SAME PEOPLE DIFFERENT PLACE

DURING THE 1980s, FANS OF OKLAHOMA STATE FOOTBALL USUALLY HAD A GOOD TEAM TO WATCH, EVEN IF THEY WATCHED IT IN A NOT-SO-GREAT FACILITY.

LESLIE O’NEAL AND MARK MOORE WERE DISRUPTING OPPOSING OFFENSES, AND THURMAN THOMAS WAS GIVING BIG EIGHT DEFENSES FITS. IT WAS 1985.

A year prior, Pat Jones’ first OSU squad beat South Carolina in the Gator Bowl, clinching the first 10-win season in program history. Most loyal and true Cowboy fans recall Barry Hanna’s never-give-up touchdown catch to seize victory.

The decade started with Jimmy Johnson as head football coach and included some of the great names in OSU athletic lore: Heisman Trophy winner Barry Sanders Olympic wrestling gold medalist John Smith. Baseball home run slugger Pete Incaviglia

Golf ace Scott Verplank . Softball Olympian lefty Michele Smith and baseball hit-streak king Robin Ventura

Except for the newly-opened Allie P. Reynolds Stadium, where the first pitch was thrown in April of 1981, the settings were not new and shiny. It was before the major college athletic facilities race took off, when there were plenty of good teams playing on and inside aging buildings often in need of repair — Lewis Field included.

Take a short walk to the other side of the OSU campus and just to the south side of University Avenue sits the infamous “Strip,” a three-block stretch of South Washington Street that owns many memories for Stillwater locals, OSU alumni and visiting sports fans. Very few Strip establishments remain from the 1980s, but a few, like DuPree Sports Equipment, Willie’s Saloon and Coney Island, continue as part of the local landscape that changes almost daily. Generations of students pass through Stillwater and most can recall a time or two when they uttered the phrase: “Can I get a couple cheese coneys, fries and a coke?” Perhaps they shot a game of pool, had a cold beer, then walked to the old stadium via Hester Street.

Gary and Claudia Humphreys remember those early 1980s. Just a couple of college kids — one from Pond Creek and the other from Ardmore — enjoying their college years. Now, more than 35 years later, the two can look back at what Oklahoma State was, what it is and what it can possibly become. The Humphreys are among many from the ’80s who have seen and been a part of a transition that keeps the OSU campus evolving into one of the finest in the country, and more recently, have added The Strip to their list as well.

“It’s pretty hard to believe how this place has changed just in the last 10 or 15 years,” Gary Humphreys said. “And to be a part of it, to be able to contribute, it feels good to be in a place where we can do that.”

That journey started on a Stillwater dance floor.

A high school girl from Ardmore, Claudia Embry headed to Stillwater with classmates for a tour of the campus. Meanwhile, OSU sophomore Gary Humphreys was not going to many Saturday football games because he was working a few jobs to pay his way through school. It was 1983, and his neighbor had a little sister who was visiting.

“My brother told me the only guy I could not date was that ‘Gary Humphreys guy’ next door,” remembers Claudia. “It was my spring break, I just turned 18 and we went dancing.”

They danced, trying to figure out who was leading, in a building that now houses Outlaws. Like many others on “The Strip,” it has gone through various ownership changes and styles. Over the next two years, Claudia, the better dancer of the two, decided that Gary might make a good permanent dance partner, and the two were married in August of 1985.

Gary, working in Amarillo, Texas, after graduating in 1983 from OSU, had accepted a job in South Dakota, much to Claudia’s surprise.

“Gary said we were moving to South Dakota in December,” Claudia said. “It was a bit of a surprise.”

The couple moved 11 times in eight years, starting in Sioux Falls. The long-distance relationship with their alma mater, through AM radio and a lot of phone calls, also got started.

“We lived on 40 acres so at times that AM signal could be weak,” said Gary, who was finding his business acumen about the same time Eddie Sutton returned to Stillwater in the early 1990s. “We had about 20-or-so OSU graduates working for what was then Tyson Foods so there would be some road trips back during football season or a trip to Omaha for the College World Series because it was an easy drive.”

“I just remember Gary pacing up and down that cow pasture during some of those games,” Claudia said. “It was cold and very windy a few times up on that hill, but we had to try and listen to the games. We had blankets, and as cold as it was, we made it work.”

Claudia gave birth to the couple’s second son, Jake, in December of 1994. A tire company founded by the Humphreys was in its early stages so things were chaotic and money wasn’t exactly growing on trees in the back yard. Meanwhile, Sutton’s basketballers were having a great season with hopes of a trip to the 1995 Final Four in Seattle in late March. With Gary’s birthday in February, Claudia thought a trip to Seattle would make for one of those trips that are never forgotten. Organizing the trip — tickets, hotel, plane tickets — was not as easy as today’s handful of clicks on the Internet. How to pay for it was another matter.

“I got everything but couldn’t pay for it,” Claudia said. “We didn’t use credit cards, not then, but Gary said put it on there because we are going to the Final Four! We’ll figure that out later.”

The couple missed the infamous Bryant “Big Country” Reeves backboard-shattering practice dunk, but the trip was a memorable one.

“It was a great trip, but one of the things I most remember is sitting on a picnic bench in Seattle just taking everything in,” Gary said. “There were a couple of college kids hanging around talking about a bunch of things and one mentioned this new email technology. I asked Claudia what was email? That was 1995.

“You go through periods. Before we had Eric (now 29) and Jake (24), it was easy to jump in the car wherever we were and road trip to Stillwater or someplace to watch OSU,” added Gary. “Then you are raising kids so you don’t make it back as much. Then they reach high school age, and you start to come back more. We’ve been tailgating (for football) for 15-straight years now.

“Your perspective of giving changes when you are not broke. Backing up, I wished we would have been more educated and had people to help us along. When you are in your 30s and struggling, $500 is a big deal. Oklahoma State does a lot better job now working with the alumni. When we got on our feet we got more involved, started to look into the things we could do to give back.”

“Gary and Claudia have watched this campus develop into what it is today. They are part of that transition, part of a lot of people who went through here in the 1980s,” said OSU senior associate athletic director Larry Reece “And they are part of future development as well, in and around campus.”

The first gift came when Eric, who suffers from dyslexia, began attending OSU just over a decade ago. Dyslexia is a learning disorder that involves difficulty in reading and with processing language. At the time there were no scholarships or aid for such students. A short discussion and the Humphreys helped set up the Eugene Embry Scholarship for Students with Dyslexia, named in honor of Claudia’s father, who also suffered from the disorder. The gifts have continued since.

“It is not a matter of if, but when,” Claudia said. “The scholarship was the first thing we did giving back to the university. Each year, we’ve tried to look into different ways to contribute.”

Since 2004, Gary, a self-made serial entrepreneur, has been CEO of Vista Proppants and Logistics, LLC, a company he founded. For the last two decades, in excess of 30 companies have had Humphreys’ influence. Some of that success can be seen at Boone Pickens Stadium in the form of a giant video board that was installed during the summer of 2018.

This giant addition is not the first in the stadium’s long history. Five renovations into its history, in 1971, there was the addition of AstroTurf, and the running track moved to north Hall of Fame Avenue across from the Colvin Center.

Wooden stadium seats were ripped out and permanent seating added as capacity rose from 39,000 to 50,440. The addition of stadium lights was put on hold at that time due to a lack of funds, although those came along in the mid-1980s.

The facility’s major facelift began in 2004, first with the south side suites and club, followed by the north and then the completion of the west end zone in 2009, all jump-started by Boone Pickens’ $165 million gift (and several other less publicized gifts he made along the way). The stadium was rededicated and renamed after him on Sept. 5, 2009.

That day, like Seattle and the Final Four in 1995, will not soon be forgotten.

Jake, who was 10 at the time and would eventually work at Coney Island, was hanging with Pistol Pete Pride, the family pet, at the massive tailgate before the Cowboys hosted Georgia and their well-known mascot, UGA, the white bulldog.

Pride (wearing a white sweater with “Real Bulldogs Wear Orange!”) and Jake thought Pride might enjoy “The Walk,” the traditional stroll from the Student Union to Boone Pickens Stadium a couple hours before kickoff. Jake had plans on giving Pride to head coach Mike Gundy for a little pre-game fun. But Madeleine Pickens took the leash and later, during the ribboncutting speech, the Humphreys’ bulldog was in the middle of the festivities.

A decade later, a massive video board continues the stadium’s evolution.

“We had talked about doing something with the Stillwater Airport, helping with some upgrades and looking at naming rights,” Gary said. “I thought it would be nice for those OU, TCU and Texas fans to fly into Stillwater and see my name (some of them co-workers). I thought that would be funny.”

But Director of Athletics Mike Holder had a better idea. Why not let those friends see your name inside the stadium or every time we play on television?

“(Holder) asked if I wanted to put my name inside the stadium on a giant television,” Gary said. “We kind of laughed about it; he showed me a number, and I said ‘That is a really big TV, huh?’ I ended up pacing up and down my office thinking about it. I ended up calling Claudia and telling her I just bought a big TV from Mike Holder. She laughed and said it must be a really big TV!”

Claudia got the last laugh.

The first game the video board was up, their two sons — one in Atlanta and the other in Washington D.C. — sent messages to their mother asking if their dad knew that the only name they could see on the television was hers.

“I laughed and said he knew because 20 of his best friends have been texting him to let him know,” Claudia said. “We have fun with it. Everyone yells ‘field goal Claudia’ during our games.”

Real estate development is also part of the Humphreys’ many endeavors, including flipping houses in Stillwater. When Gary received word that Coney Island was going to be purchased and possibly torn down to make room for something new, he thought the old hangout that opened in 1969 was worth saving.

“Forty-nine years of grease … it certainly needed some cleaning up,” Gary admitted. “But it’s one of those places that needed to be saved. Something that just had its 50th year in business needs to be kept.”

Already upgraded with more seating and a new look, the Humphreys plan on making Coney Island “the place to be” with outdoor patio seating and many other accoutrements.

Within walking distance of the McKnight Performing Arts Center, set to open in October 2019, Coney Island will be nothing like those days in the early ’80s when two young college students had no idea they would be attending a Final Four in Seattle or seeing their names on a massive video board inside a futuristic football facility.

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