Category Archives: events

A Decision

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I have pretty well made up my mind how I will vote in 2022.  I have decided because I remember.

—I remember November 22, 1963 when I had returned to my apartment house in Columbia after student-producing the noon newscast at KOMU-TV, during which we reported President Kennedy had gone to Texas to assure Texans he was not going to dump Lyndon Johnson from the ticket in 1963, and one of my housemates shouted down the stairs as I came through the door, “You better get up here. The President’s been shot.” I was drawing a paycheck from KFRU Radio as assistant news director under Eric Engberg (who went on to a long career as a CBS correspondent) and immediately went to the newsroom where we started gathering reaction stories to put on the air when ABC Radio broke for local coverage. It never did, not for three days.

—-I remember April 4, 1968 when a phone call to my apartment told me Martin Luther King had been shot, and another call later that he had died. I was in my first months as news director of a radio station that used to do news in Jefferson City. It was a daytime-only station and I had to wait until the next morning to report the story. And a few days later I was inside the Jefferson City News-Tribune building when Lincoln University students turned violent outside the newspaper’s doors when the editor refused to retract an editorial run a few days earlier critical of Dr. King.  A flying piece of glass came within inches of hitting me in the eye.

—-I remember June 5, 1968 when another call came to my apartment, early in the morning. “Kennedy’s been shot,” said the newstipper.  “Which one?” I asked because just a few days before handsome, young Ted Kennedy had strode into a room at the Holiday Inn to speak on behalf of his brother. “Robert,” said the caller.  The morning newspapers that had gone to press the night before were reporting that RFK, as he was being called, appeared to have won the California Democratic Primary. He was shot at 2:15 a.m., our time. Radio news people like me delivered the shocking news heard by those having breakfast that Kennedy was in critical condition.

—I remember June 6, 1968, when the phone rang again in the darkness.  “Kennedy has died,” said the caller.  He died at 3:44 a.m., our time.  The newspapers that morning reported he was still critical.  I joined other broadcasters breaking terrible news for a second straight morning to thousands of people again having breakfast.

—I remember September 22, 1975 when the national networks’ evening newscasts were interrupted by word that a woman had tried to assassinate President Ford in San Francisco. We later learned that the first of two shots she fired from only forty feet away had missed the president’s head by only five inches.

—I remember March 30, 1981. It was just before 1:30 in the afternoon in the newsroom of The Missourinet when the UPI wire machine bells began ringing with the bulletin that President Reagan had been shot and others had been wounded.  Throughout the afternoon, we were reporting reactions from our people in Congress as well as our state leaders, knowing no more than most other reporters how close we were to losing another president.

I remember these events vividly, maybe more vividly than many because, as a reporter, I was instantly and intensely involved in telling the stories to others.

I remember fears, especially in the 60s, of where our country was headed, fears that were rekindled in 1975 and in 1981.

They were nothing like the fears today.

Nothing, because the fear did not originate within the government.

Yesterday I watched the United States House of Representatives censure Republican Congressman Paul Gosar for his Twitter video showing an animated attack on Democratic Congressman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and an attack—with swords—on President Biden.  Majority Democrats forced the action after Republican leaders in the House refused to publicly say one critical word about Gosar’s action.  His “apology” during discussion of the censure resolution was no apology and was instead an attack on Biden administration immigration policy.

Only two Republicans voted for the censure resolution, which also takes away Gosar’s committee assignments: Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who will leave the House at the end of this term, and Liz Cheney of Wyoming, whose courage in standing against the “Big Lie” has led the Wyoming Republican Party to say it no longer recognizes her as a Republican.  Kinzinger had argued that failure to hold Gosar accountable “will take us one step closer to this fantasized violence becoming real.”  It is difficult to disagree with that fear as we continue to watch the violent rhetoric that dominates one side of our political spectrum today.

Gosar reportedly told his caucus he doesn’t support political violence. He said he had not seen the Tweet and he pulled it from his account when he learned about it.

So far we have not heard any of the leaders of Gosar’s party express any misgivings about his video or disagreement with their former president’s comment that “it’s only natural” that some of those storming the capitol in January wanted to “hang Mike Pence.”

The failure of party leaders to show any spine in the face of intentional and ongoing stoking of barely-latent fires of violence and their groveling at the feet of a man who is a stranger to honesty, empathy, courtesy, respect, and other Christian values leaves me with no choice.

In normal elections my votes are scattered on both sides of the ballot. As of now, I will fill in the little box next to only one Republican’s name next year.

Only one.  Because I am so terribly disappointed in those for whom I might otherwise vote in their reluctance to stand for the values I thought they had.

I remember 1963.  And ’68 and ’75 and ’81. Never then was I so fearful for our freedoms as I am now. Never have I had so little faith in those I should trust to be servants of the people.

They cannot be servants of the people if they are slaves to one who demands their obedience and countenances every vulgarity that stems from his gross failures of character.

I am but one voter and I am easily dismissed.  But I doubt that I am just one.

I desperately hope that I am not just one.

 

 

Eyewitness to the end

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Every war has its “last” events and on this 103rd anniversary of the end of The Great War, we have one for you, with the account of a former Jefferson City resident who was part of what arguably was the final American artillery attack on German positions.

Missouri’s own John J. Pershing found Private Henry N. Gunther of Baltimore, Maryland, died at 10:59 a.m. on November 11, 1918 in an unnecessary one-man attack on a German machine gun emplacement.

But another Missourian was involved in another “last,” or at least a “last of the last.”

Germany surrendered at 5 a.m. that day but French General Ferdinand Foch demanded the shooting stop six hours later so the message of the surrender could be distributed to the front lines on both sides.  Author Joseph Persico in his book, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour, calculated there were 11,000 casualties in those last six hours, including the deaths of 3,000 soldiers.

Former Jefferson City resident Charles D. Capelle, was with the American Red Cross.  He sent a letter home describing his day, the last day of the war.  The Daily Capital News published it on Christmas Eve.

I was sleeping in a dugout several miles beyond Verdun, with the commanding officer of an ambulance train. At eight o’clock, when we were still in bed, the telephone rang. The captain answered and the operator said, “I am asked to tell you that the armistice has been signed and that hostilities will cease at eleven this morning.”  We told all the soldiers nearby, who at once set up a great yell and then refused the good news.  After breakfast alI went up to a battery of 155’s nearby, knowing that if the news were true, the battery would cease firing at eleven o’clock.  About ten they began firing all the guns regularly and sure enough, at five minutes before eleven they prepared to fire the last shot.  The full gun crew at each gun took hold of hands and they put in the line on one gun, and with watch in hand all awaited the hour.  “Then all pulled the lanyard together. “One last can for Jerry,” said the gunners, and then howled and skipped in their glee like a crowd of Indians.  You may be sure, too, that I was as happy as they were. 

            For a long time none could realize that the whole thing was over. Out of the mud and cold, out of the holes in the ground, out of the shrapnel and machine-gun fire, and back to the real bed without “cooties”—finally—and that thought was in everybody’s mind—back in the U. S. A.

His letter continued for several paragraphs, describing pulling back to “shell-torn” Verdun, then farther to “a considerable town” where there were “all sorts of civilization” including an officer’s club where there was “wonder of wonders—a chance to take a bath.”

Capelle, a Jackson County native, had lived in Jefferson City while he was an assistant reporter for the Missouri Supreme Court, 1909-1915 and then a member of the State Board of Pardons and Paroles until 1917. He was about 35 when he went to France with the Red Cross and was attached to the 26th Infantry (Yankee) Division from Massachusetts (which included the 51st Field Artillery Brigade), where he witnessed the last shot of the war.  He returned to Jackson County after the war, served as Mayor of Independence, 1922-24 and was elected in 1932 to a term in the Missouri House.  He died at the age of 56 in 1939.

National Museum of the United States Army credits the final round of the war being fired by Battery E of the 11th Field Artillery, which fired a round from its 155 mm artillery piece, nicknamed Calamity Jane at exactly 11 a.m. on November 11, one minute after Capelle’s unit fired its last shot. We suppose there could be some discussion of whether a round fired at the precise second the armistice went into effect was fired during the war. The shot from the 11th FA landed after the war.  The shot fired by the 56th FA probably landed before the official time of the Armistice.  We’ll let World War One historians argue that.  From a parochial standpoint, we come down in favor of Capelle’s account.

 

It’s What We Do

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We are replacing today’s usual reflection on life by Dr. Frank Crane with a reflection on a regrettable reaction by our governor to a good piece of journalism in which the journalist did what journalists are supposed to do journalistically and did what a good citizen should have done ethically.

In all my years of covering Missouri politics I have never heard of any of our top leaders suggest a reporter should be jailed for giving the state a chance to correct a serious problem before a story was published.

Let’s be clear:

There is nothing wrong with testing whether the information about us held by government is safely held.  You would expect a journalist to defend another journalist who was able to prove some private information held by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education wasn’t so private after all.

And I am.

Good journalists test and challenge systems, people, programs, and policies to see if they are what they claim to be.  It’s a responsibility we have.  If I can get information about you that the government claims is protected, how safe are you from those who want that information for malicious purposes?

We were involved in just such an issue many years ago and it exposed a weakness in state government that could have exposed everybody’s most important private information.  This is the story, as I remember it.

Steve Forsythe was the bureau chief for United Press International back then. In those days there were two highly-competitive national wire services.  Steve’s office in the capitol was next door to the Associated Press office in room 200 , which now is carved up into several legislative offices.

One day, Steve called the Department of Revenue because he couldn’t find his previous year’s income tax return, something he needed for the current year’s return.  Could the department send him a copy of his previous year’s return?  Yes, he was told. What’s your address? And a few days later it showed up in his mail box.

Steve was a helluva reporter who instantly realized what had happened.   The Missourinet was a UPI client.  He called me and we talked about what he had learned and we decided on a test.

We lured one of State Auditor Jim Antonio’s employees to call the department and use the same line that Steve had used. The department gladly agreed to mail the previous year’s tax return to her.

—except the return she asked for was that of State Revenue Director Gerald Goldberg.   And the address she gave was mine.

A few days later, a fat envelope arrived in my mailbox.

Steve and I went to the Jefferson Building that afternoon and, as I recall it, stopped Director Goldberg in the lobby as he was returning from lunch.  I handed him the envelope and asked him to open it.  He was stunned to see his personal state income tax return inside it.  There was a brief moment of, I suppose we could say, anger. But as Steve explained to him why we had done what we had done, he calmed down.  On the spot he said he’d immediately look into the situation.  I don’t think he wound up thanking us but we didn’t expect any thanks.

We could have asked for anybody’s tax return, I suppose, even Governor Teasdale’s although that might have been a harder ask.  But this was bad enough.

There naturally was a certain amount of hand-wringing and anguish and probably some hostile thoughts about two reporters who were not known as friendly toward the administration to begin with pulling a stunt like this. But rather quickly, the department recognized that we had not opened that envelope and we had not looked at the director’s return, had not made any beneficial use of the information, had not yet run a story, and that we certainly did not intend anything malicious in our actions.

Antonio was less than enthusiastic that we had used one of his trusted employees as a tool for our investigation, but he also recognized the problem we had pinpointed.

The department almost immediately changed its policies to outlaw accepting telephone requests such as the ones that led to the stories UPI and The Missourinet later ran and instituted a process designed to protect the confidentiality of those returns.

From time to time in later years I wondered if I should see if the department’s policies had slipped back to those days when Steve and I embarrassed it.   But I never did.   Every year, Nancy and I file our state tax returns and assume you can’t have them mailed to you with just a phone call.

I suppose Governor Teasdale could have demanded a criminal investigation of our actions but he didn’t.  His Department of Revenue just fixed the problem.  Steve went on to a long career with UPI, which eventually lost in the competition for wire service clients to the AP and closed its capitol bureau.  I went on to a long career with The Missourinet, which still serves a lot of radio stations in Missouri. We didn’t often care if we ruffled some feathers from time to time as long as we were reporting the truth—and that always was our goal.

Good reporters do what they are called to do—question, investigate, test, and report.  Sometimes those whose skirts that turn out to be dustier than they think they are don’t like the findings.

One big difference between the days when Steve’s tax return and the security of private information turned into a state policy-changing news story and today, when a reporter’s news story about the security of private information has led to threatened criminal charges, is the change in times. We are living in stressful times that not only breed physical and political disease, but tend to breed reactions that are less prudent than necessary.

But that won’t discourage good reporters from doing what they have a calling to do.  And the day it does, all of us are losers, even those who are embarrassed by what reporters find.

 

Just try being happy

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(There are plenty of reasons to be down in the dumps.  Politics. Health. Lousy football results. Masks. The ongoing hassles of the pandemic. Dr. Frank Crane suggests your problem might be the result of just not trying hard enough to be happy.  He calls it —)

THE MIRTH CURE

There are all manner of cures, from mud baths and Perkins’s Patent Porous Plaster up to  Thought Vibrations, but the grandest of all is the Mirth Cure.

It keeps well in any climate, is guaranteed under the pure food and drug law, doesn’t cost a cent, and has helped others. Why not you?

The formula is found in the writings of the wisest man, who was a Jewish king and philosopher. He said: “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.”

Note—he did not say a merry wife, though she certainly does good (perhaps he had too many wives and was afraid he would be asked which one). He did not say a merry husband, though he helps some. Nor did he say merry children, nor a merry house, nor a merry occupation, nor any such thing.

For his wise old eyes saw too deeply into life to make the mistake of supposing that circumstances are the root of joy. He knew that the real fountain of mirth is the heart.

If you have a merry heart it makes no difference what may be your position, whether you be a tramp on the road, a scrubwoman in an office building, a brakeman, a street car conductor, a merchant man, or even a college president. You are an electric light in the fog of human    despondency, sunshine breaking through earth sorrow clouds, water to parched souls.

Did you ever hear the story of “The Happy Man’s Shirt?” It is an old one, but one of those that ought constantly be re-told.

There was once a king who was smitten with sadness and disgust of life. He had gorged at all human pleasures, could no more be amused, and now was like to die.

They called in the soothsayers and medicine men, but none could suggest a remedy. At last they sent to an old hermit who lived in the wood, who said, “The case is simple. Let the king sleep all night in a happy man’s shirt, and he will be healed.”

Whereupon the king ordered that the palace be searched, a happy man be found and his shirt brought. But no happy man could be discovered in the palace.

Then they sought through the city and then throughout the length and breadth of the kingdom, but no man could they lay hands upon who would declare, without reservation or secret evasion of mind whatever, that he was entirely happy.

A little group of the king’s courtiers was returning home disconsolate, and as they rode along the highway they espied a beggar sitting under a tree, playing with the autumn leaves and smiling to himself.

“Hola!” they shouted. “Are you happy?”

“Surely!” replied the beggar.

“Why, you’re nothing but a beggar! You don’t know where you are going to get your dinner, do you?”

“Oh, no. But it isn’t dinner time yet. I had a good breakfast.”

Then they told him of the king’s plight and besought him to give them  his shirt forthwith, adding that it should be returned to him filled with gold pieces.

At that the ragged man lay back on the grass and laughed as if he  would expire.

“Come,” said the royal attendants, “We have no time for trifling. Off with your shirt, or we will jerk it off.”

“Hold hard, gentlemen,” said the beggar, striving to control his mirth.  “That is just what I am laughing at. I Ain’t Got No shirt!”

So they went and told the king that but one happy man could be  unearthed in all his realm, and that one was shirtless.

And the king had sense enough to perceive that happiness does not  depend on the shirt you sleep in, nor the bed on which you lie, nor the house that covers you— no, nor any external thing, but comes from the heart within you.

Thus was he cured, and arose and went about his business; and thus  also may you be cured, if so be that there is still left unparalyzed in you the power to think.

The Pro Tem

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Jim Mathewson died a few days ago.  He was one of a dwindling number of state senators from a different era when “Senator” wasn’t a word; it was an honor.

It was a pre-term limits Senate before Missourians hypocritically denied themselves the right to vote for legislators they wanted to continue representing them.

It was the era of Harold Caskey and John Schneider, of A. Clifford Jones and Emory Melton, of John Russell and Wayne Goode, Betty Sims and Harry Wiggins, Danny Staples, Morris Westfall and others who respected the institution and honored its written and unwritten rules, who treated the Senate as a body rather than a series of factions.  It was a Senate where the filibuster was a legitimate tactic because the majority on any issue knew it might be the minority on any other issue and the object was compromise that produced progress, before a time when an unyielding steamroller ignored the possibility that someday roles might be reversed and a time might someday come when payback would be a steamroller run by the other side.

It was a time of bare-knuckle politics, have no doubt about that. But eye-gouging and rabbit punches weren’t tolerated.

Jim Mathewson was the leader of the state senate for eight years.  Nobody will ever equal that record or even match it as long as good men and good women are banished from public service because voters fell for the pitch of those who capitalized on the idea that those we trust in our elections every two or four  years instantly become untrustworthy.

Jim Mathewson was a Horatio Alger story, a poor boy who made good because he never gave up, eventually rising to what he argued was the most powerful office in state government, more powerful than the governor, in fact.

He was elected to the House in 1974, then moved up to the Senate in 1980. He was born on a forty-acre farm in Benton County to a “very poor” family. He father left when he was five years old and although he came back six years later, the two were never close. The fact that the family was poor, and he knew it was poor, was a motivating factor in his life. He told a State Historical Society interviewer, “I think it made me meaner and tougher and harder working.”

For a time he and his wife, Doris, ran a steakhouse in Sedalia until it burned down and there was little insurance. Some friends, seeing he had no real livelihood, decided to file him for State Representative, something Mathewson had no interest in being. He beat an incumbent, though, and got elected to a job paying, then, $8,400 a year, about one-eighth what he was making with the steakhouse.

“I got hooked!” he told the interviewer, “and I got hooked bad.”  He was a personable guy and a few years later he started getting some important committee assignments. And he started building bridges. “I’m of the Democrat philosophy, but I’ve never been offended by anyone that was of the Republican philosophy. We just happened to think different on some issues. I believe that Republicans love their family just like I love mine. I believe that they’re Christians just like I believe I am. I believe that they’re going to go to Heaven just like I am. They’re just kind of warped in their thought process about [things] while they’re here. Okay? (chuckling) And I say that jokingly, because I have probably as many friends that are Republicans as I do Democrats.”

Pure Mathewson. Taking his work seriously but not himself (a fellow Capitol reporter remarked a few years later that it seemed legislators had gotten that idea backward—and, frankly, sometimes it seems he is right).

But he was so focused on being a legislator that he wasn’t making much money in the real world. He narrowly avoided bankruptcy only because the father he hardly knew left enough in his estate for Mathewson to pay off debts. He was able to re-establish himself as a businessman in Sedalia.  He began to rise in authority and popularity among fellow Democrats in the Senate and in 1988 he was elected President Pro Tem, the leader of the Senate.

Why did he want the job?   “The power,” he openly admitted.  “The President Pro Tem of the Senate in many, many ways is the most powerful person there is in the state of Missouri. Even more powerful than the Governor because you control all the gubernatorial appointments! And a Governor cannot appoint anyone if they can’t get it by the President Pro Tem of the Senate. Because the President Pro Tem of the Senate is usually smart enough to make themselves chairman of the Gubernatorial Appointments Committee. And the President Pro Tem appoints all the committees, including the all-powerful Appropriations Committee where all the budget comes from. Not only do appoint the chair, but you appoint the members. So generally you have control over that, as you do over most of the committees — or all the committees, really, because you appoint all the chairs. So you know, I wanted to be that person. I wanted to feel that I was not only a person who could be a follower but I wanted to prove that I could be a person that was a leader. It was a unanimous election in our caucus and on the floor every time. So I feel awfully proud of that. It was a good thing.”

He thought he could have been elected for another term but felt it was time for someone else. A few years later, Republicans gained control of the Senate and the last few years were nowhere nearly as rewarding as the rest of his career had been.  The take-no-prisoners style of the new majority grated on a man who thought he had helped maintain the historically collegial atmosphere of the chamber—“the body,” he called it.

There’s one other thing about Jim Mathewson to tell you about.  He was the first Senate President Pro Tem to occupy the physical office of the Pro Tem.  The room complex next to the south end of the Senate Lounge had been the office of the President of the Senate, the Lieutenant Governor, from the day the Capitol was first occupied.  I tell about it in the Capitol history book that I hope goes to the publisher before the end of the year:

The Senate takeover of the Lieutenant Governor’s office space finally happened in the fall of 1988 through the efforts of outgoing President Pro Tem John Scott, who had grown tired of dashing back and forth from his fourth floor office to the Senate Chamber. Senator Jim Mathewson of Sedalia, the incoming President Pro Tem, remembered that Scott approached him at the end of the September veto session and said, “Don’t you think it’s a darned shame that all of these years that the Speaker’s had that office right there on the corner where he can have meetings?”

 

It’s convenient. Everybody knows where it is and they all run in there and they meet and they settle issues and so forth, press conferences and whatever, and we have to use our individual offices when we’re President pro-Tem, and we hold the same power as does the Speaker.  Why don’t we create a special President pro-Tem’s office?

 

Mathewson asked, “Which one d’you have in mind?” Scott answered, “The Lieutenant Governor’s office.” Scott and Mathewson decided to enlist the support of the Senate’s top Republican, Richard Webster…Webster had done some research and told them, “The truth of the matter is there’s no provision in the constitution or the statutes that says the Lieutenant Governor even gets an office.” Scott introduced a resolution at the end of the veto session that let the Senate take control of the office after that year’s election. 

            Shortly after Mel Carnahan won the Lieutenant Governorship, he asked Mathewson not to kick him out of the office.  “Yeah, Mel, I am,” Mathewson told him,

 

And he said, “You can’t do that.” And I said, “Yeah, I can.”  And he said, “Well, by what authority?’ And I said, “We did the research. That office belongs to the Senate. The Senate voted…that the Pro Tem would have that office, and I guess that’s me, Mel, because the caucus just elected me and we’ve got twenty-two votes. I think I’m probably going to be Pro-Tem.” And he…got red-faced as hell…and said, “You’re not going to do this.” And I said, “Yeah, I am, Mel. Gonna do it.  Sorry.”

 

Carnahan threatened a lawsuit but Mathewson played hardball: “You can do that but let me remind you of something that’s just going to offend you further…You don’t have a great big budget already. You take on the Senate and you won’t have any.” Carnahan stomped out of Mathewson’s office, returning more cool-headed a few days later to ask Mathewson what could be done if he accepted the plan.  Mathewson, Scott, Webster, and Carnahan quickly went to the first floor to look at a complex of Senate staff rooms in the northeast corner of the building. Mathewson told Carnahan the Senate would pay to remodel the space if he would take it. Carnahan agreed a few days later.  Mathewson kept his promise to have the new office ready for Carnahan by the time he was sworn in at the start of 1989.

A few years later, then-Lt. Governor Peter Kinder convinced his friend from Cape Girardeau, Senate Administrator Mike Keathley, to have the auditor swap office spaces with the Lt. Governor’s office space.

Mathewson couldn’t run for another term in 2004. He seldom returned to the Capitol. His day was already slipping away, his desk in the chamber and his office occupied by a new generation of Senators.

Are they worse people than Jim Mathewson was?  As people, I don’t think so.  As Senators, as Jim and the others of his era might perceive them in their behavior as senators, maybe.

But comparing generations against each other is hard and risks being unfair because nostalgia is not fair. Perhaps it is accurate to say that today’s senators are not like yesterday’s senators. Sometimes the old lions growling in the weeds who remember those of the Mathewson generation think “Senator” has become just a word. It will be interesting to hear the eulogies (many years from now, we hope) for those who have come after his era.

He concluded his interview with the State Historical Society by saying:

“You know, sometimes you’ve got to hang your life out there. And I have time and time again, and I’m proud of the fact that I did it and I have no regrets! My attitude is this: If the issue is important enough to do, then it’s more important than my political future. And I’ll do it.”

That’s worth thinking about.

(If you want to read Jim’s entire interview—and those of us who knew him can hear his voice as we read the transcript—go to “James L. Mathewson State Historical Society oral history” and click on the icon on the upper right for a download.)

Notes from a Quiet Street (Fall Colors edition)

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(Being a compendium of random thoughts that don’t merit full bloggiation.)

Would someone, preferably one of the people Missourians have sent to the U. S. Senate or the U.S. House, enlighten us about why we have a federal debt limit if it can be increased at congressional will?

And, members of our Washington delegation, don’t get all puffy about how you oppose raising it when you and your colleagues previous DID raise it.

Please write a 500-word theme about how you will pay back this debt. If you expect to pass this course, do not give me the tiresome argument that if government reduces its ability to pay for its programs, the public will create more economic growth that will reduce the debt.

There will be no grading on the curve. This is strictly pass/fail.

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When it was announced a few days ago that the nation was averaging 1900 COVID deaths a day for the first time since last March and that 90% of COVID patients in hospitals are unvaccinated, an ugly stroke of capitalist brilliance overwhelmed me.

Monogrammed body bags.  There’s a big constituency for this product—the thousands of people who refuse to get vaccinated.  Take your personal bag to the hospital with you so you can go out in style.

It would be the last status statement, a last chance to be SOMEBODY instead of just some body.

It will be a wonderful memento for your survivors and an inspirational symbol of your stalwart independence.  Could become a family heirloom.

And there would be a good market for used ones.  Run an ad on the internet, or maybe in the newspaper, or offer it on EBay: “Body bag, reasonably priced. Great savings if your initials are _____ (fill in appropriate letters).”

If ya don’t got it, flaunt it.

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The University of Missouri football team, a few days ago, held a charitable event for the athletic department of Southeast Missouri State University. The Tigers gave the Red Hawks $550,000 and all the team from Cape Girardeau had to do was get the snot beaten out of it again at Faurot Field.

Early in the season we see a lot of these games, usually routs.  We’re not sure they should really count on the season’s record of either team but they do—-because they are two college football teams and they do play and somebody keeps score.

Smaller schools are willing to take on these challenges because—in this case $550,000—they get a relative ton of money for athletic programs that come nowhere near having the resources bigger schools have.  If being a punching bag one Saturday afternoon makes sure there are volleyball and soccer and other minor games available for student-athletes in Cape Girardeau, the price is worth it.

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We are sure we are not the only ones to think, or to say when buying a new car, “This is probably the last gas-powered car I’ll ever own.” We’ve said it for the last two cars we’ve bought and the second one is coming up on eight years old. Will there be a third?  Two developments in the past few days make it clear the future is silently roaring (if such thing is possible) our way.

New York’s new governor, Kathy Hochul, has signed a new law saying every new passenger car or truck sold in the state must be zero-emission vehicles by 2035.   Medium and heavy-duty trucks have a 2045 goal. This is a huge goal—electric vehicles constituted only two percent of sales last year. The new law is similar to an executive order issued by the governor of California earlier.  Big difference: executive orders are not laws.

That’s plenty of time to develop EVS that don’t need to recharged on round trips to St. Louis or Kansas City.

In fact, one such car is coming over the horizon.

We’ve said that we’ll start to seriously look at an electric vehicle has a 500-mile battery.  There is such a vehicle and the EPA says its range is 520 miles, topping Tesla’s best by more than 100 miles.  The company is called Lucid and it plans to start deliveries of its cars before the end of the year. Lucid is a Silicon Valley-founded company that recently picked Casa Grande, Arizona as the site for its first purpose-built EV factory in North America. It will start by making 10,000 cars a year and plans expansion to produce more than 300,000 a year.

Prices are believed to start at about $77,000. They’re going to have to come down a few tens to be affordable to people such as I am.

Still…….

The future is coming.

0-0-0

The big inaugural/bicentennial parade in Jefferson City on Saturday, September 18t, was a week premature.   True, Missouri was admitted to the Union on August 10, 1821.  But people living out here in central Missouri didn’t know about it until September 25 when the proclamation was published by The Missouri intelligencer¸ in Franklin—Missouri’s first newspaper outside of St. Louis.   Folks in St. Louis celebrated twenty days earlier when Missouri’s first newspaper, The Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser, published the proclamation.  No big stories or headlines Just the proclamation.  That’s the primitive reporting style of the day.

 

Why didn’t you go with them? 

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You promised you would.  Remember you said during  your pep rally, “We’re going to walk down—and I’ll be there with you—We’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down.  Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women….’

You said “we” five times, and you promised to “be there with you.”

But you didn’t go, did you?   You just turned them loose then and you strolled back to the warmth of the big white house.

Sure was a funny way to lead.

Kind of like Jimmy Doolittle.  Remember how he watched fifteen B-25s take off from the security of the bridge of the Hornet?

And we’re all familiar with General Patton, commanding the Third Army from his bunker in London as his soldiers swept across France and into Germany.

George Washington, relaxing by the fireside at Mount Vernon, received regular reports on the fine living conditions at Valley Forge.

The examples are so numerous—-

Some of us are old enough to remember Martin Luther King telling his marchers who had traveled with him from Selma to Montgomery Alabama, “The battle is in our hands. And we can answer with creative nonviolence the call to higher ground to which the new directions of our struggle summons us. The road ahead is not altogether a smooth one. There are no broad highways that lead us easily and inevitably to quick solutions. But we must keep going.”  And I’m sure you remember that Dr. King, after speaking words somewhat more eloquent than yours, got into his long black Cadillac and drove back to Selma where he waited for reports of what happened in Montgomery.

Actually, the leaders in these and other situations never said, “I’ll be with you.”  But they were.  They were with those they commanded.

What might have happened if you had been a man of your word that day?  Could you have spoken to the crowd of “peaceful tourists” and urged them not to break windows, break down doors, assault security officers, vandalize offices, and force members of the House and the Senate to flee for their lives?

Would you have tolerated a noose and a sign that said, “Hang Mike Pence,” or would you have encouraged more respect for a man carrying out the constitutional duties of the Electoral College?

Could your calming presence have saved the life of Ashli Babbit?

Could you have prevented the arrests of more than 600 “tourists,” many of whom face significant time in prison or in jail while their families wonder what’s to happen to them if you had said as the crowd surged toward the doors and windows, “Wait!  We’re just here to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.  Go back out behind the fence and demonstrate out there.”

Oh, if only you had kept your promise.

“I’ll be there with you,” you said.

You’re no Jimmy Doolittle. Or George S. Patton.  Or Martin Luther King.

Or any number of other great leaders who led from the front instead of retreating inside their  nice, warm, safe quarters where they could do as you did(according to some accounts),  joyfully watch what you unleashed.

You expressed some concern a few days ago that the September 18h celebration of the January 6 insurrection was intended to make you look bad. What looked bad was the small number of people who gathered to celebrate the day,

Too bad you weren’t with them, either. Be comforted by the fact that you could not have looked worse on September 18th than you did on January 6.

But, once again, you weren’t in the front ranks. Others took all the risks and you watched it all on television. Again.

Once again you’re the man who wasn’t there.

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today.

Oh, how I wish he’d go away.

—or maybe, walk away.  You’re good at that.

The Encounter

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It had the elements of a nightmare.

Blackness

growing larger

in the eyepiece of my camera

rushing toward me

engulfing the sky

darkening it

obliterating it

consuming me

with its noise

its speed

its wind

its blast of heat

roaring past.

Bob Priddy met Big Boy

that day

And lived to tell the tale.

The railroad crossing in Osage City was crowded with onlookers a few days ago, all waiting for the largest steam locomotive ever built anywhere in the world to pass through on its way to a stop in Jefferson City.

Union Pacific locomotive 4014, the only Big Boy still running, rounded the curve in the distance, its mighty steam whistle bellowing in full-throated bass, warning those near the crossing to stand away.  Inconceivable power was coming and coming fast.

And then it blew past, faster than I could turn with it, slightly staggering me with its power, force, and the wind it was pushing outward. And briefly, a ripple of heat reaching out from its boiler to brush my face.

https://youtu.be/QweVLPAyDyY

Later, in Jefferson City, as the locomotive rested briefly at the station, too close to the Capitol bluff to be seen from above, I thought it might be visible from the House of Representatives garage, west of the capitol.  And there it was, lurking and breathing. And when it began to move, slowly, there was a feeling of menace, of a great beast stalking creatures protected by the barred garage windows as it slowly passed by, seconds later to ease onto a siding with the muscular attitude that it was going to go where it damn well pleased to go and it would be best not to challenge it.

https://youtu.be/8zmkZ1Ky2hc

We can be grateful such machines are restricted to tracks and that Transformers are not real.

Walt Whitman, the great American poet, long before Big Boy was even lines drawn on a planning page, felt what I felt when he confronted a locomotive, one of the mechanical marvels of his time:

Thee in thy panoply, thy measur’d dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive,                                                                                           Thy black cylindric body, golden brass, and silvery steel,                   Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides,/ Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance,/ Thy great protruding head-light fix’d in front,     Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple,/              The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack,/Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels,/ Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily following,/        Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack,/ yet steadily careering;/ Type of the modern—/emblem of motion and power/—pulse of the continent…/Fierce-throated beauty!/ Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music,/ thy swinging lamps at night,/ Thy madly-whistled laughter,/ echoing, rumbling like an earthquake,/rousing all,/ Law of thyself complete,/ thine own track firmly holding,/(No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,)/Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return’d,/ Launch’d o’er the prairies wide,/ across the lakes,/      To the free skies unpent/ and glad and strong. 

The older generation can dwell for a short time in nostalgia at the appearance of restored steam locomotives. Children often gaze open-mouthed at this great machine, oozing steam and occasional spurts of hot water, as it dozes in front of them. For some, the graceful dance of the slow-moving side rods as the locomotive heads toward its overnight parking place is endlessly fascinating—-as is the pounding rhythm of the same side roads at speed.

The Big Boy and its few smaller kin who still display railroading’s past are far more exciting and, dare we say, romantic than the sanitary and ungainly diesels of today.  But their constant need for care and cleaning, their relatively short runs before needing more water and more fuel, and their mechanical makeup are reasons they are now curiosities, not commonplace.

In 1976, when I rode the American Freedom Train from Boonville to Jefferson City, I asked engineer Doyle McCormack if he thought he missed anything by not living in the age of steam.  “Yeah,” he said, “a lot of work!”

Let us be glad there are still those willing to do that work.  And to bring these great pieces of fierce-throated beauty to us from time to time, glad and strong.                                                -0-

Moderates-in-waiting

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President Trump heard something a few days ago that he hadn’t heard before. He was booed by an audience he had called to hear his latest, uh, whatever.

Boos at a Trump rally?

Who else was listening?

Who else in the Republican Party was listening?

Maybe we’re reading too much into the event. But there have been, all along, questions about how tight Donald Trump’s grip on the party will remain the longer he is out of office.

It’s doubtful many people left the rally and left Trump because he suggested it might be a good idea for people to get their COVID shots.  It was only a tepid endorsement but it was the first time he had encouraged his followers to do what he had secretly done before leaving the White House.

Boos.  At a Trump rally.

And on this quiet street, these thoughts quietly began to emerge.

The competition for Roy Blunt’s to-be vacated Senate seat has drawn several Republican early entrants, the biggest names of which seem determined to prove they are the most like Trump. They are betting Trump will be the dominant force in the 2022 elections that he claims he will be.

But there are some other Republicans who are holding their counsel.  And it might be wise for them to do so. August, 2022 is a long ways away, politically. The world can take a lot of turns in the next twelve months.

But beside that there’s the issue of mathematics.

Let’s go back to the 2016 presidential primaries. We wrote just before Missouri’s primary that year that earlier state primary voters “seem to favor ANYBODY BUT” Trump with the ABT vote through Super Tuesday that year looking like this:

Iowa   76% Anybody But Trump

New Hampshire  65

South Carolina  67

Nevada  54

Alabama  57

Alaska  66

Arkansas  67

Georgia  61

Massachusetts  50 (although in the total vote, he lost by about 20,000 out of 631,413 cast)

Minnesota  79

Oklahoma  72

Tennessee  61

Texas  73

Vermont  67

Virginia  65

Kansas  77

Kentucky  64

Louisiana  59

Maine  67

Hawaii  58

Idaho  72

Michigan  64

Mississippi  53

Trump had cracked the 40% support level only six times in 22 opportunities up to that time. By the time of the Missouri vote, only four GOP candidates remained in the running.  Eight candidates on the ballot had dropped out but their names could not be removed.  In 2016, Trump got 40.84% of the Missouri votes.  Ted Cruz got 40.63 (and he did not ask for a recount).  John Kasich and Marco Rubio combined for 16.2%.  The rest was scattered among the withdrawn candidates or for “uncommitted.”   The fact is that in Missouri, as in the other states, the majority opposed Trump.

We now have five big-name candidates trying to convince voters they have the shortest political umbilical cords linking them to the former president.

Might there be a moderate Republican or two just quietly watching the internecine warfare among the COTs (Children of Trump)?  And might we see a moderate Republican candidate step forward about the first of the year who can win the Republican primary with 35% of the vote while the five (so far) COTs divide the 40%—assuming Trump still has a solid-enough 40% following in the party by then?

COTs go 25-20-10-5-5% and the moderate polls 35% and moves on to November.

Memo to the COTs in the aftermath of the Alabama boos:  Be nervous. Somebody not like you might be lurking.  And one person who looks good to the 60% can beat the five of the 40.

Or maybe we’re just reading too much into that rally the other day.

 

 

 

Hope

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About twenty-five years ago Dr. Harrison Schmidt traveled from his Albuquerque home to speak to a group in Jefferson City.  I do not recall everything he said although I recall the general topic.  But one sentence from his remarks is vivid in my memory and it is worth thinking about today.

We are living through troubling times, particularly in the last two calendar years, times of uncertainty and fear caused by a pandemic, times of uncertainty in our political system and campaign-induced fears, warranted or not, of our national future followed by the frightful events of January 6 and their lingering impacts on our political mentality.

There are major differences of opinion about the greatness of our nation.  Have we been made greater or has our greatness been dimmed by events of the past half-decade?  Do we dare think, regardless of how we answer that question, that we truly can be great or greater still?

We cannot be either if we wallow in self-pity, if we focus on our unresolved shortcomings as a people, if we accept that we as a people are limited in what we can achieve, what we should achieve, what we must achieve.  We cannot be if we worry more about false differences that divide us—and those who would stoke fears of those differences—than in the common interests we have within our diversity.

And so we come to Dr. Schmidt, world-famous geologist best known for finding one rock and finding some orange soil.  The rock is known as Troctolite 76535.  The soil is a mix of orange and black volcanic glass formed in a process we known as a “fire explosion.”

One rock and some dirt.

From the Moon.

Harrison Schmidt was the last person (for the last 48 years and counting) to set foot on the Moon.  The rock has been called by NASA “without a doubt the most interesting sample returned from the Moon!”  Note the exclamation point. Mission objectives do not often feature them.  Troctolite 76535 is at least 4.2 Billion years old and is significant beyond its age. It shows that the Moon once had a magnetic field “generated by a dynamo at its core” as our Earth has.

And the dirt shows that the Moon once was volcanically active, explosively so.

Dr. Schmitt, who reached 86 in July, is one of the four Moonwalkers still alive (Buzz Aldrin turned 91 on January 20; Dave Scott turned 88 in June and Charlie Duke will hit 86 in October).  Schmitt was 37 when I watched from the press site at Cape Kennedy as he, Gene Cernan, and Ronald Evans thundered into the night sky in December, 1972.

More than two decades later, when he talked in Jefferson City about space, his mission, the discoveries made in the Apollo program and the opportunities that waited for a nation unafraid to reach for the stars, he reminded us:

“Apollo is often forgotten as having been a program where 20-year old men and women were managed by a few 30-year olds, none of whom believed anything was impossible.”

Think of that last clause: “None of whom believed anything was impossible.”

That’s the path to national greatness.  It’s not just for 20 and 30-year olds.

Whether it’s finding rocks on the Moon, finding a vaccine against a worldwide plague within months or even finding middle political ground, we know that nothing is impossible.  But we have to look beyond ourselves. We have to look up for hope rather than down on others.

This entry can be dismissed as saccharine babble. And it might be by those to whom tomorrow is to be feared and to whom uncertainty precludes discovery. But they will not seek exclamation points in life and might limit opportunities for others to find them.

Greatness is not created by cultivating fear and uncertainty personally or on a broader stage.

Greatness is achieved by those who go beyond those issues, none of whom believe anything is impossible. Political leaders might say it.  But it is you and I who must live it and lift up others to join us.

It’s time for more exclamation points!