Wednesday, August 14, 2019

WIKI TIKI WEDNESDAY - GOVERNOR JOHN P. ST. JOHN



Bret Maverick:
Why, the Clem Diefendorfer I’m looking for is an historian. 
Clem Diefendorfer
:
Well that’s me!
Bret:
Who is the governor of Kansas?
Clem:
John P. St. John. 
Bret:
How much is his salary?
Clem:
$3000 a year.'MAVERICK'
(From the classic parody episode "Gun Shy".)


From Wikipedia:
John Pierce St. John (February 25, 1833 – August 31, 1916) was the eighth Governor of Kansas and a candidate for President of the United States in 1884.

St. John was born in Brookville, Indiana. He served as lieutenant colonel of the 143rd Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment in the Union Army during the American Civil War. From 1873 he sat in the Kansas Senate, and was the Republican Governor of Kansas from 1879 to 1883. Active in the temperance movement, he successfully promoted a prohibition amendment to that state's constitution. St. John also helped create the Kansas Freedmen's Relief Association during the Great Exodus of African-Americans to Kansas in 1879.


He was the Prohibition Party candidate for President of the United States in the 1884 election. On October 2, 1884 he was nearly shot, with the bullet hitting the window next to him. He received 147,482 votes (about 1.5%) on a ticket with William Daniel. The election was won by Grover Cleveland of the Democratic Party. St. John was also surpassed by two other unsuccessful candidates:

James Gillespie Blaine of the Republican Party.
Benjamin Franklin Butler of the United States Greenback Party.

St. John died after suffering heat exhaustion on August 31, 1916 in Olathe, Kansas.

The city of St. John, Kansas, is named after him.


Once upon a time, the IMDb offered a search function for characters and the actors who played them.  It was an invaluable resource for a televisiologist such as Yours Viewly, allowing me to find out if certain historical figures had been dramatized and it provided a list of all the actors who had played those roles.   But in their infinite wisdom, they dropped that feature.  (I think they had run out of server space and didn’t want to purchase more.)

So I don’t know if John St. John was ever seen in Earth Prime-Time as far as in the form of an actor whom we might have known.  But we do know he did exist in the main Toobworld, thanks to this Q&A between Bret Maverick and Clem Diefendorfer.  We even found out his middle name and his annual salary.

That’s more than can be said for a lot of the televersions for the real-life governors depicted in TV shows over the years.

Happy Trails!

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