Some Tulsa items

MeeCiteeWurkor has posted a poll for the 2006 Mayoral Election.

Dan Paden rebuts the opinion section of Sunday's Whirled

Mad Okie doesn't think much of the cheerleading for Tulsa as a tourist destination, but he's got some ideas for how we can capitalize on our strengths, and they start with stopping the destruction of our history, particularly along Route 66. I like his idea of using the Rose Bowl as home to a Route 66 museum.

As an aside, remember the building at 11th and Lewis atop which the big Meadow Gold neon sign once stood? The sign had to be dismantled and stored because the building's owner (a car dealer) wanted to demolish the building for parking for used car storage. The car dealer has abandoned 11th and Lewis for another location and the car lots where the building once stood are completely vacant.

Finally, and this one isn't about Tulsa specifically or by a Tulsa blogger, but Charles G. Hill drove through the Oil Region of Pennsylvania, an area that draws 50,000 visitors annually to an oil heritage festival, an event we aren't likely to see here: "It occurs to me that Oklahoma is far too embarrassed about its own oil patch, that we'd like to think we're so over that." Perhaps that because painful memories of the last oil boom and bust are still fresh to many, while Pennsylvania's oil boom dates back about 100 years. What we need to get over is any embarrassment about the black gold that built our state, and find a way to preserve and present our oil heritage to visitors. It may not be a mainstream interest, but plenty of folks lived and worked in the oil patch or had ancestors who did. About eight years ago, we played tour guide to a woman who was born in Whizbang (Denoya), a boom town in Osage County, lived many years in Seminole, and had last seen Tulsa in 1936. Let's bring back pride in Oklahoma's oil heritage, and maybe we could start by re-airing Bob Gregory's "Oil in Oklahoma," a TV series produced by KTUL in the '70s.

(Great minds think alike -- I promise I had not seen Charles' headline about OKC's underground Chinatown before I wrote mine.)