I grew up in Mexico, Missouri. Mexico is a small town just a bit northeast of the center of the state. The two houses that I called “home” for my first 18 years were near to the campus of a former college for women, called “Hardin College and Conservatory of Music”. Hardin, as a college for young women, was open from 1873 to 1931. Prior to that, the campus from 1858 to 1873 was the location of the Audrain County Female Seminary. In fact, the street onto which my family moved when I was 10 was called “Seminary Street”, and ran to the location of the front door of the old Seminary building, long gone before my time.

In the 1870’s, with a substantial donation from Charles Henry Hardin, a State Senator from Mexico and who would shortly be governor of Missouri, Hardin College and Conservatory of Music was founded.  The Hardin campus was located on and along a couple blocks of South Jefferson street, to which my street of Seminary ran perpendicular.

Jefferson Street was one of those great old small-town streets that really carry and reveal the character of the town.   It had been paved in vitrified brick in the early 1900’s, was largely tree-lined, and included broad sidewalks. It was the location of many of the finest old homes from the early years of the town.  In my childhood there were still a few concrete hitching posts along Jefferson, with big iron rings embedded in them for tying up your horse or buggy-pulling team, though it had been many years since any of those posts had gotten any use from horses.  This, even though Mexico was, as all schoolchildren knew from an early age, the “Fire Brick and Saddle Horse Capital of the World”.   It was (and is) a beautiful street.   Jefferson ran north from the Hardin college campus to the railroad depot area, and then right into the downtown central business district, or “the square” as we all knew it.

The Hardin campus and Jefferson Street were central to many of the adventures I remember as a boy. Those who grew up in Mexico when I did remember the Hardin campus as consisting primarily of three buildings, Presser Hall … recently renovated and still in use today as a performing arts center for the community; Richardson Hall which had been converted to classrooms for the Junior High School there in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s; and the old gymnasium building. This was the makeup of the Hardin campus where I went to Junior High, or what the kids today call “Middle School”. There was a large grand expanse of lawn and ball fields out in front of Richardson and the gym. But in the early years of Hardin College, there were other buildings out in front of Richardson Hall and the gymnasium. These buildings were classrooms, the main administration building and dormitories.

Some time around 1970, my parents got the itch to buy a metal detector. This was when we lived on Seminary.  So dad shopped around and ended up buying a nice “White Electronics” brand metal detector.  They had this idea that since they knew of many, many places in neighboring Callaway and Boone counties where they’d each lived growing up, where there were old abandoned farm houses or country stores, that it might be fun to “prospect” around there for buried stuff.   I would sometimes take the metal detector over to a grassy area on the Hardin campus, or one of the baseball fields there (which would have included part of the “front lawn” of the college, and the area where some of the long-gone buildings had been) to try to see what I could find. I think I found a few coins from recent years. Probably lunch money dropped by some student as they reached in their pocket while cutting across the lawn.  I also found unexplained pieces of scrap steel, long since rusted to the pint of no recognition, but likely they were bits of debris from the old buildings.

But the prize, by far, was finding a pristine “Walking Liberty” half dollar from 1923. It’s not rare enough to be worth a tremendous amount of money, but it’s gorgeous. The walking liberty half-dollar is truly one of the prettiest coins ever minted in the United States. Lady Liberty, draped in the Stars and Stripes, walking towards the rising sun. Because of the delicate features of its design, the Walking Liberty halves found in circulation are often quite worn. This one however, as mentioned above was found in rather pristine condition.  It was covered and caked in the dirt of years, but when cleaned off in cold running water, it was simply pristine.

I decided long ago that I would never, ever part with it.

Here’s why.

I always imagined that some father gave his pretty little daughter who was headed off to college that half-dollar. Perhaps he was a respected physician with a well-trimmed beard, someone who passionately believed in the power of higher education. Or perhaps he was a simple laborer or poor farmer who had scrimped and saved his whole life to be able send his daughter to college where she might learn the skills necessary to build a life for herself better than the one he himself had.

In any case, she was born to be a part of the unfolding “American Dream” of the new century, when the pace of progress was staggering, and the world was changing in ways that could scarcely have been imagined even a couple of decades before.  I imagine that father as he handed the shiny coin to her, and in the wistful knowledge that he would miss her terribly, told her to “get something nice” for herself.

But instead, while crossing the Hardin campus one day a few weeks later to the administration building, she dropped it unnoticed, and it got scuffed underfoot and eventually sank into the soil until I found it decades later.

Upon realizing her loss and not having enough money to be frivolous, she wasn’t able to join in the walk with her classmates up Jefferson Street to the square to sit in a dainty wire-back chair at a small table, to laugh and enjoy a phosphate or an egg-creme at the soda fountain counter in the drugstore. By missing that trip, she also missed the opportunity to meet a dapper young man from Mexico with a bow tie, suspenders, seersucker suit and a stiff boater hat, who just happened to be in town looking for the girl of his dreams.

Seeing her stylish tresses and beautiful laughing eyes, he would have approached her, and with nothing more to offer than that winning smile of his, he would have made an awkward introduction … awkward because he’s not particularly good at small-talk.

Soon though, with her heart beating nervously, she would have impressed HIM with her boldness in unexpectedly offering to use the half-dollar to treat him to a fountain drink. He would have insisted it wasn’t necessary for her to pay, and she would have produced the half-dollar, smiled, and said “Don’t worry, it’s not really mine, this one’s on my daddy.”  The young man would have given her a quizzical look, but she would have only given him a coy sideways glance in response, and offered no further explanation. In the ensuing conversation whilst they sipped their sodas, they would have come to realize that the hopes and dreams they each had for their own lives were truly parallel.  And they would have begun to fall for each other, even before the rattling sound made by the straw at the bottom of their very first shared empty phosphate glass reached their ears.

Love at first sight? Some are skeptical. Some may even choose to deny such a thing exists. But those who are truly in the know can assure you it happens, and when it does, it is once and for all time.

For all time.

Marrying shortly after her graduation from her beloved Hardin College, they would have left Mexico to seek fame and fortune in some large city with bright lights, wide streets and efficient public transportation. Bolstered daily by her beauty and her sparkling personality, and nightly by the selfless love they lavished upon one another, he would have quickly risen through the ranks of commerce, to become a wealthy industrialist. In later years, inspired by her kindness and generous spirit, together they would have used their amassed fortune in the service of others, to help end world hunger and eradicate horrid diseases.

Alas, ‘twas not to be.

Instead, she dropped the half-dollar coin on campus that day, and never made that trip downtown.

The young man ended up marrying Gertrude, one of her classmates. Gertrude, who though she was nice enough, was not his soul-mate. He and Gertrude lost their meager savings in the Great Depression, moved west looking for work, and were never heard from again.  Some said they went to California.  Others thought maybe it was Wyoming. No matter.

As for the young woman with the milky skin, sweet smile and no half-dollar, she never married.  Instead, she spent her final years living on a meager fixed-income in public housing in a distant city.  A city noisy, dark, and dank. Her music degree from Hardin was useful for her bored pastime of writing beautiful songs of longing, songs of hope and unrealized love. Songs which she played on a tinny sounding out-of-tune piano as she waited for music students that never came, heard by only her own ears and those of her three cats.  Also by the cockroaches and rats which shared her flat and inhabited her dismal days.

She played those songs in loneliness each afternoon, right up to the point where the drunken Romanian immigrant upstairs would pound on the floor with his cane and yell for her to “SHUT THE HELL UP!!!”.  Then she would take her chair, sit by the window and look out on the grime and grit of the city with wistful and longing eyes, and random thoughts of happy people.

Happy people who lived ….. elsewhere.

As for the Walking Liberty half, I found it some forty years later…. and to this day it languishes in my curio box, a testament to lost opportunities and the randomness of life.

When I see it, it speaks to me.

No, it doesn’t speak to me in such a way so as to suggest a need for specialized psychiatric care.  But rather, it whispers to me of everything lost, and it makes me wonder about possibilities.  Possibilities, and second chances.

Second chances.

If I could, I swear I would travel back to that day on the lawn of Hardin College and Conservatory of Music, wearing a stiff boater hat of my own, and a bright bow tie on a clean white shirt with a freshly starched collar. In my best seersucker suit I would be there, nearby, at precisely the right moment.  The moment the coin slipped unnoticed from the grasp of the girl’s delicate and milky white fingers.

Acting quickly, I would step in and reach down to pick it up. I’d say “Oh, Miss!!   Miss!!  I believe you have dropped this coin.”

Then I would gently press it into her oh so soft palm, and in so doing would hold her hand a scant moment too long.  As she blushed pink at her own carelessness, and at my somewhat unsettling impetuousness, I would see the beginning of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

She would thank me.  I’d say,  “That’s quite alright…. just take it now and go downtown. Go downtown with your friends. But first, will you promise me you’ll be open to possibilities?”

She would give me a curious look.

“I’m sorry if this may seem bold, but if a nice looking young man in a stiff boater hat and a bow tie … yes, similar to these that I’m wearing now … should smile at you, and if that smile makes your heart jump in your chest, as I surely pray that it must … just consider for a moment that what you see in his eyes is real.  It is real.   And know that boldness has rewards of its own. You just never know whether what you might dare to do in a bold moment without hesitation may reap rewards you can scarcely imagine.  Someday.”

She’ll look at me puzzled, and I’ll repeat,  “Miss, will you promise me you’ll believe in “someday”?  Please?”

Because you just never know.

love,
John