From the 1970s: KOTV's Chughole of the Week

A friend recently posted a photo showing a large and longstanding pothole, aka chuckhole, aka chughole, that had been declared Lake DOT, with waterfront property for sale: It's almost certainly an AI-enhanced photo, but it's funny, and it reminded me of the real-world, light-hearted things KOTV (Tulsa channel 6) would put in and around chugholes in the 1970s to dramatize the terrible state of Tulsa streets. Back in 2012, when KOTV was moving from the 3rd and Frankfort farm equipment showroom it had been occupying since 1949 to the new Griffin Media HQ, the station posted a lot of video from their video archives. This web article features 13 different examples of KOTV's long-running "Chughole of the Week" series, a regular feature on mid-1970s Friday night news broadcasts:

Time to take a peek into the video vault, back to the mid 1970s. Back then, viewers consistently called and complained about the condition of the streets, so we developed a Friday feature called "Chughole of the Week. Viewers nominated them, then one was selected to be featured on Friday. Reporters could be as creative as they wanted to be, so they took the opportunity to relax a bit, and have a little fun.... There was another chughole in April of 1975 they called the Academy-award winning chughole. They awarded a trophy - actually a basketball trophy, but you get the idea. From Christmas Day of 1975, the Chughole of the Week came complete with wrapped gifts for "driving through a chughole wonderland." Told you reporters could let their creative imaginations run free. Rex Daugherty was the face of chughole of the week lots of times. One week he interviewed a guy they called the "chughole watcher."... In 1979, Daugherty likened a street full of chugholes to a football defense beating up on the neighborhood kids. He even had cheerleaders cheering the city on to chughole repair.

Over the years, many KOTV veterans wrote about the Chughole of the Week on TulsaTVMemories.com. In May 1999, John Hillis wrote:

Somebody asked about "The Chughole of the Week," a feature that was well-established by the time I arrived at KOTV, but was one of those things born out of desparation to fill that 60 minute newscast. You found a large hole in the street, and figured out a set-up to feature it. One gem that was before my time (which Doug Dodd told me about when I was there for my job interview) involved having the T-U men's chorus in full tuxes standing in a pothole on S. Yale, singing "The Whiffenpoof Song." Yale...get it? Another was to use commercial spokesmen to do chughole pitches. I can still hear John F. Lawhon saying, "If you're looking for the best chughole buy in Oklahoma..." We also did holes with (I think) the Guy Henshall Shadetree Mechanic and the jeweler whose name escapes me, but we filled the hole with rhinestones for his thing and shot it with a star filter. It was in retrospect a kinda dumb feature, and we probably milked the situations too many times before we all finally ran out of ideas and variations (in short, a lot like TV today!), but it was uniquely Tulsa. I remember the consultants from McHugh and Hoffman visiting, watching it, and being puzzled, like it was in French or something. Like a lot of the back half of the 6 newscast, it was both deadpan, and ironic, (and a little weird) all at once. The deadpan and irony had a lot to do with Clayton, and obviously, the "Letters" segment he closed with was the primary example.

Rex Daugherty followed up:

Clayton Vaughn let me do absolutely ANYTHING for a chughole of the week. Being a big goof, I thought it was great --- a chance to be silly in front of 100-thousand people every week. One week I got little toy wind up Godzillas and let them churn around in a chug hole -- I got some neighborhood girls to stand way down the street and run around screaming .... it was, how you say, "forced perspective."... Once Clayton let me spend a hundred bucks to haul the KOTV grand piano out to a street off Admiral and Sheridan ... I hired a TU pianist, rented a tuxedo and bought "Mendelson's Spring Song" from Saied's music company. However, first -- and I never told Clayton this ... I wasted half a day seeing I could figure out how to play the song myself -- finally I called this guy I knew at TU to come do the deal. It worked. The piano was kind of cockeyed in the chug - chuck hole ... and Dave played away. Clayton loved it.

The public disgust with the state of Tulsa streets led to the failure of a street-improvement bond issue in December 1975 and the decision of Sid Patterson, Commissioner of Streets and Public Property, not to seek a third two-year term in 1976:

Patterson said he has been ambivalent in recent weeks about whether to seek election to his third consecutive term as street commissioner, a post he called Monday a "no-win job." "I want to get out from under this 'chughole joke," Patterson said. "I think there's been a character assassination that's made my image a joke in the community." His official announcement mentioned frustrations and gratifications of the past four years. Patterson said he's pleased to have been part of the start of programs such as a systematic street maintenance program, a tree-planting effort, and the upsurge in efforts to solve flooding and drainage problems.... Patterson showed disappointment with the recent defeat of his second proposed street bond issue. He said he is "discouraged with the rumors ... the old myths and the old lies such as 'I'm against voting money for new streets until they fix the old ones.' Shortly after Patterson was elected in 1972, an administrative reorganization of the street commissioner's departments placed virtually all units under control of City Engineer Harold Miller. A strain between Patterson and Miller has been openly discussed at City Hall since.

Chugholes were also a topic of contention during the 1976 mayoral debate, in which incumbent Mayor Bob LaFortune took flack from his primary opponent Mary "Sunshine" Watson and Democrat challenger Betsy Horowitz:

Both feminine candidates got some licks in at the mayor before he arrived. LaFortune explained he thought the meeting, which began at 10 a.m., was scheduled for 10:30. Mrs. Horowitz leveled her guns at chugholes and flood control programs as well as the city's crime problem. "Where has your money gone?" she asked. "Why has our administration spent money on studies and statues in front of fire stations when there was not enough to repair the city's streets? I warned of floods in 1970, but in 1974, people were sitting on their roofs while the city was spending money on Riverpark and $26 million to build a 200. "I like animals and pretty parks as well as anyone, but I think our priorities are out of order. I have made bureaucracy work from the outside. Think what I could do from the inside." Mrs. Horowitz said she would publish city financial reports quarterly, install a suggestion box for citizens and operate one day a week from a mobile office "that would go where the people are."

Looking back, the dire state of the streets in the mid-1970s might reflect the costs the city imposed on itself after the massive 1966 annexation, which tripled Tulsa's area overnight. Tulsa leaders continued to push for expressway construction, River Parks, and a new 71st Street bridge over the Arkansas River, instead of focusing on basic needs. EDITOR'S NOTE 2026/09/20: Four nights ago, as I was nearly done editing this entry, my hosting provider decided it was time to upgrade the server, including a new version of the language on which the content management system for this blog depends. Features that had been deprecated but legal were suddenly illegal. While the site itself remained in operation (thanks to my stubborn insistence on static pages and a minimum of dynamic content), I could neither add new content or edit existing content. There wasn't a coherent list of problematic syntax, so there was a lot of trial and error. Four days later (amidst many other responsiblities and problems), as of a few minutes ago (approximately 11:15 pm, 2026/09/20), I managed to fix the last of the newly-illegal syntax, and the login prompt has returned. Praise the Lord!
- September 16, 2026 at 08:55PM
From the 1970s: KOTV's Chughole of the Week
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