The Murder of Wilma Plaster

    After the dismembered body of a woman was found Friday afternoon, October 6, 1989, near Willard, authorities said “the crime was unlike anything ever discovered in Greene County.” The woman’s legs and pelvic area were stacked on top of her torso with her feet pointing skyward. Her head was in plastic bag nearby, and a knife and other items were found in another bag. The woman’s arms had been severed from her body but were nowhere to be seen. The missing arms and a lack of blood at the scene caused investigators to conclude that the woman had been murdered elsewhere and brought to where the body parts were found. Investigators further concluded that the parts had not been tossed from a moving vehicle but rather positioned at the side of the road.
   The time at which the body was placed at the side of the road was narrowed to a fifteen-minute window just before 4:00 p.m., but the time of death was uncertain. No clues to the woman’s identity were found at the scene. Her body was taken to Springfield and then sent to St. Louis the next day for an autopsy.
   On October 8, the victim was tentatively identified as sixty-six-year-old Wilma Plaster of Hollister, Missouri. Wilma was described by acquaintances as a friendly person and a regular churchgoer. Meanwhile, police were trying to locate the victim’s red 1969 Chevy Beretta, in which she’d left her Hollister home on October 3. Witnesses had reported seeing a car matching the Beretta’s description in the Springfield-Willard area on October 6 before the body was found.
   On October 9, Wilma’s automobile was found at a motel on North Glenstone in Springfield, and investigators began combing it for clues. The same day, the autopsy, although not yet complete, determined that the victim had been killed by a small-caliber gunshot to the back of the head. On Tuesday, October 10, investigators learned that someone had forged a check for over $4,000 on Wilma’s bank account about two weeks before her death. Officers theorized that the forgery was probably connected to her death and that she had been acquainted with her murderer.
   Later on Tuesday, a woman from Olvey, Arkansas, contacted authorities after she discovered a number of suspicious items on her property that had apparently been left there by fifty-three-year-old Shirley Jo Phillips, a friend of hers from Springfield who’d visited her on Monday and departed early Tuesday. The woman said Phillips appeared very nervous during her stay and that she had insisted on washing her car. Investigators went to Olvey, and the woman pointed them to items Phillips had stashed beneath a wooden porch adjoining her mobile home. The items, including several canceled checks on Wilma Plaster’s account and bloody floor mats, seemed to link Phillips to the forgery and very likely the murder. Further investigation revealed that Phillips and Plaster had met each other in Hollister about September 20 and that the forged check had been written just a day or two later.
   Phillips was arrested Tuesday night in Springfield and held on suspicion of forgery. Later, the charge was upgraded to first-degree murder. Phillips was charged in Greene County because it was thought Wilma was killed there, although the site of the murder was not definitely determined. Also known as Jo Ann Phillips, the suspect lived on West College Street in Springfield and had recently worked as a secretary. She also served as vice-president of a Branson entertainment fan club, and it was apparently through her connection to Branson that she had met Wilma Plaster.
   About a week after Phillips’s arraignment on the murder charge, her mother, seventy-six-year-old Lela Kyle, was reported missing, and soon after this announcement, Oklahoma authorities contacted Springfield Police to report that an elderly woman’s dismembered and mutilated body had been discovered in the north part of Broken Arrow on May 12. The dead woman was tentatively identified as Lela Kyle, and Shirley Jo Phillips, although not charged, was considered a prime suspect in her mother’s murder.
   Delayed several times, Phillips’s trial finally got underway in January 1992. Much of the prosecution testimony centered around Phillips’s visit to Nora Martin, her Arkansas friend, and the items found under the mobile home porch. Martin testified that Phillips cut a seatbelt out of the front passenger seat of her car during her stay in Arkansas and that she thoroughly washed and vacuumed the vehicle even though it already appeared clean. Phillips seemed very nervous when a newscast about Wilma Plaster’s murder came on TV, and she admitted that police probably wanted to question her about Wilma’s death. Forensics experts linked the incriminating items found under the porch to the defendant and the victim. They testified that a .38 caliber weapon found among the items was the gun that killed Mrs. Plaster.
   Phillips pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but her public defender also tried to shift blame for Plaster’s murder to the defendant’s thirty-two-year-old son, Glen “Buddy” Minster. In addition, the defense called witnesses from the Branson area to try to establish an alibi.
   On February 4, 1992, the jury found Phillips guilty of first-degree murder. The defendant showed no emotion, but, as she was escorted from the courtroom, she told reporters, “I didn’t do it.” The next day, the jury came back after deliberations with a sentence of death.
   Phillips’s subsequent appeals for a new trial were denied, but the Missouri Supreme Court ultimately threw out her death sentence and ordered a new sentencing hearing. Because of Minster’s refusal to cooperate and other circumstances, such as the fact that at least two witnesses were now dead, the prosecution decided not to pursue another death penalty, and in 1998, Phillips was resentenced to life imprisonment.
   This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Lynchings, Murders, and Other Nefarious Deeds: A Criminal History of Greene County, Mo. https://amzn.to/3yZTIuH

 

 

Murder of Springfield Jeweler Harry Klein

   Yet another notorious crime that I considered including in my book Lynchings, Murders, and Other Nefarious Deeds: A Criminal History of Greene County, Mo. (https://amzn.to/3yZTIuH), but finally decided to omit was the murder of Springfield jeweler Harry Klein in 1981. The body of the 65-year-old Klein, manager of the Zales Jewelry Store on Battlefield Mall, was found on the morning of July 14, 1981, alongside Pleasant Valley Road just south of Sunshine in Springfield. Klein had been shot several times, at least once in the stomach and once in the head.
   In the immediate aftermath of the crime, robbery was developed as the likely motive, as a money clip, a gold watch, a gold chain, and a diamond ring were among the items Klein usually had on his person that were missing from his body. Klein's car was located about two miles away from where his body was found, and fingerprints were taken from the auto. The only other lead in the case was the fact that some kids in the area of the murder said they'd heard what sounded like gunshots around 8 p.m. on the evening of the 13th, which gave investigators a good idea of the time of death. A day or so later, a witness came forward to give a description of a vehicle he had seen following Klein's Mustang shortly before the presumed time of the murder. Another witness said he had seen Klein eating at a restaurant on East Sunshine with a blonde woman not long before the murder.
   After a five-month investigation, Greg Crusen, 28, and Judy Henderson, 32, both of Springfield, were arrested in Fairbanks, Alaska, as suspects in the Klein murder. The two were known to have been acquaintances of Klein, and they were thought to have been the occupants of the car seen following Klein on the night of his murder. Henderson was thought to be the woman who had been seen with Klein at the East Sunshine restaurant. Authorities said Crusen and Henderson were identified as suspects early on in the investigation, but they had left Springfield immediately after the crime and had been moving from place to place ever since. When they lived in Springfield, Crusen had been a real estate agent, and Henderson had run a tanning salon. A former associate of Henderson described her as a real nice person. Henderson kept company with Crusen, although the associate said Henderson claimed not to consider Crusen her boyfriend.
   The suspects waived extradition, and they were brought back to Springfield on the last day of 1981. Arraigned on first-degree murder charges on January 4, they remained in jail in lieu of $500,000 bond each. At their preliminary hearing in early February, an Alaska woman testified that Judy Henderson, while drunk, had confessed to her in a Fairbanks bar to having set a man up and having participated in his killing because she hated the man, although she did not give names or other specifics. The same witness said both Henderson and Crusen seemed nervous when they first arrived in Fairbanks, and they mentioned that they had witnessed a murder and thought a hitman was after them. The witness said she saw a wound on Henderson's body and that, when she asked about it, Henderson said a bullet had struck her after passing through a man's body. Both defendants were bound over for trial in the circuit court.
   The defendants were granted separate trials, and Henderson went on trial first, in July 1982. On July 27, the jury came back with a guilty verdict and a sentence of life imprisonment. In a letter to the judge, Henderson said she thought the punishment was overly harsh, because she had not killed anyone. The whole truth had not yet come out, she said, because she had been advised not to say certain things that might hurt someone else's cause (presumably Crusen's, since she and her co-defendant had the same lawyer).
   The original charge against Crusen was dismissed because he and Henderson were charged jointly. A new indictment charging Crusen by himself was then filed in order to allow Henderson to testify against him. Although listed as a possible witness, Henderson ended up not being called to testify at Crusen's trial in July 1983, although other prosecution witnesses testified that Crusen had confessed to killing Klein. Crusen, however, took the stand in his own defense to deny the charge, saying that Henderson alone had carried out the killing and that he was not even with her at the time but rather met up with her later and that she was hysterical and crying that she had shot Klein. Described as "clean cut," Crusen was acquitted of murder, despite the fact that much evidence suggested that he, not Henderson, was the actual trigger man in the crime. Why the prosecutor chose not to call Henderson as a witness against Crusen is not quite clear.
   Henderson filed a number of appeals over the years but to no avail until her sentence was finally commuted to time served in 2017 by Governor Eric Greitens, after she had spent 35 years behind bars. In explaining his decision, Greitens said the judge at Henderson's trial had told him that she actually had a relatively minor role in the murder, and Thomas Mountjoy, who had prosecuted the case, also supported clemency, saying it was the first time in his career he had ever supported clemency in a case he had prosecuted. Greitens also cited the obvious conflict of interest in the fact that Henderson's lawyer also represented Crusen. Henderson had been offered, through her attorney, a plea deal in exchange for her testimony against Crusen, but the offer had never been passed on to Henderson. In addition, four defense witnesses had allegedly been paid to lie in Crusen's case. Suffice it to say that, if all this was indeed true, the fact that Judy Henderson served 35 years in prison for the murder of Harry Klein while Greg Crusen got off scot free was a grave travesty of justice.

 

Murder of Lena Cukerbaum

   Another notorious incident that I considered including in my latest book, Lynchings, Murders, and Other Nefarious Deeds: A Criminal History of Greene County https://amzn.to/3yZTIuH, but ultimately decided to omit was the murder of storekeeper Lena Cukerbaum on the night of Saturday, November 30 or the early morning of Sunday, December 1, 1974. Mrs. Cukerbaum's body was found in her living quarters at Luhn's store, located at the corner of Highway 13 and Greene County Route CC about ten miles north of Springfield, by a deputy who was dispatched to investigate a report that the elderly woman had not opened the store that morning as she was accustomed to doing. Mrs. Cukerbaum had operated the store for about 50 years.
   The woman's hands were bound behind her back with a coat hanger, her ankles were taped together, and she'd been brutally beaten. Investigators called to the scene speculated that robbery was the motive for the crime, since a box that was thought to normally contain money was found empty. Mrs. Cukerbaum was known to keep large sums of money on the premises, but the exact amount of missing money was unknown. Officers theorized that the victim had been tied up and tortured in an effort to get her to tell where her money was hidden. They further speculated that the 81-year-old widow had put up a strong resistance, since the tape around her ankles was almost loose and the coat hanger wire around her wrists was also stretched. Official cause of death was suffocation caused by collapsed lungs due to most of her ribs on both sides being broken. "In other words," said Greene County coroner Erwin Busiek, "she was stomped to death."
   No definite leads were uncovered or suspects identified in the immediate wake of the crime. On December 2, however, authorities announced that they wanted to question two men and a woman who were seen in the area of the store on Saturday evening driving a brown 1957 Chevrolet. The next day, December 3, officials further announced that they were looking at the possibility that three men who escaped from the Clay County Jail in Liberty, Missouri, in the wee hours of Sunday morning were responsible for the heinous crime committed 160 miles away the same morning. A car stolen in nearby Independence shortly after the escape had been found only about a quarter of a mile from Luhn's store. Over the next day or so, two other stolen cars entered the picture as possible evidence in the murder case.
   On Friday, December 6, authorities said that three definite suspects had been identified, although their names were not immediately revealed. Two men were already in custody in Iowa, while the third was still at large. The three were officially charged with first-degree murder on December 9, although they were still not publicly identified. One of the suspects was originally from the Springfield area. The three men who escaped from the Liberty jail were not the three men charged with murder.
   On December 11, the suspects were identified as James Teitsworth, 23, Ralph Parcel, 23, and Berton DeWitt, 25, all of Iowa. Teitsworth and Parcel were returned to Greene County a few days later, while charges against DeWitt were dismissed and a different Iowan, Earl Weeks, 35, was named in his place as the third suspect. Weeks was extradited to Missouri in early January 1975.
   In late January, Teitsworth agreed to testify against the other two defendants in a plea bargain deal that reduced the charge against him to being an accessory. He said he was the driver of the car and the lookout but that he did not enter the store and that the plan was only to rob Mrs. Cuckerbaum, not kill her. None of the defendants knew the woman, but Teitsworth knew of the store, because he had once stayed briefly with a family in the Brighton area.
   At his trial in early April, Weeks was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, with Teitsworth serving as the primary witness against him. When Parcel went on trial in late July, he testified in his own defense, claiming that he, too, did not go inside the store building. He said he stayed outside the door as a lookout while Teitsworth drove down the road as a lookout and that only Weeks actually entered the building. The jury, though, didn't buy his story, and he, like Weeks, was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Meanwhile, Teitsworth's deal called for him to receive a five-year sentence with one year to be served in the county jail and the remainder to be served on probation, assuming he conducted himself properly.
   During the months and years after their convictins, both Weeks and Parcel filed and lost a series of appeals and requests for new trials, just as they had lost bids for changes of venue at the time of their trials. However, both men were finally furloughed and then paroled in 1989. The actions caused an uproar of protest in Greene County, especially among neighbors of Mrs. Cukerbaum, but to no avail.

The Burning Deaths of Willard and Viola Blades

   The lot where Willard and Viola Blades lived at the corner of Grant Avenue and Catalpa Street in Springfield was so ringed with trees and shrubs that, when their home caught fire late Saturday night, June 16, 1984, no one discovered the blaze until it was out of control. A passing motorist finally noticed the fire and called it in, but the house was already consumed in flames. After the fire was extinguished, investigators found the charred remains of the couple in the rubble, but the bodies were so badly burned that investigators said they might never know the exact cause of their deaths. Fire and police detectives did not suspect foul play, and an initial examination of the bodies yielded no clues, leaving authorities to speculate that the couple must have died of smoke inhalation.
   But some things didn’t quite seem right from the very beginning. The couple were known as “sticklers for fire safety” and had several smoke detectors in their home. Mrs. Blades’s body was found in an upstairs room stretched out in the middle of a bed in an unusual position, while her dead husband was found on his back nearby in the bedroom floor. Victims of fire were more often found in a curled up position.
   Suspicions were further aroused when forensics tests revealed that Viola had two head injuries. She also had a piece of rope tied around one wrist and what appeared to be a piece of cloth tied around her neck, suggesting that she might have been assaulted and tied up prior to her death. Investigators concluded from the burn pattern beneath the bed that the fire had probably started there, and tests later confirmed that an accelerant had been used under the bed.
   Unlike his wife’s body, Willard Blades’s body had no signs of injury, and investigators tentatively concluded that he had, in fact, died of smoke inhalation. Officials now strongly suspected that they were looking at either a homicide-suicide or a double homicide.
   But which one? There were no signs of forced entry and no signs that anything of substantial value had been taken. Had Blades assaulted his wife and then burned her and himself up in the fire, or was the arson an attempt to cover up a heinous double murder? Investigators leaned toward the double-homicide theory, despite no evidence of a break-in or a robbery.
   Based on interviews with friends and relatives of the Bladeses in Oklahoma, investigators soon identified an acquaintance of the couple as a person of interest in the case. The man, whose name was not revealed at first, was known to have been in Springfield on the Saturday that the Blades house burned down.
   The “acquaintance” of the couple turned out to be Willard Blades’s nephew Ronald Conn. By July 24, Springfield officers had accumulated enough evidence to charge him and two accomplices with two counts each of capital murder in the deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Blades. The accomplices were Ann Marie Dulany and Paul Richard Schmitt, both from Illinois. Conn and Ms. Dulany, who’d been living together, were already in custody in Illinois when the charges were filed, and Schmitt was arrested later that day. The suspects were brought back to Springfield and arraigned in circuit court.
   The defendants’ cases were separated, and Conn’s came up first. He finally went on trial for capital murder in early June 1986. Just after the trial opened, Conn pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in a deal that allowed him to escape the death penalty. As part of the plea-bargain, Conn gave a statement admitting to stealing stuff from his uncle and aunt. He placed primary blame for the crime on Schmitt, however, claiming that he and Ms. Dulany were already outside the house when Schmitt set the fire. Conn was sentenced to two concurrent life terms.
   At her trial in December 1986, Dulany admitted being present at the fire, but she laid nearly all the blame for the murders on Conn. The defense claimed she’d only helped Conn because she was under his control. It didn’t help Dulany’s cause, however, that she had given a conflicting statement shortly after her arrest in which she laid most of the blame for the murders on Schmitt.
   The jury found Dulany guilty, and she was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for fifty years. Her subsequent appeals were ultimately denied.
   In February 1987, Schmitt, the third defendant, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in keeping with a previously negotiated arrangement in which he’d agreed to testify against Conn, if necessary. Schmitt received two concurrent twenty-year prison terms with no possibility for parole.
   So, even though the evidence suggested Conn was the one who actually started the fire that burned up his uncle and aunt and destroyed their house, Ms. Dulany ended up getting a tougher sentence than her male sidekick in that he was eligible for parole sooner. Perhaps that’s the risk she ran by refusing to cop a plea. However, Mother Nature stepped in to rectify the seeming inequity. Conn died of natural causes at the age of sixty-eight in 2014 while still serving time at the Farmington Correctional Center.
   This post is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Lynchings, Murders, and Other Nefarious Deeds: A Criminal History of Greene County, Mo.

 

 

Bombing of Wilder's Restaurant in Joplin

   Since moving to Joplin many years ago, I've occasionally read or heard reference to a bombing that took place in the 1950s at Wilder's Restaurant on Main Street, but I'd never actually read a detailed account of the incident until yesterday, when I started researching it for this blog.
   On Thursday night, September 3, 1959, a dynamite explosion ripped through the upstairs office, apartment, and lounge above the restaurant, injuring six people, one of them critically. Apparently, five sticks of dynamite had been placed on the roof of the two-story building, directly above the office of the restaurant owner, Vern Wilder. Police theorized that the explosion was an attempt on the life of Wilder or his associate, Harry Hunt.
   But Wilder was downstairs in the restaurant at the time and was not injured, and Hunt was also not injured. All six of the injured people were in the upstairs part of the building, including 70-year-old Charles Greenwood, who was critically injured. The blast showered bricks and glass onto Main Street street outside the restaurant and shattered the windows of several neighboring businesses. "It shook the hell out of everything," said a man who happened to be passing by on the sidewalk and barely missed being killed or seriously injured. Greenwood, an employee of a cigar store next door to the restaurant, died on the morning of September 5.
   Police immediately undertook an investigation of the explosion. It was suspected that either someone with a personal grudge against Wilder and/or Hunt or underworld figures involved in illegal gambling were responsible for the bombing, because it was an open secret that Wilder's was one of the main "casinos" in Joplin. In fact, one report said that Wilder's was among the three largest gambling establishments in the entire state of Missouri. Wilder had even admitted during a civil action in 1950 that Hunt operated a gambling room above his restaurant, and the two men had both been indicted in 1951 for setting up gambling devices, although the indictments were later quashed. At the time of the explosion, Wilder was suing an insurance company, claiming a safe containing $10,000 ($7,000 of which belonged to Hunt) had been stolen from the restaurant property and that the insurance company had refused to pay for the loss. This was cited as another possible motive for the crime.
   According the the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the upstairs part of Wilder's was Joplin's "only big-time gambling casino." The previous year (1958), Missouri governor James Blair had named Joplin as one of the "worst spots in Missouri for gambling." Although he had not identified Wilder's specifically in his formal statement, he had reportedly mentioned the restaurant in private remarks. Informed of the governor's remarks, Wilder denied that he ran the biggest gambling operation in Jasper County. He just "ran a friendly game," Wilder said. "I just try to run a good restaurant."
   The Post-Dispatch went on the assert that there had recently been "considerable jealousy among gamblers" in the Tri-State area of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, as some of the gamblers not associated with Wilder's resented the fact that the restaurant had apparently been granted an exclusive right to operate in Joplin with police turning a blind eye to Wilder's activities while clamping down on others.
   In addition, after Blair's 1958 report, some of the big-time gamblers in Kansas City had felt the heat because of the governor's vow to crack down on gambling in KC and had allegedly invaded Joplin as a more lucrative and wide-open field for their gambling operations. Several months before the restaurant bombing, the Kansas City high-rollers had begun demanding a cut of Wilder's gambling proceeds. Despite these allegations, little proof was offered, and no one was indicted for the explosion or the murder of Greenwood.
   In early 1960, a Jasper County grand jury launched an investigation not only into the explosion but also into gambling activities in the county. The investigation uncovered evidence of gambling not only at Wilder's but also in Carthage and at one or two other locations in the county. Wilder and several associates, including Hunt, were indicted for gambling, but the grand jury report, issued in February, failed to uncover a definite motive or to name a suspect in the September explosion.

"Big George" Herrelson

   One of the chapters of my book Midnight Assassinations and Other Evildoings: A Criminal History of Jasper County, Mo. is about the murder of Joplin watchmaker R. T. Thompson in late October 1929 during a robbery attempt gone bad. George Herrelson; his wife, Bertha; Bertha's brother, Earl Osborn; and two other men were arrested in connection with the crime two years later, in October 1931. The Herrelson couple and Osborn were ultimately found guilty of first-degree murder in the case, and they received sentences of life imprisonment, while the other two men, who were younger and who testified against the other defendants, were given lighter sentences for second-degree murder convictions.
   The two younger men testified that Osborn was the trigger man in the murder and that Herrelson was the leader of the gang. They said that Herrelson and Osborn had been involved in a number of previous robberies. So, I knew, or at least suspected, that Herrelson and Osborn had been involved in other crimes, but only recently did I uncover some of the details of those crimes.
   Residents of Cherokee County, Kansas, George and Bertha Herrelson were, from all appearances, fairly upstanding members of society during the early to mid-1920s. They had two popular and pretty teenage daughters, one of whom was selected a school queen at Galena. But somewhere along the line, "Big George," as he was sometimes called, got sidetracked, and his life took a criminal turn.
   Herrelson's illegal shenanigans first came to public attention in the spring of 1928, when he allegedly set fire to his own house in an apparent attempt to collect the insurance. Charged with arson, he was acquitted at trial in the spring of 1929. By this time, though, or shortly after, he had become involved in other criminal activities.
   The murder of Thompson, as previously mentioned, took place in October 1929.
   Then, in late December of 1929, a gang of men robbed a prominent, elderly businessman named William Cottengin and his daughter at Cottengin's home in Hartville, Missouri. The gang pulled up outside the home, and when the daughter came to the door, they forced her at gunpoint back into the house. They forced the old man and his daughter to lie on the floor and bound and gagged both of them. With their victims incapacitated, they chiseled open a safe Cottengin kept in his home and took about $700 from it. They then jumped back into their car and sped out of town.
   As with the Thompson murder, there were no suspects in the Cottengin case at first, but in early January 1930, just days after the Hartville caper, a jewelry store in Herrelson's hometown of Galena was robbed, and he was arrested in connection with the heist. Then, in March 1930, before the Galena case could be prosecuted, several men were arrested in northwest Oklahoma as alleged members of a robbery ring that had been operating in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri for several months, and one or more of the captives named Herrelson and Osborn as fellow members of the gang. Herrelson was also fingered as the leader of the group who had robbed Cottengin.
   The Missouri governor filled out a requisition to have Herrelson returned to Missouri to face charges in the strongarm robbery of Cottengin, and Kansas authorities, who already had the defendant in custody for the jewelry store robbery, honored the request. Herrelson was taken back to Hartville to face assault and robbery charges and was lodged in the Wright County jail. However, he somehow got free of the charge or perhaps was released on bond, because he was back home in Cherokee County when he and his wife were arrested in October 1931 on charges of murdering Thompson. And that was the end of "Big George" Herrelson's criminal career. 

Sports Broadcaster Vern Hawkins

   One of my earliest memories is listening to the Southwest Missouri State Bears basketball games on Springfield's KWTO-AM radio station. The voice of the Bears back then, in the early 1950s, was Vern Hawkins, and he continued calling the Bears games for another thirty years or so after that.
   A native of Dallas County, Missouri, Hawkins attended Buffalo High School, where he was a star basketball player during the late 1930s and early 1940s. He played one season of basketball for Missouri Valley College in Marshall before he was called into military service during World War II.
   After the war, he transferred to SMS, where he lettered for two years under legendary coach Andy McDonald (after whom McDonald Arena was named). Hawkins started his broadcasting career while still in college, calling Bears games on KGBX radio during the 1949-1950 season, McDonald's final season as head coach. In 1951, Hawkins moved to KWTO, becoming news and sports director.
   One of the highlights of Hawkins's career was broadcasting Bears games during the team's back-to-back NAIA championship years of 1951-52 and 1952-53. In addition to announcing Bears basketball games, he also broadcast Drury College basketball games for several years, and later he added SMS football games to his schedule. Hawkins retired from broadcasting in 1985, having announced approximately 900 Bears basketball games.
   While he was still broadcasting, Hawkins also went into partnership with Bill Virdon (former Major League Baseball player) and Beryl Swan in a sporting goods store in Springfield. He also became a stockbroker and investment advisor.
   Hawkins died in 1993, and he was posthumously inducted into the Springfield-Area Sports Hall of Fame two years later.

   To be sure, there have been several other long-time play-by-play sports announcers in Springfield over the years. These include Bill Maynard and Dick Bradley, both contemporaries of Hawkins. Another name that comes to mind is Ned Reynolds, whose career giving sports news and announcing sporting events for KY-3 TV in Springfield spanned almost fifty years from about 1967 to 2014.
   But I always associate Vern Hawkins, first and foremost, with Springfield sportscasters, because he was the one I listened to as a little kid and he was still going strong long after I grew to adulthood.