Category Archives: people

A final anniversary note

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—-unless another final note occurs to us.

—-about the half century since men first walked on the moon. The five or six percent of you who supposedly still think it was a Hollywood-generated hoax can leave the room now. Or maybe not.

Only twelve men in the entire history of mankind, however far back you consider that history to go, have seen our earth in its entirety with their own eyes.   Only twelve. And, assuming you are not among those who think Hollywood had computer generated special effects far advanced from what they were showing the rest of the world, or whether you think these twelve were looking at a ball or a pancake, what the twelve unanimously agree they saw affected most of them for the rest of their lives.

The first three to see the full earth were not those on Apollo 11 but those who had flown around the moon the previous December, the crew of Apollo 8.

The poet Archibald MacLeish wrote in the New York Times on Christmas day, 1968 about what that view could mean to those of us too small for Borman, Lovell, and Anders to see from their great distance.

Men’s conception of themselves and of each other has always depended on their notion of the earth. When the earth was the World — all the world there was — and the stars were lights in Dante’s heaven, and the ground beneath men’s feet roofed Hell, they saw themselves as creatures at the center of the universe, the sole, particular concern of God — and from that high place they ruled and killed and conquered as they pleased.

And when, centuries later, the earth was no longer the World but a small, wet spinning planet in the solar system of a minor star off at the edge of an inconsiderable galaxy in the immeasurable distances of space — when Dante’s heaven had disappeared and there was no Hell (at least no Hell beneath the feet) — men began to see themselves not as God-directed actors at the center of a noble drama, but as helpless victims of a senseless farce where all the rest were helpless victims also and millions could be killed in world-wide wars or in blasted cities or in concentration camps without a thought or reason but the reason — if we call it one — of force.

Now, in the last few hours, the notion may have changed again. For the first time in all of time men have seen it not as continents or oceans from the little distance of a hundred miles or two or three, but seen it from the depth of space; seen it whole and round and beautiful and small as even Dante — that “first imagination of Christendom” — had never dreamed of seeing it; as the Twentieth Century philosophers of absurdity and despair were incapable of guessing that it might be seen. And seeing it so, one question came to the minds of those who looked at it. “Is it inhabited?” they said to each other and laughed — and then they did not laugh. What came to their minds a hundred thousand miles and more into space — “half way to the moon” they put it — what came to their minds was the life on that little, lonely, floating planet; that tiny raft in the enormous, empty night. “Is it inhabited?”

The medieval notion of the earth put man at the center of everything. The nuclear notion of the earth put him nowhere — beyond the range of reason even — lost in absurdity and war. This latest notion may have other consequences. Formed as it was in the minds of heroic voyagers who were also men, it may remake our image of mankind. No longer that preposterous figure at the center, no longer that degraded and degrading victim off at the margins of reality and blind with blood, man may at last become himself.

To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold — brothers who know now they are truly brothers. 

There was that hope in those often ugly days of ’68.   And now, fifty-one years later—–?

Bearthday

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I struggle to say that I remember things fifty years ago. Remembering things fifty years past is a reminder of mortality. Maybe that’s why it’s uncomfortable to say it.

Memory is never fifty years old because memories don’t age. They’re always in the present in our mind. We are ageless in our memories.

Fifty years ago, on my birthday, we sent three men to the Moon.

I remember it as if it were—–

Not fifty years ago.

The Vietnam War was eroding our national will. The Civil Rights movement forced us to look at ourselves more than we wanted to look and it provoked intense emotion expressed in various ways. The Cold War over freedom and oppression was a daily factor. But there still was a residual of the optimism and it was nowhere better expressed than what was to happen that day.

The radio station I was working for in Jefferson City at the time (it’s no longer in Jefferson City) had no national network. So we couldn’t follow the buildup at Cape Canaveral, as it was then called, as intensely as the other station in town, a Mutual affiliate. But we were paying attention and on our newscasts we did let our listeners know what was happening.

This was in the days of 15-minute newscasts in the morning, during the noon hour when Derry Brownfield, our farm director, updated the farmers in central Missouri on the daily markets and agricultural news, and during drive-time in the afternoon.

The script for the 7 a.m. newscast that morning is in a landfill somewhere. But I can hear my younger voice closing the newscast noting the significant events unfolding in Florida. I had brought to the station that morning an LP record of one of John Kennedy’s greatest speeches and I had dubbed part of it onto a cartridge tape. I played part of his speech at Rice University from September 12, 1962—the part that is in bold type below:

“Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it–we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

“Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world’s leading space-faring nation.

“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

“There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

“…Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, “Because it is there.”

“Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.”

I remember after the tape ended with Kennedy saying, “That challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

I said, “And that’s why we are going to the Moon today.”   And closed out the newscast.

On this fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, it’s important we think about John Kennedy’s 1962 speech. In recent years some presidents or presidential candidates have said we need to go to the Moon again and Mars, too. But their remarks have caused only little ripples in the public mind.

—Because, coming from them, they’re just words. They don’t call on you and me to want to reach for something great. They don’t challenge us to think that, as President Kennedy mentioned earlier in his speech, “William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.”

We do not hear calls today for “answerable courage.” We don’t hear those who lead or want to lead us speak of “new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.” Some observers believe proclamations about returning to the moon and heading for Mars are intended to gin up a few votes in an election cycle. And the public knows it and is unmoved.

Fifty years ago was a beginning and a beginning of an end. We are people of short attention spans who too easily spend our time looking within where we are apt to find narrowness and selfishness instead of looking out where we find challenges to meet, good that we can do, rights that we can win.

Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley was one of the few people granted an in-depth interview with Neil Armstrong, who bore the public burden of being the first man on the moon by becoming a very private person. Brinkley tells in his new book, American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race, of asking Armstrong “why the American people seemed to be less NASA crazed in the twenty-first century than back during john F. Kennedy’s White House years.”

Oh, I think it’s predominantly the responsivity of the human character. We don’t have a very long attention span, and needs and pressures vary from day to day, and we have a difficult time remembering a few months ago, or we have a difficult time looking very far into the future. We’re very “now” oriented. I’m not surprised by that. I think we’ll always be in space, but it will take us longer to do the new things than the advocates would like, and in some cases, it will take external factors or forces which we can’t control.

Kennedy had the external factors. The Cold War and the Soviet early successes in space. The Bay of Pigs debacle and the need to get beyond it. The Civil Rights effort that was mushrooming. And other issues. But his speech at Rice University was a challenge for the country to move forward at a time when it could become consumed by other issues—and it did.

By the time my brother-in-law and I watched the midnight launch of Apollo 17, the final Apollo mission to the moon, from the press site at Cape Kennedy slightly more than three years after this historic day in 1969, we as a people were so looking inward at the war, the civil rights struggle, the ongoing Cold War, and by then Watergate that the cancellation of three moon flights that were originally scheduled stirred little public regret. The idea of doing things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard” seemed lost. And they seem lost, still, today.

Of the twenty-four men who flew to the Moon, the only people who have seen the entire earth and watched it shrink into the surrounding blackness, only twelve survive. Only twelve of the twenty-four walked on the moon and only four of them are still walking on the earth: Buzz Aldrin, now 89; Dave Scott, 87; Charlie Duke, 83, and Harrison Schmitt, 84. The other eight moonwalkers have, as one source put it, “left the earth forever.”   All three of the first men to see the moon up close (Apollo 8) are still with us, though. Frank Borman and Jim Lovell are 91. Bill Anders is 85.

Some historians wonder if Apollo was worth it, if going to the Moon and bringing back a few hundred pounds of rocks was worth the $24 billion total expense in the 1960s and early 70s, at a time when we were spending $30 billion each year on the Vietnam War. One of them, Andrew Smith, whose Moon Dust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, was published for the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11 and has been republished for the fiftieth, recalls an earlier Kennedy speech, the one to Congress in 1961 in which he set the goal of sending men to the Moon and returning them to Earth within the decade. He says the Moon goal resulted from Kennedy’s recognition that the Cold War “was going the be won or lost in the so-called Third World, and that cultural factors would influence the loyalties of wavering nations as much as economics did.” He maintains Kennedy wanted to capture imaginations throughout the world, a way to make democracy the system of choice, and also wanted something Americans could enthusiastically support. The answer, says Smith, was “theatre—the most mind-blowing theatre ever created,” that the Apollo program was “performance, pure and simple.”

Smith argues that the lasting value of the missions isn’t the science behind them or the rocks the men brought back. It is that these missions for the first time allowed us to see the entire earth, alone in the vast blackness of space. “It’s clear that the answer had nothing to do with engineering or technology, that what it did…was afford us the enormous privilege of seeing ourselves for the first time as small.”

Edgar Mitchell, who walked on the moon with Alan Shepard on Apollo 14 told Allen, “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch!’”

While Dave Scott and Jim Irwin were on the Moon with the Apollo 15 flight, Al Worden was by himself in the Endeavour, the command module orbiting above them. For sixty-seven hours, Worden was alone in the universe, often out of touch with anyone, anywhere, when he was traveling behind the Moon. He shared his thoughts in his 1974 book, Hello Earth, Greetings from Endeavour. One of his poems reads:

Now I can see where I’m going and am impatient to get there—                                       What will I see? The wounds of ageless strife, the anguish of cooling and petrifying, the punctures of an infinity of coolness?                                                                                   No signs of healing, or love, or care, or compassion?                                                         She is not healed. All the scars are there—from birth.                                                        Poor lady of the night.                                                                                                          But we love her and she knows it full well, for she has been faithful all these years.          And what of the scars on the planet earth?                                                                         Will she end up like the lifeless old moon, revolving slowly, hanging naked in the sky?     Life is too precious to let ego-centered ideas snuff it out.                                                   The moon must teach us, not only of age and geology, planets and solar puzzles            But of life, else we end up like her.

Smith says, “Was Apollo worth all the effort and expense? If it had been about the Moon, the answer would be no, but it wasn’t, it was about the Earth. The answer is yes.”

So today, fifty years after the launch of Apollo 11 on my bearthday, let us look beyond the event and ponder the thoughts of Mitchell and Worden and Smith.

And Kennedy. And be unafraid of doing things because they are hard—-even if the hardest of things is seeing ourselves.

(Photo credits: Apollo 11 launch, Al Worden’s photo of the Moon and Earth, and Apollo 17’s Harrison Schmitt unfurling the flag with a tiny earth in the background, and the “blue marble” photo from Apollo 17 all are from NASA)

 

Damon and Jimmy

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Jimmy Breslin, the New York City author and columnist died a couple of years ago at the age of 88. He wrote more than twenty books including a biography of a fellow New York author and columnist, Damon Runyon. It’s an entertaining read. Breslin wrote, “Damon Runyon invented the Broadway of Guys and Dolls and the Roaring Twenties, neither of which existed, but whose names and phrases became part of theater history and the American language.” Twenty-six of his short stories became movies.

Something Breslin wrote about the way Runyon’s world was created before he got to New York when real estate lawyer Henry Morgenthau instituted the development that became the Broadway-42nd Street area. Something Breslin wrote about the process caught our eye.

Whenever successful politicians and businessmen are together, it is a moment of hope being reawakened. The politician, who is impoverished by comparison to the man he stands alongside, always is at once frightened and enticed by the thought of entering the business world and earning a fortune. The merchant with his money in his pocket is in awe of a person who can stand before grubby crowds and earn their cheers. Each in the other’s presence secretly wishes he had the other’s role, and off by themselves they are insanely jealous of each other. Yet merchants and politicians seem extraordinarily friendly with one another, and form a closed society to which strangers never are admitted readily, unless the stranger has wondrous amounts of money, at which point he rapidly ceases to be a stranger. The money is often never brought into use, but the stranger must own much of it. How can you yearn to be the other guy if he doesn’t have any money? The merchant by using courtesy to the point of groveling, so flatters the politician that the impossible occurs and the politician become momentarily secure, and immediately feels a need to make the merchant richer. While it is understood that the politician takes money out of this, nobody realizes the miserable amounts of money they often accept. No amount is too small for a politician to grab, nor for a rich man to offer. As nearly all great fortunes in America are made on land stolen while the public’s back is turned—and by people who want money but don’t want to work for it, by men who use the title of builder and yet never have driven a mail into a board—nowhere was the relationship between politician and merchant closer than at the time the subways of New York were built.

If you are interested in Breslin’s take on New York subway construction, go find a copy of his book about Runyon. Otherwise, we hope you just enjoy—as we did—Breslin’s essay on business and politics, offered here without comment except that we thought it was a fun paragraph to read in a book we’re really enjoying.

Breslin and Runyon make quite a combination.

 

Notes from a quiet street, Monsoon season edition

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(Being a compilation of observation not reaching the level of full blogviation.)

Has it occurred to anyone else that the wrapped Capitol dome kind of looks like the Stanley Cup?   Maybe if you squint a little?   Kinda? Sorta?

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We’ve heard several folks who don’t watch hockey remark that they were glued to the Stanley Cup finals. “That’s really intense,” one of them has said a couple of times, referring to the constant, fast, physical play.   Some folks who watched the games because a Missouri team was playing—and making history by winning—are likely to watch games next year because they’re hockey.

The fact that the Royals are dismal and the cardinals have been fighting hard to achieve mediocrity probably drove some of those fans to the Blues games.

One of the observers also has remarked that the championship by the Blues makes the absence of an NFL team in St. Louis a whole lot less important.

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Back when we were covering the Senate, Eric Schmitt claimed to be the tallest state senator in Missouri history. We found some ancient references indicating he had some historic rivals but the record remained fuzzy enough that Schmitt remained firm in his convictions although we think we introduced reasonable doubt in at least one case.   He is now definitely the tallest State Treasurer in Missouri history.

But he is not the biggest man ever to work at the Capitol.

Until somebody comes along to disprove the information, we’ll report that title belongs to Clyde Perkins, a former restaurant man from Barnard. The Jefferson City Daily Democrat reported in January of 1923 that Perkins had been hired as an accountant for the House Accounts Committee. House Speaker Oak Hunter was the big guy in the capitol until then at 274 pounds.

The article about Perkins’ appointment said he had been “off his feed” since losing an election the previous November in Nodaway County, but he thought he’d be back at full strength when he regained fifty pounds. Perkins was to be paid five dollars a day. That’s about $74 a day in 2018 money, $370 for a five-day week. Probably not enough to sustain a man very long who weighed 476 pounds..

A 2008 Nodaway County history by Michael J. Steiner says Perkins topped out at 536. Steiner’s book has a picture of two women, each standing in one leg of Perkins’ bib overalls.

Clyde was called “Fatty” by the people back home in those less-sensitive times.  He was the Nodaway County Treasurer when he died at the age of 44 in April, 1936. His death certificate says a contributing cause of death was “extreme obesity; patient weighed 480 pounds.”

Better to be tall, we guess.

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Administration of the death penalty in Missouri was a local affair, hanging in the counties, until the late 1930s when the gas chamber was built at the state penitentiary.

The Cole County Democrat observed on February 7, 1907, “The residents of Jefferson City get mad at least every two years. When the legislature meets some untamed jackass introduces a bill to have all hangings pulled off in (the) penitentiary. No person with sense enough to grease a gimlet can blame them for getting angry. The idea of making Jefferson City the human slaughter pen for the state is disgusting in the extreme.”

The disgust lasted three decades.

The legislature in 1937 approved asphyxiation by lethal gas at the state penitentiary instead of hanging at county seats. The first victim of the new gas chamber was a 100-pound pig that stopped struggling three minutes after fifteen cyanide eggs were dropped into a crock of sulphuric acid on December 13. The death of the pig convinced state officials that the gas chamber could be safely used on humans.

Three months later it was. John Brown and William Wright were strapped to the side-by-side chairs at 6:18 p.m. on March 3, 1938. The fumes hit them three minutes later. Medical personnel say they died within three or four minutes. A newspaper story recounted, “Only twenty-five witnesses—as compared with thousands which often-times made ‘Roman Holidays’ out of hangings—peered through the five windows to watch the lethal gas deaths.”

Prisoners were gassed from 1938 to 1965 in Jefferson City. The first drug-induced execution, in 1989, was done in the gas chamber before executions were moved to Potosi, then to Bonne Terre. Gas couldn’t be used because the rubber seal around the chamber door had rotted through disuse and the gas would have been fatal to witnesses, too.

Today, people on tours of the old pen can go into the gas chamber. Many of them get their pictures taken sitting in the chairs.

It is still legal to use gas for Missouri executions. But there’s no place in the state where such an execution could be held safely.

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Well, that was pretty heavy, wasn’t it? Here’s something a little lighter.

About three years back (April of 2016) we put together a fanciful discussion of how a member of the family became his own grandfather, kind of along the lines of the famous 1940s popular and country song.

Well, friends, that song isn’t as absurd as it might seem.

Herewith is a story we discovered while trying to find something else in the State Historical Society newspaper library, straight from the Jefferson City Daily Democrat-Tribune of July 29, 1924:

HIS BROTHER WILL BE HIS FATHER IN LAW

Frank Lueckenhoff, well known and popular merchant at St. Thomas, and Miss Frances Sommerhauser, step-daughter of H. J. Lueckenhoff, the grooms [sic] brother, are to be married next month, according to word received from St. Thomas.

Mr. Lueckenhoff’s brother will be his father-in-law and his sister-in-law will become his mother-in-law.

Henry J. Lueckenhoff, the older brother married the widow of John Sommerhauser. She had two daughters and Frank Leuckenhoff (the spelling changed in this paragraph) marries the oldest one next month.

“Our” disasters

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There’s something about a disaster that becomes personal even to those who are not damaged by it.   Many people take a personal ownership of it, even take a peculiar personal pride in it even if their property stays dry and intact.

We’re seeing some of that in Jefferson City in the wake of our tornado a few days before the Memorial Day Weekend and the accompanying flooding.  This is “our” disaster and we see and will see other disasters through our lens.

It’s not unusual.  Those of us who remember the 1993 flooding measure floods in other parts of the country against that one and in some odd way find satisfaction in thinking, “Theirs isn’t as bad as ours was.”   The Joplin tornado has become our measuring stick when we see reports of tornado disasters in other parts of the country.  Theirs isn’t as bad as ours was.

Until the disaster takes off OUR porch, blows down OUR house, destroys OUR business.

OUR tornado took nobody’s life.  It damaged about 200 buildings in Jefferson City, some of which will have to be removed because they cannot be repaired, but compared to Joplin it was a little thing.

Except it’s OUR thing.   And now we will consider ourselves kin to Joplin and we will see reports of tornadoes in other places through OUR lens, not in terms of extent of damage but in terms of fellowship.  We have now joined the fellowship of them.

We don’t know if the folks in Joplin, on hearing of the tornado that hit Eldon then Jefferson City, have thought inwardly, “Huh! We had it a lot worse than they did.”   But it is likely natural that some of them would have evaluated our situation against the extent of their disaster.

We’re still waiting to see if our rainy spring continues, as it did in 1993, and pushes later flood crests that establish new references that end observations such as, “Yeah, it looks pretty bad.  But back in ’93…,” the same way that the 1993 flood ended observations from the real old-timers that, “I remember back in 1951…”

In Eldon and in Jefferson City right now, though, the focus is on recovery. The comparisons with later disasters will come after the debris is cleared away, the buildings that can be saved are saved, and the buildings that cannot be rescued are bulldozed down and the lots where they stood grow new grass.

I haven’t consulted with Nancy yet, but if we win the big lottery jackpot(s) I think I’d like to offer one-million dollars to the Historic City of Jefferson, which has worked for years to revitalize East Capitol Avenue where some of the historic structures might become those grass-filled lots, to be used to supplement insurance payments to rebuild those damaged homes—even those now seemingly destined for destruction.  Gutting the destroyed interior and building a modern inside structure while salvaging the historic exterior would be a goal worth some of those lottery winnings.

But I’m not going to win the lottery.  Somebody else somewhere else always buys a winning ticket just before or just after I buy mine (I tell myself that).  I think I will send a much, much, much smaller amount, though.  And maybe others capable of greater philanthropic capacity will want to participate more grandly in saving what some think cannot be saved.

After all, it is OUR disaster. And part of comparing OUR disaster to those elsewhere in the future should include what we do now to save the things we are told can’t be saved.

History tells us an Act of God can be countered by godly acts that rescue people and the past from the worst that has happened.

I bought another lottery ticket a few days ago.  And I also wrote a check.

Into the World

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It’s graduation season, the time when hundreds of thousands of young people will be leaving the family nest bound for college, the military, or independent grownup life.

They’re empty or near-empty vessels who will be filled with life experiences that might make them entirely different people in thirty years than they are now.  When they return for class reunions they will find with the passing years that are less a class and more a diverse community.

Kelly Pool, the former Centralia newspaper publisher who was the Secretary for the Capitol Commission Board that oversaw construction of the capitol lived to be ninety years old. Eventually he was editor emeritus of the Jefferson City Post-Tribune and wrote an entire newspaper page of reflections and inspirational thoughts each week for many years. In late 1943, he looked at the way people respond to the “youth will be served” slogan and found many people didn’t agree with it—although thousands of “youngsters” were fighting World War II.  But Pool argued the old saying is true and “more and more the world is coming to recognize the power and grandeur of youth.”

The world is young—always will be,” he wrote. “Youth will has always been in the vanguard,” he said as he put together a list to prove his point:

Alexander conquered the world at 26.

Napoleon made all Europe tremble at 25.

Cortez conquered Mexico at 26.

Alexander Hamilton led Congress at 36.

Clay and Calhoun led Congress at 29.

Henry Clay became speaker at 34.

Calhoun was secretary of war at 35.

Daniel Webster was without peer at 30.

Judge Story was on the supreme court at 32.

Goethe was a literary giant at 24.

Schiller was in the forefront of literature at 22.

Burns wrote his best poetry at 24.

Byron’s first work appeared at 19.

Dickens brought out “Pickwick Papers” at 24.

Schubert and Mozart died at less than 35.

Raphael ravished the world at 20.

Michelangelo made stone to live at 24.

Galileo’s great discovery was at 19.

Newton was at his zenith when only 25.

Edison harnessed lightning when only 23.

Martin Luther shook the Vatican at 20.

Calvin wrote his “Institute” at 21.

(“Judge Story” was a reference to Justice Joseph Story, 1779-1845, who is best known as the Justice who read the decision in the Amistad case. John Calvin as a post-Luther Reformation thinker and pastor whose writings led to the formation of Presbyterianism.)

All of which, wrote Pool, is that “our boys and girls should not let the precious hours of their youth be wasted. Begin early to make your mark in the world, and drive hard to become one of the youths who ‘will be served.”

J. Kelly Pool continued to write his “Kellygrams” pages each week for the newspaper until shortly before his death at the age of 90 in 1951.

Why wait to become a victim?

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We have talked to about 115 members of the legislature about the bill to build a national steamboat museum in Jefferson City that will house the holdings of the Arabia Steamboat Museum when its lease runs out in Kansas City in 2026

A few of them have told us casino interests have talked to them, too. That’s not unexpected because the primary financing for the museum projects we’re talking about comes from increasing the casinos’ admission fee by a dollar—which would eat into the annual windfall casinos get because the fee has not changed since it was established in law a quarter-century ago although the value of the dollar has.

We’ve been told of a couple of the messages given to some of these lawmakers.

First: that the casinos will come after them in 2020 if they vote for our bill.

Second: for those with casinos in their districts, that they’ll be blamed for any employee layoffs at their casinos if they vote to increase the admission fee.

As far as the second issue goes: That’s so much dishwater.  And we have the numbers to prove that casino employment has nothing to do with admission fees; it’s a function of the number of people playing casino games—-and that number hit its lowest level in twenty years in the last fiscal year, leaving casinos with about 25% fewer employees than they had a few years ago—something we’re pretty sure they’ve never mentioned to their home communities.

And that gets us to—-

Some advice for legislators who have gotten these messages or will get them—or some other message intended to influence their votes on our issue. And it holds true any time someone threatens retaliation for your vote—on whatever issue.

Go after THEM. First.

Don’t keep it a secret.  Don’t wait to become their victim.

Remember who you are.  You are the one who writes the laws, not them.  You are the one charged by your constituents with watching out for their broader interests, which might not be the best interests of a smaller but influential interest.

You are the one who supports something good for all Missourians rather than bowing to pressure from a few very well-to-do special interests whose only concern is how much money they can take out of the state.

You are the one who goes home for long weekends during the legislative session. You are the one who is in your district every day seven months of the year.  You are the one who talks to folks at the coffee shop or the restaurant.  You are the ones who speak to the civic clubs. You are the ones who send out a newsletter to your constituents. You are the ones likely to be interviewed on the hometown radio station or by the local newspaper—which might print your newsletters.

You are the one who can tell the folks at home the things the industry won’t.

You control the message every day, every week, not just at campaign time. You are the one who has every opportunity to explain why you have supported the broad public interest in the face of the narrower interests that think they can force you to let them write the laws that govern their operations.

Opponents of legislation such as our steamboat museum bill hope you won’t tell your constituents what they’ve said to you.  But you have every opportunity to do it.  And we can’t think of a single reason why you shouldn’t.

A few years ago, several legislators were told that if they didn’t vote the way a powerful private citizen wanted them to vote, they would find themselves facing well-financed opponents backed by the private citizen’s checkbook.  All of them won—after telling their constituents about the effort to bully them.

Let’s also be clear that there is nothing wrong with someone supporting a candidate that has views different from your own, views that might be more favorable to those who differ with you politically and philosophically. You should have to defend yourself in the competition of ideas.

But you don’t have to wait silently for someone to make you the victim they say you will become because you cast your vote for a greater public good than theirs.

Remember who you are.

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How long?

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Missouri has a new law that allows some people convicted of some crimes to regain voting rights by having their criminal record expunged.  A bill passed by the legislature in 2016 went into effect January 1 allowing people convicted of non-Class A felonies to go to court and ask that their slates be wiped clean.  There are limits.  Only one felony and two misdemeanor criminal records can be expunged.  A person cannot file for expungement for three years after completion of a misdemeanor sentence. A convicted felon has to wait seven years.  The law is more complicated than this explanation but that’s the general idea. It applies only to state crimes.

At the heart of this new law is an important question: How long must a person face punishment AFTER that person has “paid his/her debt to society?”  The new law does not grant this mercy to people involved in violent offenses, sex crimes, and other more serious crimes. They cannot regain their civil rights, ever.  But the new law offers new opportunities for many.

We want to focus on one person today, a circumstance brought about by a recent podcast we did for the Missouri Bar about this new law and a conversation we recently had with a fellow lobbyist about a former major political figure who was convicted in federal, not state, court.

Many folks can forgive others for some crimes eventually. But when a public official violates the public trust, there often is no sympathy shown long after they have completed their prison term.  Their crime probably did not result in physical harm to anyone. No blood was spilled. No violence occurred except the breaching of public trust.   But the breaching of public trust is so abhorrent in our society that it seems to be unforgivable, a violation that wipes out memory or acknowledgement of long years of accomplishments.

Case in point: Bob F. Griffin, the man who was Speaker of the House for fifteen years, far longer than anyone else before and far longer than we will ever see as long as term limits exist.

We bring this up because we’re nearing the end of writing the next book about the history of our Capitol, and we are struggling with how to describe one of the most historical figures in the history of the Missouri legislature.  He resigned before his final term as Speaker expired and three years later was sent to federal prison for mail fraud and bribery, offenses connected to his role as Speaker of the House. President Clinton commuted his sentence in 2001.  Griffin is 83 now. It soon will be twenty years after his release from prison.  We have not spoken directly to him for a long time but friends say he maintains he pleaded guilty only to keep other friends from being punished as harshly as he was.

At the State Historical Society in Columbia we have dozens, hundreds, or oral history interviews, many of them with former legislators.

One of them, a Democrat as was Griffin, recalled: “Bob Griffin did a lot for the State of Missouri and I always thought he was fair. Now I’m sure there are others who will tell you that — but that kind of works both ways. I thought he did a good job. Good political person. He had a way about himself of communicating with you. He was never intimidating or belligerent…He never once asked me to pass a bill out of committee.”

Another, also a Democrat, said, “I think that he brought progress to the Missouri House. I think that he is a responsible, through his leadership, for the passage — through his chairman or through other legislators — for very progressive legislation and laws.”

A former Republican floor leader remembered, “I became good friends with Bob Griffin after that, because of working together with him…I think that Bob did a very good job. Bob was fair. He was fair to all concerned, and he was not “blind in the right eye” where he would [not] recognize Republicans.”  Republicans, in the minority then, occupied only a few rows of the House to the right of the Speaker’s dais.

But Griffin did have his contemporary critics.  One Republican commented, “Bob was as big a crook as there was in the country. He got caught and he got by with this for a long, long time, but that was the way we—that philosophy is why the Republicans got control.”

And a fellow Democrat: “I had trouble with Bob Griffin. I was too independent for him. Bob was a very strong leader. An effective leader. I remember him calling me into his office when I was a freshman to vote for something. And I told him I wouldn’t do it. You know, there was a price I paid for that. I didn’t get a chairmanship as early as other people in my class.”

It was Griffin who broke up a large appropriations committee into five smaller appropriations committees focusing on specific issues that forwarded their recommendations to the House Budget Committee that drafted the final House version of the budget—a system that remained in one form or another until 2017 when a single 35-member appropriations committee was created with members serving on smaller subcommittees. Some women representatives interviewed recalled Griffin elevated women’s role in the house leadership. Certainly, his home town of Cameron profited from his term in the speakership.  It got two new state prisons.

Griffin’s lasting legacy in the capitol—other than the House Budget Committees—is the Hall of Famous Missourians.  After a group of legislative wives raised money to install the first four busts, the project languished until Griffin began holding fund-raising golf tournaments to place more busts there.  Speakers since have honored other Missourians but no speaker has honored more than Bob Griffin.

And that brings us to this:  While Griffin was speaker, some of his friends—we are told—raised money to have a bust made of Griffin. But that bust has never been placed in the Hall of Famous Missourians. There are some people enshrined there who are not 100% pure and at least one who is hardly a Missourian.  But it’s unlikely we will see the bust of Missouri’s longest-serving Speaker of the House in the Hall of Famous Missourians.  A suggestion has been made that it be installed in a corner of a side gallery in the House, near the photographs of previous speakers (Griffin’s picture is on the wall with the others), or perhaps put in the Speaker’s office.  But Griffin was a Democrat who, in the end, brought disgrace to the office of Speaker, and it is the end rather than the years preceding it that make the bust such a problem. Republicans are firmly in control of the legislature now, making public honoring of a Democratic politician a stretch. And a Republican Speaker surely would face severe questions from his caucus about honoring a Democrat, particularly one who, in the end, cast a lingering shadow on the office.

Expunging the record is far easier than expunging political memory.  Maybe someday the bust will find a home—maybe in the Cameron City Library, a city where Bob Griffin Road runs under Highway 36.

Bob Griffin was no saint.  But, on balance, was he such a sinner that nothing else matters?  Or is breaking the public trust one of the ultimate crimes for which there can be no expungement, no forgiveness?  Ever.

Perhaps he is proof of the truth of Shakespeare: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

Or should the words of American writer and historian James Truslow Adams prevail:

“There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us to find fault with the rest of us.”

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Josh and Bill

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Some capitol graybeards are watching the developing investigation of suspicions that Attorney General Josh Hawley used public money to further his successful campaign to oust Senator Claire McCaskill. We’re watching because we remember when another young, charismatic Missouri Attorney General who seemed to be a Republican shooting star crashed and burned.

Can it happen again? Let’s just wait and see.

The fact that it’s another Republican statewide office holder who has triggered this investigation adds some heft to the issue. And Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft’s successful involvement of State Auditor Nicole Galloway, a Democrat, in the investigation because she has subpoena powers adds more.

Hawley proclaims innocence—just as Bill Webster did throughout the long federal investigation against him while he was successfully winning the Republican nomination for governor in 1992, beating State Treasurer Wendell Bailey and Secretary of State Roy Blunt in the primary.

Circumstances will show whether Hawley’s “innocence” is genuine or whether it’s as flimsy in the end as Webster’s often-claimed “innocence” was all those years ago.

Public officials under investigation are right to maintain their innocence for two reasons. First, our justice system operates on the proposition that all of us are innocent until proven guilty.  Second, it’s important that those who supported the office holder with their money and their votes continue to believe that person is above the suspicion swirling around him or her. While confession might be good for the soul, it’s disastrous for the career.  People have survived close scrutiny, even charges and trials, and gone on to useful political careers.

But here’s something about investigations of public officials.  Once one gets started, there’s no   telling where it’s going to go.

We told friends about  a year ago that the suggestions of sexual impropriety against Eric Greitens were a she-said-he-said matter.  But, we suggested, if a prosecutor stepped in, things were suddenly much more serious.  And if a grand jury was convened, all of the cards would be wild and who knows where the story would go. The Greitens story escalated pretty rapidly and Greitens left office to keep things from becoming even more serious, particularly on issues not connected with the first suspicions, and before light was shined on his dark money supporters.

So it was with Bill Webster, son of a powerful state senator; some said he was more powerful than some governors although he was a Republican, which then was the minority party.  Some analysts thought that Dick Webster, who lost a shot at the being attorney general in 1952 and a chance to run for governor four years later, groomed Bill to reach political levels the father never could.  He provided a good part of the money for Bill’s campaigns for state representative in 1980 and ’82. And in 1984 the elder Webster called in a lot of political IOU’s from various special interests for Bill’s attorney general campaign account. Bill was elected to a second term in 1988.  He had his eyes on the governorship in 1992 as a successor to John Ashcroft (Jay’s father).

But Dick Webster did not survive heart surgery in March of 1990.  State Senator Gary Nodler, who took the elder Webster’s seat in the Missouri Senate, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch many years later that the death of the father made the son “more driven to succeed.”

The early news stories by investigative reporter Terry Ganey in the Post-Dispatch centered on the Second Injury Fund which compensated employees whose job-related injuries make an earlier health situation worse.  The early suggestions were that a second-injury fund lawyer in the attorney general’s office also was collecting campaign money for Webster’s run for the governor nomination and that private lawyers hired by Webster were getting bigger judgments for their clients than non-Webster friends.  Webster survived the primary election but his reputation took a hit when his former deputy attorney general and a resort developer who had bought some Webster property pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges. Voters took notice and made Webster a big loser in the race with Mel Carnahan in November.

The investigation shifted to Webster’s use of Attorney General employees and equipment for campaign purposes. A corruption charge was dropped against him in return for a guilty plea on two charges using state resources for political campaign purposes. Almost until the unavoidable end, Webster claimed his innocence.  In fact the federal judge in his case, who ran a multiple-day sentencing hearing, gave Webster an hour at the end to consider whether he wanted to withdraw his guilty plea or whether he wanted to accept his sentence.

He went to prison for 21 months, getting out three months early for good conduct.  When he got out, he went to work for Bartlett and Company, a Kansas City agribusiness firm.  As far as we know, he’s still a Vice-President.  Life didn’t take him where once he wanted to go, but he’s done well.

Today, one of his political descendants is being investigated for using public funds while attorney general to support his senatorial campaign.

Josh Hawley, young, charismatic, is seen by some as a shooting star in the Republican Party.  He’s entitled to proclaim his innocence. It’s unfair to assume that he is another Bill Webster despite circumstances reminiscent of twenty-five years ago.  He has his protectors who say the investigation is baseless and shouldn’t go forward, just as Webster had his protectors.  He has his critics who say smoke equals fire, as Webster did.

Time will answer enough questions, one way or another, as it did in 1992 and ‘93. We can wait.

Disasters

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Almost eight years ago (has it really been eight years?) after the Joplin tornado we were curious about how it stacked up compared to other disastrous events in Missouri and we put together a list on the old Missourinet Blog that we knew was incomplete.  We’ve found some other tragic events to add to that list and have decided it’s time for an update. In fact, the number of deaths from the Joplin tornado was a premature total so we’ve updated that. Some accounts vary in the number of deaths for some of these incidents and some are only estimated numbers.

It is difficult to pin down the exact number of deaths caused by heat waves throughout Missouri. The National Weather Service has extensive records of the heat but we haven’t been able to find comprehensive numbers of deaths for  Missouri during heat waves. We’ve been able to find numbers for St. Louis in three of them but it’s quite likely the statewide totals were much higher. We’ve listed the fatalities in St. Louis to make note of the tragedies and will update the figures if we find better numbers.

Few deaths were recorded in the 1811-1812 New Madrid earthquakes.  The areas hit hardest were thinly-populated in those days and while records were kept of the violence of the shocks it appears no effort was made to compile a comprehensive death total.

Just for the record or a record of some kind, here’s the list of disasters that have taken twenty or more lives in Missouri.

  • 4,317—St. Louis cholera epidemic, Summer, 1849 (Some accounts put the number closer to 6,000.)
  • 4,000 plus—Kansas City and St. Louis Spanish Influenza 1918-1919
  • 479—St. Louis only, Heat wave of 1936.
  • 255–St. Louis tornado May 27, 1896
  • 209-300 (est.) Steamboat Stonewall fire, Neely’s Landing, Cape Girardeau County, October 27, 1869 (accounts vary)
  • 158–Joplin tornado May 22, 2011 (plus three “indirect” deaths)
  • 118—St. Louis tornado  May 27, 1896 (118 more in East St. Louis)
  • 114–Hyatt Regency Hotel Skywalks collapse, Kansas City July 17, 1981
  • 100-plus–Steamship Saluda explosion, Lexington, Apr. 9, 1852
  • 87–Poplar Bluff tornado May 9, 1927
  • 72–St. Louis tornado Sept. 29, 1927
  • 72–Katie Jane Memorial Home for the Aged, Warrenton, February 17, 1957
  • 70 (est.) Steamboat Shepherdess sinking, St. Louis, January 3,1844
  • 65–Marshfield tornado Apr. 18, 1880
  • 55–Six County tornado (southeast Missouri) May 30, 1917
  • 42–Tipton Ford train collision, (near Neosho) Aug. 5, 1914
  • 39—West Plains Dance Hall Explosion, April 13, 1928 (various accounts put the total at 33 or 37. But 39 seems to be the most commonly cited)
  • 38–Ozark Airlines FH-227 crash, St. Louis July 23, 1973
  • 37–Kansas City (Ruskin Heights) tornado May 10, 1957
  • 34–Kirksville tornado Apr. 27, 1889
  • 34—St. Louis only, Heat wave, 2007
  • 30 (est.)—Steamboat LaMascot explosion, Neely’s Landing, October 5, 1886
  • 30—St. Louis Athletic Club fire, March 9, 1914
  • 31–Gasconade River railroad bridge collapse Nov. 1, 1855
  • 28–Kansas City (Lathrop School) May 11, 1886
  • 26–Fire at Wayside Inn Nursing Home, Farmington, 1979
  • 24—Rich Hill Coal Mine Explosion, March 29, 1888
  • 24—St. Louis only, heat wave, 1980
  • 23–Cape Girardeau tornado May 21, 1949
  • 21–St. Louis tornado  Feb. 10, 1959
  • 21–Coates House Hotel fire, Kansas City, January 28, 1978

There have been other plane crashes, train wrecks, fires and tornadoes that have taken lives. We put the cutoff point at more than 20 deaths.