Richard Lee, an octogenarian, remembers when Joplin was in its heyday. Lee, on the occasion of Joplin's 135th birthday, prepares to board the trolley for a celebratory ride.
Citizens filled the lobby of Joplin City Hall on March 25, 2008, two days after the official 135th birthday of the incorporation of Joplin. The event on March 23, 1873 was after two early settlers, John Cox who established a town for miners on the east side of what was called Joplin Creek, and Patrick Murphy and W.P. Davis who established what became a more upscale area called Murpheysburg on the west side duked it out for name prominence. Cox obviously won.
Mayor Jon Tupper read a proclamation with the usual "yada-yada" about never forgetting the people who laid Joplin's foundation and looking to the future while Brad Belk, director of the Joplin Museum Complex, filled in some historical gaps before guests tore into the chocolate and white birthday cake.
Jon Tupper, at left, exercises his mayoral duties by reading a proclamation commemorating Joplin's 135th birthday. At right, Joplin Museum Complex Director Brad Belk, left, melds the past with the future in a conversation with Joplin Convention and Visitors Bureau Director Vince Lindstrom. In the background is a glimpse of the mural by Thomas Hart Benton depicting Joplin at the Turn of the Century, 1896-1906.
Richard Lee, 82, sauntered across the street to city hall from the Frisco Station Apartments, a seniors housing community, where he lives on the fourth floor.
Lee said that if anybody told him he'd be living in the Frisco, he would have said, "You're out of your mind!" He remembers the Frisco when the trains were running. He also reminisced about the owners of a candy stand there and their fox terrier who always was with them.
In reference to Joplin on Saturday night he quipped, "It was something else." He pictured the parades and described some of the marchers as wearing "round Spanish-looking hats with small balls hanging down" from them. Those were the old days, he said, when hamburgers and coke were five cents each and a big load of coal was just $1.25.
Clovis Steele, at left, patriotically wearing his military insignias, is holding an envelope containing a small rendering of a birds eye view of the city of Joplin from 1877. The first 50 or so guests received a numbered copy stamped with a seal from the Joplin Museum Complex, and a postcard of West 4th Street circa 1908 as mementos of Joplin's 135th birthday celebration. At right, Gretchen Bolander of KODE-TV, interviews Eugene Moffet Jr. of Joplin, a descendant of the E.R. Moffet who with J.B. Sergeant in 1870 hit a vein of lead on Joplin Creek located north of today's Broadway Street area.
The event wasn't just a nostalgic reminder for Lee. Clovis Steele, also 82, is reportedly Joplin's foremost "conservative voice." The former Galena, MO resident remembers when a Movietone News camera was anchored on a downtown building that filmed the parades. No one had to ponder over what to do in Joplin in the old days, he said. He described the jukebox that provided music for an open air dance floor and how the parks once were adorned with flower gardens and fish ponds. He painted a vivid picture of how movies were shown over where the tennis courts now stand in Schifferdecker Park.
A group, the descendants of E.R. Moffet, an early Joplin settler, provided more information about the splitting of the city and then its coming back together again. Eugene Moffet Jr. said he is gathering documents that will enhance a history of the town and his family that were raised in it.
Reminiscing about more recent history was former mayor Richard Russell who is serving out a final term on the city council. Russell, who was selected to head the reunion of the Joplin High School Class of 1958, remembers what he termed "Black Friday," a day when students who were supposed to enter the newly built Parkwood High marched down Main Street against the defeat of a bond issue. It would have paid for the desks and chairs that had yet to be purchased for the classrooms.
Russell with just a "bit" of pride called attention to the trophy case that stands in one of the halls of the current Joplin High School. He said that most of the trophies were garnered by members of the classes in the mid to late 1950s.
He and Lee, who had sat with him for a while, somehow got into a discussion about the old high schools in Joplin and their colors. They were in agreement that the red and green combination should have outlasted changes to blue/white, red/white then maroon. And nothing brings a tear to the eye than to recant an old school motto or song. "Dear old Joplin--we'll stand for you," one of them chanted before Lee got up to board the waiting trolley.
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