“Then I’ll have the regular ribs,” I said, pretty certain he didn’t sell many St. Louis ribs. I ate until I was full, then walked a mile back to my hotel and crashed for the night.
The next morning I decided to see the town’s three advertised tourist sites, beginning with the Patee House Museum.
The Patee House was originally built as a 140-room luxury hotel and was, in its day, one of the best-known hotels in the West. It also served as the headquarters for the Pony Express. I was surprised to learn that for all its infamy, the Pony Express only lasted for eighteen months. Today the Patee House is considered one of the top ten Western museums in the country.
Less than a block away from the Patee House Museum was the home where Jesse James was killed. This wasn’t a coincidence. For commercial reasons, the home was lifted from its original site and moved to its current location.
The killing of Jesse James in 1882 made national news. James had been hiding out in St. Joseph under the alias Tom Howard, hoping to start a new life with his wife and two children as a law-abiding citizen. After such a notorious career, and with a lengthy list of enemies, James was understandably paranoid, so he hired two brothers to protect him, Charley and Robert Ford—family friends he believed he could trust.
Unbeknownst to James, Robert Ford had been plotting with the governor to betray the outlaw. One day, while James stood on a chair to right a crooked picture hanging on the wall, Ford shot him in the back of the head.
Then the Ford brothers hurried to the local sheriff to claim the ten-thousand-dollar reward. Much to their surprise, they were arrested for first-degree murder, indicted, and sentenced to death by hanging, all in the same day. Fortunately for the brothers, the governor interceded and pardoned the two men.
History, while heralding the outlaw, has not been as kind to the Ford brothers, painting them as traitors and cowards. After receiving a portion of the reward money, Robert Ford earned a living by posing for photographs in dime museums as “the man who killed Jesse James” and appeared onstage with his brother Charles, reenacting the murder in a touring stage show, which was not well received.
Two years after the killing, Charles, suffering from tuberculosis and addicted to morphine, committed suicide. Robert Ford was killed a few years later by a man who walked up to him in a bar then said, without explanation, “Hello, Bob,” and unloaded both barrels of a shotgun into his neck.
As I purchased a book on Jesse James at the home’s souvenir counter, I wondered why it is that we humans have such a fascination with outlaws. From Billy the Kid to Al Capone, we have always revered gangsters. Do we do this because it makes us feel good, that we are not that bad—or because deep inside, we’re really not that good? Or maybe we’re just obsessed with fame—whatever its source.
On the way back to my hotel I stopped at the third most advertised site: The Glore Psychiatric Museum. I wish I hadn’t. There was something about the museum that reminded me of those haunted warehouses that pop up in cities every Halloween.
The four-story museum is a collection of horrific, life-sized dioramas, the role of the mentally ill played by mannequins donated by a local department store. The second-floor exhibits follow the history of the treatment of the mentally ill, from witch burnings and devil stompings (the idea being that evil spirits could be stomped out of a person) to the more scientific Bath of Surprise (a device not unlike the dunking booths found at today’s carnivals, except employing a massive vat of ice water).
There was also a working model of O’Halloran’s Swing, in which insanity was spun out of the mentally ill who were strapped into the device, which could make up to a hundred revolutions per minute.
On the third floor, the more contemporary exhibits held their own horrors, including mannequins strapped to tables and covered in sheets, lobotomy instruments, a hospital cage, and a fever-cabinet used for heating syphilis patients.
One exhibit displayed the 1,446 items swallowed by a patient, which included 453 nails, 42 screws, a plethora of safety pins, spoons, and salt and pepper shaker tops. The woman died during surgery to remove the items.
Another exhibit showed what the asylum’s television repairman discovered: more than five hundred notes crammed into a television set; answers to the questions a patient had been asked by myriad psychiatrists over the years.
The museum seemed to me as schizophrenic as some of those it supposedly championed. On one hand it blared the atrocities of mankind’s treatment of the mentally ill, citing that at one time residents of London used to pay to walk through the Bedlam asylum to see those inside chained to walls or strapped to beds. On the other hand it seemed to do precisely that, exploiting the plight of the mentally ill with all the theatrics of a carnival freak show.
After less than a half hour I fled the place and was still upset when I arrived back at my hotel, which was a few miles away. I couldn’t sleep so I watched a mindless TV sitcom to erase the memory of what I had seen.
It was time to leave St. Joseph.
CHAPTER
Twenty-two
History bears witness that our
lives are far more influenced by
imagination than circumstance.
Alan Christoffersen’s diary
I wrote earlier that small towns are tinder boxes for some of the world’s greatest people and ideas. U.S. Route 36 in Missouri may be the most illustrative example of my theory. Along this 160-mile stretch of highway the world was changed. This isn’t hyperbole. These are the people who came from the small towns on this one small stretch of American highway:
J. C. Penney
Walt Disney
General John J. Pershing
Mark Twain
And Otto Rohwedder, the inventor of sliced bread.
The day I left St. Joseph, I headed east on Frederick to 29 south, then made my way to the 36.
There were trees everywhere and, according to the book I’d purchased at the Jesse James Home, this was where James and his fellow “bushwhackers” hid out. I spent the night in the small town of Stewartsville (population 759) and ate dinner at the Plain Jane Café.
I started walking early the next morning and by noon I entered Cameron, a city of ten thousand, where I stocked up on supplies. The city of Cameron had a curious birth. In 1854 a group of settlers planned a four-block city called Somerville along the route of the Hannibal to St. Joseph railroad line. As it turned out, Somerville’s land was too steep for trains, so the settlers dragged the three buildings of their town a mile southwest and changed the town’s name to Cameron.
By twilight I reached Hamilton, the birthplace of J. C. Penney. I walked into the town expecting to find someplace to stay but there was no hotel. I passed by the J. C. Penney Memorial Library and Museum but it was closed for the evening. I bought food at a grocery store called HY-KLAS and camped in a small, overgrown park near the museum.
The next day I walked just shy of twenty-five miles to the town of Chillicothe—the home of sliced bread. They won’t let you forget it. It’s posted everywhere, from their newspaper’s masthead to their city sign: Welcome to Chillicothe, The Home of Sliced Bread. Their school mascot is probably a toaster.
I walked all the way into the historic downtown because I saw a sign advertising the Strand Hotel, a big redbrick building that unfortunately had been converted into apartments. Across the street was a beauty salon called Curl Up & Dye.
I walked back toward 36, where I had passed a hotel. I ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant called El Toro, then stayed at the Grand River Inn, where a large, white dog of questionable temperament roamed the lobby. It cost fifty dollars. The hotel, not the dog.
The next morning I felt a little dizzy again, but still managed an early start. After twenty miles I turned north off the freeway to the town of Laclede, the hometown of General John “Black Jack” Pershing.
General Pershing had a rather colorful military career, culminating in the highest rank ever offered a U.S. military leader: General o
f the Armies of the United States, a rank that Congress created especially for him after distinguished service in World War I. No other American soldier ever held such a rank, until 1976, when President Gerald Ford posthumously promoted General George Washington to it.
In addition to his rank, Pershing garnered another unique distinction: he had both a missile and a tank named after him.
Laclede was quiet and picturesque, with streets lined with large elm trees, tidy neighborhoods, and many historic houses and churches. There were no hotels in the town so I continued on to the next, Brookfield, where I stayed at the Travel Inn Motel, advertised as “Veteran Owned and Operated.” My room was only thirty-five dollars for the night and had a kitchenette. There was a plethora of Christian literature in the motel’s lobby. I picked up a brochure entitled “Why Do We Die?” which I perused on my bed before going to sleep.
The next morning I ate breakfast at the Simply Country Café, then turned south on Main Street to get back to the highway. There was a narrow paved road that paralleled 36 for a few miles and I stayed on that until I reached the turnoff for Marceline—the boyhood home of Walt Disney. I walked three miles from the Marceline exit to reach the small town.
As a boy I had two heroes: Thomas Edison and Walt Disney. When I was growing up in Pasadena, Disneyland was a favorite amusement of mine, and McKale and I had many memories of the park. The first time I publicly put my arms around her was on the Matterhorn ride. It’s also where I first called her “Mickey,” a nickname that stuck through her entire life.
Elias Disney, Walt’s father, had moved his family from Chicago to Marceline in 1906, when young Walter was only four, after two of their neighbor boys had attempted to steal a car and killed a local policeman in a shoot-out.
As a child, Walt spent more time in both Chicago and Kansas City, but Marceline had a far greater impact on his life than any other place the nomadic Disneys landed. Disney spoke of his years in Marceline as his halcyon days and was quoted by a newspaper as saying “To tell the truth, more things of importance happened to me in Marceline than have happened since, or are likely to in the future.”
I almost passed Disney’s boyhood home, a handsome but nondescript house, without recognizing its significance. It was not hard to miss. The home was a private residence, its status as a landmark denoted only by a small sign warning would-be tourists to respect the privacy of the residents.
I stood on the edge of the property and stared at the house, wondering how surprised the town’s citizens would have been to know that the little boy who ran the unpaved streets and climbed their trees would someday be known in every corner of the world.
A half hour later I reached the town’s main street. I had read that Disneyland’s Main Street USA was patterned after Marceline’s main street, but in looking at its simple and aging façades, I knew Disney’s re-creation was more the offspring of an imaginative memory than a replica of reality.
On Marceline’s main street I found a bed-and-breakfast located above the Uptown Theatre, the theater Disney had chosen to premiere The Great Locomotive Chase in 1956. The small apartment was decorated with Disney memorabilia and smelled like lemon-scented Pledge. While it lacked the charm of most bed-and-breakfasts, the fact that Disney had been there was enough to justify my stay.
The next morning I walked back to the 36, passing the Disney homestead again on the way out. I had once told McKale that I wanted to visit Marceline some day. I had assumed I would see it with her. I wondered if she knew that I had made it.
CHAPTER
Twenty-three
Today I met a self-described tramp
with a most unfortunate view of God.
Alan Christoffersen’s diary
When I saw Israel he was leaning against the railing of the eastbound freeway on-ramp from Marceline, his backpack resting on the ground next to him. He looked like he was in his early to mid thirties; he was short with sandy red hair and wore thick-lensed glasses in round frames. He held a cardboard sign that read:
St. Louis
I nodded at him. “Hey.”
“How are you?” he asked cheerfully.
“Fine,” I replied. “How are you?”
“Perfect. Beautiful day to be outside.”
“Good walking weather,” I said.
“Where you headed?” he asked.
“Key West.”
“Nice place, Key West,” he said, nodding a little. He was the first person I’d told who hadn’t reacted with surprise.
“How about you?” I asked.
“Arkansas. I’ve got a job waiting for me down there.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a roofer.”
“That’s a long way to go for one house.”
He shrugged. “It’s what I do—I’ve been on the road since I was seventeen.”
“You’ve been walking since you were seventeen?”
“No, I don’t walk. I’m a tramp.”
“Tramps don’t walk?”
“Not if we can help it. But it’s a nice day. I’d be happy to walk a ways with you, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind,” I said.
He fastened his sign to his pack, then pulled it over his shoulders and walked up to me. The shoulder was wide enough that we could safely walk abreast.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Alan. Yours?”
“Israel. Israel Campbell.”
“And you’re a tramp.”
“Yes, sir. To regular folk, most homeless people look the same, but we’re not.” He held his hand out in front of him, extending his index finger. “First, you’ve got your mountain men—they’re easy to spot. They look like they just crawled out of a cave or something. They usually have a lot of facial hair and they only come out in public when they absolutely need something, then go back as soon as they can.”
He extended a second finger. “Then you have your crazies. I don’t mean serial killer crazy, but just a bit off, you know? Arguing with themselves. You can tell the elevator doesn’t quite reach the top floor.”
I nodded. “I’ve seen these people,” I said.
He extended a third finger. “Then you got your hobos.”
“Hobos and tramps aren’t the same thing?”
“No. Hobos give us tramps a bad name.”
“How’s that?”
“Hobos do a lot of panhandling—you’ll see them on off-ramps with cardboard signs begging for money. Tramps don’t beg unless we have to. Tramps work. It’s a point of pride with us. We just don’t have a home or vehicle, so we hitchhike.
“Hobos also ride trains a lot. I do that some, but only if I’m stuck somewhere. There are tricks to the trains. I’ve been thinking of learning the ropes.”
“Tricks? Like what?”
“What I know so far is that it’s the pushers, the engines in the rear, that you want to get into. They’ve got bottled water, refrigerators, and a bathroom.”
“There’s no one riding back there?”
“Not usually. But even if someone’s in there, they don’t necessarily throw you out. Once a guy let me stay on with my dog.”
“You have a dog?”
“I did,” he said quickly, as if he didn’t want to talk about it. “The thing is, they don’t really care that much. Having someone ride the train isn’t any sweat off their back, but they have to act like they care. You know what I mean?”
I nodded.
“The most important thing is to stay away from the bulls. That’s the railroad police. Most of them are lazy and don’t bother to search the boxcars, but if they see you, you’re in trouble. But, it’s like I said, that’s mostly hobo stuff. Not that I hate hobos or anything. I’m sociable with anyone on the road. A lot of homeless don’t want you around because they don’t trust anyone, but I’m not like that. I try to give others money if I have any and I always ask if they’re okay. The other day I left two dollars under a bridge and a note that said, ‘Have a be
er on me. If you don’t really need this, leave it for the next guy who does.’ ”
“So how does one start being a tramp?” I asked.
He rubbed his chin. “That’s a good question. In my case, it just kind of happened. It’s not like I was in career day at school and I said, ‘I think I’ll be a tramp.’ It just kind of snuck up on me. I had a crappy home life, so when I was seventeen, a friend called and said he had some work for me in the next state. I didn’t own a car, so I hitchhiked my way there. When I finished the job, someone else called with a job, so I hitchhiked again. Since then I haven’t stayed in one place more than three or four months. I guess I’m always looking for greener pastures.”
“You’re always on the road?”
“If there’s work. But not always. Last winter, I dug myself a shelter six feet into the side of a hill. I even had a stove I made of three five-gallon steel buckets. It was kind of a nice place.”
“Where are you from originally?” I asked.
“I grew up near St. Louis.”
I looked at his sign. “Then you’re going home?”
“Not if I can help it. It’s just the next big city on my way to Arkansas.”
“You still have family in St. Louis?”
“If you call family a bunch of cutthroats who don’t care if you’re dead or alive. I have no need to see any of them again.” He looked down. “So, what are you, hobo or tramp?”
“Neither,” I said. “I’m just walking.”
“Hitchhiking’s faster.”
“I’m in no hurry.”
He nodded. “Where do you sleep?”
“Depends on the day. A lot of cheap motels. Sometimes in the fields.”
“There’s a trick to that too,” he said. “Ever been hassled by the cops?”
“Not yet. I’ve been mugged.”
He frowned. “Me too. Comes with the territory. But cops have been a bigger problem for me. The most important thing about sleeping on the road is to stay out of sight.”