Monthly Archives: June 2015

The Lost Miss Mizzou Highway Sign

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This is a proposed Miss Mizzou highway sign printed in the Columbia Missourian on April 19, 1958. Used with permission of the Columbia Missourian.

This is a proposed Miss Mizzou highway sign printed in the Columbia Missourian on April 19, 1958. Used with permission of the Columbia Missourian.

As I talk about in the Miss Mizzou book, there were ideas being thrown around about having a Miss Mizzou sign on the newly built interstate 70 to get people into Columbia. Did a Miss Mizzou sign ever exist? Here’s the evidence I’ve gathered so far.

A story from the Columbia Missourian from August 5th, 1966 mentions that there might have been a sign:

“Miss Mizzou was greatly applauded in Columbia with sign announcing ‘Welcome to Columbia – Home of Miss Mizzou.'”

Inside the 1968 Miss Mizzou calendar, a similar tale is told, although the source material for this write up might have come from the 1966 article:

“Naturally, Miss Mizzou was much applauded here, particular when Caniff let her first name – Columbia – be known. New road signs announced ‘Welcome to Columbia – Home of Miss Mizzou.'”

I have two people who attest that there was a sign. One is a MU alumnus who graduated in 1959:

“There was a large sign, including, as I recall,  the graphic of Miss Mizzou on the sign. It was on Interstate 70 if you were approaching Columbia from the east coming from St. Louis. Don’t know if there was one on the Kansas City side. But as I recall, it was not up for long.”

Another local resident who grew up in Columbia also saw the sign:

“I think the sign was a vertical Caniff drawing of the lady herself, not a photo of Stiner, and it would have graced the shoulders of I-70, which would have been more than half-way complete across the state by 1959.”

The sign would have likely been something that wouldn’t have been officially endorsed by the city, but I’m at a loss as to who would have put it up. A rogue band of businesses? A lone Caniff fan who owned property near the highway? I’ve extensively searched reels of microfilm over and over looking for this sign. If anyone has any information about the sign, please let me know!

Bek Nelson Gordon 1927-2015

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1954 Bek Stiner photo at the Air Force Base in Nellis, Nevada. Photo from the collection of J.B. Winter.

1954 Bek Stiner photo at the Air Force Base in Nellis, Nevada. Photo from the collection of J.B. Winter.

Some sad news to share: I recently got word that the original Miss Mizzou model, Bek Stiner, has passed away. She died March 28, 2015 in Watsonville, California. She was born Doris Stiner, and was known as Bek Stiner during her Miss Mizzou modeling days, but was eventually known as Bek Nelson Gordon. You can view a list of her film credits on IMDB.

Researching the Miss Mizzou Book

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microfilm

IMAGE: The microfilm reader at Columbia Public Library.

As I write in the afterward to the Miss Mizzou book, I first came upon Miss Mizzou in 2007. I’m pretty sure that it was this Milton Caniff/Alex Raymond post from Mike Lynch’s blog. There’s just a hint about what the character was in that post, and back then at least, there wasn’t much else online about the character.

I never grew up with Milton Caniff. “Steve Canyon” was in newspapers until 1988, so I theoretically could have seen the strip growing up in the 1980s, but I don’t think any of the newspapers I read carried it. In my teenage years I did see glimpses of Caniff work in comic trade magazines and I always marveled at his excellent brushwork. I have to say that until I got to researching Miss Mizzou, I hadn’t fully read much Caniff work at all.

My interest in the research was trying to figure out why Caniff, one of the biggest celebrity cartoonists of his day, would create a comic character around the small town of Columbia, Missouri. I started to poke around in the microfilm from various newspapers for information about the character. I got addicted to the thrill of the search, and ended up finding new bits of the story piece by piece, but it was slow going. Eventually the difficulty of finding answers through microfilm got tough enough that I put the research aside for a few years to work on some other projects. I picked the research back up around 2012 and decided to get a few more answers and call it quits.

Throughout the research process, I was wondering what the final product would be? I can tell you, a book was the furthest thing from my mind. I thought at best I might get a small article that I could publish somewhere. I worked up a short version of the story, but it was of such length that it was hard to market. Somewhere in the last 10-20 years, article lengths for newspapers and magazines have deteriorated to the point where my story just didn’t seem to fit in. To be fair, longer articles still exist in publications, but they usually have some sense of importance on a larger scale from what I can tell. The Miss Mizzou story is an interesting quirky story, but just didn’t seem to fit in modern publications.

I gave some thought to morphing the research into a book, and thought that the print on demand market might work pretty well for information like this; a local history book with a slight appeal to comic fans as well. I dug up some more research and started forming it into a book.

Stylistically, the book is a bit of a compromise. I was hoping to strike a balance that would meet both popular and academic readers. Did I succeed? That’s for you to decide.

The Miss Mizzou book is a product of my research, but don’t mistake it to be the final word on the character. There’s a lot of loose ends that I didn’t get the chance to research, and I may have unintentionally gotten some of the story wrong. The chance of a revised edition of the book seems like something that would be a possibility, or perhaps I’ll just add a few more blog posts to this blog as new information is discovered?