Today, McMahon said that connective tissue is broken because owners don’t know their customers, adding they also live far away from the people who work for them or the people who buy their products.
“Once upon a time, owners like Milton Hershey or the Kellogg family were invested in the communities where they, along with their employees and customers, lived, worked, and worshiped,” he said.
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Steve McMahon, a Washington-based public affairs professional and co-founder of Purple Strategies, said that those who run the corporations that employ millions and also dominate the culture have shed their connection with both their employees and their customers.
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That facility became the first free public library in the state of Missouri the Garth Library was its next incarnation, with thousands of more books and its own building to facilitate that expansion.Īlas, those sorts of hometown civic-mindedness from the rich and successful may not still be as common as they were in Twain's time. Elliot took on the cause of a free library, which was located on the second floor of the Park Theater. Several years before that, Twain’s brother Orion Clemens, along with Robert Elliot, who moved to Hannibal as a young man from England and also become a successful businessman, were instrumental in the formation of the Hannibal Library Association.
And when Garth died, his wife donated $25,000 for a stand-alone library to be built in the center of town. They provided jobs, donated to worthy causes such as the Home for the Friendless, and attended church shoulder to shoulder with the people in the community. They also returned to their roots and gave back to the community that launched their pursuit of the American dream. Garth and his wife Helen, also a childhood friend, had briefly moved to New York City, where he prospered in the banking, brokerage, and manufacturing industries they returned to their roots and built this opulent home. Then, though, she rethought the sentiment, saying, “I suppose if there was any danger of that, it would have happened long ago." Her role in the community was as the matron of the Home for the Friendless, a charity organization for widows, mothers with dependent children, and adolescent girls: all vulnerable people who depended on Fraser to keep the doors open, sparing them from the horrors of homelessness and despair.įrazer, after not seeing Twain for a period of time during which he ascended to what was then the equivalent of rock-star status, had worried if he would be spoiled by the fame. Laura Hawkins Frazer, his childhood sweetheart and the model for his beloved character Becky Thatcher, was there. Walking through the parlors, libraries, and kitchen of the Garth home, a stunning Second Empire-Italianate mansion that is now a delightful bed-and-breakfast, it is easy to imagine Twain holding court here with his childhood friends who went on to have their own significance in the fabric of their country. Twain, known as Samuel Clemens in his youth, would leave here as a teenager and go on to spin his youthful adventures into The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and dozens of other books. It was here the boys roamed the hills, rivers, and caves that surrounded this Mississippi River town. Garth was Twain’s childhood friend, and Hannibal was their playground. They were children with me, and afterwards schoolmates.” I spent my nights with John and Helen Garth, three miles from town, in their spacious and beautiful house. "I have spent three delightful days in Hannibal, loitering around all day long, examining the old localities and talking with the grey-heads who were boys and girls with me 30 or 40 years ago," he said. HANNIBAL, Missouri - During a visit here in 1882, Mark Twain wrote to his wife Olivia of the rush of sentiments he experienced returning to the town of his childhood.