Forum Flashbacks: July 20-26
FORUM FILE PHOTO
50 YEARS AGO: Transport dilemma solved – With the gasoline shortage putting the squeeze on transportation, everyone is seeking an economical way to travel. The children of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Logan, (from left to right) Karen, Doug, Melody and Dawn, seem to have found an answer. The little red wagon runs without gasoline or oil and seldom needs a lube job. The only problem is deciding who will supply the horsepower.
15 years ago
Jake Tennihill, son of Kim Bodle and Ralph Tennihill, graduated from level 1 of the Future Astronaut Training Program June 6 at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center. Tennihill, of Ravenwood, will be an eighth grader at Northeast Nodaway in the fall.
The week-long introductory astronaut camp is for students entering 7-10 and emphasizes teamwork, leadership and problem solving. …
Throughout the week, campers train in space simulators — the centrifuge, multi-axis trainer, space shuttle simulator (“Falcon III”) and stress simulator — and practice spacewalk rescues, launch homemade rockets, direct a robotic mission and learn night sky observation techniques.
50 years ago
Mrs. Merrill Johnson, Burlington Jct., couldn’t find her pickup truck when she returned from the drug store this morning. She immediately thought that Ronnie Spratt, an employee at Peany’s Barber Shop, and Clarence Farrens, both of Burlington Jct., had taken advantage of the fact that she had left the keys in the truck and had moved it as a prank.
It had been moved, but not by use of the keys.
“Evidently, I forgot to put it in park,” Mrs. Johnson said with an embarrassed smile after she learned that the pickup had rolled down Main Street and narrowly missed a fire hydrant before Everett Brown, Maryville, caught up with it and guided it to safety.
“I did a double take at the truck and finally realized there was no driver,” Brown said. “Then I did 100 yards in 10 flat!”
Brown said the southbound traffic saw him running toward the truck and stopped so that he could pull around the corner onto East Fifth Street.
When asked how fast the truck was moving when he saw it, Brown answered simply:
“Well, I caught it.”
100 years ago
BEGAN MAIL ROUTE ON JULY 23, 1900
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BURR WILLIAMS IS OLDEST CARRIER IN TERM OF SERVICE
Traveling a distance of nearly seven times around the world in order to distribute mail to patrons along his route has been the experience of Burr Williams, who has been carrying mail on route four out of the local postoffice, twenty-three years today.
Mr. Williams is the oldest carrier in terms of years served, at the local postoffice.
It was way back in 1900, long before the days of automobiles, airplanes or radio, that Mr. Williams hitched up a horse and started out delivering mail to families on route four, south and west of Maryville. It took him seven or eight hours a day then, as old Dobbin was the safest and surest means of travel. About four years ago, Mr. Williams purchased a car and now makes the route in two or three hours.
There are 114 families on route four, receiving mail in 85 boxes. The route is a little more than twenty-four miles long.
About ten families are living on the route now that did when Mr. Williams started carrying the mail, twenty-three years ago. The amount of mail has more than trebled since he started the route, Mr. Williams said this morning. There were more families on the route then, because there were fewer routes. The boxes were not numbered; the name was put on with lead pencil or a piece of chalk and in some instances the name was not on the box at all.
Many of the little children who used to toddle out to get the mail, delivered by Mr. Williams, are now married and many of them have families. Two or three of them are living on the route at present and now their little Mary, Johnnie or Susie toddles out to get the mail from Mr. Williams, as their fathers or mothers did twenty years ago. …
Delivering mail for twenty-three years, bringing messages of sadness as well as messages of joy, watching babies grow and bloom into young manhood or womanhood and start the great wheel of life all over again — these are only a few of the things Mr. Williams has observed during his twenty-three years as carrier on route four.
*EDITOR’S NOTE: The 50-year and 100-year flashbacks are courtesy of the Missouri Digital Newspaper Project from the State Historical Society of Missouri, viewable at shsmo.newspapers.com. The original 50-year article and photo ran in the July 24, 1973, edition of The Maryville Daily Forum. The original 100-year article ran in the July 23, 1923, edition of the Maryville Daily Democrat-Forum, which later would become The Maryville Forum.
