Tulsa and Oklahoma City

We hit a few of the "photo ops" that we didn't get last night in Tulsa, then drove downtown to see the Woody Guthrie Museum and the Bob Dylan Center.

Our funky room at the Campbell Hotel, Tulsa

The house where The Outsiders was filmed

The Cosmic Cowboy at Buck's Atomic Curios

The Woody Guthrie Museum was very well done. A guide gave us a half hour talk about the song This Land Is Your Land, convincing us that it wasn't the kumbaya campfire song we thought we learned in kindergarten, but really a radical response to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" protesting the unequal treatment between rich and poor and a land that was not really "for you and me". I also found out that Woody and his wife lived for a while in Beach Haven New York, a post-war housing development build by Fred Trump. On display were several journal entries Woody wrote about Fred calling him out for racist housing policies and the way he ripped off veterans and took advantage of their GI bill benefits. He even wrote a song titled "Trump Made Me a Tramp". Man, he pegged that family.

This Machine Kills Fascists

Trump Made Me a Tramp

Original lyrics to This Land is Your Land, and the original title God Blessed America

The Bob Dylan Center was fantastic, I only wish we left for time for it. As a matter of fact, there was so much to see in Tulsa I'd love to come back again. We didn't even get to visit the memorials and museums in Greenwood section, site of the 1921 race massacre.

Display at the Bob Dylan Center

A Bob Dylan painting that really struck me. He's an excellent visual artist in addition to his music

But we were running late, so we hit the road again. Our next major stop was in Oklahoma City where we visited the memorial for the 165 people who died in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P Murrah federal building. The memorial consists of a large reflecting pond where McVeigh parked his truck on the morning of April 19th, and site of the building is a lawn with 165 chairs, arranged into rows that represented the floors that the victims were on when the bomb went off. There were many smaller chairs, representing the children. At the other end of the reflecting pond is the 9:01 gate and the 9:03 gate. The 9:01 gate represents the innocence of the victims right before the detonation at 9:02, and 9:03 represents the healing that started immediately after. Memorials like this have a big emotional impact on me, and this one hit me hard.

Original foundation of the Alfred P Murrah building

"The Witness Tree" that was there across the street when the blast went off

The fence that surrounded the site during recovery where many people left tributes and remembrances

Reflecting Pool and the 9:01 Gate

9:03 Gate

165 chairs

We rejoined Rt66 where we had left it and hit several more roadside attractions and photo ops on our way the Weatherby OK and the Travel Inn Motel, a cheap and cheerful place right on Rt66. I went downtown to do a load of Laundry and we retired after a full and emotional day.