Summer 1994

Summer 1994

Several times a year we drive downstate to visit my parents in Godfrey, IL. On this trip we decided to make a long detour through Hannibal, MO about a hundred miles north of St Louis on the Mississippi River. Samuel Clemens grew up here. He dreamed of working one of the many steamboats cruising by. His short piloting stint gave him his famous pen-name of Mark Twain (a river piloting term). Considered the father of American Literature, this town was the inspiration for his most famous novels. Humorously his childhood home has an attached white picket fence famously painted by his friends in Tom Sawyer.