Lost in Tulsa newspapers

Some time in the last couple of years, Newspapers.com, which provides paid access to scanned images of newspapers, added access to the Tulsa World throughout its run and the Tulsa Tribune through 1964. (I'm hopeful that the Tribune scanning will continue until its entire run is available.)

You've seen some of the fruits of that development here at BatesLine, as these archives allow pinpointing of dates and details that previously relied on personal memories. The subscription is not cheap, and the Tulsa and Oklahoma City papers are only available with the premium subscription, but your contributions to this site allow me to keep subscribing.

I also use that subscription to enrich older BatesLine entries. Recently someone posted a screenshot of my 2005 entry about Bates Elementary School to a Facebook group. That led me to change some dead links to point to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and then to pursue some unanswered questions about the building, which served a number of purposes after it closed as a Tulsa Public School site in 1983, just 10 years after it opened. Bates was one of three new schools to open in 1973 (along with Mayo and Thoreau), as Tulsa Public Schools enrollment had already declined from a peak of over 80,000 in 1968 to about 67,000 just five years later. I found out the origin of the school's name, in memory of the 8-year-old son of the head of Reading & Bates drilling company, who died in 1960 when his bike slid under a moving car. The school was one of several given names in 1970, including several sites in east Tulsa that were never built because the anticipated development never came. (You'll find all the links at that 2005 article; I won't duplicate them here.)

While looking up an eastside school that was built, Sandburg Elementary, I found a page with several interesting articles on different topics. It was the front page of Section B of the July 2, 1972, World.

• Tulsa Public Schools New Design curriculum at Sandburg Elementary School -- open classrooms, self-paced curriculum, individual attention
• Progress on Tulsa expressways; IDL SE interchange blocked by Riverside Expressway lawsuit: The I-244 Arkansas River bridges, completed in 1969, would finally be connected to the Red Fork Expressway and Okmulgee Bee Line; I-244 Crosstown Expressway had opened in May to the 7th/8th Street exit on the east leg of the Inner Dispersal Loop; the Cherokee Expressway was complete to 56th Street North; the Southeast IDL interchange was being held up by a federal lawsuit over environmental and other issues
• Tulsa County officials want a bigger share of the 10-mill local support property tax levy, asking for a hike from 8.1 mills to 9.5 mills as cities hike sales taxes
• County Assessor Wilson Glass has microfilmed historical assessor records and destroyed the originals, plans automated retrieval system. I'd love to know if those microfilms survive, and if so, where.

That's four articles on a single page, all of which any of which could be the start of a deeper dive and an extensive article about how Tulsa got to be what it is today. And that happens to me all the time: I find one article on a page from a search, but find other articles on the same page that fill in details on something I vaguely remember from my childhood, reveal the roots of a later important development in Tulsa history, or otherwise pique my curiosity.

Here, in the August 11, 1972, paper, is a concept drawing of Bates Elementary School explaining how much it cost, who designed it, and who is building it, and just to the right is an item about a proposal from City Finance Commissioner William Morris, Jr., to elect six city commissioners by district, and the mayor would assign each commissioners specific areas of city government to direct and oversee.

A March 1988 map showing the 43 Tulsa Public Schools sites that had closed since 1922 was accompanied by articles about 11 more elementary schools that would close at the end of the year and three junior highs that would be converted to elementaries and about the fates and ongoing maintenance needs of other closed buildings. That could be a jumping-off point for a plethora of stories about the history of each individual school and why it was closed, and about the long-term decline of Tulsa Public Schools. This page mentions that parents were reluctant to have their children moved to Sandburg because of the very same open plan that was touted in the July 1972 article linked above.

So much to write about, and so much more I find with each search through the archives.