December 2018 Archives

On the back wall of the Meers Store, overlooking a dining table laminated with a poster of Lucille Ball singing the praises of Royal Crown Cola, is a framed map of Oklahoma, a page from an old Geo. F. Cram atlas, circa 1910.

The 1910 map shows several differences with the final form of Oklahoma's county map. Tulsa County looks even more like a collection of unwanted scraps, missing chunks at its southeastern and northeastern corners -- Collinsville, and everything northeast of 126th Street North and Mingo, are in Rogers County; everything southeast of 121st Street and Mingo are in Wagoner County. One of the post-statehood counties is there -- Harmon County (born June 2, 1909) has been carved out Greer County -- but Comanche County's southern boundary is the Red River; Cotton County would not be created until 1912. The map reflects the June 11, 1910, election that moved the state capitol from Guthrie to Oklahoma City.

And yet this map shows 77 counties. In southwestern Oklahoma, between Comanche, Tillman, Kiowa, and Jackson Counties, there is Swanson County, with its seat at Mountain Park. Swanson County included the towns of Snyder, Roosevelt, Cooperton, formerly in Kiowa County, and Indianola, formerly in Comanche County.

You can view a badly-registered four-color version of the Cram 1910 map of Oklahoma in Oklahoma State University's online map collection; the version at the Meers is yellow and black only. Swanson County also appears in Rand McNally's 1911 map of Oklahoma.

Swanson County's existence was brief, tumultuous, and ultimately found to be illegal. A referendum to carve the county out of southern Kiowa County and the westernmost 8-mile-wide band of Comanche County passed on May 2, 1910, with over 60% of the vote (1990 for to 1220 against), but failed to meet that threshold in the section of Comanche County to be included in the new jurisdiction. The portion of Kiowa County voted 1910 to 907 in favor of the new county, while the Comanche County portion voted against by 80 to 223. Gov. Charles Haskell proclaimed the new county's existence on August 13 and designated Mountain Park as the county seat, but the citizens of Snyder, at an important rail crossroads, objected. According to the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture:

Competition arose between Snyder and Mountain Park for the seat. Snyder citizens claimed that their town was better suited because Mountain Park lacked a water system, fire protection, and office space for county officials. After dark on September 5, 1910, Snyder citizens removed the records from Mountain Park when a rainstorm soaked the documents housed there. In retaliation, Mountain Park men invaded county officials' homes and arrested the officials at gunpoint. Wyatt L. Staples, who worked for one of the county commissioners, was killed.

The Swanson County Democrat published letters to the county commissioners, one from County Judge Frank P. Cease and one signed by the treasurer, surveyor, registrar of deeds, court clerk, county clerk, district clerk, and superintendent. Judge Cease stated of the county courthouse:

At the present time the building is not in a habitable condition for the safe preserving of the records and the property of the county. It is impossible to remove the filing and record cases to any safe place where they would not be exposed to fire or being carried away, and the roof of the building is in bad condition, and some of the property has already been damaged by reason of the bad condition of the building.

The other county officials complained that Mountain Park "is without sufficient hotel and eating house accomodations to meet the demands of your petitioners [the county officials] or the public at large and that there are no suitable residence or sleeping accomodations for the use of your petitioners and their familes." A news story on the same page reported that officials were forced to stay in Snyder and commute every day to Mountain Park, a distance of four miles each way. The only official that didn't move his office to Snyder was the county sheriff.

A headline in the September 15, 1910, Swanson County Democrat trumpeted:

Snyder Remains County Seat

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GOV. HASKELL REFUSES TO ACT

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County Officers Remain at Snyder--County Court Held Monday and Tuesday--All Legal Business Transacted Here--No Riots--No Trouble--Just a Lot of Guano Eltoro in the Oklahoman Furnished by L. E. Cahill and E. J. Giddings Attorneys for Mt. Park

Comanche County sued to have the creation of Swanson County nullified. The Supreme Court upheld the district court's decision, citing the language of Article 17, Section 4, of the Oklahoma Constitution: "Provided, that when the territory is to be transferred from an existing county to either a new or an existing county, there must be sixty per centum of the vote cast in such particular territory in favor of the transfer."

Swanson County might have succeeded had it not attempted to include that unwilling chunk of Comanche County. It would have met the requirement for 400 square miles of land, but perhaps it would have fallen short of the required 15,000 population or $2.5 million land valuation.

With the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling, Swanson County ceased to exist, and the count of Oklahoma counties reverted to 76. Nevertheless, the territory once claimed by Swanson County would continue to elect a representative to the State House for the remainder of the decade, as it existed during the 1911 legislative apportionment, and the Kiowa County representative would elected only by those voters in the remaining part of Kiowa County, according to an Attorney General's opinion reported in the April 11, 1912, edition of the Kiowa County News.

It's easy to understand why residents of southern Kiowa County would want a county seat closer to home. Manitou was, at that time, on the border between Kiowa County and Tillman County. Someone living on the Kiowa County side of Manitou would be 36 miles as the crow flies from the county seat of Hobart, but the Tillman County side was only about 7 miles from the county courthouse in Frederick.

An item in the September 1, 1910, Swanson County Democrat describes "the new county craze which has seized southwestern Oklahoma," mentioning a new effort to form a county out of southern Caddo and northern Comanche County centered on the town of Apache.

On January 30, 1909, a proposal to create Park County, with the same boundaries that would be proposed a year later for Swanson County had fallen short of the 60% threshold by 18 votes, just a month after the southernmost township of Kiowa County had voted to join Tillman County, a decision that still needed to be ratified by the voters of Tillman County.

Not long after the end of Swanson County, a smaller swath of southern Kiowa County succeeded in getting itself transferred to Tillman County, and in 1912, the southern section of Comanche County seceded to form Cotton County, bringing the roll of counties back to 77. There would be a few more boundary adjustments over the coming years, but the end of county creation had come to a close.

I am getting caught up on the local news after all the pre-Christmas busyness and was disappointed, but not surprised, to learn that Mayor G. T. Bynum IV has shut down our city planning department and outsourced the task of evaluating the future direction of city development to a quasi-non-governmental organization that is controlled by a board dominated by suburban city and county governments, the Indian Nation Council of Governments (INCOG). Bynum announced the change in October.

The City of Tulsa has only eight seats on INCOG's 62-member-board, so the planners making recommendations on City of Tulsa zoning changes and changes to Tulsa's comprehensive plan will be more accountable to the suburbs competing with Tulsa for residents and sales tax revenue than to our own elected officials.

Until this change, planners working for the City of Tulsa dealt with the city's comprehensive plan and small-area plans, while planners employed by INCOG evaluated applications for rezoning, variances, and special exceptions, providing recommendations to the Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission (TMAPC) and City of Tulsa Board of Adjustment (BOA). Effectively, this meant that any long-term plan developed by city staff with the participation of Tulsa citizens could be undermined by INCOG staff at the point where planning is implemented, by recommending that the decision-making bodies ignore the comprehensive and small-area plans and approve zoning changes, variances, and special exceptions that violate those plans. Four out of the 11 members of TMAPC, which vets all proposed changes to the city's zoning map and zoning ordinances, are appointed by the Tulsa County Commission, with no accountability to the City of Tulsa's elected officials.

The new Tulsa comprehensive plan originally called for uniting long-term and short-term planning for the city within city government. From the Strategies section of the final draft of Our Vision for Tulsa:

Organization matters, and currently Tulsa's planning and development functions are spread between many agencies and departments. Development services and economic development functions reside in different departments. The city's redevelopment activities and programs are carried out by the Tulsa Development Authority, and staffed by the City's economic development and real estate management staffs. Neighborhood planning functions are a part of city government. While the city is leading PLANiTULSA, long range planning and zoning is staffed by INCOG under contract with the City, and the Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission (TMAPC) with both county and city appointees is the key planning advisory body and is responsible for both zoning and comprehensive planning.

For PLANiTULSA to be successful it is critical that the city coordinate development-related activities so they work together to effectively address changes desired by Tulsans. The City of Tulsa should enhance staff capacity and technical skills and consolidate city development-related activities into a Community Development Department as well as bring the current and long range planning functions that are currently outsourced to the INCOG into this new structure. This would result in City staff providing the review and analysis of development requests as well as staffing the Tulsa Metropolitan Planning Commission. The City of Tulsa should continue to support INCOG's leadership role in regional planning and transportation. INCOG's support and regional leadership is critical to implementing the PLANiTULSA vision.

After fit-throwing by certain developers and INCOG, this was significantly watered down in the version that was ultimately adopted by the TMAPC and the City Council.

When Mayor Bynum was Councilor Bynum, he supported consolidating planning within the City of Tulsa as a matter of accountability, as reported by Urban Tulsa Weekly's Mike Easterling:

That's a question ["What's the problem with INCOG?"] Bynum seems happy to answer. He claims he has no beef with regional planning in general and strongly supports INCOG's lead role in compiling a transportation plan for the area. But he hasn't always been happy with what the city has gotten from the agency in terms of land use planning.

"Not so much a feeling that they don't provide good service as much as there is a lack of accountability," he said. "The situation that crystallized that for me was the situation with the Sonoma Grande apartment complex. That was built using a (planned unit development) that was something like 30 years old and had been approved by the previous form of government (Tulsa switched from a commission form of government to the current mayor-city council style in 1989.) That's how old it was."

The controversy over Sonoma Grande may well have proved to be a tipping point in the debate over zoning and development in Tulsa. Residents of a neighboring subdivision were furious about the height and proximity of the apartments, claiming they weren't adequately warned about it beforehand.

Bynum contends the INCOG planning staff presented the plan for the complex to neighbors as an innocuous project, and few of them bothered to show up at the Planning Commission's public hearing. It was only when the project was being built, and the size of it became apparent, that neighbors became alarmed. By then, it was too late, he said.

"So you've got people in a really nice neighborhood who had probably experienced substantial damage to their property values by this project," he said.

Many of those residents complained to the City Council, Bynum said.

"When we tried to raise this as an issue, the Planning Commission pointed at INCOG, and INCOG pointed elsewhere," he said. "Ultimately, no one could be held accountable for this terrible error that impacted those folks."

That experience left him with serious doubts about the current system.

"If we can have a system that makes accountability more clear and stayed within the city, I would be supportive of that," he said.

Bynum made a bolder statement, quoted later in the same story:

"...the city shouldn't have its land use in the hands of a bureaucracy that's not accountable to the public."

In that same story, several people (including myself) point out that the INCOG planning staff seemed to see their job as facilitating whatever a developer wanted, rather than evaluating a planning application in light of long-term planning goals and the interests of all affected property owners.

The complaints about INCOG's performance in land use planning go well beyond councilors' concerns about accountability. Other critics, including former Planning Commission member Liz Wright, believe INCOG planners don't take an unbiased approach to evaluating the development proposals that cross their desks.

"They're not neutral," she said. "They're not being fair to the citizens."

[Village at Central Park developer Jamie] Jamieson believes INCOG has developed an institutional bias on the side of developers at the expense of neighborhoods. That's not good for anyone, he said.

"Developers need to put the interests of neighborhoods first," he said. "Ultimately, you develop a better bottom line by doing that. And that's not to say there aren't some good people at INCOG, because there are."

The proper relationship between Tulsa and INCOG -- one in which the city is the client, with its interests being served -- has largely been forgotten in favor of that developer-friendly approach by INCOG, he said.

"It's been flipped on its head for too long," he said, a dynamic that has led to an endless series of disputes between developers and neighborhoods.

Bates believes the INCOG planning staff has simply grown too comfortable with the developers and attorneys they work with on a routine basis, and have concluded it is their job to facilitate what those developers want -- regardless of whether it's in the best interests of the surrounding area or the city at large.

He said that's not so much a case of outright hostility toward residents.

"It's more a case of misjudging the importance of public support," he said. "They operate in a world where the public's voice is seen as irrelevant to the outcome of a zoning or planning decision. That's kind of a foreign notion."...

Bates doesn't mince words when evaluating the job INCOG has done on the city's behalf.

"I think it's been bad," he said. "There are certain individuals who work for INCOG who have the ability to do real planning, but institutionally, there's not any real forethought. They'll make a zoning change and then go back and change the comprehensive plan to reflect that."

[Then-Councilor Bill] Christiansen shares Bates' contention that residents routinely get short shrift in such cases. And he said he can't do much to help them.

"In terms of zoning, the citizens have been at the back of the bus," he said. "It's hard for a councilor because we try to do the right for our constituents, and under the current process, it's very difficult."

Christiansen repeated Bates' assertion that a handful of zoning attorneys have grown too close relationship to INCOG's planning staff, some of them even working in the same building as the Planning Commission. That gives them a distinct advantage over the average citizen, he said, though he noted he doesn't blame them for exploiting that.

"They know the system and how to access it," he said. "The citizens don't know the process at all, and they wind up calling the council."

The alienation of power from accountability is by design. A certain element within Tulsa's development community wants to be able to Build Anything Absolutely Anywhere, without regard to the impact on surrounding property owners, and has fought against any changes that would protect Tulsa's interests in our competition with the suburbs. They like it when planning and zoning decisions are shaped by bureaucrats who aren't answerable to our own elected officials, and they work to defeat elected officials who try to legislate in the city's best interests.

For example, suburban property developers and their allies led the 2004-2005 campaign to recall Councilors Jim Mautino and Chris Medlock. Medlock, Mautino, and fellow councilors Roscoe Turner and Jack Henderson opposed the reappointment of Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority board members who had approved sweetheart, long-term water deals that seemed designed to fuel suburban growth at Tulsa's expense, and they opposed construction of a bridge across the Arkansas River for the benefit of new development in Bixby.

A city's land-use policy ought to support the interests of the city's residents. That's more likely to happen if all the decision-makers involved in the process are accountable to city elected officials. The 2010 version of G. T. Bynum IV understood that. You're welcome to speculate as to why Bynum IV, 2018 model, disagrees.

A half-century ago, three American astronauts became the first humans to orbit the moon. On Christmas eve, during a global broadcast estimated to have been heard by a quarter of the Earth's population, the crew of Apollo 8 -- Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders -- read from the first chapter of Genesis, the Bible's account of the creation of the heavens and the earth.

In this short video that includes the famous broadcast from lunar orbit, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine puts the achievement of Apollo 8 into the context of the space race with the USSR and the recent Apollo 1 disaster and the problems with the launch of Apollo 6, the final unmanned Saturn V test.

Edited from the version originally published on December 25, 2012

Merry Christmas to anyone who happens by BatesLine today.

As a Holland Hall high school student, I attended and sang in the annual service of Christmas lessons and carols at Trinity Episcopal Church, modeled after the annual Christmas Eve service from the chapel of King's College, Cambridge. (The King's College service marked its 100th anniversary this year.)

At the beginning of Trinity's service, after the processional, Father Ralph Urmson-Taylor, who served as Holland Hall's Lower School chaplain, would read the bidding prayer. Confessing Evangelical has it as I remember it. It's worth a moment of your time to ponder.

Beloved in Christ, be it this Christmastide our care and delight to hear again the message of the angels, and in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and the Babe lying in a manger.

Therefore let us read and mark in Holy Scripture the tale of the loving purposes of God from the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious Redemption brought us by this Holy Child.

But first, let us pray for the needs of the whole world; for peace on earth and goodwill among all his people; for unity and brotherhood within the Church he came to build, and especially in this our diocese.

And because this of all things would rejoice his heart, let us remember, in his name, the poor and helpless, the cold, the hungry, and the oppressed; the sick and them that mourn, the lonely and the unloved, the aged and the little children; all those who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love.

Lastly, let us remember before God all those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore, and in a greater light, that multitude which no man can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom in the Lord Jesus we are one forevermore.

These prayers and praises let us humbly offer up to the Throne of Heaven, in the words which Christ himself hath taught us: Our Father, which art in heaven...

The bidding prayer was written by Eric Milner-White, dean of the chapel of King's College, who introduced the Lessons and Carols service there on Christmas Eve 1918. Jeremy Summerly describes the prayer as "the greatest addition to the Church of England's liturgy since the Book of Common Prayer."

In some versions, the prayer for "all those who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love" is dropped, perhaps because of political correctness and religious timidity, but they seem to have been restored in recent years. Who needs prayer more than those who reject the Way, the Truth, and the Life?

The phrase "upon another shore, and in a greater light" always gives me goosebumps as I think about friends and family who are no longer with us, but who are now free from pain and delighting in the presence of the Savior they loved so dearly in this life. As he wrote those words, Milner-White, who had served as an army chaplain in the Great War before his return to King's College, must have had in mind the 199 men of King's and the hundreds of thousands of his countrymen who never returned home from the trenches of Europe.

This year many Tulsans who knew him will hear that phrase and remember David Rollo, who, as Holland Hall's music director, developed the musical tradition of the school's annual Lessons and Carols service at Trinity. David passed away in June 2017. David's friends and family miss him greatly, but he celebrates Christmas this year free of all the pains and physical limitations that plagued him in this life. The 2018 Holland Hall Lessons and Carols service was dedicated to his memory.

Which brings us to the final verses of the Epiphany hymn, "As with Gladness, Men of Old":

Holy Jesus, every day
Keep us in the narrow way;
And, when earthly things are past,
Bring our ransomed souls at last
Where they need no star to guide,
Where no clouds Thy glory hide.

In the heavenly country bright,
Need they no created light;
Thou its Light, its Joy, its Crown,
Thou its Sun which goes not down;
There forever may we sing
Alleluias to our King!

MORE:

This year's broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College Cambridge will be available for the next four weeks on the BBC website. You can download the booklet for the service here. (Direct link to PDF.) This is the final year for organist and choirmaster Stephen Cleobury to direct the service prior to his retirement next September. Cleobury, who took the baton in 1982, has performed a newly commissioned carol each year since 1983. The New York Times profiled the Lessons and Carols service and Cleobury in its Sunday, December 23, 2018, edition.

The history of the Lessons and Carols service was presented in this 15-minute BBC program, Episode 8 of the series "A Cause for Caroling." (Unfortunately, it was not repeated this year, so you can't listen online at the moment, but it's available through Audible and as an audio CD.) Edward White Benson, first Bishop of Truro, originated the service of Nine Lessons and Carols in 1880. It was published in 1884 and began to be used more widely. From this year's service booklet:

The 1918 service was, in fact, adapted from an order drawn up by E. W. Benson, later Archbishop of Canterbury, for use in the large wooden shed which then served as his cathedral in Truro at 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve, 1880.

A. C. Benson recalled: 'My father arranged from ancient sources a little service for Christmas Eve - nine carols and nine tiny lessons, which were read by various officers of the Church, beginning with a chorister, and ending, through the different grades, with the Bishop'. The idea had come from G. H. S. Walpole, later Bishop of Edinburgh.Very soon other churches adapted the service for their own use. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Milner-White decided that A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols would be a more uplifting occasion at King's than Evensong on Christmas Eve. He used Benson's plan, but wrote the now-classic Bidding Prayer to set the tone at the beginning. Since then the spoken parts, which provide the backbone of the service, have only occasionally changed.

Earlier this month, the BBC Singers presented A Very Choral Christmas, a concert of carols conducted by John Rutter and Bob Chilcott, two giants of modern choral music. The performance at Saffron Hall was recorded for broadcast; I had the joy of attending an earlier performance at London's Barbican Centre, where we heard Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Fantasia on Christmas Carols," John Rutter's "Star Carol," "Shepherd's Pipe Carol," and "What Sweeter Music," Bob Chilcott's "Shepherd's Carol," "The Midnight of Your Birth," and his special version of the "Twelve Days of Christmas." It was a thrill for me to sing, along with the rest of the audience, under the direction of Rutter; his Three Musical Fables album was regular bedtime listening for my kids, as was his collection of music of the English Church, Faire Is the Heaven, for me, and all of us have had the opportunity to sing his compositions in choirs. Rutter was as joyful and sprightly at the conductor's podium as his music would lead you to expect. (The same is true of Chilcott.) You can listen online through January 20, 2019.

During the interval of the broadcast, Chilcott and Rutter discuss the history of the King's College service and the tradition of selecting a soloist at the moment. As a chorister, Chilcott sang the solo opening verse of "Once in Royal David's City" three consecutive years. Also in the interval, starting at 1:13:43, there is a feature about a BBC "Come and Sing" event, in which members of the public of all ages and abilities (including this writer) sang along with members of the BBC Singers and presented a brief concert in the newly reopened theatre at the Alexandra Palace.

John Piper explains what Christmas is all about in 115 words:

Christmas means that a king has been born, conceived in the womb of a virgin. And this king will reign over an everlasting kingdom that will be made up of millions and millions of saved sinners. The reason that this everlasting, virgin-born king can reign over a kingdom of sinners is because he was born precisely to die. And he did die. He died in our place and bore our sin and provided our righteousness and took away the wrath of God and defeated the evil one so that anyone, anywhere, of any kind can turn from the treason of sin to the true king, and put their faith in him, and have everlasting joy.

STILL MORE:

In the Queen's Christmas message, she recalls the centenary of King's College Lessons and Carols, the Royal Air Force, and the Armistice of World War I. The video begins with the choristers of King's College singing "God Save the Queen" and concludes with "Once in Royal David's City."

Sixty years ago tonight, Christmas 1958, the BBC aired an entertainment extravaganza featuring Britain's top entertainers of the day: singer Vera Lynn, comedians Tony Hancock, Ted Ray, Jimmy Edwards, Charlie Drake, and Charlie Chester, the Beverley Sisters, and Billy Cotton and his band. The show closes with a sentimental scene featuring the cast of police drama Dixon of Dock Green. Magician David Nixon is the master of ceremonies.

Some highlights:

33:30: Tony Hancock as a budgerigar (parakeet), the pet of an elderly spinster. The costume is different (feathers instead of a homburg hat and astrakhan-collared coat), but it's basically the same put-upon character that made him the top sitcom star of the 1950s.

40:30: Vera Lynn sings "A Window" and "The Bells of St. Mary's."

47:50: Jimmy Edwards plays the headmaster in a Christmas sketch set in a boarding school.