Despite the fact it was still winter and very little was green, it was a great day to get out and test the iPad as a camera. I didn’t like lugging it around in an Amazon bubble envelope, so I’ll need a new slipcase for that purpose. Still, I thought it did a good job for the most part. It was easier to see what I was getting on the larger screen. This is the central plaza park-like spot in the middle of the Atkinson Plaza shopping area across from Tinker AFB.
Farther back in the first photo is the actual park honoring WP “Bill” Atkinson, the guy who pushed so hard to build up this area and then eventually sold a bunch of houses. The statue shows him with a pony; everyone who bought one of his houses was offered a free pony, and he would keep it for free at a large facility he had a couple miles away, back when Midwest City was still a couple of small neighborhoods built to house the workers and servicemen at Tinker AFB (previously the Douglas Aircraft factory).
Here we have a section of the Palmer Loop bikeway that runs from close to Atkinson Park over to Barnes Regional Park. The grass and trees will take awhile to turn green, but the henbit and a few weeds have gotten a head start on it. Inside that high security fence on the right stands the overgrown remains of a neighborhood that the government bought out (Glenwood). It’s just off the north end of Tinker’s main runway, and a couple of plane crashes in the 1970s caused a little hysteria. The Rex86 conspiracy nuts claimed this is supposed to be a site prepped for mass civilian arrests. It’s heavily wooded across the entire square mile, with just a few open spots.
Much closer to Barnes Park is this old rail bridge; the tracks are long out of service. They used to have a branch that ran around that neighborhood I discussed in the previous paragraph, and then onto the airbase, but the Air Force quit moving freight that way, and the entire rail line went out of service. The farther end of it ran all the way to Shawnee, OK, but very large sections were pulled up in the late 1970s, I believe.
Yeah, an awful lot of stuff happened in the 1970s in Central Oklahoma, in terms of infrastructure changes.
Farther along the same bikeway is this shot in Barnes Park. Back just before the harsh cold hit here, I went along both sides of this trail cutting off all the intruding greenery, trimming it back about 3 feet from the pavement. I’m hoping that hard freeze will discourage a quick regrowth. Some of that stuff grows like weeds, sprouting multiple new branches at the site of each cutting. To my amusement, an awful lot of people walking by were thanking me, remarking how hard it was to get Parks and Rec to come out and trim it back.
In the far background of this shot are the main facilities for Barnes Park. There’s a very large open pavilion with picnic tables and a substantial playground with all kinds of climbing fixtures for the kids. I’m standing on a hill, but the slope isn’t that discernible in this image. The place has a mixture of very old style cast concrete picnic tables and here and there are some of the newer plastic coated welded steel ones. Our native tribes host a major powwow down in the open grassy area every summer.
The main feature that provoked the city government into buying up this area is Soldier Creek. It’s not marked, of course, but the banks of the creek here offered a very large amount of ancient native artifacts buried in spots. This park strip of several parks runs two miles along the creek and this was a particularly dense area for archaeology some decades ago. Surviving tribes have records of this place and their own names for it, most considering it a medicine area.
All of these images are free to use under the Creative Commons Share Alike terms for non-commercial use; it’s not necessary to give me credit.
I had to look up Rex86, but I think you meant Rex 84?
https://infogalactic.com/info/Rex_84
I hadn’t heard about that idea. Interesting.
Anyways, that iPad really picks up the blue in the sky. Looks great.
You are partly correct. The real answer is rather long, but I’ll try to summarize to the best of my memory. Keep in mind that I served in the military and had some access to this kind of information. Some of what we were told by our superiors was certainly lies, but given the paranoia of Intelligence types, there’s no way to know who had a full or more accurate story. You should never forget that the CIA leadership lies to its own people.
The reference I made to the AFB training area is correctly associated with Rex84. Various federal agencies have hosted tabletop exercises of some sort since at least the 1960s under the term “readiness exercise”. During the 1980s, the emphasis was on facing private militias. Rex84 was one of these exercises. However, this one was publicized, in part as bait for the militias. Everyone who seized upon this story and published it was identified and tracked as sympathetic to the anti-government militia movement (unless they were part of the propaganda team — Hal Turner, Sorcha Faal, etc.). There are blatant lies in the published reports, false leaks designed to mislead the public in general, and the targets in particular.
I was told by military superiors that there was a Rex86; I distinctly remember this. It was a different exercise from Rex84, but still based on the official fear of militias. Best I can tell, Rex84 proposed certain changes in federal policy, and Rex86 published the resulting policy changes to various agencies, particularly law enforcement. It would have been about the time a uniform doctrine of law enforcement shifted to treating everyone as a threat. This was around the time SWAT teams started receiving massive federal grants and their kind of tactics became far more common in police training in general. I was Military Police at the time, and we were told that this represented a change in our policies and training.
I mixed them up.
Well, I don’t know anything about any Rex’s, but I sure do love your photos – the IPad does a pretty good job! Thanks for sharing.