The Ragtime Fool (31 page)

Curd’s eldest son was Richard, Jr., who was born in “about 1902” and died in 1984. His wife’s name was Irma or Erma, and the 1930 census shows he had an infant daughter, whose name was not Susie. I found nothing to indicate that Richard, Jr. was ever called Samson, or followed his father into the sassafras business, though Hazel Lang wrote in her book,
Life in Pettis County, 1815-1973
, “In the later years of [Richard Curd, Sr.’s] life, he left the digging of the sassafras roots to members of his family but he always would go along to see that they went to the right spots.”

***

Abe Rosenthal, conductor of the Sedalia Symphony and founder of the Sedalia Mens Choral Club, was a Canadian who emigrated to Sedalia in 1930 from Canada, where he’d been concertmaster and conductor of the Hamilton (Ontario) Symphony. His future wife, then Fannye Hanlon, was a booking agent for Columbia Broadcasting, and on one of her trips to Canada, booked Mr. Rosenthal for a lifelong tour in her home town. Rosenthal’s day job was as Division Manager of the Milton Oil Company. The Rosenthals’ daughter, Willis Ann, a talented flutist, was awarded a scholarship to study at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York.

Miss Lillian Fox, “Sedalia’s Daughter of Music,” was a versatile and accomplished musician from early childhood, a music teacher, and a prominent figure in the arts world of her town. She was particularly known for her work as accompanist for the Sedalia Mens Choral Club.

Mrs. Blanche Ross was a respected Sedalia pianist who played at innumerable local concerts and other events.

Herb Studer, Republican, served as mayor of Sedalia between 1950 and 1953, when he resigned to accept President Eisenhower’s appointment to serve as Federal Housing Adminstrator for Western Missouri; his predecessor in that office was the brother of former president Truman. Studer died of a heart attack in 1960, at the age of forty-two.

In the same April 1950 election that sent Mr. Studer to the mayor’s office, Edgar (Ed) Neighbors, a Democrat, was re-elected Chief of Police.

***

Jerry Barton, Rafe Anderson, Clay Clayton, Luther Cartwright, Johnny Farnsworth, Luella Sheldon Rohrbaugh, Isaac Stark, Alonzo Green, Slim and Sally Sanders, Bess Vinson, Mickey Thurman, Susie Curd, Roscoe Spanner, Elliot Radcliffe, Cal (whose last name I never did learn), and the Chandler, Broaca, and Klein families were products of my imagination. They bear no resemblance to any person in my real world.

***

A ceremony did in fact take place at Hubbard High School in Sedalia, on Tuesday, April 17, 1951, to honor the city’s most prominent musical son, Scott Joplin. There was music and there were speeches, and a plaque was presented, to be placed on a wall in the school. Brun Campbell, the old Ragtime Kid, did not come out for the festivities, but from his home in California, he tried to persuade pianist Dink Johnson to play at the ceremony, and lobbied to have the proceedings carried by radio to New York, where he hoped to arrange for Louis Armstrong to present a scroll to Lottie Joplin. Brun wangled interviews with newspaper reporters; on the day of the ceremony, the
Sedalia Democrat
reported that “Today’s leading authority on Joplin and his music is Brunson Campbell, of Kenice (sic), California…Campbell is regarded as the number one ‘rag-time’ pianist still living, and second only to Joplin among the many who have played this music.” Unfortunately, the broadcast Brun tried to promote to New York never took place, and the event proceeded with exclusively local performers.

***

More than fifty years have passed since that dedication ceremony. By the 1950s, the Ku Klux Klan no longer held open meetings in Liberty Park, and thereafter faded into memory as an organization openly dedicated to the intimidation of Blacks and other allegedly-inferior ethnic groups. Today in Sedalia, Whites sit with Blacks in restaurants and theaters, and people of all races live side-by-side throughout the city. Lincolnville has become increasingly a ghost neighborhood of abandoned small houses and vacant lots, one of which, at 1001 Osage Avenue, was the site of Tom Ireland’s home. And as Luella Rohrbaugh predicted, the destruction of Scott Joplin’s journal did not impede the growth of regard and respect for his music. Every year during the first week in June, Sedalia swings to a syncopated beat, thanks to the lively, well-attended Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival.

I sympathized with Mrs. Rohrbaugh, Tom Ireland, and Isaac Stark, but couldn’t help hoping that Rudi Blesh might succeed in convincing the trio to preserve the journal and have it sealed until all those who would have been harmed or embarrassed by revelation of its contents had passed beyond those concerns. Clearly, there was interesting material in that book. Just why did Miss Luella Sheldon resort to such bizarre and dramatic measures to coerce young Brun Campbell to leave Sedalia in 1899? Even more intriguing, what went on among Brun, Scott Joplin, the Starks, and lawyer Robert Higdon that ended with multiple deaths and a cover-up, and was so potentially explosive as to cause Tom Ireland to fear for the safety of Brun, Isaac, and others if the episode were to become public, a half-century after the fact? What transpired late in Joplin’s life between him and Irving Berlin? Or, as Ireland put it, what did Joplin
think
transpired?

Thanks to Luella Sheldon Rohrbaugh, you won’t find this information in any work of history. But it is available to interested parties in two books,
The Ragtime Kid
and
The King of Ragtime
, both by Larry Karp, who, being a novelist and therefore destitute of conscience, scruples or principles, has laid out the sordid affairs in full detail.

***

When I visited Sedalia last June for the 2008 Joplin Festival, I found that during the previous year, Hubbard High School had been demolished. I wondered what had become of the plaque that had been put up fifty-seven years earlier, to honor Joplin. No one I talked to had any idea of its whereabouts.

***

The Uptown Theatre on Ohio Avenue, where Eileen Klein sold tickets on Saturdays, has been dark for many years. But there’s talk now among Sedalians about renovating the old building and converting it into a ragtime museum.

Selected Ragtime Resources

Radio Shows

Websites

Selected Bibliography

Brun Campbell, The Ragtime Kid

Rudi Blesh

Curd, Richard Sr. (Sassafras Sam)

Tom Ireland

Lottie Joplin

Histories of Ragtime

Social, Political, & Historical Aspects of Life in Sedalia in 1951

Venice, California in 1951.