by Darryl Wilkinson
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by Darryl Wilkinson
I can’t help being excited about the news of a new bank building going up across the street from this newspaper office.
Some years new construction of any kind in Gallatin is almost non-existent; there are times when the only measure of physical progress in town is in counting the layers of paint (and, unfortunately, there’s places where you can see various paint layers, raggedly stripped away and weather worn, in one glance). That’s never been the case at BTC Bank. Some people might even be surprised at the decision to rebuild, looking at the building in present use. But, speaking as the owner of an old business building, …well, I understand completely.
It’s great to see a business invest in our community. It’s a positive statement on the future of our community!
Writing the news article on today’s front page was personally sober, however. I find that more and more, I can trace several decades of the past by memory rather than learning background details from a local history book.
There are many memories in the buildings now scheduled to be taken down, special details that some old musty history book can never reveal… like the sheer delight in seeing a huge piece of Frances Whitt’s coconut creme pie being set before you, and a friendly waitress handing you a fork. Who says there’s no heaven on earth?
***
If we need any reminders that explode the myth of how our rural communities are free from the sins that corrupt our big cities, another one occurred this week. A front page story in last Thursday’s Kansas City Star reported on a lawsuit accusing three area priests of sexual abuse. And there’s a link in the details to Daviess County.
The 210-page lawsuit accuses three Catholic priests of molesting minors during a three-decade period. The sexual contact mostly occurred at church rectories but also at a small house one of the priests bought in 1971 at Lake Viking. Two of the accused allegedly took several boys to the lake for boating and partying.
People are people. Sin is unbounded by geography.
***
A post script to last week’s mountain lion column: As suspected, the photo/story was a hoax. Conservation Agent Alan Bradford shares this information from Dave Hamilton, a resource scientist with the Missouri Department of Conservation at Columbia. The photo comes from Bellevue, WA (a major suburb of Seattle) where voters have passed a bill banning the hunting of cougars there with dogs. The cougar was officially scored at 15-7/16 for hunter Roy Hisler, who used a varmint call and dropped the cat with one shot from a .30/06 shooting Barnes X bullets in January.
By April the photo/story was circulating widely and, like any game of gossip, with revisions. The misinformation about the kill supposedly happening near Stover, MO, even was posted on the internet on MissouriWhitetails.com and other web sites. The same photo has also circulated and been attributed to a hunter in Pennsylvania.
For more information on the current status of mountain lions in the Midwest and other parts of the country, conservation agents point to these web sites:
http://www.conservation.state.mo.us/nathis.mammals/mlion/missouri_mlion/
http://www.easterncougarnet.org/index.html
http://www.easterncougarnet.org/Conclusions.htm
Some people don’t like cats of any variety or size. One guy I know jokingly says whenever he’s driving, the black cat that crosses his path (and lives for another day) is one lucky cat! But when talk focuses on big cats in places inhabited by humans, all joking stops. The deer are so plentiful that whenever somebody here says they’ve seen a big cat, I think we should listen.
There may be arguments about whether mountain lions can be found in Northwest Missouri, but there is no question that the interest — and concerns expressed by people living here — are real.