Picking up where I left off when I went to Clayton Library
the other day, I was very excited to find the Okmulgee City directories for the
1950’s as I was now able to identify all the employees of the Okmulgee terminal
and as an added bonus, I was able to find how who Frank “the Porter” was…Frank
Shelton. Over the past two years, I had
several people ask me if I knew who he was or if I had reached out to his
family.
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Okmulgee Terminal Drivers Meeting in the early 1950’s.
Top Row L-R: Jack Thompson, Curtis Lawhead, Unknown, Len Berryhill,
William Ramsey Gill, Unknown, Adron Holland, Lyle Breeding, Sid Thomason,
Jack Holland, AB Harris, Howard Ramsby, Unknown, Cecil Breeding
First Row Seated L-R: ??? Brown, Unknown, Charles Johnston, Carl Crim,
Unknown, Louis Edward McClain, Unknown, Art Wedel
(CLICK ON PHOTO TO ENLARGE)
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On this particular day, I had fully planned to stay at the
library for a good ten hours. I really wanted to get a look at a Ponca City directory and then some Tulsa directories. The week before when I was at the library I had seen directories on microfilm from these cities and thought I would be able to go to the library here in Houston versus traveling to Oklahoma City to access these.
When I went to go find the city directory for Tulsa I only saw that they had them up through 1950. Back a couple of years ago, we had traveled to the Tulsa County Library and photographed the 1950 and 1961 Tulsa directory. However, when I got back home to look at the 1950 directory, many of the people in the directory did not have a company name marked beside their name (which rendered this a bit useless for my purposes). I had really been hoping to find a 1955 Tulsa directory to see if company names were listed in that directory. But here in Houston, I was let down. I guess in the future, I will have to make the trip to Oklahoma City to get the 1955, 1966 and 1972 city directories. Yes, I do know that it is fanatical to photograph and go through these enormous city directories, but it is an ideal place to get an employee listing for the company - which is something we haven't got our hands on as of yet.
After that letdown, I then turned to Ponca City and found a 1960 directory. Hugh Breeding Inc had terminal there in the 1960's that serviced Continental Oil Co. However, when I pulled a directory and sampled a listing names that I knew who ved and worked at the Ponca terminal, I came up empty. It appears that I need a city directory from after 1961 to see if I can find a list of employees.
So the upshot of this trip was that I had planned for a 10 hour day at the Baby Clayton but instead, I was finished after 3 hours. And that is the way research often goes: you start off so excited with the best laid plans but once you wade into the pool, you often find things different than what you thought they were. Sometimes things are better; sometimes things are worse. But even if things don't turn out like you planned, most of the time it is really helpful to know what you don't know....when specific resources aren't available. It then makes it all the more critical that when you visit a library like OKC (where resources are available) that you make the most of your time.
So where does all this lead? As I am trying to develop a company listing, I will not only have to find Tulsa but also towns like Ponca City, Ft. Smith, Joplin, Hannibal and Baxter Springs. Just recently, I've been going through the Tulsa city directory for 1961 and I've gotten through about 1/6 of the directory and have already found about 15 new employees I hadn't known of previously. That's what make it worth it because for each new employee I find, there runs some possibility that I can track down their family and hear their story.
