We Weren’t Good Enough for Trump. Or Was It The Other Way Around? 

Next year will mark the thirtieth anniversary of the opening of the first legal casinos in Missouri.

The industry has done well in those thirty years.  It has posted revenues of almost $42-Billion.

For a time, Donald Trump wanted to be part of that, making some deals that would add to his casino empire back east. Before he started sniffing around in Missouri he had bought a casino from Hilton Hotels in 1985 and opened the property as Trump’s Castle Hotel Casino (later Trump Marina) in Atlantic City.  In 1986, he bought out a Holiday Inn and opened it as the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino.

Two years later he got involved in the Taj Mahal project in Atlantic City and, using junk bonds,   turned it into a billion-dollar construction project.

In 1993, a year after voters approved riverboat gambling, he showed up in Missouri, ready to deal.  St. Louis Mayor Freeman Bosley didn’t want to cut a deal unless riverfront gambling interests got behind downtown redevelopment, a condition that Trump didn’t seem to mind, telling reporters, “Depending  on what he wants, I would be interested in discussing possible linkage. I think St. Louis needs a convention center hotel very badly. St. Louis is certainly a good gaming market.”

Already displaying the modesty to which we are accustomed, he proclaimed in May of ’93, “I think I know as much about convention halls as anyone in the public of private sector.”

While he was casting eyes at Missouri, he was feuding with Native Americans who were opening their own casinos.  The same year he looked at St. Louis he was ripping the operators of the Foxwoods Casino operated by he Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation in New York, telling New York City radio host Don Imus, “I think I might have more Indian blood than a lot of the so-called Indians that are trying to open up reservations…I think if you’ve ever been up there,  you would truly say these are not Indians.”

(Just for the record, Donald Trump has zero Indian blood. His grandfather, came here as a 16-year old barber to escape three years of German military service. The legality of his entrance to the United States is questionable.)

American Indian Republic later reflected, “His discourteous rhetoric involving American Indians has often been used to both demean and frustrate those to which such speech was directed, with his early 1990’s tirades reflecting his discontent with the rapid and expansive rise of Indian gaming in particular. Much of the racially influenced remarks that had occurred during that period would later be conveyed once again during his 2016 presidential bid against his Republican opponents and Hillary Clinton, amongst other politicians.”

The year he was considering a Missouri casino, he filed a lawsuit against the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 that allowed Indian nations to open casinos. His whine was a familiar one to us today. The suit claimed those casinos were providing unfair competition, that the act was discriminatory as well as being unconstitutional.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit, a defendant, reacted, “My initial reaction was, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I’ve never even met Marla Maples. How can he be suing me?’ It is really absurd to think that a self-proclaimed tycoon s threatened by a few bands of impoverished Indians. It’s the theatre of the absurd.”

(Marla Maples was Trump’s new hobby at the time.  They had met in 1984 and started carrying on while he was still married to Ivana, who finally split with him in 1990.  It was about the time he was fighting Indians that Marla was trying to convince him to marry her.  She said they’d set the date “about a dozen times” but he always had “a little freak out” the day before the grand event. She said she helped him get over “that fear monster,” but had started taking her wedding gown along on their travels because “you’ve got to be prepared.”  They married late in 1993, two months after the birth of their daughter, Tiffany. Three years later, Trump fired his bodyguard after police reported finding him under a lifeguard stand with Ivana on a deserted beach at 4 a.m. They divorced in June of 1999.  By then he was fooling around with a Yugoslavian-born model, Melanija Knavs, who was building a career in New York. They were married in 2005.)

Getting back to our story:

As usually seems to happen with Trump lawsuits, the one involving Bruce Babbit went nowhere.

Later that year, representatives of the Wyandotte Tribe of Oklahoma proposed building an 80,000 square foot casino/hotel/theatre/restaurant complex in the St. Louis suburb of Arnold.  One Arnold resident dismissed the idea, commenting, “Trump is in town talking about a deal on the riverfront. Who in the world is going to choose Arnold when downtown St. Louis is 20 minutes away?”  Governor Carnahan’s deputy chief of staff, Roy Temple, indicated Carnahan was cool to the idea of a casino in Arnold, generally opposed to casinos beyond those allowed by the riverboat gambling amendment added to the State Constitution in ’92.

Trump also was crosswise with Connecticut Governor Lowell Weicker, claiming he couldn’t build a casino in that state until Weiker left office because Weiker opposed casinos. Weiker responded, “My opposition to casinos isn’t just casinos. It’s opposition to Donald Trump,” who he referred to as a “dirt bag” and a “bigot.”  Trump displayed his now-familiar brand of logic when he fired back that Weiker “is a fat slob who couldn’t get elected dog catcher in Connecticut,” ignoring the fact that Weiker had gotten elected to an office of somewhat greater importance.

In November of ’93, Trump unveiled his plan for a $300 million floating casino and 20-acre development just north of Laclede’s Landing on the St. Louis riverfront.  Five other developers also were eyeing the area.

In February of 1994, he floated the idea of a $98 million casino project in St. Charles that included a golf course, aquarium, and a park. Six other companies were competing.

Trump wasn’t good enough for either project.

In August of ’95, he left some people shaking their heads when he filed a lawsuit in New York to stop the introduction of  new lottery game, Quick Draw. He described it as “video crack,” and argued, “When you add it all up, the social costs far outweigh the potential tax revenues” and would be harmful to gambling addicts and casual gamblers “who can lose far more than they can afford.”

The same concerns did not apply to his own casinos because, “The overwhelming number of people who go to casinos do so for limited periods of time and with set budgets.”

By now, by the way, the Palm Beach, Florida, town council had capitulated in the face of a lawsuit filed by Trump and approved his proposal to turn his historic Mar-a-Lago mansion into a private club. The council had refused to allow the change two years earlier and Trump had, well, you know.

Trump’s grandiose plans for St. Louis and St. Charles were stillborn but he wasn’t done with Missouri.

In 1995 he established Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts as a publicly-traded company.  Four years later THCR agreed to buy the troubled Flamingo Hilton Casino in Kansas City, reportedly for $15 million.  The city port authority approved the deal on Trump’s 53rd birthday. But the deal fell through when the Missouri Gaming Commission refused to approve the company’s gaming license, expressing concerns about the THCR’s $1.8 Billion in debts.

The summer before the deal, the Hilton had agreed to pay $665,000 in fines and penalties to the federal government instead of going to trial in federal court  for “providing financial incentives” to friends of the then-chairman of the Kansas City Port Authority in return for his political support to build the casino on city-owned land. The company always denied doing anything improper.  The gaming commission threatened to yank the Hilton’s gambling license unless it sold its property.  Hilton had spent more than $100 million to develop the site.

In September of ’99, Station Casinos bought the Flamingo Hilton at the fire-sale price of $22.5 million. A Trump spokesman said the deal was cancelled so the company could focus on operating its three casinos in Atlantic City and reduce its debt.

Anyone wanting to learn more about all of this little drama seems to be out of luck.  The Associated Press reported in 2016 that about 1,000 pages of documents are locked away in the gaming commission’s files and are secret under Missouri law because Trump’s company withdrew its application on November 17, 1999. The commission lawyer says they’re sealed because the state never took action on the license application.

So ends the story of Donald Trump’s efforts to expand his casino empire to Missouri.

Had he done so, his track record indicates those projects would have been just another part of the story of the great deal-maker’s business failures.

THCR filed for bankruptcy in 2004 and was renamed Trump Entertainment Resorts and declared bankruptcy in 2009.

The Harrah’s at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1992, closed in 2014 and was demolished in 2021.

Trump 29 Casino in Coachella, California is still open but Trump left the partnership in 2006.

Trump Casino in Gary, Indiana was sold in 2005.

Trump World’s Fair in Atlantic City closed in 1999 and was demolished a year later.

Trump Castle in Atlantic City filed for Chapter bankruptcy in 1992, was sold in 2011 and is now the Golden Nugget Atlantic City.

Trump Taj Mahal on the Atlantic City boardwalk filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1991,  closed in 2016 and is now the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino.

And those are just part of a list of failures that also include an airline, a university, a vodka and a meat business, a travel agency and a mortgage finance company. And Truth Social is weakening.

His last casino development effort was on the Caribbean Island of Canouan, described as “a place where billionaires go to escape millionaires,” when Swiss-Italian banker Antonio Saladino tried to turn his languishing resort into a successful enterprise. He hired Trump to build villas around his hotel and golf course. Trump agreed to run the golf course and put up his own casino. Saladino sold out in 2010 to an Irish billionaire who fired Trump and sold the resort in 2015.

So Missouri missed out on having Donald Trump running a casino here.  It’s probably for the best.

Missouri has thirteen casinos, none that have ever born the name “Trump.”  There are those who think we need a fourteenth one, or maybe move a license from one location to the next—-which presents another problem of what is a small town that loses its casino going to do for jobs and what’s it going to do with the boarded-up casino.  And we have another Indian Nation that is trying to open a casino .

We saw during those years the Donald Trump character that is no different today. The casino industry has moved beyond Donald Trump.  Some might think it’s because the industry is run by better people, which is a case of damning by faint praise.

Is there a lesson in this for our political system?

 

Sports: Bowls Take a Cotton to the Tigers; Chiefs Sent Packing; Battlehawks Survive

By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributig Editor

(MIZ)—Both teams headed to the Cotton Bowl in Dallas December 29 have something to prove.  The Missouri Tigers have to prove they can beat a top-ten rated team.  The Ohio State Buckeyes want to show they should have been in the national championship playoffs.

Ohio State has won twn of the 12 games the two teams have played against each other. One game ended in a tie.  Missouri’s only win was in 1976 at Columbus.

Missouri went 6-5, a year of incredible highs and deeply disappointing lows.  The story of the only Missouri victory over Ohio State was part of a season that has been described as “weird.”  Rock M Nation calls it the “craziest season in Mizzou history” and lists the top three wins in Missouri history as having occurred that year. Missouri played the toughest schedule in the nation that year. Let’s go through it.

Missouri started the season with a nationally-televised night game against Southern Cal, in Los Angeles.  USC was ranked 8th in the AP poll when unranked Missouri pounded the Trojans 46-25. Missouri was ranked sixth the next week when it lost to unranked Illinois 31-6. The third game was against Ohio State, then ranked second by the AP, and Missouri beat the Buckeyes 22-21. Missouri was 12th when he beat North Carolina 24-3 and 9th when they beat Kansas State 28-21, seventh when they lost to Iowa State 21-17.  They had dropped to 17th when they upset #3 Nebraska 34-24 in a game that saw quarterback Pete Woods complete the longest toughdown pass in Missouri and Big Eight Conference history—98 yards to Joe Stewart.  The Tigers rose to 10th but lost to 16th ranked Oklahoma State 20-19.  They were 16th when they beat #14 Colorado 16-7.  They finished out the season losing to #14 Oklahoma 27-20 while ranked 11th, and then, ranked 19th, losing to Kansas 41-14.

Al Onofrio was the coach of this team that lost three games by 1,4, and 7 points, but also lost two games by 25 and 27.  It was a team that won by 1,7,10,and 9 points as well as two wins by 21. Missouri was the best 6-5 team in college football that year, and maybe one of the best 6-5 teams in NCAA football history.

Ohio State was emblematic of that cardiac season.  The Tigers had dropped out of the top 20 when they went to Columbus that weekend and Woody Hayes’ Buckeyes had taken a 21-7 lead at the half.  But Missouri held Ohio State scoreless in the second half.  Quarterback Pete Woods found Leo Lewis III at the back of the end zone on a third-and-goal from the eight yard line with 12 seconds left to pull Missouri to 21-20.  There were no overtimes in those days and the Tigers weren’t interested in a tie.

Woods missed on a pass to the win to Curtis Brown.  But Ohio State was flagged for holding, giving Missouri a second chance from the 1½ yard line.  Woods called his own number, off tackle, was hit but dived into the end zone.  Missouri 22 Ohio State 21.

Want to see it?  (3) MU v. Ohio State 1976-3 – YouTube

Onofrio was fired the next year and is remembered for his teams sometimes stunning victories during a coaching career that finished 38-41.

Woods, who engineered the big upsets that year, is the only quarterback in Mizzou history with two wins over top-three opponents.  He and Phil Bradley are the only two Tiger signal-callers with two wins over top-five opponents. He played parts of four seasons in the NFL with the Chiefs, Broncos, Bengals, and Dolphins. He became a lawyer and now is a commercial litigator for Harr & Woods law firm in St. Louis. He was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 2018.

Curtis Brown, who led the team in rushing that year and was a key figure in the win over Southern Cal, played for six years with the Buffalo Bills and finished his career with the Houston Oilers. He is one of almost 350 NFL players to be diagnosed with dementia caused by repeated hits to the head. He died in 2015.

Leo Lewis III, who caught that last touchdown pass remains the only player in Tiger history to lead the team in punt returns for four straight years. He still holds the team record for punt returns in one game (7) and added two more kick returns for a total of nine, also a team record. He played for the Minnesota Vikings for eleven years and was the team’s director of player development for 14 more years. He went on to get a master’s degree from Tennessee and a doctorate from the University of Minnesota. He now runs a sports foundation.  His father, Leo Sr., was known in his time as the “Lincoln Locomotive” while playing at Lincoln University, where he rushed for 4,457 yards and twice was an All-American. He is in the College Football Hall of Fame. Although drafted by the Baltimore Colts in 1955, he opted to play for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the Canadian Football League, an eleven year career that included four Grey Cup Championships (under Bud Grant, who later coached the Minnesota Vikings) and 32 years of coaching and teaching. He died in 2013.  He and his son are the only father-son combination in the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame, both admitted in 2019.

(MIZZHONORS)—The Associated Press has named eight Tigers to its All-SEC team. Only Georgia and Alabama have more.

And Coach Drinkwitz is the Coach of the year, the first Missouri coach named by the AP as SEC Coach of the Year.  Gary Pinkel was voted the honor by his fellow coaches in 2013 but the AP bypassed him.

Cody Schrader is one of only four players named unanimously to the first team. Other Tigers on the firt team offense is Luther Burden Iii, the first 1,000 yard Tiger receiver since J’Mon Moore six years ago. Burden’s 1,197 yards is ten in thenation.  Left tackle Javon Foster also is on the first team with him. Defensive end Darius Robinson, who led the team with 7.5 sacks and 12 tackles for a loss and a forced fumble, is first team on defense as is Kris Abrams-Draine, who had four interceptions and 12 passes defended.

On the second team is Cam’Ron Johnson, the team’s right guard, joined by receiver Theo Wease Jr.

The last all-conference player is place-kicker Harrison Mevis, who is on the second team, beaten out by Alabama’s Will Reichard despite going 24-30 on field goals including the epic 61-yard walkoff kick against Kansas State and his game winner against Florida. He was 43-44 on PATs.

(SCHRADER)—Cody Schrader is the winner of the Burlsworth Trophy, awarded last night to the outstanding player who started his career as a walk-on. The trophy presentation was made at the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. The trophy honors the memory of Brandon Burlsworth, a walk-on with the Arkansas Razorbacks who became an All=American. He was drafted in the third round of the 1999 NFL Draft by the Indianapolis Colts but was killed in a car crash eleven days later.

The other two finalists were James Madison defensive tackle James Carpenter and Oklahoma wide receiver Drake Stoops.  In concluding his acceptance remarks, Schrader said:

My journey from high school to Truman State Division II to the University of Missouri wasn’t easy. It definitely had a lot of lonely nights. A lot of just the unknown of what was going to happen with my career. But the only thing I stayed true to was the work. The only thing that follows work is results and I truly believe that anything you want in this life you can achieve, it just takes dedication, discipline and you just have to love this game. I just know from meeting James and Drake that you guys truly love this game and embody what Brandon and this foundation mean. No matter the outcome tonight, we’ve already won just because nobody believed we’d be here. So I appreciate getting to know you guys.

My biggest thing that I hope to inspire in youth and kids who look at our stories, is the relentless consistency that it takes to be successful: never let nobody tell you no. I think Brandon was the epitome of that. He would never take no for an answer no matter the case was. Just watching the movie (Greater) and then getting to experience his family, you really got to know who he was as a person and what weight this trophy holds. This is something I’m eternally grateful for and I’m just really thankful for this event and all the support. M-I-Z.

The four finalists for the Heisman Trophy were announced last night. Schrader is not one of them.

(MIZZOU BASKETBALL)—-Missouri’s basketball team showed composure and control in handing Wichita State its first road loss of the year, 82-72.  The Tigers started the game on a 10-0 run and every time the Shockers pulled close, Missouri pulled away. Missouri’s physical game led to 25 trips to the free throw line and 23 points. They also scored 20 points off of 18 Wichita State turnovers.

A major test awaits next Saturday when the Tigers play Kansas, with Seton Hall, Illinois and Central Arkansas ahead before the end of the year and the start of conference play.  (ZOU)

(CHIEFS)—The Chiefs offense returned to form Sunday night against the Green Bay Packers after a convincing win against the Raiders.  They were held to two field goals in the first half again, and their rally attempts fizzled in the second half.  The defense, the strong point for the Chiefs all year, couldn’t stop the resurgent Packers in a 27-19 loss.

Chiefs fans might think their team was robbed by two terrible calls by the zebras.  But the Chiefs from Andy Reid on down admit the team lost the game on plenty of other well-called plays.  In the locker room afterward, Travis Kelce was asked, “What went wrong?”  He diplomatically, and correctly, answered, “That’s a good football team and they executed better than us and that’s the bottom line…I ain’t gonna blame anybody but ourselves.”

The Chiefs are now fourth in the AFC playoff standings and many fans are doubting they will play football in February.

(BATTLEHAWKS)—The XFL and the United States Football league have merged and the St. Louis Battlehawks are one of the surviving eight teams in the new league. They’ll start play in March.

Each league had eight teams and will keep four from each league. The Battlehawks will be joined by the Arlington Renegades, DC Defenders, and the San Antonio Brahmas.  The Seattle Sea Dragons, Vegas Vipers, Houston Roughnecks and Orlando Guardians will go away.  The USFL teams surviving are the Birmingham Stallions, Houston Gamblers, Memphis Showboats, and Michgan Panthers. Not making the cut are the Pittsburgh Maulers, New Orleans Breakers, Philadelphia Stars and the New Jersey Generals.

St. Louis is the XFL’s best market.

The Battlehawks bring several strengths to the league. They play home games in the domed stadium originally built for the Rams.  The XFL had rented the stadium for $800,000 a year. In exchange the league gets all ticket sales income while the city convention and visitors bureau gets all concession and parkig revenue. Earlier this year the XFL signed a here year lease with similar terms. Some stadium space was not opened but city officials decided to open other areas because of two sellouts.  The home opener last March 11 drew 38,310 fans, the largest crowd for and XFL game, including games in the earlier iteration of the league dating to 2001. The Battlehawks have played seven games at home and all of them rank in the top eight attendance in XFL history, with the Battlehawks holding the top six crowds.

(CARDINALS/ROYALS)—Baseball’s winter meetings are underway in Nashville at press time. Neither the Cardinals nor the Royals has made any waves.

Values 

It’s easy to get irritated by somebody who claims their values are somehow universal and by reference also must be my values if I am to be a good American or a good Christian, or a good something that only they can judge.

This has been going on for a long time in our political system.  The most prominent promoters of this presumption today are those labeled White Christian Nationalists.  They seem to have superseded so-called Evangelicals in their oppressive assumptions that they are righteously entitled to set a moral tone for me and for my nation.  Some folks combine the two into Evangelical White Christian Nationalists.

This issue has come up in recent days with a letter that Rep. Chris Dinkins, the Majority (Republican) Caucus Chair in the Missouri House, sent to Governor Parson that begins “I am writing to bring your attention to a matter of great concern regarding the resettlement of refugees from Gaza in our state. As a dedicated representative of the people of Missouri, I believe it is crucial to take a proactive stance on this issue and safeguard the well-being and safety of our citizens.”

She wants to keep people out “whose beliefs systems are rooted in anti-American and anti-Israel sentiments.”

She continued later, “Our state has a responsibility to protect its citizens and uphold the values that define us as Americans.”

Just what values is she talking about? “We cannot afford to compromise the safety and security of Missourians by allowing the potential entry of individuals who may harbor hostility towards our nation and its allies,” she says.

Potential entry?  Individuals who may harbor hostilities?  (Actually, the correct word to use in this circumstance is “might.”  As used to teach my reporters, might is prospective; may is permissive.  You might hit me in the nose but you may not.)

The kind of rhetoric in her letter is abhorrent.  We already have a gutful of this kind of conspiracy garbage from a presidential candidate who wants us to think all of those crossing our southern border are fentanyl-carrying killers, thieves, and rapists.

The timing of her letter is atrocious, coming about the same time three Palestinian students were shot while walking down the street near the University of Vermont in Burlington.  Police say two of them are United States citizens and the third is a legal resident of the United States. They were speaking Arabic and two of them were wearing keffiyehs, a headdress worn by Palestinians.

We will learn, eventually, if their shooter thought he should take action against “individuals who may harbor hostility toward our nation.”

What are our national values today? Are they such that we should remove the Statue of Liberty and Emma Lazurus’ invitation to send us the tired and the poor, the wretched refuse of other lands, those yearning to breathe free, the homeless and the tempest-tossed?

Many of those we idealistically have said are welcome are now stereotyped by politicians who seek success by fueling distrust and hate toward people who are not that much different from our own ancestors just a few generations ago.

Rep. Dinkins has ambitions for higher political office in 2024.  Perhaps she should publish a supplement to the letter she released online that outlines in specific and detailed form what she thinks are my values as an American citizen—and what your values have to be to be a good American citizen.

Governor Parson is on the wrong side of Dinkins’ values on this issue, and so, I hope, are most Missourians and Americans.  He wasted no time in throwing her proposal in the ash can, telling reporters, “You don’t have the authority to do that to start off with. I mean, anybody’s been around a little bit, the federal government can place refugees anywhere they want to without asking your permission. First of all, there’s this big difference between Palestinian people, and the people of Hamas. Hamas are terrorist groups that attack our country and hate who we are. We don’t want them here. But I don’t think you want to take everybody that’s from Palestine to make them as bad people. I don’t know that.”

There’s another prominent figure whose recent remarks put people like Dinkins in their places. Bill Bradley, the Crystal City native whose basketball exploits in high school and college led to a ten-year career in the NBA (that was delayed by more two years while he was a Rhodes Scholar and then in the Air Force Reserve) and three-terms as a U. S. Senator from New Jersey.

Our friend, Tony Messenger, wrote in his November 23 Post-Dispatch column about remarks Bradley gave during the Musial Awards event in St. Louis a few days earlier when Bradley received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the organization that promotes humanity and sportsmanship—

“Never look down on people you don’t understand.”

Tony noted the comment came four days after the St. Charles County Council considered a resolution opposing the International Institute’s program to make the St. Louis metro area a destination for certain Hispanic immigrants. The council did not take action.

The St. Louis metro area has been a haven for many immigrants including large numbers of Germans, Italians, and Irish people in the 19th Century whose cultures still thrive in that city—te German culture spreading well into the heart of the state. More recently, St. Louis has opened its arms to those fleeing from Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Ukraine in addition to many coming from Latin America.

Kansas City also has been a magnet for immigrants. In fact, it has the Greater Kansas City Hispanic Chamber of Commerce which works in eight counties on both sides of the state line and bills itself as “the birthplace of the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (in) Washington, D.C.”

The immigration story of the St. Louis area and all of Missouri started even earlier than the 19th century. When Spain controlled Missouri, it welcomed French Canadian immigrants who were central to the defeat of an invading British force that convinced Native Americans it was in their best interests to try to capture St. Louis in 1780.  French citizens in Spanish St. Louis defeated that force in what is the westernmost battle of the American Revolution.

The Spanish government in control of what is now Missouri also invited another group to migrate here.

Americans.

George Morgan, a Philadelphia merchant and entrepreneur, was invited by the Spanish Crown in 1788 to create a colony on the west bank of the Mississippi River.  A couple of years later he created the town of New Madrid.

Some of the early American immigrants who came here were illegal aliens: Protestants, practicing a faith that was once illegal in Catholic Spanish Missouri.  Protestant ministers from the Illinois country used to cross the Mississippi under cover of night and provide services in darkened Missouri homes.

Tony concluded is column, “It is heartbreaking that officials would now look down on such immigrants — the latest chapter in another generation of an American journey. Once a year, the Musial Awards help remind us that it is our shared humanity that makes us great. This year, a big man from a small town in Missouri gave us the words that should echo in our heads, as we move from one political crisis to another. The solution that escapes us is more often than not to treat those with whom we disagree with respect and understanding.”

I want to add this from Vine DeLoria who wrote the best-seller decades ago, Custer Died for Your Sins: an Indian Manifesto:

“The understanding of the racial question does not ulti­mately involve understanding by either blacks or Indians. It in­volves the white man himself. He must examine his past. He must face the problems he has created within himself and within others. The white man must no longer project his fears and in­ securities onto other groups, races, and countries. Before the white man can relate to others he must forego the pleasure of denying them. The white man must learn to stop viewing history as a plot against himself.”

We wonder what Chris Dinkins would say to Bill Bradley.

Bill Bradley was and All-American as a college basketball player.  His example as an All-American in deed as well as in word is the value worth having. It is those who follow the Dinkins/MAGA ideal who are the aliens to the American spirit.

 

The Shrinking Book of Numbers

Two things of note happened in our household during Thanksgiving week.  On the day itself, Nancy and I celebrated our wedding anniversary.

Only 56 of them.

The national record for longest marriage is that of Herbert Fisher Sr. and Zelmyra George Fisher, who made it to 86 years, 290 days before Herbert died on February 27, 2011.  Here’s the happy couple on their wedding day:

We are within 30 years and change of setting a new United States record.

The all-time record is held by Karam and Kartari Chand, who were married in India but lived in England when Karam ended 90 years, 291 days of married life by dying on September 30, 2016.  He was 110.

So we’re 34 years and change from setting a new world’s record.

We haven’t discussed it but I’m in if she is.

Incidentally, the longest current marriage is between Evert Stolpe and Annni Lepisto Stolpe, who are still hitched in Narpes, Ostrobothnia, Finland after (as of Thanksgiving Day in the USA) 82 years, 244 days.

Studies show (What The Average Marriage Length In US Says About Your Divorce Risk (fatherly.com) that the highest risk of divorce happens within the first two years of marriage, before there are children to complicate things. The possibilities flare up between years 5-8, the infamous “Seven Year Itch” period. But years 15-20 are average but growing because in this time of late marriages, people reach their 50s, the kids are gone, and who wants to stick around with this person through their declining years when there’s fun to be had?  “Gray Divorce” is increasing.

Apparently, we missed our chances.  Now, we’re stuck with each other, which is fortunately very good for both of us.

When I sent my parents a letter informing them of the upcoming nuptials in 1967, my father wrote back to note of congratulations and hope that we would be as happy as my parents had been.  “We never thought about divorce,” he wrote.  “Murder, sometimes, but never divorce.”

Or something like that.

Bowling Green University’s National Center for Family and Marriage Research published a study that only seven percent of American marriages make it to 50 years or more.

Hooray for Us!!!

The second thing that happened during Thanksgiving week was the arrival of the telephone book.

The 1967 phone book was the first one in Jefferson City to have my name in it.  Right there, Priddy, Bob  1519 E. Miller Street.  It was a third floor attic turned into an apartment reached by a laong narrow flight of stairs. The kitchen was the biggest room in the place.  I lived there for about three months before we moved in together after returning from our Thanksgiving Holiday honeymoon in St. Louis (how old-fashioned that must seem in today’s relationships).

The house number later was changed when the city decided to renumber houses so that there was some logic to addresses (so first responders had a better idea where the fire was or the heart attack or the overexuberant family disagreement).

We later moved to an apartment closer to my work, which was a radio station in a building that no longer exists on Capitol Avenue (the radio station doesn’t exist in Jefferson City, either—it’s one of several radio formats crammed into a single building in Columbia).  Then to a rented house where our Ericofon sat on the floor between the bedroom and the living room.

(Have you seen the video of two 17-year olds trying to figure out how a dial phone works?  Check it out at (107) Hilarious video show 17 year old teenagers baffled by rotary phone – YouTube or another example at (107) Rotary Phone Challenge for Students in 2022 – YouTube).   I’d hate to see them figure out an Ericofon, which was the first phone Nancy and I had as a married couple.

For any younger readers: the dial was on the bottom and there was a button that was pressed when the phone was put down that disconnected the call.

Look back at that 1967 phone book’s cover showing Capital City Telephone Company serving Jefferson City. But there also was Midstate New Bloomfield, Midstate Centertown, Mistate Taos, Midstate Brazito, Midstate Eugene and dial St. Thommas. It had 77 pages of residential numbers with “favored businesses”—meaning they paid more—set in bolfface and 128 Yellow Pages advertising businesses by category.

(United Telephone moved in in the early 70s.  One day I spied a company pickup truck with the first name of the company misspelled, “Untied,” on one of its doors.  I quickly called the newspaper, which ran an embarrassing picture on the front page the next day.)

The phone book for 2020-2021 was 234 Yellow Pages and 70 White Pages. It was small and obviously a lot thinner than that historic 1967 book.  But it was about half the size, top to bottom and side to side—about the dimensions of what is known in the book biz as a “trade paperback” edition—about the size of my Across Our Wide Missouri books. But way thinner.

The new pre-Thanksgiving book had 16 pages of “featured businesses.”  It has 118 Yellow Pages.  And it has only twelve white pages—people who still have land lines.

Nancy found the names of a couple of friends on those pages. I have learned of a couple of other wons.  I felt a strong urge to call them, land line to land line, to celebrate our distinctions.  But I was interrupted by dinner.

Here’s the cover of the new one.

Look at the list of towns. It takes 21 of them to generate just twelve white pages.  I’m not sure how important it is for somebody from Tipoton, 36 miles to the west on Highway 50, to have my home number in Jefferson City but what few people there have phones that don’t fit in their pockets have it now.  Same goes for people in Syracuse, 41 miles away from our house, or Otterville (where the James gang pulled one of its last train robberies), 49 miles away, or Smithton, named for railroad promoter George R. Smith who was so disappointed the town didn’t want a railroad that he moved a few miles farther west and founded another town that would be more welcoming—naming it for his daughter Sarah whose nickname was “Sed” and therefore the town became Sedalia.

Well, we got a little carried away there. But the phone book lets a person with a landline 54 miles west of my landline to call me.  The number is small enough we might invite everyone to a picnic at the Memorial Park Pavilion. We will provide a small Waldorf Salad, without marshmallows because I can’t eat them anymore.

Phone books are one of many commonplace things that remind us of the changes in our world over time.

Fifty-six years of marriage and phone books.  And phones.  We now have three numbers, two of which reside in our pockets unless we’ve forgotten where we put them.

Has anybody ever kept track of how many hours in a year we spend looking for our cell phones?

Anyway—

56 years of family and phones.  And we’re in no mood to hang up.

-0-

 

 

Sports:  Exclamation Point to a Season; Basketball Nervousness; Chiefs/ Raiders; Cardinals Red Goes Gray

By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(MIZ-WOW)—The team that many experts thought would finish sixth in its SEC Division has made believers out of many this year, and now just Tiger fans.  Finishing the season with the highest-scoring game of the year and a 10-2 record that the pre-season pundits had dismissed as an impossibility and national television exposure that grew as the season went along opens a lot of recruiting foors and transfer portals, laying the groundwork for a 2024 season with high expectations.

The tub-thumping has begun for Heisman Trophy candidacy for Cody Schrader, a Cinderfella story for the Tigers, one of the best feel-good stories in decades at Mizzou.

Next weekend, we’ll find out which major bowl game will feature one of the surprise teams of this year’s NCAA football season.

(MIZZ BASETBALL)—The Tigers are at Pittsburgh tonight.  Coach Dennis Gates continues to experiment with different rotations, hoping one of them will be the most reliable five to be on the port.

(CHIEFS)—Oh, no, here we go again…..

Or so we thought through the first quarter of Sunday’s game between the Chiefs and the Oakland/ Los Angeles/Oakland/Las Vegas Raiders.  Then Kanss City started to put things together in the second quarter and wiped out the 14-0 Raider start and outscored them 31-3 to the end.

Blockers blocked, runners ran, only one pass was dropped.  31-17.  Chiefs head to Lambeau Field in Green Bay Sunday night.  The Packers beat the Lions 29=22 last weekend.

(CARDINALS)—Sonny Gray signed with the Cardinals for three years and $75 million yesterday. He’s another guy who is approaching senior status in the game, joining the two guys signed last week, Kyle Gibson and Lance Lynn, both of whom are 36.  Gray is 34.

He was the runnerup to Gerritt Cole of the Yankees in this year’s Cy Young balloting. He was only 8-8 last year but he had a 2.79 ERA in 184 innings with the Twins. But he also had a strikeout to walk ratio of 183-55 a 1.15 WHIP through his 32 starts. Opposing batters hit only .226 against him and hit only 0.4 home runs per nine inning game His record in recent years shows he is not a dominant pitcher but he is an innings-chewer.

The Cardinals will have one of the oldest pitching staffs in baseball next year.  These three are joined by Steven Matz, 32,  and Miles Mikolas, 35 in a possible five-man rotation.  Signing the three new guys to short-term deals limits exposure to poor results as age settles in on all five.

While we wait to see if John Mozeliak will pull any more, or any younger, rabbits out of the hat,  let’s root for Left Fielder Matt Holliday who is making his first appearance on the Hall of Fame ballot this year.  He has more than 2,000 hits, 316 home runs, more than 12-hundred RBIs and a career .299 batting average. He spent six years with the Rockies and eight with the Cardinals where he hit almost half of his homers and batted .293. He won the Silver Slugger Award four times, played in seven all-star games and had a career Wins-Above-Replacement of 44.5.

We’ll get our first PR jolt of Cardinals red with the annual Cardinal Caravan visits to several cities in January.  There is more than one group of players that go out and meet the fans on these caravans.  The schedule has the players in Hannibal and Jefferson City and Springfield on January 12, in Columbia, Rolla, and Joplin on the 13th, and Cape Girardeau on the 15th.

(ROYALS)—The Royals have been pretty quiet in the first month of the post-season. They did pull off a trade with the Braves for a couple of pitchers who seem to be of limited value in 2024. Maybe in ’25, though.

The Royals picked up reliever Nick Anderson in a straight-cash deal.  He returned last season afer missing all of 2022 after elbow surgery.  He had 36 strikeouts and only nine walks in the 35 1/3 innings that he pitch before he was shut down for a shoulder strain in the last have of the season.  He was sent out on rehab at the end of the season.

The Royals also added starter Kyle Wright but he is not likely to pitch next year. He has undergone surgery on his right shoulder. The Royals hope he can be restored to his 2022 health when he won 21 games, which led the major leagues, and a 3.19 ERA.  He’s 28.  He comes to Kansas City in a trade for Jackson Kowar, who never rounded into the talent the Royals hoped for when they made him the number five overall draft pick.

BINGEING

We’ll be assessing the impact of the pandemic on our lifestyles for many years.  Two of the most obvious changes involve working from home and how we were, and are, entertained.

This household involves retired people so we are always “working” from home. Nancy’s “work” was carefully scheduling well-planned trips to the grocery store, usually as I recall early on Tuesday mornings because the shelves were re-stocked overnight and it was important to get first shot at the necessities—-which sometimes were not on the strictly grocery shelves.

Can’t do without toilet paper, you know.  We long ago threw away our old catalogs from Sears, Penney’s and Montgomery Ward (did you know that the company name was actually the middle and last names of the founder, Aaron Montgomery Ward?) and we didn’t save the cobs from the sweet corn we enjoyed in the summer months.  There hadn’t been a Montgomery Ward catalog since 1985 so that supply would have been used up or discarded years before the pandemic.

Excuse the wandering.  One does that in old age.

Anyway, we—as many of you—became binge-watchers.  Our Roku device allowed us to watch all of the episodes of a series in a string of evenings.  No more waiting for next week’s episode of Downton Abbey or Doc Martin or Gray’s Anatomy or Foyle’s War.

Everybody we know thinks Yellowstone is great. We’ve tried about three times and can’t get into it.  Longmire, however, now that’s a good show!

The Crown has been good.  Outlander is especially good for one member of the house who has read books.  Finding Your Roots is interesting. And we enjoyed all of the episodes of Boston Legal.

Earlier this year we finally got up to date with Grey’s Anatomy.  Then the writers and actors went on strike and we haven’t been able to learn if Meredith Grey will find love in Boston and whether Owen Hunt finds happiness with anybody.

The pandemic wasn’t good for the cable television industry because it increased awareness by consumers that we don’t need to keep making increasingly higher monthly rates for dozens of shopping and God channels we have no interest in watching.

Thirty years ago, or so, the Missourinet gave me the summer off to develop a Missouri cable TV channel that would have been a cross between C-SPAN, CNN, and ESPN.  The idea was to let Missourians watch the legislature work, develop Missouri-interest programs (we had ideas for telecasting from various summer festivals, featuring concerts here and there, even do documentaries on various topics), pick up evening newscasts from the TV markets and broadcast them throughout the night, and cover state high school sports playoffs and re-play Missouri football games the next day—stuff like that.

When we pitched the idea to the Missouri Cable Television Association—whose executive director supported our idea—and said we could do it for the cost of one big bag of M&Ms with peanuts per customer per month, the operators of the cable systems looked at us as if we were telephone poles.

I went to the National Cable Television Association’s summer convention to learn more about the industry and my most vivid recollection is the association president talking about the coming of ala carte viewing and how the industry needed to be prepared for the day.

Well, it’s here.

“Cutting the cord,” gained momentum during the pandemic as more and more people discovered the joys of binge-watching. And while it’s great for you and me, it’s increasingly problematic for the people who provide us with that entertainment.

It used to be that we knew what shows were on what networks on which nights.  Today we don’t have the foggiest notion what’s on the regular networks other than Monday Night Football is still on Mondays and the late-night shows start at about 10:30 if we’re awake for them.  Oh, and Sixty Minutes is still on Sunday nights at a regular time unless football pushes it back.

And we still went to movie theatres.  And sat next to people, or in front of them or behnd them.

Nancy got irritated with me because I wouldn’t explain what was going on in some movies—The English Patient was especially puzzling.  I had seen it earlier when on a business trip to the nation’s capital so I knew the answer to all her questions was at the end.  But I didn’t want to explain anything because it would irritate people around us.

Been to a movie theatre lately.  Who’s there to irritate?

We, and probably most of you, don’t wait for weekly episodes of a lot of series TV.  We just wait for the producers to drop the entire season on one of our ROKU channels and we binge watch the whole season in a few nights.

And we really enjoy some of the short series programs that seem mostly to be on channels from the United Kingdom.  But more and more of the streaming channels are producing their own products.  “The Queen’s Gambit,” for example—a seven-episode series on Netflix in 2020 that became the channel’s top program in 63 countries, netted eleven Primetime Emmy Awards, one of which was the award for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series and marked the first time a show on a streaming service won that award.  It also racked up Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards.

Netflix became a change agent in all of our lives.  A recent New York Times article explained what happened.

But we’re tired of writing this entry so you’ll have to wait for the next one to see where we’re going.

Sorry, binge-blogging isn’t offered here.  At least, not today.

 

Sixty Years

I still find it awkward to tell people, “Fifty years ago…..” and then tell them what I remember from that time.

Sixty years ago today, I had been the producer of the noon news at KOMU-TV.  I was in graduate school at the University of Missouri and working as a graduate assistant instructor in the radio newscasting class which also involved being the assistant news director at KFRU Radio, anchoring some of the student-wrtiten newscasts on that station (this was before the Journalism School created KBIA where some students get their first taste of broadcast newswritig and anchoring), so I couldn’t anchor at Channel 8.  So I produced the noon newscast that reported President Kennedy had gone to Texas to assure Texans that he was not going to dump Lydon Johnson as his running mate in 1964.

We left the station at 12:30, about the time shots rang out at Dealy Plaza in Dallas.

When I walked through the front door of the rooming house at 508 S. Ninth Street (now one of at least three houses in which I lived that are now gone), one of the guys upstairs shouted down, “Is that Priddy?”

“Yeah.”

“You getter get up here! The President’s been shot!”

The people upstairs had been listening to KFRU and had heard ABC’s Don Gardiner break in with the first word of the shooting.   Most commemorations of the event today focus on Walter Cronkite and CBS-TV.  But it was Don Gardiner, normally the morning news voice on WABC in New York, who interrupting a middle of the road music show from WABC that was fed down the network between network news programs.

(105) JFK’S ASSASSINATION (ABC RADIO NETWORK) (NOVEMBER 22, 1963) – YouTube

Gardiner’s first bulletin about 12:33 p.m. CST came from United Press International correspondent Merriman Smith who was in the fifth car behind the presidential limousine as it moved from Dallas’ Love Field toward the Dallas Trade Mart, where Kennedy was to deliver a luncheon speech.

Nick George, who is announced early in the broadcast as the New York Editor for ABC, later became a teacher at the journalism school and was an influential figure in the development of some early Missourinet reporters.

As you will hear, events unfolded quickly and the reporters—mainly Smith and AP’s Jack Bell .

In 1963, reporting from remote sites was, to say the least by today’s standards, extremely primitive.

The White House press pool reporter’s car had a radiotelephone in it, the only mobile phone available to the 58 reporters in the pool. Pool reporters rotated from the back seat to the front and it ws Smith’s day in front.  Smith grabbed the radiotelephone and dictated a FLASH (the highest priority item to go out on the wire service) to Dallas UPI Bureau rookie Wilborn Hampton, who typed it into the distribution teletype machine, showed it to his editor, Jack Fallon, who shouted, “Send it!”

UPI sent it out at 12:34:

“DALLAS, NOV. 22 (UPI) – THREE SHOTS FIRED AT PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S MOTORCADE TODAY IN DOWNTOWN DALLAS.”

As the word went out and Gardiner started his broadcast, Smith was crouched in the front seat of the car while the AP’s bell was beating on his back and demanding, “Give me the goddamn phone!”  But Smith wouldn’t give it up and continued to give information to the bureau.  “On a story of this magnitude,” Smith later said, “I was not about to let it go until I new the office had it all.”

It took six minutes to get to Parkland Memorial Hospital. Smith gave the phone to Bell who called the Dallas AP burau—and couldn’t get through.  Smith ran up to the presidential limousine where he saw Texas Governor John Connally wounded. “I could not see the president’s wound. But I could see blood spattered around the interior of the rear seat and a dark stain spreading down the right side of the president’s dark gray suit.”

Smith turned to Clint Hill, the Secret Service officer who was in the followup far and ran to the presidential limousine, jumped on the back and shielded Mrs. Kennedy with his body as the car sped to thehospital, and asked, “How bad was he hit, Clint.”

“He’s dead, Smitty,” said Hill.  Smith dashed into the hospital, took a telephone from a room clerk and started dictating the information you will hear Gardiner pass along to listeners that day. Most of what you hear Gardiner reporting is based on Smith’s coverage.

UPI ran another FLASH at 1:35 that Kennedy had been declared dead.  AP was two minutes behind.

The event was an important one for radio and particularly for television.  For the first hours, the story belonged to radio.  Newspapers already had gone to press for their afternoon editions. Several put out bulleting editions.  But in the early going, the story belonged to radio.

We had no satellites to relay the story as it unfolded.  There were telephones and wire services and that was all there was. Television relied on film that had to be shot and developed, mostly black and white (because color television was just beginning) and often not even processed as positive images.  We would shoot silent negative film and the television control room could electronically reverse the polarity of the film and the viewers saw black and white pictures.

KFRU’s newsroom was in the Columbia Tribune building at 7th and Cherry Streets (it’s partly a candy store and partly a restaurant now) because the station was half-owned by the Waters family that also owned the Tribune.

The main studios were out on the eastern business loop.  In Studio A, the main studio, a slver pipe rose up behind the control board and curved toward the announcer’s position.  The pipe contained wiring that was hooked to a small red light.  That was the network bulletin light.  If the network wanted to break in on programming, that light would come on and the board operator was immediately to flip a switch that put the network on the air. When that light came on, the board operator that day, perhaps Bill Younger who worked the afternoon shift threw that switch.

I quickly walked the four or five blocks to the KFRU newsroom to huddle with Eric Engberg, the news director and fellow graduate student—-Eric later had a long career as a CBS correspondent—and we started planning local reaction stories to run when the network broke away from its coverage for its local stations to report.

I was sent out toget reaction from Senator George Parker and Representative Larry Woods.

ABC did not break until Monday morning before coming back to broadcst the funeral.

I got to know, to a lesser degree in most cases but in a greater degree in one case, some of thosewho brought us the news that day.  Nick George, for example, became an acquaintance.

The one I knew best is the one who broke the news of Kennedy’s death on national television.  Eddie Barker was the news director of KRLD-TV and radio in Dallas that day and was at the Trade Mart preparing a broadcast of the Predident’s speech.  Word already had reached him that something had happened in the motorcade and moments late the motorcade roared past the mart.  He went on the air, broadcasting what he could learn.  One of his friends who was at the mart was a doctor at Parkland who went to a telephone and called the hospital emergency room where an acquaintance told him the president was dead.

Eddie’s friend saw he was “struggling to maintain a coherent broadcast with the limited information availability,” walked over and whispered into his ear, “Eddie, he’s dead.”

“The words sent a cold chill running down my spine. I didn’t want to believe them, but the source was too good.  I then made a decision that has caused a lot of comment in the years since that strangely brilliant Friday afternoon.  I told an audience that included the whole CBS network that a reliable source had confirmed to me that President Kennedy was dead.  What I didn’t know was tht my shocking report caused a lot of anxiety at cBS News Headquarters in New York,” he recalled in his autobiography, Eddie Barker’s Notebook several years later,  Shortly after that, Walter Cronkite told viewers, “We just had a report from our correspondent, Dan Rther, in Dallas that he has confirmed tht President Kennedy is dead.”   There still had been no official confirmation.

At 1:37, our time, CBS news editor Ed Bliss—and other of those I came to know well—gave Cronkite the AP bulletin that Cronkite is often seen reading to his audience when the story is recounted on TV today.

Dan Rather is often credited with passing along the first word of Kennedy’s death. Rather, who was the new chief of the CBS New Orleans bureau, had been on the other side of the railroad overpass west of Dealy Plaza, closer to the Trade Mart, when the motorcade flew past  He ran to the Dallas CBS bureau and started working the phones to Parkland Hospital. The doctors all were busy but an operator told him two priests were in a hallway nearby.  One of them told Rather, “The President has been shot and he is dead.”  Rather, his The Camera Never Blinks, said he asked, “Are you certain of that” and the priest, who was there to perform the last rites, respoded, “Yes, unfortunately, I am.”

Rather called Barker and told him what he had.  Eddie had just talked to the doctor.  They did not know that three people at CBS, New York were listening on the broadcast loop that had been set up for Barker’s broadcast of the speech. Before Rather could tell those listening, Barker, in his broadcast that he thought was only local in Dallas, announced a source from Parkland had told him the president is dead. Rather chimed in, “Yes, yes, that’s what I hear, too.  That he’s dead.”

It wasn’t official.  But CBS radio and television went with it.

It was only a short time later, as you will hear if you listen to the ABC account, that it was reported a Dallas policeman, later identified as J.D. Tippett, had been shot and killed.  And within a few minutes, a suspect named Lee H. Oswald had been picked up.

The night police reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram had slept late that day but rushed to the office when he heard of the shooting.  The newspaper started printing special editions that were snapped up by the public as soon as they hit the streets. “Inside the city room it was bedlam,” recalled then-CBS correspondent Bob Shieffer in his book, This Just In.  When word came that Oswald was going to be held in the Fort Worth jail, Schiefer dashed there and was present when Oswald was brought in.

“Early in my police reporting days, I learned a truck from the cops. People will sometimes blurt out the truth if they are surprised by the question, so I jumped in front of the handcuffed suspect, who was between two detectives, and shouted, ‘You song of a bitch, why did you do it?’”

‘”Well, I didn’t,’ he said as the cops hustled him into the lockup.”

Schiefer was just settling in back at his newsroom desk when the phone rang. A woman asked him if someone could give her a ride to Dallas.  Schiefer responded heatedly, “Lady, this is not a taxi, and besides, the president has been shot.”

“I know.  They think my son is the one who shot him.”

“Where do you live?” Schieffer. “I’ll be right over to get you.”

On the way to Dallas, said Schieffer, she seemed more concerned about herself than about the death of a president. “She railed about how Oswald’s Russian-born wife would get sympathy while no one would ‘remember the mother.’”

When Oswald’s wife and mother heard the news, they had the presence of mind to get a lawyer, John Thorne. Police placed the family in protective custody.  Several weeks later, Eddie Barker called Thorne and expressed an interest in interviewing the Marina, how a widow. Thorne, who Barker did not know, surprised him by saying, “She watches you every evening nd I’ll be glad to ask her.”  The interview was arranged during which time she told him in her Russian-accented English, “I think Lee shoot Kenedy.”

Don Gardiner died in 1977.  Bob Schieffer, 86, is a podcaster— “Bob Schieffer’s ‘About the News’ with H. Andrew Schwartz.”—retired as the host of Face the Nation in 2015 and embarked on a singing career.  Eddie Barker died in 2012.

Dan Rather is 92 and still likes to stir the stuff.  He was fired from CBS in 2006 after some reports using unauthenticated documents to report on President George W. Bush’s Vietnam War-era service. After working on the cable channel now known as AXSTV for several years. Rather joined the Youngturks YouTube channel and five years ago began writing a news letter called “Steady,” on Substack.

All of those you hear in the ABC coverage are gone now.

Merriman Smith committed suicide in 1970.  Some say he was despondent about the death of his son in Vienam and perhaps suffered from PTSD from witnessing the Kennedy murder. Jack Bell died in 1975. Clint Hill is 91 and is the last surviving person to be in the presidential limousine that day.

At Jefferson City radio station KLIK that day, news director Jerry Bryan checked the UPI wire just after climbing the stairs to the third-floor newsroom in a pre-Civil War building on Capitol Avneue and checked the UPI machine before going home to lunch.

He picked up the telephone and called the on-air studio down on the second floor and started telling listeners what Merriman Smith was sending him. He continued to report via telephone until station engineer Ed Scarr put together enough cable to run a microphone from the studio up two flights of stairs and down the hall to the newsroom so Jerry had a microphone. The station operated only during daylight hours in those days and did not have a national network.  Bryan was the Don Gardiner of Jefferson City that day until the station signed off at 5:30. A reel-to-reel recorder in the newsroom was set up to turn on automatically during the “Missouri Party Line Show” when a phone call came in from a listener. Bryan’s call to the studio triggered the recorder, which had a large reel of tape on it.  His early coverage that day was recorded, by accident, and still exists.  Jerry resigned in 1967 and became the press secretary to Governor Hearnes and now lives in St. Louis.

His assistant news director, who had come to Jefferson City from KFRU at the start of 1967 replaced him.  His memories, which have been shared at length with you in this entry, remain vivid–as do the memories of many.

Walter Cronkite, who died in 2009, was a native of St. Joseph, Missouri. He attended the unveiling in 1999 of  bronze bust in the Hall of Famous Missourians. There were two speakers at that ceremony that evening—Governor Carnahan and me.

The next day, he was introduced in the House and in the Senate and made brief remarks.  The press corps in the senate was seated at a table on the floor to the right of the dais and when Walter walked in, we made him sit at the press table with us.

For the next fifteen years that I covered the Senate from that table, I always made sure that when a new reporter joined us at the table, I made sure that person knew that was Walter’s chair they were sitting in and they were expected to do him honor with their reporting.

Before Walter Cronkite became the icon he became at the CBS Evening News desk, he had a program on Sunday afternoons called You Are There, during which historical events were portrayed.  He always finished the broadcast by proclaiming,

“What sort of a day was it?  A day like all days, filled with those events that altered and illuminate our time. And you were there.”

November 22nd started “like all days.”  But it was filled with events that altered and illuminate our time.

And I was “there.”

Sports:  A Thrilling Win, A Bad News Upset, the Chiefs Turn Into the Bad-Hands People. And the Cardinals make a deal. 

By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(CHIEFS)—The Kansas City Chiefs dropped a big one to the Philadelphia Eagles at home last night.  Actually they dropped several, increasing their NFL-worst record for dropped passes to 26.

Dropped passes including two as the Chiefs tried to regain the lead with time running out, penalties and two turnovers in the red zone added up to a 21-17 loss that drops the Chiefs to 7-3 whle the Eagles go to 9-1.

Wide receiver Marquez Valdes-Scantling had a perfectly-thrown pass bounce off his hands for what would have been a go-ahead 51-yard touchdown play in the last Chiefs drive. Wide receiver Justin Watson let the ball through his hands on the Chiefs’ final play, a pass on fourth and 25 that would have been a first down.

The Chiefs were held scoreless in the second half after Philadelphia found a way to stop what had been an effective run game in the first two quarters and th Kansas City offense seemed out of kilter in the second half.

(CARDINALS)—-Sometimes, seasoned lumber is the best thing to use when you start a rebuilding process. The St. Louis Cardinals have picked up two pieces of it, one as a player and one as a coach.

The Cardinals’ first significant signing of the team’s rebuilding winter is former starter Lance Lynn who has signed a one-year deal, reportedly for a guaranteed $10 million or so with incentives to earn another three million.  The Cardinals have a $12 million option for 2025.

Lynn pitched his first six years with St. Louis, went 72-43 with a 3.78 ERA.  One important thing about him is that he ate innings, 977 of them in 161 starts. He’s 36 now. Last year he started 6-9 for the White Sox but finished the year 7-2 with the Dodgers and helped them advance in the playoffs.  He has a World Series ring from 2011. He left the team as a free agent after the 2016  season and signed a deal with the Twins. The Twins dealt him to the Yankees in mid-year and then to the Rangers for three years, then two years with the White Sox.  It was a disappointing experience for Lynn but he had one strong game when he tied a team record by striking out 16 Mariners and set a Manor League record for strikes by a pitcher who went into the game with an ERA of 6.00 or more.

In his career, he’s 136-95 with a 3.74 ERA.

ON THE BENCH:  The Cardinals have hired their third bench coach during the Marmol managing era.  The newest one is former Redbird utility man Daniel Descalso. He replaces Joe McEwing who is moving up to the front office as a special assistant to John Mozeliak, the President of Baseball Operations. The team says it expects to make more coaching additions as the winter wears on.

Descalso spent half of his ten-year MLB career with the Cardinals.He also was with the Cubs, Diamondbacks, and the Rockies.  He spent last year as a special assistant in baseball operations with Arizona.

Former outfielder Matt Holliday was hired as bench coach a year ago but he decided he wanted to spend more time with his family and resigned after a few weeks.

(MIZ)—Missouri’s win over Florida has allowed the Tigers to inch up one spot in the Associated Press and the Coaches Poll. They’re tenth in each. They hold at 9th in the playoff rankings.  They’re the nation’s top-ranked two-loss team.

It began to appear as the game went along that the team that had the ball last was likely to win the game.  The Missouri Tigers had the ball last, down a point with a minute and a half to go…and then inside of thirty seconds had it with fourth and 17

And they found a way to win.

The lead had changed for the eighth time in the game when a Florida field goal put the Gators on top 31-30.  But Florida left too much time on the clock for Missouri. Here’s how the last minute-36 seconds brought the ninth lead change of the game, and gave 28 seniors on the football team a beautiful memory to take away from their last game on Faurot Field.

1:36—Missouri 25 yard line after a touchback on the Florida kickoff.  Quarterback Brady Cook throws short to Cody Schrader for two yards.

1:20—pass incomplete. Third down and eight.  Cook to Mekhi Miller good for 13 yards.  First down.

1:00—False start, Missouri.  First and 15.  Cook finds no one open downfield, throws to Schrader, who loses two yards but gets out of bounds.

Second and 17 now.  Incomplete pass to Theo Wease Jr.

Third and 17, Cook tries to hit Mookie Cooper but leads Cooper too far and he can’t pull it in .

:38—Fourth and 17.  The game rides on this play, maybe the whole season if the Tigers want a 10-win year and a New Year’s Day bowl game.  Missouri calls its final timeout because of some confusion about what play to call. Cook drops deep, throw a bullet that Luther Burden III jumps to catch amid Florida defenders and bulls his way for 27 yards and puts Missouri in Harrison-Mevis long field goal range.  The ball is on the 40.  It would be about a 57-yard kick.

:21—Incomplete pass.  Missouri needs more yards to make the kick easier for Mevis.  Cook connects with Miller at the Florida 29. First down

:13—Cook spikes the ball to stop the clock. Second and ten.  Schrader fires to Cooper, who backs out of bounds at the 13-yard line.  First down but not enough time to get closer.  Mevis walks on to deliver his second walk-off field goal of the year.  Florida calls  time out, giving Mevis time to get nervous. Mevis won’t be iced. He’s just thinking about the mechanics of thekick, “keeping my head down and making good contact…I knew if I do those two things then good things are gonna happen,” he says afterward.

Head down, good contact and the ball arcs high and through the uprights with four seconds on the clock.

On-field celebrations are interrupted by officials who say the clock still shows a handful of seconds. Florida tries the hook-and- ladder return of the Missouri kickoff but the runner is finally on the ground with the clock at zero.

Cody Schrader racked up 127 yards rushing in the first half but the Gators found a way to stop him in the second two quarters. He had only 32 more yards but upped his conference-leading total to 1,272.  Cook finished 20 for 34 for 326 yards and no interceptions.  Burden  went over 100 yards receiving for the first time since week six with 158 and now has 1,142 yards for the year, third best in the SEC.  Cook has topped the 3,000 yard mark, and ranks third in the conference.

On the other side of the line, Darius Robinson’s eight sacks tie him for second in the league. Only Mississippi State’s Nathaniel Watson has more—10.   Kris Abrams-Draine’s four interceptions put him a tie for second, one behind Kentucky’s Maxwell Hairston.

Harrison Mevis and Texas A&M’s Randy Bond lead the conference with 22 field goals. Mevis is third in points scored, 103.  Eight of the top ten scorers in the conference are kickers.  Cody Schrader ranks 11th with 12 touchdowns and a two-point conversion.

Missouri is fourth in total offense at almost 450 yards a game, trailing LSU, Georgia, and Ole Miss.

One game left in the regular season. Friday afternoon, against Arkansas, which beat up on Florida International 40-22 Saturday to run the Razorback’s record to 4-7.  (ZOU)

(ROUNDBALL/MIZBOO)—This had to be a learning experience of some kind. It certainly was an embarrassment.

Just two days after a scintillating rush from far back against Minnesota to claim a 70-68 victory Friday night on the road, Missouri’s basketball team choked big time against Jackson State.  Missouri, which outscored Minnesota 31-9 in the last half of the second half at Minnesota to come from 20 down to a 70-68 win, was up 57-50 against a team that is opening its season with nine straight road games and five straight losses.

But the Jackson State Tigers outscored the Missouri Tigers 11-2 to take the lead at 61-59 with about seven minutes left.  The Tigers re-established a lead at 69-63 but let the game slip away, with Chase Adams hitting a jumper with three seconds left to give his team the win.

Missouri crippled itself ith 18 turnovers.  Eleven of them in the first half turned into 17 points and a final one trying to get off a shot under the basket just before the clock hit zero.

Jackson State Coach Mo Williams called it a “signature win” for his team: “To beat an SEC opponent on the road, not to mention this is 15 days straight on the road since Nov. 5. To have that performance from multiple guys, O’Neal going 8-for-11 from the field and Young bouncing back from a few tough games that he has had and to hit some big shots for us and to make his free throws and continue to be aggressive was huge for us… We beat SMU last year and they are considered more of a mid-major than a Power Five just because of the conference. You beat an SEC team, a Missouri team that is not going to be at the bottom but an upper-echelon team in the SEC.”

It was the eighth meeting between Missouri and Jackson State, the first in 22 years. It’s the second SWAC team Missouri has faced this year, the first being Arkansas-Pine Bluff in a season-opening 101-79.

Missouri meets South Carolina State tomorrow night. (ZOU, but not as enthusiastically)

Getting up to speed—

(FORMULA 1)—Max Verstappen, who earlier appeared unimpressed by the hoopla surrounding the Las Vegas Grand Prix enjoyed himself so much Saturday night that he said afterwards, “I’m already excited to come back here next year and hopefully try to do something similar.”

He won his 18th race of the year, the 33rd victory out of the 43 Formula 1 races.

(INDYCAR)—The kickoff of the 2024 big-time racing season in the United States will be January 25-26 on the high banks of Daytona. IndyCar has not raced there since 1958 but the track has become a showcase for the series’ talent in recent years and next year will continue that trend.

At least sixty cars will run in the Daytona 24 Hours. Three-time winner and six-time IndyCar champion Scott Dixon; last years winner of the Indianapolis 500 winner, Josef Newgarden; James Hinchcliffe, and the winner of the 2016 Centennial 500, Alexander Rossi are the healdiners from the series.

IndyCar owners will have entries: Roger Penske, Chip Ganassi, Michael Andretti, Bobby Rahal, and Jimmy Vasser.

Dixon will team with, and with four-time IndyCar series champion Sebasian Bourdais—who won the 24 hours in 2014—and Dutch driver Renger van der Zande.   Tom Blomqvist, an English driver who will join the Meyer Shank IndyCar team for 2024 will team with two other drivers on the Whelen Cadillac entry.

Newgarden will be one of four drivers in a Penske Porsche.  Colton Herta and 2009 F1 champion Jenson Button will be half the team in a car from Wayne Taylor Racing.  Marcus Ericsoon, who won the 2022 Indianapolis 500, will be one of four drivers in the other Acura run by WTR.

Rossi, Hinchcliffe and two other driers will be in a McLaren 720s. Kyle Kirkwood and former IndyCar driver Jack Hawksworth will be tw-thirds of a team entered by Pfaff Motorsports.

 

A Slightly Warped Sense of Humor

If reporters didn’t have a warped sense of humor, we probably couldn’t do what we do.  Humor, even dark humor, helps us deal with the often tragic, often weird, often absurd things and people we have to cover.

Perhaps that’s why I used to have a series of offbeat posters that I changed monthly at my desk in the Missourinet newsroom.

These posters, from a company called Despair, Inc., are the opposite of the supposedly inspirational posters found in many workplaces.  Beautiful pictures with some saccharine sentiment beneath them.

The folks at Despair turn that concept on its head.

I suppose this could be seen as a blatant plug for this company’s products.  Actually, it’s more of a paen to the creative folks who tell us that we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously.

We badly need those who try to tell us that.  We wonder if a sense of humor can be found in our today’s politics. Everybody is so blasted serious—-and for those of us who abhor all of the divisiveness in our system today—-Good Lord, we have reached the point of physical confrontations in the hallways of the House of Representatives in Washington to an instigated near-brawl in the Senate committee hearing—there is no shortage of seriousness. One of my reporters once told me, “They have it all backwards. They take themselves seriously, not their jobs.”

We need a Will Rogers IN the government, the guy who remarked:

“The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected.”

“This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when a baby gets hold of a hammer.”

“The more you read and observe about this politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other.”

“I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.”

“On account of us being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.”

“If all politicians fished instead of speaking publicly, we would have peace in the world.”

Or Mark Russell, who used to entertain us at the piano, on PBS from 1975 into 2004, whose death last March 30th escaped our notice.  He was 90.   He was introduced once by someone who noted, “Before there ws a John Stewart or a Stephen Colbert, there was Mark Russell.”

That was 2018, when Russell told the audience, “I’m not going to do any new political humor. Why?  Because there’s no material.”

He once asked about the Adopt A Highway program, “If a gay couple adopts a highway, will the highway grow up straight?”

The difference between Republicans and Democrats: “A Republican says,’We’re in a recovery.’  A Democrat says, ‘You shouldn’t enjoy it.’”

“A fool and his money is a lobbyist.”

Here’s a compilation of some of his performances:

Bing Videos

The story is told of the day in 1862 when Abraham Lincoln called a special meeting of his War Cabinet.  When the members filed into the room, they found Lincoln reading a humor book. He laughed as he shared a story from the book. When nobody else laughed, Lincoln read another story. Again, no response. Lincoln looked at his cabinet and asked, “Gentlemen, why don’t you laugh?  With the fearful strain that is upon me night and day, if I did not laugh, I should die, and you need this medicine as much as I do.”

And after that, he showed the cabinet the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.

And so we need people like those at Despair who turn our contemporary cares on their heads with their demotivational posters.

There’s one I wish was available in my working days.  It shows a stack of papers and the poster is entitled “Media.”  The text reads, “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies right to our faces.”

I think I’ll buy that one for the good folks in today’s Missourinet newsroom

Take the 25th 

Something to ponder.

If Donald Trump becomes an imprisoned felon after winning election, can he become President?

Yes, even if he is inaugurated in his cell. Then we have to wonder if he will pardon himself before beginning his inaugural address to the smallest audience in inauguration history.

Ah, but there could be mischief afoot.

Let’s see if we can start a conspiracy theory.  We are not attributing it to anyone famous.  We’ll leave that to others because a conspiracy theory won’t work unless somebody famous is leading an organization behind it.

We are going to try to stage this so that anyone trying to pin it on the Left will have to acknowledge that there are quislings* also involved on the Right.

The only qualifications to become President of the United States are in the U. S. Constitution—that the person be at least 35, a natural-born citizen and a resident hee for at least fourteen years .  There is no morals clause in the document.

Congress could pass a Constitutional Amendment banning a convicted felon but that will take a two-thirds vote of both chambers of the Congress  and ratification by three-fourths of the states, a tall order to get done before inauguration day, 2025.

The Fourteenth Amendment prohibits anyone who has engaged in rebellion or insurrection against the United States from holding any office. But none of the 91 charges against our former president specifically accuse him of “engaging in rebellion or insurrection.’ Whether a case for insurrection-by-association can be built is being tested in some courts now.

We’ve never had a president who has a felony conviction. They’ve done all kinds of other things (fought in wars, impregnated mistresses, hanged someone, etc.,) and suspected of others, but they’ve never been convicted of a felony.

Convicted felons can serve in Congress. State laws might keep them from voting for themselves back home or from having guns, but the Constitution has no ban on them serving, either.

And that brings to the 25th Amendment.

Suppose Trump is convicted. And suppose he is elected.

The New Congress will have convened a couple of weeks before inauguration day. Let’s assume the D’s have regained control.  Here is what the 25th Amendment says about a president’s inability to serve:

Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department [sic][note 2][7] or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

Now we get to the conspiracy theory:

The Vice-President is sworn in before the President is.  Always.  This person is the key to the entire drama. This person is in cahoots with those who want the former president to keep putting a golf ball into a plastic cup on the other end of his cell.

Look at the first section of the amendment which says that the VP and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments (the cabinet) or of such other body as Congress by law may provide transmit to the leaders of the Senate and the House a written declaration that the President can’t do his job…..

Immediately upon the imprisoned President finishing his oath, a committee created by a Congress controlled by the other party submits a declaration against the President before he can sign his own pardon. The VP takes over and the inaugurated president remains in his cell.

Now, the next section comes to the fore.  The imprisoned President immediately files a letter that declares “no inability exists” and, therefore, he shall resume the duties of the office UNLESS the VP and a majority of the cabinet OR that special committee that wrote the original declaration maintains the President still cannot perform his duties from a prison cell. The Congress by a two-thirds vote can declare the president, indeed, still can’t perform his duties and the Veep will remain in charge and the replaced president remains in his cell.

This is, of course, only a layman’s reading of the amendment and it is likely there are first-year law students who could demolish this idea.

But look, this IS the age of conspiracy theories.  I smell a television mini-series opportunity here.

The weakness in this idea is that Trump will pick a running mate who would throw him under the bus as he threw Mike Pence under the bus, and that voters will turn both houses of the Congress decidedly blue and the D’s will successfully connive with the R Veep to pull this off.

So it might not be practical in the real world.

But I still maintain it might make a riveting TV miniseries.  There would have to be a role for Kevin Kline and another for Kiefer Sutherland and one for Martin Sheen  and others for Tea Leone. Michael Douglas, and Anette Benning.

And what would we call it?

Go back to the top of this column.

*From time to time we try to throw in a word or phrase that we can use to teach a little lesson in language and in history.  Vidkun Quisling, a World War II leader of Norway who was a Nazi collaborator and who tried unsuccessfully to take over the government and end resistance to the invading Nazi Army. He formed a second, puppet government supported by the Nazis, and was involved in the shipment of Norwegian Jews to concentration camps in occupied Poland.  He later was convicted of high treason, among other crimes, and was executed by firing squad in October, 1945.

His name is considered a synonym for “traitor.”

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