We Get A New Governor Today

Posted on January 13, 2025 by bpriddy

Mike Kehoe will be sworn in at noon today as our 56^th Governor although it will be the 58^th administration. Two governors, Phil Donnelly and Christopher Bnd served two separate terms.

Kehoe succeeds Mike Parson, who now goes back to his farm in Polk County where he was working six years ago, when he was lt. Governor, when a Highway Patrolman showed up to tell hm he needed to get back to Jefferson City because Governor Eric Greitens was resigning.

I’ve referred to Govenor Mike Parson and Lieutenant Govenor Mike Kehoe as Mike 1 and Mike 2—and the Govenor’s Mansion for the last six years as the Parson-age.

Incidentally, a recurring political joke for many years asks voters if they would buy a used car from the candidate. A lot of people did when he was a Ford dealer in Jefferson City. He’s the second car dealer to be sworn in as Governor. Governor Arthur M. Hyde, who served 1921-1925 was a Buick dealer in Princeton and Trenton.

We’ve gone back over our notes on past gatherings to recall some special and sometimes not-so-special moments.

Each inauguration has some special touches. Sometimes the wheels fall off as was the case in 2013 when the usually reliable church bells tolling noon, the traditional time for the oath-taking, had a mind of their own and when the judge swearing in the governor mispronounced his name.

We listened back to The Missourinet’s recording of those events to put together this chronology showing how things fell apart at the critical moment.

11:59:56—band finishes playing “God Bless America.”

12:00:20—12:01:20—The bell at St. Peter Catholic Church tolls eight times.

Long pause. Finally, Senate President Pro Tem Tom Dempsey, the MC, approaches the podium, and just as he draws a breath to introduce the judge to swear in the Governor—

12:02:23—a ninth bell (crowd and podium guests laugh loudly) Dempsey throws up his hands and retreats to his seat.

12:02:33—tenth bell

12:02:42—eleventh bell. Then silence. There is no 12th bell for the noon swearing-in. Voices on the platform (including Nixon’s apparently) are heard confirming, however, that there had been the 12th bell. Nope. Just eleven).

12:04:18—Convinced there are no more bells, Dempsey introduces St. Louis Circuit Judge Rex Burlison to swear in Nixon.

12:04:52—And Judge Burlison begins the oath by mispronouncing the Governor’s name:, “I, Jeremy Wilson Nixon…” Nixon repeats, “I, Jeremiah Wilson Nixon…”

12:05:25—oath completed. Church bells ring joyously throughout the city. Helicopter flyover.

Nixon’s first inauguration in 2009 was the second time in three inaugurals when the governor was sworn in early. Master of Ceremonies Charlie Shields, the Senate president pro tem, noted about 11:45 that the event was running early and the band would play some music to fill time. However after one number he announced the swearing in of the new governor would proceed. Shields said the National Guard, which operates the schedule for the inaugurations, told him through his earpiece to go ahead with the oath-giving and taking. The swearing-in of Governor Nixon began at 11:52 and the church bells rang early.

The 2005 inauguration is remembered by some for the relatively warm weather and for the governor’s attire.

Governor Blunt refused to be sworn in while wearing the traditional tuxedo, which he referred to in an interview with The Missourinet as a “monkey suit.” That night he did wear a tux, although the traditional attire for the inaugural ball is white tie and tails. It was a frustrating few days for one of the Jefferson City tuxedo shops with which Blunt did business. The owner tried…and tried…but failed to convince Blunt to be traditional in his attire.

Blunt used two Bibles. In his inaugural address he noted that one was the Bible he used each day. The second one would be given to his son upon his birth, which was scheduled for March. He said it reminded him “that what we do today, tomorrow and across the next four years will help define the future opportunities of every Missouri Child.

2005 was the second time in recent memory that the new first lady danced in the inaugural ball a few weeks before the birth of the first couple’s first child. Matt and Melanie Blunt had their first child, Branch, in March. In 1981, Christopher and Carolyn Bond’s son, Sam, was born two weeks after the inauguration.

Bob Holden’s inauguration in 2001 was a scrambled affair that saw the first early swearing-in, in many years. Supreme Court judge Ronnie White, the master of ceremonies, called for the swearing-in of Attorney General Jay Nixon right after the invocation. The schedule called for the inaugurations of the lesser officials to take place AFTER remarks from former Senator Thomas Eagleton and after the introduction of platform guests. After Eagleton spoke and the guests were introduced, the other inaugurations took place.

The event, which had started at 11;15 instead of the usual 11:30 saw the inauguration of lower-ranking statewide officials by 11:45. Rather than wait 15 minutes for the traditional noon-time inauguration of the governor, the ceremonies went right on ahead. Just as the church bell across the street rang once to signal it was 11:45, Governor Holden was sworn in. Radio and television stations planning to join the ceremonies just in time for the noon inauguration of the governor found themselves switching to the Capitol after Holden was well into his address, or not switching at all. The church bells did not strike 12 because it would have interrupted the speech. In his press conference after the event, Holden explained that he decided to go ahead with the swearing-in because it was 27 degrees and people were getting cold.

The early swearing-in caught the flight of four F-15s from the St. Louis national guard unit unprepared. The jets, which usually formed up west of Jefferson City and flew over the Capitol west to east were far from being ready when word went out that the swearing-in was taking place and the 19-gun salute was being fired. The jets wound up flying over the Capitol, more or less on a north to south route with two jets together and two others straggling behind, well out of formation.

The parties ended at 11;30 that night with fireworks over the Missouri River. The explosions caught many Jefferson Citians unawares and awakened several. Dozens of 9-1-1 calls were made. One woman said she thought somebody was trying to break into her basement and called police.

The first Carnahan inauguration, in 1993, first brought the festival atmosphere which existed in and around the Capitol for the rest of the day after the ceremonies. Carnahan was sworn in using an old family Bible used by his great grandfather, a circuit-riding Methodist minister. At one time there was a hole in the back cover. Family tradition held that the hole was worn by the saddle horn of his great grandfather’s saddle. A new cover was put on the Bible in later years that replaced that worn one. He did not wear a top hat–which is kind of an on-again-off-again tradition for these events. Some people wear them; some don’t. In 1989, when he was sworn in for his second term as treasurer, Carnahan wore a beaver topper with a long and distinguished history. But he told us before the inauguration in ’93 that he reviewed the tapes of that event and saw he was about the only person who wore the traditional hat for the ceremony. Others who had them either left them indoors or carried them. So he decided in 1993 to leave the hat off. It belonged to his father, former Congressman A.S. J. Carnahan, who served in Congress for 14 years and was the first United States Ambassador to the African country of Sierra Leone, appointed by President Kennedy.

But his father was not the first owner of that distinguished hat. It originally belonged to Congressman John B. Sullivan of St. Louis, whose wife Leonore became the elder Carnahan’s successor in Congress and served with great distinction for many years.

Some might find a bit of irony in the telling of that story, we suppose. Anyway, the hat stayed in the box in 1993.

But—

In 1997, Carnahan wore the beaver top hat—a little bit. He only wore it for the trip from the Mansion to the Capitol. The ceremony was held in the rotunda because of the cold weather.

—As long as we’re speaking of top hats, here’s a little top hat history for you. In 1969, when John Danforth was sworn in as Attorney General, he was the only one of the state officers who did not wear one.

Thomas Eagleton wore one that day although he refused to wear such a thing in earlier ceremonies. He had complained that all during his military service his hats had been either too large or too small and he had refused to wear any hats since.

In 1961, when Harry Truman attended John Dalton’s inauguration, he refused to wear a top hat in the parade. He wore his customary felt hat instead.

One highlight of the 1989 inauguration was the opening of the huge bronze doors on the south front of the Capitol. The doors had been closed for many years. They had been opened only for very special occasions for about 40 years. The state had paid $122,000 to repair and restore the doors. The hinges and frames were rebuilt and the finish to the doors was restored. The doors weigh 7,200 pounds, stand more than 18 feet tall and are 12-feet wide. It takes seven minutes to get the things open. The doors are divided into four panels. the second and third panels–the center panels–fold inward toward the Capitol and lock against the first and fourth panels, which also fold inward to provide a panoramic view up the 30-foot wide grand stairway to the third, or legislative, floor of the building. At the time the doors were installed, they were called the largest bronze doors cast since the days of Ancient Rome.

The bronze doors have been restored to their original appearance and the mechanisms have been repaired just in time for this inauguration.

The 1985 and 1989 inaugurations of John Ashcroft included prayers from his father, an Assembly of God minister. Ashcroft, following his faith, did not dance at his inaugural balls. Each time he played the state song, “The Missouri Waltz,” on a piano in the rotunda.

In 1985, new Governor John Ashcroft made some headlines on his inauguration day when he did not dance at the traditional ball because of his Pentacostal background that discourages drinking, smoking, gambling, and dancing. Instead, he played a piano, accompanied by famous New Orleans trumpet player al Hirt, and the St. Louis Cardinals most famous harmonica player, Stan Musial. He did a similar thing for his 1989 inaugural.

In 1985, Former Governor Hearnes did not attend the ceremonies, saying he had not been invited far enough in advance. Supreme Court Judge Warren Welliver refused to attend, showing his disappointment that an associate justice of the court was swearing in Governor Bond instead of the Chief Justice. The Associate Justice that day was Albert Rendlen, former Republican Party chairman (Welliver was a Democrat), who later became a Chief Justice. While he held that office, he swore in John Ashcroft for his first term. Ashcroft was sworn in for his second term by Judge Edward Robertson, his former aide that he had shortly before appointed to the supreme court. Robertson, who became the Chief Justice and is now in private practice, did not not swear in Governor Carnahan. In fact, most members of the Supreme Court were absent from involvement in the 1993 ceremonies. All of them were Ashcroft appointees.

It is not mandatory that the Chief Justice swear in the Governor. Circuit Judge Sam Blair swore in his brother, James T. Blair, in 1957. In 1881, Governor Thomas Crittenden was sworn in by the outgoing Lieutenant Governor, Henry Brockmeyer, because members of the Supreme Court didn’t show up for the ceremony until Crittenden was giving his inaugural address. —–

In 1981, an empty chair was placed on the inaugural platform next to Kenneth Rothman, who became Lieutenant Governor that day. Rothman had it placed there as a memorial to his father, who had died the year before.

In 1977, when Joseph Teasdale was sworn in on a bitterly cold day, Senator Thomas Eagleton was sitting on the platform next to Senator Danforth. He was so wrapped up in a shawl that Sally Danforth had given him when she went inside to get warm that a University of Missouri reporting program reporter mis-identified him as Senator Danforth’s wife. The wind chill factor that day was 25 to 40-below, so you know why he was wrapped up so tightly. The ceremony started in two-below-zero temperatures, (the high for the day was plus 3), Nine inches of snow had fallen overnight, causing the cancellation of the inaugural parade. Despite abysmal conditions—the pianist suffered frostbite on all of her fingers–Teasdale decided to have the ceremony outside because of the large number of people who had come to Jefferson City–especially from his home town of Kansas City–to see him sworn in. Many, if not the majority, of them stayed inside the Capitol, however, while the new governor earned for himself the nickname “Freezedale” from uncharitable critics, especially those who endured his event outdoors.Incoming Lt. Governor Ken Rothman reported later that Teasdale leaned over to him and said, “This must be my first mistake.” Senator Thomas Eagleton remarked later, “My feet damn near fell off.”

In his ten-minute speech, Teasdale said it was God’s will that he be elected governor, prompting State Treasurer Jim Spainhower—who would unsuccessfully challenge Teasdale in the 1980 primary—to tell a friend, “Don’t trust politicians with messianic complexes.” Spainhower was a minister of the Christian Church/Disciples of Christ.

The President Pro Tem of the Senate usually is the presiding officer, master of ceremonies, of the event—except in 1965 when the Speaker of the House presided. That was the first inauguration of Warren Hearnes, who had run against the so-called “establishment” that ran the Democratic Party, and had defeated Lieutenant Governor Hillary Bush. Former Senate leader Albert Spradling, Jr., recalled for the State Historical Society that Hearnes tried to gain control of the Senate but conservative senators stopped him by electing John W. Joynt of St. Louis as the Pro-Tem. Hearnes recalled in a similar interview that he had tried to get one of his campaign supporters, Senator Earl Blackwell of Hillsboro, elected President Pro Tem although Blackwell had been in the Senate only two years at the time. The veteran senators also rejected Hearnes’ efforts to compromise by having Blackwell named Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. The resentment caused by Hearnes’ tactics—before he was even Governor—so antagonized Joynt that he refused to preside over Hearnes’ inauguration a few days later, leaving the job to Speaker of the House Thomas Graham.

Timing of the events leading to the noon inauguration was a problem, too, in 1965, during the first Hearnes inauguration. Speaker Tom Graham, about whom we referred earlier, recalled in an oral history interview for the State Historical Society that all of the scheduled events leading to the governor’s inauguration had been finished ten minutes early. He said, “I introduced everybody in sight. I introduced Governor Dalton and his wife. I introduced my wife. I introduced the members of the House. I introduced the members of the Senate, and then I introduced the taxpayers.” That killed enough time for the swearing-in of Hearnes to take place at high noon.

Thomas Eagleton figures in a couple of other odd moments on inauguration day. On the way to the first Hearnes inaugural in 1965, Eagleton—who was to become Lieutenant Governor that day—was seen hitchhiking, dressed in formal attire. The car being used to chauffer him around had run out of gas a number of blocks from the Jefferson City First Baptist Church, where an inaugural worship service was held in 1965. Another was held there in 1969. The Hearnes family was Baptist and Betty often sang in the church choir.

The year Eagleton was sworn in as Attorney General, 1961, the man administering the oath forgot it. Former Judge Sam Blair, who had administered the oath to his brother Jim when Jim became governor in 1957, said he had sworn-in thousands of persons before, and the oath is really simple as can be. But he said he suffered a complete mental block, which lasted about four seconds but seemed far longer and left Judge Sam a little shaken.

The 1961 inauguration as unusual in another respect. The Lieutenant Governor was not sworn in with the other statewide officials. Hillary Bush was inaugurated more than two hours later in the State Senate because the Lieutenant Governor is the President of the Senate. He told the senators he respected the Senate tradition of “orderly and courteous procedure and the most searching examination into each and every law affecting our citizens.” He promised to support “full and open debate,” saying “Good laws are not enacted after bearing only one side of a question. Minority views are just as important as the views of the majority. Sound debate often results in a decision acceptable to both sides and thus redounds to the benefit of the state”

However, several of Bush’s friends from Kansas City missed the event. The passenger elevators were jammed by the large crowd, so a janitor agreed to let them use a freight elevator. Fifteen to twenty people crowded in—and the elevator stopped about five feet from the third floor. Several minutes of door-pounding and prying open the doors finally caught the attention of someone in the hallway who got on top of the elevator car and lowered a chair to the interior. After about five people used the chair to get out, the car rose to the third floor and stopped normally. But it was too late for those inside to witness the event.

The scariest inauguration might have been in 1913, when Elliott Major was sworn in. The Capitol had burned in 1911 and a temporary Capitol was erected just east of the present building. It was made of stucco, lath and wire. One account says “it was jammed to suffocation and the structure groaned and creaked under the weight of the crowd.” The building was still there when Frederick Gardner was to be inaugurated but officials were afraid to use it. The situation led to the first outdoor inauguration four years later when the new Capitol remained unfinished enough for an indoor ceremony and nobody wanted to go back into the temporary building.

Things were a little straight-laced, compared to today, in 1913. The inauguration committee issued an edict barring “ragging” at the ball, the playing of ragtime music. modern dances such as the “bunny hop” or the “bear cat,” or the “turkey trot,” and “all other of the 57 varieties of the terpsichorean art where swaying of the shoulders and other unnecessary movements” are made.

There were fears in 1881 that the inauguration of John S. Marmaduke might have to be delayed because he developed a severe nose bleed in St. Louis a few days earlier. The New York Times reported (Jan 11, 1885) that three doctors worked to solve the problem by trying to keep him “perfectly quiet and free from all excitement.” The newspaper reported the Marmaduke was at a St. Louis hotel “up in his room nursing his well proportioned nose, which has both nostrils solidly plugged up.”

Marmaduke was a bachelor and described in the article as “quite a ladies’ man.” A few days earlier he had a date with the Widow Bernoudy and was her escort as she called upon several mutual friends. During the outing he complained of a pain in the back of his head but she thought he just wanted sympathy. After the calls, the pain in his head grew much worse and he was seized with intense bleeding. She called two doctors who took him to the hotel and spent the day and night before they finally stopped the bleeding. He did recover in time to attend his inauguration. However he died in pneumonia in 1887 before the end of his term.

Governor Thomas Fletcher, chosen in the first election since the start of the Civil War, took office about three months before the final collapse of the Confederacy calling for magnanimity and “forgetful of past differences, seek only to promote the general good of the people of whole commonwealth.”

He said in part: “Henceforth Missouri shall be an asylum for all nationalities and races and peoples; the repository of wealth, and a theater for the development of the labor and enterprise of the hand and spirit of Industry; and the home of free thought, free speech and a free press, where the prejudices of caste and class have no legal embodiment or political encouragement…Let it be announced that in the new era which has come, ours is to be the first of States, with the largest freedom and the widest charities…Where a free people…guards the right of permitting the position and privileges of every man to be such as his virtues, talents, education, patriotism, enterprise, industry, courage or achievements may confer upon him.”

In 1857, Trusten Polk was being inaugurated when it was discovered there did not seem to be a Bible anyplace in the Capitol. The ceremony was delayed for several minutes while an intense search was done. A Bible was finally located, several blocks away, at the state penitentiary.

One newspaper said afterwards that Jefferson City would be a tremendous field for missionaries, noting, “”We fear that the work of legislation can never go on properly in a place where copies of the Good Book are so scarce, and that it will be necessary for other reasons than the high price of board, to fetch the Legislature to St. Louis where, goodness knows, there are plenty of Bibles, whether we govern our lives by the precepts contained therein or not.”

Inaugurations have not always been spectacular events. When Missouri’s first state Governor, Alexander McNair, delivered his first message to the legislature in 1821, he did the entire thing—the swearing-in and the speaking—so quickly that a number of lawmakers in a nearby St. Charles pub missed the whole thing. St. Charles was the temporary state capital then. McNair refused requests to give his speech again.

Fifty

Posted on January 2, 2025 by bpriddy

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 50^th 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.

Centennial

Posted on October 9, 2024 by bpriddy

A big centennial event slipped past us in Jefferson City last weekend and nobody seemed to notice.

Sunday, October 6, was the 100^th anniversary of he dedication of the Capitol.

Local historian Michelle Brooks did a presentation about it last night for the Historic City of Jefferson. I couldn’t go because I was doing a presentation at the library about the 250^th anniversary of the First Continental Congress—the one before the Declaration of Independence was written but the one that created a document that created our country.

A whole chapter of the Capitol dedication will be in my next book, a history of the capitol and some of the history of the people who worked in it, for it, against it, and died for it.

The Capitol Commission, which has been doing centennial observances since a 2011 event in the rotunda commemorating the fire that destroyed the 1840 Capitol, has been focused more on restoration and renovations for some time now and is doing persistent and diligent work on bringing the Capitol back to the way the original designers intended for it to look.

A massive exterior effort in recent years has brought Ceres down from the dome for restoration and cleaning (who wouldn’t need it after being hit by lighting about 300 times), the statues and the fountains have been cleaned and repaired. The stonework has been cleaned and tuckpointed.

Inside, the great stained glass window over the grand stairway is back in place and the vaulted ceiling has been restored to its original color. The contractor let me get up on the scaffolding for some personal time with it a few days ago. The cleaning and restoration of he window, which was installed about 1917, has brought out details that had been hidden for years and the restoration of the original wall colors makes the window’s beauty even more striking.

The legislative library will be open soon after cracks in its ceiling have been fixed and the room and its columns have been restored to their original colors.

Eventually, the double-decker offices that now house state representatives and are handicap Inaccessible will be turned into single-story offices again but that is an ongoing struggle linked to other issues—-where to put these people and who has to move to where else when that happens being a question that has been unresolved for a long time.

The goal is to return our capitol to the majesty it was when it was dedicated in 1924. The House of Representatives was restored in 1988 and the Senate in 2001. The trip to visit the window as something of a trifecta for me. I am one of the few people who has touched the ceilings of both legislative chambers, and the window is the icing on the cake. And when Ceres was on display before she was put back on the dome, I got close to her. In fact, her face is on the back of my business cards.

I often have wondered what Egerton Swartwout, the architect of the Capitol, would think of it if he were to walk in to it today and see so many of the things that were put in it in his day are still there. I know he’d be dismayed at some of the abuses the building has undergone—the double-decker offices one of the greatest, and the decades of monochrome off-white paint that has covered the color scheme that he created to highlight the architectural details of the monumental rooms, and so forth.

The dedication was held in 1924 although the building was occupied starting in 1917. A dedication planned for 1918 had to be cancelled because of the war and the building languished undedicated until 1924 when members of the commission that oversaw its construction started a movement to dedicate the building while they were still alive to enjoy it.

It was a huge event with speechifying going on all afternoon and an elaborate 1920s-style pageant (folks, I think it would be considered pretty awful today but back then it was some doin’s) that portrayed various epochs in state history. The last act was halted because of a heavy rain and lightning storm that rendered the unpaved roads of the day quagmires, and the bridge across the river dangerous.

Perhaps it was an appropriate bookend to the story of the present Capitol, which began with a rainstorm and a single lightning bolt that hit the dome of the old Capitol on February 5, 1911 and not only destroyed the building, but it created the last great challenge to Jefferson City as the seat of government.

A peach farmer from West Plains generated the greatest threat. But that’s another story. (Some folks say that Sedalia tried to get the capital designation then but that’s not true. That happened in 1896.)

But that’s another story. And if the book gets published it might make interesting reading. It sure was interesting writing, I can tell you that.

So happy anniversary to our Capitol. And to our Capital City which will celebrate its BIcentennial as the seat of state government in a couple of years. What a great time that will be to commit to being a greater city.

Notes From a Quiet Street (Injured Curmudgeon Edition)

Posted on January 22, 2024 by bpriddy

(being an irregular voyage through some mental flotsam and jetsam that isn’t worth full blogness)

There is so much to writr about these days but unfortunately your constant observer has become a one-fingr typist because was not observant when he went to the mailbox Thursday night and tripped over a little sidewalk wall and found himself in aencounter with a garage door. The door is fine but the left shoulder of your observer became removed from its socket, said left arm now tightly strapped down.

But I do want anyone in the area to know that on tuesda morning thru Wednesday afternoon I have attanged evhibits from the Steamboat Arabia Museum in KC and National TransportationMuseum in Kirkwood to be in the capitol rotunda to promote legislation to help veterans, provide financial aid to struggling local historical museums, krrp the Arabia in Missouri and help the NMOT achieve its dreams for expansion and protection for and restoration of its collection.

Now onto the original great observations about our times—-

Anybody else getting tired of emails or telephone calls from people wanting to know if your experience with your doctor, your mechanic, your financial advisor, your car salesman, your—-you name it—was a pleasant one?

Feedback Mania has taken hold.

It seems as if every time I go someplace I get an email request almost before I’m out the door wondering if I had a pleasant experience, if the office staff was friendly, or if I would recommend this to others.

Did you enjoy your colonoscopy? Was the admissions staff chipper enough? How was the taste of the gallon of stuff you drank? Was your experience with the drug administered before insertion pleasant?

I’m thinking of saving all of these surveys until I can fill them out while I’m on hold after an impersonal, recorded voice tells me that my call is important.

-0-

I had a dream the other night that I opened my closet door and the only things inside were hangers with t-shirts proclaiming that I had saved a shivering dog or an elephant, that I had helped a school kid get a meal, another kid get healed from a disease (I slept under about three adorable blankets during the night)—you know.

I had bankrupted myself at the rate of $19.95 a month for so many different wonderful causes. In my dream, I decided to go on TV and promise viewers that I would give them a t-shirt that said, “I saved Bob” if they just sent me $19.95 a month. The t-shirt would cost me 75 cents from the sweatshop in China. I needed the money because I placed a telephone call to see if a Medicare plan was available for me in my zip code and I needed to enroll.

Then I woke up and felt badly because each of these charities is only trying to do good in its small part of the human experience. All except for the Medicare guy.

-0-

Speaking of insurance: Can you imagine if Flo and Doug had a child?

-0-

Here is something that is spooky as all get-out:

A few days ago my friend Steve Mays, who was our webmaster at the Missourinet for many years and did great and creative things while some of us sluggards refused to quit living in our internet caves, was explaining ChatGPT to me. As I understand it, it’s an artificial intelligence program that lets people feed some information in and the program spits out a theme, a letter, an article, or whatever in whatever format or language or length the user wants. People talk to it on their cell phones.

Later that day he asked Chat GPT:

Do you have any information about reporting by a man named Bob Priddy?

ChatGPT

Bob Priddy, a renowned journalist in Missouri, retired after a notable 40-year career. He was known for his dedication to government transparency and his critical view on the state of statehouse reporting, especially concerning the decline in media presence and the increasing influence of lobbyists. Priddy also played a significant role in advocating for open government, such as pushing for cameras in judicial chambers. However, he expressed concerns about the worsening state of government transparency in Missouri. His career has been a testament to committed journalism, focusing on impactful stories and the importance of government accountability.

As complimentary as it was, I was, and am, a little bit chilled that some lights and wires in a box can churn out something like this about me.

I looked up ChatGPT on Wikipedia. I wonder who—or what—wrote the article.

-0-

Saw a discussion a few days ago about whether Iowa Hawkeyes’ greatest basketball player should go pro or stay in college. One of the questions is whether Caitlin Clark would take a financial cut if she did. One sports site, Firstsportz, estimates her net worth already is three-million dollars because of the endorsements of various products and services while in college.

At least Clark has stayed at one school throughout her career instead of being a jock gypsy, as so many athletes have become.

Are we alone in thinking there’s something basically wrong with college sports today? I doubt it.

Jefferson City’s first tornado

Posted on July 10, 2023 by bpriddy

The scars of the May 23, 2019 tornado that hit Jefferson City remain fresh—and obvious to many who remember when a house stood here, a big beautiful tree over there, when a fence conceals a vacant lot that once held a gathering place for plays, when broken windows at the state penitentiary continue to stare blankly at passersby.

When city and county officials had time to add things up, they found it had damaged 316 residential buildings, 82 commercial buildings and thirty government structures. It was classed as an EF-3, with winds of 73-112 mph (the scale assigns storms of less than 73 mph as an EF0).

Within hours of that tornado, and continuing today, there are those who speculate about what would have happened if the tornado had followed a path just a few blocks west—-and hit a hospital or the Southside and downtown business district and even the Capitol.

We had a tornado that did. Hit the Capitol. And a hospital. And areas in between.

It was May 12, 1890, a Monday in the town of about 6,700 residents. “The almost stifling heat during the afternoon indicated that a storm of some kind was brewing and the heavy cloud that rolled up in the southwest about 4:30 indicated further that it was a storm of the business turn of mind, and that it had business in this immediate vicinity” reported the Jefferson City Daily Tribune the next day. “It came with a roar and a crash that was terrible enough to fill the minds of those who witnessed it with apprehension of dire disaster.”

The Cole County Democrat reported, “The winds rose in a stiff blow, carrying the dark green looking clouds in every direction and threatening destruction to everything.”

And then the cloud split into three segments, “one division striking for the extreme western portion of the city, another traveling up Monroe Street to the river, while the third division took in the southern and eastern portion of the city taking in the penitentiary.”

The Chillicothe Constitution reported, “For half an hour the wind blew a hurricane, driving before it a storm of rain which so enveloped the town that nothing could be seen but the vivid flashes of lightning…At 4:45 o’clock the wind had risen almost to the force of a cyclone, and as it came roaring over the hills it struck the state Capitol with terrific force.

The seven-year old St. Peter Catholic Church was hammered and, “The heavy brick arch on top of the rear wall was blown over on the roof and went crashing through clear to the basement, making a complete wreck of the richly furnished altar and sacristy.” Fortunately, said the Daily Tribune, “it is understood that a cyclone policy was carried on the church.”

The Capitol was immediately next. “Here the wind got a grip under the cornice of the roof of the old part of the building north of the dome and did not relax its hold until a great section of the roof, tin, timbers and all, had been rolled up, crushed, splintered and scattered…,” said the newspaper. The Chillicothe paper said the debris was “rolled together like a scroll and carried over the bluff.”

The tornado struck only a few months after a new cornerstone had been laid after two new wings had been added to the Capitol.

“At the same moment, half a dozen trees in the Capitol Park were snapped in twain, and the glass in the dome came tumbling with a crash into the rotunda.” But, “the building itself stood solid as a rock.”

The eastern division of the storm unroofed the penitentiary hospital but apparently did little damage beyond that.

But the central division, the storm “tore down several chimneys, one off he residence of Postmaster Sample, one off the resident of J. R. Edwards, the smoke stack from the Brton residence and J. T. Craven lost his tin chimney. The shade trees in Mr. R. Dallmeyer’s yard were twisted considerably. The Democrat building lost a cellar door, it being lifted by the storm from the pavement and carried at least one hundred feet. One window of the building being completely destroyed, the venetian blind being blown clear away with only a small fragment left. The resident of Mr. W. M. Meyer on Adams Street has the bale end blown in, doing some damage to his furniture but fortunately injuring no one.”

The young ladies’ dormitory at Lincoln Institute lost its roof and the heavy rain damaged the interior plastering.

The Daily Tribune cataloged other damage:

“A porch in the rear of the building on High street occupied by Mrs. Robinson and Mr. Schleer was lifted over onto the roof and a big chimney, adding further destruction by tumbling over and making another big hole. The west wall of the house on McCarty Street, occupied by Mr. W. W. Meyers, was blown in. The children had been playing in this room a few moments before the storm came, but were fortunately in another part of the building when the wall went in with a deafening crash. The cornice on the rear of the Music hall building was damaged. Mrs. Vogt’s residence on Washington street, was unroofed. The Standard Shoe Co.’s building, on Main Street, was dismantled of chimneys, and buildings in all parts of the city had similar experiences.

“The roof of the Neef house was badly wrenched and some of the rooms damaged by water. At the Central hotel a smokestack on Maj. Lusk’s residence was blown through a window, carrying away the entire sash, and before the aperture could be protected a number of rooms were flooded, doing much damage to furniture and carpets. Shade and fruit trees, shrubbery and fences suffered at Mr. H.W. Ewing’s place, near the city. His stable was also minus the roof when the storm cleared away..”

No casualties were reported.

“Our people were considerably frightened, and well they may be, as no such clouds have ever before been seen in this city. We are congratulating ourselves that it is no worse, and hope that such an occurrence will not visit us again,” said the Cole County Democrat.

While residents of Jefferson City were pondering the disaster, some people sixty miles away were showing no sympathy. The booming and ambitious city of Sedalia, with more than 14,000 people, had been trying to wrestle the seat of government away from Jefferson City for more than a decade. The Sedalia Bazoo commented, “Since the Lord partially ruined the state capitol building at Jefferson City, it is a good time to agitate the removal of the capital to Sedalia.” The Sedalia Gazette noted, “The roof of part of Missouri’s capitol was blown off this week. This is the same building upon which was squandered a quarter of a million dollars recently” (with the addition of two wings on the north and sound ends of the 1840 Capitol).

Five years later, Sedalia interests stormed Jefferson City with a one-day lobbying blitz that led the legislature to put a proposition on the 1896 ballot to pull state government out of Jefferson City.

But that’s another story.

Notes From a Quiet—

Posted on June 21, 2023 by bpriddy

Road.

Your traveling correspondent has been on the road for a month, from Cincinnati and Indianapolis to Illinois to Colorado and Texas.

He has not been to Auxvasse.

Auxvasse is the home to 1,001 people. At least it was in the most recent census. It has a total area of three-quarters of a square mile. It’s a few miles north of Kingdom City, the crossroads of Missouri. You might catch a glimpse of its former small business district as you flash past it on Highway 54. The town tavern has survived.

It originally was called Clinton City when it was platted in 1873 but changed its name to honor a nearby creek because the postal service was easily confused by the presence of another town in Missouri named Clinton, with no “city” on the end. It has had a post office since 1874. It is the largest populated area in Jackson Township of Callaway County.

Blogger Tom Dryden, who might be the most famous person to come from Auxvasse—because of his blog—notes that the town website refers to the community as “the third largest fourth class city” in the county. He says I have been pronouncing its name incorrectly, Oh-vawz. No, it’s “Of auze.”

Dryden wrote a loving tribute to his hometown in his October 23, 2016 entry. I suggest you check him out at TOMDRYDEN.COM. He has written some other things about the town and its people, too.

Dryden admits the town is so insignificant he cannot convince his car’s GPS system that it exists, which led him to concede in his May 14, 2012 blog entry, “When you’re from Auxvasse, you can’t go home again.”

I can appreciate his love for his town because I grew up in a couple of small towns in Illinois—one of about 1,500 people (Mt. Pulaski) and the other of about 3,300 when we moved there (Sullivan), probably considered big cities when Tom was a kid.

Now I live in a REALLY big city. Jefferson City (43,228 people in the most recent census). And Auxvasse has been irritating me for decades.

(By the way, we made an interesting discovery on our way back from Albuquerque last weekend. We drove through Wichita, which has a listed population of 397,552 in the 2020 census. St. Louis claims 301,578. Wichita, Kansas is bigger than St. Louis!!. Sedgewick County can’t hold a candle to St. Louis County, though, so St. Louis is still a bigger metro area)

Tom Dryden’s GPS doesn’t know where Auxvasse is. But he’s wrong. He CAN go home again. The Missouri Department of Transportation makes sure of that. Interstate 70 exit 148 has a big green sign—

Maybe it’s a conversation piece designed to keep drivers bored by hundreds of miles of billboard-ugly, mostly straight, highway alert by trying to figure out (a) how to pronounce that top word and (b) why it is important enough to be on the highway sign.

“Hey, Maude, get out yer Triple-A guidebook and look up Ox-Vassy and see what’s there.”

“It’s not listed, Claude.”

“They why do you suppose Missouri wants you to go there?”

Well, why does it?

Why doesn’t the sign say “Jefferson City?” It’s only the state capital, you know. It’s only the place where the department has its headquarters.

Heck, with Kingdom City’s development into almost-Effingham West, why isn’t Kingdom City on the sign?

We are left to ponder whether Auxvasse has the distinction of being the smallest town in Missouri, or in America, to be listed on an Interstate Highway exit ramp sign.

But it just irritates the sock off me that Jefferson City apparently is less important to the department than Auxvasse is. I will confess, however, that there have been some times when I’m just one more tired and semi-dangerous driver on the road late at night, that seeing that sign has kicked up the mental processes just enough to make it the last 30 miles or so home safely. That and the Coke I get at the Kingdom City McDonald’s drive-through window.

Congratulations to Auxvasse, though. Every day, tens of thousands of people go past a sign that says it is more significant than the capital city of the state. If I lived in Auxvasse, I’d be proud of that.

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The demise of local news

Posted on May 29, 2023 by bpriddy

A friend has passed along an article written a few years ago by Jonathan Bernstein, a columnist on the Bloomberg Views website in which he lamented that the “demise of local news may be ruining Congress.” Bernstein wrote that several senators facing re-election found that “no one in their home states knows who they are.” He cited a piece by Washington Post writer Paul Kane, who saids, “A prime cause of this fight for name recognition is the increasingly fragmented media in which partisans largely receive their news from ideologically driven cable news and social media. Middle-of-the-road voters, reliant on their local news, are often left in the dark.”

Kane noted, “Overall, there are more reporters covering Congress than ever, except they increasingly write for inside Washington publications whose readers are lawmakers, lobbyists and Wall Street investors.” He cites North Carolina Senator Richard Burr, began his Washington career in the House before moving to the Senate in 2005. When he arrived in Washington, three newspapers from North Carolina had Washington Bureaus. Now, none of them do. “I can give a major policy speech, and no newspaper in Charlotte or Raleigh or Winston-Salem will even cover that I was there, much less that I gave a policy speech.”

Bernstein offers a scenario: The president proposes a new initiative. If the local newspaper has a Washington bureau, a member of Congress might figure out how district voters feel and then endorse whatever constituents want. The constituents can then read the news coverage in the local paper. But that’s not how things work anymore.

He wrote, “More and more politically active voters get their news from national partisan TV, radio and digital outlets. Less engaged voters can easily tune out all political news, at least until the height of election season. So the safest bet for an incumbent is going to be to echo the party line (which will normally mean no coverage at all) or, better, just to keep his or her mouth shut. Why stick with the district’s needs over party loyalty when no one in the district will ever hear about it — except the die-hards who support the party line no matter what?”

He also worried that the changing face of the news business works against the local Senator or Representative proposing things that benefit the district. “If the rewards for action are reduced, fewer and fewer members of Congress are going to bother,” he says. The end result: “The demise of state and local political reporting is often thought of as a potential threat because without a vigorous press, no one will expose malfeasance, and politicians will have weaker reasons to avoid corruption. But perhaps the reduced incentives for good behavior by these elected officials are an even bigger reason to despair.”

This is not just a national issue. It is a matter of concern in every state. The same concerns Bernstein voices apply to our state and city governments.

There probably are fewer reporters covering state capitols full-time than there are reporters covering Congress. Newspapers from St. Joseph, Cape Girardeau, Springfield, and Joplin once had year-around reporters at the capitol. Not today, although Springfield still sends a reporter to the Capitol during sessions. There once were two wire services covering state government. The Associated Press is the only one left. Second newspapers from Kansas City and St. Louis went out of business years ago. Don’t expect to learn much from metropolitan TV or radio stations about what’s happening in Jefferson City although what happens at the capitol affects their viewers every minute of their lives. Missouri Independent, a new and aggressive news organization whose articles appear in several newspapers, is an important addition and works hard to fill the yawning gap in coverage of state government and politics.

Missouri newspaper subscribers are more likely to get their news about state politics and government from weekly columns written by their legislators than they are to read anything from a local reporter that details or questions what the local lawmaker is doing or saying because few local news outlets have anyone focusing on covering the actions of their area lawmakers. The weekly columns from office holders must not be acceptable substitutes for reporters who are the fires to which political feet are held.

The situation is worse when it comes to local radio or television news telling of what lawmakers or even city council members are doing. The corporatization of radio stations has eliminated many vigorous local news departments. When stations that once had people covering city hall, the courthouse, the school board, and other local events become only one of a half dozen (or more) formats under one roof—and sometimes not even in the same town they are licensed for—with one person who does some news on all of the stations only during morning drive, citizens are not well-informed.

And in an election year, the voters are left to the mercy of manipulative commercials and partisan podcasts.

The economics and the technology of the news business have changed. In general, those changes have led to more concerns about the bottom line and less concerns about informing the increasingly less-educated, more self-centered electorate who make up a political system that favors agendas over broad public service. The public is in danger of being the frog in the pot of water not realizing it is being boiled to death.

It has been observed that the best thing to happen to newspapers in many towns is the disappearance of local radio news. People have only the local newspaper to turn to if they want to know about events at city hall and elsewhere. But it is unlikely those newspapers have anybody specifically assigned to make local and federal legislators accountable to their constituents. And in too many instances, local newspapers have come under ownerships that have no local commitments and thus provide few safeguards against poor public policy to their readers.

Some cities are fortunate that new owners step in who have a dedication to their communities and who believe in the responsibility the press has to them.

It is easy to blame the media for the shortcomings in political awareness among the public. But to do so is to ignore the responsibility that we, the public, carry in a free society. Bernstein spoke of irresponsibility when he wrote, “More and more politically active voters get their news from national partisan TV, radio and digital outlets. Less engaged voters can easily tune out all political news, at least until the height of election season.”

If we despair of today’s politics, we must despair of ourselves. While the too-often bottom-line-only news media share the blame (some might say “the credit) for what we have become as a political people, we cannot escape our own personal civic responsibility to pay attention, to ignore the manipulator and the self-serving promoter, to question claims and concepts, to ask if those who claim they can do anything unilaterally really have the power to do so in a three-branch system of checks and balances, and to evaluate, think, and act for ourselves. Citizens cannot allow themselves to be victims of “the demise of local news.” It is better to live and ask questions than to exist and accept self-serving answers or comfortable assurances.

Think about that as we sit in the pan of water while the political stove gets hotter.

You can read Bernstein’s article at : https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-31/demise-of-local-news-may-be-ruining-congress

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Presidents Day

Posted on February 20, 2023 by bpriddy

On this Presidents Day, we pause to think of Missouri’s Presidents. There are two, only one of whom is a native. And there might be a third.

And then there are a lot of folks who once entertained thoughts of high political grandeur but who fell by the wayside. We spent some time back in a Missourinet studio last week talking for today’s edition of “Showme Today” about our presidents and some of our presidential wannabes.

In the old railroad depot in Atchison, Kansas is the smallest presidential library in the country. It’s considered an unofficial one because of the peculiar circumstances of David Rice Atchison’s perhaps-presidency. His grave stone in Plattsburg tells a story:

Missouri’s northwesternmost county is named for him, way up in the corner. For years, Missouri and Nebraska feuded over 5,000 acres known as McKissick’s Island that was left on the Missouri side of the river after a flood in 1867 changed the river channel. The U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1904 that McKissick Island was still Nebraska territory. It took 95 more years for the two states to agree on an interstate compact approved by Congress that created the legal boundary. But the only way Nebraskans can get to it is by driving through part of Iowa and into Atchison County, Missouri.

Atchison, Kansas is 24 miles southwest of St. Joseph. David Rice Atchison was from Liberty but in the days of “Bleeding Kansas” when the state was deciding if it would be slave or free, Atchison led one of the groups of “border ruffians” who went to Kansas and voted to elect a pro-slavery legislature.

He served two terms in the U. S. Senate. He was so popular that he was elected president pro tempore thirteen times. In those days, the vice-president presided over the Senate and the pro tem was elected and presided only on those rare times when the vice-president wasn’t there.

Vice-President George M. Dallas left the Senate for the rest of the session on March 2, 1849 and the senate picked Atchison to preside in his place.

Presidents were inaugurated later back there—March 4^th (the 25^th Amendment adopted in 1933 moved the date to January). The date fell on a Sunday in 1849. Pesident James Polk signed his last bill early in the moring of March 4 because the Senate had been in session all night. In fact, it didn’t adjourn until 7 a.m.

Incoming President Zachary Taylor did not want to be sworn in on the Sabbath and did not take the oath of office until noon, Monday, March 8.

Some argue that Atchison, as president pro tem, was in line to be president of the country under the succession act of 1792. But Congress had adjourned its session that Sunday morning, meaning Atchison no longer held a Congressional office and therefore there was no line of succession.

He never claimed he was president, “never for a moment” as he wrote in 1880. The truth seems to be that there was no president and no congress for almost a day. In those days of slow national and international communication, there was no crisis.

That’s why the Atchison presidential library, those two display cases in the railroad depot, is “unofficial.”

Incidentally—there was a corresponding controversy in 1877 when Rutheford B. Hays, apparently seeking to avoid another Atchison affair, took took the oath of office in a private ceremony on Saturday, March 3. But President Grant’s term did not end officially until March 4^th. Some think that meant we had TWO presidents for a day.

Speaking of Grant—

Missouri claims him although he was not a native. He married Julia Dent, the daughter of a wealthy St. Louis County farmer and took up farming in the area. Grant was Ohio-born and his real name Hiram Ulysses Grant. He didn’t like his first name and preferred to be known byhis mddleone. He became known as Ulysses S. Grant because Congressman Thomas Hamer nominated him for appointment to West Point apparently not realizing his first name was Hiram and addig a “S” as a middle initial—Grant’s mother’s maiden name was Simpson.

There is at least one letter from Grant during his West Point years in which he signed, “U. H. Grant.” In time he came to accept the Ulysses S(for Simpson) Grant. His tactics during the Civil War led to his nickname of “Unconditional Surrender.

Grant’s father-in-law gave the young couple some of his land for their own farm. But the venture was unsuccessful. He also was unsuccessful in other business ventures.

He rejoined the Army at the start of the war and was a Colonel based in Mexico Missouri when he read in a newspaper that he had been appointe Brigadier General. He commended the unit at Jefferson City for a few days before being dispatched to southeast Missouri where he began building his fame.

Missourian Mark Twain became his close frend in his last days when the family was living in very poor conditions—there was no presidential pension then—and Grant was slowly dying of throat cancer. Twain arranged to have Grant’s two-volume autobiography published after his death. Sales gave the family some financial security.

In 1903 the Busch family bought the land, now known as Grant’s Farm. Today his farm, his cabin, and the mansion of the Dent Family are part of the Busch family estate.

And that brings us to our native-borne president, Harry Truman, who also has an “S” that means nothing. He was born in Lamar, in southwest Missouri, a town where famous Wyatt Earp had his first law enforcement job. He also has an S between his first and last names but, unlike Grant, it’s not a mistake. Formally, there’s no period after the letter because it doesn’t stand for any specific name although he often put a period there. The “S” honors his two grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young.

His extensive story is a familiar one to Missourians but there’s a special angle that links Jefferson City to the Man from Independence. In the 1930s while he was the Presiding Judge of the Jackson County administratie court, President Roosevelt appointed him to head the administrations jobs program. Three days a week, he drove to Jefferson City where he did business out of a fourth-floor room at the Capitol. It was during that time that the Pendergast political machine in Kansas City called him to a meeting in Sedalia to tell him he was going to challenge incumbent U.S. Senator Roscoe Patterson in the 1934 election. There are those who think the Pendergasts wanted him to lose so they could put their own man in the presiding judge’s chair and get Truman out of Jackson County politics. Truman, however, beat Patterson, beginning a career in Washington that led him in 1944 to the vice-presidential nomination and ultimately his historic years in the White House.

We’ve had some others who sought the presidency or thought they might seek it.

Governor Benjamin Gratz Brownan Unconditional Unionist in the Civil War and a founder of he Republican Party in Missouri. He tried to get Abraham Lincoln replaced as the Republican nominee in 1864, strongly opposed President Johnson’s Reconstruction policies, was defeated in the 1872 convention by New York newspaper editor Horace Greeley—and they ultimately were crushed by former Missouri failed farmer U.S. Grant.

Congressman Richard Parks Bland was the leader going into the 1896 Democratic National Convention. But his marriage to a Catholic woman generated opposition within the party and he lost to William Jennings Bryan on the fifth ballot.

Champ Clark, the only Missourian to serve as Speaker of the House, was the leading candidate at the 1912 Democratic Convention. Although he was favored by a majority of delegates he never could get to the required two-thirds. It took 46 ballots for the convention to choose Woodrow Wilson over him.

Young Christopher Bond was seen as a rising star in the Republican Party when the convention met in 1976 in Kansas City and was on a short-list of potential running mades for Gerald Ford. His 12,000 vote upset loss to Joseph Teasdale in November crashed dreams of the White House. But he beat Teasdale in a 1980 rematch and went on to a distinguished career as a United States Senator.

Thomas Eagleton sought the vice-presidency under George McGovern’s campaign. But reports that he had undergone some electro-shock treatments for depression ended is VP run a few weeks after the convention.

Congressman Jerry Litton was a charismatic candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1976 who died with his wife and two children and two other people when their airplane crashed on takeoff from the Chillicothe Airport on their way to a victory party in Kansas City. Litton was known to think he was presidential material. Jimmy Carter, who was elected President that day, thought that Litton would be President some day. The Senatorship went to John Danforth. His top aide told me sometime afterwards that Danforth wasn’t sure he could have beaten Litton. The what-if game can ponder whether we might have seen a Reagan-Litton contest or a Litton-Bush 41.

We haven’t had a serious contestant since, although there are rumors that Josh Hawley would like to be the running mate of Donald Trump in 2024.

Some presidents bring honor to the office. Others bring dishonor and all of them fall somewhere in between. Today we honor those who served and the office they held.

It is one of the Monday holidays decreed by Congress in 1968. Although we call it Presidents Day, Congress has never changed its original designation: Washington’s birthday.

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When the children’s poet roamed the Capitol

Posted on January 11, 2023 by bpriddy

Of all of the reporters who have covered the State Capitol, only one rose to such significance that a portrait of him is part of the great art in the building. One of the four famous Missourians whose portraits decorate the governor’s office is Eugene Field. A plaque on the side of a building about three blocks away marks the place where he had his office as a correspondent for the St. Louis Journal.

If you are not familiar with the name, you undoubtedly at some point in your childhood heard the poem beginning:

“Wynken, Blyken, and Nod one night Sailed off in a wooden shoe….”

Or maybe:

The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat…”

Or perhaps:

“I ain’t afraid uv snakes or toads, or bugs or worms or mice, An’ things ‘at girls are skeered uf I think are awful nice!”

One of these days we’ll go to the State Historical Society in Columbia and dig out the articles he wrote from Jefferson City but for now we’ll share with you a recollection by one of his contemporaries, Chicago newspaperman Slason Thompson, who write a book about Field in 1901:

Although Eugene Field made his first essay in journalism as a reporter, there is not the shadow of tradition that he made any more progress along the line of news-gathering and descriptive writing than he did as a student at Williams. He had too many grotesque fancies dancing through his whimsical brain to make account or “copy” of the plain ordinary facts that for the most part make up the sum of the news of the average reporter’s day. What he wrote for the St. Louis Journal or Times-Journal, therefore, had little relation to the happening he was sent out to report, but from the outset it possessed the quality that attracted readers. The peculiarities and not the conventions of life appealed to him and he devoted himself to them with an assiduity that lasted while he lived. Thus when he was sent by the Journal to Jefferson City to report the proceedings of the Missouri state Legislature, what his paper got was not an edifying summary of that unending grist of mostly irrelevant and immaterial legislation through the General Assembly hopper, but a running fire of pungent comment on the idiosyncrasies of its officers and members. He would attach himself to the legislators whose personal qualities afforded most profitable ammunition for sport in print. He shunned the sessions of Senate and House and held all night sessions of story and song with the choice spirits to be found on the floors and in the lobbies of every western legislature. I wonder why I wrote “western” when the species is as ubiquitous in Maine as in Colorado? From such sources Field gleaned the infinite fund of anecdote and of character-study which eventually made him the most sought-for boon companion that ever crossed the lobby of a legislature or of a state capital hotel in Missouri, Colorado, or Illinois. He was a looker-on in the legislative halls and right merrily he lampooned everything he saw. Nothing was too trivial for his notice, nothing so serious as to escape his ridicule or satire.

Sounds as if Eugene Field would have loved some of the things we have today—blogs, Twitter, Facebook—-all of the social media stuff. But Thompson says that at the time Field was part of the capitol press corps, “There was little about his work…that gave promise of anything beyond the spicy facility of a quick-witted, light-hearted western paragrapher.”

Thompson told of Field’s merry spirit when Fields was assigned the job of (as Thompson put it) “misreporting Carl Schurz when that peripatetic statesman stumped Missouri in 1874 as a candidate for re-election to the United States Senate.”

Field in later years paid unstinted tribute to the logic, eloquence, and patriotic force of Mr. Schurz’s futile appeals to rural voters of Missouri. But during the trip his reports were in no wise conducive to the success of the Republican an Independent candidate. Mr. Schurz’s only remonstrances were, “Field, why will you lie so outrageously?” It was only by the exercise of careful watchfulness that Mr. Schurz’s party was saved from serious compromise through the practical jokes and snares which Field laid for the grave, but not revered Senator. On one occasion when a party of German serenaders appeared at the hotel where the party was stopping, before Mr. Schurz had completed a necessary change of toilet. Field stepped out on the veranda, and waving the vociferous cornet and trombone to silence, proceeded to address the crowd in broken English. As he went on the cheering soon subsided into amazed silence at the heterodox doctrines he uttered, until the bogus candidate was pushed unceremoniously aside by the real one. Mr. Schurz had great difficulty in saving Field from the just wrath of the crowd, which had resented his broken English more than his political heresies.

On another occasion when there was a momentary delay on the part of the gentleman who was to introduce Mr. Schurz, Field stepped to the front and with a strong German accent addressed the gathering as follows:

“Ladies and Shentlemen: I haf such a pad colt dot et vas not bossible for me to make you a speedg tonight, but I have die bleasure to introduce you to my prilliant chournalistic friend Euchene Fielt, who will spoke to you in my blace.”

It was all done so quickly and so seriously that the joke was complete before Mr. Schurz could push himself into the centre of the stage. Annoyance and mirth mingled in the explanation that followed. A love of music was the only thing that made Field tolerable to his serious-minded elder.

A July 3, 1924 story in the Jefferson City Daily Capital News gives us more stories about Fields’ days as a member of the Capitol press corps. E. W. Stephens, the chairman of the State Capitol Commission that oversaw construction of the building, related:

“When Field was acting as a reporter in Jefferson City he sometimes tied his young son to a post while he went into the Capitol to get a story. I remember that he organized a band of serenaders here that was known as the Van Amburgh Show. One man impersonated a monkey, one a lion, another a monkey, and so on. It was a real circus especially when the lion roared. Field took the men and drilled them and then serenaded the governor and other dignitaries.

“Field was very fond of singing and one of his most popular songs was ‘I am captain of the Armyee.’ It goes like this:

I am Captain Jinks of the Horse marines, I feed my horse on corn and beans, I court young ladies in their teen I am a captain of the armyee.

“Another song he was fond of singing was, ‘If I was as young as I used to be.’ I remember one evening when Field was attending a party at the home of Judge Warren Woodson. The evening was warm, and couples strolled to a nearby well occasionally, after water. Someone came in and reported that a certain young man had been seen at the well kissing a young woman. Field immediately paraphrased a song which he was in the habit of singing and when the couple returned sang the following version of ‘The Old Man.’

When I was young and in my prime, I was drinking cold water most of my time. If any girl here will go to the well with me, I’ll show her I’m as young as I used to be.”

We have come across a letter Field wrote from Jefferson City to his wife, Julia, whom he had married in October, 1873, about two months before her seventeenth birthday. She had remained in St. Joseph. Most of the letter is the kind of usual chit-chat but toward the end, we learn a little about how bored he was in Jefferson City. It was sent on January 12, 1874.

My dear wife. I was delayed somewhat in making up my report tonight and am therefore compelled to sit up and wait for the down train so as to mail my letter to the Journal. I have been feeling much better today and am more in condition to work. Edgar’s letter received this morning. You will be very much disappointed about the wedding, will you now, Julia? I am indeed sorry that I am so situated as to be unable to go. Mr. Selby wants me to ask you whether you think it safe to let me stay in Jefferson this winter, without your presence to keep me within the proper limits. I tell him that it is your choice to be in St. Joseph and I want you to stay there as long as you feel that you want to. This has been a cold, raw day and yet I have been on the go most of the time. The session has not got fairly to running. When it does, I expect we shall have very lively times. I went to call on Miss Ella Woodson night before last. She is looking about as usual, perhaps not quite so delicate. I will write often to you, darling. Don’t forget that I love you dearly. I send many kisses. Yours ever, Field.

Eugene Field must have been one of those people who left his more conventional colleagues in the capitol press corps with a combination of amusement and embarrassment and maybe a little envy. But most of his fellow reporters then as well as his reportorial descendants now could or can identify with an observation he wrote in the Journal on August 3, 1878:

“A great many newspaper men lie awake night after night mentally debating whether they will leave their property to some charitable institution or spend it the next day for something with a little lemon in it.”

Protest Ground Rules

Posted on May 11, 2022 by bpriddy

There are few, apparently.

The Hill, a political newspaper in Washington, D.C., reported a couple of days ago that “Abortion rights activists in recent days have gathered outside the homes of three conservative Supreme Court justices to protest Roe v. Wade’s potential demise, taking their advocacy in an intensely personal and politically divisive direction.”

The homes are those of Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts. The article says the protests have “forced the White House to navigate a thorny question about the proper bounds of political discourse…” While outgoing press secretary Jen Psaki denounced threats of violence but stopped short of condemning the demonstrations—“We certainly allow for peaceful protest in a range of places in the country. None of it should violate the law,” she said.

But violating the law might be what they’re doing. A friend of ours has pointed out Federal U.S. code 1507 that says any individual who “pickets or parades” with the “intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer” near a U.S. court or “near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer” will be fined, or “imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”

We’ll wait to see if the Justice Department steps in.

These protests, while posing some liability for the participants, are not likely to be severe enough to launch a May 9^th investigative committee.

But the circumstances do raise related issues about protests whether at courthouses, capitols, or street corners. Some are constitutional. Some are practical.

We have witnessed a lot of protests in a lot of years, including the storming of the local newspaper by Lincoln University students upset about an editorial highly-critical of Martin Luther King just days before his death, and disturbances on the campus (Lincoln in an HBCU, for those unfamiliar with the school) for a couple of years that resulted in a National Guard presence.

We have seen people standing quietly in front of the post office holding signs urging us to get out of Vietnam, Afghanistan, the United Nations, etc.

Many years ago when gay rights was in a much earlier stage we remember seeing members of a group called ACT-UP! Marching around the state seal in the Capitol rotunda chanting, “You say ‘don’t f—k,’ we say ‘f—k you!”’ That pretty well ended organized political protests in the Capitol.

We watched the Medicaid 23 interrupt Senate debate on Medicaid expansion one day with prayers and songs. They wound up being charged and dragged into court.

Prayers, cursing, burning, quietly holding signs are all part of our rights as American citizens to protest. It’s right there in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech…or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

So protesting grievances is an inborn right of Americans. The accompanying responsibility for doing so in a way that does not violate the word “peaceably” belongs to the demonstrators and the subjective judgment of what is beyond propriety lies with the justice system that has the U.S. Code on one hand and the First Amendment on the other. .

Attached to that system is another value judgment that lies with the protesters: Will the event do harm or good to the causes of the protestors?

Frankly, we doubt demonstrations at the Supreme Court building influence the opinion-makers inside the building very much if at all. We do find targeting the private spaces of the judges by demonstrating at their homes is an unwarranted invasion of their lives and certainly the lives of their families and their neighbors.

Your quiet observer doesn’t even like it when a car goes slowly through my neighborhood with the bass turned all the way up in the large speakers in the backseat and shakes the windows of his house.

In our fervid proclamations of our rights, it is easy to overlook the responsible, reasonable, and respectful exercise of them. Trying to use statements of our rights as bludgeons doesn’t seem from this lofty view to be a responsible action to take.

But what is left when leaders appear to be unmotivated by the responsible, the reasonable, and the respectful?

Whatever it is, it must be a principle of our freedoms that the mob cannot be allowed to rule. It can express itself. But decisions must be made in cooler surroundings than on the passionate streets. And the likely best decisions are most often made in the quiet regardless of whether they please us.

Decisions by the courts can be protested in the courts with better arguments than those shouted outside the fences that protect the decision-makers.

Bob Priddy

A journalist's random observations

Category Archives: capitol

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