Forum Flashbacks: Sept. 15-21
FORUM FILE PHOTO
25 YEARS AGO: Headstart with computers – Maryville Headstart students gather around one of the new computer terminals in a classroom. The computers allow the students to start learning about new technology at an early age.
5 years ago
Downtown Maryville is set to finalize purchase of the future location of a pocket park at the southwest corner of 3rd and Main streets.
“We’re in the final stage,” said Matt Gaarder, President of Downtown Maryville. “The closing date for that is Sept. 29th.”
This is the second piece of land the organization will have purchased in that area. The first piece was purchased for $18,000. The second piece will cost the group $50,000. The two pieces together will form the pocket park.
“We have a rendering of where we want to start,” Gaarder said.
After the close, the organization will look at creating plans based off the first rendering and get to work cleaning up the space.
15 years ago
Rural electric cooperative members celebrated the opening of Missouri’s first wind farm Monday at the 10,000-acre site near King City, Mo. …
About 475 attended the celebration of local renewable energy development where cooperative members were joined by project partners and many state and federal legislators and officials.
Keynote speaker U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill said it was no surprise that rural electric cooperative members are working to help bring clean, renewable wind power to Missouri. “I’d pick a fight with anybody in Washington who wants to argue that Missouri farmers aren’t the best environmentalists in the world,” McCaskill said. “Nobody wants to protect the land and the water and the air more than Missouri farmers.”
25 years ago
The Nodaway-Holt School District is trying to work with Skidmore residents to reach an acceptable solution to the district’s facilities problems.
The Nodaway-Holt Board of Education voted last month to follow a building committee’s recommendation to move the elementary grades from Skidmore to Maitland and to leave the high school in Graham.
The Board of Education and district administration met last week with a group of Skidmore residents who have been exploring alternatives to that plan.
“I thought (the meeting) went pretty well,” Nodaway-Holt Superintendent Bruce Skoglund said. “Any time you deal with an issue like this, it is going to be sensitive.”
Skoglund said the district will work with the committee of Skidmore residents, but will also continue to move forward with the plan that calls for the elementary levels to be moved to Maitland.
A structural engineer hired by the district to examine the schools suggested repairs to the Graham and Maitland facilities and suggested the Skidmore building be closed, preferably within two years. …
One survey was already mailed to about 850 homes in the district, Skoglund said, and the majority of respondents favored the option supported by the board to move the elementary grades to Maitland.
100 years ago
MUCH CREDIT DUE TO ROACH FAMILY
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As Keepers of County Bastile Have Achieved Much Under Trying Circumstances
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REPORTER TAKES A LOOK
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While the Nodaway County jail in figuring the white light of newspaper publicity with other penal institutions of the state, a word might be said about Sheriff Steve A. Roach and Mrs. Roach, local people who deserve much praise for keeping the place in as sanitary a condition as possible under exceedingly trying circumstances.
Admittedly, the jail is a disgrace to the county in as far as its dilapidated, leaky condition is concerned. In the entrance or hall to the jail proper, the plastering is off in patches and the roof leaks in streams, the water forming a young river as it trickles across the floors and into a cell beyond. The plumbing in the corridor of the jail, which was undergoing repair this morning, has been in a bad condition for a long time. The automatic revolving cage, which at one time was worked from the outside, has done no revolving in recent years.
During the eleven-inch rain which occurred in July, the water ran down the flue, through the floor and into the furnace room, soaking almost all of the asbestos jacket from the outside of the furnace.
All of these things have nothing to do with the management, and Mr. and Mrs. Roach have tried under heavy handicaps to keep the place in as good condition as possible. When a Tribune reporter visited the jail this morning, the ante-room to the jail proper was scrubbed as clean as soap and hot water could make it, although the loose condition of the plastering, already off in patches, makes it a precarious business to spend much time in the room. The corridors around the one time revolving cage, and the cells, are swept every morning by the inmates under the direction of Mrs. Roach.
An army of cockroaches extending back to the bewhiskered great, great grandfather’s generation, infested the building, and they have been ousted through the efforts of Mr. and Mrs. Roach, who took turns sitting up at night with a fly swatter and waging war on the pests as they crept out from around the plumbing pipes.
The sheriff’s residence is in very good repair and is cosy, clean and inviting. But the fact that the Roaches have done marvellously well in their capacity as overseers of the (jail shows) that Nodaway County needs a new jail and needs it badly.
The 100-year flashback is courtesy of the Missouri Digital Newspaper Project from the State Historical Society of Missouri, viewable at shsmo.org/collections/newspapers/mdnp. The original article ran in the Sept. 19, 1922, edition of The Maryville Tribune, a predecessor of The Maryville Forum.
