Twenty-two years he served the people of Sequoyah County, first as a member of the county election board and then as commissioner for District Two. To top off his service, you never heard one word said about any skull-duggery and under-handedness relative to Mr. Jack Keck's time in office-or in his business dealings either for that matter.
Altzhiemer's Disease took him from our midst about two or three years ago, but that doesn't make his passing any the less heart-breaking for all those who knew him.
Shaloa Edwards soon will be Sallisaw's new chief of police, after defeating incumbent Gary Philpot in the Mar. 15 runoff election. Both candidates spent a considerable amount of money in their efforts to occupy the office, but I doubt if they would have done so, had conditions today been similar to those of 1929, recounted to me by Lester Ross.
Lester said he was "just a big ol' kid" in 1928 when an almost-daily poker game was discovered in the area south of the Kansas City Southern Railroad tracks, where they cross Dogwood. Dogwood is the same street as Keck Ford Road, which is the original name for Radio Station Road, all three of 'em the same road.
The "city law" of the time, Lester said, was a stout fellow by the name of Tom Miller (no relation to the Millers of Miller Ridge Road). Mr. Miller determined he would bust-up the poker game, since it was a violation of law. Someone asked him how he would get to the poker site without benefit of a patrol car, of which the city had none. "Walk," was his reply.
So, Lester said, "He slung a jumper over one shoulder and a chopping axe over the other. When he got to the game, he just walked right into the middle of them before anyone recognized him." Lester had no report on the charges filed, but I was super-impressed with a law man who would walk that far to make a collar.
Now, $40 or $45 thousand dollars a year is a pretty good wage today-but not if you have to walk everywhere in order to answer the calls from our citizens.
Lester's story reminded me of another early-day Sallisaw marshal, J.C. Woll. Mr. Woll realized that an officer of the law was bound by oath to serve the public, good or bad.
According to an early-day Democrat-American article, Mr. Woll was talking with an upstanding Sallisaw citizen in the downtown district. Said citizen had a terrible case of hiccups and had suffered with them for several days. Nothing had worked to relieve his misery, and he said so to Mr. Woll.
Quick as a wink, Mr. Woll whipped out his handcuffs and had his friend triced up tight. Astonished, the man asked Mr. Woll, "Why'd you do that. I haven't done anything!"
Mr. Woll readily agreed, "That's right, you haven't...and you haven't got the hiccups, either."
Case closed.
President Bush continues his pilgrimage criss-crossing the country to tout his "emergency" message on Social Security to hand-picked audiences wherever his advance men can scare up enough citizens to listen to his spiel.
So far, I haven't heard how he intends to curb the greed and excesses that permeate Wall Street and the board rooms of the big multi-national corporations, where the directors sleep while their CEOs and CFOs rape the company (and the stockholders) to fatten their own bank accounts.
A federal jury in New York just last week convicted WorldCom. Inc., CEO Bernard Ebbers on nine charges related to the $11 billion fraud and bankruptcy, the largest ever in the U.S. history. Oklahoma's pension funds lost $64 million in that little fiasco, Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson said. Yessir, $64 million would just about bankrupt most all of us here in Sequoyah County.
The $11 billion bankruptcy is only a portion of the loss. The Wall Street Journal reported that, between June 1999 and July 2002, WorldCom investors lost $100 billion in their stocks' value.
Possibly the next CEO to come under jury scrutiny will be Enron's famed head, Ken Lay, friend and over-night guest of President and Mrs. Bush on several occasions. (The President called Lay, "Kenny Boy"). Enron will be, according to Bloomberg.com, the second largest bankruptcy in history. Enron shares lost $68 billion in value from their peak in 2000 to it's bankruptcy filing.
More than 5,000 Enron employees were fired and $800 million in employee pensions were lost, Bloomberg reported.
Add to these two behemoths such lesser fraud cases as HealthSouth, Tyco International, the Rigas family and others and you have a total second only to the federal deficit for this year, not to mention a comfy $187.5 million pay package the New York Stock Exchange CEO Richard Grasso dealt himself while his directors snoozed on.
While everyone clucks their tongue over these huge fraud cases, they are just the tip of the iceberg. The National Association of Securities Dealers long ago set up the requirement that, if you have a gripe with anyone on Wall Street, you must go to arbitration before a panel of three people they select.
The Wall Street Journal reported last Thursday that, in 2004, 8,201 such cases were filed...a 47 percent jump from a decade earlier. "Most involved aggrieved investors, although arbitration panels also hear complaints from brokerage employees against their employer and sometimes from one brokerage against another," the Journal story reported.
Does this look like anything we should trade for? The security of Social Security and its long history of moral and fiscal rectitude for a pie-in-the sky "private account" boondoggle.
