Chapter I

It's sometimes really odd how just a few unrelated things can lead to a whole chain of unusual events. Looking back, none of this would have happened if the high school hadn't sprayed the football field for weeds, or if lightning hadn't hit that tree at the museum and sent a branch through the window, or the President of Venezuela had missed his flight. Like I said, unrelated things creating a very unusual chain. I live in Oklahoma City, but this entire story takes place in Bolivar, Missouri, the county seat of Polk County, firmly placed in the Ozarks, just thirty miles north of Springfield in Highway 13.

My connection is that my entire family is from Bolivar and has been for generations, at least according to my sister who has tracked our geneology clear back to Charlemagne. Not only has my family been in Bolivar for years, they still are in town, even though several of my generation have moved on and moved out. Our name isn't as big in town as it used to be, on my dad's side, my grandpa owned a hardware store as well as the first car in town, one uncle owned a gas station and another uncle was the post master. Currently, all that is left is an uncle on my dad's side, my mom, her brother and mother, and my sister.

I get back to visit about three or four times a year since I only live four hours away in Oklahoma City. It's just a quick drive up Interstate 44 , at seventy-five M.P.H. of course, and you're there. Usually, my trips back are of the honey-dew variety. My mom & grandma have a big list of "honey-do's", everything from rehanging a sticky door and building a brick sidewalk to setting up my mom's computer and cleaning my grandma's gutters. My whole family, wife and both boys would go and we would all pitch in, but since the boys are grown and off to college, it's just Barb and I. There are a lot of times I wish I lived closer so I could do more, but my sister Dalla reminds me that she and her husband are close, so I shouldn't worry so much.

Another of the chores that I really enjoy, is helping my mom with her work at the museum. Mom's sister-in-law, Marge, is the president of the Polk County Historical Society and the curator of the Polk County Museum. The museum is located in the old North Ward School built back in 1903 and it's only open a few months out of the year. Mom helps out with fund-raisers, tours, and research in the archives. She and Dalla have been busy transcribing several of the census records and probate records so folks can read them more easily and I have been working with them, training them on all the things that their PCs can do.

Last year, during a huge thunderstorm, lightning hit a tree in front of the museum, sending a huge branch through a window in the archives room. Next morning, Marge found the archives room about half flooded so she, Mom and Dalla spent the week-end drying out all kinds of books and photos. I was in town, putting in some shelves for mom, so I jumped in and helped out. That was when I got the idea of scanning all the photos, just in case they ever get destroyed. Marge & Mom thought it was a good idea, so an obsession was born.

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The museum really never had a listing of the photos that they had or any information about them, so the scanning was really haphazard. I would just put as many photos as I could fit on the scanner, scan them in and then seperate them later using photo editing software. Quite a few times I would run across copies of the same photo that had obviously been made and then misplaced, so I was also trying to catalog these as well to get an idea of just how many photos we had and what they were of.

Along the way, I was also cataloging all the comments written on the back of the photos or any information that was displayed alongside the photo if it was displayed. With all of this information, even though it was very scattered, I was getting a vague overall picture of the history of Bolivar. There were several pictures taken from the Standpipe, a watertower that was only a tall cylinder and for the longest time it was the tallest structure in town. There were a lot of pictures of the local college and the fire that burnt it to the ground. The town was hit by a tornado once and for some reason, we had about a dozen pictures of a cow with a 2x4 ran clean through it.

The topic that encompassed the most photos, however, was the visit by President Truman and the President of Venezuela back in 1948 when they dedicated a statue of Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of Venezuela. It seems that back in 1948, the people of Venezuela wanted to present a statue of Simon Bolivar to the United States of America and they felt that the proper place would be the largest town in the U.S. that was named for the famed Liberator. Turns out, that Bolivar, Missouri was the largest at the time so they received a visit from Truman and a whole bunch of dignitaries from South America. There was a huge parade with home-made floats, marching bands and there was even a photo of a flyover of several fighters that buzzed the courthouse during the parade. Bolivar hasn't seen that much excitement since, at least until this past summer when all the geese died in the community pool.

The local High School had been re-working the football field in early June and had sprayed a heavy-duty weed-killer all of the field. Late that night, a flock of Canadian geese landed on the field to graze, ate a ton of the weed-killer and then took off. Several of the geese, it appears, died in flight, or at least passed out, and landed in the community pool. The worst part were the ones that didn't exactly hit the water, but made a nice big splat on the concrete, split open and then bounced in. Of course, they had to empty the pool to clean it, and then things just went from bad to worse when one of the workers slipped near the diving end and fell eight feet to the bottom, broke his neck and died. The insurance company conducted a huge investigation into the cause of the slip and by the time they were done, it was late August and the town had been without a pool for the whole summer.

A lot of folks were mad since it ended up being the hottest summer in sixty some years. Some folks called the local radio station complaining, some complained to the city council, but others, like Dan Swiftfoot, took action. Once the word was out about the dead geese in the pool, Dan decided to bite the bullet and put in the pool that his wife had been bugging him about for years. It was during the construction of that pool, that the first big piece of the puzzle was unearthed. If it hadn't been for the geese dying, Dan wouldn't have been digging in his yard and he wouldn't have uncovered that pistol.