About 200 people filled the banquet rooms at Lucky Star Casino in Watonga Tuesday evening for the community dinner. The event was a fill in for the old Chamber of Commerce banquet. Guests mingled and filled their glasses with tea or water prior to the beginning of the evening’s entertainment. City Manager Karrie Beth Little gave an overview of the progress and accomplishments made throughout the year. Introductions of special guests and city officials were made and the meal commenced. Guests filled their plates through a double serving line and returned to their seats. Soon the first speaker, John Morris of Bikes & BBQ took the podium. Once he had updated the audience on the upcoming event, Jared Cooper, director of rural services for the Oklahoma Department of Commerce spoke on what is required for rural towns to turn back the tide of abandonment and slow death and create a thriving community and economy.
Some of his ideas included starting with an honest conversation and asking the hard questions on what is good and bad about the town. Then citizens have to determine what they want their town to look like. Getting to where a town wants to be, Cooper said, begins with deciding where it is now. Then the work to get to the next level can start with determining the resources available.
Many of those resources are from state and federal programs. For instance, Cooper is tied in to a program that has some $29 million for developing factory sites. But those factories have to be constructed in areas where the schools are teaching the skill sets needed in the factories.
“We need to develop those partnerships,” he said. “A rising tide floats all boats.” For instance, if a single business benefits from a state or federal program, the employees need a place to live and they spend salary dollars in the town. The business needs products from other businesses. And so like ripples on a pond, the prosperity spreads.
“Oklahoma, Northwest Oklahoma, Watonga, are all primed for success,” Cooper said. “Now it takes someone to raise their hand and say ‘I’ll do the work. I’m the one to make it happen.’” Following Cooper’s address, Basil Taylor was presented with a lifetime achievement award. He has been the chairman of the board of First State Bank and a member of Oklahoma Bankers Association for more than 50 years. He grew up on a farm in the 1940s and said in an 2019 interview that “Raising cotton really helped you to consider a job in town.”
Taylor was recommended to Roy Shaw, who owned the bank at Canton, only to find the job was part-time. He took it anyway, telling a friend it ‘might work into something.’
He attended the graduate school of banking in Wisconsin in 1972 and spent 25 years at the Bank of Canton and the Watonga State Bank. He purchased First State Bank in 1982 with partner C.J. Benway.
Basil Taylor may well be the reason Loren Parham, the current president of First State, is in banking today. Taylor lent Parham money to purchase a show pig when he was in school. Throughout the community and the banking industry, there are multiple stories of the good Taylor has done for people and the community. The compiled stories went a long way toward him receiving the lifetime achievement award. He called his family ‘sneaky’ for keeping the award a secret and said Watonga is probably the best little town in the world.