The Industrial Luminary and Col. George S. Park

Parkville's original Luminary

I had been "publishing" newspapers since I was a little boy. Maybe it was because my father bore a striking resemblance to George Reeves, aka Clark Kent aka Superman and maybe it was because I watched the Spiderman cartoons growing up. Also, could be that my father brought home a copy of the New York Post every night. Whatever the spark was, I've been writing all my life.

For Parkville, I was interested in knowing their history. Clearly, the town was named for this guy Park...he had a huge grave monument at the town graveyard. What was their first newspaper? What did he read? To find the answer, I went to Park University and met one of the greatest individuals in the world, their archivist Carolyn McElwess.

She told me the story of the Industrial Luminary. Col. Park was the publisher. Was he a Colonel? Probably not. But he escaped Santa Anna's firing line. He was a schoolteacher looking for adventure and was trying to get to the Alamo but Santa Anna got to his crew first and decided to shoot them all. Park dropped to the ground the moment Santa Anna's hand dropped, when he signaled his troops to fire. Decidedly not shot, Park popped up and hightailed it across the Great Plains until he came to Missouri and founded a town. You could do that in those days.

Every town needed a newspaper and Park's Luminary was phenomenal. In fact, it was too good: his anti-slavery stance put him at odds with David Rice Atchison, the Dick Cheney of the day and answer to a trivia question (he was president for a couple hours). Atchison made Park an offer for his printing press. Park said, sure...just give me a few weeks so I can get another one to keep printing the paper. Atchison went all Moe Green on him and said, om, no...you're not getting it...I'm buying you
out. Park replied, "There is not money enough to suppress the Luminary!"

Days later, a group of thugs from the hills of Platte County called "the Regulators" stormed into Parkville, took his press and tossed it in the Missouri River, scattered his type all over Main Street. They had planned to literally tar and feather him and ride him out on a rail. We hear that and we think it's funny like in the Bugs Bunny cartoons but it's not. It's brutal. It's a bunch of guys holding you down, ripping off your clothes in the middle of a public thoughfare, then pouring boiling hot pine tar over your body. It instantly scars you and burns off your first few layers of skin. The feathers stick to the tar and good luck getting them off after your lifted on a fence post and paraded out of town and tossed in the gutter.

But Park wasn't there that day, he survived, he appealed to President Polk and he got $10k to go away. He used the money to start Park University, but he always vowed that the Luminary would return someday. So I returned it. We picked it up at volume 3, since he did two volumes, we printed corrections from his last paper from the 1800s and printed letters to the editor that were still in the kitty. Not lost on me was the fact that the publishers of the Weston Chronicle and Platte County Landmark (who I worked for...more on that later), owners of newspapers that have been printing since the Civil War without ever missing a week,  hated my guts. Game on. Good thing we we were better.