Preserving early Missouri history

Felix Eugene Snider was born in 1908 and married Juanita Smith May 25, 1932. They raised three children, Robert Allen, Mary Felicia and Richard Eugene. He came to Southeast Missouri Teachers College as a student worker at 16, shortly after graduating high school, and worked for Sadie Kent. Felix worked at the SEMO library for 40-plus years before he passed away, just before retiring.

For about two years, Snider worked in North Carolina, before president Mark Scully brought him back as director of the library at SEMO. In 1968, the old library, named for longtime librarian Sadie Kent, was expanded and its exterior replaced with the present facade. Dr. Snider led the small college library to a university research library. He was also responsible for getting artist Jake Wells to paint a large mural of Southeast Missouri just inside the entrance.

Snider was also a historian and preservationist. When the old SEMO library was being dismantled, Felix salvaged marble slabs, marble column facades and some woodwork, and used them in his house under construction. There are steel beams in the attic to support large numbers of books and a small elevator to move boxes of books from the basement to the attic and vice versa. Felix had a very successful side hustle, as it is called today. Snider published books, and his home housed his office and storage.

His company, RAMFRE Press, was an acronym taken from the names of his children. "Great Cities and Why They Grew" was one of his earliest books written and illustrated by him, because he believed text books should be educational, not boring. One of his most popular books, "Biography of a City", co-written with Earl Collins in 1956, is about the city of Cape Girardeau and probably the best book on the city to that date.

Snider found local history books out of print or with expired copyrights and had them reprinted and rebound to sell. Two of his more famous books in this group are Douglass' "History of Missouri" -- which Snider took from a two-volume set to a single volume -- Goodspeed's "History of Southeast Missouri", a go-to book for any researcher of early Southeast Missouri ancestry and history. Originally printed in 1888, Snider took the mammoth, single volume, non-indexed book, reduced its size and manually created an index with the assistance of his daughter, Felicia. Words for the index were written on cards spread out on the living room floor, then organized alphabetically by Felicia and manually typed by Felix.

In all, Dr. Felix Eugene Snider reprinted approximately 17 books, along with the ones he wrote himself. Unfortunately, all the books are out of print, and RAMFRE Press died when Felix passed away in 1973. Thanks to Felix Snider's love of books and history of Southeast Missouri, he preserved much of the early ancestry and history of Missouri, and these reprints can be found in many libraries around the area and state.