Lunch at the Brick

I’m covering the Big 12 baseball tournament today. I wasn’t assigned any duty Wednesday, but I stopped by at lunch. Randy Bowen, who runs the Chevrolet dealership in Chandler and is sponsoring our Big 12 baseball coverage, was in the OPUBCO suite, so I tagged along with a couple of editors to meet Bowen and say thanks.

I like to talk about commerce, particularly in small towns, so I bent Bowen’s ear about owning the Chevy dealership in the Lincoln County seat. Here’s one thing I learned: tourists still patrol Route 66 (on which sits Bowen’s dealership). Bowen said not every day, but every few days, foreigners stop in for pictures and to talk about Route 66.

I guess the fascination still comes from The Grapes of Wrathand the old CBS show “Route 66″ starring Martin Milner and George Maharis. Anyway, it got me to wondering if Oklahoma is effectively milking its 432 miles of old Route 66. Maybe it is, but new ideas always are worthwhile.

To get to Randy Bowen, I had to travel along something far newer than Route 66. Bricktown Ballpark itself. I get a charge every time I walk into the Brick; the 10-year-old park has held up beautifully. Still a jewel of a place. I don’t care if it’s RedHawks, college baseball, a concert, whatever. The ballpark remains a wonderful addition to downtown and the first of the MAPS projects, which told us that things were changing in downtown OKC.

I think I’ll write about the Brick and Bricktown today. I still shake my head with every trip downtown, with every driveby along the Crosstown Expressway, at the transformation of a city. It’s remarkable. And the ballpark played a not small part.