Category Archives: history

Fly Missouri

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Our son flies for Southwest Airlines.  Living the Dream.

Always wanted to be a pilot.  Went through the program at Warrensburg before it was the University of Central Missouri.  Went through the Ramen Noodle days as a flight instructor to pile up the hours that let him fly cargo planes (I told him he should always fly cargo because a box never hijacked a plane) until he racked up the hours to fly people.  Flew regionally then became a First Officer for Southwest five years ago or so.

Great company to work for.  Loves it.

Pretty handsome forehead, don’t you think? A few months ago Rob got to fly a special plane.   Missouri One.

Back in 2015, Southwest decided to honor thirty years of service in Missouri with a special 737-700.

It’s been six years since Southwest unveiled Missouri One.  Don’t know why we haven’t heard about it until recently but it sure is a beauty.  It was decorated at Aviation Technology Services in Kansas City, the first city in Missouri that Southwest started serving.

Southwest went into business in June of 1971. Flights involving Kansas City began on February 18, 1982 and St. Louis about three years later. Southwest has done so well at St. Louis that everything comes out of the East Terminal and Lambert Airport has become the line’s international gateway.

At the time Missouri One took to the air, Southwest had nine other state-themed planes. And now Rob, who lives about a half-hour from Denver International Airport, has gotten to fly his home state’s plane. It wasn’t intentional.  Crews go to the airport and get aboard whatever plane is headed to the city to which the crew is scheduled to fly.  Missouri One just happened to be THE plane that day.

We can’t write perceptive and always-correct political observations, you know.  Every now and then we have to bust a button about something.

How did Southwest get the state seal and all that other stuff on that plane?

Take a look at this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLKFVIbVEfk

Missouri hasn’t declared an official Missouri Bicentennial Airplane but if it did, this one would have to merit serious consideration.

Someday, Southwest will have to retire Missouri One.  Maybe the company would donate it to be with TWA Constellation, DC-3, Lockheed 1011, and other planes at the Airline History Museum at the Charles B. Wheeler Airport in Kansas City.  Might not be too soon to suggest it.

(photo credits: Rob Priddy, Southwest Airlines, worldairlinenews.com, Airline History Museum, Kansas City)

 

The Future of Water (update)

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We seldom update one of these posts, and even less often do we do it immediately.  Had we posted on this topic today instead of yesterday we would have changed some information. But here’s an important update that underlines the point we made.

The Corps of Engineers announced yesterday that it was implementing drought conservation measures on the Missouri River.  June runoff from rain (very little) and snowmelt (much reduced) was just 52% of the average amount. The Corps has updated its forecast for upper basin runoff to finally be 60% of average.

It says this will be the tenth driest year in the upper basin since 1898.  Water storage in upstream reservoirs is expected to decline further.  That means less water coming downstream for all of the purposes defined by federal river law.

This doesn’t mean we who live in cities that rely on the river for our water will have to stop watering lawns, wash dishes once a week and clothes once a month and ourselves only on Saturday nights using the same water for everybody in the family (as many of our pioneer ancestors did).  But it adds further weight to yesterday’s discussion.

There isn’t “water, water everywhere” in more and more places.

The Future of Water

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A good part of Missouri has gotten an excessive drenching in the past few days.  But we—and perhaps you—have friends to the west who are being baked well-done by record heat and who are watching forests burn and water reservoir levels drop and disappear.

We might think we are glad we don’t have their problems—although our monsoon week is hardly without problems of its own.

For several years, Nancy and I enjoyed going to the Four Corners area for a week each fall to do archaeological work on or near the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation, adjacent to Mesa Verde National Park. We first recorded rock art from the days of the Anasazi (a Pueblo word meaning “ancient enemies”—we don’t know what those people who lived in the area until the 1200s called themselves because they left no written language). Although popular telling of their story has it that they just suddenly disappeared 750 years ago or so, archaeologists and anthropologists think they know where their descendants are, and they have developed some theories on why they fled the Four Corners area.

It’s thought they are the ancestors of the present Hopi people. One of the factors—the final straw—leading to their departure from the Four Corners area is believed to have been a 45-year drought that left them without the food and other resources needed to survive.

All of this has been brought to mind by recent reports that Lake Mead, which is behind Hoover Dam, has declined to its lowest level ever because of a drought that is now in its 22nd year. The condition is critical for 25-million people including the cities of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Diego, Phoenix, and Tucson.  The lake has hit a record low, down 140 feet since 2000, creating the bathtub ring you can see in recent pictures. One-hundred-forty feet is about the height of the Statue of Liberty from base to torch tip.

Some states already have imposed water rationing and they expect to tighten restrictions as conditions worsen. Agriculture is in dire straits. Adding to the awful conditions is the rise in major fires in forests that haven’t seen protective rain for years.

It’s hard to understand that green and verdant Missouri faces some water shortages of our own. Today.  Right now.  And stewardship of our water will become more critical as our population increases, as agriculture is under increased pressure to produce more and more food in an increasingly populous world, and as our economy grows.

The Department of Natural Resources 2020 update to its Missouri Water Resources Plan warns, “Although Missouri is fortunate to have rich water resources, localized shortages do exist because of the distance from adequate supplies, insufficient infrastructure or storage, water quality constraints, and other limiting factors. In many areas, surface water supplies are subject to seasonal fluctuations; supplies are frequently at their lowest when demand is the highest.”

Farther into the study we are told, “On average, the 6.1 million people and numerous businesses in Missouri consume 3.2 billion gallons of water each day. Of that demand, 78 percent is supplied by groundwater, while the remaining 22 percent is supplied by surface water.”  Three fourths of our water comes from under our feet.

We often heard testimony in legislative committee hearings on the dangers of agricultural runoff or industrial pollution going into our streams and rivers, our surface waters. A major concern, yes.  But that’s only one-fifth of the water we use or think we need to use.

Studies indicate our population will rise to about seven-and-a-half million people by 2060, well within the lifetimes of some who read these entries—them or their children—putting more pressure on water, a finite resource.  The report suggests a number of policies and practices that need to be started now in anticipation of that growth.

We need to do more than read about them. Our generation has to start something that later generations can continue to meet Missouri’s water needs.

The greatest pressure on our water supply is agricultural irrigation—65% of our water withdrawals go to farming. Major water systems (that provide us with water to drink, to bathe in, to do our dishes, and flush our toilets) are another 25%.

The study says the agricultural counties of Butler, Dunklin, New Madrid, Pemiscot, and Stoddard Counties—all in the southeast corner of the state—are projected to have the greatest growth in demand in the next four decades. High demand also is expected as our metropolitan areas become more metropolitan.

DNR says the state “generally has plentiful water sources.”  Now, it does. But the report also says, “many supply-related challenges exist.”

Much of the groundwater originating from bedrock aquifers in northern and west-central Missouri is highly mineralized and unsuitable for most uses. In northwestern Missouri, precipitation is generally the lowest in the state, and the lack of surface water availability during prolonged droughts can result in water shortages. Timing is also important in determining the availability of water, since peak demands often coincide with the driest times of the year and multiyear droughts can lower aquifers and drain reservoirs that typically provide ample supply. Even when available, the quality of the water may not be suitable for all intended uses without treatment.

We already are facing a critical problem in dealing with our water supplies. The DNR report says, “More than half of the state’s community public water systems became active prior to 1960, meaning that without repair or replacement original water pipes, mains, and equipment are nearing or exceeding their average expected lifespan…Many small drinking water utilities have indicated that they lack the funding not only to proactively manage infrastructure needs, but also to meet current water quality standards and adequately address water losses.”

At the other end of the process (to coin a phrase): “Similar to drinking water infrastructure in Missouri, a significant portion of wastewater infrastructure may be approaching the end of its expected life.”

Need an immediate reminder of how precious Missouri’s water supply is and how carefully we must use it and prepare for its future use is no farther away than the greatest of our rivers?

This past April 7, the Missouri River Basin Water Management Division for the Corps of Engineers noted the snowfall in the upper basin had been poor.  “We expect upper basin runoff to be below average,” said Division Chief John Remus. The Corps thinks the snowmelt runoff into upstream reservoirs to be 83% of the annual average this year.

Water is going to become more precious.  You and I might not notice it.  But our grandchildren could.  We aren’t going to turn into the Southwest by the end of the week.  But we have to understand that the way we use water today can’t be the way our next generations will use it.  And we need to prepare for those times.

Unlike the ancient pueblo peoples of the Colorado plateau in the 12th and 13th Centuries, we won’t have anyplace to go when the great drought hits us.

If you want to read the entire 2020 Missouri Water Resources Plan you can find it at:

https://dnr.mo.gov/mowaterplan/docs/2020-mo-water-resources-plan-highlights.pdf

The period

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Independence Day is upon us.  July 4th. We’re going to spend the whole long weekend celebrating July 4th. Not many people will thinking of “Independence Day,” though.

We think they should, especially at this time in our national history.

It is a day, or a weekend, to examine the most quoted—and greatly misunderstood—section of the Declaration of Independence. We misunderstand it because someone, apparently in the 1820s, inserted a period in a crucial sentence

Have you read the Declaration? All of it?   Have you read it SLOWLY enough to understand what it is about?  Even if you have read it, have you THOUGHT about it?

From numerous platforms in numerous towns someone will perform a public reading of the Declaration of Independence.  It will be more performance than reading, more ceremonial than meaningful.

Princeton Professor Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality is a line-by-line exploration of what the document means and how carefully-worded it was by its creators.  She argues that while Thomas Jefferson is considered the hero-author of the Declaration, he was only one of dozens who molded it into the living document it should be today—rather than the misunderstood symbol it is in the minds of many people.

She points to the best-known (and, she maintains, misunderstood) sentence. The National Archives, which has the original engrossed document, transcribes it this way on its webpage:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Allen argues that the insertion of a period after “pursuit of Happiness” is wrong and has led generations of readers to misunderstand the intent the authors intended.

How does she know the period doesn’t belong? “Jefferson’s first draft did not have this period, nor did any of the copies that he and Adams produced…In every draft that Jefferson copied out and in the draft that Adams copied out, each of the five truths is separated equally from the others with the same punctuation mark. The manuscript in the ‘corrected’ journal, as Congress’s official record of its work was called, does not have the period. Nor does the Dunlap broadside, the first printed text of the Declaration…Those who etched these phrases on the Jefferson monument also did so without a period. All agree: this well-formed syllogism is a single sentence.”

She asserts the period makes the Declaration a celebration of individual rights. But she contends the drafters intended the phrase “to lead us directly, and without interruption, in this single sentence through ‘consent of the Governed,’ and to the phrase ‘most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.’  The sentence laying out the self-evident truths leads us from the individual to the community—from our separate and equal rights to what we can achieve only together.”

Or, as she puts it earlier in her book, “All people have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…Properly constituted government is necessary to their securing these rights (and) all people have a right to a properly constituted government.”

Harvard Public Policy Professor Robert D. Putnam addresses that question in his new book, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and how WE Can Do It Again.  He looks back to the assessment of our still-young country by Alexis deToqueville who studied democracy in America in the 1830s and, as Putnam puts it, “Rightly noted, in order for the American experiment to succeed, personal liberty must be fiercely protected, but also carefully balanced with a commitment to the common good. Individuals’ freedom to pursue their own interests holds great promise, but relentlessly exercising that freedom at the expense of others has the power to unravel the very foundations of the society that guarantees it.”

His study looks at times when this country “experienced a storm of unbridled individualism in our culture, our communities, our politics, and our economics, and it produced then, as it has today, a national situation that few Americans found appealing.”

But, he says, “We successfully weathered that storm once, and we can do it again.”

Putnam argues that The Gilded Age of the late 19th Century, a time when individual liberties were placed above the common good, gave way to the Progressive Era of the early to mid-20th Century in which the common miseries and challenges of The Great Depression, World War II, and the Civil Rights movement made us a nation seeking a mutual good, a nation in which “we” confronted and reconciled individual liberties and universal freedoms.. But since then we have retreated to an “I” period, when the idea of achieving liberty as a community has given way to another period of “unbridled individualism in our culture, our communities, our politics and our economics.”

On this Independence Day weekend, let’s read the Declaration—slowly—and without that period and understand that ALL of us have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  But with rights come responsibilities.  And it is the responsibility of ALL of us to make sure that “a properly constituted government” is in place to secure those rights.

—rights that belong to all of US.

As Professor Allen notes, “If we abandon equality, we lose the single bond that makes us a community, that makes us a people with the capacity to be free collectively and individually in the first place.”

—and lessens the chances for all of us to enjoy our shared desires for  life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

 

To a friend thinking of public office;

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It’s been a while since we’ve talked about this topic with you.  Or perhaps we never have. This note is addressed to no one in particular in this season of domino-candidacies triggered by the pending retirement of Senator Roy Blunt.

You’ve thought about running for public office someday.  Your business has been successful enough that you can step away from the fulltime obligations. You are motivated to help other people.  You see problems that you think you can help solve.  You’ve been discussed by people in the political party with which you seem to be identified.

Your member of Congress has decided not to seek re-election next year, perhaps to run for Blunt’s seat in the U.S. Senate. Perhaps your state representative or state senator has decided to run for Congress. This is the perfect time to become a member of the U. S. House of Representatives and you have the name recognition and would have party identification on your side to compete, too.  And once you’re in the House, there might be doors to greater opportunities.

If you don’t go now, you’ll have to challenge the new incumbent or wait several years for that person to step aside.

You will be courted, cajoled, urged, and begged to get into a race.  But it won’t be because of what you might bring to the House; it’s because you’re well-known, can attract campaign donations, can pass the litmus test(s) of the party.  Your ideas are secondary.

Be wary of becoming a figurehead, and an empty one, because your party thinks your name is all it needs in its search for power.  Consider if the party’s quest for power is more important than your desire for service.  If service is secondary, have the integrity to say, “No.”

And what are your ideas?  Are they yours or are they ideas—-and you are intelligent enough to know the ones that are flawed and sometimes dishonest ideas—advocated by a figure who seems to have—or claims to have—life or death power over potential candidates?

Do you really know the issues you will face or are you just willing to go with the party flow?

Frankly, we don’t need people like you if that’s the kind of candidate and Congress-person you will be.

What we need in these troubled times is candidates who know themselves, who trust themselves, and who have the courage to BE themselves in working through the problems of our state and nation.  Cookie-cutter candidates incapable of seeing beyond party orthodoxy, dictates, and dogma cannot be servants to the public—the general public rather than the narrower public that you hope will cast the most votes for you.

Are you ready to think your own thoughts? Have you studied issues from a variety of viewpoints so you understand that answers to major problems are seldom simple because problems affect people and people come in more varieties than you can count?  Will you have backbone enough to reject the narrow, the prejudicial, the inhumane solutions you will be asked by party and well-oiled interests to support.

Remember you are not alone if you undertake this candidacy.  Remember your family because your family comes with you, spiritually if not in person.  Remember that anything you stand for, anything you say, anything you do can bring questions to your school-age children from classmates, or comments to your spouse from some stranger standing in line at a check-out counter.

What makes you think you can go from private citizen to Congress is one big leap?  Or from private citizen to the state legislature in one smaller leap?

What do you know about representing large numbers of people, each person with his or her own morals, ethics, social and economic needs, hopes, dreams, and fears?  What do you know about high-stakes discussions with others that result in policies you and all of those other people will have to follow?  How can you interact with them, take their pulse, act in their best interests if you’ve never held a public position of any kind?

I’m not saying, ‘Stay out of it.”  But I am saying, “Know what your responsibilities will be and know to whom you REALLY are responsible and respect them.  There will be dozens, maybe hundreds of people between you and your constituents if you are elected.  How prepared are you to deal with those in-between people while keeping in mind the people at home?”

What do you really know about the Constitution?  If you think reading it and doing what it says is the answer to the nation’s problems, you are woefully ignorant.  If you think the Bill of Rights is absolute, you don’t know your own rights.

Study. Study. Study.  Read and talk to people outside your partisan circle.  You are allowed to agree with them.  Not on everything, but it’s not a sin (despite the apparent political climate) to understand the other side and see that sometimes it has a better ideas.

Know history.  Not just the cleansed history this or that segment finds most beneficial to itself.  Understand that our history has warts.  Recognize them but do not tolerate them no matter how they are disguised. Think of George Santayana’s comment, “We respect the past; it was all that was humanly possible.” But that past might not be “humanly possible” or “humanly human” today. You will not erase the past by correcting its flaws that remain with us. Your public service must be focused on a future that abandons those flaws.

Congress?   The Missouri General Assembly?  The U. S. Senate?  Give serious thought to whether it’s right for you, your neighbors, and your family to go from zero to 100 mph all at once.

Maybe at your age you don’t think you can afford to wait. But there is virtue in patience and in learning.  There is a reason many of those in the offices being dangled in front of you started as members of a city council, a school board, a county commission.  They learned whether they liked to campaign.  They learned how to relate to constituents not just during the campaign but later while service those constituents in elective office.  They learned how to support and oppose ideas on their merits, how to argue with an opponent today who they need as an ally tomorrow, how to support something that is for a greater good rather than carry out the wishes of their particular constituency.  They felt the pressures of those who expected favorable votes, sometimes on unfavorable issues. They learned that personal community visibility has nothing to do with the gritty business of establishing broad community policy.

For some, the city council is satisfaction enough. For others, it just whets their desire to greater service—because they have learned how a system can work and how to make it work well.

If you have a young family, think of local office before you think of something higher.  You’ll learn politics and public service and you’ll spend you nights with your family in your own home. As you grow in understanding how things work, your family will grow in understanding them too, and will grow in understanding how your public service affects their daily lives.

Jump into the shark tank if you wish. Just don’t kid yourself or let others flatter you into thinking the jump is easy or can be painless.

Perhaps you might refresh your memory with the first eight verses of the Bible’s book of Ecclesiastes, one of the Old Testament’s “Wisdom Books,” which it says, in part:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven… 6 a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; 7 a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak…

Be wise in making your decision.  Better yet, should you win, be wise in your actions—

—-for wisdom, now so profoundly lacking in our national dialogue, is critical to our future.

 

Racing’s Happy Warrior (updated)

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(We’ve decided to add a sports page to bobpriddy.net.  With some re-construction going on with the Missourinet web page and its sports section, we’ve decided to move our weekly racing summary reports to this page—-and expand it with sometimes keenly insightful observations about other sports and their participants)

We watched something remarkable happen Sunday at the Indianapolis Speedway—not from our usual perch on the back porch of the media center but from the forced comfort of our living room recliner—put there by recent surgery and by limits on spectators and reporters because of COVID.
There is a Missouri connection with Helio Castroneves, the man we call “racing’s happy warrior,” and his career at the Speedway that now includes him as the fourth man to win the 500 four times.  We’ll get to that in due course.

The phrase has been used in politics from time to time. When young Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated New York Governor Al Smith for the presidency in 1924, he called Smith “the Happy Warrior of the political battlefield.”  The same title was applied to Senator Hubert Humphrey during his time on the national Democratic tickets, and more recently it was affixed to Joseph Biden by Barack Obama in his presidential victory speech.

But there is no one in all of sports, at least today, to whom that title applies more fittingly than Helio Castroneves, and watching him celebrate his long-sought fourth victory at Indianapolis Sunday makes it clear why. 

Castroneves, fierce behind the helmet’s face shield, is animated and joyous when the hat comes off and the most instant issues of car and contest are set aside. Any INDYCAR fan has seen it many times.

What he did Sunday, however, is only part of the incredible story of the race.

Let’s begin with this:

Castroneves’ fellow Brazilian, Tony Kanaan, won the 500 in 2013 at the record speed of 187.433 mph.  Castroneves broke that record by more than three miles an hour.  190.690.

The first sixteen cars averaged more than 190 miles an hour. The slowest car to finish the full 200 laps, driven by2014 winner Ryan Hunter-Reay, still was two miles an hour faster than Kanaan’s record. RHR finished 22nd.  Will Power, the 2018 winner, finished 30th, three laps down, and was still faster than Kanaan’s record.

Let me put some personal context into this discussion.

When I was but a sprout, my parents and I went to the Speedway for the first time to watch the first day of qualifications for the 1954 race.  From our seats in the low wooden bleachers between turns one and two we watched Jack McGrath in his yellow Hinkle Special run the first officials laps at the Speedway at more than 140 miles an hour.

Sunday afternoon, I watched SIXTEEN DRIVERS run the full 200 laps and average more than 50 mph more than Jack McGrath ran on my first day at the track.

And how about this:  Castroneves was only 2.6 seconds per lap away from averaging 200.

Here’s another thing about this guy:  He has finished second three times by .2011 of a second, .2290 of a second, and .0600 of a second.  He has come within a combined total of less than one-half second of winning SEVEN of these races.

There a a few other remarkable things about what might have been (individual perceptions using individual standards will differ) the greatest 500 ever run.  This race produced the most remarkable finish in race history, beyond what we outlined earlier.

Al Unser Jr.’s .0423 of a second victory margin over Scott Goodyear in 1982 remains the closest finish; the  Castroneves-Palou finish ranks eighth at .4928 of a second.

BUT—-Until May 30, 2021, the closed first-to-third finish had been in 2006, when Sam Hornish Jr., beat Marco Andretti by .0635 of a second (now the third closest finish) and finished 1.0187 seconds ahead of Michael Andretti.  This year, the top FOUR drivers finished within 0.9409 of each other (Castroneves and Palou, then 2019 winner Simon Pagenaud, and Pato O’Ward.

A couple of the Kanaan race records survived the 2021 race.  His race had 68 lead changes involving 14 drivers.  The 2021 race had 35 lead changes involving 13 drivers.

The Missouri connection to his story:

Helio (the “h” is silent) was born Hélio Alves de Castro Neves a little more than 46 years ago.  His first taste of big-time open-wheel racing in the USA came in 1998 when he ran for Tony Bettenhausen Jr., with a best finish of second at Milwaukee. But it was when he drove for St. Louis trucking entrepreneur Carl Hogan in 1999,  that he began to arrive. He started third and finished second at Gateway International (now World Wide Technology International) just across the river from St. Louis, leading 38 laps—more than he had led in his entire season with Bettenhausen, in this car, a Mercedes-powered Lola owned by Hogan.

The next weekend, he won his first pole at Milwaukee. There are those who thought he should have won at least three times that year for Hogan but mechanical issues short-circuited those hopes. In those days, Helio had not yet combined the last two parts of his name into one.

He became Castroneves in 2000 when, after gaining some prominence, some reports in the United States referred to him either as “Castro,” or “Neves” and he wanted them to use his whole name.

Hogan folded his team for financial reasons at the end of the year but the young driver by then shown the kind of potential a man named Roger Penske liked to see.

He drove for Penske in 2000, picked up his first three wins, and in 2001 as a rookie at the Indianapolis 500, got the first of his now-four 500s.

In 2003, the last year Gateway hosted an INDYCAR race until the series returned in 2017, Castroneves led a 1-2-3 Brazilian podium sweep with Tony Kanaan and Gil de Ferran finishing behind him.

He lost his fulltime ride with Penske a few years ago when Penske decided to bring in some younger talent. He drove for Penske’s sports car team until it was disbanded last year after winning the IMSA Sports car championship. He was picked up by Wayne Taylor Racing for the Daytona 24-hour sports car endurance race.  He won it. But Taylor doesn’t run INDYCAR.

So IMSA competitor, Meyer-Shank Racing, which does run at Indianapolis, signed him.  Many people doubted an aging Castroneves driving for a small team such as Meyer-Shank, could contend for a win.  But Helio was fast throughout practices and was among the nine fastest qualifiers, an indication that he couldn’t be dismissed lightly.  He ran near the top all day, led a few laps, and didn’t go away.  And when crunch time came, he knew he could pass Alex Palou on the outside going into the first turn on the next-to-last lap and have his chance for that cherished fourth win.  He won by a half-second.

So that’s our connection to this remarkably talented, persistent, happy, warrior.  And anybody who has watched him climb the fence after each of his four wins at Indianapolis and especially who watched his unrestrained joy on Sunday has no doubts that he deserves the designation.

(photo credits: Bob Priddy, various times and places, and Meyer-Shank Racing Facebook)

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We would be remiss if we didn’t report that NASCAR ran its longest race of the year, 600 miles at Charlotte, its Memorial Weekend tradition, Sunday night.  Kyle Larson started first and finished first. He led 327 of the 400 laps. He averaged 151 miles an hour and he won by eleven seconds.

And that’s about all we can say about that race.

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Michael Collins

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He was the first person who could see where every human in the universe was.

Michael Collins was the Command Module Pilot on the Apollo XI mission that put the first two men on the moon.  For twenty-one hours he was alone in the CMP, Columbia, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Armstrong “were doing their small stepping and giant leaping” on the Moon, as he put it a year later in Jefferson City.  He had watched them leave in the Eagle landing module headed for the surface.  He could look out a window and see the Earth, the only other place with humans.

No man had ever been in such a lonely position as he was in July, 1969. For part of those 21 hours, he was behind the Moon, completely alone with no communications either with earth or with the two men on the surface.

Michael Collins died yesterday. He was 90.  Only one man remains alive who shared that experience: Ken Mattingly, now 85, who was the Command Module Pilot on Apollo 16.

Only four of the moonwalkers are still with us: Buzz Aldrin, 91; Dave Scott, 88; and Charlie Duke and Harrison Schmidt, both 85.  Six men who flew to the Moon but did not land are still among us—Mattingly, Tom Stafford, 90; Fred Haise, 87; and all three members of the Apollo 8 crew—Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, both 93, and Bill Anders, who is 87.

We remember Michael Collins for the day we sat about twenty feet from him (and the other two astronauts) at the Capitol on the first anniversary of the Moon landing.  NASA had put the Columbia capsule on a big truck and sent it on a tour of state capitols.  It happened to be in Jefferson City that day.  And the radio station I as working for decided to broadcast the events at the capitol.

One of my most cherished possessions is a photograph showing me at the station table with the three astronauts in the foreground. As I recall it, Governor Hearnes’ press secretary, Jerry Bryan, sent the picture to NASA and the three guys signed it.

All three had remarks that day but I thought Collins’ comments were the most meaningful—and prophetic.

“I was born in 1930 and with luck I expect to see out the end of this century.  And when I am thinking about it in 1999, I expect to remember the 1970s as a time when oddly enough, man was hesitant about pushing his frontiers back. And in 1999 we just simply won’t be able to understand that fact because by then it will have become clearly apparent that man does in fact have the capability to step out and explore his solar system and that is something we definitely should do.”

When Collins made those remarks, Apollo XII already had successfully landed on the moon the previous November. But Apollo XIII had become the program’s most famous failure in April.  The Apollo program was in suspension while the investigation of that flight went on and there would not be another Moon landing until January of ’71, with Apollo XIV.

More ominous, however, had been the announcement in January of 1970 that the twentieth mission had been cancelled. There already had been a decline in public interest in the program, despite the drama of XIII, by the time Michael Collins spoke in Jefferson City.  “Been there, done that,” in the short attention span public mind.

About two months after the astronauts were in Jefferson City, NASA cancelled flights 15-19 and then restructured the crews for what would become the last three flights to the Moon—numbers 15-17.

Those events give a special context to what Collins said on that hot July day at the capitol.

None of the Apollo XI crew ever flew in space again.  NASA wanted Collins to stay in the program but he had decided Apollo XI would be his second, and last, trip to space (he and John Young had flown Gemini 10, practicing maneuvers necessary for a Moon landing). But he left a few months later, with no regrets. He wrote in his first book, Carrying the Fire, “I know that I would be a liar or a fool if I said that I have the best of the three Apollo 11 seats, but I can say with truth and equanimity that I am perfectly satisfied with the one I have. This venture has been structured for three men, and I consider my third to be as necessary as either of the other two.”

He was the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs for a while but found “long hours…flying a great mahogany desk” was not a fit.  About a year later he became the third director of the National Air and Space Museum. He set a goal of having a building on the National Mall by the time of the national bicentennial, 1976.  The ribbon was cut by President Ford for the building on July 1, 1976.  A museum statement issued upon his death said, “That building and the museum it houses stand as a lasting legacy” to “an astronaut and statesman.”

His support for pushing the frontiers back, as he put it in Jefferson City in 1970 never waivered.  On the tenth anniversary of the first landing, he said, “It’s human nature to stretch, to go, to see, to understand. Exploration is not a choice really—it’s an imperative.”

In these times when we our vision is so often by terrestrial concerns and often-petty bickering about them, we need not forget his belief that within us is the need “to stretch, to go, to see, to understand.”

Perhaps if we look less at one another with suspicion and instead see one another as having those innate desires to achieve, we might find light.

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See you Thursday night?

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Our political divisions have not always been as bad as they are.  They will be better again.

The Missouri Humanities Council will be holding a webinar at 7 p.m. Thursday called Show Me Statesmanship. The council invited me a few months ago to be part of it. If  you want to watch, sign up at the council’s web page.

Clearly, today’s political dialogue is more noted for its antagonism than for its comity. While many observers focus on the ugliness of our dialogue, this program focuses on times when opponents were not enemies, when differences need not to have been destructive, when personal differences did not preclude personal interaction.

The council asked some former Senators to be part of the program too: former President Pro Tem Charlie Shields, Jeff Smith, Scott Rupp, Jolie Justus, and Rita Heard Days. Several other senators were part of the discussion although they didn’t have speaking roles: Bob Dixon, Kevin Engler, and the late Wayne Goode and John T. Russell.

Statesmanship is not easy to achieve as an individual nor is consensus easy to achieve within groups. This program focuses on those times when seeming political opposites did join together to enact good public policy on significant issues. It concludes that those things could happen again, no matter how toxic we might consider our political environment to be today.

It was good to hear and tell those stories and I think all of us who took part in this program look forward to a time when these things can happen again more frequently.

The thought-provoking video runs about 35 minutes.  The producers have asked me to field questions and comments for the rest of the hour.  It’s a nice compliment although I am a little nervous about being some kind of Oracle.

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Who is an American?

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It’s time we reoriented the history of our country. Not rewrite it.  Reorient it—because most of it starts with the assumption that this country began with Protestant English religious-freedom pioneers establishing colonies on the east coast, thus history is told from East to West.

That is a questionable assumption at best, and some would say an excuse for a nation that talks about inclusion while its national culture has created barriers against it.

The great American writer Walt Whitman refused in 1883 to take part in Santa Fe’s observance of its founding because, “We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents and sort them, to unify them.  Thus far, impressed by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashioned from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only—which is a great mistake.”

American-born journalist and historian Carrie Gibson, who now lives in London, quotes Whitman in El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America. Unlike conventional histories, her book sees our national history from West to East.

Explorers and entrepreneurs from Catholic Spain were establishing settlements in this hemisphere a century before English Protestants started settling Jamestown and Plymouth as commercial ventures.

Gibson asserts that accepting the English-settlement version of our history is the root of some of our major social issues because it has led to categorizing people as lesser Americans. And she suggests part of the problem lies in our definition of “American.”

I am an English-German-French-Irish-Scottish-Canadian American. But none of that shows up on the census form I filled out last year.  A lot of other Americans were hyphen people in the census. African-Americans. Hispanic-Americans.  Asian-Americans. And others.

I have never self-identified with any hyphens. I don’t know a word of German. I had to take four semesters of French at the University of Missouri to pass three of them. I know no Gaelic languages. I don’t say “aboot” for “about,” or refer to my car’s trunk as the “boot.”

But we identify a lot of Americans with a hyphen and Gibson suggests none too gently that in hyphenating some Americans we are subtly saying, “not white,” and in doing so we are misunderstanding our history and, in effect, not recognizing one another as equals in citizenship.

Gibson was born in Ohio but moved to Dalton, Georgia as a child, just about the time many families from Mexico began moving in to work in the factories.  She soon realized “that if my surname were Garcia rather than Gibson, there would have been an entirely different set of cultural assumptions and expectations placed upon me” although she, too, was an immigrant—from the North rather than the South; she too was Catholic as were many immigrants coming to Dalton. Her grandmother, from Italy, never spoke English well and still had many relatives in another country. The difference, she perceived, was that she and her family were “European” immigrants and our culture, as Whitman wrote, lived with the image of being a second England—-instead of being American.

 

And what is “American?”  She suggests that many of us assume too much for ourselves and exclude others because we do not recognize the word.

It is convenient to we who call ourselves Americans to forget that the word derives from an explorer who never came to OUR shores.  Amerigo Vespucci explored what we now call South America. Our continents first show up as America, with any designation of separateness, on a map of the New World drawn by Matthias Ringmann and Martin Waldseemüller in 1507, a century before Jamestown and a century-plus before Plymouth.

She finds it presumptuous to forget that the word “American” applies to everybody from Canada to Cape Horn. But those of us from the United States like to thing WE are Americans. Everybody else from this hemisphere is somebody or something else. The most common phrase used for those coming from the south is “Hispanic” as though everybody speaks Spanish, which is another erroneous assumption.

She points to another big difference.  Gibson is two generations removed from her Italian grandmother. She is not identified as Italian-American, can’t speak Italian.  But she asks, “Are you Hispanic if you don’t speak Spanish?”  Many who don’t speak that language, however, are considered “Hispanic” no matter how many generations removed they are from their border-crossing ancestors.

That’s a nagging question.  How many generations have to pass before someone is no longer African-American.  If you’ve never spoken a word in the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese languages, are you still Asian-American?

Gibson writes, “Like whiteness, being ‘American’ was designed at some level to be exclusionary; it was built on Anglo and northern European ancestry, Protestantism, and, for the most part, speaking English. There was no place for the Indians or the enslaved Africans, or even southern Europeans.”

There probably are places where cultural identifications are useful—in determining, for example, what parts of our culture are not doing as well as others and what the reasons for that might be.

But hyphens create deep and unnecessary divisions in how we see each other.

Perhaps society will solve these problems with the passage of time.  But why should we wait for time to heal the wounds we continue to insist on inflicting on each other because we do not recognize that all of us are Americans, that our roots are not in northern Europe, but all of Europe? Or that many years ago, some who came here were Africans and others were Asians?

(For decades and decades, archaeologists have discovered evidence that the first people in our land came from Asia, thousands of years before anybody from England or other parts of northern Europe set foot in America. If we insist on identifying each other with hyphens, perhaps we should let descendants of the first peoples decide how the rest of us should be identified. Would the rest of us be satisfied with a designation that implies, “Not Asian?”)

Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the worldwide bestseller Sapiens says that mankind is nearing a tipping point driven by the third revolution that has shaped the history of Homo Sapiens. First was the Cognitive Revolution, about 70,000 years ago when our ancestors gained the capability of abstract thought. Second was the Agricultural Revolution about 12,000 years ago when our ancestors learned cultivation and food raising that led to longer lives and increased and diversified population.  He thinks we are living in the third, the Scientific Revolution that began about 500 years ago. Harari theorizes we are headed toward a time when Homo Sapiens will be transformed into something different by science. Biological engineering, computing, and cyber development, he thinks, will lead to creation of “a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world—me, you, men, women, love and hate—will become irrelevant.”

It will be the death of the hyphen. And none too soon.

Do we need to wait for centuries to pass before all of the things we let divide us become irrelevant?  Do we need to listen to those who preach hatred of our fellow Americans or is it time to banish them to caves of their own ignorance where their bones might someday be discovered and puzzled over because of their narrowness?

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Honoring Those Left Behind

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A group of us has been working on building a special monument in Jefferson City. We’re working with a national foundation led by a World War II Medal of Honor winner (The Herschel Woody Williams Medal of Honor Foundation) to put up a memorial honoring Gold Star families. I have had a small role; others have done the real work. But it is an privilege to be part of their effort. I am not a veteran although, as I reminded the group at my first meeting with them, “I have fought many valiant skirmishes at Marine Corps League trivia contests.”

One thing that kind of surprised us is how few people know what a Gold Star Family is.  In some ways that is not surprising. Unfortunate, but not surprising.

We don’t see them often these days. During our World Wars and the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, they were more visible.  Families with members in the military during times of conflict could display a flag in the window of their home with a blue star for each family member in the service.  If a family member died or was killed during honorable service to their country during those times, the family would cover a blue star with a gold one, leaving the blue outline around the gold star.  Anyone going past a home with a flag in the window knew that somebody from that home was doing something special for the nation—or had died doing it.

In these times of limited conflicts with no massive calls to service, these symbols are seldom seen and a broad general public seldom touched by the human costs of defending our freedoms is not familiar with these flags.

But for each soldier killed in those prior wars or who dies in today’s long-ongoing conflcts, there are many broken hearts at home. Our memorial will honor those left behind to carry on in the spirit of their lost loved one.

You might have seen some of the numerous Blue Star Memorial Highway markers that have been erected since 1945 by state or local garden clubs that honor the military generally. This one is at the National Cemetery in Jefferson City.

There also is a small Gold Star Memorial sign at the west end of the Capitol, a tribute to “all Gold Star families.”

Our new monument to Gold Star Families will be built on city property adjacent to the Veterans Memorial at the Capitol, near the entrance to the Bicentennial Bridge being built to Adrian’s Island.

This is a computer simulation of our proposed monument against a different background than you’ll see when we dedicate it, hopefully in August.  The Capitol will be behind it then.

We want Gold Star Families throughout the state to know about the effort to put this memorial at the State Capitol. Although there has been a lot of publicity about the effort, most of it has been local.

If you are part of a group—veterans, civic, fraternal, church, or other—we would appreciate it if you would spread the word, and perhaps in doing so, learn of the special people in your neighborhood or among you friends who deserve to know there soon will be a monument at the Missouri Capitol honoring their sacrifice and their continued work in carrying on the spirit of those they lost.

(Photo credits: JC Parks, Missouri Capitol Commission, Gold Star Memorial Monument Committee)