Pardon us if there is a certain self-congratulatory feeling to our story today. It’s not intended. I’m just going to tell a story.

Listeners to a Jefferson City radio station at 7:35 a.m. fifty years ago today heard a young radio announcer tell them a story about the famous prohibition terrorist Carrie Nation, who started her national tour that made her a household name in the fight against demon rum on February 8, 1901.

It was Missouri’s Sesquicentennial year, just a few days after Governor Hearnes had kicked off the observance by dedicating the restored first State Capitol in St. Charles.

A few days ago, Governor Parson kicked off the state’s Bicentennial with his inaugural speech at our present Capitol.

And the radio program is still on the air.

It was called “Missouri in Retrospect” when it debuted on one station, KLIK, in 1971. It’s known as “Across Our Wide Missouri” in numerous communities throughout the state and, we suppose, in all corners of the world through the Missourinet web page.

It began with a couple of old books on the shelf in the newsroom that I turned to when I thought there needed to be a better way to celebrate the sesquicentennial than to do stories about the latest sign or the latest old building that had been rescued from the wreckers.  The longtime head of the State Historical Society of Missouri, Floyd Shoemaker, had written a series of newspaper columns decades earlier outlining something that happened on a particular day in a particular year. There were some dates not covered in the two volumes of Missouri Day-by-Day, and some topics not covered—sports and crime in particular.

We thought it would be good for people to be a little better-educated about their state’s history and, by extension, Missouri’s part of ournation’s history.

KLIK continued to run the programs for a few years after I left late in 1974 to become news director of the Missourinet, founded by my former assistant news director Clyde Lear and our former farm director, Derry Brownfield. Clyde and I had to help a lawyer make a boat payment or two before we got an out-of-court settlement of a lawsuit that the manager of the radio station filed trying to keep Across Our Wide Missouri from being on the network.

One other voice has been heard doing these programs on the Missourinet.  Missourinet reporter Ron Medin voiced the stories for several days in 1983, I think it was, while I was out of work after taking a line drive in the left eye while pitching in a softball game.

As this entry is written, a stack of envelopes is sitting within arms reach, potential new stories waiting to be written.  Ernest Hemingway is there.  The story of his time as a reporter for the Kansas City Star is waiting to be written.  So is the story of Fred Harvey, whose railroad-station restaurants before 1900 made long-distance travel a little more civilized. And Clarence Earl Gideon, a “no-account punk” from Hannibal whose lawsuit guaranteed to poor people could get a court-appointed lawyer if they couldn’t affird one. There’s a fat envelope with the story of St. Louis native Butch O’Hare—for whom O’Hair International Airport in Chicago is named. Bob Ford, the killer of Jesse James is there, as is Fred Harmon, the St. Joseph artist who created the cartoons strip of years gone by called “Red Ryder,” the character for whom a b-b gun was named.  There’s Tom Mix, the silent movie cowboy star who made his first feature film in Missouri, and Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, who lived his last several years in St. Charles after creating a trading post that became Chicago.

All waiting to be written.  Stories to be told.

And there are about eight file drawers of similar envelopes in the basement.

One day my assistant news director at KLIK, the afore mentioned Clyde Lear, looked across the table between our desks and said, “Priddy, you ought to put this stuff in a book.”

A few years later an editor at Independence Press (in Independence, Missouri of course) named Margaret Baldwin decided the stories were worth publishing.  They became three books, the proceeds of which made a big dent in our children’s college expenses.

I suppose I am better-recognized for telling those stories of Missouri’s past than I am for all my years of reporting the news in a career that has lasted long enough that what once was just another story one day is now Missouri history.

If I live forever, I’ll never write all of these stories.  It doesn’t help that Missourians keep making history.

Independence Press printed the last of the three books several years ago. I have the only remaining inventory in our storage locker or in our garage and sometimes in the trunk of my car. But when they’re gone, they’ll be out of print.

There are two things about becoming an author—

Somebody, I don’t recall how, once said that writing a book is a former of eternal life. I wasn’t real sure about that until the way I was at the Library of Congress in Washington and filled out a call slip for volume one just the grins and a few minutes later, a library employee emerged from the bowels and laid the book on the desk in front of me.

The other comment came from former Missouri Treasurer Jim Spainhower who, in addition to being a politician was an ordained minister in our denomination who had written a book called Pulpit, Pew, and Politics.  He told me when the first volume came out that I was now entitled to begin my prayers, “O Thou who also hast written a book….”

There are now five books with my name on them on a nearby shelf, soon to be joined by a sixth—about the history of the Missouri Capitol.  And there are files for two more in boxes behind me.

It all began on this date, February 8, 1971.

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