By Pauline Masson –
As we gear up for the Pacific Partnership’s 21st annual downtown Car Show, the number of people to thank for this popular shindig may surprise you.
The Pacific Partnership as we know it, actually got its start at the death of a farovite son – local artist Joe McHugh.
On Joe’s death in 1999 he bequeathed his half of the McHugh-Dailey Building at South First and Orleans streets to his two nephews, Jim and Bill McHugh. And that transfer of property unleashed on Pacific the Wizard of Oz imagination of Jim McHugh that would, over time, transform a sleepy railroad town into a partnership of community activities. At that time Virginia “Ginny” Dailey, widow the late Joe Dailey owned the other half of the building.
I first met Jim McHugh soon his uncle’s passing. Early one morning, Missourian publisher Bill Miller Sr. called me and said I should go to the Clayton law office of Jim McHugh, who had inherited the Pacific building and had some ideas on what to do with it. The two men were acquainted with each other from their service on a board at the University of Missouri. When I arrived at the Clayton office, in a paneled meeting room were Jim McHugh, Ginny Dailey, and one of her granddaughters.
Jim was all charm and self confidence, a big Irishman with a shock of white hair and eyebrows, who immediately reminded me of the late Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill. His personality, hard to capture in words, is a combination of drive, ambitious, educated, intelligent and intellectual. He can see the individual trees and the entire forest.
When Jim looked at the neglected block of bricks that had been home to two generations of McHughs and Daileys, he saw an inconvenient truth. The two Joes, McHugh and Dailey – the last members of the two families to occupy the building – had not spent a lot of money on the structure that had anchored downtown Pacific and dominated the skyline for 88 years.
He turned to his friends at the University of Missouri to see what was working as other declining towns tried to transform themselves into sustainable modern communities. And, Oh Boy, did they have examples to share. Supported by his professor friends, his Clayton law firm and his exploding imagination, Jim formed the Pacific Ring – an imaginary circle with a seven mile radius – with the McHugh-Dailey Building and downtown Pacific at the center.
One after the other the academics came to Pacific to talk about university research that was testing how communities were shedding their industrial revolution past and finding their footing in the information age. At Jim’s request, all the ideas centered on the history, geography and sustainability of the small city of Pacific and its surroundings.
Among program topics presented to Pacific citizenry were flood mitigation, job creation, alternative energy, education alternatives, passenger train service, local health care delivery and water quality. Sometimes the presentations were so highfalutin that locals wondered what in the world Jim McHugh was thinking. But they kept listening.
One horticulturist showed how deep-root trees planted on riverbanks would hold the river in its bed during repeated floods. And he gave away saplings to anyone interested.
One scientist looked at the changing modes of travel and projected electric fueling stops located on Route 66 and I-44 at Pacific as a center for the new electric vehicles.
St. Louis Higher Education Channel (HEC-TV) Television producer Dennis Riggs was so captivated with the public academic symposiums (fancy word for Pacific) that he filmed each meeting and created an hour-long TV documentary that previewed at Pacific City Hall in 2015 and won the annual Telly Award that year.
Soon after his arrival, Jim visited then Mayor Jill Pigg and said what the town needed was a “partnership,” made up of the city, civic groups and citizens that could rally the community to adopt new ways of doing things. Mayor Pigg agreed. She established and hosted the first meeting of the official Pacific Partnership at City Hall.
Jim’s ideas just kept coming. He envisioned an annual Railroad Day celebration, where the town would show off its rail heritage. As it happened BNSF Railroad executive Jim Schwinkendorf, who had retired in Pacific, signed on as a member of the Partnership. At that time, Schwinkendorf chaired the steam rail organization that stored steam engines at the Railroad Museum in St. Louis. On the day of the first Railroad Day that Sheila Steelman Pacific Economic Development Direstor organized, Schwinkendorf brought out the old steam engine 1522 that had once pulled passengers trains through Pacific. It was the final run of the 1522, a closing out, if you will, of steam train travel, and regional newspapers made much fanfare about the event.
Schwinkendorf had also obtained the last BNSF caboose that the railroad still had, which was delivered to the site at South First Street in time to kick off the Railroad Days celebration. By that time Jeff Titter was mayor. He and Steelman set up a stage in the old city storage lot next to the McHugh-Dailey Building where they welcomed city, county and state leaders and posed for a dedicatory photo beside the caboose.
The town erupted like an overflowing volcano. So many people turned out for the event that one elderly man gushed to me that he had not seen that many people outside their houses in downtown Pacific since the day Wofld War II ended.
That year Bill McLaren’s Pacific Community Action Committee (PCAC) joined the Pacific Partnership. McLaren formed the PCAC, by inviting all the civic organizations to avoid competing with each other by scheduling their fundraisers on different dates and supporting each other’s benefits. The Partnership, with an attorney at its head, had a 501c3, which helped with fundraising. But fundraising was soon to take a new leap forward.
McLaren, Jim McHugh, the Pacific Chamber of Commerce, City Administrator Harold Selby, and then Mayor Herb Adams, persuaded state legislators to create a statute for cities our size to collect a bed tax from visitors. The city formed a Pacific Tourism Commission to use the funds to attract more visitors that would beef up the tax base and the town’s economy.
McHugh never slowed. As leadership of the Partnership evolved, he urged each new group of leaders to continue redeveloping the former city storage yard that occupied the lot next to the family building into a town center for the community to gather.
He named the old lot Pacific Station Plaza, garnered a lease from the City of Pacific where the Partnership would develop the Plaza as a small city park. He presented a continuous flow of drawings, that he kept revising. The Plaza, he said, could serve as a mini rail museum, offer a permanent train watching platform, present outdoor theater for public performances, and headquarters for a series of community celebrations.
In July 2013 some 20 volunteers, all skilled tradesmen, converged on the Pacific Station Plaza at 7:30 a.m. strapped on carpenters’ belts and erected the pavilion with its distinctive railroad profile that sees a frequent flow of visitors.
The Pacific Partnership, like McHugh’s insatiable quest for more, would venture into a never ending list of outdoor activities to fill downtown streets: flea markets, parades, art shows, trick or treat extravaganzas and seasonal farmers’ markets and music shows in the plaza. Turnout for the wildly popular Christmas on the Plaza and electric light parade eclipsed the downtown crowd for the first Railroad Day celebration. The Partnership found themselves producing the Iron Horse Rodeo, which drew crowds in good and bad weather. The Car Show is just the icing on the cake.
As the town grew into its own version of a Pacific partnership, Jim and the late Bill McHugh, and their cousins Tom and Mike Dailey restored the family building. They poured more than $1 million dollars and a couple of years of their own labor into the venture. The first floor, a former weather beaten liquor store, is now occupied by an upscale eatery. The second floor, former living quarters for the two families, now holds offices and a series of meeting rooms. The third floor Opera House, that served for a time as Joe McHugh’s studio, is once again staging big community events and musical performances.
My research turned up hundreds of old Opera Houses in the U.S. that were in various stages of renovation and conversions to other uses. I uncovered only one historic opera house that was still offering performances and is operated by the founding family, the McHugh-Dailey Building in Pacific.
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