 It's one of the key cities of America, Tulsa, built in a generation and still growing. In 1901, the West was cattle country and Tulsa was a cow town of 1200 persons. It's single main street bustled with new settlers. Today, only on the screen can people of Tulsa see scenes like these. The romance, the adventure and the hardships of the old West departed from Tulsa many years ago. In Western movies, these boys and girls can relive the history of Tulsa's past. An early citizen like Sam Carson has seen it all change within his lifetime. His grandchildren, Eddie and Janet, were born here. They are too young to remember Tulsa as it was, or to realize the struggle and planning that have gone into making the modern Tulsa a good place for them to grow up in. But Sam Carson remembers, he was part of the struggle and the planning. Planning that changed board sidewalks and dirt roads to paved streets and broad highways and hitching posts to parking meters. Planning that pulled down the wooden front shanties to build steel and concrete skyscrapers. Yes, there have been many changes, but Tulsa to the Carson's still means people, a place where you may meet someone you know on any corner. And the policeman is a friend, as well as public servant. The Tulsa story started in 1905, when deep underneath the land surrounding the little town was discovered a new and apparently inexhaustible source of wealth. Oil, oil that met light and heat, had now transportation for a growing country. Farmers became oil men, cattlemen became oil men. On farms and ranches, oil derricks rose. 100 derricks, 1,000 derricks. And so little Tulsa became a boom town upon a pool of oil. Over 20 years later, the underground pool ran dry and the oil disappeared from Tulsa. But in the city of Tulsa, they still had ideas. Four miles to the north and east, fine cattle grazed on grassy plains. And in Tulsa, a meat packing industry grew up. On the fertile lands to the south, were harvested great fields of corn to be shipped to Tulsa for cattle feed. Wheat to fill the tall grain elevators. To be ginned and processed in Tulsa's mills. When oil was struck in nearby regions, it was Tulsa that supplied the equipment, know-how, and men to bring out the rich crude from the ground. Each boom poured into Tulsa its products for refining. Its people had looked beyond the disappointments of the past and planned for the future. For Tulsa is still people. 200,000 of them, oil workers in tin hats or businessmen in straws. And the families who live and raise their children in Tulsa's spacious suburbs. Farmers and ranchers in town to buy or sell or talk. All of them bringing to life the arteries of downtown Tulsa. Tulsans are proud of their business section with its attractive shops. Its several and fiercely independent newspapers. All of the institutions offering the goods and services that make life easier and more pleasant. And the great church offering the ideals and hopes and aspirations that make life spiritually richer. Sam Carson lives with his son, Henry, and his daughter-in-law. Almost any evening finds the Carson family, like most in Tulsa, gathered together at home. Ellen Carson does most of the housework and cooking. Henry is a chemist and plant superintendent at a large oil refinery. Looking around the table, he feels he has much to be grateful for. In the children, Jamet and Eddie, and in their older son, Tom, the Carson's find their greatest satisfactions. Not only wholesome food, but warm and animated talk flows freely across the family dinner table. The daily activities of each member, including the children, are shared joyously with the rest of the family. After dinner, Eddie is likely to neglect his lessons to listen as his father and older brother let their conversation range to the local, national, and world issues in which, as free citizens, they feel themselves apart. Each morning, from his comfortable home, the Carson children walk to a school nearby, recently completed as part of Tulsa's municipally financed new school program. And Tom, now in his second year of college, also leaves the house early to hail the convenient bus, which will take him to the University of Tulsa. A university planned, financed, built, and staffed by the far-seeing citizens of Tulsa and attended by their children. Here are offered courses in the liberal arts, in sociology and philosophy, in science and engineering. The halls are thronged with eager young students, both men and women, for and after classes, impromptu discussion groups form. Coeducation gives opportunity for discussion of problems from the woman's angle, as well as from the man's, which usually results in a broader understanding for both. Already, university life has had a strong influence on Tom Carson, and here he makes friendships that will last him all of his life. The handsome buildings house more than classrooms and laboratories, or in them, Tom is learning to use the free spirit of scientific inquiry, which will be the basis of his education and his adult life. Even as they watch, new buildings are going up, a part of the planning that has made the great school of petroleum engineering preeminent in its field. Potential petroleum engineers or students of any of the 1,000 skills required by the oil industry come from all over the world to join the small group classes. Here they study not only from books, but from elaborate scale models. Besides their regular staff, they are taught by practical men like this chief engineer of Tulsa's largest refinery, who points out on the model the complicated process by which crude oil is broken down to provide gasoline and its many byproducts. Progressing from models, students at Tulsa have the unique opportunity of seeing the actual operations in the refineries. Under the guidance of men like supervisor Henry Carson, the functions of the great stills and fractionating towers are explained. Students can follow step by step how crude oil is piped in from fields hundreds of miles away to the refineries of Tulsa. And after going through the refining process, all the finished products are piped out to equally distant cities, there to power and lubricate the wheels of industry and transport. Complicated equations for gas storage pressure become more meaningful when students can climb this huge spherical tank to see how the equation is solved in steel or when they view the great cylinders that store the refinery surplus. When students leave Henry Carson after their tour of the refinery, they find their models and textbooks easier to understand. Just as students in groups can learn best about petroleum engineering by seeing it in action, the university believes in the same learned by doing process in other fields. Self-government, for instance. Under faculty guidance, a student council has been set up. Elected representatives of the student body meet here to discuss the problems of self-government. The council, in turn, has elected these three officers to preside over its debates, to take votes on the questions at issue, and to ensure that the wishes of the majority are carried out and the rights of the minority protected. Women hold office in the council and play an active part in its decisions. Here is a legislative body, as truly as Congress or Diet or Parliament. What they learn here about the responsibilities of office, the need for free discussion, how best to conduct a meeting so that all may be heard. These things will fit them for later participation in such groups as the Tulsa Planning Commission. Here, the larger affairs of Tulsa's present and future are discussed by people who may have first learned how best to work as a group from such practical lessons in self-government as a student council. Selected by their fellow citizens, these members of the Planning Commission come from office or factory, church or women's club to continue the planning that has kept Tulsa the commercial and marketing center of a rich farming region. To foresee such changes as the disappearance of the oil pool from Tulsa and avoid economic disaster by converting Tulsa from a producer of oil to a provider of services, pipelines and pumps and drilling rigs, storage for oil and natural gas, and grape refineries. And to make these enterprises in turn bring other industry to Tulsa. Like manufacture of huge storage tanks, only one of the many specialties manufactured in Tulsa for use in the oil industry. And such diverse enterprises as spinning cotton from the nearby south into yarn and weaving finished goods to be sold throughout the country. And the manufacture of glass jars and bottles of all kinds, with ingenious machines and highly paid skilled labor. Or building precision instruments like seismographs in ultramodern factory laboratories. Because of its location in the center of the United States, Tulsa's facilities have made it the site of large aerial maintenance shops. Its municipal airport has become a crossroads for the airlines that span the nation. Tulsa must continue to provide adequate transportation, stockyard facilities, and packing plants if it will serve the fine cattle ranches surrounding it. All this adds up to a balanced economy, no longer dependent on oil alone, a tribute to the past planning of these citizens of Tulsa. But future problems already press. Growth has brought increased traffic in the streets and the need for control and safety measures. With better education for all, an increasing call for books is making present library facilities inadequate. More happier, more prosperous families mean more children who will need more recreation space to grow in. With planning and control, the nearby Arkansas River could be converted from a flood hazard to a source of power, irrigation, and recreation. Tulsans are sure that these and many future problems will be solved to build for Henry Carson and his family and the thousands of families like his. Tulsa, a city whose foundations will be sound, a city that will provide a better life for all its citizens.