Elmo celebrates 70 years

ANDREW WEGLEY/THE FORUM
Larry, left, and Sharron Ecker sit to have lunch at a picnic table at Elmo Park during Saturday’s 70th annual Fourth of July Celebration. It was one of the only times Sharron removed her mask during the event.

ELMO, Mo. — As the 70th annual Elmo Fourth of July Celebration marched on Saturday, kicked off with a 5K at 7 a.m. and followed with a princess tea party on the blacktop of the Elmo Park basketball court, Sharron Ecker watched from a bench along the court’s sideline.

And as the tea party — which included hair styling sessions, face painting and, of course, tea, for a host of young girls — gave way to a round of bingo at the park’s shelter, she sat alone at a picnic table a few yards away from the awning, underneath an overcast sky as the day approached noon.

Unlike nearly every other patron of the celebration who gathered for a $5 round of Bingo underneath the pavilion, or those who geared up for the baby show down the hill from the shelter, Sharron, 84, wore a mask. While many similar Independence Day gatherings around the country were canceled this year due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Elmo’s celebration went on for the 70th year in a row.

Sharron guesses she attended the first 69 — though she can’t be sure she didn’t miss a year or two in the last seven decades. And despite the virus that has killed more than 122,000 people across the nation — many of whom were elderly — she wasn’t going to miss the 70th. It means too much to her, even now, or perhaps especially now, as one of her eight grandchildren, Jennifer McGinness, helped organize the event that brought much of her family together in Elmo, where she’s lived all her life.

“What could you ask to be any better?” Sharron said. “It’s wonderful. It keeps Elmo from totally, you know…”

“Disappearing,” said McGinness, the president of the Elmo Betterment Club.

“Right,” Sharron said.

And so Sharron, caught between the realities of the pandemic and her desire to support the community she’s lived in for more than 80 years, braved the virus and attended the celebration, though she did so with noticeably different mannerisms than most everyone else in attendance — at least in the gathering’s early going. She watched the tea party from a safe distance and didn’t pick up a bingo card. She took her mask off only to eat lunch. And she sat alone as morning gave way to afternoon, that was until her husband, Larry, joined her, steps away from where they met more than 60 years ago, steps away from a crowd of unmasked people now.

Sharron and Larry, like many of the celebrations’ organizers and patrons, wore green shirts with a depiction of a Native American Chief and the words, “Elmo Indians,” a nod to the mascot of the former school that used to sit where Elmo Park does now. Unlike many of the celebration’s other patrons who all gathered on the grounds where the schoolhouse used to be, now replaced by picnic tables, fresh dirt and a commemorative sign, the Eckers graduated from Elmo in the class of 1954.

They likely wouldn’t have met without the school, Larry said. They went to different country schools before Elmo opened. Sharron lived south of town while Larry lived north. But they did meet, of course, at the schoolhouse that used to be, and they got married nearby at the Elmo United Methodist Church in 1955, a year after they graduated, and not long before the school consolidated and students were instead shipped off to places like Clearmont and Burlington Junction.

“Sad day, of course,” Sharron said. “It does kill a town.”

Things are different now in more ways than one, and the Eckers have watched them change as rapidly in the last four months as they did in the last 65 years.

The Eckers have weathered the usual changes that come with growing old together. They operated a namesake dairy just north of Elmo for more than 55 years, selling off their cows in 2012. It had to end sometime, said Larry, who fought off cancer that same year. They saw Elmo’s growth stunt when the school consolidated and the railroad stopped running through the town. They don’t have the neighbors they used to have.

Sitting across from one another at a picnic table in the park Saturday, Sharron’s black mask resting in her lap and Larry wearing a pair of wire-framed glasses beneath his John Deere hat, the couple had been married for 64 years and 361 days. Perhaps the biggest changes they’ve seen over the last six-and-a-half decades, as noticeable as the changes they’ve weathered in Elmo, were the ones they’d seen and felt in each other and in themselves.

“I feel younger just sitting here, but if I get up and start walking, now, I feel like 100,” Larry said.

“Yeah, that’s true,” Sharron said, laughing.

“And if I look in the mirror, I don’t know who that guy is,” Larry said.

And so sitting under a warming sun, with the once-overcast sky opening, Larry stayed put, at least for a while. The changes the Eckers have witnessed over nearly 65 years together have been gradual, but the world they’ve occupied over the last four months has evolved at a quicker pace. Things are, indeed, different now.

Larry said they didn’t leave their farm much at all for the first three months of the pandemic’s grip on the country. Not much has changed since then. They’re going to church again now, but they don’t sing or touch the offering plate. They opt for carry-out at the Betterment Club’s monthly fish fry. They wave at neighbors, not daring to strike up a conversation these days.

Sharron makes trips to Hy-Vee on her own again after one of their children hand-delivered the Ecker’s groceries for a month or two. She usually treks to Clarinda these days, in hopes of finding a smaller crowd than the one she might in Maryville. But she’s not sure it matters. She sees the same thing in Maryville, Clarinda and Shenandoah as she did when she looked around Elmo Park Saturday. Even in counties so far mostly isolated from the brunt of the COVID-19 outbreak, Sharron can’t believe how many people refuse to wear masks.

“They should think it through, first,” Sharron said. “And they don’t. I mean, I don’t think they do.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t really like to be in a crowd,” Larry said. “A big crowd.”

“A closer crowd,” Sharron said, correcting her husband as the bingo caller at the celebration continued to yell out letters followed by numbers 10 or 15 yards away from their picnic table. “We’re in a crowd.”

McGinness, one of the event’s chief organizers, said the people of Elmo, and with them, the people who run the town’s Betterment Club, are a headstrong group. As celebrations around the country were canceled or altered due to the pandemic, she said she was always sure Elmo’s celebration would take place.

Organizers took precautions, of course, McGinness said. They were in contact with the Nodaway County Health Department as they planned the event. They moved the stage — which played home to the band “Outlaw Creek” around 6:15 p.m. Saturday — further back to allow space for physical distancing among the expected hundreds of patrons. McGinness said she didn’t want or expect Elmo to be the source for any sort of COVID-19 outbreak or uptick. That’s why there were precautions implemented — despite the lack of masks at the event early in the day.

“It sure put a crunch on a lot of things,” Larry said.

“Yeah, but do you think they should have had it? Do you think they should have had this today?” Sharron said to her husband, before thinking better of the question she asked, as she weighed her own involvement in the event and her granddaughter’s position within the Betterment Club.

“No, actually — I didn’t have to come,” she said. “I mean, you know. To me — that’s it. I chose to.”

The Eckers both chose to come, after spending months mostly cooped up on their farm, north of Elmo. They came to support the town, though, in some ways, their presence at the celebration served as both a relic of the Elmo of the past and a reminder of a pandemic that still is. Steps away from the schoolhouse plot that brought them together and blocks away from the church they married in, the Eckers came to Elmo Park both to celebrate a town they love and the parts that have slipped away — some forced out by time and others by the virus — parts, nonetheless, they miss.

They miss the school they met at that’s since been torn down. They miss interacting with neighbors — the ones they knew well and the folks who replaced them. They miss singing at church. They miss feeling safe at the grocery store. They miss the railroad that ran through town and the good memories it brought with it.

They miss what Elmo used to be — both 60 years ago and six months ago. They were not going to miss its celebration.

ANDREW WEGLEY/THE FORUM
Elmo resident Sharron Ecker supported her town during its 70th annual Fourth of July Celebration, but chose to be as safe as possible during the COVID-19 pandemic, donning a mask for nearly the entire event.

ANDREW WEGLEY/THE FORUM
Sharron and Larry Ecker wear Elmo Indians shirts in recognition of the mascot of the former school that once stood where the Elmo Park is now. On Saturday, the community threw its 70th annual Fourth of July Celebration.