Meador Manor

This week they really got going on destroying the old convention center in Oklahoma City. There was a dramatic photograph showing the arena bowl half destroyed, and then they brought the remaining roof down.

At the start of 2025, I wrote about the history of that huge facility, which was constructed from 1969-1972. It hosted my junior and senior proms and I gave a speech in it at my high school graduation. I also attended multiple conferences there over the years. The old Myriad is a few years younger than I am, but its time is up.

I’ll confess that it hurt a bit to see the former Allen Morgan Street Memorial Myriad Convention Center destroyed, despite its various shortcomings and obvious obsolescence. The pang I felt reminded me of a similar issue facing Bartlesville when I arrived here in 1989.

My Childhood Library

I’m a big fan of public libraries. I’d grown up using the Bethany branch of Oklahoma City’s Metropolitan Library System, and I remember checking out Curious George books there, along with Esphyr Slobodkina’s Caps for Sale. Years later, I prowled its shelves looking for science fair project ideas. I remember the giant checkers game in the children’s area that always caught my eye…but I’ll confess that I never learned to play checkers, let alone chess.

Another thing I noticed as I grew up was the simple elegance of the little branch’s architecture. It had opened in 1965 and was designed by Ray Bowman, the head of the Art Department at what was then Bethany Nazarene College, just blocks away. OkieModSquad posted a nice look back at it in 2017.

However, it was only 8,400 square feet and became woefully obsolete for the area’s needs. So it was replaced with a 23,000 square foot facility that opened in 2019, expanding its collection from 58,000 items to almost 90,000.

I have nostalgic memories of happily crossing the little bridge when entering or leaving one of my favorite places from childhood, but nostalgia is a trap. It is a good thing that they razed the old library and built a new and better one. It wouldn’t have made sense, given the money, the lot, etc. to try and expand the old library or repurpose it and build elsewhere.

Bartlesville’s Libraries

So let’s jump to 1989. I was 23 years old and had just moved to Bartlesville. Until then, I’d only caught glimpses of it along Highway 75 and over by Sooner High, since whenever we would head from OKC to Independence, Kansas to visit relatives, we would stop in Bartlesville to have lunch with some retired former coworkers of my parents; they lived in the Madison Heights addition.

I knew Bartlesville as an outlier town, awash in oil money, that produced lots of National Merit scholars and Advanced Placement students I had helped to recruit and advise while working in Scholars Programs at OU. Bartlesville had a symphony orchestra, a magnificent community center, a then-thriving shopping mall, and multiple skyscrapers, despite only having a population of 35,000. Surely its public library would be similarly impressive…right? Well, frankly, not at that time.

The First Bartlesville Library

The former Carnegie Library building is just across Adams Boulevard from the Community Center. The town’s Tuesday Club had begun campaigning for a library in 1908, and the Carnegie Corporation provided a $12,500 grant to help build it.

The town grew from 6,000 in 1908 to 21,000 in 1927, and the library’s collection grew with it. From 1913 to 1927, it expanded from 1,250 volumes to over 10,000 and the building was bursting at the seams. In April 1927, a city election for a $25,000 library bond passed with over 75% approval: 2,155 to 689. Frank Phillips promptly pledged another $12,500 to the project, an unconditional gift for the library to use as it saw fit.

However, just days before the election, the Oklahoma legislature passed a law, taking immediate effect, that invalidated full-term bonds like the ones in Bartlesville’s election. That forced a revote in May for serial bonds, which earned over 82% approval: 1,407 to 298.

However, by July the state’s Assistant Attorney General held that the city had no statutory authority to issue bonds for a library. The city had already begun renovating the north wing of the Civic Center, which had opened in 1923, as a temporary home for the library while the original building was prepared for expansion.

The Second Bartlesville Library

The city library board decided against a third attempt at a bond issue, voting to have local architect Arthur Gorman draw up plans to remodel the ground floor of the Civic Center’s north wing into a permanent home for the library and rid itself of the Carnegie building. I’m guessing they were just relying on Frank Phillips’ unrestricted donation. The move would help popularize the relatively new Civic Center, avoid another bond issue that might encounter yet more technicalities in debt-averse Oklahoma, and reduce the city’s operating expenses by combining facilities.

The Red Cross headquarters moved out of the Civic Center’s north wing, which was opened up into one big room, becoming the library’s new home in September 1927. The school system wound up taking over the old Carnegie library, making it an administrative building until 1974, when it was sold off to become law offices.

By the summer of 1930, the library was outgrowing its new quarters, and in March 1931 it was operating branches at three of the schools and the hospital. In May 1931, it opened another branch near the West Side Park that was open on one morning and another afternoon each week.

However, despite heavy patronage, a bond issue to enlarge the library was defeated in 1940, and it was embroiled in controversy in 1950 when Ruth Brown, the librarian since 1919, was fired for her support of Civil Rights, under the pretense of her being a Communist subversive.

The town continued to grow, but the library was wholly inadequate. Bond elections in 1957 and 1959 failed.

In 1960, 59% of the voters, by 1,873 to 1,275, finally approved a library bond issue. The resulting modernist appendage tripled the library’s size, but it in no way complemented the architecture of the older structure.

In 1989, Bartlesville still depended on that aging 1960 wraparound on the north end of a 1922 building that had been mostly abandoned for about a dozen years.

The Controversy I Moved Into

Just a block or so to the east of the old Civic Center was the mothership, the Bartlesville Community Center. Designed by the son-in-law of Frank Lloyd Wright, it featured an impressive 1,700-seat performing arts hall accompanied by a large events room, art display gallery, and basement drama room. The facility was built from 1979 to early 1982 for $13 million, funded by private and corporate donations and a three-year penny sales tax. Space for it was created by razing the city’s first brick school building, Garfield, and the wounds lingered.

The city had abandoned much of the Civic Center in 1976, amidst competing claims about its structural integrity. The new Community Center reflected how Phillips Petroleum, a Fortune 500 company, was then still headquartered in little Bartlesville. An oil boom meant the company was expanding rapidly, and it wanted better amenities to help it attract and retain workers.

However, oil booms are often followed by busts. Phillips peaked in the early 1980s with over 9,000 workers in town but then came decades of downsizing. In 1985, amidst the oil bust, a 3/4-cent sales tax proposal to demolish the Civic Center and build a new library failed with only 36% approval: 3,107 for to 5,455 against. By 1989, Phillips employment in Bartlesville had declined by almost 40%, to about 5,400 workers.

Phillips was still so dominant at the time that when I rented an apartment at The Village, they mistakenly assumed I was a young Phillips hire. They asked me what “grade” I was, and I thought they meant what grades I’d be teaching at Bartlesville High School, so I answered, “Both 11 and 12.” They were puzzled by that response, and it turned out that they were asking about my Phillips employment classification. It was an introduction to life in what was still very much a “company town”.

No Attachments

As an outsider moving into town, I explored the library, but considered it quite lackluster amidst the town’s striking amenities. Sure, it was 70% larger than the tiny branch library I grew up with in OKC, and it did feature a history room, over a decade before the Bartlesville Area History Museum would come about.

However, to my eyes, having never been in the Civic Center in its heyday and only seeing it in its partially abandoned state, it was an obsolete eyesore that served no purpose save for an old mismatched library retrofitted into its north end. It made perfect sense to me, having no nostalgia for the structures, that the city should tear it down and build a larger and much more modern library in its place.

Well, some did not agree, because they had been captured by the nostalgia trap, which doesn’t care about economic viability or functional suitability. A retired Phillips employee in his early 60s, not much older than I am while composing this post, organized a 25-member Concerned Citizens of the Bartlesville Area. They collected 1,409 signatures on a petition against demolishing the old Civic Center, demanding a citywide vote on the issue. I did not find a sensible or economically viable proposal from them on what to do with the obsolete and redundant facility, just a demand that it not be destroyed. It would have been very expensive to renovate the entire old Civic Center into an adequate new library, and the result would have been compromised by the mismatch with its original design.

Thus, on September 12, 1989, I participated in my first Bartlesville election, voting Yes on a $2.5 million bond issue to demolish the Civic Center and construct a new library in its place. It passed with 56% approval: 5,161 to 4,061.

The fellow opposing the demolition finally succeeded in getting the old Civic Center on the National Register of Historic Places, but that recognition didn’t come until November 1989, months after the vote. Contrary to popular belief, such recognition merely encourages preservation by making some properties eligible for rehabilitation tax credits. It does nothing to prevent owners from remodeling, selling, or demolishing a listed property.

I learned another lesson about Bartlesville politics when another citizen took the city to court, trying to invalidate the election. I, for one, did not take kindly to someone trying to override my vote. I’ve disagreed with the majority in many an election, but I was taught to adapt to, rather than try to subvert, majority rule. The district court ruled against the complaint, but then he appealed to the Oklahoma Supreme Court on various technical grounds. They affirmed the district court in April 1990, and the Civic Center was demolished in the summer of 1990.

I was very glad to see the library temporarily move into what appeared to be a former T.G.&Y. and for the Civic Center to come down, because I had no experience with nor nostalgia for that old building, while I was genuinely excited for a new library slated to replace it. If I had grown up in Bartlesville, I would still have supported the project, but the destruction would have been much more impactful.

Sound familiar? 35 years later, I get to watch OKC demolish a facility that hosted major events in my life. I couldn’t care less about sports, so the new arena that will replace the old convention center will do little for me, but it will serve many sports fans who are eagerly awaiting the new venue. The tables have been turned!

The Third Bartlesville Library

Back in Bartlesville 35 years ago, the library campaign raised another $1.5 million in private donations to augment the bond election, and the project broke ground in February 1991 and the new library opened in January 1992. It was the last project of architect Thomas McCrory, who would soon sell his business to Scott Ambler, who had been heavily involved in the design of the new building. In 2017, Joseph Evans, once one of my physics students at Bartlesville High School, who worked on major additions to that campus in 2015, became the President of Ambler Architects. Now he owns the firm, which in 2025 was renamed HorizonLine Architecture and Interiors. How time flies.

I’ve always appreciated the “new” library, which is still a beautiful and functional space, continuing to adapt to changing times. I am grateful that the nostalgia trap did not prevent its construction.

Avoiding the Trap

The nostalgia trap is open and waiting, but it shan’t capture me. I’m impacted, but not upset, that what I knew as the Myriad is going away. I know that it wouldn’t make any sense for the city to preserve it, since a $288 million replacement opened in 2021. The old convention center had plenty of shortcomings throughout its half-century of existence, and the new arena that will replace it was approved by the voters.

Yes, there’s already an indoor arena just to the south, built in 2002 for $89 million. Back in 2008, the city raised over $103 million to improve that facility for the relocated Seattle Supersonics NBA team, which became the Oklahoma City Thunder. (My lack of interest in sports was evident when people starting talking about the team back then: at first I thought they were discussing some sort of weather event.) Now OKC is raising a billion dollars to keep the Thunder playing there for a quarter-century, and I presume the 2002 arena will be redundant once the new one opens in 2029.

Given the significance of the Myriad in my own life, I could decry its destruction. Given the mismatch in interests, I might be tempted to consider a billion-dollar arena a waste of resources. However, I won’t take the bait. I’ll continue to enjoy the public library in Bartlesville, and no doubt many will soon enjoy OKC’s new arena.

The past deserves honor, but not necessarily publicly funded preservation. Oklahoma has always limited its public investments, meaning we must often destroy in order to create. The vote was taken. So be it.

Real estate websites have a secondary function as time machines since when properties are marketed for resale we may catch glimpses into houses we left long ago. The home my parents built in 1962 was “flipped” in 2022. I lived there from 1966-1972, with us moving once I completed kindergarten. Seeing it transformed by millennial gray prompted me to revisit the few ghostly fragments that escaped infantile amnesia.

The Village

My Greatest Generation father and Silent Generation mother were newlyweds when they built the house in 1962, four years before I came along as an early member of Generation X. My father had previously been living in a home he had purchased for his first family in 1957 in The Village, then a north central suburb of Oklahoma City. Dad worked for Cities Service Gas, which had both its executive and operational offices in Bartlesville until 1943 as part of the sprawling Cities Service empire. During World War II, the natural gas company’s executive offices were shifted to Oklahoma City and its operational ones to Wichita, while the oil company remained in Bartlesville until the late 1960s.

In 1957 the operational offices in Wichita, where my father was a gas measurement engineer, were consolidated with the executive ones in Oklahoma City. So Dad moved his first family to The Village, a suburb that had originated in 1949 when developer Clarence E. Duffner, Sr. purchased 40 acres of land near the old railroad town of Britton, itself located seven miles north of Oklahoma City’s core.

Over the years, OKC would grow to encapsulate multiple towns, including The Village, Nichols Hills, Warr Acres, Bethany, Woodlawn Park, Mustang, Spencer, Forest Park, and Lake Aluma while annexing Britton, Belle Isle, Forest Park, Deer Creek, and many square miles of unincorporated land.

Oklahoma City annexed Britton in 1950, prompting Duffner and fellow developers Floyd and Joe Bob Harrison and Sylvanus Felix to incorporate The Village to avoid a similar fate for their additions. There were only seven residents at the time, with six voting in favor and none against!

The community started with 160 acres but annexed additional housing developments to grow to encompass 2.5 square miles which are bordered by Oklahoma City on all sides except for rich Nichols Hills to the south.

My father’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1960. Dad spotted my mother at a Cities Service Gas Company Christmas party that year, their first date was in March 1961, and they were married five months later. Mom had come to OKC in late 1957 and had lived in a couple of apartments with other girls. She was 11 years younger than my father, so I am much younger than most of my paternal cousins.

Western Village Addition

Dad put the house in The Village up for sale by owner, and he and his new bride lived in a nearby rental home while a new house was constructed for them in the Western Village addition of Oklahoma City. You might be surprised that “Western Village” is situated on the east side of The Village, but the name came from it being bordered by Western Avenue on the east and The Village on the west.

In January 1962, Ferguson Investment Company began constructing over 500 new homes in that quarter-mile section.

My parents’ home was the first to be constructed on its block, with them visiting the site when it was nothing but a dirt field with completed homes lined up along a street to the south. They made almost daily checks as the house went up: a three-bedroom wood frame home with red used-brick veneer and white trim, a wood-burning fireplace, and a patio in the back.

The homes were marketed as featuring heavy “floating” concrete slab floors with windbraced wood framing anchored every four feet with steel bolts. The roof trusses were marketed as “tornado-resisting” and the homes were said to be “100% insulated — floors, walls, and ceilings.”

The exterior of the home changed very little over its first 60 years, with the 2022 flip repainting its trim in a dark bluish-gray that toned down the fake shutters but made the white garage doors even more prominent; thank goodness they are perpendicular to the street.

The 1962 marketing for the homes reflected the gender norms of the era: “The cheerful kitchens, a trade-mark of Ferguson homes, truly are a woman’s dream — built-in wall-oven and tabletop range, disposal unit and exhaust-hood. Beautiful mill-built cabinets, with counter space provided next to range and refrigerator.”

My parents reported only having one minor issue with the builder, and that involved the kitchen built-ins. They were indeed made in a cabinet shop and were delivered to the home site to be stored in the garage until installation. My mother had specified the corner built-in was to have standard shelving rather than a Lazy Susan option that was being offered. They were delivered with a Lazy Susan already installed. She advised the builder of the error, and they had quite a contest of wills before my mother made her point and regular shelving was put in the place of the Lazy Susan.

The color image of my mother in the kitchen is from a silent 8mm film my father shot in their new home around Christmas in 1962, and the other shot of me in my high chair is from 1968. That kitchen changed very little for decades after we moved away. Below is its appearance sometime before 2022. The appliances, sink and cabinet hardware had been updated, but the cabinets were still varnished instead of painted and it still had its formica countertops and backsplash and a vinyl floor.

Flippers like to paint wood cabinets and replace any wall-to-wall carpet or vinyl flooring with engineered wood floors. A variety of materials may be used to replace formica countertops and backsplashes.

As for colors, my memories of the late 1960s are fragmentary, but I know the appliances were light pink. Later, while growing up in the 1970s, I was surrounded by lots of earth tones — harvest gold, oranges, and terracottas — coupled with plenty of wood paneling and avocado green appliances. Those would all appear in my parents’ next home to the southwest in the town of Bethany. Eventually beige would sweep through homes as a more neutral color, and by the early 2010s grays began to dominate. The aesthetic adopted by the flippers was the later stereotype.

I don’t like wood wall paneling, but I do like wood tones in cabinetry and wainscoting, so we have left those intact in our 1981 home in Bartlesville. I am grateful that our home’s contractor cabinetry was stained dark and not the honey gold that became popular later that decade and endured into the 1990s. I do have to break out the Old English scratch remover, however, to touch up our dark woodwork.

The flippers extended the engineered flooring through the entire Western Village house. They also painted the mantle, but thankfully resisted painting the back brick wall.

The eleven homes and apartments where I have resided had mostly wall-to-wall padded carpet, allowing me to walk around in comfort in socks or barefoot without fear of tripping. I developed an aversion to bare hard floors at the house we moved to after leaving Western Village. It had a den paved in red quarry tile, the same kind later used in QuikTrips. A large rug softened the area around the sofas, but there was a big cold zone I had to traverse to reach the long green shag carpet of the living room and bedrooms.

Shag was an example of carpeting at its worst, with one of my household chores being to rake it. My parents invested in a massive self-propelled Kirby vacuum cleaner, and I remember the constant pings when my mother swept the living room shag. The previous homeowners had kept a caged bird in there, and I figure she swept up many pounds of birdseed. My father finally reacted by replacing the shag with commercial short-loop pile carpet that Cities Service surplussed from its downtown offices.

In 2018, Wendy and I replaced the 37-year-old saxony carpet in our home in Bartlesville. We still wanted wall-to-wall carpet, and we had Sooner Carpet install a frieze carpet that looks and feels great, doesn’t track like saxony, and thank goodness doesn’t require raking. However, I understand the appeal of having robot vacuums sweep hard floors and rugs and that owners of indoor pets want ways to address stains, smells, and allergens. I’m also sure that the popularity of open-plan spaces also contributed to the return of rugs, which can create functional zoning.

Back at Western Village, the bathrooms were also refinished. Gray again dominated, covering the walls and woodwork, with another gray mix countertop. I suppose they expected millennials to love its neutrality, versatility, and practicality. However, it all seems so bland to me. I also read that millennial gray is “oversaturated” in the cultural sense and losing favor, and “beige ‘n sage is the new greige.” Well…er…time marches on.

The Western Village development at the end of the Baby Boom continued into the early years of the Baby Bust, with the last lots filled by 1970. Pied Piper Park was just to the south and in 1963 Western Village Elementary School was built on the western side, just inside the borders of The Village.

So I lived just an 8-minute walk from the park and a 12-minute walk to the school. I do recall the walk to and from kindergarten, as I had a hernia that made the trek painful when I was in a hurry. Getting that fixed when I was five years old was my only significant surgery. Below is a clip from early 1971, months before I would start walking to kindergarten.

One clear memory of kindergarten was the day I was selected to be the “wake up fairy” for our naptime. I was given a yardstick and was supposed to gently tap each student to signal them to get up and go to recess. One of my friends had made me angry earlier, so when I came to him I stabbed the yardstick down hard on his back. That indiscretion led Mrs. Brewer to revoke my privileges to play with the wooden stove in the little kitchen area, one of my favorite things in the classroom, for what seemed like an eternity. Lesson learned!

In 1972, the court-ordered and rather complicated Finger Plan of forced busing began to desegregate the Oklahoma City school system. Oklahoma City’s long history of racism and redlining meant that many schoolchildren across the sprawling city would be bused across town to address de facto segregation that had endured for almost two decades after Brown v. Board of Education.

To avoid a plan that by fifth grade would bus me to a school many miles away, my parents joined the consequent “white flight” and sold their home of ten years. We moved to the Nazarene suburb of Bethany in far west OKC where I would be in the Putnam City school district. Oklahoma City had 71,000 students in its school district in 1971, and within a decade over 30,000 white students had left. White flight and the Baby Bust meant that the district dropped to about 35,000 students. Forced busing ended in the elementary schools in 1985, by which time the district had about 20,000 white students and 15,000 black students. The U.S. Supreme Court lifted the desegregation order in 1991. By 2011, the OKC school district had rebuilt to 43,000 students, with over half of them being Hispanic.

Western Village Elementary struggled with declining enrollment and poor outcomes. It was facing closure in 1998 when INTEGRIS Health started an after-school program there, and it officially transformed the facility into Oklahoma’s first public elementary charter school in 2000. It was renamed Stanley Hupfeld Academy at Western Village in 2010.

That concludes my look back at my first home. I already did a series of three posts on the Windsor Hills neighborhood where I lived during junior high and high school:

• Windsor Hills Pre-History and Development
• Windsor Hills Layout and Shopping Center
• Windsor Hills Homes, Schools, and the Windsor District

One of these days the house in Bethany, where I lived while attending the first through sixth grades, will be resold. If I’m lucky, photos of it will make it into a real estate time machine, allowing me to revisit that home as well, which had a more complex history and layout than the contractor home my parents purchased in Western Village.

I don’t really miss my first neighborhood, as my memories are so fragmentary. However, earlier this year Wendy and I stopped in Oklahoma City on our way to Santa Fe, NM. We had lunch at Johnnie’s Charcoal Broiler on Britton Road, and I deliberately exited the Broadway Extension to drive west on Britton Road through the old downtown, half a mile south of Western Village. The sense of déjà vu was rather eerie, even after over a half-century.