Oklahoma::History: January 2020 Archives
Bartlesville Area History Museum : Online Collections
Archive of 2,274 scanned items, including photos, documents, newspaper clippings relating to Bartlesville, Dewey, and Washington County.
"Born in 1904, he grew up in Oklahoma - way off the cultural radar. Having demonstrated a flair for art as a child, the 12-year-old Goff was taken by his father to a Tulsa architects' office, where he pleaded with them to give his boy a job. After quickly learning the basics of drafting, he began to produce his own designs. A colleague remarked that his ideas resembled the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, whom Goff had never heard of. So he wrote to Wright, who replied with words of encouragement, and advised him not to study at architecture school and to find his own path....
"...in 1955 he resigned [from OU] under a cloud. He was accused of abusing a 14-year-old boy. Many maintain the incident was a setup, engineered by rivals uncomfortable with Goff's sexuality and jealous of his reputation." Reading between the lines, one wonders whether he was re-enacting an experience from his own youth.
The linked page shows Walmart's 271 locations in eleven states. Wal-Mart, as it was then, had only just begun to move into metro areas, but not yet into big cities. The Catoosa store (actually just inside the city limits of Tulsa SW of 193rd East Ave and Admiral) was a recent addition. The list of Tulsa discount department stores includes Oklahoma City-based T. G. & Y. Family Centers (at 40k to 60k sq. ft., a larger format for the dime store chain, comparable to Wal-Marts of that time), K-Mart (Tulsa had four), Target (Tulsa had two), Woolco (Woolworth's large-format discount store -- Tulsa had one where the 41st and Yale Reasor's now is, and one on Admiral), and home-grown Oertle's (owned by this time by David's in Wichita). Note that the guide does not include non-discount department stores (e.g., Sears, Penney's, Dillard's, Froug's, C. R. Anthony). Nationally, K-Mart had 1607 stores and $11.7 billion in sales.
