Lela Howard Wood spent most of her life in her adopted city of Tulsa, and she was a dedicated civic volunteer who helped to make the city a center for arts and culture. Mrs. Wood was a native of Adrian, Michigan, and a graduate of George Washington University when she arrived in Tulsa in 1918. The wife of Robert H. Wood, she was 28 years old and a new mother to the couple’s first child, Howard Robert Wood. Mr. Wood was an entrepreneur who owned Broswood Oil Company, one of the many burgeoning enterprises in the booming oil town. For her part, Mrs. Wood spent the next 61 years involved in community service in her adopted community.

Along with rearing her children (Harold Sinclair Wood and Ailene Elizabeth Wood arrived five and six years later), she managed to make time for many interests, including her college sorority, Pi Beta Phi; Daughters of the American Revolution; Tulsa Boys’ Home; Tulsa Garden Club; the Knife and Fork Club; and the Hyechka Club.

Her involvement in the venerable Hyechka Club may explain why her son, Harold Wood, and daughter-in-law, Virginia Lee “Ginny” Wood, chose to establish the Lela H. Wood Memorial Scholarship for Music a few months after her death in 1979. Hyechka is the Creek Indian word for music. Organized in 1904 when Tulsa was still a small Indian Territory town, Hyechka is now the oldest and largest music club in Oklahoma. Membership has always been comprised of those most devoted to the art.

Harold Sinclair Wood was a graduate of Tulsa Central High School and Cornell University, and he enjoyed a successful career working as a chemical engineer for Maloney-Crawford. Harold Wood passed away in January of 2012.

The caring legacy of Lela Wood is sustained by each recipient of her namesake scholarship, and The University of Tulsa deeply appreciates her family’s generous investment in our talented music students.