Vox Magazine January/February 2020

THEY WERE ALMOST FAMOUS PAGE 13

LIFE AFTER A HOUSE FIRE PAGE 28

ALL THE HAPPY HOURS PAGE 37

THE ETHICS OF FASHION PAGE 41

THE VOICE OF COLUMBIA • JAN/FEB 2020

ENVISIONING THE FUTURE

COLUMBIA

2 05 0 IIN N

Finding Neverland January 24, 7pm • Jesse Auditorium

Russian National Ballet: Swan Lake February 17, 7pm • Jesse Auditorium

Aeolus Quartet February 6, 7pm • Missouri Theatre

Mystery Science Theatre 3000 Live February 19, 7pm • Jesse Auditorium

An American in Paris February 10, 7pm • Jesse Auditorium

The National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine February 29, 7pm • Jesse Auditorium

Visit www.concertseries.org or call 573-882-3781 for more information on our amazing lineup!

ConcertSeries

FROM THE EDITOR

BACK TO THE FUTURE

E DI T OR -I N -CHI E F ELIZABETH ELKIN DE PUT Y E DI T OR CARY LITTLEJOHN M AN AGI N G E DI T OR CATHERINE WENDLANDT DI GI TAL M AN AGI N G E D IT O R CAMERON R. FLATT

T

en years ago, my top concern was getting through middle school. I was 14, and my world was about as big as the band room where I spent much of my time. I wanted to be a music teacher, or an actress or maybe even, secretly, a singer.

Jump back another decade to 20 years ago, and I had just moved into a big yellow house in New Hampshire.

My parents let me pick my bedroom before construction was finished. I remember looking at the skeleton of the house, imagining my future room painted pink to match my pink bike with shiny handlebar streamers and a pink horn. At age 4, I envisioned myself as a future artist, drawing with chalk on the canvas of my driveway.

Thirty years encompasses my entire lifetime. I wasn’t even a thought in my parents’ heads then; in fact, it was a little more than 30 years ago that they found out they were pregnant with my older brother. If you told me a decade ago that I’d be where I am today, I wouldn’t believe you. I graduated from high school (go, Spartans), college (Roll Tide) and am now a few months from finishing my

“Whoever I’ll be, I can’t wait to meet her.” master’s degree (M-I-Z). I’ve traveled and reported around the world, lived in three states and two countries and experienced more adventures than I’d thought possible.

A lot can change in 30 years.

Starting on page 18, we envision what Columbia might look like in the year 2050. From improved transportation to withstanding a potential earthquake, we explore what three decades can do to a community.

I’m currently preparing to enter a new chapter of life. This will be my final letter as the editor-in-chief of Vox Magazine. I’m now headed to Washington, D.C., to do a reporting job I didn’t even know was my dream until a few months ago. I wonder who I’ll be in 30 years.

Maybe I’ll still be on the Hill, chasing senators for quotes. Or maybe I’ll be on the stage again, acting or singing (but certainly not dancing). Three decades is a long time. Whoever I’ll be, I can’t wait to meet her.

It has been an honor, Columbia.

Roll Vox.

ON L I N E E DI T OR GABY MORERA DI NUBILA ART DI R E CT OR S MITCHELL BARTLE, MADISON WISSE PHOT O E DI T OR DEREK RIEKE M ULT I M E DI A E DI T OR SAM MOSHER

AS S I S TAN T E DI T OR S CULT UR E SARAH EVERETT, MORGAN SPEARS E AT + DR I N K MEG DONOHUE, XIYUAN ZHANG CI T Y L I F E KRISTIN BLAKE, ADRIAN BURTIN, ELENA K. CRUZ DI GI TAL E DI T OR S LAUREN BROCATO, CHLOE KHAW, EMILY LENTZ, MEREDITH LEHMAN, HANNAH MUSICK, DANIELLE PYCIOR, NICOLE SCHROEDER, VICTORIA TRAMPLER, TAYA WHITE M ULT I M E DI A E DI T OR S FIONA MURPHY, MAGGIE MADRO, EMILY POWERS, CHLOE THORNBERRY DE S I GN E R S LAURA JONES, ELIZABETH PRINCIPATO CON T R I B UT I N G W R I T E R S JASMINE-KAY JOHNSON, MELANIE RAU, SADIE LEA, BRY BARBER, STEVE GARRISON, KELLY KENOYER, AUSTIN WEBER, EMILY ADAMS, BROOKE KNAPPENBERGER, ALLISON BROWN, NICK KELLY, EMILY REDFORD

E DI T OR I AL DI R E CT OR HEATHER LAMB DI GI TAL DI R E CT OR SARA SHIPLEY HILES E XE CUT I V E E DI T OR JENNIFER ROWE OF F I CE M AN AGE R KIM TOWNLAIN

Vox Magazine

@VoxMag

@VoxMagazine

ELIZABETH ELKIN Editor-in-Chief

BEHIND “ALL THAT REMAINS” “I heard about the fire at the Cox-Shird family’s house the same way most people in my neighborhood did. Scrolling through our neighborhood Facebook page the next day, I saw many of the same images Anissa and her family had seen early that morning — of their house burning and the firetrucks lined up along the street. Reading through everyone’s messages about the family and seeing how quickly people came together to help, I was inspired to reach out to the family and learn about how they were recovering from such a life-changing event.”

— Nicole Schroeder, contributing writer and digital editor

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VOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

ADVERTISING 882-5714 CIRCULATION 882-5700 EDITORIAL 884-6432 vox@mi ssouri . ed u CALENDAR send to vox@m i ssouri .e d u o r submi t vi a onl i ne form at voxm a g a zi n e . c o m TO RECEIVE VOX IN YOUR INBOX sign up for email newsletter at voxmagazine.com J A N U A RY / FE B RU A RY 2 0 2 0 V OL UM E 22, I S S U E 1 PUB L I S HE D B Y TH E COL UM B I A M I S S OU RIA N 320 L E E HI L L S H A L L

Cover Design: Madison Wisse Cover Photo: Courtesy of Pexels Photography by Derek Rieke and Nicole Schroeder

FEATURES

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How will technology change our town? How could a potential earthquake shake our state? From the Business Loop to hyperloop, we explore what Columbia might look like in 30 years.

After a devastating house fire in February 2019, this local family rose from the ashes and adapted to life after destruction.

2050 vision

All that remains

BY NICOLE SCHROEDER

BY VOX STAFF

Photography by Madison Parry/Archive

VOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

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DEPARTMENTS

IN THE LOOP

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New Cellar on the block The owners of Cherry Street Cellar dish on their seasonal menu and the Great Lakes Walleye.

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Vox Picks What to sip, celebrate and admire in Columbia during the new year.

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Let’s talk sports (journalism) Female writers and editors are calling a foul over continuing inequity in sports newsrooms.

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All that and dim sum

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Q&A: Lauren Crosby

Dumplings aren’t limited to their Chinese roots and can be anything from ravioli to pierogies.

This professional organizer spills her best tricks for spring cleaning.

37

The pursuit of happy hour

CULTURE

We’ve rounded up the best drink deals for every day of the week. Let’s raise a glass to that.

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Screen time Many dream of making it on reality TV, but these five locals did just that (or came close) and gave us a behind-the-scenes look.

CITY LIFE 39

So, you’ve already met the devil

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Community chords Every month one local group gathers in Boone County to croon tunes.

EAT + DRINK

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We dug up the geological history of Devil’s Icebox, the Pinnacles, Capen Park and beyond.

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Crimes of fashion

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VOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

Dressing ethically is tricky.

We talked to experts about how to support fair trade and sustainability.

Photography by Jacob Moscovitch, Alexandria Wells and Ryan Berry and courtesy of Pexels

A (WO)MAN’S

CLEAN UP YOUR

ARENA P.10

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New Cellar on the block We’ve got the inside scoop on the bold bites at Cherry Street Cellar.

BY JASMINE-KAY JOHNSON Daniel Bauer and Ali Ratcliffe Bauer met in 2006 when they were both employees at The Wine Cellar and Bistro. Since then, they’ve gotten married, lived in Chicago for a couple of years, and returned to Columbia. Once again, they find themselves working at 505 Cherry St., this time as the owners of the renamed Cherry Street Cellar.

Dan and Ali call the Great Lakes Walleye well-suited for the Cellar’s new “land and sea” menu.

Photography by Joel Chan

VOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

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IN TH E LOOP RESTAURANTS

They bought The Wine Cellar in June 2019 from Craig and Sarah Cyr, who had owned the eatery for 16 years.

“We wanted to keep the spirit of the restaurant the same,” Daniel says. “We wanted to support local producers. We wanted to have a really broad and international wine list; we wanted to have a menu that was really rooted in seasonal produce and flavors, but we also wanted to make it our own.”

The result? Ali, the executive chef, built a brand new “land and sea” menu that finds a balance among land-based proteins, unconventional seafood and a bounty of local produce. The Bauers’ focus on combining Midwestern products with Ali’s training in French techniques, among other global influences brings a change of pace to the local food scene, Dan says.

One of the new dishes is the Great Lakes Walleye, $34. The base of the entree is a pan-seared walleye filet with the skin left on to maximize flavor. The fish is then bathed in a light broth made from squash seeds, which Ali describes

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CHERRY STREET CELLAR 505 Cherry St. Mon.–Thurs., 4:30–9:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 4:30–10 p.m., closed on Sundays, 442-7281

as “earthy, dusty and sweet.” Next, some sherry vinegar is added to the broth, followed by butter to produce a velvet mouthfeel. Underneath the fish is a celery root remoulade made with creme fraiche and capers. Finally, the dish is topped with sherry-glazed shallots and roasted mushrooms.

If you can bear to wait until summer to dine at the eatery, the Bauers also take pride in their Roasted Lamb Ribs entree. The star of the dish isn’t the meat,

though. It’s a traditional pepper with a bit of a twist — a “habanada,” or a clearly named habanero pepper without the spice. “It’s really floral and fruity, much more so than a lot of other peppers,” Ali says. The peppers are specially grown at Three Creeks farm in Boone County, where they were harvested for the first time ever in 2019. Unfortunately, as the pepper is now out of season, the dish will undergo some changes until the summer rolls around again.

Dan and Ali pay homage to the old Cellar’s values while incorporating their own tastes in a new menu.

VOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

Photography by Joel Chan

I N T HE LO O P VOX PICKS

Vox picks for

JANUARY and FEBRUARY Each month, Vox curates a list of can’t-miss shops, eats, reads and experiences in and around Columbia. We highlight the new, trending or criminally underrated — so you’re always informed of the best our city has to offer.

BY ADRIAN BURTIN

Dive …

Into Missouri’s past by going to Columbia’s community spaces, whether you visit the Museum of Art and Archaeology, the Museum of Anthropology or the Boone County History & Culture Center. If you’re considering a visit to the culture center, make sure to see the “Faces Found: Boone County Portraits, 1886-1940” exhibit before it ends Jan. 12. If you want to learn without leaving the house, view “Notable Finds in Missouri Archaeology,” one of the Museum of Anthropology’s online collections.

Boone County History & Culture Center, Wed.–Sat., 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sun., noon to 5 p.m., 3801 Ponderosa St., 443-8936. Museum of Anthropology online collection, anthromuseum.missouri. edu/e-exhibits

Light …

A candle for Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Jan. 20, and carry it as you join the 48th annual walk to commemorate the activist’s life and work. Start at the Armory Sports Center and end in St. Luke United Methodist Church for the memorial celebration. Jan. 20, 6:30 p.m., Armory Sports Center, free, 874-7460

Enjoy …

A glass of bourbon accompanied by food and live music at the 2020 MO Bacon & Bourbon Festival on Jan. 18.

This event will take place at the Bur Oak Brewing Company, where you can sample different bacon-infused treats and drink cocktails, beers and spirits for three hours. To fill your schedule for the rest of the month, also attend MO Fest at The Blue Note and Rose Music Hall until Jan. 24, where breweries from Kansas City, St. Louis and Columbia will provide beverages. If you want to avoid the festival frenzy, you can still enjoy a drink by sitting back and warming up with a stout from Logboat Brewing Co. all winter long. MO Bacon & Bourbon Festival, Jan. 18, 1–4 p.m., Bur Oak Brewing Company, $20–$30, 814-2178. MO Fest, Jan. 3–24, The Blue Note and Rose Music Hall, $6–$50, 874-1944

Eat …

Your own seasonal meals. Buy ingredients at the Columbia Farmers’ Market, or get a food subscription at Root Cellar, which will deliver fresh food and recipes to your home. Sure, Brussels sprouts, cabbage or beets might not initially taste as nice as they look, but with a good recipe, you might be surprised. Start the year with healthy eating habits. Columbia Farmers’ Market, Saturdays, 9 a.m. to noon, 1769 W. Ash St., 823-6889. Root Cellar, Tues.– Fri., 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Sat., 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., 1005 Park Ave., $35–40, 443-5055

Photography by Hillary Tan and Jessi Dodge/Archive and courtesy of Chris Campbell and Pexels

VOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

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IN THE LOOP ESSAY

Let’s talk sports (journalism) Female sports editors and writers are tired of being left on the sidelines.

BY MELANIE RAU

I

love the St. Louis Blues. I’ve loved them through coaching changes, trades, the loss of free agents and blown calls. Through bitter first-round losses, so-close-it-hurts chances at the playoffs and (finally) a Stanley Cup win on June 12, 2019.

My love for the Blues is what made me want to become a sports journalism, and speed and complexity, two of my favorite things about hockey, are also what I love about sports reporting. I live-tweet every game, and in August 2017, the Canadian hockey site Last Word on Hockey reached out to me about covering the Blues. Then, in May 2019, I became an assistant sports editor at the Columbia Missourian.

But my experience as a sports reporter has not been quite what I hoped. Don’t get me wrong: Getting paid to watch sports, talk about sports and edit sports stories is a dream. Plus, I love helping lead a team of reporters and editors. But being treated differently because I’m a woman is not a dream.

In the fall, I was one of three women on the beat — two assistant editors and a reporter compared to 15 male reporters and four male assistant editors. This was a major shift from when I was on the public life beat, when there were 14 female reporters and one male reporter.

The lack of representation of women on the sports desk is not just a problem at the Missourian. It’s a problem nationwide.

The 2018 Associated Press Sports Editors Racial and Gender Report Card, a study of

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VOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

over 75 newspapers and websites, gave ASPE newspapers and websites their fifth consecutive grade of F for gender hiring practices. According to the study, only 10% of sports editors at the publications are women, and only 11.5% of sports reporters are women. This systemic lack of representation in the newsroom, this idea that only men can write about sports, has led to a lack of coverage for female athletes, and for me, it’s led to a lack of respect.

I’ve worked hard for my position as assistant editor, and I feel like some of my male colleagues on the desk don’t take my input as seriously as they would if it came from another man. Of course, this has been my experience long before my days at the Missourian.

In sixth grade, I started at a new school, and I told some of the guys in my class I liked hockey. They told me to prove it. Name five players on the team, they said.

I named every Blues player in order of what line they were on, and then I named the defensive pairings in order. Then I named my favorite former players. But they weren’t impressed.

They rolled their eyes as if my exceeding their expectations was annoying to them, as if nothing I said would make them respect me and treat me as one of “them.” And that’s what it can feel like as a woman in the world of sports journalism, too.

Joan Niesen, a former Sports Illustrated staff writer, says she, like me, has felt left out among her male coworkers over the course of her ca-

reer. “It’s a little bit of a boy’s club,” Niesen says of the upper-level management at SI. Niesen worked remotely, and her opportunities to connect with her bosses did not feel the same as those opportunities of her 40-something male peers. “Your life is different, and you’re not playing golf with them. You’re not drinking after work with them all the time.”

Women are under-represented and under-respected in the newsroom, in locker rooms, on the sidelines and on social media.

Often, players and teams host media in the locker room. It’s an opportunity to capture upclose and honest pre- and post-game reactions, a must for any reporter to stay competitive in the field. But women weren’t even invited into locker rooms until 1975.

Even then, some women still had to fight their way in. Melissa Ludtke was assigned to cover the New York Yankees in the 1977 World Series for SI but was told by Major League Baseball that she was not allowed in the locker room. In 1978, the U.S. District Court ruled that MLB was not allowed to keep women out of locker rooms. Even with this law, men still try to keep women out of locker rooms, and when they are allowed in, some of them are discriminated against.

Diana C. Nearhos, who covers the Tampa Bay Lightning for the Tampa Bay Times, had a problem in the locker rooms when she was covering minor league hockey. “It was the kind of stuff that you read about from the ’70s and Illustration by Madison Wisse

I N T HE LO O P ESSAY

’80s when people were breaking into locker rooms for the first time, and I was like, ‘Why is this happening to me in the 2000s?’” Nearhos says.

Nearhos says she has also experienced discrimination from other reporters or spectators. “I’ve definitely had instances, kind of everywhere I’ve been, where somebody either made comments about my being female or tried flirting in a place where I was like, ‘I’m just trying to work,’” she says.

At one point, she thought about leaving the industry. “Maybe this dream that I had was stupid and not going to happen,” she says.

Sometimes I feel the same way. I feel like I’m not listened to or valued by many of the men I work with, and sometimes the women, too. I think they tend to ask our male writers for input before me. And ultimately, the newsroom is supposed to be a team. Everyone needs to work together, especially on deadline.

I wish my colleagues and the men

who interact with women across the field of sports media would treat us as equally knowledgeable and capable.

And I know this is possible. Nearhos says in her current position with the Lightning, she does not encounter sexism in her day-to-day. And Christina Long, an MU student who covers MU football and basketball for the St. Louis-Post Dispatch, says she does not either.

“I do feel like people have welcomed me pretty well,” Long says. “They brought me in like I’m one of the guys.”

I am hopeful that women in sports

Associated Press Gender Report Card, 2018 APSE newspapers and websites received an F in four out of five categories for gender representation.

Sports editors 10% women Assistant sports editors 30.1% women Columnists 16.6% women Reporters 11.5% women Copy editors and designers 20.4% women

Melanie Rau comes from a family of St. Louis Blues fans.

Baroque Valentine

journalism will be treated the same way that men in sports journalism are treated.

If there’s one thing that inspires me to keep going, it’s the tenacity of the women I’ve met in the field. These women are my heroes, and they give me faith in the field as a young reporter.

“I was 26 when I got hired at Sports Illustrated,” Niesen says. “I definitely didn’t really feel like I had the standing or the voice to elbow my way in at first.”

Niesen was with SI for six years and says she became more assertive with every year. She learned to fight for her work and own her expertise. “If someone tries to hone in that, you say, I know this.

This is mine,” she says.

I know the Blues. I know hockey.

I know sports. I’m ready to work hard, but I’m also requesting empathy and respect from others. I hope we can all do our part to make the reporting experience better for the female reporters who come after me. To me, that means women need to be invited into the super-secret boy’s club.

2/22 (Sat) 7pm

Quatuor Diotima - and Esterhazy Quartet -

2/14 (Fri) 7pm

6:45pm Pre-Concert

Featuring the Winner of the Pre-Collegiate Aria/Concerto Competition with R. Paul Crabb and Kirk Trevor, conductors Bach Collegium Choir & Odyssey Chamber Ensemble with Siri Geenen, concertmaster

Bartók No. 4, Berg Shostakovich Octet

Odyssey Chamber Music Series, Inc. www.OdysseyMissouri.org

First Baptist Church, 1112 E Broadway in Columbia $20 /$10 Student / Child Under 12 Free | 573.825.0079 Photography courtesy of Melanie Rau

VOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

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IN THE LOOP Q&A

for the first thing someone said about Orderly and Organized is that the company cares about the community and that the company truly helps people and makes their life more peaceful.

What’s most rewarding about your job?

Helping others when they’re stressed or in a situation. Usually when they’re calling me, they’re at their wit’s end.

(The best part is) being able to come in and just love on them, be able to make them feel comfortable, make them know it’s not overwhelming. I’m essentially a personal trainer. I will keep you accountable. I’ll watch over you, and I’ll walk alongside to help you get to that goal. It’s not overwhelming for me. To be able to get to know them is probably the best part of it.

From clutter to order As someone who earns a living by cleaning up messes, Lauren Crosby shares her tidy tips and best spring cleaning advice.

BY SADIE LEA

L

auren Crosby was always the person friends and family members called to help them with projects around the house. She says she’s type-A and likes things to be neat and orderly. As the mother of three children, Crosby was searching for a career that would offer her flexibility. That’s why she started Orderly and Organized more than three years ago.

Since then she has helped more than 100 mid-Missouri clients organize and declutter, whether that meant tossing food with a “best by” date from 2002 or cleaning out vitamins that expired 40 years ago. One of those clients, Kathy Stafford, felt overwhelmed by a messy

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pantry, so she called Crosby. “She came in and helped me clean it out and reorganize so I could prepare and be ready to cook and entertain for two upcoming holidays,” she says. Here’s what Crosby says about tidying up and starting a business.

How is Orderly and Organized different from other organizing companies?

What makes it stand apart for us is relationship. I am someone that isn’t going to rush it. I want to obviously help clients and get their space organized, but I also have relationships with almost every single client I’ve organized for, and I think that that’s important. I would love

VOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

STAYING ORGANIZED

Lauren Crosby cleans everything from garages to holiday storage. She started her business in December 2016.

What area of the home usually gets overlooked?

The pantry is something that you use every single day. It’s something you probably go into more than your closet throughout the day. I just had to reorganize my pantry because I had a huge grocery day, so I wanted the stuff that we hadn’t eaten yet to go more toward the front so we could use it before it expires.

It’s an ongoing organizational task. But I think that’s something that’s in every single home; it’s sometimes neglected where you just shove everything in it.

What is your best tip for getting a jump start on spring cleaning?

Start small. Where a lot of clients get tripped up is they want to organize the entire house in a weekend, and you’re going to be lucky if you get a room done.

Start with one closet, start with going into the kid’s dresser, and once you finish that project, move onto the next.

What is your advice for young women looking to start a business?

Spend the time researching. Talk to anyone and everyone they know and get advice and be open to new ideas. My husband was the one that kind of pushed me to start it and to just stop talking about it and actually put the plan into work. Ultimately, you just got to jump off the deep end and go for it.

Photography courtesy of Lauren Crosby

IN TUNE WITH ONE ANOTHER P.16

Restaurant: Impossible crew members set up cameras and lighting equipment in May for interviews with the staff of McLanks.

Screen time Locals give behind-the-scenes scoops about their time on unscripted TV.

BY BRY BARBER From game shows to reality TV, several Columbians have landed spots on the small screen over the years. Here’s a look back at the good, bad and truly strange parts of TV fame.

Sheila Lankford

Restaurant: Impossible, Food Network Sheila Lankford decided to open McLanks Family Restaurant after tragedy struck. One of her sons was shot outside of his apartment.

Photography by Jacob Moscovitch/Archive

“It kind of scared the crap out of me, so I knew I had to do something to get the kids off the streets,” Lankford says.

Her son survived, and Lankford viewed opening a restaurant as an opportunity to keep her kids busy and out of further danger.

Her family spent nine months cleaning and renovating the building, and in 2017, they opened McLanks’ doors. “Everything had to be redone in this place,” she says.

The producers of Restaurant: Impossible, where professional chef Robert Irvine flips struggling restaurants, originally came to her in 2018 shortly after opening. “I really thought it was a joke,” she says.

Her kids were on board with the show be-

fore Lankford was, but the family didn’t find out until a Skype screening with the casting crew that they were not qualified for the show because they hadn’t been open long enough.

“They called us again this last year,” she says. After months of interviews with the casting crew, Food Network finally revealed that the Lankfords had a spot on the show.

The show focused on tension within the family and the restaurant. They filmed during a weekend in May 2019, and the episode aired July 27, 2019.

Joe Bechtold Truck Stop Missouri, Travel Channel For Joe Bechtold, starring on the Travel ChanVOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

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CU LT URE TELEVISION

nel’s Truck Stop Missouri was strange. The show featured Bechtold, the general manager of Midway Truck Stop and Travel Plaza, and focused on life and visitors at the pit stop located off Exit 121 on Interstate 70. It was selected from a group of 200 to 300 pit stops, Bechtold says. The Travel Channel ended the show after the second season in 2012, but Bechtold was only a little disappointed at the lost advertising opportunity.

He says it was uncomfortable to be recognized or when someone asked to take a photo with him, which happened even after the first day the show aired.

“We don’t watch a lot of TV at our house, and I didn’t even have cable,” he says. “I found it interesting you get a lot of attention from people because you’re on TV and people that don’t know anything else about you.”

Pack Matthews Shark Tank (declined), ABC “The first thing they tell you is, ‘Don’t talk about Shark Tank,’” says Pack Matthews, the founder of Health By Design, a Columbia-based company that invented the Soul Seat, a chair that allows you to sit in multiple positions.

Matthews says Shark Tank found Soul Seat on social media and reached out. However, after further research, Matthews was concerned that the show would have complete control of the product and the narrative, and he decided not to be involved with the show.

People who aren’t business-savvy sometimes think a show like Shark Tank is the only way to find support as an entrepreneur, he says.

But the billion-dollar goal, or starting a company in hopes of being valued at $1 billion and bought by a major investor, is not the only way to do business, Matthews says. It’s not representative of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

“We have a different set of values,” Matthews says. By not chasing the billion-dollar buyout, entrepreneurs will have better relationships with vendors, customers and their local community, he says.

Matthews says his approach focuses on the community first. “You don’t have to battle the sharks,” he says.

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Jim Meyer Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, ABC Jim Meyer was a 26-year-old graduate student at MU when he landed a spot on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? during its second season in 2000. His mother watched the show in its first season and encouraged him to apply.

He was accepted, and the turnaround was fast. He flew out to the New York television studio the next day with his sister, Jill. The show was filmed Saturday, and it aired on Sunday. The show paid for the trip: the hotel, food vouchers, plus a free T-shirt. “It’s a little ratty, but I still have it,” he says.

Meyer says host Regis Philbin kept his distance from the crew, but the rest of the show’s staff were there to help him navigate the process of being on a game show. He says observing and talking with the production assistants was one of the most interesting parts of the experience; they helped him prepare for the seemingly unscripted moments.

Meyer went on to win $32,000 and kept about $26,000 after taxes. He’s now 46, and he says it’s the only year he ever hired an accountant to file his taxes. “I was a minor celebrity in Columbia for about six weeks,” he says.

Now, Meyer teaches English at Rock Bridge High School and shares the game show footage with his classes every year.

Jonathan Murray The Real World (producer), MTV You might recognize the name Jonathan Murray from MU’s documentary journalism program. He is the co-founder

VOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

Jim Meyer appeared on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in 2000 and says people recognized him from the show when he returned to Columbia.

Pack Matthews designed the Soul Seat because he was frustrated by the limitations of conventional ergonomic chairs.

Shark Tank found the seats via Instagram.

of Bunim-Murray productions and the man for whom the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism is named. He graduated from MU in 1977, and in 1992, he created The Real World, where seven to eight people were chosen to live temporarily in a new city together under the same roof — while being filmed non-stop. The show was one of the first of its kind and helped define reality TV. “We basically dropped our own lives to focus, for 13 weeks, on these seven young people,” he says. No one on the crew had done a show like it before.

“We thought, ‘OK, we’ll have a crew come in at 7:30,’” he says. They didn’t realize that their young subjects might not get up until noon one day or might stay out until 7 in the morning.

As the show went into subsequent seasons, the crews were better able to accommodate their subjects’ schedules.

But there was another aspect of capturing real life that was important.

“You have a responsibility for the people, to treat them fairly and to tell their stories honestly,” he says. The producers watched the first couple episodes with the cast so that they could answer questions, and that’s a tradition that we continued into later years.

Bunim-Murray went on to produce shows such as Keeping Up with the Kardashians and Born This Way, a show Murray is particularly proud of about young adults with Down syndrome, for which he won an Emmy.

Photography courtesy of Kim Wade and Jim Meyer

Be prepared, not scared.

Considering the number of disasters that have occurred in the past decade, chances are you’ll experience some sort of emergency. Between school, sports and other activities, chances are you won’t be with your kids when it happens.

Ready.gov/kids has the tools to make preparing easy and even fun, so your kids can feel…

Prepared, not scared.

Go to

www.Ready.gov/kids and talk to your family today.

CULTURE MUSIC

Community chords This group finds joy in the simplicity of singing a tune.

BY NICOLE SCHROEDER

A

ny musician will tell you: Music feels different when you’re the one creating it. Sure, listening to songs with your headphones is fun, but it’s just not the same as belting out a tune in the shower or making music with a group of friends.

Enter Community Sing, a choral organization that is spreading throughout the United States. It found a local home through Boonville’s Turner Hall River Rats, a nonprofit art organization, in May 2018. Every month, about a dozen members gather together, form a circle and take turns suggesting songs to sing.

The music choices come from a collection of folk songs or can be introduced by group members. “This Land Is Your Land” is one of the most popular, but

16

the members also don’t shy away from The Beatles or James Taylor.

The club isn’t about creating an ensemble or hosting performances.

Instead, it welcomes people with any level of experience. They often don’t use instruments, save for a guitar if someone brings one along. As group member Dave Para says, they simply make a space for people to share a love of singing.

“Singing together is fun, and it requires a give-and-take,” Para says.

“It’s that sense of singing together and making, for lack of a better term, good vibrations together.”

The idea to bring the group to Boonville started with Para and his late wife, Cathy Barton Para, along with a few friends. Before Community Sing,

VOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

Instruments aren’t necessary, but Bob Conway brought his to Community Sing, which is held every second Thursday of the month at State Fair Community College.

the couple performed at venues around mid-Missouri, including the Big Muddy Folk Festival in Boonville. Matt Watroba, a folk singer from Detroit who developed the original concept of Community Sing, attended the same festival in 2018.

Photography by Zhuoxiu Xing

C U LT U RE MUSIC

Para and his friends heard him speak and were inspired. They soon created a regular Community Sing of their own in Boonville, providing a place for song-lovers to come together that Para felt hadn’t existed before.

“Unfortunately, people sing less and less together in our society,” Para says. “We find more ways not to sing together.”

Meredith Ludwig was one of Para’s friends who helped create Community

Turner Hall River Rats is a nonprofit organization that focuses on enhancing the arts by hosting musicals, improv comedy, art shows and more.

Sing events. She says she attends the meetings because she misses the singing she used to do as a child, when she would perform in choirs or join in with her grandparents while they sang folk songs.

“I was not a professional singer, and I don’t think many of the people actually perform anywhere,” she says. “It’s really not about performance. It’s really about the idea of singing for the joy of it.”

Singing is also good for your health, Ludwig says, and science backs her up. Recent studies have found group singing benefits mental health, social connections and overall well-being. A 2015 study by researchers in the United Kingdom and other European countries even found an increase in singers’ pain tolerance after 90 minutes of singing in a community choir, suggesting singing can trigger an increase in endorphins.

For Para, however, his love of singing comes from something much simpler.

“Words in the air have power,” he says. “Voices raised together, you know, that’s a fine thing.”

Save a life. Don’t Drive HoMe buzzeD. BUZZED DRIVING IS DRUNK DRIVING.

Photography by Zhuoxiu Xing

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2 20 050

VISION Predicting the future helps us understand the rapidly changing present, but can we really forecast the world in 30 years?

BY STEVE GARRISON

O

ur destinies contain both the possibilities for unimaginable joy and abominable grief. The snaking cables of opportunities and risks become tangled in our collective imagination, that fantastical realm where the world’s ill-defined future is negotiated daily.

But predict we must. The sun sets and rises, but will winter come early, or won’t it? Crops will thrive or fail, towns will shrink or expand, and, quite possibly, an earthquake will erupt (or won’t it?).

We can’t resist predictions. Yet, all the hope and desire and foreboding and fixation won’t help suss out tomorrow’s secrets. There is a reason why even a Magic 8-Ball, a toy sold to divine children’s desires, leaves the user wanting for answers a quarter of the time.

So why dedicate an entire issue of a magazine to that distant speck of time 30 years from today?

For one thing, those hopes, de-

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sires, forebodings and fixations can themselves be revealing, even if not revelatory. What does the desire to rehabilitate a pock-marked piece of road say about our community and its members? What about enthusiasm for a high-speed transportation system that traverses the state?

For another, thinking about the future often leads to a reckoning with the past, which informs or misinforms our every action and reaction while the minutes and hours unspool ahead of us.

The future leaders of agriculture will have to reckon with the public’s desire for the pastoral past, even as technological revolution uproots Old MacDonald’s farm. A catastrophe more than 200 years ago continues to echo today, though it’s unclear whether it resounds with Missouri state officials.

Predictions are tough. They often don’t pan out. But thankfully all the answers are a day away.

VOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

BRAVE NEW WORLD Every year, innovations push technology a little further, and the upsides and downsides can be unexpected.

BY AUSTIN WEBER

W

hen Michael Mullett first started working as the IT manager at the Daniel Boone Regional Library 20 years ago, residents could check out cassette and VHS tapes. People came in to use the public computers, and printing was one of the most important services the library offered.

Much has stayed the same during the past 20 years. People still use the computers and printers. However, the differences in technology stand out.

In those 20 years, the Daniel Boone Regional Library has evolved to fit the needs of the community it serves. DVDs, free WiFi, check-out hotspots and more have been introduced. Mullett says he thinks the library will continue to be a central location for technology, as well as the numerous other resources it provides for Columbia’s population. Some things will never change, such as the access to free WiFi, though Mullett says it will attract fewer people if the city or state installs a universal broadband network in the future. With 97.4% of Missouri land considered rural by a 2000 census from the Missouri Census Data Center, some people are unable to get quality access to the internet. As the need for it increases, so does the possibility of state- or citywide broadband. “The cost will come down, and it will become more affordable,” says Yi Shang, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MU. “The whole city will be able to have high-speed connectivity. I think that it’s not a stretch. It will become a reality.”

Mullett’s hopes for advancement are shared among many libraries. According to a 2016 article from Business Insider, libraries are already working to add technologies such as 3D printers to give people access to this for creation and design.

But what technology might the next 30 years bring? Components get smaller and more efficient and as technology becomes exponentially more precise and powerful, it is hard to predict. Shang says he doesn’t know what the future will look like but has a few ideas based on the technologies we’re using right now. “You do have very futuristic predictions, but also more practical predictions,” Shang says. “In general, if you combine them together, you can get a handle on what it will look like.”

For example, Shang says he sees improved virtual reality, which is used for things such as gaming, education, training and more being much bigger than it is today. The 3D virtual world would be used to enhance the 2D online world by making it more interactive, Shang says. The strong immersive experience could become more addictive than the online space we use now, he says. According to the 2019 digital reports collected by Hootsuite and We Are Social, the average American already spends 6 hours and 30 minutes per day online, and virtual reality might get even more time-consuming.

Shang is also concerned about self-driving cars. He doesn’t imagine the year 2050 with cars doing all of the driving because of artificial intelligence limitations. Self-driving cars would be able to operate autonomously under common, simple conditions, but once complicating factors come in, human intervention would be necessary.

“When I drive my kid to school in icy conditions, the traffic is very different,” Shang says.

“When we left turn into the parking lot, I have to yield to the right lane. The right-turn cars wait and wave us in. It’s against the traffic rules in some ways. I don’t think the self-driving cars could handle those kinds of situations very well.”

In addition to the library, another place in

Columbia where technology will have a bigger which ones are the most relevant for education, role is in the public schools. Columbia Public a problem Szydlowski noticed while travelSchools have been good at keeping up to date ing abroad. He recently took a trip to Japan, a with new technological possibilities. “There is country known for its advanced technology, and very little they haven’t tried to explore,” says saw how schools use it in the classroom. The Mike Szydlowski, K-12 science coordinator for use of technology actually was rather limited Columbia Public Schools. Schools have added compared to America, he says, for reasons he laptops recently, and all students in grades five believes American schools will face over the next through 12 have iPads decades: In Japan, they for school. aren’t using all possiEven with every“ Y O U D O H AV E ble technologies, but thing that has been using those that have added, Szydlowski enVERY FUTURISTIC a purpose. And schools visions many more new won’t be able to afford PREDICTIONS, things before 2050. One all different kinds that possibility he hopes for become available.

BUT ALSO MORE is school desks with the Another problem technology embedded in is that the more techP R AC T I CA L them. More importantly, nology students use, he wants classes to teach they will struggle with PREDICTIONS. IN students coding and human interactions, a software development. necessary skill in adult G E N E R A L , I F YO U “Everything has differlife. Cell phones have ent softwares nowadays, already been targeted COMBINE THEM from farming, to trash as part of the problem. disposal to schools,” Social abilities arTO G E T H E R , YO U Szydlowski says. “It’s a en’t the only matters skill that can help kids at risk. Security, for C A N G E T A H A N D L E example, is an issue get into any field.”

Mullett mentions.

Using devices in O N W H AT I T W I L L People already have school isn’t always a good thing, and Szyconcerns that they are L O O K L I K E .” dlowski expects there being watched by their to be critics as schools laptop cameras or are - YI SHANG start to add more. This having their inforhas already begun, with mation sold by social students at CPS opposed media companies. As to using online textbooks. But the backlash technology gets more advanced and becomes could go even further than that, since the cost a bigger part of life by 2050, surely this anxiety of new devices will force schools to choose will only intensify and it could breed fears in people who currently have no worries.

“If you are connected, although we have worked on making things more secure, there’s no such thing as 100% secure,” Shang says.

This brings up the question: if too much could be at risk, will people want to use all of the newest technology?

Shang says that any fears about technology will stem from the humans behind it. In the future, more oversight will be needed to make sure useful technologies won’t be used in dangerous ways. If it is certain that technology will take an even more important part of our lives in the future, backlash is also to be expected.

Predicting what kind of gadgets we will have in our living rooms in 30 years remains impossible, and so is figuring out the next challenges technology will bring to our lives.

Photo Courtesy from Pexels and Photo Illustrations by Madison Wisse

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LIVING The threat of a catastrophic quake lurks beneath southeastern Missouri. Or does it?

BY STEVE GARRISON

E

liza Bryan awoke at 2 a.m. Dec. 16 to the calamity of the earth’s violent shiver. An awful sound, a loud but distant thunder was accompanied by a shaking of the ground.

Sulphurous clouds arose and blotted the night sky as the residents of the small Missouri town of New Madrid joined the beasts and birds in a choir of screaming and screeching and squalling.

The chaos continued into dawn as residents fled to the hills.

So began the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812. The tremors, which continued for months, rang church bells in Charleston, South Carolina, stopped clocks in Annapolis, Maryland, and tested the sea legs of sailors along the eastern coast.

It also confirmed prophecy for members of the Creek confederacy. The Creek, also known as the Muscogee, is a Native American tribe that once controlled vast territories across the southeastern United States, but in the early 1800s, they were facing increasing pressure from the U.S. government to relocate to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River.

The threat of losing their homes made tribal members particularly receptive to the message of Tecumseh, the charismatic leader of a multi-tribal band of warriors opposing settler encroachment.

At a gathering a few months before the earthquakes, Tecumseh told members of the Creek he would ascend the top of a high mountain. There, he would whoop three times, clap his hands three times and stamp his foot three times, causing the whole earth to tremble.

And it did.

SEISMIC UNCERTAINTY Nowadays, rather than mountain tops, prophecies are more commonly issued from ivory towers. University and government researchers divine catastrophe through calculations and computers.

Federal money funnels into labs in Memphis, Tennessee, and Urbana, Illinois, where scientists analyze earthen crust for signs of an-

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ON A

FAULTLINE

cient disruption and study the scribbles made across the revolving drums of seismographs.

Divination is tough work. The mysteries of the New Madrid remain elusive, but the stakes are high in southern Missouri. The state sits on a simmering pot of primordial forces threatening to unleash catastrophe.

How catastrophic?

A 7.7 magnitude earthquake, similar in strength to the ones that struck in the early 1800s, would damage about 84,000 buildings and destroy 37,000 more, almost entirely residences, according to a 2008 report from the Mid-America Earthquake Center.

Over 15,000 people would be killed. An additional 120,000 would be displaced.

Nearly 200 schools and over 100 fire stations would be damaged; 37 hospitals and 67 police stations would be inoperable the day after the earthquake in the state of Missouri. Thousands of bridges would collapse and railways would be destroyed, paralyzing travel across southeast Missouri. Total damages to the state would reach nearly $40 billion, the report states.

Scientists say they believe there is a 7% to 10% chance such an earthquake strikes within the New Madrid Seismic Zone in the next 50 years. There is a 25% to 45% chance of a 6.0 magnitude or greater earthquake striking in that time.

In a cavernous storage unit at the University of Missouri Department of Geological Sciences building, hides a green, egg-shaped seismometer about the size of a pumpkin. “That’s our principal tool,” Professor Eric Sandvol says. “It’s an incredibly rich and very important data set.”

Seismometers like Sandvol’s register about 100 small earthquakes every year in the New Madrid Seismic Zone. Six struck on Oct. 27, 2019, alone, the largest of them a 2.8 magnitude quake just south of Tiptonville, Tennessee.

Despite this data, scientists are still not certain what is actually causing the earthquakes.

Approximately 95% of all earthquakes on the planet happen at plate boundaries. The most common cause is the grinding of tectonic plates

— pieces of the earth’s crust and mantle — as they drift like glaciers across the planet’s surface.

As those plates grind, they generate tremendous tension, which is eventually released in the form of an earthquake.

The New Madrid Seismic Zone is not on a plate boundary, however. Nestled in the center of the continent, the zone is about as far from the plate boundaries of North America as it can get, Sandvol says. Instead, there is an aulacogen, or failed rift, within this seismic zone. It was created when the continent tried to tear itself apart hundreds of millions of years ago, and for a long time it was believed that failed rift was causing the seismic activity.

But aulacogens are quite common, Sandvol says, and few of them are seismically active. A massive aulacogen extends across the Plains and hooks into Michigan, but very few earthquakes are reported in Kansas, Nebraska or Iowa.

New theories have been offered based on the relatively young age of the New Madrid Seismic Zone. One suggests those ice sheets compressed the continental plate. It has been slowly bouncing back over thousands of years.

The decompression causes tension within the crust, thus leading to earthquakes. However, it is not relevent with New Madrid Seismic Zone.

Another theory suggests melting glacier runoff caused massive sediment loads to be washed down into the Mississippi River Basin, and the crushing weight of that material compressed the plate.

ON SHAKY GROUND Not all scientists are even convinced the New Madrid is an active seismic zone. Seth Stein, a professor at Northwestern University, has argued that “zombie science,” or disproved theories, has been used by government officials to justify overblown fears about a catastrophic earthquake in the New Madrid Seismic Zone.

Stein’s team at Northwestern University has collected almost 20 years of GPS data in the seismic zone, and little to no fault-related deformation has been recorded, which indicates

that the major earthquakes that plagued the region have ended, though smaller earthquakes can still occur.

Stein’s theories frustrate scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey. They say they believe the region is overdue for a big earthquake, and communities need to prepare for it, Sandvol says. “It has gotten, on occasion, quite nasty, this debate,” he says.

For instance, the state has not adopted seismic building codes, but has left it up to local jurisdictions to decide whether buildings should be built to withstand an earthquake. That has left a perilous gap in the state’s protection system, according to FEMA, which notes adoption and enforcement of building codes at the local level can be a critical weak link in safety plans.

Sandvol, who has served on the Missouri Seismic Safety Commission for years, says he has been told statewide building codes are not “politically viable.” He’s particularly concerned about schools. The commission offers free rapid visual screenings to identify seismic risks at schools, and experts have identified a lot of buildings constructed from unreinforced masonry.

The problems don’t end with infrastructure.

The Seismic Safety Commission, a 17-member body of specialists from across a variety of fields, was created to review Missouri’s current preparedness for major earthquakes and make recommendations to mitigate impact.

But Sandvol says for years the governor’s office, under several administrations, has failed to appoint new members to the commission, hindering its efforts to inspect schools and bring awareness to the state’s problems.

The commission currently has seven vacancies, according to Jeff Briggs, the earthquake program manager for Missouri State Emergency Management Agency. Candidates have applied to fill the positions, but Governor Mike Parson hasn’t approved them.

Kelli R. Jones, communications director for the governor’s office, initially said her office’s records only showed three vacancies on the commission. When pressed on the point, Jones says more members might have stepped down or resigned without informing her office. She says the seismic safety commission is still able to meet quorum and conduct official business.

The earthquake of Dec. 16, 1811, was only the first of three major earthquakes to strike in the region around the new year. Another smaller earthquake hit on Jan. 23, 1812, and then a final powerful one struck on Feb. 7, 1812, devastating the town of New Madrid.

Though scientists question some descriptions contained in the historical record, no one

doubts the quakes powerful, each one estimated between 7.0 and 8.0 magnitude.

Due to the sparse population in the region at the time, loss of life was minimal, but the fissures, liquefied soil, landslides and sand blows destroyed buildings and sullied farmland. In 1815, Congress passed the nation’s first relief act, which authorized the sale of public lands to those who had lost property to the devastation.

Despite good intentions, the relief act was a boondoggle. Before news of the government’s generosity reached the frontier, speculators had swarmed New Madrid to purchase damaged property at bargain prices.

Those displaced by the quakes gathered up their belongings and moved to other areas, including Boone County.

Today, some local land still reflects that

Photography courtesy from Pexels and photo illustrations by Madison Wisse

history. It’s identified not with a legal description but a New Madrid claim number. Those properties were settled by survivors of the New Madrid earthquakes.

WORST CASE SCENARIO Missouri’s plan for addressing a catastrophic earthquake is outlined in a 590-page report. It details the steps government officials would take following a catastrophic earthquake.

In the earthquake’s immediate aftermath, crews would work to establish emergency communications and conduct damage and safety assessments. Emergency personnel would conduct search and rescue operations, fight fires and contain hazardous materials.

Maintaining lines of supply and transportation would be critical. With many bridges and

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roads destroyed, air routes could be used to move first responders and resources — medicine, food, water and fuel — into the damaged areas. The government would need to house and feed thousands of displaced people as well as pets, many of which would likely be separated from their loved ones.

The injured would be treated at operational hospitals or mobile emergency medical centers. Law enforcement officers would patrol evacuated areas, secure shelters and control traffic. Public affairs personnel would disseminate emergency information through whatever communication channels remained operational after the earthquake.

Throughout the recovery efforts, aftershocks would hamper operations and response.

If you were asleep in bed at 2 a.m. in Columbia when a severe earthquake hit the New Madrid, you’d know it. It’d shake and break windows, send dishes and glassware tumbling, knock books off of shelves and flip furniture.

Boone County is considered one of the 45 critical counties in the state that would experience substantial shaking, though it would be less severe than in the Bootheel. The county’s mitigation plan expects slight damage from a 6.7 magnitude earthquake — about $611,000 in building damages.

But a 7.6 magnitude earthquake, which would be about 10 times greater in strength, would be significantly more devastating, causing $73.4 million in structural damages in the county and an additional $258 million in non-structural damage. Injuries and loss of life are estimated to be low, even in the worst-case scenario.

Sherril Gladney, the planning and preparedness specialist for the Boone County Office of Emergency Management, says the state considers the county a “support county,” meaning it would assist in the evacuation of people from more severely damaged areas.

Gladney says the office promotes personal preparedness as a way to mitigate the risks of an earthquake, since government resources are limited and have huge demand. “So if more people are personally prepared and can take care of their own needs, then we can prioritize the use of those resources for people and places that have experienced the most

22

impact,” she says.

THE PREPPER’S PRAYER Not everyone is waiting for the white knight of government to save them. On preppergroups.com, survivalists seek out like-minded community members with skills in canning, animal husbandry, basic firearm use and even bomb shelter repair.

Spero “Steve” Spanios, one of the site’s users, is a 58-year-old veteran and retired pipefitter homesteading a 12-acre farm in Mansfield, about an hour east of Springfield.

Born in Okinawa, Japan, and raised in Florida, Spanios was always a tinkerer, but he first became interested in disaster preparation after the Y2K scare. Before buying his farm, he says he studied the risks of natural disasters in different parts of the country to ensure he was not located in any major disaster zones, including the New Madrid Seismic Zone.

He says earthquakes rank in his top five when it comes to disaster concerns, behind political or social unrest and extreme weather anomalies. He says to prepare for a violent earthquake, he built a small cabin on heavy pavers over a bed of shock-absorbing gravel. Thick rubber bands and cardboard insulate his glass bottles of preserved food.

Energy is crucial: He has thousands of gallons of propane in storage, but what is more important is water, particularly if the earthquake bursts utility pipes.

Spanios admits he does not know the details of the government’s plan for an earthquake, but he is skeptical. “All governments are underfunded, understaffed and totally unprepared for everything,” he says.

Spanios says disaster is God’s will.

America is an empire in decline, debauched and degraded, the world’s largest exporter of immorality. If an earthquake strikes, it’s divine providence, a punishment for people who tried to become their own gods.

Spanios isn’t shy about his beliefs.

Under the YouTube name YesuMessiah, he uploads videos lamenting in a talk radio voice the ills of our wayward nation.

“The world is in error and on the broad path to destruction, but praise the Lord that we have power and salvation through Jesus Christ our Lord,” he says on completing his sermon.

No sign yet of the earth’s tremble.

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WE DON’T NEED

ROADS Will Missouri’s future include transport from Columbia to St. Louis in just 15 minutes?

BY BROOKE KNAPPENBERGER

P

icture this: The year is 2050, and you just realized you’re late for work. You run out the door and start heading to your job in St. Louis, a trip that would typically take two hours by car from Columbia. Instead of being hours late, you make it in about 15 minutes. You didn’t take a jetpack or flying car. Instead you traveled at rocket-ship speed in Virgin Hyperloop One’s new mode of transportation along I-70.

This vision isn’t the stuff of a sci-fi movie; it may very well be a reality with a new transportation system called hyperloop. It is made of an enclosed tube that transports passengers and cargo quickly from place to place using magnetic levitation and electric propulsion. A vehicle or “pod” is loaded into the enclosed tube and propelled through the tube electronically. All air is removed from the tube, which creates a frictionless environment that allows the vehicle to levitate along the magnetic track at speeds as high as 670 mph.

Ryan Weber, president and CEO of the KC Tech Council, compares hyperloop technology to airplane travel. “Just like when you take off the airplane, you feel that initial acceleration, then you reach terminal velocity, and you don’t feel like you’re traveling at 500 mph, but you are,” he says.

The vehicles slowly accelerate and decelerate, so passengers can easily relax during their trip and enjoy a cup of coffee. The design places safety as a No. 1 priority. It will be fully autonomous, so there shouldn’t be any driver-related issues, and there would be no interactions with other transport systems or wildlife. Weather hazards such as icy roads and storms aren’t an issue because the tube is constructed of thick, enclosed steel and drilled into the ground.

The hyperloop’s speed is more than double that of high-speed trains globally. The fastest train in the world currently is the Shanghai Maglev with a speed of 267 mph. Other trains include China’s Fuxing Hao CR400AF/BF reaching 249 mph and Japan’s Shinkansen H5 and E5 at 224 mph, but nothing would compare to Missouri’s hyperloop.

WHY MISSOURI? Kansas City to St. Louis isn’t the only route Virgin Hyperloop One is looking at for its proposal. Virgin Hyperloop One, the only company with a completed hyperloop test track to scale, has projects in nine states and several other countries; however, Missouri has some advantages over the other routes.

“In Missouri, the advantage really is: The state has enthusiasm, it has a vision, it has a sense that it wants to build on a long-standing tradition of being a leader in transportation innovation, and I think that is really, really exciting,” said Jay Walder, Virgin Hyperloop One CEO in an April 2019 interview with The Missouri Times.

In October 2018, Missouri became the first state to complete a feasibility study of hyperloop technology. Engineering firm Black & Veatch examined the social impact, station locations, regulatory issues, route alignments and more to determine if a hyperloop route along I-70 is possible. The study found that transportation costs could decrease by $91 million from the reduction of highway accidents as well as up to $410 million saved from less time on the road.

Missouri House Speaker Elijah Haahr followed up the feasibility study by forming a panel in March 2019. It was tasked with creating a plan to get the first hyperloop track to Missouri, according to KOMU. Panel members include Weber, UM System President Mun Choi, Senators Caleb Rowden and Brian Williams, as well as other private sector leaders and experts.

and the government. It would ensure that the hyperloop project is delivered “in the safest, fastest and most responsible way possible, delivering the full array of project benefits while mitigating the risks to taxpayers,” according to the report.

The report also states a need for a 12- to 15-mile test track costing $300 to $500 million in addition to $50 to $100 million for initial research and development.

HOW WILL IT AFFECT MISSOURI? Hyperloop technology in Missouri means you could grab dinner in Kansas City then catch a concert at Delmar Loop in St. Louis all in the same night. Not only could your weekend plans become limitless, but hyperloop would also connect all of Kansas City, Columbia and St. Louis’ resources in what Weber refers to as a mega-region. “Being able to leverage the assets and all three of those cities will create a mega-region of millions more workers, more health care options; you have more education options,” Weber says. He says that the connecting cities would have access to millions more workers, 2.7 million more according to the report.

The report states that Missouri could reap the social, economic and educational rewards a hyperloop track would bring. This includes

WHAT ABOUT COSTS? After about six months, the panel released its final report during a news conference at MU on Oct. 28, 2019. The panel’s report estimates a hyperloop track across Missouri would cost $30 to $40 million per mile, or about $7.3 to $10.4 billion total.

However, taxpayers need not fret just yet. Weber assures that the funding will not come from taxes. “I don’t think there’s any appetite in Missouri for taxpayers to fund the development, and that is certainly not a recommendation any of us are making,” Weber says.

Weber says the development could be funded through a public-private partnership, which would be combination of businesses Photo courtesy from Pexels and photo illustrations by Madison Wisse

7,600 to 17,200 new jobs, an annual economic impact of $1.67 to $3.68 billion from new jobs and tax revenue generated by the construction of the hyperloop, as well as increased real estate value around portal locations.

“I think for employers, it would be incredibly exciting to leverage much more than what’s in your own backyard with a system like this,” Weber says.

The mega-region would significantly increase Missouri’s global competitiveness for high-quality jobs. It would have an environmental impact as well with a reduction of over 530,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to the report.

WHAT’S NEXT? To take hyperloop from conception to reality, the next step is to try to obtain the Virgin Hyperloop One test track in Missouri. Once it releases its request for proposals, Missouri will be well-equipped to put in a proposal, House Speaker Elijah Haahr said during the October news conference.

Haahr says the first full-length track will be built from the certification track, so bringing a test track in Missouri is absolutely vital. The first certification track in Missouri would also provide opportunities to expand the hyperloop across the country.

“If we build a route in Missouri that comes from St. Louis to Kansas City, then we can go west to Denver in an hour, we can go up to Chicago, we can go north to Minneapolis or south to Atlanta,” Haahr says.

Having the hyperloop in Missouri might seem far from reality, but it isn’t just a pipe dream. Haahr says all of Missouri’s qualities make it a strong competitor for getting the hyperloop.

“We’ve got something that no other state has with our geography, with having a topographical and straight line map between St. Louis and Kansas City, having the second and third largest rail hub in the country that sort of connect the two sides of the state, and then having one of the top engineering schools in the country right in the middle,” Haahr says. “Everything is sort of coming together to dovetail in Missouri.”

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SEEDS OF

CHANGE

With a growing population and a decreasing number of producers, farmers venture online to discuss the future of agriculture.

BY EMILY ADAMS

I

n our online world, people aren’t afraid to share opinions on just about anything. This includes views about the future of agriculture, whether that’s President Trump’s trade tariffs or eating less meat or genetically modified organisms, which is food that is grown from engineered seeds. At a time when there are many pathways for the future of agriculture, there are two visions that have solidified on social media. One is the smaller, more sustainable farms trying to come up with new practices to use fewer resources. The second is the larger farms that are trying to become more efficient in order to feed the growing population.

Ben Luebbering, 20, is a farmer who represents the latter. He also is literally a pig farmer of the future. Luebbering was awarded the title by the National Pork Board in March 2019. He has taken to the internet to create content and share his thoughts on pork production on sites such as Medium and Twitter for the Real Pig Farming movement, a public relations campaign dedicated to uniting farmers, educators, industry members and more to share how modern pork production works.

became widely available to improve crops and livestock. Today efficiency still reigns supreme.

The ability to reduce costs and supplies often has separated successful farms from bankrupt ones. Farmers must keep adapting to avoid this fate that so many others have faced.

BLOGGING IN THE BARN Luebbering has been sharing his love of farming

on social media for years. A former member of the prestigious Missouri Future Farmers of America Officer Team, he is soft-spoken and articulate.

Some of his articles on the Real Pig Farming’s blog make lighthearted references to delicious slabs of ribs and #Porktober, while others discuss the intricacies of antibiotic use and quality assurance. His stories are short enough to succeed on social media and simple enough for consumers to understand. They help fuel the Real Pig Farming Twitter account, where a new piece of content surfaces every few days. Sometimes it’s a “Littlest Pig Farmer” video featuring a pint-sized kid dressed in western clothing completing their farm chores. These posts help let the public see a different side of the farming industry, while still being educational.

In 1968, Ben’s grandparents founded the Lubbering’s farm, 16 years before Mark Zuckerberg was born and 36 years before he founded Facebook. The farm is located near St. Thomas,

SUPPLY AND DEMAND The world population is predicted to grow to roughly 9.7 billion people by 2050. Right now, one U.S. farm feeds roughly 155 people per year. With the predicted population growth, farmers will need to increase their production by 70%, according to Farm Bureau. But the farming industry isn’t growing like the population is. In 1935, there were 6.8 million farms in the U.S., and in 2017 there were roughly 2 million, 100,000 of which were in Missouri.

Social media isn’t the only advancement changing the lives of farmers and consumers. Technology in farming allows for production to move more smoothly and for the public to view how the food they eat everyday is made. In the 1980s, biotechnology

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Photography Courtesy of Pexels and Photo Illustration by Madison Wisse

Missouri, and sits on a hilltop overlooking intermittent pastures and woods. The farm is named Profits Point after a creek that runs through the property. Ben and his father, Doug Luebbering, share some of the daily chores such as checking pigs to ensure that they have fresh feed and water. Ben, though, is wrapping up his bachelors degree and can only come home on the weekends.

Public conversation on the web is a brave new world for many farmers, especially for those who didn’t grow up with social media, like Doug. “Ten years ago, I didn’t know what social media was,” he says.

To Doug, Ben’s foray into social media is a chance to show the public what farming means at Profits Point. The Luebberings are trying to show farming in a positive light, but not everyone agrees.

In Missouri, the Facebook group Friends of Responsible Agriculture advocates against Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, a term

used by the Department of Natural Resources to describe farms with over 1,000 units (or 1,000 pounds) of animals being raised indoors for more than 45 days straight. For example, this would be 700 dairy cows or 82,000 hens.

Community members and some farmers say CAFOs are “factory farms.” The issue these groups have with CAFOs is the potential pollutants that come from the large amount of concentrated animal waste.

“A lot of people like to use the term factory farming and things that have a negative connotation,” Doug says. “They think we’re just in it for the money.”

As margins have become thinner, the Luebberings have used technology in clever ways to become more efficient. Housing pigs indoors provides a steady income that isn’t weather-dependent, unlike growing crops, which were flooded last summer. Ben is especially enamored with technology and sees it as Profits Point’s ticket into a prosperous future. The ease of online record keeping has helped producers to reduce costs and make more with less because they have been able to track everything more easily. One of Ben’s goals for the farm is to become even more efficient in order to support himself and his cousins.

GET CONNECTED The sustainable agriculture movement offers another view of the future. It hopes to feed the growing population without compromising resources for the future generation. Some of the more sustainable practices include becoming more enviornmentally friendly by using less water and lowering pollutants, according to the Agriculture Sustainability Institute.

Farmers and consumers on social media have also worked to be more sustainable by spreading #meatlessmonday, a global campaign urging people to stop eating meat in the name of healthy living and curbing climate change.

The campaign also provides information online about recipes and health news related to food.

The Columbia Farmer’s Market serves as a haven where consumers can learn about farming and purchase fresh food. The farmer’s market has recently started work on an agriculture park that will allow residents to learn about the local farming industry in new ways.

The role of social media in agriculture was still in its infancy when John Corn became involved with the Columbia Farmers’ Market years ago. He has watched as more and more vendors begin to share their stories online. Now president of the board of directors, Corn, and other vendors, are benefiting from the market’s lively and engaging social media presence.

THE FARMING INDUSTRY ISN’T GROWING LIKE THE POPULATION IS. Corn also farms 2 acres of mixed vegetables with his wife, Sandra Corn. Sometimes she will post pictures of arrangements she’s made using fresh produce. Corn says his main goal for his farm’s social media page is to inform consumers about when they can buy his products and what is available.

Columbia resident Angela Claybrook frequently shops at the market with her husband and young son. Shes says she is interested in interacting with the farmers who grow her food and learning about the health benefits of their products. Knowing about production practices has only made her more passionate about local agriculture.

“I’m hoping that people gain more interest in coming to the farmers’ market, eating healthier and meeting all these wonderful people who are producing these things for us to benefit from,” Claybrook says.

The Luebberings also have a farm Facebook page, where rows of sleeping piglets serve as the cover photo. It’s one of Ben’s projects. He is always trying to find new ways to complete his vision, but he’s often frustrated by farm’s slow internet connection. Consumers’ opinions on the industry form online for future generations to follow. However, without access to internet, it could put farmers behind. Roughly 1.2 million Missourians are living without high-speed internet, according to the Missouri Department of Economic Development.

Internet isn’t just a problem in rural areas.

Corn says the lack of internet access can be a barrier for farmers’ market vendors, too. “A lot of our newer growers are very adept at promoting themselves on social media,” he says. “Then there are those that are very rural without internet access, and they also might be older. It’s kind of beyond their means.”

Growing access to the internet and a more youthful generations of farmers will continue to add to the shifting presence of agriculture online as the industry figures out its future over the next 30 years.

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THE LOOP OF THE FUTURE Can the fallen symbol of Columbia’s wealth regain its former splendor ?

BY KELLY KENOYER

I

t’s an odd thing to wait for someone in a sex shop, politely perusing the vibrators with the middle-aged white ladies here on a weekday afternoon. James Roark-Gruender, a giant man currently wheeling and dealing on the phone behind the counter, is the owner of Passions in Columbia. After a few minutes he hangs up and apologizes. “Ready for the tour?” he asks.

As he’s leaving the shop, Roark-Gruender grabs a tester packet of flavored lubricant from a basket by the counter and shoves it in the hands of a confused woman waiting at the register.

“Take it! It’s free! Stick it in your purse!” He bellows over his shoulder, and the bemused blonde takes them as he walks out of the store.

Roark-Gruender hops in his SUV to take a tour of the street his store occupies: Business Loop 70. As the chair of the board for The Loop Community Improvement District (CID), he has a grand vision for the future. He considers

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himself a face of the street, just like the Loop is one of the many faces of Columbia.

“You’ve got seven exits into Columbia, and almost every one of them crosses the Business Loop,” Roark-Gruender says. “This is what people see when they first come to Columbia.”

And it’s a mean mug to put forward. No sidewalks, decrepit buildings, pawn shops and title loan companies galore. The Business Loop’s rough appearance is the result of decades of reliance on cars as the vehicle of the future; shop fronts practically open into traffic in some spots.

Back in its heyday, the street was a center of economic development, and starry-eyed entrepreneurs saw it as the future of Columbia at the edge of town. The Business Loop is the original Highway 40, which traversed the entire continental U.S., so it carried a lot of through-traffic at the time. That traffic brought businesses and life to a part of Columbia that

used to be farmland, says Dave Griggs, former owner of the carpet store Dave Griggs’ Flooring America on Business Loop. He says the street used to mean a lot to him. “Even as early as the '50s, when dad and I would go to town to get feed for the dairy cows, we would stop at a little place, which literally is right across the street from my former store, called the Silver Griddle, and have breakfast on Saturday morning,” Griggs says. “Truly, it was kind of the business center of Columbia. Hotels, motels, automobile dealerships, shops, farm equipment dealers, all kinds of restaurants.”

But the buildings along that hopeful street haven’t changed much since then, and that era of expansion led into an era of decline. The new businesses brought more traffic, and the traffic caused engineers to widen the street. “The business buildings are where they were built in the '40s, '50s and '60s, but the highway is 2-1/2 or

Photography by Melissa Fogarty and photo illustrations by Madison Wisse

3 times wider than it used to be,” Griggs says.

“By reducing the setbacks, and by eliminating a lot of landscaping just because of growth of traffic, the Business Loop’s appearance suffered.”

Today, many of the Business Loop’s buildings are hunched over the sidewalks.

Griggs says the business owners on the Loop started to feel like they were on their own.

About 15 or 20 years ago, Griggs and another business leader tried to round up enough interest to form a CID to help improve the street. “I don’t want to say ‘save the Loop’ — but to at least stop the decline,” he says. “We could not drum up any interest hardly at all, so that deal just kind of went by the wayside.”

But the Downtown CID, formed in 2011, showed how that kind of organization could be a path to success. The naysayers started to see the benefits of banding together to fix up the street. In 2015, the City Council voted to form The Loop CID, and businesses along the street agreed to a sales tax increase to make their neighborhood nicer the same year. “These people are willing to put their money where their mouth is to get things done,” Griggs says.

“And when you come to the city or the state and say we want to help you do something,

and we’re willing to pay for it, you get a lot more attention.”

After years of neglect, the Loop finally has some momentum. The CID is trying to reverse the trend of wider streets and no sidewalks and take back The Loop from cars. CID’s executive director, Carrie Gartner, wants to turn this “5cent version of a highway” into a bike-friendly green corridor where people actually want to spend time. Despite the fact that Gartner wants to make the Loop more walkable and bikeable, the neighborhood will retain its industrial character. “What we’re looking at is makers and artisans and small-scale manufacturers and creative industries,” she says. “So if we can be a hub for where makers come, that would be exciting. What we do is we backfill the infrastructure, we add more sidewalks.”

As Roark-Gruender drives around, he points out parking lots that could house new buildings for artisans. As he cruises past MU’s North Campus, he indicates a field in front of the building’s parking lot: “Wouldn’t this be a great place for a little amphitheater, out here in the green space?” he says. The old campus will soon have a commercial kitchen in the basement, he says, an opportunity for entrepreneurs to produce foodstuffs for commercial sale.

But there are a lot of hurdles for the CID to overcome before it can institute its 10-year, $15-million master plan. The road belongs to the state, and Missouri Department of Transportation doesn’t have much money for road improvements. And the city can’t exactly take over the street, Roark-Gruender says. “They don’t have the means. Let’s leave it at that.”

Another problem stops a lot of landowners from building new construction on their properties. “One of the hesitations with building is stormwater; the construction is very, very expensive,” Roark-Gruender says. The 10year plan proposes curbside rain gardens to deal with flooding, but big stormwater improvements are expensive and will come on a slower timescale.

So remaking the street comes down to small-scale projects often spearheaded by local businesses, such as the Community Pop-Up Park that opened last April in a parking lot, or some sensual street art painted on the side of Passions in Columbia. The long-term master plan includes restriping the street to introduce a bike lane with a painted buffer and adding sidewalks once the unsightly electric lines go underground. Some beautifying natural elements have already been implemented in test cases: Hickman High School students planted purple and gold flowers in fall of 2019.

The full $15 million plan is projected to be completed by 2030; 2050 might see a Business Loop that fulfills at least part of Carrie Gartner’s vision. You can picture it: cyclists biking down the Loop to visit small businesses, new storefronts lining the street, safe crosswalks for the students of Hickman High. And with all the buy-in from local businesses, it seems likely that can happen.

Griggs, having seen the street deteriorate for so many decades, has a lot of hope encapsulated in the pop-up park in a parking lot right next to his old store. It’s a friendly space, with a bright blue-and-green shipping container framing a seating area with a patch of artificial turf, outdoor games, flowers in planters and strings of lights hanging above. Dozens of volunteers built the park in spring 2019, and community members often reserve it for events. The CID even does programming for the space. “It’s just really rewarding to see how the Loop has already transformed,” Griggs says. “I can only imagine what the Loop will look like in 10 or 15 years — it will be a great place.”

Leaving the Loop by bicycle, it’s still clear the street has a long way to go. Whatever bike lanes exist now sit squarely in the gutter, and sidewalks are limited at best. No safe cyclist would stay on the street for long. But with a bit of new paint and some TLC, the Loop might really become the street Griggs thinks it can be.

YOU CAN PICTURE IT: CYCLISTS BIKING DOWN THE LOOP TO VISIT SMALL BUSINESSES, NEW STOREFRONTS LINING THE STREET, SAFE CROSSWALKS FOR THE STUDENTS OF HICKMAN HIGH. 27

All that remains How does a family rebound after losing all of its possessions to a fire? What comes after the rubble is cleared and the neighbors stop dropping offfreezer meals? One Columbia family shares the story of the night it lost everything and the year of rebuilding that followed.

Story by Nicole Schroeder • Photography by Madison Parry

It was this photo, tweeted by the Columbia Fire Department, that made the Cox-Shirds aware of the chaos happening at their home.

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Photography courtesy of Columbia Fire Department

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W

hen I starting writing this, I thought it was a fire story. But it’s much more than that. It’s about a family, the Cox-Shirds.

It’s built on one unavoidable fact: Tragedy strikes. It’s a story about resilience, about how that word describes more than a quality to be exemplified in hard times. It’s about how resilience is something you build into your daily life, how it evolves. And the Cox-Shirds know how to evolve.

Anissa Cox, 36; her daughter, Alandrea Cox, 18; and twin sons, Charley and Chance Shird, 8, relocated to Columbia from Oakdale, Louisiana, in 2010. They moved into 5405 Chamois Drive in south Columbia just four years ago. Anissa’s goddaughter Sanaa’ St. Andre, 17, moved in with the family in the summer of 2018. Their house was one of the few rental homes in the Thornbrook subdivision. I’ve lived a few streets away from Chamois for 16 years — the majority of my life. Anissa’s parents had been living in Thornbrook since her dad, Willie Cox, joined the MU Women’s Basketball staff in 2010.

Willie wasn’t the only one with a love of basketball. Just mention the sport, and every face in the room lights up. Alandrea played throughout school, and Sanaa’ is a point guard on Rock Bridge High School’s girls basketball team. As for the boys, their hoop dreams go beyond school. “I want to be a basketball player for the Golden State Warriors,” Chance says. Charley chimes in, “I’m going to be a point guard, too.”

The boys seem shy on their own, but when they’re to-

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gether, they come alive — two halves made whole. As the third-graders talk about their future basketball careers, they play their own version of the game.

Charley passes a small foam ball to his brother to dunk into a toy hoop. Charley has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair.

He can’t pass quickly, but Chance waits patiently, knees bent and arms outstretched to catch his brother’s throw.

For a family that loves basketball, life has thrown them plenty of flagrant fouls. When Charley and Chance were born in 2011, they were 16 weeks premature, and each had developed a brain bleed as a result. With Charley’s cerebral palsy diagnosis a few months later, there were a lot of adjustments all at once. “You wake up, and you don’t know what’s going to happen today,” Anissa says. “That’s basically the world that we were living in for the first three months of their life.” She spent time researching the diagnosis in hopes of helping Charley live the best life possible. “It was a roller coaster,” she says. And to manage it all, she prayed.

Then, in July 2018, Willie was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

He would later be treated at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Anissa traded off watching the kids with her mother, Juanita, and used the time to make the five-hour drive to visit her father. It wasn’t easy, Juanita says, but her daughter is resilient, just like the rest of the family.

Up in flames On the night of Feb. 2, 2019, Charley and Chance had fallen asleep at their grandparents’ house. Anissa and Alandrea were home making shirts for Anissa’s work with an event planning company.

To make them, they used a heat press. After finishing around midnight, they decided to spend the night at the grandparents’, too. “We were gonna stay [home],” Anissa says, “but then Alandrea said ‘What if the boys wake

Where the Cox-Shird family’s old life had taken place, something new has been built. up and we’re not there?’”

Anissa thought she’d turned everything off before she left for the night.

Thinking back now, it’s hard to feel sure.

The fire started just a few hours later, in the early hours of Feb. 3. The spark came from a space heater or maybe that heat press. Because of the extensive damage, the fire investigator was never able to determine whether something had been left on or simply shorted out.

While the fire smoldered in the office, its appetite strengthened. The flames crept further into the house, gaining momentum. They tore through the space between the walls and scorched the house’s siding. They climbed toward the roof, singeing the gutters and melting shingles. The heat filtered upward, blowing out the dormer windows on the north side. Smoke filled the air along Chamois Drive and alerted neighbors, who called 911. When firefighters were dispatched at 4:03 a.m., the fire was leaping into the sky, higher than the surrounding houses. It was hungry: It had devoured three-quarters of the home and wasn’t slowing down.

Anissa, her parents, three children and goddaughter slept soundly at the opposite end of the same neighborhood. They were too far away to hear the roar of the fire or the sirens from the 10 engines that responded. Until a friend called Sanaa’ to ask if the house she’d seen on the news was hers, the family had no idea.

Reality hit when they saw a photo of the house engulfed in flames. The Columbia Fire Department tweeted it about 4:30 that morning. “I was like,

‘Yeah, that looks like the house, but it can’t be,’” Anissa says. “So I throw some clothes on, go around the corner, house is up in flames.”

When Anissa arrived, the fire department was there, working to douse the flames from the outside. The fire had already overtaken the inside. She asked if she could go in. “My life is in there,” she said. But the building had sustained too much damage — more than $130,000 worth of the $230,000 home. It was too unstable to enter. There was no safe way for her to look for the paperwork she was concerned about in the moment, or her son’s extra wheelchairs, or her vintage Michael Jordan shoes, or even another set of clothes.

By the end of the day on Feb. 3, the entrances had been boarded up. When Anissa drove the boys by later, only a shell of their home remained.

Does anyone know what happened?

A different home in the same neighborhood was destroyed by fire a month prior to the Cox-Shird home.

Neighbors were in disbelief that it happened again.

The neighbors took to the Thornbrook Facebook page to find answers about whose house it was and if anyone was hurt. In the days after, the comments flooded with inquiries about donations and well-wishes for the family. In their posts, neighbors called them “the sweetest,” a “wonderful family.”

Photography by Photographer Name

Again Anissa found herself turning to prayer. This time, others were helping her. Brooke Sydenstricker McCarty was one of the first neighbors to start collecting donations. She knew the family through Beulah Ralph, the boys’ elementary school. (Her twin sons are in the same grade as Charley and Chance.)

She’s on the school’s outreach committee and heard about the fire through social media. By the next day, she’d placed a collection box on her front porch with a note of the family’s clothing sizes. She made her own Facebook post inviting the community to leave items for the family with her.

It wasn’t the first time Sydenstricker McCarty had collected donations for a family in the neighborhood. Just over a month before the Cox-Shird house burned, her neighbors on Center Brook Court had been forced to relocate after a fire started in their kitchen. The Flood family had been away from their house at the time, but its dog died before firefighters arrived. Sydenstricker McCarty used the Floods’ requests to help brainstorm what the Cox-Shird family might need.

The Thornbrook community was only one of the groups that stepped up.

At Beulah Ralph, Brandy Birdsong, then

vice president of the PTA and a friend of the family’s, passed the word along to the principal, who organized a donation area in the school office. People brought garbage bags full of clothes, toothbrushes and a variety of gift cards. Chris Robinson, Chance’s baseball coach, talked with his employer, Veterans United. The company wrote a $1,500 check for the family.

For Birdsong and seemingly everyone else who pitched in, there was no question over whether they’d help. “I think lots of hands make light work,” she says. “If everybody can give them something, whether it’s an outfit or a gift card for 10 bucks even, that adds up.”

For a while, the donations filled the dining room at Anissa’s parents’ house, where the family moved. Everything from phone chargers to school supplies, body wash to bras spread across the table and onto the floor. The donations brought a lot of emotions, Anissa says, including surprise. “You’re so happy that people care so much about you to use their money and their resources to get you things.”

Spring

Signs of the house on Chamois Drive remain strewn across the yard even two

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months later. Pieces of insulation lie in the grass, and sooty bits of charred roof are scattered in what was the garden.

A blue tarp is tacked onto a corner of the roof where water from firefighters’ efforts damaged some of the shingles.

The air still reeks of smoke and melted plastic, of things that were never meant to burn. Plywood blocks the doorways of the house’s exterior, but from the holes left in the roof, you can almost see inside. There’s not much left.

Even with all the support, the adjustment has been hard at times. Charley lost two wheelchairs in the fire, which left him with only one stroller-type chair that made it harder to maneuver at meal times or when boarding the school bus.

Mobility equipment company Numotion stepped in and fitted Charley for a couple of new chairs and making sure the family’s needs were met.

The family’s daily routine changed, too. Alandrea and her mom shared a bathroom for a while, and the boys were now close enough to walk to school. Chance doesn’t like it as much as Charley. “That’s because you’re riding to school,” Alandrea says to Charley with a smile.

Almost three months after the fire, the Cox-Shird family had, for the most part, found a new normal preoccupying themselves with preparations for the end of the school year and Alandrea’s graduation from Rock Bridge. Set to attend MU in the fall, she was excited to live in a residence hall and study sports management. Anissa wasn’t quite as ready. “It seems unreal,” she says. “It’s like one day you’re holding them in your arms, and the next day they’re driving a car, and then the next day they’re having a family.”

But things still didn’t feel the same at their grandparents’ house. When someone mentions the old house, Charley speaks up. “We miss it,” he says.

The insurance company was starting to pressure Anissa about finding somewhere new to live. The sooner the family got settled somewhere new, the sooner the company could stop paying.

She dealt with insurance in the weeks directly after the fire and provided them with a list of everything they’d lost. Or, rather, she’d tried to list everything.

There was plenty she missed, like the cable equipment attached to the TV.

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The cable company would later require Anissa to reimburse them for that same equipment. As time went on, she was willing to ignore the insurance company’s insistence. Her children’s happiness is more important, she says, and they’re happy enough living in their grandparents’ house for now.

The days keep coming As the weather warmed, a bulldozer sat parked on the roadside next to the family’s old mailbox. Instead of the roof’s scorched remains, a pile of rubble now lies in the middle of the property, leaving an empty space in the row of houses, like a gap-toothed smile. “It’s eerie,” says Terri Stanley, who lives on the street. “I mean, that could be any of us.”

The smell of smoke that clung to the space was replaced with the smell of sawdust and tilled dirt. There were signs of the people who once lived here.

A red sweater stuck out from the bottom of the pile where the front walkway was, and a blue-green sports bra peeks out of the debris.

After the first day of demolition, a portion of the garage was all that re-

VOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

Brad Frazier, assistant fire chief, says it’s rare for local properties to be labeled a total loss. The Cox-Shird house was only listed as having “significant damage.”

mained of the original structure. Inside, a few odd belongings looked as if they simply had been stored there. In front was an old red and black wheelchair, dusty but intact, one of the ones Numotion replaced. It was a chair Charley would use to eat with the family at the dining table. But Anissa recalls what the fire marshal told her: The smoke and water damage meant it was beyond salvaging.

Even with all the fire took, almost everyone in the family is eager to share the lessons it taught them. “It made me realize that you can’t take anything for granted,” Alandrea says. “Cherish everything that you get because you might wake up one day and that pair of shoes that your grandma bought you that you thought were ugly might end up being the only pair of shoes that you have.”

For Juanita, the lesson was similar.

“We see the bad, but we glorify in the good because they were not in that house,” she says.

The family never returned to the house before the rest of it was cleared away. After 71 days, the foundation was all that was left. The same could be said for the family: The foundation remained.

“When tragedy strikes, you truly find out who’s in your corner,” Anissa says.

Summer

Home takes on a different meaning when you’re separated from yours. This past summer, I lived an ocean away from my family while interning in London.

On July 19, a phone call from my mother woke me up at 3 a.m.: My grandmother had passed away. Her death had been expected, but it didn’t make the hurt or sense of loneliness any less profound.

For the first time since I’d flown halfway across the world, I wanted nothing else than to get on a plane and be with my family. I had built what I thought was a home among the friends and places surrounding me, but in that moment, I learned how I truly define the word.

A little more than a month before, the Cox-Shird family was reminded yet again of what, or whom, feels like home.

In late May, Willie’s heart rate spiked to over 120 beats per minute, well over a normal resting heart rate for adults.

Thinking it was a minor issue, the family brought him back to the treatment center in Tulsa where doctors examined

him. The family thought it would be a quick trip, that he’d only be there for a couple of days. But the doctors gave Willie two weeks to live. As his situation worsened, the rest of Willie’s family traveled to Tulsa to be with him. Alandrea got on the first flight to Oklahoma. The next day, June 6, Willie Cox died surrounded by his loved ones.

Other than occasionally driving by the house’s remnants, Anissa and her family never visited the lot again.

says. “Then normal became living in that house with my parents. You transition over, and when you transition to something new, it just becomes the norm.”

Today, normal for the family means Alandrea popping back home every few weekends to visit her brothers, and Chance making friends with the new students in his class this year. It means Charley starting practices for his Spe-

cial Olympics basketball team and never wanting to leave, always asking Mom why practice has to end.

Most of all, it means looking forward to the new year with an open heart. “I’m hoping for peace,” Anissa says.

Alandrea agrees. She’s praying, “that we just put our best foot forward and keep going.” After all, the family has done it before.

Finding a new normal After losing Willie, the family’s summer passed solemnly. They organized two funerals, first in Columbia, then in Louisiana, where Willie was buried.

Alandrea, who had hoped to prepare for MU’s move-in with her grandfather, tried to gather everything she’d need on her own. She didn’t want to create more work for her mother or grandmother.

After that phone call this summer, all I wanted was to be with my family.

When her grandfather died, Alandrea was grateful she was able to be there.

“It was a moment that you would’ve wanted to be around all your family,” Alandrea says.

As for Anissa, once again life had become something to be handled one day at a time. “We’ve had a lot of just tragic events that hit us this year, so they just made our year seem longer than usual,” she says. “We’re living each day to the fullest. You never know when it’s going to be your last.”

Autumn

Sometime near the beginning of the school year, construction started on a new house at 5405 Chamois Drive. As November came to a close, it was still just a frame and insulation board. As strange as it was to see an empty space, it feels even stranger to see something new there. Gone are the debris and acrid smell from the fire that happened almost one full year ago. Where the Cox-Shird family’s old life had taken place, something new has been built.

The family that once lived at this address has experienced so many transitions this year, and with all of it, they’ve had to find a new sense of what’s normal.

“Normal” is difficult to define. The word itself is paradoxically dynamic, constantly changing around new people and new situations. “Normal for us was basically living in our own house, coming to visit my parents maybe everyday,” Anissa VOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

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SURE, AT FIRST I WAS A LITTLE TAKEN ABACK

BY THE WHOLE PEEING STANDING UP THING. BUT I TAUGHT HIM TO THROW A STICK AND NOW HANGING OUT WITH HIM IS THE BEST PART OF MY DAY. — EINSTEIN adopted 12-09-10

WHY LIMIT HAPPY TO AN HOUR P.37

All that and dim sum Local restaurants wrap different cultures into dumplings and prepare them with care.

BY ALLISON BROWN From Korean gyoza to Italian ravioli and Polish pierogies, the dumpling is a globally beloved food. Originating in China during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.–220 A.D.), dumplings are cooked dough with meat or vegetable stuffing. These little wrapped morsels have traveled across the globe, and many cultures have introduced them into their own cuisines and have added their own flair along the way. Even right here in Columbia, you can take a trip around the world through these local spins on dumplings.

Surah Korean Cuisine and BBQ

Room 38 serves Chinese-style dumplings either seared or fried for different levels of crunchiness.

Photography by Joel Chan

For traditional Korean gyoza and dumplings, head to Surah Korean Cuisine and BBQ. Although the restaurant doesn’t offer made-in-house dumplings, manager Jin Kim says he carefully selects high-quality dumplings at the food market. He describes gyoza as half moon-shaped, filled with beef, pork or vegetables, and wrapped in a Korean wrapper called mandoo pi. A vegetable gyoza is fried, while dumplings and meat gyoza are steamed. Kim says that many customers order them as appetizers.

Dumplings with different fillings offer a variety of flavor profiles. The vegetable provides a crispy and fresh taste, and the beef gyoza has a soft outer shell and unique pepper taste.

Dumplings (3–5 pieces): $6.99–$8.99 Gyoza (6 pieces): $4.99–$6.99 3510 Interstate 70 Drive S.E. Suite A Mon.–Fri., 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., 4:30–9 p.m.; Sat., 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.; closed on Sunday

VOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

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E AT & DRINK RESTAURANTS

per week, with at least nine dumplings per dish. Around the block at Chim’s Thai Kitchen, customers can order pot stickers, another type of dumpling.

Dumpling soup: $9.99 Potstickers: $4.99 905 Alley A; Mon. to Sun., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

904 E. Broadway; Mon. to Sat., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

Café Poland Big Mama Chim’s Noodle House If you’re looking for a dumpling dish that’s more than just an appetizer, pop into Big Mama Chim’s Noodle House for a warm Thai-style dumpling soup.

The stew consists of Chim’s classic dumplings, bok choy, Chinese celery and fresh cilantro. Stuffed with pork and vegetables in a Thai wrapper, the dumplings make this dish a very popular menu item, especially in the winter. Co-manager and co-owner Pantipa “Boo” Wadtananussorn says the restaurant goes through about 1,000 dumplings

In Chinese tradition, making and eating dumplings on New Year’s Eve is a way to pray for prosperity.

Café Poland serves its dumplings in the form of a pierogi — a traditional Eastern European food filled with mashed potatoes, beef, sauerkraut, cabbage, cheese, mushrooms or grains. Café Poland offers potato and farmer’s cheese, potato and bacon, or beef-filled. During Christmastime, the café serves mushroom and sauerkraut-filled pierogies, which is common in Poland because of the Polish tradition of eating vegan on Christmas Eve. Robert Burlinski, whose family owns the restaurant, says the staff spends about five hours every morning making the meat stuffing and preparing the dough by hand for each individual

pierogi. As a finishing touch, the pierogies are topped with caramelized onions.

Pierogies (6 pieces): $9 807 Locust St. Tues. to Thurs., 7 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.; Fri., 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Sat., 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Sun., 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.; closed on Monday

Room 38 For a modern take on dumplings, head to Room 38. The restaurant serves only one type, prepared in two different ways.

Customers can order them seared, which chef Jeremy Bowles says gives the dumplings a soft shell with a little crunch. For harder crunch of an egg roll, customers can also order the appetizer fried. The dumplings are Chinese-style and come with six served on a plate, which is perfect for sharing. Although the dumplings are not made in house, Room 38 pairs them with its homemade Thai dipping sauce.

Dumplings (6 pieces): $8.50 Visit: 38 N. Eighth St. Mon. to Sat., 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

R ee ss tt aa uu rr aa n t R Week January 20th-26th 36

VOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

Photography by Joel Chan

E AT & DRI N K DRINKS

The pursuit of happy hour

Wednesdays. The most popular is Martini Mondays, when the extensive martini menu runs for $5.

Tellers, 820 E. Broadway

What do we want? To save money on drinks! When do we want it? Now!

Does it get much better than buy-one-get-one-free appetizers? This special is available during regular happy hour, Monday through Friday, 3:30 to 7 p.m., and late night happy hour, Monday through Thursday, 9:30 to 11 p.m. and Sunday, 8 to 10 p.m.

The Heidelberg, 410 S. Ninth St. Or you could try…

Shiloh’s formula is simple: Start the evening with deals, and end it with different deals. On Mondays, wings are 65 cents from 4 to 10 p.m., and drink deals start at 7 p.m. and run until close. Wednesday features $7 one-topping pizzas. All day Sunday, Shiloh’s offers $3.50 burgers, $4 margaritas, $4 bloody marys and $8 domestic pitchers.

Shiloh’s, 402 E. Broadway

BY NICK KELLY

W

illiam Shakespeare wrote about everything from forbidden love and painful heartbreak to comedy and betrayal. But take a closer look — he even covers happy hour. Yes, happy hour.

In Henry V, Shakespeare, the writer of all writers, tells us: “Therefore, my lords, omit no happy hour.” He’s talking about an expedition they can’t pass up, which is not quite the same as Shakespeare saying the lords shall not avoid discounted drinks and food specials. But, maybe his advice is sound even for the type of happy hour you might find at, say, Shakespeare’s Pizza.

There are plenty of bargain opportunities to enjoy here in Columbia. But you only have so much time, and we only have so many pages. As you set out on your own expedition to find those killer deals, there are a few places that are sure to satisfy, delight and surprise.

For something different: Room 38’s brunch Start your week off right with Room 38’s brunch specials, offered Sundays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The menu features breakfast favorites such as cinnamon rolls and avocado toast, plus a variety of morning drinks, including $12 bottomless mimosas. We repeat: bottomless.

Room 38, 38 N. Eighth St. Or you could try…

With snack-sized dishes that meld Asian cuisine with American flavors, there’s no place quite like Le Bao. Whether you’re craving a Philly cheesesteak in a bao bun, ramen or even dessert, you’ll find something to love. And Le Bao’s happy hour is on a whole new level. No, literally. To access the specials, you have to go upstairs to the full bar. Happy hour runs Monday through Friday, 4 to 6 p.m.

Some of the deals include $2 well drinks

and half-off wine by the glass.

Le Bao, 1009 Park Ave.

For a marathon happy hour: McNally’s Some weeks just really take it out of you, and when those weeks strike, McNally’s Sunday happy hour is there. All day.

From noon to midnight, you can get $3.25 bloody marys and $5 turbo bombs (vodka, Red Bull and Jagermeister). Plus, the Irish pub is partnered with Wise Guys Pizza, so you can get a large one-topping pizza for $7.99.

McNally’s, 7 N. Sixth St. Or you could try…

Broadway Brewery hosts happy hour deals six days a week, running from 3 to 6 p.m., Monday through Saturday, during which customers can get $1–2 off all house beers.

Broadway Brewery, 816 E. Broadway

For the easily bored: Günter Hans Günter Hans has a different deal for each day of the week that they’re open. From trivia on Mondays and Wine and Whiskey Wednesday, to $4 Sangria nights on Thursdays and a waffle bar on Saturdays, these deals will keep you on your toes.

Günter Hans, 7 Hitt St. Or you could try…

Tellers also offers different nightly drink specials that run from 9 p.m. to close, including $3 local beers on Tuesdays and $3 well drinks on

Photography by Jennifer Prohov/Archive, Courtesy of 1839 Taphouse, The Heidelberg and McNally’s

For the hungry: The Heidelberg

For late nights: 1839 Taphouse There’s no shortage of deals at 1839 Taphouse, but it helps to be a night owl. Are you a sucker for a good gamble? On Tuesdays, pay a $3 cover (after 8:30 p.m.) and flip a coin (no, seriously). If it lands on heads, your drink is on the house.

Better yet? You can flip for every drink from 9 p.m. to 12:30 a.m.

1839 Taphouse, 212 E. Green Meadows Road, Suite 2 Or you could try…

The early bird gets the worm, but it isn’t getting dealsat Addison’s downtown location. Happy hour runs Monday through Thursday, 9 p.m. to midnight; Friday and Saturday, 10 p.m. to midnight; Sunday 9 to 11:30 p.m. Craft beers are $2.50 and wine by the glass runs for $4.50.

Addison’s, 709 Cherry St. VOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

37

CORY, stroke survivor.

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ManageYourBP.org

ETHICAL ATTIRE P.41

Patricia Moak and her son Jacob check out Devil’s Icebox, which is now closed to protect bats inside from catching white nose syndrome.

Nearby, Connor’s Cave remains open.

So, you’ve already met the devil You probably know about Devil’s Icebox. Now, understand its depths, and explore other local landmarks with million-year histories.

BY DANIELLE PYCIOR Follow Devil’s Icebox Boardwalk over the 125foot natural tunnels then descend a steep staircase Photography by Abigail Young/Archive

into a dark, cool space that will send chills up your spine. Listen to the water running through the cave; when it evaporates, the heat leaves the sandstone and creates the cold ecosystem worthy of its name.

Devil’s Icebox is a well-known Columbia feature, but from the Eagle Bluffs Conservation Area to Capen Park, there are many more hidden gems positioned around town — all with historic origin stories and distinctive structures.

The Icebox itself Missouri is home to more than 7,000 caves, says Roxie Campbell, the Rock Bridge Memorial State Park naturalist. Devil’s Icebox is a double sinkhole that leads to two caves. Downstream is Connor’s Cave, which is open to the public, and

upstream is Devil’s Icebox Cave, which is closed to protect the endangered bats inside.

Devil’s Icebox Cave is the seventh longest cave in the state, with about six miles of mapped underground passageways.

They’re made of Burlington limestone, a sedimentary rock that first formed in the Midwest about 300 million years ago. The fossilized remains of criniods, an ancient marine animal, still linger in the formations.

The fossils are visible to the naked eye, but Campbell says that when exploring Connor’s Cave, “people should bring a flashlight and get their feet wet.”

Connor’s Cave tours, available year-round upon request, self-guided tour instructions available upon request; Rock Bridge Memorial State Park, sunrise to sunset, 449-7402

VOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

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CIT Y LIFE ROCKS

Pinnacles of beauty Roughly 250 million years ago, Boone County was submerged by a shallow sea that housed ancient creatures, according to the Missouri Department of Conservation’s website.

A few million years later, the rocky land is now a local park. In 1965, private donors and organizers from the MU Extension in Boone County turned the space into a park to encourage young people to join a community of exploration, says Phillip Burk, the board president of the Pinnacles Youth Foundation.

Today, mountainous, ancient rock formations still cast shadows over the 77 acres, and fossils from the days Missouri was submerged in water remain in the bedrock of the Pinnacles.

The Pinnacles Youth Park, 8 a.m. to sunset, 449-7946

ICEBOX LIVING

Contrary to what its name implies, the Devil’s Icebox Cave ecosystem supports many creatures’ lives.

Species include the endangered gray and Indiana bats, salamanders, frogs and the pink planarian flatworm, a species that can’t be found anywhere in the world except the Icebox.

The flatworm breathes through its skin, and its mouth is located halfway down the underside of its body.

In addition, there are eight types of troglobites, creatures that can’t live anywhere but within caves, including members of the millipede, spider and springtail families.

Capen Park, shown here, Devil’s Icebox and the Pinnacles are made of Burlington limestone, which exists around the Midwest region and was named after Burlington, Iowa.

The altered course of the Missouri River helped create Eagle Bluffs Conservation Area.

Eagle Bluffs protects and preserves In the 1900s, the Army Corps of Engineers changed the course of the Missouri River by straightening the winding waterway in spots. Its new path, along with levees built since the 1930s, cut off wetlands that had previously received water from the river. In the 1980s, wastewater was going to be piped from the city into the Missouri River, and a group of mid-Missourians banded together to fight this action, says John George, the wildlife regional supervisor of the Missouri Department of Conservation’s central region. This activism led to what is now the Eagle Bluffs Conservation Area.

Today, almost 90% of the Missouri’s original wetlands, some of the most productive ecosystems on earth, are gone. In the name of wetland restoration, Eagle Bluffs was created, and the land it sits on has morphed through the centuries.

As marshes decline across the U.S., so do various wildlife. Eagle Bluffs sustains biodiversity ranging from microscopic organisms to bird species, deer and other large animals, MDOC Wildlife biologist Brady Lichtenberg says.

“Every species has its own right to persist and be successful, and if you lose diversity, it’s because species are going extinct,” Lichtenberg says. “We need to make sure we are using our resources wisely to manage the land for all species.”

Eagle Bluffs Conservation Area, 4 a.m. to 10 p.m., 445-3882

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VOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

The local limestone began forming in the Mississippian period, about 300 million years ago.

From ocean to Capen Park Capen Park’s 32 acres of land was once a tropical region just south of the Earth’s equator, submerged by a shallow sea.

Around 400 million years ago, Missouri looked quite different, Campbell says.

The Burlington limestone that now exists at Capen Park, supporting Columbia’s active rock climbing community, was eroded by Hinkson Creek throughout the past millions of years to reshape the bluffs. The bottom layer formed first and the top last. The shallow ocean brought nutrient-rich sediment and a thriving ecosystem, and tectonic plate collision changed the land’s shape, and eventually, Capen Park was formed.

Capen Park, 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., 874-7460

Archive photography by Ryan Berry, Joon Kim and Emil Lippe

C I T Y LI FE FASHION

Crimes of fashion When buying clothing, there’s a lot more to consider than fit or trends.

Here’s how to be an ethical fashion consumer.

BY EMILY REDFORD

A

t the 2019 Met Gala in New York, Livia Firth made more than a fashion statement with her choice of clothing. The founder of Eco-Age, a London business that offers sustainability consultations, wore a floral tunic made of recycled water bottles.

The growing trend of ethical fashion doesn’t have one clear definition ­— it depends on what is important to the consumer. Garments might be made in a way that’s sustainable, vegan or follows fair trade employment practices, but typically not all of those at once.

Building a conscious closet starts with understanding the factors at play.

Work the right way For the World Fair Trade Organization, some principles of fair trade are good working conditions, fair payment and gender equity. In 2018, the 323 WFTO fair trade-verified enterprises helped nearly 1 million workers, of whom 74% were women. One local business is Sseko Designs, an ethical clothing Photography by Daniel Shular

brand founded by MU graduate Liz Bohannon. This company funded 25 university-bound scholarships for Ugandan women in 2019. “It matters when you understand that children, even if they’re in other countries around the world, are literally forced into slavery to make things that we buy,” Karen Mickey, a Sseko Designs fellow, says.

Where to shop in Columbia: Sseko Designs, The Peace Nook and Global Market at Community United Methodist Love the planet Environmentally friendly fashion is tricky. On one hand, organic materials such as cotton or wool are biodegradable while synthetic materials such as polyester or nylon are not. Because these materials don’t decompose, they create massive waste. But the cotton growing process often includes large amounts of water and chemicals.

Mary Diekmeier, president of Sustain Mizzou, recommends never throwing away your clothes. Instead, recycle

Sseko Designs (top left) sells handbags, jewelry, shoes and clothing. This Fair Trade Federation company employs 63 people in Uganda and is the largest exporter of nonagricultural goods from Uganda to the United States.

The Peace Nook (top right) carries these 100% cotton ponchos, which are handmade in the Nepalese Himalayas.

Also made in Nepal, the vegan purse is made out of recycled tires.

Maude Vintage (bottom right) sells this thrifted vegan jacket, which is made out of vinyl leather, and this 100% wool sequined top.

them at the Wardrobe or Goodwill when they’re unusable. She also says thrifting and buying secondhand is a good option to reduce environmental impact. Jung Ha-Brookshire, an MU professor of textile and apparel management, says it’s a good idea to buy an item only if you’ll wear it 30 times. She suggests sustainable laundry practices, including wearing garments more than once without washing, using cool water to wash and line drying instead of machine.

Where to shop in Columbia: Secondhand stores like Goodwill and Maude Vintage or apps like Poshmark The bottom line is ...

It’s complicated. Ha-Brookshire says you can’t look at a clothing tag and know if something has been ethically made because the supply chain is so complex.

But more companies such as Patagonia and H&M are becoming transparent about their processes. The best thing to do as a consumer is to be informed by researching the brands you shop and their supply chains.

VOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

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CALENDAR

ARTS

Mid-Missouri Arts Alliance Show The Boone County History & Culture Center’s Montminy Gallery will showcase pieces from over 15 artists in its winter show. Works include paintings, ceramics, drawings, sculptures and jewelry. See the show through Jan. 23, Wed.–Sat., 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sun., noon to 5 p.m., Montminy Gallery, free, 443-8936 Reframing the Renaissance Print The Renaissance gave the world Leonardo da Vinci and Shakespeare. It was a time of innovation and creativity in science, philosophy and art. Visit this student-curated exhibit to learn about the period’s woodcut, engraving, etching and drypoint techniques, which served as the foundations for Western printmaking. Jan. 18 to May 31, Tues.–Fri., 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., noon to 4 p.m., Museum of Art and Archaeology, free, 882-3591 Finding Neverland This Peter Pan-based musical is a magical tale for both the young and the young-

TO-DO LIST

at the first CoMo Comedy Club event of the new year. Jan. 30, 7 p.m., The Blue Note, $25, 874-1944

Your curated guide of what to do in Columbia this month.

DON’T MISS IT

From metal to country, this year is starting with a bang, thanks to MO Fest 2020. The Blue Note and Rose Music Hall will celebrate all genres of Missouri music. Local artists include Violet and the Undercurrents and The Adaptation.

Jan. 3–4, 10–11, 17–18 and 24, times vary, The Blue Note and Rose Music Hall, $50, full-event pass; single ticket prices vary, 874-1944

at-heart. Struggling playwright J.M. Barry finds the inspiration he’s missing after befriending four adventurous young brothers, Jack, George, Michael and Peter, and their widowed mother. Jan. 24, 7 p.m., Jesse Auditorium, $52–72, 882-3781

CoMo Comedy Club: Todd Barry You might have seen New York-native and comedian Todd Barry before on Late Night with Seth Meyers, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert or his latest Netflix special, Spicy Honey. See him in person

Wild and Scenic Film Festival Celebrate nature at this activist-led film festival. While the main fest is held in California annually, it goes on tour each year to more than 250 locations, including Columbia. The 10th-annual local celebration is hosted by Missouri River Relief, and it will feature films, a silent auction, live music, a bake sale, a bar and more. Feb. 9, 1–5 p.m., The Blue Note, $15; $10, students; free, children under 6, 443-0292 An American in Paris Watch the story of a World War II veteran unfold as he falls in love and traverses Paris while trying become a famous painter. This Tony-winning 2014 musical is based on the 1951 film starring Gene Kelly, which in turn was based on a 1928 orchestral piece by renowned composer George Gershwin. Feb. 10, 7 p.m., Jesse Auditorium, $46–66, 882-3781

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C ALE N DAR

The Green Book Wine Club Train Trip Kick off Talking Horse Productions’ 2020 season with this Missouri-based play. It follows main character Marie on a train ride across the state as she tours wineries and uncovers her own past. Feb. 14–15 and Feb. 20–22, 7:30 p.m.; Feb. 16 and 23, 2 p.m., Talking Horse Productions, $17; $15, students and seniors, 607-1740 Legally Blonde the Musical Start stretching because it’s time to break out the bend and snap.

In this iconic musical, Elle Woods explores the world of Harvard Law School while trying to win back her ex-boyfriend. What, like it’s hard?

Feb. 13–15, 20–22 and 27–29, 7:30 p.m.; Feb. 16 and 23, Mar. 1, 2 p.m., Columbia Entertainment Company, $14; $12, seniors, students and children; $10, Thursday night special, 474-3699 Russian National Ballet: Swan Lake Although Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 1877 ballet Swan Lake was initially a flop, it has stood the test of time. See the Russian National Ballet bring the tale of Odette to life in this 143-year-old classic. Feb. 17, 7 p.m., Jesse Auditorium, $20–40, 882-3781 Mystery Science Theater 3000 Live After 30 years of making audience members laugh, the television show Mystery Science Theater 3000 is on its final live tour. The show will feature original host, Joel Hodgson, along with all of the show’s beloved characters. Feb. 19, 7 p.m., Jesse Auditorium, $30–55, general admission; $115–215, VIP packages, 882-3781

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CALENDAR

CIVIC

Super Wedding Show Prepare for your special day by checking out the wedding show at the Holiday Inn Executive Center. Jan. 19, noon to 4 p.m., 2200 I-70 Drive Southwest, $5, 446-3971 MU Celebrates Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As the first African-American woman to earn a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Yale, Gwendolyn Elizabeth Boyd overcame boundaries. When she visits the Missouri Theatre for this MLK-Day event, she’ll discuss the need for increased diversity in the STEM field. Jan 23, 7–8:30 p.m., Missouri Theatre, free, 882-3394 Cats and Crafts Cat’s cradle just got a revamp. Grab that yarn and other art supplies, and create crafts while kittens roam around you. The materials and a drink from the menu are included. Jan. 26 and Feb. 23, 2:30–4 p.m., Papa’s Cat Café, $10, 449-2287 American Red Cross Blood Drive One pint of blood can save up to three lives. You can donate by dropping by the drive or making an appointment on the Red Cross blood drive website. Make sure to arrive well-hydrated and wellfed. Feb. 7, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Friends Room, Columbia Public Library, free, 443-3161, for an appointment: https://www. redcrossblood.org/

Columbia’s Largest Indoor Garage Sale!

The space at this garage sale is about 40 times the size of a two-car garage. Sift through household items and more at the 19,000-squarefoot sale. Feb. 9, 1–4 p.m., Holiday Inn Executive Center-Columbia Mall, $4; free, kids 12 and under, 446-3975

FOOD

band inspired by The Killers. Jan. 10, 8 p.m., Cafe Berlin, 441-0400 Ward Davis The sounds of Nashville are coming to town, thanks to singer-songwriter Ward Davis. Country stars including Willie Nelson and Trace Adkins have recorded some of this crooner’s work. Jan. 25, 9 p.m., The Blue Note, $15, in advance; $20, day of; $50, four-pack, 874-1944

Logboat Flybye Taste this Belgium-style beer, fermented with Pilsner malt, oats and wheat. It’s on tap from early February through May. Tues.–Thurs., 3–10 p.m.; Fri., 3–11 p.m.; Sat., noon to 11 p.m.; Sun., noon to 6 p.m.; Mon., closed, Logboat Brewing Company, 397-6786

Tyler Boehmer Tyler Boehmer isn’t new to tickling the ivories. He started playing the piano at age 4 and then took up the organ at 14. This February, the maestro is bringing his organ tunes to Columbia. Feb. 1, 7 p.m., Missouri United Methodist Church, $10; $5, student, 443-3111

Gospel Explosion and Soul Food Dinner Feed your spirit. The Gospel Explosion and Soul Food Dinner is presented by Inclusive Impact Institute and features artists and groups from central Missouri. Feb. 23, 4–7 p.m., St. Luke United Methodist Church, 204 E. Ash St., 443-5423

Aeolus Quartet Sharing roots at The Juilliard School, the members of this string quartet have been performing together for more than a decade. The Baltimore Sun called its music a “smoothly meshed technique with a sense of spontaneity and discovery.” Feb. 6, 7 p.m., Missouri Theatre, $28–35, 882-3781

MUSIC

Crooked Fix with Dream Squeeze A self-proclaimed “psychedelic indie rock band,” from Columbia, Crooked Fix will take the stage along with Dream Squeeze, an indie-pop

Mike Zito: A Tribute to Chuck Berry From “Rock & Roll Music” to “Johnny B Goode,” you know the Chuck Berry classics, and Mike Zito is here to share his own twist on them. Zito released his 16th album in November, which even

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C ALE N DAR

features Berry’s grandson. Feb. 7, 8 p.m., The Blue Note, $10; $20, balcony, 874-1944 Danielle Nicole Band The band Trampled Under Foot was founded by Kansas City-native Danielle Nicole, and her distinctive way of using the bass won her the Blues Foundation’s 2014 Blues Music Award for Best Instrumentalist.

She now tours under her own name and has released two studio albums. Feb. 13, 7:30 p.m., Rose Music Hall, $15, in advance; $18, day of, 874-1944.

Koe Wetzel By mixing hillbilly Texas country music and classic punk rock from the ’90s and 2000s, Koe Wetzel reclaims the Texas music scene with his new album, Harold Saul High. Feb. 13, 8 p.m., The Blue Note, $19.50, in advance; $22, day of, 874-1944 Brother Moses In 2015, Brother Moses was just a small, two-man band comprised of roommates and childhood friends. Now, the group of Arkansas-natives is based in New York City and tours across the United States. Feb. 16, 8 p.m., Rose Music Hall, $6, 874-1944 Todd Snider After years of making rock albums, Todd Snider returned to his folk roots with Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3. Paying respect to legends such as Johnny Cash while relaying his views on today’s world, Snider delivers an intimate, recharging and engaging album. Feb. 20, 8 p.m., The Blue Note, $25, in advance; $30, day of, 874-1944 A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen: River Ghost Revue On Feb. 21, Rose Music Hall pays homage to Bruce Springsteen’s sixth studio album, Nebraska, performed by Columbian folk band River Ghost Revue. Feb. 21, 8 p.m., Rose Music Hall, $5, 874-1944 The National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine The National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine performs classics from famed composers such as Sergei Prokofiev as well as its own repertoire. The 102-year-old orchestra, nominated for multiple Grammys, is considered one of the finest in Eastern Europe. Feb. 29, 7 p.m., Jesse Auditorium, $20–40; free, children, 882-3781

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SPORTS

ROC 7K Trail Run Whether or not getting healthy is on your 2020 to-do list, why not sign up for Rhett’s Outdoor Challenge 7K Trail Run? All participants who take on the 4.3-mile single track course will receive a free long-sleeve shirt. Plus, there’ll be a bonfire and breakfast afterward.

Sounds like a win-win. Register in advance. Jan. 25, 9 a.m., Cosmo Park, $35, 874-7460 Missouri Capitals vs. All Frontier Attack The Show-Me State might not have an NBA team, but we do have an American Basketball Association team. Watch as the Missouri Capitals take on the All Frontier Attack. Feb. 1, 3 p.m., Stephens College, $20, mocapitals.net

KOPN

89.5 FM live streaming at kopn.org VOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

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S’NO PLAYING HERE PHOTOGRAPHY BY JACOB MOSCOVITCH Snow covered a dismantled playground at Lions-Stephens Park on William Street last February. Don’t worry, this year, Lions-Stephens has an upright playground and a triangle of posts where you can hang your hammock, lie back and relax. If it does happen to snow, try some indoor recreation at the Missouri Athletic Center, Activity and Recreation Center, Sky Zone trampoline park, Level Up Entertainment, AMF Town & Country Lanes or Bonkers indoor play place.

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VOX MAGAZINE • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

AMERICA, LET’S DO LUNCH

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Julius Gaines, SINCE 1933. He’s got a curious intellect that can’t be satiated.

Now, he and 1 in 6 seniors face the threat of hunger and millions more live in isolation. So pop by, drop off a hot meal and say a warm hello.

Volunteer for Meals on Wheels at AmericaLetsDoLunch.org

A four-day celebration of art, music, and film, transforming downtown Columbia into a one-of-a-kind creative wonderland.

TRUE/FALSE film fest March 5–8, 2020 columbia, mo

sses pao n sale TRUEFALSE.ORG