Mary Beth Babcock named Oklahoma Today's 2011 Oklahoman of the Year

There's Something about Mary Beth by Sheilah Bright

Once upon a childhood, there was a smart, shy girl who liked to let her hair blow and her mind wander as she rode a pink Huffy through the tree-lined neighborhoods of Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Back home, she’d throw a faded blanket over an old table on the back porch and dream about cash registers. Sometimes, she’d steal her brother’s Star Wars characters and hide them under the family piano.

What kind of adult does a child like that grow up to be? Creative genius comes to mind.

Meet Mary Beth Babcock, the thirty-nine-year-old geek-chic cheerleader for all things Okie who makes you want to wear state pride like a party dress. Her Dwelling Spaces store in Tulsa’s Blue Dome District blew the dust off a dilapidated section of downtown back in 2006 and triggered a technicolor arts revolution splashed across the state in every form from funky murals to intimate book readings to jam sessions to graphic T-shirts. 
If you don’t know her, you likely know her handiwork.

“Sometimes, I look around and think, ‘How did this happen?’” says Babcock as she fires off a list of projects (Booksmart Tulsa, Public Arts Project 66, the Blue Dome Arts Festival, Tulsa Tough, This Land Press) that have either found a launching pad or were borne from the creative spring that resides in her feel-good space. 

Michael Mason, editor and founder of This Land Press, a Tulsa media company, inaugurated his first issue of This Land in May 2010 at Dwelling Spaces and chose the store as the publication’s merchandising hub. It wasn’t just because, as he’s said on the company’s website, “Mary Beth Babcock is ten pounds of Okie enthusiasm in a five-pound bag.” The rest of the story is that he recognized her ability to connect the dots on the creative drawing board.

“She rides the Okie zeitgeist like a bronco buster,” says Mason. “She’s introduced me to Oklahoma artists and musicians I would not have known about otherwise. It’s become something of a Tulsa truism that if you want to get on the scene in Oklahoma, you need to get in front of Mary Beth. She’s one of the few shop owners who has managed to turn her store into a conversation with the community, and it’s earned her the embrace of nearly everyone in Tulsa.”

A true goddess of gab, this people person gushes with personality best evinced by the eclectic offerings at her store, which feels a lot like a hip apartment. Robots. Flaming Lips Hot Sauce. Cuddle Monsters. Okie Grown T-shirts.

“When I started the store, back when there was really nothing down here and everyone thought I was crazy, I wanted to be surrounded by robot artwork. I searched the Internet, and Eric Joyner popped up,” Babcock says of one of her favorite artists, a San Francisco native. “I’ve just always loved robots. They’re metal guys with personality.”

In 2006, a college friend, Jack Allen, agreed to sell her the name of his furniture store. With his guidance, Babcock moved her version of Dwelling Spaces into his former storage space, a building owned by Michael and Patricia Sager on South Detroit Avenue.

It’s taken a steel-tough exterior protecting a sentimental gooey center for Babcock to wage a one-woman war in the retail battleground. On the first day of business in August 2006, she sold four items totaling $108. She kept plugging away, researching Oklahoma-based goods that oozed personality.

Soon, Babcock rolled out a welcome mat and invited musicians, authors, and artists to hang out to sing songs and tell tales. If customers needed a reason to venture out to the Blue Dome District, she would give them more than one. Art feeds the soul, so she would feed the art.

“I’m single. I have a dog and a cat. This store is my life, and I want my life to include music and books and art,” says Babcock. “From there, things just started to happen.”

Jeff Martin is more than a regular customer. He has introduced hundreds of people to Dwelling Spaces by hosting book events there, and in return, the store has filled his Booksmart Tulsa organization with a growing collection of people who love the written word.

“With her ongoing, and somewhat pioneering, commitment to local products and artists, Mary Beth lent her stamp of approval and energy to Booksmart Tulsa from day one and continues to do so,” he says.
Along the way, the shopkeeper’s stockpile of friends has grown as much as her business. This year, store sales are up 12 percent over last year—an achievement at a time when business forecasts are about as gloomy as an Oklahoma February.

In June 2010, she perked things up by opening JoeBot’s Coffee Bar, featuring local Topéca Coffee, inside the store so people who were hanging out could sip on something good. Plus, Babcock likes the smell of good coffee. 

Like all things Babcock, JoeBot’s served coffee as art, with trained baristas blending cream and bean into a confection that makes folks pull a stool up to the bar and linger over aromatic elixirs.

Books, music, robots, art, conversation, coffee: What more could you want from a shopping experience or a workplace? In the world according to Mary Beth Babcock, change is as comfortable as an old coat, and a colorful one, no doubt. 

With the help of Oklahoma artists Rick Sinnett and Jake Harms, she’s planning eleven elaborate murals to transform buildings along historic Route 66. The idea was born after Babcock met Sinnett at a Flaming Lips listening party at Tulsa’s Circle Cinema. She fell hard for his pen-and-ink drawing of Indian Warrior and bought it for her downtown apartment in the Mayo Hotel. Before long, she started imagining it oversized, maybe on a blank exterior wall. Her “what if?” wheel started spinning. Why stop at one? Why not let murals spring up all over Oklahoma’s stretch of America’s favorite highway?

The Public Arts Project 66 was born. Babcock can now see Indian Warrior blooming on the Rose Pawn Shop just over the store’s shoulder, and Guardian of the Mother Road has become a showstopper at an old drive-in theater in El Reno. Nobody was happier to see that happen than Tulsa’s favorite father of the Mother Road, author Michael Wallis.

“Mary Beth is a hoot,” he says. “I like nothing better than introducing out-of-town visitors to the hippest goodwill ambassador Tulsa has ever produced. Spend thirty seconds in her presence, and if you’re not absolutely charmed and energized, then, my friend, you have to be brain-dead.” 

How does someone learn to quickstep among rattling off Oklahoma trivia, serving up go-getter goodwill, and feeding the artistic soul? Babcock credits her early days as a college student working at Stillwater hot spot Eskimo Joe’s. She started as a hostess, then delivered mountains of cheese fries as a waitress before she figured out that what she really wanted to do was something she was naturally good at: selling stuff.

While completing her bachelor’s degree in retail merchandising at Oklahoma State University, she jumped into her new job in the quality control department on the brand’s retail side with the intention of soaking up every drop of expertise she could in hopes that one day, she might own a store of her own. For Eskimo Joe’s founder and CEO Stan Clark, it was evident that there was something different about Babcock.

“She was, and is, about as delightful a person as you’re ever going to meet,” says Clark. “She was a sponge, a constant learner. As good as she was at every job she did, what you really remember about her is that great big smile. We still love to see her.”

When she’s not changing the way Oklahomans see their state, selling funky T-shirts, orchestrating in-store concerts, or delivering Okie-inspired gifts to visiting musicians, Babcock likes to cozy up in her eclectic apartment at the Mayo Hotel. A few years ago, she decided to sell her Midtown home and live the downtown life in a space where her vintage furniture sidles up to modern art bolstered by salvaged architectural gems like a limestone rock from her elementary school, which was torn down years ago. 

It’s been a wild, crazy ride from those bicycle days in Bartlesville, but childlike awe still infuses many of Babcock’s business decisions. You can see a whisper of the kid who loved macaroni art and inflatable letters in the edgy creativity that lines the walls of her store. Watch her jump on her cruiser bicycle, and you get a quick flashback of a Huffy princess bursting through the neighborhood.

Then there’s the “We’ve got spirit. Yes, we do! We’ve got spirit. How about you?” of her life.

When she tried out for cheerleader at Bartlesville’s Central Junior High in the 1980s, Babcock lacked an important element, but it didn’t matter. She had a secret weapon.

“My mom, who died last year, said that I ran out and did the most horrific cartwheel you can imagine,” says Babcock. “But she told me, ‘You jumped up with a big smile that made everyone forget about that awful cartwheel.’”

Her godmother, Beth Maddux of Bartlesville, remembers the cheerleading tryouts as a few minutes out of a day that define the kind of person Babcock was as a child and is as an adult.

“She and my daughter, Leigh, both tried out for cheerleader, but Leigh didn’t make it,” says Maddux. “When they pulled up in the driveway, I could tell something was not good. Mary Beth jumped out of that car and walked with Leigh up to the door so she wouldn’t have to announce it alone. Once she’s on your team, she’s there.”

It didn’t surprise Maddux that her goddaughter made the cut. When she decided to try out, she walked up to a cheerleader who lived across the street and asked her to teach her what she would need to know to make the squad.

“She’s always lived her life with an attitude of ‘I know what I want, I can work hard, and I can have it,’” says Maddux. “And she wants to work just as hard to make you feel good. If you don’t, she wants to know what she can do to make you happier.” 

Babcock’s river-wide smile and optimism are working double-time these days as she puts her personality magic to use stirring up good things for the state. Blessed with the ability to draw people in and convince them to do something positive, Tulsa’s poster girl for state pride isn’t one to rest on her laurels. She does, however, recognize her ability to make good things happen.

“At the end of the day, I hope I have encouraged someone to follow her own passion,” says Babcock. “That is success to me.”

The story of Mary Beth Babcock isn’t so much a story of “local girl does good.” It’s more “local girl does Oklahoma good.” 

“I owe it to this state,” she says, “to keep this up.”  

Dwelling Spaces will host the Space Cadet Collective: Employee Art Show on January 28 and Illustrations by David Bizzaro on February 25. 119 South Detroit Avenue, (918) 582-1033 or dwellingspaces.net.