American diners serve as the hub of any community wheel. PJs Corner Grill in Disney is no exception.
Purchased in 1979 from a friend, PJs owner Diana Owen has been capably running her business for 36 years. The grill stays hot from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. during the winter months and an incredible 7 to 11, seven days a week during the summer. Continue reading EPTOM Dam Run, Stop 5A: Disney – Diana Is Ready To Fish
Four key events set the stage for a perfect visit with Donna Kuek at the Grand River Dam Authority (GRDA) Ecosystems and Education Center in Langley. They were, in no specific order: Continue reading EPOTM Dam Run, Stop 4: Langley – Mayes County Field Notes
Larry Eby must have been a bus driver because he definitely took us to school. From the moment we walked into his jam packed “Corner Store” emporium, until we exited an hour later, class was in session and Mr. Eby taught us well.
Leaning casually against the glass cased counter, coffee in hand and
his dog Prince at his feet, our “social studies teacher” covered subjects deeply important to an Oklahoman reflecting on 73 years of change in Adair.
He opened with family history. When his eldest son was born (“a fifth generation”), “that child had 13 living grandparents.” 21 years later when his son’s eldest daughter was born, “she was again the fifth generation on both sides of the family.” Then 22 years later when her children were born, they were again the fifth generation on Larry’s side of the family. His eyes twinkled as he told us of his nine great-grandchildren.
It was evident while listening that family was important to Larry. His grandmother was Cherokee, and he and his wife still live on her Indian allotment land on an area known as Rock Creek.
The Works Progress Administration (WPA) had built a dam on that creek “around 1935, and it backed up a little lake for three-quarters of a mile, and below that dam was the best fishing hole in the country, because when the creek would get up, the fish would come up from the river but they couldn’t get over that dam and they’d pile up…and that’s where I grew up…fishin’…so that’s why that property is important to me.”
His outline moved to the theme of business. Larry lectured about the importance of hard work, details about local commerce and how downtowns look and feel completely different than times prior to the installation of toll roads. And, about the day when he realized he had worked hard enough and it was time to “close the store”:
“I had a convenience store right across the road there, where that car lot is…for 27 years and 8 months, which is almost 28 years (he chuckles). I had got to the point where I had run off most of the help, and it was just me and a woman who run this store. And I went down one morning to open the store, and the first 3 or 4 people that came in were – to say the least – not very nice.
And I stood there after that second or third one, whichever one was left, and I thought, ‘You know, I don’t need this anymore.’ And I just closed the door, I was completely stocked and everything, and never opened it again…practically gave the inventory away. That morning they all had a real bad attitude, and at that point in my life I didn’t want to listen to it….and I’ve got worse as I’ve got older about ‘not wantin’ to listen to it.'”
Another smile.
The topic of business was important to Larry. He had a grandfather who owned “a laundry there” in Adair. His life’s work was spent growing his business holdings, and he and his wife patiently paid for everything they owned in cash while they watched some of their friends suffer from the worries of owing money. “They’d get a new boat, or car…but I’ve slept like a baby every night of my life.”
Larry wrapped up his lecture by discussing the changes in the landscape and land ownership from his perspective:
“When I was young, the older folks lived on their homestead places, 160 acres, and there were 2-4 homes per section. Now their kids have sold off those homesteads into 5,10 and 20 acre plots, and there are trailer houses all over ’em, and there’s not any amount of land that people farm around here any more.
One thing I really love is to quail hunt. There used to be quail all over this country. But people have chopped up the land, and they pull up those old fence lines where the briars and brush served as protection for the quail, then they bulldoze the land, tearing up the native grasses,and plant their Bermuda or fescue in the dirt, and birds can’t make it on that. So the few that DO manage to survive, the hawk gets. I haven’t seen a covey of quail in years.”
I felt like we had been on a field trip without ever leaving the store. Pounds of Depression Glass reflected rainbow colors in Rachel’s eyes as she spent her “recess” walking down the aisles of Larry’s emporium. I looked for April and found her stroking the luxurious sheep hides, her brain calculating how much one would set her back if she spontaneously decided to take one home. Larry shared a story about purchasing a hurricane lamp for $15 and selling it for $200 the following day while our photographer and videographer wrestled with the urge to load the car up with his “inventory.”
School was out and we drove down the road with Larry’s stories in our heads. I had an inclination to go fishing and take steps to rebuild the quail population in Mayes County. Rachel was sharing a story about Larry’s wife happening upon a mother lode of Depression glass and how they brought it back to Oklahoma. Finishing her second official stop, April was beginning to grasp what our project was all about.
And on we traveled…to the next little town whose buildings were shorter, and businesses were almost non-existent, and we wondered what the area might have been like had toll roads never been built.
***
Notes: We skipped our publishing date last week because of a family death, and dedicate this particular post to Emma Lee Bennett who we covered a few years ago in a series called “One Voice on the Oklahoma Prairie.”
Here’s a link on cool Adair history. And, here’s an even better one. The Oklahoma Historical Society always wins against Wikipedia.
April apologizes for the “Strang” slide in the Adair movie above, and will change it as soon as she returns from Haiti.
Rachel really wants this lens if any philanthropic readers happen along and feel generous.
And, we’ll be rolling out a non-profit soon in order to help underwrite our expenses for this project. Otherwise, we’re all safe and doing just fine. ~ Peace, RDK
This is my favorite picture of Larry Eby, “social studies teacher” and owner of the Corner Store (wonder emporium) in Adair, OK.
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Every Point on the Map has never been as much about the towns in which people live, as it is about the people who live in the towns.
Our time with the Fleming family of Strang wholly exemplifies this philosophy. Their living room environment was intimate, warm, and thoughtful; bursts of occasional laughter were a delight.
The cloudy overcast day, however, seemed to temper the municipality’s mood as we traversed the diminishing town proper four or five times. I struggled while absorbing what remains of a formerly vibrant area through our car window vantage point. Strang seems as if “the town” somehow vanished mysteriously, while a random sampling of people remained – still connected to each other, but without a sustaining economy to support their lives. Continue reading EPOTM Dam Run, Stop 2: Strang – View from the Bridge
[Editor’s Note to Readers: Dear reader, we are currently in correspondence with Merlin Music. We received express permission to use the music in our Pryor Creek video from the manager of the artist. However, an outside agency may have purchased the rights to this music and they did not heed our letters for consideration to relinquish their copyright claim. This process has been ongoing for about two months. We hope to restore the video soon. Until then, we are choosing not to replace the video with other music but to go through this process of asserting the rights of artists and entities such as ourselves to collaborate. Thank you, Kelly Roberts, Editor, Red Dirt Chronicles 7/15/2016]
In about four weeks, Paul Lewis, photographer and ad builder at “The Paper” of Mayes County, won’t be in his downtown Pryor Creek office. Rather, he’ll be as close as his pass will allow to the Rocklahoma 2015 festival main stage, cheering on vocal bombast Lzzy Hale, lead singer of the power band Halestorm.
No doubt he’ll have more than her powerful vocals on his mind. Paul will most likely be decision-making about the best way to add a signed poster to his burgeoning memorabilia collection covering every square inch of his walls. And couch. And shelves.
Paul’s museum-like space was the first stop on our guided tour of The Paper’s historical workspace. The office walls sectioned off just enough square feet for the entire staff of three: Paul, who clearly loves rock n’ roll (as well as a variety of other music); Andrea “Andie” Finney who sells their ads and manages the billing; and, Terry Aylward. Aylward “write[s] the stories and [does] all the book work.”
And Aylward was the person we were there to see. Raised in the Kansas City area, he graduated from the University of Missouri school of journalism in 1977 and took the first job he was offered at an entry-level salary of $150 per week. That job was working for “The Daily Times” in Pryor Creek.
For twenty years he worked steadily, many times foregoing his vacation on behalf of the news business. He met his wife in Pryor, raised a family, became a part of the community. Things changed radically, however, as a large outside company bought the Daily (now known as simply The Times) and 50 other newspapers across Oklahoma in 1997.
Overnight, the business environment in which Aylward thrived turned from chasing the news and managing a paper, to meetings…and more meetings. The process became heavy, burdensome.
“Everything [in Pryor] was the same, but in this town of 9,000 people we were always meeting about what we were going to do…instead of just doing it.”
By 1999, Aylward and Lewis left “The Times” and set out on their own with a competitive set of ideas to help launch “The Paper” of Mayes County. They offered free classifieds, free obituaries, and free engagement or wedding announcements. They re-focused on their community stories and resisted filler text of outside or national news.
In other words, they were “sticking it to The Man.” And it’s been working for 16 years.
“So we don’t have any meetings. We don’t have any policies. You know, if I need Paul I just holler, and Andie may answer me because she thinks I’m talking to her, or whatever. That’s the way we…you know, we just…take care of business.”
This business model is all-encompassing. The three of them only take one week of vacation each year, generally during a five-week month in the summer so they can bill for four weeks and keep the cash flow consistent.
Those two pivotal moments, accepting the job in Pryor Creek and starting his own paper, are defining in Aylward’s life. The decisions were both leaps of faith, and commitments to his craft. And through a newspaper man’s lens, he’s witnessed his community processes for almost forty years.
“There’s really no REAL news in a small town,” he said with a chuckle. More seriously, he followed, “The tornado of ’42 was huge, and then there was the Girl Scout murders, [that] happened in Locust Grove which is about 20 miles away. Now the campground’s closed, and I think it’s farmland. But that’s really the only two that would be considered…that ‘the New York Times is coming to cover it.'”
Those two stories were big. Huge, actually. The 1942 tornado took a booming Pryor Creek metropolis down to ruins. Moving directly down main street, the twister took off the second and third levels of many of their buildings, and killed 70 people.
Discussing that tragedy, Aylward later told me through e-mail correspondence that “a tornado has not revisited Pryor since 1942 because an Indian medicine man went west and drove a stake into the ground to split future threats to the north and south. Believe it or not, as you watch the TV news reports of storms heading our way, they always seem to split and strike to the north and south if they strike at all.”
And of course, the Girl Scout murders were so big their mention still solemnifies the faces of Oklahomans today.
Conversations in the offices of The Paper echo slightly. The building itself has many stories. Children used to run to the stoop, then up through the halls as an after school play activity. At one point in history, their building was known as “Robber’s Roost.” Even walking through the halls now feels as if it would be imperative to locate an office there if you moved to Pryor, but at the same time you might expect turn of the century ghosts to treat you with occasional visits.
Settling into our discussion, a few topics were mentioned that help define both Aylward and his job.
Requests to “not print that” – any pressure from the locals?
“You know, we’re always asked to ‘not print that,’ and you can’t. You just have to print it. Especially people who don’t want their name in the paper for when they get a DUI or something…they’re going to lose their job. You just have to say, ‘Look, if you do it, your name’s going to be in the paper.’ I tell ’em , ‘My kids have been in the paper. So, I’m not holding you out.’ And, they know my kids…[then they respond], ‘oh, yeah, I remember…’
And government-wise, sometimes they’ll say, ‘Oh, they don’t need to know all that..’ But it’s a lot better now, that we’ve been on our own. They just accept what we say because they know, ‘these guys…they’re crazy, they don’t have to answer to anybody.’ Down there (at The Times), they can call people, and go over their heads…but here, it’s beautiful, because it’s just us. And Paul and Andi don’t really care about the news part (he chuckles), so it’s just me. And the community has given up trying to get me not to print things.”
Caricatures and/or Characters in Pryor Creek?
Caricatures – “Oh, there’s tons of ’em. The first one that pops into my mind is the mayor. When you see today’s paper…he’s running for re-election. However, he goes down to the park, squirms himself into this little bitty kid’s toy, for a picture just to promote his election…with the ‘new toy.’ He’s unbelievable. He’s in a race for the first time this year with a retired fire chief. [The current mayor’s] philosophy has always been, ‘If the library employee gets a 5% raise, the fireman gets a 5% raise. There’s no difference. And [the fire department] thinks they should get more because they pay union dues…”
Characters – “Carl Curry, another former mayor here…the thing that stands out to me about Carl was, he’s born and raised in Pryor, and he’s the mayor, and the city’s thinking about having ‘Martin Luther King’ as a holiday. Now, he’s a WWII guy…and he breaks the tie of the city council vote to allow our Martin Luther King holiday.
Well, that did not go over very well with his generation. And he said, still today, life-long friends of his don’t speak to him because of that. But he told me the reason he did that was when he was a little kid, he remembers a Troop Train stopping, that railroad’s gone through here forever, stopping and getting out was a total Black platoon. And they double-timed down to ma-whatevers cafe, and they had to go in the back.
And as a little kid, Carl thought, ‘These are OUR soldiers. Why did they have to do that?’ So he said, that’s the picture he had when he voted to break the tie. He kind of righted that wrong of something he saw as a kid he knew wasn’t right. And we still celebrate Martin Luther King holiday today in Pryor Creek.
I think there was a survey in the Tulsa World stating that 90% of Oklahomans believe their community is prejudice one way or another. And then 80% believe that it doesn’t keep everybody from achieving the American Dream. Which is…kind of the comical part of that deal.”
I personally appreciated our discussion with Aylward a great deal. We waxed philosophical about whether or not removing adults with developmental or intellectual disabilities from the community helps or hurts everyone involved. We discussed various areas our EPOTM team was preparing to visit and received pointers on where to investigate. We learned about how Google has poured dollars into their community the way Pryor Creek’s water is pouring over the servers to keep things running smoothly for the internet giant.
I think I wanted his NPR baseball cap. I know I wanted his office space.
“What’s one of the things that makes your team laugh?” I asked.
“Every city council meeting,” he responded with a chuckle.
***
And we laughed too. Thanks, Terry, for the 50 copies of the The Paper, for your graciousness and tour of your building, and for helping us understand a little better our Pryor Creek point on the map.
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All photo credits: Rachel J Apple (except the photo below this line)
Video credit: April Kirby
