SHSMO Oral History

Buck O'Neil on Segregated Travel (Covering the Bases)

BUCK O'NEIL: When you’d travel to a place, you would stop. Now, a lot of times, this would cut you, a lot of times. You would go to just say Oklahoma, and you would go to a place and the white ball players would have to go in the place to get food for you to eat, because you couldn’t go in that place when we were playing through some of them towns. Well, we couldn’t go into a place to eat, but the guys would go in and get sandwiches for us, which would kind of cut you, you know what I mean. These things would cut you. But, we were accustomed to these things, because we had gone through it. We trained in that and all of it. We were trained in the South, and play all through the South, a lot of it. But, the thing about it, we didn’t get cut too much because we knew the places to go. The only time it would cut you would be this, we would go into a filling station to get gas and the guy would see us coming and he might lock the restroom, which was a thing. Actually, after traveling so long, we knew the stations to stop to to get the gas, where you wouldn’t have these things. But, a lot of places we have gone, they wouldn’t let you in the restroom. Lock the restroom. A lot of places we would go, we were here, we would drive up here to get gas, and somebody else would drive up to another pump over there five minutes after us. He’d stop waiting on us and go wait on this person. See, all these little things would kind of get you. Yeah, they would get you. You’d feel like, oh, well, I want to do this and do that, but if you would, you were in trouble, because the police would come and put you in jail. Different things like that. But, all in all, it was quite an experience.

Whitey Herzog on Minor League Baseball (Covering the Bases)

WHITEY HERZOG: I think the Yankees had twenty-three farm clubs. The Cardinals had about twenty-five. The Dodgers about twenty-six. One thing about that, Matt, when we started playing ball, if you didn’t do well one place, they’d send you to another place. You had an opportunity to play a lot more, before they’d send you home. If you could show them one of the three things—if you could run, you could throw, or you could hit, they’d stay with you. Hopefully the other two would come. I went out to McAlester, and I had a fairly decent year. I hit .279. I played a hundred-and-some games down there. Had thirty assists or something like that in the outfield. The next year, they rewarded me by sending me back to Class D again. I went back to McAlester. I hit .351. The next year, I got to go to Class C, which was Joplin. It was a slow process in those days. You didn’t jump—like nowadays, if he has a good year in A League, they bring him to spring training. It wasn’t like that then. They’d send you one place, and they’d send you another place. I went into service in ’52 during the Korean War, and I was at Fort Leonard Wood, and I played there two years. When I came out, I went to the Yankee rookie school and Casey Stengel was there. He told Ralph Houk, who was going to manage Denver, that I was going to be the centerfielder. So, I got to go, actually, from Class B to AAA, which is quite a jump. I had a sort of decent year. I hit twenty-some home runs, I drove in ninety-nine runs, and hit .290, .289, I think it was. The next year, of course, I would have really have liked to have gone back to AAA one more year, but I got traded to Washington. That was on April Fools’ Day 1956.

Dorothy Caldwell and the Missouri Historical Review

The Logans Reflect on Alberta’s Hotel (African American Heritage in the Ozarks)

Voda Curtis on the 1906 Springfield Lynchings (African American Heritage in the Ozarks)

Mark Dixon on Benton Avenue AME (African American Heritage in the Ozarks)

Ann Bryan Mariano - SHSMO National Women and Media Collection

This clip is an excerpt from an undated audio recording of Ann Bryan Mariano with her husband, Frank Mariano, titled “Ann’s Best Seller.” Listen as Anne reminisces about first arriving in Vietnam in 1966 at LZ Dog, a US Army base in Bồng Sơn, Bình Định Province that served as the headquarters for the First Cavalry Division. [Ann Bryan Mariano McKay Papers (C4009)] Learn more about the collection at https://collections.shsmo.org/manuscripts/columbia/c4009

This recording comes from a collection that is part of the SHSMO National Women and Media Collection (NWMC). Visit the Center for Missouri Studies in downtown Columbia from June through December 2022 and see the exhibit “In Their Own Words: Celebrating the National Women and Media Collection.”

Henry "Hank" J. Waters III

Music in Missouri Exhibition

Music in Missouri explores Missouri’s contribution to American music. The state’s early folk musicians, marching bands, and choral societies inspired the birth of ragtime and then overlapped with the evolution of a new brand of blues in St. Louis. Those emerging styles then intersected with an explosion of new jazz in Kansas City, at the same time that Ozark bluegrass migrated northwards and entered this melting pot of rhythm to help create rock n’ roll, rhythm and blues, modern country, and gospel. As viewers observe Missouri’s role in shaping American sound, they will also see the ways in which musical interactions broke down barriers—especially those based on race, gender, and region—and made Missouri a unique place for creativity, reinvention, and progress.

Jazz + Blues = Soul - Kevin Walsh with Dr. Charles Nilon

Originally aired on KOPN (89.5 FM) in Columbia, MO