Halloween Party on Commercial Street

When I was a kid growing up in Fair Grove in the 1950s, most residents of the town and those from the outlying areas bought groceries and other essentials in Fair Grove, at least until the large supermarkets in Springfield started taking that business away in the latter part of the decade. Even in the early and mid-fifties, though, Fair Grove residents did most of their shopping in Springfield for bigger items like home furnishing and appliances. Most also did their Christmas shopping in Springfield.

There were basically two main business districts in Springfield: the public square and the Commercial Street district. There was still something of a competition between the two districts, which was likely a holdover from the 1870s and 1880s when North Springfield (i.e. the Commercial Street district) was its own separate town.

Many, if not most, Fair Grove residents did their Springfield shopping at the Commercial Street district. I know that my parents tended to go there quite a bit. The popularity of Commercial Street as a destination for Fair Grove folks might partly have been simply a result of the fact that it was slightly closer to Fair Grove than the square, but I think the loyalty to Commercial Street was more than just a matter of convenience. 

At any rate, Commerical Street and the surrounding area was a thriving business district in the 1950s and into the 1960s when I lived at Fair Grove. It went downhill for a while after that, but it has since rebounded to a large extent, designated as a historic district.

Prior to the 1950s, I think Commercial Street was an even more flourishing district than it was when I remember it. For instance, for a few years in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Commercial Street Business Club hosted a street party on Halloween evening that was apparently quite a big deal, However, it lasted only a few years, cut short no doubt by the beginning of World War II.

The first Commercial Street Halloween Party was held in 1939. In the lead-up to the event, the Springfield Leader and Press announced that "a huge jack-o'-lantern will leer from every lamp post on Commercial Street from Boonville to Jefferson, and the whole street for those two blocks will be roped off for one of hte biggest Halloween parties ever given hereabouts." 

People were invited to come to the event dressed up, ready to "frolic in the carnival grand parade" and "dance in the street afterwards." There were to be prizes for the best costumes in several categories, including men women, children, and couples. Prizes for the best square dance couple and the best jitterbugger were also going to be offered. A seven-piece orchestra was scheduled to play in the Community Building with the music broadcast on the street by loudspeakers for the benefit of the dancers. Bill Ring, whom I recall as a radio personality in Springfield two to three decades later, was going to be master of ceremonies of the event.

The day after the event, the Daily News reported that thousands of people had attended the street dance, and there was much laughing, singing, and dancing among young and old alike. The crowd was so large that "spectators were forced to find refuge in doorways of store buildings."

The following year, 1940, organizers were expecting a crowd of up to 15,000 people to attend the Halloween street dance on Commercial Street.  The length of the parade was lengthened so that it started at Washington Avenue and marched to Boonville, and Commercial was blocked off from Benton to Boonville. As it turned out, only about 5,000 people showed up, but it was still considered a great success. 

The next year, 1941, cold weather put a damper on activity in Springfield on Halloween night, including the Commercial Street party. The event was not well attended, and the Daily News commented the next day that even Bill Ring and his orchestra "had to be jitterbugs to keep warm." 

I can find no mention of the Halloween party in succeeding years; so I assume that the U.S.'s entry into World War II put an end to the celebration. 

A Greene County Bigamist

Sometime around January or early February 1951, a woman filed a complaint with the Greene County (MO) prosecutor claiming that her sister's husband, Jack Wilson, was also married to another woman under the name Coy Burney. Apparently, Wilson and his wife, Eula Mae, had recently traveled from Springfield to Nichols Junction to visit another sister, and a friend of the other sister recognized Jack Wilson as Coy Burney. The woman said Burney lived at Bois D'Arc and that he had a wife named Alma. The sister did not believe her friend until the two women started comparing pictures and realized that Jack Wilson and Coy Burney were one and the same.

Shortly afterwards, the first sister filed her complaint with the prosecutor, who undertook an investigation. It revealed that the man's real name was Coy Burney and that he had married Alma Leigh at Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1944, shortly after getting divorced from his first wife. He had a child by his first wife and had been arrested about the same time as his marriage to Alma for nonsupport of the child. But that didn't keep him from having two more children with Alma.  

In January of 1950, Burney, under the alias Jack Wilson, married Eula Mae Rowden at Berryville, Arkansas, while still married to Alma. Jack and Eula Mae took up residence on North National in Springfield, while Coy continued to live off-and-on with Alma at Bois D'Arc, only about ten miles away. Wilson was a truck driver, and he managed to pull off the balancing act by telling each woman that he was away on an over-the-road trip when he was really with the other wife. 

The 25-year-old Burney was arrested on February 21, 1951. He denied his double life at first, but, when he was brought into the prosecutor's office as Eula Mae was leaving, he admitted that she was "one of my wives." He said, "I was in love with Eula Mae and did not want to hurt Alma at the same time." He was charged with bigamy and jailed in lieu of $2,500 bond. 

In June of 1951, Burney pleaded guilty to bigamy and was released on $2,500 bond to await sentencing. I have not found the final disposition of the bigamy case, except I know that Alma was granted a divorce from Burney in October 1951 and given custody of their two children. 

Note: photo of Burney, alias Wilson, above is from the Springfield Leader and Press, as is most of the info for this post.

Rural Vs. Urban

When political observers and other national media types talk about a rural-urban divide, they are normally talking about the difference between the way people in Podunk, Arkansas, for instance, see things compared to residents of New York City or Los Angeles. However, Susan Croce Kelly, in her recent book about legendary Springfield newspaperwoman Lucile Morris Upton, which I'm currently reading, makes the point that there was, at least during Lucile's time, a rural-urban divide even within the Ozarks.

And she's not talking about a divide just between country folk and people living in the larger towns or cities like Springfield. Ms. Kelly says that while many of Lucile's contemporaries during her youth and young adulthood identified more with the hills and valleys and woods and streams of their own farms than they did with the community down the road, Lucile strongly identified with the small town of Dadeville where she grew up. 

This observation made an impression on me because I realized that the same was true for me when I was growing up. I think many of my classmates at Fair Grove Schools, those who lived on farms, identified much more strongly with the land they and their families lived on than I did with the small plot of land in the town of Fair Grove where I and my family lived when I was growing up. 

The majority of my classmates were farm kids. Most of them did farm chores either before school, after school, or both. Many of the boys took agriculture classes and were active in FFA, while I was involved in those two pursuits only during my freshman year and only because taking ag was such a given in Fair Grove that nothing else was offered for me to take during the particular time slot that ag was offered. 

Don't get me wrong. I had nothing at all against agriculture or farming. In fact, I sometimes felt left out because I often didn't know what my classmates were talking about when they'd start talking about certain animals, or certain crops, or certain farming techniques. 

It's just that farming wasn't something I was really interested in and was not something I identified with. I was a town kid. Most of my best friends were boys who, like me, lived in the town of Fair Grove rather than classmates or people I met at school, although at least a couple were both pals from town and classmates.

During my childhood, from the time I was six or seven years old, my friends and I largely had the run of the town. The whole town, although initially it was just the south side, was our playground, from the feed room at the MFA Store to the little stream than ran by the old mill. I came to know not just all the kids in Fair Grove who were anywhere near my own age but also most of the adults, particularly the old-timers who used to sit on benches in front of the stores whittling, telling tall tales, and passing the time. 

As I got a little older and had more freedom to go wherever I wanted to, I got to know the town even better. This was especially true after I got to be about junior high age and started delivering newspapers and mowing lawns in Fair Grove. There were few people in Fair Grove whose yard I didn't mow or whose paper I didn't deliver, one or the other if not both.

So, I grew up strongly identifying with Fair Grove. Fair Grove the town, not Fair Grove the school. Oh, I identified with the school, too, but the town came first. It was the town first, then the school, and then my own home place, in that order. For many of my classmates, I suspect the order may have been exactly reversed. 

That's a revelation I really hadn't given much thought to until I read Ms. Kelly's statement about Lucile's attachment to Dadeville. 

Outlaw Dick Adams

I'm currently working on my next book, which will likely be called Murder and Mayhem in Northeast Oklahoma, since it is scheduled to be part of the Murder and Mayhem series published by The History Press. One of the desperadoes I considered including in the book was Dick Adams, a notorious thief and whiskey peddler who operated mainly in the Spavinaw region during the 1890s; however, I've pretty much decided not to include him, since he really wasn't all that desperate or infamous. So, I'm going to write about him here.

Adams was first heard from on the criminal front in the spring of 1895 when several officers went out southeast of Vinita across the Grand River to try to capture him and other outlaws said to be terrorizing that neighborhood. The mission proved unsuccessful.

According to a later report, Adams had first come to Oklahoma (Indian Territory at the time) from Missouri several years prior to his run-in with the law. He was an upstanding farmer at first who was considered very industrious. It was said he would work from sunup to sundown.  

Not finding farming profitable enough, however, he turned to whiskey running. He would travel to Arkansas by day and return at night with a load of whiskey, which he reportedly sold mainly to the black population along the Grand River. When law officers got on to his scheme, he began to steal cattle.  

In February of 1896, Adams and some of his cohorts clashed with a posse led by US marshal Heck Bruner. The two sides exchanged gunfire, but no one on either side was seriously injured.

In November of the same year, lawmen made a raid on a band of cattle thieves on Mustang Creek about ten miles from Vinita. In the ensuing gunfight, Adams was wounded with a shotgun blast to the gut, and one of his sidekicks was killed. 

Then, about the first of December, four black men were arrested near Bolen's Ferry on Grand River for stealing a steer from a man living at the ferry and butchering it. Adams was also implicated in the crime, but he evaded arrest. 

About the first of September 1897, Adams was arrested at Sapulpa. At first there was some doubt as to his identity, but it was finally confirmed that he was indeed Adams and he admitted participating in the shootout on Mustang Creek. In late September, Adams passed through Vinita in the custody of lawmen who were taking him to jail at Muskogee. Quite a crowd turned out to watch the notorious outlaw pass through town.

Adams pled guilty to cattle theft and was sentenced to four years in prison. Some observers thought he got off with a very light sentence, considering that he was under indictment on three other charges at the time and those charges were dropped. Among the critics was a Vinita newspaperman, who said that Adams "never shot a man in his life and was a notorious coward, always running away when an attempt was made to capture him." 

Surgery

I said a couple of weeks ago, when my wife had a health crisis, that the concerns of everyday life sometimes supersede writing about history, and I guess today is going to be another example of that, because today I'm going to write about my own health issue. 

On Friday morning I had double hernia surgery. Not a life-threatening crisis the way my wife's pulmonary embolisms were, by any means, but it was the first time I'd ever had surgery of any kind. So, it was a little scary, but it seems to have gone pretty well and I'm not feeling too bad. The weekend brought some pain, but it's eased up today, and I think I'm on the road to recovery. 

Still, I don't really feel up to researching and writing about Ozarks history. I hope to be back close to normal by next week so that I can resume diving into regional history, whatever topic I might come up with.