HeyJaredRoots & Main Street
Just some guy with a notebook and a reason to care — writing about work, love, and the places that hold us together.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 19
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- Sep 30, 2026
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Privacy Used to Depend on Friction (opens the original)
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Back when I worked for small-town daily newspapers, part of my job was telling people things they sometimes didn’t particularly want their neighbors to know.Who got arrested. What they were arrested for. What happened when they went to court. It was routine newspaper work, the sort of material that once filled columns of briefs in local papers across the country. Every now and then, though, the phone would ring and somebody on the other end would be furious.“You invaded my privacy.”Then came one
Why Does Oklahoma Keep Building Turnpikes? (opens the original)
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If you drove from Oklahoma City to Tulsa in 1952, you probably took U.S. 66.It was the famous highway, but fame didn’t make it fast. Route 66 passed through towns, crossed intersections and carried local traffic along with travelers trying to get from one end of the state to the other. Oklahoma wanted something different: a limited-access highway connecting its two largest cities.There was a problem.It was expensive.So Oklahoma came up with an arrangement that sounded fairly straightforward. Bor
Before the Gun Gets to School (opens the original)
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When I was in about the fifth grade, my school taught me what to do around a gun. This was rural Missouri, way back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, and firearms were about as exotic in my community as hammers or shovels. People hunted. Guns were in people’s houses. Children were going to encounter them whether the adults particularly wanted them to or not, so we learned about them.As I remember it, the class was offered through the Missouri Department of Conservation. There weren’t any actual fi
Who Should Run the Restaurant at a State Park? (opens the original)
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One of the last anniversary weekend trips Angie and I took together was to Roman Nose State Park.We stayed in the lodge. At the time, the restaurant there was one of Swadley’s Foggy Bottom Kitchens, the barbecue company’s attempt to turn restaurants at several Oklahoma state parks into a recognizable brand. We ate there. It was all right. Nothing particularly wrong with it, but nothing I remember as spectacular, either.The meal I remember better was somewhere else in the park.There was a little
What if the next Nazih Zuhdi chooses somewhere else? (opens the original)
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In 1957, a 32-year-old surgeon named Nazih Zuhdi came to Oklahoma.He wasn’t from here. Zuhdi was born in Beirut, Lebanon, the son of a physician. He studied medicine at the American University of Beirut before immigrating to the United States in 1951. He trained at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center and later worked with C. Walton Lillehei, one of the pioneers trying to make open-heart surgery possible.Then the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine brought him to Oklahoma City with an amb
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