Remembering Brian Earl

by Blake Harper
Columnist
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    To many people, Brian Earl would have been considered an outsider or just plain different.  But to himself he was perfectly normal.  Taking baths in ice water in the dead of winter probably would have killed most people, but it could have been what kept Earl alive.

    In a newspaper article about Earl in 1989, it is said that he was a man before his time.  Brian lived in a time when agriculture was progressing rapidly.  He was the first man in the state of Missouri to use a combine pulled by a tractor.  He grained great pleasure to see the grain stocks and cobs returned to the soil.  One of Earl’s greatest discoveries to help the soil probably was lime.  There was a limestone bluff on the back of his father’s farm at Hannatown (which now has a population of three) that Earl crushed and spread out on fields.  Brian had no way to spread the lime.  He bought a McCormick Deering manure spreader and a 15-30 International tractor.  He experimented with other types of crushed rocks, but didn’t think that they would be profitable.

    Earl was a strange, but happy person.  Dorothy Harper said that she had never seen him mad.  He said that his childhood was different from most.  His father left his mother and later remarried.  Many feel this could have led to him acting so strange (in the eyes of others) all the time.  At age 90, Earl could no longer drive.  He wanted to buy an old-fashioned bicycle so he could ride to the Grand Canyon once more on his own.

    The writer doesn’t remember his early childhood meeting with Earl, but wishes he did.  His two-room house is half a mile from the writer’s home.  The writer’s father and grandfather tell him many stories about Earl, and there is hardly a conversation about Jasper that goes by without Earl’s name mentioned.
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[The Maple Grove-Dudenville Gazette, 2002]