From: khematite@gmail.com   
      
   Why are Bob Dylan’s archives in Tulsa?   
   The reasons the Bard chose Oklahoma as the home for his collection may have   
   more to do with politics than money   
   By Seth Rogovoy,  The Forward   
   May 03, 2022   
      
   Why Tulsa?   
      
   To be more precise: Why is the new Bob Dylan Center –which opens Tuesday,   
   May 10, and will be home to the Nobel Prize laureate’s archive as well as   
   gallery space that will perpetually play host to 16 revolving exhibitions   
   based on the archive’s    
   holdings — located in Tulsa, Oklahoma, of all places?   
      
   As it turns out, there are many reasons. The city of 400,000 is already home   
   to the Woody Guthrie Center, where the archives of the venerable 20th century   
   folk singer (and Oklahoma native) who was a huge influence on Bob Dylan –   
   one of whose very first    
   original compositions was entitled “Song to Woody” — are housed. When it   
   came time to negotiate with Bob Dylan to entrust his archives, including   
   memorabilia, notebooks, recordings and films, to a team of civic and academic   
   suitors, Tulsa had a    
   huge leg up on the competition, playing on Dylan’s emotional attachment to   
   Guthrie as well as demonstrating the thought and care that has been put into   
   representing and preserving Guthrie’s legacy in a manner befitting the folk   
   bard of America.   
      
   Or, just look at a map. Tulsa is smack dab in the center of the United States.   
   Anyone looking for symbolism in where Bob Dylan’s legacy will be made   
   available to generations of visitors and scholars will not overlook the fact   
   that it is in the    
   heartland of America, just where one might expect to find what will   
   undoubtedly become ground zero of Dylan studies. Perhaps the greener pastures   
   of Harvard University may have been more befitting a Nobel laureate. Maybe an   
   NYU-based museum in Greenwich    
   Village, New York, where Dylan quickly made his mark on the burgeoning   
   early-1960s folk scene on his way to rock ‘n’ roll superstardom by the   
   mid-1960s, would have made instant sense – as well as having the advantage   
   of being located in a major    
   media market with a built-in tourism infrastructure.   
       
   Songwriter Bob Dylan’s childhood home in Duluth, Minnesota on October 14,   
   2016. On October 13, 2016, Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.   
   Even Minneapolis may have been a more logical location, a nod to Dylan’s   
   home state of Minnesota (he was born in Duluth and grew up in the iron-mining   
   town of Hibbing near the Canadian border) and the city in which the teenage   
   Robert Allen Zimmerman    
   first began performing in folk clubs while attending (or, more precisely, not   
   attending) university, and where he first adopted the stage name by which the   
   world has always known him (and which he made his legal name in August 1962).   
      
   No doubt the benevolence of Tulsa’s best-known billionaire – the   
   civic-minded George Kaiser – whose eponymous Family Foundation has   
   transformed the city’s early education efforts as well as its landscape,   
   having underwritten a Central Park-style    
   stretch of public garden called the Gathering Place — a 66-acre park   
   believed to be the largest public park in the country built with private funds   
   – went a significant way toward winning the Dylan archive for Tulsa.   
      
   According to Forbes magazine, Kaiser is worth over $10 billion, placing him in   
   the top 200 of richest people on earth, and one of the top 25 most   
   philanthropic billionaires in the United States. The check he reportedly wrote   
   for $20 million to bring the    
   archive to Tulsa must have been enticing, even if it was a virtual steal: an   
   original, handwritten sheet of lyrics for the song “Like a Rolling Stone”   
   alone fetched $2 million at auction in 2014. There are approximately 100,000   
   items in the archive,    
   and while they are not all lyrics to groundbreaking songs, the math is simple:   
   if it were just a question of dollars and cents, the Dylan collection could   
   have been auctioned off piecemeal for at least 10 times as much – maybe more   
   — as Kaiser paid    
   for the whole shebang.   
      
   Kaiser, who was born and raised in Tulsa by Holocaust refugee parents, once   
   admitted to The New York Times that he was never a huge Bob Dylan fan, but   
   more of an appreciator of his accomplishments in the pantheon of American   
   music. The Harvard graduate’   
   s musical taste tended more toward one of Dylan’s earliest champions. “I   
   was taken by Joan Baez in college,” Kaiser told the Times, “when she was   
   singing down the block,” presumably referring to the famed Club 47 in   
   Cambridge’s Harvard Square    
   where Baez frequently performed.   
      
   Like most fortunes made in Tulsa, Kaiser’s was built on oil in this one-time   
   capital of the U.S. oil industry. Kaiser took over his family’s   
   Kaiser-Francis Oil Company in 1969, and when the Bank of Oklahoma was   
   teetering toward failure in 1991, he    
   scooped it up for a mere $60 million. Fortunately for Tulsa, Kaiser has proven   
   to be a benevolent municipal oligarch; he was a charter signee of the Giving   
   Pledge, the challenge issued by founders Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to   
   billionaires to commit    
   to giving away more than half their wealth to charitable causes. Forbes named   
   Kaiser to their list of Top 25 Most Philanthropic Billionaires in 2021. The   
   George Kaiser Family Foundation has already paid out more than $1.3 billion, a   
   significant amount of    
   which has remained in Tulsa.   
      
   About the foundation’s devotion to early childhood education efforts, Kaiser   
   famously once said, “Those who have won the ovarian lottery by being born in   
   an advanced society to loving parents have a special obligation to help   
   restore the American    
   Dream.” Kaiser has also been a generous donor to Jewish organizations and   
   programs in Tulsa. His family history is never far from the surface. His   
   mission statement includes this phrase: “My family joins me in my intention   
   to … focus these efforts    
   in the community that welcomed my family from Nazi Germany.” Kaiser is also   
   a major donor to Democratic candidates and was a “campaign bundler” for   
   Barack Obama. According to The New York Times, Kaiser likes to refer to   
   himself as a “robber baron    
   from red-state America” who has come to love public preschool. (George   
   Kaiser trivia: his nephew is actor Tim Blake Nelson.)   
      
      
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