April 19, 1995

Fourteen years ago today, I spent the day packing my bags for my first trip to Oklahoma. Lonny had been asked to transfer to Tulsa and his company sent us out here to decide if we could live here. We had our doubts. Five years earlier a job in Tulsa had been offered and immediately turned down. The television was on as I prepared to leave my children with my parents for a few days. And the only thing that was on the TV that day was the OK City bombing. I had a million reasons to not want to live in OK and now I had another. We arrived here the following day. Tulsa is 90 miles from OK City but the bombing was on everyone's mind. Each store and restaurant we visited had a jar collecting money for the victims and their families. It didn't take long to realize that Oklahoman's are compassionate, they were grieving for their neighbors. The people in OK won me over.

Today in our newspaper I read the following, taken from an article by Julie DelCour: "On April 19, 1995, 19 children perished in the Oklahoma City bombing. Another 213 children were victims themselves or sons and daughter of those killed or injured.
. . .many survivors helped [with] an outpouring of donations. The large and small checks, the jars of pennies, the $1 and $5 bills stuffed in envelopes, came from everywhere.
So generous were contributions to the Oklahoma Disaster Relief Fund that a separate Survivor's Education Fund was established to aid children eligible for assistance once they reached college age.
From enormous tragedy has come enormous promise.
Thanks to the scholarship fund, 154 students have attended one or more semesters of post-secondary education. Another 31 still are in secondary schools and have not yet aged into the scholarship program. Seventy nine have completed one or more degrees or certifications and 27 have earned graduate degrees. Three became lawyers, two veterinarians and two are pharmacists.
A handful of children who were inside the day care that fateful morning sustained severe injuries but defied the odds and survived.
One of them is in college. That outcome should remind us that even in the wake of unbearable and inexplicable evil we should never underestimate the power of the human heart to come forth with unbounded good."

For the first couple of years I lived in Oklahoma I would get asked if I had ever thought I would live in OK? I always felt bad about my answer because it was that I had never thought about OK, period. And yet here I am, fourteen years later, surrounded by some really amazing people. They are generous and should be really proud of what that generosity has accomplished.