Remembering Dixie Haase

(The following is my column for this week's Newton County News.)

Not that there’s anything wrong with Price Cutter, but to the generations of people who lived in and around Granby during the 20^th century, the food and the memories came from Burnett Grocery and from the Nichols sisters.

I don’t remember the famed sliced meat from Burnett Grocery, but I vividly remember my aunt, Carolyn Strait, taking me there and me plunking down a quarter to buy a copy of the Sporting News with my favorite St. Louis Cardinal Orlando Cepeda on the cover.

Burnett Grocery is just a memory as are Nichols Grocery and the Sporting News. My aunt Carolyn died, far too young, a couple of years ago, and it has been decades since Orlando Cepeda was carving out a career that led him to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The memories though are just as vivid as they were five decades ago, sometimes seeming to contain more reality than the world that surrounds us.

Making the past come to life is a rare gift and it is one that Dixie Haase shared with us for much of her adult life.

Dixie, who died last week at age 79, was the Granby historian, keeping alive the days when businesses lined both sides of Main Street, when people still had first-hand memories of the city’s mining heyday and when Dr. Charles O. Chester personally delivered most of the population, including the writer of this column.

In her book, Mini Histories of Granby People, Dixie, through the use of obituaries and long forgotten newspaper articles made the past live again. Looking through those pages, I could relive the days when Billy Johnson would drive the Bookmobile into Newtonia and I would check out my limit of 10 books, all of which would be read in three or four days and I would have to wait another month for the Bookmobile to return. Billy Johnson’s obituary is one of hundreds included in the book. When I saw his picture, I could hear his voice again, advising me that he had new biographies I might want to read about major league baseball players.

The book, which was published in 2002, included some of my relatives and many others I knew, but even in the stories of people I did not know, I picked up the flavor of a community that is part of the East Newton R-6 School District, but which keeps long departed Granby High School  firstin its heart.

Dixie wrote other books on Granby history, including books on the Granby Cemetery and her well-remembered 1985 book Granby, Missouri: The Oldest Mining Town in the Southwest.

Thanks to Dixie Haase, there will always be a Granby where Burnett Grocery and Nichols Grocery vie for customers, where semi-pro baseball players ply their wares on a field north of town, where the best ice cream in town is yours for 10 cents at the Dairy Dip, and where Howard Smith can turn his hearing aid back on when his wife leaves the room.

Best of all, in that Granby that will live forever, there will always be Dixie Haase, sharing stories and reminding everyone why she loved the mining town that wouldn’t die.