Tag Archives: Bootheel

Excerpts II: 1925 Tri-State Tornado, 1949 Baseball Dream of A Patriot

Passages adapted from stories of the book Legend In Missouri by Matt Chaney

Copyright ©2017 by Matthew L. Chaney

Tornado

Excerpt 2: The Tri-State Tornado continues its path on the afternoon of March 18, 1925

Averaging about 55 mph, the tornado flew on a beeline into Iron County, Missouri, showing no deference for the rugged Ozarks topography, whether peak or plain. Its width hugging the ground was a quarter- to a half-mile and destined to expand. Any tree or wooden structure in the storm’s path was subject to destruction; any living being was in mortal danger.

In the twin mining towns of Annapolis and Leadanna, 700 citizens did not know the largest breed of tornado was on its approach.

Lunchtime had just ended. At the school, more than 200 students were back at their desks; downtown, people were back at work. Darkening skies had thundered and rained during lunch, so a storm was expected. But when huge hailstones hit a few minutes past 1 o’clock, people took real notice. Adults gazed anxiously to the southwest, up the valley heading out of town. Schoolchildren fretted when light outside dimmed rapidly, turning their classrooms dark.

Still, there was no funnel cloud visible from town, just a thick, dark fog rolling over the hills—“like a huge column of very black coal smoke,” described one witness—covering everything before it. Many people began dashing for cover, while some lingered a moment or two longer before the spectacle. Then a roar like multiple freight trains burst through the valley, and winds 200 to 300 mph blasted Annapolis.

In a rare benevolent act, the tornado damaged but did not destroy the two-story brick schoolhouse, sparing the children inside. At a house nearby, a terrified housewife clutched her small son, unable to move because plunging air pressure had sucked the front door shut on her dress. That house was left standing too. But save for a handful of other structures, Annapolis was leveled in seconds. All three churches and most of the business district were destroyed. Loaded railroad cars were thrown off tracks and dumped; automobiles were lifted and hurled.

On street after street, houses blew apart around cowering victims. Adults were swept up by wind and launched, landing with injurious thuds, while the small bodies of babies offered no resistance whatsoever against the force. One infant was carried hundreds of yards before being laid down unharmed, but another was seriously injured in a long flight.

The air was full of debris: glass, splinters, metal, bricks, timbers, even chunks of buildings. A young teamster, Raymond Stewart, was struck and killed instantly. Nearby, an airborne wooden beam stabbed through two brick walls.

Annapolis, sitting on a hillside sloping south and west, had been swallowed in the storm’s path. On the ridge top above town, tombstones in the cemetery scraped a pile of trees and wreckage from the tornado’s gut.

The next valley beyond—also in line for a direct hit—was site of the lead mine and Leadanna, a community of mining families in about 30 houses and tents.

The home of Osro and Nell Kelley sat on a west slope in the Leadanna valley. Osro had been predicting “a twister was coming,” and he and his wife each held one of their two small daughters. A hailstone crashed through the dining room window, and when Nell looked out she saw the garage flattened atop their new Chevrolet car. Instantly the house itself was picked up and thrown, launching the family backward. Osro flew against a tree stump near a creek, striking his head and killing him; Nell landed unconscious, covered in debris and nearly dead from injuries through her shattered body. The winds had yanked the little girls from their parents’ arms, 4-year-old Lucille and 2-year-old Wilma. But they landed clasped together in the creek, bruised and cut but not injured seriously. Lucille held her baby sister’s head out of the water until help arrived.

Every other house in Leadanna was blown down, and the mine was wrecked at surface level, ruining the crusher mill and other heavy works. The tipple tower above the shaft was mangled, ruining the cage hoist and cutting off electrical power. Seventy-five miners stranded 450 feet underground would have to climb up a ladder to reach the surface.

The terror had lasted barely a minute before the storm screamed off at great speed on a virtual straight line northeast—21 degrees north of east, the same general bearing it had flown from the start.

Within minutes, the sun was shining over the sudden chaos of Annapolis and Leadanna. This storm left its devastating signature with two communities flattened in a straight track. The ground was strewn with wreckage: boards, bricks, broken glass, twisted automobiles, bolts of store cloth, clothes and household goods. One home stood oddly intact amidst the ruins, but fire broke out nearby and flames spread unchecked to engulf the house and force out the elderly occupants.

Bleeding, dazed survivors roamed the town, some cradling maimed children. Screams shot from under piles of rubble, where rescuers dug urgently to reach the trapped victims. Two lives were lost, Stewart and Osro Kelley, and more than 100 were injured. Seven hundred people were left homeless, virtually the entire local population.

About 10 miles northeast of Annapolis-Leadanna, the storm crossed into Madison County to demolish rural homes, farms, orchards and timber. It plunged into the deep St. Francis River Valley then mowed back out with no change in course. Two country schools were destroyed near Fredericktown, but both were unoccupied. Missing Fredericktown, the tornado struck near Cornwall community, hurling three men. They landed without serious injuries, however, which reflected the miraculous outcome for the area. Properties lay wrecked along a 25-mile path through Madison County, but no one was hurt beyond scrapes and bruises.

The storm had traveled 50 miles in under 60 minutes of life and expanded to three-quarters of a mile wide, dwarfing specifications of the average tornado. Already a ferocious freak of its kind, the storm was only growing in intensity. Shooting past a 1,300-foot mount above Marquand, it swooped down off the eastern Ozarks Plateau toward the Mississippi River Valley. With all telephone and telegraph communications destroyed in affected areas, no warnings could be forwarded ahead.

Next in line was Bollinger County, where the tornado began its penchant for killing children.

A Patriot

Excerpt 2: A local baseball pitcher shocks big-league stars on their exhibition tour, October 1949

The bus with barnstorming major-league baseball players rolled into Sikeston, a bustling agriculture center of 11,600 in “Swampeast” Missouri. People on the streets looked up and some waved, those expecting the famed athletes.

At VFW Memorial Stadium on the east side of town, grids of lights burned against the evening dusk, visible for some distance across the flat farmlands. Baseball fans were still on their way, but a crowd of 1,000 already packed grandstands as the bus for Harry Walker’s All-Stars wheeled onto the gravel parking lot. Spectators craned their necks to see the door swing open and the big leaguers step out wearing uniforms emblazoned Phillies, Reds, Cardinals, Cubs and Giants.

The fans cheered loudly. Big Ted Kluszewski marched with his biceps bared, and Hank Sauer wrapped one huge hand around three bat handles. Harry “The Hat” Walker grinned and waved, as did his former St. Louis teammate Terry Moore, both local favorites.  The 6-1, 195-pound Robin Roberts had a look of intensity. These visitors were national heroes of newspapers, newsreels, radio, and the new broadcast medium, television, preparing for live baseball. Folks were delighted.

The Stars’ opponent, the Holcomb Cardinals, were the Missouri semipro champions. The Holcomb players stole glances at the big leaguers on parade, and some turned completely to watch. A few were not awestruck, especially pitcher Lloyd “Lefty” Fisher and Clyde Martin, both former minor leaguers who relished the chance to compete with players recognized among the best in the game.

Holcomb was a tiny Bootheel town in the delta south of Sikeston. The baseball team was bankrolled by wealthy cotton planters who enticed standout players all over the region, from Cape Girardeau south to Arkansas. The exhibition with Walker’s Stars was played at Sikeston because of the accommodations for a large paying crowd.

The confident big leaguers warmed up quickly and Walker signaled their readiness to play. An umpire in his dark bulk of protective gear strode stiffly to home plate, stooping over like Frankenstein to brush it clean. The infield had been dragged and raked, smoothing dirt from clods to flake, and white chalk lines gleamed under the lights.

In the shadows along the leftfield line, Roberts began loosening his arm to pitch, pausing just a moment to watch the opposing hurler for Holcomb, Lefty Fisher, trot in from rightfield. Some of the major-league hitters watched too, from the visitors dugout, but others paid no attention.

Fisher was a handsome athlete, 6-1 and 185 pounds. He reached the pitcher’s mound in smooth gait, then began toe-digging the rubber with a cleated shoe. Satisfied with the foothold, he looked in at the catcher, wound up and fired a warm-up pitch. The fluid delivery sent the ball as a dart over home plate, popping the airy catcher’s mitt.

The stands held many fans who followed Fisher, and they clapped and yelled encouragement. Fisher was among the top semipros in Missouri, and he used to pitch for AAA-level Montreal in the Dodgers organization; if any local pitcher could compete with the major leaguers, he was the one.

The game began and Fisher did not disappoint the locals. He gave up hits to the Stars but remained composed, pitching around threats to keep them scoreless, which made the game interesting. Otherwise it was unfolding as expected with Holcomb batters flailing hopelessly at Roberts’ pitches; the sensational young Phillies hurler felt good, despite appearing in his 20th exhibition game over 10 days across multiple states.

Holcomb’s Charley Hart had batted .580 during the semipro season and starred at the state tournament in Jefferson City. But Roberts overwhelmed him, sending 90 mph fastballs with “action” that Hart struggled to merely foul off. Unleashing one pitch wild, Roberts yelled “Watch out!” barely in time for Hart to duck it. With two strikes, Hart whiffed at a hard slider. Back in the dugout, he placed his bat in the rack as teammates asked about facing the Philadelphia ace. “It’s like trying to hit a rifle bullet,” Hart replied.

The major leaguers, meanwhile, continued having problems with Fisher. The top of their batting order came back up in the third inning, but Lefty was now compiling his mental “book” on every hitter, finding weaknesses to exploit. His fastball was topping 80 mph with lots of movement, and he mixed-in off-speed pitches and curves. Walker’s Stars could not get a base-runner home, and the score remained 0-0 at a time when they usually were building a comfortable lead.

With two outs in the Holcomb third, leadoff man Martin stroked a liner to the fence in left center, a double. Roberts bore down to retire the next batter on strikes, stranding Martin, but the pitcher felt peeved returning to the dugout. He strode up and snatched a towel, wiping dirty sweat from his face, then gazed down the bench at his teammates. No one looked back, including player-manager Walker, who would not consider inserting himself on the mound yet. Roberts would not have allowed that, anyway; ever the competitor, he wanted to put away this upstart opponent himself, backwoods team or not.

The fans sensed something special occurring. Semipros in southeast Missouri had a long tradition of hosting barnstorming big leaguers, including great pitchers like Dizzy Dean. But no one in the stands could recall a local team ever winning such an exhibition. They watched Fisher stymie the Stars—including Kluszewski, the cleanup hitter who struck out to start the fourth—and became more vocal in supporting Holcomb.

The crowd roared and hooted as Big Klu trudged back to the dugout, muttering and kicking dust. Roberts, both impressed and confounded by Fisher, motioned to a local through the dugout screen. Nodding toward Lefty, he asked, “Who the heck is this guy?”

Matt Chaney is a writer, editor and publisher in Missouri, USA. For more information visit www.fourwallspublishing.com. Email: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.

Excerpts: 1925 Tri-State Tornado, 1949 Baseball Dream of A Patriot

Passages adapted from stories of the book Legend In Missouri by Matt Chaney

Copyright ©2017 by Matthew L. Chaney

Tornado

“I could just see a big black cloud and it was rollin’. It was really rollin’. And it seemed to be right on the ground.”

Cecil Hackworth

Sam Flowers could not have known the peril that lay ahead when he left Ellington, Missouri, during the noon hour on March 18, 1925, and began the familiar walk to his farm five miles northeast of town.

Flowers did know he was probably walking into a storm. Heavy, dark clouds swept across the Reynolds County sky from the southwest, fast as any train could travel. At Ellington, a remote town in the Ozark Highlands, the clouds appeared to fly low enough to touch trees on the ridge tops.

But Flowers was a hearty middle-aged man who worked a hard-scrabble homestead. He had made this trip hundreds of times before, in wagons, automobiles, and on foot. And he had made it day and night, year-round, through every kind of weather the volatile skies of southern Missouri could bring.

Or so he must have thought. But the gathering storm was no ordinary weather event. It would become catastrophic.

Flowers walked the gravel highway, Route 21, through woods toward the tiny county seat of Centerville. Black clouds rushed overhead, massive and just above the treetops, it seemed. Winds snapped tree limbs back and forth, and rain began to pelt the road. He moved over to the rim of the west ditch, where the woods broke the big drops somewhat, but footing was tricky with the red clay turning wet and slippery around the stones.

A Model T rattled by, headed south, with top down and the driver soaking wet. Flowers might have considered turning back but he pressed on, still not overly concerned about a rainstorm. He stayed alert for old, heavy timbers that might crash down, and he watched for rocky banks to shield him if the storm worsened. He figured he would be all right in getting home to his wife and children.

In these minutes, a massive storm boiling 50,000 feet in the sky topped a 1,500-foot peak near the Current River and, on the downslope, hit ground along Logan Creek west of Ellington, heading northeast.

Three miles north of Ellington, Flowers came down a hill into Dry Valley. The rain was a torrent, blue lightning bolts exploded all around, and winds came in powerful gusts that almost swept him from his feet. The road crooked northeast, and hundreds of yards ahead lay the path up and over a short ridge into Spring Valley, leading to Flowers’ place near the village of Redford. But Spring Valley seemed a million miles away. Flowers could hardly see. The rain was blinding, and the valley had been enshrouded in a huge shadow, dark as night. Flowers had to look down with lightning flashes to see he was still on the road.

Suddenly, hailstones the size of small potatoes beat from above, and Flowers panicked. Too late, no shelter could save him. An ungodly rumble, like some flying earthquake, rushed up from behind as incredible winds sheared through the valley, tossing large trees. Flowers felt uttermost terror—then he was struck in back of the head.

What would become the deadliest land storm in American history, The Tri-State Tornado, had claimed its first human life: Sam Flowers.

***

A Patriot

“Lefty wasn’t your regular cornfield pitcher.”

Melvin Williams

The research on a local legend began with a death of note in southeast Missouri—Lloyd B. Fisher of the Stoddard County community of Puxico. Folks were remembering Mr. Fisher in the multiple roles he lived: as a loving family patriarch, a war veteran, teacher, farmer, mail-carrier and athlete. Many people had known Lloyd “Lefty” Fisher, the baseball pitcher of exceptional talent, and the effect his service as an infantryman had on that.

It was the summer of 1989, baseball season, proper time to imagine Lefty Fisher on the pitching mound. And, invariably, a storyteller would recall a special exhibition game from decades ago: the night Lefty matched the great Robin Roberts, his mound opponent, in hurling a shutout.

***

On a clear October evening in 1949, a silver bus cruised north through the sprawling flatlands of the Missouri Bootheel. The charter’s roomy interior was quiet. Most of the riders, major league baseball players on a barnstorming tour, were napping, their heavy uniforms soiled from an afternoon exhibition in Arkansas.

One strapping young athlete, Robin Roberts, sat gazing out a window. The 23-year-old enjoyed the scenes of harvest in the great delta. Mechanical cotton-pickers were just starting to chew through the wide fields of white bolls clinging to brown stalks. But the cornfields really commanded his attention, the rows of stiff yellow stalks falling to the cumbersome combines. That reminded Roberts of home in central Illinois, Springfield, where the capital city limits ended as the cornfields and hog farms began.

Roberts only recently had completed his first full major league season in Philadelphia. Then he and a dozen other players met in Illinois to board the bus for the barnstorming tour, which would conclude that night in southeast Missouri. The young man was ready to go home.

Sikeston was the final stop in 20 games for “Harry Walker’s All-Stars.” Their travel accommodations were much improved over the early days of exhibition tours, when players often slept in barns, or “barn-stormed,” but the grind of play was just as grueling. Now in their 10th day across three states, Walker’s Stars had played two games daily in different communities. The big leaguers dominated their rural opponents, of course, but 18 innings a day for the entire trip had worn them down, and injured some.

They did it for money: $1,000 apiece motivated these pros to barnstorm. Each man received $50 a game on the tour, an excellent supplement for a major league salary in 1949. Roberts, for example, had been paid $9,000 while winning 15 games that year for the Phillies. The barnstorming tour made it an even $10,000 for Roberts from baseball that year, and he had a winter job lined up selling menswear.

Walker’s Stars had no idea what team they would face in Sikeston. They did not know the pitcher they would face, and they did not care.

Roberts would be on the mound, and the team’s player-manager and organizer was Harry “The Hat” Walker, who led the National League in hitting two years before with a .363 average. Walker was gaining experience for his future as a major league manager and coach.

The Stars lineup would intimidate some pro pitchers, much less one from the backwoods. The names included Cincinnati power hitter Ted Kluszewski, large, agile athlete at 6-foot-2, 225 pounds. The former football player for Indiana University played first base for the Reds, and “Big Klu” was already known for biceps bulging from his trademark sleeveless jersey. Kluszewski was bound for stardom in the big leagues, like his buddy on the barnstorming trip, Hank Sauer, who had hit 31 home runs for the Cubs. Sauer was a big outfielder who in a few years would be named the National League MVP.

Besides Roberts, there were two other pitchers on the trip, veteran Kirby Higbe of the Giants and young Herm Wehmeier of the Reds. The pitchers normally split the games equally, or three innings, apiece, and Walker helped out by taking the mound to finish easy victories. But as the bus approached Sikeston, Walker sat down next to Roberts.

“Higbe and Wehmeier both say their arms are shot,” Walker told Roberts. “You pitch the first three innings or so tonight, then after we get way ahead, I’ll relieve you. We’ll win and then we’ll go home.”

“Sure thing, Skip,” Roberts replied.

***

Matt Chaney is a writer, editor and publisher in Missouri, USA. For more information visit www.fourwallspublishing.comEmail: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.

Missouri Boasts Its Place in Rock ‘n’ Roll History

By Matt Chaney, ChaneysBlog.com

Posted Thursday, February 16, 2017

Classical piano teacher Louise Mercer was worried in Memphis. Musical forces were afoot in the Mississippi River Valley and progressing, but not for this instructor’s preference. It was 1948, and Mercer saw nothing positive for her concerto affection within the region’s folk music, jazz and blues. And hillbilly music, so-called, appalled her.

Mercer fought back, or brought Bach back to the South, according to The Associated Press, by organizing concert piano competitions for deprived youths. “The nation’s greatest musical talent comes from the South,” she said. “We have the romantic and cultural background, although we haven’t the opportunities for study that are offered in other sections of the country.”

The piano teacher was right on, mostly. Southern musical talent stood boundless along the river, the great “delta” landscape of beauty and struggle, spawning creativity from Cape Girardeau to New Orleans. And Mercer apparently detected musical revolution at hand—it just wouldn’t happen for her classics.

Memphis would mother the uprising, blending music from every direction into what would become known as rock and roll. The components were in place by 1948, including a teenager of destiny, Elvis Presley, having relocated to Memphis with his parents from Mississippi.

***

The hundred rural counties of Missouri today, as always, generally maintain allegiance to the state’s three cities—St. Louis, Kansas City and Springfield—for extended shopping, entertainment, medical services and more. But two counties are unique, Pemiscot and Dunklin, which stand out together on a Missouri map for essentially comprising that Bootheel appendage of the southeast corner.

As far as an adopted city for people of Pemiscot and Dunklin counties, the roads lead to and from Memphis, Tenn., less than two hours away by Interstate 55. And maybe that’s the best explanation why the Pemiscot-Dunklin area—a thousand square miles of flat delta ground, largely farm fields—stands tall in musical heritage, especially the evolution of rock and roll.

Most “rockabilly” stars of the 1950s staged shows around here, and many local musicians made a good living, with some cutting records. I recently visited Pemiscot-Dunklin as a writer in search of history. There were legendary spots to see, with an old sharecropper crossroads topping my list—Gobler. “There ain’t nothing there now,” a friend remarked at Hayti, where I exited the interstate.

What he meant relied on a pretext: There used to be something at Gobler, something quite special, the notorious B&B Club, rockabilly showplace for Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, among players.

The B&B was an old wooden roadhouse serving watery 3.2 beer, reputed for gambling and fighting. A liquor store next door sold bottles for carry-in. The B&B could seat a few hundred patrons, and Gobler population was 116 in the 1950s. But on a big music night a thousand young people might show up, ready to party, driving in from multiple states.

Jimmy Haggett, a radio deejay, musician and promoter, keyed success for the B&B. His Memphis connections included producer Sam Phillips at Sun Records, who stabled rising stars like Elvis, Jerry Lee, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash. Haggett, a minor recording artist for Sun, was often instrumental in booking big names for shows across Pemiscot and Dunklin counties, and elsewhere in southeast Missouri. He promoted events on radio and in newspapers.

“Jimmy Haggett, he had an afternoon radio show, and he would advertise the B&B,” recalls Al Jordan, a Hayti musician who toured with rockabilly and country legends. “Jimmy would say, ‘Weelll, we’re gonna have a big dance Friday night at the B&B Club at Gobler, and we’re gonna feature the blond bombshell from Memphis, Tennessee—Elvis Presley.’ ”

Gobler is some 10 miles across the fields southwest from Hayti, sitting smack on the borderline between Pemiscot and Dunklin counties. True, Gobler doesn’t offer much these days: a trucking company, a tiny post office, a hunting outfitters store near the old B&B site, and a few dozen homes ranging from clapboard to neat brick. There’s no booze for sale, no gas, just canned soda from a machine on someone’s porch.

But there never could’ve been much to see around here, in literal sense. This is flat farm country, where the horizon begins at top of a tree or fence line. Crop fields stretch out of sight beyond the Gobler structures; in summer the corn plants, beans and cotton are seemingly endless.

I considered my own boyhood in the delta decades ago, and occasional despair. In daylight I might spy a jet airliner streaming overhead at 30,000 feet, flying on to exotic locales, carrying exciting people, and I’d feel small, isolated in this world.

But moonlight turned the delta dreamy in blue hue. Barren fields transformed into calm, glowing sea. Scattered farmsteads cast imaginary boat lights. The night sky was enormous but inviting, intimate, stars glistening like diamonds within a child’s reach. Anything seemed possible in those moments.

There’s an inspiration about this region, rather inexplicable, that fosters individual expression. Among youths I’ve seen that manifest typically in sport with tremendous athleticism, but delta mojo also motivates art. Southeast Missouri first stirred my creative soul in the 1960s, long after piano teacher Louise Mercer saw the dynamic among Memphis kids, after World War II.

Passing through Gobler last month, I thought of an observation by writer John Pyle, who reviewed one of my Missouri books. “We live our lives in a place, and sometimes it’s just place that’s important,” Pyle wrote.

***

During the mid-1950s, Al Jordan’s brother-in-law owned a rockin’ roadhouse in southeast Missouri, Smitzer’s Club east of Malden, down in the bottoms along Highway 62. Al was around 10 years old when his father started toting him along to Smitzer’s on Sundays for live music. The 3.2 beer flowed while little Al enjoyed bottles of soda, plopping himself at the stage to watch history in the making.

“Back then Roy Orbison, Conway Twitty and Narvel Felts all used to play there,” Jordan says of recording artists at their outset. “They’d be up there playing that rockabilly, and I’d drink a Dr Pepper. I’d think, Boy, I’d like to do that someday.”

Jordan was 14 when he visited a friend’s house in Gideon, his hometown where New Madrid County edges down into the Bootheel by latitude. Another youth brought a guitar for a jam session. “I’d never sat down at a set of drums before in my life,” Jordan remembers. “They had a little set of drums, and this guy played guitar. He was doing a song called ‘Walk, Don’t Run,’ a Ventures song. I accidentally ended up sitting down at the drums, and just started keeping the beat. And it just came natural for me, God-given.”

Like most Bootheel boys, Jordan had one option for paying work, picking cotton. The job was back-breaking, knee-tenderizing and finger-slicing, and hot as hell in delta sun and humidity. Meanwhile Jordan kept at the drums, practicing by avocation until a local bandleader hired him for a teen dance at Puxico, Mo.

Jordan received eight dollars for the evening gig, astounding him. In the cotton field he had to bag almost 300 pounds of fluffy bolls to earn eight bucks, more than a day’s work except for a champion picker. “Next morning my mom woke me up. She said it’s time to go to the field. I said, ‘Nope, I ain’t going to the cotton field no more. I’ve found an easier way to make a living.’ ”

It was 1959, and kid Jordan’s drumming paid off. By age 16 he’d played in fifty clubs between Memphis and St. Louis, accompanying luminaries on stage such as role model Twitty and Charlie Rich. “Most of the places were honky-tonks,” Jordan recalls, who saw it all, as the saying goes.

“We’d be in an old place playin’, and everything would be lovely, and then all at once you’d hear beer bottles crashing and tables turning over. I’d just duck down behind my drums and let ’em get with it. But I played for years and never had a problem. Most of the time they never bothered the band guys, you know. And the old stories you hear about the bandstands with chicken wire across the front—I played a couple places like that, to keep us from gettin’ hit by flying beer bottles.

“The music was rockabilly—that was the term. What they did, they took country music and put a jazzed-up beat to it. Actually, Bill Haley and the Comets [in Pennsylvania], he was like the father of rockabilly, and rock n’ roll. But then Elvis came along and they christened him as ‘The King’ of rock n’ roll.”

Elvis energized youths of the delta, where music production spiked. “Elvis kicked everybody off, you might say. He jump-started everybody. They thought, My God, if Elvis Presley can do it, I can too.” Jordan laughed. “But—they failed to realize, Elvis had the looks, Elvis was something new, and Elvis had Colonel Tom Parker to promote him.”

Elvis appeared twice at the B&B in Gobler during 1955, on April 8 and Sept. 28. At the latter date the village was in uproar over a murder at a dice game outside the club. Elvis, his career soaring, had outgrown venues like the B&B. Colonel Parker made sure of that.

Gerald Burke, an owner of the B&B, later told Jordan he paid Elvis $300 after the September show. Soon Elvis signed with RCA Records and released “Heartbreak Hotel,” smash hit. Burke said he checked again on booking Elvis, and the new price was $3,000.

“Needless to say, the B&B didn’t have Elvis anymore,” Jordan says.

***

Elvis Presley died in 1977 at age 42, reduced to a caricature for crass commercialization and his weight problem. Twenty years later, Pennsylvania writer Cathleen Miller personally reflected on the icon in her piece for The Washington Post:

“When I was in high school, I went to see the fat, bejeweled singer in concert at the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis, and sat in awe—not of the man, but of the crowd’s reaction. He sang the same old songs I’d listened to a million times on the jukebox in my grandma’s diner—but with the slightest swivel of those infamous hips, the women in the audience would go insane. The Pelvis, it seemed, was taunting them: a little swivel here, then reverse, then stop dead in the middle and wait for the screams.”

Miller was native of Kennett, Mo., the Dunklin County seat. She grew up only a few miles by blacktop road from Gobler, years after its heyday with Elvis. But she heard plenty. Miller recalled “everybody had stories about Elvis—and not the kind of stories that would make you think he was anything special.”

“When my mom and dad were dating in the ’50s they used to go see him play at the B&B Club, a honky-tonk in nearby Gobler that was the rowdiest place around for white people. My uncle best described it by saying, ‘If they didn’t have five fights on a Friday night, they didn’t have a crowd.’ The B&B Club was prestigiously located in the middle of a cotton field… My best friend’s dad said he went there to see Elvis once and after the show handed him $50 to come back out and sing his favorite song. He said the young King took the money but left hurriedly through the back door.”

“So we didn’t think much of Elvis.”

Miller passed through Memphis with her husband in the 1990s, intent on purchasing goofy trinkets for an Elvis theme party in California. Her husband planned his costume as Singing Elvis Lamp. “But while visiting Graceland and the haunts of my childhood, I gradually realized that I had taken for granted Elvis’s contributions to American music,” she wrote. “On this trip, I discovered the ‘real’ Elvis.

“When my husband and I drove into Memphis on a steamy summer afternoon, boarded-up storefronts were much in evidence on the west side of the city, and families sat out on the front stoops of run-down tenements, fanning themselves in the heat. Still, the streets were clean, and the parkways exploded with azaleas. As we headed east toward Overton Park, the sights began to look like the Memphis I remembered: large Southern homes separated from the street by expanses of shady lawns, magnolias, moss-covered oaks and willow trees. The contrast had intensified during 20 years—or maybe 20 years had changed the way I looked at things.”

Gaudiness surely met the couple at Graceland, home of late Elvis, but a 1960 film of the young man captivated Miller. “He was so young and handsome and fresh. Joking with the reporters, smiling that gorgeous smile, wearing no visible jewelry,” she noted. “He hinted that he had met someone special in Germany [during military service], but no, he couldn’t call her his girlfriend.

“In the museum, we learned that Elvis had been awarded more gold and platinum records than anyone on the planet. We watched a film about his life, and when he sang ‘Blue Christmas’ I remembered listening to the same song on the radio as a child, wondering why he sounded so sad when it was Christmas time. The music had reminded me of the songs we sang in Sunday school; most of them were sad also.

“Sadly, I realized that the Elvis I had known all these years was the ‘Old Elvis,’ the King of Kitsch in jeweled jumpsuits. The real Elvis was a simple Southern boy who, through his music, had given a voice to the restless, pent-up youth of the ’50s. He had taken gospel, blues and country and fused them into a unique style—a style that would revolutionize the music industry.”

“And it all happened because of this place. Memphis,” saluted Miller. “Sometimes we have to leave home to see things for what they really are.”

We live in a place, often all that matters. We make do, and big things can happen when we strive, even from a lonely crossroads and cotton fields. Down in the delta, folks understand.

Matt Chaney is a writer, editor and publisher in Missouri, USA. For more information visit www.fourwallspublishing.com. Email: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com.