Category Archives: family

The Shrinking Book of Numbers

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Two things of note happened in our household during Thanksgiving week.  On the day itself, Nancy and I celebrated our wedding anniversary.

Only 56 of them.

The national record for longest marriage is that of Herbert Fisher Sr. and Zelmyra George Fisher, who made it to 86 years, 290 days before Herbert died on February 27, 2011.  Here’s the happy couple on their wedding day:

We are within 30 years and change of setting a new United States record.

The all-time record is held by Karam and Kartari Chand, who were married in India but lived in England when Karam ended 90 years, 291 days of married life by dying on September 30, 2016.  He was 110.

So we’re 34 years and change from setting a new world’s record.

We haven’t discussed it but I’m in if she is.

Incidentally, the longest current marriage is between Evert Stolpe and Annni Lepisto Stolpe, who are still hitched in Narpes, Ostrobothnia, Finland after (as of Thanksgiving Day in the USA) 82 years, 244 days.

Studies show (What The Average Marriage Length In US Says About Your Divorce Risk (fatherly.com) that the highest risk of divorce happens within the first two years of marriage, before there are children to complicate things. The possibilities flare up between years 5-8, the infamous “Seven Year Itch” period. But years 15-20 are average but growing because in this time of late marriages, people reach their 50s, the kids are gone, and who wants to stick around with this person through their declining years when there’s fun to be had?  “Gray Divorce” is increasing.

Apparently, we missed our chances.  Now, we’re stuck with each other, which is fortunately very good for both of us.

When I sent my parents a letter informing them of the upcoming nuptials in 1967, my father wrote back to note of congratulations and hope that we would be as happy as my parents had been.  “We never thought about divorce,” he wrote.  “Murder, sometimes, but never divorce.”

Or something like that.

Bowling Green University’s National Center for Family and Marriage Research published a study that only seven percent of American marriages make it to 50 years or more.

Hooray for Us!!!

The second thing that happened during Thanksgiving week was the arrival of the telephone book.

The 1967 phone book was the first one in Jefferson City to have my name in it.  Right there, Priddy, Bob  1519 E. Miller Street.  It was a third floor attic turned into an apartment reached by a laong narrow flight of stairs. The kitchen was the biggest room in the place.  I lived there for about three months before we moved in together after returning from our Thanksgiving Holiday honeymoon in St. Louis (how old-fashioned that must seem in today’s relationships).

The house number later was changed when the city decided to renumber houses so that there was some logic to addresses (so first responders had a better idea where the fire was or the heart attack or the overexuberant family disagreement).

We later moved to an apartment closer to my work, which was a radio station in a building that no longer exists on Capitol Avenue (the radio station doesn’t exist in Jefferson City, either—it’s one of several radio formats crammed into a single building in Columbia).  Then to a rented house where our Ericofon sat on the floor between the bedroom and the living room.

(Have you seen the video of two 17-year olds trying to figure out how a dial phone works?  Check it out at (107) Hilarious video show 17 year old teenagers baffled by rotary phone – YouTube or another example at (107) Rotary Phone Challenge for Students in 2022 – YouTube).   I’d hate to see them figure out an Ericofon, which was the first phone Nancy and I had as a married couple.

For any younger readers: the dial was on the bottom and there was a button that was pressed when the phone was put down that disconnected the call.

Look back at that 1967 phone book’s cover showing Capital City Telephone Company serving Jefferson City. But there also was Midstate New Bloomfield, Midstate Centertown, Mistate Taos, Midstate Brazito, Midstate Eugene and dial St. Thommas. It had 77 pages of residential numbers with “favored businesses”—meaning they paid more—set in bolfface and 128 Yellow Pages advertising businesses by category.

(United Telephone moved in in the early 70s.  One day I spied a company pickup truck with the first name of the company misspelled, “Untied,” on one of its doors.  I quickly called the newspaper, which ran an embarrassing picture on the front page the next day.)

The phone book for 2020-2021 was 234 Yellow Pages and 70 White Pages. It was small and obviously a lot thinner than that historic 1967 book.  But it was about half the size, top to bottom and side to side—about the dimensions of what is known in the book biz as a “trade paperback” edition—about the size of my Across Our Wide Missouri books. But way thinner.

The new pre-Thanksgiving book had 16 pages of “featured businesses.”  It has 118 Yellow Pages.  And it has only twelve white pages—people who still have land lines.

Nancy found the names of a couple of friends on those pages. I have learned of a couple of other wons.  I felt a strong urge to call them, land line to land line, to celebrate our distinctions.  But I was interrupted by dinner.

Here’s the cover of the new one.

Look at the list of towns. It takes 21 of them to generate just twelve white pages.  I’m not sure how important it is for somebody from Tipoton, 36 miles to the west on Highway 50, to have my home number in Jefferson City but what few people there have phones that don’t fit in their pockets have it now.  Same goes for people in Syracuse, 41 miles away from our house, or Otterville (where the James gang pulled one of its last train robberies), 49 miles away, or Smithton, named for railroad promoter George R. Smith who was so disappointed the town didn’t want a railroad that he moved a few miles farther west and founded another town that would be more welcoming—naming it for his daughter Sarah whose nickname was “Sed” and therefore the town became Sedalia.

Well, we got a little carried away there. But the phone book lets a person with a landline 54 miles west of my landline to call me.  The number is small enough we might invite everyone to a picnic at the Memorial Park Pavilion. We will provide a small Waldorf Salad, without marshmallows because I can’t eat them anymore.

Phone books are one of many commonplace things that remind us of the changes in our world over time.

Fifty-six years of marriage and phone books.  And phones.  We now have three numbers, two of which reside in our pockets unless we’ve forgotten where we put them.

Has anybody ever kept track of how many hours in a year we spend looking for our cell phones?

Anyway—

56 years of family and phones.  And we’re in no mood to hang up.

-0-

 

 

JUST DESSERTS

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When I’m in Indianapolis, I stay with my friends, Rick and Karen, who have a condo downtown, a few blocks from Monument Circle.  They know all of the fine downtown restaurants—I think, in fact, that Rick has a couple of places that have tables for him whenever he goes in—and, worse, they know all of the dessert places.

The most recent visit involved three excellent dinners and three visits to dessert places none of us had any business going into.  The last night we went to something called The Sugar Factory.

I should have turned and run as fast as I could the other way.

Of all the items on the menu, I thought the Strawberry Cheesecake Milk Shake sounded the most tasty and probably the simplest of the desserts.  Boy, was I ever wrong.

There was the milk shake in a sugar-topped glass and a straw.  But the straw was there mainly to hold the other elements together. Whipped cream and candy strawberries topped the shake itself, topped by the cheesecake and more whipped cream, a real strawberry, and then a strawberry/chocolate cupcake topped by more whipped cream.

God help me!  I ate and drank it all.  The cupcake was nothing to write a blog about but the cheesecake was pretty good and the strawberry milkshake was just the right thickness and flavor.

The eight-block walk back to the condo was done at a fairly leisurely pace.

I had planned to spend a fourth night, after the race, but I decided to stick around only long enough to take the pictures I wanted and then head home early, listening to the rest of the race on the radio (it is, after all, about a 400-mile drive).  I told Rick I was leaving early because I didn’t think I could survive another dessert.

If my doctors were to look closely at my blood samples, I am sure they would find I don’t have white blood cells.  I have vanilla blood cells.

Once a week Nancy and I get together with a couple friends for game night—dominoes, Rummikub, Five Crown, Swoop, stuff like that.  Halfway through the evening, or when we change games, is dessert time.  No matter what the basic treat is—brownies, cobblers, cake, whatever—ice cream is the vital ingredient.  Always too much ice cream.

On our refrigerator, amidst the numerous pictures of grandchildren, cartoons, the next shopping list and assorted refrigerator magnets, is an advertisement I found in a 1916 Jefferson City newspaper. I look at it the way some people consider their bumper stickers, “He said it. I believe it. So it’s true.”

In 1916 the ad assured buyers that Weber’s ice cream was safe to eat, produced in sanitary surroundings, and was not the impure foods of the time found in grocery stores, themeat sometimes hanging openly in the windows.   Eat our ice cream and you’ll be alive tomorrow to eat more.  That kind of message.

But in today’s FDA-regulated food environment, I am comfortable reading it another way—that ice cream is an essential food group.

I think it is a genetic flaw.

While doing some family research a few years ago, looking for references to my great-grandfather, a Union (with Sherman) Civil War veteran, I uncovered a family secret

A longer article in the Decatur (Ill.) Evening Bulletin from July 6,1896 telling me that Robert Thomas Priddy and his partner, A. A. Cooper, both experienced dairymen, had bought “the milk depot and ice cream business “in the basement of Fay’s meat market on the west side of Lincoln Square.”

A year later:

I inherited my addiction to ice cream from an ancestor who was with Sherman at Vicksburg and later helped capture Little Rock.

He died in 1925.

In the old family photographs, he’s thin. It’s clear he didn’t dip into the inventory as often as he could have.

I wonder what he would have thought of that Strawberry Cheesecake Milkshake at The Sugar Factory.

 

 

 

SPORTS:  The Hendrick 1100; The Chiefs Debut; Tiger Basketball Gets the Beef; Tiger Football Developing.  Then there is baseball.

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(RACING)—We normally start with the stick and ball sports but the stick-shift or paddle-shift sports took some interesting turns (to coin a phrase) this weekend and we were there so we’re going to talk about things faster than a baseball pitch.

First, NASCAR and IndyCar shared the road course at Indianapolis this weekend, IndyCar on Saturday and cars with fenders on Sunday.

(HENDRICK)—The weekend was the perfect venue to unveil the cars that former NASCAR champion Kyle Larson will run next year as he tries to “do the double, .” racing in the Indianapolis 500 and then jetting to Charlotte, NC for NASCAR’s 600 mile Memorial Day race that night.

Larson, who won Saturday night’s Knoxville Sprint Car Championship in Iowa, got to Indianapolis at 4 a.m. Sunday but was at the Indianapolis Speedway at mid-morning the unveiling of the cars he will drive next Memorial Day Weekend.

.His car owner, Rick Hendrick, is partnering with Arrow-McLaren Motorsports, which fields cars for the 500.  The color scheme is McLaren Papaya Orange and Hendrick’s traditional blue. Because he’s an active partner in the effort, the event has been unofficially dubbed the “Hendrick 1100,” for the 100 miles Larson will drive that day if he completes both races.

Four other drivers have tried it but only Tony Stewart has been able to run all 600 laps in the two races.  Robby Gordon tried four times, John Andretti tried it once and the most recent driver to make the attempt, Kurt Busch, was 6th at Indianapolis but fell out of the Charlotte race with engine problems.

Hendrick, owner of 94 automobile dealerships employing 10,000 people, owned Jeff Gordon’s car that one the first Brickyard 400, the first NASCAR race on the Indianapolis oval, in 1994. At one time he considered having Gordon run both races, but Gordon was cool to the idea.

But Jeff Gordon was a strong advocate for Larson to try it, and Larson has been eager to do it.  Hendrick says Larson has shown he can win in any kind of car.

For his part, Larson says he’s not nervous although he expects the nervousness to start “creeping in” as next May gets closer.

(SUNDAY ON THE ROAD COURSE WITH MIKE)—Michael McDowell had been one of the drivers keeping an eye on drivers’ points as NASCAR’s playoff runs begins to grow close.  But his win Sunday eliminated any uncertainty about his presence among the 16 drivers competing for a slot.

McDowell, who has shown improvement as a road course driver in his career, seized control of the race that went without a yellow flag for the last 77 of 82 laps.  It’s his second CUP victory—the first being the Daytona 500 two years ago.

His closest pursuer was Chase Elliott, who desperately needs a win to qualify for the playoffs.  Although Elliott trimmed McDowell’s lead from four seconds to less than one second, he couldn’t get the win that would have put him, Elliott, into the 16-car playoff field. He gave Ford its first road course victory since 2018, whcn Ryan Bleney won the first race on the Charlotte Roval.

He’s the 13th winner this year, leaving only three playoff positions available for non-winners.  Kevin Harvick and Brad Keselowski seem secure in the points chase, leaving only one position, for all intents and purposes, open. Bubba Wallas holds the 16th playoff spot now, by 28 pins over Daniel Suarea

McDowell’s win reduces the number of available Playoff spots to three. Keselowski and Kevin Harvick are comfortably situated on points—barring more different winners at Watkins Glen and Daytona—but Wallace’s hold on the final spot was reduced from 58 points pre-race to 28 over Suárez. Next closest is Ty Gibbs, who’s 49 points out.

The road course at Watkins Glen is next on the schedule.

(INDYCAR)—The IndyCar race Saturday was awash in history from beginning to end.  Saturday was the 90th birthday of Speedway legend Parnelli Jones, the first driver to run a 150 mph lap, a past winner of the 500 in May.  This year is the 38th anniversary of Danny Sullivan’s famous “spin and win” 1985 500. Dixon had not planned to celebrate Sullivan’s achievement when the race started but less than one minute into the contest he spun off the track into the dirt as part of a five-car tangle.  Dixon’s car was undamaged and he got back under power before the field came back around, keeping him on the leader lap.  A pit stop four laps later would let him run the rest of the race on only two more stops while other drivers had to make three.

The alert move by his team put him in the lead late and his legendary fuel-saving abilities left him ten seconds ahead of pole-sitter Graham Rahal after the final pit stops.  Rahal bit into the lead but finished about a half-second back.

(Dixon meeting a fan)

The win is Dixon’s 54th; only A. J. Foy had more (67).  It gave Dixon at least one win in 19 consecutive seasons, breaking a tie with Foyt.  He’s known as “The Ice Man” for his ability to keep his cool during tight races but he’s also IndyCar’s “Iron Man” after making his 319th consecutive start, breaking the record held by Tony Kanaan.

The race was a disaster for Josef Newgarden, the winner of the 500 in May. His car was one of the five in the first lap crash and he never got into contending position after repairs. Dixon has replaced him as second in points but Alex Palou has a 100-plus point lead going into the last three races of  the year (the first of which is just across the river from St. Louis in two weeks, at World Wide Technology Raceway).

(HELIO)—The race near St. Louis likely will be the last chance we have to see Helio Castroneves except for the Indianapolis 500.  Castroneves is easing into retirement and his only race for 2024 for his current owner, Meyer-Shank Racing, will be his next big for a fifth Indianapolis 500.  Otherwise he’ll assume a minority ownership of the team. He’ll also run sports cars in the IMSA series.

He remains one of the most popular and charismatic figures in IndyCar.

His MSR teammate, Simon Pagenaud, is still not allowed to race because of concussion problems resulting from his horrendous crash at Mid-Ohio a month ago. His contract with Meyer Shank ends at the end of this season. Linus Lundqvist has been filling in for him. He was 12th in the Saturday race.

(ONE OTHER THING)—Imagine the players on your favorite base, foot, basket, or soft ball team pausing on their way to the field to start the game to pass among fans and sign autographs.

IndyCar and NASCAR drivers do that.  We weren’t there to collect autographs but instead we were there to photograph drivers.  One young Indiana couple brought their young children, each wearing t-shirts saying, “My First NASCAR Race.”

Chase Briscoe was one of the several drivers who saw their little girl sitting on top of the fence, held by her father whose hat was signed earlier by broadcaster Dale Earnhardt Jr., (barely visible on the bill) and signed her shirt. Briscoe finished sixth in the race.  Briscoe is 28 with a lot of future ahead of him; she looked to be three or four with even more future before her.

Forty-six years ago, a woman named Janet Guthrie became the first woman to start a Daytona 500 AND an Indianapolis 500.  A year later she finished sixth at Bristol, the highest finish in a NASCAR race ever by a woman up to that time (Danica Patrick also finished 6th in a NASCAR race, in 2017).

Your on-the-scene scribe once had an autographed Guthrie picture hanging in his daughter’s bedroom, not because he thought she would become a woman race driver but because he wanted her to know she could be anything she wanted to be.

TIGER FOOTBALL)—Coach Eli Drinkwitz started sounding a little more positive about his team after Saturday’s closed practice, especially about the defense—although the offense began to find itself a bit toward the end of the first half of the closes scrimmage.

The competition for slots on the offensive line is intensifying. He says as many as eight players are competing for five positions.  He indicates Javon Foster might have left tackle nailed down and Connor Tollison is impressive at center.

A week ago he was critical of Tiger wide receivers for their shortcomings in the blocking game but after the weekend scrimmage, he says the players have “responded really well.”

(MISSOURI ROUNDBALL)—Coach Dennis Gates has been signing some big guys to fill what has been an aching shortcoming of the Tigers for years—the lack of interior size.  His newest recruit isn’t just tall.  He’s BIG.

He’s Peyton Marshall, a 7-foot, 300-pound center from Marietta, Georgia, who has picked Missouri aver Georgia Tech, Auburn Ole Miss, Cincinnati, Georgetown, and Mississippi State, and about ten other schools.  He’s the third top 100 player in the 2024 recruiting class. He is considered to have a lot of raw but unpolished talent.

(CHIEFS FOOTBALL)—The starters hardly broke a sweat in their first exhibition game of the year against Russell Wilson and the New Orleans Saints 26-24 on a late field goal.  The regulars were in for just a few plays while coach Andy Reid got a good  look at the rookies and the newbies. The Chiefs play the Cardinals next week. The regular seasons starts September 7.

Okay, now let’s take a look at our baseball teams. It will be a short one.

Our two teams had a rare Sunday off after their two game series that ended in a split at the end of the week.  In both games, both games played well above their winning percentage.

(ROYALS)—The Royals have to win their next 50 games in a row to have a .500 season. They start tonight’s game against the Mariners 31-81.  The Royals used the day to juggle the lineup.  Drew Waters is returning from the three-day Bereavement List.

Edward Olivares is headed down to Omaha to make room on the roster for Bubba Thompson, coming over from the Rangers, who designated hm for assignment this week. At first glance, Thompson doesn’t appear to be much of a game-changer. He is hitting .170 in 27 games for Texas.

(CARDINALS)—The Cardinals (52-66) face another team that, on paper, would appear to be easy pickings—the Oakland Athletics, who sport a 33-85 record.  It is the first meeting of these two teams since 2019.

Just when some things were starting to look just a teeny more rosy, the Cardinals have announced that Steven Matz is going to be on the 15-dayh DL with a left lat strain.

Manager Oli Marmol hasn’t said it in so many words, but the time as come to seriously address what’s to be done with Adam Wainwright.  Last Friday night’s outing against the lowly Royals was nothing if not tragic for a beloved player who wants so badly to go out with 200 wins. Marmol promised afterward to “sit down with Waino” and “talk through a few things.”  But he says the future doesn’t look great.

Wainwright, however, will make a start later this week.

(Photo Credits: Bob Priddy and Rick Gevers)

 

The Bag

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Did you ever hear someone say something out of the blue that just hit you squarely between the eyes?   Something that stopped you cold.  Something you had to write down because it was so startingly profound to you that you dared not let it escape?

It is so rare that this kind of thing happens.  Stops you in your tracks.

I was asked to speak to the local Unitarian Universalist Fellowship a few days ago and on Thursday I was doing the final edits of my remarks before printing them out.

As I was typing those last thoughts, I was listening to Sirius/XM’s channel of old radio programs from the 30s into the 60s when radio drama and entertainment finally faded away because television had become the established preference for people’s entertainment.

I was listening to an episode of “Have Gun, Will Travel,” a western drama show about a gunslinger-for-hire named Paladin (no first name ever given). Some of you might remember Richard Boone in the role on television in the early 60s.  But before then it was on radio with John Dehner, whose face you might recognize before you recognize the name) as Paladin.

Paladin had been hired to deal with an Indian chief who was reluctant to give up a white child who had been kidnapped when his family was wiped out. The chief argued that the boy was “his son.”

They finally decided the boy was white and would be returned to relatives. At the end of the negotiation, the “chief” said something that reached out of the speaker and instantly grabbed me. It was so startling and so profound (in my estimation) that I paused the broadcast and went back to get the wording correct.

“Skin is leather bag God made to hold the soul. Color of bag no matter.”  

That’s a grabber.  I’ve searched the internet to see who really said something like that and can find no reference.  It was so startling, so different from the usual dialogue written for those old radio dramas for Native Americans, that I typed it at the end of the speech—-not that I planned to use it but because I had to make sure I got it.

I don’t think I’ve ever had something—especially a non-news item—jump out of the radio like that before and instantly force me to halt what I was doing so I could write it down—and I’ve heard a lot of great rhetoric (and a lot of really lousy rhetoric, especially lately) come out of the speakers of my radio, my television, and my computer.

I think I’ll tidy it up a little bit and find a good use for it from time to time.

“Skin is a leather bag God made to hold the soul.  The color of the bag doesn’t matter.” 

Amen.

 

Was it a Lynching?

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(Before we dive into this story, we ask our readers to please go back to Monday’s entry which required a major correction of information that incorrectly stated the position of a prominent former political leader from Missouri.)

Nancy and I went to Salisbury a few days ago where I had been asked to speak to the Chariton County Historical Society.

What happened during that speech is a reminder of something James Baldwin said: “History is not the past. History is the present. We carry our history with us. To think otherwise is criminal.”

William Faulkner said in a similar vein, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Those are great quotations in today’s turbulent political times when it seems we have people who want us to ignore some of the lamentable events of years gone by—shadows of some of which remain present among us.

Whenever I speak to a county historical society I like to spend a day at the State Historical Society going through the newspapers that have been published in that county. We have 60-million pages of newspapers on microfilm so a huge amount of local history is within each spool of microfilm.

Folks are regularly surprised when I tell them how many newspapers have been published in their county. In Chariton County’s case, there have been 31.  I pull random reels of microfilm and spool a reel through a reader and start looking for random news accounts or advertisements that are informative and sometimes amusing but say a little something about that particular time and place.

I have wondered if any of the people in my audience are learning something about one of their ancestors—but until the visit to Chariton County I had never heard from anyone connected to one of the stories.

Sometimes, the news article I choose is difficult to hear.  Such is the case of a 1917 article in The Rothville Bee, that began, “The body of a negro, apparently dead about ten to twelve days, with limbs tied and wrapped in barb wire, was found in the Missouri River below Brunswick Sunday of last week. The body was later identified as being that of William Wilson of Brunswick…Examination disclosed a bullet wound through the heart and a scalp wound, indicating that the negro was murdered.”

The historical society had more people watching the presentation on its streaming internet feed than it had room for in the museum (which, by the way, is an outstanding county history museum, and they’re expanding). A few days after the speech I got an email from one of those viewers:

“One of the news articles you read was from the Brunswick newspaper regarding a man found in the river by the name of Bill Wilson, I think this is about my grandfather.  I would love to visit with you about the article and see if we can uncover anything additional regarding his murder.”  

I couldn’t provide him with anything more than I had because the article had been picked randomly but I did give him the names of several newspapers in the county that might have had follow-up articles and several from surrounding counties since the body had been found in the Missouri river.  And I suggested some courthouse records he might check—if they still existed 106 years after the fact.

But I cautioned him he might not find much because Chariton County, just before the Civil War, had a population that was about 25% enslaved.  And 1917 in Missouri was a time when the Klan was active. The murder of a Black man might not have elicited the kind of investigation a white man’s murder might have created.

Last week, I was back at the Center for Missouri Studies for a meeting and I built in some extra time to run down the original newspaper article.  The Rothville Bee had reprinted a story from the Brunswick Brunswicker that I discovered originally had been published in the Salisbury Press-Spectator. Each iteration had a difference of small details.  The the original story concluded with a discouraging but not unexpected comment:

“There seems to be no special interest in the matter as the negro’s reputation was bad.”

So it will, indeed, be surprising if there are any follow-up stories. Why was his reputation bad?  That might be hidden in reports generated by the sheriff or the coroner or the county prosecutor—-if they still exist and if they went into any detail, which seems remote.  Family legend might give some hints.

The State Archives, which has thousands of death certificates from 1910 onward has no death certificate for William Wilson of Chariton County in 1917.  The archives of the state penitentiary show no William Wilson who matches the timeline or the description of this man so we don’t think his “bad reputation” was so bad as to merit prison time.

The Chariton County Prosecuting Attorney at the time was Roy B. McKittrick who later was elected to the Missouri Senate and, with the backing of Kansas City political boss Tom Pendergast, was elected Attorney General.  He turned on Pendergast and teamed with Governor Lloyd Stark and with U. S. Attorney Maurice Milligan to break the Pendergast organization. Pendergast eventually went to federal prison for tax evasion. They also broke up a major scandal in the state insurance department and sent Pendergast crony R. Emmett O’Malley, the state insurance superintendent, to federal prison for tax fraud. McKittrick and several other Democrats were involved in an effort to keep Republican Forrest Donnell from assuming the governorship in 1940.  He ran against Donnell in 1944 for the U.S. Senate but lost. He lost a race for governor to Forrest Smith in 1948.  He died in 1961 and the story of the investigation of the murder of William Wilson seems to have died with him.

Harriett C. Frazier, in her book, Lynchings in Missouri 1803-1981,  says there were at least 227 cases of “mob murder’ in Missouri during that time. The Equal Justice Initiative has counted sixty African-Americans who were lynched, 1877-1950  The archives at Tuskeegee Institute says 53 Whites and 69 Blacks were lynched in Missouri between 1882-1968.

William Wilson’s name is not on any of those lists.  Should he be?  The fact that he was bound in barbed wire, shot, and thrown into the river with a weight tied to him points to a hardly routine killing.

But the event has been lost to history, recorded only (as far as we know) in old small-town newspapers in one of our smallest counties, and barely reported at that, more than a century ago.  Even family memories or family stories have had time to fade in the telling and re-telling.

—and the only thing we know about William Wilson is that he died a terrible death in 1917 and, it seems, nobody cared much about finding his killer(s).

More than a century after his murder, the United States Congress finally got around to declaring lynching a federal crime.  One of these days we’ll tell you about a Missouri Congressman who didn’t live to see the law that he pushed throughout his career finally adopted.

The genetic pull

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No, not the genetic pool.  The pull.

Some of the few who read these profound thoughts will understand when I ask if  you’ve ever felt drawn to a place or to an event because its in your genes—-because something was planted in your DNA early in your life and your life isn’t complete if you can’t see or do something?  Because there are instinctual longings that drive you to do, to be, or to go—-just as instinct drives the gees south in the fall and north in the spring, as the Wildebeest is driven in constant migration following the good grass from north to south to north to south, despite the lions, leopards, jaguars, and cheetahs, or big crocs in the streams.

A few years ago we were in the middle of it, on the Masai Mara in Kenya (in a balloon over it, in fact, one morning), and in the Serengetti National Park and the Ngorongoro Conservation area of Tanzania.  In the lower right corner is the Ngoroongoro Crater, where even an elephant is overpowered by the magnificence of the surroundings.

Go there if you ever get the chance.  We’ve been.  And right now our next big trip will be across Kansas, where there used to be gigantic fish-things whose bones have turned to rock—and you can stop in Hays and see them.

Many folks hate to drive across Kansas.  Not us.  In fact we feel it whenever we go to something in Kansas City. There is a faint whisper in our genes that says, “Don’t stop here.”

We think it’s because her mother’s family was from the Larned area and my ancestors, on both sides, moved to north-central Kansas’ Mitchell County not long after the last Indian raid.  We have a Kansas Gene.

The Flint Hills and the Tall Grass Prairie, the rolling prairies that stretch before us as the sky grows larger as we head beyond Salina.  Not until Hays, the home of the Sternberg Museum’s fish things and the remains of other fascinating beings, is the rising flatness something we notice. But the sky is all around us (as are big trucks) and the sky is open and uplifting.

The Garden of Eden is out there, you know.  We’ll let you look it up.  But it’s worth a jaunt a little to the north to break up the trip.

As we cross the Colorado line, we confess, we have to remind ourselves we’re still at least two hours from seeing the first faint outlines of mountains. But we’re done with the quiet stateliness of Kansas.  Let’s get to the dramatic stuff now.

The problem is—there’s too much Kansas in Colorado.

The other problem is that it’s I-70.  We understand why people get bored crossing Kansas on I-70 but we wish they appreciated the fact that it’s the road, not the landscape or the places along the way, that is boring.  It’s I-70 on the land beyond the windmills and before the sighting of the mountains that becomes tedious, even for us.

We are going to answer the call of our genes in a few days.  Time to visit the granddaughters at the foot of the Rockies in Longmont.  That means a day and a half on the road, most of it enjoying Kansas in warm weather.

But before than I have a personal gene pull that has to be satisfied.  I’m off later this week to the east, to the City of Indianapolis—a prototype for a big city that wants to reclaim itself—and to the Greatest Spectacle in Racing.

There are those who are surprised that an educated and literate person can also like to watch noisy very fast cars going so fast that it’s impossible to read a sponsor’s message  on the side of the car.  This corrupted gene was planted almost (Oh, Lord!  Just saying this give me chills) seventy years ago.  Something about the unique climate of the event, as well as the event itself, is a magnet.

In my working days, the trip to Indianapolis was a step toward freedom after being cooped up for four and a half months inside the pressure cooker that is the Missouri Capitol in the closing days of the legislative session.

And I’m going to watch 33 people hurl themselves around a 2.5-mile squared oval at 230 mph-plus, turns included. I have tried to think of something else that is so frightening yet so remarkable and the closest I can come is Olympic downhill skiing.

Why go?  Because it’s the Indianapolis 500.  It is part of my genetic programming. My parents took me there for the first two or three times. I have taken my self there for as long as I have had a driver’s license.

I do not know if the those I will watch ever think about Theodore Roosevelt’s famous remarks about “the man in the arena,”  those who “strive valiantly; who know the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spend themselves in a worthy cause; who at best know the triumph of high achievement and who, at worst, if they fail, fail while daring greatly, so that their place shall never been with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.”

Some people like to watch birds. Some like to chase little white balls around well-manicured courses. Let me admire the courage and the remarkable precision of 33 cars going 230 mph and turning left, perfectly putting wheels where they must, running within inches of one another. In my genetic makeup, that beats the tar out of watching a little white ball slowly curl its way into a hole.

So, pick the adventure your genes call on you to take. If it’s genetic, it can’t be wrong.  And don’t pay attention to those who think you are odd.

Greatness is not achieved by those who think those who push the envelope are odd.

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Showing His Stripes

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Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft wants to be the second son of a former Missouri Governor to also achieve that office.*  Ashcroft seems to have been aloof from the three-ring show at the Attorney General’s office that has involved lawsuits against China, meddling in the elections of other states and, now, joining an abortion lawsuit in Texas—all of which by some twisted logic seem to involve protecting or advocating MISSOURI’s laws.

But with the passing of the 2022 elections, Ashcroft has left his moderate self at home and has started to show his stripes.

His declaration a few months ago that he alone can withhold state aid to public libraries unless they agree with his personal standards on what’s fit for your children and my children to read is scary.  He seems to be most worried about the corruptive influences of anything other than stories about married heterosexual adults sleeping in separate beds (the Rob and Laura Petrie model of marital bliss).  His proposed policy is worrisome enough on its own but in pondering the example it sets for his successors, we are gravely concerned.  Suppose our next Secretary of State denies the existence of the holocaust, regardless of the reader’s age.  Suppose our next Secretary of State is one who thinks the history of black people is not material to our well-being.  Suppose our next Secretary of State reveals himself to be fond of Karl Marx and will take money away from libraries that have any capitalist literature.

His announcement of his availability to lead our state is aggressive, antagonistic, and—as it turns out—ill-timed.  He says Missouri is at a “crossroads,” which is certainly true.  We are known as the Center State, with as many states to the north of us as to the south and as many states to the east as to the west.  But he’s not talking geography here. He’s talking about his own party’s failure to make Missouri a one-party state.

And it would not be surprising if some of his fellow Republicans didn’t feel like he’d gut-punched them when he said, “Red states like Florida, Texas, Tennessee, even Indiana and Arkansas have become examples of conservative leadership while Missouri Republicans, who control every statewide office and have supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature have failed to deliver.”

As we recall, Ashcroft wasn’t satisfied last year that Missouri still has two Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives and wanted new congressional district maps redrawn to reduce that to one by eliminating a district in Kansas City served by Missouri’s current longest-serving African-American congressman.

As for the legislative supermajorities failing to deliver, legislators of the red school might rightfully take umbrage.  They’ve delivered a lot although some of what they’ve delivered has been ruled unconstitutional by courts.

He complains about career politicians who “talk a lot but don’t do a lot.”

The career politician is a frequent target of fervent successor wannabes who have not given us a definition.  Perhaps he’s referring to a career politician such as:

State auditor 1973-1975

State Attorney General 1977-1985

Govenror 1985-1993

  1. S. Senator 1995-2001
  2. S. Attorney General 2001-2005

Yep, Jay Ashcroft knows all about the dangerous career politicians.

He’s also critical of “politicians and lobbyists in Jefferson City [who] slap each other on the back while they give our tax dollars to global corporations, sell out farmland to China, and raise gas taxes on hardworking Missourians.”

Right. Before the recent ten-cent hike (spread over several years) in the gas tax, the latest “big” gas tax hike was a six-center spread through four years (a 55% increase in the then-11-cent per gallon tax) that was proclaimed as “the great economic development tool of the decade” by the then-governor, the career politician described above.

Wonder what dad thinks of the swipe in his son’s candidacy comment.

Give our tax dollars to global corporations?  Several years ago the state cut a big tax deal with a company called Ford to keep it building trucks here. Ford’s pretty global. There are no doubt other examples that don’t jump immediately to mind of such irresponsible use of our tax dollars.

Selling our farmland to China? How about leasing it?  Bad idea, too?

Don’t be too critical with your mouth full. Smithfield Foods, owned by a company in Hong Kong—that’s in China, you know—owns eleven of Missouri’s biggest concentrated animal feeding operations and hires hundreds of Missourians to work those operations or process the meat they produce.

His announcement reiterates a commonly-heard GOP claim that, “It is the very rare occasion if ever, that the state spends its money better than families that it’s taken that money from.”  There’s a lot of validity in that claim if you think social services, criminal justice, education, and our infrastructure can be financed with car washes and cookie sales while taxpayers keep their money and buy a new big-screen teevee.

His comment that Missouri Republicans have failed to make Missouri more like red states of Florida, Texas, TENNESSEE, Indiana, and Arkansas could not have been more poorly timed, coming about the same time the Republicans in the Tennessee legislature expelled two black Democrats who had joined a protest that interrupted a house session, while keeping a white representative (by one vote) who was part of the protest, too.

If Florida is going to be an example, does this mean Jay Ashcroft will take over Worlds of Fun if it disagrees with his political philosophy?

This critical examination of the words used in announcing his political intentions leaves this observer of the passing scene uncomfortable after reading his idealistic words reported by Missouri Independent in its story on his announcement:

“It helps that I was raised with the understanding that people being involved in politics is normal, that elected officials aren’t special. I was raised to understand that it’s about public service, that it’s everyday human beings that are willing to give up their life to serve other people and to make a difference in the lives of current generations and future generations.”

That is an honorable statement. I’ve heard his career politician father say the same sort of thing. But I am left wondering how to reconcile this kind of idealism with his angry, aggressive, antagonistic, and unsettling statement of candidacy.

Which is the real Jay Ashcroft? Which one should I believe in?

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*John Sappington Marmaduke (1885-died in office 1887) was the son of Meredith Miles Marmaduke, who served the last ninet months of Thomas Reynolds’ term after he committed suicide February 9, 1844.

But What About Jenae?

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The recent traffic crash in St. Louis that has cost a 17-year old volleyball player her legs has triggered outrage focused on St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner—who has been something of a political lightning rod throughout her career.

The Missouri Senate is considering a remonstrance—a word describing a severe grievance or protest against a person or institution, usually demanding corrective action—against Gardner, who is accused of letting the driver of the car remain on the streets despite having a revoked driver’s license and having violated his bond in a robbery case at least fifty times.

The remonstrance is signed by every Republican in the Senate.  Gardner is a black Democrat and her defenders say the remonstrance and the Attorney General’s ouster petition filed against her are politically partisan and racist.

We will leave that fight to be waged in the political arena. We hope, however, that those who are and who will be focused on Gardner do no harm to Jenae Edmondson, the young volleyball player from Tennessee, for it can be too easy for them to use her as an instrument of their political rage at a time when she might desperately need support and hope.

What will they say to her?   What should they say to her?  What should you and I, most of us along in years with legs that carry us in the halls of power, on the playing fields and hiking and biking trails, and even on walks with our grandchildren?

Legs are part of our identity, particularly when we’re young. They’re part of running through life, part of our future, part of our social involvement—we dance with them; we jump to our feet when our team scores in a close game; we begin to drive a car with them.

If you and I—and the senators and the Attorney General—were to send her a letter, what would we tell a 17-year old girl who is dealing with the terrible question double-amputee Drake McHugh asks in King’s Row, “Where’s the rest of me?”

She is not the first person to suffer such a tragedy. But she’s the first person in her own body and in her own mind to go through it. And those who become immersed in the political fallout of this disaster should remember that and not victimize her additionally.

There are others, too, who intimately share her tragedy.  Her parents are doubly affected because they must deal with her injuries and with sustaining her character while they deal with suddenly becoming parents of a disabled teenager and the costs of her care now and in the future.

They are getting help from the Middle Tennessee Volleyball Club that has set up a GoFundMe account that is about halfway to meeting its one-million dollar goal to help pay medical and other bills.

There are many who can give her hope, who can inspire her at the right time to live through this, who can teach by their examples that there will be bikes to ride, trails to hike, games to be played, life to be lived.  Thousands of those who returned alive but damaged from Afghanistan are the ones we hope she will focus on.  At some point, Paralympians can provide inspiration. At some point, the remarkable U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois can become an inspiration—a woman who lost her legs in a military helicopter crash and who told Vogue magazine that when he sees her artificial legs, painted to match her skin tones, she sees “loss.”  But when she sees her steel and titanium prosthesis, “I see strength.”

But that is in the future.  Jenae and her family are living very much in the present with its present challenges.  We hope she does not become a pawn in a developing political battle.

She and her family have more important things to do.

 

 

You never know—

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—-what stories you might discover when you knock on a stranger’s door.

One summer night in Columbia when I was a college student selling encyclopedias door-to-door—a job that convinced me I was not meant to be in sales—an old man named Brooks Bradley answered the door.

I sold no encyclopedias that night.  Instead, I spent my time in his living room listening to him tell me stories.

He told me he was the oldest printer in the state. He showed me his commission as a Kentucky Colonel.  (Many years later, I joined him in that, uh, distinguished group.)

I wound up talking to a man who used to run steamboats on the Osage River as far upstream as Warsaw; today there are two dams and two big reservoirs below Warsaw. Nobody can take any kind of a boat upstream on the Osage anymore, at least not past Bagnell Dam at the Lake of the Ozarks.

Bradley’s family was an old family in Columbia.  He told me of the day his grandfather almost murdered General Odon Guitar, one of the city’s most famous residents. Guitar had been a Union officer and the Bradley family was on the Confederate side.

He told me he dreamed of writing a book someday called, “Pre-eminent Sons of Bitches I Have Known.”   I read his obituary in the paper a few months later. I still have it. I don’t think he ever wrote the book and to this day I wish I had a recorder that night.

The other day I decided to see if he had left any writings of any kind behind.

I found a January, 1914 copy of the magazine Typographical Journal that listed “W. Brooks Bradley, age 29 years; at trade fourteen years; learned trade in Rockport, Mo; has also worked in Pleasant Hill, Harrisonville and Warrensburg, Mo.”  He was applying for membership in the Typographers Union.”

I don’t know if the house where I spent that memorable evening was at 810 Sandifer Street, but that’s where he and his wife, Mae, were living when the census taker came round in 1940 and found them living with their 20-year old daughter, Dorothea.

I have run across one other record that includes a Brooks Bradley story.  A monthly magazine, Confederate Veteran (published “in the interest of Confederate Veterans and Kindred Topics”), from October, 1923, has him asking for some help.

An inquiry comes from Brooks Bradley, of Fayette, Mo., for some information of a soldier buried in that community, Richard Benedict, of Virginia, who went into Missouri in 1864 to secure recruits and information, and while there was taken ill and died. Mr. Bradley is very interested in securing the record of this soldier, as he and a few friends wish to erect a monument at the grave, which is on the old Bradley farm.

The following is taken from a newspaper story of this long forgotten soldier:

“In a neglected grave on a farm some seven miles northwest of Columbia (Mo.) rest the remains of a Confederate soldier whose tragic death is still remembered by a few Boone County people. The name of this soldier was Benedict, a commissioned officer of the Confederate army, and his business in this part of the country was to secure recruits. The county at the time was overrun with Federal commands.

“While on this mission, Benedict was taken sick, and, to keep his whereabouts a secret, he was placed in a camp on what was then the William Wade farm. In the same camp was a wounded soldier, Andrew J. Caldwell, now a resident of Columbia, who had been shot in a sharp skirmish on what was known as the John Fenton Ridge.

“So completely was the county overrun by Federals that it was almost impossible to give Benedict’s body a decent burial. An attempt was made to secure a suit of gray for burial purposes, but this was impossible. During the night his body was removed to the residence of James Boyce and prepared for burial. James Bradley made the coffin, and the immediate neighbors gathered and conveyed the body to its final resting place. In passing through this old deserted graveyard to-day, a close observer will find a plain, flat rock upon which is inscribed the word ‘Benedict.'”

Mr. Bradley is a young man and the nephew of a Confederate soldier. He writes: “My grandfather raised the first Confederate regiment in Boone County, Mo. He was a sort of preacher and sent out a call to meet at the church. Going into the pulpit, instead of preaching a sermon, he read the ‘Ordinance of Secession.’ At the conclusion, they all sang the ‘Bonnie Blue Flag.’ The old church yet stands as a shrine of democracy, and he is buried there. The monument marking his grave reads: ‘Here lies buried a Hardshell Baptist and an Unreconstructed Rebel.'”

Oh, how I wish that old printer had been more of a writer.

The Chair

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It was one of those little mysteries that we notice that stays quietly in the backs of our minds but doesn’t nag at us.  But then somebody says something and the mystery is solved although they don’t know there ever was a mystery.

This mystery is rooted in the story of one of Jefferson City’s most prominent 19th Century citizens, the donation of a building to the city, the founding of a church, and the creation of a center to help the city’s needy a century after a man’s death.

And a mausoleum.

Joseph M. Clarke, Ohio-born, Illinois newspaperman, Alabama horse trader, Osage County Missouri plantation owner, state legislator, and Jefferson City banker is at the center of the story.

He was a city developer and philanthropist and upon his death toward the end of 1889, he bequeathed Bragg Hall to the city.  Bragg Hall still stands at the corner of High and Monroe Streets, on the southwest corner. For decades, the upper floors were city hall, with the city council chambers (which doubled as the Municipal Court during the daytimes) on the top floor.

One of the provisions of his will was that the city had to pay for a life-size bronze statue of Clarke to be kept in the building. Portraits of his wife, Lavinia, and of his two sons, Marcus and Junius, also were to be placed prominently in the building. All of them wound up in the council chambers, the statue in the southeast corner where it watched the council proceedings, the portraits of his sons on the east wall and the life-size portrait of his wife on the west wall.  In those days, five councilmen sat on each side of the room and I always felt sorry for the councilmen on the east because Mrs. Clarke was, well, a very severe looking woman and I often wondered if any of the council members felt her withering gaze.

Bragg Hall became inadequate as a city hall in the 1970s and after negotiations with Clarke descendants, the city sold the building and moved to a new city hall.  But the new building didn’t seem to have adequate space for the bronze Clarke and the canvas family members.  Four years later, when the city opened a nutrition center, it was named for Clark. And today folks who have meals there do so under the watchful eyes of Mr. Clarke and his sons. And I think Lavinia is watching their table manners closely.

One of the other things Clarke did was to give the First Christian Church a lot at the corner of (then) East Main and Adams Street as the site for its first sanctuary, to which he also contributed liberally.

All four members of the Clarke family are in that mausoleum in the old cemetery.  One day while I was doing some church research about Clarke, I went to the mausoleum, the interior of which was pretty dusty and cobwebby and peered through the locked door.  There wasn’t much to see except for a very old chair that was slowly collapsing under the weight of dust and decades.

Why is that chair there? I wondered.  Were they expecting visitors?   Were they thinking someone would come in a sit with them for a while?  Somebody would come in and tell them what had happened with their gifts?

That chair was the mystery that stuck in the back of my mind for several years.  Since then, the mausoleum has undergone a maintenance and repair effort.

A few weeks ago I think I learned what that chair was and why it was there.

The Christian Church has been without a minister for more than a year, a situation that will be resolved this coming Sunday when our new minister preaches his first sermon.  In the interim we have had “pulpit supply” ministers filling in, including three retired ministers who are members of the congregation.  We’ve had sermons from two lay members. And on June 26, a young woman who was raised in our church—her parents and her grandmother are still active members—and then went on to become a minister stood in the pulpit and asked what kind of a church we would be in the future, one stuck in the old ways or “will we accept the mantles of change and embrace our own giftedness and passions?”

Her sermon was based on the story of Elijah, the prophet from the Old Testament Book of Kings where stories of his miracles are told—one of which is resurrection. Early in the message, Sarah Blosser Blackwell referred to an ancient custom that sometimes is practiced in some homes today:

An empty chair at a family gathering was likely referred to in passing as the “Elijah” chair.  The idea was that since Elijah did not die an earthly death, but instead was taken up into heaven, and we should save him a space in case he returned. According to Jewish tradition, Elijah was known as the messenger of the covenant and, thus, was present at every circumcision, so a chair was left open for his arrival.  Later that became the place of honor for the godfather of the child.

And there it was!

That was why the chair was in the Clarke family mausoleum—the Elijah Chair where he could sit when he returns as a harbinger of the arrival of the Messiah.

I don’t think there’s a chair in the mausoleum since the repairs were made. I could see no sign of it as I peered through the three dingy windows.  It’s unknown if the chair had been put there at the request of the Clarkes or if it was just part of a tradition in 1889.

I kind of think there should be a chair in there now, though.