Category Archives: history

Where was it?

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When the permanent seat of state government was moved from St. Charles to Jefferson City on October 1, 1826, it was headquartered in a building known as The Governor’s House. Not the capitol.

It was called the Governor’s House because it contained a couple of rooms for the lodging of the Governor and his office. The House of Representatives chamber was on the first floor. The Senate was on the second floor, an appropriate positioning for the body known at state and federal levels as “the upper house.’   Rooms for other state officers were in the building.

That was fine for Governor John Miller, a bachelor. But his successor, Daniel Dunklin, had a family, a situation that led to construction of an executive mansion nearby.

There were plans for a specific capitol but they didn’t come about until the Governor’s House burned in 1837 with a terrible loss of early records. The historical record is sketchy about what happened after the fire. How long did the gutted walls of the brick building remain? How was that area used between then and 1871 when the Governor’s Mansion was built?

Just where was the first seat of government on that lot?

Two conjectural drawings exist of that first building. One appears to show the building near the corner of Madison Street and Capitol Avenue. The other places the building closer to the bluff where it would be more visible to people traveling on the Missouri River.

We know it must have been fairly close because contemporary accounts say wet blankets were used to keep the mansion roof from catching fire from sparks blown from the burning original Governor’s House and a map from about 1843 indicates the 1826 building was near the present Executive Mansion site and the first Executive Mansion was built at the northwest corner of Madison Street at Capitol Avenue (which was Main Street then). We know from written records that the house was used during the Civil War by the officer in charge of the federal force that occupied the capital of Missouri.

How much of the current mansion, if any, is on or in the footprint of the first government building in the City of Jefferson?

There are some issues, often small ones, that get wrapped around a historian’s mind and won’t let go. Where were those buildings?

For several administrations this dabbler in archaeology (Nancy and I have spent several weeks in southwest Colorado mapping and finding pueblos either in the cliffs or on the ground of the Mancos River valley area near Mesa Verde) has wished somebody would be allowed to peel back the grass (in one way or another) at the Governor’s Mansion and in the process peel back the historical record to find the remains of the buildings that have occupied that space. Maybe there’s equipment that can survey the area without disturbing the lawn and pinpoint places to investigate without wiping out tent space. With the state’s first family in temporary quarters while major repairs and restorations are done at the old house, this might be a time to electronically see what’s under the yard.

The problem is that the lawn is often used for entertainment. Big tents are pitched and gatherings are held and digging up the lawn would disrupt those. But my goodness, what might we learn about the place where government began at its permanent location?

What’s under there?   Where was that first building in Jefferson City where some of Missouri’s greatest citizens of the first half of the Nineteenth Century walked, negotiated, and thundered?

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Damon and Jimmy

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Jimmy Breslin, the New York City author and columnist died a couple of years ago at the age of 88. He wrote more than twenty books including a biography of a fellow New York author and columnist, Damon Runyon. It’s an entertaining read. Breslin wrote, “Damon Runyon invented the Broadway of Guys and Dolls and the Roaring Twenties, neither of which existed, but whose names and phrases became part of theater history and the American language.” Twenty-six of his short stories became movies.

Something Breslin wrote about the way Runyon’s world was created before he got to New York when real estate lawyer Henry Morgenthau instituted the development that became the Broadway-42nd Street area. Something Breslin wrote about the process caught our eye.

Whenever successful politicians and businessmen are together, it is a moment of hope being reawakened. The politician, who is impoverished by comparison to the man he stands alongside, always is at once frightened and enticed by the thought of entering the business world and earning a fortune. The merchant with his money in his pocket is in awe of a person who can stand before grubby crowds and earn their cheers. Each in the other’s presence secretly wishes he had the other’s role, and off by themselves they are insanely jealous of each other. Yet merchants and politicians seem extraordinarily friendly with one another, and form a closed society to which strangers never are admitted readily, unless the stranger has wondrous amounts of money, at which point he rapidly ceases to be a stranger. The money is often never brought into use, but the stranger must own much of it. How can you yearn to be the other guy if he doesn’t have any money? The merchant by using courtesy to the point of groveling, so flatters the politician that the impossible occurs and the politician become momentarily secure, and immediately feels a need to make the merchant richer. While it is understood that the politician takes money out of this, nobody realizes the miserable amounts of money they often accept. No amount is too small for a politician to grab, nor for a rich man to offer. As nearly all great fortunes in America are made on land stolen while the public’s back is turned—and by people who want money but don’t want to work for it, by men who use the title of builder and yet never have driven a mail into a board—nowhere was the relationship between politician and merchant closer than at the time the subways of New York were built.

If you are interested in Breslin’s take on New York subway construction, go find a copy of his book about Runyon. Otherwise, we hope you just enjoy—as we did—Breslin’s essay on business and politics, offered here without comment except that we thought it was a fun paragraph to read in a book we’re really enjoying.

Breslin and Runyon make quite a combination.

 

Almost There

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Notes from a quiet street, Monsoon season edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better to be tall, we guess.

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

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

The disgust lasted three decades.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HIS BROTHER WILL BE HIS FATHER IN LAW

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

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

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

Notes from a quiet (and perhaps flooded) street

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

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

Uh, no.

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

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

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

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

Having gotten that out of my craw—-

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

Now—-

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

 

Adjournment!

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

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

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

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

Yours respectively, Publius.

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

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

 

Into the World

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

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

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

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

Alexander conquered the world at 26.

Napoleon made all Europe tremble at 25.

Cortez conquered Mexico at 26.

Alexander Hamilton led Congress at 36.

Clay and Calhoun led Congress at 29.

Henry Clay became speaker at 34.

Calhoun was secretary of war at 35.

Daniel Webster was without peer at 30.

Judge Story was on the supreme court at 32.

Goethe was a literary giant at 24.

Schiller was in the forefront of literature at 22.

Burns wrote his best poetry at 24.

Byron’s first work appeared at 19.

Dickens brought out “Pickwick Papers” at 24.

Schubert and Mozart died at less than 35.

Raphael ravished the world at 20.

Michelangelo made stone to live at 24.

Galileo’s great discovery was at 19.

Newton was at his zenith when only 25.

Edison harnessed lightning when only 23.

Martin Luther shook the Vatican at 20.

Calvin wrote his “Institute” at 21.

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

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

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

Casino abuse

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Missouri’s casino industry is feeling abused.

And those of us who want to do something great in Jefferson City are the apparent chief abusers.

Takes one to know one.

We’ve now had committee hearings in both the House and the Senate on the Steamboat Legacy Fund bill that suggests Missouri’s casino industry be the main funding source for the creation of a National Steamboat Museum in Jefferson City, the construction of a Missouri State Museum that has been needed for ninety years, and the conversion of the present state museum space into a Capitol Museum/Visitor Center that focuses on the history of the capitol and the function of state government.  Our goal is to do all of this without state funds and without any general tax increase.

In each hearing, the casino industry has complained that it’s being picked on because we (a small group of Jefferson City residents who have been working on these goals for more than a year) think the industry has capitalized on—–no, the proper phrase is “taken advantage of”—Missouri’s steamboat heritage for more than a quarter-century.

The casino industry thinks we’re picking on it by telling the truth about it.  We think the casino industry has earned the right to provide the financial base to accomplish these goals. 

We’ll start showing you why today.

The attempt to portray yourself as the victim when you are caught with your hand in the cookie jar is as old as cookies and jars.

The casinos aren’t victims. But there are victims—Missouri’s veterans and the home communities of the casinos in particular.  We’re going to show you how it happens by using numbers from three sources: Missouri Gaming Commission annual reports for the last 25 years, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.  And one other source: the casino industry itself.

Let’s begin this explanation with the parable of the 1994 pickup truck.  That was the year the first two casinos opened in Missouri. It was near the end of fiscal 1993-1994.  During that year, legislation went into effect establishing the two-dollar admission fee for casinos.

It’s important to understand that casino patrons do not pay that fee.  The casinos do, based on the number of people who gamble.

We won’t go into detail about how that number was established except to note that it goes back to the time when the industry convinced Missourians to allow casino gambling here by selling the image of steamboats cruising our great rivers on two-hour cruises while people could gamble (but lose no more than $500 per cruise). Each time someone went on a cruise, they would pay two dollars. One of those dollars was for the Missouri Gaming Commission and it’s “worthy causes” (more about those in a minute).  The other dollar went to the city and county that had a casino to offset the extra costs of public services because of the presence of a casino.  Leftover funds were used for capital improvements in those towns.  When the image of steamboats on our great rivers turned rather quickly into so-called boats in so-called moats the casinos decided not to charge patrons to enter the gambling floor. Instead the casinos counted noses and wrote checks to the state, probably making up that expense in charges for food and beverage, hotel rooms and the like, which is how the industry says it would make up for the dollar we are seeking for the museums project.

There is no doubt the host cities have made good use of that money.  But in the process they have become victims of their casino.

If the city street department in one of the first two casino towns bought a Ford F-150 four-wheel drive extended cab long-bed pickup truck in 1994, it might have paid the MSRP of $18,607.  By 2018 the truck badly needed to be replaced. But the price of a new Ford F-150 four-wheel drive, extended cab, long-bed truck, was $40,010.

The price of pickup trucks has doubled, and more.  But the city is still getting a dollar.  And it’s not a 2018 dollar.  It’s still 1993 dollar. And it’s not worth a dollar any more

The legislature in 1993 didn’t think to include an inflation adjustment clause when it set that two-dollar fee and the casino industry has successfully insisted the legislature not correct that shortcoming.

The inflation calculators at the BLS and the Minneapolis Fed tell us that the equivalent of $2 in 1993 was $3.41 in 2018.  The host city in 2018 got a dollar per admission at its casino.  Had there been an inflation clause built into that 1993 law they would have gotten a dollar-seventy.  Plus another half cent.

And the situation is worse for the city because those webpage inflation calculators show the dollar they DID get in FY18 had the purchasing power of only 58 ½ cents.

Does the casino industry give a hoot?  Suggesting this avaricious industry should care about making sure its thirteen host communities receive a dollar that is worth a dollar will bring forth claims that such suggestions make the industry a victim somehow.

The other half of the two-dollar admission fee goes to the Missouri Gaming Commission which takes its annual operating costs out and then distributes the rest to a list of “worthy causes.”  Those causes have varied through the years but the biggest beneficiary in 2018 was the Missouri Veterans Commission Capital Improvement Trust Fund, which funds veterans’ homes and cemeteries.  Last year it got about $22 million.   In 1993 dollars.  While the casinos were hauling in 2018 dollars from people who thought they could go to a casino and win, the veterans homes and cemeteries were getting dollars worth 58 ½ cents in purchasing power..

In fiscal year 2018, the difference between a 1993 two-dollar admission fee and its 2018 equivalent value ($3.41) was more than $56 million dollars.

Where did that money go?  Not to veterans’ programs.  Not to the home dock cities.  That $56 million dollars in windfall profits left Missouri and went to casino corporate headquarters in Nevada and in Pennsylvania.

And each year, because there’s no inflation adjustment in that two dollar admission fee, the windfall gets bigger and bigger.  In the twenty-five years that Missouri has had casinos, the industry has had windfall profits of more than $830,000,000.  That’s as of last June 30.

That’s $830-million that has not gone to programs for veterans, early childhood education, college tuition assistance programs, programs for problem gamblers—and to the host cities.

And when representatives of Jefferson City suggest that about two-thirds of the windfall going forward remain in Missouri to keep a treasure trove of American history from being purchased by a museum in Pennsylvania and moved there, and to satisfy a 90-year need for a state museum that can REALLY tell the story of Missouri and its people and its resources, the casinos whine that we are abusing them.

The casinos will attack any proposal to make two-dollar admission fees worth two dollars.  And anybody who suggests it, or who suggests (as we have) that using part of the huge annual windfall profit casinos realize for something benefitting Missourians is making the casinos victims somehow, and we should be ashamed to suggest it. .

Reviewing every annual report of the Missouri Gaming Commission makes this clear: The casinos get richer ever year by paying the state in 1993 money.  The state gets poorer because the programs and services that admission fee goes for cost 2018 dollars to operate.

We know that casinos are not built because their patrons have an even chance of winning.  The tables are always tilted in the casinos’ favor.  The tables tilt even more with each passing year that they pay the state two dollars in admission fees.

An industry spokesman has accused those of us supporting this measure of suggesting the casinos make too much money.  As is often the case with statements from the industry, it’s less than truthful and is intended to deflect attention away from the issues. It’s not the amount of money the casinos make, it’s how much they KEEP, how they keep it, and how they are adamantly opposed to any idea that the two-dollar admission fee should be changed so that veterans and home dock communities get dollars that are worth dollars.

Now, having beaten up on these “victims,” let’s acknowledge some important things.

The casinos have broken no laws. They are paying what the law requires them to pay.  Whether they are keeping faith with Missourians who voted to have majestic steamboats cruising our rivers or keeping faith with those who thought two dollars was going to be worth two dollars is another issue.  But they have not broken any laws.

They have said in the committee hearings that they have met every obligation the state has put on them.  And they have. And they sure don’t want the state to update any laws that make one of their obligations be that dollars be worth dollars.

They say they provide thousands of Missourians with jobs.  And they do.  Not nearly as many as they used to—which they don’t talk about publicly—but they do provide thousands of jobs that pay millions and millions of dollars in wages and benefits.

They pay a lot of property taxes and in some places they pay for leases of city or county land for their boats in moats. Not much to sympathize about there. Those are costs of doing business.

Here’s another indication that the casinos don’t much care about anything but how many dollars they can take out of Missouri:

Last year, Missouri’s casinos had almost one-and-three quarters BILLION dollars in adjusted gross receipts (income minus payouts for the minority of customers who won anything).  And by the time they deducted the expenses the gaming commission forces them to report, the industry still had about $820-million left, including the $56-million in windfall profits from the admission fees.

Here’s another example of how our casinos don’t really care for much more than taking as many dollars out of Missouri pockets as they can:

The gaming commission requires the casinos to report their charitable giving each year.   Last year the thirteen casinos donated about $940,000 to charities.  If asked, they’d probably point to that number with a lot of emphasis and pride.  They like to do that kind of thing.

But it’s not what they say. It’s what they DON’T say that is important in understanding their avarice.

The charitable contributions last year were just .00054% of their adjusted gross receipts.  Remember than .01 percent represents one penny per dollar.

One casino with more than $70-million in adjusted gross receipts in FY2018 reported charitable giving of $915.

Your observer seems to be the chief casino abuser, I guess, because I came back from a meeting at the Steamboat Arabia museum in Kansas City a year ago with the idea that Jefferson City would be a great place for the museum’s new home when the museum’s lease runs out on its city-owned building in Kansas City in 2026. And our working group thinks an industry that has taken advantage of our steamboat heritage to make billions and billions of dollars should help preserve the heritage of the steamboats.

If the plan that our working group has developed in the last year constitutes casino abuse, all of us willingly plead guilty.

So the casinos accuse of abusing them, of making them some kind of victims.  Read the numbers again. And think about who is—and wants to remain—an abuser.

The question then becomes: Who really is abusing the system: a citizens group that wants to use casino money to create something good—great—for our state or the group that wants to truck as much money as it can out of the state for its own enrichment?

The problem can be corrected.  All it takes is 82 courageous members of the Missouri House and eighteen courageous members of the Missouri Senate who will vote for boats that are not in moats but whose cargoes are instead in museums or are waiting under farm fields for their stories to be brought to the surface.

The casinos have made billions of dollars from the heritage of those boats.  Giving back a relative few million to honor the importance of steamboats to America—and to casino development in Missouri—isn’t going to make any casino executives jump off the top floor of Wynn’s in Las Vegas.

More later.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vote for the boats

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Nobel Prize-winning poet and dramatist George Bernard Shaw said it in his play Back to Methuselah in 1949: “You see things; and you say “Why?”  But I dream things that never were; and I say “why not?”

I awoke one morning a few months ago thinking about a National Steamboat Museum in Jefferson City, a museum that emphasizes the role of Missouri River steamboats as the lifelines to the American West.   It was a little while after our meeting in Kansas City at the Steamboat Arabia Museum where we talked about the museum’s future and its move to a new location where it can become a National Steamboat Museum.

There once had been some uneasiness about applying the “national” name to the museum— how a museum alongside the Missouri River could assume the “national” title for a creation that had such a profound impact on almost all of the nation’s navigable streams for most of the Nineteenth Century.  But that uneasiness went away when I remembered the Shaw’s remark about dreaming things that never were and asking “Why not?”

And that’s why we’re willing to buck some politically-influential big nay-sayers and the reason we hope members of the legislature will join us in a venture that requires some courage to make something great materialize for our city and for our state.

Why not put our National Steamboat Museum along the nation’s longest river system?  Why not put the museum on a hill overlooking the most challenging river that steamboats ever faced?  Why not display a boat or boats exhumed from their watery graves of a century and a half ago and more?  Why not a museum that represents the importance of steamboats to this nation’s greatest adventure—the expansion of our country from ocean to ocean?

Others have not been reluctant to use the “national” designation in connection with steam boating.  Cincinnati, on the Ohio River, has the National Steamboat Monument, a sixty-ton replica of the original paddle wheel from the “American Queen” (a modern tourist boat built in 1995) that towers forty feet off the ground, with a series of twenty-four metal smokestacks to symbolize the importance of steam in early river travel and the importance of riverboats to Cincinnati’s history.

Jeffersonville, Indiana—across the Ohio River from Louisville—has the Howard National Steamboat Museum in the 1894 mansion of steamboat captain James Howard (a museum that, appropriately, has survived a 1971 fire caused by an explosion of its steam heating plant).

Marietta, Ohio has the Ohio River Museum that includes a twenty-four foot long model of the sternwheeler “The Pioneer,” and a collection of artifacts from steamboats in three buildings.

The Clifton Steamboat Museum in Beaumont, Texas is a 24,000 square foot museum that includes steamboat history as well as artifacts from various wars in which Texans have participated.

Irvington, Virginia’s Steamboat Era Museum includes the pilot house from the steamer “Potomac,” built in 1894 and disassembled in 1938.

And Marion, Arkansas has The Sultana Museum that commemorates the disaster that struck the steamboat Sultana in 1865, an explosion of boilers and fire on a 367-passenger capacity boat packed with 2,300 passengers, mostly paroled Union soldiers just released from Andersonville and Cahaba Confederate prison camps. Only five-hundred of those passengers survived.

But nowhere is there a museum that honors the steamboats that fought the nation’s most dangerous river, a river on which the average lifespan of a steamboat was only three years. And in honoring those boats and those who built and operated them, wouldn’t we be honoring steamboat history in general?

The dream is for a museum that houses at least one exhumed steamboat. The whole thing. But maybe more. We’ll know when we dig down to others. The museum also would provide a window on the people we were in the early days of the frontier through the years until railroads had so penetrated the West that steamboats were no longer essential to the survival of frontier communities and the movement of the frontier toward the Pacific Ocean.

Some parts of the museum already exist; the steam engine from the “Missouri Packet,” the first of about 400 boats to sink in the Missouri River when it went under in 1820, the two-hundred tons of cargo recovered from the exhumed “Arabia,” and soon, the cargo of and perhaps the entire “Malta,” due for recovery this winter if fund-raising can be completed.

Introductory displays of the earlier history of steamboats on the Hudson, Potomac, and Ohio Rivers—among others—can provide the context for the main displays in the National Steamboat Museum which will take nothing away from the importance of existing collections and monuments but will instead bring the importance of steamboats and their era into sharp and dramatic focus complementing other facilities that highlight this often overlooked but vitally important part of the development of our nation.

Why the Missouri River?  Writer and epic poet John G. Neihardt, who canoed downriver from Fort Benton, Montana in 1908 wrote:

“The Missouri is unique among rivers.  I think God wished to teach the beauty of a virile soul fighting its way toward peace—and his precept was the Missouri.  To me, the Amazon is a basking alligator; the Tiber is a dream of dead glory; the Rhine is a fantastic fairy-tale; the Nile a mummy, periodically resurrected; the Mississippi, a convenient geographical boundary line; the Hudson, an epicurean philosopher.

But the Missouri—my brother—is the eternal Fighting Man!”

I have come to realize we can call it The National Steamboat Museum because—while focusing on Missouri River steamboats—it will be a tribute to all of the rivers, all of the boats that challenged them and won or lost, all of the people who invented, built, and operated those boats—and those who died in their disasters—and all of the people who rode them into uncertain futures that are our national history.

Their descendants not only will have a unique glimpse of their real-people ancestors. They might draw courage by knowing that progress is not achieved by sitting on a riverbank and watching the water flow by but instead is often achieved by having the courage to go against the current in search of better things.

Those of us who want to create the National Steamboat Museum in Jefferson City do not lack the courage to face the heavy opposition of our casino industry to provide the funding for that museum as well as for a State Museum building and the transformation of the present state museum space into a visitor center that focuses on the history of the capitol and of state government, a place to learn about being a Missouri citizen. The casino industry, which has capitalized on (some say “has taken advantage of”) our steamboat heritage for more than twenty-five years, appears not to care about leaving funds in Missouri to accomplish great goals that will benefit all Missourians. The legislature can decide if its best to keep some of the casino’s annual windfall here for future generations rather than let it flow to casino corporate offices in Nevada and Pennsylvania.

A National Steamboat Museum in Jefferson City, Missouri?

Why not?

Join us in making what never has been—-

be.