Voices of Oklahoma

A Norman, Oklahoma resident, Yancey Red Corn plays a former Osage chief in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” He traveled to Cannes Film Festival for the movie’s premiere. Yancey’s ancestry includes a great-grandfather who was poisoned during the era when the Osage were dying mysteriously. In this interview, Yancey talks about his experience of acting while Martin Scorsese is behind the camera, what it...

Geoffrey Standing Bear is the Principal Chief of the Osage Nation. He is the great-grandson of Osage Principal Chief Fred Lookout. Before his election, Chief Standing Bear practiced law for 34 years. He concentrated on federal Indian law receiving national recognition by Best Lawyers in America, Oklahoma Super Lawyers, and a listing with Chambers and Partners. He served as Assistant Principal Chie...

Artist Willard Stone was born and raised in Oktaha, Oklahoma, and was best known for his wood sculptures carved in a flowing Art Deco style. Willard had an early interest in drawing and painting, but at the age of 13, he picked up a blasting cap he found while walking home from school, and it exploded. He lost his thumb and most of two fingers on his right hand. However, he became an accomplished...

While Joe Williams is primarily known in Tulsa as an oilman, his friends and family speak of him as a bird hunter and conservationist, and then an astute businessman and oilman. It is Williams’ work on behalf of the country’s largest preserved tract of native tallgrass prairie that is his lasting legacy. He is given credit for making it happen, thus the preserve was renamed the Joseph H. Williams...

April 10th, 2010 the oral history website Voices of Oklahoma was launched. We began collecting stories in 2009. So, on this, our 14th anniversary, we would like to share the history of Voices of Oklahoma as we relate some of our experiences in collecting over 270 oral histories of Oklahomans. We will talk about how the concept originated, the many places we have visited for these recordings, and w...

Bob McCormack was one of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s premier photographers. A native of Pompey, New York (just a few miles east of Syracuse), Bob’s family moved to Lathrop, Missouri, while Bob was still a child. Bob came to Tulsa during the great depression. He spent his first night in Tracy Park. The next morning he went to the Tulsa World, where Eugene Lorton hired him immediately and sent him to Claremor...

For those who remember the television show “Shindig!” but may have forgotten the host, this story will remind you of the very talented Jimmy O’Neill, who was from Enid, Oklahoma. He started his radio career at 16 in Enid, then on to WKY Oklahoma City and KQV Pittsburgh before making his Los Angeles debut at the brand-new KRLA in 1960. The station had just adopted a top-40 format. At the age of 20,...

James C. Leake was a Television pioneer along with his wife Marjory Griffin Lake and brother-in-law John “J.T.” Griffin. In the 1940s, they applied to the FCC for licenses to put television stations in Little Rock, Arkansas (KATV), Tulsa, Oklahoma (KTUL) and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (KWTV). They put these three stations on the air in nine months. What you are about to hear is James Leake describing...

Ernestine Dillard of Bixby, Oklahoma is perhaps best remembered for her April 23, 1995 performance when she electrified 11,000 mourners and a national television audience with her “God Bless America” vocal arrangement. The medley closed the Oklahoma City Memorial Service honoring the victims of the Murrah Building bombing. In 1994, Ernestine Dillard ended a 33-year career as a registered nurse—the...

A Man’s Perspective on Business and Life was a film prepared for the employees of Getty Oil Company and Skelly Oil Company shortly before J. Paul Getty’s death on June 6, 1976, at age 83. James C. Leake and journalist Bob Gregory produced a 10-part series on Oklahoma oil men, which aired on KTUL Tulsa and KWTV Oklahoma City. Harold Stuart, son-in-law of William “Bill” Skelly and former owner of KV...

Oklahoma native James C. Leake, Sr., grew up on the farm his grandfather homesteaded in 1891. He worked the soda counter at Rickner’s Bookstore and Restaurant in Norman while attending college at the University of Oklahoma and, as a trombone player, even took a job repairing the school’s band uniforms on a $10 sewing machine. He became president of the band in 1938 and raised money for trips, wher...

In the late 1930s, women basically had four career choices – nurse, secretary, hairdresser, or teacher. Mary Helen Stanley decided to follow in her aunt’s footsteps to become a teacher. She began her career as a high school speech and English teacher and later joined the faculty at the University of Tulsa, where she taught speech and organized the university’s first debate team. After taking more...

Marina Metevelis answered the call to defend the United States as one of the iconic bandanna-clad Rosie the Riveters. Marina was sixteen when Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941—an event that inspired her to apply for a job at the Wichita aircraft plant where the B-17 Flying Fortresses met the wings that carried them into battle. She became a Rosie the Riveter her senior year in high school. When Mari...

George Krumme was born and reared in rural Oklahoma, about five miles northeast of Okemah. His early education took place in a rural school. He finished high school at age 16 in Bristow and then attended Oklahoma A&M as a music major. World War II changed the course of his life. He left A&M to study weather forecasting at Spartan School of Aeronautics and then taught aviation cadets in Tex...

“The greatest game ever pitched” was an event that may best describe the baseball story of Warren Spahn. For in that game, he displayed the strength and the stamina that earned him the title of the greatest major league left-handed pitcher of all time. Warren Edward Spahn was a baseball hero and a hero on the battlefields of World War II. His 363 wins on the baseball field made him the all-time wi...

Julius Pegues was the first Black varsity basketball player at the University of Pittsburgh, and went on to serve in the U.S. Air Force as a weather forecaster and later as an advisor to the Federal Aviation Administration. A star basketball at Booker T. Washington High School in Tulsa, he was forced to matriculate to the University of Pittsburgh because University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and...

He’s a small-town guy who charmed the big city. He was merely a name who coached high school sports before he became the face of Oklahoma high school athletics. Through his appearances on radio and television, J.V. Haney became the state’s most significant voice of high school sports. From the late 1980s through the early 2000s, Haney promoted Oklahoma high school sports from his pulpit that was C...

James Osby Goodwin was one of eight siblings who grew up next door to Tulsa’s St. Monica Catholic Church. His father purchased a 150-acre farm in the community of Alsuma at East 51st Street and South Mingo Road. Nearby railroad tracks separated whites and blacks. At 9 years old, Goodwin became an amputee when he lost his right arm in a horseback riding accident that involved a train on the Katy Ra...

Joyce Jackson was in Junior High School when she became part of the Katz Drugstore sit-in in 1958, the beginning of a movement that contributed to race relations reform in Oklahoma. Joyce was the first black woman on television in Oklahoma at KOCO 5, Oklahoma City, becoming an award-winning broadcast journalist, producer and talk show host. In 1982 she began a career in the Oklahoma Department of...

David Walters was the 24th governor of Oklahoma from 1991 to 1995. Born in Canute, Oklahoma, he was a project manager for Governor David Boren and the youngest executive officer working for the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. In 1986, Walters was the Democratic nominee for governor of Oklahoma, but was defeated by Republican Henry L. Bellmon. On November 6, 1990 Walters was elected...

Dr. James A. Rodgers, a neurosurgery specialist in Tulsa, Oklahoma, completed his medical school prerequisites at the University of Tulsa in 1972. He then graduated with honors from the University of Oklahoma medical school in 1976. After completing his internship and residency in neurosurgery in 1981, he opened a solo practice in Muskogee, Oklahoma, returning to Tulsa in 1989. In his solo practic...

Riesinger’s Jewelry was a mainstay in Utica Square for over fifty years with a heritage that dates back to the fourth floor above the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Tulsa. That was where Frank Riesinger’s father, Otto, presided for many years over a jewelry repair store repairing items sent to him by retail jewelry stores in Tulsa. Frank was home from military service when he witnessed downtown Tulsa...

Joe Cappy had a front-row seat to a strange episode in U.S. car manufacturing history: the 1987 sale of American Motors Corp. to Chrysler-the deal that gave the Jeep brand to Chrysler and made Joe Cappy the last American Motors Corporation CEO. Joe played several roles in this story which goes back to when the French car company Renault partnered with AMC, lending AMC operating capital and eventua...

The Hughes Osage County ranch started as a land purchase in 1938 by John Hughes’s father, an oil industry pioneer with Phillips Petroleum Co. John Hughes was a junior in high school when he purchased his first cattle — at $100 a head for strays he had gathered for Boots Adams of Phillips Petroleum. After graduating from College High School in 1951, Hughes attended Oklahoma A&M College — now Oklaho...

Dale McNamara wanted to play golf, but there was no team at the University of Tulsa, so she entered tournaments on her own and became the first woman to win an athletic letter at TU. In 1974, when Tulsa decided to start a women’s golf team and McNamara volunteered to coach the team. They had no money, no support, and no players. Dale went on to become one of the most legendary and successful colle...