Danny Boy O’Connor, executive director of The Outsiders House Museum, readily admits he never has read the 1967 book to which the shrine pays tribute.

 “My mother used to say, if you want to hide money from me, you would hide it in a book because I would never find it,” O’Connor said.

He did, however, see the 1983 Francis Ford Coppola-directed movie The Outsiders, and it touched him.

“When I saw the movie, for the first time in my life I saw on the screen how I felt inside, which was separated and apart, like a true outsider,” O’Connor said. “So, the movie meant everything to me.”

O’Connor chronicled his journey to building The Outsiders House Museum on Monday at the Tulsa Regional Chamber’s Joint Board of Directors and Board of Advisors meeting at Tulsa Tech’s Lemley Campus.

Alongside KOTV-6 anchor LeAnne Taylor and Tulsa Regional Tourism President Renee McKenney, he discussed the lasting impact of The Outsiders, a novel written by Tulsan S.E. Hinton. They also talked about the new wave of popularity The Outsiders is enjoying with The Outsiders Broadway musical, which last week took home four Tony awards, including Best Musical.

In April, Taylor provided television coverage of a Tulsa delegation of about 150 people that traveled to New York City. The group of Chamber, City of Tulsa and business leaders used the premiere of The Outsiders musical to also meet with site selectors and media and tout Tulsa’s attributes as a destination for economic development and tourism.

“When I was tasked with going, I was nervous because it’s The Outsiders; you can mess that up really easily,” Taylor said. “I remember reading the book. I remember watching the movie. I remember all those handsome stars and why I didn’t get to meet them when they were here back in the day.

“But there was a big pressure, if you will, because I wanted to get every aspect.”

The Outsiders musical is coming to Tulsa in the fall of 2025. McKenney revisited with the cast last week in New York as they celebrated their Tony awards.

“Every one of them said they want to move to Tulsa,” she said. “They love Tulsa. They sing about it. They talk about. They have embraced it.”

In the last three weeks, the number of visitors to the Outsiders House Museum has been extremely high, O’Connor said.

“I have to attribute that a little bit to summer, but a lot to all of the press and all of the fanfare and the success of the musical,” he said. “It’s incredible that the world is now involved in this more than just readers of the book or viewers of the movie.”

For O’Connor, a Brooklyn-born rapper, the obsession with The Outsiders began to balloon about 15 years ago during visits to Tulsa with his band. While in town, he would seek out Outsiders landmarks such as the Admiral Twin and Circle Cinema.

He later purchased The Outsiders House for $15,000 and turned it into a museum, which opened in August 2019.

“It’s hard for me to walk around this town without somebody pulling me aside at some point of the day and saying, ‘Thank you so much for what you’ve done for Tulsa,’” O’Connor said. “But really, you guys did it for me. It was mutual. It wasn’t anything I could have ever done for myself. I was humble enough to ask for the help, which is not easy for me, and the help arrived. It was miraculous in the way that it just kept going along. Here we are now in 2024 talking about Tony awards and Broadway musicals. It’s surreal for me. But I never forget the power of that story and the little girl who wrote that story.”

Hinton penned the coming-of-age novel as a teenager at Rogers High School. That same year, she failed English and received a D-plus in creative writing, O’Connor said.

“In a lot of ways, she’s very much like a lot of kids out there who may not test well or do well with school curriculum but have a whole other creative side that doesn’t get activated in that curriculum,” he said. “She wrote a masterpiece. The thing has never been out of print in 55, 56 years. What author can say that?”

People magazine recently listed The Outsiders House No. 3 on its list of 25 bucket-list travel spots in the United States. Last year, more than 4,000 students from five states visited the museum, O’Connor said.

“I thought I was building a middle-age Greaser museum for me and my friends to look at switchblades and leather jackets and stuff,” he said. “But on accident, I built this museum for families, which is weird.

"It’s driven by seventh-grade girls and boys who are reading this book. It is resonating with them, and they are dragging their whole family out to see it.”