Missouri Facts

In Missouri, anyone under 21 who handles household trash containing empty alcohol containers could technically be charged with illegal possession of alcohol under the state's broadly written possession laws.

In 2000, the KKK adopted a stretch of highway near St Louis, the MO government responded by renaming the road the “Rosa Parks Highway.”

A Missouri family sued the previous owners of a house that they had just bought after Brown Recluse Spiders "started bleeding out of the walls." An expert came in and estimated that the house was infested with 4,000 — 5,000 of the spiders.

Bill Bader's family ran Missouri's largest peach farm. Then Monsanto's herbicide drifted from neighboring fields and killed 30,000 of his trees. He sued. During discovery, 180 internal documents revealed Monsanto had warned it would drift. They sold it anyway. A jury awarded Bader $265 million. Monsanto's dicamba is still on the market.

When an EF-5 tornado leveled Joplin, Missouri in 2011, 203 people were inside Walmart Store #59. Employees had rehearsed a severe-weather plan just a month earlier and executed it precisely - rushing customers to the reinforced back as the walls came down. 200 of the 203 walked out alive. Across the street at Home Depot, 8 perished when tilt-up concrete walls collapsed. Same storm, same street, very different plan.

Ryan Ferguson spent nearly 10 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit - convicted after a witness claimed he 'remembered' the night through dream-like flashbacks. Both witnesses later admitted they lied. An appeals court freed him, then a jury handed him $37.9 million.

In 2011 a tornado tore through Joplin, Missouri, and a few competition barbecue cooks towed their giant smokers over, figuring on four days and 5,000 meals. More cooks kept arriving, and they stayed nearly two weeks and served 120,000 meals to families and first responders. That crew became Operation BBQ Relief, now past 12 million meals, and the smokers still roll out to wrecked towns.

Bigfoot is widely called the first monster truck, and it began as Bob Chandler's 1974 Ford F-250. He kept breaking it off road, and local shops did not stock the parts, so he opened a 4x4 shop. In 1981 he drove it over junk cars in a field and filmed the run, and in 1983 more than 68,000 fans packed the Pontiac Silverdome to watch Bigfoot. Bigfoot trucks still tour arenas today.