Norma Duncan

Norma's story

In the Hitchcock classic Vertigo, Jimmy Stewart says that every town has a couple of people who know the person-to-person history, what he calls, “the small stuff, the juicy stories.”  

Norma Duncan is one of these people. She can track stories in extraordinary detail: who lived where for how long; who was close with who; how much a credit hour cost at Southwest Missouri State in the 1960s.

She told us she gets it from her mother, who was an English teacher at Lincoln. And details mattered – particularly when Norma was growing up in Springfield. 

“There was a lot of interaction between black and white populations,” Norma said, but segregation added tension and nuance to these relationships. Recently, Norma realized that a woman she knows used to bake pies for a well-known Springfield restaurant. “We couldn’t go in there and eat,” she told us. “But she baked the pies.”

And, she said, “Even in a town where people knew everybody, you never know when that one person’s going to come up and want to change things. You never know when that person is going to attack somebody or catch somebody out by themselves and beat them up,” which, she told us, led parents to caution their children against staying out after dark. 

Surprises came in many forms. Once, as she was boarding a bus from Joplin to Springfield, “I sat down next to a white guy that I had gone to Central with, and we were having a good time, talking about school and our lives and how proud we were when we saw the Kilties march. And then the bus stopped, and a white lady got on with a baby. The driver comes back to where I’m sitting. He said, ‘Get up, and give this woman your seat.’

"And so I got up, and all the seats were full, so I had to stand up all the way to Springfield," she said. "But the guy sitting next to me got up and stood up with me." It's a small detail, she knows, but details mattered.