Gretchen, I certainly welcome the response. I also certainly welcome the small steps that the Hannibal museum has made toward presenting some slave history. I am the local person who has been poking and prodding to get what little there is there -- though the real credit goes to Shelley Fisher Fishkin for calling the omissions to people's attention.While I don't want anyone being anything less than cordial to anyone, there are problems of great magnitude in Hannibal beyond the issue of slavery. In response to your posting, I will go into them in a bit of detail. In 1989, the city council entered into a contract with a not-for-profit corporation called, "The Mark Twain Home Foundation" to manage the boyhood home. The foundation is composed of a small group of business people. The business has been conducted has been done by a steering committee. The problems that exist here are myriad. Attendance at the museum was in the 200,000 people per annum range in the mid-1980s. The Foundation initiated an admissions fee. This precipitated an sharp drop in attendance -- which might be expected. However, the decline has continued at an alarming rate. It was down to 100,000 in 1992. In 2000 approximately 80,000 came. In 2001 only 72,000 people attended. I believe that in large part this is attributable to the policies of the foundation. Of most concern to Twainiacs and historians of any stripe should be the many significant fact errors. Regarding the house, in 1842-43, the Clemens's property was sold for the benefit of creditors. They were quite poor. John Marshall Clemens went to work as a clerk for Holliday and McCune in 1845 as a clerk to supplement his very modest income as Justice of the Peace which was a part-time job. Only family intervention from St. Louis got the Clemens family back into the little house following JMC's death in 1847. They could not have owned anywhere near all the upper-middle-class accoutrements on display. They are lovely period antiques, (and I love antiques) but not accurate. The Clemens family struggled along. Jane took in boarders. If memory serves correctly, Pamela gave piano lessons. After the office fire of the Journal, Sam and Orion actually ran the newspaper out of the parlor. It was never, as represented, the home of a prosperous Hannibal attorney. The Clemens family lived a very hardscrabble existence here. Which brings us to another substantial fact error: John Marshall Clemens never practiced law in Missouri. Vicki and I have done extensive searches in the courthouses. He was never licensed, nor practiced here. He was an attorney in Tenn. and Ky. The office of justice of the peace did not require him to be an attorney. When he died he was a candidate for clerk of the circuit court -- a non-attorney position. He served as a court reporter for some cases. But Hannibal has his "law office" on display and a tape recording tells visitors how JMC met with clients in the parlor. (The information about the professional status of JMC was presented to a meeting of Jane Clemens's Neighbors nearly 10 years ago. The director of the museum was present at the meeting.) In January, the president of the Foundation, stated to a meeting that it was his intention to continue to tell the story of "Tom Sawyer" in Hannibal. He stated that there would be no "social history" included in the Hannibal museum -- a buzz word for no black or slave history. Perhaps my use of the term Mickey Mouse was too easy -- but the question of culture vs. business came up in the context of Hartford and Disney -- excuse my taking the easy route. I didn't get up on the wrong side of the bed, but I was a bit tired. But also allow me to state clearly that there are serious problems here whether I am cranky or not. I suspect that if enrollment at Elmira College dropped by 2/3rds, there would be a lot of introspective analysis followed by corrective adjustments. You are most certainly correct that the museum has some fine artifacts -- most unrelated to Clemens's life in Hannibal. I was shocked to find that there is no inventory -- although one was supposed to have been prepared twenty years ago. I finally have unearthed the manner in which the Tom Sawyer story became the story told by Hannibal. It is a story of George Mahan. George was born in 1851 to slave owners. I have uncovered a case where George Mahan's father captured a runaway slave and returned him to his owner. His father was also active in the racist colonization movement. George Mahan was an extremely conservative lawyer. He chose Tom Sawyer (which in fairness was Twain's top selling book in his lifetime) as the story to tell. When president of the Missouri State Historical Society, he had official historic markers erected around town denoting where events from the novel "took place." He gave the house to the city in 1912, nearly 15 years before Rev. Armstrong discovered the stash of Hannibal newspapers in the attic of a descendant of William League, editor of the Messenger. These papers were the source for Minnie Mae Brashear's book and much of Dixon Wecter's book. Unfortunately, Hannibal pretty much ignored this scholarship. Instead of opting to tell the story of the historic Sam Clemens, it continued with the Mahan presentation. This is as dated as many of the other ideas of 1912 when children labored, women couldn't vote, and blacks suffered under the Jim Crow Laws. I am sending the mss of my book to my readers next friday -- I am thankful to Vic Doyno, Robert Sattelmeyer and Kent Rasmussen for their help. I will address some of the misconceptions about Sam Clemens's time in Hannibal. Others will have to be addressed in a more detailed biography down the road. Gretchen, I sincerely appreciate your collegiality. I have no personal objections to any individual here in Hannibal. The restored facilities for the museum annex are very nice. Buildings are well-maintained. We certainly do possess some nice goodies. But we have many, many problems that should not be swept under the rug. All the best to you in lovely Elmira, Terrell