Hannibal and Marceline- Friday, July 26, 2019

We took a little more time to get up this morning.  On our way into Hannibal, we stopped at the Missouri Welcome Center.  Remember, Hannibal sits along the Mississippi River and so it is right on the border with Illinois.  We stopped at the welcome center to get the mandatory "Welcome to Missouri" pic.  Even though we've been here for a few days, we hadn't done that yet.

When we talked about what to include in this trip, Hannibal was a given.  It's one of those places where myth and story seem to be interwoven with the historical past and the tourist sites of the present.  We've been to Walnut Grove and Walton's Mountain, Sherwood Forest and 221B Baker Street.  It seemed natural for us to want to come to the boyhood home of Mark Twain, where the experiences of his youth were later made into the literature of a growing nation.

The Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum is a complex of several buildings, many of which are in their original locations.  It begins in a museum that introduces the early life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens and the community of Hannibal.  His family moved here when he was four.  His early life and the social fabric of the community are covered in the exhibits in this first building.  Then, after you exit, the first stop is the home of Tom Blankenship, who was the recognized as the model for the character of Huckleberry Finn.  Twain himself said, "In Huckleberry Finn I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was.  He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had."  Both had fathers who were the town drunks.  The small home here is furnished sparsely to show their poverty.

     The next building that the route takes you through is the home that was owned by the Clemens family.  While Mark Twain and Tom Sawyer are not exactly the same people, it's clear that Twain was drawing on many aspects of this house when he created the setting of the story.  It's not hard to picture young Tom climbing out the window of young Sam's room, to go off to mischief.  None of the furniture is original to the house, but each room is set up to show how it might have looked when he was a boy here.  The most interesting thing in each room is a life size statue of Mark Twain as an adult.  Each statue has a contemplative look about it, as if the adult Sam Clemens has come back wax nostalgic with us, and each is accompanied by a quote that is appropriate to that mood.  "Nothing remains the same," he says in one.  "When a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood, it has always shrunk; there is no instance of such a house being as big as the picture in memory and imagination call for."  Visitors tour both floors of this narrow house.   Unusually, you enter this building from the back and exit out the front.  Once in the street you can see the infamous fence in need of whitewashing, which Tom conned his friends into doing for him, in what might be the most famous episode of any of Twain's books.

     Across the street is the home of "Becky Thatcher," whose real name was Laura Hawkins.  In fact, in the first room of the house, a radio plays an interview with Laura Hawkins where she herself plays the character of Becky Thatcher and describes Tom Sawyer in first person.  It's one of those moments where it's almost hard to tell fact from fiction, or literature and myth from history-- like if Alice Liddell remembered her trip to Wonderland.  The rest of the museum has relatively new exhibits geared to younger visitors that show aspects of daily life from the perspective of children in different societal positions- including slaves.  It's simple, but pretty well done.  There is also an interesting video how printer's apprentices, like young Sam Clemens, would work.  Next door to Becky Thatcher's house is Judge Clemens's law office.  The "Judge Thatcher" of the books is really based on Mark Twain's own father, whose office is represented there.  Certainly, the best quotes about Hannibal come from Twain himself when he became nostalgic on later trips back to his hometown.  "Alas! everything has changed in Hannibal-- but when I reached Third or Fourth Street the tears burst forth, for I recognized the mud.  It at least was the same-- the same old mud."

     At that point, we turned onto Main Street in town.  Julie and Emma wanted to visit the many shops there.  The stores were all filled with quaint things.  The first one we visited sold brilliantly colored quilts and quilting supplies.  Some shops were set up like general stores.  Others were more generic gift shops.   A mandolin player sat busking in the shade on the sidewalk and added to the atmosphere with many tunes that Scott recognized.  We ate an early lunch at Ole Planters Restaurant, which had the atmosphere of an old general store too.  The furniture and shelves were all dark wood, and the place smelt faintly of sauerkraut, which was one of the specials for today.  After lunch, we continued exploring the stores on Main Street, ducking inside often to keep in air-conditioning because the temperature was well over 80 degrees.

     Further down Main Street was the Mark Twain Museum Gallery, which was part of the tour that we had purchased tickets for.  Julie and Emma chose not to go in, but instead they went on and continued their shopping.  Julie said she liked Mark Twain but she had enough of him for now.  Scott really enjoyed the museum though.  It contains many items that belonged to Twain.  Several times we read or heard about the many original Norman Rockwell paintings that are on exhibit here, but we didn't realize that they were all illustrations that Rockwell had done for editions of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.  Rockwell actually visited the town of Hannibal to do these paintings and included what he learned in them.  A preliminary sketch of Tom climbing out his window was changed to look like the window we had seen earlier in the Clemens home.  Rockwell chose to make Injun Joe's cave look like the nearby "Mark Twain Caves" rather than the stalactite and stalagmite filled caverns pictured by other illustrators.

     One floor of the building examines six or seven of Twain's most important books in life-sized walk-through dioramas.  Scott was pleased to see that Innocents Abroad was the first one, because that book has always been a favorite of his and he has read it at least three times.  A lighted map traces the route of the "pilgrims" through Europe and the Holy Land, and a large sign highlighted one of Scott's favorite passages- when Clemens and one of his friends torment their tour guide by asking stupid questions and pretending not to know who Christopher Columbus was.  "Is he dead?"  Roughing It is the next book, complete with a stage coach like the one he describes in his trip to the West.  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court has a castle for its framework.  Scott remembered the paper he wrote in college where he argued that Twain was using this book to criticize the backwardness of the South with Camelot standing in for the South while the "Connecticut Yankee" brought their world into the 19th Century by introducing "industriousness and change."  Naturally Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are covered as well.    The raft in the Huck Finn exhibit rocks and bounces as you walk across it, and that triggers a video clip of Huck and Jim on Jackson's Island (which we saw last night).  After touring the museum, Scott found Julie and Emma waiting for him in the lobby.  He bought two DVD's in the gift shop (Ken Burns's documentary and Hal Holbrook's Mark Twain Tonight.  Scott saw Hal Holbrook perform this show at Shea's back when he was in college.  There are at least two people in town that do similar performances in Hannibal.) In addition to those two, he also bought a CD earlier this morning  (Mark Twain: Words and Music-  a star-studded project that was made to benefit this museum.)  Julie had bought some healthy snacks for the car ride, and a baby elephant puppet book to put away for the little one.

     Since we had ridden the riverboat last night, we were ahead of schedule and left even earlier than we had planned this morning.  Julie said that would give us the ability to stop at any interesting places that we might see along the way.  Scott peaked ahead on the map and discovered just the thing- Marceline, Missouri, the boyhood home of Walt Disney.  We had heard people at Disney mention this place before, but we hadn't expected to have it right in our path.  We used the opportunity to stop at the museum there.  It used to be a train station for the Atchison, Topeka and Sante Fe Railroad, but when the building was no longer needed, the town looked for a way to save it.  Meanwhile, Walt's sister Ruth was looking for a place to donate family items to, and the town used this opportunity to open a museum to its most famous son.  The director of the museum was actually the person who gave us the overview of it before we began touring.  She was in several of the videos that play throughout the museum, and she quite obviously loves the job she is doing here.

     Walt had moved to Marceline when he was about four, and this train station would have been the first place that he would have stopped.  "To tell the truth," Walt once said, "More things of importance happened to me in Marceline than have ever happened since, or are likely to in the future."   One part of the museum focuses on the trains and the history of Marceline.  One part focuses on the park he was planning in Marceline.  When the Midget Autotopia ride was dismantled at Disneyland, he donated it to Marceline and it ran for a while here.  One of the cars is on display.   He couldn't make the dedication of the new track, though, because he had developed a cough and would die of cancer shortly after.  Part of the museum focuses on his family members.  Julie liked the TV set that is on display.  Walt purchased it for his mother so that she could watch the dedication of Disneyland on TV because she did not like large crowds.   Naturally, the dedication of Disneyland is now shown continuously on it.  There is also a collection of models of many of the buildings at Disneyland, including the Sleeping Beauty Castle and both sides of Main Street U.S.A.  When Walt designed the park, Main Street was inspired by his idealized memory of Marceline, though with a lot more Victorian filigree and ornamentation.

     The heat had gotten to Emma, along with the hard mattresses that we've had the past few nights, so she was asleep when we arrived in Marceline.  We tried to wake her to see the Disney museum, but she said she wanted to continue to sleep.  We let her rest.  After the museum, we drove around Marceline to get a quick tour.  Naturally, we saw Main Street, which has "Main Street U.S.A." on its black mouse-eared street signs.  We also saw the Disney family home, which is still a private residence, but which is marked with a sign.  Nearby is the entrance to where the Disney farm and Walt's "Dreaming Tree" once stood.   Our time here was up though, because we had an appointment in Kansas City.

     Scott originally met his friend Richard when we lived in Petersburg, Virginia, where they worked together in the city's museums.  We haven't seen him since we moved away from Petersburg, though they have been following each other on Facebook for the last few years.  When we realized that we would be passing near Kansas City on this trip, we thought we should use the opportunity to reconnect with him in person.  We suggested that we get together for dinner, maybe for some of Kansas City's famous barbecue.  He ultimately suggested that we meet at a place called Gates Barbecue, which is well known in the area.  We managed to keep to our schedule and arrived there about 6:00 as planned.  He was waiting there, along with his husband Jay, who we met for the first time.   We got a big table and a lot of food and spent a long while chatting and getting caught up with each other.  Emma got to see pictures of their four dogs, which made her miss her own pets even more.  We heard about the Arabia Steamboat Museum, where Richard now works, and other things he has done since Petersburg.  Since he's the only person from the Petersburg museums that we've stayed in touch with, he filled us in on the sad state of the museums themselves, many of which are now closed.  Both Richard and Jay seemed disappointed that we hadn't scheduled more time in Kansas City, and there certainly does seem to be a lot to see here, so we might have to find time to come back soon.

     Meanwhile, our hotel room was in Ottawa, Kansas, and we had about an hour to go before we'd be able to stop.  We crossed into Kansas shortly after getting back on the expressways, but we didn't see a sign to mark the occasion.  It is, however, a new state for Scott and Emma.