Tag Archives: kennett

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.