At The Corner of Main & Broadway

OKLAHOMA CITY

When I started the journey of seeing all the museums in Oklahoma, I had just gone through the Oklahoma Contemporary Art Center in Oklahoma City. It's a wonderful place where I always see great, well curated exhibits. It inspired me that day to see more. No! See it all! Yeah, that's what I'm going to do. In my mind, I thought, "There's probably about 120, maybe 130 museums in Oklahoma. That's totally doable in a year. I went to The Porcelain Museum which I had passed by occasionally, then to a couple I found on Google that were in OKC. I had a great time at all of them, but there must be some more. I wondered if there was a master list of museums so I started looking and found it buried in the Oklahoma Museum Association's website. It was in an Excel spreadsheet so I downloaded it and started scrolling through it. I scrolled and scrolled, 10, 20, 50, 100. When I finally got to the end of the list, I was at line 525. Five hundred and twenty freakin' five!!? Oh, what have I done? I've made this personal goal of seeing *GULP* over 500 museums. I sat at my desk for ten minutes looking through the OMA's spreadsheet. How was I going to pull this off?

Since I hadn't really worked with Excel much, I did a lot of YouTube searches on how to move columns and all that. The list the OMA has is just the name of the museum and what town it's in. So, just like many other things in my life, I decided to modify it. My wife and I often use the phrase, "Buy it and modify it." When we see something that's close to what we want, but not exactly, we buy it and make changes until the thing is what we wanted. I feel like that might be a GenX thing carried over from learning it from our Dust Bowl grandparents who taught it to their kids, our parents. I don't know. But I started modifying this list. It was alphabetical by museum, but I changed it to be alphabetical by the town that the museum is in. If I was planning to go to, say Claremore, I wanted quick access to every museum there. That way I can hit all of them on the same trip. Seemed logical. The next thing I added for myself was how far away all these towns were from my house. If I had a certain amount of time set aside to go Museum Crawling, knowing my travel time would be crucial. The next thing I added was the addresses of all the museums. This required in depth searches on the internet. Sometimes it was an easy Google search. But since they've switched to AI answers, sometimes it required alternate means like Facebook or the city's website. In any case, I got the entire list done with addresses and an extra columns for how much adult admission is and when they're open. I'm filling those in as I go see them. One interesting thing that I noticed when I was adding all the addresses to my list was that a very large number of these museums were either on Main Street or on Broadway Street/Avenue. When people talk about small town America, they often refer to it as Main Street, USA. I can affirm that the moniker is fitting. There are over 75 museums that are on Main or Broadway in their respective towns. This isn't a staggering number or an earth shattering revelation. I just noticed it and found it interesting. Main streets are still a vital part of American life. I would much rather visit a downtown Main Street than one more strip center with every homogenized retail store that every city has these days. It the same thing. The same thing. The same thing. How about we get out of our rut of being force fed the things that Fortune 500 companies want us to look at and instead go down to Main and Broadway and see a museum or a mom and pop hardware store. I've seen so many small scale bakeries on my travels. I can't stop at all of them or I'll be six thousand pounds, but I've stopped at a few and had great conversations with the owners while I have a kolache, muffin, or piece of pie. I have stopped in family diners and had fantastic food. I find little gift shops where I can purchase handmade things from wonderful people who can brag that they sold something and also maybe have a better day.

I'm finding that as much as the internet has separated us, there are a lot of people who long for connection that isn't an IM, DM, SMS, or email. A real life conversation with a human that's in the same room. It's completely sad that this has become kind of a rarity. Now, there are people that I've talked to that I may not have enjoyed as much as others. That's the way life is though. Sometimes, there are a-holes. It's unavoidable. But I would rather risk the occasional nimrod than to miss out on meeting all the great people I've met along this journey. Go see a museum. Talk to the poeple there. Make a connection. It truly makes life better to know you're part of the human race. And I always think about a quote from a guy that I watched on television every day, Mr. Rogers. He said, "We're all so much alike...and yet we're so different! I find myself rejoicing at the endless variety of human beings, and that's partly, I know, because your differences from one another tell me that it's alright for me to be different in many ways too." Well said, Fred.

Jonathan Elmore ©2025