The Harlem Wizards show basketball team came to Highland High Wednesday to face off against a district educators’ team called the “Cougar Dawgs” in a light-hearted game of roundball that raised thousands of dollars for the Lewis County C-1 PTO. If the video below looks like a lot of fun, that’s because the event was. Great night for everyone involved.
(Bonus: See if you can spot Quincy rocker Cheeks McGee in this video!)
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Below are photos from the Battle of Athens State Historic Site in northern Clark County, where a pivotal early Civil War battle was fought 150 years ago this summer. The site also marks what’s left of Athens, which, for all intents and purposes, existed for about half a century.
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The Hannibal Kiwanis Club held its 24th annual Easter egg hunt Saturday morning, one of the region’s largest, with more than 8,000 eggs and a wide array of door prizes. Below is a snapshot of area children enjoying the springtime brouhaha.
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If you’ve gone to an event on the scale of Hannibal’s National Tom Sawyer Days — or better yet, if you’ve been involved in planning one — it’s apparent that a tremendous amount of work and arranging goes into pulling off a multi-day, multi-event festival that’s widely acknowledged as the biggest weekend of the year. Attendees at Tuesday’s Hannibal City Council meeting got a taste of just how much work the Hannibal Jaycees and city staff put into making it happen over the 4th of July weekend.
Jennifer Foster and Rhonda Stevenson, the Hannibal Jaycees’ co-chairs for the 56th annual National Tom Sawyer Days, approached the council Tuesday night with a slew of street closures and other considerations that were readily granted:
• That the city parking lot near Ole Planters Barn restaurant at Main and Bird streets be used as a vendor area. That lot also will be used for musical performances, while an adjacent grassy area owned by the city will be used for Tanyard Gardens, the food and beer tent and the epicenter of the festivities. Permission to sell alcoholic beverages in those locations also was sought and granted.
• That the streets in the historic downtown area — Main Street from Hill and Bird north to North — be temporarily closed from July 2-4. Barricades have not been enough to deter motorists in the area in the past, Foster said, and Police Chief Lyndell Davis suggested the additional measure of closing the streets.
• That the alleyway from Hill to Bird be closed from June 30-July 4, creating unfettered access for patrons with open beverages between Tanyard Gardens on Bird Street and the Y-Men Pavilion on Hill Street, site of the Y-Men Mud Volleyball Tournament.
• That the license fees be waived and Broadway closed from Fourth Street to the riverfront from June 27-July 5 for the ever-popular carnival. Third Street would remain open to traffic. The Jaycees requested that the area in front of Bubba’s be designated as overflow parking for the carnival and for vendors, with snow parking used to secure it.
• That Broadway be closed from Grand to 4th for the parade July 4, with no parking along Broadway in that area from midnight till noon that day.
The festival of all things Twain was staged in the same area last year. The Jaycees obtained permission last year to use Nipper Park in perpetuity, but high waters last year forced them out just as quickly, and as Hannibal installs its floodgates today ahead of what the National Weather Service has said will be a long, wet spring and summer, the same scenario appears to be unfolding this year.
Even with the city’s permission to use the aforementioned areas, there are still many other considerations to take into account. Police Chief Lyndell Davis said the Jaycees and city department heads will reconvene in about a month to iron out many smaller details of the festival.
In a separate request, Bill Webber of the Hannibal Kiwanis Club, which sponsors the Samuel L. Clemens Arts and Crafts Festival over 4th of July weekend, requested the use of Central Park and the use of Fourth Street from Center to Broadway from July 1-4 for the 35th annual craft fair. Webber noted that all 126 booths at the craft fair have been leased, 70 of them by return vendors from last year.
The City Council voiced only one serious question about all of these requests for the biggest weekend of the year.
“Could you order a little cooler weather this year?” Second Ward Councilman Michael Dobson asked Webber.
It’s officially spring turkey season in NEMO. I saw a pretty big turkey scurrying along the side of the road Saturday near Mark Twain Lake, and our political reporter Doug Wilson, a Knox County resident and an avid hunter, has taken a few days off to hunt turkeys in our corner of the state.
Gov. Jay Nixon joined in the sport Monday, the official opening day of turkey season, by bagging a 24-pound gobbler near Fort Leonard Wood in southern Missouri, according to a release this morning.
While it would be terrific if Nixon would do a little turkey hunting up this way, our governor, also an avid hunter, usually gives Northeast Missouri love at the beginning of deer season. For the last two years, he’s kicked off that late fall tradition in Clark County. He usually donates his deer to a program that collects deer meat for less fortunate Missourians. No word on whether he’ll do so with Monday’s turkey.
I don’t personally have much desire to shoot animals for sport, but I can agree with hunters on one thing, as perfectly stated by Nixon in this morning’s release: “There’s no better way to spend a beautiful spring morning than enjoying the solitude of the Missouri outdoors.”
Mark Twain Lake is playing host this weekend to the first-ever Salt River Pow Wow, a celebration of the rich Native American heritage of Northeast Missouri, which was home to the Sauk and Fox Indians and the site of the Black Hawk War in the 1830s. This weekend’s is the first powwow in Northeast Missouri in this millennium, organizers say.
Below is a video snapshot of this weekend’s festivities, including traditional dancing, drumming, crafts and food.
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The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Thursday was kind enough to let members of the local media get up close and personal with the Re-Regulation Dam, downstream from Mark Twain Lake on the Salt River. The corps is in the thick of one final round of repairs to the dam and its popular Bluffview Recreation Area, which sustained extensive damage in 2008 when a surge of water burst through the dam as the corps battled high water levels at Mark Twain Lake, flooding that echoed the near-record watermarks along the Mississippi River that summer.
Thursday was a beautiful day for a visit to the dam, perfect for the fishing that the corps hopes will return to Bluffview once it reopens late this fall. Repairs to the dam itself should be complete by Labor Day.
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If you saw Hannibal firefighters responding to a call last fall, you might have seen them wearing pink Hannibal Fire Department T-shirts. Perhaps you even bought one from them in the past year. The fruits of those sales are now in the hands of a local cancer support group.
International Association of Firefighters Local 1211, the Hannibal Fire Department’s union, recently made a $2,000 donation to Pinky Pals, raised through the sale of those pink HFD shirts. The group helps cancer patients with medical costs not covered by their insurance.
Pictured below are firefighters Neil Johnson and Jeff Moore, Local 1211′s vice president, with Pinky Pals members Sherry Ingram, Barb White and Sarah Roth.
Hannibal firefighters present a donation to the cancer support group Pinky Pals.
Olive Kraus, a Hannibal-based jewelry artist who moved from Chicago last year to become part of Hannibal’s growing artist colony, will show her wares this weekend at the prestigious Smithsonian Craft Fair. Here she demonstrates a piece of her latest work, involving manipulated plastic and vinyl; she calls the ring version of this brooch a “gumball engagement ring.”
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Palmyra and Monroe City kicked off a friendly Biggest Loser competition today, with their respective mayors taking part in the community weight-loss contest as well for a little friendly gamble.
The winning community will have lost the greater percentage of its participating residents’ total body weight at the end of eight weeks. The winning mayor, however, gets a little something extra.
Monroe City Mayor Neal Minor said he and Palmyra Mayor Loren Graham will take part in a “friendly personal wager” over whose community will come out ahead. The stakes hadn’t yet been figured out when Minor remarked on the competition Friday, but when all is said and done in early June, the losing mayor will travel to the winning community to make some sort of presentation — presumably the fruit of the bet.
Though the competition has just kicked off, Minor expressed optimism about his community’s chances.
“I feel pretty confident (Graham) is going to be coming here,” Minor said.
