Bartlesville, OK

After Leaving the Woody Guthrie Museum Sandy and I walked up the street to the spot that the Tulsans call the Center of the Universe.  It is a place on a pedestrian bridge surrounded by waist high walls and a few buildings, that when you speak there is a strange amplifying echo and you can actually feel the vibration of your voice coming back up through the soles of your shoes.  An interesting phenomena, but I don’t think it was really the true center of the universe. I think that must be some place else.  

Sandy standing at the center of the Universe

                                         From there we headed to Bartlesville.

After learning all about the Price Tower we headed up to Dewey, OK to visit the Tom Mix Museum.  Tom Mix was the first cowboy movie star.  He was very much like the Clint Eastwood Character “Bronco Billy”, that is a man can be what he wants to be.  Mix grew up in Pennsylvania, but he was always enamored with the cowboy life.  So, he became one, kinda.  Mix was never one to understate his achievements, even if he never did them in the first place.  He talked of his service with Teddy Roosevelt as a Rough Rider and how he had been wounded in the fight.  Never happened!  That is not to say he wasn’t wounded in other ways, as a boy while working on trick shooting, he shot himself.  Also, when his third wife found that he had been regularly spending time at a house of ill repute she took a gun and started shooting up Tom’s Duisenberg automobile.  Tom told her to stop so she quit shooting at the Duisenberg and started shooting at him.  Wounded again.  In the end Tom did not die by the gun, but was done in by a piece of luggage hitting his head.  Still with all this in the background he defined the heroic cowboy as the romantic lead in so many movies to follow.  The town of Dewey has his museum as he spent a few years of his life here and even did a stint as a deputy sheriff.

And the luggage that done him in

After dinner we were walking in the neighbor hood around the Price Tower and came across the Bartlesville Civic Center, designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright.  This building was unique and I believe that FLW would approve.  Even better for Sandy and I was that when we went in there was an event taking place.  A young women in charge, upon finding out that we were from out of town invited us to go in as a guest of Bartlesville.  We thought we would be watching some local talent.  She found two seats for us and we were amazed at how well the folk trio on the stage sounded.  It turns out these guys were two members of the Kingston Trio, and one from the Diamonds.  They now call themselves the Folk Legend Trio.  This was a really good concert with guys singing many of the folk songs that the Kingston Trio made famous.  Sandy and I have always been very lucky when we travel.