Rememberances
by David Stinchcomb
There are many stores about the tunnels in the Arnett Building. The most
credible stories are from two people who knew Eugene Arnett. The first story was from an interview that appeared in the Sunday Oklahoma on April 18th 1982. His name was Levi Brookings. The day after graduating from the eighth grade, he went to work for Arnett. The interurban was the stimulus for the idea to start building tunnels. They ran from under the building to the north side of what is now the N.W. 39 th Street expressway. There were rumors that they were part of Putnam’s plans for the Capitol complex, but Brookings said that was not true.
Levi said, “I helped dig them”. They were to be used to transfer coal, cement and other materials to the building with his own cars. They were never finished, for a reason that is known only to Arnett. He further stated that the tunnels are now filled with water. There was still an entrance in the part of the building that remained after the fire.
The second story comes from an interview by Pendleton Woods with former superintendent, Patrick A. Tankersley. For those that are interested, it is included in the Centennial Book published by the Putnam City Schools Museum. Mr Tankersley says that there is no mysterious motive involved in creating the tunnels. They were a practical solution to the problem of moving fuel and materials from the interurban into the building. The idea was to load carts to transport the materials
underground instead of across the roadway.
In the era before natural gas, large structures such as the Arnett Building were heated with hot water/steam and radiators. That was true of this building up until sometime in the eighties, when they installed package units that were both heat and air conditioning. This is the most natural explanation for the tunnels that were in this complex. They were for the network of pipes that carried the heat throughout the complex. It would make sense that when the new Junior High / Central Intermediate was built across the street, its system was abandoned and the network was removed from the tunnels, leaving them empty. Also, they would serve no purpose with the loss of the rest of the complex from the fire in the 1950s. What was left would serve as fodder for speculation as to their purpose.
When I first went to work for the school district, the boiler was across the street at Central Intermediate. On Monday mornings in the cold part of the year we had to wait for the boiler to be brought up before we had heat in the building. The water came piped from across the street in a tunnel into our building. There was an opening, in the floor, in the back of the building directly across from the boiler room at Central Intermediate.
There was an add-on section on the west side of the building that had access to what remained of the tunnels. When I went down into this section, it ran south a short way, but not the full length of the building. About midway, there was a junction that went to the west under the football field. This would have been the connection to the west wing of the building.
As the Arnett building was being razed, I stopped by to visit with one of the workers. He said that there was a north section of the tunnels that appeared to be a basement. Again, I was able to look into the section that ran west under the football field and see that it stopped about where the west section of the original building would have been. There was part of the tunnel that ran toward 39th Street that was filled in. That would have been the part that was supposed to run to the Interurban.
There is also a story that the fire department and police used the tunnels for emergency training exercises. In the 20+ years that I worked in the building, they came once and had training in the tunnels. Bits and pieces of people's recollections will continue to feed the sense of mystery about the tunnels and their purpose. This is what I know from having worked in the building for over 20 years.
by Libby Quaid
(from the Putnam City 75th anniversary book, Page 42)
A.C. Carlson, Putnam City High School Class of 1925, recalls the early days of Putnam City fondly.
Carlson began attending Putnam in 1914 after four one-room schools in the area consolidated to form Putnam City.
Carlson had attended Central School, located at the northwest corner of 23rd and Rockwell. The Ozmun School was located at the northeast corner of 23rd and Portland, the Goff School was on the northeast corner of 63rd and Rockwell, and County Line School was located at the junction of Wilshire Boulevard and Canadian County Line.
Carlson remembers riding the district’s first buses which were actually horse-drawn vans.
“We used to sit on each other’s feet in cold weather to keep warm,” he said.
When the school began using Model T Fords as buses, Carlson drove one for a short period of time.
“Fred Lawson, one of our bus drivers, got married and asked me to drive his route while he was on his honeymoon,” he said.
At that time, the school had no cafeteria. Students brought metal lunch pails and collapsible metal drinking cups.
Carlson can relate some amusing anecdotes about those days.
“I remember one morning I came in the school, and our superintendent, P.A. Tankersley, was trying to talk to George Cook, who owned a fruit farm in the area, into giving one of the addresses at the dedication of the clock the Class of 1929 was giving the school. ‘There’s A.C.,’ Cook said. ‘He’ll do it.’ Well, I was late and didn’t know my lesson, so I volunteered because I got out of class to do it. Mr. Tankersley helped me write and memorize my speech and when I got up to speak, I said, ‘We wish . . . we wish . . .’ and I saw all those eyes staring at me and I couldn’t remember a word of my speech. Mr. Tankersley brought me my speech and I finished it. And that was my introduction to speech making,” he laughed.
Carlson actually quit school in 1924 to help his father on their farm but returned to graduate the following year.
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The First Superintendent
By David Stinchcomb
Ophelia Elizabeth Overstreet was born in June 1868 in Missouri to John Overstreet and Amanda Virginia Phelps Overstreet. No information could be found about her early years before college. In 1900, records show that she was a student at Valparaiso College and Indiana University. She received her A.B. Degree from Indiana University in 1902. After college, she came to live in Oklahoma City. From 1904 until 1908, she taught German at Oklahoma City High School. The 1908-1909 school year found Ophelia as an assistant English professor at Central Normal School in Edmond. In the fall of 1909, East Central Normal School opened in Ada, Oklahoma, and she assumed the roles of the German teacher and assistant professor of English.
In 1911, records show that Miss Overstreet was an assistant principal in Yukon, Oklahoma. She had the distinction of being the first superintendent of the newly formed Putnam Schools in 1914-1915, which later became Putnam City Schools. As was common for teachers at this time, she moved around quite a bit. She was appointed as the new matron of the women’s dormitory at Oklahoma A & M when she left Putnam School district. From there, she returned to teach in the high school in Oklahoma City. In 1919, she was off to El Reno and the following year to teach normal studies in Lawton. She received her masters from the University of Oklahoma and in 1923 published a book entitled The Composition and Language of Norman Children.
Miss Overstreet taught history at the high school in Enid in 1923 and in 1926 she was in Shawnee, where she covered her sister’s teaching position while she was recovering from an illness. Miss Overstreet was active in several organizations outside of education including, The United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Sorosis Society and the Shakespeare Club of Oklahoma City. Later life found her living in Oklahoma City until her passing on August 25, 1951. She was interred in Rose Hill Memorial Garden.
A.C. Carlson, a former graduate, made this observation in his remembrances in 1974. He said that “Ophelia Overstreet, the first superintendent, was a portly woman and was well liked by all the students.”
Overstreet was one of the names under consideration, when the school board was choosing the name for the new middle school on N. Council Rd. in the River Bend Development.
by A.C. Carlson
Although I graduated from Putnam in the spring of 1925, I had quit school in December 1924 to help Dad on the farm, so I could enroll at Oklahoma ALM the
next fall. Therefore, I will confine this history to the period of 1914 through 1924.
Putnam City Consolidated School District No. 1 had its beginning in 1914 in the Arnett Building, and in 1915 the school moved into the new 2-storv brick buiIding at 40th and Grove. By 1924 it still housed the entire student body. The building was destroyed by fire in 1940. There was no school cafeteria and students and teachers brought their lunches. Nearly everybody had a metal lunch pail and a collapsable metal drinking cup.
School board members I can recall were Lee Stinchcomb, W. H. Blaney, Mrs.J. B. Shellenbarger, Lloyd W. Anderson, A. J. Vance, A. W. Connor, John Guyer and Mr. Ramsey.
Some of the early teachers were Mrs. Cosner, Miss Gibbs, Mrs. Gill, Mamie
Springer, Mary Ann Black, Mary Wheatly, Miss Settle, Mamie Russell, Hattie Johnson
and Lee Gilstrap.
My first teacher at Putnam, of whom I was very fond, was Miss Rice. She whacked me on the leg with a yard stick for trying to trip Besie Walker. My eighth grade teacher was fired because she could not maintain order. She was succeeded by Mr. French, who, after several fist fights with some of the larger boys, restored law and order.
The school district was served by four horse-drawn vans. These vans were warm-
ed by coal oil heaters and the students would sit on each others' feet to keep them
warm. There were canvas curtains on either side which could be rolled down for incle-
ment weather. The entrance was at the rear and there was usually one or two boys
riding the back steps. When students got too rowdy, the driver would make the offenders get out and walk home. Students living within one-half mile of the school were required to walk. Quite a few of the boys rode horses to school and horse races home from school were not uncommon. There was a shed for horses northwest of the school house.
The superintendents during the period were Ophelia Overstreet, Darwin T. Styles,
G. D. Moss, Mr. Reynolds, P. A. Tankersley, Mr. Smith and Cathryn Simpson.
Ophelia Overstreet our first superintendent, was a rather portly woman and was well liked by the students. Darwin T. Styles was a handsome man and a neat dresser.
G. D. Moss was rather chubby and during World War I taught the students to march
by counting cadence. He would start leading us around the race track and then cut across while we marched around.
Mr. Reynolds was a very young man, well liked by the students. Mr. Tankersley was our agriculture teacher. In the spring of 1922 he took about 10 of us up to Oklahoma A & M to participate in the inter-scholastic meet. While he was superintendent, the basement of the original building was remodeled into class rooms, and Putnam City was placed on Oklahoma's state list of accredited schools.
In the fall of 1923 the school board hired a Mr. Smith as superintendent, but
he lasted only a few weeks. He was succeded by Cathryn Simpson. Mrs. Simpson was very heavy on extra-curricular activities. She organized the first football team, directed the musical comedy "The Gypsy Rover" and supervised the publication of "The Afterglow"
the school's first year book.
The "Putnam Review", the school's weekly newspaper, was being published under the supervision of J. C. Hawk. The boys quartet and the girls quartet were both county winners, and the school had 8 individual winners in music, dramatics and athletics.
The school had grown to a faculty of 13 and a student body of over 400. Three students had graduated in 1919, four in 1920, one in 1921, four in 1922, four in 1923, six in 1924, and nine in 1925.
It is our hope that 50 years from now this history will be read and enjoyed by succeeding generations as much as we "Old Timers" have enjoyed assimilating the
material for the history.
Respectfully submitted,
A. C. Carlson - 1974 Historian
Class of 1925
