Offering classic Italian specialties like pizza, pasta and steak with modern twists is her gist; after all, she is a most modern girl. Owner Lori Tyler and Chef Jonathan Krell have devised a menu that combines fresh flavors with the stick-to-your-ribs Italian comfort. Favorites like linguini and clams and mushroom and sausage pappardelle appear on the menu alongside pan-seared escolar served over sautéed green beans, arugula and citrus fruit, and the lamb shank, glazed with a mint balsamic reduction and served with an asparagus and spring pea salad. Salads and sandwiches are just as flavorful and are a more popular option for lunch diners at Stella. The House Smoked White Tuna Sandwich served on grilled ciabatta with tomato, greens and lemon herbed aioli is just as decadent as it sounds. 1201 N. Walker, Oklahoma City. www.stellaokc.com
No Horsing Around
It’s 4 p.m. In an hour, Stonehorse Café, wildly popular since the day it opened more than a decade ago, will be packed. In the spare yet elegant gray-walled dining room, waitresses scurry about setting up tables. In the kitchen, four sous-chefs, moving like veteran troupers performed a well choreographed dance routine, stir, pound, cut and chop. Next door, in the bakery, an impossibly cramped little room jammed with ovens, racks, mixing bowls – a situation that expansion plans will soon change – is Tim Inman, the owner, chef and driving force behind it all. With a deft and graceful hand, he whisks a creamy, fragrant liquid that will soon become the filling for a key lime pie. Hostesses rush in with last-minute questions; his executive chef squeezes in to go over that night’s menu and Inman never stops stirring. There’s a boyish little smile on his face; he’s having fun.
“The day it stops being fun,” says Inman, “is the day I’ll find something else to do. Why not be happy?” he adds. “I’ve got everything I’ve dreamed of.”
It took hard work to grab those dreams. He tries, he says, to be a better chef each day. Most top chefs don’t bother themselves with dessert; they hire a pastry chef for that. Inman, though, wants to do everything. A few years ago, he spent six months in a Chicago culinary school, learning the fine art of desserts and baking. Most restaurants buy their bread; at Stonehorse it all comes out of the tiny room where Inman is making that key lime pie. Within a year, though, this will change. Inman has acquired a warehouse a mile north on Utica that will hold a vastly expanded bakery and butchery, both devoted to preparing food for the restaurant and its adjacent retail market.
Creative, innovative, the menu changes daily. Its rich flamboyant mix of styles is impossible to pin down.
“It’s American food,” says Inman, “with classic technique, and that means French, because France is where it all began. I like French technique because it means high standards. I get all my workers to buy into those high standards; if they don’t, the restaurant will fail.”
High standards mean vegetables fresh from Bixby and north Texas farms, USDA Prime beef from Chicago, only the best. They mean complex, carefully designed dishes such as the pistachio crusted halibut, which appears on nearly every evening menu. It’s served on a bed of shrimp, leeks and tomatoes and surrounded by a thin, broth-like sauce redolent with flavor, the color of lobster bisque with flecks of cream. Those tiny dots of cream, Inman explains, make it cling to the palate and saturate the taste buds, yielding a rich intense taste without a huge infusion of fat. Lunch is a special treat. Unlike almost anywhere else in Tulsa, the lunch menu features entrees as complex and sophisticated as dinnertime, but at much gentler prices.
Next to the restaurant is a magic little shop called Stonehorse Market. Step through the little wooden door and go back 50 years. White-smocked clerks proudly stand behind gleaming cases loaded with two-inch thick juicy pork chops, plump six-pound chickens rubbed with spices ready for the oven, huge shrimp, scallops, lamb. Cases and cases full of delights: layered terrines of creamy cheese and lox begging to be spread on crackers, pillowy quiches (just heat and eat), slab bacon as succulent as country ham, homemade ice cream, huge crusty bread hot from the oven. All this will soon be improved and expanded, though it’s hard to imagine how they can improve upon perfection.
The Lap of Luxury
The term “luxury home” often calls to mind grand homes built with only the finest materials by skilled artisans and filled with expensive décor and rare artworks. The term may also suggest that these homes are stiff, stuffy and not to really be lived in. This is certainly not the case for the four luxury homes profiled in the following pages. Each of the homes was custom built not only to look beautiful, but to also function as a home in which to raise a family. Certainly there’s fine craftsmanship, impeccable design and that extensive art collection; in these homes, however, it would not be uncommon for the art to hang alongside a children’s drawing.
The Ultimate Family Resort
The Ultimate Family Resort
A Blank Slate
A Blank Slate
Comfort And Elegance
Comfort And Elegance
A Hidden Modern Gem
A Hidden Modern GemThe Crew Chief
Prosthetist Scott Sabolich is the third-generation owner of Sabolich Prosthetics. An accomplished orthotist, Sabolich hopes to once again show off the latest technology in prosthetics on the world stage at the 2012 Paralympic Games in London. He discusses commitment to patients, advancements in the field and inspirational stories.
When you’re a prosthetist, you create prosthetics for people so they can go about their normal daily lives. That’s what we do, but it’s not what we’re about. We form a bond, a union, with these people, and we take care of them for life. Most patients need a new prosthesis every two to five years. We form a lifelong partnership with our patients.
My grandfather started the business in 1947, after World War II. Back then he made back braces and wooden legs. My dad got into it as a young child, so I grew up in the field. When I was little, everyone else wanted to be a policeman or fighter pilot; well, my dad was a prosthetist, and so that was what I wanted to do.
When I went through my residency in the early ‘90s, my passion was in racing. Racing was in my blood. I thought if I wasn’t going to be prosthetist, I was going to be a racer. What really turned me on was racing legs. I thought I can live vicariously through amputees by building racing prosthetics and being their virtual pit crew. In 2000, I picked up a couple Paralympic athletes, and we came back from Sydney with three medals; I also had athletes at the 2004 games in Greece. By the 2008 Beijing games, (Sabolich Prosthetics) had so many athletes that Team USA asked me to come as team prosthetist. In Beijing, Team USA won 48 medals, 10 of which were from this facility, three of which were gold. Team USA also had three world records. We’re hoping to have an even better turnout in London.
People say to me, “Wow, you must see a lot of veterans.” Yes and no. There are about six, seven to 8,000 amputees from the war so far over the last decade, more than 3,000 people in the United States lose a limb every week. If those soldiers hadn’t lost limbs over the past 10 years, those 3,000 people per week wouldn’t have such awesome prosthetics. When soldiers lose a limb, the country rallies around them. From this we get better prostheses, better knees, feet, ankles for everyone like the Genium knee and the Michelangelo hand.
My work with Wayman Tisdale was a powerful thing for me. I grew up watching him play basketball at the University of Oklahoma, and then seeing such a great man like that go through horrible cancer treatments and be able to get him up and going again and see that smile on his face. It’s sad that he’s gone now, but I’m glad we were able to affect his life while he was here.
The Accidental Author
Ally Carter liked to write, and she’d been doing it for years. But it was a hobby to her day job as an agricultural economist – a field in which she holds an advanced degree from an Ivy League college.
“On a lark I thought I’d see if I could get published,” she says.
She did. Her first book, Cheating at Solitaire, hit shelves in 2005, the same year the fifth Harry Potter book was released and the first of the Twilight books was published. Young Adult readers’ thirst was about to be unquenchable. Carter’s literary agent suggested she offer them something.
While watching an episode of Alias, Carter wondered if the main character, CIA agent Sydney Bristow, had gone to a school for spies.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about how awesome that would be,” Carter says.
She created this school, and the Gallagher Girls series was born.
The jump from agricultural economist to spy fiction writer may seem an odd one. Carter, though, says she’s always imagined a deeper hidden story behind everything. Growing up on a farm in Locust Grove, Carter says she would wonder if her room had a secret passage.
“My career absolutely started on a farm in Oklahoma where I could let my mind wander,” she says.
Carter, too, had always wanted to write. She was inspired as a young adult by the writing of fellow Oklahoma writer S.E. Hinton after reading The Outsiders.
“Until I read that, it never occurred to me that people wrote books,” she says. “Much less people like me. And teenage me really took hold of that.”
As her books became successful, writing became more of a job and less of a night and weekend hobby. Carter developed a second series, Heist Society. The economist in her ran the numbers and decided she could swap out a second series for her day job. She submitted her resignation at Kansas State where she worked at the extension service. A week later, she was told Gallagher Girls would be on the New York Times Best Sellers list.
“It’s an odd transition. But ultimately nothing is really different,” says Carter, who now calls Tulsa home. “It’s great I get to do what I wanted to do when I was 12 or 13.”
This spring, Carter traveled to promote her latest installment of the Gallagher Girls. The fifth book in the series was released in March, and she’s been in bookstores and libraries talking with readers and signing books.
“It’s nice to be among your people,” she says.
Getting to see and meet readers is what keeps her grounded. She says that readers ask her what it is like to be famous and wonder if she knows anyone famous.
“Really not so much with the famous,” she says. “It’s not a magic wand and ultimately just a job. I’m really, really lucky to have this job,” she says.
Skin Trade
Tortured, stabbed and beheaded, the remains of 19-year-old Carina Saunders ended up in a duffel bag discarded not in Mexico, where such crimes are common, but behind a Homeland Grocery in Bethany, Okla. Of the two men charged with her murder in October 2011, one, Francisco Gomez, was a Mexican national. The other, Jimmy Lee “Big Country” Massey, told police the teenager was killed to send a message to other kidnapped prostitutes controlled by the trafficking ring that they either obey their “owners” or end up dead.
“Anytime you see a headless body,” says Police Detective David Ramer of Chandler, Ariz., “the message is, ‘If you cross us, this is what happens.’” Arizona is a human trafficking corridor from Mexico and Latin America into the United States.
According to the FBI, there are more slaves in the world today than at any other time in human history. Worldwide estimates are that 27 million men, women and children are in slavery at any given time. Human trafficking, defined as the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services through use of force, fraud or coercion for the purpose of involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage or slavery, is a $32 billion industry, second only to drugs as the largest criminal activity in the world.
The U.S. State Department lists America as the number one destination for human trafficking, especially of children. California, New York, Texas and Oklahoma top the list of states most active. After rescuing children from forced prostitution in 40 cities around the nation, FBI agents discovered that nearly each city had harbored exploited children from Oklahoma. An FBI report states that it is well known among truck drivers that if you want good barbecue, go to Kansas City, and if you want young girls, go to Oklahoma City.
“There are 170 countries that buy and sell humans. One is America,” says Mark Elam, who was the guidance behind the 2008 founding of Oklahomans Against Trafficking Humans (O.A.T.H.). “Why such a demand? Sadly, it’s the resale value. You can only sell a kilo of cocaine once. Humans you can sell again and again.”
O.A.T.H. is endorsed by and works closely with the FBI, Immigration and Customs, the U.S. State Department, U.S. Attorney General’s Office, and with Oklahoma authorities in promoting awareness of and education about what is considered a national crisis. It launched partly as a result of a series of murdered prostitutes who worked out of Oklahoma truck stops. Pilot, Love’s and Travel Center of America are like little cities populated by truckers on the move. Parking lots are known as “Party Row.” That’s where the girls are.
FBI agents and state police of the Innocence Lost Initiative arrested more than 45 pimps and 100 prostitutes at truck stops. “Cindy,” 14, told how she had been bought and sold from one pimp to the other, how when she tried to leave the state her pimp had another girl stab her in her arms and hands.
Forced labor, baby factories and other illicit dealings in human lives account for only 30 percent of human trafficking; the real monster is sex trafficking. Children are a significant portion of the trade. Outreach workers say that of the 1.5 million runaway children in the U.S., some 100,000 will enter the sex trade yearly. The average age of a prostitute is 14-years-old. The average entry age is 12.
Jeannetta Taylor of Sand Springs, who speaks publicly of her ordeal, was coerced into prostitution at 12. By 18, she was working truck stops, the property of a Texas criminal organization. When she tried to escape, her pimp tracked her down, stabbed her 38 times and left her for dead by the side of the road.
“Jules” was beaten with a crowbar when she tried to run away and forced to watch other girls being punished.
“They would chain (a girl) to a bed and have a line of men raping her and beating her and we had to watch and that was a sign to let us know that you didn’t disobey them,” Jules told FOX 23 reporter Abbie Alford in 2010.
Increasingly, human sex trafficking in the U.S. can be traced to the Mexican border and the crime cartels. Arizona has become a freeway for drug smugglers and human traffickers. Lt. Matt Thomas of the Pinal (Ariz.) County Sheriff’s Department says sexual predators in the U.S. order women and girls through the cartels. The cartels in turn send them with a drug run across the desert to be delivered to their new owners.
Pinal County’s Chief Deputy Steve Henry explains that, due to lax federal border enforcement, “what used to be a trickle has turned into a torrent. The violence in Mexico…is here, and it’s not going away.”
Houston is a main port city for human sex trafficking, says Oklahoma Rep. Sally Kern (R-Oklahoma City), who authored House Bill 2518 in 2010 to help victims of sex trafficking. Oklahoma with its three main major interstate highways – I-35, I-40 and I-44 – provides a pipeline out of Texas running to all ports north, east and west, a crossroads for human trafficking.
Muskogee County Deputy Sheriff Jeff Gragg monitors I-40 at least four or five hours a week, checking for drug and human traffickers.
“Eighty-seven percent of all crimes, including trafficking, are linked to drugs,” he says. “Only three percent of officers nationwide work the highways looking for traffickers. If we worked the roads more, we could make a real dent in both trafficking and other crimes.”
In early 2012, Oklahoma police and federal agents busted a major sex trafficking ring operating out of homes and apartment buildings in Oklahoma City and Tulsa. So far, six Hispanic illegal immigrants have been charged in a conspiracy to recruit, entice and transport Mexican girls for commercial sex acts in Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kansas, Missouri and Florida. One pregnant woman said she was transported from Houston to Tulsa and forced to have sex with more than a dozen men a day under threat of being murdered if she refused.
Authorities in Oklahoma City recovered cell phones, cash, condoms and poker chips in the sting. Poker chips, police explain, are calling cards for Mexican cartels. A “John” buys a poker chip and goes to a secondary location to pick out a girl.
For various reasons, such as fear of deportation and violence, few victims ever voluntarily go to the police. Mary Noble, shelter manager for the Cherokee Nations Youth Shelter in Tahlequah, one of a network of such facilities in Oklahoma that provides temporary emergency care for abused or homeless children, says she rarely encounters victims of trafficking, not because such cases are rare, but because the activity is so tightly controlled by the underworld.
The National Human Trafficking Hotline is affiliated with some 3,000 organizations nationwide that work against the growing flood of trafficking. Media Director Megan Fowler says the hotline has received some 50,000 calls since 2008, few of them from actual victims.
“We have to rely on law enforcement,” she says. “If during a traffic stop, an officer notices a woman or girl is not allowed to speak for herself, that the man controls her ID, that could be an indication of something wrong.”
“I stop a guy with a background and he has young girls with him,” Gragg adds, “I ask the kids things like, ‘Is this your dad?’ If they say no, it requires more investigation.”
Recent statistics reveal that there are 3,160 convictions for sex trafficking worldwide during a typical year. Only one person is convicted for every 800 victims being trafficked.
“Human trafficking is extremely profitable and carries few risks,” says O.A.T.H.’s Mark Elam. “The ones that are driving the market are not dealt with. Only two percent of the pimps and Johns are ever arrested.”
While O.A.T.H. stresses awareness, other national organizations take a more proactive approach. Kendis Harris, executive director of Colorado-based Truckers Against Trafficking, which was launched by Harris’ mother Lyn Thompson in 2011, says truckers are the nation’s eyes and ears. As part of its ministry, Truckers Against Trafficking uses big rigs as blinds and employs film crews in undercover surveillance of truck stops where juveniles are often forced into prostitution against their will.
“Our goal is to mobilize truckers and people working truck stops to be aware of forced prostitution of women and children,” Harris explains, “and take an active part in fighting it.”
Human sex trafficking involves more than truck stops, seedy apartments and crime cartels. It includes other forms of sexual exploitation as well, such as pornography.
Agent-in-charge Steve Tanner of the OSBI Internet Crimes Against Children Unit, which began operations in 2007, deals primarily with child porn and works about 200 cases a year. Social networking sites, he stresses, provide opportunities for predators to prey on and manipulate children.
“Predators become ‘friends’ with their intended victims and wait for the right moment to entice them out of the house. Child porn trafficking is a multi-billion dollar enterprise. Child molestation and child pornography typically go together –as child porn is child molestation. A part of society that believes sex with children is not wrong.”
“One-third of 30 million children online will leave home at some point to meet someone they do not know but meet online,” says Kern.
Eric Yarborough, Assistant District Attorney of Oklahoma’s Third Judicial District in Mangum, Okla., sees another form of sexual trafficking as particularly chilling because it involves family members as exploiters. Mothers will encourage their juvenile daughters to get pregnant in order to collect more government assistance checks. One 16-year-old already had three children, the oldest of which was 5.
“It’s a form of pimping, of exploitation and trafficking, of your own kids.”
After a 30-year-old man was charged for the statutory rape of an 11-year-old girl, who became pregnant, the family of the victim protested his arrest.
“He’s a good man,” the girl’s mother insisted. “She wanted it.”
Her mother was drawing welfare on her daughter and new granddaughter.
A mother and daughter, both addicts, were caught shoplifting. Authorities learned the mother routinely drove her 16-year-old to Texas to pimp her out for extra money.
“The first thing that goes is the maternal instinct when a woman gets hooked on (drugs),” Yarborough says. “They will sell themselves or their children to get more. A lot of statutory rapes go unreported.”
Elam agrees. “A family member who becomes the pimp – mom, dad, brother, husband, uncle – can start the victim as young as 3 or 4 years old. Most of the time they are drug-dependent.”
Elam, named FBI’s Citizen of The Year in 2011 for his work against human trafficking, believes a number of social factors contribute to Oklahoma’s being near the top of the scale in child trafficking. Among these, he says, is the fact that Oklahoma leads the nation in the incarceration of females. Kids without mothers are six times more apt to follow the dark side than other children.
He points out further that in the United States, Oklahoma is ranked No. 2 in teen pregnancies and homeless children, No. 3 in divorce and No. 4 in women murdered by their husbands. The state is ranked No. 46 in per capita income, No. 49 in education and is considered the third hardest place in North America for a girl to grow up. These factors create a vulnerable population for human trafficking and other crimes.
Organizations against human trafficking, children’s shelters and law enforcement agencies cannot win the battle alone. Elam emphasizes the point that it will take a general awareness of the public throughout the nation and the world and the intervention of the law-abiding public. Nothing short of a coordinated alliance among organizations, law enforcement and citizens can stop 12-year-old girls from hooking at truck stops and teens like Carina Saunders from ending up beheaded in duffel bags.
The Art of Golf
Any golfer will tell you the game is a true art form. The Oklahoma City Museum of Modern Art thinks so, too, but approaches the assertion through a collection of art that includes works from Norman Rockwell, Charles Lees, Andy Warhol and Rembrandt. The Art of Golf was organized by the High Museum of Art and the National Galleries of Scotland to explore the sport beginning with images of early Dutch landscapes and subjects. The Art of Golf runs July 19-Oct. 7. Each of the 90-something works of art in this diverse collection illuminate on golf’s history and culture. The prime example is Charles Lees’ The Golfers (1847), which portrays a match on the Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland, the birthplace of the game we have today. Lees’ work is the centerpiece of a collection of fine pieces, sketches, aerial photos of courses, antique equipment and early clothing. For more, go to www.okcmoa.com
Color Me Rad
If you cross the finish line of this 5k race with flying colors, you may come out of it unrecognizable in Muppet-toned hues. Color Me Rad Oklahoma City is not an ordinary run. The trail courses through the Oklahoma State Fair Park grounds beginning at 9 a.m. July 14. Runners of all ages start out in clean, white T-shirts and clothes, but they don’t stay that way. Along the race path, Color Bomb Squad volunteers hurl handfuls of colored (and nontoxic) cornstarch at runners. Sound familiar? The bombardment of color powders is an idea borrowed from the Hindi festival of colors known as Holi. Village and city squares are generously dusted in pinks, purples, greens, blues and oranges for tradition and celebration. Color Me Rad races are everywhere this year. Races in Philadelphia, Connecticut and Utah sold out. Oklahoma City’s race may be next. Go online to www.colormerad.com to learn more and register.
SummerStage
Years ago, there were few theater and performing arts attractions booked in the summer. Actors, dancers and singers typically had a brief respite from rehearsals as companies and groups prepared for the season to come. SummerStage Tulsa changed that. The festival of performing arts has picked up momentum over the last several years with a roster of one-night, one-weekend and multi-week shows in live theater, dance programs and musical performances booked for several weeks in summer, a time when entertainment venues are usually dark. SummerStage Tulsa enters the second half of its June through July 22 run with such shows as Dorothy in India from the Sanskriti School of Dance and featuring Indian folk and Bollywood dance; an evening with the lauded Vintage Wildflowers trio; children’s musical theater; and three shows from Rebecca Ungerman’s Spinning Plates Productions, including A Blossom, Dearie!, about ‘60s jazz icon Blossom Dearie, June 30-July 1 at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center. www.tulsapac.com
Googling Green Country
Google is famous for creating environments for its employees that seem way more like fun than actual work. Googlers, as they are called, are treated to elaborate break areas, fully stocked kitchens, catering and video games. This investment in employees doesn’t stop at the tightly sealed security gate or the employees for that matter. Google invests itself fully in the communities where it opens operations.
“They are a good neighbor,” says Larry Williams, the 21-year general manager of MidAmerica Industrial Park in Pryor, where Google purchased 900 acres to build their sixth U.S. datacenter. “They are a very community-spirited, very community-minded company.”
There was immediate and tangible economic impact of Google’s $600 million investment. There was a boost to construction, most of which was completed by Oklahoma companies. About 100 jobs that pay above industry standards were largely filled with people from Pryor and surrounding communities. An estimated $1 million contribution in sales tax was added. A recently announced expansion will add about 50 jobs and about $100 million to Google’s investment. And Google’s datacenter only went live in September 2011.
These numbers, however, says Pryor Mayor Jimmy Tramel, are eclipsed by Google’s immense contribution to the community. The total economic impact is impossible to put a figure on, he says.
“The social impact and quality of life impact are immeasurable,” Tramel adds.
Among those institutions Google is reaching out to are local schools.
Don Raleigh, superintendent for Pryor Public Schools, applied for a grant from Google to fund computers for a new high-tech, hands-on physics lab at the junior high.
“I wrote it for $25,000, and they came back and said that’s not enough and actually granted us with $30,000,” he says.
In the few years Google has been in Oklahoma, they have granted Pryor schools alone about $92,000. This has been used to create state of the art robotics and high-end desktop publishing and video production labs, and added computers to libraries and classrooms.
A total of nine grants have been funded by Google in the last six months totaling about $300,000 to fund programs in science, technology, engineering and math to area schools and organizations, says Mike Wooten, operations manager for the Google datacenter.
Most recently, they have partnered with the Boys and Girls Club to create a remote command center to communicate with marine biologist Robert Ballard during his deep-sea explorations.
“They are giving kids in this area, and adults, a huge advantage in the future,” says Tramel.
Google also partnered with the city to provide the 40-business downtown area with wireless internet service.
Buy Local
Google is also investing itself in local businesses.
“Everything they do, they do locally,” says Tramel.
Through a free, one-day program called Get Your Business Online, Google educates local businesses on how to create and run a website. Google also shows the businesses tools they offer that can be used to promote and manage business.
“Pryor and Mayes County and northeastern Oklahoma couldn’t have asked for a better corporate citizen,” says Barbara Hawkins, president of the Pryor Area Chamber of Commerce.
Tramel says that Googlers have become ubiquitous in the community.
It is larger than just the Pryor and Mayes County communities. Google has had an impact on the entire state economy, says Jon Chiappe, deputy division director of research and economic analysis at the Oklahoma Department of Commerce.
Spotlight on Oklahoma
Google’s location and success in Mayes County has focused a spotlight on Oklahoma, even if the total impact can’t yet be fully evaluated.
“Economic gain is a long game,” says Dustin Pyeatt, spokesperson for the Oklahoma Department of Commerce.
Google has prompted people to take a second look at what is going on in Oklahoma, he says.
“Every state thinks they are the best state, but we know that after an exhaustive search Google located in Oklahoma. We believe it positions Oklahoma uniquely to say, ‘If it is good enough for Google, maybe there is something here you also need to look at when you are selecting the location for your next facility,’” says Williams.
