Voices of the Ozarks – John Mertens

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Today we are interviewing John Mertens, former director of Ozark Regional Library, interviewed by John Jones.

First, some background on you.

Where are you from?

What did you do before coming to the Arcadia Valley and so forth?

Yeah.

Okay, I grew up, partially grew up in Wisconsin.

My family, when I was very young, lived in Wisconsin.

I lived there until I was 12 years old, had an unfortunate situation.

My father was an excellent businessman.

He worked hard, worked long hours.

He owned a clothing store in Dodgeville, Wisconsin.

That’s the home of the Land’s End, their main place of business is Dodgeville, Wisconsin.

But my father died at age 44 of a heart attack, and so that was the end of his business.

My mother sold the business and so we were sort of out of a place to live.

So we moved to Fulton, Missouri.

Of course, between Jefferson City and Columbia, and that’s where I was born, in Fulton, Missouri.

I have a twin brother, and he’s living in Bowling Green, Missouri.

We sometimes don’t have much contact, being that far away, but I’m going to see him this coming Sunday, so looking forward to that.

I lived in Fulton, Missouri, partially through my college years, from sixth grade on through most of my college, and I don’t know, Fulton was a great place to grow up for a kid back then.

I’m talking about the late fifties, early sixties, and living in Fulton, good grief, I was close to half a dozen different colleges and universities, I had my choice of a lot of places to go to school.

The main college that I went to was Lincoln University, and of course that was Missouri’s black university, I guess it still is, but what a pleasure it was to go to Lincoln University.

You know, I’d spent time in, like at University of Missouri in Columbia, and a lot of the courses at the University of Missouri in Columbia were taught by graduate students, who left a lot to be desired as teachers.

When I got to Lincoln University, all the courses were taught by PhD professors, and it was so enjoyable to the professors with doctor’s degrees, what wonderful teachers they were, and I really enjoyed that, I enjoyed being taught by PhD professors.

Same thing about Lincoln University, and some of the other schools back then, fifteen hours a semester, you could take fifteen hours at Lincoln University for sixty dollars a semester, that was the cost of fifteen hours of college education back then, a whole semester.

But very soon, the price went up to seventy-five dollars a semester, and three years later, when I graduated from Lincoln University, tuition had gone up to a hundred dollars a semester, and I had just gotten out of the Army when I went to school at Lincoln University, and I had the advantage of the military paying for my education, and for five years, I received money from the military for my education, five years of college, through master’s degree, and the total cost of my college education was five thousand five hundred dollars for five years, eleven hundred dollars a year got me through college, and that’s the thing I appreciate most about my military experience, was that it paid for my education, and I of course graduated from Lincoln University with a bachelor’s degree in sociology, and from there I went on to the University of Missouri in Columbia and received my master’s degree in library science, so that’s my background, and had a wonderful time growing up, and really enjoyed my college education, so while, also while I was