Bill Meyer
By JIM HOY
© Plains Folk
Bill Meyer, 15 years older than I, had already left Cassoday by the time I was growing up, but the Meyer name was still often heard there in my formative years.
My father used to talk about Doc Meyer, a physician whose foul-tasting concoction Dad credited with saving the lives of many local residents during the great influenza epidemic back in the teens. He also talked about Doc's son, Ott, and his wife, Ruth, who operated a combination filling station/café in Cassoday, also before my time. Ott and Ruth were Bill's parents.
I first met Bill back in the early 1980s when Cassoday was preparing to celebrate its centennial in 1984. My main function was to edit the centennial history book for which my mother, Lola Diller, and many other local residents had been gathering information.
"We'll have Bill Meyer publish it," Mother said. "He's a good old Cassoday boy." This was at about the same time that Tom Isern and I were thinking about starting this column and were sending out letters seeking newspapers in which to publish it. As I recall, the first acceptance we got was from Bill Meyer's Marion County Record.
I met Bill in person soon afterwards, and I enjoyed talking with him as much as I enjoyed reading his sometimes feisty, sometimes humorous, sometimes provocative, and always well written editorials.
The way he referred to himself as the Ol' Editor (or simply OE) and the paper as the Old Thing immediately put me in mind of the great idiosyncratic country editors of Kansas newspapers of an earlier time, men who were not averse to voicing strong opinions in a distinctive voice, men like Rolla Clymer, William Allen White, and Edgar Watson Howe. Bill well deserves an honored spot in that pantheon.
Over the years I would occasionally see Bill, and he would usually have a Cassoday story to share, often one about my family.
My favorite was about the times my father, when courting my mother, would drive up to the gasoline pumps and call out, "Fill 'er up, Ott," but with his left hand hanging out the window signal for only two or three gallons. That way, Bill said, he came across as a big spender but at the same time made sure that he didn't leave too much gas in the tank for Uncle Marshall, co-owner of the car.
Mother, who was just as firm in her opinions as Bill, claimed this never happened, but I'm inclined to believe Bill was right. After all, Mother couldn't have seen Dad's hand when he flashed the sign.
(A side note: Bill said that Dad would come into the store, pull out a dollar bill, pay for three gallons of gas, and have 43 cents left over. That's about the same amount of change you'd get from a 10 these days.)
Mother also remembered Bill as a youngster selling soft drinks at the town-team baseball games in Cassoday back before World War II. He had outfitted a wheelbarrow to carry bottles of pop in ice, then wheeled it around the stands calling out "Ice cold pop, five cents a bottle!"
Years afterwards, Bill said, when Mother would see him, she would cup her hands around her mouth and call out "Ice cold pop, five cents a bottle!"
A couple of years ago I met Bill and some other area old-timers at the Cassoday Café, my last extended visit with him. Of the many stories he told, I recall especially how he was hired to drive Jim Teter around pastures so that he could check cattle, this before Bill was even old enough to have a driver's license. Bill knew the name of every pasture within 10 miles of Cassoday, and he never lost his love for the Flint Hills.
Bill died Nov. 14. We'll not see his like again.
