Tulsa Shopping Wars

Today’s guest blogger is our East Tulsa historian and bon vivant, Mr. Eric.

If you look closely at this historical photo of Oertle’s House of Name Brands you can see my mom’s car in the parking lot.

You can bet your saved dollars that she drove us all around the parking lot twenty-five times so she could park within two spaces of the door. That was the story of my childhood, circling retail store parking lots, waiting for that “perfect space” to open up!

Since the early 80s, when I lived in Dogpatch Arkansas for a while, I’d heard the following rumor from my Ozark-bred friends: 

In the very early 60s, Sam Walton and his family were in Tulsa because they had a relative who was in St. John’s hospital. At that time, Sam was still a single-store proprietor in Bentonville, Arkansas. During that trip to Tulsa to visit their ailing friend, he was taken by his local Tulsa family to shop at Oertle’s. 

Need I say more? 

Yes.

So I Present…

The History of the Pre-Wal Mart Tulsa Shopping Wars: 1960 to 1980

Perhaps the greatest locally-owned Tulsa Shopping Trifecta of the mid Seventies was:
Oertle’s, Otasco and Looboyle’s.

These stores, among other things, all had Olin™️ black gun powder available in 80 oz. tins right off the shelf, no license required… badass.

Oertle’s, as mentioned previously, was basically a pre-Wal Mart idea right down to multiple cash register entrance/exits, and an outdoor living center. The lower level was dominated by manly pursuits with sporting goods and automotive supplies. Originally located on 11th Street, their new “suburban” two-level complex was a huge form-cast concrete building on South Memorial. It’s still standing and serves as the studios for FOX 23 television.

OTASCO (Oklahoma Tire and Supply Company) was founded in 1918 by three brothers from Lithuania, the Sanditen family. The first store was in Okmulgee, but the chain eventually opened stores in 12 states. It was primarily a tire/car service store, but I’ll be darned if they didn’t sell close to everything that was made of metal. Everything. Bicycles, outdoor barbecue cookers, shovels and rakes, hand tools, car parts, you could even buy sheet, pipe and rod metal there. They could cut it to size. It was like a modern ACE hardware where you could get the front end of your car rebuilt in a day.

Looboyle’s was also an automotive service center that became a local sporting goods store on steroids. Originally a Consumers Gas Station spinoff, the name originates from their primary offerings: lube and oil. They started out in the building on 11th Street that Oertle’s had vacated in the early Sixties. Eventually the main store grew too full and they expanded into half of the entire lower level of Southroads Mall.

These Looboyle’s guys marketed Zebco fishing products directly from the factory in North Tulsa. Even today’s Bass Pro Centers don’t have a pro level camera department. Looboyle’s did. Walmart doesn’t sell high-end stereo equipment. Looboyle’s did. 

The firearms department usually had about eight guys working the counter. This store sold handguns and bagged candy by the pound. The place seemed to have it all.

However, just 15 years earlier in 1960, the big new locally-owned stores would’ve been:
Shoppers Fair at 21st & Sheridan and Jubilee City was near the 6800 block of East Admiral, later becoming Belscot, then a short-lived flea market. The Jubilee Liquors store is still hanging in there, using that same name since before I was born. Their sign is the only reminder of the parking lot’s glorious past.

There were some very cool smaller, more off-the-beaten-path stores that were very weird-and-prebox beautiful:

Airway Variety 5 & 10 on North Sheridan, kind of a smaller very cramped version of another local hero chain, TG&Y (think DollarGeneral) but older in concept (early 50’s?) and perhaps the marketing template for our beloved TG&Y, or ‘ToysGames&YoYos’ as we called it.

Airway Variety was right across the street from the Crystal Pistol club, so that places it on holy ground as far as I’M concerned.

The old Warehouse Market at Third and Lewis (not to be confused with the original Public Market at 11th & Elgin – Ed.) was a grocery store built in 1930. And when you walked in there, it seemed and smelled like it was still 1930. The building that’s there now was built after the original was torn down in the Seventies.

The Piggly Wiggly at Admiral and Pittsburgh, however, was always a clean store, and their meat market was exceptional. This store hung in there for a long time. Same thing with Buds Thrifty-wise at 31st & Yale. Bud’s had a very convenient location at the time, and usually about 20 stoned bag-boys to getcha’ to your car.

The grocery store in my Traffic Circle Mingo Water Feature neighborhood was called Red Bud. They had another location at 11th and Garnett. I heard a rumor there was a Red Bud in Owasso, but I have no proof. A great little chain of local grocery stores, built in 1960s, that would let you shop on credit, and would cash any check as long as it was written in English. Repeated Mingo Creek floods killed half of our neighborhood homes and the Admiral & Mingo store. Now it’s the state’s largest Flea Market!

What later became the Casa Bonita restaurant was a huge grocery store called Stocktons IGA, the first big-box grocery store in Tulsa. They were put out of business by a UFCW strike and Safeway (a unionized company) was the big winner of the day. 

But really, we were all big winners because it made way for Casa Bonita!

Gulf-Mart, another pre-Wal-Like designed store at 21 & Sheridan, kept folks coming back with a fresh donut counter AT THE FRONT DOORS. The first place we ever encountered Donut Holes. This location eventually became Handy Dan, the philosophical baby daddy to Builder’s Square and Home Depot. And just in time for the 1970’s Mingo Creek Floods! Our dad probably spent $10,000 a year in MidCentury money at that place for home rebuilding supplies.

Two other stores that were national chains, but were around Tulsa before Walmart went super-national, Woolco and Kmart. Woolco was what was left of the 1879 founded Woolworth & Company, and Kmart was what was left of the 1899-founded Kresge and Kress drug stores nationally. 

Two old names that were trying very hard to survive Wal-fication. 

Woolco’s two Tulsa stores always smelled better than the K-Mart’s, and had the best After-Christmas sales in town! They also had a smashing in-store music jingle that was so well written that I remember it, and can sing it to this day. The location at 41st & Yale was opened in 1966 and included a full service automotive center. It was an anchor tenant at Southroads Mall for decades.

K-Mart was always a powerhouse, yet the place never seemed to change, and maybe that was what people liked about it. You can look at photographs of Kmart stores in the 1970s, and they look like photographs of Kmart stores in 2005. But, in their defense, Kmart had ICEEs and cotton candy right up to the sugary end. The Big Red Grill indeed.

Then, there was the two strange shopping anomalies, which actually blew into town right around 1970:

Service Merchandise and the S&H Green Stamp store.

One was a place that you had to have a membership to buy anything (I guess this was the Sam’s Club genesis moment), and the other one was a place where your money was NO GOOD. You couldn’t buy anything without these, well…green stamps, S&H Green Stamps to be exact, that you had received at other stores for buying things. Every dollar got you 10 stamps. And you had to lick them and stick them in these S&H stamp books, cause they wouldn’t take the stamps unless they were in the books. 

But the empty stamp books were free.

Crazy stuff if you think about it… or even if you don’t!

But always some of our favorites, places we thought would always be with us, and yet, sadly, not forever…
CR Anthonys 
JC Penneys
Skaggs-AlphaBeta
Sipes
and SEARS!!!

So…Who won this war of retail dominance?

Who survived the growing and omnipresent

Wal-Ma-fornication?

Who is still here in Tulsa (in its original location) and doing pretty damn well nationally?

Target.

Go figure.