Karl Monroe Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

Karl Monroe 8
the money and he wants a sales tax and we're against the state property
tax. Do you think he'd guarantee not to have any more state property tax
if we'd go for the sales tax?" Dad said, "Well, I don't know but let's
go find out.'' So they walked down the hall and talked to the governor
and he said yes, he'd go for that. And that's the basis on which we
haven't had any state property tax since the mid-1930s. It was in the
constitution, it was in the law all that time that the governor and the
secretary of state and the treasurer I believe, these three were a state
board which was to set the rate and put it on the books for the state
property tax. And they had had a state property tax for years and years.
And after that we didn't have one and we don't have one to this day and
probably never will have one again.
Q: Well back in the early days of circuses, Collinsville Herald was one
of the printers in this area. Would you relate that story?
A: Well, the way it went was my father came here in 1917 with the idea
of converting the Herald to a daily newspaper. Well, it's not daily to
this day. Instead, in the twenties when business got very bad he conceived
the notion of doing poster printing. And due to the fact that we had two
big Miehle cylinder presses to print the newspaper on--it only ran once a
week--he had a lot of time open on those presses. And they were the kind
of presses that you could print posters on. They were big. So he got
into the poster printing business very big and into the streetcar card
business and bus card business in a big way. And one time the Herald and
Globe Poster were the two biggest poster printing businesses in the
middle west. We used to have type that was five feet high. Take two big
boards, wood cut boards, to make one letter. And we rented three old
buildings to store the standard portions of the circus and stock show and
burlesque show and movie advertising billboard material.
We had three or four Singing Sam From Alabama shows out on the road.
They weren't ours but we were stocking the paper for them. And there
were Uncle Tom shows and Darr-Gray stock shows and Mutt and Jeff and all
sorts of road shows.
And we'd get a wire from Little Rock. Send 25 dates, Oklahoma City,
general delivery. So they'd get out that man's material and they'd get
the right dates that they'd specified and usually they'd specify where
they were going to show, in a tent or someplace like that. And they'd
wrap them in a certain way so they could be put up by the bill posters
and send them off. Well about 1930 the absolute bottom dropped out of
that business. The Depression came along so that people didn't have any
money anyway. And radio came along to pull people's attention away from
that kind of entertainment, And talkie movies came along and the road
show business and the circus business both just fell flat on their face.
And from having a big business, the Collinsville Herald ended up with ten
long years, believe it or not, of losing money. Dad had a lot of insurance
and-he managed to keep the business going by borrowing on his insurance
and borrowing everything he could on his building. And finally about
1940, the daylight could be seen at the other end of the tunnel but it
was a bad time. And it was a rather remarkable thing that all three of
these factors ganged up on this rather thriving business all at one time.