Kenneth Quennoz Sr, Saw Himself As a Communicator Who Could Talk to Individuals with Differing Ideas 

By Pauline Masson – 

He was the longest serving elected official in Pacific history – 26 years as ward one alderman, two years as mayor and eight years on the Pacific Fire District board.  He hired the city’s first city administrator, urged his fellow aldermen to speak up but be willing to listen to the other guy and orchestrated assistance for victims of the city’s greatest flood.

Kenneth Quennoz Sr lived his entire life in Pacific. He graduated from Pacific High School, attended St. Bridget Church and throughout his adult life was known as an active and outspoken city official. He saw disagreeing as an art form.

He was 28 years old the first time he was elected to the board of aldermen in 1963.  He served as mayor from 1982-1984, at the time of the Great Flood of 1982. He served his last term as alderman in 2003.

He did not always win. He ran for his old ward-one seat unsuccessfully two times after 2003. But his recurring election pitch campaigns never varied. He campaigned on the need for officials to communicate with each other.

“I am a communicator,” he said. “I can talk to individuals with differing ideas.”

During his term as mayor in 1982-1984, he changed the way city business was run by hiring William Price as the first city administrator. Although for the rest of his life he would campaign for the city to be run by a professional manager, he said he couldn’t fairly take credit for hiring Mr. Price. The real credit, he said, belonged to the late Neil Brennan, who was an alderman at the time and “did all the work.”

“That was an important move for the city,” former mayor/alderman/judge – and second longest serving official – Herb Adams said. “That was the beginning of the city applying for grants. There are things a city our size could never accomplish without grants. And Bill Price, who came to Pacific after serving as  city administrator in Bowling Green, knew how to do that.”

But the big event of Mayor Quennoz’s administration was something no mayor would want to repeat, and was one that brought his communication skills to new highs.

On December 6, 1982, the Meramec River overflowed its banks, spilling across the city sewage lagoon and reaching the railroad tracks north of Orleans Street, creating what locals refer to as The Great Flood of 1982. Flood water crested at 32.71 feet, a record that would not be broken until 2015 when the flood crested at 33.44  feet.

During the days of rising and high water, Mayor Quennoz was a man for all seasons. He could be seen at every aspect of the emergency, the victims, the damage to city property and the recovery.

Again, he said did not want to take credit for the city’s response. Public Works Commissioner Ed Gass and his staff were the real heroes of the response, he said.

When ABC News sent a helicopter from Chicago to Pacific to report on the flood, public works commissioner Ed Gass cadged a ride for himself and the mayor to survey the flood.

“He (the pilot) took us for a couple of circles above the city,” Mr. Quennoz said. “We were worried about the lagoon. When we got above the lagoon you couldn’t even see it. It was completely covered with floodwater.”

“He (Mr. Gass) and his men worked 16 to 18 hours a day. After the water went down, the city allowed people to place all of their destroyed furniture on the street and Mr. Gass made arrangements for prisoners from the Missouri Eastern Correctional Facility to help load the trash onto trucks to be hauled away,” Mr. Quennoz said.

Mr. Quennoz persuaded the new pastor of St. Bridget Church to open the St. Bridget school gymnasium for flood victims and contacted the Red Cross to bring food to feed victims and volunteers for three days.

In the aftermath he learned that by freezing soggy paper the ice could be brushed off and precious records restored. He arranged to send city hall records damaged in the flood to McDonnell Douglas where they were frozen and brushed clean, to save the records. He sent city furniture to the Missouri Eastern Correctional Facility where it was refurbished.

In 1990, when I was a new reporter in Pacific and commented that the city was hard to get around in if you didn’t know where to cross the railroad tracks to get from north to south, he took me on a two-hour tour of the entire city. He showed me, not only every grade crossing – the city had no overpass at that time – but took me to the top of  the bluff at Blackburn Park and Jensen’s point. He took me to the little known mushroom cave, the city’s sewage lagoon, the city’s four cemeteries, four schools, the entrances and exits of two industrial parks and the modern subdivisions that existed at that time.

In 1999, when I was still pretty new, he lectured me about the need for an engineering study to determine the cost to operate the city’s water and sewer system in preparation for taking in the proposed Brush Creek Sewer District. He also wanted his fellow aldermen to plug any loopholes in the city’s zoning ordinance to give the city more controls of developments.

He objected to one developer’s request to place a gate at the entrance to a proposed subdivision because it was, in his words it was, “completely wrong for a small city like Pacific that had always valued neighbors visiting neighbors.”

Always, he wanted me to understand the pros and cons of an issue so I could write about it in a way that would help the aldermen and the citizens see what was at stake.

He answered or returned every phone call I made, a practice that he kept up for thirty years.

In 2012  when he was elected to the Pacific Fire District board, he became as vocal an outspoken promoter of the District’s work as he had been for the city.

“The fire district is working to provide services to citizens,” he said. “We do more than just go and put out your fire.”

 The community needed to aware of such free community service programs as the child safety seat program, smoke detector inspections and lift assist, he said.

“More and more often there are incidents where people fall and can’t get up without help,” he said. “They can call 911 and the ambulance district or fire district will send someone to help.”

He would serve eight years in what could have been his retirement years. But he never gave up on the needs of the city and the citizens. Even as he reached his seventies and eighties, he could be seen at BOA meetings urging aldermen to look to the citizens’needs.

When Mayor Jeff Palmore decided to not reappoint City Administrator Harold Selby, Mr. Quennoz launched a campaign urging the board of aldermen to hire a city administrator, which he believed was vital to the operation of the city.

“There are seven elected people in city government, from all walks of life,” he said. “They’re there part time. They cannot run a multi-million dollar operation.”

He also made a pitch to bring unity among the board of aldermen and the mayor. He saw himself as a communicator who could talk to individuals with differing ideas.

 “I think I can talk to anybody,” he said. “I can give and take and that’s what it takes have unity in government.”

In 2019 – thirteen years after his last term as an alderman – he questioned the ability or inability of the city’s zoning regulations to mitigate storm water drainage from new subdivisions or building sites. He launched a city-wide effort for the the city’s zoning officer and planning and zoning commission to examine the language of the zoning laws to determine if, or how, the city could make storm water planning a mandatory part of the site plan approval process.

As a city located on a southerly slope, that still has hillside land that can be developed, Mr. Quennoz said he believed future storm water solutions should be made part of the development plan; site elevations should be studied by the planning and zoning commission as part of the review process; and the developer should participate with the city in any storm water public works costs that result from the building site.

His suggestion is now part of site plan reviews.

He loved being a city official. The year before he died, he wanted to show me a 1966 Globe Democrat newspaper clipping he had had kept. As an alderman at the time, he was asked to represent Pacific at the celebration of the opening of the Gateway Arch in downtown St. Louis. He and his three children were among 2,000  people that rode to the top of the arch the day before it opened to the public. In the news photo, his three-yeaar-old son William was shown with Miss St. Louis pinning a “Top of the Arch Club” pin on his chest.

When he died on Nov 3, 2019,  Mayor Steve Myers requested and was granted authority to lower the flag at City Hall to half-staff from Friday morning until Monday morning, to honor the veteran official.

Members of the Quennoz family were recognized at the Nov. 5 board meeting as officials observed a moment of silence.