NINE
Missouri, or “I wake in a panic, fear swamping me”
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Having lain down for a nap with a political analysis podcast running, I wake in a panic, fear swamping me, though the best I remember I was dreaming about placing stamps on a sheet of torn cardboard, which were as money for me, and trying to roll them up in that cardboard. My size and temperament were that of the child me at ten years of age, and in the way I determinedly met the task as if negotiating a difficult school project. The stamps weren’t little individual stamps in a tidy compact roll or laid out in rows in neat rectangular sheets, they all had the same monochrome blue- or purple-toned image, whatever it might have been, not commemorative but generic older stamps that were grouped as if one spilled out a bunch of loose ones and their adhesive backs had melded them together to form a series of collaged continents of undisclosed meaning. It was each of these collaged groupings of the identical stamps that I was attempting to roll up on individual sheets of thin cardboard. As I did this, I was trying to convince someone I was with, who was asking for more of my stamps to spend, that these few groups of stamps were all I had to live on and I had to make them last, yet after some grave consideration I gave them more as they said they’d no money at all, even though I knew they had wasted the stamps I’d already given them on childish purchases of bubble gum and candy. I was also confused because I was managing an impromptu political campaign, which I kept protesting I couldn’t handle as I knew nothing about fundraising, but then I heard a fortune teller relate that I’d earn millions, even as I learned that on the first day I’d pulled in a quarter of a million dollars, and I put my hands to my ears and told the fortune teller to stop, stop, that I didn’t want to hear any more, I was frightened. And I didn’t understand how it was I was being asked for the few stamps on which I had to live when I had raised so much money for others, why didn’t I have any money for myself, or had money due me for my work simply not had time to become available to me in the bank. Then I heard my husband say, “Oh, no,” and I was trying to discern if his tone was only one of casual concern, rather than true alarm, as I woke in a panic and was surprised to remember that in the dream I was ten and at my father’s parents, it was on the floor in the entry that I was working on trying to roll up these stamps, on their low-pile, wall-to-wall carpet that was decorative without calling too much attention to itself and was always pristine clean. A man who I now understood represented my brother, B, who shared his name, had been standing near me, the one asking for my stamps, it was night and I could clearly see beside us, opposite the front door in the entry to the living area, the dark red-brown mahogany of the little desk upon which was always a leather desk organizer set with a writing pad and formal ink pens for signing daily sundries rather than the bigger business to which my grandfather’s home office was dedicated, the lamp on the desk gleaming its wood and faintly illuminating the area on the floor where I pursued my stamp project, dressed in a white polyester-cotton, long-sleeved,
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pullover top and a navy blue pleated wool skirt that I frequently wore when I was ten. I rarely to never dream about my father’s parents’ home, and the attempt to roll the stamps on the torn sheet of thin but too stiff cardboard reminded of how my grandfather would sometimes return from his morning trips to the post office with fat rolls of stamps for his home office, and how that was, to me, the security of wealth, his stamps were the stock and trade of self-esteem, emblematic of the confidence of power in how those concise little rolls were so casually handled by him. My husband phoned after I had just woken, while I was distracted by my dream, to let me know his next recording session was about to start. I got up and because my son was for the first time acquainting himself with the music of The Pogues, I put on for him their cover of Eric Bogle’s “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”, an anti-war song on the false glory of wars that legitimize the treatment of common folk as garbage human cannon fodder. Daily, so many people’s lives, if not completely destroyed, are laid waste by imperious powers beyond their control, and the song is a plaint for them, how history walks over their bodies and on. The old Australian “Waltzing Matilda”, which was first published in 1902, never mind what may have been its origin, tells the story of a hungry itinerant worker who captures a stray sheep to eat, and when the police pursue to arrest him he yells that they’ll never capture him alive then drowns himself in a billabong, which his ghost thereafter haunts. For whatever reason, it became near an unofficial national anthem. Eric Bogle’s 1971 song transfers the heartache and pride in the recollection of that solitary and hungry itinerant worker to those Australians who fought in the catastrophic Gallipoli Campaign during World War I, the cost in dead and casualties on all sides no one can agree upon. Inspiration provided by a Remembrance Day parade he witnessed, Bogle’s song, while being about WWI, was a commentary on the miseries of the then ongoing Vietnam War. I remember one interstate drive during the late 1990s for which I put on the Pogues’ rendition as background music and played it over and over, tears streaming. You know how it’s said as long as you’re remembered by one soul, you remain alive. Eric Bogle’s is a song that makes one feel as long as it is played then whoever hears will empathize with the hopeful dreams of the many who never had a chance and mourn the pointless sacrifice of people one never knew.
The dream of the stamps stayed on my mind, partly because I could feel with such immediacy how my brain, at the age of ten, tried to process problems, and because I’d been briefly back in that body and experiencing my combined sensations of ease and awkwardness. Such as I could feel how small I was—and I was small at ten—how thoughtlessly my bent knee tucked into my slender chest as I bent over my work, a child chest that didn’t yet have any hint of breasts, a sensation my adult body has long forgotten, yet how my body also felt like jigsaw puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit with the world, out of place, beyond even my own control, and here I was trying to make my way with a child’s concept of basic needs, unable to clearly anticipate how far my stamps would stretch in providing me food and board. I consider that that stamps may dovetail with Thomas Pynchon’s book, The Crying of Lot 49, the Lot 49 eventually revealed as concerning the auction of a rare and mysterious set of stamps, some of which have the watermark of a muted posthorn symbol perhaps belonging to a postal service that had been driven underground and formed a loose and anonymous secret society of those who used it. The question is if indeed the secret postal service
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actually exists and isn’t instead a mirage composed of nothing more than coincidence and pattern seeking. The stamps were part of an estate of which the protagonist, Oedipa Maas, had been made executor—the reason for which I think of Oedipa’s stamps in the same territory as my stamps, for though I received no financial inheritance from my grandparents, my dream struggle with the stamps explicitly takes place in my grandfather’s territory. Also, the stamps of Lot 49 belong to a secret, conspiratorial world. Consequence of pursuing her duty as executor, Oedipa is led into the rabbit hole mystery of the secret society, signs of which she begins to see everywhere, but confirmation or not of its existence resting beyond the end of the book. A tag-along undercurrent theme is the drama of the horrific murder of a courier betrayed, as well his fifty knights whose bodies were thrown into a lake, their bones later recovered and made into charcoal for ink. My mind turns to the Brothers Grimm tale of the singing bone, which when carved into a flute and played, voices the true identity of its murderer. Oedipa encounters the history of the betrayed courier and the slain knights in a Jacobean tragedy, as a play within a play, Shakespeare’s mousetrap, which in Hamlet functions to reveal the truth of a situation to those concerned, who have ears to hear, but will be meaningless to all others.
Strangely, though I don’t remember ever sitting in that place on the floor in the entry, when I picture my father’s parents’ home it is in this spot, on the floor, that I have often found myself, previous the dream, considering the wallpaper, the carpet, the sensibility of what I’ve supposed were my grandmother’s tastes in the decorating of their home base that they’d had constructed when my father was in college, which was model perfect, exceptionally absent of hints as to subterranean realms of thoughts or preoccupations of the people who lived there. A home that was thus armed like a fortress.
Don’t let anyone know who you are, my grandparents had taught me at their kitchen table the evening I pressed to go to the Roman Catholic Church the next Sunday, because I’d been going to church for several years before I landed in their home and I was still in the mindset that this was expected of me by the church its priests the nuns this thing that was the Roman Catholic religion of which my parents had made me a member, into which I’d been baptized and had received my First Communion. When I’d first arrived in Carthage, I had asked about continuing to go to church, and my grandparents had told my mother that I could go to church with their friend Mrs. Daly who was Roman Catholic. Then it didn’t happen, Sundays came and went and I didn’t go to church, and was my soul destined for hell, which I didn’t really believe but I’d been taught this for several years that if I didn’t confess and go to church I’d be in trouble, at least with the church. I pressed my grandparents on this finally, that I should go to church, because to not go to confession once a week or receive communion was a sin, at least these were the church’s rules, what I’d been taught in my catechism classes, and I’d not been to confession or received communion in weeks. Also, though I didn’t voice this, I wanted to see what the Roman Catholic Church in Carthage looked like, I liked how Roman Catholic Churches were like art, I liked the opportunity to sit in quiet contemplation of the imagery presented in paintings and sculpture and where did I see paintings and sculpture but in church. But my grandparents had scorned, “You don’t really believe all that do you,” they said they had thought I was smarter than that, and told me that they gave money to the
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Methodists but it was for appearances, if you do the proper things for appearances then no one inquires further than face value, but they didn’t go to church, they didn’t believe and it was no one’s business whether they believed or not. Present the proper appearance and that keeps the world from inquiring beneath the surface.
This was when I first learned from them about having socialist ancestors, my paternal great-great-great-grandfather’s family through my grandmother’s father, including my great-great-grandfather, at the Alphadelphia Association commune in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and that my great-great grandparents had moved to Liberal, Missouri, because it was a freethought town. I was proud of this aspect of the family, that they were socialists and freethinkers and had bucked the status quo.
Did I mention this transpired at my grandparents’ dining table in their breakfast nook, and how shocked I was when they said you don’t really believe all that do you and how they thought I was smarter than that.
I knew my grandparents were right about the God part, that church indoctrination had an element of brainwashing to it, the longer I was away from the church the less adamant was its pull, I wasn’t going to confession and hadn’t received communion for several weeks and I wasn’t dead yet, but if I did go to confession now then I’d have to tell the priest how long it had been since my last confession and the prospect of his ire over it having been weeks was frightening, though I was a child and it was out of my control whether or not I went to confession when I’d not even been to the church in Carthage. I understood that the answer was to never step inside a Roman Catholic church ever again. The power of the church’s demands begin to collapse when one is outside it, away from its enforcers, and as I hadn’t been initially raised in the church it was easy for me to access the outsider’s viewpoint again, but I felt intimidated as well by the scorn of my grandparents when they said they thought I was “smarter than that”, to have fallen for the dogma, I felt strong-armed as well by them in their urging that I not go, that I not be indoctrinated like the rest of the sheep, like Mrs. Daly, who it sounded like they scorned though I thought she was a friend. At their kitchen table, I immediately felt my grandparents were right about the church, I knew they were right, I was returned to my youth before church had become a part of my life, when I was skeptical of the business of religion, and was still skeptical else I’d have not been so easily divorced from the church, which I actually feared, the priests and nuns. What I would miss was a time set apart every week for my contemplation of the art and architecture, as Roman Catholic Churches were my art museums. I’d miss as well the solemnity of the ritual that admitted how mysterious was our existence that it could only be addressed symbolically.
“You’re smarter than that,” they’d said and that had both pinged and pricked my vanity. So they thought I was smart. I didn’t want to be stupid.
At the time, the go-to (probably the only) Catholic Church in Carthage would have been St. Ann’s, a 1908 stone building likely constructed of the limestone Class A Carthage “Marble” for which Carthage became famed, which belongs to the Burlington division of the Mississippian or Lower Carboniferous era. Why is Carthage “Marble” in quotes? Because there is true marble that is a metamorphic rock “that
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forms when limestone is subjected to elevated temperatures in Earth’s crust. True marble typically contains no fossils because the metamorphic process obliterates them from the rock” (thank you Missouri Department of Natural Resources and its description, in its publication, “Capitol Stone”) and then there is the sedimentary limestone that also qualifies as marble but belongs in quotes, because it is marble-like and contains fossils and is the “marble” that is from Carthage, and Phenix, Missouri, that is used in Missouri’s State Capitol. The Carthage “Marble” was formed 335 million years ago when a shallow sea covered “Missouri” (I put Missouri in quotes there to remind it wasn’t Missouri yet). Carthage “Marble” is full of the invertebrates that populated that sea and in death left the hard parts of their existence at the bottom of it (etcetera, something about how this becomes stone under compaction). I may have gone once to St. Ann’s, the Roman Catholic Church that Mrs. Daly attended. If I did attend after that conversation, it was no more than once. I’m pretty sure that I did attend once, after that conversation with my grandparents, because I have a strong recollection of Mrs. Daly having picked me up (knock, knock on the front door she stands on the porch) to port me with her to the church, and that she was a nice enough woman, but she struck me also as disinterested and that I was a chore. If I had been impressed with the church building, its art and iconography, I might have pursued the matter further, but I wasn’t impressed. Plus I felt I was a burden to Mrs. Daly. And I was by now almost completely, maybe totally, disconnected from the church.
As it turned out my parents were no longer going to church either, out of my sight, no longer in Richland. When I reunited with my family in Augusta, they didn’t return to the church, I don’t know why. They sent me to CCD one Saturday, but the monsignor came in to ask each one in the class when was our last confession, and when a boy was physically punished and sent to his office for not having been in a month, I lied and said I hadn’t been in a couple of weeks rather than four months, then refused to return, and my parents didn’t press the matter as they were no longer attending, they were over and done with the Roman Catholic Church for the time being and I never knew why. My mother now was all for mocking the church and one afternoon when she was a little tipsy came up with a joke in which she called my father’s secretary at work, pretending to be a nun checking up on why I hadn’t returned to CCD. That fell flat as a prank, but my mother was laughing so I was happy and laughing and all in on her pretending to be a nun, and my father called back very angry and told us never to do that again.
How’d we get here? Having left Richland, Washington, along the way to Augusta, Georgia, when I was ten, my brother, B, and I were dropped off to live with my father’s parents in Missouri, my parents going on to find a house in a South I couldn’t begin to imagine, which would be like another country and wouldn’t accept me because I wasn’t from the Confederate States of America, I was from America, the USA that was supposed to be for all of us. My brother had never met my father’s parents. I had only met them once, when I was two years of age in Richland where they had purchased for me the green and red swing-set, a visit from which I’d seen several vivid Kodachrome photos of my diminutive grandmother in a pale gray sundress with a matching cropped short-sleeve jacket in the same material, and red-haired (at that point it was dyed) grand-aunt Thelma, sister of my father’s father, in beige-and-white
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striped sundress with a cropped short-sleeved jacket in the same material, little blond me in a sunsuit vertically striped with a pale blue micro floral print alternating with a micro rose floral print on white, the sunsuit’s bib edged with a ruffle, on my feet white socks and black Mary Jane t-strap shoes, and my mother looking reticent and distant in her blue jean shorts rolled up high on slender legs, white flats with black button ornamentation, and sleeveless buttoned up to the neck collar shirt with a hint of blue flower embroidery on either side of the button plaque, the females of the family gathered in various configurations around the new swing-set, me on the slide, on its little red seesaw, on one of the two yellow-seated swings my mother standing with her rear resting on the other like if she sat down she might swing, but my father never pictured and my grandfather never pictured at the swings, one of them would have been handling the camera. The grass is a washed-out green burning to yellow under a white hot sun that rests high in the desert blue sky. Obviously taken at the same time, the same color film, me in the same sunsuit and socks and Mary Jane t-strap shoes, are several photos, posed to be portraits, of me, my mother and father seated on the stoop of the Blue Street house. My father smiling is on the right, dressed in white trousers and a short-sleeved shirt of an indeterminate light pastel, his forearms relaxed on his thighs as he leans slightly toward the camera, I am on the other side of my mother who sits in the middle. My eyes squint against the golden light of the setting sun in the desert west to the screen-right of us that is unseen. My mother, dressed in a lovely, attention-grabbing white sleeveless sundress with a glamorous spare print of bold overlarge yellow flowers standing out against slashes of dark leaves, leans slightly into the shadow of my father, eyes vacant, unsmiling, her face so radically disjointed chopped up by light and dark that she resembles, though with dark hair and no ponytail as it’s been chopped off again she has a pixie cut, one of the more somber of Picasso’s cubist portraits of the blond Sylvette with long ponytail who served as his muse in 1954, a woman of nineteen with whom he didn’t have a sexual relationship. Sylvette said Picasso was fatherly with her, inspirational, silent with intense artistic concentration as he painted her. I assume that my grandfather took these photos, and my mother is so distanced that she’s haunting. My mother went back and forth between liking and disliking my father’s parents until his mother had died and his father had become a benign vacant smile as he began to enter the dementia of his final years at which point she seemed to forget any past malcontent for them and he became a “nice man”. Perhaps in this particular photo she was thinking of the twins and how neither her parents or my father’s parents had come to visit when they died, perhaps she is bitter rather than sad, or perhaps she is spaced out on prescribed medication and her expression is only that of a drug. It’s impossible to tell. In contrast, in all these photos I am forthright, confidently meeting the camera, my stance sure. A solo portrait on the same stoop has me standing with one foot down on the stairs, my left foot on the step above, body twisted toward the disappearing sun that lights the entire scene in its diminishing rose-gold as I direct my smile at it. My eyes do not squint which means the sun has lowered enough that it’s possibly now dipped just beneath the distant hills. At the age of two, I look like I was out to conquer the world, or something. Not that I exhibit bravado, but I appear not only self-confident, I also look sharply world-aware. What is out there? I am ready to pursue the glow of the sun to the hills and beyond.
And I was. I loved the world. For me, it was magic.
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“When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” my grandmother also advised me when I was ten, which I told her I wouldn’t do, this during a conversation about race and I thought it was important to not sacrifice one’s ethics. I had said I didn’t believe in segregation and race wasn’t going to determine my friendships in the South. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” my grandmother said, telling me Georgia wasn’t going to be like Washington State. But whereas I was easily talked into divorcing myself from church, I wasn’t going to accept racism and segregation. Just because I was being transplanted South, I wasn’t going to throw aside my ethics, and my devotion to my friend, Cecelia, and everything I’d learned about racism and the fight for civil rights from Cecelia’s mother. No, I thought when you’re moving into super racist territory it was instead profoundly important to stick with your anti-racism beliefs. I had no intention of doing what the Romans do and blending in with racism.
My father’s parents traveled, but they had only once driven out to Washington State to visit, and for all intents and purposes I had never met them as that only visit happened when I was two, though I did remember it. I remembered the swing-set and that my mother was somehow irritated with it in the same way she would be irritated by Aunt Thelma’s gifts. I remembered my first nightmare in which my grandmother’s laugh became the laugh of a wicked witch. The nightmare had woken me from a nap while they were outside, sounding as if their get-together was gay and high spirited. I would remember being a little uncomfortable as I comprehended them as being a little drunk, which made my father’s parents seem friendly but instead it was the alcohol being friendly with me and I could sense the hollow space between the alcohol smile and the remote people that they actually were. Lest one gets the wrong impression, I should add that they were not alcoholic or problem drinkers. They were social drinkers, and people who had a ritual of having a couple of drinks every evening as they relaxed watching television. Sometimes my grandfather stumbled as he rose from his chair but I interpreted that as age-related balance issues or it simply being awkward for him to rise from the chair, for they both struck me as capably fit. He wasn’t quick on his feet, his stride was long, deliberate, measured, and his feet made little sound, barely leaving the ground. He leaned into this long but slow gait of a walk which could give the impression of being casual, when instead it exerted dominance as he never would have changed to keep pace with another, one had to adapt to him, and if he did quicken his walk, such as when he was literally taking care of business, it maintained the same long, measured step, his feet never rising far from the ground. He wasn’t a heavy man, but from his shoulders to knees his build was broad, the long, lean ectomorph he would have been in his youth ghostly lingered, giving hm a dual aspect. On the other hand, my grandmother usually took always quick little steps, her stride half that of others as if she was always in a pencil skirt. In her pajamas and slippers her stride lengthened and slowed, taking on gravity. Both dominated the conversation that is people walking along together, expecting others to conform to their speed and direction.
Okay, they may have been a little drunk at times, but just enough to affect my grandfather’s coordination a little, and to make them a little more prone to laughter, though as with the rest of my family they never gave full rein to a laugh, in enjoyment of it, they never guffawed or belly laughed, yet my grandmother would still tear up occasionally over a comedian, after a few twitters, and wipe her eyes with a tissue.
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Rather than going with my parents to Augusta, my brother, W, and sister, A, would be dropped off to stay with my mother’s parents who had moved from Chicago to Huntsville, Alabama, but were with them less than a couple of nights before my mother’s father called, so I was later told, and demanded (yelling involved) my parents right then drive the near 350 miles between Augusta and Huntsville to pick the children up as they couldn’t be expected to handle two very active youngsters. I don’t know how it was decided which of us would go to which grandparents, but there is a difference between the ease of handling children ten and seven years of age as versus two and five years of age. Maybe my father’s parents had first choice. Nevertheless, had my brother, B, and I been instead dropped off with my mother’s parents, I can’t imagine that having lasted more than a couple of days either. My mother so reviled her parents that it’s difficult to imagine what she was thinking when she left her two youngest with them, prospectively for months, except that she and my father perhaps thought this was their opportunity for a vacation from children. While house shopping in Augusta they could turn time back for several months and be again the couple they were when they married, the responsibilities of their four children split up far away between two households.
There are bits I recollect of the trip from Washington State to Missouri. It is night and we’re in Kansas, my mother asleep in the back of the station wagon, my siblings are asleep, and I’m in the front seat reading the map for my father, ably guiding him and proud that I know my way around a map, which he didn’t believe I’d be able to handle but I knew I could do it, maps were easy for me to read. I fiddle with the radio but it’s hard to find a clear station, and I give up. During the day if we were listening to pop radio we may have heard what according to Billboard had been the top ten hits in August: “The Letter” by The Boxtops, “Ode to Billie Joe”, by Bobbie Gentry, “Come Back When You Grow Up”, by Bobby Vee and the Strangers, “Reflections”, by Diana Ross and the Supremes, “Never My Love”, by The Association, “Apples, Peaches, Pumpkin Pie” by Jay and the Techniques, “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher”, by Jackie Wilson, “You’re My Everything” by The Temptations, “I Dig Rock and Roll Music” by Peter Paul and Mary, and “Funky Broadway” by Wilson Pickett. But I must not have been listening to the radio much that month because only a couple of these hits, including “Reflections”, strikes me as a song I would have been hearing at the time. What we would have been listening to on the radio during the trip was FM classical, when our car passed within range of classical music radio waves, because that is about all my mother ever listened to, my father never listened to music, and then for the next several months in Carthage I will hear no music except for what was on television as my grandparents didn’t listen ever to music at home or in the car, their environ is a music desert. I was excited about making the trip to the Midwest as a reverse version of my move to the Pacific Northwest when I was little, only this time I’d appreciate the landscape, but I don’t remember Idaho or Utah at all, my memory kicks in as we drive up to the Little America travel center in Little America, Wyoming, the penguin figure in the dark Wyoming night was a shock, like a hallucination, a veritable mystical experience, decades later I write a book around it, and then when we hit Kansas the world begins to solidify again in memory. Late at night in a small nowhere Kansas town I see my first Sinclair gas station and while my father is irritated that the station is closed for the night I am enchanted by the green dinosaur on the sign as I’ve been taught the erroneous belief that gasoline, a fossil fuel, is the
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soup of ancient dinosaurs which means the only reason they once existed was because destiny knew we would need their carcasses, pressure-cooked by eons, to run our cars. We travel through Kansas as well during the day as I remember sunlight on the old, closely-spaced Burma Shave signs to the right of the road, which together composed a vaguely entertaining rhyme that broke up the tedium of flatter than flat west Kansas and its miles upon miles of farmland. A cross-country trip, even a trip half across, naturally conjures the expectation of an adventure that would have taken maybe a week or two of sightseeing parks, enjoying diners, photos taken of happy smiles at a national park or two, and influenced by what others would expect even I imagine it is an epic occasion of which I have no memory, when it was nothing but a furious blur, my father wanted to make record time plus he didn’t like spending money on motels and never planned for having a good time so we drove straight through almost nonstop, my mother napping in preparation for when my father finally could drive no longer and had to take his one short nap in the back of the station wagon, and I mean a short nap he maybe slept two hours at most, maybe three, I’m pretty sure my father was on amphetamines, while my mother was marginally present on whatever prescriptions she was then on. But we couldn’t make it all the way with them trading out nap times, we stayed one night at a motel, an old mom and pop place in Kansas, and my sister, two years of age, accidentally locked herself in the bathroom. The small window to the bathroom, at the rear of the motel, happens to be unlocked and while I am small enough to do it my brother, B, is elected to climb up and fit through the window and resolve the problem, becoming a hero. This was the same motel where was accidentally left behind, in some frenetic commotion the following morning, the baby blanket my sister hadn’t released from her hands since she was a small toddler. She sucked her thumb as well, both habits that my parents wouldn’t have tolerated with me as I had to be a grown-up, I had never sucked my thumb and had never been so attached to any object that I needed to carry it around with me everywhere for comforting reassurance. These two dramas concerning my sister reminds me it was reacquainting time for her, and my brother, W, the two youngest, with our mother as she’d been gone most of the summer at the hospital in Seattle, my sister wouldn’t leave her side, she and my youngest brother were profoundly anxious to have their mother’s attention again. They wouldn’t have understood that in a few days they were going to be dropped off to live with my mother’s parents. And it occurs to me that my mother’s parents, however crazy, may have had valid reason to call my parents after a couple days and demand they come and get them, because these two children, two and five years of age, were probably a mess of confusion and discontent with not having been around their mother all summer, then to be only with her a few days before finding themselves dropped off to live with, yes, relatives, but people they didn’t know, and not even their two eldest siblings around to provide stability. That hadn’t occurred to me until just now, and if it ever occurred to anyone else it was never mentioned to me the realization of how stressed my two youngest siblings would have been.
In a station wagon with four restless young children who are only let out of the car for the rare restroom stop that was much resented by my father who only stopped when he needed gas and coffee (our stops were so parsimonious my mother peed in a bowl and tossed the urine out the window which sprayed the side of the car as well as blowing back inside), and one concession-to-exhaustion motel stay in Kansas, on the
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second day we made it the approximately 1700 fucking miles to just outside Lawrence, Kansas, where we stayed a night with my mother’s middle sister and her family. where I was a little bored with their two-story white wood farmhouse as it didn’t involve a working farm with crops but in the morning they did go out early to tend a few cattle that were kept on the property. It was my first and last time I would meet these cousins, and my mother would leave upset with her sister and vowing she would not visit her again because that’s the way their relationship was. We drove through Lawrence, Kansas, where they had gone to university and I had been born, and my parents stopped at the Rock Chalk Cafe, their college hangout, and they purchased somewhere a lead Jayhawk figurine, the KU mascot and fictional bird that was originally known for plundering, probably mixed up with the tricksterism of Blue Jays, and became equated with free-state Kansas guerrilla fighters. For several years the figurine would rest in the kitchen window of our home on Edinburgh in Augusta and though it was never handled the paint on it still managed to chip. As for “rock chalk”, Mount Oread, the mighty hill of 1037 feet upon which KU was founded, it is known for its limestone, hence the cafe’s name, and while I believed that in the name for the cafe was communicated the rock-and-roll scene of the 1950s and 1960s, that was an accident of time, as the cafe was named the Rock Chalk Cafe when it opened in 1923. Then we visited my father’s only sibling and his family, who also lived in Kansas, about two hours away from Lawrence, in another white two-story house, part stacked-stone masonry in the front, but this one wasn’t a farmhouse, from the street it looked like a candidate for a television show in which a handful of sons learn that father knows best. Inside, the layout sprawled left and right and to the rear and upstairs and downstairs in unexpected ways forming odd configurations of rooms. At sunset we were entertained by bats flying about just outside their house, above our heads in the cross-street. To my knowledge, I had never seen bats before, but I very well may have because if they hadn’t been identified as bats for me I would have thought them to be birds. And then my cousins showed off to me, on the second floor, a hidden short hall, reached through a closet in a bedroom, that led to a “secret” room that wasn’t completely hidden as it had a window, and one of the older cousins told me that it was a safe room during Bleeding Kansas and the Civil War. As yet, I knew nothing about the Civil War or Bleeding Kansas, which played an important part in the lore of my father’s mother’s side of the family, and I didn’t know if it was possible or not that this house could have been standing during the Civil War. Much of it seemed fairly modern to me, but it was so oddly configured that I reasoned there could have once been an old core house obscured by modern additions. The road out front was impressively paved with brick, which I knew was old, and the Civil War and Old Frontier West conflicts seemed the only sensible reason for an empty room accessed by a secret hall. I’m fairly confident, too, we were driven by the old Fort Scott historic site at the small town’s edge, named for Winfield Scott, that was built in 1842 and had to do with securing the frontier and the Mexican-American War as well, nothing ever happened there so it was sold to civilians in 1853 and part of it became a hotel, then in 1861, because of the Civil War, the Union Army occupied it again, after the war it became purposeless again, in 1865 the US Army auctioned it off because who needed it, well the US Army did because they returned in 1870 only they didn’t much use the old fort grounds as they were camped around the railroads, protecting them from squatting settlers who feared eviction by the railroad, then the fort was let go by the
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army again in 1873, then in 1965 it was undertaken by Fort Scott and the National Park Service to restore it and it became an historic site in 1978. I was a Pacific Northwest child and this was my first brush with anything Civil War related, I saw old wooden white buildings, and this reinforced for me the story I’d been told about my cousins living in a house that was standing during Bleeding Kansas and the Civil War. But I did have doubts and should have as the house was twentieth-century vintage, and I don’t know if they were intentionally pulling my leg. News items reveal the home was previously owned by a doctor with a large family and was perhaps built in the very early 1940s. I was introduced to the soda Dr Pepper (no period after the Dr), which I’d never heard of before as it was then a regional beverage. They had cartons of it stored on the steps down to the basement in an attempt to satiate the thirst of a large family of boys and one girl who loved Dr Pepper. My uncle was a champion fisherman, I had previously seen a black-and-white professional photo of him from the early 1960s in which he was depicted with a trophy but that photo was one never discussed, it was just silently present in the family photo box, and now I saw in my uncle’s house there were trophies, he really had been a champion fisherman, but my father never spoke about his only and elder brother except to a couple of times briefly relate the story of how when he was small he had stepped onto a metal street plate heated to sole-burning temperatures by the summer sun and how his elder brother had burned his own feet rescuing him from it, a sacrifice for which he still obviously felt indebted, my father seemed like he didn’t like to remember or talk about it. Otherwise, he never spoke of his brother, his brother’s wife, their children, the fishing championships, that he’d been a president of the Chamber of Commerce, there were no stories about their perhaps having fished together as children (I’ve no idea if they ever did, and my father never fished or went out in a boat), or how they played together or didn’t, what interests they shared or didn’t, no stories about their growing up together in Ponca City though they were only three years apart. Living with my father’s parents wouldn’t open the memory chests to those years either. My grandparents divulged few stories about the past, none about the interests and activities of their children, of special or everyday incidents, of family trips, of holidays, of music or movies or books that anyone in the familial universe might have enjoyed, of toys they’d had, of school, of anything, nothing shared that gave any idea of their recent history, where they’d lived, the houses in which they’d lived, the order of their days. Like my father’s universe, the world of his parents was one largely without memories. Now I had, for the moment, cousins, but with no sense of history of the family or place I didn’t know how to interpret the household, they were friendly but what was I to make of this geniality when my father and uncle never spoke. I still don’t know why my father and his brother had no relationship. As much as my father ever said, which was only once or twice, was that they had different interests.
That night I slept next to the closet with the door to the secret space.
The next day we left that small town of only about 9000 people and drove the seventy miles to Carthage, Missouri, when then had about 11,000 people, two towns of distinctly different character as Fort Scott had grown out of a military installation that was originally there to define the boundary that was Indian Territory stay out if you’re a settler, and Carthage had a big courthouse as centerpiece of a town square that brought to mind the era in which Meredith Willson and Franklin Lacey’s musical
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The Music Man was set because the towering Richardsonian Romanesque Jasper County Courthouse was built in 1895 and The Music Man was set in 1912. I remember nothing about arriving at the home of my father’s parents, or my parents driving away and leaving my brother and me there, but I wouldn’t have minded being left behind because it meant a vacation from my parents, from my mother’s mental illness, from having to take care of three siblings, and I wasn’t overly anxious to continue down to the Deep South.
Oh, I forgot we did have one entertainment stop on the trip, which was to see the taxidermied remains of a two-headed calf, which was a disorienting surprise to me, and we weren’t stopping to see the calf, the stop was to do with getting gas, the station was part of an attraction that promised old time frontier west, but there wasn’t much there, maybe a small fake cemetery with a few headstones, the plan was to grab some food, my siblings and I were desperately hungry, but there was no food, as for my dad he didn’t care about getting food because he could survive for days on cellophane packets of malt peanut butter crackers, my siblings melted down finally after having gone too long without food and even my mother demanded we be fed, but nothing was there except coffee for my father, when he stopped for coffee he wouldn’t let us buy anything to snack on or drink, my mother was finally angry and insisting on food and I don’t know where or if we ate but it wasn’t there, where I was freaked out by nature’s cruelty in its creation of a two-headed calf.
2
I’ve deliberately left some errors in the previous few pages, because that is how I’ve always remembered things, but searching the newspapers after I wrote the above I’ve found a couple of bits of new information that call for some corrections on visits with my father’s parents. In January of 1961, my grandparents’ hometown paper reports my family had been to their home to visit from December 29 to January 7, traveling by train, which means I’ve been through the grand Kansas City Union Train Station, as well as the one in Chicago, and have no recall of the experience of either, which I mildly resent.
In July of 1962, my grandparents’ hometown paper reports they had just returned from a trip up the Pacific Coast Highway from California to Washington, at the end of which they visited us in Seattle and attended the Seattle World’s Fair which lasted from April to October. With their return trip to Missouri they’d logged 5600 miles.
It surprises me that I have always remembered the train trip made when I was three years of age to visit my mother’s parents, but not this trip in 1961 to my father’s parents. I’m perplexed that while I have always remembered us as not visiting the Seattle World’s Fair until it was over or almost over because my father said he didn’t want to fight the crowds, I had no memory of his parents visiting and that they had gone to the World’s Fair without us. I wonder at how, when I was ten years of age, arriving at my grandparents’ house, I would have no memory of having been there when I was younger for nearly two weeks. What is most bewildering to me is how my
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parents never mentioned these visits, either one of them, nor did my father’s parents mention them to me. I lived with my father’s parents a couple of times, the several months when I was ten and for a summer when I was fifteen, and as far as I ever knew we’d only previously visited when I was two, in Richland. That was the only visit from my youth ever brought to mind. Nor were there any photos from either of the other trips. If my parents were still alive, if I didn’t have the proof of these newspaper clips I have my doubts they’d speak about the trips with me. I tried once to ask about the time when I was fifteen, my father in Colorado during the time he'd returned to medical school, when my mother and I and my siblings lived with his parents in Carthage for the summer, and neither of my parents said they could tell me anything about it, that they didn’t remember anything about it at all. During the same phone conversation, I’d first asked my mother and then when my father was briefly on the line I’d asked him. I only said that I was trying to remember exactly which year it was we’d stayed in Missouri while my father was in Colorado, because they always became defensive and suspicious with any kind of inquiry. My mother did ask, “Why?”, and so I’d again explicitly said, “I was just trying to remember the year.” She couldn’t tell me, she didn’t recollect it, she passed the phone later to my father and he said he had no memory of the time. “You were in school in Colorado,” I’d reiterated. I didn’t buy that my father could forget being in school by himself in Colorado for about two months while we were in Carthage, but he insisted he had no memory of it and that was the end of the conversation.
It’s not uncommon for individuals to not recollect much of their early childhood, and to feel no bewilderment over this, so it may seem peculiar to the reader that I’m a little distracted over learning about these visits. When one’s childhood is daily erased by one’s parents, when they alter events, when they have a history of molding what and how one will remember, this creates a different dynamic in approaching childhood memories. Train trips and the rare visit of relatives are major events that one would expect to be occasionally remembered by family instead of dropping into a black hole.
Though I was only five, I knew the World’s Fair was a big deal. I remember our not having visited the fair until after it was closed as my father didn’t want to deal with the crowds. By the time we visited, the grounds were near empty, and as I don’t recall any fairground atmosphere or rides, it may be my memory is correct and that we didn’t visit until after it was closed, which is why I only recollect those things that were left behind as permanent installations—the arches at the US Pavilion, the Science Center, the monorail, the International Fountain, and the Space Needle. Plus there was the matter of price. General admission for the fair was $1.60 including taxes, which is only a little over $16 in 2023, but even if children were perhaps allowed in free we would have wanted to ride some rides and eat some food, which would have made for conflict as my father was hardline against purchasing anything ever except for my mother, so he never took us to a carnival, thus no World’s Fair.
One can perhaps imagine the excitement of having the World’s Fair in one’s proximity, hearing about it on the news, knowing it was ten minutes away, the desire to go and participate in this perhaps once-in-a-lifetime celebration with everyone else. After it was over and done with, we did get to ride the monorail and go up in the Space
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Needle. I have a vague memory of gazing on the arches of the US Pavilion and, as the area was empty now of visitors, by virtue of imagination I stepped back in time to before the fair closed, when it would have been packed with people and activities, those ten million people who visited the fair between April 21 and October 21 of 1962.
One hears almost exclusively about the science offerings at the Seattle World’s Fair, but I’m looking at an official program for it and see there was also a Fine Arts Exhibition in five galleries: Art Since 1950, American (120 paintings and thirty-four sculptures by such artists as Ben Shahn, Jackson Pollock, and native Northwesterners, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Ken Callahan and Paul Horiuchi); Masterpieces of Art (72 works, by such painters as Titian, Cezanne, Renoir, El Greco, Rembrandt and Winslow Homer); Art of the Ancient East; Art Since 1950; and Northwest Coast Indian Art. The Children’s Theater of America staged its puppet show of The Nutcracker Suite. London’s Old Vic theater staged productions of Romeo and Juliet, St. Joan, and Macbeth. The San Francisco Actors Workshop staged Waiting for Godot. The Royal Dramatic Theater of Sweden staged plays by Eugene O’Neill and August Strindberg. The Korean Folkart Company performed. Count Basie, Isaac Stern, Van Cliburn and Igor Stravinsky. The Philadelphia Orchestra, Juilliard String Quartet, CBC Vancouver Chamber Orchestra, D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, and the Seattle Youth Symphony. The Bayanihan Dance Company from the Philippines, Uday Shankar Dancers, Virginia Tanner Dance Company, Folkloric Ballet of Mexico City, the Ukrainian State Dance Troupe, the New York Ballet Company. These are just a few names and events extracted from a program of 100 pages, which serves simply to illustrate that a World’s Fair is a significant stage for the arts, as well as other forms of entertainment. My father was a scientist and thought science was all there was, and my mother didn’t care about any of it, but damn there was so much to be experienced, and I read of Seattleites who attended the fair weekly when they were children, some even two and three times a week and I’m like, “Wow.” There wasn’t only the World of Science Exhibition with the United States Science Pavilion and an exhibition area for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the famed World of Century 21 Exhibit, there was also the World of Domestic Commerce and Industry, including fashion and interior design, and the General Electric Pavilion and the Electric Power Pavilion. There was the World of Foreign Commerce and Industry representing Great Britain, the Republic of China, Sweden, Denmark, Canada, Mexico, Japan, European Communities, Brazil, United Arab Republic, San Marino, Korea, Indian, Africa, Thailand, the Philippines, Berlin (note the countries not represented), and the Boulevards of the World. The World of Art and World of Entertainment included a Playhouse, Opera House, Arena, Stadium, Show Street and Gayway with space-theme rides. Understanding the difficulties of managing three very young children at a major fair, and I suppose it was too much to ask that my parents hire a babysitter for my siblings who were too young perhaps to appreciate any of this, and take me, for I was eager to go and knew something about what I was missing as I was alert to the local news about the fair, that remains a lot of culture to avoid for 365 days because one doesn’t want to pay for food or drink or be bothered, which is me simply making the case for there being more to life than drinking and sitting the kids in front of the television and making them feel miserable for existing. If an activity was centered around anything other than drinking alcohol, my parents just weren’t interested,
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which is an opinion my mother expressed throughout my childhood. I begin to feel bitchy when I say we didn’t do anything ever, and unduly judgmental when I say my parents refused to do anything unless drinking was involved, or that I must appear to be simply bitchy. But the World’s Fair sounds like it was fun. I wish I’d been there.
We may have had souvenir glass beverage tumblers from the World’s Fair for a little while, or perhaps I’m remembering a set my Aunt Thelma showed off from her visit to the fair with my grandparents. I looked up World’s Fair souvenirs and as I write this I realize that I’ve retrieved a memory of the visit of Thelma and my grandparents to the fair, but at the moment it is only this one, we are in the kitchen and Thelma is displaying the glasses she purchased as a souvenir, and I wish we too had glasses like that because they were really special with their imprints of the Space Needle and Arches and other scenes. I was a little jealous she would be taking these home with her.
Shifting back to 1961, I shrink myself down and imagine myself, at four years of age, in the home of my fraternal grandparents, I try to inhabit my four-year-old body walking around their ranch house with which I became so familiar later, eating at the table in the informal dining area next the kitchen, sleeping whereever it was that I slept when I was four, playing, and nothing returns to me. I likely stayed in the second bedroom which had two single beds with nice solid wood frames from the 1930s or 1940s, whereas my parents would have stayed in the full-size fold-out sofa bed in my grandfather’s office. But I’ve no memory of sleeping there. Zip. Zero. I can remember when I was two and hating scratchy petticoats that felt like nothing short of steel wool scraping the skin off one’s thighs but I can’t recollect my first trip to my father’s parents’ home, which must have been attended by high emotional drama on my mother’s part as she would have had to fit into their routine. What did they do for entertainment, for certainly they didn’t sit around and indulge in long hours of conversation without one or the other becoming offended and disappearing to their room for as many hours of recuperation time. Did they go to Belk’s for the advertised “Gigantic White Sale” to purchase 2 for $1.00 Cannon’s solid color and exact-match striped 22 by 44 inch bath towels for my grandmother’s bathrooms? 6 washcloths or 3 hand towels for $1.00. My grandmother was an indefatigable shopper, they likely went shopping nearly every day as her life was ordered around her diabetes and hunting for game in stores, though I wonder how they handled this with two children in tow as none of them had patience to fit their interests around children, especially not an infant boy who would have become irritable within minutes and demanded near constant attention in a strange environment. I know this because at the age of four I was already exasperated with my parents ignoring my toddler brother so that I was the one who tended him in stores and watched to make sure he didn’t handle and break things and tried to keep him happily entertained, but then he’d weary of his older sister guarding him and my parents would finally turn their attention to him when he was utterly exhausted and save him from his nagging older sister who had done her best to keep him from pursuing curiosity and grabbing up attractive glass curios invitingly displayed on low shelves.
On Thursday, the fifth of January, the newspaper gave my father as a guest of his father’s at the Rotary Club dinner meeting at the now historic Drake hotel, during
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which the film Missouri—A Living Portrait was shown. The film showcases the state’s features and industries, as introduction using the Regionalist and Social Realist art of Thomas Hart Benton, Missouri born and bred by a family of politicians to go into law or politics but he went into art instead, studied in Paris, lived in New York, summered for fifty years in Martha’s Vineyard, but the movie presented him as the Missouri artist-philosopher, wisdom keeper with a long view down the great Mississippi into the many stages of Missouri’s past, and perhaps he was this folklorist and perhaps it was partly for show, I don’t know. He did some beautiful paintings, one of a farmer’s field personified as Persephone lying at the foot of a tree alongside flowering vines and a creek, and was so bold as to include in a mural on Indiana history the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross outside a dark church, context marking the KKK as racist White supremacist hate and part of Indiana’s history of shame supplied by the depiction of a little Black girl with a bandaged wrist, tended in a hospital in the forefront. His New York Times obituary gave him as pugnacious and outspoken. Yet though Thomas Hart Benton says he grew up near Indian Territory, and several times speaks of Missouri being a heartland even before white settlers, the movie tenaciously avoids ever mentioning the Osage in Missouri, nor are any American Indian nations named. I know this because the movie, faded to varying shades of purple and rose red, is archived on Youtube by the Harry S. Truman Library. Musical entertainment for the Rotary dinner program was supplied by a teen named William, a “promising” young baritone, who sang “Let us Break Bread Together”, followed by “He”, then “The Men from the Valley of Apple Pie”. William appears frequently in the Carthage paper due his prowess as a singer and performer in high school productions, and several times is almost pictured in a group photo but he is printed so dark it’s impossible to see his face. The one time a solo photo is offered, it is a blank, black silhouette, which made me wonder if he was, indeed, black. As it turns out, he was, and perhaps if he was promoted so vigorously it was because, as occasionally noted, his voice teacher was white and the new wife of a wealthy industrialist and Rotarian. I know about his voice teacher because I’ve looked up her history, and if one probes a little more one finds that on William’s mother’s side he had a step-relation, James Scott, also from the Carthage area, who Wikipedia notes was considered one of the “big three” in Ragtime music, who had in the early 1900s gone to Kansas City where he’d made his living, and died, largely forgotten, sixteen years before William was born. There were at least a couple of other musicians in the extended family. As musicianship sometimes runs in families, perhaps it ran in his, and it was also a way to step up the ladder and make a better life for one’s self, if one was able to make it and it looked as though William had a promising start. With further investigation I find that William lived several blocks down the street from where my grandparents were. A little while after I arrived in Missouri, as my best friend in Richland had been black, and I’d lived across the street from her, I asked my grandparents where all the black people were as the only people around us were white. They did their best to sidestep the question, and when I persisted my grandmother said vaguely, “Down there,” that was that, and I was ten and gave up, but there was a black neighborhood “down there” through which we never drove, and William was living there when I was a child. Hoping William got out of Carthage and into music, I searched but found no musical future. He was also in ROTC, had received ROTC awards, he went into the army, served in Vietnam, and returned home a sergeant. It may be this was the life William wanted. Or it may be the
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life that happened due things outside William’s control, which is the way of many lives, and one becomes a philosopher negotiating the difference between leading one’s best life and a life well lived.
My father’s parents lived on a street called River, which baffled me as I was coming straight from a town set on the great Columbia River and there was no river in sight of my grandparents’ home. Blocks down the street, I see on Google Maps that a small bridge crossed over a little creek for which I’m unable to find a name. River Street ultimately dead ends about a mile north on the old Route 66 though on the other side of Route 66 there is a brief snippet of road called Eldorado, I guess because River Street decided here was where it found the fabled city of gold. Take a right on Route 66 and a short way from this is a bridge that crosses over Spring River. Perhaps River Street had once crossed over this and that section of it had been absorbed into Route 66. When you call a street River one expects there should have been an association with a river at some point in the past. I would look out across my grandparents’ back yard to the big field where more Carthage had yet to be built and think that there, as in Washington State, just beyond that field should be the river.
When I was in my early twenties and my grandmother learned that I had black apartment neighbors, she astonished me by expressing disapproval and said that I should move. I told her that was racist, and I wasn’t moving, to which she replied that was my decision but a person couldn’t trust people not of one’s own race and that I’d learn this. She spoke in her typical matter-of-fact manner, in the same voice she would have used to inform yet again that bananas are a good source of potassium. Then rather than waste her time further, she wrinkled her nose in her typical expression of disgust and fluttered the thin fingers of her left hand indicating she was done with the conversation as she turned her head and shoulders away from me. It always surprised me when I heard white people deploy such racist rhetoric because as far as I could tell I was always being fucked over by white people, I had no trust for white people. Why should a white person trust white people when white people were always proving to them they were not to be trusted. As for my family, I wondered how people who took pride in having abolitionist ancestors could be themselves so profoundly racist.
3
A mural celebrating the history of the Carthage area, painted by Lowell Davis, is on display in the Carthage Courthouse. Many appear to be appreciators of Lowell Davis’ art. Unlike the energetic fluidity of Thomas Hart Benton, whose work seems designed to encapsulate and break open a myth in each frozen moment, Davis’ Carthage Courthouse mural strikes me as a cramped composite of illustrations of varying quality with little dialogue between them, some even forgetting the so-called folk art style that Davis typically produces, perhaps not surprising as he spent some years as an art director for a large advertising agency before he became known as the “Norman Rockwell of rural art”, popular with people desiring friendly collectibles. An Osage Indian is portrayed in the courthouse mural and a news article relates the
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name of the person who served as a model. I looked up the individual to see to which Osage families he was related as I didn’t recognize the name, and I was confused to find he had no Osage ancestry. This is extra confusing for the painting of the Osage, which reaches toward the confident and vivid dignity of George Catlin’s nineteenth-century American Indian portraits, breaking out of the folk art depictions, does look like it’s modeled upon nineteenth century imagery such as Catlin’s, either a painting or photograph. I’m baffled and there’s no questioning Lowell Davis about any of this as Lowell Davis is deceased and so is the white model. I’ve never seen the mural in person, which is called “Forged in Fire”, there are only a few not very good piecemeal photos of it online, but its fiery focus seems to come from Carthage having been taken and retaken by Union and Confederate troops during the Civil War, and that it was completely burned, only one farmhouse left standing after Confederate guerrillas torched the town, the seat of Jasper County, in 1864. Riding tall over the conflagration is a woman on horseback, Myra Maybelle Shirley Reed Starr, who married James Reed of Quantrill’s Raiders in 1868. Quantrill’s Raiders was the pro-slavery bushwhacker group that killed over 180 civilians of Lawrence, Kansas, during their attack on the town in 1863. While it’s often said the history of Carthage was burned during the Civil War, the town wasn’t laid out until 1842, so twenty-one years of its history was burned and it was a hundred and eleven years later that this particular mural, “Forged in Fire”, was painted, which was a gift to Carthage by its chapter of Soroptimist International, a club dedicated to the “Best for women”, however started in 1921 by a man, Stuart Morrow. I guess Myra, whose maiden name was Shirley and whose parents were aligned with the Confederacy, seemed to have a thing for outlaws, she having married also Cherokee Sam Starr, and Bruce Younger of the Younger Boys (the Dalton Boys tie in through Bruce’s sister, Adeline, marrying James Dalton, thus was the Dalton Boys gang bred). Also highlighted in the mural is Anna Baxter who was born in Pennsylvania but grew up in Carthage and was voted into the position of Jasper County Clerk in 1890, before women had the privilege to vote. But it’s Belle Starr who Lowell Davis loved. He built near Carthage the town of Red Oak II, based on his old home town, and conveyed there, for preservation, the cabin in which Belle was born, which he blended with a recreation of the home in which she was living when shot and killed. That is the house in which Lowell Davis died. It was in 1974, after his long stint in advertising in Dallas, Texas, that he purchased the farm that he would transform into what he initially called his “Foxfire Farm” homestead, where the small town was recreated, free for tourists to roam, but of course had a shop where he sold his popular Foxfire Farm paintings and figurines (no argument, sell your stuff) that recalled a more sympathetic yesteryear of supposed self-reliance. Lowell Davis fondly remarked that, “The 1930s seemed to be a much simpler time. Neighbors helping neighbors, everyone had a garden and canned their own food. They had a milk cow and they even made their own clothes. By today’s standards, they were poor…they just didn’t know it.” That’s not how it really was for everyone, probably not even most everyone in the 1930s, but that’s the version Davis sold, he wasn’t born until 1937 and his childhood point-of-view was a little more privileged than some as his bio states his grandfather had a blacksmith shop and his father ran the general store then owned a gas station (while his father’s obituary and the censuses state both were carpenters), and though he’d said he’d left behind his Country Club consumerist, hot car, big city lifestyle, having learned to value the simpler things in life, by 1981 he was being paid to create and go on tour a few times a year, receiving royalties for all his cows with limpid eyes and
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smiling pigs sold by Schmid Collectibles, his paintings selling for “upward of $4,000” when his personal art previously went for about $500. His farm was self-described as “a cross between Old McDonald’s and a rural Disneyland”.
In 1968, Lina Wertmuller’s The Belle Starr Story, directed under the masculine alias of Nathan Wich, reimagined what was already mythologized to suit Belle as a sex bomb. When the truth is hard to get to, perhaps the myth is owned by everyone to be molded as they want, but there are historical facts, which are all tossed aside. As a fiery redhead clothed from head to toe in tight black leather, she becomes involved with a gambler, kills men, and relates a tale of her sadistic uncle having murdered her parents etcetera, there’s no point relating it in full, the story has nothing to do with Belle Starr. I am able to watch the confused mix of feminism and (perhaps satirical) misogyny on Youtube. Whether Lowell Davis would have been able to view the film when it came out, I don’t know. I can’t find a release date for it in the United States, and it doesn’t appear when I search the newspapers for it. With his obsession for Belle, however, I can imagine Lowell purchasing a copy for his collection, or traveling to Europe to see it and be fascinated by Sexy Starr, if possibly distracted by how her painted freckles move around on her face. Undoubtedly, he’d have been familiar with the 1941 Belle Starr starring Gene Tierney. The film opens with the South losing the Civil War and Belle being highly offended at Blacks not behaving like slaves, she scowls at Black people riding as passengers in carriages with whites, and Black women dressed up in finery as nice as her own. She’s aghast at the idea of plantations broken up and former slaves being promised land and a mule and being able to walk on the sidewalk. Why did Hollywood keep promoting defeated Confederates as heroic, which is why she’s now falling all over Sam Starr, because he’s represented as the Confederate who won’t give up and thus is an outlaw, for which reason she becomes an outlaw. But then Sam gets involved with outlaws who don’t care about the Confederate cause and Belle’s good brother Ed is killed and then Belle is gunned down for the ransom money and Sam says, “No, that’s not Belle,” so her killer won’t get the ransom, and now Belle will live on as a legend, never dying. Not much history was involved—Belle’s brother Ed died in a Civil War battle, and Sam Starr died a couple of years before Belle—but Belle was at least depicted as riding side-saddle, and Sam Starr was one of the men she married. The film was intended to ride on the coat tails of Gone With the Wind, pulling in more pro-Confederacy cash, and Carthaginians would have been excited as backdrop portions were filmed in southwest Missouri. It was in 1940 to 1942 that my maternal grandmother’s Brewer relation was filming westerns in Hollywood, sold as a Grapes of Wrath style refugee from the Missouri Ozarks. 11 September 1941 on page seven of The Joplin Globe was an ad for “Richard Dix in The Round Up with Betty Brewer” showing at the Rex theater in Joplin. At the bottom of the page was an ad for the Paramount theater and a feature that was starting the next day. “Belle Starr, the lawless queen of a lawless era! For the first time the screen unfolds the exciting true story of the West’s first two-gun woman…who hated as fiercely as she loved. Midwest premiere showing starting tomorrow for one week. The most important picture since Jesse James. Filmed in gorgeous color. All outdoor scenes filmed near Pineville and Noel.” Well, except for those parts that were filmed in Agoura, California, the Santa Susana Mountains of California, at Sherwood Forest in California, and at the Iverson Ranch in Los Angeles. But there are landscapes I recognize as Missourian, such as some scenes of limestone and dolomite cliffs. At
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least I think they’re Missouri. When I saw them I thought, “Missouri”, that these were a type of cliff I would have seen on our drives. Stand-ins were used for the stars in these long and medium-long shots, their faces not seen, Gene Tierney wasn’t out riding a horse around Missouri hills. On 18 September Belle Starr! Is playing in St. Louis and a couple of columns over is a story on “Stage Mothers to Background Stars” and how “the film colony’s best business woman, 13-year-old [she was eighteen] Betty Brewer, handles her studio affair perhaps better than many of the adult stars. During the past year her parents haven’t been on the lot more than a half-dozen times, and then only for lunch. Betty usually skates to the studio every morning, to attend the school on the lot, after which she goes home in the afternoon to play with the neighborhood kids. When working, she generally gets home about 6 o’clock, has dinner, studies her script and gets to bed early.”
Lowell had a rural childhood, that was no fabrication, most of his family seeming to have been from Iowa and Illinois, they made their way down to Missouri between 1880 and 1930. By 1974 to 1980 he was already gaining significant collectible fame. Newspapers advertised meet-and-greets with the artist whose limited edition porcelains and bronze castings were commissioned and sold by, among others, Kaiser of Bavaria, one brass for Kaiser advertised in the 1979 Atlanta Journal paper for $1,150. Kaiser presented him as an artist interested in conservation and his art under their brand exhibited none of the cute elements found in the later works sold by Schmid, whose oversized news ads for Davis depicted him as a rural life artist, his heritage “deep in the Ozark foothills of Missouri”. By 1980, with Schmid, he was advertised as representing the self-sufficient family farm in his sculptures, producing such pieces as “Good Clean Fun” which was of geese cavorting in a washtub. A large 1980 ad in the Fort Lauderdale News gave itself completely over to a new Davis painting, “Surprise in the Cellar”, limited edition porcelains and plates being devoted to a favorite cat of Lowell Davis’ who disappeared, and “just when all hope of finding the cat was lost, he found her in the cellar. With four newborn kittens.” Meet and greet at a preview, purchase and have the work signed by the artist. The audience Davis had by then cultivated, which was most lucrative, was significantly different from those concerned with conservation.
I don’t know where Davis got the idea to name his farm Foxfire, but down in Rabun Gap, Georgia, an educator, Eliot Wigginton, had become already famous for publishing, with his school students, a magazine called Foxfire about Appalachian rural life and folklore. The periodical, begun in 1966, was repackaged as a best-selling book in 1972. It inspired a veritable industry and produced the Foxfire Foundation. He was "Georgia Teacher of the Year" in 1986. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1989. Then in 1992 Eliot Wigginton landed in jail for the sexual molestation of a ten-year-old boy, the iceberg tip of a problem which had been known about by some since as early as 1969, and he may have abused more than a hundred youths. He planned to fight the charges, which he claimed were false, adults were seeking to take advantage of the success of Foxfire for monetary gain, then it was revealed about twenty other students and former students he'd abused were lined up to testify as well, so Wigginton pled guilty to the one charge, went to prison for a year and received nineteen years probation. I was working for a columnist at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution when all this happened and it was a big shake up, everyone had
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defended him, saying it couldn't be true, this inspirational man, a chronicler of the prized past, uplifting youth. No, he was targeting vulnerable youth. When the news first broke, of course I had conversations in which I said I believed it would probably turn out to be true, and the person with whom I was talking would shake their head in disapprovingly, in protest, no, it couldn't be, it was lies. A 1993 article in Atlanta Magazine reveals, "The molestations allegedly began the year that Eliot Wigginton first stepped into the classroom, and for 25 years constituted a current of suspicion and fear that wound through Rabun County like a black creek". Some nicely poetic phrasing there. There had even been a GBI investigation into Wigginton in 1986--Mr. Teacher of the Year--initiated by the father of an individual who was undergoing therapy due, he said, Wigginton having molested him in the 1970s, but it seems people weren't ready to talk, or willing to talk, or at least the people contacted knew nothing, and the statute of limitations had run out. A newspaper check for Lowell Davis’ Foxfire Farm dries up about 1989, which is when the name of Red Oak II first appears, so Davis was already seeming to have begun to dissociate himself from the Foxfire name, which leads one to wonder if he had initially gotten a pass with “Foxfire Farm”, then had perhaps been challenged, and by 1992 he was glad to let go of it altogether. I don’t know, I’m only speculating.
After a night of reading news articles I come across a fully informative one from 1979, attached to Lowell Davis’ appearance at a mall in Lafayette, Louisiana, in which it’s stated that Foxfire Farm was named in honor of the “series of books dedicated to the preservation of rural life”, his return to Missouri following his having already achieved enough attention that he was able to start his own studio.
Lowell Davis’ art and his rural Old McDonalds Disneyland found their home outside Carthage in the 1970s. Precious Moments Chapel, filled with Sam Butcher’s kitsch child angels, was built in Carthage in the late 1980s, and the road on which it’s located is now named South Chapel. When I was periodically in Carthage in the 1960s and 1970s was before its theme park associations with Davis and Butcher, however in the 1961 film, Missouri—A Living Portrait, the artist that was profiled, Thomas Hart Benton, produced work of a more mature type, not sentimental, not timid about addressing sexuality and social issues. While the movie wasn’t produced out of Carthage and may not have reflected the interests of the majority of Carthaginians (or maybe it did), we at least know at the time Missouri didn’t shy from profiling Benton as an important Missouri artist who was from Neosho in Newton County, thirty miles from Carthage which was in neighboring Benton County, so he too was from what might reasonably called the Carthage area. I read that a mural by Benton is in Joplin, where he once worked at the newspaper, and depicts "Joplin at the Turn of the Century"". I find images of it and it seems a lesser work. The painting depicts a colorfully dressed young woman who stands on stairs to the left, carrying a parasol in one hand, her other lifting slightly her skirt’s hem, below her are men gambling at cards next to a table on which is placed a Bible and religious revival notice, Main street stretches beyond, while on the right is a lowly wagon that carries a family and their few worldly goods “Joplin or Bust” toward whatever promise it is that Joplin offers, and then working men and some industry of the area on the far right. Painted in 1972, it was unveiled in March of 1973, Benton’s last mural, $60,000, fourteen by five and a half feet. Another mural of his, more significant, dresses the Missouri capitol, a
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review of the history of Missouri that in one section shows a Black man lynched on a tree neighboring Civil War Union and Confederate forces clashing. Polished businessmen—only men, obviously of power—sit at tables with drinks and cigars at a stag banquet while in the background their entertainment is a chorus line of scantily clad women dancers on a stage. A trial by jury is depicted, all men, but seated beside them, commanding more attention, is a woman with a toddler spread across her knees, she changing the boy’s diaper and wiping him up. A Black man is sold in a slave market, the White male in wealthy plantation finery. Settlers are burned out of their home and a man is tarred and feathered by what I take to be pro-slavery Missouri bushwhackers. There’s the Mississippi River with a Sam Clements riverboat, on the shore a black Man fishing with a young white boy, Mark Twain’s Jim and Huck Finn, Huck looking up with admiration at Jim who holds their catch on a line. Jesse James holds a gun on fearful men during his commission of the Gads Hill Train holdup. There’s a fight in a Black saloon with a black woman firing a gun at a man and woman seated together at a table before a painting of Custer’s Last Stand, this part said to be a depiction of Bill Dooley’s ballad, “Frankie and Johnny”, said to be based on a Frankie Baker who shot her boyfriend Albert Britt when she caught him with a prostitute. She claimed he’d attacked her with a knife, and in truth he was a pimp and she was a prostitute of his, and there was proof she’d acted in self defense and was acquitted. An 1899 report of the incident states it happened October nineteenth at 212 Targee Street in St. Louis. Above the report is an advertisement for Sulphur Elixir for wasting and coughs, which means tuberculosis. Below the report is “No tipping at Crawford’s Restaurant.” Interspersed throughout the painting are people laboring in various industries, lumber, brewing, printing, farming. An older man relaxes and reads his newspaper while the industrial slaughter of hogs and horses is depicted beside a building with gleaming white stairs that lead up to a columned portico, a neighbor to the scene of the men entertained by the dancers, men who were movers and shakers drinking and smoking, one of them the corrupt political boss Tom Pendergast. People were up in arms over the depiction of Their Missouri, demanding why Benton didn’t show some of the best people. In an 8 March 1937 article in the St. Louis Star and Times he defends himself as follows, “Well, they’re there, but you just don’t recognize them in their natural aspect—doing the things they ordinarily do, when not on parade.” He said he attempted to paint a realistic view of Missouri society, its general social history. “Only through the behavior of people can a social history be shown. I have painted what I’ve actually seen in Missouri life and what I know to be true of its past. In the back of my head are no patterns of what life ought to be, or has been; I try to paint what is and was. Naturally, there must be some basis of selection; absolute realism is not attainable. I use what seems to me to be significant, but the selection is also conditioned by the work of art itself…To be a successfully working thing the parts must be related, belong to one another. People say that Missouri has ideals, and that they’re absent from my murals. But ideals only become real when they affect behavior…Essentially, criticism of my Jefferson City murals grows out of the fact that they represent a break with tradition. One can always expect a storm in that case. Mural painting has always been an idealizing art; using it as a realistic medium is almost shocking…” Some legislators boycotted the room in which was the mural. An editorial in the Independence Examiner deemed it sordid and disgusting, and accused the painter of picking out and emphasizing the weaknesses of early Missouri life, leaving out its strong characters and ideals. Despite the protests, the mural prevailed. It’s still there.
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Carthage, Missouri, to my knowledge, has no art by Thomas Hart Benton. No, instead you have Lowell Davis’ Old McDonalds Disneyland town, and South Chapel Road and the Precious Moments Chapel. If they renamed a road for Sam Butcher that at least means he was good for business.
4
Having grown up near the University of Washington, overlooking Lake Union in Seattle, a city that had a population of 550,000 in 1960, and Richland, Washington, which had a population in the twenty-thousands and was surrounded by semi-arid desert and mountains, I had no idea what to do with myself in Carthage, which had a population of about 11,000 and no urban or desert areas to roam, no horizons, but there was activity that preoccupied and ordered the days before school started, which was accompanying my grandfather as he made his rounds to the small town radio stations he owned and managed.
Their house, a mid-century modern ranch style, was built in 1954/1955, which meant my father would have visited while he was attending KU but he didn’t grow up there, he was already at university. I find in September of 1955 the Joplin Cement Company touts in a sizable ad that the new home of my grandparents features their installation of Copples aluminum sliding windows, Ratox folding closet doors (bifold wood, not louvered, Ratox folding doors were only sold between 1951 and 1965) and PFC Ornamental Iron. Henson Construction, in another large ad, congratulates my grandparents for having chosen the nation’s number one selling Super Kem-tone rubberized wall paints, exterior house paint by Pratt & Lambert given as the finest quality made, the “38” Pale Trim varnish by Pratt & Lambert used on woodwork throughout, and Pratt & Lambert semi-gloss enamels in the kitchen and bathrooms. It feels weird to say that while they would have refreshed the paint between 1955 and when I lived there, I was in fact impressed with the paint job and varnish when I was ten because it was of a quality that made the entire house feel like it was nice furniture. A near full page spread of my grandparents’ new home appears in the 10 September 1955 issue of the Carthage Evening Press, complete with a large photo of its exterior and a view from the kitchen’s dining nook through the kitchen into the dining room. The house’s exterior is described as painted in “ranch red” and trimmed with Carthage split face stone, “situated on a slight rise above the street on a 90 foot wide and 149 foot deep lot”. The 12 by 19 foot kitchen and breakfast nook has bleached finished birch cabinets, cabinet tops in Formica green, walls painted dusty pink and a floor of terrazzo-type linoleum. The built-in cabinet in the dining room is limed oak, the wall paper a harmonizing green floral. The living room, 27 by 14 feet, has a large fireplace of Carthage stone. The den is paneled in natural mahogany. The sunroom is paneled with surf wood. I learn the bathroom walls were in green plastic tile rather than ceramic. On the following page are yet more pictures of the dining room, the interior of the sun room and the exterior rear of the home. That’s a lot of newspaper space for showcasing a new home. I assume the contractors who worked on it were eager to be recognized as my grandfather was the radio guy there and was also
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President of the Chamber of Commerce. I wonder if my grandfather got a price break in exchange for permitting his home to be advertised in this way.
Were they advertising also themselves as upwardly mobile, or were they downplaying what they might have been making in radio, or felt they stood to make, with the somewhat modest but nicely appointed ranch home.
I wonder why they opted for plastic tile rather than ceramic. Because it was cheaper? Because it was modern? To my eye, it looked ceramic. Water damage could happen with plastic tile, getting behind it. I wonder if they’d had the plastic tile replaced with ceramic by the time I was living with them.
A side note on America and shifts in marketing. Ratox folding doors were manufactured by the Hough Shade Corporation which was begun in 1900 and sold shades for your porch during a time when there was no air-conditioning and people slept on their porches during the summer. Old ads for Hough’s Vudor Ventilating Porch Shades describe how they make one’s porch comfortable and luxurious, cool and shady and restful all summer long, day and night, not only is the porch a healthful place for children to sleep but Vudor shades will bring comfort to afternoon card parties and porch dances. I don’t know when Hough Shade Corporation became Hufcor, but their products now are chiefly operable partitions and movable wall systems for corporate settings where you don’t want permanent walls, you need to be able to reimagine work spaces easily, convention and even entertainment and theatrical spaces. They also do situational training wall systems, which is stagecraft for gunplay, “build your own temporary street and rooms” for “bringing potential scenarios to life, whether you’re conducting a situational training for police or fire squads, in need of shooting stalls or want to simulate a specific setting.” The photo below the ad copy has two officers in black, their heads encapsulated by black helmets that have shields covering their faces, entering an interior room with guns drawn. Below that is a photo of the movable walls staged to look like the exterior of a house. One movable wall is covered with the image of a garage door before which is seated a black Labrador retriever, and I’m kind of surprised they used this photo as the fake brick siding on the corner side wall is all torn up and the gray seal finishing that joins the walls looks like hell, bent up, not sized for a clean fit, like someone slapped up strips of vinyl and said to hell with making it look nice these are fake fronts inside a warehouse for training officers with scenarios you can change “in minutes instead of hours”. There’s even a front door with two upper panels for glass and one of the panels looks like it was punched out. Why’s the dog there? How do they deal with the threat of a painted Labrador guard dog? Anyway, Hough’s once concerned itself with giving you a cool porch to sleep on. Now its movable walls are used for training officers to bust into residences.
How I would describe the house’s layout is you walked in the front door from a nice-sized porch, into an entry adjoining the living room, and on the right was a hall that led to my grandfather’s office, what was described as a den in the news article, and the master bedroom, both of which looked out on the back yard. The office had a fold-out couch so it served as a third bedroom when need be. There was a main bathroom that faced a neighboring house, and a second bedroom that had windows
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that looked out on the neighbor’s house and the front yard. It had nice size twin beds, a vanity, and dresser, and was also the room where my grandmother stored all her extra clothes and several furs in a large sliding-door closet. Back to the front entry, on the left as one entered was the living room, to its rear was a dining room for formal occasions and bridge parties, then to the rear of the dining room was a “day room” where were a couple of small sofas that when you removed the rear cushions became beds. To the left of the dining room was the kitchen then another dining area used for all non-formal meals, then the laundry room with a half-bath off of it that my grandmother used for monitoring the glucose in her urine in the morning.
Though my father hadn’t lived in this house, he had spent part of his youth in Carthage and graduated from Carthage High School. For the first time, looking at advertisements such as these, reports on activity concerning the radio station, talks my grandfather gave when he was president of the Chamber of Commerce, I began to get a picture of my father, at least while in Carthage, positioned as the son of a family of privilege. As he never spoke about anything personal or past, that was a reason I’d never have learned about this from him, and it is peculiar to realize what would have been his social standing. But how had they gotten there? Before their arrival in Carthage, since at least the time of my father’s birth they had been in Ponca City, Oklahoma, where my grandfather was, according to the census and his WWII draft registrations, employed as a clerk in the traffic department at Continental Oil. The family lived in a modest two-bedroom home of about 1000 feet that can still be viewed on Google Maps, and maybe no one ever mentioned that home to me because it was so unassuming as to be self-erasing. On 24 April 1947 an article was published in the Jasper County News that a new radio station would begin operations May fifteenth in Carthage under the partnership of my paternal grandfather and an individual who would act as sales manager while my grandfather would be the station manager. The article didn’t inform that both of the men were employed at Continental Oil, instead relating they had “extensive radio experience” at WBBZ in Ponca City. The 1947 transition coincides with Ponca City Publishing Company beginning negotiations that year with Adelaide Carrell, owner and station manager of WBBZ, to purchase the station that was begun in 1927 by her husband, Charles Lewis Carrell, who had died in 1933. Adelaide was not Charles’ wife when he started WBBZ. About 1930 he and his first wife divorced, and not long after he was remarried to the Australian-born Adelaide who was about twenty years younger and whose family had been in entertainment. Had my grandfather and his KDMO partner wished instead to be in Ponca City, but felt they couldn’t beat out the Ponca City Publishing Company? Or had they instead planned and desired to start this new station in Carthage?
Why Carthage?
A news article relates that the first broadcast from KDMO was on the evening of June third 1947, not the fifteenth of May as was projected above. The broadcast day, Monday through Saturday, would be from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., and from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Sunday.
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How I know anything wiith any certainty about my grandfather is from an application for a Winfield, Kansas, station that was before the Federal Communications Commission in 1962 as it includes a biography for my grandfather that related how after graduating from Kansas Business College in Coffeyville, Kansas, he completed two years of study in commerce and business administration at Kansas State College in Pittsburgh, Kansas. Subsequent this, he was employed by the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad in the fields of transportation and communications, then, from 1934 to 1947 was employed by Continental Oil in its general office traffic department at Ponca City. Simultaneous to his employment at Continental Oil, and after taking a night course in radio engineering in 1940, he was employed part-time by WBBZ as its business manager, “in the evenings, on weekends, and in the early morning hours.” Other duties included announcing, programing, news, and sales.
What this tells me is that my grandfather had seven years of part-time experience with many aspects of running a radio station, so he was prepared for managing KDMO, but for years he’d had no room for family in his life, not working full time for as a clerk for the oil company and putting in hours like that at WBBZ.
My father and his family had moved from Ponca City, Oklahoma, to Carthage, Missouri, in 1947, when my father was thirteen, the year my father’s father and a partner “signed on” the KDMO radio station there. The station broadcasted from a house at 1201 East Chestnut, originally known as the Carter mansion, also Carter’s Bluff, built outside Carthage in the 1890s by Dr. John Addison Carter who became the largest landowner in Jasper County, accruing 3000 acres, plus large real estate holdings in Iowa, Colorado, Kansas and California. After his death in 1913 his son remained in the house with his wife, but before 1923 the Carters had moved, then he left his wife and she sued him concerning settlement of property rights, complaining he was “sullen and morose”. A year after his second wife’s death, in May of 1963, Carter, still a resident of Carthage, died by suicide by gun.
The Carter home had decades before been purchased by H. B. McDaniel, a Springfield banker, and was in that family until his death, when it was put up for auction in 1943, which was still being settled in 1946. So says a 1946 news report. But a 1920 article reports a W. J. McDaniel, head of McDaniel Milling Company, acquired the home that year from James Luke, all of its 316 acres. W. J. McDaniel was William Jasper McDaniel who died in 1934. He had however a brother, Horace Bunch McDaniel, a bank president in Springfield, the same H. B. McDaniel as above, but he didn’t die until 1949. If there’s confusion, perhaps the property had passed instead into the hands of their sister Elizabeth McDaniel who died in 1946. In 1926 she had been a partner in the purchase of the Ross Farm near Marvel Cave, with the intention of restoring the property where had lived characters of the Shepherd of the Hills play. She turned “Matt’s Cabin” into a tea room and curio shop, later opening Cove Hollow Bowl theater in 1933.
There were signs everywhere for the Shepherd of the Hills play, and I asked my grandparents about it because I was interested in plays, but my grandmother had nothing to respond and my grandfather passed over explaining anything about it to me, he shrugged it off as some kind of show. So I will tell you that it was based on the
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1907 book by Harold Bell Wright, a minister who hadn’t much desire to be a minister, and who had hit the jack pot with The Shepherd of the Hills, which was his second novel. The book was about life in the Ozarks, what he’d seen of it as a visitor, and enabled him to go into writing full time and rather than settling down in the Ozarks he purchased a ranch near El Centro, California. But as a young man, for health reasons he had taken vacations for eight years in the Ozarks, and had come to know people who had served as inspiration for the book, which was about an Ozark man named Old Matt and another man named Howitt. Howitt escaped city life for the backwoods after the deaths of his wife and children and the later suicide of his artist son. Howitt is a minister, the “Shepherd of the Hills”, friend to these simple people of the Ozarks. His artist son, Mad Howard, had, years before, spent time in the area and had painted a picture of Old Matt’s daughter, who he wanted to marry, but that relationship was broken when he returned to the city and his father wouldn’t permit him to marry beneath their place in society. Years later Mad Howard makes it appear he has committed suicide, but instead returns to find his beloved has died giving birth to their son, Pete, who is mentally unstable. He has visions. Old Matt has vowed vengeance on Mad Howard and his father, so Mad Howard becomes a recluse in the hills. Howitt, going by the name, The Shepherd, having moved to the Ozarks to connect with what his son had loved, learns of the girl and the grandson, and then discovers his son is still alive but near death. He reconnects his dying son with Old Matt, who had sworn vengeance against him but now realizes how much Mad Howard had loved his daughter. Mad Howard dies and then Pete dies. Also, Young Matt, son of Old Matt, is in love with a girl, Sammy, who is also being courted by Wash Gibbs who is the leader of The Baldknobbers, an outlaw gang. Wash Gibbs kills Sammy’s father, and a posse in pursuit of the gang accidentally shoots Mad Howard, which is what leads to his death. And then Sammy and Young Matt marry. It’s more involved than that, but that’s quite enough. The book is supposed to be about forgiveness but by the end of it there’s not much of anyone left to be forgiven or forgive. The play is a big production that features eighty actors, forty horses, fist fights, gun fights, and the actual burning of a log cabin. It’s a spectacle. A log cabin burns! The play has been around for generations and I don’t know if it’s always been a spectacle. I don’t know how they pay eighty actors. My father’s parents never took me to the play in the 1960s or 1970s but they didn’t do any entertainment other than television, they never went to the movies, and they never listened to music.
On 26 April 1946 it was reported that M-P Construction Company had purchased the McDaniel farm. Company representative Roy Mayes stated the aim was a prospective expansion of Carthage.
This history of the Carter mansion may be confusing but, relying on news articles, I can’t help that.
Not only had KDMO been situated in the old Carter mansion, from what I understand it was for a time the communal household of the two partners and their families, adults sleeping on the second floor and the children on the third. In 1954 my father’s father released his part ownership of KDMO to his partner, taking full ownership of two other stations. In October of 1962, KDMO was purchased by George Kolpin, a TV
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sales executive for Columbia Broadcasting in New York for twenty-six years who by 1959 had risen to sales manager for “extended market plan”, a purpose of which was to increase the use of smaller markets by advertisers. His wife, Ruth, undertook restoration of the house on the estate, also building a second house. George died, she married a third time, then after Ruth’s death both of the houses went on the market in 2022 and astonished even residents of Carthage when real estate sites gave permission to peer upon the ostentatious grandeur and bizarre accoutrements of the two houses. Many confuse the second house Ruth built as being the older, original house, with its grand wrap-around porch that has more of a curve to it, this fulfills for them their idea of what is truly Victorian, when instead it is, as viewed from the road, the house on the left that is the original, the one that has maple trees by its front porch and queer bunker style extended-stone entries that have been added in the rear, I don’t know when. While they were running KDMO together, my grandfather and his partner had packs of cards printed up with a picture of the station house on the front to distribute for publicity. When I look at current photos of the interior, it’s impossible for me to imagine its appearance when my father’s family was living there due all the obvious alterations Ruth made getting in the way along with her gold-gilt furnishings and floor to ceiling mirrors and bronzes. But more than the bones are there. The house is labyrinthine big, full of halls and hefty Edwardian staircases, flanked throughout with old black walnut woodwork. Just within the entry is a formidable marble fireplace that is alone worth the price of admission, there are several such fireplaces, these and the window and door lintels all constructed of Carthage “Marble”. What might have been wallpapered, what might have been painted, what were the original colors of the paint on the walls, what chandeliers are original, I of course have no idea, but the National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form of 1977-1980 states that Ruth’s restoration of the Victorian Eclectic was being pursued with “great sensitivity”, and mentions the stained and beveled glass throughout so we know these features are original. Ruth’s sense of self and her fancies are like a ten thousand pound New Year’s bag of gaudy confetti that exploded all over the house and so permeated it with trite displays of wealth and banal modern improvements that any old ghosts must become trapped between what was and is. With all the money spent, every wall bearing art, I would say not a single canvas is of a quality to be purchased in a Salvation Army thrift shop except perhaps for the frames, but there are a few paintings that stand out. On the third floor of the old mansion, I was surprised to come across a painting of southern Ioway Chief John Grant, (Ka-thu-an-nu, and Ahblocenazin "Standing on Prairie"). And it’s a nicely done painting. I immediately recognized it as based on a photo taken during an Ioway delegation trip to Washington, D.C., in 1900. Its presence surprised me, this image of a real chief based on a real photo, not a fantasy image of fantasy Indians. Is it a new painting? Old? Why of an obscure Ioway chief such as John Grant? I wondered because my third great-grandfather McKenney was said to have married an Ioway woman. It astonished me that the only painting of a historical American Indian in the home, in the attic where my father slept, was of an Ioway. I wondered how to find out about the provenance of this painting, unable to learn anything about it online, nothing about who was the artist. I sent an inquiry to someone I didn’t know who I hoped would know how to learn about the painting but heard nothing in response.
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Among the new additions to the grounds is a neighboring brick gazebo Ruth built sold for its centerpiece of a storm-blasted ancient tree, roots still anchoring the ground, that’s been fashioned into a throne, the inside back of the seat carved with the image of the Statue of Liberty, the wood inlaid with stars on the front below the seat on which are stars and stripes cushions. It sits in the middle of the octagon gazebo under a high dome ornamented with stars and stripes stained glass windows. Installed in one wall of the gazebo is an ice maker and little bar area, a few white garden tables and chairs around the perimeter of the room where Ruth was said to entertain. Did she sit on the throne? Of course she would have sat on the throne. It was her throne, why shouldn’t she sit on it.
The second house, the new one, not the old original house, has a facade of make-believe Victorian, while the interior is a ferociously business-class rationalization of nouveau riche space, an architectural disaster in which McMansionism transforms into blatant senility. As that house had nothing to do with my family I’ll not bother with a description except to hazard—as there’s a massive meeting table in its basement bunker office, and the layout is so Lego bizarre with a corporate flair—this second house was principally for business and that Ruth likely lived in the original house which has a main bedroom decorated for a queen in royal gold and blue and a massive crown canopy high over the bed to sweeten your sleep. But I could be wrong about that as it’s in the newer, second house that a Meditation Room is installed, on the third floor, in which there are two matching beige lounge chairs set on a beige low-pile wall-to-wall carpet facing a low book shelf upon which stands a small statue of Jesus Christ pointing to his flaming heart, a small crucifix above, a red votive candle before, on his left a much smaller statuette of the Virgin Mary. Facing the shelf, on the right is a large, human-sized, I guess polychrome statue of what may be a biblical figure with long beard, carrying a small scroll in his left hand and a sword in his right. Saint Paul is often paired with a book and sword so perhaps this is Saint Paul, his representation said to be the most common in Catholic Churches around the world. To the right is another large statue of what may be a biblical figure and he’s carrying I don’t know what in his right hand, maybe a staff, and a carpenter’s square in his left, the kind used for math and construction, which is a symbol of Saint Joseph. Behind the chairs stands another figure with a long beard, again draped to appear to be biblical, in his left hand an open scroll and a quill in his right hand. The small representation of an ox rests at his feet, which may identify this figure as the Apostle Luke, the ox being connected with him and representing sacrifice. Behind that statue is a roach trap. There are roach traps everywhere in both houses.
Family photos of Ruth’s are throughout. Maybe surviving family members have claimed them by now. What may have been Ruth’s office, in the second home, has cabinetry filled with white porcelain statuettes of angels. Framed awards and recognitions fill a wall.
I sense ghosts, so many ghosts, but it’s the wrong house to have ghosts as it’s the new one. I guess a new house can have ghosts.
The scale of the old house is 2350 feet for the first floor, about the same for the
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second floor, 1549 feet for the third floor and 2013 feet for the basement, which equals 8253 feet. I don’t know how much if any of the basement may have been built out when my father’s family was there, but if I add up the other three floors they went from a living space of about 1000 feet in Ponca City to about 6200. My grandmother, who typically reminisced about her youth in terms of privilege, recalling they were the wealthiest in the county (Barton, where Liberal was, immediately above Jasper County) and that she was flush with beautiful clothing, had grown up in a large, two-story farmhouse with three porches, then had spent years in a 1000 foot abode in Ponca City. The mansion was not her dream house. When they left it, they radically trimmed things down to a little over 1530 feet living space with their construction of the 1955 mid-century modern. She said she was glad to get rid of the responsibilities of a massive place, that the mansion was too much. I know this because as a child I had wondered why not purchase instead one of the many, lovely Victorian homes in Carthage but she said she was tired of old, she wanted new and easy to take care of. I’ve no idea if her account that her family was once the wealthiest in the county of Barton is factual, I rather doubt it is, but I have read online people from the area remembering how my grandmother’s brother’s wife had a couple of mink coats and that she would go out to feed the chickens in the old mink, and that she was known for wearing bare-back dresses and being old Hollywood glamorous, and an excellent seamstress. Another person reminisced how a cousin of my grandmother’s gave her a diamond bracelet she had purchased in Paris, France, during a graduation tour. While she may have taken a graduation tour to Europe, I don’t find any news reports other than a 1927 European tour as a Legion Auxiliary, in connection with an American Legion Convention in Paris. She not only visited France but England, Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland and was reported to have returned with presents for family and friends. I’m taking it for granted the wealth the Noyes possessed wouldn’t have been counted as much outside the county, but they had money, I just don’t have any idea how much and how much might have filtered down to my grandmother. My father never spoke what it was like to grow up around radio. He never spoke much of living at the Carter place except to say that he had, how the children slept on one floor and the adults on another, and my grandparents had little to say about it. What set the internet astir over the mansions was the underground tunnel that connects the two homes. The underground tunnel was a big talking point, like a mystery. Among others, The New York Post wrote about it, Business Insider, House Beautiful made mention of it. Why the underground tunnel connecting these two houses? As a child I’d been told there was an entrance under the Carter house to some caves, not much more said about that except a supposition that perhaps they were for hiding during the Civil War. But the Carter house wasn’t built until—well, newspaper accounts relate in January of 1891 Carter was preparing to build on his East Chestnut land, in July of 1893 they were working on the foundation, the home projected not to be finished before spring. A May 1893 report said it would cost about $35,000, which accounting for inflation would be between $1,100,000 and $1,200,000 in 2023. In October it was ready to be roofed. In 1898 a George Turner was in town from St. Louis “securing orders for draperies to be used” which means it took time to outfit the large home as desired. So, if the Carter House had an entrance to a cave in the basement, it wasn’t accessed during the Civil War through the Carter House as the Carter House
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had yet to be built. It’s my guess there was an entrance to a cave from the basement, and that this may have been converted into the underground tunnel. But that’s me just making a supposition, I have no idea. As the Kolpins moved in during the Cold War, I would wonder if they had initially developed the cavern, or whatever it was, into a bomb shelter, then with the construction of the second house replaced it with the modern tunnel.
Carter, a physician, was one of the wealthiest men in the district. In August of 1899 he and the Mrs. took off for Poncha Springs, Colorado, to spend a month or so at the “hotel and summer resort” he owned there. Mines were leased out on some of the 3000 acres he owned around Jasper County, much of it said to be mineral yielding, and also valuable farm property. He had the largest apple orchard in the county, 160 acres of the Ben Davis variety, a process rather than table apple. In 1894 he donated two acres to the city for a Soldiers’ Monument. In 1897 he deeded to the city ten acres to be Carter’s public park on which he expected the city’s light plant to be built (I think he wanted lights). He contributed the land for Oak Hill Cemetery. In 1900, he donated stone from a quarry near his residence to be the foundation of the new Methodist parsonage opposite the northwest corner of the city park on Garrison Avenue, but he was not himself a member of any church. When a peddler stole his hat from his Carthage office in 1903 this was reported in the paper.
Carter is in the Carthage Hall of Heroes. So is Lowell Davis. So is the Ragtime composer and musician James S. Scott. So is Ralph Marlin Perkins, the zoologist and television personality of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. My grandmother and grandfather often mentioned Marlin having been born in Carthage. The Shirley family that gave birth to Belle Starr is in the Carthage Hall of Heroes, John Shirley’s biography noting they arrived in Carthage in 1851, a prosperous and popular pioneer family that built an inn, livery stable, corral, tavern and blacksmith shop, then departed for Texas after the war. Ruth Kolpin in the Carthage Hall of Heroes. Her hero page relates her advice was not to let go of your dreams because if you persevered and had the faith to continue those dreams would come true.
If your dreams came true then good for you, you kept the faith and persevered. If your dreams didn’t come true then you can’t complain because you only have yourself to blame.
I hope you know that’s almost one hundred percent bullshit.
5
Losses of memory happen where events consolidate and congeal into nuggets of knowledge. Such as I’ve retained in memory some incidents of being beaten before moving to Carthage, but Carthage became the vacation from being beaten, which was great, and that’s how the daily physical abuse before then was somehow boiled down to become a prior condition of daily stress and fear from which I experienced relief in Carthage. The past abuse became a fact with few associated memories. I don’t know
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how that transition happens, from memories of experience to instead a knowledge of what one had experienced, but it did, because I had these memories intact before Carthage. My grandmother and grandfather never used corporal punishment with us. I don’t recollect their ever having to punish us, which likely says something about how we were unnecessarily punished beforehand. I had other stresses with which to contend in Carthage, but no beatings or spankings, no mother getting out of control at any moment, no warning. And though I know from memories we had little order in our lives while in Richland and Seattle, it was in Carthage, where we experienced reliability and three meals a day, so the disorder of our lives before then was boiled down to the fact of that was how it had been and one knew that was how it had been because it was a relief to be now experiencing order, having meals, and my not having to be burdened all day with the responsibilities of taking care of my siblings, not worrying about my mother and what was going to set her explosively off, not wondering when my mother was going to come home from the hospital and what she would do while home and when was she was going to enter the hospital again.
My parents were unsafe, and when I went to stay with my grandparents for those few months when I was ten, I initially thought of this as my safe place, and though my grandparents drank in the evenings no one was ever outright drunk, just sometimes a little tipsy maybe. I had to keep my brother, B, entertained and out of the way but that must have been easy in Carthage as I remember no upsets and we didn’t get into trouble, I don’t even remember my brother and me fighting while we were there. We had regular meals, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and everything was spotlessly clean, nothing ever left out of place, and I mean not even a stray scrap of paper, and my brother and I faithfully adhered to these demands. The same rigor was practiced when it came to orderly emotions. None of my family touched or held or even kissed on the cheek, I wouldn’t have wanted hugs or kisses at home, touching was only associated with pain, but at least here things were emotionally antiseptic with no fireworks. At home, only my mother was permitted emotions. In Carthage, any slight betrayal of emotion was judged and scorned, no upsets allowed. Life was wholly oriented around material concerns. Indeed, to exhibit emotion, even any passion for anything, was to risk being perceived as mentally ill. Any idea of romantic love raised a cynical eyebrow, though my grandmother consumed historical, bodice-ripper fiction. Sensory pleasures of any type seemed not to exist, not even with food which was purely mathematical fuel. One recognized whether it was hot or cold, and that was about all the body was permitted or acknowledged to feel. Intellectual and philosophical pursuits were worthless and might indicate a nervous personality, which was no good, just as creativity in the arts belonged to nervous and ill personalities. No matter the politics of the moment the world would keep on turning according to the interests of business, and business was what mattered, how the numbers were doing. My grandparents didn’t purchase things for my brother and myself, so I didn’t think of them as having any substantial wealth, but then there were the furs in the closet and only once was I briefly permitted a glance in my grandmother’s jewelry box but that very brief look surprised me with the glint of diamond jewelry, which I only knew wasn’t costume because my grandmother proudly assured me those diamonds (nothing ostentatious) were not costume (the drawer wasn’t dripping jewels, there were enough to express some physical appreciation
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beyond the birthday gifts of stocks), which I wasn’t permitted to touch, I never saw her wear any of her bet-you-can’t-tell-I’m-not-costume jewelry which was confusing, and I realized, oh, they really do have things don’t they, they just keep them secret or low key. My mother hated my grandparents, she thought they were heartless, robotic, authoritarian freaks, and if she was right about anything in her life it was about that, but her assessments were also hard to accept as she hated nearly everyone, a way in which she and my paternal grandmother were a little alike in their being predisposed to take apart others with disdainful humor, the only time I saw them get anywhere close to simpatico was when my grandmother took a person apart limb by limb and fairly licked her fingers with their juices. At least at my father's parents, we had stability. Life was never chaotic. If we needed to be picked up from somewhere, we were picked up. If we needed school supplies they were purchased. We ate when my grandparents ate and on an unfailing schedule as my grandmother was diabetic.
My grandmother’s diabetes was our religion that manufactured many of our daily rituals. We were religiously out of bed by seven to have breakfast. Gram was always the first one up to test her blood sugar and have her insulin shot and when she was done and preparing breakfast then we knew it was time to enter. She wouldn’t dress yet, she would be in her red or pale pink or navy blue nylon pajamas with the white piping and matching robe, the sound of her tapestry slippers lightly abrasing the carpet and tile as she scuffed about, she had a habit of never really lifting her feet. Breakfast was an important but fairly elementary meal, her preparations were limited to cutting cantaloupe and making coffee and I’m sure she and my grandad would have had some protein but I don’t recollect what it was, if she prepared eggs or if they’d sworn off eggs and so had something else because she read Science Digest from cover to cover and swore off cholesterol in 1968 when the American Medical Association advised three egg yolks a week was more than enough. Grandad would have already dressed for the day and we children would usually sit down to the option of cereal and milk with banana, the radio tuned to the local news, weather, farm report, small town chat, no music. For me, radio before that, in Richland and Seattle, was a source of classical, popular music, and bits of news and weather so I had to get used to only listening to local radio with no music at all around my grandparents, which was the oddest most distressing fast of all to go from a musical to one in which music wasn’t recognized. The side cart on which was the bread (healthy whole grain) and toaster was next to my grandfather’s chair before the window in the dining area off the kitchen and it was up to him to pop in the bread for toast, that was his job. All our jams and jellies were artificially sweetened. Living with my grandmother meant having nothing with real sugar, no cookies or other sweets around, if she couldn’t eat sugar then no one was going to eat sugar, which wasn’t a big adjustment as we didn’t have sweets in Richland or Seattle. We never even had regular gum as my grandparents chewed artificially sweetened gum and we only ever had artificially sweetened gum, but we rarely had gum at home. During breakfast, while listening to the radio, my grandfather would peruse the news in the local paper. After breakfast, while my grandfather was out picking up his mail at the post office, we prepared ourselves for the day. As my brother and I were around during August before school started we became familiar with the daily routine of my grandparents. After breakfast, grandad went out in the morning to play golf with his business friends at the country club and
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then would settle into his home office to work. On the days he didn’t golf we’d be out the door to travel around southern Missouri to the radio stations he owned or managed, none of which weren’t so far away that we wouldn’t be there on time to have dinner (called lunch at home), the hot meal for the day always had around noon to keep with my grandmother’s schedule. We’d dine at a trusted restaurant or cafeteria with which they were long familiar, the kind of restaurant that was never fancy but always had a cloth tablecloth and cloth napkins and hot dinner rolls that came with your meal that was a choice of meat and a couple of vegetables and and carbohydrate like mashed potatoes with gravy. My grandfather would conduct his business at the radio station and then we’d have a short break in the afternoon for my grandmother to have a snack, and sometimes she would have a little bit of ice cream, she was occasionally permitted that. We’d be home by supper time (called dinner at home), which was always a sandwich, typically Colby Cheese which had little taste, for some reason never Cheddar (I liked sharp Cheddar), and a thin slice of ham with a lettuce leaf and mustard and Miracle Whip. Then after the dishes were done and the kitchen light shut off we’d sit down to watch television the rest of the evening, and my grandparents would have their highballs and mixed nuts and my brother and I would have milk or an occasional grandmother-friendly artificially sweetened soda. When we weren’t traveling and weren’t in school, we might eat dinner at home, grandad would maybe have dinner at the country club, perhaps because it was going to be more tasty than cottage cheese or tuna fish, and we would sometimes go out as well, which I preferred because whatever my grandmother prepared was tasteless. Between meals, around which life revolved, when we weren’t making the rounds to the stations, my brother and I were tasked with disappearing into the woodwork while my grandfather conducted business in his office and my grandmother did whatever she did, which is hard to say what that was as she had no interests other than shopping, reading torrid historical romance novels, watching detective dramas at night, and playing bridge once a week. She mainly prepared herself for going out to do her daily shopping and doing light housekeeping. She had a cleaning woman in once a week and the day before that she would spend time putting things in order for her. And there was the once a week beauty salon appointment. I don't remember much of what I did except stay very still and quiet, which was what was expected.
I confused this with taking-care-of, which it wasn't.
Well, it was being taken care of in that we had food and a bed and a clean home and our clothes were washed. It was being taken care of in that everything was on schedule and orderly and we knew what to expect. It wasn’t being taken care of in that we were expected to generally fade away between meals and become one with the furnishings. We felt taken care of because we lived in a comfortable ranch house that was well taken care of, its exterior lack of ostentation belying the amount of money my grandfather was accruing in radio—but don't get excited about the money part, I was left nothing by my grandparents, was left nothing by my father, and was given nothing by my grandparents except for a few times, nothing big, they rarely even purchased us clothes, because my grandparents seemed to want to impress upon me how money didn’t fall from trees, as if I didn’t already know this, and while living with them what they actually treated me like was the stray kitten dropped off
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on the doorstep and with whom food would be shared but nothing else lest the kitten develop expectations and forget it was the one living on the familial dole and thus was in the subservient owing position. In one way or another I was daily not permitted to forget my brother and I were burdens.
We may have been more harshly considered as parasites in the form of human children. It was a mystery to me how and when one earned the right to step up from being a grandchild on a trial basis.
When you’re a child you can also feel taken care of for totally nonsensical reasons. My grandparents had a nice color television, which we’d not had at home, and that was great, that made us feel like we were living rich and being taken care of in a very modern up-to-date way, which is how it is when you’re a child. My grandmother was crazy about Mannix, and she liked the evening game shows and the Late Night Show with Johnny Carson. They watched Petticoat Junction and The Beverly Hillbillies. I don’t recollect watching any children’s shows in the morning, I don’t think that was permitted. We did watch some television on Saturday and Sunday, if our grandmother wasn’t resting on the living room sofa reading, but it tended to be the shows our grandparents wanted to watch and we didn’t argue about that, it was their home. I don’t remember weekend day television being a thing, but I don’t recollect either what we did for entertainment because, like my parents, our grandparents didn’t take us around to do “family” or “kid” things. We didn’t do parks or take drives just for the sake of exploration. And we didn’t have friends. Despite the fact we lived right across from the junior high school, there were no neighboring children, at least none in elementary school. I’m at a loss trying to remember how my brother and I entertained ourselves on the weekends. The big thing our grandfather did when we began living there was plant a single tomato plant with my brother, but for some reason it wasn’t something my grandmother wanted to see from the kitchen window, so it was planted it all the way across the back yard back behind a bush at the rear of the yard, so we couldn’t even see this little tomato plant unless we trudged across the lawn (which we never played in, no toys) to see if it was growing, plus it was planted in August and even I knew somehow, with no garden experience, that it was too late in the season to plant tomatoes and it was unlikely this plant would do well, and it didn’t, it was soon neglected and forgotten. One day I remembered it was out there and went out to the back of the yard to remind myself that the tomato plant had actually happened, it wasn’t my imagination, and there were its remains.
The tomato plant was not actually an activity that was intended to involve me. My grandfather took my brother out back to plant it, and I insisted on tagging along. I’d never seen anything planted in the ground before.
Managing the radio stations, my grandfather did so much traveling that he got a new car every year, he said it was worth it rather than having to worry about repairs, and the cars were nice, like Lincoln Continental or Cadillac nice, real quiet and smooth rides, spacious and comfortable. I used to think he had Cadillacs then somehow got the idea Lincoln Continental was the car of choice, but when I look up Lincoln Continentals I find that from 1961 to 1969 the four door sedans had suicide doors,
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which I know their cars didn’t have, so maybe he was driving Cadillacs in the 1960s and had switched to the Lincoln Continental after 1969. When I learned they got a new car every year, I thought, “Wow, that’s kind of wealthy,” but when my grandfather explained the reasoning I saw that for my grandparents this was optimal and they could afford it, which made the difference, he did it because he put so much mileage on a car and could afford it. The traveling, though it was only around southern Missouri, I enjoyed. I liked viewing the scenery and learning about the area. I liked having crops identified for me, lots of soy beans and alfalfa, my grandmother pointing out Queen Anne’s lace, and our sighting the occasional roadrunner. My brother didn’t care for all the driving as it was boring and he would sometimes get carsick in the thick of the Ozark mountains and I’d try to distract him by reading to him, though my grandmother otherwise vetoed my reading in the car as she said it was bad for one’s eyesight, and she also wouldn’t let me read in the dark for the same reason. I resented it a little that my brother got to go with my grandfather to the radio stations, whereas I had to go with my grandmother as rather than hang out at the radio stations even for a minute she went shopping for clothes or antiques. If you were a boy you got to learn about the trade (at the age of seven, my brother wasn’t learning anything) whereas if you were a girl you weren’t considered able or viable, that was the message, but the split also meant that my grandmother had company and that the station wasn’t overwhelmed with two children. As a companion to my grandmother I was confounded that she never stopped buying. She was always purchasing some small new antique vase or porcelain cup or a new suit or silk scarf that to me was near indistinguishable from her other suits or scarves. Almost every shop we went into, the proprietor would seem to know her, this was also her time her socializing, they’d exchange friendly smiles and chat in a way that showed they were familiar with one another and had mutual acquaintances and so would gossip a bit as well. Men weren’t described as gossiping, though they exchanged news and were agents in carrying stories from one place to another. Women who worked and didn’t work outside the home, even when they had roles in charitable or other social functions, their information exchange was described as gossiping, and in the case of my grandmother I never heard them talking about politics or business, they dealt in exchanging health and family news, which was its own kind of networking, grooming the back end of community relationships.
What I wanted was to visit each radio station and see how it was laid out, learn how it all worked, how it was arranged for different programs and ads to be played, see how the DJs handled themselves live on air. What I instead did was wander antique shops and fairs looking at antique vases and tea cups with my grandmother, and waited while she tried on suits in small boutiques. I do remember my grandfather once showing me a small studio room at one of the stations and saying that was where musicians used to perform live on air, and I was disappointed that they no longer did, because that’s the kind of thing I would have loved to see and had hoped I might, I’d had this vision in my head of southern Missouri blues and gospel and country artists strumming guitars and whining into mics, and while it wasn’t my kind of music I found the idea of on-air performance thrilling.
My grandfather had KRMO in Monett, Missouri, which was begun in 1950. He had
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KMDO in Fort Scott, Kansas which began broadcasting in 1954. In 1956 he went into partnership with Robert Nearthery in the KBHM station, the first local broadcast service in Branson, Missouri, doing business as Shepherd of the Hills Broadcasting Company (but when I asked my grandfather what was the deal with Shepherd of the Hills being a big thing, the theater attraction, he had skated over getting into it or its history). In 1961 he started KALN in Iola, Kansas. With Neathery, he began KBLR in Bolivar, Missouri in 1961 also as the Shepherd of the Hills Broadcasting company. He had no ownership in but managed KRLS in Mountain Grove, and KICK in Springfield, Missouri. He was an organizer of the Missouri Broadcasters Association, on its first board of directors. Small potatoes, perhaps, if you’re not from Jasper County, Missouri. But that was his choice. From what I’ve read, he liked local radio, it was his choice of place.
As a child, I was awed by my grandfather commanding his minor kingdom of the air waves, and puzzled by how he never tutored me in it. As with my parents, he never pretended to be interested in my future. He never said, have you thought about a career in radio. He never gave me any part of the vocational guidance talk on the importance of radio and how to prepare for a profession in it that he gave to Carthage high school students the morning of 2 Feb 1949 that was also published in the Carthage Evening Press. It was a surprisingly good talk on all the different parts involved in the operation of a station, which acknowledged people’s aspirations to be star DJs but put such in their place of the whole of radio and its position of service in a democratic society, though he never once said the word “democratic” in his talk. I never heard him listen to music, never saw him read a book, never heard him speak even two words of a foreign language, but if it was the job of announcer or program director one wanted he informed the high school students that one needed to sound educated, trustworthy, to know at least one foreign language, one needed to take speech courses, study diction and pronunciation, take part in school plays, debate, and other activities that would develop rhetoric abilities, study music, learn to play a musical instrument, play in the school band, sing, learn the correct pronunciation of foreign words and names, know history, have a knowledge of sports. If you wanted to be in a higher position, one needed to learn business law, copyright law, the laws that apply to radio. Among other things, the news editor and presenter needed to be a diplomat. The continuity chief needed much of the announcer’s education, had to be educated in all the ins and outs of writing copy, needed to be a good writer and know timing, music, appropriateness, be familiar with merchandise at the local level, be an idea person, and a reliable soothsayer. He talked about women’s editors, farm editors, the radio operator. He talked about the sales work and management end. The place of a woman was defined when he brought up the subject of the secretary. With the proper education background and abilities, “the secretary may become one of the most valued local station employees, who can present the women’s programs, the children’s story, take the feminine part in the two-voice commercial, write the letters, handle the phone work, take over the traffic work and do any one of many things, or be a specialist in any one of them.” A Jill of many trades but always in the primary role of the secretary, that seemed to be the woman’s place, though the Ponca City station
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had been owned by a woman. He packed a lot of condensed information into the speaking space of two newspaper columns, and in conclusion invited anyone who wanted more information to come down to the Radio House where he said he usually always was (in 1949 he had seventeen people working for him at the station). I was very surprised to read this talk as my grandparents had ignored any of the arts in which I was interested or involved, and the only advice for my future given to me was by my grandmother, when I said I wanted to go to college and be a writer and artist, she told me I should become a secretary. Not even a teacher. I was told to learn shorthand and become a secretary.
Intergenerational wealth privilege should be addressed. I’d say I have no idea how my grandfather’s business in radio translated into no privilege for me except a check for fifteen dollars at Christmas during the limited span of my teen years (which didn’t go toward luxuries, it went to necessities for me as I was having to pay for my clothes, shoes, anything I wanted that wasn’t served on the breakfast table), but any inheritance privilege that may have been funneled down on my father’s side of the family (I’ve no idea how it was handled with his brother) went only to my parents, and my grandparents helped this along by somehow conveying that one was owed nothing so don’t dare think to ask for that toy as you’re not one of us not really. When my father’s mother died, my mother called me after a few months and said that the will divided things so a lump sum was given to my father with the direction he dispense it as he saw fit to the rest of us, that’s how my father had chosen to have it be, and how my parents saw fit was to keep it all to themselves since they needed to think of their retirement. As for what happened after my grandfather died, I have no idea, I had long not been in contact with the family, but I was obviously willed nothing as I didn’t even know he had died for years. When I was young, for all that I was then aware, no one gave money to their kids or grandkids at all ever, everyone’s job was to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, plus I was taught it was vulgar to talk about money, it took me a little while to wake to the fact that inheritance privilege was really a thing and that elder generations would give downline generations a boost up, even often before they died, many feeling it was their obligation, many wanting to do so to help out not only their children but grandchildren, and one didn’t have to be upper middle class white collar to do it, children of blue collar workers were somehow willed tidy sums. How did blue collar families afford things for their children, save money for their children to help them get a start, same money for their schooling, even help them out with their first home, when I experienced nothing like this.
It looks like the Branson station ceased to exist around 1981, but the Branson station was the one that got my attention because being in Branson it seemed to me to be the one with the most potential. Even I, as a child, could see Branson was an entertainment resort town, it had lakes and was close to the Silver Dollar City theme park and Marvel Cave, both of which my grandparents took us to visit once. At the time, as far as amusements catering to children, there may have been more but not much more at Silver Dollar City than a kiddy train that carried one not much of
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anywhere but was a ride just long enough to maybe thrill a five or six year old and make them think they had partaken of something real—and which it was, it was real as far as it being a real kiddie train ride in a theme park. If I remember correctly the train stopped for us to witness a theatrical of outlaws being caught by lawmen. But as a theme park it was primarily a “living museum” composed of exhibits and shops, more of interest to adults than kids, one could visit a blacksmith and woodcarvers at work, see a man craft brooms, people make candles and candies and blow glass and work leather, look around the old McHaffie Home pioneer homestead which was the Levi Casey family log cabin made in 1843 by slave labor but last belonged the the McHaffies before it was disassembled and transported to Silver Dollar City Square where it was furnished with a featherbed and rocking chair. About noon you’d take a break and eat at the Lucky Silver Mine Restaurant (not a real mine). At the age of ten, expecting an amusement park, hoping for an amusement park with rides as I’d never been to one, I was a little bored, but I also visited Silver Dollar City when I was in my early twenties, after it had grown up a little, and found it interesting to see the crafts people at work, I don’t know what it’s like now but at the time it didn’t strike me as Disneyfied, it was what it was which was a modern exhibit reaching for a flavor of the past, and the climate was good for walking around in September, there were enough woodsy areas that the trees kept the pavement paths fairly cool.
After school started, my brother and I no longer went around to the radio stations. We were at Fairview Elementary, which had just opened and was still partly under construction. Though it was a little less than a mile away, we rode to it on a school bus, and as the cafeteria was not yet ready for students, we rode the school bus to the junior high across the street from our grandparents for lunch in their cafeteria. We were given money to eat school lunches, and that was our main meal of the day. As we could make supplementary choices, my brother and I got in the habit of treating ourselves to an ice cream sandwich, which we told our grandparents about. One day when I was preparing for school my grandmother came into the bathroom where I fixing my hair, pulling it back in the usual low ponytail I liked to wear, and she abruptly and sternly told me I had a "fat" face, that I needed to lose weight, and I shouldn't wear my hair pulled back in a low ponytail as it accentuated the fullness of my face. "See?" She had pulled my low ponytail hard back so I could see. "Don't you see now how fat your face looks? You don't need any more ice cream sandwiches." As far as I was aware, my clothes fit the same as they had previously, I hadn’t noticed them getting tighter. I didn’t see a fat face but I stopped pulling my hair back into a low ponytail and stopped eating the ice cream sandwiches. I’ve a school photo from that year and I know from that picture my face was anything but fat. The photo is even what I have thought of as being one of my nicer school photos, perhaps the best. I was wearing a navy blue dress that I’d really liked, which my grandparents had purchased me for school, and I’d gotten to select it, so the dress had a lower jewel neck rather than the high necks my mother almost always insisted upon.
My grandmother occasionally spoke about how in order to keep a slim figure she had never permitted herself sugar even before she’d developed diabetes, about which she
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was then bitter. It only occurs to me now that my grandmother might have been jealous over the ice cream sandwiches and wanted me not to have them.
It was when I was fifteen, visiting my grandparents, my grandmother abruptly gave me to read an old book that she said was her favorite when she was a teenager. She was born in 1908, so she was twenty-one in 1929, the year of the stock market crash, which was the end of the flapper era. The book, easily finished in an afternoon, concerned a young woman from a rural community who ate almost only apples to keep her figure trim for her flapper clothes. That is the opening of the book, the featured character’s mother had prepared her lunch for school, but she didn't eat it, only the apple, and had to hide this from her mother, a plump woman whose ways were a tiresome annoyance to a girl who desired to be a modern sleek and glamorous woman. She moved to the city to be a career girl and pursue a jazzy-flapper life style and escape her mother who pestered her to eat more than apples no matter how it would ruin her figure for flapper clothes. She continued eating the apples and getting slightly more than politely drunk at jazzy parties (prohibition lasted from 1920 to 1933, so many of the flapper years were during prohibition). Now that she was living in the city away from home, she also learned how to smoke, which was great as it eased hunger pangs and helped her maintain her flapper figure. Sometimes she would faint and her boss or a person she was dating would make her eat a meal, but she would return to her apples. It was so annoying when her boss tried to get her to eat as she had to fit into her stylish clothes! I kept waiting for the book to become even a little more substantial, but the woman gained no insights and no insights were to be gained about her other than she was just someone who was living, in the city, the perfect life of the flapper. You are probably imagining that I missed how the book wanted the reader to learn they couldn't live on an apple a day and some alcohol and tobacco. That wasn't this book. The writing style was basic. This was no F. Scott Fitzgerald who'd authored it.
I’ve looked and looked for the book so I could give its name here, and not come across it.
The acquaintance with this book caused me to rethink the culture of dieting as everything thus far in my life seemed to have taught me it was a recent invention. I understood the book had influenced my grandmother but by the time she was eighteen and of age to pursue it the flapper era was near its end. I don’t know what my grandmother wanted me to learn from the book, for she was still so concerned with weight that she criticized even toys she saw as being fat. When the My Little Pony toys came out she was disgusted with them as they were “fat” and thus bad role models for children.
6
With Neathery, my grandfather had also a station sales representative company called
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the Magic Circle (described as a regional radio network in some publications), each owning fifty percent, that sold time on their stations and fifty to sixty other stations, as described in a 1964 Federal Communications Commission report. In a 1955 news interview with Neathery, anticipating the new Branson radio station they would be starting, it was stated the network was then composed of twenty-five stations in the Ozarks. He said, “Our network setup has a blank spot right here in the heart of the Lake Country, and we feel that there is enough potential growth to Branson and this area to support a station here to fill that blank spot.” A 1953 news article leads me to believe the Magic Circle Network may have begun in 1951 with Joplin’s WMBH as the point of origin station though it was owned by neither my grandfather nor Neathery.
Back up to 1949 when my grandfather was president of the Chamber of Commerce in Carthage, an April 28 news article gives him, with the secretary-manager, and the chairman of the industrial committee, going to Eureka, Kansas, to meet with the “noted economist” Roger W. Babson at Babson’s Utopia College. The purpose was to discuss the progress of industrial development of the Magic Circle area for the year and to plan for the future. This was not the Magic Circle that was the station sales representative company, but I think it may have been in part an inspiration.
What was this Magic Circle? Why was Roger Babson’s Utopia College established in 1946 in Eureka? Babson was a well known entrepreneur and financial and business theorist, highly successful investor and stock analyst, and his idea was that Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and northern Texas were in the area of what he called a “Magic Circle”, Eureka as the center, that had little risk of being targeted in a nuclear war, and when nuclear war did happen this area would carry the rest of the nation and prosper big, and should prepare for this and begin already to reap the financial benefits. The Carthage Evening Press, on 17 March 1949, before the meeting in Kansas, published the address on “Industrial Development of the Magic Circle” that had been delivered to the Carthage Chamber of Commerce, by Walter A. Bowers, president of Utopia College. The paper stated, “His talk here is regarded as showing the way to a greater Carthage district as well as to other areas”. The article occupied two pages, and covered location, the agricultural wealth of the area, the mineral wealth of the area, how the area was surrounded by the greatest markets on earth, how it was a great opportunity for healthy human resources but that they were leaving the area because of lack of industry, and how emergency action was required now, right now, to change the situation and prepare the Magic Circle “to be an inland fortress for preservation of the best system of government ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’—the Utopia of systems now on earth—against attacks against free enterprise and a free people from at home or abroad—whether in war or in peace.” The word “nuclear” didn’t appear once, maybe because it wanted to focus on the positive. But Utopia College had been founded to prepare for the coming Third World War, for Babson believed the large cities would be nuked, population centers and industry wiped out, and that “the nation must be fed, fueled, and reorganized by people living in the central portion of the country.” Babson’s Magic Circle News advocated moving the U.S. Government departments away from Washington, D.C., in
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preparation for WWIII, suggesting Springfield, Missouri, as the center and a good place to relocate the White House, that the state department could be relocated to Little Rock, the air force to Wichita, the navy to Texas, the army to Omaha, the secretary of defense to Denver, the interior department to Tulsa, the department of agriculture to Des Moines, the department of commerce to Kansas City, the treasury to St. Louis, and the internal revenue bureau and social security administration to Dallas. The Joplin Globe reported on this in October 1950 and was distressed as it felt that because of its “wealth of bomb-proof underground mining properties” it should be the place for the White House and not Springfield. A couple of months later, in December of 1950, Washington, D.C., addressed this through Jess Larson, administrator of the General Services Administration, who when speaking to a six-state governors’ industrial defense conference on the “magic circle” held that it wasn’t practical to disperse the nation’s powers in this manner, that “certainly the executive and legislative branches must be together so they can have face-to-face conferences. Legislators cannot live in a vacuum.” Furthermore, all cities of the country were vulnerable to attack under the “arctic circle concept of warfare.”
In the 1950s something called Magic Circle Food Stores appears in midwestern papers, which was a “voluntary chain organization” that promised the ability to buy and sell competitively at lower prices. In case one might be in doubt that this was a reference to Babson’s Magic Circle, a 1955 “Happy Holidays” ad from “your Magic Circle Food Stores in Parsons (Kansas)”, shows an image of America within the words “Magic Circle” and the outline of a big white circle in the middle of the country which was now well known as Babson’s Magic Circle.
In 1961 the Carthage Evening Press ran an advertisement for “Magic Circle Dairy-Land”, touting that $1,250,000 in dairy products were sold in the Magic Circle each month but only three-quarters of this was locally produced. Magic Circle Dairy-Land had been formed to keep all the dairy money in the Magic Circle. The local “Magic Circle” dairy plants were Banner Dairy, Meadow Gold, Meadow Sweet, Miller’s Dairy, Oldham’s Dairy, Page Milk Co., Picco, Purity Dairy, and Tastemark.
The White River Lakes association of Branson, Missouri, promoting area resorts, in 1950, produced a new booklet called, “Your Magic Circle of Fun.”
In 1952, KLKC, the Parsons, Kansas, radio station announced in the news it was joining the “newly-formed Magic Circle (Radio) Network”, which was then a group of eight stations. “A top feature of the network will be three daily four-state weather broadcasts from Springfield, Mo., by C. C. Williford, U.S. Observer there who is widely known for his homespun presentation of forecasts…Other programs of regional interest will be developed by the network, which has been in existence only a month. Formation of the network also offers an opportunity to regional and national advertisers for effective and economical coverage of the four-state region.” The key station in the network was WMBH, Joplin, joined by KDMO in Carthage, Missouri, KRMO in Monett, Missouri, KNEM in Nevada, Missouri, KSEK in Pittsburg, Kansas, KGLC in Miami, Oklahoma, KUOA in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, and KBRS in
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Springdale, Arkansas. When Nixon spoke in Joplin, Missouri in October of 1952, then a Republican presidential candidate, the Parsons paper reported it would be rebroadcast over radio station KLKC as “a paid political feature of the Magic Circle Network”.
In October of 1953, 1954 and 1955, in conjunction with a special Harvest Jubilee Exhibition, the Springfield radio station, KICK, was advertised as daily presenting broadcasts and entertainments “direct from Heer’s Main Floor”, Heer’s being, according to Wikipedia, “one of southwest Missouri’s largest and most prominent department stores for 80 years.”
The desire to promote industry and staunch the outflow of area youth was an admirable goal, though it was also competing against established centers of the arts in metropolitan areas, and while industry is essential, so too are invigorating hubs of culture, and one could hazard the midwest didn’t do a great job of reimagining itself in this respect, and it doesn’t appear that an effort was made to get American Indian nations in the Magic Circle area interested and draw upon them as important and exceptional contributors to the cultural identity of the region.
Probably close to 100 percent of Americans have never heard of Babson, but he was a celebrity “Babson’s post-apocalyptic Magic Circle inhabitants would not only survive due to their residence within the mapped nuclear safe zone, they would also serve as stock from which to draw a predicted ‘Royal Family of America’ that would essentially rule the world. He was not employing a democratic euphemism here. Babson had a long history of disparaging popular democracy…His convictions on the matter dovetailed nicely with his 1940 Prohibitionist Party presidential campaign. In the closing of his acceptance speech, delivered six years before he conceived of the Magic Circle, he seemed to be hinting at a future apocalypse to be remedied by Social Darwinism: ‘Our nation must choose between training and protecting our youth against evils or permitting the weak and unfit to be eliminated. The present system of ignoring the fit and protecting the unfit is biologically unsound and will end in disaster.” He was a eugenicist. I begin to wonder if in 1940 he wasn’t something of a fascist, though he may not have said as much. He was paid attention to because he was a veritable celebrity of economics. He advised presidents. “His Babson Statistical Organization, founded in 1904, became one of the nation’s leading for-profit economic forecasting services and served as the cash cow for his later sundry ventures.” He had predicted the great crash of 1929 and the depression. He was a rich man whose economic prognostication columns were carried in the newspapers and wrote books with such times as Business Barometers Used in the Accumulation of Money.
Where did that “Royal Family” quote come from? I find in his 1930 autobiography, Actions and Reactions, he wrote on the need of “the saving of America will come through the building up of an aristocracy of character, health, and intelligence. Such an aristocracy would consciously become the Royal Family of America.” On the prior page, condemning large slum families and what he considered to be too low a birth
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rate in the right sort of people of good health, strong character and intelligence, he writes, “I would not tolerate a property test for the voting franchise, but certainly it is against the best interests of all honest people to have everyone vote simply because he is twenty-one years of age. The privilege to vote is a sacred right which should be treated far more seriously than it is at present. A voter should be free from a criminal record, should have a knowledge of government, and perhaps should be a parent. To bring this change about may require a temporary dictatorship or some form of fascism. If such comes I hope my descendants will cooperate…” So, my suspicion was right about Babson. He believed fascism was necessary to bring about what he conceived of as a proper democracy. That’s in the section, “Democracy vs. Aristocracy” on page 379, near the end of his book.
By 1953, his dream of the Magic Circle was busted. 24 September, The Mennonite Weekly Review observed, “How long ago is it—hardly more than five or six years—that the noted economist, Roger Babson, designated Kansas and several surrounding states as the ‘magic circle’ where one would find maximum security and protection from foreign attack. Today that magic circle has vanished and no longer exists. According to the civil defense administration, most of the larger population centers in this and other states must now be considered ‘atomic bomb target areas.’”
It wasn’t until several years ago that I learned about The Magic Circle Network, coming across it via news articles. It seems that by 1962, Dick Bradley, who had been a sportscaster on Springfield radio for a long time, was then managing the Magic Circle Radio Network. His 1990 obituary states he was president and owner of the network, and that it had represented 127 radio stations in a four state area. He had begun sportscasting on KICK radio back in 1951, which was already in the Magic Circle Radio Network. A brief 1971 news mention of Dick’s wife being hospitalized (she would die) states she is the wife of the “founder of Magic Circle Radio Network and well-known sportscaster”. It’s wrong on his founding the network, but it seems it had been sold to him by that point. In another 1971 report Dick Bradley is instead given as the president of the network.
While Babson believed in the Magic Circle and started the Utopia University in Emporia, he never moved to the Midwest, he stayed on the East Coast, living near Boston. Though he believed an apocalyptic nuclear war was unavoidable and would happen in the near future, though he believed it would destroy coastal America, maybe he was ready to go out with Massachusetts or maybe he thought he’d have time to hop a plane and fly to his Kansas Utopia. Maybe Babson was devoted to Massachusetts as the home of his American ancestors. One history states he was the tenth of as many generations that had lived in Gloucester, which isn’t right, he was an eighth generation American, nine including his immigrant family, but close enough, and he felt a strong hereditary bond to those who he probably felt had made him one of a Royal Family of worthy, healthy, intelligent, moral Americans. Perhaps, as important, the east coast was where he had his Gravity Research Foundation in New Boston, New Hampshire, it was here he was dedicated to fighting the powers of “or
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enemy number one” which was gravity, “a dragon” that had drowned his sister, Edith, when she was thirteen and he was eighteen, seizing and dragging her to the bottom of the river. Babson wanted to develop a gravitational shield that would block gravity. He wrote, “It seems as if there must be discovered some partial insulator of gravity which could be used to save millions of lives and prevent accidents.” I’ve no clue what Babson had in mind, if everyone should be supplied with some kind of anti-gravity device they could wear. If his sister had been wearing such, she could have turned it on and floated up to the surface of the water? I don’t know. Hell, if there was an anti-gravity device, maybe dropped bombs would never fall to earth. Right? No. Somehow suspend gravity over an area of the earth and say bye to its atmosphere, water, everything that isn’t nailed down to its foundational rock.
Imagine everyone in Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Iowa going around talking about how they lived in The Magic Circle. There’s a Magic Circle Drive in Emporia, Kansas, which will have everything to do with Babson’s Magic Circle, but it's less than half a circle. In Eureka, Kansas, there’s a Magic Circle Road, which is also the Q Road, and is mostly a straight line. At 708 E 5th Street in Eureka the minor two-story building that once housed Utopia College still stands in a residential neighborhood. It’s four sale for a little more than $190,000, near 3000 square feet with four bedrooms and two baths. Built in 1880, Utopia College had opened in an already existing building, with modifications. With the death of The Magic Circle as a place free of nuclear warfare harm, on 30 December 1954 it was announced in The Eureka Herald that Utopia College was changing its name, on 1 January 1955, to the Midwest Institute of Business Administration. The reason for the name change was not because Eureka wasn't Utopia, Kansas, a few miles to the north, which was where Babson had initially planned for Utopia College to be located, and nothing about The Magic Circle was mentioned, instead the change of the name was to better describe the school’s affiliation with its parent school, the Babson Institute of Business Administration in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts. After Babson’s death in 1967, the school closed in 1970. An auxiliary building of mid-century red brick stands behind it which would have once served as a dormitory. When Utopia College opened in 1947, Eureka, about sixty miles straight up Highway 99 from the old McK family seat of Chautauqua County, had about 3900 people. The population increased to its peak of about 4000 in 1960, and now stands at a little more than 2300, a little more than 97 percent white.
My father never mentioned the Magic Circle Network to me, and its genesis as a response to the prospect of nuclear warfare. He never spoke about what inspired him to pursue radiation research and considering that he was in his early teen years when the Magic Circle was being promoted, I wonder at its impact on him.
7
Missouri has lots of holes in the ground a lot of caves, a legend in Carthage when I was there was that there were extensive caves underneath it, not the 43,000,000
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square feet of Americold quarry caves used for storage for food production outside of Carthage (check out online videos to gawk at the size of these), but a naturally formed network of caves that had been only partially explored by unknown someones at some point in time but no one knew if they actually existed despite the fact many said that they did. I don’t know which system was referenced in a 1962 Carthage Evening Press article of January 18, an AP report out of Jefferson City, that was on the local Civil Defense and Chamber of Commerce’s interest in establishing a Cold War fallout shelter in the caves. “Material and assistance offered in the last few days indicates a survey of the systems of caves believed to lie under the Carthage area may soon be forthcoming.” Missouri’s Civil Defense was interested in both limestone quarries and caves, asserting that with two or three days warning time 3,110,830 people could be assigned space in them, and that even with only a warning time of three to five hours forty percent of the population would have the opportunity to find shelter in them.
This 18 January 1962 article was followed up on 10 February 1962 by one on the legendary caves of Carthage, publishing in full a letter that first appeared 12 December 1872 in the Carthage Banner, written by Avery Bigsell, on his exploration of the recently discovered cave network with C. C. Allen, H. F. Beebe, Timothy Regan, D. S. Chase, and the geologist Captain Clauson, how with torches and rope and rubber suits they’d met at ten in the morning on the grounds of Mr. Simeon Mitchell, “directly in front of Major Beebe’s house on Garrison Avenue.” From there they had descended into a “yawning chasm”, then through a low passage for a distance of “perhaps one hundred feet” whereupon they encountered a chamber that was estimated to be forty feet wide, two hundred feet long and at least thirty feet high, from which petrified animal bone specimens were taken that were at that time on view at the drugstore of Young & Coffee. At the end of the chamber was “a pit so dark and deep that the light of our torches failed to reach the bottom”. Their rope being fifty feet in length they were only able to descend forty feet but could “plainly hear the rush of waters at the bottom and could hear the splash of the stone precipitated from above”. They discovered a narrow opening leading south, from which they were able to remove enough blocking clay and stone that they made their way into an “arched chamber with perpendicular sides and a smooth solid granite floor, sloping quite precipitately to the west” which was determined at its extremity to be 583 feet long. As it was now about three in the afternoon and their torches were exhausted, they decided to exit, and found “at a distance of about 300 feet from the entrance, and bearing to the north, another passage at the end of which we found a beautiful lake, clear as crystal and sweet to the taste”.
A letter from 8 October 1959, written by F. A. Asendorf, affirmed the existence of the caverns, he saying he had been down in “the entrance” numerous times, but that the “only known opening, which undoubtedly led to the larger portions of the caverns, has long been packed with debris…Following the path of least resistance, the Carthage street department used the cave as a storm sewer outlet. For sixty years all the rainwater from Macon to Chestnut on the west side of Main street, the east side of Garrison and all of Lyon and Maple streets was drained into this cave. None of
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these streets were paved and sand, silt and leaves were washed into it indiscriminately. By 1932, after a heavy rain, an outboard motor boat could be run up and down the streets at Tenth and Garrison and the basements in that area were flooded. But, given sufficient time, the water still drained away. However, the cave was by then stopped up to the entrance, so in 1933 a storm sewer was constructed which crosses Garrison diagonally in front of Cedar street, proceeding down the south side of that street, satisfactorily carrying the rain water away. The writer moved with his family to the house at 1010 South Garrison in June, 1907. The existence of the cave was common to knowledge to all the small boys…” The article then relates the extent of some of the explorations made by youth of that era, followed by a list of possible entry points for prospective Cold War use, the “various reported cave entrances” being “in the center of Tenth Street, just east of Garrison, under the sealed-over basement floor of the home of Richard Fugate, 115 East Ninth; in the river bottoms at the National Biscuit Company, under the Central National Bank basement, under the Snyder building, under the basement of the Belk-Simpson store, at one corner of the H. E. Williams Products company basement and presumably at a point along the Spring river bluffs. At the moment the most likely spots for a usable entrance seem to lie within the area bounded by Tenth and Cedar and Maple and McGregor or on Ninth Street.”
The Avery Bigsell account of the discovery of the caves was also printed in the Carthage Evening Press 24 May 1951 and 24 September 1959, each time with a photo showing the lot at Garrison and Tenth Street in which the entrance to the cavern, which had been closed, had been.
People are still asking if the legendary caves exist or not, and their reluctance to be proven makes for, as with Richland and its unproven Cold War tunnels, a town in which memories have been so subverted as to be unreachable, the mystery ever at its back. Without proof of their existence, the caves are called an urban myth, but many of the names in the reports are proven to have lived in Carthage. The Asendorf family was in Carthage living on Garrison, the census says at number 1500 and that the next residence was 1010 occupied by L. N. Manley, who was in real estate, so it seems the census taker made an error. In 1880, Timothy Regan, a capitalist, was living at 57 West Tyler. Hinkley F. Beebe, whose occupation was “traveling”, was living at 15 South Main. In 1870 he had been a lumber dealer. Dwight Chase, a fire insurance agent, was at 293 East Street. Simeon Mitchell was living at 390 East Eighth. The only thing that might cause concern is that I find nothing on Avery Bigsell and his name could be interpreted as “A very Big sell”.
In 1957, at Neatherly and McKenney’s freshly minted Branson radio station, KBHM, Dave Whittaker, sports and special events director, decided to do a broadcast from Marvel Cave, the plan was to go as deep into it as they could, into the bowels of Marvel Cave, farther than any soul had ever reached. The Springfield News-Leader reported on 17 July 1957 that the four men who had undertaken the feat were muddy when they emerged, reporting they’d reached an impassable canyon in a previously
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unexplored section about four-and-a-half miles from the entrance. From the cave they made six radio broadcasts by telephone line “through station KBHM of Branson, describing their progress in the depths of the cave…Dave Whittaker of KBHM, one of the four, said they had to scale a forty-foot-high wall, descend a crevasse 100 feet deep, crawl a mile on hands and knees and cross two underground lakes before reaching the canyon that stopped them.” Whittaker described it as awesome, “Something like a huge inverted cone 275 feet from bottom to top. The bottom, 100 feet below us, was about 50 feet in diameter. At our level it was 100 feet across, and on up at the top it was so big I couldn’t estimate the distance. Near the top was a big crack that looked like the bed of an ancient river. Across from us were passages leading away. The walls were smooth and sheer—not a toehold anywhere. We could have slid to the bottom on our rope, but the rope was so muddy and slick we never would have gotten back up.” Dave estimated them as having been about 395 feet underground at that point. Accompanying were the cave’s owners, Jack and Pete Hershend, and a photographer, John Morris, from Springfield.
The Carthage Evening Press stated the men had carried a small portable radio and bundles of telephone wire for use in making the live broadcast. “They reported underground minerals made it difficult at times to get reception on their portable radio set.” About three-and-a-half miles in, they broadcast from a rubber raft while traversing a lake. It was supposedly the first live broadcast from inside a cave. In 1954, at Floyd Collins Cave in Kentucky, a broadcast had been made but wasn’t live, it was telephoned to the surface and then put on record for broadcasting.
On 20 December 1957 the White River Leader reported the first anniversary of the KBHM station that had given the “wonderful White River Lake area its own voice for the first time”, constructed by the Shepherd of the Hills Broadcasting Company with offices and studios at 111 Pacific Street in Branson and the tower and transmitter at Hollister. The staff invited everyone to an open house celebration from 2:00 p.m. until 6:00 p.m. the following day, Saturday. Free coffee, on the station, had been arranged to be served from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. then 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. at the downtown Branson Cafes: High Cafe, Town and Country Cafe, Post Office Cafe, The Shack, The Steak House, White River Grill Cafe and Branson Cafe. The “Merry Christmas” banner across the top of the front page had an illustration of a church on a snowy, evergreen-spotted landscape, the sky ablaze with large stars.
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Many of my memories, what there are of them, seem as though they were sucked bloodless by vampires even as they were forming so there is nothing left but dried husks that, as I reach to touch each one, fall to dust.
I know my grandmother loved to collect antiques but I have no idea where she would have put all of them. In their home I felt a hint of her appreciation for a Japanese
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aesthetic, but all that firmly remains in memory in respect of this is a little bonsai cherry tree made of porcelain with jade leaves and rose quartz blossoms that she purchased as a gift for herself, which I didn’t quite understand this gift aspect as she was always buying things for herself. From what I can tell, looking up vintage trees of that type for sale online, they were very popular and collectible and it may be the tree she’d purchased promptly lost its value when she purchased it. When it was placed, several hours later, upon her living room coffee table, it had devalued even further. That is a memory that stays solid.
I remember sitting on the couch with my grandfather and his instructing me on Aryan history, as in Vedic Aryanism being the mother race of white Europeans, and telling me about skull shapes. At the age of ten, I had no idea what he was talking about, certainly no idea this was what Nazi white supremacy was built upon. It’s a memory I’ve always had but it feels unplugged. I’ve no context, only the sofa in front of the living room window and it being a day without much to do. Do I jettison the memory as possibly uncertain and confused?
The idea of a banana chopped up in a bowl and milk poured over it for breakfast was quite novel to me when I first moved in with my grandparents. My grandmother sliced many bananas into bowls but it’s a dry husk memory that evaporates, free of physicality. When I bring up a visual of her cutting up a banana, I don’t know if I am creating it, though it was something I regularly saw. I would have taken many baths but I remember only once sitting in their bathtub and it’s another dry husk, a split couple of seconds of facing the faucet in the tub, which I know is real, but it’s surrounded by dry husk dust. In Richland, I was an avid reader, and long past my bedtime I would hide out on the floor just within my bedroom reading by the light that filtered down the hall from the living room. When I look back on Carthage I wonder at how the moment I laid down to sleep from the moment I got up in the morning the world was black.
On 17 October 1967 there was a total lunar eclipse. Early in the evening, I announced I was going to go out and watch it. I had never seen a lunar eclipse and this seemed a great event to me. My grandparents didn’t think much of this idea and had no desire to participate. Looking it up, I see the Springfield Leader and Press informed that the moon would enter the earth’s shadow at 3:26 a.m., and the total eclipse would last from 4:45 a.m. to 5:46 a.m. The St. Joseph News-Press stated the eclipse would begin at 1:10 a.m. with a “weakening of the eastern limb, or outer edge of the moon. At 3:26 a.m. observers will notice an indentation of the eastern edge of the moon as it enters the earth’s umbra, or total shadow…As twilight envelops the moon, it becomes a copper-red disk…Totality begins when the moon has totally entered the earth’s umbra. This will occur at 4:45 o’clock. Totality will end at 5:46 a.m…The moon will leave the earth’s umbra at 7:05 and its penumbra at 8:21. At that moment the eclipse will be over.” As the eclipse wouldn’t be until late, I first went to bed for a few hours of sleep. I don’t remember having an alarm clock, but somehow late in the night I woke up and walked through the black of the house, not daring to cut on a light, through
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the quiet of the living room into the dining room, which is when the memory cuts out so that a don’t remember whether I went into the sunroom off the dining room and out its door into the back yard or if I went into the kitchen and through its dining area and the laundry room to use its back door. No, that’s right, for the first time I remember I had tried to wake my brother, B, who slept in the sunroom, so he could watch the eclipse as well, but he wouldn’t wake up despite his having said he wanted to watch the eclipse as well. As I’d gone into the sunroom I would have used the sunroom’s door to access the back yard. Then there I am in the dark back yard, where I looked up at the sky and saw nothing, so briefly feared I had missed the eclipse, then I shifted my vision to the east and there it was the red moon hanging like a strange rubber ball in the sky and I was astonished for I’d not expected the moon to turn red, it felt like a dream, and I was the only one out there to experience it, which made it feel even more like a dream. So it was reassuring to check records on lunar eclipses and find the one I had observed, for while I knew it hadn’t been a dream, my sense of reality was so dislocated, standing out in the chill of that black back yard, under that great remarkable red ball of an otherworldly near supernatural moon, that I sometimes wondered if I’d seen this at all or if it had been a dream.