FOCUS/Midwest

Ryan L. Nave is the new editor of FOCUS/Midwest magazine.

A professional freelance journalist and former writer for Illinois Times and other publications, Nave has covered politics, business, environmental issues and other subjects. Nave is a graduate of the University of Missouri. He was born and raised in St. Louis.

FOCUS/Midwest was founded in 1962 by Charles and Rose Klotzer. It suspended publication in 1983, but was revived in 2008 as an online publication. For more information about the magazine, go here.

To contact Ryan, call 314-518-4655 or e-mail rlnave@gmail.com.

What happens when hundreds and hundreds of unemployed or underemployed communications workers converge with digital media? You get a veritable revolution, staged on multiple platforms, and the flowering of hundreds and hundreds of websites devoted to criticism, analysis, innovation, self-promotion and related topics. [Here] are 100 of them of varying quality, listed alphabetically. Feel free to repurpose this info, make it viral and stick in everybody’s content bucket. You supply the emoticons. Send recommendations or corrections to focusmidwest@yahoo.com

This story, about two St. Louis entrepreneurs, appeared in 1990. They were about 20 years early. Read Alan Kaufman’s recent essay about electronic books, “The Electronic Book Burning,” by clicking on this link.

Dust off the books on the shelf. Put ‘em in a box and take it to a recycling center.

You might not need them anymore, if a small St. Louis company has its way. The home library of the future could be reduced to a shoebox full of memory modules, each about the size of a quarter.

VPR Systems Ltd. — headed by Robert Griesedieck, 66, a former brewing executive, and Michael Saigh, 37, a stockbroker and business professor — plans to introduce a hand-held electronic book by the fall of 1991.

Unlike other manufacturers, who are developing systems that use compact discs for text and graphics, VPR’s ‘video pocket reader’ uses an interchangeable, reprogrammable memory module.

Saigh and Griesedieck — who operate out of a converted suburban duplex in St. Louis County — say each module can store three to four textbooks. The entire Encyclopaedia Britannica could fit on as few as three. The video pocket reader shows 16 lines of text on a liquid-crystal display, operates on four AAA batteries, weighs about 8 ounces and will retail for less than $100. There’s a prototype, but working models won’t be available until January.

Who will want an electronic book?

Lots of people, based on the number of firms plunging into the business.

The players range from consumer electronics giants, like Sony Corp., to tiny start-up companies tinkering with circuit boards.

Sony, which gave Walkman to the world, unveiled Data Discman in July, a three-pound, $ 350 electronic book that uses 3-inch compact discs. Data Discman is available only in Japan.

Franklin Electronics in New Jersey and SelecTronics Inc. of New York both are marketing electronic Bibles and dictionaries in the form of hand-held calculators. Prices range from $50 to $300.

Seiko Instruments Inc. this summer introduced multilanguage pocket translators for Japanese, English, Spanish and French. The translators retail from $ 80 to $ 100 each.

Even a company in ”Silicon Holler” is getting into the act.

EMPRUVE Inc. of Knoxville, Tenn., is introducing Cornucopia, a device that not only provides full text and graphics, but will offer stereo audio and moving video on three screens, using digital video interactive technology developed by Intel Corp.

The flood of new gizmos merits a healthy amount of skepticism, says an industry expert.

”Every week, someone comes down the pike and says, ‘I’ve got it now!’ ” said Richard A. Bowers, executive director of the Optical Publishing Association, a trade group representing the compact disc, read-only memory (CD-ROM) publishing companies.

Bowers said the electronic book still has big obstacles ahead. The technology to develop a portable, inexpensive electronic book already is available. What isn’t available is an abundance of titles that can capitalize on new technologies.

”What we’re talking about is not a computer problem. We’re talking about a publishing situation. You can’t publish one book and build your company around it,” said Bowers.

That’s where the VPR inventors believe they may have a leg up on competitors.

Compact discs, while they can store tremendous amounts of information, can’t be erased and can’t store new data. And unlike the Franklin Bible, the video pocket reader can accept an unlimited number of texts.

Here’s how the video pocket reader will work:

Bookstores each are equipped with a toaster-sized ‘VPR Book Bank,’ containing numerous book titles with on-line access to additional titles.

A customer makes a selection and takes a voucher to a cashier, who automatically transfers a title to a memory module.

”It’s a special design that hasn’t been used somewhere else,” said Tom Domian, VPR vice president of operations. The modules will sell for about $20.

A central processing center records the transaction, providing publishers with instantaneous information to monitor sales and royalties.

”This is a point-of-purchase duplication process. It’s right in the stores, erasable and interchangeable,” said Saigh.

Saigh, a business professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, says the system gets new book titles to the public without printing, production, shipping and warehouse costs.

No trees, no lumber, no printing inks, no diesel fuel for trucks, no cut for wholesalers.

And better still, no remainder table.

Saigh cites Donald Trump as an example of the type of marketing nightmare publishers can avoid using the VPR system.

Random House paid the New York developer a $2 million advance and printed 500,000 copies of his book, Surviving at the Top, based on the success of Trump’s earlier tome, Art of the Deal.

Art of the Deal stayed on the best-seller list for two years.

Surviving at the Top survived seven weeks.

”Publishing is a very conservative business,” said Bowers.

”One of the greatest fears about traditional publishers is that they will cannibalize their traditional print markets,” said Bowers.

”They know for sure they can make money on print. If they blow away their print business, could they recover?”

Saigh admits he’s bucking a powerful, entrenched industry. After all, the printed book has been around for at least 534 years.

”We are battling a concept that the book is sacred,” said Saigh.

Indeed, the initial reaction from publishers, wholesalers and printers is, well, less than overwhelming.

”It sounds awful to me,” said Arlynn Greenbaum, marketing director for Little, Brown & Co. Inc. ”You can’t get it autographed and can’t put it on the shelf.”

”It’s going to have to be a pretty darned good invention to uproot a written tradition this long-standing,” said Dan Cullen, editorial director fo the American Booksellers Association, a New York trade group that represents bookstores. – Roland Klose

Published by The Commercial Appeal, the daily newspaper of Memphis, Dec. 4, 1990.

It hit New Madrid, Mo., on Dec. 16, 1811, at 2 in the morning. Settlers ran terror-stricken from tottering and falling buildings to find the earth belching forth great volumes of sand and water. Stores and houses fell into great fissures. The river rose five or six feet in a few minutes. Its color changed to a reddish hue and became thick with mud roiled from its bottom. The surface of the Mississippi was covered with foam and the jets on the shore went higher than the treetops. Within five minutes, the clear serene night became overcast and purplish. The air was filled with a dense, sulfurous vapor that left the inhabitants gasping for breath. The overcast stayed until daybreak; aftershocks (twenty-seven of them) occurring every six to ten minutes accompanied by sudden flashes of fire brought a night full of horror. The fissures ran from southeast to northwest. People felled trees across the direction of cleavage and hung to the trunks to keep from being buried alive. The churchyard with its dead was gone. The great fissures bared the bones of gigantic mastodons and ichthyosauri.

Between New Madrid and Vick’s Plantation, now Vicksburg, there wasn’t the sign of a town remaining along the 300-mile stretch of river. Chimneys were thrown down in Cincinnati. Doors and windows were rattled in Washington, D.C. A church bell rang in Boston and plaster cracked in Virginia and the Carolinas. The three major shocks on Dec. 16, 1811, Jan. 23, 1812, and Feb. 7, 1812 were felt over an area of 1 million square miles. It was felt at the headwaters of the Missouri and Arkansas rivers and on the Gulf of Mexico and in Canada. Jared Brooks at Louisville recorded 1,874 shocks between Dec. 16 and March 15. Aftershocks were felt for more than a year and it almost two years before complete cessation.

It had not been a favorable year in the West. Hunters were alarmed when the squirrels started migrating in herds from north to south. There had been heavy spring floods with the accompanying diseases. A comet of intense brilliancy had appeared in September only to disappear the night of the quake. Superstitious backwoods men recalled a total eclipse of the moon in September.

There had been no warning. Fortunately, there was little loss of life because of the thinly populated area. Between the Mississippi and the Great Plains, Indians reported forests were overthrown and rocks split in two.

An English traveler and botanist, Bradbury, had moored for the night about 150 miles below New Madrid. He was wakened by a tremendous noise. The Mississippi was in such a state of agitation that he feared the boat might upset. The noise he described as being inconceivably loud. “I could hear trees falling and screaming wild fowl, but the boat was still safe at mooring. By the time we got to our fire in the stern, the shock had ceased, but the perpendicular banks both above and below us began to fall into the river in such masses as to nearly sink our boat.” They sent men ashore who found a chasm about four feet wide and eighty feet long. The banks had sunk two feet and at the ends of the chasm, they had fallen into the river. Bradbury’s party had been saved by mooring to a sloping bank. They embarked when this bank appeared to be moving into the river. Aftershocks made the trees on both sides shake violently and the banks in several places fell, carrying trees with them. “The terrible sound of the shock and the screaming of wild fowl produced the idea that all nature was in a state of dissolution.”

Between Cairo and the mouths of the White and Arkansas rivers, the ground rose and fell in great waves, making new lakes, leaving swamps and river beds dry. One of the largest of these earthquake-formed lakes is Reelfoot in Tennessee, which is sixty to seventy miles long and three to twenty miles wide. Here forest trees had fish swimming through their branches and tortoises crawling through cane brakes. The water is clear as a mountain stream in contrast to the yellow Mississippi water. . . .

While there is reason to anticipate a recurrence, which could cause serious damage to such places as Cairo and Memphis and minor damage to St. Louis, it is well to remember that no place on earth is earthquake proof. – Jeanne G. Hawkins

Excerpted from “The day the Mississippi ran backwards,” published in the November 1963 edition of FOCUS/Midwest.

During the Great Depression, an estimated 50 million people tuned into Father Charles Coughlin’s radio programs, which were known for their ultra-conservative denunciations of the Roosevelt administration and poorly concealed anti-Semitism. Coughlin left the airwaves in the early 1940s. Nearly a quarter-century later, FOCUS/Midwest contributing editor Bernard Eismann interviewed Coughlin, and found a substantially different man.

The white-haired priest, cassock skirts flapping, moved with short, quick steps along the snow-spotted pavement that runs parallel to broad Woodward Avenue in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak. As he turned to enter the church his ruddy face, hardly showing seventy-one years, was brought into sharp relief against the gray stone background of the Shrine of the Little Flower that dominates the corner with a 150-foot tower supporting a stone image of Christ on the Cross. The priest is the Rev. Charles Coughlin, a living ghost of the angry Thirties, described in a chronicle of the decade as the master in “the arts of vituperation and demagoguery.”

In his study the radio priest of the Thirties, whose vein-straining oratory enraptured hundreds of thousands more than two decades ago, recently talked after keeping silent since 1940. The fire is not gone after the years of public exile, but Coughlin has mellowed, suffering no longer from what he calls the arrogance of youth. Apparently, he has changed with age and he sound quite different from what he was in the late Thirties when Coughlin, his theories of “Social Justice” and his companions on the fringes of American political sanity fed the fires of anti-Semitism and hatred already smoldering through large segments of the frustrated and frightened middle classes. Coughlin started invoking his invective against the “modern pagans who have crucified us upon a cross of gold” in 1926 and by 1935 the Jew-baiting in his radio talks and in print was barely disguised. His following grew along with the flow of nickels, dimes, and dollars that built him and the Shrine of the Little Flower into forces to be reckoned with. In 1940, however, the curtain drew tight. The Post Office banned his magazine from the mails for printing Nazi propaganda and the Church finally imposed a censorship that he was unable to break. . . .

We talked in the richly comfortable lower floor dining room at his Royal Oak rectory, and Coughlin carefully measured his words and his tone.

F/M: Your career has been characterized as one of “vituperation and demagoguery.” How do you meet this criticism?

Coughlin: I committed an egregious error, which I am the first to admit, when I permitted myself to attack persons. I could never bring myself to philosophize the morality of that now. It was a young man’s mistake.

F/M: What general observations of that period and of what you were trying to accomplish do you have now?

Coughlin: No clergyman has business injecting himself into the practical side of politics. I could have done much better had I been more mature in my thinking at the time, and I could have accomplished much more if I had retained the advocacy of my principles.

F/M: This is a remarkable admission.

Coughlin: I don’t think so. Every man has to mature a little bit, and make an act of contrition sometime during his life, because there is no human being perfect. . . .

F/M: There is a considerable degree of noise in the country these days about a movement generally called the Far Right. . . . Am I correct in saying that those who have described themselves as extreme conservatives are incorrect in striving to return to a more traditional economic system?

Coughlin: Principles are principles. Two and two the four will always obtain, and thievery will always be considered an immorality. Those principles will remain; but, nevertheless, the application of those principles has to be reviewed once in a while. [The Far Right] is always so fearful that we’re going to become bankrupt, always fearful that the federal debt is going to become unmanageable. Well, in my concept of things, I think the federal debt should be put into orbit and let it stay there. We admit that it’s there, we’re not going to try to annihilate it. We’ll be content to pay taxes on the interest, and let it be. But why should human beings all over the world, especially our American world, suffer for the lack of federal spending or federal credit for new houses, new factories, new schools, new hospitals? To me, it doesn’t make sense, because, after all, money is simply a man-made instrumentality.

F/M: You sound like a liberal Democrat.

Coughlin: Maybe I am. Maybe I’m a liberal. A human care comes ahead of financial care, in my estimation.

F/M: This area of spending and economic and fiscal responsibility, which was so involved in the things that you preached, caused you, in the Thirties, to be highly critical of the administration of the President. In these years, it’s causing others to be highly critical of the current President. Do you feel that the degree of criticism of the chief executive should remain high, or should it abate?

Coughlin: Well, in my opinion, the President is living in a glass house, and the binoculars of all the nation constantly train upon his every action, his every thought. He knows that. All of us know it. And in our system of doing things, we have a right to inspect him. That’s Americanism. But we haven’t a right to oppose his actions to the extent that we attribute maliciousness to him or evil — “selling out to Castro, selling out to Khrushchev” — I think that’s horrible to accuse Mr. Kennedy of those things. After all, he has a wife, he has children, he has assets in this country, he has a good moral background with good training. . . . He is just as anxious for the maintenance of the United States as you or I. . . .

F/M: For the last 21 years, you have been seldom heard outside your parish in Royal Oak. What is it, if anything, that at this time makes you feel more free to express yourself?

Coughlin: I’m not necessarily free. I’m just an ordinary citizen now, having attained this three score and ten with the powers of observation that a younger man lacks. You see, when you gain not your majority, but your senile maturity, if I may put it that way, you really can reappraise things.

F/M: Has it been for you personally, then, an almost agonizing reappraisal?

Coughlin: No, no, no, no. It’s not agonizing at all. I think it’s the humilities that an old man acquires. A young man knows nothing or very little about it.

F/M: About humility?

Coughlin: Yes.

Excerpted from Bernard Eismann’s “Reflections of a radio priest,” published in the February 1963 edition of FOCUS/Midwest. At the time, Eismann also was the Chicago-based Midwest correspondent for CBS News.

The abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy was the first American editor to die in defense of freedom of the press. Very few have been called to follow him since the transplanted Yankee’s blood ran out on the cobblestones of Alton, Illinois.

Today freedom of the press calls on editors to live for integrity of expression rather than to die for it. An editor who exemplifies the daily living free press is William Theodore Evjue, editor and publisher of the Madison, Wis., Capital Times.

White-haired Bill Evjue reached the age of 80 on Oct. 10 [1962]. Thus he has lived more than twice the lifespan of Elijah Lovejoy. But there is much in common in their careers and in their intense devotion of their own concepts of honor and truth and the welfare of their fellow men.

Evjue told the story of his mother and father, Nils and Mary Erickson Evjue, immigrants from Norway, in his page 1 column “Hello Wisconsin,” on his eightieth birthday. He told how they made their new home in the lumber country, surrounding Merrill, Wis. There Bill Evjue was born.

He did the hard work of a small town Midwestern boy, and then worked his way at the University of Wisconsin where he became a devoted admirer of the first Senator Robert Marion La Follette – “Old Fighting Bob” who led the liberal and progressive forces in the first quarter of this century.

Evjue started his newspaper career as a cub reporter on the Milwaukee Sentinel back in 1905. He was business manager of the Wisconsin State Journal at Madison in 1917 when its editor launched an intemperate, unjustified attack on Sen. La Follette. The Wisconsin statesman was opposed to involvement in the war in Europe and this brought the bitter criticism.

As soon as this attack on La Follette appeared in print, business manager Evjue went to the editor, protested the attack and then immediately resigned. Almost at once he started The Capital Times. For a year the Madison merchants boycotted the new paper, but its readers and friends sustained it until it could obtain needed legitimate revenue.

Last April [1962], Sigma Delta Chi, the professional journalistic society, honored Evjue by naming him one of its annual fellows. The citation commended him for fighting “for honest government, better politicians, clean journalism and for what he believes would contribute to a better America. He has not been daunted by criticism, by the threat of the Ku Klux Klan, or by rabble-rousing politicians, but has continued since 1917 to public and edit a fearless and independent newspaper. – Irving Dilliard

William T. Evjue, who died in 1969, crusaded against gambling and Joe McCarthy. His paper, The Capital Times, ended its 90-year run as a daily newspaper in 2008, but continues an online edition.

Excerpted from “Lovejoy and Evjue,” published in the November 1962 edition of FOCUS/Midwest. Dilliard, who lived in Collinsville, Illinois, was the editorial page editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in the 1950s.

It has been nearly 10 years since the Battle of Armageddon was supposed to have occurred, according to the predictions of the late Richard Kieninger. Life in Stelle, Illinois, goes on.

Kieninger founded Stelle, the German word for “place,” in 1973. The original residents of the planned community believed in the prophecies set forth in Kieninger’s 1963 book The Ultimate Frontier, which forecast that Armageddon would commence in November 1999. Writing under the pen name Eklal Kueshana, Kieninger further warned that survivors of the final war would be put out of their misery soon thereafter by a series of catastrophic events.

Among other things, Kieninger claimed he was the reincarnation of King David and Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten. In The Ultimate Frontier, a mysterious character named Dr. White contacts a boy named Richard, who is then recruited into a multi-tiered secret society of perfect human beings, called the Brotherhoods, which allegedly originated 25,000 years ago.

“On May 5 of the year 2000 A.D.,” wrote Kieninger, “the planets of the solar system will be arrayed in practically a straight line across space, and our planet will be subjected to enough gravitational distortion to tip the delicate balance. Although one cannot normally expect mere planetary configurations to have such a spectacular effect on us, many factors within our earth are conjoining to produce great surface instability around the turn of the century.”

Kieninger described in detail the earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and hurricanes that would occur after the conjunction, citing the biblical book of Revelation as a corroborative reference. He further forecast that the tumult would cause existing landmasses to sink into the ocean. He and his followers, however, planned to escape the havoc in high-tech dirigibles of their own design. Kieninger envisioned that the residents of Stelle would ultimately colonize the Kingdom of God on the lost continent of Mu, which would resurface from the Pacific Ocean near Easter Island.

Originally, Stelle residents, who hailed mainly from the Chicago area, were required to donate their assets to the cause. But by the late 1970s, some believers had begun to waver and filed lawsuits to regain their lost savings. In 1980, the remaining Stelle residents ousted the autocratic Kieninger, who moved to Texas and founded the community of Adelphi, Texas, which was also based on his apocalyptic visions.

In 1998, a federal jury convicted Kieninger, by then 70 years old, for his role in a secessionist movement that passed millions of dollars in fake checks backed by the nonexistent Republic of Texas. The failed scheme was apparently part of Kieninger’s vision as well. In The Ultimate Frontier, Dr. White tells young Richard that he will create a city and, later, a nation.

Today, 44 households comprise Stelle, according to the town’s website . The Stelle Group, the community’s original governing body, was disbanded in 2006, replaced by a more traditional community association. Nowadays, the curved drive and suburban-style homes give no hint of the town’s unusual history. But there are signs that residents continue to believe in self-reliance and sustainable energy. For instance, the village still provides its own telephone and Internet service, which is solar-powered.

Although many Stellites accept reincarnation as a precept, it seems that most of the people there loathe reliving the past. There is a stigma attached to the early days of the community from which they would prefer to disassociate themselves. But the work of another failed prognosticator has helped keep Kieninger’s ideas alive.

Kieninger wrote the preface to Richard W. Noone’s bestseller 5/5/2000 Ice: The Ultimate Disaster, first published in 1982 and reissued by Random House in 1997. In the book, Noone theorizes that the 2000 planetary alignment would trigger a solar flare, which could induce a polar shift, causing the reversal of the earth’s magnetic field. If this would have happened, it could have dislodged trillions of tons of ice from the South Pole, according to Noone, and consequently unleashed geologic disasters across the face of the earth. Neither Kieninger or Noone foresaw the melting of the polar caps due to global warming.

Kieninger, who served approximately 18 months in federal prison for his involvement in the Republic of Texas secessionist movement, lived beyond his prophesied end of the world. He died in Adelphi, Texas, in 2002. – C.D. Stelzer (cdstelzer@yahoo.com)

Residents are concerned about mortality levels near the site of a 20-year-old radioactive waste clean-up.

Diane Ratliff, a native of Venice, Ill., remembers when the dump trucks first started lumbering up and down Meredosia Avenue in the early 1990s. She then surmised the drivers must have made a wrong turn. “Where the hell were they going?” she asked herself.

Nobody informed her or any of the residents of the neighborhood that a radioactive clean-up was taking place down the block.

That was 20 years ago, and Ratliff, a special education teacher for the East St. Louis School District, is still searching for answers as to whether exposure to radioactive waste may have affected the health of her family and neighbors. She is among a group of citizens who are now pressing the federal government for an epidemiological study of the area to determine the impact that the radioactive site may have had on public health.

In 1989, the Consolidated Aluminum Corp. (Conalco) and Dow Chemical Co. began to quietly clean up a 40-acre site adjacent to a foundry in Madison, Ill., that the two companies formerly owned. The plant and dump site are both located on the boundary between the Metro East cities of Madison and Venice. [read earlier story by clicking here]

The clean-up entailed dividing the area into a massive grid made up of hundreds of squares and then using a complicated formula to measure the contamination levels in each of them. To carry out the job, contractors constructed a laboratory, rail spur and loading station.

By the time the project ended in December 1992 more than 105,000 tons of thorium-contaminated slag had been loaded into 978 rail cars and shipped to a low-level radioactive waste facility in Utah, according to a final report prepared for the Illinois Department of Nuclear Safety (IDNS), the state agency responsible for overseeing the clean-up.

The 1992 report states: “Because of the proximity of the contaminated area to a residential neighborhood, and the inconvenience that the construction activity imposed upon the neighborhood, the construction was done in a manner such that all contaminated material above natural background was removed and the area was backfilled immediately. ”

Larry Burgan, a community activist and former foundry employee, has doubts about that conclusion. “It makes it sound like they were doing the residents a favor,” says Burgan. “But they also could have been doing it quick to get it out of sight [and] out of mind.”

Earlier this summer, Burgan and Ratliff’s brother, Calvin Ratliff, canvassed the neighborhood, asking among other things whether residents had ever been informed of the safety risks posed by the radioactive waste or its removal. None of the residents with whom they spoke indicated that they had ever been contacted.

Instead, contractors appeared to have launched the first phase of the clean-up without warning.

At 8 a.m., March 5, 1990, heavy equipment operators began excavating more than 15,000 cubic feet of radioactively contaminated soil along Rogan Avenue, a neighborhood street that borders the 40-acre site. The work continued for the next two days. Contamination in this area was found from six inches to five feet below the surface, according to the final report.

To ensure compliance with state safety regulations, Conalco and Dow installed eight air-monitoring stations to measure airborne concentrations of contaminants during the clean-up, but a portable generator that powered one monitor was stolen early in the clean-up and never replaced. Despite the loss, the work continued and the final report dismissed the significance of the incomplete data.

The assessment, prepared by Roy F. Weston Inc. of Albuquerque, N.M., does stipulate, however, that one of remaining air monitors registered high concentrations of radioactivity on numerous occasions and exceeded permissible levels at least three times. But the risk to residents was deemed safe because all the radioactive contaminants were “assumed” to be Thorium 228 and not its more potent sister, Thorium 232. Moreover, concentrations of radioactive airborne contaminants were averaged out over several months to lower the estimated dosage to within established limits set by IDNS.

The history of radioactive contamination at the foundry dates back to 1957, when Dow began processing uranium for fuel rods under a subcontract with St. Louis-based Mallinckdrodt Chemical Co., which was working for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. The plant was one of hundreds of low-priority radioactive sites nationwide identified by the federal government’s Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program in the 1990s. The subsequent government-mandated clean-up, which was overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2000, focused mainly on uranium contamination inside facility and did not include additional monitoring or remediation at the adjacent 40-acre site.

The thorium waste was the byproduct of another facet of the foundry’s operations — production of lightweight alloys used for military and aerospace applications. Between 1960 and 1973 Dow dumped millions of pounds of sludge containing 4 to 8 percent thorium behind the plant on the adjacent property. After Conalco took over the operation, the dumping continued for years, including monthly shipments of thorium waste produced at Dow facilities in Bay City and Midland, Mich.

Company guidelines also permitted up to 50 pounds of thorium sludge per month to be poured directly down the sewer. The radioactive contamination could also have been released into the environment by the plant’s several 20-foot diameter exhaust fans.

The Ratliff family has lived in the brick bungalow at Meredosia Avenue and College Street next to the foundry since 1950. Louis D. Ratliff, Diane Ratliff’s late father, built the house. He died in 1974 from brain cancer. An informal survey of a two-block stretch of Meredosia Avenue conducted earlier this year yielded anecdotal evidence of 44 cases of cancer or lung disease among longtime residents, many of whom are also now deceased.

“Before sunset there was always a cloud emanating from the plant,” says Ratliff, who attended elementary school across the street from her family home. The special education teacher now worries about spots that she says have developed on her lungs. Ratliff also worries about her siblings, whom she says have been diagnosed with sarcoidosis; a debilitating, chronic disease that commonly causes inflammation of the lungs and other organs, and in some cases can be deadly.

The clean-up of the site that was initiated 20 years ago did nothing to allay her fears. It only left unanswered questions.

“They were supposed to have examined the yards for contaminants,” says Ratliff. “But that didn’t happen.” — C.D. Stelzer (cdstelzer@yahoo.com)

The pack of Harley riders that roared into the Meramec Caverns parking lot on a sunny morning earlier this month had barely enough time to stretch their legs before their guide whisked them toward the ticket counter.

The group, which included five New Zealanders and more than a dozen Europeans, was following in the footsteps of countless other travelers who have been drawn to the cave’s cool subterranean confines. Lester Dill, an entrepreneur with the instincts of P.T. Barnum, opened the roadside attraction near Stanton, Mo., in 1935 with an eye towards luring passing motorists from the then-nascent Route 66.

But it was Rudy Turilli, Dill’s son-in-law, who initiated the publicity campaign that would forever link the cavern to Jesse James, Missouri’s notorious 19th century outlaw. For decades thereafter, barn roofs throughout the Midwest enticed cross-country travelers to visit the natural wonder by pitching it as Jesse James’ hideout.

The myth began to take shape in 1949, after Frank O. Hall, a journalist from Lawton, Okla., reported that the real Jesse James was still alive. According to Hall’s account, 100-year-old J. Frank Dalton claimed to be the outlaw and said that he had faked his own death in 1882 as a means to end his criminal career.

When Turilli heard the news, he arranged to have Dalton moved to a cabin on the Meramec Cavern grounds. Dalton, who was bedridden with a broken hip by this time, still managed to chew tobacco, cuss and fire a six-shooter indiscriminately on occasion. His long white hair and beard gave him the appearance of Wild Bill Hickok.

Despite contradictory evidence from DNA recovered in a celebrated 1995 exhumation of James’ grave in Kearney, Mo., Meramec Caverns remains indelibly connected to the outlaw’s exploits due in large part to Turilli’s earlier efforts. The cave promoter estimated that he traveled more than 98,000 miles and spent $35,000 investigating the Dalton case.

One of his attempts to gain exposure involved hauling Dalton to New York City, where the old man appeared on a nationally-broadcast program, “We the People.” On the air, Turilli offered $10,000 to anyone who could prove Dalton was an imposter. After returning to Missouri, Turilli had Dalton file a petition in Franklin County (Mo.) Circuit Court to legally change his name to Jesse Woodson James. In response, Jesse E. James, the outlaw’s son, who was an attorney in California, filed an opposing motion.

The hearing took place before 80-year-old Judge Ransom J. Breuer on March 10, 1950. Among those to testify on behalf of Dalton’s request was 109-year-old Col. James Davis, a Confederate Civil War veteran from Nashville, Tenn. His testimony was backed by 111-year-old John Trammell, a black man from Guthrie, Okla., who claimed to have once been the cook for the James gang. Davis died in Stanton the day after he testified at the hearing.

Turilli paraded out a cast of other elderly men who also backed Dalton’s contention. Among them was 95-year-old John William Pierce, who claimed to have been one of the first to arrive at the murder scene in 1882. Pierce swore in a notarized affidavit that he was acquainted with both James and another outlaw Charlie Bigelow, and that the murder victim was most assuredly the latter. Retired Judge Henry Priest of St. Louis, then 91 years old, said Dalton appeared to be the same man who had rented a house from him in Nashville in 1881 using the last name of Howard. James is known to have employed the alias Thomas Howard.

Three witnesses for Jesse E. James, the son of the outlaw, rebutted Dalton’s claims. The octogenarians from St. Joseph all stated that they had identified James’ body at the time of his death.

When the hearing ended, Judge Breuer ruled the issue was beyond his authority. “There is nothing for this court to pass on,” said Breuer. “This court has been called on to change a man’s name where there is nothing to change, because he never changed it, and by law it has never been changed from Jesse James to anything else. If he isn’t (who) he professes to be, then he is trying to perpetrate a fraud upon this court. If he is Jesse James . . . then my suggestion would be that he retreat to his rendezvous and ask the good God above to forgive him, so he may pass away in peace when his time comes to go.”

Eventually, J. Frank Dalton returned to his home in Granbury, Texas, where he died Aug. 15, 1951. Until his death, he continued to assert that Bigelow was actually the man who was murdered in his stead back in 1882.

According to Dalton’s theory, members of the James gang suspected Bigelow of being an informant for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. At the time, Missouri Gov. Thomas T. Crittenden had placed a $5,000 dead-or-alive bounty on James. Crittenden solicited the reward money from railroads and express companies with the help of a lawyer for Wabash line in St. Louis.

Supporters of Dalton’s version of events assert that Bigelow disappeared immediately after the shooting never to be heard from again. James allegedly planned the conspiracy with the assistance of Charlie and Bob Ford, Gov. Crittenden, Kansas City police commissioner Henry H. Craig and Clay County Sheriff James H. Timberlake, among others. Dalton’s confidant Col. Davis alleged that James quietly contributed to Crittenden’s 1880 gubernatorial campaign. In return, Crittenden later allowed James to fake his own death. The governor then supposedly pocketed most of the reward money. Bob Ford the triggerman who allegedly killed Bigelow is said to have only collected small portion of the bounty.

A flurry of events preceded the assassination. As pressure increased to halt James’ 16-year crime spree, gang member Dick Liddil turned himself in to authorities, after murdering James’ cousin Wood Hite. Liddil likely killed Hite over a love triangle that included Martha Bolton — Bob Ford’s sister. Bolton is suspected of negotiating Liddil’s surrender with Gov. Crittenden. At the time, John Bugler, another gang member, was on trial in Independence, Mo., for train robbery. The story is further complicated by intermarriage. Hite, Ford, Bigelow and Zerelda Mims James — the outlaw’s wife — were all said to be cousins of James.

Doubts over who was murdered on April 3, 1882, at house on the corner of 13th and Lafayette streets in St. Joseph, Mo., began almost immediately after the shooting. On April 4, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported: “Mrs. James strenuously denied the identity of her husband for some time, but finally broke down and acknowledged the truth.” Other accounts describe a similar reaction by the outlaw’s mother.

One of Dalton’s true believers was Joe Wood. The retired St. Louis Globe-Democrat photographer published his recollections in the Washington Missourian newspaper in 1989. His story has since been reproduced in a booklet and is available at Meramec Caverns. Wood’s version mirrors Turilli’s account, with few notable exceptions. The moment of Wood’s total conversion came when he witnessed the reunion of Col. Davis and Dalton.

“In that brief exchange,” wrote Wood, “something happened to me. I can’t explain it. Perhaps it was the expression in their eyes, the sincere tone in their voices. I began to perspire and could only say to myself: `My God it’s true.’”

The late Carl W. Breihan, on the other hand, was never convinced of Dalton’s authenticity. “Wood . . . just brings out contemporary stuff that people said back in the 1950s. He can believe what he wants, it’s his opinion,” said Breihan in a 1995 interview. The former St. Louis County councilman, who wrote four books on Jesse James, labeled the Crittenden conspiracy theory as nonsense. Moreover, Bigelow, the purported fall guy, disappeared because he died in 1880 — two years prior to James, Breihan said. Breihan contended that James shot off the middle finger of his left hand as a young man, and in 1950 Dalton still had all five digits. According to Breihan, Trammell, the 111-year-old man, who claimed to be the James gang’s cook, later recanted his testimony. Breihan suspected that more than one witness was paid to testify in Dalton’s behalf.

Jesse James remains an American folk hero mainly because he died before the future could catch up with him. His older brother Frank, however, may be regarded as a modern anti-hero.

Both men participated as Confederate guerrillas in the Civil War. After the defeat of their cause, the James Brothers found that their irregular military status prevented them from readily receiving amnesty. The denial of constitutional rights coupled with the abuses of the carpetbaggers made re-assimilating difficult for them and other members of Quantrill’s raiders.

In some ways, the James brothers’ subsequent bank and train robberies were considered a continuation of the war against financial interests of the North. They found political support from former Confederate Gen. Jo Shelby. Journalist John Newman Edwards, a Southern sympathizer, romanticized their crimes, as did the dime novels of the day. The James brothers’ pro-slavery sentiments were often overshadowed by the violence perpetrated against them by the Jayhawkers and Pinkertons.

For Jesse, it all ended in 1882 with a bullet to the back of the head.

After surrendering to Gov. Crittenden, Frank James stood trial the following year in Gallatin, Mo. He was ultimately acquitted in a highly politicized trial that included the drunken testimony of Gen. Shelby.

In his later years, Frank James became a parody of his former self. He was exhibited at county fairs and used as a starter at horse races. He sold shoes for a while in Nevada, Mo., and worked for a clothing company in Dallas. For a brief time, the Shakespeare-quoting outlaw acted in vaudeville. In 1903, he promoted a Wild West show for a Chicago brewer with his former partner in crime Cole Younger.

From 1894 to 1901, Frank James was the doorman at Ed Butler’s Standard Theater, a St. Louis burlesque house. Butler didn’t need to rob banks or trains; he was the first boss of organized crime in St. Louis and controlled every politician in City Hall.

Before his death in 1915, Frank James’ experiences led him to redefine the enemy. “If there is ever another war in this country, it will be between capital and labor,” he said. “I mean between greed and manhood, and I’m as ready to march now in defense of American manhood as I was when a boy in defense of the South.”

Frank James had entered the 20th century. – C.D. Stelzer (cdstelzer@yahoo.com)

This year marks the 40th anniversary of a boycott of white-owned businesses by the United Front of Cairo. The protest was met with violent opposition from local merchants and police — and, for the most part, indifference from state officials.

By 2000, the town’s population had fallen to 3,632; of those, 33.5 percent lived in poverty.

The town’s decline continues today. As a resident of Cairo wrote recently to The State Journal-Register, the capital city’s daily newspaper: “I guess the saying is true that ‘the state of Illinois stops at Carbondale,’ because anything south of that doesn’t matter!”

This piece was published in a special edition of FOCUS/Midwest.

“Driving on U.S. 51 through Cairo, Illinois, you can see a few “closed” signs on drive-in restaurants and most of the motels along the highway appear to be deserted. Chances are you probably won’t get downtown to Commercial Street to see the vacant storefronts; you probably won’t even see the bullet holes in the rectory of St. Columba Catholic Church or the burned-out homes and businesses in Cairo’s black community.

“Once a booming river town strategically located between the big Ohio and Mississippi rivers, Cairo is a town forgotten by the surge of modern technology; abandoned by towboat captains who once stopped there for refueling on their long journey northward. Perhaps because of its geographic location at the southern tip of Illinois, coupled with its proximity to Kentucky and Tennessee, Cairo is steeped in southern tradition.

“Cairo is a town of just over 6,000 people, about half of whom are black. It has been steadily losing population, recording a drop of 33 percent from just over 9,000, between the 1960 and 1970 U.S. Census. . . . A report by Basis System Inc. found that of the 2,369 families living in Cairo in 1960, 1,057 earned less than $3,000 annually. Unemployment averages about 8.2 percent, and is as high as 20 percent among nonwhite males. Only 10 new homes have been built in Cairo within the last 10 years.

“Cairo is a study in contrast, seemingly mismatched with the lush green fields that surround this dying town in what is popularly known as Little Egypt. It is a dirty town, decaying from within, torn by racial strife; it is a community where rifle shots penetrating the quiet nights have become the rule rather than the exception. It may well be the most polarized community in the nation…. “

Excerpted from William R. Brinton’s “The Story of Confrontation,” in the July-August 1970 edition of FOCUS/Midwest.