MOMissouri Famous People

Two boys on Elizabeth Avenue

On The Hill, the Italian district of south St. Louis, Lawrence Berra and Joe Garagiola grew up in houses directly across the street from one another on Elizabeth Avenue. Both signed as catchers. Garagiola got the bigger bonus and had the better reputation as a teenager. Berra, born in 1925 and nicknamed Yogi by a childhood friend, went on to ten World Series rings with the Yankees, three most valuable player awards, and a second career as the most quoted man in the sport. Garagiola played nine seasons and then spent thirty years in the broadcast booth.

Casey Stengel was born in Kansas City in 1890, which is where the nickname came from, and managed the Yankees to seven championships including five in a row. Bill Bradley was born in Crystal City in 1943, won an Olympic gold in 1964 and two titles with the Knicks, then represented New Jersey in the Senate for eighteen years.

The president whose middle initial abbreviates nothing

Harry S. Truman was born in Lamar on 8 May 1884 and raised in Independence. The S is not short for anything. His parents could not choose between his grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young, so they used the letter both names shared and left it at that. He commanded an artillery battery in France in 1918, opened a men's clothing shop in Kansas City that went under in 1922, and remains the most recent president never to have earned a college degree.

He became president on 12 April 1945 having been vice president for 82 days, and served until 1953. His 1948 win over Thomas Dewey produced the photograph of him holding up the Chicago Tribune that had already called it the other way. Missouri also produced two of the country's most senior soldiers: John J. Pershing, born near Laclede in 1860, commanded the American Expeditionary Forces in the First World War, and Omar Bradley, born in Clark in 1893, commanded the American ground troops in Normandy and became the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Florida, Missouri, and the boy who watched the river

Samuel Clemens was born in the village of Florida, Missouri, on 30 November 1835, two weeks after Halley's Comet reached perihelion. He said he expected to go out with it, and he died on 21 April 1910, the day after it returned. The family moved to Hannibal on the Mississippi when he was four, and the town, the caves, the island and the river traffic became the whole geography of "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn." His pen name, Mark Twain, came from the leadsman's call for two fathoms of water on the steamboats he piloted.

Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in Wisconsin, but she wrote all eight of the original Little House books at Rocky Ridge Farm outside Mansfield, starting in her sixties, in pencil, on school tablets.

Joplin, St. Louis and the writers who left

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin on 1 February 1901, not in the Harlem that claimed him. T. S. Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888, grandson of the man who founded Washington University, and left for Harvard, then England, taking British citizenship in 1927 and the Nobel Prize in 1948. Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis in 1928 and shuttled between there and her grandmother's store in Stamps, Arkansas.

Tennessee Williams was born in Mississippi but spent his adolescence in a cramped St. Louis apartment, and the Wingfield flat in "The Glass Menagerie" is a version of it. Walter Cronkite was born in St. Joseph in 1916 and was polled the most trusted man in America at the height of his run at CBS. Joseph Pulitzer was a Hungarian immigrant who built the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which paid for the prizes that carry his name.

Chuck Berry, Josephine Baker, and ragtime out of Sedalia

Chuck Berry was born in St. Louis in 1926, trained as a hairdresser, and wrote the guitar vocabulary that everyone who followed borrowed. He played a monthly show in the basement of a Delmar Loop restaurant for nearly twenty years. Josephine Baker was born in St. Louis in 1906, danced on a Chestnut Valley street corner as a child, sailed for Paris in 1925, and returned in 1963 to stand at the March on Washington in her Free French uniform, the only woman to speak from the platform.

Scott Joplin was born in Texas but made his name in Sedalia, where "Maple Leaf Rag" was published in 1899 and named after a local club. He later lived in St. Louis in a house that is now a state historic site. Charlie Parker was born on the Kansas side of Kansas City in 1920 and raised on the Missouri side, in the jam sessions that ran until dawn under a city administration that ignored Prohibition. Sheryl Crow was born in Kennett in 1962 and taught primary school music before moving west.

Diamond Grove, Marshfield, Hamilton and Marceline

• George Washington Carver was born enslaved on a farm near Diamond Grove around 1864. The national monument on that land, dedicated in 1943, was the first in the country honouring an African American.
• Edwin Hubble was born in Marshfield in 1889. He proved that the Andromeda nebula lay outside our galaxy and that the universe is expanding, and the orbiting telescope carries his name.
• James Cash Penney was born in Hamilton in 1875 and opened his first store in Wyoming in 1902.
• Walt Disney was born in Chicago but spent his formative years on a farm at Marceline, the small town he later used as the template for Main Street, U.S.A.
• Jesse James was born in Kearney in 1847 and was shot in a rented house in St. Joseph in 1882 by a member of his own gang.
• Ginger Rogers was born in Independence in 1911, Vincent Price in St. Louis in 1911, John Goodman in Affton in 1952, and Dick Van Dyke in West Plains in 1925.

Missouri and the states around it