Photos of Main Street in Joplin by Mike Stover
You won't meet many musicians in town like Mike Stover. He's in an array of music projects, none like the others (Mr. Marcos V7, Dead Voices, the People's Liberation Big Band among them) and he plays a wide variety of hard-to-master instruments (theremin, steel guitar, mandolin ...). He's a native of Joplin, and this week he returned to his hometown to help his mother in the aftermath of Sunday's tornado. Today, he posted this on Facebook, with some photos. It's a moving piece on the personalities of place and hometowns and how the sum of their structures and fixtures and homes and businesses becomes embedded in us, a part of who we were and who we are, something deeper and more profound than nostalgia. -- T.F.
Today I finally lost my shit. Today I had to quit pretending I don't have a connection to this place.
Getting my mom through this nightmare brings my pragmatic tendencies front and center; it's important that I be the "Rock," the "Heavy," for her sake.
On top of that, some of you have listened to me berate Joplin, heard me moan about the sad wasteland where I grew up -- bereft of culture, a town where health care is the number one industry because everyone is sick from eating junk food from WalMart all their lives ... blah blah blah ...
I wouldn't wish this sort of destruction on my worst enemy, but the fact is that I didn't come here for epiphanies, I didn't come here to grieve, and I definitely didn't come here out of any sort of unique kinship with the residents of Joplin. I came here to help my mom.
In the midst of multiple trips across town (banks, insurance agents and the like), circumstances today put us on the stretch of Main Street between 20th and 26th. This area lies right between St. John's Hospital and Joplin High School, two local landmarks whose demise has made the papers on other continents.
This area had just been opened to through-traffic, and the wreckage here was overwhelming, surreal. For the first time since I arrived, I crumbled. I'd seen pain and loss in the faces of others and felt empathy for them, but now I finally felt like I had lost something. I held back tears, for Mom's sake. As we drove I was picked up and thrown backwards in time, to a time when a 16-year-old kid experienced his first taste of freedom.
In Joplin, when you were 16, you got yourself a car, preferably a loud, rod-knocking, gas-guzzling beast. Mine was a 1970 Chevy Malibu -- two-door, three-on-the-tree. Man, that car could've taken me ANYWHERE. (In fact it had quite a great run, which ended a few years later when my buddy Mitch "sort of" drove it into the Grand Canyon. But he could tell you that story better than I could.)
Once you had a car, you took it to Main Street, and you drove from one end of town to the other. All. Night. Long. Sound stupid? Of course it does -- because you're not a 16-year-old kid from the sticks. When you haven't yet seen what the world has to offer, burning up gas with your friends is the ultimate expression of FREEDOM. (I know: cue the damn Bob Seger song.)
How better to become engrained into this new alien culture than to get A JOB on Main St? This line of thinking landed me my first 'real' job, at the Sonic Drive-In on 23rd. There I fell in with a crowd of greasy degenerates (some of whom could BUY ME BEER!). We flipped burgers, we tried (in my case, failed spectacularly) to make out with chicks, we plotted the groundwork for world domination. If I wasn't working I was hanging out in the parking lot. For a couple of years, Main Street was everything.
Cruising on south Main Street was outlawed shortly after I split town (I hear it's made a resurgence up north, between 4th and 7th). Over the years I would periodically visit old haunts -- Daylight Donuts, Murphy's Irish Pub, Southtown Meat Company (The Sonic closed and was demolished years ago--preemptively spared the undignified carnage of this week). I would point out to my wife silly, insignificant landmarks whose stature and importance are herculean in my decades-old recollection.
All those landmarks are gone now. The destruction at the hospital, the school and the retail outlets is well documented, but the carnage in this section of town is spectacularly sad. The buildings on South Main ran the gamut from ratty 100-year-old storefronts to gleaming fast food abominations. Moreover, just behind the stores on either side of Main lay working-class residential areas, neighborhoods once shielded by retail, now laid bare and eviscerated. After four days, residents still wander the streets, dazed and disoriented.
In the evening, after finishing up Mom-biz, I drove back into town. I parked the car at 20th & Main and walked to 26th, snapping pics until the curfew was enforced. I'll put the pics up in an album called "Main St" here in a sec. You can check them out if you want-- I took them on my phone, and I'm no photographer. They might not look any different from the other horrible images you've seen in the news. Just know that they were taken by a guy who finally found a piece of home, but only after it was taken away.
Getting my mom through this nightmare brings my pragmatic tendencies front and center; it's important that I be the "Rock," the "Heavy," for her sake.
On top of that, some of you have listened to me berate Joplin, heard me moan about the sad wasteland where I grew up -- bereft of culture, a town where health care is the number one industry because everyone is sick from eating junk food from WalMart all their lives ... blah blah blah ...
I wouldn't wish this sort of destruction on my worst enemy, but the fact is that I didn't come here for epiphanies, I didn't come here to grieve, and I definitely didn't come here out of any sort of unique kinship with the residents of Joplin. I came here to help my mom.
In the midst of multiple trips across town (banks, insurance agents and the like), circumstances today put us on the stretch of Main Street between 20th and 26th. This area lies right between St. John's Hospital and Joplin High School, two local landmarks whose demise has made the papers on other continents.
This area had just been opened to through-traffic, and the wreckage here was overwhelming, surreal. For the first time since I arrived, I crumbled. I'd seen pain and loss in the faces of others and felt empathy for them, but now I finally felt like I had lost something. I held back tears, for Mom's sake. As we drove I was picked up and thrown backwards in time, to a time when a 16-year-old kid experienced his first taste of freedom.
In Joplin, when you were 16, you got yourself a car, preferably a loud, rod-knocking, gas-guzzling beast. Mine was a 1970 Chevy Malibu -- two-door, three-on-the-tree. Man, that car could've taken me ANYWHERE. (In fact it had quite a great run, which ended a few years later when my buddy Mitch "sort of" drove it into the Grand Canyon. But he could tell you that story better than I could.)
Once you had a car, you took it to Main Street, and you drove from one end of town to the other. All. Night. Long. Sound stupid? Of course it does -- because you're not a 16-year-old kid from the sticks. When you haven't yet seen what the world has to offer, burning up gas with your friends is the ultimate expression of FREEDOM. (I know: cue the damn Bob Seger song.)
How better to become engrained into this new alien culture than to get A JOB on Main St? This line of thinking landed me my first 'real' job, at the Sonic Drive-In on 23rd. There I fell in with a crowd of greasy degenerates (some of whom could BUY ME BEER!). We flipped burgers, we tried (in my case, failed spectacularly) to make out with chicks, we plotted the groundwork for world domination. If I wasn't working I was hanging out in the parking lot. For a couple of years, Main Street was everything.
Cruising on south Main Street was outlawed shortly after I split town (I hear it's made a resurgence up north, between 4th and 7th). Over the years I would periodically visit old haunts -- Daylight Donuts, Murphy's Irish Pub, Southtown Meat Company (The Sonic closed and was demolished years ago--preemptively spared the undignified carnage of this week). I would point out to my wife silly, insignificant landmarks whose stature and importance are herculean in my decades-old recollection.
All those landmarks are gone now. The destruction at the hospital, the school and the retail outlets is well documented, but the carnage in this section of town is spectacularly sad. The buildings on South Main ran the gamut from ratty 100-year-old storefronts to gleaming fast food abominations. Moreover, just behind the stores on either side of Main lay working-class residential areas, neighborhoods once shielded by retail, now laid bare and eviscerated. After four days, residents still wander the streets, dazed and disoriented.
In the evening, after finishing up Mom-biz, I drove back into town. I parked the car at 20th & Main and walked to 26th, snapping pics until the curfew was enforced. I'll put the pics up in an album called "Main St" here in a sec. You can check them out if you want-- I took them on my phone, and I'm no photographer. They might not look any different from the other horrible images you've seen in the news. Just know that they were taken by a guy who finally found a piece of home, but only after it was taken away.
| Mike Stover
wow.
Posted by: SinCityDisciple | May 26, 2011 at 02:32 PM
The lyrics to the Rush song 'Force Ten' is correct in saying 'Look in to the eye of the storm'.
Posted by: Kurt | May 26, 2011 at 02:56 PM
Damn. As some native Kansas Citians probably felt in regards to Paul Splittorf's passing yesterday, I felt I lost any of the childlike innocence I may have had left with the death of my boyhood "hero", Harmon Killebrew last week. Yet I can't imagine having almost all of one's youthful memories ripped away in an instant as Mr.Stover's were this past Sunday. Thanks for sharing and godspeed to you and your family and friends.
Posted by: pellboy | May 26, 2011 at 03:03 PM
Nice piece, Thanks Mike and Thanks Tim.
Posted by: 40wnks | May 26, 2011 at 08:42 PM
Seems like the heavy rain has destroyed all the street. But there is nothing to worry. If some bad days are there there are also some good days and it will be ever memorable in the life.
Posted by: hire a web programmer | May 27, 2011 at 02:10 AM
Its just unbelievable. I'm not ashamed to say I just crumbled when I heard my parents house where I grew up and my grandmas house where I spent a lot of time were devastated. (I still can't even go to my grandma's to see) these pics just make me sick. While trying to walk back where my car was parked in Carthage which is atleast 15 miles away I had a couple of complete strangers drive me the 15-20 mins back to my car. This has atleast helped me find good in humanity again.
Posted by: 300%_Density | May 27, 2011 at 03:22 AM
Nice words on a not so nice topic Mike. If you get a chance to read it, check out William Least Heat Moon's Roads to Quoz. He does a piece in there on the Spook Light, in which he describes Joplin's gritty past that includes houses of ill repute, snake oil salesmen, and the mining business. Provided some reference to what I came to know as the place I came to "cruise main".
Posted by: Professor | May 29, 2011 at 01:10 PM