tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20364263334576578342024-03-11T23:17:07.871-05:00Munichburg MemoriesJulianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.comBlogger54125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-41642712165323296802024-03-11T23:08:00.001-05:002024-03-11T23:16:05.236-05:00Fred H. Binder Was Prominent Jefferson City Leader<p>By Walter A. Schroeder, for Historic City of Jefferson</p>
<p>Fred Henry Binder, prominent Jefferson City builder and civic leader, was born Oct. 14, 1845, in the Kingdom of Hanover to lumberman and architect Friedrich Binder and Johanna (Meier) Binder. He was apprenticed to carpentry at an early age and emigrated at age 21, arriving in Jefferson City in 1867.</p>
<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><i>How do you say it?</i> "Binder" is a German name that is pronounced BINN-der, rhyming with the word “cinder,” or the first two syllables of the word “kindergarten,” which is a German word. So Jefferson City's Binder Lake, too, is pronounced “BINN-der” (not “BINE-der”).</p></blockquote>
<p>In 1868 he married widow Katherine (Blochberger) Hugershoff with infant daughter Clara. Her sister was Margaret Knaup, wife of hotelier Fred Knaup, who helped Binder get established in business, according to memoirs of Binder’s son-in-law <a href="http://munichburgmemories.blogspot.com/2012/09/remembering-francis-joseph-zeisberg.html" target="_blank">F. J. Zeisberg</a>.</p>
<p>By 1873 Binder had his own carpentry business. his work as architect, builder, and contractor continued for three decades. St. Peter Catholic Church (1883), for which he was architect and builder, is in the North German Gothic style—tall, slender steeple and pointed-arch windows—the style of Binder’s native Hanover. He also had a role in designing St. Francis Xavier Church (1883) in Taos and was architect and builder of Central German Evangelical Church (1891), both in the same North German Gothic style.</p>
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<p><i>Above, left to right: St. Francis Xavier Church, Taos; St. Peter Catholic Church; Central German Evangelical Church.</i></p>
<p>He was the leading proponent for the Water Works (1888), including the river pumping plant and settling basins, and was the company’s president and manager.</p>
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<p><i>Above: The first Missouri River Bridge at Jefferson city opened in 1896 and operated as a toll bridge until 1932. It connected to the south side of the river at Bolivar Street, where Rotary Park is now. This bridge was replaced in 1954 (by the current span that carries southbound traffic). Image from the 1900 </i>Illustrated Sketch Book and Directory of Jefferson City and Cole County<i>, p. 40.</i></p>
<p>Binder was president of the Bridge & Transit Company. He oversaw construction and operation of the Missouri River Bridge (1895–96) and was the longtime company president. He was its largest subscriber and executed the $200,000 contract for the bridge.</p>
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<p><i>Above: The U.S. Government Building, High St., between Jefferson and Washington streets, held the U.S. Circuit and District Courts for the Central Division of the Western District of Missouri as well as the U.S. Post Office for Jefferson City. Image from the 1900 </i>Illustrated Sketch Book<i>, p. 17.</i></p>
<p>He had the state contract to design the U.S. Court House–Post Office in the 100 block of West High Street (demolished in the 1970s). He designed and built the Music Hall (1885), 238 E. High St., and the Binder Building, 214 E. High St. He reconstructed Bragg (City) Hall (1890), 240 E. High St., after a major fire and put a slate roof on the Supreme Court (1895). He was contractor for the enlargement of the state Capitol in 1887–88.</p>
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<p><i>Above: The Binder Building on High St., as shown in the 1900 </i>Illustrated Sketch Book<i>, p. 431. The caption described the then-retired Binder, noting he was “the owner of a large amount of valuable property in the Capital City, included in which is the Music Hall, in which is his private office and that of the Water Works Company. Mr. Binder also owns a handsome park in the western suburbs of the city. Before retiring, he built, under contract, a number of the most modern and imposing buildings in the State outside of St. Louis. . . . He superintended the erection of the U.S. Government building of this city, which is conceded to be the most perfect piece of architecture in the State.”</i></p>
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<p><i>Above: Bragg Hall, on the southwest corner of High and Monroe (on the left, in this photo), was used as a gathering place for public entertainment before it became the city hall. It remained the city hall until 1983. Now, it’s the Cole County Abstract and Title Co. The building looks very different than it did in 1900, as in this image from the </i>Illustrated Sketch Book<i> (the view is looking west on High Street).</i></p>
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<p><i>Above: The old Capitol Building, as shown in the 1900 </i>Illustrated Sketch Book<em style="font-style: italic;"> and Directory of Jefferson City and Cole County</em><i>, p. 21.</i></p>
<p>Among the many residences he built were those of Fred Knaup (1877), 400 E. Capitol Ave., and Henry Ruwart (1886), 731 E. High St.</p>
<p>Binder’s reputation enabled him to secure state contracts for building the Engineering Building on the MU campus quadrangle (1893–95; contract for $200,000); state asylum (now hospital) at Fulton; reformatory school for girls at Chillicothe (1895) and for boys at Boonville (1888–89).</p>
<p>Binder served his city in many ways. He served on the City Council (1881–84) and was mayor (1884–85).</p>
<p>Zeisberg wrote: “Mr. Binder’s administration was an efficient one from a business standpoint, although he was accused of being too autocratic and dictatorial. . . . He was conceded to have always worked for the best interests of the city.”</p>
<p>He was on the school board (1878–83; 1903–11) and the Carnegie Library Board. Binder was president of Central German Evangelical Church for 29 years (1882–1911), during which he led it to become a mainstream English-speaking church. He brought from Germany the progressive idea of a nonprofit building and loan association, which enabled residents with modest incomes to own their own homes.</p>
<p>Emigrant Binder brought to Jefferson City the German closeness to nature, deeply rooted in the German psyche. For his own residence at 210 E. Dunklin St., built in 1873, he chose not a location among other achievers on prestigious Capitol Avenue, but an irenic, wooded quarter block with a small creek in Muenchberg on the Southside. According to the 1906 <em>Missouri Volksfreund</em> [German-language newspaper], Binder “has around his house the most luxuriant and most glorious yard of the city.”</p>
<p>Binder invested in real estate, like the lot he sold in the 1200 block of East McCarty Street to the Jewish congregation (1879) for its cemetery. He purchased a beautiful tract of mature oak and hickory woods (1895), called Binder’s Woods. After the Binder estate was settled in the 1940s it became the popular Memorial Park, “Memorial” referring to the Binder family. Today’s 644-acre Binder Park and Binder Lake (155 acres) are the chief legacies of the Binder name.</p>
<p>Binder, identified as a capitalist, died at his home on Sept. 27, 1911, of cancer and, Zeisberg said, from a broken heart from his son’s marital problems. [It was probably also a blow that the Missouri State Capitol building had been destroyed by fire in February of that year. –ed.] Binder died intestate, and difficulties with his only son’s marriage surfaced during litigation of his enormous estate, valued in today’s dollars at almost $3 million. His only son, Fred C., died soon afterward in 1918. Fred C.’s only child, Fred W., had died earlier, in 1916, from injuries sustained while playing football, sealing the fate of the Binder name.</p>
<p>Zeisberg summarized his father-in-law: “He was a man of ambition and, if I may add, fastidious and a little vain. He had worked his way up from a very humble beginning, starting as a day carpenter and becoming a successful contractor and a man of influence and wealth. . . . While a strong church and lodge member, he could also entertain some broad and liberal views.”</p>
<p><em>Walter Schroeder grew up in Jefferson City’s historic German Southside now known as Old Munichburg. A retired professor of geography, he is devoted to preserving cultural history and is the author of five books on the history of the Old Munichburg neighborhood.</em></p>
<p>[This article first appeared in the <em>Jefferson City News-Tribune</em>’s “Cole County History” series on Saturday, July 24, 2021, p. B4. Slight editorial changes have been made, including adding several images and captions that didn't appear in the newpaper piece, and to update for 2024 the number of JC history books authored by Walter Schroeder. —ed.]</p>
<p>For more about Binder and other German progressives, see my <a href="http://munichburgmemories.blogspot.com/2024/03/19th-century-german-progressives-made.html" target="_blank">previous post</a>.</p>
<p>For more about Binder’s property on Dunklin Street—his home, the woods, and more—see my <a href="http://munichburgmemories.blogspot.com/2012/09/remembering-francis-joseph-zeisberg.html" target="_blank">9/4/2012 post</a> about his son-in-law, Franz Josef Zeisberg.</p><p>For more information about Binder's Music Hall, see <a href="http://munichburgmemories.blogspot.com/2024/02/jefferson-citys-early-german-clubs.html" target="_blank">this post</a>.</p>
<p>Copyright © Walter A. Schroeder, 2021</p>
Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-14074753213079818202024-03-02T13:09:00.006-06:002024-03-06T13:57:35.658-06:0019th-Century German Progressives Made Mark in Jefferson City<p>By Walter A. Schroeder, for Historic City of Jefferson</p>
<p>German immigrants contributed to Jefferson City in many ways. The contribution of 19th-century German progressives has not received attention because they were not organized and had no name.</p>
<p>Few in number, not more than 50, they were vastly outnumbered by other Germans. I call them “progressives” for being dissatisfied with the status quo and advocating often unpopular changes or “progress.” Many supported the Radical Republican Party that took over post–Civil War government.</p>
<p>Who were these early German progressives? Their core comprised immigrant refugees from the failed German revolutions of the first half of the 19th century in which the struggle for freedom from governmental and ecclesiastical autocracy was squashed by royalist armies. They subscribed to the humanism of Goethe and Schiller, which in America translated into elevating women’s status and treating African Americans as equals.</p>
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<p><i>Prussian-born Arnold Krekel (1815–1888) was an abolitionist newspaper publisher, attorney, state representative, Union Army colonel, federal judge, and a founder of Lincoln University. He was one of several prominent German immigrant progressives in Jefferson City in the 1800s.</i></p>
<p>German progressives were well-educated, especially in the humanities, and expressed their ideas through oratory, drama, and poetry. City-oriented, they encouraged rapid learning of English and rapid integration into public life in contrast to the tradition-preserving German Catholics and Lutherans in their parish churches. Progressives advocated diversity and multiculturalism by bringing visitors to Jefferson City who offered different ideas. In 1892, progressive German Central Evangelical Church hosted Amen Hasi, Palestinian speaker and perhaps the first Muslim in Jefferson City, “to illustrate customs and practices of Mohammedans and oriental ways in general.”</p>
<p>Progressives made their mark in the beginnings of public education in Jefferson City. They established their own German-English School at 216–222 W. McCarty before the Civil War. Four of the six members of the first Board of Education (1867) were German immigrants. In her history of Jefferson City public schools, Jerena Giffen wrote “it was the German element . . . who were the main supporters of the earliest public school efforts.” That “German element” was more specifically German progressives.</p>
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<p><i>Jefferson City’s German-English School, 216–222 W. McCarty (now demolished).</i></p>
<p>German Catholics and Lutherans maintained their parochial schools. Progressives insisted local taxation for schools include provisions for a Black school, which roiled voters just after the Civil War. Progressives brought from Germany the belief that school teaching was a profession and one not left to pedagogically untrained, unmarried women.</p>
<p>Progressives stood out for their religious views, sharpened by what they experienced in Germany as disallowing freedom of personal belief. While unquestioningly Christian, they dismissed the many denominations that Christianity had been divided into. They disdained adherence to a particular interpretation of scripture to the exclusion of others. They were sheltered throughout Missouri in the Protestant Evangelical church, which became the liberal United Church of Christ in 1957. Jefferson City’s Central Evangelical Church, born in 1858 as a “union” church for all, accepted different creeds and confessions and let members use their personal interpretation of scripture to reconcile differences.</p>
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<p><i>Central Evangelical Church (1858), Parsonage (1860), and School (1871), photographed in 1881. The church was on the corner of Washington and Ashley, and the street in the foreground is Washington. This was the first church building of the congregation that, after denominational mergers, became Central United Church of Christ in 1957.</i></p>
<p>Progressives were outspoken in civic affairs well beyond what their small numbers would suggest in elective city offices like mayor, treasurer, assessor, and the City Council.</p>
<p>Notable Jefferson City progressives include:</p>
<p><b>Ernst Anton Zuendt,</b> who gave up his German inherited title of baron to become a humanist author and journalist in America and doyen of German American poets. He was the first German teacher (1868) in local public schools and left an indelible mark in the character of early public education. He established the local Turners Club, center of German progressivism.</p>
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<p><i>Ernst Anton Zuendt (1819–1897) was a Jefferson City progressive, humanist, poet, and educator.</i></p>
<p><b>Fred H. Binder,</b> an architect, builder, mayor, councilman, and leader in many civic projects. He was president and builder of Central Evangelical Church. He brought from Germany the concept of a building and loan association—a progressive idea that enabled common people to acquire their homes affordably and avoid usurious interest rates of banks.</p>
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<p><i>Fred H. Binder (1882–1911) was one of Jefferson City’s most prominent civic leaders in the 19th century. Binder Lake was named in his honor. (His German name is pronounced BINN-der.)</i></p>
<p><b>Theodore Schultz,</b> a High Street grocer, city assessor, justice of the peace, and Civil War veteran, in whose back room progressives met for <em>gemütlichkeit</em> while discussing social and political issues.</p>
<p><b>Fred Knaup,</b> who used his High Street City Hotel to be unofficial greeter of arriving German progressives and others; he was on the board of education for 23 years.</p>
<p><b>Nicholas DeWyl and family,</b> pharmacists; his daughter <b>Frederika DeWyl Simonsen</b> cast off the social status then expected of women to become Missouri’s first licensed female pharmacist. The DeWyls were members of the Evangelical Church.</p>
<p><b>George Wagner,</b> Bavarian brewer who left the confessional Lutheran Church to join the open Evangelical Church. His sons Conrad, Lorenz, and William used their fortunes to help develop the city, like Wagner Place and Monroe House.</p>
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<p><i>George Wagner (1821–1895) founded the Wagner brewery that ultimately became the Capital Brewery. He was one of the group of German progressives who championed public education and equal rights in the 19th century.</i></p>
<p>Federal judge <b>Arnold Krekel,</b> a leading figure in establishing Lincoln University, who relentlessly pushed for Black education. He and other progressives worked with veterans of the 62nd and 65th regiments of the USCI to establish Lincoln.</p>
<p>The Rev. <b>Joseph Rieger,</b> who lived with abolitionist Congregationalists in New England before becoming the first pastor of Central Evangelical Church in 1860. He spoke out for abolition and for education of Blacks at Lincoln University and in public schools.</p>
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<p><i>Rev. Joseph Rieger (1811–1869) was the first pastor at Central Evangelical Church. A staunch abolitionist, he led the congregation that dared to fly the Union flag proudly in front of its church in the tense, politically mixed city during the Civil War. He ministered to Black and White inmates at the prison and was its only chaplain during the Civil War, and he married Black couples who had fled from slavery in Callaway County. After the war, he helped establish Lincoln University and served on its board until his death.</i></p>
<hr>
<p>Note: On June 13, 2021, Central Church, its progressive members having earlier left to organize The Oasis United Church of Christ, voted to leave the progressive United Church of Christ denomination.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Walter Schroeder grew up in Jefferson City’s historic German Southside now known as Old Munichburg. A retired professor of geography, he is devoted to preserving cultural history and is the author of five books on the history of the Old Munichburg neighborhood.</em></p>
<p>[This article first appeared in the <em>Jefferson City News-Tribune</em>’s “Cole County History” series on Saturday, July 31, 2021, p. B4. Slight editorial changes have been made, including to add images and captions beyond the one picture (of A. E. Zuendt) that appeared in the paper, and to update for 2024 the number of JC history books authored by Walter Schroeder. —ed.]</p>
<p>Copyright © Walter A. Schroeder, 2021</p>
Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-14298890759255017672024-02-27T13:07:00.004-06:002024-03-02T13:34:51.807-06:00Jefferson City’s Early German Clubs: Turners and Germania<p>By Walter A. Schroeder, for Historic City of Jefferson</p>
<p>There’s a saying that when three Germans get together, they will organize and form a club with bylaws. That was certainly true among immigrant Germans in Jefferson City in the 19th century, but the clubs faded away after 1900 and are little known today because their German-language records inhibit research. In their heyday, German social clubs promoted the businesses and trades of their members and provided socialization in their traditional German way of singing, drinking, and dancing. These selective clubs were for men only, and they lacked membership from laborers and common folk.</p>
<p>The first of the clubs was the Turners, or Turnverein, organized in 1868. It was founded by Ernst Anton Zuendt, a freethinker and the first German teacher at the new public school. The principle of the Turner movement was the Greek ideal of “a sound mind in a sound body.” “Turner” means “gymnast,” and gymnastics were its principal exercise.</p>
<p>The local Turners in 1869 established a Turnergarten on a hill in the 600 block of Madison Street, opposite what is now Central Dairy, in an emerging Munichburg. As described by Julius Conrath Jr., the sprawling Turner Garden had a brick meeting house and “a long, wooden building . . . where wine, beer, and sandwiches were sold. Great crowds would gather there, particularly on Sunday afternoons. . . . We had a turnmaster who put us through the various exercises, and on the grounds were bars, racks, horses, swings, rings, and other appliances on which we performed.” Among events at the Turner Garden was an 1872 “masked military ball” for the Franz Sigel battery, a unit of Missouri German immigrants that had fought for the Union in the just-ended Civil War. Several of the Sigel unit’s veterans were residents of Jefferson City.</p>
<p>Zuendt resigned his public school teaching position in 1876 and left Jefferson City. The Turner Club disbanded in the mid-1870s. Ernst Friemel acquired the Turner Garden site in 1881 and turned it into the popular Friemel’s Garden. [For more on Friemel’s Garden, a hilltop gathering place for cold beer, sandwiches, picnics, music concerts, and dancing, see Walter A. Schroeder, <em>Breweries and Saloons in Jefferson City, Missouri,</em> (Jefferson City: Old Munichburg Association, 2009), 28–30.]</p>
<p>As the Turners faded, immigrants formed the Harmonie Club, or Harmonie Gesellschaft, primarily for singing. It was formally organized May 26, 1873, with 73 members. In 1873, it opened its own building, Harmonie Hall, in the 300 block of Madison Street. Harmonie dissolved about 1880 but reformed as the Germania Club.</p>
<p>On Feb. 8, 1883, German-speaking residents organized the Germania Club. “Germania” is the personification of the German nation—counterpart to Britannia for the United Kingdom and Columbia for the United States—and was associated with the drive in Germany to unify the German people. Germania clubs were established in many American cities.</p>
<p>In 1884, founding member Fred Binder [pronounced BINN-der], prominent local builder, built the Music Hall building, 236 E. High St., next to Bragg Hall (city hall), specifically for the Germania Club. At that time, the club had 55 members in business and the trades. The second-floor “Music Hall” was one single room, 90 by 30 feet, with 140 chairs, a stage, and dressing rooms.</p>
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<p><em>Photo: The Music Hall, built in 1884 by Fred Binder for the Germania Club, was at 236 E. High St. next to Bragg Hall, the city hall. The distinctive, large plate glass windows were to allow the maximum of natural light into the hall before electricity. The Music Hall has been replaced by the current building that houses Samuel’s Menswear. (Source:</em> <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/02028239" target="_blank">1900 Illustrated Sketch Book of Cole County</a>,<em> p. 231.)</em></p>
<p>The Germania Club held its grand opening on its first anniversary, Feb. 8, 1884, and met weekly thereafter. The club hosted visiting lecturers, presented dramas in German and English, and provided frequent musical entertainment by visitors and local groups. It was a cultural center for the growing city. The Music Hall building is no longer standing. The site is now occupied by Samuel’s Menswear.</p>
<p>The Germania Club served as a chamber of commerce to promote members’ businesses and provide a networking forum. Among its nearly 100 members were Binder, Dallmeyer, Priesmeyer, Brandenburger, Porth, Stampfli, Wagner, Knaup, Obermeyer, Bruns, Heinrichs, Fischer, Meyer, Monnig, and others who had High Street businesses. Wives attended its elegant social events. The club held weekly dances and masked balls and hosted parties for visitors from Germany. A local orchestra or cornet band provided music for the club’s activities. Germania gave annual Christmas parties for children, one of which in 1893 was attended by 250 children who sang, danced, and received gifts.</p>
<p>The Germania Club was the high point of German socialization in Jefferson City. It was the largest, most prestigious, and most active social club for German businessmen and civic leaders. It reached its peak in the 1890s, which marked the decade of greatest prominence of German-American identification and influence in Jefferson City.</p>
<p>By 1900, these businessmen and civic leaders were fluent English speakers and were fast losing their identity as a separate ethnic group. They also were members of other civic groups that provided larger forums for intercourse like the Commercial Club/Chamber of Commerce. They were serving in elected city offices and on the public school board. Assimilation was nearing completion. Thus, there was no longer a need for separate German social groups.</p>
<p><i>Walter Schroeder grew up in Jefferson City’s historic German Southside now known as Old Munichburg. A retired professor of geography, he is devoted to preserving cultural history and is the author of five books on the history of the Old Munichburg neighborhood.</i></p>
<p>Copyright © Walter A. Schroeder, 2021</p>
<p>[This article first appeared in the <em>Jefferson City News-Tribune</em>’s “Cole County History” series on Saturday, March 6, 2021. Slight editorial changes have been made in square brackets and to update for 2024 the name of Samuel’s Tuxedos and Gifts and the number of JC history books authored by Walter Schroeder. —ed.]</p>
<p>For more on the history of German Turner gymnastic societies, including the club swinging those societies are associated with, enjoy this <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaoS_IVx1go" target="_blank">YouTube video by Oliver Janseps</a>.</p>Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-30730023077656620092023-12-22T15:28:00.008-06:002024-02-23T15:19:57.951-06:00Zombies Invade the Southside! New Book by Walter A. Schroeder<p>Hi, everyone, it's Julie, the daughter of Walter. He's the author of this blog, but I'm the one who posts his essays here online. I'm also the editor of his publications for the Old Munichburg Association, and I wanted to let you know he has a new collection of memoirs!</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUDRXbJHMLTJkrVgTdbWL6kFuX0DhD3r34h42tQ9tWLSGBkzqLgIVufbv4rWjtSJqoxqLVLMCeUciKn_kO09CFzLTIhrHRisWwRd5qASOAPxXNtv4y6ahA8s1XAcWeYJwc6c_GLyxV_CrnCIovPI0SJiSIzSOn7n7pLnhvvZsVa6GEtN1EIay0z0_vwlbq/s2775/Zombies_cover.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="2775" data-original-width="1796" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUDRXbJHMLTJkrVgTdbWL6kFuX0DhD3r34h42tQ9tWLSGBkzqLgIVufbv4rWjtSJqoxqLVLMCeUciKn_kO09CFzLTIhrHRisWwRd5qASOAPxXNtv4y6ahA8s1XAcWeYJwc6c_GLyxV_CrnCIovPI0SJiSIzSOn7n7pLnhvvZsVa6GEtN1EIay0z0_vwlbq/s320/Zombies_cover.jpg" /></a></div>
<p>We just picked up the books from the printer a few days ago. Are we in time for Christmas? Not quite, but Downtown Book & Toy and J Street Vintage will soon have copies for sale. I'm sure there will be other places, as well. We are also anticipating some booksignings and perhaps some public author talks, too.</p>
<p>Why is it called “Zombies”? you may ask. Well, this is collection of essays about a number of different topics. Would people pay attention if it was titled “More Essays by Walter”? We went with a title that grabs your attention. So: the title comes from a whimsical story about the time when all the kids on the block saw the 1943 comic-horror movie <i>Revenge of the Zombies</i> . . . and then spent the next week staggering around the neighborhood's sidewalks, arms outstretched, wearing vacant expressions—causing passing motorists to do double-takes! Worse, as they muttered "I will do thy bidding. . ." their mothers caught on to the trick and told them to clean their rooms, or do the dishes!</p>
<p>But perhaps more to the point, it has to do with the magic of details. In his introduction, my dad talks about how “history” comes to us as a collection of facts, but we all have a hard time picturing how things really “were.” His goal in <i>Zombies</i> is to revive scenes of the past so we can better understand and imagine what Jefferson City was like (at least for him) in the 1940s. (Was his experience “representative”? Well, if not his, whose <i>would</i> be?) As he explains, “In every generation . . . young people learn only the skeleton of the past. I want to put <i>meat</i> on the skeleton’s bones.”</p><p>In other news:</p>
<p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Dad's book <i>Buddy's Stories</i>, published in 2018 by the Old Munichburg Association, sold out this year, so we reprinted it. So it's still available, too!</li><li>His <i>Breweries and Saloons</i> book is also available. It's a relatively small book, but it's packed full of interesting information about the early breweries and saloons/taverns in Jefferson City. Sure, it's got lots of cool photos, old ads from the local German newspapers, and other illustrations, but it's also got a lot of colorful information in the text—the text is substantial, so don't let its compactness fool you. Be sure to check it out!</li><li>Dad's book <i>Southside Sketches</i>, published in 2016, is now out of print and unavailable.</li></ul><p></p>
<p><b>One more note:</b> <i>Zombies, Buddy's Stories,</i> and <i>Breweries and Saloons</i> are all <b>published by the Old Munichburg Association,</b> which is a <i>nonprofit neighborhood association</i> dedicated to the revitalization of Jefferson City's historic Southside. We are a group of homeowners, business owners, and others who share a love of the district and a desire to promote, preserve, and protect it. <i>Proceeds from the sales go to OMA.</i></p>
Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-18969129868303160852023-06-21T17:12:00.003-05:002023-06-21T17:15:53.452-05:00New Publication: Broadway School in the 1940s<p>It’s a fact: a school is more than a building, more than books, more than the teachers and students within—and the farther you get from your school days, the more you appreciate the impact of school on you and your community.</p>
<p>The building on the northeast corner of Dunklin and Broadway was a public school from 1904 to 1955. Today, most people know it as the Carpenters Hall, since the local Carpenters union operated it as an office building longer than it was a school. Now, it has been remodeled into private apartments. Schroeder breathes life into the history we sense as we ponder this historic building.</p>
<p>Reflecting in his eighties, historian Walter A. Schroeder shares his personal experiences of attending Jefferson City’s Broadway Elementary School in the 1940s. It was a much different learning environment than what today’s schoolchildren experience. While public documents and newspaper accounts can present a basic outline of what public elementary schools were like in the past, only accounts like these—of personal experiences—can make history come to life.</p>
<p>A slim volume packed with information, Broadway School in the 1940s offers details like these:</p>
<ul>
<li>All boys wore long pants; all girls wore dresses. All shoes were made of leather.</li>
<li>Class size was 30–35 children, and all the teachers were unmarried women.</li>
<li>All pupils had their weight and height recorded every six weeks.</li>
<li>Student desks had a round hole originally meant to hold an ink bottle, but the ink bottles used in the 1940s didn’t fit the holes. So kids dropped paper wads down the holes: “Bombs away!”</li>
<li>Students learned to write in cursive using the Palmer method.</li>
<li>Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays were observed separately, on different days.</li>
<li>The playground had separate sides for boys and girls, with the same playground equipment on both sides.</li>
<li>The hand-held, brass school bell was wielded by the principal or by the janitor.</li>
<li>Report cards included notes on deportment, study habits, and attitudes.</li>
<li>Cloakrooms held coats, caps, gloves, scarves, and galoshes—but no actual cloaks!</li>
<li>All the students, and nearly all of the teachers, walked to school every day. School was never closed for inclement weather.</li>
</ul>
<p>In addition to his detailed accounts of what Broadway School was like in the 1940s, Schroeder offers his reflections on the changes he’s observed after seventy years: decorum in the classroom, changing technology, evolving public educational policy, diversity, and more.</p>
<p>“I want people to have a detailed description,” Schroeder says. “Over a thousand kids were educated in that building. Early education leaves an indelible imprint in our lives. Elementary education was so different in the past. And there are few people left who have memories of Broadway School as it was.”</p>
<p>An entertaining, authentic collection of memories of a wartime schoolchild, Broadway School in the 1940s paints vivid scenes of a historic elementary school, inspiring readers of all ages to make comparisons to their own school memories.</p>
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<p><strong><em>Broadway School in the 1940s,</em> by Walter A. Schroeder</strong><br />
Published in 2023 by the Historic City of Jefferson, Inc.<br />
58 pp.; 28 photographs and illustrations</p>
Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-51420123319225908602022-05-16T21:55:00.000-05:002022-05-16T21:55:50.914-05:00Ward Dorrance, Jefferson City's Distinguished Creative Writer<p>C-SPAN visited Jefferson City June 4, 2012, to prepare <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?306832-1/book-tv-jefferson-city-missouri" target="_blank">a TV program</a> that was aired nationally on July 8. Producers said the program was to showcase the “literary life” of Jefferson City. It turned out that C-SPAN was interested only in nonfiction writing. Except for Jean Carnahan’s brief account of her fine book on the Governor’s Mansion, the other fifty minutes of the program had nothing to do with the “literary life” of Jefferson City! Two segments described some rare holdings of the Lincoln University and the University of Missouri–Columbia archives, none of which had to do with Jefferson City. At least half of the TV hour was devoted to three abstruse works that had nothing to do with Jefferson City, and they were written by university professors unknown to Jefferson City residents.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, by restricting Jefferson City’s “literary life” to nonfiction writing, C-SPAN overlooked one of Jefferson City’s most distinguished creative writers. For not only did the program omit the many distinguished writers at Lincoln University, they ignored Jefferson City’s native son Ward Dorrance: Guggenheim fellow, folklore preserver, prolific creative writer, who rubbed shoulders with Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor. He taught at the University of Missouri, then advanced to professorships at Cambridge, Oxford, and Georgetown universities. He was a World War II veteran, and he won the prestigious O. Henry Prize. And he was born and grew up in Jefferson City.</p>
<p>Ward Allison Dorrance was born in Jefferson City April 30, 1904, and raised in Jefferson City’s Southside, at 602 Madison, next to Wear’s Creek. That site is now a Central Dairy parking lot. At that time, the Southside was nearing completion of its transition from German-speaking Muenchberg to the English-speaking Southside. Young Ward attended Jefferson City public schools (probably Central School around the corner on Dunklin Street) and graduated from Ernst Simonsen High School in 1922. He was valedictorian of his class and editor of both the <em>Marcullus</em> yearbook and the Jeffersonian student newspaper. Here is his photo, at age 18, from the <em>Marcullus</em>.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiztv3CjCBK_YweMTlKenFZh0qji_u9ip2UgRGlCKetIoQ2y7WNQz8ZHh68IOVrJDl2RwplotnOAp6w9hv8YDYk5ujyaS2llhkup-R6_GlY11JKCexwXTqqH51osQP_ijfWy9d6Vqc8081fDQVPCBtwzlvIqxRt0zyzMegTiKxLoatXqogQmYHL52uNgg/s611/Ward_Dorrance_1922_Marcullus_crop.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="611" data-original-width="445" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiztv3CjCBK_YweMTlKenFZh0qji_u9ip2UgRGlCKetIoQ2y7WNQz8ZHh68IOVrJDl2RwplotnOAp6w9hv8YDYk5ujyaS2llhkup-R6_GlY11JKCexwXTqqH51osQP_ijfWy9d6Vqc8081fDQVPCBtwzlvIqxRt0zyzMegTiKxLoatXqogQmYHL52uNgg/s320/Ward_Dorrance_1922_Marcullus_crop.jpg"/></a></div>
<p>Dorrance went to the University of Missouri in Columbia where he majored in French and English and began teaching French there immediately upon receiving his B.A. in 1926. He received his M.A. in 1928. He then went to Paris to study for a doctorate at the Sorbonne, but he returned without it in 1930 when his mother died. He resumed teaching at the University of Missouri. He received his Ph.D. from MU in French in 1935. His dissertation, <em>Survival of French in the Old Ste. Genevieve District</em>, was published by the university in its academic series, which was quite an honor for a graduating student.</p>
<p>His published dissertation, based on field work especially in the rural Ozarks community of Old Mines, Missouri, brought attention to the remnants of Missouri French culture and became one of the foundations upon which the revival of French heritage and tourism in Missouri was based. Dorrance located a few hundred people who spoke a vanishing French Creole dialect and meticulously documented their speech and culture. The work also greatly helped promote the study of Missouri folklore in general, as later folklorists readily acknowledged.</p>
<p>But Dorrance’s broader fame was yet to come, and very shortly. Now an MU professor, he bought <a href="https://comohistoricplaces.com/places/homes/2815-oakland-gravel-road-guitar-mansionconfederate-hill/" target="_blank">a historic Civil War–period mansion</a> in Columbia and named it “Confederate Hill” (also known as the Guitar Mansion, it’s now on the National Register of Historic Places). As he continued to teach French and English at the university, he began a prolific period of creative writing.</p>
<p><em>Three Ozark Streams: Log of the Moccasin and the Wilma</em> appeared in 1937 (Richmond, Mo.: The Missourian Press). Dorrance floated the Black, Current, and Jack’s Fork and captured the flavor of the rivers and the people who lived along them. The lyrical beauty of his writing caught the attention of many. It was among the first of a long string of expressive writing by others on Ozark streams that led to popular support for the establishment of the National Ozark Scenic Waterways in 1964.</p>
<p><em>We’re from Missouri</em> (Richmond, Mo.: The Missourian Press) appeared the next year. Thomas Hart Benton, who had just completed his murals in the Capitol, supplied a special frontispiece, possibly because Dorrance’s previous book caught Benton’s attention as a soulmate in portraying the nature of the real Missouri and everyday Missourians.</p>
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<p>Though only 97 pages in length, <em>We’re from Missouri</em> is a rich collection of thirteen short essays about the good life in Missouri. One essay, “Repulse of Texas at Potosi,” has been frequently cited. It tells the story of audacious Texans’ nighttime attempt to steal the body of Moses Austin from its grave in the Ozark town of Potosi. Another is “Preëminent Sons of Bitches of Boone County, Missouri,” a title that speaks for itself. The delightful collection ends with a prayer to the Lord: “With due respect, I hope you will do nothing more for me but just go away and leave me alone. . . . The time you might have spent on me . . . can be used on the Legislature. Or the D.A.R.’s. Singly they’re fine folks. But collectively they pass resolutions.”</p>
<p><em>Where Rivers Meet</em> (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons) came out in 1939, a third consecutive year of book publishing! Dorrance noted that leaders in St. Louis never had been to the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers and didn’t appreciate the huge role of the confluence of interior rivers in the nation’s history. He personally traveled seven major rivers (Osage, Missouri, Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee, Cumberland, and Wabash) to report, in beautiful prose, the rich history and life along them.</p>
<p>By now, Dorrance was well established as a “river man” in American literature. These three works, appearing in 1937–1939, captured the beauty and essence of Missouri. Yet Dorrance’s Southern heritage and his pride in Southern ways also impelled him to bring folklore into his creative writing.</p>
<p>In 1940 he received a prestigious <a href="https://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/ward-dorrance/" target="_blank">Guggenheim Fellowship</a> to write <em>The Sundowners</em> (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942). Here is Professor Dorrance at age 36 when he received the Guggenheim Fellowship.</p>
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<p><em>The Sundowners</em> is a novel about a boy of French descent growing up in the Callaway County bottoms (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cote_Sans_Dessein,_Missouri" target="_blank">Cote Sans Dessein</a>, <a href="https://www.callawaymohistory.org/tebbetts" target="_blank">Tebbetts</a>, <a href="https://www.callawaymohistory.org/cedar-city" target="_blank">Cedar City</a>) across the Missouri River from Jefferson City. The young boy in the novel walks across the <a href="https://bridgehunter.com/mo/cole/first-jefferson-city/" target="_blank">Missouri River Bridge</a> into Jefferson City and pays a dime at the tollbooth. Dorrance includes a lot of his hometown Jefferson City in this novel. He describes, from a young boy’s view, <a href="https://www.newstribune.com/news/2013/nov/10/dallmeyers-jewelry-closes-after-100-years/" target="_blank">Dallmeyer’s</a> big store (a skylight and balcony at the far end, with “cash baskets riding up to the glass booth in the balcony”); Linhardt and Delmonico grocery stores; the Madison House bar; <a href="https://tolsondrugstore.com/" target="_blank">Tolson’s Drug</a> (where the “town sports read westerns, opened pimples by the mirror over the magazine rack, and told one another how they had got ‘fixed up’ last night”); the Busy Bee Candy Kitchen (where his banana split cost a quarter); the <a href="https://www.downtownjeffersoncity.com/cole-county-courthouse" target="_blank">Cole County Courthouse</a> (with its “lariat of pigeons” and a cannon on the lawn); the Monroe House; and the fire station on High Street (where firemen shadowboxed on the sidewalk).</p>
<p>The boy in the novel goes to the <a href="https://www.theclio.com/entry/149339" target="_blank">Carnegie Library</a>, where he is introduced to a world of fascinating books. He walks along the railroad tracks, looks at river boats and explores the old, original jail and stone warehouses along the tracks. In September, he enters <a href="https://www.newstribune.com/news/2021/jun/13/Simonsen-building-construction-delayed-as-owners-a/" target="_blank">Ernst Simonsen High School</a> and, as a freshman, he studies English, algebra, Latin, ancient history, and music.</p>
<p>Dorrance’s extraordinary seven years of published creative writing were interrupted by military service in World War II from 1942 to 1946. He served as a lieutenant in the Coast Guard in Newfoundland.</p>
<p>After the war, he returned to his position at the University of Missouri and resumed writing, this time shorter pieces. They were published in major literary journals like the <em>Hudson Review</em>, the <em>Sewanee Review</em>, and the <em>Atlantic Monthly</em>. “The White Hound,” about the death of a little boy, received the O. Henry Prize in 1949.</p>
<p>In 1959, the <a href="https://upress.missouri.edu/" target="_blank">University of Missouri Press</a>, just founded by his colleague, English professor Henry Belden, selected for its first publication a collection of four of Dorrance’s short stories and four of a Tennessee friend. The book was named <em>The White Hound</em> from the title of the republished prizewinning essay. Two other Dorrance stories in the collection, “A Stop on the Way to Texas” and “The Devil on a Hot Afternoon” had previously been selected to appear in <em>Best American Short Stories</em> for 1954 and 1956 respectively. One reviewer noted that Dorrance “is a writer with a sixth sense of things hidden in the ordinary course of events.”</p>
<p>Professor Dorrance encountered major personal difficulties with the Missouri University administration and withdrew from the faculty in 1953. He gave up his comfortable, historic <a href="https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/local/if-these-walls-could-talk/article_a15656df-53f9-5b16-9bd6-534e9e509582.html" target="_blank">Confederate Hill home</a> in Columbia and abruptly left the state he loved so deeply, never to return. He lived in England for a while, teaching at both Cambridge and Oxford as a visiting professor. He moved to Washington, D.C., and in 1958 joined the English Department of Georgetown University, where he remained on the faculty until his retirement in 1974.</p>
<p>After leaving the University of Missouri, Dorrance’s creative writing changed significantly. There was much less of it, and it consisted primarily of short pieces. The dual themes of the social history of the state and its environmental beauty waned. Once he left the state and lived as an exile, his former sources of inspiration—the land and people of Missouri—dried up.</p>
<p>In 1969 his novel <em>The Party at Mrs. Purefoy’s</em> appeared, about a flood on the Missouri River in central Missouri, and in 1972 the University of Missouri Press published <em>A Man about the House</em>, a novella of 116 pages, which was set in Jefferson City. Dorrance also carried on correspondence with some of the most notable contemporary writers like Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor.</p>
<p>Ward Allison Dorrance, Jefferson City native, died at age 92 in Washington, D.C., on September 16, 1996. His body was cremated; a <a href="https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/135895447/ward-allison-dorrance" target="_blank">memorial marker</a> next to his mother’s parents’ graves in Jefferson City's Woodland/Old City cemetery notes his military service, but there is nothing on it about his distinguished career as a creative writer. Nothing about his great love of his native Missouri.</p>
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<p>Missouri’s late, beloved wildlife writer Joel Vance was a student in the last French class Dorrance was teaching at MU when he abruptly left. Vance <a href="https://shsmo.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/oral-history/transcripts/c3966/vancej.pdf" target="_blank">spent a decade</a> researching the life of Dorrance—whom he had admired as a teacher and as a writer—and wrote a biography of him. In it, he exposed the reason for Dorrance’s MU departure (Dorrance was run out of the university, and the state, because he was gay) and the university administration’s subsequent cover-up. Vance could not find a publisher for the manuscript, and the monograph is archived at the State Historical Society of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. Still awaiting a publisher.</p>
<p>Thanks to the State Historical Society of Missouri for allowing use of the two photographs of Dorrance and the Benton frontispiece.</p>
<p>Copyright © Walter A. Schroeder, 2012</p>
<p></p>
Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-85881013769558938792022-04-25T12:45:00.000-05:002022-04-25T12:45:37.838-05:00What Could Have Been: The Missouri State Capital in Sedalia<p>After American independence had been won, President Thomas Jefferson and associates used rationalism and geometry to plan how the trans-Appalachian west was to be occupied. To administer the new lands, they focused on the principle of centrality. Administrative centers were to be located in the center of the land being administered. County seats were to be in the center of counties. Schools were to be in the center of the township on a designated “school section.” State capitals were to be in the center of their states. Columbus, Ohio; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Springfield, Illinois, served as examples of centrally located capitals before Missouri.</p>
<p>State commissioners located the site of the Missouri capital in the center of the state, on the Missouri River, and named it Jefferson City. That choice was a real winner for “centrality,” because two centuries later (2010 census) the center of Missouri’s population was just outside Wardsville, or only seven miles south of the Capitol. The center of Missouri’s geographic area is just west of Etterville in Miller County, 21 miles southwest of Jefferson City.</p>
<p>Over the years some Missourians have questioned the suitability of Jefferson City as the location of the state capital, and all would-be rivals were in the state’s central part. In the early decades of state history, Columbia, Fayette, and Boonville were proposed as better locations. But it was Sedalia that mounted the most determined effort to remove the capital from Jefferson City.</p>
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<p>Sedalia had grown rapidly in the post–Civil War years, thanks to its railroad connections and development of the surrounding rich farming and stock-raising lands. In contrast, river-located Jefferson City grew more slowly after railroads superseded steamboats as the primary transportation mode. By 1890, Sedalia had more than double the population of Jefferson City (14,068 to 6,742), and promoters of that booming railroad town mounted a vigorous campaign to relocate the state capital to their town.</p>
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<p>The Commonwealth Land Development Company of Sedalia, composed of those promoters, proposed a “Capitol Addition” in the southwestern part of the city. It was an irregular polygon of 211 square blocks that lay between Broadway on the north, 32nd Street on the south, and west of Barnett Street.</p>
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<p>A tract of six square blocks was reserved for the Capitol and surrounding grounds. Locations were also designated for a Governor’s Mansion, a Supreme Court building, and an armory. A divided lane parkway, named Capitol Avenue, connected the Capitol to Sedalia’s chief thoroughfare, Broadway. Laid out in the days of horses and carriages, it was designed to be a ceremonial esplanade.</p>
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<p>Apparently the entire addition was to be residential, since the company provided no information about land for commercial, industrial, or even neighborhood parks and churches. Capitol Addition comprised approximately 9,000 lots of different sizes, sufficient for more than 25,000 people. Most lots were only 25 feet wide! That narrow width allowed the promoters to maximize the number of lots in the addition, and thus the promoters would maximize the amount of money they would raise from sales. It was necessary to raise as much money as possible from lot sales because money raised from sales was to pay for the retirement of bonds sold to finance the capital removal, which was estimated to be a whopping $3,810,000 ($114,300,000 in 2022 dollars). For comparison, construction of the new Capitol and expanded grounds in Jefferson City in 1915 cost Missouri taxpayers less, $3,500,000 ($94,800,000 in 2022 dollars).</p>
<p>By means of clever parliamentary maneuvering, Sedalia was successful in getting passed a concurrent resolution in the Missouri state legislature requiring the state to vote at the general election in November 1896 on removal of the state capital—the Capitol building and all associated state functions—to Sedalia. Eighteen ninety-six was also the year the Missouri River bridge was opened, which greatly enhanced Jefferson City’s position. Despite Sedalia’s efforts, the statewide vote went solidly against removal by a vote of 65 percent to 35 percent. The initiative won approval in only 19 counties, most of which were around Sedalia.</p>
<p>Fifteen years later, 1911, when fire destroyed the Capitol in Jefferson City, the issue of keeping the state’s capital at Jefferson City once again came up, but the legislature’s quick decision to rebuild the Capitol in Jefferson City effectively ended all questions as to whether the city would remain the capital of Missouri. Nevertheless, some Missouri government officials, politicians, and lobbyists continue to grumble about smallish Jefferson City as their capital city.</p>
<p>Missourians could have had a capitol on uninteresting topography overlooking nothing but flat land. Instead, Missourians today are proud of their magnificent state Capitol rising majestically on a high bluff in Jefferson City overlooking our state’s namesake Missouri River.</p>
<p>Map courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri</p>
<p>Text ©Walter A. Schroeder, 2022</p>
Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-51849101190143067882021-10-05T13:23:00.003-05:002021-10-05T13:53:25.281-05:00Schwartze Blacksmith and Wagon Shop Building, 630 Jefferson Street<p>Below is the text and image for the "Munichburg Memories" ad that ran in the <i>Jefferson City News Tribune</i> on September 19, 2021, as a promotion for the Old Munichburg Association's annual Oktoberfest, which was held September 25.</p>
<p>The image is from the Missouri State Archives. To see it in more detail, click on it to enlarge it.</p>
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<p>The intersection of Jefferson and Dunklin streets is Munichburg’s center. By 1873, Mauritz Laudel had a blacksmith shop on the northwest corner, catty-cornered from Farmers Home. Henry Schwartze bought Laudel’s shop before 1900 and turned it into one of Munichburg’s major businesses. Schwartze added wagon making and repairing, which became more important than the blacksmith business. The large, two-story brick building on that corner, still standing today, was erected in the 1890s, possibly in the 1880s. The photo, circa 1912, shows the wagon business occupying the ground floor; above, the large Schwartze family, who lived upstairs, are peering out the windows. The family had a separate recessed, arched entranceway on Jefferson Street. A separate paint shop was affixed to the north side on Jefferson Street in 1912. When autos began replacing horses and wagons, Schwartze—seeing the writing on the wall—moved his business to Vienna in rural Maries County in 1914.</p>
<p>In 1914, the building was completely renovated and repurposed for retail business downstairs and offices above. The original wide doorways were bricked in and replaced with new entrances and windows. The original limestone foundation was preserved. The former paint shop addition was also converted into retail space below and offices above, with separate entrances to both. Very important, the soft-brick exterior walls from the nineteenth century were covered with new wire-brushed, resistant brick to give the building the completely different appearance you see today that belies its age. The former paint shop was similarly rebricked. It was incorporated into the original corner building so seamlessly that the two buildings appear as one today, although at slightly different elevations.</p>
<p>The Southside Post Office (the city’s first branch post office) and <a href="https://munichburgmemories.blogspot.com/2011/03/southside-drug-stores-one-arm-wonder.html" target="_blank">Southside Drug Store</a> were the first to occupy the renovated buildings, with doctor and dentist offices above. In 1921, the corner building became the ill-fated <a href="https://munichburgmemories.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-cole-county-bank.html" target="_blank">Cole County Bank</a>, which was forced to close in 1938 during the Great Depression.</p>
<p>This more than 130-year-old building, now owned by Prairie Farms, is one of the signature historic buildings in the Southside.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZgMjSqJPckxP37PnjuXVJxVOdzj6sd9J_D-Vj-8P3dnV8yLiN3wqkKCzs5IeBoDPoYF1WZmgzQAxUyAEgpRbSkpZqRCUTnoFzL1jfkuUf2VfcgpkaMR1Gzg2-ubfgm7ij_JGvhdjiNJpb/s1400/Schwartze_Shop_ca1912_MO_State_Archives.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="997" data-original-width="1400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZgMjSqJPckxP37PnjuXVJxVOdzj6sd9J_D-Vj-8P3dnV8yLiN3wqkKCzs5IeBoDPoYF1WZmgzQAxUyAEgpRbSkpZqRCUTnoFzL1jfkuUf2VfcgpkaMR1Gzg2-ubfgm7ij_JGvhdjiNJpb/s400/Schwartze_Shop_ca1912_MO_State_Archives.jpg"/></a></div>
<p>Text ©Walter A. Schroeder, 2021</p>
<p>Photo credit: Missouri State Archives</p>
<p></p>Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-73504088220801406072021-09-28T13:23:00.004-05:002023-06-21T13:16:37.026-05:00The 700 Block of Jefferson Street in the Southside<p>Below is the text for the "Munichburg Memories" ad that ran in the <i>Jefferson City News Tribune</i> on September 12, 2021, as a promotion for the Old Munichburg Association's annual Oktoberfest, which was held September 25.</p>
<p>The image that this post refers to is the property of C. Trenton Boyd, who graciously allowed us to use it in the newspaper promotion. He did not provide permission for any other use, so the image does not appear here. A verbal description of the image appears at the end of this post.</p>
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<p>Jefferson Street has always been a major street in the Southside. However, its 700 block—the hill from Dunklin past ECCO up to Ashley—presented problems for traffic. When it had a dirt surface in the nineteenth century, wagons used every bit of its 80-foot right-of-way to zigzag up the steep grade through deep ruts. The hill was so troublesome, going both up and down, that horses and wagons often detoured over to Washington Street past Central Church.</p>
<p>A chief impediment was a rock ledge in the middle of the hill and an oozing spring above it. This spring was associated with a natural cave just to the east of the street, which Farmers Home used for natural cooling. The constant seepage in the street was not overcome until the mid-twentieth century.</p>
<p>The steepness of the hill was lessened by grading down the road bed. The photo (ca. 1910) shows thirteen men (all with hats) removing several feet of rock from the crest of the Jefferson Street hill at Ashley Street. They are using a single pneumatic jackhammer (used by the man in back, right), plus picks and shovels. Men in suit coats are hauling away rock in two mule-pulled wagons. Central Church is visible in the left background. Today’s Calvary’s Gifts is located where the black steam boiler is. The two-story, frame Kielman house (no longer there) is on the right, atop undisturbed rock; when the grading was done, it was eight feet above the new street level.</p>
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<p><i><b>Image description:</b> The black-and-white photograph was taken from roughly east-southeast of the intersection of Jefferson and Ashley; the view is roughly north. Central Evangelical Church is at the far left, in the background, and a clapboard-sided, two-story house is at the right. The center foreground is dominated by a wide area of excavation into bedrock. Within the excavated area are two mule-drawn, open-bed wagons (in line, with both facing toward the left) and thirteen men standing at their various work locations to pose for the picture. Several of the men are leaning on their shovels or other tools. In each wagon, a teamster stands holding the mules' reins. At the right, a man at a higher level of the excavated area appears to be jackhammering and is the only person not facing the camera. A large steam-powered generator stands in the background, with smoke coming from its exhaust stack and drifting toward the south. A shadow, apparently cast by an off-camera structure to the left, falls on the lower left portion of the image, shading the front part of the front mule and the south part of the excavated area.</i></p>
<p>©Walter A. Schroeder, 2021</p>
Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-79146904620757107042019-09-27T15:52:00.000-05:002019-09-30T15:53:50.168-05:00Flooding Turned Dunklin Into Waterside DockOne thing we’ll remember about the summer of 2019 is the prolonged, extensive flooding along the Missouri River, its tributary Wear’s Creek, and other low areas in Jefferson City. Did you know that in 1844, a major flood allowed a Missouri River steamboat to float up the east branch of Wear’s Creek—whose course essentially ran along today’s 50/63 expressway—all the way to the 100 block of East Dunklin? The low backyard of Busch’s Florist is where the boat docked.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6hA1dL1JjsJpAUstnILD49ZR8IOG48cJ_DoXiwoEPIYperzpCVjcnhOKVfNL4U4os2iNpQON56kyr3TiPPo-QDg3Pv8CFUougvy_mD2qODjrmmzv9qBcHaUp4ZaHuUpcIS_xaxIX3lSJj/s1600/clean_for_blog_resize.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6hA1dL1JjsJpAUstnILD49ZR8IOG48cJ_DoXiwoEPIYperzpCVjcnhOKVfNL4U4os2iNpQON56kyr3TiPPo-QDg3Pv8CFUougvy_mD2qODjrmmzv9qBcHaUp4ZaHuUpcIS_xaxIX3lSJj/s400/clean_for_blog_resize.jpg" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="768" /></a><br />
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The watercraft, in this case, was a small, short steamboat—more like a river ferry, or a large steam-powered raft—not a monster like today’s “Delta Queen.” It was carrying German immigrants, including members of the Nieghorn and Hartenstein families, who were among the first Bavarians to farm in Cole County. After crossing the Atlantic, they had traveled on steamboats north from New Orleans on the Mississippi, then, on smaller craft, west on the Missouri. Boats were the best way to get to Jefferson City in its early years, since there were no railroads to town at that time.<br />
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The flood of 1844 was the Missouri River’s greatest flood ever in recorded history, by volume of water. The Great Flood of 1993 was actually somewhat less in volume, though it rose higher due to later channel engineering and levees. The 1844 flood, which occurred before the river had been contained, created 10-foot-high sand dunes in the Missouri River bottoms. The river channel changed its course in several places that year. River pilots navigated their steamboats over the tops of completely submerged trees and croplands in the river bottoms. Considering the floods of 1993 and 2019, it’s not hard to see how the backed-up water of Wear’s Creek, in a time before the Whitten Expressway, could allow a steamboat of German immigrants to navigate as far as where Busch’s Florist is today.<br />
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©Walter A. Schroeder, 2019, with information from Gary Schmutzler, a Nieghorn descendant<br />
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<i>This piece originally ran in the</i> Jefferson City News Tribune <i>as an ad for Oktoberfest on September 25, 2019.</i><br />
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Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-59403484214066167912019-09-24T15:38:00.000-05:002019-09-30T15:41:19.853-05:00Dunklin Street Closure Reminds Us It Wasn’t Always a BeelineOne thing we’ll remember about the summer of 2019 is the closure of West Dunklin Street! We’re glad the city’s making major improvements to the 300 and 400 blocks of Dunklin, including a new bridge over Wear’s Creek. But detouring around the construction zone has certainly grown wearisome!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAezRFVx-_UoYbtaS7D0rrd7q1gCc3xotqG2zYo8TEQ3Y7i5QPhI5iTgcoNBDMnL7SwwU0hPun8kTgoi2zJQbHTRTMNDY5yRGWI3aXelqUaLSY1idNzmt27lA9gBtgQh6gjYRWb-HfSimQ/s1600/road_closed_cropped.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAezRFVx-_UoYbtaS7D0rrd7q1gCc3xotqG2zYo8TEQ3Y7i5QPhI5iTgcoNBDMnL7SwwU0hPun8kTgoi2zJQbHTRTMNDY5yRGWI3aXelqUaLSY1idNzmt27lA9gBtgQh6gjYRWb-HfSimQ/s400/road_closed_cropped.jpg" width="400" height="329" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1317" /></a><br />
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Few people know that until the 1920s, the Southside was shut off from both east and west sides of Jefferson City, because Dunklin stopped at each end. A steep hill on the east side of Jackson Street closed off access to Lincoln University, and a steep bluff west of Broadway and Wear’s Creek closed off access to the west.<br />
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But when cars came in and subdivisions sprouted up around the city center, something had to be done. Dunklin was selected to become the Southside’s major through street. The steep hill in the 500 block of East Dunklin was graded down and paved to handle cars. Likewise, the bluff in the 300 block of West Dunklin was graded down and paved, and a substantial bridge was built across Wear’s Creek in the 400 block. These two street improvements simplified access to the emerging Fairmount Boulevard and Moreau Drive neighborhood on the east, and to the emerging Washington Park neighborhood, along the new US 50 (now Missouri Blvd.), to the west.<br />
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When city buses replaced streetcars in the 1930s, they joined thousands of local drivers in using the new beeline that Dunklin offered—and which we have missed using this summer. It’s easy to see why this summer’s improvements to Dunklin are necessary. Not only is Dunklin the Southside’s “main street”—it’s a critical east-west connector in Jefferson City.<br />
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©Walter A. Schroeder, 2019<br />
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<i>This piece originally ran in the</i> Jefferson City News Tribune <i>as an ad for Oktoberfest on September 22, 2019.</i><br />
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Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-18608090570033667662019-09-23T16:09:00.000-05:002019-09-23T16:09:10.498-05:00The 1880 Tornado and 218 West ElmThe tornado of May 22, 2019, wasn’t the first to hit Jefferson City. Just after 6 p.m. on Sunday, April 18, 1880, a tornado struck nearby Cole County and the far west side of town. The injuries and ruin it caused were described in the <i>Peoples Tribune</i> and the <i>Evening State Journal</i>. The quarter-mile-wide tornado ravaged the Centertown, Elston, and Scruggs Station neighborhoods and continued as far east as the present Jaycees Fairgrounds, Country Club, and Capital Mall.<br />
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Lengthy newspaper accounts named forty families and individuals affected by the tornado, detailing their injuries and property damage. About twenty-five frame and log homes were damaged or destroyed. Farm animals were killed or blown away, orchards were downed, and people were hurled from their homes as far as forty feet. A house was blown onto the Missouri Pacific tracks, and a train crashed into it in the dark, nearly killing the engineer and fireman.<br />
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One of the tornado’s frightened survivors was eighteen-year-old Nannie Pollock, who lived with her parents and sisters on a farm near present-day Turnberry Drive (just west of the Country Club). Eleven years later in 1891, when she married John C. Renner and moved to Jefferson City’s Southside, she insisted that the house he was building for them, at 218 West Elm, have double-thick brick walls. She wanted it to be able to withstand a tornado!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyAL1X1tiA5sBVMRPsUnEkb8sBiyU8nAyd89wx6U9g0aLPwKJDiMxw3Fph4F1DIZNEm400YtuFF8UXpUFm1MXszfUEd6WdKJ1gdcvda7olFryxOhEzyP0Um4jK-Ta_5gy1S7SyAvstcSj7/s1600/Renner_house_1_CROPPED.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyAL1X1tiA5sBVMRPsUnEkb8sBiyU8nAyd89wx6U9g0aLPwKJDiMxw3Fph4F1DIZNEm400YtuFF8UXpUFm1MXszfUEd6WdKJ1gdcvda7olFryxOhEzyP0Um4jK-Ta_5gy1S7SyAvstcSj7/s400/Renner_house_1_CROPPED.jpg" width="400" height="273" data-original-width="1093" data-original-height="746" /></a><br />
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That solidly built 1891 brick house with extra-strong walls is still standing, 128 years later, testimony to a young woman scarred by the terrible 1880 tornado on the west side of Jefferson City.<br />
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©Walter A. Schroeder, 2019, with information from Pat Renner Schroeder<br />
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<i>This piece originally ran in the</i> Jefferson City News Tribune <i>as an ad for Oktoberfest on September 25, 2019.</i><br />
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Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-15712886251992262512019-09-18T15:58:00.000-05:002019-09-18T15:58:36.219-05:00Jefferson City’s First YMCAJefferson City’s popular Firley YMCA, at 525 Ellis Boulevard on the southern edge of the Southside, recently reopened after serious damage from the tornado of May 22, 2019. Most people don’t know that Jefferson City’s first YMCA was organized in the Southside (then called Munichburg) on November 2, 1881, at Central Evangelical Church, now Central United Church of Christ. At the time, it was a German-speaking congregation, so its YMCA was called the Christliche Jünglingsverein der Evangelischen Central Gemeinde (Young Men’s Christian Association of Evangelical Central Congregation). It was affiliated with the national YMCA organization.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-wT1FeJlGyQlVGL0a5fgSwPRpAp-iosXAB-ReXLYZy5JYQpnUWZFWVSTCl0p1hlMXwdaGAWr_Nawa1bhc9zMB85FiFSCpehI4gd9QTeGYnbIduF46xbtRLMPJi3b0Ld6yueZv1P_Tn9DH/s1600/experiment-resize.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-wT1FeJlGyQlVGL0a5fgSwPRpAp-iosXAB-ReXLYZy5JYQpnUWZFWVSTCl0p1hlMXwdaGAWr_Nawa1bhc9zMB85FiFSCpehI4gd9QTeGYnbIduF46xbtRLMPJi3b0Ld6yueZv1P_Tn9DH/s400/experiment-resize.jpg" width="400" height="255" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="653" /></a><br />
<i>The Central Evangelical Church's school (left, shown in 1881) was the home of Jefferson City's first YMCA.</i><br />
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It was common for German American churches to be among the first Midwestern sponsors of YMCAs, perhaps because of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turners">German penchant for calisthenics and exercise</a>, and for forming organizations. Membership began after confirmation at age 13 and lasted until age 30, when one became a honorary member. The organization’s constitution had rules, with cash fines, on attendance, language, and smoking (prohibited during singing and praying).<br />
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In keeping with the congregation’s openness to those of other faiths, Central’s YMCA included young men from other local congregations, including English-speaking ones. It also included members from families of all socioeconomic levels and thus was an “equalizer.” By 1895 the YMCA had 66 members but lost its affiliation with the national organization because it began to accept young women. The name was then changed to Christlicher Jügendverein (Christian Youth Organization).<br />
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Central’s YMCA was briefly resurrected in 1920, when the church’s Men’s Association authorized the YMCA to sign the contract with Brunswick to construct a bowling alley. By that time, the congregation had switched to English. Central’s YMCA disappears from the record not long after and was replaced by several youth groups.<br />
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©Walter A. Schroeder, 2019, with information from the Central UCC archives<br />
<i>Photo illustration from CUCC archives and from Harold Horstmann and Mrs. Gus Schwartz Sr.</i><br />
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Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-3841643401316543172018-11-06T13:18:00.005-06:002021-06-29T13:08:14.689-05:00Hott and Asel BaloneyIn 1849, John Michael Asel and Margaret Barbara Mueller emigrated from Bavaria to the United States. After marriage in New York, they moved to the Muenchberg (Munichburg) area of Jefferson City, where other Germans were settling. They built a log cabin at the corner of Madison and Ashley streets that stood until the late 1960s. During the early years, the Asels befriended Indians camping on the south side of town with Barbara’s home-baked bread and John’s cured meats. They became charter members of Central Evangelical Church (now Central United Church of Christ) when the congregation organized in 1857.<br />
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In 1852, when Jefferson City had a population of about one thousand, John Asel established a meat market on High Street. According to a 1964 article in the <i>Jefferson City News and Tribune</i>, his first ovens and smokehouse were fueled by giant logs pulled as driftwood from the Missouri River. The slaughterhouse was along the river just downstream from where the bridge is now. In winter, ice cut from the Missouri River was stacked in a huge icehouse. During the Civil War, the Asel meat market sold sausage sandwiches to soldiers stationed in the city.<br />
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As Jefferson City grew after the war, the Asel meat market prospered not only among the large number of German immigrants but also among the city population in general. It gained a strong reputation for fresh and cured meats, especially for its smoked, cooked sausage made from recipes brought from Bavaria.<br />
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John Asel died in 1873 and Barbara in 1891, but several of their eight children continued in the meat business. In addition to the main High Street market, which had different locations on High Street, other Asel meat markets were at the corner of West Main and Bolivar and in Washington, Missouri. Among the advertised items in 1915 were pork ham roast, boiling beef, Porterhouse steak, sugar cured bellies, dry salt meat, smoked spareribs, fancy country hams, calf liver, sweetbreads, and homemade bockwurst every Saturday.<br />
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In 1915, John and Barbara’s son Christ (Christopher) Asel went into partnership with William Hott to establish the Crescent Meat Market in the commercial heart of Munichburg at 110 E. Dunklin (now a parking lot just east of the ECCO Lounge). A smokehouse was behind the store. A 1915 newspaper article described it as “clean as a pin and finished in oak, marble and plate glass,” with an enameled refrigerator. They carried a full line of meats, lard, and sausage, and the two proprietors were noted for their courtesy. Christ’s son Ralph was a butcher apprentice in the market.<br />
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On June 1, 1931, William Hott and Ralph Asel relocated the meat market to a new building at 711 Madison Street, on land that had been in the Asel family since John and Barbara built their log cabin around 1850. William Hott retired in 1940, but Ralph Asel continued to operate the meat market alone under the name of “Hott & Asel” for another twenty-four years. It is this location, on Madison Street, that is so well remembered by Southsiders as the place to go to get their meat, especially the famous Hott & Asel garlic baloney.<br />
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Until 1964, a small creek ran behind the Madison Street store and went underground at the intersection of Madison and Dunklin. The wooded land around the creek was “the jungle” to Ralph’s nephews, Bill and Tom Asel, who lived nearby, at the corner of Ashley and Madison. Ralph Asel had no children, and Bill and Tom recall their Uncle Ralph awakening them early in the morning, before school, to chop cloves of fresh garlic and to chop wood for smoking the famous baloney. The boys also tied the sausage links while holding their hands in “salty, briney water that really toughened up our hands.” The smokehouse was just behind the market, along the creek, and the entire Munichburg neighborhood could tell, from the powerful aroma, when Ralph Asel was making fresh baloney. To the locals, “good eatin’” was Hott & Asel baloney, soda crackers, and a bottle of Moerschel’s beer from the Capital City Brewery.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7lVjPBtLNbgq6wsFrkf7JvzH_-pvTHSuyJxaa9W7rRHFjtWZpwNmR5k-Dcx61hAfrZH1L7LqbAroU-b4wHUkGQmsJPvKU-NJ1NrkQIPdLCUuY1Dj-VI6zK90AB7kJCEVqItJSCbQTlKG1/s1600/Swiss_Bavarian_Bologna.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7lVjPBtLNbgq6wsFrkf7JvzH_-pvTHSuyJxaa9W7rRHFjtWZpwNmR5k-Dcx61hAfrZH1L7LqbAroU-b4wHUkGQmsJPvKU-NJ1NrkQIPdLCUuY1Dj-VI6zK90AB7kJCEVqItJSCbQTlKG1/s400/Swiss_Bavarian_Bologna.jpg" width="400" height="230" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="590" /></a><br />
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The store was plain and immaculately clean. A single display case surmounted with a large scale was the central fixture. Behind it was a butcher table for cutting and packaging meats and a table where Mrs. Asel would knit and answer the telephone. A lattice-topped partition framed the opening to a large, walk-in refrigerator behind which was a workroom for butchering. Neighborhood boys remember the store by the antlers on the walls and the sawdust on the floor. Women, who did most of the grocery shopping then, remember the friendliness and candid humor of Ralph and his wife, Milburn.<br />
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When he retired in 1964, Ralph told the <i>News and Tribune</i> that he and Mrs. Asel were finally going to take their honeymoon trip: “We probably will go to Florida, Cuba, Paris—and other Missouri towns.”<br />
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Ralph Asel closed his business on June 30, 1964, ending 102 years of Asel meat markets in Jefferson City. He sold the building to Milo Walz, who cleared and filled the land behind the building, put the creek underground, and build a hardware store with a concrete parking lot. (See the historic photos on <a href="http://munichburgmemories.blogspot.com/2012/09/remembering-francis-joseph-zeisberg.html">this post</a>.)<br />
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Old timers recall snacking on Hott & Asel baloney, soda crackers, and beer after a baseball game or in the middle of the day. Though Jefferson City residents could no longer buy their favorite baloney after 1964, the recipes were not lost. One of the recipes was passed on from Ralph Asel to Johnny Wilbers, a butcher who worked at a grocery store on Monroe Street. Johnny Wilbers then passed the recipe on to his son, Dick Wilbers. In 2004, Dick operated Johnny’s Butcher Shop & Bar-B-Que off Route B, where Viet’s Pub and Grill is in 2018. With Dick Wilbers’s cooperation, and the meat processing services of Swiss Meat and Sausage Company near Hermann, Missouri, the Old Munichburg Association was able to bring back Ralph Asel’s Hott & Asel baloney in 2004. We sold 400 pounds of it in one-pound rings at Oktoberfest, so festival attendees could recreate the pleasures of the past. Dick Wilbers passed away in January 2011.<br />
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Early in 2005, another garlic baloney recipe was discovered in a book published by William Hott in 1912. His <i>Secrets of Meat Curing and Sausage Making</i> included another variation of the baloney fondly referred to as Hott & Asel Baloney. So in 2005, the Old Munichburg Association again hired the Swiss Meat & Sausage Company to produce a limited quantity of garlic baloney, this time using the Hott recipe. The association sold 1-lb. rings of the baloney at Oktoberfest for $7 each or 3 for $20. We also made 1/4-lb. sausage packages, which we sold as part of an "Oktoberfest Snack-Pack" in good old-fashioned white paper sacks, along with crackers and samples of Munichburg member Jo Meyer's Mama Jo's Gourmet Honey Mustard. It was fun to offer this unique baloney relished by generations of Jefferson City residents.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkJwvj0i9UPLBY-P39Vm6GEAhHiUmUR-MVxJ0vAfUfQeQpxZauZMJ3C0vmWpm52v1YWdchjQ1hWnxNZi3Cwis3cpOIDrJFcQos4Ujf6FUPKDKJV0SLxo1q42YOSoNNx0dx-vll46lXOY14/s1600/this_one.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkJwvj0i9UPLBY-P39Vm6GEAhHiUmUR-MVxJ0vAfUfQeQpxZauZMJ3C0vmWpm52v1YWdchjQ1hWnxNZi3Cwis3cpOIDrJFcQos4Ujf6FUPKDKJV0SLxo1q42YOSoNNx0dx-vll46lXOY14/s320/this_one.jpg" width="320" height="197" data-original-width="915" data-original-height="563" /></a><br />
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Updating this story in 2018, we’d like to note that our friends at <a href="https://www.swissmeats.com/">Swiss Meat and Sausage Company</a>, which produced the association’s recipes for Hott & Asel baloney, sell 8 ounce chubs of their Rhine Valley German Style Bologna that is a LOT like the Hott & Asel recipe. It’s fully cooked, though it must be refrigerated or kept frozen. If you haven’t been to their shop, about eleven miles south of Hermann on MO 19, you should go there sometime. Lots of deals on some tasty meats! If you can’t make it there personally, remember that they can ship anywhere in the continental United States! (Christmas is coming . . . !)<br />
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And if you’ve enjoyed this little trip down memory lane, consider sending a contribution to the <a href="http://www.oldmunichburg.com/apps/OMAmembership_18.pdf">Old Munichburg Association</a>, for helping keep these memories alive.<br />
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Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-64426974504418546842018-10-23T06:00:00.000-05:002018-10-23T06:00:07.506-05:00The Gundelfinger HouseFew know the story of the gray apartment building on the southwest corner of Broadway and Elm. It begins with Daniel Gundelfinger, son of Bavarian immigrants and well-known High Street hardware merchant. He built it as his home in 1892, three years before the Herman Tanner residence on the south end of that block was built. The newspaper said the two houses were “very elegant,” noting that they bookended what was becoming “one of the [city’s] most impressive residential blocks.” The spacious, two-story brick Gundelfinger home had a deeply recessed, arched entrance on Broadway; prominent stone lintels; ornate, dentiled cornices; mansard roof with decorative metal parapet and a hexagonal turret; and two huge metal urns flanking the entrance that identified it as a hardware merchant’s home.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4XFE32vePYqEqoTpynmcj3yfrO5MOHt6o68fJJzStGWVCdL5aVXvqFgznleUziHS0fElsiNSzucq2nm6OE2eCNHJyNiIZPK3h3l6v-vv6svcjv4Vm2vTBLxQwU5-ls-eTFFzHkNkFCZhd/s1600/Gundelfinger_past-present_resized_for_blog.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4XFE32vePYqEqoTpynmcj3yfrO5MOHt6o68fJJzStGWVCdL5aVXvqFgznleUziHS0fElsiNSzucq2nm6OE2eCNHJyNiIZPK3h3l6v-vv6svcjv4Vm2vTBLxQwU5-ls-eTFFzHkNkFCZhd/s400/Gundelfinger_past-present_resized_for_blog.jpg" width="400" height="223" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="570" /></a><br />
<i>Left: Gundelfinger House ca. 1920 (Schroeder family collection); right: Gundelfinger Building, 2018 (courtesy Matthew Holland).</i><br />
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All the other houses in the 600 block postdate the Gundelfinger house and are now on the National Register of Historic Places, but the Gundelfinger house is not. Daniel built the house for his wife, the Bavarian-born Margaretha Hoehler (age 17 when married), and the happy couple moved in. But she became seriously ill, and in a few months, in 1893, she died. Her funeral was held in the parlor of the new house.<br />
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Daniel then married Bertha (Bessie) Roesen in 1895, and family life resumed in the big house; they had two sons in short time, Daniel W. and Karl H. But tragedy struck again: in July 1906 a probate jury declared Daniel of “unsound mind and incompetent of conducting his affairs.” He was committed to the State Hospital in Fulton and died there in November 1907. What would become of Daniel’s dream house?<br />
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The Roesen family was intermarried with the Moerschels, who had the big Capitol Brewery. Brewery owner Jacob Moerschel lived in the Gundelfinger house while he was building his Villa Panorama mansion on Swifts Highway in 1907–1908. A much smaller home was built on the property, 602 Broadway, for Bertha and sons. (Now it’s a driveway.) In 1916 the “Bertha Gundelfinger property” (two houses at 600 and 602 Broadway) was sold for $2,500 to neighbor Nelson C. Burch. The widow moved to rural Columbia to live with her son Karl, who, incidentally, committed suicide at age 44.<br />
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Between 1931 and 1935 the Gundelfinger house was transformed from a spacious single-family residence into four apartments. The Broadway entrance was eliminated, and a new, pointed-arch, canopied entrance was opened facing Elm Street to access the two apartments on each floor. The lintels were removed and all windows made smaller, changing its appearance from Victorian to Craftsman. The mansard roof, dentiled cornice (minus parapet), and turret were retained. Also, a two-story addition was fused to the back of the house, with a matching pointed-arch, canopied entrance for the two new apartments.<br />
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Today, the six-apartment Gundelfinger Building looks as if it has been this way all along, but its history is betrayed by the roofline—the addition lacks a mansard roof. The building’s address was changed from 600 Broadway to 301 and 301½ W. Elm. The original brick exterior was faced with tan stucco, mirroring the tan stucco just added to the catty-corner brick German Methodist Church building that had also been converted into apartments. The Gundelfinger’s stucco has since been painted gray.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCofKm0TIbZjMKqoc_fJf9NkJM8l3EZQNFQxaTHDbykjUaCBdoRh7e24hBiKYTKpAvsM5RP5vXCPKEIUl-L_SA4Qc4mpekURRKrM9DCguvEZLnSVZCrsBQieOPy6U3_83yv1qqESA6Tgyz/s1600/Gundelfinger_Building_9-26-18.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCofKm0TIbZjMKqoc_fJf9NkJM8l3EZQNFQxaTHDbykjUaCBdoRh7e24hBiKYTKpAvsM5RP5vXCPKEIUl-L_SA4Qc4mpekURRKrM9DCguvEZLnSVZCrsBQieOPy6U3_83yv1qqESA6Tgyz/s400/Gundelfinger_Building_9-26-18.jpg" width="400" height="285" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="729" /></a><br />
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Since the 1930s the apartments have served as rental residences of Missouri state office professionals, including an assistant attorney general, lawyers at the Supreme Court, state representatives, and professionals with the Tax and Public Service commissions, State Auditor, Education and Revenue departments, Board of Health, and Missouri Highway Patrol.<br />
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The 126-year-old building is now owned by Matt Holland and Eric Hemeyer (H&H Property Management), who are renovating it inside and out to make it once again a sought-after residence in Munichburg, Jefferson City’s historic Southside.<br />
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©Walter A. Schroeder, 2018<br />
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<i>This piece originally ran in the</i> Jefferson City News Tribune <i>as an ad for Oktoberfest on September 23, 2018</i>.<br />
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Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-12946896628144001642018-10-16T06:00:00.000-05:002018-10-16T06:00:01.880-05:00Hickory Street Neighborhood ParkLots in the Southside’s Woodcrest Addition, between Monroe and Jackson streets and Hickory and Union streets, went on public sale in September 1914. The potential growth in this first platted addition to Jefferson City after cars became common prompted the Jefferson City School Board to consider opening a new elementary school there. The School Board purchased land for a new school in the 1200 block of Monroe. In 1919 Dr. Charles P. Hough donated four lots in the new Woodcrest Addition to the School Board for a playground, stipulating that it be named the “George W. Hough Playground” to honor his father. Hough also donated $1,500 for playground equipment. These four donated lots are on the southeast corner of Hickory and Adams streets.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEx7kcC92TJB80TNkPTQWO9yAwyRi3kxTdLPbdkqS0GrwJfqetgp6Hw5wsimeIZDst38gSF34u9pgeczIitAX2E5vJTsOCq_JVy0wuB0p5aZ0J8pgM8SNwLat2SaC9VuodZUCcE1UuWiL0/s1600/Hickory_Street_Park.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEx7kcC92TJB80TNkPTQWO9yAwyRi3kxTdLPbdkqS0GrwJfqetgp6Hw5wsimeIZDst38gSF34u9pgeczIitAX2E5vJTsOCq_JVy0wuB0p5aZ0J8pgM8SNwLat2SaC9VuodZUCcE1UuWiL0/s400/Hickory_Street_Park.jpg" width="400" height="288" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="738" /></a><br />
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As the years passed, the School Board never built a school on the Monroe Street land and sold it in 1946 to the Missouri Osteopathic Association to build Still Hospital, which has since become Capital Region Medical Center. The School Board, however, did <i>not</i> sell its playground at the corner of Hickory and Adams—it conveyed it to the City of Jefferson for management as a neighborhood park, an arrangement that continued for many decades. Then, in April 2016, the Jefferson City School District, concerned with potential issues of liability, deeded the land to the City of Jefferson for $10 for continued use as a playground.<br />
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Now 99 years old, the Hickory Street Park is one of the oldest tracts of public land in Jefferson City specifically designated as a park. (Charles’s brother Arthur Hough donated the land for Hough Park in 1917.) The well-maintained, shady, popular playground in Jefferson City’s Southside is today a shining example of what a neighborhood park should be.<br />
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By the way, Hickory Street was <i>not named for the tree</i> but for the 7th US president, Andrew Jackson, nicknamed “Old Hickory.” “Jackson” was already in use for the next street east of the park. Adams Street is named for the 6th president. The next street south of the park is named for the 10th president, John Tyler. The next street west of the park is named for the 5th president, James Monroe. Children using the playground are surrounded by US history—four presidents!<br />
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©Walter A. Schroeder, 2018<br />
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<i>This piece originally ran in the</i> Jefferson City News Tribune <i>as an ad for Oktoberfest on September 16, 2018</i>.<br />
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Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-69132067024648901862018-10-09T06:00:00.000-05:002018-10-09T06:00:04.501-05:00The Broadway Street SextupletsThe Broadway Street sextuplets are at least 110 years old this year! Six nearly identical houses are located in a half block of Broadway, at numbers 711, 713, 715, 717, 719, and 721. Passersby notice their similarity even at a glance! The sextuplets were built at the beginning of the nineteenth century and by 1908 all had been occupied as rental residences of Southside families of modest incomes. In time, they were sold to individual owners.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1yRRvuu5elqf0CCXAmUFw7kT12A1UZOLrNrL_WstLpaK-UibxuHEcc2s1FMasfnh7TmYLq8MhECRQ4RCt5gF9g5_sI_E9l_wRgiRZ9XmcgtM1B13NuCxFHOHbnNJxOuls_Ou1N7g7HZUQ/s1600/Broadway_Sextuplets.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1yRRvuu5elqf0CCXAmUFw7kT12A1UZOLrNrL_WstLpaK-UibxuHEcc2s1FMasfnh7TmYLq8MhECRQ4RCt5gF9g5_sI_E9l_wRgiRZ9XmcgtM1B13NuCxFHOHbnNJxOuls_Ou1N7g7HZUQ/s400/Broadway_Sextuplets.jpg" width="400" height="236" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="603" /></a><br />
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The six were built before cars were planned for by homebuilders, resulting in them being so closely set on 30-foot-wide lots that the few feet between them allows no space for a driveway. Instead, when their inlot (901) was subdivided, a 10-foot-wide alley was designated behind all of them, from Tanner Way to Ashley Street. The alley—originally used for horses and wagons—still gives the residents access to the back of their narrow properties. Each lot had a wagon shed, now a garage, in the rear. The two houses on the ends were built slightly larger on their back sides than the other four.<br />
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The six are styled like many other small houses for working-class families at that time in Munichburg. Each is a red brick, one-and-a-half-story structure with stylized window framings and doorways. Each has a gabled projection on its north side that is complemented by a small inset porch on the south.<br />
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Just as human sextuplets will evolve different personalities as they mature, these architectural siblings, under individual ownerships, have also evolved differently over the decades. Some have been enlarged by second-floor rooms, and some have new siding, new porches, or additions in the back. As property values are increasing in Munichburg, several of the sextuplets are being updated and renovated to be comfortable, small, owner-occupied residences or investment properties. Their original similarity as sextuplets continues to attract the attention of people passing by.<br />
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©Walter A. Schroeder, 2018<br />
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<i>This piece originally ran in the</i> Jefferson City News Tribune <i>as an ad for Oktoberfest on September 9, 2018</i>.<br />
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Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-3012810982484775022018-08-29T14:39:00.000-05:002018-10-10T21:42:30.904-05:00Buddy’s Stories: Growing Up in Jefferson City in the 1940s<b><i>Everyone has a story. This is Buddy’s.</i></b><br />
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<i><b>Meet Buddy:</b></i> a bike-riding, towheaded, everyday kid growing up on Elm Street during World War II. Everyone he knows is a proud American, including his German-immigrant grandparents. Life on the Southside isn’t rosy, but people do what they can to get by—and Buddy and his friends grow up learning to reduce, reuse, and recycle . . . to be self-sufficient . . . and to help others.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPsuciF_OwjiaMgSb69WWpKSab0odJy84ftXe7NZQjkcadC_d7r0odl_nTiwvA9bYrGUmAvcNqOBST7ZmjFW6z_HID6XBLVeZ8PSk3kO7xp_SASXQWiw4SDynskuCK2zccNExVYstz3tox/s1600/Buddy%2527s_Stories_front_cover.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1069" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPsuciF_OwjiaMgSb69WWpKSab0odJy84ftXe7NZQjkcadC_d7r0odl_nTiwvA9bYrGUmAvcNqOBST7ZmjFW6z_HID6XBLVeZ8PSk3kO7xp_SASXQWiw4SDynskuCK2zccNExVYstz3tox/s640/Buddy%2527s_Stories_front_cover.jpg" width="427" /></a></div><br />
Generous with details, the geographer and historian Walter A. Schroeder—nicknamed “Buddy” in his youth—shares his personal memories of growing up in Jefferson City, Missouri. His descriptions will resonate with people who remember those simpler times, and they will cause others to reflect on what we lost as the years went by.<br />
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These 42 brief essays cover an array of topics about Jefferson City places, everyday life, the effects of World War II, and expressions of patriotism. How did families make ends meet? How did kids participate in the war effort? What was it like to have bread, eggs, milk, and coal delivered, to make sauerkraut in the basement, to be fitted for shoes with commercial X-ray machines? What did kids do for fun? How did the old Missouri River Bridge rotate, and what was it like to go to the dime store?<br />
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Engagingly written, enhanced by the judgment of a professional historian, and illustrated with 72 photos, maps, and scrapbook mementos, <i>Buddy’s Stories</i> is a vibrant perspective on Jefferson City history . . . and a fond commemoration of the way things used to be.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhER_F186a_Jg4ZuJGXIgXDjaExzeq29SHdOpgIZ4Cuy1FdMIXdfU2WKk2XvB1SuokobZtm3HuK51OQ9L2cmnWs6-o0chI9pb1Uu0dXYIPX_3ZBUNfLK-OdkjghD40ROxmsIuF_DyGyFiPc/s1600/Richard_and_Buddy.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" data-original-height="453" data-original-width="326" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhER_F186a_Jg4ZuJGXIgXDjaExzeq29SHdOpgIZ4Cuy1FdMIXdfU2WKk2XvB1SuokobZtm3HuK51OQ9L2cmnWs6-o0chI9pb1Uu0dXYIPX_3ZBUNfLK-OdkjghD40ROxmsIuF_DyGyFiPc/s320/Richard_and_Buddy.jpg" width="230" /></a></div><br />
<blockquote>“I helped my grandfather make beer while Doctor Hill came to our house and brought my brother Walter Albert Schroeder into the world. He cost twenty-five dollars. My parents got a bargain, and I got a ‘buddy.’”</blockquote><blockquote>—Richard A. Schroeder, older brother</blockquote><br />
<blockquote>“This book is a real treasure. Buddy treats us to recollections of our community. It is as if he, Richard, and I are sitting together talking about the old days.”</blockquote><blockquote>—Thomas K. Schroeder, younger brother</blockquote><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><b>COPIES WILL BE AVAILABLE AT JEFFERSON CITY'S OKTOBERFEST,<br />
SEPT. 28 AND 29, 2018</b></div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 700;"><br />
</span></div><b><div style="text-align: center;"><b>AUTHOR SIGNING 10:30 a.m. to Noon Sept. 29</b><br />
<b>at the Old Munichburg booth</b></div></b><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;">Published in 2018 by the Old Munichburg Association</div><div style="text-align: center;">200 pages; 70 photographs, maps, and illustrations</div><div style="text-align: center;">$15</div><br />
Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-10373986922960946062018-07-15T16:13:00.000-05:002018-09-26T15:09:20.558-05:00When a Steamboat Docked on Dunklin StreetWhat? A steamboat in the heart of Munichburg? How could this possibly be?<br />
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It’s true, and here’s how it happened.<br />
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The Nieghorn family of Cole County has in its family history an intriguing story of German immigrants coming to Jefferson City in 1844. This story was told to me by Gary Schmutzler of Jefferson City, a Nieghorn descendant. Gary heard it from his great uncle Andy Nieghorn, who heard it from his immigrant grandmother Hartenstein. It’s so unusual that it could not have been made up.<br />
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The Nieghorns and Hartensteins were among the first Bavarian immigrants to Cole County farms. The Hartensteins came through the port of New Orleans, then up the Mississippi by steamboat, then up the Missouri, also by steamboat. For the Missouri River part of the trip, they traveled in small, short steamboats more like a river ferry, not monsters like today’s <i>Delta Queen</i> or <i>Admiral</i>. The immigrants had to come by river, of course, because Missouri had no railroads in the 1840s.<br />
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When they reached the little town of Jefferson City, barely twenty years old, the boat left the Missouri River, entered Wear’s Creek, and continued upstream into its East Branch to where Central Dairy facilities are now, and then it moved south one block to Dunklin Street. That would put the boat with its immigrants into what is today the low "backyard" of Busch’s Florist. This is what that area looks like today.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyh3oDSex8bpr6STNQxReAMIT9_9OTfCtOrH_KOMjEbe1VJXXk4E5jiKb3J4pmpjH6b-HaeS7ofkcbKa4Pc0awlhWoUzUJeJh38FdzfSkqo67Uhu7ZRyLsd9sNqLoGFEv02WnffS_iEJea/s1600/Low_area_n_of_dunklin.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyh3oDSex8bpr6STNQxReAMIT9_9OTfCtOrH_KOMjEbe1VJXXk4E5jiKb3J4pmpjH6b-HaeS7ofkcbKa4Pc0awlhWoUzUJeJh38FdzfSkqo67Uhu7ZRyLsd9sNqLoGFEv02WnffS_iEJea/s400/Low_area_n_of_dunklin.jpg" width="400" height="306" data-original-width="1004" data-original-height="768" /></a><br />
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The immigrant Hartenstein party got off the boat, transferred to wagons, and traveled southwest overland a few miles to the Zion neighborhood, where they settled among Nieghorns and other German Lutheran immigrants and became farmers.<br />
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If that family account is to be believed, how can it be explained?<br />
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The family account says the Hartensteins arrived in 1844. In that year, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Missouri River experienced its greatest flood ever in recorded history, by volume of water. The Great Flood of 1993, though somewhat less in volume, actually rose higher because of later channel engineering and levees. But the 1844 flood happened before the river had been so deeply channeled and walled in. The floodwater created ten-foot-high sand dunes in the river bottoms, and the river channel changed its course in several locations. Historical records tell of river pilots navigating their steamboats over the tops of submerged trees and croplands in the Missouri River bottoms.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhP_j4eHOGLJwnD2KjqWV0qUzlvMXQf4PCjgIk1cXE6GGe8-1ZGCTmXh20dmPRHJd8VLlesQDLWTEL45FExT0sKHMjuQIKYyl6gpWri7biL5qG3MIv_0pRXsFCASfq9qz9jF27q88fKqq_u/s1600/big_muddy_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhP_j4eHOGLJwnD2KjqWV0qUzlvMXQf4PCjgIk1cXE6GGe8-1ZGCTmXh20dmPRHJd8VLlesQDLWTEL45FExT0sKHMjuQIKYyl6gpWri7biL5qG3MIv_0pRXsFCASfq9qz9jF27q88fKqq_u/s400/big_muddy_2.jpg" width="400" height="314" data-original-width="977" data-original-height="768" /></a><br />
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With the Missouri River at such a high flood stage, water backed up into Wear’s Creek, as it always does in any Missouri River flood. If you remember the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXG_S6qPeqg">Great Flood of 1993 in Jefferson City</a>, you remember water backing up in Wear’s Creek and flooding the Capitol Plaza Hotel and the parking lots around it. In fact, river backwater continued upstream in the East Branch channel past Central Dairy and even beyond Monroe Street. So the boat carrying the Hartenstein family could have come up into the Southside using the quiet Missouri River backwater just like moving into the arm of a big lake. In 1844 there were no bridges over the creek, either for a railroad or for wagons. The creek was totally unobstructed and would have been open water.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi44dcREkCApF0or-3_wEwyXZF3xr6BtK-RxGaXfHk1b2xFzkRDVKSOT1oXd08JFNMTRw2smsn_RQc9nxEFTBwW8OvUZJgDEnQ-YYEwGgFZwEHoFLkBzyaoRCEk39FlDC6ziWZphjnhZhyphenhyphenF/s1600/East_branch_Wears_Creek.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi44dcREkCApF0or-3_wEwyXZF3xr6BtK-RxGaXfHk1b2xFzkRDVKSOT1oXd08JFNMTRw2smsn_RQc9nxEFTBwW8OvUZJgDEnQ-YYEwGgFZwEHoFLkBzyaoRCEk39FlDC6ziWZphjnhZhyphenhyphenF/s400/East_branch_Wears_Creek.jpg" width="400" height="294" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="753" /></a><br />
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If you stand on the Dunklin Street sidewalk behind Busch’s greenhouse and lean over the railing, you will see how low the ground is there.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTL8p0ujB_P_U1hMSFWlB4j3ID9l2ez1zRnr3myFBuaUKTpnp5LELVU-NZOSvCG2fXWZFVatIML9YCeILHGuNZzREJuvqvcq0pLJcQjqGq2S9qY0WcD9ReC0cjhATkJP2NNm9Zk9Jv1iuE/s1600/Buschs_backyard.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTL8p0ujB_P_U1hMSFWlB4j3ID9l2ez1zRnr3myFBuaUKTpnp5LELVU-NZOSvCG2fXWZFVatIML9YCeILHGuNZzREJuvqvcq0pLJcQjqGq2S9qY0WcD9ReC0cjhATkJP2NNm9Zk9Jv1iuE/s400/Buschs_backyard.jpg" width="400" height="251" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="642" /></a><br />
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A small creek, visible in an 1892 photo, used to flow behind Busch’s greenhouse. Water from a flooded Wear’s Creek readily backed up into that low ground. In fact, the 100 block of East Dunklin, between Jefferson and Madison, was originally at that low level you see behind Busch’s.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigEq0SU0db2b9qfHpfleU4qJXh8TE45RXaLoTUq4F6cXQdjB_HdmZqD3jBT5kse0KAhO442txBuuU0xYE9ZbotAZgf3SBIu773gqAseyPfW2Uw2VMDABOwc2-yYjzSjXfRHVqQLgNYmJt3/s1600/dunklin_dip.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigEq0SU0db2b9qfHpfleU4qJXh8TE45RXaLoTUq4F6cXQdjB_HdmZqD3jBT5kse0KAhO442txBuuU0xYE9ZbotAZgf3SBIu773gqAseyPfW2Uw2VMDABOwc2-yYjzSjXfRHVqQLgNYmJt3/s400/dunklin_dip.jpg" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="575" /></a><br />
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It wasn’t until 1912 that the city decided to fill in the north side of Dunklin ten feet or so, to build up the street and make it relatively flat in that block.<br />
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If you lean out over that sidewalk railing and look back under the Dunklin Street sidewalk, you will see the original 1912 limestone retaining wall the city built to hold up the dirt fill that Dunklin Street is built on.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTYLiAZunR6gyWVb9TEtUF9pruxHhAyEZRw6tSSNhErF6SDd5TSsc2_EfM75pLDg_7up9C0Y2D7xSA6oNx-NlYyq8XdDEQbSKXrwbzulIaa8iyKkCQ3TYKZlBFjSMt8uVjLWGr86hBYYaG/s1600/Dunklin_Retaining_Wall.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTYLiAZunR6gyWVb9TEtUF9pruxHhAyEZRw6tSSNhErF6SDd5TSsc2_EfM75pLDg_7up9C0Y2D7xSA6oNx-NlYyq8XdDEQbSKXrwbzulIaa8iyKkCQ3TYKZlBFjSMt8uVjLWGr86hBYYaG/s640/Dunklin_Retaining_Wall.jpg" width="480" height="640" data-original-width="768" data-original-height="1024" /></a><br />
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My conclusion is that the Nieghorn family story of the Hartensteins coming all the way to Dunklin Street by steamboat in 1844 is entirely believable. It shows that the stories we hand down from generation to generation may not be distorted or inaccurate retellings, tall tales, or figments of someone’s imagination, but actually could have happened, however unbelievable it seems at first.<br />
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But wait! There’s more to the story! When John Nieghorn (1819–1899), who came to Cole County about the same time as the Hartensteins, retired from his business as a tailor and farmer in the Zion community at age seventy-one, he came back to the same place on Dunklin Street where the Hartensteins disembarked from the boat in 1844. He built a three-story brick hotel there in 1892, called the Nieghorn Haus, and he spent his final retirement years living in it.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuD9HrQbwMm7M-HRypfwspbMfbQy7MI6bufWGa9CAhcWnuhKfKfSPqFABrH2VkTqmiiBIQHB9fILF6DrWik25gwU5_9mB-5C6vO4p4msKpVu_JEer88EL-5ArGqOfaLYyZuX9R156Q7TDB/s1600/Bassmann.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuD9HrQbwMm7M-HRypfwspbMfbQy7MI6bufWGa9CAhcWnuhKfKfSPqFABrH2VkTqmiiBIQHB9fILF6DrWik25gwU5_9mB-5C6vO4p4msKpVu_JEer88EL-5ArGqOfaLYyZuX9R156Q7TDB/s400/Bassmann.jpg" width="400" height="252" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="644" /></a><br />
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That hotel building, at 120-122 East Dunklin, and later called the Bassmann Apartments, was thoroughly renovated and updated by Phil Kolb and Steve Rollins in 2010 and is now on the National Register of Historic Places as the Nieghorn Hotel. Thank you, Nieghorns and Hartensteins, for giving us great Munichburg memories!<br />
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Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-6273787457415946932018-04-30T22:39:00.007-05:002022-05-13T14:46:34.761-05:00Hugo Busch and Busch's Florist<p>In 1890 German immigrant Hugo Otto Busch and partner Charles Purzner bought Mathias Nagel’s florist and landscape business on the corner of Madison and East Dunklin. Nagel had been in business there since at least 1873. Busch bought out his partner in 1902 and expanded the business, calling it Capital City Greenhouse. In 1909 he purchased 25 acres of farmland between the 1400 blocks of St. Mary’s Blvd. and Missouri Blvd. to raise plants and flowers. That land today is occupied by Jefferson Plaza and Busch St. In the 1930s Busch had eight large greenhouses: six were on Missouri Blvd., and two were connected to the sales room on Madison Street. He had a total of 50,000 square feet under glass. Busch annually raised thousands of poinsettias, roses, and carnations for his business and for wholesaling. Busch’s Florist served the general public with cut flowers and bedding plants and also decorated for weddings, funerals, and church events and for state government functions at the Capitol and governors’ inaugurations. Busch’s began FTD service around 1920 and rose to rank among FTD’s national leaders. Busch’s has long been considered Jefferson City’s premier florist.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKnwNUXDif9osp1dN_YZjqCMsgBwpj_Lo3PMiLUXgDbKF4epm_HLf_J4buev8DiljZXhUK3KKiZBuzOJgyFMomi3Lo6Fvczg-ILuPIFToIJd5y5_pzHMT14GFwZBJMITX30R2i_mm3DpTskmZuSdcCDNgokg3YasOXxVIt42hlRZD6ap4pbsSlvFPW_g/s503/HugoBusch2x2.5at200dpi.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="200" data-original-height="503" data-original-width="407" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKnwNUXDif9osp1dN_YZjqCMsgBwpj_Lo3PMiLUXgDbKF4epm_HLf_J4buev8DiljZXhUK3KKiZBuzOJgyFMomi3Lo6Fvczg-ILuPIFToIJd5y5_pzHMT14GFwZBJMITX30R2i_mm3DpTskmZuSdcCDNgokg3YasOXxVIt42hlRZD6ap4pbsSlvFPW_g/s200/HugoBusch2x2.5at200dpi.jpg"/></a></div>
<p>Hugo and his German immigrant wife Lina (Carolina Jung) lived at 117 East Dunklin (part of the business property), where they raised eight sons and two daughters. Six of the sons worked with their father at some time. Son Arthur began working in the 1930s and in 1955 assumed control of the business when his father died at age 89. Art and wife Leota were known for their personal attention to customers and for their friendly, skilled employees. Art died in 1990, and Leota continued until 1997, when the business left the Busch family after 107 years. John Pelzer then owned it, proudly continuing the name Busch’s Florist. The business is now owned by Reid Millard, who in 2018 has renovated the landmark greenhouse on “the most beautiful corner in Jefferson City.”</p>
<p>Hugo Busch was a founding member of Southside Boosters that formed in 1912 to promote the Southside. Busch’s Florist has been an anchor to its business community for more than a century and is an active member of the Old Munichburg Association.</p>
<p><i>This piece originally ran in the</i> Jefferson City News Tribune.</p>
<p><i>Copyright 2018, by Walter A. Schroeder</i></p>
<p><i>Photo of Hugo Busch, age 79 (1945), courtesy Trinity Lutheran Church, Jefferson City, Missouri</i></p>Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-27521143815290667252018-03-12T07:26:00.000-05:002018-03-12T07:26:01.743-05:00Mr. Hugo Busch’s PansiesOn June 8, 2013, the Old Munichburg Association unveiled <i>The Historic South Side Mural</i>, which the group had commissioned local artist Jim Dyke to paint. The 48-feet-long mural is designed as a pair of panoramic streetscapes; it depicts the long history of the Munichburg neighborhood via an overlapping potpourri of images from different time periods.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJQv2TWOqRnJgAjy2V2i7XeKUxyJXhspCaeztWPks1PdI_rOR6GIpOYiLh6BuwjwklDh0r9TiOUYleJeuIVA4xJLmwT2h1NMKSWf_QQ6pB9sOfQWYc9NPPx9KI09HYKL6cBXICbIBVj62I/s1600/muralsection.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJQv2TWOqRnJgAjy2V2i7XeKUxyJXhspCaeztWPks1PdI_rOR6GIpOYiLh6BuwjwklDh0r9TiOUYleJeuIVA4xJLmwT2h1NMKSWf_QQ6pB9sOfQWYc9NPPx9KI09HYKL6cBXICbIBVj62I/s400/muralsection.jpg" width="400" height="168" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="430" /></a><br />
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The location of the mural, 117 East Dunklin Street in Jefferson City, originally held the residence of Hugo and Carolina (Lena) Busch and their family of ten children. Built around 1900, the modest-looking brick house was one and a half stories above the street, but it had a full lower floor because the land the house was built on lay ten to fifteen feet below the street level. The house was really a two-and-a-half-story house. It is prominently shown in the mural and labeled as the Busch house.<br />
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The building that the mural is in was put up in the 1950s by Milo H. Walz to house Missouri state offices. Later, it was bought by Central Dairy/Prairie Farms and converted into a warehouse, with the first floor removed so that now, if you were able to open the sealed front doors and enter, you would drop ten to fifteen feet to the ground below. The mural is installed in the windows of this 1950s building. This building is not shown in the mural.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJN1zMkRXcG3ZQmbsvQUpLnkXFAJeXiW1Z2M2dWz51-JiDbOJoP0nsJqMkWThNm6_QwiNFVomnqnvFK6O0WVPQsXPvnsWw0axvZh2Ls53u1ujN3BtsyKesgD5HDWpfnrpmkxn6yEoFF9EE/s1600/Buschs_Florist_9-19-13.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJN1zMkRXcG3ZQmbsvQUpLnkXFAJeXiW1Z2M2dWz51-JiDbOJoP0nsJqMkWThNm6_QwiNFVomnqnvFK6O0WVPQsXPvnsWw0axvZh2Ls53u1ujN3BtsyKesgD5HDWpfnrpmkxn6yEoFF9EE/s320/Buschs_Florist_9-19-13.JPG" width="219" height="320" data-original-width="701" data-original-height="1024" /></a></div>Hugo and Lena Busch, nineteenth-century German immigrants and members of Trinity Lutheran Church, were leaders in Muenchberg/Munichburg. In 1890, Hugo and partner Charles Purzner bought an existing florist and greenhouse on the corner of Dunklin and Madison. In 1902, Purzner sold his interest to Busch. Most of the ten children (eight sons, two daughters) worked in the business at some time, which was a tradition in Munichburg in those years.<br />
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The Busch family operated the business continuously until son Arthur Busch died in 1990 and widow Leota sold it in 1997. Reid Millard purchased the business in 2017 and retains the name “Busch’s Florist.” For more than a century Busch’s Florist has been Jefferson City’s premiere florist. The “Busch corner” of Madison and Dunklin is perhaps the most beautiful street corner in Jefferson City.<br />
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My mother liked pansies. In spring she always had pansies with their smiling faces in flower boxes at the front door. She and Grandpa sometimes called them by their German name <i>Stiefmütterchen</i>, or “little stepmothers.”<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP33Ys0gYjsan82WGNxQdBgtDI3cB1wnmdk47YxXrZt5BxCWgm3e7SrI-lOmMYWopie0xNvge8xFKo1j6LlUbW6BVrq1x9NHGgIayHu0n04bbyDhvycC5RSjlsHKJApfxSUgh2m9PFcJ0Z/s1600/pansyface.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP33Ys0gYjsan82WGNxQdBgtDI3cB1wnmdk47YxXrZt5BxCWgm3e7SrI-lOmMYWopie0xNvge8xFKo1j6LlUbW6BVrq1x9NHGgIayHu0n04bbyDhvycC5RSjlsHKJApfxSUgh2m9PFcJ0Z/s200/pansyface.JPG" width="159" height="200" data-original-width="768" data-original-height="969" /></a></div>Pansies are hardy and among the first flowers to bloom in spring. Mom’s birthday was March 22, and it became a custom for me, when I was about eight to ten years old, to give her a dozen pansies for her birthday. I got them from Busch’s.<br />
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Mr. Hugo Busch, who by then was almost eighty years old, helped me out personally. His hot beds sat those ten to fifteen feet below the Dunklin Street sidewalk between the greenhouse on the corner and the Busch house on Dunklin. I went to them by walking down a ramp from the street sidewalk. The hot beds, each about eight feet square, were held in by 2 x 12 boards standing upright. The beds had heavy wood frames of glass panes for a cover, much like the roof panes of the greenhouse. The frames would be placed over the top of the beds in winter to protect against freezes. Mr. Busch set out his pansies in the fall, so that in mid-March, he could remove the frames from the hot beds and the pansies would be big enough for transplanting to brighten yards with their colorful stepmother faces.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwCuubsHT6C2gSRcEWLL80d9AHHiR-d4bUCa75LAcMBCpXWwItoTbb8SSgI_4JXKH7pUdwezLkf59_9cW89t90YH0RLxw7RvTrq-5G5cNJVIiNrQIfn60no8H8mTm2rtaHQjccXs2JojND/s1600/pansies2.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwCuubsHT6C2gSRcEWLL80d9AHHiR-d4bUCa75LAcMBCpXWwItoTbb8SSgI_4JXKH7pUdwezLkf59_9cW89t90YH0RLxw7RvTrq-5G5cNJVIiNrQIfn60no8H8mTm2rtaHQjccXs2JojND/s400/pansies2.JPG" width="400" height="190" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="486" /></a><br />
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Mr. Busch helped me pick out the pansies one by one. He sat on a board placed diagonally across a corner and patiently waited while I looked over the dozens of plants in one bed. When I picked out one, he gave his approval with a slight German accent, “Yes, Buddy, that’s a nice one.” He scooped it out with his trowel and carefully placed it with just enough dirt in a shoebox. He kept the shoebox tilted so that the little plant with its dirt stayed in place. Then I chose another and then another. We moved to a different bed and again inspected dozens of plants.<br />
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It was so hard to make choices! I wanted the showiest for my mother’s birthday, and I needed Mr. Busch’s expert approval for each. The whole process took at least half an hour. Mr. Busch’s patience was inexhaustible. He knew my family and knew that the pansies were for my mother’s birthday.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrRKBRvtKEVbSBka-shT0T-9OYVmDDcsPXb3jnR2Ck51GCkGaJ6bjmrMv5iVe6xdTdggo0w3N3DBTTM1Ad_Awak433ZusxyDBU0jAxmaNWDcVXIfPlwjO9MXQ7t5a6pItzQ6HOHscU8XM3/s1600/Pansies1.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrRKBRvtKEVbSBka-shT0T-9OYVmDDcsPXb3jnR2Ck51GCkGaJ6bjmrMv5iVe6xdTdggo0w3N3DBTTM1Ad_Awak433ZusxyDBU0jAxmaNWDcVXIfPlwjO9MXQ7t5a6pItzQ6HOHscU8XM3/s400/Pansies1.JPG" width="400" height="222" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="569" /></a><br />
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After we filled the shoebox with a dozen plants—they cost a nickel each, and I had sixty cents to spend—I walked up to the sales room at the back of the greenhouse, paid the clerk, and walked the four blocks home with my shoebox birthday gift of pansies. When I got home, Mom thanked me and planted her pansies in the concrete flower boxes at the front door so that all who passed by would see the bright, colorful faces of the “little stepmothers.”<br />
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<i>Copyright 2013, 2018 by Walter A. Schroeder.</i><br />
Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-6700990980693031472018-02-25T20:21:00.001-06:002018-02-28T18:59:52.706-06:00This Mother and Son Will Not Be Remembered Unless I Write ThisSometimes I wonder if people who have gone quietly about living good, decent lives will ever be remembered for having lived their good, decent lives. Here is a story of a devoted mother and her only child that was told to me by my mother.<br />
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In the first decade of the 1900s, Katharine and Johann Saar were members of the German Methodist Church on the corner of Broadway and West Elm, in the Munichburg neighborhood of Jefferson City. My grandparents, who lived next door to the church, were also members of that small congregation.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH6GTYmggtPLdj59TMBXqoEkwGmbtf41jzA1VP8oGb_OLF8uH3CTA0oFK3Y7q9LWYPJQ7GKDuskDVyW21yjPF54NhyjPxDKj_GgZMBn3CV-uDLuAlj-5E1ION2bRQqHqrxFvwAfXMBti_O/s1600/GMEChurchcrop.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH6GTYmggtPLdj59TMBXqoEkwGmbtf41jzA1VP8oGb_OLF8uH3CTA0oFK3Y7q9LWYPJQ7GKDuskDVyW21yjPF54NhyjPxDKj_GgZMBn3CV-uDLuAlj-5E1ION2bRQqHqrxFvwAfXMBti_O/s320/GMEChurchcrop.png" width="320" height="160" data-original-width="704" data-original-height="351" /></a><br />
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The Saars lived less than a block away in the smallest brick house I have ever seen. It measures not more than 12 x 24 feet. Remarkably, it is still standing in good shape with few modifications, like the addition of an indoor bathroom. It sits alone on its own very small piece of land behind the Schaefer House, 618 Broadway, with hardly any yard; parking and driveways surround the house.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg999PSjf6K3A-YptBdc2qJ7OY_45hKhDHFP3kHdsFU9UEWgAmx1BvL5z-WwOEp3XxS212Tn4fjdjvVk_81SRy1ZyUqmKIolK-nZXIqemuIA9aPWnMN-1lRNDep8hE9S3Op7UavWTBNusvg/s1600/pietsch_house.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg999PSjf6K3A-YptBdc2qJ7OY_45hKhDHFP3kHdsFU9UEWgAmx1BvL5z-WwOEp3XxS212Tn4fjdjvVk_81SRy1ZyUqmKIolK-nZXIqemuIA9aPWnMN-1lRNDep8hE9S3Op7UavWTBNusvg/s400/pietsch_house.jpg" width="400" height="223" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="570" /></a><br />
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Made of soft, porous brick, this little house was probably built in the 1890s. It had only two very small rooms, each about 10 x 10 feet with separate flues, and a microscopic attic above. Today it still serves as a residence. Sadly, the inconspicuous house was overlooked when the grander neighboring buildings facing directly on Broadway and Dunklin were put on the National Register of Historic Places as the Munichburg Historic District. It should have been included.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggS4oflsn2QMfp_luD2puPrvaokYqNlRQum8_MbgSDyVPvwmWxVgO1URYHeGv6LEZF7V7bSy45KQibYsDlpC4DunSDGklyMRAQ6TK9Tap6-rBIhyQndmIeislWrNT1myThmzwjLv1AKgys/s1600/Paul_Pietsch_1917_yearbook.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggS4oflsn2QMfp_luD2puPrvaokYqNlRQum8_MbgSDyVPvwmWxVgO1URYHeGv6LEZF7V7bSy45KQibYsDlpC4DunSDGklyMRAQ6TK9Tap6-rBIhyQndmIeislWrNT1myThmzwjLv1AKgys/s320/Paul_Pietsch_1917_yearbook.jpg" width="235" height="320" data-original-width="751" data-original-height="1024" /></a></div>In 1901 the Saars’ daughter, Marie, married Franz Pietsch, which is pronounced “peach,” just like the fruit. The Pietsches had a son, their only child, Paul, born soon after.<br />
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Franz Pietsch, reportedly a railroad worker, died shortly after little Paul’s birth. Marie Pietsch was left to raise her son by herself. Those were tough times for a widow. Marie moved with baby Paul into the tiny brick house to live with her also widowed mother. Somewhat later, Katharine Saar moved south to the Brazito community, leaving Marie Pietsch and young Paul alone in the tiny house.<br />
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In order to make a living, Marie Pietsch took the job of charwoman, or scrub woman, at the old U.S. Post Office on High Street, which was across the street from today’s Arris’ Pizza Palace. My mother described to me how Mrs. Pietsch not only wet-mopped the rooms of the building but also got down on her hands and knees and hand scrubbed all the steps—cleaning them of spat tobacco juice and whatever else. Those steps were used every day, winter and summer, by hundreds of people. Everyone using those steps literally looked down upon her as just a simple scrubwoman. There was no more menial job in public sight, but Marie had a child to raise.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-upSku_ajyU7fUiZlR5tYM6Cw23X2FTTlD2nxqRnl1bsAHYxkpcHl4TLkXYXYN0nI8r9nQrgIdOCX85VlcEg5BWPqNtVvaLxmP3TWUVurmezAn8gzmgRFBv2yNOLyyM5DJfNqMvqDzSAt/s1600/steps.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-upSku_ajyU7fUiZlR5tYM6Cw23X2FTTlD2nxqRnl1bsAHYxkpcHl4TLkXYXYN0nI8r9nQrgIdOCX85VlcEg5BWPqNtVvaLxmP3TWUVurmezAn8gzmgRFBv2yNOLyyM5DJfNqMvqDzSAt/s400/steps.jpg" width="400" height="272" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="697" /></a><br />
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Paul attended Jefferson City schools and turned out to be a stellar student. He graduated from the high school in 1919 no less than class valedictorian and champion debater. He received the coveted A. M. Hough Medal given annually to the student who ranked highest in scholarship. According to the yearbook, his fellow students voted him the “greatest athlete.” Within a few years out of high school he had a respectable Missouri state government position as an assistant chemist. Marie Pietsch must have taken great pride in her son, having risen from such humble circumstances, and he, in turn, must have thought the world of his devoted mother.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2cfpz2zRHRj30dsoQpHP7qJ8pbe-Tziap-rOenVQypEJ0_An6bM2y4ZbUExGiEPU708zk4W7Diazbmwp27BGNsJr0y2EHXEQMoFMKpNs-f4XGoJRsXrCMxqJA7Qetn3YohNP1gZpVmnG5/s1600/Paul_Pietsch_1919_Marcullus_p15.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2cfpz2zRHRj30dsoQpHP7qJ8pbe-Tziap-rOenVQypEJ0_An6bM2y4ZbUExGiEPU708zk4W7Diazbmwp27BGNsJr0y2EHXEQMoFMKpNs-f4XGoJRsXrCMxqJA7Qetn3YohNP1gZpVmnG5/s400/Paul_Pietsch_1919_Marcullus_p15.jpg" width="400" height="155" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="618" /></a><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE19ZgEhCuK7cuda6iI5RmZPHFXE7r1gQDy061VuCqif0wgqbUcCFDAH5yaJEexFrHbKi4FxKF6Jixai0ZUyKUehYOxEj_rZYG8w1ku_W-qdfLbqgPnrrwav13ehhzFsMJ07FZvp2vArCY/s1600/Maybe_Paul_Pietsch_1919_yearbook.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE19ZgEhCuK7cuda6iI5RmZPHFXE7r1gQDy061VuCqif0wgqbUcCFDAH5yaJEexFrHbKi4FxKF6Jixai0ZUyKUehYOxEj_rZYG8w1ku_W-qdfLbqgPnrrwav13ehhzFsMJ07FZvp2vArCY/s200/Maybe_Paul_Pietsch_1919_yearbook.jpg" width="108" height="200" data-original-width="551" data-original-height="1024" /></a></div>In 1930, Marie Pietsch was the only non-family person at my parents’ wedding one block away on Elm Street. Mrs. Pietsch assisted my grandmother with the wedding reception for her daughter. Grandma’s and Marie’s friendship was based on their earlier years in the German Methodist Church. My mother blushingly admitted to me that she had had a teenager’s crush on the neighborhood boy Paul—handsome, smart, athletic—who was just a couple years older. Paul did not attend her wedding.<br />
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World War II came in 1941. Paul, still single at age thirty-nine, entered U.S. military service. Then no one heard anything more about him. When asked, Mrs. Pietsch, now living alone in that tiny house, said he was doing “just fine” and had not been sent overseas.<br />
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Mrs. Pietsch died while the war was still raging. She died alone. All alone. According to my mother, the U.S. military would not allow Paul to come home from wherever he was for his own mother’s funeral and burial. Not a single family member was there to mourn Marie, the devoted mother who scrubbed the post office steps on her hands and knees.<br />
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You see, Paul had a supersecret job with military intelligence, and he was so indispensable to the war effort that, though he was still in this country, he was not allowed any time off, not even for his mother’s funeral. That bothered my mother very deeply. As a mother herself, she imagined how grieving Paul must have been not to be able to say goodbye to his dear mother.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0P81MNvHa1jP4QViQwVkPvPmzs8ZK4WAqwCBM-ahLrvY_VIv8Fk6skfX78AWBzFcQoJmZrVglumAV9IobpsfxF8MtHmvG_zWQtnqwDEa8wylLT7hZ7VcTv08VpE2wkIH5odV11oI989UB/s1600/Paul_Pietsch_portrait.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0P81MNvHa1jP4QViQwVkPvPmzs8ZK4WAqwCBM-ahLrvY_VIv8Fk6skfX78AWBzFcQoJmZrVglumAV9IobpsfxF8MtHmvG_zWQtnqwDEa8wylLT7hZ7VcTv08VpE2wkIH5odV11oI989UB/s320/Paul_Pietsch_portrait.jpg" width="234" height="320" data-original-width="749" data-original-height="1024" /></a></div>I don’t know what happened to Paul Pietsch after the war, but he did not return to Jefferson City. So this story has to end here.<br />
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I think about him and his mother whenever I see that tiny brick house, and I wonder if the devoted mother Marie Pietsch and Paul, her high-achieving son, are ever remembered by anyone else.<br />
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Now that I have told you their story, you can remember them, too.<br />
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<i>Copyright 2013 by Walter A. Schroeder.</i><br />
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_________________________<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigx5d053ge_XMX3JwjGhjPhzmyVkJ7UesOwPKh9LwEJwCT4SCEmMfxD-RP9_ygbkEY6qMf9n7Sx7S-jeyqSDzLnG7bi0LvLesg1SgBIVwSgIzyJiOaJ41sAF7jJX5qMXcQkXZnFevf9ps0/s1600/Southside_Sketches_book.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigx5d053ge_XMX3JwjGhjPhzmyVkJ7UesOwPKh9LwEJwCT4SCEmMfxD-RP9_ygbkEY6qMf9n7Sx7S-jeyqSDzLnG7bi0LvLesg1SgBIVwSgIzyJiOaJ41sAF7jJX5qMXcQkXZnFevf9ps0/s320/Southside_Sketches_book.jpg" width="211" height="320" data-original-width="675" data-original-height="1024" /></a></div>IF YOU LIKED THIS ESSAY, YOU'LL WANT TO READ MORE IN WALTER SCHROEDER'S<br />
<br />
<i><b>Southside Sketches: Essays on Jefferson City’s Old Munichburg</b></i><br />
200 pages, paperback<br />
$12 (available at Downtown Book & Toy, the ECCO Lounge, J Street Vintage, and the Schaefer House, all in Jefferson City, Missouri)<br />
Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-59008415836643938052018-02-23T21:15:00.002-06:002018-02-23T21:15:49.191-06:00Civilian Defense Corps and Air Raids in Jefferson CityThe U.S. government responded to the early, spectacular successes of the Japanese and Nazi Germans at the beginning of World War II by creating the Office of Civilian Defense on May 20, 1941. This office was to protect Americans from the possibility of enemy bombing of our towns and cities. Clifford G. Scruggs, the lumber dealer, was the chairman of the Jefferson City Council of Civilian Defense and was in charge of administering the executive order locally.<br />
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My dad, age 38 when the war began, had been given a 3-A (exempt) classification for military service. My mom jokingly said it was because he had flat feet, but then she quickly added that he was the sole provider for five other persons, including his two young sons (my brother Richard and me) and Mom’s German-born parents who lived with us. With civilian status, Dad was expected to do his duty by civilian service. To do this, he became an air raid warden with the local Office of Civilian Defense.<br />
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Looking back seventy years ago, it seems incredible that we believed that Japanese and German Nazi planes could penetrate so deep into the heart of the continent to reach Jefferson City, Missouri, without being intercepted somewhere along the way. Nevertheless, at the time we took the possibility seriously . . . very seriously.<br />
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The kids on West Elm Street, six to eleven years old, learned how to identify enemy airplanes from silhouettes of them published in the newspaper and on the back sides of breakfast cereal boxes. (Airplane identification cards also came in packs of cigarettes, but no one in our family smoked.) With our binoculars we surveyed the skies, lying on the steep, grassy terraces or peering out of second- and third-story windows. We were sure we would spot a German Stuka or Messerschmidt or maybe a “Jap” Mitsubishi or Zero and save Jefferson City from air attack.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn8IpOz4ltNZu6JNQqzsQcGFVhCz9aVZxupzCJzXZp10xkO9LNl8Pwak3oLLtDlWgE0TvRz1N1KzAIFeGTQ880yQWl7bLdTf9rfvnEs-nWAz9BN9ikPPrlHUd3M2CcDrQZCowNpCTx5EIF/s1600/WWII_Air_Raid_Warden_handbook.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="606" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn8IpOz4ltNZu6JNQqzsQcGFVhCz9aVZxupzCJzXZp10xkO9LNl8Pwak3oLLtDlWgE0TvRz1N1KzAIFeGTQ880yQWl7bLdTf9rfvnEs-nWAz9BN9ikPPrlHUd3M2CcDrQZCowNpCTx5EIF/s320/WWII_Air_Raid_Warden_handbook.jpg" width="189" /></a></div>
The Office of Civilian Defense distributed leaflets about preparation for air attacks: “Read and Save this Leaflet—it may Save Your Life Some Day!” The city held air raid drills to practice what to do. It was important to extinguish all lights inside houses, so that the enemy planes could not find anyplace to bomb. So we had to put out all lights in the house and pull all the window shades shut. We were not allowed to use any matches or flashlights outside. People were not even allowed to light a cigarette in the open. All streetlights were extinguished. If you were driving, you had to stop immediately, turn off the lights, and park close to the curb, but not at any intersection or fire hydrant. Police and firemen could use their headlights, but their headlights had to be mostly covered, leaving only a slit to allow a little light through. Detailed rules were in place for those caught in theaters and other meeting places at time of an air raid. We were also instructed, should an attack actually occur, to seek cover under a large table or under an overturned sofa. “Carelessness or negligence in observing these precautions may invite disaster.”<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLAusipl51kt0z7Nvu0F0K6GKdhx9_1rWIzQ4tw9lmS1cxFFHQuBPS28X3KjnO498mjF7aaA0CGalTaN4cXf3KG0TSvwmLj84xxhCEqA1BhFEryByb6vWr2JT64r-asM3P8LmzYt4KkLVI/s1600/Meet_your_air_raid_warden.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" data-original-height="268" data-original-width="1024" height="105" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLAusipl51kt0z7Nvu0F0K6GKdhx9_1rWIzQ4tw9lmS1cxFFHQuBPS28X3KjnO498mjF7aaA0CGalTaN4cXf3KG0TSvwmLj84xxhCEqA1BhFEryByb6vWr2JT64r-asM3P8LmzYt4KkLVI/s400/Meet_your_air_raid_warden.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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Newspapers also printed information about what to do when an attack comes. Since gas was a dreaded weapon in World War I, there was fear it could be used again. In case of gas attack, we were to close doors tightly, stuff cracks, avoid the basement, and retreat into the attic. If we were caught outside, we were to cover our mouths and noses with damp handkerchiefs and “walk against the wind to get in the clear quicker. Above all, keep your head. Running around wildly results in much greater danger to yourself.”<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG4TXRWrOlTze3Pwqlwf-PAMmRh8yd9Q8SBnPGBmaLNZeifmLqkPtiNth01pbtZYTByV4lqojKuHtv7UKzQ7rxKbzAn8epBeNdzJ-aOg5lIyqnT80yTAZofh3MV67vivnNELJzi25qU1-A/s1600/newspaper1.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" data-original-height="556" data-original-width="1024" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG4TXRWrOlTze3Pwqlwf-PAMmRh8yd9Q8SBnPGBmaLNZeifmLqkPtiNth01pbtZYTByV4lqojKuHtv7UKzQ7rxKbzAn8epBeNdzJ-aOg5lIyqnT80yTAZofh3MV67vivnNELJzi25qU1-A/s400/newspaper1.jpg" width="400" /></a>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjrychCfA6eQYmxMVq_If43YWDCytNEBYaQF3BJ1kpFnDBAYPteX2uqRNJn41lZrVMcuHtVPlwYLcHaAEd1-lhRpADoxqmFtSdqHA5I-U6QVLaWi4jclSYDeg-_KZ82g5id3gCX4x-T-Ty/s1600/newspaper3.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" data-original-height="526" data-original-width="1024" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjrychCfA6eQYmxMVq_If43YWDCytNEBYaQF3BJ1kpFnDBAYPteX2uqRNJn41lZrVMcuHtVPlwYLcHaAEd1-lhRpADoxqmFtSdqHA5I-U6QVLaWi4jclSYDeg-_KZ82g5id3gCX4x-T-Ty/s400/newspaper3.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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To be an air raid warden, Dad had to take a training course. It consisted of eight sessions, taught in evenings at the Junior College (now the Miller Performing Arts Center). He learned about chemical warfare, high explosives, incendiary bombs, and how to keep civilian morale up.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheSTwk2iXZKwGvzCZ6U6BDZk66Alv7T-bvOpWedE2ReQJJKpyI_gDNs6GTAzyoArNUEpBKXjWuEjWC8HuZQP3ttiS1c6XFRpoj5kedj4CCo4cvr3kluIWlluTA0iWwwZVIYW0KaswlLNYM/s1600/bomber_1.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" data-original-height="774" data-original-width="768" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheSTwk2iXZKwGvzCZ6U6BDZk66Alv7T-bvOpWedE2ReQJJKpyI_gDNs6GTAzyoArNUEpBKXjWuEjWC8HuZQP3ttiS1c6XFRpoj5kedj4CCo4cvr3kluIWlluTA0iWwwZVIYW0KaswlLNYM/s400/bomber_1.jpg" width="397" /></a>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO9UaTRP5li-TASpzJ1tgaBF1qeai02ZtcLIvHonOLEKgCBWpyBeAEQm4WwjBtpRgPofXrkuo3vpX0uqZM8bnQ4fcBVUSb5VvZ1Je8LOJLHxYlhyphenhyphenQ3M7PTZzZ9725yBmW3FzV3aesaz_Me/s1600/bomber_3.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" data-original-height="776" data-original-width="768" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO9UaTRP5li-TASpzJ1tgaBF1qeai02ZtcLIvHonOLEKgCBWpyBeAEQm4WwjBtpRgPofXrkuo3vpX0uqZM8bnQ4fcBVUSb5VvZ1Je8LOJLHxYlhyphenhyphenQ3M7PTZzZ9725yBmW3FzV3aesaz_Me/s400/bomber_3.jpg" width="396" /></a>
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Each session included first aid instruction, including how to care for casualties of gas bombs. “It is the responsibility of the Air Raid Warden to see that everything possible is done to protect and safeguard the homes and citizens within his area from the hazards created by attacks from the air.” On December 12, 1942, the class received certification of membership in the United States Citizens Defense Corps as air raid wardens. Dad was now an official air raid warden!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij4qb2qDSWvMofwEuzAGIRZZ6bVBkkxdW6_pc_FEvG8aS3MCt9V4yRzlZnilhmV50N-omxOsaxJcaiIsSjG_BzfmLNk0d5hNXGjQOTs-1QcTees5p1XPQSq6TfT0A1iWB-DfayUuzKXMFB/s1600/WWII_Civil_Defense_certificate.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="698" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij4qb2qDSWvMofwEuzAGIRZZ6bVBkkxdW6_pc_FEvG8aS3MCt9V4yRzlZnilhmV50N-omxOsaxJcaiIsSjG_BzfmLNk0d5hNXGjQOTs-1QcTees5p1XPQSq6TfT0A1iWB-DfayUuzKXMFB/s320/WWII_Civil_Defense_certificate.jpg" width="218" /></a></div>
Jefferson City was divided into geographic areas for air warden patrol. Each area comprised about 500 persons. Dad was assigned to Lafayette Street between McCarty and Dunklin and connecting streets, the neighborhood known as “The Foot” of Lincoln University. It contained the black business district and many residences of both blacks and whites.<br />
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When an air raid drill was called in the evening, Dad put on his sleeve identification band, picked up his flashlight, and walked the eight blocks from our house on West Elm Street to Lafayette. He looked at all the windows of the businesses and houses to make sure no light was visible from the street. He told those walking on the sidewalk that they should go inside a building and those with cigarettes to put them out or go inside.<br />
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My brother and I waited up in our darkened house with all the window shades drawn until he returned to find out what was going on. He never reported anything unusual. He said that everyone was in full compliance with the regulations. We were actually kind of disappointed that no enemy planes had been spotted flying over Jefferson City. It had been just another drill.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiDptV5F6iVe7fnJG9M4Cv5hL4qGOioNAr4EfQVTcQ0UnzJMJg2xlWMXHoMYEMyXPZ2jw98onpcCpEi7UMdWUsqZnOJzzwBYW4Ojfe3RHCIG-qGUwR3d2STn-vC_qfHzOBksMo6d14ISwo/s1600/WWII_Civil_Defense_arm_band.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" data-original-height="614" data-original-width="1024" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiDptV5F6iVe7fnJG9M4Cv5hL4qGOioNAr4EfQVTcQ0UnzJMJg2xlWMXHoMYEMyXPZ2jw98onpcCpEi7UMdWUsqZnOJzzwBYW4Ojfe3RHCIG-qGUwR3d2STn-vC_qfHzOBksMo6d14ISwo/s400/WWII_Civil_Defense_arm_band.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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As 1942 turned into 1943 and then into 1944, the probability of enemy air attack on the 48 United States greatly lessened, although we kids still occasionally surveyed the skies looking for enemy planes. The Japanese temporarily occupied Attu in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska and sent some incendiary balloons over Oregon, and German U-boats were sighted off the East Coast, but we in Jefferson City felt safe from air attack.<br />
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Dad, however, retained his air warden status and participated in more air raid drills. It was not until June 4, 1945, a month after Germany had surrendered on May 8, that the Office of Civilian Defense was terminated by executive order and Dad put his air raid warden sleeve band away. Japan surrendered on September 2, 1945.<br />
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<i>Copyright 2012 by Walter A. Schroeder.</i>
Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-73750940267511570782013-09-15T17:00:00.000-05:002018-09-24T16:10:42.869-05:00Cows, Hogs, and Chickens in MunichburgIn the good ol’ days, folks in Munichburg (Jefferson City’s Southside) kept barnyard animals on their properties. In those days, all families had vegetable gardens for their food supply, and more than a few raised animals for food. A property was like a mini-farm.<br />
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For a long while, well into the twentieth century, animals were given free rein to roam. Folks had to put up fences to keep roaming animals off their properties and out of their gardens. That’s why you see such a huge network of fencing in old photographs. Today those fences are gone, and when people put up fences today, they’re to keep other <i>people</i> out.<br />
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Hogs roamed all over town in the nineteenth century. In 1873 it was reported that “cattle graze and hogs root in the City Cemetery upon the graves,” though the neighboring National Cemetery, well protected by a stone wall, was free from roaming animals. Newspaper articles were still calling in 1919 for hogs to be controlled in Jefferson City.<br />
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Cows could also roam about. The congregation of Central Evangelical Church gathered outside its church one Sunday morning in February 1891 after worship service for a <a href="http://opulentopossum.blogspot.com/2009/07/americanization-of-german-immigrant.html">congregational photo</a>.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivHsB4RhzW362-zyS6WwfiUCskV5faI4EBgcJQya_F2Tz9QV7EAptU60A7gBki1S0LSsR7B2ZfFLkEpULhPDLq5yUxA2ixrDUx62lUD4HE_Szvd3SEF2zb-4h1yQGDBJfAPwJQxpMcjM46/s1600/Cropped_once.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivHsB4RhzW362-zyS6WwfiUCskV5faI4EBgcJQya_F2Tz9QV7EAptU60A7gBki1S0LSsR7B2ZfFLkEpULhPDLq5yUxA2ixrDUx62lUD4HE_Szvd3SEF2zb-4h1yQGDBJfAPwJQxpMcjM46/s400/Cropped_once.jpg" width="400" height="308" data-original-width="997" data-original-height="768" /></a><br />
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In that sharp photo taken by professional photographer Carl Deeg, a cow is standing just behind the congregation in the middle of muddy Ashley Street, looking straight at the camera. A roving critter to be sure. It seemed to be saying, “Just what do you people think you’re doing, invading my territory?”<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH4mczq-bp9p61TTwc-YsDCQsOo-Po15LX_Zl0mLztC-N03Tn2Td6G973Zk9SZfBbPBTb_Cc1bnogt3-yU8yEp4Xmk-rgc6fYHACi2ksEwnP3mCEkKvTpxvjVhOAmYeb0I-qnWxESV7M2h/s1600/Cropped_further.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH4mczq-bp9p61TTwc-YsDCQsOo-Po15LX_Zl0mLztC-N03Tn2Td6G973Zk9SZfBbPBTb_Cc1bnogt3-yU8yEp4Xmk-rgc6fYHACi2ksEwnP3mCEkKvTpxvjVhOAmYeb0I-qnWxESV7M2h/s400/Cropped_further.jpg" width="385" height="400" data-original-width="784" data-original-height="814" /></a><br />
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In the early 1900s, residents kept a cow in order to have fresh milk in those days before refrigeration. My mother related that, as a young girl, her parents would send her the four blocks over to Mulberry and Atchison to get a bucket of milk from Mr. Petry, who kept cows.<br />
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When I was a young boy around 1940, Affolter’s pasture occupied the hillside from the end of Broadway (where four-lane US 54 now crosses over it) up to Swift’s Highway and included the site of today’s South School and Pamela Street. Grandpa led me through the cow pasture on <a href="http://munichburgmemories.blogspot.com/2011/10/grandpas-friend-herr-goldammer.html">our trips to visit his old German friends</a> on Swifts Highway. Dozens of cows grazed that hillside.<br />
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People kept horses, too. Before cars, horse-drawn wagons and carriages were the way to get around. If you had a carriage, you probably had a horse and stable in the back of your property on the alley, or else you had to rent one from the several neighborhood liveries. When a horse- or mule-drawn wagon came by our house on Broadway, Grandpa was quick with his shovel to go out and scoop up droppings for manure for his garden. Until motor vehicles took over in the 1920s, businesses had hitching posts and horse-watering troughs in front of them. Today we feed parking meters in front of stores instead of horses.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS9fy-30M6qp0wDrBO1uwyKL06rL1IfpfgyPlqMf4EyhaFsqr16BJBvb3zTLQ6_i1g63tC-UIj-N4rn5su1SL4uNOS5O_NS4RrUPm01VFu7hNPrWsBaKzNbjxEukKe-AHeo3_BnLMK68zS/s1600/Cropped.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS9fy-30M6qp0wDrBO1uwyKL06rL1IfpfgyPlqMf4EyhaFsqr16BJBvb3zTLQ6_i1g63tC-UIj-N4rn5su1SL4uNOS5O_NS4RrUPm01VFu7hNPrWsBaKzNbjxEukKe-AHeo3_BnLMK68zS/s400/Cropped.jpg" width="400" height="188" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="480" /></a><br />
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Every week a buggy or wagon accident occurred and made the newspaper. The corner of Jefferson and Atchison had more than its share. In October 1906, two women in a buggy collided with another there. “Both women were flung and the hardly three month old child of one fell between the spokes of a front wheel. Fortunately the horse was steady and remained in place, otherwise the baby would have been slit to death.” At that same corner, farmer Ulrich Zehender, standing alongside his wagon, slipped and fell and was run over by his own wagon. And on the adjacent Jefferson Street hill, in front of what is now the Salvation Army, a team of horses bolted, causing a woman to fall backward out of the wagon. Her head struck a rock, “causing the blood to flow freely.” One day in 1916, thunder spooked the horses of Crandell’s ice cream wagon, and they ran away. Crandell was heavily bruised, but no ice cream was lost. These wagon and buggy accidents of the past have been replaced by car accidents today.<br />
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In 1915, the newspaper reported that a band of gypsies had moved onto the low ground along Wears Creek at Washington Park. “The gypsies turned their horses and cattle loose and permitted them to roam about the country. Residents complained that the stock was devastating their gardens. The protest had little effect upon the gypsies, who in effect told them to go jump in the creek.”<br />
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Some folks, like the Pash family on West Atchison, raised pigeons in dovecotes. From what I hear, boys raised these for “homing pigeons,” but it is likely that some were eaten, if the tastes of the family were such. Likewise, some families raised rabbits in hutches. Of course, men would still go rabbit hunting out in the country, but domestic rabbits didn’t have the “wild” taste, and they were there to butcher whenever you wanted. Our neighbors raised white rabbits during the hard years of the Great Depression. They also raised chinchilla rabbits for their valued fur, which they shipped by rail to fur markets in the big cities. In those days, people out of work did not get unemployment checks, so they had to be resourceful in finding ways to make money.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUKc4io4ElVjo4N-GjE9j_A9IbslfeD2qKftyx1TQoFQoY2-WeR6cdHHYvHOv2vIhuEGbPAjBH-uH2fai-QPoazLK5e3BMmDii5LwX0mVKlOLrZKToXhhQmF1MoODwJBPUix0zaMWNm9r4/s1600/9_Rabbit.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUKc4io4ElVjo4N-GjE9j_A9IbslfeD2qKftyx1TQoFQoY2-WeR6cdHHYvHOv2vIhuEGbPAjBH-uH2fai-QPoazLK5e3BMmDii5LwX0mVKlOLrZKToXhhQmF1MoODwJBPUix0zaMWNm9r4/s320/9_Rabbit.jpg" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="768" /></a><br />
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Apparently no one raised turkeys. Turkeys are an American bird and not part of the customary diet handed down from German immigrants. Nevertheless, it was common in the few days before Christmas for grocers to give away fresh-killed turkeys to shoppers. A news item in 1912 reported that “thirty-five turkeys are to be given away at the Southside pool hall Wednesday night.” That pool hall must have been busy that evening! Even barbershops got in on the turkey promotional giveaways.<br />
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Geese seldom appear in the records. “Goose Bottom,” the name used for the low ground around the junction of the west and east branches with the main Wears Creek (the area around the present junction of Missouri Boulevard with Highway 50/63) either got its name very early from wild geese there, or later from geese being raised there by someone. Max Baer (no relation to the boxer or to his actor son), who had a junkyard at Broadway and Miller, advertised for goose feathers. Someone was raising geese.<br />
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Chickens were everywhere. Roosters came with them, and their cock-a-doodle-doo’s crowed out at the crack of dawn across Munichburg. Of course, everyone was already awake by then. In fact, in summer housewives generally already had done their three loads of wash, put it through the ringer, and hung it out on clotheslines by seven o’clock to avoid the heat of the day. Today, roosters have been replaced by alarm clocks.<br />
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Hungry folks and rascals stole chickens. Hardly a week went by without some family reporting chickens stolen in the Southside, and the thieves were hardly ever caught. Since dogs roamed also, chickens were lost during the night to hungry dogs.<br />
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Chickens were kept in fenced pens and coops. If the property was large enough, a couple dozen could be kept this way, providing eggs as well. Others kept just a few chickens in small cages for shorter times. The space under the back porch served this purpose. Today, many people don’t have back porches.<br />
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By time the 1920s came, families began to have iceboxes and refrigeration, so that keeping chickens was dispensed with and replaced by a short trip to buy fresh meat from Hott & Asel’s butcher shop or one of the chain groceries that were moving in. But when the hard times of the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, which were then followed by the frugal years of World War II, families returned to keeping chickens along with their “victory gardens.”<br />
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We kept a few chickens in a chicken-wire cage behind our garage on Elm Street. My brother and I took care of them. When it was time to kill one for Sunday dinner, Dad grabbed a fat hen, took it to the gravel driveway under the purple martin box, put the hen on a wooden chopping block, and whacked off its head with one blow from an axe. The martins would go crazy and dive-bomb us (we thought in terms of planes fighting in the war going on). Sometimes Dad wrung the hen’s neck: He grabbed the hen by its head and whirled it around his head several times until the head twisted off and the body sailed off onto the gravel. I watched the headless body flop around for a couple of minutes, spewing off blood in all directions. It was great excitement! Then it was Mom’s job to dunk the critter into hot water and begin plucking the feathers, cutting it up, and getting it ready to fry for dinner. We ate every bit of it, except the head and feet. Dinner doesn’t come any fresher than that! Today we buy processed foods instead of eating our home-grown vegetables and chickens.<br />
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Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2036426333457657834.post-61126948766806727022013-07-21T14:03:00.000-05:002013-07-21T14:03:29.806-05:00Nits and Lice and Cooties<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSchJEA-wR86Y9woytZmTtbSXVhelpPRx69Eue5aSJCEH-TfdXfCigM9YU4suwQn3lQiEWxOQoQhgmyaKMPdCaWFk274A15n0XUWgBSOmmi3uocd5MzfKXyxDovIrmWNhOxWJ27eXv3Jms/s1600/Louse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSchJEA-wR86Y9woytZmTtbSXVhelpPRx69Eue5aSJCEH-TfdXfCigM9YU4suwQn3lQiEWxOQoQhgmyaKMPdCaWFk274A15n0XUWgBSOmmi3uocd5MzfKXyxDovIrmWNhOxWJ27eXv3Jms/s320/Louse.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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My father was a barber, so I learned about head lice very early. Here’s how it happened.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixqBbDf0ZDxkL5kxuyXwSn9F5xSB6-m84nxR-zWl_OSGs1I5X1IcEwbIEFM8gBfiNE-7xdf1Xo1OhhIUEucq6FuPjdm0u0S2wAYCjntJWiBOa0lsHnisF2BI4xvc7orcQIVZLQSuS850mg/s1600/At_the_table.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixqBbDf0ZDxkL5kxuyXwSn9F5xSB6-m84nxR-zWl_OSGs1I5X1IcEwbIEFM8gBfiNE-7xdf1Xo1OhhIUEucq6FuPjdm0u0S2wAYCjntJWiBOa0lsHnisF2BI4xvc7orcQIVZLQSuS850mg/s200/At_the_table.jpg" /></a></div>While my family sat at the supper table eating, we always talked about what happened during the day. One evening while eating, Dad related that while he was cutting a man’s hair that day, he discovered lice on his scalp. Dad, holding his fork in his hand, pointed to the back of his head to show exactly where.<br />
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Mom interrupted, “Oh, <i>Walter!</i> Not at the table while we’re <i>eating!</i>”<br />
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For the benefit of his young sons, Dad continued to describe how tiny the lice were and how they laid eggs, called nits, on hairs close to the scalp.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh08hlD8Mj7ZEWRvpZt8i9y3AyIYNs39hRI-YgmjDiT-cdwv8DLa2iXMylFdF5-okJIYZMoBcUx1RDxwd0wwQ9X9z_-VlyH38BUqfg5GlykImlgukaAAUnzc9_LsmWjaJ9q5mToB12zoJrS/s1600/Hair.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh08hlD8Mj7ZEWRvpZt8i9y3AyIYNs39hRI-YgmjDiT-cdwv8DLa2iXMylFdF5-okJIYZMoBcUx1RDxwd0wwQ9X9z_-VlyH38BUqfg5GlykImlgukaAAUnzc9_LsmWjaJ9q5mToB12zoJrS/s400/Hair.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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Following his training at barber college (and state law), Dad had to immediately stop cutting the hair of anyone with lice and ask the customer to leave the shop. He had to disinfect in formaldehyde his electric shears, cutting shears (scissors), comb, and anything else that had been touched.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhorfeIi-qSgJ_tmRtrSMEFW_bTilPTNACrMB9Rbrp4o0gWhnoqkR2Gp41I6W-NGCmUDqnho6bxGiBI-4xSMVzRPxIz5W4XiRynoD-SWE6Wci0_zPBk2iFCrjoQNKl0mC6wm14Uxra-d1Ar/s1600/Scissors.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhorfeIi-qSgJ_tmRtrSMEFW_bTilPTNACrMB9Rbrp4o0gWhnoqkR2Gp41I6W-NGCmUDqnho6bxGiBI-4xSMVzRPxIz5W4XiRynoD-SWE6Wci0_zPBk2iFCrjoQNKl0mC6wm14Uxra-d1Ar/s320/Scissors.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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He took the customer’s hair cloth, carefully folded it inward, and put it in a sack in his closet. While he did this, the next customer waited patiently on the bench and wondered if the disinfecting really worked. Nits and lice, as everyone knows, can be easily spread.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXzrxoITNaeHeZ7-Kw4KCy8AFaC6-pSPdcvgmLMekOsZ79E5r9IpxMYydZYNWLzgzKxI0bWOi__TNj8G9jghyphenhyphenhB96pXer6GA1FWnswYKUZHcCmHZNnMKim5sN-tQ7SbBuwFXBHvGv1822L/s1600/WAS_barbershop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXzrxoITNaeHeZ7-Kw4KCy8AFaC6-pSPdcvgmLMekOsZ79E5r9IpxMYydZYNWLzgzKxI0bWOi__TNj8G9jghyphenhyphenhB96pXer6GA1FWnswYKUZHcCmHZNnMKim5sN-tQ7SbBuwFXBHvGv1822L/s320/WAS_barbershop.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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My own head suddenly seemed itchy, and I scratched it.<br />
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About that same time, Cole County Nurse Hetty Joach (pronounced <i>Jo-ack</i>) made her annual visit to Broadway School, where I was an eight-year-old in Miss Ruth Longan’s third grade. We pupils went singly into the cloakroom and sat on a stool while Nurse Joach looked at our teeth, throat, and a lot of other things and, of course, took a comb to examine our scalps for head lice.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKWdCxINP5XYnuio9wP4E4clVfwIvcZvpit9j9AYgTEOaAIkUWkjsAA7500lWXYKiYDs17FcF0BYGk5P6OnxOR-UTWhkf6Xkw3zCT2ivU9YdXPsUrusULqHhmf-nIdXKCHfQ289EmwhDSv/s1600/Nurse_Joach.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKWdCxINP5XYnuio9wP4E4clVfwIvcZvpit9j9AYgTEOaAIkUWkjsAA7500lWXYKiYDs17FcF0BYGk5P6OnxOR-UTWhkf6Xkw3zCT2ivU9YdXPsUrusULqHhmf-nIdXKCHfQ289EmwhDSv/s320/Nurse_Joach.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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I don’t remember if she found any in our class that year, but if she did, it was revealed privately to the pupil, the teacher, and parents. Nurse Joach told us all about head lice and reminded us to wash our hair often, which some kids didn’t do in those days. But my Mom and Dad made sure my head got washed more than I wanted.<br />
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We kids found out that <i>cooties</i> was another word for lice. It was common to tease someone, especially girls, by saying, “You’ve got cooties!” Teachers and parents frowned on this, because they knew it could be hurtful. People believed that contracting head lice was a sign of dirty, shameful housekeeping, and families were embarrassed when it happened.<br />
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Then one evening Mom’s bridge club met at our house.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7ttXDd3o4St9ywKjCpNHRrJ1spQRQFSfGfNSEOcZYWL2jJxLq2MthyphenhyphenxYEYO-da7R3pqksZRVEtqmjZtw3ENqlEJ7qwyECpP3NkOKMSSO6q5NpeMF0NQiOfHpz7X8RzZYp9KMqh8_qt6SO/s1600/Bridge_Club_Ladies.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7ttXDd3o4St9ywKjCpNHRrJ1spQRQFSfGfNSEOcZYWL2jJxLq2MthyphenhyphenxYEYO-da7R3pqksZRVEtqmjZtw3ENqlEJ7qwyECpP3NkOKMSSO6q5NpeMF0NQiOfHpz7X8RzZYp9KMqh8_qt6SO/s320/Bridge_Club_Ladies.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<br />I was allowed to stay up for a while and watch the “girls” play several hands. At one point, I heard one of them exclaim, “Oh, all I had in my hand was <i>nits</i> and <i>lice!</i>”--meaning that she held low cards, but I didn’t know that. I puzzled why anyone would be holding lice and their eggs in their hands.<br />
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I wanted to look, because I had never seen a louse, dead or alive, but I didn’t. Soon after, I went to bed and started imagining my head itching.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlAdbat8jAfW5Ck38Iygeqx-2MPoEvyunzv2DE_YZb4y6DVxLqOE9qLn2aNoMNlrupRs0Muzf4Q6HlY6WPMbgFKX4xsMLtXZJ31l4ksoukoNdRk24u0Yp82e_Om5ZTjMi1_Ar7MWKDr4ma/s1600/Low_cards.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlAdbat8jAfW5Ck38Iygeqx-2MPoEvyunzv2DE_YZb4y6DVxLqOE9qLn2aNoMNlrupRs0Muzf4Q6HlY6WPMbgFKX4xsMLtXZJ31l4ksoukoNdRk24u0Yp82e_Om5ZTjMi1_Ar7MWKDr4ma/s320/Low_cards.jpg" /></a></div>
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Then, the next Christmas, my Aunt Esther and Uncle Emil Kaiser came to visit. She told us about a group she belonged to in Kansas City called the <a href="http://www.lotcs.org/">Cooties of the Veterans of Foreign Wars</a>. Uncle Eme had served in the U.S. Navy during World War I, and the Cooties were veterans who brought fun and entertainment to sick and wounded veterans in hospitals. Women formed Cootie auxiliaries and had just as much fun as their veteran husbands did. My Aunt Esther was always singing, laughing, and cracking jokes, so I knew she could make vets in hospitals happy. The group was called “Military Order of the Cootie” because it poked fun at the lice that tormented troops living in trenches during the war.<br />
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When I learned all this, I started thinking of "cooties" as neat people who had lots of fun!<br />
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And in the early 1940s, this is how an eight-year-old found out about nits and lice and cooties!<br />
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Julianna Schroederhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277727700915648607noreply@blogger.com1