Print - "strictly country people"

I have to admit, I'd never heard of the Kirksville Daily Express before this interview, although I guessed that Kirksville had a paper. Growing up, both Joanne and Vernon received the Express at their family's homes through the mail, the day after it was printed. Additionally, Vernon's family received the Greentop paper once per week. As children (and adults, it seems), neither had much interest in reading the paper. "Even the funnies?" I asked. Chuckling, they admitted they never even checked to see if the paper had a funnies section. As far as magazines, Joanne was pretty sure they received one called "Moody Monthly," a publication of Moody Bible Institute - Joanne's mother was a preacher. I asked if there were magazines in public waiting areas, like the doctor's office, but they both instantly shook their heads. Apparently, back then, no one expected to be entertained while they waited.
While they may not have inspected newspapers for comics, they both definitely read comic books - although they can't really remember which ones. However, later on in the interview, Vernon's eyes lit up and with no warning he exclaimed, "Alley Oop!" I was understandably confused. He was remembering, as it turns out, one of the comics he liked to read.
 

They bought their comic books, of course, from the service station, where apparently everything you could ever need in Kirksville, Missouri was located. Additionally, Vernon had a comic version of the Bible, sometimes also called an Action Bible. I almost didn't ask if there were any comics, magazines, or books that were controversial or that they weren't allowed to read, because I was relatively sure I already knew the answer. "No," Joanne said, "we were strictly country people."
Books was a topic they had a little more to say about. I was interested to know the situation of Bibles in their homes, because I was under the impression that most families back then owned one, usually large, Bible. Joanne and Vernon and their siblings, however, each had their own. All their Bibles were King James Version, a rarity today (they now read New International Version). In Joanne's home, the Bible was read every day at the dinner table; a practice that would also be quite rare today, even in rural Missouri. Because they did not have electricity until 1943, reading at night was done by light of an "Aladdin" brand kerosene lamp, which Joanne and her siblings would gather around.
          (Like this)                                                    (Not like this)
                                                                        
         
Her favorite books, which she owned, included Black Beauty, Little Women, and Anne of Green Gables. His favorite books, on the other hand, were Westerns, with titles such as Silver Chief, that he bought for 25 cents each at (where else?) the service station. He also recalled a book called Shepherd of the Hills, a collection of mountain folklore.


At the time, there was no public library, books were usually bought. They often received books as gifts for their birthday or Christmas, some of them purchased at the trading center in Greentop. Their high school had a small library that held novels as well as educational materials, and Vernon thinks that in his time there he probably read every single book. (I was surprised at this, I would have figured Joanne for the bookworm).
How much have newspapers and magazines changed over the years? A lot. Joanne brought out an enormous edition of Life magazine from 1952 that was nearly twice the size of a modern magazine. In the corner is marked "20 cents." Flipping through it, I noticed a few things: first, and Joanne commented on this also, that the ads were significantly more innocent than what you'd see today. A picture of a woman in modest undergarments was about as scandalous as it got. However, from looking at the ads in the magazine, I think the notion that extreme thinness in models is at all a recent thing is false.Even without Photoshop, many of the women in those ads were just as thin as models today. Second, to put it frankly, there were no black people. Or Asian, Hispanic, so on, in the entire large volume. Apparently in the thick of civil rights, the controversy was not discussed in popular reading, but ignored.
Today, Joanne and Vernon still enjoy the occasional book. They do not use other means of reading beside good old fashioned ink and paper - after all, they are strictly country people.

Some snapshots from the Life magazine: