The Pioneer Woman Museum is excited to host its annual Prairie to Palate fundraising dinner on Thursday, September 21, from 6-9 p.m. The event will be held on the beautiful lawn of the Pioneer Woman Museum in Ponca City.
Prairie to Palate is an outdoor, farm-to-table dining experience. Enjoy a night of delicious food, wine, live music, and a silent auction. Dinner will be provided by Stagecoach BBQ & Catering, dessert by Banana Crate, drinks by Vortex Alley Brewing and El Patio, and live music by Ryan Burkett. All proceeds support the Pioneer Woman Museum and Statue’s operating costs throughout the year.
Tickets are $50 each and can be purchased online at the PWM website. Bottomless drinks with a souvenir-etched Pioneer Woman Museum pint or wine glass can be purchased for an additional $12.50. Please RSVP by Friday, September 15.
Corporate sponsorships are available for $1,000 each. This covers eight dinners with bottomless drinks and souvenir glasses.
The Pioneer Woman Museum is located at 701 Monument Rd. in Ponca City. For more information, please call 580-765-6108 or visit their website, https://www.pioneerwomanmuseum.com/.
The Pioneer Woman Museum and Statue is a division of the Oklahoma Historical Society. The mission of the Oklahoma Historical Society is to collect, preserve and share the history and culture of the state of Oklahoma and its people. Founded in 1893 by members of the Territorial Press Association, the OHS maintains museums, historic sites and affiliates across the state. Through its research archives, exhibits, educational programs and publications the OHS chronicles the rich history of Oklahoma. For more information about the OHS, please visit https://www.okhistory.org/.

A new exhibition featuring acclaimed American photographer Patrick Nagatani’s (1945-2017) portfolio that addresses nuclear testing, waste and history in the state of New Mexico opens Thursday, Aug. 5, at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, located on the University of Oklahoma Norman campus. Nuclear Enchantment, a series of 40 images created by the artist between 1988 and 1993, plays upon New Mexico’s motto as the “Land of Enchantment” to raise awareness of the effects of the nuclear industry on the state’s land and people. This is the first time the entire series has been exhibited in Oklahoma.

After moving to New Mexico in 1987, Nagatani visited sites of nuclear testing and radiation in the state. He saw parallels between narratives constructed around the nuclear industry and those found in the Hollywood film industry, where he had previously worked as a set designer. “The story Nagatani reveals through vivid colors and outlandish compositions may surprise, even disturb, viewers about the region many of us escape to during hot Oklahoma summers,” said curator Hadley Jerman. “The fabricated scenes and distorted landscapes are fascinating accounts of the stranger-than-fiction tale of nuclear testing in New Mexico but also serve as pointed commentary on photography’s role in “recording” the past.”

This exhibition is made possible by the generous recent gift of the series to the museum from the FJJMA Association and the Andrew Smith Gallery. In a time when museum galleries across the nation, and the world, were shuttered for the better part of the past 18 months, the acquisition of this portfolio helps meet the museum’s mission of bringing diverse art for public display at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art. “We are excited and grateful for this opportunity to expand the museum’s collection with this striking, imaginative series,” said Alison Fields, a faculty member at OU’s School of Visual Art and co-interim director of the museum. “The issues raised in Nuclear Enchantment remain relevant today, and we look forward to sharing Nagatani’s important work with the public.”

In Nuclear Enchantment, Nagatani makes visible a New Mexico whose “enchanting” vistas are poisoned by toxic waste and whose arsenal—whether celebrated in monuments or missile displays outside schools—continues to threaten New Mexico’s inhabitants, specifically Native Americans. Before his untimely death in 2017, Nagatani wrote, “My intentions are to raise public consciousness about the effects of New Mexico’s nuclear industry that continues to grow despite the damage it has already caused and will continue to bring to the state. The series, Nuclear Enchantment, attempts to awaken the many New Mexicans who still believe nuclear power poses no threat and that defense spending promotes the economy. Culturally and geographically connected to New Mexico, it is perceived by the elite powers as a place that can be abused and even reduced to rubble.”

Patrick Nagatani: Nuclear Enchantment, will be on display through January 30, 2022. Public programming for this exhibition will be announced at a later date.

Story and photos by Darl DeVault, Contributing Editor

Four presidential reenactors celebrated Oklahoma Statehood Day before a mostly senior capacity crowd of 300, where President Theodore Roosevelt gave an enthusiastic historical perspective 117 years to the day after he signed the Oklahoma Statehood Proclamation.
The senior historical reenactors portraying presidents who appear on the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota gave speeches and answered questions in the free matinee on November 16 at the Oklahoma History Center. The audience listened intently to experienced actor-interpreters playing the “Rushmore Four.” A 7 p.m. ticketed performance saw a more mixed-age crowd attend. The events continue a long-standing initiative by the OHC to share world-class interpreters and their stories with the public.
Professional reenactors portrayed Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Roosevelt dressed in top hats and tails in period attire. The actors have worked together in many previous appearances around the country.
Each president stood as they offered remarks of historical perspective from their eras in the order of their time as president. They invited and answered wide-ranging questions. The men only spoke of modern politics a few times when it applied directly to a significant point in their speeches. The actors stayed in character throughout their session and while posing for photos after the event.
Dan Shippey portrayed President George Washington in a full Revolutionary War uniform and three-cornered hat. The actor founded and directs The Breed’s Hill Institute, an educational nonprofit teaching the history of American liberty. Shippey works as a writer, director and actor in commercial film and theater.
Washington expressed his admiration for the 260-270 brave Maryland soldiers who stood fast during the Battle of Long Island, allowing his main force to withdraw to fight another day. He mentioned several of the dozen survivors of that largest battle of the Revolutionary War by name, calling the men his Marylanders.
The general and commander in chief of the Continental Army spoke the most about how courageous men from all the colonies fought for others’ rights to be free throughout the Revolutionary War. He said he took great pride in how those men grasped the need for unity in fighting for our new democracy.
After answering several questions, the historical interpreter was asked if Washington liked to speak before crowds. He paused for effect, empathically answered “No,” and sat down as the audience reacted with laughter.
President Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, stressed in his speech the importance of the first words of the preamble to the Constitution, “We the people.” The actor explained that this marked the first time those words were expressed worldwide in a formal government document.
Portraying Jefferson since 1983, professional actor and theater director Bill Barker depicts Jefferson on television, in film and many historical locations. His main reenactment venue as Jefferson is the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello.
Asked about his devotion to science as president, Jefferson spoke at length about founding a university and the patent office in support of citizens receiving credit for their scientific inventions. Before election to the presidency, he was the first examiner of American patents. An inventor, he said a president’s primary role is to celebrate others’ achievements.
President Abraham Lincoln provided the audience with an overview of America in the years before running for the presidency. Fritz Klein, 74, bears a strikingly uncanny physical resemblance to Lincoln. He spoke at length about the Missouri Compromise of 1820’s failure to stop the spread of slavery.
Klein portrays Lincoln as an actor and speaker since being recruited to do so for a small, local celebration during the bicentennial year. One of the nation’s best-known Lincoln reenactors, he has appeared in 43 states and a variety of films since 1981. He is a member of the National Speakers Association as a full-time actor traveling internationally to portray Lincoln on stage, in feature films, documentaries and speaking engagements.
Klein convinced the actor playing President Theodore Roosevelt to become a professional interpreter in 2003 after watching him perform and noting his physical resemblance to a circa 1915 version of the president.
Roosevelt, retired Huntington, Indiana businessman Gib Young, was the most energetic speaker of the four presidents. He wove many mentions of his associations with Oklahomans and his visit to Comanche peacetime leader Quanah Parker at his Star House in Cache into his speech. He delighted the audience with his “bully” rendition of Roosevelt’s personality, intellect, and zest for life. He said it was proper to speak at length because Roosevelt visited Oklahoma before and after signing the proclamation making Oklahoma a state.
Roosevelt gave a reverent accounting of Oklahomans who had volunteered to charge up San Juan Hill with him in the Spanish-American War.
Not noted in the actors’ speeches is the distinction that Roosevelt is the only president ever awarded the Medal of Honor. In 2001 he was posthumously honored for courage under fire described as “…acts of bravery on 1 July 1898, near Santiago de Cuba, Republic of Cuba, while leading a daring charge up San Juan Hill.”
Roosevelt cited the important dates leading up to Oklahoma’s Statehood Day and engaged members of the audience by asking them questions about American history during his question session.
His zest for the president’s job rose to a zeal of patriotism as he discussed Roosevelt’s role in setting aside large parts of America for its citizens as national parks. In citing his authority as president to protect wildlife and public lands by creating the United States Forest Service, he reeled off a litany of accomplishments for the audience. Starting in 1901, Roosevelt established 150 national forests, 51 federal bird reserves, 4 national game preserves, 5 national parks, and 18 national monuments. Roosevelt’s enabling of the 1906 American Antiquities Act protected approximately 230 million acres of public land.
Although the National Park Service was established 106 years ago with just 35 sites, the actor listed those five parks he had helped include long before the more formal act of Congress created the service. He finished his speech by pointing out how proud Roosevelt would be that America now has more than 400 parks and monuments under what he termed the amazing National Park Service.
The Inasmuch Foundation sponsored the program, coinciding with the OHC’s 17th anniversary and Oklahoma’s 117th Statehood Day in 1907.
The OHC is a division of the Oklahoma Historical Society, seeking public engagement through its affiliation with the Smithsonian Institution and National Archives. It is an accredited member of the American Alliance of Museums. The OHS’s mission is to collect, preserve and share the State’s history and culture of its people. The Territorial Press Association founded the OHS in 1893 to maintain museums, historic sites and affiliates across the state. It chronicles the rich history of Oklahoma through its research archives, exhibits, educational programs, and publications. For more information, visit okhistory.org.

Longtime Oklahoma City resident Patty Kelly Stevens faithfully displays the U.S. flag outside her Nichols Hills home for most holidays. But Flag Day, June 14, is extra special to the 99-year-old American patriot, who at an early age lived through shattering experiences that bonded her with her country’s flag.
Watching recent televised reports of students protesting on U.S. college campuses and taking down the American flag has shocked and upset her. “Yeah, that flag means a lot to me,” she says. “For me, it’s mostly about freedom.” As for those protesting students taking down U.S. flags and replacing them with other flags: “They need to ship ‘em out.”
Her impatience with the protesters’ lack of respect for the U.S. flag is better understood in context with her experiences in 1941 as a 17-year-old American high school senior in the Philippine Islands. Abruptly arrested by Japanese soldiers when World War II began, she was classified as an “enemy alien” and sent to the infamous Santo Tomás Internment Camp in Manila. After three years at Santo Tomás with thousands of other American civilian prisoners and suffering badly from malnutrition, she and her mother volunteered to transfer to another internment camp, Los Baños, thirty miles south of Manila.
Patty and her mother had hoped for better conditions at the new camp, but by January 1945 they and the Los Baños camp’s 2,150 other prisoners were on the verge of starvation and a possible mass execution. To their surprise and delight, the captives awakened one morning to find their Japanese guards gone. Thinking the Japanese soldiers had fled from approaching American troops, the prisoners began a celebration.
“We broke into the guards’ food warehouses-we called them bodegas-and started eating like kings and queens,” Patty recalled. “Then someone asked if anyone had an American flag to put up. I was shocked when my mother pulled out the large American flag that had been presented to my father by Philippine Governor-General Leonard Wood around 1921. It had been a family heirloom since way before the war. I didn’t even know my mother had smuggled it into our camp and was hiding it.”
As someone played a recording of the “Star Spangled Banner” over the camp’s loudspeakers, the captives sang along while saluting the raised 48-star flag, many weeping openly. They renamed their former prison “Camp Freedom.”
The gorging and celebrating went on for several days-until the Japanese guards unexpectedly returned one night. “They were furious when they found out someone had put up an American flag,” Patty said.
Fortunately for Patty and her mother, their flag had been taken down as a precaution and hidden before the Japanese returned. “The guards searched our barracks three or four times trying to find it,” Patty recalled. “I remember sitting outside the barracks when they searched and getting so upset. My mother kept telling me, ‘Don’t get all worked up, Patty, don’t get all worked up. They won’t find it.’ They would have killed us if they found that American flag.”
She never learned where her mother had hidden the flag. With conditions worsening in the camp, in the early morning hours of February 23, 1945, Patty and the prisoners were stunned to see a company of U.S. paratroopers from the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment drifting down just outside their camp. The troopers had been ordered by Gen. Douglas MacArthur to rescue the suffering civilians in a special operation. MacArthur and other officials worried the captives would be executed by their Japanese guards in the closing months of the war.
“God, those parachutes falling were a wonderful sight,” Patty says nearly 80 years later. “I’ll never forget it. Whenever I’m a little down or depressed, I just think about that sight.”
The famous airborne rescue of these 2,150 civilians behind enemy lines at Los Baños was described in 1993 by Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell as “the textbook airborne operation for all ages and all armies.” The complex operation was the subject of a 2004 documentary, Rescue at Dawn-The Los Baños Raid, which aired as recently as last summer on the television network History (formerly The History Channel).
Barely 20 years old when freed by U.S. troops, Patty was soon to meet her future husband, Paul J. Kelly, a 22-year-old first lieutenant from Oklahoma City who had dropped out of the University of Oklahoma to join the war effort. Paul was serving with the First Cavalry Division, which had liberated Santo Tomás Internment Camp in early February 1945 and was stationed in Manila in the closing months of the war. After a whirlwind courtship following the war, the two were wed in Oklahoma City on February 24, 1946, one year and a day after Patty’s liberation from Los Baños.
Long after the war, Paul Kelly founded Guaranty Bank and Trust in Oklahoma City. The couple had two children who grew up in the city, Paul Jr. and Carole. At her husband’s funeral in 1971, Patty had his coffin covered with the U.S. flag that had flown at “Camp Freedom” in January 1945.
With the storied flag nearing 100 years old in 2018, Patty and Paul Jr. found a permanent home for the flag at the U.S. Airborne and Special Operations Museum in Fayetteville, N. Carolina. Patty and her family delivered the flag to the museum where it was honored in a ceremony around a special display in the museum’s front lobby.
Reciting the flag’s proud history, museum director Jim Bartlinski said at the ceremony, “We have an obligation to care for that flag until the end of time.”
Still active and regularly driving herself to an exercise class in north Oklahoma City, Patty finally decided to put in book format the story of her family’s famous flag, her early fraught years as a Japanese prisoner, and her dramatic rescue by U.S. airborne troops. She worked with a local historian and author to complete Waiting for America: A Civilian Prisoner of Japan in the Philippines, published in late February.
As one of the last living witnesses to these historic events, she has recounted parts of her story at several local book signings and is excited about several more planned around the state. And she gets a special thrill displaying her American flag outside her home.
“Armed Forces Day, Memorial Day, Flag Day, the Fourth of July-these are all holidays I take special pride in flying my Stars and Stripes,” Patty says. “Those few of us still around who lived through those hard war years have a special connection with that flag. I wish more Americans did. But most have never lost their freedom for more than three years and been denied the right to fly that flag.”

Last year began as I was sworn into my second and last term as your Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner. I am always grateful for your continued trust and the unique opportunity it is to serve my fellow Oklahomans. Last year was also an eventful year from an insurance standpoint. From severe weather to changes in the insurance market, the Oklahoma Insurance Department (OID) was here with you through all of it. I want to highlight some of our work from 2023 and discuss what’s in store for this year.
We were here to help.
As we state in our vision, OID’s top priority is to protect Oklahoma consumers. Last year, our Consumer Assistance division assisted with 13,157 phone calls and 2,784 complaints, resulting in 327 external reviews and $8,295,011 recovered for consumers. Our Anti-Fraud division also assisted with 1,414 complaints. With the Life Insurance Policy Locator, we matched Oklahoma beneficiaries with $49 million in life insurance benefits…that they didn’t know they had! Additionally, through all the winter weather, wildfires, hail and tornadoes, we were ready to provide assistance and answer your insurance questions. We help Oklahomans in their time of need, and I want to reiterate that if you need assistance or would like to file a complaint, please contact us at 800-522-0071 or visit oid.ok.gov.
We met with those we serve.
My team and I love getting out in the communities we serve and meeting consumers and insurance industry professionals. We arranged Coffee with the Commissioner and attended Mix and Mingle events across the state, where we met with chambers of commerce, licensed agents, Rotary Club chapters and other organizations to learn ways we can better serve the community. In September, we set up a booth at the Oklahoma State Fair to inform thousands of consumers about our services while having fun in the process. In addition to these events, our Medicare Assistance Program (MAP) was active, giving 303 community presentations and engaging in 19,254 one-on-one client contacts, leading to 27,164 people reached. If you’d like to host an event with us, visit http://www.oid.ok.gov/speaker or call our office at 800-522-0071.
We informed and advocated for Oklahomans.
In 2023, we looked for new ways to reach consumers and licensed producers. We launched campaigns like Here to Help, Ask OID and Winter Weather to give guidance on what Oklahomans should know about insurance. We brought you 13 new episodes of the Mulready Minutes podcast, where we featured informative guests to share perspectives and information on topics such as Medicare Open Enrollment, captive insurance and the different divisions at OID. Our team also produced six episodes of the Medicare Monday webinar, and we hosted our first Insurance Day, where we connected with 125 industry professionals on issues affecting the insurance industry in Oklahoma and across the country. As a reminder, you can keep up with the latest news and events with us by following us on social media and subscribing to email news updates at https://oid.ok.gov/subscribe.
We’re looking forward to 2024.
Before looking ahead, I’d like to thank the OID team, who are dedicated state employees who make all of this possible. We expect 2024 to come with unique challenges and opportunities, but our commitment to serving Oklahomans will not change. We will keep you informed by bringing you new podcast episodes, webinars, campaigns and events in your own community. Check out our 2023 Annual Report for more information on all the work we do at OID. Here’s to a successful 2024!