Missouri Twenty - Transcription
Well, I was born in uh Minnesota, a town of Owatonna that's uh just south of the twin cities. My dad worked for a publishing company and he got transferred when I was real young, 'bout two years old to, uh Hannibal, Missouri, which was, uh Mark Twain's boyhood home. And, uh it's a small town right along the Mississippi river and, uh I lived there until I was uh, oh about 14 or 15 years old, but, uh it was the main place that I grew up at. And uh since then I uh, we lived for just a short time in California but then moved to, uh Topeka, Kansas and I've more or less lived in Kansas for the rest of my life. Uh, now I live in Lawrence, and uh, Lawrence, Kansas, and I'm a . . . I've always worked construction, uh, I uh, right now I'm a stonemason and a stone carver.
When I was a kid, uh the, the Mississippi river, uh was uh, ya know, it's kind of a treacherous river, uh particularly, uh on that stretch of it and it's real wide and the current's real, real strong, and uh, but there was an area north of the little town of Hannibal that they called "The Bay." And, it really wasn't a bay of the, of the river I don't think. It was more uh oxbow lakes and, and backwater of, of the river and there would be these big pools that would be, you know, five or six acres of water and then they'd be connected by canals. And, uh, because the water wasn't very deep and there was no current in there, our parents would 'llow us to go up there and fool around, and uh . . . There was this, uh, friends of ours, that uh, my brother and I had some friends, and their dad had a construction company and his construction shop was right near this bay and so whenever we needed to build something we'd go in there and there'd be somebody that, you know, could like do welding for us, and stuff like that, ya know? And uh, so we'd get things built, ya know, go-carts and stuff like that. One of the things we built was this, uh, raft put on the bay and, uh, we, uh, would have, uh, like a paddle wheel on it. And the paddle wheel was uh run by pulleys on a . . . we'd have a lawn mower engine and so we could putt-putt around and go up and down the thing, ya know, and go fishin' and mostly it just was to fool around ya know, to go from here to there, and that was about all we did ya know, we'd . . . it had a little house on it and we'd climb up onto the house and, ya know, leap off into the water and all that stuff.
TRANSCRIBED BY RYAN BUTTS