Forum Flashbacks: Jan. 16-22
MARYVILLE DAILY FORUM, JAN. 20, 2000
25 YEARS AGO: Logan Stiens displays some of the items he placed in his personal time capsule.
25 years ago
Maryville Daily Forum, Jan. 20, 2000
One Maryville boy hopes that his grandchildren will be able to dig up a chapter of his life.
Logan Stiens, sixth grader at Maryville Middle School, created a millennium time capsule to capture what was important in his life before the year changed to 2000.
He initially saw the idea in the media and decided to construct his own version. But Stiens didn’t want just anything to be in his time capsule.
“I just went in and thought what would be important in the future or what was important in the past,” Stiens said.
Some of the things inserted into the time capsule were a newspaper and a yearbook. He believed these items would help future generations to understand what the world was like before the new millennium.
Stiens is a Beanie Baby collector, so it was only fitting that the capsule contain one of his stuffed friends.
“I just thought a beanie baby was one of the most popular things,” Stiens said.
Evelyn Summa, Stiens’ grandmother, said it wasn’t easy for him to part with one of his collectibles.
“It was kind of hard for him to part with one of his beanie babies,” Summa said. “I know he wanted something from his school, something from his family and he wanted something that he treasured.”
Another important aspect of the capsule’s contents is a family history. For this, he recruited the assistance of his grandmother and other family members. …
At school, Stiens’ friends were surprised by his time capsule.
“They think it’s kind of different,” Stiens said.
Though his family helped, the capsule was completely his project.
“I thought it was very cute, he came up with the idea all by himself,” Summa said. “He did the complete selection of what he wanted to put in all by himself.”
His grandmother also helped him obtain a container with a rubber seal, because Stiens knew he needed to prevent moisture from creeping in and affecting the contents.
50 years ago
Maryville Daily Forum, Jan. 16, 1975
WASHINGTON – AP — Missouri is the most vulnerable area in the United States to a limited Soviet nuclear attack against U.S. missile bases, the Defense Department said in testimony released this week.
The state’s vulnerability results from the proximity of Whiteman Air Force Base at Knob Noster, about 50 miles east of Kansas City, to two major metropolitan areas and the prevailing westerly winds that would carry radiation across Missouri to St. Louis.
Testimony by Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger said that a nuclear strike against each of the 156 Minuteman II missile silos scattered through 14 western Missouri counties could result in 750,000 deaths and 210,000 injured in the St. Louis area if the wind were blowing out of the southwest.
If the wind were out of the east and carried radiation toward Kansas City, the casualties would amount to 225,000 dead and 1,250,000 injured in the Kansas City area, according to the testimony.
A meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Kansas City said the varied casualty estimates for the state’s two biggest cities apparently recognizes east-west winds do not last for a long time and that the wind would still be blowing from the southwest above 5,000 feet.
Schlesinger’s testimony was given to a Senate committee in September and was declassified Tuesday.
David Harrison, regional director for the Defense Civil Preparedness agency in Denver, said fallout shelters in the two cities are adequate to hold more than the population of the cities. He said an inventory of the shelters is being conducted to update them and to designate new buildings as shelters.
“There’s a lot of new buildings in both cities that will make excellent shelters,” he said. “We are also conducting tests at the mines, especially around Kansas City. They will make excellent shelters.”
Steve Ferris, an emergency preparedness coordinator in Kansas City, said many people who work in offices and factories could use shelters in their buildings if an attack came during the day.
“If it’s in the middle of the night, well, that’s another matter,” Ferris said. “There isn’t that much protection in the average home.”
100 years ago
The Maryville Daily Democrat-Forum, Jan. 17, 1925
There’s a Reason for Gus Breaking His Resolution
“To smoke or not to smoke; that is the question.
“Whether it is better to be good and stand by a New Year’s resolution, or to be independent and tell the whole wide world to go hang and again worship at the throne of Lady Nicotine.”
Several days before Christmas, Gus Romasser, city commissioner, made a resolution that the New Year would find him tobaccoless in every sense of the word. He would toss away his pipes, decline all complimentary cigars, and never more would use the filthy weed.
And then along came Christmas. Old St. Nick had not heard of Mr. Romasser’s resolution, and when he looked over his many gifts, he found the following:
Two beautiful pipes.
Several packages of fine smoking tobacco.
Four or five boxes of cigars.
Today, Mr. Romasser is contentedly puffing away on one of his pipes, the smoke clouds forming visions of what might have been, had Old Santa only known.
Wotta life! Wotta life!
EDITOR’S NOTE: The 50- and 100-year flashbacks are courtesy of the Missouri Digital Newspaper Project from the State Historical Society of Missouri, accessible at shsmo.newspapers.com.
