Recently unearthed (bad) photo of me astride the majestic beast. (1981)
The Day the Circus Came to Town
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Tag Archives: kennett
5 questions for Sheryl Crow
Regular readers know that Barb and I are from the same small town in southern Missouri as Sheryl Crow. A small Brush with Near Greatness. On a recent road trip I came up with five questions I'd ask Ms. Crow, if I had the opportunity. In the off chance her publicist or agent (or daddy) finds their way to this post…
- What group or artist do you have on your iPod that would be most surprising to your fans?
- Do you have a favorite book you've read more than twice?
- If you could pass along just one life lesson or bit of wisdom to young Wyatt, what would it be?
- What do you miss most (if anything) about being a civilian? (Sorry, but answer cannot be: "Running in to QuikTrip for a quart of milk, wearing Roy Rogers pajama bottoms & torn sweat shirt.")
- Do you have any skill or trick that would win a bar bet?
Blogs turn websites into conversations
A couple of years ago my friend Everett asked my advice on a website. He’s a veterinarian and had your basic Web 1.0 site. I suggested he think about a blog because I knew he was a good story teller and would be a natural. And he is.
He often writes about cases he sees in his practice and gets lots of feedback from readers, many of whom have questions.
“Even though I certainly cannot prescribe for a pet that I have not examined, sometimes I can clarify a situation, or make suggestions. Sometimes they just have questions that weren’t addressed in the original post, but are related to the topic. I receive questions from around the country, and even Europe and (today) Tanzania.”
I share this as just one more example of the powerful difference between a blog and the old “brochure” sites that are still all too common. Some day –soon, perhaps– this will not be worth mentioning. Everyone will get it and all or most websites will be blogs or have a strong blog component. I believe this is called the “Duh Moment.”
Everett’s blog is YourPetsBestFriend.com. If you have a pet, it’s a must read.
KBOA voice of SE Missouri during/after ice storm
In the early days of the big ice storm that knocked out power to so many in southern Missouri, I kept hearing from friends in Kennett, Missouri (where Barb and I grew up) what a great job the local radio station (KBOA-AM) was doing. It was the only source for information and just a few announcers were keeping the station on the air with a generator and broadcasting non-stop with nothing but a phone and a microphone.
Steve Tyler, News Director Charles Isbell and Operations Manager Monte Lyons are all veteran radio guys (“with more than 100 years of experience between us”) who remember a time before computers and automation and syndicated talk shows. I figured they had some good stories to tell about the recent disaster. It runs about 20 minutes and –since they were on a speaker phone– you might have to listen closely.
A tip of the hat to William Pollack, President of Pollack Broadcasting, the owner of the station(s), for deferring to his local staff and letting them make the call on how best to serve the community.
With cable and phone lines down, the Internet wasn’t much help for all those people sitting in the cold and dark, wondering when the power would come back on. But radio was there. Literally the voice of a community. Or communities.
I can’t foresee the future of small market radio but have to believe it will involve this kind of service and involvement. But that’s going to take people. People who know their neighbors and local business because they live there.
Will finding and hiring and training these men and women be easy. Doubt it. Will such staffing cut into profit margins. Probably. But if broadcasters don’t find a way to be truly local and relevant… their stations are almost certain to be cold and dark.
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For those that missed these earlier posts, Matthew Howard and Charles Jolliff share some photos of the ice damage… and friend and fellow-blogger Dr. Everett Mobley shares the journal he kept for the two weeks his family was without power. This is a terrific account.
The photography of Matthew Howard
Matt Howard is a talented photographer in Kennett, MO (my home town). Matt’s day job is personal trainer so I guess he’s technically an amateur but certainly in the best sense of that word. I stumbled onto Matt’s flickr page recently and was immediately taken with his haunting (for me) images of the flat, empty fields I remember growing up. I got him on the phone for a brief (15 min) chat this afternoon during which he explained his passion for photography started with a book rather than a camera.
AUDIO: Interview with Matt Howard 15 min MP3
R.I.P. Whitey
Richard Whitehorn died last week. Following a long slug-fest with cancer. Richard was just a year ahead of me in school and we weren’t close growing up. But I have lots of memories of him.
I don’t know if Richard was a bully or I was just intimidated by him. But he projected a kind of tough guy image. He and his BFF Tommy Crunk were like Butch and Sundance, tooling around town in Whitey’s ’57 Chevy. When the Honda motorcycle craze hit, Crunk and Whitey were among the first to own them. Yes, they were dashing.
One hot summer night during high school, my friends and I pooled our money and gave it to Whitey to buy us the beer we were not quite old enough to purchase ourselves. We also gave him a detailed list of what each of us wanted. He returned with a case of Champagne Velvet. Nasty stuff that was much cheaper. (“You guys had just enough money.”) A really bad guy would have just taken our money. Whitey gave us beer and a little lesson in free enterprise.
As an adult, Richard (I don’t know if anyone still called him Whitey by then) became a crop duster. Hard to imagine a more fitting occupation. Our friend Pam attended Richard’s funeral this past weekend in Kennett.
“It was sad as hell. They had visitation starting at 11:00 and a graveside service at 2:00. The funeral was over, the preacher had just said “amen” and closed the Bible when I heard someone say “here they come” and I wondered, who’s coming? I looked in the direction I heard some noise and here came 3 Pawnee crop dusters in formation, streaming smoke like they were Blue Angels, tree top high right over the funeral tent. Once past the left and right planes peeled off and the middle plane pulled up. I think everyone lost it at that point.”
To which Richard would have growled, “What are you pussies crying about?”
More photos of ice storm damage
Photo above –taken by Matthew Howard– shows why many homes in southeast Missouri are still without power. Matthew managed to get some photos on his Facebook page and give me permission to share a few here. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a utility pole snapped in two. Or this much ice damage to trees. And this close-up sort of tells the story.
Ice storm Kennett Missouri
As power is slowly restored to some parts of southern Missouri, more photos like this one are getting out as folks get back online. This is Nancy’s home (Kennett, MO) and you get some sense of just how much ice it would take to bring down a tree limb this size.
Pictures from home
Regular readers will know that I grew up in Kennett, Missouri, and lived there until 1984. A great place to be from, if you catch my drift. The landscape is so flat you can see the curve of the earth. And the crop chemicals made for spectacular sunsets. But I never thought of the area as beautiful… until I stumbled across some photos by mshhoward. It appears he has enhanced the images a bit but I could be wrong on that. Doesn’t matter. They’re really striking.
I’ve emailed asking for an interview to find out more about the photographer and his work. Watch this space.
“This is not really an Obama area.”
I grew up in Kennett, Missouri, the county seat of Dunklin County. So when I heard the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had a front-page story (by Todd C. Frankel) about Bootheel politics, I headed for the paper’s website to check it out.
I wasn’t really surprised to learn than Dunklin County was Obama’s worst showing in the primary. Just 18 percent.
But then I was heartened to learn that the Obama campaign has two office in the county and that Sheryl Crow’s momma and daddy volunteer for O.
They have a Republican campaign HQ but if I read the story right it’s a first for Dunklin County.
The story quotes Ronnie Johnson who’s “voting for McCain. Or rather, against Obama.”
“He is reluctant to explain this at first — “You don’t want to know why,” he says.”
“The others on the porch goad him. And Johnson, a lanky 20-year-old white man who works as a meatcutter at a grocery store, starts to talk about an issue that has persisted throughout the campaign: race.”
“It is not just that Obama is black, Johnson says. He has heard that Obama is Muslim. (Obama is Christian.) He also has heard rumors that Obama refuses to salute the American flag, and that Obama has promised that black men will have more rights than white men. (Independent fact-checking groups say these rumors
are false.)”“He’s white,” Johnson says.
The story concludes with a couple of demographics:
“Dunklin is one of the poorest counties in Missouri. The unemployment rate hovers near 9 percent. More than a quarter of the population lives in poverty.”
Not sure we’ll see this clipping on the Chamber of Commerce bulletin board.