Ozarks Getaway

by Pa Rock
Native Son

Early tomorrow morning I will board a jet plane and head for the hills - the beautiful Ozarks of southwest Missouri. I will be going home to Noel, MO, to visit with my dad and see how he is doing. My sons and oldest grandson will also be there, so it should be a very nice four-day weekend.

Some of my trip will focus on checking out my small farm on Old Pine Trail. It is sadly vacant (I refuse to rent my green haven), so I will have to knock down the cobwebs and give the place a good mow. My little farm, aptly named Rock's Roost, is the most serene spot in the Ozarks, and I miss it terribly - especially every time I step outside here in Aridzona and into the bowels of hell!

Noel has several claims to fame. It is nestled along the Elk River, the first floatable river south of Kansas City. There is only one decent motel with just fifteen or so rooms, but the area abounds in nice campgrounds that will put you in a canoe or kayak at a very affordable rate for a day of floating down the river. It's a wonderful way to enjoy the summer weekends.

Noel was the home to a Hollywood crew and cast in 1939 when Henry Fonda, Tyrone Power, and Nancy Kelly all called the little town their temporary home while the movie, Jesse James, was filmed in various locations throughout McDonald County.

Kate Smith, the singer, formed an attachment to the small town in the 1940's after several residents got together and sent her a very large birthday cake. She talked about Noel on her radio program several times after that. In 1969 some boxcars filled with fertilizer on a Kansas City Southern train exploded one hot August night and nearly leveled the town. One person was killed, and several others were severely maimed.

And then there were the escaped convicts from Kansas who hopped a freight train in the early 1980's and decided to hop off when they got to Noel. They played cat-and-mouse with several law enforcement agencies throughout the town and its rustic environs for several days before finally being captured in a boxcar of another train as they were ending their Ozark vacation!

I'm anxious to get home - as if you can't tell!

Monday's Poetry: "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

by Pa Rock
Poetry Appreciator

This evening, and for the next several Monday evenings, I am going to talk poetry. In particular, I am going to present poems that have had some impact on my life, and attempt to explain how and why they touched me. The initial selection for Monday's Poetry is Robert Frost’s simple, yet beautiful, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, a poetic account of a traveler pausing briefly in the woods to contemplate the solitude and snowfall.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
(by Robert Frost, 1923)

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

I went to high school in the small town of Noel, Missouri. My senior year was the last year that high school was in operation, because it was being consolidated into a county school system the following fall. My twenty-one classmates and I literally shut the little school down in May of 1966.

One of the classes that I took my senior year was speech, and my teacher, Jennibel Paul (who was also my English and Latin teacher), came up with the idea of taping all of the speech students reading a poem early in the school year, with the intent of playing the tape back at the end of the year to have some sort of measure as to our level of public speaking progress. She borrowed a large reel-to-reel tape recorder for the project.

I have no idea what poem I chose to read, but my friend and classmate, Linda Merchant, selected Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. Sadly, I can still hear her reciting those stanzas over forty years later.

Linda and her younger sister, Susan, had moved to Noel that year from the neighboring small town of Sulphur Springs, Arkansas, a community five miles south and just across the state line. They lived in a large house on Sulphur Street, just off of Main and about three blocks from the school. Most mornings I would ride to town with my dad and then walk to school. Many mornings I would pass Linda and Susan’s house just as they were emerging, and we would all walk together.

It was a warm Saturday night early in the school year. I had just gotten off duty at the local movie theatre when the horrible news started making its way up and down Main Street. Linda and Susan, as well as two other sisters, Shirley and Thelma Todd of Sulphur Springs, had gotten into a car with a young man who was home on leave from the military, and they had just been in a bad accident south of town on a treacherous piece of highway prophetically referred to by the locals as “Dead Man’s Curve.”

We quickly learned that the car had been travelling downhill and had careened into the path of a semi-tractor trailer that was struggling uphill. Several of the kids in the car had, according to the flying rumors, been killed.

Linda and the Todd girls did die that night, as well as the driver of the car. Susan hung on for a few days longer before joining her sister in death. Several weeks later Mr. and Mrs. Merchant heard about the taped recording that their oldest daughter had made just days before her death. The class presented it to them in remembrance.

Linda Merchant and those other young people should have had many more miles to go before they slept, but that was not to be. We need to appreciate our snowfalls as they happen - and experience each as though it might be our last.

Finally Friday!

by Pa Rock
Weary Traveler

The wedding is history now, and Nick boarded the plane home this morning - so my life is becoming my own again. I didn't want to let this week end without memorializing a couple of other things that happened during the week of Molly and Scott's wedding.

The only descendant of mine who wasn't in San Diego was my grandson, Boone. He stayed in West Plains, MO, and had a big Thanksgiving dinner at his Grandmother Margaret's house. I did talk to Boone a couple of times on the phone during the week. He is into heavy-duty reading - things like the novels of Stephen King. That is fairly amazing for a nine-year-old fourth grader! I will see Boone next weekend when we all meet in Noel to watch my Dad serve as Grand Marshall of the Christmas Parade.

Molly and Scott's wedding was on a very public beach, and, not surprisingly, life on the beach kept right on happening even with the solemn event occurring at the center of the maelstrom. One notable competing event was a game of beach paddle ball that worked its way right up to the edge of our little group. I guess that we didn't bother them because they never quit playing! Then a company-sized unit of young military men ran by in formation heading north along the beach. They were wearing shorts, t-shirts, and military footwear. Ten minutes after that a similar group ran by headed south. It was hard to tell if they were the same unit or not, but if it was, they had lost their shirts. My guess is that they were marines, and running on the sand was preparation for Iraq. But whoever and whatever, they are now a part of the history of Molly and Scott's wedding!

My Dad's older brother, Wayne Macy, died of leukemia in San Diego in 1956 at the age of thirty-five. He is buried in a military cemetery on a beautiful piece of land that juts out into the Pacific just north of Coronado, a place that we could see clearly from the beach. His widow and daughter were at the wedding. So Wayne Macy was a part of the wedding also.

My Dad is too old to travel - or at least he thinks he is, so he stayed in Missouri and did not attend. I called him from the reception and he was able to visit with the happy bride, her brothers, and my Aunt Mary and Cousin Janet. So he, too, was a minor character in the wedding.

After the reception I wanted to make sure that my kids had the opportunity to visit among themselves and to talk with other people there who are important in their lives. To get out of the way, I drove to Imperial Beach, ostensibly to see the new sixteen-foot statue of a surfer that was unveiled on the beach this week.

I got to the beach community shortly before the sun set. I drove down the same streets that I had walked last May, taking note of the yard full of roses that had resulted in my making a new friend during my last visit. I stopped at several different beach access points, but never did find the statue. I did sit on the rocks until well after dark watching some surfers riding the waves. A storm was blowing in off the ocean, probably making their waves better, and definitely bringing a welcoming calm to my life. I guess that I had forgotten just how wonderful the solitude of the ocean could be.

Peace is the ocean soothing a beach in the moonlight - and if lightening is dancing across the dark horizon, that's all the better!

Fred Blue (18 Aug 1931 - 21 Dec 1990)

by Rocky Macy
Mourner

If ever there was a person whose identity was defined by his workplace, that person was Fred Blue. Fred was as much a part of the Noel School as any book in the library, any desk in a classroom, or any trophy in the trophy case. He was as hard and noisy as the ancient radiators that warmed the school, and yet, had a heart that was pure marshmallow.

Fred was a bus driver who couldn’t be rattled by the shenanigans of any student, or any parent for that matter. He was the school’s ubiquitous custodian who was everywhere doing everything. If it was snowing - Fred was outside spreading salt, if some kid got sick - Fred was throwing kitty litter in the vomit and sweeping it up, and when the roof sprang a leak – Fred was Johnny-on-the-spot with a bucket. If it needed painting, trimming, cleaning, mopping, repairing, mowing, thrown away, or just a good old-fashioned cussing, Fred was there!

Fred Blue could be loud and demanding. If he set his sights on getting something done, it happened. When he wanted a blade for the school’s riding lawnmower so that he could push the snow off of the school’s sidewalks, and didn’t have the time or the patience to get one through normal channels, he simply went out and bought one himself – with his own money.

And Fred Blue could be quietly effective behind the scenes. When a young boy was falling behind on his lunch bill because of problems at home, Fred quietly stepped in and paid the balance. No kid would suffer needlessly at Fred’s Place.

I came to the Noel School, a K-8 elementary/junior high, from a large rural high school. The bulletin boards in high schools are often used for posting bulletins, and I suffered under the delusion that it would work that way in an elementary school too. But bulletin boards in elementary schools are for decorating, and before I could ever get anything posted, some do-gooder teacher would have the board dressed up for Columbus Day or Christmas or Easter. One November I had something that needed posting. After finding every bulletin board at the Noel School covered with Pilgrims and turkeys, I approached Fred and asked him (smart people rarely told Fred anything, they always “asked”) if he would please put up a bulletin board outside of my office for my personal use. Less than an hour later as I was walking down the hall, I noticed that he had the new bulletin board up. He had even gone to the trouble of covering it with turkeys for me!

Another pure Fred incident that I remember involved a certain teacher who liked to rearrange her classroom monthly, an event that Fred dreaded because she always asked him to move her large, wooden teacher’s desk. (Fred implied to anyone that would listen that the thought this monthly event had something to do with the teacher’s biology!) After several months of lugging the teacher’s desk around, he came up with a solution. When the teacher reported for work the next morning she discovered that Fred had attached wheels to her desk!

Fred had a very small circuit that ran from his house, to the school, and occasionally to the town’s hardware store when he needed to buy something for the school. He was the first person at the school every morning, making sure that the boiler was working and the radiators were warming the classrooms. Then he would drive his bus route, spend the day cleaning and making repairs, and drive his evening bus route. If there was a ball game at night, Fred would be there late sweeping up popcorn bags and soft drink cups.

Neosho, Missouri, is about twenty miles north of Noel. One evening I convinced Fred to go to Neosho with me so that he could help pick out the ceiling fans that our booster club was purchasing for the classrooms. As we made our way through Wal-Mart, a place that was a second home to most people in Noel, I noticed that Fred seemed fascinated with everything. When I mentioned that to him, he said that he hadn’t been to the Neosho or to Wal-Mart in many years. If it wasn’t at the school, at his home, or in the hardware store, Fred just didn’t have any use for it!

Fred’s wife had passed away several years earlier, and he had a live-in girlfriend who eventually came to work with him at the school. When Fred needed TLC, it was provided by Leatha. He certainly would never spend any of his energy taking care of himself – not when the school needed him. He and Leatha married shortly before his death. Fred also had two grown daughters, both of whom had gone on to become teachers.

Fred Blue was diagnosed with cancer shortly after I left the Noel School. He was cantankerous to the end, and he stayed on the job as long as he was able. I managed to make it out to his house several times during his last few weeks, and always found him cussing and going on about things that really weren’t important in the grand scheme of things. When Fred died I knew that I had lost one of the best friends that I would ever have.

The Noel School was more than a job for Fred, it was the major focus of his life. And Fred, in turn, was a major force in the life of that little school. They had a symbiotic relationship, each dependent on the other for definition and survival.

The Great Train Blast

by Rocky Macy

It was the second day of August in 1969, a hot and noisy Ozark Saturday night. The next day would mark the two-week anniversary of man’s first walk on the moon. I was twenty-one and had just finished spending almost all of my college summer vacation at ROTC Camp at Ft. Riley, KS. After two months in hot, humid, tick-and-mosquito-infested Kansas, I didn’t need any special reason for partying with my friends. This particular night I had been up late drinking beer, and probably playing Risk, at a cabin on the bluff in Noel, MO, that was being rented for the summer by some of my friends.

(The cabin is still there. It was reportedly built new in 1939 to serve as a temporary home for Henry Fonda and Tyrone Power while they filmed the movie, Jesse James – leaving one to wonder where Randolph Scott slept. But I digress.)

At that time my parents were living on a ridge that overlooked the little town of Noel. (It was called Chicken Plant Hill because the Hudson Foods Chicken Processing Plant sat at its base. The view was as scenic as the smells were toxic. But, again I digress.) I made it home sometime during the wee hours of August 3rd and found my way to bed with every intention of sleeping late that morning. Those plans came to an abrupt end an hour or two later when a blast rocked our house.

My dad, mom, sister (Gail) and I poured out into the living room, groggy from sleep, (and in my case, groggy from sleep and too much beer!) to try to figure out what had happened. The first thing we noticed was that even though it was still dark out, a red glow was coming through the back picture that faced Noel. It was obvious that something had blown up in Noel, something really big, maybe the feared atomic bomb! We also noticed that the force of the blast had kicked our air conditioner out of its wall mounting and into the living room.

My dad started trying to call the telephone operator (if you remember those, you’re old!) to find out what was going on. The lines were busy, but he eventually got through. The operator told him that something had blown up in Noel, but no one knew what was going on.

Dad had a small appliance store on Main Street that held a lot of merchandise, much of which could be carried off by looters if the windows had been blown out, which they obviously had to have been. He and I got in his pick-up and went into town, not knowing what we would find.

There were several people staggering up and down Main Street and a few emergency vehicles were beginning to circulate by the time we got to his store. We learned immediately that a train boxcar had blown up, and people were worried that the large propane storage tanks that were located in town next to the railroad tracks would blow.

The store windows had been blown out, as had most of the windows in town. Dad and I worked at getting the glass swept up. He got involved in helping the other merchants with getting things organized around town, and I stayed at the store to watch the premises and keep picking up glass and clearing and cleaning.

As dawn arrived we could see the awful devastation that had visited our small town. It was complete chaos of glittering glass shards, twisted pieces of iron that had recently been railroad track, busted homes and buildings, and rumors of dismemberment and death.

Sulphur Street runs parallel to the Kansas City Southern train tracks in Noel, beginning at Main Street and ending four or five blocks south at the Noel School. Growing up in the Christmas City, I had walked those several blocks more times than I could tally. I knew the people in every house, all of their kids, and most of their pets.

It was Sulphur Street that suffered the brunt off the train blast. The Catholic Church sat up next to the tracks midway down Sulphur Street, at approximately the location of the blast. That church was so thoroughly destroyed that the parishioners were forced to go seeking other accommodations for several months. The Episcopals, whose church was at the corner of Main and Sulphur, had sustained far less damage, and they opened their doors and their hearts to the homeless Catholics.

There was only one immediate death from the blast, a result of two fortunate circumstances. First, the blast happened late at night when there were substantially fewer people in town than would have been present during daylight business hours. Second, there as a small warning blast several minutes before the one that did so much damage, and many were able to get to their cars and drive away from the center of town.

Roxie Miller, a beautician who lived in an upstairs apartment on Sulphur Street, heard the first blast and ran for her car. When she got to her car, she realized that she had left her purse behind. She ran back into the house and had made it to the top of the stairs when the big blast hit. The forty-something, single woman had her throat cut with a piece of flying glass and became the blast's first fatality. (My mother, also a beautician, worked with Roxie at Carol Kerry’s Beauty Shop in Noel.)

There was a Mr. Green living in Noel at the time of the blast, one of those local characters that often make themselves memorable. Mr. Green used to busy himself by telling people that the end of time was near. He shared the date of the impending doom with anyone who would listen. I don't remember this person, but my dad recently told me about him. Although his date for the end of the world has been lost to history, Mr. Green's end came on the afternoon following the blast when he keeled over dead following a heart attack that was thought to have been a result of all of the excitement generated by the exploding boxcar.

Lottie Bentley and her husband Virgil, an older couple, were asleep in bed at their home a block or so behind Sulphur Street when the major blast occurred. A two-thousand train wheel came crashing through their roof and landed on the bed crushing Lottie’s legs.

Mertie Harmon, a good friend and the mother of one of my classmates, lived in the biggest house on Main Street, just a block or so from Sulphur Street. She had heard the first blast, and was standing at her front door looking out the screen door when the second blast hit. She said that she could see the glass on the screen door spidering with fractures and just had time to cover her face with her hands before it all flew in on her. She was soon in her car driving away from town.

All of the people in town the following morning had one thing on their minds – hunger. Kilmer’s Grocery was located across the street from my dad’s store, but it had been pummeled with flying fragments of glass, rendering much of the store's contents inedible. Before the morning was very old, however, two agencies put up tables with doughnuts and sandwiches, and their presence taught me a lesson about charity that I have never forgotten. The American Red Cross aided the dazed citizens of Noel by selling them food. Most people hadn’t thought to grab cash as they dashed into town to assist with rescue and clean-up. The Salvation Army also set up a stand where they gave away sandwiches. Those fine folks were literally our “salvation!”

(Many years later I was in a social work class at the University of Missouri, and one of our class assignments was to do a follow-up of a river community – Hartsburg , MO – that had been devastated by flooding a few years earlier – the horrible floods of 1993. As my research partners and I talked to residents about what they had encountered during that disaster, many mentioned how grateful they had been to the charity provided by the Salvation Army, and spoke with scorn about the Red Cross selling their services. Today when a disaster occurs, such as Hurricane Katrina, I donate according to the life lessons that I have learned.)

But, back to Noel on August 3rd, 1969:

By early afternoon another crisis was looming. Police were going door-to-door telling people that the gas company was preparing to drill into the large propane tanks by the tracks to bleed off the pressure that they felt was building. We were being ordered to evacuate. Most of the merchants did not want to leave their wares unprotected. Some had managed to board up a few windows, but there was still basically little security for the town’s personal property. My dad gathered up his credit book and other important papers and prepared to leave, but we ended up staying until the town’s warning siren started going off. We drove out of town for a little while until we heard that an all clear had been given.

The national guard arrived that afternoon and tried to keep everyone out of town, but somehow my dad managed to get us back in. I volunteered to sleep in the store that night. We set up an army cot behind a row of washers and dryers. With the national guard patrolling the streets all night, things should be fairly secure, but we didn't want to take any unnecessary risk. I didn’t manage to sleep much because the young soldiers kept walking by and shining their flashlights around the store interior. I stayed concealed until I heard one say, “Hey. Mike, there’s one of them little radios like you want.” At that point I stood and cleared my throat. “There’s somebody in there,” I heard him say. I waved, and they moved on down the street – without the little radio.

As the days passed we learned that a boxcar full of fertilizer had exploded when the brakes on the boxcar caught fire as the train was braking coming into Noel. Apparently the night man at the Noel Train Station had radioed the engineer and told him about the fire. Instead of pulling the boxcar safely out of town, the engineer stopped where he was at to address the issue.

The train’s insurer, Aetna Casualty, was in town quickly and spent several weeks writing checks. Most people were in a hurry to settle, anxious to rebuild and get on with their lives, but a few held out for more. Famed attorney, Melvin Belli, came to Noel to encourage the greedy to sue. Aetna paid out over $2 million in claims, enough to rebuild the town as it was then several times over. Some of the greedier people managed to do a little better, and some did not.

My dad got a fair settlement for the damage to his store and merchandise. We also got a small claim for damage to our house air-conditioner. I drove a little red Chevy Corvair at the time that was parked in our garage. An old wooden wagon wheel fell over on it at the time of the blast causing a big dent in the passenger door. I was able to parlay that into a few hundred dollars.

We lost telephone service for most of the next few days, but my mother was able to contact her family in Newton County and let them know that we were all alright. The next day my aunt and uncle, Fred and Ruth Marble, read about the blast on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. They weren’t able to call us, but they did reach my grandad who told them that we were okay.

And a couple of weeks later I was back at Southwest Missouri State with stories to share that weren't all about the rigors of ROTC summer camp.

No Calls - Or Else!

When the national "No Call" list was first initiated, I got my name on it the first day. No calls, no problems, it worked wonderfully! I tried in vain to get my Dad to put his name on the list, but he's old and he gets some enjoyment listening to people prattle on about things he has no intention of buying. (I think he also reads his junk mail!) Good for him, but I have more important things on which to waste my time.

I never renewed by "No Call" registration after leaving Noel a few years ago, and until I got to Arizona, it was never a problem. Out here, however, telephone solicitations are a savage business. And what are they selling? Condos. Mondo condos! Every evening I get one or two calls from some chirpy young person who gives their first name, and then follows up with "How are you doing tonight?" And I tell them. Boy howdy, do I tell them! If they can ruin my supper, or television, or sleep, I want the satisfaction of knowing that my sadistic, blood-drenched response, always personalized with the use of the cretin's name, may weave its way into his or her dreams late some night when its very, very dark.

This week I finally relented and signed up for the "No Call" list at: www.nocall.gov. It will take 30 days to kick into effect. Until then, sleep well my lovely telemarketers! I'm coming for you - and I have a chainsaw!

Lee Nida

One of my best friends during my wild and wayward youth was an old man (probably about the age that I am now!) named Lee Nida (pronounced “Ni-dee”) who lived in a ramshackle cabin on the side of a hill in my home town of Noel, Missouri. Lee was a town character that I had known most of my life.

I spent a couple of summers working for the city of Noel when I was in high school and college. On most days Lee and I were the entire work crew. Our supervisor, a really old rascal named Jim Woody, would drive up and check on us at various times during the day to make sure we weren’t goofing off. Lee could lean on his shovel or rake for hours smoking and philosophizing, but he had an uncanny sense of when Woody was about to make an appearance. I would be enthralled with one of his outrageous tales, when he would suddenly stop and say that it was time to get back to work. Sure enough, Woody would soon come puttering along to ensure that we were busy.

Lee had a couple of fingers missing on his right hand, possibly due to frostbite because he lived very primitively, so he had to roll his cigarettes with his left hand only. That skill alone earned the respect of many teens in the 1960’s, and, try as we might, my friends and I had to struggle to roll a decent smoke with two good hands!

Lee also liked cold beer. He would make a purchase for any teen who would transport him out of town to the liquor store and buy Lee a six pack for his trouble. Most small towns had a guy or two like that back then, and most parents knew what was going on. The activity was tolerated, and any parent who was forced to comment on the situation would reply with something like: “Kids will be kids.” Or, “At least he’s not doing drugs.”

After I hit the magic age of twenty-one, one of my favorite activities when I was home from college was to go out and buy a twelve-pack or two and drive up to Lee’s cabin to spend the afternoon. Lee had electricity to run his radio and refrigerator, but those were his only modern conveniences. He had no water, and a trip to the bathroom meant a trip out behind the cabin so as to be out of view of the highway below. He kept an old barrel under the eve of the cabin to collect rain water for bathing. The less it rained, the riper Lee became!

The cabin, a one-room affair, was dirty – greasy, grimy dirty – but I could sit at his old kitchen table for hours and listen to Lee’s unique take on life. He was a strong Republican and would go on and on about how no wars had ever been started by a Republican. One of the city fathers, who was dead by the time that Lee and I became friends, had been Lee’s employer for menial jobs over the years. Any time an election came along, this small town plutocrat would gather up all of his employees and take them to the polls and tell them to vote Republican. Lee couldn’t read or write, but he knew an elephant when he saw one! After all of his workers had voted, the city father would take them to the tavern as a reward. Chicago politics didn’t have a thing over the Noel machine!

Lee died while I was in the army serving on Okinawa, so it was sometime during 1972 or 1973. My mother wrote and said that he had been found in his cabin several days after his death. I didn’t know how old he was, and I am fairly certain that he didn’t know either. He had spent his entire life never traveling more that a few miles from Noel. He had never married and claimed no children. Lee did have a sister and nephew in Noel that he didn’t claim, but as far as I know there was no other family.

There weren’t many around to mourn the death of Lee Nida, but I did. He was my friend.

Army Life (1)

I entered the U.S. Army thirty-seven years ago today. My first duty station was Ft. Eustis, Virginia. I had left my hometown of Noel, Missouri, two days earlier. I remember pulling into Don Davis's Phillips 66 station and filling up as I was leaving town. Don was an institution in Noel, and his wife, Boonetta, had been my fifth grade teacher. He had served in World War II in Europe and had been personally decorated by Charles DeGaulle, yet that was an achievement that he never bragged, or even talked, about. When I told Don that I was leaving for the Army, he pulled me aside and told me how proud he was of me. He said that I would make friends in the Army that I would know for the rest of my life.

During the following four years I would be stationed on three continents, get married and become a father, and meet people from all over the United States and the world. And, yes, I still have good friends that I met while serving in the Army.

The Ozark Theatre

My first “regular” job was as the projectionist the Ozark Theatre in my hometown of Noel, Missouri. The job consisted of five shows each weekend (Friday night, Saturday afternoon and night, and Sunday afternoon and night), and if I remember correctly I made two dollars and fifty cents for each showing. I started doing that about the time I began high school and managed to hang onto that job until I left town to attend college.

The Ozark Theatre was a great place to work. I helped out at the concession stand before the show started and got to see who all of the couples were for that week. There was an outside balcony on the projection booth that allowed for monitoring everyone who was cruising Main Street. One of my predecessors had been thrown off of that balcony by an irate customer, but the reason for that ejection now escapes me.

One plus to working at the theatre was that I got to see all of the movies. A negative was that I got to see them all five times, whether I really wanted to or not! One time that the multiple showings had a serious impact on me was when we ran a movie on the life of Hank Williams, Sr, called Your Cheating Heart. When the movie started, I had no love at all for country music, but by the end of the fifth showing I had developed a real appreciation for Hank Williams unique songs and style. (Years later when I was introduced to Sheldon Williams – Hank III – at a political picnic in which his maternal grandfather was running for county office and working the crowd, I told the 11-year-old how much I liked his paternal grandfather’s music. That picnic was was on the banks of the Elk River in Noel.)

The projection booth was always too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. The summer heat could be alleviated somewhat by keeping the door to the balcony open, and even stepping out onto the balcony from time to time. My boss, Mildred “Ma” Cash always made sure that I had a soda and a box of popcorn at the ready during every show.

Friday evening I would haul the film cases upstairs to the projection booth. Each case contained three or four reels of 35 mm film. A normal movie would run around six reels, but some weeks we might be running a double feature which could mean lugging four heavy cases upstairs. Most weekends the presentation would also include a one-reel cartoon – a good one like those made by Walt Disney and Walter Lantz. If previews were included, I would have to splice them onto the cartoon or first reel of the film, and then remove them after the last showing on Sunday night. I would drag the film cases back downstairs after the Sunday night show, and sometime during the week a freight company would pick up the old movie and replace it with the new one.

The two projectors were World War II vintage. They got their light from a carbon arc reflecting off of a concave mirror. A full reel would last about eighteen minutes and it was necessary to constantly monitor the long carbon rods and the light on the screen, making adjustments as necessary. At the end of each reel cue marks would appear in the upper left corner of the film, alerting me to start the other projector and be ready to make a smooth transition. As soon as the next projector took over, I would have to rush around and drop the shutter on the machine that had just run out of film. The next step was to thread the upcoming reel in the projector that had just been turned off, and to replace its carbon rods if they had burned too low. One machine was always running and the other was always being prepared to run. It was a fairly complicated process that became second nature as the months and years rolled by.

My friend, Tom Anderson, and I acquired a recipe for homemade beer when I was a junior or senior in high school. The recipe called for the concoction to be placed under a heat lamp for several days. The main problem that we had to deal with was where to make this brew. Being bright lads, we hatched a plan to mix it in the projection booth one Sunday night after the show closed, and leave it there underneath a jerry-rigged heat lamp. We would then come in the following Friday before the show and bottle our beverage. What could be simpler than that? When we got there on Friday the boss’s daughter and her best friend were already there, and they were madder than the proverbial wet hens. The entire theatre smelled of our brew, and, although it proved to be essentially undrinkable, we had the smell right! We hauled the beer out, and opened every door trying desperately to air the building out before show time!

In the fall of 1966 I moved to Springfield, Missouri, to go to college, and I left the Ozark projectors in the capable hands of my best friend, James Carroll. Needing a part-time job to support myself in college, the first place that I looked for work was at the local theatres. There were four theatres in Springfield at that time. The Fox, Gillioz, and Landers theatres were downtown close to the square and were all owned by Fox. The Tower Theatre, closer to the edge of the city, was owned by Dickinson Company out of Kansas. Dickinson also owned the Ozark Theatre in Noel, so it wasn’t hard for me to get a job in their concession stand earning sixty-five cents an hour. Later I was promoted to the projection booth and a much healthier salary of ninety cents an hour.

James Carroll joined me as a projectionist at the Tower when he came to Springfield for college a couple of years later. The most significant difference between running projectors in Noel versus running them in Springfield, was the number of showings to which a projectionist might be subjected. In Springfield a movie could be held over indefinitely if it was drawing good crowds. James and I saw some movies way too many times!

James eventually went back to Noel and bought the Ozark Theatre. He and his wife, Patti, ran it for several years until it tragically burned to the ground one afternoon. My son, Nick, had the privilege of working the concession stand at that old theatre on its last night of operation.

There wasn’t much money in the theatre business, but to this day those job memories are some of my best and most satisfying.

The Death of Innocence

Thanksgiving Day, 2007. A day for festive food and football, family and friends, and that perennial favorite, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. It is the one day each year when people are most likely to spell my last name correctly. It’s not Macey, Masey, Massey, or even Mason, but just a simple four-letter-word: Macy.

But this post isn’t going to focus on family history, it is going to examine an intersection between personal and national history. I want to ramble about one of those highly significant days that was so cataclysmic and historic that anyone who lived through it, and was old enough, can remember exactly what they were doing at the time. The date: November 22, 1963, forty-four years ago today. The event: the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

I was a sophomore in high school in the resort town of Noel, Missouri, that November. Our class was small, twenty some young people in a school population, 1st grade through 12th grade, of probably less than 300 students. Our school was four blocks off of Main Street, in a quiet part of a quiet town. Many of the students walked home for lunch every day, and some even walked down to Main Street and ate at the local drug store. We had an hour for lunch, and the concept of a closed campus was unheard of.

I had eaten lunch at school that day and was sitting in the study hall room talking to friends when the news first started to come in. Melvin, a senior who had just returned from having lunch at home, began spreading the word that he had seen on television that President Kennedy had been shot. Ten minutes or so later when the bell rang to go back to class, the word had filtered throughout the school.

My memory of the rest of the day is that everybody was too stunned to focus on school. Some kids were openly sobbing, and most of the others had a bewildered look that seemed to say, “What do we do now?” The school had no televisions to wheel into the classrooms in 1963, so we were left knowing something terrible was occurring, but unable to follow events. Some kids did go home to watch the story unfold on television, but most of us stayed in class and tried to concentrate on school.

Sometime that afternoon our superintendent, Mr. Bill Spears, held and all-school assembly and we all marched into the bleachers in the gymnasium. There he told us that President Kennedy had died. The crying spread through much of the student body as he tried to continued by letting us know that school would dismiss at the regular time that day. My dad was on the school board, and I learned later that Mr. Spears had contacted all of the board members and asked if he should let school out early. Somehow they had come to the conclusion to keep school in session in the pursuit of normalcy.

Years later I was principal of that same little school, by then a K-8 facility. Our music teacher was Coradell Alexander. She had been teaching music at Noel for decades by the time I came back to lead the school. Mrs. Alexander and I were visiting one day about the assassination, and she told me that Mr. Spears had been bewildered and had told staff that he had no idea what to do that day. No one had ever been through a presidential assassination before.

Two days after the President was killed I was quail hunting with my dad and a family friend when we heard the news that Lee Harvey Oswald had been shot. I had been stunned by the death of the President, but the shooting of Oswald made me feel that the world was suddenly very out of control. (Somehow I think that feeling has persisted from that day to this.)

Mr. Spears cancelled school on the day of President Kennedy’s funeral. It was a nationally televised event and I was glued to the set. I remember scenes of Charles DeGaulle, Prince Phillip, Haile Selassie, and scores of other world leaders marching in somber cadence behind the catafalque that was carrying the President. I also remember a television image of Lady Bird Johnson sitting in the White House, sipping a drink, and laughing with a group of dignitaries. It looked very uncaring, and my first thought was how did they get Jackie and the kids moved out so quickly. (I went on to become a great fan of Lady Bird’s, but I always thought that she looked a little to eager that day to be the Queen Bee.)

And life went on after that. Everyone, even high school kids in the Ozarks, seemed to know that our country had changed in irreversible ways. We had crossed a drawbridge and were stepping into a very different place, and in the background we could hear the bridge being raised. It was severing us from our innocence.

7F2

I was listening to Michael Feldman’s “What Do You Know” program on National Public Radio last Saturday when the host made a statement to the effect that high school kids today have never known a time without cell phones. That simple remark set me spinning on the subject of how fast things are changing. Just on the topic of telephones alone, I have lived through an amazing array of technology.

The first telephone experience that I remember happened before I even started to elementary school. We were living in an old house in Goodman, MO., that was equipped with a crank phone hanging on the wall. My mom asked me to call my dad for some reason, perhaps to see if he was coming home for lunch. I pushed a chair up to the wall so that I could reach the telephone, cranked the handle, and put the ear piece to my ear. Violet, the operator, came on and tried to connect me, but it was just starting to storm and a loud noise came through the line. Violet came back on the line when the noise subsided and asked in a surprised voice, ‘Rocky, are you still there?” We tried again, but the connection couldn’t be made. I hung up the earpiece and had barely moved away from the telephone when a bolt of lightening came through the earpiece and left a black scorch mark on the wall. Timing was everything!

A year or so later we moved to a new house in Goodman and had a very modern black, rotary telephone that probably weighed in at close to ten pounds. The early years of elementary school brought occasional telephone conversations with friends, but the phone was in the living room and privacy was not an option. It was the only telephone in the household, and everyone recognized the need to limit the length of calls.

We moved to Riverview Court when I was ten. The court got its mail on a Noel, MO, rural route, and telephone service was from the perpetually sleepy village of Lanagan. Lanagan had crank telephones, but I knew how to handle those. Lanagan also had a telephonic concept that was new to me: party lines. A party line meant that several customers shared a telephone line. A half dozen or so households were on our party line, so making a call often meant having to wait until the neighbor was done sharing the gossip. If an emergency came up, the person needing the phone had to interrupt the on-going conversation. And it did need to be an emergency, because the person who was interrupted would invariably get back on the line and listen in. Each person on the party line had a unique ring code to let them know if the incoming call was for them. Ours was two long rings. A neighbor’s ring might have been two shorts and a long, or perhaps three shorts, or some other unique combination of shorts and longs. If you were calling someone else on your party line, you had to carefully crank out their ring code. Our telephone number was 7F2, and to this day I have no idea what that signified.

When I was sixteen we moved to the town of Noel. There we were blessed with rotary telephones again, but they were getting lighter and easier to move around. Our house had a rotary phone in the living room, and a rotary phone mounted on the wall in the utility room. The wall phone was an extension, so we were still limited to one person using the telephone at a time.

Push button phones began to make an appearance in the early 1980’s. The first time that I remember becoming aware of the enormity of that cultural change was around 1990 when I was a junior high school principal. A student came to the office to use the phone to call his mother. I directed him to an old rotary phone that was at an empty desk. He stared at it for awhile, and finally asked in a bewildered voice, “How do you start it up?”

In the mid to late 1990’s I worked in Child Protection for the state of Missouri. That job occasionally led me into remote areas where dangerous situations could arise. My agency began signing out “bag phones” to take along on remote visits. Of course, my county was so rural that most of the places we went were unable to get reception. Fortunately, county deputies often accompanied us with their radio-equipped patrol cars.

I entered the modern era in 2000 when I got my first cell phone. Since that time it has become a fixture in my life, and the necessity of having a land line at home has lessened to the point that I practically never use the one I have. But, in defense of my old fashioned values, my cell phone does not play music or games, compute, transmit television shows and movies, or take pictures. At least I don’t think that it does!

One more significant cultural change that has occurred over the years is the virtual disappearance of telephone booths. My first realization of this trend was in the movie “Superman” where Clark Kent (aka Christopher Reeve) prepared to jump into a phone booth to change into his crime fighting gear, only to realize that pay phones were no longer encased in booths! A few years later I was in London and heard that their famous red phone boxes were slowly being removed due to the public’s growing reliance on cell phones. Dr. Who did all of his time and space traveling in a British red phone box.

What’s to become of us mere mortals if Superman is reduced to changing clothes in an alley and Dr. Who has to take the bus?

Telephones have definitely evolved over the fifty plus years that I have been using them, but I have nagging doubts as to whether all of this evolution represents true progress. Are cell phones, the latest link in the evolutionary chain, great liberators that enable people to communicate anywhere at any time? Or are they virtual leashes that tie us to home, and office, and school, and the never-ending roar of civilization? Some days I yearn for the simpler time of crank phones and solitude – and the lightening be damned!

Riverview Court

Two relative constants in my parents’ lives were these: they seldom worked for wages, preferring instead to own and operate their own businesses, and it was a rare day indeed when they paid rent. One of my Dad’s favorite tirades to this day is on the wastefulness of paying rent, or as he puts it, “just throwing your money down a rat hole.” Those two principles came together nicely in the summer of 1958 when they bought a tourist cabin court four miles north of Noel, Missouri, on the beautiful Elk River. Not only would being innkeepers make a nice, seasonal income, the court also boasted living quarters for the owners.

I was ten-years-old and my sister, Gail, was closing in on eight when we were uprooted from our home and friends in Goodman, MO, and moved to Riverview Court. I was excited to be living so close to the river and suspected that it would be a life-changing event, but daily swimming and fishing aside, I had no idea how much of an impact that this unique experience would have on my formative years. We were there six years, a time that proved to be as much of a transition for me personally as it was for the country.

Riverview had eight units, with five of those being kitchenettes that would suit families looking to spend a week or two playing on the river. One night in a sleeping-only cabin ran six dollars, and the kitchenettes ranged from eight to twelve dollars per night depending on the number of beds required. The two largest units were triples, with three double beds each. There were special rates for three-day stays as well as those that lasted a week or more.

It was at Riverview where I learned to work and follow routines. Every morning I had to empty trash from the cabins, dump and clean the garbage cans, and help my mom and Gail clean cabins. We washed sheets and towels in the afternoons, using an old ringer washer with two rinse tubs. I then helped to hang the laundry outside to dry, and brought it back into the laundry room later where my mom would iron the sheets on a “mangle.” I usually mowed one afternoon a week, a process that took several hours. When all of that was done, Gail and I were free to swim or play with kids who were staying at the court. For a couple of years I also managed the soda machines and learned to be a successful merchant in my own right. My dad owned and operated a DX gas station (remember DX?) in Noel during those years, leaving much of the cabin business to the rest of us.

We had two sets of seasonal neighbors who had summer cabins next to the court. Bill and Olive Bledsoe from Tulsa and her sister, Mabel Rainey, from Fayetteville, AR, were there most summer weekends, as were Charlie and Maureen Legg and their daughter, Jonne Sue, from Webb City, MO. Gail and I spent lots of time with them and always hated to see the summer end and the neighborhood become quiet again. Jonne Sue taught us to play pinochle, an activity that I carried on into my college and army years. Her fat Chihuahua, Tinkerbelle, would roam around our feet looking for scraps of food while we played endless hours of cards.

Our neighbors, primarily Olive and Mabel, also managed to get us hooked on the soap opera, “As the World Turns”, which aired weekdays at 12:30 p.m., usually after the cabins were cleaned, but before time to do the laundry. I would make grilled cheese sandwiches, and then Mom and Gail and I would settle back with our meal to wallow in the fictional lives of the Hughes family. Gail and I were at school that fall day in 1963 when Mom’s show was interrupted by Walter Cronkite with the news that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.

Riverview was on the side of a hill with a trail and steps leading down to the river. We were on the muddy side of the river, but my dad built a small dock where three or four aluminum flat-bottomed boats were kept for customers so they could paddle across to the nice gravel bar on the opposite shore. It was also relatively easy to jump off of the dock and swim to the other shore, or float across on inner-tubes. Gail and I both learned to swim while we lived there. I spent many happy hours catching sun perch, letting them go, and often hooking the same ones again. I also liked to quietly sneak up on turtles sunning on logs, and then jump out of the boat and try to catch them as they frantically swam to safety. Water moccasins were plentiful too, but I usually make enough commotion stomping through the water that they gave me a wide berth.

A friend gave me four Muscovy ducks while we lived on the river, two drakes and two hens. That fall they were joined by three mallard hens who cottoned to the idea of just waddling up and enjoying the corn chops that I left on the bank each morning and evening. After a year or so, all of the ducks disappeared except for one of the mallard hens. She stayed on a couple of more years, and even laid two nests of eggs. The first nest was washed away in a flood. The second time Mama Duck nested farther up the hill behind the cabins, but a snake or some other critter managed to destroy that effort. She eventually became tame enough to walk the long hill to our yard where she would quack for her supper. After eating, often out of my hand, she would take flight and go back to the river. To this day I find that animals are often more comforting to be around than people. (Someday soon I will post about my little farm in the Ozarks, Rock’s Roost.)

My best memories of those years at Riverview involve sitting outside on the warm summer evenings and visiting and playing with the kids who would stay there while on vacation. We always looked forward to Nancy and Jimmy Hurn and their parents from Henrietta, Texas, arriving each August for one or two weeks. Their vacation often felt as though it was also our own vacation as well. (Kids who worked all summer in the tourist industry never got to go on vacation, so our best bet was to glom onto someone else’s!) The Hurn’s cousin, Danny, from Wichita Falls, Texas, was a regular as well – and there were many others who were important to Gail and me, but too many summers have passed for me to come up with their names.

Living on the river and having the opportunity to interact with people from a variety of areas and backgrounds was a wonderful experience. Yes, it was hard work, but it was also fun, and exciting, and educational – and I am a better person today for having grown up there.