Tag Archives: kennett

“How many more people have to die?”

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What a closed rural hospital tells us about US healthcare


When I was growing up in Kennett, Missouri, in the ’50s and ’60s, the Dunklin County Memorial Hospital was… an institution. That’s where I had my tonsils removed and that’s where everybody went if you needed to be in the hospital. If you needed some kind of special treatment or care you probably went to one of the hospitals in Memphis, 100 miles away. The hospital closed last year, pushing the little town that much closer to… I’m not sure what.

“We’re having probably three to five more deaths a month without having the hospital here,” he said. “I had a 35-year-old patient who started having chest pain. He needed to get to an emergency room but died on the way to the hospital. There are multiple deaths due to not having emergency services, mostly from heart attacks and accidents. There’s nowhere to stabilise them. If they’re having a heart attack, they’re dying before they get to the hospital. Plus the infant mortality rate has increased since the hospital closed.”

It’s happening all over rural America. This article tells the story. As does RP.

UPDATE (5/15/20): Company announces plans to re-open hospital in Missouri’s poorest region. “Nine of the state’s ten poorest counties are in southeast Missouri, and the Bootheel is the state’s poorest region.”

Richard Peck (1948-2019)

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Richard was a poet, performance artist, sculptor, philosopher, film maker, handy-man and life-long friend.

“Picture a very swift torrent, a river rushing down between rocky walls. There is a long, shallow bar of sand and gravel that runs right down the middle of the river. It is under water. You are born and you have to stand on that narrow, submerged bar, where everyone stands. The ones born before you, the ones older than you, are upriver from you. The younger one stand braced on the bar downriver. And the whole long bar is slowly moving down that river of time, washing away at the upstream end and building up downstream.

Your time, the time of all your contemporaries, schoolmates, your loves and your adversaries, is that part of the shifting bar on which you stand. And it is crowded at first. You can see the way it thins out, upstream from you. The old ones are washed away and their bodies go swiftly buy, like logs in the current. Downstream where the younger ones stand thick, you can see them flounder, lose footing, wash away. Always there is more room where you stand, but always the swift water grows deeper, and you feel the shift of the sand and the gravel under your feet as the river wears it away. Someone looking for a safer place to stand can nudge you off balance, and you are gone. Someone who has stood beside you for a long time gives a forlorn cry and you reach to catch their hand, but the fingertips slide away and they are gone. There are the sounds in the rocky gorge, the roar of the water, the shifting, gritty sound of the sand and the gravel underfoot, the forlorn cries of despair as the nearby ones, and the ones upstream, are taken by the current. Some old ones who stand on a good place, well braced, understanding currents and balance, last a long time. Far downstream from you are the thin, startled cries of the ones who never got planted, never got set, never quite understood the message of the torrent.”

–From John D. MacDonald’s Pale Gray for Guilt

UPDATE 6/16/19: Said goodbye to RP yesterday. His remains were cremated and placed in a .50 caliber ammo box (complete with small Confederate battle flag sticker) along with assorted mementos (a two dollar bill; some Risk pieces; etc). The ammo box was placed in the back of a new Cadillac hearse and transported to Piggott, AR for burial (a compromise with Rebecca). At the conclusion of the graveside service the minister reached down and blessed the ammo box. The End.

Professional wrestling is returning to Kennett

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In the hierarchy of professional sports, professional wrestling is just below shooting rats at the town dump. But for some reason it was extremely popular where/when I grew up in the 50’s. Live coverage every Saturday morning by one of the Memphis TV stations. And these guys would take the show on the road, performing before packed houses. (I wrote about this ten years ago) And they’re back!

“Professional wrestling is returning to Kennett. Fall Brawl presented by American Hostile Championship Wrestling is slated to take place at the American Legion Building in Kennett Oct. 6. American Hostile Championship Wrestling owner Mark Manley said wrestlers scheduled to be on the six-fight card include: WWE Hall of Famer Koko B. Ware, Memphis Wrestling icon Superstar Bill Dundee, young up-comer Marko Stunt, the Missouri Bad Boys, Austin Lane, Meklakov, Naughty by Nature Rude and Kennett native J.T. Ice.”

Please note that Bill Dundee is now 74 years old.

UPDATE 10/9/18: Here’s the follow-up story on the “Fall Brawl” with accompanying photos. And just who are these small town fans of professional wrestling?

A Dying Town

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The tagline for this story is: “Here in a corner of Missouri and across America, the lack of a college education has become a public-health crisis.”

1. This is a long-ish story. 2. This is not a happy story. Damned depressing, in fact. I share it because it’s about Kennett, Missouri, the small town where I grew up in the 50s and 60s and to which I returned as an adult in the 70s.

Kennett was a swell (yes, we used words like ‘swell’ back then) place to grow up. The good example of small town America in the mid-twentieth century. It was fraying around the edges by the time Barb and I left in the early 80s and these days I hardly recognize it on my infrequent trips back.

This story (from the Chronicle of Higher Education) paints a bleak picture of Kennett and thousands (?) of little towns like it across the country. The focus of the piece seems to be the link between education and health.

“People with less education are twice as likely, for instance, to die of lung cancer or COPD. Heart attacks and strokes are far more common for those without much schooling — one study found that heart-attack rates for middle-aged adults who hadn’t finished high school were double those with a college degree.”

Lots of well-documented factoids like this and while they’re hardly surprising, the author does a nice job of putting human faces on the data.

But for one fateful phone call back in ’84, I might still be living in Kennett, MO. Some of my lifelong friends still do. So this is a “what might have been” story for me in some ways.

Old Halloween pics featured in British tabloid

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The Daily Mail is a British daily tabloid newspaper published in London. It is the United Kingdom’s second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun.​ The editor of the travel section was looking for Halloween story ideas and came across our photos on Flickr. He asked if they could use the photos in a story and I said yes. Not sure why UK readers would be interested in 50 year old Halloween photos from the U.S. ​Perhaps they were on deadline and just needed a story.

The Basement Diaries

10 Most White Trash Towns in Missouri

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My hometown doesn’t make a lot of Top 10 lists so I was pleased to see it near the top (#3) of this list. What did it take to make the cut? Using publicly available government data, as well as Google Maps, data was collected on the following white trash metrics:

  • Cities where there are lots of white people
  • Cities where residents are poorer than average
  • Cities where a high number of residents are high school dropouts
  • Cities with a high number of single parents
  • High drug use
  • Higher than average Payday Loan Outlets
  • Violent cities (measured in aggravated assaults)
  • Cities with a high number of residents on welfare

Alas, Kennett has fallen on hard times since I left in 1984, not to mention when I grew up there in the 50s and 60s.

Yearbook Photos

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If my family paid more than fifty bucks for my senior picture, I’d be very surprised. That would have included a couple of 8×10’s, maybe some 5×7’s and a stack of wallet size prints to hand out to relatives and friends. Wore a coat and tie that day, walked into the room next to where the band practiced, smiled a smile that would haunt me the rest of my life and I was done.

Today a friend told me about the senior picture experience (for his granddaughter) in 2017. Let’s not bury the lede: $660 for the mid-priced package. $1500 for the top-of-the-line package. I didn’t ask what the cheapest package.

And you don’t stand in line outside the band room anymore. You book a “shoot” that can involve multiple “locations.” And costume changes. He said something about professional makeup and hair styling. Sounds like my buddy will drop a grand before it’s over. And this is in a small (< 10K) community in southeast Missouri!

I don’t have kids so I can say what I would or wouldn’t do for my kids but this is pretty fucked up. What message does this send to a high school kid? Again, I don’t have a dog in this hunt but I’ll tell you what… I won’t be taking any shit for pissing away a bunch of money on vintage truck. Not from people who spend a couple of grand on yearbook photos.

Kennett’s Flying Bank Robber

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In January of 1976 I was on the air (noon hour?) at KBOA in Kennett, MO, when the police scanner in the studio went nuts. Someone (dispatcher? patrolman?) was yelling that someone had robbed the bank and “took off in an airplane!”

I grabbed a cassette recorder and dashed out of the station, yelling for someone to go up and take over the live studio. I got to the small motor bank before the police and got a few minutes of audio with the teller who had been robbed.

Police showed almost immediately and made me get out. I was pumped because I had some good stuff. When I pulled the cassette from the recorder it was hopelessly wound around the roller and gears and shit. No way to salvage. I nearly wept. Instead, I hung around long enough to get a little more information and then headed back to the station where I did a quick ad lib report live and then started writing up the story.

The satellite image above tells you most of what you need to know. The pilot taxied the small plane out to A where pilots always stopped to let their engines warm up before take off. He slipped out and ran across the highway to the small motor bank (Bank of Kennett). This was a tiny little facility. Room for maybe two tellers and a little lobby (6×10?) separated by glass and a door. The way I remember the story, he asked the teller for a chair and she opened the door to hand him one (he said he was waiting for a friend). He stuck a gun in her face, got the cash ($24K) and boogied back across highway (about 100 yards) and took off into the sunset. He was also charged with “interstate flight.” The FBI arrested 39 year old Dennis R. Holmes a few weeks later in Phoenix.

According to a story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Joseph Appleyard, chief pilot at Dolphin Aviation in Sarasota, taught Holmes to fly a few months earlier. “He didn’t see like my average bank robber,” Appleyard said. Holmes rented the plane (in Sarasota) on the Thursday before the robbery, flew to Kennett on Saturday.

The plane was tracked on radar by the nearby Air Force base in Blytheville, AR, but lost him when it put it on the deck and disappeared. He had a range of about 700 miles.

Mr. Holmes was also arrested for holding up a bank in Arcata, CA in February. He fled in a car but quickly transferred to a small plane. He was also a suspect in a $55K stickup the previous October in Michigan. In that one the robber held up the bank just as the high school homecoming parade was about to begin, and he melted into the crowd.

If you’re out there, Dennis… if you’re reading this… how about an interview to make up for the one that got away?