Category Archives: museums

George 

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I’ve written about George Will before in these entries, a conservative columnist I admired for his thinking in a time when many on both sides don’t, for his eloquence at a time when many merely shout and curse, his insight when many prefer not looking below an ugly surface. Earlier this week, he used something odd from FOX News as the springboard for a powerful essay about an obviously deteriorating, clearly fearful, increasingly worried about how he will be remembered and his efforts to erase history, particularly history of black people. George Will turns 85 on May 4 and unlike our President, he is very much still all there.

If you are a dyed in the wool Trump fan, you won’t make it to the end. If you are a Republican who still believes in service to the country rather than a country serving a President, you might find yourself surprised by how much you agree. If you are a Democrat, you’ll think George nailed it.

From our hilltop, we will not argue with him.  Even when we have disagreed with him, we would not want to debate him. Here’s George with our Friday bonus: (1800) 1 Minute Ago: Trump Falls Apart Staff Handling Him Legacy Panic & Black History Erasure |George Will – YouTube

(We just checked a few minutes ago and saw that the video has been taken down. However, Cockatoo has provided a transcript.  The video ran about 23 minutes.  We’ve adjusted some of the time cues in the interest of complete sentences.)

Something very unusual happened this week. Donald Trump held a cabinet meeting, the kind of organized event where he sits at a very long table, surrounded by people who just agree with everything he says. But this time, things went differently. In the middle of his unclear remarks about trade deals and made up economic wins, Fox News did something they almost never do. They stopped showing it. They just cut away, went to a commercial break, and came back talking about something else entirely.

0:38

When your own supportive news channel, the one that spent years defending everything you said, explaining away every mistake and cleaning up every power grab, decides they can no longer show you to their viewers. That tells you everything you need to know. This wasn’t Fox News protecting Trump. This was Fox News protecting their audience from Trump.

1:02

Because what they saw in that cabinet room was a man clearly falling apart mentally and physically. Even they knew there was no way to put a positive spin on what everyone could plainly see. Let’s look at what actually happened in that meeting, because the clips that got out are truly disturbing. Trump tried to explain recent economic numbers, and I say tried very generously. What he really did was throw out random figures, confuse countries with companies, and at one point completely forgot what he was saying in the middle of a sentence. He said, and these are his exact words, we’re bringing back $400 billion, maybe $500 billion, some say $600 billion from China, from Canada, from the European Union, which is basically Germany if you think about it. And nobody has ever seen numbers like this, the biggest numbers in history.

1:59

None of that means anything. Those aren’t policy ideas. That’s not even a twisted version of the truth. That’s a man reaching for numbers he thinks sound impressive while having no clue what he’s actually talking about. But it’s not just what he said. Look at how he looked physically. The way he gripped the table. The way he leaned forward like he needed the furniture to hold himself up, the way his staff, Carolyn Levitt, Stephen Miller, whoever was there, watched him, the way nurses watch a patient ready to jump in if something went wrong. And afterward, he didn’t take any questions. He didn’t walk over to the reporters. His team rushed him out of there as fast as his weakening body could go. Because they know. Every single one of them knows. Here’s what has become completely obvious.

2:58

Donald Trump’s staff isn’t serving him anymore. They’re handling him. There’s a big difference. Compare how much he appears in public now to his first term. Back then, whether you liked him or not, the man was everywhere. Daily press briefings, hour-long unplanned rants. He would stand in front of his helicopter and just talk.

3:22

It was stream of consciousness, sure, but he was alert and present. Now he barely shows up. When he does, everything is carefully planned. He uses a teleprompter for remarks that he would have made off the top of his head in 2017. Only pre-approved questions are allowed. Media access is limited. And the moment anything goes off script, they pull him away.

3:50

Why? Because the people around him, Stephen Miller, Elon Musk, JD Vance, are no longer working to advance Donald Trump’s goals. They’re pushing their own. While he falls apart in front of everyone.

4:06

There were recent reports that Miller runs a separate private communication line with Trump, feeding him information all day long, basically creating an unofficial power structure that goes around the official White House chain of command. That’s not loyal staff work. That’s a power grab. That’s someone making themselves the real decision-maker, while the president, in name only, gets worse and worse. Elon Musk has openly disagreed with Trump’s own policy statements.

4:44

J.D. Vance is already doing his own interviews, presenting himself as the calm, reliable leader of the administration. These people aren’t serving Trump. They’re using him. They’re getting rich, pushing their own plans, playing the stock market with inside information, and just waiting for the unavoidable moment when he’s too far gone to stop them. Donald Trump has become a figurehead in his own White House, and everyone around him knows it. But here’s where it gets really telling. Here’s where Trump’s mental state becomes impossible to look away from.

5:20 You may have heard about this already. Donald Trump is currently holding up federal infrastructure money, specifically funding for the Gateway Project, which is vital transportation infrastructure for the Northeast, unless he gets his name put on Dallas Airport and Penn Station in New York. Read that one more time. The President of the United States is using blackmail against a sitting senator, Chuck Schumer, to get public buildings renamed after himself. On the surface, this is just sad. It’s the behavior of a deeply insecure narcissist who never got enough attention growing up.

5:43

But it goes deeper than that. Because when you look at the pattern of what Trump has been doing over the past few months, a clear picture forms. And that picture is of a man in total panic about how he’ll be remembered. He renamed the Kennedy Center to include his own name, making it the John F. Kennedy and Donald J. Trump Center for the Performing Arts. He couldn’t even let JFK have that one thing to himself. He’s ordered the construction of a huge arch in Washington DC, a literal monument to himself that historians have compared to the kind of ego-driven projects built by Saddam Hussein and Stalin in their final years. He’s trying to rename military bases, government buildings, any structure that has federal money attached to it. Why?

Why this sudden obsession with monuments? Because history shows us that when dictators sense the end is near, whether that’s political, physical, or both, they speed up their monument building. Saddam Hussein’s palace construction went into overdrive in the late 1990s when international sanctions had him isolated. Stalin’s worship of his own image grew stronger as his paranoia and health got worse in his last years. It’s a pattern. When authoritarian leaders know their time is running out, they try to lock themselves into stone because they understand something basic.

They’ve lost control of their own story. And Trump knows he’s lost control. You can see it in his social media posts. You can hear it in the way he’s been talking lately. He started this week, and I’m not making this up, talking about whether he’s going to get into heaven. He just posted it out of nowhere. He wrote something like, the nasty fake news keeps reporting that I said I’m not going to heaven. It was a joke, but they reported seriously because they’re terrible people who want to make me look bad. First of all, nobody was reporting that. He brought it up on his own. He’s the one who can’t stop thinking about it.

8:13

Second, Donald Trump, a man who never talked about God except to win over religious voters, who couldn’t name a single Bible verse when asked, who famously said he’s never asked God for forgiveness, is now fixated on whether God will judge him. That’s not politics. That’s psychology. That’s a man facing the reality of his own death and realizing that no amount of spin can change what’s coming. There are reports from inside Mar-a-Lago that he’s been having conversations about his funeral, about how people will remember him, about what will be said about him after he’s gone. He’s trying to negotiate with history in real time, and he’s losing that negotiation.

You want to know the most perfect symbol of Trump’s panic about his legacy? The Kennedy Center situation. After Trump forced his name onto the building, after he held a big renaming ceremony, after he stood there smiling like he’d done something meaningful, the Kennedy Center shut down. Just closed, with no set date to reopen.

Officially, they said it was for renovations and reorganization. But let’s be honest about what really happened. Donald Trump couldn’t stand the idea that his name would be next to the legacy of a real president. A president remembered for his vision, his way with words, and his sacrifice. So rather than let that comparison exist, rather than risk the building not getting the worship he demanded, he just closed it. He took his ball and went home. And here’s my prediction. Write it down and come back to it.

In 10 years, every monument Trump is building right now will be a source of embarrassment. Hotels will remove the Trump name to avoid being boycotted and some already have. Buildings will be given new names. The arch will be torn down or turned into something else. His own children will try to distance themselves from the brand and some already are. The monuments he’s so desperately trying to build won’t protect his legacy.

10:27

They’ll become places people visit to laugh. People will go see Trump’s folly, the way they visit Confederate monuments, not to honor them, but to remember what we got past. Donald Trump senses this. He knows this, and it’s destroying him inside.

10:46

But here’s the thing. This isn’t just about one aging man’s vanity. This obsession with monuments, this panic about his legacy, it’s connected to something much more dangerous. It’s connected to what his administration is trying to cover up. Because at the exact same time Trump is trying to build monuments to himself, his administration is systematically wiping out other people’s history, specifically black history.

11:17

It started right away, from day one of this administration. The rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. The removal of materials from the Smithsonian. The changes to school curriculum, forcing schools to take out discussions of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and the civil rights movement from American history classes. Remember the Enola Gay situation? They ran a computer search for the word gay in federal museum records and just started deleting things. They removed an entire exhibit about the plane that dropped the atomic bomb because the word gay appeared in its name. That’s the level of foolishness we’re dealing with. But it’s foolishness in service of a very specific goal, which is erasing history.

12:11

Now a lot of people rightly said, of course Trump wants to erase black history. He’s a racist. His administration is full of white supremacists. They don’t want those stories to be told. That’s true. But it’s not the whole truth. Because the reason they’re erasing black history isn’t just hatred.

12:32

It’s a deliberate strategy. Fascism needs people to forget history. Authoritarian rule cannot survive if people remember how it works, what it looks like, who it targets, and how it has been fought before. There was a podcast conversation recently between Andrew Schultz and Charlemagne the God that captured this perfectly. Schultz, who, let’s remember, defended Trump, made excuses for Trump, told people they were overreacting about Trump, was now expressing shock at what he was seeing. I never thought I’d see this in America, he said. People being shot in the streets by federal agents, families being ripped apart, armed thugs with badges hunting people down for no reason. And Charlemagne said something so simple, so obvious, and so powerful in response. He said, you never thought it would happen to white people. Because here’s the reality. This is American history. This has always been American history. Where do you think policing in America came from? Slave patrols. That’s it.

13:46

That’s the origin. Armed men given power by the government to hunt down black people, return them to slavery, and terrorize communities into obedience. That’s where American policing started.

14:01

The ICE raids happening right now—agents breaking into homes without warrants, tearing families apart, making people disappear into detention centers. That’s not new. That’s a copy of the Fugitive Slave Laws, where federal agents were given the power to hunt human beings across state lines and drag them back into bondage. The heavily armed police beating protesters in the streets, the government surveillance tracking activists, The criminalization of people helping each other. Black Americans have been living through this for 400 years. Indigenous Americans wrote the book on it with their own blood. What’s happening now isn’t Trump inventing American authoritarianism.

14:48

It’s American authoritarianism finally reaching everyone. And that’s exactly why they need to erase black history. Because if Americans knew that history, if they truly understood it, they would immediately recognize what’s happening right now. If we knew Frederick Douglass, we would know how to speak truth to power. If we knew Harriet Tubman, we would know how to build secret networks of resistance. If we knew Ida B. Wells, we would know how to document terrible acts and force the country to face them. If we knew Fannie Lou Hamer, we would know how to document terrible acts and force the country to face them. If we knew Fannie Lou Hamer, we would know how to organize at the local level and fight corrupt systems. If we knew about the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program, we would know how to build community support networks that make us less dependent on a government that wants us helpless.

15:44

If we knew about the labor movements led by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, we would know how to shut down the economy when those in power refuse to listen. They’re not erasing history because they hate the past. They’re erasing it because they’re afraid of a well-informed future. They’re terrified that if you knew how black Americans resisted slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration, you would know exactly how to resist them. That’s why Trump’s monument-building and history-erasing are two sides of the same authoritarian coin. Build monuments to the regime. Erase monuments to resistance. Control the past. Control the future. Except it’s not going to work. Because here’s what Donald Trump can’t seem to grasp. His legacy is already written. It’s done. It’s finished. No amount of marble or fancy stone or renamed airports is going to change it.

16:56

January 6th will be studies for centuries, not as a patriotic uprising, not as a protest that got out of hand, but as a fascist attempt to overthrow the government by a president who refused to accept that he lost an election. His face will be next to the word insurrection in history textbooks forever. His COVID response, telling people to inject bleach, holding packed rallies while hundreds of thousands of people died, tearing apart pandemic preparedness systems because Obama built them. That’s his legacy. His family separation policy, children locked in cages, toddlers forced to represent themselves in immigration court, thousands of families permanently broken apart. That’s his legacy.

17:46

His two impeachments, his 34 felony convictions, his being found liable for sexual assault, his fraud convictions, his theft of classified documents. That’s his legacy. Future generations aren’t going to ask, was Trump a great president? They’re going to ask, how on earth did Americans fall for this twice? His name isn’t going to stand for greatness.

18:14

It’s going to stand for American decline, the weakening of democracy, and the conman who nearly destroyed the republic. Every monument he builds is one more thing to tear down. Every name he puts on a building is one more name to scrub off. Every arch he orders is one more structure future generations will demolish. That’s his real legacy, and he can’t change it. But you wanna know what the real monument to this era will be? It’s not going to be his arch. It’s not going to be his renamed airport. It’s going to be the resistance. The millions of women who marched the day after his inauguration and kept marching. The sanctuary cities that refused to become part of his deportation machine, the election workers who protected democracy while he sent a mob after them, the journalists he called enemies of the people who kept reporting the truth anyway, the lawyers who filed lawsuit after lawsuit to block his worst actions, the mutual aid networks that fed people when his government shut down. The young people organizing climate protests while he gutted environmental protections.

19:35

The families torn apart by ice who are fighting to be brought back together. The trans kids he tried to erase who refused to disappear. That’s the monument. That’s what will be taught. Not his buildings, not his speeches, but the fact that millions of Americans looked at his authoritarianism and said, no, not here, not us, not ever. The monument to this era is every person who resisted.

20:06

And that monument is being built right now, in real time, by all of us. Which brings me back to Chuck Schumer and that airport naming deal. Senator Schumer, you have one job right now, one very simple job. Do not negotiate with someone using threats. Do not build monuments to tyrants. Do not give this man one more piece of legacy preservation while he’s actively tearing apart American democracy. The answer to Trump’s blackmail should be simple. No. Build the Gateway Project because it’s critical infrastructure and name it after the workers who built it, not the would-be dictator who held it hostage.

20:55

This is a test not just for Schumer, but for every Democrat who claims to be part of the opposition. Are you actually going to push back? Or are you going to make deals with fascism because it’s the easier path?

21:11

But more than that, this is a test for all of us, because Trump’s team is counting on us being worn out. They’re counting on us forgetting. They’re counting on us not remembering how we got here and who showed us the way out. So here’s what we do.

21:27

We write down everything. Every abuse, every lie, every crime. We create the record they’re trying to destroy. We learn the history they’re trying to hide. Read Frederick Douglass, read James Baldwin, read Ida B. Wells, read the scholars they’re removing from universities.

21:48

Learn the strategies of resistance they don’t want you to know about. And we build the other side of the story right now while they’re still in power, so that when this era ends, and it will end, the history that gets taught is the true one. Not Trump’s fantasy, not his monuments, but the real story of what happened and how we made it through. They want us to forget. Our job is to remember everything. If you’ve read this far, you’re part of the resistance. You’re part of that counter-monument we’re building, and I hope you’ll keep building it with me.

Chuck Schumer, do the right thing. No airports, no monuments, no deals with autocrats. And to everyone else, keep fighting. Keep writing things down. Keep learning the history they’re trying to erase. Keep learning the history they’re trying to erase. They’re counting on your silence. Don’t give it to them.

 

A Museum is Dying—And We Should Be Ashamed

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Something more important than Kansas City sports stadiums has come up so I’ll wait to encourage some thinking about that issue until later.   An announcement late last week takes precedence—the planned closing of the Steamboat Arabia museum in Kansas City.

Some readers of these entries know that for almost eight years I have been trying to convince the Missouri General Assembly to keep this irreplaceable historical resource from closing and probably leaving our state.

We have tried to convince the legislature to meet its responsibilities to the people of Missouri by updating an important part of our gambling laws—the casino admission fee. One part of that proposal would have that industry finance a new home for the Steamboat Arabia Museum in Kanas City—or in some other city as long as it stays in Missouri.

But the legislature has refused to end the multi-million dollar scam gave them more than $60 million in unearned profits in the most recent fiscal year, weakened the financial ability of the Missouri Gaming Commission to regulate it and, even worse, has brought our system of seven state-operated veterans homes to the verge of closing one of those homes.

Last Thursday, the Arabia Museum announced that it would be closing a year from now. Many of you know what an incredible experience the museum provides in telling the story of life in Missouri and on the frontier five years before the Civil War.  There is nothing like this museum anywhere.

For those unfamiliar with the story, here it is.

The Steamboat Arabia, bound upstream to deliver winter supplies to sixteen then-small communities and outposts struck a submerged log above Kansas City and sank withing half an hour, taking 200 tons of cargo with it. The boat sank into the soft river mud so quickly that the cargo would not be recovered—-until the winter of 1988-89 when five men located it in a Kansas farm field a half mile away from the present river channel.  They went far in the hole financially and realistically, finding the wreckage fifty feet down and recovering the entire cargo that had been perfectly protected from the deteriorating effects of light and air.

They decided their discovery was too important to be sold and three years later opened the museum that has never take a dime of government funding but has given hundreds of thousands of visitors an unequalled window into the mid-19th century and how our ancestors lived.

I invite you to look at a video at 1856.com to get a taste of what is and what can be—if the state steps in and for once does not allow itself to be influenced or intimidates by a predatory industry untruthfully claiming to be a good corporate citizen.

Our plan has been to increase casino admission fee, set at two dollars per person in 1993, to contemporary dollar values with part of that money going to finance a new building for this incredible historical resource.

Why the casinos?  Because the very existence of casinos in Missouri is based on our riverboat heritage. The industry never promoted “casino gambling” in winning voter approval for it in 1992.  Instead, it promoted “riverboat gambling,” avoiding the red-flag word that might have incited increased opposition.  We still see the results of that campaign in our laws and in our Constitution where casinos are called “excursion gambling boats.”

Thirty years of inflation have greatly increased the contemporary equivalent of two dollars in 1993 money to $4.56 as of September, 2025.  So it is that the state and host cities still split the two dollars for each admission but the casinos keep $2.56. However, inflation works both ways by lowering the buying power of the two dollars they do receive. Two 1993 dollars have the buying power now of 90-cents.

The admission fee is equally split between the gaming commission with its worthy causes that include veterans nursing homes, and the casinos’ host cities.

These calculations mean that the host cities of our casinos are getting 45 cents in today’s valued money while the casino on the riverfront of those cities is making $2.56.  That is not how the legislature thirty-some years ago planned for the situation to be.

These are the five men who spent a cold, wet, muddy and miserable four months digging down to the Arabia and recovering history as it really was lived in 1856 on the frontier.  Two of them have died—Bob Hawley and the older of his two sons, Greg, (the left of the two men in or near the cab). The other three are (L-R)_ Jerry Mackey, Dave Hawley, and David Luttrell.

These five men decided their findings were too important to be sold. They have protected the museum and its teachings and dreamed of expanding it to include, among other things, an entire boat that might have escaped extensive damage in its sinking.

The dream is fading and the museum will disappear if private philanthropists or philanthropic organizations do now act quickly to raise money and if the legislature continues to let the casino industry dictate what state policy will be for that industry.

I have compiled almost 200 pages of charts, tables, and other information showing how this industry, not the legislature nor the gaming commission, is serving the general public as it should.

One of the sad facts accompanying the situation is that the Missouri Gaming Commission has let all of this happen without public comment even as it has watched its own financial resources decline because of decreasing admissions and the decreasing value of the funds the casinos have agree to let it have.  It publishes an annual report but never has put the industry-supplied numbers in any context that would tell the public how the industry has annually mugged the state.

In the most recent fiscal year, the casino industry kept $64.1 million in unearned income that would have stayed with the state and the host cities if the admission fee had been adjusted for contemporary values.  Because inflation also has diminished the purchasing power of the money the casinos DID pay, the state and the cities lost another $30 million.  The lost revenue/unearned profits are on track to be a nine-figure amount this year.

Maybe, now that the museum has announced its planned closure, enough members of the legislature will recognize the seriousness and the urgency of this issue and will find the courage to meet their responsibilities more to the people at home than to the casino people in the Capitol hallways, and will provide funding to keep that museum open and in Missouri.

Leavenworth, Kansas has made a strong offer and the state of Kansas is supporting it.

This is make or break time for Missouri. Frankly, I am pessimistic. I do not believe our legislators have the will to act in the people’s interests rather than the gambling industry’s interests.

All of the numbers I have cited here, and much more, are from a lengthy study, year by year, of how the industry has exploited a flaw in the original admission fee law and now refuses to let the legislature fix it.

Do not misunderstand me. The Missouri General Assembly seems incapable of exercising its policy-making authority on this issue.

The situation is more desperate than ever. The clock is ticking at an increasing rate. The people must act, whether it is in pressuring their elected officials or seeking out those with philanthropic sympathies.

We cannot lose this museum.  We will lose a major part of ourselves and of our history if we do not act now.  As we view the situation at this hour, though, Leavenworth and Kansas will not so much gain the museum as Missouri and Jefferson City will shamefully abandon it.

If you can help or if you know someone who can offer major help, we will be giving ourselves history—and saving history is a reward in itself and a legacy of this generation to generations we will never know.

There’s another video I hope you will watch— One Last Chapter: The Arabia Steamboat Museum.

You know what’s worse than personal disappointment?  The feeling that Missouri will have let down the dreams of the five men who gave us this incredible gift recovered during those cold, wet, muddy months in the winer of 1988 and ’89 because it puts the will of the powerful few above the benefit of the common many.

I’m not sure how much I can believe in the state motto very much:

“Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law.”

The King of the World

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The big black limousine pulls to the curb and out steps a man in a pin-stripe suit, his shiny dark hair slicked back, a bulge on the left side of his coat indicating there’s something behind the handkerchief poking up from the pocket.

He looks around, warily, the toothpick shifting to the other side of his mouth, as he swaggers inside.

His cold, piercing eyes underline his words:

“Nice little university you got here.  Be unfortunate if something happened to it.”  (The implication is clear that it better toe the organization line or something, perhaps several hundred million dollars worth of business, will disappear.)

Or:

“Nice little museum you got here.  We’d like you to change it for us.” (There is a “or else’’ understood in his request.”)

“Nice little law firm you got here.  You crossed the boss one too many times. We’re gonna shut you down.” (No reason for the boss to be subtle about it.)

With some strokes of his pen that produce an unreadable signature, the boss assumes powers to extort tribute from numerous targets, the congress, the law, and the courts be damned.

One of his biggest a few days ago asserts the power to cut off funding for the Smithsonian Institution if it continues exhibits that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.”

And who decides what those programs are?  Who decides what policies degrade shared American values—values apparently established by one man?

Does this mean closing the Museum of the American Indian? The African-American Museum?  The Holocaust Museum?  And the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art with all of its meaningless modernist stuff?

Maryland Governor Wes Moore, the third African American elected to a governorship in
our country calls the effort “disrespectful” and told an interviewer this weekend, “Loving your country does not mean dismantling those who have helped to make this country so powerful and make America so unique in world history in the first place.” Moore is the third black governor in American history, the first in Maryland.

Trump’s says, “Museums in our nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn instead of being “subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history”

That’s Boss Trump’s job.

He also wants to influence what we can read. He has ordered the Institution of Museum and Library Services to be eliminated. That organization provides support for libraries and museums in Missouri and the other 49 states. Can’t have “divisive” things in our libraries that serve diverse audiences.

He has set up the Federal Communications Commission to become a censor of news and entertainment programs.  One of the first targets is Disney and its ABC News unit and their diversity and inclusion practices.  Chairman Brendan Carr says he wants to make sure ABC “ends any and all discriminatory initiatives in substance, not just name,” and that he wants to make sure ABC has “complied at all times with applicable FCC regulations.”  And what about FOX and OAN, One America Network, that is known for its fawning over all things Trump while FOX has had the temerity from time to time to challenge him?  Don’t look for Trump’s FCC to censor OAN, but FOX is no longer above suspicion.

ABC has become just another target in his war on the diversity of voices available to Americans. And he has shut down the Voice of America, greatest international representation of American values, especially in countries under dictatorial governments.

We should be very frightened of his belief he can censor or shut down news organizations that don’t buy his lies.

He has taken over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts so that the only acts it can host are those that fit his definition of “American values.”

He wants to rewrite our history, especially eliminating references to times that non-whites have achieved breakthroughs in a white male-dominated society.

His rabid dog-like attacks on DEI has intimidated NASA into dropping its commitment to flying  the first person of color and the first woman on the moon, had led the Defense Department to eliminate postings about Jackie Robinson’s service during WWII, Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee Airmen, and Pima Indian Ira Hayes, who helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima.

The fact-checking website SNOPES got an email from Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot proclaiming, As Secretary Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department. Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military. It Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the service’s core warfighting mission. The code-talkers website was later restored to the Pentagon website, as were the stories of Major General Charles Calvin Rogers, 1970 black Medal of Honor recipient and Ira Hayes, who was at Iwo Jima.

And don’t forget the silliness of the removal from the internet of the Enola Gay, the first plane to drop an atomic bomb on Japan===because the word “gay” was used in the plane’s name.

And now he thinks he can order European countries to follow this blatantly discriminatory cleansing of our history. He has sent a letter to some large European companies that supply services to our government threatening them unless they adopt his DEI strategy, says The Financial Times.

Like Jack Dawson standing against the railing on the bow of the Titanic and shouting, “I’m King of the World!” the Don, not content with being the Despot of the United States, is dedicated to running the world.

Give me a major segment of your economy to pay off what I consider loans, he has told Ukraine, and I will make peace—a demand and a boast that must include a willing third partner who is proclaimed as a good friend but who has no interest in a peace.

“Pay economic blackmail,” says the Don, not realizing countries don’t pay tariffs but his own citizens will, “and I will let you do business in this country,” while the other countries are beginning to grow closer together and are beginning to plan for themselves instead of bowing to his demands.

He wants Canada and he wants Greenland, the feelings of the people living there notwithstanding in his quest for domination.

However, the people of Greenland should be breathing easier now that “Little Me” Vance has told them the Don will not use the military, his national muscle, to take over their island. He has urged them to embrace “self determination,” apparently failing to understand the Greenlanders long ago determined for themselves that they want to be aligned with Denmark and they don’t want to be under the Don’s “protection,” when all he really cares about are the country’s mineral deposits. “We think we’re going to be able to cut a deal, Donald-Trump style, to ensure the security of this territory,” said Vance to people who think Denmark has done a pretty good job of protecting them from—-China? And Russia, which is far more interested in restoring the Soviet Union and absorbing all of Europe eventually with little apparent interests in little Greenland?

So there he is, the Don standing on the prow of our Ship of State proclaiming himself King of the World.

We know what happened to Jack Dawson and the ship that was once thought to be unsinkable.

Kind of like our Ship of State.

Others in the world can see the rip in the side of the hull caused by Executive Order icebergs.  Others in the world are seeing our great Ship of State going down by the bow.

Some Republicans are starting to wonder if there are lifeboats enough for them.

There aren’t.

And the water is growing colder.

Erifnus Caitnop

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I spent a few minutes with an old friend at another old friend’s funeral a few days ago and we wound up talking about his car that he affectionately calls Erifnus Caitnop.  John Drake Robinson has written some books about the adventures he and Erifnus have shared through the years.  Erifnus has 313 miles on the odometer and John told me his mechanic thinks the car can hit the half-million mile mark.

John doesn’t think he can last that long, though, but he agreed with me that Erifnus is a historical automobile that deserves to be in a museum.

John is a Jefferson City native.  He and his parents attended the same church we go to. His father, B. F. (“Buford,” John fondly calls him) Robinson was a fixture in the state education department for many years and was a beloved and friendly doorkeeper for the Senate for many ears in his retirement. So I have known the Robinsons, father and son, for more than fifty years.

I always feel strange saying something like that—knowing someone for fifty years.

Erifnus is historic because it is the only car that has traveled every mile of every highway in Missouri. 

At least, we think so.  We can’t imagine anyone else being that interested in doing something such as this.  Or maybe as crazy.

But we all have goals in our lives, some more expansive than others.  Driving on every mile of every highway in Missouri became John’s goal, especially while he was the State Tourism Director and had a reason to do all of that traveling.  I suppose he could have used a car from the state motor pool, but he chose Erifnus and, I have been told by one of those who worked with him, he did not always take the most direct route.

John is one of the most personable people you could ever hope to meet. And a lot of people had a chance to meet him in his odyssey.  His biography on Amazon notes:

He penetrated beyond the edges of civilization, peeked into the real American heartland, and lived to tell about it.

His books are “on the road” adventures blending local characters and mom-and-pop food into an archipelago of tasty stories. He dives deep into the wilderness, where the nearest neighbors are coyotes, and the bullfrogs sound like banjo strings.

When an interviewer asked if he ever “heard banjo music,” John replied, “Sure, all the time. And when I do, I grab a big bass fiddle and join in.”

Through all his travels, John shows a deep respect for history, and for the environment. As a former state director of tourism, he heard the question a lot: How can we balance tourism and the environment? His answer: “If we don’t preserve our natural heritage, and put back what we take out, these attractions won’t be worth visiting.”

Called the “King of the Road” by Missouri Life Magazine, John Robinson lives in Columbia, Missouri when he isn’t sleeping in his car. His articles and columns are regularly featured in a half dozen magazines.

This is Erifnus:

It’s a Pontiac Sunfire.  Spell it backwards.

I have been thinking a museum in Jefferson City would be a great place for Erifnus to continue telling its story, and John’s.  Unfortunately, there is no such museum.  We have two historical organizations in Jefferson City but neither has a museum that can accommodate Erifnus—or other historical city and county artifacts for that matter.  I think it’s time we have such a mseum, but that’s a separate discussion.

I’ve contacted a friend at the National Museum of Transportation in Kirkwood to see if Erifnus might find a place in its collection of automobiles, trains, and airplanes.  Jefferson City’s loss could be Kirkwood’s gain.

There’s another historic vehicle in central Missouri that HAS been saved although it’s not on display.  That’s William Least Heat Moon’s Ghost Dancing, the 1975 Ford Econoline van he used in compiling the stories in his famous Blue Highways. It’s in the storage area of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Missouri’s Academic Support Center.

Both vehicles need to be displayed where people can appreciate them, the men who drove them, and the stories they have told that enrich us all.

John lives in Columbia so maybe Erifnus could find a home there, too.  But as a Jefferson City resident, I wish we had a place for it here because this is where John grew up and where his service as Director of the Division of Tourism did so much to create the tales of Erifnus and the stories its driver has written.

The Gun, The School, The Town , The Times

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I took a gun to school once.

In a more innocent time.

A long, long time ago.

It was a revolver that held seven .22-short bullets.

It wasn’t loaded.

Here is the gun:

Well, not really THE gun. Our house burned down three weeks before Christmas when I was a high school freshman.  I lost my coin collection that included a mis-strike nickel that had two heads, several plastic model airplanes, a baseball card collection that probably included a Mantle rookie card, a few Red Man Chewing Tobacco cards, and assorted other baseball cards that would have put both of our children through college had the collection survived, a collection of Lone Ranger novels (since re-accumulated through the years), my old maid aunt Gertrude’s National Geographic collection that began in 1907 (I had looked through only a few as I sought out the ones that had stories about African natives whose lack of above-the-waist attire was very interesting to a boy my age), and the gun.

Today I would be rushed to the principal’s office; my parents would be called; I would be home-schooled for a while, to say the least.

My great-grandfather played the fife for the 126th Illinois Infantry that served under General Sherman at Vicksburg and then was instrumental in gaining control of northern Arkansas, including the capture of Little Rock.  He enlisted in another town in Moultrie County and after the war lived in what we called a big city in those days—Decatur—for sixty more years where he once owned an ice cream store.

His pistol was the first Smith & Wesson pistol.   Not THE first, but—well, you get the idea.

I think I took it to school because we were studying the Civil War in an elementary school class and it was no big deal.

I don’t remember the duck-and-cover drills some children of that vintage practiced, thinking that hiding under a school desk would save them from an Atom Bomb.   We had fire drills, though.  A couple of times a year.  Outside we’d go. Never in rain or snow but I do remember some cold days standing on the sidewalk while the teachers checked every room to make sure one of my classmates hadn’t decided to hide out.

I grew up in two towns in which Abraham Lincoln, then a circuit-riding lawyer, occasionally visited to take part in trials.  I have been told that the one in which I spent the most time had a Sundown Ordinance—no Negroes allowed in town after dark.  (I use the word because that’s the word that was used then.) Many years later I considered the irony of a town where Lincoln was a sometime-lawyer that told black people they were not welcome after sundown.  But then, as I have learned, Lincoln’s own attitudes toward black people were pretty undeveloped then.

My class was the first to graduate from the new high school that I could watch being constructed when I was in my Junior English class in the old high school—which was torn down a few months ago. Some black men from Decatur were part of the construction crew and one day one of my classmates told me he had heard that they planned to move their families to our town after the new school was built and “if they do, there’s going to be trouble.”

I couldn’t understand why he felt that way. I was young, innocent of worldly things.  I did not meet my first black people until the second semester of my freshman college year when the Residential Assistant for my dormitory floor brought a couple of black guys around to every room and introduced them.  To me they were just guys.  Years later, I figured out that the university was integrating the dormitories (I watched the first black football and basketball players perform for the school).  By the time I left, America had undergone a painful change. I had changed, too, picketing a segregated bowling alley one evening with my church group, and came to work in a segregated city with an HBCU that would taste violence during the Civil Rights struggle.

My little town surrounded by the rich land of the Illinois prairie still has high school sports teams unapologetically called Redskins. It’s about fifty miles from the University teams are called the Fighting Illini. My class ring, safely in a bank deposit box, features the abstract image of a Native American Chief.  Or at least the profile of a Native American in an ornate headdress.

Not commenting. Just saying.

One of our World War II heroes was a B-25 pilot who wasn’t satisfied to just fly over his hometown. He buzzed it.  Stood that plane on its wing and flew around the courthouse dome.  That was before we moved there.  By the time we moved there he was our school principal.  Col. Loren Jenne’s Army Air Corps uniform is in the county historical museum.  It’s a really, really good recently-built museum constructed with the help of an advisor for the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield.  Visiting it for a reunion a couple of years ago made me realize how lacking we are in Jefferson City for a good local historical museum.

The town library’s board room holds part of local resident’s collection of 700 hood ornaments and the former Illinois Masonic Home has one of the largest collections of sea shells in the country.

I had a laid-back high school history teacher who once told me he became a teacher because “it was better than working for a living.”  Everybody had to do a report on some historical event for his class. Mine was on the Battle of Gettysburg. It took as long as the battle took—three days. Even then I could write long.

I missed one of the biggest events in town history because I was in college.  Richard Nixon dropped in on this little town of about 3600 during his 1960 campaign. Town leaders had invited him and challenger John Kennedy to hold an old-fashioned debate at the annual buffalo barbecue.  Kennedy didn’t show but Nixon ate half a sandwich and then spoke to about 17,000 people who gathered in a park where I had learned to love playing baseball.  A Boy Scout who helped provide security at Nixon’s table picked up the remainder of his buffalo sandwich and took it home.  His mother put the remnant in a pickle jar and froze it.  Sixty years later, he published a book, The Sandwich That Changed My Life, recounting how the sandwich is still in that jar but occasionally had been on public display including the day he took it to Los Angeles for an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.  Carson gave him one of his half-eaten sandwiches, which led people such as Tiny Tim and Steve Martin to make additional contributions.

Nixon wasn’t the first presidential aspirant to visit my little town.  When Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas were holding their famous debates throughout the state—Lincoln was challenging Douglas for a seat in the U. S. Senate—Lincoln paused to give a speech in a little grove of trees that is now the site of the civic center. Douglas wasn’t there. However, a riot between Lincoln and Douglas supporters broke out on the town square during the 1858 campaign.

We had a Brown Shoe factory, as did many small towns, for decades. It was near the now-gone elementary school I entered late in my fourth grade year.  I hit a softball through one of its windows one day during a noon hour game on the vacant lot between the school and the factory. Foreign competition shut it down. The building is still there, re-purposed several times. .

I went away from that little town to study journalism at the University of Missouri.  In those first few days, new college students ask and are asked many times, “Where are you from?”  There were nods of the head when the answers were St. Louis, or Kirksville, or Joplin, or Polo, or Hannibal (my roommate), or other Missouri towns.  But when I said, “Sullivan, Illinois,” there was the second question:

“Where’s that?”

And I would reach into my back pocket and pull out an official Illinois State Highway Map, William G. Stratton, Governor, and I would unfold it and show them.  Today I would say, “It’s about 40 minutes north of Effingham” and everybody would know because Effingham, then a bowling alley and a gas station-small town on Highway 40, is a major stop on straight and boring I-70 between St. Louis and Terre Haute.  I’m sure some of my new classmates walked away thinking, “He’s too weird.”

In a few days, I’m headed back to Sullivan for my (mumble-mumble) class reunion. I cherish these get-togethers, especially as our numbers dwindle.  I have a nice red polo shirt, although I wish I could find an appropriate red and black sweatshirt or jacket to wear while I ride in one of the 1959 convertibles a classmate has arranged for classmates to ride in during the homecoming parade. It shouldn’t be as hard as it was the other day to find the right thing in Jay and Chiefs country.

But the other day I bought a new car that’s red with black trim and I hope that is appropriate.

A few years ago I came to the conclusion that the last time we met as a class was the night we graduated.  Now, we are the Community of ’59.  Then, were a homogenous group raised in the same county, for the most part, part of the same culture for the first 18 years of our life, no more acutely aware of the greater world beyond us than teenagers today probably are plugged into life outside their schools.  But since then, life has changed us, has filled us with our own unique experiences and we come together as diverse individuals shaped by the decades that have passed.

Yet, when I think of them, it is easy to see them in my mind as perpetually young. And when we meet, we don’t spend a lot of time reminiscing. Instead we talk as contemporary people who have been friends for a long, long time who have nothing to prove to each other or no reason to try to impress one another.  We are special friends bound together by long-ago experiences who can talk about present issues, even those on which we not unexpectedly differ, and then go back to our homes and our separate futures cherishing this one more chance to be with each other.

I’ve lived in Missouri (except for three summers while I was in college) for almost eighty percent of my life. Each year I travel from Jefferson City to Indianapolis for a couple of races.  I usually stop for lunch in Effingham.  And each time, I feel a little tug to turn north.

All of our towns and each of us have stories such as these. Someday, descendants I will never know, might read these stories.

Think about writing yours.

For them.

I went to school with a gun one day in a time my grandchildren probably would not understand, when the only drill we had to worry about was the fire drill.

That was a long, long time ago. But if nobody every tells about those times, how can anybody else ever hope that there ever can be that kind of safe era again?

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The Difference 

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Tomorrow is Independence Day, the day the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. Only two people definitely signed it that day, The President of the Congress, John Hancock, and Secretary Charles Thompson.   Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams claimed they signed it then, too, but historians have disagreed for decades on whether they did and when the other signers added their signatures.

The course of human events had made it necessary to dissolve the political bands that had linked the colonies with Great Britain.

What of the people from whom we separated?  Are they different from us after almost 250 years?

We recently spent two weeks sharing streets, buildings, restaurants, and other places with them, people differing from us only in accent, the side of the road on which they drive, and dogs.

The people of the United Kingdom do love their dogs and they take them everywhere. It’s a rare restaurant that has a sign we are familiar with: “Service dogs only.”   We saw one sign that told us we could buy vegan ice cream for our dog inside.  One of our hotels had a kiosk with a dog menu.

We loved our exploration of their country.  We enjoyed meeting the many people we met. Our guides were incredible.  Every citizen was friendly and courteous and proud to show us things or explain things—-as we would be for those from England who visit our country. They, like us, are free people.  But our definitions of freedom are a little bit different—-which is why our country got its divorce in 1776.

But few citizens of this country likely would want to trade places with those good folks as far as government is concerned and as far as the citizen’s voice is heard in government.

Much of our system of government and laws is based on the centuries-old policies born in England starting with King John I’s acceptance of demands by several of his Barons at Runnymede in June, 1215 in the Magna Carta. The document placed the King and all the Sovereigns who have come after him within the rule of law, a concept we are arguing in this country more than 800 years later.

The document remains a symbol of freedom from government oppression. It’s philosophy was brought to our shores with the early English settlers and was a precedent for the Declaration of Independence.

But our founders took the concepts far beyond the Magna Carta, and we were surprised by how hard our differences in approach to rule hit home with us during our visits to two places within the last month.

This is the Tower of London:

And this is Edinburgh Castle in Scotland:

What is inside these two structures says much about our differing national concepts of government.

The Tower of London, among other things, is the home of The Crown Jewels.  Edinburgh Castle houses the much smaller Honours of Scotland, that country’s crown jewels that date from the days before Scotland became part of the United Kingdom. When a new monarch is coronated, these items are ceremonially donned to symbolize the monarchy’s rule over all of the UK.

We would like to show you pictures of this collection; it’s overwhelming. But photography is not allowed in the darkened rooms where spotlights illuminate the sparkling and glowing treasured regalia that is kept behind enclosures. Visitors can purchase a $10 guidebook, however.  Although it devotes fourteen of its eighty pages just to the various crowns in the collection, it cannot carry the impact of walking into dark rooms with illuminated display cases filled with large sparkling items of gold and jewels.

The guidebook to the collection at the Tower of London tells visitors:

Kings of England had a crown for everyday use, and the coronation crown that was worn rarey but was the ultimate symbol of their sacred and regal authority. The crowns were accompanied by other symbols of power: a sceptre indicating control over the realm and royal rights; a rod representing the responsibility to protect the people; a decorated sword for military strength; and an orb; a globe representing the world with a cross on top symbolizing Christ’s power over all creation

The Crown Jewels include more than 23,000 gemstones and more than 100 objects. The value of the collection is placed as much as six BILLION dollars, although officially they are considered priceless. One diamond, the Cullinan, has an estimated value of $430 million

The collection says everything about the difference between our system of government and the English system of government.

These jewel-encrusted items are symbols intended to make it clear that power is separate from and far above the people, and that it is blessed by an official national church. Only three people are permitted to handle these treasurers—the King, the Royal Jewler, and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Contrast those museums with a museum in this country that shows us the symbols of OUR system. We have one room displaying, not jewels but a few pages of paper:

—Four pieces of paper in particular.

The National Archives Museum in Washington, D. C. has rules about cameras, too.  Take them in.  Use them. Photograph the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.  Don’t use flash or other supplemental lighting, selfie sticks, monopods or similar equipment. But otherwise, snap away.

If you want real detailed images of the documents, you can download free scans of them, buy facsimiles in the museum store or online, or download closeups of the documents and other features in the rotunda. You can have the symbols of our government in your own home or your office. You don’t have to go hundreds of miles, get tickets, and stand in lines to see them. They belong to YOU. You do not belong to them.

The words of the documents describe the gulf between this country and the home country we left in 1776:

“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands….”

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union…..”

“The Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: and as extending the ground of public confidence in government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.”  

In darkened tight rooms of ancient buildings in London and Edinburgh are housed symbols that display the power of government OVER the people who are not allowed to even take photographs of those symbols

In the bright, light-filled rotunda of a public building in our country are the documents that describe the power of the PEOPLE over government.

We, the people of the United States, elect a President and two houses of a Congress that represents us. The people of the United Kingdom have little voice in picking those who will rule them.

The Constitutional Monarchy that is the United Kingdom considers the King, an inherited position, the head of state although not the head of government. Political decisions have been left to the government and Parliament since the Magna Carta but the people’s involvement is relatively minimal.

The top officer in the political system is the Prime Minister, who is not elected by the people. By tradition, the PM is a member of Parliament answerable to the House of Commons. The King has “Royal Prerogative powers” that include the power to appoint and dismiss the Prime Minister. However, it is customary that the Sovereign (King or Queen) appoints someone from the majority party in the House of Commons.

And the way those representatives of the people are elected seems by comparison to our elections to minimize the power of the voter.

The 650 members of the House of Commons are elected from districts in a “first past the post” system of voting that pits all candidates together regardless of party with the candidate getting the plurality, not necessarily the majority, winning the position.  The “first past the post” concept is likened to a horse race finish in a multiple horse field. Members of the House of Commons are called MPs, Members of Parliament.

The members of the House of Lords are not elected.  They are appointed and serve for life. The custom of people serving by inheritance was ended in 1999 but Lordships are determined by in-house elections. There is no fixed number of members and not all who are members are allowed to attend proceedings.  Last year there were 261 Conservative Party Lords, 185 Crossbench Lords, and 174 Labour Party members.  A year earlier, the total was 798 but only 755 could take part in the proceedings. As many as 26 members are bishops or archbishops of the national church.  The people have no voice in selecting members of the House of Lords..

We describe all of this, as far as we are capable of understanding it, given our background in our own form of government, to point out how distinctly different things are for us, and to underline how those dark rooms filled with billions of dollars of jewelry symbolize power that does NOT flow from the people but clearly reminds the people how superior the government is over them, how separate government power is from the consent of the governed.

Those rooms remind us that government of, by, and for the people is a concept that was stated in Philadelphia by traitor radicals who knew the personal danger they faced. Many have died to protect that traitorous system. Many have died in the country’s uniforms as well as in civilian attire on battlefields and in city streets to protect and expand that concept for everyone.

We left those darkened rooms in England and Scotland with even greater appreciation for being a citizen of a country that trusts the people to define governmental power. In doing so we are not criticizing the system that the people of our Mother Country have; we are only pointing out the differences with which both we Americans and our British cousins are comfortable having.

On this Independence Day, we need to ponder the power—and especially in this year the responsibility—we have to determine the kind of government we will allow and the kind of people we will choose to operate it on OUR behalf, not on THEIR behalf.

Symbolically, we are facing a choice between going to a dark place or staying in a place of light, of retaining the power of government that serves the people or giving it up to those who seek power to serve themselves.

We the people are the crown jewels of this country.

And this country is the crown jewel of freedom for the rest of the world.

Never, ever, forget that.

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Sports: Norm’s In; Going Opposite Directions; New AD on the Horizon? And a Few More

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(NORM)—Former Missouri Tiger basketball coach Norm Stewart finally is getting his place in the Hall of Famous Missourians at the State Capitol.  The bust will be unveiled at 1 p.m., May 1 in the House Chamber. It later will be moved to the rotunda, joining more than three dozen other busts of famous Missourians.

Stewart turned 89 in January.

His teams rang up a record of 731-375 in 38 seasons as a head coach, 634 of them at his alma mater.

(BASEBALL)—One of our teams finished last week at 13-9.  The other one finished at 9-13, with some folks remembering last year when the team started 10-24.

(KANSAS CITY)—The 13-9 record isn’t the only statistic that shows how much the Royals’ season is a turnaround from last year. Here’s another one:

The Royals were held without a run by Baltimore on Sunday, their first shutout of the year. Last year they failed to score fifteen times.  Seth Lugo took his first loss and gave up his first home runs of the year after winning three straight to start his season and not giving up a homer in 41.1 innings.

Kansas City is led this year by catcher/first-baseman Salvador Perez, who starts this week hitting .333 with six homers and Bobby Witt, Jr., at .300. The pitching is among the best in baseball with a 3.18 ERA, which normally would be an outstanding year for an individual, let alone a team.  The pitching continues to carry the team, which is batting a cumulative .237, Perez and Witt notwithstanding.

(CARDINALS)—The Cardinals on theother hand are 9-13.   Wilson Contrares has the longest hitting streak in Major League Baseball, 14 games, at the end of the playing week.  Shortstop Masyn Win and Contreras are above .300 at the plate but the ‘Birds as a team are hitting only .219. But with an offense like that, the pitching staff’s 3.95 ERA, solid thought it be in today’s game, isn’t good enough.

The Optimist Award for 2024 goes to Sonny Gray, the pitching ace who says the Cardinals are going to turn things around big-time soon. Gray is doing his part, going 2-0 without an ERA and an 11-0 strikeout to walk ratio in his first two starts. Sunday, a dozen of the 19 outs he got were strikeouts. He did give up his first walk of the year and his first home run and that was enough for the Brewers in a 2-0 shutout.

(FOOTBALL)—As we were going to press (as they used to say in the journalism biz), reports were coming out that the new Athletic Director at the University was going to be Laird Veatch, the AD at Memphis for the last five years.

It’s a return for Veatch, who supervised fund raising for the athletic deaatment, 2000=2002. He later was the general manager of Mizzou Sports Properties in 2003, coordinating external media operators for Learfield Sports, which has multimedia rights with Tiger sports teams.  His first big job, other than lining up all of the NIL deals, will be raise half of the money for the $250 million dollar make over of the north end of Memorial Stadium.

(BATTLEHAWKS)—A big offensive day for the St. Louis Battlehawks coupled with a solid offensive day gave them a 32-17 win over the Memphis Showboats and a 3-1 record. St. Louis again led the UFL in attendance with 31,575 people in the Dome.

‘Hawks quarterback A. J. McCarron threw the ball an all-time high of 45 times, completed 35 of them for 222 yards and three touchdowns. Running back Jacob Saylors rushed for 103 yards. The defense gave up only 127 yards and let Memphis convert only one of ten third and fourth down attempts.

(Playing with Engines)

(INDYCAR)—Nobody INDYCAR “makes fuel” as Scott Dixon does.  He proved it again with his win at the Grand Prix of Long Beach.

Dixon went about 50 of the race’s 85 laps without refueling and had to hold off Josef Newgarden, who was closing the gap with ten laps left before   Newgarden was hit from behind by Colton Herta’s car.Herta went on to finish second, about one second behind Dixon.

The win extends Dixon’s record of having at leat one victory to twenty consecutive years.

(NASCAR)—The “big one” didn’t happen until the field was roaring toward the checkered flag at Talladega Superspeedway. With cars crashing ahead of him, and more crashing behind him, Tyler Reddick kept his foot on the floor and steered out of harms way to the win.

The crash was triggered when pole sitter Michael McDowell tried to block Brad Keselowski but touched Keselowski’s car at 200 mph and turned into the wall.  Reddick let the wrecking cars move out of his way while he slipped Keselowski for the win.

(FORMULA 1)—Max Verstappen adds the trophy for the Chinese Grand Prix to his shelf, posting a 13 second victory over runnerup Lando Norris.

(Photo Credit: Bob Priddy)

 

 

 

 

 

 

One Man’s Vision—4 

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A state-of- the-art comprehensive Jefferson City/Cole County History Museum, at the old prison—discussed in the previous entry in this series—should be only a start.

Let’s shoot for the moon.

What really would be a giant step toward greatness would be he acquisition of another museum, one destined for a Smithsonian-quality reputation.

Six years ago we had a shot at getting the Steamboat Arabia museum to move here from Kansas City. But our planning group never got beyond talking, talking, talking and the expertise I hoped would develop when the group was formed never did develop. In effect, we decided we are good enough, as is. And one important business leader straight-out told me it wouldn’t work here.

None of the people I thought would take the practical lead did. But another smaller, more ambitious town went beyond talking and what it discovered for itself speaks volumes of what Jefferson City would have discovered had there been some initiative generated by all of that talking and should be a challenge to Jefferson City to show it wants to be more than the state capitol, more than a convention center can give us, more than we are.

City leaders in Marshall reportedly raised $150,000 for a feasibility study of a steamboat museum at I-70 and Highway 65. The initial investment would be high. The payoff will be large and long-lasting

The findings show that the payoff of this major commitment will be multiples of what was forecast for the Marshall/Sedalia/Lexington area.

I took a lot of notes at the meeting where the findings by the consulting firm of Peckham, Guyton, Albers & Viets (PGAV) were revealed three years ago.

PGAV called the museum proposal “a chance to put something iconic in Central Missouri.’  It described a state of the art museum with a national and regional strategy. It addressed continued investment that renewed the museum’s life cycle, the development of supporting amenities, the financial sustainability for generations, and the leadership the project would provide for future development.

The company looked at tourism strategies—attracting people to the area, creating support for the project, and connecting the museum to other parts of the country by defining a larger region to draw from.

They saw the museum as being a local draw and, more important, a destination attraction. PGAV calculated the trade area for the museum south of Marshall at more than 7.5 million people within a three-hour travel time.  The study forecast the operating costs would be about $2.4 million a year, based on an $18 adult admission fee, retail sales, and food and beverage income, among other things. It could be operated with 18 fulltime employees.

The first phase would be a 77,000 square foot museum (about double the present footprint, that would hold the Arabia and a second boat (we’ll discuss that later) and provide support and storage space on 3.7 acres, including parking. Estimated cost: $37 million.  That’s what we built the Center for Missouri Studies for in Columbia—a three-story, 77-thousand square feet building.  By the time the third phase of the steamboat museum would be completed, the complex would cover 8 acres, including parking

PGAV’s site analysis pointed to the great visibility of the museum from I-70 and to the great amount of open land at Marshall Junction.

The company found that museums are “economic engines” for an area—that non-profit art and culture attractions have an economic impact of more than one-billion dollars in Missouri (that’s a 2015 study).  They calculated that $1 generated by such a museum would generate $3.20 for the economy.

The study identifies several financial tools created by state law—Community Development Block Grants, Neighborhood Assistance tax credits, Community Improvement Districts, and ta exempt bonds issued by the Missouri Development Finance Board.

Additionally, PGAV calculated the national 250th anniversary celebration in 2026 will create federal funding capabilities for projects with about two-billion dollars allocated for state signature projects—and the museum, they said, would be a prime choice that a signature project (Jefferson City benefitted from the Bicentennial in 1976 by getting funding for restoration of Lohman’s Landing when it was declared a statewide bicentennial project).

In Summary, PGAV concluded that the Marshall-centered market would be enough to support a destination museum that would be an anchor for other tourism assets in the region (Arrow Rock, Sedalia and the State Fair, Santa Fe Trail sites, etc.  It would develop tourism synergies for local tourism in a three-county region (or broader), it would trigger multiple development opportunities near the Marshall Junction interchange and would create an economic development opportunity when combined with other attractions.  The study indicated the museum would draw 3.7 million visitors when phase one opens in 2026.

If that is true for Marshall, consider what it would mean for Jefferson City.

The population of Columbia, Jefferson City, and Fulton tops 182,000.  The combined populations of Marshall, Sedalia, Lexington, Boonville, and Moberly is about one-third that.

Seven state or private institutions of higher education within thirty miles of Jefferson City have more than 44,000 students. Another thirty miles, north and south, are Moberly Area Community College and the Missouri University of Science and Technology that add another 12,000 students. Sporting events and parental visits bring tens of thousands more people to those schools.

Add tto that, that Jefferson City is on the way to the Lake of the Ozarks. Lake Expo recently estimated 2.5-million people visit the Lake every year, 75% of them between May and September.

Increased tourism is only part of the benefit. The steamboat museum here could offer academic opportunities in technology, archaeology, textile preservation, museum management, American Western history, and other programs at or through those higher education institutions. The museum could benefit them and could gain benefits from them.

And think what a museum dedicated to grow in coming years or decades to capture the history of  the golden decades of Missouri River commerce and frontier development (1820-1880) could do.  The goal of the museum is to have artifacts—and maybe complete steamboats—excavated from past river channels, now farm fields from each of those decades.  Arabia museum President Dave Hawley has one of those boats located and test borings indicate the Malta might be complete enough to bring up as whole as possible. He would love to open a new museum with an 1841 steamboat in it.

Think about that.

Six years ago, we had the chance to raise about five million dollars to pay the costs of excavating the Malta and having it here, keeping the museum project highly visible while he rest of the project developed. Only one person was asking, “How do we do that?”  Nobody answered.

At the time, major fund-raising was focused on the Bicentennial Bridge or on the Missouri River Port.

I wrote at the time that I didn’t see hundreds of school buses with thousands of school children and their adult chaperones visiting a river port or taking in the view from Adrian’s Island as they would visit a steamboat museum.  To be clear, I think Adrian’s Island will be appreciated more in ten years than it was then or might be appreciated now. I can’t recall the last time I heard anything about the riverport but it’s not likely something I will take visiting relatives to see.

The Arabia museum is running out of time before it closes and the collection possibly moves to Pennsylvania, significantly, in November, 2026. Making the acquisition of that museum for our city as the official Capital City Bicentennial Project would be about a $50 million initial commitment. But it would transform our city and it would be an incredible driver to prison redevelopment as well as an incredible complement to the convention center/capitol avenue restoration and redevelopment effort.

Based on my conversations with Joe and Josephine Jeffcity, the steamboat museum would enhance chances for approval of a bond issue for the convention center, the library, and the historical museum, together or separately.

How can we make this step toward greatness happen?

Why should we do it?

Some of us are old enough to remember President Kennedy’s September 12, 1962 speech at Rice University when he set the goal of a manned moon landing within the decade:

“But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic?…We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.”

The steamboat museum can be, should be, Jefferson City’s moonshot.

At the risk of sinking into hyperbole, bringing this museum to Jefferson City could be the greatest reach for greatness in city history since civic leaders organized the construction of our first Missouri River bridge that helped blunt Sedalia’s effort to steal the capital in 1896.

How can we organize and measure the best of our energies and skills to make it happen?

How can we do it?

 

One Man’s Vision—3 

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I am writing this series of entries—six of them in all at this point—not entirely comfortably because they are intimately personal thoughts, and suspecting that they might be perceived as self-aggrandizing and presumptuous, two characteristics I have not much appreciated in the people I covered in my long life as a political reporter.

Why am I indulging in this exercise that involves unflattering questions about whether our city is so self-satisfied as the capital city that it is reluctant or even resistant to striving to be not just good but great?

And who am I to do it?

Asking the second question is a partial answer to the first question.  Why sholdn’t we expect more from ourselves, FOR ourselves, and for those who come after us?

This city is where I have had a successful career, where I have raised my family, where I have participated in its activities, and where I long to return to regardless of what part of the world I have been in.

I have never sought or wanted to seek public office—-although I have been asked a few times if I was interested. I’m just one of forty-thousand or so citizens living on a quiet street, retired from daily job responsibilities but involved in a few church and civic activities.

I care passionately about my town and what it can be.

—-because I know what it has been and what it is.

That’s right. MY town.  I have a proprietary interest in it, as do you, or as should you. And I want it to be better.  I look around and I see ways that it could be and I wonder if it has the courage to reach for greatness.

I came to Jefferson City fifty-seven years ago to report news for a radio station that no longer has its studios here.  Fifty years ago this November, I joined with one of my best friends, Clyde Lear, to create The Missourinet.  At the time, I was the Secretary of the Jefferson City American Revolution Bicentennial Commission—-I count the successful 18-month effort to bring the American Freedom Train to the town named for the principal author of the Declaration of Independence as one of the best things I’ve ever done for my city.

I am now the president of the regional library board, a member of the Cole County America 250 Committee—a group formed to commemorate, in just two years, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—a life member of the Cole County Historical Society, and Past-President of the State Historical Society of Missouri.

My sixth book, all of which deal with some part of Missouri and/or Jefferson City history, is under consideration for publication with the University of Kansas Press.

It is a mistake to think that historians live in the past.  We don’t. We use the past as lessons to consider the future, and I have been thinking a lot recently about the future of my town, and yours.

A coincident combination of recent events and circumstances has triggered all of this:

—The decision to give up on the penitentiary as the site for a hotel and convention center.

—A “for sale” sign in the window of our former family pharmacy

—The defeat last August of the library’s proposed levy increase to bring our 1970s library system into the third decade of the 21st century, thanks to a secret committee that spread a giant lie to voters throughout the county.

—An ongoing effort to keep an irreplaceable historical resource from leaving the state

—A legislative refusal to fund a major restoration project filled with the lessons of history, and

—-And a citywide social problem

All of this has come together as we look the bicentennial of the City of Jefferson becoming the seat of state government on October 1, 1826, and the bicentennial of the first legislative session held here, beginning that November 20th.

So far I have heard of no plans to celebrate the city’s bicentennial as the state capital.  And I think that says something about the cultural character of my town.

I believe the celebration of the 200th anniversary of Jefferson City becoming the capital city of Missouri could change the way we see ourselves and the way others see us going forward.

Inspired by the story of Mayor Cecil Thomas, recounted in the first episode, I am offering this one man’s vision requires us to be better—no, to be GREATER—than we are.  I hope you have, or will have, your own vision.

I have formed the opinion through many years of observing my town that we have a split personality.

First, we seem to think that being the state capital is good enough.

That has never been true.

Being “good enough” is not good enough.  Great cities do not become great by being “good enough.”

I do not want to hear anyone tell me, “We can’t do this.”  Cities don’t become great because they think they cannot accomplish great things.  They become great by asking, “How can we get this done?”

Another impression I have is that we waste too much time comparing Jefferson City to Columbia.  If that is, indeed, the case, we need to get over it. And this is a good time to focus on what we can be, not what we are in comparison, or what they have that we don’t.

And third, I wonder if we are in some respects a cubicle city in which many of us go to work each day, spend the day in our own little cubicle—seldom standing to look around or to communicate with people in other cubicles—and then go to a larger cubicle that is our home. It is hard to think outside the box if you spend your life in a cubicle.

Our family drug store closed last fall. The historic soda fountain that was a landmark part of our city culture remains.  When the “for sale’ sign went into the window late last year, I began to worry about what would happen to that soda fountain under new ownership of the building—and how it needs to be saved and preserved somewhere if it is to be removed.

But Jefferson City has no place to put it, or to preserve other important artifacts from our county’s past that tell the story of how we have become what we are..

While all of this was happening, I was asked to speak at a fund-raising Tea sponsored by the ladies of the Cole County Historical Society. They wanted me to talk about the history of the society, which this year celebrates the 80th anniversary.

And the Cole County America 250 Commission was being formed about then to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

After I saw the “for sale” sign in the Whaley’s window, I sent an email to the Historic City of Jefferson and to the Cole County Historical Society suggesting it is time for the two groups to get together and start planning a meaningful county history museum.

We do not have a museum that preserves the history of our other communities in Cole County.  There are no exhibits about Wardsville or Taos or Russellville or Osage City, Elston, or others including the little communities that winked out; no exhibits about The Foot or Munichberg.  Where can we go to learn about what an international city we are?  Where will we find the stories of Steve the Tailor, Arris the Pizza-maker, Helmut the Restauanteur, Yannis the Coffee Merchant, the pioneers of Temple Beth-el, the stories of those who serve us food from Thailand, China, Japan, Vietnam, India, Mexico—and Ireland.

Where can we learn of the migration of African-Americans, northern Missouri slaves, who crossed the river to come here to escape guerilla warfare, knowing they were safe in the first state capital to be occupied by the U. S. Army in wartime?  We need to show how Lincoln University came to be and how it has transformed through many decades into an institution of higher learning that has served this community far better than we seem to acknowledge. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people of all races in our area are walking around with degrees and advanced degrees from Lincoln.

And sports—where can we learn about Pete and Ray (Adkins and Hentges), and who WAS Dwight T. Reed?  Or where can we learn about our five (at least) major league baseball players and the five, so far, Jefferson Citians with careers in professional football? Or even the story of tennis star Althea Gibson.

We have two historical organizations, neither of which tells the story of our city and county as well as many local museums I have visited—in much smaller towns—have told about their cities and counties.

We need a city/county history museum built inside the old prison that meets modern museum standards for story-telling and is a true value to the people here and to visitors—a museum within a museum. I mentioned this at the most recent meeting of the America 250 Committee as a project that would be our legacy and committee members seemed attracted to the idea.

Developing such a museum would mean a new location for the Cole County Historical Society museum, which now occupies a 150-year old building with severe limits on space with costly upkeep costs that impede expansion.  The building would be desirable to associations or entities such as those that already occupy large amounts of building space close to the Capitol. Instead of the building being a financial drain, the sale of it would provide part of the financial foundation for a truly representative center of Cole County history.

That’s not the only important public institution that needs a new home that would fit well within the renovation of the old penitentiary and be a legacy from this generation to tomorrow’s  greater city.  We’ll explore that possibility next.

(We are sharing our vision for a greater city.  We are interested in what others hope for a better city for our grandchildren’s grandchildren.  Take some time and let us know in the response box below)

Notes From a Quiet Street (Injured Curmudgeon Edition)

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(being an irregular voyage through some mental flotsam and jetsam that isn’t worth full blogness)

There is so much to writr about these days but unfortunately your constant observer has become a one-fingr typist because was not observant when he went to the mailbox Thursday night and tripped over a little sidewalk wall and found himself in aencounter with a garage door.  The door is fine but the left shoulder of your observer became removed from its socket, said left arm now tightly strapped down.

But I do want anyone in the area to know that on tuesda morning thru Wednesday afternoon I have attanged evhibits from the Steamboat Arabia Museum in KC and National TransportationMuseum in Kirkwood to be in the capitol rotunda to promote legislation to help veterans, provide financial aid to struggling local historical museums, krrp the Arabia in Missouri and help the NMOT achieve its dreams for expansion and protection for and restoration of its collection.

Now onto the original great observations about our times—-

Anybody else getting tired of emails or telephone calls from people wanting to know if your experience with your doctor, your mechanic, your financial advisor, your car salesman, your—-you name it—was a pleasant one?

Feedback Mania has taken hold.

It seems as if every time I go someplace I get an email request almost before I’m out the door wondering if I had a pleasant experience, if the office staff was friendly, or if I would recommend this to others.

Did you enjoy your colonoscopy?  Was the admissions staff chipper enough?  How was the taste of the gallon of stuff you drank?  Was your experience with the drug administered before insertion pleasant?

I’m thinking of saving all of these surveys until I can fill them out while I’m on hold after an impersonal, recorded voice tells me that my call is important.

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I had a dream the other night that I opened my closet door and the only things inside were hangers with t-shirts proclaiming that I had saved a shivering dog or an elephant, that I had helped a school kid get a meal, another kid get healed from a disease (I slept under about three adorable blankets during the night)—you know.

I had bankrupted myself at the rate of $19.95 a month for so many different wonderful causes. In my dream, I decided to go on TV and promise viewers that I would give them a t-shirt that said, “I saved Bob” if they just sent me $19.95 a month.  The t-shirt would cost me 75 cents from the sweatshop in China. I needed the money because I placed a telephone call to see if a Medicare plan was available for me in my zip code and I needed to enroll.

Then I woke up and felt badly because each of these charities is only trying to do good in its small part of the human experience.  All except for the Medicare guy.

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Speaking of insurance:  Can you imagine if Flo and Doug had a child?

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Here is something that is spooky as all get-out:

A few days ago my friend Steve Mays, who was our webmaster at the Missourinet for many years and did great and creative things while some of us sluggards refused to quit living in our  internet caves, was explaining ChatGPT to me.  As I understand it, it’s an artificial intelligence program that lets people feed some information in and the program spits out a theme, a letter, an article, or whatever in whatever format or language or length the user wants.  People talk to it on their cell phones.

Later that day he asked Chat GPT:

Do you have any information about reporting by a man named Bob Priddy?

ChatGPT

Bob Priddy, a renowned journalist in Missouri, retired after a notable 40-year career. He was known for his dedication to government transparency and his critical view on the state of statehouse reporting, especially concerning the decline in media presence and the increasing influence of lobbyists. Priddy also played a significant role in advocating for open government, such as pushing for cameras in judicial chambers. However, he expressed concerns about the worsening state of government transparency in Missouri. His career has been a testament to committed journalism, focusing on impactful stories and the importance of government accountability​​.

As complimentary as it was, I was, and am, a little bit chilled that some lights and wires in a box can churn out something like this about me.

I looked up ChatGPT on Wikipedia.  I wonder who—or what—wrote the article.

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Saw a discussion a few days ago about whether Iowa Hawkeyes’ greatest basketball player should go pro or stay in college. One of the questions is whether Caitlin Clark would take a financial cut if she did.  One sports site, Firstsportz, estimates her net worth already is three-million dollars because of the endorsements of various products and services while in college.

At least Clark has stayed at one school throughout her career instead of being a jock gypsy, as so many athletes have become.

Are we alone in thinking there’s something basically wrong with college sports today?  I doubt it.