We Treat You White

Some of the best reference books at the Johnson County Historical Society are the phone books housed in the archive room in the basement of the Smiser building.  Looking at the advertisements and lists of names and businesses in the old books can give you a glimpse of what the county was like way back when.

There was a time when "white privilege" was openly proclaimed and celebrated.
This ad is from the 1927 phone book.

See how colorful the books were before the great Depression.

During the Great Depression phone books got gray and depressing.

For a short time Sweeney-Phillips took on a third partner.  Business hint: If your name is Gore, don't go into the funeral business.

Another business hint:  If you are in the funeral business don't start an ambulance service.  Nobody is going to get into your meat wagon if your main source of revenue is burying dead people.

In 1961 telephone numbers changed for people in Holden

But not for people in Warrensburg.

By the way, Robert L. "Buddy" Baker still lives at 319 W. Culton and still remembers his old phone number.

In the 1960s the covers got colorful again -

-but not very imaginative.

I like this picture.  I think that's a cool phone.

The Hamilton Motor Company

"They called him Precious.  Precious Hamilton.  Where he got that name, I'll never know but everybody called him Precious." Buddy Baker, my resident walkingWarrensburg History Book, couldn't even point out which of these gentlemen in the picture developed from the Simmons Studio collection of negatives was Precious Hamilton.  Maybe someone else knows.

I couldn't blow up the calendar behind them, so I have no idea when this picture was taken, but Buddy believes the car below is a Desoto from around the mid-40s

Buddy remembers when Hamilton Motors was on East Pine street just behind where the United Missouri Bank is today.  

Here's an matchbook cover Bruce Uhler found,

The Oldsmobile Rocket was in production from 1949 to 1960.

The 1948 Warrensburg phone book shows they had moved to 314 N. Holden.

They were still in the 1966 phone book, but weren't listed in 1968.

I think next week, I'll do an article on phone books.

MO.-Pac. R.R. Imegration Bureau

I love finding a mysterious picture in the Simmons Studio collection of negatives.  This one, for example. I had a million questions. Why is a photograph of a Denver touring car stored in a Warrensburg studio?  What's the connection? What is the Mo. Pac R.R. Imegration Bureau?  Where can I get a neat car like that?

So I looked in the Transportation File upstairs at the Johnson County Historical Society and did a little reading. Did you know that getting a railroad to come through your town was once so important that people killed each other over it.  Here, read this:

Then after you shot all the right people and got a railroad line, they would defraud you and your neighbors by selling you worthless land out west.  Here's an example:

The above story is about the Northern Pacific Railroad but apparently MO PAC had an Imegration (sic)Bureau, too. And I'll bet that one of the Imegration Bureau members pictured above was a capper from Warrensburg with capacious pockets.  (A capper is a huckster.)