Jerry Thomas Howard was still farming the land around Dexter, Missouri, in the days before he died on September 17, 2026, at 90. The Democrat had represented rural southeast Missouri in the Missouri House and Senate across parts of three decades, never fully stepping away from the fields that shaped him.

Howard was born March 28, 1936, in Oak Ridge, Missouri, to John Thomas Howard and Sylvia Ann Brecheisen Howard. He served in the United States Army in Korea, then spent 16 years in the Missouri National Guard, rising to the rank of first lieutenant and earning an honorable discharge. Afterward he enrolled at Southeast Missouri State University, earning a double major in agriculture and biology with minors in chemistry and history, according to the Missouri Senate.

That grounding in the land followed him into government. Voters sent Howard to the Missouri House of Representatives in 1972, and after two terms and a return via a 1987 special election, he won a special election to the Missouri Senate's 25th District in 1990, representing Butler, Dunklin, New Madrid, Pemiscot, Stoddard and Wayne counties. In the Senate he served as vice chairman of the Agriculture, Conservation, Parks and Tourism Committee and chairman of the Aging, Families and Mental Health Committee, while also sitting on the Appropriations and Judiciary panels, according to the Missouri Senate. In 1996 he sponsored Senate Bill 972, which would have allowed licensed growers to cultivate industrial hemp; the bill drew four supportive witnesses and no opposition at its Agriculture Committee hearing, though the session ended before it reached a vote, as NORML reported at the time.

Away from the Capitol, Howard worked as a farm credit manager for agricultural lenders, raised quarter horses, and kept working his own ground, a practice he did not stop until the final days of his life. He belonged to the Dexter Masonic Lodge, was a 50-year member of the Scottish Rite, a Moolah Shriner, a past Exalted Ruler of the Dexter Elks Lodge #2439, and a lifelong member of the American Legion.

Howard married Shirla Rathjen McFaddin on July 14, 1973, in Thayer, Missouri; she died in 2015 after more than four decades together. He is survived by two sons, John Trevor Howard and W. P. H. "Bill" McFadden IV, a daughter, Elilza Jane Winfrey, eleven grandchildren, three great-granddaughters, and his longtime companion, Dora Cole, according to his obituary from Mathis Funeral Home.

Howard's mark on southeast Missouri stayed close to the ground: the fields he farmed until his final days, the quarter horses he bred, and a Senate record built on agriculture policy for the six counties he represented. The Dexter lodges and the American Legion post he belonged to for decades, and the family named in his obituary, carry that work forward in Stoddard County.