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Boonville —
The Boonville Daily News reflects on Kemper Military School and College's long history and its closing in 2002. Kemper Military School and College Alumni Association is hosting a reunion this weekend in Boonvile.
If the advent of casual Friday was the worst thing to happen to the entire dry-cleaning industry, a personal low for Spic and Span Cleaners happened when Kemper Military School and College closed in 2002.
At one time, the military school had enrolled hundreds of cadets, each of whom received three uniforms. The students were required to keep the clothes clean and pressed. Their daily dress code mandated blue pants with a stripe down the side, a blue shirt. and a garrison cap. They had fatigues for training, and for events such as parents' weekend and military balls, they wore Class A uniforms that featured a blazer, 60 brass buttons, gloves and an officer-style hat with a brim.
"The school emphasized appearance pretty much over a lot of other things," said Steve McCallister, a former instructor at the school.
Angie Zaug lobbied persistently for Kemper's business when she purchased the dry-cleaners in 1989. She cleaned not only the uniforms, but the cadet's civilian clothes. When the school closed, Spic and Span lost its largest customer. It was one among many businesses that were hurt by students from all over the world no longer boarding in Boonville.
"I didn't know how Spic and Span would stay open one more day," Zaug said.
The school did laundry in the basement of the administration building. Each day, Zaug or one of her employees drove to the school and picked up about 300 outfits.
She said cadets often held doors open for her when she visited campus. On one occasion, as she exited a van and unrolled clothing into a cart, she noticed two cadets in a scuffle. Soon after, a cadet officer arrived and stopped the fight.
"He made those two boys stand there in the middle of the campus and hold hands, and I can guarantee you they never did that again," Zaug said. "It was hard not to laugh."
McCallister, a social sciences instructor at Kemper, said he rarely had to reprimand cadets directly for not wearing a hat or having their shirt tucked-in. He went to a cadet's squad leader first, and then, if needed, to their platoon leader.
The Boonville Daily News reflects on Kemper Military School and College's long history and its closing in 2002. Kemper Military School and College Alumni Association is hosting a reunion this weekend in Boonvile.
If the advent of casual Friday was the worst thing to happen to the entire dry-cleaning industry, a personal low for Spic and Span Cleaners happened when Kemper Military School and College closed in 2002.
At one time, the military school had enrolled hundreds of cadets, each of whom received three uniforms. The students were required to keep the clothes clean and pressed. Their daily dress code mandated blue pants with a stripe down the side, a blue shirt. and a garrison cap. They had fatigues for training, and for events such as parents' weekend and military balls, they wore Class A uniforms that featured a blazer, 60 brass buttons, gloves and an officer-style hat with a brim.
"The school emphasized appearance pretty much over a lot of other things," said Steve McCallister, a former instructor at the school.
Angie Zaug lobbied persistently for Kemper's business when she purchased the dry-cleaners in 1989. She cleaned not only the uniforms, but the cadet's civilian clothes. When the school closed, Spic and Span lost its largest customer. It was one among many businesses that were hurt by students from all over the world no longer boarding in Boonville.
"I didn't know how Spic and Span would stay open one more day," Zaug said.
The school did laundry in the basement of the administration building. Each day, Zaug or one of her employees drove to the school and picked up about 300 outfits.
She said cadets often held doors open for her when she visited campus. On one occasion, as she exited a van and unrolled clothing into a cart, she noticed two cadets in a scuffle. Soon after, a cadet officer arrived and stopped the fight.
"He made those two boys stand there in the middle of the campus and hold hands, and I can guarantee you they never did that again," Zaug said. "It was hard not to laugh."
McCallister, a social sciences instructor at Kemper, said he rarely had to reprimand cadets directly for not wearing a hat or having their shirt tucked-in. He went to a cadet's squad leader first, and then, if needed, to their platoon leader.
"You would see them at times doing push-ups because they didn't have their brass polished," McCallister said. "Typically by the second or third week of school that stuff was pretty rare."
McCallister taught primarily at the junior college level. Some of the students attended mainly to play football — a program which produced several NFL players — and weren't as interested in the school's decorum. Other students from wealthy families were in Boonville foremost for the stringent military training. McCallister said the uniforms acted as a leveling agent between cadets of different backgrounds.
"Everyone wore the same thing everyday. You couldn't display your family's affluence or the lack of it by what you wore," he said.
In its last few years, Kemper didn't have enough textbooks or uniforms for students. McCallister recalled one year students wearing athletic warm-up style suits until parents' weekend because the school couldn't afford the traditional outfits.
"You could definitely see the financial issues and that it wasn't going to be saved," Zaug said.
Still, when Zaug heard on the radio that Kemper was closing in May 2002, the news startled her.
"I think at that time there were 111 staff members working at that school, which meant 111 families lost income," she said.
In June, Spic and Span closed and turned over its dry cleaning operation to the gift shop Never the Same. Zaug lasted almost a decade without the military school.
"Dry cleaning is just really almost falling by the wayside, like, let's just say the Post Office," she said. "They just don't dry clean and wear those types of clothes anymore."
