P. Wayne Goode

An Interview with P. Wayne Goode at his legislative office in Jefferson City, Missouri 06 November 2000 interviewed by N. Renae Farris Oral History Program The State Historical Society of Missouri © 2000 Collection C3929 Politics in Missouri a.c. 281, 282 NOTICE 1) This material is protected by copyright law (Title 17, U.S. Code). It may not be cited without acknowledgment to The Oral History Program of the State Historical Society of Missouri and the Western Historical Manuscript Collection, a Joint Collection of the University of Missouri and the State Historical Society of Missouri. Citations should include: [name of interviewee], [name of the interviewer], [date and place of interview], [audio recording or transcript], and [where it can be found, for example, The Oral History Program of the State Historical Society of Missouri, Politics in Missouri Oral History Project]. 2) Reproductions of this transcript are available for reference use only and cannot be reproduced or published in any form (including digital formats) without written permission from the Western Historical Manuscript Collection. 3) Use of information or quotations from any Politics in Missouri Oral History Project transcript indicates agreement to indemnify and hold harmless the University of Missouri, the State Historical Society of Missouri, their officers, employees, and agents, and the interviewee from and against all claims and actions arising out of the use of this material. For further information, contact: Western Historical Manuscript Collection 23 Ellis Library University of Missouri Columbia, MO 65201-5149 PREFACE Wayne Goode was born August 20, 1937 in St. Louis, the son of Peter Wayne Goode, Sr., and Helen McManus Goode. Educated at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Goode earned a Bachelor of Science degree in banking and finance. Upon graduation, he entered his family‟s truck transportation business. As a Democrat, he was first elected to the Missouri House of Representatives in 1962 and served there for eleven consecutive terms. Mr. Goode became a Missouri State Senator in 1984, and was re-elected in 1988, 1992, 1996, and 2000. At the time of the interview he was chair of the Senate Appropriations committee. For his most recent biographic entry, see the Official Manual of the State of Missouri, 1999-2000. The recording session took place in his Capitol Building office. Although the legislature was not then in assembly, Goode had traveled to Jefferson City to see his first grandchild who had been born the day before the interview. As our conversation progressed, it became apparent that he had spent some time reflecting upon the history of the legislature as it had occurred during his tenure. Topics discussed included his varied legislative efforts, such as environmental preservation, school finance, and utility regulation. The interview was recorded on 3M AVX60 audio cassettes (normal bias), using a Sony TC-D5 ProII manual recorder and a Shure VP64 omnidirectional microphone attached to a floor stand. There are only minor background sounds, and the recording is of generally high quality. The following transcript represents a rendering of the oral history interview. Stylistic alterations have been made as part of a general transcription policy. The interviewee offered clarifications and suggestions, which the following transcript reflects. Any use of brackets [ ] indicates editorial insertions not found on the original audio recordings. Physical gestures, certain vocal inflections such as imitation, and/or pauses are designated by a combination of italics and brackets [ ]. Any use of parentheses ( ) indicates a spoken aside evident from the speaker's intonation, or laughter. Quotation marks [“”] identify speech depicting dialogue, speech patterns, or the initial use of nicknames. Double dashes [--] and ellipses […] are also used as a stylistic method in an attempt to capture nuances of dialogue or speech patterns. Words are italicized when emphasized in speech. Particularly animated speech is identified with bold lettering. Underlining [ __ ]indicates a proper title of a publication. Although substantial care has been taken to render this transcript as accurately as possible, any remaining errors are the responsibility of the editor, N. Renae Farris. [tape meter, 001. Begin side one, tape one of two. Begin interview.] RF: I‟m Renae Farris, and I‟m here in Jefferson City at Senator Wayne Goode‟s office on Monday November 6, 2000. Senator Goode was first in the House of Representatives beginning in 1963, am I correct? WG: Right. RF: And you served there until around 1985, you ran for Senate in 1984. WG: Right. RF: And have served as Senator since that point. Well, if you could just give me a little background on yourself? When, where you were born. Your family, things like that. WG: I was born in St. Louis [in] 1937. My parents were both born in St. Louis, so the family had been there for some period of time. I moved out to St. Louis County in [the] early forties and went through the Normandy school system. And then [I went] to the University of Missouri at Columbia, then graduated from there in 1960. [I] got a ROTC commission [and] was briefly in the Army for six months. Then [when I] got out [I] ran for the legislature. [I] didn‟t expect to spend most all my life here, but that‟s kind of the way it‟s turned out. RF: Who were your parents? WG: My father was Peter W. Goode, Senior and my mother was Helen McManus Goode. Her mother‟s name was Egan, so that was the Irish side of the family. Actually my grandfather Goode came from Ireland also. They all settled in St. Louis. RF: What sort of things did they do for a living? What did your father do for a living? WG: Well, my father started a trucking business in the early thirties. It was a company by the WG = Wayne Goode; RF = Renae Farris 1 name of Be-Mac Transport. The name came from some of the early partners. The “Be” came from a man by the name of Bemer that I never knew, and the “Mac” was my mother‟s brother, Bill McManus. Over a fairly short period of time, my father and his brother, George Goode, bought out the other partners and started building the business. Back in the thirties, when this was an altogether new form of transportation… As you can imagine, the highways were quite poor. My dad drove a truck, as well as tried to get the business, and managed the business, and everything else and built it into a fairly substantial small [to] medium-sized mid-western truck line. And [he] actually took the company public with a public stock offering in the early sixties. We had about five hundred stockholders. [The] family still owned most of the stock. Then in ‟72 we sold it to a holding company, U.S. Truck Lines, who owned about half a dozen other truck lines of that size. My dad had great foresight. He was very much worried about the deregulation of the trucking industry. I worked for the company at that time as well as in the legislature, and I was more or less ambivalent about it (whether we sold it or not). But he was absolutely right, because almost all these small truck lines went out of business within three or four years after deregulation in the later seventies. So it was definitely the right thing to do. RF: Was your father involved in politics? Or even your mother, for that matter? WG: No, neither directly. They both grew up in rather poor families. Neither one graduated from high school because they had to go to work. My mother‟s father died when she was very young. Actually, [he died] during World War I, but not as a soldier. But it [grandfather Egan‟s death] was [a result of] one of the epidemics that went through the 2 WG = Wayne Goode; RF = Renae Farris St. Louis area. So they were both very poor and had to earn a living. But as they progressed through life, they were active in the community and active voters and active citizens. There was always good discussion of what was going on in the world and in the neighborhood and all those sort of things, so in that sense they were involved. RF: What prompted you to become involved? WG: Well, I graduated (as I said) from the University of Missouri in 1960, and that‟s when John Kennedy was running for President. He got a lot of young people excited about politics. [tape meter, 050] I thought, “Well, if he could be President at age forty-two (or whatever it was), I could probably get involved in politics in my early twenties.” I looked around and they were re-districting the legislature, of course, after the census in 1960. I thought maybe that was the opportunity that I was looking for. So I decided to run for the House of Representatives. RF: Back at that point, that was still the county representative, right? [Correcting herself] Well, the St. Louis area would have been [divided into] districts [even during the era of county representation.] WG: Yeah, that was pre-“one man, one vote”, and that is a very interesting period of time. I really hadn‟t thought much about what I wanted to talk about today, but I woke up about six o‟clock this morning -- I was here in Jefferson City because as it turned out my son and his wife delivered our first grandchild yesterday (November 5th), so we drove up to Jefferson City yesterday morning and then spent the night here at their home -- I woke up WG = Wayne Goode; RF = Renae Farris 3 and gave some thought to this for the first time, and what occurred to me is when I came to the Legislature right after the 1962 elections it was an altogether different place than it is today.

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