Monthly Archives: August 2022

Tread Carefully

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The Missouri General Assembly convenes in a special session in a few days to consider a significant cut in the state’s income tax and other issues.

The past and the present and two seemingly unrelated situations suggest this is a time to tread carefully—-although, this being an election year, politics could take a higher priority than should be taken in considering the tax cut.

Let’s set aside politics for a few minutes and raise some concerns based on years of watching state tax policy be shaped.

Days after Governor Parson announced he was calling the legislature back to cut the income tax, President Biden announced his program to eliminate a lot of college student loan debt.  The two issues, seemingly wide apart, actually are related in this context. It will take some time to explain.

We begin with the Hancock Amendment. In 1980, Springfield burglary alarm salesman—later Congressman—Mel Hancock seized on a tax limitation movement sweeping the country and got voters to approve a change to the state constitution that tied state government income to economic growth.  If the state’s tax collections exceeded the calculated amount, the state had to send refund checks to income taxpayers.

Some of the Hancock Amendment was modeled on Michigan’s Headlee Amendment adopted two years earlier. But the timing of Hancock could not have been worse.  While Michigan’s amendment was passed during good economic times, Missouri’s Hancock Amendment went into effect during a severe economic recession considered to be the worst since World War II.

Missouri therefore established a limit that had a low bar. There are those who think the state has suffered significantly because of that.

Except for one year the Hancock Amendment has worked well.  Too well, some think, because it has encouraged state policy makers to underfund some vital state programs already hampered by Hancock’s low fiscal bar.

In 1998, the state revenues exceeded the Hancock limit, forcing the Revenue Department to issue about one-billion dollars in refund checks (averaging about forty dollars per household).

The legislature decided it did not want to repeat that. So it decided to cut taxes to keep from hitting the Hancock limit again.  Not a bad idea, except that when the national and state economies took a dive, financing of state institutions and services was severely lowered.  Had the refund program remained in effect, the economic downturn would have meant no refunds but institutions and services would have been hurt far less because the tax base would have stabilized funding.

The MOST (Missouri Science and Technology) Policy Initiative, a fiscal think tank, has recorded twenty tax cuts from 1993-2013.  The result is that Missouri is almost four-billion dollars under the revenue limit set by Hancock, according to the latest annual study done by the state auditor.

Missouri is unable to do a lot of things it could be doing because the legislature eroded the state tax base instead of issuing checks.

Now the legislature will consider an even deeper tax cut.

Nobody likes to pay taxes. But there has been cultivated in our state and nation a culture that seems to think the benefits of government—education, public safety, infrastructure, care for the sick and elderly and indigent, and other parts of our lives we take for granted—should be free.  Or, to the way of thinking of some people who don’t need those things, eliminated.

How does the Biden program to forgive billions of dollars in student loans provide a cautionary element to consideration of the Parson tax cut?

When I was in college in the previous century, I knew many people who worked their way through school. Some could do it with part-time jobs on campus or in the community. I had one friend who worked for a semester and then took classes for a semester.  I have one friend who  financed his college education by selling thousands of dollars worth of Bibles and other religious books during the summer.

But the expense of a college education today makes that kind of self-financing impossible, or almost impossible.  And here is a major reason why.

Back when my generation and the generation after us, probably, could work our way through school, the state provided for a substantial cost of higher education.  Today, the percentage is much lower.

Last year, one of Missouri’s most distinguished attorneys—who also was appointed by Governor Parson to the Coordinating Board for Higher Education—W. Dudley McCarter, noted in The Columbia Missourian, “After striving to attain this goal over the past 10 years, the state of Missouri has now succeeded in becoming the state that is at the very bottom in funding for higher education. No, it is not Mississippi, Arkansas or Alabama — it is Missouri. Over the last 10 years, state funding for higher education has increased nationwide at an average of 12.40% with some states increasing funding by over 40%. In Missouri, however, funding has decreased during that same period by 13.70% — the only state that had reduced funding. When adjusted for inflation, the decrease is actually over 26%. The national average for funding is $304 per student, with some states providing over $700 per student. In Missouri, the funding is less than $200 per student.”

The downward trend has been going on far longer than that. The internet site Ballotpedia has noted that state appropriations per full-time student dropped by 26.1% in the first decade of this century, about twice the national average.

A study done a few years ago for Missouri State University showed that, nationally, student higher education tuitions made up 30.8% of higher education revenues in 1993. By 2018, tuition was financing 46.6% of higher education costs—and the costs were higher. It was during that time that student borrowing ballooned to offset declining percentages of state and federal higher education support.

The Biden student loan forgiveness program deals with those who have debts already. It does nothing to prevent current or future students from incurring crippling student debts, because government has reduced its support for higher education.  And now, the legislature is being asked to reduce state revenues even more.

We lack the expertise to get too far into the weeds of economic nuance.  But reducing the state’s ability to meet its fiscal responsibilities in the future, whether it’s in higher education or numerous other fields is a long-term issue that must be approached with great caution.

Things are flush right now, thanks partly to inflation and the massive injection of federal Covid relief funds in the last few years.  But Missouri still is far short of its own limit on the state tax burden and still far short in funding numerous human-service needs.

It is politically popular in an election year to cut taxes. The public seldom recognizes the long-term penalties that might result.  Tomorrow’s college graduates might be among those paying a high price for today’s popular tax cut and incurring new student debt burdens.  And if a recession hits next year, as some economists keep predicting, some unfortunate results of this year’s tax cut could become painfully clear.

Governor Parson has taken a wise step in meeting with members of both parties to explain why he thinks a tax cut is appropriate today. We suspect he had an easier sell with member of his own party than he did with the other side. We expect some passionate discussion of this issue during the special session.

We also expect a cut will be enacted.  We hope, however, that we do not have a repeat of the unfortunate post-refund tax cuts of decades ago. We must be careful as we consider what we might do to ourselves, our children, and our friends.  Tread carefully.

Sports—Racing: NASCAR Playoffs Set; The Tiger at the Top of INDYCAR; F1 Resumes

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(NASCAR)—Austin Dillon has emerged from the rain and the wrecks at Daytona to claim the last NASCAR Cup playoff spot by becoming the sixteenth winner of a race this year.  Dillon survived unscathed a multi-car crash with fifteen laps to go when rain suddenly struck the Daytona Speedway Sunday afternoon.  After the restart, he bumped Austin Cindric out of the way with three laps left and was protected from a last-lap surge by the few other surviving cars by teammate Tyler Reddick, who finished second.

Because Kurt Busch, one of the other winners this year, has withdrawn from the qualified finalists for the ten-race championship runoff, non-winner Ryan Blaney (right) will join the playoff field.  Blaney finished third in the regular season points chase. But Dillon’s victory kept fourth-place regular season points-finisher Martin Truex Jr., from a run for the title.

The sixteen-driver field is made up of drivers who won races. If there are fewer than sixteen drivers eligible with victories, remaining playoff slots are filled on the basis of regular season points.  Dillon finished nineteenth in regular season points  but made the field of sixteen with his win. Dillon will start the first runoff race next week at Darlington seeded 16th.  Blaney is seeded seventh because he got bonus points for winning stages of five races.

Rain Saturday night caused the race to be postponed until Sunday. The rainstorm that winnowed the field with the big crash late in the race Sunday caused a three-hour, 20-minute delay until the track was dry enough to finish the race.

(INDYCAR)—INDYCAR President Jay Frye is watching a heated battle for the championship play out as the season moves toward its last two races.

Frye, who played tight end and offensive tackle for the Missouri Tigers, 1983-86, under coaches Warren Powers and Woody Widenhofer, has been with INDYCAR since 2013 and has been the series President since 2018. He posted this picture from those days on Twitter recently. (There are some folks who think the uniforms of those times are much preferable to today’s outfits).

We talked with him in his mobile INDYCAR office while he was at World Wide Technology Raceway a little more than a week ago, just before the INDYCAR race won by Josef Newgarden.

AUDIO jay frye 2022  17:51  mp3

Frye and other INDYCAR officials enjoy being out of the office on race day, often being seen mingling with fans and often on the starting grid during pre-race ceremonies coordinating events and, in the case of the race at WWTR, checking the weather.  The start of the race that night was moved up by half an hour in an effort to avoid approaching rain.  It almost worked.  The race was stopped with about 40 laps left and resumed more than two hours later after the storms had moved on and the track had been dried.

INDYCAR races at Portland next Sunday then finishes its season with the Grand Prix of Monterey on the Laguna Seca road course a week later. Will Power clings to a three-point lead over Newgarden heading into these last two races. Six-time champion Scott Dixon is just 14 points back as he tries to equal A. J. Foyt’s record of six series championships. Indianapolis 500 winner Marcus Ericsson is fourth, trailing Power by only 17 points.

(FORMULA 1)—Max Verstappen has started the second half of the F1 season with a statement victory at the Grand Prix of Belgium at Spa-Francorchamps. He started 14th, took the lead on the 12th lap, and finished a full 17 seconds in front of his nearest challenger, Sergio Perez.

Verstappen’s qualifying speed would have put him on the pole but he was set back in the field because his team put a new engine in his car.

Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso, a pair of former F1 multiple champions, tangled on the first lap, the impact sending Hamilton’s Mercedes into the air.  Alonso was able to continue but Hamilton’s car was too badly damaged to go on. Hamilton said Alonso was in his blind spot. Alonso had far less charitable remarks about Hamilton.  Alonso recovered to finish fifth.

(Photo credits; Jay Frye Twitter, Rick Gevers, Bob Priddy)

 

Unprecedented

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“Unprecedented” is a word frequently heard these days in our national political discussions.  We thought it might be interesting to see what other times “unprecedented” has been applied to our Presidents.   “Unpresidented,” if you will, although it isn’t a real word.

It was unprecedented when the nation selected its first President who was not a member of an organized political party.  He also was the first President unanimously elected, a truly unprecedented feat: George Washington.

The idea that a President would never veto a bill while in office was unprecedented when John Adams did, or didn’t, do it. Adams had a lot of “not” precedents: the first President who did not own slaves; the first President who was a lawyer; the first President to lose a re-election bid and the first President who did not attend the inauguration of his successor.

Thomas Jefferson’s defeat of an incumbent President (Adams) was unprecedented. (So was the method of his election.  In those days the President and Vice-President each accumulated electoral votes.  Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, each got 73 electoral votes. Incumbent John Adams had 65 but his running mate, Charles Pinkney, only had 64.  The House of Representatives cast 36 ballots before Jefferson won 10 of the 16 state ballots. Burr had four and Maryland and Vermont delegations tied within the delegation.  All of this was unprecedented, too, of course.)

James Madison took the unprecedented step of asking Congress for a declaration of war.

The election of Senator James Monroe to the presidency was unprecedented.

John Quincy Adams’ election was unprecedented because he was the first President who lost the popular vote.  (None of the candidates got a majority of the electoral vote, throwing the election into the House of Representatives under the 12th Amendment. Thirteen state delegations favored Adams, seven favored Andrew Jackson and four favored William H. Crawford.)

Andrew Jackson’s administration was the first administration to pay off the entire national debt.

Martin Van Buren’s presidency was unprecedented because he was the first President who was born an American citizen (all of his predecessors had been born as British subjects).

The death of William Henry Harrisons while in office was unprecedented.

The House of Representatives took an unprecedented vote to impeach President John Tyler.  It failed.

James K. Polk took the unprecedented step of refusing to seek a second term.

Zachary Taylor had never held a public office before becoming President, an unprecedented event.

Millard Fillmore took the unprecedented step of installing a kitchen stove in the White House.

His successor, Franklin Pierce, took the unprecedented step of installing central heating in the White House.

James Buchanan was our first bachelor president. Historians debate whether he was gay.

No president had been murdered until John Wilkes Booth took the unprecedented step with Abraham Lincoln, who is the only president to hold a United States patent.

The House of Representatives held a successful unprecedented impeachment vote against Andrew Johnson.  The Senate held an unprecedented trial and failed to convict him.

U. S.  Grant vetoed more than fifty bills, an unprecedented number.

It was unprecedented in modern election history when Rutherford B. Hayes won the electoral vote but not the popular vote.

James Garfield was an unprecedented President because he was left-handed or ambidextrous.

Chester Arthur took the unprecedented step of having an elevator installed in the White House.

Grover Cleveland set several precedents—the first President married in the White House; the first to have a child while President, and the first President to veto more than 100 bills.

Benjamin Harrison set a precedent by being the first President to have his voice recorded.

William McKinley was the first president to ride in an automobile.

Teddy Roosevelt set a precedent by becoming the first president to ride an airplane. (He got aboard a Wright Brothers airplane piloted by Arch Hoxsey and flew for about four minutes at Kinloch Field in St. Louis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaFulqGGkwk). He also took an unprecedented trip on a submarine.

The first president to throw out the first ceremonial pitch of the baseball season: William Howard Taft.

The first president to hold regular news briefings was Woodrow Wilson. He also took the unprecedented stop of appointing a Jew to the U.S. Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis.

Warren G. Harding learned of his election in an unprecedented way—he heard about it on the radio.

In 1927 the Lakota Sioux tribe took the unprecedented step of adopting a U.S. President as a member of the Lakota nation. Calvin Coolidge.

Herbert Hoover took the unprecedented step of having a telephone installed on his desk.

Franklin D. Roosevelt set a precedent by serving more than two terms. Among his other precedents—the first to fly across the Atlantic and the first to establish 100 days as the first benchmark for accomplishments in office.

The Secret Service set a precedent when it made Harry Truman the first President to have a code name (General). Television set a precedent by televising his 1949 inauguration.

Television set a precedent when it gave one of its Emmy Awards to President Eisenhower who was the first President to appear on color television.

First President who was a Catholic: John F. Kennedy. He also set a precedent by being the first former Boy Scout elected to the office.

The first President to be inaugurated on an airplane was Lyndon Johnson. He also set precedents by appointing the first African-American to the U.S. Supreme Court and appointing the first African-American to serve in a cabinet position

Richard Nixon set a precedent when he attended a National Football League game. Also: First President o resign.

First President never elected to the office or to the office of Vice-President: Gerald Ford.

Jimmy Carter broke precedent when he went by a nickname instead of the formal James E. Carter Jr.  As we write this, he moves into unprecedented territory by living longer than 97 years and being married for more than 75 of them.

Ronald Reagan set a precedent when he was re-elected, the first President re-elected older than 70 (73 at the time). He also set a precedent by nominating a woman to the U.S. Supreme Court.

George H. W. Bush set a precedent when he became the first President to pardon a Thanksgiving turkey.

First President who was a Rhodes Scholar, to have an official White House website, and to perform at a jazz festival (saxophone): Bill Clinton

First President to achieve a 90% approval rating in modern polling: George W. Bush.

America set a precedent by electing African-American Barack Obama, who was the first president born outside the 48 continental United States (Hawaii) and who was the first to endorse same-sex marriage.

First President with no prior public service experience, first to be impeached twice, first president to never see an approval rating above 50%, first president to refuse to publicly acknowledge re-election defeat: Donald Trump.

Joe Biden has set a precedent by being in office past his 77th birthday. He’s the first President to get more than 80-million votes.

First President to be indicted by a grand jury?  The first President to be brought to trial on criminal charges?  The first President to wear a prison uniform?  These are unprecedented possibilities that many hope never come to pass while many others hope come true.

That’s because we are living in unprecedented times.

 

Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene

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The names might ring a bell for some of our readers.  “They” wrote books that have sold millions of copies and are still being published after more than a century.

For a short time, Franklin and Carolyn were the same person.   His name was Leslie McFarlane and I came across his second autobiography during a recent visit to a bookstore in Michigan.

Did you ever read or hear about The Bobbsey Twins?

Your grandfather or great-grandfather might have read  the Tom Swift novels or The Rover Boys, or perhaps novels featuring the heroics of Dave Fearless or the sleuthing of The Dana Girls. I have some copies of The Radio Boys. There also was a companion series, The Radio Girls. All were among the 109 juvenile fiction book series published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate which hired writers and gave them story outlines and paid them small amounts to churn out books, the best known of which are The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. 

Their contracts required that they never admit they were ghost writers of any of these books, using names assigned them by the syndicate.

McFarlane wrote 22 of the adventures of Frank and Joe Hardy and the first four spinoff volumes of Nancy Drew called The Dana Girls.

The book I picked up in Michigan is Ghost of the Hardy Boys. If you grew up reading any of the syndicate’s series, you’ll enjoy reading McFarlane’s story—which is far more than the story of the Hardy Boys stories.   His writing about the small Canadian town where he grew up and his stories of his early jobs with small-town newspapers are wonderfully written.

Not even his son knew he had written that shelf of books in the family bookcase. McFarlane, who considered his authorship just a job, never paid attention to what happened to his books after he wrote them and did not realize until the closing years of his life the significance of his efforts.

(I read several of the Hardy/Nancy novels but the real juvenile fiction author of my youth was Fran Striker, who created The Lone Ranger novels.  I have all of them about ten feet from where is have written most of the literary gems such as the one you are now reading.)

McFarlane struck a chord with your book reviewer a couple of times when he wrote about writing.  Here are a couple of excerpts:

When my young wife told her friends that she had married a writer, their good wishes sounded more like condolences…One good woman said, “God help you, my dear!” with compassion. We thought it amusing at the time. Later we realized what she meant.

Writers are not good husband material. (I am not qualified to speak for the husbands of female writers.) Not because they are worse characters than men of other occupations. They aren’t. Not because they are impractical and untidy. They are. Not because their income is chancy. It is. But they are always underfoot…Who can blame her if she envies her sisters whose husbands clear out every morning and stay the hell out until dinner time, returning with fascinating accounts of their adventures in the great world, of the installation of a new water cooler and how he told off the assistant manager? My life has been blessed by two remarkably happy marriages, each happy because of a woman who had the cheerful courage and devotion to put up with an existence calculated to drive most wives to a psychiatric hospital or divorce court…

The other day someone asked my friend, MacKinlay Kantor, when he planned to retire. Our paths in life have differed vastly but we both are of the same age, began on small-town newspapers, made a living from the pulps, and are still writing. “Writers,” replied Kantor, in a voice that came mighty close to a snarl, “never retire.  Real writers, that is.” And we wouldn’t have it any other way. It is a survival course that never ends for any of us. I will be freelancing until someone draws the cover over my typewriter for me for the last time.

I wish more people were writers.  Of their own stories.  Many people are intimidated by the thought, never sure “where to start,” thinking a story has to begin at the beginning.

Hogwash.

A story just has to begin. Earlier or later accounts will fill in the before-and-after holes. All life stories are worth telling. It is unfortunate that the main accounts of the lives people have lived are woefully inadequately summarized in the last newspaper article that will ever mention them.

Some people who retire worry about what they will do without a job and the social contacts that are part of employment.  The answer is simple.

Become a writer.  Write about the things you know best.  And the one thing you know best is yourself.  Abandon any pretense of modesty. Enroll in McFarlane’s “survival course that never ends for any of us.”

Descendants you will never meet will meet you.  And they will be enriched by what they read.

I was enriched by reading about Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene and discovering how much more they were than a couple of names.

 

Lyrics

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A couple of song lyrics have become  mental pests.

First, there’s a Faron Young country song from decades ago that I hear on some radio commercials these days: “I want to live fast, love hard, and die young, and leave a beautiful memory.”

Second, and even more relevant today is Kris Kristofferson’s claim that “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Young’s desire to leave a beautiful memory after a short life of self-centered existence strikes your loyal observer’s vestigial Puritan instincts as foolhardy.  The death of the young is never beautiful.  And the death of one whose short life focused on self-gratification seldom provokes a “beautiful memory,” at least not one that lasts very long.

The American poet John Greenleaf Whittier captured it well;

For all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these, “It might have been.”

Kristofferson’s song, BobbyMcGee, became a big hit for Janis Joplin but only after she died.  And its most famous lyric has never made any senste.

—because freedom is NOT just another word.  And freedom means there is EVERYTHING to lose.

Freedom is not sustainable individually, for individual freedom is irresponsible.  Freedom is at its most powerful within a community. And the community is most free when it recognizes the joint resonsbilities that go with its freedom.  The one who proclaims his freedom is more important than the freedom of those around him—whose only interest is to “live fast, love hard, and die young”—is a danger to others.

A society that refuses to accept the community responsibilities of shared freedom is a society ripe for falling into the hands of those who will reserve freedom to themselves and take it from those who have not met freedom’s responsibilities to protect it for all.

When community freedom is forsaken, despots rule.

And freedom becomes a beautiful memory.

 

The Lake

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Wire service reporters used to do something called a “new top” as stories developed.  If something happened reasonably soon after an original story was sent out on the wire, the reporter would write a new lede that would replace the opening paragraph or paragraphs, and editors down the line could use it and graft the rest of the story behind it.

Today we offer a new top to an old story that we related in this space on September 5, 2016.  It was about the naming of the Lake of the Ozarks.

Construction of Bagnell Dam was completed in April, 1931 and the water reached spillway level in May.

A year-and-a-half before the dam was finished, a controversy broke out about what to name the reservoir.  Union Electric, now Ameren, the builder of the dam, found itself fighting an effort in January, 1930 to name the reservoir “Lake Osage.”

A land company had bought property on the planned lakeshore and had gone to the Camden County Recorder of Deeds to register the name “Lake Osage.”  But the development of the lake was a private enterprise by Union Electric which immediately said the proposed name was not authorized and would not be allowed.

The land company liked the name because it wanted to build a “summer colony” it wanted to call Osage Beach.

But critics thought “Lake Osage” would be confusing because the new lake was only two counties away from Lake Sac-Osage at Osceola (now the Truman Reservoir).

The 1929 legislature passed a bill calling the new lake “Lake Missouri,” but Governor Henry Caulfield vetoed it.  Several other names were suggested including Lake Benton, for Senator Thomas Hart Benton.  When the legislature passed a bill in ’31 calling the reservoir “Lake Benton,” Caulfield vetoed it, too, because it referred to “Missouri’s greatest Senator,” a phrase some might question then and one that could be questionable when future men and women had the job.

Union Electric, through the construction years, had referred to the dam creating the “Ozark Reservoir,” which turned out to be the largest man-made lake in the world—a claim that was eclipsed five years  later.

By 1932 the lake was generally referred to as the Lake of the Ozarks. As far as we know there was never a formal dedication of the lake’s name.

And Osage Beach became much more than a “summer colony.”

Sports—Keeping Your Head in the Game

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

Kurt Busch was sitting in a chair he didn’t want to be in Sundary afternoon.  He would rather have  been strapped in to his usual seat in his NASCAR Cup car,  racing three-dozen other drivers on the three-quarter mile track at Richmond.

But for the fourth weekend in a row the 2004 Cup champion was ruled unfit to race because of a concussion incurred in a qualifying crash at Pocono last month. He appeared unhurt when he got out of the car but doctors at the infield care center determined he was showing concussion symptoms.

Concussion protocols have become a much more important issue in sports at all levels in the last decade, highlighted by auto racing’s Dale Earnhardt Junior’s struggles in 2016 when he missed the second half of the NASCAR season. He retired at the end of the 2017 season, a season that began with the abrupt retirement of Columbia driver Carl Edwards, whose run for the 2016 championship had ended with a hard crash at Atlanta.

Edwards gave three reasons for leaving the sport. The third was his health. “I can stand here healthy after all the racing I’ve done and all the stupid stuff I’ve done in racecars. I’m a sharp guy and I want to be a sharp guy in thirty years.”

Edwards’ wife, Kate, is a doctor who works with people who have severe and traumatic brain injuries.

What do doctors look for when assessing concussions (and a person’s recovery from them?

The Mayo Clinic says someone, such as Busch after his crash, might not show signs and symptoms until hours or days after the injury.  Busch apparently did show signs because he was quickly ruled out of that weekend’s race at Pocono.

Doctors run some neurological tests that check on a person’s vision, hearing, strength and sensation, balance, coordination, and reflexes.  There also are cognitive tests—how thinking skills are working. Memory, ability to concentrate and the ability to recall information are part of that evaluation.

If the person shows signs and symptoms of severe headaches, seizures, repeated vomiting or worsening symptoms, brain imaging might be needed to see if there is bleeding of brain swelling.

The standard test to determine the condition of the brain right after an injury is a computerized tomography scan (or as they say in every episode of Grey’s Anatomy,  CT scan).

And a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) can be sued to identify brain changes or complications.

The great 1950s and 1960s English Grand Prix driver Sterling Moss, who raced long before sophisticated concussion evaluations, decided after a horrible crash in his Lotus that he knew his brain was no longer fit for him to race when he had to think about doing things he had previously done automatically.

Whether it is race drivers or athletes in general, head injuries that leave them having to think about what they normally would do automatically is a sign that they need to step out of the arena until the automatic response returns.  Sometimes it doesn’t and the person risks greater harm by trying to bull through the condition.

That’s why concussion protocols are so important in sports. It’s dangerous to the individual and sometimes to those also in the game with them to play before they have recovered. Self-assessment cannot be tolerated.

As Kurt Busch put it when he was ruled unfit for last weekend’s race at Richmond:

 “Brain injury recovery doesn’t always take a linear path. I’ve been feeling well in my recovery, but this week I pushed to get my heart rate and body in a race simulation type environment, and it’s clear I’m not ready to be back in the race car.”

For Kurt Busch, the brain is more important than trying to win another trophy, a recognition that now exists across various sports platforms.  Infield care hospitals or tents on the sidelines—they’re all signs that the idea of “playing through an injury” is increasingly unacceptable.

As Carl Edwards put it: “I’m a sharp guy and I want to be a sharp guy in thirty years.”

(NASCAR)—Kevin Harvick had so much fun finally winning another race a week ago that he decided to do it again—at Richmond, where he took the lead after the last round of pit stops and then held on to beat the charging Christopher Bell, on fresher tires, by four-tenths of a second.

The win is number 60 in his career, moving him to ninth place on the all-time winner’s list.

Only two races remain in the regular season. Ryan Blaney, who has yet to win this year, is the only non-winner in the playoffs and he widened his points advantage over Martin Truex Jr., for the last  of 16 playoff slots.  If a non-winner claims one of the last two races,  other than those two, both will miss the playoffs although they are  second and forth in the overall points standings.

The Series moves to the Watkins Glen road course next weekend.

(INDYCAR)—INDYCAR runs the first of its last three races of the 2022 season at Worldwide Technology Raceway across the river from St. Louis next Saturday.

(FORMULA 1)—Formula 1 ends its summer break with the Grand Prix of  Belgium on August 28, the fourteenth race in the 22-race season.

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The Inner Troglodyte 

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My friend Derry Brownfield had a phrase he like to use to describe something that the “smart people” thought was special: Ignorance gone to seed.

I got a new cell phone a few months ago.  My old one was 15 model numbers behind the newest model.

A few days ago I was on a Zoom conference call, away from home and in a place with a lot of background noise.  I took the little headphones with little microphone with me to plug in so I could hear the meeting and unmute myself long enough to make a comment while keeping the background noise from distracting from the meeting itself.

That was when I learned the new phone does not have a headphone jack.  So instead of protecting my meeting attendees from the background noise of my surroundings, I contributed to the noise level at my location by listening to the meeting discussions on my cell phone speaker.

I suppose I would have known about this sort of thing if I had read the operator’s manual for the cellphone.

But it didn’t come with an operator’s manual either.

To get the operator’s manual I had to use the cell phone to get to the operator’s manual website. There were no instructions that I could find that would instruct me how to find the instructions for looking for the instructions.

Oh, and on top of all of that, the company has changed the little thingie that connects the power re-charging cord to the phone, so I couldn’t use the cable from my old phone to charge the new one. And the recharging cord is almost long enough to reach from the outlet to the nearby table where the phone can sit while charging.

So there I was, on the road 400 miles from home.  The charger I keep in my car to re-charge my cell phone had the older thingie on it so I couldn’t charge my cell phone in my car.

The other day I went back to the phone store.  I now own a pair of ear buds that have a wireless Bluetooth connection to my phone.   But I have to charge them to make them work. Fortunately, they came with a power cord with the appropriate thingie on it.  And I got an extension cord for my wall plug-in to charge the phone.

And I got a new car charger.  So now I have to carry two car chargers, one for my phone and the old one because the new charger doesn’t fit the charging port of the tablet we take with us on our trips.

As a result I have more things to worry about plugging in and more things to worry about making sure I pack for a trip. I’m not sure but I might have to leave behind three changes of underwear on the next trip so there’s room in my suitcase for all of the new charging cables, earbuds, and earbud containers.  Plus adaptors for foreign outlets.

That’s quite a racket the phone company has going for it.  I wound up spending $200 so that I can take part in my next remote meeting and so I can make sure my phone is charged enough that I can watch the whole thing.

And I still haven’t found the instruction book.

Sometimes I think cell phone companies and other tech manufacturers change things for the same reason dogs lick certain parts of their bodies—because they can.

Oh well, I can still use the earphones with my desktop computer.  And they don’t need to be charged.

You never know—

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—-what stories you might discover when you knock on a stranger’s door.

One summer night in Columbia when I was a college student selling encyclopedias door-to-door—a job that convinced me I was not meant to be in sales—an old man named Brooks Bradley answered the door.

I sold no encyclopedias that night.  Instead, I spent my time in his living room listening to him tell me stories.

He told me he was the oldest printer in the state. He showed me his commission as a Kentucky Colonel.  (Many years later, I joined him in that, uh, distinguished group.)

I wound up talking to a man who used to run steamboats on the Osage River as far upstream as Warsaw; today there are two dams and two big reservoirs below Warsaw. Nobody can take any kind of a boat upstream on the Osage anymore, at least not past Bagnell Dam at the Lake of the Ozarks.

Bradley’s family was an old family in Columbia.  He told me of the day his grandfather almost murdered General Odon Guitar, one of the city’s most famous residents. Guitar had been a Union officer and the Bradley family was on the Confederate side.

He told me he dreamed of writing a book someday called, “Pre-eminent Sons of Bitches I Have Known.”   I read his obituary in the paper a few months later. I still have it. I don’t think he ever wrote the book and to this day I wish I had a recorder that night.

The other day I decided to see if he had left any writings of any kind behind.

I found a January, 1914 copy of the magazine Typographical Journal that listed “W. Brooks Bradley, age 29 years; at trade fourteen years; learned trade in Rockport, Mo; has also worked in Pleasant Hill, Harrisonville and Warrensburg, Mo.”  He was applying for membership in the Typographers Union.”

I don’t know if the house where I spent that memorable evening was at 810 Sandifer Street, but that’s where he and his wife, Mae, were living when the census taker came round in 1940 and found them living with their 20-year old daughter, Dorothea.

I have run across one other record that includes a Brooks Bradley story.  A monthly magazine, Confederate Veteran (published “in the interest of Confederate Veterans and Kindred Topics”), from October, 1923, has him asking for some help.

An inquiry comes from Brooks Bradley, of Fayette, Mo., for some information of a soldier buried in that community, Richard Benedict, of Virginia, who went into Missouri in 1864 to secure recruits and information, and while there was taken ill and died. Mr. Bradley is very interested in securing the record of this soldier, as he and a few friends wish to erect a monument at the grave, which is on the old Bradley farm.

The following is taken from a newspaper story of this long forgotten soldier:

“In a neglected grave on a farm some seven miles northwest of Columbia (Mo.) rest the remains of a Confederate soldier whose tragic death is still remembered by a few Boone County people. The name of this soldier was Benedict, a commissioned officer of the Confederate army, and his business in this part of the country was to secure recruits. The county at the time was overrun with Federal commands.

“While on this mission, Benedict was taken sick, and, to keep his whereabouts a secret, he was placed in a camp on what was then the William Wade farm. In the same camp was a wounded soldier, Andrew J. Caldwell, now a resident of Columbia, who had been shot in a sharp skirmish on what was known as the John Fenton Ridge.

“So completely was the county overrun by Federals that it was almost impossible to give Benedict’s body a decent burial. An attempt was made to secure a suit of gray for burial purposes, but this was impossible. During the night his body was removed to the residence of James Boyce and prepared for burial. James Bradley made the coffin, and the immediate neighbors gathered and conveyed the body to its final resting place. In passing through this old deserted graveyard to-day, a close observer will find a plain, flat rock upon which is inscribed the word ‘Benedict.'”

Mr. Bradley is a young man and the nephew of a Confederate soldier. He writes: “My grandfather raised the first Confederate regiment in Boone County, Mo. He was a sort of preacher and sent out a call to meet at the church. Going into the pulpit, instead of preaching a sermon, he read the ‘Ordinance of Secession.’ At the conclusion, they all sang the ‘Bonnie Blue Flag.’ The old church yet stands as a shrine of democracy, and he is buried there. The monument marking his grave reads: ‘Here lies buried a Hardshell Baptist and an Unreconstructed Rebel.'”

Oh, how I wish that old printer had been more of a writer.

Sports:  A Super Coach, Landmark Cardinals Win, Royals Rookie Shines. And the Cars.

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet contributing editor

(CANTON, OHIO)—-Dick Vermeil, the only man to serve as head coach of both of Missouri’s NFL teams, couldn’t thank enough people enough in his NFL Hall of Fame Speech. Given eight minutes to speak, Vermeil took twenty-three.

Along the way he saluted several people who made his enshrinement possible.

One of those was St. Louis Rams linebacker Mike Jones, who tackled Tennessee Titans wide receiver Kevin Dyson one yard short of a game-tying touchdown when the Rams won the 2000 Super Bowl “If he doesn’t make the tackle on the last play of Super Bowl 34, I’m not here today,” Vermeil said.

His bust was unveiled by John Shira (L) and Carl Peterson. Shira was the quarterback for Vermeil’s UCLA Bruins that defeated unbeaten Ohio State in the 1976 Rose Bowl. Peterson was an executive with the Philadelphia Eagles when Vermeil led the Eagles to four straight playoff appearances and to their first Super Bowl. Later, during his twenty-year tenure with the Kansas City Chiefs, he hired Vermeil two years after he had led the Rams to their Super Bowl Victory and then retiring.

He recalled UCLA’s win over Ohio State as the win that made him an NFL Coach. “If you don’t do that, the ownership form Philadelphia doesn’t get on a plane right after the game—so help me God it’s the truth—fly to Southern California…and recruiting me to come and coach your football team in Philadelphia.”

The Eagles were the first of three teams he led into the NFL playoffs.

But it was a basketball coach who taught him about coaching.  He took every chance he had to watch John Wooden.  “When you watch him practice, the intensity and the discipline and the structure was there of a great football practice.”  Wooden counseled him not to worry about the players he failed to recruit to UCLA. “Just make sure you do a great job of making those who you have the best that they can possibly be,” he quoted Wooden, “And I’ve operated under that simple philosophy the rest of my coaching career. It is so true. So true.”

Vermeil told the audience, many of them former players or fellow coaches, “Players win games. It’s our job to prepare them to win games.”

Kansas City Chiefs Coach Andy Reid, one of those who succeeded Vermeil with the Eagles, left Chiefs training camp in St. Joseph, Missouri to fly to Canton for a Saturday night reception for the Hall of Fame Class of 2022. “I have never had in my coaching career a better display of respect from someone else in the profession than what Andy Reid did for me last night. It will always touch me…That was unbelieveable.”

(BASEBALL)—The longest game in the short history of the current Busch Stadium has brought the St. Louis Cardinals a sweep of a three-game series against the New York Yankees.  It’s only the second time in Cardinals history they’ve won three straight against them.

Playing the Yankees is still rare for the Cardinals despite interleague play. The last time they won three straight against the New Yorkers was in the 1942 World Series when they won the last four games of a five-game series.

The Yankees have the second-best record in the American League but the Cardinals showed they could win tight games as well as slugging contests.  Sunday’s game finished 12-9. The twenty-one runs were generated by 27 hits (only three of which were home runs). The Yankees left a dozen runners on base. The Cardinals stranded eight.

The Cardinals have now surged to a two game lead over Milwaukee in their division and are on a seven-game winning streak. The Yankees lost their first three-game series this year and are on a five-game losing streak.

Yadiar Molina singled in the third inning for his 1,000th career hit at home.  The only catcher in baseball history with more is St. Louis native Yogi Berra with 1,042.

Across the state, the Royals hammered the Boston Red Sox 13-5 with rookie M. J. Melendez driving in six runs, three of them on a home run. The Royals have on four of their last five home series. It’s been nine years since they last won a four-game series against the Red Sox.

However they are not in any danger of playing in the post season. They’re 44-65. But they are not last in their division.

(NOW THE CARS)—Kevin Harvick, facing a win-or-else scenario for getting into the NASCAR playoffs, has made it in. Scott Dixon, running out of time to challenge for his seventh INDYCAR title, is knocking on the door with three races left.

Harvick, now 46 years old and 65 straight races without a win, is the fifteenth winner this year.  He went into the race at Michigan as the first man out of the playoffs, based on the points standings although in ninth place.  Playoff positions are based on wins and hadn’t had one in two years.

His victory is his 59th in Cup competition, 10th best all-time. It means Martin Truex Jr., is the odd man out.  He’s fourth overall in points but doesn’t have a win this year.  The only winless driver still in playoff contention is Ryan Blaney, who is second in overall points but also has yet to win a race this year.

There are three Cup races remaining before the field is set for the playoffs.  If both Blaney and Truex win one of those races, Kurt Bush would be eliminated. Although he has a win this year, he is 20th in points. Busch has missed three races since suffering a concussion in a pre-race crash last month. Ty Gibbs, the grandson of team owner Joe Gibbs, has filled in for him and had his first career top ten finish \

In INDYCAR—Scott Dixon went from last to first in the last 51 laps on the Nashville street circuit to close within six points of the INDYCAR points lead. He’s looking to equal A. J. Foyt’s seven series championships, the record.

Dixon (with his family at last week’s Indianapolis road course race) was in last place after a penalty for pitting when the pits were closed. The win is the 53rd of his career, breaking a tie with Mario Andretti for second-most INDYCAR victories. Foyt had 67 career wins.

A late-race collision brought out a red flag that set up a two-lap shootout between Dixon and Scott McLaughlin.  Dixon never made the high-pressure mistake during those two las and eat McLaughlin to the line by .1067 of a second, the closest finish of the year in INDYCAR racing.

Defending points champion Alex Palou was third. Last week’s winner at Indianapolis, Alexander Rossi, went a lap down after an early race shunt required repairs in his pit and then rallied to fourth.  Teammate Colton Herta, also the victim of a too-close encounter with a competitor, also rallied from a lap down (also for repairs) to finish fifth.

The top five drivers in the INDYCAR point standings now are separated by just 33 points. Their next chance to shake up the standings will be at World Wide Technology Raceway, across the river from St. Louis, in two weeks.

(photo credits: Bob Priddy, Rick Gevers, NFL)