Route 66 - Erick & The Mediocre Music Makers

Coming into Erick, Oklahoma
Putting Sayre and the site of The Great Indian Uprising of 1959 behind us, we cruised a few more miles west on Route 66 to Erick, Oklahoma, just seven miles east of the Texas state line and site of numerous interesting stories and people. 

Erick is the boyhood home of Roger Miller, Mr. "King of the Road" himself. Roger used nearby Texas as a source for his first guitar - he borrowed it from a pawn shop while the place was closed. This incident led to Roger's stint in the military in the early 1950s. The stretch of Route 66 entering Erick from Sayre has been named the Roger Miller Memorial Highway and the road through town is named Roger Miller Boulevard. This is also home to the Roger Miller Museum. We had plans to visit the museum and I would like to tell you all about it, but it is only open Wednesday through Saturday and we didn't come through on one of those days so, here's the outside pictures and if you tour it, let me know how it is!

Roger Miller Memorial Highway
Erick is also the birth place of Sheb Wooley, related to Roger Miller by marriage. The name "Sheb Wooley" may be familiar, but likely you just can't place him or figure out why the name is kind of familiar. Well, Sheb Wooley was the real deal - cowboy, rodeo rider, country & western singer, songwriter, actor and comedian. Perhaps he is most famous though for a little ditty he wrote and recorded in 1958 - One Eyed, One Horned, Flying Purple People Eater. Now that one most folks remember! Some of his movies included High Noon and The Outlaw Josey Wales. Appearances on TV included Rawhide, The Cisco Kid, Kit Carson, and repeat performances on Hee-Haw. The town also has named a street after him and yes, there is an intersection of Sheb Wooley and Roger Miller - and if you go to that intersection on a Wednesday through Saturday, you can visit the Roger Miller Museum and tell me all about it.
The 100th Meridian is close to Erick. Except for Erick being the location of the 100th Meridian Museum, that fact doesn't mean anything today, but it certainly did in the 1800's. Back then, the 100th Meridian was designated as where the American desert started and banks would not lend money for farms beyond this line because you can't farm in a desert!

Erick used to be one of the most notorious speed traps in America. Officer Elmer had a very fast, black V-8 Ford that enabled him to catch most anybody he wanted to catch. Bob Hope drove through Erick just a couple of miles per hour over the speed limit one time and he was busted by Officer Elmer. During his next national TV show, Mr. Hope said the only way he would go through Erick again would be on a donkey. Eventually, the tourist business dropped off so drastically that the town's business owners rose up in protest, threatened to close their stores and leave town. The town council soon put an end to the traffic ticket terror by Officer Elmer. To this day however, stories continue to be heard about an old black Ford mysteriously appearing in the rear-view mirrors of those who speed through Erick in the dark of night.
Downtown Erick on a busy weekday afternoon

Mural in downtown Erick


Entrance to the Sandhills Curio Shop
No place along the length of The Mother Road exemplifies the uniqueness of Route 66 businesses better than the Sandhills Curio Shop (201 South Sheb Wooley) and nobody exemplifies the uniqueness of the interesting people who make their home along the route than its owners, Harley and Annabelle Russell. We were lucky enough to stop at just the right time for a small musical performance by Harley and Annabelle, the self-proclaimed Mediocre Music Makers. Interesting, funny, very outgoing and unique in the extreme, meeting them was a true experience and browsing their shop crammed from floor to ceiling with thousands of   Route 66 memorabilia, signs, and, well, tons of junk, was fun as well. By all means, this is a must stop on your trip!

Harley &Annabelle Russell - owners of the
Sandhills Curio Shop
 



The Mediocre Music Makers in action!
 
The totality of the "stuff" within the
Sandhills Curio Shop is truly astounding!
It was getting on in the day when we finally pulled ourselves away from the Sandhills Curio Shop, but there was still some light left and we had a couple of more stops we wanted to make before looking for a place to park our heads for the night. Our next stop would be our last stop along Oklahoma's section of Route 66.

Harley & Annabelle with Lil Dude, our traveling
troll. Check out the pics at "Where My Troll Goes"

Go to the first Route 66 entry here.
Or go to the first entry of each state:

Route 66 - The Great Indian Uprising of 1959

Leaving Clinton, Oklahoma, continuing west on Route 66, we passed by Foss, an official ghost town in spite of several people who still live there, and Canute, a ghost town in the making. After a nice drive of about 30 miles, we slowed down for Elk City. In 1901, the first lots were sold and Elk City became a town. As far as we could tell, even though there are almost 12,000 people who call it home, nothing much has happened there since. And then we came to Sayre, a small town of just 4,000 happy souls, but the place of several stops we wanted to make.

Downtown Sayre on a busy weekday.
 In 1901, a new rail line was built from Weatherford, Oklahoma to Texola, Oklahoma. When the railroad crossed the North Fork of the Red River, the town of Sayre sprung up. A year later, the town had almost 1,000 citizens and that's the way it stayed until the 1930's when Route 66 came through and gave the town new growth serving the travelers of The Mother Road. In the 1970's, Sayre would benefit from the natural gas and oil development in the Panhandle-Hugoton field, the largest volume gas field in the United States and the world's largest known source of helium. Between 1973 and 1993, it produced over 8-trillion cubic feet of gas.

Sayre does have one somewhat famous native son, balloonist Maxie Anderson. Maxie, Ben Abruzzo, and Larry Newman were the first to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a balloon, the Double Eagle, in 1978. But this sleepy little town may be best known for an incident that happened in 1959.

Site of the Great Indian Uprising of 1959
The Great Indian Uprising of 1959 took place at the Route 66 bridge on the edge of town. The bridge itself had suffered fire damage during a brush fire so it had been barricaded off by the highway department and a detour route marked for getting around the damaged structure. With Route 66 being the major highway through town, there were numerous out-of-state cars full of tourists on the road that Saturday. As each car bearing out-of-state license plates slowed down for the detour, a group of the local high school kids would rush up and excitedly tell the naive tourists to roll up their windows and head west as fast as possible because Indians had burned the bridge and were on the warpath! For almost an entire day, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol had its hands full stopping all of the speeding cars headed west to safety from all of those rampaging Indians.

The only Red Uprising at the bridge nowadays
are the numerous Red Ant beds beside the
roadway. DO NOT mess with these things!
Like Elk City a few miles away, not much has happened here except for the high drama of the Indian uprising over 50 years ago. Oh, there were 2 days of excitement in 1939 when John Ford filmed a part of his movie, "The Grapes of Wrath" here. In the movie, there is a 30-second appearance of a courthouse. Most folks think it is the capitol in Oklahoma City, but it's not. It is instead, the Beckham County Courthouse right here in Sayre, but since few people know this, there's no tourism from it. Sleepy, quiet Sayre - an opportunity for a little bit of fame passed on by. But maybe that's exactly how the friendly citizens of this Small Town America want it. After spending a little time in this nice, clean little community, I sure can't say I blame them.

The Beckham County Courthouse, famous for
being in the movie, "The Grapes of Wrath."

Go to the first Route 66 entry here.
Or go to the first entry of each state: