Michael Bates: May 2020 Archives
Dinosaur Fever - Sinclair's Icon - American Oil & Gas Historical Society
Sinclair began marketing under the symbol of the brontosaurus (as it was then called) in 1930. The company displayed life-size dinosaur models at the World's Fairs in Chicago (1933), Texas (1936), New York (1939). Sinclair stations gave away dinosaur stamp collecting books.
A new set of models was created for the 1964 New York World's Fair. It was shipped down the Hudson River by barge to New York City, and after the fair, the models toured shopping centers across the country. Visitors to Dinoland at the fair and to the traveling exhibit could use the Mold-A-Rama to make their own plastic dinosaurs for a quarter each. The exhibit visited the west parking lot of Tulsa's Southland Shopping Center in 1966. (Southland was enclosed and renamed Promenade Mall in the 1980s.) I vaguely remember visiting a Sinclair dinosaur exhibit in a rail car and getting plastic dinosaurs when the exhibit stopped either in Nowata or Coffeyville around the same period.
Where are they now? The corythosaurus is on permanent display in Riverside Park, in Harry Sinclair's hometown of Independence, Kansas. The apatosaurus and tyrannosaurus are at Dinosaur State Park in Glen Rose, Texas, triceratops at the Museum of Science & Industry in Louisville, KY, stegosaurus at Dinosaur National Monument in Jensen, UT; ankylosaurus at Houston Museum of Natural Science, struthiomimus at the Milwaukee Public Museum, and trachodon at the Brookfield, Zoo near Chicago. "Sadly, Ornitholestes was stolen and never recovered."
Democratic U. S. Senator Thomas Gore expresses his support for the new election law in Oklahoma, approved by the majority Democrats over the objection of the Republicans. As evidence that the Democrats are committed to honest elections, Gore says, "If they [Democrats] had been disposed to tamper with the ballot box, they would possibly have begun with the negro commissioner in Wagoner [County] and the negro representative in Logan [County]." Sen. Gore explains that the Oklahoma law is only going as far as Massachusetts, Connecticut, California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin in disenfranchising African-American voters "within the purview and limitations of the Fifteenth Amendment." Gore warns, "The negroes hold the balance of power in fourteen counties today and will soon hold the balance of power in fourteen more." Gore claims that Lincoln would have opposed giving African-Americans the vote, had he lived, and concludes, "The democrats and the Lincoln republicans will assuredly make common cause in Oklahoma to preserve and perpetuate Saxon supremacy and Caucasian superiority."
The Pandemic Road to Serfdom - The American Mind
Joel Kotkin's description of "the clerisy" sounds a lot like my "yacht guests": "Today's other ascendant class is what I call the clerisy, who today fulfill the role played by the clergy in the Middle Ages. Known as the First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, the clerisy today is largely secular but consists of the key influencers in the media, academia, the upper bureaucracy and the ever-expanding 'non-profit' sector. This new middle class enjoys something of a symbiosis with the oligarchic elites who mainly finance non-governmental organizations and the universities, and tends to a share a similarly progressive world view."
