Calhoun County resident Kermit Bell is a West Point graduate and a retired Lt. Col from the US Army. Bell was drafted for WWII in 1946 as he attended Calhoun High School. However, he was granted the ability to finish school before he began his service. Bell went on to serve through Korea and Vietnam and settled into his optometry practice after earning his degree in Tennessee. Kermit Bell has played an orchestral role in efforts to build up the county’s infrastructure, including helipads, the county pool, Bell’s gym, the medical center, among other projects.
“Serendipity governs what you do.” Bell’s close relationship with this concept has brought him across the country multiple times, often in ways he did not expect.
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“I was an enlisted man, not very experienced in anything. I had a high school education, but the Calhoon High School wouldn’t have gotten me too far.” Early on in Bell’s military career, he recognized his drive to become more educated in whatever field would prove useful to him.
“I didn’t know how to drive, and I was in Cheyanne at the time. They put a notice out that they wanted truck drivers, so I went up to the Captain and I asked him if I could take that truck driving course. He didn't want to lose me from what I was doing for him. So, he said ‘Godamnit Bill, if you want to go to school, why don’t you go to West Point?”
Bell’s captain had unintentionally inspired him to pursue higher education out East, in areas unknown to both the captain and himself. With the help of friends and family, he would embark on a life-changing journey across the United States.
“I had friends in the processing department … one of them tells me, ‘Tell them you got a car, and they’ll give you more money to travel,’ otherwise, they’ll give you a penny a mile to ride the train. They put on the record there that I had a car, so when I processed out, they handed me a check for 3 cents a mile … So, I went down to the train station with my duffel bag, and I was going to buy myself a ticket to West Point Prep School in New Burton, NY. I kind of chickened out because I figured the ticket master there would ask me where I wanted to go. So, I just turned around, went back out with my duffel bag, got on the highway, and just started hitchhiking. I knew it was East of Cheyanne.”
Bell’s preference for hitchhiking transformed him into a magnet for serendipity. After leaving Cheyanne on the highway, he was able to stay with his uncle in Colorado, attend a cattle show in Kansas City, and stop by in Illinois to visit the family.
“I got going east and wound up in NYC, I was taking commercial transportation part of that time.” Commercial transportation, while sometimes used out of necessity, was not the most financially efficient way to go. Especially considering a substantial part of his transportation was sponsored by the US military or kindhearted Americans willing to help him reach his destinations.
“The way people thought about it in those days, soldiers deserved anything you could do for him. If a soldier was on the road hitchhiking, he was picked up right now … you just give them the ride.”
Kermit Bell’s variety of transportation in and around the United States during his time at the West Point Prep wasn’t limited to the roads or the tracks. “You could hitchhike on army airplanes, and I knew that. So, if I could get into an airbase, I’d ask them if they had a plane going where I was going.” He ended up taking advantage of this knowledge to make his way back to St Louis, once an opportunity was available.
Bell got on a plane heading to Tullahoma, TN with a group of German Scientists planning to build a wind tunnel. After stopping at the base, “I got out, got into operations, and told them I wanted to go to St. Louis. They said ‘well, we’ll have a plane going there pretty soon,’ they put me in the gunner’s section of probably a B-26 or a B-25, in a little side mount; it was an uncomfortable thing.”
He eventually landed in Scott Airforce Base and after a visit to his brother in college, he made his way back to his home base in Spokane, WA. As usual, Bell’s reliance on serendipity got him where he needed to go, but not without stops in Colorado, and Utah from which he can recall a particularly generous citizen.
“Some guy picked me up and asked me where I was going. He said, ‘well I’m only going about a mile down the road, but I’ll take you further.’ He took me ten miles.” Those short moments where Bell was able to experience the good generated by selfless giving helped guide his community service efforts once he returned to the county after retiring from the Army and continuing his optometry practice.
“After the flood in ‘90 our Medical Center got inundated. We were looking for money to get it back, and some people who donated money didn’t like the board they had to deal with. We had a Medical Center board that was kind of lackadaisical.”
“They said, ‘If you get appointed to that board, then we’ll give you some money.” Recognizing Bell’s background in military logistics, donors felt more comfortable having him manage the money as opposed to the current leadership at the time.
“I went down to the President and told him I wanted to be part of the board and he said ‘good’. So, I got me, and a couple other friends appointed to the board. Money started coming in, you wouldn’t believe how much money donated to disaster there is … before I knew it, I had $6,000.” That amount of money is equal to about $12,000 today.
“I expected people to volunteer as much as I was doing. I couldn’t see why our local contractors couldn’t volunteer some of their expertise and their time.” Bell’s focus on volunteer service alienated him from the attitudes expressed by some of those with the equipment necessary to complete the project.
“I had a meeting with the builders and all, and I asked them if they could reduce their prices a little bit to help us out, and one of them said, ‘No! I’m not gonna work for nothing!’” Bell chuckled at this during his recollection of the event.
“Somehow or another FEMA got involved, and that was a big mistake. I had contractors who were going to build it for about $4,000 dollars. They said, ‘No, we’re going to declare it a FEMA disaster and build the medical center [ourselves]’. They put close to a million dollars into it. This wasn’t good because they decide what you’re going to get.”
“We lost control of it, but we got a building built and it wasn’t too shabby. We didn’t get $1,000,000 worth of building; we didn’t get much better than we would have gotten for the $4,000!”
The town of Hardin having a helipad was a high priority for Bell, and one that’s proved useful since its implementation. “A helipad was part of the plan, they came to me and said, ‘well we can do the groundwork and have it already for construction, but we’re not going to build the helipad.’ I wanted one because when I was in Vietnam, I had 256 helicopters, so I knew what a helicopter could do.”
In a short tangent, Bell recollects his time overseas organizing a defense project within his base. These skills transferred seamlessly towards the projects he has orchestrated since his retirement from the military. “[In Vietnam] we were in pretty meager circumstances; we didn’t have any elaborate stuff.” His instructions were, “‘First thing I want you to do is get these helicopters protected,’ because they were just sitting out there in the open. We weren’t going to build hangers; we were going to build a revetment. Sort of a wall area where if a rocket came in, it might do some damage, but it couldn’t get the whole thing.”
“The base’s previous leadership asked, ‘how long would it take to get these helicopters protected?’ This was due to a rocket attack where they had lost several helicopters. I yanked a figure out and said that I could do it in 30 days.” While his figure was ambitious, he was convicted of meeting this deadline.
Rallying the troops, as he would do in Calhoun, “I got a hold of my engineering company that I had there and asked them if they could go to work on it … we pretty well got them all protected in 30 days, and they didn’t lose another helicopter the whole time I was there.”
“I was just the type of person to think there wasn’t anything I couldn’t get done. All it takes is somebody willing to work at it instead of just saying ‘well I need to get somebody to tell me how to do it.’”
Fast forward back to the construction of Calhoun’s first helipad, “The Medical Center got done, I had a little money left over, around $30-$40,000. I had built an [optometry] office over in Jerseyville at the time, and I knew some of the construction people over there, and I knew the guy that did the concrete work for me. I called him up and told him I wanted to build the helipad, and he told me, ‘Well I never built a helipad before,’ but he agreed to do all the concrete work. He said, ‘I had to get someone else to do the lights, but we got a helipad built up in Hardin for $25,000.”
“After that, I said I wanted a helipad in every town: Brussels, Kampsville, Batchtown, Hamburg.” For Kermit Bell, there would not be a compromise on this issue.
“I’m a little ingenious,” he said with a smirk, “so I went to each town and said I’d build them a helipad, but they had to raise $5,000 and they had to find a place to put it. You get some ridiculous answers like, ‘we don’t need no Goddamn helipad! They can just land out here in the wheatfield,’ and the mayor of Batchtown was totally against it. But I had a couple people that wanted the helipad, so they got busy raising the money.”
“They raised $5,000. I got a hold of Illinois Aeronautics, and they sent a man down here to ‘okay’ the spot. Then I called a man in Batchtown who I knew did concrete work … he built me a hell of a nice helipad.” To repay the workers for their labor, he took them out to dinner on a part of the remaining budget. “I just told these workers to bring their wives and come on over to have dinner with us.”
However, this was not the end of Kermit Bell’s efforts to improve his hometown, “Now Bell’s Gym, the idea started from one of the teachers [in Hardin] that wanted to get something going where the kids could have special exercises, she wanted a climbing wall in it, and she had all kinds of fantastic ideas. So, I jumped into the middle of that one and said I wanted to help.”
“If you got a barn with exercise equipment in it, you got a gym,” as far as he was concerned, but the school board had other ideas that involved an architect’s design plan; an addition he saw as unnecessary and expensive due to his inability to build the plans supplied anyway. However, as usual, this did not stop him. “When they gave me those architect plans, I went ahead and poured the concrete.”
Along with leading the organization of the electricity for the building, he also helped obtain the exercise equipment. He was able to contact a man in New York for this, “Pretty soon I had a truck on the way with a bunch of used equipment from Buffalo Bill’s training camp.” This all ended up being sponsored by the same Medical Center board he had been a part of previously, “They said, ‘well, it’s a good thing for the community, so they gave me carte blanche to spend all that I wanted, they weren’t going to have a use for it.” Revisiting these connections was a technique that Bell found a pattern of success doing, as it worked on quite a few occasions.
When asked to comment on his motivators, he replied, “I guess it’s in my personality more than anything else.” On top of this, his appreciation for the smaller rural environment found in Calhoun County is another variable that helps to push him in his service. “As an optometrist, I had an offer to work in St. Louis. Koetting wanted to hire me right out of school. I said no, I wanted to practice in a rural area and be on my own.”
Kermit Bell’s service to our country extends beyond the military. These contributions to Calhoun County will be tied to the land for many years forward. His advice is, “I don’t think you can go far enough in giving accolades to the community for the things they do volunteer-wise.”
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