This story always made me giggle and wonder, but my father swore it was true. The event took place at his Grandma Franklin’s house on east 14th Street in Kansas City. She lived in a rambling two-story house. The dining room, where Thanksgiving was held, was lit by an old gas light fixture. All the […]
My father enjoyed including jokes in his weekly Post Scripts columns and simply liked to pass along to others funny things he had heard, whether in print or in person. Below is a brief selection: Kenneth Mitchell, who served as Farmers Home Administration supervisor in the area for many years, took delight in springing a […]
Note: The following came from my father’s Post Scripts column on August 15, 1963, and concerned one of my classmates for a time, Joycelyn Hook. Not long after I come to Gallatin, perhaps two or three years later, a little girl walked into the office and asked to see the editor. I went to the […]
One day when I was working part-time in the summer at my dad’s newspaper office, a man came in red and fuming. “You sent me the wrong newspaper,” he said, slapping his copy of The Gallatin Democrat on the counter. “But they are just the same, sir,” I said, “except for the title.” Clearly, he […]
When I think of the song that goes “Dear hearts and gentle people,” I think about Gallatin. In the early part of the 20th century, before paved highways made an assault on the face of rural America, thousands of towns looked similar to Gallatin, Missouri. Most had between 1,000 and 2,500 residents. Many were county […]
At the risk of holding someone up for ridicule, I’m not going to name names here, but three surnames in Gallatin labeled you. Why? Townspeople considered these families the lowest of the low–unkempt and poor families said to be on “welfare,” whose fathers didn’t work hard enough and who had too many children to properly […]
My neighbor Gayle and I were together from morning to night from the time I was 8 until I graduated from high school. That isn’t to say I didn’t have other friends, but she lived diagonally across the street and we shared learning to cook, learning to sew, even learning to knit, not to mention […]
When Goldie Tague died at Sunrise Center Nursing Home in Gallatin in the spring of 1984, her passing produced little or no interruption in the everyday life of Gallatin. Though she had been a citizen of the town her whole life, her name never appeared on a church roll, nor was she ever invited into […]
“Your dad’s newspaper is going to go out of business,” Butch said during class one day. What? Did I hear that right? Could it be true? What would it mean to me, my mom and dad and my little sister? “My dad says it’s not even worth wrapping up the garbage in,” Butch said the […]
“Oh, Joseph,” Miss Virginia crooned two days later when we arrived at the McDonald Tea Room. “I just loved this week’s edition. Let’s get your be-yoooo-tiful family seated.” The McDonald Tea Room enjoyed a crowd on Sundays with people not only from our area, but from St. Joseph 50 miles away and Kansas City 75 […]