Oak Hill Boys at The Church Studio

The Church Studio

Blue Whale of Catoosa

Rogers State University

The first thing to understand about Rogers State University is that the university is considerably younger than the hill it occupies.

That distinction becomes difficult to miss in Claremore. The campus does not have the feeling of an institution that simply appeared when somebody decided northeastern Oklahoma needed another four-year university. Its oldest buildings belong to another story entirely. Preparatory Hall, with its dome rising above College Hill, looks backward toward a succession of schools that have occupied the same ground for more than a century.

Rogers State University is merely the latest name on a place that Oklahoma has repeatedly reinvented whenever its needs changed.

The story begins in 1909, only two years after Oklahoma became a state. The legislature established Eastern University Preparatory School in Claremore to prepare students from the region for college. While Preparatory Hall was being constructed, classes met elsewhere in town. Only five students graduated at the end of that first academic year. By the following year, enrollment had reached 375.

That is an extraordinary amount of growth for a school in a state that was itself still trying to determine what it was going to become.

The school added a library, earned accreditation, and occupied the new building on the hill, but its first life was brief. Eastern University Preparatory School closed in 1917 as educational needs changed and the United States entered World War I.

For a time, the hill went quiet.

Then the war helped give it another purpose.

In 1919, the Oklahoma Legislature established the Oklahoma Military Academy on the former preparatory-school campus. Its first class numbered only about 30 students, and the new cadets reportedly spent their first year living in tents while permanent barracks were constructed. Meyer Hall, completed in 1920, was named for Maurice Meyer, an Oklahoma soldier who died from wounds suffered during World War I. What is now an administrative building began its life as a barracks.

The Oklahoma Military Academy would define the hill for more than half a century.

By 1923, OMA had expanded beyond secondary education to include two years of college. It became known as the “West Point of the Southwest,” and more than 10,000 cadets eventually attended. Thousands of former students served in the American armed forces during World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, and more than 100 died in military service.

But the history becomes more interesting when it leaves the parade ground.

For roughly two decades, horses were part of daily life at OMA. Cadets trained as cavalrymen and played polo at the Rogers County Fairgrounds. In 1933, Will Rogers himself joined the cadets for a polo match. Five years later, the academy’s polo team was ranked first in the nation after winning 23 consecutive matches.

There is something wonderfully Oklahoma about that chapter of the story: a military academy on a hill above Claremore, young cadets on horseback, and Will Rogers showing up to play polo.

Then history changed the equipment.

After World War II, the horses disappeared and tanks arrived as OMA’s cavalry program became an armored cavalry unit. It is difficult to imagine a more concise picture of the twentieth century than that: horses on the hill before the war, tanks afterward.

The academy itself changed as well. A coeducational night school began in 1957. Women were admitted to daytime classes in 1968, followed by the academy’s first women instructors in 1969. By then, the institution was already moving toward another identity. The needs of northeastern Oklahoma were becoming less military and increasingly connected to higher education, industry, and a changing economy.

In 1971, the Oklahoma Military Academy ceased to exist.

Claremore Junior College took its place.

The transformation could hardly have been more complete. A campus once organized around cadets, barracks, military discipline, and cavalry training became a public community college. Yet even this version of the school grew quickly. Enrollment rose from 477 students in 1971 to more than 3,000 by 1982. That year, Claremore Junior College became Rogers State College, a name intended to reflect its widening service to Rogers County and the surrounding region.

Rogers State College continued doing something the hill had been doing since 1909: adapting.

It expanded academic programs, established outreach centers, and became an early participant in distance education. Long before online courses made remote learning ordinary, Rogers State was experimenting with telecourses and independent study. The institution also developed what became Oklahoma’s only full-power public television station located on a university campus.

The name changed again in 1996. Rogers State College was merged with the University Center at Tulsa and became Rogers University. That arrangement lasted only two years. In 1998, the legislature separated the institutions again. The Tulsa component became part of Oklahoma State University’s presence there, while the Claremore institution emerged as Rogers State University with authorization to develop its own bachelor’s degrees.

In 2000, Rogers State received accreditation as a four-year university.

So Rogers State University can truthfully trace its beginnings to 1909, even though something actually called Rogers State University did not exist until nearly 90 years later. Between those dates came Eastern University Preparatory School, Oklahoma Military Academy, Claremore Junior College, Rogers State College, and briefly Rogers University.

That complicated lineage may be the most interesting thing about the place.

Universities often work very hard to manufacture tradition. They build buildings meant to look older than they are, invent ceremonies, establish mottos, and eventually hope enough graduating classes have passed through that everything begins to feel permanent.

Rogers State has the opposite problem.

Its history refuses to stay still.

The same hill has educated students preparing for college, cadets preparing for war, community-college students preparing for work, and university students pursuing bachelor’s degrees. Horses became tanks. Barracks became offices. A military academy became a civilian university. Even the definition of what it meant to be a student there kept expanding.

Yet Preparatory Hall remained on the hill.

That may be the best object through which to understand Rogers State. The building has survived nearly every institutional identity that has come and gone around it. When it was constructed, Oklahoma itself was barely out of infancy. It watched a preparatory school disappear, cadets arrive, two world wars pass, cavalry horses give way to armored vehicles, a military academy become a junior college, and a junior college gradually become a university.

Rogers State University is therefore not really the story of a school founded once.

It is the story of a place founded repeatedly.

And perhaps that is a more interesting kind of history anyway.

William Penn Adair Rogers

Will Rogers was born in a place that would not become Oklahoma for another twenty-eight years, and he died in another territory that would not become a state for another twenty-four.

There is something appropriate about that.

Rogers spent most of his life somewhere between settled categories: Cherokee and American, cowboy and actor, comedian and political commentator, local character and international celebrity. He made a career out of moving between worlds and explaining each one to the others.

William Penn Adair Rogers was born on November 4, 1879, on his family’s ranch near Oologah in the Cooweescoowee District of the Cherokee Nation, then part of Indian Territory. His parents, Clement Vann Rogers and Mary America Schrimsher Rogers, were both Cherokee. Clem was a prosperous rancher who also served as a Cherokee Nation senator and judge. The family ranch was enormous, supporting thousands of cattle across land held within the Cherokee Nation.

Will entered the world not as some impoverished frontier waif destined for greatness, but as the son of a prominent family in a complicated and rapidly changing nation.

The distinction matters because later America would turn Will Rogers into the idealized cowboy, and he certainly knew his way around a horse and rope. But his childhood was not simply a chapter from a Western. He grew up within the political and cultural life of the Cherokee Nation at precisely the moment when federal policy was dismantling tribal landholding and preparing Indian Territory for Oklahoma statehood.

The world in which he was born was disappearing around him.

Rogers was much better with a rope than he was with a classroom.

He attended several schools and spent time at Kemper Military School in Missouri, but formal education never suited him. Eventually, he abandoned what he called the “school business” and returned to ranching. He could ride, rope, and work cattle, but settling into the predictable life his father imagined for him proved equally difficult.

Rogers possessed the particular defect common to many interesting people: he could not leave well enough alone.

In 1901, he and a friend headed for South America hoping to make their way as ranchers. It did not go particularly well. Rogers eventually worked aboard a cattle ship to South Africa, where his roping ability provided him with a more promising profession. He joined a Wild West show and performed as the “Cherokee Kid,” later traveling with a circus through Australia and elsewhere before returning to the United States.

The cowboy had discovered show business almost by accident.

At first, there was very little comedy involved.

Rogers performed rope tricks. He could spin loops, rope horses and riders, and manipulate a lariat with the precision of someone who had learned it as a working tool before realizing people would pay to watch him do it.

In vaudeville, however, audiences began laughing when he made casual remarks between tricks, particularly when something went wrong. Rogers gradually realized that the talking might be more valuable than the roping.

That discovery changed everything.

He began commenting on the news while performing, reading newspapers before going onstage and working the day’s headlines into his act. Instead of delivering polished jokes that sounded as though they had been written in an office, Rogers talked. His grammar could be deliberately informal, his delivery sounded conversational, and his stage persona suggested that he had wandered in from the ranch and happened to notice that the people running the country were behaving foolishly.

Behind the act was a man paying very close attention.

By 1915, Rogers had joined Florenz Ziegfeld’s productions in New York, eventually becoming one of the stars of the Ziegfeld Follies. The rope remained, but increasingly it served as something for his hands to do while his mouth went to work. Presidents, Congress, businessmen, prohibitionists, diplomats, celebrities, and political parties all became material.

Rogers discovered that the safest place from which to criticize powerful people might be underneath a cowboy hat.

His humor worked because the joke was usually aimed upward.

Rogers was capable of sharp criticism, particularly of politicians and institutions, but he cultivated the impression that he was amused rather than furious. He could make an audience laugh at Congress without requiring everyone in the room to agree about what Congress ought to do instead. He was associated with the Democratic Party and joked relentlessly about it, once producing the line that has probably outlived most of the politicians he was discussing: “I belong to no organized party. I’m a Democrat.”

His political humor depended upon the persistence of human foolishness, a resource that has shown no obvious signs of depletion.

By then, Rogers had also built a family life. He married Betty Blake in 1908 after a long courtship, and they eventually had four children. Betty became an essential partner in a life increasingly dominated by travel, performances, deadlines, and public attention.

Motion became one of the defining characteristics of his career.

He traveled constantly. He crossed the United States, toured abroad, met presidents and industrialists, visited Europe and Latin America, and observed foreign governments with the same mixture of curiosity and skepticism he applied to Washington. He became fascinated with the new technology that was shrinking those distances, particularly aviation.

Airplanes represented precisely the sort of thing Rogers loved: practical, modern, slightly dangerous, and capable of turning an impossibly large world into a neighborhood.

Meanwhile, new forms of mass communication were doing much the same thing to his audience.

Rogers moved from the stage into silent films and then into talking pictures, ultimately appearing in dozens of movies. He became a radio personality at a moment when Americans were gathering around sets in their homes to hear voices arriving invisibly through the air. He wrote weekly newspaper columns and short daily dispatches that were syndicated across the country.

A man whose formal schooling had never suited him became one of the most widely read writers in America.

His famous claim that “all I know is just what I read in the papers” was funny precisely because it was so obviously inadequate. Rogers read the papers, certainly, but then he traveled to the places in them. He met the people making the news. He talked with presidents and farmers, actors and aviators. He absorbed the enormous machinery of modern America and then translated it back into the language of somebody leaning against a fence.

That may explain why he became so valuable during the Great Depression.

Rogers could not fix unemployment, bank failures, drought, or political paralysis, and he did not pretend that he could. What he could do was make institutions that seemed impossibly large appear human again. Presidents became men. Congress became a room full of people capable of making mistakes. Wall Street became something that could be teased.

Humor did not solve the crisis, but it reduced the distance between ordinary people and the forces shaping their lives.

There was always movement, though.

Another city. Another column. Another broadcast. Another airplane.

In August 1935, Rogers joined his friend Wiley Post, one of the most celebrated aviators of the age, on a flight through Alaska as Post explored the possibility of an air route connecting the United States and Russia. On August 15, near Point Barrow, their aircraft suffered engine failure shortly after takeoff and crashed.

Both men were killed.

Rogers was fifty-five.

The news produced national mourning.

Yet eventually the story returned to Claremore.

Rogers had originally been buried in California. A memorial was built on land overlooking Claremore that Will and Betty had purchased years earlier with thoughts of someday making a home there. The Will Rogers Memorial opened in 1938, and in 1944 his remains were brought back to Oklahoma and placed in the tomb there. Betty died later that same year and was buried beside him.

It is tempting to reduce Will Rogers to the things that survived him: the cowboy hat, the rope, the quotations, the airport in Oklahoma City, the highway carrying his name, the statue, the museum.

But the objects can obscure what made him interesting.

Rogers succeeded because he was never only one thing.

He was a Cherokee boy born in Indian Territory who became an American celebrity. He was a working cowboy who learned that talking was more profitable than roping. He was a dropout who became one of the country’s most widely read writers. He was a comedian who talked seriously about politics, a movie star who continued presenting himself as an ordinary fellow, and a man rooted in northeastern Oklahoma who seemed incapable of staying home.

Even his best-known line—“I never met a man I didn’t like”—is more interesting than the pleasant sentiment it has become. Rogers spent his career making fun of people. He criticized presidents, mocked Congress, laughed at the wealthy, and pointed repeatedly toward the absurdities of public life.

Somehow, he managed to distinguish criticism of what people did from contempt for the people themselves.

That may be why the old jokes still work.

Will Rogers understood that human beings are ridiculous creatures, especially once we acquire money, authority, or a microphone.

He also seemed convinced that our ridiculousness did not make us irredeemable.

For a man who made his living pointing out what was wrong with everybody, that was a remarkably generous way to see the world.

Will Rogers Memorial Museum

Nixa Eagles at Joplin Eagles

9th, JV, and Varsity 

Avengers: Time Runs Out

 

Untitled (Plum and Dark Brown) (1964)

When I look at Mark Rothko’s Untitled (Plum and Dark Brown), I see a new moon.

There is no moon in the painting, of course. There is hardly anything recognizable at all. Rothko gives me no landscape, no figure, no horizon, and no narrative. There is only color: an immense field of plum surrounding a dark brown form that nearly disappears into it. One darkness settles inside another.

And yet I feel something there.

That, I think, is what draws me to Rothko at this particular moment.

His paintings resist the easy interpretation of emotion. There is no grieving face to tell me that I am looking at sadness, no gesture that signifies joy, no scene that provides a story. I am left with color, scale, atmosphere, and whatever happens inside me as I stand before them.

I do not simply see this painting.

I feel it.

Perhaps that is why I see the new moon.

The new moon seems to disappear into the night sky, but the moon itself has gone nowhere. It remains completely present even when there is almost nothing for us to see. Its apparent absence is a matter of relationship among light, position, and perspective.

Something can be present without announcing itself.

Something can be real without becoming immediately visible.

Some things are felt before they are seen.

I have been thinking about that because people ask me almost every day how my new position is going. Teachers stop me in the hallway. Administrators check in. People who knew me in my previous role want to know how I am adjusting. More than once, I have been told that I am doing a great job.

I appreciate hearing it. I believe the people who say it.

But I have also discovered how difficult it can be to recognize success while still living inside the work.

From inside my room, I do not experience something called “success.” I experience days.

Students come through the door. Assignments need to be found. Procedures need to be explained. Someone is frustrated. Someone needs redirecting. Someone surprises me. A conversation works better than I expected. Another does not. I reconsider something I thought was settled. I change a procedure. I think about what tomorrow needs to look like.

Other people encounter the effects of the work.

I encounter the labor of it.

Perhaps that is why they can sometimes feel something I cannot yet see.

There is rarely a single moment I can point toward and say, There. That proves this is working. Much of what happens in a classroom, especially one like mine, exists in atmosphere. Students begin to understand the rhythm of the room. Teachers sense that communication is working. Administrators notice changes in how the space functions. Students ask for circle at the end of the day.

None of these things is spectacular.

Together, however, they create a feeling.

Human beings are sensitive to these emotional environments. We enter a room and know when there has been tension. We can often tell when someone we know is carrying something heavy even when that person insists that everything is fine. We know the difference between being merely tolerated and genuinely welcomed, even when the words spoken in both places are equally polite.

That sensitivity is part of empathy.

I once thought empathy meant understanding what another person feels. I am less certain of that now. Another person’s interior life is never completely available to me. I can listen, observe, remember my own experiences, and try to understand, but there will always be some distance between us.

Perhaps empathy begins by respecting that distance.

It is not necessarily saying, “I know how you feel.”

Sometimes it is simply recognizing, “There is more here than I can see.”

That matters in an in-school detention room.

Students generally arrive because something visible has happened. There has been an argument, a violation, a referral, a disruption, or some other behavior significant enough to remove them temporarily from the ordinary rhythm of school. Institutions necessarily respond to what can be observed and documented.

But the visible behavior is never the whole person.

Anger may contain fear. Defiance may conceal embarrassment. Silence may hold grief. Exhaustion may appear as indifference. None of this excuses harmful behavior, nor does empathy require abandoning expectations. It simply asks me to remember that there may be more present than I can see.

Again, I think of the new moon.

It is there precisely when it appears not to be.

Rothko’s painting makes something similar available to me emotionally. The dark brown form initially seems almost empty, but the longer I remain with it, the more presence it acquires. The brown changes because of the plum around it. The plum changes because of the brown within it. Neither exists emotionally in isolation.

Color is relational.

So are people.

We alter the emotional environments we inhabit. A student changes a classroom simply by entering it. A teacher changes a school through the way they occupy a room. A colleague can make a difficult day lighter by stopping at the door. An administrator can alter an entire afternoon with a few sentences of encouragement.

Much of that influence is difficult to quantify.

But it is felt.

This has changed the way I understand the praise I have received. Perhaps when someone tells me I am doing a good job, they are not simply evaluating my performance. They are telling me something about what the work feels like from where they stand.

That requires something from me too.

Empathy usually feels outward-facing. I try to understand students whose experiences I cannot fully know. Yet perhaps I also need enough humility to accept that other people can perceive things about my work that remain difficult for me to perceive from within it.

Their perspective becomes a kind of reflected light.

I know every imperfection because I know where to look for it. I remember every uncertain decision because I was the one making it. I see the scaffolding because I am still building.

Other people may be experiencing the structure.

There is a difference between humility and refusing affirmation. If I am willing to believe people when they tell me something is not working, I should probably be willing to believe them when they tell me something is.

Perhaps that is what I am learning now.

Not certainty.

Trust.

Trust that something is happening.

Trust that atmosphere matters.

Trust that relationships do work that cannot always be observed directly.

Trust that what other people are reflecting back to me deserves to be received.

That is why this Rothko feels right to me now. It does not explain itself. It does not prove what it contains. Its meaning emerges through encounter.

I feel the painting.

I feel the moon even when the sky is dark.

And increasingly, I am learning that the work I am doing can be felt by the people around me even when its consequences cannot yet be clearly seen.

Perhaps education has always worked this way. Some of its most important effects become visible only much later. A conversation acquires meaning years afterward. A boundary once experienced as frustration becomes remembered as care. A teacher’s consistency becomes part of someone’s understanding of what a trustworthy adult can be.

Much of education happens by reflected light.

So I return to Rothko’s dark field.

I still see a new moon.

The moon is there.

The light is there too, even if, from where I am standing, I cannot yet see it.

I am still too close to the beginning of this new chapter to know what the work will become. There is much that remains unfinished.

But I can feel something.

Apparently, others can feel it too.

For now, that may be enough.

Not everything that matters asks to be seen.

Some things ask to be felt.

Lebanon Yellowjackets at Joplin Eagles (JV)