Editor's note: Pony Coffee wouldn't be what it is without Gaylord Oscar Herron. In a 2012 This Land piece called "The Genesis of Vagabond," Grant McClintock told the story behind Herron's photographic masterpiece, Vagabond, linking through to the downtown bike shop—G. Oscar Bicycles—that's now become a quintessentially Tulsa hang.
It’s a Saturday morning and I’m standing on the second floor of a downtown house, dizzy with deja vu. It’s not quite the feeling that I’ve been here before, though I have. It’s more like I’m looking through a stack of negatives held together against the light, seeing the same spot through multiple frames, the texture of one image filtering through the outline of another.
Right now, in 2025, it seems like all of Tulsa is sitting inside this house, chatting, working. Moms and musicians and millennial remoters are tucked into odd corners, and a couple of kids are playing drums out back, all watched over by a plastic toy horse, an APPLAUSE sign, a kaleidoscope of bike wheels, and ephemera about a man named Gaylord Oscar Herron. Stickers peel off the walls; scuff marks streak the creaking floors. Since Pony Coffee opened here back in October, it’s become SoBo’s new favorite place for caffeinated public privacy. It’s small enough to feel cozy, big enough so you can find a seat without too much trouble. It’s a house you’d gladly leave the house to go hang out in.
The last time I came here, it was Gaylord Oscar Herron himself I was looking for. It was 2017, and the spot was called G. Oscar Bicycles then, but I wasn’t there for a bike. Herron—the visionary photographer of the 1975 photo essay Vagabond—wasn’t there strictly for bikes either, though he had a long history with them by then: as a kid working on mechanical stuff with his father; as someone whose eye was drawn to them as a young photographer, as he told The Tulsa Voice; and as this shop’s longtime proprietor. The bike shop had become, Herron said, “how I maintain my contact with people.”
I came to G. Oscar’s to interview Herron about a group photography show called “Home,” in which some of his work was going to appear. I found him surrounded by the chaos of tools and tubes and wheels that had built up around him since he’d moved his bike business (originally located at what’s now Grumpy’s Garden) into this house two decades earlier.
We spoke downstairs for a while, and then, focused and soft-spoken, he led me up the zigzag steps onto the second floor, where the world of bikes gave way to the world of his photography. He showed me his Tulsa, spread out across tables in piles of loose unpublished prints and crumbling albums: a city of glimmers and shadows in sepia and gray, a city of what he called “dappled light.” When I walked back down and out the door, the street outside looked different, vibrating with the after-images of what he’d shown me.