Friends In Low Places

It's funny the things you discover when poking around the net at random. I'm not sure how it started, but I started looking at the last place I lived in Stillwater, OK, on a map.

In my college years, I was trying to save a little money so a few friends and I rented a trailer out in the country, just outside of Stillwater, OK. It was on Lakeview Road and it was waaaaay out of town. The road was barely paved and there were about 5 to 10 trailers in this plot of land that must have been two acres or so.

It was cheap, full of mice, and so far out of town that we rarely got visitors. But it was our place. My life started to spiral out of control about this time, and I can definitely remember laying in bed in that trailer, asking myself what I was doing out in the country in Oklahoma. I hated my major at OSU. I hated my job. I had no girlfriend. I was just plain unhappy. So I decided to move to California. I decided I would be gone by the end of 1980, and I made it with a month or so to spare. I've only been back to Stillwater once since then, but I'm pretty sure we were the last people to live in that dilapidated old trailer (my roomies moved back to town when I went to California).

Today, I noticed on the map that there was a huge building approximately where the trailer used to be. The trailers are long gone so I can't locate the exact spot, but it appears to me to be darn close to the same spot. Reading a bit, I found out that the building was a country ballroom built in 1981. When it was built, they brought in country acts, many of them famous, from all over the country. Now this surprised me because there was NOTHING out there but farm fields when I was there. For miles, you wouldn't see anything but a farmhouse every half mile or so. And in 1981, someone built a ballroom there? Wow!

But not as strange as the next thing I read. It turns out that another OSU student named Garth Brooks worked as a bouncer at that ballroom, called Tumbleweeds, in 1981. He liked it so much, in fact, that he started performing there. On this little lonely country road, just a year or two after I left, Garth Brooks did his first performance. That, my friends, is absolutely bizarre.