Forum Flashbacks: Sept. 22-28
FORUM FILE PHOTO
25 YEARS AGO: Hounds Homecoming ’97 — Newly crowned king and queen John Otte (left) and Janna Johnson (right) smile as they get their picture taken by parents and other students.
5 years ago
Following the announcement this week that the City of Maryville is acquiring almost 2 acres of land near the intersection of First and Vine streets for construction of a new police and fire headquarters, Maryville Public Safety Director Keith Wood said Tuesday he couldn’t be more pleased with either the proposed facility or its location.
Wood said the large vacant field — former site of Washington School — is “absolutely” the right spot for a new police-fire station and the place the veteran chief has imagined for such a structure for the past 20 years. …
Wood said the former 1960s grocery store, which has housed the city’s Public Safety operation for about 40 years, still is structurally sound, though inadequate to meet the demands of modern-day police and fire departments. While Maryville’s police officers and firefighters have done their best to keep the facility functioning as efficiently as possible, Wood said the headquarters is outmoded in a number of respects, with two of the biggest weaknesses being space and security, factors that are not unrelated. …
Wood said the existing headquarters contains about 8,400 square feet of floor space, and that the new station will come in somewhere around 24,000 square feet, nearly three times the size. …
Revenue to build the station will come from the city’s half-cent capital improvements sales tax, which voters extended for 20 years in last April’s municipal election.
15 years ago
In the past, Nodaway County law enforcement officials were concerned about getting a Child Abduction Response Team (CART) formed to be prepared for any situation.
According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) a CART team is designed for professionals from a variety of fields within a community that may be involved in the immediate response to a missing or abducted child incident.
Nodaway County’s professionals are David Baird, Nodaway County Prosecuting Attorney; Keith Wood, Maryville Public Safety director; Rick Bradley, Chief Juvenile Officer for the Fourth Judicial Circuit; Marla Pritzel, Department of Social Services circuit manager and Monica McCollough, Northwest Missouri State University Campus Safety communications supervisor.
“It was an attempt for the group to be proactive in the topic of missing and exploited children, instead of reactive,” Wood said.
25 years ago
The Maryville Parks and Recreation Department is currently working on turning a field west of the Northwest Missouri State University campus into a new athletic field complex, but there is an even larger project looming on the horizon for the city department. Plans for a new indoor recreational facility, which first surfaced in 1990, is now being looked into by the Parks and Rec Department.
“We’re in the very preliminary stages right now,” Department Director Rod Auxier said. “We first drew up plans for the facility in 1992, and we are now looking at those plans again.”
A 1990 questionnaire showed that an indoor facility was the number one recreational need in town, beating out the number two need of a trail and the number three need of a golf course. …
A Missouri law passed last year would allow a community to impose up to a one-half cent sales tax to fund such a project, although Maryville is currently looking for a three-eighths cent sales tax. …
“We’re planning on having three ball courts, two racquetball courts, a suspended running track, a fitness room, our offices, a nursery for children and a 100-seat meeting room,” Auxier said.
100 years ago
MANDAMUS SUIT TO FORCE BOARD TO OPEN SCHOOL
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An alternative writ of mandamus to compel A. C. Ford, Charles Garrett, John Knabb, Ben Booher, Charles Patterson and Dave Neidel, members of the board of directors of the Wilcox Consolidated School district, to “open and maintain the high school” in this district was issued in Circuit Court this morning by Judge John M. Dawson.
The directors, under the writ, must open the school or appear before the court on Monday, October 9, and show cause why they should not open and maintain the school.
The plaintiffs in the suit are Elihu Shell, B. K. Ferguson and Jack Holt, and they brought the suit, according to the petition, “in their own behalf and for a large number of residents of the Wilcox Consolidated School District.”
The petition recites that the defendants, “acting as the board of education for the said Wilcox Consolidated School District, have wilfully(sic) and wantonly closed said high school and refused to maintain same and now have said high school closed and refuse to open the same, although requested to do so by many residents of said district and these plaintiffs; all to the great injury of students and children of said Wilcox Consolidated School District.”
The Wilcox district, the petition states, has been consolidated under the law for a long time and has maintained an elementary school and a high school of the third class. There are students in the district, it is stated, who have passed the elementary school and are eligible for high school, but who cannot attend because the directors refuse to open the high school.
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. 28, 1922, edition of The Maryville Tribune, a predecessor of The Maryville Forum.
