Jack Ward Skinner

My name is Jack Ward Skinner.

I was born November 28, 1935 in St.

Louis.

My history with this county actually begins with my parents.

My dad grew up in the Knoblick area, but my mom, I was born and raised down on Caster below Higdon, Missouri, and so a lot of my early information comes from her hand-me-down stuff.

This was, of course, they got married in 1934, and I was born in 1935, and they're in the middle of the Depression.

Jobs were hard to find, and so we moved to St.

Louis, and that's why I was born up there. 1940, still jobs were kind of hard to find, so dad, we moved back down to live with my grandpa and grandma Ward, whose farm, they had an 80-acre farm, which lies across the road from the current Amidon parking lot there on Caster.

You might find a job, and a month later, you're laid off.

It was just very hard to find jobs even there.

My dad's name was Glen Skinner.

My mother's name was Anna Ward.

My grandparents' name was Tom Ward and Lou Ward.

Actually, her name was Lou Zetta, but whenever we went by the Zetta part, we always went by the Lou part, Tom and Lou Ward.

She was a Venable.

Grandma Ward was a Venable, and her ancestors date all the way back.

Some of them were in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.

They came in from Alabama.

Grandpa Ward, my great-grandfather, was in the Civil War.

The North was in the Calvary.

They were outside, a little town outside of Nashville, and it was raining very hard, and so the Calvary troop gathered under trees, which is probably the wrong thing to do.

But anyway, lightning struck the tree and killed three of the troopers and injured about thirteen of them, including my grandfather.

He was in the hospital in Nashville for almost a year.

Eventually, he was released, and then my grandpa was born in Tennessee.

Then they moved to the Castor River area.

My great-grandfather and grandmother are buried—it's a family by the name of Erbelin lives there now.

We call it the old Tom Tennant farm.

Where the dam is, that concrete dam on Castor, it's kind of a wilderness now.

It used to all be open, and the road went from there all the way down to Highway 72.

That's closed off now, but they're buried in a cemetery there on that farm, and my grandparents are buried down at Spring Valley in the McClanahan Cemetery there.

We moved back, let's say, with my grandparents to their farm for about four or five months.

Actually, going back to my grandfather and the farm, I went to the courthouse and took a look back at it.

The first mention of it was 1820, a family by the name of Fair, F-A-R-R-A-H, I think same name as Clara Fair here in town.

It was the first owner, but the key, 1820 of course, it was when Missouri became a state and sold prior records.

We don't know how long he lived there before that, but he was connected with some of the early people who helped to farm the county.

It stayed in the Fair family until the late 1890s, a family by the name of Combs bought it.

They sold it to a backer who lived there two years, and then my grandparents bought it in 1923 and lived there until 1955 when they retired and moved to town.

Loved that old farm.

A lot of those farms and even towns sprang up because there was a spring, and the spring is still running big today.

I go back down and visit with the fellow who lives there once in a while now.

My grandfather had—the house was a one-room log cabin with a loft.

There was a log smokehouse right next to it, and then a log barn down in front of it.

When my grandpa moved there, they built a kitchen on one side.

When we moved there in 1940 to live with them, grandpa and my dad built a couple rooms on the back.

The old house is gone now.

None of those original buildings are there anymore.

But the spring house was so important to that farm.

It was built on the side of a hill, and the spring came out the side of the hill.

So grandpa took some flat rocks and built a square box and cemented them together.

He had a pipe running out of the bottom, and he built a concrete box, sort of a long concrete box along one side, and the pipe ran into the bottom of that so the water would fill up in the box.

Then he had a pipe running out the top of the box so it would never—it would always flow out and would keep it filled.

This was all covered with a wooden building, a spring house.

From there it ran down through the chicken yard, so he never had to water his chickens.

There was always water for chickens there.

Ran under the fence into the barnyard, and he dug out a little area there and made a hole to water the livestock, the cattle, and the horses and all.

Then it curved under the fence through the hog lot.

And so that spring—well, originally it was their drinking water.

In later years they had a well drill, but it supplied water for the whole menagerie.

Now, was it connected to the—with pipes, or just— No, no.

Just after it ran out of that concrete box, it just ran underneath the wall of the spring house and was just open as it ran down through the barn—the chicken lot and the barnyard and— Like a natural stream.

Like that.

Just a natural stream.

It connected with another creek, or branch, that came out of the woods to the west of there, and both of them then would flow into the Castor River.

That was so valuable.

Yeah.

Oh.

Good as gold.

Yeah.

Again, Dad could not find work even around Frederictown, so after about four or five months we moved back to St.

Louis.

He did find a job there for a while, and I was not five years old until November.

So St.

Louis schools would not let me start school until January.

They run by semesters, not by years.

So in January of 41 I started kindergarten.

I had an uncle who was living with us at the time, and he had—there was a plan that President Roosevelt had where you could join the Army for one year and get some training because things were already brewing in Europe by 1941, the spring.

So he joined in March with the idea he would get out in March of 42.

One happened in December of that year called Pearl Harbor, and he was long gone to New Guinea for the duration.

But anyway, I started kindergarten there, then spent the summer, went back to kindergarten then in September, and graduated from kindergarten in 1941, started first grade in 1942, but we only stayed there until March, and we moved to Frederictown.

And that's my introduction to living right in Frederictown itself.

Too late to start first grade here because I'd only had three months in St.

Louis and one more month and they would have been out.

At that time they dismissed school like the 1st of May.

So I just stayed out of school until the fall of 1942, started first grade.

I would say that the school I was attending in St.

Louis was Hodgins School.

I was scared to death the whole time.

It was dark, it was a monstrous building, and I knew no one up there.

In my first year in the Frederictown school, it was such a pleasure.

Big wide open windows, of course there was no air conditioning so you cooled up by raising the windows.

I had Miss Johnson and Miss Cobb, who Ellen Cobb married Glenwood Counts.

She became a Counts midway through the year.

It's a good thing because being naive, I had a lot of jokes about her and I got caught one time.

I said to another boy after we had passed her on the side of the road, there goes Miss Corn on the Cobb.

And she heard me.

Oh, I felt about two inches tall.

But she was very understanding and of course we got along just fine after that.

And then after we got out of school, we even worked for her husband for a few months.

So all was forgiven.

We moved in on a big white two story house on the corner of East Marvin and High Street, the southwest corner, East Marvin and High Street.

A man by the name of Charlie Bullinger and his wife, they owned from East Marvin that whole block to the south down to the other corner.

And there was a family, Lloyd White and his family lived there.

But the Bullingers had been farmers and so they had a garden that covered that whole block except for where the two houses on each corner stood and their son and his wife and two teenage kids lived with them.

They had one bedroom upstairs and of course they spent all their time downstairs with grandpa and grandma, but they all slept in the one bedroom upstairs.

My mom, dad and me, we had two rooms upstairs and a screened in back porch.

We did not have a refrigerator.

Back in those days we used an ice box.

We had a beautiful old oak ice box with four doors on it and you hung your sign out when you got ready for ice and the guy carried it up with tongs on his shoulder and kept things cold.

And of course the winter time it was sitting out on that upstairs porch, took care of itself with the temperature.

Then we had a gas stove and a table in the kitchen and a washing machine in the winter time.

In the summer we would roll the old Maytag wringer washer out on the upstairs porch.

All the laundry had to be carried down the stairs around the big old white house to the backyard and hung out on lines in.

Didn't have dryers in those days.

We did not have a bathroom.

There was one bathroom downstairs for four different families actually or four different people who, groups who lived there.

So it had to be a timing to use the bathroom.

No, no.

There was none there.

My dad had gone to work and got a job with Sinclair Oil Company.

At that time they worked out of the Frederictown Milling Company office.

Junior Thompson and Mr. Whitener were the bosses.

They ran both the Frederictown Milling Company and the gas, Sinclair Gas.

A lot of times when he would make a run out into the rural areas to the little country stores they would throw a sack of feed, maybe two or three sacks of feed or something up on the side of the oil truck.

And so he delivered feed as well as gas to those country stores.

I loved to go with him a lot of times in the summertime, especially the one that I think of most as Castor Station, which again is no longer there.

It's a private dwelling now.

But they were so unique.

Usually like in the wintertime there would be a heating stove right in the middle of the floor, two or three old gentlemen sitting around it discussing politics or hot stove league we called it, where the cardinals are, are they going to trade this one or that one?

How are they going to do next year?

They always had a roll-top glass cabinet with candy, penny candy in there.

Of course that always caught my eye too.

But there was just a peculiar smell about those country stores.

And I think part of that had to do with they put treated sawdust on the floor every morning.

It was wood floors and they put that sawdust down and then sweep it up and it's kind of an oiled material.

And of course it was not self-served.

All the canned goods and everything were on shelves behind.

We just told the clerk, at that time Lee Gregory owned it when I was a kid riding with my dad in the gas truck.

But they lived in a house on the side of the store so a lot of times even if they were closed somebody in need they'd just go knock on the door and he'd open the door and go next door and get them a can of food or whatever they wanted.

Croquet courts were big back in those days and it was more of a professional type court.

They really manicured them and took care of them.

Most of them were sand.

They would water them down and roll them and make them almost as hard as concrete but they were level and the ball would roll true.

And the men would take special mallets, drill holes in the end of them and put lead in there to make them heavier and then cut the handle off and just a short handle and they would get down low and sight up on the end.

They played for blood.

There was a professional court down on South Main next door to Turnbows had a grocery store there across from the swimming pool and right next to that was a croquet court.

My mom's aunt and uncle, George Jones, lived on the corner of Marshall and it's that street that runs up to the park.

They had a house there and behind his house was a croquet court so there were quite a few of them scattered around.

Kids were not allowed to play on those.

That was just strictly for the men who were serious with it.

Were they dense?

No.

But they did have a board about this high as the outer boundary and of course you could bounce the ball off of that and kind of like a pool table you could use that as getting your ball around if you wanted to or needed to.

That was some of the best years of my life I guess when we lived there with the Bullingers.

Down the block and around the corner there was a jillion kids and had a lot of kids that became acquainted with and I guess that's one reason I liked the Fredericktown school because I spent that summer playing and I knew some kids when I went there.

But it was just such a different atmosphere.

It was a country atmosphere that was different from the city schools and I just thoroughly loved school all the way through.

Some of us, fact is we were having our sixty-fifth class reunion two weeks from tomorrow.

We've been narrowed down.

There would probably only be about twenty, twenty-five of us there.

But I think we started off with close to eighty or ninety as a freshman and we graduated sixty-six.

I graduated in 1954.

It was interesting things were so much different back then.

The band director in 1947 left in the middle of the summer, left them short-handed.

So I was taking violin lessons from Della Seal and they asked her, she had a teaching degree.

They asked her if she would take the band.

She did.

And she asked me if I wanted to be in the band.

I was in the fifth grade and well yeah.

So I didn't have a band instrument but the school had some that they supplied.

I started off the first year on a trumpet but they had a lot of trumpet players.

So the next two years I played a French horn and then in 1948 I believe it was there was a Ludwig music salesman came to town, sat up in the old gym, the granite gym up on high street and I bought a trombone.

So the last five years I spent eight years in the high school band and I didn't fail a single year but it was interesting.

We took a lot of trips and things.

Even in grade school we would take parties and things like eighth grade we would go out to Roadside Park for a picnic and things like that.

But the classes would have, we always had a Valentine's Day party and a Christmas party and there were three grocery stores, neighborhood grocery stores right around the old school up on high street, the old Marvin College which became the school and kept three stores in business until the school moved.

When we were in grade school we would have dues, ten cents a month or something like that and one year I was the treasurer for our class.

And what you would do when we get to like the Valentine's Day or whatever holiday it was, me or the treasurer and a couple other boys would go across the street.

We had orders for what kind of soda to buy and we would buy a whole case of soda and of course take a couple boys to carry it full and carry it back.

My mom was a cook at the school and was in the basement of the old high school and they cooked for the elementary and the whole school.

And so I went down to the car where she had her car parked down the hill and I had the jar of money for the class that had saved up.

Carrying it back up that sidewalk, dropped the jar, broke it and the coins scattered all over.

Well there was a high school girl and this was the kind of people you had back in those days.

She saw that and of course I was just about in tears, I was just a little kid and oh I was drained, I broke all the class money you know.

She came over and sifted through the broken glass and picked it all up, we got every bit of the money and she had a sack or something that had been her lunch sack, put the money in there and I made it on to school.

Have no idea what her name was, but high schoolers were just kind of like babysitters, they just took care of your kids you know and helped you out.

When we were in high school Ms. Whitener was the drama teacher and every year she took a group to St.

Louis to some of the plays up there.

My senior year, well junior year we went to see South Pacific.

We would go most of the time we went to the American Theater, but the senior year we went up there and saw Death Takes a Holiday and Vincent Price was the actor and she got us a pass.

We went behind the stage, got to meet and talk to Vincent Price and he was just as common as an old shoe.

He signed my program and I've still got that, I think I've got it locked up in the safety deposit box.

It probably doesn't mean a whole lot, but it does to me.

He was a well known actor and played a lot of villain parts at times, but he was very popular but sure didn't seem like a villain.

He was just so friendly to a bunch of kids, he didn't have to be, here's a big star, but he just mingled right in with us and talked and answered our questions and took time to talk to us.

Our senior year also I played baseball and Diz Anderson who had been a former professional football player, he was our athletic director at that time, coached the football and baseball and I don't think he coached the basketball, but anyway we had athletic banquet in the spring every year.

He told us as a senior, he said, I'm going to have a surprise for you.

So we got there that night and lo and behold it was Mickey Mantle and Billy Martin was here in Fredericktown.

This was either Mickey's first or second year.

He wasn't the big name yet, but we got to meet and greet and talk to Mickey Mantle at the banquet you know and a lot of things to remember, pleasant things to remember about my school years.

When I graduated from high school I was kind of lost, I didn't know for sure what I wanted to do.

A lot of my friends had gone on off to college somewhere, some of them joined the military, some of them went to St.

Louis to get jobs, this was 54, and my dad had purchased a little grocery store over in Northtown and so I worked in there until about November and he decided he wasn't cut out to be a business person.

He was a hard worker, but that just wasn't for him so he sold that store.

I carried the mail for one month.

Back then everybody mailed 50, 60, 70 Christmas cards, it only cost you two cents to mail a Christmas card in those days so you sent a lot of them to everybody.

So they always had a big increase and they hired extra mail carriers for the month of December and Albert Baines is the one who broke me in, I carried Northtown and really liked the job.

I knew it was just temporary, I knew as soon as Christmas came I'd be out, but I loved that job and being young like that it didn't take me long to memorize who lived where and knew where to deliver the letters, but once Christmas came I was out of work.

In February I got a job at White Market, which was right across the street here, White Market grocery store.

I was the delivery boy.

They had an old, like a panel truck except it was open on the sides and they would have call in orders and I would get empty boxes and put the order in the box and then I would plan my route to deliver those groceries to people.

Well, White Market was, the mines had not shut down yet, but Kroger had moved into this building that we're in now, right across the street from them.

So it made it kind of rough on them and so they closed their business.

Well, I was out of work.

So I went to work at Swisher Chevrolet in the gasoline part up front.

Worked that through the summer and I knew I should be doing something more than just pumping gas.

Got a job at Everett Osborne's Men's and Boys Clothing Store, which is a blonde brick building down here on South Mind LeMotte.

Worked there three years and I met my wife, Betty Joyce LaChance.

And by the way, you might want to talk to her sometime too because her ancestors are the ones who helped to found Frederictown, it was called St.

Michael's Village, but up on the Courthouse Square, that big rock up there and seven of those people are her ancestors.

Kind of interesting, kind of backing up here just a little bit, when in 1943 we were living at Bullinger's and Dad was drafted and went into the Navy in World War II.

When he came home, they had never had a home and we were living in two rooms without the bathroom and refrigerator and stuff like that.

So we used the GI Bill money and we bought a little four room house over on 414 Virginia Street.

It was white at the time, it's painted yellow now, I still drive by there and look at that sometimes.

But lo and behold we had a bathroom inside, that seems important, but back then it certainly was.

But we kept that for two years and traded it for what became known as the Green House.

This is a house that had green shingle siding on it and a red roof and it's just east of town, today it's a white house with a black roof, the distinguishing characteristic is that it has a concrete garage built into the hill in front of the house, it's right next door to the shoe factory building out there on Z Highway.

There was nothing there, golf homes owned all of that land and we just had four acres right in the middle, kind of like an island.

We were a half a mile from the city limits, which was the Saline Creek, a low water bridge at that time, and six tenths of a mile from the courthouse, so we were closer to the courthouse than most people in town and yet our closest neighbor was a half a mile away.

And I dearly loved that place as well, it was a great place to grow up.

We had an orchard behind the house and had grape vines and a big garden spot and just a great place to grow up.

Had a barn, chicken house, wash house, and I became infatuated with trains there because the railroad at that time ran right behind our house.

There was one empty field behind our land and then the train, and we called it the old local.

One of them went down in the morning and another one came back up in the afternoon.

I could run out the back door and on the side of the wash house there was a shelf built and we had the doghouse underneath that.

I could on a run hit that, leap up and hit the top of the doghouse, the shelf, grab a limb and a big old maple tree and swing up on the roof of the wash house, run to the other end of it and wave and get the engineer to wave back at me.

Made my day.

And I would ride my bike over to the depot and take pictures of the old trains and things like that and I would get pretty close with my camera and of course they always waved at me and once in a while they would wait until they got even with me and they would hit the whistle and try to scare me but I was expecting it and I was used to it.

I used to love to watch them do a flying switch.

Right down the tracks from our house was a spur that went over to National Lead and of an evening, well of a morning, they were going south so they would just stop and take the one car and back it all the way over to the mines.

Of the evening they were going north and so how do we get the car over there without being in front of the, behind the engine.

So they had what they call a flying switch.

The switchman would get down at the switch, the brakeman would get on top of the car that they wanted to take over.

They would uncouple the cars behind it and the old steam engine, he would give it the gas you know and open it up wide and the wheels would spin and finally catch and they would take off as fast as they could and then the brakeman would cut it loose and the engine would pull on off away from it and this car would keep rolling.

The switchman would throw the switch, it would curve over onto the spur going to National Lead.

Then the engine would back up and come up behind it then and push it over to the mines.

Interesting how they do it but for them it was just a routine thing.

But loved those old steam engines and I would watch them a lot from my house or I would go over into North Town and watch them as they would shuffle back and forth.

They had a spur that went into the milling company before it burnt.

We were there the night it burnt, helping them carry stuff out of the office, the records and things because dad worked out of that office at that time.

But during flood stages when the Mississippi River would get over the tracks, sometimes they would reroute those trains through what this was called the Belmont Branch.

They would reroute them through here and so I got to see some of the first diesel trains that came through here.

One time there was one of the Eagles came through here.

But they did not have the modern equipment and so a lot of times they just stopped.

The telegrapher and the depots had to call back and forth and had to wait for trains to pull off on a siding and then this one would pass and they just started to shuffle back and forth through here and it would last probably about a month or so until the water went back down and then they—plus they had to go slow because these tracks were not built for the heavy fast freight that the Missouri Pacific was using.

Now the depot was in North Town, but some areas in North Town were prone to flooding as well.

Yeah, not around where the tracks were.

The tracks crossed Lincoln Drive there where Country Mart is now.

The part that flooded—and that's a story too.

I was dating my wife and my grandparents had sold the farm in 1955 and they bought a house on North Main Street.

It's a big—Frederick Town has a picnic ground there, which is where they hold their festival, the Azalea Festival and things like this.

I don't know the names.

There are parks on both sides of the roads, but about two doors down from the Free Road Baptist Church was where my grandparents' house was.

So I had orders any time I was coming back in and water was over the low water bridge, don't cross it, go over and spend the night with grandpa and grandma.

Well, it was one night and it was still pouring down rain.

I went over and just got to bed and about an hour later my grandpa woke me up and said, Jack, we're going to have to get out of here.

He said, the water's up to the front porch right now.

They were just like two doors from the Free Road Baptist Church, if you know where that's at.

Just south of it or south of it?

They were south of the Free Road Baptist Church toward downtown on that side.

We picked grandma up and carried her up to the Free Road Baptist Church and it was still dry ground there.

Then we went back and they had an old high-poster bed set up pretty high off the floor.

We started picking up chairs and tables and things and sitting up on top of the bed in our second bedroom.

We did the same thing in there and set as many things up on top high spots as we could.

That night, well, it was getting close to morning and someone said, what about the lady that lives in the little old house right next to the river?

Has anyone seen her?

We hadn't.

The fire truck came around Lincoln Drive, came in there and drove as far as it could in the water down North Main Street.

Then probably 20 or 30 people formed a human chain, which I was part of that.

My dad was farther along.

He came in to help too.

We would hold hands because the current was pretty swift, even that far from the main channel.

It went all the way down.

The water was up pretty high on this lady's house and knocked on the door.

She didn't answer.

They pushed the door open and that woke her up.

The water was just level with the top of her bed.

She didn't know there was any problem at all.

She scared her.

She swung her legs over and hit the water.

She didn't know they had water in her house at that time, but they got her and carried her out, carried her up that chain back to the fire truck and then it backed her out and got her out of the well.

The water was 14 inches high in my grandparents' house at that time.

It also ran over the top the two times, I think, that it has gone over the top of Lincoln Drive and the other time was what, 1993 or somewhere through there again, but I saw water run over the top of—you know, as you go out past the funeral home there, go down Wilson Funeral Home and then go over that bridge and right the little straight stretch there, water was going over the top of it.

It was that deep.

Back then, there were no homes where they're at now, out G Highway.

Like I said, ours was the only home and it sits up high.

We could not get out.

We would just walk behind, walk over the railroad tracks and walk to town when the creek was up, and it ran down pretty quick, too.

Had some interesting times with Celine Creek there.

After I got married in 1958, I got a job over at National Lead working in the laboratory, one of the two jobs I have dearly loved in my life.

I probably would have spent my entire time working there if the mines had not shut down.

I got the feeling that maybe every place I worked, they went broke, they shut out.

But anyway, went to work in the lab and we would run essays on ore samples from different places in the lab.

They had built the refinery at that time and the roaster, and so I broke in with Carlton Mooney broke me in on titration of iron ores.

Then when I quit the last year or two, I was working in the cobalt-copper room, analyzing the cobalt-copper content.

That's why I was very much interested when this current mine company is coming back in to work the cobalt.

The miners, when they shut it down, the guys who worked on the ground said, well, they haven't even touched the richest veins of cobalt yet.

They'll open up in another month or two, and that was what, fifty-some-odd years ago, and now they're finally opening up.

Those miners are all gone.

But anyway, supposedly the best cobalt and copper is still down there, or at least the best cobalt is still down there.

Used to be a sign out here on the highway as you entered, a big billboard said, cobalt capital of the world.

I imagine the historical site probably has some pictures of that, because it was out there for several years as you entered the town.

But I thoroughly loved that job, but of course when it shut down, then everybody was out of work.

It was hard to find a job.

I worked in this building as a produce clerk, which I knew nothing about, but you just got any kind of a job you could get.

And it was difficult, because Kroger believed in quality, and they wanted me to buy three bins of watermelons, and I don't know if there's like a hundred watermelons in a bin, and they were selling for a dollar apiece, but you could go down to a thousand, buy them for a quarter.

Well, with everybody out of work at the mines, they could care less about quality.

They wanted to get the most bang for their buck, and so I had a lot of produce and stuff that I couldn't sell.

So I didn't stay with it too long.

I got a job at Monsanto and moved my family to St.

Louis.

I worked for Monsanto for a year.

Then the company was talking about layoff, the union was talking about strike, and so I worked there a year, and there was nothing secure at all about it.

Finally, the union signed their contract, and two weeks later the company laid off about seventy-five people, which would have caught me, but I quit in the meantime, and we moved to Cape, and I started college at Cape and went into the education field.

I wanted to get into some type of work that had some security, which I thought maybe I'd have a job next year, and I did.

I wound up, after four years, I graduated from college in 1966 with a bachelor's degree in elementary education and specialized in science and social studies, and I was doing my student teaching at Farmington, and I wanted to come back to Frederictown.

Frederictown has always been my home, even today.

It feels more like home to me than Farmington, where I have lived since 1966.

But there was not an opening at the time, and the superintendent at Farmington said, well, I'll have a job for you, I'll sign you, and he did, and so I spent the next thirty years teaching at Farmington, had eleven years as an administrator there.

I dearly loved—I taught earth science.

It was a wonderful time to get into science.

In 1966, the space program was just going wild at that time, and the kids were interested in it, and of course, earth science covers space, and then with this area, the rocks and minerals was important because the mines had been here, and a lot of people were still working at mines, vibing them in different places, and so it was a great time to get into education then.

Yes?

If I heard you correctly, you graduated with a triple major—elementary, special ed, and social studies.

Okay.

One major was elementary education, and the other were called minors—a minor in science and a minor in social studies.

But no, I finally found a job that had some security.

There may have been some other college degrees that would have paid more, but I enjoyed teaching.

The teaching and the lab job were the two best jobs I ever had.

We are keeping busy now with retirement, and of course there are some health issues I guess that kind of limit us on what we can do, but never been sorry that I went into education.

Never been sorry that I worked at the mines.

But I just ideally loved Madison County, I guess, because of my grandparents' farm down there.

I wish I had bought it.

They sold it for $3,000 in 1955, and it's probably worth $152,000 today, or more, I don't know.

But right there on Castor River, you know.

But I loved where we lived here at the greenhouse, so I wish I could have bought that too, and just was still in college when the folks sold it.

So I couldn't afford it yet.

But I could always just grab my fishing pole, and 15 minutes later I'd be somewhere fishing.

Like at the reservoir out there, at that time the slime pond was open.

Mine Lamont Lake, which became Lake Harmony, or I could, my favorite was just to run down to Castor and go fishing from the bank.

I never had a boat until later years.

But there were a lot of swimming holes.

It was kind of funny when we were living with the Bullingers over there, we did not have a bathtub.

You had a wash pan, you washed off every day, but on Saturday was special.

We had a foot tub, and you stood in the foot tub, and you washed from the top to the bottom.

You got your weekly bath that way.

Saturday mornings when I was a kid was special.

I had some little chores around the house I had to do, and around 10 o'clock radio time I would listen to Let's Pretend and Grand Central Station, some of those kids' programs which ran before television came along, and then the cartoons took over.

But back then it was a radio program for kids.

Then I would take my bath around noon, grab a bite to eat, and jump on my bike and ride down to the Mercer Theater.

And they always began with a cereal of some kind which lasted a half hour, usually ran for about a month or two.

And at the end each Saturday there was a crisis left you hanging, so you had to come back next Saturday to see how they got out of it.

And then there was a mystery movie for an hour, and then there was a western.

And I would get a quarter on Saturdays, ten cents for the show, sometimes I'd spend a nickel for a bag of popcorn, but most of the time I saved that.

And after the show was over I would go down to Dyke's Drugstore, ten cents for a comic and a nickel root beer.

That was my Saturdays.

I was friends with Buddy Mercer back in those days, and his dad of course ran the theater.

But his grandma had Huff's Cafe, which is Capitol Cafe, is that what it's called now I believe.

No, Olympic Cafe, the Olympic Cafe.

But back then it was Huff's Cafe, and it was the elite restaurant in this part of the country.

Common folks just didn't go in there, you know, you had to be somebody.

But Buddy would take me after the show, he said, come on down I'll get you a phosphate.

And so he would take me in there, because he liked to mix them up himself, and so I would climb up on the stool.

He would go around behind and he would make a phosphate, and it was free, and that made it even better.

So a phosphate would be like a soda?

Yeah, it's kind of like Kool-Aid with fizz to it, with the carbonated water in it, usually strawberry.

And you said you liked getting a root beer in a comic, so what was a root beer back then?

Same as today?

Imagine different.

But was it a similar sort of drink?

Yes, yes.

It was a fountain.

Fountain root beer and a bug, kind of like you get at the A&W.

It wasn't the A&W brand, it was just all of the stores, the drug stores had fountains, soda fountains in them.

Rose's Drug Store, which is on the corner up here, that's where the high schoolers all hung out.

That was their hangout area.

And they had booths there, and you had little jukeboxes there.

You could put your quarter in and select three songs, and it would play on the jukebox back over here somewhere.

And that was the one on the corner?

Yeah, Rose's Drug Store.

I think it's an antique place now.

And it was just like two doors down to the theater, where Mercer Theater was.

Which is on the Court Square.

Yeah, it's on the Court Square, right.

It sounds like it's a great afternoon movie.

I'm just playing in my mind of a couple of movies, and then root beer and a comic.

Yeah.

Phosphate.

Great.

Yeah.

Sometimes a free, I could save my nickel then for the root beer, I get the free phosphate.

Boy, I had a stack of comic books, and when I left home, they had no use for them, and they disappeared.

And now they'd probably be worth a fortune.

What were some of the comics that you read?

Oh, when the Superman comics first came out, you know.

During the war, there were special comics.

The Black Hawk, this was a group of guys in blue uniforms with a chauffeur-type cap, and they flew airplanes, and they shot down Japs and Germans, and wherever they happened to be, you know.

They were great.

Archie.

Archie.

Comic books.

I was about to mention, if you said that Rose's Drugstore was for the high school kids, then Archie and Jughead Comics would have been a documentary, right, because it was real life.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

And I never hung out there at Rose's too much because that was where the high schoolers were.

I would go down to Dicus, and it was across the street from where Pizza Hut is now.

It was across the street there.

I think there's a law office there, maybe, now.

Bill Dicus owned it, and later on he also put in Dicus drugs up in Farmington as well.

Do you live in Farmington now?

I lived three miles east of Farmington on Highway 32.

We've been there about 20 years.

We've lived several different places at Farmington, but been there since 1966.

When did you stop teaching?

1996.

Yeah.

I've been retired 23 years.

And it was science and history, social studies?

I never wound up teaching history.

I taught science the whole time.

Science teachers were hard to come by, and there was such a big demand for them in 66.

And so the first year I taught, I taught all the subjects.

It was like a homeroom.

Students came in, and they stayed in my room all day, and I taught—I did teach social studies then, but math and reading and science and the whole works.

But the second year, they departmentalized and had science teachers, math teachers and language arts teachers and so on.

And, of course, I qualified.

They were hungry for science teachers, and I got right in.

So you said you retired in 96.

Was that from administration or teaching?

That was administration.

Yeah, I finished up in administration.

I loved the teaching the best, but thinking of retirement and the pay went into administration.

And I really did get to help kids one-on-one more as an administrator.

Sometimes they didn't think so, because they usually had to penalize them for doing something wrong.

That was mainly my job was working with the discipline part, but even today, I run into those kids at Walmart or someplace, and they are the friendliest.

Because most of the time, they knew they were doing something wrong.

They were just mad because they got caught, and I didn't personally have trouble with them.

I was just the judge who handed down the penalty, you know?

So you were a science teacher during the build-up to the moon landing.

Yes.

And now, okay, so we just celebrated the anniversary of the moon landing, but you also have this interest.

I know you contribute a lot to the Facebook for Federal Times, Madison County History.

Yes, yes.

So you have this interesting mix of interests of history as well as science.

Yes, yes.

So how was the celebration of the moon landing for you?

Oh.

Did you enjoy it?

Oh, great, yes.

And like I say, that came about three years after I started teaching, and of course, the space race was on, and we were always running behind the Russians and kind of leapfrogged, and then they'd go off, and we'd leapfrog, but we were the first ones on the moon.

And it was interesting talking to them about the three-stage rocket, you know, and like the first stage is kind of like a tractor.

It's the workhorse.

It has to lift all of this off the surface to the earth's atmosphere.

That's the problem.

It can't get going very fast.

The second stage was to kick it into higher altitudes and get it in orbit, and then that third stage sent it off toward the moon.

And of course, when the Apollo 13 thing came along, boy, did we have some discussions over that how they were able to survive in the lunar lander.

The LEM was Lunar Excursion Module.

They crawled in there, and how the problem was the amount of oxygen was not that great in there, and yet they needed to save some of it to fire to put them in an orbit to come back to earth.

So it was touch and go.

And of course, the kids ate that up, you know, they really...

And I went back after I retired.

I went back and did some subbing.

One of the science teachers was having a baby and was going to be out for six weeks.

And I said, well, save your earth science topics for when I fill in.

And it's just not as interesting to today's kids as it was then, because it was happening then.

But today, oh yeah, they did that, you know.

I was going to ask you, thinking about today, so if you're still following all the missions we have going on in Mars, we're about to launch the 2020, you keep up with it?

Not as much as I used to.

When it first started, you had those, that first group of astronauts, and they became household names.

Now half of your astronauts are from some other countries, you know, and it's just not the same.

I don't know their names and all.

I try to find out sometimes what they're doing, but they're running so many experiments and things now, it's hard to keep track of.

But those early days, it was just, let's see if we can get up there and do something and come back.

Yeah, they could take it for granted now because it's become such an important thing.

And with the space station, it's just, you never call it routine, but it's about as close as you can get to it being routine anymore.

So it's not, I don't follow it as close as I did when it first started.

And I guess that's kind of why the kids don't feel like it's as important as it once was.

Now you had said that Russia was ahead of you, but I feel as if I remember that Russia took more risks and that in retrospect afterwards you would hear, he died, a human died also.

They started with Sputnik, and you could go out at night and you could see Sputnik going over.

I guess the sunlight was shining off, it wasn't very big, but it was very shiny on the outside.

Then it looked like a star moving across the sky, you know.

Then we put something up there.

And another thing that was important was because our early spacecraft was made up here in St.

Louis at McDonnell Douglas, and I had an uncle who worked there.

He worked in the aircraft part, not in the space program.

But a lot of those astronauts were flying in and out of St.

Louis, and two of them died in a landing up there.

They crashed on landing in just a regular old airplane.

But then they put the dog Laika, the Russians put him, sent, well it was not meant for him to survive.

They just wanted to measure what happened to him and all.

Well when we put a monkey in there, we planned to bring him back.

So that's one of the differences you're talking about.

We were thinking then of survival and returning him, you know, and the Russians could care less, you know.

We'll send him up and then we can put him to sleep.

Don't worry about it.

And then they put the first man up there, Yuri Gagarin.

We countered that with John Glenn.

We think about him being in space, but actually he just circled the earth three times.

But he was beyond our atmosphere, so we called it space, the first man in space.

We did have the first spacewalks.

We beat the Russians on that, the spacewalks.

And of course we beat them.

They never did go to the moon, that we know of.

And I think it's kind of amusing now.

We send an astronaut up, he hitchhikes with the Russians on their rockets.

And when they show their rocket lifting off, it looks kind of antique-ish.

Looks pretty much like some of their original rockets.

Yeah, it'll be interesting here in the next couple years with SpaceX, with their landing their rockets after they— Yeah, yeah.

Well, one question I have, stepping away from that, getting back to some of the history of Madison County.

So you contribute all the time to the Historic Madison County Facebook page.

Yes.

How did you kind of come back around to that, and what is the— I started about a year ago.

I just liked my life in Madison County and all, and so I wrote an article.

I didn't write it for the Historical Society, I just put it on Facebook, and I think Ruth Ann Skaggs picked up on it, and she liked it.

So I wrote another one, and then another one.

So then she talked to me about—she thanked me, said I was making her day because she was always looking for something to put in the Historical Society newsletter, and she was using my articles.

So I got to writing one, I put it in on Facebook every Monday, and she copies it and puts it in the Historical Society.

And just recently I put one in about the trains, and I put in some of the pictures of the trains that I had taken when I was a kid, little ol' Hawkeye, Brownie Hawkeye camera.

And she called me and said, could I have your permission to copy those pictures from Facebook?

And I said, well I'll do better than that, I'll bring the pictures down and you can copy them.

You know, that—oh, that would be great.

And she told me that they have put up feelers several times wanting pictures of the trains that ran through Frederictown.

They don't have a single one.

My pictures are the only ones that they have.

And so they scanned them and they're going to blow them up and hang them on their walls and things.

They also told me that the Depot restaurant over there had been looking for pictures of trains that went through there too.

And I told them they're welcome if they want to get copies from the Historical Society, they're welcome to get those too.

I have no need to hoard them, I just soon share them because I enjoy them, why not everybody else?

It's your love of history that has led you into it.

Yeah, yeah.

It's a gift.

Yeah.

Oh, I don't know what else I have here.

Oh, going back to Amidon Park and that area, there's an area called the Edmond Hole.

I don't know if you know where that's at or not.

It's the lower end of, we always knew it as the Mill Shoals, and M-I-L-L, and then S-H-O-A-L-S. But as usual, the local people said these this way and it sounded like Mill Shoals, S-H-O-W-S, but it should be Shoals, but we just call it the Mill Shoals.

And then in later years, the young people call it the Pink Rocks.

Well then in the, I believe it was the early 90s, Evelyn Driscoll got ready to retire and she owned the land down there on both sides of the river.

And you may know the story of how it got to be called Amidon, I don't know, but anyway, she got ready to retire, her mom had passed away, and she met this professor from, I believe it was the University of Vermont or New Hampshire, one of those two states up there, and they decided to get married and she was going to move up there with him.

And so she made a deal, she gave half of it to the, I'm going to say Vermont, she gave half of it to the University of Vermont, the other half to the state of Missouri if they would buy that half from Vermont.

And the state of Missouri did and made it a state park, but one of the stipulations is that it would always be called after her husband's name, Amidon.

He'd never lived in this part of the country, but he will forever be immortalized as, immortalized as a state park here, Amidon State Park.

But there's a road no longer there, it ran through the wilderness and came out over in Bullinger County around the Pine Hill area.

It was called the Wildcat, and a lot of farmers used that from over in Bullinger County.

They came through the Wildcat to get their grain ground.

There was a grist mill there by the Driscoll Farm, and there was one up at the upper end of the mill shoals.

And you can still see the iron sticking up where it's been cut off, where it anchored the mill, and there is a mill race cut out of the granite rock there where the water would run through when they would turn the wheel to grind their grain.

It was, I don't know if it was destroyed by fire or washed out in a flood or what, it's no longer there.

But I have seen the one at the lower end down there, a fellow by the name of Hahn built both of them, and then he sold it to U.S. Skaggs.

And U.S. Skaggs is the father of Paul Skaggs, who is the father of John Paul Skaggs, who is the father of Ruth Ann Skaggs.

John Paul, I met with him a lot of times.

I invited him up to school one time to talk to my class about the history of Madison County.

And he did, and it didn't last too long after he died, but got a lot of history from John Paul.

And, of course, Ruth Ann knows a lot of now, too.

And so does Terry Moss, I don't know if you know Terry Moss or not.

She lives down there on Castor River now.

But the Wildcat, I used to go through there with my cousin on a horse and wagon.

We would take from their farm over around Pine Hill.

We would take the horse and wagon, hay wagon, through the Wildcat, over to my grandpa's, and haul hay on it.

Back then it was loose hay, didn't have the balers yet at that time.

And I didn't know this until about six, seven months ago.

My cousin, who is Sandy Smith, was Sandy Ward, married John Smith, and they used to have a catfish kettle up there at Farmington.

But she and this Terry Moss both was telling me there was a skirmish there during the Civil War.

The Union troops had stockpiled warehouses at Jackson, and they would come up the old Jackson Road, and they would cut through there to take supplies over to Pilot Knob.

And the Confederates laid an ambush there in the Wildcat and killed three or four of the Union troops.

And they are buried in a cemetery there on the Amidon Park Grounds.

My great grandfather on the Venable side is buried there too.

The graves are not marked.

We just know he's there and we know where the cemetery is, but there's no grave markers.

His name was Mathildred Bass Venable.

Well, they shortened the Mathildred down to Dred, D-R-E-D, Dred Venable.

And his family moved into the Alabama area.

And when he was 11 years old, he saw his dad killed by the Indians.

He was off at a distance, he saw the Indians murder his dad.

And he was very bitter, very mad.

He got with a group of other young men, and they built a raft on the Tennessee River.

And they sail down the Tennessee to the Ohio, and then the Ohio to the Mississippi, and then came up to Bullinger County to start with.

And then he moved to what today is called the Flying V Ranch, where Paul Vance bought it from the old Venable homestead down on Castor.

And Paul bought it from the Venable people.

But he was living there and was coming across Castor one day with a team of oxen pulling a wagon, and they got hung up in the loose gravel in Castor River, and he was cussing them out and just making a blue streak in the air with his language.

And he saw a vision of his mother who was dead.

He saw a vision of her walking out onto the creek bank.

And she got onto him and said, Mathildred, why are you using such language?

It scared the bejeebers out of him.

He climbed down and waited to the bank and knelt down and prayed that God would forgive him, and he did.

And from that time on, Mathildred had Bible study every morning and every night.

They prayed at every meal.

And all of his kids turned out to be devout Christians as well.

And of course, one of his granddaughters was my grandmother.

Is that a French name?

Yes, yes it is.

And we were able to trace—there is an attorney in the state of Washington.

His name is Boyd Venable.

I don't know if he's even alive or not.

But he was able to trace the Venables in France.

They crossed over into England.

They spent several years, several generations in England, and they came into Virginia, settled into Virginia.

And we were able to trace back Fern Wamser, who is dead now, but she has an article in that history of Madison County, the big blue book.

She has an article in there and traces it back.

And we were able to come with Boyd's information and connect with hers to connect the family all the way through.

She puts in there one article.

One of the ancestors had a dispute over some land, I think it was, so he hired Patrick Henry as his lawyer, and they won the case.

Henry was a pretty good lawyer, as well as a statesman, I guess.

Good forager.

Yes, yes.

There is an earlier spelling, Venere, V-E-N-I-E-R-E, or something like that, Venere, Venere, which became Venables, and then they dropped the S and just called it Venable.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah.

It was interesting.

Of course, the war years were especially important with me and with my dad being in the Navy and all.

My mom was working at the high school in the cafeteria, and not that she was an exception.

The same thing happened to a lot of women, who all of a sudden, they have to run the whole show.

They have to take care of paying the bills and budgeting the money and taking care of the sick and all like this.

Henry did an excellent job, as all the women did.

A lot of women went to work at that time, and that was, I have an article coming out Monday along those lines.

They found it was easier to work in industrial plants by wearing slacks rather than dresses.

And after the war was over, then slacks became more popular just to wear for every day or dress or whatever.

So now it's just common.

Probably see slacks more than you do dresses anymore.

My dad's folks still lived at Knoblick up until the latter part of 1943.

And with dad gone, we would go up to visit.

Well, gas was rationed.

A lot of things were rationed, sugar and flour, well, I don't know about flour, but rubber and gas and all those things were rationed.

So we didn't drive.

We had an old 36 Chevy.

We didn't drive it any more than we just had to.

And we just lived a block from the school.

So we walked the school, but unlike those people, which was uphill both ways, ours was one block and was level.

We had it made.

But we would go over on Friday afternoon sometime and get a taxi and it would take us over to the depot.

We would catch the old local and it was basically a freight train, but they carried one passenger car on the back end.

Rather than a caboose, they carried a passenger car.

And so we would buy a ticket and get on the old local and we would ride up to Knoblick and get off there.

And my grandparents lived on the street that ran parallel to the tracks.

We would spend the weekend with them.

And the buses back then, the schools owned very few buses.

The buses were all private.

Thompson owned most of the buses back then.

And I often wondered how they could do this, but we would get up like on Monday morning and there would be three different buses up at the grocery store, which was the main intersection there in Knoblick.

You could ride one bus to Farmington High School.

You could ride another bus to Minal Mob.

Or you could ride a bus to Frederictown.

Knoblick School went to the 10th grade.

And from there you had a choice of either one of those three schools to finish your high school years.

Well, we could get right on the Frederictown bus.

Not regular riders, a lot of times they hauled civilians because they eased the requirements back in those days.

And we would take it right back to school and mom would get off and go to the cafeteria and I would sit down there with her until 8 o'clock time to go to class.

So we kind of had it made then we could visit my other grandparents and my dad's folks and didn't cost us anything for the travel.

Well, I was going to ask you, how much was train fare?

I don't know.

My mom paid it.

I was about 7 or 8 years old at that time.

But it wasn't much.

You took a cab to the depot.

Which was probably about a quarter for both of us to ride the cab over to the depot.

It's interesting to think of Frederictown with a cab service.

Well, it was right around the corner here.

Galey, they had Baldy Kinder had a Shell service station here where the barbershop is now.

It was a Shell service station.

And Galey parked his taxi right here beside this building only on the gas station lot.

One thing that popped into my mind at a couple of points while we were talking or while you were talking, and I really hadn't picked up on this until today.

Other people talked about it, but it seems like the further back you go, the more small neighborhood stores you had.

Yes.

As you go forward in time, those stores gradually disappeared and replaced by bigger storehouses.

They were, for the most part, they were still here until Wal-Mart came in, which is typical of every community.

Farmington was the same way.

They have no neighborhood grocery stores, but yeah, you had your staples.

You had milk and bread, and you usually had a lunch, a meat counter.

It almost seems like you had little shops that were locally owned, whereas in time they were replaced.

Like you said, Kroger moved in, and I'm guessing that was not necessarily the case.

Kroger was here when we moved to Frederictown, but it was all local people working in it.

They were in a building at the time right across the street from where the Olympic is now, but they moved into this building, and Sterling Ivey put in a men's and boys clothing store there.

That was a thing growing up.

We had three men's clothing stores in town where you could buy better quality stuff.

There were several women's stores.

I said I worked at Osborne's men's and boys.

Right next door in the same building was Effie Price's dress shop, and she had nicer dresses and things like this for people.

Figler's had men's and women's clothes right down on East Main Street.

Then you had the Fair Department store, the Federated store.

These were general stores, carried a little bit of everything.

Swanners down on the corner where Seaballs is now, Swanners had mostly clothing for farmers, overalls, and shirts and things like that, but they had pots and pans, they had furniture, they had groceries.

Ward's store, which was right on the corner here where there was a prescription, a drug store there that's closed now.

They were the same way.

They carried rubber boots, overalls, and farm equipment and things like this.

Very different from what we know.

It was a thriving economy of goods.

Northtown was a booming place as well.

There were three grocery stores side by side.

You had the Red and White store, you had the Depot store, and you had the Gears store.

They all had families who survived, made it middle living out of the store.

Now, that was Seaballs.

There was one right across the street that's kind of in a wedge.

You turn in here to the Depot, and the other road goes on up through Northtown, and right in this wedge there's a little white building.

It was pretty notorious.

Yeah, I've never been in it.

It may be a church now.

It is.

It's a church house now.

It got religion and cleaned it up.

That would be Biller, right?

Biller Street?

I believe that's right, uh-huh.

Well, tell us about the No to Life.

Mom and Dad said, no, you'll never walk past that place.

I think it was especially on Saturday night.

It was dangerous to be close there.

Well, it was just a lot of drinking, and they'd get in fist fights.

What do you think about Fredericktown as a mining town?

There were a lot of people working, and you had...

It had two things.

It had three mines, National Edge, St.

Joe at Mine Lamont, and Catherine Mine West of here, and they had the shoe factory, and the shoe factory had probably two, three hundred people working there, and that was the industry for Fredericktown, and they all kind of shut down about the same time, which really hurt.

We had our store right across the street from us was Wagoners.

Hub Wagoners had a store, and here's two stores across from each other, made a living.

Turnbows had a little store down on South Main.

Farther out, Southside Market.

It seems that they were everywhere.

Yeah, there was one out in Cobalt Village on High Street, as you go on out to there.

Where Reggie Starkey had his store before he died, had used furniture.

That was a grocery store at one time.

It came along a little bit later on.

Well, people walked.

Yeah.

Couldn't carry...

Yeah.

And if you figure, without a big centralized place like Walmart, and even before Walmart, you started getting bigger stores like the IGA and Town & Country.

It started off with, on the corner across from Wilson Funeral Home, that was Thal's grocery store.

Twister and Walter Thal, both were there.

Then Twister built this building next door where his son is now.

It was a frozen food locker and grocery store combined.

That was a big thing coming in.

In fact, as he built one, built a locker plant up at Farmington, too.

Twister and Walter, father, son, or brothers?

Brothers.

Brothers.

Walter went out across from Casey's.

He built a store out there.

I think it's an auto parts store now.

But he built that out there.

All of a sudden, the two Thals had two brand new stores in town.

And Hills Sporting Goods had, in the block that's been taken over by New Era Bank, there used to be a row of stores there.

One of them was a bowling alley, and just a little storefront, but it had four lanes, four bowling lanes there.

And Hills had that.

And when the Thals moved out, they moved into that building and put a sporting goods store in there, and that stayed that way.

She was a teacher, a language arts teacher at high school, and he sold his sporting goods.

Stayed that way.

And when they finally left out, I think it was Bess Insurance went into that building.

I don't know what's there now.

The Democrat News was right behind it, in the building behind it.

And then, of course, they moved into this building next door.

And that was a standard service station.

Originally, it had the sign of the flying red horse, which was that mobile?

Mobile.

Mobile gasset.

Where the DN is now was a gas station?

Yes.

Yes.

I believe it.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think I saw a picture recently.

Yeah.

I mean, just the way the...

Yeah, you could turn into the pumps there.

There were gas stations everywhere back then, too.

But...

Well, this was a service station at one point, wasn't it, or am I thinking of the DN?

You're thinking of the DN, I think.

Yeah.

I don't think...

This was a garage at one time.

That's what I think.

It was a garage.

It was a garage.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A motor company where I don't know what kind of car they sold.

That was before my time.

But Kroger moved into this building about the time I moved to Frederictown, which was like 1942.

The dime store is right across the alley from Pizza Hut, and young kids were scared to death of Mr. Posh.

He was an old guy with jaws like a bulldog.

He sat on the stool with a cane right up front, and he glared at you because you didn't dare do any shoplifting back in those days, or I didn't anyway.

But he was almost afraid to go in there.

So I bought, when I got into building plastic models and all, I used B.A. Mueller's, which was on down the street.

He had a supply of model airplanes and cars and things back there.

But Mr. Posh ran the dime store with an iron fist, and he sat up with that cane, and he had shaken at the kid.

No it was just, I'm not sure, it wasn't a Woolworths, but it was a five and dime, five and dime.

Yeah, it might have been.

He sat on a four-legged stool right up front with that cane, and he just watched every kid that came in.

I guess adults didn't have any problems because it was always busy, but kids couldn't look at toys very much without getting the eagle eye.

I've seen, when we lived in, I mentioned the greenhouse, golf homes owned all that land, and especially that big bottom field there on Z Road as you go out of town.

And after his crops were in, there were two or three times they would come in with a circus there.

So we had a front, we'd sit out on a front porch and watch them come in with their elephants and all and set up the tent.

In Fredericktown?

In Fredericktown, yes.

Yeah, they had elephants and tigers and the Woolworths, you know, and they'd set up this big tent, and it was a three ring circus, literally three rings.

And of course, golf homes got paid for doing that, plus you got some free fertilizer from all the animals.

And how long would they stay?

They would stay about two days, two to three days, something like that.

But they had trapeze artists, you know, the high wire people and the clowns and the whole works.

What year was this?

Early 50s.

I know that where the high school is, they had a circus there for a couple years.

Did they?

Okay.

And that I didn't know.

That was after my time.

My class was the last one, 54, to graduate from the old high school up there that they've torn down now.

The next year, Class of 55 started there, and at Christmas break, they moved into the new high school, which was the one that burnt over here by the water tower.

So the Class of 55 was the first one to graduate from that building.

And then I don't know what year was the first class out here, where the high school is now.

When was the elementary school?

The elementary was up there on High Street.

Is it the same one?

Not the same one that's there now.

Same location?

Same location.

Well, it was on the far end of the street next to Albert Street.

It was a brick building.

You had where the granite gym is, that's the only one left, that was built in the WPA days.

So that was the newest building built in the 1930s, I think.

Then you had the auditorium, which was a beautiful old building, stained glass.

I think they tried to get it on the Historical Society, but didn't get it.

But it had a winding staircase on both sides when you entered.

It was a beautiful old building, but the key word was old.

It was about to fall in, I guess.

Then you had the high school building where all the classes were, and then you had the elementary on the far end of that lot.

The only thing left from when I was in grade school, they've got the two, they've got the granite gates, the post gate, the fence is gone, but the posts are still there.

Then there's an old cedar tree, kind of scarred and battered, standing up there.

The kids played around that.

That was a fixture right beside that was a big tall sliding board.

You climbed up to the top and had handles up here, had a bar across here.

Of course, when you got old enough and daring enough, you held onto that and you did a somerset over and landed on the slide and slid down.

But it was so worn slick, there was no rust on that.

Well, when you came back from the summer, you had to wear the rust off for a little bit.

Of course, your mom got to wash that out of your seat of your pants the first few times going down.

But it didn't take long to get that thing.

It was also very hot in the summertime, you'd get burnt on that thing.

Down at the bottom end of the field, that's where the seventh and eighth graders went.

We would play ball down there.

And then the fifth and sixth graders had an area over here, and then the little kids had to stay up close to the building.

And of course, there was always the teachers out there on playground duty.

Opal Osborne was one of the favorite teachers, I don't know if any of you knew Opal or not.

She just passed away about three or four years ago.

But all the kids wanted to be in her room, and I didn't make it.

I was sorry that I didn't make Miss Osborne's room, but she would get out and she'd play with the kids when she was on playground duty.

I was never a dancer, but in about the fifth or sixth grade, they had a pole out there and every year they did the Maypole dance.

And I don't know who put them up, but they had the streamers of crepe paper.

I flubbed that up even.

If you wove in and out and all, you wound up with the pole with the crepe paper and alternating.

But I messed that up somehow or other, and there was a blotch in the pole, I could claim that.

So much culture.

Yeah, yeah.

Well things were a lot stricter back then.

You didn't dare goof off.

My first principal was Miss O'Brien, and she was just a little, short, dumpy gal.

But boy, she ruled with an iron fist too in school.

You didn't dare cross with her.

When I graduated from eighth grade, Burl Lowry was the principal.

He also taught.

We had two teachers, De La Silla taught eighth grade, and Mr. Lowry also had to come in and teach one hour or so, plus be the principal of the elementary school.

That's a good thing, because then the administration still gets to be in the trenches.

Yes, yes.

They believed in that.

Fact is, my high school principal was Clarence Moore, wonderful guy, but he also taught math.

The superintendent didn't, he and the superintendent stayed in his office and he handed out this and that and something else.

But when I was in high school, a sophomore, I got the job of filling the candy and the soda machine, and I got a free lunch out of it.

That was my pay.

And so I got pretty well acquainted with the office staff.

The supplies were kept in the closet in the office.

When I started college, I had worked in the lab at the mines, and I thought, well, I want to be a chemist.

I didn't start out in education, I had never taken chemistry when I was in high school.

And so when I got in and talked to the advisor, I said, I told him that I had worked in a chemical lab and wanted to get into chemistry.

They stuck me in an advanced class, I had no idea what I was doing.

To date the time, which was 1962, they didn't have calculators yet, let alone computers.

I was sitting in a class doing chemistry problems, everybody else was using slide rules.

They were using slide rules.

And I was trying to do square root on paper, and I couldn't remember exactly how to do it because I had been out of high school eight years before I started college.

So I came back to town one night and went over to Mr. Moore's house.

He said, yeah, come on in, I'll show you.

And we sat down at his table and he showed me how to do square root.

So I still was way behind everybody else because I was doing it on paper and they were writing the answers down.

And I didn't do very well in chemistry.

So after the first semester, I decided to change my major and a fellow by the name of Richard Moore, he just passed away, he was going into elementary education.

He told me, he said, they are crying for male teachers in elementary school, everyone, everybody is a female teaching and they need some men in elementary school.

You can write your ticket for wherever you want to go.

So I made the decision to go into elementary education, but I still hung on to the science part.

I specialized in my area, which we call it a minor, with science.

And I took enough history courses that I qualified for that too.

Why didn't you get your own slide group?

I did.

Okay.

And then you would have been right up there with them writing those answers.

But I had never had any training on the slide group too.

I could do two times four and I could get eight, but I could do that in my head.

To do the square root, I really didn't understand and by that time the semester was over and so I changed.

I still got the slide rule somewhere, don't know how to use it, but.

So you have to have classes or training.

Well, either have someone explain, usually I am guessing that those people had a math teacher in high school explain to them how to use the slide rule.

We didn't have those when I was in high school.

You just did everything on a big chief notebook, you know.

Thank you.

Well, I appreciate it. you you