Author Archives: bpriddy

Sometimes you miss a turn

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—and you wind up in part of a long-ago Missouri political embarrassment.

I was headed back to my Illinois home town of Sullivan for a brief visit a few weeks ago when I missed the entrance to I-72 from Highway 54 and wound up in Griggsville, Illinois, a small town of about fifteen-hundred people that fifty years ago, or so, was linked to Jefferson City because of an event that some people in Griggsville and elsewhere thought was a major scandal.

Whatever you want to call it, the incident made national headlines—even in the New York Times. The incident/scandal came to mind as I saw the big sign painted on the wall of a downtown Griggsville tavern, just around the corner from city hall. The incident was known in Jefferson City—and Griggsville— as the Great Purple Martin Massacre. Griggsville had started calling itself the “Purple Martin Capital of the Nation” just two years earlier. At the time it was the home of Trio Manufacturing Co, the nation’s leading producer of Purple Martin bird houses.

This is the story, then, of how a little Illinois town and Missouri’s capital city suddenly had a lot in common.

It was the summer of 1967, a usual hot and muggy Monday night in the heart of downtown Jefferson City when five men armed with shotguns invaded the grounds of the Executive Mansion, ready to kill. It was August 21, fifty-two years ago today.

Governor Hearnes had been bothered for a month or more by smelly, noisy, roosting birds in the trees around the mansion, His spokesman told New York Times reporter Douglas Kneeland (whose career later included coverage of somewhat larger stories such as Charles Manson’s murders, Patty Hearst’s kidnapping, the Kent State shootings, Richard Nixon’s “Saturday night massacre,” the firing of special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox, and four presidential campaigns), that Hearnes “said to a sergeant in the State Highway Patrol who was on duty at the mansion on Monday, ‘Let’s try to do something about these birds.’”

The sergeant apparently took that to mean the governor had ordered a “hit” on the thousands of noisy starlings, maybe as many as ten-thousand, around the old white-painted mansion (Betty Hearnes later led the effort to wash off decades of paint so the beautiful brick could be seen). The word was passed along to Stan Diemler, the assistant to the director of the Department of Planning and Construction, who recruited two other employees, Roy Renn and Earl Campbell. They invited two other state workers, Ed Plogsted and Larry Jarrett to go starling hunting. This wasn’t the first time shotguns had been used to encourage starlings to find other roosting places. Diemler had consulted with the Conservation Commission on previous occasions and had been encouraged to poison the birds.

“Last time we tried poisoning them we didn’t kill any birds and just killed six pet squirrels,” he said later.

The shooting started about 9 p.m. Street lights provided limited visibility of the clusters of birds on the limbs above the men. About one-hundred shots were fired into the trees and about 2,000 birds dropped to the ground. But, said the spokesman, “In the course of the shooting, a little old lady called a state biologist who was a neighbor of hers and said someone was shooting those lovely birds.” The biologist showed up, got the killers to stop shooting, and started looking at the carcasses.

Not a single starling was found. The birds were Purple Martins, most of which were hauled away to be cremated. But some were turned over to the Missouri Department of Conservation, which confirmed that the five men had murdered birds protected by state and federal law and international compacts.

“It’s a sad story. I just wish to hell we could redo the whole thing,” the spokesman told Kneeland. “We made a mistake and we’re sorry. The Governor regrets this thing more than anyone else at the present time. He never would have condoned the shooting of Purple Martins. Nobody is his right mind would, particularly since we had a wet spring and there are a lot of mosquitoes around here.

You know, this has been done for several years previous to this. It has been S.O.P., standard operating procedure. Now the question has arisen in our minds as to whether we have been killing starlings all these years or Purple Martins.”

National umbrage made itself felt almost immediately. The National Audubon Society Executive Director Charlie Callison, a former director of the Conservation Federation of Missouri, admitted the birds do migrate in large flocks about that time of year. But, “If their droppings are offensive to anyone, all they have to do is call upon the local fire department to chase them out of the local trees with water from a hose line.”

Truth to tell, Purple Martins and Starlings can be easily confused, particularly in the dark, especially by amateur bird observers (as opposed to the more serious bird-watchers). Purple Martin Place, an internet site that advocates for the Martins, says they’re sometimes confused with Tree and Barn Swallows and European Starlings.

The European Starlings are darkly colored with some feathers of iridescent green or purple. Purple Martins are “blackish” colored. Males are “blueish-blackish” while females have chests that are creamy colored or grayish. The most distinguishing feature is the beak.

The European Starling beak is “long pointy and deadly…designed to unearth ground dwelling insects…bright yellow in color in both males and females. The shape of the head is more narrow and longer.”   The Purple Martin beak is “ALWAYS dark colored and much shorter with a downward curve…much wider at the base as it is designed to catch insects while flying.”

Within twenty-four hours the incident had gained national attention. Federal Game Management Agent John Hague, who lived in St. Joseph, was ordered to start a federal investigation.

Letters began to pour into Jefferson City from individual bird lovers and bird advocacy organizations demanding the heads of the shotgun five.

“Yes,” said Cole County Prosecutor Byron Kinder, “I’ll file charges,” a statement that quickly put long-time Magistrate Judge O. Lee Munger in the spotlight. “Let’s have a hearing,” he said.

The hearing November 15 was, as you might expect, a colorful event, highlighted by testimony from M. D. Anglin of Berryville, Arkansas, who once described Berryville as being “about eight miles, as the crow flies, to the Missouri line,” an interesting observation for the President of the National Association for the Protection and Propagation of Purple Martins and Bluebirds (NAPPPM&B), who claimed he had “fooled around with Purple Martins and Bluebirds” for 56 of his 62 years. He disagreed with the defense that Purple Martins had been known to break tree limbs. “Never heard of it before in my life,” he said. He maintained the only way to keep Purple Martins from flocking into a tree was to “cut the tree down,” a comment that prompted Kinder to protest, “But, Mr. Anglin, only God can make a tree!”

Anglin complained that man had spoiled nature with pesticides, insecticides, and even birth control pills for birds. He charged that most people won’t know anything about birds except that they have feathers and can fly. Personally, he said, he would rather clean up after Purple Martins and do without the mosquitoes they eat. As for Starlings—they’re so bad that even cats wouldn’t eat them.

“I don’t want to cut their throats,” he said referring to the five defendants. “Or I don’t want to see them shot because they didn’t know the difference between a Purple Martin and a Starling. If you shot everyone who didn’t know the difference, you’d have one big funeral.”

Munger and defense attorney Bud Wilbers hoped to keep any mention of Governor Hearnes out of the proceedings. But Anglin, who called himself “a fellow Democrat,” said he’s heard all kinds of reports about the killings, even that the governor——

But shouts from the dozen spectators, the two lawyers, and the judge cut that part of his testimony short.

Wilbers withdrew the earlier “not guilty” plea from the five shooters, who pleaded “guilty,” although Wilbers doubted Kinder could have made much of a case because it could not be determined which of the five men actually killed or wounded all those birds. Besides, “the defendants felt a moral obligation” not to “hide behind the law.”

Kinder, who had a bit of a flamboyant side at times, argued that the honest intentions of the men made no difference and that they should have looked into “what species they were dealing with” before they started shooting.

Munger wanted to know three things “for my own conscience” from the accused killers. Had the men been acting on their own or at the request of “someone else,” if they knew the birds were Purple Martins, and whether they would have shot them even if they had known it.

Diemler said “someone else’ had made the request. He said he decided to use shotguns because “this is the way it was done in the past” in getting rid of starlings. And, no, he wouldn’t have shot the birds if he’d know they were protected by law.

The five threw themselves on the mercy of the court. Munger find each of them fifty dollars plus $12.10 in court costs.

Among the onlookers were Thomas Coulson, the editor of the Purple Martin Capital News, published in Griggsville, who brought with him Wayne Bradshaw and George Mobus, a photographer and writer for the paper. They described themselves as representatives of the Griggsville Wild Bird Society, which had a membership of 12,000. He described the organization as having a “Madison Avenue approach” to selling the concept of protecting wildlife.

“We thought by this time in the Midwest everyone knew the difference between a Purple Martin and a Starling either by sight or sound,” he lamented. “It will take years again to build the martin bird society in this area.”

He found Munger’s judgment unsatisfactory. “If I went out and shot a duck that wasn’t in season I’d be fined $25 or $50 for each duck I shot. But here we had 2,000 federally protected species slaughter and all it cost them was $50 for the whole lot.” He considered the possibility the case could be prosecuted by federal authorities (it wasn’t). And, in noting that the birds are protected by compacts with other nations, “It could go as far as the United Nations.” It didn’t.

Retired Presbyterian minister A. B. Jackson, in his weekly column in the Jefferson City Sunday News and Tribune, observed a couple of weeks later that various groups were demonstrating for their rights in those days and “I suppose the purple martins would have liked to have some rights, but somehow they didn’t seem to have. The ‘purple martin incident’ is over, and a lot of folks would like it to be forgotten, but it leaves some unanswered questions. Such as, who ordered the shooting and why didn’t he come forward and take the blame? When someone said at the trial that the only way to get rid of the birds was to cut down the trees, someone remarked, ‘But only God can make a tree.’ True, but it is also true that only God can make a purple martin and it will take him some time to replace the 2,000 which were killed.”

For months after the trial, Governor Hearnes’ office received The Purple Martin Capital News, which had covered the massacre as most newspapers cover major wars. Prosecutor Kinder, who once opined that his knowledge of birds was not very extensive although he felt he could tell the difference between an ostrich and a hummingbird, also received gifts for several months, including a stuffed bird.

The incident appears not to have caused lasting damage to the major participants. Hearnes was elected to a second term as governor. Kinder became a widely-known circuit judge. Diemler later was a deputy sheriff and then Cole County Clerk. The incident is remembered, if it is remembered at all, as one of life’s embarrassing moments, although Purple Martin lovers would never dismiss it that lightly.

And Griggsville, Illinois, remains a small town about sixty miles west of Springfield, a town whose streets are lined with Purple Martin houses including a 70-foot tall, 562-apartment complex for the birds. Trio Manufacturing, founded in 1947, was a leading maker of television antennas until founder J. L. Wade started building Purple Martin houses and selling them throughout the nation. Wade, by then 93, sold his company—then known as Nature House and Nature Society, in 2006 to Erva Tool and Manufacturing Co., of Chicago. Production of Purple Martin houses ended in Griggsville in March of 2007 and the twenty-two employees were laid off. Erva today makes a lot of metal lawn and garden equipment, still makes metal Purple Martin Houses, and “the World’s Greatest Squirrel Baffles” (that’s the real name) to keep squirrels out of bird houses. And the company ships directly from its factory. No Amazon involved.

When I told the folks at the Griggsville City Hall I was from Jefferson City, Missouri it didn’t cause a stir. They hadn’t heard about the connection between Griggsville and the big state government scandal in Jefferson City so long ago.

It’s a nice, clean, little town just off I-72. You’d like it. And I bet if somebody says Griggsville is for the birds, the folks there would smile and say, “It sure is.”

Governor Mike and First Lady Teresa Parson have moved to temporary quarters while a much-needed extensive renovation and repair is made to the Governor’s Mansion. One nice touch during that effort might be to add a Purple Martin house to the place.   Have a little dedication ceremony for it. Invite the mayor of Griggsville. I bet he’d enjoy it.

(Photo credits: Griggsville—Bob Priddy; Mansion—Missouri Secretary of State; Purple Martin—Audubon.com)

Notes from the Road

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Before we get into this, we note that a few days after returning from a short trip we turned on our computer and got a message reading, “Hmmm…can’t reach this page.” The message offered to connect me with my usual first page by using a different web address. I tried that and that didn’t work either.   Going back to the previous “can’t reach this page” page, I noticed another line:

“Report this issue.”

I wonder how many people have gotten similar messages and have clicked on that line before giving themselves a good solid dope-slap.

Now, on to our stories:

(Oh? What did I do about that “report this issue” message? None of your business. And besides, the red mark on my forehead has disappeared.)

I always get a good chuckle, if not a good laugh, from audiences when I say that God invented Kansas so Missourians would appreciate Colorado more when they get there.   Problem is, you don’t start seeing hazy mountains in front of you until you’re more than 100 miles into Colorado. I consider that area for several miles west of Limon to be Kansas West.

And in truth, Nancy and I don’t mind driving across Kansas all that much. A lot of our ancestors were pioneers who were there when corn was the dominant crop. We like the way the sky opens up, enjoy the Flint Hills, and the rolling prairies.

It’s easier to enjoy those things at 80 mph instead of looking at the back end of the oxen for the month it took thousands of people headed to the mountains 150 years ago.

Best name for a Kansas town: Grainfield. It’s three counties in from the Colorado border, a little place of about 275 people, that topped out at 417 in the 1980 census. Children from Grainfield attend Wheatland High School (another appropriate name), where the sports teams used to be called the Shockers, as in shocks of wheat (we mention that for the city folks who think the kids might have done weird science with electricity). They’re the Thunderhawks now.

Grainfield’s old opera house is on the National Historic Register. We don’t know when the last opera or any other performance was held there. The place is an antique shop now. Not surprisingly, it’s the dominant building in a town that, like a lot of small Kansas farming towns (one up north particularly close to your observer’s heart) seems to be shrinking back into the prairie.

But if you’re on I-70 and not enjoying the experience as much as we do, you might drop in on Grainfield.

Or just down the road, at Quinter, which boasts the Fick Fossil Museum (do not try to say that real fast too many times). The oldest Mosasaur skull in the world is on display there.

Not far away is Oakley, which is near Castle Rock and Monument Rocks, the chalk remnants of the great inland sea that split present North America into two land masses about one-hundred million years ago. Nearby Quinter, about 30 miles from Oakley, is Castle Rock, from the same time period.

—The features live on in the Kansas University cheer, “Rock, Chalk, Jayhawk.” At least we suspect that’s where it came from, should any Missourians care.

Incidentally, all of this silly Kansas-Missouri animosity aside, we like Lawrence and we think the KU campus perched on Mount Oread (seen from the interstate) is a lovely campus. It, too, has a nice fossil museum but it’s most famous museum attraction is the hide of Comanche, the Seventh Cavalry Horse that survived Custer’s ill-considered attack in Montana. The hide is stretched over a taxidermy mount so it looks like the horse. Although Comanche is sometimes described as “the only survivor of Custer’s Last Stand,” he isn’t. A lot of Indians survived. And about half of Custer’s troops survived a few miles away on another hill.

As long as we’re providing you with a travelogue, you might consider drifting off the interstate about 115 miles east of Quinter, in the Ellsworth area, and going to Lucas, which is the home of The Garden of Eden. We wrote about it years ago on the old Missourinet blog—about a Civil War Veteran who hated corporations and decorated his house built out of concrete logs with concrete anti-corporation figures and figures from the Genesis story of the Garden of Eden, something bizarre to many visitors but also an interesting piece of self-expression through folk art.

Of course, if you want to get up near Highway 36 you can visit the largest ball of twine, in Cawker City, or if you want to drop down to Highway 50, you can climb down into the world’s largest hand-dug well at Greensburg—and while you’re there you can appreciate the effort to rebuild the town after it was flattened by a tornado almost twenty years ago.

We always enjoy driving through the miles-long Smoky Hills Wind Farm about 140 miles west of Topeka. There are 155 of these giant three-bladed machines, some close enough to the road that we can appreciate how big those things are. There’s an interesting juxtaposition near the eastern end of the farm, a church with a big windmill nearby:

 

I call the image “Higher Powers.”   This picture isn’t a good one. It was shot with a cell phone while Nancy was driving about 80. One of these days I’m going to have the good camera and we’re going to stop and do it right. We find these big wind turbines (the official name; I guess “windmills” are the old things we sometimes also see along the road that pump water for livestock) kind of fascinating.

We “enjoy” running on a couple of toll roads in the Denver area.  We saw “enjoy” because they don’t have toll booths.  Cameras take pictures of our car’s license plate and a week or two later a statement arrives in our mail box saying how much we owe the state of Colorado.

Saw a headline in the Longmont, Colorado newspaper that recalled an old television comedy show and we—for some reason—thought, “Ralph Kramden would be proud.”   For those few who peruse these entries who do not know about Ralph Kramden, let us perform an educational service.

 Ralph Kramden was a television character in “The Honeymooners” skits, a New York bus driver in the 1950s and 60s who made $62 a week and who lived in a small tenement apartment with his wife of fifteen years, Alice. Ralph was a bombastic, fat, man with who was often scheming on ways to get rich. His schemes, often hatched with sidekick Ed Norton, an always-cheerful sewer worker who lived with his wife, Trixie, in the apartment upstairs, never worked. Alice was the queen of the put-down who dreamed of a better life that included a refrigerator that didn’t need to have a bowl underneath it collect water that dripped from the ice box. Sometimes she would irritate Ralph with her spot-on observations of his girth or job or scheme and he would, in anger, threaten:

“One of these days, One of these days, Alice: Pow! Bang, Zoom, you’re going to the Moon.”

It was funny then and it remains funny in the context of its times. Of course, it wouldn’t play at all, now. But those were different times. By the end of the skit, the humbled Ralph would tell Alice, “You’re the best,” and they would kiss and the screen would fade to black and then to a commercial.

Ralph Kramden was played by Jackie Gleason, who might be remembered by some younger—but increasingly older—movie viewers as Sheriff Buford T. Justice from the “Smokey and the Bandit” films. Alice was played by Audrey Meadows. You can still see “The Honeymooners” sketches on various YouTube videos.

Ralph, a prophet in his way, and Alice, the beneficiary, might find that headline, uh, meaningful, I thought.

Longmont, by the way, is the hometown of Vance Brand, an astronaut who was the command module pilot on the 1975 flight that linked a leftover Apollo capsule with a Soviet Soyuz capsule for the famous “handshake in space” that was the first American-Soviet joint space venture. He also flew three shuttle flights, including the first fully-operational flight. He might have walked on the Moon if there had been an Apollo 18 mission.

Well, enough of these latest notes from the road, which culminated with a hike to 12,005 feet and an involuntary geological study of the relative hardness of my head with some Rocky Mountain granite that left a temporary mark on my forehead and some marks on the granite that will wash off in the next rainstorm.   Conclusion: both seem to be of equal hardness.

—which might explain why we drive across Kansas rather than fly over it.

Bob

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More than forty years ago, in the months before we set up The Missourinet, when we were still in local radio in Jefferson City, a new guy showed up to cover city council meetings. He was working for a then-new FM station that hadn’t shown much in terms of news coverage but he’d been hired as the news director and he arrived determined to carve a place in this market for a new news voice.

I was impressed with this kid right away. And I was impressed with him right up to the day he died, Sunday, a third day after gall bladder removal surgery.

I liked Bob Watson’s ambition and his work ethic right away. He wanted to be part of the Missourinet when we started it and I kept putting him off through several cycles of new reporters on our staff because I didn’t want to tell him he just didn’t have the kind of voice we wanted to have on the air. I respected his commitment to reporting, his desire to be a good reporter, the persistence he brought to his work. On top of that, he was a good guy. But finally, I forced myself to break the news to him. I was sorry I had to disappoint him.

Bob left the radio station and worked for the local television station where his conscientious behind-the-scenes role shaped the content of the newscasts. Fortunately, Betty Weldon, the owner of the News-Tribune, saw in Bob Watson the kind of reporter she wanted on her newspaper staff. She hired him more than thirty years ago; Bob said it was the best thing that ever happened to him. That is where he carved his place. In years to come, when people look at the microfilms of the newspaper for the last thirty years they will find the byline of Bob Watson everywhere in the News-Tribune. I used to joke that there were times when he wrote the entire front page. While he might not have really done that, he came darned close a lot of times. His passion for reporting is reflected in the volume and the quality of solid reporting on those pages.

Mrs. Weldon died several years ago and the family sold the newspaper to an Arkansas-based company that, unlike many businesses that are buying the media today, maintains a high standard of local news coverage. A few months ago it named Bob its employee of the year.

He was the statehouse reporter for the newspaper and was a tenacious questioner of governors and lawmakers—-there were times when some of his colleagues had to force themselves to interrupt him to get OUR questions in. He, as all good reporters, hated vagueness and contradictions from the newsmakers. He never backed down in questioning their statements or their intentions. I knew when I read a Bob Watson story that it was accurate, balanced, and thoroughly-developed.

We sat at the Senate press table for many years, both of us at times going into what I call “screen saver mode,” Bob because he dealt with a sleep disorder and me because my work day had passed the eight-hour mark by 1 p.m. most of the time. Both of us always had our recorders running so we didn’t miss anything.

Bob’s coat pockets always bulged with pens of multiple colors. He had a color-coded system of note-taking of some kind that I never asked him to explain. His notes were always neat, his handwriting always clear—while most of us at the table filled notebooks with scrawls that only we could read.

One of his last stories was published on the anniversary of the first moon landing. It was about the reunion of the Apollo 11 astronauts with their space capsule that happened to be at the state capitol on July 20, 1970. Bob knew that I had broadcast the event and he tracked me down at a family gathering in Colorado for an interview. He wasn’t feeling well and had taken a rare day off from work the day before and still wasn’t back up to snuff but he had to get the story, had to find the person he wanted to interview, wanted to tell the tale.

That’s a good reporter for you. As long as you can drag yourself to the keyboard, there’s reporting to be done, a story to be told.

One thing Bob did that I never have done—-a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/reporterbob

You’ll find a lot of his own words and informal photos that capture the spirit we’ll remember, his joy of being a journalist, his love of his family (official and unofficial families), a bit of his self-deprecating humor, and a face that says kindness, steadfastness, and  “character” in both senses of the word.

We have lost invaluable institutional memory. We have lost a good friend, a man who committed his life to good journalism, a newsroom mentor. His church has lost a willing worker, a good soul. His children have lost a proud parent, his grandchildren a proud grandfather. All of us have richer lives because God gave us Bob.

When I dropped in at his room at St. Mary’s hospital Saturday, the day after his surgery and shortly after the nurses had gotten him up for his a post-surgery shuffle to the end of the hall and back, I asked him, “Watson, what’s a good Presbyterian boy like you doing in a place like this?” He took it in all good humor. We talked for a few minutes but just before I left I said, “You know, people are going to start asking, ‘How can you have the gall to ask that question?’ after this.”

“You don’t have to have a gall bladder to have gall,” he answered with a weak smile.

That was Bob Watson.

(The photo is from the News Tribune “contact” page)

 

The Pen

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It’s going to cost millions of dollars to restore the old Missouri State Penitentiary that was hit hard by the May tornado. Some folks think it shouldn’t be repaired. Just tear it all down, they say.   There’s room to differ with that opinion—and we do. It is, after all, one of the distinguishing features of Jefferson City. In fact, it might be one reason there IS a Jefferson City.

In the early days of the city’s existence, the place was pretty crude and the legislature, which moved here in 1826 was reluctant to spend any money to make the town better. Governor John Miller suggested that building a state penitentiary here would stabilize the town, provide year-around employment (the legislature did not meet annually back then), and answer a statewide public need.

So the place was built, well outside of town at the time.

An exploration of A Hall, the oldest building at the pen, or the solitary confinement dungeon in the basement of another cell block is more than enough to understand why the place was considered “a bar to heaven, a door to hell,” as one long-ago inmate put it.

The old joint opened in 1836 on the outskirts of Jefferson City and closed in 2004, well within a residential area of the city.   A Hall dates to 1868 and looks it. The inmate’s comment to the contrary, the prison was once praised as one of the most efficient state lockups in the nation because it fed prisoners for an average cost of eleven cents a day. A few years later, a local newspaper called it “The greatest in the world.” Local pride aside, if it was the greatest, the middlin’ kind of pen must have been really awful.

By 1967, thirteen years after the worst riot in the prison’s history, it was called “The bloodiest 47 acres in America” by Time magazine.

Your correspondent was in the place from time to time to cover stories or play softball. Once of the times he was there was very late at night, on the top tier of cells in ancient A Hall, interviewing inmates about the order to integrate the cell blocks. “I don’t care who’s in the cell next to me. I just want to do my time and get out,” one inmate told me. “How much more time do you have?” I asked. “Thirty-five years,” he answered as calmly as you and I might say “Friday.”

Weasel-worders in 1991 changed its name from the Missouri State Penitentiary to the Jefferson City Correctional Center. One look at the walls and the cell blocks, and it was hard to buy the idea that it was anything but a penitentiary. A pen.   By 2004 it was called the Missouri State Penitentiary again. That September, however, all the inmates moved into a Jefferson City Correctional Center east of the city.

Since then the old prison has been an increasingly popular place for public tours. About 35,000 people have been going through it each year, some of them buying into the idea the place might have spooks in it and taking overnight visits. There have been no visits since the tornado, though.

But whether you go through it in broad daylight or whether you are looking for extra chills in the middle of the night, the place is still what an anonymous inmate wrote about it in 1917. At least he was anonymous when the Rocheport Progress printed his verse, called “Rightfully Named,”  on March 30.

A bar to heaven, a door to hell,

Whoever named it, named it well.

A bar to manliness and wealth

A door to want and broken health.

A bar to honor, pride and fame

A door to grief, sin and shame.

A bar to home, a bar to prayer,

A door to darkness and despair.

A bar to honor, useful life,

A door to brawling senseless strife.

A bar to all that’s true and brave,

A door to every patron’s grave.

A bar to joys that home imparts,

A door to tears and aching hearts.

A bar to heaven, a door to hell;

Whoever named it, named it well.

The newspaper commented the verse had been written “by a poor devil in the Missouri State Penitentiary who learned by bitter experience the truth he here expresses in rhyme.”

The old pen, battered by the May tornado, faces some uncertain times now. Damaged roofs, blown-out windows, and a blown-down wall segment are discouraging things to see. But we cannot lose this place that for so long was the “bar to heaven, a door to hell” for many who lived and died there.

 

A final anniversary note

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—-unless another final note occurs to us.

—-about the half century since men first walked on the moon. The five or six percent of you who supposedly still think it was a Hollywood-generated hoax can leave the room now. Or maybe not.

Only twelve men in the entire history of mankind, however far back you consider that history to go, have seen our earth in its entirety with their own eyes.   Only twelve. And, assuming you are not among those who think Hollywood had computer generated special effects far advanced from what they were showing the rest of the world, or whether you think these twelve were looking at a ball or a pancake, what the twelve unanimously agree they saw affected most of them for the rest of their lives.

The first three to see the full earth were not those on Apollo 11 but those who had flown around the moon the previous December, the crew of Apollo 8.

The poet Archibald MacLeish wrote in the New York Times on Christmas day, 1968 about what that view could mean to those of us too small for Borman, Lovell, and Anders to see from their great distance.

Men’s conception of themselves and of each other has always depended on their notion of the earth. When the earth was the World — all the world there was — and the stars were lights in Dante’s heaven, and the ground beneath men’s feet roofed Hell, they saw themselves as creatures at the center of the universe, the sole, particular concern of God — and from that high place they ruled and killed and conquered as they pleased.

And when, centuries later, the earth was no longer the World but a small, wet spinning planet in the solar system of a minor star off at the edge of an inconsiderable galaxy in the immeasurable distances of space — when Dante’s heaven had disappeared and there was no Hell (at least no Hell beneath the feet) — men began to see themselves not as God-directed actors at the center of a noble drama, but as helpless victims of a senseless farce where all the rest were helpless victims also and millions could be killed in world-wide wars or in blasted cities or in concentration camps without a thought or reason but the reason — if we call it one — of force.

Now, in the last few hours, the notion may have changed again. For the first time in all of time men have seen it not as continents or oceans from the little distance of a hundred miles or two or three, but seen it from the depth of space; seen it whole and round and beautiful and small as even Dante — that “first imagination of Christendom” — had never dreamed of seeing it; as the Twentieth Century philosophers of absurdity and despair were incapable of guessing that it might be seen. And seeing it so, one question came to the minds of those who looked at it. “Is it inhabited?” they said to each other and laughed — and then they did not laugh. What came to their minds a hundred thousand miles and more into space — “half way to the moon” they put it — what came to their minds was the life on that little, lonely, floating planet; that tiny raft in the enormous, empty night. “Is it inhabited?”

The medieval notion of the earth put man at the center of everything. The nuclear notion of the earth put him nowhere — beyond the range of reason even — lost in absurdity and war. This latest notion may have other consequences. Formed as it was in the minds of heroic voyagers who were also men, it may remake our image of mankind. No longer that preposterous figure at the center, no longer that degraded and degrading victim off at the margins of reality and blind with blood, man may at last become himself.

To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold — brothers who know now they are truly brothers. 

There was that hope in those often ugly days of ’68.   And now, fifty-one years later—–?

Bearthday

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I struggle to say that I remember things fifty years ago. Remembering things fifty years past is a reminder of mortality. Maybe that’s why it’s uncomfortable to say it.

Memory is never fifty years old because memories don’t age. They’re always in the present in our mind. We are ageless in our memories.

Fifty years ago, on my birthday, we sent three men to the Moon.

I remember it as if it were—–

Not fifty years ago.

The Vietnam War was eroding our national will. The Civil Rights movement forced us to look at ourselves more than we wanted to look and it provoked intense emotion expressed in various ways. The Cold War over freedom and oppression was a daily factor. But there still was a residual of the optimism and it was nowhere better expressed than what was to happen that day.

The radio station I was working for in Jefferson City at the time (it’s no longer in Jefferson City) had no national network. So we couldn’t follow the buildup at Cape Canaveral, as it was then called, as intensely as the other station in town, a Mutual affiliate. But we were paying attention and on our newscasts we did let our listeners know what was happening.

This was in the days of 15-minute newscasts in the morning, during the noon hour when Derry Brownfield, our farm director, updated the farmers in central Missouri on the daily markets and agricultural news, and during drive-time in the afternoon.

The script for the 7 a.m. newscast that morning is in a landfill somewhere. But I can hear my younger voice closing the newscast noting the significant events unfolding in Florida. I had brought to the station that morning an LP record of one of John Kennedy’s greatest speeches and I had dubbed part of it onto a cartridge tape. I played part of his speech at Rice University from September 12, 1962—the part that is in bold type below:

“Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it–we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

“Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world’s leading space-faring nation.

“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

“There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

“…Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, “Because it is there.”

“Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.”

I remember after the tape ended with Kennedy saying, “That challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

I said, “And that’s why we are going to the Moon today.”   And closed out the newscast.

On this fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, it’s important we think about John Kennedy’s 1962 speech. In recent years some presidents or presidential candidates have said we need to go to the Moon again and Mars, too. But their remarks have caused only little ripples in the public mind.

—Because, coming from them, they’re just words. They don’t call on you and me to want to reach for something great. They don’t challenge us to think that, as President Kennedy mentioned earlier in his speech, “William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.”

We do not hear calls today for “answerable courage.” We don’t hear those who lead or want to lead us speak of “new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.” Some observers believe proclamations about returning to the moon and heading for Mars are intended to gin up a few votes in an election cycle. And the public knows it and is unmoved.

Fifty years ago was a beginning and a beginning of an end. We are people of short attention spans who too easily spend our time looking within where we are apt to find narrowness and selfishness instead of looking out where we find challenges to meet, good that we can do, rights that we can win.

Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley was one of the few people granted an in-depth interview with Neil Armstrong, who bore the public burden of being the first man on the moon by becoming a very private person. Brinkley tells in his new book, American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race, of asking Armstrong “why the American people seemed to be less NASA crazed in the twenty-first century than back during john F. Kennedy’s White House years.”

Oh, I think it’s predominantly the responsivity of the human character. We don’t have a very long attention span, and needs and pressures vary from day to day, and we have a difficult time remembering a few months ago, or we have a difficult time looking very far into the future. We’re very “now” oriented. I’m not surprised by that. I think we’ll always be in space, but it will take us longer to do the new things than the advocates would like, and in some cases, it will take external factors or forces which we can’t control.

Kennedy had the external factors. The Cold War and the Soviet early successes in space. The Bay of Pigs debacle and the need to get beyond it. The Civil Rights effort that was mushrooming. And other issues. But his speech at Rice University was a challenge for the country to move forward at a time when it could become consumed by other issues—and it did.

By the time my brother-in-law and I watched the midnight launch of Apollo 17, the final Apollo mission to the moon, from the press site at Cape Kennedy slightly more than three years after this historic day in 1969, we as a people were so looking inward at the war, the civil rights struggle, the ongoing Cold War, and by then Watergate that the cancellation of three moon flights that were originally scheduled stirred little public regret. The idea of doing things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard” seemed lost. And they seem lost, still, today.

Of the twenty-four men who flew to the Moon, the only people who have seen the entire earth and watched it shrink into the surrounding blackness, only twelve survive. Only twelve of the twenty-four walked on the moon and only four of them are still walking on the earth: Buzz Aldrin, now 89; Dave Scott, 87; Charlie Duke, 83, and Harrison Schmitt, 84. The other eight moonwalkers have, as one source put it, “left the earth forever.”   All three of the first men to see the moon up close (Apollo 8) are still with us, though. Frank Borman and Jim Lovell are 91. Bill Anders is 85.

Some historians wonder if Apollo was worth it, if going to the Moon and bringing back a few hundred pounds of rocks was worth the $24 billion total expense in the 1960s and early 70s, at a time when we were spending $30 billion each year on the Vietnam War. One of them, Andrew Smith, whose Moon Dust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, was published for the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11 and has been republished for the fiftieth, recalls an earlier Kennedy speech, the one to Congress in 1961 in which he set the goal of sending men to the Moon and returning them to Earth within the decade. He says the Moon goal resulted from Kennedy’s recognition that the Cold War “was going the be won or lost in the so-called Third World, and that cultural factors would influence the loyalties of wavering nations as much as economics did.” He maintains Kennedy wanted to capture imaginations throughout the world, a way to make democracy the system of choice, and also wanted something Americans could enthusiastically support. The answer, says Smith, was “theatre—the most mind-blowing theatre ever created,” that the Apollo program was “performance, pure and simple.”

Smith argues that the lasting value of the missions isn’t the science behind them or the rocks the men brought back. It is that these missions for the first time allowed us to see the entire earth, alone in the vast blackness of space. “It’s clear that the answer had nothing to do with engineering or technology, that what it did…was afford us the enormous privilege of seeing ourselves for the first time as small.”

Edgar Mitchell, who walked on the moon with Alan Shepard on Apollo 14 told Allen, “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch!’”

While Dave Scott and Jim Irwin were on the Moon with the Apollo 15 flight, Al Worden was by himself in the Endeavour, the command module orbiting above them. For sixty-seven hours, Worden was alone in the universe, often out of touch with anyone, anywhere, when he was traveling behind the Moon. He shared his thoughts in his 1974 book, Hello Earth, Greetings from Endeavour. One of his poems reads:

Now I can see where I’m going and am impatient to get there—                                       What will I see? The wounds of ageless strife, the anguish of cooling and petrifying, the punctures of an infinity of coolness?                                                                                   No signs of healing, or love, or care, or compassion?                                                         She is not healed. All the scars are there—from birth.                                                        Poor lady of the night.                                                                                                          But we love her and she knows it full well, for she has been faithful all these years.          And what of the scars on the planet earth?                                                                         Will she end up like the lifeless old moon, revolving slowly, hanging naked in the sky?     Life is too precious to let ego-centered ideas snuff it out.                                                   The moon must teach us, not only of age and geology, planets and solar puzzles            But of life, else we end up like her.

Smith says, “Was Apollo worth all the effort and expense? If it had been about the Moon, the answer would be no, but it wasn’t, it was about the Earth. The answer is yes.”

So today, fifty years after the launch of Apollo 11 on my bearthday, let us look beyond the event and ponder the thoughts of Mitchell and Worden and Smith.

And Kennedy. And be unafraid of doing things because they are hard—-even if the hardest of things is seeing ourselves.

(Photo credits: Apollo 11 launch, Al Worden’s photo of the Moon and Earth, and Apollo 17’s Harrison Schmitt unfurling the flag with a tiny earth in the background, and the “blue marble” photo from Apollo 17 all are from NASA)

 

Where was it?

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When the permanent seat of state government was moved from St. Charles to Jefferson City on October 1, 1826, it was headquartered in a building known as The Governor’s House. Not the capitol.

It was called the Governor’s House because it contained a couple of rooms for the lodging of the Governor and his office. The House of Representatives chamber was on the first floor. The Senate was on the second floor, an appropriate positioning for the body known at state and federal levels as “the upper house.’   Rooms for other state officers were in the building.

That was fine for Governor John Miller, a bachelor. But his successor, Daniel Dunklin, had a family, a situation that led to construction of an executive mansion nearby.

There were plans for a specific capitol but they didn’t come about until the Governor’s House burned in 1837 with a terrible loss of early records. The historical record is sketchy about what happened after the fire. How long did the gutted walls of the brick building remain? How was that area used between then and 1871 when the Governor’s Mansion was built?

Just where was the first seat of government on that lot?

Two conjectural drawings exist of that first building. One appears to show the building near the corner of Madison Street and Capitol Avenue. The other places the building closer to the bluff where it would be more visible to people traveling on the Missouri River.

We know it must have been fairly close because contemporary accounts say wet blankets were used to keep the mansion roof from catching fire from sparks blown from the burning original Governor’s House and a map from about 1843 indicates the 1826 building was near the present Executive Mansion site and the first Executive Mansion was built at the northwest corner of Madison Street at Capitol Avenue (which was Main Street then). We know from written records that the house was used during the Civil War by the officer in charge of the federal force that occupied the capital of Missouri.

How much of the current mansion, if any, is on or in the footprint of the first government building in the City of Jefferson?

There are some issues, often small ones, that get wrapped around a historian’s mind and won’t let go. Where were those buildings?

For several administrations this dabbler in archaeology (Nancy and I have spent several weeks in southwest Colorado mapping and finding pueblos either in the cliffs or on the ground of the Mancos River valley area near Mesa Verde) has wished somebody would be allowed to peel back the grass (in one way or another) at the Governor’s Mansion and in the process peel back the historical record to find the remains of the buildings that have occupied that space. Maybe there’s equipment that can survey the area without disturbing the lawn and pinpoint places to investigate without wiping out tent space. With the state’s first family in temporary quarters while major repairs and restorations are done at the old house, this might be a time to electronically see what’s under the yard.

The problem is that the lawn is often used for entertainment. Big tents are pitched and gatherings are held and digging up the lawn would disrupt those. But my goodness, what might we learn about the place where government began at its permanent location?

What’s under there?   Where was that first building in Jefferson City where some of Missouri’s greatest citizens of the first half of the Nineteenth Century walked, negotiated, and thundered?

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Damon and Jimmy

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Jimmy Breslin, the New York City author and columnist died a couple of years ago at the age of 88. He wrote more than twenty books including a biography of a fellow New York author and columnist, Damon Runyon. It’s an entertaining read. Breslin wrote, “Damon Runyon invented the Broadway of Guys and Dolls and the Roaring Twenties, neither of which existed, but whose names and phrases became part of theater history and the American language.” Twenty-six of his short stories became movies.

Something Breslin wrote about the way Runyon’s world was created before he got to New York when real estate lawyer Henry Morgenthau instituted the development that became the Broadway-42nd Street area. Something Breslin wrote about the process caught our eye.

Whenever successful politicians and businessmen are together, it is a moment of hope being reawakened. The politician, who is impoverished by comparison to the man he stands alongside, always is at once frightened and enticed by the thought of entering the business world and earning a fortune. The merchant with his money in his pocket is in awe of a person who can stand before grubby crowds and earn their cheers. Each in the other’s presence secretly wishes he had the other’s role, and off by themselves they are insanely jealous of each other. Yet merchants and politicians seem extraordinarily friendly with one another, and form a closed society to which strangers never are admitted readily, unless the stranger has wondrous amounts of money, at which point he rapidly ceases to be a stranger. The money is often never brought into use, but the stranger must own much of it. How can you yearn to be the other guy if he doesn’t have any money? The merchant by using courtesy to the point of groveling, so flatters the politician that the impossible occurs and the politician become momentarily secure, and immediately feels a need to make the merchant richer. While it is understood that the politician takes money out of this, nobody realizes the miserable amounts of money they often accept. No amount is too small for a politician to grab, nor for a rich man to offer. As nearly all great fortunes in America are made on land stolen while the public’s back is turned—and by people who want money but don’t want to work for it, by men who use the title of builder and yet never have driven a mail into a board—nowhere was the relationship between politician and merchant closer than at the time the subways of New York were built.

If you are interested in Breslin’s take on New York subway construction, go find a copy of his book about Runyon. Otherwise, we hope you just enjoy—as we did—Breslin’s essay on business and politics, offered here without comment except that we thought it was a fun paragraph to read in a book we’re really enjoying.

Breslin and Runyon make quite a combination.

 

Almost There

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We’re only about six weeks away from opening the new future for our past.

It’s a building. But it’s more than just a building. It’s a statement. And, My God! What a statement it is.

Employees of the State Historical Society of Missouri are overseeing the move of thousands of cubic feet of documents, artworks, microfilmed newspapers, and other items from our corner of the basement of the Ellis Library on the University Campus to the new Center for Missouri Studies on Elm Street, just across from Peace Park on the north edge of the University campus. Our manuscript collection alone totals seventeen-thousand cubic feet. If we stood all of the pages in that collection on end, they could cover six football fields. And that doesn’t count the 54-million pages of newspapers on microfilm or twenty-thousand pieces of art, or maps, or sculpture or——-

—or all of the things we have gathered in our own 121-year history that tell the story of Missouri back to the days before it was called Missouri.

We’re going to officially open the place on Saturday, August 10, the 198th anniversary of Missouri becoming a state. It’s going to be a big deal. We’re going to have an outdoor ceremony to start and then we’ll move into the awesome lobby to finish up and to serve various celebratory goodies.

It’s been thirty years or so since the society began to seriously consider moving into a better place to serve the public and to serve the cause of history. It’s been a decade or so since our executive director, Gary Kremer, began a career-long effort to create the Center for Missouri Studies and to find a way to put up a building worthy of Missouri’s heritage.

We thought of some locations that didn’t work out. We drew some plans that didn’t work out. Gary talked to governors and legislators and those conversations didn’t work out—-for a while. But then the idea began to take hold and finally, about five years ago, the legislature provided $35 million for a Center for Missouri Studies.

We were blessed with the leadership of two extraordinary people during those years. Gary, of course (on the left), and Steve Limbaugh, whose enthusiasm and counsel was so central to the effort that we changed the constitution to let him be the first society president who could be elected to succeed himself.

For Steve, there was a special link to the society and to seeing the new building materialize. In 1915, when the society moved out of its then-quarters in Academic Hall (later renamed to honor University of Missouri President Richard Jesse) into the then-new university library, a law student who became Steve’s grandfather and still later became the society president, helped carry things from the FIRST old place to what is becoming the SECOND old place. Steve’s grandpa was Rush Limbaugh Sr., or as his biographer calls him, “The Original Rush Limbaugh.”

A lot of people for several generations of society leadership dreamed of what we are about to celebrate August 10. Many of them will be with us in our memories and, we hope, in spirit.

Three years ago we broke ground on what had been a deteriorating parking lot one-half block big. Only then did I begin to grasp how large this project would become. I saw the plans, the three-dimensional model that was less than a foot tall. I saw the architects’ drawings of the building’s exterior. But even now, after many hard-hat visits, my mind has trouble grasping the scope of what is soon to open.

Throughout this process, one of our staffers already has spent more time in the building than anybody other than the workers who have transformed lines on paper into the building we will dedicate in a few weeks. When our Senior Associate Executive Director, Gerald Hirsch, joined us a dozen years ago, he had no idea he would be our designated eyes watching each detail of the construction. But he’s been the go-to guy for dealing with any problems, adjustments, or changes that we’ve had to deal with.

I look from street level at this startling structure and I am always reminded of President Lincoln’s admonition to Congress on December 1, 1862: “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.”

On this corner on the southern edge of downtown Columbia and the northern edge of the University of Missouri will be the material expression of Lincoln’s words.   The Historical Society of Missouri is moving from its easily-overlooked quarters in the library basement into this statement building. It is unique in the architecture of the university. And in its boldness, the building proclaims that history must be part of our character and that we dare not ignore it and dare not lose conscious thought that we create more of it each day.

We, today, are responsible for tomorrow’s history. And before we make that history, we should keep in mind something else Lincoln said that day: “We…will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us.”

Perhaps if we consider the history we are making, which sometimes seems not to recall the history we and our ancestors made, our prospects for the future will be better.

We’ll dedicate this building, this statement on August 10. Join us.

 

Notes from a quiet street, Monsoon season edition

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(Being a compilation of observation not reaching the level of full blogviation.)

Has it occurred to anyone else that the wrapped Capitol dome kind of looks like the Stanley Cup?   Maybe if you squint a little?   Kinda? Sorta?

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We’ve heard several folks who don’t watch hockey remark that they were glued to the Stanley Cup finals. “That’s really intense,” one of them has said a couple of times, referring to the constant, fast, physical play.   Some folks who watched the games because a Missouri team was playing—and making history by winning—are likely to watch games next year because they’re hockey.

The fact that the Royals are dismal and the cardinals have been fighting hard to achieve mediocrity probably drove some of those fans to the Blues games.

One of the observers also has remarked that the championship by the Blues makes the absence of an NFL team in St. Louis a whole lot less important.

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Back when we were covering the Senate, Eric Schmitt claimed to be the tallest state senator in Missouri history. We found some ancient references indicating he had some historic rivals but the record remained fuzzy enough that Schmitt remained firm in his convictions although we think we introduced reasonable doubt in at least one case.   He is now definitely the tallest State Treasurer in Missouri history.

But he is not the biggest man ever to work at the Capitol.

Until somebody comes along to disprove the information, we’ll report that title belongs to Clyde Perkins, a former restaurant man from Barnard. The Jefferson City Daily Democrat reported in January of 1923 that Perkins had been hired as an accountant for the House Accounts Committee. House Speaker Oak Hunter was the big guy in the capitol until then at 274 pounds.

The article about Perkins’ appointment said he had been “off his feed” since losing an election the previous November in Nodaway County, but he thought he’d be back at full strength when he regained fifty pounds. Perkins was to be paid five dollars a day. That’s about $74 a day in 2018 money, $370 for a five-day week. Probably not enough to sustain a man very long who weighed 476 pounds..

A 2008 Nodaway County history by Michael J. Steiner says Perkins topped out at 536. Steiner’s book has a picture of two women, each standing in one leg of Perkins’ bib overalls.

Clyde was called “Fatty” by the people back home in those less-sensitive times.  He was the Nodaway County Treasurer when he died at the age of 44 in April, 1936. His death certificate says a contributing cause of death was “extreme obesity; patient weighed 480 pounds.”

Better to be tall, we guess.

—

Administration of the death penalty in Missouri was a local affair, hanging in the counties, until the late 1930s when the gas chamber was built at the state penitentiary.

The Cole County Democrat observed on February 7, 1907, “The residents of Jefferson City get mad at least every two years. When the legislature meets some untamed jackass introduces a bill to have all hangings pulled off in (the) penitentiary. No person with sense enough to grease a gimlet can blame them for getting angry. The idea of making Jefferson City the human slaughter pen for the state is disgusting in the extreme.”

The disgust lasted three decades.

The legislature in 1937 approved asphyxiation by lethal gas at the state penitentiary instead of hanging at county seats. The first victim of the new gas chamber was a 100-pound pig that stopped struggling three minutes after fifteen cyanide eggs were dropped into a crock of sulphuric acid on December 13. The death of the pig convinced state officials that the gas chamber could be safely used on humans.

Three months later it was. John Brown and William Wright were strapped to the side-by-side chairs at 6:18 p.m. on March 3, 1938. The fumes hit them three minutes later. Medical personnel say they died within three or four minutes. A newspaper story recounted, “Only twenty-five witnesses—as compared with thousands which often-times made ‘Roman Holidays’ out of hangings—peered through the five windows to watch the lethal gas deaths.”

Prisoners were gassed from 1938 to 1965 in Jefferson City. The first drug-induced execution, in 1989, was done in the gas chamber before executions were moved to Potosi, then to Bonne Terre. Gas couldn’t be used because the rubber seal around the chamber door had rotted through disuse and the gas would have been fatal to witnesses, too.

Today, people on tours of the old pen can go into the gas chamber. Many of them get their pictures taken sitting in the chairs.

It is still legal to use gas for Missouri executions. But there’s no place in the state where such an execution could be held safely.

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Well, that was pretty heavy, wasn’t it? Here’s something a little lighter.

About three years back (April of 2016) we put together a fanciful discussion of how a member of the family became his own grandfather, kind of along the lines of the famous 1940s popular and country song.

Well, friends, that song isn’t as absurd as it might seem.

Herewith is a story we discovered while trying to find something else in the State Historical Society newspaper library, straight from the Jefferson City Daily Democrat-Tribune of July 29, 1924:

HIS BROTHER WILL BE HIS FATHER IN LAW

Frank Lueckenhoff, well known and popular merchant at St. Thomas, and Miss Frances Sommerhauser, step-daughter of H. J. Lueckenhoff, the grooms [sic] brother, are to be married next month, according to word received from St. Thomas.

Mr. Lueckenhoff’s brother will be his father-in-law and his sister-in-law will become his mother-in-law.

Henry J. Lueckenhoff, the older brother married the widow of John Sommerhauser. She had two daughters and Frank Leuckenhoff (the spelling changed in this paragraph) marries the oldest one next month.