Category Archives: Places

Invasion

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Our president has decided cities with Democratic mayors are so hopelessly overridden by violent crime that the only solution is an invasion by federal forces who presumably will get rid of the crime problem.

Your observer isn’t sure criminals in those cities should start “shaking in their boots” because of his rhetoric, but he sure scares the hell out of me.

His insertion of 114 federal law enforcement agents into Portland a couple of weeks ago ostensibly to protect the federal courthouse from “anarchists” (a nice phrase borrowed from the late 19th and early 20th centuries) has shown to many of his critics that he is a man with a can.

Not a man with a PLAN.  A man with a can

—of gasoline.

The behavior of those agents, captured on cell phones and in stories of some of those hauled into vans and spirited away to lockups, does not indicate that this strategy is providing any significant increase in the protection of the general population, nor is it showing any concern for stopping violent crime—unless you consider all protestors to be in the same league with murderers, rapists, armed robbers, arsonists, and others of that ilk.

Based on reports we have read and seen, the presence of these forces has intensified the protests in Portland.

A few days ago Portland’s mayor was among those gassed by federal agents. Our president found that gleeful. “They knocked the hell out of him,” he declared.

How he wants to “help the cities” is something few of us could ever have imagined and few of us want to contemplate. “We’ll go into all of the cities, any of the cities. We’ll put in fifty-thousand, sixty-thousand people that really know what they’re doing. They’re strong. They’re tough. And we can solve these problems so fast,” he told a FOX interviewer last week, adding, “but as you know, we have to be invited in.”

He says it but he doesn’t believe it—the part about being invited in, that is.

So far he has sent or threatened to send agents to Kansas City and Portland, Chicago and Albuquerque.

Let’s do some invasion math—-because what he’s proposing isn’t assistance. It’s invasion.

Number of mayors asking for hundreds (and ultimately thousands perhaps) of agents to come in to fight violent crime: 0

Number of governors who have asked for such actions by the Trump administration: 0

Number of congressional delegations who have sought this “help” in their states: 0

One of the first surges of federal agents was the insertion of 225 of them into Kansas City to help catch and prosecute violent criminals. The administration says it is sending more.

Number of violent crime charges the administration claims have been filed in Kansas City since Operation Legend began: 200

Number of charges really filed by federal prosecutors: 1

Attorney General William Barr last week, speaking of Operation Legend, said, “Just to give you an idea of what’s possible, the FBI went in very strong into Kansas City and within two weeks we’ve had 200 arrests,”

That was news to the U. S. Attorney who told inquisitive reporters for The Kansas City Star that his office has filed ONE charge and it was against a guy with a drug conviction on his record who had a gun. Convicted felons cannot have guns under the law.

Last weekend, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said on FOX News Sunday he welcomed the federal agents in his town, but for a “pinpointed and targeted focus on solving murders.”  But he was frustrated by our president’s rhetoric about the George Floyd Protests and the Black Lives Matter movement because “that’s not the case in Kansas City.”

“What we don’t need is more fuel on the fire from federal agents to make, I think, an exciting political issue.”

He told NBC’s Chuck Todd our president’s talk about Black Lives Matter protests causing murders is “asinine” as well as “inaccurate and unfair” and does nothing to address the real issue—national gun trafficking that make guns readily available on cities’ streets.

There are many people, whether they are supporters of our president or supporters of someone else, who argue the cause of states’ rights. These actions should provide fertile ground for spirited arguments on both sides of whether the federal government has a right to invade cities at the whim of a president, a person who thinks he can order fifty or sixty thousand people “who really know what they’re doing” into a city for whatever purpose he might have—including looking good to his political base by creating “an exciting political issue.” Forget about any invitation.

States rights advocates, in our observations, generally seem to fall on the right side of the political spectrum.  But we haven’t heard or seen any of those folks questioning the administration’s uninvited invasion of cities as a violation of states rights. We might have missed it, but the issue deserves louder discussions than we have heard. There is no doubt that discussion will take place. Among judges.

The administration’s choice of locations for these invasions also is curious. The most recent FBI final non-preliminary data (whatever that means) that we’ve seen for cities with the highest violent crime rate lists none of these cities among the top 20 cities for violent crime. Kansas City is 23rd.

It is interesting that our president was not as concerned about mobilizing federal forces to fight a pandemic as he has been in fighting mostly-legal protests (destroying public buildings is hardly legal). You might recall that early in the pandemic, states were pleading with the administration to help them find the equipment needed to fight the virus, particularly the protective equipment needed to protect those on the front lines.  But the states were told to fend for themselves, that federal help was a “last resort,” at a time when many states were seeing the federal government in precisely that way and our president said he felt no responsibility for the spread of the virus.

The administration’s handling of the pandemic has undermined our president’s re-election hopes.  He hopes to regain that ground by his “tough on crime” approach.  A key question for the public to consider is whether his approach has been appropriate in either case.

He relied on the Tenth Amendment for his defense that fighting the virus was a state responsibility. States and cities see Tenth Amendment as their defense on the local issue of crime.  This crime-fighting strategy already is headed to the courts. It appears the pandemic defense is headed to the ballot box.

The polls indicate most potential voters consider his response (or non-response, depending on the way the question was answered) in the spring produced tragic results. We can only hope the crime fighting strategy of the summer does not also turn tragic before the courts define the bounds of presidential power exercised or suggested by the man with a can.

(For those who lean right who see this entry as an attack on them, we plan our next entry to question the left, with the rights of states at the center of that argument, too.)

Better names

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If we are to remove the names of traitors from our military bases—and we should—whose names deserve to replace them? The issue requires some thought and some understanding of the purposes of the bases.

Rudi Keller is a longtime friend whose company I used to enjoy during my days as an active member of the Capitol press corps. Not only is he a fine reporter, but he is an excellent historian. During the Civil War Bicentennial, Rudi wrote hundreds of columns about life in central Missouri during the war. The columns were turned into two books, one covering 1861 and the other 1862. I hope that someday, somehow, his work covering other three years of the war are published.

Rudi is now the news editor of the Columbia Daily Tribune. He still finds time to write news stories and some opinion pieces published in the Tribune and in other Gatehouse-owned newspapers. A couple of weeks ago he offered some “humble suggestions for new base names,” a response to suggestions our military bases named for Confederate officers should get new, more honorable names. His ideas are worthy of consideration by the people who have the power to make changes.

Last Thursday, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley voted against an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act directing that new names be chosen for bases honoring Confederate military heroes. The amendment targets 10 military bases — all in states that initiated a war to preserve the right to own another human being.

In a statement to reporters, Hawley played the history card. We’ve seen it before, used to defend everything from flying the Confederate battle flag at the South Carolina capitol to keeping statues of violent racists in places of honor.

“I just don’t think that Congress mandating that these be renamed and attempting to erase that part of our history is a way that you deal with that history,” Hawley said.

Well, as the Tribune’s resident expert on the Civil War, I would recommend that Hawley ask his colleague, U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt, for some books on the generals whose names adorn some of the nation’s most important military installations. Blunt, you see, was once a high school history teacher and is a trustee of the State Historical Society of Missouri.

Blunt is not advocating for the names to remain on the bases. In fact, he suggested to reporters that renaming some or all would be appropriate.

“If you want to continue to name forts after soldiers, there have been a lot of great soldiers who have come along since the Civil War,” Blunt said, according to CNN.

Blunt noted that Braxton Bragg, whose name is on the largest military base in the world, was “probably the worst commanding general in the entire Confederate Army. He’s an interesting guy to name a fort after.”

But in case Hawley is too busy to read some books, here’s a short list of reasons why renaming those bases is a good idea. As Blunt noted, some of them have less-than-inspiring records of military achievement.

FORT LEE

We’ll start with Fort Lee in Virginia, named for Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Lee was an audacious, enormously successful commander and an inspiration to his troops. He was scrupulously honest, a brilliant engineer and he had a lasting impact on higher education after the war with his reorganization of what is now Washington and Lee University.

But instead of fighting for the nation that had given him an education, employed him and made him prosperous, he took up arms against it. That, in the Constitution, is the definition of treason.

Lee’s greatest military achievements were as an enemy of the United States. If he had been any more successful, the property occupied by Fort Lee would not be in the United States.

Fort Lee is a training center. How about Fort Steuben, for Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben? A Prussian officer, he served in the Revolutionary War teaching basic military drill, tactics and discipline.

FORT HOOD

Fort Hood, in Texas, is named after John Bell Hood, an aggressive commander who destroyed through incompetence the last effective Confederate Army fighting west of the Appalachian Mountains.

Fort Hood is the army’s base for deploying heavy armored forces. How about renaming it Fort Patton, after the aggressive World War II Gen. George Patton? At a crucial moment of the war, he spearheaded an armored drive to defeat the last Nazi offensive in western Europe.

FORT BENNING

Fort Benning in Georgia is named for Henry L. Benning, a competent fighter who served under Hood. Benning was never a grand strategist and never held an independent command.

Fort Benning is where the U.S. Army trains its airborne troops and is the home of its infantry school. How about renaming it for Gen. Anthony “Nuts” McAuliffe? He was the commander of the 101st Airborne Division when it was surrounded at Bastogne, Belgium and acquired his nickname from the one-word answer he gave when Germans demanded his surrender.

FORT GORDON

Fort Gordon in Georgia is named for Gen. John Brown Gordon, who was an aggressive and audacious commander but who, after the war, opposed the Reconstruction policies that gave civil, social and economic rights to freed slaves. He is believed by many to have been the leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia, although he is also on the record as having made some statements of benevolence to the people freed by the South’s defeat in the war to preserve slavery.

Fort Gordon is the Army’s center for signal and cyber security. Perhaps a better name would be Fort Lowe, for Thaddeus S.C. Lowe, who organized the Union Army Balloon Corps, which provided aerial reconnaissance of Confederate positions reported by a telegraph wire from a platform tethered up to 500 feet above the ground.

FORT BRAGG

Fort Bragg, North Carolina, is named after Braxton Bragg, as Blunt noted, one of the South’s least successful generals. On two separate occasions, Bragg had major strategic victories within his grasp but failed at the moment of execution.

Perhaps a fitting name would be Fort Washington, in recognition of the fact that George Washington led a meager, ill-fed and ill-clad force in the Revolution. The name applied to the world’s largest base would celebrate the power of what Washington started.

FORT POLK

Fort Polk, Louisiana, a joint readiness and training center, is named for Gen. Leonidas Polk, who did not survive the Civil War. As a military leader, he made a major strategic blunder early in the war that cost the Confederacy the chance to turn Kentucky to its side.

As a readiness center, perhaps it would be better named for Gen. George Thomas, who held his command in readiness at Nashville during an ice storm and struck at Hood when the weather warmed, scattering the rebel army and ending any substantial resistance in the war’s western theater.

FORT PICKETT

Fort Pickett, a Virginia Army National Guard installation, is named for George Pickett, who gave his name to the famously futile Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. If the military wants a symbol of bravery in the name of a forlorn hope, perhaps it could remain Fort Pickett.

I offer the name Fort Johnson-Brown, for Gen. Hazel Johnson-Brown, the first black woman to become a general in the U.S. Army and, in retirement, a professor of nursing at George Mason University in Virginia.

FORT A.P. HILL

Fort A.P. Hill, an Army training and maneuver center in Virginia, is named for Gen. A.P. Hill, who died in the last days of the war after a distinguished battle record. Like Lee, Hill was educated by the United States at West Point and turned on the loyalties of a 14-year U.S. Army career to take up arms against his country.

It could be renamed Fort Sherman, for Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. While Gen. Ulysses Grant was piling up casualties in Virginia in 1864, Sherman mainly used flanking maneuvers to drive Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston back almost 100 miles to Atlanta.

FORT RUCKER

Fort Rucker, Alabama, is named after Gen. Edmund Rucker. A cavalry leader, Rucker was a competent commander and after the war, a business partner of Nathan Bedford Forrest, first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Fort Rucker bills itself as the home of Army aviation. How about naming it Fort Doolittle, for Jimmy Doolittle, who commanded the daring raid in which B-25 bombers launched from an aircraft carrier to bomb the home islands of Japan in early 1942? The raid did little damage but it did bring a big morale boost to a nation reeling from the Pearl Harbor attack and notified the Japanese that the U.S. had immense power to strike out.

If anyone is squeamish about the name Doolittle because it sounds like the camp for slackers, it could be Fort Wright, for the Wright Brothers, who built the first successful airplane and sold the Army its first air machine.

CAMP BEAUREGARD

And we come to Camp Beauregard, established as a training base during World War I and now operated by the Louisiana National Guard. It is named for Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, commander of the forces that opened the war with the bombardment of Fort Sumter.

Beauregard won the First Battle of Bull Run, a battle he easily could have lost, but had few additional successes. His forté was dreaming up grandiose plans for a vast, strategic move with himself in command.

The camp is one of the oldest ones in existence from World War I. Might I suggest to the fine state of Louisiana one of their own, Natalie Scott, as the new namesake?

Known to be one of only three Red Cross workers to serve in World War I and II, Scott returned home from World War I a heroine. She was the only American woman to earn France’s highest medal for courage, the Croix de Guerre.

The current names are legacies of a time when racism turned those men’s traitorous conduct into a romantic legend of an honorable defense of home against invaders.

Time has consigned that legend to the ash heap of history and the base names should go with it.

Thanks, Rudi.

 

Why not Benedict Arnold Army Base?

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One of the issues growing out of the protests after the death of George Floyd is whether military bases named for Confederate Civil War figures should be re-named.

Their cases are different from discussions of whether Thomas Jefferson’s statue should remain at the University of Missouri or whether statues of other historical figures should be taken down because they were slaveholders in a time and in places where slavery was considered a normal part of culture.

Let’s consider Fort Lee, Virginia, originally named Camp Lee in 1917 to honor Colonel Robert E. Lee of the United States Army, a hero of the Mexican War. The camp became a permanent military outpost, Ford Lee, in 1950.

Robert E. Lee might be the poster child for the movement to sanitize our history. Boston College historian Michael McLean has written, “Robert Lee was the nation’s most notable traitor since Benedict Arnold.” He was a hero of the Mexican-American War that brought us California and the states of the Southwest. “But when he was called on to serve again—this time against violent rebels who were occupying and attacking federal forts—Lee failed to honor his oath to defend the Constitution. He resigned from the United States Army and quickly accepted a commission in a rebel army…”

Did he ever show any remorse about his choice?

General Armistead Long, who wrote The Memoirs of Robert E. Lee in 1886, quoted Lee saying shortly before his surrender in 1865, “We had, I was satisfied, sacred principles to maintain and rights to defend, for which we were in duty bound to do our best, even if we perished in the endeavour.”

This great-grandson of one of Sherman’s soldiers at Vicksburg sees Lee—and other Confederates whose names are on current military bases—through eyes that are distinctly different from the great-grandsons of Lee’s soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia and leans toward a harsher assessment of Lee and the others than do some friends who admire him.

NPR’s Scott Simon commented on June 13, “Those bases were not founded in the wake of the Civil War, when President Lincoln encouraged national conciliation.” They weren’t opened until the nation geared up for World War I. Simon cited Civil War historian Harold Holzer saying the Army gave states “naming rights” to the bases in exchange for states giving the land to the federal government.

Simon went on, “Brigadier General Henry L. Benning was acclaimed as ‘Old Rock’ by his men. He once had two horses shot out from under him in battle. Harold Holzer calls him ‘a pretty formidable military commander. That is, effective in the war to perpetuate slavery. More to the point, he was a virulent white supremacist who issued incendiary warnings about the so-called dangers of having free black men outnumbering white men and threatening the purity of lily-white womanhood.’

“Harold Holzer says Braxton Bragg, ‘may have been the worst commanding general in the Confederacy. He was a bad strategist, an inept tactician whose usual order was to charge straight ahead…He did absolutely nothing to establish a claim to a place in national or even Southern memory…I just find it mystifying,’ he says, ‘that two iconic American army installations should have been named in honor of a racist and a screw-up.’ Braxton Bragg, we’ll add, may have qualified as both.”

He also cited English Professor Elizabeth Samet, who teaches at West Point and who favors re-naming the bases because they originally were named “to erase the true history, that the Confederacy fought the war to retain slavery.” She thinks the bases should be re-named to honor true heroes of various races who have fought for and died for our country.

President Trump seemed to miss the point when he said the bases “have become part of a Great American Heritage…The United States of America trained and deployed our HEROES on these Hallowed Grounds…” The grounds of those bases, however, are hallowed because of the heroes who trained there, not because of the names on the base entrance signs. The “heroes” he vows to protect took an oath upon their enlistment to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same…”

It’s basically the same oath created in 1789 and taken by other people such as Braxton Bragg, Henry Benning, Robert E. Lee and about a half-dozen others—all of whom deserted that oath and waged war against the constitutional system they had promised to protect.

If we evaluate prominent figures as historian Jon Meacham suggested in our last post, on the basis of whether their lives’ goal was to “form a more perfect union,” these figures fail badly.

…They were devoted to ending the constitutional experiment in the idea of Jeffersonian, however imperfect, however incomplete, idea of equality. And if anyone doubts—and there may be a few and they’re probably sitting there seething right now—if you doubt what we’re saying about what the Confederacy was about, go to your—what George W. Busch used to call “the Google machine” and look up the Cornerstone Speech by Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Confederate States of America. It is a speech that he gave in Savannah, Georgia that says, “The cornerstone of the Confederacy is the preservation of slavery.”

And once the battle against slavery was lost, then the cause of white supremacy took over. So those figures are part of that…History is history. That is what they were about. So why should we commemorate that? That has nothing to do with the sacrifices and the grace and grit of the men and women who have trained at those facilities. Nothing whatever.

They should remain on pages of our history books, not on the entrance signs at places where we train soldiers to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” a sacred promise these men broke.

Next week: A friend with good ideas about better names.

Us vs. Us

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A fearful old man sat down at my computer yesterday and began to type.

The son of Kansas Baptist/Methodist Republicans—Landon, anybody-but-Roosevelt, Dewey, Eisenhower, Nixon Republicans—earlier in the year fearful of a spreading plague but now fearful of something more dangerous.

Fearful that he might soon see an American Tiananmen Square, the violent and deadly pro-democracy protests that are remembered because of the image of one man blocking a military tank on its way to put down the demonstrations.

Fearful that a desperate effort to project and protect personal power without limits, unchallenged by timid participants from his own party intimidated by his presence and his loud loyalist legion will leave a legacy of distrust in a system of government created long ago by men whose ideals ultimately far overshadowed their ideology.

Fearful of a force that sees a crisis as a political opportunity rather than as a cause demanding responsibility and as an opportunity for creating a united spirit to reach an inclusive goal.

Fearful of a climate being expanded that encourages citizens to feel they are victims of government rather than responsible participants in it.

The old man at the keyboard remembers other bad times and other missed opportunities to heal the national spirit, other days of burnings and of lootings, other days when the peaceful expression of grief and of hope growing from it was overshadowed by uncaring opportunistic violence that diverted actions and intentions to create a better community and a better nation to overshadowing relief that the burnings and lootings finally were over.

The old man, having seen many things in a long life, is fearful, fearful that the democratic republic that he and his Kansas Republican parents have loved and believed in has been pushed to the edge of its existence by repeated missed opportunities and now by leadership that cares about plagues and public tragedy and disruption only to the degree that it can turn them to perceived personal advantage.

The old man is fearful when those within a leader’s orbit lack the bravery to advocate compassion that transcends perpetuating personal political power and the will to work for reason in unreasonable times. He worries at the loss of common integrity and the lack of diverse voices demanding it from those in the most powerful positions, and the refusal of those in those positions to display it.

His mind is often drawn to a poem called “Talk” by Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko from many years ago that ends:

How sharply our children will be ashamed

Taking at last their vengeance for these horrors

Remembering how in so strange a time

common integrity could look like courage.

Integrity. Courage. The old man seeks them from those reluctant or afraid to display them. And in times like these when integrity and courage are most needed, he is fearful.

Lord, but do I ever need baseball!

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It’s gray and it’s cold and it’s been gray and cold far too long and far too much. Or maybe grey and cold.

Life is so bad that I have been driven to ask what the difference is between “gray” and “grey.” Which one has fifty shades (It’s “e”). Is it Thomas Grey or Thomas Gray who was the 18th century English poet who wrote “Elegy Written in an English Churchyard,” a poem with the original ending that doesn’t do much to improve the mood on these cold, gray days.

No more, with reason and thyself at strife,
Give anxious cares and endless wishes room;
But through the cool sequester’d vale of life
Pursue the silent tenour of thy doom.

Gray (not “e” but “a”) rewrote the 128-line poem with a different conclusion but it offers no more solace on days like these.

I have been driven to Grammar (“a” not “e”) dot com for help. It wasn’t real helpful.   Look for yourself.

The past few weeks have given us the leaden cloud of impeachment, the weight of which has left us tired and has left our political system with a terrible burden of public distrust precisely at the time we must start deciding who, if anybody, can lift our confidence in government, which is—after all—led by those we, ourselves, select.

It is easy on days like these to think of ourselves as victims of government instead of what we really are—partners in government.

We have attended too many funerals of friends in the last year, read far too many letters to the editor that are little more than partisan political popgun skirmishes, watched noble aspirations for public benefit wither under the power of campaign donations, seen too few films or shows or television series that leave viewers uplifted, and watched too many late-night comedians whose one-note monologues encourage fleeing to bed and seeking refuge fully under the covers.

Yes, the Chief won the Super Bowl but then the President tweeted that they made the state of KANSAS proud and I wondered if he could identify Ukraine on a map without country names printed on them.

Lord, do I ever need baseball.

Some friends at the YMCA, knowing of my media background, have asked if I can get them tickets to a New York Yankees-Chicago White Sox baseball game to be played near the small Iowa town of Dyersville, Iowa, population about 41-hundred, this summer. Dyersville, as you probably know, is widely recognized as the home of the National Farm Toy Museum and the home of the Ertl Company, which makes die-cast metal alloy scale models of farm equipment and other vehicles.

There’s also THE baseball field, the filming site of Field of Dreams, which celebrated its thirtieth anniversary last year.

Major League Baseball has been pretty close to the vest with information about tickets for the Dyersville game but there won’t be very many. https://www.mlb.com/news/field-of-dreams-game-tickets-and-faqs

The teams taking part were announced last November:

https://doyouremember.com/108307/mlb-field-of-dreams-game

Beyond that, there’s been little information. We do know the game is scheduled for August 13 and it will count as a regular season game. It will be played in a specially-built ballpark owned by Go The Distance Baseball, the present owners of the movie site. The park has only 8,000 seats and it will be north of the movie ball diamond, connected to it by a path cut through a cornfield.   There will be windows in the outfield walls so fans can see the corn. The owners say they’ll find other things to do with the ballpark after the game.

No, I can’t get tickets for you. But like you, I’ll probably watch the game on the teevee.   Who will throw out the first pitch?   Your guess is as good as mine but I’ll bet it’s a pretty close.

But baseball is coming near. And, boy howdy, do I ever need it!

Chasing down information about the ball game at Dyersville brought me to several Youtube sites about Kevin Costner, the movie, and even the composer of the theme music, James Horner, who was killed in a plane crash in 2015 and is best remembered for the soundtrack to Titanic.

And that, of course, led to James Earl Jones intoning his ode to baseball near the end of the movie. It’s been cited so often that it is almost corny. But, gosh, is it good.

“They’ll walk out to the bleachers, and sit in shirt-sleeves on a perfect afternoon. They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they’ll watch the game, and it’ll be as if they’d dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick, they’ll have to brush them away from their faces….The one constant through all the years…has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game — it’s a part of our past…It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.”

In the offseason we’ve watched baseball writhe because of the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal. We’ve watched the free agent meat market produce players paid sums beyond our imaginations. The Royals have changed managers. The Cardinals still have enormous potential waiting to break through.

But when we hear the sound of baseball hitting leather or wood hitting the baseball, all of that offseason stuff fades away because games are played in their time and it is only the game that is important. Uniforms change, players once young and now old at 37 come and go. But it is still 60’6” from mound to plate, still 90’ from plate to first, still 127’ 3 3/8” home to second. The eternal dimensions contain the game.

The rules are clear and mostly unchanging year to year, decade to decade. Lines clearly mark what is fair and what is foul. Every batter has an equal chance to get a hit—three strikes and four balls. The tag of the bag in the first part of the double play, the infield fly, obstruction, the balk—all have rules requiring specific actions or situations. Baseball will be played this year with the same basic rules and dimensions it used last year. It’s one thing we can count on in otherwise unstable times.

Go to a baseball game and for a few hours you know how the game will be played. In the time before the game and the time after the game, we live in a world much less certain.

And the game is all there is for however long it takes to finish it. Cold, gray days, politics and impeachment, popgun partisanship in the letters to the editor page, and most of the cares of the world fade to insignificance because baseball is baseball, a game that by its eternal dimensions tells us there can be stability in life and that what once was good could be good again.

Lord, I do need baseball!

Notes from a quiet street (holidays edition)

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We’re puzzled by President Trump’s pronouncements that some people are “human scum.” Apparently he has forgotten that there are good people on both sides.

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Ceres will be on display this weekend at the capitol before she’s hoisted back into her position on top of the dome. She’s back from her year-long “spa treatment” at a bronze restoration company in Chicago. We expect a lot of folks to go to the capitol to see her before she goes back up. Who knows, it might be another ninety years before she comes back down.

However, the folks in Chicago did some detailed 3D scans of the old girl. The Capitol Commission hasn’t decided what to do with them yet. There’s been some discussion of creating a Ceres hologram somewhere inside the capitol so we won’t have to wait ninety more years to see her up close.   Your observer has advocated for years flying drones or something around the dome to do just such a scan so 12-inch reproductions could be made and sold at the tour desk.

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Speaking of Ceres: One of the questions we’ve been asked several times is whether she was supposed to face north instead of south (or at least, north as we think of it in Jefferson City—an observation about that in a minute). We think she was always intended to face south.

North advocates say it’s odd that the patron goddess of agriculture isn’t facing the most fertile farmlands in Missouri and is instead facing the rocky Ozarks.   Not really. She’s facing south because that’s the entrance to the capitol and she’s extending a hand of welcome to those who come to the building. It wouldn’t do to have her turn her back on visitors.

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Now, is she facing south? No. We think she’s actually facing, uh, southwest.   Columbia is north; Fulton is northeast. Check a map that shows where north is.

Many years ago, Jefferson City officials realized house numbering was a scrambled mess because some houses, say, were in the 400 block of West Kneecap Street while houses right behind them on West Headache Avenue had numbers starting with 700. It wasn’t a problem in the earliest days of the town when it was a nice grid. But when it spread and the streets began to snake along the high ground that conformed to the meandering river channel, numbering became scrambled.

It was a huge deal when the city launched a house renumbering program that brought things into a more sensible system that would make it easier for police or fire or other service people to find out where something was happening or had happened. A lot of folks didn’t like getting new numbers but they had to go out to Westlake/s Hardware or maybe uptown of Schleer Brothers Hardware Store (imagine that: a hardware store on High Street. And a grocery store. And a dime store.) and buy new numbers to put on their walls, mail boxes, and doors.   But they finally did.

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We’ve often observed that our church as a hymn, “In Christ there is no east or west; In him, no north or south” and we’ve suggested the substitution of “Jefferson City” for “Christ” would give us an accurate city anthem.

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Our city has a contest for the best house Christmas lights. There’s a place just up the block from our house where the folks seem to take great delight in the darkening months’ holidays, not with lights but with balloons. This year there are inflatable figures of Snoopy and Charlie Brown and other Christmasy things. We always look forward to the fall holiday season when we see the latest Halloween inflatables , then the Thanksgiving ones and, now, Charlie Brown figures, including Snoopy’s Sopwith Camel, complete with turning propeller.

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Something from the Jefferson City Daily Democrat-Tribune in June of 1914, a headline reading “Beautifying the River Front.”

Nothing is more unsightly than railroad tracks between a city and its river front. It was a mistake to ever permit the railroad tracks to be constructed between the city and the river. Under the circumstances, there is nothing to be done but to arch over the tracks, or at least a part of them…

The article was about an early drawing by the architects of the soon-to-be new capitol showing a terrace over the tracks on the capitol’s river side with steps leading down to the water. That part of the capitol project was never done, of course. But the often-maligned proposed Bicentennial Bridge might materialize that hope of 105-years ago.

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For the record, the last time a state official was impeached and removed from office in Missouri was when Secretary of State Judi Moriarty was removed from office for post-dating her son’s document filing as a candidate for the Missouri House. Eric Greitens quit before articles of impeachment could be taken up in the House. In about 1968 there was a circuit judge in St. Louis named John Hasler who had taken a fatherly interest in a woman whose divorce case he was hearing. But he resigned before the trial could be held. And the last impeachment before THAT was probably State Treasurer Larry Brunk in the 1930s, who was charged by the House but the Senate couldn’t get a two-thirds vote against him. Brunk had been a state senator a few years earlier. The Brunk case is considered one of the reasons the new constitution adopted in 1945 eliminated trial by the Senate and put it before the Missouri Supreme Court.

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And in each of those cases, we are sure there were good people on both sides.

A Ground-Source Heat Pump Nation

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It’s early afternoon on top of the Langjokull glacier (Langjokull means “long glacier” so I’m being a little redundant here perhaps) in the Highlands of Iceland. The ice is about 1,900 feet thick below us as we stand on the second largest ice cap on an island named for ice. We are about five hundred feet short of being a mile high.

And we are standing on top of two volcanic systems. But we’re relatively safe. There have only been thirty-two eruptions in the past ten-thousand years. We do not think when there might be a thirty-third.

This is a land of fire and ice, of long dark nights and long bright days, of heat and snow, of Northern Lights in the winter and whales and Puffins in the summer. It is a country the size of New York with a population equaling that of Anaheim, California. About 266,000 of the country’s 360,000 people live in one town, Reykjavik.

Iceland has about 130 volcanoes, about thirty of which are considered active. Glaciers melt from the bottom here because of the warmth of the ground. The water is pure and cold and it spills over dozens of waterfalls and careens through canyons carved through the volcanic rock laid down through thousands of years of eruptions.

In some places it’s boiling hot and there are geysers. Visitors are cautioned to stay on walkways lest they break through the thin crust and encounter boiling water. More than ninety percent of the homes in Iceland are heated with geothermal water heated by the underground magma that is part of the ecosystem of this fascinating country, an entire country that is, in effect, a ground source heat pump.

In other places, steam from geothermal sources generates electricity that provides lights to much of the island.

Heat and cold. Light and dark. The darkness of winter is setting in fast in Iceland. During our visit, we could make out outlines of mountains on the horizon about 9:15 a.m. and it was fully light by ten.   But by three o’clock we were headed back to our hotel because darkness was coming on fast.

Christmas lights go up early in November and they stay until February, not because Iceland celebrates Christmas for four months but because the people NEED THE LIGHT.

Actually, Iceland celebrates Christmas for about two weeks, beginning December 23 and running through Epiphany on January 6 with traditional events linked back to ancient Norse customs and figures such as the thirteen Yule Lads.

The lads are trolls, children of Gryla, a part-troll and part animal who lives in the mountains with her husband and the black Christmas Cat. At Christmas time she and her family come down out of the mountains looking for children who’ve been more naughty than nice. She likes to boil them in her cauldron while the boys go around visiting the homes of children.

Icelandic Christmas custom has children putting a shoe in their bedroom windows each evening for the thirteen days before Christmas. Each night, one of the lads comes by and leave small gifts—candy is always popular—for the good little girls and boys. But the child who has been a pain in the neck that day can wake up the next morning and find a rotten potato in the shoe.

The Yule Cat prowls the countryside and eats people who haven’t received any new clothing before Christmas Eve.

Those of us who live in the less harsh but soft and more temperate and light world of Missouri have a fat old man in a red suit who flies around with the help of reindeer.

The country has an officially established church, a state church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church.

Some folks will attend holiday services at Hallgrimskirkja, the church of Hallgrimur Petursson, a seventeenth-century poet and clergyman (although that’s a statue of Leif Ericson in front of the church instead of Pastor Petursson). This modern church is the largest church in the country and at 244 feet is one of the tallest buildings in all of Iceland.

 

 

 

 

 

Simplicity is its beauty. Workers started building it in 1946 and did not complete it until 1986. The original design was for a building not as tall as this one. But it grew in design when the Church of Iceland insisted on a spire that would be higher than the cathedral of Iceland’s Catholic Church.

Yes, we saw the Northern Lights.

Our cameras saw them better than our eyes did. To our eyes, the lights were barely visible. But our digital cameras with slow shutter speeds captured the lights and (if you look closely) the Big Dipper. We had gone out on a Northern Lights tour in a boat the previous night but they didn’t materialize. The second night, we took a bus an hour into the dark interior of the island. We were on the verge of giving up when the first slight glitter caught our attention.

But on our boat trip we did see a light—Yoko Ono’s Imagine Peace Light that is turned on during the winter for various periods.

This year, she went to Reykjavik to turn it on in honor of husband John Lennon’s 79th birthday, October 9. It will be turned off for the season on March 27. “Remember, each one of us has the power to change the world,” she wrote in a message in October. “Power works in mysterious ways. We don’t have to do much. Visualize the domino effect and just start thinking PEACE…

It’s Time of Action.

The Action is PEACE.

Think PEACE, act PEACE, Spread PEACE.

PEACE is power!”

It was late at night when I took that picture and I’m surprised it turned out as well as it did. It looks lighter than it was because of the slow shutter speed. And we were riding on a boat. Actually there are fifteen searchlights that form the column. The stone monument housing the lights features “Imagine Peace” in two-dozen languages.

Now—back to the glacier, back to where we started. Standing on a glacier is one thing. Going inside one is something else. But we did.

With sixty feet of ice over hour heads and hundreds of feet of ice and volcanoes beneath our feet we explored the interior. The tunnel was designed by a geophysicist and snakes through the glacier far enough that the trip through takes about an hour. We were given spikes that we stretched over our boots; some of our group had toe-warmers that they inserted inside their boots but it wasn’t all that bad (we thought), especially as long as we kept moving. In fact, it was warmer inside the glacier than it was outside.

There are some rooms carved into the ice, including a chapel where weddings are held from time to time, not something we could ever anticipate doing because of the hassle, if nothing else. Plus, we observed, who wants to start a marriage with a frigid spouse?

In the middle of our tour, one of our group was startled by the ringing of his cell phone. Somebody from Jefferson City was calling.   We’re sixty feet underneath the top of a glacier in Iceland, for goodness sakes, and a cell phone still found him.

The geology that shapes the island and the people who live there and the environment in which they choose to live produces some amazing lifestyle developments (at least amazing to us).

This is the biggest greenhouse we have ever seen, at Freoheimar. And it’s only one in a complex that covers about 1.25 acres that grows tomatoes and cucumbers and has restaurant facilities scattered throughout the vine-growing area. A computerized climate-control system takes care of temperature, humidity, lighting and carbon dioxide. Geothermal water heats the greenhouses. Pure cold water irrigates the plants. Plants are protected from pests by biological controls and bumblebees that care nothing about humans help pollinate the plants.

We’re not sure how tall the plants are—more than fifteen feet, we suspect. Visitors can have tomato soup and home-made bread for lunch. And, oh, is it good soup! And the bread is to die for. Each of us tasted a little tomato and this consumer who tolerates tomatoes on hamburgers tried one. Very low acidic content. It was almost sweet.

And the plastic container that these folks market their small tomatoes in: After the purchaser has eaten all the tomatoes, the container can be held under hot water and it disappears.

Iceland, where people live on volcanic lava rather than good rich (or not so rich) dirt could teach us Americans a lot about efficient, low-waste, natural living.

Two or three final things: Remember we mentioned the Christmas lights going up early and staying up late because people in long winter-dark time need light? How about this gas station/car wash?

Gas was costing about nine dollars (US) a gallon there. But people don’t drive little bitty cars. In fact, Iceland has an amazing variety of cars available from Skodas made in Czechoslovakia to Volkswagens from Germany and Jaguars from England, Subarus from Japan, and Fords from the United States, among others.

The Icelandic language is very old. It has no dialects. Old Icelandic is a derivation of Old Norse. The oldest written documents in Iceland date to about 1100 CE. Most modern Icelanders can read those documents because their language has been so unchanged. The Icelandic alphabet is based on the 12th Century First Grammatical. It also has six letters our alphabet doesn’t have.

Reykjavik also is the home of the only museum of its kind in the world. You’ll have to go to Google Images to see more about it. I cannot imagine the public reaction in most of this country if somebody opened a museum like it here. I did take some pictures of it (although I didn’t have time to get any farther inside than the gift shop—and some of the gifts would have made interesting objects on the airport luggage security cameras). Actually, it’s called The Iceland Phallological Museum but it’s best known by its sign.

Almost all of the land and sea mammals found in Iceland are represented. Including, uh, Homo Sapiens. In all, there are 282 specimens from 93 different species of animal. Should anyone want to create one of these museums in this country, we suggest locating it in Olean, the Miller County town of about 125 or so souls who have held an  annual Testicle Festival, which we understand has moved to another town.

So, we went to Iceland a couple of weeks ago. And we found it intriguing for several reasons. It’s about six hours from Chicago if you are so unfortunate as to want to leave from O’Hare International.

It was kind of an anniversary celebration for us. A week after Nancy and I got back and got the unpacking and the laundry mostly done, we celebrated our 52nd wedding anniversary.

Would we go back?  We have other places on our list but a maybe a summer visit when the whales and the Puffins are there…..

 

 

 

Our sub is back at sea

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The USS Jefferson City, a now-“improved” Los Angeles-class attack submarine, is back in action after five years in dry dock at Pearl Harbor for extensive repairs. The boat is coming up on thirty years of age (launched August 17, 1990).

More than five years ago it left its base in San Diego for a reported six-month deployment in the western Pacific but went to Guam for emergency repairs for what the Navy said was a small water leak from a valve in one of the reactor propulsion systems.

But the sub stayed at Guam longer than some folks, including crew members’ families, thought was necessary to fix a small water leak. The Navy said the leak was so small and so internal that it took some time to track it down. Some spouses in San Diego complained the Navy was giving them no indication when the Jefferson City might get back to San Diego.

At one time the Navy was not planning to pay the crew up to $495 a month in Hardship Duty Pay, a plan that was reversed after the Navy Times started asking questions.

Five months after reaching Guam it went under its own power to Pearl Harbor for a major overhaul, originally scheduled for twenty-two months. It went into dry dock on April 1, 2015 and didn’t get cleared for sea trials until November 12. And to make matters worse for crew families, the Navy decided in November, 2014 to switch the sub’s home port to Pearl Harbor. The Navy said at the time that the switch had been planned for 2015 anyway, when the sub was scheduled for the extended overhaul it has now received.

The crew remained with the sub and continued training even while the submarine was immobilized for repairs and updates.

Commander Steve Dawley, a Joplin native, sent a note yesterday to the local support group that the sub has been through “several weeks of final testing and certification” before the sea trials that ended Monday. “The crew did an amazing job operating the ship after a five-year availability and spirits are high onboard,” he said.

The Jefferson City will get a few more fixes before heading to sea again for training exercises ahead of the Christmas holidays.

180511-N-LY160-0016 PEARL HARBOR (May 11, 2018) – Cmdr. Steven Dawley is piped aboard during the Los Angeles-class fast-attack submarine USS Jefferson City (SSN 759) change of command ceremony at the USS Bowfin Submarine Museum and Park in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, May 11. Dawley relieved Cmdr. Kevin Moller as the 14th commanding officer of Jefferson City. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Michael Lee/Released)

Dawley became the fourteenth commander of the Jefferson City in May, last year. He had not planned to be in the Navy but the terrorist attacks in 2011 changed his mind. He had planned to go to medical school after getting his degrees in math and chemistry at Missouri Southern State University but changed his mind after the attacks. He told the Carthage newspaper that Navy recruiters talked him out of his interest in being a pilot and, because of his college degrees, steered him into submarines.

Dawley’s wife is the executive officer on a guided missile destroyer.

From time to time the sub commander and some of the crew members visit Jefferson City. And from time to time some folks from Jefferson City get to visit the sub—an experience your observer was given several years ago.

A lot of folks don’t think they could serve on a submarine. And there are some drawbacks. But think of this: Most of us get up and have breakfast, go to work, some home, have dinner, watch a little TV or get on the computer, call it a night and go to bed. And then we get up and have breakfast—–

The biggest difference is that we get to go outside when we go to work, most of the time. But routine life in a submarine isn’t that much different from routine life on land.

But on a submarine, you can’t be sloppy. You can’t leave your shoes on the living room floor. Or magazines on the table next to the recliner chair.

But you do work with some extraordinary people. Really extraordinary.

It’s good to hear our sub is back to doing what it’s intended to do.

(Photo Credits: U. S. Navy)

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Lynching

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The circulation of the word “lynching” in high political circles is an insult to one of the most despicable words in our language.

Missouri knows about lynching. A study by the Equal Justice Institute two years ago documented 4,084 lynchings in the South between 1877 and 1950. It also found sixty lynchings in Missouri during that time, the second most of any state just outside the south. Oklahoma had 76 of the 341 events labeled by the institute as “racial terror lynchings.”

In April, 1906, Horace Duncan and Fred Coker, accused of rape in Springfield, were taken from the jail and hanged from a tower on the town square. Five-thousand white people—men, women, AND children—watched the hangings and then the burning and shooting of the bodies.

The men had alibis, confirmed by their employers. But the mob never let them have their day in court, never let them present evidence of their innocence. Newspaper reports after the fact said the men were innocent.

A third man, Will Allen, accused of murder without any evidence, was chase down and strung up on the same tower.

That was lynching.

1931. Raymond Gunn confesses to killing a woman at a rural school near Maryville. While Gunn was being taken in the sheriff’s car to a court hearing, a mob stopped the car, dragged Gunn out and took him to the school. He was tied to a roof ridge pole. He and the building were doused with gasoline and the building was set afire. About fifteen minutes later the building collapsed. When the fire burned down enough, spectators took burned fragments of the building as souvenirs.

That was lynching.

In 1919, Jay Lynch was convicted in Lamar of murdering the sheriff and the sheriff’s son during a jail break. Missouri had taken a brief break from having the death penalty so he was sentenced to life in prison. While Lynch was in the judge’s office saying goodbye to his family, two dozen people burst in, put a rope around his neck and dragged him to a nearby tree. When the first branch broke, the rope was thrown over a stronger one and Lynch was hauled up to die. A large crowd cheered. Lynch was one of four white men lynched that year, four out of 83 people lynched that year nationwide.

That was lynching.

1893, Audrain County. Emmett Divers, charged with murdering a white woman, was taken by an estimated crowd of 500 people to and bridge and hanged. After Divers died, his body was taken to the fairground and hung from a pole and later burned.

That was lynching.

1942, Scott County. Cleo Wright, accused of murdering a woman and shot eight times resisting arrest, was grabbed by a mob who poured gasoline on him and burned him in front of a Sikeston church. The incident led Governor Forrest Donnell to order the Highway Patrol and the local sheriff to put more officers on the scene.   But about 100 black residents who fled never went back. Some black residents who stayed armed themselves and patrolled their part of town.

That was lynching.

1923, Columbia. James T. Scott, a University of Missouri janitor, a World War I veteran, the grandson of a slave, was identified by a 14-year old girl as her attacker. A mob using sledge hammers broke into his jail cell, took him out and hanged him from the Stewart Road bridge over the MK&T Railroad tracks.. A University professor who tried to stop the mob was told to get out of the way or he’d be lynched, too. St. Louis newspapers reported the girl identified another man, who had shared the cell with Scott. Reports say Scott told the mob that took him from the jail that the other man, Ollie Watson, had told him that Watson was the attacker.

That was lynching.

Three years ago, the Association for Black Graduate and Professional Students at the university dedicated a historic marker alongside the KATY Trail near the spot where the Stewart Street Bridge, from which James T. Scott was hanged, once stood. “Lest We Forget,” it says at the top.

1882. Kansas City. Moments after a white policeman was shot, Levi Harrington was stopped by officers and arrested although there was no evidence to implicate him in the crime. A crowd forcefully seized Harrington and hanged him from a nearby bridge and shot him.

That was lynching.

In 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative unveiled a plaque not far from the bridge site, commemorating the lynching.

A century earlier, in 1918, Missouri Congressman Leonidas Dyer introduced a bill in the House of Representatives making lynching a federal crime. The Senate approved the bill last year. The House has yet to act. There remains no federal anti-lynching law.

Missouri has no anti-lynching law.  Participants can be charged under murder statutes.

Let us be clear. What is happening in Washington is not a lynching. Saying it is insults our language, cheapens the shameful actions of some of our ancestors, and dismisses the agony of those who fell victim to public savagery.

 

The District

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What if Jefferson City had become like Washington, D. C.? What if it wasn’t the county seat of Cole County? What if the state capitol was not even in any county?

What if everything within a four-mile radius of the Missouri Capitol, south of the river, was the District of Jefferson?

On February 26, 1923, Representative Casper M. Edwards of Malden offered a proposed constitutional amendment to create such a district. If the legislature approved it, the matter would go to a statewide vote in November, 1924. His proposed four-mile line would have taken in almost all of the city, at the time a town of more than fifteen-thousand people (and growing fast; the population would be almost fifty percent bigger in 1930)

All laws governing the district would be decided by the General Assembly which also would appoint all local authorities.

The proposed district would have devastated Cole County’s tax base, of course, and would have required relocation of the county seat. But where would it go? The population in the farmland outside of Jefferson City at the time would have been pretty small. Russellville had 364 people in 1920; St. Thomas, probably not more than 150; Lohman had 120 in1920; St. Martins, Taos, and Wardsville had a few hundred each. Osage City was unincorporated.

We could have had one heckuva fight for the county seat! Or maybe later laws would have merged the remainder of Cole County with surrounding counties.

We haven’t found any records of what Edwards was thinking about or what prompted him to suggest the District of Jefferson. While some contemporary accounts contemplated the district as being like the District of Columbia, it’s likely Edwards did not intend his proposed district to be part of no state. Even then, Missouri had districts of various kinds.

We’re not sure how much square mileage his plan would have totaled, but today, Jefferson City sprawls over almost 37.6 square miles (about 26 square miles fewer than Columbia but six more than Joplin, eight more than Cape Girardeau, eight fewer than St. Joseph) so the city would have grown far outside his circle. The Jefferson City Country Club is 5.4 miles from the Capitol, for instance. Binder Park is 3.2 miles farther west. (And it’s pronounced BIN-der, not BINE-der. It’s named for a German fellow who was a powerful civic leader in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.)

And what a mess would things be if the General Assembly was the agency that appointed local officials?

Citizens might have been offended by losing their rights to vote for members of the city council, the mayor and the municipal judge. Instead of a local police department, would there be a state police department and would it be in charge of penitentiary security and capitol safety as well as making sure the city streets were safe?

Would the appointment of local officials mean no election of school board members? Who, then, would hire teachers and on what basis. Would state taxpayers be financing the local high school football team?

Would the city have been more prosperous if state funds made up its budget? What would it be like if the legislature-appointed mayor had to go before the appropriations committees each year to ask for money for everything the city has or does now?

Good Heavens!

Fortunately for the City of Jefferson (that’s what its real name is), Edwards’ resolution was assigned to the House Committee on Constitutional Amendments and was not heard from again.

Who was this guy Edwards anyway?

He was a Representative from Dunklin County for three terms, born in Farmington in 1870, a lawyer and a newspaper publisher. Robert Sidney Douglas, in his 1912 History of Southeast Missouri, wrote that the Malden Clipper moved to Kennett in 1886 and became the Dunklin County News, a weekly paper. Several years later Casper Edwards formed Edwards Publishing Company, and took over the News. He was described as “a brilliant and forceful writer.” He finally sold the paper to the Malden Printing Company. The newspaper continued until 1931 when it became the Twice A Week Dunklin Democrat until 1956 when it became the Daily Dunklin Democrat, which continues to publish in Kennett.

Edwards died of a head injury suffered when his car overturned down an embankment near Malden in August of 1936. He appeared not seriously injured by died five hours later of a cerebral hemorrhage. One newspaper report said the hemorrhage was brought on by “excitement over the accident.

Another account said he had practice law in Malden since 1900, had been an Assistant Attorney General under John Barker (1913-1917), and had published newspapers in Malden, Caruthersville, and Van Buren.

As we have noticed, from time to time, discovering a long-forgotten incident while prowling through old newspapers can lead to being involuntarily drawn down a path to other stories. This is one of those. It eventually leads to a poem saluting a legislative colleague who had died, the story of a disappearing rabbit, the discovery of a huge hoard of bat guano, and the early days of Missouri tourism.

It’s a long and winding road from the story of the Casper Edwards and the District of Jefferson and we’ll have to tell it some other time.