Monthly Archives: November 2014

Branding the Ozarks, Tourism

RUINS OF DOGPATCH USA – PART 2

November 28, 2014 • 0 Comments

Billboard two miles north of the ruins of Dogpatch USA on Arkansas Highway 7, south of Harrison.

Across the road from the peeling Dogpatch USA billboard is a contemporary smaller sign illustrating the Edenic recreational opportunities of the Buffalo River country. This wild and scenic stream in 1972 became the first National River and is administered by the U. S. Park Service. (click to enlarge).

A keen observer of popular culture, Roger Brown, published an article called Dogpatch USA: The Road to Hokum, published in Southern Changes, The Journal of Southern Regional Council (1993). Brown actually set foot in the park shortly before its demise:

Dogpatch USA is a classic American roadside attraction. It’s a basket of cornpone and hillbilly hokum in a beautiful Ozark mountain setting. Nearby is a waterfall, limestone caverns, and a spring that flows clear and steadily into a creek that has powered a gristmill for more than 150 years. The decor is bumpkin kitsch.

Though Brown enjoyed the “hokum”, he found the place had “surreal” aspects that the patrons likely missed:

What most of the visitors didn’t fully realize, however, was that they were participating in a moment rich with a sort of postmodern poetics which has since become commonplace: The Arkansas syndicate that built Dogpatch USA was peddling colonial stereotypes as family entertainment, and at the core of the park’s attraction was a complex melody conjured by the dueling banjos of simulation and authenticity.

He interviewed Melvin Bell who bought the park from investors who acquired it at a bankruptcy auction held on the courthouse steps in Jasper after Odum went bust. The auctioneer’s wife once played “Daisy Mae” at Dogpatch. Bell thought the growth that was happening 45 minutes away at Branson would help Dogpatch. Brown also gave some credence to that incorrect idea.

Since 1906, Branson had aggressively pursued tourism with the assistance of Harold Bell Wright and the Missouri Pacific Railroad. A four lane highway now connected the Shepherd of the Hills country with an interstate highway. Silver Dollar City, Dogpatch USA’s competitor, didn’t lock in its image to a clever, but sarcastic comic strip. Folksy Romanticism was in. Irony apparently didn’t appeal to the generation who saw nothing wrong with protesters like leftist folk singer Joan Baez, who Capp had satirized as “Jonnie Phoanie”. Though Silver Dollar City tolerated some fringe hillbilly-ness the park played up a hillfolk portrayal a la Harold Bell Wright and emphasized native crafts. Al Capp might have done a takeoff on the hillbilly Las Vegas, as the neon lit booming Branson was misleadingly called. Early on, he had ripped Shepherd of the Hills in his comic strip.

In the spring of 2014, we wandered through the abandoned Lil’ Abner themed venture in Northern Arkansas. That summer, newspaper articles began popping up announcing that the long closed attraction had a new owner. Charles “Bud” Pelsor and investor James Robertson and wife of Newbury Park, California had purchased 400 acres of the troubled property. Other sections had been already disposed of.

Pelsor, inventor of the Spill Proof Dog Bowl, had big plans. He announced he would restore the old grist mill and with grain milled on the grounds bake artisan bread. He wanted to fix the train tracks that once circled the park and buy back the little locomotive. Trout would be stocked and served at a restaurant. Fresh water mussels would produce pearls. Dilapidated buildings would be reborn. No more locals dressed as characters from a hillbilly comic strip would communicate with visitors in an anachronistic vernacular regional dialect. In other words, Pelsor is not going to go hillbilly with his theme park. The Harrison Daily Times ran an article titled “This Place is Magical” on September 3, 2014 that said: “The park will be geared to eco-tourism. They will plant gardens, orchards, and vineyards.”

Click any image to start the slideshow of Crystal Payton’s photographs of abandoned Dogpatch USA, May, 2014.

Branding the Ozarks, Tourism

DOGPATCH USA THEME PARK – PART 1

November 26, 2014 • 0 Comments

When life and art collide the result is not always explosive. When Al Capp’s cartoon hillbillies were played by real Arkansas youngsters in a Dogpatch built of abandoned log cabins and sawmill shacks in an Ozark hollow, the result was more of an implosion. The failure of Dogpatch U.S.A. had the hollow poetry of “not with a bang but a whimper.” The deflation of interest in hillbillies in mass media in the late 1970s and ‘80s, along with the disappearance of Li’l Abner from the funny papers, were not its only challenges. Developers’ fantasies collided with geographic reality. An amusement park is a very real, material thing that has environmental specificities. A comic strip is a paper-thin illusion. Dogpatch USA was located on a winding two-lane blacktop, miles from anywhere and years too late.

Given the history of Arkansans trying to disassociate themselves from the Arkansas Traveler legend and other rude, backwoods mythos, it’s surprising that it was a group of local businessmen who dreamed up the idea. While Li’l Abner often had satiric sequences with little or no mountaineer clichés, its central characters were indisputably hillbillies who lived in a southern mountain setting. Capp had been pitched on a theme park based on Li’l Abner before, but he bit when Harrison, Arkansas real estate agent O. J. Snow and some friends approached him with an ambitious scheme. They proposed developing Mill Creek Canyon, a scenic valley just off the Buffalo River with a fifty-five foot waterfall, a trout lake, and several caves, into a complex of rides, restaurants, lodging and the entire obligatory theme park infrastructure that would attract tourists.

There were some sensitive souls in the Publicity and Parks Commission in Little Rock with reservations about the hillbilly image thing. By and large, though, the business community and state government got behind creating a job-creating, make-believe hillbilly-land smack dab in a region with an unflattering primitive reputation. All the good timber had been cut out years ago and subsistence farming lost its charm. Ozarkers were desperate for employment. If dressing up in ragged old clothes and talking ungrammatically through your nose entertained outsiders, then so be it. The hillbilly personae had been created primarily for urban consumption. Capp, DeBeck and Webb were hardly southern country boys. Still Arkansas natives, Lum & Abner, and Bob Burns had cashed in playing rusticated naïves. People in rural and small town settings chuckled at Snuffy and Li’l Abner too, although they generally preferred folksier versions of the mountaineer. By this time in history, city and country sensibilities were converging.

Dogpatch USA actually got off to a promising start.

Li’l Abner’s creator gave a short speech to a crowd of eight thousand at the park’s opening on May 17, 1968. Capp and his wife also had been on site when ground was broken the preceding year. Then he said, “Of all the by-products of the strip, this is the one I’m most proud of.” Their adopted son, Colin Capp (Kim), came to Dogpatch in 1969 to help with sales and public relations. In an atypically harmonious blend of art and life, Kim fell in love with Moonbeam McSwine, or rather Vickie Cox, the local gal who played the sexy, but unhygienic temptress.

A million-three was spent on the park, and a big expansion was on the drawing boards. Four hundred thousand paying customers came; a million-two-hundred-thousand were projected for the next year. Alas, that first year was the high water mark. In the following twenty-five years attendance would never break two hundred thousand. An argument over whether to distribute the hundred thousand dollar profit from that happy first year among the nine local investors, or plow it back into improvements, created discontent. This riff led to Jess Odum, who had just sold his insurance company for millions, buying out the original group.

Bumpsticker. Dogpatch USA had Al Capp’s blessing, but he had little input into the actual park. That a group of native Ozarkers wanted to base an attraction on his characters flattered him. Doubtlessly he was somewhat sensitive to criticism that Li’L Abner reflected poorly on the intelligence, character and cleanliness of southern mountain folk.

Odum had ambitious plans that unfortunately collided with international geopolitical developments like the oil crisis, stratospheric interest rates, and flaws in the concept. When he hired disgraced segregationist, former governor Orval Faubus, to manage Dogpatch USA, he gave ammo to those who didn’t care for the park to start with. Faubus symbolized that “good old boy” type that, like the hillbilly caricature, was becoming a joke that no one laughed at.

Interior of a 1989 brochure. Near the end of its twenty -five year run, Dogpatch USA devolved from its Li’l Abner themes to an imitation Silver Dollar City craft village with a few carnival rides. The trout lake had been there before the park and it remained popular. Meager as its attractions were, there are a lot of comments on the Internet that reveal many warmly remember the hokey hillbilly hamlet.

The politically savvy hillbilly governor didn’t stay long at Dogpatch. Brooks Blevins works this into his summation of Dogpatch USA in his erudite book, Arkansas/Arkansaw:

We could debate the level of cultural degradation served up by Dogpatch, U.S.A., as well as the complicity of Harrison businessmen and locals and college kids who made a buck or two cavorting around as cartoon characters. But the fiscal health of the park seems rather more cut and dried…In the final estimation, it seems likely that a major reason for the park’s failure was location. Rugged and remote, Newton County might have seemed the ideal setting for a place like Dogpatch, but there is a fine line between rusticity and just plain old too far off the beaten path. Orval Faubus’s decision to jump off this wagon not long after jumping on it should have been a warning to the park’s ownership, for the old governor always had a good sniffer for trends and popular crusades.

Souvenirs from Dogpatch USA. (Click on any to start slideshow).

Branding the Ozarks, Tourism

A FALL JAUNT ON OLD 66: Part 3 – Gay Parita Station at Paris Springs Junction

November 24, 2014 • 0 Comments

a period building across from the famous Gay Parita station appears to be in the process of restoration. Click to enlarge.

On to Paris Springs Junction, final stop on my short, fall road trip. Several miles west of Halltown 266 bends off left and is absorbed by 96. Old 66 shoots straight ahead to Paris Springs Junction. There is an early building on the south side that looks like it is being renovated. On the north side is a grab-your-camera-and start-wildly-shooting –‘cause-you can’t possibly take a frame from any angle that doesn’t scream “spirit of old Route 66”. Gary Turner’s rebuilt and enhanced Sinclair station attracts transcontinental road warriors like a waterhole on the Serengeti draws gazelles.

Mulling around in the front are the bikers I photographed tooling down the road at Halltown. It’s a Japanese motorcycle club looking for the real America. At first I wonder if they’ve found it at such an orgy of vintage and reproduction signage, rusty and restored vehicles, and new and old buildings. The more I wander through this ode-to-the-road, I recall our thesis on the HYPERCOMMON. Authenticity is not a ruler to be held up to American popular culture. An excess of the ordinary – while immeasurable – is what a lot of American culture is all about. Yes, the bikers from the land of the rising sun may have indeed found a true piece of the real, but often inauthentic and theatrical America.

There was a 1934 gas station here called Gay Parita, but it burned in 1955. The owner’s wife was named Gay. What Parita means I don’t know. Gary G. Turner and his wife Lena constructed a new station from period specifications, but didn’t stop there. Every surface of the building is plastered with repro signs and the yard is filled with aging rolling stock.

Among Gary’s many past occupations, mostly as a truck driver, he played a bank robber at Knott’s Berry Farm in California. He was born in Stone County, Missouri, not far from the mythic Shepherd of the Hills country that morphed into the Branson fantasia. Clearly he endorses a creative approach to history. His up to date knowledge of road food for at least several hundred miles on old 66 is however factual. He will even tell you what to order for dessert at the best cafes. Like Halltown’s Thelma White, Gary Turner is a beacon of mythos and information to guide the traveler on their real and imagined trip back in time.

The liberties with strict recreation Gary took with the Sinclair station are minor compared with what awaits the visitor in the vintage stone garage. It’s a noteworthy example of vernacular architecture filled to the roof with a surrealist assemblage of commercial artifacts. Words don’t do justice to this artfully arranged collection of genuine old stuff so be amazed at the slide show.

There are many hundreds of images of this recreated Sinclair gas station on the Internet.

Click on any image for a slide show.

Paris Springs Junction is on a short section of doubly bypassed Route 66.

In the HYPERCOMMON universe there’s nothing odd about a group of Japanese guys on Harleys enjoying a recreated gas station on a vanished highway.

Lena Turner, like Gary, enjoys the diversity of travelers who stop to chat, and occasionally buy a T-shirt or souvenir.

The handsome, original stone garage. Photographers, amateur and professional alike, find this place has limitless potential. National Geographic Traveler has a substantial post on it.

The tableau of mostly roadside related antiques is amazingly arranged.

Sadly, the mechanic at the Gay Parita garage has been worked to death.

Stetson hat posed on the hood of a chrome yellow restored truck. Transportation-related things tend to be masculine. While the building is of local materials and vernacular construction these machines reflect modern corporate technology, most of which were bought and utilized by men.

The bold design of roadside signage reflects Madison Avenue’s effort to appeal to the male eye. There’s little domestic about roadside products. The female cutout figure (is it Marilyn? Let us know if you know) sticks out.

Dad’s cash register and check writer sit on Mom’s treadle sewing machine. Men chased the buck, while women stayed home and sewed. That’s how it once was, folks, like it or not.

Branding the Ozarks, Tourism

A FALL JAUNT ON OLD 66: Part 2 – Halltown

November 21, 2014 • 1 Comment

My next stop on the nostalgia highway is hardly a ghost town, although it got a write up and several pictures in Ghost Towns Of Route 66 by Hinkley and James (2011). Its population isn’t even in decline. Halltown had 168 residents in 1946, stated Jack D. Rittenhouse in his seminal A Guide Book to Highway 66, published that year. The 2010 census lists its population at 173.

Closed gas station, Halltown, Missouri. The rain-polished rock remains of the Plano store invite photography, or even poetry. The off-ochre shut-down gas station is just a sad comment on the perilous state of small business. I’m intrigued by it, but it probably goes unnoticed by most Route 66 pilgrims.

Brenda and Dirk pressed their hands in the wet cement where a gas pump once stood in front of the failed station. Two dimes were also embedded in the concrete. One is missing. A loose penny lay on the sculptural commemoration of their relationship. Where are you Brenda and Dirk?

Seal of the Route 66 Association of Missouri. Thelma White, a co-founder, was a retired schoolteacher, librarian and antique dealer who turned the Whitehall Mercantile into a kind of visitors center for Route 66 tourists. Click on the image to enlarge.

West of Springfield to Halltown, old U.S. 66, now Highway 266, runs parallel to I-44 a few miles north. A short distance after exit 58 the interstate bends southwest. A mile from 44 on blacktop Z, which exits at 58, is Halltown, which unlike many bypassed burgs on the Mother Road still functions as a community due to its propitious access to the new highway.

No longer do “15 or 20 establishments line both sides of the highway here: gas stations, cafes, antique shops, stores,” as Rittenhouse described. Today there is a barbershop and the celebrated Whitehall Antiques, a fixture on the Route 66 tour. Thelma White, who opened the store in 1985 and co-founded the Route 66 Association of Missouri, died, but the emporium of antiques, collectibles, and Route 66 souvenirs is still open.

Twenty years ago, when we tore up the back roads looking for underpriced antiques, there were more shops in Halltown. It was too close to the interstate and the swarms of California pickers who were our main competition for good old stuff could access it easily. We never spent a dime in Halltown, but remember how cordial Thelma was.

Click on any image for a slide show.

Old 66 plunged down the Main Street of Halltown, Missouri. The façade of the famed Whitehall Mercantile has been recently replaced.

Front porch of the Whitehall Mercantile.

The commercial buildings of Halltown are generally maintained, even if unoccupied. A few, like the barbershop, are active.

What the small white structure once was we haven’t a clue. Beside it is a foundation with a larger footprint.

t seems the real estate business is good in Halltown. The frame houses are reasonably priced and the interstate provides a twenty-minute access for Springfield workers.

Halltown has a more vital infrastructure than many small towns. The churches and volunteer fire department are in kept-up structures.

At the west end of Halltown are several empty buildings that were once antique stores. They are sufficiently venerable to provide photo ops. At my next stop I would encounter the motorcyclists going over the distant hill. Their identity was a surprise.

Branding the Ozarks, Tourism

A FALL JAUNT ON OLD 66: Part 1 – The Ghost Town of Plano

November 19, 2014 • 0 Comments

The ghost town of Plano never had much corporality. Named (probably) for the substantial town of Plano, Texas, this two-structure place was but a crossroads store built in the early 1900s. A filling station was added when Route 66 came through in the 1920s.

Plano means ‘plain’ in Spanish. Plano, Missouri is on the lip of the Ozarks and is a bit hillier than Plano, Texas.

Retracing the route of extinct U.S. 66 has become a curious species of tourism. Extensive sections of the old highway still exist at varying distances from I-44. Aficionados of roadside Americana come from all over the planet to motor along these renamed relic sections of the famous “Mother Road.”

Every structure that ever existed along that venerable highway, no matter how insignificant or wrecked it might be, has a history these travelers are familiar with. Books and websites have reconstructed the chronology of even vanished crossroad communities and extinct businesses. There is interest in the most minute details of the utilizations of long-vanished enterprises.

Several online sources mention the splendid ruined limestone building at Plano along 266, about ten miles west of Springfield, Missouri. Many state it was a mortuary and casket factory. Such a morbid past would be appropriate as the place has been officially designated a ghost town by Greene County. Valerie Mosley, a reporter for the Springfield News-Leader, drove out in December of 2013 and recorded her impressions of the haunting ruins:

“Through the large arched windows and doorways, you can see the small forest growing inside. Tree branches reach out wildly through the open roof.

I had seen the rock walls a few times before, but only recently when I stopped to photograph it did I see the Greene County Historic Site marker that reads “Plano, a Ghost Town.”

Inside the structure, paths zigzag through the middle. Beer and soda bottles litter the ground. Vines climb the cracked stone walls. In the back, a tree grows at an odd angle through a window.

Standing in the woods within walls was eerie and made me wonder what this place used to be.”

The walls didn’t speak to her so she contacted the person who had researched its past for the historic sites procedure:

“There’s a lot of misinformation about Plano,” said Jackie Warfel, who prepared the historic site nomination.

A quick Internet search turns up many sites — mostly Route 66 travel blogs — that claim the limestone structure was a mortuary and casket factory.

“It was not,” Warfel said.

According to Warfel’s history, John Jackson and his family built the two-story 50-foot-by-60-foot building in 1902 of local limestone “with the help of neighbors as needed.”

The building became a hub of community activity. Two rooms on the lower level were a general store where farm families could sell their produce, eggs and baked goods.

The store was managed by Jackson’s son, Alfred, and daughters Mollie and Quintilla Jackson, who had taken a course on business administration in Springfield.

Upstairs, along with living quarters, was a large room used for club meetings, dances, court proceedings and even church services.

The Jacksons bought a wooden structure across the street, on the northeast corner, from Steve Carter. In this building, which is no longer standing, they operated a “mortuary and undertakers parlor where caskets could be purchased and a horse-drawn hearse was furnished.”

Warfel also noted in her research, “there was no embalming at that time and the families bought the caskets and lay the deceased family member out at their homes before burial.”

No doubt in time this small correction about the Jackson’s casket sideline will filter into popular lore. Such historic minutia is scripture to Route 66 pilgrims just as Christian fundamentalists embrace Biblical literalism.

A forest has grown up inside the two-story limestone walls of the Jackson General Store. Pretty snakey terrain, but unfortunately I visited in October after the blacksnakes undoubtedly had gone to sleep until spring. From a lifetime of poking around places like this, I’ll bet at least a couple of five-foot shiney black reptiles reside here.

Click on any image for a slide show.

Catty-corner across the street was a Tydol gas station, now a home. The handsome rock building was, unfortunately, backlit.

The handsome stonework is all that’s left of the big store. It’s unrestorable but, unlike many shell buildings, doesn’t need stabilization. Unlike balloon-frame construction, stone buildings, if left alone, will stand forever. Europe’s full of them.

How thoughtful of the telephone company to provide a convenient parking place for Route 66 travelers.

Branding the Ozarks, Dams

THE FALL OF UNION ELECTRIC’S LOUIS EGAN

November 14, 2014 • 0 Comments

In this press photo of December 30, 1943, Louis H. Egan is not “having the finest time in the world,” as the 1925 profile was titled. With wife Fannie grasping his left arm and deputy U. S. Marshal Davidson holding his right, the tall, disgraced executive clutches a cigarette with a gloved hand. We tell the story of Egan’s glaring error in management that led to his downfall in Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozark and Truman Reservoir:

Cutline on the press photo dated 3-5-42 showing Egan with a federal eagle behind him, posed as if to sink his claws into him:
“Louis H. Egan, former president of the Union Electric Company of Missouri entering federal court in St. Louis, Mo., where he was found guilty of violating the Corrupt Practices section of the Utility Act. “

Egan’s downfall began when he foolishly fired a Union Electric vice president named Oscar Funk, who, as the July 29, 1940 Time article put it “knew where the bodies were.” A muckraking St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter named Sam Shelton had suspected the utility had been paying politicians for years. Funk spilled the beans to Shelton who in turn confided the information to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The reporter got an explosive series of articles and the SEC got Egan. In the Post Dispatch and in court, it was revealed that Union Electric had been demanding sizable kickbacks from lawyers and contractors. From this slush fund, they bribed newspapermen, paid elected officials, and illegally contributed to political campaigns. Egan and his cronies also enriched themselves. Union Electric sued Egan, VP Frank Boehm, and even whistle-blower Oscar Funk to recover $400,000. Funk sued Union Electric for being unjustifiably fired. Several vice presidents did short sentences for perjury, but Louis Egan was convicted of violation of the Corrupt Practices Section of the Holding Company Act of 1935. Union Electric paid an $80,000 fine. Egan paid $10,000 and was sentenced to two years. His appeals failed and on December 31, 1943, the $68,000-a-year former executive entered the federal penitentiary at St. Petersburg, Florida.

The cut line pasted on the back of the photo of Egan leaving for jail said he was headed for federal prison at Terre Haute. Another source had him released a few months shy of two years later from a penitentiary in Florida. He died in 1950 at his home in Clayton, Missouri at the age of sixty-nine of bronchopneumonia.

The names of Egan and the other felons who managed Union Electric during the building of Bagnell Dam are cast in bronze on this plaque attached to the powerhouse. It was Egan’s pond, but his role in this enormous undertaking has been forgotten.

Some of the laws Louis Egan broke regarding campaign financing by corporations were not in place when he began his career. Recently businesses have again been allowed to contribute to political races. Even the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 was repealed in 2005, replaced by a new set of regulations that consumer advocates objected to.

In the text of Egan’s appeal, the court upheld his conviction but noted, “the evidence also tends to show that the whole subject of political expenditure was distasteful to him and that his preference would have been to have nothing to do with such matters.” Nevertheless Egan approved for years the “raising a secret fund for political purposes.”

Sordid as the history of building Bagnell Dam is, we suspect public records reveal only a small percentage of the crimes and skullduggery committed by its creators. When the federal government subsequently took over dam building, they too began to lie and subvert regulation, just like the capitalists. Who regulates the regulators?

Branding the Ozarks, Dams

UNION ELECTRIC’S LOUIS EGAN “I’M HAVING THE FINEST TIME IN THE WORLD.”

November 12, 2014 • 2 Comments

Three men were essential to the building of Bagnell Dam, which created Lake of the Ozarks: a banker, a lawyer, and the president of a power company. Only one stayed out of federal prison. The head of Union Electric was not that lucky one.

Louis Henry Egan was born in 1881 in Lacrosse, Wisconsin. Egan followed his father’s profession and graduated from Yale with a degree in engineering. The “moose tall” president of Union Electric, as Time magazine described him, was profiled in the January 1925 issue of The American Magazine as a can-do, overly optimistic executive. The subtitle of the puff piece read, “’There isn’t any job you ever heard of that can beat mine,’ says Louis H. Egan one of the leading public utility men in the Middle West – It was this attitude that helped him at the age of thirty-eight, to become president of a big electric light company.” Above all, the article stated, Egan despised complaining slackers who he called “Whimper Whine-ies,” who are always “crying a pond.”

The concrete obstacle in the Osage River that ponded Lake of the Ozarks was one of the last significant privately built dams in the United States. It was a project birthed in the Roaring Twenties when free enterprise had been released from strict government regulation after an era of “trust busters” and reformers like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Bagnell Dam, as Project No. 459 came to be called, was completed in 1931 just as big government was about to snatch the reins back from hard-charging businessmen who had created both phenomenal wealth and crippling debt and were being blamed for the ensuing Great Depression. Egan, prototypical of these Twenties boomers, had built the St. Louis utility into a profitable part of The North American Company’s holdings.

When equally expansionist Kansas City banker Walter Cravens diverted his Land Bank assets into his speculative dam scheme, he ran afoul of federal law and was forced to sell his overly ambitious, underfinanced project. When his original backer pulled out, Cravens took his project to Wall Street, looking for investors. Many firms passed on the opportunity, but he finally connected with Dillon, Read & Co., an investment-banking company with connections to Stone & Webster, Inc., a New England engineering services company founded in 1889, which specialized in public utility projects, especially hydropower facilities. Together they bought a one-year option to buy Cravens’ valuable permit to impound the Osage. In July, 1929, the license was retroactively transferred to Union Electric ninety days before the Wall Street crash that signaled the start of the Great Depression. Cravens was paid $300,000. He needed a good bit of it for lawyers.

North American Company Annual Report, 1947. Sometime in the late 1920s this octopus of a holding company acquired control of Union Electric’s stock. North American, known for its bare-knuckle practices, encouraged the St. Louis utility to build a slush fund from kickbacks and use it to illegally finance politicians and bribe public officials. This notorious holding company was broken up by the feds in 1946. Many online sources state that Union Electric was divested at that time, but this 1947 report still lists the St. Louis utility as an asset. The holding company for Union Electric today is Ameren.

The two new project owners had approached The North American Company, among whose holdings was the St. Louis utility, Union Electric. North American also owned ten percent of Stone & Webster. The construction company’s chairman was on the board of the giant holding company as well. Several years earlier Louis Egan had turned down Cravens who was looking for a market for the electricity Project 459 would eventually produce. When a similar proposal came to UE from The North American Company, Egan jumped on board. Union Electric had had no use for the electricity when first approached, and still didn’t, having just finished a huge coal-fired power plant at Kahokia, Illinois near St. Louis. In the late 1920s sophisticated companies like all these involved with the Bagnell Dam project were aware that financial storm clouds were gathering. This $36 million project promised to be one of the last big deals possible before the looming Wall Street deluge of plummeting stock prices.

Had the deal not been expeditiously done, Bagnell Dam would not have been built. Even the reputable construction company was damaged by the crash. Ten shares of Stone & Webster common stock valued at $1,133.75 in 1929 were only worth $62.50 in 1933.

Had the private power company not built the big dam on the Osage River, decades later, the U.S. Army Corps of engineers would have undoubtedly used this superior dam site instead of building their big Osage River dam at the decidedly inferior Kaysinger Bluff site at Warsaw, Missouri. The Miller County location permitted a much higher dam to be constructed, but the capitalist builders were afraid of the political uproar of flooding Warsaw, a town of more than a thousand at the time. Flooding five hundred people at Linn Creek was an overcome-able public relations problem. The disaster that Truman Reservoir became might not have happened if the dam on the lower Osage known as Bagnell had become a larger federal project.

Bagnell Dam, planned in the Roaring Twenties and barely finished as the Great Depression set in, was one of the final privately financed major water resource developments.

NEXT POST: THE FALL OF UNION ELECTRIC’S LOUIS EGAN

Various

PRETTY UP THE POLES

November 10, 2014 • 0 Comments

Like many municipalities Springfield, Missouri has a number of “special districts” whose social justifications many times confer some “special” tax benefits. Click to enlarge.

The Springfield, Missouri News-Leader covered this story twice in October 2014. One feature is titled “The Pole Painting Project – Moon City spruces up utility poles – public art project aims to beautify Woodland Heights, curb graffiti.” The other article is titled “Moon City’s latest project: pretty up the poles:

While some neighborhoods push for underground utility lines to pretty things up, the artsy folks with the Moon City Creative District are using the utility poles in the Woodland Heights Neighborhood as canvases.

On Saturday, about 60 local artists — professional and amateur, young and old — spent hours painting unique designs and scenes on more than 35 poles. The public art project is aimed at calming traffic, curbing graffiti and beautifying the neighborhood.

“Why poles? Well, poles are everywhere,” said Phyllis Ferguson, one of the event coordinators. “They are not the most beautiful thing in our sight when we look around, so we decided to paint the poles.”

The project, Ferguson said, also helps create awareness about the Moon City Creative District located in the Woodland Heights Neighborhood, a specially zoned “live/work” overlay district that features many types of artists who operate studios or galleries from their homes.

Only a small percentage of utility poles have so far been enhanced. Click to enlarge.

Ferguson and fellow artists, Steve Miller and Linda Passeri, got the idea after traveling to an art district in Victoria, British Columbia, where artists have painted about 300 utility poles.

In Victoria, Ferguson said, they are seeing less graffiti on the poles because graffiti artists seem to appreciate and respect the painted poles. Also, traffic has calmed somewhat due to drivers slowing down to look at the poles.

Passeri said she hopes the painted poles will cause people to get out and enjoy their neighborhood.

“The more people see public art, the more they appreciate public art. And it just makes people happy. It improves quality of life, just to have art in our everyday,” she said. “When you get in your car and you are driving to work and you see a pole painted with some flowers — it just makes your day better.”

An unpainted utility pole can be assertive, but it does not distract from the integrity of an industrial landscape. This scene is from Chase Street, looking toward Commercial Street. Click to enlarge.

The project was possible thanks to a collaborative effort with the district and City Utilities, Ferguson said. The Healthy Living Alliance gave a $2,000 grant to buy paint and supplies, and Mexican Villa also contributed supplies.

Another “Paint a Pole” project will be scheduled for next spring, Ferguson said.

Want to see the poles?

Yes I did want to see the poles. Sunday morning found me waiting for the sun to rise on Commercial Street, which runs parallel to Chase Street, which the newspaper said was the site of some of the pole painting. Between sips of lukewarm coffee I photographed the assortment of sculptures at a little park at the north end of the 1902 iron footbridge that connects Woodland Heights with Commercial Street. C Street, as it is called, is a Federal Register Historic District.

A similarly enhanced transformer box photographed by Crystal on Atlantic Avenue in Atlantic City. There seems to be a widespread effort to decorate all manner of objects in public spaces. As well as paint, art groups cover utility poles and sculpture with knitted cozies. This practice is called yarn bombing. Click to enlarge.

The also-federally-recognized 628-foot span permits creatives who live in the Moon City Creative District to shop for vintage clothing, chug a micro brew, be inspired by art exhibitions, and possibly contribute to the down-and-outs who come to C Street for the charities and shelters, not the culture.

With the sun up, I drove down Chase Street pole watching. It “made my day better” as I was prompted to later research pole painting and other similar efforts worldwide to beautify public spaces with sanctioned and subsidized graffiti.

Decorating telephone poles is a phenomenon that resonates with our Hypercommon thesis. What is more hyper than soliciting funds and painting banal symbols on these exceedingly common and natively unsuitable for embellishment utilitarian objects? The shape, receptivity to paint, and the usual architectural environment of utility poles are hostile to these well-meaning efforts at civic improvement.

Artists through the ages have attempted to defend against criticism by evoking religious or political justification. To suggest lackluster graffiti performed by groups of middle class amateurs will thwart gang tags is exceedingly inventive we must concede. The “creative” elevation of the mundane is the very essence of hypercommonality.

Had Edward Hopper happened upon this decorated pole in front of the majestic abandoned grain elevators he might have chosen another angle to paint. Admittedly, the raw American commercial landscape may be an acquired taste, but adding silly doodles to power poles does not domesticate it.

Click on any image below to start a slideshow.

A “welcome earthling” painted pole.

Octopus painted pole, perfect for the Ozarks.

Fortress clubhouse of the Galloping Goose motorcycle club, an affiliate of the Hell’s Angels.

Car lot on Chase Street.

There are many vacant commercial spaces along the tracks.

Against a cream-colored block building this cartoonish ocean-themed pole is innocent enough.

Branding the Ozarks, Hillbillies

SQUARE DANCING

November 7, 2014 • 0 Comments

Small workshop ceramic old-time square dancing couple vase. (click to enlarge)

Square dancing has a non-urban image. Like folk, country-western and country square dancers don’t usually care to be associated with hillbillies’ rowdier reputation. Manifestations of old-timey entertainments and practices have different constituencies and standards. Like folk music, the square dance is of European origin. Four country-dressed couples perform an American version of the Quadrille to fiddle music and the spoken direction of a caller. Vestiges of this dance, like balladry, survived into the 19th century in rural areas of the South, but the twentieth century practice was motivated partly by an idealization of our agrarian past.

A chief promoter of square dancing was the distinctly non-hillbilly Henry Ford. The architect of the modern assembly line had a romantic nostalgia for “old-fashioned dances” which were “clean and healthful … modern dances are not.” In a 1926 book, Today and Tomorrow, Ford evidences his capitalistic genius and mastery of industrialization. He mentions as well his promotion of “old time fiddle contests” and how he partitioned a corner of his new laboratory building at Dearborn for a ballroom.

Hobbyist ceramic square dancers. (click to enlarge)

There, two times a week, Henry Ford presided over old time dancing classes: “The rules are followed. There is no holding up of two fingers for a dance and no “cutting in”. The ladies do not enter the room unescorted and must slightly precede the gentlemen. Everything is formal. The instructions are all in the manual we have written.”

“We are all getting a good deal of fun out of dancing.” Ford added, “We are not, as has been imagined, conducting any kind of crusade against modern dancing,” which he had earlier described as “ugly dance” that went with “tuneless music”.

The square dance revival that began in California in the late 1940s produced relatively few pieces of memorabilia.

1950s country square dance bandana.

Branding the Ozarks, Hillbillies

PIPE SMOKING MOUNTAINEERS

November 5, 2014 • 0 Comments

Ceramic hillbilly wall hanging with corncob pipe made by Comocraft, Branson, Missouri. 1950s. Comocraft was the name of the concrete slip dripped ware invented by Harold Horine in the 1920s. Obviously someone purchased the name after his death. In the 1950s and 60s they manufactured cast ceramics, many with a hillbilly theme and a paper label that said Comocraft.

Unlike the hillbilly-associated outhouses which have no historic validity, pipe smoking by both sexes was often remarked on by early frontier travelers. The clay pipes of early mountaineers have been replaced by corncob pipes in pop culture renditions.

Illustration of old lady smoking a clay pipe from article, “Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback,” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June, 1886, by James Lane Allen. (click to enlarge)

Hill Billy Sack of tobacco circa 1910. (click to enlarge)

Sirocco ware ashtray with pipe holder, 1940s. (click to enlarge)

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