“Newspaperwoman of the Ozarks” by Susan Croce Kelly

For my two introductory reporting courses in journalism school, I had the teacher said to be the toughest of the faculty. And he was. His classes tended to weed out anyone who wasn’t fully committed (which the school administrators were less than pleased with). A typo, a grammatical error, a factual error – all earned an automatic F on the assignment. He often did calisthenics during timed in-class assignments and even sang opera on occasion – to teach us to avoid distractions and to focus.  

Yes, he was a piece of work. And yes, he taught us speed, accuracy, focus and a deeply reverential attitude toward what we were studying.

 

I think of him often when I read the newspaper today. He wouldn’t recognize what’s happened to journalism. Neither do I, when any given news story provides opinion with a thin veneer of news. That would have earned an automatic F.

 

The kind of journalism I do recognize is that of Lucile Morris Upton (1898-1992). She didn’t attend journalism school, although she wanted to. She started out as a teacher, and it was seemingly only by happenstance that she found herself writing for newspapers in New Mexico, Colorado, and Springfield, Mo. She wrote at a time when most reporters and editors didn’t have journalism degrees. She understood the place of a newspaper in the community. And little if anything would stand in the way of her from getting the story.

 

Susan Croce Kelly

Upton’s story is wonderfully told by writer Susan Croce Kelly in Newspaperwoman of the Ozarks: The Life and Times of Lucile Morris Upton. The biography a part of the Ozark Series published by the University of Arkansas Press. (Technically, the Ozark region includes a large chunk of southern Missouri – St. Louis is considered the foothills; northern Arkansas; a small part of southeastern Oklahoma; and even a sliver of Kansas.)

 

Upton is best-known for her work in Missouri, based in Springfield, but she cut her journalistic teeth in New Mexico and Colorado. She was even offered a foreign correspondent position in London, but she eventually turned it down. Her career wasn’t a straight-line trajectory. She taught school, she wrote for newspapers, she taught again and reported again, she retired after getting married but returned to do columns for writers on leave and during World War II. She covered some of the most significant stories in 20^th century Missouri and even national history.

 

And she did more than report. She championed the Ozark region, helping to develop it as a tourism destination. She wrote an acclaimed book on the Baldknobbers, a group of vigilantes who operated after the Civil War and became a law unto themselves. She helped Greene County, Missouri, turn the Nathan Boone home into a landmark (he’s the son of Daniel). And she was instrumental in having Wilson’s Creek, the site of the second major battle of the Civil War, incorporated into the National Park Service.

 

She was close to her two brothers and their children. She married in her late 30s; her husband J.B. Upton died in 1947 following a heart attack; they’d been married only nine years. She pressed on and continued to work in the newspaper business for decades after.

 

Susan Croce Kelly, the author, is herself a former reporter for the Springfield News and Leader and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. She previously published Route 66: The Highway and Its People and is the managing editor of Ozarks Watch at Missouri State University’s Ozarks Studies Institute. 

 

The woman was a presence, and Kelly is perhaps the ideal writer to tell her story. Not only does the author have her own extensive Ozarks and journalism background, she also is a relative of Upton’s. She interviewed numerous people throughout the region, and she provides a well-done context for the events of Upton’s life.

 

By the end of Newspaperwoman of the Ozarks, the reader has a finely drawn portrait of a woman dedicated to a newspaper career, a champion of her region, and a solid sense of the practice of journalism through much of the 20^thcentury.

Some Monday Readings

 

Back to the New Jeffersonianism: A Review of Tyranny Inc. – Hamilton Craig at Front Porch Republic.

 

Corrosive Curation: Against the politicization of museums – Lara Brown at The Critic Magazine.

 

Inside the Model of St. Paul’s – Spitalfields Life. 

 

Who is Kaleo Manuel? Maui Water Official Faces Scrutiny Over Fire Response – Giulia Carbonaro at Newsweek. 

Pat Durmon’s “Push Mountain Road”

Highway 341 is a generally north-south road in Baxter County in north central Arkansas. Its approximately 34 miles of length (with extensions) meander in the Arkansas Ozarks. The highway is also known as Push Mountain Road, and that’s the title poet Pat Durmon has given to her latest collection of poetry – Push Mountain Road (which certainly sounds more interesting, and poetic, than Highway 341).

Comprised of 118 poems (and one introductory poem), the collection is a celebration – of people, nature, relationships, the everyday, the small things (like making the crust for a quiche), and the larger things (like sitting in a radiation waiting room). Durmon combines an almost childlike wonder with the wisdom gained through a lifetime of experience.

In this poem, an observation about the declining afternoon light becomes something much more:

 

Open Doors

welcome

the failing

afternoon light

bellowing bullfrogs

a spider quilting

between porch rails

a wood-wild road

zigzagging

up the mountain

a herd of deer

coming our

from dense

ragged woods

where they cross

a pasture

to go down to the river

and catch grace

off guard

Pat Durmon

It is that “something much more” that characterizes Durmon’s poems. And the poem cover the landscape that’s extends outward from Push Mountain Road – the small towns, the people, the trees and streams, animals in the forests, the mountains and the seasons.

Durmon is the author of Light and Shadows in a Nursing Home: Poems and Blind Curves. Her poems have been published in such journals as Rattle, Main Street Rag, Poetry East, Cyclamens and Blades, Between the Lines, and Lucidity. A former teacher and now retired mental health counselor, she currently facilitates two support groups.

The poems of Push Mountain Road are the poems of rest and refreshment, a place to come to and abide as the world’s craziness swirls around.

Top photograph: Little Red River in the Arkansas Ozarks, via Arkansas.com.

Poets and Poems: Dave Malone and “O”

My first experience with the Ozark Mountains was virtual – a novel called The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks by the late Donald Harington. It was published in 1975; I read it about 1980 and thought it hilarious. A few years later, we spent a long weekend in Branson, before it was discovered by all the big name entertainers and when Silver Dollar City at the duck boats were the bog attractions.

It was then that I learned about The Shepherd of the Hills and the Bald Knobbers, a group of vigilantes who were still fighting the Civil War for the North in the 1880s, their enemy being the Anti-Bald Knobbers, who sided with the south. I also discovered that St. Louis is considered to be in the foothills of the Ozarks, surprising, since the Ozarks about 100 miles away. And we’ve spent several long weekends at Lake of the Ozarks, created way-back-when by a dam and today a heavy tourist draw Missouri.

So my knowledge of the Ozarks was essentially limited to what any observant tourist might know. And I didn’t consider the movie Winter’s Bone to present an accurate portrayal of life in the Ozarks, either.

I’ve had a different picture of life in the Ozarks, and it’s thanks to Dave Malone’s poetry: View from the North Ten; Under the Sycamore; Seasons of Love; and Poems to Love, and the Body. His latest collection, O: Love Poems from the Ozarks, includes some of the most vivid love poetry I think I’ve read.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph by Candy Simonson via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Poets and Poems: Dave Malone’s “View from the North Ten”

The Missouri Ozarks is a distinct region within the state of Missouri, yet geographically indistinguishable from the Arkansas Ozarks. It presents distinctly different faces, depending upon what one is looking for: the entertainment complex of Branson (and upscale resort at Big Cedar); the natural beauty of the hills, small mountains, rivers and streams; St. Louisans’ favorite weekend resorts at Lake of the Ozarks; the rural, backwoods movie setting of “Winter Bone;” the Ozarks of the Baldknobbers legend and Harold Bell Wright’s “Shepherd of the Hills.”

Behind the legends, entertainment extravaganzas, resorts is the region that tens of thousands call home, where they live, work, get married, raise families and die, much like any other part of the United States. This is the territory of farms and small towns (Springfield, Mo., population of 162,000, would likely be the unofficial capital). Away from the glitz of the Branson Strip, it’s an area of rugged, stark beauty; I even have two photographs from the region on the walls of my office at work.

This Missouri Ozarks is the home of poet Dave Malone.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.