I’ve sort of hinted at this, but now the full story can be told.
Mike the Musicologist and I went on a road trip to Oklahoma the weekend of November 8th.
I bet you thought I was going to put Rogers and Hammerstein there. Nope.
I’ll put them here instead.
(And yes, the wind does come sweeping down the plains.)
We did go past Lake Eufaula and through Tushka going up and coming back. We did not, however, stop at that Pop Knife and Gun place because if it actually exists, we couldn’t find it. We also had other reasons for not stopping, which will be explained shortly. We did not stop at the Club 69 (which apparently does exist) because it was too early for drinking. We did see a lot of Indian casinos (which we did not stop at, having better uses for our money, which will also be explained shortly).
Our primary objective was to attend Wanenmacher’s Tulsa Gun Show. You may ask “Why?”, especially given that there was also a show in Austin that weekend. One reason is that Wanenmacher’s is huge: they claim 4,200 tables, and I believe it. You can go through an Austin gun show in two or three hours; it took MtM and I almost all of two days to go through Wanenmacher’s, and I’m still not sure we saw everything. MtM has been looking for some specific items, and he thought they might be easier to find at a big show. Also, he thought a road trip the week after his birthday would be fun. When he made the suggestion, I jumped at it. There’s also an informal gathering of Smith and Wesson Collector’s Association members on Saturday night during Wanenmacher’s which I’d heard about, but had not been to.
Wanenmacher’s runs Saturday and Sunday, so what were we to do with the rest of the time? On the way up, we stopped by the USS Batfish War Memorial Park and Museum. Good news: admission was free. Bad news: admission was free because there was a giant sinkhole underneath the gangway that led from the museum onto the Batfish, so we couldn’t go on deck. I hope they manage to get that fixed soon; the Batfish Museum is one of those nice small museums that really deserves your support.
We spent a considerable portion of the day on Friday at the J.M. Davis Arms and Historical Museum. J.M. Davis began collecting guns when he was seven. (His dad gave him a shotgun as a reward for taking his medicine when he was ill.) Mr. Davis grew up and became a prominent citizen of Claremore; he owned a a local hotel, and displayed his collection in the lobby. Mr. Davis accumulated more guns, and eventually accumulated even more guns. People came from all over to trade guns with him, in some cases just so they could say one of their guns was in the Davis collection. Before his death, he had accumulated somewhere around 25,000 firearms from every historical period. Mr. Davis made arrangements with the state to establish the J.M. Davis Museum, which opened in 1969. Mr. Davis himself died in 1973.
This is an amazing museum. If a gun existed, Mr. Davis had at least one example in his collection, and maybe two or three. And he also collected German beer steins, Indian artifacts, statues, and horse tack. It feels like the biggest strength of the J.M. Davis museum – sheer size – is also the biggest weakness. Towards the end of our time there, my eyes were starting to glaze over, and I think MtM felt the same way. I never thought I’d say this, but there is a limit to how many guns you can look at in one day.
That’s not really a complaint. It is a nice museum, and also worth your support. (Admission to the museum is free, but they do accept donations, and have an interesting gift shop.)
As a side note, it was interesting to compare Oklahoma and Texas in terms of gun culture. Don’t get me wrong: Texas has a strong gun culture, even in places like Austin. I think there may be a smaller arms museum associated with Texas A&M, and other ones scattered throughout the state, but nothing comparable in size to the Davis Museum, and nothing actually run by the state. This was the 60th anniversary of the Wanenmacher show, and the Tulsa World did a complementary profile of Mr. Wanenmacher: I can’t imagine the HouChron or Statesman running a similar profile of the Saxet or High Caliber founders. And then there was this:
This is the cover of one of the free magazines that was all over the place in Tulsa. If you put a woman with a hunting rifle on the cover of one of the Austin free magazines, the screams of the Sisters of Perpetual Indigence would be audible clear up to West, even without the accompanying guide to hunting accessories.
But I digress. We took a break from firearms and went over to the Gilcrease Museum. My mother tells me we visited there when I was younger. I remember being impressed by the Frederic Remington bronzes, and thinking it’d be neat to own one when I grew up. I still like Remington’s work very much, but something clicked with me when I saw it this time; Remington’s works hurt. It seems like everyone he sculpted is either about to experience a painful event, or has just experienced one.
This time around, I also noticed that I was drawn to the works of Charles M. Russell, who I don’t remember from my first visit as a small boy. Actually, there were a lot of artists who grabbed my attention for one reason or another: this page has some good examples, including not just Remington and Russell, but Moran, Schreyvogel, and Bierstadt among others. There was one painting in particular – I don’t remember the artist – but the way he depicted sunset just took my breath away. The colors were so perfect…
(One thing Mike and I noticed about the Western art at the Gilcrease: Western artists seemed to have a hard time depicting realistic bears. Leigh’s “Close Call” in the above link is a good example of what I’m talking about, but there were several others in the museum that had the same issue.)
And by the way, we got into the Gilcrease for free. (Are you sensing a trend here?) I think this may have been tied to their special exhibit of Washington’s Inaugural Bible, but we didn’t know about that; it was just sheer luck. (I did look at it. I don’t know what I can say about it; it seemed like a nice old Bible in a giant glass case with an armed guard nearby. Somehow, even with the connection to Washington, it didn’t move me as much as the actual art did.)
That pretty much takes care of Thursday and Friday. Saturday and Sunday, as I indicated above, were spent almost entirely at Wanenmacher’s. Saying it took the better part of two days to see (almost) all of it doesn’t really get across the scope of the show. Wanenmacher’s restricts non-gun tables to roughly 2% of the total, so there’s not a lot of jewelry, candles, candy, or jerky there. What there is, is guns, gun parts, and ammunition.
Almost anything you might want, you can find at Wanenmacher’s. A SKS rifle? Pick your table. A couple of full cases of that steel core ammo with the Berdan primers from some East Bloc nation? Ditto. Would you like a Desert Eagle in .50 caliber, and how tacky do you want yours to be? Surplus tracers? Yep. I didn’t see any functioning BARs that I recall, though I did see a cutaway one designed for training purposes. I didn’t find a muzzle brake for my Model 41, alas, but I did find many other things. One of my grail guns is a XP-100 in .221 Fireball: I saw several there, but none at a price that was worth the trouble. I’ve also been looking for a Nylon 66. I saw quite a few there, including one guy whose entire table was Nylon 66 parts and rifles. Unfortunately, the prices were higher than I would have liked.
(Side note: As Texas residents, Mike and I could legally purchase rifles and shotguns at the show, or at a licensed dealer in Oklahoma, and take them home with us. However, in order to purchase a handgun, like the XP-100, we would have had to make arrangements to have it shipped to a licensed dealer in Texas, who would then do the transfer to the purchaser.)
Did I buy anything at the gun show? Sure did. I got a really nice calender featuring an etching of Theodore Roosevelt from The Antique Gallery for $2. I’m not sure if you can mail order those, but it might not hurt to try (the email address is on their home page): I think I’d like to get a couple of extras. I also picked up a reprint of John “Pondoro” Taylor’s Maneaters and Marauders, which one dealer was selling for $10 in hardcover. Looking over it, this is an odd book; there’s no colophon, or, indeed, any publishing information I can find anywhere. Makes me wonder, it does.
I also spent some money on fair food. And I did purchase one other thing, but the time is not ripe to discuss that item.
I don’t think we had a bad meal in Tulsa. We had great dinners at:
- Siegi’s German Restaurant, which is also a store, and which also does wild game processing. Really:
- Gogi Gui Korean Grill, which does an interesting fusion of Thai and Korean food (they share their kitchen with a Thai place). I recommend the Gogi fries.
- The Chalkboard, where we had the best meal of the trip. It wasn’t just the food, though that was excellent: I haven’t seen anyone offering Beef Wellington in ages. The service, however, was extraordinary. As MtM said, “It is a pleasure to be waited on by a professional.”
- We also had barbecue from the Rib Crib (a local barbecue chain, kind of like Rudy’s) for the Saturday night gathering. I thought it was pretty good barbecue – not Franklin level, but at least as good as Rudy’s, with a spicy sauce that had some real kick to it.
We also had some good breakfasts at the Old School Bagel Cafe and the Florence Park Cafe. And I managed to use my considerable powers of persuasion to get MtM to take me to a Braum’s (a popular ice cream/fast food chain in North Texas and Oklahoma that I’d never been to). The ice cream was okay, but I still prefer Blue Bell or Amy’s.
As far as gear goes, there’s not much new to report. I’m still using Project e, and it is still working okay, though it needs an Ubuntu update. I brought the big Nikon and didn’t use it at all. The one new bit of kit this time around was a Nikon Coolpix S6500
(I still have the little Canon SD1000 that my beloved sister gave me many years ago, and it is still a great camera. But the Nikon was a bargain, and this gives me a chance to use the Canon as an experimental camera with CHDK.)
Thanks to MtM for organizing the trip and the Southwest Bunch for Saturday night barbecue and show-and-tell.
A special thanks goes out to Sports World in Tulsa. We stopped there on the way in to purchase advance tickets for Wanenmacher’s, and were highly impressed. If I lived in Tulsa, this might be where a lot of my shopping got done. The staff was very nice, especially the guy working the knife counter who spent the better part of a half-hour talking knives with us. They also had some excellent deals on display model and dealer sample long guns; I came very close to picking up a Marlin 1895 in .45-70, as their price was about $100 less than the used ones I’ve seen at Cabela’s. (And their 1895s were mint, or pretty close to it, with boxes and paper.)
Wyndham Tulsa, you have bad WiFi and you should feel bad.
And, yes, Tulsa does pass the Keller test. We drove through several neighborhoods in our wanderings; there were a lot of nice older (and some newer) houses that I could easily see myself living in, if my Austin privileges were revoked. Plus: open carry!
Did you mean to put this up password-protected, or were you still working on it?