My great-grandmother, it was continuously impressed upon us, continually impressed upon my grandfather that "a young man without an education is nothing." Such was the wisdom a hundred years ago, and I think the same still holds true today. My grandfather became a self-made man, successfully putting himself through medical college and completing residencies in Boston and Louisville before coming to Tulsa. The original plan had been to wander a bit, but he liked the town so much he decided to hang his shingle for good, determined to make a go of being something in a city that was, in fact, succeeding in doing much the same.
When Harold arrived, Tulsa was a boomtown and big fortunes were in the making, though the entrée to his trade was significantly humbler. He always said his first patients consisted of winos and prostitutes, and that he preferred the latter as they always paid their bills on time. Though he never specified by what currency the account was settled. Later, it being the time of segregation, he would volunteer weekly at the "colored" hospital on the north side. And eventually he took up residence in the Hotel Tulsa, which stood then at 3rd and Cincinnati - where the Performing Arts Center stands today - his room and board in exchange for services rendered as the hotel doctor.
I am pretty sure Harold must have been one of the more eligible bachelors of 1930s Tulsa: he was tall, funny, handsome enough, and heterosexual. He was also living in a hotel that happened to be the epicenter of the city's petroleum deal making. Apparently one of the lesser publicized bi-products of the booming Tulsa oil economy was a surplus of well-heeled divorcées, several of whom had set their sites on the young doctor. This was occasionally evidenced to us at the house, in the odd run in with, say, an old but very good watch. Or a much-coveted paperweight from Louis Comfort Tiffany. Or an attic boxfull of dapper silk smoking jackets I pretty much destroyed wearing to the clubs when it was the retro fashion in the Eighties. "Oh, that?" My grandmother would reply to questions of provenance - and often accompanied with the most subtle of eye-rolls - "it's from one of your grandfather's old girlfriends..."
My grandmother Jebbie rolled herself into town in 1946. She was an only child and she happened to be a young woman with an education as well, having been finished at a private Southern girl's college - something that I wondered would have been possible at the tail end of the Great Depression if there'd also been brothers educate. And she was also a young war widow, having - like many young women of her generation - wed her longtime sweetheart for a few weeks of marriage before he shipped off to Europe to be a tail gunner on a B-17 Flying Fortress.
During the war she lived in Washington, D.C., working in the Pentagon and for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as a draftsman, where she helped to lay out military camps. And she did it all in a hat and gloves, too. After the war, she took a position as an illustrator with the U.S. Geological Survey and was soon given a temporary assignment in Wyoming. But because it was scheduled for February all she could think about was how much she did not want to be that cold, in Wyoming; so she swapped assignments with a co-worker and packed her bags for Tulsa, Oklahoma, in October.
On the ride in from D.C. Jebbie started feeling ill, and by the time the train pulled into the Union Depot downtown, she was very sick with the flu. Her assignment was to work at the Federal Building on South Boulder, which then housed the local branch of the Geological Survey, and lodging for the duration of her stay had been arranged at the nearby Hotel Tulsa. When she checked in sick, the front desk shortly arranged for the hotel doctor to pay her a call, and that is in fact how Harold met Jebbie.
But Harold was not the only one with admirers, and soon Jebbie found herself not lacking for them either. She was, after all, a bit of a Southern belle, with the lilting accent and, it was sometimes noted, a coincidental resemblance to Vivien Leigh. Harold's main contender for Jebbie's attention was a man we always knew simply as Swan, an upper-level civil servant here in the city. Harold and Swan became active competitors for Jebbie's hand, and their competition did not escape the attention of the hotel staff, where after all, my grandmother would spend the next few months and my grandfather had by now resided for some years. They watched and waited, too - including, my grandmother liked to note in later years, a restaurant hostess in the habit of changing her hair rinse to match her dress.
Everyday Swan ordered room service to deliver an apple to Jebbie's room - expressly to keep the doctor away. And daily Harold would pay a call on Jebbie and eat the apple in the process. But there's an advantage in proximity - and I don't doubt in an M.D. as well, since as we know, a young man without an education is nothing - and Dr. Black was the eventual winner of my grandmother's hand. And just like that one of Tulsa's most eligible bachelors was taken off the market, by some little missy that just breezed into town out of nowhere - or so those divorcées fumed.
Together they joked that she'd elected to marry him in lieu of paying her bill, and they lived at the Hotel Tulsa in the adjoining rooms of 706 and 708, until Jebbie came to be expecting the baby that was to be my mother. They bought a little bungalow in Riverview, and when that, like the hotel suite, no longer filled the bill, they built a rambling ranch house further south, in what then must have been the boonies but today is considered midtown. Here they both lived long and, I think, mostly happy lives. And my grandfather would hold court at the dinner table, alternately with a glass of bourbon or buttermilk, and revisit the episodes of his country-to-town life.
By the time I came along, years of telling had shaped the stories into well-honed anecdotes, but we cried to hear them anyway, like piano bar standards, already quite conscious of every lyric before the first word was uttered: Tell us about the first time you had a Coke! (At the county fair, and the fizz shot out his nose). Tell us about the time you put up two stockings at Christmas! (You can probably guess how that one went.) And alas, Tell us how you met mother! (Well, you just heard that one...)
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