​Ever wonder what it was like to hang out with the young Thomas Lanier Williams before he started calling himself "Tennessee"? (And ever wonder why he started calling himself Tennessee in the first place?) Well, that's where old college buddies come in handy, particularly college buddies like William Jay Smith, who has the advantage of being a good writer (he served a two-year term as the U.S. Poet Laureate) and blessed with a long life (he's currently 93) and a solid memory. It really minimizes the potential for embarrassment.

Smith just released a new memoir, My Friend Tom: The Poet-Playwright Tennessee Williams, that looks back on their student days at Washington University in the 1930s. Williams and Smith bonded early on not only because of their shared ambition to become great writers, but also because of their families' Southern heritage and because of their alcoholic fathers. Smith was a frequent visitor to Williams' house in University City.

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Robert E. Lee's 1863 portrait.

​Residents in several neighborhoods in Sedalia, Missouri, found fliers promoting the Ku Klux Klan on Monday morning, which happened to be the observed holiday to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, who was born January 15, 1929.

But three states -- Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas -- also celebrate the life and legacy of General Robert E. Lee on the third Monday in January, because that's close to his birthday, January 19, 1807. (Digression: Lee was born in Virginia, and yet that state doesn't officially celebrate the holiday. Discuss.) Unofficially, the KKK upholds the tradition of honoring Robert E. Lee regardless of where their members are located, hence the flier drop on Monday. If you're so inclined, you can dig up some example fliers online, but it's not recommended. (N.B., there are no guarantees on what happens to your computer or your self esteem if you download that flier yourself.) KKK members probably enjoy the subversive nature of honoring a Confederate hero on a day dedicated to a black man, but I don't pretend to understand the pleasures white supremacists derive from their actions.

Questions of race aside, the idea of commemorating the supreme military commander of the Confederate army and the supreme leader of the nonviolent Civil Rights movement on the same day seems incongruous, especially on an official level. It's important to remember that the Civil War was only four years of Lee's life. After the war, Lee applied for an official government amnesty, which was denied him by President Andrew Jackson JOHNSON (thanks, commenter Billy), a man who knew how to hold a grudge. Lee spent his later years urging peaceful reconciliation between the North and South, trying to heal the rifts that lingered after the war -- MLK and Lee had some peace-making tendencies in common after all.

Below: The ending to the speech Martin Luther King Jr. made in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated. King was in Tennessee to support striking sanitation workers and talked during the speech about the possibility of his early death. 


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Click here to see the map enlarged.

​Even back in 1884, before college football was the widespread money-making machine it was today, the names of many of your favorite teams already existed. In that blessed year, H.W. Hill & Co. of Decatur, Illinois, the sole manufacturer of Hill's Hog Ringers (142,000,000 rings sold!) drew up a map of these United States and territories with all the state nicknames, each lovingly illustrated with a little pig. (Well, the Texas pig ain't so little.)

There you have buckeyes and badgers and wolverines, jayhawkers and hawkeyes and even hoosiers -- though in the Indiana sense.

And then there are the Illinois sucker and the Missouri puke. WTF?

Read on, fellow pukes and/or suckers. All shall be explained!

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Bonnie, Clyde and a shotgun -- which could become yours!

​Ever wanted to own a set of guns that belonged to two celebrated Depression-era outlaws? Well, now's your chance! A tommy gun and 12-gauge 1897 Winchester shotgun seized when police raided Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker's Joplin apartment in April of 1933 will be up for auction later this month in Kansas City.

One of the police officers who had participated in the raid presented the guns to Mark Lairmore, a Tulsa police detective. The guns remained in the Lairmore family who, until recently, had lent them to the Springfield Police Museum, where they remained on display.

"They were the major draw of the museum, and I don't think they were all that anxious to give them up," Lairmore's great-grandson, also named Mark Lairmore, said in a statement. "But my father and grandfather have also passed away, so the sentimental reasons to hold them are no longer there.I feel it's time for someone with an appreciation of antique guns and the history behind these guns to own them and care for them."

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"Dixie" came out of blackface minstrel shows in the mid-19th Century.

​The song "Dixie" was born from the blackface minstrel shows of the mid-19th century. The lyrics take the perspective, and exaggerated dialect, of a free slave who aches to return to his days of plantation bondage.

The first verse opens: "I wish I was in the land of cotton/ Old times they are not forgotten/ Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land." And the chorus continues: "I wish I was in Dixie. Hooray! Hooray!/ In Dixie Land I took my stand to live and die in Dixie/ Away, away, away down south to Dixie/ Away, away, away down south to Dixie."

During the Civil War, the song became the Confederacy's anthem. Today, of course, "Dixie" induces polarized sentiments. Some call it an offensive reminder of one of America's great injustices. Some call it an essential artifact of the South's culture, of America's culture.

On November 18th, Missouri State University stepped firmly into the smoldering controversy, when its "Pride Band" played the song at a dedication of Park Central Square in Springfield, the site where three black men were lynched in 1906. On Saturday, the school's interim president Clif Smart issued an apology, telling the Springfield News-Leader that "Dixie" was "an unfortunate selection" that "will not be played again in a public venue."

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A drawing shows a keel boat tossed by waves from the tremor. Despite the magnitude of the earthquakes, few people died because the population in the area was so sparse at the time.

​Seismologists don't know for sure the magnitude of the earthquake that rocked Missouri at around 2:15 a.m. December 16.

Some believe the quake would have registered around 7.7 had anyone back then had a seismograph handy. Others say the tremor was the equivalent of 32 megatons of dynamite or roughly 2,500 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Nearly all scientists agree, though, that the earthquake was one of the most powerful (if not the most powerful) to strike America since European settlement.

And that first tremor (strong enough to jostle people out of bed as far away as New York City) was just the beginning. Five hours later the first aftershock, an estimated 7.0 magnitude quake, sent more shock waves across the nation. Another quake, estimated at 7.5 on the Richter scale, struck on January 23, 1812. A final aftershock on February 7 (estimated to be the same magnitude of the original earthquake) destroyed the town of New Madrid and knocked down homes in St. Louis.
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courtesy St. Louis Post-Dispatch

November 11, 1911, as depicted by a Post-Dispatch cartoonist.

​Yes, friends, it is that mystical day, the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year of the century. (Technically, only the tenth, but whatever.) Several among you took to the Twitters to note the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour. The more historic-minded reminded us that today is the anniversary of the end of the War that Was Supposed to End All Wars, which has since morphed into a day to honor all the men and women who served our country during the wars that followed. For a small subset of you, it is a day of celebration: The 111111 Grandest Meeting of the Corduroy Appreciation Club.

All of these things are worth honoring. But Daily RFT wants to take you back to the last 11/11/11, November 11, 1911, when Missouri experienced one of the biggest temperature drops in recorded American weather history.

At 2 p.m. that day, just before the cold front swept in, it was 78 degrees in St. Louis and 82 in Columbia, a record high for that day. By 7 p.m., most of the state reported freezing temperatures. Some areas reported 30-degree temperature drops in the span of 10 minutes.

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Saint Louis University has asked the city's Preservation Board for demolition permits to raze the old Pevely Dairy complex on the southwest corner of Grand and Chouteau.

The brick campus -- complete with its signature smokestack and giant P-E-V-E-L-Y -- was built around 1915 and served as headquarters for Pevely Dairy until 2008. In 2009 a fire swept through part of the complex, causing one building to collapse. That same year the building was placed on the National Historic Register.
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The original Cards logo. The team didn't adopt the more familiar birds-on-a-bat until 1922.

​Uh, well then, you're not nearly as nerdy as Daily RFT. During a recent game, we came up with four possibilities:

1. The team's early owners were ardent birdwatchers and especially fond of the northern cardinal, state bird of neighboring Illinois.

2. The nicknames Red Stockings (or Sox) and plain old Reds were already taken.

3. The name was a tribute to the overwhelming Catholicism of the citizens of St. Louis.

4. Unfortunately, the team was founded more than a century before the inaugural appearance of the Rally Squirrel. (St. Louis Squirrels has a certain ring to it, no?)

But then we decided to put down our beer and do a little research.

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