped and stayed a few times over the years, and on past the Huerfano Butte. We stopped for a pit stop at Colorado City, where the helpful clerk alerted us to hail on the road ahead. So we delayed there for awhile to let the storm sweep eastward, texting our friends up in Manitou Springs that we would be delayed.

A tornado warning came up on our phones, so we were glad to have missed the excitement to the north. Soon enough the radar app on my phone showed me the storm had cleared the interstate highway, and we drove on through and beyond Pueblo. The clouds were still unsettled, and we spotted piles of hail on the roadside terrain.

We reached the hotel before 4 p.m. and that evening joined our friends, John and Betty, and their grandson Max, for the melodrama at the Iron Springs Chateau. It once offered a three-course meal with the show, but had devolved to snacks, so we dined on popcorn and nachos. The show was “All Trains Lead to Home…or…Training Spaces” and we dutifully cheered the heroes and booed the villains.

The next day, while our friends took Max on adventures in the area, Wendy and I had breakfast at Uncle Sam’s Pancake House…it wasn’t worth the long wait, and she was much happier with the pancakes and sausage she bought the next morning at a McDonald’s.

Manitou Springs Locations — Manitou Springs and Old Colorado City locations

Miramont Castle

We drove up to Miramont Castle, which I had been wanting to see since our previous visit with John and Betty in Manitou Springs in 2019. The rambling mansion was built on the side of a mountain from 1895-1897 for Father Francolon, a French Catholic priest, and his wealthy aristocratic mother. It is a weird mix of nine styles of architecture with four levels, each with at least one exit to level ground along the mountainside, with the front door on the first level and the back door up on the fourth.

The mansion is over 14,000 square feet with over 40 rooms, including octagonal rooms, a 16-sided room, and various oddities. It has been lovingly restored, with a fire department museum in the lowest level, various odd rooms outfitted to remember different aspects of life in Manitou Springs, a gift shop, tea room, etc.

Father Francolon had moved to Manitou Springs for his health after drinking from a poisoned chalice during Mass in New Mexico. Perhaps that was because of his conflicts with Spanish priests, or because of his own misbehavior. He first built a home above the later castle, and after the castle was completed, his original home became a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients run by the Sisters of Mercy. A tunnel connected the castle to the sanitarium, through which the nuns delivered meals for the Francolons.

Francolon and his mother didn’t enjoy their castle for long, as in 1900 a lynch mob came for him after the mother superior of the Sisters of Mercy accused him of pedophilia. He hid under the seat of a buggy and was whisked away to refuge at a Catholic church in Colorado Springs, and he and his mother later returned to Europe.

The sanitarium moved into the castle when its original home burned, and it was sold off in 1946 and converted into apartments. It was purchased by the Manitou Springs Historical Society in 1975.

My impression is that overblown mansions, such as the Marland Mansion of Ponca City and La Quinta of Bartlesville, seldom stay in families for more than a generation or two. Their long-term survival, due to tax and maintenance issues, often depends on them being repurposed by tax-free religious or academic institutions. Eventually historical societies get hold of some of them, raise funds for restoration, and we get to tour them. Miramont stands out for having shifted from a sanitarium run by nuns into private apartments before finally becoming a museum.

When I was younger, I would fantasize about what it would be like to live in such a mansion. Now I’m grateful that our home is only about a tenth of the size of Miramont and is 27 times smaller than the Marland Mansion. I now appreciate having a home that is small enough that we can operate our machine for living without additional staff, and I realize that we are introverts who don’t need space to host gatherings.

Red Rock Canyon Open Space

After climbing through the castle, Wendy and I enjoyed a tasty lunch at Savelli’s, which was next door to our hotel, before driving down the highway to the Red Rock Canyon Open Space in Colorado Springs.

Almost a century ago, John George Bock accumulated land parcels south of the famous Garden of the Gods area, which is where Wendy and I stayed in 2015. The city acquired 789 acres of Bock’s parcels in 2003, which had previously been used for quarries, gravel pits, a gold refining mill, and a 53-acre landfill. The former industrial sites have been transformed into a rugged and beautiful landscape with miles of trails for hikers, joggers, and mountain bikers. The city has now expanded the park to 1,474 acres.

Granger at Red Rock Canyon Open Space — Granger at the Red Rock Canyon Open Space

We only had the time and endurance to explore a few trails on the northwestern edge. The trails led past ridges of red sandstone. Those formed from sand and gravel washed down from the ancestral Rocky Mountains which spent millions of years near the edge of a sea, then formed the bottom of a shallow sea, and were slowly buried under a mile of new sediments. Eventually, when the Rocky Mountains were uplifted to the west, the mile-deep Red Rock Canyon strata were lifted up, deformed, and bent onto their ends to be eroded into what we enjoy today.

The sandy trails led around the jagged upturned strata, with rises and falls providing vistas of Pike’s Peak and nearby homes in panoramas to the west. We saw a snake and trees that seemed to grow from the rocks.

There were quite a few people out enjoying the area on a Sunday afternoon, but the size of the park kept it from feeling crowded. I hope to explore more of the Open Space on a future visit.

Old Colorado City

That evening we regrouped with our friends and drove into Old Colorado City for a Father’s Day dinner. Old Colorado City is a tiny 8-acre area on the western edge of modern Colorado Springs, which is over 125,000 acres. In 1859, it was a small settlement of El Dorado at the eastern entrance to the pass through the mountains to the west. Renamed Colorado City by four founders, it became the first permanent town in the Pikes Peak region.

Colorado Springs was a “dry” town, while Colorado City was “wet” with over 20 saloons, gaming parlors, and brothels serving gold miners after gold was discovered in 1891 at Cripple Creek. Prohibition arrived in 1914, and the town was annexed by Colorado Springs in 1917. It is now an arts district.

We dined at the Trails End Taproom and Eatery, which had been the Mason Jar when we were there in 2019 before the pandemic. Now there was a wall of beer taps, but we ordered items like peach cobber, macaroni and cheese, a salad and patty melt, and fried mushrooms.

Ad astra per aspera

The next day we began our journey home. That meant a long drive along rough Highway 24 from Colorado Springs to intersect Interstate 70 at Limon. Then it was a long roll along the interstate to Hays, Kansas, where we stopped to rest overnight.

I surprised Wendy with Gershwin done surfer style by playing for her a cover of Rhapsody in Blue by Thomas Lauderdale and Satan’s Pilgrims.

That helped pass the time, along with a train and wind farms. At Burlington, just west of the Colorado-Kansas state line, we stopped at The Farm Grill & Restaurant where Wendy enjoyed corn dogs and pecan pie while I had another French dip.

A train and some windfarms in Kansas

It was windy and hot driving through Kansas, which has the state motto “Ad astra per aspera” or “To the stars through hardships”. Their tourist board has condensed that down to just the first three words. Oklahoma has a similar issue with its motto of “Labor omnia vincit” or “Work conquers all”, which is another saying from Virgil, this time from his Georgics, a poem supporting Augustus Caesar’s back-to-the-land policy encouraging Romans to farm. Our tourist board gave up and uses, “Imagine that”, which is pretty awful, but perhaps better than its predecessor during my childhood: “Oklahoma is OK”.

At Hays, we loved JD’s Country Style Chicken, which featured all fresh food with chicken tenders, rolls, spicy and delicious potato salad, green beans, corn, and more.

I was surprised at having to navigate four roundabouts on Highway 183 from our hotel to drive into Hays. It reminded me of encountering a long chain of them in Bend, Oregon. I like the lone and often busy roundabout we have in Bartlesville, which is both faster and safer than the stoplight it replaced, but find that a series of them gets old pretty quickly, especially if there isn’t much intersecting traffic to highlight their functionality.

The next day we dashed home. We roused to enjoy fresh hash browns, good pancakes, and French toast at the Pheasant Run. Then we drove along the interstate to Salina, stopping at the Kansas Originals Market & Gallery outside Wilson for a nice shopping break.

I like the historical map on the wall of the one of the rest stops in Kansas. It included the Great Osage or Black Dog Trail across southeastern Kansas near where we live, which was a 200-mile trail leading east from Baxter Springs, Kansas to the Great Salt Plains in Oklahoma. Black Dog lived from approximately 1780 to 1848. He was born near St. Louis, Missouri and his village, Pasuga (Big Cedar), was located at present-day Claremore, Oklahoma. He was a huge fellow, almost seven feet tall and weighing about 300 pounds.

Historical Kansas Map — On the wall of an interstate rest stop

Next was a windy drive south to Wichita, where we had lunch at the Old Mill Tasty Shop, a feature of the Old Town there since 1932. Wendy had tasty crab salad on white bread, while I enjoyed a turkey sandwich and a delicious chocolate shake. We wrapped it all up with a 2.5-hour zigzag drive from Wichita through Derby, Winfield, Cedar Vale, and Caney to finally head south into Oklahoma and little Bartlesville, concluding our latest westward expedition.

Photo Album | Previous Stop: Trinidad

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Westward Ho! Trinidad

Posted on October 15, 2023 by Granger Meador

June 16-17, 2023 | Photo Album

There are two roads from Santa Fe to Taos. Each begins in Española, a 30-minute drive north of Santa Fe. The high road is more scenic, winding through the Sangre De Cristo mountains for 105 miles. Wendy and I took it in 2019.

So this time we took the low road, which winds for 70 miles, much of that along the Rio Grande. We stopped at the Rio Grande Gorge Visitor Center, where they had a print of a view from the west rim by Geraint Smith. It was priced at $450, and I’ll allow you to compare it to my own iPhone 14 Pro snapshot of the view from the road.

The Rio Grande is the fourth longest river in the USA. The Missouri is 2,341 miles, the Mississippi is just barely shorter at 2,340 miles, the Yukon is 1,979 miles, and the Rio Grande stretches 1,759 miles from southwestern Colorado to El Paso, Texas where it then forms the southern border of both the state and the country to the Gulf of Mexico.

We enjoyed tamales and tacos at Mante’s Chow Cart SouthSide in Taos, and then headed east on US 64 across the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the southernmost sub-range of the Rocky Mountains. They are generally much lower in New Mexico than in Colorado. The portion in Colorado has ten peaks above 14,000 feet, but there are several peaks over 13,000 feet near Taos and Santa Fe.

The two-lane highway is edged by giant, sandy-colored rocky cliffs with distant green peaks. It follows the Rio Fernando de Taos stream through the mountains for 20 miles to the Moreno Valley. The Angel Fire ski resort is at the south end of the valley, and we drove into town to use a restroom at a grocery store there.

Then we drove north to Eagle Nest and turned east to cross another section of the Sangre de Cristos to Cimarron. That took us across the midsection of the immense Philmont Scout Ranch.

The boundaries of Philmont; we crossed on US 64 across its midsection

Philmont covers over 140,000 acres of wilderness and was donated to the scouts by oil baron Waite Phillips. Waite was based out of Tulsa, and donated his 72-room mansion there to become the Philbrook Museum of Art. When he donated Philmont to the scouts, he not only included its water, mineral, and timber rights, but also endowed it by donating the Philtower building in downtown Tulsa. He was the brother of Frank and L.E. Phillips who founded Phillips Petroleum in Bartlesville.

From Cimarron we drove northeast to intersect Interstate 25, which took us north through Raton, a few miles south of the border with Colorado, and on to Trinidad. Once we could see Fishers Peak, I knew we were close.

Trinidad

My first visit to Trinidad was in 2012, and I liked it enough to take Wendy there last year. We were pleasantly surprised at the accommodations of the Family Suite at its La Quinta and booked it again for this visit.

We turned off Interstate 25 to follow the route of the old Santa Fe Trail into town. Wendy wanted a sandwich, and TripAdvisor led us to the Sub Shop at the Whistle Stop convenience store. Our sandwiches were top-notch, as was the service.

We had breakfast the next morning at the La Quinta and then drove downtown to return to the A.R. Mitchell museum we had enjoyed last year. We again parked a couple of blocks away in the public lot east of the Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church and the imposing old abandoned brick Schneider Brewery. It was built in 1866 and was one of four breweries in Colorado to survive prohibition by making non-alcoholic beer or malted milk or by bottling soda water.

Trinidad Brewery Building — Old brewery building in Trinidad

The brewery fell into disrepair in the late 1950s and has been mostly vacant for decades. New owners plan to demolish parts of the structure that have become structurally unsound while renovating much of it. We shall see in the coming years if they can make a go of it.

We strolled through the Sister Blandina Wellness Gardens and then along Main Street, popping in at a thrift store so Wendy could see if they had any Barbie dolls. She has been re-rooting the hair on old dolls as a hobby. They didn’t have any dolls, but I loved the melting pot of old phonograph albums they had on display.

Thrift Store Records — Fun old albums at a Trinidad thrift store

The A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art was again a treat, with us admiring Robert Martinez’s Blue on Black Coyote.

Upstairs was a fun exhibit about the Fox West Theatre with old projector equipment and many old movie posters.

A juvenile science fiction book that also mixed crystals with Atlantis

Seeing the poster of George Pal’s 1961 movie about Atlantis set my mind pinballing around the world of science fiction of my youth.

I first thought about a book I enjoyed as a youngster: Lester Del Rey’s Attack from Atlantis of 1953. Its premise included crystals from undersea volcanoes that created forcefilm bubbles that excluded liquids and solids with unlimited force. The poster reminded me that Pal’s film also featured crystals, albeit ones that absorbed sunlight and could fire heat rays.

Before I fixated on the poor physics of both works, my mind dredged up that the special effects and miniatures in the film were by Project Unlimited, a group that included Wah Chang. He was the non-union artist who built several creature costumes used in the original Star Trek series, designed the communicator and Vulcan harp props for it, and built the original Romulan spaceship model.

Then my mental railcar jumped tracks to how Project Unlimited had also built masks, creatures, and special effects for the earlier series The Outer Limits. I wondered if Wah Chang built the eponymous hand for my favorite episode, Demon with a Glass Hand.

To escape the mental ricochets, I strode past the wall of posters to look at a large old sign near the front windows, which thankfully diverted me from science fiction to westerns.

It was an advertisement about Hopalong Cassidy promotional gifts. William Boyd portrayed that fictional cowboy in 66 films from 1935 to 1948 and then in radio and television series until 1952. I’ve never seen a Hopalong Cassidy show nor read any of the stories; my childhood experiences with western series were limited to The Lone Ranger and the genre-blending The Wild Wild West.

But the internet informs me that Boyd’s portrayal of Cassidy was of a clean-cut sarsaparilla-drinking hero who never shot first, while the character in the original novels of Clarence E. Mulford was rude, dangerous, and rough-talking. The name came from his walk, which had a little “hop” in it after he was shot in the leg during a gun fight.

Hopalong Cassidy Gifts — Vintage Hopalong Cassidy promotion

Another exhibit was of framed photographs by Edward S. Curtis. I liked The Rush Gatherer – Arikara, and a photograph of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce inspired a previous post.

The Rush Gatherer - Arikara by Edward Curtis — The Rush Gatherer – Arikara by Edward S. Curtis

For lunch, we walked a half-mile up Main Street to Tony’s Diner, where Wendy enjoyed a BLT while I indulged in a French Dip and a chocolate shake.

After lunch, we returned to the minivan. Lowering clouds were an omen of a tornado and hail storm brewing up north, along our path to Manitou Springs.

Photo Album | Next Stop: Manitou Springs | Previous Stop: Santa Fe

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A Port in a Storm

Posted on October 4, 2023 by Granger Meador

October 4, 2023

During my Sunday morning walk, I was listening to Richard Osman’s second Thursday Murder Club book, The Man Who Died Twice. A character remarked:

…it really is very pretty here in the dark. There are a few lamps lighting the paths, and you can hear the animals in the bushes. I could just imagine the foxes thinking, “What’s this old woman up to?” And I was thinking the same.

Whoosh!

My mind was instantly transported from the Pathfinder Parkway in Bartlesville to a destination 137 miles southwest and 38 years in the past: my port in a storm.

The Port

Imhoff Creek drains central Norman, Oklahoma into the sandy expanse of the Canadian River. Four decades ago, there were paved paths along the west side of the creek north of the river. Shaded by trees, sidewalks meandered above the steep bank, alongside timber retaining walls. They were lit by sturdy metal lamps along the sidewalks, sometimes perched in beds above the paths.

It was all part of The Port apartments, which had been built in the early 1980s just northeast of a new golf club, The Trails, built between state highway 9 and the river. The apartments were northeast of the club’s 10th fairway, separated by a large pond. The place had a nautical theme, with heavy ropes, life preservers, etc. The laundry was built on pilings, projecting out above the pond.

The complex was built between 1981 and 1983, so it was still quite new when I was hunting for an apartment in 1985, seeking refuge after a stormy freshman year living in a dormitory at OU — the University of Oklahoma.

Walker Tower

The Walker Tower dormitory opened in 1966 as Couch North and was renamed in 1970 to honor a prominent banker. It housed over 1,400 students in the four wings of its twelve stories. Next door was the Adams Center, built two years earlier and named for K.S. “Boots” Adams of Phillips Petroleum, with four towers connected at ground level. Across the street was the Couch Tower, seemingly identical to Walker, although in 1984 it was rented out by the U.S. Postal Office’s training center.

Walker Tower at the University of Oklahoma

Serving all three gigantic dorms was the circular Couch cafeteria. The food at the cafeteria was poor enough that a few months in we got notices that the cafeteria apologized for itself, had plans to improve, and would be offering us a steak and lobster dinner one evening. I had the steak, which was as you might expect. It was more worthy of catsup than Worcestershire.

Back then, freshmen who didn’t own property in Norman were required to live in the dorms. I had a steady girlfriend for the final two years of high school and first two years of college who escaped living in them because her parents had purchased a condominium in Norman for her and her older brother.

As an introverted only child, I had signed up for a single room with air conditioning and a dorm that didn’t have an entire hallway of residents sharing a communal bathroom. I was assigned to Walker’s 8th floor, the Honors Floor, and I expected to have a single room with a bathroom that I would share with the occupant of the adjoining single room.

I moved in on a sizzling summer day. As I waited for an elevator in what would soon become a familiar wait, I spied orange flyers taped on the walls beside each elevator. They urged me to come to a concert by the Kansas City punk rock group “Orange Donuts” with “Death Puppy” as their local warm-up band. It is interesting what sticks in the mind.

Arriving in my room, I puzzled over the message our Resident Advisor had written on a markerboard in the room: Chill out, guys!

The use of the plural form and the presence of two beds alarmed me. I found the Resident Advisor, who cheerfully told me they had more students than expected, so I had been randomly assigned a roommate and we would be sharing a connecting bathroom with two suitemates: a guy from Nebraska and a fellow from South Dakota.

I returned to my room, fuming. I set up my TRS-80 Color Computer and my microwave oven. Eventually Random Roommate came in with some boxes. He proclaimed, “A microwave? Nice! And a computer? Cool! That will sure come in handy for us.”

At that point, I was anything but chill. So as soon as he left to get more things, I scoured the Honors Floor and located a fellow from my high school who had his own computer. I convinced him to be my new roommate, and we moved his stuff into my room, transferring the boxes my assigned roommate had brought up thus far to my new roommate’s former abode. When Random Roommate reappeared, I informed him of his new room assignment and guided him to it. The Resident Advisor came by later, asking what was going on. I cheerfully told him how to amend the assignments on his clipboard.

Self-confidence can be learned, practiced, and mastered–just like any other skill. Once you master it, everything in your life will change for the better.
Barrie Davenport

I was happy enough in my recruitment of a new roommate, but dorm life was not for me. I was frequently awakened in the middle of the night by slamming steel doors, and we endured multiple middle-of-the-night fire alarm evacuations. The Resident Advisor would come around, opening each room to ensure we evacuated. That meant climbing down the emergency stairwell for eight flights, and then climbing back up it afterward because the elevators would be hopelessly overloaded. The most frustrating was the alarm sounding in the depths of a cold winter night and us freezing outside for a long time only to find out that the alarm was sounded by someone who had seen the steam coming from the vents of the basement laundry and mistaken it for smoke.

Earlier this year, they tore down Walker’s high-rise neighbor, Adams Center. Walker Tower will be coming down next. I shan’t shed any tears.

Finding Refuge at The Port

So I was excited to go hunting for an apartment in the summer of 1985. My own bathroom, kitchen, and bedroom! I was thrilled when I found The Port, with 128 units on four acres. It had a cute theme, a nice mix of residents, and I was able to secure a 6-month lease for a second-floor one-bedroom unit with a cathedral ceiling, a skylight, and a balcony for $275 per month. That is equivalent to about $782 in 2023.

My first apartment was upstairs and to the left

I set up my Color Computer again, this time on a pressboard desk and hutch with my 13″ television doubling as its monitor. The setup included a joystick, floppy disk drive, daisy wheel printer, and a modem to connect to the university’s engineering computer as well as CompuServe. I still remember that my CompuServe username was 71460,2557 even though, like Orange Donuts and Death Puppy, CompuServe disbanded long ago.

The living room was also adorned with a dreadfully uncomfortable Papasan chair with a loud 1980s floral print cushion and an old love seat. I squeezed a small mid-century modern wooden table and chairs into the tiny dining area, complete with old Pizza-Hut style checkered tablecloth.

It was nice to escape the small apartment along pathways made out of concrete and railroad ties meandering around plenty of landscaping, with high lights on fancy wooden poles.

I was intrigued by the pond and inspired by the nautical surroundings. So I bought an inflatable boat and invited my former roommate to come over and take it out with me on the pond. We plugged its inflator pump into the cigarette lighter of my Toyota Supra, and once it was ready we took the little boat out on the water near the laundry dock.

The pond and laundry at what was The Port in the 1980s but is now The Landing on 9

All went well, with us merrily paddling about the pond, until my roommate saw a snake slithering by in the water. I thought of it as Little Nessie, our water snake, but he thought it looked like a copperhead and insisted that we return to shore. I don’t recall using the boat after that.

My favorite aspect of The Port was the pathways along its eastern edge in the woods above the creek. I remember once struggling late into the night with a Modern Physics assignment. A problem involved a spacedock with movable doors at each end and a spaceship that was too long to fit inside. I was supposed to do calculations about the ship going fast enough that Lorentz contraction could allow it to temporarily fit inside, and the shift in frames of reference in the problem had me baffled.

An object foreshortens in the direction of motion in a moving frame of reference per the Lorentz contraction

After an hour of struggling through calculations that yielded wrong answers, I got up and went for a walk. I slowly wound my way along the wooden pathways over to the peaceful lighted walkways in the woods. I was already beginning to question my future in Engineering Physics, but then the solution dawned on me. I scurried back along the pathways to my apartment and my calculator.

Early in the next semester, my six-month lease was up. I confidently strode into the office, to be told by the manager that I would be shifting to a $285 month-by-month renewal. I was put out by the $10 per month increase, and retorted that I had been a model tenant and wanted another six-month contract, but reduced by $10 per month to $265. The manager was nonplussed at first, but she then agreed to my demand.

Leaving Port

Life can be fleeting, and I wound up only living at The Port from August 1985 to December 1986. The summer of 1986 was a deflection point for me. Immediately after being named the Outstanding Sophomore in Engineering Physics, I abandoned that major as I was unhappy in most of my sophomore year engineering and physics courses. I switched majors, broke up with my girlfriend of four years, and found a new side job working for the University of Oklahoma Scholars Program.

It was a tumultuous period of reinvention, and I became lonely at the apartment, something I would have not thought possible back in my freshman year in the dorms. So I rented a room at a house owned by a friend from high school and college. Eventually I was ready to be on my own again, and for the rest of my undergraduate years I lived in an apartment across town from The Port. It was cheap and roomy, but its grounds were drab and desolate. I would never again live in a place as charming as The Port.

The Port would soon encounter troubles of its own. It went into foreclosure in 1987 and was sold in 1990 for $1.4 million. It became Port at the Trails and ran down over the decades. In 2006, it was sold for $3.7 million and is now refurbished as the Landing on 9.

Like me, the bones are the same but the finishes are different. The last time I was there was many years ago, and the beautiful old pathways in the woods were long gone. Now I happily walk the Pathfinder Parkway, having successfully weathered a few major course corrections in my journey through space and time. I miss the old walkways at The Port, but as this weekend showed, my mind can revisit them at the turn of a phrase, and as Marcus Aurelius wrote, “Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight.”

Whoosh!

Posted in history, nostalgia, physics, random | 1 Comment

My History of Bartlesville Public Schools

Posted on September 27, 2023 by Granger Meador

In July 2023, I was asked to present about the history of Bartlesville Public Schools at a Thursday Lunch & Learn meeting at the Bartlesville Area History Museum. This spring I began gathering and digitizing thousands of photographs in the district’s Community Relations archives. I had shared hundreds of them in a Facebook group on local history, and that caught the attention of the museum staff.

I later made presentations about what was going on in the district, with an overview of its history, to the Washington County Retired Educators and residents of Green Country Village Senior Living. I had enough interest at those talks to prompt me to create a 40-minute video about the district’s history.

I want to provide some context for that video:

How did I wind up in Bartlesville?
Why am I interested in its history?
How did I gather the material used in the video?
How did I make the video?

To study history means submitting yourself to chaos, but nevertheless retaining your faith in order and meaning.
Herman Hesse

My family history with Bartlesville

My father as a baby in Dewey, with his parents and two of his sisters

My family connections to Bartlesville go back a century. In 1923, my paternal grandfather and grandmother brought their two daughters to the town of Dewey, Oklahoma, immediately north of Bartlesville. They had left hill farming in southeast Missouri, travelling to Dewey in a horse-drawn covered wagon.

My grandfather hoped to find work at the Dewey Portland Cement Company, where his brother-in-law was a power plant operator. Grandpa Meador got hired on, and my father was born in Dewey in 1925. They moved to a compressor station south of Independence, Kansas in 1936, when my grandfather became a machinist for Cities Service Gas.

So my father had childhood memories of Bartlesville, and it was along the highway route from Oklahoma City, where I grew up, to my grandparents’ home in Independence. We made regular trips to visit our Kansas relatives, and my parents often stopped in Bartlesville to have lunch with Frank and Alice Rice, who had once worked with my father at the Cities Service Gas Company offices in Oklahoma City. The Rices had built a home in the Madison Heights neighborhood in northeast Bartlesville, just south of Sooner High School.

Getting hired to teach in Bartlesville

Fast-forward to 1989, after I had graduated with my bachelor’s degree from the University of Oklahoma (OU) and certified to teach a variety of high school sciences. I had spent the spring substitute teaching at the three high schools in the Putnam City district I had attended for grades one through twelve.

I was looking for a position to teach physics at an Oklahoma high school. Full-time physics positions are a rarity in our state, but I was stubborn and passed up offers to teach other subjects at Moore, Sapulpa, and Ponca City, holding out for physics. Finally, in late July 1989, I got a call to interview in Bartlesville.

As I was growing up, we drove by Sooner High when visiting the Rices in Bartlesville

I was only familiar with a few things in Bartlesville: Highway 75, the Pizza Hut, Sooner High School, and the Madison Heights area. So when Bartlesville High School Principal Ben West asked me if I knew where the high school was, I said, “Sure! It is on Baylor Drive.”

Ben chuckled and explained that in 1982 Sooner High had become a Mid-High serving grades 9 and 10, and he would be interviewing me at Bartlesville High School on the west side of the Caney River.

Bartlesville High School, where I taught physics from 1989 to 2017

I drove to Bartlesville, found my way west across the Caney River for the first time, and entered an odd-looking white concrete building that had once been College High. The facility was interesting but quite dated. The science labs and auditorium were pathetic compared to what I had experienced as a student at Putnam City West High School and as a student teacher at Norman High.

However, I had worked for several years for Scholars Programs at OU, advising fellow National Merit Scholars and members of the President’s Leadership Class. So I knew Bartlesville churned out lots of top-notch students with plenty of Advanced Placement credits. Its high socioeconomic status, arising from being the headquarters of Phillips Petroleum, a Fortune 500 company, allowed the small town of 35,000 to punch above its weight in academics as well as cultural opportunities.

So I left the 1,000,000 strong metropolitan area where I had always lived and began looking for an apartment in little Bartlesville.

Family historians

My father had always enjoyed history. He drew a huge timeline of world history on the backs of a series of natural gas pipeline charts, compiled many notebooks on genealogy, and wrote autobiographies, a biography of my mother, etc.

I enjoyed my high school history classes, and choose my World History teacher to accompany me to Washington, DC when I was named a U.S. Presidential Scholar. In college, I took Honors Seminars on ancient Greece and Rome as well as the mandatory U.S. history course. But I wasn’t a history buff.

After I moved to Bartlesville, I knew I would eventually see Edgar Weston, my double first cousin once removed. For those needing a translation, Edgar was the son of my paternal grandmother’s brother and the son of my paternal grandfather’s sister.

Edgar was 50 years older than me and an avid historian. He was born in Dewey nine years before my father and helped organize the Washington County Historical Society, raised funds and supervised the restoration of the Dewey Hotel, helped build the Tom Mix Museum, researched and conducted tours of historical sites and landmarks in the county, and wrote a newspaper column about local history. Edgar passed in 2002, but the local paper is now re-running his columns.

Edgar Weston, local historian and my first cousin, once removed

Edgar had been a fixture at the Meador and Weston reunions I had attended in childhood, so in June 1990 when I saw that he was going to host a bus tour of area historical sites as a showcase event for the annual OK Mozart music festival in Bartlesville, I signed up.

Edgar regaled us with stories as we drove around downtown Bartlesville and down south of town to the Tyler-Irwin farm. That kindled my interest in the history of the little town I had made my new home.

Whetting my interest in school history

Teaching at a high school which dated back to 1939, with oddball additions, also roused my curiosity. Why was the building clad in concrete rather than bricks? Why was the annex where I began teaching so oddly built, with its basement numbered as the third floor?

Exploring with Rick

I learned a lot about the old buildings from Rick Keen, the high school head custodian. During my first winter of teaching, I was desperate for more electrical equipment for my physics courses. I asked Rick if he’d seen anything squirreled away somewhere. He grinned and said there was some stuff in an odd place. He could show me, if I was feeling adventurous.

Rick led me outside and down an old stairwell to a room tucked beneath the 1939 field house. He led me under a huge air handler to a hatch in a wall. He opened it and climbed through with his flashlight, located a light switch, and urged me to step carefully through the hatch. I clambered through the narrow opening and found we were standing on the unexcavated soil beneath the 1939 field house.

Back then, scattered on the dirt beyond the ducts, were a bunch of old College High athletic trophies and, relevant to me, some wood cases and boxes of electrical equipment. Rick told me they had come from the old physics lab, which had been turned into a second chemistry lab years before. He thought some of the items dated back to before 1950, when there had been a junior college class in electronics at the school. We hauled the stuff back to my physics lab. That was also when Rick told me about the tunnel connecting to the main building.

The equipment we scavenged included old gutta percha cables, light bulb circuit boards, and, of particular interest to me, analog ammeters and voltmeters in Bakelite housings. We used those old meters for years in my physics classes, until a generous parent eventually donated funds for me to purchase digital multimeters. I know that some of the old meters eventually found their way to a school in India…one school’s trash is another’s treasure!

That scrounging success led me to eventually explore every nook and cranny of the old buildings. That in turn led me to skim through old yearbooks to figure out how they had evolved. I also started asking Rick for insights about some of the building’s oddities.

One example was how, in the 1939 building, there used to be a metal plunger sticking out of the wall in the student restrooms. You pumped it to get soap, but there was no visible reservoir. So where did the soap come from? There were no custodial closets behind most of those restroom walls.

I asked Rick, and he took me on another adventure. We climbed up inside the tower on the front of the building, where there was still a huge wooden case for what had once been a telescope that they used to wheel out onto the roof back in the junior college days. He led me out onto the roof and over to a barrel way out in the center. It was marked SOAP on the side, and had a line coming out of it down into the roof.

Yes, it was an original centralized soap system. That single barrel fed, via internal conduits, all of the wall spigots in the various 1939 bathrooms. Eventually the entire district started using the now-ubiquitous plastic soap wall dispensers we are all familiar with, and the old spigots were removed, but I remember how they used to do it!

Figuring out the district

One thing I noticed as I drove around Bartlesville over the years was that it had a LOT of former school buildings. Why were there so many tiny old neighborhood schools? Why had the town built two high schools, only to later consolidate them?

15 of Bartlesville’s public schools were closed over the decades, with 9 currently operating

In the summer of 1997, I decided to get some answers. I went to the public library’s Local and Family History Room. The librarian showed me some publications dating to the 1910s that were from a time before yearbooks. Better still, she told me there were vertical files on the school district. I thumbed through those, finding many old newspaper articles, back-to-school newspaper layouts from decades before, and an old computer printout listing two dozen different school buildings and the years of their construction, various additions, and when many were closed.

The high school website has my historical information

Having gathered a lot of information, I decided to share it in a more modern fashion. On my personal website, I built a page about each school, past or present. I drove around town, taking photographs of every building, to enhance each page. When I built the high school website two decades ago, I included a lot of historical information, and I have migrated that to each new platform ever since.

When I took over the district website a decade later, I shifted all of my information and photos of the various buildings to it.

The school district archives I have built

Over the decades, I purchased a couple dozen books on local history and saved scraps of information I found online. I pieced together how and why the district had changed. This year, I found time to scour the files squirreled away in the district administration building, where I have worked since 2017.

That started a massive project to digitize for a public archive the most interesting documents and thousands of photographs trapped at the district headquarters as uncatalogued dead media: old prints, negatives, slides, and optical discs.

I’ve digitized almost 9,000 photographs thus far, with thousands more still be processed. I’ve built facility timelines and charts and created a spreadsheet of district leaders.

This project ensures that I always have something to do when I’m not helping diagnose technology issues, planning budgets and purchases, handling the district websites and social media feeds, and whatever other Technology and Communications tasks arise.

Making the new history video

My previous district history video from a decade ago

A decade ago, when I was still teaching physics, I made a video about the district’s history since 1950. It was directly adapted from a PowerPoint presentation I had prepared for some community presentations.

So when I was approached about a new round of presentations, I wanted to go back to the beginnings of the district in 1899 and share what I had gleaned from months of archiving. I again wanted a video for the public to see, but I had watched a lot of YouTube videos during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their higher production values encouraged me to go beyond simply narrating a slideshow.

So I wrote a script and inserted various photographs and charts in the WeVideo online video editing service we make available to all district teachers and all secondary school students. I then animated many of the photographs, in what is often termed the “Ken Burns” style, to boost their visual interest. Recalling Burns’ use of the Ashokan Farewell in his influential series The Civil War, I also experimented with adding period background music, such as ragtime for the first years of the district’s history. But I judged that to be too distracting given my limited experience and patience for mixing audio.

I hope you enjoyed this post, and if it has sparked your curiosity, you might see if my 40-minute video is worth your time. No worries if it is not; there are countless videos out there these days on every imaginable topic. Happy hunting!