Charles (Chuck) Kensinger

How old are you?

July 20, 2026

Do you ask people this question? I try to be very careful with this inquiry. Especially with older women. After more than seven decades of life, I have several ways to respond.

You are as old as you feel. If I used that today, I would have to set the chronology in the range of the eighties. After bypass surgery, it requires many weeks to recover. Pain, inability to do simple tasks, and having to be careful not to rip out stiches, it ages one.

You are as old as you act. Want to feel younger? Join some younger folks in their activities. Simply be sure not to participate in anything too strenuous for you. Working as a sponsor for youth activities keeps me young.

You are as old as you want to be. When we were kids, we wanted to be older. Fourteen-year-olds want to be sixteen. Seventeen-year-olds wish they were eighteen. Shortly after you turn twenty-one, it all reverses. Every ten years we want to erase that decade.

Pick the age you liked the best and proceed to consider that is where you will be the rest of your life. Don’t complain when the birthday gifts stop. You asked for it. A friend of mine began celebrating the anniversary of her thirty-ninth birthday. Which one do you want to substitute?

You are as old as you think you are. Refer to the last paragraph. You may want to rethink this one. It is best to embrace where you are. I have outlived my oldest brother and Father. I have some more years to go before I surpass Mom. I hope I will be like her and live every minute to its fullest, but not fear the next chapter of my life.

Is there something that you wanted to do and have not accomplished yet? As I was approaching my sixtieth birthday, I began publishing these columns. I noticed how many were about my family, experiences, and life as a workplace minister. In college, I began studying Greek and Hebrew.

I learned that Doulos meant servant and was sometimes translated as slave. One of the significant scriptures where it appears is Romans 1:1. Paul describes himself as a slave to Christ. As I examined what I had been writing and publishing, I decided to write a memoir and named it “Doulos.”

That was over ten years ago, and I have yet to publish another book. This year, I have set a goal of publishing at least two more books. They are “The Inedible Credible Egg” and “Cosmic Flatulence.” Keep reading and see where we go with these books. I believe you will like what you read.

Amendments for August

July 13, 2026

We have four amendments on our Missouri State August primary ballot this year. I am going to explain what the ballot wording means and why there is a controversy on these issues. I recommend that you read the actual amendments and not just what appears on our ballots.

Amendment One is one that we have been voting on every ten years for decades. It approves the renewal of a one-tenth of one percent sales tax for Conservation. This continuing tax has accomplished much for our state.

The next issue is Constitutionally required to allow Jackson County to elect a county assessor. The county has already voted to do this, but the state constitution requires a statewide vote to allow them to do this. This is Amendment 2.

Our General Assembly is asking us to approve Amendment four which will limit our current ability to add issues to the ballot that legislators do not want us to be able to vote on. Advertisements tell us that this will prevent out-of-state groups from influencing our state laws. The problem is that these ads are paid for by Political Action Committees that are registered in other states.

Another provision that concerns many of us is that it requires every congressional district to approve the voter endorsed issues. That means that voters in any one district can defeat every other district’s votes. This is not one person, one vote. It would allow one vote to override hundreds of others.

The only good thing in this bill is the requirement to give voters a copy of the exact wording of every issue that we force them to allow us to vote on. If the legislators put it on the ballot, they control what we can know about what we are voting for. It sounds like they want more control of us.

We are also being asked to allow changes to laws that have been in effect for years. One that we approved is called the Hancock Amendment. When we, the people, voted it in it required our state legislators to ask our permission to raise our taxes above a certain level without our permission.

Amendment five will allow them to ignore this law and do anything they want as they did before we restricted their powers. They tell us they will “phase” out the state income tax and ask us to give them Carte Blanche to add as many sales and use taxes as the legislators want.

This amendment will also allow them to force local property tax cuts without the permission of residents. I usually ask for an issues only ballot in the primary elections. I plan on taking the Republican ballot because my representative and senator that approved these issues are Republicans. They are not representing me, and I want them to be fired.

Once again, the organizations promoting a yes vote are from other states. I think we need a state law that does not allow out-of-staters from lying to us about issues that will make them money at our expense. When the hail hit this spring my wife and I did not allow any of those contractors that are not based here to even quote on our repairs. Why would we want to listen to foreigners when our President is doing such a good job of throwing them out of our country.

Jim Bridger Part Two

July 11, 2026

I’d like to finish the story of one of our least remembered and talked-about Americans that I started yesterday. Check these facts online if you do not believe me.

By the late 1860s, he was nearly blind. His body, destroyed by fifty years of frontier punishment, finally forced him to stop. He retired to a small Missouri farm to live with his daughter, his mountain man era finished.

On July 17, 1881, Jim Bridger died at age 77.

America barely noticed.

The newspapers that had once mocked his “lies” didn’t bother with obituaries. The mountain men who’d first mapped the West had been replaced by railroad tycoons and cattle barons. The wilderness Bridger knew was being conquered, divided, and forgotten.

The man who’d seen the Great Salt Lake when most Americans couldn’t locate Utah on a map died in poverty and obscurity.

But here’s what makes his story extraordinary:

He wasn’t merely an explorer. He was a witness to wonders no one was ready to acknowledge.

His “lies” about Yellowstone became a treasured national park. His fort saved countless pioneer families. His guidance determined railroad routes still carrying freight today. His mental maps, drawn from pure memory, proved astonishingly accurate when modern surveyors checked them decades later.

He transformed from an orphaned, uneducated teenager with zero prospects into one of the most valuable sources of geographical knowledge in 19th-century America.

Today, his name marks the landscape he explored: Fort Bridger State Historic Site, Bridger-Teton National Forest, Bridger Peak, Bridger Pass, Bridger Wilderness Area. His story fills countless Western history books.

But perhaps the most powerful tribute is this:

When modern geologists finally studied Yellowstone’s geothermal features, when surveyors mapped the Great Salt Lake’s chemistry, when historians retraced the Oregon Trail—they discovered that the “absurd fabrications” of an old mountain man were remarkably, almost impossibly precise.

Jim Bridger saw what no one else could see. He told truths no one was prepared to hear. And he died before the world caught up to everything he’d known all along.

The newspaper advertisement he answered at 18 promised adventure and danger. It delivered fifty years of discovery that helped build a nation—even if that nation forgot to thank him before he went blind and died.

Not bad for a broke, blind orphan who once mistook a desert lake for the ocean.

Jim Bridger Part One

July 10, 2026

He told them he’d found water that boiled without fire and forests made of stone. They called him a liar. Every word was true.

St. Louis, 1822. An 18-year-old orphan named Jim Bridger worked in a blacksmith shop for pennies. No education. No family. No future anyone could see.

Then he saw a newspaper advertisement that would rewrite his entire existence: “Enterprising Young Men” wanted for a fur trapping expedition into the Rocky Mountains. Pay. Uncertain return. Possible death.

Jim Bridger had nothing to lose and everything to prove. He signed his name and walked away from the only life he’d known.

What followed was nearly six decades of exploration that would make him the most knowledgeable man in America about a landscape most Americans couldn’t even imagine.

Around 1824, young Bridger and fellow trappers followed Utah’s Bear River to discover where it ended. When Bridger reached an enormous body of water stretching beyond sight, he knelt at the shore and tasted it.

Salt. Intense, bitter salt.

He’d reached the Pacific Ocean—or so he believed. He was magnificently wrong. He’d discovered the Great Salt Lake, one of the western hemisphere’s largest saltwater lakes, sitting impossibly in the middle of the desert. He was the first non-Native person to document it.

But that discovery was merely his opening act.

In the late 1820s, Bridger ventured into the Yellowstone region. What he witnessed there defied reality itself.

Water exploding from the earth in columns hundreds of feet high. Pools of boiling liquid in every color imaginable. Mud that bubbled like cooking stew. Entire forests of trees turned completely into stone. Ground trembled. Air that smelled of sulfur.

When Bridger returned to civilization and described what he’d seen, the response was universal: laughter.

They called him “Old Gabe the Liar.” Journalists mocked his “tall tales.” Even fellow mountain men questioned whether he’d lost his mind.

He hadn’t invented a single detail. He’d simply witnessed Yellowstone four decades before it would become America’s first national park—before the nation was ready to accept that such a place could exist on Earth.

Every impossible thing he described was real. The world just wasn’t ready to believe him.

For twenty years, Bridger lived as a mountain man, surviving conditions that killed most men within weeks. He learned six Native languages fluently. He married into the Flathead tribe, later marrying twice more after tragedy. He became legendary for reading weather, tracking game, and navigating terrain with supernatural precision.

When the beaver fur market collapsed in the 1840s, Bridger adapted instantly. Thousands of emigrants were beginning the desperate journey west. They needed help.

In 1843, he and his partner, Louis Vasquez, constructed Fort Bridger in southwestern Wyoming. For a decade, that fort served as a critical rest stop where pioneer families could repair wagons, buy supplies, and gather strength before the final brutal push to Oregon or California.

Thousands of lives were saved at Fort Bridger.

As westward expansion accelerated, Bridger became irreplaceable. Military expeditions needed guides who knew every mountain pass. Railroad surveyors needed someone who’d walked every mile of potential routes. Scientific expeditions needed the man who’d accumulated thirty years of geographical knowledge that existed nowhere else.

He guided expeditions well into his sixties, even as his eyesight deteriorated—the price of decades under relentless sun and blinding snow reflecting off endless white peaks.

The rest of the story tomorrow.

The last 70 years

July 4, 2026

A lot has happened in this nation since I was born. I’d like to share some of those from my point of view and memories. In 1960, Alan Shepherd was the first American in space. He was followed by five others of the original seven astronauts.

Three years later, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, and we still do not know what really happened. I was watching President Johnson be sworn in on Air Force One and did not know who he was. I looked at my brothers and told them that he was the man who killed the President. I still am not sure that I was wrong.

Before 1970, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins flew Apollo 11 to the moon, where Armstrong and Aldrin walked while Collins circled the satellite. Seven more times, Americans traveled to that world, landed, and returned to our planet. Many of you are surprised that we have not returned to that place. I knew we eventually would.

The conflict in Vietnam seemed that it would never end. President Nixon stopped our involvement in the fighting there in 1974. We accepted refugees from South Vietnam as their government collapsed, and those who had worked with us would be in danger once our military was gone.

In the late 1990s, we were told that computer chips in many electronic devices would fail when the calendars in them hit the year 2000. Manufacturers began the process of replacing all the antiquated equipment with ones that could roll over into the new century. The expected problems of January first were not realized.

Most of us have heard of the events of September 11, 2001, when we were attacked by people who despised our country and our freedoms. Our President George W. Bush eventually sent our troops into Afghanistan to deal with the terrorist group that used commercial aircraft as missiles of destruction, killing thousands. Those who planned the attacks were found and their lives ended.

COVID-19, a virus that was identified by a laboratory in China, took the lives of thousands across our world. Every developed nation attempted to find a treatment and a vaccine for this disease. Economies were impacted, and our government tried ineffectively to throw money at the problem.

Our Congress and Presidents were closing businesses, schools, travel, and asking all of us to quarantine if we might be ill and avoid leaving home unless necessary. We are still dealing with all the financial, political, and emotional difficulties that resulted from bad decisions across the world.

The United States has been a leader, even when others did not think they needed or wanted us to be. We have gained and maintained our integrity and greatness despite the foolishness of politics. It is up to us, the people, to vote intelligently and force our officials to listen to us. Keep working, voting, and being the decent human beings we all know we can be. Happy 250th anniversary, USA.

Get involved

July 1, 2026

Have you seen the series of insurance commercials that make it seem they don’t believe young homeowners should emulate their parents? When Cindy and I purchased our first home, we did it the way Mom and Dad had. We signed a contract for deed because we did not have a down payment.

The commercials I am speaking of criticize these young adults for getting involved. My wife and I encouraged our children to get involved in school, church, and with their friends. I do not get why having our children do things the way we do them is bad.

Maybe you did not think your parents were cool when you were growing up. Let me tell you about our girls. I was a teacher at church most of their lives. Now I am the proud father of three women who are teachers. One has been an elementary school teacher for over ten years. Her oldest sister began teaching high school a few years ago. The youngest is a stay-at-home mom who homeschools her kids.

There is the man who wants to help the server at a coffee joint find who a drink is for. I would not do this, but I would watch the entrance and the hall leading to the restrooms. When someone isn’t there to pick up their order, that is usually where they are. If I am alone, I go to the facility before ordering.

When I walk into a room, I look for someone who is not involved in conversations or other activities. Especially if I am also a stranger. It is difficult for many to strike up discussions with those they do not know. My years in sales, making cold calls, taught me to speak to anyone about everything.

I have thousands of stories about people I have met and the stories they have told me and how I began talking to them. I have shared many of these in these columns. One that I want to repeat here is about my oldest daughter when she and her husband had a company with a friend.

Cindy and I were talking to her about a trip they were all three taking to a convention. I knew the guys went to those to meet prospective customers, and I asked why she was going. They had a female buyer that had been difficult to reach, and they asked her to start a conversation weeks before this gathering. They were planning on closing the deal while there, and she had been asked by the lady if she was going. That is why she was.

She told me that it was my influence that made her learn to make contacts easily. When my girls were growing up, I always responded to their comments about other kids that seemed to have difficulties getting to know others. Our conversations with our girls encouraged them to make new friends by drawing them into the groups they are in.

I wish to encourage you to become involved with people. You may not be the one in your groups that can draw new folks in. If you aren’t, do not be the one that discourages friends from including those that need to belong somewhere.

Cliff Claven made it to visit the bar, Cheers, almost every day, where everybody knew his name. I walked into a PA’s office one day and met the new man. His office was covered in St. Louis Blues memorabilia. I left making a new client and knowing more about hockey than ever before. Try it, you’ll like it.

Eating your own

June 30, 2026

Have you seen the Cinnamon Toast Crunch commercials where one piece of cereal is eaten by another? This is cannibalism at its best. We all know we should not eat people, and some vegans, vegetarians, and others have decided not to eat other animals or even animal products.

This is another of those columns that I call tangents. When I worked in a pet store and then as assistant livestock manager at a pet wholesaler, I learned that many species in the animal world consume each other. We used inexpensive goldfish as feeders for larger fish. We sold a lot of them to hobbyists who raised large breeds.

I also learned about the species that attacked each other. There is a Siamese fighting fish where the males must be kept separate. Most of the time they are kept in individual bowls from all other fish. The females are safe with other species, and the males can cohabit with larger breeds that will not attack their flowing fins.

When I was young, I learned that male guppies had to be separated from the females before they gave birth, or they would eat their own young. Mice and rats are the same way, which I learned when I was the assistant livestock manager. We raised these in our department because of the ease.

My wife and I purchased a breeding pair of black gerbils and raised and sold them to my boss. As animal breeders, we learned that most rodents tended to kill and consume their young even when they were well fed. That is one of the disgusting aspects of animal husbandry.

More disgusting is that we humans tend to attack each other. I am not just speaking of physical violence; I also have seen families and friends verbally consume each other. I wish we would all watch these cereal ads and think about what we do to each other.

Children and teenagers say, “I hate you” to their parents and other authority figures. This is hurtful, but we as parents and adults know that they do not mean it, really. Or at least they will grow out of it. It seems that many in our society think that speaking hateful words to others is acceptable. I watch press conferences where many influential people seem to criticize, abuse, and denigrate anyone who disagrees with them.

I believe, as a born-again believer in Jesus, that we should treat each other with kindness and patience, which are the first attributes of God’s love. I know many of you think that Christians are the last ones that you would trust to treat you this way. I am sorry if you have confused Christians with followers of Jesus. Read my previous columns, and I hope you learn the difference between Church people and Jesus’ followers.

Take your toys and go home, Donald

June 29, 2026

Have you noticed the tantrums that the man who holds the office of Chief Executive has been throwing lately? He’s continued to lie about everything from how the 2016 election ended to having a photograph taken in Europe. He has his point of view, while others disagree with how he sees reality.

Now he has come back to the U.S. and decided not to sign a law that the Senate and House had both approved. He’ll sign it as soon as the Trumpites browbeat those who don’t agree with him into agreeing on another bill that does not seem to be very popular.

This is just another example of the childish attitude of a man who is old enough to know better. Spoiled brat behavior is often seen in preschoolers. Grown men who have been elected President of the United States rarely pitch these kinds of fits in front of the press. We know today that some of the former Presidents did this in private.

Donald Trump no longer has a filter that most of us use to prevent the embarrassment of foot-in-mouth syndrome. I’ve been a non-Partisan voter for all my voting career. When I registered to vote in August of 1972, they tried to tell me at the county clerk’s office that I had to declare a party to be eligible to vote.

Having my high school diploma did not necessarily guarantee that I knew voting law. My history teachers made it a priority to teach us about the new laws that were in effect after the problems in the sixties. I asked to speak to the county clerk, and he told me I was correct that I did not need to declare a party.

I currently serve as an election judge for Greene County, Missouri, where most voters are Republicans. When I signed up for this job, they needed to know my party affiliation, and I told them I was non-Partisan and that is what I am listed as. To me, that means I should be able to work with a Republican or a Democrat. I have always been paired with a member of the GOP because here, there are always more of them and fewer of us.

It does not matter to me whether Trump belongs to any party. I have known for over forty years that he is a dishonest, lying businessman that I would never trust, even if my pastor told me to. For the last three elections, when most of my friends thought he was the only choice, I disagreed with them. I continue to believe that he never should have been elected either time.

This year, as always, I want to overthrow all the political parties. It is not just the way our groups work against each other. After fifty-plus years of watching politics, I have seen US and other countries’ politicians use party affiliation to bypass the people they represent. I’m tired of it. We need to learn this as citizens.

Did you know that Trump used to be a Democrat, and so was former President Ronald Regan. When the Republican Party was formed, it was the party for the downtrodden. The Democrats were the ones who supported slavery. They continue to flop back and forth on almost every issue. I can trust a candidate but not the party he belongs to. They sell their souls to the parties to get money to buy their election. It must stop.

Too aggressive

June 28, 2026

A few weeks ago, the north side of Springfield, Missouri, experienced one of those 100-year hailstorms we hear of from time to time. Almost every home and business within a three-mile-and-then-some range has hail damage to cars, buildings, and anything that was outside during those few minutes.

That is the introduction to this topic because everyone in the area is being inundated with unwanted salesmen and unauthorized inspections. I know you want and need business. Stop and think for a moment, and you will realize that there is such a thing as pushing business away.

When I was operations manager for a bearing and power transmission distributor, I had to take up the outside sales responsibilities for a time. My district manager made calls with me one day and did not feel that I was aggressive enough for him. I think that was when he decided that I would never be the branch manager.

Shortly after that, our location had its best month in years, and when I received that report, he told me he had rehired a man who had deserted us, and he would be my new boss. That was when I made my decision to leave that company and informed my vice president.

I left there a few years later and returned to purchasing. This had me on the opposite side of the sales process. I made it a policy to avoid working with companies whose sales personnel practiced hard sell tactics. At each new position, my previous company was a supplier. Some pushed harder than I liked, and their portion of my business was reduced.

As I was growing up, one of the men at church was a car salesman. As a young man, I went with another friend to talk to him about a new vehicle. I was surprised that he was as kind and polite at the dealership as he was at church. I thought that I could do that myself when I was given a chance at sales.

He is the example that I chose to follow. I was trained by more than one company to be a hard sale salesperson, and I chose not to follow that instruction. I did not stay in sales for very long with those companies. I want to be the type of person that I want to deal with, not the people that I walk away from.

Aggression is not only used in sales. Managers often use tactics that make workers fear and despise them. Again, I chose not to be that type of leader in the businesses where I had authority over others. I was not perfect in all my management responsibilities everywhere I worked, but I tried. My recommendation to you is to attempt to curb aggressive behavior in all situations. I believe life will be better for you.

We don’t want it

June 27, 2026

I just heard another commercial that bothers me. Have you heard about the companies that don’t want your money for what they are selling for a certain period? Most of these offers are for delayed interest payments.

Cindy and I enjoy these offers of no interest payments until a future date. What you may not know is that many of these contract’s state that the interest is only waved if you pay off the debt before the specified date. We use this to our advantage.

We accept the free interest period and divide out the total cost of our purchase, so it is paid off before interest is accrued. This is an easy way to establish credit when you have had problems or are new to being a responsible adult.

Sometimes these offers include a credit card that you can continue to use. Do not fall victim to this trap. The issue with credit cards is that they do not expire like individual loans. After the limited date offer expires, you may only have 30 days to clear your account to prevent being charged interest.

This is the concept of getting you to take out a charge card at stores. Our first Discover card was issued to us when we made a purchase at the Battlefield Mall Sears store. Recently we were given a Home Depot card on a similar type of deal.

We had a plan to clear up this cost within the allotted months. No, it and the Lowe’s card are in the lock box and kept until this type of offer comes again for another purchase. Stop and think for just a minute before you pay cash that is in savings when this type of offer is available.

If something happens and you need to use those savings for purchases that do not have this kind of deal, they will still be available. Being an adult is great isn’t it. The commercials I was talking about at the beginning of this column are from vendors that act like they are benevolent.

Everyone must earn a living whether you sell products or services like producing advertising commercials. We do have a capitalistic economy and buying and selling things is a legitimate way of making a living.

They are just marketing, but not as good at it as those companies that tell you openly that you will pay more if you do not pay it off entirely by the end of the offer. This is simply their tactic of choice. Honesty is the best policy. I’ve lived my life by this motto and I still endorse it.

Walk With a Servant