RIVER CITY JOURNAL: HERE'S MY PLAN TO GET NEW FLOODWALL MURALS PAINTED FOR FREE

It's not every day you can save money and cure cancer at the same time. So I'll just work on the money-saving bit.

One of my loyal readers who works up the street dropped by yesterday. He grew up in the Ozarks too. He reminded me I hadn't written anything about outdoor toilets or one-room schools recently.

We hillbillies love to relive our lives. Don't ask me why. We just do.

Frankly, I've been so busy with the present and the future that I just plain haven't had much time to spend in the past. You know how it is when you've got to save half a bridge and plant artificial seeds so fake grass will grow on your favorite football field.

And then there are all those plans to be made for more murals on the downtown floodwall.

I saw what they did on a piece of the St. Louis floodwall over Labor Day weekend. The city brought in graffiti artists from all over the country.

Like St. Louis doesn't have enough vandals of its own.

The visiting artists created their own art form on those concrete walls. You know what? It's pretty striking.

The world is full of unfulfilled artists. When I was in Shady Nook School over on Greenwood Valley (hey, Ken, here's an old memory for you) we had some fantastic pocketknife artists. They would whittle their initials into the wood tops of the desks. Sometimes they would carve caricatures of the teacher. Or hearts with arrows through them signifying deep affection for the pretty girl on the other side of the room.

As I recall, teachers did not give gold stars to young farm boys who used desktops for their artistic endeavors.

On the other hand, those old desks became, over the years, something of a local history of whittling. I bet someone would pay a lot of money these days for one of those old desks with handsome chunks cut out of it.

We didn't have spray paint in those days. I don't think aerosol had been invented yet. That's why boys whittled. Nowadays, boys use bright spray paint to mark their territory. That's what a social anthropologist would call it.

So here's my point:

Why not get some of those professional vandals to come to River City and paint our floodwall?

We're always complaining about hoodlums who won't get respectable jobs and wind up living off us taxpayers. Well, get those graffiti experts to spiff up our floodwall, which is just about as ugly as a wall can get, if you don't count the mess amateur punks make with a can of spray paint.

I know. I know. We try to teach youngsters these days that graffiti is wrong, anti-social and a huge burden on taxpayers who prefer to pay big bucks to professional artists to do the same work. But let's face it: If we can get some vandals to do the work for nothing, wouldn't that free up some money so maybe we could buy three-fourths of a bridge? Or seven-eighths?

As you can tell, I want to see this plan to save a piece of the old bridge succeed. But I don't want it to be just halfway successful. If you know what I mean.

My guess is the official mural committee would rather spend a lot of donated money rather than keep tabs on a gang of hoodlums armed with cans of spray paint. So there will probably be a nice fat check for some artist to paint pretty pictures on our floodwall.

If that's the case, I'd like to make a request. It's not anything outrageous. It's just an idea that, I believe, already has some support in our town's historical and artistic cliques.

Here's my idea:

Please paint a picture on the city side of the wall that looks like the river, which, for those of you who never go look on the other side of the wall, is there.

Really, it is. It's a big river too. So it might take a lot of paint to make a pretty picture of the river on the wall.

But wouldn't that be something?

Townspeople and visitors alike could drive downtown and cruise past the floodwall and pretend they're looking at the river. A smart artist would paint a tug and some barges. And some old logs floating downstream. Just like the real thing on the other side of the wall.

This would be quite a sight: A faux art river.

By the way, I didn't learn to say "faux art" at Shady Nook School. If I had used a word like that when Mrs. Rayfield was around, she would have taken me to the pump and washed my mouth out with soap. Like she did the time one of the other boys used another four-letter word that my sons, years later, saw spray painted on the side of a stormwater tunnel near the house we were living in at the time.

It's amazing how well those graffiti punks can spell when they want to.

There you have it. Another undeniably brilliant idea for our fair city. Paint a picture of the river on the floodwall. Or put in a window.

Which is another whole column.

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