|
|
The original video was shot in the early 1980s by Stacey Woelfel, who now serves as the news director at the KOMU radio station. However, journalism classes at Mizzou did not start using the video until the early 1990s.
Around 1999, another video was shot of the factory. Grigsby alternates between both videos to use in his classes.
Mizzou's broadcasting classes average about 100 students each year. That means over the past 20 years, roughly 2,000 students have edited the video of the corn cob pipe factory.
"For students, this is their first videotape editing exercise and they have to cut the video to the script they write," Grigsby said.
He called the footage "a good editing video" because it contains matched action sequences, meaning it has a lot of repetition.
Each raw video footage is about 10 to 15 minutes long and features workers at the factory making corn cob pipes.
"The workers at the factory are in an assembly line, so it's the same thing over and over again. This helps them learn to match their shots up, Grigsby said.
On Thursday, Aug. 20, about 30 staff members from newspapers around Missouri, including a reporter from The Missourian, attended an all-day session at the Reynolds Journalism Institute on the UM campus to learn how to shoot and edit video. During the classes, the reporters and editors had the chance to edit the video of the Meerschaum factory themselves.
The video has become so popular that Grigsby often receives corn cob pipes from his students and alumni. Grigsby also gives corn cob pipes away as prizes to his students at the end of each semester.
The Meerschaum corn cob pipe factory was the first in the country and is the only one still in operation in the United States.
Henry Tibbe, a Dutch immigrant woodworker, first began production of the corn cob pipe in 1872. His company, the H. Tibbe & Son Co., became the Missouri Meerschaum Company in 1907.
By 1925, there were as many as a dozen corn cob pipe companies in Franklin County, most of them in Washington.
Meerschaum is taken from a German word that means "sea foam." It is a Turkish clay used in high grade pipes. Tibbe likened his light, porous pipes and their smoke to Meerschaum pipes and later coined the name Missouri Meerschaum for his pipes.
Workers at the plant first coat the corn cobs with Xylonite, a resin made from pine trees before the clay is added. The pipes are then fired and hardened.
The factory produces 12 different styles of pipes in addition to the Meerschaum and a few wooden pipes. Some pipes are shaped with a lathe, while others are used in their natural shape.
In its heyday, the company produced about 10 million pipes a year, and was known for making pipes for Gen. Douglas MacArthur during World War II and actor Robin Williams in the 1980 movie, "Popeye."
The Missouri Meerschaum Company has survived hard times, including the 1993 floods when most of the corn crop used for the pipes was destroyed.
