Category Archives: history

A Creek by Any Other Name

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—is still a creek.

But what IS its name?

Jefferson City has a creek that winds through the town, divides the north part where the Capitol and the old penitentiary and the business district are located from the south side called by early German immigrants “Munichburg,” crosses under the Rex Whiten Expressway (Red Whitton, for those not native to these parts was the chief engineer of the state highwy department in 1941. Early plans for an expressway through Jefferson City were drawn up during his term, and Missouri became the first state to pave segments of the interstate system during his tenure. He was appointed Federal Highway Administrator in 1961 and oversaw early work on the interstate system.) and traverses what we call the “mill bottom” before emptying ito the Missouri River.

In flood times, the creek backs up and helps flood low-lying areas of central Jefferson City.

We call it Wear’s Creek today, or most all of us do. But it has worn various names through the peopled history of this area and the name’s origin is a mystery.

An 1825 map shows it as Wyer’s Creek.  A 1947 Jefferson City Daily Capital News article quotes then-County Recorder Henry LePage saying the creek’s name was recorded “under different spellings in different deeds.”  Some people called it “Ware’s Creek,” after Clem Ware, who owned a lot of property in the county.  But the creek’s name preceded him by many years.

He suggested that some called it “Wire Creek” because it twists and turns “in a wiry fashion,” leading to the spelling of is name as “Wier” or “Weir.”

The research for our next book, about the Capitol’s location, creation, and other history noted a report from the commissioners picked to find a permanent central location for the seat of state government that refers to it as “Wan’s Creek.”  An account of the execution of a Confederate guerilla by Union soldiers in the Mill Bottom calls it “Weir’s Creek.”

The 1947 newspaper article concludes by suggesting the then-new Cole County Historical Society could study the issue and settle the question about the creek’s name or, if the CCHS failed to do that, “Mayor Blair could appoint a commission to ponder the question, reach the decision on the spelling that could be accepted and which will permit uniformity.”

Neither the society nor Blair (who later became Governor) did anything about it.

However—

Missouri has a State Board on Geographic Place Names (did you even know such a thing exists?). It coordinates place names, working in cooperation with local, state, and federal agencies to coordinate the naming of places so we don’t have two of something with the same name.

Maybe someone should look into having this organization decide what this creek’s name should be once and for all.

On a related note:  About fifty years ago, the Cole County Court (an administrative body using a long-outmoded name from Missouri’s early days) decided to name all of the county roads.  As I recall, it was being done so emergency vehicles could find places and people in trouble.  The public was invited to suggest names. Then-Presiding Commissioner Tony Hiesberger told me that a suggestion for one road was “Old Muttonhead School Road,” a name stemming from a long-ago incident in which some rustlers took the sheep they had stolen to a country school, butchered them, and hid the remains underneath the school.   The commission decided against using that name, the reason why is lost to me but it would have taken a pretty large road sign to have the full name.  I don’t recall what name was adopted.

 

Sports: Baseballs Says Goodbye to the Season; Two Great Pitchers Remembered; Football Leagues Merge; And Other Sports

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

Before we delve into tributes to two pitchers who left their marks on the game, two football games that merit comment, and a race, there is one thing we want you to understand.

TRAVIS KELCE AND WHAT’S HER NAME ARE NOT SPORTS.

And this is the only time you will read about them in this column.

(FOND FAREWELLS)—–

When Will We See Players Like TheseAgain?

Every year about this time, those of us who live for the next baseball season and live for the first day a spiked foot steps across a baseline in Florida or in Arizona bid farewell to some young men who are too old to play our game anymore.

We’re going to forego our usual appraisal of the Cardinals and the Royals today. Both have seasons best left in the quickly descending night of the 2023 baseball season. Instead, we want to say some things about two guys whose careers will far overshadow their final successful days in struggling seasons.

We Missouri baseball fans have been blessed by two remarkable pitchers who are leaving, or likely to leave, the game with memorable performances and memorable careers.

(WAINWRIGHT)—Adam Wainwright struggled all year He wanted to to reach a goal, to realize a dream, to accomplish something rare in today’s game.  He finally won his 200th game.

Remember that night.  It will be years before we see something like that again.

It wasn’t just a personal goal.  It was a professional goal.  He has known that in today’s game, 200 wins is a Hall of Fame credential.

Two-hundred baseball wins seems to be a modest amount for those who have watched the greats of the past.  But in today’s game of 100 pitch limits, five-man rotations and parades of pitchers to the operating room for Tommy John or other surgeries, 200 wins is remarkable. This year, for example, only five pitchers threw more than 200 innings. And there were only 35 complete games pitched.

When did the last THREE-hundred game winner throw his final pitch?  Fourteen seasons ago, when Randy Johnson retired with 303 victories.  Since 1990, only four pitchers have reached 300—Johnson, Tom Glavin, Greg Maddux, and Roger Clemens.  All are in Cooperstown but Clemens, a victim of the performance enhancing drugs era.

Only five pitchers ended this year with 200 victories.  Justin Verlander, 40, has 257.  The Royals’ Zack Greinke has 225.  Former Missouri Tiger Max Scherzer is in at 214 and is 38.  35-year old Clayton Kershaw of the Dodgers has 210 and Wainwright with his 200. All of them are in the twilight of their careers or at the end.

Are all of these guys, even Wainwright, bound for Cooperstown some day?  Yes, although most of them are unlikely to be first-ballot selections.

Brady Farkas, writing on FanNation a few days ago, pointed out that Wainwright’s 200th win makes him unique. He is the only player (not just pitchers) whose career has been within the divisional era (there have been 10,331 of them) to hit ten or more home runs in their careers (2,395) AND win 200 games as a pitcher (36).

He also has 75 RBI and a career .193 batting average.

The first pitch he saw as a major league hitterr turned into a home run.

He is a three-time All-Star. He has two Golden Gloves and a Silver Slugger bat and a World Series Ring. He never won the Cy Young Award (runnerup a couple of times), but he led the league in wins twice, led the league in innings pitched two times, and was a 20-game winner in 2014.

And, from all accounts, he’s been a class act.

When will someone else win number 200? It might be quite a while.

Cole Hamels has 163 wins and he’s 39.  Johnny Cueto is next at 144. He’s 37.  Gerrit Cole seems to have the best chance. He’s only 32 but has 145 wins. If he has three more years such as the last three years, he could be within 10-15 wins of 200.  Aaron Nole is 30 with 90 wins. The biggest winner for pitchers less than 30 is Jose Berria, who is 29 and has 83 victories.

Wainwright’s final game was a seven-inning masterpiece. He was given only one run and he tenaciously battled to keep that lead. It was a final curve, to Milwaukee’s Josh Donaldson that induced him to fly out to end the seventh.  He had gone into the game with back spasms and struggles during his pre-game warmup and he knew he had to make one more pitch, get one more out, before leaving the mound after the 7th inning.

“I know its gonna hurt. I’ve gotta go one more time over the top and get this ball to have a little more depth to it.  I think I can do one more of those,” he recalled in an interview with Post-Dispatch reporter Derrick Gould and others a few days later. “I knew in that moment, from up on top, that I had one more pitch.”

His discussion of his last pitch is a masterpiece in describing, in real not Hollywood dramatics, all that went into it—the curve to Milwaukees’s Josh Donaldson that induced Donaldson to fly out.  “I literally left everything I had out there,” he said a few days later.  Watch this rare insight we fans don’t usually get to hear.

(screenshot  from Gould’s article, Sept. 27, 2023)

With a curve, Adam Wainwright’s pitching career ends. So, what about an at-bat? Cardinals Extra (stltoday.com)

He thought he might have another start or two before the end, but when tried to play catch a couple of days after the Milwaukee game, he hurt badly enough that he decided he had thrown his last pitch.

He has herniated discs that will need repair and says his shoulder needs looking-at because he can’t lift his arm over his shoulder without pain.

He goes out with others recognizing his uniqueness, competitors who appreciate not only what he has done but what he is.  Cincinnati’s Joey Votto presented Wainwright with a bouquet before the game and eloquently explained the respect the game has for Wainwright later in the locker room—

“This game gets harder not only the older you get but as your tools fade. To be able to stay put and still be a contributor at you know, 30, 35, 40 and beyond, which Adam has done, and to be steady with it, is admirable. There’s a reason why the St. Louis fanbase is celebrating this weekend, because it’s rare, rare is the pitcher who can compete this deep into their career, can stay with one organization, can be a productive player, productive member of the community, and to me that’s what I admire the most. Game recognizes game.”

Votto knows what he’s talking about because he is a Wainwright kind of guy—17 years with one team, almost 40, finishing a disappointing   season after having surgery on his shoulder, an aging veteran on a team that has seen a good crop of promising young talent come up from the minors. An extended standing ovation that prompted the umpire to delay the last game of year in Cincinnati so he could enjoy it showed the affection for Votto in Cincinnati that Wainwright has gotten in St. Louis. The crowd seemed to realize it was seeing a great player for the last time although Votto hasn’t said yet that he’s retiring.

And Votto has a sort-of connection to St. Louis. A Canadian native, now a naturalized American citizen, he and former Cardinal Larry Walker are the only Canadians in major league history to have 2,000 hits, 1,000 runs batted in, and 300 homers.

Game recognizes game.

So Wainwright has reached his goal and has come to the end of the line as a major league pitcher, the last of a generation of Redbirds that included last year’s retirees, Albert Pujols and Yadier Molina.

The torch has now fully been passed to the next generation. We wonder who among them in what has become a game for contract gypsies will be as beloved fifteen, twenty years from now as Adam Wainwright is to this generation of fans.

There’s a red jacket in his future when he joins the Cardinals Hall of Fame. And eventually, we think, a bronze plaque on the wall of a building in a picturesque little upper New York town.

(GREINKE)—We might have seen the last of Zack Greinke of the Royals Sunday.   As was the case with Adam Wainwright, he finished with a season that was far less than he hoped it would be. But in his last game, he was young again.

Greinke went five innings, gave up only one run on four hits and struck out two. He finishes the season 2-15—and a standing ovation from the crowd.

He’s a free agent seemingly with limited possibilities for another season in the majors. We don’t know if he has, or had, some goals he wanted to reach this year—as Wainwright wanted to get his 200th win.  He did reach 225 wins with the outing Sunday, putting him ahead of Hall of Famers Jim Bunning and Catfish Hunter on the all-time win list. But he finished about twenty strikeouts short of 3,000.

But there is a significant strikeout milestone he DID get.  On May 13th, he fanned Brewers rookie Joey Weimer to become only the fifth pitcher ever to strike out 1,000 different batters.

(The Royals created a special commemorative image for the accomplishment.)

That night, he joined Nolan Ryan (1182), Randy Johnson (1123), Greg Maddux (1049) and Roger Clemens (1022).  He finished with two more than Clemens.

The one thing that has eluded him is a World Series ring.

He started with the Royals, but battled depression and social anxiety and almost gave up the game after leading the league in losses (17) in 2005. He left spring training early in 2006 but returned late in the season to make three relief appearances.  He returned to starting pitcher status in 2008 and the next year won the Cy Young Award by going 16-8 and leading the majors with a 1.66 ERA.

His best years were eight seasons with the Dodgers and the Diamondbacks when he went 134-49, a .732 winning percentage.

And he was a pretty good hitter for a pitcher. He finished with a .225 batting average and won two Silver Slugger Awards.  As with Wainwright, his first major league hit was a home run. He also succeeded in nine out of ten stolen base attempts.  He pinch hit in the 2021 world series and became the first pitcher to have a pinch hit since Jack Bentley of the New York Giants in 1923.

He is, as of today, the last pitcher to get a hit in a postseason baseball game.

Greinke admitted after signing with the Royals that he had hoped to stay in the National League for a couple more years because he hoped for more chances to hit.  But when the NL adopted the designated hitter, he looked to returning to the Royals.  He hoped there might be a chance to pitch AND be a designated hitter some time when the team was short at that position. But he never got the chance.  He cited Kansas City’s fan enthusiasm and his relationship with former Royals official Dayton Moore, for signing with the team in March, 2022.  He pitched the last two opening days for the team. His 2022 start was the first time he’d pitched for the Royals on opening day since 2010.  It set one of those arcane records baseball is so full of—the largest gap between opening day starts for the same team.  He finished his career by starting the first and the last games of the 2023 season for the Royals.

Cooperstown for him, too?  Wouldn’t it be nice if both Greinke and Wainwright could go in on the same day?

(CARDS/ROYALS)—The Cardinals had their first losing season since 2007 when they were 78-84. The Royals tied their record for losses with 106.  The last year the Royals had a winning record was their World Series-winning year of 2015.

The Royals finished on a hopeful note, going 14-12 in September—their only winning month of the year (well, they were 1-0 in October).  The Cardinals had only two winning months, going 15-13 in May and 14-13 in July. The Royals finished the year going 12-5.

The Cardinals’ Miles Mikolas was one of the five pitchers to throw 200 innings this year—201.1.  No MLB pitcher gave up more hits than he did—226. He faced 860 batters, the most in the major leagues. His 35 starts were the most of any pitcher in the majors.  He finished 9-13 with a 4.78 ERA.

Relief pitching was a sore point all year. Cardinals relievers saved 36 of 64 games, 56%.  Royals relievers held on 53% of the time. Neither was anywhere close to the top in the final rankings.  The Royals pitchers had a 5.17 ERA. Cardinals pitchers were at 4.79.

And get this:  There were 4,840 games this year.  There were only 35 complete games by pitchers.  The Royals had three of them.  No pitcher went the distance this year for St. Louis.

But both showed a lot of young talent, particularly the Royals’ Bobby Witt who joined the 3030 club with thirty home runs and 49 stolen bases. The Cardinals promise a busy off-season. Several of the Royals’ young hopefuls didn’t pan out, leaving fans to speculate on whether the team will invest in the free agent market or be active traders.

(MIZ)—Missouri’s win against Vanderbilt 38-21 in its SEC season opener has set up a match between two ranked SEC teams next Saturday in Columbia. The Tigers, 5-0 now in their best start in a decade are 21st in the weekly AP poll and 22 in the USA Coaches Poll.  LSU, which is 3-2 with three of its games being in the conference already, is 23rd in the polls , a ten-place drop after losing to Old Miss 55-49 last weekend.

Missouri’s ranking is its highest since the fifth week of the 2015 season, the year they won their first seven games of the season. Quarterback Brady Cook will be looking to extend his conference record consecutive passes without an interception, now standing at 347.

The Mizzou offense chewed up Vanderbilt’s defense to the tune of 532 yards, 395 of them by Cook, a personal best.   (ZOU)

(CHIEFS)—The chiefs beat the Jets Sunday night but nobody is happy about it including the winners.  A late field goal, a fumble by the Jets’ quarterback, and a clock-sapping final drive that ended with Patrick Mahomes sliding to a stop at the New York one-yard line so the clock could run out salvaged a 23-20 win.

The win is number 250 for Coach Andy Reid. That puts him into a tie with Dallas coach Tom Landry for fourth all time. He has won 120 of those games while with the Chiefs and trails Hank Stram for the team record by only four.

The Chiefs seemed to be on the road to a blowout with an early 17-0 lead before rookie quarterback Zack Wilson, filling in as Aaron Rogers and his repaired achilles tendon watched from the owner’s suite, found his rhythm and led the Jets to a 20-20 tie.  But he lost a snap with his team on the move in the fourth quarter; the chiefs recovered and picked up a field goal and then held on the rest of the way.

Patrick Mahomes had an off-game with two interceptions. But Isaiah Pacheco’s running kept the chains moving at key moments. He picked up 115 yards on 20 carries and scored one of the two Chiefs’ touchdowns. He also caught three passesfor 43 yards.  He was responsible for 158 of the Chiefs’ 401 total yards.

(BATTLEHAWKS)—We’re waiting to learn if the St. Louis Battlehawks of the XFL will survive the merger of the XFL and the USFL, announced last week.  The merged league plans to begin play next spring.

The XFL has been resurrected twice. The last couple of years there have been eight teams in eight cities—St. Louis; Arlington, San Antonio, and Houston Texas; Las Vegas; Orlando, Florida; Seattle, Washington; and Washington, D. C.

The USFL was reincarnated a couple of years ago with all games played in Birmingham, Alabama. Last season, the eight teams were located in four “hub” cities—Detroit, Memhis, Birmingham and in Canton, Ohio, the home of the NFL Hall of Fame.

The Battlehawks have played in the domed stadium abandoned by the Rams. The team drew a record 38,310 fans for the fourth game last year. They have compiled seven of the biggest crowd numbers in theleague’s short history.

Officials will announce late rif all 16 teams will have home cities when play starts after the NFL’s Super Bowl in February.

Now, on to the crash-and-turn sports.

(NASCAR)—Ryan Blaney has survived 500 tense miles on the Talladega high banks to pick up his ninth career win and second of the year.

Blaney finished .012 seconds ahead of Kevin Harvick, the biggest margin he has enjoyed in his three wins at Talladega. He beat Ryan Newman and Ricky Stenhouse, respectfully, in  2019 and 2020 by 0.007 of a second.

He only led eight laps in a race that featured 70 lead changes during its 188 laps with the field running two and three wide in a tight pack for most of its running.

Harvick’s second-place car was disqualified after the race because some windshield fasteners were found to be loose.  He was moved to last place.  Crew Chief Rodney Childers says some windshield bolts loosened and vibrated out because of buffeting caused by the close running.

The win locks Blaney into the semifinal field of eight drivers who will compete for the final four spots in the last race shootout of the season. The field of 12 will be cut to eight at next weekend’s race on the Charlotte “Roval,” a road race course that uses part of the tri-oval track and a road course on the track’s interior.

(NASCAR—IOWA)—Missouri NASCAR fans have another Cup race within driving distance.  Iowa Speedway has been added to the schedule next year. The track has featured IndyCar races for the past several years.  It’s a .875 track designed by former NASCAR Cup winner Rusty Wallace, a St. Louis native. The track is at Newton, Iowa, about 30 miles east of Des Moines.

Actually, NASCAR’s  first choice for a new track on its schedule had been Montreal, Canada but that deal never came together, opening the door for Newton. The race is set for next June 16.

Today’s Adlai 

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Last week we introduced you Adlai Stevenson, grandson of as United States Vice President, two-time presidential candidate, and historic UN representative for our country.  And we said we’d ponder some of the things he says before more of the modest number of readers of these columns were born.  His intelligence and his eloquence are, in some cases (perhaps too many) accurate for our times.  Such is the case of these remarks delivered in 1948, seventy-five years ago, in Springfield, Illinois, when he was the governor of the state:

Ours is a sad, disillusioned world.  Too many people on this blood-soaked, battered globe live in constant fear and dread; fear of hunger and want, dread of oppression and slavery.  Poverty, starvation, disease and repression stalk the world, and over us all hangs the mence of war like a gloomy shroud. But everywhere people cling to their hope and their faith in freedom and justice and peace—though fear, anguish, even death are their daily lot.

The remarks were three years after the end of a worldwide war when Europe was still putting its civilization back together after the scourge of Naziism presumably had been wiped out and only two years after Winston Churchill had warned in Fulton, Missouri that a new war, a Cold War, was underway as the Soviet Union expanded its borders.

Japan was a two-time nuclear victim and the idea that other nations would develop an A-bomb cast a frightening shadow on our futures.  The next year, on August 29, 1949, The Soviet Union conducted its first successful test of a bomb—based on the design of our “Fat Man” A-bomb.

In many ways, we still live in the world of 1948 and 1949.  Millions still live in constant fear; millions seek relief from “fear of hunger and want, dread of oppression and slavery.”

Our world has gotten smaller.  No longer are those living with these fears confined to their faraway continents.

And we have people in this country who seek to stoke fear within all of us of THEM, the people the Greatest Generation wanted to help at home and abroad when Stevenson made his speech.

In another speech we’ll refer to at another time, Stevenson spoke of the need for Christian humility.

Christian humility.

Where is it in our country today?

And why isn’t it more in evidence among those who expect us to let them lead us?

 

 

 

Eggheads, Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Yolks!”  

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I recently came into possession of a little book from 1965 called A Stevenson Sampler, 1945 to 1965,  a compilation of quotations from Adlai E. Stevenson II, the former Governor of Illinois who had the misfortune of running twice as the Democratic Party nominee for President against Dwight D. Eisenhower.  When John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960, he made Stevenson the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, where he played a historic public role and a largely unrecognized backroom role in the Cuban Missile Crisis. There are things to be learned from that time.

Stevenson was an unrepentant intellectual, one of several eggheads chosen by Kennedy for key posts in his administration.  When the Cuban Missile Crisis exploded in our headlines, Stevenson was the one who delivered this country’s response in the United Nations to Russia’s installation of guided missiles that could easily reach the United States in Cuba.

Many in my generation felt that we were staring down the deep black barrel of an atomic cannon.  Those days are a couple of generations past and we think it’s time for the young folks to learn about how close we came to a nuclear war, and why it didn’t happen at a time when many of us woke up each day and turned on the radio to see if we had a future.

Stevenson played a major role in keeping the crisis from becoming the war we (as we recall those days) were scared to death would happen.  But his role often is overlooked although it was Stevenson who proposed the ultimate solution.  Peter Kornbluh, writing for Foreign Policy magazine a year ago, says much of the reason for the lack of recognition dates from a Saturday Evening Post article in late 1962 by Stewart Alsop and Charles Bartlett that claimed Kennedy and his associates came up with the solution to the dangerous deadlock. They also claimed that Stevenson was the only one around the strategy table who “preferred political negotiations to the alternative of military action,” as Kornbluh put it.

The article, to use a current phrase, threw Stevenson under the bus when, actually, he was driving it.

A major question for most of the crisis was whether Russia really did have ICBMs in Cuba.

It all became clear on the tenth day when Stevenson, far tougher than he had been credit for being until then, confronted Soviet delegate Valerian Zorin at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council.  It is one of the most dramatic moments in UN history. Here is a long version of that confrontation and a short version of it.  The longer version is good for the background leading up to the event. The shorter one is the denouement only.

Long version of the session and challenge:  (30) Adlai Stevenson and Valerian Zorin on Soviet Missiles in Cuba (1962) – YouTube  (Audio quality varies)

Short version: TWE Remembers: Adlai Stevenson Dresses Down the Soviet Ambassador to the UN (Cuban Missile Crisis, Day Ten) | Council on Foreign Relations (cfr.org)

If you want to follow along, here is a transcript of the confrontation in which Stevenson accused the Soviet Union of being less than honest about its missiles in Cuba:

 I want to say to you, Mr Zorin, that I do not have your talent for obfuscation, for distortion, for confusing language, and for doubletalk. And I must confess to you that I am glad that I do not. But if I understood what you said, you said that my position had changed, that today I was defensive because we did not have the evidence to prove our assertions, that your government had installed long-range missiles in Cuba.

Well, let me say something to you, Mr.  Ambassador: we do have the evidence. We have it, and it is clear and it is incontrovertible. And let me say something else: those weapons must be taken out of Cuba.

Next, let me say to you that, if I understood you, with a trespass on credibility that excels your best, you said that our position had changed since I spoke here the other day because of the pressures of world opinion and the majority of the United Nations. Well, let me say to you, sir, you are wrong again. We have had no pressure from anyone whatsoever. We came in here today to indicate our willingness to discuss Mr U Thant’s proposals, and that is the only change that has taken place.

But let me also say to you, sir, that there has been a change. You, the Soviet Union has sent these weapons to Cuba. You, the Soviet Union has upset the balance of power in the world. You, the Soviet Union has created this new danger, not the United States.

And you ask with a fine show of indignation why the President did not tell Mr Gromyko on last Thursday about our evidence, at the very time that Mr Gromyko was blandly denying to the President that the USSR was placing such weapons on sites in the new world.

Well, I will tell you why: because we were assembling the evidence, and perhaps it would be instructive to the world to see how far a Soviet official would go in perfidy. Perhaps we wanted to know if this country faced another example of nuclear deceit like that one a year ago when in stealth, the Soviet Union broke the nuclear test moratorium…

Finally, the other day Mr. Zorin I remind you that you did not deny the existence of these weapons. Instead, we heard that they had suddenly become defensive weapons. But today again if I heard you correctly, you now say that they do not exist, or that we haven’t proved they exist, with another fine flood of rhetorical scorn.

All right, sir, let me ask you one simple question: Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the USSR has placed and is placing medium and intermediate range missiles and sites in Cuba? Yes or no. Don’t wait for the translation, yes or no?

[Zorin] This is not a court of law, I do not need to provide a yes or no answer…

[Stevenson] You can answer yes or no. You have denied they exist. I want to know if I understood you correctly. I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over, if that’s your decision. And I am also prepared to present the evidence in this room.

And he did. Stevenson’s show and tell exposed the Soviet duplicity to the world.  By then, Kennedy had offered to take obsolete United States nuclear missiles out of Turkey bases in exchange for Russia’s withdrawal of its missiles in Cuba. Most tellings of the story do not mention who originated that strategy.  That was Adlai Stevenson.

The possible nuclear war was averted not by threats of attacks on sites in Cuba and deadly confrontations at sea but by Premier Nickolai Khruschev’s acceptance of the base-swapping plan.

Today we have a Russian leader threatening nuclear war and there are those who are suggesting strong military action against Russia.  Kornbluh suggests the not well-known story of how diplomacy, not military confrontation, disarmed a possible Armageddon in 1962, is forgotten by those dealing with events in Ukraine and threats of atomic conflagration.

Kornbluh wrote last year, “Iit would seem prudent to revisit the story of how and why Kennedy sacrificed both Stevenson and the truth about the resolution of the missile crisis and what lessons that history really holds. Documents and transcripts now accessible to the world from government archives allow us to tell the story more fully and accurately than ever before.”

Today, as a Russian leader threatens the use of nuclear weapons in a war of his own making, we edge close to the events we dodged in 1962—-but we are yet a distance from those tense hours before the Soviet ships turned around. You and I are not privy to secret diplomatic discussions while more threatening words are flung into the air evoking frightening possibilities.

Talking is always better than shooting, as Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy knew.

Some suggest we have no business being involved with Ukraine and the conflict.  Adlai Stevenson, the defender of eggheads that included himself, had an answer for them in a 1954 speech at Harvard:

There was a time, and it was only yesterday, when the United States could and did stand aloof.  In the days of our national youth, Washington warned against “entangling alliances,” John Adams spoke of that “system of neutrality and impartiality” which was to serve us long and well, and Jefferson enumerated among our blessings that we were “kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe.”  But those days are gone forever.”

Unfortunately, almost ninety years after Stevenson’s remarks, far too many reject their reality and want to believe the United States is not separate from the rest of the world and its troubles, challenges, and opportunities.

Adlai E. Stevenson II (1900-1965) was the grandson of Grover Cleveland’s vice-president, and great-grandson of Jesse Fell, the campaign manager for Abraham Lincoln.  I think there will be some days when we offer another comment from A Stevenson Sampler, a collection of excerpts from a man dead for almost sixty years who still has something to say to us.

(Photo credit:  JFK Library)

 

The Sacred Burial Site, and Other Musings 

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I knew a man named Ed Bliss who wrote the news for Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite.  They wrote their commentaries; he oversaw the writing of their newscasts.  We often had Ed conduct newswriting seminars at our national broadcast journalism convention.  One day I asked him,  “When is a person no longer ‘late,’ but is only ‘dead?’’  Ed didn’t know.

When will we no longer refer to “the late” Queen Elizabeth II?  Why don’t we refer to “the late Harry Truman?”

King Tut is dead, not “late.”

A related issue showed up a few days ago in a news story that salvagers plan to start plucking unattached objects from Titanic despite an international agreement that considers the wreckage “a sacred burial site.”

What is a “sacred burial site” and does it become less sacred after a certain number of years?

RMS Titanic Inc., based in Georgia, has the salvage rights to Titanic. It plans an expedition next May to shoot a new film of the deteriorating ship and recover any unattached artifacts despite an agreement among Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and France that the wreckage is considered a sacred burial site off-limits to looters and salvors. There is a United States law supporting that position.

RMST, on the other hand, reached an agreement in 1994 with the owners of Titanic (Liverpool and London Steamship Protection and Indemnity Association to be considered the exclusive salvor-in-possession of Titanic. It has retrieved many items from the sinking and has put them on display in museums such as the one in Branson and in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.  The place is worth seeing.

Video: (12) Titanic Museum VIP Guided Tour in Branson, Missouri – YouTube

The museums are owned by John Joslyn, who led a 1987 expedition down to the Titanic.  The museums hold artifacts recovered after the sinking but not from the wreck of the ship proper.

Other artifacts are housed in other museums in this country, Canada, and the UK.

(Your correspondent has some of the anthracite coal recovered by RMST from the debris field)

RMST says it does not plan to alter the wreckage.  But deterioration of the hull has opened new ways to get remotely operated vehicles inside. Court documents say the company also would “recover free-standing objects inside the wreck.”  The Associated Press reports that includes items in the Marconi (radio) room that aren’t bolted down.

The telegraph that sent out the distress calls that fateful night is a specific target.  RMST wants to pull it out.  A judge has rejected a federal government challenge to that plan saying the historical and cultural significance of that device should not be lost to decay.

There are fears that the creatures and the elements will leave the wreckage nothing more than a huge pile of rust within another twenty years.

Very large.  A couple of months ago the BBC reported on the completion of the most detailed view of the wreck, shaped from more than 700,000 digital photos that create a 3D rendition.  The network superimposed the image(s) on the stadium used for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.

Titanic: First ever full-sized scans reveal wreck as never seen before – BBC News

or: Titanic: Scan reveals world’s most famous wreck – BBC Newsround

The concept of the Titanic site as being a sacred gravesite brings us back to the “late/dead” discussion.

We have heard of only one human remain found at the wreck site in the many dives to the site, a finger bone with part of a wedding ring attached that was concreted to the bottom of a soup tureen.  It was retrieved but was returned to the sea floor on a later dive. It is generally concluded that the passengers’ and crews’ bodies have long ago been consumed by various deep sea organisms.

Some have pointed to shoes on the ocean floor as being remnants of the people who wore them.  But that contention is questionable.

Some argue that the Titanic is a graveyard—-an argument heard at the Arizona memorial at Pearl Harbor and for other lost (and many later found) ships.

But if the bodies have long since disappeared, is it valid to consider such sites as sacred graveyards?

And how long must a body be dead before it can be removed from its burial site, perhaps to be studied by various kinds of scientists?

The mummies of Egypt, mummies found high in the Andes mountains, bodies preserved in peat bogs in northern Europe, skeletons excavated at Williamsburg, Virginia—all of these people clearly are not “late” and society does not demand that they stay buried.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, however, requires that Native American remains that are unearthed or located be transferred to their lineal descendants, for reburial—-the sacred ground philosophy.

And that raises a secondary question.  Is it sacred ground only because it is OUR ancestors, OUR people?

And why shouldn’t the Titanic be explored and artifacts be brought to the surface?  Are we dishonoring the dead by displaying the clothes they were wearing when they died—long after any physical trace of the person who wore those clothes has disappeared?  Or are we instead honoring their memories?

An autoworker in Wichita, Kansas—Joe Combs—was looking for answers when he saw pictures from the titanic debris field of shoes:

Titanic Shoes: Myth & Reality | joeccombs2nd

I think your thoughtful correspondent comes down on Joe’s side—that we honor the victims of the great tragedy—-and those who died less tragically hundreds or thousands of years ago by seeing something tangible about them and in doing that we recognize they were people rather than one of x-number of casualties of a tragedy or citizens of lost civilizations.

This concept is brought home strongly at the Titanic museums when entering visitors are given a card with the name of one of the ship’s passengers on it.  At the end of the trip through the museum, the patron can learn if “they” survived or died in the sinking. It’s a good way to humanize the experience.

As for referring to someone as “the late,” maybe we have the answer.  It comes from Robert Hickey, the director of the Protocol School of Washington. In his 550-page book, Honor & Respect: the Official Guide to Names, Titles, and Forms of Address, he writes:

Use ‘the late’ before a name of someone who is deceased – often recently – when one wants to be respectful. For example, on a wedding program:

—-John Smith, the bride’s uncle, will give away the bride in place of her father the late Thomas Smith.

—-The groom is the son of Mrs. James K. Gifford and the late Stephen R. Gifford

Some style guides say a person can only be ‘the late’ if they have been dead less than a decade. 

That sounds like a reasonable guideline.  Even at that, ten years is a long time to be late.

 

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.

 

 

 

NOTES FROM A QUIET, HOT, HUMID STREET

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This series of observations began a long, long, time ago as “Notes from a Battered Royal,” which were notes sent out to Missourinet affiliate stations about what we were planning and what they had done to help us.

With the coming of the computer, then the internet, and then the requirement that the Missourinet have a blog, it became “Notes From the Front Lines.”  But the author is no longer on the front lines. He lives on a quiet street.  And its getting quieter.  The folks who used to live in the house across the street now are in an assisted care place in Columbia.  One of the houses next to us hasn’t been occupied for more than a  year because the man living there also is in assisted living. Three nuns who lived in a house just across the street and up one driveway have moved out.

It’s been a while since we made some observations that don’t qualify for fully blogness.  Let us proceed.

Saw a letter to the editor in the local paper the other day that said Missouri’s state motto, Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto means “The will of the people is the Supreme Law.”  That’s wrong. And it’s dangerous.  Maybe we’ll go into in more depth later but for now, the correct interpretation is, “The welfare of the people is the Supreme Law.”  For now, just think of how different our freedoms would be if the word “will” actually was the philosophy of our government.  The quote, by the way, is from Marcus Tullius Cicero, who we know by his last name, the author of “On the Law.”

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Is there a more pitiful figure in American politics today than Rudi Giuliani?  Of all the people whose lives and reputations have been destroyed by their association with and defense of Mr. Trump, the wreckage that is Rudi is the most pitiful.

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I have a friend who lives in Tucson, Arizona who comes north for a couple of months every summer to find cooler weather (even 10-15 degrees cooler is significant).  I call her a Sunbird.

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There are certain words that have become so politicized that all of the honor has been crushed out of them.  I recall when words such as “liberal” and “conservative” were not said with a sneer and were not spoken as if they were scarlet letters.

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The latest word that falls into this category is “evangelicals.”  The people I heard described as such while I was growing up—-and the people who had the word on their churches—were perceived as fervent believers in God and Jesus, more fervent than us Disciples, Methodists, Presbyterians and my grandmother’s Baptists.  But then came those who discovered evangelical techniques could be applied to achieving political power, making it a third word that is being abused in “the politics of personal destruction.”

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We were talking recently with some friends about the totally trivial things we remember for decades.  I remarked that I still remembered the Army service number of a high school friend who joined the service shortly after we graduated—RA18541439.

Now there’s a new number that I’d like to remember sixty years later—P01135809.  It has a certain rhythm to it, too.

And to think this person was once known only as 45.

We’ve seen the official portrait of PO-1135809.  We are sure that Fulton County, Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis is soooooooo intimidated.

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This is about the most enthusiastic your correspondent has been for the start of the football season in decades. Maybe it’s because this year, it will bring relief from the near-daily disappointments of baseball.

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Can’t help it.  Everytime I see a major sports team or league sign a deal with a sports-betting company, I start thinking its time to cast Cooperstown plaques for Shoeless Jackson and Pete Rose.

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The Capitol regains its heartbeat for a couple of days soon. The lawmakers will decide whether to override some of Governor Parson’s vetoes.  There’s a lot of money available to pay for the things he differs with the legislature about.

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But having a lot of money now means there’s a cushion for the bad days.

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Or we can forget about the bad days and just blow it all now.

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Or we can enact tax cuts so our tax base is even less able to deal with the eventual downturn.

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Anybody else have deer in the yard that just watch you come home and go in the house without ever getting up?  I think that in our case, they’re just resting while they digest  their latest serving of Hostas from Nancy’s garden a/k/a the deer buffet.

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A longtime friend of mine died a few days ago.  He didn’t want a memorial service.  He was a retired reporter who didn’t want his death reported in the newspaper.  Steve Forsythe, whose byline for United Press International read “A. Stevenson Forsythe” was a helluva reporter. Governor Teasdale blamed us, at least in part, for his failure to win a second term.

We could have thanked him for the compliment but we never did.

 

 

A Record Week; A Weak Record. And Some Speed

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by Bob Priddy, Missourinet contributing editor

(BASEBALL)—Time to play what you’ve been dealt.  Trading deadline has come and gone and so have Cardinals’ and Royals’ players.  Both teams will be playing out the string, seeing who develops, who has possibilities, or showcasing possible trade bait.  Our two teams went different directions last week but they’re really going nowhere for the season.  The Royals won seven in a row and are 7-3 in their last ten.  The Cardinals went 3-7.

(ROYALS)—-About that seven-game winning streak:  It was historic. And there’s a Cardinals angle to it.  It’s another example of how baseball is the playground for the figure filberts of the world.

(There are conflicting versions of who the original figure filbert was. One version refers to Al Munro Elias who The New York Times once said, “He ate, slept, dreamed and breathed baseball averages and odd records.”  He was the founder of the Elias Sports Bureau, often cited for its collection of arcane records.  The other person who is sometimes considered the original statistics nut is Earnest John Lanigan, a sportswriter and baseball historian who pioneered the gathering of statistics about games and players. He wrote the first encyclopedia on the issue.)

Pete Gratoff of the Wichita Eagle has written that the Royals last week became the first team in Major League history to have a winning percentage of less than .300 to win seven games in a row since the 1907 CARDINALS won nine straight, all against the same team—the Boston Doves, that later became the Boston Braves, the Milwaukee Braves and the present Atlanta Braves.  The Cardinals finished that year 55-101-2 and finished last in the eight-team American League.  The Doves fluttered to a record of 50-90-4, good for seventh.

The Royals now are 36-77, ahead of the A’s who are 32-80.

Who’s hot for the Royals?  Bobby Witt Jr., started this week hiting .336 since the start of July (he was at .244 through June). He has 20 homers and 32 steals, becoming the first player in baseball history to go 20/30 in his first two seasons in the Majors. “It’s just me playing the game,” he says.

Who’s not hot for the Royals?  Zack Greinke, who fell to 1-12 last week, He has given up 23 homeruns, 13 in the last ten starts. He has averaged five innings in his 22 starts. His most recent win was May 2.

(CARDINALS)—You see it happen in all kinds of situations—businesses, churches, sports—

Someone who has become an institution leaves the scene.  The person who comes in next is often unfairly compared to his or her predecessor. Sometimes that person tries to hard to BE that predecessor.  And they don’t stay long.

Wilson Contreras admits he was trying to hard at the start of the season.  Cardinals’ fans, many of them, were quick to judge him based on Yadiair Molina.  He hit .158 in May, .221 in June, and then he says he realized the Cardinals signed him to be himself.  And during the month of July he hit .429. Through the first few days of August he was hitting .313 and his season averages are close to his career averages.

Down on the farm, the ‘Birds’ top prospect, Mason Wynn, had to leave a game this past weekend with a minor glute strain. He’s hitting .284 at Memphis with 17 homers and 59 RBIs.  He’s 17-19 in stolen bases.

Luken Baker is lighting up opposing pitchers at Memphis. He leads the minor leagues with 37 home runs.  He hit .263 during a cup of coffee with the big team earlier this year.  The problem is that he’s a first baseman and the Cardinals are well-positioned (so to speak) there. And the Cardinals have a full arsenal of designated hitters.

(FOOTBALL)—This might be one of those years when there’s less talk about the overlapping seasons of baseball and football and more about how great it will be when the football season starts.  The Chiefs and the Tigers (and other college teams) are in workouts now. High Schools start soon.  Here’s hoping your team takes your mind off of baseball for a while.

ZOOM:

(INDYCAR)—This is turning out to be Kyle Kirkwood’s breakout year.  Kirkwood picked up his second IndyCar win of the year, the second of his career, by holding off Scott McLaughlin on the 2.1-mile street course in downtown Nashville.

He beat pole-sitter McLaughlin to the line by about eight-tenths of a second after a late-race restart with a little more than three laps left. The race had been red-flagged after a three-car crash that left no room for racing through one of the turns. Kirkwood got a good jump on the restart and pulled away to a 1.6-second lead after the first lap. But McLaughlin and series points leader Alex Palou rallied to cut the lead in half with one lap left.

McLaughlin was disappointed to finish second in the race for the second year in a row.

Kirkwood started eighth but team strategy early in the race moved him into contention and eventually put him in front for 34 of the race’s 80 laps.

Palou’s third-place finish upped his points lead over Josef Newgarden, who finished fourth, to 84 points.  Only four races with 216 possible points remain in the IndyCar season.  Next up is a return to the road course at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway next Saturday afternoon.

(NASCAR)—Chris Buescher, who broke a long winless streak at Richmond has made it two in a row, taking the rain-delayed race at Michigan International Speedway.  His wins and strong finishes by teammate and part-owner Brad Keselowski have signalled a return to prominence of the former Roush Racing, now Roush-Fenway-Keselowski racing. Keselowski finished fourth.

The closing laps turned into a fierce chase of Buscher by Martin Truex Jr., for the last ten laps. Truex closed with five laps left but couldn’t find a way around Buescher who took away Truex’s driving line down the stretch.

(Formula 1)—F1 is on break. It takes off most of August each year.

(Photo credit: Kirkwood at Indianapolis: Rick Gevers)

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.

A New County—part II, A New Book

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Before hostilities in pre-Civil War Missouri turned deadly with the Camp Jackson incident in St. Louis, Governor Claiborne Jackson and his associates were gathering supplies they would need to repel an “invasion” of Missouri by federal troops if one happened.  A large quantity of gun powder was procured in St. Louis and taken to Jefferson City by two companies of the Missouri Volunteer Militia, one of which was Kelly’s.  From Jefferson City, some 12,000 kegs of powder that had been stored at the fairgrounds about a mile from town were distributed throughout much of the state to be hidden away until needed by Jackson’s forces. Kelly and his unit took about half of the supply to Cooper, Saline and other nearby counties where they were carefully hidden.  The stored powder was a factor in the Confederate victory in the Battle of Lexington.  One of those involved was Michael K. McGrath.

The Irish unit fought at Boonville, Carthage and Wilson’s Creek, where Kelly was wounded in the right hand, (as seen in his picture) and in the Confederate capture of Lexington. The unit also was at the Battle of Pea Ridge, in Arkansas then in 1862, he became part of the regular Confederate army that fought in Mississippi and in the Atlanta campaign against Sherman and his Union troops.

St. Louis researcher Doug Harding indicates that McGrath would have been one of the 23 survivors out of the original 125 members of Kelly’s unit. Kelly surrendered in Louisiana in 1865 and took the oath of allegiance to the Union and was paroled in Shreveport.

It is not clear if McGrath also took the oath there or at some other time and place.  But signing it allowed him to take a bar examination and become a lawyer, paving the way for him to return to public office.

Kelly, his health broken by the war, died in 1870 and is buried in the McGrath family plot in St.  Louis’ Calvary Cemetery.

(Official Manual of the State of Missouri, 1913-14)

McGrath in 1866 became a deputy clerk for the United States district and circuit courts. In 1868 he was elected to the clerkship of the St. Louis City Council.  Two years later he was elected clerk of the criminal court and in 1874 he was elected to the first of his four terms as Secretary of State (his first term under the 1865 Constitution was for only two years; the 1875 constitution established the term at four years.

He decided the State of Missouri government had grown large enough to require some kind of a directory.  He produced the first one in 1878.

(Missouri State Archives)

McGrath wrote in the two-page introduction, “It is a truth that must be admitted, that many outside and some even in it, know but little of the vast resources or of its immense wealth and unexampled prosperity, and when told scarcely believe it, so great is the extent and magnitude thereof…No location in the republic represents a more encouraging field for the honest laborer or the aspiring citizen. The contentions of the war have long since disappeared. Liberalism and tolerance in politics and religion are noted characteristics of her people. They are generous, hospitable and enterprising. Among them poverty and humble birth present no barrier to the attainment of wealth, distinction and honor.

“True merit is the criterion of success, and is fostered by hearty encouragement and profitable recognition. Occupying, as she does already, a front rank among the States of the Union, it is easy to forecast her future as one of glory and renown!”

This first manual was 72 pages long.

His term was the longest in Missouri records until James C. Kirkpatrick served five four-year terms.

He was elected to the Missouri Senate to fill a vacancy and served in the Senate during the 1889 session.

McGrath was never far from the public trough, it appears.  The Columbia Daily Tribune observed upon McGrath’s death that “He has been inspector and attorney in the office of the building commissioner, assistant state examiner of building and loan associations…” He also had a brief and unsuccessful stint as a publisher of a Sedalia newspaper. He was nominated in 1909 to be St. Louis City Register of Deeds and was nominated for another city job in 1911 but lost both times.

In 1912, McGrath was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives. He introduced some bills, including the one to chance St. Louis County to Grant County, but failing health forced  him to go home where heart trouble and bronchitis became too much to overcome and he died on January 28, 1913 at his home in St. Louis.

A resolution of mourning passed by the House of Representatives said, “The House lost a useful, honest, and courageous member, the State a valued and Patriotic citizen, and society an influential and sympathetic member.”

The St. Louis Times wrote, “It is much to say that a man can spend all his mature thought in a lifetime covering seventy-nine years upon the chances and changes of politics and go to his grave ithout surrendering the belief that reform in politics is possible, and that it is worth while to keep on fighting.  Such was the experience of Michael McGrath, of whom men ar easing toda, ‘Yes, he was a politician—but he was square.”