Students attending the University of Missouri without a car have long used public transit. In the years before and after World War II, bus services were privately owned and operated and covered the whole town. Today, public transit service is more limited, MU undergraduate Cass Isele drew on an oral history from Leroy Day to examine how it may well be harder to get around today without a car in Columbia than it was 80 years ago.
Reverberations is a grant-funded, collaborative project from KBIA, the Missouri School of Journalism, and The School of Visual Studies, with support from Missouri Humanities. Special thanks to the State Historical Society of Missouri for partnering with this project to digitize and explore the Haskell Monroe Oral History Collection.
This episode contains audio from:
- Mary Lou Glauser
- Leroy Day
- Cass Isele
- Car alarm sounding
St. Louis Blues
The transcript of this piece is as follows:
Music: St. Louis Blues
Intro: This is KBIA News. I'm Trevor Harris. This week, we will be traveling back in time to the 1930s and 40s with Reverberations, a new series at KBIA. Producers have spent the past few months creatively engaging with recordings from the State Historical Society of Missouri's Haskell Monroe Oral History Collection to bring the past to the present in rich soundscapes. Today, KBIA's Cass Isele uses archival audio from Leroy Day to show how Columbia may have been more accessible in the 1940s than today.
Sound of horn honking
Cass Isele: In my nearly 21 years of life, I’ve never driven in a car by myself. It would be illegal for me to do so since I’ve never had my license. This was fine for me, because even though I lived in Ballwin, a suburb of St. Louis County, I was able to walk to anywhere I needed.
Now though I live in Columbia, and I’ve found that without a car I can’t even do something as simple as get some groceries. It makes me wonder, has Columbia always been this inaccessible?
Leroy Day: We had busses at that time that ran all over town. And ran even up into 10 o'clock the evening. So, you could ride from over in the University area way out into Western Columbia for a nickel, transfer downtown and get where you were going.
We had a lot of brick streets back in those days. There is a still a few that are still here. Prominent businesses back in those days down on Ninth Street were the Harris Cafe, the Dew Drop Inn, Grabeler's, The Shack and The Topic Cafe. Very trafficked by students.
Cass Isele: That was LeRoy Day, he was a student at Mizzou in the 1930’s and 40’s. He talks about the many places that he could get to in Columbia by walking or by bus, and although the bus is free now, it seems that the area of operation is drastically smaller. However, in that time LeRoy also talks about some of the places around Columbia that you did need a car to get to.
Leroy Day: Ok, then some other places where we went further out. The Outside Inn was out on Clinkscales, and the Breezy Hill Tavern was out East on what was then Highway 40. And Springdale Gardens was out on West Broadway. That old white house on Broadway is still there and in behind there was some gardens, it was a place to eat. You had to have a car as that was way out.
Cass Isele: The importance of a car in American society has always been prevalent, however since the 1930’s for many economic reasons, the car has become such a focus of society that alternate transportation methods have been almost entirely phased out.
Music: St. Louis Blues
Trevor Harris: That was Cass Isele with Reverberations, a project produced using sound from SHSMO's Haskell Monroe Oral History Collection. For more Reverberations, go to kbia-dot-org. I'm Trevor Harris, KBIA News.
