Hard working youth Page 2
Pulled pork tacos Page 7
Now hiring Page 8
Free complimentary copy July 18, 2014 • Volume 1, No. 42
www.raytowneagle.com • 75¢
Extreme Grand Prix Celebrates One Year Anniversary Featuring Eierman Extreme Wrestling Clinic
By Diane Krizek Editor Extreme Grand Prix Family Fun Center, 6731 Blue Ridge Boulevard, will celebrate its one year anniversary that starts with its Raytown Chamber ribbon cutting ceremony on July 23, 2014, from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. All racing is half price – only $10.00 – from Friday to Sunday, July 25 to July 27. This is the weekend to experience the best of indoor karting on a quarter mile track if you haven’t yet taken the wheel of one of these indoor electric karts capable of 45 mph. The celebration continues with
kart demos from 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m on Friday, cotton candy, snocones and give-away raffles. At 10:00 p.m., the lights go out for Cosmic Racing where drivers race in karts accessorized with LED lights until 3:00 a.m. Normal closing is at midnight. On Saturday, July, 26, Extreme Grand Prix will introduce Eierman Extreme Wrestling, a wrestling clinic in partnership with Mike Eierman, the most sought after wrestling coach in the nation. He is credited for turning J’Den Cox of Hickman Mills High School into a four-time state wrestling champion at the University of Missouri (MU).
Eierman will be on site to meet and greet Saturday. The clinic opens July 29 and offers training of his one of a kind techniques on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. From noon to 8:00 p.m. on Saturday, July 26, the celebration con-
tinues with free food and drink and more raffles while exploring what the center has to offer. On Saturday night, Club Nite kicks off at 10:00 p.m. with a live D.J. music, mixed drinks and racing for only those over age 18. Extreme claims it is the only karting facility in the nation
that allows drinking and driving with some restrictions. Every Sunday, Extreme Grand Prix welcomes Kansas City Poker. First game starts at 4:00 p.m. and second game at 7:00 p.m. Extreme Grand Prix Family Fun
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The Girl That Gave Co-Mo Electric Cooperative It’s Heartbeat
By Diane Krizek Editor
When Geraldine Schmidt left her first fulltime job in Tipton, Missouri, and headed for Washington, D.C., to a new job working for the U.S. Navy in 1941, she never looked back – until last year. Her nephew contacted her about the Co-Mo Electric Cooperative in Tipton celebrating its 75th anniversary in May. He told her that
they are writing a book covering the entire history of the cooperative but they were missing gaps in the beginning. Co-Mo came from the first two letters of each county in the cooperative’s territory: Cooper, Cole, Moniteau and Morgan. “I told him that I was the one who deposited the check that gave Co-Mo its heartbeat in 1939,” said Geraldine who is now 94 years-old and still living in Raytown after
Photo by Steve Hartman Ken Johnson and Geraldine Schmidt Rodgers at the 75th annual meeting of the CO-MO Electric Cooperative in May 2014 raising a family. Folks here know her as Gerri Rodgers. Geraldine took immediate action and called Ken Johnson, general manager of Co-Mo. She introduced herself to his secretary who immediately recognized her name. “I will see to it that he calls you back,” she said. And so he did and they had a nice chat about what happened in Tipton four years after the passage of the Rural Electrification Act in 1935 that would provide federal loans for the installation of electrical distribution systems to serve the rural areas of our nation. Geraldine told him that Jack
Needy hired her to be the bookkeeper for the new electric cooperative office in Tipton. She was its second employee (Needy being the first) and was all of 19 years-old having recently completed the bookkeeping program at the Central Business College in Sedalia, Missouri. “I’m not a bookkeeper so you’re pretty much on your own’” she remembers him saying that first day on the job when she was handed an endorsed check for $342,000 (now equivalent of about $5.8 million today) from the Rural Electrification Administration (REA). That allocation from the REA would be used
to build its first section of electrical lines. Electric companies would not electrify rural America because they claimed they couldn’t make money with the properties being so far apart. Productivity set with the sun. Barns and stables did not have light. Farmhouses could not use the modern appliances of the day, like refrigerators and washing machines. Building electrical networks across the country put people back to work after the depression. Geraldine remembers that every task she did that first day on the job
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