George Kaiser, The Quiet Man Behind the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa

"I was young when I left home..."

The big story this week has been the announcement of a date for the opening next year of the Bob Dylan Center. News travels fast in Dylan circles, courtesy the many Dylan fan clubs on social media and our touchstone, Expecting Rain. 

This ArtNet News story expresses the sentiments of most: "For Dylanologists, the opening date of the Bob Dylan Center on May 10, 2022 may as well be Christmas: it could mark the first time the enigmatic musician’s most private possessions are made available to the public." 

That Rolling Stone would write it up was no surprise. Even the New York Times recognized it as newsworthy for its Arts section.

Yesterday's Pitchfork story by Eric Torres opens with a statement about the scale of the collection. "The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma will contain over 100,000 artifacts spanning Dylan’s career." That is a collection that didn't just come together over night.

It's no wonder, then, that the museum has taken so many years to open. Simply sorting and cataloging a collection of that scale is monumental, let alone all the decisions with regard to how to decide who should have access to what or how to best display it all. 

When Dylan sold a 6000-piece collection of his own personal items -- including notebooks, letters, photographs, audio and video material -- to the George Kaiser Family Foundation in 2016, I remember a few people asking why a Dylan museum would be in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It's proximity to the Woody Guthrie Center answers that question. That George Kaiser has a home there is also a consideration. 

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Someone recently shared with me an interesting factoid that surprised me. Until five years ago I never heard of George Kaiser. Unlike Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and the Oracle from Omaha, he's not been a household name or headline grabber. 

In 2008 he was listed third on BusinessWeek's top 50 American philanthropists, behind Warren Buffet and Bill and Melinda Gates. According to a recent Forbes story the George Kaiser Family Foundation has contributed more than a billion dollars to early childhood education, among other things.

For Woody Guthrie fans -- Bob Dylan among them -- Kaiser's foundation played an instrumental role in the funding of Tulsa's Woody Guthrie Center, which opened in 2013. He also facilitated, in conjunction with the University of Tulsa, the acquisition of the Bob Dylan archive, which is to be maintained by archivists at the university's Helmerich Center for American Research at the Gilcrease Museum. (1)

WANT TO LEARN MORE about the Bob Dylan Center?
Visit https://www.bobdylancenter.com/

LEARN MORE about the George Kaiser Family Foundation and "The Giving Pledge."
https://www.gkff.org/who-we-are/about-george-b-kaiser/

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(1) Source: Wikipedia

More Numbers

My September 23 entry on Numbers got good reviews, so I looked forward to the next slow news day as an excuse to assemble another list of numbers. Every picture tells a story, they say. Some numbers tell pretty vivid stories as well.

$9.6 Billion

Amount of money Warren Buffet has lost in his investment holdings in 2008.

$52 Billion
Current value of Warren Buffet’s holdings.

$3 Billion
The current value of Rupert Murdoch’s holdings after losing $3.9 billion in 2008.

1500
Number of employees Yahoo last week announced they will lay off.

7200
Number of workers Merck is laying off in its current restructuring.

24
Number of megacities over eight million in 2004.

1
Number of cites of this size in 1950.

300,000
Population of Lagos in 1950.

13,500,000
Current population of Lagos, Nigeria.

193,800,000
Number of Chinese currently living in urban slums.

35,600,000
Number of Pakistanis currently living in urban slums.

84.7
Percentage of population of Bangladesh living in slums.

5.8
Current percent of U.S. population living in urban slums.

99.4
Percentage of Ethiopians living in slum conditions.

200,000
Estimated number of slum communities in the world today.

4
Number, in millions, of people living in Mexico City’s largest megaslum in 2005.

320
Number of children per thousand who die before age five in Luanda, Angola.

34
Number of inner city slums in Karachi, Pakistan.

66
Number of Karachi slums on the city’s periphery.

107,000
Number of people evicted from slums in Hong Kong in 1950.

In addition to the problems of overcrowding, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, the poor must deal with the constant insecurity of not owning their homes. In recent years, enforced evictions by the State have caused untold disruption in countless lives. Here are some numbers from a few famously awful slum evictions of the past two decades.

1988 ~ Seoul, Korea… 800,000
1990 ~ Lagos, Nigeria… 300,000
1995-96 ~ Rangoon, Burma… 1,000,000
1995 ~ Beijing, China… 100,000
2001-03 ~ Jakarta, Indonesia… 500,000
2005 ~ Harare, Zimbabwe… 750,000
2007-08 ~ Beijing, China… 350,000

Less than 300
Number of toilet seats available to the 480,000 people in 1100 Delhi slum settlements.

Sources
Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2008.
Planet of Slums, Mike Davis
Elements of a slum for the purposes of this report: Overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure.