I think I have hijacked this thread -- sorry Knapp!!
They are now working on building phase 2 of the Gathering Place - a hands on children science and learning museum.
OKC has improved greatly over the last 20 years. Tulsa was always considered (of course by Tulsans) the progressive, sophisticated town and OKC the cow town (Kind of like Dallas vs Ft Worth). OKC passed up Tulsa in the late 1990s wt their MAPS (metropolitan area plan) program but now Tulsa has rebounded.
George Kaiser and the Kaiser Foundation oil and gas of course and banking BOK - Bank of Oklahoma.
Kaiser was born on July 29, 1942 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
[1][2][5] He attended
Central High School in
Tulsa.
[6] He earned a BA from
Harvard College in 1964 and an
MBA from the
Harvard Business School in 1966.
[7] He briefly considered joining the
U.S. Foreign Service, but instead returned to Tulsa in 1966 to work for his father.
Kaiser-Francis Oil Co. was created in the 1940s by Kaiser's uncle and parents,
Jewish[8][9] refugees from Nazi Germany who settled in Oklahoma.
[10][11]
George's father, Herman George Kaiser, had been an attorney in the district of the
Kammergericht in Berlin until 1933, when he was dismissed by the Nazis because he was Jewish. He and his wife Kate then moved to
Rostock where Herman Kaiser worked with his father-in-law
Max Samuel's
EMSA-Werke company. Herman Kaiser escaped to England in 1937 and his wife and daughter came over in September the following year. In 1940 all three emigrated to the United States.
[12] They settled in Tulsa, where Herman's aunt and uncle already lived. Herman joined the uncle's oil drilling business. Their son was born in Tulsa.
[5] Herman died in Tulsa on October 14, 1992 at the age of 88.
[
Oil and gas
Kaiser took control of Kaiser-Francis Oil Company in 1969, after his father had a heart attack. Kaiser-Francis was a little-known, privately owned oil prospecting and drilling company at the time. Under George's management, it became the 23rd largest nonpublic energy exploration company in the U.S. by 2010. In that year the company earned about $217 million, based on estimates by Bloomberg News.
[14]
Banking
In 1990, Kaiser bought
Bank of Oklahoma out of
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation receivership. Despite BOK's depressed state, it was rich enough to land Kaiser on the Forbes 400 at one stroke. He has since expanded BOK from a 20-branch company located solely in Oklahoma into a $23.9 billion bank with operations in nine states. He owns 61.5 percent of BOK.
[14] As of 2007, Kaiser's ownership interests in BOK were worth $2.3 billion. In 2008, with an estimated current net worth of around $12 billion, he was ranked by
Forbes as the
20-richest person in America and the richest person in
Oklahoma. In March 2009, in the face of the general world economic downturn,
Forbes reported that Kaiser's net worth had dropped to $9 billion, ranking him in a tie for 43rd-richest person in the world.
[15] It has since risen to $9.8 billion as the markets recovered.
[1] As of 2019, George's net worth was estimated at $7.6 billion.
[16
