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Oklahoma pro-capitalism museum met ironic end [The Oklahoman, Oklahoma City](Daily Oklahoman (Oklahoma City) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Oct. 26--The last remnants of Enterprise Square USA are covered with a thick coating of dust in what is now a storage room at Oklahoma Christian University. A grand, three-story circular arena-type structure that once housed the museum's famed Venture Game is now dark and stripped down to its bare concrete pillars. The Venture Game was Enterprise Square's grand finale, where countless Oklahoma school children played at making pretend fortunes as investors, oil producers and cattle ranchers using 47 computer terminals featuring cutting-edge, touch-screen technology. "It's kind of sad," said Stafford North, distinguished professor of Bible at Oklahoma Christian, who oversaw much of the development of the museum. Now 82, North still has his office inside the Enterprise Square building at Oklahoma Christian. A museum dedicated to teaching children about the free enterprise system, it was ultimately economics that closed Enterprise Square after 17 years. "The technology quickly became outdated and it would have been very, very expensive to replace," North said. Left behind A few arcade games remain from the museum, tucked behind a collection of props used in student theatrical productions and other surplus furniture. One of the remaining games, which still has its antiquated computer monitor intact behind its faded blue acrylic panels, is called "Protect Your Rights." Players had to protect their rights to own property by shooting down potential invaders with a space ship. "The game is over when you have lost all of your rights or when the time runs out," players were instructed. Enterprise Square's interactive, animated exhibits drew national media coverage when the attraction opened in 1982. More than 600,000 visitors passed through Enterprise Square USA during its 17-year run. President Ronald Reagan even sent a message praising the new museum and its goal of helping to "popularize free enterprise concepts" for young people when it opened. A massive glass 20-person elevator that once carried Enterprise Square visitors past a giant wall of video screens is now little more than a cavernous cement shaft surrounded with a plywood railing. Hidden behind stacks of metal filing cabinets, patio heaters and folding chairs is some of the last remaining signage for the museum. The message "Be Enterprising!" in foot-tall letters once greeted visitors to the gift shop. Victim of geopolitics? In 1999, Oklahoma Christian University officials made the decision to close Enterprise Square. There have been attempts to revive the building and turn it into offices, classrooms, and and art gallery, but nothing has ever gotten off the ground. Oklahoma Christian still uses the endowment created to fund Enterprise Square to finance a speaker series at the school to promote values such as free enterprise and constitutional government, said Risa Forrester, vice president for admissions and marketing at Oklahoma Christian. However, after the end of the Cold War, the funding to revive Enterprise Square to its former glory just wasn't there, Forrester said. "After the Berlin Wall fell, and many former communist countries and former Soviet Union broke up, it wasn't quite as urgent as it had been," she said. Major undertaking A three-foot-tall brass plaque bearing the names of Enterprise Square donors still adorns the lobby of the mostly empty museum building, reading like a corporate who's who for Oklahoma in the early 1980s. Major donors to the project included Phillips Petroleum Co; Halliburton Co.; Getty Oil Co.; First National Bank of Oklahoma and Kerr McGee Corp. as well as General Electric, Quaker Oats and Exxon Corp. During the Cold War era, people seemed to rally around the importance of teaching the economic concepts of the free market system to school children, North said. "It was to compare the free enterprise system with socialism and educate young people about free enterprise," North said. "We wanted to promote capitalism, help people understand how the free enterprise system worked and principles like supply and demand." At a time when Oklahoma Christian had only about 1,000 students on campus, the small Christian liberal arts university managed to raise $10 million for construction and another $5 million to endow the museum in the span of about five years. "It was a big project and to see this huge thing get built and see all of the exhibits designed, then built in Denver and shipped here was rewarding," North said. All of the computer games and economic data gathered for the museum's Venture Game were created in-house by Oklahoma Christian students and alumni. "The seven-inch floppy master disc for all of this had to be mastered in Japan because nobody in the United States could do it," recalls North. Playing for history Bill Goad, Oklahoma Christian executive vice president was one of a group of recent Oklahoma Christian graduates in 1982 who had taken all of the computer science courses that the university had to offer at the time and helped develop the museum's arcade-style games on the Apple II platform. "There were only a few video games out at that point of time like Pong and Donkey Kong (that) had just been released," Goad said. "Some of our research for developing the games involved getting rolls of quarters and going to play those arcade games." Enterprise Square's Venture game used computer terminals with touch-screen technology, which was almost unheard of in the early 1980s. "Everyone has an iPad or and iPhone now, but it was was brand new technology then with these graphic terminals from Digital Equipment Corp.," Goad said. "We had to develop a lot of the code to even know what portion of the screen was being touched -- all of which is very archaic today." Memories of Enterprise Jon Fisher grew up in Oklahoma City, where he attended a private Christian school and recalls his class taking a field trip to Enterprise Square every year. Looking back, Fisher said he found some of the lessons taught by the museum disturbing. "It was like walking through an Ayn Rand book," Fisher said. "It nearly deified masters of industry and capitalist political figures. As though the people owed them something for their grace." With its pro-capitalism flourishes such as dollar bills featuring the animated heads of U.S. presidents that sang in praise of free enterprise, Enterprise Square had a definite 1980s zeitgeist. The museum also featured a "Great Talking Face of Government" with nine video screens that warned about governmental overreach. "It was a very rah-rah free economy, USA, Reagan-era sort of place," said Josh Ward, who grew up in rural McClain County and took several school field trips to Enterprise Square as a child. Oklahoma City resident Greg Elwell recalls school field trips to Enterprise Square as a fun break from class. He recalls seeing high-tech gadgets of the era, including a video phone that was a thing of awe in the days long before Skype and FaceTime. "Oklahoma City had a lot of wealth from oil, and Oklahoma City at the time, I think, was trying to create itself into a financial hub -- there was a big push for something that would teach our children about capitalism," Elwell said. More than anything, Elwell recalls the doughnut shop designed to teach children about supply and demand, although he remembers more about the fake doughnuts than the economics lesson from the exhibit. "I remember piles and piles of doughnuts. It was very fun -- it was like the Science Museum Oklahoma -- but for money." Ward also has the most vivid memories about the doughnut exhibit. "I was a little fat kid and they had what really looked like the most appetizing, beautiful doughnuts I had ever seen," Ward said. "I wish I could say that if I had been a little older I would have gotten more out of it, but all that comes to mind are these colorful doughnuts." ___ (c)2014 The Oklahoman Visit The Oklahoman at www.newsok.com Distributed by MCT Information Services |