(WARRENSBURG, Mo.) – The story of the Prussing family is a tale of athletics, politics and empowerment that is captured in a new book by an equally intriguing family member.
Natalie Prussing-Halpin is co-author, with Lisa Irle, of “The Captain and the Judge: Building Camps, Forts, Dams, Bridges and Character Across the Ozarks” and also the donor of the Prussing family farm to UCM.
“The whole book is a tribute to my parents, Max Prussing and Natalie Wilson-Prussing,” she said.
Natalie said Wilson-Prussing, her mother and the Captain portion of “The Captain and the Judge,” was a star basketball player at UCM and Sargent School for Physical Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the first women to be certified through the Red Cross for lifesaving, taught physical education across the Midwest, went into politics and took on various other roles throughout her life.
“You can’t believe the stuff I have that she’s accumulated over the years, and I never went through it until I started putting the book together,” Natalie said.
After playing basketball her whole life, Natalie said Wilson-Prussing broke her ankle while she was coaching in her later years and had to give up the sport she loved. Years later, she asked her mother about her injury and said she didn’t seem too bothered by it.
“I said, ‘Wasn’t it devastating that you couldn’t play your beloved sport, basketball, anymore?’ and she said, ‘Why would it affect me? I wasn’t playing it anymore; I was teaching it!’ Nothing ever got her down,” Natalie said.
Wilson-Prussing also started the first privately-owned girls camp west of the Mississippi called Camp Carry-On in 1917 in Camden County, Missouri. She taught young women crafts, sports, dancing and drama. The camp was open until 1941 when a tornado destroyed it.
As far as her political career goes, she was the Republican chairwoman of the county and a chairwoman for the Republican Women’s Club in the 1960s.
She was also a gymnast, owned a dance studio with her brother and taught physical education at the University of Missouri from 1925 to 1935.
“When she went to Sargent, they asked her why she decided to come to school rather than join the circus,” Natalie said.
Natalie said her mother never used the term liberated to describe how she was able to succeed in a time that wasn’t as accommodating to women. She said her mother just did whatever she wanted to do.
“That’s my whole philosophy. You can’t say that all these things are keeping you down. You just have to take care of what you want to do,” Natalie said.
Natalie said her father, and the Judge portion of “The Captain and the Judge,” was also a very successful person, serving in World War I with Harry Truman, being a self-taught civil engineer, overseeing the building of Fort Leonard Wood and keeping the Prussing family farm up, which has been running since 1868.
Natalie said the book is not only full of her parents’ accomplishments but also of the lessons they taught her.
“I put down things my father has taught me, and one of those things is don’t buy it unless you can pay cash,” Natalie said.
Prussing and Wilson-Prussing were also graduates of Warrensburg Normal College, which is now the University of Central Missouri.
“They never talked about their accomplishments. They were very humble,” Natalie said.
Natalie said she wants the readers of the book to take away lessons about character, honesty and perseverance.
“You can do anything you set your mind to without money from home or government assistance,” she said. “If you don’t have money, you go out and get a job and then you can do what you have to do.”
Wilson-Prussing died in 1986 at age 93 and Prussing died three years later at the same age.
She started putting the stories together in the early 1990s when she participated in a writer’s circle led by former UCM professor Robert Jones.
“I had all this information, and I didn’t know how to organize it. So I hired and worked with Lisa Irle to help me. She is responsible for putting all of this together,” Natalie said.
Irle has written two books prior to “The Captain and the Judge” about Warrensburg and Johnson County history. She was also the curator of the Johnson County Historical Society for 16 years.
“It has been Natalie’s lifelong dream to have this book about her parents written and I had done books before, so I did some background research and organized these wonderful stories,” Irle said.
She said she was happy to be a part of the book because Natalie’s parents were groundbreaking people, and she thought people needed to know.
“I was surprised myself to learn how amazing these people were,” Irle said. “People need to know how many lives they touched.”
Like her parents, Natalie has kept herself busy in her 80 years of life.
She studied at the University of Arizona and pursued a fashion buying career. After living in Atlanta with her FBI agent husband, she moved back to Warrensburg in the 1970s and took over the Prussing family farm and its 118 head of cattle.
“I changed out of my pearls and high heels into my cowboy boots and bandana,” Natalie said.
She donated the farm to the UCM agriculture program in 2002 and still goes out there every day to feed the farm cats and keep an eye on things.
There will be a book signing for “The Captain and the Judge” from 5-7 p.m. Feb. 8 in Room A of the Warrensburg Community Center.