Category Archives: Media

Swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath

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(The Kingston Trio, the folk singing group of the 60s, had a song called “The Merry Minuet” that seemed to capture our times.  Some of the lyrics go:

The whole world is festering with unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles
Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don’t like anybody very much!!

I refer to this condition euphemistically as “being in a state of high urinary agitation.” Everybody seems to be in that state these days and social media is a prime purveyor.  We know we’re going to become increasingly agitated as November 3 nears.  This seems like a good time to see what Dr. Frank Crane thinks about—-)

ANGER

There is no use telling you, son, not to get angry; nu use telling you any red-blooded man that.

Indignation is a natural flame that spurts up in the mind, upon certain occasions, as surely as gasoline explodes at a lighted match.

All I say is—Wait!

Don’t do anything till your heat is gone. Don’t say words, nor pass judgments, until your brain has cooled down.

For most anger is the irritation of offended vanity.

We think a lot of our opinion, and when one sneers at it, it is as if he threw mud on our white duck trousers.

We have a high notion of the respect due us, and when it is intimated that we are nobody we want to smash something to show we are somebody.

We are never angry, save when our pride is hurt.

Anger is self-esteem on fire.

So, flare up, if you must, swear and break the furniture; it may do you good. But go up to your room to indulge in this relief, lock the door, and stay there until the stork blows over.

Never write a letter while you are angry. Lay it aside. In a few days you can come back at your offender much more effectively.

Don’t transact business in heat.  When you are “mad clean through” it is your sore egotism that is operating, and acts prompted by egotism are usually ridiculous. Hang up the matter for a few days, and come to it again when your intelligence is not upset by your feelings.

One of the bet things to say is nothing. When you answer a man he gets your measure; when you keep still you have him guessing.

The cool man, who has himself under control, always has the advantage offer the hot man.

Even if you have to lick a man you can do much better if your head is clear of anger fumes. Wrath may lend a little extra punch to your blows, but self-control will plant them to better effect.

Anger dulls your efficiency. What you do goes wild. You have a lot of energy, but no accuracy.

Anger dims your eye. You see vividly, but what you see is not so.

Anger makes chaos in your thoughts. You are a crazy man. What you think in the egotism of anger you will pay for in the humiliation of saner moments.

Few good deeds have been done in anger, while all manner of crimes are due to the intemperance of wrath, such as blows, murders, and war, “the sum of all villainies.”

The first and greatest lesson for you to learn, son, is to control your temper and if your nature is touchy, to resolve to take no action until the blood is cooled.

Dr. Crane would like some quiet

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(As we sink deeper and deeper into the muck of a major political campaign year, the noise level is going to rise with each new charge or claim or denial, with each new voice whether of a candidate a surrogate or a secretly-funded attack group. Although written almost a century ago, Doctor Frank Crane’s suggestion that we see all of this noise for what it is, is particularly contemporary.)

ALL NOISE IS A WASTE

Power is a curious and much misunderstood thing. Noise and display, which are commonly thought to indicate it, in reality are indications of its absence.

All show of force is a sign of weakness. Loud talking is a sign of a consciousness that one’s reasoning is feeble. When one shrieks it means that he knows or suspects that what he says does not amount to much, and it irritates him.

Profanity comes from a limited vocabulary.

A country is poor in proportion to its fighting spirit. A nation habitually peaceful is hardest to conquer. It was the United States that settled with the Barbary pirates.

In advertisements, a persistent over-statement will in time destroy all confidence. Even here the strongest, most impressive thing, in the long run, is modesty.

Power is an inverse ration to noise, as a rule.

The strongest being conceivable is God. And he is so modest, quiet, and hidden that many people to refuse to believe there is a God. He never blusters. Hence humbugs cannot understand how He exists.

The most powerful material thing in our range of experience is the sun, the source of all earth-forces. Yet the sun’s pull, energy, and radiation are silent. It raises billions of tons of water daily from the ocean with less noise than an April thunder-storm.

“The greatest things have need to be said most simply,” remarked a Frenchman; “they are spoiled by emphasis.”

 

Crisis Buffet

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We are trying to think of a time when a Missouri governor has had as many major issues to deal with at one time as Governor Parson has on his plate now.

We can’t think of one.

In addition to the normal burden of duties governors have, there has been added to this one’s plate the state’s response to a worldwide pandemic, the related collapse of the state’s economy and its hundreds of large and small widespread ripples to which state government is either a party or to which it must respond, civil unrest that must be dealt with on a daily—or nightly—basis at a time when the responsibility of government to restore or maintain order is under intense scrutiny, and questions about the role of government in correcting the social and political ills that are behind the disorder. So far the governor has not had to deal with major natural disasters—a devastating tornado or a historic flood for examples.

Plus—it’s a campaign year. Additionally, the instability of national leadership, legislative action to overturn the will of the people on the so-called “Clean Missouri” initiate of 2016, and the August ballot issue to expand Medicaid and the state funding responsibilities that will go with it constitute a salad bar of issues to go with the buffet of crises facing a governor who has been given an average-sized plate.

Governor Henry Caulfield in late 1931 once ordered an immediate 26% cut in the state budget to deal with the depression’s major impact on state finances when retail sales were down by half and unemployment was rising toward a 1932 level of thirty-eight percent. His successor, Guy B. Park in 1933 faced a state treasury holding only $15,000 with a $300,000 payroll to meet. Central Missouri Trust Company loaned the state enough money to pay its bills and to match available federal funds for depression relief until a special legislative session could enact new revenue measures—a gross receipts tax that was later replaced with the state’s first sales tax.

A plethora of problems faced Republican Governor Forrest Donnell in 1941, the first being the refusal of the Democrat-dominated legislature to certify his election at the start of the year and, as the year wound down, putting Missouri on a war footing.

Governor Warren Hearnes faced civil unrest during the Civil Rights era and in the wake of the murder of Martin Luther King, calling out the National Guard at times to maintain order.

Other governors have dealt with killer heat waves or 500-year floods. But the Parson administration will be remembered for 2020, a year in which crisis after crisis came to Missouri.

We have watched his almost-daily briefings and have watched as he and administration members and private organizations have scrambled and worked to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and its myriad effects. The civil unrest in the streets will remain as extreme civil discomfort long after the streets are clear and a record is yet to be written on whether Missouri—and the nation—at last really will do something about that discomfort after decades of talk but insufficient progress being made to limit chances for the streets to blaze again.

The economy will come back although it might take years. Missouri and the country had finally put the 2008 recession far back in its rear view mirror when all of this hit but that experience should remind us that a quick fix to today’s economic ills can best be hoped for but not counted on.

A couple of times we have seen Governor Parson show some irritation with a reporter or a published story during his briefing, a circumstance that might best have been handled with a phone call rather than a public criticism. But we’re willing to cut him a little slack, given the pressures he feels, the burden he carries, and the daily stress of a job that has become far more than any governor we know about. The passage of time will evaluate whether his leadership in this unprecedented time is, or was, effective and long-lasting.

Missouri has seldom needed as steady a hand on the tiller as we need one now. Missourians viewing today’s challenges and responses through their personal partisan lenses might differ on how this governor is doing in the moment. But he is Theodore Roosevelt’s man in the arena.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Who among us would want to be carrying the burden of office that this governor is carrying? Who among us would want to be in the arena he is in?

Frankly, we think he is fighting the good fight. And we look forward to the day—as he undoubtedly does—when we can again live off a menu rather than deal with a crisis buffet.

Us vs. It—part VII, Thoughts from a Quiet Street, Pandemic edition

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A lot more thinking happens on the quiet street when you can’t mingle with your usual social groups and when you have to stand in the middle of the street to talk to your neighbor. It is amazing how profound one can be if the only one you can talk to up close is yourself.

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We’ve been keeping a journal of our thoughts about the pandemic year since March 28. No idea when we’ll stop because there’s no idea when the virus will stop. It’s not too late for you to start one, too. And you should. The State Historical Society has suggested it as a worthwhile time-filler for you and as a valuable historical resource in the future for those who want to see what life was like during this event. The society has some journals from the Spanish Influenza years and they give us some insight behind the newspaper headlines we have in our microfilmed newspaper files (about 60-million pages worth). Personally, a lot of mental wandering goes on as we reflect on each day’s events. Hopes and fears. Anger and frustration. Funny occurrences. Next-door sorrow. The disappearance of our children’s inheritances. Struggles to pay the rent, the mortgage, and the grocery and pharmacy bills. The sound of birds as we take our daily walks. The real story of this era will be found in the daily journals we keep and put into historical societies and other archives. And what we are experiencing can be instructive decades from now (we hope) when another pandemic sweeps the world.

As long as you are cooped up, write about it. It can be therapeutic.

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Today, tomorrow, and Friday are all that’s left of this legislative session, a historic one because of the circumstances facing it. The legislative session of 1820 when lawmakers created state government, the sessions leading up to the Civil War and the turbulent governance years during the war, and the longest session in history after adoption of the 1945 Constitution might be considered equally unique. The 1945 session that started on January 3 lasted 240 days for the House, which adjourned on December 12, 1946, about three weeks before the 1947 session began. The Senate met for 251 days and adjourned on November 25. The legislature met every other year back then but the 1945 session ran through ‘46 because the legislature had to change so many laws to make them conform to the new Constitution.

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This session will be remembered because of the virus that extended spring break, caused a re-write of the state budget, and rewrote the rules for floor debate, not to mention the images of masked people in committee hearings and on the chamber floors. Depending on how irrational the omnibus bills that have materialized in the closing weeks because so many different issues were combined in one bill because of lack of time for regular processes, we might see an unusual number of vetoes or court cases challenging the legality of the bills passed.

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This business of quarantining might not seem as difficult to retired people as those with jobs. Retired people have been working from home for years.

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We do wish our state and national leaders would don masks when they go out in crowds or to check on how well businesses are reopening. This is not a time for, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Please, folks, be the example of what you promote.

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We suppose a lot of you have binge-watched a lot of television in the last several weeks. Your vigilant observer and his faithful companion are going to have to make a list of all the shows we’ve been binge-watching, just to keep track of which ones we’ve exhausted, which ones we’ve tried and didn’t think merited continuing, and which ones are still active. The other night we accidentally watched a third episode of something we gave up on after two shows several weeks ago. If we don’t keep a list we’re probably going to waste another 46 minutes on the fourth episode sometime in the future.

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Nancy has the sewing machine humming today making masks. She made a mask for informal occasions last week and she’s working on a “tuxedo” mask for me now that I can wear for a formal occasion or when I want to look as dignified as I can look with hair that hasn’t been this long since the high school senior play when I was a cousin in “Hillbilly Wedding.” You probably haven’t heard of it. For good reason.

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Cole County kicks off its bicentennial year with an event at Marion on June 5th. Maybe I can wear my formal mask for that. Marion was the first county seat of Cole County, back before Moniteau County was split away from us. Our first courthouse and county jail were built on Howard’s Bluff, just down Highway 179 from the Marion Access to the Missouri River. For most of the county’s history, we’ve been told it was named for Stephen Cole, “pioneer settler and Indian fighter.” But that’s about all we’ve known about him. We’ve spent the last couple of months or more trying to learn more about him. And we’ve come up with some surprising stuff. If you want to know about it, come out to Marion on June 5th. We’re going to be joined by some Cole ancestors.

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As far as we have been able to determine, Stephen Cole was never in Cole County unless he stopped here while canoeing back and forth from Boonville to St. Charles.

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Something we’ve noticed when we go on our almost-daily two mile walks through the neighborhood. Men drivers who go past us are more likely to wave than the women. And all drivers have a tendency to swerve into the other lane of the street even though we’re hugging the curb when they go by.   We always walk toward oncoming traffic, which we were taught long ago is the proper way to do it.

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A few nights ago we were on YouTube and came across Johnny Carson’s 17th anniversary Tonight Show. It occurred to us that we enjoyed Carson because he was funny. Today’s late-night hosts seem to have lost that spirit. Of course, Johnny Carson didn’t have Donald Trump to kick around.

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Therefore, we’re thinking of using this space next week for some Coronavirus humor.

Us vs. It—part II, Waist deep

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At the height of the Vietnam War one of the nation’s greatest folk singers began performing an allegorical song called “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.”

When Pete Seeger performed it on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour more than fifty years ago, the song became part of a national controversy because many people, apparently including the CBS censors, thought that the next-to-last verse criticized President Johnson’s increasing investment of American lives in what some already thought was an unwinnable war.

It didn’t help that Seeger was among those blacklisted during the McCarthy Era (he was part of The Weavers, the group that brought folk singing to early popularity. But the group was too liberal for McCarthyites) and he was still considered somewhat “leftist,” therefore, “subversive.”

The CBS censors cut the song out of the show but when Seeger performed it on a later program—one of the last in the show’s brief run—it was allowed to stay in, perhaps because of the public reaction to its deletion the first time.

We keep hearing President Trump talk about the need to re-open the country or to get big-time sports going again even as he also says we’re headed for the deadliest part of the Coronavirus assault. The shutdown of a part of the economy—the hospitality industry—is a big blow to his personal interests and reopening the country, as he likes to put it, would certainly be to his benefit. We make the observation without implying that he is driven only by his personal economic concerns but his insistence that reopening business in the wake of the ongoing pandemic brings Pete Seeger’s song from another era to mind. It was the next-to-last verse that got Seeger and the Smothers Brothers in trouble then and it might get this observer in trouble today, at least with some people. Have at it in the comment area at the end if you wish—either way. Just remember our civility guidelines.

Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

It was back in nineteen forty-two,
I was a member of a good platoon.
We were on maneuvers in-a Louisiana,
One night by the light of the moon.
The captain told us to ford a river,
That’s how it all begun.
We were — knee deep in the Big Muddy,
But the big fool said to push on.

 

The Sergeant said, “Sir, are you sure,
This is the best way back to the base?”
“Sergeant, go on! I forded this river
‘Bout a mile above this place.
It’ll be a little soggy but just keep slogging.
We’ll soon be on dry ground.”
We were, waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.

 

The Sergeant said, “Sir, with all this equipment
No man will be able to swim.”
“Sergeant, don’t be a Nervous Nellie, ”
The Captain said to him.
“All we need is a little determination;
Men, follow me, I’ll lead on.”
We were, neck deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.

 

All at once, the moon clouded over,
We heard a gurgling cry.
A few seconds later, the captain’s helmet
Was all that floated by.
The Sergeant said, “Turn around men!
I’m in charge from now on.”
And we just made it out of the Big Muddy
With the captain dead and gone.

 

We stripped and dived and found his body
Stuck in the old quicksand.
I guess he didn’t know that the water was deeper
Than the place he’d once before been.
Another stream had joined the Big Muddy
‘Bout a half mile from where we’d gone.
We were lucky to escape from the Big Muddy
When the big fool said to push on.

 

Well, I’m not going to point any moral,
I’ll leave that for yourself
Maybe you’re still walking, you’re still talking
You’d like to keep your health.
But every time I read the papers
That old feeling comes on;

We’re, waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.

Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.


Waist deep! Neck deep! Soon even a
Tall man’ll be over his head, we’re
Waist deep in the Big Muddy!
And the big fool says to push on!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXnJVkEX8O4

We are not implying in this entry that President Trump is “the big fool” of today’s “war.” That would be name-calling and we do not believe name-calling either solves problems or ennobles the person who has nothing of intrinsic value to otherwise add to a conversation.

A blogger, Chimesfreedom*, has a nice piece about Seeger’s performance of the song on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Tom and Dick Smothers were constantly at war with the CBS censors and Seeger’s performance of the song on their season-opening show in 1967 led to a loud public fight about censorship.

http://www.chimesfreedom.com/2014/01/28/the-censored-pete-seeger-performance-on-the-smothers-brothers-comedy-hour/

The brothers’ constant fight with CBS about the content of their show led the network to abruptly cancel it, despite good ratings, after just two years. It was replaced by Hee-Haw.

Chimesfreedom is a blog with an unnamed “editor-in-chief” who describes himself as “a writer and professor in New York.”

Dr. Crane of truth and lying

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(The cynical observation that “you can tell when a politician is lying; his lips move” is easy to make in these times but it also is unfair to the large majority of people we elect to serve us. We like to think good people are elected to work in a badly-flawed system where they find their principles challenged daily. Make no mistake: there are liars abroad which is why we have extensive fact-checking after each presidential debate or presidential rally, news availability, or statement. It is comforting to think, no matter how realistic such thoughts are, that the more honest person will emerge victorious. The real world doesn’t always work that way but we cannot abandon hope. Here’s Dr. Crane on

THE TRUTH IN ADVERTISING

Listen, young man! The cleverest man in the world is the man that tells the truth, and tells it all the time, not occasionally.

Sometimes you can profit by a lie, but it is like dodging bullets; you never know when you are going to get hurt.

Lying is a game. Sometimes it is a very exciting game. But it is essentially gambling. And gambling, any sort of gambling, is not business.

The fundamental laws of business are just as accurate and as well established as the principles of geometry.

It is hard to see this, for our visual range is limited. Most us can see the crooked dollar coming today, but not the ten straight dollars it is going to lose us tomorrow.

Real business success is cumulative. It grows like a snowball. And the one thing that makes it keeps us growing, even while we sleep, is our persistent truthfulness and dependableness.

If you put an advertisement in the paper announcing goods worth five dollars for sale at two dollars, and if the people come and buy, and find out the stuff is not worth ten cents, you may make a one day’s gain, but you have alienated a lot of indignant customers and have started to saw away the posts that sustain your reputation.

If you have a store rented for a week only and propose to conduct a sacrifice sale of goods that will make everybody disgusted who buys then, then perhaps you may lie with a high hand and stretched-out arm.

But if you are in the town to stay, and want regular, returning, increasing, satisfied and friendly customers, it will pay you to stick to the old-fashioned truth.

Exaggeration is lying. It does not take long for the people in the community to get the habit of discounting twenty-five percent of all you say.

If you continually overstate and vociferate you must keep on getting louder, until you soon become incoherent.

But if you habitually state only what is soberly, honestly true, by and by everything you say will be away above par.

A man’s repute for truthfulness is as much a part of his capital as are his store and stock; so much so that he can raise money on it.

As civilization progresses, business becomes more and more an affair of credit, of trust. The very foundation of big business is trustworthiness. Therefore if you are ever going to get beyond the peanut-stand and push-cart stage of merchandise you must establish a basis of dependableness.

There is not one thing in this world, young man, that can be of as much value to you as building up a reputation such that men will say, “your word is as good as your bond.”

It is well to be clever and keen and Johnny-on-the-spot, it is well to look out for number one and to know a good bargain, but best of all is to have the world say of you:

“Whatever that man says can absolutely be relied upon.”

Dr. Crane on thinking

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(Dr. Frank Crane left the pulpit as a Methodist minister after 28 years to become a writer and newspaper columnist. The New York Times wrote in his 1928 obituary, “His message always was one of uprightness of living, sincerity of thinking and ‘sweet reasonableness.’” We could use a few doses of that sort of thing these days of division and derision, so we have been sharing some of his thoughts at the start of each week.)

SLOVENLY THOUGHTS

Clean up your thoughts.

Don’t have your mind looking like the dining-table after a banquet, or the floor after a political meeting. Sweep it and dust it and put the ideas away where they belong.

Don’t have a waste-basket mind.

Or a top-bureau-drawer mind.

It doesn’t do you much good to have a grand idea, or a wonderful impression, or a strong passion, if you don’t know where to put it.

I notice when I talk to you that you have a good many interesting notions. The trouble is they are all higgledy-piggledy; they have no unity, coherence, order, organization.

You think, but you don’t think anything out. Your wheat is full of chaff.

Perhaps I can help you if you will lend me your ear for a space.

  1. Don’t pick up some opinion you hear and make it your own because it sounds fine, and go to passing it out, without carefully examining it, scrutinizing, cross-questioning and testing it.
  2. One of the best tests of any opinion (not an infallible, but very valuable, test) is “Will it work?” If it won’t something’s wrong with it, nine times out of ten. That last brilliant notion of yours—hundreds of sensible people have had it, and discarded it, because it wouldn’t work.
  3. Don’t let anybody make you think you owe a certain amount of belief in a thing simply because you can’t disprove it. Nor be deceived by the argument, “If that doesn’t account for it, what does?” You don’t have to account for it at all. Some of the most pestiferous bunk has got itself established by this kind of reasoning. You don’t have to believe or disbelieve everything that comes along; most things you must hang up and wait.
  4. Don’t be afraid to say, “I don’t know.” It’s a sign that you know what you do know.
  5. Ask questions. Don’t be ashamed of appearing ignorant. What you ought to be ashamed of is seeming to understand when you don’t.
  6. Classify. Education is nothing but the art of classification. Keep a scrap-book. Keep an index rerum. And classify.
  7. Waste no time in acquiring “general information.” Always read and study with a purpose. Look up subjects; don’t just read books. Books are to be referred to, consulted, not to be read through—that is, as a rule.
  8. Be a friend and daily companion to the dictionary and encyclopedia. Look things up.
  9. Define. Practise defining. Practise telling what a thing is not, as well as what it is.
  10. Get clear ideas of what you don’t know. Then you can see better what you do know.
  11. Write. Not for publication, necessarily, but for yourself. Writing accustoms you to choose just the right words. Beware of adjectives, especially two of them. Favor nouns. Use simple, short words. They mean more and carry further.
  12. And never hurry or worry.

Sometimes you miss a turn

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—and you wind up in part of a long-ago Missouri political embarrassment.

I was headed back to my Illinois home town of Sullivan for a brief visit a few weeks ago when I missed the entrance to I-72 from Highway 54 and wound up in Griggsville, Illinois, a small town of about fifteen-hundred people that fifty years ago, or so, was linked to Jefferson City because of an event that some people in Griggsville and elsewhere thought was a major scandal.

Whatever you want to call it, the incident made national headlines—even in the New York Times. The incident/scandal came to mind as I saw the big sign painted on the wall of a downtown Griggsville tavern, just around the corner from city hall. The incident was known in Jefferson City—and Griggsville— as the Great Purple Martin Massacre. Griggsville had started calling itself the “Purple Martin Capital of the Nation” just two years earlier. At the time it was the home of Trio Manufacturing Co, the nation’s leading producer of Purple Martin bird houses.

This is the story, then, of how a little Illinois town and Missouri’s capital city suddenly had a lot in common.

It was the summer of 1967, a usual hot and muggy Monday night in the heart of downtown Jefferson City when five men armed with shotguns invaded the grounds of the Executive Mansion, ready to kill. It was August 21, fifty-two years ago today.

Governor Hearnes had been bothered for a month or more by smelly, noisy, roosting birds in the trees around the mansion, His spokesman told New York Times reporter Douglas Kneeland (whose career later included coverage of somewhat larger stories such as Charles Manson’s murders, Patty Hearst’s kidnapping, the Kent State shootings, Richard Nixon’s “Saturday night massacre,” the firing of special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox, and four presidential campaigns), that Hearnes “said to a sergeant in the State Highway Patrol who was on duty at the mansion on Monday, ‘Let’s try to do something about these birds.’”

The sergeant apparently took that to mean the governor had ordered a “hit” on the thousands of noisy starlings, maybe as many as ten-thousand, around the old white-painted mansion (Betty Hearnes later led the effort to wash off decades of paint so the beautiful brick could be seen). The word was passed along to Stan Diemler, the assistant to the director of the Department of Planning and Construction, who recruited two other employees, Roy Renn and Earl Campbell. They invited two other state workers, Ed Plogsted and Larry Jarrett to go starling hunting. This wasn’t the first time shotguns had been used to encourage starlings to find other roosting places. Diemler had consulted with the Conservation Commission on previous occasions and had been encouraged to poison the birds.

“Last time we tried poisoning them we didn’t kill any birds and just killed six pet squirrels,” he said later.

The shooting started about 9 p.m. Street lights provided limited visibility of the clusters of birds on the limbs above the men. About one-hundred shots were fired into the trees and about 2,000 birds dropped to the ground. But, said the spokesman, “In the course of the shooting, a little old lady called a state biologist who was a neighbor of hers and said someone was shooting those lovely birds.” The biologist showed up, got the killers to stop shooting, and started looking at the carcasses.

Not a single starling was found. The birds were Purple Martins, most of which were hauled away to be cremated. But some were turned over to the Missouri Department of Conservation, which confirmed that the five men had murdered birds protected by state and federal law and international compacts.

“It’s a sad story. I just wish to hell we could redo the whole thing,” the spokesman told Kneeland. “We made a mistake and we’re sorry. The Governor regrets this thing more than anyone else at the present time. He never would have condoned the shooting of Purple Martins. Nobody is his right mind would, particularly since we had a wet spring and there are a lot of mosquitoes around here.

You know, this has been done for several years previous to this. It has been S.O.P., standard operating procedure. Now the question has arisen in our minds as to whether we have been killing starlings all these years or Purple Martins.”

National umbrage made itself felt almost immediately. The National Audubon Society Executive Director Charlie Callison, a former director of the Conservation Federation of Missouri, admitted the birds do migrate in large flocks about that time of year. But, “If their droppings are offensive to anyone, all they have to do is call upon the local fire department to chase them out of the local trees with water from a hose line.”

Truth to tell, Purple Martins and Starlings can be easily confused, particularly in the dark, especially by amateur bird observers (as opposed to the more serious bird-watchers). Purple Martin Place, an internet site that advocates for the Martins, says they’re sometimes confused with Tree and Barn Swallows and European Starlings.

The European Starlings are darkly colored with some feathers of iridescent green or purple. Purple Martins are “blackish” colored. Males are “blueish-blackish” while females have chests that are creamy colored or grayish. The most distinguishing feature is the beak.

The European Starling beak is “long pointy and deadly…designed to unearth ground dwelling insects…bright yellow in color in both males and females. The shape of the head is more narrow and longer.”   The Purple Martin beak is “ALWAYS dark colored and much shorter with a downward curve…much wider at the base as it is designed to catch insects while flying.”

Within twenty-four hours the incident had gained national attention. Federal Game Management Agent John Hague, who lived in St. Joseph, was ordered to start a federal investigation.

Letters began to pour into Jefferson City from individual bird lovers and bird advocacy organizations demanding the heads of the shotgun five.

“Yes,” said Cole County Prosecutor Byron Kinder, “I’ll file charges,” a statement that quickly put long-time Magistrate Judge O. Lee Munger in the spotlight. “Let’s have a hearing,” he said.

The hearing November 15 was, as you might expect, a colorful event, highlighted by testimony from M. D. Anglin of Berryville, Arkansas, who once described Berryville as being “about eight miles, as the crow flies, to the Missouri line,” an interesting observation for the President of the National Association for the Protection and Propagation of Purple Martins and Bluebirds (NAPPPM&B), who claimed he had “fooled around with Purple Martins and Bluebirds” for 56 of his 62 years. He disagreed with the defense that Purple Martins had been known to break tree limbs. “Never heard of it before in my life,” he said. He maintained the only way to keep Purple Martins from flocking into a tree was to “cut the tree down,” a comment that prompted Kinder to protest, “But, Mr. Anglin, only God can make a tree!”

Anglin complained that man had spoiled nature with pesticides, insecticides, and even birth control pills for birds. He charged that most people won’t know anything about birds except that they have feathers and can fly. Personally, he said, he would rather clean up after Purple Martins and do without the mosquitoes they eat. As for Starlings—they’re so bad that even cats wouldn’t eat them.

“I don’t want to cut their throats,” he said referring to the five defendants. “Or I don’t want to see them shot because they didn’t know the difference between a Purple Martin and a Starling. If you shot everyone who didn’t know the difference, you’d have one big funeral.”

Munger and defense attorney Bud Wilbers hoped to keep any mention of Governor Hearnes out of the proceedings. But Anglin, who called himself “a fellow Democrat,” said he’s heard all kinds of reports about the killings, even that the governor——

But shouts from the dozen spectators, the two lawyers, and the judge cut that part of his testimony short.

Wilbers withdrew the earlier “not guilty” plea from the five shooters, who pleaded “guilty,” although Wilbers doubted Kinder could have made much of a case because it could not be determined which of the five men actually killed or wounded all those birds. Besides, “the defendants felt a moral obligation” not to “hide behind the law.”

Kinder, who had a bit of a flamboyant side at times, argued that the honest intentions of the men made no difference and that they should have looked into “what species they were dealing with” before they started shooting.

Munger wanted to know three things “for my own conscience” from the accused killers. Had the men been acting on their own or at the request of “someone else,” if they knew the birds were Purple Martins, and whether they would have shot them even if they had known it.

Diemler said “someone else’ had made the request. He said he decided to use shotguns because “this is the way it was done in the past” in getting rid of starlings. And, no, he wouldn’t have shot the birds if he’d know they were protected by law.

The five threw themselves on the mercy of the court. Munger find each of them fifty dollars plus $12.10 in court costs.

Among the onlookers were Thomas Coulson, the editor of the Purple Martin Capital News, published in Griggsville, who brought with him Wayne Bradshaw and George Mobus, a photographer and writer for the paper. They described themselves as representatives of the Griggsville Wild Bird Society, which had a membership of 12,000. He described the organization as having a “Madison Avenue approach” to selling the concept of protecting wildlife.

“We thought by this time in the Midwest everyone knew the difference between a Purple Martin and a Starling either by sight or sound,” he lamented. “It will take years again to build the martin bird society in this area.”

He found Munger’s judgment unsatisfactory. “If I went out and shot a duck that wasn’t in season I’d be fined $25 or $50 for each duck I shot. But here we had 2,000 federally protected species slaughter and all it cost them was $50 for the whole lot.” He considered the possibility the case could be prosecuted by federal authorities (it wasn’t). And, in noting that the birds are protected by compacts with other nations, “It could go as far as the United Nations.” It didn’t.

Retired Presbyterian minister A. B. Jackson, in his weekly column in the Jefferson City Sunday News and Tribune, observed a couple of weeks later that various groups were demonstrating for their rights in those days and “I suppose the purple martins would have liked to have some rights, but somehow they didn’t seem to have. The ‘purple martin incident’ is over, and a lot of folks would like it to be forgotten, but it leaves some unanswered questions. Such as, who ordered the shooting and why didn’t he come forward and take the blame? When someone said at the trial that the only way to get rid of the birds was to cut down the trees, someone remarked, ‘But only God can make a tree.’ True, but it is also true that only God can make a purple martin and it will take him some time to replace the 2,000 which were killed.”

For months after the trial, Governor Hearnes’ office received The Purple Martin Capital News, which had covered the massacre as most newspapers cover major wars. Prosecutor Kinder, who once opined that his knowledge of birds was not very extensive although he felt he could tell the difference between an ostrich and a hummingbird, also received gifts for several months, including a stuffed bird.

The incident appears not to have caused lasting damage to the major participants. Hearnes was elected to a second term as governor. Kinder became a widely-known circuit judge. Diemler later was a deputy sheriff and then Cole County Clerk. The incident is remembered, if it is remembered at all, as one of life’s embarrassing moments, although Purple Martin lovers would never dismiss it that lightly.

And Griggsville, Illinois, remains a small town about sixty miles west of Springfield, a town whose streets are lined with Purple Martin houses including a 70-foot tall, 562-apartment complex for the birds. Trio Manufacturing, founded in 1947, was a leading maker of television antennas until founder J. L. Wade started building Purple Martin houses and selling them throughout the nation. Wade, by then 93, sold his company—then known as Nature House and Nature Society, in 2006 to Erva Tool and Manufacturing Co., of Chicago. Production of Purple Martin houses ended in Griggsville in March of 2007 and the twenty-two employees were laid off. Erva today makes a lot of metal lawn and garden equipment, still makes metal Purple Martin Houses, and “the World’s Greatest Squirrel Baffles” (that’s the real name) to keep squirrels out of bird houses. And the company ships directly from its factory. No Amazon involved.

When I told the folks at the Griggsville City Hall I was from Jefferson City, Missouri it didn’t cause a stir. They hadn’t heard about the connection between Griggsville and the big state government scandal in Jefferson City so long ago.

It’s a nice, clean, little town just off I-72. You’d like it. And I bet if somebody says Griggsville is for the birds, the folks there would smile and say, “It sure is.”

Governor Mike and First Lady Teresa Parson have moved to temporary quarters while a much-needed extensive renovation and repair is made to the Governor’s Mansion. One nice touch during that effort might be to add a Purple Martin house to the place.   Have a little dedication ceremony for it. Invite the mayor of Griggsville. I bet he’d enjoy it.

(Photo credits: Griggsville—Bob Priddy; Mansion—Missouri Secretary of State; Purple Martin—Audubon.com)

Bob

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More than forty years ago, in the months before we set up The Missourinet, when we were still in local radio in Jefferson City, a new guy showed up to cover city council meetings. He was working for a then-new FM station that hadn’t shown much in terms of news coverage but he’d been hired as the news director and he arrived determined to carve a place in this market for a new news voice.

I was impressed with this kid right away. And I was impressed with him right up to the day he died, Sunday, a third day after gall bladder removal surgery.

I liked Bob Watson’s ambition and his work ethic right away. He wanted to be part of the Missourinet when we started it and I kept putting him off through several cycles of new reporters on our staff because I didn’t want to tell him he just didn’t have the kind of voice we wanted to have on the air. I respected his commitment to reporting, his desire to be a good reporter, the persistence he brought to his work. On top of that, he was a good guy. But finally, I forced myself to break the news to him. I was sorry I had to disappoint him.

Bob left the radio station and worked for the local television station where his conscientious behind-the-scenes role shaped the content of the newscasts. Fortunately, Betty Weldon, the owner of the News-Tribune, saw in Bob Watson the kind of reporter she wanted on her newspaper staff. She hired him more than thirty years ago; Bob said it was the best thing that ever happened to him. That is where he carved his place. In years to come, when people look at the microfilms of the newspaper for the last thirty years they will find the byline of Bob Watson everywhere in the News-Tribune. I used to joke that there were times when he wrote the entire front page. While he might not have really done that, he came darned close a lot of times. His passion for reporting is reflected in the volume and the quality of solid reporting on those pages.

Mrs. Weldon died several years ago and the family sold the newspaper to an Arkansas-based company that, unlike many businesses that are buying the media today, maintains a high standard of local news coverage. A few months ago it named Bob its employee of the year.

He was the statehouse reporter for the newspaper and was a tenacious questioner of governors and lawmakers—-there were times when some of his colleagues had to force themselves to interrupt him to get OUR questions in. He, as all good reporters, hated vagueness and contradictions from the newsmakers. He never backed down in questioning their statements or their intentions. I knew when I read a Bob Watson story that it was accurate, balanced, and thoroughly-developed.

We sat at the Senate press table for many years, both of us at times going into what I call “screen saver mode,” Bob because he dealt with a sleep disorder and me because my work day had passed the eight-hour mark by 1 p.m. most of the time. Both of us always had our recorders running so we didn’t miss anything.

Bob’s coat pockets always bulged with pens of multiple colors. He had a color-coded system of note-taking of some kind that I never asked him to explain. His notes were always neat, his handwriting always clear—while most of us at the table filled notebooks with scrawls that only we could read.

One of his last stories was published on the anniversary of the first moon landing. It was about the reunion of the Apollo 11 astronauts with their space capsule that happened to be at the state capitol on July 20, 1970. Bob knew that I had broadcast the event and he tracked me down at a family gathering in Colorado for an interview. He wasn’t feeling well and had taken a rare day off from work the day before and still wasn’t back up to snuff but he had to get the story, had to find the person he wanted to interview, wanted to tell the tale.

That’s a good reporter for you. As long as you can drag yourself to the keyboard, there’s reporting to be done, a story to be told.

One thing Bob did that I never have done—-a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/reporterbob

You’ll find a lot of his own words and informal photos that capture the spirit we’ll remember, his joy of being a journalist, his love of his family (official and unofficial families), a bit of his self-deprecating humor, and a face that says kindness, steadfastness, and  “character” in both senses of the word.

We have lost invaluable institutional memory. We have lost a good friend, a man who committed his life to good journalism, a newsroom mentor. His church has lost a willing worker, a good soul. His children have lost a proud parent, his grandchildren a proud grandfather. All of us have richer lives because God gave us Bob.

When I dropped in at his room at St. Mary’s hospital Saturday, the day after his surgery and shortly after the nurses had gotten him up for his a post-surgery shuffle to the end of the hall and back, I asked him, “Watson, what’s a good Presbyterian boy like you doing in a place like this?” He took it in all good humor. We talked for a few minutes but just before I left I said, “You know, people are going to start asking, ‘How can you have the gall to ask that question?’ after this.”

“You don’t have to have a gall bladder to have gall,” he answered with a weak smile.

That was Bob Watson.

(The photo is from the News Tribune “contact” page)

 

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—–