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After the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, a veritable war toy boom swept the country, dominating the toy industry among Baby Boom boys. Leading that charge was G.I. Joe, a costumed, plastic soldier marketed by Hasbro as “America’s Moveable Fighting Man.” Yet by decade’s end, the Vietnam War claimed G.I. Joe as just another of America’s casualties.

If you ever huffed and puffed climbing a rope to a school gym ceiling in the sixties or strained, red-faced to chin up on the playground in the seventies hoping to win the coveted President’s Council on Physical Fitness award, those words from the “Youth Fitness Song” are probably making you break out in a spontaneous sweat as I speak.

The 1970s are the “golden age” of Saturday Morning Children’s Television. You see, adults had it all backwards. Their Saturday Night Fever never held a candle to our Saturday Morning Fever.

Ladies and Gentlemen… the Beatles! And with those words Ed Sullivan – America’s unofficial Minister of Culture – introduced us to four exuberant Englishmen, unleashing a musical and cultural revolution.

“Roger,” astronaut Jim Lovell radioed to mission control in Houston on Christmas morning 1968, “please be informed there is a Santa Claus.” Lovell’s revelation confirmed Apollo 8’s departure from lunar orbit. The night before on Christmas Eve, he, Frank Borman, and Bill Anders – the first humans to orbit the moon – enthralled a global primetime television audience with extraordinary celestial footage, before sending us off to bed by taking turns narrating the Bible’s depiction of creation.

In early 1873, the state created a third district normal school for southeast Missouri, joining district one in Kirksville and district two in Warrensburg.

Professor Harry Albert, a dedicated faculty member, wept openly at the sight of what remained of Old Normal’s ornamental towers after an overnight fire destroyed the school’s lone building and all its contents on April 8, 1902.

Robert Burett Oliver, one of the region’s foremost attorneys – and whose wife Marie designed the state flag – was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives in November 1902 for one purpose: obtain $250,000 for Academic Hall.

From 1887 to 1925, Houck served 38 years on the university’s Board of Regents; 36 of those as president – an unmatched record of service.

At the time of the Old Normal fire in 1902, work was underway on a second campus building, a new Science Hall just a few hundred feet to the east of Academic to accommodate the recently created Department of Chemistry and Agriculture. By that summer – with insurance money from the fire – construction commenced on a third campus structure, the Training School.