his sixties. “We’re happy to have a Kirksville student to ride with us,” he welcomed Dad.
“Well, I appreciate the ride, especially with you....” Dad stammered.
Penney explained why he stopped: “It’s Friday, you look like a student, you have the emblems on your bag. I enjoy conversations with college students because I get ideas about merchandising. I don’t get enough opportunities to talk to people directly about what they want.”
They talked for the hour it took to reach Macon. Dad told Penney about the things he’d like to buy in a department store, a long list from a kid mired at the bottom of the Great Depression. Dad hopped out, thanked Penney and the chauffeur, and thumbed east to Hannibal. Penney headed west, home to Hamilton. They both were following a road that would become the Avenue of the Greats.
***
West of Hannibal just off that highway, Dad’s grandfather lies in a peaceful cemetery next to a church that struggles against time. Like the pastoral setting where he’s buried, Daniel O’Dwyer was a man of peace—mostly. Oh, there’s strong evidence that he liked whiskey more than gravy. He’d stand in the churchyard after services and get drunk with his cronies while their families waited in wagons, shivering cold. And yes, sometimes when he got drunk he would fight, but never in the churchyard and never in front of the family.
Years before, he had been a Catholic priest in his native County Cork, Ireland, until the church excommunicated him for falling in love with a girl who became my great-grandmother. They came to this country and dropped the overtly Irish “O’” from their name. He became a teacher, and she became a mother to their nine children, and when he died—murdered by horse thieves who tied him to railroad tracks—she scraped together money to pay the church a ransom to bury the pieces of his body in consecrated ground.
Dad always told me to “live recklessly for good.” I guess it’s a family trait.
So I drove west to get to Daniel Dwyer’s grave.
Over the decades, the unique personalities of legendary routes have earned them colorful nicknames: Burma Road. Tobacco Road. The Mother Road.
This road to St. Jo deserves a nickname, too. So I call it the Avenue of the Greats. Nobody else does. Regardless, this road is the birthplace of your modern concepts of literature, religion, fighting, driving, shopping, sinking, eating and armed robbery. Seriously.
Locals still refer to it as Route 36, because that’s what it is. Nobody says, “I’m going down the Avenue of the Greats to get some gas.” A few years ago lawmakers gave the road a formal name: the V.F.W. Memorial Highway. But nobody calls it that. More recently, a group of tourism promoters tried to nickname it The Way of American Genius. Nobody calls it that, either. Nicknames take time to stick. Some never do.
Like a headband, the Avenue of the Greats stretches across Missouri’s brow and attaches to America’s great jugular veins, the Missouri River on the western edge of the state and the Mighty Mississippi on the eastern edge. From that narrow nerve passage between Missouri’s temporal lobes evolved some of the globe’s most influential individuals.
How influential? Two decades ago a London newspaper polled its readers with one simple question: “Who is your favorite American?” Respondents picked Mark Twain, Jesse James and Mickey Mouse. All three were born along this road.
Those are world-famous names. But this highway is the estuary for other greats who made their marks on the world. Even before Erifnus and I left downtown Hannibal, we passed the house where the Unsinkable Molly Brown grew up, on a hillside so steep it taught her how to remain buoyant during a lifetime of ups and downs. Down the road and around the bend, I was about to stumble onto the story of a man who should be a candidate for sainthood.
A few miles off the Avenue of the Greats, Route DD turns its pavement over to a gravel road. Just past a fork in the road, Brush Creek Cemetery sits in peaceful seclusion. There, I’d revisit the grave of Daniel Dwyer, the Irish Catholic priest who became my great grandfather, and I’d bask in his special brand of evangelical fervor, with its heavy emphasis on liquor and procreation.
Meantime, in that same country churchyard, I discovered a story with a meaning as deep as Huckleberry Finn. Unlike Huck’s tale, though, this story is true. It’s just not as well known. Beside that cemetery on a bluff above the Salt River, where Samuel Clemens roamed as a boy and ran as a rebel, there sits a very unique window to Missouri’s past.
St. Peter’s Church casts its short shadow beside the cemetery, awaiting parishioners from Monroe City and Perry, Spalding and Rensselaer, as it has ever since the church was built back at the beginning of the Civil War. Nowadays, the faithful come to the country church less often. There are no regularly scheduled masses. But on the church wall a small plaque would help lead to a revival in its proud ministry.
The plaque hails this home parish of Father Augustine Tolton, a man who would break the color barrier in the American priesthood. Augustine was trained and ordained in Rome, because America would afford him no such opportunity. He was born a slave.
Despite that barrier, nearly 60 years before Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line and 70 years before Rosa Parks inspired the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the young priest who would become known as Good Father Gus said his first mass in the United States, thus becoming America’s first African-American Roman Catholic priest. His long journey began here, in this little chapel.
I surveyed the scene. Here, in the middle of nowhere, a tiny church was losing its struggle against weather and time, abandonment and neglect. Despite the best efforts of local supporters and a spot on the National Historic Register, the building was in danger of collapsing before its 150th birthday. Because the good Catholic families who live nearby had migrated to other parishes, the diocese discontinued regular mass at St. Peter’s. The building’s roof sagged. A peek through the church’s windows revealed crumbled ceiling plaster covering dust-caked pews. The tiny living quarters for a priest, attached to the back of the church like a lean-to, was a wooden box not much bigger than a horse stall. It was past mere decay. But even as the lean-to collapsed and the roof sagged and the incense was replaced by the smell of water damage, the church’s rock walls remained as strong as the last time young Augustine John Tolton saw them.
At his birth, the church’s baptismal record gave no name: “A colored child born April 1, 1854, son of Peter Tolton and Martha Chisley, property of Stephen Elliott; Mrs. Stephen Elliott, sponsor; May 29, 1854.” Peter and Martha, Augustine’s parents, were enslaved separately to neighboring families, so when Peter and Martha wed in St. Peter’s, the families agreed that any children would be owned by Martha’s owners, the Elliotts. Martha was Mrs. Elliott’s personal slave. As a child, Augustine was raised in the influence of the Brush Creek parish of St. Peter’s.
But in 1861 as parishioners were building the rock-walled church that struggles to survive today, Augustine’s father left to join the Union army. Soon after, Augustine left with his mother and two siblings. Stories differ about whether they were freed by the Elliotts or ran away. Regardless, the family rowed one night across the Mississippi River into Illinois and freedom.
Illinois offered freedom from slavery. But racism infected rural Illinois the same as it infected Missouri. When he wasn’t working in a tobacco factory in Quincy, Illinois, young Augustine attended a private parochial school at the urging of a local priest. The community howled in protest at this mixing of races. Parents threatened to take their children out of the school and quit the Catholic Church. They even threatened violence. Augustine was forced to leave the school, and years passed before another priest enrolled him in a different parochial school. Once again, parishioners threatened violence. But the priest
