Bankruptcy

Prosperity didn't last in peacetime for the Moores.

Small towns were changing. The GI Bill paid for soldiers to go off to college and many never moved back home. The industrial machine that geared up in the nation's cities during the war converted to provide the luxuries of a booming post-war economy, offering jobs in the cities for people living in new homes in the suburbs, built with GI loans and serviced by a new freeway system modeled on the German Autobahn.

Villisca's population dropped by 16 percent from 1940 to 1960, to 1,690.

And with agricultural technology improving rapidly, farmers could manage, and had to manage, ever larger farms. That left fewer rural families driving into town to buy prescriptions and the other staples of drugstores - greeting cards, gifts, paint, wallpaper and, of course, sodas.

Villisca, which supported four drugstores when Moore was born, could no longer support two. Survival of the fittest on Main Street didn't take into account one's ability to command troops.

"As a businessman," Bobby said, "Dad was a better soldier."

Jim Honeyman, who owned the competing store, said he had some built-in advantages over the Moore brothers. He was a pharmacist and they weren't. So they had to hire a pharmacist. Their profits had to support the two brothers' families, while Honeyman supported only his own.

Trying to stay afloat, the Moores took out a $6,700 loan from the Small Business Administration in 1956. As collateral, they pledged the business and their equipment, including a couple of Hamilton Beach mixers, a 12-foot electric soda fountain, a Hallmark card case, a wallpaper trimmer and eight booth tables.

The loan only delayed the store's demise. The brothers closed shop and declared bankruptcy in 1962, when Moore was 57. Most of the store's contents were auctioned off.

The loss was more than financial. "You didn't take bankruptcy in those days," said Eva Croxdale, Dorothy's sister. "It was a sad thing in a little town."

Moore found a job as city clerk in Red Oak, the county seat 15 miles northwest of Villisca. The Moores sold their Villisca home and moved to an apartment in Red Oak.

"We didn't see much of them in Villisca after that," Mrs. Croxdale said.

Eventually, Moore became a bailiff at the Montgomery County Courthouse, a job he held into his 80s.

Moore loved the variety of people he would meet at the courthouse, from felons to judges. One convict the old bailiff befriended invited the Moores to his wedding. They gladly attended.

Dorothy also got involved in their new community, volunteering on Republican committees, working at the polls on election day and cooking meals for inmates at the jail.

Moore became known as a friendly and colorful courthouse character. "He had lots of good stories to tell," said County Recorder Pat England, "as long as you didn't mention the ax murders."

Bobby's War

Another Moore went to war in 1966.

Bobby, who graduated from Villisca High School in 1963, enlisted in the Army after receiving his draft notice. After serving a hitch in Vietnam, he went to Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, attending a modern version of the leadership course his father had started. He returned to Vietnam as an officer, but his military career was cut short by a Viet Cong booby trap that seriously injured his left leg.

Though Bob Moore was a veteran of World War II, a Civil War buff and the son of a Spanish-American War veteran, he found no common ground in his son's infantry experience.

The Vietnam War "was clearly different than all the people in Villisca, Iowa, used to talk about World War II," Bobby said. "He really couldn't identify with it at all, so we really didn't discuss it."

Friends who did discuss Vietnam with the elder Moore remember his strong opinions.

"He felt like the military was not allowed to do their job in that particular war," said Mike Boylan, a longtime friend and Red Oak funeral director.

Mrs. Renander, the Red Oak editor, remembers that Moore disapproved of the courts-martial that followed the My Lai massacre, in which hundreds of civilians were slaughtered by American troops. His view, she said, was "that was war and in war those things happen."

Moore was proud of his son's service in Vietnam, Mrs. Renander said. Bobby was the guest speaker at Red Oak's Memorial Day program in 1990, and "Bob practically busted his buttons."

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