{"id":35661,"date":"2026-09-08T14:55:29","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T19:55:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=35661"},"modified":"2026-09-08T09:28:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T14:28:21","slug":"gritty-scenes-updated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/08\/gritty-scenes-updated\/","title":{"rendered":"Gritty Scenes, Updated"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2012, when I was dabbling with the Missouri Insight<\/em>, I did a series of bits on small towns in Missouri, and I talked about Republic and Brookline<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Where Washington Avenue (the name of Commercial Lane after a couple of curves) meets Highway MM, you find the post office that serves Brookline and Republic (and Battlefield, and other parts of Greene County):<\/p>\n

The Brookline Post Office<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a two-room cinderblock building where one of the rooms is a lobby and the other half loads mail for our rural postal carriers. I\u2019ve been in on occasion. Nadine is always friendly, giving my child leftover stickers or stamping his hand SPOILED. What, your post office has more than one clerk? That, my friends, is urban.<\/p>\n

At any rate, I was driving into Brookline to vote today. I drive twenty minutes at highway speeds to get to my polling place, checked once by a stop sign and twice by traffic signals. I filled out my scantrons and stepped out of the polling station, a Republic Fire District station (professionals, although part of the near parts of Republic including my domicile are covered by the volunteers).<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what I saw from the doorway. Forgive me for not stitching them together for you:<\/p>\n

Views from my polling place<\/p>\n

Views from my polling place<\/p>\n

Views from my polling place<\/p>\n

Views from my polling place<\/p>\n

The only thing in sight is a Church of Christ.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you want to see the photos, you’ll have to click through. And if you’ll pardon me, but I don’t have photos this time, but just a description of what’s changed.<\/p>\n

The post office is still there; it never really handled Republic’s mail–there’s a post office down off of Highway 60 that handles it–and the Brookline post office no longer handles our mail–it’s handled by the larger Republic post office. The Brookline post office is just a storefront that sells stamps now and has a wall of post office boxes. Nadine is gone now, as are her replacements including Mark, the only other one whose name comes to mind. I haven’t been to that post office in a long time.<\/p>\n

Our polling place is no longer at the fire house. Instead, the whole family now votes across the street at the aforementioned Church of Christ.<\/p>\n

The intersection of MM and Sawyer Road there now has a stop light. And a giant Amazon warehouse. And a strip mall servicing trucks coming out of the various new warehouses in the area. And the Iron Grain District which is a “mixed use” development which has at least one restaurant and coffee shop plus other things, including a large gas station. There’s another large gas station across from the post office. And they’re talking about widening MM from 60 to the interstate to better accommodate the big trucks.<\/p>\n

When we moved here, we expected the suburbs to expand west on Highway M \/ Republic Road, but they followed Highway 60 from west Springfield instead. New shopping centers and apartment complexes are working to fill that empty space, but the lot on the corner of FF and M remains mostly empty even after having been for sale and development for most of the time we’ve been at Nogglestead. It didn’t help that the local wireless retailer put its home office in the middle of it, which might keep it from developing as retail. <\/p>\n

But over time, I guess everything changes. But I’m still mostly the same. Which probably says something about me, and perhaps not something good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2012, when I was dabbling with the Missouri Insight, I did a series of bits on small towns in Missouri, and I talked about Republic and Brookline: Where Washington Avenue (the name of Commercial Lane after a couple of curves) meets Highway MM, you find the post office that serves Brookline and Republic (and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35661"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35662,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35661\/revisions\/35662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}