Shannon Rich is the CEO and president of the Oklahoma Hall of Fame at Gaylord-Pickens Museum in Oklahoma City. After working in the hospitality sector, Rich joined the state’s Hall of Fame in 2004, which for nearly 100 years has honored exceptional Oklahomans and hosted various educational events and scholarship programs.
Oklahoma Gazette: You were raised in Oklahoma, right?
Shannon Rich: Yeah, I’m a fifth-generation Oklahoman. My family was here before the Land Run, close to Springer, Oklahoma. I’m a graduate of Oklahoma City University, and I was in the hotel business before I took this job. I opened the Renaissance Hotel downtown. I opened the Courtyard downtown and helped reopen the old convention center when it was brand new 20 years ago, the one they’re about to tear down.
What brought you to the Hall of Fame?
I had opened several hotels — that was my background — and I had initially thought I would run for political office. So when I took this job, I thought it’d be a great opportunity to build a statewide Rolodex, but I really did fall in love with our mission.
I’ve worked on the revenue side at a corporate hotel where we were driven by our shareholders and the profit and loss statement, which is awesome. But when you come here and you get to call students who get to go to college for the first time in their family, it’s also amazing. We’re creating a different narrative for Oklahoma here, and I really love that work.
Why is the Hall of Fame important?
When I grew up here and I graduated from high school in Yukon, most people who went to college weren’t coming back. Dallas, Chicago, D.C. — that’s kind of where all my friends went because there just weren’t certain opportunities here in the early 1990s. And now if you look around these walls (of the Hall of Fame), there are people of every walk of life.
Whether you’re from a rural environment or an urban environment, whether you’re Asian American, African-American, Native American, there’s someone on these walls who’s done something amazing. So giving students, giving kids Oklahoma heroes so they can go off and, you know, go to college, find what your passion is, but come back to Oklahoma and make this your place to do your business, that’s kind of our hope.
What programs are you most proud of here?
I think creating organizations like the teen board have made me really proud. We have one of the first and one of the most active teen boards in the state, and it is truly a statewide teen board. Having teenagers talking about Oklahomans who’ve done great things is something that I thought was missing. This organization has been around for 98 years, and so we own a demographic of older people because that’s mostly when people are inducted. But we were missing the opportunity to really connect with students and young families.
A lot of the Hall of Fame seems to be geared toward state pride.
I think most people leave here, whether they are from Oklahoma or not, with a different impression of the state. When U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut came to introduce Mike Turpen to the Hall of Fame, he sent me the kindest note after, and he said, ‘You know, I’ve never seen so much pride in a room.’
To think about kids thinking, ‘That guy on the wall looks like me,’ or ‘She’s from the same place I am,’ and then believing they can build their own business or they can go to college and become a doctor, those connections and representation matter.
Why did you ultimately decide to stay at the Hall of Fame?
Like I said, my intention was to be here from 2004 to 2007 and then run for office in 2008. But I got to make a phone call in 2006 that really changed a lot for us. We had a girl win a scholarship who, at the time, didn’t have a phone. So we called the school to tell her she had won the scholarship. They said they would work with her family, which had to go to the Save-A-Lot in Durant to take the call. In my mind, I pictured seven or eight people standing around a phone at a Save-A-Lot in Durant, and we got to tell her she will be the first person in her family to go to college.
I have delivered a lot of revenue, and I have made a lot of profit, and I’ve gotten some big bonus checks, and I’ve been very fortunate in my life. But I can’t tell you how much I cried that night because education is really an equalizer and the difference we were making in her life. I don’t think I had ever had a feeling like that.
This article appears in deadCenter Film Festival 2025.