Word: joplin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When William E. Cook was five years old, his mother died; his father, a ne'er-do-well Joplin, Mo. smelter worker, abandoned the boy and his seven brothers & sisters in a deserted mine cave. After the authorities discovered them there, most of them found foster parents, but only "the county" would take William, a small, ugly child with a deformed right eyelid. William bit like a caged wildcat at the institutional hand that...
...boarding home, he threw tantrums and complained that he wanted a bicycle like other kids. At twelve, he quit school; when he was hauled before a judge he sullenly asked to be sent to the reformatory. A married sister got him out; he responded by robbing a Joplin taxi driver...
...notoriously uncharitable critic, acknowledged as "the greatest ragtime writer that ever lived." In a book packed with the high-sounding names of old ragtime wizards and composers ("Blind Boone," "Jack the Bear," "One-Leg Shadow"), a quiet-mannered, softspoken, scholarly little man stands out above them all: Scott Joplin, the composer of Maple Leaf...
Like a lot of other ragtimers, Texas-born Scott Joplin served his time rocking a piano in that cradle of jazz, the sporting house. But unlike flamboyant, razor-handy Jelly Roll Morton, Joplin was, as one old friend recalls, the kind of man who "never hurt anybody. A kitten could knock him down. He wasn't much socially, but most everyone had a lot of respect for Scott because he never threw himself away...
...group, called the International Council of Community Churches, will act in an advisory capacity to some 300 of the 3,000 autonomous, nondenominational Community Churches** in the U.S. (total membership: more than 1,000,000). Its first president: the Rev. John R. Howe of Joplin, Mo. "We are entered on one of the most significant movements in the history of the church," he told the delegates. "Nothing quite like it has ever happened before...