Hannibal: A Trip into the Past
I am in Hannibal, Mo., with my wife, Lisa, for a few days to visit my mother. Rather than stay at a chain hotel, we booked a room at the Pettibone-Reagan House, a circa 1889 Queen Anne house full of original stained glass, antiques, hand-crafted trim work and charm. We have the whole third floor. I got up before dawn today to explore this creaky bed and breakfast, traipse dead leaves outside in the dark and catch a frosty sunrise.
Each trip back to Hannibal is a sudden journey back to my past. The steep hills, dark trees, limestone bluffs, narrow caves and muddy Mississippi River that were so much a part of my life as a teenager are still here, just as they were. I feel at home with them.
I arrived in Hannibal from Southern Illinois with my family in the early 1970s when I was 12, after my dad died. We had family here. My mother got a job teaching home economics at Hannibal Junior High. I went to junior high and high school here and left for college after that. It took decades for me to want to return. I can’t tell you exactly why because I’m not sure I know. I have decided it doesn’t matter.
I did not understand, until reading Tulane University Professor Richard Campanella’s books about New Orleans, how much people and communities are shaped by the geography around them. Whole cities like New Orleans arise solely because their locations are so geographically well suited to particular human wants and needs, usually commerce.
I have seen evidence of this all my life – here in Hannibal, in the cornfields of Southern Illinois, in the plains of the Texas Panhandle, in the wetlands of the upper Gulf Coast, and nowhere more than between the levees of New Orleans. But now I get it. Thirty miles can make a huge difference; drive from New Orleans to Biloxi, Miss, and you will see. The people in those two places are different, not necessarily better or worse, but attitudes, dispositions, voices, hobbies, preferences, politics, homes, skills, etc., reflect where these people were brought up. I believe the lay of the land, whether flat or hilly, wide open or cramped, hot or cold, difficult or easy, wet or dry, hard or soft, fat or lean, has much to do with shaping cultures.
Hannibal in the 1970s was typical of other small, American towns in many ways – rural, a little poor, cliquish, and other ways I don’t wish to nitpick. People here were friendly and hard-working, but I detected, then as now, a subtle yet pervasive Midwestern cynicism born of an opinion, whether justified or not, that things were not that great and were never going to get much better. I began to catch this virus in high school. I wanted free of it.
I was keenly aware, however, maybe because I had been born in flat, less instantly picturesque Illinois cornfields, that Hannibal was a special place, unlike anywhere I had ever been. It was different even from towns close to it. Drive 30 miles west of Hannibal and you are out of the hills and into flat, Northeast Missouri farmland. Back then, much of rural Missouri, with its fortunes tied to agriculture, seemed doomed to inevitable decline, yet Hannibal had more going for it. It had scary-steep hills, a picturesque downtown, the Mark Twain historic district, lots of tourism, a little industry, spectacular views of the mother of American rivers, 20,000 people, and the best high school jazz band in the state (not opinion, fact. I played trombone).
Hannibal is a quaint old river town that inspired the best literature of Samuel Clemens. If you don’t believe that last part you can ask down at the Mark Twain Dinette or the Becky Thatcher Restaurant or the Huck Finn Shopping Center or anywhere else in town.
I’m not sure all of my friends who had been born and raised here appreciated, quite as much as I did, the beauty around us. Somehow, and I am grateful for this, I never took this place for granted. I understood the luck of being here when I was young and largely unencumbered by responsibilities, when freedom was as simple as borrowing my mother’s car and earning or bumming three dollars in gas money.
I wasn’t a great student here, just OK. But, I was a teacher’s kid and enjoyed all the privileges thereof; mostly the kind that kept me out of trouble. I avoided math courses and could write just well enough to get by in other classes. I think a lot of long-suffering teachers read so many badly written papers that when they receive one that is somewhat organized and easy to read they are so relieved they are not all that concerned about what it says. That was the theory I went with, anyway – dazzle ‘em with clarity.
This was the golden age of big party cars, when just about every kid had an old Impala or Grand Prix to cruise around in. If you didn’t have one, a friend did. On weekends and through sweltering summers, I ran the streets with my buddies and cruised the winding, ever rising and falling ribbons of asphalt that swept through town and out to the countryside. I explored wild caves that I am lucky I’m not still trapped in, tramped through forests, tempted death in small boats on the Mississippi and fished in abandoned rock quarries. I earned spending money giving cave tours where Twain’s Tom and Becky got lost, and worked at a 100,000 watt FM top-40 radio station. I was too young for Vietnam.
To this day, the 1975 and 1976 Hannibal High Studio Bands are things of Hannibal legend. During those two school years, our jazz band director, Terry Boone, must have known he had an extraordinary group of young musicians on his hands, the likes of which might never come around again in his career. He loved jazz and went all out for us. We had a great time. Many of our band members were exceptional musicians, among the best in the state. The power of our trumpet players could push you back in your seat, and our saxophone section was a wall of sound. I would have put our drummer against any other high school or college student in the country. He held us together and once stopped the band in the middle of rehearsal and yelled, “No!” The band director just stood back and let him take charge.
Our concert and marching bands were exceptional, too. We joked that in Hannibal, football was for people who couldn’t cut it in band. I hated marching practice. Our other director, Pat Rippeto, once told me, on a football field in front of the entire marching band, that I looked like a farmer walking through a pasture trying not to step on cow patties. She was a great teacher.
Our jazz band was a tight-knit group of friends and that quality came out in our music. I held my own spot in the trombone section well enough, but I was not one of the stars of the show. I was a junior in the Class of 1976 Studio Band. Most of the others were seniors. It was a great privilege to play with them. That may have been the greatest year of my life; certainly, it was the most fun.
Mr. Boone made sure we were noticed. Other school jazz bands wore t-shirts with the names of their schools on them; Mr. Boone bought us dashikis. He got us a Fender Rhodes electric piano – the kind Herbie Hancock played. On stage, we were arrogant and full of ourselves. We blasted difficult, crowd-thrilling charts by the likes of Maynard Ferguson, Buddy Rich and Stan Kenton, soaking in yells of YEAH! from the crowd. We were feared at jazz contests. We thought we were regional superstars; in many glorious moments we absolutely were.
I spent a lot of time at Riverview Park, looking down from the bluffs at the shining river below, and across the flat, five-mile-wide flood plain on the Illinois side. Somewhere out there was my future, but even from that height it was too far away to see. I think those days in the park, down at the river and out at Mark Twain Cave greatly influenced, and may have delayed, my process of growing up. I’m not sure where I would be today, geographically or creatively, if not for those places that so inspired my imagination.
A few years ago, in an episode of the cable show “No Reservations,” Anthony Bourdain visited the home of an artist in Venice, who was painting his wife in the sunlight he liked best, which arrived through a window of his studio at a certain time of day. As the painter, brush in hand, talked of his long years there, Bourdain leaned at the open window and looked out at a canal and at the old, sinking city.
In this idyllic setting, the artist was no longer happy. His life there used to be better, the Venetian said. Now, there are too many tourists, costs are too high, and so on. Then he said the most dispiriting thing.
“You must realize that looking out of the window is probably the biggest waste of time in life. But, what else can one do if he has nothing else to do with it whatsoever?”
In that statement, the painter’s broken heart was revealed. Maybe when he was young he found out that window beauty, time and opportunity in abundance. He no longer sees those inspirations. His muse has been priced out of the city. I felt sad for him. I could not disagree more with his opinion of time spent at windows. I am sitting by a good one now. There is more out there than most of us realize, as Shakespeare noted, more eloquently. We need artists like the painter in Venice to show us what they feel about life, to express and imagine and provoke, lest we grow more dull-witted than we already are. Artists are our boatmen to transcendence.
All is not yet lost, however, and here it is, Christmastime again. This Queen Anne mansion is decorated for the season and Lisa and I are in for the night. Stars above and streetlights below shine down on the hills of Hannibal, keeping us safe. Train whistles by the river warn us to be careful at the crossings. The night is cold, but the furnace in the basement has kicked on. It’s not 1976 again, but it’s good to be back.
Guy D. Johnson is a writer and marketing communications professional. Previously an animation studio owner, daily newspaper editor, reporter and photographer, volunteer fireman, railroad bridge gang helper, FM radio station underling and cave guide. He has lived on farmland trusted to the sun and rain; atop a wooded hill; beside great rivers; upon an arid, high plateau; and at the subtropical coast of the Gulf of Mexico. For 20 years, he worked and wrote in New Orleans.