07/31/2026
T.S. Akers is an historian, collector, author, and professional menace to poorly footnoted local history. He has spent years wandering the archives of Oklahoma in search of forgotten proceedings, dusty newspapers, and obscure lodge records that everyone else wisely ignored. Where ordinary people see a stack of century-old minutes, he sees a gripping narrative and several dozen endnotes.
His principal work, Knights on the Prairie: A History of Templary in Oklahoma, established him as one of the leading chroniclers of Oklahoma Masonic history. Since then he has continued an apparently endless campaign against historical inaccuracies, armed with nothing more than primary sources, stubbornness, and an unhealthy willingness to read every page of an 1894 proceedings volume because "there might be one paragraph."
He serves as Grand Commander of the Grand Commandery Knights Templar of Oklahoma, a role for which he has become known for insisting that chivalry is not a costume, administration is not optional, and attendance registers are, in fact, historical documents. Somewhere, a Recorder has just broken into a cold sweat.
His interests extend beyond Freemasonry. He collects art, studies military history, haunts museums, and possesses the unsettling ability to look at an old courthouse and immediately begin explaining who designed it, who laid its cornerstone, and which Masonic lodge attended the dedication. Casual conversations have been known to devolve into twenty-minute lectures on Indian Territory, Victorian fraternalism, or the architectural evolution of Oklahoma City. Most listeners eventually accept this as their fate.
Akers approaches historical research with the energy of a Victorian detective and the disposition of a bloodhound that has caught a scent. Once presented with an unsourced claim, he cannot rest. Family members have reportedly learned never to say, "I heard that..." unless they are prepared to receive a bibliography before dessert.
His library exists in a quantum state: simultaneously organized and incomprehensible. He knows precisely where every volume resides, despite a filing system that appears to have been devised by a committee consisting of a medieval monk, a cartographer, and an exceptionally confident raven.
He has also developed an uncanny ability to identify forgotten Masons from a single photograph, a chipped cornerstone, or a passing mention in an 1887 newspaper advertisement. This is either scholarship or sorcery. The distinction remains under review.
Friends know him as thoughtful, loyal, and quietly amusing. Enemies know him as the man who will politely—but relentlessly—produce documentary evidence that they are wrong. He has never raised his voice when a footnote would suffice.
Should civilization collapse, Akers will almost certainly survive by founding a historical society in the ruins, cataloging the debris, electing officers under Robert's Rules of Order, and publishing Proceedings, Volume I before anyone else has finished gathering food.
His greatest fear is not obscurity, but discovering that somewhere in Oklahoma there is an uncatalogued box labeled "Miscellaneous Masonic Records" that someone threw away in 1978.
He would, of course, like to know who authorized that decision.
