Category Archives: education

One Man’s Vision—5 

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The shift of the focus on a convention center and hotel reopens the penitentiary for more redevelopment ideas than museums.

We need a new library.

Last August, the local library board asked voters for a 15-cent levy increase to renovate, expand, and modernize our 50-year old building.  The $28-million effort was killed by a secret group of people, none of whom had ever attended a single library board meeting during which these plans were developed (and who have never attended a board meeting since), who circulated a huge lie throughout Cole County that the library board was going to increase property taxes by 75%.  We were asking for nothing of the sort and I am still waiting for someone from this group to explain to the library board why they circulated this lie and who created it.  I want to see its homework but it appears no one from this group has the courtesy or the courage to prove its case.

—Because it can’t.

What is true is that the need for 21st century library service has not changed.  We know that we will have to go to the voters again but we worry that this group so poisoned public confidence in the library system and the library board that our task of winning support for the library this city, county, and region must have for most of the rest of this century is much harder.

Nonetheless, we cannot stay in a building that no longer meets the needs of our constituents. Our efforts to maintain the services we offer has led to the rental of office space across High Street for our administrators who have been crowded out by the space we needs to meet our responsibilities. We are facing a choice of moving some of our staff back into the building and reducing some services now occupying the space they would reclaim, or leaving things as they are.

We have never had the parking we need.  When the present building was constructed, the plan was to tear down the original Carnegie building to create parking for our patrons. After the building was completed, however, those interested in historic preservation preserved the old building.

We thought in our planning for last year’s renovation election that the county would be picking up some of the Buescher vacant lots and leasing some of the space to us, but the city decided after we had set the August election date that it would be keeping all of them—although it has told us it will lease space to us once it has completed its acquisition program.

But that still does not resolve the inadequacies that have developed through fifty years since the building was new.  The county has indicated an interest in acquiring the building if we decide to sell and move, and further negotiations are warranted because we will, eventually, move.

We have no choice but to do so if we are to responsibly serve our patrons.

About twenty years ago or so, we planned to put up a new building across Lafayette Street from the original prison entrance. But the federal government decided to build the Christopher S. Bond Federal Courthouse there, leaving us in our present situation.

Moving the convention center discussion to Madison and Capital re-opens the prison as a potential site for a new library. It’s in the minds of our library board members but not yet an active discussion.

We are starting to think about asking ourselves, however, “How can we do this?”

One Man’s Vision—4 

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A state-of- the-art comprehensive Jefferson City/Cole County History Museum, at the old prison—discussed in the previous entry in this series—should be only a start.

Let’s shoot for the moon.

What really would be a giant step toward greatness would be he acquisition of another museum, one destined for a Smithsonian-quality reputation.

Six years ago we had a shot at getting the Steamboat Arabia museum to move here from Kansas City. But our planning group never got beyond talking, talking, talking and the expertise I hoped would develop when the group was formed never did develop. In effect, we decided we are good enough, as is. And one important business leader straight-out told me it wouldn’t work here.

None of the people I thought would take the practical lead did. But another smaller, more ambitious town went beyond talking and what it discovered for itself speaks volumes of what Jefferson City would have discovered had there been some initiative generated by all of that talking and should be a challenge to Jefferson City to show it wants to be more than the state capitol, more than a convention center can give us, more than we are.

City leaders in Marshall reportedly raised $150,000 for a feasibility study of a steamboat museum at I-70 and Highway 65. The initial investment would be high. The payoff will be large and long-lasting

The findings show that the payoff of this major commitment will be multiples of what was forecast for the Marshall/Sedalia/Lexington area.

I took a lot of notes at the meeting where the findings by the consulting firm of Peckham, Guyton, Albers & Viets (PGAV) were revealed three years ago.

PGAV called the museum proposal “a chance to put something iconic in Central Missouri.’  It described a state of the art museum with a national and regional strategy. It addressed continued investment that renewed the museum’s life cycle, the development of supporting amenities, the financial sustainability for generations, and the leadership the project would provide for future development.

The company looked at tourism strategies—attracting people to the area, creating support for the project, and connecting the museum to other parts of the country by defining a larger region to draw from.

They saw the museum as being a local draw and, more important, a destination attraction. PGAV calculated the trade area for the museum south of Marshall at more than 7.5 million people within a three-hour travel time.  The study forecast the operating costs would be about $2.4 million a year, based on an $18 adult admission fee, retail sales, and food and beverage income, among other things. It could be operated with 18 fulltime employees.

The first phase would be a 77,000 square foot museum (about double the present footprint, that would hold the Arabia and a second boat (we’ll discuss that later) and provide support and storage space on 3.7 acres, including parking. Estimated cost: $37 million.  That’s what we built the Center for Missouri Studies for in Columbia—a three-story, 77-thousand square feet building.  By the time the third phase of the steamboat museum would be completed, the complex would cover 8 acres, including parking

PGAV’s site analysis pointed to the great visibility of the museum from I-70 and to the great amount of open land at Marshall Junction.

The company found that museums are “economic engines” for an area—that non-profit art and culture attractions have an economic impact of more than one-billion dollars in Missouri (that’s a 2015 study).  They calculated that $1 generated by such a museum would generate $3.20 for the economy.

The study identifies several financial tools created by state law—Community Development Block Grants, Neighborhood Assistance tax credits, Community Improvement Districts, and ta exempt bonds issued by the Missouri Development Finance Board.

Additionally, PGAV calculated the national 250th anniversary celebration in 2026 will create federal funding capabilities for projects with about two-billion dollars allocated for state signature projects—and the museum, they said, would be a prime choice that a signature project (Jefferson City benefitted from the Bicentennial in 1976 by getting funding for restoration of Lohman’s Landing when it was declared a statewide bicentennial project).

In Summary, PGAV concluded that the Marshall-centered market would be enough to support a destination museum that would be an anchor for other tourism assets in the region (Arrow Rock, Sedalia and the State Fair, Santa Fe Trail sites, etc.  It would develop tourism synergies for local tourism in a three-county region (or broader), it would trigger multiple development opportunities near the Marshall Junction interchange and would create an economic development opportunity when combined with other attractions.  The study indicated the museum would draw 3.7 million visitors when phase one opens in 2026.

If that is true for Marshall, consider what it would mean for Jefferson City.

The population of Columbia, Jefferson City, and Fulton tops 182,000.  The combined populations of Marshall, Sedalia, Lexington, Boonville, and Moberly is about one-third that.

Seven state or private institutions of higher education within thirty miles of Jefferson City have more than 44,000 students. Another thirty miles, north and south, are Moberly Area Community College and the Missouri University of Science and Technology that add another 12,000 students. Sporting events and parental visits bring tens of thousands more people to those schools.

Add tto that, that Jefferson City is on the way to the Lake of the Ozarks. Lake Expo recently estimated 2.5-million people visit the Lake every year, 75% of them between May and September.

Increased tourism is only part of the benefit. The steamboat museum here could offer academic opportunities in technology, archaeology, textile preservation, museum management, American Western history, and other programs at or through those higher education institutions. The museum could benefit them and could gain benefits from them.

And think what a museum dedicated to grow in coming years or decades to capture the history of  the golden decades of Missouri River commerce and frontier development (1820-1880) could do.  The goal of the museum is to have artifacts—and maybe complete steamboats—excavated from past river channels, now farm fields from each of those decades.  Arabia museum President Dave Hawley has one of those boats located and test borings indicate the Malta might be complete enough to bring up as whole as possible. He would love to open a new museum with an 1841 steamboat in it.

Think about that.

Six years ago, we had the chance to raise about five million dollars to pay the costs of excavating the Malta and having it here, keeping the museum project highly visible while he rest of the project developed. Only one person was asking, “How do we do that?”  Nobody answered.

At the time, major fund-raising was focused on the Bicentennial Bridge or on the Missouri River Port.

I wrote at the time that I didn’t see hundreds of school buses with thousands of school children and their adult chaperones visiting a river port or taking in the view from Adrian’s Island as they would visit a steamboat museum.  To be clear, I think Adrian’s Island will be appreciated more in ten years than it was then or might be appreciated now. I can’t recall the last time I heard anything about the riverport but it’s not likely something I will take visiting relatives to see.

The Arabia museum is running out of time before it closes and the collection possibly moves to Pennsylvania, significantly, in November, 2026. Making the acquisition of that museum for our city as the official Capital City Bicentennial Project would be about a $50 million initial commitment. But it would transform our city and it would be an incredible driver to prison redevelopment as well as an incredible complement to the convention center/capitol avenue restoration and redevelopment effort.

Based on my conversations with Joe and Josephine Jeffcity, the steamboat museum would enhance chances for approval of a bond issue for the convention center, the library, and the historical museum, together or separately.

How can we make this step toward greatness happen?

Why should we do it?

Some of us are old enough to remember President Kennedy’s September 12, 1962 speech at Rice University when he set the goal of a manned moon landing within the decade:

“But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic?…We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.”

The steamboat museum can be, should be, Jefferson City’s moonshot.

At the risk of sinking into hyperbole, bringing this museum to Jefferson City could be the greatest reach for greatness in city history since civic leaders organized the construction of our first Missouri River bridge that helped blunt Sedalia’s effort to steal the capital in 1896.

How can we organize and measure the best of our energies and skills to make it happen?

How can we do it?

 

One Man’s Vision—2

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Jefferson City’s hopes of turning the old penitentiary into a major redevelopment project are in danger. City officials have for many years pinned many of their hopes for a mid-city rennaiscance to the state’s preservation, restoration, and redevelopment of the prison and dozens of acres of land controlled by he city inside the old walls.

Jefferson City leaders must aggressively overturn an effort by the House of Representatives Budget  Committee to eliminate $52.3 million from the state budget that Governor Parson recommended in January and another $40 million he wants set aside for later preservation and restoration work.

It is essential if a downtown convention center is to be more than a stand-alone project that misses the chance to bring about greater transformational change for our city from Madison and Capitol for the next seven blocks to the east.

The plan has been promoted as putting the old place in shape for expanded tourism attraction.  But the issue is far more important than that.  It is only one part of a much greater future for a major part of the Capital City and, it can be argued, is part of a package of developments that is highlighted by the expansion of the Capitol itself.

The Capitol and the penitentiary are bookends of our city’s historic, cultural, economic, and ethnic past, present, and future.  In fact, the penitentiary is a major reason this city continued to exist for the first eighty-five years as the seat of state government, a development that curtailed the efforts to end the City of Jefferson’s political history before it had hardly begun.

Jefferson City was a tiny, dirty/muddy, little frontier village, the worst of the three possible locations for a permanent capital, when Governor John Miller told the legislature in 1832 it had to do something to create an economy for the city or take the government elsewhere:

If t is not to be the permanent seat of government, that fact cannot be too soon made known, while on the other hand if it is to remain as such, it is advisable that those measures which would advance its prosperity, should be taken with the least possible delay. Some of the principle streets are from the nature of tne ground impassable. It is therefore respectfully recommended that an appropriation be made for grading and otherwise improving,them. The erection of a penitentiary here, the necessity and utility which cannot be doubted, would contribute in a great degree to calm the public mind in relation to th« permanent location of the seat of government.

 The penitentiary, for many years well outside the city limits, today is the link between the water company overlooking the river on the hill west of Bolivar Street to Ellis Porter/Riverside Park and its recently-restored amphitheatre on the east. It’s an area that swells to include Dunklin Street that runs through the heart of Munichberg and continues to and past the entrance to Lincoln University before turning back toward the river at Clark Avenue.

For many years, the tall standpipe at the water company,  the capitol dome, and the smokestacks of prison industries were parts of our skyline.

That area has been, is, and will be the heart of our city.

One Budget Committee member called the restoration “the stupidest idea I’ve heard all day,” and another said it was not a place she would take her grandchildren. Another opposes the idea of making a tourist attraction out of the suffering of thousands of inmates.

It’s time for these folks to hear, loudly, from city leaders that they are flat wrong on several counts.

There’s plenty of time and ways to get that money put back into the budget but Jefferson City needs to become very aggressive in making the case that these committee members are just flat wrong. Thirty thousand people a year don’t think the prison is stupid. A lot of grandchildren have gone through it. And the suffering of inmates is an important part of the reason our national history of corrections has undergone massive change. The prison is a great example of showing how our past can guide us to the future.

Alcatraz is not too gruesome to draw 1.5-million people a year. Nor is the old Eastern State Prison in Philadelphia, which draws 350-thousand. Nor are at least a dozen restored prisons and jails throughout the nation.

Jefferson City cannot allow the short-sightedness of these representatives to prevail.

In a city where you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a lobbyist, it wouldn’t hurt if they had enough interest in their town to speak up for it voluntarily and help get that money back. And asking the governor to step in would not be improper.

Jefferson City must fight for the restoration of this funding not just because the old prison is a tourism draw but because of its potential for significant other developments that will take advantage of a large plot of available land in the heart of the city. What prison restoration can mean to Jefferson City’s core redevelopment is part of the vision of making a good city a great one.

The prison is more than an old, miserable lockup.  It is one of the most important historical structures still standing in Missouri, a massive learning experience for all who visit it, even grandchildren. Going through it is a matter of going through several eras in the history of crime, punishment, and justice in Missouri.

You want to know how bad things were?  Take a tour. You want to know how things changed?  Take a tour. The stories you hear from guides are intensely human. Calling the prison a tourist attraction, in fact, cheapens the prison as a teaching and learning experience.

We can concede that there are those who don’t think the public should see this institution that focuses on the worst of our society.  But ignoring the worst does not make us better.  Crime is here.  Prisons are here.  Refusing to acknowledge their presence, their purposes, or the changing standards that they represent in our history is unrealistic.

Thousands of men and women went into that “bloodiest 47 acres in America” and came out to live peaceful lives. Understanding the world where they were sent and from which they emerged is important.  Making a tourist attraction out of the suffering of thousands of inmates?  It’s much more than that.

The decision by our city leaders to abandon the old penitentiary as the potential site for a convention center and hotel is a welcome, solid, decision. The plan to put the hotel/center in the prison seemed to be a good idea about a decade ago but nothing developed other than a few lines on paper. It was correct for the previous city administration to bring this long-ignored opportunity back to the public mind and to keep it there. But it is not unusual for first concepts to fall by the wayside as time shows their weaknesses.

I was the President of the State Historical Society of Missouri when we opened our $37-million Center for Missouri Studies about five years ago. It is far beyond what we imagined it would be in the first stages of our planning and it is not on our first choice of location.  But the leaders of our society never once conceded that we could not do what we wanted to do. Our only question was, “How do we do this?”

That characteristic, when applied to cities, is what elevates good cities to great cities.  Do not tell me we can’t do something; explain to me how we can.

What happens with the penitentiary now that it is available for new development is a major factor in Jefferson City’s move from a good city to a great city.  As we explore one man’s vision in this series, details will emerge.

We’ll talk about our vision for the penitentiary later. But for now, the priority must be action that will preserve the penitentiary for its own value to the public while creating an improved opportunity for the city to take steps toward greatness within it.

(photo credit: Missouri American Water Company)

 

Books and Beyond

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I am not happy if I do not have a book within reach.

I have upstairs books (Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers). I have downstairs books (Bob Edwards’ A Voice in a Box). I have doctor’s office books (finished reading Steve Inskeep’s Disagree We Must in an office this week). When we go on a trip, I pack at least two paperback whodunnits (John Grisham has shortened a lot of flights over water) that won’t be much of a loss if I leave one in a hotel room or an airline seat pocket.

The box next to the chair is waiting to be re-filled at the Missouri River Regional Library’s used book sale in a couple of weeks.  I have a porch book—-to take out on the screen porch on nice days and sit in the glider with Minnie Mayhem, one of our cats who likes to glide, and I read a bit, nap a bit, read some more and then come inside to write.  Or fix a salad for dinner or something. The book is called Masters of the Word: How Media Shaped History from the Alphabet to the Internet by William J. Bernstein.

The preservation of language, he argues, did not begin with writing; it began with mathematics in “a small area of southern Mesopotamia about five millennia ago…The first writing arose not from the desire to record history or produce literature, but rather to measure grain, count livestock, and organize and control the labor of the human animal. Accounting, not prose, invented writing.”

It is a long way from then to now and our emphasis on technology and all of the uncertainties we feel as we plunge into worlds of information that we could not have imagined as recently as yesterday. Bernstein is an optimist:

“When viewed over the ages, technologies do matter; a writing system that is simple to master is inherently more democratic than one that is difficult; a printing press capable of inexpensively turning out thousands or millions  of tracts is inherently more democratic than limiting book production to a few Church-controlled scriptoria, and two-way cell-phone and Internet communications are inherently more democratic than mass-market one-way radio and television…Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, an ever greater portion of the human race lives under democratic rule, and it is not difficult to credit this happy result to recent advances in two-way communications technologies.”

He concludes by noting that the technology of information distribution did not change much after Gutenberg’s invention of movable type moved Martin Luther’s status from being a dissatisfied German Catholic priest to being the creator of the Protestant Reformation and the 1840s that saw the development of the high-speed press and the telegraph. But the ongoing, though slow “empowerment of ordinary people” took a step back in the late 1800s and early 1900s—-an era most of us might think was a time of great growth in the flow of democratizing information. To the contrary, he argues, that era brought “the advent of the penny newspapers, radio, and television—expensive, complex media that could be controlled by only a few hands.”

But, “Fortunately, the new digital media have once again dramatically moved the empowerment needle back toward ordinary citizens. For the first time, a significant fraction of the world’s citizens can be in instant communication with one another.”

He is confident MOST of the changes affecting our political, social, and cultural lives will be positive.  But he warns this new world also could give governments more ways to control their citizens.

It seems from our high observation position that we are just entering that era in which we as free or potentially free people will be the determining factors in whether technology continues to enhance more democracy in our country and in the world—-or if we allow that technology to turn us against one another, which will only ennoble and enhance those who wish to use communication technology for repression and control rather than for Expression and freedom.

We have to control technology, not let technology control us.

Dictator For A Day 

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Who wouldn’t like to be Dictator For A Day?   Let’s be honest.  What would  you dictate?

How about world peace?

Economic stability?

Real opportunities to achieve the American Dream?

Or to define the American Dream?

An unending supply of money to donate to programs to feed the hungry, house the ill-housed, give everybody a chance for however much education they might need to reach  their goals, help crime victims, cure diseases, etc.?

Then what would you do on the second day?

—Because you’ve only been a dictator for one day?

Wouldn’t it be smart on the first day to dictate that your authority extended for the rest of your life?   (I’ve always wondered by people who rub the lamp and find a genie in their midst granting them three wishes didn’t immediately wish for unlimited wishes.)

Our former president says he won’t be a dictator except on the first day when he’ll build the wall and drill, drill, drill. We hope he doesn’t get a cramp in his hand from signing all of his executive orders.

One day of a dictatorship is 24 hours too many.

A long-ago friend of mine once remarked after listening to a public office holder proclaim upon his inauguration that God intended him to be in that office, “Never trust a politician with a messianic complex.”

Let’s take a big leap beyond that.

Never, ever, trust a politician who says he wants to be a dictator for only one day, or denies obvious thoughts of being a dictator far longer. An old limerick warns us against placing trust in such a person:

There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger.

Crock

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Republicans in the U. S. House of Representatives have had the night to twist arms, make promises or threats, or do other things to cajole their own caucus to vote for a Speaker who has been in the House since 2006, has introduced only thirty bills in all that time, and has gotten none of them passed.  They’ll try again today.

Jim Jordan not only didn’t get the votes to become Speaker of the House on the first ballot yesterday, he got outvoted by Democrats.  All 212 Democrats voted for their leader, Hakeem Jeffries. Jordan had only 200 votes after twenty of his fellow Republicans voted against him.

The Republicans, who can’t get their own ducks in a row, are blaming Democrats for their failure to use their majority to pick a new Republican  Speaker to replace the ousted Kevin McCarthy.

Whose fault is this historic and ugly deadlock?

McCarthy maintains the House would not be stalemated if “every single Democrat didn’t vote with eight Republicans to shut this place down.”

That, my friends, is a crock. And it’s full to the brim.

The Democrats have no obligation to Republicans who have let four percent of their caucus run their conference.  Democrats are not in charge of putting the Republican House in order.

Democrats have scored some points by saying they’ll work with moderate Republicans to end the chaos.  But McCarthy and Jim Jordan and their supporters who have shown no interest in bipartisanship otherwise think Democrats should ride to their rescue.

Hypocrisy flows in buckets with their whining.

Perhaps the Republicans, especially those who have aligned themselves with the political evangelicals should have a discussion group about the meaning of Luke 4:23—“Physician, heal thyself.”

And to remember another old adage:  If you point a finger at someone remember that there are three fingers pointing back at you.

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Notes From a Quiet—

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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 journalist

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The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was last weekend.  They’re filled with jokes and jabs between those who cover and those who are covered.  And along the way, the people who are covered get to say some good things about journalists. Sometimes, the covered make some pointed comments about journalists.

We pause today to pay our tribute to the fellow ink-stained wretches who daily do their best to tell us about our city, our state, our nation, and our world. There are those who will dismiss this contribution as silly because they already know that reporters are biased against their viewpoint, whatever it might be.  Some of those who dismiss these remarks might, in fact, claim that they know the “media” is biased because their favorite radio or television talk show host or political leader says it is, missing the irony in that position. We hope they will excuse us as we plunge ahead, using words of another written a long time ago when the press was newspapers and reporters really could be called ink-stained wretches—a title many were proud to wear.  The phrase, incidentally, is of uncertain origin but has been used for decades.

In 1922, New York American writer Gene Fowler, one of the great journalists of the first third of the Twentieth Century, asked Arthur Brisbane to write about the one-thousand members of the Newspaper Club of New York. Brisbane was the editor of William Randolph Hearst’s tabloid New York Mirror. When he died in 1936, Brisbane was called “the greatest journalist in his day” by Hearst.  And Damon Runyon, certainly no slouch as a 1920s writer, said, “Journalism has lost its all-time No. 1 genius.” What he wrote then about newspaper reporters rings true today among those who toil not only in newspapers but in the changing world of electronic journalism, often without pay increases for years, to responsibly report about the factors that shape our lives. We found a reprint of Brisbane’s editorial on page nineteen in the October 14, 1922 edition of The Fourth Estate, which billed itself as “a newspaper for the makers of newspapers.”

A thousand newspaper men represent, among other things, disappointment in life. Newspaper work is hard, and it does not get better as you grow older, unless you are among the few very fortunate.

Men in other professions, as they work through the years, build up a firm name professionally or in business they build up a business name. And at the end of years they have created something that goes on earning for them when they are old.

Not so with the newspaper man.

He must do every day the work by which he lives, and do it all over again.

Each day he must create his reputation anew.

His greatest asset is enthusiasm, real interest in what he sees and what he tells.

And the years are the enemies of enthusiasm.

A thousand newspapermen, however, represent something more important than several hundred kinds of disappointment. They are to our civilization what the bulb in the electric lamp is to the big factory grinding out electricity down by the waterfront. The light in the bulb tells what the factory is doing. The reporter in the newspaper tells what civilization is doing, as it works, builds, tears down, cheats, lies, deceives and slowly goes ahead.

“The electric bulb burns out, so does the newspaperman. He at least has made it possible for humanity to see more clearly and to advance with knowledge. That means satisfaction.

Newspaper work brings disillusion. After a few years a man starting out full of enthusiasm knows too much about human beings. He must begin with a great supply of hope and optimism, and a good deal of knowledge of the past and of progress in the past to avoid pessimism and gloom.

Young reporters learn that the words of great men is often unreliable. One of the best known statesmen and heroes of this country always had two reporters sent to see him by the Associated Press, that one might corroborate the other and discourage denial of what the hero had actually said.

Reporters in the very beginning learn the pitiful craving for notoriety, eagerness for publicity that obsesses their fellow citizens and that diminishes their opinion of them.

Reporters learn quite young that politics and the government of this nation are managed to a great extent by the intellectual dregs of the population. They discover that the first step toward public approval is a step down, and that discourages them,

However, newspaper work is an education. It enlightens reporter as the reporter enlightens his fellow citizens. If he can stay out of the rut, which is extremely difficult and unusual, or if he can stay in long enough to get the information he wants, then get out and try something else, the reporter usually can thank his newspaper experience.

If he stays too long and is not exceptionally fortunate, time and the current of news running through him burn him out, as the electric current burns out the bulb, and like that bulb he goes into the scrap heap.

This is written after thirty-nine years of reporting and other newspaper work, and therefore with some slight authority.

Without the work of good reporters our government, our grafters, our hypocrites, big and little, our crooks in politics, and our politics in crime would be a thousand times worse than they are. Let that repay the 1,000 newspaper men.

We often have said that being a reporter is the most exciting thing to do because reporters do something that scientists say is impossible and they do it every day.  Each day reporters walk into their newsrooms not knowing what events will challenge their skills and their principles during the day.  At the end of that day—and passionate reporters know a “day” for them is not measured in a fixed number of hours—they have created something out of nothing, a product known as “news.”  It happens every day in newspaper, radio, and television newsrooms throughout America.  Critics blast television for the “if it bleeds, it leads” attitude, or bemoan the shrinking commitment to solid local news reporting on radio, and mourn the passing of competition in local newspaper markets.  But in hundreds of newsrooms of those organizations are those who consciously work to tell the story straight.  But even if you believe the “media” are biased, believe Brisbane’s last paragraph:

Without the work of good reporters our government, our grafters, our hypocrites, big and little, our crooks in politics, and our politics in crime would be a thousand times worse than they are

Brisbane also wrote something else—advice that is good for reporters and non-reporters alike—that we’ll pass along in another entry.

Bob and George, Part II 

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I’ve already admitted that I appear to be woke and unapologetically so.  Now I have revealed that I once was involved with George Soros.

I have some strongly conservative friends but so far none have made the sign of the cross and waved garlic branches to protect themselves as I have drawn near them.  I swear, however, based on some letters to the editor, that there are people who each night pull their Murphy Beds down from the storage space in their bedroom wall and then look under it to see that George isn’t there.

Here’s how George and I got together.

One of the hinge-points in world history occurred on November 9, 1989 when the gates of the Berlin Wall were opened and the destruction of the wall began.  The fall of the Berlin Wall was the symbolic end of the Cold War, confirmed at a summing meeting on December 2-3 ith George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev during which both declared the Cole War was officially, in their opionons at least, finished. German reunification took place the next October.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republicans quickly fell apart.  When Czechslovak President Gustav Husak resigned on December 10, the only hard line Communist government remaining from the Warsaw Pact was in Nicolai Ceaucesecu’s Romania and he was about done.

(He pronounced his last name Chow-CHESS-koo.)

About the time Berlin was celebrating the fall of the wall, the Romanian Communist Party’s Fifteenth Congress  was electing Ceausescu to another five-year term. His speech that day denounced the Peaceful Revolution, as it was called, that was underway throughout Eastern Europe. Violent demonstrations broke out in the Romanian Capital of Bucharest and in Timisoara, considered the cultural and social center of the western part of the country.

Ceausescu held a mass meeting on University Square in Bucharest four days before Christmas that year in which he blamed the riots in Timisoara on “fascist agitators who want to destroy socialism” but the crowd was having none of it. He was booed and heckled and took cover inside the building.  By the next day the revolution was nationwide and the military turned against him. He fled in a helicopter than had landed on the roof of the building, just ahead of demonstrators who had surged inside. The chopper was ordered to land by the army which soon took custody of the president and his wife.

They were tried on Christmas day by a court established by the provisional government, convicted and sentenced to death. It was reported that hundreds of soldiers volunteered to be their firing squad. A firing squad described as “a gathering of soldiers” began shooting as soon as the two were in front of a wall. Their execution was videotaped and shown on Romanian television.

In the months after those events, Marvin Stone, a former deputy director of the United States Information Agency, with support from Secretary of State James Baker, founded the International Media Fund to “help establish non-governmental media across the former Communist bloc.”

In August and September, 1991, I was one of three men sent to Romania and Poland to conduct seminars under the auspices of the International Media Fund and the National Association of Broadcasters. While there we worked with The Soros Foundation for an Open Society, which organized the seminars we conducted.  The foundation told us it was formed “to promote the values of freedom and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe.”

In order to build an open society, one needs education, free communications and the free flow of ideas, and the development of independent, critical thinking at all levels in society. An open society is characterized by a plurality of opinions. There is never only one truth, such dogmatic thinking is the characteristic of closed societies. In an open system ideas, ideals and opinions are constantly challenged, and they enter into competition with each other.  This free, unhindered competition of ideas yields a better system for all.

I was joined by two other men, Bayard “Bud” Walters of Nashville, the owner of several radio stations who would discuss sales—a novel concept in a country that had nothing approaching a capitalist society or a capitalist mindset—and Julian Breen, a former programmer from WABC in New York who had built WABC to having the largest listening audience in America.

Julian died at the age of 63 in 2005. Bud, who is my age, still runs his Cromwell Media expire from Nashville.  When he was asked a couple of years ago about his career highlights, the first one he cited was being “part of a three-person media team that taught how to have a Free Press in Romania and Poland.”  It was eye-opening and rewarding.”

We spent a week in each country and all three of us were impressed by the enthusiasm the young people of Romania and Poland had for free expression.  I talked about the mechanics of covering the news, of who news sources would be—or should be, of the things people needed to know about in a free society (heavy emphasis on telling people what their government was doing for, to, and with them, a unique thing to those folks).  I talked of ethics, a particular interest of our audience.  I talked about the courage it takes to be a reporter, a quality necessary in building free media in a society still mentally adjusted to totalitarianism.

When we came home, we hoped we had planted some seeds of freedom in countries that still had few free radio stations, countries where many people—especially older ones who were accustomed to cradle-to-grave government regulation of their lives—were not sure what this freedom thing was all about and whether it was a good thing.

But the young people knew it was.  One of them told me there was a great irony in the advent of freedom in Romania.  In 1966, Ceausescu made abortion illegal. It was an effort to increase the country’s population. Decree 770 provided benefits to mothers of five or more children and those with ten or more children were declared “heroine mothers” by the state. The government all but prohibited divorces.

The ”decree-ites,” our friend told me, the children born because of the ban on abortions, constituted the generation of Romanians that revolted and killed Ceaucescu.  And were learning lessons about a free society from us.

A decade later, I was judging an annual contest for excellence in news reporting for the Radio-Television News Directors Association—an international organizationthat made me the first person to lead it twice—when one of my board members announced that we had our first truly international winner.

A young woman from Romania.

I think she was too young to have been in those seminars in ’91.  But knowing that a seed we had sown in Romania had, indeed, flowered, was a strongly emotional moment.

We were sent there by the IMF and the Media Fund.  The seminars at which we spoke were financed by George Soros.

For those who speak his name because of their ignorance of his belief in an open society, I want you to know that I am proud of my association with him even though it was decades ago.  To those who think we as a nation should be ignorant of our history of prejudice, discrimination, and coercion,  and blindly follow those who demean and insult our intelligence in their efforts to get and maintain self-serving power over us, I want to remind you of the goal of George Soros’ Open Society foundation:

In order to build an open society, one needs education, free communications and the free flow of ideas, and the development of independent, critical thinking at all levels in society. An open society is characterized by a plurality of opinions. There is never only one truth, such dogmatic thinking is the characteristic of closed societies. In an open system ideas, ideals and opinions are constantly challenged, and they enter into competition with each other.  This free, unhindered competition of ideas yields a better system for all.

When it comes to freedom, I’d rather have George Soros on my side.  Because I have seen the other side. Unlike so many of those who have turned his name into an empty-headed epithet, I have been within his circle. And I do not fear him.

Despots should.  And I know why.

George and Bob, Part I

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The far right’s obsession with George Soros as some kind of leftist boogeyman funding every supposedly un-American conspiracy it can think of shows a lack of creativity, reality, and intellect we should expect in discussions of our political system.

To some of these folks, the mention of the words “George” and “Soros” provokes the same reaction that Pavlov got from a dog when he rang a bell.

Soros bashing emerged again last week with the indictment of Donald Trump.  Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, attacking Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg as “a Soros-funded prosecutor who refuses to prosecute violent crimes…” A New York Times fact-checker has found no direct Soros funding link to Bragg’s campaign although he did give a million dollars to a political action committee that put a half-million dollars into the Bragg campaign.

Our former Attorney General and Trump acolyte, Eric Schmitt, accuses Bragg of ignoring “violent crime (that) rages on & violent criminals walk free.”  Too bad he never criticized prosecutors here at home where our two biggest cities have had high murder rates for years, including time when Schmitt was AG or was in the legislature making state policy.

Current AG Andrew Bailey accused Bragg of being “another Soros-funded prosecutor with misplaced priorities.

Governor Parson says it’s a matter of “another Soros-backed prosecutor [who] uses the rule of law to serve his own political agenda, not justice.

My defense of Soros should not be unexpected because I have been a beneficiary of Mr. Soros.

Or maybe I was a Soros enabler and others benefitted—-although his critics will say nobody has benefitted from the distribution of his wealth as he sees fit to distribute it—-a reverse reflection of how the people on the Left feel about the Koch brothers and their support of right-wing activities.

In such discussions we should acknowledge some things:

The Golden Rule in politics has been expressed as, “He who has the gold, rules.”

That’s not exactly correct. There are a lot of instances in which wealthy patrons have invested in this or that candidate only to see that candidate lose.  But the super-wealthy can afford to just shrug and see who else or what else they can buy, confident they will prevail eventually—although most of us wonder why the super-rich feel a need to keep prevailing.

Why can’t they just be like Scrooge McDuck and go down in their basement and take a bath in their money?

Why should they?

Soros faced his wealth and the freedom it gives him to be involved not only in politics but in other causes this way in a 2016 essay in The New York Review of Books: “My success in the financial markets has given me a greater degree of independence than most other people. This obliges me to take stands on controversial issues when others cannot, and taking such positions has itself been a source of satisfaction. In short, my philanthropy has made me happy.”

One of the things that makes him happy is the project that involved me.

Before I tell the story, let me tell you some things about George Soros that his critics never talk about but they’re things that help understand some of the man.

George, if I may speak of him with a familiarity I have not earned, is about 92, the son of a man who escaped from a Soviet prison camp and made his way back to Nazi-occupied Budapest where his family—Jewish family—was living. He says his father printed fake identity documents for other Jewish families.  Those years living as a Jew in Nazi Hungary shaped his life.

He went to England after escaping from Hungary, studied economics and developed his philosophy of investing. He came to America, became a naturalized citizen in 1961and began a career as a financial analyst before he later moved into hedge fund management and a career that led him to be what he calls a “political philanthropist.”

This article from The Street  includes Soros’s Wall Street Journal article in 2016 explaining, “Why I Support Reform Prosecutors.”

Billionaire George Soros Hits Back at Donald Trump – TheStreet

It might be educational for some of his critics whose knees jerk and whose saliva glands gush at the mere mention of his name to read—-although I doubt that few will.  He seems to be right on the money, however, when he wrote, “Many of the same people who call for more punitive civil justice policies also support looser gun laws.”

As for supporting Bragg, Soros says he has never met him and has never directly contributed to his campaign although his political action committee has constributed money to a group that has given some funds to Bragg’s campaigns.  To assert that Soros owns Bragg is a big leap.

In the early 80s, Soros created the Open Society Foundations to promote democracy and financial prosperity in nations that were falling away from the Soviet Union as the USSR crumbled.

And that is when George Soros and Bob Priddy came together.

Now, to be clear—I have never met George.  But the opportunity he gave me to be part of his program to bring freedom to the newly-independent countries that had been Soviet territories for decades turned out to be one of the most rewarding experiences of my career as a journalist.

George Soros is not always correct in backing the causes he backs. The history of his involvements makes that clear. Some of his assessments of this country’s present and this country’s future anger those on the right who see this country as the world’s dominant nation during a time when there are challenges to that idea and that reality every day.

His wealth and his world life-experience allow him the freedom to challenge those who have trouble thinking outside the box that constitutes the boundaries of the United States. But he does not have a corner on international geopolitical wisdom.  His ideas are open to challenge.  But such challenges are not beneficial if all they do is call him a name or vaguely blame him for everything that is wrong for this country and this world by merely beeathing the word “Soros.”

It is his right, as it is the right of wealthy others on the other side, to use his wealth to disseminate his opinions and to shape societies as he thinks they should be shaped.

The great broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow once said something that brings up a problem with the ability of the super-rich to influence our political system. Murrow told fellow broadcasters, “Just because the microphone in front of you amplifies  your voice around the world is no reason to think we have any more wisdom than we had when our voices could reach only from one of the bar to the other.”

So the super-rich on both sides of the aisle can afford a much bigger microphone than you or I can afford.  Finding a way to equalize the voices of the average American and the billionaire American is an important quest, but one unlikely to succeed in the foreseeable future.

My experience with George Soros leads me to defend him as something other than a leftist boogeyman. And I am naturally inclined against finding validity in those who only parrot cheap-shot party line character assassinations in place of intelligent discussion.

I’ll tell you about George and me in the next entry.