Use money for heroic statue

To the editor:

I have a suggestion for the $1 million that has accumulated through the convention and visitors bureau fund. The city needs something distinctive like the arch in St. Louis. I suggest an equestrian statue of heroic proportions, fixed on the berm of the large valley just east of the Show Me Center entrance. Don Louis Lorimier would sit astride, perched to watch over his city for the next two centuries.

Art serves no utilitarian purpose, so no one could accuse us of wasting money. "Beauty is its own excuse for being," we could affirm. Louis Houck recalled that he met old-timers who remembered the French patriarch, Lorimier, riding barefoot through the unpaved streets of our city. Just as Houck recalled Lorimier, I can reach back and touch Mark Scully, Rush Limbaugh and Ray Trotter. St. Paul instructs me to remember the cloud of witnesses who surround us.

PETER HILTY, Cape Girardeau