"I'm just an ordinary person," said Birdle Mannon, 88, standing in her modest cabin near Bradleyville in Taney County, Missouri. It had been her home since 1916 when her parents moved from Nebraska and homesteaded there. Birdle lived a simple life in a two-room cabin without the modern conveniences most of us have come to believe we could not live without. The structure now was a ramshackle structure of lumber and logs tilting precariously, held upright by a lick and a prayer.
Birdle was graduated from Ava High School in 1935. She had been a teacher and rural newspaper correspondent, but for the last 30 years lived in the cabin, alone but never lonely.
Inside the simple cabin Birdle looks up a name in her church directory. "I don't get lonesome - I'm not a person who gets lonesome," she said, "I've never been lonely in my life. I'm well-satisfied, I can say that. I don't really worry my head about being happy or sad.”
The little old lady who lived in the woods died in 1999. Birdle rests now in Clark Cemetery, a small plot of land near the cabin she held so dear.
They laughed and smiled, leaned across desks and stood on chairs to get a look. A dozen or so students from Mwaya Secondary School listened as Kelsey Esther, a high school junior from Springfield, Missouri, guided them through video lessons from the Khan Academy on a laptop computer.
Students at the school near the village of Tenende in southwest Tanzania got computers in their classrooms for the first time. Through a unique program, a group of Missouri high school and university students brought the computers along with LCD projectors and generators to this school that has no windows or electricity.
Before speaking at Drury University’s Clara Thompson Hall, comedian turned political activist Dick Gregory stood backstage under a bare light bulb. Gregory was intense and quiet, as though gathering momentum before his lecture. While some of his talk was social satire, much more was fiery activism.
Glory Hole Falls is a gem of the Ozark National Forest in Newton County, Arkansas. Water flows down the hillside, tumbling through a two-meter hole in the roof of a bluff shelter. It is a spectacular sight best seen in person.
The child — poverty — is dressed in a flannel shirt worn to softness and in loose-fitting trousers from another person’s home.
He wants, but often cannon have. He eats, but often not properly. He is warm, but not far from being cold.
He walks the hills of south-central and southeastern Missouri, but his tread is subtle.
He is not desperate, but he is poor — poor, according to the standards by which Americans judge poverty. — Steve Cusick
The Ozarks hill country of south-central and southeastern Missouri, rich though it is in refreshing beauty, reassuring traditions and resourceful people, is one of America’s poorest regions in economic terms.
In the winter of 1985 writer Steve Cusick and I produced an eight-part series looking at poverty in seven of Missouri’s poorest counties. The series, titled “Hard Hills, Hard Times,” was published in the Springfield News-Leader.
The statistics were compelling but it was still an startling experience to actually see how so many people were existing in 19th-century living conditions. However, many of the people living in poverty do not consider themselves poor. Some choose the subsistence lifestyle their parents lived in the rugged hills.
It was a hot August afternoon in 1978 that my friend and co-worker Mike O’Brien and I visited with Eva Barnes Henderson on her farm in the Buffalo River valley in Arkansas.
Known affectionately as “Granny Henderson” to many at that time and to this, Granny lived just out of sight of the Buffalo River. A short distance from the spectacular Hemmed-in-Hollow to the east and Goats Bluff to the southwest, Granny lived in the heart of what is now the Buffalo National River preserve. And that was the problem.
Congress had designated the Buffalo as a National River in 1972. Federal agents contacted Granny and other neighbors up and down the river shortly after.
Now the Park Service needed her 167 acres to complete the 95,000-acre federally-protected area.
“They came out here one morning while I was turning out the cows out,” recalled Granny. “They said they aimed to buy my land, and asked what I thought of it. ‘I don’t think much of it,’ I told ’em. I said it kinda short, because I meant it short.”
Finally Granny came to an agreement with the Park Service. She took up residence with her daughter “up on the hill.”
Granny never learned to drive a car but she recalled plowing behind a team of mules in fields she help clear with her husband Frank. She left behind the four-room cabin she’d lived in for more than a half-century in the splendor of the Buffalo valley, the cows and chickens she cared for, a water well located by the local “water witch,” a lifetime of memories – but not her faithful dog Bobby.
“When you work that hard for something, you naturally hate to see it go. Of course I don’t like it. I guess a lot of the rest don’t like it, either. I want everybody to see the river who wants to, but…”
When asked if she would come back to the old place after she moved, she said, “I don’t believe I would want to visit, but I know it’ll be hard not to come back. I’ve been lonesome out here sometimes, but I’ve never been afraid. I’ve always had me a mighty good dog and some good guns.”
Granny Henderson passed away less than year later on July 10, 1979. Her cabin still stands on the gentle hillside above the river. Her pasture grown over, it is used as popular resting spot for hikers and adventurous floaters.
The earth is full of water, as full as it’s been in years. It can drink no more, and the springs are spitting with fury into the creeks.
Henry Gore can feel the earth. And he knows the earth is full of water. He can feel the sun. And he knows what time it is, and he knows the sun isn’t too warm now. He knows this has been a cold, hard winter. A winter thawed from his memory, from his youth, when the winters were always cold and hard.
“It’s a bad old winter, ain’t it?” Henry says. “We might be going back to the hard weather.”
The hard weather is on Henry’s face. Creases have been baked and frozen into his weathered face. This winter will leave its markings, too.
His eyes are wintry eyes, icy blue and honest. His eyes are summery eyes, captured little pieces of clear summer sky. His beard is grizzled, and Prince Albert has left a honey-brown stain on his mustache. He is 80 and his shoulders are stooped slightly toward the earth. But his head is not bowed.
“I spent my life with horses and mules on the farm,” says Henry. “I never drove a car. You take a guy that’s living on the farm, he don’t got time to drive a car. “
“I don’t have a clock. I don’t need one, I guess. I don’t fool with news. I live the old-time way. I’m just an old hillbilly, that’s all I am.”
“I feel pretty good. I’ve got a house here, a place to stay. It’s just an old sawmill house. There’s plenty of people that don’t.” ¬– Steve Cusick
Henry Gore lived along Bryant Creek in the backwoods of Shannon County, Missouri, in a “sawmill” house. He had a spring in back for water. No electricity, plumbing, television or radio. At one time, Blair Creek valley in Shannon County was dotted with small bottomland farms. Now the farms are gone. Folks moved out of the valley, but Henry stayed. He lived with his parents until they died, and he never married.
For Henry, the human code of honor is defined by a man’s treatment of a dog.
“I would rather a fellow steal anything than a dog,” he says. “That’s one thing I wouldn’t do, bother a man’s dog. And you wouldn’t want one bothering yours.”
In the winter of 2000 Maria was invited to attend the dedication of a museum aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Enterprise dedicated to 28 sailors who were killed and 344 injured in a fiery munitions accident during the Vietnam War. Her son, Paul, was one of the sailors killed.
It would be the longest trip for the German war bride since she moved to Pulaski County, Missouri, with her husband, now deceased.
Despite the companionship of her late husband and the love of their five other children and four grandchildren through the years, 73-year-old Maria longingly studied the face of one son, Paul Jr., every day in photographs hanging in her farmhouse near Crocker, Mo. Her freezer still held the serving of Christmas turkey she wrapped with care and placed there 32 years earlier.
While packing for her trip to the Enterprise she said: “After 32 years I get to see it, and I get to be on it. It’s still kind of a nightmare to me ... I’ll make it once I’m on the ship.”
She holds the flag that draped the coffin of Paul Jr.
Sam Kinison was a preacher turned one of the loudest and rudest comedians of the 20th Century.
I caught up with Kinison when I was assigned to photograph him during his guest appearance on a radio talk show in San Francisco. I made several photos of him during the show, but I was nervous about what I had. After he finished his portion of the show, I followed him out the back door to ask if I could have one more photo. He stopped and turned in the hallway right where the window blind's shadow fell across his face. I was afraid to ask him to move. In retrospect it was for the better, I think. He turned out to be the opposite of his on-camera persona. He was really rather soft-spoken.
Kinison was killed by a drunk driver on his way to a show in Laughlin, Nevada, in 1992.
The radio show photo was published, but I always liked this one better.
This one of my favorite photos. It didn’t win any contests. It won’t grace the walls of any museum, the cover of a book or a double-spread in a magazine, but it makes me feel good. Although it was at least 20 years ago, I remember taking it like it was yesterday.
There had just been a big summer rain shower. I was driving through town when I saw them. They were standing on the corner near a large puddle, waiting to receive a refreshing splash from a passing car. I stopped about half a block away and with a long telephoto lens watched and laughed as I took the photos.
“That’s me cowering from the spray,” Will Lampe, the boy in the center with the red shorts, says upon seeing the photo years later. “We were walking home and some of us got sprayed on accident. From that point on, we decided to have fun. Why not?”
Now 31, Will still keeps up with his childhood friends who also live in or around Springfield. “Thank you for taking the picture,” he says. “It’s been a good memory for us.”
Not everybody thanks me for taking his or her photo, but that one meant a lot. It still speaks to me about the sheer joy and enthusiasm of youth.
