My Missouri childhood inspired the newest Mini-State collection, so a blog about the Show Me state seemed fitting. 

The proud owner of divorced parents, I called Soularde, Spanish Lake, Wentzville & Florissant all home at some point. We spent summers swimming in the Lake of the Ozarks, holidays in Montgomery City, and vacationed in Kansas City & Joplin.

I ran the Man Maker at Sioux Passage - more times than I can count; went sledding in Sunset Park and didn't get a concussion; watched the house next door to me go up in flames because of a bad drug deal; frequented the beauty of Shaw Gardens; filled sand bags in the Great Flood of '93; and know that the status quo question when meeting another person from S-T-L-M-O is "Where did you go to high school?".

At seventeen I moved to Illinois. In Illinois, Missouri was for cheap gas, the Cardinals, and swimming in the Mississippi River. Missouri was life's beginning, brought me up by my boot straps, and is now a beautiful reminder of the stronger, wiser, and braver woman I am today.

So - Show me, where'd that come from?? Well, there's a couple versions to how it came into popularity -

1. A Missouri Congressman back in the late 1890s gave a speech that if he was going to believe and back something, they needed to show him. That fancy words were in fact not enough for him.
2. In the Mid-1890s some miners in Colorado went on strike, miners from Joplin, Missouri were imported to fill in, however the mining methods were different in the two states and the Joplin boys had to keep askin' for instruction. At which point it caught on by the big bosses that they were gonna have to show those Missouri boys what to do.

Good Ol' Missour-ah folks -

1. Mark Twain - Samuel Clemens, author of Huckleberry Finn & Tom Sawyer
2. Brad Pitt - the actor formerly known as part of the couple Br-Angelina
3. The "Unsinkable" Molly Brown - Titanic Survivor
4. Eminem - Marshall Mathers, rapper
5. Maya Angelou - born in St. Louis, Author - "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"