Latest / The Dry Line Podcast / OKC’s Past is Criminally Underrated, Part I with Robert Fightmaster

Transcript

OKC’s Past is Criminally Underrated, Part I with Robert Fightmaster · The Dry Line Podcast

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to The Dry Line Podcast,
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: OKC's purveyor of culture,
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: where we each week break down OKC sports, weather, food, art, and culture at large.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your podcast host, Ryan Fightmaster, editor-in-chief of The Dry Line.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: A few Saturday nights ago, I was driving east on I-44 approaching the pin exit.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Reflexively, my eyes shot out the passenger side window.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Looking for Coit's Root Beer stand at my grandfather,
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: David Scott, who managed the Northwest 40th and Penn location for over 40 years.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: It was a perfect summer Saturday evening.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Hot, but not sweltering, and everything was tinted orange by the setting sun.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: A perfect night for a root beer float and a car show.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Something I'd enjoyed for most of my childhood.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Closing in on the exit, I glimpsed.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Over the guardrails of the highway, what now sits on the corner of Northwest 40th and Penn?
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: An automated car wash.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Damn, I thought.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: God, I was sobered up pretty quick.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: I miss Coits and their car shows and their Christmas trees.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: And man,
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: I wish I could go back and feel what it felt like to be inside of one
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: of those summer nights just one more time with my grandpa.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: That night, I made two calls.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: The first, to my grandfather.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: I asked him if I could interview him about his 81 years of OKC life experience and wisdom.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: I published that interview today, this week, on The Dry Line Substack.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: I honestly do not know when I will laugh harder and call it work.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's linked in the show notes.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: His stories made me even more proud to be a Southsider.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: The second call was to my dad.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: I asked him if he wanted to do an OKC nostalgia podcast,
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  SPEAKER_00: a decade by decade breakdown of the things and places we miss the most around here.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what this is, starting with the 1980s and then rolling through the decades.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's into the 2020s.
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  SPEAKER_00: Bars, restaurants, sporting events, venues, parks, shopping centers, malls.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Gotta give a huge thank you to my dad,
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Robert Fightmaster, for coming researched and prepared for the show.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: His insights surprised me.
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  SPEAKER_00: There were things he talked about that I've never heard him talk about before.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: So it was really cool.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: It was a ton of fun.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: So much fun, in fact, that we decided to split our conversations into two parts.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: The second part of our conversation is an analysis of the OK Gazette's recent Best
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: of OKC Awards.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: We say who was deserving, who wasn't, who got snubbed.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Then we ask if OKC's past,
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  SPEAKER_00: what we talked about in today's show, was actually better than its present.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Get our answers to that dangerous question when the part two podcast drops on Saturday morning.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening, y'all.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: As always, into the OKC time machine we go with my dad, Robert Fightmaster.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: First podcast talking about Oklahoma City for us.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: Most definitely.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: First one about our beloved city here.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: So what do you think about Oak City instead of OKC?
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: I had this discussion with Ben today at work.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: I know it's caught on as a national...
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Moniker for us.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: When you watch SportsCenter, everybody refers to Oklahoma City as Oak City.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: I hate it so much because it's like I think of Oak the Wood.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: How do you spell Oak City?
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Is it O-A-K?
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: And nobody locally calls it Oak City.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's terrible.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: So you feel the same way?
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'm kind of indifferent.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: I hadn't really thought about it until today.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: So is this something that just popped into my head just now?
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: Is it OKC?
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: Is it Oak City?
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: It also sounds a lot like Elk City.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: Shout out to our friend Justin.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I don't know.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to keep going OKC.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's just been saying it for way too long to change that up now.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Oklahoma City is a complete name.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: OKC is perfect.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
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  SPEAKER_00: I don't think we need Oak City.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's like an in-betweener.
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  SPEAKER_00: We already have a long name and we have a short name.
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  SPEAKER_00: We don't need like a middle name.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
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  SPEAKER_00: I think we're set.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: So, all right, Dad,
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  SPEAKER_00: our mission today,
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: in preparation for this discussion that we're going to have,
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  SPEAKER_00: we both made lists,
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: which were basically stuff we love that no longer exists in Oklahoma City.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: We did not share our list because we wanted to surprise each other with what we came up with.
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  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: And you were born in 1969.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry to give away your age.
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  SPEAKER_00: So your wheelhouse of OKC expertise opens up really after 1980.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: I was born in 1989.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: So mine begins around Y2K, though I'm not afraid to mix it up, talk about some 1990s.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: But for me, most of my expertise is going to come after 2000.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: So we've got like 1980 to 2020 covered.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: 40 years of OKC experience.
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  SPEAKER_00: Everything before that is not going to necessarily be our ballpark.
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  SPEAKER_00: So I know we're going to miss a huge swath of stuff.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: Oklahoma City has a really strange, rich history, and we're not going to get to all that.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: And we were both suburb kids, right?
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: Correct.
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  SPEAKER_01: I didn't go to the core much when I was a kid.
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  SPEAKER_01: Frankly, there was not a lot going on.
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  SPEAKER_01: There was no brick town.
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  SPEAKER_01: Downtown was not a place that you went unless you were going to a basketball game or anything.
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  SPEAKER_01: A concert of the myriad.
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  SPEAKER_01: There was no restaurants down there.
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  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, a lot of my experiences in the 70s were not in Oklahoma City.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: They were in Moore or Norman or Edmond because I had grandparents in those places.
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  SPEAKER_00: Right, because Urban Renewal knocked many of those city buildings out from 1970 through...
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever the Bricktown Ballpark opened, which would have been what, like 96, 97?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: 98.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: It was 98.
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  SPEAKER_01: 1998.
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  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Fun fact,
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  SPEAKER_00: urban renewal,
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  SPEAKER_00: and I don't know if you knew this,
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  SPEAKER_00: I found this out in our research for this,
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  SPEAKER_00: that the whole reason they knocked out a lot of those buildings around where
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  SPEAKER_00: the Myriad Gardens is now was because the plan was to bring in a Galleria Mall.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
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  SPEAKER_00: And it never came in.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: I did not know that.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: And just the funding dried up.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: The architect, I forgot his name.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's in Boomtown.
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  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, that was the original plan.
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  SPEAKER_00: Was to create that Houston and Dallas shopping experience.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: Would that have worked in Oklahoma City downtown?
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: Probably not.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: There weren't enough people in downtown at that point.
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  SPEAKER_00: I don't see it.
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  SPEAKER_01: We'd already had the urban sprawl where there was not a lot of,
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  SPEAKER_01: besides Heritage Hills and Mesa Park and those areas,
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  SPEAKER_01: there weren't a lot of people living in that area.
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  SPEAKER_01: They would have supported it.
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  SPEAKER_01: And again, there wasn't a reason to go to downtown unless that's where you worked.
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  SPEAKER_01: I remember going down there.
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  SPEAKER_00: Everybody had already spread at the suburbs by that point, right?
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, mainly.
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  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't a place to go on the weekends.
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  SPEAKER_01: There wasn't a lot of draw to go to downtown OKC.
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  SPEAKER_01: Even concerts.
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  SPEAKER_01: There was concerts at Lloyd Noble.
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  SPEAKER_01: That was a big concert venue when I was a kid.
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  SPEAKER_00: Besides the myriad.
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  SPEAKER_01: Right.
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  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
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  SPEAKER_01: And there wasn't other things to do in downtown OKC.
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  SPEAKER_01: When we get to the list,
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  SPEAKER_01: you'll kind of see that a lot of the things that you did were on the outskirts.
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  SPEAKER_01: Outside the urban core.
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  SPEAKER_01: Outside the urban core.
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  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
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  SPEAKER_00: Which is crazy because the city's changed a lot.
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  SPEAKER_00: But so accordingly to our goal of listing all the stuff that we missed,
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  SPEAKER_00: we sorted it by restaurants,
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  SPEAKER_00: bars, experiences, which was exporting events, places, various other.
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  SPEAKER_00: By the decade.
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  SPEAKER_00: So that's how we're doing this.
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  SPEAKER_00: And we're going to begin in the 80s and conclude with, well, like yesterday.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because there's some stuff recently that's gone out that I'm going to miss
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  SPEAKER_01: a lot.
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  SPEAKER_00: But it must also be noted that our list will have a regional flair.
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  SPEAKER_00: We are Southsiders, as you mentioned.
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  SPEAKER_00: Both of us grew up in the suburbs.
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  SPEAKER_00: You're a Moore Lion.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm a Westmore Jaguar.
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  SPEAKER_00: Go Jags.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: Thus, we cannot necessarily speak to the goings-on of Edmund over the last 50 years
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  SPEAKER_00: because we weren't classy enough.
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  SPEAKER_00: To get into their restaurants and bars growing up.
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  SPEAKER_00: It just is what it is.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: And after we're done with our nostalgic walk down memory lane,
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  SPEAKER_00: we're going to stack up the past with this most recent Best of OKC awards
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  SPEAKER_00: and winners that got released by the OK Gazette this week.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: And we're going to give you some thoughts on those awards too.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: And that's actually still a printable document, a gazette.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Which is amazing.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: And they cover culture in a way that is not represented anywhere else online or on social media.
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  SPEAKER_00: So everybody, support your local OK Gazette.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: There is a coffee near you.
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  SPEAKER_00: Just go search for it.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's out there.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: Go to one of these restaurants that's still open and grab one.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: There are plenty.
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  SPEAKER_00: I picked a few up this week.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: So we are going to start with the 1980s.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: So this is sort of a 70s and 80s mix.
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  SPEAKER_01: Mainly that they came into existence in the 70s or in my memory or my pattern of going there.
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  SPEAKER_01: And then went into the 80s.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: Not sure exactly when some of these things kind of lost their flair.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm going to start with what was the mecca of Southside, South Oklahoma City.
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  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: you kind of talked about that we were talking about having a Galleria type thing
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: in downtown.
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  SPEAKER_01: Well, this was actually supposed to happen in Moore, America.
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  SPEAKER_01: And Moore didn't want it.
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  SPEAKER_01: So Crossroads Mall...
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
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  SPEAKER_01: Ended up at 74th and I-35.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: At one point, it was supposed to be in Moore, actually, Moore proper.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so they moved a little further north, and that's where Crossroads Mall landed.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
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  SPEAKER_01: I did not know that.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: So why was Crossroads Mall special?
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I know there's Quail Springs, but, man, it was state of the art at the time.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: It had a Le Mans, which was a game room slash bumper car place indoors.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you went to the mall to go to Le Mans
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: because you'd spend hours there playing air hockey.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: Awesome name, too.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: It was cool.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: Le Mans.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: I think there may be some still in some malls here and there.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: And then they had this place called Farrell's inside the mall.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: And it was Farrell's Ice Cream Parlor.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it was the place for birthday parties.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: It was, it was awesome.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
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  SPEAKER_01: a group of your friends,
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: if you could,
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: if your parents could afford Ferrells,
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: because this is the seventies and early eighties in Oklahoma, it was very difficult.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: But you,
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: when you left Ferrells,
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: you always left with a massive,
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: like we were talking about like three inch jawbreaker.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: You couldn't get it in your mouth, right, as a kid.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: So you basically took it home, wrapped it in saran wrap, had it in your refrigerator.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's where we put it.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: I guess it was hard candy, so you didn't have to.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: But you'd work on that thing for weeks to try to finally get
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: where you could actually break it and eat the whole thing.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: I may have it for a month.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: But Farrell's was the place which made Crossroads Magic.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: And you had your Orange Julius.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: There was a hot dog place with amazing liquid cheese.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: But it was a great place to hang out as a kid.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then some of the stores left over the years.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: When did that attrition start at Crossroads Mall?
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: I remember going in the 90s and Orange Julius was still there.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: We would do Haunt the Mall.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember as a little kid going and doing the Halloweens there.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I always thought Crossroads was really cool.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: The architecture was pretty interesting.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: It looked very much like it was built in the 70s.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: With that.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it's still all there.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: It still looks that way.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: For anybody that wants to see it.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's empty now, right?
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's nothing going on there.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: They tried to kind of repurpose it with what they call it.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: It was Playa del Mer?
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: Playa del Mer?
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: Mayor?
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Plaza Mayor.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: Plaza Mayor.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that kind of gave a little bit of life for a little bit, but I think it's pretty much gone.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: There was a rumor a couple years ago that they were going to put
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: an indoor football league inside there.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: Whoa.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like a football team of some sort we were going to get,
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: and that, yeah, it was going to be inside Crossroads Mall.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: They were going to repurpose it into a stadium.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: I just can't imagine what those costs would have been.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's got this big cavernous area in the middle.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it did.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: It had that huge area.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: It was like an atrium, right?
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: But I think the revival of Penn Square,
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: when they made Penn Square,
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: you know, Penn Square used to be an open mall, and they covered it.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: So that kind of drew a lot of people to go there.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it just,
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: the location,
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: it just was not a draw for a lot of people that weren't from South Oklahoma City.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Norman had their mall.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then you just saw it decline and there was no reason to go there anymore.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: Something at Crossroads Mall that I remember going to a lot with you as a kid
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: that I thought was so cool was Jumbo Sports.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: I could not remember.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: You remember Jumbo Sports?
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: I do, yeah.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: So in my head, I was like, there was a sporting goods store there.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: What was it?
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: It was Jumbo Sports.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't actually in Crossroads.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: That's where I got really nice
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: football equipment.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where I'd get my cleats every year.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like younger than 10.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: So that had to have been like mid-90s.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's where I bought all the baseballs for our baseball team.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: But it was just outside the mall.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: They'd build a whole bunch of freestanding buildings.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's where the Dove Sciences Academy is.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: I knew there was something.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: I couldn't remember what the name it was.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: So Jumbo Sports.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: It was a great place.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's where I went.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Regal Cinema.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: Regal Cinema.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there were two movie theaters.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: There was two theaters up front.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Then there was the dollar movie theater that used to be the main movie theater
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: that was more to the east.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: That whole area just dried up.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: Your mom and I saw Ghost at that one.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: Not the Regal, the other one.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: At the smaller one, yeah.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: And we had to leave because of a bomb threat in the middle of the movie.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: It was not a bomb.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing happened.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: But they asked us all
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: to evacuate.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: It was kind of scary.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: Pretty scary.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I think we had to rent it later at Blockbuster, things that aren't here anymore.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so moving on from Crossroads Mall,
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: there used to be a retailer headquartered in Oklahoma City called TGNY.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: I just came up talking with my grandpa earlier this week.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's a precursor to Walmart.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: Basically, it was the Walmart of my age.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: There was one in Moore.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: There was one in South Oklahoma City.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: Almost every small town.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: It was a regional.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: It went to Kansas, Missouri, all kinds of places.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: Just the Midwest, probably?
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: Mainly Midwest, yeah.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: In 1986, it sold.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: They sold out and they closed the headquarters and then it kind of just went away over time.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: But it was the TGNY.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: No one ever knew what it stood for.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: Toys, gadgets, and yo-yos.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: It was Thompson.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: Gilligas or something and Young, I think were the names of the three original owners.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: But it was kind of a big staple because that's where you went to get,
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: you know, there's no Walmarts.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's where you get your back to school supplies was TGNY.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: They had clothes.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't have as many tools as like a Walmart has or a Sears or something like that.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: Or an auto department.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: No, but it was games, clothes, school supplies, that kind of thing.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: Pretty cool place.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: And it has a pharmacy too.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it has no relation to the TGNY frozen yogurt.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: Places that were around.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: There was one in Lloyd Noble when I was a kid.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: Was that TGNY or was it T...
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: The country's best yogurt.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: TCBY.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: TCBY.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: It was TCBY.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: Very close.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: I had to think about what that acronym stood for, the country's best yogurt.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for correcting me.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: So then another one, this is definitely a Southside thing.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: So people lived in South Oklahoma City, but people would drive forever.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: And when I looked this up, it was funny because people, I know where it used to be.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: And some people have it in the wrong location, but it was called Gulf Acres.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: And it was on 119th Street,
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: in between Penn and May,
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: had a driving range, nine-hole par-three golf course, batting cages, and mini golf.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know it was there now?
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: Fisher Elementary School?
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: Fisher Elementary School.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: No way.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: Because that creek where Troy Ross's old neighborhood was,
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: there's a creek that kind of goes through Redbud.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: Redbud Estates or whatever?
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: That neighborhood?
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: I remember picnicking there with the church group because our church was on 119th
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: or 12th Street and more.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember picnicking near that creek.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: But that's where you went to...
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't go there a lot because you had to go down a gravel road,
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: not very great road at the time.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe Village Green was over here.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: There was no other neighborhoods.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: These were all dirt roads.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, these were dirt roads.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: 119th and 134th were all dirt.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: But Gulf Acres was a pretty amazing place.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of had everything that you wanted in a little community,
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: a little picnic area in Fun Park.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: Nowadays...
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: It seems like all of the Celebration Station-like things like Main Event
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: and Andretti's, everything keeps moving.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: Inside.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's moving inside now, but everything has always been on the city perimeter.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just the perimeter of all that has just continued to expand.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like Hay Day had there, which I've heard that they're closing actually.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: They are, Turnpike Authority.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: Because of the Turnpike Authority.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, that's where it was.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's where it was at at the perimeter then, and then it got gobbled up by...
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: New developments.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, if you think about it too, land cost, right?
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: You try to put something like that because it was big.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it had all that stuff, the nine hole, the driving range.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's a really pretty section of land too.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: At one point they had, I think they had go-karts too.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: Did I have that on the list?
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think they had go-karts too.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: I remember that.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: So you're talking about it had that.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: So it went from Fisher Elementary all the way north almost to 104th probably, right?
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: So think about how much land that would cost.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: So if you try to put something like that in today and you're trying to put it in the core...
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: Oh.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: Just the land costs itself are just going to be astronomical.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: So that's why you see those things in suburbs.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: And why you see them right along the highway.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because the land cost is cheaper.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: Main events right off of Kirkpatrick, Andretti's.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: So another one that I only went there a few times as a kid,
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: and this is probably one
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: that maybe your grandfather brought up is Spring Lake Amusement Park.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: I've heard about Spring Lake a lot in my life, and I have no idea what Spring Lake is.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: It closed in 1981, apparently.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: I remember going there probably in 1980.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, so you remember going there?
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: I went there with my sister for some reason.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: We went there with some friends on a Saturday.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: Where was it located at?
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: Basically just west of the zoo.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: There's Spring Lake Technical School there now.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's right there at, I guess it's probably 46.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: To Lincoln Park.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: On the west side.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: Directly west of the Zoo Amphitheater.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: So it's in that area.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's down the hill from the Zoo Amphitheater, actually.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a little closer to 36th than the Zoo Amphitheater.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: there's a neighborhood
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: called Spring Lake Estates or something that's right off
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: that road that you turn into Remington Park.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: But it is a pretty cool place.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: They had, you know, like an old wooden roller coaster that was kind of their big thing.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then, of course, you know, it closed.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: And then we were left with just Frontier City, which Frontier City is great.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: But this Frontier City is pretty far out of the way, especially back then.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: It was quite a drive.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: So Spring Lake was pretty cool.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: But at one point in time, there was...
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: A side note, too, real quick about Frontier City.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I did a whole podcast about Frontier City a couple weeks ago.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: You would not believe how controversial it is.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: To say that Frontier City is a good time.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: People don't like it?
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: I got roasted.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm still getting roasted for saying that Frontier City was fun.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: People were saying I'm paid by Frontier City to put those comments out there.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: People were genuinely upset with me for saying it was fun still.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's not universal.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, what are your expectations?
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: If you're having a good time and you want to go ride some rides and just kind
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: of flash back to being a kid and enjoy losing your stomach on a ride or something,
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: hey, whatever.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: What's better than Frontier City?
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: They got four roller coasters.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that bad.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's like $35 to get in.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I was going to say.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's like $35.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: Go to Disney for $300 and tell me that Frontier City is not a good value for
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: a Saturday night in the fall or something.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we used to go there for, they had haunted houses there.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if they still do.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: They still do.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: Friday night's still a big deal.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: They used to have foam pits.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: Foam pit dance parties whenever I was in middle school.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: It would be cool to do the log right into a foam pit.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: Pretty cool.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: That would be awesome.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think I told you they have a bar now right next to the log ride.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: A bar.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: A bar in the lagoon that is a part of the log ride.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: Modern day amusement parks.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: Throw in some alcohol.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: More free advertising.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: Cheap margaritas and really tall glasses and you're set.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, $22 a piece.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: So this is the one where I was going to throw you for a loop.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: So the 80s, again, I was a child of the 70s, teenager in the 80s.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: We had teen dance clubs in Oklahoma City.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: Teen dance clubs?
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: You had to be 15 to get in.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: And you pretty much didn't go there if you were over 21 because they served no alcohol.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: I vaguely remember this from...
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like 2005-ish times.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: There were three big ones that I can remember.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: And we would go there,
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: me and my buddies,
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: and you'd see the guys from Midwest City,
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: like some of the bombers that we didn't really get along with from our school
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: for more.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: We would see some of those guys there.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: So you got in a little trouble maybe.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: But one of them was called Gators.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: That was the big one.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then there was Quicksilver's, which was in more Bethany.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: So Gators was on like 50th and Meridian, so in the PC area.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then you had,
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: like I said,
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: Quicksilver's, which was more Bethany, like 10th and Council or something.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: So you had to drive a pretty good way.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: Pretty good drive.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so we'd all load
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: up in our cars,
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: you know, our Camaros or whatever we had, our Monte Carlos.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: And then there was one on Northeast Expressway called Cafe Exito.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: And it was like two story.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: I went there a couple of times with some friends and your mom.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: She was with me on one of those trips.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway,
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: so those teen dance clubs were probably not something that you had when you were
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: in high school or junior high.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: We did not have that.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: We did have these specific events where I don't know who
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: the party planning company was, but they would rent a gym.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: You remember off Indian Hills?
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: In I-35, there was that basketball slash indoor soccer place.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what it is now.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think it might be a church now.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's over there.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe gone now.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe torn down.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: Valuable.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: Turn back authority now.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: Took it, I'm sure.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's gone.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: How many of my memories are gone?
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: Based on the Turnpike Authority's imminent domain.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: The Death Star, the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: So much money.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: $20 to go to Tulsa.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: $21 to go to Tulsa now.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: Back and forth.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's crazy.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah,
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: that building,
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: they used to do these like one Friday night,
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: these like Friday night 18 or like 15 and up party things.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: It might have been like 12 and up.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: It was...
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even remember, but it was kind of like what you were talking about.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: It was awesome.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: But no, we didn't have standalone bars or clubs, basically, you could go to.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: But I like the names of those.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: Quicksilvers, Gators, very 80s names.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: And Cafe Exito.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: And they had a commercial that was all over KJ 103.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember it was like, exit, exitos, exit, exitos.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, it was just in your head.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: I doubt that KJ 103 has the cachet that it used to.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: But whenever you were in middle school or grade school,
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: listening to KJ 103,
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: whatever they were talking about was what you should be doing
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: for your summer nights, whatever.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: It was like the coolest thing on earth, whatever it was that they were talking about.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like I can remember one summer, all they did was advertise.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: This Hootie and the Blowfish concert, it was like 97 up at Frontier City.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's all you could think about was like the KJ ads.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, here's the question.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: Was there any other radio station that really had that?
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: Was there an alternative to KJ-103?
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: There was Wild 97.9 whenever I was growing up.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: But that came on later and it was edgy.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: Gotcha.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: That was the edgy radio station.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: That played Eminem around here, which was a big deal.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, Eminem.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: That was controversial.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, so KJ-103 came aboard.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: I don't remember there being anything.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: It was like the early 80s.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: And before that, we had two radio stations.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: The Cat, which was rock, and 96.1 was the rock station.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, it was a rock station.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: It was a rock station.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't country.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: It was not country.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: So those two were the kind of two competing.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: And then you got KJ that was kind of more geared toward pop music.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: The pop.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: That was like the Michael Jackson era.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: Funny thing,
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: when 96.1 turned to 96.1 KXY country,
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: I believe it was 24 Hours,
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: they played Nothing But You're the Reason God Made Oklahoma,
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: which was a country song of the 80s.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: And they played it over on a loop, and that's how they introduced their format change.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: Pretty smart marketing.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, pretty good stuff.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: So the last thing for my 1970s and 80s is cruising.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: Oh.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know what cruising is?
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: I've heard of cruising.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: I never did any cruising, though.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: Tell us about what it was like to cruise.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: 12th Street.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: So cruising, yeah.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: I imagine more.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: So cruising, you got in your car, which at the time would have been a Oldsonville 442 for me.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: 76 Oldsonville.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: Had a friend that had a really nice Trans Am, so we would go out in his car sometimes because...
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: We went this way for a second.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: So we had to kind of reshuffle, put everybody in a different spot in this car.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: So we would basically drive up and down 12th Street and more, and other places too.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: Before I really was old enough to drive,
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: everybody went to Air Depot out in Midwest City,
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: but they made it where it was legal to do a U-turn, so they kind of ended cruising.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: That was it.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because the cruising was fun because you could U-turn.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was the big point,
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: was you go down to one end,
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: you do a U-turn, and you come back, and you just did it on loop.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: And you're like spotting girls and the cars coming the other way.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: Or your friends or your buddies.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: And you're trying to do this over and over and over again.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's like the original social media.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: Except you did it on a Friday or Saturday night and you did it forever.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, you know, there was bad things that happened.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: there was fights and there was drinking and all those kind of things
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: that teenagers do.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: But they closed down the one in...
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: It was probably a nightmare to try to go anywhere in those restaurants.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, people parked in the restaurant parking lots and not eating food.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so they got rid of that.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: But it came back.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you know this.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: During COVID,
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: because of social media,
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: a bunch of people probably that I went to high school with revamped cruising
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: and they got the city to get involved in it.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: And they gave them like a special permit and actually went out there.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: How was it?
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't look really as cool in my truck cruising.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: Or my SUV.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: Silverado wasn't the same as the 442.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: No, no.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: But they're doing it still.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: Apparently they do like an anniversary cruise and I found it on Facebook.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: There's a Cruise 12th Street Facebook page.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the last one I saw is they did it in like May.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: But people go out there that are my age in their hot rod or their lawn chairs
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: and they'll sit in the parking lot and they say,
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: please go to these patrons and buy some food if you're going to sit
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: in their parking lot.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: But it's not the same when you're 55, 60 years old cruising.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: Have you been out at Scissortail Park or around the Myriad Gardens on a Friday
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: or Saturday night in the summer?
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: No, I don't think so.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because it has a cruising feel to it now.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, once the sun starts to go down, I mean, it's like the music bumps.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: And cars just moving through the downtown metro area?
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's a nonstop loop basically all the way around Scissortail.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: Huh.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: In a loop back and forth.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: So cruising culture isn't completely dead.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's just not what it used to be.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: So that's my list for the 70s slash 80s on places.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have anything to add from that era?
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: I do not have anything else to add from the 70s and 80s in my one year period.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to think if I have any big memories from 89.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: I guess you probably wouldn't.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: Your one-year-old memories.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: So I'll move to the other things later.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: So should I move into some other stuff into the 90s,
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: 2000s on places, and then we can kind of...
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: We can kind of fill in the
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: gaps.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then we'll go back to maybe restaurants or whatever else you want to talk about.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: That sounds good.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so...
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this is one of these things that kind of was a big memory in the 80s.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then it kind of went away in the 90s.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: But it's called Putt-Putt.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: And you think, well, yeah, there's still Putt-Putt, Robert.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_01: Miniature golfs, Putt-Putt.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: No, there's places called Putt-Putt.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: And they were orange and green is what I remember.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: And they would be in a shopping strip mall in the parking lot.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: Oh.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: And they'd have a little shack.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I didn't see that.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: So they had some snacks.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: So you get nachos or a hot dog or whatever and a Coke.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: And all you did was putt-putt.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: And it was a great date for four bucks or something.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: And there was one on Southwestern at like 59th Street.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: There was one in Norman.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: There was one in Edmond.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: There was one in Midwest City.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: There was one out in 39th Street in Bethany.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it was like a franchise.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: It was a national thing.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember seeing their putt-putt championships on Saturday morning TV.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: ABC's Wide World of Sports.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of one of those things.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: But they had a funny commercial like, putt-putt for the fun of it.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: That would have been gone by the
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: time I was in.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: By the time I remember.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because all the putt-putt that I remember was at places like Celebration Station.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: Perfect Swing.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: And those places probably were, they were a lot fancier.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: This was, there was no putting through a clown's mouth.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was pretty much your flat putt putt.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: There might've been a hole that maybe had some fake water on it or something,
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: but it was,
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: it was just a great place for a cheap date or a little fun with your family on a,
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: you know, for a cheap budget.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: So putt putt.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: I thought I would mention a few local retailers that we had that were kind
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_01: a big deal in the 80s.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe they went away a little later in the 2000s, but there's three that I can think of.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_00: Culturally,
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think retail and shopping and the shopping experience because of e-commerce,
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: but even before e-commerce and the internet, It's shifted.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like these places that I imagine you're going to talk about are places
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: that were just, I don't know, just a bigger part of people's lives than it is today.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and these were places that probably started out in necessity in the 40s or 50s.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: And then they grew, you know, like TGMI.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: And then somebody else did a little better and a little more scale.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: And when you have scale, you have cost advantage.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so you can grow in selection.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then I can imagine what these to be a local,
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_01: locally based company now and still be relevant with the age of Amazon.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: But so we had three big ones that everybody would be pretty familiar with.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: We're kind of more higher end.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: And it's Rothschilds, Streets and Herald's.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so they had men's clothing, women's clothing, some had jewelry, shoes, you name it.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: But that's where you went if you were looking for business attire.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe, I think Streets had some kids' clothes.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: Rothschilds, they may have some kids' clothes too.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: But these were kind of the higher-end places.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so Rothschilds got purchased by Dillard's in 1992.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: And surprisingly, Streets closed in 1992 as well.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm not sure why those two things line up.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: But those were...
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they had their own brand.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they had their own brand.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think that's when they kind of went is they started their own brand.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that's really not why people were going there.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that was probably one of their issues.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: But they had this huge salary that they do at the fairgrounds where they brought
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: in all this stuff from all their stores that didn't sell.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: And they had this huge Herald's blowout in a building in the fairgrounds.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_01: And you can get all kinds of cool stuff for good prices.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: And outlet before outlets.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: And they were big enough to do that, which I didn't know about.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because they had all those different locations too.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway,
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: so those are some stores that I can remember that were kind of iconic back in
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: the day that we don't really have anymore.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you think about it, I mean,
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: there's the local tailor,
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: there's a couple places,
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_01: but like what stores do we have today that are local Oklahoma stores
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: where you get men's clothes,
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: women's clothes, children's clothes, jewelry, et cetera?
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: You go to the outlet mall.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: You go to Penn Square.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: You used to be able to go to Stein Mart.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_01: Stein Mart was fun.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: And Stein Mart's gone now.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: Online.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, online.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's online.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: Or you go to Dillard's.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: Or you go to Dillard's still.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: And we really don't have that many great, nice clothing stores in Oklahoma.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: We don't have a Nordstrom's in Oklahoma City.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's one in Tulsa.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: You have Nordstrom Rack.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I haven't bought a lot of stuff in Orson Rack lately.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_01: But there's places that I do like, you know, Metro.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'll buy some stuff at Metro and places like that.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_00: Metro is probably the only place that fits what those places used to do.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's more casual.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: This was more dressed.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: But of course, people dress a lot nicer to go to work.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: They weren't in the business casual mode.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: That most people go to work in today.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you wore a suit.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: Golf shirts.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_01: Golf shirts.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: It used to be suits.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: So Harold's had an advantage.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then the other big store, of course, was Sears on Southwest 44th and Western.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: They were at the mall too, but the one on 44th, that freestanding building was special.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: Back to school clothing shopping.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: You could get appliances there.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: You could get electronics there.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_01: They had the Craftsman brand.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: I was driving on Western...
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_00: The other day through that whole area
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: and you could feel how Sears would have impacted because there was
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: so much residential opportunity in the area and there was just so much going on.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: I felt like I was driving through there and I could imagine when in the 70s and 80s
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: that would have been a hub kind of like you see on like 63rd now.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: Or off of like North May now.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: It was, definitely.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: It would have felt like that because you had the Winchester Drive-In.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: It was right there, just a couple miles up or more south.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, yeah, it's a cool area that I feel like has just been passed by.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: I had a discussion,
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_01: your grandfather and I went on a ride, a long ride to Colorado a few weeks back.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: But we were talking about some things about, because he grew up in the Capitol Hill.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: This is my father-in-law.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: But there was a golf course, he said, like behind that Sears.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: I had no idea.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: He said it was a part of Woodson Park.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_00: He told me that too.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: They're like a mile away.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_00: This made total sense.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: He said the first round of golf he ever played,
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: he told me this the other day,
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_00: first round of golf he ever played was at Woodson Park.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, maybe it somehow wound through South Oklahoma City.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: I had no idea.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: But he told me there was a golf course there.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_01: I had no idea.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: I guess it backed up to Capitol Hill.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_01: But that was like, I mean, my grandfather went to Capitol Hill.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: And of course,
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_01: then you had the Capitol Hill business district where there was lots
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: of clothing there, like Johnny Brown.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's crazy that the department stores had presences.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: They did.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: All those neighborhoods.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: And small towns.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: There was Johnny Brown's in small towns.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: There were wards in small towns.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_01: And all those things, of course, went away as the big malls came in.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_00: And Walmart.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_01: And Walmart.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_01: Walmart and Target.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: Those two things basically replaced a lot of those places.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: So you mentioned drive-in movies.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: So that's on my list as well of things that kind of went away.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: So at one point in time in Oklahoma, there were 108 drive-in movies in the state.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: Basically any city...
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_00: That would have had a population north of...
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: 5,000 people?
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: 5,000 people would have had a drive-in theater, which is astounding.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_00: The culture,
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: but in all those movies from the 50s and 60s,
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: there's a scene in the drive-in movie theater.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: You see it.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was everywhere.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: And part of this happened, the car culture that we became as a society.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: But it was also a social place to be seen.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember going to...
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: Driving movies as a kid.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_01: And we'd bring our own popcorn.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: We'd bring our own two-liter bottles of Pepsi because we drank Pepsi at our house.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: And we'd make an evening of it.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_01: And they had like a play area and that kind of thing.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you went a few times to Winchester.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: But there were four.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_01: There were actually four in South Oklahoma City at one point.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: There was Winchester.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_01: There was one on 59th and Between Shields and like Robinson.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: There was one there.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: There was one out by the airport.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then there was one at 104th and Western.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: It was called 14 Flags.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's now a neighborhood.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I remember.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: Four just in South Dakota.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: So if you took the whole metro,
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_00: the million-person population base, I mean, who knows how many you had?
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I have no idea where the other ones were.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: But now we're down to one, which is Winchester, and it's still going strong.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: I was surprised to find out that
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_00: Winchester is still open.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, still going strong.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: So in my little research on this, in 1983, they called it Black Monday.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: There was a company nationally that had bought a whole bunch of drive-ins.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_01: They closed 53 drive-ins in one day in 1983.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: In Oklahoma?
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_01: In Oklahoma.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: Oh.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: So we lost half our drive-in movies in one day.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: This big conglomerate said, this doesn't work for us.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_01: So anyway.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: The rise of VHS.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_00: That was a big deal.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: Has to be linked somewhat.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: Then I think you also started seeing bigger Metroplex movies where you'd have five
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: or six screens at a movie theater.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_01: Because movie theaters back in the 70s were- More options at the Metroplex movie theaters.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: You had a drive-in and then you had the one screen in downtown.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe two screens.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: In a theater.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_01: In a theater.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_01: In a theater.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: You see in almost every town you've got an old theater that's been converted to something.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: Norman has a Sooner Theater that is now a place to see live performances or whatever.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_01: Moore had a double screen movie theater,
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: which was in the same complex as the TGNY, City of Moore Shopping.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: So you would never know it's there.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's on the back side, on the west side of that City of Moore Center.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's where the movies were.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: Behind the Humpty Dumpty.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: That was a grocery store.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_00: The Humpty Dumpty?
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh-huh.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't see the Humpty Dumpty either.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_01: So one more thing and then we'll move on is The Concourse.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: I know you have this look on your face like, what are you talking about, The Concourse?
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: So some people probably know this and you know this, you just know what it's called.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_01: But there's a tunnel system under Oklahoma City that connects all those buildings.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_00: I have been into The Concourse a few times.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: So it was called The Concourse in the 70s and 80s and 90s.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: And it was a city in itself.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember my mom worked downtown one summer.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: I was probably 19.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I think she gave my sister,
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_01: who was 12 probably at the time,
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: she gave us some bucks and said, go entertain yourselves while I'm working.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so we basically just roamed the concourse for a whole day one summer.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_01: And there were restaurants and there was a Rothschilds downtown.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so you could get to that Rothschilds.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: There's a B.C.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: Clark.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: You get to B.C.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_01: Clark.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's still there, I think.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_01: But there was probably 10, 15 restaurants underneath Oklahoma City.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: And you didn't have to go outside to be able to go to lunch
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_01: and you could just walk down your escalator or stairs into the tunnel system
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_01: and you could go to shops.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so that slowly they slowly went away downtown.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm even imagining how this.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: All the office complexes.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_01: The offices moved.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: And then that came back where there's a lot more businesses with oil and gas
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: that moved to downtown Oklahoma City in the 2000s, right?
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: But that's where all the law firms were.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: That's where everybody went.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_01: The courthouse, of course, is the hub of things.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: So you can get to the concourse from the courthouse.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, so I remember that as a really cool experience as a kid.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: But it's thriving today.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_01: But it's totally different.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_01: There's like one coffee shop, maybe a trinket store of some sort.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_01: And it's been remodeled.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's called OKC Underground.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it is a walking art display.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: So apparently they've taken the tunnels.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, so they've kind of remarketed it so you don't have the retail.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: But it was a pretty cool experience as a kid.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: What would be the best way to get into it, you think, today?
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if you go to the First National Building, you can get into there.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: You go down the hallway where Stock and Bond is.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: There's some stairs.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_01: You've got to find the stairs.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then you can go down that way.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_01: You used to be able to get to it from Leadership Square.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: You can get it from Leadership Square.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: You get to it from the courthouse.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: You used to be able to get to it from the Myriad.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: That was kind of like the end of it.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: But, of course, Myriad's gone, and so you can get to it there.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_01: But if you want to look it up, it can tell you where the entrances are.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: You can get to it from Liberty Tower, which is now...
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_01: Continental.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_01: It used to be Liberty Bank, and that was the Liberty Building.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: Sheraton, you can get it from the Skirvan.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, from the Skirvan Hotel.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_01: You can get to it from the Sheraton because their little mall system connected to it.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_01: So it was a big deal, man.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: You could get all over the city and not have to go outside.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_00: As a kid, that would have been really cool.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, you thought you were in some secret cool Harry Potter world or something.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it makes sense in Chicago or New York or one of these places where the weather...
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_00: Where you have to go underground.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_00: And you had all these meetings and everybody back then met face to face.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_00: There were lots of phone call meetings even back then.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: So that was kind of a neat memory as a kid being able to go down there
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: and you learned about something that nobody else knew about because
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_01: if you didn't go downtown, you didn't know about it.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: And apparently there's some stories that we had apparently
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: a underground like Chinese network of people Like businesses,
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_01: like maybe some illegal gambling and stuff like that.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're ever doing some research in underground Oklahoma City type things,
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_01: you can find some stuff,
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_01: some rumors that there was a tunnel system outside of downtown Oklahoma City
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_01: as well.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen this.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's going to have to, okay, at some point we're going to do a deep dive.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to do a deep dive,
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_00: maybe like a series on that, the Chinese tunnel system conspiracy.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I don't know if it's true or not.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: It'd be really interesting.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_01: I hope it is.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_01: I hope it's true.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think it'd be really cool.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_00: Tony, Oklahoma City, we have the strangest, richest history.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_01: We do.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_01: We've got some interesting stuff,
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_01: which we can hit on some of this stuff when we get a little deeper
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: into some other things too.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so where do you want to go now?
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: Are we into the 90s?
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: We are into the 90s.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_00: Shall we go into bars and restaurants from the 90s?
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do that.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_00: That do not exist anymore?
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_00: Can I give you one to start?
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: Please do.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have the varsity on your list?
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_01: I do have the varsity on my list, and that is what I kind of mentioned earlier.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: The varsity as a kid,
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_00: I thought that was the first like real sports bar that I had been into as a kid
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_00: with huge screens, individual screens in the booths and the food.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_00: The food was fantastic.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_00: The club sandwich, the varsity club sandwich.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's what they were known for as a kid.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_00: That was like the first place I had a club sandwich and thought like,
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_00: okay, yeah, this is like a special kind of food to eat.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_00: I know it's a crazy thing to say about a club sandwich, but I love the feel of the varsity.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_00: It was like you would walk in and it was dark and it's so much OU specific,
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_00: OSU specific stuff on the walls.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_00: It just felt big time.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_00: In 90s sports.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_00: And we haven't really replaced that since then.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_00: We have a lot of corporate sports bars.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_01: But not like that.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_01: But not like the varsity.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: That was locally owned.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it was off Meridian,
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_01: Southside.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_00: And there was another one too though, Northside.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_01: So the original one is on, it was on 63rd.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_01: The one in South Oklahoma City is the one you went to a lot because I had an office there.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: Do you remember what my favorite sandwich was when I went there?
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: Pretty easy if you know.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: The Reuben?
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's a different lifetime.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_01: Buffalo chicken sandwich.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_01: They had a fried buffalo chicken sandwich covered in buffalo sauce.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'd get a side buffalo sauce, had blue cheese on top of it.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was my thing.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_01: So you remember the Meridian location because I worked close to that.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_01: I do.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the one we went to the most.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_01: But the best one was their original, which was at 63rd between Western and Grand.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_01: Grand.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_01: So right by Whole Foods, there was a building.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_01: And it was in that building.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_01: And before that, it had been a dance club.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_01: And then a restaurant came in, Italian place called Tony Roma's.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_01: And Tony Roma's went out and Varsity went into their space.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was in 1990 is when they opened.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_01: And...
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_00: Man, I can't picture that at all.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: So it was kind of interesting because it was different levels.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_01: It was like one of those.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_01: So it was a building.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_01: There's an old school there.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_01: So it was like directly west of that old school that's been converted to whatever.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_01: So the Chesapeake-ation, they call it, let's see, Chesapeake-ization.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_00: The Chesapeake-ization of that whole area.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_01: Of that whole area.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's when that building got taken out.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_01: It was an office building, like maybe a four or five-story building.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_00: Oh.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_01: And inside it was...
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_01: That restaurant.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think there was also a place called the Tack Room on the backside of it.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_00: It was kind of like around racing.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_01: So that's where the original varsity was.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_01: So it had different levels.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_01: So you step down into part of it and you can step up into the game room.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it had been a dance club before Tony Roma's.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_01: But that was the original location.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, they also went to Tulsa.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_01: And then that closed in 2007.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: Sleepy Hollow.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_01: Sleepy Hollow.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's a popular one for people.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_01: I only went there once.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_01: How many times did you go there?
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_00: I remember going there maybe twice and thinking it was really cool because it was in
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_00: the country.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_00: This is like pre-seven years old probably.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think the last time I went there was for my aunt's relationship.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_01: Rehearsal dinner.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_01: Rehearsal dinner.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I can't.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_00: That was Kristen's.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_00: Rehearsal dinner, right?
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so I can't really remember it,
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_00: but I can remember the feeling of the restaurant is a feeling that I can't remember
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_00: or I can't think of in the city right now.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_00: Which was the kind of like destination restaurant.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's out somewhere.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_00: I guess the closest thing would almost be like Carletti's now.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_00: But Carletti's is in the city, but it's kind of like that.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's where Sleepy Hollow was.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: It was in that same area.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: It was off of 50th.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_01: But it was in a nice building that was surrounded by blackjacks.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there was big trees all around it.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so it was off 50th, out
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: between Lincoln
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_00: and the Zoo?
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_00: So it was around Kelly?
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_01: It was in that area.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think it was on 63rd.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_01: That is a really pretty area.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was a really cool area, but that's where it was.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: There's going to be a big nature reserve over there off of 50th.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's going to be a thing about my state.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so Sleepy Hollow was one of those places that people went for prom
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_01: because it was nice and it was chef-made.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_01: They were famous for their fried chicken.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_01: It was their big thing that we talked about.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_01: There was also The Haunted House.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_01: Have you ever heard of that one?
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so it was kind of that same area.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_00: Year-round?
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_00: Or was this only...
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_00: The name of the restaurant was called Haunted House.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_01: The Haunted House.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_01: So it was north.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_00: Why is this not still open still?
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it was, and they tried to bring it back, and it only lasted a couple years.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_01: So it was north of Remington Park on the opposite side of the highway.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: So when 44 comes across, you took the service road.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_00: Another cool part of the city.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: Very cool part.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_01: It hasn't been developed that much there.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's not much out there.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_00: I was actually looking at a map around Frontier City the other day.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of that is still wide open land.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_00: There's no neighborhoods.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_00: There's like square miles in that area that there's nothing.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_00: So somebody owns it.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm glad it's open personally.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: So think east of Kelly or Martin Luther King, east of Martin Luther King.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_01: North of I-44, there's a little service road.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_01: You took that service road and you turned north and you drove for half a mile to the house.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where you had dinner.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: And it was called the Haunted House
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_01: because apparently some lady killed her stepdad there in the 40s.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_01: Got off.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_01: And then she died in the house.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_01: It went into foreclosure.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody bought it and turned it into a restaurant.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: It operates a restaurant for however many years.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then it kind of went away a few years later.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_00: horror's return at the box office and how all of the creative energy
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_00: of Hollywood is pouring into horror right now.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_00: That restaurant concept right now would be perfect in Oklahoma City.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it was cool.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_01: So that was on the problem list.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_01: Today, by the way, it is a boy's home.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_01: It has been converted to a boy's home.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, think of the history of this place and you got a boy's home.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the haunted house.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_01: So since I'm kind of on that theme,
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_01: another place that people would go to prom was, can you think of this one?
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's a big one.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: You've been there.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_00: Applewoods?
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_01: Eagle's Nest.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_00: Eagle's Nest.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_00: Oh.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_00: At the top of Founders Tower.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_01: And of course it turned to Nick's.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_01: I love Eagle's Nest.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's where my first cream roulette.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_01: We take you there because you did really well on your report card or something.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because you officed that.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I officed in that building.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_01: Because you were in there.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_01: I was on the 19th floor at one point in that building,
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_01: and we came in on a Monday,
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_01: and their plumbing had leaked all over our copier,
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_01: all over our desk, ruined everything.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, our lease said they weren't responsible for water damage.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: Who would have thought you'd have the restaurant above you leak on you?
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if any restaurant could leak on you, at least it was Eagle's Nest.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_00: That leaked on you.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because was Eagle's Nest, you think, one of the first...
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't say it was like an amazing high quality restaurant,
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_00: but it was like the first like visionary restaurant concept that was in
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_00: that category of like a Dallas style restaurant.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_00: Or it felt like almost like a tourist attraction in Oklahoma City.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_00: Was it the first one of those restaurants?
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_01: It rotated.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you remember that.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_00: I do remember that.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_01: So if you sat on the outside tables,
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_01: it had a conveyor belt type thing that rotated around so you could see downtown.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_01: You could see the Capitol.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_01: You could see Lake Hefner.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_01: But that was an office building,
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_01: and it had a swimming pool in the basement when I first moved into that office
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_01: in 1993.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_00: It had a swimming pool in the basement?
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_01: It had a swimming pool in the basement.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there was a gym and a swimming pool in the basement.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_01: Those were some of the really high-end restaurants that I remember as a kid.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_01: There was also one called Christopher's, which was by Will Rogers Park that overlooked a pond.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: That was a really cool high-end restaurant in Oklahoma City.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_00: It would be a good spot for one then, too.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah, yeah.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_01: The building's gone.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_01: At one point it turned into a mortgage company.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_01: There was a mortgage company in there for a while.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_01: But those are a few of those.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_01: And then you mentioned Applewoods.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you were a Southsider especially, Applewoods has special memories.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: So do you remember going to Applewoods?
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_00: And special smells.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_01: And smells.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_00: You walk in that place and the apple fritter smell was crazy.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_00: I barely remember being in there.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_00: I remember more of the parking lot of Apple Woods for whatever reason.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_00: I just always remember parking in that place in what felt like an office building.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_00: But what was Applewoods like?
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_00: And what was even on the menu at Applewoods?
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_00: We were there all the time for special get-togethers, birthdays.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was home cooking,
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_01: if you will.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_00: Oklahoma-style, like prairie home cooking?
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: No, like high-end home cooking, like chicken and dumplings, pot roast.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_01: You could get a steak.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_00: Kind of like what Pioneer Pies used to do like that style.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but it felt like it was higher end.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_01: So they had a big banquet room.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of events that I went to in my industry over the years,
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_01: I went to a monthly luncheon there for a long time.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_01: But apparently it was in a different location.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_01: So it was at Third and Meridian.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_01: So just south of Trappers.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_01: So Meridian and Reno in that area.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_01: There was a building.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_01: Apparently it was in a different building.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_01: And the guy bought that building and moved the restaurant.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_01: And there had been an office or industrial building.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_01: And then three years later, he sold the building but stayed there and leased it.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason that they left is they couldn't come to terms on the new lease.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so the guy closed it.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_01: And it was the guy that owns Cattlemen's, that owned Cattlemen's.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_01: Dick Stubbs was the one who owned Applewoods.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_01: I found that out in my research.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_00: Are you serious?
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_01: So the guy owned Cattlemen's and Applewoods at the same time.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then they briefly tried to open on the north side and they called it Northgate
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_01: or North Applewoods or something like that.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it didn't quite last.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_01: It just didn't kind of have the same...
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_01: It was Southside as an institution too.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_01: That story we've heard about...
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_00: Many times of a lease negotiation gone wrong.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then a restaurant leaves and then it's gone.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like two years later.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_01: Location, location, location.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_01: And that was also, you know, the heydays of Applewoods was Urban Cowboy.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so that part of Oklahoma City had all, it had Grams, it had In Cahoots.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, right.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: All those country dance places.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so people go there, get a good meal, go out.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_01: Grams and Anchor Hoots.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_01: That was the place to go dancing in the 80s.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_01: It still was.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_00: That was a few years ago.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what that country.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_01: Is it called Cowboys now?
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_01: Cowboys.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's called Cowboys.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I think Gramps might still be there too.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's not my, I don't go dancing, so it's not my thing.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_01: So Applewoods was a classic place I'd love to see come back,
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_01: but again,
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think you have to recreate the environment, and that's the hardest part about it.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_01: There was also another place that was kind of down in that same part of the world.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_01: It was called Molly Murphy's.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_01: Never heard of Molly Murphy's.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_01: Again, place to go for prom, right?
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_01: Or birthday.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so what Molly Murphy's was a local place that was kind of based on a place
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_01: in Dallas called the Time Machine.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's what it's called.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_01: And the waiters dressed up as characters.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_01: So you might have Popeye, Minnie Mouse, whoever.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_01: And they were sort of rude to you.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_01: They weren't real nice.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_01: So like when you get up to go to the restroom.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_01: Dick's Last Resort.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of Dick's Last Resort.
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_01: They would announce that Ryan's got to go potty.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then they would follow you to the restroom and be really loud.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_01: Or they sang Happy Birthday really crazy.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_01: But it was just like this.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was also over there off Meridian.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_01: It was off Meridian.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_01: It was probably, I don't know, 8th of Meridian, a little freestanding building.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_00: Meridian used to have a lot of juice.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_00: It did.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_00: It had a lot of really good restaurants.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_00: There was a lot of stuff going on out there that wasn't happening anywhere else in the city.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we didn't have the downtown.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody went downtown for dinner.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_01: Memorial was not a thing yet.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_00: The pool of Meridian was before the revitalization of downtown.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the growth of Mustang and Yukon and...
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_01: we kind of talked before this started is there was not a lot of chains
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_01: in Oklahoma City.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_01: At that time, there was a lot of locally owned things and then a lot of chains came in.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I think those ended up being close to where people lived and made
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_01: a little more convenient.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_01: For you to go to dinner after baseball practice or after school
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_01: or whatever versus having to get in your car and drive 20,
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_01: 30 minutes to Meridian if you weren't living in South Oklahoma City.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_01: But that was the place.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there was a Zeo's down there.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_01: This is where we always went to dinner was that whole corridor, Charleston's.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_00: Charleston's, Zeo's on the border.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_01: On the border.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_01: On the border.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_00: Over there.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I was going to bring up Zio's because I don't know if I actually miss Zio's food.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I would say the same thing for like Don Pablo's.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_00: Don Pablo's.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_00: The food was good,
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_00: but I do miss that style of restaurant that was so family focused when you walked in
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_00: and they had the paper on every table.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, for the kids to be able to.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_00: In the crowd.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_00: And they had the printout sheets of activities for kids to do.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_00: I can't even tell you the last time I saw it.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_00: A restaurant, give out crowns and paper a table and stuff like that.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_00: But that was a vibe that I think was done by about 2004.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_00: But that was the 90s to me.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_00: It was Zio's, Don Pablo's, those places.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_01: Those were cool places.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_00: The fountain inside the restaurant.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_00: And Don Pablo's?
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_00: Abuelo's, Don Pablo's.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_01: And Buenos was really good when it first opened up too.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_00: It was in business for what?
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like 20 years?
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think it just closed a couple years ago.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_01: Bricktown location.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_01: But they had that one.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_01: They had the one.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_01: And they may have one in Norman too.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_01: They had the one on Memorial for a long time.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_01: But those are things that we can maybe talk about later in this podcast.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_00: That might come back up.
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_00: Restaurants too.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_00: Other Mexican themed restaurants.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_00: Nino's.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_00: I miss Nino's.
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_00: Oh.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_01: Nino's.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_01: That was our family's Mexican restaurant.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_01: So good.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_01: Great memories there.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_00: Love Nino's.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then Crispy's.
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my gosh.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_00: In Norman.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_00: Crispy's in Norman.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_00: That was in Brookhaven Plaza.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_01: On the corner.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_01: And again, that was location.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_01: They had such a cool, unique.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_01: Where PubW is.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_00: That was one of the most badass restaurants that I could remember as a kid.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_00: The way that the tables,
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_00: and they had those tiles in the tables that were like the multicolored,
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_00: like blue, yellow, and green.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_00: And they had that like Jester looking mascot.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_00: That was like the Krispies logo.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they did.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_01: Remember that?
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_00: I just thought it was a really cool restaurant.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_01: You remember going there for my mom's 50th birthday party after like a football game?
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_00: I do.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_01: And they had that room upstairs.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_00: I do.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_00: And looking out over the top.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_00: I love Krispies.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_00: What were you?
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like seven years old?
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_01: How old have you been?
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_01: Seven, eight years old probably.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_01: We just played some football game and then show up in your clothes.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_01: It would have been football because it's September.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_01: Another one that was a Southside staple was a place called Harrigan's.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, gosh.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_01: And they had a Northside location as well as on Northwest Expressway.
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_01: They have one in Amarillo still.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_01: There's still a Harrigan's in Amarillo, I believe.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_00: That could warrant a special road trip.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_00: It could.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_00: Those cheddar rolls.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my gosh.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_01: The cheddar rolls.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_01: Those cheddar rolls.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_01: The fried zucchini.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_01: They also had this steak.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_01: It was almost like a roast, but it was a steak.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_01: Like they marinated
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_00: it for a long time.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_01: And it came in a boat of potatoes and gravy.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it was phenomenal.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_01: But that was the Sunday brunch place.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_01: We would go there after church.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_01: We would go there as a family for birthdays and stuff like that.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it got bought by another restaurant place and things.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_01: It went out of business when in, I think, 2003, something like that is when it went away.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_01: But man,
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_01: a place in the 80s and the 90s,
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_01: probably more 90s on Harrigan's,
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_01: it was the place in South Oklahoma City to have a good dinner.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_01: Because there weren't a lot of options.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_00: Not really.
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_00: Not local.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_01: And there's not a lot going on 74th Street like there used to be.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_01: 74th and Meridian, each of those two places were great places to go to dinner.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's still restaurants there, but they're mainly chains and restaurants.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's not really something I look for as a consumer.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where we ate at Outback, Office 74th, all the time at those chain restaurants.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the chains were different back then.
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_00: Outback felt like a really good meal when we would actually go eat there in like 98 or so.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then it's just changed quite a bit.
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_00: I know they've got, we know Price, the general manager there.
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_00: He's going to turn the quality around.
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_00: He has.
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_00: The Outback on 74th.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_01: I went there at lunch one day and talked to Price.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_01: And he was telling me that they've reinvested in some really good beef.
• 1:04:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so I had a lunch steak and it was great.
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_01: And he was telling me their dinner steaks are off the charts.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_01: So I've got to get over there to try that out.
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_01: Lunch.
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_01: You do lunch.
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_01: That works well.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_00: I got experiences or like sports stuff in the 90s.
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have anything?
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_00: I do.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_00: I have a few things.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder if we got the same ones because there are some big ones that I'd like to get to.
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to let you go first because I don't want to steal your thunder on something.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think you should go first.
• 1:05:05
  SPEAKER_00: I was throwing some out there.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_00: You go first.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to take it.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so this is one that I think I may have already mentioned it to you once,
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_01: but before,
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_01: as Ryan said,
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_01: we tried not to talk about this beforehand, but I think I let one slip.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_01: I loved All Sports Stadium.
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_01: It was just magic to me because I had memories there going as a kid with my little league team.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, my first date with your mom.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_01: All Sports Stadium.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_00: No way.
• 1:05:35
  SPEAKER_01: All Sports Stadium, yeah.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_01: So she- You tell the story a little differently than I do.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know that.
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_00: Seriously?
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_01: First date was at All Sports Day?
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_01: First real date, like car date.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_00: You had like some interactions at the ballpark.
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_01: So we had a bet.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_01: I played for the central mid-high baseball team.
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_01: She went to Moore West and we played them in baseball and she said, hey, if...
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_01: You guys win.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'll take you to dinner.
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_01: And if we win, you take me.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we won.
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_01: So she had to take me to dinner.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_01: So we went to dinner at Johnny's on 74th.
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_01: And then we went there for dinner.
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_01: And then a bunch of my friends showed up.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so she was like, really?
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's epic.
• 1:06:25
  SPEAKER_01: You had to have your friends show up on our date.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_01: So we went to a baseball game at All Sports Stadium.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_01: I like the setting, being there at the fairgrounds.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_01: And then now, of course, we've got a lot nicer baseball stadium win.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, wow.
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_01: I had a friend whose dad was a driver and his brother ended up being a driver.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_01: So I went a few times as a kid.
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_01: No, they quit racing.
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_01: They quit racing in like 2009 or something like that, 2015.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember exactly when it was.
• 1:07:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that was such a staple of every time you would drive past on I-44 or I-40,
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_00: you would look over there because the lights would be on there and
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_00: the lights would be on at the ballpark.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_01: So that was kind of a neat part of the city, and so you got a little nostalgia for that.
• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they also used to
• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_00: play Bedlam.
• 1:07:31
  SPEAKER_01: They did play Bedlam at that.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_01: At all sports, right?
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:07:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where I, my uncle took me to a game, to a Bedlam game there.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's right,
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_01: because you guys ran into Bob Berry Jr.
• 1:07:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because we ran into Bob Berry Jr., who I actually have on the list later on.
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_00: I was going to say, BBJ is somebody I miss from the 2000s period as a cultural sports force.
• 1:07:55
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, sure.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_01: Another thing sports-wise, there was a couple of different runs with this team.
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_01: Apparently, there was a run in the 60s and 70s, and then it came back in the 90s.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_01: And it was rabid.
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_01: We had a rabid fan base and it was the Oklahoma City Blazers hockey.
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_01: So they played at the Myriad.
• 1:08:18
  SPEAKER_01: We would set records for the Central Hockey League.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's what it was called.
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_01: We averaged like 10,000 fans or something a night for years.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_00: I remember the environments being completely electric and bought in and it was
• 1:08:32
  SPEAKER_00: the lead story often.
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_01: It was a big deal on the local sports, right?
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, BBJ, I mean, he would open it up.
• 1:08:39
  SPEAKER_00: Blazers, Blazers.
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_01: We had Doug Sauter, the coach with the walrus mustache and the Canadian accent.
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_01: So we had this hated rivalry with Tulsa.
• 1:08:51
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know if you would remember this, but we had a guy named Shoebottom.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_01: He was kind of our enforcer.
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_01: And he was in a penalty box in Tulsa.
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_01: And he came out of the penalty box early to fight.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_01: And he apparently knocked down the attendant.
• 1:09:09
  SPEAKER_01: And he ended up getting arrested on the ice.
• 1:09:11
  SPEAKER_01: They choked him out.
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_01: He ended up having to go in the hospital because they damaged his throat.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_01: And, I mean,
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_01: you're talking about – you think Oklahoma City,
• 1:09:19
  SPEAKER_01: Thunder, and the Spurs have a rivalry?
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_01: Man, the OKC and Tulsa hockey rivalry was – Crazy.
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_01: But that went away in 2009 was the last season.
• 1:09:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it kind of, you know, Oklahoma City moved to more of a basketball town.
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_00: So there was some overlap, though.
• 1:09:37
  SPEAKER_00: They must have played at least one.
• 1:09:38
  SPEAKER_00: It was a scheduling issue.
• 1:09:39
  SPEAKER_00: They played one season at the Myriad, probably?
• 1:09:41
  SPEAKER_00: Or did they play inside of what used to be the Ford Center?
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:09:46
  SPEAKER_00: Name the Ford Center?
• 1:09:47
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think they were ever in the Ford Center.
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_01: But there was some scheduling type issues because the parking and everything else.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we lost interest too a little bit maybe.
• 1:09:57
  SPEAKER_01: Toward the end, the attendance was not quite what it had been.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Will you miss the myriad?
• 1:10:07
  SPEAKER_01: I will miss the Myriad for only a couple of reasons.
• 1:10:10
  SPEAKER_01: I went there for the Indoor Fun Fair once, which was maybe a couple times.
• 1:10:15
  SPEAKER_01: It was kind of fun.
• 1:10:15
  SPEAKER_01: That was kind of a neat thing.
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_01: Do you remember that?
• 1:10:18
  SPEAKER_01: It was an Indoor Fun Fair.
• 1:10:19
  SPEAKER_01: Basically,
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_01: you know those little carnivals that you see set up in a parking lot in
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_01: the little small towns and whatnot?
• 1:10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_01: They had that inside the Myriad.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think they put that in the PACOM.
• 1:10:30
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 1:10:31
  SPEAKER_00: I don't remember this.
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_00: This might have been around in the 90s.
• 1:10:33
  SPEAKER_01: So it was pretty cool.
• 1:10:35
  SPEAKER_01: And you could actually go into one of the hallways into another room
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_01: and there was more stuff in there that didn't need the height that
• 1:10:41
  SPEAKER_01: the actual arena had.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_01: So that was pretty cool.
• 1:10:44
  SPEAKER_01: But the Myriad ended up becoming a pretty cool place for...
• 1:10:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like the Oklahoma City Food Show was always in the mirror,
• 1:10:52
  SPEAKER_01: not in the actual arena part, but all those rooms that attached to it.
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_01: The convention side.
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_01: The convention side.
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_00: We were there a lot.
• 1:10:59
  SPEAKER_01: There was a Christian men's breakfast there.
• 1:11:01
  SPEAKER_01: There's the State of the City address that had always been there
• 1:11:05
  SPEAKER_01: because they had it really nice.
• 1:11:07
  SPEAKER_01: And it was a lot easier for people to get to downtown-wise as far as like
• 1:11:11
  SPEAKER_01: if you were, you know, use the tunnel system or parking, whatnot.
• 1:11:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:11:15
  SPEAKER_00: It was always really easy to access the Myriad from the north, it felt like.
• 1:11:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was pretty easy to get into that and to get out of there.
• 1:11:23
  SPEAKER_01: Not to say it's not hard or easy to get in and out of the new convention center,
• 1:11:27
  SPEAKER_01: which is certainly a lot nicer.
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_01: But that was always kind of neat to go there.
• 1:11:33
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, the Indoor Fun Fair was a big deal inside the Myriad.
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_00: I thought it wasn't the most aesthetically pleasing venue and will not be remembered
• 1:11:43
  SPEAKER_00: for its design on the inside.
• 1:11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Those red seats.
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Although, do you remember those octagonal
• 1:11:52
  SPEAKER_00: markers of the sections that had the numbers on them?
• 1:11:55
  SPEAKER_00: At the very top?
• 1:11:57
  SPEAKER_00: The white things?
• 1:11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Those white things.
• 1:11:58
  SPEAKER_00: If anybody has any of those, I will buy those from somebody.
• 1:12:01
  SPEAKER_00: I would pay a lot of money to them.
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_00: As an OKC relic.
• 1:12:07
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, that's where I saw my first concert, Shania Twain.
• 1:12:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's where I fell in love with Shania Twain.
• 1:12:13
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't there.
• 1:12:13
  SPEAKER_01: I was out of town.
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you were out of town.
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I had to give my ticket up to Christy Hawkins.
• 1:12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we're up on third row.
• 1:12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:12:18
  SPEAKER_00: It was amazing.
• 1:12:19
  SPEAKER_01: She sang you a personal concert I heard.
• 1:12:20
  SPEAKER_01: I was in Kansas City.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_01: She did, yeah.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_00: I was right there.
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we made our contact like three times.
• 1:12:24
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 1:12:25
  SPEAKER_00: And then you won a Wayne Gretzky autograph.
• 1:12:29
  SPEAKER_01: That was at a Blazer game.
• 1:12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Photo at a Blazer game that you gave me that I still have in my possession
• 1:12:34
  SPEAKER_00: that I think is in your app.
• 1:12:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so that was the credit bureau night of the hockey.
• 1:12:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm in the mortgage business, so credit bureaus are a big thing in our world.
• 1:12:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so they had a thing where they gave you free tickets.
• 1:12:46
  SPEAKER_01: They basically rented almost the whole thing out to bankers and whoever.
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so I did.
• 1:12:50
  SPEAKER_01: I won.
• 1:12:51
  SPEAKER_01: Somehow there was a drawing that night, and I won the Wayne Gretzky.
• 1:12:56
  SPEAKER_01: He was with the Kings.
• 1:12:58
  SPEAKER_01: When he was flying for the Kings by then.
• 1:13:00
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder what percentage of the population of Oklahoma City had their high school graduation.
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_00: At the Myriad.
• 1:13:08
  SPEAKER_00: If you looked at the actual raw number,
• 1:13:10
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder if it's like 10% of the people that live in Oklahoma City.
• 1:13:13
  SPEAKER_00: The Myriad.
• 1:13:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, mine was at the Myriad.
• 1:13:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's a really good point.
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_01: What percentage?
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Of people who got their graduation diploma at the Myriad.
• 1:13:20
  SPEAKER_00: Especially the big places.
• 1:13:21
  SPEAKER_01: So Edmonds, the Moors, the... Everybody had theirs there.
• 1:13:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:13:26
  SPEAKER_00: For a period of 25 years.
• 1:13:29
  SPEAKER_01: If you were 5A and up, that was the place to go.
• 1:13:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like...
• 1:13:34
  SPEAKER_01: Your cousin, her graduation was like the Coca-Cola Center or whatever.
• 1:13:39
  SPEAKER_01: You can't really see very well because it's the flat place, right?
• 1:13:41
  SPEAKER_00: It was a perfect place for graduation because you were so close to the floors.
• 1:13:46
  SPEAKER_00: It also felt like such an intimate arena.
• 1:13:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like if somebody was sitting across the myriad from you,
• 1:13:51
  SPEAKER_00: you could see people's faces like really clearly.
• 1:13:55
  SPEAKER_00: There was not a seat that you couldn't see clearly across the arena.
• 1:13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_01: You know how many pictures have been taken over the years of people throwing the streamers?
• 1:14:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:14:03
  SPEAKER_01: With the red seats in the background?
• 1:14:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's a great point, man.
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's the myriad and graduation.
• 1:14:13
  SPEAKER_01: How do you replace that?
• 1:14:14
  SPEAKER_00: Rest in peace.
• 1:14:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:14:16
  SPEAKER_00: All this graduation is probably happening on school campuses now.
• 1:14:19
  SPEAKER_00: I got a place for you from the 90s that you haven't mentioned yet.
• 1:14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have any left?
• 1:14:26
  SPEAKER_01: I have a couple of more bar type things.
• 1:14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:14:29
  SPEAKER_00: The Wilds.
• 1:14:32
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my gosh, that was so cool.
• 1:14:35
  SPEAKER_00: I can't believe sometimes that that place existed here.
• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I think it was a dream that I went there as a kid.
• 1:14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Can you explain it to me?
• 1:14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because I can't really recall how it worked.
• 1:14:46
  SPEAKER_01: So it was like six miles north of Yukon.
• 1:14:49
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't realize it was that far north.
• 1:14:51
  SPEAKER_01: It was north.
• 1:14:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it may have been
• 1:14:55
  SPEAKER_01: north of Piedmont.
• 1:14:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was, gosh, it was, what road was it?
• 1:15:03
  SPEAKER_01: It may have been in between like Yukon and El Reno.
• 1:15:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then way west, so it was that far west, and it was almost, it was back to Danforth.
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was pretty far north, but it wasn't so far north that you would drive into Okarchi.
• 1:15:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because it always felt like we had a drive, but it never felt like we were taking a big trip.
• 1:15:23
  SPEAKER_01: No, but it was a good 45-minute drive from here at least.
• 1:15:27
  SPEAKER_01: So, had a bunch of land, had a restaurant.
• 1:15:31
  SPEAKER_01: Had some ponds, had some goats walking around, and had some injured animals.
• 1:15:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I think they rehabbed some local injured deer or whatever.
• 1:15:43
  SPEAKER_01: So it was country cooking.
• 1:15:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:15:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think they had an organ, and so they had people playing the organ inside this place.
• 1:15:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it definitely felt like you were thrown back to the, yeah,
• 1:15:54
  SPEAKER_01: we actually had a cassette for a while of a couple of ladies that were playing
• 1:15:58
  SPEAKER_01: the organ.
• 1:15:59
  SPEAKER_01: It was a joke that we bought them.
• 1:16:00
  SPEAKER_01: We were supporting their music careers.
• 1:16:04
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't know if you remember this.
• 1:16:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure you do.
• 1:16:06
  SPEAKER_01: We took your Little League team there for a hayride and bonfire and took out.
• 1:16:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that was really cool.
• 1:16:12
  SPEAKER_00: How old would I have been?
• 1:16:12
  SPEAKER_00: About 10?
• 1:16:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, about 10.
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I was probably 99, Y2K.
• 1:16:15
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody fell in the water or went in the water.
• 1:16:17
  SPEAKER_01: Of course.
• 1:16:19
  SPEAKER_01: I know who it was.
• 1:16:21
  SPEAKER_01: Or did somebody fall
• 1:16:21
  SPEAKER_00: in the fire?
• 1:16:22
  SPEAKER_01: No, nobody fell in the fire.
• 1:16:24
  SPEAKER_01: There was no injuries.
• 1:16:25
  SPEAKER_01: There was just a wet kid in October or November and it was cold.
• 1:16:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was Biscuit Head.
• 1:16:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was Shane.
• 1:16:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:16:32
  SPEAKER_01: He fell in the water fishing or did something.
• 1:16:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so...
• 1:16:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the wilds.
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_01: I had not thought of that place in so long.
• 1:16:41
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe the last time I drove I-40,
• 1:16:43
  SPEAKER_01: I thought about it because a county line road or something may have been where.
• 1:16:47
  SPEAKER_01: It was way out there, though.
• 1:16:49
  SPEAKER_01: It may have been further than that.
• 1:16:50
  SPEAKER_00: The whole experience of that place was special because you would arrive
• 1:16:52
  SPEAKER_00: and it would be daylight and you would do some kind of outdoor activity
• 1:16:55
  SPEAKER_00: that involved roaming around the property and fishing.
• 1:16:59
  SPEAKER_00: Then you would go into your reservation inside the restaurant and And
• 1:17:02
  SPEAKER_00: the sun would set outside and it always felt like we were there in the fall or
• 1:17:05
  SPEAKER_00: the winter.
• 1:17:06
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:17:06
  SPEAKER_00: So it was dark.
• 1:17:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so you're eating inside this like prairie eatery that felt like Oklahoma food.
• 1:17:13
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 1:17:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:17:15
  SPEAKER_00: I wish we still had that place.
• 1:17:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:17:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the way I wish we still had like the haunted house.
• 1:17:19
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:17:20
  SPEAKER_00: Some of that.
• 1:17:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:17:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that was pretty epic.
• 1:17:24
  SPEAKER_01: That's a good one.
• 1:17:25
  SPEAKER_00: Man, that...
• 1:17:27
  SPEAKER_00: Those are some remote memories right there.
• 1:17:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, should we get into the 2000s?
• 1:17:34
  SPEAKER_01: Let's do it.
• 1:17:35
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:17:36
  SPEAKER_00: Where do you want to start?
• 1:17:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, is there anything besides the myriad that's gone from the 2000s?
• 1:17:48
  SPEAKER_00: Brookside Golf Course and more is no longer present.
• 1:17:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that was really Oklahoma City.
• 1:17:55
  SPEAKER_01: We can call it South OKC.
• 1:17:57
  SPEAKER_01: Was it?
• 1:17:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:17:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because it would have been off 89th.
• 1:17:59
  SPEAKER_00: It was.
• 1:17:59
  SPEAKER_00: It was 89th.
• 1:18:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:18:01
  SPEAKER_00: So it was.
• 1:18:02
  SPEAKER_00: Brookside was probably the most run-down nine-hole golf course
• 1:18:09
  SPEAKER_00: that you could probably ever imagine playing on.
• 1:18:11
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, no, there was a worse one.
• 1:18:12
  SPEAKER_01: You ever played at Lakeside anymore?
• 1:18:13
  SPEAKER_01: It was much worse.
• 1:18:14
  SPEAKER_00: Lakeside was worse.
• 1:18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Lakeside was a concrete parking lot for a course.
• 1:18:19
  SPEAKER_00: But there was something about that Brookside.
• 1:18:21
  SPEAKER_01: At one point, it was really nice.
• 1:18:23
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever I was playing, it was pretty beat up.
• 1:18:26
  SPEAKER_00: You could see how it could have been nicer because it was built, I think, in the 60s.
• 1:18:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I played there a lot in high school because you could play for like $6, right?
• 1:18:32
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe it was $8 and it was only $4 to play Lakeside.
• 1:18:35
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was cheap.
• 1:18:36
  SPEAKER_01: So me and my buddies would play there like Chris Smith and Billy Lord and Brad Cook
• 1:18:40
  SPEAKER_01: and the whole group of guys we would play after baseball practice or
• 1:18:43
  SPEAKER_01: before baseball practice or in the summer.
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_01: So we played quite a bit, went to driving rings there with you a lot.
• 1:18:51
  SPEAKER_01: That was just a nice place to go hit golf balls.
• 1:18:56
  SPEAKER_01: What I remember was they didn't take tee times.
• 1:18:59
  SPEAKER_01: So you had to walk in and pay,
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_01: and then you put your ball in this little chute,
• 1:19:04
  SPEAKER_01: and when your ball hit the bottom, that's when you got to go up, then you were next.
• 1:19:09
  SPEAKER_01: I always thought that was really cool.
• 1:19:10
  SPEAKER_01: You might get there,
• 1:19:10
  SPEAKER_01: and there's 10 balls in front of you,
• 1:19:12
  SPEAKER_01: so you'd go putt, or you'd hit driving range balls, or get a hot dog, or whatever.
• 1:19:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, half the time on Brookside was spent over on the putting green,
• 1:19:19
  SPEAKER_00: waiting for your tee time.
• 1:19:20
  SPEAKER_01: You waited, waited forever, but I want to say it was a Pete Dye course.
• 1:19:25
  SPEAKER_01: It was like designed by...
• 1:19:27
  SPEAKER_00: I looked up the course and I don't think it was Pete Dye.
• 1:19:31
  SPEAKER_01: It was somebody there, wasn't it?
• 1:19:33
  SPEAKER_00: It was a golf course designer that I had heard of before.
• 1:19:36
  SPEAKER_00: Let me see if I can pull it up.
• 1:19:40
  SPEAKER_01: Who did all this stuff up in Guthrie?
• 1:19:42
  SPEAKER_01: Is that Pete Dye?
• 1:19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Architect was Duffy Martin.
• 1:19:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's it, Duffy Martin.
• 1:19:48
  SPEAKER_00: Opened in 1952.
• 1:19:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's right, Duffy Martin.
• 1:19:50
  SPEAKER_01: 1952 is when that opened.
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_00: 1952.
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it still felt like it.
• 1:19:54
  SPEAKER_00: The shack...
• 1:19:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the way you walk through, it had like a Caddyshack
• 1:19:59
  SPEAKER_01: filling to the ground
• 1:20:01
  SPEAKER_00: and all of it.
• 1:20:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because there was like a walkthrough, like a little portico you walked under.
• 1:20:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then there was a tiny pro shop that you paid in.
• 1:20:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then there was a snack bar on the other side of the portico
• 1:20:13
  SPEAKER_01: where you get your tokens for getting your golf balls.
• 1:20:17
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, that was a cool place.
• 1:20:19
  SPEAKER_01: It really was.
• 1:20:20
  SPEAKER_01: And now it is a Catholic church.
• 1:20:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 1:20:23
  SPEAKER_00: And now it's the home of the...
• 1:20:26
  SPEAKER_00: I just looked up what the hill is called.
• 1:20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Oklahoma City's Martyr.
• 1:20:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:20:31
  SPEAKER_00: The Catholic Church.
• 1:20:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:20:33
  SPEAKER_00: I just looked up the specific naming of this.
• 1:20:34
  SPEAKER_01: Brother...
• 1:20:36
  SPEAKER_00: Brother...
• 1:20:38
  SPEAKER_00: I looked this up too.
• 1:20:39
  SPEAKER_00: We're not Catholic.
• 1:20:39
  SPEAKER_00: We're not Catholic, obviously.
• 1:20:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we're not Catholic.
• 1:20:44
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
• 1:20:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:20:44
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:20:45
  SPEAKER_00: Any bars and restaurants from the 2000s that you've got?
• 1:20:48
  SPEAKER_01: A couple.
• 1:20:49
  SPEAKER_01: So, Russell's Lounge...
• 1:20:53
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't ringing any bells for me.
• 1:20:54
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so Russell's opened in 1985 and it closed in 2018.
• 1:21:01
  SPEAKER_01: Across from Baptist, inside the old Marriott.
• 1:21:06
  SPEAKER_00: Oh.
• 1:21:06
  SPEAKER_01: It was kind of like free,
• 1:21:07
  SPEAKER_01: you could get to the hotel from it, but it's like a freestanding little part.
• 1:21:12
  SPEAKER_01: And when, I mean, in the 80s, it was great.
• 1:21:15
  SPEAKER_01: I spent a New Year's Eve there once.
• 1:21:20
  SPEAKER_01: Spent a bachelor party there once.
• 1:21:23
  SPEAKER_01: Just kind of hanging out with some friends.
• 1:21:24
  SPEAKER_01: So it was part dance club, part bar, part restaurant.
• 1:21:30
  SPEAKER_01: Went there for lunch a few times.
• 1:21:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then when they rebranded to Embassy Suites and kind of redid it, it went away.
• 1:21:36
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 1:21:37
  SPEAKER_01: I think they knocked that part of it down.
• 1:21:39
  SPEAKER_01: And it's where you actually pull through now.
• 1:21:42
  SPEAKER_01: To check in.
• 1:21:44
  SPEAKER_01: But so Russell's was a pretty cool little place.
• 1:21:46
  SPEAKER_00: It was an accompaniment to Groovy's.
• 1:21:49
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:21:49
  SPEAKER_00: Just down the street.
• 1:21:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I think this is correct.
• 1:21:53
  SPEAKER_01: So at one point in time,
• 1:21:54
  SPEAKER_01: I want to say Groovy's used to actually be in an apartment building on May Avenue.
• 1:22:01
  SPEAKER_01: And then they moved from the apartment building to Groovy's because we went there
• 1:22:05
  SPEAKER_01: a couple of times and it was a 70s type theme.
• 1:22:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's smaller than Groovy's.
• 1:22:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's always felt like Groovy's has more history than the recency of that building.
• 1:22:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and they've been in that building for a long time that it's in.
• 1:22:16
  SPEAKER_01: Since I was born.
• 1:22:16
  SPEAKER_01: What was the name of that apartment?
• 1:22:17
  SPEAKER_01: There was an apartment building on May Avenue around that 59th Street.
• 1:22:23
  SPEAKER_01: Tradewinds Apartments across from Zorba's.
• 1:22:26
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 1:22:26
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where this 70s dance place was.
• 1:22:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that was the precursor to Groovy's.
• 1:22:32
  SPEAKER_01: If somebody knows the answer to that, feel free to let us know.
• 1:22:36
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what my memory was.
• 1:22:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so then the other thing,
• 1:22:38
  SPEAKER_01: and again,
• 1:22:39
  SPEAKER_01: that part of town,
• 1:22:40
  SPEAKER_01: Northwest Expressway was kind of a hot area in the 80s, 90s, right?
• 1:22:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's where everything was.
• 1:22:46
  SPEAKER_01: There was a Joker's Comedy Club from 1982 to 2001.
• 1:22:51
  SPEAKER_01: They were open in Oklahoma City.
• 1:22:52
  SPEAKER_01: They also were in Bricktown.
• 1:22:53
  SPEAKER_00: I remember when you all went and saw Seinfeld there.
• 1:22:56
  SPEAKER_01: Seinfeld we actually saw at the Civic Center.
• 1:22:58
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, so it wasn't...
• 1:22:58
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, that was not a Joker.
• 1:23:00
  SPEAKER_01: But I did see somebody famous at Joker's.
• 1:23:02
  SPEAKER_01: So the original place was on 59th of May.
• 1:23:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:23:04
  SPEAKER_01: Had a really cool charm to it.
• 1:23:07
  SPEAKER_01: Again, it was one of those places that wasn't like a flat restaurant.
• 1:23:09
  SPEAKER_01: It had like a...
• 1:23:10
  SPEAKER_01: The bar was up high and then it sunk down in the stage
• 1:23:13
  SPEAKER_01: and had really comfortable seating and stuff.
• 1:23:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I saw Bill Ingvall there.
• 1:23:18
  SPEAKER_01: No way.
• 1:23:18
  SPEAKER_01: From the Blue Comedy Tour.
• 1:23:19
  SPEAKER_00: Was that before the Blue Comedy Tour?
• 1:23:21
  SPEAKER_01: Before the Blue Comedy Tour.
• 1:23:22
  SPEAKER_01: And the only reason I remember that is I remember this guy was really funny
• 1:23:25
  SPEAKER_01: and he told some jokes that I can still remember to this day.
• 1:23:29
  SPEAKER_01: One was like a Barkless dog joke or something.
• 1:23:31
  SPEAKER_01: And then I've seen him perform that same joke.
• 1:23:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, that was Bill Ingvall.
• 1:23:35
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was before he...
• 1:23:36
  SPEAKER_01: So this would have been...
• 1:23:38
  SPEAKER_01: Mid-90s probably that I went there.
• 1:23:41
  SPEAKER_01: I went there a couple of times.
• 1:23:42
  SPEAKER_01: Went to also the one in Bricktown, but that was pretty cool.
• 1:23:45
  SPEAKER_01: It was mentioned all the
• 1:23:45
  SPEAKER_00: time by people.
• 1:23:47
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, we don't really have a comedy club that's like that now.
• 1:23:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's another one now somewhere.
• 1:23:52
  SPEAKER_00: There's got to be a comedy club somewhere in the city.
• 1:23:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just not aware of where it is.
• 1:23:55
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe Bricktown.
• 1:23:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think it's in Bricktown, but I haven't been to it.
• 1:23:58
  SPEAKER_01: But Joker's was cool.
• 1:24:00
  SPEAKER_00: In that same area.
• 1:24:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 1:24:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I guess more north.
• 1:24:04
  SPEAKER_00: This would be a couple miles north.
• 1:24:06
  SPEAKER_00: And this is obviously not something you would have been doing at that age,
• 1:24:08
  SPEAKER_00: but you were there with me doing it, was LaserQuest.
• 1:24:13
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, LaserQuest?
• 1:24:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:24:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:24:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's kind of by where my office is today.
• 1:24:18
  SPEAKER_00: And...
• 1:24:19
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how many birthdays I celebrated Laser Quest
• 1:24:21
  SPEAKER_00: or just random Friday nights we'd go play Laser Tag.
• 1:24:24
  SPEAKER_00: But it felt like you would walk into those doors and you would enter
• 1:24:26
  SPEAKER_00: into this whole different world.
• 1:24:28
  SPEAKER_00: And again, it would always be dark outside.
• 1:24:30
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like these were a lot of activities we did in the wintertime.
• 1:24:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so you would show up.
• 1:24:37
  SPEAKER_00: It felt like a really high-level operation.
• 1:24:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I never did Laser Tag anywhere else that came along after Laser Quest that was
• 1:24:45
  SPEAKER_00: as fun than at Laser Quest.
• 1:24:46
  SPEAKER_00: I thought the layout was geeky.
• 1:24:47
  SPEAKER_01: That was great because they had all the different levels.
• 1:24:49
  SPEAKER_01: You'd get second floor, first floor, hidden areas.
• 1:24:52
  SPEAKER_00: There wasn't really anywhere you could hide.
• 1:24:54
  SPEAKER_00: You would have those people who played all the time
• 1:24:56
  SPEAKER_00: who had their little sneaky spots they would hang out in.
• 1:24:58
  SPEAKER_00: But you would exit and then come out and look at the TVs.
• 1:25:02
  SPEAKER_00: You would see your scores and they would give you the printouts.
• 1:25:04
  SPEAKER_01: You think you did really well and then you realize you just got destroyed
• 1:25:08
  SPEAKER_01: because some little kid would sit there and shoot you as soon as you came alive
• 1:25:12
  SPEAKER_01: because you would be dead for a second.
• 1:25:13
  SPEAKER_01: And they'd sit there and shoot you over and over again until you had to run from them.
• 1:25:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and the little kids would hide their spots.
• 1:25:20
  SPEAKER_01: You couldn't shoot them back.
• 1:25:21
  SPEAKER_01: You didn't know they were there, and they'd just shoot you over and over again.
• 1:25:23
  SPEAKER_01: You're like, why?
• 1:25:24
  SPEAKER_01: Who's shooting me?
• 1:25:26
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 1:25:26
  SPEAKER_01: Laser Quest was really cool.
• 1:25:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'd miss the laser tag life for sure.
• 1:25:32
  SPEAKER_01: That place probably was around until just a few years ago, I think.
• 1:25:35
  SPEAKER_00: Probably pre-COVID.
• 1:25:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, probably.
• 1:25:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it seems like a lot of things went out in that period of time.
• 1:25:41
  SPEAKER_00: Restaurants wise,
• 1:25:43
  SPEAKER_00: a place that came to my mind was,
• 1:25:47
  SPEAKER_00: and this was actually one of the few things we talked about before we got started.
• 1:25:49
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, no, this is not something we talked about.
• 1:25:51
  SPEAKER_00: What was the name of that Italian place next to Capitol Hill Florist?
• 1:25:57
  SPEAKER_01: In South Oklahoma City?
• 1:25:58
  SPEAKER_00: In South Oklahoma City.
• 1:25:59
  SPEAKER_00: That we would go to after church.
• 1:26:01
  SPEAKER_01: So somebody from our Sunday school class introduced us to it.
• 1:26:05
  SPEAKER_01: It was ridiculous.
• 1:26:07
  SPEAKER_01: As a group, we went there once.
• 1:26:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then we went there several times.
• 1:26:10
  SPEAKER_01: It was really good.
• 1:26:11
  SPEAKER_00: Still, I think it might be the best pizza I've had in Oklahoma City.
• 1:26:14
  SPEAKER_00: And they had calzones.
• 1:26:16
  SPEAKER_01: It was right across from an old movie theater.
• 1:26:18
  SPEAKER_01: So it was at 59th and Western.
• 1:26:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:26:22
  SPEAKER_01: What was that place?
• 1:26:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's a pretty cool little place.
• 1:26:25
  SPEAKER_00: Again, if somebody remembers the name of this place, please let us know.
• 1:26:28
  SPEAKER_00: But then other restaurants, the Landry's that was off the Lagoon on Northwestern.
• 1:26:32
  SPEAKER_00: I can't call it the Lagoon.
• 1:26:34
  SPEAKER_01: The people that live in that neighborhood probably don't appreciate the Lagoon, but...
• 1:26:41
  SPEAKER_01: Let's call it a lake.
• 1:26:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's a small lake.
• 1:26:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's a private lake.
• 1:26:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was a Joe's Crab Shack after it was a Landry's.
• 1:26:47
  SPEAKER_01: But the Landry's was special.
• 1:26:48
  SPEAKER_01: The Landry's was so cool.
• 1:26:50
  SPEAKER_01: Because it was high in seafood.
• 1:26:52
  SPEAKER_00: It was on the water.
• 1:26:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they had a patio.
• 1:26:54
  SPEAKER_01: They had like a big wooden deck out there I think that you could sit on.
• 1:26:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and they didn't have like a mosquito netting or it had some kind of netting on it.
• 1:26:58
  SPEAKER_00: And that was a cool concept that I wish was still around.
• 1:27:01
  SPEAKER_01: That was a good place.
• 1:27:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:27:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then Bahama Mamba's.
• 1:27:06
  SPEAKER_01: Bahama Breeze?
• 1:27:07
  SPEAKER_00: Bahama Breeze, not Bahama Mama's, Bahama Breeze.
• 1:27:09
  SPEAKER_01: You could probably get Bahama Mama at Bahama Breeze.
• 1:27:11
  SPEAKER_01: That was really cool, which is now Mama Rojas.
• 1:27:14
  SPEAKER_01: See, that's what you put the two restaurants together.
• 1:27:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's crazy that happened, yeah.
• 1:27:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I went to Bahama Breeze a few years back in Orlando, and it was still pretty good.
• 1:27:24
  SPEAKER_01: But again, I think it's one of those things that grew, had to be in the right market.
• 1:27:29
  SPEAKER_01: It was kind of seafoodish, wasn't it?
• 1:27:30
  SPEAKER_00: It was seafoodish.
• 1:27:31
  SPEAKER_00: It was tropical.
• 1:27:32
  SPEAKER_00: It was that Kenny Chesney, no shoes, no shirt, no problem.
• 1:27:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:27:36
  SPEAKER_00: 2005 vibe.
• 1:27:38
  SPEAKER_01: I do think that there's a theme in some restaurants in Oklahoma City that make it
• 1:27:42
  SPEAKER_01: and don't make it, and it's seafood.
• 1:27:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, like the Drake didn't make it.
• 1:27:47
  SPEAKER_01: There's been some really big investments.
• 1:27:49
  SPEAKER_01: There's a place called Herman's years ago that was like really famous and
• 1:27:52
  SPEAKER_01: then they reopened where the ranch is, Northside, and they didn't make it.
• 1:27:56
  SPEAKER_00: That fried seafood place that's off of 63rd or that used to be off 63rd that did
• 1:28:02
  SPEAKER_00: the fried Cajun seafood.
• 1:28:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's the tequila bar.
• 1:28:06
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:28:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's in the Mexican restaurant.
• 1:28:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was the Cajun...
• 1:28:13
  SPEAKER_01: But they had a pretty good run there.
• 1:28:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was there for quite a while.
• 1:28:15
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Pearl's has been around for a long time.
• 1:28:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so has the seafood place at Lake Hefner Grill.
• 1:28:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's just a really tough marketing sell.
• 1:28:25
  SPEAKER_01: It is.
• 1:28:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think we can make the—as Oklahomans,
• 1:28:28
  SPEAKER_00: we can reach for Cajun because it feels close because we've got
• 1:28:31
  SPEAKER_00: that little Louisiana, Cajun, Southeast feel to us sometimes.
• 1:28:35
  SPEAKER_00: But high-end seafood just doesn't— I never even want it here.
• 1:28:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I love seafood.
• 1:28:41
  SPEAKER_00: I would, I would never want to eat that.
• 1:28:42
  SPEAKER_00: I just think the main problem is Oklahoma doesn't touch the ocean.
• 1:28:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:28:45
  SPEAKER_00: It violates the rule of eating seafood.
• 1:28:48
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a little bit of a seafood snob in the fact that if you have tilapia
• 1:28:51
  SPEAKER_01: on your menu, you should not call yourself a seafood restaurant.
• 1:28:55
  SPEAKER_01: Just saying.
• 1:28:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's the truth.
• 1:28:56
  SPEAKER_01: Just saying.
• 1:28:57
  SPEAKER_00: And there's been a lot of seafood restaurants here that have had tilapia as a main entree.
• 1:29:01
  SPEAKER_00: And we've tried all of them.
• 1:29:02
  SPEAKER_01: We've tried them all.
• 1:29:03
  SPEAKER_01: I am a seafood guy.
• 1:29:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:29:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, Okay.
• 1:29:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think, oh, okay.
• 1:29:11
  SPEAKER_00: Sports from the 2000s.
• 1:29:14
  SPEAKER_00: Briefly, the OKC Wranglers games.
• 1:29:17
  SPEAKER_00: The indoor football.
• 1:29:19
  SPEAKER_00: That was really cool.
• 1:29:20
  SPEAKER_01: That was a really cool thing.
• 1:29:21
  SPEAKER_00: The first couple years, it was really good.
• 1:29:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:29:23
  SPEAKER_00: Because the vibes were high.
• 1:29:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they used to see them on ESPN.
• 1:29:26
  SPEAKER_01: They would be, they covered in ESPN.
• 1:29:27
  SPEAKER_00: They had the contract, didn't they?
• 1:29:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:29:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the players were good.
• 1:29:31
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, it just felt like arena, we got a little bit of that fun arena league.
• 1:29:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like whenever the Rattlers, like the Arizona Rattlers were big.
• 1:29:38
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:29:39
  SPEAKER_00: It was, I feel like we got a dose of it.
• 1:29:41
  SPEAKER_01: Because Danny White was the coach.
• 1:29:43
  SPEAKER_01: The ex-Dallas quarterback was the coach of the Wranglers.
• 1:29:45
  SPEAKER_01: Was he really?
• 1:29:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the Rattlers.
• 1:29:47
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know that.
• 1:29:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:29:48
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, was it?
• 1:29:49
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, that's right.
• 1:29:50
  SPEAKER_00: The Rattlers.
• 1:29:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the Arizona Rattlers.
• 1:29:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then sports-wise, Little League-wise, Davis Park.
• 1:29:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's on my list too, man.
• 1:29:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and that goes back to when I was a kid too.
• 1:30:00
  SPEAKER_00: What are your memories about Davis Park?
• 1:30:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because I feel like a lot of people who grew up
• 1:30:04
  SPEAKER_00: the north side may not have ever played games or baseball games or softball games
• 1:30:08
  SPEAKER_00: at Davis.
• 1:30:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, then they weren't playing competitive baseball.
• 1:30:13
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
• 1:30:14
  SPEAKER_00: It was the home of the best baseball in the city for how many years?
• 1:30:17
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, gosh.
• 1:30:18
  SPEAKER_01: Fifteen?
• 1:30:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:30:20
  SPEAKER_01: So...
• 1:30:21
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there was, what was the Optimist, Putnam City Optimist?
• 1:30:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but that wasn't Davis.
• 1:30:27
  SPEAKER_01: That wasn't Davis.
• 1:30:29
  SPEAKER_01: Putnam City Optimist had kind of their own, it was the PC area, but...
• 1:30:33
  SPEAKER_01: You had teams from Edmond that played league in Davis,
• 1:30:36
  SPEAKER_01: and that's where you went for good tournaments and found Norman teams played.
• 1:30:41
  SPEAKER_01: If they didn't want to play at Reeves Park, they wanted a little more competition.
• 1:30:43
  SPEAKER_01: They played at Davis.
• 1:30:45
  SPEAKER_01: So the UConn played at Davis.
• 1:30:47
  SPEAKER_00: It was tournament-level competition in league every single night.
• 1:30:52
  SPEAKER_01: And when there was a tournament, they brought in some big teams.
• 1:30:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so you kind of ask the question, what made it unique?
• 1:30:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it wasn't the chain-linked.
• 1:30:59
  SPEAKER_01: And when you hit a home run?
• 1:31:22
  SPEAKER_00: At a chain link park versus at Davis Park, the feeling's different.
• 1:31:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because when the ball disappears, it feels like a home run.
• 1:31:28
  SPEAKER_00: That is so cool.
• 1:31:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's a different feeling.
• 1:31:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:31:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it was the only ballpark that had that in the scene.
• 1:31:33
  SPEAKER_00: Only one.
• 1:31:33
  SPEAKER_00: Until Legends opened.
• 1:31:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:31:35
  SPEAKER_01: And Legends was really cool, except Legends was so big.
• 1:31:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:31:41
  SPEAKER_01: It took forever to get from one park to the other.
• 1:31:43
  SPEAKER_01: The thing about Davis is that it was small enough in the way it was put together
• 1:31:47
  SPEAKER_01: that whether you were on the backfields, You felt like you were a part of the park.
• 1:31:51
  SPEAKER_01: When you played it,
• 1:31:52
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:31:53
  SPEAKER_01: that other place,
• 1:31:54
  SPEAKER_01: if you were in that backfield,
• 1:31:55
  SPEAKER_01: you were by yourself and you didn't know anything about what was going on there,
• 1:31:58
  SPEAKER_01: the games.
• 1:31:59
  SPEAKER_01: This had this feel where you could get the excitement of the game next to you
• 1:32:02
  SPEAKER_01: while you were playing yours.
• 1:32:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's what made it special.
• 1:32:05
  SPEAKER_01: So when I was a kid, baseball was in the front and softball was in the back.
• 1:32:10
  SPEAKER_01: So where you played when you were like 11.
• 1:32:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like all those backfields in the back were softball fields.
• 1:32:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, those were all softball.
• 1:32:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I remember going out with my sister when she played.
• 1:32:18
  SPEAKER_01: And my baseball teams didn't play a lot at Davis.
• 1:32:20
  SPEAKER_01: I played at Davis when I was probably like 13, 14.
• 1:32:23
  SPEAKER_01: We played a couple of tournaments there because we went and looked for better coaches.
• 1:32:27
  SPEAKER_01: But we played a lot of the other parks like Dell City and Midwest City and those places.
• 1:32:32
  SPEAKER_01: But Edmond, we didn't play a lot at Davis.
• 1:32:36
  SPEAKER_01: But Cousin Greg, he played a little bit at Davis.
• 1:32:39
  SPEAKER_01: There was a league at Woodson too.
• 1:32:41
  SPEAKER_01: So there was Woodson Park League, Davis League.
• 1:32:42
  SPEAKER_01: So that's where those two teams would maybe go play each other.
• 1:32:45
  SPEAKER_01: But that was a great place.
• 1:32:48
  SPEAKER_01: And again, the answer was they had really nice infields.
• 1:32:52
  SPEAKER_01: And you didn't see that.
• 1:32:53
  SPEAKER_01: Moore was dirt.
• 1:32:54
  SPEAKER_01: And Davis at the time was – because when you played, was Moore dirt?
• 1:32:58
  SPEAKER_00: Moore was not dirt.
• 1:33:00
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't very nice, right?
• 1:33:01
  SPEAKER_00: But it wasn't like Davis.
• 1:33:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Davis was manicured.
• 1:33:03
  SPEAKER_00: It felt like you were playing on high school baseball field.
• 1:33:06
  SPEAKER_00: Not quite that nice.
• 1:33:06
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:33:07
  SPEAKER_00: It was a really nice experience.
• 1:33:09
  SPEAKER_00: And they had those – I don't know.
• 1:33:11
  SPEAKER_00: There was like a level of – Yeah.
• 1:33:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:33:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's what made it special.
• 1:33:36
  SPEAKER_01: You felt like you were special when you played there because it was unique.
• 1:33:40
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of big time baseball games got played at that park.
• 1:33:43
  SPEAKER_01: There were some big ones.
• 1:33:45
  SPEAKER_01: I realized I missed a restaurant.
• 1:33:48
  SPEAKER_01: Can we backtrack a little bit?
• 1:33:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, let's go back.
• 1:33:51
  SPEAKER_01: If anybody's watching this and they're a child of the 70s and 80s,
• 1:33:53
  SPEAKER_01: they're like, you have not mentioned Crystal's Pizza.
• 1:33:56
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, God, yeah.
• 1:33:57
  SPEAKER_00: This is probably the reason why we even did the show.
• 1:34:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:34:01
  SPEAKER_01: How did I miss that?
• 1:34:02
  SPEAKER_01: So, Crystal's Pizza was a national chain,
• 1:34:06
  SPEAKER_01: or maybe it was a regional chain, because I think they're out of Texas.
• 1:34:10
  SPEAKER_01: I think the last one closed recently in Texas, but they'd stayed open.
• 1:34:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, it had...
• 1:34:16
  SPEAKER_01: There was one in South Oklahoma City, which...
• 1:34:19
  SPEAKER_01: I went to a lot.
• 1:34:19
  SPEAKER_01: You went there when you were really little.
• 1:34:22
  SPEAKER_01: It closed before the one on Northwest Expressway closed.
• 1:34:25
  SPEAKER_01: But they had really good pizza.
• 1:34:27
  SPEAKER_01: They had something for everyone.
• 1:34:29
  SPEAKER_01: They had an area for adults that had like a singer and a place to have a beer
• 1:34:34
  SPEAKER_01: and listen to music while you were friends and having pizza.
• 1:34:37
  SPEAKER_01: While your kids were either in the arcade or were in
• 1:34:40
  SPEAKER_01: the movie theater watching old Three Stooges and cartoons and things like that.
• 1:34:44
  SPEAKER_00: So you're saying there was actual adult entertainment from like a band or a singer?
• 1:34:48
  SPEAKER_01: It would be like just the guys drumming on a guitar, singing that kind of stuff.
• 1:34:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, acoustic type thing.
• 1:34:53
  SPEAKER_00: Popular songs at the time.
• 1:34:53
  SPEAKER_00: Certain nights of the week.
• 1:34:55
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:34:55
  SPEAKER_01: And they had their like $2.99 spaghetti on Wednesdays or something that we went to a few times.
• 1:35:01
  SPEAKER_01: And then, of course, it closed.
• 1:35:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then Northwest Expressway stayed open for probably another 10 years, it felt like.
• 1:35:07
  SPEAKER_01: And it was pretty far out there.
• 1:35:09
  SPEAKER_01: It was like Rockwell.
• 1:35:10
  SPEAKER_00: The one-off of Northwest Expressway I remember going to for the last time,
• 1:35:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think whenever I was 10 or 11.
• 1:35:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:35:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that was about the last time I remember going there.
• 1:35:21
  SPEAKER_01: Was there Don Pablo's out in front of that?
• 1:35:23
  SPEAKER_00: I believe there was.
• 1:35:24
  SPEAKER_01: Did Don Pablo's
• 1:35:25
  SPEAKER_00: replace it?
• 1:35:26
  SPEAKER_00: In that same area?
• 1:35:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think there was.
• 1:35:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that would have been the same time frame in the late 90s.
• 1:35:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:35:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:35:32
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I somehow missed that on my list earlier when I was going over restaurants.
• 1:35:36
  SPEAKER_00: It felt like they'd like, was the eating area on top of the arcade or something like that?
• 1:35:41
  SPEAKER_00: Wasn't the eating area,
• 1:35:42
  SPEAKER_00: there was like an eating area vaulted up or like a page room that was up on top
• 1:35:45
  SPEAKER_00: of things and then there was an arcade and then there was
• 1:35:47
  SPEAKER_00: the private movie room screening where they played the old black and white movies?
• 1:35:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:35:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's, again, like unbelievable that a place like that existed in the city.
• 1:35:56
  SPEAKER_01: Two of them existed at one point in the city, right?
• 1:35:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was a great place to go with your family.
• 1:36:02
  SPEAKER_01: It was all family entertainment.
• 1:36:04
  SPEAKER_01: But they also knew that adults sometimes didn't want to hang out in the arcade with the kids.
• 1:36:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so as an adult,
• 1:36:09
  SPEAKER_01: you felt pretty safe to say,
• 1:36:10
  SPEAKER_01: go watch movies in the theater and take your own pizza
• 1:36:13
  SPEAKER_01: and you guys don't tear anything up.
• 1:36:16
  SPEAKER_01: We'll come check on you in 30 minutes.
• 1:36:17
  SPEAKER_00: It was the perfect setup.
• 1:36:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it makes you look around at places like Main Event and Yeah,
• 1:36:24
  SPEAKER_01: it's probably precursor to the main event in those kind of places,
• 1:36:26
  SPEAKER_01: but not centered around bowling, though.
• 1:36:28
  SPEAKER_00: There's so much more heart in the crystals concept than there is in those, but hey.
• 1:36:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 1:36:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to sound like the old man who works in this
• 1:36:36
  SPEAKER_01: town.
• 1:36:38
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a Mr. Gaddy's that reopened.
• 1:36:40
  SPEAKER_01: Mr. Gaddy's was a pizza chain back then,
• 1:36:42
  SPEAKER_01: and they kind of tried to create that same type feel,
• 1:36:44
  SPEAKER_01: that incredible pizza type feel.
• 1:36:47
  SPEAKER_00: Incredible pizza is probably the closest modern concept to that idea.
• 1:36:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:36:51
  SPEAKER_01: So Mr. Gatties has that concept too.
• 1:36:52
  SPEAKER_01: They have pizza, movie theater, video games, but it's one level.
• 1:36:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that was the magic of Crystals is that...
• 1:37:03
  SPEAKER_01: Like the south side, you had to walk up steps to get to the theater.
• 1:37:06
  SPEAKER_01: So it was a theater where you actually looked down.
• 1:37:09
  SPEAKER_01: Same thing with the one on the north side had the steps that you went up to.
• 1:37:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that just made it different.
• 1:37:14
  SPEAKER_01: To me, restaurants are a lot more interesting when they're two stories.
• 1:37:18
  SPEAKER_01: And they've got a little more depth to it than just the flat box.
• 1:37:22
  SPEAKER_01: Like we went to, I won't even name this chain.
• 1:37:24
  SPEAKER_01: I went to this chain that just opened up and I was kind of excited to go.
• 1:37:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, I don't like the restaurant because it's just a big old box.
• 1:37:33
  SPEAKER_01: And it just didn't do anything for me.
• 1:37:34
  SPEAKER_01: It was just kind of boring.
• 1:37:35
  SPEAKER_01: But there you go.
• 1:37:36
  SPEAKER_00: It matters.
• 1:37:37
  SPEAKER_00: Again, and when you move locations, if you have that location that works, no guarantees?
• 1:37:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:37:45
  SPEAKER_01: 2010s?
• 1:37:45
  SPEAKER_01: 2010s, what do you got?
• 1:37:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to start with an experience from the 2010s that I think I will argue for
• 1:37:55
  SPEAKER_00: a person in their 20s in the 2010s was the archetypal experience of what it meant
• 1:38:02
  SPEAKER_00: to live in Oklahoma City at the time.
• 1:38:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that was the H&A festivals that used to happen off of Hudson and 8th.
• 1:38:10
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 1:38:11
  SPEAKER_01: Do you remember those?
• 1:38:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I do remember that.
• 1:38:13
  SPEAKER_00: That was at the Nader of Food Truck.
• 1:38:15
  SPEAKER_00: St. Anthony's.
• 1:38:34
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:38:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like, if you were around Saints, there was a lot of crime in the area around Saints.
• 1:38:37
  SPEAKER_00: There still is a lot of crime in the area around Saints,
• 1:38:39
  SPEAKER_00: but that area has—and that was before Midtown was Midtown.
• 1:38:42
  SPEAKER_00: Right, exactly.
• 1:38:43
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Vignelli's was present at that point,
• 1:38:45
  SPEAKER_00: I believe,
• 1:38:46
  SPEAKER_00: but when H&A came in, I mean,
• 1:38:48
  SPEAKER_00: there were just thousands of people there,
• 1:38:51
  SPEAKER_00: and that also launched—H&A launched the first Friday events,
• 1:38:56
  SPEAKER_00: the last Friday events,
• 1:38:58
  SPEAKER_00: the second and third Friday events that ended up starting in the Paseo in
• 1:39:01
  SPEAKER_00: the Plaza District— Right.
• 1:39:03
  SPEAKER_00: Afterwards.
• 1:39:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:39:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so, I mean,
• 1:39:05
  SPEAKER_00: that's where like the Loaded Bowl came,
• 1:39:08
  SPEAKER_00: which rest in peace, Loaded Bowl just closed.
• 1:39:10
  SPEAKER_00: But that's where Saucy Sicilian came out of.
• 1:39:14
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 1:39:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so all of those restaurants kind of came from that food scene.
• 1:39:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure I'm missing probably like 10 established restaurants now that came out of that.
• 1:39:22
  SPEAKER_00: But H&E was so fun because it felt like you were at this like burgeoning,
• 1:39:27
  SPEAKER_00: cultural, I don't know, zeitgeist.
• 1:39:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:39:31
  SPEAKER_00: For the city at the time, you know.
• 1:39:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I wish that we still had that,
• 1:39:35
  SPEAKER_00: but you can't really go back and put it in the bottle
• 1:39:36
  SPEAKER_00: because now all those restaurants are all those food trucks are restaurants now.
• 1:39:40
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 1:39:41
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, that was a big experience.
• 1:39:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's where their incubator is, is the food trucks a lot of times.
• 1:39:48
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 1:39:49
  SPEAKER_00: And speaking of food trucks,
• 1:39:50
  SPEAKER_00: another thing that's linked,
• 1:39:52
  SPEAKER_00: and then I'll toss it to you, something I really miss is Blue Garden.
• 1:39:57
  SPEAKER_01: That was a really cool concept too.
• 1:39:59
  SPEAKER_01: I like that, yeah.
• 1:40:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I think they've been out now since pre-COVID, maybe 2018, 2019.
• 1:40:07
  SPEAKER_00: But that was really cool because on a really nice day,
• 1:40:09
  SPEAKER_00: which in Oklahoma we have like, what, like 14 of those a year.
• 1:40:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that could be the problem with a place like Blue Garden.
• 1:40:14
  SPEAKER_00: Is that the seasonality of that.
• 1:40:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you're not going there today.
• 1:40:17
  SPEAKER_01: You're not going there for the last month, right?
• 1:40:20
  SPEAKER_01: I told you my car was 122 today when I got in it.
• 1:40:24
  SPEAKER_01: I've never had that registered.
• 1:40:25
  SPEAKER_01: The Blue Garden wouldn't work today.
• 1:40:27
  SPEAKER_00: But it was funny though,
• 1:40:28
  SPEAKER_00: as soon as the sun would set,
• 1:40:30
  SPEAKER_00: no matter what the time of year was,
• 1:40:31
  SPEAKER_00: or in the summer,
• 1:40:32
  SPEAKER_00: as soon as the sun would descend,
• 1:40:34
  SPEAKER_00: that place would just fill up and it would stay open late.
• 1:40:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:40:38
  SPEAKER_00: It was, I don't know, there was something about it, the indoor-outdoor aspect.
• 1:40:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:40:45
  SPEAKER_00: It kind of brought people together from multiple niches.
• 1:40:48
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the bar scene in Oklahoma City has been so specific to certain groups
• 1:40:52
  SPEAKER_00: of people where it's like that's the fraternity and sorority crowd,
• 1:40:54
  SPEAKER_00: that's the oil and gas crowd, that's this crowd, this and that crowd.
• 1:40:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think everybody went to Blue Gardens.
• 1:40:59
  SPEAKER_00: You got to see a bunch of different diverse groups of people hanging out in one spot.
• 1:41:04
  SPEAKER_01: That's cool.
• 1:41:04
  SPEAKER_00: I still think it would work.
• 1:41:06
  SPEAKER_01: Truckyard.
• 1:41:07
  SPEAKER_00: Truckyard is essentially that now.
• 1:41:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:41:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 1:41:10
  SPEAKER_00: And Trucker, it's cool.
• 1:41:11
  SPEAKER_00: Me and you went.
• 1:41:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's really cool.
• 1:41:12
  SPEAKER_00: A couple weeks ago.
• 1:41:13
  SPEAKER_01: I have one other restaurant that went out in the 2000s.
• 1:41:20
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:41:22
  SPEAKER_01: Actually closed in 2016.
• 1:41:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's got a pretty interesting character that developed it.
• 1:41:28
  SPEAKER_01: But it's called Nomad.
• 1:41:31
  SPEAKER_01: Technically, it's the Nomad 2.
• 1:41:34
  SPEAKER_00: That always confused me, that part.
• 1:41:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:41:37
  SPEAKER_00: But God, I miss the Nomad.
• 1:41:40
  SPEAKER_01: Great atmosphere, dark setting.
• 1:41:43
  SPEAKER_01: If you've ever had ever been there, you know, it was on 70th and North May.
• 1:41:50
  SPEAKER_01: But it was started by kind of one of the early entrepreneurs of restaurant in Oklahoma City.
• 1:41:57
  SPEAKER_01: And when I was kind of looking up a little history on it.
• 1:42:00
  SPEAKER_01: So the Nomad operated for 41 years and it was started by a guy named Jack Sussy Sussman.
• 1:42:07
  SPEAKER_01: So Sussy's Pizza.
• 1:42:10
  SPEAKER_00: You're talking Southside Sussies was related to the Nomad?
• 1:42:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:42:14
  SPEAKER_00: Southside Sussies from the 50s and the 60s.
• 1:42:16
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 1:42:18
  SPEAKER_01: If you start reading about him,
• 1:42:19
  SPEAKER_01: he had like 10, 15 different restaurants that he started over the years.
• 1:42:23
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 1:42:23
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't realize that.
• 1:42:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I think he ended up getting into maybe some financial trouble and some trouble
• 1:42:30
  SPEAKER_01: with the law and little things from some financial stuff.
• 1:42:34
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, it operated until 2016 and then it changed hands and changed concepts.
• 1:42:41
  SPEAKER_01: But the recipes were his family's recipes.
• 1:42:46
  SPEAKER_01: He wasn't Italian.
• 1:42:48
  SPEAKER_01: They basically, his name is Sussman, so they called him Sussie.
• 1:42:52
  SPEAKER_01: His business partner said, we're going to call you Sussie so you sound Italian.
• 1:42:56
  SPEAKER_01: But if you talk to anybody from Oklahoma City from the 60s and 70s, man,
• 1:43:02
  SPEAKER_01: they talk about Sussie's Pizza because it was basically the first Italian pizza
• 1:43:07
  SPEAKER_01: in Oklahoma City.
• 1:43:09
  SPEAKER_00: Sussie's Pizza was the first Italian pizza?
• 1:43:11
  SPEAKER_01: They brought pizza to Oklahoma City.
• 1:43:14
  SPEAKER_00: That guy had an eye.
• 1:43:15
  SPEAKER_00: He did.
• 1:43:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because the places that he had ended up becoming these places that people loved hanging out at.
• 1:43:21
  SPEAKER_01: But I think it's interesting to read if you kind of go through and kind
• 1:43:24
  SPEAKER_01: of look him up and see all the different restaurants that he started.
• 1:43:26
  SPEAKER_00: What was his first name?
• 1:43:27
  SPEAKER_00: Sussman?
• 1:43:28
  SPEAKER_00: Jack.
• 1:43:28
  SPEAKER_00: Jack Sussman.
• 1:43:29
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:43:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:43:30
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 1:43:31
  SPEAKER_01: But that was a pretty awesome place.
• 1:43:34
  SPEAKER_01: I love the Nomad.
• 1:43:34
  SPEAKER_01: The only thing I ever got there was pizza,
• 1:43:36
  SPEAKER_01: but somebody, one of your grandpa's friends, said he loved their steak.
• 1:43:41
  SPEAKER_01: Tui was a big steak guy.
• 1:43:43
  SPEAKER_01: Apparently, I think he used to get steak there.
• 1:43:45
  SPEAKER_00: Huh.
• 1:43:46
  SPEAKER_00: Steaks.
• 1:43:46
  SPEAKER_01: Mm-hmm.
• 1:43:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:43:48
  SPEAKER_00: The atmosphere on the inside was really cool.
• 1:43:50
  SPEAKER_00: The butter and the saltines.
• 1:43:53
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 1:43:53
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:43:54
  SPEAKER_01: At the entry.
• 1:43:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
• 1:43:55
  SPEAKER_01: My saltines.
• 1:43:56
  SPEAKER_01: I would eat a lot of those, I'm sure, while we're waiting.
• 1:43:58
  SPEAKER_00: That was another one of those great winter night Oklahoma City places.
• 1:44:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:44:03
  SPEAKER_01: What else you got?
• 1:44:03
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:44:04
  SPEAKER_00: A couple of other 2010s notes.
• 1:44:06
  SPEAKER_00: I miss the Packard's Upstairs bar.
• 1:44:09
  SPEAKER_01: That was a really cool rooftop.
• 1:44:10
  SPEAKER_00: That overlooked the city.
• 1:44:12
  SPEAKER_00: I also really miss Cuppy's and Joe as a coffee shop.
• 1:44:15
  SPEAKER_00: That was, yeah.
• 1:44:17
  SPEAKER_00: Cuppy's and Joe, the coffee wasn't the best coffee in the city.
• 1:44:19
  SPEAKER_00: The big goods weren't the best goods in the city.
• 1:44:21
  SPEAKER_00: But the inside
• 1:44:23
  SPEAKER_00: of their craftsman style restaurant building always felt more intimate
• 1:44:28
  SPEAKER_00: than any other coffee shop.
• 1:44:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it was always packed at night.
• 1:44:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know,
• 1:44:32
  SPEAKER_00: it was just like a fun place to have in the city as like a dessert place to go
• 1:44:37
  SPEAKER_00: after dinner.
• 1:44:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I also really liked that whole development at one point in time.
• 1:44:42
  SPEAKER_01: Guernsey Park.
• 1:44:43
  SPEAKER_01: Guernsey Park.
• 1:44:43
  SPEAKER_01: I was going to ask you if you can remember the name of it.
• 1:44:45
  SPEAKER_01: That was a cool restaurant.
• 1:44:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:44:48
  SPEAKER_01: Asian fusion kind of place.
• 1:44:51
  SPEAKER_01: And then the chicken and beer place.
• 1:44:53
  SPEAKER_01: Chicken and beer.
• 1:44:54
  SPEAKER_01: Chicken beer.
• 1:44:54
  SPEAKER_01: Chicken beer just went out too recently.
• 1:44:56
  SPEAKER_00: So that whole, I think that whole area is under some kind of like reimagining at this point.
• 1:45:02
  SPEAKER_00: There's like a beer hall, I think, that's going in the back.
• 1:45:06
  SPEAKER_01: Is it Guernsey Park?
• 1:45:07
  SPEAKER_01: Building's still there?
• 1:45:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's still there.
• 1:45:09
  SPEAKER_01: Because that was pretty unique.
• 1:45:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's a beer place back there, like a tap hall right now.
• 1:45:15
  SPEAKER_00: I just haven't heard anybody talk about it.
• 1:45:17
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, I think that's the thing.
• 1:45:20
  SPEAKER_01: Restaurants come in and out depending on what's the hip type, you know, food and concept.
• 1:45:27
  SPEAKER_01: And to talk about places like a Sussie's or a Nomad or that they were in business
• 1:45:34
  SPEAKER_01: for 50 years...
• 1:45:36
  SPEAKER_01: You don't get to say that very often.
• 1:45:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think a restaurant life,
• 1:45:41
  SPEAKER_01: if you can get 10 years out of a restaurant, that's pretty amazing, honestly.
• 1:45:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's pretty amazing how many restaurants go in and out that were really top of
• 1:45:52
  SPEAKER_00: the market restaurants at one point in time.
• 1:45:56
  SPEAKER_00: Another 2010s thing I miss is the Whole Foods patio.
• 1:46:00
  SPEAKER_01: That was a really cool thing, too.
• 1:46:02
  SPEAKER_01: Go over there at lunch, grab a salad, sit outside, kind of escape.
• 1:46:06
  SPEAKER_01: For a few minutes and then get back and it was good.
• 1:46:11
  SPEAKER_00: It was good.
• 1:46:11
  SPEAKER_00: The quality, it was different before the Amazon takeover in 2018.
• 1:46:14
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think the salad bar is quite...
• 1:46:17
  SPEAKER_00: The quality went down.
• 1:46:17
  SPEAKER_00: They don't use real eggs anymore at the salad bar.
• 1:46:20
  SPEAKER_00: Last time I was at a Whole Foods, they didn't use that anymore for the breakfast buffet.
• 1:46:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we don't need to go down that rabbit hole.
• 1:46:26
  SPEAKER_00: But it was a fun place to hang out.
• 1:46:28
  SPEAKER_00: It was.
• 1:46:28
  SPEAKER_00: On a really nice night.
• 1:46:30
  SPEAKER_00: It was easy.
• 1:46:31
  SPEAKER_00: Whole Foods was a different idea back then, too.
• 1:46:33
  SPEAKER_00: It was like a fun place to be.
• 1:46:35
  SPEAKER_00: Again, the Chesapeake-ification of the area.
• 1:46:38
  SPEAKER_00: The only reason Whole Foods is there is because of Chesapeake, Samba Trader Joe's.
• 1:46:42
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, I think that's about all I got for 2010s.
• 1:46:45
  SPEAKER_00: I have a couple other 2020s thoughts that I could run past you.
• 1:46:49
  SPEAKER_01: All right, what you got?
• 1:46:50
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:46:51
  SPEAKER_00: I miss the pump.
• 1:46:56
  SPEAKER_00: The bar, that just went out, I think a year and a half ago.
• 1:47:00
  SPEAKER_00: As an outdoor bar,
• 1:47:01
  SPEAKER_00: we do not have very many good patio bar scenes in the city,
• 1:47:05
  SPEAKER_00: but I felt like the pump was really cool.
• 1:47:08
  SPEAKER_00: I guess they got in a disagreement with the landlord and that property.
• 1:47:10
  SPEAKER_00: And now that whole area, that whole service station, it's been gutted now.
• 1:47:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know what they're going to do with that.
• 1:47:15
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's for sale now.
• 1:47:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I think their lease got bumped up.
• 1:47:20
  SPEAKER_00: They left and now they're trying to sell the property.
• 1:47:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a really important corridor next to Mott In between Mott.
• 1:47:27
  SPEAKER_01: And Paseo.
• 1:47:27
  SPEAKER_00: And Paseo.
• 1:47:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:47:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great place for an indoor outdoor bar.
• 1:47:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm really hoping that that comes back because the pump was, I don't know, it was cool.
• 1:47:34
  SPEAKER_00: That was a really cool place.
• 1:47:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:47:37
  SPEAKER_00: In the city.
• 1:47:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then Whiskey Cake had a pretty good run in front of Penn Square Mall.
• 1:47:42
  SPEAKER_01: It did.
• 1:47:43
  SPEAKER_00: How many years were they open before they closed?
• 1:47:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think they just closed a couple months ago.
• 1:47:47
  SPEAKER_01: Probably eight.
• 1:47:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:47:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:47:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's not bad for that restaurant though.
• 1:47:51
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
• 1:47:51
  SPEAKER_00: For that location.
• 1:47:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:47:53
  SPEAKER_01: That location has always been kind of tough.
• 1:47:54
  SPEAKER_01: It was Elephant Bar at one point.
• 1:47:56
  SPEAKER_00: Whiskey Cake was around a lot longer than Elephant Bar.
• 1:47:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:47:59
  SPEAKER_00: It was.
• 1:48:00
  SPEAKER_00: It was.
• 1:48:00
  SPEAKER_00: On that note,
• 1:48:01
  SPEAKER_00: I just miss the way the Penn Square Mall used to fill generally,
• 1:48:04
  SPEAKER_00: but we don't need to talk about malls and the differences there.
• 1:48:10
  SPEAKER_01: Now, you wonder too, with the Oaks, did that kind of take away from
• 1:48:19
  SPEAKER_00: Whiskey Cake?
• 1:48:19
  SPEAKER_00: Whiskey Cake, maybe?
• 1:48:20
  SPEAKER_01: I can see that.
• 1:48:22
  SPEAKER_01: Let's go to these other restaurants over here instead of...
• 1:48:25
  SPEAKER_01: Because Whiskey Cake was high-end bar food,
• 1:48:29
  SPEAKER_01: and their cocktails, nothing was from a mix.
• 1:48:33
  SPEAKER_00: They were at the start of the craft cocktail wave.
• 1:48:37
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:48:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel like we're kind of past the craft cocktail wave into this new era of cocktail.
• 1:48:43
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of hard to get to.
• 1:48:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:48:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:48:45
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 1:48:47
  SPEAKER_01: if you're going to go to Whiskey Cake,
• 1:48:48
  SPEAKER_01: you kind of had to be committed to go through all that little traffic mess to get
• 1:48:53
  SPEAKER_01: in there.
• 1:48:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I hadn't been there in probably a year or so.
• 1:48:58
  SPEAKER_00: There was something about it that shifted.
• 1:49:00
  SPEAKER_00: It was a great 2016 idea.
• 1:49:03
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 1:49:05
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:49:06
  SPEAKER_00: Anything else?
• 1:49:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's all.
• 1:49:08
  SPEAKER_01: Nostalgia-wise for the city?
• 1:49:11
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 1:49:12
  SPEAKER_00: Part two of our OKC Nostalgia Show.
• 1:49:16
  SPEAKER_00: We'll release Saturday morning.
• 1:49:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sorry for the technical difficulties about that in the show.
• 1:49:21
  SPEAKER_00: We lost the video capability for that.
• 1:49:23
  SPEAKER_00: Camera just had some stuff I've never had happen before happen in the middle of that show.
• 1:49:28
  SPEAKER_00: That will not happen again in the future if I can control it.
• 1:49:33
  SPEAKER_00: So thanks for hanging with us.
• 1:49:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure on Saturday morning you will be putting our podcast release
• 1:49:39
  SPEAKER_00: on your calendar,
• 1:49:40
  SPEAKER_00: making your weekend plans around hearing me and my dad talk some more
• 1:49:44
  SPEAKER_00: about Oklahoma City culture.
• 1:49:45
  SPEAKER_00: Because you should, alright?
• 1:49:48
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, if you enjoyed this episode of The Dry Line Podcast,
• 1:49:52
  SPEAKER_00: please drop us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
• 1:49:55
  SPEAKER_00: On YouTube and Spotify, as of this week, we now have video podcasts of all episodes.
• 1:50:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know what to do.
• 1:50:04
  SPEAKER_00: Like, subscribe,
• 1:50:06
  SPEAKER_00: share this show with anyone who cares about this strangely endearing crossroads on
• 1:50:11
  SPEAKER_00: the prairie that we love to call home.
• 1:50:15
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, you'll know where to find us.
• 1:50:18
  SPEAKER_00: At the powerhouse.
• 1:50:25
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, God.