By Fredric R. Wheeler D.O.
Special to The Globe
JOPLIN, Mo. —
I don’t usually endorse candidates for public office for three reasons. I usually don’t know them well enough, I know them and therefore can’t endorse them or I don’t think anyone cares what I think about them.
That being said, Bill White’s wife asked me if I would feel comfortable writing a letter to the editor in support of his candidacy, and I was pleased and honored to do that.
I have known Bill since soon after he and Ellen came to town. I often saw his children in the office and he was a father who could actually bring the children in as opposed to a “Father/Unreliable Historian” that many good men still are. I knew him a little from his practice of law, and he was on the side of representing the “little guy” — not the rich corporations, or even the rich doctors, and not trying to take money away from the rich corporations or rich doctors to make himself rich, but to make sure that the law was applied as God intended.
I more recently got to know Bill as the educator when I, as the chairman of the Joplin Area Catholic School System, presented him with a plaque for his six years of teaching social studies classes at McAuley Catholic High School.
“Mr White,” as the students call him, has taught several classes over the years, but has not been willing to take any pay. We had to work real hard to get him to take the plaque. The classes he has taught over the past six years include, but are not limited to, current events, economics and advanced placement government. These are the subjects that our representatives need to have given deep thought to before they decided to run for office.
I don’t know that his opponent has not done this but I do know he has, and I do know that he is a good man.
I feel he can be the compassionate conservative I was looking for after the 2000 election.
Fredric R. Wheeler D.O.
Joplin
