RIVER CITY JOURNAL: MEL CAME FROM GOOD STOCK, JUST LIKE OVER IN KELO VALLEY

There is a sadness that follows the death of a family member or friend who has lived a long and full life. But there is another emotion, more like outrage, that comes over those of us left to mourn the unexpected death of someone whose life is in no way finished.

This outrage hit me at 10:55 p.m. Monday when Heidi Hall called me at home and told me Gov. Mel Carnahan was probably dead following an airplane crash in Jefferson County.

Such calamities don't affect your gut when they happen to people you don't know or who live much farther away from where you are sitting when the news arrives. But this news twisted my stomach.

I can't say I knew Mel Carnahan very well, but I've had a loose link to the Carnahan family for nearly half a century. In a way, Carnahan was like one of those second cousins who shows up at some of the same funerals you do but who isn't expected to be at your house for Thanksgiving.

When I was first starting school -- that would be Shady Nook School over on Greenwood Valley, just over the hill from Kelo Valley -- there were a couple of major events all the students could count on.

One was the annual visit of the county superintendent.

When the county superintendent came, girls brushed their hair and washed their faces. Boys took some of the water from the pump up the hill and tried to slick down the tangles.

The teacher would line up some of the best spellers for an abbreviated spelling bee. The better math students would do multiplication and long division at the blackboard. Some of the eighth-graders might even recite a few lines of Longfellow's "Hiawatha."

Another big event in the school year was deer season. School would shut down for fear of having some careless hunter shoot a youngster walking through the woods to get to school. A good-sized bullet hole on one side of the frame school building was a source of wonder for first-graders.

But I remember the time our United States congressman came to Shady Nook. He brought a United States of America flag that had flown over the United States of America Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Some of us had studied about Congress and Washington and the Constitution, but few of us had ever seen a United States congressman up close. So when A.S.J. Carnahan came to Shady Nook School and made the flag presentation, he might as well have been the king of England. Or Gene Autry.

Congressman Carnahan, of course, was the father of Mel Carnahan. The Carnahans had a connection to Shady Nook School. The school district either touched or slightly extended into a portion of eastern Carter County. And the Carnahans had deep roots in Ellsinore just a few hills over. The elder Carnahan himself had taught school and had even been a county superintendent in Carter County. He might have been a Washington bigwig, but he knew one-room schools inside out.

Like that second cousin I was talking about, Mel Carnahan and I didn't have any contact until the 1980s when I was visiting Jefferson City. A state representative from Northwest Missouri, an old friend, treated me to lunch in the Capitol cafeteria. The food wasn't that hot, but the elbows you touched made up for it.

We sat at one end of a table for eight. At the other end was Mel Carnahan and a man who turned out to be a banker from St. Louis. Later, my representative friend clued me in: "Mel's taking up an offering," he said. For what? I asked. "So he can be governor." In 1992, Carnahan used the money to win the election for governor.

Like other governors before him, Carnahan continued the tradition of inviting newspaper folks to lunch at the Governor's Mansion. Unlike his predecessors, Carnahan was always at ease around reporters and editors whose jobs depended on asking tough questions and putting the governor on the spot. I never once saw Mel Carnahan flinch from any question, not even the stupid ones. If you asked him a question, you could count on a straight answer without a lot of frills.

Folks with roots in Carter County and those parts don't go in for frills much.

And Carnahan did something else at those lunches: He ate with his wife, Jean. This made it seem more like lunch with the Carnahans than lunch with the governor. It was a touch that most every journalist commented on.

I won't get to go to lunch with the Carnahans again. That makes me sad.

But, as they say in the hills around Shady Nook School, I'm still as mad as a wet hen about that plane crash. I probably will be for a long time.