Chapter 45 Old Haunts

June 2017 I paid a visit to Bartlesville with my wife on the occasion of my daughter's wedding. She was to be wed in Catoosa Oklahoma on Sunday so we drove up to B'ville and tooled around on Saturday.

I must say the place looked like a ghost town, but in hindsight not much more than it did on weekends in the 1980's.  We drove downtown and all through the adjacent residential areas visiting my old haunts including my old house on Cherokee. I knocked on the door and asked the present owners if I could take a look around and they invited me in.

The three intervening owners had made a few changes to the home and alterations to my remodeling.
The stained wood tongue and groove wood ceiling I put in in the kitchen had been painted over by the previous female owner, as well as the hard wood kitchen cabinet doors and base cabinet drawers.

She had the good sense to refinish the hard wood kitchen floor pulling up the vinyl flooring I had put down, when I ran out of time to refinish it when I did the breakfast room and hallway. The had closed in the archway between the living room and the "music room" or TV room. They put in two French doors. It made the living room seem a lot smaller. The vestibule door by the front door had been removed, kind of defeating the purpose of the vestibule in bad weather, and the thick oak arched top front door had been replaced with a cheap rectangular job. I thought it really destroyed the look of front of the house since it always reminded me of a gingerbread house, with a steep pitched roof and brick porch and such. The door was a real eye catcher. The guy who bought it from Phillips National Bank made that change. I can't recall if the old casement windows were still there, though I think they were. It still had the old asbestos siding shingles in place.

The privacy fence I put up around the back yard in 1982 was still there except for the double gate I put up to contain my Doberman, Panzer in the back yard. I guess I can build a privacy fence to last.

The old garage apartment that one of my old flames lived in that I could see from my kitchen is still there but vacant and you can't get to the front door for all the debris piled in front. That is a shame it was a nice one bedroom apartment and the scene of a lot of good times.

Patrick's is long gone, Disco International is nothing but a ghost of the past. We drove up to Lake Bar-dew and found the access road padlocked and closed despite the cat-woman who purchased it saying the public would still have access to it. I reckon it is now a private hunting preserve for the adjacent land owners who use it without the owner's knowledge. It had good hunting. I took more than a few deer and a lot of quail. This visit I was hoping to capture some fossils from the dam spillway, which is a cut through Pennsylvanian age black/gray shale which is filled with fossils.

My son takes my grandsons to "The Mound" north of the research center and digs fossils to this day.

We went up to Nike Hill to visit the candle factory and it is a former shadow of its past glory too. Much smaller with fewer hand painted candles for sale.

I found out the Fronkier ranch of the infamous Forth of July party in the Osage had been sold due to lack of funds. My former direct report living here in Houston, last name Mundy told me about that. That is a shame. The Indian land should stay in Indian hands. Too much was lost under the Dawes Act allotment.

We drove out to R&D and it is much reduced. The old PPCo Softball fields are now padlocked and overgrown an indication of how the demographics have changed.

To show how small the world is, I was sitting in the sauna at my gym, when this drop dead young blonde came in. I've spoken to her on occasion before. We got to talking about things and she said she had just broken up with her boyfriend. One thing led to another, and she mentions he is from Bartlesville and that his father worked for Phillips. The last name was Johns. He is Mormon and comes from a large family. I wracked my brain...the name sounded familiar. I thought I might have shared a cubicle with her boyfriend's father in the 1980's for nearly a year.

We compared notes and I gave her some insight as to why her relationship failed. The guy apparently expected her to toe the Mormon female line and she wanted a career and wanted to continue to work out at the gym, two things he apparently could not abide. Too bad. She would have been a real catch. She is the image of Nordic perfection.

I contacted one of my old coworkers and mentor who is also Mormon and I did in fact, NOT know anyone in that family. My cubicle mate' first name was John, not his last. But the fact that the blonde and I were both connected to Bartlesville and had made the connection in such a random way was a real hoot.

I spoke to her about the book I am finishing up, that touches on relationships between men and women. In it I try to give young men some insight into the history of the Feminist movement from the 1970s to present. How Feminists have controlled the dialog for over fifty years and have endeavored with great success to define men for our society. A small number of militant lesbian feminists have purported to speak for the majority and it is obvious from the failure of the ERA and the 2016 election that they are completely out of touch with the majority of women in the US.  They resort to shaming, name calling and bullying just like a bunch of Junior High school girls. Hillary and Michelle O. took to social media to lambaste and name call the majority of women who did not vote for Hillary. So it is okay for them to do the same thing that liberals are horrified about when it takes place in social media and results in a teen girl or boy committing suicide. Bullying by name calling and shaming is okay for liberals to do, as we see in the Me Too! movement where they resort to lynching any male regardless of color by accusation alone. There is no need for investigation, trial and conviction, he is guilty just by reason that he has testicles.  They do not care about collateral damage like the female agent who killed herself when caught in the middle of the social media charges and counter charges between Rose McGowan and her alleged 'rapist."

That McGowan would levy harassment charges against anyone is laughable. How does she think she got her first role? Based on her talent?  Hardly. Her talent resides below her chin.

Seriously any woman who would dress like this in public is simply a trolling whore. She isn't trolling to get laid, but she certainly is making it known there is little she wouldn't do to get noticed, get notoriety, or to land a role. This outfit established what kind of woman she is, not she's just quibbling over the price. She is a has been which is demonstrated by her cutting her hair short which gives her instant credibility with the Lesbian Feminists, after all we remember Sinead O'Connor right?

It is pretty clear that Rose's assets have take a drop, and so did the number of calls she was getting. That is all part of a Hollywood star getting older. So now with her documentary and all she is trying to be taken seriously. Way to late for that.

Ah but I digress. The wife and I went to Sunset Lake after stopping at Murphy's for an artery clogging Hot Hamburger. She had heard about it, so I felt I needed to treat her to one. It was a nice lunch.

We stopped at the new (to us) refurbished locomotive and B'ville Train Station. We had driven through Johnstone Park to see if the gays were still hanging out in the men's room. I thought maybe we'd see George Michaels or Eddie Murphy, but no, it was pretty deserted. I noticed the locomotive was gone, alas so were the legion of stray cats that it housed.  The I discovered it had been moved to the tracks west of down town, a fitting site.  I often wondered about the last hours of all those stray cats and whether they made it to the top of the locomotive cab before the flood waters of 1987 closed over them when the entire park was under 25-30 feet of water.

We drove around both sides of town, visiting my old residences, and saw nary one familiar face. The place had really turned into a retirement community, which is not all bad. In fact, I am looking to move from Houston to be closer to my daughter and son and grandsons. I have even considered Bartlesville and the surrounding environs. I guess as they say, time will tell.