• The American Countryside is truly a slice of Americana. It might be a well-known music or TV star or just someone with an interesting story that lives down the street. From Iditarod sled dog mushers, to NASA scientists... from the Rooster Crowing Championships to NFL greats...The American Countryside is sure to be of interest. Click the button above to listen to the latest show, or visit the American Countryside archives.
  • Archives

  • Categories

  • Have an idea for a story?

A Talking Dog

Today we make history on the American Countryside, for today we feature a talking dog. Don’t think dogs can talk? Just keep listening and you’ll hear a dog you’ve no doubt heard before…..

Roger’s Theatre

There was a time when just about every town in America boasted a one or two screen, main street movie theatre, complete with neon lights advertising the latest blockbuster. Few of those art deco theatres from the 40s and 50s remain, but in this town, they’ve not only saved the theatre, they are hosting some of the biggest names in music to play here…..

Jowler Creek Winery

Most crops in the Midwest are planted in the spring and harvested in the fall.  The farmer’s investment is mostly in that single year the crop is in the ground.  Now imagine a crop where it’s at least six years before the first harvest and the profits you make from the crop and highly dependent on knowing how to handle the final product…..

Growing Grapes

What led this beef and row crop farmer to begin growing grapes?  The answer is a good one, but it is probably not the first one that comes to mind…..

Cape Girardeau: Discovery Playhouse

We’ve all been to museums, but have you ever been to one were you needed to put on a boot and raincoat?  It?s  a unique museum that is teaching us a lot about how we like to learn…..

Cape Girardeau: Riverfront Murals

Michelangelo had a very large canvass when he began work on the Sistine chapel.  Make a trip to this river town and you’ll find a man who had two and a half blocks of canvass to fill, and his results are also very impressive……

Cape Girardeau: Lazy L Safari Park

When you pull in the drive at the Lance farm, you might expect to see cattle or horses.  But a closer look reveals a variety like that about Noah’s Ark.  It’s a new business that allows visitors to see, touch and feed exotic animals…..

Cape Girardeau: Civil War History

Civil War engineers were simply running out of names, but that doesn’t mean the forts here were not important.  It’s a place where the Union troops simply named their forts for the letters of the alphabet…..

Cape Girardeau: Bollinger Mill

All this week, we’ll be in Cape Girardeau, Missouri–the place where the river turns a thousand tales.  We begin with one of the most photographed sites in all of Missouri…..

The Battle of Boonville

As you may know, we do all of our stories from the actual location where they occur. While we did travel to this town, our computer ate the interview sometime after the broadcast, but that didn’t keep us from getting John Holtzclaw on the phone to talk about the 600 civil war troops that will soon arrive in his hometown…..

Your Own Railroad

Ever dream of owing your own railroad?  Well, now you have the next best thing–you can rent a railroad for you and your friends and family and have the engineer take you on the mile long tracks…..

The Magic City

Today we welcome our listeners on 1230 KWIX in Moberly, MO.  To visit the radio station there, you’ll need to cross the busy railroad tracks. As many residents can tell you, its those tracks and the unique geography here that built this city…..

King City, Missouri’s BIG Pump

In over 15 years of traveling the countryside, we have yet to feature an attraction from my hometown, the place I went to school, the school district where I still reside.  So on the occasion of King City, Missouri’s 150th birthday celebration, I declare to you that while we don’t have the biggest gas prices in the nation, we do have the biggest gas pump…..

Settling King City, Missouri

New York City as the Empire State building, Seattle the Space Needle and for many years, King City, Missouri had a tombstone.  It shows how times have changed when it was a tombstone that was part of the skyline that one could see for miles, and it really tells us a lot about the settling of the Midwest…..

Living Past 100 Years Old

Helen Netherton may still be able to purchase long term care insurance, but at the age of 110, she’s still never spent a night in such a facility. She’s still going strong, caring for herself and providing advice to others who want to live a century…..

Helen Netherton

Today we make history on our broadcasts. Out story is with the oldest person we have ever interviewed for the American Countryside. In fact, she beats out the previous record, a 98 year old, by twelve years…..

From Japan to the United States

As a Japanese teenager, Barbara was taught to defend herself from American soldiers arriving in her country. She ended up marrying one of them! But there were more far more surprises when she landed in the United States…..

World War II From the Other Side of the Globe

Probably all of us have heard stories about World War II. Perhaps we have friends or relatives who have shared first hand accounts. It’s rare, though, that we get to hear an account from someone who saw the war from the other side of the globe…..

Graham Cave

One of the first men to farm this plot of land used the nearby rocky overhang to shelter his herd of hogs.  Then he discovered someone else had been living therefor over 10,000 years…..

Crowley’s Ridge

Today we say hello to our listeners on KOTC in Kennett, MO.  Is it really true the Mississippi River once ran to the west of your town?  Today the river is 20 miles east of Kennett.  Most say that’s the case thanks to a very famous ridge of land stretching nearly 200 miles through Missouri and Arkansas…..