My cousin sent me this picture from Alva, Oklahoma on Monday. The blizzard dumped 20 inches of snow and caused the Sonic Drive-In to collapse. No more soft drink happy hours in Alva for a while it seems.

My great-grandfather Crowell’s grain elevator in northwestern Oklahoma, circa 1910. My great-grandfather also owned hardware stores and a number of other businesses throughout northwestern Oklahoma.

1950sunlimited:

The Glancy Motel, 1960s

Clinton, Oklahoma 

Visiting Alva, Oklahoma this weekend and saw this old Studebaker Champion sitting in a parking lot.

Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, 1956. At 19-stories high, it’s Frank Lloyd Wright’s only “skyscraper”.

My great-great aunt, Mary Wells Osborn, circa 1900. She and her husband James Osborn lived in Cashion, Oklahoma Territory, which was an oil boom town of the early 1900s. (Oklahoma didn’t become a state until 1907, hence the “O. T.” at the bottom of the picture.)

baronswankenstein:

The Plainsman Motel, located in Blackwell, Oklahoma, was less than 20 miles from the Kansas border. According to this tourist postcard, the Plainsman, with its Googie architecture front office, had a restaurant and service station facilities.

Presumably, the Plainsman has been demolished; A quick net search (hotel web sites and Google street view) shows no lodgings resembling this.

Postcard from my personal collection.

I was there as a kid!

John Addington, 1950 — More genealogy work; my Mother’s first cousin drowned in the Great Salt Plains Lake in NW Oklahoma on June 6, 1950 at the age of 20. He was sailing with friends when a summer thunderstorm came up in the heat of the day and capsized their sailboat.

My great-grandmother Carrie Mae with my great-aunt Elsie and my grandfather Floyd. About 1912.

The Piggly Wiggly grocery store in Alva, Oklahoma, 1930s