farm. Although both partners are gone, Kaye has taken steps to enhance living history at Walt’s boyhood home. She showed me the house, including the bedroom Walt and brother Roy shared, unchanged from their childhood.
Behind the house, young Walt’s Dreaming Tree still stands unbowed in the fields behind the Disney home. One of the oldest cottonwood trees standing in Missouri, it was mature even when Walt was a boy. The tree has survived two lightning strikes, which only added power to the inspiration that flows from its branches.
Not fifty paces from the Dreaming Tree sits the barn. In typical Disney style, the townspeople raised a new barn in 2001 to replicate the structure where eight-year-old Walt got his showbiz start. It’s a faithful replica, with a swayback roof—like the one that faithful Mouseketeers remember on TV—a shrine on the spot where his imagination began.
The original barn was the venue for Walt’s first showbiz production, a circus. He charged neighborhood kids a dime apiece to see barnyard animals dressed in toddlers clothes. Most of his fellow eight-year-olds left the show less than satisfied. Locals testify that Walt’s mother made him return the proceeds to his disgruntled patrons. Therein he learned his first valuable showbiz lesson: When promoting a show, under-promise and over-deliver. In retrospect, the attendees probably consider the admission price a bargain for the memories those thin dimes bought the lucky crowd.
From all over the world, pilgrims visit the new barn, scribbling thousands of notes, verses, and signatures in every language on the rough-hewn wood walls and beams.
Somewhere, a belly botanist is beaming.
Blackjack, Zack and the Bread Rack
We drove west toward a horizon smeared with smoke. Even from a distance I could tell it wasn’t the steamy cloud produced when volunteer firefighters pour water on a burning barn, or the black-orange roiling of a gasoline fire from a wreck. We got closer and veered off the Avenue of the Greats to investigate. What we encountered was surreal. Crossing the boundary into this domain, we were surrounded by scorched earth on all sides. Smoke rose from the smoldering ground, commanding the senses to yield to confusion. Slowly, Erifnus and I felt our way forward, immersed in the conflagration that might’ve been Verdun.
But it wasn’t. The road led us through the forests and fields that were the playground of a child named John Pershing. Young John would grow up with the ambition to be a school teacher. But an education at West Point changed his course, and he rose through the ranks to become General of the Armies. With a nickname he picked up during his command of the army’s vaunted Buffalo Soldiers, General Blackjack Pershing led doughboys to save the world, in his role as Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Force during World War I. His remains lie beneath a simple marker in Arlington National Cemetery.
But on this day, his ghost moved in the cover of smoke that rose from his childhood playground, now called Pershing State Park. Park rangers had set a series of controlled grass fires that burned through leaves and brush. The fires would energize the soil, but as we moved deeper into the smoke, it was an eerie, unintended remake of a battle during the War to End All Wars.
Obviously, that first visit to Pershing State Park was not what I expected. But that’s the beauty of exploring new territory. And it’s a reminder that indeed, you never step into the same burning battlefield twice.
I’m just grateful to the state park personnel, who unwittingly welcomed me in a way I’ll never forget.
Across the highway from that state park is Pershing’s home. As a boy, born at the outbreak of the Civil War, he didn’t have to worry about crossing busy highways to get to his playground, like kids do today. And Highway 36 didn’t roll past his house until 1922, long after he had left to vanquish the Axis powers, at least for a while. But when he came back from Europe, leaders asked him to turn his logistical skills to highway planning. His 1921 Pershing Map for a national highway grid is the grandfather of the Interstate Highway System, finally funded during President Eisenhower’s administration.
Today, the Avenue of the Greats doesn’t go through Laclede, Missouri, anymore. And Pershing’s hometown looks much like it did when he lived here: Sleepy. Comfortable.
On the edge of this little town, big concrete pillars once propped the overpass where Highway 36 crossed Highway 139. Now the pillars prop only sky. A middle-aged man with crooked teeth rode a go-kart through the town’s empty streets. Bordering the city park were a dozen American flags.
A block away, a statue of the man who saved Europe stands near his boyhood home. I paused in front of that house and thanked his mother for raising a son who envisioned our modern highway system. Then Erifnus motored down the road to Chillicothe, where I discovered a story that led to national outrage.
Back in 1928 a jeweler from St. Joseph named Otto Rehwedder invented the first automatic bread slicer, which he sold to the Chillicothe Baking Company. The invention was heralded by kitchen help everywhere, and even though some folks claim the first automatic bread slicer was used in Battle Creek, Michigan, that wasn’t the ruckus. When a St. Louis inventor named Gustav Papendick improved the process by inventing a cardboard tray that kept the sliced loaf together before it got wrapped, the future looked bright for sliced bread.
But then Hitler invaded Poland and Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and America went to war. As a wartime conservation effort, America’s food administrator banned sliced bread, claiming that the heavy wrapping was a wasteful step, and needless in our consumption of bread. The ban lasted 49 days, crumbling under the outrage of cooks and moms and sandwich eaters everywhere, and the ghosts of Prohibition, too, who reminded leaders about the last time the government tried to control yeast.
So sliced bread flourished, and so did Chillicothe, which adopted the slogan “Home of Sliced Bread” and painted its 13th downtown mural to celebrate the feat. I indulged in a yeasty treat while my eyes feasted upon the baker’s-dozen tasty murals downtown. Among other scenes of wheat fields and flour mills and streetscapes, a Burlington Northern locomotive belches smoke and steam. The murals are proof that Chillicotheans promote their town better than most do, offering mural mugs and mural magnets. As good as Chillicothe is at promotion, the recognized father of modern mercantile hails from just down the road.
Tiny Hamilton, Missouri, actually produced two legendary Americans. Hamilton marks the intersection of the Avenue of the Greats and the Zack Wheat Highway. Most folks probably know more about Cream o’ Wheat than Zack Wheat. Casey Stengel called Zack “one of the kindliest men God ever created.” Kindliness doesn’t guarantee fame, and it’s likely that more folks can identify Casey’s General Store than Casey Stengel. Well, Casey and Zack are baseball icons, in a league with Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb. Zack played baseball in Polo, Missouri, and the Polo Grounds, too. Nowadays, more folks know about Polo shirts than the Polo Grounds, but that’s what happens to immortals over time. Anyway, now Highway 13 from Polo to Hamilton is Zack Wheat Highway.
Hamilton is also J.C. Penney’s birthplace. While there doesn’t appear to be a J.C. Penney Highway near here, or anywhere in Missouri, there is a J.C. Penney Memorial Highway in Florida.
In Hamilton, it’s easy to find the 500th store built by J.C. Penney, right on the main highway, one block from the local Casey’s General Store. It’s a museum now, since his hometown isn’t big enough to support a J.C. Penney store. It shares space with the town library, which probably increases traffic for both places. Hey, it’s a small town. I was the only visitor on the morning I walked through the displays of Penney’s life, his photos and memorabilia. I learned how one of 12 children in the Penney household revolutionized the mercantile business. Mostly self-taught, his employee-training regimen is legendary. Even as a kid, while he raised feeder pigs, he sold lemonade and watermelons and livery stalls to playmates
