If you saw any of the news coverage during Sapulpa’s ousting of Superintendent Burr, you probably saw Brandon Mull, his wife Brooke, and one or two of their fellow “De-Burr Sapulpa” entourage. Sporting signs and t-shirts with the catchy slogan, they were easy to spot and hard to forget.
Mull and his wife, who own Mission Street Tattoo at 200 N Mission Street, were frequently shown on camera for their enthusiasm, and written about in print for the same.
While I wouldn’t say I wrote them off completely, I just figured them for passionate parents who had a vested interest in the education of their kids. “After all this settles down,” I told myself, “they’ll go back to normal life.”
It turns out that I was mistaken about what “normal life” meant to the Mulls.
When my wife brought to my attention that she had spotted the Mulls picking up trash before school, I made a mental note to try to catch them the next morning. Sure enough, after dropping off my son, I spotted both Brandon Mull and his wife walking the field across the street with white garbage bags, stuffing them full with trash that had blown every which way on account of the students and construction.
As I flagged them down and we began to talk, you could see that these two were not what you’d call “all hat and no cattle,” to use a common phrase, which means someone who talks a lot but doesn’t do much.
“We spend all this money on these new building projects, we just feel that we ought to have clean streets and playgrounds to go with them, you know?” Mull said.
It’s true—a brand new building (or renovated stadium) looks oddly out of place when adjacent to a filthy and littered intersection. Tune in to a community group on Facebook and you’ll see plenty of people complaining about it, but much fewer actually doing something about it.
Not content to merely discuss such things, it’s refreshing to see Brandon Mull and his wife Brooke actually doing the things that everyone else talks of doing. Of course his hope is probably that many more of us would take on that same sort of desire to see our town become the town we’ve always talked about it becoming (or what it used to be), but for now, just the fact that we have one shining example in the Mulls on what it actually takes to become that town, for that—I am grateful.
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By the way, of course Brandon and his wife are not the only example of compassionate people working to make a difference in our town, and we wouldn’t want to say anything of the sort. If you know of someone else who ought to be recognized, please get in touch at news@sapulpatimes.com
