Contents:

• Kansas City's Union Station Revisited
• An Edison Phonograph's Rebirth in Bollinger County
• Baseball and History
• Chautauquas near the old Chautauqua Grounds
• Thirty Plays in Thirty Days: Brown Bagging it with Will Shakespeare in Rolla

Union Station Revisited

Two of Kansas City’s most famous structures, the 1914 Union Station and the slightly earlier Corinthian Hall on Gladstone Boulevard, are living up to their legacies as the places where Kansas City connects with its history. Both locations are undertaking new projects with the help of one of the Council's long-term associates in Kansas City, Dr. Bill Worley. Many know Bill as "Harry S Truman" or "William Clark" in Chautauqua-style programs, and others know his books on the history of Kansas City. He's now a consulting historian with Union Station and with the former home of the Kansas City Museum, R. A. Long's grand residence, Corinthian Hall.

Bill is helping Union Station set up a display that shows the progress of the Lewis & Clark Expedition across the states of Missouri and Kansas during the late spring and summer of 1804. Visitors will be able to read Clark’s actual journal entries describing the events of each day and locate the stretch of river in question. This will be the only such exhibit where words and locations can be so readily connected in the Kansas City region during the upcoming Journey Fourth observance of the Expedition’s passing through the area. The exhibit opens May 14 in the northwest gallery near the information kiosk in the Grand Hall.

Bill is also working on a new temporary exhibit on Kansas City’s Northeast neighborhood. For this project, the former billiard room in Corinthian Hall, built in 1911, is being returned to its original size and configuration. The room features a carved mantelpiece with billiard balls and cue sticks built into the design. The first exhibit, entitled "The Northeast: A Neighborhood of Beginnings," will feature photographs and postcards depicting life and institutions in the neighborhood that have helped make it the most diverse section in the entire city. Dr. Worley is assembling the items for display and preparing the labels in conjunction with the Collections Staff of Union Station and the Museum.

For a brief biographical sketch of R. A. Long, see this page at the Kansas City Public Library:
http://www.kclibrary.org/sc/bio/long.htm

Edison's Phonograph Reborn!

If you're in or near Marble Hill (population 1,447 or so) in the next couple of weeks, stop in for the Saturday programs at the Bollinger County Museum of Natural History, 2 p.m. on May 1, 8, and 15. The special program entails a demonstration of an old Edison phonograph which "Doc" Hahn used to demonstrate at Wicecarver's Mercantile store. Doc Hahn's nephew, Charles Hopkins, will impersonate his uncle and reminisce about the modern technology that made it possible for people in rural areas to hear the latest "hits" from the cities. Charles Hopkins will do the program on May 1. Eva Dunn will do a similar presentation on May 8, and Jeanie Troy will do the final program on May 15.

The programs and a special exhibit are made possible by a Missouri Humanities Council grant of $2,120. This grant exemplifies MHC's desire to focus its support on new initiatives that help a local organization take another step forward in public outreach. Hats off to the Bollinger County Museum!

Baseball, 1862 Style

Just when you think your favorite St. Louis baseball team has tanked for the season, along comes this novel idea. The ingenuity of Civil War reenactors has spilled over to a baseball team composed of Union soldiers, who play in the style of those bygone days when the game was new. So if you are blue about the prospects of the Cardinals, or if you don't care about their prospects and need to keep that fact hushed up, take the kids to one of the exhibition games of the "St. Louis Unions."

Their web site and schedule of games is listed below. If you have a modernized computer, be prepared for a lively rendition of "Rally Round the Flag" as you check their Home Page. Other period music plays in grand style behind each page of this web site.
http://home.earthlink.net/~stlouisunions

Although this historical activity has nothing to do with the Missouri Humanities Council, it does illuminate the richness and variety of people's appetite for a union of theater, fun, and history. Play ball!

Chautauquas on the Old Grounds

This year's Chautauqua season marks the end of our "Changed Lives" tour, centered on the meeting of peoples during the Lewis and Clark expedition. The fun is still a month away, but I'm moved to comment on the great store of memories that a Chautauqua festival still can stir in a local community.

It was just one lifetime ago that the great American Chautauqua movement peaked in rural towns everywhere in the United States. People like my mother, now aged 91, were in grade school in the Roaring Twenties. Their parents likely took them to the Chautauqua. In the little agricultural market town of New Egypt, New Jersey, my mother was part of a school pageant for the Chautauqua. She performed on the stage of the Isis movie theater on main street, the same theater where I went to see movie serials during Harry Truman's presidency and where I realized, too late, that I should not have dared to get on stage for the yo-yo competition!

So many people still have a living parent or grandparent who remembers the Chautauquas in Missouri in that era. The memories should be harvested! This season our Heartland Chautauqua appears in two towns with a Chautauqua history, Carthage and Maryville. Each town has photographs and programs from those earlier Chautauquas. I'm thinking it would be a good idea to create a web page that either collects Missouri's Chautauqua memories or points to local web sites that collect them.

If you're in the St. Louis area and want to go on a dinner trip to see the Chautauqua program in Alton, Illinois, we'll have a bus for the group on June 23, leaving from the Brentwood City Hall at 2:00 p.m. The trip includes a visit to the Lewis & Clark Historic Site at the mouth of the River Dubois in Hartford, Illinois. The Chautauqua program features Joyce Badgley Hunsaker as Sacagawea. Full details on the Alton schedule and the bus/dinner trip are on a downloadable PDF file:
http://www.mohumanities.org/E-News/May04/bustripinvite200498.pdf

Thirty Plays in Thirty Days

Nick Knight, the Chair of the Missouri Humanities Council, is in his thirtieth year of service on the faculty of the University of Missouri-Rolla. Although he retired last year, he remains in a part-time teaching role because he has been recognized not only as an outstanding scholar of Shakespeare, but as an inspirational teacher. In thanks for thirty wonderful years in Rolla, Nick is doing a "first." He is delivering thirty brown-bag lunch lectures on the thirty plays of Shakespeare in thirty days. There will be many references to the films of Shakespeare plays and to material that is related to the plays.

Nick told me that the only way to pull this off is to avoid thinking in terms of writing out each lecture, as if for subsequent publication. The thing to do, he said, was to map out each program as an experience for the audience, and then to pull together the supporting cast of materials and videos, to check the facts, and then to ad lib the lecture with the confidence that comes from decades of close study of that body of work.

If you are anywhere in the vicinity of Rolla during this extraordinary opportunity, be sure to take your brown bag lunch and be a part of the fun. The complete schedule is here:
http://www.mohumanities.org/E-News/May04/ThirtyPlays.htm

--Michael Bouman