Down At "The Rip-Off"
Spartan Trailers---run with this one, John.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Back To Square One
This just in from Wes Johnson of the SN-L: Developer Puts Brakes On Heer's Building Due To Square Delays.
St. Louis developer Kevin McGowan said his Blue Urban company has spent $600,000 in development and design work for the Heer’s Tower and still intends to see the project to completion.
But the twists and turns over the square’s historic designation are making it difficult for him to proceed with an early June construction start.
“It’s difficult for me because we have tenants that want to know what their front yard will look like,” McGowan said. “At this point, I don’t know. What we thought we were going to be selling to our customers turns out not to be the case.”
Mayor Tom Carlson said he was not aware of McGowan’s decision to delay construction of the Heer’s project.
City Economic Developer Mary Lilly Smith said she wasn’t concerned about the Heer’s project delay.
The view of the square in the postcard looks pretty good now, eh? Click on it to make it bigger. Just think of all of our money being spent downtown: car parks and movie theaters and brick streetscapes. I wonder how long are we going to have to be reminded of those 350 people on Vision 20/20 who decided on this course of action? 350 people out of a population of how many? I hear Vision 20/20 blamed, I mean used as justification for everything that goes on downtown? Will we ever get to Vision 20/20? Will it ever be finished? Or is it a moving target?
I may be tagged as an 'akinner', but even I know you don't throw good money after bad. I've seen a lot of changes happen to my hometown lately, and while I haven't been against all of them, I wonder about some of them.
Could anyone blame McGowan if he made the city take back Heer's and just focused on the McDaniel and Woodruff Buildings, and maybe some more? (Warren Davis: Come back, all may be forgiven.)
Does this mean anything?As the designated authority under the National Historic Preservation Act, as amended, I hereby certify that this [ x ] nomination [ ] request for determination
of eligibility meets the documentation standards for registering properties in the National Register of Historic Places and meets the procedural and
professional requirements set forth in 36 CFR Part 60. In my opinion, the property [x ] meets [ ] does not meet the National Register criteria. I recommend
that this property be considered significant locally. Signed Claire F. Blackwell, 6 September, 2002.
Springfield, Missouri: This Is My Hometown
And I love my Queen dearly! But First, Let Us Watch The Springfield City Manager Search VideoOh, Springfield, My Springfield, My Hometown...My Hometown, Springfield, MO
Fly Derrie-Air
The Story of Dick Derrie and Derrie-Air
Dick Derrie was born in Salamander, Missouri, a tiny hamlet on the banks of the Mississippi. (Salamander is small, so small that you won't find it on any map.) His father was a fisherman. As a child, Dick ate nothing but line-caught Mississippi fish. This unusual diet flooded his brain with Omega-3 fatty acids, to which he credits his remarkable business acumen.
As a boy, Dick did whatever he could to save money. He dreamed up rising up from the life of poverty he was born into. He held down all kinds of jobs-building rafts, hunting wild boar, guarding prisoners at the nearby correctional facility. By the time he graduated high school, Dick owned a chain of pinball machines in local juke joints and had a net worth of some $5 million. Over the next ten years he would attend business school, open Missouri's third-largest plant for the bottling of generic cola, and multiply this small fortune one hundred times over.
Dick's longing to plunge into Derrie-Air began in 1994, when he sent his first express package. "Heck," he reasoned to himself. "These sons-of-a-gun are making me pay by the pound! Now what if we ran an airline the same way..." The idea lay dormant until 2005, when Dick saw a popular film on global warming. He began to worry that if he didn't do something to cool off the planet, his grandchildren might never know the joy of hunting alligators on his marshy wetlands from the back of a two-ton truck. He called a meeting of Derrie Corp's board of directors the next day, and Derrie-Air was born.
Today Dick is 35 years old. He is the richest man in the state of Missouri. He lives with his wife and two sons on a ranch of a thousand acres near Salamander. Dick's father lives in a magnificent castle that Dick had specially imported, block by block, from Scotland. He still likes to hunt boar. It is, after all, his early experiences with the sublimity of wild nature that planted the seeds of his desire to save our planet. "The planet's a lot like life," Dick often says. "We only get one."
Monday, June 09, 2008
Sunday, June 08, 2008
Jim McKay, The Munich Olympics And The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon
Jim McKay passed away yesterday. As mentioned on several local blogs, he was the sportcaster who reported on the horrors at the 1972 Munich Olympics
In 1972, I was stationed at the Nurnburg Army Hospital. Four of us took a VW bug down to Munich for the Olympics, we had gotten tickets for being 'strac' troopers. As we were looking for a place to park in the Olympic park, we ended up at a McDonald's and were surrounded by German police. We produced our passes, ID cards, and waited for an interpreter to arrive. We were eventually given the ok to leave. Those were scary times. 
AFN was full of warnings to troops to go back to their bases and stay away from Munich. When we arrived back in Nurnburg and entered the hospital gates, the MPs ran mirrors under our car, and searched us and the vehicle.
Another terrorist group of that era was the "Baader-Meinhof" gang of whom, more than likely, you will be hearing about again, real soon.
Saturday, June 07, 2008
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