Oklahoma: August 2009 Archives

Please join me in wishing a happy belated birthday to Brandon Dutcher, vice president for policy for the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, whose birthday was Sunday, August 16. OCPA is Oklahoma's version of the Heritage Foundation, offering effective free-market approaches for solving Oklahoma's challenges.

Probably the best way to honor Brandon on his birthday is for you to pay a visit to the OCPA website and see for yourself the great work that this organization does. (And consider joining!) Or check out his latest entries on Choice Remarks, the blog of Oklahomans for School Choice, such as this essay by former U. S. Secretary of Education Chester Finn, explaining how school choice can work in rural Oklahoma.

Many happy returns of the day, Brandon!

Lynn Sislo has started a photographic series on her blog Violins and Starships called Oklahoma Scenery. Lynn writes:

We all form mental images of places we have never visited. The image many people have of Oklahoma is of flat grassland. I never had a chance to form that particular image myself since the first part of the state I ever saw, at age 10, was the southeast and then for a number of years I lived in northwest Arkansas, "next door" to Green Country so my primary image of Oklahoma has always been mainly hills and forests.

Lynn begins her series with photos Talimena Scenic Drive in the Ouachita National Forest in southeastern Oklahoma, the sort of photos she says "most often provoke exclamations of surprise from non-residents."

Somewhere back in the '70s, an Oklahoma tourism commercial coupled photos like these with an old Sons of the Pioneers tune:

The everlasting hills of Oklahoma,
They hold a million treasures to be found.
Golden grain on hills of green
Wave to valleys cool and clean.
Too bad some folks have never seen
The everlasting hills of Oklahoma.

The everlasting tales of Oklahoma
Are told in clouded statues in the sky.
Pioneers who long have gone,
Their wagon wheels still rumble on
When thunder peals and falls upon
The everlasting hills of Oklahoma.

The everlasting fame of Oklahoma
Will live in names of men she claimed her own.
Some were right and some were wrong
In history's pages, prose and song.
All hail them now for they all belong
To the everlasting hills of Oklahoma.