Submitted by Buddy Hughes.

 

 

Here is the recap of our trip to Jefferson City as a guest of Senator Jay Wasson.

 

We took 10 players, along with myself and David Krol.  We arrived around 9:45am and began finding our way through the beautiful, expansiveness of our State Capitol.  We found Senator Wasson's office and were greeted by his staff, Barbara Mustoe, Mike Cunningham and Senator Wasson.  They were tremendous hosts and treated us all wonderfully.  At around 10:15am, we were led down to the Senate floor and ushered in for the Senate Session to begin.  After a short prayer and Pledge of Allegiance, each senator that had guests were allowed to introduce them.  Senator Wasson did a wonderful job of introducing us as the reigning High School State Bowling Champions, even explaining how this was achieved in our first season.

 

After the introduction, he presented us with a resolution.  This resolution recapped our season with information from the state tournament, then concluded with this statement.  Now, Therefore, Be It Resolved, that we the members of the Missouri Senate, Ninety-sixth General Assembly, join to applaud the creation of a competitive bowling team at Nixa High School and to convey to all of those involved this legislative's body most heartfelt congratulations upon earning state champion status in 2011.

 

We then went to the House of Representatives and witnessed a bill being introduced and the voting procedure used during this process, which was very interesting.  After that bill was finalized, Rep. Kevin Elmer introduced us as well and presented a resolution from the House.  This resolution read similarly to the Senate one, but with changes necessary to establish that it was from the House of Representatives.

 

After receiving these resolutions, we were then accompanied on a tour of the Capitol.  The Capitol building is very spacious, beautiful and full of marble, most of which was mined near Carthage.  One of the highlights of the tour was the journey to the top of the Dome and Whispering Gallery.

 

Whispering Gallery is about half way to the top of the dome and is the top of the inside of the Capitol.  You can look straight down from the walkway directly through the center of building through each floor.  The inside of the dome is painted with remarkable murals and designs.  

 

To reach the Dome, you continue up more stairs from Whispering Gallery and are actually now above the inside of the dome.  When you reach the very top, you can walk out onto a walkway and see for miles around Jefferson City.  To reach the Dome area, there were almost 300 steps, with the climb to Whispering Gallery being about 200 steps.

 

After working our way back down, we began touring the different floors.  One floor has numerous paintings to highlight different eras and events in Missouri history and bronze busts of significant shapers of Missouri history.  Some of the busts I remember were Stan Musial, Jack Buck, Mark Twain and Laura Ingalls Wilder.  There were 52 busts with significant information about each person.

 

The last stop of the tour was the House Lounge.  This is an area where lawmakers come during sessions to read and relax.  This expansive room contained a 3 wall mural that was created in 1936.  Very bright, vibrant colors containing scenes and pictures depicting significant events of Missouri history.  The creator of this mural came under sharp criticism upon its completion, because not only did it show the good things, but also touched on some issues not very popular to lawmakers in 1936.  Some of the negative items were Missouri slavery, handling of Mormons and crooked politicians.  There were also very positive scenes like Missouri family life, importance of farming and featured a couple forklore areas - Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn and James Brothers Gang.  Very beautiful room and our tour guide was really knowledgable with everything she showed us, particularly surrounding the mural.

 

After a nice lunch in the Senator's office, we toured the Capitol a little more by ourselves, then headed to the Missouri Supreme Court building.  Here we visited a courtroom, learned about responsibilities of everyone involved there and what cases might come to the Supreme Court.  We also visited their conference rooms and library.  This was a very short tour, but interesting on how our Supreme Court works.  This was our final stop and we headed home from there.