Destination: Bartlesville, Oklahoma 

Our first stop was to the Woody Guthrie museum in downtown Tulsa.  There is an entire city block dedicated to outdoor music performances across the street from the museum.

 As usual, we learned a lot about someone we thought we knew.  I only knew about his most famous song, “This Land is My Land” but he wrote over 3,000 songs.

 He was also an artist and a poet.  Here’s a painting he did of Abraham Lincoln.

The museum did a great job of presenting Woody Guthrie’s life and his talents in a beautiful venue with lots of displays to listen to and experience.  Over 10,000 items are archived in this museum and his most used and famous instruments…here’s a couple…

When we were leaving the museum, we were stopped by a local television reporter who wanted to interview us for our opinions about the flu and COVID-19 and how we are dealing with both.  We don’t know if we made the news or not.

 Then we were off to Bartlesville for a tour of the Frank Lloyd Wright Price Tower. This is where we are staying tonight…a high rise tower on the Oklahoma prairie !  We have a two story room on the 13th and 14th floors. It was built in 1956 and is quite an example of Wright’s fortitude in creating what must have been fun for him…but somewhat challenging to live/work in.

He took his inspiration from the form of a tree…(a little hard for me to follow that, but I’ll buy it)

                                                              

                                                                    lobby

FLW called this “the tree that escaped the crowded forest” because he had designed this to be built in New York City but the Great Depression hit and he was unable to build it.  So 25 years later he got Mr. Price to build it.  Mr. Price asked for a 3 story building but FLW gave him plans for a 22 story building. They came to a compromise with it being a 19 story building.  Mr. Price also asked for the cost to be about $300,000 but it ended up costing $2.1 million!  One would think that would just about ruin a relationship but, nope, the Price family had him build another house in Flagstaff, AZ and one of the sons had him build a very nice house here in Bartlesville which is privately owned and impossible to see from the highway.

                                    Upstairs bedroom

                                                                Downstairs

All metal trim and accents were made of copper and on the inside it still looks like new copper…on the outside everything is a verdigris. FLW knew he wouldn’t live long enough to see the change the copper would take, but now we do.

After we enjoyed the Tom Mix museum in Dewey, we came back to eat at Copper, our hotel’s restaurant where we had a wonderful meal outside on the patio.