Leland J. Kennedy Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

state central committeeman. Now state central committeeman included Madison and St.
Clair Counties. And there's no date on that, but that was the particular elcction that I mentioned
in Vandalia, that's where they held those conventions and . . .
Q: So you went pretty regularly to those then?
A: Oh yes. I went regularly, that's right, regularly as regularly.
Q: Yes.
A: Now the judicial district is just Madison and Bond I think, but it may have been a little
larger then. Well you'd meet a lot of people from surrounding areas that were mayhe from
smaller rural townships, met a lot of people from agriculture though.
And that's one thing about the assembly. A fast friend I have up there, and he's been here
and I've been there and our wives are socially acquainted, is Clarence Neff. He was born
about six months before I was born in 1909. And he's a self-made millionaire and he's up
at Stronghurst and I talked to him - oh I talked to him a couple of times now before the
election. I've talked to him a couple - I just know him. We used to eat together and we
stayed over at the State House Inn together and had breakfast together and never voted
together, always quarreled on the Banking Committee, but we'd laugh about it. And I was
on the County Problems Commission with him, and that's how come I got to know him.
He was always wanting me to come up to Ilenderson County. We met up there one time
in that area, maybe up in Peoria, and I went up home with him. And he took me around
and showed me his - rural communities have - well thcy didn't have many
factories. Madison County and Alton and Granite City are industrial areas. And then they
had a lot more jobs than they've got now. You could see the difference in their
problems. Galesburg was near him. Of course Galesburg was a fairly large city, and it had
- oh, problems maybe not adjacent to thc area that I represented but they ended up about
the same.
And you always found that the highways were a major problem. And I see that someone's
giving Thompson hell for not building highways. And I noticc that Reagan wants to add
a nickel to our gasoline tax and 1 imagine that somewhere along the line, whether
Thompson's governor or Stevenson, you're going to have to have - they're going to have
an increase in the gasoline tax in Missouri. You don't build highways for nothing. I mean
it takes money to build them. And that's one thing you learn.
Just like I see that our property tax out up here is - the county share - they're having
a public hearing and I'm not going to go to it, it's in Edwardsville - but they're going to
raise the county tax for 10 percent, and our taxes are getting up pretty high. And the
schools need money. Teachers want more money. If everybody would keep their damned
mouths shut for maybe five years, we could get something down to where you could get a
loaf of bread instead of paying a dollar for it. But . . .
Q: Well now you've mentioned Clarence Neff. When you reported in up therc, one of the
first things they did was seat you. Where were you seated in the . . .
A: Well when I went there the first time well at that time, why, therc was only sixty odd
Democrats. I mentioned yesterday that there was fifty-one districts. There was 153
members. And I believe the count then was cighty to seventy-three, or it might have been
eighty-two to seventy-one. So Hugh Green had a majority of about eight to ten. Or maybe
it was greater than that. It might have been greater than that. Well, of course they seat
them on seniority.
Q: Yes.