(upbeat music) ♪ Hey ♪ (upbeat music continues) (smooth music) - [Ryan] My name is Ryan Stone.

- [Matt] My name is Matt Carver.

- And we gotta take turns on the weekends being here, and we just kind of help run the place.

- Yep, so my background is electronics, and I've done a little bit of everything kind of, from engineering to application engineering, systems administration, kind of all over the place.

- So I wear multiple hats.

I'm actually a music teacher for my full-time job.

I work at SMS, it's a middle school.

I just teach fifth grade music all day.

When we were coming up with names, we just wanted something fun, something unique.

We were just throwing things at the wall basically to see what would stick.

And Matt is actually the one that came up with it.

He goes, "Well, it's an arcade, let's power up Sedalia."

- Yeah.

- I was born and raised in Sedalia.

I actually grew up in Smithton area, and I've been going to Sedalia my entire life.

And since I've been a kid, they've been saying, "We need an arcade in Sedalia" since I've been a kid, so.

- Grew up walking around in Walmart for fun, you know, on weekends.

And so it's kind of been in our heart for a while to provide some form of entertainment.

- But it's been a long time in the making.

- Yeah, so we got our start seven years ago when Ryan texted to me at the time a Craigslist ad and he said, "Matt, here's a broken arcade.

Do you think we can fix it?"

And I said, "Well, let's try."

We started flipping arcades basically, buying, selling, trading, and that's how we kind of got our start.

We've kind of been biding our time here, and it's been seven years in the making, so.

- I always loved video games growing up, and just you learn from a lot of video games.

- Video games can in some ways be therapy.

Play doesn't fix everything.

And to that end, it's not perfect therapy, but it sure does help.

(electronic music) We just did a fundraiser with CASA which is Citizens Against Spouse Abuse.

We went there and had some of our games be part of the highlight there.

But also we'd like to work with some of the institutions where children who have had not a great family life can come and just kind of be a kid, you know?

- But if you just come in here, spend an hour or two, just having fun playing some games with your kids, or you're gonna be kid yourself, and just going playing some Skee-Ball.

It is really relaxing.

Like it's just, you know, get your mind off the world and what's going on out there.

(light upbeat music) We've seen, we bought out a lot of arcades.

That's how we got all of our arcades.

We bought out so many and we see what works, and we see what doesn't work, and that's what we kind of molded this into something that we think that would prosper really well.

- Crazy enough, we bought half of these new, but you can't get many of these, because they're functioning so well in arcades.

You just cannot buy them used.

- You don't buy 'em, you don't sell 'em.

- We had to buy them new.

- We worked very hard on the games that we have in here.

We had to get the right ones.

It's a smaller space, so we had to pick the right games to put in here.

We had to be really selective for the ones that we wanted in here, 'cause we don't want just, you know, 10 year olds to come in here and play games.

We want everybody to come in here and enjoy games.

So we had to get the Skee-Balls, we had to get the Pac-Man, the Galaga.

But we also had to get the new games, you know, the Super Bikes 3 and the racing games and the shooting games.

- [Matt] Tank!

Tank!

Tank!

is a unicorn.

It's in Japanese.

We bought it from an arcade in Arkansas as we bought out that whole arcade.

It's pretty powerful, you can hear it going there.

There's an air compressor attached to it, so when you fire, it literally feels like you're firing a machine gun in a tank.

(game vocalizing) It's crazy.

It's kind of what we didn't think it was gonna be, to be honest.

Like we love the video games.

We love the Jurassic Park and the Halo.

- [Matt] Super Bikes and well, the Tank!

Tank!

Tank!

And all the classic video arcades.

- I wish pinball was more popular.

It's kind of on the bottom of the list, and I love pinball.

- And I think we need to get that out more, because some of the pinball guys are starting to wander in.

And honestly, the demographic and everything has been changing from when we open to now, because people, now that they're knowing more about us, I've seen more people wander into the pinball.

We'll see a lot of say 40, 50, 60 year-old men go straight to the pinball and play that during the day.

- They switched.

Nowadays, kids love the redemption.

They love getting tickets, and they love redeeming them up there at the prize wall.

And we're kinda unique.

We want to get prizes that, you know, you can't go to find at Walmart.

We want unique stuff in here that people can leave with, and you know, we don't wanna spend 20 bucks and leave with a lollipop.

We wanna give them really cool prizes that are bang for their buck.

We got a leaderboard actually with an adult that comes in all the time.

We've only been open for a month and a half, he has 98,234 tickets.

That's a lot of tickets.

So he comes in, he is one of our regulars.

- Hunter357, that's a shout out to him.

- Yeah.

(both laughing) Then we got 30,000, 26,000.

We're getting some regulars in here that love this coming in and just hanging out.

- [Matt] Well and see, he said he wasn't even sure if he wanted to cash in.

He said, "Well I already have a PS5.

I don't know if I wanna do that or not, or just keep going."

We'll have to get a dune buggy or something for him, you know.

And one of the things we want to do, is work with local businesses, and on our prize wall featured local businesses and their gift certificates and whatnot.

Then we do pizzas, slushes, we've got chips and soda.

- Along with our food also.

We also have one of our really cool slushies that we have been making.

People always talk about it, like, "When are you get that on tap again?"

It's called Buttercream Crunch.

We kind of made it ourselves.

It's a slushie, but it's kind of based off of Harry Potter's butter beer.

But it's pretty phenomenal if you ever get a chance to try it out.

- [Ryan] But we also are going full into the events.

We just finally had our first event.

That was Halloween, and we had our costume contest, and we had a runway right here, and we had the fog machine, the judges up here.

It was a blast, it was a lot of fun.

And we're looking to do a whole bunch of other stuff, and Ryan could say that.

- Yeah, so we're wanting to do a Smash Bros tournament.

We're gonna get more of the tournaments.

We're basically pinball tournaments, Skee-Ball tournament just get people in here to show off their skills and their games.

- Even cosplay stuff, you know?

Trivia nights, whatever, you know.

anything suitably, nerdy and fun.

(upbeat music) - We think the image says it all.

Pizza, games.

- Bliss, here at Power Up.

- My name is Eric Honour.

I am currently the chair of the School of Visual and Performing Art here at University of Central Missouri.

Interviewed right around now in 2000, and then started working in August.

And was, you know, the only music technology professor here until about 2010.

They hired me in 2000 here at UCM to create a degree program in music technology, and I've basically spent 24 years doing that, and building the program I wish had been there when I graduated from high school.

And so within my school, we have three divisions, which are the division of art and design, the division of music, and the division of theater and dance.

The perennial powerhouse of music here is the music education program.

We've been training teachers actually since the year the institution was founded, so more than 150 years ago now, right, that we've been doing music educator training.

Of course we have the degree program in music technology and commercial music, which is the one that I started.

We offer a a bachelor's degree in performance.

We also offer a Bachelor of Arts in music, which is again, much more flexible.

One thing that's unique about our school compared to really almost any other academic unit on campus is that in addition to being a university academic, you know, institution, we also are a public facing arts presenter and arts creator.

And that is a big part of my role as well, to make sure that we're managing both of those jobs well.

Faculty here are really deeply committed to meeting every single student where they are, and being open to what that student can do, and then working with them very closely and very creatively to develop that student over time to be the best whatever it is they want to be.

We've gotta a BA student right now, who's really interested in composing for musical theater, and so he's using that degree to take some classes in music and also some classes in theater and kind of put those all together.

We do also in each of the divisions of my school, we have a course or a couple of courses that are specifically designed to help artists learn how to position themselves in terms of business, right?

So they learn how do you develop your brand, how do you build a website, how do you make a press kit, how do you, you know, do all the different things that are gonna be expected post-graduation to both work with media and to work with others in business.

You know, we try to give that to the students to really help them hit the ground running when they graduate.

This program competes nationally.

Like there are people actually all over the world who know about this program, and that's something I'm really proud of.

You know, that here in little tiny Warrensburg, we have a music technology program that you know, we're competing with major institutions in Nashville and Denver and Chicago and on both coasts.

I mean, I'm just blown away by what our students do, and what they've gone on to do.

(smooth music) (cymbal crashing) I came to the program with my own predisposed notions about what music technology should be, and I very intentionally from the beginning, defined it very broadly.

And I basically said anything that we choose to perceive as music is music.

And so, you know, when I think about music technology, yes, obviously, you know, live sound entertainment, and recording studios and that kind of thing.

But then, you know, music for game, music for TV, dialogue, ambient sound, all of these things are part of that world of sound and technology coming together.

How do we create a community within music?

And I think it's one of the things that music does very naturally.

It brings people together, you know?

Music making, a lot of it is inherently a collaborative, and community-based art form.

It's a rare person who can't listen to some music of any genre, and find something about it that speaks to them.

Whatever kinda music you play for them, you'll see that their head will start bobbing, or they'll react to it one way or another, even if it's something that they end up saying, "Yeah, I didn't really like that."

But their physicality says they were drawn in by it.

And so I think that one of the things that we do very intentionally to try to create community within the unit is we have regular meetings of kind of all of the music majors and the faculty and the staff and we all get together.

Sometimes, that's just passing information along.

But, you know, every two weeks there are performances that happen over in Harbor Recital Hall that involve students from all the different areas of music.

And those range from our large ensemble concerts of course, the wind ensemble, the symphonic band, the symphony orchestra, the concert choir, the collegiate choir, two jazz ensembles.

Each one of those ensembles typically does two concerts a semester, sometimes even more than that.

The really big concerts will be in Hendricks Hall in the administration building, but most of our concerts are in Hart Recital Hall, which is in the UTT music building facing Highway 13 there.

Beyond that, there's a real culture here of tolerance and of acceptance and of interest in the best part of diversity in that term of let's bring all the ideas to the table.

Let's create a space where everybody can speak the truth that they wanna speak, as long as we're dealing with truth, right?

And be open, and get the best from each other that we can get, right?

It happens all the time that I sit down in a class with students or in a lesson with students and I walk away learning something that I didn't know before.

I think at the end of the day, creating that sense of confidence and giving students that ability to begin eventually to analyze their own work and start to develop their own work in the direction that they want to go.

That's really the nut of it, right?

That's the hub.

We actually have some funding in place to fund a what we call service ensemble.

So these students get a special award to be in the service ensemble and then anytime, you know, the president's office or the Dean's office or the Chamber of Commerce or you know, whoever, wants a group, we send one of the service ensembles out, or over to the Missouri Veterans' Home.

You know, we go over and perform there.

So I think that's kind of how we do that.

We're very tightly integrated with the Warrensburg Community Band.

Our faculty are regularly getting off campus and going out and doing clinics in the high schools, actually kind of all over the state.

And all of that is to try to build that community, and make, you know, not necessarily center UCM, but have UCM be part of that larger network of music makers kind of at all levels, from elementary through professional and amateur and all of that and just try to connect with people.

(gentle music) - We provide services and resources to keep people in their own homes if that's what they choose.

So yeah, it's the whole how do you wanna live your life?

Our goal is to help people live as independently as possible as long as possible.

My name's Deb Hobson, I'm the executive director at West Central Independent Living Solutions, WILS.

Independent Living is really helping people or empowering people to live their best life and to live it, in the least restrictive environment possible.

WILS is one of 22 state independent living centers.

You know, in anything from assistive devices.

We build ramps for people in wheelchairs.

It's amazing even now in this, you know, 2024, how much is still not accessible.

But then it's also the community that's built, and that's a key for our consumers.

'cause like they were kind of used to being isolated because they don't leave their homes often.

They have chronic conditions or they have limitations.

We have a weekly arts and crafts, primarily painting and wood carving group on Fridays.

But really we wanna do more outreach to the community and we wanna provide more resources, and we wanna partner with other agencies, other nonprofits in our six counties that provide those kinds of resources as well.

If we could all kind of pull together and pool resources, that's what I really want.

That's really the goal.

(gentle music continues) - I am Samantha Jarvis and this is WILS' Assistive Technology Demonstration Center.

And the whole point of our area here is to show you different options.

So it's not an area to purchase items, it's an area to come play, see and try.

What's nice about having an area like this, is to try use those items before you go and spend the money and find out it doesn't actually work for you.

The laundry folding board here, you might not realize that's a form of assistive technology, but if you are not able to fold your clothes or to do laundry, sometimes laundry is overwhelming.

And being able to have something there, that can help you to fold it makes an individual be able to do their own laundry maybe for the first time.

Say someone has problems being able to write like just with a standard pen.

Again, they don't have that dexterity or the grip to be able to hold a standard pen.

An option that you can do with that, is shove a pen in a stress ball.

You now are able to just hold on like this, and now you can independently write.

You're not having to squeeze, you're not having to put as much thought and motion into it.

You can just move your whole hand instead.

So an example of a low key modification to a high is magnifiers.

You can have a standard little handheld magnifier that can cost a couple of dollars, or you can have something that's a digital magnifier that can cost upwards of hundreds of dollars.

And so again, it's nice to come somewhere that you can try those things out before you're spending that money.

- I'm Don Hall, H-A-L-L.

I'm 83 years old and couldn't hardly wait to get here, but I really think very good about this company.

My wife introduced me to WILS about eight years ago, and it was a painting class then, and I painted two eagles and a few other scenes.

I didn't even know what a paintbrush was when I went there, so they've done a real miracle on me, and they furnished all the materials.

Our only cost was just getting there, and you know, they've got a car to pick you up and a car to take you home if you haven't got a ride.

- I'm Judy Hall and I'm a consumer with WILS.

I first heard about WILS when we were at the senior center and a lady came in, and she invited Don and I to come to the painting class.

We've been coming ever since.

They've done a lot in ways to get us out, and out of the home and to get together with others around our same age.

You always wanna live in your own home.

You always wanna do that.

They make it possible that you can, because if you need to get get somewhere, they come to get us.

And this past fall, then they offered a computer class in Odessa, and Samantha came by and picked us up, and took us to the computer class and they ended up giving each of us a laptop.

Now we wouldn't have done that and Don loves that laptop 'cause he looks up all kinds of tools for his is carving.

I just don't let him charge anything.

(Judy laughing) - We have to teach people how to advocate for the needs that they have, because that's how everything gets accomplished.

That's how change occurs and change needs to occur.

We take some of our staff to the capitol, we meet with legislators and advocate for programs for people with disabilities.

Tell others once you watch this, and you learn a little bit about WILS, yeah, go to the website and you can donate there.

It's not just helping somebody but to empower people to help themselves.

That's the real key.

(gentle music) (smooth music) - We opened up in here in March of '23.

At that time, we were only open Friday and Saturday 'cause he was working his other job.

So then, was it August I think that we started being here more, and he stopped the other job and came here.

- Started full-time in August.

So try and be here as much as possible with him, makes it a little tough, but we're here Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and we also have a food trailer.

We also do catering, so.

- And I do not make the sauce.

(Cindy laughing) I do like the money and the orders.

That's kind of my job.

- [Cindy] And I do the same money and orders, and preparing the food for the customers.

- I take care of cooking all the food, making sure everything's done.

We all help make the food.

If we have big orders, catering events, food trailer events, whatever.

We try and make it all work, 'cause it's just the three of us, and there's no other big sponsors.

Nobody's backing us, it's all us.

I've been smoking meat for 17 years roughly.

Done a few catering, a lot of catering events.

But we've done a few barbecue contests.

Got the food trailer, decided we was gonna try and make this work, to be our own boss instead of working for somebody else.

We started the food trailer about a little over two years ago.

I like doing the barbecue, I like doing the smoking.

We've done, like I said, a lot of catering events prior to that.

And we had a lot of people who said we either need a restaurant or a food trailer.

So we couldn't afford a restaurant, so we got the food trailer.

And if you want a local person, then I'm as local as it gets.

I was born right here in Warrensburg, and I've been here my whole life.

- We were on our way to Tightwad when we were first trying to come up with a name, and I was following him and I'm like, "Rollin' Smoke, let's do it."

- I drive with the smoker going down the road, and she came up with the Rollin' Smoke, because it rolls smoke going down.

So that's where we came up with the roll, the name.

- Well I have five smokers, and my favorite thing to really make on my five smokers is really hot dogs.

Hot dogs or brawst.

- Or steak.

- Or steak.

- One of our most popular items is what we call the Redneck Snackpack.

So that is easy and convenient if you're at an event especially.

It's a 16 ounce cup layered with meat, your choice of meat and two sides.

So it'd be like pulled pork or cheesy potatoes, or pulled pork, baked beans, more pulled pork, and you just eat it with a spoon.

We sell a lot of those.

- [Steve] It's our version of a walking taco.

- Mac and cheese.

(Cindy laughing) That's my favorite, but they have other favorites.

- Brisket or the jalapeno cheddar brats are really good.

- I really don't have a favorite thing, I like it all.

But pulled park is good, brats and all are good.

We do chicken, we do turkey, we do ham.

Everything people want, we pretty much do.

If there's something special they want, we try and cater as much as possible to help it out.

We've done everything pretty much off the smoker, chocolate chip cookies included.

If there's a problem, tell us, we'll make it right.

Favorite part?

Customer attraction.

Seeing all the people, 'cause we got return customers that have become friends from coming here or to the food trailer, and it's enjoyable.

We like talking to everybody, seeing everybody.

- We did.

Last fall or summer, I guess, we had somebody call.

They flew in from Colorado to Kansas City, and got a rental car and were driving to their lake house and they called and placed an order for what, 12 people, was it?

- 14.

- 14 people, yep.

And they came to get it, because they saw on reviews that everything looks good, and they wanted to try it.

- We have people drive from, we've had people come from like Springfield passing through.

People come like from the lake that live farther up north, and they'll stop here on their way through, or to the lake or back home to get food, and it makes us happy.

- Customer service and providing to the community.

Wedding catering, we've done graduations, we've done a few unfortunately funeral events.

We've done just about everything.

A few fundraisers.

We did have one wedding that we did Brussels sprouts for 250 people, smoked Brussels sprouts.

We're located at 1034 South McGuire Street, Warrensburg, Missouri.

And then the food trailer at whatever location we've been.

Sedalia, Buffalo, Missouri, Tightwad.

Where else?

- Sugar Creek, Cole Camp.

- Cole Camp.

- Yeah, so wherever the events are at.

You can locate us on Facebook under Rollin Smoke BBQ and Catering, and you can send messages there.

And also he's got his cell phone, which is the number listed on Facebook.

That phone number is 660-909-1918.

- And you can Google it.

We have a thing on Google too, so there's several ways you can find us.

- There's like a thousand.

(Cindy and Steve laughing) - That's crazy.

- That's crazy!

- If you're watching this and you want some good barbecue, come see us.

Keep supporting us.

If we don't get the customers, we're not gonna be here, and everybody needs the small town businesses.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues)