People from the Past: Joe Card

The following information appears in a self-published book by former Raymond resident, David A. Sorrell, called “As I Remember.” The book features Mr. Sorrell’s recollections about the early days of Raymond. The stories appeared in a weekly column in The Raymond News from 1963-1972. 

There was a man in our town whose name was Joe Card. Now Joe was not a prominent man in our town but he was a well-known man for he served several hitches, if I may use that term, as our town Marshall. The daylight hours of a town Marshall could have been from sun up to sundown or perhaps from daylight to dark. I doubt if there were any set hours. Time clocks were unheard of in our town in those days. What did Joe Card look like, you say? Well, he was a tall man weighing perhaps 180 pounds and along with most of the other men of our town, he wore a good-sized mustache. The color of his mustache is not remembered but it is remembered that Joe lived in one of Dr. Hicks’ rent houses and the house was just across from the Gus Davis place. I know you have no idea where the Gus Davis place was, but the Davis place was just a block or so from Highway 48 where it meets 127. Dr. Hicks had three rent houses, one next to where Nancy Graham lives now, and then the Joe Card place and on around the curve and faced on the same street and just across the street where my friend of the olden days, Mrs. Ada Kildow now lives. These old places are long gone as is their owner, the late Dr. Hicks.

Now, a town Marshall in our town didn’t have much to do for we were a law-abiding town and I imagine a whole year could go by without Joe Card being called on to arrest anyone. Sometimes in the winter, a tramp might ask to stay all night in the calaboose there in the town hall. There was a bed in the steel cage and as the calaboose was in the town hall, Joe would bring in a couple of buckets of coal from the town hall coal house and tell the bum he could keep the fire going all night. Joe spent a lot of his time in the summer sitting on one of the settees in front of the Darlington Lumber yard office or the one in front of Jim Houcks elevator office. Then, too, there were the five daily trains that stopped at Raymond each day and carried our citizens away to other parts of Illinois or the nation. The first train came down from Decatur at seven thirty a.m. and the next morning train came up from St. Louis somewhere between nine and nine thirty a.m. Its destination was Decatur. Old Number Nine, the solid mail train, came through the town at sixty miles an hour and the train mail clerk kicked off a small mail pouch and grabbed a catcher pouch with a big iron hook as the train roared through the town. A couple of times it looked as though the mail clerk didn’t kick the mail pouch hard enough to clear the train wheels. The pouch was sucked under the train and the ground up mail went flying in all directions. It took Win Carter and Joe Card and all the small boys who happened by to get the torn up mail gathered up and put into what was left of the mail pouch.

Joe Card had two children. Derry was a tall black haired lad of some fifteen or sixteen summers. His little sister, Geneva, had black hair and a face full of freckles. Joe’s wife, Naomi, had died some years before and Joe was doing his best to raise his motherless children alone. Just how many years Joe Card was town Marshall in our town is not remembered. When his term was over, Joe would sometimes dig tile ditches and sometimes do carpenter work.