Once in a while, amidst the hustle and bustle of day to day social networking, someone rises out of the fray who is decidedly special and worthy of deeper scrutiny. You know, when someone you’ve only recently met shoots straight to the top of your this-person’s-really-going-to-go-places list. The person who recently topped my whole family’s list is a young, Poplar Bluff native named Donnie Magruder.
I’m no scholar, but I appreciate people who speak well. My dad was an eloquent speaker, gifted with the ability to frame his thoughts with well-chosen words. It’s not that he was so highly educated whereby he gained such a command of the English language. He simply valued the power of language and its importance in every day communication. Growing up, I watched my dad engage people in conversation about any given subject, from the seemingly mundane to the hot button issues of the day, with wit and passion. He had an opinion and could clearly convey it. He wrote letters to editors and articles for newspapers about issues he wished to weigh in on, many of which I have
Before 2007, ask a woman "Who is Jenny McCarthy?" and she may not have been able to tell you. If you would ask a man, you could have gotten an answer of former Playboy Playmate, former host of MTV shows and guest appearances on a variety of shows. Jenny was not known for her “smarts”, but instead her physical attributes.
As a life-time shopper at the Valley Plaza Shopping Center, I have a number of fond memories. As a child, I remember the the toy section of Newberry's being used as a way to point my parents on the right track for upcoming birthdays and the few times my dad broke-down and said "yes" to a soda at the Newberry's diner. Sitting at that chrome bar...wow, what a memory! As a young teenager, I would beg for a nickel to play a the Four Kings pinball game in Newberry's while my parents shopped; and a few years later a quarter to play Joust or Tron in the mall hallway near the restrooms.
It’s like Alan Jackson wrote. On September 11, 2001, our world really did stop turning. One of the only things about that morning linking it to a handful of other days in U.S. history is the fact that we all remember precisely where we were, and what we were doing, when tragedy struck. Shortly after people all over the country had dropped their kids off at school and settled in for another day’s labor, four aerial suicide attacks brought sudden, unspeakable destruction to New York City; Arlington County, Virginia; and Somerset County, Pennsylvania.
