Columbia needs several people to fill role of Hank Waters in community affairs

David Webber, Columbia MISSOURIAN, October 20, 2023

I knew Hank Waters.

I am no Hank Waters.

I miss Hank and the function he served in the Columbia community. He was the publisher of Columbia’s other local paper, the Columbia Daily Tribune, and authored a signed daily opinion essay, titled “Hank’s View,” for more than 40 years. I wrote about his life in 2021, so I won’t review it again here.

Times have changed and no one can fill his shoes or his editorial space. We are worse off without him.

He had a breadth and depth of knowledge about Columbia and Missouri politics, society and life that few people accumulate over their years on earth.

He also had a vantage point as publisher of a local paper and a business owner that gave him a legitimacy, an authority and an opportunity to observe much of Columbia’s business and governing community up close and personally.

I never felt obliged to agree with him, but I sure considered his point of view.

As I wrote then, I only knew the public Hank Waters. I never had a coffee or beer with him. I talked with him in his office three times that I remember and at public events at least three times.

I wrote for his Tribune for several years, so he knew my name. In hindsight, I wish I had used that opportunity to learn about his writing habits, spied on his local community interactions and studied his political views.

I always found him to be thoughtful, pleasant and open to other perspectives. My views on Hank are reinforced by Michael Davis, who wrote a 2013 master’s thesis in journalism, “Editorial Personality: Factors that make editorial writers successful.”

Davis found that a majority of the 19 self-identified readers he surveyed thought Hank’s editorials were fair and that he did a good job of giving “the other side” of issues he addressed. Readers described Hank as “intelligent,” well-informed,” a “good person,” “folks,” curmudgeonly” and “warm.’

Just having Hank’s presence in Columbia affected and, I suspect, improved city governance. I don’t know how much of his time he spent preparing to write his opinion pieces, but I know he aimed to meet and speak to local candidates before the elections.

As a failed School Board candidate, myself, I recall my fellow candidates in 2001 talking about their upcoming meetings with Hank and anticipating what questions he might ask.

There is a long list of recent and current issues about which I want Hank-type analysis and opinion. Let’s start with what took city leaders so long to make a decision on roll carts, and was it a good decision to overturn the vote of citizens?

Same with the city’s and Boone County’s use of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds. Why the city’s long and closed process?

The City Council has seen a major turnover in the past two elections with few, perhaps no, non-self-interested observers keeping an eye on city business. There will soon be a vacancy in the Second Ward because Andrea Waner is moving out of the ward.

There is currently an effort to recall newly-elected First Ward Councilmember Nick Knoth because of a possible conflict of interest.

Yes, there are immediate print and TV media reports, but there is seldom experienced observation and comment — and almost never follow-up.

Columbia is currently in the process of hiring a police chief and has held several types of meetings in the past three months. I applauded those efforts and knew they were taking place, but I feel I need more.

This week I attended the crowded public forum of the final four police chief candidates who were, out of fairness, asked the identical questions, and we heard, out of risk avoidance, nearly identical soothing answers.

Yes, we need community collaboration with the police. Yes, we need co-responders of social workers with police to 911 emergency calls. Yes, Columbia is a great place to live. I learned that CALEA — the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies — is the “gold standard for police department performance.” The candidates seemed to be following the same script. I don’t have much useful feedback for the search committee and the city manager. Hank would have.

This newspaper reported a basic review of the event but not enough to help the reader judge the competency of the candidates.

I applaud and appreciate Columbia’s public forums and surveys, but I miss not having a thoughtful experienced reaction from someone who recalls how other police chiefs were selected. Someone like Hank, who I think would have talked and listened to some of the attendees of this summer’s police chief forum and to some other folks around town before he wrote “Hank’s View.” In the gold ole days of yesteryear, it seems that kind of local intelligence was more common.

An under-appreciated function Hank served was community building. In the days of the afternoon-printed Tribune, you knew if you attended an evening policy forum or political event that others attending had already read “Hank’s View,” too.

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David Webber joined the MU Political Science Department in 1986 and wrote his first column for the Missourian in 1994.

Reflections on life now that all my baby boomer siblings have retired

David Webber, Columbia MISSOURIAN, October 6, 2023

The last of my working siblings retired last week. As one of eight children, born between 1948 to 1961, this seems like a family achievement, a sociological milestone.

Seven graduated college; one graduated from, and became an instructor, at a technical trade school. All eight have had long records of employment security and lifelong stability. Most of them have stayed in the same geographic area they moved to after college and several came close to living 25 years in the same house — twice the national average. This is a bit unusual for a society now averaging seven jobs and 11.7 moves during a person’s lifetime.

It’s complex to disentangle the influence of our family, hometown and America on our development and lives. In a way, the early 1960s were a “golden age” of American history. The GI generation were middle-aged parents then; NASA was exciting in every school room; the nation was not yet involved in Vietnam. We had national tragedies of the Kennedy assassination and civil rights violence — yet they were not personal worries, but an opportunity to watch adults and the nation deal with life and death.

We were brought up in Butler, Pennsylvania, a steel town north of Pittsburgh, population of about 35,000 in the city and 125,000 in the county. We moved there in the mid-1950s, and our mother was the last to leave in 1982 to move back to her roots in Philadelphia, and later to be near her daughters. High school yearbooks are about the only trace that we were ever there. None of us chose to stay in our hometown, but we left before the steel industry declined in the 1980s. My mother even relocated my father’s grave about 15 years after he died “so he could be nearer” and they would both be interred in a veteran’s cemetery.

Looking back, we realize we were lower middle class, at best. We had a wonderful old three-bedroom farmhouse with lots of grass and trees. We played sports in the sideyard, hiked and camped in our woods, shoveled snow in the winter and mowed grass in the summer. We mowed lots of grass.

We attended Catholic grade school, unlike most of our neighbors, which gave us a taste of being outsiders. Few of us did well in grade school, in part because of so many earnest distractions and so much chaos at home, in part because getting chores done and keeping life moving was a higher priority.

We had lively dinnertime and late-night political discussions which never seemed to end in bitterness even during the Vietnam Era. Boy Scouts were my saving grace, competitive swimming did the same for two brothers and jobs were similar for two sisters. We always had things to do. We had the good fortune of good health and the good judgment to avoid juvenile legal problems. We had plenty of books and news magazines at home. We weren’t supposed to read the evening newspaper until after my father read it.

Looking back, we see that our parents’ health was a defining factor in our lives — but it didn’t always feel that way. For us older ones, a bedridden mother soon produced the joy of a new sister or brother. A Christmas Day visit to the hospital for eight kids to see their mother still brings back festive memories. Our father’s heart attack and premature death in 1976 at age 58 is our family’s top tragedy, with three siblings in college or still at home at the time. Losing a parent before their time changes a person. Our youngest sibling was killed in a car crash when he was 50.

Our parents’ perspective was always wider than our hometown. They had both served in the military during War World II, as did our aunts and uncles and most of our friends’ parents. I remember learning that one uncle had fought in Belgium, another spent a lot of time in San Francisco and several took the train through St. Louis when they were reassigned military responsibilities. Aunts and uncles had photos to prove their travels and described them in an inspiring way. Having cousins in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia broadened our worldview, too.

Attending college was practically an unexamined expectation. We had a wastepaper basket in the downstairs bathroom decorated with dozens of college banners and pennants. We had maps and globes we used to locate colleges playing in bowl games.

We all had jobs in high school, where we had to interact with adults other than our parents and teachers. My mother was skilled at identifying employment opportunities at grocery stores, the public library, car dealers, delivering newspapers and eggs and summer jobs in the steel mill if we were home from college. I don’t recall work as begrudged jobs but as adventures that paid.

Somehow all these childhood experiences added up to shape eight independent-minded people who followed opportunities that came their way. We sought little family or societal conformity growing up or throughout our lives. My mother reportedly told a daughter-in-law that she “often felt like she had eight only children.” She has a point.

Overall, work and life have worked out rather well for most of us. Our parents would be satisfied, even pleased, with us although we would be cautioned not to think we, individually, are responsible for our successes.

We are very aware and grateful for the many joys and sorrows our parents experienced on their parenting journey. It’s easy to see what the GI Generation bestowed on baby boomers. Let’s hope our children have the same gratitude.

David Webber joined the MU Political Science Department in 1986 and wrote his first column for the Missourian in 1994.