When I go out of town for almost any trip, I usually buy whatever local newspaper is for sale at a gas station.
Cody Thorn
I do it for a few reasons. One is, because I know how important it is to support fellow journalists. They are in the same boat as I am, when your livelihood depends on people to pick up or subscribe to what you do.
More importantly, I do it to read stories. I’m not the type to pick up a book and read very much anymore, but I will scan almost every story in a newspaper.
Every once in a while I will stumble across a story that makes you appreciate good journalism but also wonder about how the system works sometimes.
The St. Louis Post Dispatch did a story on a man who found a job as a truck driver after 12 years in prison. He was trying to piece his life together but then got a call from his employer while he was in Michigan. The division of child support had called his work to inform them that this driver had his license suspended because he owed past child support.
He was in jail for 12 years and got a job when he got out and was trying to get his life back together. Being in jail for 12 years, I’m sure your child support racks up.
Heck, mine went up when I took this job. We filed the paperwork as soon as I started but it took almost two months for them to deliver the piece of paper to authorize it. My employer even sent in the money before the paperwork was official, but the money wasn’t credited to the account since nothing was ‘official.’
It just seems like there are plenty of times when people try to do the right thing and the powers that be find a way to make it dang near impossible and maddening at the same time. I won’t go into what it is like calling them and being on hold for 45 minutes or longer.
My boss, Adam, knows what I’m talking about.
There are currently two lawsuits filed against Missouri’s practices of suspending driver’s licenses in child support cases.
Yes, child support needs to be paid, but if you have a job in almost every city in Missouri, you will need a car to get there. There isn’t exactly a ton of public transportation available.
There needs to be a way for child support to work with parents, not against them.
CORRECTION
As I suspected we got our answer to if Alexis Stewart was the first girl to play football at North Platte.
The answer is yes and no, we think.
We were told that back in 1994, Christina (Perry) Strobbe played junior high football for the Panthers, but not in high school.
Some people asked why we couldn’t find that information out before we wrote the story? That is a fair question. We heard about Stewart playing in a JV game and that her varsity debut was coming up. So I started to ask around to see if anyone had any idea if that had happened at North Platte. My first thought was as tough as Regan Nash was, surely she did, but she didn’t.
I asked a handful of people and no one knew. But given it happened in the school district a quarter century ago that is one reason we didn’t know. There aren’t exactly many around from that time period still teaching, let alone still teaching at North Platte. Most small schools don’t have coaches that are lifers anymore; they are there for five minutes and move on. Most use smaller schools as a stepping-stone, which made researching such a topic difficult. We tried and we wrote what we knew off what we gathered in the research.
However, as you see, we were wrong in being the first girl. She may be the first girl to play high school football. We haven’t heard of another one doing that, but hopefully we will.
We felt it was a story that should be shared and we did the due diligence to the best of our abilities given certain time constraints.
THIS AND THAT
It’s been a while since I had a news column so here are a few tidbits of stuff I wanted to touch on that caught my attention.
Kudos to Gov. Mike Parson on a few things he did last session that I thought were idiotic to begin with. The first was called the ‘Jedi Disposal Act’ which would’ve allowed outdoor cremations by licensed funeral directors. Missouri would’ve been the first to allow such act, which got its name from Star Wars that had two Jedi Knights cremated in public ceremonies. The bill passed in the legislative session but Parson didn’t allow it to become official. Kansas City Sen. Jason Holsman (Jackson County) proposed the measure.
The other one dealt with the freedom to not wear helmets while riding a motorcycle. Parson vetoed an effort to repeal the helmet law for riders 18 and older with qualifying insurance.
A similar measure died at the hands of Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon in 2009.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety states that helmets help protect against fatalities up to 37 percent and brain injuries by more than 60 percent.
I have known plenty of people in the nursing field that had to deal with the aftermath of those that chose to not wear a helmet and met them in the ER. Those chance meetings are ones that many have not forgotten if the rider didn’t have a helmet on.
I hadn’t touched on this, but a new law signed by Parson will change the start date of school next year. The new law states school can start no earlier than 14 days before the first Monday in September. Had that been in effect this year it would’ve been Aug. 19, but most of the schools in this area started before that date, the exception was North Platte. At one point, the law makers wanted to make it 10 days, but a compromise was reached despite Missouri National Education Associations was against the state mandating a start date. State representative Brad Pollitt (Sedalia) noted this provides a chance for family vacations before school starts.
Speaking of schools, I ran across this story a while ago too. A tiny school in Southwest Missouri, Jasper, has banned the use of cell phones at lunch in efforts to encourage communication between students. Interesting idea. I’m curious to see how it goes and if it works. I mean, I’m not sure the last time my daughter ate a meal without her neck craned down looking at her phone.
Sundance TV has been showing ‘No One Saw A Thing’ documentary series about the killing of Ken McElroy in Skidmore, Mo., in 1981. The debut of the series was Aug. 1 and for those that recall, Dearborn was picked to serve as ‘Skidmore’ after officials in the small northwest Missouri town didn’t have interest in having the film shot at the scene of the unsolved murder.
This summer a company called 24/7 Wall Street worked with MSN to pick the best counties in each state. Platte County was the pick for Missouri.
The company used numbers such as poverty, percentage of adults with a bachelor’s degree and average life expectancy. Only counties with 10,000 or more in population were considered.
The slide for Platte County said, “Platte County, Missouri, is one of two counties on this list within commuting distance of Kansas City, one of the largest cities in the Midwest. The access to a major city provides greater job opportunities for county residents and reduces the likelihood of financial hardship. Unemployment in the county stands at just 2.3%, and the poverty rate is just 7.2%, each well below the respective 3.6% and 14.6% rates statewide.
Platte County residents are also more likely to live longer, healthier lives than those in much of the rest of the state. The county’s average life expectancy at birth is 80.4 years, nearly three years longer than the average life expectancy across Missouri.
Also of note, Platte County was also tabbed as the most expensive county to live in Missouri by 24/7 Wall Street as well.
A sidenote to some of the work going on at the new KCI terminal that I ran across recently. Frontier and Spirit didn’t sign the agreement like the other airlines did to get the project underway. Because of that, they will have to pay 125 percent higher gate fee for not being locked into the deal like the other airlines. The ones that did sign the lease will have veto power over any airport improvement that is $1 million or more.
“Under our current agreement with the city and airport have all the risk,” aviation deputy director Dave Long told FOX4. “In the new agreement, they’re backing the debt and therefore the risk is shifting more toward the airlines and for that you give up a little bit of control.”
If there is not money remaining to tear down the existing terminal B and C when the new single terminal opens, the airlines will cover the cost of the demolition within five years.
Facebook removed more than three billion fake accounts and estimated only five percent of its remaining 2.4 billion active users are fake accounts, according to a story in the Associated Press.
Also, the recycling options for myself in town are dwindling. The city-ran facility closed and now Casey’s General Store got rid of their recycling canisters next to the gas stations. I only noticed that when I went to recycle like 20 water bottles the other night.