Blue Whale blues

A Route 66 mainstay is the host of a new concert series

Even by the standard of roadside attractions, the Blue Whale is an odd sight. Situated half-beached in a sand-lined pond at 2680 Oklahoma 66, the 80-foot-long, 20-foot-tall, ball-capped beast greets traffic with its gaping smile and giant, blood-red eyes. Thousands of motorists drive past each day, many never giving it more than a sideways glance as they make their way to their destination. But every other week for the remainder of the summer, passersby will have an added incentive to stop as the massive mammal plays host to a diverse crowd of Oklahoma musicians.

According to an excerpt from the Catoosa Historical Society, the Blue Whale began as a doodle on then-60-year-old Hugh Davis’s napkin.

“My grandmother was an animal lover, and she particularly had a thing for whales,” said Lee Davis, Hugh Davis’s grandson. “My grandfather was going to build her a little concrete whale by the pond for their anniversary. As things went with my grandfather, as he started building [the whale], he continued making it larger – he came up with the idea to make the fin a slide, then he thought to put a diving board on the tail.”

Two years, 15 tons of sand, nearly 20,000 pounds of rock, and 19.5 yards of ready-mix concrete later, the whale was finished, and people started showing up to take a closer look.

“Kids started sneaking in to swim,” Davis said. “So he went ahead and opened it up and made it a swimming hole.”

One of those kids was Ryan Smith.

“Starting in 1979, my grandmother would drop us off there every day at eight o’clock in the morning and wouldn’t pick us up until six o’clock at night,” said Smith, the Catoosan turned Tulsan who organizes the shows.

“Last June, I was contacted by one of the Fins of the Blue Whale [the group that restored and took over as caretakers of the property after it closed in 1988] about doing live music out there,” Smith said. “I knew a huge roster of artists since I was booking shows for the [now-defunct] Vinyl Countdown, and it kind of got out of hand from there.”

Out of hand, indeed.

“We already had food trucks that would come park out here for a week at a time, and we started getting regulars, which showed me there was steady demand,” Smith said. “For the first year, we got around 50 people per show. The first show we did this summer there were around 150 people there, which kind of put the fear in me, like, ‘where is this going?’

“Right now, I can’t think of any other way to put it than that it’s a labor of love. With the attendance comes the chance of the money aspect coming into it, it just complicates things. Right now, nobody gets paid, nobody has anything to gain from it, there are no stakes, and there are no expectations. I like it that way.”

And, so do the owners.

“I think the whole time it was open, my grandfather only ever charged a dollar to come and swim all day,” Davis said. “We’re trying to stay in that tradition.”

The next show in the Blue Whale summer concert series, scheduled for July 25, will feature food trucks, music by three area blues bands – Black Kat Benders, Sunday Moan, and James Groves Blues Machine – and a live broadcast by Tulsa’s online blues station, Radio IDL, radioidl.com.

For Smith, the summer concert series is about spreading the gospel of an Oklahoma landmark, albeit a strange one.

“You’d be surprised how many people from Tulsa, native Tulsans, have never been to the Blue Whale, who have no idea what or where it is,” Smith said. “I want to change that.”