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Fifty 

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It was 5:55 a.m.  Fifty years ago today, I turned on the microphone, pushed a button on the cart machine to play the theme, and said to people throughout Missouri, “This is news on the Missourinet….” for the first time.

We’re going to tell you the story of how it all started and some of the things that it turned into. This will be a long entry.  But half a century is a long time and no, it does not seem like only yesterday.

This entry runs to about 15-16 printed pages, so you will be forgiven if you decide it’s not worth finishing if you start.  But the company isn’t doing anything to celebrate this anniversary, so I’ve decided to put some things on the record. Voluminous things and I apologize for being voluminous. But The Missourinet and the people who made it deserve a historical accounting.

All we did was revolutionize the way Missourians learned about their state government, their candidates, their office-holders as well as the daily flow of events throughout the state.  We lived by the second hand and by the events, some scheduled and some random, and a few were tragedies that put us to tests and challenged our capabilities to respond. But respond we did.

The Missourinet was a dream of my former assistant news director at KLIK in Jefferson City, a station that has since become just one more format in a building full of formats in Columbia, one of the hundreds of stations owned by one of the larger radio station groups in the country.  Clyde Lear was the first Plan B graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, a program that let people do a special project instead of writing a thesis.  I probably would have a master’s degree today if that option had been available in my time at the Journalism School.  But as time went by, I found that doing radio was more interesting than writing a big paper about some arcane issue in the business.  Clyde’s project was how to do a statewide radio news network.

A report Clyde did for KOMU-TV while he was a student shows some of the roots of the company that he, Derry, and others founded.  The creation of a broadcast center on the first floor of the Capitol was a significant development, as you will see.

Bing Videos

Clyde, who earned enough money in the summers selling religious books to finance much of his college education, recalled on his own blog many years later:

My first “run” at starting a radio network failed. It happened in the fall of 1968 between my final book summer and starting at KLIK. My idea was a simple one. I’d charge each station an average of $10.00 per week for feeding them personalized stories from Missouri’s capital city. Bigger stations would pay more; smaller markets less. All I needed was 20 of the some 70 markets to earn $200 per week; pretty good pay in those days. So, I started selling; driving east on I-70 toward St. Louis. KWRE, Warrenton signed on; then St. Louis’ powerhouse rocker, KXOK; then Farmington; then another along I-55 and then Cape Girardeau. At Sikeston in the southeast corner of the state I hit a snag. The owner was a board member of the Missouri Broadcaster’s Association and he reported that he thought the MBA was going to start its own news network. He suggested I chat with the President of the MBA over in Joplin — on the other side of southern Missouri. I remember clearly driving all night for an early morning meeting with this guy who confirmed that most certainly the MBA was getting into the radio network business and there wasn’t a chance I’d succeed. So, I drove home. Five hours. A failure. And dejected. The next day I applied for and got my $85/week job at KLIK. The rest of the story is that the MBA never moved on its scheme. But I’d had a taste; learned tons; and four years later was much wiser.

Just down the hall from us in that century-plus old building at 410 East Capitol Avenue in Jefferson City, was the office of farm Director Derry Brownfield, who had dreams of doing some kind of agricultural marketing program throughout the state.

When I met Derry, I thought he had the perfect name for a farm broadcaster.

Clyde was a terrific reporter and as a Jefferson City native, he had a background in the city I did not have. We made a great team. Both of us were committed journalists, aggressive, creative—and newlyweds.  Clyde left us after a couple of years (to sell driveway sealer for a local lumber dealer—-which might help you understand how paltry his salary was) but he stayed in touch with Derry and with me.

He and Derry got some financial backing to put a farm network on the air on January 2, 1973. They called it Missouri Network, Inc.  Derry did the broadcasting. Clyde was the engineer, manager, salesman and whatever else needed be done. They started with just six affilaites, but  before too long they had a lot of stations and when they started picking up affiliates outside Missouri, they had to change the name.

And that’s where the Brownfield Network began. Today it is known as Brownfield Ag News and bills itself as “the largest, and most listened-to ag radio network in the country with more than 600 affiliate radio stations across Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and the Delta region.”

“The Delta Region” originally was The Delta Net, a specialty network for Missouri’s bootheel and farming areas around it where the crops are a little different—cotton for example—that went on the air a year after Derry’s first broadcast.

By early 1974, Clyde and Derry’s project was strong enough for them to move toward creation of a news network.  The Missourinet, they decided to call it.  Clyde asked me to be his news director.  I put him off because the CBS Regional Vice President and KMOX General Manager Robert Hyland had told me that the station in St. Louis wanted to “bring you in” when there was a news department vacancy. I believed it and so did then-news director Bob Hardy but as the months went by and Hardy moved more to the programming side, and a new news director took over, it became apparent I had been misled.

So I agreed to work for Clyde.

(An early ad from Missouri Life, which the company owned until it cost too much to keep. It flourishes today under another generation or two of owners.)

The only thing close to a statewide radio network that existed before that was something that was haybaled together once every four years for a gubernatorial inauguration.  The Missouri Broadcasters Association arranged all the necessary phone lines for stations throughout Missouri to pick up the KLIK broadcasts of the parade and the ceremonies at the Capitol.

But a full-time network focusing on state government and politics that also picked up stories from affiliates throughout Missouri—a state version of the national networks—was revolutionary in Missouri broadcasting.

Clyde and Derry had built so much confidence in the industry that The Missourinet started with something like 36 affiliates.

I was the seventh employee of the company, the sixth on the staff  at the time because one of the early ones had stayed only briefly and was gone when I arrived. I thought it would be great, at least for a while, to work from 8-5 getting things set up and hiring two other reporters.

Not so fast, Bob—Derry had gone to Rome to cover the World Food Conference.  So my first day started before 6 a.m. and I had to drive to Brownfield’s farm off of Route 179 just past Marion where a studio had been set up in a house originally intended to be a residence.  My first broadcasts were farm news.  Thankfully our other farm broadcaster, Don Osborne, did the markets.  I knew how to do news but I didn’t know a pork belly from a tenderloin, so that worked out well.

When Derry got back, I went to work on the state network side.  The first thing we had to do was think of a new name for a history show I had done on KLIK called “Missouri in Retrospect.”  The station still had the original scripts but I had copies retyped by the station secretary and it was always our plan to do a network version of the show. We kicked around several ideas before slightly paraphrasing the title of Bernard DeVoto’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Across The Wide Missouri. I suggested substituting “our” for “the,” and the rest is, well, history.

It took a lawsuit to allow us to run the program. The manager of KLIK maintained I had done the program as part of my employment there and thus the station owned all the rights to it—although the program began as a voluntary effort on my part to commemorate Missouri’s sesquicentennial in 197I and I had kept doing it voluntarily until I left with the station never telling me I had to keep doing it.  So we had a little lawsuit that let us run the show on the network while the station had someone else reading my scripts.  We finally got it settled without a hearing.

One day, when Clyde was working at KLIK, he looked across the table that separated our desks and said, “You should put this in a book.”  Eventually, there were three.

One day we went to St. Louis to meet a fellow with a synthesizer to create the opening and closing themes for our newscasts.  We settled on a jazzed-up version of the first five notes of The Missouri Waltz, the state song. In 1976 I heard someone comment that it’s a lousy state song, languid and reeking of the old South and having nothing to do with Missouri except being a song about a song that someone learned while sitting on their mammy’s knee, “way down in Missouri where I heard this melodeeeeeee.”  I immediately agreed but not until relatively recently have I heard something immeasurably better—The Missouri Anthem sung by Neal E. Boyd, the young man who won the America’s Got Talent contest.  Neal died in 2018 at the age of 42. There’s a video of him made when he was running for a legislative seat—he ran twice and lost both times—in which he sings the anthem: Neal E. Boyd and Brandon K. Guttenfelder – MISSOURI ANTHEM

After that we had to find a studio, furnish it, hire the other two reporters, and let the world know about us.

The original Carnegie library in Jefferson City was about to move into its new building and had furniture to sell.  The U-shaped circulation desk struck me as the ideal studio piece. We also bought a big two-sided library shelf.  A few days before we went on the air the three members of the news staff exhausted themselves trying to get that big U-shaped desk up a flight of stairs, around a corner to the left and then through a door on the right.  It took all day and we finally took the thing apart enough to get it in.

We didn’t have regular soundproofing materials for the studio so we put carpet on the floor and on all the walls; the orange and red shag design looked okay in the 70s but by the time we left 216 East McCarty Street to move into an attic of an old house across the street, that carpet looked sooooooo 70s.

(The original cast in what is now a Missouri Bar office that once was our newsroom—-with a piece of the “soundproofing.”)

Down on the first floor of what had once been a funeral home was affiliate KWOS. The station break room had a drain in the floor.  It was next to the hand-operated elevator that brought caskets from the display room, down the hall from the Missourinet office, to be used by those who had been prepared in the later KWOS break room.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that we got a group picture taken of the three of us who were the Missourinet that first day.

The first reporter we hired for the Missourinet was Jeff Smith, who had worked with us at KLIK for a while before going to Illinois to find more profitable employment.  And we also hired a young reporter from KRKE in Albuquerque named Charles Morris.  Jeff much later retired as a VP with Northwest Airlines and Chuck went on to a long career in religious broadcasting, recently retiring as the voice of Haven Ministries.  Our get-together a few years ago was the first time we’d been back together in the better part of four decades. That’s Charles on the left, Jeff, me, and Clyde on the right. Frankly, I think we look pretty good, fifty years along.

I don’t think it ever occurred to any of us that this thing might not make it.  I like to say we materialized Clyde’s dream.

We went on the air on January 2, 1975. We had spent the week before that doing interviews and gathering actualities for our first newscasts.  We spent a day “dead-rolling” our programs—newscasts at :55 with repeats at five minutes past the hour (the 7 a.m. newscast was stretched an additional five minutes in those days when stations did longer newscasts, in case anybody wanted to stick with us for the extra time) and again on the half-hour—-except during the noon our when the third feed went out at 12:29 because the farm network had a show that was fed from the Centertown office at 12:35.  Our second newscast on the first day featured Governor Bond welcoming us to the Missouri airwaves and saying a nice thing or two about us.

We were everywhere.  We sent people with the Missouri delegations to the national conventions. When a tornado hit Neosho not long after we went on the air, we sent Chuck to Neosho to give us live reports.  We were in the House and the Senate every day and often would be at the Capitol for night committee hearings when the common folks got to tell their stories about potential legislation and we were recording, recording, recording so listeners could hear the voices of those shaping their public policy.

At the time, the Capitol Press Corps was made up of guys who’d been around for years with two wire services, two newspapers from St. Louis and two more from Kansas City with other newspaper reporters from Cape Girardeau, Springfield, Joplin and St. Joseph. There was some
“who are these guys” questions and there was some skepticism that we would last.  We were a completely new animal and sometimes—because we hadn’t been around very long—we asked some impertinent questions.

People throughout the state heard their legislators arguing about bills. They heard the governor’s voice talking about issues.  They heard the state epidemiologist talking about the Swine Flu, the Revenue Director updating the number of income tax returns being filed (with the assistance of United Press International Bureau Chief Steve Forsythe, we embarrassed one Director of Revenue by having the department mail somebody’s tax return to a stranger).  And our affiliates provided stories from all corners of the state.

Some members of the House didn’t like it when they heard that their voices in debate were being broadcast on the radio but we quickly overcame that.  Once, the chairman of a Senate Committee—William Baxter Waters—demanded that I remove a microphone from a witness table at a hearing. He and I worked that out right afterward and we never had another problem with recording hearings.

There were few hearing rooms at the Capitol when we set up operations, which meant a lot of committees met at night because there was no place to hold hearings in the daytime. The House sometimes had hearings in the Capitol restaurant in the basement because it could hold a pretty good number of people.  It worked out well—until the refrigerators and freezers motors kicked in and unless you were face to face with the committee, you couldn’t hear anything.

Sometimes we had hearings in the legislative library, a wide-open room with the witness table facing the windows and the audience sitting behind them It’s a beautiful place (more beautiful now that it’s been restored to its original colors) but the acoustics were horrible.  Those of us sitting behind the witness struggled to hear what was being said. I had headphones plugged into my SONY 110B cassette recorder, so I was better off.

House Appropriations Committee meetings were in the House Lounge with the large committee seated at a c-shaped section made up of several tables to the left of the entrance. The witness sat at a table across from the entrance and others, including me, sat behind them, to the right. When things got boring, which was most of the time, I would find myself looking at part of the Benton mural and a few minutes later I would realize I was looking at another segment. Several years later when I wrote a book about the mural, I discovered Benton designed the painting to draw the viewer’s eyes through it.

There also were hearings in the Highway Department hearing room a block away, in the rotunda, and at least once, in the House chamber.

One hearing in the Senate Lounge—on the Equal Rights Amendment—was packed and undoubtedly was far beyond fire safety standards.  The Senate committee was around a couple of tables on a platform on the left side from the entrance and I spent the hearing account halfway under the committee table, right in front of the table that witnesses who struggled through the crowd would stand at to testify.

We were doing primary election returns in 1976 when Congressmen Jim Symington and Jerry Litton and former Governor Warren Hearnes were competing for the Democratic nomination to succeed the retiring Stuart Symington, Jim’s dad.  It appeared Litton, a cattle farmer from Chillicothe, had pulled off an upset when we got a telephone call. There had been a plane crash at the Chillicothe airport. We immediately suspected the worst because we knew Litton was staying at home until the numbers came in and then planned to fly to Kansas City for a victory party.  We worked the phones and wound up talking to the driver of the ambulance that had gone to the scene. He confirmed there were no survivors.  Litton and his family all died along the pilot and the pilot’s son.

A few days later we arranged to broadcast the Litton funeral.

Twenty-four years later, Nancy and I were at her sister’s house in Albuquerque, decompressing after a week in the back country of Colorado mapping ancient pueblos and rock art sites, when the KOB-TV newscaster announced that the plane carrying Missouri Senate candidate Mel Carnahan was missing.  We switched over to CNN and it was reporting the plane had crashed. I called the newsroom and everybody was there—including Clyde.  I told Brent Martin, my managing editor, to find Lt. Governor Roger Wilson and stick with him because he was going to be sworn in as governor that night if worst came to worst.  Brent gave Clyde a recorder and sent him to the Capitol.  Roger didn’t want to say much but Clyde, the old fire horse of a journalist got a brief interview from him anyway.

Nancy and I got a little sleep and then drove 996 miles from Albuquerque to Jefferson City the next day. Brent told me later that when he went on the air at 5:55 that morning for our first newscast, he had to stop and remind himself that thousands of Missourians would be hearing for the first time that their governor was dead.

Our Chief Engineer, Charlie Peters, spent the next day getting phone lines installed the capitol for the big funeral that was expected.  By then the word was out that President Clinton and Vice President Gore would be attending the funeral, along with a large number of those I referred to as “the stars of C-SPAN.”  Workers at the Capitol had worked hard to get aluminum stands set up for photographers and TV cameras and facilities for radio and other media.  One of the Carnahan aides complained that the  Secret Service had gotten involved and, “It was secret and not very much service.” We had a little set-to with them when they said we couldn’t broadcast from our planned location. I think the Carnahan folks intervened because the media stayed put.

The funeral was on a beautiful day three weeks before the election and it was outdoors on the south lawn. Clinton, Gore, and members of the U. S. Senate and the House of Representatives walked right past our broadcast position. The AP took a picture of the procession and I’m standing right at the fence, broadcasting what I was seeing.

Two events. Two plane crashes.  I believe they changed the course of Missouri politics.  People have asked me what were the biggest stories the Missourinet covered.  The flood of 1993 was a huge and long=running story.  But the most important stories of the first half-centuries of The Missourinet were the most important ones we covered.

It was a difficult event to broadcast because I had allowed myself to get closer to the Carnahans than I did to anyone else I ever covered. Jean kept me up to date on the book she was writing about First Ladies and I gave a couple of speeches at special events there.  The governor’s coffin was in the mansion’s main hallway and I, as the radio pool reporter, was in the library to the left of the hallway as you enter the front door.  Jean came down to welcome the governor’s office staff and when she came in, she saw me in the library and came over and hugged me and said, “We’re so glad we got to know your son.”

Our son, Rob, was a flight instructor at the time (now a Southwest Airlines Captain) and one evening during the campaign, when Governor Carnahan showed up to fly a light plane to Hermann—he hadn’t had his pilot’s license very long, I don’t think—where was going to meet Jean and their Highway Patrol security officer and go on to a fundraiser in St. Louis. Somebody had to fly the plane back to Columbia.  But when they got to Hermann on that hot summer night, the plane’s engine wouldn’t refire.  The Governor invited Rob to go into town with them and have dinner together. And Jean remembered that when she saw me in the library on a day that she had the heaviest of hearts.

There have been other funerals at the capitol, only a few, and none had a greater influence on What Missouri—and maybe the nation—would become.

Carnahan had gone to St. Louis three weeks before the election for a fund-raiser and then was headed to southeast Missouri for another one when the plane went down.  Many years later, I met the man who hosted the fundraiser in St. Louis and he told me that Carnahan announced during the meeting that he had, for the first time, pulled ahead of John Ashcroft in the race for Senate.

The crash was a huge problem for Ashcroft. He did the honorable thing by pulling all of campaign commercials and not campaigning for the last three weeks.  It was too late to put somebody else’s name on the ballot and on election night, I was anchoring our coverage when, along about midnight the last big slug of votes came in just before we went on with that hour’s report. I remember thinking, “My God, he’s done it.”

We covered a lot of important stories in the first 50 years of The Missourinet. Those were probably the most consequential stories.

Telephone lines were the lifelines of our operation when we started. But as the Brownfield Network expanded into other states, we had to look at an alternate distribution system because the phone bills were getting financially difficult.  Satellite technology was just catching on and Clyde and the other company officials decided we had to distribute our services by the bird.  Our first satellite dish was set up behind the office at 216. The Missourinet and Brownfield Net became the first broadcast networks, including the national ones, to be distributed entirely by satellite.

A bigger uplink dish was installed at the farm office.  In 1989, as we consolidated the farm and news divisions in the one building at 505 Hobbs Road, the company hired a big-lift helicopter company to airlift the big dish from the farm to the new office site.  I think there still is a video on Youtube that shows what happened—-that shortly after the helicopter lifted the dish off and headed toward town, one of he retaining bolts snapped and the added eight was more than the others could hold so the whole thing fell a few hundred feet into a farm field with a disastrous “crunch” and our dish became material for recycling.  Fortunately, the incident happened early so the dish didn’t fall on top of road, a home, or even a shopping mall.  We used a portable uplink until we got all of the insurance stuff settled and built a whole new one at 505.

One day we got job application filled out in pencil from a kid working our affiliate in Lexington. When we were far enough along to hire a sports director, we brought him in.  His name was (and still is) John Rooney.  Each morning, after I had finished the major newscast and John had finished his 7:20 sports report, he and I would make a fast trip to the Yum-Yum Tree up on High Street to pick up a version of a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit and a diet cola drink called TAB.  We’d be back in plenty of time to do the 7:55 newscast.

John later teamed with another up and coming young sports broadcaster for some of our early Missouri Tiger basketball broadcasts.  Both John and Bob Costas went on to long careers in major sports broadcasting. John, of course, has been in the St. Louis Cardinals broadcasting booth for a long time.

After a few years at 216, we moved across the street into a house at 217 E. McCarty. The news department was in the attic. Our studios were one floor down. It was dark up there so Clyde installed a skylight, which was fine until summer arrived and that old attic, as attics do, got hot, really hot. There were times when I’d send some members of the news staff to the kitchen to cool off. We finally got up on a ladder and scotch-taped some wire-service fanfold paper to the ceiling to deflect some of the sun’s rays and heat.

We moved to 505 Hobbs Road, the present headquarters of the two networks, in 1988-89.  That place became the nerve center of a major broadcasting corporation that was moving to become one of the nation’s dominant entities in collegiate sports radio and is today THE largest.

As time went by and as technology changed, my House reporter—Travis Ford—convinced the Speaker to let us run live floor debate on our web page. I did the same with Senate leader Jim Mathewson.  A few years later, we convinced the Missouri Supreme Court, which only recently had agreed to let people record and film its hearings, let us stream arguments before it. I’m not sure if we were on the internet for the trial of impeached Secretary of State Judith Moriarty, but I do know we recorded the whole thing. The recordings are in the oral history archives of the State Historical Society in Columbia.

When the state re-instituted the death penalty with legal drug injections as the means, we knew we had to cover executions because we believed the state should not inflict its most severe penalty without statewide news media present, and by then UPI had faded away, leaving us and the Associated Press as the only statewide media organizations. The Missourinet’s Dan McPherson covered the first one—which was done in the gas chamber at the old penitentiary (they couldn’t use gas because the seal around the door to the chamber had rotted away and witnesses as well as the honored guest would all be executed so a lethal cocktail of three drigs ws used for George “Tiny” Mercer, who was about as bad as they come.  Dan was one of the pool reporters that covered the event and reported to the large number of other media folks what had happened—and there was a large crowd for the first execution in more than a decade. Dan is one of three of our former reporters who had to learn  new way of writing and thinking when they went to law school. He’s been an assistant attorney general for a long time.

In 2009, I covered the execution of Dennis Skillicorn, one of 22 executions I covered, first in Potosi and then in the newer prison at Bonne Terre.  Executions were done at midnight then (now they’re scheduled for 6 p.m.) and reporters then, and now, cannot use cell phones during the event itself—or other recording or photographic devices.  I kept notes of the times various events occurred that night and afterwards, in my motel room, I sent out a series of tweets doing a chronological recounting of events.  I think I might have been the first reporter in the world to tweet an execution.

And it goes on through the pronouncement of death, interviews (if there were any) of survivors of his victims and eventually with me leaving the prison.

It got a lot of reaction. Some thought it was gruesome. Some thought it was a revelation. Some were critical, including some anti-death penalty people in Europe—as I recall.  I only did this once, not because of any bad reaction but because when executions were finished and I was back in my motel room, I had to write my stories and feed them back to Jefferson City for the morning newscasts. By then it would be about 4 a.m., and my only thought was getting to bed.

After the 1986 elections, we compared the two wire services reporting of the numbers and found a lot of inconsistencies. I met with Secretary of State Roy Blunt to see how we could develop a centralized, reliable election reporting system, and the Missouri Elections Consortium was born, giving the media that paid the consortium fees that were used to pay Blunt’s staff who had to run the feeds.  Secretary of State Bekki Cook took the consortium system and made it available to the public at large.

We believed in pushing the envelope.  One year, we had an intern whose expertise on the internet was so much a benefit that we almost started doing video feeds of the legislature. We were wired for let people watch the state senate’s last day but backed away at the request of the President Pro Tem who worried the senators would misbehave on the last day if they knew they were being televised. By the time the next session began we had lost our intern and some internal company management changes ended our experimentations.

One election, we went on the internet live at 7 p. m. and stayed live until we wrapped up our coverage after midnight.  During the feed we paused to do reports on the network.  We had a small audience of people watching us do radio in the August Primary that included reports from reporters or stringers at various campaign headquarters. Our audience tripled for November.  The next time, we tried to use Google Groups so we could have videos. Our success was spotty but we were looking forward to taking the next step but it never happened.

Clyde let me have a summer off one year to work with the Missouri Cable Television Association to establish a Missourinet cable channel that would be kind of a hybrid between ESPN, CNN, and PBS.  We put together a terrific programming package that we could deliver to the cable operators throughout the state for a price per customer per month that was about as much as a large bag of M&Ms with peanuts.  When I pitched it to the local operators, they looked at me as if I was a telephone post.

Today the House, Senate, and the Supreme Court do their own streaming.  House floor sessions are televised and so are some hearings. Inaugurations are televised, streamed, and broadcast.

One reason we were able do the things we did, or try the things we tried, was that the owner of the company was a journalist at heart.  As we have seen radio change in these last fifty years, and too often not for the good of the communities in which they operate, we realize how important Clyde was to the things we were free to do.  I think Missourians are better off because we didn’t just do newscasts but because we were motivated to push that envelope.

Because Clyde was a journalist at heart, he let me do a lot of things—especially getting involved with the Radio-Television News Directors Association, the equivalent in our business to the American Bar Association or the American Medical Association. The company paid for my travels to meetings in Washington and convention cities. I was the first person elected to lead the organization twice and my active participation in it led me to lecture programs on college campuses and even conducting seminars on creating free newsrooms in Romania and Poland after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Clyde never voiced any concerns about the costs of those activities. And I always had great news staffs that kept up our levels of reporting while I was gone.

I walked out the door for the last time as news director on December 1, 2014. As they say in sports, “I left it all on the field.”

The Missourinet is still where I left it but not the same as I left it.  It has changed as the radio industry has changed.  But it still fills its role as the statewide news organization that keeps an eye on our government and our politics.

Clyde retired before I did and I see fewer faces that I recognize whenever I visit to record some new episodes of Across Our Wide Missouri (I have a new batch on a shelf next to me) or drop in for some other reason.

A lot of people worked for The Missourinet in those years and good people work for it now.  It’s different but the industry is different.

Fifty years ago today we went on the air.  We started something good.  We had faith in each other that we could do it.

We started with Royal manual typewriters (our first newsletters were called “Notes from a Battered Royal—which all these years later has morphed into “Notes from a Quiet Street.”), cart machines in the studio, one reel-to-reel tape recorder that we used for telephone interviews (everything else was one-to-one in person interviews) and one UPI wire machine.

And we had no idea what the network or the company would be fifty years later.

It’s only a tiny part of a billion-dollar corporation with headquarters in Plano, Texas now, but it keeps churning out meaningful products and profits.  Learfield Communications helped inaugurate the big-money collegiate sports marketing deal to the country when we bid six million dollars to broadcast Missouri Tiger basketball and football games for five years.  Today, Learfield says, “From tailgates to t-shirts, courtside seats to NIL activations, on game day and every day, Learfield is your connection to college sports and live events. We engage 150M+ loyal and passionate fans across the US with unrivaled leadership across sponsorship, ticketing, licensing, and more. Our playbook is powered by media, technology, and data, unlocking value for university partners and venues while connecting brands to fans.”

The 50th anniversary of the Missourinet will pass quietly today. The corporation decided there would be no celebration. But that’s okay because The Missourinet will do what it did on January 2, 1975—cover the news for the people of Missouri, with good people who will do it responsibly and do it well.

Four of the founders of various parts of what became Learfield Communications (a combination of Lear and Brownfield)  are in the Missouri Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame—Clyde, Derry, Rooney, and me. It’s quite an honor but more important, it’s a validation that Clyde had a dream and we make it come true far beyond what any of us could conceive.

So there’s some of the story of The Missourinet, just for a historical record.  It began fifty years ago today, on this date, January 2, 1975.

It seems like it was only—

Fifty years ago.

Governor Parson has pardoned my killer.

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I was Robert Newsom, a middle-aged widower-farmer in Callaway County who bought a 14-year old girl slave and raped her whenever I wanted, including in the farm wagon on the way home from the sale.  She had two children with me and was expecting a third when I went to her cabin in June of 1855 looking for more sex.

She beat me to death because I had ignored her protests against my abuse. and had warned me not to come to her cabin. She burned my body to hide what she had done.

This is not a tale of reincarnation. I died in the second act of a three-act reader’s theatre production of Song of the Middle River, written by Thomas D. Pauley III, a longtime professor at Lincoln University that I got to know and appreciate late in his life. He was at the performance, just short of his 90th birthday.

(MU professor and distinguished actor Clyde Ruffin, who played George—the slave in whom Celia sought refuge—and Griot, who told the story; MU Theater student Valerie Raven-Ellen Backstrom* as Celia; and Bob Priddy)

The State Historical Society, produced three readers’ theatre productions that were performed at Boonville’s historic Thespian Hall. This one was performed on February 6, 2009.

Celia was hanged on December 21, 1855 for killing Newsom.  She’s referred to in various accounts as Cecilia Newsom because slaves often were given the last names of their owners no matter what their real names were.  But she was never considered part of the family—just property.

As Newsom, I played someone whose wife had died in 1849. Some say we had fourteen children in the 37 years we were married. Others list ten.  By the time she died, I owned 800 acres of farmland southwest of Fulton. About half of the families in Callaway County owned at least one slave, and about one out of every three people in the county were property then.

Several counties along the river in central Missouri had high percentages of enslaved population, earning the area the title of “Little Dixie.”  Ten percent of all of the people in Missouri were enslaved then; thirteen percent of all families had at least one slave. The slave population was closed to 115,000 and there were 24,300 slave owners. The 1860 census put a monetary value on slaves—$44.2 million. That’s the equivalent of about $1,578,320,000 today.

It was not uncommon for owners of female slaves, even young ones, to define “property” and “property rights” broadly, to say the least. After she beat him to death, she burned his body and buried the ashes and other remains.

Reports indicate her defense attorney used an 1814 law protecting women from sexual assault but the judge ruled that Celia, as a slave was not legally recognized as a citizen and as a slave, her status as a woman was not recognized in the law, a ruling underlined a few years later when the Supreme Court ruled Dred Scott had no right to sue for his freedom because black people would never be considered citizens.

She was hanged. Nobody knows where she’s buried. But now Governor Parson has pardoned her and in doing so has placed a new spotlight on justice for those our society has considered—and in some cases still does consider—different and therefore not deserving of having the rights the rest of us have.

One of her descendants, Alan Turner, said at the recent commemoration of her execution in Fulton, “It’s worth mentioning  that if Celia’s act of self-defense occurred today, she most likely would not have been executed. Robert Newsom would be convicted of a crime instead”

Each year, some of Celia’s descendants gather in Fulton to remember her case. They hope Callaway County will take notice of what happened to Celia and that the legislature will pass a bill requiring schools to make her story part of the learning process.

Legislation has been filed for the session starting soon.  But it might be difficult to pass in an era where many loud voices think the most important this is to post the Ten Commandments in school and teach about the Bible.

They seem to be afraid that they will lose something if their children learn about all of our history.

Despite them, we are slowly being taught about the time when many of our ancestors were not good enough to be considered citizens—-and when some of our residents are deemed not worthy of living here.

The descendants hope a monument to Celia can be erected in Fulton to remind all of us of what our culture once was and to make us uneasy today when it is easy to condemn others as non-citizens or to look at them as lesser than ourselves.

A year or so ago, a monument was erected in St. Louis honoring enslaved people who sued for their freedom and the white attorneys who helped some of them win. It sprang from work beginning more than thirty years ago when the local records preservation program began at the state archives. Then-archivist Ken Winn recalled (Rescuing History – Rediscovering the St. Louis Freedom Suits – FREEDOM SUITS MEMORIAL FOUNDATION (stlfreedomsuits.org) the discovery of the documents involved in 300 lawsuits and more than 350 people:

Unfortunately, the verdicts frequently go unnoted in the case files, but of these 300 cases it would appear nearly half of the enslaved plaintiffs won their lawsuits. This is remarkable because the plaintiffs could not testify on their own behalf and were forced to rely on white lawyers and judges and needed white witnesses to help them. They risked physical harm, harassment, and intimidation from those who wished to keep them in bondage. 

All of these suits did not happen in only in St. Louis. A slave named Sant won his suit in Boone County; we don’t know if there were more filed in other counties but it would be no surprise if some ere.

In Greene County, Millie Sawyers finally won her freedom on a third attempt in 1836.  But after she won her freedom, a mob took her from a home and beat her badly. Some of those involved are considered founders of Springfield.  It’s thought she survived but she disappears from the historical record after that.

A play called “The Milly Project” was created and performed in Springfield a few years ago. It later was turned into a documentary film.

We had an outstanding discussion about the memorial and about The Milly Project in a podcast for the Missouri Bar more than  a year ago. (‘Is It Legal To…?’: Missouri’s Freedom Suits, ‘The Milly Project’ (mobar.org)

Our state and nation are great at building statues to men. We have a few showing women.  But monuments to slaves?  Hardly any. We need them.

In Boonville, a statue of Hannah Cole commemorates her as the first white woman to settle on the south side of the Missouri River in central Missouri.  There probably was a second woman who was with her—a sister-in-law named Phoebe—but she’s overlooked.

And so is Lucy, a third woman, Hannah’s slave, given to her as a wedding present according to some accounts, who stayed with Hannah until she died and is buried near her mistress in a cemetery south of Boonville although the exact locations are uncertain. She would have been the first black woman in that part of the state (there might have been a male slave but that history is even more cloudy that hers).There’s not statue nor is there any marker nothing that she probably was on the same pirogue that came across the river with Hannah and her sister-in-law, that she braved the hostile conditions of 1810 just as the white women did. But there is nothing either in the city or in the cemetery that says she existed.

On December 1, 1862, Abraham Lincoln told congress, “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise —with the occasion…”

In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free honorable— alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just — a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.

On the larger scale, Lincoln’s words are fitting for our times.  But in terms of today’s discussion, his comment that, “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free” is particularly appropriate, then as part of s second revolution, and today as a warning against accepting any form of tyranny—within or without.

When I was Robert Newsom that night on the stage of the oldest continuously operating theatre west of the Alleghenies—it opened nineteen months after Celia was hanged—her story became part of my story.  Whether we like it or not, her story is part of the nation’s story.

Alan Turner said in Fulton a few days ago, “There’s a saying that time heals pain, and that is true to an extent, but some pains transcend generations and never completely heal.” Unfortunately, each generation seems to find someone new on whom to inflict the pain of inequality.

So, Justice has finally come for Celia, thanks to Governor Parson. But the search for justice remains for many and for some, the pains and the search are ongoing.  And as long as that is happening, the desire in our Constitution for a more perfect union remains unfulfilled.

*(Photo Credits: State Historical Society of Missouri and The Missouri Bar. Valerie has since 2009 become an award-winning playwright, illustrator, author, and teaching artist. She is based in Chicago)

Rape Theology

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The Missouri Senate went after the legislature’s favorite annual punching bag the other day—Planned Parenthood.  It argued about a bill that would keep the organization from collecting Medicaid reimbursements for dispensing family planning and other women’s health services including cancer screenings.

Planned Parenthood hasn’t provided abortions for a couple of years in Missouri.  But that’s not enough for the PP-haters who don’t want the folks working for the organization to even say the word. And suggesting someone who has thought through the issue and still wants an abortion to places in other states, well, that is calamitous.

One Senator wants to make it a crime for a woman to seek an abortion—although she’d have to leave the state to have it.  He also would have rapists castrated or shot.

Apparently the Senator is not familiar with Article 1, section 8, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution that gives Congress exclusive power over trade among the states. It also limits state powers to limit interstate commerce. And abortions ARE interstate commerce. But ignoring the U. S. Constitution has not been a problem in the legislature on the hot issue du jour for some time.

Another Senator says rapists should get the death penalty and suggested forcing the victim to carry the fetus to term created by the rapist who should be executed “may even be the greatest healing agent you need in which to recover from such an atrocity.”

Still another suggested that rape might be “mentally taxing…(but) it doesn’t justify an abortion.”

Missouri Independent reports she continued, “God does not make mistakes. And for some reason he allows that to happen. Bad things happen. I’m not gonna be able to support the amendment because I am very pro-life.”

I have often remarked that nothing screws up faith more than religion, or as one of my favorite cartoonists expressed it a few years ago:

To describe rape as “mentally taxing” is completely inappropriate.  So is the idea that executing the rapist would be a great healing agent. An African-American member of the senate attributed her existence to the rape of her great-grandmother, a slave, who by her white master.  The event was “mentally taxing” enough that the victim killed herself.

Several years ago, a similar argument against putting rape and incest exemptions into the abortion was pushed by a woman state representative who argued that it is God’s will that  something beautiful (the birth of a child) could result from something so bad as rape or incest.

I wrote in the old Missourinet Blog that, that kind of reasoning argues against rape being a crime. If God intended something beautiful, a baby, to result from something so ugly as a rape or incest, then God must have intended for the rape and incest to happen—especially since God is perfect.  And if that’s the case, rape should be considered an Act of God, not a crime.  After all, God does not make mistakes.

This is why we have, presumably, a separation of church and state.  Religious Dogma should not replace a law of humanity.  But it does and there are many who want to erase that separating line entirely. To do so would thus make one religion more free than others. And that would mess up the idea that this is a nation that practices religious freedom.

My theocracy is better than your theocracy. My God is better than your God. That’s what it all boils down to.

The major flaw in the “God does not make mistakes” argument is that God created people who make mistakes because God gave people free will.

So we live in an imperfect world and reconciling the imperfections in a way that makes living more humane is a never-ending argument. Killing others in the name of God has only produced never-ending wars.

Killing the rapist raises questions about the entire right to life philosophy. Would it be a “healing agent” to kill the rapist of a pregnant ten-year old girl who will likely not understand why she is left to bear what some consider God’s Gift? And if the product of a rape is a gift from God, how can killing the bearer of that gift be considered correct policy?

It is not our intention here to argue whether there should be abortions. But there are two innocent lives involved, not one.  And to try to make rape a theological issue is a political Gordian knot.

If we accept that God is perfect then we must accept that it was God’s will that we mortals are imperfect. And as imperfect creatures we make imperfect decisions. The challenge is in determining the fairness of the way we deal with those imperfections.

Maybe some issues are beyond the law and ongoing gyrations trying to make them fit within a law that carries equal rights and compassion for everyone the law touches is beyond human capabilities.  In those instances, the decision should rest with the individual, their doctor, and God.

Turn to faith, not religion, for the ultimate guidance.

Lynching

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The circulation of the word “lynching” in high political circles is an insult to one of the most despicable words in our language.

Missouri knows about lynching. A study by the Equal Justice Institute two years ago documented 4,084 lynchings in the South between 1877 and 1950. It also found sixty lynchings in Missouri during that time, the second most of any state just outside the south. Oklahoma had 76 of the 341 events labeled by the institute as “racial terror lynchings.”

In April, 1906, Horace Duncan and Fred Coker, accused of rape in Springfield, were taken from the jail and hanged from a tower on the town square. Five-thousand white people—men, women, AND children—watched the hangings and then the burning and shooting of the bodies.

The men had alibis, confirmed by their employers. But the mob never let them have their day in court, never let them present evidence of their innocence. Newspaper reports after the fact said the men were innocent.

A third man, Will Allen, accused of murder without any evidence, was chase down and strung up on the same tower.

That was lynching.

1931. Raymond Gunn confesses to killing a woman at a rural school near Maryville. While Gunn was being taken in the sheriff’s car to a court hearing, a mob stopped the car, dragged Gunn out and took him to the school. He was tied to a roof ridge pole. He and the building were doused with gasoline and the building was set afire. About fifteen minutes later the building collapsed. When the fire burned down enough, spectators took burned fragments of the building as souvenirs.

That was lynching.

In 1919, Jay Lynch was convicted in Lamar of murdering the sheriff and the sheriff’s son during a jail break. Missouri had taken a brief break from having the death penalty so he was sentenced to life in prison. While Lynch was in the judge’s office saying goodbye to his family, two dozen people burst in, put a rope around his neck and dragged him to a nearby tree. When the first branch broke, the rope was thrown over a stronger one and Lynch was hauled up to die. A large crowd cheered. Lynch was one of four white men lynched that year, four out of 83 people lynched that year nationwide.

That was lynching.

1893, Audrain County. Emmett Divers, charged with murdering a white woman, was taken by an estimated crowd of 500 people to and bridge and hanged. After Divers died, his body was taken to the fairground and hung from a pole and later burned.

That was lynching.

1942, Scott County. Cleo Wright, accused of murdering a woman and shot eight times resisting arrest, was grabbed by a mob who poured gasoline on him and burned him in front of a Sikeston church. The incident led Governor Forrest Donnell to order the Highway Patrol and the local sheriff to put more officers on the scene.   But about 100 black residents who fled never went back. Some black residents who stayed armed themselves and patrolled their part of town.

That was lynching.

1923, Columbia. James T. Scott, a University of Missouri janitor, a World War I veteran, the grandson of a slave, was identified by a 14-year old girl as her attacker. A mob using sledge hammers broke into his jail cell, took him out and hanged him from the Stewart Road bridge over the MK&T Railroad tracks.. A University professor who tried to stop the mob was told to get out of the way or he’d be lynched, too. St. Louis newspapers reported the girl identified another man, who had shared the cell with Scott. Reports say Scott told the mob that took him from the jail that the other man, Ollie Watson, had told him that Watson was the attacker.

That was lynching.

Three years ago, the Association for Black Graduate and Professional Students at the university dedicated a historic marker alongside the KATY Trail near the spot where the Stewart Street Bridge, from which James T. Scott was hanged, once stood. “Lest We Forget,” it says at the top.

1882. Kansas City. Moments after a white policeman was shot, Levi Harrington was stopped by officers and arrested although there was no evidence to implicate him in the crime. A crowd forcefully seized Harrington and hanged him from a nearby bridge and shot him.

That was lynching.

In 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative unveiled a plaque not far from the bridge site, commemorating the lynching.

A century earlier, in 1918, Missouri Congressman Leonidas Dyer introduced a bill in the House of Representatives making lynching a federal crime. The Senate approved the bill last year. The House has yet to act. There remains no federal anti-lynching law.

Missouri has no anti-lynching law.  Participants can be charged under murder statutes.

Let us be clear. What is happening in Washington is not a lynching. Saying it is insults our language, cheapens the shameful actions of some of our ancestors, and dismisses the agony of those who fell victim to public savagery.

 

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.

-0-

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.

—

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.

Five grams

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The state used five grams of pentobarbital in May to execute Earl Forrest, the 87th Missouri inmate executed by lethal injection since George Mercer died in the gas chamber at the old penitentiary more than twenty-seven years ago.  Mercer was executed in the gas chamber because the prison system did not have a place for lethal injections. Although gas was still an option, the gas chamber was no longer safe to use. It was good enough for the inmate’s experience but the chamber’s sealing gaskets were so bad that it was likely no witnesses would have been left alive to testify that he had been legally executed. The chairs were removed from the gas chamber and a gurney was placed inside for Mercer.  

Twenty-five men remain under death sentences in Missouri but it might be some time before your correspondent or someone else on behalf of the Missourinet goes back to Bonne Terre for another execution.  

Forrest was the 22nd execution these eyes have watched.  Those men were responsible for at least 36 murders.  Several, including Forrest, were considered likely killers in other states or were suspected but not charged in other Missouri murder cases. 

He killed three people, including a Dent County Deputy Sheriff, in a meth-related incident.  Death for Forrest came peacefully, a situation that seems unfair to many.  When the curtains around the execution room were opened, witnesses could see him lying on the medical gurney, his head turned toward those he had invited as his witnesses.  He, as has been the case with all of the others we’ve seen, was tightly strapped down so that only his head and feet could move.  Although the time of death was set at 7:18 p.m., he might have died sooner.  He stopped wiggling his feet and talking to his witnesses only about 45 seconds after the drug started flowing.   The curtains are closed after five minutes to let the medical staff check for signs of life, then reopened when they have certified the inmate is dead.  

The Attorney General’s office calls witnesses a few days later to see if we saw any signs of suffering or pain, just in case death penalty opponents try to claim the drug causes the recipient to suffer.  For the record, we have never seen any of the 22 men we have watched indicate any sign of pain and suffering.  Forrest showed no indication of discomfort.

Missouri used to use a three-drug procedure to produce death.  But it now uses only one because of court rulings and industry actions against the use of FDA-regulated drugs for executions.

These 112 men, living and dead—the 87 executed and the 25 waiting—are not the only ones who have been sentenced to death by lethal injection in Missouri.  The Corrections Department says 181 men and five women have been given that sentence. What about the others?  

The department gives reporters an information packet at each execution that includes a list of the disposition (a pretty cold word, but we are talking about murder cases here) of all of those sentenced to death.  You may interpret what we are about to tell through whatever lens you view the death penalty.  For some, it will be an indication that the system works.  For others, it will be an indication that it is flawed and might have led to executions of innocent men.   Some, perhaps many, of those who have been re-sentenced to life without parole won new trials and took a plea bargain instead of risking another death sentence in a new trial. 

This stuff can get pretty complicated but we think we have a pretty good handle on the people who have been facing a death sentence but are not facing it now, and why.

Thirty-nine inmates have gotten new trials that resulted in sentences of life without parole.  One of them has since died.  Those surviving range in age from 36 to 76. Two are women.

Five more were sentenced to life with a chance for parole after fifty years. They are now 55-68 years old. Although one is now in his 37th year in prison, he is not thirteen years from possible parole because his new sentence came after a new trial and the clock is resent with that new sentence.  He’s 61 now and still has a long time to go.

Four men were resentenced to life for a lesser crime, second-degree murder.  Two, ages 46 and 55, remain in prison.  One completed that lesser sentence in 2010 and was released. The fourth died in prison.

Fifteen inmates facing the death penalty have died of natural causes.  They were 33 to 82 years old. Two were women.

One inmate became a prison murder victim four years after he arrived in a state prison.

Three have committed suicide. One killed himself at the age of 61, ten months after being sentenced. One died at 31.  The third, a woman, committed suicide in her cell at age 43 just a few hours after a jury had convicted her in her second trial.  

One inmate, whose conviction was reversed not long after being put in prison, was transferred to a federal prison on federal charges and remains there. If he’s released, he still faces the murder charge in Missouri.

A half-dozen have been released, some after their convictions were reversed, including one who was retried and convicted of manslaughter and then released after finishing the manslaughter sentence.

Some inmates are awaiting new trials and we’ll assign them to a category after those trials take place. 

Four inmates are under a “special circumstances” category.   The death sentence for Roosevelt Pollard is under a stay because he’s been declared mentally incompetent.  His conviction remains and if his condition improves, he still could be executed.  He’s been in prison thirty years and is now 53. 

We’re not sure where to put David Barnett although he could be the fortieth inmate in the “life without parole” category.  His conviction was reversed last year by a federal judge and sent back to the lower court.  The prosecution had 180 days to file a request for a new death sentence. It appears that time has elapsed, meaning Barnett automatically gets life without parole.

Two inmates achieved “special circumstances” status under Governor Mel Carnahan.

Darrell Mease, who murdered a man, his wife, and their paraplegic son, was scheduled for execution January 27, 1999.  That would have been the second day of Pope John Paul II’s visit to St. Louis.  The Missouri Supreme Court re-set the date for February 10 after realizing the situation with January.  The Pope, in a private conversation with Carnahan, urged him to show mercy to Mease.  Carnahan, who had approved 26 executions by then, later said that he could not resist making an exception with Mease after the Pope looked him in the eye and asked for mercy.  So Mease shows up as one of the 39 on the “life without parole” list.

William Boliek, now 60 years old, was to be executed in 1997.  But two days before he was to die, Carnahan ordered a three-member board to investigate claims that his court defense had been inadequate.  The board submitted a report to Carnahan who was killed in a plane crash in 2000 before acting on its recommendations.  The wording of Carnahan’s stay is such that only he could have lifted it. Governor Holden asked the Missouri Supreme Court to vacate the stay but the court refused.

It’s hard to predict how many of the 25 still under a death sentence will be executed.  All still have enough appeals remaining to lead to speculation that Forrest will be the only execution this year.  Questions about the pentobarbital used for executions remain.  Two days after Forrest’s execution, Pfizer announced steps to keep any of its products from being used for executions.  Industry observers say that shuts the door on access to open-market drugs used in that process.

The Corrections Department refuses to identify the source of the drug it uses although some sources say Missouri gets it from a compounding pharmacy in Oklahoma.  Texas and Georgia also get the drug from compounding pharmacies. 

Licensed pharmacists, licensed doctors, or a third party supervised by a licensed pharmacist can mix or change the ingredients of a drug to tailor medication for a specific purpose.  Sometimes a patient needs medicine in liquid form although it is available on the open market only as a pill the person cannot swallow.  Or maybe the medication has a dye in it that causes an allergic reaction.   The compounded drug is not under Food and Drug Administration regulation, meaning the FDA cannot verify its safety or its effectiveness.

Regardless, five grams of pentobarbital does the job.  Effectively.

Killing death

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We’ve gotten emails from a conservative group proudly announcing that the conservatives appear to have realized the death penalty needs reassessment.

It’s interesting that there is a certain amount of chest-thumping about this discovery because until now the conservative majority in the Missouri legislature has turned up its collective nose at any proposal by Democrats to study the issue or to just repeal the death penalty.

You can ask Senate minority leader Joseph Keaveny about the seemingly sudden shift. He has tried to get legislation approved to study the issue for several years but has been rebuffed repeatedly.

Be that as it may, Senator Paul Wieland’s bill to repeal the death penalty has cleared a Senate committee and is going to the full senate for debate with a committee recommendation that the Senate approve the bill. Wieland’s latest press release squarely addresses an issue that critics say the pro-life forces have sidestepped for years—at least in the eyes of death penalty opponents. “I am a devout Catholic,” says Wieland in his release, “and I believe if I’m going to be pro-life, I should be so on both ends of the spectrum—from conception to natural death.”

No one will be watching this bill more than Earl M. Forrest.

The state Supreme Court has set a May 11 execution date for him because back in 2002 he got into an argument with a woman about her purchase of a mobile home and a lawn mower from him. He killed her and a man who was at her home, took $25,000 worth me meth and went to his home. When law enforcement officers showed up, he got into a shootout with them and killed a Dent County deputy sheriff and wounded the county sheriff. Forrest was wounded. He’s now 66 years old. The U. S. Supreme Court has refused to review his case and all of his state and federal appeals otherwise appear to have run out. The legislature is to adjourn two days after his scheduled execution so there is some urgency to deal with Wieland’s bill.

Lloyd Leo Anderson, the last man to be executed by lethal gas in Missouri, was in a position similar to that of Forrest. After Anderson’s appeals ran out, St. Louis Representative Jay Howard introduced a bill to end capital punishment. Governor Warren Hearnes stayed Anderson’s execution until the legislature decided the issue. When the legislature killed Howard’s bill, Hearnes lifted the stay and Anderson was gassed on January 26, 1965. But not before some angry last words: “Tell them I didn’t get a fair trial. Tell Hearnes to kiss my ___ ass. The same to the rest of you guys,” apparently referring to the large number of witnesses that crowded around the gas chamber, peering through windows to watch him die minutes later.

Missouri executed eighteen men between November, 2013 and September 1, 2015 when I watched Roderick Nunley die quietly for the kidnap, rape, and murder of a fifteen-year old Kansas City school girl a quarter century earlier. He was the eighty-sixth Missouri inmate executed by drugs. The first drug-induced execution was that of George Mercer January 6, 1989—in the gas chamber at the old penitentiary. No new execution facilities were available then.

There are twenty-seven men left under a death sentence in Missouri. No one has been sentenced to death in the last two years, mostly because of plea bargains—as we understand the situation.

Wieland’s bill says anyone sentenced to death by the time his bill would become law on August 28 would be re-sentenced to life without parole. At least twenty men who had been sentenced to death already have been re-sentenced to life without parole after further re-evaluation of their cases. Two men, Robert Driscoll and Joseph Amrine, have been released after their death sentences were overturned. One has been declared mentally incompetent to be executed although he’s still under a death penalty.

Your correspondent has watched more than twenty men die on a gurney from lethal injection. After several of those executions, relatives of the victims have spoken with reporters in a prison press room. No one has ever indicated any regret about the inmate’s ultimate fate. And in the last few times, they have expressed resentment at a system that has taken so long to put a killer away. More than once they have complained about the cruel and unusual punishment that the system has inflicted on the survivors of the victims. We wonder how the families of the victims of the twenty-seven men under a death sentence feel about Wieland’s bill.

Missouri has repealed the death penalty before. It did it in 1917 only to have the legislature reinstate it in 1919 when sponsors spoke of a marked increase in murders since the repeal. It was repealed again after Anderson’s 1965 gassing and a U. S. Supreme Court ruling in 1972 that gassing was cruel and unusual punishment. That let every inmate in America under a death sentence be re-sentenced to life. The U. S. Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that a new system of executions was not cruel and unusual punishment, leading Missouri to reinstitute the penalty in 1977. The legislature changed the law allowing executions by gas or lethal injection in 1988 with lethal injection the preferred means.

So now, it appears, conservatives seem to be deciding that liberals might have had a good idea after all. Is this just the start of a new cycle of thinking or has society forever changed on this issue? Is there nobody whose crime is so abhorrent that the forfeiture of life is the only just punishment? Is life in prison with no hope of ever getting out the worst possible penalty?

Consider part of the last statement of David Zink before his execution July 14, 2015:

“For those who remain on death row, understand that everyone is going to die. Statistically speaking, we have a much easier death than most, so I encourage you to embrace it and celebrate our true liberation before society figures it out and condemns us to life without parole and we too will die a lingering death.”