toads over 70: an interview with May

Each issue, we consider it important to feature a longtime Joplin resident and hear their story. Celebration of heritage is just as important as celebration of the new and now. So we built the Toad with this section being one of our cornerstone features.

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If I had to pick one person that I felt embodied the heart of Joplin, I think of my grandma May Cottrell. Not only was she born and raised in Joplin and has a deep love and admiration for the city and its people, but she is humble, kind, gentle and loving. She has always been there for me through the good, the bad and the boring. And to me, she is home. That is why I chose to interview her; I wanted to capture some of her stories of what it was like to grow up here in this small city. 

-Austin
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interview conducted by Austin Spencer, with his grandmother May. Transcribed by Theresa Schorr. Current photographs by John Laude, historic photos of May and her family obtained with permission.

How long have you lived in Joplin?

May “Since 1942, I was born here in Joplin out on 1906 West 4th street.”

So you were born there and you grew up over there for the most part, when did you move away from Joplin and then move back?

May “When I got married in October of 1964, my husband Grant and I moved to Topeka in 1965. After the tornado in Topeka we went to Manhattan and lived there for a little while and then we went to Omaha. And then we moved back to Joplin in 1971.”

Before moving to Topeka, the other day you were telling me about how every other day you would come into town, what day was that?

May “Every saturday. That was the day we got to come to town and daddy would give us a nickel or a dime and we’d come to the dime stores and look around and when we got older we’d go to the new dixie shop or the clothes shop. Momma would buy some of our clothes there, Pennies was down on 5th and main and that one side where the church is now. And we would buy a lot of our material to make clothes there because mom made all of our clothes when we were young. Then she would take us over to the dime store and she’d buy us our favorite candy of whatever we wanted with our nickel or dime. There was a fountain where you could buy drinks and you could get a coke for a nickel and she would buy us one of those. Then we would get on the bus and go home.”

How old were you then?

May  “It was probably in the 50’s. I don’t really remember how old we were, I remember more after I was nine or ten. The only time I remember when I was young was when I was about five or six I guess cause I didn’t go to school till I was six, but I remember getting new shoes and walking around cause I was really proud of them. The biggest thing I remember was just playing around the house, we didn’t do a lot of stuff, we went on Saturday to town and I used to walk and just play around all down by our house out on West 4th street.”

How different was it then compared to how it is now?

May “I just think of 4th to 7th street was our territory where we shopped, I don’t remember a whole lot more than that. I don’t even remember when the Friscoe building was a train station. Even though I was around when It was that. I remember when we had to come here for doctor and dentist visits. I didn’t go to the dentist until I was in like Highschool. Well, I did go to a dentist but that was back when I was in school. They would take a group of kids from the school to the dentist to have their teeth checked and you had to have your parents signature to say that you could go so we did. And they pulled my two front teeth, I guess the dentist just wanted to do something to say that he did something so that they would pay him.” 

Sounds like an awful field trip...

May “I was in first grade but, I hadn’t lost any of my teeth yet, so he pulled the two front teeth on the bottom. After that I didn’t want mom or dad to send me to the dentist again because he didn’t use enough time to let things get numb and it was pretty scary. They used to do that with shots too, you’d go to school and they’d give you your shots once your parents signed the paper. My parents would never sign the paper for us to get shots so I had measles and chickenpox. All that good stuff when I was young.” 

Where did you go to school?
May “I went to Jefferson, it’s at the same place it’s just a different school now. I remember all of my teachers, but we had a principle she was really a cool lady, she was getting pretty old when she was our principle and she was really strict and pretty neat though, I liked her.”

On West 4th street where you guys lived, what was it like over there back then, was it country?

May “There were chat piles where they had mined and left the piles all around, and we’d go over there and we would make little tunnels through them, and make a little house and things. That’s where we played a lot was in that chat pile area. They had a cabinet shop back there along time ago, they would make little seats and tables for restaurants. We would go and get those pieces of things they would throw away. They had several of those back things that they put on a booth and we would drag them over to the chat piles and put them all together and make us a play house. We would climb trees, I was a little afraid to climb trees so once I got up in it I couldn’t get back down. One time we had a neighbor come over and get us down. We got up there somehow but we were afraid to come down, and there was no limbs to just climb up from the ground. This little girl, ran over and got her dad and he lifted us out of the tree, I never climbed that tree after that.”

How many people lived over in that area?

May “All of those houses that are built along 4th street were built when I was a kid. That’s when they were built. A lot of our friends were right there within a block of our house, east of us. Across the street there wasn’t anything but those chat piles.”

How much have you seen Joplin change?  What do you think about it?

May “When I think about it I think about all the things that are still there from when I was young. When I think about it I think about the open space that was around us back then. We didn’t have UPS and then they started building those houses up on the street. The UPS was originally a Pepsi Cola business, so we started buying pepsi cola from them by the case because we could get it cheap. Daddy would go buy a case of pop when he felt good and let us have our 4 cans. When I was 10, I started going to the store for mom every night. We didn’t go once a week, we went every night. Mom had an account at the grocery store there on 4th and Mckinnely, I would go and get the groceries. I remember our bills were usually $3-4 a day. We’d get a couple quarts of milk, cause they were in the bottles not in the plastic containers like they are now, cause we used 3 quarts of milk a day. I drank it like crazy. We’d buy supper, and breakfast, and lunch for the next day. There was nothing open on sunday where you could buy stuff, so we would buy stuff till monday. Daddy would take us to dudes donuts down on mainstreet and get a couple dozen donuts on Sunday afternoon, and we would have milk and donuts for supper on sunday night a lot of times. We could eat whatever we wanted that mom had fixed, but she didn’t fix supper on sunday night. We would also drive around every sunday, Daddy liked driving. We would drive around the states, we went to all kinds of places. We would stop for ice cream a lot of the time somewhere, and then come home and then daddy would go get the donuts and we would have donuts and milk for supper. “

What is one thing you miss the most about Joplin from back then? 

May “I think if I had one day I would like to be at home with my mom and dad and my brothers and sisters, and I wouldn’t mind being out in the garage helping daddy paint cars and get ready to paint, cause I think that’s what I miss the most. I miss that most of all, those times we had just at our house. I remember coming downtown and going shopping and one christmas daddy brought us down to shop, gave us a whole dollar to buy christmas presents, which was a lot of money cause daddy usually gave us a nickel. I went to Christies of course, where we bought stuff, and I bought a little bottle of really cheap perfume. I would ask daddy sometimes if I could have a nickel and he would give me one so that I could go over to the store and buy something and I would usually get penny candy cause you could get a whole bunch of them for a nickel. I used to buy a candy bar for a nickel. There are a lot of things that are the same and there are a lot of things that have changed too. The stores behind sonic there was a time where there was a mine hole there. I remember a time when the fire department had to go over there because somebody had fallen into the mine hole and they had to go over there and get him out. I’m not sure if it was a kid or what but they were messing around over there and they fell in. We had mine holes everywhere.”

Were they still mining quite a bit growing up or were they done?

May “They were done mining in Joplin, we hadn’t seen any mine holes except for the holes in the ground. And the chat piles. But we lived right around it, the reason daddy bought our property was that the whole block where we lived had no mine holes under it, He was guaranteed there was no mine holes from the abstract and the title and stuff. He bought it from a guy who let him pay $400-500 a year till it got paid off, I don’t remember how much it cost but it wasn’t that much, i was in highschool when daddy finally paid it off, he only paid it once a year and he only paid four hundred and something dollars a year. My moms father worked in the mines, and he died of miners TB when he was 49 years old. Then grandma moved to Joplin and got married and lived here till she died. Mom and dad met in joplin, they worked at a garage over somewhere. Daddy built the house where we lived when I was little, I think all of us kids were all born in that garage. The garage was a big green garage but the front of that had two rooms at the bottom and one room at the top cause it was two stories and it was only that front part of that garage where we lived.” 

When you were little he ended up building what granny lived in till she passed away, that’s the one that I know. 

May “Yes. They tore that big garage down a few years ago. We lived in that first part of the garage, and daddy had his business in the back little part. His business was home baked enamel. He painted the cars with enamel paint and then he put them in that room and baked it until it was dry. He was the first one to do home baked enamel.”

Did he do that the whole time you were growing up?

May “ Ya, he did that until I got out of college then he had a stroke and couldn’t work anymore. We would help tape up cars for him and sometimes we sanded them. Back then he would charge like $35 to paint a car and if we helped him he would give us all the money so that we could to go to town and buy all of our school supplies.”

Did he stay pretty busy with that business?

May “Ya, he made a living with it. We weren’t rich or anything but we had food on the table we had good clothes, and we never worried about money or anything. I got pretty good at taping cars, I got to the point where I could tape a whole car in 2 hours by myself, there was a lot to tape back then because there was a lot of chrome to cover. It was really fun, I felt good that I could do something like that. It wasn’t something I wanted to do for the rest of my life, but it was something I could do that other people wouldn’t think about doing, and it helped daddy and I liked working with daddy. We’d talk about different things from when He was a boy, so it was kind of neat I felt closer to him that way when we got to work together.”

Where did you go to college?

May “Joplin Jr. College.”

Where was that at?

May “That was on 8th and wall. I guess that’s the school building now, so they just rented it out for something, I can’t remember what it was. The highschool was there when I went to my first year of highschool and then they built the big highschool out on 20th street. So my last two years of highschool was out there. But my first one was at the old memorial building.”

You went to highschool and college there, so How did you meet grandpa?

May “Yes, I Went to highschool and college there. I met Grant when I went to a parade on Christmas, it was around December 5th or so of 1963. My friend and I walked over to Main street to watch the parade, and we decided to go into a cafe that was on 8th street and Main and we ordered a nickel coke. I had given her my money to keep in her pocket for the nickel cokes, and when we went to pay for them she had lost the money cause she had a hole in her pocket. I had left my purse in the car so I said well you wait here and I’ll go get my purse. When I came back she was sitting there talking to Grant. He sat there with us for the whole evening and instead of going and watching the parade we sat there and talked to Grant. Then he took us to wilders, and we all had another coke at wilders and then I took him home, and after that he called me for a date, and that’s how that happened.”

How long did you date before you got married?

May “Well I met him in December and the next October 25th we got married.”

And you said before a year of being married you moved to topeka and then when did you have Carl, your first son?

May “Carl was born February 6 1966 in Topeka, and then when he was 2mnths old we were in Topeka, and a big tornado went through. It damaged our house but we were just right on the edge of the tornado, so we move to a house on the other side of town. Grant worked at a payless shoe store, and we got transferred to Manhattan, Kansas. We went to manhattan and lived there for a few months, we didn’t live there very long. We had Eric my second son in 1967 in a small town. Both of us didn’t like the town it was too small, it was dirty, there was nothing to do, we went to church there and it was ok, but they had dust storms there. Eventually we decided to move, so we packed whatever we could get into our car and left everything else. We moved to the biggest town closest to us which was Omaha, Nebraska. We stayed there till 1971. Bethany my daughter was born in Omaha. I kept having dreams where I climbed a ladder, and was falling I would never fall completely but I had those falling dreams all the time and I couldn't figure out what was going on. We went through a couple of blizzards in Omaha, within  2 months that last year in Omaha and then we decided to come back to joplin.”

What made you guys decide to move back?

May “It was my hometown and I really missed being here, my whole family was here, I mean that’s back when everybody lived here and nobody moved away. The kids were all here, and momma was still alive, so we moved back here. I’ve been here ever since. I like joplin because, even though I've been to other places, and they were ok, and I had good friends in all of those places, I just loved joplin. This was just home, and if I were somewhere else I would be ok as long as I had family around me. I couldn't just be by myself anywhere other than joplin and feel comfortable.”

Has there been anything crazy that has happened in Joplin while you were growing up?

May “I got to see Ferlin Husky one time at memorial hall I don’t know if that’s great or not, he’s pretty neat but he was drunk at the time. But the one thing that I remember back in grade school was when Bill Cook killed that family. I didn’t really listen to the news very much, but since daddy knew Bill Cook he was talking about it the night before they found the bodies. He said ‘I bet you that he dumped them in one of these mine holes around here.’ The next day when we went to school we came back for lunch and there were policemen over a block and a half away from our house and they were all over this area that we knew was a mine hole because they found bodies in there. Because Bill Cook lived in our area, he used to work down the street and would stop in the garage and say hi to daddy. You think about something like that and you think what if that was your family. I never thought about it too much back then but I knew it was something bad. There were a lot of mine holes and chat piles all over the city of Joplin. They had one on 7th street and tyler road that caved in, and from what I understand you can go underneath the whole city of Joplin in a tunnel, and that was the thing that fell over there.”

It’s kind of scary and kind of amazing how much there is of the mine itself, like nobody is down there and there are just these empty mine shafts.

May “Well there is so much of it, they put gravel in to fill them up but then it washes down the mine shafts and leaves a gap where they fill it in.”

You said that grannys’ dad was a miner?

May “Daddy came from around Saint Joe, that’s where he was born. His dad was a judge up there, I don’t know when he died but he died young. Younger than he should’ve I think in his 40’s. I’ve never seen him, we had a picture of daddy’s mom but we didn’t have a picture of his dad that I know of. It’s amazing though, Joplin has changed a lot but some places haven’t. We used to have the big Conner hotel there on 4th street, and they took it down, and that was really traumatic cause it fell on a couple of guys that were in it. They got one guy out who was still alive but one ended up dead. That was a big day I remember hearing it fall, cause we lived over there on 4th and Byers or 6th and Byers so you know it was pretty big.”

So would you say Joplin hasn’t really changed but it has grown?

May “They’ve taken a lot of the buildings out and they’ve added a lot of them too especially out on west 4th street. A lot of the places out on west 4th street are all the same from when I was a kid. The bowling alley is still there, I don’t remember a time when the bowling alley wasn’t there.  A lot of those houses down on 4th street were there the whole time after I was 5 or 6 years old, so there are a lot of places that are the same but a lot has been added over the years and just changed businesses.” 

How would you sum up Joplin to someone who hasn’t been here?

May “I would tell them it's not too big and not too small, and that you can live here and feel fairly comfortable. Seems like lately it’s not as peaceful as it used to be, we could walk down the street at night without any fear when I was a kid.”

If you could change one thing about Joplin now what would it be?

May “I don’t know, I really like joplin, I think because it’s home. I think Joplins a place where you can feel peace. I think the thing I would like to see most is the police department and the fire department with enough people to make everything good. I don’t know what I would do cause I like joplin the way it is.”

Since the tornado it feels like the mindset here has changed, or the heart of joplin, what do you think about post tornado and seeing all the changes going on?

May “I like it, it seems like people are doing really good, I think overall it has been a pretty positive thing that has come through that time.”

How would you describe the people of joplin?

May “I think most of the people of Joplin are good people. The type of people you could sit down and have a meal with and enjoy being around them at a picnic.”