Missouri Press Association
Serving Missouri Newspapers Since 1867
The following excerpt is from Kent Ford's memoir, Boomer Tales: Adventures of a Part-Time Delinquent. It is republished here with permission.
Kent Ford was editor of Missouri Press News for 25 years and died July 31, 2026, after a recent cancer diagnosis. You can find his obituary here and a memorial story about Kent's time with MPA here.
A celebration of life will be held 2-4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 10, at Para Project, 300 Portland Street, Suite 140, Columbia, MO 65201.
Fire in the Night
Only a few weeks after I joined the Daily American Republic, the editor called me in the middle of the night. The radio scanner that he kept turned on at his home around the clock had awakened him. Fire crews were at a building downtown that had smoke coming out of it. “Check it out,” Mr. Stanard said. The building, on one of the main intersections of downtown, held a hardware store. It sat across the street from the parking lot of the Daily American Republic. Sharon and I lived in an apartment not more than a mile from downtown, so it took only a few minutes for me to dress and drive to the scene.
Soon after I arrived and parked a couple of blocks away from the scene, four firemen entered the building through the rear basement door. No flames visible, but smoke seeped out around window frames. Flashing lights on emergency vehicles splashed color across store buildings. Idling fire engines added a soundtrack to the eerie scene. I watched from the sidewalk across the street from the smoking building.
Bricks Litter the Street
Suddenly, a muffled explosion blew out the side of the structure, littering the street in front of me with bricks and debris. “Dam, we’ve got dead firemen!” I thought. Then, “I need to call the boss and get help.” Unfortunately, the collapsing building had cut the electricity and telephone service in the area. Cell phones, indispensable now for news reporters, remained many years in the future. I had no way to call for help, and I did not want to leave the scene of the action to find a working phone.
I began making pictures. Bystanders and other firemen waded toward the now flaming building and dragged out what I thought were bodies of firemen. Moments later, I heard to my left in the middle of the street a faint plea, “Help me, help me.” As I looked toward the sound, a figure rose up slightly from the rubble in the street. Another fireman! Alive! He was on his hands and knees directly under overhead wires whipping violently as the conflagration convulsed the building.
Hoping to get a picture of bystanders dragging this fireman to safety, I looked around to shout for help. The street was deserted. Everyone who had been there was busy moving the other firemen or scrambling for more equipment to fight the fire. That left me, standing there with a journalism school rule fresh in my brain: Record the news, don’t become part of it. “To hell with that,” I thought. “I am the only one here!” Quickly stepping through the clutter of bricks, I reached the man and grabbed around an arm to help him up. This was a big man, dressed in firefighting gear.
Fortunately for both of us, another man hurried over. “This way,” he said, and we helped the fireman stagger to the parking lot behind the newspaper office. We laid the fireman in the back of the man’s pickup truck, and he drove to an emergency room three blocks away. The next day I learned that the man with the pickup truck was the father of the fireman we dragged out of the rubble. He had been sitting in his truck watching the action.
Fuzzy Photos
Meanwhile, the fire grew. It eventually engulfed several businesses before being contained. I spent the next couple of hours taking pictures, retrieving more film from the DAR darkroom and taking more pictures. (Like cell phones, digital cameras were years in the future. At the DAR, we spooled our own film from bulk, 100-foot rolls of black-and-white film.) One picture I hoped would be useable showed a fireman pouring gasoline from a five-gallon can into a pumper truck. To my utter horror and embarrassment, not a single nighttime picture I made of that fire was in sharp focus. The DAR printed several of them anyway.
When the rest of the newsroom staff arrived that morning, I wrote a first-person account of the fire. The newspaper went to press around noon. The collapse of the building had not killed a single fireman. One of them suffered a mangled leg, which had to be removed. The man I helped drag out of the bricks suffered a minor neck fracture.
The fire station already was part of my daily beat. Each morning I visited the station to check out calls made during the previous day. After the fire, smiles greeted me at the station every day. Before the fire, I was just the nosy reporter looking into their business. I had become a minor hero among those real ones.
Some months later the fire gained new life. The county prosecuting attorney called me at home on a Sunday evening. He asked me to come to his office the next morning. He said he was going to file arson charges in the fire that had destroyed the hardware store and other businesses. He wanted me to get the news first. That made me proud. I began to understand more clearly how important a local newspaper is to a community. Even when it seems nobody is paying attention, many are.
A Reporter’s Playground
Through the years at the DAR, I moved from the fire/police/county beat to courts and the city administration. With the go-ahead from the editor, I started weekly pages dedicated to local business, outdoors and religion. Along with the routine coverage of the city and county, the region provided enough fires, robberies, drownings, crashes, floods, train derailments and homicides – a reporter’s smorgasbord – to keep our staff hopping and happy. We wrote plenty of human-interest feature stories, too.
I filled in on the editor’s desk a few times when Mr. Stanard took a break. On one of those occasions, in November 1978, a U.S. congressman was murdered and more than 900 members of a religious sect, many of them Americans, committed suicide in the South American country of Guyana. The people had drunk a flavored drink spiked with cyanide to escape what their leader told them was the evil world about to descend upon them. Investigators determined that many of the people who died had been forced to drink the poison. That tragedy led to the phrase “drank the Kool-Aid” to describe acceptance of ideology without question of basis in fact. (Most official reports of the event indicated the flavored drink to be a different brand than Kool-Aid.) Editor & Publisher magazine used my front-page layout of the AP photos and account of that horrible incident in an article about how to present a multi-piece story.
