05/23/2026
Here is another story from "Sandite Sketches - Growing Up In Sand Springs, Oklahoma In the '30s And 40s"
by George Everett - Class of 1947 - Sand Springs High School
This is Chapter 2 - "FUN IS WHERE YOU FIND IT"
When the Sand Springs Amusement Park began to wind down during the last years of the Depression, the kids of Sand Springs had to look to other places for amusement. It's surprising how many locations provided fun for a boy or girl in the pre-television era. One of the earliest I remember is Clay Banks, simply a wooded area at the edge of town.
To find out whether someone is really a Sand Springs old-timer, ask what that street is west of Franklin. If he or she says Industrial, he or she must be under sixty, because back in the 1930s it was called Section Line. And just west of it, where Fourth Street headed on west out of the city limits, there was (and still is) a wooded creek bottom on the south side of the road. Coming down the hillside east of the creek was a 30 or 40 foot bank of soft red clay, sloping at just the right angle for kids to slide all the way to the bottom. We all know where 'Clay Banks' was.
It was not only a neighborhood play area, it was actually a destination for school outings from Central School. Children would be taken there to play in the creek or slide down the bank in the cool shade of the tall oaks and elms. Later, after the town's parks were more fully developed, Clay Banks was destined to fall into disuse, as the area at the top of the bank was developed into a new street, Walnut, and the lower area along the creek bottom became the site of a bait shop.
Another venue, a bit farther out of town, was what boys called the Indian Cave, which was actually a cavity under an overhanging ledge in the sandstone northeast of town. We fancied that the smoke stains on the ceiling of the cave had been made by Indians long ago. Also located in this area was Box Canyon, where two sheer rock walls formed a right angle with water coming down in one corner of the enclosure.
South of this and much closer to town, in fact just a couple of hundred yards from the North Road, was North Lake, the site of much swimming and ice skating. It was also home to some vicious poison ivy, as Ken Tharp and some other class of 1946ers learned when they rolled a log down to the lake through the ivy one summer day. (But they didn't have it as bad as did Barbara Brown one December when she climbed a tree to get some mistletoe, not noticing the vine wrapped around the trunk.)
Now North Lake has given way to a subdivision of beautiful homes. Besides, the winters are milder now, and conditions needed for ice skating would be rare.
When we did have a good snow, 'Big Hill' was the favorite starting place. You could hop a sled just above the Hubbard house and if conditions were right you'd coast all the way down McKinley to 10th Street-o-about two-thirds of a mile. North Road was also an exciting sled ride, but you really had to watch out for the curves because if you didn't make a curve you could crash head-first into a pile of rocks.
On south of North Road in another area now full of homes, but in the 1930s a woodland, was the site of an old brick plant. Like Clay Banks, it had an ample supply of red clay, but the need for these primitive bricks had died out, and there was only enough signs of past activity to stir the imagination of a boy or girl. Parents just didn't understand why anyone would want to visit this site.
In what was later called Prattville, there was a good swimming hole west of Limestone School, and a few indications that there had once been a country club in the area.
Or you could ride a bike southeast of town, down by the Sinclair Refinery, and find fascinating old pipes and boilers where once stood the Phoenix and Cobden refineries. The possibilities for play were as unlimited as a boy's imagination.
But the site probably most interesting and attractive for church and school picnics was what we called Lost City, in the river bluffs several hundred yards east of the south end of the Arkansas River bridge. The place got its name because the limestone boulders had broken off into huge chunks that resembled the ruins of ancient buildings. Similar formations can be seen a mile or so eastward in Tulsa's Chandler Park even today.
As these boulders split and broke off, they would lie in rows where the gap between boulders might be as little as two feet, top to bottom. Sidling through the crevice made for an adventurous move, especially if you were worried about centipedes. But for the really brave kids, the trick was to climb to the top of a boulder and leap across a crevice perhaps 12 feet deep and, one hoped, land safely on the top of the net boulder.
Another appeal was that the limestone formations south of the river supported a different ecosystem from the sandstone on the north side. Flowers, grass and underbrush were more plentiful in Lost City. And there was one focal point for most picnics--a solid rock with a large overhang, only a few dozen feet uphill from the south side of the road, large enough to shelter a sizable group roasting wieners around a fire. Sometime in the 1940s, when no one was around (fortunately), that overhang broke off and another monster boulder fell to the ground. Lost City never seemed the same again.
If you craved extreme excitement, you could follow the example of Edward Criner, who as an eighth grade told us he liked to climb to the roof of the old three-story Central School and walk around the 12-inch-wide parapet at night, some 30 feet above the ground. I don't think any of the rest of us ever took him up on his offer to join him. However, there were a few takers willing to follow Glen Dick English as he hopped aboard freight trains on the MKT Railroad which ran along the north side of the Arkansas River from Muscogee through Tulsa and Sand Springs to Osage, where it connected to a main line. That was before Keystone Dam and Lake forced the abandonment of the Katy tracks, and all Glen Dick saw was Wekiwa. Prue, and some cattle pens, but riding the rails weas high adventure for a young teenager. And it was pretty country, especially back in those pre-interstate days.
Somewhat less dangerous was the practice of walking the wooden aqueduct from Sand Springs west out to the source of our water supply, Shell Creek Lake. It followed the banks of the Arkansas to Wekiwa, then headed up Shell Creek through some scenic woodlands. The pipe was made of wooden staves held together by steel bands. It was four or five feet in diameter, and the surface could really get slick when the water leaked through the cracks and made the surface mossy. Walk such a pipe over a creek crossing, where the line ran thirty feet above the ground, and it could become exciting.
Of all these play sites, I suppose only the Indian Cave can still be located and looks much the same as it did in our childhood. All the others we must picture in our memories of those days when a kid with little or no money had to find fun without the help of TV, Game Boy, fancy playground equipment or Little Leagues.
Sociologists of the 21st Century have observed that modern children's lives are much more structured in these days of the Soccer Mom. Children's play is more likely to be scheduled, and supervised.
Comparing this to our own childhood, don't you kind of feel sorry for them?"
Central School - Criner's walking path
Wooden Aqueduct - 6 mile walk on the aqueduct
Riding the rails......
