Category Archives: people

A seldom-told story of the end of WWII

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This year has been the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II.  We’ve see a lot of publications about the anniversary, including V-J day, Victory over Japan day.  We have yet to see one that tells you the story we are about to tell you.

Most of us probably have seen photographs of General MacArthur signing the peace treaty with Japan in ceremonies on the deck of the USS Missouri.

But few of us probably have seen these pictures:

A few weeks ago my long-time friend, Hugh David Waggoner, called to see if I would be interested in an old trunk full of pictures from World War II that had belonged to a man named R. Sheldon Gentry (his first name was Rusaw, which might explain why he used “R” so he wouldn’t have to explain or repeat “Rusaw.”)  The name rang a faint bell with me but I have not been able to pin down who he was.

The pictures you see above are from the trunk.  The photographs and some 70-plus years old newspaper clippings tell the story behind the famous pictures of the surrender on the Missouri.  This story from that trunk is a story not often told, one I had not heard. So we’re going to tell it today because we doubt many of you have heard it, either.

One of the people in the third picture above is of extremely special interest because without him the war might have gone on longer than it did with consequences of immensely tragic proportions beyond the tragedies that had been occurring since Japan invaded China in 1931, the real beginning of the war.

A word, first, about Gentry, who went into the Army as a Second Lieutenant and came out a Major. He was a decorated photo intelligence officer who wound up with two Presidential Citations and two Legions of Merit among his medals because of his expertise in advising bomber crews about their targets. In fact, he went on several missions and helped guide crews to their targets in the southwest Pacific Theatre as the allies closed the noose around Japan.

Three days after the second Atomic Bomb was dropped, Gentry was in an American bomber fifty feet over Nagasaki assessing the damage.  A few days after that, Japan accepted the surrender terms laid down at the Potsdam Conference by the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union. The notification was announced on August 15 by President Truman, the same day the Emperor dramatically announced to his nation that he had ordered all Japanese military forces to stop fighting. It also was the day General McArthur was designated the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers.

MacArthur immediately ordered the Japanese Imperial Government to send envoys to Manila on the 17th to put the surrender into effect. The delegation was to travel from Japan in a white airplane with green crosses on the fuselage and wings to the island of Ieshima where they would transfer to an American plane that would take them to Manila. The Japanese were granted some extra time to make preparations for the flight—painting an airplane, for example.  On the morning of August 19, the sixteen-member delegation boarded two re-painted Mitsubishi G4M “Betty” bombers and flew to IeShima (the Japanese called it IeJima or Iye Jima), an island in the Okinawa Prefecture.

The Betty was the main bomber used by Japan, often as a torpedo bomber—as it was at Pearl Harbor. It was fast, 265 mph, could fly 3,250 miles. One of its most notable accomplishments was the shocking sinking of the British battleships, Prince of Wales and Repulse during the earliest days of the war, the first battleships sunk in a wartime air attack. But the plane had no armor and no self-sealing fuel tanks, making it vulnerable to a few well-placed shots.  Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of the Japanese Navy at Pearl Harbor and Midway, was sought out and shot down in a Betty over Bougainville in 1943.

But that’s straying from our story.

The pictures at the top of this entry were in Gentry’s trunk.  They show the two disarmed Betty bombers, as the Americans called them—Americans gave male names to Japanese fighter planes and female names to the bombers—being escorted by two Army Air Force B-25s.  The second pictures shows one of them landing.

The delegation was met by American officers who escorted them to one of our C-54s for the flight to Manila.   Notice, in the third picture, the man in the white suit, in the center, wearing glasses. He was the only civilian among the seven men who sat at the negotiating table in Manila, across from seven American military representatives who worked out the final agreement in two sessions the evening of the 19th and the morning of the 20th.

In the trunk is the first teletype message that negotiations for Japanese surrender had been completed and Japanese negotiators would arrive later on the 20th in Tokyo.

But things almost did not turn out well.

The man in the white suit at the negotiations was Katsuo Okazaki, a 5,000 meter runner at the Paris Olympics of 1924.  Although MacArthur’s directive was for negotiators only from the Army and the Navy, the Japanese government decided to have a representative of its own with the group and selected Okazaki, the former second secretary of the Japanese Embassy in Washington and then the director of the research bureau of the foreign office.

The surrender flight to Ie Jima had been a nervous trip for those aboard the two bombers. “At that time the Kamikaze corps was still strong.  We had to make our preparations in secret lest the Kamikazes attack us on the way.  It took longer than we expected…

“We flew from Kisarazu airbase,” he recalled in a late 1947 interview with Ray Falk of the North American Newspaper Alliance. “A little after noon we were off Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island, where we were met by American planes. We had been given the call signal, ’Bataan.’”

(The Battle of Bataan in the Japanese Philippine campaign of 1942 ended with a 65-mile forced march of 75,000 captured American and Filipino troops to concentration camps. The march was infamous for the brutality of the Japanese, who beat bayonetted the starved and weak prisoners who were too weak to walk. Thousands of them died on the march or in the camps.)

“When we called, ‘Bataan! Bataan!’ the American pilots answered, ‘Yes, we are Bataan’s watchdog—follow us…’”

The group returned to IeShima after the Manila conference to find one of their planes was undergoing repairs and split up, with half of the group going back to Japan and the other half waiting to fly back later.

“Half an hour before our expected landing time in Japan, the pilot came back and said, ‘I am sorry but we found our gasoline tank is leaking, and we have very little gas left.’ We were flying over water. We didn’t know whether we could reach land. We knew the bomber would not float more than one or two minutes.  Come what may, I was entrusted with all the documents.”

“Fifteen minutes later, the plane crashed, and I made a compete somersault. A second crash and another tumble followed.  I was ready to jump out when the pilot came back and said, ‘Please remain calm and swim ashore.’  We had landed in shallow coastal water.”

The pilot had managed to land the plane near a beach at Hamamatsu, about 285 miles south of Tokyo.

Okazaki went into the water and swam ashore, holding the vital documents above his head. “We couldn’t see where we were for it was so dark,” he continued. “Eventually a full moon rose and we went ashore. Two fishermen from Hamamatsu helped us to get to the Hamamatsu airbase.  The villagers had been reluctant to help us when they saw the plane crash because they thought I was a B-29. We were lucky not to have been attacked as enemies.

“Anyway, we reached Prime Minister Prince Higashi Kuni’s office at 9 o’clock the following morning, only seven hours late.  The cabinet had waited for us all night.

“I can’t imagine what would have happened if I had drowned. General headquarters already was mistrusting us because we were two days late in getting to Manila. What measures the allied armies might have taken are pure conjecture. But they would have been unpleasant. It might have caused the war to continue in view of the fact that our party had to escape from the anti-surrender Kamikaze corps which wanted to continue the war.”

There might have been conjecture on Okazaki’s part in 1947 but there was no conjecture on the part of the allies of 1945 who already had been planning one of the largest amphibious operations in history, Operation Downfall, to start in November.  The second phase would have been launched in early ’46 near Tokyo. Japan knew the invasions were coming but hoped the cost to the allies would be so great that the war would end with an armistice, not a defeat.

The forecasts for casualties varied widely. One estimate from Secretary of War Henry Stimson forecast 400,000 to 800,000 fatalities and as many as four-million total casualties, not counting the 100,000 allied prisoners of war who were to be executed if Japan was invaded.

But for Russia’s late-war invasion from the north and the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with threats of more such attacks—and a swimmer named Katzuo Okazaki—history might have been a great deal more “unpleasant” as Okazaki put it in 1947.

The first advance party of American soldiers arrived in Japan on August 26 with greater numbers arriving two days later, with the surrender ceremonies taking place on an American battleship in Tokyo Bay September 2. Okazaki was part of the Japanese delegation on the Missouri that day.

And what became of him?

The man in the white suit was elected to the Japanese House of Representatives in 1949. Two years later, Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida name him Chief Cabinet Secretary and state minister without portfolio. He became Foreign Minister in 1952 and during his three years in that office, signed a Mutual Security Assistance Agreement with American Ambassador John Allison. He retired but was called back to service to be Japan’s delegate to the United Nations from April, 1961 to July, 1963.  He died two years later at the age of 68.

And the Betty bomber, the Mitsubishi G4M1 that carried Okazaki and the others on those historic surrender flights? The Japanese called it the Hamaki, meaning “cigar,” a reference to its shape. Wrecked remains of hundreds of them are scattered throughout Southeast Asia and in the Southwest Pacific. The Smithsonian Air & Space Museum has pieces of one it is slowly restoring. A wrecked one is on display at an air museum in Chino, California.  Two years ago Warbird Digest reported two of the bombers had been recovered from the Solomon Islands for possible restoration. There are no flyable Bettys in existence.

There are more stories in that old trunk, It now resides at the Museum of Missouri Military History at the Ike Skelton Training Center near Jefferson City. We might tell more about Gentry in some later entry.  We haven’t learned much about his post-war years, but his trunk sure has some interesting things about that part of his life and the war he saw and helped fight. Now his trunk and the stories in it are at a place where they will be cared for and appreciated.

 

The Staples Lesson

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A lot of time and space is being chewed up in the media—including here—about our president’s desire to dominate the Republican Party after he leaves office.  We’ve heard, read, and seen a number of questions about why the GOP, by and large, refuses to acknowledge that the president lost on November 3.  One answer we have NOT heard suggested was explained in the Missouri Senate during the September veto session of 2002 by Danny Staples.

Senator Staples ran a canoe-rental business in Eminence, in country of Ozark Mountains, National Forests, and Scenic Riverways.  He might have been the greatest storyteller in the history of the Missouri Senate—certainly I never heard anybody better in four decades of statehouse coverage.  Some of his stories were tinged with truth.

When things got pretty testy, Staples often would get up and go off on a long, windy discussion of life in Shannon County’s Horse Hollow, his baseball career, his adventures with his horse Trixie, how he was related (by marriage) to Lady Godiva, defending cockfighting, or the days when he hauled cars from New Orleans to Omaha or something else. When Danny Staples was forced out by term limits, the Senate lost about 80% of its sense of humor.

But getting back to today’s situation in Washington, where it seems all sense of tension-relieving humor left the Capitol long ago.

For those worried about the Republicans in Congress who don’t dare speak even slightly ill of our president, we turn to a story told by Danny Staples in his farewell remarks to the Senate eighteen years ago.  Your reporter had the foresight to turn on his tape recorder to capture many Staples stories and has transcribed most of those recordings. Here’s part of his last speech to the Missouri Senate:

“…This is the greatest place in the world to try to make a living.  Sometimes the food is free.  Sometimes the beverages are free.  But I can tell you now…that I had to come up here two weeks ago on constituent services business and I went over to the Deville Hotel.  There was 18 lobbyists sitting there eating and drinking. And I’m term limited out. They know I can’t ever vote again.  And I set over in the corner, all by myself like an orphan boy at a picnic, bought my own Bud Lite and bought my own steak dinner.”

Danny died seventeen years ago, a little more than seven months after leaving the Senate.

The Deville Hotel has a different name. It no longer is a hangout for lobbyists around a restaurant table because it doesn’t have a restaurant anymore. And the Senate doesn’t have Danny Staples.

Nor does the Senate, or the House, in Washington have anyone who can step in when things get too self-important and tense, and cool things down the way Danny Staples did in the Missouri Senate.  And man-oh-man do they ever need it.

As far as why Republicans in Washington—or even the Republican candidate for the Senate in Georgia—continue to parrot Trumpian hogwash that the election was stolen from him, the answer might become more clear on January 6, 2021.

That’s the day after the two U. S. Senate elections in Georgia.  After that, our president will be considerably weaker because there will be nobody over whom he can threaten harm. Disparaging remarks on Twitter will mean far less because all elections have been decided. The control of the Senate has been determined. While he still might bark loudly, most of his harmful teeth will be gone—for at least two years. And with the passage of time (and the potential for legal difficulties that might mean more than another four-year term), his bite will be even less fearful.

Walking into a room of the powerful when you are in no position to help them or to seriously harm them will be a far different experience for our president from the days when he could walk into a room or into a Tweet before that senate election and hurt somebody.

As of January 6, it might be the president who “sets over in the corner like an orphan boy” because the people he will leave behind in the House and the Senate will have a much reduced reason to deal with him.

As far as being “relevant” within the party or whether a Trump will lead the national GOP: other people will be making a lot of decisions once our president no longer has the cover of his office to protect him and those decisions have the potential to make some decisions for the party regardless of the number of true believers the president now has when he has the power to do something for them. Sooner or later the party might recognize a need to move on and the path might be clearer when there is no sitting president blocking the view.

Regardless, both parties and   both houses of the Congress still badly need somebody such as Danny Staples to tell them to quit taking themselves so seriously that they lose sight of the broad public that believed it was electing them to serve in its interests.

 

 

Playbook

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We offer this observation from a book called “My Fight,” an autobiography written in 1925 by a German World War One veteran who refused to acknowledge his country’s leadership had lost the war and who was  looking for someone else to blame.  This is a 1939 translation by Irish writer and translator James Murphy. You may draw from it anything you wish, or nothing at all.

…It remained for the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood, and their fighting comrades, the Marxists, to impute responsibility for the downfall precisely to the man who alone had shown a superhuman will and energy in his effort to prevent the catastrophe which he had foreseen and to save the nation from that hour of complete overthrow and shame. By placing responsibility for the loss of the world war on the shoulders of Ludendorff they took away the weapon of moral right from the only adversary dangerous enough to be likely to succeed in bringing the betrayers of the Fatherland to Justice.

All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true within itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

“My Fight” in German is Mein Kampf. The description of “The Big Lie” has been widely attributed to Hermann Goering, the information minister for Adolph Hitler.  But no attributable source has been found for Goering. But it is attributable to his boss, in this book.

A further discussion of the author of this technique can be found in A Psychoanalysis of Adolph Hitler, His Life and Legend  that was compiled for the Office of Strategic Services during World War Two. (The OSS morphed into the CIA after the war.)

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78-02646R000600240001-5.

Again, we offer this material without comment.  Make of it what you will.

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HAPPINESS AWAITS

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(All of us can make long lists of reasons to be unhappy in the backwash of a political campaign, the uncertainty of a pandemic, the lack of job and food security, the potential for holidays apart, and more. In these conditions, it seems almost an insult to be happy. “Not so!” exclaims Dr. Frank Crane as he encourages us to find our—-)

HIDDEN HAPPINESS

Happiness is rarely visible to the multitude, says a shrewd observer; it lies hidden in odd corners and quiet places.

Happiness is a shy thing. Grief is blatant and advertising. If a boy cuts his finger he howls, proclaiming his woe. If he is eating pie he sits still and says nothing.

If you ask a man how he is, he searches himself to find a pain to report. If he has nothing but happiness he hates to mention it, and says, “Oh, not half bad.”

We conceal happiness as a vice.

We are rather suspicious of it, and if we feel particularly well, or have exceptional good luck, we knock on wood.

The fact is that happiness does not come from big events of life, but is made up of innumerable   little things.

Ordinary every-day happiness is composed of shoes that fit, stomach that digests, purse that does not flatten, a little appreciation and a big of this, that, and the other, too trifling to mention.

The big things, such as someone giving you a million dollars, are not only rare, but they do not satisfy when you have the neuritis.

We are so cantankerous by nature that we are usually able to spell happiness only by holding it before the mirror and reading backwards. Leonardo da Vinci used to write that way; that may be why he could paint “The Joyous One” with so enigmatical a smile.

For if you seek to analyze contentment you got at it negatively. To feel well means you do hnot have a headache, toothache or toe ache, you have no dyspepsia, catarrh, gout, sciatica, hives, nausea, boils, cancer, grippe, rhinitis, iritis, appendicitis nor any other itis. And to determine your joy you must reckon by checking off and eliminating the factors of possible pain. Answer—happy, if no pain discoverable. So elusive is joy!

Someday try reversing this process. Note all the pleasurable things. For instance, a good sleep, a delightful snooze in bed after you ought to get up, a delicious bath, the invigorating caress of cold water, a good breakfast, with somebody you love visible across the coffee-cups, half-hour’s diversion with the newspaper, the flash of nature’s loveliness outdoors as you go to work, interesting faces on the street car, pleasures of your business, pleasant relations with your fellow workers, meeting old friends and new faces, the good story someone tells you, and so on—you’ll fill your notebook—and you can get your disappointments and grievances into three lines.

Happiness, they say, is scant in this wicked world and hard to find.

One way to find it is to look for it.

 

Sports fan Christmas gifts

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Let’s take a break from the heavy observations of the contemporary scene and help you with your Christmas shopping, particularly if you have sports fans on your list.

How about t-shirts, sweatshirts, or replica jerseys from some unique teams?  Your Christmas Shopping Advisor was prowling around on the internet the other day during the fifteen free minutes that our president was taking a breath or resting his thumbs and we found some teams your loved one would turn heads by wearing one of their t-shirts, caps, jerseys, or hoodies.

Some are based on movies or television shows:

Crash Davis’s Durham Bulls

and Corporal Klinger’s Toledo Mud Hens.

New York Knights, the fictional team of Roy Hobbs in The Natural

And for the female sports fan: Rockford Peaches—but no crying is allowed when wearing this shirt.

Minor league baseball teams:

Richmond Flying Squirrels

Hartford Yard Goats

Montgomery Biscuits

Modesto Nuts

Binghamton Rumble Ponies

Clinton Lumber Kings

Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp

Wichita Wing Nuts (although they folded in 2018)

Akron Rubber Ducks

Traverse City Beach Bums

Albuquerque Isotopes (the town is the home of the Atomic Museum)

New Orleans Baby Cakes

The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City has some great shirts or jerseys:

Homestead Grays

Kansas City Monarchs

New York Black Yankees

New York Elite Giants

Atlanta Black Crackers

Detroit Stars

Chicago American Giants

—and a lot of other great caps and other souvenirs

A few colleges:

University of California-Irvine Anteaters

Webster University Gorelocks—right here in Missouri

The University of Missouri-Kansas City Kangaroos

University of California Banana Slugs

Campbell Fighting Camels

Scottsdale Community College Fighting Artichokes

Presbyterian College Blue Hose

Youngstown State Penguins

Fort Wayne Mad Ants—actually it’s an NBA development league team

Hockey:

Toledo Walleyes

Halifax Mooseheads

Macon Whoopee

Odessa Jackalopes

Kentucky Thoroughblades

Lewiston Maineacs

Minot Minotaurs

And a wild card:

Thailand Tobacco Monopoly Football Club—we call it Soccer here.

We’ve also come across some great high school sports team names but we don’t know if any of them have t-shirts.  But here’s an article from T. R. Robertson about some of the more unusual names he has come across. You might check various websites to see if the schools do have a potential gift for you.

http://www.thevistapress.com/unusual-and-creative-high-school-team-names/

The Washington Football team in the NFL is playing without a name this year after being the Redskins since 1933.  Other teams with ethnic names at all levels and in all sports have come under some scrutiny from those who find the team names derogatory.  What we have seen in these shopping suggestions, however, is that there is no lack of creativity in naming sports teams. We’re confident that they’ll find a new name in Washington.  The Memorials.  The Navy Yards.  The Malls. The Air and Spaces. The K-Streeters.  Maybe they could name themselves after the man who designed the city, the Washington L’Enfants.  But probably not that one.

Or maybe they could name themselves after the city. The Washington Washingtons.  After all, George was a pretty good quarterback in his day. Stood six feet-two. And he could throw.  He did NOT throw a silver dollar across the Potomac River, which is about a mile wide at Mount Vernon, which is just south of town.  But his step-son, Washington Parke Custis, claimed he once threw a piece of slate across the Rappahannock, and threw another one over a natural bridge 215-feet high.

Whatever, we hope this has helped those of you with sports fans in your family have a happy and an unusual Christmas.

 

 

 

 

Fat

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(Dr. Frank Crane wanted to help people be better through positive thinking and in his writings he took that responsibility seriously. But Dr. Crane was not a man without humor. Our Centers for Disease Control says we are a nation of fat, that the prevalence of obesity was 42.4% in 2017-2018, the most recent year the CDC has weighed the facts and the facts show we’re plumping up. The Centers say that in 1999-2000, only 30.5% of us were, shall we say, overly insulated against the cold. As we are now into the season of over-indulging, we call upon Dr. Crane to offer some light-hearted positive thinking about this heavy topic.)

THE FAT MAN

Every once in a while, said the fat man, somebody comes along with some medicine or treatment or system of exercise or plan of starvation to reduce my flesh.

What do I want to reduce it for?  It all feels good.  And every time I lose weight I get peevish.

What’s the matter with people, anyhow, that they can make fun of fat folks?

They are the salvation of the race. They keep humanity cheerful.

Optimism is mostly a matter of adipose tissue.

Fat people like to eat and drink. They don’t have food fads. They enjoy breakfast, dinner, and supper, and a bite between. And that’s the kind of people mother likes to cook for, and the rest of the family like to live with.

People with appetites are human.

Human folks are those who make joys of life’s necessities. Must we eat? They make eating a celebration.  Must we drink? They adorn with songs the inserting of liquid into one’s anatomy. Must we labor? It shall be to music. Must we exercise? It shall be a game.

It’s your fat men that keep humanity form dying of the dry rot. They make existence a poem. They see the jokes of destiny.

Fat men have the sources of humor in them. Some lean persons have been funny, but what would they have amounted to had there been no fat persons to laugh at them?

Your skinny ones take themselves too seriously. They are reformers, prohibitionists, revolutionists, suffragettes. Their gospel is: Whatever is, is wrong.

Why do men admire slender women? They nag.

Slim women are neat, orderly, everything-in-its-place. They are good housekeepers, meaning that they keep the house fit for everybody but the husband and children.

And why do women admire slim men, with no girth? Such men are fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. They beat their wives, if they are vulgar; and persecute them more subtly, if they are cultured.

Take it from me, girls. Pick out a nice, large, round, juicy man, that likes to feed, and whose conscience is not wormy, marry him and, as the Good Books says, “let your soul delight itself in fatness. “

It doesn’t follow that because a man’s fat he’s a slob. Napoleon was roundish. Samuel Johnson was obese, and so was Boswell, who write about him.

The world and an overcoat, it was said, could not contain the glory of Victor Hugo. And believe me, he was some eater. Here’s one of his meals: veal cutlets, lima beans, oil, roast beef and tomato sauce, omelets, milk and vinegar, mustard and cheese, all swallowed rapidly with great draughts of coffee.

They called Rossini “a hippopotamus in trousers,” and for six years before his death he couldn’t see his toes.

Alexander Dumas could eat three beefsteaks to any other man’s one; and Balzac looked more like a hogshead than a human being.

Besides, added the fat man, if everybody was fat, there would be no war.  It’s the lean men that fight.

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Titles 

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Congratulations to all of those who gained titles on November 3.  Representative.  Senator.

Don’t let it go to your head.

Some people get all puffed up about titles, job titles. Some of the puffiest are those who are elected to wear titles on behalf of all of us.  But as pious Sam the Eagle learned to his embarrassment on The Muppet Show, we’re all naked under our clothes and therefore, we are all alike even if we have been given an impressive title.

That’s a good thing to keep in mind for those we elected to lead us into the third decade of the Twenty-first Century.

President, Governor, Representative, Senator (state as well as federal) and others who have achieved loftiness with a phrase they now can put ahead of their names or can keep ahead of their names for a while longer need to remember political titles are temporary and even during the times they carry them, there are people who know what they look like in their underwear.  Or less.

Your obedient servant has never been one who believes titles of elective office stay with a person once they leave that office.  Mr. Danforth. Mr. Obama. Ms. McCaskill, Mr. Holden. The public endows the person with the title until they leave office, at which point the public usually bestows that title on a successor. Do not presume that a title should be ahead of your name on your tombstone. You are no more distinguished in your final resting place than all of the others around you. You were Joe or Mary to the folks back home before you got here—to the Capitol. They will still call you by those names when you return on weekends or between sessions. And you will still be Joe and Mary when your years here are finished. Titles are nice in the Capitol where many people want to be your best friend.  But to your real best friends, the ones who sent you here, you will still be Joe and Mary.

For many years, I have spoken to the incoming new members of the General Assembly about the Capitol’s history or how to get along with the press.  I have tried to impress upon them that although they might be a Representative or Senator from X-district, they are STATE Representatives and STATE Senators and there will be times when the interests of people statewide outweigh the wishes of the folks at the Friday morning coffee table.

The same is more true for those we send to Washington where the opportunities for perceived self-importance are even greater. It would be helpful if they, even more than those at the Missouri Capitol, remind themselves of the truth of Sam the Eagle’s epiphany.

Sometimes I have told incoming legislators that if they begin to feel pretty important or if they start believing the messages of their importance that lobbyists sometimes spread upon them, to take a walk in the third and fourth floors, the legislative floors, and look at the composite pictures of members of past General Assemblies, even as recently as ten years ago, and see if they can recall anything any of those faces on the wall said or did.  “With luck, you are no more than eight years away from being just another picture on the wall that some small child might look at for ten seconds when told that ‘Great grandpa was a member of the legislature,’ and then want to go back downstairs to see the stagecoach in the museum again,” I tell them.

Whether at the state level or the federal level—or even in our city halls and county courthouses—those we pick to represent us are better served (and we are better served) if they adhere to the words of the eminent 23rd Century philosopher  S’chn T’gai Spock: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” (The Gospel of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.)

So, to the newbies as well as the re-elected veterans: The job is not about the title given to you. It is about what that title enables you to do for the people.  All of us.

 

 

Refusing to accept the truth

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(Dr. Crane is back in his Monday slot this week.  With so many people doubting or being encouraged to doubt the truth of the November 3 election results, we thought it appropriate to share his thoughts on truth and his answer to a question—)

WHAT TO DO

An interesting letter comes to me from a man who says that he has had enough of my finding fault with this, that, and the other in society, in law, and in customs; that he is aweary of this aimless iconoclasm; and that he wishes that I would come out flat-footed and tell him and the world precisely what to do to remedy the injustice and folly of mankind..

I could comply with his requests. I or any other opinionated man could in a half-hour tell the world just what it ought to do.

“I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

Why, so can I, or so can any man;

But will they come when you do call for them?”

The trouble lies here: that neither the individual man nor mankind in general becomes better by TELLING.

Didactic teaching may do some good, but only in a very roundabout way; by familiarizing the hearer with helpful principles and ideas.

If an angel from God were to appear and tell the world precisely what to do, and if every man and woman believed him, they still would not, and could not, do what he said.

The reason is a psychological one. It is that the net result of any truth you had a man is the product of that truth MIXED WITH THE STUFF ALREADY IN HIS MIND.  Your information is not ADDED to his, it is DILUTED by his.

It all depends on the kind of mind, the whole set of ideas, habits, temperament, and so on with which the imparted truth is compounded.

Hence we see that progress is a matter of growth; it is slow; it moves by waves a generation apart. Old notions and inborn prejudices die hard, and rule us a long while after they are dead.

The human mind today is haunted by a swarm of ghosts of ancient frauds. Think of how many people today still believe in the divine right of kings, in the “natural” right of inheriting property, in the supremacy of Mahomet, and that criminals can be cured by punishment!

Some day, said Victor Hugo, children will be amazed to hear that there were kings in Europe. And some day, we may say, children will look back with incredulity upon our own era, where mothers can be seen content with their happy children and not turn a hand to rescue the myriad other children from stunting toil.

Many a thinker has thought out an elaborate plan for smashing things and composing them all anew. But not so comes the Golden Age.

It is a tree growing, not a house building. Age after age things get better, as the long rising of the tide.

Truth is like a lump of leaven which a woman puts in a measure of meal “until the whole is leavened.”

All we can do is keep on declaring the truth as we see it; putting in the leaven and waiting. We are digging about the truth, watering and cultivating it.  We do not “make’ it; the gardener does not “make” apples.”

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We are all one big county

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(Normally, we try to have some positive thoughts from Dr. Frank Crane on Mondays but some recent comments on the pandemic seem far more important today)

I suspect the people in this house on this quiet street are not the only ones who are scared today. We responsibly wear our masks whenever we leave the house to go anyplace where there are other people—the YMCA, the grocery store, the bookstore downtown, church (we are back to watching services on the First Christian Church webpage now that the weather has cooled off enough we can’t meet in a park pavilion or in our parking lot and services have moved to our gymnasium).  We wash our hands.  We’ve been “nosed” twice.

But every day we look at the Health Department’s COVID dashboard and we see the numbers of new cases and deaths and the daily record hospitalizations.

Last Friday, Dr. Alex Garza, the head of the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force pleaded for state officials to go beyond asking citizens to be individually responsible. It is time, he said, for a statewide mask mandate and other steps because this virus is pushing our healthcare system to its breaking point—not just in the St. Louis, but everywhere.  “We’re at war. And right here, right now, the virus is winning that war. It will take significant and decisive action through individual acts and determined public policy to get us through,” he said.

The Post-Dispatch posted a video of his remarks with its web story.  We found his thoughts so important that we transcribed them because we are, frankly and honestly, scared about what is and what is likely to be, we hope you will read what else he said:

For months we have talked about a time, a time when we would run out of options, a time when we would run out of space to care for sick patients and our options would be limited when the virus is hitting us so hard that the healthcare system that we have would be unable to address the people’s needs. That terrible time gets closer with each passing minute, each passing hour, and each passing day.

 The number of people with the virus is skyrocketing in our region. The number of people so ill that they have to go to the hospital is nearly three times what we described as a sustainable level. The number of people with COVID in our intensive care units is higher than ever.

 The real peak of this pandemic has yet to come. At the pace we’re on right now we could easily—easily—double the number of COVID patients in our hospitals within about two weeks. At that point we will not have the capacity we need to sufficiently care for our patients, not just COVID patients but all patients.

 Unfortunately, as has been painfully obvious to even the casual observer, we are past the time when individual behavior alone can address this disaster. Healthcare systems across Missouri need Governor Parson and the state to take additional actions to prevent unnecessary illnesses and deaths.

 When it comes to the virus, we are all one big county now.

 Every day COVID patients are crossing county lines to go to hospitals.  The lack of a mask mandate in one county has implications for residents and healthcare professionals in other parts of the state. The spread in cases is blanketing the state and no locale is safe anymore.

 Secondly, let me be really, really clear on this. A statewide mask mandate is needed to save lives across the state. 

 Secondly, we are also asking the state to work with our system’s emergency managers to start planning for what will happen WHEN the healthcare system becomes overwhelmed. 

 Our healthcare heroes have fought valiantly day after day but we have no reserves. We have no backup that we can suddenly muster to come in and save the day. If we stay on the path we’re on, even just two more weeks, we will not have the staff we need to care for patients. It’s now just a numbers game. We are danger-close.

 Finally we are asking for a statewide safer-at-home policy. Such a policy would limit the face-to-face interaction and decrease the spread of infection. This policy would instruct residents to stay home except for specific things such as schools, going to the store, seeking medical care, among other things. This would greatly help slow the spread of the virus by eliminating social gatherings that we know continue to be the avenue for sustaining this great pandemic.

 Some counties have had only a few deaths and a relatively small number of cases. Should those counties be required to do the things Dr. Garza thinks need to be done statewide?  Their experience might argue for local control, not a statewide mandate. But even in those places, if someone becomes seriously ill, where can they go if the rural hospital that served their area is one of the dozen or so that has closed in recent years, or if that small hospital remains but its small staff operates on a thin capacity margin and can’t treat them?

A vaccine is on the horizon. But we are months away from its general availability. The virus is here. Now.  It won’t wait.  And we do not know where it is lurking, despite the individual precautions we are taking.

“We are all one big county now,” Dr. Garza said. We think he’s right.

We’re too scared to think otherwise.

More History Than We Could Have Imagined 

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We have been reminded from all sides that this year’s election is historic. Whether it is as historic as some of the rhetoric has tried to portray it will be determined by the passage of time, as time’s context defines history. But it is, at least, unique.

Especially for Missourians.

We might be—probably are—participating in a huge first step of a transition from polling place to mailbox or other ways of casting votes. While mail-in voting was approved by the legislature as a one-off experience in this pandemic year, this bell has been rung and it can’t be UNrung. It is hard to believe lawmakers here and throughout the country will not revisit this issue, smooth out its rough spots, and move to make remote voting in one form or another a regular practice.

Resistance can be expected. But the arrow is in flight and while its course might become longer than anticipated, it will not be diverted.

More locally, what we are seeing in Missouri this year has never happened before or has happened only once. For example—-

Governor Mike Parson is not running for RE-election. He was Lieutenant Governor when Eric Greitens resigned, moving him into the big office. This is the first time Missourians have been faced with a sitting governor running for election since Lilburn Boggs, who as lieutenant governor replaced Daniel Dunklin, who resigned after becoming Surveyor General of Missouri and Illinois. Boggs, who is best known for issuing the extermination order against the Mormons, was elected to a full term in 1836.

(As a side note, all of this occurred a decade after an unusual gubernatorial succession circumstance put one man in the governor’s office with no opponent. Our second governor, Frederick Bates, died in 1825. Lieutenant Governor Benjamin Reeves had resigned earlier to help survey the Santa Fe Trail.  Senate President Pro Tem Abraham Williams, a one-legged shoemaker from Columbia, assumed duties as governor and under the constitution in effect at the time, called an election.  John Miller defeated three other candidates. Miller ran for a full term in 1828 and to this day is the only governor elected without opposition.  He served the longest continuous term until a constitutional change allowed Warren Hearnes to succeed himself in 1969.)

Never before have we had so many people seeking election to statewide offices they already hold but were not elected to hold.  Parson, Lieutenant Governor Kehoe, Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Treasurer Scott Fitzpatrick were not elected to their present offices. But  Mike Kehoe was headed back to private life as a term-limited senator and Fitzpatrick was facing ouster from the House because of term limits. When Parson moved up to governor, he promptly appointed Kehoe as Lieutenant Governor. Schmitt was elected State Treasurer then was appointed by Parson as Attorney General when Josh Hawley ended Claire McCaskill’s U. S. Senate Career.  Fitzpatrick, the outgoing House Budget Committee Chair, was appointed by Parson as Schmitt’s successor as Treasurer. The only statewide office holder who is running for RE-election, not just election, is Secretary of State Jay Ashcoft, who has stayed where voters put him four years ago.

The last time a sitting statewide office holder was elected, not re-elected, was 1996 with the election of Bekki Cook as Secretary of State.  She had been appointed to succeed acting Secretary Dick Hanson after the Missouri Supreme Court removed Judi Moriarty from office. Hanson, incidentally, served in the office only a few days and as far as we know holds the record for shortest time in office of any statewide official.

Cook did not see re-election but four years later was the Democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor. She lost to fellow Cape Girardeau resident Peter Kinder who went on become the only person to serve three full terms as Lieutenant Governor—a record unlikely to be broken if Amendment 1 is unfortunately approved next week.

President Trump’s repeated refusal to say he would assent to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses recalls an instance in Missouri when the legislature refused to allow such a transfer. Democrats had a stranglehold on state offices and on the legislature in 1940 when Republican Forrest Donnell was elected Governor.  In those days, the Speaker of the House proclaimed the official winners of statewide elections and Speaker Morris Osburn refused to certify Donnell’s election. The loser, Democrat Larry McDaniel, and state Democratic Party Chairman C. Marion Hulen claimed voting irregularities made McDaniel a winner by 30-thousand votes, not the 36-hundred vote loser. The Missouri Supreme Court finally ordered Donnell be sworn in—six weeks late, and to serve until a recount showed he had lost. The recount became a disaster for McDaniel, who withdrew his challenge without consulting Democratic leaders who had urged him to fight.

The event is unlikely to be repeated. A new state constitution adopted five years later made the Secretary of State, not the Speaker of the House, the person who certifies election results.

Many who read these observations already have cast their ballots and already have contributed to this historic election.  Thousands more will go to polling places next Tuesday to do their parts.

It’s not often that so many people make so much history.  We hope you will have or already have done your part.