Item 01
Western Electric Console
1949 · Statewide dispatch
The original console used by Patrol HQ. Reconstructed with help from a former dispatcher; powered up daily for the audio tour.
Before cell towers, before computers, the Patrol ran on a single statewide radio frequency and the voices of dispatchers who knew every trooper by car number. This gallery preserves the equipment — and the people — that made statewide service possible.
In 1937, a trooper east of Tulsa could not call a trooper west of Lawton. Statewide coordination meant pulling over at a gas station and asking to use the phone. The Patrol's first communications office was a single Western Electric console in Oklahoma City, manned around the clock by two dispatchers.
This gallery reconstructs that console, pairs it with field radios from every decade, and ends at a working modern dispatch terminal. Visitors put on a headset and listen to real (anonymized) call recordings — from a 1962 highway emergency to a 2019 weather rescue.
The original console used by Patrol HQ. Reconstructed with help from a former dispatcher; powered up daily for the audio tour.
A vehicle-mount field radio. Originally installed in cruiser No. 47; donated with the cruiser by Garfield County in 2017.
The Patrol's first transistor handheld. Visitors may pick it up — battery is removed; weight is original.
A complete day of dispatch entries from the morning of June 14, 1968. Handwritten in carbon-copy pen by Dispatcher M. Reed.
The original troop-boundary map that hung in HQ for thirty-one years. Pinholes mark every active call from 1952 to 1983.
A working modern dispatch terminal, decommissioned from Troop A in 2023. Visitors may sit and watch a recorded call replay.
The communications gallery is in the mansion's ground-floor west wing — the original Marland telephone room. Wheelchair accessible; headphones available at the listening station.