Category Archives: events

Bearthday

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I struggle to say that I remember things fifty years ago. Remembering things fifty years past is a reminder of mortality. Maybe that’s why it’s uncomfortable to say it.

Memory is never fifty years old because memories don’t age. They’re always in the present in our mind. We are ageless in our memories.

Fifty years ago, on my birthday, we sent three men to the Moon.

I remember it as if it were—–

Not fifty years ago.

The Vietnam War was eroding our national will. The Civil Rights movement forced us to look at ourselves more than we wanted to look and it provoked intense emotion expressed in various ways. The Cold War over freedom and oppression was a daily factor. But there still was a residual of the optimism and it was nowhere better expressed than what was to happen that day.

The radio station I was working for in Jefferson City at the time (it’s no longer in Jefferson City) had no national network. So we couldn’t follow the buildup at Cape Canaveral, as it was then called, as intensely as the other station in town, a Mutual affiliate. But we were paying attention and on our newscasts we did let our listeners know what was happening.

This was in the days of 15-minute newscasts in the morning, during the noon hour when Derry Brownfield, our farm director, updated the farmers in central Missouri on the daily markets and agricultural news, and during drive-time in the afternoon.

The script for the 7 a.m. newscast that morning is in a landfill somewhere. But I can hear my younger voice closing the newscast noting the significant events unfolding in Florida. I had brought to the station that morning an LP record of one of John Kennedy’s greatest speeches and I had dubbed part of it onto a cartridge tape. I played part of his speech at Rice University from September 12, 1962—the part that is in bold type below:

“Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it–we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

“Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world’s leading space-faring nation.

“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

“There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. 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? Why does Rice play Texas?

“We choose to go to the moon. 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 which we intend to win, and the others, too.

“…Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, “Because it is there.”

“Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.”

I remember after the tape ended with Kennedy saying, “That challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

I said, “And that’s why we are going to the Moon today.”   And closed out the newscast.

On this fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, it’s important we think about John Kennedy’s 1962 speech. In recent years some presidents or presidential candidates have said we need to go to the Moon again and Mars, too. But their remarks have caused only little ripples in the public mind.

—Because, coming from them, they’re just words. They don’t call on you and me to want to reach for something great. They don’t challenge us to think that, as President Kennedy mentioned earlier in his speech, “William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.”

We do not hear calls today for “answerable courage.” We don’t hear those who lead or want to lead us speak of “new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.” Some observers believe proclamations about returning to the moon and heading for Mars are intended to gin up a few votes in an election cycle. And the public knows it and is unmoved.

Fifty years ago was a beginning and a beginning of an end. We are people of short attention spans who too easily spend our time looking within where we are apt to find narrowness and selfishness instead of looking out where we find challenges to meet, good that we can do, rights that we can win.

Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley was one of the few people granted an in-depth interview with Neil Armstrong, who bore the public burden of being the first man on the moon by becoming a very private person. Brinkley tells in his new book, American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race, of asking Armstrong “why the American people seemed to be less NASA crazed in the twenty-first century than back during john F. Kennedy’s White House years.”

Oh, I think it’s predominantly the responsivity of the human character. We don’t have a very long attention span, and needs and pressures vary from day to day, and we have a difficult time remembering a few months ago, or we have a difficult time looking very far into the future. We’re very “now” oriented. I’m not surprised by that. I think we’ll always be in space, but it will take us longer to do the new things than the advocates would like, and in some cases, it will take external factors or forces which we can’t control.

Kennedy had the external factors. The Cold War and the Soviet early successes in space. The Bay of Pigs debacle and the need to get beyond it. The Civil Rights effort that was mushrooming. And other issues. But his speech at Rice University was a challenge for the country to move forward at a time when it could become consumed by other issues—and it did.

By the time my brother-in-law and I watched the midnight launch of Apollo 17, the final Apollo mission to the moon, from the press site at Cape Kennedy slightly more than three years after this historic day in 1969, we as a people were so looking inward at the war, the civil rights struggle, the ongoing Cold War, and by then Watergate that the cancellation of three moon flights that were originally scheduled stirred little public regret. The idea of doing things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard” seemed lost. And they seem lost, still, today.

Of the twenty-four men who flew to the Moon, the only people who have seen the entire earth and watched it shrink into the surrounding blackness, only twelve survive. Only twelve of the twenty-four walked on the moon and only four of them are still walking on the earth: Buzz Aldrin, now 89; Dave Scott, 87; Charlie Duke, 83, and Harrison Schmitt, 84. The other eight moonwalkers have, as one source put it, “left the earth forever.”   All three of the first men to see the moon up close (Apollo 8) are still with us, though. Frank Borman and Jim Lovell are 91. Bill Anders is 85.

Some historians wonder if Apollo was worth it, if going to the Moon and bringing back a few hundred pounds of rocks was worth the $24 billion total expense in the 1960s and early 70s, at a time when we were spending $30 billion each year on the Vietnam War. One of them, Andrew Smith, whose Moon Dust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, was published for the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11 and has been republished for the fiftieth, recalls an earlier Kennedy speech, the one to Congress in 1961 in which he set the goal of sending men to the Moon and returning them to Earth within the decade. He says the Moon goal resulted from Kennedy’s recognition that the Cold War “was going the be won or lost in the so-called Third World, and that cultural factors would influence the loyalties of wavering nations as much as economics did.” He maintains Kennedy wanted to capture imaginations throughout the world, a way to make democracy the system of choice, and also wanted something Americans could enthusiastically support. The answer, says Smith, was “theatre—the most mind-blowing theatre ever created,” that the Apollo program was “performance, pure and simple.”

Smith argues that the lasting value of the missions isn’t the science behind them or the rocks the men brought back. It is that these missions for the first time allowed us to see the entire earth, alone in the vast blackness of space. “It’s clear that the answer had nothing to do with engineering or technology, that what it did…was afford us the enormous privilege of seeing ourselves for the first time as small.”

Edgar Mitchell, who walked on the moon with Alan Shepard on Apollo 14 told Allen, “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch!’”

While Dave Scott and Jim Irwin were on the Moon with the Apollo 15 flight, Al Worden was by himself in the Endeavour, the command module orbiting above them. For sixty-seven hours, Worden was alone in the universe, often out of touch with anyone, anywhere, when he was traveling behind the Moon. He shared his thoughts in his 1974 book, Hello Earth, Greetings from Endeavour. One of his poems reads:

Now I can see where I’m going and am impatient to get there—                                       What will I see? The wounds of ageless strife, the anguish of cooling and petrifying, the punctures of an infinity of coolness?                                                                                   No signs of healing, or love, or care, or compassion?                                                         She is not healed. All the scars are there—from birth.                                                        Poor lady of the night.                                                                                                          But we love her and she knows it full well, for she has been faithful all these years.          And what of the scars on the planet earth?                                                                         Will she end up like the lifeless old moon, revolving slowly, hanging naked in the sky?     Life is too precious to let ego-centered ideas snuff it out.                                                   The moon must teach us, not only of age and geology, planets and solar puzzles            But of life, else we end up like her.

Smith says, “Was Apollo worth all the effort and expense? If it had been about the Moon, the answer would be no, but it wasn’t, it was about the Earth. The answer is yes.”

So today, fifty years after the launch of Apollo 11 on my bearthday, let us look beyond the event and ponder the thoughts of Mitchell and Worden and Smith.

And Kennedy. And be unafraid of doing things because they are hard—-even if the hardest of things is seeing ourselves.

(Photo credits: Apollo 11 launch, Al Worden’s photo of the Moon and Earth, and Apollo 17’s Harrison Schmitt unfurling the flag with a tiny earth in the background, and the “blue marble” photo from Apollo 17 all are from NASA)

 

Almost There

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We’re only about six weeks away from opening the new future for our past.

It’s a building. But it’s more than just a building. It’s a statement. And, My God! What a statement it is.

Employees of the State Historical Society of Missouri are overseeing the move of thousands of cubic feet of documents, artworks, microfilmed newspapers, and other items from our corner of the basement of the Ellis Library on the University Campus to the new Center for Missouri Studies on Elm Street, just across from Peace Park on the north edge of the University campus. Our manuscript collection alone totals seventeen-thousand cubic feet. If we stood all of the pages in that collection on end, they could cover six football fields. And that doesn’t count the 54-million pages of newspapers on microfilm or twenty-thousand pieces of art, or maps, or sculpture or——-

—or all of the things we have gathered in our own 121-year history that tell the story of Missouri back to the days before it was called Missouri.

We’re going to officially open the place on Saturday, August 10, the 198th anniversary of Missouri becoming a state. It’s going to be a big deal. We’re going to have an outdoor ceremony to start and then we’ll move into the awesome lobby to finish up and to serve various celebratory goodies.

It’s been thirty years or so since the society began to seriously consider moving into a better place to serve the public and to serve the cause of history. It’s been a decade or so since our executive director, Gary Kremer, began a career-long effort to create the Center for Missouri Studies and to find a way to put up a building worthy of Missouri’s heritage.

We thought of some locations that didn’t work out. We drew some plans that didn’t work out. Gary talked to governors and legislators and those conversations didn’t work out—-for a while. But then the idea began to take hold and finally, about five years ago, the legislature provided $35 million for a Center for Missouri Studies.

We were blessed with the leadership of two extraordinary people during those years. Gary, of course (on the left), and Steve Limbaugh, whose enthusiasm and counsel was so central to the effort that we changed the constitution to let him be the first society president who could be elected to succeed himself.

For Steve, there was a special link to the society and to seeing the new building materialize. In 1915, when the society moved out of its then-quarters in Academic Hall (later renamed to honor University of Missouri President Richard Jesse) into the then-new university library, a law student who became Steve’s grandfather and still later became the society president, helped carry things from the FIRST old place to what is becoming the SECOND old place. Steve’s grandpa was Rush Limbaugh Sr., or as his biographer calls him, “The Original Rush Limbaugh.”

A lot of people for several generations of society leadership dreamed of what we are about to celebrate August 10. Many of them will be with us in our memories and, we hope, in spirit.

Three years ago we broke ground on what had been a deteriorating parking lot one-half block big. Only then did I begin to grasp how large this project would become. I saw the plans, the three-dimensional model that was less than a foot tall. I saw the architects’ drawings of the building’s exterior. But even now, after many hard-hat visits, my mind has trouble grasping the scope of what is soon to open.

Throughout this process, one of our staffers already has spent more time in the building than anybody other than the workers who have transformed lines on paper into the building we will dedicate in a few weeks. When our Senior Associate Executive Director, Gerald Hirsch, joined us a dozen years ago, he had no idea he would be our designated eyes watching each detail of the construction. But he’s been the go-to guy for dealing with any problems, adjustments, or changes that we’ve had to deal with.

I look from street level at this startling structure and I am always reminded of President Lincoln’s admonition to Congress on December 1, 1862: “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.”

On this corner on the southern edge of downtown Columbia and the northern edge of the University of Missouri will be the material expression of Lincoln’s words.   The Historical Society of Missouri is moving from its easily-overlooked quarters in the library basement into this statement building. It is unique in the architecture of the university. And in its boldness, the building proclaims that history must be part of our character and that we dare not ignore it and dare not lose conscious thought that we create more of it each day.

We, today, are responsible for tomorrow’s history. And before we make that history, we should keep in mind something else Lincoln said that day: “We…will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us.”

Perhaps if we consider the history we are making, which sometimes seems not to recall the history we and our ancestors made, our prospects for the future will be better.

We’ll dedicate this building, this statement on August 10. Join us.

 

Notes from a quiet street, Monsoon season edition

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(Being a compilation of observation not reaching the level of full blogviation.)

Has it occurred to anyone else that the wrapped Capitol dome kind of looks like the Stanley Cup?   Maybe if you squint a little?   Kinda? Sorta?

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We’ve heard several folks who don’t watch hockey remark that they were glued to the Stanley Cup finals. “That’s really intense,” one of them has said a couple of times, referring to the constant, fast, physical play.   Some folks who watched the games because a Missouri team was playing—and making history by winning—are likely to watch games next year because they’re hockey.

The fact that the Royals are dismal and the cardinals have been fighting hard to achieve mediocrity probably drove some of those fans to the Blues games.

One of the observers also has remarked that the championship by the Blues makes the absence of an NFL team in St. Louis a whole lot less important.

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Back when we were covering the Senate, Eric Schmitt claimed to be the tallest state senator in Missouri history. We found some ancient references indicating he had some historic rivals but the record remained fuzzy enough that Schmitt remained firm in his convictions although we think we introduced reasonable doubt in at least one case.   He is now definitely the tallest State Treasurer in Missouri history.

But he is not the biggest man ever to work at the Capitol.

Until somebody comes along to disprove the information, we’ll report that title belongs to Clyde Perkins, a former restaurant man from Barnard. The Jefferson City Daily Democrat reported in January of 1923 that Perkins had been hired as an accountant for the House Accounts Committee. House Speaker Oak Hunter was the big guy in the capitol until then at 274 pounds.

The article about Perkins’ appointment said he had been “off his feed” since losing an election the previous November in Nodaway County, but he thought he’d be back at full strength when he regained fifty pounds. Perkins was to be paid five dollars a day. That’s about $74 a day in 2018 money, $370 for a five-day week. Probably not enough to sustain a man very long who weighed 476 pounds..

A 2008 Nodaway County history by Michael J. Steiner says Perkins topped out at 536. Steiner’s book has a picture of two women, each standing in one leg of Perkins’ bib overalls.

Clyde was called “Fatty” by the people back home in those less-sensitive times.  He was the Nodaway County Treasurer when he died at the age of 44 in April, 1936. His death certificate says a contributing cause of death was “extreme obesity; patient weighed 480 pounds.”

Better to be tall, we guess.

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Administration of the death penalty in Missouri was a local affair, hanging in the counties, until the late 1930s when the gas chamber was built at the state penitentiary.

The Cole County Democrat observed on February 7, 1907, “The residents of Jefferson City get mad at least every two years. When the legislature meets some untamed jackass introduces a bill to have all hangings pulled off in (the) penitentiary. No person with sense enough to grease a gimlet can blame them for getting angry. The idea of making Jefferson City the human slaughter pen for the state is disgusting in the extreme.”

The disgust lasted three decades.

The legislature in 1937 approved asphyxiation by lethal gas at the state penitentiary instead of hanging at county seats. The first victim of the new gas chamber was a 100-pound pig that stopped struggling three minutes after fifteen cyanide eggs were dropped into a crock of sulphuric acid on December 13. The death of the pig convinced state officials that the gas chamber could be safely used on humans.

Three months later it was. John Brown and William Wright were strapped to the side-by-side chairs at 6:18 p.m. on March 3, 1938. The fumes hit them three minutes later. Medical personnel say they died within three or four minutes. A newspaper story recounted, “Only twenty-five witnesses—as compared with thousands which often-times made ‘Roman Holidays’ out of hangings—peered through the five windows to watch the lethal gas deaths.”

Prisoners were gassed from 1938 to 1965 in Jefferson City. The first drug-induced execution, in 1989, was done in the gas chamber before executions were moved to Potosi, then to Bonne Terre. Gas couldn’t be used because the rubber seal around the chamber door had rotted through disuse and the gas would have been fatal to witnesses, too.

Today, people on tours of the old pen can go into the gas chamber. Many of them get their pictures taken sitting in the chairs.

It is still legal to use gas for Missouri executions. But there’s no place in the state where such an execution could be held safely.

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Well, that was pretty heavy, wasn’t it? Here’s something a little lighter.

About three years back (April of 2016) we put together a fanciful discussion of how a member of the family became his own grandfather, kind of along the lines of the famous 1940s popular and country song.

Well, friends, that song isn’t as absurd as it might seem.

Herewith is a story we discovered while trying to find something else in the State Historical Society newspaper library, straight from the Jefferson City Daily Democrat-Tribune of July 29, 1924:

HIS BROTHER WILL BE HIS FATHER IN LAW

Frank Lueckenhoff, well known and popular merchant at St. Thomas, and Miss Frances Sommerhauser, step-daughter of H. J. Lueckenhoff, the grooms [sic] brother, are to be married next month, according to word received from St. Thomas.

Mr. Lueckenhoff’s brother will be his father-in-law and his sister-in-law will become his mother-in-law.

Henry J. Lueckenhoff, the older brother married the widow of John Sommerhauser. She had two daughters and Frank Leuckenhoff (the spelling changed in this paragraph) marries the oldest one next month.

“Our” disasters

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There’s something about a disaster that becomes personal even to those who are not damaged by it.   Many people take a personal ownership of it, even take a peculiar personal pride in it even if their property stays dry and intact.

We’re seeing some of that in Jefferson City in the wake of our tornado a few days before the Memorial Day Weekend and the accompanying flooding.  This is “our” disaster and we see and will see other disasters through our lens.

It’s not unusual.  Those of us who remember the 1993 flooding measure floods in other parts of the country against that one and in some odd way find satisfaction in thinking, “Theirs isn’t as bad as ours was.”   The Joplin tornado has become our measuring stick when we see reports of tornado disasters in other parts of the country.  Theirs isn’t as bad as ours was.

Until the disaster takes off OUR porch, blows down OUR house, destroys OUR business.

OUR tornado took nobody’s life.  It damaged about 200 buildings in Jefferson City, some of which will have to be removed because they cannot be repaired, but compared to Joplin it was a little thing.

Except it’s OUR thing.   And now we will consider ourselves kin to Joplin and we will see reports of tornadoes in other places through OUR lens, not in terms of extent of damage but in terms of fellowship.  We have now joined the fellowship of them.

We don’t know if the folks in Joplin, on hearing of the tornado that hit Eldon then Jefferson City, have thought inwardly, “Huh! We had it a lot worse than they did.”   But it is likely natural that some of them would have evaluated our situation against the extent of their disaster.

We’re still waiting to see if our rainy spring continues, as it did in 1993, and pushes later flood crests that establish new references that end observations such as, “Yeah, it looks pretty bad.  But back in ’93…,” the same way that the 1993 flood ended observations from the real old-timers that, “I remember back in 1951…”

In Eldon and in Jefferson City right now, though, the focus is on recovery. The comparisons with later disasters will come after the debris is cleared away, the buildings that can be saved are saved, and the buildings that cannot be rescued are bulldozed down and the lots where they stood grow new grass.

I haven’t consulted with Nancy yet, but if we win the big lottery jackpot(s) I think I’d like to offer one-million dollars to the Historic City of Jefferson, which has worked for years to revitalize East Capitol Avenue where some of the historic structures might become those grass-filled lots, to be used to supplement insurance payments to rebuild those damaged homes—even those now seemingly destined for destruction.  Gutting the destroyed interior and building a modern inside structure while salvaging the historic exterior would be a goal worth some of those lottery winnings.

But I’m not going to win the lottery.  Somebody else somewhere else always buys a winning ticket just before or just after I buy mine (I tell myself that).  I think I will send a much, much, much smaller amount, though.  And maybe others capable of greater philanthropic capacity will want to participate more grandly in saving what some think cannot be saved.

After all, it is OUR disaster. And part of comparing OUR disaster to those elsewhere in the future should include what we do now to save the things we are told can’t be saved.

History tells us an Act of God can be countered by godly acts that rescue people and the past from the worst that has happened.

I bought another lottery ticket a few days ago.  And I also wrote a check.

Notes from a quiet (and perhaps flooded) street

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Might one offer an observation about the extensive coverage of rainfall by the television weatherfolk?    They do an excellent job when weather is awful except for one thing.

What does it mean when they say the Missouri River is expected to crest at—for example—32.3 feet at Jefferson City?   Will there be 32 feet of water over the Jefferson City Airport?  Or in the River Bottom area west of the Capitol?  Will the community garden in what once was Cedar City (and the nearby Highway 63) have 32 feet of water over it?

Uh, no.

When we did flood stories at the Missourinet, we never used numbers like that.  Here’s why.

Flood stage at Jefferson City is 23 feet.   That means that a Corps of Engineers river gauge is someplace that measures the bank of the Missouri River at 723 feet above sea level.  The altitude changes as the river flows east or downhill. (Bank full at Washington is only 720 feet, or “20 feet” as is commonly said.)  Any water higher than that means the river is out of its banks.

So, 32 feet means the river is nine feet above bank full at Jefferson City.  It always seemed to us to be more meaningful to report the river was expected to crest nine feet over flood stage.  And a flood stage at 30.2 feet at Washington means the river will be about ten feet above bank full there.  Nine feet and ten feet are more meaningful to people who are five-feet-ten inches tall than thirty-two feet.

The record flood crest at Jefferson City in 1993, by the way was 38.65 feet, or as we reported it, 15.65 feet over flood stage.   There’s a graphic example of the accuracy of reporting flooding using the 15.65 feet standard we used.  Go to the restaurant at the airport and look at the markings on the door which record the levels of various floods.  The mark for the 1993 flood is almost at the ceiling level of the restaurant, about sixteen feet up, not thirty-two.

Having gotten that out of my craw—-

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A few days before the end of the legislative session, your observer watched some of the debate in the House about whether undocumented immigrants living in Missouri should be denied in-state tuition and financial aid when attending our state colleges and universities.

Among those banned from paying in-state tuition and financial assistance using tax dollars were the DACA people, children brought here at a young age by their undocumented parents.  The legislation says the state universities can use their own resources to provide that assistance or to make up the difference between in-state tuition and international student tuition.

The Columbia Daily Tribune had a story about then noting there were 6,000 people in Missouri approved for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or eligible for it.

 

A thought occurred during the discussion: Why couldn’t our universities, state or private, offer a course for those students that would lead to American citizenship, online for adults and especially for DACA high school students and current college students?  Might solve a few problems.

Might not be a bad idea to have a lot of our non-DACA students enroll, too.

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Come to think of it:  The capitol is awash in third-graders each spring, students who are taking their courses in Missouri government.   They sit in the visitors’ galleries for a few minutes and are introduced by their legislator and given a round of applause and then go downstairs to look at the old stage coach and the mammoth tooth.

It will be nine years before they graduate, months ahead of casting their first vote.  That’s a long time to remember what they saw and learned as third-graders.

I THINK I can remember the name of my teacher and the building I attended in third grade.  But that didn’t make me qualified to cast a learned vote the first time I had the chance to do so.

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I was driven out of retirement this year to lobby for the steamboat museum bill in the legislature.  The opportunity to help do something great for my town and my state forced me back into coat and tie more times in the last four months than I have worn them in the last four years. I found that I was regularly turning the wrong way to get to a meeting with a legislator in the most efficient way.  I had forgotten my way around the Capitol.

I confess there are some things I liked about being a lobbyist and being back in the capitol while the legal sausage was being made.  In all of my years as a reporter, my contacts with legislators were arms-length business arrangements.  As a lobbyist I got to spend a half-hour or more—sometimes less—in the office talking to lawmakers. And I met some REALLY interesting people, particularly the members of this year’s freshman class.

But, boy, did I miss my guilt-free naps. (A few times I hid behind a column in a side gallery of the House and snatched a doze—but those instances sometimes ran afoul of a school group that came in to see five minutes of debate that I’m sure didn’t teach them a darned thing about their government in action.  Or inaction.) And living by my own clock.  And going around in tennis shoes all day.  And going to the Y three days a week for the fellowship there that replaced the relationships I had while I was working.

But the chambers are dark and cool now.  And my naps have returned.  Until January when we take a stronger, better organized run at building a National Steamboat Museum in Jefferson City.  You’re welcome to join the effort.

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It was interesting to know that some things haven’t changed at all.  About three weeks before the end of the session, the place starts to get kind of squirrelly.  That’s about when the House gets all huffy because the Senate hasn’t turned fully to debating House-passed bills. And the Senate gets in a snit because the House hasn’t switched to Senate-passed bills.  And the budget isn’t done with the deadline looming.

 

In the second week, a purported compromise budget comes out and the chambers start and stop on no particular schedule depending on who’s filibustering what bill or which chamber thinks its conferees didn’t stand up for their chamber’s priorities, and whether to stop the entire process to have more conferences on a small part of a multi-billion dollar budget, and the Senate decides a “day” can actually last until sunrise the next morning or longer.

And the last week when legislators are like desert-crossing cattle who catch a whiff of water in the distance and scramble to get a bill dead a month ago resurrected and added to something moderately akin to the topic, thereby adding to the legend that “nothing is dead in the Senate until the gavel falls at 6 p.m. on the last Friday.”   And, oh, what a blessing that falling gavel is.

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The end of a session today is nothing compared to the days when the odd-year sessions ended at MIDNIGHT on June 15, usually with a “midnight special” appropriations bill just before adjournment that created funding for new programs approved during the session. The only people who knew what was in it likely were the people who hay-baled it together in the closing hours. Pandemonium hardly describes those nights when everybody was beyond exhaustion and more than a few were seriously—shall we say “impaired?”—because of social visits to numerous offices which were well-equipped with adult liquids.

 

And at midnight, many lawmakers went out to the Ramada Inn to celebrate surviving another session.  The Capitol press corps would start writing stories about the session, a process that was not nearly as much fun as falling in the swimming pool at the Ramada. Both groups would pack it in about sunrise—except for those of us who had newscasts all day Saturday.

One of the best things the legislature ever did was change the adjournment time to 6 p.m. on a Friday night.

Now—-

If we could only get rid of term limits now—–

 

Adjournment!

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The sound of a gavel at 6 p.m. on the last day of a legislative session is the sound of freedom, of welcome relief for lawmakers, lobbyists, staff members, reporters, and others who for weeks have been under growing pressure to grasp success in the face of rapidly shrinking time. Within minutes after the gavel falls, the roads out of Jefferson City will be occupied by cars with license places beginning with the letters S and R, followed by their district numbers, speeding homeward and back to real life.

The members of the first session of the 100th General Assembly of the State of Missouri will repeat actions hundreds of their legislative ancestors knew well long ago. The capitol press corps will have a few hours to recap the day for it can go home, also exhausted but buoyed by the relief that adjournment brings them to.

The correspondent for the Liberty Tribune wrote at the end of a very long March 2, 1855, “As it is late at night and I am worn down with fatigue, and constant application, I beg leave to do as the Dutchman’s team did in the sands of the Mexican desert—just quit.”  His column was published in the March 16 edition.

Yet, before I take my final leave of you, Mr. Editor, I would like to picture to your mind’s eye the scene of the last day of the session.  The day was bright and balmy—a lovely spring day with its light and shade—its sun and its showers—gay groups of ladies in and about the Capitol—Old Nature was loosing the bands of winter, and the tide of the mighty stream that sweeps the base of the capitol was rapidly increasing in strength. The shrill whistle of the steamboat at the wharf called away one-third of the members, with hearts buoyant to see their long-absent wives, sweet-hearts and little ones. The stage coaches were all filled and crammed with departing members and their trunks and sacks of public documents to enlighten the dear people. Private vehicles were rattling along the streets loaded to the guards with absconding legislators. All was bustle, hurry, confusion, mixture and disorder. The confusion of tongues at Babel, or the cloven tongues on the day of Pentecost, could scarcely have been more wonderful or picturesque. The Speaker’s hammer, the very symbol of authority, was as little heeded as the woodpecker’s tattoo, on the hollow tree.  Several ineffectual efforts were made to introduce bills—to call up bills—to make reports—to pass resolutions &c.  A member would rise at his desk and at the top of his voice cry out Mr. Speaker! A dozen voices at the same time, still a little louder. Mr. Speaker! Rap, rap, rap goes the Speaker’s gavel. Another member shouts out Mr. Speaker, I move to have the St. Louis riot act read, as this appears to be “an unlawful assemblage of persons!” At length, after many attempts to do business, within a thin and disorderly house, a resolution was passed deferring all the business on the clerk’s table and in the hands of the committees, until the first Monday in November next. Resolutions were then passed by both houses, notifying his excellency, Gov. Sterling Price, that they had completed their business for the present sitting, and appointing a committee to wait upon him with a copy of the resolutions.—In a short time the committee returned stating that the Governor had no further communications to make with either house of the General Assembly. A motion was then put and carried to adjourn over to the first Monday of November next.  Then, sir, scatterment took place which I shall not further attempt to describe.

Yours respectively, Publius.

The legislature in those days met in the winter months after the crops were in and before the next planting season.  It was allowed to carry over unpassed bills from one year to the next within the two-year session.  A lot of things have changed in the 164 years since “Publius” filed his report. But one thing remains.

When the gavel falls at 6 p.m. today, scatterment will take place once again.

 

Into the World

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It’s graduation season, the time when hundreds of thousands of young people will be leaving the family nest bound for college, the military, or independent grownup life.

They’re empty or near-empty vessels who will be filled with life experiences that might make them entirely different people in thirty years than they are now.  When they return for class reunions they will find with the passing years that are less a class and more a diverse community.

Kelly Pool, the former Centralia newspaper publisher who was the Secretary for the Capitol Commission Board that oversaw construction of the capitol lived to be ninety years old. Eventually he was editor emeritus of the Jefferson City Post-Tribune and wrote an entire newspaper page of reflections and inspirational thoughts each week for many years. In late 1943, he looked at the way people respond to the “youth will be served” slogan and found many people didn’t agree with it—although thousands of “youngsters” were fighting World War II.  But Pool argued the old saying is true and “more and more the world is coming to recognize the power and grandeur of youth.”

The world is young—always will be,” he wrote. “Youth will has always been in the vanguard,” he said as he put together a list to prove his point:

Alexander conquered the world at 26.

Napoleon made all Europe tremble at 25.

Cortez conquered Mexico at 26.

Alexander Hamilton led Congress at 36.

Clay and Calhoun led Congress at 29.

Henry Clay became speaker at 34.

Calhoun was secretary of war at 35.

Daniel Webster was without peer at 30.

Judge Story was on the supreme court at 32.

Goethe was a literary giant at 24.

Schiller was in the forefront of literature at 22.

Burns wrote his best poetry at 24.

Byron’s first work appeared at 19.

Dickens brought out “Pickwick Papers” at 24.

Schubert and Mozart died at less than 35.

Raphael ravished the world at 20.

Michelangelo made stone to live at 24.

Galileo’s great discovery was at 19.

Newton was at his zenith when only 25.

Edison harnessed lightning when only 23.

Martin Luther shook the Vatican at 20.

Calvin wrote his “Institute” at 21.

(“Judge Story” was a reference to Justice Joseph Story, 1779-1845, who is best known as the Justice who read the decision in the Amistad case. John Calvin as a post-Luther Reformation thinker and pastor whose writings led to the formation of Presbyterianism.)

All of which, wrote Pool, is that “our boys and girls should not let the precious hours of their youth be wasted. Begin early to make your mark in the world, and drive hard to become one of the youths who ‘will be served.”

J. Kelly Pool continued to write his “Kellygrams” pages each week for the newspaper until shortly before his death at the age of 90 in 1951.

King Canute, Charles Wilson, and the dangers of rejecting change

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We have a lot of misquotes that we like to quote to prove our points in arguments and discussions.

One arose when Charles E. Wilson was appointed by President Eisenhower as Secretary of Defense. Wilson was the President of General Motors and his position triggered intense questioning during his confirmation hearing.  When he was asked if he could, as Secretary of Defense, make a decision that would be bad for GM, he said he could although he could not think of such a situation happening because “for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa.”

Through the years his statement has been turned into the rather arrogant and erroneous quote that “What’s good for General Motors is good for the U.S.” It came to mind recently when GM announced layoffs and plant closures affecting thousands of workers in the United States and Canada.

The President has threatened GM with various penalties if it doesn’t reverse course and keep running factories and keep employing people making vehicles that consumers aren’t buying in enough quantity to justify their continued production.

It’s the equivalent of President Woodrow Wilson in 1915 ordering the thirteen-thousand manufacturers of wagons and buggies and their supporting industries (horseshoes, harnesses, buggy whips) to maintain production while people drove by their factories in Model T’s.

Paul Turner has recalled in his Adaptive Insights Blog that there were 4,600 carriage manufacturers in 1914, the year after Henry Ford fired up his first production line.  About a decade later there were only 150 of those companies and just 88 in 1929.  “Companies that tried to hang on to the past, or simply apply old world skills and technology to the new world simply failed to exist,” he wrote. One company that recognized the future and embraced the idea that it was not in the business of making wagons and buggies, but was in the transportation business was Studebaker. But changing economics, market demands, and public taste eventually drove Studebaker out of business, along with its late partner, Packard.

Think of the badges that have disappeared in recent years—Plymouth, Oldsmobile, Saturn, Mercury.  We let them slip away with some minor mourning, not paying as much attention as we might have to what their disappearance meant.  But now Ford has announced it’s getting out of the passenger car business because of changing public demand. And General Motors has ignited public awareness dramatically with its announcement that the products it makes, while good products, are not what the public wants in enough numbers to justify continued production and before GM becomes another Studebaker-Packard, it has to reprogram itself for what tomorrow’s consumer wants.  And tomorrow’s consumer appears to be leaning more toward being a rider than a driver and increasingly turning attention to electricity rather than gasoline.

We have lived through numerous non-weather climate changes and that is happening with the auto industry—worldwide—might just be the most eye-catching example.  The sprouting of big windmills and wind farms is an unmistakable indication that the way we get our energy in ten years will be much different from the way we get it today.  A former Sierra Club CEO, Carl Pope is quoted by Theenergymix.com saying “Real markets are poised to savagely strand assets, upset expectations, overturn long-established livelihoods, and leave a trail of wreckage behind them.”

Some will see the words “Sierra Club” and immediately dismiss Pope’s observations as drivel. But remember how quickly the wagon makers and their extensive support industries that employed thousands of people disappeared.  Pope wrote in 2015, just three years ago of, “fossil fuels, with coal companies declaring bankruptcy at the rate of one per month, stock exchanges delisting their stocks, and oil and gas beginning to lose market value.”

Woodrow Wilson probably could have gotten a lot of votes in some places if he promised to revitalize the horse-drawn wagon industry. But by then, Lydston Hornsted had driven his 200 hp Benz faster than 124 mph, pretty well proving one horsepower was not the future of transportation.

Change is not coming in transportation and energy alone, it is here and it is gaining momentum.

Paul Turner set forth three lessons from the transition to the car:

  1. “Only those who embrace creative destruction will make the shift…The carriage makers that didn’t invest in retooling their production failed. Most were too busy protecting their existing, dying, revenue streams. The same holds true today….”
  2. “The transition is much faster than anyone expects.” He cites the death of the wagon industry 1914-1929 and remarks, “That’s akin to a staple of the year 2000 sliding into the dust today—or perhaps today’s cars essentially being replaced by self-driving cars by the mid-2020’s. The pace of change can be disconcerting. Those that have spent their entire careers in a single industry invariably underestimate the breadth, depth, and speed of change. The speed of disruption and the unwillingness to put aside antiquated technology is a potent combination capable of bringing organizations to their knees much faster than thought possible. Innovators like Google with a self-driving vehicle, and Tesla Motors with an electric vehicle designed from the ground up understand this, while the old automakers do not.”
  3. “New innovators emerge out of nowhere, faster than the old world leaders expect.” Forty-six hundred carriage makers were in business in 1914. A dozen years later there were 3.7-million cars and trucks on the roads, some of them driving past a lot of shuttered carriage factories.

He concludes, “Holding on to the past is more risky than embracing the future.”

The Twelfth Century English Historian Henry of Huntingdon told of King Canute setting his throne by the seashore and commanding the tide to stop before it wet his chair and his robes.  Moments later the wet king rose and turned to his followers and told them, “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.”

The tide is here and it is going to keep coming and General Motors is the latest “king” to realize sitting still is to become submerged by the future.  There is pain in change but history tells us that ignoring change or ordering us to ignore that change is asking for a mouth of salt water at best, drowning at worst.

Tea party politics, 1860

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One in ten people living in Missouri in 1860 was a slave.  A total of 24,302 slaveholders owned 114, 931 slaves.  Thirteen percent of Missouri families had at least one slave.  The division within the state on the issue of slavery played out in different ways.  The situation was serious enough that national news correspondents came here to witness it.

A seeming innocent request by a church congregation to borrow the Senate Chamber for a few hours turned into an example of the conflict within Missouri and among Missourians as the nation trembled at the precipice of a Civil War. It began because a church wanted to hold a tea party.

The Senate Journal for March 5, 1860 is the usual dry record of procedures.  “On motion of Mr. Scott;

Resolved, That the use of the Senate Chamber be granted to the Methodist Episcopal Church on Tuesday evening, the 13th inst., for the purpose of giving a tea party for the benefit of the church.”  The motion was approved with only two or three barely audible “no” votes.

But some people started thinking about that resolution overnight and the next morning “Mr. Thompson moved reconsideration of the vote granting the use of the Senate Chamber to the Methodist Episcopal Church on Tuesday, the 13th inst; Which motion was decided in the affirmative…”

A correspondent for the New York Tribune watched what the journal does not record:

This morning, Senator Thompson of Clay moved a reconsideration on the ground that the Methodist Episcopal Church is Anti-Slavery, and an enemy to “the institutions” of the state. This brought out Senator Scott, in one of the finest vindications of political and religious freedom it has been my fortune to listen to in the State. It is more valuable, coming as it did from a most decided advocate of Slavery. It is impossible to do it justice in a hasty sketch.

He said he hoped the resolution would not be reconsidered. He remembered no instance in which the chamber had been refused any other denomination. It was true the Methodist Episcopal Church was thoroughly Anti-Slavery. They had the constitutional right to be so, as much as he had to be Pro-Slavery. His right to be Pro-Slavery and theirs to be Anti-Slavery, had a common origin in the inalienable rights of man beyond the just control of human governments. He believed Slavery to be a moral, social and political blessing—best for the white man and best for the negro—and he was not afraid of Anti-Slavery sentiments or Anti-Slavery arguments in the churches or out of them. If Slavery was right, it would be maintained. There was no danger in error, when truth was left free to combat it.  He asked for himself the common rights of a citizen, of a freeman, and was willing to grant them to all others. Was Slavery so weak that it must be maintained by proscription? by a violation of the constitutional rights of our citizens? The denial of freedom of thought and religion? If so it was time it was out of the State. He was not willing to make the admission, and was sorry that anybody else was. Proscription would defeat its own purposes. The freedom of thought and discussion could not be crushed out by it. The Christian Religion had reached us through the proscription of ages, standing the test of infidel oppression, and arguments supported by local tyrannies and temporal persecutions. The Reformation swept over Europe like a tornado, unappalled by the terrors of the Inquisition. Even Mormonism flourished as long as it was animated by the fires of proscription. Driven into the Wilderness, a desert state astonished the world at the base of the mountains. Another example was the proscription of the Catholics by the Know Nothings. The charge of proscription broke up the organization. Many who were in it were now proscribing the Methodists.  Were the lessons of experience lost upon them? Would they never learn them? The Methodist Episcopal Church was one of the oldest and most numerous denominations in the country. Founded by the great Wesley, thoroughly Anti-Slavery, its discipline had undergone no change for three quarters of a century. It was now what it had  been before the division of the Church, when its members from all parts of the Union worshipped at the same Anti-Slavery alter [sic].  He was willing that they should worship God as of yore, according to the dictates of their own consciences, unmolested by the hard hand of proscription. He believed them to be obedient to the Constitution and the law. If not, he did not doubt the power of the State to bring them to punishment. To exclude them from the Senate Chamber for their religious opinions, learned from Wesley, the founder of Methodism and steadily maintained through the long history of the Church, was indiscriminately granted to all other denominations, was an attempt in violation of the Constitution of the United States, to prohibit the free exercise of religion, and in violation of the Constitution of this State, a denial that all men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences; an attempt, by human authorities to control and interfere with the rights of conscience, and to give preference to sects and modes of worship. He was sorry that such a wrong should become by anybody, but not surprised that it should be asked in e name of Democracy, which had long since lost its original meaning, and become synonymous with despotism.

Senator Parsons, a determined advocate of Slavery, rose to reply. He is a great, big, stalwart, black-featured specimen of humanity, whose contour and manner irresistibly suggest “Border Ruffian.”  There were some strange things in his speech. He astonished the Senate with the statement that, ‘Bishop Andrews “was driven out of the church because he wouldn’t sell a slave girl he had got by his wife to a stranger.” Whether the statement was intended to carry with it the idea that the Bishop inherited the slave girl was left to inference. But with or without inference it was a rare item of intelligence, and could only have been dug out of the voluminous church controversy by the most laborious and profound research. It has established the Senator’s character as a well-informed man, and hereafter his statements will be received with universal credence.

Senator Halliburton followed on the same side. He, too, had made a discovery. The Senate listened in breathlessness. The Senator read from a scrapbook he held in his hand the astounding intelligence the Methodist-Episcopal Church was Anti-Slavery. He seemed to have just discovered it in some concealed book of church history, and put it in his scrapbook, that the world might not lose it. Where in the world he got the information, whether in the Discipline, or whether he stumbled upon it in some profound research into church history, I do not know; but that he has it, and in a way that the world can never lose it, there can be no doubt. The fact is, I heard it myself, and the Church need no longer deny it. The Senator stoutly insisted the Anti-Slavery sentiments of the church were not religious, but political, and on that account, they ought to be excluded from the chamber.

Senator Scott said if this were so, it was nonetheless proscription. Under the Constitution and laws of the State, there were two modes of emancipation—one, to emancipate on compensation to the owners, as had been done in the West Indies; the other to amend the Constitution, and pass a gradual emancipation act. Anti-Slavery citizens had the same right to insist on the measure as he had to oppose them. It was simply a question of freedom of opinion and discussion, and he was sorry to see any advocate of Slavery to defend by proscription of any kind, religious or political. It was the worst possible defense for Slavery, and would do more to break it up than anything else.

The discussion shows the character of Slavery. It originated in wrong, and must be maintained in the same way. It cannot bear discussion, and hence, its advocates want to suppress it. I need hardly add that the resolution was reconsidered and laid on the table. This is the institution which the Constitution totes into the Territories under the Dred Scott decision; and if it cannot be toted out again, no Christian denomination can have a tea-party there without indorsing [sic] Slavery.

About three weeks later, the March 28 journal recorded:

“Mr. Goodlett offered the following resolution: Resolved, That Mr. Wm. E. Dunscomb, Commissioner of the Permanent Seat of Government, be and is hereby authorized to grant to the ladies of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, the use of the Senate chamber on the evening of the 10th of April next, for a charitable purpose.”  The Senate passed the resolution a few hours later.

The Methodist Episcopal Church South favored slavery.

The Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist Churches split—the Presbyterians in 1838, the Methodist Episcopals in 1844, and the Baptists in 1845 with the Southern Baptist Convention being formed and later becoming the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

And who were these men whose actions in March of 1860 reflected the growing divide in our country?

Senator John Scott was from Buchanan County. He was elected to the Senate to replace Robert M. Stewart when Stewart was elected governor.

Senator James T.V. Thompson probably was one of the first 75 residents of Liberty.  He was part of the Confederate Senate that met in Neosho and passed an act of secession. He called himself a “an old-fashioned states’ rights Jackson Democrat” who donated the ground on which William Jewell College was built.

Senator Wesley Halliburton moved to Randolph County from Tennessee in 1823. He helped write the state constitution of 1875, which lasted for seventy years until it was replaced by a constitution that his grandson, Senator Allen McReynolds, helped write. He was one of the incorporators of the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railway Company, the only railroad that did not go bankrupt in the early days.  His southern sympathies led to his arrest by federal troops at the start of the Civil War. He was one of the first men arrested in northeast Missouri and was imprisoned in Quincy, Illinois until he was ordered released. He founded the first newspaper in Milan.

Senator Mosby Monroe Parsons was a Jefferson City lawyer who commanded a Confederate brigade in Sterling Price’s army.  He was among the rebels who refused to surrender at the war’s end and went to Mexico where he was among a half-dozen American Confederate soldiers killed by Mexican troops in August, 1865. His family home at 105 Jackson Street is one of the homes the city has taken over under a widespread eminent domain action so it can be made habitable again. It’s one of the city’s oldest homes.

Senator M. C. Goodlett, whose resolution allowing an event by the slavery supporting branch of the Methodist church, was a slave owning Warrensburg lawyer.  He went south with Governor Jackson.  On October 12, 1861, Goodlett introduced the bill in Missouri’s rebel senate to “dissolve” Missouri’s ties to the Union.  He apparently moved to Nashville, Tennessee after the war where his wife became a co-founder of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

The Methodist Church, South returned to the fold in 1939 to form the Methodist Church although some congregations held out and formed the Southern Methodist Church.  The main Methodist Church merged with the Evangelical United Brethren in 1968, which is why you’re most likely to have a United Methodist Church in your town.

A church tea party that never was, was much more than the Senate Journal tells us. But the names recorded in that dry journal record come to life in a reporter’s observations and in the historical records that tell us something of what we were and who we were as the people as a terrible war was about to engulf our state.

Josh and Bill

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Some capitol graybeards are watching the developing investigation of suspicions that Attorney General Josh Hawley used public money to further his successful campaign to oust Senator Claire McCaskill. We’re watching because we remember when another young, charismatic Missouri Attorney General who seemed to be a Republican shooting star crashed and burned.

Can it happen again? Let’s just wait and see.

The fact that it’s another Republican statewide office holder who has triggered this investigation adds some heft to the issue. And Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft’s successful involvement of State Auditor Nicole Galloway, a Democrat, in the investigation because she has subpoena powers adds more.

Hawley proclaims innocence—just as Bill Webster did throughout the long federal investigation against him while he was successfully winning the Republican nomination for governor in 1992, beating State Treasurer Wendell Bailey and Secretary of State Roy Blunt in the primary.

Circumstances will show whether Hawley’s “innocence” is genuine or whether it’s as flimsy in the end as Webster’s often-claimed “innocence” was all those years ago.

Public officials under investigation are right to maintain their innocence for two reasons. First, our justice system operates on the proposition that all of us are innocent until proven guilty.  Second, it’s important that those who supported the office holder with their money and their votes continue to believe that person is above the suspicion swirling around him or her. While confession might be good for the soul, it’s disastrous for the career.  People have survived close scrutiny, even charges and trials, and gone on to useful political careers.

But here’s something about investigations of public officials.  Once one gets started, there’s no   telling where it’s going to go.

We told friends about  a year ago that the suggestions of sexual impropriety against Eric Greitens were a she-said-he-said matter.  But, we suggested, if a prosecutor stepped in, things were suddenly much more serious.  And if a grand jury was convened, all of the cards would be wild and who knows where the story would go. The Greitens story escalated pretty rapidly and Greitens left office to keep things from becoming even more serious, particularly on issues not connected with the first suspicions, and before light was shined on his dark money supporters.

So it was with Bill Webster, son of a powerful state senator; some said he was more powerful than some governors although he was a Republican, which then was the minority party.  Some analysts thought that Dick Webster, who lost a shot at the being attorney general in 1952 and a chance to run for governor four years later, groomed Bill to reach political levels the father never could.  He provided a good part of the money for Bill’s campaigns for state representative in 1980 and ’82. And in 1984 the elder Webster called in a lot of political IOU’s from various special interests for Bill’s attorney general campaign account. Bill was elected to a second term in 1988.  He had his eyes on the governorship in 1992 as a successor to John Ashcroft (Jay’s father).

But Dick Webster did not survive heart surgery in March of 1990.  State Senator Gary Nodler, who took the elder Webster’s seat in the Missouri Senate, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch many years later that the death of the father made the son “more driven to succeed.”

The early news stories by investigative reporter Terry Ganey in the Post-Dispatch centered on the Second Injury Fund which compensated employees whose job-related injuries make an earlier health situation worse.  The early suggestions were that a second-injury fund lawyer in the attorney general’s office also was collecting campaign money for Webster’s run for the governor nomination and that private lawyers hired by Webster were getting bigger judgments for their clients than non-Webster friends.  Webster survived the primary election but his reputation took a hit when his former deputy attorney general and a resort developer who had bought some Webster property pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges. Voters took notice and made Webster a big loser in the race with Mel Carnahan in November.

The investigation shifted to Webster’s use of Attorney General employees and equipment for campaign purposes. A corruption charge was dropped against him in return for a guilty plea on two charges using state resources for political campaign purposes. Almost until the unavoidable end, Webster claimed his innocence.  In fact the federal judge in his case, who ran a multiple-day sentencing hearing, gave Webster an hour at the end to consider whether he wanted to withdraw his guilty plea or whether he wanted to accept his sentence.

He went to prison for 21 months, getting out three months early for good conduct.  When he got out, he went to work for Bartlett and Company, a Kansas City agribusiness firm.  As far as we know, he’s still a Vice-President.  Life didn’t take him where once he wanted to go, but he’s done well.

Today, one of his political descendants is being investigated for using public funds while attorney general to support his senatorial campaign.

Josh Hawley, young, charismatic, is seen by some as a shooting star in the Republican Party.  He’s entitled to proclaim his innocence. It’s unfair to assume that he is another Bill Webster despite circumstances reminiscent of twenty-five years ago.  He has his protectors who say the investigation is baseless and shouldn’t go forward, just as Webster had his protectors.  He has his critics who say smoke equals fire, as Webster did.

Time will answer enough questions, one way or another, as it did in 1992 and ‘93. We can wait.