Warrensburg residents reclaim Blind Boone Park

WARRENSBURG, Mo. -- For more than a decade, Blind Boone Park was the only park that black residents of this central Missouri town were allowed to use.

The park, which was established in 1954, was the center of black residents' social lives until integration arrived in the 1960s, allowing blacks to visit other parks.

The city eventually stopped keeping up Blind Boone Park and it turned into a wilderness of weeds and brush.

Now, Sandy Irle hopes to turn it into a place for everyone. She is leading a group of 800 volunteers that is taking axes and shovels to this relic of Warrensburg's past. They hope the park will reopen later this year.

"We were allowing this history to be forgotten," Irle said. "This is an opportunity not to change history, but to respectfully remember it. We want to make it so that every single person could enjoy the park."

The group's greatest challenge is raising the $170,000 needed to complete renovations.

Plans include a 20-foot stage in the style of a gazebo at the park's center. Irle hopes to have the park substantially completed by June, so it can host Warrensburg's Blind Boone Music and Culture Festival, which she founded two years ago.

"Most of the people just kind of forgot about the park and let it grow up in brush," said Charles Briscoe, 70.

The park is named for John William Boone, a ragtime pianist who grew up in Warrensburg.

Irle, 43, had lived in Warrensburg for 30 years without once hearing of Boone or the park. It was her husband, whose family has lived in Warrensburg for three generations, who took her to see the tangled green mess in May 2000.

Larger than life

When Irle began to explore the park's past, she found a character who appeared larger than life.

Boone was born to a runaway slave in a Union army encampment in Miami, Mo., in 1864. A child of mixed race, Boone was 6 months old when he developed what was described as "brain fever" -- a painful swelling inside his skull so severe that doctors thought they had only one course of treatment to relieve the pressure.

They cut out his eyes.

But the child had unusual musical ability. At the age of 5 -- when he was living with his mother in Warrensburg -- Boone took his tin whistle and formed a band with some other children.

The residents were so impressed by the child that they took up a collection to send him to a school for the blind in St. Louis. He would escape at nights to the city's Tenderloin District, home to bars and brothels -- and some of the earliest musicians who played in the style that became ragtime.

Years later, despite his blindness, Boone would become one of the best-loved ragtime pianists in the Midwest.

Boone died in 1927 in Columbia, four months after playing his last show.

"I found his (Boone's) story so compelling and fascinating," Irle said. "Every single obstacle in front of him in life, he either walked around it or climbed over it."

------

On the Net

Blind Boone Park Renovation Group: www.blindboonepark.org/