The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming ‘Letters From Peckerneck: What the School Board Don’t Wantcha To Know!” published by the Greater Peckerneck Historical Society.
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Son of a Clay County Canal War veteran, Wagstaff R. Itterman came to Peckerneck in 1921, via Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska and Montana. He began his slow westward trek towards Oklahoma in 1897, when his father secured a veteran’s land grant and moved the family from Terre Haute, Indiana to Geneseo, Illinois. An ever-restless young man, Itterman moved another state over in 1912, making Kansas City, Missouri his home. It was in Kansas City that he made the acquaintance of a young JC Hall, a small time greeting card salesmen. After several failed romances, and a mysterious fire that nearly destroyed the fledgling Hall family business, Itterman took to the road again in 1915. He founded two precursors to the Peckerneck Picayune: the Omaha Mutual in 1916 and the Billings Collector in 1918. Itterman hated holidays that involved greeting cards and wrote the following in the winter of 1927.
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The Scourge Approacheth
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Wagstaff R. Itterman, Publisher
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Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
And you Happy Valentiners can all go to Hell!
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February 14th is the bane of the Modern Continental, an insidious attempt to undermine a man’s God-given Providence by the mush mongers and passion peddlers, the trinket traders and card makers. And in his own home, no less! I clothe, feed and house my woman. She asks for nothing. She wants for nothing. Fancy perfumes – there in the water closet. Fine, East Coast Fashions – freshly laundered and hanging in the armoire next to her dainties. Chocolates – always within a summer stroll of the grounds. My paramour knows the depths of my feelings and there isn’t a flowercartist or confectioner alive who can tell me otherwise!
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St. Valentine’s Day. Rubbish!
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I blame the Catholics.
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Yes, them. Those idol-worshipping, do-no-wrong papists, who have inflicted themselves upon the calendar with innumerable feast days and appropriated pagan holidays. First bingo and now this, interjecting themselves into my most private of affairs. Their weapon of choice? Only the most scornful of saints from their seemingly endless parade of martyrs, St. Valentine, that unctuous gob who defied the Emperor Claudius by marrying his soldiers in secret and sending mash-notes to minors.
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Harrumph, I say! Double Harrumph! An unhealthy obsession with marriage and an unnatural lust for children, this is the way of the papists and their indolent acompli. I have every confidence we’ll soon find them upon the steps of the town square celebrating St. Buckleberry Day in honor of sodomy!
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To paraphrase my good friend Billy Yeats, a blood-red tide is loosed upon us, and everywhere our innocence is drowned. Our moral center lost, anarchy shall be loosed upon the world. Thusly, does the great beast slouch onward to Peckerwood, waiting to be born.
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Beware these papists, my friends. They’re everywhere.
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