Monthly Archives: September 2018

What makes a city also makes a state

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More than eight decades ago a study was done to determine what makes a city a worthwhile place for people to live.  It probably wasn’t the first study and it sure hasn’t been the last.

The same factors that make a city a good place to live make a state a good place to live.  In our political discussions, however, contemporary talk seems to focus on one element that diminishes the importance of other factors and, in fact, makes some other factors harder to achieve.  But the other factors often don’t manipulate political emotions as effectively as the one that year after year gets the greatest attention.

The Jefferson City Post-Tribune ran an editorial on December 17, 1937 about the survey on the qualities of good cities.  Then, as now, the politically popular supposed solution to all problems was not a factor in determining what makes a livable city.   Here’s the editorial that could be as applicable today as it was then.

More than three hundred cities of our United States recently were investigated by a group of researchers from an eastern college to learn the difference between a city where people live and where they merely exist or serve time until the job runs out.

They found among other things that the character of the cities’ inhabitants more than economic advantages make for civic goodness. 

In studying a given city, the university investigators asked questions like these:

What are the general and infant death rates?  How much money, per capita, is spent on libraries, on education, on recreation? How common is extreme poverty?  What percentage of the people own their own homes?  What percentage own automobiles? How many doctors, nurses, and teachers are there in proportion to the population?  What are the per capita expenditures for highways, for light, for sanitation, for police, fire and health departments?  What is the homicide rate?  How much unemployment was there in the census year 1930?  What is the average income of the citizens?

Answer all those questions—and a lot more along similar lines—and you get a pretty fair picture of a city.  Furthermore, you get a picture which is not necessarily the same as the one you would get simply by adding up the city’s tangible, visible assets—its transportation facilities, its industries, its natural resources and so on.

In other words the man who works for decent municipal playgrounds is doing as much for a city as the man who goes out and gets a factory. One is essential to the well-being of the community and the other to its prosperity in dollars and cents. A first rate mayor, chief of police or street commissioner can be a civic asset of incalculable value. And so, of course, can a first rate Chamber of Commerce, civic club, women’s organization, that has the general welfare at heart.

A city is a place to live as well as work and it is what we do to make the idle 16 hours pleasant and worthwhile that goes a long way to measuring the worth of the community.

We thought it interesting that the editorial’s list of questions asked “How much money, per capita, is spent on…?”   But our state policy makers so often find themselves saying, “There isn’t enough money for….” as they discuss the newest proposal to have even less.

A state is a place to live as well as to work and it is what we do to make the idle 16 hours pleasant and worthwhile that goes a long way to measuring the worth of a state. Unfortunately there aren’t many lobbyists or major campaign donors who have “the general welfare at heart.”

There is a difference between a state where people live and where they merely exist or serve until the job runs out.

Which way are we headed?

The portrait

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To be candid, we had something more interesting than this planned for today but decided to wait a little bit before posting it. Instead we are focusing on a tempestuous teapot of an issue.

Post-Dispatch reporter Jack Suntrup asked a few days ago if there will ever be a portrait of Governor Eric Greitens hanging along with portraits of Missouri’s other governors at the Capitol.  The answer is, yes, there should be one.

The hanging of official portraits has been an irregular sort of thing.  Several recent governors’ portraits were missing until the Missouri Academy of Squires (as we remember the story) paid to have them painted.  Matt Blunt’s portrait does not appear between the portraits of Roger Wilson and Jay Nixon. Neither he nor anybody else has commissioned one.

There are no doubt some who think the circumstances of Greitens’ departure should prohibit his portrait from being placed in the building.

We respectfully disagree.

Refusing to allow a Greitens portrait amounts to trying to erase history.  He was elected.  He did serve.  He quit.  We cannot deny that by some arbitrary decision that his portrait doesn’t belong among portraits of statesmen.  And spies. And traitors. And drunks. Human beings are elected to the governorship.

Let’s consider Trusten Polk, Sterling Price, Claiborne Fox Jackson, and John Sappington Marmaduke for example.

Polk, who served the shortest time as governor, became a U. S. Senator and was expelled from the Senate for disloyalty at the start of the Civil War when he cast his lot with the South. His portrait is in the collection and we’ve never heard anybody suggest it should be removed.

Sterling Price was a Confederate general during the Civil War and once led an army that threatened to try to capture Jefferson City by force of arms.  His portrait shows him wearing his Confederate uniform.  We’ve not heard anybody say he shouldn’t be recognized.

Claiborne Jackson was the governor who fled from Missouri when a U. S. Army general rejected his efforts to keep federal troops out of the state. Jackson set up a Confederate government in exile in Arkansas, where he died. He, Price, and Polk had taken oaths to defend the United States Constitution but then took up arms against their state and nation.

John S. Marmaduke is somewhat different.  He was a Confederate general who was nevertheless chosen by the people twenty years after the end of the Civil War to be the Governor of Missouri.  Haven’t heard any objections to his portrait being at the capitol.

James Wilkinson, twice a Revolutionary War General who was involved in shady deals and kicked out of the Army later became a general again and was involved with Aaron Burr’s plot to foment a western frontier revolution. He was a spy for the Spanish government when he was the governor.

Robert M. Stewart was known for his drunken escapades, one of which involved riding his horse into the governor’s mansion and feeding it from a sideboard that is in the present mansion.  He was a bachelor who sometimes employed female prisoners to work at the mansion. No, we don’t know what they did while they were there.  But nobody has suggested that character issues should keep his portrait from being provided.

Guy B. Park, a product of the Pendergast political machine of Kansas City, was just a Platte County Circuit Judge three weeks before his election as governor.  When the Democratic candidate died, Park was plucked from his bench, put at the top of the ticket, and won by a big margin.  His ties to Boss Tom Pendergast were supposedly so strong that the mansion became known as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

But his portrait is in the capitol.

These and other governors were humans, political animals of one stripe or another, who did what they had to do to get elected and to serve, or get elected to a lower office and move up to the governorship when the job became vacant for one reason or another.

The portraits are not intended to provoke unwarranted admiration for the men who have held this office. They are there to mark Missouri history.

So it is with Eric Greitens. He deserves some wall space because he was elected to fill some office space. Somebody, some day, will paint his portrait.  There won’t be a historical gap in the images of our governors.   People can look at his portrait as they look at the portraits of other governors and perhaps wonder what he did.

Or, most likely, they’ll glance at it and then move on to something more interesting—the big map of Missouri soils or the stagecoach or the big kettle used by the Boone family to boil salt water.

Sounding the bugle call to public office

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—and why it’s a good idea to know who’s blowing it and how.

We pause this week in our reveries about Africa as we reach the halfway point between the primary election and the general election to share a story that we hope reminds voters that it is wise to be careful about all of the rhetorical horn blowing that is part of today’s campaigns.

Your faithful observer and listener once heard Hughes Rudd tell the story, “Bugle Call of a Georgia Mule,” at an economic development conference at the old Ramada Inn in Jefferson City. This was in the early to mid-1970s.

Rudd (in this old CBS News photo) was a Texas-born fellow who still had a pronounced Texas twang in his gravelly voice as he told stories on newscasts, commentaries, and on the speaking circuit.  He was called by various observers “bright and bristly,” or “deft (and) sardonic,” or “puckish (and) curmudgeonly.”  He achieved his greatest popularity as a correspondent for CBS and then for ABC. He used to finish his daily newscasts with two-minute commentaries that Ted Koppel referred to as “evenhanded malice.”

Rudd didn’t read the news. He told news stories. And that’s why he was so popular. Rudd, who died at the age of 71 in 1992, had come north to study journalism at the University of Missouri but quit after three years to join the Army Air Corps early in World War II.  He had 20/40 vision in one eye so the AAC sent him to the regular Army where he became a spotter pilot for artillery batteries.

Somebody, somewhere (maybe Rudd for all I know), wrote the story I heard Hughes Rudd tell that day in Jefferson City to an audience that became increasingly amused as the story went along.  We pass it along to remind political candidates they’d best know what they’re talking about.

One fine Georgia evening a Mrs. George Wood, now deceased, called a Dr. Marvin Satterfield, a veterinarian in Hardwicke, from her home in Bryan County. It was about her mule, Horace.  She was upset and said, “Doctor, Horace is sick and I wish you would come out and take a look at him.”

The sun was setting, but there was still plenty of daylight to see by.  After asking a few questions and hearing the answers, Dr. Satterfield said, ”It’s after six o’clock and I’m eating supper.  Give him a dose of mineral oil and if he isn’t all right in the morning, phone me and I’ll come and take a look at your mule. 

She wanted to know how to give the mule the oil so the doctor said it should be through a funnel.  Mrs. Wood protested that the mule might bite her. Then Dr. Satterfield, a bit exasperated, said, “You’re a farm woman and you should know about these things.  Give it to him in the other end.’ 

Mrs. Wood went down to the barn and there stood Horace, moaning and groaning and banging his head. He certainly looked sick.  She searched for a funnel, but the nearest thing she could find was her Uncle Bill’s fox hunting horn hanging on the wall. It was a beautiful gold-plated instrument with silver tassels. She took the horn and affixed it properly.  Horace paid no attention so she was encouraged.

Then, she reached up on the shelf where the farm medicines were kept. Instead of picking up the mineral oil, nervously, she grabbed a bottle of turpentine and poured a liberal dose of it into the horn.

Horace’s head shot up with a sudden jerk and he stood dead still at attention for maybe three seconds.   Then he let out a bellow that could be heard a mile down the road.  He reared up on his hind legs, brought his front legs down, knocked out one side of the barn, cleared a five-foot fence, and started down the road at a mad gallop.  Since Horace was loaded with gas, every few jumps he made, the horn would blow.

All the hounds in the neighborhood knew when the horn was blowing, it meant Uncle Bill was going foxhunting. So out on the road they went, following close behind Horace the mule.

People who witnessed the chase said it was an unforgettable sight. First Horace, running at top speed with a horn in a most unusual position, the mellow notes issuing therefrom, the silver tassels waving and the dogs barking joyously.

They passed the home of old man Harvey Hogan, who was sitting on his front porch. It was said that Mr. Hogan had not drawn a sober breath in 15 years.  He gazed in fascinated amazement at the sight before his eyes. Up until this day he hasn’t touched another drop.

By this time, it was good and dark. Horace and the dogs were coming to the Intracoastal Waterway.  The bridge tender heard the horn blowing frantically and figured that a fast boat was approaching.  He hurriedly went out and cranked up the bridge. Horace went kerplunk into the water and drowned.  The pack of dogs went into the water, too. They all swam out without much difficulty.

What makes the story doubly interesting is that the bridge tender was also the sheriff of Bryan County and was running for re-election at the time.  When the election day came, he managed to get only seven votes and those were from kinfolks.

Those who took the trouble to analyze the election said the people figured any man who didn’t know the difference between a mule with a fox horn up his caboose and a boat coming down the Intracoastal Waterway wasn’t fit to hold public office anyway.  

That’s the story Hughes Rudd told that day in Jefferson City.  We offer it in this campaign season to those who think they have heard a bugle call to public service.  We guess citizens will be the ones who decide which end of the mule summoned the candidate to the ballot and will vote accordingly.

Homecoming

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This is the old home place.  It’s changed quite a bit since my folks left it a long time ago.

We think they lived here.  The story has gotten kind of foggy in the last three million years or so.  The old home place actually could be in one of several places in Africa.  Cousin Lucy, for example, was living in nearby Ethiopia 3.2 million years ago.

This is Oldupai Gorge.  “Oldupai” is a Masai word.  This place usually is called “Olduvai” Gorge because a German butterfly hunter named Wilhelm Kattwinkel stumbled on this place in 1911, and asked the Masai people who live in the area what the place was called. They thought he was referring to a plant that flourishes there, the Oldupai, and he misunderstood what they said and furthermore mispronounced it and the gorge has been stuck with Olduvai ever since..

That’s the Oldupai plant growing outside the museum. The more formal name is Blue Sansevierra or Sword Sansevierra.  It has a tuxedo-formal name but let’s just leave it at being a Sansevierra plant.  The old timers such as Uncle Nutcracker Man used it for all kinds of things, much like a more modern people in this country we erroneously call the Anasazi used Yucca plants.

The Masai have used it for clothing, or thread for sewing. They use it to fix problems with leather products.  They make the fibers of it into rope. It’s also good for baskets and roofs.  And bandages. In fact it has a natural antiseptic quality.  Almost fifty years ago one of the scientists working in the gorge used the plant for a natural bandage over an injury.  It worked so well that he went into pharmaceutical research with it.  And cattle like it during the dry season.

Oldupai Gorge is a thirty-mile long feature of the Great Rift Valley—as some call it—which is an area of tectonic activity that eventually will produce a rift deep enough for water to flow into it, splitting this part of eastern Africa away from the main continent. Don’t worry about it.  It will happen long after you have been there and have returned safely.

The Leakey family, starting in the 1930s, found fossils here that started to rewrite the human evolutionary record.  They found in soil layers about three-hundred feet deep four kinds of hominids, each showing an increase in brain size.  In related levels, they found increasingly sophisticated stone tools.

For a few minutes we were face to face with old Uncle Nut, as we like to call him. He originally was named Zinjanthropus boisei.  Well, we don’t know what his contemporaries called him, assuming they had names for each other 1.84 million years ago.  The Leakeys gave him that name and then they changed it after deciding he was part of the Paranthropus genus.  He gained the nickname “Nutcracker Man” because he had small incisors and large molars that led the Leakeys to think he fed on grains, nuts and seeds. Later studies have revealed he lived on grass and leaves.

How do we know that Uncle Nut should actually be Uncle Grass?   A Smithsonian article in June of 2012 says there was another Paranthropus genus in another part of Africa.  And an analysis of  the fossilized teeth of Paranthropus robustus, who lived in South Africa suggest he was the one who ate hard foods.  Chemical tests of robustus’ enamel, indicates as much as sixty percent of their diet was fruit and hard-shelled nuts. Imagine that—there’s enough food residue on those teeth after almost two-million years that scientists can figure out what their diet was.

Uncle Nut, P. bosei in scientific terms, had a bigger jaw and the biggest molars of any hominid found up to 2012, indicating that species was a strong chewer.  At the time, eastern Africa was open grasslands and woods, much different from southern Africa. But Uncle Nut’s molars don’t have the pitting one might find in animals that eat hard objects. Carbon isotopes from his teeth also show as much as 77 percent of his diet was sedges and grasses. The study of the teeth also indicates the area of Oldupai Gorge was quite a bit different from the arid area it seems to be today.

So Uncle Nut was a vegetarian, a trait that hasn’t crossed to this particular possible descendent in the millennia since. This possible descendant is a confirmed carnivore. If there’s going to be pizza, let’s make it a meat lover’s pizza.

To be clear, we call him “uncle,” but he might be more of a cousin.  Some scientists say the Paranthropus genus is an offspring of Australopithecus, the line that they think led to Homo erectus and then to Homo sapiens, which is us.

Frankly, I don’t see much of a family resemblance in the pictures at the museum but as time went by and as his descendants and contemporaries moved throughout Africa and then later into what we call “The Holy Land” and ultimately into northern Europe or along the Mediterranean seacoast—and the rest of the world—they gained some new looks.

Now, we realize some who read this chronicle disagree with the whole evolution thing.  That’s okay.  But Nancy and I have let National Geographic analyze some of our spit and our DNA shows we might have had some relatives in common with Nutcracker Man or at least some of his contemporaries.

Things are pretty up-to-date in ancient Oldupai or Olduvai Gorge. Power lines are not strung across national parks to reach this place. Tanzania is big on what we call alternative energy.  Hydropower.  Solar power.  And wind.  There is oil but it’s under some areas that are too precious, not to mention too dangerous, for drillers.  And we hope it is always so.  If the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge had some of the critters lying in the grass that we saw in the nearby Serengeti National Park, there would be no controversy about drilling for oil there as there does not seem to be, so far, at Oldupai.  It’s not wise to drill for oil in an area where the drillers are considered food.

Just before we headed to Africa, I started reading Yuval Noah Harari’s book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.  He writes that at least seven different kinds of Sapiens eventually evolved from areas like the Gorge.  But we, Homo sapiens, have survived and we’ve done it by eliminating the others.  We have been the lone human species for the last twelve-thousand years and that, he says, has left us arrogant but uncertain.

“We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction.  Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?”

A group of Homo sapiens gods from a place their kind call Missouri looked down into an ancient gorge that day, the place where Paranthropus bosei ate grass and leaves in what they call Tanzania, African-Americans many generations removed visiting the old home place.