June 4, 2025
Through Friday, you can go to Schifferdecker Park to watch artists from eight foreign countries, plus two from the U.S., create 3D works of art on pavement.
Then on Saturday, from 10 to 2 p.m., you can attend the World Street Painting Festival, Route 66.
The public is invited to watch the artists daily and see the 3D art come alive. Three such works were created last year in front of the Harry M. Cornell Arts and Entertainment Center.
This is Joplin’s signature event celebrating the Route 66 Centennial, notes Patrick Tuttle, with Visit Joplin. Next year, there will be 20 artists.
“2025 also marks the 10th anniversary of the World Street Painting Foundation,” said Mike Kothuis with the World Street Painting Foundation. “As an organization, we have set the goal of making public spaces more beautiful and bringing art close to people worldwide.”
There are similar festivals in Germany and the Netherlands. Joplin’s Route 66 festival is currently their only U.S. project.
Sky Kings, the remote-contol airplane club, invites spectators to attend their annual Fall Fun-Fly and Swap Meet Saturday, June 7.
Club members and guests will begin flying at 9 a.m. and continue until sunset, as weather permits.
There’s no admission charge for spectators. Chairs, hats and maybe umbrellas are recommended.
The Sky Kings airfield is east of East Street on Sharon Drive.
In the annals of legendary Wild West desperadoes, Belle Starr is remembered to this day as the Bandit Queen. Shortly after her murder in 1889, a highly romanticized, sensational book titled “Bella Starr … The Bandit Queen, or the Female Jesse James” was published – the first in a series of high-profile portraits to brand Starr as a villain.
Now, celebrated author Michael Wallis parses over a century of mythmaking to reveal the woman behind the renegade legend, with his new book, “Belle Starr, The Truth Behind the Wild West Legend.”
Wielding compelling research, including correspondence, official records, and contemporary newspaper accounts, Wallis traces Starr’s beginnings to Carthage, Mo., where she was born Myra Maibelle Shirley in 1848 and was classically educated to be a Southern belle. Myra’s early years were characterized by the chaotic violence of the Civil War – she was traumatized by the death of her brother, who was killed riding with “bushwhackers,” one of the many insurgent guerilla groups supporting the Confederate Army. From then on, she swore revenge against all Yankees and became a willing “friend to any brave and gallant outlaw.”
The crimes committed by Starr’s innermost circle – stagecoach stickups, bank robbery, horse theft – would take her from war-torn Carthage to rollicking Scyene, Texas, until she finally settled in Indian Territory (present Oklahoma). And although Starr indeed ran in the same circles as notorious outlaws Jesse James and the Younger brothers, the crimes ascribed to her were greatly embellished – including the fact that the allegedly bloodthirsty Starr more than likely never killed a single person.
Turning a redemptive eye to Belle Starr’s tarnished legacy, Wallis crafts an illuminating portrait of a woman demonized for refusing to accept the genteel Victorian ideals expected of her, a woman who chose instead to live her life outside the law, riding sidesaddle with a pearl-handled Colt .45 strapped to her hip.
Webb City was one of Michael Wallis’ book-signing stops in 2001 when he published “Route 66: The Mother Road.” He has published 19 books, including “The Best Land Under Heaven” and the best-selling “Route 66 and Billy the Kid.” And he is the Sheriff in the Disney·Pixar Cars franchise. A resident of Tulsa, Okla., he is a popular public speaker and voice actor.
The Webb City Sentinel isn’t a newspaper – but it used to be, serving Webb City, Missouri, in print from 1879-2020. This “newspaper” seeks to carry on that tradition as a nonprofit corporation.
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