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Volume 104 • Number 12 • Friday, January 17, 2014 • PO Box 188 • 111 E. Jenkins • Maryville, MO
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Fifth-grader Myers is local geography champ
Alex Myers By TONY BROWN News editor
Can you name the flat intermontane area located at an elevation of about 10,000 feet above sea level in the central Andes? Chances are Alex Myers can. That’s why Alex, the son of Randy and Shari Myers,
is the first Maryville fifthgrader ever to win the local level of the National Geographic Bee. Thirty-five students entered this week’s the preliminary round, which was held Tuesday at Maryville Middle School. Eleven finalists then competed for top local honors Wednesday night. In addition to Alex, the other finalists were Sam Steinmeyer, Chance Hermelink, Cailee Burg, Austin Drake, Chad Sullivan, Caleb Feuerbacher, Jacob Reuter, Kelsi Dredge, Alex Gotszling and Tara Hull The National Geographic Bee (formerly the National Geography Bee) is an annual geography contest sponsored by the National Geographic Society that is open to students in fourth
through eighth grades. As a school-level winner, Alex will now take a written test in an attempt to qualify for statewide competition this spring. Only the top100 local champions make the cut. After that, winners from all 50 states, Washington, D.C. and the U.S. territories will gather for the national finals in late Mary at the the National Geographic Society headquarters in the nation’s capital. The first-place winner there receives a $50,000 college scholarship as well as a lifetime membership in the society. Since 2009 the national champion has also been awarded a trip for two to the Galapagos Islands. And that flat intermontane area in the Andes? It’s called the Altiplano.
DARREN WHITLEY/NORTHWEST MISSOURI STATE UNIVERSITY
Illustrator
STEVE HARTMAN/MARYVILLE DAILY FORUM
Kid lit artist brings imagination to life By STEVE HARTMAN Staff writer
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Finalists
Pictured are the 11 finalists of this year’s local-level National Geographic Bee. Pictured front row left to right are Sam Steinmeyer, Chance Hermelink, Alex Myers, Cailee Burg and Austin Drake. Shown in the back row from left are Chad Sullivan, Caleb Feuerbacher, Jacob Reuter, Kelsi Dredge, Alex Gotszling and Tara Hull.
Top: Horace Mann Laboratory School fourth graders look on as illustrator Brad Sneed gives a drawing exhibition during a Wednesday assembly at Northwest Missouri State University. Left: Pictured are two of the 27 books Brad Sneed has illustrated during his 25-year career.
Brad Sneed faced a major decision in junior high school. There were three occupations that interested him: football player, cowboy and artist. Thirty years later, the veteran children’s book illustrator appears to have made the right choice. Sneed, who usually works with watercolors to create his vivid, richly imaginative images, visited Northwest Missouri State University
on Wednesday and spoke with four groups of Horace Mann Laboratory School youngsters as well as university literature practicum students. He discussed his background, the process he uses to complete his work, and then did some quick sketches for each group. Sneed’s presentations at Northwest were arranged through a collaborative effort by members of the literature education program and Horace Mann art teacher Erin
Oehler. Sneed said timing was everything at the beginning of his career as an illustrator. “I was very fortunate in that I graduated from Kansas University in 1989, then took my portfolio to New York and visited several publishers. Within a month of returning home, I received a call from one particular publisher, got the job, and have been busy ever since,” Sneed said. “I was fortunate See SNEED, Page 3
Newspaper, Maryville have changed with times By JIM FALL
Executive editor
Changing Forum
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The Maryville Daily Forum sign is shown circa 1955 hanging over the entryway to the newspaper’s office at 414 N. Main, current location of The Pub. The former Elvalee Donaldson, a journalism student at the University of Missouri, submitted an assessment of the newspaper’s use of photographs — and her impressions of her hometown — for a class project. Both focal points of her report have changed over the past 58 years.
In 1955, when Elvalee Donaldson was a student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism enrolled in an advanced press photography class, she wrote a report on her hometown newspaper’s use of photographs. She was not kind in her assessment of the Maryville Daily Forum’s photographic efforts, describing the newspaper as “not picture-minded, not in the least.“ “The Daily Forum is dragging and dragging badly,” she said in her report, which received an “S” under the old Missouri grading scale of E, S, M, I and F. “S” stood for superior.
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Undoubtedly, the Maryville newspaper was “not picture-minded,” as Donaldson surmised, but neither were many of the other small-town newspapers that served communities like Maryville across northwest Missouri, a list that included such publications as the Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune, the Macon Chronicle-Herald and the Trenton RepublicanTimes. Photographs were pretty much a luxury back then, as Donaldson’s research paper indicated, and the large photographs readers are accustomed to today were the exception. Four-color photography, which anybody with a smartphone can produce these days, was, of
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course, practically unheard of. Donaldson, who worked at the Daily Forum through high school and her first two tears of college, married Bob Swift and the couple enjoyed a long and successful journalism career in Florida. Elvalee reviewed restaurants for the Miami Herald’s Where magazine and Bob authored his Swift Thinking column for the newspaper. The couple returned to Maryville for a brief period, and Elvalee now lives in California. Her sister and brother-inlaw, Pat and Al Turner, are Maryville residents who formerly owned The Sport Shop. Pat was also a teacher and coach at Maryville High School.
Community Life ..... 6 Sports.................... 7, 8 Classifieds......... 10, 11
Donaldson’s chronology of the evolution of the present-day Maryville Daily Forum is intriguing, as is her list of the staff that headquartered in the storefront now known as The Pub building (currently closed for renovation). Showing up for work at the daily were “a managing editor (Barney Alcott), a reporter, a society editor, a part-time reporter, an advertising manager and the circulation manager, in addition to the proof-reader, Linotypists and the basement (press) crew.” Her evaluation of her hometown is also revealing. “Maryville is a rural community — full of corn, hogs, and farmers, produce stores and retired business See NEWSPAPER, Page 3
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