Close your eyes and throw a Yakov flyer and you might hit a grizzled moonshiner, but you’re just as likely to hit the frontman of a moderately successful indie rock band. There’s an emo ice cream parlor that serves charcoal-dyed soft-serve there’s a weekly bluegrass hour on the local NPR station. It’s got the quirk of a college town and the sprawl of a farming community a Marxist bookstore, a firearms dealer, and a Route 66 museum are all located within a one-mile radius of the town square. When he’s not around, we settle for his brother, who is unironically named Doug Pitt.Īnd while the latest census data puts the median income around $38,000, it’s hard to classify Springfield as a blue-collar town. He still comes home for the holidays, treating vigilant locals to selfies at an upscale pizza joint. I once heard someone describe the area as a “freaky vortex,” a bubbling cauldron that spits out the strangest artifacts-artifacts like Brad Pitt, who went to high school with my mother. The hills had lost their luster my hometown had transformed into an entirely unknown beast. They decided he had a pretty good reason for offing Tutt. After a three-day trial, a jury acquitted Wild Bill of manslaughter. Humiliated, Wild Bill challenged Tutt to a duel and killed him on the spot. Legend has it that the shootout began as an argument over a gambling debt, prompting Tutt to seize Wild Bill’s prized watch as collateral. Mine’s the site of the nation’s first one-on-one quick-draw duel, which took place in 1865 between Wild Bill Hickok and Davis K. Oh, your town square’s the site of an infamous Revolutionary War skirmish? Great. Sure, your city might have a robust penny-farthing racing community, but Springfield has miles of underground limestone tunnels in which the United States government stores 1.4 billion pounds of cheese.īrag about your hometown heroes all you want Springfield has the Baldknobbers, a group of fearsome masked vigilantes who stalked outlaws and corrupt government officials throughout the nineteenth century. I’ve always rolled my eyes at the rhetoric surrounding other “weird” towns-places like Austin, Texas, or Portland, Oregon. Like the Yakov billboard, Springfield is weird. You can drive from one end of town to the other in about twenty minutes if you’re really cooking, though no one ever is. It’s half the size of St. Louis, the next-largest city. Springfield is the third-largest city in Missouri, with a population that recently broke 160,000 and a shiny new Costco to prove it. Drive a few miles in the other direction and you’ll find my hometown. EXPLOSIVE LAUGHTER! WITH YAKOV.ĭrive a few miles down the highway and you’ll find Yakov’s two-thousand-seat Branson comedy theater. Glance up and you’ll see the Ukrainian comic’s grinning face, thirty feet in the air and partially camouflaged by a Cossack fur hat. It’s on State Highway 248, a half hour from my parents’ place near the Missouri-Arkansas border. I was raised in the shadow of a Yakov Smirnoff billboard.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |