They Call it Living History / Pacific Couple Make Past Events & Heroes Seem Like Here and Now  

By Pauline Masson –

Eugene Vale and Jo Schaper – a Pacific couple who don’t know when to quit – spend their free time putting a modern face on movers and shakers of the past.

The pair spent decades wooing tourists to Missouri State Parks. Now they take their passion for the past to students, family history buffs, and history museum visitors. They call it Living History

For 38 years, Eugene Vale worked for the Missouri Parks Department as an interpretative resource specialst. Not interpreting foreign languages but interpreting the arcane scientific, academic and bureaucratic language describing the State Parks flora and fauna into everyday talk for folks like you and me.

Vale’s wife Jo Schaper, an unreconstructed workaholic, was as a representative at the State Park Visitor’s Center.

I first met Jo Schaper when she was assistant editor of the River Hills Traveler, with offices in St. Clair. She was a multi tasker even then. She taught creative writing at a junior college for ten years at the same time, and served on the Franklin County Tourism Commission.

In retirement Vale and Schaper can be found on most Saturday afternoons center stage at the St. Clair Historical Museum, where they research and produce history shows. More than exhibits of photos and historic artifacts, their shows are narrated tales of what took place.

Their exhibits have included Missouri’s role in the development of railroads, the impact that four Black families had on the Robertsville and St. Clair areas. That exhibit filled the museum for tours narrated by Netley Clay, a descendant of one of the families. July 15, the museum drew a crowd to its “Military March Through Time: A Living History” exhibit. For that show Vale donned his Benjamin Franklin duds and spectacles to talk about the Revolutionary War.

Schaper is a degreed Geologist, who was a rock collector before she knew what a Geologist was.

As a pre-teen she knew she liked rocks and had habit of picking up rocks, loads of pretty little rocks that she stacked all over her bedroom. Her mother, tired of dusting what she saw as debris, threw them all out.
“It’s not fair,” Jo said to her father. “Put a label on them and tell her its research,” her father said.  It worked and a lifelong Geologist and label maker was born.

Most of us know Schaper as the narrator of programs featuring our geologic landmark Sand Mountain.

“We have the most dramatic exposure of the St. Peters sandstone in Missouri,” Schaper said. ”The extreme white color of the sand has been washed for 450 million years and a river cut down the bluffs over that period of time.”

She is also a poet. In 2017, Schaper designed and produced a chapbook Three Rivers Reflections, featuring the work of eight area authors. She was one of the founding members of the weekly poetry group, which was made up of partly or totally retired, schoolteachers, computer workers, printers and other occupations, living in Pacific, Union, St. Clair, Washington and Marthasville. They met at the Scenic Regional Library in Union.

“This is non-academic and simply for fun and for people to get better,” Schaper said.

An equal opportunity observer, Schaper frequently dashes off letters to the editor calling for political compromise, better use of property taxes, the danger of river currents, representatives who don’t listen, and short term rentals. One of her letters answered Lt. Gov. Mike Parson’s comments about state veterans’ homes by offering her experiences with private nursing homes and veterans homes.

“I’m just trying to keep the world straight,” she said.

In the Living History shows, Schaper does the research and writes the place cards, a skill honed during her childhood rock labeling days, which she prints on a lap top. Vale puts the entire show on video, a skill garnered from his State Park interpreter tenure. But lately he has become pals with our County namesake Benjamin Franklin and does a one man show for school classrooms and history groups.

He got hooked on Franklin when the late Marc Houseman, with the Washington Historical Society who did Franklin talks, had more requests than he could fill so he asked Vale to pitch in. Vale is so enmeshed in Franklin history that he now calls the Poor Richard’s Almanac publisher and signer of the Declaration of Independence, by his first name ‘Ben.’

“Actually, it turns out I look more like Ben Franklin than Marc did,” Vale laughs.”My natural hair line is more like Franklin’s, and when I let my hair grow and switch my modern glasses for a set of wire-rimed Franklin spectacles, I’m on.”

A stickler for detailed accuracy, Vale loves to take Ben Franklin’s kite and electricty experiment to the classroom.

“The modern tale seems to show Ben standing out in a field in a lightning storm holding a kite string,” Vale said. “Actually he was quite protected in a shed and was smart enough to use silk string for the end of the string that he held because silk doesn’t conduct electricity.”

Franklin invented two modern words from his kite experiment; ‘conductor‘ because lighting conducted electricity; and ‘battery‘ because a row of Leyden jars that he aligned to store electricity reminded him of a row of cannons, referred to in military parlance as a battery.

“And he did not ‘invent‘ electricity, as modern lore keeps repeating,” Vale said. “What he did was prove that lightning was electricity.”

In the classroom, Vale enlists four students to help recreate the kite experiment.

“It’s fun to work with the kids, but it’s also rewarding,” Vale said.  “After they work through it they know what really happened that day in history.”

“I really like Ben Franklin because, of all the things he did, he just wanted to help people,” Vale said. “He never took a patent on any of his inventions. He wanted the world to have the use of them.”

To book a Ben Franklin demonstration or talk, Vale can be reached at 636-667-4164, [email protected], or [email protected]