Website created!...

Pat (Brown) Hummelsheim & Jim Knodel. These are two of the four people that wokred with me on a saturday morning hour long program. They were just youngsters then. It was sponsored by Gem City Building and Loan. We featured different guests each week...visited jails...learned how things were made and in general we had a good time. We don't know where to contact John Ebeling and Jeannie Richmond is deceased.

We visited the Adams County Jail. And we all got fingerprinted and put in a cell! Pat is on the left and Jimmy Knowdel next to her.

Parades and Personal Appearances. Often we had to appear in parades...and after I was saved, I did make several appearances at youth rallies and churches.




We did a lot of different shows and it gave us a chance to provide more than "knock-knock and riddles" which were staples of The Cactus Club.
I still get Christmas cards from Pat!

Mr. T. E. Musselman, Gem City Business College Pres.. Mr. Musselman often appeared
on our Saturday morning
program and always had an
exciting "bird" story to tell.
He did me a favor by taking
my two sons and myself along
a secluded river trail and he
explained the hqabits of various
birds we heard. He thrilled us
with some stories of how birds act to protect their nests and their young.

June Dairy Month Parade Float. This was probably on a Monday night as Quincy held June Dairy Month Parades on Mondays as I recall. Here was a typical
JDM float with Bob Foster, Manager of the Quincy plant encouraging us.

Horse Drawn Milk Wagons. Sorry, I don't know who the little girl is...but Mushy and Wishbone, the last of the "home delivered" milk horses in Illinois, were used in parades all over Central and Southern Illinois.

Another Parade. This time a pickup truck decked out for a parade!

Gooch's Market, Hannibal, MO. On Saturday afternoons I often appeared for 4 hours in a grocery store such as this. I used a vibrating diamond
engraver and would set up a card table. The grocer would supply jelly jars (which were used as tumblers or drinking glasses when the jar was emptied). Youngsters would bring one of these jars to the table and I would print their name on the glass with the engraver and then write Cactus Jim in reverse on the bottom...(so it could be read looking through the glass). This gave me something worthwhile to do and let me talk to the youngsters while I worked!
I really enjoyed that. Often would misspell a name (such as Catherine with a K). So to save the day I would draw a flower out of the mistake...and 90% of the time could save the jar!
((THIS PHOTO CAME FROM DALE HAYES OF HANNIBAL WHO WRITES: Cactus,

Attached is a picture of Gooch's Food Center that was located on Grand Avenue in Hannibal, Missouri. A girl I attended school with remembers when Cactus Jim and Prairie Farms would make special appearances at Gooch's Food Center during the early 1960's. The building is now part of the Hannibal Clinic.

Dale)