Over the course of the Pony Express’ eighteen-month life, a rich mythology grew up about the riders and their exploits. While only one rider was killed by Indians, the story became that his horse still safely arrived at its station, precious cargo intact. Another story told of Jack Keetley, who was said to have gone 340 miles without rest, fell asleep in his saddle, and again safely arrived at his destination. Then there was the story of Johnny Fry, the most popular contender for “first rider” status. Fry, a very handsome young man, supposedly had a following of young women along the route in Kansas. They would line up alongside the road and offer him cookies and sweets. However, Fry would be traveling at such a rate that he would often be unable to grab the treats, so one young woman put holes in the middle of her cookies so that he could grab them more easily. The birth, the story goes, of the do-nut.
Johnny Fry
Whether any of these stories are true or not is not the point–the point is simply that they make great stories. And the Pony Express has always made not just a great story, but a great American story. As folklore, these stories serve the same purposes that all folklore serves: entertainment, education, cultural validation. From its doomed-from-the-beginning origins, its handsome young riders, and its replacement by technology, the Pony Express has given a lot of mileage to St. Josephites and others.
And why not? A large part of the Pony Express’ appeal is that it ultimately failed–or at least was replaced when better options came along. As one writer colorfully put it, “In retrospect the Pony [Express rider]’s very failure appears to have worked like a bright polish on the radiant sheen of his splendor. Poverty seems to have beautified and strengthened his indomitable spirit and . . . encompassed his memory in a mighty aura of legend and fantasy.” The enterprise is recognized as a valiant band-aid effort; the march of technology, in the form of the telegraph, is proven to be inevitable. The stories thus support notions of technological progress and sets the Pony Express up as an enabler of that progress, the necessary sacrifice to the god of technology: that is where the Express’ power as a symbol lays.
The Pony Express’ financial failure is valuable to the stories’ symbolism in another regard. Part of the reason Russell, Majors & Waddell went broke was the failure of Boyd’s promise of government contracts. In a promotional brochure for Union Pacific written by Miss Mary Pack in 1924 called “The Romance of the Pony Express,” the author wrote, “It seems strange that although the Government was expending millions of dollars in fostering less successful mail routes, not one cent was advanced in the interest of the Pony Express.” The Pony Express thus supports a very western notion of distrust of government; it wasn’t the government that made the Pony Express run, but a rag-tag bunch of boys on horses.
The Pony Express wed commerce, westward expansion, and selfless bravery in equal measures, depicted in a series of commemorative stamps.
The true stars of these stories are, appropriately, the riders themselves. They hold a special place in the legend, because they have been imbued with all the qualities of both the western hero and the western victim, the cowboy and the Native American. One writer mentions that the Pony Express riders were termed things like “the Dauntless brigade,” “Messengers of Romance and Commerce,” and “Martyrs to the Cause of Patriotism and a newer and braver civilization.” The writings on the Pony Express are full of noble descriptions of these young men. “Carrying out their schedule became a religion with them,” Miss Pack wrote. “Their grim determination in the face of difficulties places them in the rack of heroes, yet heroism with them was never a self-conscious trait.”
Another writer describes them as “tough, brave, keen express riders,” few of whom “cringed or faltered along the way. Many kept to the schedule even when payless pay days had come and gone. Most of them gallantly rode headlong over mountains of loneliness, some down the bloodied path of death, but all into the infinity of proud glory.” Yet another, Mrs. Louis Platt Hauck, writing on the occasion of the St. Joseph Historical Pageant in 1923, states:
All but a few of the riders have disappeared on the long trail. Those who are left cherish tender, half sad memories of the days when to them was entrusted a duty which called for an endurance, a reckless courage to which to their descendants is well nigh incredible. . . . A touch of the charm of the unknown hanges about the names of those riders. It grips our imagination–that picture of a slim young figure with eyes asparkle in the joy of his task, spurred heels touching the sides of his willing horse, head upflung as he gallops toward the sunset. Behind him the safe, green hills of home; before him the monotonous prairie, the cruel desert, the lonely mountains.
The riders’ glory didn’t end with their last duty on the trail. the “survivors” of the Pony Express also found glory in modesty. the former riders, Miss Pack writes, “are reticent as to their part in the Pony Express and modestly assert that nothing remarkable ever happened to them.” In other words, the legend of the Pony Express has turned these men into noble savages, though more noble and less savage than the “drunken, lazy, quarrelsome, and altogether unworthy Sac and Fox and Ioway Indians” who had been moved from the territory twenty-four years earlier. But the riders occupy the same position as Native Americans in the story of the American West. They were the martyrs who bravely did their part in the march of progress, though their enterprise was doomed from the start.
Through the Gold Rush, St. Joseph learned to focus on the here and now, not to chase fanciful dreams as the ’49ers had. As a 1920s advertisement for the Empire Trust Company put it, “St. Joseph was then and is now in the vanguard of the Westward course of Empire. Shall we too be tricked by the color and glitter of distant sands, and leave behind, undeveloped, our fallow acres of potential diamonds–the countless opportunities for independence and fortune that lever lie in the accessible levels of our soil, industry, and commerce?”
Mssrs. Russell, Majors, and Waddell
Still, there was great profit to be made in moving people and materials west. The Pony Express was part of that trade. John M. Hockaday was said to have made $190,0o00 a year carrying mail and other cargo west; he eventually sold his business out to Russell, Majors & Waddell, the firm that founded the Pony Express. In 1915 E. L. McDonald and W.J. King looked back on those rough-and-tumble days of mail deliver by horse, writing, “People who travel to California in cushioned cars in these days can have but little conception of this gigantic enterprise and its offspring, the Pony Express.”
It was, in fact, a Californian who came up with the idea. California senator W.M. Gwin, traveling east from the Golden State with B.F. Ficklin, general superintendent of Russell, Majors & Waddell in the fall of 1854, realized the political value of establishing a faster mail route to California. The joke was that the senator’s term would expire before he made the trip from California to Washington, but more important was the need to keep California in the Union in the days leading to the Civil War.
Click to enlarge.
At the time, mail took 21 days to reach California via Panama, and the Union forces in the state needed to know what was happening in Washington and elsewhere more quickly than that–not to mention the thousands of settlers anxious to quicken their correspondence with friends and relatives back east.
So, as Gwin and Ficklin bumped over the “Central Route” from Sacramento through Salt Lake City to St. Joseph, the senator discussed his concerns with the cargo company representative. Several years later, Gwin finally convinced W.H. Russell of the need for a quick overland route, and Russelll convinced his partners to at least go along with, if not actually endorse, the Pony Express.
It is interesting to note that the Pony Express was designed, in part, to save California for the Union. Mayor M. Jeff “Swamp Fox” Thompson may have been unaware of that fact as he loaded the first mailbag on the first horse and sent it on its way on April 3, 1860, almost exactly a year before the
The Confederate attack on Fort Sumter launched the Civil War.
Battle of Fort Sumter. St. Joseph was largely a Southern town, and when the war started and the mayor’s term had expired, he stormed the St. Joseph post office and tore down the United States flag there.
Another consideration is that the enterprise was a financial failure. The Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company, the firm Russell, Majors & Waddell organized to run the Pony Express, sought to convince the government to buy into the route. Secretary of War John B. Floyd promised Russell $2,000,000 in government contracts, but Congress refused to approve them. That, combined with stretching of the telegraph from St. Jo to Salt Lake City, doomed the enterprise, and Russell, Majors & Waddell went belly up. Finally, for an enterprise that has become the center of a community’s dreams about its past and hopes for the future, some of the most basic information about the Pony Express is simply missing.
The first rider–whoever he was–departs from St. Joseph.
For example, who was the first rider? No one seems to know, though “a large crowd whooped and applauded” as he–whoever he was–left town on April 3. Some say it was a young man named Alex Carlyle, some Billy Richardson, and some Johnny Fry. Similarly, some accounts have the first horse leaving at 5:00, some at 7:30. Other details of the trip, however, are crystal clear; several accounts offer the image of members of the crown plucking hairs from the horse’s tail as souvenirs.
Whatever the truth of this first historic ride, the newspapers went to work on the story immediately, instantly romanticizing the event. When the St. Joseph rider’s hooves reached California soil, the St. Joseph Free Democrat rhapsodized,
They are in California, leaping over its golden sands, treading its busy streets. the courser has unrolled to us the great American panorama, allowed us to glance at the home of one million people, and has put a girdle around the earth in 409 minutes. Verily the riding is like the riding of Jehu, the son of Nimshi, for he rideth furiously. Take out your watch. We are eight days from New York, 18 from London. The race is to the swift.
Did such a dramatic scene ever occur? We may never know.
Flowery rhetoric aside, the young men–boys, really–who ran the Pony Express for that year and a half indeed accomplished something great. The trip from St. Joseph to Sacramento was nearly 2,000 miles over every obstacle imaginable. A network of stations were set up along the route, one ever ten miles or so, for a total of 190 stations between Missouri and California; here, riders turned in their horses, which were good for only about ten miles each. the riders themselves rode up to to thirty miles a day before passing the reins to a fresh horseman. the entire route was completed in ten days, meaning that on any given day about seven riders needed to cover 190 miles. By comparison, the average speed for a wagon pulled by an ox or mule was fourteen miles a day.
But the facts and statistics tell only part of the store. The Pony Express’ real power as a civic symbol, then and now, lay in the legend and mythology that grew up around the enterprise and made it a key part of St. Joseph’s civic identity.
The man who founded St. Joseph, Joseph Roubidoux, foresaw the bustling city of the 1930s dimly, if at all, when he first lay eyes the site in 1825.
Joseph Roubidoux IV had been born on August 10, 1783, to Joseph Roubidoux III, owner of 1,725 acres in St. Louis’ St. Ferdinand’s common fields. In 1789, at the tender age of sixteen, Joseph IV headed north to Council Bluffs, Iowa, and began trading there as an independent agent. In 1822 John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company bought him out and asked him to stay away from Council Bluffs so that they could establish a chain of trading posts. Three years later, the company offered Roubidoux $1,800 a year to work for them on Roy’s Branch, a tributary of Blacksnake Creek, which still flows underneath St. Joseph. He stayed for a year, then moved his post to where the Blacksnake enters the Missouri River, about where the city’s Jules Street–named for one of Roubidoux’s eight children–ends today.
At the time, Roubidoux’s Black Snake Post was not yet in the state of Missouri; it was in Indian Territory, controlled and populated by the Sac, Fox, and Iowa tribes. The Missouri border shot straight north from Arkansas, cutting off what we now know as northwest Missouri. Roubidoux didn’t mind –he relied on Indians for his trade , after all–but the other settlers who were beginning to enter the area did. It meant that they had to cut across Indian Territory to get to the Missouri River, and it also meant that the beautiful, rolling, fertile land was not open to settlement.
In 1835, General Andrew S. Hughes, the first Indian agent for the United States in northwest Missouri, asked to include the land west of the border to the river as part of the state. On September 17, 1836, Superintendent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs William Clark granted his wish. Clark gave the Indians $7,500 for the land, moved them across the Missouri River–partly into what is now Doniphan County, Kansas–and presented them with “five comfortable houses . . . an interpreter, a farmer, a blacksmith, and a schoolmaster,” as well as “rations for one year and agricultural implement for five years.” As an early twentieth century history of Missouri’s Buchanan County romantically put it: “The red man was told to move on, and resumed his pilgrimage toward the setting sun, and the white man promptly built his cabin where the Indian’s tepee erst had stood.”
With the “Platte Purchase” completed, settlers streamed in to be near Roubidoux’s trading post. He began selling and leasing land to settlers, finally having the town platted and registered in St. Louis on July 26, 1843.
A map of Missouri before the Platte Purchase. (Click to expand.)
At the time, the town’s population was five hundred; three years later, it had almost doubled. Of its 936 residents,nearly a third were white men over 45 years of age.
The Platte Purchase territory, in red.
Meanwhile, elements of “civilization” came quickly to the growing settlement. Charles and Elias Perry set up their dry-goods shop in 1843. Hull and carter and E. Livermore & Co. built their “business house” a year later. By 1845, the first three-story building had risen from Main and Francis Streets, and the first newspaper, William Ridenbaugh’s Weekly Gazette, had begun publishing. the years 1848-49 saw “many hopes fulfilled.” According to one history, 143 buildings were built, 19 stores were operating with a combined stock worth some $400,000, and the city’s first brewer appeared–a sign of civilization if ever there was one.
For those who could afford it, a clipper ship could answer California’s Siren call. For everyone else, there was the trail. (Click to expand.)
By the winter of 1849 Gold Rush fever had come to St. Joseph, a jumping-off point for those who dreamed of riches in California and other western lands. Between April 1 and June 15, 508 wagons left the city bound for the west, carrying more than six thousand people. The next year, emigration west was estimated to be more than 100,000 people, half of whom are thought to have left from St. Jo–a staggering number for a town that had been one-fiftieth as large just three years earlier.
This Kurz painting shows the cautious ambiguity Native Americans must have felt toward the new St. Joseph settlers.
“The city was so packed full of people,” Swiss artist Rudolph Frederick Kurz wrote, “that tents were pitchedabout the city and the opposite bank of the river in such numbers that we seemed to be besieged by an army,” but the merchants loved it. Many of St. Joseph’s great fortunes–the Wyeths, the Tootles, the Krugs–can trace their beginnings to the gold seekers of 1849.
Things didn’t turn out as well for many of the adventurers. Having spent most or all of their money on supplies in St. Joseph, they had to come back, tails between their legs, days, weeks, or months later when they found themselves without funds on the unforgiving prairie. It was a hard lesson for them, and one that would shape the city’s identity for decades to come.
Around 1968, my family–at the time, just my parents, my sister, Marilyn, and I–moved to St. Joseph, Missouri. We rented a modest home on Trevillian Drive, a little loop of a street that starts and ends at the Belt Highway. The semicircle of earth between our house and the Belt was empty land, populated only by a few trees; one directly across the street from us was felled by an ice storm. At the north end was a small tourist attraction–the home where outlaw Jesse James was shot and killed in April of 1882.
St. Joseph, Missouri, Looking South from Wyeth Hill
St. Joseph has clung to James’ notorious life and death since that day as one of its claims to fame. Another is the Pony Express. Both remain as powerful symbols for this small midwestern city of about 76,000 people on the bluffs above the Missouri River in the northwestern part of the state.
Like all cities, St. Joseph is a place of leftovers. Stunning buildings from the town’s prosperous early days, restored Victorian homes (and some waiting to be restored), a still handsome high-rise that houses a retirement home, a 1920s-era movie palace, three columns salvaged from the Roubidoux Hotel before it was imploded in the 1970s, a defunct downtown department store, and the stockyards: all stand as testament to St. Joseph’s booming past.
Presiding over all of this history is the image of the Pony Express rider, straining forward, riding forever west with his packets of mail at his side. It’s an image that gets a lot of mileage in St. Jo. The archetypal statue in downtown went up in 1940. Across the street, the Southwestern Bell building features a triptych relief illustrating the role of the Pony Express and then the telegraph in opening the American west–ironically, the very technology that ended the novel mail delivery system. A few blocks west a mural depicts a Pony Express rider morphing into a jet airplane. The German-American Bank building now houses the Pony Express Community Bank. Out on the Belt Highway, just down the road a mile or so from where I grew up and near my high school, the Pony Express Motel long boasted a sign with a Pony Express rider astride a horse. The horse’s legs pumped furiously in red neon.
Older cities, like St. Louis, have long histories of shifting community symbols and identities. Over St. Louis’ 200-plus years, it has been the Mound City, recognizing the Native American lands which once dotted the area; the land of the Crusader King, named for the statue of King Louis XIV left over from the 1904 World’s Fair; and of course the Gateway City, due to the glorious Gateway Arch.
The Missouri Theater, Completed in 1927
In contrast, St. Joseph has stuck to its identity as a town of yore bound to both vision and violence–in other words, the Old West. A few years ago visitors traveling west on Interstate 70 toward St. Joseph found signs reading “Rails, Trails, and Mail.” Earlier the signs neatly joined the yin and yang of the town’s history: “Where the Pony Express began and Jesse James ended.”
Sold: 2840 Plattsburg Avenue, Winter 1970-1971
In 1997 I went back to St. Joseph for a week to help my dad paint our family home. About twenty-five years earlier we had moved from Trevillian Drive to the first and only home my parents would ever own. It was bigger than the Trevillian Drive home, and it needed to be. My brother Paul had been born in 1969, followed by David in 1971. Another brother, Chris, would come at the end of 1972. The house was at the end of a block-long street called Plattsburg venue. It jutted off of South 28th Street, which was the city’s eastern limit in the late 1890s. I still remember seeing the stop sign at the intersection of South 28th and Agency Road on our early (maybe the first?) visit to the house, and rummaging through the home with my sister to find odd-colored rocks and other goodies mysteriously hiding in the closets.
Not much had changed since I left home in 1984. The boulevard system that abutted our property line was still a stunning monument to 1920s-era urban planning. The twenty-seven-mile system of gently curving boulevard was still nestled among a carpet of green and criss-cross of creeks, one of which flowed very near our house. The city was still sharply divided along racial lines, with the black community largely where it had been before, west of 22nd Street, north of Mitchell, and south of Krug Park. The wealthier neighborhoods still looked wealthy, the poorer neighborhoods still looked poor, and home still looked like home.
The lack of change shouldn’t have surprised me. More than half a century ago, the WPA Guide to 1930s Missouri described my hometown like this:
The Idyll: Our house is somewhere among the trees in the center of this scene, taken from the boulevard above the Parkway.
St. Joseph (814 alt., 75,711 pop.), which covers the bluffs that overlook the Missouri River and the grain and grazing lands of the western prairie, once bestrode the roaring trade lanes to California and Mexico. Today, it is Missouri’s third largest city, and an important grain, livestock, manufacturing and wholesale center. Here is the center of the fifth largest meat-pacing industry in the world, out of which has risen a modern city of skyscrapers and chromium-plated facades. But even in the maturity of its development, St. Joseph keeps its sidewalk lounging chairs, and clings to the river and to memories of the wagon trials and the Pony Express of its early days.
From whose labors did this metropolis arise, this curious place of both modernity and memory? Answering that requires a trip back 235 years and across the state, to St. Louis.
Birthdays in the age of Facebook remind me of the chapters of my life. If you made a Venn diagram of the more than 100 people who wished me a happy birthday on Facebook today, it would be comprised of eleven circles with the following labels: family, pre-grade school, grade school, high school, college-Kansas City, college-Columbia, MoPIRG, University of Missouri Press, Missouri Historical Society, Ameren, Washington University. There would be some overlap between a few of them, but mostly they’d be distinct circles. The overlap they all share would be Facebook.
Birthdays were a big deal for us growing up. Not as big a deal as for kids today, with the orchestrated parties and guest lists and thank-you notes–but maybe an even bigger deal because they were not that. They were mainly family events. My mom had a book, a pamphlet, really, of different cake designs. Every birthday for all five of us she would make a cake from the pamphlet after the birthday boy or girl chose the design. I don’t remember any of us having the same cake twice or the same cake as anyone else. They involved a lot of cake cutting and cake pasting with cake frosting and cake decorating. I remember a giraffe, a rocket, a cat … in the one at the right, from my fifth birthday, it was a house. We would gather around the kitchen table to sing the birthday song, Catholicized as:
Happy Birthday to You
Happy Birthday to You
May Mary and Joseph
Smile down upon you
Then we’d blow out the candles, and my dad would playfully swat our butts, one swat for each year. Plus one to grow on, and a pinch to grow an inch.
A birthday was also a time for going out to eat, which we didn’t do often. Again, not like today. Even McDonald’s was exotic, because it was not home. And again, the birthday boy or girl got to pick. Chain steak places like Sizzlin’ Sirloin were the absolute outer limits of our imaginations. For senior prom, my date and I drove the hour to Kansas City, where we were served prime rib au jus in the rotating restaurant atop a downtown hotel. I had no idea what to do with au jus, and neither did she. I poured it over the meat, messily, because au jus cups–as I’ve experienced at countless wedding receptions since–are made for dipping, not pouring.
For my sixth birthday, a bike.
My favorite birthday ever was my twelfth. I asked for, and got from my mom and dad, an orange plastic portable cassette recorder from Radio Shack. It altered my understanding of time. Conversations, television shows, music–I could record anything and freeze it forever. The idea of captured time, preserved time, fascinated me. I spent the day recording things, and recording things became an obsession. Skits I made up, The Gong Show, Saturday Night Live, conversations: they were all preserved on a tape that I kept and listened to for years afterward. The following Christmas my sister gave me cassettes: Styx, The Grand Illusion; Queen, Jazz. I listened to those tapes over and over on our annual pilgrimage to Kansas that Christmas, listening raptly with a single ear bud shoved in my head.
Exactly forty years later, I’m still fascinated by captured time. But the people from my Venn diagram, while necessarily representing some part of my past, are also my present. I am lucky to have lived long enough, healthily enough, and happily enough to have had all of these chapters, which most people can only dream about, and to still be in touch with people from each of them. I am beyond grateful.
The east end of the creek’s concrete and limestone bridge is to the right of center.
If the creek that flowed 100 yards east of our front door was my childhood’s lifeblood, the concrete and limestone bridge that crossed the stream was its heart.
The bridge had been built sometime between the 1950s or ’60s and eternity. The north side served as a dam. The west end was raised above ground before descending to the bridge itself. At the east end of the bridge another set of four or five more steps ascended to another raised section. One of the workmen had left a single hand print and a boot print in the concrete on the east side. No initials, no date. I liked to put my tiny hands and feet in the impressions, which gathered water when it rained. It was touching the past.
A mulberry tree and thick stands of nettles–we called it itchweed–grew along the west bank. In summer I’d climb the tree to gather the berries and put them in my cereal. Water pooled a foot and a half deep on the north side of the bridge before flowing over it, making a waterfall on the south side. Long strands of slimy green moss clung to the bridge beneath the flowing water. The Bell kids called it pussy hair.
The Bell kids–Rick, Sally, and Billy–lived just west of us, where our block-long street T-boned with the north-south main drag. Their house sat on a small hill. Next door to them, to the south, was an abandoned frame house, rumored to be haunted. Once we gathered the courage to creep up on the porch and look in the window. Dust-covered dishes and empty coffee cans on a table, frozen forever.
Behind their back yard were woods and a garage. A farm was tucked back in the woods. We’d hear roosters crowing sometimes. Behind the garage the Bell kids smoked cigarettes and played with matches stolen from their parents.
Me, c. 1970.
Rick was the oldest, about my sister’s age, four years older than me. He was quiet, thoughtful. Sally, the middle child, liked to place crank calls to the male burlesque club downtown, where we suspected their mother hung out. Billy was my age, a bed-wetter with bright red hair and freckles. One day he lounged around his room naked, displaying the angry rash on his chronically wet skin.
The Bell kids’ parents were shadowy figures. Their father drove a truck for a living. Now and then he’d bring home carnival trinkets for us: knock-off Hot Wheels cars, plastic toy soldiers, candy. He also kept a box of old Playboy magazines in the parents’ bedroom, an extension to the original house. Their mother seemed to have grown up hard. She kept the kids in line the best she could, but she often wasn’t home after school, and their dad would be on the road.
Sometimes I would spend a Friday night at the Bells’ house. The night always started with excitement and ended with Saturday morning disappointment–just another day of grocery shopping and hanging around the house or the creek and waiting for Saturday night TV and Sunday morning church. I remember trying to sleep on the floor of the Bells’ living room once, cars hissing by in the fresh rain outside, The Untouchables on TV, counting dead cockroaches under the furniture.
The creek is hidden over the rise just beyond the two dead trees, looking east from our house. The field is in the center, rising to the parkway.
Some combination of the Bell kids were often at the creek with me. The creek flowed through the Parkway, a 26-mile stretch of green space and curving boulevard connecting St. Joseph, Missouri’s, Krug Park on the north side to Hyde Park on the south. Designed in 1918, it is one part of the city that has retained its dignity and utility since its conception. The section of the Parkway west of the creek joined our lawn; a row of bushes and our two apple trees informally marked the property line, but the Parkway gave us a vast back yard.
On the east side of the creek, a football-field-sized expanse of flat green rose to a hill. From the top of the hill I could survey it all–the gentle green slope, the field, the creek, our yard, our trees, our house. We sled down it in the winter.
We didn’t often play in the field. Sometimes we’d fly kites there, but being on the other side of the creek, it seemed like a million miles away. But one night, as the sun was setting behind our house, Rick Bell, some other kids, and I decided to use the field to hunt fireflies or, as we called them, lightning bugs.
Hunting lightning bugs was a nightly ritual in the early summer. Our yard was perfect for it, being filled with trees and bushes and a grape vine that gave the insects cover until the sky started turning pink, then purple, then black. Slowly they would start to venture out, glowing brightly with their yellow-green lights. They were easy to catch, especially before dark. Their lights would shine just long enough to give a sense of their trajectory, and then we could follow the shadows of their bodies against the gloaming. Slow and clumsy, they were easy to grab from the air, leaving a queer grassy scent on our fingers.
A vast back yard.
We usually hunted lightning bugs and put them in a glass jar so we could watch them crawl around and glow for an hour or so, then we would release them. We’d put some blades of grass in the jar, punch holes in the metal lid with an ice pick for air.
We weren’t always so friendly, though. Sometimes we’d take a few and turn them over, clenched in trembling fingers, while we pulled out the light with the other hand. We’d stick the light on our fingers like a ring, waving our hands around in the growing darkness.
That night in the field we lined our jars up on the east end of the bridge, near the foot- and hand prints. Rick stood at the east end of the bridge while we ran through the night collecting our lightning bugs. When I had several in my hand, I raced to Rick at the bridge for him to help put them in the jar. I held my hand out carefully as he placed his hand below mine so I could scrape the bugs into it. As soon as he had them in his hand, he threw them on the bridge, stomped them with his foot, and smeared them across the concrete, leaving shining streaks of bleeding color against the gray slab.
II. Eggs
Witnesses.
God started taking my mother’s voice around 1980. This was my 14-year-old perception: God was taking her voice. At the end of that year, Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon outside his New York City home. So God took John Lennon, too.
My mother’s singing skills were legendary at our parish, St. Francis Xavier, where she sang every Sunday. I went to the parish grade school, and kids sometimes imitated her amazing voice–not in a mocking way, but in admiration. They were jealous. I knew that.
What was originally thought to be a cold, then laryngitis, was eventually diagnosed as Laryngeal dystonia. Though she would never solo in church again, she continued to sing in the choir until she died, from leukemia, in 2014. My dad would drive her to Columbia, Missouri, several times a year–a 350-mile round trip–for BoTox injections into her vocal cords. For weeks after the treatment mom’s voice would be high-pitched and mousy, but it was easier for her to talk, if not sing.
But in the years before all this there was rushing around the house on Sunday mornings. We would all go together to church, and it was a scramble to get everyone dressed and to the car. Mom would be working on dinner so it would be ready to eat when we got home–pounding meat, quartering chicken, peeling vegetables.
To the north of our house was a clean, 1950s-era subdivision called Strader Terrace. I went to school with some Strader Terrace kids, but more of them were public-school kids. They seemed dangerous to me, unpredictable. One of them, Wally Bennett, terrorized me after school one day. I ran home and hid in my room and asked God to do something terrible to him.
Outside of our dining-room window was a tree, and in the tree birds of some sort had made a nest and laid eggs. My mom could tell you what kinds of birds they were. She loved birds, because they sang and flitted about and were pretty and harmless. She faithfully kept feeders outside the kitchen window so she could watch them in the morning and as she was doing dishes at the sink.
“Red Birds,” Jeffrey Moulton Benevedes, 2016
One Sunday afternoon after church we were gathered around the table in the dining room, mom going between the dining room and the kitchen bringing in dinner. Suddenly, shadows appeared on the window. Mom stopped what she was doing, and we all looked outside. Strader Terrace kids in our yard. What did they want?
We all watched as the kids started looking around the birds’ nest in the tree. Then one of them reached into the nest and crushed all the eggs with his thumb.
My mother gasped as her free hand instinctively went to her chest. Then, after a moment, she went back to serving us dinner.
III. Mysteries
The Parkway
One great thing about growing up on the Parkway was that it connected not only the city’s north and south sides, but also the high schools that anchored both, Lafayette and Benton. In between the Parkway passed the city’s largest high school, Central, a few miles southwest of what would be my high school, Bishop LeBlond.
The Parkway was thus a thoroughfare for partying teenagers, with lots of places to pull off the road and disappear into the woods with a six pack or two. The green swards along the Parkway route itself were also convenient dumping grounds for empties passed from passing cars or, if the police were in pursuit, full cans.
This became important to me because when I was eleven or twelve, I became interested in collecting beer cans. I’ve since realized that many American boys became fascinated with beer cans around this time, the late 1970s. It was the beginning of massive consolidation in the brewing industry. St. Joseph had been home to the M.K. Goetz brewery, which was purchased by Pearl Brewing in 1961. The St. Joseph Pearl brewery closed in 1976, and by the time I was collecting beer cans, both brands, and Country Club, another Goetz product, were hard to find in St. Joe.
The M.K. Goetz Brewery, St. Joseph, Mo.
There was a parkway overpass just east of the bridge at the creek, and it was great beer-can hunting grounds. For some reason teenagers seemed to enjoy throwing cans off of things, like overpasses, and the grassless loess soil beneath the overpass was largely undisturbed when I started exploring it–graffiti notwithstanding. I’d find older cans there, even some coveted “flattops,” manufactured before ring-pull cans became ubiquitous.
The overpass was a place of mystery for me because it was rumored that our block-long street, Plattsburg Avenue, had once continued east from where it ended at our house and continued on, over the creek, under the overpass, and on to Plattsburg, Missouri, some thirty miles away. While this may not have been completely true, there was a road cut approaching the bridge from the west side that continuing on to the east on the other side, so it was easy to imagine a street having been there once. In the late 1990s I confirmed these suspicions when I found a map that did indeed show Plattsburg Avenue extending to the east beyond where it ends today and under the Parkway, though it was not clear whether it continued on to the city of Plattsburg.
One day as I approached the underpass, I saw a brown paper bag on the ground. The teenagers often threw cans away in bags, so I bent to pick it up. The bag was empty. Beneath it lay a bloody thing on the grass, dead and stripped of its fur, black holes where the eyes had been.
I have never not been looking for work. Even during my longest tenure, a twelve-plus-year stint at a publicly traded utility company, I kept sending out resumes and cover letters. Three in 2000. Five in 2006. Thirty-one in 2011. So I have a good understanding of the ins and outs of job hunting–and I have been on the other side several times. Here is what I have learned:
Companies rarely send out acknowledgment of having received your materials.
Interviews, whether by phone or in person, are not promises of employment.
If something is going to pan out, it’s going to pan out quickly.
It can take weeks or months to make decisions and to communicate those back to applicants–though again, in most cases a response will never come.
Having played this game for so long I keep my expectations in check, but recently I started subscribing to a service that posts questions and comments from job hunters. These posts tell me, first, that a lot of people out there need work more than I ever have, and without the luxury of looking for a job while having a job. However, they also tell me that people entering the job market often have no idea what to expect. Here are some samples:
“I would like to know, why is it when you know a company is looking for help, and I am trying to deal with you all, you have the job posted, I have placed an application, but you guys give me the run around ! What’s up with that ?”
“I’m an 18 year old girl with a disabled mom and two younger brothers. So of course that means its time to go out and get a job. Its so devastating when you put out applications and attend many interviews and still no luck. I’m not sure if its something I’m doing wrong but why is this so hard? Gosh we definitely need another income and it doesn’t seem like employers care about that. I’m not going to give up though.”
“Have finally thrown in the towel. Have been unemployed for 9 months. First registered with around 6 agencies, it came to only two finding me work, but nothing tangible, like long-term. Too date I have been on numerous interviews, one part-time job, which lasted a week. Another one gave me the job, then went with someone else because I couldn’t start until two weeks. What next? I will have to relocate. This is a new year and I am frustrated and have given up, sorry to say.”
“I’m soooo tired of putting apps online and no one calls you back. What’s the point? It’s really frustrating to get no feed back on any of them. I have valid driver’s license, no bad background, Clean system. So what’s the problem employers?”
Well, there are a couple of problems. First, employers get a lot of applications from applicants who aren’t qualified for the position. When people get desperate enough, they’ll apply for anything, which wastes their time and energy as well as that of their prospective employer. Second, a lot of people are looking for jobs even though the unemployment rate is low. Currently the rate is 4.1 percent, but that translates to 6.6 million people. Finally, I don’t think people know how to present themselves to potential employers. Granted, an online message board is not the best indicator of a person’s grasp of grammar and communication skills, but employers have high standards because they can. 6.6 million people!
The problem transcends statistics. This week I interviewed for a position with an international, privately held company headquartered in St. Louis. Here are some of the instructions I received for the interview:
Clothing must be cleaned and pressed.
Shirts and blouses should be freshly laundered and tucked into pants or skirts.
Sunglasses should be worn outside the office only.
No jeans, denim fabric, or casual slacks.
No shorts.
Undergarments should be worn.
I am sure that each of these items is on the list because it is something the employer has actually seen–and in some cases now is desperately trying to un-see. Maybe it only happened once, but the fact that it happened at all indicates that many applicants don’t understand the cold realities of the job market–whether because they aren’t around people who model job-appropriate behaviors, because no institutions have helped them learn those behaviors, or both.
Like so many things in contemporary society, I think it comes down to social class. The irony is that the same economic forces that make jobs so competitive perpetuate the conditions that keep people from moving up financially. Individuals can temper their expectations. They can tuck in shirts and blouses. But they need help from all of us to climb the ladder.
I dreamed this morning that I had failed to complete an assigned reading in school about Theseus. The teacher–whom I recognized as Mrs. Tyre, my fifth-grade teacher who will figure in at least one future memoir piece–mentioned the name several times. My memory of the other students is hazy, but I think they were high-school people in a grade-school class.
I was late entering the room. When I finally did enter, I was panicking, knowing I had not read the assignment about Theseus. The class was arranged in a circle. Mrs. Tyre looked at me as if to say, “Well, it’s about time!” and it became clear that no one had read the assignment. She looked directly at me and said, “Tim, can you tell us about the story of Theseus?”
I woke up in a start because I knew I did not know the story either dreaming or awake. Why Theseus? I vaguely thought he might be a figure from Greek mythology, but I hadn’t studied Greek mythology in high school or college. However, lately I have been wondering if there is a mythological figure who represents a half-formed person–a person frozen between childhood and adulthood.
A quick Google search uncovered the story of Theseus that I did remember learning in grade school, or at least at that age. Theseus killed the Minotaur, a creature to whom Athenian children were sacrificed regularly to appease the Minotaur’s father, Minos. Interestingly, the Minotaur was half bull, half human–like the half-formed person I’d been thinking about. When Theseus left Athens to find the Minotaur, he raised a black sail on the ship. After he had completed the task, he was to change the sail to white and return, indicating that the threat was gone.
The Minotaur lived at the center of a maze. To kill him, Theseus unwound a ball of thread as he traveled throughout the maze. This allowed him to find his way out after he had killed the Minotaur. However, he forgot to change the sail from black to white, so that when his father saw the ship returning with the black sail up, he assumed Theseus had been killed and, in turn, killed himself.
Many people know that for more than two years we have been helping Kate deal with depression and related problems. I think child-devouring depression is the Minotaur. Theseus represents us in our quest to kill the depression and ease her suffering. The maze are the dozens of medications and combinations of medications we have tried that have failed.
This month we have embarked on a last-ditch effort involving a non-pharmaceutical intervention. The treatment is still under way, and though we are seeing changes, it will take time to know if we have finally succeeded in our quest to slay our Minotaur, and if we can begin to follow the thread back to a more “normal” life.
The question is: If we succeed, will we remember to change the sail from black to white, so that others see in us hope rather than despair, or will we continue to carry the scars of the past two years before us?
Tom Petty, who died last year, wrote two of my favorite lines of 1970s rock ‘n’ roll: “Two cars parked on the overpass/rocks hit the water like broken glass.”
At various times I’ve tried to unravel why those two lines have lodged in my head . The first line is great because there is so much that could be behind it. Parked on an overpass. Why? What’s happening? Make-out session, knife fight, accident, throwing-up drunk? The second is great because it combines, in seven words, imagery that is both aural and visual, creating not just an unforgettable scene for the listener but a scene that is unforgettable for the song’s character.
It occurred to me this week that my obsession with writing memoir is, as I’ve written before, not just about remembering the good old days, but about capturing events that can never be again, and that in their never-can-be-againess, have their painful poignancy and power.
One mysterious example for me: I’m 10 or 11 years old, walking home from school. It’s a sunny afternoon, late winter, and it’s warmer than it’s been–above freezing, maybe for the first time in weeks. There is still some snow on the ground, but it’s melting, slushy on the grass and sidewalks. I look down to see where water had been frozen along the curb, but it’s melted underneath now, and I can see through the remaining ice the water flowing underneath, and I can hear it, too. It is beautiful and promising; winter is ending, spring is coming. Not quite an olive branch carried by a dove on the 40th day of the flood, but something like that. And that image–the sun glistening off the ice, the cold water rushing underneath, the feel of cold and warmth and change in the air, all at the same time–it sticks with me. When I think about it long enough even now, 40 years later, it still seems fresh and hopeful and sad.
Ice shatters. Glass shatters. Waves splash. Rocks fall. A ker-plunk and a splash and concentric waves fading at the edges.
I see myself now, standing in my rubber boots, book bag in hand, looking at the crystal-clear ice with the water flowing underneath, hearing the gurgle of it, the air fresh and cold–today I think, what wonders am I missing around me now? What is there, still in my past, that will never be again exactly as it was? And how can I capture it with just words so that others can see them, hear them, feel them?
The Pony Express’ financial failure is valuable to the stories’ symbolism in another regard. Part of the reason Russell, Majors & Waddell went broke was the failure of Boyd’s promise of government contracts. In a promotional brochure for Union Pacific written by Miss Mary Pack in 1924 called “The Romance of the Pony Express,” the author wrote, “It seems strange that although the Government was expending millions of dollars in fostering less successful mail routes, not one cent was advanced in the interest of the Pony Express.” The Pony Express thus supports a very western notion of distrust of government; it wasn’t the government that made the Pony Express run, but a rag-tag bunch of boys on horses.
Another writer describes them as “tough, brave, keen express riders,” few of whom “cringed or faltered along the way. Many kept to the schedule even when payless pay days had come and gone. Most of them gallantly rode headlong over mountains of loneliness, some down the bloodied path of death, but all into the infinity of proud glory.” Yet another, Mrs. Louis Platt Hauck, writing on the occasion of the St. Joseph Historical Pageant in 1923, states:
The riders’ glory didn’t end with their last duty on the trail. the “survivors” of the Pony Express also found glory in modesty. the former riders, Miss Pack writes, “are reticent as to their part in the Pony Express and modestly assert that nothing remarkable ever happened to them.” In other words, the legend of the Pony Express has turned these men into noble savages, though more noble and less savage than the “drunken, lazy, quarrelsome, and altogether unworthy Sac and Fox and Ioway Indians” who had been moved from the territory twenty-four years earlier. But the riders occupy the same position as Native Americans in the story of the American West. They were the martyrs who bravely did their part in the march of progress, though their enterprise was doomed from the start.
