‘Tis the season to be … looking at other people’s holiday lights!

The Hannibal Regional Hospital Auxiliary will be hosting a holiday house tour on Saturday, Dec. 4, from noon to 5 p.m.

Five distinctly different Hannibal homes will be showcased on the tour. They include Reagan’s Queen Anne Victorian Bed & Breakfast, the newly built duplex of Allen and Vicki Gottman, the downtown loft of Kristy Trevathan, the Italianate home of Daren and Sandy Caswell, and the American Colonial style home of Steve and Beth Carroll.

Shuttle service is available for the Gottman home from the First Church of Nazarene at 4000 W. Ely.  A shuttle to the Carroll home will depart from the Hannibal Aquatic Center, 1700 Pleasant Drive.

• Reagan’s Bed & Breakfast, 313 N. Fifth.
• Gottman home, 116 W. Ridge
• Trevathan loft, 112A Main. (entrance is to the left of Alliance Gallery)
• Caswell home, 311 Bird.
• Carroll home, 1000 Country Club Drive

Inside each of the featured homes, visitors will be treated to the hosts’ holiday decorations as well as the special architectural features which make each location special.

Tickets for the tour are $8 in advance and $10 at the event.  Tickets can be purchased at Judy’s Boutique located inside Hannibal Regional Hospital or at Becky Thatcher’s Bookstore.

For more information, please contact Alicia Rollins, Director of Volunteer Services, at (573) 248-5272.

A few extraneous observations from Tuesday’s livestock semitrailer crash on U.S. 61 in Hannibal and ensuing backyard cattle roundup …

(I need to preface this by saying that for a city slicker such as myself, who moved to Quincy from suburban St. Louis by way of Columbia, Mo., the idea of cows running through town was completely stupefying. The theme music from the movie “The Magnificent Seven” kept running through my head.)

When I first got to the scene and parked my car at the Hardee’s at that intersection, a woman was standing next to her car, staring incredulously at the knot of emergency vehicles that surrounded the overturned truck. She said she wasn’t from the area, but was simply in town for car repairs. What an introduction to Hannibal, I thought.

A bevy of emergency responders were on the scene Tuesday morning: the Hannibal Police Department, Hannibal Fire Department, Missouri State Highway Patrol, Hannibal Street Department (to secure the street), Hannibal Animal Control and a local veterinarian. As I walked up James Road to talk with Street Department employees who were directing traffic at the intersection with St. Mary’s Avenue, two men who were walking behind me grumbled, “The (expletive deleted) SWAT team came out for the cows.”

Adding to the long list of cow-related puns I heard in the newsroom during and after our coverage of the crash, I heard quite a few steak jokes as I made my way around Hannibal yesterday. Based on the cows’ appearance, a member of our newsroom staff who’s a family farmer guessed that the cows were probably black Angus cattle, prized for their meat. All of the cattle were ultimately accounted for, but if any had gone missing, at least there would have been a possible explanation.

I’m told this isn’t the first time a livestock truck has run into some trouble at the U.S. 61/James Road intersection. Apparently, a truck carrying hogs overturned there some years ago — with many more animal casualties.

Traffic was snarled in the area around the accident. I spent at least 15 minutes sitting in traffic on St. Mary’s Avenue. Despite my mission to report the news, I’d been chortling all morning about the many cow puns and steak jokes there for the taking, plus the mental picture of our ace photographer Phil Carlson chasing a horseman on foot as he chased a cow (that would be how we got these excellent pictures), plus the sheer craziness of the day. If my mother had been there, she probably would have said, “That’s your angel punishing you.”

To be sure, yesterday’s crash is kind of not funny. Four cattle died — that’s four animals, and judging from the size of the cows, it probably also is close to $10,000. It’s a miracle more didn’t. It’s a miracle the cattle that escaped, which were roughly the size of minivans and were pretty agitated, didn’t injure any humans. It’s a miracle that the driver wasn’t injured, that the truck didn’t take out any other vehicles and that it didn’t go crashing through the front wall of Cassano’s, a popular restaurant at that intersection. We make fun, but we must also take a deep breath and remember that it was serious, that it could have been much more serious.

Still, on a certain level, it’s pretty darned funny — mostly because, as my esteemed colleague Rodney Hart would say, you can’t make it up.

While an emotionally charged meeting with dozens of flood-weary Hannibal residents was Sen. Claire McCaskill’s most talked-about appearance in America’s Hometown on Tuesday, it wasn’t her only one. Missouri’s Democratic senator also stopped by the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum on Tuesday afternoon to chat with supporters and local tourism officials.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) poses by her autograph on the celebrity section of the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum's "10 by 10" fence.

McCaskill signed the celebrity portion of the museum’s “10 by 10″ fence, a campaign to raise $10 million in 2010 for the museum’s endowment by offering folks a chance to ceremonially whitewash (i.e., sign) Tom Sawyer’s whitewashed fence at the Mark Twain Boyhood Home. She also dropped off a contribution for the museum, joked about the love of Mark Twain that led her daughter to have Huckleberry Finn tattooed on her foot in college, and thanked the museum’s staff and supporters for their hard work to preserve and broadcast Twain’s legacy.

“I think it’s terrific that you all are working so hard to make this such a special place because of what Mark Twain means to this community and the fabric of our country and culture,” McCaskill said.

McCaskill also provided an update on a bill currently making its way through Congress that would introduce a Mark Twain commemorative coin. If the budget-neutral bill (H.R. 1195/S. 483) passes, four key Twain sites — the Hannibal museum, the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Conn. (where Twain lived and worked for 17 years), the Center for Mark Twain Studies in Elmira, N.Y. (where Twain was buried), and the Mark Twain Project at the University of California-Berkeley — will benefit from the $5 gold and $1 silver coins to be minted with the visage of Hannibal’s most famous native son in 2013. The bill is currently in committee.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) speaks at the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum as Tom and Becky (Austin Janes and Salwa Mikhail) listen.

Missouri’s congressional delegation, whose members often differ sharply on the issues of the day, is in full agreement on the Mark Twain Commemorative Coin Act, McCaskill said.

“It’s not going to happen in the next couple years, but I am optimistic we will get it done,” McCaskill said. “It will be very helpful in spreading the cause of Mark Twain in our country.”

As I chatted with Beau Hicks, executive director of the Hannibal Convention and Visitors Bureau, before McCaskill’s arrival at the museum, he expressed excitement about what the bill’s passage will mean for tourism funding in Hannibal.

“Oftentimes, the 12 to 15 percent of the city budget that comes from tourism is completely overlooked by anyone except those right down here on Main Street,” Hicks said.

Wi-fi Internet access is a big hit in a lot of tourist spots. Add the word “free,” and you’ve got a regular chart-topper. In our increasingly wired world, don’t try to take away someone’s ability to check e-mail, work, waste time on Facebook and look up videos of cats in a far-flung city or foreign country.

So with all the tourists wandering around downtown Hannibal, wouldn’t blanket wi-fi access in the downtown area — that is, universal access no matter where you stand in the historic downtown area — be an excellent idea?

Maybe, but Convention and Visitors Bureau director Beau Hicks says it’s not in the works anytime soon.

“No one’s ever really brought it up for here,” Hicks said on the phone last week. “I would be interested in pursuing it if people are interested in it.”

The venerable Java Jive coffeehouse, billed as the oldest coffeehouse west of the Mississippi, offers free wi-fi access. But universal downtown access — on the order of Grand Haven, Mich., or Mountain View, Calif. (in fairness, Google’s responsible for that one) — isn’t on the agenda, Hicks says.

But one thing he’d like to see down the road, he adds, is a wireless downtown intercom system, which ideally would pipe in music to the downtown area.

Why not? We’ve already got a Mark Twain Coke machine.

Kenneth Marks, the man who has signed a letter of intent to purchase Rockcliffe Mansion in Hannibal, says he wants to ensure the mansion and its contents will still be available to future generations of Hannibal visitors and residents alike.

Renovations, started by current owner Rick Rose, are slated to continue if Marks’ purchase is approved by the bankruptcy court in Shreveport, La., now overseeing the property. Marks says he wants to see Rockcliffe “restored to its original grandeur.”

Just imagine that. The one-time family home returned to the state in which J.J. Cruikshank envisioned it.

To make that happen, Marks is calling for the support of local entities, civic leaders and the people of Hannibal. He does not say in what shape that support would take, but given the outcry of many residents after they learned of a planned sale of some of the mansion’s contents, support of the moral variety surely is there.

It will be up to Marks to indicate what other kind of support he’s looking for.

Here’s hoping that what Marks has said he wants to do to Rockcliffe Mansion comes about. The mansion is truly one of the gems in Hannibal’s attraction crown … or it should be.

Word spread very quickly Friday about the planned sale of at least some of the contents of Rockcliffe mansion.

The mansion at 1000 Bird was built at the turn of the century by lumber baron J.J. Cruikshank, and for the last 40 years it’s been a gem of an historic site for Hannibal. The mansion has apparently been on the market for months. Price tag? $1.5 million on the Rockcliffe Web site; $999,000 on another realty Web site.

Most folks talking about the situation had no qualms about the sale of the mansion itself. It was the bits and pieces of history inside that got attention.

The private sale of items from the mansion is set in Clayton Saturday and Sunday by antique dealer Finches by Robinson, LTD, and is expected to feature everything from antique lace, quilts, and dolls to clothing, furniture and Limoges porcelain.

This is Hannibal history for sale because it’s likely many of the items belonged to the Cruikshank family.

Former Hannibal tourism director Faye Bleigh was saddened when she heard the news by e-mail Friday. She said the house would not be the same without the antiques.

“That’s what made the house so interesting,” she said. “It gave it more character.”

The items breathed life into a home that had not been lived in since the Cruikshanks left after the death of J.J. Cruikshank in the 1920s. It was resurrected as a tourist site after being rescued by a small group of concerned local residents in the 1960s.

Three local families (Dr. and Mrs. Merrill Roller, Mr. and Mrs. Delbert Hartley and Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Raible) formed a corporation in 1967 to buy the home — just days before it was to be torn down.

More than one person talking about the sale of the mansion and its content expressed hope Friday that a local buyer or group would step into the fray once again and save the structure.