Phillip Arnold Moeckli, 75, passed away Tuesday, October 16, 2018, with family and close caretakers at his side. Phil was born on July 6, 1943 in Owensville, Missouri, to Arnold and Marjorie (Barnett) Moeckli.  His quick wit and clever mind did not help him scholastically – he graduated from Owensville High School in 1961 near the bottom of his class – but did enamor him to his teachers, his classmates (he was the student body president), and Karen Bledsoe, his on-again, off-again high school girlfriend.

After graduation, Phil served in the United States Air Force, 7405th Support Squadron (7499th Support Group (USAFE)), receiving his honorable discharge in 1965 as the rank of Airman First Class.  Trained to operate and maintain bomb navigational systems on B-52 and B-47 aircraft, he was assigned to Royal Air Force Station, Sculthorpe, England, then to West Germany at Wiesbaden Army Airfield.  He traveled throughout Europe, the Canary and Ascension Islands, and West Africa. In October 1964 Phil was one of ten from the 7499th to be assigned to Leopoldville, Republic of the Congo to provide direct passenger and cargo support for operation DRAGON ROUGE, USAF’s most ambitious airlift in the DRC to recover nearly 2,000 Western hostages seized by rebels in Stanleyville.

On June 13, 1965, Phil and Karen married.  Their first home was in an apartment above the funeral parlor in Owensville. Phil graduated Magna Cum Laude from Central Missouri State College in Warrensburg, Missouri in 1970, with a BS in Education and a MS in Administration and Supervision.  Phil and Karen moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1970, where they had Jane in 1972, and Phil began his 35-year career as a teacher and teacher advocate.  After teaching several years at Buena Vista Elementary School, Phil became president of the Colorado Springs Teachers Association and in 1975 he led a teachers’ strike in Colorado Springs School District 11, one of over 200 strikes across the nation during the 1975-76 school year fighting for professional respect, better pay, and smaller class sizes.  Phil was offered UniServ Director positions in Idaho, teaching local Idaho Education Association affiliates how to bargain, grieve, and advocate from 1976-1982. He then worked for 2 years as the Executive Director of the Spokane Education Association across the state border in Washington.  In his final column prior to retiring as Colorado Education Association’s Executive Director, Phil wrote how blessed he was to have worked with and for wonderful people throughout his career, but especially the first staff he worked with in Idaho.  They were an exceptional team and great friends.

Phil was State Executive Director in both Missouri, his home state, and Colorado, where he began and would end his professional journey.  When teachers’ unions saw widespread decline in membership in the 1980s, Phil successfully reorganized and reenergized regional and state affiliates to build membership, become fiscally responsible, and be innovative in their approach to advocating for education.  His colleagues characterized him as thoughtful, reasonable, and calm, yet gutsy when necessary.  Phil worked especially hard to build coalitions during a time of deep political divisions in Colorado.  In between those two positions, Phil made lasting contributions to the National Education Association as the Western States Regional Director and the Midwest Regional Director during the 1990s.  He was Interim State Executive Director in Ohio and Virginia, providing “knowledge, courage and wisdom” to organizations experiencing difficult transitions.

After retiring in 2005, Phil volunteered as a sound engineer at KRFC, Fort Collins Community Powered Radio station.  He transitioned into “retirement golfing” – weekdays instead of weekends – and traded his Colorado Rockies season tickets for a training camp vacation with longtime friends and the MLB satellite TV package where he could follow the St. Louis Cardinals, too.  In anticipation of their first grandchild, Evelyn, Phil and Karen moved to Iowa in 2010.  Phil applied his past experience with building organizations (he was a Charter Elder of Faith Presbyterian Church in Hayden, Idaho) to support opening and volunteering at the Solon Community Pantry, a partner of the Johnson County Crisis Center.  Phil enjoyed watching Evelyn and her younger brother, Wyatt, grow, time with Fox Ridge neighbors – especially on the golf course, and trips to Missouri to visit family.  Above all else, Phil was dedicated to Karen and Jane, and they to him.

Phil was preceded in death by his father, Arnold, and his mother, Marjorie (Niederer), nephew Jerry Aufdenkamp, and brother-in-law Ronald Bledsoe.  His family includes his wife, Karen, daughter, Jane (Christian Mozena), grandchildren, Evelyn and Wyatt, his siblings, Stanley Moeckli (Loralee), Judy (Moeckli) Borutta (Robert), Patricia (Aufdenkamp) Gillespie (Brian), Charles Aufdenkamp, Deborah (Aufdenkamp) White, and Christopher Aufdenkamp (Wendy), numerous nephews and nieces, sisters-in-law Glenda Fuchs and Lois Bledsoe, and brother-in-law Donald Fuchs.

Funeral services will be held on Tuesday, October 30, 2018, at the Palmer House Stable, 200 E. Main St., Solon, IA, 52333.  Visitation will occur from 4:00-5:00 pm, followed by a memorial service and light dinner.  In lieu of flowers, donations may be made through Gay & Ciha Funeral Services to the Solon Community Pantry, Pathways, or the Memory Care unit, Solon Retirement Village. To share a thought, memory or condolence with Phil’s family please visit the funeral home website @ www.gayandciha.com. Burial will be at a later date at the Salem Methodist Church Cemetery, Bland, MO.

Phil’s family would like to thank Pathways Adult Day Health Center and the Solon Retirement Village – especially the Memory Care unit – for their compassionate, respectful care of people with dementia.

Joel Packer, NEARO President

As we approach election day, it’s important to remember that, for over two hundred years, Americans have been lobbying, litigating, demonstrating, rallying, marching, and sometimes dying for the right to vote. It’s been a long, slow process to ensure that everyone, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, national origin, or disability can exercise their right to vote.

The Constitution as drafted in 1787 left voting issues to the control of individual states. Most states allowed only white, property-owning males to cast a ballot: not African Americans (most of whom were enslaved), not women, not those between 18-21 years of age, not Native Americans.

The first group of Americans to gain voting rights were actually white men—specifically working-class and poor white men who did not own property. By 1856, white men were allowed to vote in all states regardless of property ownership.

However, it took the Civil War to expand voting rights to nonwhites.

In 1868, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution granted full citizenship rights, including voting rights, to all men born or naturalized in the United States. Then in 1870, the 15th Amendment mandated that U.S. citizens could no longer be denied the right to vote based on "race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

Tragically, discriminatory laws, poll taxes, literacy tests (along with grandfather clauses that exempted white, male voters), and violent intimidation were adopted by most southern states which all but completely suppressed Black participation in elections until the 1960s.

The women's suffrage movement began alongside that of poor whites and African-American men, but it took decades longer to achieve. The 19th Amendment, which is completely identical to the 15th except that it includes women, officially become part of the Constitution on August 18, 1920, when the Tennessee legislature narrowly approved it.

Between the Civil War and World War I, Native Americans were forced to give up their tribal affiliations or join the military in order to vote. The 1924 Indian Citizenship Act redefined the language of the 14th Amendment to include Native Americans and granted full U.S. citizenship to nearly 300,000 indigenous people (about a third of the native population at the time). However, some Native Americans who were granted citizenship rights under the 1924 Act did not have had full citizenship and suffrage rights until 1948, due to restrictions imposed in seven states.

Other key voting rights expansions prior to the 1960s Civil Rights movement include the Magnuson Act (also known as the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act of 1943), which gave Chinese immigrants the right to citizenship and, thus, the right to vote; the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which granted all people of Asian ancestry the right to become citizens, and thus vote; and the 23rd amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1961, which granted citizens of Washington, DC the right to vote for President (although DC residents still do not have voting representation in Congress).

Although African-Americans technically gained the right to vote after the Civil War, only a small percentage of southern African-Americans were allowed to perform their civic duty until the 1960s. In 1964, the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, eliminating poll taxes nationwide. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 included some voting rights protections. But, the key piece of legislation was the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibits every state and local government from imposing any voting law that results in discrimination against racial or language minorities. Since its original passage, the Voting Rights Act has been amended five times to broaden its scope of protections, such as the 1975 requirement for districts with high non-English-speaking minority populations to provide bilingual ballots and voting materials.

The 26th Amendment, ratified in July 1971, lowered the minimum voting age for federal, state, and local elections to 18. And in 1984, The Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act required polling places to be accessible to people with disabilities.

The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (also known as the Motor Voter Act), mandated that citizens be offered a chance to register to vote when renewing their driver's license. The 2002 Help America Vote Act addressed improvements to voting systems and voter access that were identified following the 2000 election.

Today, advocacy groups and public officials are making strides to improve voting accessibility to homeless voters, those with physical disabilities, and former felons. Nationwide, about 6 million Americans can’t vote as a result of a felony conviction. About half have fully completed their sentences, another quarter are in the community under probation or parole supervision, and a quarter are still incarcerated.

Sadly, several states are moving backward by having enacted or trying to enact new restrictions on voting, including expanded purges of voting roles, more restrictive voting ID requirements, making it more difficult to register, limiting or eliminating early voting, and closing and consolidating voting places. Overall, since 2010, 23 states have new restrictions in effect.

The fight goes on!