One exhibit displayed the 1,446 items swallowed by a patient, which included 453 nails, 42 screws, a plethora of safety pins, spoons, and salt and pepper shaker tops. The woman died during surgery to remove the items.

Another exhibit showed what the asylum’s television repairman discovered: more than five hundred notes crammed into a television set; answers to the questions a patient had been asked by myriad psychiatrists over the years.

The museum seemed to me as schizophrenic as some of those it supposedly championed. On one hand it blared the atrocities of mankind’s treatment of the mentally ill, citing that at one time residents of London used to pay to walk through the Bedlam asylum to see those inside chained to walls or strapped to beds. On the other hand it seemed to do precisely that, exploiting the plight of the mentally ill with all the theatrics of a carnival freak show.

After less than a half hour I fled the place and was still upset when I arrived back at my hotel, which was a few miles away. I couldn’t sleep so I watched a mindless TV sitcom to erase the memory of what I had seen.

It was time to leave St. Joseph.

Chapter Twenty-two

C H A P T E R

Twenty-two

History bears witness that our

lives are far more influenced by

imagination than circumstance.

Alan Christoffersen’s diary

I wrote earlier that small towns are tinder boxes for some of the world’s greatest people and ideas. U.S. Route 36 in Missouri may be the most illustrative example of my theory. Along this 160-mile stretch of highway the world was changed. This isn’t hyperbole. These are the people who came from the small towns on this one small stretch of American highway:

J. C. Penney

Walt Disney

General John J. Pershing

Mark Twain

And Otto Rohwedder, the inventor of sliced bread.

The day I left St. Joseph, I headed east on Frederick to 29 south, then made my way to the 36.

There were trees everywhere and, according to the book I’d purchased at the Jesse James Home, this was where James and his fellow “bushwhackers” hid out. I spent the night in the small town of Stewartsville (population 759) and ate dinner at the Plain Jane Café.

I started walking early the next morning and by noon I entered Cameron, a city of ten thousand, where I stocked up on supplies. The city of Cameron had a curious birth. In 1854 a group of settlers planned a four-block city called Somerville along the route of the Hannibal to St. Joseph railroad line. As it turned out, Somerville’s land was too steep for trains, so the settlers dragged the three buildings of their town a mile southwest and changed the town’s name to Cameron.