Good morning, good morning, good morning. Welcome, welcome, welcome. It is time now for our community connection. And we've got one of the best storytellers I know, Joe Sears, is here from the Dewey Hotel.
How you doing, Joe, Hey, good morning. I'm enjoying this nice, cool morning.
Well, we got a few days of that before, you know, we go back to about the two degrees short of cremation again.
We've had a good summer.
We have for the most part.
Yeah, and we didn't have that sizzling horrible heat that we had last year.
More water than we normally get, good.
A lot more water, and I haven't turned on my sprinkler system at my house.
It's been very nice. Everything nice and green.
When I returned to this country ten years ago because I got I left when I was nineteen, Yeah, yeah, went out and saw the world work and came back home because of my health. Not ten years ago, it was being all that really heavy drought. Everything was brown. I wasn't used to see in my beautiful Oklahoma brown in the summertime. And the old sage especially with all their wonderful grass and the blue stem, and to see it's so green, the way it's supposed to be green, green country.
I enjoy that.
The Old Sage is really I think the prettiest part of Oklahoma ever. It's just this, and so I like living here among it, and I'm real happy to have all that green.
Green is a healing color.
I'm an artist, a painter, and we learn certain things about color in school and sure, and then there was a book back in the seventies about color and all it means. Green is actually a very You can wear the color of green and it makes you feel better.
You don't get pitched on Saint Patty's Day.
No, you know.
I used to say, well, I'm a rage you go ah, ain't good enough? You better have some green on. Yeah, but it's it's nice to have green around. It's just a healthy feeling. And speaking of health, I'm here to talk about the Sandlot, our movie coming up Saturday.
Oh yes, indeed, we've got the Family Movie returning our.
Family Film Festival. And we started that a couple of years ago.
Tom.
It's funny, we thought we were very clever. Well, come to find out, museums all across the nation are doing films, so it's not unique just at the Dewey Hotel. We were just behind and didn't know about it, but it sure fits like a glove.
It does.
And we have a nice big screen that's inflatable. We just bought one.
It blows up like one of those bouncy things you can get for birthday parties. It's a big screen and it's like going to the Bowman twin drive in.
So wait, this is an inflatable screen.
It is an inflatable screen.
So instead of seeing it in Imax, we're watching it the air Max.
Airmax and it's really really nice and it's nice and clear. So we had this big, beautiful screen that we put out on the north side of the house and of the hotel, and we provide the seed. We have a concession stand of you know, all we don't have is lollipops. And I sticked.
To the bottom of the shoe after a while. Yeah, yeah, how that goes to Family Films and.
The old Aral Theater downtown. I grew up with that. That was built originally in Martlesville as a vaudeville house.
Imagine who was Yea?
And Ruby Darby performed there and she was quite controversial.
And she the legend is that Ruby Darby. Uh every she was.
Very popular vaudeville performer. She was Queen of the oil fields, a colt her and all of the men and women, I mean, it was a to do things to go watch her perform the burlesque. But church growers, churchgoers did not like Ruby Darby and her bodiness. But anyway, it was still acceptable until there was a Fourth of July parade and she rode down the street as an event
as Lady Godiva. Oh and all she had on was a big wig from Europe, and that was the final straw, and the church ladies at Bartlesville said you gotta go. And overnight at the Aero Theater, the men stopped going and business really dropped after that, and so she had to leave town.
But what a legend you know of the Errol Theater.
Now, all that was gone by the time I was born, but I remember the Beatles appeared there, and that's the first time I saw people lined up for a movie.
Oh the Hard Days Nights, Hard Days Night. The Beatles played bartles But.
Yeah, uh yeah, so the Aero Theater locally, But anyway, back to the our theater, we have a nice Don Tyler slab between our hotel and the hitching post, and we call that the slab Theater and we put on all kinds of activities, but that's where we show our movies. And in the fall and winter time, we have big heaters that we can bring out and it's like outdoors seating at a cafe. We can actually heat the audience
and watch a film. So it's our film series has come in and we make sure it's always a family film and we've been very successful with it. We've had to cancel a few times because of the weather. But The Sandlot is a classic made nineteen ninety three in an era in America when, gosh, you know, it was just a much better time for all of us. You know, we didn't have the anger politics going on, and the neighborhoods were full of just growing up. It's it's a
coming of age, a baseball neighborhood movie. You know, a young, little nerd guy moves into a neighborhood and the neighborhood kids tak him in. They need a baseball player and he doesn't know anything about it, so what he experiences, but it's a it's a movie about good mental health in young people, and you just you can't talk enough about good mental health and the importance of good mental health and young people, adolescents and and and after adolescence.
Those are the things you take into adulthood. And here's a movie about everybody feeling welcome that the majority, the majority coming together for a combined effort, you know, to make something happen. Applause rewards. All of that is is a uh, it's just very good for the mental health and young people. So this film really captures all that. And James Earl Jones is in that. I saw him on Broadway and I have never seen a performance of anyone on stage live better than a James Earl Jones.
He can project, yes, his whole body is an actor, you know. And he was honored by the Cherokee Nation here in Oklahoma several years ago as their Cherokee of the Year. He was part Cherokee, and I didn't realize and Tommy Lee Jones has been honored by the Cherokee and you just never.
Know who they're going to put an honor on.
But I was really thrilled to find out that James Earl Jones is part Cherokee, because I'm a Cherokee descendant myself. I mean in Oklahoma, you're a descendant probably of one triver or another.
At the Dewey Hotel.
When we give tours, a lot of people are very surprised that we had slavery in Indian Territory, and they're even more surprised that the tribe, the Cherokee tribe, brought most of the slavery to Indian Territory.
There were rich, very wealthy.
Cherokee that came before and during and after the Trailer of Tears, and they brought their property the slaves with them, and that slavery. They were not allowed to intermarry with the Cherokee. The Cherokee did not teach them how to read and write. They did everything they could to go along with the whites to be left alone, and they still put them on the Trail of Tears. But the Cherokee, being a very advanced tribe of people, saw nothing wrong with the slavery issue. So when you got out here
in in Indian Territory, we had lots of runaways. There was a runaway slave. You could run away from a rich Indian family and there was no one to turn you in like in the Old South or a neighbor
accarenting the next state, Indian Territory. Oklahoma had a lot of runaways and most of them were trying to work their way to Kansas and freedom, and a lot of them were trained to be Buffalo soldiers and they were That's another thing when you go on a tour to a museum, you find out so many things, but oh, you do the Blacks were big cowboys in this Texas and those were states that had slaves who learned how
to be really good cowboys. So there's a great history of cowboys that from a black culture, and so there was a lot of that. In the Indian Territory. You had slaves. You knew how to ride horses and could outride some of the Confederacy. But they were all working their way to Kansas, which is our country up in here. We were white encroachment country up here, and all of our this was all Cherokee Land, northern Cherokee Land, and the Confederacy occupied it because they did not want an
invasion of Texas and Arkansas coming from Kansas. And that's what break brought Jake Bartles down here for the first time. So all of that's part of the history that you can learn by just a field trip to the Dewey Hotel.
My gosh.
Yeah, And we don't preach history, but when those questions come up, people are very surprised to find out about wealthy Indians that Oklahoma even had slavery. We had one hundred and seven engagements between the Union and Confederate forces in Indian Territory. That's a lot of battles when you look at it for a territory, and we was young. We became an Indian territory in eighteen thirty four and it was created to for the placing of tribes out here.
So the hotel is built from Delaware money. Now the Delaware where originally from the East coast up near New York City. Yeah, they had become a small tribe. Bartlowsville is their capital, per se, and it was their money that helped build the Dewey Hotel. In nineteen hundred, Jake Bartles had married the daughter of Chief journey Cake, who was also he was a preacher, a Baptist preacher, and
we'd like to say in tudw Texas. He was a member of the BBB, the Better Baptist Bureau but Nanny maintained the avenue of going down a Baptist so she had the parlor at the hotel was served as an early day church in Dewey, and she eventually built the first Baptist church there and it was called the journey Cake Baptist Church. And recently the church has donated to the hotel some of the artifacts from phil Nannie. Yeah, we've been trying for a long time to get our
mittens on some of the those things. But they gave us a set of four dishes that are commemoritative of the journey Cake Baptist Church and we have those on display in our dining room. And so it's besides our film festival, it's an opportunity to come and learn about the hotel and business has picked up. We have a lot more visitors than we used to. But we're trying to get the Dewey Hotel to be a destination point like the Tommis Museums for travelers, and the Pioneer Woman
over in Pahosca has certainly made that more popular. A lot of people were on the route of their pilgrimage and to go over and have her wonderful food and it is good, so they look up and google things to do in the area of Pahusca, and Bartlesville pops up, and then the cultured people like to visit museums and they oh, the Dewey Hotel, and so we're off the beaten path, but they certainly find they do, and so we get a lot of customers from out of town.
But locally, you know, we're just the icon of history, that's all. And we're trying to play that up. And the film Festival is one way of brightening that star, of creating a focal point for Dewey because that hotel used to be the focal point for everything.
Well, entertainment, everything.
Yes, yes, And so anyway, the movie The Sandlot is going to be shown this Saturday, and we started at nine o'clock when it's nice.
And dark and coming early.
It gets you a hot dog, yes, but it's a nice way to enjoy a summer night, it is, and to particularly for kids. We keep all of our movies are fairly friendly, but I particularly enjoy The Sandlot. And it's not just my selections for the film. We have actually had a little committee that that says, oh what about this, uh, and and but I'm a big pusher of preventive mental health in young people, and this is one of those movies that really shows the good mental
health and kids and the importance of participation. And then in August, August sixteenth, we're doing back to school movie a School of Rock.
Oh Jact black Jack, Black You amazing. The board members go, oh, I really like that movie. It is.
And so that's a good selection that's going to take place on the sixteenth of August. And then in we've got some things planned for Labor Day. And then in Western Heritage. We haven't selected a movie for Labor Day yet time, but Western Heritage we're going to do Andy Get Your Gun Good. You know, it just fits like a glove there. And then we've got you know, a Memorial Day. I'm not my World Day, Armistice Day. See, they don't call it Armistice Day. It's in America. It's
a Veteran's Day. Yeah, And so those are we'd like to do Holidays, Thanksgiving. It's been a very successful series. But they do they do this in other museums. Tulsa does it at their museums, but Dewey is unique. I mean, it's just it's a small audience. We provide the chairs and some movies we'll have maybe twenty five people. Some won't have fifty people. But it's it's a lot of fun. So if you're looking for something to do on a nice summer night out the sad.
Lot, let's do it. Hey, Earl, Thanks, I mean, let's uh, let's get this going here.
Joe, Joe, joey. I have that problem with Earl a lot.
I bet you do. I call him Joe.
Well, just we were at the Kopan restaurant last night. I enjoyed chicken fried steak. Oh gosh, and that very thing came up and they did double takes and said, well, we never see you two boys together.
I saw you together once once. Yeah, it was a fleeting moment.
That leading moment.
Well, actually, ear Earl Sears and I are very close brothers. Then we differ in politics, but we don't let that separate us. We're very dedicated to brothers.
Joe, thanks for being with this, yere Dewey Hotel. What times are we going to start the old flickorama?
It starts at nine pm? All right, nice and dark?
All right, very good? Be there, folks or b square