MR. TED T. CABLE: Thank you very much. I’m really pleased to be here tonight. I see several familiar faces and I have several friends in the audience here. I have to tell you and I’m not doing this just to suck up to the audience, but although I reside in Kansas I spend a lot of time here in Missouri. And really in many ways it’s my professional adopted home state as I do a lot of speaking and working and training and working with the parks folks here in the wonderful State of Missouri. So -- so it is sort of a second home in addition to -- in addition to Kansas.
Well, thank you for coming and I appreciate you being here to hear a little bit about the -- the latest highway book that I’ve been involved in the Driving Across Missouri. It all started in Kansas though and it has been alluded to already, I wrote a book about driving I-70 in Kansas, but even that has a strong Missouri link. And let me tell you why.
I was born in California. I grew up in the Chicago area. I went to college in Indiana for most my college career. And no matter where I lived the only thing I knew about Kansas is that it was flat and boring.
(Laughter.)
MR. TED T. CABLE: Then I moved there in 1984 and I found out that Kansas isn’t really flat. I live in the Flint Hills and it’s quite hilly. And there’s the Smoky Hills and the Osage Hills and Chautauqua Hills and -- and I also found that it wasn’t really boring or at least I didn’t think it was boring. And so -- so I -- I thought, boy, something really needs to be done about this -- this terrible image that we have here. And it occurred to me that most perceptions of Kansas are generated by driving across Interstate 70. That’s how the vast, vast majority of people who experience Kansas that’s how they experience it and that’s what they see.
Well, the last straw, the last straw came from right here near Jeff City; I had some friends and they told me that whenever they go skiing in Colorado they plan the trip so that they can drive across Kansas at night because there’s nothing to see there, right?
(Laughter.)
MR. TED T. CABLE: I see a lot of nods. And, in fact, I’ve met a couple of people that have also said that, too, that they drive across Kansas at night because there’s nothing to see in Kansas. Well, I took that as a challenge and I thought that does it, I have to do something about this. So -- so I wrote the book.
But, just to show you and this is just an amazing coincidence. It’s really wonderful serendipity. Just to show that that sentiment hasn’t changed, I just want to read to you from yesterday’s paper here. This is from the Boone County Journal written by a Mr. Bruce Wallace. I don’t know if any of you know Bruce or not. And it’s a great piece and I -- I’m reading this with a smile on my face, but it helps make my point about the perceptions of Kansas.
So this is just dated just yesterday and he wrote -- he went to Colorado and so forth. I’ll paraphrase some of this in the interest of time. But he’s writing about traveling back from his vacation in Colorado and he mentions that Kansas isn’t too scary except that I forgot to get my malaria prescription earlier this summer.
(Laughter.)
MR. TED T. CABLE: He said the more serious threat is dying of shear boredom. Traveling to Colorado means driving through the desert and it means potential soul-searching conversations with your traveling partner, in this case, my wife. It also means you’ll probably listen to, and this is great, you’ll listen to the Big 1370 KGNO WaKeeney’s news beacon cover the county fair LIVE. And they do.
(Laughter.)
MR. TED T. CABLE: They do. They do. They interview 4H kids and -- and I’ll even add to his observation. I’ve even heard a parade broadcast over the radio, LIVE. So you have to sort of imagine the floats coming down the street.
It says once you leave Denver there’s nothing, nothing through eastern Colorado, nothing until Topeka, 539 miles away. But we found time -- ways to pass the time. We listed -- and there’s a whole list of things they did to pass the time. One of them is we listed the 144 things we despise most about Kansas between Goodland and Hays.
(Laughter.)
MR. TED T. CABLE: We had plenty of time to accomplish this as we only had to list one item per mile in the 144 miles between these two towns. Another thing they did to pass the time, they listed the pros and cons of owning a fast-food restaurant in Colby, Kansas, the self-proclaimed oasis on I-70. The upside you’d make a ton of cash from motorists who won’t have another chance to eat for hours.
(Laughter.)
MR. TED T. CABLE: The downside, you might actually have to visit your investment two or three times a year.
(Laughter.)
MR. TED T. CABLE: They counted the number of 4H kids that were interviewed and how many goats they heard buying in the background and all of that. They dealt with calculating average wind speed.
Someone was just telling me here as I was signing a book that they had just been to Hays, Kansas, and that the recession hadn’t hit Hays. And they were just telling me about all the job wanted signs and everything there and sure enough this gentleman here from Boone County said that he saw a billboard proclaiming, Hays is hiring.
We did a quick spreadsheet which said it would be cheaper to take an out-of-work autoworker from Michigan, from Detroit and take them off unemployment, give them $25,000 in expense money, move them to Hays to take one of those many jobs.
But -- but then they speculated that $25,000 wouldn’t be enough to get someone to move from Detroit to Hays. And, again, I’m sort of shortening this.
(Laughter.)
MR. TED T. CABLE: There was many others and again in the interest and I don’t want to belabor this, but I thought these were really funny. The last one that I’ll just share with you is, driving past Lawrence, very quickly; we were at least heartened by the fact that William Quantrill had the good judgment to burn the town to the ground on August 21st, 1863, a day to be celebrated by all Missourians and those who just survived driving 15 hours on I-70.
(Laughter.)
MR. TED T. CABLE: So I just couldn’t believe this was in the paper yesterday, I thought, what perfect timing for me to share that with you and to help me make my point that the sentiment about driving across Kansas, particularly Missourians having to drive across Kansas hasn’t changed very much.
But my goal of that book and also the goal of the Missouri book, which I’m going to get to just here in a second. But the goal of that book was to help people see beauty in things that are not pretty. That’s one of my little mantras. Most of the people that drive I-70 and experience Kansas in that way are on their way to the pretty Rocky Mountains, you know, the postcard stuff; the pine trees, the mountain lakes, the snowcap peaks and so forth.
But my goal in that book was try to convince travelers that there was a lot of beauty that they were passing by, too, in the prairies, in the resourcefulness of the people that made a living on these lands, and the courage of some of the settlers and historic figures, there’s the beauty and the utility of some of their resourcefulness. That there’s a lot of more subtle beauty there, that if you had it called to your attention maybe through this book we could sort of call attention to that and in some way make the trip more engaging, more entertaining, more fun, maybe more educational and if nothing else maybe reduce some of the pain that people feel traveling across -- across that. So that was going to be my gift to humanity, I guess, was to try to make that trip more bearable and actually maybe make it even enriching in some ways.
So that book came out in 2003 and I have copies of it up here if you’re interested. It was quite successful and so the publisher asked me if I would write one about Missouri going from Kansas City to St. Louis and back and so I agreed to do that. I have a wonderful co-author. She couldn’t be here tonight, but here name is LuAnn Cadden. And she works for the Missouri Department of Conservation. I knew she was passionate about writing and was an excellent writer and with the resources of being part of MDC and I wanted to have a Missouri person as a co-author just to get some credibility. So it wasn’t this Kansas guy writing about Missouri. For all those reasons, I brought her on board and she was a wonderful help to me as we wrote about Missouri.
But you know the challenges were fundamentally the same. I-70 across Missouri is also a much maligned highway. Now, for totally different reasons, but people talk about it being -- sometimes being cluttered; the billboards, the crowdedness of it, the congestion and so forth. And so our goal was very much the same, is to help people see beauty in the landscape. Beauty in the landscape of Missouri, beauty in the history of Missouri, to help people see beyond the billboards to see the wonderful people that live there and the wonderful history and the wonderful natural resources of your -- of your wonderful state here that both LuAnn and I have come to appreciate even more so after having written the book.
So it was really fundamentally the same problem, but it was the absolute opposite extreme. Kansas was basically empty, that was my challenge was to make all that -- deal with all that space and here it was just the opposite problem of trying to help people see beauty through a lot of maybe things that got in the way of that. So that was our endeavor. That was the goal of both books to try to educate, entertain and make traveling that much more enjoyable across both of these states.
So this sort of shows what we did. I often drove LuAnn often took notes. And the process was going back and forth a number of times, now, as I mentioned I -- or maybe I mentioned, I think, that I spent time in Illinois and Indiana and I have family back in the Chicago area and that part of the world, so I drove across Missouri many, many times to go back to see family and I would take notes anticipating this book. And so I probably went 15 to 20 times back and forth across. LuAnn joined me for five or six trips back and forth. And each time we would go, we would start out with a skeleton, you know, like interesting farm at Mile 63, cemetery at Mile 72, whatever. We’d make a list and then each time we start flushing out stories and as I’ll show you in a minute here, we did interviews with people as well to sort of fill in a lot of blanks and add sort of a personal touch.
But that’s the way the book sort of grew. But it was -- it was a very challenging book to write. I don’t know how many of you have written books and probably some of you are writers in the audience here. As was mentioned, I’ve written several other more traditional-type books, but this one was really hard because if a person is going 70 miles an hour you have less than a minute before that mile is gone, you know. So you have to keep the stories very short. We tried to keep it to ten lines per mile, which is about the most a person could read if they’re going the speed limit.
Now, we’re not -- we’re not suggesting that you drive and read at the same time, by the way. Someone could read to them. Actually, in western Kansas you can get away with that.
(Laughter.)
MR. TED T. CABLE: It’s straight and there’s no other cars and you can probably read a whole novel while you’re going across, but that doesn’t work here in Missouri.
But, in any case, so we had that challenge of keeping stories short and keeping them moving. And if an object was going to be at Mile Marker 300 we really had to maybe start the story at 298 going one direction and leading up to it so that people could then see it. Or maybe at Mile 302 coming back the other direction, so it was a little bit more complicated of a book to deal with.
And the other thing is as you’re doing the research, if you just think about this if we’re driving down the highway and all of a sudden we get a call on our cell phone and if I talk to my wife for ten minutes on the cell phone, just a normal ten minute conversation, I’ve missed ten miles or more going the speed limit. Or if I get distracted by something on the radio, a news story or a song for three or four minutes, I’ve missed three or four miles. And sometimes it’s, oh, darn. Where was that thing -- that tree we were looking at? You know, and have to circle back and so it really -- we would do this all day long. And it was really -- it took a lot of concentration. And, of course, you have to worry about things like traffic and semis and other things, too, of course. So when I would be looking over my shoulder for the tree that I missed, sometimes it got kind of scary for LuAnn.
(Laughter.)
MR. TED T. CABLE: But, anyway, she would be taking notes. I would be driving and several of our trips were in the winter. And in that case, we were just trying to race the sun, you know. We would be halfway back from St. Louis and it was getting dark. You know, those winter days that get dark at about five o’clock and we were going to try to get to a certain mile marker to check on something and so we were sort of racing the daylight. So it was quite an adventure and quite a different process of writing the book.
Well, one of the themes of the book. One of the whole category of stories in the book is history and I’m sure most of you in this room know your history better than I do as an outsider. But one of the common threads throughout the book is trails. And we like to think and we tried to portray I-70 as a modern day trail heading west and east, of course, across Missouri. So one of the things that our books talks about is just that; how transportation changed over time and we make constant allusions to that. How early travelers traveled on the river, there was steamships on the Missouri River, which roughly paralleled I-70. Then there was the Boonslick Trail, which starts over by St. Charles and ends up near Arrow Rock and that’s where Daniel Boone’s sons had a saltlick. A saltlick is a place where salt rises to the surface and wild animals would come and lick it to add salt to their diet and hence the -- hence the name lick.
And then ultimately we had highways like Highway 24 and Highway 40. Highway 40 many times is underneath current I-70, other times it’s the frontage road. We talk about U.S. 40 and how that was called the Nations Road, the National Road, and that has a wonderful history to it as well. And then, of course, I-70 was built in the beginning of the 1950s.
And, of course, the Santa Fe Trail, which I failed to mention, which starts near Arrow Rock, New Franklin. I guess, in there it’s sort of a nebulous concept of where it began and then the starting point sort of moved west. From there and the, of course, all the way down to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and that was really the first freight highway with sort of the equivalent of semi-trucks. It was mostly a freight trail. And for all the semis we see today the 19th Century equivalent of that was the freight traveled on the Santa Fe Trail.
So we have all these useful trails. And then we included another trail, which I bet many of you have actually walked on or biked on and that’s the Katy Trail. How many of you have been on the Katy Trail?
(No response.)
MR. TED T. CABLE: I bet you a lot. Yeah. Almost everybody here. That’s what I expected. And the Katy Trail crosses -- intersects I-70 twice and that’s why it’s included in the book. And so travelers on I-70 can learn about that as well as they cross under it and then ultimately over it as well.
So let’s talk about history a little bit. One of the things that we sort of got a kick out of, this is probably an old hat for some of you, but Boonville. I don’t know how many times I’ve driven I-70. Many, many times over 20 years or more and never -- I never noticed until one day, actually LuAnn pointed it out, that on -- there’s no E in Boonville, at the end of Boon, you know. And, of course, every time that we had seen Boone spelled it was with an E, B-O-O-N-E.
And so, well, that’s odd, you know. And so we started doing some investigations and asking around about it and talking to some historians and interestingly enough we would get all sorts of different stories, but the apparently the truth of the matter is that Boon’s ancestors some of them used the E at the end and some of them didn’t. And sometimes Daniel used the E at the end and sometimes he didn’t. And on the tombstone there is no E.
So -- so it’s just sort of one of these very fluent things and it’s something that wasn’t really pinned down as far as Boone with the E or Boon without the E. I guess even maps I was told by these historians that we talked as we did our research, even maps of of early Boonville varied. Some of them had the E and some of them didn’t. So that was kind of a quirky little thing that we discovered along the way. And we sort of noticed on that water tower, which probably looks very familiar to many of you as you traveled I-70.
This is over in the St. Louis area, a little different history or at least a different era. And this is the Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church and this church was founded in the mid 19th Century, but this particular building was built in 1899. It was modeled after the Strasbourg Cathedral in Europe. This was built by a German, a German community, but they called it the Bremen Community and so they were of the sort of German-Catholic heritage. I-70 went right through that neighborhood and destroyed a lot of the homes of parishioners there.
But the interesting thing we found out about this church is, is that in 1927 it was hit by a tornado and there was a lot of damage done to the roof and, also, to this statue that’s part of the roof. That’s the Archangel St. Michael. That’s what it’s supposed to represent. And as part of -- as an effect of the tornado -- as a result of the tornado the wing, one of the wings was broken off Michael. Well, the priest at the time and I guess subsequent priests as well they fixed the roof, but they never fixed the statue because Michael did not protect them from the tornado.
(Laughter.)
MR. TED T. CABLE: So there’s sort of grudge there, you know, that the -- this is actually a visual representation of the grudge that is being held by the church leaders because St. Michael didn’t protect them. So, I guess, St. Michael is destined to never have his wing.
Some of you may be familiar with this. I’m sure some of you know the story. This was a real hidden gem for us. This is just a non-descript white building, you know, again, I know I’ve personally passed it a million times without even taking notice. It’s right along the interstate. This is right up against the shoulder of the interstate on the north side of the highway and it’s the Danville Female Academy or it’s what’s left of that. There was a cluster of buildings there in the mid 1800s, a girls’ school. All that remains now is the chapel. That’s what this building is. This is the remains of the chapel of this academy.
But it’s the home to a really wonderful story and, again, it’s a story like many historical stories that you hear different versions of, but a children’s book has even been written about this site and the children’s book is titled, How the Petticoats Saved the School, or something like that. And the story goes is that some of the Confederate sympathizers that were raiding villages and burning towns and so forth came through and they thought that maybe some Union soldiers would be hiding in the chapel. They demanded the keys to the chapel and the girls in the Academy, now, here’s where there’s two versions of the story. One is, they hung their petticoats out as a sign of truce, like, you know, peace or whatever. Or the other -- but the other story, which I would prefer to believe and is a little bit more colorful is that they actually waived their petticoats to the soldiers and they actually feigned a Southern accent and they feigned that they were supporters of their cause.
(Laughter.)
MR. TED T. CABLE: And, therefore, were left alone. So I don’t know what the truth is and maybe there’s a third story that some of you are aware of, but those are the stories that we ran across about how the girls’ petticoats actually saved the Academy during those Civil War years.
There’s several cemeteries along the highway as well, along I-70. This one is right at the Concordia Exit and this picture to me just -- it always strikes me, I think, it’s a -- well, I don’t know if profound is too strong of a word, but if you look at those old tombstones, Civil War era tombstones in the foreground and then you see Hardees and other things in the background there. We have a spot, you know, sort of a space in time thing going on there. There’s one spot where nothing’s changed in a hundred and -- more than 150 years and then we have -- surrounded by all this more-modern progress, if you want to call it; progress or development. So to me, just the spatial juxtaposition of those two things, I think, it’s kind of interesting.
But in this cemetery, there’s 15 Civil War soldiers buried. There’s also nine victims of a raid that happened in Concordia. In general, there’s a lot of German settlements in this region and, in fact, all the way across Missouri. That’s again sort of a theme that we discovered and that we write about. And, in fact, Concordia was settled by Germans. Ironically, enough Concordia means harmony. And there wasn’t much harmony in Concordia for a long time after it was founded during the 1850s and ‘60s.
So 25 men were killed, German men were killed. Germans were generally anti-slavery. They generally have allegiances to the North and so 25 men were killed. Nine of those men are buried in this cemetery along with those 15 Civil War soldiers. And that’s right at the Concordia Exit from I-70.
And then just down the road a few miles is another cemetery. This one’s on the north side of the highway, St. John. And it’s -- if the corn is not too tall, you can actually see the tombstones. In the book we have the picture of that -- there’s an archway leading into the cemetery, which you can see from the road regardless of the corn that surrounds it. And, again, a strong German heritage; most of the tombstones are written in German. We found these wonderful etchings here of the hand and the crowns and we found some with weeping willows which must have been a popular symbol in that time or culture anyway. That seemed to be very common in that particular cemetery. Just a wonderful cemetery; we visited it on a cold, drizzly, fall day and just sort of the perfect mood, too, to be in such a somber place. Other victims of that raid are buried -- the raid that I alluded to in Concordia there are other victims and some of those German men are buried in this cemetery as well.
And I’m not going to go through every story in the book obviously of even tell a lot about it, but I just want to sort of give the flavor of some of the other things that are in there. This is a rock that some of you may have heard about. Many people call it Slave Rock and its east of here, east of Columbia. And it’s in the median now between the two lanes of the interstate and there was I understand a particular lady who lived in the area that was very instrumental when the interstate was being built of insisting and drumming up public support for separating the interstate at that point to preserve this particular rock formation.
Again, talking to historians it’s a very cloudy picture. It has that tradition of many, many, many people told us that slaves were sold on this rock. But we talked to historians with State parks and with other Missouri agencies and they said, well, maybe but there’s never been an announcement found about it, you know, a posting about it that they would have posted for a slave auction. They thought it’s a little funny that the location ‘cause it’s not right in the middle of a town and most of those were held right in sort of a town square kind of environment. So there’s some skeptics out there, too. So whether or not slaves were ever actually sold on that rock, that’s sort of up in the air; that’s up for debate. But nevertheless that rock was saved.
But one of the things that did happen on that rock was that there were family picnics. It was a gathering spot, Sunday afternoon’s families in the area including the Graham Family, which owned a lot of land around there would have picnics. And then later, when U.S. 40 came through that area it was also a spot where people would stop along U.S. 40 to -- to picnic.
So, again, we have a real juxtaposition don’t we of -- of something as tragic and as awful as possibly slaves being sold and then it’s an afternoon Sunday picnic at the same -- the same rock formation. And so if -- if those slaves stories are true that rock formation has seen both extremes, I guess, of human nature and behavior.
We tell the story and I won’t tell it here in the interest of time, but just to wet your appetite a little. We tell the story of this hermit who lived in a cave. Right there in that Graham Cave State Park area. His name was George Baughman. He lived in the cave until his dying day. He refused to come out of the cave or leave the cave area. He was a real kind of funny guy, but the local people came to know him and to love him and actually somewhat care for him from time-to-time. I just tell you a little bit of -- just one little characteristic of George is that he was a very generous man and when people would bring him food, which he really needed and bring him some sort of goods to help him he always felt like he had to pay them back.
And so if someone did something like that to him, gave him food, they would maybe find a couple squirrels hanging on their doorstep later where he would insist as they take a couple squirrels or something as payback. He was too proud just to take it as a gift. But he was a very interesting man that lived there.
Okay. So that’s history. So there’s a lot of history stuff like that in the book. One of the -- our favorite things, maybe I guess -- I think, I can speak for LuAnn and say our favorite thing was to do interviews of people that live in the I-70 corridor today. It’s -- we have got to meet so many wonderful people, so many nice people and interesting people and here you see what you might think is a rather average house, a rather non-descript house that anyone of us would drive by without thinking anything about it. But they had a sign out in front that said Ridgeway Farms and it looked like a pretty substantial farm. You don’t really see that in this picture here, but I guess we can maybe see a few silos or something off there to the right.
But it looked like a pretty substantial place, so we thought, well, let’s -- let’s stop and see if we can find out about -- about Ridgeway Farms. It was the day after Christmas. I was on Christmas break and so it was one of those opportunities for me to travel a little bit. And we pulled into the driveway and we both have long, black, winter coats on. And I got to thinking, you know, having a person like me come up to the door unannounced in a black coat that looks a little scary so I said, LuAnn, why don’t you go up?
(Laughter.)
MR. TED T. CABLE: So she did and she’s just a petite, young woman. So she was like probably less threatening and sure enough she went up and knocked and explain what we were doing and then asked if it was okay to bring my co-author. He’s out in the car there. So we went in and we met this family, Lisa and Ron Williams. And they were so gracious. Here it’s the day after Christmas and Christmas trees and all that hoopla, you know, that they’re sort of probably recovering from.
And they told us about his family farm. It was a dairy farm for several generations and they shared with us what it was like to be dairy farmers and so forth. And unfortunately, again, because of the nature of the book we can’t put these long stories in. We got to make it short ‘cause people are driving by this at 70 miles per hour. But we put something in. But may be the best part of that and the part that we did write about was that he -- Ron said to us, he said, I want to show you something. And he took us through his house and to this backroom in his house where there was a huge trophy about this tall maybe. And turns out that his farm -- this was his father’s farm, too, it has been passed down generations. That in 1967 they won the dairy cow of the year award at an international competition and had this huge trophy from 1967. And he was so proud of that in that his father had won that and he was really anxious and happy to share that with us.
And those were the kinds of people we met as we did these -- these interviews. I don’t have a photograph of it in here, but just down the road a little farther is a poultry farm. And we went up to the house and the wife was very nice and said well, my husband’s down in the chicken coops, I guess, you would call them, although they’re huge and very modern. And -- but go down and talk to him. He would be happy to talk with you. And we went down and, of course, we took one step inside a chicken coop; how many of you have been inside a chicken coop?
(No response.)
MR. TED T. CABLE: It was -- I think, LuAnn just about fainted. I said, LuAnn, if you need to go out with fresh air I’ll deal with -- I’ll handle this one, you know, just the look on her face. But we met these people and I just have such an appreciation, again, stuff that I would take for granted about the life that these people lead. As they told us and they made the point there’s not a single day off when you’re in that business. There’s not a single day off.
They have tens of thousands of chicks that they raise. Tens of thousands, in fact, several thousand die each week and one of their big jobs is just getting rid of the thousands of dead ones each week. And they’re dealing with tens of thousands of chicks. They raise them to a certain age and then they sale them to Tyson and then they get shipped down there. But it’s never-ending. You cannot miss a day of feeding them, cleaning them out, dealing with dead ones and all that. It’s just a 365 day a year job and -- and physical labor in that sort of environment we just had -- we had such respect. In fact, we were actually embarrassed and felt bad that we had bothered them, although they were very gracious, but like how could they take time out to even talk to us. It was amazing.
Here’s something that you may have seen. I’m going -- I’m going to make sure I get my dates right on this ‘cause this is quite a story. This Ferris wheel, I’m sure many of you have seen it. It’s in High Hill and as you drive towards Kansas City you pass it. I certainly passed it for many, many years and had no idea what in the world a Ferris wheel was doing out in the middle of a field, right along the interstate.
Well, the answer to that question is, is this is the property of a Mr. Rich Tinsley. He has -- his company is Tinsley Amusements. And Rich started in the amusement business in 1945 as a small boy. He helped his dad setup kiddie cars and rides at little fairs and things. And he’s been in the business ever since 1945. Today, he’s the largest amusement ride provider in Missouri and one of the largest in the whole Midwest. He takes his rides; he has over 80 rides now that he owns. He takes them all over to fairs even the Illinois State Fair, county fairs and church festivals and whatever. And so it’s very conceivable that many of you have even ridden on one of Mr. Tinsley’s rides.
The way I -- I portray it in the book is that he manufactures happiness. And that’s kind of a neat business to be in and so some of you may have experienced some of that happiness and some of that joy because of Mr. Tinsley and his -- and his rides. But let me mention the specific story about the wind -- the Ferris wheel. He bought that Ferris wheel in 1954, so it’s quite old. He put it at an amusement park in St. Louis named Holiday Hill. Anybody ever been to Holiday Hill?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: By the airport there.
MR. TED T. CABLE: Okay. Some of you remember it. Yeah. It’s by where the airport is, right? Yeah. And so that was actually the Holiday Hill, again, may be some of you who raised your hands have ridden on that then without maybe even knowing it.
During the winters, during that period when it was at Holiday Hill; during the winters, it would be shipped to Miami, Florida, and be put on the roof of a building there and decorated for Christmas. It was a Christmas decoration during the winter months and then during the summer months when the park would open again they would ship the Ferris wheel back.
Eventually when Holiday Hill closed this particular Ferris wheel went to Coney Island. It was at Coney Island for a while giving people rides there. Then it went from Coney Island to the Poconos. It spent time in the Poconos giving people rides. And then it kind of returned home. It came back to St. Louis and it was at Union Station in St. Louis, you know, when they closed it down from being a railroad station and made it more of an amusement area, entertainment area. And then he reacquired it, which he had owned -- I mean, it came back really to the original owner. Here he reacquired it many decades later after this Ferris wheel had traveled the eastern United States all over the place. So now it’s back at his place.
The big bull you see there that was just given to him by a friend, you know. That’s what every friend needs, right. A friend in Kentucky had that, didn’t know what to do with it so Rich took it off his hands back in the 1980s and Rich said -- Rich told me, you know, it’s been part of his family ever since.
(Laughter.)
MR. TED T. CABLE: So that’s the story of the Ferris wheel and the bull that you see on your -- on your way to St. Louis.
This is another one of my favorite stories related to an interview. If you travel west at all on I-70 towards Kansas City or Concordia you may have noticed this chimney, right along the highway, right along the Frontage Road, on the north side of I-70. It still has a T.V. antenna on top of it. And it’s been that way since 2001. In February of 2001, there was a nice three-bedroom home here that burned to the ground. That’s the only thing that remains of this three-bedroom home, is the chimney and the T.V. antenna. And here we are almost ten -- ten years later.
But I had the opportunity of interviewing the -- or corresponding with, I didn’t meet her face-to-face, but I corresponded with the -- the owner of this home. A lady who now lives in Marshall, Missouri, but she commutes to work and she passes her chimney every day, twice a day on her way to and from work every day. And this isn’t a reading or anything tonight, but I do want to just read to you what -- what this woman wrote about -- about this chimney and why she kept it there. I think you’ll -- I think you’ll find it interesting.
The woman whose home this belonged to, she said, “This was the first and only home I have ever purchased. To lose the house was devastating, but more devastating was to lose the contents inside the home that can never be replaced. The pictures, the yearbooks, the childhood toys, the family furniture those are the things I think about each time I drive past on I-70. To lose everything is hard to overcome and I still feel sad. Someday when I purchase another home I will take down the chimney and use the bricks to build a fire pit in the backyard. And if I never buy another home the chimney will remain standing as a reminder.”
So this woman has rebuilt her life, but she still has kept this, I guess, you might say almost as a memorial. And then she has that wonderful, positive outlook that if she does buy another home someday she’s going to take those bricks and turn it into something positive as an outdoor -- outdoor fire pit; so that’s the story of that chimney that just stands out there all by itself along -- along the highway.
Some of you many have noticed a Learjet sitting out by the highway over by Bates City. Again, this is another interview that we did which I thought was interesting. For years and years and years I would drive past this place and I would see the tails of airplanes sticking up over this berm here. And I have three boys that are pretty much grown now, but for years I would say someday boys we got to go see this airplane museum. I just assumed it had to be an airplane museum. All these airplanes sitting out there I figured it was some kind of museum and my boys liked airplanes and I -- I for years had promised to take them to this airplane museum.
So LuAnn and I are working on the book and I get off on the Bates City exit and I pull into a convenience store ‘cause I wasn’t sure exactly how to access the frontage road and so forth to get over to this. And there was a nice little gentleman coming out of the convenience store and I said, can you tell me how to get over to the airplane museum? And he just looked at me like I was nuts. And he goes, airplane museum? There’s no airplane museum around here. And I said, sure there is, you know. And I don’t know why I felt so sure of myself, but I just couldn’t fathom it being anything else.
And there’s a Learjet sitting out by the highway and it’s just -- you know -- so, anyway, after going around and around a little bit he realized finally what I was talking about. And it’s White -- it’s a place called White Industries. The guy’s name is Ted White that owns it. And what this is, is essentially kind of a junkyard for airplanes. It’s a place -- a salvage yard for spare parts and used parts for airplanes. And they salvage wrecked airplanes and airplanes that are just being, you know, obsolete, to old to use or whatever and they use them for spare parts.
I’ll say a little bit more about that in a second, but the Learjet that’s out by the highway is actually a fairly significant jet. It was a Lear 23. It’s from the early to mid-1960s. And it actually sets like 18 records as I recall -- flight records at that time. It had the world’s record for flying around the world in 50 hours, in a little over 50 hours; 50 hours and 20 minutes, back in the day. It had the record for getting to 40,000 feet the quickest. It was seven minutes and a certain number of seconds; seven minutes and 31 seconds, I think. So it was actually quite a historic jet and one of the, sort of top-performer record-breaking jets at the time. So that’s the Learjet that’s out in front.
But this is what the place looks like from the air, which you don’t see from the highway. He has a 4,400 foot runway for flying in jets that are still able to fly or planes able to fly. He has 2,600 airplanes in his inventory. I understand that there’s only about two or three of these places left in the country. There used to be more. There’s one, I think, he said in Colorado and one maybe in California. So this may be only one of three such businesses around anymore where he can use these airplanes for parts.
But he had many interesting stories about salvaging airplanes. Interestingly enough I should tell you that he was private about and really very reluctant to talk about crashes. In fact, he wouldn’t. He didn’t -- I would -- you know, I was sort of hoping to get some story about some celebrity plane crash or some famous plane crash that maybe he was involved in that he could tell us about. But he was -- he wouldn’t talk about anything like that, but he did tell me a couple of interesting stories about salvaging planes.
One was an Air Espana plane was flying to West Africa and it ran low on fuel. And so there’s a runway, which actually it’s a town that I’ve actually been to, Ivory Coast, that I’ve written about in my Africa book up here called Susandra. It’s right on the coast. And they have a runway there, but it’s just a dirt, gravel runway, unapproved runway, no runway lights so he must have been able to radio ahead because the way he tells the story is that they got all the vehicles in the town to come out and line the runway with their headlights so that -- the car headlights served as the runway lights. Well, when the jet landed because of these unusual conditions and so forth it ran off the end of the runway. The runway wasn’t long enough for it apparently and it ran right into the jungle and smashed up the nosecone. So, White Industries from Bates City, Missouri, was called into action and they flew out a new nosecone from one of their -- from their stock here. They replaced it right there in the field and then flew -- flew the plane out.
Another interesting salvage story that he told me was a plane also low on fuel. I guess pilots don’t always check the gas gauge like car drivers or something. I don’t know anything about flying, but this happens to be another plane. This was a business jet with a family in it that was flying back from Europe. And, of course, they were taking that great circle route. If you’ve ever flown commercially to Europe, you know, you go way up over Iceland and so forth.
Well, they were coming that way and they were trying to make a refueling stop in Greenland. And, again, they ran short of fuel. And the pilot landed the jet on a glacier. Well, that was -- that was okay. It was a safe landing. The Danish Air Force came out with a helicopter, rescued all the people, they were fine, no -- no problems at all; but while they were trying to decide what to do with the jet the sun, of course, warmed up the metal of the jet, which melted the ice around it. So it sort of sunk into the glacier.
(Laughter.)
MR. TED T. CABLE: So the way -- again, White Industries from little Bates City was called to Greenland and in that case they had to dismantle the plane and take pieces up by helicopter, you know, lifting them up in these big large kind-of helicopters and disassemble the plane and then ship it home that way and presumably reassemble it. I’m not sure about that, but that’s another one of the White Industries stories.
Well, I’ve talked about history. I’ve talked about interesting people that live across -- along the interstate today. The book also talks a lot about natural resources, the beautiful forests of Missouri and how valuable they are and how they’ve decreased over the years in terms of -- in terms of the acreage and we -- we interpret the forest that you see along the road.
We interpret the prairie of Missouri. At one time Missouri had 15 million acres of prairie and now it’s down to about 90,000. So a tremendous, on a percentage basis, tremendous decrease in prairie habitat; but we passed a couple prairies like the Tucker Prairie which some of you are probably familiar with up here.
We talk about how that has something like 280 species of plants. But prairies in Missouri as a whole have over 800 species of plants. They’re extremely rich, beautiful places so we talk about that in the book as well.
And then we talk about roadside wildflowers. You know, Emerson said, “The Earth laughs in flowers.” And so as you drive along I-70 we try to give you a few laughs, I guess, by pointing out those beautiful wildflowers that grow along the highway.
And one of the common plants along the highway is sumac. It’s really the first sign of fall. It turns this beautiful scarlet red. It won’t be long I hope, at least, on hot days like this I’m thinking, it won’t be long and the sumac will be turning. And it’s one of the first to change color. Those of you -- and I know some of you are naturalist in the room here. You know about making lemonade from the berries. And the other reason why it’s often been planted especially in slope situations like along highways as it has a dense root system and so it’s really good at holding soil in place and preventing erosion as well. So that’s an example of one of the many plants that we talk about along the road.
We mention wildlife that you see from the road, Eastern bluebird, which is your State bird. At many of the rest stops along I-70 there’s bluebird houses and so we call attention to that. We call attention to -- invite people to look more-closely at the bluebird and what a beautiful bird it is that you have as a State bird, you know, Thoreau said that “The bluebird carries the sky on its back, and the Earth on its breasts.” And that’s really a nice poetic way of thinking about that -- that beautiful bird. It’s a very gentle bird, but it nests in a cavity so it can’t make its own cavities ‘cause it doesn’t have like the woodpecker bill to do that. And so that’s why bluebird houses are such an important factor for bluebirds. And so you have an opportunity to see some of those at the rest stops.
Then there’s the red-tailed hawk over here. That’s the common hawk that you see along the highway. Now, there’s chances you’ll see others, but the primary hawk you see when you see a big hawk sitting up in a tree odds are that it’s a red-tail. It’s not a chicken hawk. There’s no such thing as a chicken hawk per se. Well, at least, if you look in the book you won’t find anything called “chicken hawk”. And, in fact, red-tailed hawks are very valuable to farmers because they eat a lot of rodents which in turn eat a lot of grain.
At one study that was done years and years ago in Illinois said if you had a pair of red-tailed hawks on your farm in Illinois at the time, and this is way back several decades ago, but even then it was worth of $500 they figured in terms of the grain saved by the rodents killed by the red-tailed hawk. So they’re a valuable bird. And they love being along the interstates because they feed on the mice and the vole that are in the grass medians and shoulder areas of the interstate. Often, and particularly in winter, the fields are plowed and bare and so the best habitat really is right along the road there.
We talk about rivers. And, of course, this picture looks familiar to you. I’m almost sure. It’s one of the most beautiful spots along I-70, maybe the most beautiful spot with those gorgeous bluffs, historic bluffs that Lewis and Clark passed. There’s a lot to think about and a lot to write about at that location, but one of our common threads is rivers. And Missouri is sort of defined by the Mississippi River and the Missouri River and so we talk about the importance of rivers and how that has really shaped the culture and the history of Missouri.
As some of you know there’s a winery up here on the bluff and -- there by Rocheport -- we even interpret some vineyards that you can see from the highway, too. And we -- we mention for example, not only do you have a state bird, the bluebird but you have a state grape. It’s the Norton grape. So in case you didn’t know that a little piece of Missouri trivia that’s been designated as your state grape and it makes a wonderful wine.
There’s a couple spots along I-70 where looking south you can sort of glimpse the north edge of the Ozarks and you can see sort of the rocky hills and forested hills. And we touch on geology at a couple of our stories along the way. And then we’ve talked about historical beauty; beauty and courage and resilience and resourcefulness of people and we’ve talked about the beauty of the ingenious people that live across -- along the highway today and the beauty of nature but there’s some of the urban areas -- the urban areas have beauty as well and, of course, St. Louis with the beautiful Arch and the lights reflected in the Mississippi River.
The Mississippi River which T.S. Elliot called the “great brown god” is -- goes by in a very dramatic fashion as we have this dramatic skyline of St. Louis. And we do interpret sites in St. Louis and along I-70 there. We just had a change and our books already obsolete. I understand that the Missouri Legislature didn’t like the Mark McGuire Highway anymore and so we actually mention that you’re traveling on the Mark McGuire Highway. Although I mention that it’s controversial ‘cause even when I wrote the book I knew that some people didn’t like that. And sure enough now you guys -- you guys, I -- Missouri has officially changed that now to the Mark Twain after he came out and admitted to drug use and so forth. So that’s one thing that’s already a little bit out of date in the book.
And then at the other end of the state, Kansas City and we talk about the -- the three Bs of Kansas City, you know, the blues and barbeque and it’s -- I think it’s very neat that Missouri and I-70 across Missouri has bookends, these two urban bookends; both of them on rivers, major rivers. So you have the urban areas anchoring both sides, of course, Columbia is urban as well, but not to the extent that Kansas City and St. Louis are. And then you have agricultural areas in between so it’s really a nice mix and Kansas City also is a very beautiful city as well.
So just in closing I really like this quote, “The real void to discovery lies not in seeking new lands but in seeing with new eyes.” And I know some of you have driven I-70 100 times. Some of you make commute on it and drive it daily every day and for those of you that are in that category, the people who have driven it many, many times our goal then is to help you see this highway with new eyes. And for those of you who don’t travel it very frequently we too hope that you will see things that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise when you travel it. And that you will be able to see beyond the billboards and see the beautiful landscape that makes up central Missouri.
Thank you very much.
(Applause.)