1st place winner

Russ Long

Norman



"Bicycling Past the Norman Depot"

How many times have you passed the old red brick train depot, and how many times have you seen a train chug-chug its way through the center of Norman with a long freight train on behind? For me it has been many. My father moved us to a farm west of the city in 1932, and by the time I was in Norman Junior High School I had a bicycle. Riding across Norman, from southwest to northeast, I always passed along the railroad somewhere, from the crossings by the university or on Duffy Street to Main or Gray streets, but always a route past the Santa Fe Depot.

My friend on those bike rides to junior high school was Jimmy Bumgarner, and often we'd be joined by Mary Louise Stubbeman. Our favorite railroad crossing was on Duffy, and we'd turn up the path along the tracks and ride on the red brick loading platform of the depot to Main Street. From there it was a direct shot to Highway 77, and across on Gray to Norman High School.

We often toured the walkways on the OU campus in south Norman, and understood every nook and cranny of the buildings there. On the OU campus we often rode around the reflecting pond facing the Field House, and inside the stadium on the track around the playing field. The dome for the telescope atop the ROTC classrooms was especially intriguing, as was the polo field to the south, where a formation of 12 PT-1 pursuit planes from Fort Sill once landed for a demonstration. Anywhere along the railroad was our playground.

The red brick depot was always a focal point of childhood travels across Norman. I'm sure our bicycle antics were a detriment to automobile traffic, as we did not realize difficulties we sometimes caused drivers, nor our danger. It provided exciting times when freight trains passed. We'd stop to watch and count the cars with their incomprehensible writing from far-away places. Once I'd departed on a train there to meet my brother in Kansas for a vacation drive to the west coast. Still later, I left from that station to report for duty in the Navy during WWII, and well remember my arrival home after that war. Many scenes of sad departures and joyous arrivals have been enacted along the red brick loading platform of the Norman depot. It will always be a location of heart-rending memories for many.

The depot was a focal point of activities related to the establishment of the NAATC south base and the NAS Norman north base during WWII. Many Armed Forces members who trained in Norman have passed through that access, and carried memories of this part of Oklahoma to every part of the world. It is fitting that the bronze replica of the Stearman Kaydet "Yellow Peril" aircraft was dedicated south of the Santa Fe platform as a part of the Legacy Trail -- a broad paved walking and biking path that curves through central Norman.

The typical red brick railroad depot building with the marker "Norman" will long indicate an important point of development of this educational cultural center of Oklahoma, and of our nation.



2nd place winner

Lena Hamrick Frost

Norman

"Whistle - Stop!"

When I go into the Santa Fe Depot nowadays for a Winter Wind concert or a poetry reading, I am transported back in time to 6:30 on multiple Friday evenings in 1964-65, my freshman year at the University of Oklahoma. I am waiting for the whistle of the Santa Fe Chief to signal its arrival to take me to my hometown of Ponca City for the weekend.

The depot itself is fairly mundane. Benches around the edge. A rack with timetables for the Santa Fe Chief's twice daily route from Chicago to Houston and back. Little do I know that I will be riding another part of that route four years later as a graduate student in Illinois. Usually there aren't more than five or six of us boarding in Norman. Just before the train arrives, the mail truck pulls up and the bags are readied to be slung into the baggage car.

The stationmaster is all business. He sells tickets, converses with agents at other stations and lets us know whether the train is on time or not. He's also the Western Union person, and tippity-tap-tap-tap of the teletype interrupts the silence from time to time. Once, when the train is going to be two hours late, I walk down to the drugstore on Main Street and purchase a paperback of "Gone with the Wind" -- all 862 pages for 95 cents. I know because I still have it today. I start reading and, in that little depot, I'm transported to another place and time.

Married, in Illinois, in 1973, somehow my husband learns of a celebration at the Norman Santa Fe Depot and buys a brick with my name engraved on it -- a fine reminder of happy times waiting to go home.

I still love to hear the whistle of a train and fondly recall waiting at the depot. When I hear of a proposal to make Norman a quiet zone without train whistles, I cringe. Those whistles bring back memories and take me back once again to the Santa Fe Depot of my youth.



3rd place winner

Jaunita and Dan Brown

Richardson, TX

"Memories of the Norman Train Depot"

The tracks running through Norman and past the train depot are a pathway of memories from our early married life. Every workday would find me strolling to the train station in Norman, my skirt at mid-calf and dreading the rough trolley ride to Oklahoma City. As a 20-year-old, already possessing a college degree, I headed north to my job at a library. My husband, back from the Pacific, was working on his degree in geology at OU. That put us with hundreds of other WWII vets living in Sooner City in 1947. It is where the OU law school is located today and where our daughter and her husband graduated. We did have a Chevy, but it was cheaper to ride the trolley into town.

I remember the depot in Norman was very much like all the other depots of the time -- red brick exterior, wooden benches and an interior ticket booth. I would buy my paper ticket each day and wait inside until the 7 o'clock car came. As I rode north through Moore, I remembered I had turned down a teaching job there. I couldn't make myself build a wood fire to heat the schoolhouse every morning.

It would take an hour to get to Oklahoma City and an hour to get me back by 6 p.m. My husband would wait across the tracks in his taxi. His part-time job had him lining up at a phone pole across from the Majestic Theater, waiting for calls to come in for taxis and studying. Main Street was full of shops and, besides football games, the Majestic was the only entertainment around.

The train station was right in the middle of town back then. My memories of the ride to Oklahoma City from Norman were jarring but the station was a safe, secure place. Today our grandson and his wife, both Sooners, have a home just the other side of the tracks. It seems as if those tracks and the station that intersected our lives so long ago continue to meet our family and tie us to Norman.