JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

First, the good news: Friday’s post about the Shawnee gun-shop robbery and murder was my 500th since starting the blog on March 23, 2010.

It’s been very gratifying, and I appreciate your readership and comments. Comments are the lifeblood of many blogs, including this one, and I’ve been lucky to have been spared, for the most part, of trolls, those Internet provocateurs who can make a blog virtually unreadable.

The blog has enabled me to keep my hand in writing and reporting; it’s the column I never had during my 36-plus years at The Star. A former Star editor named Mike Davies once offered me the opportunity to write a Metro column, but I turned him down, mainly because the prospect of coming up with three good column ideas a week and then producing three good columns a week was incredibly daunting.

My hat is off to the columnists around the country who accept that challenge (at most papers it’s down to two a week) and work their butts off to keep their columns fresh and interesting.

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Many of you probably haven’t noticed, but there’s a lot going on over in our cross-state sister city of St. Louis.

I keep up with St. Louis a bit more than the average person for three main reasons: we have some good friends over there; our daughter Brooks spent many months in that area last year; and I’ve always liked to keep an eye on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the first big paper where I applied for a reporting job. That was back in 1969, when I was hired at The Star. I just missed getting a job at the P-D (I wasn’t quite aggressive enough in my interview with the editor), but I have no regrets. Kansas City has been very good to me.

Anyway, here are three St. Louis highlights I thought might interest you.

:: You’ve noticed, of course, the recent upswing in violent crime in the Kansas City area, highlighted (or low lighted) by the Shawnee gun-shop robbery. Well, St. Louis has got plenty of its own problems.

Within a space of about 12 hours last Wednesday night and Thursday morning, St. Louis recorded six homicides. The most shocking was the fatal shooting of 50-year-old Scott Knopfel, the night manager of a Drury Inn & Suites at I-44 and Hampton Avenue.

Knopfel

Knopfel, who had worked at the hotel for three years, buzzed in a man he thought was a customer at about 2:50 a.m. Thursday, only to have the guy pull a gun, vault over the counter and proceed to go for the cash. Unfortunately, Knopfel resisted, and the robber shot him in the head during a struggle.

The robbery was caught on hotel cameras — which, I guess, almost everyone but the robber realized are commonplace in hotels — and a suspect has been arrested.

…This case was of more than passing interest to me because Patty and I stayed there several times last year when we went over to visit Brooks. It is an excellent hotel — as most Drurys are — and I recall speaking with Knopfel at least once when we arrived very late. He was friendly, engaging and easy going. My thoughts and prayers go out to Scott’s family.

:: It appears very likely that Stan Kroenke, billionaire owner of the St. Louis Rams, is getting ready to move the Rams to Los Angeles. Kroenke, a Missouri native and a graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia, recently unveiled a plan to build, with his own money, a stadium in Inglewood, Calif.

Kroenke

The stadium would pave the way for him to return the Rams to the Los Angeles area after a two-decade absence. Currently, the Rams are on a year-to-year- lease with St. Louis, so pulling up stakes in St. Louis would be no problem for Kroenke.

This would be the second NFL team to depart St. Louis. The first was the St. Louis Cardinals, which moved to Arizona in 1988.

…I don’t watch much pro football any more, mainly because of recent studies showing that 28 percent of NFL players will go on to develop early-onset dementia or other neurological problems, but I am glad we have a stable franchise in the Chiefs. When pro football fades away in 50 to 100 years, I would like to see the Chiefs go out as the Kansas City Chiefs, not the Memphis Chiefs or the Louisville Chiefs.

:: Multimillionaire St. Louis resident Rex Sinquefield is trying to buy the governor’s office in 2016 and — just to make sure he’s got his bases covered — the lieutenant governor’s office as well. Sinquefield’s golden-years’ goal is to eliminate Missouri’s income tax and replace it largely with higher sales taxes. In trying to eliminate the income tax, he is linking arms with Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, whose income-tax cuts are running our left-border state into the ground.

Sinquefield

A story in Sunday’s Post-Dispatch said that in December Sinquefield contributed $1 million to Republican Bev Randles, a Kansas City lawyer who is exploring a 2016 campaign for lieutenant governor. The story said, “It is apparently the single biggest donation to any candidate by an individual donor in Missouri history.”

Also last year, Sinquefield gave $900,000 to 2016 GOP gubernatorial candidate Catherine Hanaway. Another $100,000 came from a Sinquefield-backed group. Some of the money came in $10,000-a-week donations in November and December.

Nice allowance, eh?

So, fellow Missourians, whatever you do, DO NOT vote for Catherine Hanaway or Bev Randles next year.

I would vote for convicted felons for governor and lieutenant governor before I would vote for candidates bought and paid for by a man who wants to shift the burden of financing state government to middle- and lower-income people.