October 2015 Archives

I follow Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Facebook page. While he often addresses grave matters like terrorism, many of his posts are about happier events relating to his responsibilities. For example, today he wrote about his speech celebrating the launch a plan to build 32,000 new housing units in the growing city of Ashkelon.

Netanyahu spoke about his vision to build stronger links between the different regions of Israel:

My vision is simple. My vision is to - to a great extent - cancel the term 'periphery' and link everything into one vibrant bloc. What I said several weeks ago, that my vision is to see Be'er Sheva with 500,000 residents in 12 years, I say to you Itamar, and to all of you, Ashkelon will be a city of at least 250,000 residents within 12 years. This is not only possible, it is happening before our eyes. It is a very great thing that is happening here. Of course this depends on many things. What we are doing today is essential. The transportation link, not just to Ashkelon, but in the south and throughout the country, is to link up everything, from Dan to Eilat, without a single red light. It won't be a two lane road but a multi-lane highway, and trains. Now from Ashkelon we are 50 minutes by train to Tel Aviv and to Be'er Sheva, and we will yet reduce this.

Most of the comments were supportive and celebratory, but one hostile comment stood out. It was from a Facebook user whose profile picture showed the Ayatollah Khamenei and the Iranian flag:

Mohammad Erdem

Masjid Al-Aqsa is a holy place of worship for the Muslims
Iranian army liberate the Al-Aqsa.
Jerusalem will be the capital of a future Persian Empire.
We are going to murder all 7 million Jews in Israel!!!!!
https://www.facebook.com/100010517441764/videos/117658968594684/

The post was timestamped at Thursday, October 29, 2015 at 4:02 pm CDT.

The video shows a soldier in camouflage fatigues suiting up, with close up cuts to putting on unit insignia, placing a book (a Qu'ran?) in one pocket and a handgun in another. Dramatic music plays in the background. The production values remind me of a commercial for the U. S. Army. The final scenes shows a growing mass of soldiers overlooking Jerusalem's Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock, and the al-Aqsa mosque. I'm curious to know what the words at the end of the video say. Is this an official Iranian government message?

I have reported the comment to Facebook as hate speech. As of this writing it has not been removed.

From the Left Coast:

Concerns raised over lack of diversity in SF school election results

There's a bit of controversy surrounding student elections at a San Francisco middle school after the results were immediately withheld by the principal because they weren't diverse enough.

The incident happened at Everett Middle School in San Francisco's Mission District. The voting was held Oct. 10, but the principal sent an email to parents on Oct. 14 saying the results would not be released because the candidates that were elected as a whole do not represents the diversity that exists at the school....

According to Principal Lena Van Haren, Everett Middle School has a diverse student body. She said 80 percent of students are students of color and 20 percent are white, but the election results did not represent the entire study body.

"That is concerning to me because as principal I want to make sure all voices are heard from all backgrounds," Van Haren said.

The story quotes the mother of a 7th grader who is unhappy about the principal's decision:

Parent Bianca Gutierrez said the experience has made her son, a 7th grader, rethink his run for class representative. She said he is discouraged and does not want to be a part of the process anymore.

"That should have been something [discussed] prior to elections and prior to the campaigning process," Gutierrez said.

I wonder what voting system they used. Were representatives elected by grade or by homeroom? Was it first-past-the-post or some form of runoff? When constituencies are geographic, a certain amount of diversity is built in, but grades or homerooms at a school are all likely to have about the same proportion of different groups as the overall population. With such a homogeneous population distribution, a voting system designed to produce a plurality or majority result will likely give the most popular faction in the school all the seats.

If geography isn't a factor, and you're trying to produce a result representative of the diversity of the electorate, the Single Transferable Vote method may be the best method. With STV, if the council has M members elected by V voters, a faction of V/(M+1) voters (a number known as the quota) is sufficient to elect a representative.

It sounds like Principal Van Haren would like to classify students by ethnicity and have each ethnicity elect a proportional number of representatives, an approach that brings the final years of apartheid South Africa to mind. What makes STV superior to other forms of proportional representation is that it allows each voter to decide what kind of diversity is most important to him or her, and it also allows the voter to decide which candidate will best represent his or her priorities. A voter could decide that she cares more about having a student council representative who shares her love of Tolkien than having a representative who shares her ethnic background or her year in school. Instead of being assigned a constituency by some bureaucrat, in STV each voter effectively selects his own constituency.

Like instant runoff, in the STV system each voter casts a preferential ballot, marking "1" next to his first choice, "2" next to his second and so on. In instant runoff voting, counting, elimination, and transferring continues until one candidate has a majority of the ballots cast, because the aim is to produce a single candidate acceptable to a majority of voters. In STV, candidates are elected as soon as they can reach the quota of ballots -- V/(M+1).

Ireland uses STV to elect members of parliament from multi-member districts (each with 3, 4, or 5 representatives), which provides a combination of local representation and proportionality. It's also used for European Parliament, Assembly, and local elections in Northern Ireland, where the system ensures that both Unionists and Nationalists are represented, along with a range of opinions within each broader group.

MORE:

CJP Grey has a "Politics in the Animal Kingdom" video which illustrates the process of STV in multi-member districts.

A memorial service for Lee Roy Chapman will be held Wednesday, October 14, 2015, at 4:00 p.m. at Cain's Ballroom. All are welcome. A fund for the benefit of his five-year-old son, Kasper, has been set up at GoFundMe. Friends are sharing memories on the "Remembering Lee Roy Chapman" page on Facebook. I've posted his curriculum vitae on a separate page and will add links as I am able.

Thursday night I got the news that Tulsa historian and artist Lee Roy Chapman had died. He was 46. Tulsa lost a passionate curator and narrator of its history, someone who delved into aspects of our city's past that aren't publicized as points of pride.

I first met Lee Roy at Coffee House on Cherry Street some years ago. This intense but soft spoken man with dark eyes and the bushy brown beard of a prophet introduced himself, squatted next to the table where I was writing and gave me two small pinback buttons, as he told me about his effort to rename the Brady District to honor Bob Wills. The buttons featured his own graphic art. One of the two buttons featured a jubilant Bob Wills, cigar in hand, superimposed with the word "REVOLT!" in yellow lightning-bolt letters.

The other button featured Bob Wills' 1948 Flxible Clipper tour bus, which he had traced to a field near Big Spring, Texas. Lee Roy hoped to bring the bus back to Tulsa, restore it, put it on exhibit, and take it on tour. He put an option on the bus to hold it until he could raise the money to bring it home. In June 2013, with the help of Loren Frederick, Bob's bus returned to Tulsa.

While I didn't always agree with the conclusions he drew, I always appreciated the passion and persistence Lee Roy brought to digging out the facts and then presenting his findings to the public in a compelling way.

For example, in 2011, Lee Roy and a team of people converted the storefront at 13 E. Brady, the location of Benny's Billiards in Francis Ford Coppola's Rumblefish and turned it into an art installation about the film. A video about the installation (embedded below) caught the attention of Chilean author Alberto Fuguet, who had been inspired by Rumblefish to write about the ordinary stuff of life. Fuguet had been working on a documentary about the film and its influence on Latin American writers and filmmakers. Fuguet had visited Tulsa a few months earlier and had been frustrated by his inability to connect with locals who loved and appreciated the film. Through the installation video, Fuguet connected with Chapman, who became his second-unit director, gathering footage of Rumblefish locations around Tulsa and allowing Fuguet to complete his homage, Locaciones: Buscando a Rusty James.

A man in the video says, "Lee Roy Chapman should be applauded for doing this.... That kind of energy and spirit really embodies what Tulsa is all about, in my mind, the best part of Tulsa."

I suspect that Rumblefish never caught the imagination of mainstream Tulsans because it was a Tulsa that had almost entirely succumbed to the urban renewal wrecking ball, a Tulsa that early '80s suburban mall rats didn't recognize as their own city.

Chapman was passionate about another body of artwork that mainstream Tulsa has ignored, the work of another curator of Tulsa's seamier side, photographer Larry Clark, whose 1971 book Tulsa depicted a teen underworld of drugs, guns, and sex. Chapman tried to persuade with Clark to do a retrospective of his work in Tulsa, as he had done in Paris, but without success; instead Chapman created a "guerrilla art installation," posting three-foot-by-five-foot prints of all of the images in the book in the ruins of the Big Ten Ballroom in north Tulsa. Photographer Western Doughty interviewed Chapman about the installation and published it in two parts on his blog: Part 1, Part 2. Here's what Chapman had to say about Tulsa's reaction to Tulsa, which gives you a sense of Chapman's own artistic mission:

[Clark's] work is representative of a whole side of Tulsa that still remains unseen. If it is ever seen by anyone, it's mocked. Tulsa tries to represent itself as this myriad of things, the first of which was the "Oil Capital of the World", but working to represent to the world wealth, class, prestige, and culture, there is a price; the working class has paid a price for that. And this book shows that price, all the drugs and violence, and all those excesses that come with being a part of the working class society. You're at war with main stream society, you're at war with the cops, and sometimes you're at war with yourself, and you can see that in the pages of this book. And for the book to be as well known, as influential as it has been, and for Tulsa not to have any representation of it here at all, not to have even tried, it's beyond neglect....

But the people who run the arts here, they want what every other city has. They want the A-lister stuff; they don't want anything that's organic. The formula has been that you have to move from here to become successful in the art world, either New York or L.A. I think some of that's changing, though, now....

Asked by Doughty if Clark's work had influenced him personally, Chapman replied:

Yeah, of course it has, to know that there is somebody living and running in not the same circles, but in similar circles, and has seen some of the things that I have. He was really one of the first photographers that documented the scene he was within, not coming as a photographer-colonizer. You know, "Oh, what a weird bunch. I think I'll take pictures of them." He was exposing his own secret. So I think that's the sign of a true artist, too. Of course, when you're dealing with other people, there are repercussions to that. But it's, for one, made me want to stay here in Tulsa and create, rather than going somewhere else. Two, it's made me want to force it on eyes that don't want to see it; I just think it's that important, not necessarily just his work, but that kind of work, that kind of organic, dirty, real work that only comes from the bottom up.

Chapman's last blog entry was about the Lew Clark Photography Studio on the west side of Peoria south of 15th Street. Lew and his wife Fran were Larry Clark's parents, and the little house that served as their studio, with the clock above the door and lighted portraits on display through the front windows, was a neighborhood landmark until a few years ago, when it was demolished for a parking lot.

It was Chapman who called attention to Tate Brady's connections to the Ku Klux Klan and vigilante justice. His exposé led to a public debate about Tulsa's founding father and the street, district, and neighborhood named in his honor. The debate received international attention and led to a compromise that left no one happy.

Chapman did some work for the George Kaiser Family Foundation (this silkscreen etching of Bob Wills from 2013) but that didn't stop him from taking some jabs at the billionaire and his incongruous ownership of Communist singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie's archives.

An inscribed first edition of Atlas Shrugged was found by George Kaiser, the billionaire banker and philanthropist, as he was unloading the materials from the back of truck last week.... Ms. Rand penned a nasty note on the title page; "Woody, you're a filthy [*******] hick. I hope you do gather all the poor together one day so they'll be easier to kill. One day a banker will own you. - Ayn"....

---

George Kaiser Family Foundation is kicking out the big bucks for a large scale mural of Woody Guthrie on the Tulsa Paper Company building, soon to be home of the Kaiser owned Woody Guthrie Archives, in the Brady Arts District. Is this mural supposed to offset the fact that the Guthrie Green and the entire district, has no representation or historic relevance to the park's namesake?

The original namesake for the green was to be the same as the district where the park is located, W. Tate Brady, architect of the Tulsa Race Riot and a founder of the Tulsa Ku Klux Klan.

---

This guitar's owned by George Kaiser

Woody Guthrie's 1930 Slingerland May Bell is owned by the Woody Guthrie Archives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I'll betcha Woody wrote Jolly Banker on this one.

Lee Roy worked with the libraries of Yale, Duke, and the University of Tulsa, finding for and selling to these institutions books and ephemera relating to Tulsa history. Thanks to his efforts, Yale and Duke Universities have copies of the limited-printing original edition of Mary Parrish's first-hand account of the Tulsa race riot.

Last year, Lee Roy was kind enough to give me a sneak preview of an album of photos that were taken in the Greenwood District as it was being rebuilt following the 1921 Race Riot. The photos showed stylishly dressed African-American young adults posing in Deep Greenwood, out in the countryside, and at what may have been the Acme brick pits. These photos are now in the University of Tulsa McFarlin Library Special Collections and viewable online.

My last interaction with Lee Roy was indirect. A few weeks ago, my wife and youngest son were driving down 15th Street in the middle of the day when she noticed that Oak Tree Books was open. She had bought some bookshelves when the store was going out of business and was surprised to see it open, so she stopped in. Lee Roy was there. They chatted about books, children (he has a son a few years younger than ours), schools and homeschooling, and music. When he figured out that they were connected to me, he handed her a cassette album to pass along to me: "The Bob Wills Story: The Life and Music of the King of Western Swing," narrated by Hugh Cherry. There's a little Post-It stuck to the front: "Michael -- hope yr well. Lee Roy Chapman."

("The Bob Wills Story" is available for listening online at bobwillsradio.com.)

I was out of town at the time on an extended business and personal trip. I had intended to stop by and thank Lee Roy when I got back in town a week ago Tuesday, but getting back into the routine of family life distracted me, and it slipped my mind. And now it's too late.

The doors of The Marquee on North Main in Tulsa. Silkscreen art by Lee Roy Chapman, from a portion of a photo of Bob Wills in Indian headdress, when he was honored by the Osage Tribe. Photo found at topix.net.

MORE:

Michael Mason of This Land Press posts a tribute, entitled "Lee Roy Chapman Is Still the King":

Last week brought the news that historian and journalist Lee Roy Chapman has passed away. Among the many roles he fulfilled, Chapman was a contributing editor at This Land and delivered some of our most well-known articles. He also hosted the Public Secrets video series, and was an ongoing resource in numerous other pieces. A polarizing yet beloved figure, Chapman leaves behind a rich legacy of scholarly work and groundbreaking journalism.

Below are links to the many works Chapman authored, along with videos in which he appeared. Besides being a skilled professional, Chapman was also a beloved colleague to many of us at This Land Press.

If your life has been enriched by Chapman's work, please consider donating to the Lee Roy Chapman Memorial Fund, the proceeds of which will go to the support of his son, Kasper Henry Chapman, age 5.

UPDATE 2015/10/13:

The Tulsa World and the Tulsa World Alumni Association have each posted an item about Lee Roy.

UPDATE 2015/10/20:

The video shown at Lee Roy's memorial, produced by Matt Leach, has been posted to Facebook. (I can't embed it here.)

Connor Raus has posted video of Lee Roy Chapman's 12-minute presentation "Twenty Shades of History Recovery" during PechaKucha 20x20 at Living Arts of Tulsa on April 12, 2013. It covers a range of topics, including the Race Riot, the impact of Brady District gentrification on the historic Greenwood District, Larry Clark, The White Dove Review, The Outsiders, Rumblefish, and Bob Wills's tour bus. It's a good overview of Lee Roy's range of interests and attitude.

So this is what I do. I read about this stuff, research it, and drive around and find this stuff. Some people care. Some people don't care. It doesn't pay. It's, like, horrible. I'm chronically unemployed. I'm obsessed....

In the Warsaw Ghetto, I don't think there's, like, an arts district named after Adolf Hitler. But Tate Brady is one of the few people that we know that actually participated in the Tulsa Race Riot, and did numerous other things.... If Woody Guthrie knew that he was in the Brady District, he would burn that park down....

Institutions aren't really that interested that much in what organically comes out of Tulsa. It's like it has to come from somewhere else....

(A quibble: To say that Tate Brady "participated" in the riot seems intended to lead the listener to conclude that Brady was part of the white mob that descended on Greenwood, killing African-Americans and torching their homes and businesses. But elsewhere Chapman says that Brady's participation was to stand guard on Main Street, well away from the battle lines, joining his neighbors in defending their buildings from any rioters. Some of the "numerous other things" that Chapman mentions were far more morally blameworthy -- his participation in the 1917 tarring and feathering of labor union activists, his membership in the Klan, his efforts to block the rebuilding of Greenwood after the riot -- but Chapman seemed to understand that saying that Brady "participated in the riot" communicated his unworthiness of honor in a way that needed no further explanation.)

UPDATE 2015/10/22:

Tributes to Lee Roy Chapman from friends, compiled by Josh Kline of The Tulsa Voice.

What follows is mainly from Lee Roy Chapman's LinkedIn profile. I thought that his list of accomplishments and the tributes from the people who worked with him needed a more permanent location. (You can read my tribute to Lee Roy Chapman here.) I will be adding to the list and adding links to articles and videos. Anything I've added is in italics.

Lee Roy Chapman is an independent scholar, journalist and historian specializing in the recovery of forgotten histories. In 2008, he established the Center for Public Secrets, a curated collection of artifacts that explores the sub-popular culture of Oklahoma. A longtime student of Oklahoma history with a special emphasis on race relations, art, and radical histories, Chapman has authored several articles that have received global attention. In 2011, he published "The Nightmare of Dreamland: Tate Brady and the Battle for Greenwood" in This Land magazine, which revealed that a founder of Tulsa was also an architect of the city's most violent hate crime--the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. The article was lauded by historians such as Alfred Brophy and Scott Ellsworth, and has been cited by media companies ranging from National Public Radio to The Guardian.

Aside from his writings, Chapman has also produced and hosted several independent documentaries in which he discusses topics ranging from the Sex Pistols and the New York School of Poets to the art of Larry Clark as well as the hidden mass graves of African Americans in Tulsa. As a curator, Chapman has also located and acquired a number of important historical artifacts and artworks that now reside in university libraries and museums.

Chapman also frequently lectures in public and private forums, and has spoken to groups ranging from grade school students to university classrooms. His in-depth research into an eclectic range of subjects has earned him a reputation as an authority on Oklahoma culture and he regularly consults with foundations, companies, and private groups.

Creator
Center for Public Secrets
January 1999 - Present (16 years 10 months)TULSA

Curatorial:

• 2008 "Public Secrets ," Liggett Studios, Tulsa, OK


• 2009 "Gaylord Herron"​


• 2010 "The editors are not hipsters," Circle Cinema, Tulsa, OK. Warhol Screen Test


• 2011 "Larry Clark's Tulsa," Public Installation, Tulsa, OK.


• 2011 "Motorcyle Boy's Never Coming Back, " Bennie's Billiards [pop up] East End Gallery, Tulsa, OK. An autonomous installation featuring the work of S.E. Hinton, Francis Coppola and Gaylord Herron


• 2012 "Strangelove: An evening of Cold War Fear and Propaganda," [pop up], Church of the Christian Crusade, Tulsa, OK. Curated artifacts regarding radio pioneer Billy James Hargis Pop Up


• 2012 "Tulsa Time: The Graphic Legacy of Brian Thompson" Tulsa, OK. Presentation of iconic concert posters from an iconic artist.


• 2014 "This is not a Larry Clark Show," Arts and Humanities Center of Tulsa, OK. Video installation from James Payne and photography by Nick Haynes.


• 2014 "Locaciones: The influence of S.E. Hinton on South American culture," East Village Gallery, Tulsa, OK. Featuring photography from Western Doughty, Joe Cervantes and Gaylord Herron


• 2015 Let's Get Lost/Chet Baker Installation Yale, Oklahoma - Pending

Acquisitions:

2009 Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys 1948 Tour Bus
(private collector)

2010 Ted Berrigan's contributor's copy of the White Dove Review
McFarlin Library/University of Tulsa

2011 A collection of Tulsa School of Poets printed materials
University of Tulsa McFarlin Library's Special Collections

2012 The Leon Russell Archive/Steve Todoroff Collection
OKPOP/Oklahoma Historical Society

2014 Events of the Tulsa Disaster
David Ruebenstein Library/Duke University

2014 Archive of 124 Greenwood reconstruction photographs from 1922
McFarlin Library/University of Tulsa

2014 Alvin Krupnick 1921 Race Riot Relief 8x10 photo
McFarlin Library/University of Tulsa

2015 B.C. Franklin Race Riot typescript, photos, scrapbooks
Smithsonian/NMAAHC

2015 Events of the Tulsa Disaster by Mary Jones Parrish
Beinecke/Yale University

Contributing Editor
This Land Press
February 2011 - December 2014 (3 years 11 months)Tulsa, Oklahoma Area

Writer, producer and host of Public Secrets video and print series.

Articles:

• "The Nightmare of Dreamland: Tate Brady and the Battle for Greenwood," September 2011, This Land


• "The Drexel Building," January, 2011, This Land


• "Anarchy in the OK: The Sex Pistols in Tulsa," January 2012, This Land


• "Who's Afraid of Elohim City," April 2012, This Land (with Josh Kline)


• "Meet the Clarks," November 2012, This Land


• "The Strange Love of Dr. Billy James Hargis," November 2012, This Land


• "Subterranean Psychonaut: The Strange and Dreadful Saga of Gordon Todd Skinner," July 2013, This Land (with Michael Mason and Chris Sandel)

Video:

• "Public Secrets: The White Dove Review" 2011 This Land TV


• "Public Secrets: Larry Clark's Tulsa" 2011 This Land TV


• "Public Secrets: Pantoja's Driving Lesson" 2011 This Land TV


• "Larry Clark's Return to Tulsa," 2012, Field Guide Media


• "Public Secrets: Joe Brainard" 2012 This Land TV


• "Public Secrets: Calvary Cemetery" 2012 This Land TV*


• "Public Secrets: Woody Guthrie" 2012 This Land TV


• "Public Secrets: Tate Brady" 2012 This Land TV


• "Public Secrets: Mass Graves" 2012 This Land TV


• "Public Secrets: Sex Pistols" 2012 This Land TV


• "Public Secrets: Historic Greenwood 40 Blocks" 2013 BeInformedTV


• "Public Secrets: 1921 Tulsa Race Riots Reconnaissance Survey" 2013 BeInformedTV


• "Public Secrets: Guthrie Green Park" 2013 BeInformedTV


• "Public Secrets: Train Derailment" 2013 BeInformedTV


• "Public Secrets: Cement Plaques" 2013 BeInformedTV


• "Public Secrets: The Stem" 2013 BeInformedTV


• "Public Secrets: Standpipe Hill" 2013 BeInformedTV

Research and Discovery
Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture
May 2010 - May 2013 (3 years 1 month) Tulsa

Locating and acquiring information and artifacts for the Smithsonian Institution's NMAAHC.

Second Unit Director
Cinepata
June 2012 - July 2012 (2 months)Tulsa

Second unit director for Alberto Fuguet's Locaciones

"Mr. Chapman is a mind and a human engine to reckon with. He is outstanding in his brilliance, full of humor and wit, determined to tackle history and see it with new eyes and force of human empathy and drive.

I was able to meet and work with Lee Roy in a documentary I made on the symbiosis between Tulsa and the Francis Ford Coppola movie Rumble Fish. Lee Roy, as a advocate for Tulsa´s history and a historian and editor of the outstanding journal This Land helped me immensely, opened his heart and contacts and ended up being my director of second unit once I was back in Chile and felt I needed extra footage.

Lee Roy has turned is unfathomable knowledge about Tulsa and Oklahoma in
general in a creative way. He´s more than a historian or an academic; he is a writer,
a chronicler, a raconteur, a filmmaker and an over-all achiever. I know that when my
film was selected at the Telluride Film Festival last year, and was presented by
Francis Coppola, that Lee Roy was the one who helped get there."
- Alberto Fuguet

Research Specialist
Raisin Cain LLC
2010 - 2012 (2 years)

Research and development
Exhibits
Panhandle Plains Historical Museum
2006 - 2007 (1 year)

Assisted in the creation and production of artifact displays.

Acquisitions and Sales
Oak Tree Books
1998 - 2004 (6 years)

Locating, grading, mending, protecting, pricing, cataloging and selling rare and out of print books. Specializing in Native American and Oklahoma histories.

Lead Printer
Wackyland/Artrock/Frank Kozik
1993 - 1994 (1 year)

Pre-press, production and post-production of fine art serigraphs and rock posters. Prints are now part of University of Texas, Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design, RocknRoll Hall of Fame and Cain's Ballroom.

Recommendations:

Cecil Cloud III
Photographer

Lee Roy Chapman: Dogged pursuer of truth, finder of artifacts, artist and independent filmmaker. A rare combination of knowledge, skill and determination,
always seeking a challenge. The man to turn to for obscure information and forgotten documents.

Dean Williams
Chairman, Williams & Williams

Lee Roy has an artist's perception regarding location - the space where people, land and buildings interact; and a curator's instinct for what's relevant thereto. His passion for truth discovery is a courageous guide to what matters, regardless of the "winners" to date and powers that be that otherwise, and too often impersonally, impose their stamp at whatever costs. Lee Roy is an Oklahoma treasure, in that by stewarding what's just he also quite personally insures all that is creative and possible as between people and this land.

Michael Mason
Editor, author, journalist

The combination of unparalleled knowledge of his subjects along with the ability to endow his work & research with broad vision makes Chapman a singular person in his field, and one of Oklahoma's best resources on matters relating to history and culture.

Paul Gardullo
Museum Curator at Smithsonian Institution - National Museum of African American History and Culture

I continue to benefit from Lee Roy Chapman's expertise about Tulsa's and Oklahoma's history. Lee Roy is an outstanding writer and researcher whose skills in digging up crucial archives, stories, contacts and collections have proven invaluable to my work at the Smithsonian.

Silvio Canihuante
Productor Audiovisual

Lee Roy and his partner Jeremy Lamberton did a wonderful job shooting for three nights in Tulsa, OK. They went to awesome places, looking for the original locations of Rumble Fish, which was shot at Tulsa. Lee Roy as the director of the 2nd unit of documentary "Locations: Looking for Rusty James"

MORE:

This Land Press has posted an item with links to many more of Lee Roy's articles and videos: "Lee Roy Chapman is still the king"

Lee Roy Chapman Flickr photostream: 511 photos from 2009 and 2010, including photos of the charred ruins of the Admiral Twin's original screens, images from the White Dove Review, an autographed copy of Stride Toward Freedom by Martin Luther King Jr. and a program from his appearance at the 1960 Tulsa Freedom Rally, portions of the Bible in Choctaw, a biography of Sequoyah, books about Indian land allotments, Bob Wills 1948 tour bus (including the title), and Chapman's own artwork in various media.

Here is a link to a online real estate listing (no longer active) for a 640-acre spread between the Red River and Little Red River in Hall County, Texas:

640 Acres Bordering BOTH the Red River and Little Red River. This is the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River.

This is the original home place of Bob Wills. The old homestead is still there and would be inhabitable with a considerable amount of work. The home is being given no value. Electricity and County water available at home site.

This is an incredible hunting property, boasting numerous Large mule deer, white tail deer, turkeys, wild hogs, and dove as well. There is even some duck hunting when the Little red is holding water.

Also great for running cattle and growing crops in some areas.

If you're interested in raising deer or exotics, the neighboring tract is high fenced. This means about an entire 1/3 of this property is already high fenced!

Don't miss out on this pristine Panhandle Property!

The location is northeast of Turkey, Texas, which is home to the Bob Wills Museum and the annual Bob Wills Festival in April. It's not far from the Caprock Canyons -- pretty country where walls of red rock line the river valley.

Bob's family moved here in 1913, when he was about 8 years old. In a few years, he and his dad were playing house dances around the area. To finish this off, here's a song he might have played for one of those dances: Wednesday Night Waltz.

From a Leftist publication, a surprising report focused not on weapons but on the copycat aspect of mass shootings:

Journalism can be a powerful force for change, and news organizations should not flinch at reporting on mass shootings. But what the Daily News editors didn't realize was that this sensational approach can possibly do more than perturb or offend. Such images provide the notoriety mass killers crave and can even be a jolt of inspiration for the next shooter.

The next one struck just five weeks later, in Oregon. The 26-year-old man who murdered nine and wounded nine others at Umpqua Community College last Thursday had posted comments expressing admiration for the Virginia killer, apparently impressed with his social-media achievement: "His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day. Seems like the more people you kill, the more you're in the limelight."...

Evidence amassed by the FBI and other threat assessment experts shows that perpetrators and plotters look to past attacks both for inspiration and operational details, in hopes of causing even greater carnage. Would-be attackers frequently emulate the Columbine massacre; one high-level law enforcement agent told me that he's encountered dozens of students around the country who say they admire the Columbine killers. "Some of these kids now weren't even born when that happened," he said. The 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech and other attacks that generated major publicity have also spawned many copycats, according to several law enforcement officials I spoke with....

As part of our investigation into threat assessment, Mother Jones documented the chilling scope of the "Columbine effect": We found at least 74 plots and attacks across 30 states in which suspects and perpetrators claimed to have been inspired by the nation's worst high school massacre. Their goals ranged from attacking on the anniversary of Columbine to outdoing the original body count. Law enforcement stopped 53 of these plots before anyone was harmed. Twenty-one of them evolved into attacks, with a total of 89 victims killed, 126 injured, and nine perpetrators committing suicide. (See more about this data here.)

More from their research on the Columbine effect:

In at least 14 cases, the Columbine copycats aimed to attack on the anniversary of the original massacre. Individuals in 13 cases indicated that their goal was to outdo the Columbine body count. In at least 10 cases, the suspects and attackers referred to the pair who struck in 1999... as heroes, idols, martyrs, or God. And at least three plotters made pilgrimages to Columbine High School from other states.

But this data only raises the question: Why did these copycats seek the glory of infamy? What psychic void were they trying to fill?

Here are three writers that see a pattern: The absence of a father.

Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D., "
Obama Ignores the Obvious in Oregon: Yet Another Fatherless Killer."

What Obama did not say in his impassioned address, what would have truly been a break in the "routine" and rhetoric that inevitably follow tragedies involving firearms, was that 26-year-old shooter Chris Harper Mercer was the umpteenth example of a fatherless boy who grows up to be a violent criminal.

It is, of course, much easier to blame guns for our problems than to address the underlying causes of American violence. For one thing, gun control is a popular, quick fix. All it takes is a law and legislators can pat themselves on the back for having "dealt with" the problem.

Fatherlessness, on the other hand, is a trickier affair that requires more complicated and unpopular solutions, such as dealing with America's ridiculously lax no-fault divorce laws and a culture that privileges independence over personal responsibility.

And no one wants to face the ugly truth that our current redefinition of marriage from its historical identity as the union of one man and one woman has effectively made the role of fathers optional. By putting the desires of adults above the needs of children, we inadvertently feed the fire of violent crime....

As University of Virginia Professor Brad Wilcox pointed out in 2013: "From shootings at MIT (i.e., the Tsarnaev brothers) to the University of Central Florida to the Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy in Decatur, Ga., nearly every shooting over the last year in Wikipedia's 'list of U.S. school attacks' involved a young man whose parents divorced or never married in the first place."

Wilcox has noted the overwhelming social scientific evidence connecting violence and broken homes, which suggests that boys living in single mother homes are almost twice as likely to end up delinquent compared to boys who enjoy good relationships with their father.

Another researcher, Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson, has written that "family structure is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictor of variations in urban violence across cities in the United States."

And criminologists Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi, have further documented the fallout from fatherless families, writing that "such family measures as the percentage of the population divorced, the percentage of households headed by women, and the percentage of unattached individuals in the community are among the most powerful predictors of crime rates."

As long as politicians and the media choose to focus exclusively on firearm availability in their response to violent crime, they will continue to miss the most important element involved.

A more mature response to America's current crisis would begin with a serious discussion of what factors have come together to produce the breakdown of American families and what can be done to reverse this trend.

Dennis Prager, "The Right does have answers on guns, Mr. President."

Why does the left focus on more gun control laws, and why doesn't the right?

One reason is quintessentially American. Most Americans believe that it is their right -- and even their duty -- to own guns for self-protection. Unique among major democratic and industrialized nations, Americans have traditionally believed in relying on the state as little as possible. The right carries on this tradition, while the left believes in relying on the state as much possible -- including, just to name a few areas, education, health care and personal protection.

A second reason for the left-right divide is that the left is uncomfortable with blaming people for bad actions. The right, on the other hand, is far more inclined to blame people for their bad actions....

The third reason for the left-right divide on guns is that the two sides ask different questions when formulating social policies. The right tends to ask, "Does it do good?" The left is more likely to ask, "Does it feel good?"...

On gun violence, the left doesn't ask, "What does good?" It asks, "What feels good?" It feels good to call for more gun laws. It enables liberals to feel good about themselves; it makes the right look bad; and it increases government control over the citizenry. A liberal trifecta....

One thing that would make incomparably more difference than more gun laws is more fathers, especially in the great majority of shooting murders -- those that are not part of a mass shooting. Why aren't liberals as passionate about policies that ensure that millions more men father their children as they are about gun laws? Because such thinking is anathema to the left. The left works diligently to keep single mothers dependent on the state (and therefore on the Democratic Party). And emphasizing a lack of fathers means human behavior is more to blame than guns.

Another is to cultivate participation in organized religion. Young men who attend church weekly commit far fewer murders than those who do not. But this too is anathema to the left. The secular left never offers religion as a solution to social problems. To do so, like emphasizing fathers, would shift the blame from guns to the criminal users of guns.

I would ask every journalist who cares about truth to ask every politician who argues for more guns laws, and every anti-gun activist, just two questions:

"Which do you believe would do more to decrease gun violence in America -- more gun laws or more fathers?" "More gun laws or more church attendance?"

Barack Obama says, "Our gun supply leads to more deaths. The GOP has no plausible alternative theory."

The GOP does. But as usual, few Republicans say what it is. And no liberal wants to hear it.

Matt Walsh, "Our Kids Don't Need Gun Control Laws, They Need Fathers":

In all of these cases, the media and Obama -- and this time even the perpetrator's father -- diligently counted how many guns the killers had in their homes but failed to notice how many parents they had in their homes. That seems like quite a detail to overlook. Before we wonder if a guy's access to guns turned him into a murderer, you'd think we'd pause to reflect on whether his lack of access to his own father might have played a role.

These mass killings happen with relative frequency, and they are usually not perpetrated by men who grew up in strong families with both biological parents present. Divorce and fatherlessness are the two elements that tie most of these cases together. No other factor -- gun laws, politics, racism, etc. -- comes close. Dylann Roof was a white guy killing black people, Vester Flanagan was a black guy killing white people. Their races were different, yet the one line that cut right through both of them was divorce. Even in cases where the killer's parents are still married, a closer inspection will often reveal a home filled with instability and chaos.

Indeed, it's not just the high publicity tragedies that seem to always involve broken homes. The statistics across the board are staggering and conclusive: 90 percent of homeless kids are from fatherless homes; 63 percent of kids who commit suicide are from fatherless homes; 71 percent of high school dropouts are from fatherless homes. Children from fatherless homes are at a much greater risk of developing drug addictions and are four times as likely to be poor. Out of all the youths in prison, a full 85 percent are from fatherless homes. In the inner city where violence and drug abuse are rampant, four out of every five children are growing up without their biological fathers.

You name the societal ill or problematic group -- from violent boys to promiscuous girls to everything in between -- and right there in the middle you'll find broken homes, unstable families and absent fathers.

So why aren't we talking about this?...

Fathers and mothers both play an integral role in the spiritual and emotional formation of a child. Take one or both away, and there's a chance the child becomes emotionally and spiritually deformed. It's a very simple formula. There's no disputing it -- just ignoring it -- and I think we choose to ignore it for a few reasons.

For one thing, the left-wing cultural narrative requires us to deny the distinction between men and women, which means denying the distinction between mothers and fathers. According to progressivism, the nuclear, biological family is but one type of arrangement, one variant equal in every way to families with one mom or two moms or three dads or whatever, and none can be judged more ideal than the others....

Even though progressives obsess over organic milk and free-range chickens, they pretend that the natural, organic family -- the family as it was meant to be -- is in no way superior to the modified versions. But to connect violence to broken homes is to admit that (shock!) kids benefit from having mom and dad in the same house. Progressivism can make no such admission, so it continues blaming bad things on inanimate objects, rather than fatherlessness and divorce.

But for another thing, beyond ideology, I think we ignore the family's role in all of this because it hits, literally, too close to home. Some single mothers bizarrely see a discussion about fatherhood as an attack on them, and some men, especially divorced men, see the hand wringing over fatherlessness as an affront against them. Both groups make it impossible to have this conversation.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are equally hesitant to speak categorically in favor of the nuclear family. We know it's challenging and difficult to be a parent and a spouse.... If we acknowledge that our kids need us, that they depend on our presence, that they require our full-time love and support, then we've backed ourselves into a corner. If the going gets tough, we have to stick around.... We minimize the importance of families to provide ourselves with an escape hatch, should we need it.... These are scary propositions -- all this duty and responsibility stuff. We'd rather not dwell on it. Let's get back to talking about gun laws and mental health, we think. That's a much more comfortable debate. Much more removed from our daily lives. It requires much less of us. Actually, it requires absolutely nothing -- which is ideal.

I don't think all of our problems in society can be solved through stable families, but I do think that, if we want to address them, we should begin with the simple but hard things: staying married, raising our kids, being examples, instilling faith and values, teaching them how to be good people, etc. It's not foolproof, but it's a start.

We just have to be willing to do the work.

On his Facebook page, Walsh emphasized that he was speaking about patterns and principles:

I'm not saying these people turn into killers solely because they come from broken homes. I'm not saying every kid from a broken home will be a killer. I'm not saying a kid from a broken home can't grow into a fine adult. I'm not saying any of that, so please don't derail this conversation by pretending that I am. What I'm saying is very simple: in principle, kids are meant to have two parents. A mom and a dad. In principle, this is the ideal arrangement. In principle, the more we stray from this arrangement in our society, the worse things get. The statistics absolutely back me up here.

And that means we should probably at some point start discussing the real solutions. Not gun control. Not policies. Not politics. Parenting. If we REALLY want to cut down on all of these bad things, we should begin by getting married before we have kids, staying married, parenting our kids together with our spouses, and guiding and teaching and raising them so that they can grow into well adjusted adults. Simple.

The City of Tulsa is asking for public to submit ideas for Route 66-themed artwork to be placed at the Admiral and Mingo traffic circle.

Tulsa is considering installation of new public art in the Traffic Circle at the intersection of East Admiral Place and North Mingo Road, on the original 1926 to 1932 alignment of Historic Route 66. This was the original site of a tourist court operated by Cyrus Avery, the "Father of Route 66". Mouse over the postcard to see more about the tourist court.

What artistic concepts appeal to you: Serious or humorus? Historic or futuristic? Traditional or avant garde? Static or kinetic? Funky and eclectic?

Share ideas for public art that YOU think would advance Route 66 tourism in Tulsa to capture the imagination of Route 66 enthusiasts. You may also attach a photo to further illustrate your idea.

Here is the comment I submitted:

What draws visitors from around the world to Route 66? It's the chance to relive the golden age of American auto travel through the buildings and businesses that line the old highway. Route 66 enthusiasts come to experience cafes, tourist courts, and gas stations, streamline Art Deco and Mid-Century Modern architecture, neon signs and landmark buildings, and to meet small-business owners like Dawn Welch in Stroud and Laurel Kane in Afton who have breathed life into these places that were long ago bypassed by the interstate. Route 66 thrills foreign visitors who want to connect to America's distinctive character -- the independence embodied by auto travel, small-business entrepreneurship, and wide-open spaces.

Spending money on some "iconic" piece of new art misses the point of Route 66. If we have money to spend to attract Route 66 enthusiasts to Tulsa, it would be better spent on funding the preservation and restoration of historic buildings and signage. The federal Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program helped restore dozens of historic sites along the highway, including the Vickery Service Station at 6th and Elgin, for a mere $10 million. By comparison, the $15 million Tulsa County voters set aside for Route 66 in Vision 2025 has done little to promote preservation, while neon signs continue to be replaced with backlit plastic and historic buildings are bulldozed.

We already have a piece of "iconic" Route 66 art at Cyrus Avery Plaza. The historic Meadow Gold sign and the Warehouse Market tower are iconic as well. Our city's Route 66 efforts should be concentrated on (1) protecting and restoring the historic resources that attract Route 66 travelers; (2) developing material to promote those historic resources to be available online and brochures at tourist sites, welcome centers, and accommodations along the full length of Route 66; (3) providing directional signage and interpretive signage to make it easier for visitors to get on 66 and then back to the interstate, find the most interesting sections of the road through Tulsa, and know what they're looking at when they get there. Sites that are in the spirit of Route 66 but not right on the highway -- e.g., the Golden Driller, the Admiral Twin Drive-In, neon signs like Sheridan Lanes and Moody's Jewelry -- should be included as landmarks of interest for the visitor.

Much could be accomplished with the existing hotel/motel tax money which is earmarked for tourism development. The city should consider special historic preservation zoning districts to discourage demolition and to ensure that new construction is in keeping with the historic character of different portions of the route.

UPDATE 2015/11/03:

Swa Frantzen is a Route 66 enthusiast and pioneer of the World-Wide Web, a Belgian who established a website devoted to the highway in 1994. Frantzen gave a talk last week at the Miles of Possibility conference, explaining how Europeans view Route 66 and what cities can do to better attract foreign Route 66 enthusiasts. Authenticity, not streetscaping or museums, is what these visitors are seeking:

Authenticity is valued by Europeans, and that includes so-called eyesore properties, Frantzen said. Historic sites shouldn't be "overly restored," and streetscaping and beautification efforts aren't deemed authentic by Europeans.

"It doesn't have to be pretty, clean, cheerful, slick and freshly painted," he said. "Don't be so quick to repaint it."

Originality also is valued by European travelers. Frantzen says efforts by towns to set up a Route 66 museum, a welcome gateway, murals on every wall and painted water towers are too common.

With historic preservation, Frantzen says a mantra of "preserve if you can, restore if you have to" should be adopted. Restoration, he said, should be done carefully, or else you irreversibly lose the property's originality.

I suspect city officials resort to streetscaping, museums, and gateways because they involve new construction, and so they can follow the familiar pattern of municipal contracting. (New construction also means bigger budgets and bigger contracts for friends in the business.) Preservation grants to building owners are not as familiar, but the National Park Service's Route 66 Corridor program has demonstrated a workable pattern that produced excellent results.

Politics is about change. If you don't believe change is possible, you're not an advocate for politics; you're simply a guy taking a check, discussing which other guys should get checks.

Ace posted this over a week ago, in reaction to John Boehner's resignation, but it's still worth your time and attention. He explains why Boehner's entire leadership team should be purged and urges Freedom Caucus members and other House Republican outsiders to block them from remaining in leadership.

...Under no circumstances should the Freedom Caucus permit McCarthy, Scalise, or Cathy McMorris Rogers -- all the Boehner Warriors who have brought GOP morale to all-time lows -- to serve in any leadership position. A purge is a purge. To permit any of this crew to profit from their disasters would show the GOP to be what many of us strongly suspect it is -- basically, the Teachers Union for RINOs, an organization devoted to protecting its members jobs and not to serving its alleged constituents.

4. And on that point, note that if McCarthy, Scalise, and McMorris Rogers merely advance one step each in the leadership, then the only person to have paid any price here is Boehner; the rest of them will actually benefit from the Freedom Caucus forcing them out.

They should not benefit. We keep saying, of Obama, that failure ought to have consequences; how can this team be characterized as anything other than complete failures?

Are we rewarding Republican failures while claiming Obama should be held accountable for his own?

At the heart of the GOP failure is the failure to offer Republican voters any hope that things can be better. Congressional Republican leaders offered a great deal of hope in 2014 that GOP majorities in both houses could block and reverse Obamacare and executive amnesty; voters responded enthusiastically, giving Congressional Republicans a clear mandate to block Obama's lawlessness, and the Congressional GOP leadership proceeded to let them down, offering one excuse after another and acting like we were fools to believe their promises of action and resistance.

The fecklessness, failures, and flat-out betrayals of the current GOP leadership has destroyed all hope in the GOP. And a political movement without hope is not a political movement at all; it is simply an advocacy organization for getting a very small number of people cush jobs in the federal government.

If there is to be any hope permitted to the rank and file of the Republican Party, then we need big changes that permit us the illusion and fantasy of hope, without which we are nothing at all, just dejected former Republican voters.

Hope requires a change -- Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, and Cathy McMorris-Rogers are no change at all; they are simply John Boehner's less accomplished inferior employees.

Ace concludes:

I find it increasingly difficult to write about politics now, you may have noticed; it's because I can no longer even pretend to care which a[-----]e is in which federal sinecure.

I think many people feel the way I do.

And if you want to entice the alienated back into the fold, you have to at least let us dream of the possibility of actual change.

That requires allowing us hope -- and not simply doubling-down on the current crop of failures and fainthearts we are obligated, sourly, to call our "leadership."

Hope is a silly illusion, but it is a necessary, sustaining silly illusion.

Faint heart never won fair lady, fellas. Nor have fainthearts ever contributed anything to society, except cowardice and inertia.

Read the whole thing, which includes an analogy involving the Star Trek episode "Mirror, Mirror."

It seemed like a good idea: Head to a coffeehouse this afternoon with my daughter as she worked on her homework for Monday. We'd have a change of scenery from home, get some lunch, and I'd be there to keep her on track without hovering too closely. For whatever reason, it seems less claustrophobic to sit together at a small table in a coffeehouse than it does to sit around a larger table in our kitchen. Most of her schoolwork required access to the Internet -- a situation that I deplore -- so we needed to be some place where the wifi was working.

After church, we headed to our favorite coffeehouse, ordered a gluten-free grilled cheese sandwich and a breakfast burrito, a bottomless coffee, and a San Pelligrino orange, and sat down to work.

We could connect to the router, but our devices were never assigned an Internet Protocol (IP) address, which meant the Internet was inaccessible. We tried on two different Windows laptops, an iPod, and an Android tablet with the same result.

My daughter spoke to the barista, whose only advice was The IT Crowd mantra:

We dutifully rebooted the laptops and tried again -- no joy, as I expected. I asked the barista if he could reset the router, and he said it can cause problems for their cash register and order printer, problems that last for hours. That's understandable, but my daughter had to have wifi, so we left.

As it was close to 1 p.m. and the Sunday lunch rush, Panera or Qdoba seemed like a bad idea. I decided to head to a close-by coffeehouse that was new enough that I thought it might be less crowded, but we had the same problem there, as did another customer. I really should have checked the connection before ordering drinks.

So we headed for home, $30 poorer and having wasted two hours.

Here's my theory: While the router was working at each of the coffeehouses, its pool of available IP addresses was exhausted.

When you connect to a wifi network with your laptop, phone, or tablet, your computer requests an IP address. In the bad old days, you would have to ask a system administrator for an available address on the network, then manually configure your network adapter with that address and reboot your device.

In response to this inconvenience, the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol was developed and became widely available in the late '90s. With DHCP, your device automatically sends out a request for an IP address when it connects to a network, and a DHCP server (usually resident on the router) answers the request by granting a "lease" on a specific address for a specific length of time.

The DHCP server only has a certain number of addresses in its pool, and leases are granted for a fixed length of time. The duration of the lease and the number of addresses are often part of the router configuration. In a typical setup, a total of 254 addresses are available, with a small number of those addresses reserved for devices that are always connected, and the remainder available to the DHCP server. A typical lease length is one day. Once the lease is granted on an IP address, the address will be unavailable for reassignment until one of three things happens: (1) the lease expires, (2) the lease is manually revoked, or (3) the DHCP server is restarted (e.g., by turning the router off and back on).

This means that if around 250 customers connect to your network over the course of a few hours, you'll run out of IP addresses for the rest of the day, and anyone trying to connect to the network after that point will be disappointed.

You may think it unlikely that so many would try to connect in such a short time, but consider the ubiquity of wifi-enabled phones and tablets. If a customer has ever connected to your network with her phone, the next time she comes in to order a latte to go, it's likely that the phone will automatically request and receive an IP address from the router, even if the phone never leaves her pocket.

Dear coffeehouse owner, as much as I enjoy your coffee and the ambiance you've created, it's the ability to get work done at your establishment that allows me to justify to myself the extra cost of the coffee and food over what I'd spend to drink and eat at home. If a coffeehouse's internet connection is hit-or-miss, I'll have to find somewhere else to work -- and somewhere else to spend money.

There are some steps you can take to improve the likelihood that your customers will get the wifi service they expect:

1. Reduce the DHCP lease duration to an hour or less. Exactly how you do this will vary by router -- check your manual. There's no downside to this; if a customer needs to be connected for a longer period, his device will automatically send a renewal request, and the customer won't perceive a break in service.
2. Expand the number of available DHCP addresses. Your default setup may not be maximizing the number of addresses your router can support.
3. Require users to check a box or click "Connect" before they can get on the internet. Both Starbucks and Panera do this, and it should eliminate the kind of inadvertent connections I mentioned above. This also gives you a chance to display and receive consent to your terms of usage before granting the customer access to your network.
4. If possible, move your business-critical devices to their own secured network and assign fixed IP addresses to each. Separating your credit-card machine, order management system, and your PC with schedule and HR records from the public network just makes good sense, and it also allows you to reset the public network -- and clear any zombie DHCP leases -- without affecting the devices you need to run your business. Even if a separate secure network isn't practical, reserving fixed IP addresses for your business-critical devices will make it easier for your devices to find each other and resume operation if a router reset becomes necessary.

And if you need a hand with any of the above, give me a holler. I do computer stuff for a living, and while networks aren't my speciality, I've had to configure routers as part of my job. And I will work for coffee.