October Saturday In Tulsa

It was time to visit Tulsa. I mean, one can only go so long before one has to visit an out of town daughter, right?

Jan and I left at oh-dark-thirty on Thursday morning and arrived in Tulsa before 2:15 PM for a nice visit with Daniel and Shelley, and their dog, Zoe.

The rest of Thursday was a relax and visit time, and Friday we just nattered about, went geocaching, ate, and visited.

However, on Saturday, Shelley had grand plans for us.

She had planned for us to travel north to Bartlesville, OK, to see the Price Tower, and then a secondary jaunt into Kansas to see the Little House On The Prairie. It was a great trip, and that's what this posting is about - to tell you of those visits.

The "Little House" Really Is

We left their house about 9:45 to give us time to stop for gas and get to the Price Tower by their first tour, which started at 11. They also had tours and 1PM and 2PM, which was a good thing, because we didn't arrive there until 11:05, and the tour that had just started was already full. The 2PM tour was also full, so we signed up for the 1PM tour, and took off north for Kansas.

Many people have read Laura Ingalls Wilder's series about "The Little House On The Prairie," but for those who haven't, the TV show, which was set in Walnut Grove, MN, showed only one of several places the Ingalls lived while Laura was growing up.

Another place they spent a year living was about 12 miles southwest of Independence, Kansas. They went there because they got some free government land, but had to leave after only a year because of Indian uprisings.

While they were there, they build a cabin to live in, and we got to see what is claimed to be a very accurate replica of the cabin where they lived, built on the foundations where their original cabin stood.

The area is now a rather small tourist destination, and comprises about half an acre of land, onto which, besides the cabin replica, the historians have moved an old schoolhouse, and old post office, and have build an old style farm house that now houses the gift shop.

When we arrived, we went first, of course, to the cabin. We were all boggled at the miniscule size of where they lived. Five people lived for a year in a one-room cabin smaller than a typical bedroom today.

There was one single bed in a corner, a couple of chairs constructed from rough logs, and a small fireplace next to the bed. It seems they must have had to do all their cooking in that fireplace, since there was no stove.

There was no heat, no plumbing (meaning no bathroom or kitchen), of course, no electricity, and the day we were there, the temperature was 50° which I'm certain was not unusual for Kansas this time of year, and the cold bite in the air gave us a new appreciation for the age in which we live.

It also brought to mind the thousands, perhaps millions of people in the world today who are living in equally primitive conditions. Thinking of these people, and praying for them, we felt a chill that had to do with the cold.

The entire cabin was no more than fifteen by eighteen feet, maybe smaller. We wondered where everyone slept, how they ate, how they read their Bible, where did they keep their few extra belongings.

It wasn't all that long ago, in the history of mankind, less than 150 years.

Then we looked at the tiny post office, which had been moved onto the property when it was finally closed in 1970, when the town of Wayside (is that it?) went defunct, only a few miles from the current location.

The post office had perhaps fifteen boxes with combination doors on them, that patrons could access from the lobby, and about thirty pigeonholes inside the behind-the-counter cage, where it seemed patrons could ask the postmaster for their mail. The lobby could comfortably accommodate three or four people, although with four it became a bit close.

Not a very large post office.

Then we toured the one-room schoolhouse. Just inside door were two small partitioned areas. The one on the left might have been a cloakroom, and contained an old-fashioned potbellied stove. The room on the right might have functioned as a "kitchen," in that it had some counters, a water bucket and dipper, and shelving under the counters. We wonder if the children stored their lunches there until time to eat.

In the main area were about twenty student desks and a teacher's desk. The student desks were one-piece units, with the smallest to the front left and the largest desks to the right rear. About half of the desks were double units, seating two students. The teacher's desk was barely larger than a student's desk.

There was a real blackboard, about three feet tall and ten feet long, almost the width of the front of the room. On display near the blackboard were some student slates, looking like miniature blackboards.

On a bulletin board in the back was a list of all the teachers who had taught at that school since it was built in about 1872 through when it closed in 1947. It was quite a long list.

The teacher who taught Laura Ingalls Wilder was paid $33.33 per month for seven months of teaching, and the teacher who succeeded her was paid a mere $25 a month but only taught for two months.

The combination of the cold and the upcoming tour in Bartlesville cut our visit there shorter than it might otherwise have been, but it was a worthwhile visit, a impressive look into American history, and a sobering glimpse at what frontier life was like.

So we left the really, REALLY LITTLE House on the Prairie, and went back to Oklahoma for our scheduled tour, deciding to postpone lunch until after that tour.

You can visit the official "Little House" website here.

The Price Tower Wasn't So Pricey

So we went to tour the Price Tower in Bartlesville, OK. I'll give you a link at the end of this posting so you can read more about it on your own if you like.

Harold C. Price was a chemist in the early 1900s in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. He came up with a chemical that came to be in high demand by the oil companies operating in the area at that time, and he started his own company and became quite wealthy.

In the early 1950's, his company was outgrowing their offices in downtown Bartlesville, so Price asked an architect to design him a new office building. The architect he contacted was a professor at Oklahoma University and could not take on this project in adddition to his other work, so referred Price to Frank Lloyd Wright.

Frank Lloyd Wright agreed to take on the project, and the Price Tower opened for business in October of 1956. We understand it cost just over $2 million to build, which would make it a true bargain at today's prices. Of course, back in 1956, it represented a lot more. For comparison, check out apartment rates then, given below.

As is typical of Frank Lloyd Wright designs, this tower is striking, beautiful, and slightly unwieldy. Frank Lloyd Wright was never one to let practical considerations stand in the way of design.

The tower supposedly represents a tree. It is constructed of concrete, glass, ribbon mahogany, aluminum, and a great deal of copper. Much of the copper is on the outside of the building, and has taken on a green patina that lends substance to the like-a-tree motif.

You can see from the photo there are vertical as well as horizontal louvers over the entire building.

Price initially wanted the building to be only four to six stories, but Wright convinced him to go up, not out, and the Price Tower wound up being nineteen stories tall.

The interior of the building not only contained the Price company corporate offices, it also had eight two-story apartments, which rented for six times the going rate. In 1956, you could rent an apartment in Bartlesville of equivalent square footage for $50 a month; Price Tower apartments rented at $300 a month.

Besides the apartments, there were also a number of shops in the building.

It's quite a structure.

Today, the bottom two floors house an art gallery/museum, the aparments and many of the shops have been converted into eighteen (best my foggy memory can recall) hotel rooms, and the top two floors have been restored to what they were as corporate offices and are now part of the Price Tower museum tour.

We saw one restored apartment, and I've got to tell you, it's Frank Lloyd Wright all the way. His theme for the building is triangles. They're everywhere. Ceiling light fixtures and air conditioner vents are triangles. Desks and chairs are truncated triangles. Even the wastebaskets have a triangular theme. There are triangles in the carpets, in the drapes, in the concrete in the floor, in the murals on the wall, and even the elevators were shaped like triangles with the points cut off.

And everything's small.

Typical of Wright, who we understand wasn't all that large, himself, doors were small, rooms were small, bathrooms were small, and even closets were small and triangular. If you put four people in an elevator, it seemed cramped.

The famous Otis elevator company had never worked with Frank Lloyd Wright before, and they jumped at the chance to work with him on the elevators for this building. We hear that after this project, they were never willing to work with him again.

Wright even designed special chairs for this building. They look like they belong on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. They have hexagonal seats and arms that slope down in front at about a thirty degree angle. Wright said it was harder to design the chairs than it was to design the building. Evidently the people who had to use the chairs thought they were also harder to sit in, because reports have it they quickly brought in their own chairs and relegated Wright's designs to storage, bringing them out only when Wright came back for a visit.

The tour guide said that Wright usually made entryways and foyers very small so when people proceeded from those into small offices, they would seem larger by comparison.

You can visit the official Price Tower website here.

It was a very interesting tour, and the buiding has a unique beauty to it. It is definitely a landmark piece of architecture in Oklahoma and America. But I'm glad I don't have to live in one of those apartments or work in one of those offices.

If you get the chance, you should go see the Price Tower. And the Little Teeny House on the Prairie. You'll enjoy both of them.