The way I remember it 2007 was the worst summer ever. Newly back in town from a fun and liberating freshman year, I found myself in the doldrums. My newfound collegiate qualifications for white collar work landed me the Kafkaesque job of “Accounting Intern” for a rental car company in Owasso. The hands of Tulsa Time rotated slowly, and I counted down the days until September.
Even in this melancholy, I sought to make something of that summer. Perhaps, with a more positive attitude, untold wonders of Tulsa would reveal themselves. It was the pursuit of such secrets that led me to Miss Belvedere.
She was a vehicle, bottled up in a time capsule and buried in 1957 as part of the grand “Tulsarama” jubilee festivities that year, to be unearthed in 2007 for Oklahoma’s centennial. With great gusto, event organizers called the car “an advanced product of American industrial ingenuity” and she was sealed shut, ostensibly for the next half-century.1 A can of fuel oil was even included among the time capsule’s artifacts, perhaps with the hope that Miss Belvedere would roll through the streets of Tulsa again upon her resurrection. This would come to pass, but not in the way that city leaders in the 1950s probably expected.
This sense of assured optimism was not unique to Tulsa in 1957. World War II was in the rearview mirror of our shiny automobiles, which were newly affordable to most Americans. New federal housing policy and the G.I. Bill caused homeownership to blossom nationwide. Tulsa’s economy, still riding the wave of the early-century oil bloom, teemed with blue-collar, middle-class jobs. Housing was inexpensive and available.
This is a far cry from the Tulsa of today, which is trapped in the grip of a nationwide housing crisis. 49% of today’s renters spend more than a third of their income on housing and one in ten spends over half. We’re not just broke, either. Household sizes have shrunk dramatically. Almost 70% of homes in Tulsa consist of one or two people, and more than a third of Tulsans live alone. 74% of Tulsa households are child-free, which means three-quarters of Tulsans don’t live with their nuclear family.