Mike Kehoe will be sworn in at noon today as our 56th Governor although it will be the 58th administration. Two governors, Phil Donnelly and Christopher Bnd served two separate terms.
Kehoe succeeds Mike Parson, who now goes back to his farm in Polk County where he was working six years ago, when he was lt. Governor, when a Highway Patrolman showed up to tell hm he needed to get back to Jefferson City because Governor Eric Greitens was resigning.
I’ve referred to Govenor Mike Parson and Lieutenant Govenor Mike Kehoe as Mike 1 and Mike 2—and the Govenor’s Mansion for the last six years as the Parson-age.
Incidentally, a recurring political joke for many years asks voters if they would buy a used car from the candidate. A lot of people did when he was a Ford dealer in Jefferson City. He’s the second car dealer to be sworn in as Governor. Governor Arthur M. Hyde, who served 1921-1925 was a Buick dealer in Princeton and Trenton.
We’ve gone back over our notes on past gatherings to recall some special and sometimes not-so-special moments.
Each inauguration has some special touches. Sometimes the wheels fall off as was the case in 2013 when the usually reliable church bells tolling noon, the traditional time for the oath-taking, had a mind of their own and when the judge swearing in the governor mispronounced his name.
We listened back to The Missourinet’s recording of those events to put together this chronology showing how things fell apart at the critical moment.
11:59:56—band finishes playing “God Bless America.”
12:00:20—12:01:20—The bell at St. Peter Catholic Church tolls eight times.
Long pause. Finally, Senate President Pro Tem Tom Dempsey, the MC, approaches the podium, and just as he draws a breath to introduce the judge to swear in the Governor—
12:02:23—a ninth bell (crowd and podium guests laugh loudly) Dempsey throws up his hands and retreats to his seat.
12:02:33—tenth bell
12:02:42—eleventh bell. Then silence. There is no 12th bell for the noon swearing-in. Voices on the platform (including Nixon’s apparently) are heard confirming, however, that there had been the 12th bell. Nope. Just eleven).
12:04:18—Convinced there are no more bells, Dempsey introduces St. Louis Circuit Judge Rex Burlison to swear in Nixon.
12:04:52—And Judge Burlison begins the oath by mispronouncing the Governor’s name:, “I, Jeremy Wilson Nixon…” Nixon repeats, “I, Jeremiah Wilson Nixon…”
12:05:25—oath completed. Church bells ring joyously throughout the city. Helicopter flyover.
Nixon’s first inauguration in 2009 was the second time in three inaugurals when the governor was sworn in early. Master of Ceremonies Charlie Shields, the Senate president pro tem, noted about 11:45 that the event was running early and the band would play some music to fill time. However after one number he announced the swearing in of the new governor would proceed. Shields said the National Guard, which operates the schedule for the inaugurations, told him through his earpiece to go ahead with the oath-giving and taking. The swearing-in of Governor Nixon began at 11:52 and the church bells rang early.
The 2005 inauguration is remembered by some for the relatively warm weather and for the governor’s attire.
Governor Blunt refused to be sworn in while wearing the traditional tuxedo, which he referred to in an interview with The Missourinet as a “monkey suit.” That night he did wear a tux, although the traditional attire for the inaugural ball is white tie and tails. It was a frustrating few days for one of the Jefferson City tuxedo shops with which Blunt did business. The owner tried…and tried…but failed to convince Blunt to be traditional in his attire.
Blunt used two Bibles. In his inaugural address he noted that one was the Bible he used each day. The second one would be given to his son upon his birth, which was scheduled for March. He said it reminded him “that what we do today, tomorrow and across the next four years will help define the future opportunities of every Missouri Child.
2005 was the second time in recent memory that the new first lady danced in the inaugural ball a few weeks before the birth of the first couple’s first child. Matt and Melanie Blunt had their first child, Branch, in March. In 1981, Christopher and Carolyn Bond’s son, Sam, was born two weeks after the inauguration.
Bob Holden’s inauguration in 2001 was a scrambled affair that saw the first early swearing-in, in many years. Supreme Court judge Ronnie White, the master of ceremonies, called for the swearing-in of Attorney General Jay Nixon right after the invocation. The schedule called for the inaugurations of the lesser officials to take place AFTER remarks from former Senator Thomas Eagleton and after the introduction of platform guests. After Eagleton spoke and the guests were introduced, the other inaugurations took place.
The event, which had started at 11;15 instead of the usual 11:30 saw the inauguration of lower-ranking statewide officials by 11:45. Rather than wait 15 minutes for the traditional noon-time inauguration of the governor, the ceremonies went right on ahead. Just as the church bell across the street rang once to signal it was 11:45, Governor Holden was sworn in. Radio and television stations planning to join the ceremonies just in time for the noon inauguration of the governor found themselves switching to the Capitol after Holden was well into his address, or not switching at all. The church bells did not strike 12 because it would have interrupted the speech. In his press conference after the event, Holden explained that he decided to go ahead with the swearing-in because it was 27 degrees and people were getting cold.
The early swearing-in caught the flight of four F-15s from the St. Louis national guard unit unprepared. The jets, which usually formed up west of Jefferson City and flew over the Capitol west to east were far from being ready when word went out that the swearing-in was taking place and the 19-gun salute was being fired. The jets wound up flying over the Capitol, more or less on a north to south route with two jets together and two others straggling behind, well out of formation.
The parties ended at 11;30 that night with fireworks over the Missouri River. The explosions caught many Jefferson Citians unawares and awakened several. Dozens of 9-1-1 calls were made. One woman said she thought somebody was trying to break into her basement and called police.
The first Carnahan inauguration, in 1993, first brought the festival atmosphere which existed in and around the Capitol for the rest of the day after the ceremonies. Carnahan was sworn in using an old family Bible used by his great grandfather, a circuit-riding Methodist minister. At one time there was a hole in the back cover. Family tradition held that the hole was worn by the saddle horn of his great grandfather’s saddle. A new cover was put on the Bible in later years that replaced that worn one. He did not wear a top hat–which is kind of an on-again-off-again tradition for these events. Some people wear them; some don’t. In 1989, when he was sworn in for his second term as treasurer, Carnahan wore a beaver topper with a long and distinguished history. But he told us before the inauguration in ’93 that he reviewed the tapes of that event and saw he was about the only person who wore the traditional hat for the ceremony. Others who had them either left them indoors or carried them. So he decided in 1993 to leave the hat off. It belonged to his father, former Congressman A.S. J. Carnahan, who served in Congress for 14 years and was the first United States Ambassador to the African country of Sierra Leone, appointed by President Kennedy.
But his father was not the first owner of that distinguished hat. It originally belonged to Congressman John B. Sullivan of St. Louis, whose wife Leonore became the elder Carnahan’s successor in Congress and served with great distinction for many years.
Some might find a bit of irony in the telling of that story, we suppose. Anyway, the hat stayed in the box in 1993.
But—
In 1997, Carnahan wore the beaver top hat—a little bit. He only wore it for the trip from the Mansion to the Capitol. The ceremony was held in the rotunda because of the cold weather.
—As long as we’re speaking of top hats, here’s a little top hat history for you. In 1969, when John Danforth was sworn in as Attorney General, he was the only one of the state officers who did not wear one.
Thomas Eagleton wore one that day although he refused to wear such a thing in earlier ceremonies. He had complained that all during his military service his hats had been either too large or too small and he had refused to wear any hats since.
In 1961, when Harry Truman attended John Dalton’s inauguration, he refused to wear a top hat in the parade. He wore his customary felt hat instead.
One highlight of the 1989 inauguration was the opening of the huge bronze doors on the south front of the Capitol. The doors had been closed for many years. They had been opened only for very special occasions for about 40 years. The state had paid $122,000 to repair and restore the doors. The hinges and frames were rebuilt and the finish to the doors was restored. The doors weigh 7,200 pounds, stand more than 18 feet tall and are 12-feet wide. It takes seven minutes to get the things open. The doors are divided into four panels. the second and third panels–the center panels–fold inward toward the Capitol and lock against the first and fourth panels, which also fold inward to provide a panoramic view up the 30-foot wide grand stairway to the third, or legislative, floor of the building. At the time the doors were installed, they were called the largest bronze doors cast since the days of Ancient Rome.
The bronze doors have been restored to their original appearance and the mechanisms have been repaired just in time for this inauguration.
The 1985 and 1989 inaugurations of John Ashcroft included prayers from his father, an Assembly of God minister. Ashcroft, following his faith, did not dance at his inaugural balls. Each time he played the state song, “The Missouri Waltz,” on a piano in the rotunda.
In 1985, new Governor John Ashcroft made some headlines on his inauguration day when he did not dance at the traditional ball because of his Pentacostal background that discourages drinking, smoking, gambling, and dancing. Instead, he played a piano, accompanied by famous New Orleans trumpet player al Hirt, and the St. Louis Cardinals most famous harmonica player, Stan Musial. He did a similar thing for his 1989 inaugural.
In 1985, Former Governor Hearnes did not attend the ceremonies, saying he had not been invited far enough in advance. Supreme Court Judge Warren Welliver refused to attend, showing his disappointment that an associate justice of the court was swearing in Governor Bond instead of the Chief Justice. The Associate Justice that day was Albert Rendlen, former Republican Party chairman (Welliver was a Democrat), who later became a Chief Justice. While he held that office, he swore in John Ashcroft for his first term. Ashcroft was sworn in for his second term by Judge Edward Robertson, his former aide that he had shortly before appointed to the supreme court. Robertson, who became the Chief Justice and is now in private practice, did not not swear in Governor Carnahan. In fact, most members of the Supreme Court were absent from involvement in the 1993 ceremonies. All of them were Ashcroft appointees.
It is not mandatory that the Chief Justice swear in the Governor. Circuit Judge Sam Blair swore in his brother, James T. Blair, in 1957. In 1881, Governor Thomas Crittenden was sworn in by the outgoing Lieutenant Governor, Henry Brockmeyer, because members of the Supreme Court didn’t show up for the ceremony until Crittenden was giving his inaugural address. —–
In 1981, an empty chair was placed on the inaugural platform next to Kenneth Rothman, who became Lieutenant Governor that day. Rothman had it placed there as a memorial to his father, who had died the year before.
In 1977, when Joseph Teasdale was sworn in on a bitterly cold day, Senator Thomas Eagleton was sitting on the platform next to Senator Danforth. He was so wrapped up in a shawl that Sally Danforth had given him when she went inside to get warm that a University of Missouri reporting program reporter mis-identified him as Senator Danforth’s wife. The wind chill factor that day was 25 to 40-below, so you know why he was wrapped up so tightly. The ceremony started in two-below-zero temperatures, (the high for the day was plus 3), Nine inches of snow had fallen overnight, causing the cancellation of the inaugural parade. Despite abysmal conditions—the pianist suffered frostbite on all of her fingers–Teasdale decided to have the ceremony outside because of the large number of people who had come to Jefferson City–especially from his home town of Kansas City–to see him sworn in. Many, if not the majority, of them stayed inside the Capitol, however, while the new governor earned for himself the nickname “Freezedale” from uncharitable critics, especially those who endured his event outdoors.Incoming Lt. Governor Ken Rothman reported later that Teasdale leaned over to him and said, “This must be my first mistake.” Senator Thomas Eagleton remarked later, “My feet damn near fell off.”
In his ten-minute speech, Teasdale said it was God’s will that he be elected governor, prompting State Treasurer Jim Spainhower—who would unsuccessfully challenge Teasdale in the 1980 primary—to tell a friend, “Don’t trust politicians with messianic complexes.” Spainhower was a minister of the Christian Church/Disciples of Christ.
The President Pro Tem of the Senate usually is the presiding officer, master of ceremonies, of the event—except in 1965 when the Speaker of the House presided. That was the first inauguration of Warren Hearnes, who had run against the so-called “establishment” that ran the Democratic Party, and had defeated Lieutenant Governor Hillary Bush. Former Senate leader Albert Spradling, Jr., recalled for the State Historical Society that Hearnes tried to gain control of the Senate but conservative senators stopped him by electing John W. Joynt of St. Louis as the Pro-Tem. Hearnes recalled in a similar interview that he had tried to get one of his campaign supporters, Senator Earl Blackwell of Hillsboro, elected President Pro Tem although Blackwell had been in the Senate only two years at the time. The veteran senators also rejected Hearnes’ efforts to compromise by having Blackwell named Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. The resentment caused by Hearnes’ tactics—before he was even Governor—so antagonized Joynt that he refused to preside over Hearnes’ inauguration a few days later, leaving the job to Speaker of the House Thomas Graham.
Timing of the events leading to the noon inauguration was a problem, too, in 1965, during the first Hearnes inauguration. Speaker Tom Graham, about whom we referred earlier, recalled in an oral history interview for the State Historical Society that all of the scheduled events leading to the governor’s inauguration had been finished ten minutes early. He said, “I introduced everybody in sight. I introduced Governor Dalton and his wife. I introduced my wife. I introduced the members of the House. I introduced the members of the Senate, and then I introduced the taxpayers.” That killed enough time for the swearing-in of Hearnes to take place at high noon.
Thomas Eagleton figures in a couple of other odd moments on inauguration day. On the way to the first Hearnes inaugural in 1965, Eagleton—who was to become Lieutenant Governor that day—was seen hitchhiking, dressed in formal attire. The car being used to chauffer him around had run out of gas a number of blocks from the Jefferson City First Baptist Church, where an inaugural worship service was held in 1965. Another was held there in 1969. The Hearnes family was Baptist and Betty often sang in the church choir.
The year Eagleton was sworn in as Attorney General, 1961, the man administering the oath forgot it. Former Judge Sam Blair, who had administered the oath to his brother Jim when Jim became governor in 1957, said he had sworn-in thousands of persons before, and the oath is really simple as can be. But he said he suffered a complete mental block, which lasted about four seconds but seemed far longer and left Judge Sam a little shaken.
The 1961 inauguration as unusual in another respect. The Lieutenant Governor was not sworn in with the other statewide officials. Hillary Bush was inaugurated more than two hours later in the State Senate because the Lieutenant Governor is the President of the Senate. He told the senators he respected the Senate tradition of “orderly and courteous procedure and the most searching examination into each and every law affecting our citizens.” He promised to support “full and open debate,” saying “Good laws are not enacted after bearing only one side of a question. Minority views are just as important as the views of the majority. Sound debate often results in a decision acceptable to both sides and thus redounds to the benefit of the state”
However, several of Bush’s friends from Kansas City missed the event. The passenger elevators were jammed by the large crowd, so a janitor agreed to let them use a freight elevator. Fifteen to twenty people crowded in—and the elevator stopped about five feet from the third floor. Several minutes of door-pounding and prying open the doors finally caught the attention of someone in the hallway who got on top of the elevator car and lowered a chair to the interior. After about five people used the chair to get out, the car rose to the third floor and stopped normally. But it was too late for those inside to witness the event.
The scariest inauguration might have been in 1913, when Elliott Major was sworn in. The Capitol had burned in 1911 and a temporary Capitol was erected just east of the present building. It was made of stucco, lath and wire. One account says “it was jammed to suffocation and the structure groaned and creaked under the weight of the crowd.” The building was still there when Frederick Gardner was to be inaugurated but officials were afraid to use it. The situation led to the first outdoor inauguration four years later when the new Capitol remained unfinished enough for an indoor ceremony and nobody wanted to go back into the temporary building.
Things were a little straight-laced, compared to today, in 1913. The inauguration committee issued an edict barring “ragging” at the ball, the playing of ragtime music. modern dances such as the “bunny hop” or the “bear cat,” or the “turkey trot,” and “all other of the 57 varieties of the terpsichorean art where swaying of the shoulders and other unnecessary movements” are made.
There were fears in 1881 that the inauguration of John S. Marmaduke might have to be delayed because he developed a severe nose bleed in St. Louis a few days earlier. The New York Times reported (Jan 11, 1885) that three doctors worked to solve the problem by trying to keep him “perfectly quiet and free from all excitement.” The newspaper reported the Marmaduke was at a St. Louis hotel “up in his room nursing his well proportioned nose, which has both nostrils solidly plugged up.”
Marmaduke was a bachelor and described in the article as “quite a ladies’ man.” A few days earlier he had a date with the Widow Bernoudy and was her escort as she called upon several mutual friends. During the outing he complained of a pain in the back of his head but she thought he just wanted sympathy. After the calls, the pain in his head grew much worse and he was seized with intense bleeding. She called two doctors who took him to the hotel and spent the day and night before they finally stopped the bleeding. He did recover in time to attend his inauguration. However he died in pneumonia in 1887 before the end of his term.
Governor Thomas Fletcher, chosen in the first election since the start of the Civil War, took office about three months before the final collapse of the Confederacy calling for magnanimity and “forgetful of past differences, seek only to promote the general good of the people of whole commonwealth.”
He said in part: “Henceforth Missouri shall be an asylum for all nationalities and races and peoples; the repository of wealth, and a theater for the development of the labor and enterprise of the hand and spirit of Industry; and the home of free thought, free speech and a free press, where the prejudices of caste and class have no legal embodiment or political encouragement…Let it be announced that in the new era which has come, ours is to be the first of States, with the largest freedom and the widest charities…Where a free people…guards the right of permitting the position and privileges of every man to be such as his virtues, talents, education, patriotism, enterprise, industry, courage or achievements may confer upon him.”
In 1857, Trusten Polk was being inaugurated when it was discovered there did not seem to be a Bible anyplace in the Capitol. The ceremony was delayed for several minutes while an intense search was done. A Bible was finally located, several blocks away, at the state penitentiary.
One newspaper said afterwards that Jefferson City would be a tremendous field for missionaries, noting, “”We fear that the work of legislation can never go on properly in a place where copies of the Good Book are so scarce, and that it will be necessary for other reasons than the high price of board, to fetch the Legislature to St. Louis where, goodness knows, there are plenty of Bibles, whether we govern our lives by the precepts contained therein or not.”
Inaugurations have not always been spectacular events. When Missouri’s first state Governor, Alexander McNair, delivered his first message to the legislature in 1821, he did the entire thing—the swearing-in and the speaking—so quickly that a number of lawmakers in a nearby St. Charles pub missed the whole thing. St. Charles was the temporary state capital then. McNair refused requests to give his speech again.
