Author Archives: bpriddy

Notes from a quiet street—elections issue

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A week from today is elections day.  We look forward to elections days for the wrong reasons.  Instead of being excited about taking part in the voting process we are excited because it’s the end of that interminable period when our intelligence is assaulted 30 seconds at a time—all the time, it seems, on the television.

—and when our mailboxes are stuffed with mailers of questionable veracity usually provided by people without the courtesy or the courage to admit they paid for the appropriately-named junk mail.

Interestingly, at the end of the day, a lot of people will transfer from being the kind of people they campaigned against to being those people. And what will they do to correct the impressions their voters have about government?

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We have been interested in some of the reasons various groups don’t want us to vote for a new system of drawing legislative districts after the 2020 census.  One side says it would be a mistake to let the state demographer (a person who spends his or her life analyzing population and population trends) draw new districts because they’ll just use statistics and will come up with districts that are more gerrymandered that some districts from the last go-around.  Others worry that letting the demographer draw the districts will weaken the political power of this or that group.   We must have been mistaken all these years because we thought reapportionment dealt with representation rather than power. Silly us.

Could it be that the state demographer won’t care if two legislative incumbents wind up in the same district instead of benefitting from a process that is suspected of protecting incumbents or at least their party majorities?  As far as the demographer coming up with screwball districts, surely that person couldn’t do worse than the creation of the present Fifth Congressional District that I dubbed the “dead lizard” district after the last congressional redistricting (it looks like a dead lizard lying on its back with its feet in the air) that has a former Mayor of Kansas City representing a rural area as far east as Marshall.

What the heck.  We can always change the constitution back to the present system if the legislative districts after the 2020 census are as bad as some interest groups forecast they will be, can’t we?

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Elections almost always have issues created by petition campaigns.  It’s an important freedom we have as citizens to propose laws or to ask for a statewide vote on something the legislature did that raises questions in the minds of enough people that they want citizens to have the final say.  But that freedom can carry with it unintended consequences because petitions don’t go through the refining process of legislative committee hearings, debates, votes, and compromises where possible.   Of course the legislature sometimes fumbles an issue and in both cases ballot issues can be issues financially backed by a special interest if not an individual.

Voters have an often-overlooked responsibility to get out the spy glass and read all the fine print in the election legal notices.  We haven’t talked to very many folks who have done that. So we get what we get and the courts often have to figure out what we got regardless of what we thought we were getting.

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The best part of election day is that all of the junk mail campaign propaganda that goes straight to our waste baskets will be replaced by Christmas catalogues.  We prefer Christmas catalogs for several reasons.  They don’t forecast national or international catastrophes if we buy something offered by another catalog.  They usually are honest about their products (the pictures usually are more accurate than the pictures of the hamburgers at fast foot joints). We have never gotten an L. L. Bean catalogue that suggests the products in a Land’s End catalogue are dangerous to our well-being because of who wears them or because of who the wearers hang out with.

And they don’t proclaim exclusive knowledge of what our “values” are.  The Vermont Country Store is filled with traditional values—soap on a rope, Adams Clove chewing gum, old-fashioned popcorn makers or hand-cranked ice-cream makers, or dresses whose styles are timeless.  Coldwater Creek is for people whose values tend toward the stylish with a little “bling” thrown in.   We have yet to see the Vermont Country Store catalogue that says the Coldwater Creek catalogue is too liberal to be good for us.

In short, the catalogues have a lot more things that we will buy than most of the campaign junk mail that winds up in landfills instead of recycle bins.

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Jefferson City is building a new fire station, replacing an older one in the east end of town (the building will be for sale, by the way, in case you want a unique home, assuming you can get a zoning change).  News of the planned sale of the old fire house brings to mind our old friend Derry Brownfield, who used to occasionally remind us why fire engines are red:

“Because they have eight wheels and four people on them, and four plus eight is 12, and there are 12 inches in a foot, and one foot is a ruler, and Queen Elizabeth was a ruler, and Queen Elizabeth was also a ship, and the ship sailed the seas, and in the seas are fish, and fish have fins, and the Finns fought the Russians, and the Russians are red, and fire trucks are always ‘russian’ around.”

Uh-huh.

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Go vote next Tuesday.  Do yourself and your state a favor and spend the next seven days with your reading glass studying all that fine print.

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It’s only a band-aid but I’ll wear it

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A new product came on the market in 1920.  The Band-Aid (registered trademark symbol is supposed to be here) became so popular that its name has become a generic term for anything that temporarily solves a problem.

Missourians will vote on a gas tax increase in a few days and I’m going to vote for it because I am part of the problem the proposed tax increase seeks to temporarily solve.

My car’s dash tells me all kinds of stuff including the cumulative fuel mileage since I bought the car in 2014.  This is the way it looked yesterday.

Another “screen” told me that I have driven this car about 63,000 miles.  In all of that driving, town and highway, summer and winter, short trips to the grocery store or longer trips to, say, Nashville or Indianapolis, this car has averaged 25.4 miles per gallon, pretty good for a 300 hp car that can hit 60 in a little over five seconds.

This car replaced one that got 26 mpg, tops, on a long trip.  Obviously I don’t burn as much gas in this newer car as I did in the older one making me one of those who doesn’t contribute as much in gas taxes with the present car as I did with my previous one. But I drive the same roads most of the time and cross the same bridges most of the time as I did with the previous car.

I am, therefore, one of hundreds of thousands of the people on our roads who are the collective cause of our Transportation Department’s long decline in financial ability to operate our highways.

As a good and responsible citizen who prefers not to replace his shock absorbers anytime soon or fall through a bridge floor, I’m going to vote to increase the tax on the gas I burn.

Frankly, it’s kind of a chicken way to go about it—a ten-cent increase that’s phased in during four years so the percentage increase is small enough that it won’t be too painful to the parsimonious Missourians who have been told for a couple of decades now that it’s okay to think state services and programs can get by on less and less and less and less because the people know better how to spend their money than the government does.

But the potholes and the patches have become such an inconvenience to motorists that maybe they’ll decide the government really can make better use of 2.5 cents than they can.

But this is only a band-aid.   Only a temporary solution.  A good friend is a reason the gas tax isn’t a long-term solution to the problems with our transportation system.

My friend recently bought a Tesla 3.   He likes it a lot.   He’s had it for about a month and has not put a single gallon of gas in it.  (Anybody who buys gas for their Tesla might be planning on setting the thing on fire.) Tesla claims drivers can get 310 miles out of a full battery charge but battery technology is moving quickly and when a 500-mile battery car hits the market at a reasonable price, watch out.

Even 310 miles isn’t bad.  We’ve been told Teslas come with a directory that can be called up on the big cockpit screen and shows where there are chargers—such as these we saw the other day at a fast foot place in Limon, Colorado. It’s like of like the printed directories that came out in the 1970s when a lot of people started driving diesels, showing them where there were gas stations with diesel pumps for cars.

You’ll notice there’s a Tesla like the one my friend has that is getting a re-charge while the driver is inside the Limon restaurant enjoying a casual cheeseburger or something.  Tesla says it has 1,359 Supercharger stations with 11, 234 superchargers like those in Limon. Plug in for thirty minutes and you’re good for another 170 miles.  That gets you to 480 miles with a lunch stop on the way.

Tesla is quickly getting competitors and that means prices will become more reasonable and that means more of us will be paying zero gas taxes before long.  I have thought that each of the last two cars I have bought would be the last completely gas-powered vehicles I would own.  A Tesla, by the way, will get to 60 in about half the time my current car does.

So a ten-cent gas tax increase (spread through four years) is only a band-aid.  It’s going to take more than a Band-Aid to permanently assure our road system doesn’t go back to gravel.  We hope those who formulated the ten cent (after four years) gas tax increase are thinking about what comes when tens of thousands of motorists don’t use gasoline or diesel fuel at all.

I’m going to vote for the band-aid.  The four-year phase-in means it’s flesh-colored so it’s not so noticeable.

What would you save?

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We caught some video a few weeks ago of North Carolinians who had fled their homes and who had taken refuge at the Charlotte Motor Speedway, which was providing parking space for trailers and RVs, camping facilities, and food service to hurricane refugees.  Some of the folks were interviewed about what they had brought with them.

One woman’s pickup truck contained a small chest freezer with all of her home’s frozen food, ready for hookup to an electrical supply.  She also brought along a generator.  A family of seven brought five dogs.  One family brought some children’s drawings and a blanket with family handprints on it. Another family brought things it would use while away from home; the father had stayed at the house in a rural area to prevent looting.

Watching news coverage of various and recent natural disasters such as forest fires and hurricanes and floods, we started thinking about a group consensus exercise we have done from time to time.

If you had a few minutes or a few hours, to flee from your endangered home, what would you take?   We are assuming your first priority is yourself and any other family members.  But after that?  Here’s a list of possibilities.  Feel free to add others in the comment section below.

Computers

Wallet

Passport

Pets

Cell phone

Coin collection

Television(s)

Clothes

Children’s (Grandchildren’s ) Refrigerator drawings

Family archives

Financial records

Video games

Family heirlooms

Jewelry

Medicines or medical supplies

Wedding dress and/or album

Art collection (prints, posters, originals, etc.)

Favorite furniture

Mom’s recipes

Cameras

An additional vehicle or vehicles

Antiques

Baseball card collection

Food

Guns

Family Bible

Insurance policies

Sleeping bags

Tools

I’ve run consensus exercises with groups using a similar list.  Admittedly the exercise assumes there is at least SOME time to grab things although many disasters such as house fires in the middle of the night require instant escape in whatever sleeping attire is being worn—or whatever clothing can be grabbed on the way out.

The answers show generational differences.  Younger people are more likely to take the material things—the television set, the pets, the tools, the jewelry.  Older folks are likely to make memories the priority—pictures, recordings, some family heirlooms.  Younger folks grab things they can replace. Older folks grab things that cannot be replaced.

When I was a high school freshman, I dashed out the front door of my house one morning to get on the school bus.  Six hours later a man met me in the principal’s office to tell me that my parents were okay but all we had left were the clothes we were wearing, the family car, and whatever was in my gym locker.  A person never forgets what was lost in a disaster. A small nugget of fear deep inside never goes away.  And sometimes people spend the rest of their lives trying to recover what was lost (which is why I have a complete set of Fran Striker’s Lone Ranger novels on the bookshelf five feet from where I am sitting).

Many people have their family photographs, documents, and all kinds of other things stored in the cloud, which might alter the disaster-grab priorities.  But a lot of us haven’t gone there yet.

There are three places in our home where we keep family archives, one of them a basement cabinet filled with thousands and thousands of slides.  I’ve made up my mind that if I had the time, those would be the first things to go in the minivan—after the second row seats had been removed, if possible—then the computer. What would you save, beyond yourself, if you had the time to save something?   It’s worth thinking about.

Because we never know.

 

Political fashion statement

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Overalls.

There was a time in our younger years when it was easy to identify the farmer boys at school.  They were the ones wearing the bib overalls.  The rest of us wore Levis or Lee Riders or just denim jeans from Monkey Ward or Sears. The rich kids wore slacks, eventually the kind with buckles in the back.

For a while not long ago, bib overalls became fashionable, especially for girls.  They came in bright colors—which made them fashionable.  Some even had short legs. Can’t recall any of the green or pink overalls with the “Big Smith” label.  Big Smiths had loops to hold hammers and were built for working comfort not for style.  And, like all REAL bib overalls, they were blue.

Almost a hundred years ago, however, overalls were political statements.  There were overalls clubs formed.  The craze started in the southern and southwestern states.  In April, 1920, W. H. Pahlen, an automobile accessory salesman walked into the St. Louis City Hall and announced he was a representative of the American Overall Club.

Pahlen met with F. W. Kuehl, the head of the Municipal Employees Union, and got permission to circulate lists for city employees to sign up as club members. Workers in Kuehl’s office, the Water Rates Office, quickly signed up, promising to wear overalls “whenever possible” until the prices of clothing had been lowered to a fair level.

That’s what the movement was all about.  Clothing costs had taken off (to coin a phrase) in the post-war years and a lot of folks thought the situation was out of hand.

Mayor Henry Kiel refused to pledge to wear overalls but he didn’t object to employees showing up at city hall in denim.  “I have lots of old clothes at home which I can wear in the time to come if I find the prices of new clothing too high…I have no objection to overalls; in fact, I have worn them myself long enough and I might wear them again but I have no interest in the overall club.”

City Sewer Commissioner William Clancy said his workers already had organized an overall club.  In fact, his statement sounded like a mandate. “Until the cost of men’s clothing is reduced to a price commensurate with the ability of the employees of the sewer division to pay for same, all employees in the future will wear overalls.”

Real estate salesmen peddling lots in a new subdivision pledged to greet possible purchasers while wearing overalls until clothing prices came down.  Other real estate salesmen were considered likely to follow suit (to coin another phrase appropriate to the discussion).

Ninety men at the Wagner Electric Company had formed a club, pledging to wear a standard khaki uniform each work day.

The members of the Central YMCA announced they planned to attend church services that day dressed in blue denim.

The Financial Corporation and Development Company chartered, under the common law, an Overall Club to solicit membership from “white-collared” citizens.  Company Secretary E. Kreyling told a reporter, “Lawyers, office men, business men, are all getting in line with the army of blue denim-clad fighters against the profiteers. The association will equip its members with the uniform of the overall brigade and muster them in as high privates in the antiprofiteering army.  There are no generals or colonels or other officers; all are privates.

Three-hundred students and three professors at Washington University signed the agreement to organize the Overall and Old Clothes Club at the school, promising to wear overalls or old military uniforms “or any other cast-off apparel” until “the objective of the national overall movement is attained.”  A dance was scheduled at the school gymnasium with entrance restricted to those wearing old clothes.

About forty Wash-U coeds pledged to refuse to speak to any “gentleman friend” and refusing to be escorted to any event by any guy not dressed in overalls, old military uniforms, or old clothes.

In Washington, D. C., Congressman William D. Upshaw of Georgia caused something of a sensation when he showed up in the House of Representatives wearing overalls.  Nothing unusual about it, he claimed.  It was just a move “to strike at the high cost of clothing.”

But the movement had detractors.  President Robert K. Rambo of the Southern Wholesale Dry Goods Association, not surprisingly, thought the whole thing was foolish because, “It will run the price of overalls up to a figure that cannot be paid by those who of necessity must wear them.”  He thought it made as much sense for overall club members to refuse to buy cars until prices dropped 25 percent. “So long as people are willing to pay any price for the things they want and are not willing to practice self-denial, all talk about cutting down the high cost of living is gabble,” he said.

Owners of cotton mills in New England charged southern cotton-growers had started the whole thing in an effort to drive up the prices of cotton.

Our governor, Frederick Gardner, refused to join the overall club when it was formed in Jefferson City.  He preferred to be a member of the W. Y. O. C., the “Wear Your Old Clothes” Club.  One newspaper observed that it was hard to believe the governor’s claim that his newest suit had been made in 1914, six years earlier.

The Jefferson City Democrat-Tribune was an even harsher critic. It noted a week after the formation of the city’s club that it had not seen any of the signers of the pledge going around “in their best blue denim bib and tucker.”  Instead of driving up the price of denim clothes, said an editorial, “Wear out you old clothes.  Send them to the cleaner. Let’s wear patched clothes as we did in our youth, and we will do more to reduce the price of clothes than all the overall clubs in the world. Cut out useless spending and extravagance and the price of living in every community will be reduced.”

And a few days later, it called the overall movement the latest example of American “pinheadedness” and observing, “Why any sane-headed citizen, whose occupation does not require the wearing of apparel of this kind, should wear overalls to bring down the high cost of living is about as clear as a mud puddle.”

The movement played out in a few months—midsummer, probably.  Its legacy might have been expressed by American Medicine magazine in April, as the movement was gaining momentum. “It is the first indication of protest to come from a class which has been a silent and patient sufferer during all the clashes that have taken place between capital and labor in recent years,” said an op-ed article.

Capital and labor remain part of our national dialogue today. We wonder what new clothing statement will emerge.

Notes from a quiet street—October, 2018

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Get your speculation machines turned on.   Someone asked the other day, “If Josh Hawley is elected to the U. S. Senate in November, who do you think Governor Parson will appoint to finish Hawley’s term?”

Well…..?

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In a long life, a person is likely to make some interesting friends.  Well, all friends are interesting or they wouldn’t be friends, would they?  And if you’re lucky, you get to go to interesting places that broaden your perspective on the world and your place in it.  Some who read these entries might be scornful of those, such as your correspondent, who can see beyond the concrete, steel, and glass of the big cities and can cherish the big and the small worlds that surround us.

A friend in Indianapolis is the Executive Director of the Indianapolis Prize, the world’s leading prize for animal conservation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UARcO8jTVk0

This year’s prize went to Dr. Russell Mittemeier.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=207&v=OqeoeDg-CTo

Harrison Ford flew to Indianapolis to attend the awards dinner.  Nice guy, said those who met him.   Why are we surprised to learn that big-time people we admire from afar are nice?

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In my news director days I sometimes reminded myself and my reporters that it was not always necessary to do a story about an event if nothing was done or said worth reporting.  If a committee or a commission or a council met for three hours but did nothing newsworthy, there was no reason for any of us to waste our listeners’ time by saying a meeting was held and then trying to find something in our notes or on our recorders to write or let people hear that had no purpose other than to justify our presence at the meeting.  “It’s just three hours of your life that you’ll never get back,” I sometimes counseled the news staff.  “Don’t spend any more time trying to find something not worth the time to put on the air.”

Somebody else had the same philosophy a long time ago. From the Jefferson City Daily Capital News of May 10, 1945:

Gov. Phil M. Donnelly yesterday held his first press conference in four days but it was unproductive of printing news.

We were told by a reporter who covered him that Donnelly used to hold two news conferences a day. One in the morning was for reporters from afternoon newspapers.  The one in the afternoon was for reporters from morning papers. He had more news conferences in a month than some governors have in a year.  Or two.

We also had a lot more reporters covering the capitol.

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Some of the saddest places are baseball diamonds in city parks and baseball parks in the big cities when there’s no more baseball to be played. Especially by January. With a little snow. Even hope has left.

But we’ll find it in Arizona and Florida in February.

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A restaurant sign seen from across the room recently:

It raises a question.  Does the sign mean the place isn’t all that dangerous?  Or does it mean that people who eat there live longer?

I rolled the dice.  I had a big breakfast.  So far, so good.

What makes a city also makes a state

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which way are we headed?

The portrait

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

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

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

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

We respectfully disagree.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But his portrait is in the capitol.

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

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

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

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

Sounding the bugle call to public office

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Homecoming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The last eden

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There were three zebras munching on the grass outside our patio on the edge of the Ngorongoro Crater on our last morning in Tanzania.  Monkeys frolicked on the sidewalk as we walked to the lodge for breakfast.  And we realized after two weeks of civilized travel in dangerous places what an amazing adventure we had had.  And it is likely we would never return. But we took a lot of pictures that we will look at time and again because—–

Well, because we were someplace magic, I guess.  That might be the closest we can come to describing being in another world, one that wasn’t a human world.

Imagine being in a place so sublime that you can sit on your patio after dinner and watch what we were able to watch.

It doesn’t take long to realize why Serengeti National Park in Tanzania is called “The Last Eden.”  But dangers lurk in these places.  Not long after we got home, we saw a news article that a tourist at a park where we watched zebras and gazelles graze was killed by a hippo.  We were told that the hippos came around our sleeping places in that park late at night to graze.  They are very territorial and surprisingly quick.  We were in a boat on a Kenyan lake one day and we made sure we kept our distance.

So did the hippo.

Visit all the zoos that you want to visit, but until you have seen the broken line of hundreds of families of approaching elephants stretching to the horizon on your left to a similar line headed to the horizon on your right, these elephants crossing the road twenty yards in front of you, you have not seen elephants.

Until you see a black line in the distance and realize it is thousands of migrating Wildebeests, you cannot imagine the Great Plains in our country as our ancestors in covered wagons saw buffalo.  Nor can you imagine the grasses of that era until you have gazed at the grass of the Serengeti that extends as far as you can see.

 

See the giraffe in a zoo and you have not seen a giraffe until you see a half-dozen of them gliding in their awkward dignity across an open area, nor can you appreciate the magnificence of these creatures until you walk past one of them munching on the leaves of the tree over your head as you head to your room from the dining hall.

And seeing a lion in its zoo “habitat” is not really seeing a lion.  Peering into the tall, tan, grass trying to differentiate between what is grass and what is fur, listening to it eat and then watching something  of powerful grace emerge and walk away, perhaps with a dismissive glance toward you, that is seeing a lion. But it’s often hard to see them, and that’s the way they like it.

For most of us, zoos are where we can appreciate these animals. In some cases, zoos are places where these animals have their greatest hopes of survival as species and we should appreciate the people who want to make sure we see something more than skeletons of extinct animals in our natural history museums.

But friends, if you ever have the opportunity to see them where they really live, save your money for however long it takes to afford the trip, and take it. We signed up for a Central Bank Classic Club tour, knowing we would spend hours in an aluminum tube high in the air, sometimes so crowded we couldn’t stretch out our legs all the way, hoping our tray tables didn’t cut us in half because a dolt in front insisted on lowering his (or her) seat back all the way.  We knew we might get little sleep, would eat microwaved food (which isn’t all that bad) and snacks and might get to watch a movie to help pass the time. More than seventeen hours on three flights each way, and vehicle travel for two weeks that often made us dearly appreciate seat belts might be discouraging to some.  But every inconvenience was worth every penny—and then some.

We endured the worst roads we’ve ever traveled to get to some of the most magnificent areas we have ever seen. (Come along with us for several minutes on a stretch of road that led to one of our lodges. Understand that our guide, James, did an excellent job making our ride as smooth as possible by swerving all over the road to minimize the beating we were taking).  It is worth noting that the tires on our vehicles were TWELVE-ply radials.  The tires you and I drive on our tame Missouri roads are four-ply. Some of our party who wore the wrist-bands that measure how many steps are taken in a day (10,000 is considered healthy) were seeing numbers beyond twenty and thirty-thousand. One even got a reading of 42,000—because of the daily bouncing, twisting, turning and grabbing the OS handle in our Land Cruisers.  At the end of the day we could understand how tennis shoes feel after they’ve been through the clothes dryer. We were surprised when we got home to see that we had each lost about five pounds although we had eaten well.

But, oh, my goodness.  The things we saw—some of them things that are disappearing in the wild.

The rhinoceros is under dire threat from poachers who are killing them for their horns that are ground into a powder and sold for high prices in some countries because of the belief the powder cures cancer or hangovers or improves virility or produces a cocaine-like high.   This is the only time we saw rhinos and these were white rhinos.  We saw no black rhinos because they are considered critically endangered and only about 5,500 are known in all of Africa.

Marvel at the trees, the Acacias with their leaves that seem to grow as clouds over the top branches, but also with thorns similar to the thorns on our locust trees—a reminder that in the wild, beauty and danger often are the same.   And sometimes it’s not the thorns that are the most dangerous things in those trees.

No, we did not get out of our Range Rover to go stand under the tree to take this picture.  On trips such as these, we worship the telephoto lens and the high-megapixel camera.  In fact, we worshipped them more than 3,500 times, probably and we worshipped the big memory card when we got home.

But the eaters and the eaten are facing uncertainty.  The National Geographic we bought at Downtown Book and Toy after our trip had an article about Kenyan farmers who were crowding the habitat of the magnificent creatures we saw poisoning the animals who were there in the first place to protect their crops and livestock.

Did you know that you can tell if an elephant is right-handed or left-handed?  Yep.  And that leads us to the difference between the elephants we saw in Africa compared to those we would see if we ever go to India.  African elephants such as this fellow (and we were a safe distance from him, too), both male and female, have tusks. Asian elephants don’t all have tusks. Those that do are males.  About half of the Asian lady elephants have tusks but they don’t have any pulp in them and they’re called tushes, a word that has a different meaning in our country.  something else.

Yes, the tusks are weapons against predators. But they’re mostly used for foraging, or digging, or stripping bark off trees or just moving things out of the way. And you can tell if an elephant is right-or-left handed (tusked?) by checking which tusk is shorter.

We saw the “Big Five,” the animals the big game hunters most covet—Lion, Cape Buffalo, Rhinoceros, elephant, leopard—throughout our safaris although we saw the rhinos only that one day and leopards were elusive. We didn’t start seeing them until our last couple of days.  We saw them from a safe distance, too, and we wouldn’t have seen them at all if our guides and their trained eyes didn’t spot them for us.

Leopards like to take their food up a tree to eat it.  Otherwise a lion will take it away from them, we were told.  We knew we were in leopard territory when our guide pointed out the horns of a former gazelle dangling from a tree branch.

And if we needed any reminders that the furry friends at home are related to these beautiful, lethal, creatures, this one reminded us that a cat like this, awakened from a nap and ready for action, acts just like our lap-warmer at home.

Okay, that’s enough for this edition of the summer vacation slide show.

Find a way to do what we did.  Find a way to explore cultures and economies and habitats far different from ours and witness some animals who dismiss you as long as you are in your vehicle but who will gladly and quickly kill you if you step outside.

You won’t find anybody named “Puff” out there.