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We started The Pickup because we wanted to cover Tulsa from the ground up. This is a polite way of saying that we were sick of hearing about the same “40 under 40” corporate rockstar-type people in local media year after year after year. Tulsa’s much weirder than that!
And so as we started covering Tulsa from a new perspective, new characters began to emerge. We met pranksters, heroes, hucksters, visionaries and innovators. Some are our neighbors, people who live in Tulsa’s modern day. Others are figures of local lore.
So here are our favorite characters we met along our new adventure this year, from the new-to-us to the purely fictitious. We even threw in one or two characters whose very existence seems to blur the line between these two modes of classification, depending, I suppose, on how you think about artificial intelligence. Enjoy, and we'll see you in 2026! —Matt Carney
The star of one of Russ Cobb’s earliest pieces for The Pickup, Sadie James emerged as a gun-toting, shit-talking barwoman who managed Tulsa’s infamous “Bucket of Blood” (which was definitely not a brothel, according to her) in the early 1900s. Russ Cobb went looking for her; you can read that story here. —Z.B. Reeves