From the Roundtable: Population passes 100,000 mark, but getting six digits is no big deal

So, the population of Columbia has crossed the hundred grand mark, according to the latest official estimate. This is hardly news to those of us who’ve been tracking local statistics over the past few years. Greeted largely with a yawn, there have been few out there within range of our corps of reporters saying much more than, “Gee whiz.”

Selling Greater Columbia to the rest of the world will require more than trumpeting the fact our habitation has reached the six-digit mark.

Those who pine for the nostalgic time of a smaller, simpler and quieter community, when the signs at the city limits said 36,650 (1960) and 58,804 (1970), should be poked for conveniently forgetting how long it took for the little college town to get the conveniences we now take for granted, such as a shopping mall and multiple television stations, supermarkets and movie theaters.

Provinciality was noted on my arrival more than 40 years ago, when I had to turn the clock back an hour because St. Louis observed daylight savings time while Columbia did not. Shopping meant going downtown or maybe a swing along scenic Highway 40, which was “uptown.”

After getting my first job, holding down the fort in KFRU’s Studio A, I discovered Columbia wasn’t a Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area. The hours quickly mounted into what I thought would have been the sacred realm of overtime pay. When my pay stub came back without overtime, my concerned parents, having more knowledge of the 1938 Federal Wage and Hour Law than I, urged a meeting with management.

That’s when the word “exemption” reached my ears. I was spread out across the green Naugahyde sofa in the late Mahlon R. Aldridge Jr.’s office, competing for his attention amidst the squawking of a half-dozen police and fire scanners. Tossing me a well-thumbed spiral bound booklet that may have been as old as I was at the time, he said, “See if you can find Columbia on Page 18.”

Of course, I couldn’t. Columbia was exempt from the law because of its small size, which was the reason he had the booklet to begin with. You gotta love federal regulations and the power of lobbying organizations to influence them. Back in the late 30s, lobbying organizations representing newspapers and radio stations successfully exempted their clients from various provisions of the 1938 law including additional pay for overtime.

I remember dropping in to see Aldridge in 1972. That was about the time the federal government had added Columbia to its list of Standard Metropolitan Statistic Areas and the little spiral-bound booklet no longer applied to our fair city. He was a little dismayed and remembered how piqued I had been five years earlier. But he conceded growth was good, and he looked forward to Columbia getting the attention it deserved. And indeed it has!