Author: Ken Steinhoff

Don’t let that sweet, innocent smile fool you. Patricia Foster was a real mangler. No, she didn’t wrestle, nor was she a roller derby queen, but she was a mangler in 1967 all the same.

St. Francis Hospital laundry

Instead of taking the summer off, Patricia decided to work in the St. Francis Hospital laundry before starting her freshman year of college at SEMO.  Her duties included running the dried linen and clothing through the “mangle,” a big ironer, sorting material and folding mountains of sheets, she told The Missourian’s September 2, 1967, Youth Page.

(Actually, I think she told it to me. The story’s not bylined, but I recognize my style. I generally figured other people could tell the story better than I could, so most of my writing consisted of lots of quotes with a few transitions stuck in between.)

Work was monotonous

The work was monotonous, she said. “A lot of my friends said I was foolish to go to work in the summer instead of to school, but I figured that this was as good an education as I could get. Learning about people, I mean.”

Patricia was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Foster, 1625 Bloomfield. The story doesn’t mention which high school she attended.

Didn’t have to handle “wet wash”

“Once I got to know everybody, it wasn’t as bad as I had anticipated,” she said. “We didn’t have to handle the ‘wet wash’ – stuff that comes straight from the floors.” The routine nature of the work made it easy to slip into daydreaming, she observed.

Singing made the time pass

Good-natured give-and-take between the workers and singing helped make time on the job pass quickly.

“My specialty was singing,” she said. “We couldn’t have music, so we made our own music.

Photo Gallery from St. Francis Laundry

I’m going to include a gallery because some of the photos show other workers in the background. Some of the pictures show other angles of the laundry area that might mean something to someone who worked there. Click on any image to make it larger, then click on the left or right side to move through the gallery.

Paul Blue, left, of Delta, and Tony Ziegler, of Advance, finish the concrete floor of a culvert near the intersection of Hopper Rd. and Kingshighway. The photo was taken Feb. 11, 1967, and ran in The Missourian two days later. The pipe in the foreground carried water from a cofferdam through the culvert and out of the work area.

Hawthorn (now Clippard) School

The project, under contract to Superior Concretors, included grade improvements, widening the roadway to 36 feet and concrete paving from Kingshighway to the Hawthorn School. (Hawthorn School was renamed to Charles C. Clippard Elementary School in 1991. Charles Clippard retired after being principal of the school for 25 years, and with the school district for 35.

I hope Paul Blue’s name is spelled right

There were some folks down around Delta and Advance who spelled their last name “Below,” but pronounced it like “Blue.” Actually, it was more like “BaLoo,” but it was close enough in sound that I was always afraid I’d make a Blue a Below or a Below a Blue.

Newspaper people are pretty blase about celebrities. Or, at least, they pretend to be, even if they’re not. Notice how business-like Society Editor Emily Hughes is while she’s interviewing heartthrob  Rory Calhoun in 1966 or thereabouts.

As a testament to Emily’s importance, she was the only person in the newsroom with an electric typewriter.

I’m not sure who the suits are with Calhoun. Someone said they thought they might have been from KFVS-TV. I don’t know if a story ever ran in the paper. The Missourian had a quaint style that said you never mentioned the call signs of the Cape radio and TV stations unless you couldn’t avoid it. They were to be referred to as “a local station.”

Proofreaders are visibly impressed

The proofreaders are leaning around to get a better look at the genuine badboy star of The Texan, and more than 80 movies. He had a part in just about every oater on the small screen. When Westerns fell out of favor, he appeared on police shows and sitcoms. In all, he appeared in more than 1,000 TV episodes.

His father died when he was nine; a theft of a revolver at 13 landed him in reform school; he escaped, robbed several jewelry stores and swiped a car. That and some other escapades got him boarding in the federal pen in Springfield, Mo., and San Quintin until he was just shy of 21.

He got his acting break when he happened to run into Alan Ladd while horseback riding in 1943. His agent changed his name from Francis Timothy McCown to Troy Donahue, then decided that the young man made a better Rory Calhoun. (His agent eventually used the Troy Donahue name for another actor, Merle Johnson. Who knows why he thought Francis made a better Rory than a Troy?)

Calhoun had quite a reputation as a lady’s man. When his second wife, Lita Baron, sued for divorce, she named 79 women with whom he had allegedly committed adultery. Calhoun responded, “Heck, she didn’t even include half of them”.

He died in 1999, at age 76.

Proofreaders could save you

I always had a soft spot in my heart for Missourian proofreaders. They weren’t supposed to look for errors of fact; they were only supposed to check the copy against the type proofs to make sure the typesetters hadn’t deviated from the original text. In reality, someone like Gloria Davis, far left, above, would walk over to your desk with a piece of perfectly clean copy and say, “There’s a smudge here. The pastors name is Boone, not Boob, right?” “Oh, yes, I guess the typesetter must not have been able to read that clearly. Thanks for catching that.”

Rory Calhoun visits the back shop

Visiting dignitaries generally don’t make it back to the composing room – the back shop – where the paper comes together. The group is standing next to a “turtle,” a heavy steel table on wheels that support the frame where the lead type is laid out. After the page is made up, the bolts on the side of the frame are tightened to keep anything from moving. The back shop foreman, whose name escapes me, is showing the visitors the tool used to tighten the bolts. The man in the plaid shirt to his right is Johnny Hohler.