Category Archives: people

Sell Sell Sell

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(Selling encyclopedias one summer in college was not profitable enough to encourage a career in sales. But knocking on strangers’ doors in strange towns and convincing four in ten to let me in to give a presentation—making a sale to one of the four—did teach about selling myself, especially selling myself to people I did not know and who had no reason to want to know me.  Dr. Frank Crane offers his thoughts on—–)

SALESMANSHIP

Every young man should some time in his life have experience in salesmanship.

Selling goods is the best known cure for those elements in a man that tend to make him a failure.

The art of success consists in making people change their minds. It is this power that makes the efficient lawyer, grocer, politician, or preacher.

There are two classes of men. One seeks employment in a position where he merely obeys the rules and carries out the desires of his employer. There is little or no opportunity for advancement in this work. You get to a certain point and there you stick.

Such posts are a clerkship in a bank, a government job, such as letter-carrier, a place in the police force, or any other routine employment requiring no initiative. These kinds of work are entirely honorable and necessary. The difficulty is, they are cramping, limiting.

Some day you may have to take a position of this sort, but first try your hand at selling things.

Be a book-agent, peddle washing-machines, sell life-insurance, automobiles, agricultural implements, or peanuts.

You shrink from it because it is hard, it goes against the grain, as you are not a pushing sort of fellow. And that is the very reason you need it.

Salesmanship is strong medicine. You have to go out and wrestle with a cold and hostile world. You are confronted with indifference, often contempt. You are considered a nuisance. That is the time for you to buck up, take off your coat, and go in and win.

A young lawyer will gain more useful knowledge of men and affairs by selling real estate or fire-insurance than by law-school…

Get out and sell goods. Hustle. Fight. Don’t get fastened in one hole. Take chances. Come up smiling. So the best and biggest prizes in America are open to you.

Selling things, commercialism, business, is not a low affair; it is a great, big, bully game. It is a thoroughly American game, and the most sterling qualities of Americanism are developed by it, when it is carried on fairly and humanely.

There is incitement in it for all your best self, for your honesty, perseverance, optimism, courage, loyalty, and religion…

I mean to cast no slurs upon faithful occupants of posts of routine. They have their reward.

But…don’t look for a “safe” place. Don’t depend upon an organization to hold your job for you. Don’t scheme and wire-pull for influence and help and privilege.

Get out and peddle maps. Make people buy your chickens or your essays. Get in the game. It beats football.

Leaving the Pulpit

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(I bought my first computer from a former priest who was married to a former nun. Dr. Frank Crane, who we feature each Monday, left the Methodist pulpit to become a newspaper columnist.  He explained, “I began to find out that I did not fit as a denominational leader…I was not interested in denominational aims…There never was any clash over doctrines. I believed, and still believed, in the great fundamentals the church stands for. But the machinery repelled me. I could not throw myself into the great and fascinating business of propagandizing the essentials because I had to work too hard at the nonessentials…My whole aim and enthusiasm is for the individual, not for the corporate body.” A century after he wrote those words, mainline churches are pondering what to do—not with ministers who leave the pulpit, but young people who don’t come through the doors.  Dr. Crane left the formal ministry voluntarily; he was not DEfrocked, but he became one of—-)

THE UNFROCKED

There was a curious banquet held at Paris not long ago. There met a  hundred and fifty former priests and former preachers who did not blush either for their past or for their present.

To one class of men society seems peculiarly unjust: to the unfrocked.  The man who leaves the ministry, no matter how conscientious and sincere his motives, is always look up askance. We persist in regarding him as if were tainted with the flavor of desertion and disloyalty.

Why? Is it not more honorable to leave holy orders, when one no longer believes the articles of faith, or when one is convinced of the inutility of the institution, when the  development of one’s mind and heart has led him honestly to these convictions, than to remain and be insincere?

Does not the church itself believe that an honest layman, no matter  what his views, is better than a dishonest clergyman?

For all that, the rupture between the parson and his organization is  always painful. Laymen hardly welcome him. By a strange illogicality we are usually cold to the men who enter our ranks for conscience’s sake. We mistrust them; we put pressure upon them to conceal their past as something of which to be ashamed; as a rule, they have a hard time making a living.

Among the former clergymen at the banquet mentioned we may note three lawyers, two police magistrates, two farmers, a physician, two artists, two capitalists, one mayor, besides commercial travelers, university professors, accountants, and public school teachers.

They have formed a union which proposes, according to its bylaws,  never to proselyte or in any way attempt to induce men to leave the ministry, but to extend a helping hand to those who, on their own initiative, have severed their ecclesiastical ties, and to help them in their endeavors to gain an honest livelihood.

It will do no harm to the church—it can only do good—to make the way as easy as possible for those who have ceased to be in harmony with its faith or its methods to get out.

In most instances men enter the ministry when young. When they arrive at maturity their convictions may in all honor have undergone a change. It should not be taken as a matter of course that their reluctance to continue in the ministry means a loss of religion or of personal integrity. The minister may discover that, while his religious sentiment is as profound as ever, he is not adapted by nature or gifts to be a clergyman.

His retirement from church office may be as heroic and worthy of praise as his entrance into it.

The Unanswered Question

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There is an unanswered question that we did not address in Monday’s observation in this space about the governor’s accusation that a newspaper had “hacked” a state education department website.

It is unfortunate that Governor Parson refused to take questions after last week’s press conference in which he said he wants St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Josh Renaud criminally charged for notifying the state he had found personal information about thousands of school teachers easily obtainable from a Department of Education website.

Someone should have asked—and we are confident WOULD have asked—“Did the story tell the truth?”

That has been the critical question for 300 years whenever a United States political figure does not like what a reporter has written about him or her—since 1734 when New York’s Royal Governor, William Cosby, jailed newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger for eight months on a charge of libel.  Cosby proclaimed Zenger’s criticisms of his actions amounted to “divers scandalous, virulent, false and seditious reflections,” an 18th Century equivalent, perhaps, to Governor Parson’s complaint that the Post-Dispatch and Renaud were involved in a “political game” intended to “embarrass the state and sell headlines for their news outlet.”

The jury in the Zenger trial was out for only ten minutes before finding him not guilty. His  attorney had argued that a statement cannot be libelous if it is true regardless of the discomfort it causes someone, in this case the Royal Governor. More than fifty years later, Freedom of the Press became part of the nation’s constitution.

More than a century ago, a Missouri Capitol reporter was jailed for reporting the truth. Robert Holloway of the long-defunct St. Louis Republic was jailed after reporting in 1917 that a Cole County Grand Jury had indicted a top state official for selling coal from the state’s coal supply.  The official was John W. Scott, the former Commissioner of the Permanent Seat of Government.  Holloway also reported the grand jury was investigating whether Penitentiary Warden D. C. McClung improperly used state property. Grand jury proceedings, even today, are supposed to be secret.

His story ran before any indictments had been made public, leading the judge who had convened the grand jury to haul Holloway before him to tell where he had gotten his information. When Holloway refused to reveal his source, the judge jailed him until he talked, or until that grand jury’s term ran out. The Missouri Supreme Court upheld the order.

State Historical Society Executive Director Gary Kremer, who wrote about the Holloway case for the Jefferson City newspaper several years ago, has a picture of Holloway seated at his typewriter next to a barred jail window as he continued to report, his stories datelined “Cole County Jail.” He finally was released after two months on a promise to appear before a new grand jury if it called him.  It refused to take up the whole issue when it was convened. Those who had been indicted by the earlier grand jury were found not guilty.  Holloway remained a reporter, off and on, for most of the next three decades.

But he remains, as far as we have been able to determine, the only Capitol reporter ever jailed by the state of Missouri for telling the truth.

The governor’s call for Cole County Prosecutor Locke Thompson to take action against the newspaper gives Thompson a lot to think about.  There’s the First Amendment protection of press freedom. The newspaper attorney doubts the state’s law on computer tampering sufficiently applies to this case because the computer code allowing anyone to access the information was readily available through the Department of Education’s website.

There might also be a question of whether the state law on computer tampering is unconstitutional prior restraint on reporting information gained through legal means from a state computer. And proving the newspaper published the information with malicious or criminal intent will be difficult.  To the contrary, the newspaper’s actions to withhold the story until the department fixed the problem the investigation pinpointed is a strong argument against criminal intent.

But the basic question remains.  Did the reporter tell the truth?  There is no acceptable “yes, but” response. Zenger-Holloway-Renaud (or the name of any reporter since 1734) are linked together by that question.

And that is the only question that matters.

It’s What We Do

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We are replacing today’s usual reflection on life by Dr. Frank Crane with a reflection on a regrettable reaction by our governor to a good piece of journalism in which the journalist did what journalists are supposed to do journalistically and did what a good citizen should have done ethically.

In all my years of covering Missouri politics I have never heard of any of our top leaders suggest a reporter should be jailed for giving the state a chance to correct a serious problem before a story was published.

Let’s be clear:

There is nothing wrong with testing whether the information about us held by government is safely held.  You would expect a journalist to defend another journalist who was able to prove some private information held by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education wasn’t so private after all.

And I am.

Good journalists test and challenge systems, people, programs, and policies to see if they are what they claim to be.  It’s a responsibility we have.  If I can get information about you that the government claims is protected, how safe are you from those who want that information for malicious purposes?

We were involved in just such an issue many years ago and it exposed a weakness in state government that could have exposed everybody’s most important private information.  This is the story, as I remember it.

Steve Forsythe was the bureau chief for United Press International back then. In those days there were two highly-competitive national wire services.  Steve’s office in the capitol was next door to the Associated Press office in room 200 , which now is carved up into several legislative offices.

One day, Steve called the Department of Revenue because he couldn’t find his previous year’s income tax return, something he needed for the current year’s return.  Could the department send him a copy of his previous year’s return?  Yes, he was told. What’s your address? And a few days later it showed up in his mail box.

Steve was a helluva reporter who instantly realized what had happened.   The Missourinet was a UPI client.  He called me and we talked about what he had learned and we decided on a test.

We lured one of State Auditor Jim Antonio’s employees to call the department and use the same line that Steve had used. The department gladly agreed to mail the previous year’s tax return to her.

—except the return she asked for was that of State Revenue Director Gerald Goldberg.   And the address she gave was mine.

A few days later, a fat envelope arrived in my mailbox.

Steve and I went to the Jefferson Building that afternoon and, as I recall it, stopped Director Goldberg in the lobby as he was returning from lunch.  I handed him the envelope and asked him to open it.  He was stunned to see his personal state income tax return inside it.  There was a brief moment of, I suppose we could say, anger. But as Steve explained to him why we had done what we had done, he calmed down.  On the spot he said he’d immediately look into the situation.  I don’t think he wound up thanking us but we didn’t expect any thanks.

We could have asked for anybody’s tax return, I suppose, even Governor Teasdale’s although that might have been a harder ask.  But this was bad enough.

There naturally was a certain amount of hand-wringing and anguish and probably some hostile thoughts about two reporters who were not known as friendly toward the administration to begin with pulling a stunt like this. But rather quickly, the department recognized that we had not opened that envelope and we had not looked at the director’s return, had not made any beneficial use of the information, had not yet run a story, and that we certainly did not intend anything malicious in our actions.

Antonio was less than enthusiastic that we had used one of his trusted employees as a tool for our investigation, but he also recognized the problem we had pinpointed.

The department almost immediately changed its policies to outlaw accepting telephone requests such as the ones that led to the stories UPI and The Missourinet later ran and instituted a process designed to protect the confidentiality of those returns.

From time to time in later years I wondered if I should see if the department’s policies had slipped back to those days when Steve and I embarrassed it.   But I never did.   Every year, Nancy and I file our state tax returns and assume you can’t have them mailed to you with just a phone call.

I suppose Governor Teasdale could have demanded a criminal investigation of our actions but he didn’t.  His Department of Revenue just fixed the problem.  Steve went on to a long career with UPI, which eventually lost in the competition for wire service clients to the AP and closed its capitol bureau.  I went on to a long career with The Missourinet, which still serves a lot of radio stations in Missouri. We didn’t often care if we ruffled some feathers from time to time as long as we were reporting the truth—and that always was our goal.

Good reporters do what they are called to do—question, investigate, test, and report.  Sometimes those whose skirts that turn out to be dustier than they think they are don’t like the findings.

One big difference between the days when Steve’s tax return and the security of private information turned into a state policy-changing news story and today, when a reporter’s news story about the security of private information has led to threatened criminal charges, is the change in times. We are living in stressful times that not only breed physical and political disease, but tend to breed reactions that are less prudent than necessary.

But that won’t discourage good reporters from doing what they have a calling to do.  And the day it does, all of us are losers, even those who are embarrassed by what reporters find.

 

Food at It’s Best

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“Ignorance and laziness have won,” said retired British journalist John Richards a while ago.

Richards, who turned 96 when he made that observation, started the Apostrophe Protection Society about twenty years ago.  He crusaded for the correct use of the “much abused” apostrophe.  But he has given up.   He told the London Evening Standard late in 2019 there were two reasons for disbanding his organization: “One is that at 96 I am cutting back on my commitments and the second is that fewer organisations and individuals are now caring about the correct use of the apostrophe in the English Language. We, and our many supporters worldwide, have done our best but the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won.”

His society was a small one.  Depressingly small, it seems.  He told the Standard he started the APS after he saw the “same mistakes over and over again.”  He hoped to find a half-dozen people who felt the same way.  He didn’t find a half-dozen.  Within a month of his announcement of the founding of the society, he said, “I received over 500 letters of support, not only from all corners of the United Kingdom, but also from America, Australia, France, Sweden, Hong Kong and Canada.

But that wasn’t enough (Note the apostrophe).

That sentence is an example of one of the three simple rules Richards has given for proper use of the apostrophe.

  1. They are used to denote a missing letter or letters.
  2. They are used to denote possession.
  3. Apostrophes are never used to denote plurals.

And there’s a corollary.  “It’s” only means “it is.”  The possessive version is “its.”  The cat had its breakfast.

Otherwise, this sign says “Food at it is best.”  The Towne Grill in Jefferson City isn’t (note the proper use of the apostrophe to symbolize the elimination of the letter “o”) going to change its (note proper use of the possessive) sign.  It has become an institution in Missouri’s capital city, a quirky but incorrect use of the apostrophe that is part of the city’s (proper use of the apostrophe to denote the possessive) culture.

The Apostrophe Protection Society seems so English.  The story about it reminded us of Professor Henry Higgins in Lerner & Lowe’s Broadway musical “My Fair Lady,” of a half-century ago.  Professor Higgins decided to teach an untutored London flower girl to speak proper English and lamented:

An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him
The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him
One common language I’m afraid we’ll never get
Oh, why can’t the English learn to

Set a good example to people whose
English is painful to your ears?
The Scots and the Irish leave you close to tears
There even are places where English completely disappears

In America, they haven’t used it for years!

To end this on a couple of more serious notes:

First, John Richards died earlier this year—March 30.  He was 97. Mr. Richards’s Washington Post obituary is at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/john-richards-dead/2021/04/25/9c7c1994-a425-11eb-a774-7b47ceb36ee8_story.html.

Second, I had a friend named Ed Bliss who used to write news for Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite at CBS.  Ed, who died several years ago, often conducted newswriting seminars at our conventions of news directors. I can still hear him say, “We have become a nation slovenly with language. The slovenliness in grammar, punctuation, and spelling is all about us.”

If we lack respect for our language in speaking and writing, we limit our abilities as a people to communicate effectively and we damage the trust we can have in one another. Today, we shout more than we speak; we talk but we don’t listen; we tweet more than we write; we dismiss one another with disparaging personal assessments.  In the midst of this noise, this transformation of the grace of our language into crudeness, it is no wonder that a group that upheld something as small as an apostrophe should feel that “ignorance and laziness” have won.

It’s not just the continued improper use of apostrophes that should concern us.  Our language deserves better use than we are making of it. We cannot respect one another if we do not respect the language we use with one another.

 

The Pro Tem

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Jim Mathewson died a few days ago.  He was one of a dwindling number of state senators from a different era when “Senator” wasn’t a word; it was an honor.

It was a pre-term limits Senate before Missourians hypocritically denied themselves the right to vote for legislators they wanted to continue representing them.

It was the era of Harold Caskey and John Schneider, of A. Clifford Jones and Emory Melton, of John Russell and Wayne Goode, Betty Sims and Harry Wiggins, Danny Staples, Morris Westfall and others who respected the institution and honored its written and unwritten rules, who treated the Senate as a body rather than a series of factions.  It was a Senate where the filibuster was a legitimate tactic because the majority on any issue knew it might be the minority on any other issue and the object was compromise that produced progress, before a time when an unyielding steamroller ignored the possibility that someday roles might be reversed and a time might someday come when payback would be a steamroller run by the other side.

It was a time of bare-knuckle politics, have no doubt about that. But eye-gouging and rabbit punches weren’t tolerated.

Jim Mathewson was the leader of the state senate for eight years.  Nobody will ever equal that record or even match it as long as good men and good women are banished from public service because voters fell for the pitch of those who capitalized on the idea that those we trust in our elections every two or four  years instantly become untrustworthy.

Jim Mathewson was a Horatio Alger story, a poor boy who made good because he never gave up, eventually rising to what he argued was the most powerful office in state government, more powerful than the governor, in fact.

He was elected to the House in 1974, then moved up to the Senate in 1980. He was born on a forty-acre farm in Benton County to a “very poor” family. He father left when he was five years old and although he came back six years later, the two were never close. The fact that the family was poor, and he knew it was poor, was a motivating factor in his life. He told a State Historical Society interviewer, “I think it made me meaner and tougher and harder working.”

For a time he and his wife, Doris, ran a steakhouse in Sedalia until it burned down and there was little insurance. Some friends, seeing he had no real livelihood, decided to file him for State Representative, something Mathewson had no interest in being. He beat an incumbent, though, and got elected to a job paying, then, $8,400 a year, about one-eighth what he was making with the steakhouse.

“I got hooked!” he told the interviewer, “and I got hooked bad.”  He was a personable guy and a few years later he started getting some important committee assignments. And he started building bridges. “I’m of the Democrat philosophy, but I’ve never been offended by anyone that was of the Republican philosophy. We just happened to think different on some issues. I believe that Republicans love their family just like I love mine. I believe that they’re Christians just like I believe I am. I believe that they’re going to go to Heaven just like I am. They’re just kind of warped in their thought process about [things] while they’re here. Okay? (chuckling) And I say that jokingly, because I have probably as many friends that are Republicans as I do Democrats.”

Pure Mathewson. Taking his work seriously but not himself (a fellow Capitol reporter remarked a few years later that it seemed legislators had gotten that idea backward—and, frankly, sometimes it seems he is right).

But he was so focused on being a legislator that he wasn’t making much money in the real world. He narrowly avoided bankruptcy only because the father he hardly knew left enough in his estate for Mathewson to pay off debts. He was able to re-establish himself as a businessman in Sedalia.  He began to rise in authority and popularity among fellow Democrats in the Senate and in 1988 he was elected President Pro Tem, the leader of the Senate.

Why did he want the job?   “The power,” he openly admitted.  “The President Pro Tem of the Senate in many, many ways is the most powerful person there is in the state of Missouri. Even more powerful than the Governor because you control all the gubernatorial appointments! And a Governor cannot appoint anyone if they can’t get it by the President Pro Tem of the Senate. Because the President Pro Tem of the Senate is usually smart enough to make themselves chairman of the Gubernatorial Appointments Committee. And the President Pro Tem appoints all the committees, including the all-powerful Appropriations Committee where all the budget comes from. Not only do appoint the chair, but you appoint the members. So generally you have control over that, as you do over most of the committees — or all the committees, really, because you appoint all the chairs. So you know, I wanted to be that person. I wanted to feel that I was not only a person who could be a follower but I wanted to prove that I could be a person that was a leader. It was a unanimous election in our caucus and on the floor every time. So I feel awfully proud of that. It was a good thing.”

He thought he could have been elected for another term but felt it was time for someone else. A few years later, Republicans gained control of the Senate and the last few years were nowhere nearly as rewarding as the rest of his career had been.  The take-no-prisoners style of the new majority grated on a man who thought he had helped maintain the historically collegial atmosphere of the chamber—“the body,” he called it.

There’s one other thing about Jim Mathewson to tell you about.  He was the first Senate President Pro Tem to occupy the physical office of the Pro Tem.  The room complex next to the south end of the Senate Lounge had been the office of the President of the Senate, the Lieutenant Governor, from the day the Capitol was first occupied.  I tell about it in the Capitol history book that I hope goes to the publisher before the end of the year:

The Senate takeover of the Lieutenant Governor’s office space finally happened in the fall of 1988 through the efforts of outgoing President Pro Tem John Scott, who had grown tired of dashing back and forth from his fourth floor office to the Senate Chamber. Senator Jim Mathewson of Sedalia, the incoming President Pro Tem, remembered that Scott approached him at the end of the September veto session and said, “Don’t you think it’s a darned shame that all of these years that the Speaker’s had that office right there on the corner where he can have meetings?”

 

It’s convenient. Everybody knows where it is and they all run in there and they meet and they settle issues and so forth, press conferences and whatever, and we have to use our individual offices when we’re President pro-Tem, and we hold the same power as does the Speaker.  Why don’t we create a special President pro-Tem’s office?

 

Mathewson asked, “Which one d’you have in mind?” Scott answered, “The Lieutenant Governor’s office.” Scott and Mathewson decided to enlist the support of the Senate’s top Republican, Richard Webster…Webster had done some research and told them, “The truth of the matter is there’s no provision in the constitution or the statutes that says the Lieutenant Governor even gets an office.” Scott introduced a resolution at the end of the veto session that let the Senate take control of the office after that year’s election. 

            Shortly after Mel Carnahan won the Lieutenant Governorship, he asked Mathewson not to kick him out of the office.  “Yeah, Mel, I am,” Mathewson told him,

 

And he said, “You can’t do that.” And I said, “Yeah, I can.”  And he said, “Well, by what authority?’ And I said, “We did the research. That office belongs to the Senate. The Senate voted…that the Pro Tem would have that office, and I guess that’s me, Mel, because the caucus just elected me and we’ve got twenty-two votes. I think I’m probably going to be Pro-Tem.” And he…got red-faced as hell…and said, “You’re not going to do this.” And I said, “Yeah, I am, Mel. Gonna do it.  Sorry.”

 

Carnahan threatened a lawsuit but Mathewson played hardball: “You can do that but let me remind you of something that’s just going to offend you further…You don’t have a great big budget already. You take on the Senate and you won’t have any.” Carnahan stomped out of Mathewson’s office, returning more cool-headed a few days later to ask Mathewson what could be done if he accepted the plan.  Mathewson, Scott, Webster, and Carnahan quickly went to the first floor to look at a complex of Senate staff rooms in the northeast corner of the building. Mathewson told Carnahan the Senate would pay to remodel the space if he would take it. Carnahan agreed a few days later.  Mathewson kept his promise to have the new office ready for Carnahan by the time he was sworn in at the start of 1989.

A few years later, then-Lt. Governor Peter Kinder convinced his friend from Cape Girardeau, Senate Administrator Mike Keathley, to have the auditor swap office spaces with the Lt. Governor’s office space.

Mathewson couldn’t run for another term in 2004. He seldom returned to the Capitol. His day was already slipping away, his desk in the chamber and his office occupied by a new generation of Senators.

Are they worse people than Jim Mathewson was?  As people, I don’t think so.  As Senators, as Jim and the others of his era might perceive them in their behavior as senators, maybe.

But comparing generations against each other is hard and risks being unfair because nostalgia is not fair. Perhaps it is accurate to say that today’s senators are not like yesterday’s senators. Sometimes the old lions growling in the weeds who remember those of the Mathewson generation think “Senator” has become just a word. It will be interesting to hear the eulogies (many years from now, we hope) for those who have come after his era.

He concluded his interview with the State Historical Society by saying:

“You know, sometimes you’ve got to hang your life out there. And I have time and time again, and I’m proud of the fact that I did it and I have no regrets! My attitude is this: If the issue is important enough to do, then it’s more important than my political future. And I’ll do it.”

That’s worth thinking about.

(If you want to read Jim’s entire interview—and those of us who knew him can hear his voice as we read the transcript—go to “James L. Mathewson State Historical Society oral history” and click on the icon on the upper right for a download.)

Racing: History at Talladega

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(NASCAR)—William Darrell Wallace, known to friends and fans as “Bubba,” has been declared the winner of the rain-shortened race at Talladega, a historic win at a track with great historic significance to the first African-American driver to win a race in NASCAR’s highest division in 57 years.

Wallace, the only black driver in NASCAR Cup competition, drives for a new team owned by basketball star Michael Jordan and fellow driver Denny Hamlin.  The race, postponed from Sunday because of rain, was called after 117 of the scheduled 188 laps Monday because of more rain.  Wallace, who had started 19th, drove his way to the front five laps from the end, passing Kurt Busch to become the 19th driver to lead the race on the track that traditionally features nose-to-tail racing and at least one big crash.  A wreck on the 116th lap, just before the rains came, froze the field with Wallace at the head of the pack.

Restrictor plate races at the big high-banked tracks of Daytona and Talladega are traditionally mad and unpredictable scrambles but Wallace has shown flashes of strength in those races.  He has finished second twice at Daytona although his best previous finish at Talladega was 14th.

He finished ahead of two Ford teammates, Brad Keselowski and Joey Logano.  Bush was squeezed back to fourth, just ahead of Christopher Bell.

The next race, on the Charlotte Roval, will be a cut-down race in which four drivers are eliminated from the chase for the championship.  Kevin Harvick, who led more laps in the Talladega race than any other driver, was shuffled back to eighth when the red flag came out, short-circuiting his hopes of climbing into the top eight in the points chase. He’s nine points out of the playoff field heading to Charlotte.  Christopher Bell’s fifth-place run still leaves him 28 points back.  William Byron, who tangled with two other cars just before the rains hit, is in a must-win situation if he is to advance, as is Alex Bowman, whose chances for a good finished vanished when his car was badly damaged in an early-race wreck with three other competitors.

The victory in the playoff race will not propel Wallace into the next three-race runoff round because he was not among the top sixteen drivers in the points when the regular season ended.

(THE BACKSTORY)—Wallace’s victory was a popular one among his colleagues who showed their support of him by pushing his car to the front of the starting field at Talladega in June, last year, after a noose was reported on the pull-down rope of the door of his garage at the track.  The FBI investigated and determined that the noose had been there since the previous October, at a time when it could not have been predicted Wallace’s team would later use the garage.  Wallace supported the finding.

Wallace was born almost three years after the death of the only other black driver to win a top-level NASCAR race.  His victory comes a little more than 100 years after the birth of Wendell Scott, who passed Richard Petty with 25 laps to go on the half-mile dirt track at Jacksonville Florida in 1964 and went on to win. He was not announced as the winner, however—some say it was because of the racist culture of the time—and the win originally went to Buck Baker, who was two laps behind. NASCAR discovered two hours after the race that Scott had won but he was not officially awarded the win for two more years.  He never received a trophy.  NASCAR presented his family with the trophy he had earned in 2010, seven years before Bubba Wallace ran his first NASCAR Cup race.

Scott ran his last NASCAR race in 1973 but it was injuries he suffered in a crash at Talladega earlier in the year that forced him to retire.  He died in 1990. He never had a sponsor.  His low-budget owner-driver operation nonetheless saw him finish in the top ten in the points standings four times in a thirteen-year, 495-race career.  He finished in the top ten at the end of 147 races.

Bubba Wallace’s team has had full sponsorship all year.  Next year, 23XII Racing (23 was Jordan’s jersey number and XII refers to Hamlin’s car number, 11) will expand to a second car with former NASCAR champion Kurt Busch as driver.

(INDYCAR)—Wheels already are turning for the 2022 INDYCAR season.  The Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s Rookie Orientation Program tomorrow will feature two drivers who focused on road courses this year, Jimmie Johnson and Romain Grosjean.

Johnson, who raced on the track’s road course this year, is not unfamiliar with the big oval. He ran eighteen Brickyard 400s in his NASCAR days and won four times.  But this will be his first time on the oval in an open-wheel car.  He has tested an Indycar on an oval however, running some test laps at the Texas Speedway. He has expressed an interest in running the Indianapolis 500 in May but has not committed to the other ovals on the schedule at Texas, Iowa, and Gateway.

Joining him in getting the feel of the big track is Romain Grosjean, the former Formula 1 driver who built a big following in the series this year.  He got a taste of oval racing late in the season at Gateway’s Worldwide Technology Raceway in August.  It will be his first run for his new team-owner, Michael Andretti.  He’s moving over from Dale Coyne racing.

Before drivers are allowed to run on the Indianapolis oval, they have to prove they can handle it.  The program requires them to run ten laps at 205-210 mph, fifteen more at 210=215, and then 15 laps at more than 215.

The big test will come in May.  In this year’s 33-car starting field, Simona DeSilvestro had the slowest four-lap qualifying run at 228.353. Will Power had the slowest qualifying lap at 227,535.

Scott Dixon sat on the pole at 231.685 with a fast lap of 232.757.

The last NASCAR driver to run the 500 was Kurt Busch, who was the rookie of the year with his sixth place finish in 2014. “The Indianapolis 500 will blow you away,” he said after the race. Johnson could become the nineteenth driver to drive in both the Indianapolis 500 and the Brickyard 400, which was first run in 1994.

(FORMULA 1)—Formula 1 was off last weekend. It resumes racing in Istanbul with the Turkish Grand Prix. Lewis Hamilton is clinging to a two-point lead over Max Verstappen. \

(Photo credits:  Bob Priddy; Wendell Scott—NASCAR Hall of Fame)

 

The Basic Question

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(In our quieter moments, all of us probably have questioned our existence. Most of us find it unprofitable to dwell on the issue because it gets in the way of living. But there are those who (often sequestered) ponder this matter. Do we exist only because of combinations of atoms set in motion billions of years ago by the Big Bang? And if there is life elsewhere in the universe, what will our discovery of it mean to our understanding of what we are and how we became what we are? Dr. Frank Crane is among those who have asked—-)

WHY WAS I BORN?

There is one question upon the answer to which rests the success or failure of life.

It is the question: “Why was I born?”

A strange fact is that nobody knows the answer. The purpose which the Creator had in mind when he made me has never been known, will never be known.

Curious that the most fateful of all problems should be forever  unanswerable!

We may believe this or that to be the reason; we cannot KNOW.

Notwithstanding this fact, the net result of my life depends upon the  THEORY I form to answer this query.

But how can I tell which theory is best when there is no means of knowing which is true?

There is a way to tell which theory is, if not true, at least approximately  true. This way is suggested by what is called PRAGMATISM.

That is to say: That answer to the question is most likely to be true Which WILL WORK .

We cannot answer the question, “Why was I born?” by investigating Causes. The secrets of life are beyond us. The Creator will not be interviewed.

But we can select an answer by noting RESULTS. For instance:

“I was made in order that I might get all the pleasure possible out of        life.” This solution means wreckage. Its fallacy is proved by insane hospitals, feeble-minded asylums, and by those murders, adulteries, and heartbreaks that constantly attend the end of the pleasure seeker.

“I was made in order that I might escape this evil world and get safely into a better one after death.” Such an answer leads logically to the asceticism that marked the dark ages and the hard morbidity that characterized Puritanism.

“I was born to labor for others” means a race of slaves.

“I was born to live and to enjoy myself upon the fruits of others’ labor”  means a class of snobs .

The most satisfactory answer, in twentieth century terms, is: “I was born to express what forces my Creator planted in me; to develop my instincts and talents under the   guidance of reason; to find permanent happiness by fostering the higher, more altruistic, and spirit impulses and by subduing the violence of the more brutal impulses. I was born to find love and my own work, and through these liberty. In one word the purpose of creating me was that I should be as GREAT as possible.”

Only by this answer do we get strength without cruelty, virtue without narrowness, love without contamination, reverence without superstition, joy without excess.

I do not know this answer is correct. I believe it to be the most NEARLY correct for the simple reason that IT WORKS .

 

Notes from a Quiet Street (Fall Colors edition)

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(Being a compendium of random thoughts that don’t merit full bloggiation.)

Would someone, preferably one of the people Missourians have sent to the U. S. Senate or the U.S. House, enlighten us about why we have a federal debt limit if it can be increased at congressional will?

And, members of our Washington delegation, don’t get all puffy about how you oppose raising it when you and your colleagues previous DID raise it.

Please write a 500-word theme about how you will pay back this debt. If you expect to pass this course, do not give me the tiresome argument that if government reduces its ability to pay for its programs, the public will create more economic growth that will reduce the debt.

There will be no grading on the curve. This is strictly pass/fail.

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When it was announced a few days ago that the nation was averaging 1900 COVID deaths a day for the first time since last March and that 90% of COVID patients in hospitals are unvaccinated, an ugly stroke of capitalist brilliance overwhelmed me.

Monogrammed body bags.  There’s a big constituency for this product—the thousands of people who refuse to get vaccinated.  Take your personal bag to the hospital with you so you can go out in style.

It would be the last status statement, a last chance to be SOMEBODY instead of just some body.

It will be a wonderful memento for your survivors and an inspirational symbol of your stalwart independence.  Could become a family heirloom.

And there would be a good market for used ones.  Run an ad on the internet, or maybe in the newspaper, or offer it on EBay: “Body bag, reasonably priced. Great savings if your initials are _____ (fill in appropriate letters).”

If ya don’t got it, flaunt it.

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The University of Missouri football team, a few days ago, held a charitable event for the athletic department of Southeast Missouri State University. The Tigers gave the Red Hawks $550,000 and all the team from Cape Girardeau had to do was get the snot beaten out of it again at Faurot Field.

Early in the season we see a lot of these games, usually routs.  We’re not sure they should really count on the season’s record of either team but they do—-because they are two college football teams and they do play and somebody keeps score.

Smaller schools are willing to take on these challenges because—in this case $550,000—they get a relative ton of money for athletic programs that come nowhere near having the resources bigger schools have.  If being a punching bag one Saturday afternoon makes sure there are volleyball and soccer and other minor games available for student-athletes in Cape Girardeau, the price is worth it.

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We are sure we are not the only ones to think, or to say when buying a new car, “This is probably the last gas-powered car I’ll ever own.” We’ve said it for the last two cars we’ve bought and the second one is coming up on eight years old. Will there be a third?  Two developments in the past few days make it clear the future is silently roaring (if such thing is possible) our way.

New York’s new governor, Kathy Hochul, has signed a new law saying every new passenger car or truck sold in the state must be zero-emission vehicles by 2035.   Medium and heavy-duty trucks have a 2045 goal. This is a huge goal—electric vehicles constituted only two percent of sales last year. The new law is similar to an executive order issued by the governor of California earlier.  Big difference: executive orders are not laws.

That’s plenty of time to develop EVS that don’t need to recharged on round trips to St. Louis or Kansas City.

In fact, one such car is coming over the horizon.

We’ve said that we’ll start to seriously look at an electric vehicle has a 500-mile battery.  There is such a vehicle and the EPA says its range is 520 miles, topping Tesla’s best by more than 100 miles.  The company is called Lucid and it plans to start deliveries of its cars before the end of the year. Lucid is a Silicon Valley-founded company that recently picked Casa Grande, Arizona as the site for its first purpose-built EV factory in North America. It will start by making 10,000 cars a year and plans expansion to produce more than 300,000 a year.

Prices are believed to start at about $77,000. They’re going to have to come down a few tens to be affordable to people such as I am.

Still…….

The future is coming.

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The big inaugural/bicentennial parade in Jefferson City on Saturday, September 18t, was a week premature.   True, Missouri was admitted to the Union on August 10, 1821.  But people living out here in central Missouri didn’t know about it until September 25 when the proclamation was published by The Missouri intelligencer¸ in Franklin—Missouri’s first newspaper outside of St. Louis.   Folks in St. Louis celebrated twenty days earlier when Missouri’s first newspaper, The Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser, published the proclamation.  No big stories or headlines Just the proclamation.  That’s the primitive reporting style of the day.

 

Sedimental Value

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(My mother-in-law, Yuba Hanson, used to refer to things that we didn’t need to keep, but did keep, as items of “sedimental value,” things that just accumulate, like sediment in a corner.  As one advances in years, the word “downsizing” grows in importance. And that provokes thoughts of why and how we accumulated so much stuff to begin with. Dr. Frank Crane thought about that, too, and wrote about—–)

THINGS

Miss Mathilda Tommet of Milwaukee left a will the other day eight and one-half feet long, written in her own hand on sheets of paper pasted together. In it she bequeathed to one relative “my best bedspread and one-half of my best towels;” to another a high-backed-chair, admonishing her executors to “be sure to take the one standing on the north side of the sideboard;” to another her chickens and feed; while vegetables, fruit, pickles, a pail of lard, and “father’s old clock” go to another, and to her dearest enemy a pair of old shoestrings.

Then there was Thoreau, who in his house by Walden Pond would have no furniture; he found a stone once which he fancied, and kept awhile, but soon threw it away, as    he found it had to be dusted.

One of the greatest tyrannies of life is THINGS.

The most common form of insanity is the mania to Own.

One of the first acts of a person who comes into money is to load himself down with a pile of rubbish that makes his life a fret and his death bed terrible.

The very rich collect. They get together spoons, canes, pictures, vases, pitchers, books, or marbles.  When there is no more room for them in the house they build a wing and pack it full.

I knew a man who had $ 20,000 worth of old postage stamps locked up in a safety deposit vault.

I knew an old woman who never traveled, although she longed to travel and had plenty of means, because she was afraid her parlor carpet and her blue china dishes would not properly be taken care of.

The stores are heaped up with THINGS. The most skillful men are employed to persuade people to buy THINGS for which they have no earthly use.

Every home contains sets of books that were bought at a high rate, and that have stood for years without a soul looking into them.

American living rooms are as cluttered as Westminster Abbey. Every  mantel is loaded with junk. The walls are covered with pictures, most of them bad. The floors are so thick with chairs and superfluous stands and tables that few can wind their way through them by day and none by night.

Things, things, things! Bedrooms are full of them, closets heaped with  them, the attic is choked with them, the woodshed and barn are running over.

When we go away on vacations we take trunks full of things. When we go to Europe also we find that baggage is the plague of our life.

It is a relief to turn to the books of the Hindus and read :

“Even if they have longer remained with us, the objects of sense are  sure to vanish. Why, then, not forsake them ourselves? If they pass away by themselves they cause  the greatest pain to the mind, but if we forsake them ourselves they cause endless happiness and peace.”

And in another Oriental book we find this searching word:

“For a man ‘ s life consisteth not in the abundance of THINGS which he possesseth.”