History
With the Masters golf tournament just around the corner, and my last article about the transition of women’s high school sports still in the back of my mind, I thought of golf professional Jo D. Duncan Armstrong. You haven’t heard of her? Just keep reading.
In the 1960s, WSHS had a boy’s...
My first inclination was to privately record all this and file away my memories of a co-worker who was a lifelong friend and had the most significant influence on my thirty-three-year career in the Missouri State Highway Patrol. However, I decided this is a story that needs to be shared.
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In several previous articles, I focused on men’s sports, mostly football and basketball, but a few recent events, including a federal executive order, shifted my thoughts to the progress that has been made in women’s sports.
The Willow Springs school song has the words “. . . playing...
In the previous article, I mentioned connections, in various “degrees of separation,” between the old Willow Springs gymnasium and high-scoring basketball players in the Ozarks. One example was Richard Beavers (WSHS 1964) coaching at Winona, the same school where Willow Coach Johnny Ledgerwood...
Her death prompted newspaper coverage in major cities and small towns across the country. The St. Louis Post Dispatch printed a full-page tribute to her life. An immigrant to this country, on arrival, she spoke no English but quickly learned the language of her new nation. One hundred years after...
The old WSHS gymnasium has always reminded me of a swimming pool, a natatorium of the 1930s, set below street level and surrounded above by concrete bleachers with backless, slatted seats. Reprising the lines of the school song, it was “a place of many blessed memories.”
With the smell of...
One hundred years ago this week, the Thursday, January 27, 1921, edition of the West Plains Journal-Gazette newspaper, on its front page and leading column, reported the: "Largest Funeral in West Plains. One Thousand People Witness Soldier Heroes' Burial." The headline also announced, "Business...
Many worked on the idea worldwide, but Alexander Graham Bell was the first to be awarded a successful patent on the telephone in 1875. The utility of his device wasn't immediately seen but soon caught on, and by the turn of the century, phone service reached the Ozarks.
In Howell County,...
It is the time of year when we frequently hear words taken from the second chapter of Luke telling of the birth of Jesus, that read, "In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius...
During my junior year at Mizzou, my friend Steve and I had two buddies who spent a summer in Europe. They returned with hair growing over their ears, daring and radical in 1967 in the Midwest, and with fabulous tales of their adventures. Paris. Rome. Munich. And Rickey’s Bar in Sitges, Spain. ...