Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/99748
President Schwengel, Congressmen Barber Conable (second from left) and J.J. Pickle (far right), along with sculptor Marcel Jovine present President Ronald Reagan with a complete set of the Society's 1987 Signing of the Constitution Commemorative Medals. booklet on the Allyn Cox murals, a series of Statuary Hall pamphlets that were also published as a collection in book form, the completion of a scholarly bibliography on the Speakers of the House of Representatives, and research on the speeches delivered before Congress by visiting foreign dignitaries. Striner resigned in December 1987 to resume a career in teaching. He was succeeded as chief historian by Donald Kennon. Mary Lee Kerr, who had joined the staff in 1984, completed the publication of Foreign Visitors to Congress in 1989. She also edited the Capitol Dome, adding several improvements in style and substance to the newsletter prior to her return to North Carolina in 1989. Kerr's role as editor of the Dome was assumed by Rebecca Rogers, who had originally been 36 THE CAPITOL DOME hired in 1987 as principal researcher for the history of the Committee on Ways and Means project. The Society had never collected local sales tax at its sales outlets in the Capitol building, operating on legal advice of counsel that local taxing authority did not extend to federal property. The District of Columbia government in 1979, however, presented the Society with a bill for $740,000 in back sales taxes on what it contended were sales of "commercial items." The Washington Post backed the city's effort, referring to the Society in an editorial as "a dutyfree PX." Congress and the United States District Court agreed with arguments presented by the Society's counsel and by the Justice Department that the Society was an instrumentality of the federal government and therefore exempt from taxation. Congress passed a bill to retroactively exempt the Society from local sales taxes, and Judge Charles R. Richey of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled September 2, 1982, that: "Having held that the USCHS is a federal instrumentality the Court necessarily must conclude that the USCHS is exempt from taxation. " PUBLICATIONS AND PRODUCTIONS THE SOCIETY ADDED several new publications and productions to its record between 1978 and 1992. Four new editions of We, the People: The Story of the United States Capitol were produced, and the We, the People calendar continued on an annual basis. A commemorative medals series was WINTER 2013