Rund Abdelfatah
speaker
598 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 19 Jul
Rund Abdelfatah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
But I think he might have been the kind of a guy that pretty soon you'd turn around if he walked into a room, you know, to see who that was.
Sy was rapidly becoming a local leader in Tulsa.
Farmers went to him for loans.
And the community voted for him to be on the board of county commissioners, even though he wasn't running in the election.
Was he like, as far as we know, was he a good orator?
Yes, golden-tongued orator.
He was a twinkly-eyed guy.
He would sit down and talk to anybody.
And I don't think that he cared if people were barefooted or had servants with him.
He was just a real universal kind of a guy and very smart.
and very committed to what he was doing.
What he was doing was building roads.
And he found a way to do it without money from the federal government or the state of Oklahoma.
In 1912, he raised $25,000 from private donors to build roads.
And all the while, he was rubbing elbows with state senators to get laws passed that would make it easier for county officials to approve and break ground on roads in their communities without having to deal with red tape at the state level.
We know Cy hated being four wheels deep in the mud as much as the next guy.
But Susan says his obsession with roads was also about something bigger.
He knew this issue would one day become existential for his community.
In that part of the world, I guess in most of the world, even still today, it's all about money.
In the Midwest and on the frontier, a road could totally change a place, not just in the obvious ways, by building up an economy and making commerce easier for everyone, but by attracting new people, new settlers, and maybe for the first time, visitors, tourists.
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