BOWLING GREEN, Mo. — Champ Clark had a great example of how it pays to treat everyone with respect and dignity.

The congressman and presidential candidate was named “Greatest Living Missourian” in September 1915. The man who did it started as a janitor for Clark.

Born during the Civil War and 14 years younger than Clark, Elliott Woolfolk Major attended public schools in Lincoln and Pike counties. An unrefuted story, published during Major’s lifetime by the Monroe County Appeal, recounted how he and Clark met.

It seems a young Major was traveling by horse-drawn carriage with his parents to a picnic when the harness broke. James Major asked his son to fix it and lashed him with the buggy whip when the boy failed.

That night, Major left home, walked over several days almost 40 miles to Bowling Green and got a job taking out the trash and cleaning Clark’s law office.

A quick learner, Major studied under Clark and was admitted to the bar in 1885. His political rise began in 1896, with election to the Missouri Senate.

Voters chose him for attorney general in 1908 and governor in 1912. The same year, Clark narrowly was defeated for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Major was as innovative as his two predecessors, one a Republican and the other a Democrat. During four years in office, he launched the statewide Good Roads Movement, advocated an increase in funding for public schools, created the Public Service Commission to oversee utilities and reformed the prison system.

Clark was more conservative, but he and Major agreed on most issues and remained very close.

Charles Moore of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco asked Major for a “Greatest Living Missourian” candidate. The governor didn’t hesitate.

Major told his buddy that “your character and life work” made Clark “better than any other man in public life.”

“You merit this tribute by reason of your achievements, the splendid service you have rendered both state and nation, and the honors and distinction bestowed upon you by an appreciative people,” Major said.

Clark was humbled and joked that friendship between the two may have “mislead your judgment.” Still, he called the distinction a “high and unusual honor.”

“To be selected from among so many illustrious Missourians goes straight to my heart,” the Speaker said.

Clark, who came to Missouri with pennies in his pocket, then became reflective. He wrote that Major’s “friendly act aroused in my mind many fond memories of the time when you and I were living the simple life among the best of people” in Pike County.

“I take it that when you were reading law in my office, if some prophet had made bold to predict that, in this blessed year you would be Governor of imperial Missouri and I Speaker of the National House of Representatives, he would have been in imminent danger of being clapped into a straightjacket and a padded cell,” Clark continued. “Thank God ascent to the high places is possible for the poorest boy in the land under our benign institutions, for no boys are poorer than were you and I.”

The congressman closed by citing a poetic quote from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who had been on the bench since 1902.

“After all is said, ‘There is no friend like the friend who has shared our morning days, no welcome like his greeting, no homage like his praise; fame is the scentless sunflower with gaudy crown of gold, but friendship is the breathing rose with sweet in every fold.’”

Clark wished Major “Heaven’s richest blessing upon my old pupil and his wife and children.”

Major did not seek re-election in 1916 and practiced law in St. Louis. He died at 84 on July 9, 1949. Clark passed at 70 on March 2, 1921. Both are buried at Bowling Green City Cemetery.