Michael Wallis, author of the best-selling and Pulitzer-nominated “Route 66: The Mother Road,” gave a presentation Friday during Tulsa Town Hall.
His speech covered a lot of ground on Oklahoma history, including mentions of Woody Guthrie and the infamous Tulsa Race Riot. But this part of the exemplary Tulsa World article is worth excerpting:
His first real experience of Tulsa came in 1980, when he came here “hunting a good story” as a correspondent for Time-Life. He took an evening stroll along the Arkansas River and happened to meet with a man with whom he shared a few hours, talking of the man’s career as a rodeo cowboy, the injury that ended that part of his life, the despair that led to his living under the abandoned 11th Street Bridge.
It was an evening that, for Wallis, brought together everything from Washington Irving, who had paused at the spring near the McBirney Mansion during his tour of the prairies, to Cyrus Avery, who had used the existence of the 11th Street Bridge to make his case for Route 66 passing through Tulsa.
And this “silent man with empty eyes” brought to his mind memories of his mother finding work and providing food for the drifters who might come to their door, the stories they would spin about these men’s lives and his mother’s admonition to be aware of “angels in disguise.”
Not long after that, Michael and his wife, Suzanne, moved to Tulsa, and have resided there ever since.