Can this south KC candidate win lieutenant governor?

By Don Bradley

Tough going these days for a Democrat trying to win a statewide election in Missouri.

But Richard Brown, who is term-limited from his Missouri House seat representing southeast Kansas City, thinks he can do it this year. He’s running for lieutenant governor.

“It’s mine to lose,” he says in a booth at Caleb’s Breakfast & Lunch in Red Bridge.

How’s that?

He nods and jumps in. The man’s got some stories.

First off, the night he won his first election for his House seat in 2016, his wife told him he was going to be lieutenant governor someday.

She has since died. He says her prophecy hasn’t.

“She was a saint,” he said. “I can’t believe she was my wife.”

He also lost a daughter at age 15 to cerebral palsy.

They keep him going.

Brown talked about what he calls his “Forrest Gump” life — singing on stage with Phil Collins, getting on an elevator with the wife of a British prime minister.

Then he leans across the café table, his fedora low on his brow, and he tells about when he was a boy and he and some friends got caught out in the 1977 Plaza flood that killed 25 people.

Royals all-star center fielder Amos Otis found the wet bunch out in the storm, loaded them in his new Lincoln and took them home with him–after stopping for hamburgers at Jack in the Box.

They stayed up until 4 that night, talking baseball and talking life. The next morning, Otis took the boys home, navigating flooded streets.

Otis would say later he did what any dad would do. “What if they were my kids,” he said.

Richard Brown would say later that what Otis did that night changed his life; showed him the kind of person he wanted to be.

This story moved him to tears. In a packed Caleb’s. People looked. He didn’t care.

Brown became a teacher in the urban core. Twenty-some years later, he won a state house seat (beating a favored incumbent along the way) and devoted his legislative work to affordable housing and retirement income.

He supports legislation that supports trans kids.

“Like A.O. (Otis) said about us that night — what if they were my kids?”

Yes, he knows the hill Democrats must climb in red Missouri. Yes, he knows his Republican opponent will have more money.

“Money don’t worry me,” Brown said. “I’ve been Black and broke my whole life.”

He expects to defeat his primary opponent, Anastasia Syes, a first-timer, then face the winner of a crowded Republican field.

“God blessed my opponents with money,” he said. “He blessed me with brains and skills. I’m gonna win.”

His platform is moderate Democrat. He wants to eliminate state sales tax on groceries, expand early childhood services, increase childcare funding for working families and protect pensions for first-responders.

He’s never lost a race in four terms. Never even had a contested one after that first primary. He’s also never had to get votes much beyond Interstate 435.

But this is the part that he thinks makes him different from other Dems who have jumped into statewide waters. Brown says he avoids the entrenched partisan divide in Jefferson City.

He not only works with Republicans on legislation, he considers many of them friends. He travels to their districts in rural parts of the state–the parts that have proven to be sinkholes for Democrats.

“Republicans like me,” Brown said. “They say I’m their favorite Democrat.”

His longtime legislative assistant Donna Gentzsch described her boss as “a very charismatic guy.”

She is retiring later this year and says she couldn’t have asked for a better way to end her long career at the state capital.

“No hate, no yelling, no stress,” she said. “He just does what’s good. It’s a pleasure to come to work.”

Brown’s father was career Army. His mother is Japanese. The two met in Japan during the occupation after World War II.

Brown was born at Fort Riley, Kan., and grew up on Kansas City’s east side.

“I learned about racism from Black people,” he said. “Having a Japanese mother will do that.”

That beginning and later teaching in the inner city, having students die from gun violence, gave him his sense of social justice and humanity.

Now age 61, he’s remarried, lost a hundred pounds and always ready to go. He and his wife saw the Rolling Stones in Branson the other night.

Leaving Caleb’s, Brown saw someone wearing a t-shirt about something he’d done or somewhere he’d been.

He headed that way. That had to be somebody to talk to.