Latest news with #GreatState
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Yahoo
Memories and lessons from ‘the darkest day in OHP history'
CADDO, Okla. (KFOR) — The spotlight of memory can glow or glare depending on what those memories contain. For both Bob Young and OHP Capt. Ronnie Grimes, the events of May 26th, 1978, are impossible to forget. Young was 21 years old in the Summer of that year. Hampton was just a kid, but as they pore over old headlines and pictures from a 47-year-old crime scene, neither can look away. 'I needed to know exactly what happened,' explains Young. 'What were Dad's footsteps?' As Memorial Day approached in 1978, Hampton recalls that people in Bryan and Hughes Counties were scared. Two escapees from the prison in McAlester had been on the loose for more than a month, robbing and killing across three states. 'They were very, very violent people,' states Hampton. Fugitives and law enforcement finally came together on a county road north of Durant, at a place called Nails Crossing. Bob Young's father, Billy, and another veteran trooper, 'Pappy' Grimes, headed off a stolen pickup truck driven by the escapees. Both Young and Summers lost their lives in a hail of bullets. From the original shooting scene near the community of Kenefic, Hampton points, 'Trooper Young was struck in the forehead, and he fell at the back of the car.' The manhunt for both fugitives ended violently in the town of Caddo. 'Just a few seconds at Kenefic, then a few seconds at Caddo,' Hampton continues. Two more troopers who were first on the scene took fire as well. Pat Grimes was killed there. His partner, Hoyt Hughes, was wounded but recovered. Both fugitives were slain. 'It was a high price to pay,' Hampton remarks. There are two separate memorial sites now. The marker at Nails Crossing was placed there in 2019. Both men have dedicated parts of their lives to studying what happened that day, Young to keep his father's memory alive. 'It was on my mind every day,' he says. Hampton says his memories of the event convinced him to become a highway patrol officer. 'It was really a defining incident in my life,' He claims. Studying what happened, walking the same ground as those who gave their lives, doesn't ever get easier. Polishing the marker at the site in Kenefic, Young admits, 'It took a long time to actually want to be out here at this location.' But they insist it's still important to draw the proper lessons, to remember the sacrifices three men made that day to serve and protect. 'They were doing what police officers, deputies, and troopers are doing all over the country, every day,' explains Hampton. For more information on the three killed on May 26, 1978, and other troopers who lost their lives in the line of duty, visit the Officer Down Memorial page by clicking here. Great State is sponsored by True Sky Credit Union Follow Galen's Great State adventures on social media! Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Escape to America: An Edmond author adds to the many harrowing stories that came from the Fall of Saigon in 1975
EDMOND, Okla. (KFOR) — Memories and the words to describe them. Amy M. Le works with both to grapple with her family history after the collapse of Saigon, and the destruction of her family. 'It was amazing how resilient, not only my mom but the people who were left behind were,' she says. She is the author of several books, including her own memoir from that time. Only an infant in the Spring of 1975, her father was a South Vietnamese soldier but secretly married to an American. 'He was literally splitting his time between our family and his American wife,' learned Amy. When it came time to evacuate, Amy's mother refused. 'My mom was like, 'No.' 'Why would I go with you and your American wife. What would I do there?'' said Amy. It would be another four years before Amy, her mother, and cousin could try to escape the country. They did so under the cover of darkness and beneath a hail of bullets, only to be cast adrift on an overcrowded boat. Amy was stuffed inside a putrid hold. 'It was horrible,' she recalls. 'It's one thing that still triggers me when I smell something like that.' Some of their number fell victim to pirates. Malaysian authorities wouldn't take them at first. They burned their boat rather than return to sea. Stifling tears, Amy relates, 'We had a lot of women and children who were either stolen from us or raped. But we were lucky, in a sense, that all of us did make it to a refugee camp.' A sponsor from Seattle brought them to the U.S. Throughout her young life, Amy remained in dire need of heart surgery due to a congenital defect. 'Doctors told us they didn't think I would live past the age of five,' said Amy. She's written about all these things from the perspective of safety. Her mother's photograph looks down from a shrine in Le's Edmond home, still on guard, still watching. 'It's to honor my mom and the incredible woman that she was,' smiles Amy. Amy, her husband, and son moved to Oklahoma several years ago, surprised to find a community filled with similar stories. She added hers to that collective, the memories always carried forward. Amy M. Le's 'The Snow Trilogy' is a novelization of her mother's struggle to survive those years and live in America. She has dedicated herself to helping other authors get their own stories into print. For more information, go to Quill Hawk Publishing here. Great State is sponsored by True Sky Credit Union Follow Galen's Great State adventures on social media! Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
19-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Calling with COWs: What it took to use a cell phone in downtown OKC in the weeks after April 19th, 1995
OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — Kurt Beecher walks Harvey Avenue in downtown Oklahoma City as aimlessly as someone might while looking at their cell phone, but he is different in that he's probably more connected than most. Beecher is a longtime cell technician and engineer. He's been with the phone company for more than 30 years, building the bandwidth from analog to 5G, and he remembers the challenge of a young system unable to handle the volume of a terrorist attack. 'It's a different perspective,' he offers. 'Analog technology. One call per channel.' The city has changed a lot in that time, but Beecher can still point to where Southwestern Bell teams brought in a cellular truck on wheels. 'Right here in this parking lot,' he points, standing behind the current OCU Law School parking lot. They still call them COWs today. 'Cell on Wheels,' he said. 'The network was so busy on that day, we'd never experienced it before.' The first truck came in from Dallas in response to April 19th, filled with columns of radio transmitters. Beecher points to an old photograph of the inside of that COW. 'These were radios. These were amplifiers,' he said. Each light on the panel represented one call. 'We stayed and we watched it. If there was a problem, we fixed it immediately,' said Beecher. He doesn't know why, but he kept a trove of snapshots from that time tucked away and buried in a box. What Kurt recalls is what was in the air during that time, cell phone signals, yes, but thousands of thoughts and feelings too. Each one responding to something tragic with whatever they could muster. 'The interesting thing,' he argues, 'is not what any one person did. It's what everyone did.' If you got a call out from downtown OKC in the weeks after April 19, 1995, to deliver news, good or bad, or to tell someone you were okay, it probably came from a COW or a maxed-out cell tower hastily erected to meet demand. Beecher is still on the job 30 years later, long after the COWs went home. He works for AT&T these days. Kurt recently donated his collection of photos and mementos from that time to the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum. Great State is sponsored by True Sky Credit Union Follow Galen's Great State adventures on social media! Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Reflections of April 19, 1995, from a former Assistant to the Mayor of OKC
OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — It is a place to remember. The grounds of the Murrah Memorial attract visitors from around the world. To people like Rick Moore, this is sacred ground where horrific memories of that day rise to the surface every spring. 'When you come here,' he states, 'you realize something special happened here.' 'Something about the date has always triggered me,' he continues. 'I don't know why but when it gets to be April 19th, I know it.' Rick was the Assistant to OKC Mayor Ron Norick in 1995, his eyes and ears and City Hall. He recalls coming from the Mayor's Prayer Breakfast, settling briefly in his office, then rushing to the Murrah Building as the 9 o'clock hour struck and shook the world. 'Did it change your life?,' we ask. 'Totally,' he replies. 'It's one of those things you don't realize until you think about it, until to see it, and talk about it. April 19th comes and it's like something in my heart.' Moore practically lived here and at his office for weeks. He stayed busy in the weeks and months after with good will tours across the United States. Items he saved, then donated to the Memorial Museum, include t-shirts, VHS tapes, pins people gave him to wear. There is one item he still keeps at his desk, a 'God Bless Oklahoma City' placard that used to grace billboards across the state in the aftermath of April 19th. Moore says, 'It makes me think back to that time.' The is one more reminder too, in the form of whiskers gone grey. Recalling 1995, 'So one day I finally got to go home and kind of clean up and shower. My wife said, 'I like your beard.' And like any man understands, what my wife liked, stayed.' From annual remembrance ceremonies to items placed on empty chairs as the Memorial took shape, time and decades have passed. Rick Moore quit his job as Assistant to the Mayor in 1996, but he's still drawn here to the Survivor Tree. He admits, 'I often pull in here to sit and just think.' The good memories slowly outweigh the bad, like a scarred elm still growing and sprouting new leaves. Moore went back to school and earned a PhD from Oklahoma State University at the age of 65. He is currently the Executive Director of the Oklahoma Municipal Contractors Association located in Edmond. Great State is sponsored by True Sky Credit Union Follow Galen's Great State adventures on social media! Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
08-04-2025
- Yahoo
A robotics tournament in a power outage
OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — As if the challenge of building and programming a completely autonomous robot weren't enough, hundreds of teams and thousands of students from across Oklahoma and Kansas had to complete preparations in the dark Saturday morning. Regional Botball Organizer Steve Goodgame got an early phone call explaining the situation. 'I got a call about 5:30AM that the power was out,' he says. 'They said they were working on it.' An overnight rainstorm cut power to the Centennial Building at the Oklahoma State Fairgrounds. Junior Botballer Presley Bolton and friends from Pratt, Kansas worked through morning overcast away from the dark interior of the building. She admitted, 'It's kind of hard to code in the dark but we moved right next to the window.' Two separate divisions, two different eras in history met in one building, the Age of AI and the Stone Age. Junior Botball contestants worked on a series of challenges that included retrieving soda cans from a pre-arranged grid. Senior Botball teams worked with two robots at a time preparing food in a simulated kitchen. Practice was supposed to start at 8 a.m. for these first time competitors from Allen-Bowden south of Tulsa. 7th grader Jesse Whitlock explained, 'A major obstacle is probably that we crammed in a lot of the programming last minute.' The same went for a team from Millwood Schools in OKC. 'We coded five times,' chuckles one member of the team. 'We've had to run it and re-run it,' Organizers like Goodgame present different challenges each year, a course impossible to fully complete. The only think lacking in this simulated kitchen happened to be a Stone Age staple. 'No open flames?,' we ask. 'No open flames here,' Goodgame agrees. 'In fact, no kitchen. No power.' In the cave of the Centennial Building where light came from cell phone flashlights and laptop screens, robots on battery power and students on cold Poptarts solved the kinds of problems humankind has always faced, getting a meal ready fast with no heat or light. Survive and move on. The 2025 Regional Botball Challenge did get underway later Saturday, April 5th. Winners from both divisions qualified for the World Botball Conference scheduled for early July 8th in Norman OK. For more information on Saturday's event, click here. For more information on the World Conference go to Great State is sponsored by True Sky Credit Union Follow Galen's Great State adventures on social media! Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
