RIVER CITY JOURNAL: CRAZY MARY, COLOR LADY AND CHESTER: JUST LIKE FAMILY

Every town has its characters, the folks who ought to be in novels -- and for all you know wrote a few way back when.

Several of you have mentioned from time to time that my recollections about growing up on Kelo Valley near my favorite hometown west of here in the Ozarks have made your memory juices flow.

I've always said that it doesn't matter much where you were reared, you probably knew people like the teachers, preachers, mailmen, butchers, politicians and dime-store clerks in my early life.

Not that these people are so ordinary that they're all alike. Quite the contrary. It is their individualism that makes them so memorable. And each of us can think of a coach or a Scout leader or a band director who was so distinctive that we still talk about him dozens of years later.

We tend to remember all those wonderful and sometimes strange people through our own special lenses, rose-colored or otherwise.

My most recent trip down memory lane was this week at the barbershop. My barber, a Cape Girardeau native, is about the same age as I am, so we tend to think alike on a lot of things. We were trading stories about the characters who populate any town, the ones who are distinctive because of the way they dress and behave. But when you get right down to it, you don't know them at all.

I was telling the barber about when we lived in Maryville, Mo. There were three of these people. Everyone in town knew them -- or thought they did. We saw them every day. We talked about them a lot.

But most of us didn't even know where they lived.

As I was telling the barber about Crazy Mary, the Color Lady and Chester, he was nodding knowingly. My barber probably has never been to Maryville, but he understood exactly what I was talking about, because every town has its own set of characters.

Crazy Mary -- see, I don't even know her real name, but I doubt it was Mary -- was a slender woman, perhaps in her late 40s or early 50s. She wore plain dresses and sneakers with no laces. Her only really distinctive feature was her fading red hair, which came down below her shoulders. What you remembered most about Crazy Mary was that she walked from dawn to dusk along city streets -- not the sidewalks, in the street. And she never looked up. She looked down at the street and walked and walked and walked.

Once in a while, she would pass a yard with flowers in bloom, and she would pick one blossom. The rest of the day she would cradle the flower in her hands and talk to it as she walked. By nightfall the flower would be limp. And Crazy Mary would go wherever it was she stayed at night.

The story told about Crazy Mary was that, as a young wife with a new baby, her husband and child died in a house fire from which she managed to escape. She had been walking up and down streets ever since.

The Color Lady was much older, probably in her 70s. She too had red hair -- flaming red hair from a bottle. Everything she wore -- suits, blouses, shoes (sometimes cowboy boots), purse and hat -- were always the same bright colors. All yellow. All orange. All blue. She would walk to the square every day and do some shopping, spending a quarter here or a dime there, which wasn't easy to do in the late 1970s and the 1980s. What can you buy for a dime anymore? Occasionally she would come into the newspaper office with some junk mail that had arrived at her house. She would lay the envelopes on the counter and start talking about the White House conspiracy to steal her Social Security check. She would hold up some of the envelopes as proof.

Chester was more sociable only in the sense that he involved you in his life if you came within five feet of him. He posted himself each day in front of the Citizens State Bank building on one corner of the square. He would crouch at the base of one of the ornate windows nearest the door. As you approached Chester, his mumbling would turn to cursing and then to shouts of nonsense aimed directly at you. And if you came really close, he would spit on you.

Although Chester had a small house on the edge of town, he usually spent his nights in the lobby of the post office just down the street from the bank. Unfortunately, Chester viewed the post office lobby as an all-purpose space: bedroom, dining room and restroom. The poor postmaster had to close off the lobby with its mailboxes and stamp machines and letter slots from time to time just to encourage Chester to go home.

We all lived with Crazy Mary and the Color Lady and Chester. Somehow their very existence enriched the sometimes ordinary lives we all lived. They were the spice in our day-to-day porridge. And, as far as I know, they never harmed anyone, not even themselves.

Then one day Maryville got a new police chief. Within a few weeks he went on a crusade to rid the town of what he called public nuisances. In the name of their own safety, he managed to get all three of them committed to the state hospital in St. Joseph.

There weren't a whole lot of people willing to personally come to the defense of these three extraordinary people. But the public outcry was decidedly loud over the treatment of folks who had become so much a part of our lives. Eventually, Crazy Mary and the Color Lady and Chester were back at their daily routines, walking, shopping with dimes and cursing at passers-by.

I don't think any of them ever said thank you to those who wrote letters and raised their voices at city council meetings about the shabby treatment they received at the hands of the new police chief. Maybe they liked the three meals a day and the clean beds at the state hospital.

But I can tell you that I was among those who were glad to see their familiar faces again.

It's odd how you get attached to wilted flowers, wildly colored clothes and spitting.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.