Yahoo Movies Why a giant 'leg lamp' has a Californian in a hurry to transform a small Oklahoma city
The original "leg lamp" featured in the holiday classic "A Christmas Story" was a divisive "soft glow of electric sex gleaming in the window" in the Parker family home, but the much larger display in Chickasha, Oklahoma, is credited with helping inspire a California businessman to invest millions in the city's Main Street.
Either tale might seem as imaginative the BB-gun loving kid Ralphie in the holiday classic, and yet, anyone driving through downtown Chickasha can attest a 40-foot replica of the leg lamp, standing atop a 10-foot crate labeled “fragile,” is now on permanent display in this city of 16,000.
The same day a crane operator was dropping the giant lampshade into place, one of those who stopped to watch was Chet Hitt, a California businessman driving through town after a 40th reunion at his high school in nearby Anadarko, Oklahoma.
“If you drive across the country, you have these iconic places,” Hitt said. “When I saw the lamp, I thought, ‘What a clever, clever idea this town has.’ If you travel Route 66, you see it’s a gimmick world. Somebody was proactively thinking here.”
Less than a year later, Hitt is renovating a 120-year-old former hotel and is using a converted mill house (built in 1895) as a showcase that he uses to explain to a sometimes-stunned populace what their downtown will look like in the near future. Hitt also has plans to redevelop the town’s grain elevator, built in the early 1900s, along with the historic Rock Island Depot, built in 1910.
To top it off, Hitt, who owns a distillery in Apple Valley, California, is planning to build a larger operation adjoining the mill building. He also is negotiating to buy and redevelop at least four more older downtown properties while making plans to add a recreational train to the park surrounding the depot and leg lamp.
“People keep saying since I’ve been here, ‘Oh, we’re so thankful you’re here, we’re thankful you are doing things,’” Hitt said. “To be honest, we were thankful to be here. We’re so excited to see people excited in their small community, to see growth and opportunities in an area that’s been stagnant for a long time.”
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“A Christmas Story” opened in 1983 and did moderately well at the box office, taking in $19.2 million against a budget of $3.3 million.
The movie, narrated by Jean Shepherd and based on his 1966 book “In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash,” the movie told the story of Ralphie Parker, a 9-year-old kid growing up in Cleveland in 1940 and dreaming of a getting a Red Ryder Carine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifle.
The top prop in the movie, however, is a “major award” Ralphie’s father unpacks from a wood crate that turns out to be an approximately four-foot-high lamp consisting of a lascivious fishnet-stocking covered mannequin leg topped with a lamp shade.
The movie, released the week before Thanksgiving, 1983, saw its run end before Christmas. But the film took on a life of its own via VHS and replays on television. Legendary movie critic Gene Siskel proclaimed “’A Christmas Story’ is right up there with ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ and “Miracle on 34th Street’ as a holiday classic.”
The film turned into an annual Christmas Day movie marathon on cable. News stories featured families reproducing the leg lamp and making it a part of their own holiday lore. Reuben Freed is credited with creating the movie’s leg lamp after taking directions from Shepherd, who according to historical accounts, told Freed his vision of the lamp was inspired by a 1960s Nehi advertisement.
Tim Elliott, a lifelong Chickasha resident, was visiting Winslow, Arizona, with his family when they stopped to take their photo with the sculpture of the man “standing on a corner...” sung about in The Eagles song “Take it Easy.”
Chickasha was already a holiday attraction thanks to its annual “Festival of Light” started in 1993 by the local chamber at the city’s Shannon Springs Park. What if, Elliott asked, a giant reproduction of the famous leg lamp could bring similar life back to the city’s struggling Main Street?
“I spent four years trying to get this leg lamp idea up and getting people to accept it, and being told 'no, people would never accept it,'” Elliott said. “The leg lamp is doing exactly what it was expected to do — it's attracting people by the thousands.”
The 2020 death of longtime Chickasha resident Noland James, who helped start the city’s Festival of Light holiday celebration, added momentum to Elliott’s effort to display a giant leg lamp replica. The obituary for the retired University of Oklahoma visual arts professor noted he always felt that the leg lamp was inspired by his creation of a lamp in which a lampshade topped the bottom half of a woman’s mannequin.
After displaying an inflatable giant leg lamp for two years, a permanent sculpture, the one Hitt saw with the lamp shade being put in place by a crane, opened to the public in November.
Up to 175,000 people visit the Festival of Light annually, and while visitor counts are more difficult to count for the leg lamp, the Chickasha Chamber of Commerce reports downtown foot traffic from the opening of the permanent leg lamp in November through May is up 21.5% from the same period the year before.
Jim Cowan, CEO of the chamber of commerce, said the data is accumulated through a subscription with Placer, a cellphone location tracker service.
The lamp, however, was far less loved by the mother in “A Christmas Story,” and likewise the giant replica has critics in Chickasha. School board member Laurie Allen is among the giant lamp’s most vocal critics, asking how a city home to the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, once the state’s only all women’s college, can promote what she calls the “tramp stamp of town.”
“People will come and say, ‘What is that?’, and others ask, ‘Will it stay?’ Others don’t even know what it is,” Allen said. “And they’ve spent $1.4 million on it. And that’s taxpayer funds. That doesn’t show good stewardship of taxpayer funds. It takes away any historical value of our town; it’s just hedonistic.”
Cown responds that of the $1.4 million, the only taxpayer money spent on the project was $25,000 from the Chickasha Economic Development Council. He said the rest of the $1.4 million consisted of private donations raised by the Chickasha Community Foundation.
Allen also believes city leaders are in danger of getting sued by Warner Bros., which owns the copyright to the movie and the leg lamp.
Cowan said the Chickasha Economic Development Council, which he also heads, was given advice by attorneys that the leg lamp is widely used and also protected by the university’s ownership of the park where the replica is displayed. State-owned universities, Cowan said, are exempt from trademark laws.
“The originating story that it’s created here is based on a lie,” Allen said. “They don’t have permission from Warner Bros. And it was run through USAO because they couldn’t get permission.”
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Despite Allen’s opposition to the leg lamp, she is a solid backer of the efforts by Hitt to create an Old Town out of a collection of older neglected buildings in the heart of Chickasha. In just a few months, Hitt has struck up friendships across town, including with Allen and her husband.
As a former resident of Anadarko, a 20-minute drive west of Chickasah, Allen said, Hitt wasn’t a stranger in town when he first arrived in October. Familiar faces included Brandi Terry, owner of Brandi’s Bar and Grill.
Although she has lived and worked in Chickasha for the past 26 years, Brandi Terry’s earliest years were spent growing up in Anadarko, also Hitt’s old hometown.
“He’s great,” Terry said. “We get along great. He's a good guy.”
Terry’s restaurant is just south of the old Savoy Hotel and east of the leg lamp. She opened for business in February after converting the old garage into the restaurant and an adjoining scrap yard into an outdoor patio and live music venue.
She has yet to be open during the holiday season, but she’s seen enough to say the leg lamp is drawing visitors.
“You see all different kinds of people visiting,” Terry said. “There was a busload of people who came in from New Zealand. We see people from all different states coming in.”
Terry, like the rest of the city, didn’t know of Hitt’s plans until December as he started buying up properties and sharing his Old Town vision. The plan emerged as the town was already seeking to bring life back to its Main Street.
“There really wasn’t much going on down here at all,” Terry said. “It was kind of dark and gloomy.”
In the past couple of years development along the city’s Main Street, Chickasha Avenue, has included renovation of aging storefronts into a florist, bike repair shop, women’s clothing store, a speakeasy, pizzeria, gift shops and brewery.
Who is Chet Hitt, the man that wants to redevelop downtown Chickasha?
Hitt’s story, reported over the years by his hometown newspaper in Apple Valley, California, is filled with details of his love of history, barbecue and distilled spirits. When Roy Rogers died, he promised to fulfill a dream of the cowboy legend’s widow, Dale Evans, to build a chapel by his grave.
Hitt, who owned the cemetery, was able to share the plans with Evans before she died, and the 300-person chapel opened in 2007. Hitt sold his cemetery and funeral home holdings, but instead of retirement, he was in search of a new adventure when he drove through Chickasha.
Hitt reassembled his team that he had built to run his cemetery holdings in California and immediately began buying downtown properties during that initial visit. He drew on his experience running the distillery and steakhouse in Apple Valley, as well as redevelopment of a marina, restaurant and bar in Topock, Arizona.
His master plan, coordinated with the city, chamber and the university, is rolling out at a rapid pace.
His love of barbecue began early at a favorite Anadarko restaurant, since closed. Equipped with a recipe he believes is the sauce used at the restaurant, Hitt made an appearance with it on a Cooking Channel show.
He has since purchased the sign for the restaurant and is planning to open a barbecue restaurant with the sauce and sign on the bottom floor of the Savoy. His plan is to open a haunted house/nightmare before Christmas venue on the second floor of the hotel and has brought in an 1898 horse-drawn funeral hearse to be a part of the operation.
Planning is underway for construction of a distillery to be built next to the mill house. Renderings show the building will include an event plaza, and Hitt wants to eventually produce a million barrels a year compared to the 60,000 barrels produced at his current distillery.
“I can buy corn direct from farmers, I can develop easier here, I have a labor force that wants to work and the taxes are less,” Hitt said. “We want to make this our main manufacturing plant and distribute from here.”
The grain elevator is set to be used for storage of the barrels with a large sign on the surface of the elevator greeting visitors driving toward downtown. He is exploring additional uses for the elevator, including a rock-climbing venue like the one located south of Bricktown in Oklahoma City.
His most recent purchase, a building home to the Canadian River Brewing Co., will allow him to add a Mexican restaurant to the space not being used by the brewery. The build-out will include a large catering kitchen, which he will use for multiple restaurants he plans to open along Chickasha Avenue, along with an event venue he hopes to operate at the city’s historic Rock Island Depot.
The lease drawn up with the city for the depot represents what Hitt calls a commitment to ensuring his investments will continue beyond his own involvement. He is asking the city to collect his lease payments and place them into an escrow to pay for future upkeep of the landmark.
“It has plumbing problems, HVAC problems, and while the city owns it, they don’t have the budget to maintain it,” Cowan said. “His goal is to ensure that the building he is leasing is never in disrepair again.”
Hitt also hired three welding students from the local CareerTech to work on the Savoy building and is in talks with the university to look at how best to link the city’s fairgrounds, which is separated by a rail yard from downtown Chickasha. In the meantime, he has relocated a tour bus he used in California to be used to raise awareness of Old Town and to provide a link between Old Town and events at the fairgrounds.
“I sat back and did a lot of listening to what people’s needs are,” Hitt said. “Tourism is the whole key to revitalizing Old Town Chickasha. The fairgrounds plays a vital role in all of this. We don’t want people to leave here and go back to Oklahoma City to stay. We need more hotels; we need better restaurants.”
Hitt’s vision also includes helping the university launch a hospitality program that would operate from a hotel he hopes to see built on the fairgrounds side of the tracks, as well as downtown’s restaurants. He has submitted a proposal to the city to build a pedestrian bridge over the tracks that would link the fairgrounds and downtown.
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Those students, he said, would get hands-on experience at the hotel, similar to the program offered at Oklahoma State University, and also connect with jobs at the restaurants opening downtown.
Hitt, who has joined the city’s park planning committee, also is in talks with a local benefactor interested in acquiring a train ride in the same park that is home to the leg lamp. Imagine, Hitt says, a Polar Express-style train ride in addition to the city’s growing holiday celebrations.
While the leg lamp got Hitt’s attention, he credits Chickasha and Oklahoma with convincing him coming back home offers more opportunities than back in California, where he said overly burdensome regulations, delays and red tape would prevent him from accomplishing what his vision is in Chickasha.
“My tomorrows are a lot fewer than my yesterdays,” Hitt said. “What I don’t have time to get anymore is time. I don’t have much patience for people who don’t want to move quicker. I don’t mean that to be disrespectful. It's the nature of the beast.”
Staff writer Steve Lackmeyer started at The Oklahoman in 1990. He is a reporter, columnist and author who covers downtown Oklahoma City, related urban development, transportation and economics for The Oklahoman. Contact him at slackmeyer@oklahoman.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY NETWORK: Leg lamp from 'A Christmas Story' inspired Oklahoma town transformation
