Publishers Note: The following is reprinted from the Columbia Daily Tribune and was written by the publisher, Henry J Waters III.
You can leave comments and greetings for George at the end on any of the three stories we have on the home page today. Just scroll to the bottom of the page and enter your greeting or comment.
If you know your life will end in a matter of weeks, you should do what George Parker did Saturday: stage a happy goodbye party.
It was Parker’s 86th birthday. Only recently he learned he has terminal cancer with mere weeks to live. Blessedly, his illness will not linger. As his body deteriorates, his mind remains sharp. His family agreed the time to have a party is now while he can enjoy it. In a real way he cheats death by living right to the end.
George Parker is Mr. Republican hereabouts, but you hardly would know it by comparing him with many of today’s partisan flamethrowers. He gained most intraparty fame with his organizational work right here in Boone County founding the Pachyderm Club, later to achieve national status. Today 64 clubs exist in 16 states.
Parker said he wanted places where people could learn more about government and politics, a purpose much too broad and tame — shall we say moderate — than many party leaders embrace today.
I remember George from his first run for political office in 1968. He was an outlier, a Republican running for the Missouri House of Representatives in a district known as Little Dixie that had not elected a member of his party since sometime before the Great Flood. He was opposed by a well-known, bright but quite young man deemed the putative favorite by almost all political observers hereabouts simply because he was the Democrat.
At that time I was also a youngster, getting feet wet in the world of commentary. My editorial writing career was but two years into what has become an unrelenting barrage entertaining, informing, irritating and boring the local populace on a daily basis lasting 43 years, so far.
When George ran in 1968, the Tribune had never endorsed candidates for local office. During the tenure of our first publisher from 1905 until 1937, the newspaper was known as staunchly supportive of the Democratic Party, though in those days being a Democrat in Missouri and Boone County was by no means a mark of left-wing liberalism. When my father was publisher until 1966, the paper did endorse a few Republicans on the national scene, but nothing of the sort locally.
The election of November 1968 gave this third publisher my first opportunity to exercise what I had come to believe should be our duty to comment on local political races. One of our principles was and is nonpartisanship, evaluating the candidates rather than merely their party affiliations.
In that 1968 election we decided Parker was the superior candidate and conscientiously ignored the fact he was sure to lose. We thought our endorsement would be a cry in the wilderness but vowed we should ignore the box score of wins and losses as we pursued a coming lifetime of political endorsing. It was all right to start with a loss.
But, believe it or not, the underdog Republican won. That he was endorsed by the Tribune, the Democratic trumpet of Little Dixie, had been curious enough to warrant a news story in the St. Louis Post Dispatch.
In later years Parker endeared himself to me with his persistent research and advocacy for the constitutional principle embodied in the First Amendment establishing separation of church and state. His studies and writing, and private orations delivered in my office and elsewhere, constitute a worthy body of information and support for this vital and often debated idea.
Parker, the consummate Republican dedicated to perpetuating his party and what he believes to be its important principles and the most ardent supporter I know of the separation principle, represents the type of thoughtful open-mindedness I wish we were seeing more of in both parties today.
George Parker is one of the public personages I have grown up with all these years. He leaves a legacy worth remembering.
HJW III
