Outlook 2017

A version of this story appears in the 2017 Outlook: The Way We Live special section in Sunday's The Oklahoman.

Embodying a comeback
Revived Science Museum Oklahoma is setting attendance records and bringing back a popular traveling exhibit that helped it get through hard times.

A bass drum changed its beat with the heart rhythms of different animals, a stick poked through the spokes of a spinning bicycle wheel made a rhythmic ticking and a bass guitar made from a water jug reverberated with a sound not unlike a didgeridoo.

Over these sounds of experimentation, the shouts and laughter of children echoed throughout Science Museum Oklahoma’s CurioCity on a rainy spring Saturday.

“At one point we calculated that if you pressed every button and read every line that was in CurioCity alone that it would be a 10-hour visit. And that’s just about 20,000 square feet of our much larger … building. So, there’s a lot to do,” said Colin FitzSimons, chairman of the museum’s board of trustees.

Surrounding the crowded exhibit’s elaborate water table, youngsters oohed in wonder as they manipulated a strange bubble of liquid and fog, a recent addition to the children’s area that just opened a year and a half ago.

“That was an absolute reaction of talking to our visitors because they weren’t using the water table in CurioCity like they were in (the old children’s area) Kid Space, and we started asking why is that. We started putting different things out in the water table to see what people liked, what they didn’t like. We changed it. We saw, ‘it’s not working,’ so we made it better,” said Sherry Marshall, the museum’s new president and CEO.

“We’re not afraid to keep going and keep learning and improving.”

That attitude is has been essential to a remarkable turnaround for the science museum, a venerable Oklahoma City institution that went from nearly shuttering in the early 2000s to recording one of the biggest single days of attendance in its history during spring break 2016.

“We did look at closing the museum at one point, but realized because a lot of the artifacts that are from the Air Force or the National Air and Space Museum or the Navy or NASA, all of those artifacts, have to be returned at the museum’s cost should we end the loan … it was almost as expensive to close the museum as it was to keep it going. And this community deserved a great science museum,” said Don Otto, who retired last fall as the museum’s CEO and president.

“(Museum founder) John Kirkpatrick had a great vision for this place. He wanted a place where families could come and learn about science and the arts, and it would be a shame to lose that. So, we set out to figure it out. Made a lot of changes. Virtually everything changed because it had to.”

Making a difference

Marshall admitted she has trouble recalling birthdays and anniversaries, but she has no problem remembering June 6, 1994, the date she started working at the museum then known as the Omniplex. Nor does she struggle to remember what she was doing in the summer of 1978, when she attended camp in the museum’s current home just a few months after it moved from State Fair Park.

“It wasn’t until I had already worked here for maybe five or six years that my sister uncovered a paper that I wrote about how I loved this place and I wanted to work here someday – that I’d written in fifth grade,” she said. “I know firsthand what an institution like this can do for a person’s life. We say, ‘Oh, we change people’s lives.’ No, we really can change people’s lives. I would not have a degree in physics or have studied chemistry if I had not had those two summers at this place where I felt I found my people.”

By the time her sister unearthed that paper, however, the museum was struggling.

“There were times that we weren’t sure how we were going to meet payroll. For a variety of reasons, there hadn’t been a lot of recapitalization done, so there wasn’t anything new on the floor. People would say, ‘I’ve seen all of that; let me know when you bring in a new traveling exhibit and I’ll come back,’” said Otto, who came to the OKC museum in 2004 after retiring from the Fort Worth (Texas) Museum of Science and History.

“We focused on the idea of making this the greatest science museum in the country. … We focused on families, focused on individuals and tried to figure out how to make that individual experience something special.”

While the staff got creative redesigning and building new exhibits, a couple of big traveling shows helped boost interest: “Titanic: The Artifact Exhibit” set a museum attendance record in 2003, and "Our Body: The Universe Within,” a collection of human bodies dissected and preserved in a plasticized state, drew thousands of fascinated visitors in 2007.

“That allowed us to begin to plow revenue … beyond expenses back into the museum,” Otto said. “People started taking notice, and the Reynolds Foundation said, ‘I think we want to be a part of that.’ So that really has moved the museum to a new level.”

Making a comeback

In 2007, the institution changed its name from Omniplex to Science Museum Oklahoma and received a $7.2 million grant from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation to launch the Oklahoma Museum Network, which Marshall oversaw for several years. The grant allowed the museum to develop hands-on exhibits to debut in Oklahoma City and then send to four partner museums around the state.

It was another catalyst, but also a chance for the museum to prove itself. When the museum embarked a few years ago on a capital campaign to fund extensive improvements, the foundation gave a $12 million grant.

On Father’s Day 2015, the museum unveiled one of the biggest changes in its almost six-decade history: a 20,000-square-foot, $9 million family exhibition named CurioCity that was designed to teach children, parents and grandparents about science through exploration and creative play.

The next phase of the two-year, multimillion-dollar renovation was finished in time for spring break 2016 and included a new entrance and gift shop, improved parking lot and remodeled art space.  

“What CurioCity has done for us and what the community thinks of it is a new high bar for us,” FitzSimons said. “We’re still astonished at the numbers of people that are coming in. More and more. We’re setting records most months still, and CurioCity has been open a year and a half. The community has really embraced the change in the new entrance, in CurioCity, but they also have a passion for everything that’s there that’s always been there.”

Making plans

The museum’s board is not only finishing up its $22.4 million capital campaign that paid for the remodel but also looking ahead to the future.

“Having the board recognize the quality of Sherry Marshall and install her as the next president of this organization is terrific,” Otto said. “She’ll do a great job. It’s been fun watching her grow. … She’s that woman who at 9 years old said, ‘That’s what I want to do when I grow up.’ And she did.”

In the immediate future are plans to bring back the strange plasticized bodies that were such a hit a decade ago. The related traveling exhibit called "Bodies Revealed" opens April 29 at the museum.

But the staff and board also are looking further ahead and pondering questions like what might be done with the former dome theater space.

“I know that we want to see how we can involve our community more. We want to find projects that are meaningful and big and fun,” Marshall said.

“Every single day – and it sounds really cheesy – it blows my mind,” she added, getting emotional. “Every time I walk in the door, I’m blown away by what this place was, what it means and what it’s become. … It’s an overwhelming emotion. I’m so fortunate to be a part of it, to have seen that evolution.”

GOING ON

“Bodies Revealed”

When: Opens April 29.

Where: Science Museum Oklahoma, 2020 Remington Place.

Information: www.sciencemuseumok.org.

-BAM

Visiting Midtown today, it's easy to forget the neighborhood could have taken an entirely different direction in 2003 when St. Anthony Hospital contemplated a move to southwest Oklahoma City.

The historic Plaza Court building across the street from the hospital was empty and dark. Prostitutes and drug dealers frequented a motel nestled among the hospital's campus structures.

Boarded-up buildings, flop houses and dive bars had turned the neighborhood into a truly worthy candidate for a blight declaration.

Physicians were seeking to go to the suburbs, developers were offering incentives to the hospital to make the move, as well, and civic leaders were stunned to learn St. Anthony was indeed contemplating abandoning its historic home for a new $250 million campus.

Civic leaders, led by then-Mayor Kirk Humphreys, made their best pitch to the hospital to stick it out. The city and county both pledged to assist the hospital in bringing the neighborhood back to life.

The turnaround was relatively rapid. Plaza Court and surrounding properties are now a bustling mix of restaurants, shops, salons, offices and housing. The area is home to both a YMCA and a bowling alley.

When I first started covering the plight of the neighborhood and the uncertain future of its anchor, about half of the hospital's patients were traveling from out-of-town.

If they exited from Interstate 235 onto NW 10, they passed the Packard Building at Robinson Avenue, which was then largely empty except for Pat's Lounge with a storefront consisting of plywood painted blue.

If they were exiting the old alignment of Interstate 40 onto Walker Avenue, they passed another stretch of vacant commercial properties and empty lots before crossing NW 10, the gateway to St. Anthony.

A walk to some of the doctor's offices, meanwhile, might have required passing the Brass Lantern Inn, which in 2003 drew 33 calls for police and where at least one slaying transpired.

Those views now are entirely different. The motel is gone, the flop houses were transformed by Midtown Renaissance Group into upscale apartments. Several hundred apartments have been built from the ground up, including The Edge and Lift.

People feel safe walking, jogging and strolling with their children through Midtown.

When civic leaders rallied around St. Anthony, the hospital pledged to invest $220 million in rebuilding the campus established by Catholic nuns in 1898.

The recent completion of a new emergency room and ambulatory wing for the hospital marks the completion of that plan. The hospital campus is no longer a mishmash of medical buildings built around seedy motels and boarded-up storefronts.

The whole story seems like a commonsense outcome for Midtown. But in 2003, the city came very close to seeing a different direction for the hospital — one that would have left Midtown with a giant, abandoned cluster of buildings that might have doomed the neighborhood to a blight that would have taken years to recover.

The $220 million master plan changed everything for Midtown, and while it's done, the area's transformation continues. Both Midtown and the hospital will continue to evolve. Several developers have joined with St. Anthony in turning Midtown into an exciting mixed-use urban neighborhood.

But have no doubt: Without St. Anthony, you don't have Midtown.

Jim Sharrock wasn't enthusiastic about the doctor's recommendation.

For 40 years, Sharrock had lived with a condition that caused his heart's wall to be thicker than normal.

And throughout his adult life, physicians repeatedly told him that, most likely, he wouldn't ever need a heart transplant.

But, at 67, there he was, at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, with a cardiologist telling him the opposite.

"What if we just waited until things got worse?" Sharrock asked her.

"I don't think you have very long," the physician said.

"How long?" Sharrock asked.

"Less than a year," she said.

That got Sharrock's attention.

"Well — OK," he said.

And with that, Sharrock soon was placed on the organ transplant waiting list.

Sharrock originally was hesitant about the surgery because he would receive not only a new heart but also a new liver.

Over time, Sharrock's failing heart had placed too much pressure on his liver, and, as a result, he needed both organ transplants to ensure his odds of survival, and beyond that, a better quality of life.

"Ninety-five percent of the people who saw me, the first thing they said was, 'You look great' and then (they had) this big smile," the 69-year-old Oklahoma City attorney said.

Getting a diagnosis

In 1975, Sharrock went to the doctor for a physical exam as part of a requirement for a life insurance policy that he wanted to buy. He didn't know that visit would be so memorable.

During the visit, the doctor asked Sharrock, then 27, if anyone had ever told him that he had a heart murmur.

Throughout adolescence and early adulthood, Sharrock had been healthy. He played sports and was in the military. And as a part of that, he had undergone several physical exams. No one had ever mentioned a heart murmur.

Soon, Sharrock was diagnosed with what's now known as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the heart muscle enlarges and thickens without an obvious cause, according to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

Essentially, the wall between the lower chambers of Sharrock's heart was thicker than normal.

Often, the first symptom of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is sudden death, a term Sharrock heard an unsettlingly high number of times in the early days of having the disorder.

For years, he took medicine and lived a healthy life.

In 1993, though, he developed an atrial flutter, a type of abnormal heartbeat.

Over the next several years, Sharrock's heart would go out of rhythm, and usually, his body could fix it naturally.

However, over the time, the fluttering — which felt like a small bird was flying around in his chest — worsened.

Sharrock had two procedures to create scar tissues inside and outside the heart.

The first was a catheter ablation in 2002. His physician went into the interior of Sharrock's heart through a vein and used various types of energy to burn specific areas of the right atrium.

During the second procedure, his physician and medical team made several small incisions in Sharrock's chest and, using small cameras, lights and wires, they burned the top part of his left atrium.

But that didn't solve Sharrock's heart issues.

In 2008, Sharrock realized he had congestive heart failure. As a result, his body retained fluid, and he didn't have much energy to do anything physical.

"2008 was the hardest year of my life, with the possible exception of last year," Sharrock said. "Because in 2008, I was getting worse. There didn't seem to be a solution. ... I really just did not have much hope."

His doctors operated again, this time implanting a defibrillator that also served as a pacemaker.

Yet again, things went well for Sharrock — for a little while.

In 2015, he started retaining a noticeable amount of fluid, mainly in his abdomen. Sharrock's doctor soon diagnosed him with a nonalcoholic form of cirrhosis of the liver.

At this point, Sharrock didn't know what solutions were left.

In September of that year, Sharrock went to his fraternity's pledge class reunion at the University of Oklahoma.

There, he talked with a fraternity brother who was a cardiologist in Texas. Sharrock updated his friend on his health issues.

After the reunion, the friend called and asked him more questions about his liver issues.

The friend recommended that Sharrock try to get on the heart transplant list as soon as he could. He told Sharrock that his liver problems likely were related to his heart. Sharrock would soon find out his friend was right.

Getting the call

Next, a family friend recommended that Sharrock go to Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas, which has an experienced transplant team.

In late 2015, Sharrock and his wife, Nancy, went to the appointment at Baylor. They originally thought it would be a brief consult, but the doctor told Sharrock that he needed to be hospitalized. He was sicker than he realized.

Sharrock soon was told that he needed the dual transplant, a procedure that Baylor offers.

Dr. Shelley Hall, chief of transplant cardiology at Baylor, said when she saw Sharrock, she knew he wasn't in immediate danger, but his condition was only going to worsen.

In her 20-year career, Hall has been a part of six heart-liver surgeries. They're fairly rare, she said.

However, overall, Sharrock was healthy, and the team was optimistic that he would do well post-transplants.

"He was healthy — that sounds kind of funny when you're talking about somebody who needs transplant — but that's one of the nuances of transplants," Hall said.

"Their organ has to be sick enough to need it, but their body has to be well enough to go through it."

Sharrock was placed on the organ list Dec. 18. At that point, he and Nancy chose to move to Dallas, temporarily. They weren't sure how long it would take to get a match.

"Through most of that time, we were thinking, 'Gee, is this match going to happen?' " Sharrock said. "... We never really had time to worry very much because we got the call on Feb. 18."

Sharrock's surgery took 12 hours. First, the heart team performed its transplant, and then the liver team came in. After the liver team finished, the heart team returned to close Sharrock.

Life after surgery

Sharrock didn't wake up for three days after surgery.

And he didn't immediately feel better. His doctors pointed out that Sharrock went through two of the most traumatic surgeries at the same time. It would take awhile.

However, once he was on his feet, those feet took Sharrock back to the golf course.

Over the past year, Sharrock has restarted activities that he enjoys, including a regular golf game with friends.

Overall, Sharrock says he has become a more tolerant person, especially toward people who seem to be experiencing health issues.

He can remember not long ago when he was struggling to keep up with his family at football games and on trips.

Sharrock is grateful that, throughout his transplant experience, he was able to have hope — hope that he would be healthy again and able to do the things he loves. He's keenly aware that, for many people who suffer major medical issues, regaining a healthy life is often not imaginable or possible.

The transplants changed everything for him.

"That puts me in a position where my life expectancy is pretty much what it would be for a normal person my age, so for me, it's real positive," Sharrock said. "... Even when you get a bypass, and you go, 'Man, I've dodged a bullet there,' but you still know you've got heart disease. I don't have heart disease any more. ... They say a heart transplant is not a cure, but I haven't quite figured out why they say that."

Talita DeNegri wasn't sure what to think about the offer to become principal of Mount St. Mary High School 13 years ago. But after an evening of prayer and discussion with family, she agreed to a homecoming that helped spur a transformation of the south Oklahoma City private school.

“I had never been an administrator before,” said DeNegri, who was teaching at the time. “But I leaned on my memories of my time at Mount St. Mary and relied heavily on my trust in the values that my parents had instilled in me.”

DeNegri had graduated from the school in 1980 but also had spent her childhood running through the historic school's hallways and classrooms with her dad working on the school staff.

She had returned to a place she loved, but the school's foundation was anything but solid.

With just 220 students, "The Mount" was heavily in debt, offered just two advance placement courses and was "on the verge of closing," DeNegri said.

But 13 years later, the school's enrollment has nearly doubled, advanced placement classes have expanded to 18, and a $5.5 million construction project is underway that is breathing new life into the school that was nuns established in 1903.

“The very first day of being principal I whispered to a friend that I was so scared,” DeNegri said. “But his words to me were, 'It's just us, it's your family.' I've embraced this family, and we are thriving.”

'Growth and progress'

Five Sisters of Mercy traveled to what was then Indian Territory to establish a school and eventually made their way to a hill south of present-day downtown Oklahoma City. The school was originally a boarding school for young women and has evolved into its present state as a coed private high school that is jointly owned by the Sisters of Mercy and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City.

“That partnership started in 2000, and it was such a gesture of trust on each sponsor,” DeNegri said. “The Sisters donated $2 million, the archdiocese donated $2 million, and then the Mount community raised $2 million.”

DeNegri said the original mission of service by the Sisters of Mercy is also a mission for the school.

“We nurture that expectation with our students through every program that exists that we are to be leaders of service,” DeNegri said. “Our students need to live it, they need to smell it, they need to feel it.”

The construction project currently underway at the school will include an 11,000-square-foot building that will include a 300 seat cafeteria and 1,884-square-foot kitchen.

“I am delighted by the archdiocese's deep involvement in the life and mission of Mount St. Mary Catholic High School,” the Most Rev. Paul S. Coakley, archbishop of Oklahoma City, said at last year's groundbreaking of the new project. "The growth and progress that this historic event represents is a demonstration that this cherished school is moving in a direction that will provide families of Oklahoma City and the surrounding communities a strong, viable and sustaining Catholic education for years to come."

The school also is launching a new program that DeNegri said will allow students with special needs the opportunity to not only attend the school but integrate fully in its classes and programs.

The new program is just one of many additions made in recent years that has expanded the roaster of opportunities at Mount St Mary.

"It's a small school, but you get every opportunity as a student," said Paige Williams, vice president of the school's board and a 2003 graduate. "You have choir, robotics, all the sports and just all these opportunities that didn't exist when I was there in school."

Williams, who joined the board in 2013, said the school's turnaround benefit from a team of people and a renewed commitment from the school's community.

"But her passion and commitment is what I point to in making The Mount into what it has become," Williams said about DeNegri.

What Mount St. Mary has become is a school tightly connected to its past, while rapidly moving toward a new identity.

"We had to let go of the way things used to be, but we needed to move forward while still holding onto the traditions," DeNegri said. "It was almost like we needed to get to know ourselves again and figure out where we wanted to get to."