The Golden Driller: Seventy-Six Feet of Oklahoma Confidence
Near Tulsa, Oklahoma
He stands about seventy-six feet tall and weighs about forty-three thousand five hundred pounds. His left hand rests on the crown of an actual oil derrick. His right hand sits on his hip. He has a hard hat, a short-sleeved shirt, and the posture of a man who is entirely comfortable being one of the tallest freestanding statues in the United States.
The Golden Driller has stood at the entrance to the Tulsa Expo Square fairgrounds since nineteen seventy-nine, when the permanent version was installed. The first version appeared in nineteen sixty-six for the International Petroleum Exposition, which Tulsa hosted regularly beginning in nineteen twenty-three as the Oil Capital of the World. He was made of a material that did not survive the Oklahoma weather, and was rebuilt. The permanent statue is reinforced concrete covered in fiberglass. He is painted the color of crude oil money, which in Tulsa is golden.
Oklahoma named him the Official State Monument in nineteen seventy-nine. He has appeared on postcards, on novelty mugs, in the background of thousands of photographs, and in the opening sequence of the television series Tulsa King. He is, by most measures, the most recognizable object in Tulsa, which is saying something in a city that has the Boston Avenue Methodist Church, the Philtower, and the Council Oak.
He faces west, toward the city, as if watching over it. The derrick his hand rests on is real. The oil it represents is mostly gone. The driller remains.
