Whiz Bang City, Oklahoma - Oil Boom towns of OK

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Whiz Bang City, Oklahoma

Captain Billy's Whiz Bang is the first magazine to have a "city" named after it

The thriving little oil town of Oklahoma has been christened Whiz Bang City. The picture show on this page (not included here) is by courtesy of Vince Dillon, photographer of Fairfax, Okla. Upon close examination, "kind readers" note that all of the buildings are new and that a truck standing in front of the garage bears the sign Nitroglycerine. However, there is no connection between nitroglycerine and the Whiz Bang. It is true that we have an explosion, but ours is harmless, and used to blow out the spleen of the American human instead of Mother Earth.

Well anyway folk, here's wishing many happy days to Whiz Bang City and its live citizens.
[Page from Captain Billy's "Whiz Bang"]

Oil Ghosts of the Osage
Third in a series

Whizbang: Explosive Town

by Paul C. Day
of the Tribune Staff
[Unknown newspaper, unknown date. Sent in by Sherri Hale, Transcribed by K. Torp]

OSAGE COUNTY - "George, come quick! There's a ruffian chasing your wife with an axe!"
Fort Apache, 1881?
No, just Whizbang, 1921.

George Overmyer, then a rough-neck in the Burbank oil field, recounts the tale in the Overmyer's comfortable Tulsa home at 2538 S. Cincinnati, far from the muddy brawling streets of the short-lived Osage boom town.

"My wife Brenda was the pianist in the Pettigrew Theater, where she provided the music for the silent movies of the day. We had bought a rickety boxcar shack right next door - or we thought we had.

"A rough character claimed the shack was his, and threatened Brenda with an ax while I was away working in the oil fields. A friend brought word, and I hurried back the short distance to town.:

Brenda Overmyer, seated across the room, smiles. "We had some professional wrestlers at the theater for the regular Monday night matches. They said not to worry, that they would take care of anybody who bothered me. And an old rancher stopped by and said "No one's going to hurt a woman while I'm here."
But soon George arrived on the scene and asked what was the matter. Well the man then insulted me and of course that made George mad, so he shucked his coat and the two of them had a fist fight, right in the middle of Main Street.

"He did pretty good too, except that when he turned his back to put his coat back on, the fellow jumped him. One of the wrestlers then pulled him off George, and knocked him out with one punch."

One would think that the would-be bad man would have had enough. But he erected a tent across the muddy street, and continued to menace Mrs. Overmyer from his canvas bastion.

Finally George decided the time had come to get tough. "I gave her a Luger pistol which I had taken from a dead German gunner during the war. After that, there was no more problem."

Just another quiet afternoon in Whizbang, the boom town named for an artillery shell, which also gave its nickname to a popular magazine.

Overmyer himself was an artillery man who saw enough combat in that war to earn a chestful of medals for bravery in action. The decorations now hang neatly framed on his living room wall, flanking a photo of American ace Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker, autographed by the famous aviation pioneer months before his death in 1972.

"We were pinned down by strafing German fighters before the Soissons battle, and we called on the U.S. fighters for help. Capt. Rickenbacker's Hat-in-the-Ring Squadron responded and shot them up pretty badly. Years later, I met him at a convention, and he signed that picture for me."

For such men, the rowdy atmosphere of boomtowns such as Whizbang was almost like a vacation - but a hardworking one.

"We spent 18 months at Whizbang," Mrs. Overmyer says. "Playing the piano kept me from going crazy." Her husband grins. "Perhaps I had better explain. The theater and our shack were right in the middle of the red light district. We were surrounded on all sides by brothels. It was no place for a lady."

the Overmyers came from Marion, Ind., to seek their fortunes in the oil fields. Many times, Mrs. Overmyer regretted that she had left her Hoosier home for the then raw oil frontier of Oklahoma.

"Bear in mind, there were no trees, no nice homes, and no water - we had to buy that and haul it from the river," she says. "after we finally got back to Indiana, I never even wanted to see anyone from Oklahoma."

George came to the wild oil patch at the behest of a war-time buddy and Marion neighbor named Glenn Rhodes, whose father Ben Rhodes was E.W. Marland's lease superintendent. Glenn Rhodes was married to Lucille Ward, a daughter of Charles Ward, another Hoosier neighbor, the driller of the discovery wildcat well for the Burbank field, Marland's Bertha Hickman No. 1.

"The only buildings at that time were our bunkhouse, boarding house, and tool shed. Over the weekends, Glenn and I had rooms in Kaw City, nine miles away in the ranch home of Ike and Laura Clubb, where Glenn's wife Lucille was staying.

"The Clubbs became immensely wealthy when the Burbank field was extended over the Osage County line into Kay County, where the Clubbs owned a ranch of some 800 acres on the county line.

"Later, in Europe, Laura collected famous works of art which she later presented to Tulsa's Philbrook Art Center. She happened to be on the same train with us from Arkansas City to Kaw City, and was thus the first woman whom my wife met in Oklahoma when I brought her down as a bride. by then, Whizbang had sprung up and was growing fast, with a drugstore branch from Kaw City and a large new movie theater built of 1 by 12 lumber and operated by Mr. and Mrs. Howard Pettigrew."

Mrs. Overmyer says with a twinkle: "For the past 45 years, I have been trying to do penance for those 18 months of piano playing in that theater." Her "penance": She has played the organ at their church for nearly half a century.

The Overmyers and 23 friends formed a syndicate to lease 240 acres in the Burbank field. "The first well we brought in was the biggest in the field," George says. "It was so good that we sold 75 percent interest in it to Waite Phillips in 1923, and held onto the remaining 25 percent."

But all was not as rosy as it seemed on the surface. "When the Mary Sudik well was brought in in the Oklahoma City field, it produced 50,000 barrels a day." George says. "It broke the market, driving the price of oil down from $1.50 a barrel to 25 cents.:

So the Overmyers sold their remaining interest to Waite Phillips and dropped out of the oil business. But they later got back into it - almost by a looking-glass route

"I got a job during the Depression with Liberty Glass in Sapulpa, then after a few years bought their novelty department and established our own firm here in Tulsa. We turned to making glass cases for perforating jet guns for well casings. So you might say we backed back into the oil business."

The Overmyers sold their business and retired several years ago, and George is looking forward to celebrating his 80th birthday this autumn.

And Whizbang is no more. Even the name was officially changed by the Post Office to DeNoya, for Margaret DeNoya, an Osage woman who owned the surface rights to the land where the rip-roaring boom town stood. But to the people who lived there, it will always be Whizbang, the town which had a fast, brief life and an explosive reputation.

Just like an artillery shell.

Denoya

Denoya, better known locally as Whizbang, was the "wildest" of the boom towns that developed with the opening of the Burbank Oil Field. The Post Office Department thought the name Whizbang was an undignified identification, so they named the new town Denoya after a prominent Osage Indian family.
Denoya came into existence almost overnight after a six-hundred-barrel well was brought in just north of where the town located. The well was drilled by E. W. Marland, later Governor of Oklahoma and also United States Congressman. The second well was a heavy gas and light oil producer. The oil would burn in an automobile. The third offset well was topped the day before Christmas. On New Year's Day, while the crew was on vacation, the well started flowing one barrel per minute with the tools still in the hole. The only tank available was a thousand-barrel wooden storage tank. A flow line was laid to it, and help was summoned from Tulsa immediately. By dark, trucks had delivered three-inch pipe, and by three o'clock the next morning a pipeline three miles long had been laid to adequate storage facilities. The flow from the well increased to a little over twenty-five hundred barrels per day.
With an oil play of such magnitude, businesses of all kinds, desirable and undesirable, were soon established in the new town. Large oilfield supply houses were started, and a railroad was extended to Denoya. In the early 1920s there were more than three hundred business buildings ranging in size from the very small hamburger shacks to two moderately large hotels. Many people living in Denoya were not connected with oil companies. Shootings were more frequent in Denoya than in other towns in the Burbank area. The bank was robbed twice, and "it wasn't safe for a woman to be on the streets of Whizbang after dark."
Jose Alvarado, probably the most controversial law officer to serve in an Oklahoma oil field area, was a special officer for oil companies during a part of the boom period. His name was actually Bert Bryant, he was a Texan, and he had served in the revolutionary army of Pancho Villa. During World War I he worked with General Alvarado of Mexico, and in the early 1920s he came northward to the Oklahoma oil fields. Stories of his activities describe him as everything from a cold-blooded killer to a Robin Hood. One story says that during a raid on a notorious "boarding house" he seized twenty-five hundred dollars from the woman manager. Later, although he returned the money to the woman in the presence of two bankers and received a receipt for it, he was arrested for stealing it, but was finally tried and acquitted. On another occasion, when a fire started in the post office of Denoya, Alvarado refused to let the oil companies help extinguish the fire until all postal records were burned. After that the oil companies refused to help, and an entire business block was burned. During the fire Alvarado had a shootout with a lawman from a neighboring town, probably over a married woman. The visiting lawman killed the woman and then shot Alvarado in the chest. Alvarado returned fire and shot the other man four times in the body while he was hunting for cover. Alvarado then took cover behind a merchandise laden table that had been moved into the street from a burning store, but since his legs were exposed below the tabletop he was shot in the shins, and both his legs were broken. (The two men were taken to the same hospital; they recovered, forgot the woman, and became good friends.) Such was a day in the life of Whizbang.