Bill Osborne
My name is Bill Osborne, O-S-B-O-R-N-E. I was born in March of 1948, here in Frederictown, in fact, in the home on Franklin Street, where I was born and raised.
And who are your parents?
Rosina Kessler Osborne and Buddy J.E. Osborne.
And if you could, we'll start by if you could maybe say a little bit about your earliest memories.
Oh, my earliest memories were going fishing with my father, and my cocker spaniel dog got out in the water, and I was just sure that dog was going to drown, but Papa assured me that it would swim out, and sure enough, he was right, it swam right out.
It's a big St.
Francis River, down by Saltpeter Cave.
It's just up from the new bridge there on T.E. Highway, and Papa drove a stock truck, so he knew all the farmers, and he'd go anywhere in the county and fish or hunt or whatever he liked.
So that was one of my earliest memories, and then I was probably four or five at that time.
But then my father passed away when I was six or eight years old.
That was a vivid memory, too.
But my mother always admired her because she had three kids ranging in age from I was the youngest to my sister was probably fourteen, fifteen years old, and then my brother was oh, probably twelve, fourteen, but he had had spinal meningitis, which was similar to polio whenever he was like three months old, and it was prevalent at that time.
The girl next door, she had it.
She survived and could still walk and talk.
My brother couldn't do either one.
But my mother told me about having, you know, Papa died.
She had three kids to raise, and had like 40 cents in the bank account or something like that.
So you have to really admire people like that.
And the other thing is I was raised by women, and I can really appreciate how hard the women worked.
I worked out sometimes with the men, but it was really the women that worked.
They started like at 2 a.m., particularly on work days or canning days or things like that.
And the luxury was having a summer kitchen.
This way you had a wood fire and a stove outside your house, but we didn't have that luxury.
So Mama would be canning on a wood stove in our house during this, much like this 100 degree weather.
Right.
Now this was on Franklin Street?
Yes, it's on Franklin Street.
And it was across, well, it was about a block down from the elementary school.
And in the block between, the lead company, National Lead, had built homes for their executives and their upper echelon staff.
So we had the experience of being raised with, these folks are really, really neat people.
They had came from all over the country to work in the lead company, lead mines here.
And they had, oh, like one gentleman was from Louisiana, another one was from Texas, and one of the engineer's wives, I'll always remember that family, because she had went to one of the colleges out east, Seven Sisters, Barnard or something like that.
And she was quite a lady, and you mentioned the impact in the community.
Those folks were very active.
The husbands worked at the jobs, but the wives were available to head up efforts among the community organizations and community service, and they were very dedicated to education.
And I think it's to their credit that we have the quality education that's there, not just Fredericktown or Madison County, but they were interested in the junior college, Seymour University, and Columbia.
We're truly blessed to have all these information education facilities, including the library.
I remember when I was a kid, my sister, she was older than me.
She still is.
But we'd walk from up there down to the library, and I think it was at the corner of West Main and Park Street, Tidal Company has it now, that the library was there.
And if I was really a good boy, she would stop by and there was a bakery.
The fellow's name was Winters, Gus Winters, I think.
She would stop by and let me buy a sugar cookie about the size of a hubcap for the old cars.
That would have been on South Main, the print shop.
Yeah, it was across the street from where we were at.
This was a Kroger store at that time, but this was across the street.
And I'm trying to think, it may be where the Masonic Lodge— They had those windows that would be telling that they still had the bakery.
We had a granny lady, she'd be comparable to what today would be called a bedwife.
Just a neighborhood lady, Mrs. Clempe.
And she grew up, or she was out from the German community where Mama was born.
And so she came up to help Mama deliver meat.
Where was the German community?
Oh, it was out on H Highway, let me think, it was probably about seven miles from Frederick Town.
And you know where the Bruins live, it's about seven miles up H Highway from Frederick Town.
And then if you get to K Highway, it went too far.
But it was a very close-knit community out there.
Many of the folks moved, they were first generation in this country.
My grandfather, well he was born in this country, but some of his brothers and sisters were born over in Germany.
But they again, very, very supportive of education.
Several of my cousins and my uncle, they never had any children by that time, they knew they never would, but they always voted for tax increase education.
And everybody valued education so highly.
And we were lucky to be here in this area because we had Marvin College, we had each of the little communities like German had a school, one of the first things they did was have a school, church services in the same building.
This was in the fifties?
No, this was probably in the early 1900s.
Even in the fifties.
But the community was still functioning when you were born in 1948?
And it had the school until probably the late, I'm guessing the late fifties.
And each one of these small communities had a school, either first through sixth grade, first through eighth grade, or first through twelfth grade.
But most of them were within walking distance, the students home.
Of course, walking distance might have been three miles, but it's one way.
But they didn't go home for lunch.
So it was quite an interesting group.
Did you actually live in a miners' home then?
Did you live in one of those brick miner homes?
No, I was across the street.
There were several homes in that area that had the owners lived on the first floor and then they had sleeping rooms up above because the miners wanted some place to stay close because automobiles and such as that were available, but a lot of people didn't have them.
So they'd get a sleeping room, they called them, and they had sleeping rooms upstairs.
And I think it was my grandmother, yeah, my grandmother fixed lunch and maybe evening meal breakfast or something like that for these miners.
And it brought them into the home and kind of the early bed and breakfast.
Great.
Did your mom do that too or just your grandma?
No, just my grandmother.
And it—Like a boarding house?—Like a boarding house, except it was just a boarding house, a sleeping room.
Yeah.
Okay, so you were born on Franklin Street and you grew up there.
You were talking earlier about your mom canning and all the work that they did canning in the cante.
Oh, my God.
And so what do you recall of that, of your early childhood?
Your older brother was because of the illness.
Disabled.
Yeah, so he was disabled.
And mama took care of him just like a child.
Right.
So did anyone, after your father passed, was she—how did she— Made a living?
Yeah.
Okay.
Papa had worked long enough to be—so we were eligible for Social Security survivor benefits.
Now, it was kind of in a gray area, but statute of limitations has passed.
So yeah, he was set up so he had worked long enough to draw minimum Social Security, which was a godsend for us because, you know, mama couldn't leave and work because my brother.
And then she took care of my sister and me too.
And the Social Security disability is what helped us survive.
And in fact, I was on Social Security whenever I was in high school and college.
It gave a stipend for attending.
So okay, and let's maybe talk about school.
Oh.
Did you enjoy school?
Seems like education is important to you, so what— I enjoyed school.
One of the things I remember early on, my sister, as I mentioned, would bring me down to the library.
And you had, at that time, some books called Great Works of the Western World or something like that.
And it was a series of authors.
And I checked those out—hey, I'm just 10 years old or something like that.
And I checked those books out.
It just broadened my horizon so much.
And I wasn't a great student though.
In fact, I was on—I'm trying to remember the term they used for the kids that weren't real bright.
I was one of those.
I mean, that's not what they called us, but we knew what it was.
They had probably called it Learning Disabled, but back then they didn't make it so.
They used to track kids too, you know, if you went to 7th grade and you'd be 7A and 7B. Oh, that's right.
Yeah.
And I was way down at the bottom of those, but I managed barely.
But the education, I remember the instructors, teachers, were some of the most well-respected people in the whole community.
And the superintendent's school and principals, administrative staff, you know, they were really highly recognized for their expertise and leadership in the community.
Oh, those were the days.
Several of my friends acted out.
I tried to talk them out of it.
I was 10 years old.
I tried to talk them out of it, but they did it anyway.
And if they were caught, they would be punished at school, physical punishment, but when they got home they would get punished again.
Now I can say and tell the truth, my parents, neither one of them ever hit me.
They were adequately against that, and I just wouldn't do it.
So I didn't have to worry after I got home if they would sit me down and talk to me.
Oh man, it made you feel bad all the more for the head is beating than to sit down and talk to you.
What did you do in the summers?
Well, I usually worked.
My family had farms, and I would work farm.
I thought I was working.
I think they were just keeping me to take it off, load off mama, but I thought I was working, particularly my uncles at a German community.
He was one of the last people to give up the horses, so I worked the horses.
I could drive the horses.
I could help him.
I couldn't handle the hornets, but I could help him hook up the horses.
He was, we've got an Amish group out here, much like that.
They, the whole family worked on the farm, and it was much like the Amish, but one of the things that had labor, or my work as a child, really got me set for labor as I got older.
When I was, oh, ten or twelve, I was driving the horses.
One of the easy jobs, whenever they were cutting logs, was hooking up the horses and dragging the logs down to the stationing area, where a truck would come by and pick up the, but bringing the, and again, I thought I was driving the horses.
I think the horses knew where to go, and I was just kind of holding the reins.
And by the time I was, oh, twelve, fourteen, I had full-time employment, maybe working the hay fields.
Now, my family put up hay loose.
They didn't bale it or anything.
They just cut it, break it, threw it on the wagon.
After that, some of the more progressive farmers in this area actually had hay balers to take a lot of that work off, but it, and really, putting up hay was a hard job, even at best.
So, before the balers, did you just do like that iconic shape of stuff?
Oh, no.
We put everything in the barn, and the process was, you would put this loose hay, they'd cut it, let it dry in the fields, and then come back around with a rake, either a harsh drawn rake or, by that later, they had a tractor that would pull and put the hay in a row down through the field, and then you go back with the hay farm and make a pile, and then they bring the wagon around.
This would be hay wagons like you'd see in European farm scenes, you know, with the support system, and then they'd big pile of hay on this, and then you'd take that into the barn, and they had something called a hay fork that came out on a rope.
You'd set it in the hay, and then hook the horses to this hay rope, and pull it up into the barn, back into the back of the barn, and then release it with a rope.
That was loose?
Pardon?
It was loose?
Yes.
It's all loose.
So, no haystacks?
No haystacks.
No.
Haystacks were for other purposes.
My folks thought that if you let the hay get wet, it would draw the nutrients out of it, and even in a haystack, you'd have some get wet, and they were very careful that they took care of everything they had.
They were really meticulous in the care of their feed and their stock, and the feed was one issue.
The other one was always having fresh water for your animals.
You had to carry the water, possibly twice a day.
Did you have impressions of the outside of Madison County, the outside world, current events?
Anything to jump out at?
Well, some of my relatives were in the Korean War.
And then we had newspapers out of St.
Louis.
And in 1958, one of the fellows that worked out the mines, and Mama took care of his kids, we all went to the 1958 car show in St.
Louis.
And one of my most vivid memories, you know, he and his wife wanted to do it right because I'd been to St.
Louis maybe half a dozen times by then, but I'd never been to a really nice restaurant.
And I remember us sitting down in this restaurant, and it had crystal glasses.
And he did, he said, watch this.
And he dipped his finger in that glass and ran it around me.
And I was just amazed, you know.
I'd been up, I mean, jelly jar, I just wanted to make that sound.
And you had only been about an hour or so.
Yeah, just a kid.
And they, I'm uncertain where they went to, after the mines closed, that had a major impact on our town.
We lost a lot of, I don't know what you'd call it, intellectual bank deposits or something like that.
But these folks knew, they knew the world around them.
They knew what it takes.
And they were very, very willing to share it.
When do you remember that happening as far as people leaving because the mine was winding down?
I'm thinking it was in the 60s.
I don't remember when the mine closed.
Do you remember sort of seeing that change happen?
Oh, yes, yes.
Very much so.
That's one of the reasons why I'm so excited about the possibility of the mines opening again.
There was a fellow that came here probably now 15, 20 years ago.
And he was from South Africa.
Well, he was really originally from Boston, but he had moved to South Africa and had worked in the mines there in South Africa.
And he came over to start this mining operation.
He was a geologist.
And he told me that, you know, bill sooner or later they'll have to open those mines.
But of course, I've been hearing that ever since the 50s or 60s whenever they moved out.
So I don't know.
I'm hoping Larry was right, but yeah.
Well, there were several rumors and why Larry's mine didn't work in the 60s.
Okay.
I think one of the products they were getting was cobalt.
And that was a strategic mineral.
And there was federal assistance to make sure we had enough cobalt to support our, well, military industrial efforts.
And cobalt was used for, I'm thinking, to strengthen steel and in jet engines there's a little fluke that the air moves through and spins the engine.
And I think that is made from either cobalt or a cobalt material type.
But that was one.
And the other one was that they lost any support from the federal government for the mining operation.
That and— So what?
It was subsidized?
Yeah, it was subsidized.
Yeah, it was strategic material for our military.
So it couldn't run independently without government funding?
No.
I'm guessing, were they still doing lead and other things?
Oh, yes, lead, zinc, nickel.
So let's say that that was winding down maybe in the 60s and 70s.
And that's about when you were— 60s.
Okay, 60s.
And you would have been in your mid-teens?
Right.
Yeah.
And what do you recall of that time period as a teen in Fredericktown?
You know, during the 60s, was there much going on or was it too insulated?
Well, I worked in a service station that was like a rite of passage.
You had to work in a service station if you were a kid in this town.
And so I worked in a service station.
And I remember several of the people—they were old people, like they were way up in their 20s whenever I knew them—but I remember them working in St.
Louis and coming down here on weekends and looking forward to—these guys were maybe in their 20s, 30s, but they were looking forward to retirement so they could move back home.
Wow.
But I don't know how many of them actually came back, but it was—and there was, at that time, even during the early 60s, there was an active retail community here.
There were like three different men's clothing stores, two or three women's dress shops, and then the Kroger store, IGA, and then every little neighborhood had a neighborhood store.
So I remember that.
There was seemingly more money floating around.
Right.
Disposable income.
Yeah, disposable income, too.
So you talked about the Korean War, and I know the United States was concerned—they even named it the Domino Ferry—that they were trying to contain communism.
There was like an S&M thing with fallout shelters during the 50s.
Was that anything people were worried about down here?
Especially the Cuban Missile Crisis, but also prior to that, we had a—in school, I think it was once or twice a year, we had practice for a nuclear attack, and there was fallout shelters where you needed to go, and they had like a cookie in there, or a cracker or something like that, that you could eat.
That's what you would live on.
It was located around the Frederick Town?
Yes.
Uh-huh.
In fact, I'm trying to think if there was one in the basement of the courthouse, or—I don't remember where they were located, but at that time it was vividly—I remember vividly that we knew where they were, but it— Were they in the school, as well?
Oh, yeah, I'm sure there was some in the school, but— So was it concerned?
Oh, yes, very much so.
Then whenever President Kennedy was shot, I guess that was 64, 63—time passes faster, you're having fun—but no, I remember that breaking on—I was at school at the time, in high school, the one that used to be down on South Main, and, you know, that was just horrible for kids, because nobody knew what to expect, but it was finally—but the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was older at that time, and that really, really scared me.
Yeah, I think that was 62—October 62.
Oh, I don't have a timeline on that, but it— You were old enough to know— Yeah, that was a biggie.
Did you watch it on television?
Yes, yes.
In fact, my neighbors all came over to my house because we were one of the first homes to get a television.
One of the ladies that lived with us, she had came on, joined our family, and to take care of my grandmother and to help my mother take care of my brother, but she worked at a restaurant.
Highway 67 ran through town at that time, and out across the pick-pick barbecue, there was a Graham's Cafe or some—a cafe, and she worked there, and she saved her tips for like a year or so to come up with enough money to buy us a TV, and she was a wonderful lady.
Very gentle.
You know, I remember, I went back even further, my sister and I saw Sputnik, the first Russian— Satellite?
Yeah, it was a satellite, about the size of a basketball, I think, a tiny little thing, but it just circled the earth, and you could see it go over.
It wasn't that high.
Right.
And then they had the first astronaut, cosmonaut, Yuri, I forget its last name.
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
And I think they sent a dog up before that.
Yeah.
I can't remember the name of the dog, though.
Monkey?
Yeah, monkey.
Well, it sounds as if, you know, you had a window to the world out here, so you still had not a lot of television stations.
No, we had Channel 5, Channel 12, and Channel 2, but we always had something to watch, and now we have probably 200 channels, and I'm not sure—noth of it's really interesting.
Was the Democrat news different back then?
Did it cover the national?
Well, it was an independent newspaper, and owned and operated locally.
So, it never was really a national news type thing?
Well, they had a—it was more oriented towards the local market, and I think it was successful.
I remember Ferguson.
Oh, right, right.
They were key leaders in our community, and just great people.
I forgot about their involvement.
So your first job was working at the gas station.
What do you remember as far as transitioning to out of high school?
What was your life like, say, when you were eighteen to thirty?
Oh, I went to school first at MAC, and MAC had just opened a—I was just opening a new facility where they're at now, and I had been in that school so long that they let me park on a teacher's parking lot.
I'd been there, like, five semesters or something.
Then I went—I took about a year off working in collections and loan companies, and decided that one of the fellows that I was working for, our manager, we were floor planning, like, television was still—people financed our TVs.
We had several of them financed, and some people got behind on their loan.
The manager of the loan company, I was just a collector, and that's way down here at the bottom, but the manager was like king, and he got angry one day that we couldn't collect some money from some people, and he said, What are you doing Saturday morning?
And I said, Well, you know, I'll be here to work.
He said, Well, we'll do some collecting.
Well, I thought we'd go out and knock on some doors and tell people, you know, pay for all things that are bad that are going to happen.
No, he brought his pickup truck, and we went in on Saturday morning.
At that time, children loved cartoons.
Saturday morning cartoons was wonderful, and, you know, we went into these homes with a little kid sitting around eating Cheerios and watching their favorite— Yeah, Tom and Jerry, and I'm trying to think of the little Mighty Mouse, Mighty Mouse.
And we walked in there and explained to them we needed some money, or we was going to have to pick up their TV.
Well, they thought it was bluffing, and, you know, I'd told them that before, but this time the manager was with me, and he said, Okay, I'm plugging the TV.
I'm going to take it on out.
These little kids were just told that that was my motivator to go back to college and go into business or something like that.
I knew I didn't want to do that as a career.
Right.
That has been heartbreaking.
Oh, and we did like three or four of them that one morning, and— So he did not like being a repo then?
No, no, I really—now, the repo like that is horrible.
Normally, I could talk with people and they would, you know, I mean, they borrowed the money or they bought the car, and I never had a minute's trouble—well, I never had trouble on repos with adults.
And the little kids, you know, we were taking the TV away from them.
I couldn't explain to them why we were taking their TV, because, you know, then I had to explain to their parents, and I didn't want to do that, but the other parts of repo I didn't mind.
One of the fellows I worked for whenever I was going to school down in Cape, he had a fleet of probably 45 to 50 vehicles that he would sell people on payments.
He had a loan company, too, and he would sell them a car and then finance it, and then they would get behind for whatever reason, and you had to go get the car.
They'd bring it by and say, I can't make the payment.
Well, some of those people—I worked there about three years, and I know some of those people had bought four or five cars there.
They'd just buy a car and not be able to pay for it, but it was a regular fleet he had that he sold and financed, and then the people brought him back.
But then they would buy another car later?
Later, whenever they got some money together.
They couldn't pick up the old car because it had all that interest and principle against it, so they'd buy another car about the same condition, but it was all legal.
As far as legal, it was legal.
Yeah.
Imagine that was an interesting time for this area because the mines were shifting, and I guess Brown's Shoe was still here?
Brown's Shoe was still here.
So they were still employing people.
And Brown's Shoe was a cornerstone of—particularly the wives would go to work at Brown's Shoe.
The guys would work at something else.
Why was that?
It was normally pretty low pay, and all of the shoe companies tried to attract rural women to work for them because they would work cheaper and not— Did it have to do with sewing?
Yeah, sewing, cutting, gluing, whatever it takes to make a shoe, the women could do it.
A lot of them, this had been the first job they ever had, and they would stay with it until retirement, forty years or so.
Then what would the men do?
What would they try to do?
Some of them hunted and trapped, and my mama had a restaurant, and the guys would hang around there during the day waiting for their wives to get off work.
Oh, wow.
No, I'm making it worse than it really was.
What would they do with what they had hunted?
Pardon?
What would they do with that?
Oh, trapping?
Would they just feed their own family with it, or was there a market?
Oh, there was a market for the skins, and I'm going back years now, back to probably there was a rationing during World War II, and whatever you raised, you could eat or sell, but mama and papa, papa was going back and forth to St.
Louis with a truck hauling livestock and such as that, and then bringing a load of coal or whatever might be needed down here, bringing that back, but mama would raise white rabbits, these were New Zealand rabbits, and she would butcher them, and papa would take them to St.
Louis and sell them up there, or would sell them here locally.
And that's when they had the restaurant?
No, this was before my papa died.
Okay.
Would they, so your mom would skin the rabbits and then send the pelts?
No, and the pelts, but also the meat.
Oh, meat too.
Uh-huh.
And— So separate markets, separate places to sell them.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I don't know, I never rode with him up there for that.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
But it— So when did she have the restaurant that came later?
That came whenever.
I was probably in high school, probably into 62 to 66, about 64 to 68, I guess, and she had a small restaurant in the, let's see, it would be the southwest corner of the Court Square.
Okay.
And it was just a hamburger place.
She ran it, and had, I washed dishes, and did fry cook type stuff, and she actually made the meals.
Uh-huh.
So that was in the 60s.
Uh-huh.
So that would have been, probably you worked at the gas station for a while, and then that maybe would have been next.
Just— No, it was both together.
Oh, they were both together.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
And you would have been— What did she call it?
I'm sorry.
What did she call it?
Sportsman's Cafe.
Okay.
She was the one that had the local radio station, and he was going to run them both, and he decided the radio station was easier than a restaurant.
Restaurant is hard, hard work.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
So then you were doing that.
Then let's jump back to when you were a little older, you were doing the collections, and that prompted you to go back to school.
Yeah.
School.
Right.
Okay.
So you went back to school, and then what happened?
I started— You went to Mac?
Well, after I graduated— You went to Mac?
Pardon?
You went to Mac?
Yeah, I went to Mac for four or five semesters.
Okay.
Yeah.
It was just a start.
It started in the old Flat River High School.
Okay.
We had one building at the campus.
And then here a school bond was passed, and they decided they would open up where they're at now.
They're at the intersection of Highway 67.
Okay.
So it's— And then— What were you studying there?
Well, I was studying economics and physics.
The only reason for that was those were easy classes, so I took those, too.
Okay.
So that might be debatable.
Pardon?
Physics.
Physics, my friend.
Yeah.
No, there was an instructor there that was a statistician, and he made the physics easy, and he had real challenges with his statistics.
I didn't do real well at that either semester.
And then economics was just a snap.
I was working and everything, and I had a lot of other activities that I took in rather than studying.
And did you go to school afterwards, after you had your associates?
Oh, yes.
I went to Cape.
I finished up down there.
And since that time, I was lucky.
The company I was working for, SMTS, a transportation group, your taxpayer dollars were at work.
I've traveled to at least three or four universities to learn how to be a better manager.
And I can't say how valuable the training was, but it sure worked for me.
Right.
So did you then, you finished off school in Cape, how soon did you start working for SMTS?
Oh, it was about a year after I, yeah, I worked in Chicago for about nine months.
Okay.
So you had business management?
Yes.
And in Chicago, I was working with the warehousing distribution of Tractor Supply Company.
They had 125 stores at that time.
And we had a computer there in Chicago and all the inventory was kept on the computer.
No way it didn't work that way.
We'd send people out to count them.
And sometimes they would send me out to count things at the Indianapolis office or warehouse.
And I was never well received at those places.
People from home offices, second-guessing the folks there in the field.
So then you came back to Missouri at that point after how long, you said about nine months you worked?
Yeah, about a year.
Yeah.
Let's see, it was in 72, 73, I started with Southeast Missouri Transportation Service.
At that time there was just a bunch of dedicated people who had been working on its volunteers.
And then they kind of gelled and the board of directors got together and made application to the state, and the state had some local money and some federal funds for rural transit.
Was that one of the first agencies of that kind in this, I would imagine, certainly in the region?
Oh yeah, there was a group called Oats out of Columbia.
They had all but Southeast Missouri.
And they are a national recognized, they were one of the first ever.
And SMTS wouldn't be where it's at, or wouldn't have been where it was at when I was running it, without the Oats Group, they were just fantastic to work with.
Yeah, but that trend has really increased having rural transit because it's particularly difficult for rural residents to get back and forth to doctors or even facilities.
We started off providing medical transportation, particularly long distance medical transportation from places like Malden and Kennet, Carothersville, taking folks up to the Columbia, Missouri, up to the Ellis Fischel Cancer Research Center, and then the medical hospital there.
To give you an idea, these people were sick, I mean they were very sick, but they endured a band ride from Malden, or way down the boot hill, up to Columbia and back.
They would be on the vehicle at least 12 hours, and then they'd be sitting around waiting for their appointment for another 8 or 10 hours, then they'd come back.
That was an educational training hospital, and some of the people that went up there, the doctors were saying they hadn't ever seen anybody that bad of shape.
And I think part of it was, people had just written 12 hours, but later on we had to start sending two drivers, because of the limited number of hours that drivers could work, but the riders, that was really rough on them.
We were in such a spread out area, it's not like an urban area where people can catch a bus.
Exactly, exactly.
So I can't imagine the coordination of getting people on businesses.
It was interesting because people were so dedicated to that, the employees, the volunteers, everyone was so dedicated to get those people back and forth, even here in Frederictown, getting people back and forth here in Frederictown, up to Farmington, down to Cape, back and forth to the Senior Center.
There was some of the employees, these people would work for that without pay.
They were so dedicated to helping other people.
It was almost like a cult.
So it was volunteer to begin with, and gradually you were able to get funding if you employed people.
Right, right.
That was a model.
Some of the, all kinds of different models developed in the industry.
We had employees who were coordinating trips, taking the calls and scheduling the trip for the riders.
Then we had paid staff to drive the vehicles.
Other people used, other groups used different models, but that was, that's what we thought was the two most important jobs, that and management.
Right.
So you started there in 75, and you were there until how recently?
Let's see, I was there until for 30, 35 years, something like that.
So it's, I've been retired four or five years.
Okay.
It's been very rewarding for me to help develop that and then watch it grow.
And since I retired, it's grown even more.
Wow.
So it- How many do you have in your, or did you have in your fleet?
I think we had like 125, 150 vehicles.
Now all of those weren't running full time, but you have to have a backup fleet in order to have the dependability of the service because we ran quite a bit of dialysis, people going back and forth to dialysis.
And if those folks, they had to go.
So you had to have at least some backup equipment, but you know, the other thing is the support we got in the local communities, for instance, the mechanic shops and the service stations and places like that, those guys had just been over backwards to help.
In fact, at one time we were having some financial problems and we got behind on paying people.
And it was my job to call these debtors, people that we owed money to, and explain to them why they weren't getting their checks, that.
But what amazed me was there was one fellow with Salem, he owned several stations we were gassing at, and he just carried an open ticket, you know, and sent us a bill every month.
And we got behind, I mean, we were like, good God.
Now how would you get behind, was it because the federal government cut funding?
Well, sometimes, well, I could say it was the federal government, but in reality, we got behind on sending bills in, and then sometimes they got behind on sending us payments too.
So it was a combination of factors, but the fellow over at Salem, I'll always remember he said, well, Bill, you don't worry about that, pay some other folks, but just don't pay me when you can.
I thought, good God.
You really filled a need.
For a lot of people, I know myself until this conversation, I sort of in the back of my mind, I knew that I had a sense of what was going on.
You don't think of SMTS as being a medical service, but really you kind of are medical services as much as anything, isn't it?
Yeah.
At one time, probably over 50% of our business was medically related, mileage particularly.
Not just transport, it's medical transport.
Yeah.
Since SMTS started, there's been a lot of emphasis on providing medical transportation, particularly in rural areas.
The Medicaid program, it has picked up some of the need, and then I think Medicare is paying for some trips, but I'm not involved in that at this time.
Young people use it, too, from, say, they've lost their license and they have to go to SATA, so they have to get a ride.
Yeah.
Then a lot of people work at sheltered workshops.
We carry a lot of folks to training facilities, employment programs, and that is particularly sheltered workshops.
Man, I'm just amazed.
Everybody can do something, and those managers, managers of the sheltered workshops, they're able to find a way to help these people learn to do what they need to do.
One of the fellows I worked with out of West Plains, he had a system set up to sort screws, bolts, and things like that, and he had made a whole indentation, and they had to be able to put the right bolt in, but after those folks once learned that, it was just amazing how quick they could sort bolts or do most of that kind of stuff, and much better than I ever could.
I could be there the rest of my life, and I wouldn't be able to do that, but they managed to do it.
Now, are the fairs a sliding scale for SMTS?
I'm not sure how that works now.
I'll leave that to the experts.
So really, SMTS though is a fundamental service.
Many of my colleagues worked in urban transit systems, and they would worry if their bus was running 10 or 15 minutes late on the run.
I mean, you just do not run late on the bus in an urban area.
Well, in rural Missouri, whenever I was working with SMTS, if our bus got there within a half hour, we were tickled pink, and sometimes the same day.
People weren't used to it at running precisely, and again, on the employees, the drivers, and the coordinators, they were just great.
I am sure we were hiring from a secondary labor pool, much like the Brown Shoe Company.
People that needed money, what they used to call pen money, just walking around.
These folks, the wife or the spouse, a farmer, had a full career and were in their 60s and just needed something to do.
Now, many of the husbands did not know they needed something to do until the wife explained it to them.
One of our biggest recruiters were the wives and people that had retired.
They would come in and get an application for their husband, and we would explain to him that, you know, here's the deal and here's the pay, and they said, you mean you're paying for this?
I think some of them were willing to pay us to get him out of the house.
It worked out well.
One area we didn't really touch on, did you marry and have any children?
Yes, I have married Velma Sykes from out near Silvermines, and you've met Kessie, and my son, Bill, he works up at the correction facilities at Bondair.
And Velma worked at the county health office.
So, is that two children?
Yes, uh-huh.
It has been and still is a wonderful life.
Thank you. you you