Editor's note: When Natasha Ball captured this portrait of Orpha's Lounge in the July 1, 2011 issue of This Land, the notorious dive was beginning to see downtown change around it. As the newly opened BOK Center brought sports fans and concert-goers by the thousands, Orpha's preserved a world of its own by continuing to cater to a revolving cast of Tulsans living on the edges of society. It seems like that's how the bar's namesake would've wanted it.
The 1970 Cole’s Cross Reference Directory—an avocado-green volume in the corner of the fourth floor of Tulsa's Central Library—lists 112 W. Fourth St. as the home of Orpha’s Lounge. Upstairs, at 110 ½, was Orpha’s Hotel. On the same page, there’s a number for Oral Roberts University and its Dial-A-Prayer line, and a listing for the Orpheum Building. There’s also a personal address tucked among the commerce listings: Orpha Satterfield. She’s been dead more than 10 years, but she continues to receive mail at the address.
Orpha’s Lounge, Inc. management says that the bar opened in the three-story Irving Building in 1958. In the years between, the street and phone directories show Satterfield operated a bar northeast of Orpha’s on Second Street, a place listed as the Post Office Bar. A space in her name lingered in the direct vicinity until she bought the Irving Building with the help of a small loan from her son-in-law. She moved in above the lounge two years after it appeared in the listings on Fourth Street, between the Coney Island Hot Weiner Shop and the Downtowner Motor Inn.
Satterfield, who also owned and managed apartment buildings at 1901 Riverside Drive, ruled her properties from behind a desk on the second floor on Second. She’d sit there watching daytime TV in the breeze of a small desktop fan, her presence like gravity on tenants and what they owed for rent. Her neighborhood was flush with attorneys’ offices, stenographers services, insurance and financial companies, hotels and barber shops. When her family came to town to visit, she pretended to live in an apartment at her 19th-and-Riverside property, the one with the wrought-iron fence and award-winning gardens.
Satterfield—who in her later years looked not unlike Momma in Throw Momma From The Train—had been in Tulsa since the mid-Fifties, when she worked at Bishop’s Restaurant. The Norman-born Orpha Mae Gibbs, whose name means “neck” in Hebrew, served the governor, local celebrities and entertainers at the downtown lunch spot. It was a far cry from the clientele she served at her mother’s restaurant and at the Burger King in Bristow, where she worked as a teenager. By the time she was 18, she’d married William Satterfield, an oil refinery worker. She was a housewife before she stuck herself out as a bar owner and landlord.
Orpha’s Lounge, Inc. was in Orpha’s name until 1996; she died at her Mansion House apartment in 1999 at the age of 85, on the first day of June. She was survived by at least 20 children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and, yes, great-great-grandchildren, many of whom resided in Oklahoma at the time of Orpha’s death.
“If someone showed up at her place hungry, Orpha made sure you were fed,” her obituary read. “If you needed some cash, she could find an odd job for you to do. She would cook holiday meals and feed anyone who showed up.” A former tenant of hers remembers how she’d offer beer coupons to anyone who paid their rent on time and in cash. She made mothering a lucrative business.
Since Orpha’s time, the neighborhood along Fourth Street has changed a bit. The BOK Center opened in the fall of 2008, putting Orpha’s Lounge on a thoroughfare between a couple of Tulsa’s renovated hotels, a vast inventory of surface parking lots and the 19,000-seat arena. It brought nearly 200 events and more than 360,000 ticket holders to downtown in 2010. On nights when the BOK Center doors are open, the crowd at Orpha’s turns into a mix of regulars and ticket holders, sharing cue sticks and turns at the jukebox.