Missouri Life February/March 2015

[ O U R Q U I LT I N G C A P I TA L

•

103 CABIN FEVER CURES ]

THE SPIRIT OF DISCOVERY

What Time Is This Place?

Uncover the Art of Memory

Our

ANTHOLOGY Canonized Women Writers, the New Ozark Noir, Q&A with Richard Burgin, and Our Prodigal Son— Tennessee Williams

February 2015 | $4.50 (Display until Mar. 31)

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Bird is the Word: Millions Flock to Squaw Creek

www.missourilife.com

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YOU DESERVE

BETTER HOT WATER. THE SOONER YOU INSTALL A PROPANE WATER HEATER, THE SOONER YOU’LL ENJOY THE BENEFITS. The comfortable, consistent hot water and significant cost savings of a propane water heater are second to none…and you deserve the best, right? You’ll use less energy, save money, and reduce your carbon footprint compared with electric units. But don’t wait to install a new, energy-efficient propane model. Over time, the performance of any water heater diminishes, and that means you could be wasting energy and incurring unnecessarily high costs.

Talk to your propane provider about a $250 rebate on a new propane hot water heater installation, or visit moperc.org/for-homes for more information.

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PROMOTION ADVERTISEMENT

AWAKEN to Fulton’s rich history with exciting sights and sounds all wrapped up in the warmth of small-town charm, with brick streets, elegant architecture, and 67 buildings on the historic register.

UNWIND at a Missouri top 10 inn, the historic Loganberry Inn where Margaret Thatcher and other famous guests have stayed.

CONNECT to our history at the newly renovated National Churchill Museum.

This $4-million museum inside a priceless piece of architecture offers a look back at living history.

IMMERSE yourself in the arts and music at Kemper Center for the Arts and Westminster Gallery.

MARVEL at the impressive collection of 84 historic automobiles displayed in Hollywood-style sets for their era at the new Backer Auto World Museum.

SAMPLE some distinctive Missouri wines at Canterbury Hill Winery, or bottle your own at Serenity Valley Winery.

SAVOR scrumptious dining at one of our great restaurants, like Beks, for a unique blend of old and new where internet and espresso meet 1902 architecture.

CAPTURE a sense of local history at the Historical Society Museum, or pay your respects at the Missouri Firefighters Memorial.

The National Churchill Museum features interactive displays that engage and educate visitors of all ages.

Celebrate the joy of painting, pottery, jewelry making and more with weekly events at the Art House in Fulton’s Brick District.

SMILE at the offbeat collection at Crane’s Museum in Williamsburg, and before you head out, stop by Marlene’s Restaurant. A pulled-pork sandwich and warm slice of pie will leave you grinning.

REVISIT the 1930s by sharing a shake made with locally made premium ice cream at Sault’s authentic soda fountain.

Loganberry Inn B&B offers a variety of intimate wedding packages as well as other romance packages.

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ADVERTISEMENT

Backer Auto World Museum displays an impressive collection of 84 historic automobiles in Hollywood-style sets.

Calendar of Events Celebration Romance Basket Feb 1-March 30 Loganberry Inn Bed and Breakfast Free with any 2 night stay 573-642-9229 www.loganberryinn.com Cox Gallery Art Exhibits William Woods University Campus Fulton For schedule of exhibits visit 573-592-4244 www.williamwoods.edu National Winston Churchill Museum Exhibits 501 Westminster, Fulton For schedule of exhibits visit 573-592-5369 www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org Beer, Brauts and Burgers Sunday March 15, 4-8 PM Beks in the Historic Brick District, Fulton 573-642-8010 Fundraiser for Brick District Fultonbrickdistrict@gmail.com

Crane’s 4,000-square-foot museum is a one-of-akind viewing experience featuring rural Missouri history dating back to the 1800s.

Unique shops and restaurants dot Fulton’s Historic Brick District.

Come tour our seven historic Civil War sites on the Gray Ghosts Trail!

www.callawaycivilwar.org www.mocivilwar.org

Savor a “Brown cow” at Sault’s authentic soda fountain.

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For your next getaway or family vacation, visit Fulton and Callaway County. For more information and calendar of events, visit www.visitfulton.com or call 573-642-3055.

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Plan to stay with us in Marshall:

Super 8 of Marshall 1355 W. College Ave. 660-886-3359 www.super8.com Claudia’s B & B 3000 W. Arrow St. 660-886-5285

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Kitty’s Corner Guest Houses 228 E. North St. 660-886-8445 Courthouse Lofts 23 N. Lafayette St. 660-229-5644 Marshall Lodge 1333 W. Vest St. 660-886-2326 www.marshall-lodge.com

Photo courtesy of Larry Arrowood

Be sure to include a visit to Nicholas Beazley Aviation Museum in your next trip to Marshall.

This gem, sure to please guests of all ages, is located adjacent to the Martin Community Center at 1985 S. Odell. A tour of the museum provides intriguing information, hands-on activities and displays of early aviation history. Hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. For more information visit www.nicholasbeazley.org or call 660-886-2630.

Visit the Marshall Welcome Center on the northwest corner of the Square, open March through mid-December.

Comfort Inn – Marshall Station 1356 W. College Ave. 660-886-8080 www.comfortinn.com

Marshall is home to The Martin Community Center. Conveniently located at 1985 S. Odell, it is the ideal venue for your next function, large or small. This beautiful facility can accommodate groups from 50-500. Our staff will assist you with plans for hosting meetings, trade shows, parties or receptions. To learn more or to book your event, visit www.nicholasbeazley.org or call 660-886-2630.

Photo courtesy of Sharon Hoeflicker

“Marshall is Music,” to be presented at the fifth annual Bob James Jazz Festival on Saturday, May 23, 2015, tells the story of a small town in mid-Missouri.

Beginning at 6:00 p.m., experience the history of Marshall in a musical/visual presentation at Bueker Middle School. Performances by natives Bob James and the Morton Sisters bring to life a journey through time and music. More details and announcements of additional artists can be found at @MarshallisMusic on Twitter or by calling 660-815-3664. Visit us online: www.bobjamesjazzfest.org, and www.facebook.com/BobJamesJazzFestival

Photo courtesy of Christina Morrow

Logo courtesy of Jacob I. Hatfield

Scan to learn more about Marshall.

The Marshall Welcome Center and Jim the Wonder Dog Museum are nearing the end of a winter’s nap. We will re-open on March 1, ready to assist you in making your next visit to Marshall even more enjoyable. We have information on attractions and events in the area. In the museum, the story of Jim the Wonder Dog is on display with artifacts and photos. Come visit.

We’re next to the Jim the Wonder Dog Garden at 101 N. Lafayette. For more information visit www.jimthewonderdog.org or call 660-886-8300.

Upcoming Events February 15 – Marshall Philharmonic Concert, featuring Ron Montgomery, Trumpet – Bueker Middle School – 2:30 p.m. -www.marshallphilharmonic.org or 660-886-5853 February 15 – Marshall Bow Hunters 3-D Snow Shoot – Indian Foothills Park – 7 a.m. – 3 p.m. www.marshallbowhunters.org or 660-886-2714 March 13 – Women in Agriculture 12th Annual Conference – Martin Community Center –- www.womeninag.net or 660-886-7447

www.visitmarshallmo.com

March 21 – Marshall Cultural Council Craft & Art Festival – Marshall High School – 9 a.m. – 4 p.m. www.marshallculturalcouncil.org or 660-229-4845 March 21 – Marshall Philharmonic Chamber Music Concert – First United Methodist Church — 7:30 p.m. www.marshallphilharmonic.org [6] MissouriLife or 660-886-5853

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Contents FEBRUARY 2015

[38] SECRETS OF SQUAW CREEK Flock to Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge this spring to see millions of migrating birds and other wildlife.

featured >

[26] MISSOURI ARTIST T-Marie Nolan paints outside the lines. In fact, this Hannibal artist has no boundaries at all.

[68] SHOW-ME HOMES On a river bluff, a couple built their dream home inside a corn-crib barn from the 1800s.

[74] REMARKABLE MISSOURIANS

special features >

[29] A SHOW-ME ANTHOLOGY

Newspapers, sporks, and noodles aren’t trash for this breakout fashionista; they’re dresses.

Review the Missouri authors in this miscellany, and see why we think our state

[76] MUSINGS ON MISSOURI

makes a respectable run at the title of literary capital of the world.

Ron Marr finds wisdom in sunsets and harmonicas.

[42] STITCHED TOGETHER A quilting empire and Youtube revitalized James Cash Penney’s hometown of Hamilton. Discover new destinations that have opened in the past year.

[50] THE ART OF MEMORY What time is this place? Discover how the past plays out in the beautiful, historic

COURTESY OF BRENT FULTON

district that surrounds Missouri’s Capitol in Jefferson City.

[56] THE BEST BISCUITS AND GRAVY

special sections > [48] WEALTH MANAGEMENT

and gravy, from Southern-style classics to epicurean updates.

There is no time like the present to plan your legacy. Learn the basics, so you can start today.

[66] CULINARY COMPETITION

[77] TRAVEL GUIDE

Each year, some of the best chefs from across the state compete in the Taste of

Pack your bags, and explore some of the most intriguing destinations in and around our state.

Take a starch-loaded journey across the state to find some of the best biscuits

Elegance—the prestigious twenty-eight-year-old, nationwide pork cook-off.

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Contents

CONTENT BY LOCATION 24 26, 56 42, 98 20, 24, 32, 56, 56, 65 98 65, 66 20 16, 19, 68 56, 74, 65 50 98 38

F E B RUA RY 2 0 1 5

departments > [12] MEMO

[22] BOOKS

Discover why you should bike with us

Joe Johnston explores how the state

across Missouri and visit every one of

was settled in this history of vigilante

24 16

35 16

19

56

56

20

our eighty-nine state parks.

justice. Discover six more books.

[14] LETTERS

[24] MUSIC

A reader responds to “Teachers with

Rae Fitzgerald’s music has the potential

Guns,” and another shares some love.

to break through to the mainstream.

[16] MADE IN MISSOURI

cuits and seventy ounces of gravy?

See chic bird feeders; lounge on antler

[65] DINING WORTH THE DRIVE

décor, and sample dandelion liqueur.

Eat barbecue in an old train car, try Colum-

from Missouri’s literary hall-of-famers.

[98] MISSOURIANA Do you think you can eat seven bisPlus, see some of our favorite quotes

bia’s sophisticated coffee shop, and dine

[19] MO MIX

on crepes in a hundred-year--old theater.

Kayaks race down the St. Francis River.

Cupcakes get creative. Blacksmiths

[81] CALENDAR

unite. Puppeteers find a new home.

Isn’t it time that you got out of the

And wine and painting finally meet.

house? These events cure cabin fever.

– THIS ISSUE –

On the Web

DANDY RECIPES

RICHARD BURGIN Q&A

DRESSED UNLIKE THE REST

A few creative folks made a dandelion liqueur

If you’re looking for the full story, read the

This fashion designer doesn’t use fabric to

and concocted a few must-try drink recipes,

extended interview with Richard Burgin, one

make her clothes. See more of her unusual

including the We Got the Beet martini.

of Missouri’s brightest literary minds.

dresses, and discover the stories behind them.

Be mine!

Missouri Life books and T-shirts make the perfect gift for your valentine. Order yours at MissouriLife.com.

on the cover> ART AND HISTORY IN JEFFERSON CITY Between lunettes at the Capitol, Seth Garcia captured this picture of Frank Nuderscher’s The Artery of Trade, which depicts St. Louis’s Eads Bridge. Nuderscher, who had painted in St. Louis for over fifty years, was considered the only person for the job.

COURTESY OF LION'S TOOTH LIQUEUR, RICHARD BURGIN, AND DJENEBA ADUAYOM; SETH GARCIA

Sign up for Missouri Lifelines, our free e-newsletter, and follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MissouriLife or on Twitter @MissouriLife.

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Hand Stamped •Personalized •Wax Seal Jewelry

Made in Missouri • Gift Certificates Available Shop online at www.CrowStealsFire.com & in independently owned boutiques

THE SPIR IT OF DISCOV ERY 501 High Street, Ste. A, Boonville, MO 65233 660-882-9898 | Info@MissouriLife.com

Saleigh Mountain Co. Quality Hand-Crafted Leatherwork & Shoe Repair 573-486-2992 www.saleighmountain.com 1005 Market Street Hermann, MO

Publisher Greg Wood Editor in Chief Danita Allen Wood EDITORIAL & ART Managing Editor Jonas Weir Creative Director Andrew Barton Art Director Sarah Herrera Associate Editor David Cawthon Special Projects Editor Evan Wood Associate Art Director Thomas Sullivan Graphic Designer and Staff Photographer Harry Katz Calendar Editor Amy Stapleton Administrative Assistant Karen Cummins Editorial Assistants Taylor Fox, Alex Stewart

JUST RIGHT FOR YOUR COFFEE BREAK! Bookmark features original, hand-etched scrimshaw on a recycled antique ivory piano key with genuine leather and handmade paper accents. $22, plus $5 shipping/handling Check/Money Order/Visa/MasterCard 31 High Trail, Eureka, MO 63025 • www.stonehollowstudio.com

Contributing Writers Chanelle Koehn, T.S. Leonard Columnist Ron W. Marr, W. Arthur Mehrhoff Contributing Photographers Seth Garcia, Notley Hawkins, Stephanie Sidoti, Andra Bryan Stefanoni MARKETING •800-492-2593 Advertising Director Marynell Christenson Sales Manager Mike Kellner Advertising & Marketing Consultant Brent Toellner Advertising & Marketing Consultant Mimi Gatschet Sales Account Executive Paula Renfrow Sales Account Executive Gretchen Fuhrman Advertising Coordinator Jenny Johnson Marketing Assistant Hannah Landolt Circulation Manager Amy Stapleton

Events Apres Ski - Dinner Theatre

Feb. 7

ArcAttack

Feb. 13

Presented by Ozark Actors Theatre

Presented by Leach Theatre

Arlo Guthrie - Alice’s Restaurant Mar. 6 50th Anniversary Tour So You Think You Can Dance Rolla Edition

Mar. 7

2nd Annual Best Ever St. Pat’s 5K

Mar. 14

For more information on these and other events visit

www.VisitRolla.com

DIGITAL MEDIA MissouriLife.com, Missouri eLife, Facebook, Twitter Director Jonas Weir Editors David Cawthon, Sarah Herrera, Evan Wood Missouri Lifelines Harry Katz TO SUBSCRIBE OR GIVE A GIFT AND MORE Use your credit card and visit MissouriLife.com or call 800-492-2593, ext. 101 or mail a check for $19.99 (for 6 issues) to: Missouri Life, 501 High Street, Ste. A, Boonville, MO 65233-1211 Change address Visit MissouriLife.com OTHER INFORMATION Custom Publishing For your special publications, call 800-492-2593, ext. 106 or email Greg.Wood@MissouriLife.com.

Back Issues Order from website, call, or send check for $7.50.

Rolla Area Chamber of Commerce & Visitor Center

Rolla Area Chamber of Commerce • 1311 Kingshighway Rolla, MO 65401 • 573-364-3577 or 888-809-3817

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emo

WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?

OUR SURPRISING STATE PARKS

WHAT’S MORE pleasant than a bicycle ride through Missouri’s

WHILE EDITING a new book about Missouri’s state parks, I’ve learned so much about our state. Even better, working on the book is inspiring me to visit them. I can’t count how many times after editing an essay, I’ve turned to Greg and said, “We have to go to this one.”

We hope to have the book, Exploring Missouri’s State Parks, off the press by spring. Here are random but fascinating tidbits I’ve learned: • The Battle of Carthage Historic Site memorializes one of the earliest Civil War conflicts—July 5, 1861. The battle was the only one in American history in which a sitting governor led a state army against a federal government force.

• The 60,000-acre Roger Pryor Pioneer Backcountry is the state’s largest privately owned forest, but it’s open to the public via the state park system. With more than fifty miles of trails, it has been called “the heart DANITA ALLEN WOOD, EDITOR of roughness.” Its rugged setting offers remarkable hiking, backpacking, and horseback riding.

• Onondaga State Park was named in a contest during the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. The name Onondaga means “spirit of the hills” in Iroquois.

• Meramec State Park has four dozen named caves within its boundaries, more than any other state park and second most in the nation.

• The largest remaining oxbow lake along the Missouri River is Big Lake in Northwest Missouri. It is the largest natural lake of any type in the state.

• The cave at Graham Cave State Park once served as a barn for hogs. Archaeologists learned the owner was going to bulldoze it to enlarge the usable area, but they persuaded him to stop and then discovered artifacts that revealed almost continuous human occupation there during the past ten thousand years.

• The Missouri Mines State Historic Site reminds us that, at one time, Missouri was the largest producer of lead in the world.

• Missouri’s American Indian Cultural Center is at Van Meter State Park.

The center presents the cultural history of each of the nine tribes that lived in or passed through Missouri in the early nineteenth century.

You can see why I want to visit each.

I’ve already visited twenty-three out of eighty-nine. If I start now and visit one a month, I’ll be done in … five-and-a-half years. Wow! I’d better get started!

Graham Cave State Park

scenic countryside? Well, what if that bike ride were five days long and from one side of the state to the other? Add a full-fledged concert every evening, great food, craft beer, and the camaraderie of about a thousand other cyclists. How would that sound to you? I hope it sounds like fun because come June 21, that’s what we’ll be doing.

Welcome to the inaugural Bicycle Across Missouri, or Big BAM for short. You might wonder why we’re hosting this event. Well, that’s like asking why someone climbs a mountain or hikes the Grand Canyon. Either you know or you don’t. But even if you don’t bike, you should think about coming to one of our “overnight” towns to see what makes the 2015 Big BAM so special.

It has nothing to do with the fact that I GREG WOOD, grew up on a farm near and graduated from PUBLISHER Albany High School. I have to admit, though, I’m looking forward to seeing people come to one of Missouri’s greatest treasures: beautiful, scenic northern Missouri. The 2015 Big BAM route starts in Rock Port on the western edge of the state next to the Missouri River where we’ll gather on Father’s Day, June 21. The ride officially starts the next day as we head east to Maryville for the first overnight stop. After that, we’ll stop at Albany, Unionville, Kirksville, and end alongside the Mississippi River in Canton. Some of us intend to dip our bike tires into both of Missouri’s big rivers.

And to give credit where credit is due, we are modeling Big BAM after Iowa’s beloved RAGBRAI, which attracts more than ten thousand riders every year. The forty-year-old annual event’s name stands for (The Des Moines) Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa.

The towns along the route are rolling out the red carpet to make you feel welcome. And did I mention the music? The hills of northern Missouri are going to be alive with the sounds of dozens of bands and performers, including Brewer and Shipley, Ha Ha Tonka, Brody Buster Band, Stone Sugar Shakedown, The Mean Wells, The Flood Brothers, The Marcus King Band, and many more.

Big BAM is as much a traveling music festival as it is a bicycle ride. But it’s really whatever you want it to be.

You can relax and pedal or drive across northern Missouri’s laconic, pastoral landscape at any pace you wish. Enjoy the people, the beauty, the food and drink, the music, and the camaraderie.

BRUCE SCHUETTE

MISSOURI

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FEBRUARY

LETTERS from all over You write them. We print them.

AGAINST ARMING EDUCATORS Writer Wade Livingston did a great job with “Teachers with Guns” (October 2014). I’d like to respond to Daisy’s request at the end of the story for an opinion on arming teachers.

(Editor’s note: Daisy was a participant in a weeklong program in West Plains that trains educators to carry concealed pistols in rural schools.)

Missouri Life visited West Plains to cover a week-long program that trains educators how to carry concealed pistols and react to a violent threat in rural schools. Read the story in the October 2014 issue and at MissouriLife.com.

ter quality of life for our families, we need to recognize we are all in this together and that helping others helps ourselves.

Being guided by fear seldom results in the best reaction. Arming teachers is the wrong solution. The correct solution is to spend our time, money, and efforts in building a respectful and nurturing environment to reduce the temptation and need to resort to violence to resolve conflicts.

CORRECTION On page 71 in the December 2014 issue, we should have stated that the creator of the fashion label Amatoria Clothing is designer Monica Rojas, not Emily Rojas. We regret the error.

SEND US A LETTER

—James Vokac, Willow Springs Email:

CLOSE TIES My family and I enjoyed your article in Missouri Life about The Beatles in the Ozarks (August 2014). We also lived in the Eureka Area and around Times Beach. It’s a good magazine, so I am subscribing.

—Gloria Schemlire, Salem

Facebook: Address: STEPHANIE SIDOTI

Teachers are in the position to teach more than the three Rs. Children learn how to work with others, be responsible, delay gratification, follow rules, etc. Arming teachers with guns teaches the wrong lesson—and not only to the children.

Yes, we have to protect our children, but a solution that breeds more violence is not a way to do that. Children must learn that resorting to violence to solve conflicts will lead to more violence.

In a post-Wild West society, there are better ways to deal with problems and conflicts than having more guns.

Rather than trying to be the winner and make “the other” the loser, we need children and adults who see the value in treating others with respect, attempting to understand others’ needs, and looking for solutions that serve the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

The Golden Rule was a good guideline (the biblical one, not “He who has the gold makes the rules”), but in our economically stratified and diverse cultural society, the Platinum Rule is more appropriate: we need to treat others how they would like to be treated, not how we would like to be treated (within the limits of our own moral code).

None of us see the world the same way as anyone else, nor do any of us need the same sustenance from the world to be contributing members of our communities. To have a bet-

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Made IN MISSOURI Ste. Genevieve

Roots and Booze A FINE SPIRIT made

Two and a half years ago, sib-

from dandelions may sound like

lings Gabe and Maria Kveton came

“The brandy is a really good

something out of a Harry Potter

across a hand-written recipe for

pairing because the roots them-

book—but Lion’s Tooth dandelion

dandelion wine in a box in their

selves give off this kind of earthi-

liqueur is brewing in Ste. Genevieve.

grandmother’s basement.

ness that you immediately smell,”

months of trial and error.

“Don’t try and make that reci-

Gabe says. “There’s a slight

pe,” their dad said. “It’s disgusting.”

sweetness, and the dandelion

Intrigued, they and their friend

root has natural notes of citrus

cept. If wine wouldn’t work, they would try something else.

and honey.”

The liqueur’s website has cocktail recipes, such as “The

First they started with a neutral

Lion Who Came to Tea,” a mixture

grain spirit. It was bad. Dandelion

of Lion’s Tooth, Jeremiah Weed

extract has a potent flavor; they

Sweet Tea, and lemon.

needed something to soften it.

Using Crown Valley Winery’s

Visit lionstoothliqueur.com to see where you can buy a bottle

young brandy as a base, Lion’s

and for more information.

Ladue

Tooth came to fruition after four

—Alex Stewart

For the Birds

Carthage

SURFBOARDS AND raccoons

Antler Décor

the first of Joe Papendick’s eclectic bird feeders.

LARRY GLAZE transforms antlers into sculptures, chandeliers, and lamps. He also carves grand

placement, Joe implemented a design that surfers use

pieces of furniture from locally sourced wood.

to ride giant waves. He welded two rectangular plat-

inspired

A pesky raccoon had toppled his fiancé’s mother’s traditional wooden feeder, so, to anchor its metal re-

Originally a dental technician creating prosthetics for cancer patients and burn victims, Larry applied his carv-

forms to the base, which anchor the metal feeders in

ing skills to his carpentry hobby. He began selling tables, chandeliers, and art around the country. By 1986, Larry

the dirt. One withstood a hurricane at his parent’s New

worked on his craft full-time and dubbed his business Antler Art of the Plains.

Jersey home. But Joe had more than function in mind.

Glaze makes his rustic furniture and sculptures from wood and antlers from moose, elk, and whitetail deer. Every

Joe, an east-coast native, had studied art in New

two years, he purchases forty thousand pounds of shed antlers to create pieces, which he sells from his gallery at his

York City and moved to St. Louis in 1994, attracted by

home and farm in Carthage.

the low cost of living and the art community. He opened

His most noted work involves mak-

and ran a pair of restaurants to feed his passion for art.

ing eagles with moose antlers as wings.

He created wine racks and a serving podium, among

He’s made over 1,500 of them; two for

other items. After twelve-hour days in the kitchen, he

presidents. Although you can purchase

longed to make art his full-time job. He realized building

his work, one piece isn’t for sale—the

bird feeders might be the key to artistic freedom.

second eagle sculpture at Joplin’s Mercy

Since he left the restaurant business, Joe has assem-

Hospital, a replacement for the original

bled hundreds of feeders from the scrap metal at Shapiro

piece destroyed in the 2011 tornado.

Metal Supply in St. Louis where he peruses the scrap-

Call Larry at 417-358-0753 to sched-

yard shapes that inspire each design. Depending on the

ule a tour of his workshop at 9313 County

metals used and the time required to make one, feeders

Drive 175 in Carthage. For more informa-

range from about $58 to $400.

tion, visit antlerartoftheplainscom.

For more information, visit joepapendick.com or email

—Alex Stewart

Joe at info@joepapendick.com.—David Cawthon

COURTESY OF LION’S TOOTH LIQUEUR AND JOE PAPENDICK; ANDRA BRYAN STEFANONI

Bethany Holohan pursued the con-

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“Dad , that was awesome!”

So , when dad hurts his back teaching you hockey...

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Jason T. Korecki, MD Alan G. Anz, MD Matt I. Jones, MD Tim Crislip, DPM J. Camp Newton, MD

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Behavioral Sciences Biology Chemistry Computer Science Engineering and Physics Family and Consumer Science Health Sciences Kinesiology Mathematics

Improving the quality of life Engineering is an evolving field. In the same way, Harding’s department of engineering and physics changes and adapts to meet the needs of this growing career. With programs in computer, electrical, mechanical and — most recently — biomedical engineering, the department offers state-of-the-art equipment and skilled faculty members to help students prepare for in-demand jobs, which improve the quality of life for individuals and society. Students are given hands-on opportunities to put theory into motion and are equipped with the tools they need for success as Christian professionals after graduation.

Faith, Learning and Living Harding.edu | 800-477-4407 Searcy, Arkansas [18] MissouriLife

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Mo MIX Ladue

DIY Cupcakes

WE FOUND the Gateway City’s sweet spot.

kids. Kara, who has a background in law

Fredericktown

Racers on the Rapids

Kara Newmark and DeAnn Bingaman

and worked for technology start-ups,

are co-founders of Sweetology, a do-it-

specifically designed the business and

yourself cupcake decorating space with

the space to cater to both children and

specialty cakes that resemble some you

adults. Girls’ nights out are frequent at

“The first time you go over a six-foot waterfall in a kayak is a terrifying and ab-

might see on TLC reality shows.

the shop, as are rehearsal dinners and

solutely enjoyable moment all at once,” says Garrett Bentley, a six-year competitor

even company retreats.

in the Missouri Whitewater Championships.

In the “makery,” sweet tooths of all ages customize chocolate and vanilla

COURTESY OF SWEETOLOGY AND MISSOURI DIVISION OF TOURISM

But these cupcakes aren’t just for

The space is prime for birthday par-

cakes, cookies, and cupcakes with icing.

ties and corporate functions, and Sweet-

At guests’ disposal are à la carte sprin-

ology hosts classes and camps to help

kles, candies, and edible decals to adorn

you get your Ace of Cakes on.

SPRINGTIME RAPIDS lure racers to the St. Francis River.

During the three-day event, racers of all abilities compete in three events: slalom, downriver, and boatercross, where multiple kayakers race neck-and-neck.

The statewide Missouri Whitewater Association organizes the races, which

the cake canvas. Go nuts on the fondant

Aspiring cupcake aficionados who

began forty-eight years ago, and it’s no

and frosting; a Sweetology employee

live far from St. Louis, fear not: Sweet-

secret why racers love the St. Francis, a

can help you create your edible art.

ology has online ordering for decorat-

river with a pedigree for prime kayak-

ing kits and desserts. With themes like

ing. It was one of four final US qualify-

sports, birthdays, flowers, and weddings,

ing locations for the 2000 Olympics in

the shop suits virtually every event and

Sydney, Australia.

“Anybody can do it with the professional tools we have,” Kara says.

You can spot the shop by its brick exterior, which looks like a gingerbread

reason for feasting on sweet treats.

On March 21 and 22, visit the Mill-

house covered in frosting, with an apple

Visit Sweetology at 9214 Clayton

stream Gardens Conservation Area,

green door and accents, striped aw-

Road from 11 AM to 6 PM Tuesday through

located about a half-mile west of the

nings, and white pillars at the entrance.

Thursday, 10 AM to 6 PM Friday and Satur-

intersection of Routes K and 72.

“We wanted it to be fun and happy, something that we absolutely loved,” Kara says.

day, and noon to 4 PM on Sunday.

Visit missouriwhitewater.org for

Visit the shop online at sweetology .com.—Alex Stewart

a schedule of events and for more information.—David Cawthon

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Mo MIX Independence

Pulling Strings REMEMBER THAT marionette scene in

shadow puppet show called When Night Dreams.

The Sound of Music? Are you looking for a location to put

For a hands-on experience, visit the workshop to

on your own “Lonely Goatherd” number? Pack the car

build a puppet using materials from Rollins’ twentieth-

and head to the Puppetry Arts Institute in Independence.

century factory and put on your own show.

Founded in 2000, the organization was inspired

Stop by the Puppetry Arts Institute at 11025 E. Winner

by Hazelle Hedges Rollins, who in 1932 owned a small

Road in Independence from 10 AM to 5 PM from Tuesday

puppet company in Kansas City that later became the

to Saturday. For reservations at the puppet workshop

world’s largest puppet manufacturing factory.

and for tickets, call 816-833-9777.—Alex Stewart

The institute’s museum showcases approximately 120 puppets and playthings from around the world, about 150 of Rollins’s own puppets, an exhibit called “Amazing Women in Puppetry,” and another rotating

Doniphan

Heavy Metal Hobby

exhibit. This year, you can see Punch and Judy puppets and paraphernalia from the show’s 350-year history.

The puppet research library features plays and instructional materials for building stages.

Another room houses a theater that offers monthly shows. See a marionette production of Beauty and the Beast on February 14 and 15. On March 21, see a

AT THE Current River Heritage Museum, one Association of Missouri passes on the secrets of iron-

Columbia

working to the modern world at the museum’s Tom

A Brush with Wine

Kennon Blacksmith Shop, built in the early 1900s.

Ripley County prosecutor Chris Miller leads the shop’s weekly demonstrations and hosts classes twice

THE IDEA was

a year.

Stephanie Hall’s birthday in 2012.

“He teaches people how to get started in smithing,” says Lynn Maples, a volunteer at the museum.

born on

What’s the twist? Customers pair painting classes with wine or

kind in Columbia, and similar locations are opening nationwide.

In her home studio, Stephanie

beer, such as Les Bourgeois vari-

Stephanie and Angela show cus-

and her friend Angela Bennett

eties and Schlafly brews. Stepha-

tomers, step by step, how to paint

During demonstrations on Saturday mornings, on-

tossed around the idea of host-

nie says that classes tend to get

everything from outdoor scenes

lookers can get their hands dirty. Visitors, including the

ing art classes—with a twist.

louder and messier as the night

to animals, yet painters are able to

kids, can hammer the iron, though Chris and the other

Four months later, The Canvas on

goes on.

personalize their canvas. The night

professionals do most of the work.

Broadway opened its doors.

You can also purchase items in the store that are

The Canvas is the first of its

sky might appear teal to you but pitch-black to another painter.

forged on site and, if nothing strikes your fancy, you

Although beginners won’t be-

can commission custom work.

come skilled artists during a one-

On March 21, the Blacksmiths Association of Mis-

hour session, all participants can

souri will gather at the shop for a mass demonstra-

take their creation home.

tion, complete with portable forges and a discussion

Visit The Canvas on Broadway

about the intricacies of the skill.

at 706 E. Broadway, Suite 100, or

Visit the Tom Kennon Blacksmith Shop at 101 Wash-

call 573-443-2222 to schedule a

ington Street on Saturdays from 9 AM to 12 PM. Asso-

private event. Hours vary, so call

ciation members who complete a training course can

ahead or check the calendar on-

use the facility to forge their own creations. For more

line at thecanvasonbroadway.com.

information, visit doniphanmissouri.org.—Taylor Fox

—Taylor Fox

COURTESY OF CHRISTOPHER MILLER AND MISSOURI DIVISION OF TOURISM; HARRY KATZ

centuries-old craft is still going strong. The Blacksmiths

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! y a w a t e G r u o Y Pl a n L e ba n o n!

So m u ch t o s e e a n d d o in

Opening Day of Trout Season March 1 Bennett Spring State Park www.bennettspringstatepark.com

Bennett Spring State Park is home to Missouri’s fourth largest spring. Anglers line the banks of the crystal-clear stream to catch their limit of rainbow trout. Come watch the fishing, or join in on the fun.

Rental equipment and lessons are available. Hiking trails, camping, playgrounds and picnic areas make Bennett Spring a relaxing family destination.

Visit Lebanon, where there is always something to do. For more information about Lebanon, please contact the Tourism Department of Lebanon.

Lebanon is known by its motto,

Cope Chili Cook Off

“Friendly people.

Friendly place.”

February 21 Cowan Civic Center 417-533-5201

These events are only part of the fun we have to offer.

Cornet Chop Suey Concert

March 12 Cowan Civic Center www.lebanonmoconcertassociation.com www.lebanonmo.org | 1-866-LEBANON [21] February 2015

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SHOW-ME

Books

West

HOW THE WAS WON

This book by Joe Johnston explores vigilante justice and breathes life into old stories.

BY JONAS WEIR

WATCH AN EPISODE of Bonanza, a

COURTESY OF THE MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM PRESS

classic Western, or even a newer cowboy movie, and you’ll find—more often than not—that the movies are set in the far western United States: Arizona, the Dakota Territory, Montana, and so forth. Dramatized history often glosses over the fact that Missouri was the original Wild West.

“Writing about the Mormon Wars in the 1830s, I started thinking to myself, this is way before anything in Dodge City, Tuscon, Tombstone, and the gold camps of California,” says author Joe Johnston. “Vigilante justice started in Missouri earlier than anyplace else, and it was more enduring.”

In Necessary Evil: Settling Missouri with a Rope and a Gun, Joe explores vigilante justice and its functions, benefits, and detriments in settling our state: “As wild as young America could be, no place was home to such a long-lasting concentration of bristling, take-the-law-into-their-own-hands people as Missouri, where vigilantism was vio-

lent, common, and more enduring.”

The book hits on the stories most Missourians know: the Baldknobbers, the Mormon Wars, and the vestiges of Civil War guerillas and militias. It also highlights the historical figures that almost everyone knows, such as Wyatt Earp and Doc Holladay. But Joe also brings to life stories that even the most studied Missouri history buffs might not know.

Take for example the tale of John A. Sartin, the Union Army veteran who turned into a full-time preacher and a part-time bounty hunter.

“I thought he was one the most colorful characters,” Joe says, “and he had this unique slant of combining his religion with law enforcement.”

Historical gems and little-known stories set Necessary Evil apart from history textbooks, but its narrative nature is why the book is such a thrilling read. Joe’s storytelling takes minor liberties with details like the weather, which breathes new life into old stories, but the major details remain historically accurate.

Some of Joe’s guesses are necessary because of his source material. An avid genealogist, he used oral histories, family stories he found through genealogical organizations, and newspaper and magazine accounts.

“If there’s a story in your family that’s been handed down for generations, it might not be correct, but there’s a nugget of truth there,” he says.

“There’s a reason that story has been retold.

Joe has a reason for choosing certain stories and leaving out others. Most of these tales display the need for justice in an untamed land where the lack of law enforcement left a void that had to be filled; they are tales of people trying to police their communities for the greater good.

Necessary Evil Joe Johnston 336 pages, paperback Missouri History Museum Press, $24.95 However, after reading, you’ll be left with a similar question: did they truly do the right thing?

And that’s the point.

“Part of why we tell these stories is so we’ll understand how imperfect this system was,” Joe says. “The problem with vigilante justice is that it’s short-sighted. It always leads to more violence and more vengeance. And there’s just no place to stop.”

Give this book a read, and decide for yourself what was necessary and what was evil.

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MORE GOOD READS

BY TAYLOR FOX AND ALEX STEWART

Pastry & Dessert Techniques

Show Me the Gold

Daniel M. Pliska, American Technical Publishers, 304 pages, softcover, cookbook, $32.40 Daniel Pliska, executive chef and assistant manager for the University Club at MU and University Catering, has compiled sixtyfive dessert recipes he has perfected during his thirty-seven-year career. His recipes are broken up into sections, such as “Savory Pastry Basics” and “Classic and Signature Showcases,” so readers can go directly to recipes that pique their interest, whether they’re craving something sugary or cheesy. This book includes detailed step-by-step photos of different techniques, so even beginners can master them. The pictures alone will make your mouth water.

By Carolyn Mulford, Five Star Publishing, 301 pages, hardcover, mystery, $19.23 The third book in Carolyn Mulford’s Show Me series follows former CIA agent Phoenix Smith on a mission to find a group of gang members who stole gold coins. As she works on the case, the FBI begins to suspect that she has already found the gold and is hiding it for herself—and so does the gang of robbers. The books are set in Vandiver County and spotlight the rise in crime in rural areas throughout the state. This mystery novel is full of action and twists as Phoenix tries to recover the stolen gold and clear her name.

Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule

Unguarded Moments: Stories of Working Inside the Missouri State Penitentiary

By Jennifer Chiaverini, Dutton, 384 pages, hardcover, historical fiction, $19.86 Jennifer Chiaverini, a New York Times bestselling author, writes about Julia, the future wife of Ulysses S. Grant. The novel begins in 1834 Missouri, depicting the relationship between Julia and her best friend and slave of the same name, Julia.

As the two women grow older, they rely on each other’s guidance despite the growing tension of antebellum America. Each woman struggles with her own battle: one, to learn how to live as a perfect Southern Belle and wife of the future president; the other, to escape slavery and live as a free woman. Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule will be released March 3, 2015.

Larry E. Neal & Anita Neal Harrison, 200 pages, softcover, nonfiction, $19.95 While most prison memoirs are from the perspective of the prisoner or corrections officer, Unguarded Moments was penned by a Missouri State Penitentiary maintenance worker. As a leader of prisoner work crews, Neal sometimes witnessed the lighter side of prison life, in which prisoners and staff pull pranks on one another, reminding himself and readers alike of the humanity of everyone who spends their days in the penitentiary.

All My Love, George… Letters from a WWII Hero

The Empire Rolls

Darla Noble, 110 pages, softcover, nonfiction, $12 In this deeply personal anthology of letters exchanged during World War II, Missouri writer Darla Noble shares her Uncle George’s highs and lows of serving in the Army and recounts the pain of a soldier’s family in Miller County, eagerly awaiting a homecoming that would never happen. After the letters, Darla quotes her father as he recalls the events detailed in each and shares thoughts about growing up at that time. Noble also provides plenty of historical context of the war in the South Pacific, where George spent his final days.

Trudy Lewis, 302 pages, softcover, fiction, $16.95 This is the story of Sally LaChance, a recently divorced forty-something who is a park ranger by day and emcee for the Boonslick Bombers, a roller derby team, by night. After she pulls her gun on polluters and a video of the event goes viral, Sally must fight to keep her job and relationships in the wake of the recession of 2008. The political subplot makes this a unique love story, and many Mid-Missourians will delight in finding small nods to the area peppered throughout the story, such as Columbia’s Empire Roller Rink.

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MISSOURI

WORSHIPPING SONGS Rae Fitzgerald crafts personal and poetic songs with a universal appeal. BY JONAS WEIR

Rae Fitzgerald is playing for the second year in a row at the True/False Film Fest in Columbia.

This year, the festival takes place from March 5 to March 8.

Soon after she moved back to Farmington, Rae began writing her own music, skipping the music lessons and avoiding learning covers.

Although Rae says she’s not religious anymore, Biblical imagery and those years in Muscle Shoals took root in her lyrics. Snakes and saints, heaven and hell, and good versus evil all play a role in her poetic folk music. Some songs even feature the unofficial instrument of the church, the organ. Listen to her sing, and you can still hear the kid whose parents divorced at age fourteen, the same kid who had trouble believing in God when it was so central to her inclusion. Now, Rae has found her calling, and she’s completely devoted to her craft.

“I’m excited for this album to materialize,” she says. “My only longterm goals are to make this album as successful as possible.”

COURTESY OF RAE FITZGERALD

APOCALYPTIC DREAMS, perfectly punctuated deliveries, complex allegories, and the occasional curse word thrown in at just the right beat, Rae Fitzgerald’s music showcases vivid imagery and adept lyricism. Crafting highly literate songs has always been this twenty-sixyear-old songwriter’s goal.

“That’s why I started playing guitar,” she says. “I wanted to write songs.

Well, I wanted to write poetry, but who reads poetry?”

Although she lives in Columbia now, Rae is about to earn a creative writing degree from Truman State University in Kirksville. Writing is her first love, but she is constantly working on crafting melodies, too, whether that means religiously looking for new artists online, checking out forty CDs at a time from Daniel Boone Regional library, or listening to her favorite artists: Conor Oberst, PJ Harvey, and Elliott Smith, to name a few. And her hard work shines through on her new album.

After a year of touring, an intensive recording process, and a successful Kickstarter campaign, Rae is on the verge of releasing her most ambitious album to date. Stepping away from the guitar-centric sound that dominated her first two albums—Of War and Water and Quitting the Machine—this new collection of songs employs more drums, bass, Casio keyboards, and even reverb-affected vocals.

To accomplish this, she enlisted Boonville native Lucas Oswald of the bands The Appleseed Cast and Shearwater to produce the currently untitled album. The album has the potential to break Rae into the world of indie rock. However, there was a time when indie rock was a foreign word to her.

Rae grew up in a strict religious household. She was born in Farmington, but when she was six years old, her family moved to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, so she and her siblings could attend a fundamentalist school and church in Tuscumbia, Alabama.

“I spent my adolescence going to church three times a week and going to Christian school, which is like going to church,” she says.

Rae was not allowed to listen to secular music. Instead, she owned Christian rock CDs and fell in love with traditional hymns; dreams of rock stardom were not on the table. Everything changed when she was fourteen, though.

Her parents divorced. Her mother moved to Bakersfield, California, and remarried. Her father moved the family back to Farmington when Rae was sixteen. And secular music was welcomed in her home for the first time.

“Both parents got remarried and became totally different people,” says Rae, who is still close with both of her parents. “Those two characters played a fundamental role in my psychological, emotional, and spiritual development.

Now, they’ve disappeared into thin air. They don’t exist anywhere.”

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BUY YOUR LOVED ONE

k oo B t a e r G A

1

New Regionalsim: The Art of Bryan Haynes Rediscover our landscape! Explore the sweeping views inhabited by historical figures, native Americans, and local characters with stunning colors and eye-popping clarity created by Missouri artist Bryan Haynes. 12” x 12”, 180 pages, more than 150 pieces of artwork, hardcover and dust jacket, $49.99

Savor Missouri: River Hill Country Food and Wine

Exploring Missouri’s State Parks and Historic Sites

Travel the back roads of Missouri’s river hill country, and find the best homegrown regional foods, wines, and more. 7” x 10”, 176 pages, more than 400 photos, $24.95

This 400-plus-page book will be presented in a coffee-table quality, hardcover, large-format edition with hundreds of updated photos.

(Shown is the book published in 1992). $49.99 Delivery in March 2015

Missouri River Country: 100 Miles of Stories and Scenery from Hermann to the Confluence West of the Gateway Arch, just miles from Downtown St. Louis, another world exists. This book is your guide to that world, taking you along 100 miles of the Missouri River to discover attractions new and old. More than 60 contributing writers have made Missouri River Country possible, including Gov. Jay Nixon, Sen. Claire McCaskill, Sen. Roy Blunt, William Least Heat-Moon, Sen. Kit Bond, and a host of others. 12¼” x 9¼”, 192 pages, 236 photos and illustrations, hardcover, $39.95

HOT OFF THE PRESS! Prepare for Leadership: From farm boy to Times Square

Prepare for Leadership is an open and honest memoir by the man who had the vision and passion to help create the biodiesel fuel industry. He shares his journey from a Midwestern farm through the business world at Ralston Purina to Purina Mills which uniquely prepared him for the job. He describes his successes there and the difficult transition when he found himself suddenly unemployed at age 55. However, the book is more than a memoir. The Innsbrook resident also ties in the business principles and philosophies that allowed him to advance and succeed, which can offer excellent guidance for employees and entrepreneurs at any stage of their career. 9” x 6”, 192 pages, $15.99

Praise for Prepare for Leadership “Prepare For Leadership is a must-read! The book will inspire you to live a life of significance, and it will also give you wisdom years ahead of your age. I highly recommend that you read this leadership book no matter if you are a leader or aspire to become one. I worked in the same company during the early 1980s with the author, Nile Ramsbottom, and he is a remarkable servant leader. We can all learn from his wisdom!”

—Mark Whitacre, coauthor of Against All Odds, subject of the blockbuster Warner Bros. movie The Informant (starring Matt Damon; directed by Steven Soderbergh) “I recommend Prepare for Leadership not only as a good read, but also as an excellent journey to be taken by anyone who approaches life with purpose. Nile’s story is entertaining, instructive, and inspiring. More importantly, it is convincing in its central message: effective leadership is within reach for all of us. I’m a believer.”

—Tom Hill , coauthor of Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneurial Soul, Living at the Summit, and Blessed Beyond Measure

MissouriLife.com/store or call 800-492-2593, ext. 101 [25] February 2015

Shipping and tax added to all orders.

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MISSOURI T-Marie Nolan has shown her art in galleries all over the world.

This “outsider artist” from Hannibal will be displaying her art on billboards in the Hannibal area this year.

BRUT ART IN THE BASEMENT of an abandoned church in Hannibal, along the Mississippi River, T-Marie Nolan transforms pieces of recycled wood into colorful works of art. Using thick acrylic paint, the self-taught artist’s style is considered art brut, or outsider art— raw, creative art that exists outside of the traditional art community; the “art of the artless” is another way to put it. Still, without any formal training, her work can be seen all over the world, from the Show-Me State to the South of France. While formally trained artists may become popular by knowingly breaking traditional rules, T-Marie and other brut artists don’t even know the rules.

In 1972, Roger Cardinal wrote the first English book on art brut called Outsider Art, in which he further popularized the out-of-the-box genre and gave it the universal name by which it’s now known. T-Marie was born in 1954 in Connecticut, decades before the term was coined. Now, she selfidentifies as an outsider artist. She’s proud of the fact she creates expressive and lively art, despite not having attended art school.

“It conveys playfulness, a sense of spontaneity,” she says. “Ideally, I would like to evoke emotion in the viewer.”

With jagged people, lines that snake across the canvas, and seemingly random swatches of color, T-Marie’s paintings have movement to them— movement inspired by music.

“I like jazz and blues, and I listen while I paint,” she says. “Humor inspires me, too, and nature. A lot of animals show up in my paintings.”

Not only are her paintings unconventional, but her canvases are also atypical. T-Marie’s art supply stores are construction dumpsters, and she considers the dumpster diving experience to be part of her journey. The artistic narrative of any given piece can begin when she first sees a piece of scrap sitting among the rubble.

One piece began with a bowling pin. She soon painted the faces of two men on either side of the top and two different animals toward the base using dark shades of blues, reds, and yellows. The acrylic paint she uses,

COURTESY OF T-MARIE NOLAN

This Hannibal artist creates artwork in a former abandoned church. BY TAYLOR FOX

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COURTESY OF T-MARIE NOLAN

which does not come from dumpster diving, is fast drying and allows for a dry-brushed look to her final work. This combined with the textures of her different canvases leave her pieces looking coarse and rugged.

The colors and textures add to dreamlike interpretations of shapes and characters. One painting, Rabbit Patrol, depicts the images of two blue and black rabbits standing on their hind legs in uniform; it seems like a vague memory of a childhood dream.

Dreams have always been an inspiration for art, though, as explained in the 2010 documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which analyzed 32,000-year-old cave drawings. Outsider art has often been compared to prehistoric paintings, too. And T-Marie’s pieces certainly nod to this ancient style. Her painting Horse and Bird uses fundamental shapes to create a basic horse image and thick black strokes to form a bird flying in the sky overhead across a deep orange sun; it’s not far from the depictions of animals an archeologist might discover in a cave.

For the past twelve years, T-Marie’s cave has been an old church in Hannibal. She lives there and shares the studio space with her husband, Bob Hoke, a fellow outsider artist and two-dimensional painter. Bob’s art is very similar to his wife’s. A self-described bohemian, he paints on a wide variety of found items, from plastic to metal.

Last year, the couple’s art was exhibited in Hannibal Art Council’s “Everything is Relative.”

T-Marie’s art is also in exhibits all over the country, from the Outsider Gallery in New Jersey to Panorama Folk Art in St. Louis. She’s been able to connect with an array of galleries through social media, frequently sharing her work on Twitter and Facebook. She also sells art online.

“The internet is how I choose to market my work and how I have made the connection for nearly every gallery show I have exhibited in,” she says.

Most recently, though, T-Marie’s art has been a part of a very different sort of gallery: the state highway system. The Hannibal Arts Council, Independent Services, and Lamar Advertising have partnered to let five artists from the area display their art on vacant billboards around Hannibal, and T-Marie was one of the artists selected. She will be displaying on five billboards throughout the year.

Bigger things than giant canvases may be on the horizon for T-Marie, though. Despite her lack of formal training, T-Marie continues to learn and grow as an artist. Her education continues to evolve in the same way that it always has; the more style and techniques she tries, the more she realizes what she likes and doesn’t like, what works and what doesn’t work. She may not know where the road is taking her, but the journey is the sweetest part.

“Art has been an ongoing part of my life as far back as I can remember,” she says. “I just really like to paint and make things, and people seem to like what I do.”

To see T-Marie Nolan’s billboard art, contact the Hannibal Arts Council at hannibalarts.com or 573-221-6546. Check T-Marie’s Facebook for more information, and connect with her on Twitter @1outsiderartist.

Top right: This painting, entitled Woody Guthrie, is a perfect example of how T-Marie’s’s art is often inspired by music, which includes folk among other genres. Bottom right: Bike Ride uses elemental shapes to create a scene from T-Marie’s life.

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missouri

MISCELLANY

“To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement.”

COURTESY OF UNSPLASH

–Mark Twain, in a letter to Emeline B. Beach, 1868

THE NUMBER OF MISSOURIANS who have, by one means or another, put ink on the page in pursuit of that most ambiguous of occupations—writing—must at least be somewhere in the hundreds of thousands. And even by that conservative estimate, we’ve all got two or three favorites. Mark Twain’s name would be a peerless feather in any state’s cap, but add his name to the company of Maya Angelou, William S. Burroughs, Langston Hughes, and many more, and you realize that Missouri is making a respectable run at being the world’s literary capital. What follows is a guide to just a handful of our state’s writers: up-and-coming, established, and indelible members of the English literary canon. We chose these writers for myriad reasons, but suffice it to say that if you come across a name you’ve never seen before, you’d do well to look them up the next time you’re searching for a good read.

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PUBLIC DOMAIN

Maya Angelou

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Kate Chopin [30] MissouriLife

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missouri

MISCELLANY

WOMEN in the CANON Here are a few of Missouri’s foremost literary writers.

Everyone knows that Mark Twain hailed from The Show-Me State, and we’ve heard tales of other legendary men of literature being born here, such as T.S. Eliot and Tennessee Williams, but over the years Missouri has been home to no shortage of prolific literary women. Some of these names are known the world over, and others may be familiar only to the most bookish English majors; from renowned to obscure, these are some of our favorite Missouri writers.

Maya Angelou (1928-2014)

A woman of many talents, it’s hard to imagine Maya Angelou ever lived a boring day. She was a writer, civil rights activist, actor, director, dancer, singer, composer, threetime Grammy winner, professor, mother, and St. Louis native.

Born April 4, 1928, Maya became a world-renowned inspiration, writing thirty-six books, most of which were focused on overcoming racism and sexual abuse. Her most popular book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1969, was her first autobiography and includes details of being raped when she was just eight years old. Although the book was banned in many schools, it opened the door for public discussion of sexual abuse.

was surrounded by strong, female role models who would later influence her writing. After the death of her husband, Chopin spent most of her time writing. Her short stories were printed in local publications, such as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and St. Louis Life, and her controversial feminist novel The Awakening caused decades of contention over its supposedly morbid depiction of the female role during that time. She died from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1904 after a trip to the World’s Fair in St. Louis.

Kate Chopin (1850-1904)

Chopin, a St. Louisan throughout her life, attended the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart and

Sara Teasdale

By Taylor Fox

Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

A modernist poet born in Kirkwood, Moore was a celebrity of her time, known for the precise language found in her writing as well as always wearing a tricorn hat and cape. In 1921, she moved to New York with her mother and became an assistant at the New York Public Library where she met poets like Wallace Stevens and Hilda “H.D.” Doolittle. Moore’s first book, Poems, was published by H.D., who collected Moore’s work without her knowledge. Moore’s 1951 book, Collected Poems, won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the National Book Award.

Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

Known during her time as a singer more than a poet, Teasdale’s lyrical work was popular for its clear and simple meanings and themes of romance and transformation. She was born in St. Louis to a distinguished family and moved to New York in 1914 after marrying. In 1918, she won the first Columbia University Poetry Society Prize, which would later become the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her final collection, Strange Victory, was published in 1933 shortly after she committed suicide while recovering from pneumonia.

Marianne Moore

Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957)

Wilder, now remembered as the quintessential American pioneer, was born in Wisconsin and moved with her family from one Midwestern town to the next, collecting inspiration for her future novels.

Wilder’s Little House books were based mostly off life on her family’s farm in Kansas, though they were written at her Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield many years later, from 1932 to 1943. The series was originally written as an autobiography of Wilder’s life but was transformed into a third-person narrative after being rejected by publishers.

The Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum is now a popular tourist attraction in Mansfield where visitors can peruse items from the Wilder family and experience life as they knew it.

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How I got to MEMPHIS

A search for the Missourian in Tennessee Williams “The sort of life which I had had previous to this popular success was one that required endurance, a life of clawing and scratching along a sheer surface and holding on tight with raw fingers to every inch of rock higher than the one caught hold of before, but it was a good life because it was the sort of life for which the human organism is created.” – Tennessee Williams in a 1947 essay, four days before the opening of A Streetcar Named Desire.

When one hears the name Tennessee Williams, arguably the ultimate embodiment of the American theater’s solemn and genteel tendencies, “salt of the earth” may not be the first thing that comes to mind. Growing up in Missouri, one hears that expression, “salt of the earth,” used to approvingly label good, virtuous, real people. It’s not often associated with the highfalutin echelons of the theater. But contrary to the evocative plantation homes and New Orleans streetcars that color the playwright’s body of work, the man himself was distinctly and unremarkably a Missourian.

In March of last year, The Strand magazine released a previously unpublished short story by a young Tom Williams titled “Crazy Night,” a tale of indulgence and revelry set against the backdrop of a hedonistic end-ofyear party at the University of Missouri. And it unearthed an often forgotten aspect of the theatric legend’s early life: Tennessee Williams, the frat boy.

A member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house, Tom slacked-off and rabble-roused and tramped, tramped, tramped around the Mizzou campus like many young fraternity men are wont to do. Tom began to realize

By T.S. Leonard

during his college years that he was gay. It’s not entirely surprising, then, that this life of girlchasing and macho flexing was not always comfortable for him.

When he arrived in Columbia to attend the university, Tom wasted no time embarking upon the kind of rash romantic gestures and boozy indulgences that are still a mainstay for many during this period of collegiate self-discovery. His first night in his boarding house, Tom wrote a letter to his St. Louis sweetheart Hazel Kramer proposing marriage; of course, the two never married.

But Tom was young, confused, and daunted by how he was going to make it on his own. For anyone who remembers their first week of freshman year, this is an excusable anxiety.

Tom struggled at Mizzou, academically and personally, to find his place among the prescribed expectations of collegiate life. He later lamented an unrequited but intimate relationship with a

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“For every artist, experience is never complete until it has been reproduced in creative work.

To the poet his travels, his adventures, his loves, his indignations are finally resolved in verse and this in the end becomes his permanent, indestructible life.”

– Tennessee Williams, 1938.

The writer had returned to St. Louis with his tail between his legs in 1931, after a poor academic performance at MU. He worked for his father at the International Shoe Co., feeding his soul at night with hard drink and feverish writing. There was a strained relationship between the dreamy artist and his stern father, and similarly between the precocious Tom and his hardened hometown. He continued his education at Washington University and produced short plays with the troupe, the Mummers of St. Louis, but he dreamed of more fanciful climbs.

While the straight-lipped restraint of his Missouri home may have been a source of strife for the ardent young Tom, surely he was, in his own way, grateful for the material. Having moved to

St. Louis at a young age after being born in Mississippi, the backdrop of Missouri failed to dazzle him like the languid cypress trees of the South. But Williams was clearly gripped by the mystique of the characters here. The not-quitesouthern and just-about-west geography of Missouri is reflected in its inhabitants.

Williams considered himself to be a Southern expat. He was another misplaced drifter from somewhere else that had by some accident landed here. A certain bitterness and restlessness, bred by this landlocked sentencing, festered in Tom. It is notable that there are Tennessee Williams characters across his oeuvre, from Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to Stella Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, who seem to be paying the price for staying put. The settling down, the submission to contentment—these were the Midwestern compromises observed by Williams that would stir within him a fiery thirst for escape.

In 1938, after finishing his studies with a bachelor of arts from the University of Iowa, the twentyseven-year-old promptly moved to New Orleans. Williams wrote in his journal on his first night in the Crescent City: “Here surely is the place I was made for, if any place on this funny old world.” In this land of merry misfits, the outsider had found a place where he wanted to belong.

On his way to New Orleans, Tom stopped off for a night at his grandparents’ home in Memphis and submitted a packet of plays to a national contest in New York, postmarked by one “Tennessee Williams.” With his newly adopted Southern identity and home, Williams was swimming in a swamp of inspiration that would inform his breakthrough work in the following decade’s The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire.

One can only imagine the wide-eyed Williams as his immortal protagonist Blanche Dubois, suddenly immersed in a liberating world of indulgence. In fact, legendary director Elia Kazan— whose staging of Williams’s work played a major role in its early success—noted this comparison after working on Streetcar.

“I saw Blanche as Williams,” Kazan recalled, “an ambivalent figure who is attracted to the harshness and vulgarity around him at the same time that he fears it, because it threatens his life.”

Williams would not stay long in New Orleans, but his time there is notable for offering the twentysomething Tom a clear and decisive break from the life he had felt trapped in. He had left the Midwest and immediately declared himself Tennessee; he was indulging his fantasies on balmy French Quarter nights. It took a stranger’s eye to see this strange world and declare it achingly, dramatically beautiful.

Whether discussing it in print or exploring it on the stage, Williams never disavowed his Midwestern upbringing. A man of his word, he seemed to feel a need to return to these experiences to finish them outright.

“Do you know what I mean by home? I don’t mean a regular home. I mean I don’t mean what other people mean when they speak of a home, because I don’t regard a home as a … well, as a place, a building … a house … of wood, bricks, stone. I think of a home as a thing that two people have between them in which each can … well, nest—rest—live in, emotionally speaking.”

– The Night of the Iguana, 1961.

ANDREW BARTON

fraternity brother that veered on sexual. It seemed the more attention Williams paid to writing, the further his grades slipped. In “Crazy Night,” he describes the malaise of his classmates at the end of the Prohibition era and the beginning of the Great Depression: “Students graduating or flunking out of college had practically every reason for getting drunk and little or nothing that was fit to drink.” From a young age and an undeveloped literary voice, Tom was already in dialogue with the sort of pressures and releases he would continue to explore in plays like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

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COURTESY OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE

Tennessee Williams’s early stage successes would come quickly after winning a Rockefeller grant in 1940. But the splash of his meteoric success quickly ebbed into a period of artistic and personal struggle, beginning after 1961’s The Night of the Iguana. Williams ended that decade in St. Louis, institutionalized after a nervous breakdown.

For Tennessee Williams, the strife of mental instability had always been tightly interwoven with the idea of home. His elder sister Rose struggled all her life with schizophrenia. The experience of Rose’s prefrontal lobotomy, at the insistence of their mother in 1943, proved personally and artistically powerful to Williams. She was immortalized on the stage the next year as Laura Wingfield, the delicate, stunted sister to Tom in The Glass Menagerie.

The map of Williams’s work certainly expanded throughout his career, but the emotional center of it seemed to creep ever closer to the personal. The playwright remained preoccupied with themes present in the almost autobiographical Glass Menagerie, that of family members gripped by mental instability, matriarchs’ struggles to control their children, and wanderers restrained by resented circumstance.

After being Tom for nearly twenty-seven years, he was Tennessee for almost forty-five—the rest of his life. But he never stopped revisiting that young Missourian version of himself: green to the world but in wonder of it, trapped by a circumstance that was a tribulation from which he might transcend.

Like many of the characters in his work, Williams found a sense of pained optimism in this yearning for something more.

Williams’s works have always struck a potent chord for American audiences, because the overly

dramatic figures are so painfully familiar. Williams wrote about “the common man” in a revealing manner reminiscent of Missouri’s own Mark Twain. His characters were ultimately “salt of the earth” types; hard-working or hard-drinking, hopeful for or unlucky in love, people with families they felt resentful about or responsible to.

Tom Williams’s formative years were fraught with the struggles that came to define his artistic vision. His burgeoning homosexuality put him in a precarious position in his college days. Working at his father’s factory forced him to fraternize with the kinds of dominant men that would populate his stage plays. It was not until he left Missouri that he would finally find the artistic success he so craved, but for decades after, he was able to so tenderly understand his misfits and their motivations because he was himself of their world.

Williams found on the stage a home where he was able to emotionally nest and challenge the audience to ask what a family really is. In the final moments of The Glass Menagerie, when Tom delivers his immortal fire escape monologue, he explains that even after traveling far from St. Louis, he will still find himself visited by visions of his sister. “Oh, Laura, Laura,” Tom cries, “I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!”

Tennessee Williams never stopped returning to home, to his family, to the people and places that, from a young age, inspired his explorations. He was shaped as much by the Midwest that he resented as he was by the South he romanticized. The playwright may have had to leave home to understand it, but in the home of the American stage, Missouri can proudly claim Tennessee Williams as its prodigal son.

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Story MATERIAL

Laura McHugh recalls her small, Ozark town upbringing, and still draws inspiration from it.

By Alex Stewart

Laura McHugh is tired.

She just dropped off her two daughters at school, which she thought would be a welcome vacation. After carpool duty, she met her writing group at Panera Bread.

Now, she sits in a different Columbia Panera with a large coffee warming her hands. Another day, another interview.

At age forty, the novelist is humble and shy. She speaks in hushed tones, competing in volume with the soda fountain on her left, and takes up little space in her booth.

Couple her reserved demeanor with her icy blue gaze, and you understand why she was immediately taken for a stranger in her southern Missouri community. The youngest of eight children, it seems Laura wasn’t one to fight to be heard in her crowded household, but rather relied on written short stories to illuminate her thoughts.

Last year, Laura published her debut novel, The Weight of Blood— a dark, suspenseful thriller about

a teenage girl in the Ozarks who seeks out answers about her longlost mother, an outsider to the close-knit community of Henbane as well as a childhood friend recently found brutally murdered.

She just wrapped up the first draft of Arrowood, another thriller to debut in early 2016. Was the writing process any easier this time? “No,” she says flatly. “There’s a lot more pressure the second time around because the book already sold before I wrote it. So, I had all these other people’s expectations that I was thinking about.”

Her second book takes place in a small Iowa town, where a young woman witnesses the kidnapping of her sisters. Two decades later, new facts about the crime come to light, causing her to question her own memory.

Seedy, small-town mystery is Laura’s bread and butter. Her favorite book is, unsurprisingly, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. “It’s just the kind of thing that is in my

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“I’ve always been intrigued in terms of writing about anxiety in general: how people deal with it, how people deny it, how people sublimate it. Just ask yourself one question: How could there ever have been nothing? And how could there always have been something?”

how to LIVE FOREVER A conversation with Richard Burgin

By Evan Wood

Missouri Life: Your first book was a series of conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, an internationally renowned Spanish-language writer. How did that come about?

Richard Burgin: I was introduced to Borges’s work as a freshman in college at Brandeis. Later on, I found out that he was going to be at Harvard, which was maybe fifteen minutes from where I went to school. I’d become friends with this young woman, a classmate from Brazil who had read Borges in Spanish, and she was kind of a

Borges freak, too. She said she’d call him up because she could speak Spanish. She called up and found out where he was living. It was such a different world, you know; people were in the phone book, people answered their phone. So, he was obviously very open and generous about his time and about meeting us. We were just two fans.

And to my delight, or amazement, he asked us to come back again.

So I asked if I could tape record a conversation. And he said, ‘Sure; just don’t make me too aware of it.’

That was it. I had the most innocent of motivations and just sort of walked into something.

ML: How was the book received?

Burgin: It was received really well. I think part of it was that I was so young. It came out during the height of the protest era, and I remember one person wrote that I was an example of an unalienated youth doing something positive instead of taking LSD and fighting in the street.

This was just sort of destined to work out for me, especially

when you consider that when I went in there, all I wanted to do was meet him.

ML: The volume of short fiction, as opposed to novels you’ve published, is relatively high. What’s the reason for that?

Burgin: There ought to be an amendment, in addition to the Fifth Amendment, where you can plead naiveté. I wrote novels as a teenager and in my early twenties. But they didn’t get published, and I thought, in the time it took me to write this novel for which I

COURTESY OF RICHARD BURGIN

Richard Burgin was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, and now lives in Missouri. In the years in between his birth and our brief conversation inside his home in Clayton, he has won five Pushcart Prizes, published sixteen books, and founded three magazines; one of them, Boulevard, is in its thirtieth year of publication.

His most recent book, Hide Island, is a collection of short stories and a novella.

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get nothing, I could have written maybe ten stories. So I had more success as a story writer. I wrote the novels when I was too young to realistically expect them to be published, and I got discouraged.

But what I should have done after publishing the first or second book of stories was go back to novels right away. By the time I tried to write and send out novels, I was already typecast or perceived as a short story writer.

ML: In many of your stories there’s an element of danger of which the characters aren’t necessarily aware. Is there a specific reason for that?

Burgin: Fear is kind of an underrepresented emotion in literature, so I’ve always been intrigued in terms of writing about anxiety in general: how people deal with it, how people deny it, how people sublimate it. Just ask yourself one question: How could there ever have been nothing? And how could there always have been something? And if you meditate upon that simple line, I think you’re bound to feel mystery, awe, anxiety, fear—and it amazes me how people persist in their lives in light of that. That’s why I have that line in Rivers Last Longer: “Art is a lost illusion.” Somebody says that to somebody at a cocktail party. Here everybody is, sacrificing everything and striving because they think, what, that their work will last forever? That their name will be known? Nobody’s will. Not Beethoven, not even Shakespeare.

Not in a million years, not in a half million years, probably not in fifty thousand years. But art is like a religion for people. They think they’re going to defeat death through their work. And they’re not; nobody is. How people avoid this truth or deal with it interests me. But I think there’s more hope and optimism in my stories than I’ve generally been given credit for. I know what I just said about art being a lost illusion

isn’t what writers want to hear or want to believe, but I don’t think anything in life is simple enough to sum up with one viewpoint. Even a pessimistic writer like Hemingway, who committed suicide, said in an interview: “I have enjoyed living.”

And I’m sure that’s true. Somehow in spite of all the horror that’s going on in our society, even right here in Missouri, people enjoy living more than they don’t, or they wouldn’t struggle to live to the extent that they do.

ML: So you deprive yourself of the thought of your work lasting?

Burgin: I do believe that immortality exists but in a more subtle way.

I believe that species immortality is real. It’s not the individual. This is hard for us to accept. Nobody thinks much of killing an ant, but we wouldn’t want all ants to disappear from the earth. If we identified with our species, instead of striving so much for ourselves, then it wouldn’t be so tragic when we die.

The goal should be immortality of the species, not the person. That, I believe, is possible. While for sure, if you take the reverse, if the species doesn’t survive, nobody’s work will.

We know that much.

ML: But the idea of leaving something behind does create a sense of purpose for many people.

What’s your sense of purpose?

Burgin: It’s funny; I used to talk about this stuff with my father.

He was the one who gave me that line: “Art is a lost illusion.” I didn’t know what he meant at the time.

I’m flooded with a little nostalgia thinking about my father. But that’s kind of like saying, in light of death, what is the point of doing anything? What is the point of falling in love? Basically, I do it because I enjoy it. I have maybe a compulsion or an urge from doing it. I get pleasure from it. Something doesn’t have to last forever to get pleasure from it.

Read the full interview online.

Laura McHugh (cont.)

head—creepy, dark stories,” she says of her consistently macabre subject matter, “even when I was younger. My poor mother.”

As she raised her large family, Laura’s mother held jobs at places like Waffle House, Wendy’s, and a mailroom before earning her associate’s degree in her fifties. Laura’s father, a shoe repairman, got antsy easily and moved the family frequently. Laura was born in southern Iowa and moved to the Ozarks at age seven. She moved two more times after that and attended five different schools, a small number compared to her siblings’ moves before she was born. The family hated moving.

“But my mom said, ‘Oh, it gave you something to write about!’ ” Laura says, laughing.

Laura’s time spent in the Ozarks was quiet. Having only one brother and one sister left at home, Laura was lonely, she says. She uses that word a lot.

As a child, Laura spent a lot of time inside, concocting and writing twisted stories. She recalls spending a whole afternoon with her sister watching a dung beetle curl into a ball and roll around the house.

Many of the natural remedies and superstitions in The Weight of Blood, such as digging up sassafras to make tea, are drawn from Laura’s own observations of the locals in Ozark County’s Tecumseh. To this day, she still splits open persimmon seeds to divine the winter weather.

Laura’s Tecumseh home was the next-to-last house in a “forbidding area” at the end of a dirt fork in the road. At the other fork

missouri

MISCELLANY

resided the East Wind Community, perhaps best known as the commune that produces hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of nut butters and rope sandals each year to sustain its microcosm of citizens.

“This woman jogged by our bus stop, naked from the waist up, this older woman,” Laura says, wide-eyed, of her sole childhood interaction with the commune. They mostly kept to themselves.

Although she no longer lives in the Ozarks, Laura still draws on her childhood there for inspiration. The Weight of Blood deals a lot with family; the title alludes to the question of how far one should go to protect their own— including breaking the law.

The novel is based on a news story she read from Lebanon, Missouri, where she attended high school. The story is a gruesome saga involving years of sexual abuse and torture that many people knew about but never reported.

There’s a delicate balance in small towns between everyone knowing the business of everyone else and the intense secrecy of many of the townspeople, she found. “So people know, but nobody tells.”

While she’s received some flak for depicting this already heavily stereotyped area in such a harsh light, she takes it in stride.

“This is fiction,” she reiterates.

Even so, there are clearly some rays of truth in that darkness.

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following THE \ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /

flock

Visit the Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge in the spring to uncover its transformative beauty. \ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /

COURTESY OF JIM MCCONNELL

BY ALEX ST EWART

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Although not a common sight, great egrets appear during spring, summer, and fall at the Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge.

The sky is nowhere to be found. Instead, the air above your head is gray, white, and feathery. It’s vibrating ceaselessly. The mass seems to be approaching the ground, coming closer and closer until it falls, gracefully, and lands on the water. Suddenly, the shapes are discernible: migrating geese, swans, cranes, and ducks that stop at Squaw Creek before soldiering northward for the spring.

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“They are quite the sight and quite the noise,” says Christina Buhman, president of Friends of Squaw Creek, a nonprofit that fundraises and promotes the refuge. “They are so noisy when they get together.”

A million snow geese sound like a constant whirring or a million emergency vehicles with sirens blaring. It’s both deafening and hypnotic.

The Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge, near Mound City in Northwest Missouri, is home for more than three hundred bird species, forty-one mammal species, and thirty-seven reptile and amphibian species. Wetlands, grasslands, forests, and croplands make up this vast habitat of award-winning greenery.

In 2001, it made the American Bird Conservancy’s top 500 Globally Important Bird Areas in America. In 2007, the refuge was labeled a Site of Regional Importance by the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network. But its first recognition as a crucial part of Missouri wildlife occurred in the 1930s.

President Franklin Roosevelt established the Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge as a 7,415-acre feeding and breeding refuge for migratory birds and other wildlife on August 23, 1935. Why was it worthy of an executive order? Squaw Creek is a kind of bottleneck region for migrations, explains Squaw Creek wildlife refuge specialist Corey Kudrna.

“We’re part of the Mississippi Flyway, but we’re right on the line with the Missouri River, and across into Nebraska is the Central Flyway,” he says.

“So you’ve got a lot of birds pushing through the area. We’re kind of a key wetland—almost a pinch point of an hourglass.”

COURTESY OF THE MISSOURI DIVISION OF TOURISM AND JIM GRIGGS

Above: Millions of geese make a pit stop here during the winter and spring migrations. Birders can download the checklist on the refuge’s website to see what species can be seen at different times of year. Left: Red-tailed hawks are commonly sighted at the refuge year-round.

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COURTESY OF JIM MCCONNELL, JIM GRIGGS, AND SQUAW CREEK NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE

In addition to the walking trails, the auto tour route is a ten-mile drive where visitors can see coyotes, bald eagles, otters, and other wildlife. From your vehicle, you can often see birds of prey, waterfowl, beaver, and muskrat in marshes and pools.

Bird migrations are a sublime sight to see here February through April.

In February 2014, refuge officials counted more than a million snow geese.

Expect to see vibrant plumage and increasing numbers of trumpeter geese. At the refuge in the spring, Eagle Pool and Pelican Pool host the birds, and the Eagle Overlook Trail, which has a watchtower, is the best seat in the house.

For hikers seeking a spectacular tri-state view, the Loess Bluff Trail, originally built by the Civilian Conservation Corps, is a half-mile long and ends with a two-hundred-step ascent, rewarding hikers with a glimpse of eagles spiraling below to catch their prey.

“You’re about three hundred feet above the river valley at that point,” Corey says. “You’ll be looking through the flock.”

Loess hills cover seven hundred acres of the refuge on the east, along the Missouri River floodplain. There, visitors can trek past some of the state’s native plants, like Indian grass, big bluestem, blazing star, compass plant, yucca, beard-tongue, and skeleton plant. May through September is a great time to visit the loess hills; wild flowers, butterflies, and passerine birds are abundant that time of year. March marks the beginning of prime fishing season.

“As soon as the ice is gone, and it’s not unbearable,” Corey says, “it’s time to come to the refuge.”

Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge is located five miles south of Mound City and thirty miles northwest of St. Joseph. Visitors can take I-29 to Exit 79 and then travel 2.5 miles west on Route 159 to the refuge.

The office is open Monday through Friday from 7:30 AM to 4 PM. Call 660442-3187 or visit fws.gov/refuge/squaw_creek for more information.

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stitched

together in time STORY BY CHANELLE KOEHN PHOTOS BY STEPHANIE SIDOTI

How a quilting business and Youtube videos helped mend Hamilton’s entrepreneurial spirit.

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At Missouri Star Quilt Company, Cindy Moms (right) discusses a quilting project with visitors from Topeka, Kansas. The store opened in 2008 in the town’s former J.C. Penney store. The influx of visitors to the shop in the past two years has also brought commerce to new small businesses that range from a brewery to an upscale restaurant.

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James Cash Penney grew up in Hamilton, and after his department store chain took off, he opened a J.C. Penney store there and helped fund the town’s library, high school, and cemetery.

ON A CLEAR afternoon, the sun blazes down on Dean Hales’s weathered face. He cruises down Davis Street, Hamilton’s main thoroughfare, in his Cadillac SUV. What began as a “quick tour” has now stretched into a scenic showcase of the town, population 1,800, and a lesson on its history.

As Dean waits at a four-way stop, he points to a brick building with a sign that reads “PENNEY’S QUILT SHOP.” “See there?” he asks. “That building was the J.M. Hale and Brothers dry goods store. J.C. Penney worked there as a boy.”

J.C. Penney left town in 1897 and eventually created his chain of department stores. The old dry goods store would become Hamilton’s first J.C. Penney store and the chain’s five hundredth outlet in 1924. In his thirties, Dean worked at a grocery store next door.

“That’s how J.C. and I became friends,” Dean says.

Dean loves his hometown. He moved here during his childhood in 1938. But sometimes, his thoughts seem far away, as if he’s reliving his

The J.C. Penney Memorial Library and Museum was built with donations from the community, friends, family, and many people affiliated with the company. It was dedicated in 1976.

seventy-seven years here through the stories he tells; one involves the closure of Hamilton’s only J.C. Penney store. On the day it closed, Dean says he was the last customer. He bought a handkerchief and a pair of socks, which he still owns.

“It was a sick feeling,” he says. “All towns along Highway 36 from St. Joseph east to Hannibal had J.C. Penney stores: Chillicothe, Hamilton, Cameron, Brookfield. But it all comes down to roads and convenience. People started realizing that they could leave home—so they left.”

Dean, the town’s unofficial tour guide, tells that story often. He’s so fond of Hamilton that he’s never felt compelled to leave. But he’s watched other people and their businesses come and go, including his friend James Cash Penney.

At eighty-four years old, Dean Hales spent most of his life watching Hamilton slowly die— but now he’s watching it come back to life.

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B.J. Richardson, operations director at Missouri Star Quilt Company, commutes from Kearney to Hamilton for work. The quilting store has created jobs and brings in out-of-towners.

A SCAR ALONG THE HIGHWAY Hamilton owes its existence largely to the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad. When railroad construction began in the 1850s, the Hamilton Town Company developed a tract of land along the rail lines. That area would become Hamilton.

The community might have been called Prairie City if Albert Gallatin Davis, a prominent member of the Town Company, had not insisted on another name. Instead, he proposed Hamilton to honor the American founding father and first treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton, as well as Joseph Hamilton, a notable early American lawyer and military hero killed at the Battle of the Thames during the War of 1812. Albert’s wish was granted, and in the summer of 1855, he became Hamilton’s first resident, building its first home and business.

The railroad was completed in 1859, and as the first trains arrived at Hamilton’s railroad

depot, so, too, did new residents.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Hamilton had about twenty-five homes and businesses. From 1867 to 1868, increasing sales of land brought rapid growth to Hamilton, making it Caldwell County’s largest town. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Hamilton’s main street was crowded with shoppers, farmers bringing produce to town, and children attending Saturday movies.

For many small towns nationwide, the second half of the twentieth century was not kind to Hamilton’s main street. Rural commerce weakened in the wake of World War II, while big cities expanded with indoor shopping malls and department stores. But the biggest economic blow Hamilton would suffer was still to come.

In 1956, the new I-35 shortened the drive from Hamilton to Kansas City by twenty minutes, but it also affected the local businesses. The Burlington Rail Depot, once at the heart of the town, was dismantled when the railroad abandoned its line through Hamilton; the tracks were ripped from the ground and left a scar, still visible along Highway 36.

People continued to leave small towns for big cities from 1960 onward, and businesspeople took their trade along with their families. By the late 1990s, townspeople recall Hamilton—once a bustling hub of commerce—having fewer businesses than it once had. The Stride Rite Shoe Factory shuttered, leaving three hundred people to seek jobs elsewhere. The main street in town wasn’t buzzing like it had a century ago.

It seemed the spirit of the town was suffering along with its economy. But one family had the remedy.

QUILTERS AND YOUTUBERS Jenny Doan and her family didn’t start Missouri Star Quilt Company with the intent of stitching

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Left: In addition to the main store, Missouri Star Quilt Company has four themed stores. Each features different fabric patterns: vintage, seasonal, boutique, and standard. Above: Owner Jenny Doan (right) talks with a customer from Pennsylvania.

PLACES TO EXPLORE J.C. PENNEY MUSEUM 312 N. Davis Street 816-465-0244

J’S BURGER DIVE 116 N. Davis Street 816-309-2384

MISSOURI STAR QUILT COMPANY 114 N. Davis Street 888-571-1122 missouriquiltco.com

NINJA MOOSE BREWERY

105 W. Bird Street Open 11 AM to 10 PM Friday and Saturday ninjamoosebrewery.com

POPPY’S BAKERY 118 N. Davis Street 816-583-2020

Hamilton back together. Rather, the business, which has grown to occupy fifteen buildings on Hamilton’s main street, started as her hobby.

The Doan family moved from the state of California to Hamilton in 1995. Jenny and her husband, Ron, chose the tiny town by chance.

“It was literally on the middle of the map under Ron’s finger,” Jenny says. “We just wanted to move where things were a little more familyoriented.”

Ron commuted to his job in Kansas City as a machinist for The Kansas City Star’s newspaper press. Jenny stayed home with her youngest children. She had worked as a costumer in California and accepted what little work she could find near Hamilton.

“That just didn’t work for me very well,” Jenny says. “When you love to sew, well, when you love to do anything, you have to do it all the time.”

As her children got older, Jenny had more free time, so she began attending a quilting class at a vocational technical school in Chillicothe.

There, she fell in love with the hobby that would change her life.

“When you make a costume, it has to look good from twenty feet out and hold together for two weeks—probably nobody uses it again,” she says. “But when you make a quilt, it becomes an

heirloom. It’s something people hang onto forever. And even if you give it to your children, and they hate it and send it to the Goodwill, somebody’s going to walk along, gasp, and say, ‘I can’t believe I found this!’ I mean, that quilt is going to be loved by somebody.”

Jenny became passionate about quilting, but it was her children, Alan and Sarah, who suggested she turn her hobby into a business to build on her retirement funds. Ron, worried by cutbacks at the newspaper, left his job at The Star in 2008 to pursue the quilting business. The family bought a quilting machine but needed a building to house it; the building cost less than the machine.

“We put a sign up, and people started bringing their quilts to me,” Jenny says.

The Doan’s saw little payoff at first. Alan suggested they take their craft online.

“Alan asked me, ‘Do you want to do tutorials?’ ” Jenny recalls. “And my answer was, ‘Sure, Alan. What’s a tutorial?’ ” The Doan family began making YouTube tutorials for beginning quilters in February 2009. Jenny, the star, turns on the charm with her bubbly personality but keeps the language simple enough so that anyone can understand.

When the videos became more popular, Alan saw another business opportunity. Viewers wanted to purchase the fabric used in the tutorials, and the Doans realized that Missouri Star Quilt Company could become an online business. They stocked up on fabric and started taking orders.

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Poppy’s Bakery and J’s Burger Dive opened in 2014. Enjoy desserts, sandwiches, salads, and cold and hot drinks at the bakery, or order a burger, fries, and a milkshake next door.

Missouri Star Quilt Company is often a stop on tours that bring new faces from all over.

Scott Falke, owner of Ninja Moose Brewery, collected spent grains from Kansas City breweries for livestock feed. It was during those trips that he discovered his passion for brewing.

PATCHED TOGETHER Missouri Star Quilt Company got big—and it got big quickly. Six years later, the company employs over 145 people and fulfills about 2,000 to 3,000 orders daily, according to B.J. Richardson, the company’s operations director. They still produce tutorial videos, and Jenny has become a celebrity in the quilting world, with over fortythree million video views on Youtube.

The Doans have recycled a good part of

their multi-million-dollar business back into Hamilton by revitalizing its main street, where they own fifteen buildings, including five quilting stores and a retreat center for visiting quilters. The Doans have welcomed people from as far as Russia, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

“There’s no agenda at work here,” B.J. says.

“The Doans are really just trying to better the town.”

Dean Hales says, “It’s a good change.” He’s seen Hamilton through its ups and downs, and if there’s one thing he knows for sure, it’s

the sentiment he constantly repeats: “Business brings business.”

That statement seems to ring true. Missouri Star Quilting Company has restored Hamilton’s main street to the bustling hub that residents haven’t seen for decades, inspiring others to start their own businesses. Poppy’s Bakery, J’s Burger Dive, a fine-dining restaurant called Blue Sage, and Ninja Moose Brewery are among the new destinations in town.

Like James Cash Penney, the Doans are modern examples of an enterprising spirit that has endured more than a century later.

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WHAT WILL YOU LEAVE BEHIND?

by Kyle Elliott

History is full of examples of parents taking actions they believe will improve the lives of future generations. ln 1780, then President of the United States John Adams wrote to his wife, “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce, and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine.”

The underpinning for an improved future may be found in the bedrock of an enduring political system, a free country, a strong work ethic, a superb education, or elsewhere. The 2014 US Trust Insights on Wealth and Worth Report found six in ten wealthy Americans believe it is important to leave a financial legacy for the next generation. If you intend to provide heirs with financial bequests—and you want to preserve family harmony—you need to clearly understand the story your inheritance choices will say to your heirs.

WHAT IS EQUAL IN THE CONTEXT OF FAMILY?

Families are complicated, and that’s one of the most challenging aspects of planning an inheritance. American families are varied, but their members tend to fall into a few broad categories, according to the 2014 US Trust Insights on Wealth and Worth Report: • Single person: About one-fifth of wealthy participants had never married or had not remarried after being divorced, separated, or widowed. (A small percentage are cohabiting).

• Traditional marriage: About three-fourths of affluent Americans are in their first marriage and two-thirds have children.

• Blended marriage: The Silent Generation (24 percent) and Baby Boomers (17 percent) are more likely than younger generations to have blended families, meaning they have remarried after being divorced or widowed and may have step-children.

• Multigenerational household: Generation X (11 percent) and Millennials (32 percent) are more likely to live in multi-generational households, meaning they either live with siblings, parents, or grandparents, or have adult children, parents, or grandparents living with them.

In the context of family, what seems like the simplest choice—dividing assets equally among all of heirs—becomes quite tricky because equality is in the eye of the beholder. A grown son may believe he deserves a bigger slice of financial pie because his family has the most children. A daughter may believe she deserves more because she was the primary caregiver when you were ill. Mix subjective judgments about fairness with the complexities of modern American family structure, and inheritance issues can become quite touchy.

MINIMIZING INHERITANCE DISPUTES

Determining an equitable division of assets is never easy, not even for single parents or couples in traditional families. One child may suffer a disability, have an addiction problem, run the family business, be less successful than siblings, or have made life decisions parents are uncomfortable supporting. If your family circumstances necessitate an uneven distribution of assets, there are a myriad of ways to try and minimize the conflicts: • Act discretely: If you’ve decided an unequal division of assets is necessary, consider establishing a discreet trust for each child. The advantages are that they can be funded unequally, and each one can have completely different distribution triggers and incentives. In addition, each child will only be apprised of the provisions of his or her trust, unless they share the information. Make sure the assets that will fund each trust are properly titled.

• Establish a shared trust: If you distribute the majority, but not all, of your estate equally among heirs, the remainder (perhaps one-fifth or one-quarter) can fund a shared trust to be used when an heir has an emergency need.

The trust should have an objective third-party

trustee who will be responsible for distributing funds fairly.

• Choose your executor carefully: Some say it’s best to follow family hierarchy and make your oldest child executor. Others say it’s best to choose a family member who is organized, hardworking, honest, and a good communicator.

Still others will suggest you appoint a committee of executors because of the checks and balances a group provides. No matter what you decide, make sure everyone understands your choice.

• Explain your thinking: The difference between family harmony and an ongoing feud may be determined by how clearly you communicate with your family. The Wall Street Journal suggests, “Whenever possible, try to be open about your inheritance plan while you are still alive, so every family member understands it, minimizing the chances for suspicions to arise later. If you don’t want to have this difficult conversation while you are alive, you can write a letter or make a video elaborating on the reasons and thought process behind your plan and making it clear that these decisions are yours alone.”

There is no right or wrong answer when it comes to inheritance. Parents make decisions based on family dynamics and individual needs. The American Association of Individual Investors Journal suggests taking “a multi-faceted approach that combines psychology, good lawyering, a lot of self-awareness, and a good dose of common sense.” If you haven’t recently, you may want to review your will and estate plans with your financial adviser or attorney.

This information is not a substitute for specific individualized legal advice. We suggest you discuss your specific situation with a qualified legal advisor.

The above material was prepared

by Peak Advsior Alliance using the following sources: havardmagazine.com; www.ustrust.com; online.wsj.com; www.fa-mag.com; www.aaii.com;

www.nolo.com.

Visit MissouriLife.com for direct links to all the sources.

Kyle Elliott, LPL Financial Advisor

Securities offered through LPL Financial, member FINRA/SIPC. Insurance products offered through LPL Financial or its licensed affiliates. The investment products sold through LPL Financial are not insured Commercial Trust Company deposits and are not FDIC insured. These products are not obligations of the Commercial Trust Company and are not endorsed, recommended or guaranteed by Commercial Trust Company or any government agency. The value of the investment may fluctuate, the return on the investment is not guaranteed, and loss of principal is possible.

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Pride OF PLACE

THE ART OF MEMORY The Missouri State Capitol complex serves as an epitome art district.

NOTLEY HAWKINS

BY W. ARTHUR MEHRHOFF

At 437 feet long and 300 feet wide, the building covers three acres with 500,000 square feet of floor space for legislative assemblies and government offices.

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“The setting draws both the teller and the hearers into a larger and older conversation.”

—Harvey Cox, When Jesus Came to Harvard

SOME MISSOURI LIFE

readers may remember the exciting spring ritual of boarding a yellow school bus to tour the Missouri State Capitol. Although the waiting tour guides may not have shared the excitement, everyone understood that something big was taking place.

In literature, an epitome represents or summarizes something big. The Missouri State Capitol Historic District, in the absolute heart of Missouri, epitomizes a much larger and older conversation about the course of Missouri’s life.

OF TIME AND THE RIVER The Missouri River flows through more than five hundred miles of the state, several major metropolitan areas, and past the State Capitol. Formed more than 100,000 years ago when the Rocky Mountain streams flowed eastward and confronted the western edge of a massive glacier, these bodies of water wisely diverted southward until reaching present day Kansas City. From there, they flowed east along the glacier’s southern border, through what is now central Missouri.

Lewis and Clark noted that the powerful river teemed with islands, side channels, quiet backwaters, and lush marshes. Like Runge Nature Center near Jefferson City, the Missouri River floodplain hosted grasslands, forests, and wetlands that attracted the first native peoples and, later, the westering Americans.

Today, more than half of all Missourians receive their drinking water—along with fish, wildlife, outdoor recreation, power generation, and river commerce—from this now heavily channelized river and its alluvial plains. It remains the matrix of Missouri.

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Pride

OF PLACE

As population flowed to Missouri from both the North and South after the Missouri Compromise, the seat of government shifted from St. Charles to the City of Jefferson in 1826. Renowned artist George Caleb Bingham celebrated the lively Missouri River scene and the vital Jefferson Street transportation and commercial landing in the new capital.

The Jefferson Landing State Historic Site features the Lohman Building (1839), which is on the National Register of Historic Places, and the Union Hotel (1855). A general store and warehouse in the Lohman Building interpret the mercantile trade era. Both antebellum buildings display the simple, symmetrical Federal Style, which was characteristic of the early American republic. The arrival of the Pacific Railroad on the Missouri River in the 1850s made Jefferson Landing the transfer point for goods arriving by rail to head west by steamboat. New development, such as the Union Hotel, sprang up to serve the constantly changing needs of the bustling district. First dubbing the place the Missouri Hotel and later the Veranda Hotel, owner Charles Maus finally proclaimed it the Union Hotel after returning from Missouri’s wrenching Civil War experience. While the Union was forever in song, the Civil War dramatically changed Jefferson Landing and Missouri.

THE GILDED AGE: THE GOVERNOR’S MANSION The Missouri Governor’s Mansion offers tours January through July and September through November. You can also reserve the mansion for private events. Visit mansion.mo.gov for more information on tours, reservations, and events hosted at the Governor’s Mansion.

The Missouri Governor’s Mansion (1871)—whose first resident and chief proponent, Governor Benjamin Gratz Brown, ran unsuccessfully as the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 1872—symbol-

COURTESY OF JEFFERSON CITY CVB AND MISSOURI STATE ARCHIVES

ACROSS THE WIDE MISSOURI: JEFFERSON LANDING

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The Runge Nature Center, just outside Jefferson City, features an indoor wildlife viewing area.

Plus, the Missouri Department of Conservation Area has exhibits, classrooms, and an auditorium.

izes those dramatic changes. This stately mansion, designed by noted St. Louis architect George Barnett and built in only eight months by prisoners of the nearby state penitentiary, cost approximately $75,000. With its mansard roof and pink granite portico columns perched high above the Missouri River, the Missouri Governor’s Mansion is on the National Register of Historic Places, and it reflects the fashionable French Second Empire architectural style celebrating the vast new wealth created by industrial capitalism.

Mark Twain called the period from the Civil War to the turn of the twentieth century The Gilded Age, coining the term in his book of the same title. Large corporations made possible, even necessary, by the Civil War replaced the small, locally owned factories and businesses found in places like Jefferson Landing. This new social order witnessed advances in communications and transportation, such as the telegraph and transcontinental railroads facilitated by Eads Bridge in St. Louis; waves of immigrants and rapid urbanization; a perceptible shift from farms and countryside to factories and cities; and the closing of the frontier. The Governor’s Mansion overlooking Jefferson Landing clearly reflects these vast new financial and cultural energies in Missouri.

AMERICA BY DESIGN: THE STATE CAPITOL

COURTESY OF JEFFERSON CITY CVB

Missouri’s monumental Capitol shows us the continued growth of Missouri and its government during the first part of the twentieth century.

Following a devastating 1911 fire, Missourians approved $3.5 million in state bonds to erect a new Capitol, which was officially dedicated on October 6, 1924.

This Classical Revival building sits on a limestone bluff high atop the south bank of the Missouri River and towers 238 feet over the landscape. The building covers three acres with a half million square feet of

The Lohman Building at the Jefferson Landing State Historic Site was built in 1839. Then, it was a grocery store, warehouse, and tavern. Today, it serves more as a living history museum.

Field trips to the State Capitol were commonplace among Missouri public schools in the 1950s and 1960s. Here, children exit buses near the south entrance and statue of Thomas Jefferson.

floor space for legislative assemblies, government offices, and a truly amazing collection of public art.

The Missouri State Capitol and grounds, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, proudly reflects the City Beautiful urban design tradition. The complex was designed by New York architects Egerton Swartwout and Evarts Tracy, who were formerly with the legendary firm of McKim, Mead, and White and who designed several buildings for that firm in the nation’s capital. Strongly endorsed by civic and business leaders, the City Beautiful Movement used classicism to create what architectural historian Spiro Kostof called “an iconography of unity” to mask the ills of rapid modernization. Similar to other early twentieth century urban designs—especially the famous 1902 McMillan Plan for Washington, DC—key elements of the Missouri Capitol design include using physically imposing government buildings in a classical style to define broad boulevards, using monuments to memorialize leaders and historic events, providing grand public spaces, and emphasizing aesthetic improvements such as public art.

And therein lies a tale. When the special property tax earmarked for building the Capitol generated a $1 million surplus, the state attorney general ruled that the money had to be spent on the building. Legislators decided to use the money to decorate the Capitol, so they appointed a fine arts commission to recruit some of the most notable American artists of the day. Those masters created a fantastic legacy of stained glass, murals, carvings, and statuary that portray Missouri’s history, legends, and cultural achievements. In 1935, the Missouri House of Representatives commissioned Missouri native Thomas Hart Benton to paint a mural on the four walls of the spacious House Lounge on the third floor in the Capitol’s west wing. Despite serious threats to whitewash its bold, vivid, and often critical scenes of everyday Missourians, Benton’s epic Social History of Missouri survives as a valuable Depression-era counterpoint to its City Beautiful venue.

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OF PLACE

WHAT TIME IS THIS PLACE? In The Mystic Chords of Memory, Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural historian Michael Kammen wrote that “societies in fact reconstruct their pasts rather than faithfully record them, and … they do so with the needs of contemporary culture clearly in mind.” The evolution of the State Capitol historic district epitomizes Kammen’s statement about how and why we remember. According to the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, the state acquired the Jefferson Landing properties in the 1960s for another parking lot, but concerned citizens, led by Elizabeth Rozier, organized a major historic preservation effort in true sixties style. The Lohman Building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1969, and in 1974, Missouri’s Bicentennial Commission adopted the Jefferson Landing proposal as the state’s official Bicentennial project. The Lohman Building and Union Hotel were restored, and the Lohman Building opened to the public on July 4, 1976, as the cornerstone of Jefferson Landing State Historic Site.

The Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, perhaps as much or more than the American Bicentennial, galvanized historical interest throughout Missouri. In 2008, state officials unveiled the Lewis and Clark Monument Trailhead Plaza that depicted Lewis, Clark, interpreter George Drouillard, Clark’s slave York, and their dog Seaman. About 1,100 tons of native stone that evokes Missouri River limestone bluffs surround the group, whose cultural diversity clearly reflects more recent thinking about Missouri life.

The site also features two waterfalls, benches, and a drinking fountain designed for both people and pets; Seaman would approve. Unlike the intimidating City Beautiful approach to monumentality, the plaza’s design allows visitors to physically interact with their heroes.

Located near the corner of Jefferson Street and Capitol Avenue, just east of the Capitol, the memorial overlooks the Jefferson Landing Historic Site and the river. The project cost more than $1.3 million and was funded through a federal transportation grant, state and city matching funds, inkind services, and private donations. The trailhead connects the Capitol to the Katy Trail, Jefferson City’s greenway trail network, and back to the river from where the course of life in Missouri originated. As novelist Thomas Wolfe wrote, “Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth and listen.”

PLACES TO VISIT JEFFERSON LANDING STATE HISTORIC SITE 100 Jefferson Street mostateparks.com • 573-751-3475

THE MISSOURI GOVERNOR’S MANSION 100 Madison Street mansion.mo.gov • 573-751-4141

MISSOURI STATE CAPITOL 201 W. Capitol Avenue senate.mo.gov • 573-751-2514

RUNGE NATURE CENTER 330 Commerce Drive mdc.mo.gov • 573-526-5544

COURTESY OF MISSOURI DIVISION OF TOURISM

Pride

The Lewis and Clark Trailhead Plaza was designed by Columbia artist Sabra Tull Meyer. Sabra also designed a bust of Old Drum that sits in the Missouri Supreme Court building, an eagle statue in Linn, and the Freedom Flight Veterans Memorial in Boonville.

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An elegant haven, magically blending the decades and offering legendary small-town hospitality

The DeBourge House DeBourge House is nestled in the heart of historic downtown Washington, Missouri, just two blocks from the river and trail. www.debourgehouse.com 636-399-0466

Phillips Place B & B www.phillipsplacebandb.com Macon, Missouri 660-385-2774

Bed and Breakfast Inns of Missouri

119 Johnson St Washington

MO 63090

Hilty Inn Bed and Breakfast

Gottfried’s Cabin Gast Haus Gottfried’s Cabin is the oldest standing structure in downtown Washington, and the privacy and accommodations make it feel like it’s just for you.

636-239-1743 info@gottfriedscabin.com www.gottfriedscabin.com

124 Jefferson Street Washington, MO 63090

Granny’s Country Cottage

Our guests enjoy access to local theatre, great restaurants, a large Mennonite community and the Lake of the Ozarks.

573-378-2020 • Versailles, MO

The only place where you’ll find Inspected and Approved member inns at locations statewide.

Enjoy the quiet countryside in a restored grain bin unit.

12473 Atom Dr., Humphreys, Mo. www.grannyscountrycottage.info 660–286–3981

www.hiltyinnbedandbreakfast.com

www.bbim.org

A cozy bed & breakfast located in historic Marquand, at the foothills of the Ozark Mountains

573-783-3282 www.auntkats.com

BBIM Gift Certificates Are Available

Epple Haus Bed and Breakfast Morrison, MO

573-294-6203 Home 573-690-7779 Cell kayarlen@gmail.com www.epplebedandbreakfast.com

WELCOME TO THE

HOTEL FREDERICK

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FOR WEEKEND GETAWAYS

The Hotel Frederick offers an exclusive, comfortable, and creative environment, with 24 rooms, 3 meeting rooms, and a cozy bar with a separate sitting room. Contact us today to reserve your room. www.hotelfrederick.com • 888-437-3321 501 East High Street • Boonville, MO 65233

Five luxury suites Gourmet breakfast Walk to Columbia’s downtown shops, restaurants Steps away from MU’s campus

Operated by the MU College of Agriculture, Food & Natural Resources Rated No. 1 Bed & Breakfast in Columbia, Mo. – TripAdvisor.com

Make a reservation today!

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Located in the heart of Missouri wine country. Experience small town charm and hospitality at our historic inn while enjoying amenities you expect to find in a fine hotel.

1017 Maupin Ave. | 573-237-8540 innkeeper@centralhotelnh.com | www.centralhotelnh.com

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SHOW-ME

Flavor

THE NOTORIOUS

B&G

Follow our quest for the state’s best biscuits and gravy.

The Corner Restaurant in Kansas City is known for its biscuits and gravy. The meatiness of the gravy makes it special. Try the gravy on the amazing chicken and biscuit sandwich, too.

Biscuits and gravy traces its origins back to the early days of America. The dish became especially popular after the Revolutionary War when Southerners, looking for a cheap way to fill their bellies, began making it before long days of farm work. Today, biscuit and gravy connoisseurs are more likely to take a nap after eating the hearty Southern delicacy.

Although biscuits and gravy is a staple at any diner or home-style breakfast joint, it’s also making its way onto menus at more sophisticated breakfast and brunch spots. Chefs are experimenting with

this old standby now more than ever—trying out new ingredients and pushing the limits of what can be deemed B&G. Considered the northern-most Southern state, Missouri is a particularly good place for biscuits and gravy. As rural and metropolitan cultures collide, you can find innovative and home-style variations of the dish in equal parts within our borders.

In that spirit, we uncovered some of our state’s best.

These restaurants are some of our favorites, but we’re only scratching the surface.

COURTESY OF THE CORNER RESTAURANT

The Gravy States

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Kansas City

COURTESY OF THE CORNER RESTAURANT

THE CORNER RESTAURANT The Corner Restaurant is a Kansas City institution. When Steve Friedman opened the diner on the corner of Westport Road and Broadway on Valentine’s Day 1980, he had no idea that the restaurant would be a hot topic among gourmet connoisseurs and food writers thirty-five years later.

Back when Reagan was king, the Corner Restaurant was a diner in every sense of the word. It was cheap. It offered everything. And it was a hit. In the center of Kansas City’s counterculture district of Westport, people would wait in lines that ran around the block to dine in a hip environment that served topof-the-line breakfast faire, including some of the best biscuits and gravy around. However, in its twilight years the restaurant changed ownership and declined in quality. In 2010, the Corner Restaurant closed its doors.

Shortly after the restaurant closed, Dawn Slaughter moved to Kansas City. She was originally from Springfield, so she didn’t know the Corner Restaurant’s legendary status. However, her then business partner, Michael Pfeifer, was a Kansas City native who grew up on the food there. After some careful consideration and six months of remodeling, Michael and Dawn reopened the restaurant in April 2013.

The Corner Restaurant is no longer the place to come for a $2.99 breakfast, but it might be all the better for it. The restaurant is clean, the ingredients are better, and it’s a great spot for brunch seven days a week.

“Our stance was to bring in a more modern approach: make everything from scratch and try to use as much local ingredients as we can,” says Dawn Slaughter, now the restaurant’s sole owner.

Using as many local ingredients as possible is one reason for the higher menu prices, but it’s worth it. All the eggs come from La Ferme du Bonheur farm in Higginsville. The bread is from Farm to Market Bread Company in Kansas City. Coffee is from the Roasterie in Kansas City. And a variety of other ingredients come from Missouri farms, including the delicious

Outdoor seating has always been part of the appeal of the Corner Restaurant. However, the newest incarnation, circa 2013, is slightly more upscale than the previous restaurant.

jellies and jams from Good Natured Family Farms—a cooperative of more than 150 farms in the Kansas City area.

Along with high quality ingredients, the menu has a few items that may have been a bit high-minded for the Corner Restaurant’s previous incarnation: grapefruit brûlée, gourmet salads, and more. However, much of Steve Friedman’s spirit is still alive.

“We kept a few things that were signature to the Corner,” Dawn says. “Like, instead of omelettes, we do Scramble-fuls because that’s what they did.”

The restaurant even has a plaque dedicated to the original owner out front. However, the restaurant is both honoring the old Corner and outpacing it in one way: its Swoonin’ Biscuits and Gravy.

Chef Stephanie Dumler seasons pork sausage with a signature spice blend, which includes sage, before preparing it for the gravy.

The fluffy biscuits are made fresh every day.

And everything about the biscuits and the gravy is nearly perfect. However, the best part is the meatiness of the gravy. Every bite is packed with delicious, spicy, savory sausage.

“I was raised in Southwest Missouri, so

I know you have to do a good biscuits and gravy,” Dawn says. “For a breakfast-brunch place, that’s the focus. You can’t do gravy with no meat, or it’s just not worth putting it on the menu.”—Jonas Weir thecornerkc.com • 4059 Broadway • 816-931-4401

Springfield

GAILEY’S BREAKFAST CAFÉ Gailey’s in Downtown Springfield does not fill prescriptions any more, unless your doctor wrote you a prescription for a big, hearty breakfast.

More than seventy years ago, Joe and Beulah Gailey opened Gailey’s Drugstore. The pharmacy also had a lunch counter, where workers on break could come grab a hamburger and a soda. Eventually, though, Beulah had to sell the store, and in 2005, Gailey’s reopened as a breakfast restaurant that specialized in solid diner staples, heaping portions, and excellent quality.

Today, Gailey’s is marked from the outside with a sign, seemingly from a bygone era, hanging from a four-story brick building. A

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SHOW-ME

Flavor

Gailey’s Breakfast Cafe in Springfield is located in a historic pharmacy. This restaurant has become known for its Sweet Browns—sweet potato hash browns with brown sugar.

sign on the side reads “prescriptions” and is bookended by Coca-Cola logos. Inside, Gailey’s maintains a similarly classic look with nods to the drugstore that it once was. You could imagine 1950s factory workers congregating at the lunch counter during break or Joe Gailey hanging up the Hiland ice cream sign some sixty years ago.

The food is akin to the décor; it’s classic. All the diner favorites you could ask for are on the menu. The Big Boy offers pancakes and eggs with your choice of bacon or sausage. The Steak and Eggs plate is what kings would have for breakfast. The Downtowner offers a sampling of just about everything. However, the must-order plate at Gailey’s is the Bear Hug: two eggs, your choice of sausage or bacon,

hash browns, and a huge portion of the restaurant’s spectacular biscuits and gravy.

Gailey’s has biscuits that could sink a horse, and the secret recipe gravy is the apex of traditional country gravy. It’s not too spicy, the cooks don’t overdo it on the flour, and the sausage ratio is perfect. It’s the archetypal Southern breakfast food, and there’s nothing too fancy or innovative about it. However, Gailey’s does serve up some culinary adventurousness.

Instead of hash browns, you can order Sweet Browns: shredded sweet potatoes with a touch of brown sugar. The scrambled eggs on The Executive plate are mixed with Asiago cheese and cilantro. The Full Monty English breakfast is served with baked beans and grilled tomatoes. But what keeps customers coming

COURTESY OF MISSOURI DIVISION OF TOURISM; HARRY KATZ

Café Berlin in Columbia serves breakfast faire with a bohemian flair. This restaurant gained local media attention in 2009 when it moved locations and transported everything in the restaurant by bicycles. About thirty cyclists helped out.

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After twenty-nine years in business, Logue’s Restaurant has become an institution. Logue’s serves breakfast all day, so you can get your biscuits-and-gravy fix at any time between 6 AM and 9 PM, Monday through Saturday.

back is overall quality and one of the friendliest restaurant staffs in the state, not to mention some of the best biscuits and gravy this side of the Mississippi.—Jonas Weir Facebook: Gailey’s Breakfast Café • 220 E. Walnut Street • 417-866-5500

Columbia

COURTESY OF LOGUE’S RESTAURANT

CAFÉ BERLIN Café Berlin does not serve German food, though the staff gets asked all of the time.

With a mix of Southern comfort food and traditional diner classics, Café Berlin’s menu can only be considered Missouri cuisine.

“If you read the menu and see the first few items—the Yankee, the Rebel, the Union— you’ll see we’re playing off our proximity to the Mason Dixon Line,” says kitchen manager Pat Connor. “It’s definitely got that Missouri flair.”

Part of why Café Berlin has such a distinctive Show-Me State flavor is because the restaurant buys as many as ingredients as it can locally. The free-range eggs are from Stanton Brothers near Centralia. The sausage and bacon come from Patchwork Family Farms in Columbia. The coffee is roasted at Lakota Coffee in Columbia. And it uses as much local produce as possible.

“It’s cool to meet the people who prepare our meat or grow our crops,” Pat says. “That’s more fulfilling at the end of the day: knowing that not only are you making good food, but you’re also supporting a local economy.”

Supporting a local economy gives Café Berlin a sense of place, but its quirkiness cannot be understated. The menu items either have offbeat names—Anonymous Tacos, the Awesome Burger, the Compost Pile—or were named after employees or customers, like the Schyler sandwich or the Carey Burrito. For some reason, the restaurant is home to over two dozen copies of Jurassic Park on VHS. And the coffee cups are all mismatched mugs from local thrift shops.

“It’s gotten to the point where people bring in coffee mugs for us,” Pat says. “This lady last weekend brought in like twenty coffee mugs.”

In addition to the quirkiness, Café Berlin has many ties to the arts community in Columbia. The restaurant serves as a music venue for the True/False Film Fest. Plus, the newly built bar and stage serves as a year-round venue for local music and independent touring artists.

The interior is aesthetically pleasing. And the staff is a regular motley crew of local artists.

“Everyone we employ has huge artistic passions outside of work, and that just speaks volumes about what Café Berlin is and what we’ve always strived to be,” Pat says. “Everything at the cafe was built and touched by an employee at some point.”

Both the menu and the logo were designed by employees. The new renovation, which features a beautiful, handcrafted wooden bar, was done by a line cook who does carpentry work.

The T-shirts were designed by a former employee whose passion is creating comic books.

And oddly enough, the most ordered item at the restaurant is The Starving Artist.

An egg, sautéed greens, and the restaurant’s signature vegetarian biscuits and gravy make up this simple and flavorful dish. The vegetarian gravy is truly what makes the dish,

though. With whole chipotle peppers, simmered red onions, butter, milk, and flour, this gravy stands out as one of the most unique twists on the Southern staple. And it’s so good, even meat lovers will come back for seconds.

On the other hand, Berlin’s sausage gravy could be even better. Made with loads of pork sausage and a special spice blend that includes sage, this gravy is hauntingly good. The trick is using bacon grease as a base. So, if Café Berlin has only one message for aspiring chefs, it’s to save your bacon grease.—Jonas Weir cafeberlincomo.com • 220 N. 10th Street • 573-441-0400

Hannibal

LOGUE’S RESTAURANT Logue’s Restaurant in Hannibal is about a year away from its thirtieth anniversary, according to Darin Logue, whose father, Larry, owns the family restaurant. In the food industry, thirty years is a pretty respectable run, but it’s even more impressive when you take into account that Larry Logue has owned and operated the place since the day it opened.

He and his wife, Eoke, run the show, and Darin helps them out with social media and their website.

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“Dad owned other restaurants before this, too,” Darin says. “He still does everything with a paper ledger and a number two pencil.”

With that much experience driving both front- and back-of-house, it’s not surprising that Logue’s has good biscuits and gravy. You won’t see anything too fancy on the menu at Logue’s, but the restaurant’s reputation is for good, home-style cooking. The daily specials on any given day at Logue’s include countryfried chicken, pork chops, veal parmesan, or even homemade goulash.

If you’re a biscuits-and-gravy connoisseur, you probably already know that many of the best restaurants have a cutoff time—a point by which they’ve either run out of gravy for the day or have simply stopped making it. Luckily, Logue’s serves breakfast all day, including biscuits and gravy, so there’s never a bad time to stop by.

And if the B&G alone is not enough to fill you up, try the Farmer’s Breakfast: two eggs on a biscuit or toast covered with gravy. Logue’s also features a kids menu and a fifty-five-and -older menu that make it the perfect place to go with Grandma and the kids.—Evan Wood LoguesRestaurant.com • 121 Huckleberry Drive

her dad’s; he is the Andy in the menu item’s name. The story goes that every year Jessica’s family had a camp-out on Memorial Day weekend, and both sides of her family came together for the occasion.

“He would make the same breakfast every time,” says Jessica, “beer biscuits and gravy.”

When asked where this tradition came from, Jessica says: “My father’s family is very German.” She adds that cooking with beer is commonplace for that side of the family.

In recent years, as eating brunch has become en vogue, biscuits and gravy dishes have developed something of a reputation for being a hangover cure.

“When you have them, it’s usually the morning after,” says Jessica of her restaurant’s B&G. But before you write this off as a gimmicky play on hair of the dog, just try it. Jessica says that there’s a zing to the dish, and that’s probably the most apt way to describe the taste. It’s a savory flavor that immediately announces itself when you take a bite—not quite salty, just a bit of “zing” cutting underneath the rich, hearty taste of gravy.

In case you’re wondering, Benton Park Cafe’s choice of beer for the beer biscuits

and gravy is Budweiser. It’s in keeping with Andy’s original recipe, and it seems appropriate given the restaurant’s proximity to the Anheuser-Busch brewery.

Everything on the menu at Benton Park Cafe looks good, but Jessica says that they move a lot of orders of B&G. People are familiar with this dish in particular, and they will let the restaurant staff know if the biscuits don’t taste right.

This dish has come a long way since the Memorial Day camp-outs of Jessica’s childhood, but she says the actual recipe hasn’t changed much. Maybe someone in your family cooks biscuits and gravy that will always be your favorite, but be prepared to give Andy’s version at Benton Park Cafe a close second.—Evan Wood BentonParkCafe.com • 1900 Arsenal Street • 314771-7200

Cape Girardeau

SANDS PANCAKE HOUSE Sands Pancake House is housed in a nondescript building along one of Cape Girardeau’s main thoroughfares. Although easily over-

573- 221-9742 (takeout) • 573-248 -854 (restaurant)

St. Louis

Every family has one recipe that defines a certain dish for them. It could be your grandmother’s fried chicken, or maybe it’s your dad’s chili. Whatever the case, you and your family tend to think of it as the pinnacle of that particular food. But to outsiders, whose palettes are unclouded by nostalgia, these dishes can sometimes prove underwhelming.

Andy’s Beer Biscuits and Gravy at Benton Park Cafe, though, provides a glaring, impossible-to-ignore exception to this rule.

When you see it on the menu at Benton Park Cafe, you might have a couple of questions. Namely, you may ask, “Why put beer in biscuits and gravy?” According to Benton Park Cafe’s owner, Jessica Anderson, the recipe is

Andy’s Beer Biscuits and Gravy at Benton Park Cafe incorporates Budweiser beer to give it the remarkable taste for which it has become known.

COURTESY OF BENTON PARK CAFE

BENTON PARK CAFE

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PAIGE PRITCHARD

Sands Pancake House has some of the best biscuits and gravy in Southeast Missouri. However, other favorites include blueberry pancakes, a bacon double cheeseburger called Betty’s Big Burger, homemade desserts like blackberry cobbler, sweet tea, and more.

looked, the breakfast joint is a staple for area natives. It’s also one of the few remaining locally owned cafes in town. As the largest city in Southeast Missouri, Cape attracts an increasing number of chain restaurants every year. This means that breakfast restaurant options are mostly restricted to the likes of Cracker Barrel, Denny’s, or the newly acquired IHOP. In the midst of these big-name players, Sands stands out.

Sands’s specialty is clearly breakfast. Their list of early morning eats spans two pages, with a small but appetizing choice of lunch items on the back. The cash-only restaurant

is only open until 2 PM every day and offers a generous variety of pancakes, waffles, breakfast meats, and yes, biscuits and gravy.

Equally generous are Sands’s portions; their half order of biscuits and gravy is big enough to be considered a full serving at any other restaurant. This stems from the familystyle atmosphere, one where customers greet each other as they walk in, and portion sizes mimic those of a concerned grandmother.

Sands is famous for its perfectly light and fluffy pancakes. They keep the recipe a closely guarded secret; even if you come for the pancakes, you should stay for the B&G.

It comes as a simple order of two housemade biscuits topped with creamy milk gravy and sausage bits. Even the most judicious salt and pepper users will probably find Sands’s gravy to be perfectly seasoned. The topping is just savory enough to complement the sweet biscuits below. The dish rounds out with a slight peppery taste.

Like the restaurant itself, which is still very much the same as when it opened in 1953, the stick-to-your-ribs biscuits and gravy at Sands Pancake House is perfect as is and should stay that way.— Paige Pritchard 1448 N. Kingshighway Street • 573-335-0420

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—MissouriLife —

CAFÉ BERLIN’S SAUSAGE GRAVY Ingredients >

1 pound pork sausage Sage Garlic powder Paprika Salt

Pepper 1 cup bacon grease Flour as needed 6 cups milk

Directions >

1. Season sausage with sage, garlic powder, paprika, salt, and pepper.

2. Combine bacon grease and seasoned sausage in a large pan, and cook on low heat until the sausage is fully broken down and cooked.

3. Once the sausage is cooked, add flour as needed to thicken into a thick roux, or paste. Continuously stir, so the flour does not burn.

4. After the mixture has become paste-like, stir in milk until it becomes a gravy.

5. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve with your favorite biscuits.

Makes about 10 Servings.

HARRY KATZ

Visit missourilife.com for more of the best biscuits and gravy recipes from around the state.

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S I N C E 19 3 0

Visit the Historic Westphalia Inn Serving our famous pan-fried chicken, country ham and German pot roast family-style since 1930 106 East Main Street Westphalia, Missouri

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Filled with savory treats made in Missouri: BBQ sauce, spice rubs, pickled jalapenos, ˜ and more will spice up any meal. All of the products are created by Missouri producers. A personalized gift card is included with the box. Each box includes a one-year (6 issues) subscription to Missouri Life. $63.70

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(All basket prices include US shipping and sales tax.)

Visit us online for many more great Missouri-themed gift ideas! www.MissouriLife.com/store • 800-492-2593, ext. 101 [63] February 2015

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Travel with Fellow Missourians!

Spain, Portugal, & Morocco

Hurry! Early Booking

13 Days • October 12-25, 2015 $4,171 includes air from Kansas City or St. Louis

Join Greg & Danita Wood, publisher & editor in chief of Missouri life

Take scenic drives through the rugged mountain ranges of Spain and Portugal. Beautiful forests, mountain streams, and lakes provide magnificent views. Visit quaint towns and wander cobblestone alleys. See the charming water gardens and fountains.

Bask in the sun, and enjoy the sandy beaches on 4-star hotels, plus full buffe t Costa Del Sol or shop the trendy boutiques. Sail breakfasts da ily an d 6 th re eacross the Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco, and visit course dinners! exciting Tangier. Explore the colorful Grand Socco Square and the narrow streets of the Kasbah.

For more info visit missourilife.com/travel/travel-with-fellow-missourians/ or travelerslane.com • 314-223-1224 • travelerslane@hotmail.com

Savings Ends Soon

SPAIN O N PRESEN LINE TATION Februa ry 17,

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To regis t

traveler slane@h

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We’ll visit: Madrid, Segovia, Avila, Salamanca, Fatima, Lisbon, Seville, Tangier, Costa Del Sol, Granada, and Toledo

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Dining worth the drive.

SHOW-ME

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Columbia

Grounded Coffee TUCKED AWAY in an alley in Downtown Columbia, Shortwave Coffee is on the same frequency as coffee connoisseurs. Roasting all its coffee in-house and specializing in single cup brews, this modern coffee house offers caffeine at a different pace.

However high-minded it may seem, owner and roaster Chris Dale Bassham is modest. He offers pre-brewed coffee for people who can’t wait around for slower brew processes like the AeroPress or pour-over specialty cups. He also has a small selection of espresso drinks and teas; the most interesting tea and a must-try for adventurous palates is the cascara tea made from dried coffee cherries, which offers notes of raisin and flowers and gives you just a touch of caffeine. Crossing the one-year milestone in February, Shortwave Coffee has already set itself apart in Columbia as a friendly place for coffee experts and novices alike. —Jonas Weir shortwavecoffee.com • 915 Alley A • 573-214-088

Kansas City

Theater of The Crepes WALK PAST

the inviting outdoor seating, up a staircase, and into the re-

cently restored, century-old Summit Theater, and you’ll find Chez Elle Creperie and Coffeehouse sits on the main floor below condos. A chalkboard displays a handwritten menu behind a vintage 1913 ticket stand. That’s where you place your order and make

COURTESY OF CHEZ ELLE CREPERIE; ALEX STEWART AND HARRY KATZ

the difficult decision: Do you want a sweet or savory crepe … or both?

Savory crepes range from the

Sedalia

Tour Eiffel—filled with smoked

Ticket to Dine

salmon,

IN A 1920s railroad car on the side

fraîche—to the Acropolis—filled

capers,

caramelized

onions, artichoke hearts, herbed cream cheese, and crème

original seats and window shades.

of a busy Sedalia road is a bustling staff of

John Kehde took over the family res-

with roasted chicken, tomatoes,

servers and cooks serving barbecue per-

taurant in the 1970s following his parents,

Kalamata olives, baby spinach,

fected by three generations of tinkering.

Ed and Ruth. John’s son Roger also helps

feta, and Tzatziki sauce. On the

Kehde’s Barbeque, which began as a

run the place, and his daughter Mare Sch-

sweet side, everything from the

Dog ’n Suds in 1955, serves up the juici-

lup is a waitress there. They’ll gladly take a

Tropicale, filled with coconut

est pork around, along with its delectable

seat and tell you about their restaurant’s

cream custard and tropical fruit,

homemade barbecue sauce.

humble beginnings as a drive-in.

to the Au Chocolat, a choco-

Every inch of the restaurant walls is

The Carolina pork barbecue sandwich

late crepe filled with chocolate

decorated with memorabilia from Mis-

is served with “Grandmother’s slaw” on

mousse and topped with rasp-

souri’s railroad days. Covered in signs,

a Kaiser bun and a pickle on the side.

berry and chocolate sauces, is delightful.

lanterns, newspaper clippings, pictures

Add sweet potato fries to complete your

Once you order, take your number, and sit down amongst the eclectic artwork and com-

and more, Kehde’s serves as a mosaic

country meal. And you can’t leave with-

fortable furniture; you can watch the crepes being created, which makes for a dazzling

of life from the first half of the twenti-

out dessert; the pecan pie is gooey and

show in a theater that once showed silent films and the first talkies. Located only a few

eth century. The railcar’s dining section

sweet.—Alex Stewart

blocks from the Kauffman Center for Performing Arts, Chez Elle is a perfect spot to dine

is perfect for kids. Old suitcases line the

Facebook: Kehde’s Barbeque

before a real cultural performance, like a ballet or orchestra concert.—Amy Stapleton

overhead racks, and the car still has its

1915 S. Limit Avenue • 660-826-2267

1713 Summit Street • chezellekc.com • 816-471-2616

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SHOW-ME

Flavor From left, Brian Maness and Patrick Wilson of the Ozark Mountain Biscuit Company assemble their dish—a stuffed pork belly entree—for the Taste of Elegance in Columbia.

MR. PIG STUFF PANS HISS while pork tenderloin is seared to a finish over high heat. The smell of myriad vegetables roasting and spices simmering fills the air. Eight chefs from across Mid-Missouri have all gathered at the Holiday Inn Executive Center in Columbia to create eight different pork dishes in hopes of winning the Taste of Elegance.

For many chefs, winning the Taste of Elegance is more than an honor; it’s a milestone. This pork cook-off, sponsored by the National and Missouri Pork Associations, started in 1987 and has dozens of events across the nation. In Missouri alone, there are four different competitions: St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield/Branson, and the Mid-Missouri Taste of Elegance. And the competition in Columbia is stiff.

Each dish is good in its own right. Chef Dennis Clay, from Inside Columbia magazine, has prepared one of the most wildly inventive dishes: a duet of kasu marinated pork tenderloin and confit of pork belly brûlée, Nashi pear, sweet potato, maitake mushrooms, pork jus, and a mustard

seed aioli. Hailing from the University Club in Columbia, Chef Nick Bahan’s “The Prime Devine Swine” is extremely succulent. But flavor isn’t reason enough to win. The judges, who are all chefs themselves, make the decision based on three categories: taste, originality, and presentation. Of course, the people get to vote for a winner, too.

In the end, everyone in attendance had their fill of pork fit for fourstar restaurants, and the judges did not seem disappointed by anything. Chef Nick Bahan ended up placing first, while Chef Dennis Clay came in second, and Chef Bryan Maness of the Ozark Mountain Biscuit Company in Columbia placed third. The attendees selected Trey Bistro’s Chef Trey Quinlan’s Seared Pork Tenderloin and Wild Mushroom Salad as the fan favorite. But the real winners were everyone who had the privilege of sampling the dishes.

All proceeds from the events go to benefit charities and food pantries.

Visit mopork.com for more information and this year’s dates.

HARRY KATZ

The Taste of Elegance is Missouri’s premier pork cook-off. BY JONAS WEIR

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—MissouriLife —

STUFFED PORK BELLY

Courtesy of Chef Brian Maness, Ozark Mountain Biscuit Company Ingredients >

4 cups wild mushrooms (may use seasonal varieties available regionally or a mix of commercially available yellow oyster, cremini, portabella and shiitake) 2 tablespoons minced shallot 2 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon parsley, flat leaf, chopped

1 tablespoon fresh sage leaf, chopped 1/2 cup ground pork 2 pounds pork belly Kosher salt Fresh ground pepper 3 tablespoons olive oil 1 cup vegetable oil 1 large sheet caul fat, soaked overnight in refrigerator

HARRY KATZ

Directions >

1. Preheat oven to 400°F. Sear mushrooms, shallots, and butter in a sauté pan over medium heat, about 4 minutes. Finely chop mushrooms and mix in a bowl with parsley, sage, and ground pork.

Season the mixture with salt and pepper.

2. Rinse and uniformly trim the pork belly; blot dry. Insert a long, sharp knife into the side of the cut end of the belly through to the other side, creating a pocket to fill with the mushroom mixture. Using a piping bag, fill the belly with the sage-mushroom mixture. Heat 3 tablespoons olive oil in a large braising pan and sear the belly on each side until golden brown and crisp. Transfer the braising pan into the oven, and roast the pork belly for 50 minutes. Remove from the oven, and let rest. Then cut into one inch thick slices.

3. Heat vegetable oil in a large, heavy skillet to 325°F. Remove the caul fat from the refrigerator and blot dry. Place a slice of the belly, cut side down, on the edge of the caul fat, and give it a couple turns, completely wrapping the belly in fat. Trim excess, and neatly fold in the loose ends to form a tight package. Repeat with the remaining slices of roasted pork belly. Place the wrapped belly seam down into the skillet, and fry until golden brown. Repeat until all sides are evenly browned.

For more recipes, visit missourilife.com.

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BARN HOME

on the Bluff

A couple builds their dream house inside a mid-1800s barn.

STORY BY DAVID CAWTHON | PHOTOS BY HARRY KATZ

The board-and-batten pattern on the home’s exterior is a nod to the barn’s past. The blue-green paint is reminiscent of one of the Reay’s past homes on Lake Michigan. The water inspired the color.

TOM AND TRICIA REAY know a thing or two about converting old barns into homes. They’ve done it twice. The second is pictured at left.

“They’re out there,” Tom says of the barns.

“They’re not easy to find, but they’re out there.”

But before they found the first barn, they had to find the perfect location.

Looking to escape the St. Louis suburbs in 1977, the Reays searched for a picturesque riverfront property where they could construct their new home. Both in the furniture business, the couple were at an antique show when they ran into friends who told them about 13.5 acres for sale along the Missouri River near New Haven. Tom and Tricia had seen other properties in Missouri’s wine epicenter, but all prospects between Jefferson City and St. Louis left them disappointed. Still, there was something promising about this lead.

On the northwest fringe of town, Tom, Tricia, and the real estate agent trudged through a field of snow, eventually arriving at a patch of trees framing the bluff that drops sharply toward the shoreline of Pinckney Bend, a sharp curve in the river where a few nineteenth-century steamboats met their doom. Tom studied the vista, the woods, the farmland, the tranquility. He was mesmerized.

“I asked what she wanted for it,” Tom says.

“She told me. I said, ‘Write it up.’ ” They had the location. Now, they needed the home, but a traditional house wouldn’t do.

Tricia wanted something out-of-the-ordinary, something she saw on a television show when she was younger—a barn home.

“We had absolutely no idea what we were doing,” Tom says about their first build. “We just thought it would make a neat house. Tricia had always wanted to live in a barn.”

In the late 1970s, they purchased a barn about ten miles south of the property, moved it to the river bluff, and used its mammoth oakbeams as the skeleton on which the home was built. They filled the gaps between the handhewn logs with chinking and used pine boards to complete the roof, like you’d see in most traditional homes.

When the home was finished, it was a weekend retreat until 1991 when they sold it and the land. They eventually left the United States to sail in France for seven years. The emptynesters lived on a boat and traversed the rivers in the south part of the country, going wherever the waters took them. Although the European rivers were relaxing, they longed for the currents of the Missouri.

“The kids kept saying that it was time to come home,” Tom says, “so we sold the boat and came back.”

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SHOW-ME The logs in the Reay’s barn-turned-home date back to the 1800s. Part of the original barn door covers the opening into the loft, which is now the guest room.

The Missouri River’s Pinckney Bend got its name from the town of Pinckney. The town vanished, and the river has changed its course since the days when it swallowed steamboats.

It wasn’t just family that called them back.

It was the view. The sense of home. An anchor on that little spot near the river.

“If you look at the bottomland in the farms, that hasn’t changed in thirty-five years, yet it changes every day,” Tom says. “The river changes. The fields change from green to brown. It’s constantly changing—but it hasn’t changed.”

After purchasing about 3.5 acres of the riverbluff property they owned decades before, just a few hundred feet away from their first barn

home, they built a second. It would be more than a weekend retreat this time; it would be a permanent residence where they could gaze out and see birds swoop and dive among the rolling natural tapestry of farmland and forest.

Their second barn wouldn’t only be unique for its aesthetics but also for its historical significance. The Reays first saw it in a book.

Author Howard W. Marshall writes in Barns of Missouri: Storehouses of History that the Pelsters were masterful rural architects, building unique structures—like the one that housed both people and animals—that still endure today. Frederick Pelster and his seventeenyear-old son, William, built a double-crib barn during the mid-1800s that had similarities to their other farm buildings. More than a century and a half after that, Tom and Tricia moved that barn to their property and called it home.

Aside from the allure and the aesthetics that come with living in a former barn, cost is another draw. Old barns typically sell for a few thousand dollars, much cheaper than assembling a log home from scratch, which Tom estimates might run about a quarter of a million dollars. That price is understandable once you know that the single beam at the apex of the roof runs the length of the home and weighs 1,200 pounds.

Before Tom and his crew dismantled the Pelster’s former barn, they took note of the matching Roman numerals carved into the wood where each beam met. Tom points out that the numerals don’t follow the typical conventions and aren’t numbered in sequence, which made re-assembly a bit of a challenge.

The beams had to be pieced back together precisely as they were originally constructed, or they wouldn’t fit together.

It took eleven days to take down, but it took five weeks to piece together during the summer of 2012. Ten days exceeded 100 degrees.

“It was hotter than hell,” Tom says.

The rules of building a barn are like the laws of physics: you can’t create more house, and you can’t make the home smaller. And Tom didn’t want to detract from the open design.

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Above: Tom preserved the open design of the barn. He incorporated two walls (seen here) on the north side of the home to separate the master bedroom, study, and bathroom.

Middle Right: Tricia has decorated the home with hundreds of swine because she was born in the Chinese year of the pig.

“When you find one of these structures, you have to work within the parameters of what you have,” Tom says. “You can’t move the exterior walls out five feet because you can’t lengthen the logs five feet. You have to stand in the middle, look around, and think about what could be the kitchen, the bedroom, and so on.”

Once inside the home, you can envision where the barn doors on each side would have been and where wagons and horses passed through. The upstairs corn-crib became a bedroom. The wood from the lofts became flooring. Next to the home, leftover pieces from another barn became an open-air garage and outdoor kitchen.

Throughout the interior, Tricia decorated with trinkets, treasures, and memorabilia.

Their chandelier is from an old home in Sonoma Valley, California. The old woodworking bench and tools came from a hardware store in Hermann. The outdoor lanterns and the clock above the basement stairs hail from France. The clawfoot tub in the guest loft is

from the early 1900s. Even the staircase to the guest loft was from an old firehouse in Albert Lee, Minnesota.

It’s been two years since Tom and Tricia have built their second barn home. The newest addition is Pinckney Bend Bed-and-Breakfast, a pair of cabins built from old barns on their property at 449 Vine Street in New Haven, where visitors can experience the view Tom and Tricia see every day. To make reservations or for more information, call Tom or Tricia at 314-604-2612.

Tom has an affinity for woodworking tools. He purchased these and an accompanying workbench from an old hardware store in Hermann. The items mesh with the home’s country décor.

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Remarkable MISSOURIANS

STRANGER THAN FASHION

WHEN TIFFANY RAE saw the leftover boxes from her twin daughters’ Christmas gifts, she didn’t see trash; she saw a dress.

“That’s where my designing journey was born,” she says.

The twenty-four-year-old uses plastic utensils, playing cards, straws, and other objects you wouldn’t normally wear to make dresses and matching shoes. She says her designs would be at home in Lady Gaga’s eccentric wardrobe.

“They’re flamboyant, and they’re eye-catching, especially with how artists are today; they like to wear very artistic designs,” Tiffany says.

Her career in fashion started a few months before she made her first dress in December 2012. She was working at a bank when a local photographer sent her a Facebook message on a whim and invited her to audition for a photo shoot. Soon after, Tiffany began modeling.

“It was kind of a whole new world being in front of the camera and getting your hair done,” Tiffany says. “It was kind of surreal.”

After that, Tiffany styled models for photo shoots and then created that first dress. Since then, her designs have been featured in fashion magazines, and she has participated in runway shows at Missouri Style Week and Fashion for Food.

Tiffany’s affinity for working with her hands developed during her

childhood—while lying in hospital beds. At six years old, she was diagnosed with spinal chiari malformation, an abnormality that causes the cerebellum to grow unnaturally into the spinal cord. If it had gone unchecked, it could have killed her.

Tiffany had four surgeries; each carried the chance that she might

not walk again. Kids made fun of her back brace. Because her physical activity was limited, she was drawn to art.

“When I was in the hospital for my brain surgery, my dad was teaching me how to draw balloons and different things, and I enjoyed it,” she says. “When I left the hos-

Going piece by piece, Tiffany Rae assembles a dress made out of newspaper on a model. She often constructs her designs directly onto a model because her designs can’t be worn like most attire.

pital, I got really into painting and drawing and anything artistic.”

She had her final surgery at seventeen.

Today, the designer and model has made that artistic outlet into a career. She stands tall while following models wearing her designs down the runway.

Tiffany is not only juggling the struggles of being a young designer on the St. Louis fashion scene, but she is also raising her four-year-old twin daughters. She often works during the early hours of the morning while her daughters sleep. During the day, she plays dress-up with her girls, who squeeze hangers around their wastes and walk down imaginary runways. Tiffany says they talk about growing up to be models or designers like their mom.

Seven years after her last surgery, Tiffany is grateful for her experiences and for her health. She says she is proud of her scars.

In 2015, her designs will be featured at shows in St. Louis, Chesterfield, Atlantic City, New York, and Australia. Her consumer line—practical fabric clothing based on her avant-garde designs—will debut as well.

See and buy Tiffany’s designs on April 26 at the Earth Day festivals in Chesterfield and St. Louis.

Visit tiffanyraedesigns.com for more information.

COURTESY OF KAY SHEA

A self-taught designer finds runway success with her unusual styles. BY TAYLOR FOX

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COURTESY OF DJENEBA ADUAYOM

This design, part of Tiffany Rae’s first collection of dresses, is made out of toothpicks that have been fastened together and spray-painted silver. The dress debuted in 2014.

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Musings ON MISSOURI

LESS IS MORE, AND MORE IS LESS IT GOES AGAINST my grain to actively search for universal truths. These things—these secret tips and tricks to a more fulfilling life—are of the “don’t call us; we’ll call you” variety. A person can successfully hunt for many things—catfish, cheap gas, and spectacular deals on flat-screen TVs—but sagacity cannot be purchased, bartered, or enticed by chicken livers. You can’t force the onset of wisdom any more than you can force good ideas, bad puns, or love; the very attempt to do so sends it scurrying for the shadows.

I suspect “hidden” knowledge usually hides in plain sight. We fail to see it because we’re too busy running around like acephalous chickens. Worries, anxieties, and obligations, both real and imagined, consume our minds.

Egocentricity—whether it consists of keeping up appearances, forwarding petty gossip, or posting trivial blather on Facebook—clouds our thoughts. Shallow water is safe, but you’ll never learn the breaststroke in a bathtub.

I’m generally more fond of advice gleaned from The Old Farmer’s Almanac than I am of aphorisms attributed to French philosophers.

Nonetheless, one of my strongest guiding principles comes from the seventeenth-century physicist Blaise Pascal: “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”

This quote was never intended as a recipe for the recluse, and it counsels more than is

obvious at face value. Stay out of other people’s business, and realize you alone are responsible for your own happiness. Pay scant attention to the world’s day-to-day drama; it cares not a whit what you think. Ignore the artifice and guile of wily opportunists; their

schemes require an invite to impact your life.

In other words, clothing yourself in nonsense is voluntary. For long-term happiness and peace of mind, watching the evening sunset is infinitely more beneficial than watching the evening news. One is real and of inestimable value. The other is nothing.

Which brings me to the harmonica.

Every so often, I become moderately obsessed with blues harmonica. I buy a harp, order a book, and download some online lessons. I practice until my honking sounds

okay and then hit a wall of boredom. The harmonica is retired, until the day I’m once again moved to make horrible noises that upset my dogs and make birds fall from the sky.

This trend could indicate my short attention span. It might point to the fact that one-to-one lessons are critical for progress on an instrument. Most likely, it means that life is short, and I’ve long preferred to acquire a little knowledge on a stupidly wide range of subjects over deep knowledge in one or two. Most likely it means that, while certain aspects of life should be approached with earnest seriousness, most of life is better viewed as a passing breeze.

This personal doctrine (sorry, you’ll have to find your own) strikes me as one of the aforementioned universal truths that snuck by when I wasn’t looking. The greatest secret of life is that you should always view yourself as a beginner. Hold tightly to your amateur status, and even if you’re an expert, never view yourself as such. When your selfimage is that of a novice, the world is an endless horizon of limitless possibilities. When you imagine yourself as the world’s greatest anything, you’ve reached the end of the line.

Wisdom of this nature goes against all we are taught. That bothers me not even a little. Inevitably, in any endeavor, less is more, and more is less.

RON MARR More or less.

ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREW BARTON

BY RON MARR

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2015Travel Guide

Getaway!

Vintage Charm

Timeless Beauty

Plan a romantic Wine Country escape at VisitHermann.com

Wurstfest | March 28-29 Tour of Hermann | April 11-12 Antique Show | April 18 Wedding Trail | April 26 Wild Bacon Wine Trail | May 2-3 Maifest | May 15-17

800-932-8687 • VISITHERMANN.COM On the Missouri River just an hour west of St. Louis

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Tim Williams

Photo by Beth Watson

Race cars on display Meet the Drivers Collect Autographs Championship Action

Rally in the 100 Acre Wood February 27-28, 2015

The 2015 Rally in the 100 Acre Wood serves as the second event on the Rally America national championship calendar. Teams from coast to coast will race through the Ozark foothills to crown winners in three national and six regional rally classes. Real cars on real roads, but driven at speeds that are difficult to believe!

DO NOT ATTEMPT: These are professional drivers

There’s more to do here.

Naturally.

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2015Travel Guide

the term ted. e r e h w e e S ina uple” orig o c r e w o p “ Tour the Clinton’s first home, where they exchanged their vows.

Observe rarely seen memorabilia from Bill’s early political career and enjoy a quiet stroll through the First Ladies’ Garden. Also, don’t miss our new exhibit: “Clinton Meets Kennedy”.

Doubletree Hotel Westport

Marriott Residence Inn

Courtyard by Marriott

Stay & Play

Wingate by Wyndham

in Maryland Heights

Red Roof Inn Westport

Hollywood Casino & Hotel

Drury Inn & Suites Westport

Sonesta ES Suites

La Quinta Inn & Suites

Extended Stay America

Sheraton Westport Chalet & Tower

clintonhousemuseum.org

Hollywood Casino St. Louis in Maryland Heights... ...the perfect place to stay and play!

Visit www.more2do.org for a current calendar of events.

Maryland Heights Convention & Visitors Bureau 888.MORE2DO • www.more2do.org Quality Inn Westport

Motel 6

Hampton Inn Westport

Holiday Inn Express

Comfort Inn Westport

Days Inn

Homewood Suites

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ALL AROUND

Missouri FEBRUARY/M ARCH 2015

SOUTH CENTRAL

DISCOVER NATURE PROGRAMS Feb. 7, 14, 21 and Mar. 14, 19, 21, and 28, Winona > A different program each week, from a turkey call workshop to Nature’s Nuts and children’s programs. Twin Pines Conservation Education Center.

Times vary. Reservations. Free. 573-325-1381, mdc .mo.gov/regions/ozark/twin-pines-conservation -education-center CHOCOLATE FESTIVAL Feb. 14, West Plains > Chocolate creations contest, auction of contest entries, and a tasting that benefits a local children’s shelter. National Guard Armory. Noon-5 PM. Free ($5 tasting). 417-4691190, christoshouse.com

THE TEMPEST Feb. 20, Rolla > Shakespeare’s drama is filled with magic and the supernatural. Leach Theatre. 7:30 PM. $15-$38. 573-341-4219, leachtheatre.mst.edu OUTDOOR SPORTSMAN SHOW Feb. 20-21, St. Robert > Vendors, products, and information for the outdoor enthusiasts. Community Center. 5-8 PM Fri.; 10 AM-5 PM Sat. Free. 573-4512625, saintrobert.com

COURTESY OF MISSOURI DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES

WHERE EAGLES SOAR Eagle populations have soared over the past decade, and Missouri has become a hot spot for birders to see the majestic bald eagle and the equally beautiful golden eagle. On February 6 and 20, Montauk State Park in Salem will host its Bald Eagle Viewing Days from 9 to 10 AM; call 573-548-2225 for more information. The Mingo National Wildlife Refuge near Puxico will host a similar event on February 7 from 9 AM to 4 PM; call 573-222-3589 for more information. If you can’t make it out during one these designated days, you can go birding during the best season to spot eagles. Hot spots include Lake of the Ozarks at Bagnell Dam Access, Eagle Bluffs Conservation Area, Lock & Dam 24, Lock & Dam 25, Moses Eagle Park, Old Chain of Rocks Bridge, Riverlands Environmental Demonstration Area, Schell-Osage Conservation Area, Smithville Lake, Swan Lake National Wildlife, Table Rock Lake, Shepherd of the Hills Fish Hatchery, and Truman Reservoir. Visit mostateparks.com or mdc.mo.gov/events/eagledays for more information.

RALLY IN THE 100 ACRE WOOD Feb. 27-28, Salem > Champions from coast to coast come out for one of the most challenging rally races where teams face a track that is unknown to them and consists of rugged terrain including sand, mud, and possibly even snow. Throughout the area. Call for race times and costs. Free to spectators. 573-729-6900, 100aw.com BREWFEST Feb. 28, West Plains > Sample some of the best Missouri and nationally known craft beers. All proceeds benefit local arts exhibits, performances, workshops, and an arts scholarship for a local student. Civic Center. 5:30-8 PM. $20-$25. 888-2568835, westplainsbrewfest.webs.com These listings are chosen by our editors and are not paid for by sponsors.

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OPENING DAY OF TROUT FISHING Mar. 1, Salem > Join the large numbers of enthusiastic anglers at the exciting first day of trout season. Montauk State Park. 6:30 AM-6 PM. Fee for required tag. 573-548-2202, mostateparks.com /park/montauk-state-park ARLO GUTHRIE Mar. 6, Rolla > The Alice’s Restaurant 50th Anniversary Tour concert. Leach Theatre. 7:30 PM. $15$40. 573-341-4219, leachtheatre.mst.edu ARBOR DAY Mar. 7, Salem > Celebrate trees, get a free tree, and enter a drawing for a rare Ozark chinquapin (chestnut) tree. Montauk State Park Dorman L. Steelman Lodge. 9 AM-3 PM. Free. 573-548-2225, mostateparks.com/park/montauk-state-park CYSTIC FIBROSIS CONCERT Mar. 21, West Plains > Country music artist Collin Raye and Jessica’s Friends, a group of local children,

will perform. Live and silent auctions will also be held. Civic Center. 6-9 PM. $17-$22. 877-256-6034, civiccenter.net ROUTE 66 ST. PATTY’S FEST Mar. 21, Waynesville > Family-friendly street festival features face painting, bounce houses, Daisy BB gun range, vendors, police and fire vehicles, and live music. Downtown on the square. 11 AM-4 PM. Free.

573-774-3001, pulaskicountyusa.com

CENTRAL

CELEBRATE JAZZ ANNIVERSARY EXHIBIT Feb. 5-Mar. 15, Fulton > More than eighty artists exhibit their works of fine art to celebrate the Art House one-year anniversary. Art House. Opening reception Feb. 5, 5-7 PM. Show hours 10 AM-6 PM Mon.-Fri.; 10 AM-5 PM Sat. Free. 573-592-7733, arthousefultonmo.org MISSOURI RIVER RELIEF PROGRAM Feb. 4, Jefferson City > Missouri River Relief members discuss their grass roots efforts through river clean-up and educational events. Missouri State Museum’s History Hall. 7 PM. Free. 573-751-2854, mostateparks.com/park/missouri-state-museum

Folds to 11” from wall Mounts to steps Uses a standard wall outlet Flip-up arms Retracting seat belt Stitched high back seat Lifetime warranty Made in Missouri

The Branford Marsalis Quartet swings in to Columbia to celebrate the We Always Swing Jazz Series’s twentieth anniversary. A noted saxophonist and member of the legendary family of jazz musicians, Brandford Marsalis will be joined by an ace quartet—pianist Joey Calderazzo, bassist Eric Revis, and drummer Justin Faulkner—for this performance at the Missouri Theatre on February 8 at 7 PM; doors open at 6 PM. Ticket prices range from $18 to $40. Call 573-449-3009 or visit wealwaysswing.org for more information.

COURTESY OF ERIC RYAN ANDERSON

BRIDAL AND PROM EXPO Mar. 1, Rolla > Prom and wedding fashion shows; hair and makeup show; prize drawings; and photography, catering, cake decorating, travel agency, tuxedo rental, and florist vendors. Havener Center.

Noon-4 PM. $2. 573-341-7019, visitrolla.com

HARDWARE OF THE PAST For the present and the future

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Call today 877-585-4044

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KCPT IS MORE THAN JUST TELEVISION‌ WE OFFER VIEWERS OF ALL AGES A TERRIFIC JOURNEY THROUGH LIFE. Almost a million viewers like you rely on KCPT each week for quality national and local PBS programming that enhances their lives and strengthens our community.

kcpt.org

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ROCHEPORT ROUBAIX Feb. 15, Rocheport > This bicycle rally ride has 30-, 55-, and 70-mile races. Medals will be awarded at the end of the ride. Meet downtown. The race is on the Katy Trail. First ride 11 AM. $40-$55. 573-4452664, ultramaxsports.com

WHAT EVERY GIRL SHOULD KNOW Feb. 19-22, Columbia > A thought-provoking play about four young Catholic suffragettes in early twentieth century New York who adopt birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger as their patron saint.

Warehouse Theatre. 7:30 PM Thurs.-Sat.; 2 PM Sun. $6-$8. 573-876-7199, stephens.edu/performingarts MARDI GRAS PUB CRAWL Feb. 21, Osage Beach > Dress up in your Mardi Gras attire, and ride buses to more than twenty locations to celebrate New Orleans-style. Throughout town. 3 PM-1:30 AM. $10 wristbands (21 and over only). 800-386-5253, lakepubcrawl.com

LOVE, LOSS, AND WHAT I WORE Feb. 26-Mar. 1 and 5-8, Columbia > A funny and compelling play about women, clothes, and memory, covering subjects like buying bras, hating purses, and motherhood. Columbia Entertainment Company Theatre. 7:30 PM Thurs.-Sat.; 2 PM Sun. $8.

800-838-3006, cectheatre.org

OIL AND CLAY Mar. 3-April 25, Jefferson City > Art show byColumbia College faculty: potter Bo Bedilion and painter Naomi Sugino Lear. Elizabeth Rozier Gallery at Jefferson Landing State Historic Site. 10 AM-4 PM Tues.-Sat. Free. 573-751-2854, mostateparks.com/ page/55183/elizabeth-rozier-gallery RURAL LIFE Mar. 4, Jefferson City > Missouri Century Farms and historic barns will be discussed and celebrated, and Missouri Barn Alliance and Rural Network President Bill Hart will give an update on current efforts and restoration needs. Missouri State Museum’s History Hall. 7 PM. Free. 573-751-2854, mostateparks.com/park/missouri-state-museum KEMPER LECTURE Mar. 8, Fulton > Professor Richard Toye speaks on Churchill and the Golden Age of Journalism. Church of St. Mary, Aldermanbury at the National Churchill Museum. 2 PM with author reception afterward.

Free. 573-592-5369, nationalchurchillmuseum.org

DEATH SUITE Mar. 13, Linn Creek > The audience participates in this interactive murder mystery dinner theater.

Camden County Museum. 6-11 PM. Reservations. $20. 573-873-7191, camdencountymuseum.com

GET THE LED OUT Mar. 15, Columbia > This band focuses on Led Zeppelin’s early music and is considered America’s premier Led Zeppelin tribute band. Missouri Theatre.

7 PM. $17-$32. 573-882-3781, concertseries.org CRAFT AND ART FESTIVAL Mar. 21, Marshall > More than sixty vendors with handmade items, and retail vendors, such as Tupperware and Pampered Chef. Marshall High School. 9 AM-4 PM. Free. 660-229-4845 MID-MISSOURI COLLECTORS SHOW Mar. 21-22, Osage Beach > Family-friendly hobby event features coins, stamps, postcards, jewelry, currency, and free apprasials. Elks Lodge. 9 AM-5 PM Sat.; 9 AM-3 PM Sun. Free. 620-423-6600, bordertownauctionhouse.com

SOUTHWEST

LERNER AND LOEWE’S CAMELOT Feb. 6-7, Springfield > This musical recounts the legend of King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and the Knights of the Round Table. Juanita K. Hammons Hall for the Performing Arts. 8 PM Fri.-Sat. and 2 PM Sat. $25-$45. 417-836-7678, hammonshall.com

Upcoming Events February 28: Music Festival Presser Performing Arts Center 573-581-5592 www.presserpac.com March 26-29: “Who Will Call Him King of Kings” Presser Performing Arts Center 573-581-5592 www.presserpac.com April 23-26: “God’s Favorite” Presser Performing Arts Center 573-581-5592 www.presserpac.com Mexico is a perfect combination of small-town charm and urban style. Artsy boutiques, jewelry, quilt shops, scrapbooking, antiques, and cultural offerings give Mexico a sophisticated air with a family-friendly attitude. Come visit us today!

Mexico Area Chamber of Commerce We work hard as a Chamber of Commerce to be the pulse of the community, assisting all to provide services that will nurture and encourage our businesses and strengthen our community.

573-581-2765 | www.mexico-chamber.org

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BEER, WINE, CHEESE, & CHOCOLATE Feb. 7, Springfield > Sample beer, wine, cheese, and chocolate from the region’s finest artisans, and enjoy live music and educational seminars.

Ozark Empire Fairgrounds. Noon-4 PM. $26-$30.

417-833-2660, ozarkempirefair.com

COURTESY OF OZARK CHAMBER

BRASIL GUITAR DUO Feb. 12, Joplin > This guitar duo was the winner of 2006 Concert Artists Guild International Competition, and their performance is a blend of traditional and Brazilian guitar works. St. Peter’s Catholic Church. 7 PM. Donations accepted, 417-625-1822, promusicajoplin.org POPOVICH COMEDY PET THEATER Feb. 25, Springfield > European-style clowning, juggling, and a cast of performing pets, including fifteen house cats, ten dogs, four geese, eight doves, and two parrots. Juanita K. Hammons Hall for the Performing Arts. 7 PM. $15. 417-836-7678, hammonshall.com SERTOMA CHILI COOK-OFF Feb. 25-27, Springfield > This big fundraising party features chili contests, samples, and multiple stages of entertainment; proceeds benefit local charities for children. Expo Center. 11 AM-5 PM. $12-$15.

417-863-1231, sertomachilicookoff.com

SHOWCASING OZARK Experience all that the town of Ozark has to offer on March 28.

This regional showcase features many of the services, retailers, tourist attractions, restaurants, and community service organizations in the area, plus a whole lot of fun.

Enjoy carnival fun and games for kids. Sample cheese and desserts at the food booths. The showcase will also feature giveaways, contests, and prize drawings.

Plus, the Ozark High School drama club will treat audiences to a preview of its spring play Treasure Island. And the National Tiger Sanctuary, located in the nearby community of Chestnut Ridge, will be talking about its mission.

Stop by for a visit with a Chamber of Commerce representative and city officials, including representatives from the police department, fire department, and county sheriff’s office.

The expo will be at the Ozark Community Center from 10 AM to 5 PM and is free and open to the public. Call 417-581-6139 and visit ozarkchamber.com for more information.

d l u o c u o Y ping... be shopoberly! in M Centrally Located, Just 30 Miles North of Columbia at the Junction of Highways 63 and 24 See what’s happening in Moberly at www.moberly.com [87] February 2015

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BUSINESS EXPO Feb. 27-28, Carthage > More than sixty-five exhibitors, retailers, and organizations display their products and services. CMC Auditorium. 5-8 PM Fri.; 10 AM-4 PM Sat. $2. 417-358-2373, carthagechamber.com LAWN AND GARDEN SHOW Feb. 27-28 and Mar. 1, Springfield > More than a hundred exhibitors display and sell everything for your lawn and garden needs. Ozark Empire Fairgrounds. 9 AM-6 PM Fri.-Sat.; 11 AM-5 PM Sun. $4.

417-833-2660, ozarkempirefair.com MEMORIAL FISHING TOURNAMENT Feb. 28, Branson > Rainbow and brown trout tournament with cash prizes. Lilleys’ Landing Resort and Marina on Lake Taneycomo. 8 AM-4 PM. $50, twoperson team. 417-334-6380, lilleyslanding.com

417-532-4338, mostateparks.com/park/bennett -spring-state-park KANSAS CITY CORNET CHOP SUEY Mar. 12, Lebanon > This seven-piece jazz band performs traditional jazz, swing, and blues with a twist. Cowan Civic Center. 6 PM. $20. 417-532-2990, lebanonconcertassociation.com THE ISAACS IN CONCERT Mar. 13, Lebanon > This award-winning family group performs acoustic gospel music. Cowan Civic Center. 7 PM. $25. 417-532-7402, lionsconcerts.org GOING PLATINUM Mar. 14, Nixa > About 165 booths featuring charities, businesses, and civic groups, plus face painting, drawings, inflatables, and a DJ. Nixa High School. 8 AM-3 PM. Free. 417-725-1545, nixachamber.com

OPENING DAY OF TROUT SEASON Mar. 1, Cassville > First day of trout season at the park. Roaring River State Park. Whistle blows for first cast at 6:30 AM. Fee to purchase required tag.

417-847-2814, cassville.com

ST. PATRICK’S DAY CELEBRATION Mar. 14, Springfield > Parade, food booths, vendors, Irish pet contest, and more. Downtown. 2 PM. Free. 417-831-6200, itsalldowntown.com

TROUT SEASON OPENING DAY Mar. 1, Lebanon > Come out for the first day of trout season in Missouri. Bennett Spring State Park. 6:30 AM-6 PM. Fee to purchase required tag.

TRIVIA NIGHT Mar. 27, Carthage > Teams compete in various categories for prizes. Memorial Hall. 6 PM. Call for costs. 417-358-2373, carthagechamber.com

REMODEL AND GARDEN SHOW Feb. 6-8, Kansas City > Over five hundred exhibitors feature home and garden products from contractors and product providers. The American Royal Center. 10 AM-9 PM Fri.-Sat.; 10 AM-6 PM Sun. $8-$10. 855-931-7469, kcremodelandgarden.com

CINDERELLA Feb. 6-7 and 13-15, Lee’s Summit > See this magical family musical where dreams come true. West High School. 7:30 PM Fri.-Sat.; 2:30 PM Sun. $8. 816986-4000, westsidestage.com “E” TOWN CHOCOLATE TOUR Feb. 7, Excelsior Springs > Merchants prepare chocolate samples. Downtown. 1-5 PM. $10. 816637-2811, visitexcelsior.com KC CACTUS AND SUCCULENT SOCIETY Feb. 7, Kingsville > Show and sale of a wide assortment of beautiful plants and a great selection of cacti and succulents and the Desert in Bloom exhibit. Powell Gardens. 9 AM-4 PM. $3-$7. 816-6972600, powellgardens.org

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Swee theart THE GIFT OF GIVE YOUR

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This year, give all your loved ones the gift that gives all year long. Missouri Life celebrates and explores our amazing state. Discover charming small towns, secrets of our big cities, and terrific road trips. Try recipes from top chefs. Meet artists, and find wonderful made-in-Missouri products. Discover adventures, our fascinating past, and the people and places that make our state great. Order today for your sweetheart.

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CHECK OUT MISSOURI-THEMED BOOKS & GIFTS AT MISSOURILIFE.COM/STORE [90] MissouriLife

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FAIRY TALE VILLAGE Feb. 7-May 3, Kansas City > This interactive exhibit brings children’s tales to life as you walk into a world of the make believe. Crown Center Shops Showplace. 10 AM-6 PM Mon.-Sat.; noon-6 PM Sun. Free. 816-274-8444, crowncenter.com ELVIS LIVES Feb. 12, Kansas City > Multi-media and live musical journey across Elvis’s life. Arvest Bank Theatre at the Midland. 7:30 PM. $39.50-$59.50. 816-4719703, midlandkc.com

COURTESY OF GEORGIA SADLER

QUILTS FOR EVERYONE For five years, the Quilts Among Friends Guild has put on a large quilt show. There will be more than a hundred handmade quilts and bed turnings on display and a gift boutique with many handmade gifts for sale. The Hoffman Challenge traveling exhibit—a premier quilt, clothing, and doll collection— will exhibit the top entries from national and international contests. The show is March 21 in Warrensburg at the First Christian Church from 9 AM to 4 PM and is free. Call 660-5847379 and visit hoffmanchallenge.com for more information.

THE WOMEN OF LOCKERBIE Feb. 20-21 and 28-Mar. 1, Lee’s Summit > This play tells the story of the aftermath of Pan Am Flight 103 and how the women of Lockerbie began a movement to wash the victims’ recovered clothes to send back to the families. Lee’s Summit High School. 7:30 PM. (Sun. matinee) $6-$7. 816986-2059, lshstheatre.com NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC LIVE Feb. 24, Kansas City > Follow photographer and filmmaker Carsten Peter into some of our planet’s most extreme environments. Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. 7:30 PM. $10-$45 816-9947222, kauffmancenter.org

“You will

never realize your

full potential until you learn to choose the

hard right

over the

easy wrong.”

SYMPHONY SPRING CLASSIC Mar. 6, Lee’s Summit > Concert includes classics and popular music. Bernard Campbell Performing Arts Center. 7:30 PM. $8.50-$16.50. 816-401-5251, lssymphony.org

ONCE UPON A MATTRESS Mar. 6-8, Lee’s Summit > This family-friendly musical is based on “The Princess and the Pea.” North High School. 7 PM Fri.-Sat.; 2 PM Sun. $7-$8. 816986-3031, lsntheatre.com FFA TOY SHOW Mar. 7, La Monte > Show and sale of pedal tractors, farm toys, NASCAR toys, and collectible cars and trucks. La Monte High School Gymnasium. 9 AM-3 PM. $2. 660-619-3276 TASTE OF LEE’S SUMMIT Mar. 7, Lee’s Summit > Food from over twelve local restaurants, hundreds of silent auction items, and a live auction. The Pavilion at John Knox Village. 6-10 PM. $60. 816-986-1015, lsedfoundation.com IRISH FESTIVAL Mar. 14, Excelsior Springs > Parade and beer garden with live music. Downtown. 2-6:30 PM. Free.

816-637-2811, visitexcelsior.com

A Treasure Trove of Cartoons Populist Cartoons

An Illustrated History of the ThirdParty Movement of the 1890s

Worth Robert Miller $34.95 pbk 9781935503057 $27.99 eb 9781612480107

Miller provides a short narrative history of the Populist Party and analysis of approximately 150 cartoons, which are attractively reproduced.... [this] volume deserves a wide readership and should encourage serious reflection upon our own troubled times.

—Kansas History, Winter 2011–12

Truman in Cartoon and Caricature James N. Giglio $20.00 pbk 9781931112048

Wentworth

While the clever cartoons confirm the notion that a pic picture can be worth a thousand words, the accompanying text is a surprise bonus. It presents a masterfully concise biography of Truman and a review of his impact upon the world.

—Springfield News-Leader

where potential is realized!

wma.edu •

800-962-7682

•

admissions@wma.edu

100 E. Normal Ave., Kirksville, MO 63501 tsup.truman.edu • 660-785-7336

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DISNEY’S TARZAN Feb. 20-22, St. Joseph > Based on the animated movie, this play features heart-pumping music and uplifting songs by rock legend Phil Collins. Missouri Theatre. 7:30 PM Fri.-Sat.; 2 PM Sun $10-$30. 816232-1778, rrtstjoe.org

DEATH AND MOURNING IN THE 1800S Mar. 17, Independence > Multi-faceted program and one-woman show shares the history of mourning customs from the 1830 through the 1860s. National Frontier Trails Museum. 7 PM. Free.

816-325-7575, ci.independence.mo.us/nftm

INDIAN ARTIFACT SHOW Mar. 7, Agency > Displays of authentic Indian artifacts with appraisals available for one item per person. Community Center. 10 AM-4 PM. Donations accepted. 816-253-9301,

NORTHWEST

HOME AND BETTER LIVING SHOW Mar. 22, Maryville > This event showcases the area’s products and services, prizes, and giveaways. Community Center. 10 AM-4 PM. Free. 660582-8643, maryvillechamber.com

CANTUS Feb. 7, St. Joseph > Men’s vocal ensemble with nine members perform a program spanning many periods and genres. Missouri Theatre. 8 PM. $17$32. 816-279-1225, saintjosephperformingarts.org

NORTHEAST

LAST POTLUCK SUPPER

The Church Basement Ladies are back in this musical comedy that features four unique characters who organize the food and solve problems in a rural Minnesota church. The play is set in 1979 during the church’s Centennial Celebration. The parishioners come together to enjoy hot dishes, yummy homemade desserts, and the stories from the last hundred years. Performances are held at the Missouri Theatre on March 31 at 2 and 7:30 PM. Ticket prices range from $12-$40. Call 816-279-1225 or visit saintjosephperformingarts.org for more information.

MURDER ON VALENTINE’S DAY Feb. 14 St. Joseph > The audience participates in this interactive murder mystery dinner theater.

Robidoux Landing Playhouse. 7:30 PM. $25. Reservations. 816-232-1778, rrtstjoe.org

NEMO AG SHOW Feb. 7, Kirksville > Wide variety of exhibits by vendors that educate and broaden the knowledge of farming and agriculture throughout northern Missouri. NEMO Fairgrounds. 9 AM-4 PM. Free. 660665-3781, 1450kirx.com

COURTESY OF CHURCHBASEMENTLADIESONSTAGE.COM

EMERALD ISLE PARADE Mar. 14, Lee’s Summit > Floats, Irish dancers, musicians, Irish Breakfast, Gold Coin Hunt for children, and Emerald Isle Pub Crawl. Downtown. noon-1 PM (pub crawl follows parade). Free. 816-246-6598, downtownls.org

PBS programming and more for 1 million viewers in 37 central Missouri counties.

kmos.org

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COURTESY OF KIRKSVILLE TOURISM DIVISION

THE GREAT GATSBY Feb. 14, Kirksville > Witness the sweeping grandeur in this performance by the Montana Repertory Theatre of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s celebrated novel. Baldwin Hall Auditorium at Truman State University. 7:30 PM. $10. 660-785-4016, lyceum.truman.edu

SO YOU WANT TO START A GARDEN? Mar. 21, Kirksville > Local garden enthusiasts and the USDA share their knowledge on many topics from how to choose a garden location to canning and freezing produce. Jacob’s Vineyard and Winery. 9 AM-1 PM. Free. 660-627-2424, jacobsvinyardandwinery.blogspot.com

POLAR PLUNGE Feb. 28, Hannibal > Take a dip in the Mississippi River to raise money for Special Olympics. Participants can dress up in costume. Meet at the boat ramp. Noon-2 PM. Donations accepted (participants need to raise a minimum of $75). 573-2210154, somo.org/plunge

BIG BAND CONCERT OF 1945 Mar. 28, Hannibal > The St. Louis Big Band performs jazz and swing music from the World War II era. Bluff City Theater. 7:30 PM. $24.75. 573-7193226, bluffcitytheater.com

47TH ANNUAL JAZZFEST Feb. 28, Kirksville > Competition for student combos and ensembles, several clinics, workshops, and a concert by renowned trombonist, Ray Anderson.

Ophelia Parrish. 9 AM-7 PM. Free. 660-785-4447, upsilonphi.org/jazzfest/

SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS Mar. 3, Kirksville > A plan to marry off six rowdy brothers goes awry in this classic comedy set in 1850s Oregon. Baldwin Hall Auditorium at Truman State University. 7:30 PM. $10. 660-785-4016, lyceum.truman.edu

ShowMe ZIPLINES 816-699-9739 15510 Highway C Rayville, MO showmeziplines@gmail.com www.showmeziplines.com

ANTIQUE SHOW AND SALE Mar. 28, Paris > Antique dealers bring a variety of antiques for show and sale. Paris High School. 10 AM-3 PM. $3 (early bird 9 AM for $5). 660-327-4034

ST. LOUIS

CASINO AND GAME NIGHT Feb. 6, Chesterfield > Play casino games, pinball, and shuffleboard. Enjoy food and an open bar. A portion of the proceeds benefit the USO of Missouri. Amini’s Home Rugs and Game Room. 6-11 PM. $50. 636-532-3399, chesterfieldmochamber.com

Do you care about the arts in Missouri?

GET YOUR IRISH ON Everyone is Irish for a day at the St. Patrick’s Day celebration in Kirksville on March 17.

Kick off the day with the Little Leprechaun Costume Contest and Baby Show followed by a 5K run and a 1.5 mile fun run. The festivities continue with a parade filled with floats, bands, a pet costume contest with prizes, and much more. The day’s events are held downtown from 3-7 PM and are free, though contest entries are $3 and the race participation is $15. Call 660-665-9764 or visit dukuminn.com/Pages/saintpats.aspx for more information.

Beautiful

in every season

Attend Citizens’ Day at the Legislature on February 11, 2015 9:30 a.m. - 3:30 p.m.

Visit with YOUR legislators, to let them know that the ARTS are important to you!

Registration details at www.mo4arts.org/your-message

www.VisitChillicothe.com • 1-877-224-4554

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CELEBRATE THE GOSPEL CONCERT Feb. 8, St. Louis > Enjoy soul-stirring renditions of traditional gospel favorites performed by the New Sunny Mt. Baptist Church Chancel Choir. Shoenberg Theatre at Missouri Botanical Garden. 3 PM. $8. 800-642-8842, mobot.org ROCK, FOSSIL, AND GEM SHOW Feb. 13-15, Kirkwood > Rocks, minerals, fossils, gems, and jewelry will be on display and for sale; attendance prizes will be given. Community Center.

4-9 PM Fri.; 10 AM-6 PM Sat.; 10 AM-4 PM Sun. $2-$3.

314-882-5855, cabinfeverprod.com CHOCOLATE WINE TRAIL Feb. 21-22, Hermann > Follow the wine trail, and taste local wines paired with chocolate creations.

Seven area wineries. 10 AM-5 PM Sat.; 11 AM-5 PM Sun. $30. 800-932-8687, hermannwinetrail.com

DELLA’S DINER Feb. 22, Florissant > A musical comedy soap opera full of twists and turns. Civic Center Theatre. 2 PM. Call for tickets. 314-921-5678, florissantmo.com

BUILDERS HOME AND GARDEN SHOW Feb. 26-Mar. 1, St. Louis > A showcase of lawn, garden, kitchen, pools, and building projects.

America’s Center. 10 AM-9 PM Thurs.-Sat.; 10 AM-5 PM Sun. $4-$10. 314-994-7700, stlhomeshow.com MILITARY COLLECTORS SHOW Feb. 28, Lemay > Reenactors and memorabilia collectors sell and trade military items. Community Center at Jefferson Barracks Park. 9 AM-3 PM. $3.

314-544-5714, stlouisco.com BUSINESS EXPO Mar. 5, Chesterfield > More than seventy-five display booths, demonstrations, and speakers.

Chesterfield Mall. Call for times and costs. 636-5323399, chesterfieldmochamber.com HOME SHOW Mar. 6-8, Washington > More than fifty exhibitors.

City Park Auditorium. 5-7 PM Fri. 10 AM-4 PM Sat.; 10 AM-3 PM Sun. Free. 636-239-2715, washmo.org COURAGEOUS AND FAITHFUL Mar. 7-Dec. 27, Lemay > Explore the birthplace of the American cavalry and the contributions of St. Louis’s mounted troops. Old Ordnance Room Museum at Jefferson Barracks Park. Noon-4 PM. $3 donation. 314-544-5714, stlouisco.com

BLAST FROM THE PAST Renaudier Meat Shoot and Rendezvous is a living history event that features historic black powder and archery shooting. Come out and see history come alive with flintlock and percussion rifle matches and primitive archery.

Primitive attire will be worn, and awards will be given in each match. Purchase a loaf of fresh baked bread to take home. The event is held at St. Joachim Church grounds from 9 AM to 4 PM on February 21 and 22. Admission is free, but there is a cost for campers and a shooter’s fee.

Call 573-210-7599 or visit talking-bear.com for more information.

COURTESY OF THE INDEPENDENT-JOURNAL

LEO KOTTKE Feb. 6, St. Louis > One of folk music’s favorite performers. Sheldon Concert Hall at Grand Center. 8 PM. $40-$45. 800-293-5949, thesheldon.org

kmos.org

This new 3-part documentary covers the first documented appearances of cancer thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the 20th century to cure, control and conquer it, to a radical new understanding of its essence.

March 30 - April 1 PBS programming and more for 1 million viewers in 37 central Missouri counties.

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As a MEMBER of the Missouri Chamber YOU WILL RECEIVE:

Regular legislative and regulatory updates The Missouri Chamber is a critical, behind-the-scenes power in Jefferson City, helping draft bills to be introduced by legislators, testifying at hearings, and watch-dogging regulations. Updates and alerts are published on all major issues and sent to our members. Members can participate in issue webinars and conference calls.

MEMBER PROGRAMS: Cutting edge seminars and conferences Competitive employee health insurance programs

Member Help-line

Missouri Drug Card savings program

Access to our lobbyists and legal experts is an automatic membership benefit. Members can contact us with legislative questions concerning: • Local and state tax issues

Shipping and office supply discounts Competitive employee 401K programs

• Workers’ compensation • Employment law • Environmental regulations • And much, much more

Missouri Business Magazine The full-color magazine, Missouri Business, highlights our members and gives readers a more in-depth look at the issues facing the business community.

WANT TO LEARN MORE? Contact Linda Gipson at lgipson@mochamber.com, or by phone at 573-634-3511.

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BUYER AND CELLAR Mar. 11-29, Webster Groves > This one-man show is an uproarious fictional account of celebrity eccentricity inspired by Barbra Streisand’s book, My Passion for Design. Loretto-Hilton Center for the Performing Arts. Call for show times. $42-$65.

314-968-4925, repstl.org SMALL BUILDINGS Mar. 13-May 20, St. Louis > This exhibit is centered on themes of architecture and includes models, maquettes, and sculpture. Craft Alliance Center.

10 AM-5 PM Tues.-Thurs.; 10 AM-6 PM Fri.-Sat.; 11 AM5 PM Sun. Free. 314-725-1177, craftalliance.org

SCRAP ART MUSIC Mar. 20-21, St. Louis > Take old bike parts, PVC pipes, and other recycled odds and ends; add five hipsters and some drumsticks; and you get a barrage of beats. Edison Theatre at Washington University. 8 PM Fri .; 11 AM Sat. $12-$36. 314-935-6543, edison.wustl.edu RACE TO THE ROCKER Mar. 21, Cuba > Four-mile race from Cuba, Missouri, to the world’s largest rocking chair in Fanning. Starts downtown. 9 AM. Free to spectators ($25 to run). 573-205-7704, racetotherocker.com POST OFFICE STOMP Mar. 21, Washington > Travel back in time with live music at a 1950s sock hop. City Park Auditorium. 7 PM. $20-$25. 636-239-1743, washmo.org

KINKY BOOTS Mar. 24-April 5, St. Louis > This Broadway musical follows the story of a struggling shoe factory owner as he turns his business around with the help of Lola, an entertainer in need of some sturdy stilettos. Fabulous Fox Theatre. 8 PM Tues.-Fri.; 2 and 8 PM Sat.; 1 PM Sun. $25-$85. 314-534-1678, fabulousfox.com WURSTFEST Mar. 28, Hermann > Sausage samples and sales, professional and amateur sausage-making contests, demonstrations, Weiner Dog Derby, and a whole-hog breakfast. Throughout town. Most events 9 AM-5 PM. Free (except special events).

800-932-8687, visithermann.com THORNHILL OPEN HOUSE Mar. 28-29, Chesterfield > Tour the historic home, barns, smokehouse, peach orchard, blacksmith shop, and family cemetery. Faust Park. 1-5 PM. Free.

314-615-8328, stlouisco.com

AMAZING WORKS OF ART From February 1 to 22, the Margaret Harwell Art Museum will feature the astonishing work of Cape Girardeau photographer and digital artist Tim Vollink.

Tom explores themes of transience and his subjects include abandoned vehicles, landscapes, and the human figure. The exhibit is open Tuesday through Friday from noon to 4 PM and Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 4 PM. It is free and open to the public. Call 573-686-8002 or visit mham.org for more information.

Hammerstein. Donald C. Bedell Performance Hall.

7:30 PM Wed.-Thurs; 8 PM Fri.; 2 and 7:30 PM Sat.; 2 PM Sun. $17-$20. 573-651-2265, visitcape.com

SOUTHEAST

TANGO BUENOS AIRES Feb. 3, Cape Girardeau > This group is one of the most authentic representatives of the Tango. Donald C. Bedell Performance Hall. 7:30 PM. $33-$39.

573-651-2265, visitcape.com KING’S BALL Feb. 7, Ste. Genevieve > Bring a basket of snacks, and dress in French Colonial costumes for a night of traditional dance at this French-inspired celebration that has been held for over fifty years. VFW Hall. 7 PM. $5-$10. 800-373-7007, visitstegen.com MAPLE SUGARING Feb. 14, Cape Girardeau > Learn about the history, equipment, and process of making maple syrup.

Conservation Nature Center. 1-4 PM. Free. 573-2905218, visitcape.com ROMANCING THE GRAPE Feb. 14-15, Ste. Genevieve > Celebrate Valentine’s Day with great wines and decadent foods. Route du Vin (wine trail). 11 AM-5 PM. $25. 800-373-7007, rdvwinetrail.com

THE KING AND I Feb. 25-28 and Mar. 1, Cape Girardeau > A truly unique love story in the grand style of Rogers and

PASTEL PAINTING Mar. 1-29, Poplar Bluff > Traditional pastels create realistic still life and landscape paintings. Margaret Harwell Art Museum. Noon-4 PM Tues.-Fri.; 1-4 PM Sat.-Sun. Free. 573-686-8002, mham.org REGIONAL HIGH SCHOOL ART SHOW Mar. 17-April 30 , Sikeston > Area students participate in a judged art show for prizes. Sikeston Depot Museum. 10 AM-4 PM Tues.-Sat. Donations accepted. 573-481-9967, sikestondepotmuseum.com

FREE LISTING & MORE EVENTS At MissouriLife.com PLEASE NOTE: TO SUBMIT AN EVENT: COURTESY OF TIM VOLLINK

VANYA & SONIA & MASHA & SPIKE Mar. 18-April 12. Webster Groves > Mayhem and hilarity abound in this present-day homage to Chekhov. Loretto-Hilton Center for the Performing Arts. Call for show times. $17.50-$79.50. 314-9684925. repstl.org

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Missouri Citizens for the Arts, p. 93 Missouri Life books, p. 25 Missouri Life gifts, p. 63 Missouri Life subscriptions, p. 90 Missouri Life travel, p. 64 Missouri Pork Association, p. 2 Missouri Propane Gas Association, p. 3 Moberly Area Chamber of Commerce, p. 87 Old Trails Region, p. 86 The Railyard Steakhouse, p. 63 Rolla, p. 10 Saleigh Mountain Co., p.10 Show Me Ziplines, p. 93 Socket, p. 89 St. Charles Convention & Visitor’s Bureau, p. 13 Ste. Genevieve, MO, p. 93 Stone Hollow Studio, p. 10 Sydenstricker, p. 99 Truman State University Press, p. 91 Wentworth Military Academy & College, p. 91 Westphalia Inn, p. 63

Directory of our Advertisers Connect with us online! www.MissouriLife.com www.facebook.com/MissouriLife • Twitter: @MissouriLife

Arrow Rock, p. 86 Best of Missouri Hands, p. 88 Big BAM (Bicycle Across Missouri), pgs. 72-73 Callaway County Tourism, pgs. 4-5 Cape Girardeau Convention & Visitor’s Bureau, p. 28 Carthage Convention & Visitor’s Bureau, p. 28 Central Trust & Investment Company, p. 49 Clay County, MO Tourism, p. 15 Columbia Appliance, p. 85 Columbia Orthopaedic Group, p. 17 Crow Steals Fire, p. 10 Greater Chillicothe Visitor’s Region, p. 93 Harding University, p. 18 Hardware of the Past, p. 82 Hermann Hill Vineyard & Inn, p. 100 Hermann Wurst Haus, p. 63 Isle of Capri, p. 11 James Country Mercantile, p. 86 Jameson Medical, p. 82 Jefferson City Convention & Visitor’s Bureau, p. 88 John Knox Village East, p. 86 KCPT, p. 83 KMOS, pgs. 92 & 94 Lebanon, MO Tourism, p. 22 Lexington, MO Tourism, p. 86 Lodge of Four Seasons, p. 9 Marshall Tourism, p. 6 Mexico, MO Tourism, p. 84 Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry, p. 95

Bed-and-Breakfasts & Boutique Hotels, p. 55 Aunt Kat’s B & B Bed & Breakfast Inns of Missouri Central Hotel DeBourge House Epple Haus B & B The Gathering Place B & B Gottfried’s Cabin Gast Haus Granny’s Country Cottage B & B Hilty Inn B & B Hotel Frederick The Phillips Place B & B

2ve0l 1G5 Tra uide

Travel Guide, pgs. 77-80 Fayetteville, AR, p. 80 Helena, AR, p. 80 Hermann Tourism, p.78 Lawton-Fort Sill Chamber of Commerce, p. 79 Maryland Heights Convention & Visitor’s Bureau, p. 80 Salem Area Chamber of Commerce, p. 79 St. Joseph Convention & Visitor’s Bureau, p. 78 Stone Hill Winery, p. 78 Hermann Maryland Heights St. Joseph Salem Stone Hill

Fayetteville, AR Helena, AR

Lawton-Fort Sill,

OK

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Here’s another way to connect to our partners!

Pull out your smartphone and scan this code to request information or link directly to their websites.

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Missouriana You are getting a little bit smarter, word by word.

Have you seen this?

Designer and model Kimora Lee Simmons was born and raised in ST. LOUIS and was discovered at a model search in Kansas City.

Her mother enrolled her in the search in an attempt to give her some confidence because she was constantly bullied in school.

Aside from James Cash Penney, HAMILTON’S second most-notable son was Brooklyn Dodgers left-fielder and baseball hall-offamer Zack Wheat, who is the franchise leader in hits (2,804), doubles (464), and triples (171).

The Squaw Creek National WILDLIFE Refuge is home to one of the last five Massasauga rattlesnake populations in the state.

Have you heard of this?

“In the US, you

have to be a deviant or die of boredom.”

–William S. Burroughs, St. Louis native

ANDREW BARTON

THE MIDWAY AUTO TRUCK PLAZA NEAR COLUMBIA IS KNOWN FOR ITS I-70 CHALLENGE. TO COMPLETE THE CHALLENGE, ONE DINER MUST EAT SEVEN BISCUITS AND SEVENTY OUNCES OF GRAVY. THE RESTAURANT REQUIRES TWENTYFOUR HOURS NOTICE BEFORE THE CHALLENGE CAN BE ATTEMPTED.

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