The Hughes Commission Asks: Who died and left you boss?

The pinnacle of statecraft (Not really)

May 23, 2015

William Charles Hughes

216 Nagel Avenue

St. Louis, MO  63111

Neva G. Thurston

340 Sterling Price Road

Jefferson City, MO  65109

Dear Ms. Thurston:

It’s been a long time since a consulting outfit called “The Columbus Group” was supposed to fix all that ails Missouri’s habilitation centers. Farther back? I was the one on a high school freshman bus who told peers calling Bellefontaine “The Funny Farm” to shut the f--- up. I later ended-up president of my high school, ran the college student government like I knew Dick Nixon personally, and as for people in California who think it’s just as easy to become president of the U.S., perhaps they need drug “rehab,” psychotropic medication, or both.

Meet Bill Hughes, who is not afraid to say the Californians are correct, but I’d rather be appointed DMH director, given that will entail enough headaches the way I view dwindling state dollars. I recall rushing headlong into telling NAMI KC I’d close the hospital on Arsenal Street that is fraught with some very bad practices and migrate the MRDD population to a neighborhood where they’d be more welcome than an Arsenal Street cottage crowd that may elope, they may not.

Ward H patient S--, upon promotion to a cottage when my team meeting vote was an LCSW abstention, promptly eloped and teamed-up with crack dealers. Not to worry, as he was a “good” psych patient who missed his social worker Bill, so he spent the last of his cash at an Iowa diner. When the Sheriff came in for breakfast and said, “What are you doing here?” a phone rang at 5300 Arsenal, and to this day I wonder why I was not the one to drive up there and retrieve him. (Maybe it is because I was not as excited as the boss about his clinical promotion).

Again, my 7^th grade nun was correct as she wagged her finger at me and said, “You are like a reed in the wind. You go left and right as the others do.” Therefore, in the next SLPRC team meeting I said, “He won’t run from me at the Dollar General.” Today, I sadly have no means to get to the Dollar General, unless I’m driving a state Impala once more.

Two wrecked cars, two missing phones, two missing external drives, a handful of missing CD-ROM’s, five missing computers, one cross-county bus ride, two cross-country train rides later, I’m back to stay, unless a Swiss or Iranian woman finances more travel. The quip ready in my hoped-for interview? “Must be my last name.” That’s why the Teledyne man said, “Just leave your computer on all of the time,” the Boeing guy called me “Howard,” Northrop said, “You need a little more work,” and as for, “Don’t go selling F-22’s to Japan,” I think Lockheed was a bit out of line, given he was addressing me next to my homeless shopping cart.

My stack of floppy discs made it back intact, if hacked, and I do not plan on looking at the resume of a woman who left hers in the public computer’s bay after saying, “William, the Secret Service is in trouble again” because she might be one of them. During my interview, we can wonder together why John Kennedy took a “selfie” of himself with a stack of floppies in a Men’s Room. Is the photo of me doing the same thing stolen yet? Not yet.

William Charles Hughes