By Andra Bryan Stefanoni
Globe Staff Writer
JOPLIN, Mo. —
Some familiar Joplin landmarks might be gone, but they are very much alive in the mind of Anna Frank “Frankie” Hale, whose ancestors settled in Joplin in the late 1800s.
Hale, 86, spoke to the Joplin Welcome Club last week at Twin Hills Country Club, without notes, about her affinity for the city and its early development.
Born March 26, 1926, at 10th and Rex streets, the dyed-in-the-wool Joplinite hasn’t strayed far since. Her family’s beginnings in Joplin date back to 1895, when her mother, Laura Taylor, came by covered wagon from Springfield as a young girl with her mother and father.
The trip took three days. There was no road, just a path.
When they arrived, they lived in a tent city populated by mining families in the area near East Seventh Street and the current-day Target store.
“It was all open country,” Hale said. “There was a spring she hauled enough water from to drain the Mississippi dry.”
Taylor would meet and marry N.H. Carson, Hale’s father, and they began building a life together. With his horse team, Carson earned $2 a day hauling chat to help build nearby roads.
“We called Seventh Street ‘the pike,’” Hale said. “I can remember, in my childhood, when they paved Seventh Street.”
The Carsons built a white house at 1002 Rex St. to the tune of $1,100, but worried that when they were finished they still owed $35.
When Hale was born, the home still was without electricity or city water, so the family built a house at 802 Rex St. using stones from the American Beauty Mine. Its location afforded day laborers the ability to hand dig a water line extending all the way to an existing water line at Range Line Road.
The family moved in when Hale was 22 months old. She still lives there today.
“If I live to be 1,000, it will always be home,” she said.
The street was almost named after her family Ñ Carson Avenue Ñ but her father rejected the suggestion from the street superintendent, advising him instead to name it Rex after the Rex Mining Co.
Growing city, growing child
In Hale’s youth, one could ride a streetcar from Fourth and Main streets to Duenweg for 5 cents. The streetcar line ran along nearby 10th Street, so the sight of miners coming and going was commonplace. From 13th to 32nd streets, between Range Line and Duquesne roads, a 1,000-acre tract of undeveloped land was referred to as “the Diggins,” Hale said.
“Miners would get off (the streetcar) to walk up to the Diggins, which meant they were just diggin’ to see what they could find,” she said. “If they found ore, they would put down a shaft.”
As a youngster, Hale occasionally rode that streetcar to and from Duquesne Elementary, where she attended school starting in 1932.
Hale recalled an announcement by then-President Theodore Roosevelt’s administration that the government would provide each pupil with a half pint of milk.
Her father rejected the offer.
“’The government has never given us anything and we’re not going to start now,’” Hale recalled him telling her, opting instead to pay the 2 cents per half pint.
Hale later transferred to McKinley Elementary when Joplin annexed the area.
To support their family, her parents were early entrepreneurs: Her father once owned the southeast corner of Seventh Street and Range Line Road, but sold it to a developer for $250. That same property’s recent purchase price was $1 million.
Her mother learned to trade commodities and was well-known for being the only woman who worked at the Joplin stock market office. She also bought ice cream from a nearby factory to sell to passing miners, who carried it home in their lunchbuckets, and opened a wallpaper and paint store at Eighth and Main streets. Hale said her mother persuaded her as a young girl to visit a competitor’s store to check on prices.
“I came back to tell her, and she’d lower her prices,” Hale recalled.
Coming home, buying houses
Hale graduated from Joplin High School in 1944, then spent time working at Camp Crowder before working at The Joplin Globe from 1947 to 1954 in the display advertising department.
She met her husband, Pat Hale, on a blind date only to discover they had known each other since grade school.
They married in 1949, then left for Texas in 1954 so Pat could finish his education at the University of Texas. It was a bleak time in Hale’s life, she said, because she yearned for Joplin. She worked as an administrative assistant in the Dallas corporate world. Whenever she could save enough money, she’d return home to the Show-Me State to visit.
Hale recalls her displeasure at having to live away from Joplin for nine years.
“I cried five gallons of tears being in Texas,” she said. “I love Joplin. Just love it.”
After the birth of their first and only child, Laura, the Hales decided to return to Joplin permanently. In 1963 they purchased the Long Brothers’ real estate and insurance business.
And they soon settled back into the house at 802 Rex Street.
The Hales took over management of the First National Bank building, known then as the Liberty Building because during World War I, liberty bonds were sold at that spot. The bank rented the lower portion of the building from them. The trust department was on the second floor.
The Hales did well in their business. They took their real estate exam in Springfield the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, and despite all the distractions, they scored 100 percent.
At the height of their careers, they managed 53 rental properties and developed 10 acres near Murphy Boulevard Park, where they named Laura Lane and Laura Circle after their daughter.
Pat died eight years ago. Hale has asked her daughter to take over the beloved stone home on Rex Street in the near future, but she says Laura will have no part of it.
“She wants to stay in Washington, D.C.,” Hale said. “And I think Washington is the tail end of nothing.”
