JCHS Journal | Winter 2022

JACKSON COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY

JOURNAL Vol. 56, No. 1, Winter 2022

11 Articles highlighting Jackson County history

Dedicated to the Future of the Past

PLUS Reviews of JCHS bookstore offerings

Editor's Note As inferred by our slogan, “dedicated to the future of the past”, an understanding of the journey helps us to find the way.

The Publication Committee Brad Pace | Chair Brian Burnes Irene Baltrusaitis Karla Deel Gloria Smith Jim Stilley Danielle Hall Layout Designer: Stephanie Rohr

When the JCHS inaugurated its E-Journal in 2020, the intention was to post electronic articles while continuing to publish the traditional Journal. That objective is now met with this current Journal issue, the first one printed since the E-Journal launch.

As inferred by our slogan, “dedicated to the future of the past”, an understanding of the journey helps us to find the way. Volume 1, number 1, of the Journal was distributed to membership in May of 1958. It was 3 pages, mimeographed, stapled, and unnamed. The title of “Journal” didn’t appear until 1961, along with a masthead sketch of the 1859 Jail. With occasional changes in layout and artwork, the Journal has been published most every year since. Now with the help of self-publishing software, and non-profit status postage, we are able to continue this tradition. So the journey continues.

This issue includes 11 articles covering a variety of subjects ranging from Jackson County landmarks to civil rights. Also included are reviews of several books currently available for sale at the JCHS bookshop. We hope you will enjoy this issue—and the many more to follow!

BRAD PACE Editor JCHS JOURNAL

The Journal can also be found online monthly at www.jchs.org/ejournal All rights reserved. Contents, when fully credited, may be used with written permission.

www.jchs.org

In This Issue KING IN KANSAS CITY KANSAS CITY BLACK HISTORY PROJECT GREAT TASTE: A REMEMBRANCE OF VIRGINIA JENNINGS NADEAU UMPIRES WEREN’T SAFE IN OLD KC RECALLING ‘CACTUS’ JACK CALL OLD CARS – AND MEMORIES FROM JITNEYS TO LYFT

JACKSON COUNTY CELEBRATES MISSOURI BICENTENNIAL

BUILDING CHANUTE’S BRIDGE VETERANS ORAL HISTORY PROJECT EVAN S. CONNELL BOOK REVIEWS

BY BRIAN BURNES

King in Kansas City The late civil rights leader made at least six visits to Kansas City between 1957 and 1968.

Those visits ranged from April 1957 when King spoke at a Kansas City Baptist church when he was just emerging as a national figure, to January 1968 when he flew through what is now Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport while traveling to Kansas State University, where he was scheduled to speak.

After Gray’s interview with King in 1968, she joined him and a group of local admirers in an airport lounge, not quite three months before King’s assassination in Memphis. Either in personal encounters like that experienced by Gray, or during public speaking engagements, Kansas City area residents experienced King’s charisma and surpassing oratorical skills.

APRIL 1957 - ST. STEPHEN BAPTIST CHURCH King’s April 11 appearance at St. Stephen Baptist Church at 1414 East Truman Road occurred about two months after his face had appeared on the cover of Time magazine, which had described King as a minister “who in little more than a year has risen from nowhere to become one of the nation’s remarkable leaders of men.”

Among the approximately 750 people who heard King speak was the late Dorothy Johnson, a former reporter for The Call, a weekly newspaper serving Black readers across the Kansas City area.

“His charisma made you rise up in a standing ovation,” Johnson told the Kansas City Star in 1998.

(Photo courtesy of Chester Owens, Jr.)

THE ASSIGNMENT She had been sent to get an interview and she would get it, but not without some help.

Her assignment: talk to the Black minister, civil rights leader and 1964 Nobel Peace Prize-winner – Martin Luther King, Jr. – who had just flown into Kansas City.

“I saw him in the airport corridor,” said Helen Gray, the first Black woman hired as a reporter by the Kansas City Star-Times.

“But I could barely get anywhere near him because several men from the local TV stations were there and in those days the cameras they carried on their shoulders were pretty large.

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“But somehow Dr. King saw me. I remember him saying ‘Excuse me’ to the cameramen and then putting his arm around my shoulder and kind of gently pulling me in. I was able to interview him while I was walking down the corridor with him, and he gave me his full attention.”

“People just kind of automatically rose up without a signal. I did, too, which surprised me.

“As an old newspaper reporter, I had heard so many speeches.”

Upon his 1957 appearance in Kansas City, King was known as the principal leader of the successful 381-day boycott of the Montgomery, Ala., public transportation system, today considered perhaps the first large American protest of racial segregation.

“The cameras were big, I was small, but I was going to get the interview, one way or another.”

“Dr. King just made it easier for me.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday anniversary will be observed on Monday, January 18, made at least six documented visits to the Kansas City area.

Helen Gray, who in 1968 interviewed Martin Luther King, Jr. while walking down a Kansas City airport corridor, had been the first Black woman reporter hired by the Kansas City Star-Times in 1965.

(Photo courtesy of Helen Gray).

The boycott had begun following the early December 1955 arrest of Montgomery seamstress and local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter secretary Rosa Parks, who had declined to give up her seat to a white patron on a Montgomery bus.

In 1958, following the bombing of a Nashville Jewish community center, Silverman had delivered an address defending his support for the integration of Nashville schools.

Silverman caught the attention of Rabbi Samuel Mayerberg, who by 1960 had led B’nai Jehudah since 1928 and had established his own social justice legacy as a frequent critic of the political machine led by Tom Pendergast.

King and other leaders chose to end the boycott in December, 1956, not long after the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld a lower court ruling that found segregated seating on public buses unconstitutional.

During the subsequent spring and summer of 1957, King made more than 50 public appearances in an attempt to build the successful boycott into a national civil rights movement, showcasing the power of nonviolent social action.

At B’nai Jehudah, Silverman went on to lead the Greater Kansas City Council on Religion and Race, while also serving as a public advocate for fair housing legislation.

“Rabbi Silverman was rabbi of the largest and most influential and oldest Jewish congregation in the city,” said Bill Worley, history professor at the Metropolitan Community College-Kansas City’s Blue River Campus in Independence.

King’s local appearance, organized by the Kansas City, Mo., N.A.A.C.P. chapter, influenced the subsequent social justice agenda adopted by local Black leaders, Johnson said.

In December 1958 Kansas City area civil rights activists launched a sustained boycott of five downtown Kansas City department stores, in protest of the stores’ segregated restaurant policies. Demonstrators carrying picket signs walked outside store entrances throughout the subsequent weeks.

Store representatives agreed to integrate the restaurants that following spring. The Montgomery bus boycott directly influenced the Kansas City protest, according to Johnson.

“Almost everyone who made a speech brought up Martin Luther King or, specifically, the cooperation and unified efforts of the residents of Montgomery,” Johnson told The Star.

In a 1960 thesis submitted to the University of Kansas, Johnson had documented the boycott’s origins and organizers, and detailed how Kansas City protests echoed the Montgomery boycott in its tactics and rhetoric.

Handbills advertising the Kansas City boycott also referenced Montgomery, reading “They Stopped Riding in Montgomery – Let’s Stop Buying in Kansas City.”

JUNE 1958 - SUMNER HIGH SCHOOL, KANSAS CITY, KAN. On June 20, 1958, six months before the department store boycott began, King spoke again in the Kansas City area.

Black citizens “must not use violence to achieve integration because this will cause bitterness for generations to come,” King told listeners in the auditorium of what is now Sumner Academy of Arts and Science at 1620 N.

8th St. in Kansas City, Kan. King added that while Black citizens may “hate segregation and injustice,” according to a Kansas City Times account of his speech, “this hate must not include segregationists.”

King, the Times reported, added that segregation was doomed and “only the date of burial remains to be determined.”

“While Dr. King was primarily concerned against discrimination against African Americans, he was certainly open to creating alliances with people like Rabbi Silverman,” Worley added “King’s taking on the fair housing issue was really part and parcel of the overall civil rights dialogue going on at that time.”

Worley, the author of a “J.C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City,” a 1990 biography of the Kansas City real estate developer, said that Kansas City proponents of fair housing legislation believed they would benefit from their association with King.

MARCH 1961 - CONGREGATION B’NAI JEHUDAH, KANSAS CITY On March 15 King spoke to 400 persons at a “Temple Brotherhood” dinner at Congregation B'nai Jehudah, one of the oldest Reform Jewish congregations in the country and the oldest synagogue in the Kansas City area, then located at 69th Street and Holmes Road.

At the dinner King explained that he favored non-violent resistance as a method for ending oppression.

"With this method, one can affect moral ends with moral means," King said. "One can deal with an unjust system and still maintain love for those who, perhaps by training, were caught up in the system.”

King likely had been invited to speak by Rabbi William Silverman, who had come to lead B’nai Jehudah in 1960 after proving an outspoken civil rights advocate in Tennessee.

During one visit to Kansas City during the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr. sat for an interview with longtime Kansas City broadcaster Walt Bodine and his colleague Bill Griffith.

(Photo courtesy of LaBudde Special Collections, UMKC University Libraries.) bit of body text

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“He was invited to B’nai Jehudah to give greater influence to the efforts to get fair housing ordinances passed,” Worley said.

The Kansas City Council approved an initial fair housing ordinance in 1967.

While opponents prompted a referendum election on the ordinance the following year, that vote was cancelled after the council unanimously approved a new ordinance incorporating the protections against discrimination included in The Civil Rights Act of 1968.

President Lyndon Johnson would sign that legislation on April 11, 1968, one week after King’s assassination.

King denied the charge.

SEPTEMBER 1961 - NATIONAL BAPTIST CONVENTION, U.S.A., INC., KANSAS CITY MUNICIPAL AUDITORIUM

About 8,000 people attended the November 4 event, organized by the Kansas City area Council of Churches.

“All men are one in Christ Jesus,” King said.

King’s next visit to Kansas City, only a few months later, would prove contentious.

A six-day annual convention of the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc. was marred by a struggle between two factions.

“King went into that hoping to reform the policies of the convention,” said Worley.

Subsequently King helped form a new organization, the Progressive National Baptist Convention.

NOVEMBER 1962 - KANSAS CITY MUNICIPAL AUDITORIUM Just over a year later King would revisit Municipal Auditorium, this time to address the annual Festival of Faith, an annual service observing the Protestant Reformation.

“And it must be realized that segregation is not only politically and economically wrong…

Its underlying theme is diametrically opposed to the Christian meaning. ”The Negro doesn’t want to defeat his white brother, but to win friendship and equality.”

King always spoke from a minister’s perspective, said Helen Gray, the StarTimes reporter who in 1971 would be named the newspapers’ Religion Editor.

“One thing I felt that often was lost on some people is that Dr. King was first, always, a man of God, a man of faith, a preacher,” Gray said.

“Even his speeches as a civil rights leader had the cadence of a minister preaching in the Black style, and everything he did in the civil rights movement was an extension of his faith and beliefs. His faith was always in the forefront of everything he did.

“The marches he helped lead as a civil rights leader always started with a church service.”

The convention was split between supporters of incumbent president J. H. Jackson of Chicago and Gardner Taylor of Brooklyn.

Jackson and his followers disapproved of the nonviolent direct action protests such as lunch counter sit-ins and the ”Freedom Rides” of earlier that year, in which protestors had ridden buses through the American South to demonstrate against segregated interstate bus policies.

The convention attracted about 10, 000 delegates to Kansas City’s Municipal Auditorium, 301 W. 13th St., where they would vote on the new president. King was in attendance but his voice appeared muted, according to daily newspaper coverage of the event, saying only that he supported Taylor.

During one convention session, a struggle for control of the speaker’s podium apparently contributed to the fall of a delegate, a Detroit minister, off the speaker’s platform and onto the convention hall floor. The minister later died at Kansas City’s Menorah Medical Center.

In the vote tally, Jackson prevailed over Taylor.

Jackson blamed the Detroit delegate’s accidental death on King, saying he had helped organize the disruption.

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Once he agreed to speak at Kansas State University in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. (left) contacted Kansas State Sen. George Haley (back to camera), a former Morehouse College classmate, to arrange his transportation from Kansas City to Manhattan. Others conferring with King were Chester Owens, Jr., and Clyde Townsend (right), a former Wyandotte County commissioner.

(Photo courtesy Chester Owens, Jr.)

JANUARY 1968 - KANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY King last visited Kansas City on January 18, 1968.

He had agreed to deliver a speech at Kansas State University the following day. Before traveling to the campus in Manhattan, Kan., King visited with friends and admirers in a Kansas City airport lounge.

In both his remarks at Kansas State, and in his airport interview with Gray, King voiced his opposition to the Vietnam War. King had detailed his objections to the war in an April 1967 address in New York. The speech had caused controversy, even among admirers.

Officials with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had criticized King for connecting the two issues – the Vietnam War and civil rights. Roy Wilkins, N.A.A.C.P. executive director - who during the 1920s had served as reporter and columnist for The Call in Kansas City - said that "civil rights groups do not have enough information on Vietnam, or on foreign policy, to make it their cause."

But in his address at Kansas State, King remained committed to his anti-war message.

“In the war in Vietnam, we have the most unjust, ill-conceived war in our history,” King said at Ahearn Field House.

“We see in our nation everywhere the damage being done to our nation by this war.”

In his remarks to Gray, King had said the war had caused the country’s attention to domestic issues – chief among them the “Great Society” initiative of domestic programs unveiled by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 – to suffer.

“The ‘Great Society’ programs are the casualties of the war,” King told Gray.

“I think Johnson started out in good faith, but somehow he has ended up with the illusion you can have guns and butter. But as long as you have guns, you can’t even get good oleomargarine.”

The approximately 7,200 spectators who heard King speak in Manhattan gave him a standing ovation. But the controversy over his anti-war position seemed to concern him while he had met with Kansas City area admirers in the airport lounge, said Chester Owens, Jr., a longtime Kansas City, Kan. civil rights activist.

“We spent about an hour with him and you could see, from my perspective, the fear in his eyes,” Owens said.

During his January 1968 speech at Kansas State University, Martin Luther King, Jr. continued to criticize the country’s involvement in the Vietnam War. (Photo courtesy of the Kansas Historical Society).

“A lot of civil rights organizations, like SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), opposed him on the Vietnam issue.”

Bill Worley, then Kansas State University student body president, believed King had looked fatigued during his speech in Manhattan.

“My impression was that he was tired of having to talk about the same things over and over and over again,” Worley said.

“He gave bits and pieces of several speeches that he had given, and there were parts of the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, which at that time was more than four years old.

“So what struck me was that this man was tired – tired physically and probably tired emotionally of having to continue to say what he had to say which is still very relevant today but to him was an old message and a message that had not been responded to.”

Gray, who also joined the group of admirers in the airport lounge, disagreed with descriptions of King’s fear or fatigue.

“He did seem to be kind of low-key,” said Gray, who had seen King deliver his “I Have A

Dream” speech during the 1963 March on Washington.

You think of him when he is giving these great speeches, how he would be so animated, like at the March on Washington.

“At the airport I don’t recall him being tired, but just low-key and relaxed, like you see in the photograph. He was smiling and leaning forward, enjoying the company.”

Many of those meeting with King in the airport lounge were friends of Kansas State Senator George Haley. King and Haley had been students together at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Ga. Once he had agreed to speak at Kansas State, King had contacted Haley to arrange transportation to Manhattan.

Gray, who retired from The Star in 2013, recalls that those present asked King to return to Kansas City in the fall, to campaign on behalf of Haley’s 1968 re-election campaign.

“He said that he would,” Gray said.

“But this was only about three months before his assassination – so, of course - he never did.”

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BY JOE ROBERTSON

Kansas City Black History Project We ‘chant their names almost as if holy’

Every year, the project told the stories behind seven or eight of the so many names hidden by time. It gathered them in booklets and posters that were given to schools, libraries and other public spaces — used by teachers, librarians, mentors and parents to raise up a neglected history.

The audience grew by the thousands, spreading deep into the Kansas City area and nationwide into multiple states — and even internationally to Nova Scotia, Canada.

Now this joint effort by the Kansas City Public Library, the Black Archives of Mid-America and the Local Investment Commission has produced a book, is planning special events and is building a website that will be offering curriculum to educators over the next year.

“If we don’t save this history, educate people about this history and share this history, it is lost,” said Black Archives of Mid-America Executive Director Carmaletta M. Williams. “And there was too much blood, sweat and tears that went into this community to let it be lost.”

Williams is another of today’s writers who speak in the book. Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas, who wrote the introduction, is another, along with Negro Leagues Baseball Museum President Bob Kendrick and Justice T. Horn, a young community leader and social justice activist.

Bruce R. Watkins, shown leading a march during protests following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, is one of more than 70 historical Kansas City figures profiled in the 2021 Kansas City Black History Project. Photo: LaBudde Special Collections, UMKC University Libraries

“I SING THEIR NAMES . . .,” Story by story, name by name, the annual Kansas City Black History Project seemed destined to meet this auspicious moment in history.

The determined and reverent collection of biographies, now a decade in the making, was already preparing to stake its ground in the commemoration of the Missouri Bicentennial in 2021.

Then came the racial reckoning of the Black Lives Matter movement and the uprising against persistent injustice.

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Now new voices echoed the hallowed deeds and struggles of the Black men and women who fought for their place in Kansas City and American history across two centuries.“I sing their names . . .,” writes Kansas City poet Glenn North.

His words are one of several contemporary voices joined in a new, 44page book that collects the more than 70 biographies that the Kansas City Black History Project team has researched and shared with the Kansas City community since 2010.

“I sing of… Langston and Parker, Ms. Bluford and Mary Lou, Old Buck, Leon Jordan, Horace and Bruce . . .”

The new, 44-page book that collects the more than 70 biographies that the Kansas City Black History Project team has researched and shared with the Kansas City community since 2010.

APrincipal Anna H. Jones (standing, left) leads a class at Douglass School in Kansas City, circa 1911. Photo: The Black Archives of Mid-America.niversity Libraries.)

The book, he said, will strengthen the community with wisdom on “what’s going on nationally and the conversations we’re having, plus the lessons we can learn from the biographies.”

The project gathers biographies of heroes who have passed. While many of the men and women profiled are well known — like Charlie Parker and Satchel Paige — many more tell of the heroic lives of people whose bold achievements were fading from Kansas City’s history.

The stories are as old as that of Hiram Young, born in 1812 into slavery, who built wagons for Westward pioneers and started a school for Black children in Independence.

And the stories are as close as two newly profiled heroes who passed away in 2020 — Bailus Tate Jr. and Rosemary Smith Lowe.

The project historians have drawn from at least 28 archival resources in the past decade to build the collection of stories and pictures.

“They mined the depths of multiple historical societies and library collections, both near and as far as Wisconsin and New York. They searched newspaper clippings and numerous university records.The project is always revelatory,” said Local Investment Commission Deputy Director Brent Schondelmeyer. “You learn stories of people you didn’t know — people you wish you knew. You learn of the contributions they made and, regrettably, the obstacles they had to overcome, often not of their own making.”

In looking back at their stories, Williams said, the book is “forwardthinking” in what builds into a powerful arc toward the future.

These men and women shaped Kansas City and the nation as educators, activists, entrepreneurs, entertainers and athletes.

“Look at how they made so many advances with all the structures that stood against them,” Williams said.

“Missouri was a slave state. Racism was rooted here. Here is the positive: How Black people overcame that racism.”

While the Missouri Bicentennial can revel in a remarkable history of achievement and generosity, it’s also true that statehood came bargained with the dedication of a slave-holding state — a concession to our nation’s supreme racial injustice.

That’s why Kansas City’s Black history must “reclaim our narrative,” North, the poet, writes, and tell their stories: “. . . Sarah Rector, Junius Groves, Tom Bass and Anna Jones. Count Basie, Chester Franklin, Bernard Powell and D. A. Holmes . . .

“I chant their names, almost as if holy.”

Reprinted with permission from the Local Investment Commission.

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BY BRENT SCHONDELMEYER

Great Taste: A Remembrance of Virginia Jennings Nadeau Her election as JCHS President in 1987 reinvigorated the Society.

That community initially was Independence where Virginia grew up in a well-to-do family who owned and operated Jennings Furniture Store - a business that opened in 1941.

About the same time, Virginia (then a young school girl) and her family moved into an historic Queen Anne-style house located on the corner of Delaware and Waldo.

The house was built for Aaron Sawyer, a local banker - a named partner in the ChrismanSawyer Bank - and his wife Sallie. The couple raised two children in the home and Sallie remained in the house - beloved by neighborhood children - until her death in 1939.

Independence was a relatively small town of 15,000 and the house was within walking distance of the Independence Square - the center of the community.

David McCullough, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Truman, discussed the importance of the community in shaping the character of the future president and also its other inhabitants.

“To what extent was Harry S Truman the man he was, and thus the president he became, because he came from Independence,” McCullough asked in a 1993 talk given at a neighborhood church.

“To what extent did the culture of this community, this small American town, so close by a burgeoning very American city, shape and direct this young man.

“The answer to the question is, of course, somewhat obvious. It shaped him. It shaped him a lot. What else is it shaping? How many others?”

Virginia like others was deeply shaped by the neighborhood and forged enduring relationships she retained her entire life.

In 1995, McCullough’s book was made into an HBO movie in which Gary Sinese played the Man from Independence. The Truman Home had been given as a gift to the National Park Service so the producers went looking for an alternative location.

GREAT TASTE Any conversation about Virginia Jennings Nadeau quickly surfaces this shared assessment: “She had great taste.”

Virginia Jennings Nadeau, 85, died peacefully at her Kansas City home on Oct. 31.

Memorial services for her were scheduled for Friday, Nov. 20 from 6-8 p.m. at CarsonSpeaks Funeral Home in Independence.

Great taste. That was a wonderful quality, particularly if your business was interior design but it involved more than that.

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But for those who knew her well it was a broader assessment of a remarkable woman who has a strong sense of self, deeply appreciated history, valued friendships and had a strong aesthetic appreciation of the arts. ““She had wonderful taste, artistic taste and historical taste,” said Barbara Potts, former City of Independence mayor and later executive director of the Jackson County Historical Society. “She had a first hand (experience of) history living in the historic center of the city.”

Virginia graduated from William Chrisman High School - the original location - and went to Monticello College (UT), the University of Kansas and did graduate work at the well known Parsons School of Design in New York.

At one point, Virginia even taught art at her former high school. Nancy (Saunders) Steele, one of her students, shared this remembrance in an online condolence: “What an inspiration she was — not because of what she revealed to us about making art, of which I remember almost nothing, but because of the way she was, and the way she treated us.

“Tall, elegant, and always soft-spoken, she looked directly into my eyes with a twinkle in her own eyes in a way that made me feel as though we shared a secret: that she could look beyond the uncertain, awkward, uneducated teenager that I was to see someone who was not only worthwhile but bursting with potential.”

She was involved in the family business. In 1979 she renamed it Jennings Interior and relocated to the Country Club Plaza.

“Having Virginia as my mentor and creative genius in her professional life has truly been a blessing for me over the decades,” wrote former Kansas City mayor Kay Barnes, in an online condolence. “Her vision and tireless dedication to helping so many achieve their dreams for their homes has been a remarkable gift to hundreds and hundreds of people.”

Virginia met folks through a variety of ways the art scene, clients, civic endeavors and a wide range of relationships forged by graciousness, intellect and some you wanted to be around.

“Pure elegance. That is how to describe Virginia who exuded style, charm, intelligence, and whimsy,” said Eileen Weir, who is mayor of Independence and a past JCHS president.

“Virginia is the person you want to sit by at a dinner party. She was full of information and insight on current events, travel, art, history and much more. But mostly Virginia is a gifted listener. She is the one who in a meeting or at a social event looks you in the eye, and says, ‘What do you think?’”

She married Richard Nadeau - a therapist, preservation activist and advocate for mental health issues - who was legally blind. While Virginia was well-measured in tone and manner, Richard was vocal and boisterous and ready to share what he thought.

Historic Kansas City established an award in Richard’s name to recognize individuals and organizations willing to engage in preservation fights because the essential nature of advocacy “is the willingness to annoy people."

JACKSON COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY The “willingness to annoy people” was clearly evident in 1987 when Virginia (with Richard’s support) played a key leadership role in a bitter controversy involving the Jackson County Historical Society.

The Sawyer-Jennings House, built in 1887, where Virginia Jennings Nadeau grew up. Photo courtesy of the Jackson County Historical Society Archives.

There were two major contentious issues - the future of the archives and ownership of the historic John Wornall Home in Kansas City which JCHS had bought in 1964 for $35,000 and opened in 1972 after extensive renovation work.

The then board president and executive director wanted to transfer to JCHS’s extensive archives to the Missouri State Historical Society with likely storage in underground caves in Columbia, Mo making the archival material secure, but largely unavailable. That was the eastern front of the war.

On the western front was a strong desire, mostly Kansas City JCHS members, to spin off the John Wornall House and give it to an active group of volunteers who were operating the Greek Revival house museum located just north of the Brookside neighborhood.

“The Wornall House people think they personally have a vested interest in that building,” said former JCHS board president John Paxton in an article in The Examiner. “I certainly wouldn't be in favor of handing the house over to them on a silver platter. They should pay for it if they want it.”

The brewing controversies resulted in a highly unusual move - the recruitment of an eightperson “reform slate” to be nominated from the floor at the upcoming annual meeting. If the entire “reform slate” was elected it could effectively have a board majority.

Virginia was the natural leader of the group because of her strong ties and relationship with like-minded members in Independence and Kansas City.

The “reform slate” consisted of eight individuals who ran on a published platform raising concerns about membership, fundraising, financial management, communication and governance.

Virginia was the nominal leader of the “reform slate” that also included Sara Jane Aber, Susie Block, Ted Cauger, Carmelita Kinchie, John Paxton, Ben Weir and myself.

Weir, the long-time publisher of The Examiner, coincidentally died the same day as Nadeau.

I remember meeting some of the other “reform” candidates - for the first time - in the home of journalist and local historian Sue Gentry who lived a block from Virginia’s childhood home which at that point was known as the Sawyer-Jenning home as designated on the US Bicentennial Plaque in the front yard.

This was my first involvement with JCHS - an enriching involvement that has continued to the present.

Normally the annual meeting was a quiet, perfunctory gathering - more of a social event with some organizational business conducted. But this annual meeting had more the trapping of a rambunctious, boisterous political gathering with about 200 in attendance.

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Virginia Jennings Nadeau, second from right with her parents and brother Frank Jennings, Jr. in their home after receiving the Preservation Award for the Sawyer-Jennings Home at the JCHS Annual Meeting in 1976. Photo courtesty of the Jackson County Historical Society Archives.

The entire “reform slate” was elected, defeating several well-known and respected individuals whose names were offered rather late in the process by the Nominating Committee. At the annual meeting, the membership approved a motion restricting the JCHS board of directors from selling any property or research materials without a prior vote of the membership.

Virginia was elected the new JCHS president displacing the incumbent president whose actions and demeanor had given rise to the “reform slate”.

The controversy - while difficult and resulting in many strained personal relationships helped reinvigorate the county historical society. Membership increased. A separate Friends of the Archives was established to raise funds to keep the archives in Independence which is still the case.

The new board also endorsed the concept of decentralization including the divestment of the Wornall House. That would take several years, but in 1999 JCHS approved a purchase agreement to sell the Wornall house to a separate Wornall House newly established organization. JCHS received $250,000 in the

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transfer and the passionate Wornall House volunteers achieved the autonomy long sought.

Virginia and Richard, themselves community volunteers, also appreciated the efforts of others and underwrote appreciation events for JCHS volunteers. They were memorable and lively occasions.

Virginia and Richard enjoyed a wide range of friendships, always lived close to the Nelson Atkins Art Museum, civically involved and active in Democratric politics.

She was well-connected and deeply respected.

Weir remembers attending a small dinner party at a home near the Nelson Atkins and not surprisingly Virginia invariably came up.

“The small group of guests – about 10 – soon fell into a game of ‘Six Degrees of Virginia Jennings’, said Weir. “The dining companions came from varied backgrounds but each one had a connection to the great Virginia Jennings.”

Many friends recount the joy traveling with the couple, particularly on international trips.

Richard died in August 2010.

Laura Hockaday, journalist and society editor for the Kansas City Star, recounted "in traveling with Virginia, you never knew where you would end up but, no matter, she could solve any conundrum through her creativity and grace.”

Creativity, intelligence and grace. When Virginia entered a room, everyone noticed, and the fashionable hat on her head or tasteful scarf that perfectly complemented her outfit served as a reminder to everyone present that poise and elegance still have a place in today’s world. As a member of the Kansas City Star 40 Years Ago Club (local history group), she invariably had an insightful anecdote to share with the other guests at her luncheon table, no matter what the topic of that day’s program.

These are qualities that seem somewhat missing in our civic life and why Virginia will be deeply missed.

BY PAT O’NEILL & TOM COFFMAN

Umpires Weren’t Safe in Old KC Ted Sullivan’s Baseball Cowboys Called the Shots

1884 knew that baseball in Kansas City was not for the faint of heart, and Irish-born manager Ted Sullivan was at the center of the city’s national rough and tumble baseball reputation.

BRINGING THE MAJORS TO MISSOURI In his day, T.P. “Ted” Sullivan was considered the best baseball mind in America. Some went so far as to call him “The Godfather” of the sport. He was early baseball’s town-hopping bandleader; the ringmaster of the minor leagues; a George Washington, a Harold Hill and a P.T. Barnum all rolled into one.

He was described by one old-time sportswriter as “a red-cheeked, sturdy little Irishman…goodnatured, crafty, a chatterbox when wound up, very proud of his ancestry and himself.”

From the late 1860s until the day he died in 1929, the cunning, fast-talking, witty, charming, serious and sober Sullivan traveled more than a million miles in horse-drawn buggies, sootspitting trains and lumbering steamships to spread the gospel of his beloved sport across the breadth of North America, Europe, Asia, and South America.

A native of County Clare who emigrated to America in 1855 at age 7, Sullivan was no stranger to the Kansas City region. He was already mad for baseball in 1874, when he graduated from St. Mary’s College just west of Topeka, where he captained the school’s baseball team. By the time he returned to the Kansas City region a decade later, Sullivan had founded a historic minor league, built a reputation as the sport’s best scout, managed the St. Louis Browns and helped establish the upstart Union Association and bring major league ball to Kansas City.

THE KANSAS CITY COWBOYS In the summer of 1884, baseball pioneer Ted Sullivan’s Kansas City Cowboys team seem poised to capture a rare Union Association victory when an egregious decision by the team’s umpiring nemesis, George Seward, cost them the win. In response, the local crowd stormed the field and chased Seward through a door under the grandstand and into a waiting hack with a speedy horse.

The Kansas City Times called Seward “drunk and incompetent,” and The Star predicted

that “If Mr. Seward appears again in Kansas City, he will probably be carried home on a stretcher.”

The reaction to Seward’s call was not untypical. Kansas City, in fact, was not a popular destination for adjudicators.

Visiting teams liked to scare first-time, $5a-game umps with stories of cowtown fans pulling their pistols after a questionable call and shooting the covers off fly balls to keep them from being caught.

Anyone who paid attention to the sport in

Sullivan’s 1883 success with the legendary Browns did not go unnoticed, especially locally.

Henry V. Lucas, a 26-year-old heir to his family’s St. Louis real estate empire, sought out Sullivan to organize the Union Association, identify potential franchises, and ultimately create and manage his St. Louis franchise. The Union Association, weak as it turned out to be, was nothing less than a full-on attack on the baseball establishment by refusing the join the National League and American Association as a signatory to the National Agreement and its “Reserve Rule,” which, in effect, kept players in contractual bondage to their teams by “reserving” their services in perpetuity.

Sullivan shared the young magnate’s opinion of the reserve rule. Sullivan was also ahead of his time with his prediction that courts would one day override the reserve rule. Just as he had presaged the American League’s adoption of the designated hitter and the elimination of “whippoorwill swingers.”

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RUBES, MAYBES AND WANNABES The Union Association was a “major league” in name only, with teams fielding mix-andmatch rosters of rubes, maybes and wannabes. Still, Manager Sullivan had a great gig going in St. Louis managing Lucas’ Maroons franchise and nearly running away with the league. By the end of June, the elite team Sullivan had put together had a 35-4 record against the league’s vastly weaker franchises, and the Union Association was having a tough time staying alive.

At the end of May, the Altoona squad, after playing just 25 games, had dropped out of the association, and the franchise was transferred to up-and-coming Kansas City, Missouri, making “the Paris of the Plains” the farthest west city ever to field a “professional” baseball team.

Naysayers thought Lucas was really stretching his luck by gambling on such a small market, but still the steadfast optimist, Lucas countered: “Their population is 100,000 or over and their people understand the game and will patronize the club if it is worth patronizing.”

Kansas City malt and grain merchant Americus McKim paid Lucas $15,000 for the franchise and refurbished and expanded Athletic Park, located near the current intersection of Summit Street and Southwest Boulevard. McKim ordered uniforms, picked up some of Altoona’s cast-off players and made a swing back east to pick up a few more players, but he was still taking applications from rock-throwing farm boys and out of work amateurs two days before the team’s first game.

Al Spink would later recall that “No official score was kept of this game for the reason that no one in Kansas City at that time knew how to keep a regular tabulated score.”

The Evening Star reported that “the Kansas Citys played an uphill game and gave many evidences of skill. The fact that the Kansas City nine never played together before made the audience very charitable…. The Chicagos are very strong at the bat, the place where the home club is unmistakably weak.”

By mid-July Kansas City was a Union Association doormat, but only one of many. The cranks – famously dubbed “fans” by Sullivan – across other Union Association cities were losing interest and the owners were losing loads of money.

Desperate to keep his league alive, Lucas talked Sullivan into catching a cross-state train and taking over the hapless Cowboys.

Lucas promised Sullivan part-ownership of the Kansas City organization, and a financial guarantee to the team’s primary owner, Americus McKim. On July 14, the St. Louis Globe Democrat announced that Ted Sullivan had been appointed manager of the Kansas City Unions.

Sullivan found the Cowtown a wide-open river bluff town teeming with, as a writer for Harpers Weekly described it, “all classes and conditions of men – cowboys from the cattle trails, railroad laborers, farmers from down the rivers and immigrants from all parts of Europe” But work in the growing town was plentiful and The Kansas City Star observed that “The number of people who drift to this city from week to week is astonishing.”

In 1884 Kansas City’s baseball team often was known as the ‘Cowboys’ or ‘Kaycees’ but advertisements sometimes referred to them as the ‘Unions,’ as they played in the Union Association.

The “Kaycees,” or “Cowboys,” as they were called by their eastern rivals, presented a hodge-podge roster of mediocre veterans and unheralded youngsters who hadn’t met or played together before trotting onto the field to face the Chicago Unions in June.

Although they lost that first game 6-5 in 12 innings, the baseball innovator

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Lucas and McKim, and now Sullivan, were gambling on Kansas City’s legions of bluecollar workers – mostly Irish, German and Scandinavian, working as puddlers in the iron works, or throat slitters and beef boners in the massive slaughter and meat packing houses, to embrace and support professional baseball.

Sullivan struggled to attract decent performers to the smoke-veiled town at the edge of the American west.

He did inherit or find a couple of young talents who would, in time prove to be keepers in the major leagues, including William “Billy” Smith O’Brien, a first baseman who three years later would lead the National League in home runs; and Emmett Seery, a reliable journeyman outfielder who would rack up nearly 1,000 games in an eight-year major league career.

Sullivan’s managerial debut saw his Cowboys lose 17-5 at Baltimore in what the Journal gently called a “most ignominious fashion,” describing the play of KC’s nine as “ridiculous.”

On July 21, the Cowboys were in last place in the new league with an embarrassing record of 319. Kansas City’s roster was so thin in talent that Sullivan reportedly shuffled at least 40 different players onto the field that season trying to find a combination that could tally a win once in a while.

Despite the team’s awful play and record, attendance at home games continued to be strong. Sullivan hawked promotions like LadiesGet-In-Free Days and experimented with group ticket sales, wooing organizations like The Knights Templar to help fill up the grandstand.

And in the chase for a buck, Sullivan didn’t mind risking the wrath of preachers and the law by playing Sunday games, which drew double and triple the number of weekday fans. The team was proving profitable, but they continued to lose, and by September the manager was as frustrated as the fans.

As often as not, those frustrations were taken out on umpires.

The Cowboys took to relishing their reputation in the press as baseball’s wild and wooly western gunslingers prone to verbal harangues and fistfights. Several gun incidents in Kansas City reportedly made the league’s eastern investors nervous, causing them to have second thoughts about Kansas City’s future as a baseball town.

Harassing and threatening the league’s umpires became the Cowboys’ calling card – with manager Ted often the first to stir up the crowd.

During a losing effort against Milwaukee in early June, Sullivan accused the umpire, a fellow named Hoover, of “crookedness” and threatened to assault him.

“I have been badly treated in the West,” umpire Tom York told The New York Times, upon quitting the profession. “I have often heard that an umpire’s position was a thankless one, but I have never realized it before.

It’s bad enough to be hissed and called a thief, but in the West when the local club loses, an umpire is fortunate if he escapes with his life. Of all the cities in the league Kansas City is the worst.”

Recalled catcher Charlie Bennett: “The first time Ed Beaten umpired a game in Kansas City, he was scared as a man could possibly be. He came from Baltimore and his idea of the West was a sparsely settled country overrun by …cowboy desperadoes and train robbers. On the train to Kansas City, one of the boys told him to ‘be ready to throw your hands up at any moment, for those cowboys are dangerous fellows…They’d as soon shoot you as look at you."

When all was said and done of the Union Association’s one and only season, Sullivan’s Cowboys finished with a collective batting average of .199, had lost 63 of the 79 games (11-23 at home and 540 on the road) and finished at the bottom of the standings.

Sullivan’s reputation as a manager suffered, but the Cowboys’ financial success gained attention from everyone in baseball. He and McKim reported an attendance of 54,000 for those 34 games at home, and claimed a season ending profit of $7,000, while most every other Union Association affiliates were dying in pools of red ink.

Still, the league seemed to have a future and there was talk of “next year.” But when McKim and Ted went to the winter meetings of the Union Association, they were the only team representatives to show up, so, without the benefit of goodbye or benediction, the Union Association was declared dead.

SULLIVAN’S COWBOYS STICK AROUND Back in Kansas City, manager-turnedentrepreneur Sullivan found himself with bats, balls, uniforms and a few players, but no league to play in. So, in the winter of 1885 he put his hustler hat back on and again became the baseball version of a traveling Bible salesman.

“According to one story told by a baseball player to umpire Ed Beaten, some fly balls hit by Kansas City batters would prompt local fans to shoot at the ball in hopes of preventing it from being caught.” (Illustration from the San Antonio Gazette, 1906)

Bennett said another player swore to the flummoxed ump that he was once playing in Kansas City, when a Kaycee player hit a high fly to the right fielder. As the fellow chased after it, he said, “a fusillade of shots” came from the grandstand. “The cowboys were shooting at the ball. They must have hit it a dozen times. The cover was torn off the ball by their shots, and the fellow managed to catch the cover.”

“He claimed an out on the catch,” said Bennett, “but we disputed the claim, and the game broke up in a row. If I recall rightly, we (Kansas City) got the benefit of the doubt on all close calls that day.”

Sullivan and other survivors of the ill-fated Union Association circuit formed a new league – which the retributive major leagues insisted be strictly categorized as a “minor” league. As the new Western League’s traveling representative, Sullivan set about organizing franchises. Sunday games would be allowed, in hopes of boosting attendance and revenue.

Milwaukee (the Brewers), Keokuk (the Hawkeyes), Indianapolis (the Hoosiers), Omaha (the Omahogs), Cleveland (the Forest Cities) and Toledo (the Avengers) bought into smooth-talking Sullivan’s new field of dreams, and he upped his own financial stake in the Cowboys. In Kansas City, he gathered and managed a nine composed of some of his better players from the Union Association Cowboys of the

year before and added a sprinkle of untrieds, unprovens and weren’t-ever-gonna-bes.

Realizing that good promotion was as important as good pitching when it came to selling 25-cent tickets to the working class fan, Sullivan honed his knack for publicity, managed ticket sales, and printed his own scorecards and advertising fliers on a small press in his office beneath the stands. The Gaelic character of Sullivan’s team and audacious style of their play reminded some observers of a popular New York vaudeville show of the day.

“A St. Louis exchange cruelly remarks that with the Dugans, the O’Briens, the Sweeneys, and the Sullivans, Ted Sullivan will have a team fit to appear in ‘Muldoon’s Picnic” as well as on the ball field.” The Kansas City Star, March 25, 1885 On road trips he sometimes introduced the team as his “Red Lions,” and even sent them out in a second set of red and brown uniforms. But the Cowboys of 1885 wore blue and white uniforms and were sometimes referred to during games as “The Blues.” As it turned out, they wouldn’t play enough games that year to soil either set of uniforms.

Newspapers predicted there’d be “a dog fight” when the Cowboys locked horns with the major league St. Louis Browns, led by Sullivan’s apprentice from his St. Mary’s College days and baseball’s rising star, first baseman Charlie Comiskey. Upon arrival, the Browns were greeted by Kansas City’s “ninety-nine degree bugs” and carted to the St. James Hotel, drawn by the town’s finest white horses. The Browns proceeded to thank the local bugs by whipping up on their Cowboys 15-3.

Despite the Western League’s minor league status, attendance at Kansas City home games was surprisingly strong, with crowds of 5,000 to 10,000 not uncommon. And that wasn’t counting the little bugs on the other side of the fence. Part of the attraction was Kansas City fans never quite knew what they might see at a Cowboys game – such as the day Sullivan made baseball history with the only dead man to pitch a game (you’ll have to read the book for that story).

Sullivan’s unruly but mildly talented squad held its own through May and into June, alternating places at the top of the league standings with the Hoosiers of Indianapolis and paying for itself with steady gate receipts. But the business-minded manager nearly pushed his luck a bit too far at an exhibition game against the Forest Cities, played in nearby Atchison, Kansas.

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He boldly charged 50 cents a head for admission, causing the locals to grouse and protest. According to a reporter who was on the scene, Ted was able to calm the unhappy crowd by telling them they could not expect to see real live professionals for a quarter.

The fans left satisfied after Billy O’Brien launched a home run to center field that knocked a ticketless young fan out of a tree, and the Cowboys won the game 5-4.

In early June, pressure began to mount from churches and law enforcement agencies calling for an end to baseball on the Sabbath.

On June 7 at Cleveland, police stopped a game between the Cowboys and the Forest Cities after just three innings of play, with Kansas City leading 3-0.

PAID IN GLITTER In Toledo, after playing three games against his old friend, the gregarious, and generous and always gambling Dan O’Leary’s Avengers, Sullivan went to collect his take of the gate. Ted remembered O’Leary, “calling me to one side and uttering the Irish phrase ‘sinn féin’ (we ourselves), then whispering: ‘It is this way, Ted, this backer of mine has no money.’”

The backer, the owner of a jewelry store, had been paying Dan’s creditors with jewelry. Said Sullivan: “This indeed was a new phase in baseball guarantees and for genial Dan, with his ‘plámásing’ (ingratiating).” (Plamas: Plámás /'plɔ:mɔ:s/ ['plaw-mawse'] is an Irish noun and verb used in Hiberno-English; it means empty flattery, ingratiating talk, disingenuous praise.) Sullivan accepted jewelry and gave it to the landlord that had provided his Cowboys with three days room and board while in Toledo.

The next day, on June 15, the Indianapolis club – atop the league standings with a 274 record – gave up the ghost, and Sullivan’s Western League died with them. Sullivan’s Cowboys were in third place with a 17-13 record and still profitable when the league collapsed. Billy O’Brien was leading the league in hitting (.372 over 30 games).

Ernie Burch had hit .361 over 26 games, and Emmett Seery was hitting over .300, as well.

“The ball park was populated by the knothole urchins ‘on the outside looking in.’”

Kansas City Star, May 10, 1885

“The authorities of the good old pious town have determined to enforce the Sunday laws,” crowed the Kansas City Evening Star.

“Ted Sullivan… is indignant at the action taken by the ministers and says that all the men in his club were engaged with the understanding that they would be required to play Sunday games and that if the Sunday games are prohibited, he will disband the club.”

Looking back years later, Sullivan conceded that, “In the middle of the ‘80s, minor leagues had no foundation and the best of them would hardly live through July.” By early June in ‘85, virtually every team in the Western League was starving for cash to survive.

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The baseball season being still young, Ted took an overnight train to Memphis, where he signed on to manage the Reds in the fledgling minor Southern League. Billy O’Brien and some of the other Cowboys packed their saddlebags and went with him. Within weeks, Sullivan and his roughneck boys would be the most hated team in the South.

To learn more about Ted Sullivan’s groundbreaking and colorful contribution to baseball history (including the dead pitcher in Kansas City), check out Ted Sullivan, Barnacle of Baseball: The Life of the Prolific League Founder, Scout, Manager and Unrivaled Huckster, written by local authors Pat O’Neill and Tom Coffman and available from McFarland & Co. in June 2021.

BY BRIAN BURNES

His older brother Don Call, remembers it that way, too.

Recalling ‘Cactus’ Jack Call The Man Patsy Cline Came to KC to Honor

“I tried to wipe it off and it smeared,” he said recently from his Eudora, Kansas home. “It was embarrassing for a little kid like me.

“But, you know, if I was a book writer, I always thought, that would be quite a book: ‘The Last Kiss of Patsy Cline.’ ’’ Today the Call brothers’ encounter with Cline represents a brief but still-vivid moment in the tragic sequence of events that arguably nudged the trajectory of their family in new directions. The memory also allows them an opportunity to fill in a blank spot in the familiar Patsy Cline narrative in which their father, who died at age 39, sometimes appears only as “a disc jockey in Kansas City.”

But the country music artists who came to Kansas City that weekend knew all about Cactus Jack.

“In those days there were two ways for country music artists to have their music heard,” Dan Call said.

“One was in live concerts and the other was over the radio. Radio was a distribution point for their music and my father was a major player in the whole sequence of getting their music heard.

“My dad really felt a calling to play that music.”

BECOMING CACTUS JACK Jack Call worked all the time.

In Sedalia, and then in Kansas City, country music fans believed they knew disc jockey Jack Call, known to them as “Cactus Jack,” on an almost personal basis. (Courtesy | Call family)

THE KANSAS CITY COWBOYS Almost everybody knows the Patsy Clinecomes-to-Kansas City story.

Fewer people know the Cactus Jack Call story.

Cline died on March 5, 1963, now 58 years ago. She and three others, flying in a private plane, crashed in Tennessee on their way home to Nashville from Kansas City. Cline and several other country music stars had performed at three benefit concerts to assist the family of a popular Independence, Missouri disc jockey who had died from injuries sustained in a January 24th car accident.

That had been Call, known to his listeners as Cactus Jack.

Some 48 hours before her own death, Cline had met briefly with Call’s widow Ann and her two sons – Don, 11 and Dan, eight - in a small backstage room inside Memorial Hall in Kansas City, Kan. The singer had bent down to kiss the cheeks of both boys.

“She was wearing pretty heavy lipstick and it just wasn’t anything I wanted to have on my face,” Dan Call, today a professor at a Texas evangelical university, said recently.

Born in Trenton, Mo., in 1923, he had served as a U.S. Army staff sergeant during World War II and by 1955 was on the air over KDRO in Sedalia, where he hosted both country music radio and television shows as Cactus Jack.

On weekdays his radio programming began just after 6 a.m. and continued throughout the day.

At 7 p.m. on Sundays he hosted the half-hour television program “Cactus Jack’s General Store,” for which he built the set.

He read news, weather and held cue cards, Don Call said.

He also met the public. A newspaper advertisement for an April 1955 dance at the Double B Corral, one mile south of Sedalia on U.S 65, featuring the Byrd Brothers and the Drifting Tennesseans, mentioned the added attraction of “Cactus Jack On The Drums.”

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Through such appearances his father earned a reputation as a friend of younger performers looking to break in, Dan Call said.

“He served as a master of ceremonies at country music concerts, although that is probably too grand a word for it,” he said.

“He had done that more at small venues, probably bars.

“But he was adamant about it. He loved what he did and worked hard at it.”

By 1957 his father had moved to KCKN in Kansas City, 1340 on the AM dial. By playing country music over the radio, Cactus Jack Call became part of a long-beloved Kansas City broadcast tradition.

KCKN had prospered during and after World War II by playing Big Band music during the war as well as vocalists like Rosemary Clooney and Jo Stafford during the early 1950s.

of autonomy, allowing him to observe an almost fierce belief in the value of individual relationships with both listeners and performers.

But KCKN suffered when Todd Storz, of Storz Broadcasting - today considered the innovator behind the Top 40 pop music radio format acquired Kansas City’s WHB in 1954. Storz hired high-profile disc jockeys away from KCKN and soon dominated the local AM band.

“Dad had his way of doing things,” Don Call said.

“When these artists would cut a new album, the norm was to send the album to all the radio stations to get them to play it.

“I can remember sitting in the office with Dad. He would get an album out of the mail, open it and throw the record in the trash. Then he would open another album and throw it in the trash.

Ultimately KCKN’s owner – the estate of former U.S. Sen. Arthur Capper of Kansas, who had died in 1951 - sold the station. Country radio entrepreneur Cy Blumenthal eventually acquired the station in 1957 and added it to what would become his group of large-market country stations.

“Cy hired Jack Call as his first program director at KCKN,” Cramer said.

With Call, KCKN made a splash with country.

Blumenthal, Cramer said, authorized a promotional blitz with advertisements in The Kansas City Star-Times as well as billboards placed around town. That year KCKN also distributed sheets advertising the station’s “Fabulous Fifty,” or top 50 country hits, a nod to WHB’s Top 40 format.

The KCKN hit surveys featured photos of the KCKN disc jockeys, including Cactus Jack Call, pictured wearing a cowboy hat and sitting behind a microphone.

On Sunday nights in the mid-1950s Sedalia residents could watch the half-hour “Cactus Jack’s General Store” on KDRO-TV, Channel 6, and also hear him on the KDRO-1490 on the AM dial every weekday morning. (Courtesy | Call family).

For almost 20 years, from the late 1930s through the mid-1950s, a Saturday night country music review known as “The Brush Creek Follies” aired over KMBC-AM. During the 1950s KCKN operated as one of the country music radio stations directed by Cy Blumenthal, considered perhaps the first entrepreneur to build a network of largemarket country stations.

But for disc jockeys, the industry was fluid.

Ted Cramer, a Country Radio Hall of Fame member who was a competitor of Jack Call’s in the 1950s and 1960s, can testify to the extreme volatility of the Kansas City radio market during those years.

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Still, KCKN was a disadvantage in the Kansas City market, Cramer said, in part because many of the high-profile Top 40 artists being played by WHB – such as Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers – also appealed to country music fans.

“Sometimes you could hardly tell the difference between the country charts and the pop charts,” Cramer said.

“It was a big problem for KCKN.” In 1959 Blumenthal moved away from the country format .Cramer moved from another Kansas City area station - KANS at 1510 – to KCKN, where he played pop hits for about a year.

“Jack Call and his group of country jocks went over to KANS and they went country there.”

AUTONOMY During his Kansas City radio career, Don Call said, his father had operated with a measure

“He looked at me one day and he said ‘You know, if these singers aren’t proud enough of their albums to bring them to the station themselves, I’ll never play them.’

“It was more than just a job to him. It was about having a friendship with these guys.”

Call put a premium on maintaining a personal touch with listeners, as well. The KANS studios were located at Blue Ridge Center – later the Blue Ridge Mall - which had opened in 1958.

The radio station had been outfitted with picture windows through which shoppers could watch the disc jockeys broadcast.

“I can remember sitting on my father’s lap and waving at the people through the windows,” Don Call said.

That - plus what is often described as deep, radio-friendly on-air voice – apparently resulted in an unusual bond with listeners. More than once Don Call remembers his parents accepting dinner invitations from listeners they didn’t know personally and had never met - but who nevertheless believed they knew Jack Call well.

“Occasionally Dad would put us in the car and we would do that,” he said.

“We were just kids and we didn’t know who these people were. But then the next week, while on the air, Dad would say ‘Happy anniversary to Bill and Gladys,’ or something like that.”

Meanwhile, over at KCKN, its pop music programming couldn’t dent WHB’s Top 40 dominance, and after a year KCKN returned to a country format in 1960.

Cramer remained, director.

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“I hired a couple of jocks and we invented the modern country format,” he said.

“I ran it like a Top 40 station, in other words, with up-tempo production values. It caught on big time and in one month we had beaten KANS. “Then KANS was sold and it went religious.”

By late 1962 Cactus Jack Call was between things.

On December 5 he wrote to country star Jim Reeves, who apparently was pondering becoming part of the ownership of a Colorado radio station.

“If you do get it I would really like to go to work for you,” Call wrote to Reeves, according to a transcription of the letter posted on a Reeves tribute website.

“I am a hard worker Jim and the hours mean nothing to me. If you could use me I would like to be your program director and D.J. I know I could program that station just the way you like it.”

According to the late Guy Smith, a colleague of Call’s at both KCKN and KANS, Call had approached the owners of KCMK, in those years one of the comparatively few stations available on the growing FM band.

The programming found at 93.3 FM had proved eclectic: In 1961 its KCMK listeners could hear, according to one newspaper radio program grid, shows such as “Waltz Time,” “Jazz Session,” “Night Sounds,” “Honky Tonk Time” and “Sounds of Strings.”

Call convinced station owners to commit to a country format.

He also found work for Guy Smith.

“You can see how I loved that guy like a brother,” Smith told The Kansas City Star in 1993.

in 1993. One of the arms he twisted belonged to Randy Hughes, who was Walker’s manager – and also the manager for Patsy Cline.

The show took shape. The advertisement in The Star the morning of Sunday, March 3, 1963 listed Walker, George Jones, Lloyd “Cowboy” Copas, Harold “Hawkshaw” Hawkins and Dottie West.

There were to be three shows – 2 p.m., 5:15 and 8 p.m. – at Memorial Hall. Tickets were $1.50 for adults and 50 cents for children.

Patsy Cline’s name had not appeared in that morning’s newspaper advertisement.

But she was waiting for the Call family backstage.

WHITE DRESS, RED LIPSTICK

Today Cactus Jack Call seems an especially forward-thinking example of the vast numbers of post-World War II radio disc jockeys, said Chuck Haddix, curator of the Marr Sound Archives at Miller Nichols Library at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

“I remember a lot of the artists getting down eyeball-to-eyeball with me, and saying nice things,” Dan Call said, recalling that afternoon.

“I remember being patted on the head. A lot of it is blurry to me today.

“Playing country music on FM radio was a bold move on his part,” said Haddix, who also serves as host of the weekend “Fish Fry” programs over KCUR-FM.

“But the one who stands out is Patsy Cline. She brought us back to a little secluded place behind the stage. There was no one else there – it was just Patsy, mom and my brother and I.

“A lot of people back then didn’t have FM in their cars or even in their homes.”

“I remember vividly how she looked. I remember her white dress and her red lipstick.”

In his brief encounter with Cline, Dan Call gained a new appreciation for the considerable regard such accomplished performers had for his father.

Call also appears to have worked hard to build a personal brand in an industry notorious for its uncertainty, Haddix said. ”Disc jockeys at country or rhythm and blues stations often had short tenures and didn’t have any job security,” he said. “It would not be unusual at all to move from one station to another to try to step up.”

Jack Call and Guy Smith started at KCMK in January, 1963. But on January 24 Call’s car and a truck collided near the intersection of Sterling Avenue and U.S. 40 in Independence.

He died the next day at old St. Joseph Hospital in Kansas City.

In a 1958 “Fabulous Fifty” sheet distributed

by KCKN, a photo of “Cactus” Jack Call “It was a very difficult time,” Dan Call said. (upper left) was included with pictures of other station disc jockeys.

As Guy Smith explained in 1993, he felt compelled to do something. One of his many contacts in country music industry was a But then Call hooked on with KCMK-FM in singer named Billy Walker, a Grand Ole Opry Kansas City. member who had enjoyed a hit, “Charlie’s Shoes,” in 1962.

“Jack went over to KCMK and turned that into an FM country station,” Cramer said.

“I started twisting arms,” Walker told The Star

“That was part of the reason why the outpouring of love at that benefit concert was so strong,” he said.

“They really valued what he had been doing for them.”

The country performers who turned out for the benefit concerts, according to Ted Cramer, wanted to pay proper respect to a radio veteran who had stuck with the country format despite all the volatility in the Kansas City market.

“Those of us who program country stations in the large markets have a rapport with the record labels and the artists unlike our counterparts in pop music,” said Cramer, who now is in his 66th year in radio, on the air today at WGGE and WLYQ, both of them country stations located in Parkersburg, West Virginia.

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Patsy Cline, some 48 hours before her death in a March 5, 1963, plane crash, visited with the widow of disc jockey Jack Call, and her two sons, Don and Dan, at Memorial Hall in Kansas City, Kansas. (Courtesy | Mildred Keith family)

“We are a much closer family and there’s no doubt Jack had a good relationship with those artists and their labels.”

During a 1993 interview Ann Wilson – the widow of Jack Call who by then had remarried – remembered her own encounter with Patsy Cline.

When she met the singer, as Wilson told The Star, Cline was not quite two years removed from her own car accident. In June of 1961 Cline had suffered wrist and hip injuries, as well as a laceration across her forehead, after her car had collided with another in Nashville.

“She talked about how badly she had been hurt and how she didn’t know why the Lord had spared her,” Wilson said. “I told her it was because she had wanted to do good for someone else.

“I thought she was a beautiful person, outside and inside.”

To his family, the impact of Jack Call’s death proved seismic.

“When my dad died my mom was a stay-at-

JCHS JOURNAL | 19

home mom, she didn’t even have a driver’s Yet their mother was determined to persevere, license,” Dan Call said.

Don Call added.

Ann had been born and reared in Gentry, Arkansas, in the extreme northwest corner of the state, in 1929, on the brink of the Great Depression.

She got her own car and worked at that school for more than 20 years,” he said. “We stayed in the same house and she didn’t retire until the mortgage was paid off.”

In the early 20th century Gentry was known His mother, according to Dan Call, also for its orchards. After attending formal reconnected with her faith, attending services at schooling only through the fourth grade, Maywood Baptist Church in the Englewood according to Dan Call, his mother had served district of Independence. as an agricultural field worker, picking cotton and other crops with her siblings.

“My brother and I, we were going to church every It was in Kansas City, where she had moved Sunday and it wasn’t an option,” he said. to find work, where she had met and married Jack Call.

“Looking back now, I think some of the seeds can be found there for our future lives.”

After her husband’s death, she obtained her driver’s license. She also found a job in the Meanwhile, in the years following her 1963 cafeteria of what is now Nowlin Middle death, Cline’s legend continued to grow. By the School in Independence.

1980s the Call family found itself occupying an unexpected place in popular culture history.

"It was a minimum wage kind of job,” Dan Call said. “We did get a lot of help; people were Filmmakers examined the circumstances of very helpful to us.”

Cline’s death in two movies, “Coal Miner’s Still, he added, “It is a bit of a miracle that we Daughter,” released in 1980, and “Sweet Dreams,” which appeared in 1985. survived.”

The latter proved provocative regarding the Kansas City connections in Cline’s death. The film presents Cline, as portrayed by actor Jessica Lange, as a foul-mouthed singer in a troubled marriage.

“That’s right, I’m not here,” Lange, portraying Cline, yells at actor Ed Harris, portraying her husband Charlie Dick during an argument.

“I’m out singing in every house between here and Kansas City so you can wear $30 silk shirts.”

”Ann felt guilty because of Patsy Cline’s death,” Leonard Wilson, Ann’s husband, said during his wife’s 1993 interview in their Independence home.

Today aspects of his family’s 1963 tragedy are still difficult for him to articulate and understand - chief among them the exact date of his mother’s death at age 83.

“Well, you have a feeling for some one like that,” Ann Wilson had replied. “You just feel, if she hadn’t of been here she might have lived, and the rest of them, too.”

“My mom died on Jan. 25, 2013,” Dan Call said.

“With my mom passing 50 years later to the day of my father’s death – I don’t know how to put it into words,” he added.

It had gotten to Guy Smith, too.

“It almost has a sovereignty to it. It’s as if God was somehow in all of that, including my mother going back to the church.”

That didn’t reconcile with Ann Wilson’s memories of the singer she encountered in 1963.

“It still bothers me,” Smith had said two years before his 1995 death. “All we had been trying to do was raise money for Ann.”

“I’m not saying she wasn’t like that,” Wilson said 1993. “I’m just saying they didn’t show the beautiful Patsy Cline that I met.”

THE CLINE-CALL CONNECTION

Also in “Sweet Dreams” Cline is depicted as being annoyed about having to go to Kansas City for the Jack Call benefit concert.

“I don’t believe it,” Lange says. “I got recording sessions starting Friday night; I gotta go to Kansas City to do a benefit for that disc jockey that died last month….”

Charlie Dick, husband of Cline, disputed that perception in his own 1993 interview with The Star.

“The show was no problem,” he said. “It was just because she had been traveling so much. We’d had a pretty hot schedule. She had been in Vegas for 35 days running in December, 62.

“It wasn’t a case of her not wanting to be in Kansas City. She was just tired of being anywhere except home.”

Cline had arrived in Kansas City, Kan., at old Fairfax Airport, as a passenger in the fourseat private plane piloted by her manager, Randy Hughes.

Following the March 3 Memorial Hall concerts, foggy weather had prevented Cline and Hughes from leaving that Monday. On Tuesday, March 5, the plane carrying both of them, along with Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins, crashed near Camden, Tenn.

On March 7, Jack Anglin, a Grand Ole Opry veteran, died in a car accident on his way to attend Nashville memorial services.

“I didn’t want to hear anymore,” Ann Wilson said in 1993. “It was enough.”

After the plane crash, there was enough regret to go around.

His mother, Dan Call said recently, often declined media invitations to discuss her family’s connection to Cline.

___

This article first appeared in Flatland KC, the digital magazine of Kansas City PBS.

But he has often thought of it in the more than half-century since.

“Today, if you go online and look up the name ‘Patsy Cline,’ you see either the name ‘Jack Call’ or the words ‘disc jockey from Kansas City,” he said.

“So our families have been sort of forever connected.”

It’s possible, Call added, that Cline – who had survived her own car accident – felt uniquely connected to his family.

“No one really knows today what was in Patsy Cline’s heart when she came to Kansas City,” Call said.

“But, from what we can determine today – just from that one meeting and the kind words she’d had for us that day – we know she was a wonderful person who just wanted to help.”

Today both brothers believe their mother’s return to her faith influenced them in later years.

Don Call would serve as a minister to congregations in Bonner Springs and Eudora.

Dan Call would become an ordained minister in the Assembly of God church. He also would pursue a career in Christian higher education, earning master and doctorate degrees from the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary in Springfield, Missouri.

Today he directs the doctoral program and serves as a full-time professor at The King’s University, an evangelical college near Dallas and Fort Worth.

JCHS JOURNAL | 20

BY BEATRICE MORSE WASHBURN

Old Cars – and Memories Touring in 1910 Pierce Arrow To California Was Adventure

emergency. The car would make 40 miles per hour on a good level, but there was little grading on the roads which were mainly dirt, with a few stretches of gravel here and there through the towns.

After much planning, the great trip was under way the summer of 1910. My father and mother (Hiram B. and Olive Bell Morse), uncle and aunt, and her adopted nephew, Earl Rutt Morse, then about 12, comprised the party.

(I was in Los Angeles, at my Bell grandparents – having been sent there for the winter after a long and serious bout with typhoid fever the previous summer. And my little 3 ½ year old twin brothers, Lucius and Southwood, were left to follow on the train with the nurse.)

The hardy tourists packed their $400 worth of equipment; tent, cots, cook-stove and provisions, and made the trip as far as Olathe (some 38 miles) the first day. The camping routine proved a bit strenuous – pitching tent, finding firewood for the stove, begging water from a farmer, cooking, setting up cots – and then all the un-doing the next morning, not to mention having to throw out a forlorn stray kitten from each bed in turn!

The next day it began to rain incessantly, and the Kansas dirt roads became mud, all but impassable. More rain all night and the following day, now with mud up to the hubs. So they turned and drove back to Kansas City, put themselves and the car on a train for Dodge City in western Kansas, and made a fresh start “out where the West begins.”

This article first appeared in the JCHS Journal in August 1976

THE TOURING CAR Early in 1910, my father’s twin brother, Asahel U. Morse, who lived in Kansas City, bought a Pierce Arrow. He and Aunt Inez had long owned a horse and carriage and I was relieved at the change because the great “boulevard system” had been started in Kansas City, with paved streets; and on our afternoon drives (when we came to visit from St. Louis), the poor horse would slip on the paving and fall down two or three times, to my extreme childish consternation.

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The Pierce Arrow “touring car” was very elegant; folding canvas top, little halfdoors into the back seat (no doors in front), running boards and acetylene lamps, and an authoritative bulb-squeeze horn. Of course, it was hand-cranked, to turn over the motor for starting.

The twin brothers, farm boys from central Illinois, still possessed much of the adventurous pioneer spirit, and they began to talk of a motor trip to California.

In preparation, my uncle went to the Pierce Arrow factory, to “take apart a car and put it together again” so that he would be fully cognizant in any

DID YOU KNOW? The JCHS Journal started in 1959 and we are working to digitze all past issues and make them available online.

WWW.JCHS.ORG/JOURNAL

Roadways in the early days of car transportation, especially outside of urban areas were usually dirt roads. This car was stuck on a muddy road in Jackson County, circa 1920s. Photo courtesy of the Jackson County Historical Society.

By the Colorado line, the camping enthusiasm had waned, and they had decided to take their chances on any available accommodations en route, so at La Junta they packed up all the equipment and shipped it home.

They followed approximately the Old Santa Fe Trail – the road never far from the railroad – through Trinidad, Colo.; over Raton Pass; through Santa Fe and Albuquerque, N.M.; Flagstaff, Ariz.; and Needles, Calif.

The route was marked only with occasional red, white and blue stripes around telegraph poles; there were no road signs. But the navigator sat next to the driver with a finger constantly on a page of the wonderful “Blue Book.” These extraordinary volumes told you exactly how far to go and where to turn: “4.6 miles to cross-road; take left turn … 20.5 miles to water tower; take right fork … 2.7 miles to red barn…” etc. The navigator could not afford to nap!

As garages were only in the scattered towns (there were no filing stations), they carried three large cans on one running-board; red for gas, white for water and blue for oil – two spare tires on the other, and several African waterbags hanging on the back.

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They all wore “dusters” (long linen coats), the men wore caps and the women hats with crepe de chine veils tied under their chins.

While the men were attending to the car in the mornings at the town garage, the women were busy in the hotel room making sandwiches and lemonade, for they were never sure of finding a place to eat at noon and picnics were the order of the day.

Another problem with the lack of gas stations was the “comfort stop.” Wooded areas were fine, but prairies and deserts afforded little privacy, so when a stop was made, the word went out, “Gentlemen to the fore; ladies to the rear.”

Whenever they came to a city on the Santa Fe Railroad which boasted a Harvey House, they whooped for joy, for these famous western hostels were clean, well run, and the food served by the “Harvey Girls” was excellent.

However, air-conditioning was undreamed of in 1910, and even the best establishment could not guarantee comfort to its guests on a summer night in Needles, Calif. It was well over 100 degrees, and to make the night endurable they wrung out towels in cold water to spread over their bodies. And after days crossing the desert, their lips were dry and parched by all the dust.

After a visit in Los Angeles and San Francisco they set out along a northern route for home through Lake Tahoe (near Reno, Nev.), Salt Lake City, Utah, and south through Colorado.

The roads here, as everywhere, were atrocious – full of chuckholes, dusty when dry and slippery ooze when wet.

In wooded areas they often bumped for miles over “corduroy” roads, with logs or sometimes old railroad ties laid crosswise; or in desert areas drove over the arroyas on tracks of plank troughs, a rather nerve shattering business.

But with these, at least, you knew where the road was! It faded out one day in northwest Nevada, between Smoke Creek Desert and Black Rock Desert – the tracks in the sand becoming fainter and fainter, with no reassuring hands painted on these northern telegraph poles. Suddenly, the car slowed mysteriously, and the men jumped out to find the front wheels sunk to the hubs – quicksand! They all piled out, threw gunnysacks under the back wheels and backed for a mile before they dared turn around. They then retraced their way to the last town they had passed, Gerlach, Nev., a full 40 miles back, to ask their way.

he first car my own family had was a Detroit Electric, bought in 1913. It had big batteries fore and aft, solid rubber tires, and windows all around so that you felt as though you were on display like the treasures in the little gold cabinet in the living room.

(A Mrs. Ver Steeg had her electric painted a bright peacock blue, and she had a “duvetyn” suit made to match, so that the whole town recognized her as she glided about.)

All through the Southwest, Fred Harvey Hotels provided a new kind of brand experience, offering quality and consistency for travelers drawn to explore the region. (Photo by Rykoff Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

The word “motel,” much less the reality, had not come into being, and the best accommodations outside the cities were little western small-town hotels, primitive at best, with many outdoor privies.

But an all-time low was hit at Sulphur, Nev., where the proprietor had gone away for a week, leaving a young boy, his only employee, in charge. Dinner proved to be “slumgullion” (a kind of slippery oats and wheat cereal) and “sow-belly” – which greeted them also for breakfast! The sheets had obviously been used by former guests, so they slept in their clothes, and spread their handkerchiefs over the pillows.

And we think we have adventures!

It took us a day and a half to make the trip (which we now make in four hours on Interstate 70). Going east we would stay at Jonesburg, in a country hotel directly on the railroad tracks, where the little twin boys would beg for the front room so they could see the choo-choos and invariably sleep through all of them; and going west we would cut our first day a bit short in order to stay at the luxurious Hotel Frederick at Boonville.

The electric would go as long as the “juice” held out – the farthest point we ever made, on our Sunday afternoon drives, being Gumbo, a little town on the Missouri River, some 25 miles from our house. When we crept home, there was so little electricity left in the batteries that we’d all have to get out and push the car up the driveway. We had a charging set in our own garage, which was considered rather plush, so that each day we could start out with a lot of pep.

One night a short circuit developed in the set, and suddenly flames were leaping out of the garage.

As firemen saved the garage but not the electric, Mother sat at my back bedroom window sobbing, “The comfort of my life is gone!” Daddy got out of the streetcar on his way to the office next morning and bought her a new one.

The Colorado mountains were challenging.

The day going over Tennessee Pass it rained, and the one-track mountain road was treacherous. No one spoke for hours, and Aunt Inez wept the entire way. When they finally got down to Leadville, and old-timer remarked, “You come over thet pass today?

Yore plumb lucky! Thar ben eleven autymobiles go over the’ edge this year.”

Subsequently, in 1913, we children were taken on a couple of trips in the Pierce Arrow, between St. Louis and Kansas City, about 260 miles. We took pictures in front of the car which was blazoned with banners, “St. Louis to Kansas City or BUST!” The worst part of the road, I remember , was in the rocky, hilly section near Minneola; it gave the feeling of the car bumping down stone steps as it was eased from ledge to ledge of rock.

There was a cut-glass vase attached to the inside, and Mother always kept a rose in it.

The steering bar was long, and was manipulated with the right hand; the power bar was short and managed by the left.

This, of course, became automatic, but required much thought in the learning stage. On one of my early trips, attempting a left turn, I mistakenly pushed the power bar instead of the steering one, and, full speed ahead, ran into a lamppost, bending the front axle.

By 1916 my father had purchased a Stanely Steamer.

“It has only 17 moving parts,” he said.

“Therefore it stands to reason that it will be much simpler to keep in repair than an internal combustion machine (a gasoline car) which has nearly 1700 moving parts.

And as for speed – with steam, the sky is the limit!” Besides, it burned “coal oil” (kerosene) which was much less costly than gasoline.

Detroit Electric Automobiles Advertisement (1913) . Courtesy of the Public Domain.

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1912 Stanley Steamer Model M Touring Car. Courtesy of WorthPoint.com

So, with all five of us aboard, we started for the East Coast that summer. As long as the 17 moving parts moved, all was well, and we reached Maine, where my gourmet mother’s build-up of the gustatory delights of lobsters and steamed clams made converts of her three children.

But, alas! – In Damarisotta, a little seacoast town with a team of oxen drawing the loads of logs to the sawmill, one of the 17 parts balked, and no one for miles had ever seen a Stanley Steamer.

There we sat for five days waiting for a mechanic from Boston to repair our car.

Fortunately the tiny resort hotel served unbelievably good fricasseed chicken which was more to my father’s taste than seafood.

New England was fun, because every little village square had a stone water trough in the center for the horses. This meant for us no hunting for a clear stream, no requests for water from a farmer’s well. All we had to do was drive up to the trough, drop our suction hose and suck up water for our boiler, to the utter amazement of the villagers.

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At Boston, news of the dreadful first epidemic of “infantile paralysis” (polio) in New York convinced our parents that they should not take us three children into the area. So they decided to ship us and the car by boat from Boston to Norfolk, Virginia. (I shall always remember the boatload of watermelons with little Negro boys sitting on top, in the Norfolk harbor.)

One harrowing experience on the way home was on the slippery, rain-soaked, black dirt road leading to Forsyth, Ill., near Decatur, the site of my father’s boyhood farm. The road was high crowned for drainage. We skidded and landed in a deep ditch, unharmed but shaken. During the sickening slide, my mother kept exclaiming, “Oh, God! Oh, God!”

Now, Virginia posed another problem. In those days, I am convinced, there was nary a culvert in the city. Any stream that wasn’t really a river was not bridged, but forded.

And The water would invariably splash up and put out the Steamer’s pilot light which activated the burners. In a mile or so we’d be as unequivocally stopped dead as is a modern car out of gas. But no walking to the next service station (had there been one!). Father would crawl under the car and relight the pilot. Mother would sit tensely wringing her hands and murmuring, “It’ll blind him!” because once the burners had flashed on and singed his eyebrows.

Back on the road (with the aid of a farmer’s team), I reproved her, “Mother you were swearing! Aren’t you ashamed?” Mother eyed me coldly, “Swearing?! My child, I was PRAYING!”

BY MICHAEL WELLS

From Jitneys to Lyft Kansas City’s Transportation Hang-Ups

were left to wait in the cold as the motor bus merged back into rush-hour traffic.

In the early 1900s, most would have recognized this scene as the latest transportation fad to hit Kansas City: the jitney. Jitneys became the talk of the town. Many Kansas Citians may have even wondered if perhaps it was time they tried it for themselves.

On the evening of January 18, 1915, the Kansas City Star reported that the city’s first jitney bus had started operating in the city. Jitneys were privately owned early automobiles whose owners accepted set fares to transport people along an established route. The name was taken from a slang term for a nickel, the usual fare charged by the drivers for a ride. Noting a very similar visual identification tool to that used by Lyft drivers of today, a writer for the Kansas City Star described the first of many jitneys to come: A five-passenger Ford motor car bearing a big “5” on the radiator, indicating the fare, was the beginning this morning of Kansas City’s innovation in transportation, the “jitney,” one W. H. Miller, owner and driver of the car, smiled and collected the nickels as he ran back and forth over his route between Twelfth Street and Benton Boulevard, and Eleventh Street and Grand Avenue, at the rate of three round trips an hour.

A JITNEY BUS ON THE UNION STATION LINE, 1914

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN JUNE 2015 IN THE ONLINE MAGAZINE SQUEEZEBOX CITY.

A HULKING MODEL T BUS A mass of downtown workers huddled together at the corner of 8th Street and Grand Boulevard, coat collars upturned against the January chill, attention focused to the north in search of a streetcar that would eventually arrive to take them home. The evening sun had all but faded, taking what little warmth it offered as a few in the group grumbled that the drivers on this line always seemed to run late. Others

chatted, voicing their fear that the car would be full to capacity by the time it reached them.

Most hoped that one of the straps dangling from the roof would be free, or simply for space enough to stand with a little breathing room. All just wanted to get home.

Suddenly, a hulking Model T bus came to a rickety stop about half a block to the south. Several began to break away from the crowd one by one, each digging deep into pockets and purses for coins and calling out to the vehicle’s driver. The first to arrive coin in hand were permitted to climb aboard, those who lagged behind

KANSAS CITY STAR. JANUARY 19, 1915, P.2

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Berry Map Company. 1914 Map of Greater Kansas City. Kansas City, Missouri, 1914. (W. H. Miller’s jitney route is highlighted just north of the 12th Street streetcar line)

Miller’s route was in no way a matter of happenstance. Rather, he was simply trolling where willing passengers could easily be found – that is to say, along an established and popular streetcar line. In 1915 the 12th Street line traveled from Jackson Avenue in the east, through downtown, and eventually wound up in the West Bottoms before making a return trip. Miller, by circling 12th Street between Benton Boulevard and Grand Avenue, had simply claimed the line’s middle portion for his own.

I am a young woman living near Armour Boulevard and Main Street and I work in a manufacturing plant near Sheffield. It’s a long, tedious trip to work and back by streetcar. If I purchased an inexpensive 5passenger motor car could I make it pay its own running expenses in taking me back and forth to work by this process? I would be going and coming in the rush hours and I believe I could pick up eighty cents a day in this manner, at the same time solving my transportation problem.

A “jitney invasion” swept over Kansas City early that year. Many residents were so enamored with the new transit option that jitneys began to be viewed as the reasonable replacement for Kansas City’s crowded streetcar lines. Many Kansas Citians responded to the excitement by becoming jitney operators themselves. A young woman described her circumstances to the editors of the Kansas City Star and asked to be advised as to whether or not it would be profitable to operate a jitney bus of her own:

The paper responded the next day by publishing an account of one female driver that had already found no shortage of patronage since beginning her business venture:

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…they pile into the seats as soon as I get to the station and they would climb up on top, sit on the hood and perch on the running boards if I would let them…I wanted to help my husband and I think I have a perfect right to do it. We are young and if I can help and we can get a start early in life I think it’s the thing to do. I have driven a car for four years, and if I do say it myself, I am considered a good driver.

Kansas City Star. January 25, 1915, p. 19

The new fad was so pervasive that a national convention of jitney drivers was held in Kansas City in May of 1915. The fledgling automobile industry pounced upon the opportunity to boost sales and sent representatives to promote everything from tires to headlamps. Despite all the gaiety and sense of economic empowerment caused by the jitney boom, convention organizers made sure to set aside time to discuss the wave of backlash from municipal and transit authorities that was sure to come.

jitney boom. The longstanding nature of the problems affecting the Metropolitan is evidenced by the gargantuan size of its estimated 5.5 million dollar amassed debt at the time of its entrance into receivership proceedings.

While the profitability of operating a private jitney was nearly wiped away as a result of the city’s 1919 ordinance, the arrival of reasonably priced cars on the market made the prospect of owning and commuting by individually owned automobile a viable option for many by the early 1920s. Another challenge to the streetcars arrived in 1924 when the Kansas Cities Motor Coach Company began carrying passengers between downtown Kansas City, Kan., and Union Station on the Missouri side of the state line via motor bus. The streetcar interests fought the new buses with the very ordinance they had used to shut down the jitney drivers – and once again prevailed. The Motor Coach Company ceased operations later that same year. By this time, however, the streetcar interests had become convinced that motorized vehicles were indeed the wave of the future and on New Year’s Day in 1925 Kansas City Railways began operating six of its own buses, thereby mapping out the future of public transportation in the area.

Kansas City Star. March 1, 1915, p. 1

The new law established fixed jitney routes set safely away from streetcar lines, limited the number of drivers that could operate upon a route at any one time, developed a city licensing system for drivers, and provided a salary for a jitney inspector charged with insuring that jitney buses met a strict set of safety standards. The death nail for the jitneys, however, proved to be a provision of the law requiring each driver to contribute $2,500 to a bond fund established to settle accident claims made by jitney riders involved in motor accidents. On the morning of September 4, 1919, the Kansas City Times reported passage of the new law with the simple headline “The Monopoly Wins.” And win they did. While some of the jitney drivers attempted to continue on in accordance with the city’s strict regulations, the fact was that the jitneys had quite simply been legislated out of business and Kansas Citians returned to the streetcars.

Despite the fare hike, the Metropolitan Street Railway Company entered financial receivership in 1920. Of course, the entirety of the blame for the decline in streetcar usage amongst Kansas Citians at that time cannot be placed solely at the feet of the jitney drivers and their passengers. To be sure, allegations that operators of the Metropolitan sought to squeeze every cent possible out of a populace with few transportation options while constantly degrading its level of surface predated the

As the prospect of automobile ownership soared during the country’s post-war economy, streetcar ridership in the city plummeted. The Kansas City Public Service Company continued to operate its lines until 1957 when its many miles of tracks were ripped up and paved over during a slew of federally backed urban renewal projects.

Today, aside from the occasional bit of track protruding from the asphalt or tales of the old 8th Street Tunnel, little evidence of the city’s once vast streetcar network remains.

Fast-forward nearly a century later and it is clear that Kansas City continues to be hung-up on the issue of transportation. When the KC Streetcar project was approved by voters in 2012 to transform Main Street as we know it today, city leaders were already scrambling to secure extensions to the 2 mile starter line before construction had even begun. Critics of the project cite the high cost of streetcar projects in similar cities, an unproven association with increased development, poor planning, and an undue tax burden placed at the feet of downtown property owners, many of which do not reside in the special streetcar taxing district and therefore were not permitted to vote on the ballot measure that made the project a reality. Further, they add that the public’s transportation needs have

“Bean Branch” in downtown KC. This line branched off the old KCS main down near the river and went up a very steep hill to reach a coffee bean distributor.”–Image and caption courtesy of the Akron Railroad Club

already been met by the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority’s extensive network of bus lines. Supporters of the project, on the other hand, do not agree with their bleak assessment and maintain that buses simply lack the urban mystique likely to attract millennials to live and work downtown.

Additionally, the ride-share company Lyft began its Kansas City operations in the spring of 2014.

For those unfamiliar with its services, Lyft connects vehicle owners with passengers in need of a ride. Drivers are summoned using the company’s smartphone app, where users can read vehicle descriptions and reviews of drivers and passengers alike before making any commitments. Rather than charging a traditional metered or set fare, as with a taxi or other livery car services, Lyft sets a “suggested donation” payable to the driver. Drivers must have the vehicles inspected by a Lyft representative, pass a background screening, be appropriately insured, and echoing back to the large 5 prominently displayed by many jitney drivers, display a large pink fur mustache upon the grill of their vehicles before accepting riders. In addition to added income, Lyft drivers describe a feeling of empowerment gained through meeting new people and through their participation in the so-called peer-to-peer economy, another similarity to their early 20th century counterparts.

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Lyft appeared to be off and running and the buzz generated by the pink mustachioed cars zipping around town showed little sign of slowing. Yet, mirroring the response to the jitney craze, many public and business officials have called for Lyft to apply the brakes. Representatives from the Kansas City Transportation Group – operators of Yellow Cab, Who’s Driving You? – a national organization whose aim is to raise awareness of safety concerns associated with ride-share services, and the City Council were all quick

The trademark pink mustache, courtesy of KCUR

to condemn Lyft’s business model. Each has asserted that the service represents a public threat due to the fact that it enables its drivers to sidestep the public regulation, oversight, and operating fees other Kansas City-based taxi and livery companies must navigate in order to legally operate. Mayor Sly James himself, often noted for his staunch support of innovation and fresh business models, has spoken out against Lyft for its operating practices. In a blog posted to the city’s website, Mayor James called Lyft to task for not contacting city officials until the very day its drivers began picking up riders and for failing to comply with established taxi and livery service ordinances.

Actions quickly followed. In early May the City Council acted to close a legal loophole that allowed Lyft drivers to operate in the city with impunity and filed a motion in a U.S. District Court to halt its operation. At the same time police officers began issuing citations to Lyft drivers, their large pink fur mustaches making them easy prey. Lyft was handed a temporary victory in early July when a federal judge overseeing the city’s lawsuit ruled that the company’s drivers could continue to operate until the matter is settled at trial.

While ride-share services may represent a very real threat to the city’s taxi companies,

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axi drivers themselves often feel very differently about the public discussion and controversy Lyft has helped generate. In 2012 the Kansas City Taxi Cab Drivers Association, a group of over 200 area taxi drivers, filed a lawsuit in federal court against the municipal government of Kansas City in reaction to its taxi cab licensing practices. According to the lawsuit, the Kansas City government issues only a very small number of taxi cab licenses each year and exclusively grants them to just nine private companies. Under this system, independent drivers must lease a license from one of these companies in order to operate, all the while paying out of pocket to maintain their privately owned vehicles. The group of drivers claimed that the leasing fees, paid on a daily basis directly to the taxi companies, nearly eliminate their ability to earn a living and force many drivers to live below the poverty line. In the end the court sided with the city and the taxi licensing structure was kept in place. However, many of these same drivers must have been elated when Lyft landed in Kansas City in 2014 and at least temporarily made it possible for them to sidestep the current fee structure.

City officials of today maintain that ride-share services should be allowed to function so long as controlling companies and their drivers submit to appropriate regulation, a mandate that has effectively been used to eliminate transportation options for Kansas Citians on more than one occasion. Interestingly, language similar to that used in the past to disparage Kansas City streetcar interests has entered the arguments of Lyft supporters. In an opinion piece posted to The Kansas City Star website, Steve Rose has called for the breakup of the Kansas City taxicab monopoly.

Rose reached out to Uber, another ride-share service based out of San Francisco, to ask when the company planned to enter the Kansas City market. Their response was not hopeful. At that time Uber was in no hurry to confront what they labeled as Kansas City’s entrenched and municipally protected taxi monopoly. Rose concludes his piece by stating that Kansas City should be encouraging new business models to grow and that the healthy competition brought about by these companies will only encourage taxicab providers to improve their level of service.

Whether inspired by Rose’s urging or perhaps sensing that the climate for ride-share services in the city would soon change, Uber began operating in spectacular fashion in early May when Kansas City Chiefs running back sensation, Jamaal Charles, used the Uber app to arrange for a ride. City officials were reportedly “not amused” by the stunt.

Kansas Citians rally to keep Uber ride-sharing alive in the city, KCUR

The city council acted in early April, 2015, and with the support of Mayor James, passed a new ordinance that brings ride-share services under the same regulatory framework that governs the taxi industry in the city. Lyft officials, still hoping to reach a mutually beneficial arrangement with the city, were all but silent.

Uber, on the other hand, spoke out immediately, declaring that the new regulations and fees may force them to abandon Kansas City entirely. It is true that ride-share services left to govern themselves may represent a very real threat to public safety. If this is the case, then the recent actions by the city council and the mayor will be regarded as just given time.

However, if the goal of these new regulations is to insulate taxi companies from legitimate competition, as the jitney laws of the early twentieth century seem to have done for the financially strapped streetcar system, then how will their actions be remembered?

And how will the KC Streetcar project be received once it becomes fully operational in 2016? The answer to this question will depend largely upon whether the many misgivings of its critics are dispelled or confirmed over time. To many, it must seem that the city’s ride-share services, taxis, buses and streetcar system to come are headed for a confrontation. It is important, however, to remember that this fight is not one that will likely be taken up by average citizens. Much like their early 20th century counterparts, Kansas Citians of today are seeking the most affordable and convenient way to get where they need to go. Surely a greater number of options made available can only make it easier for each individual to find what works best. Rather, it will be for public officials and vested interests to fight over which option is outdated and which looks to the future, which represents a threat to the public and which is deemed safe. Time will tell which flourishes — and which may be legislated into extinction in Kansas City.

BY BRIAN BURNES

Jackson County Celebrates Missouri Bicentennial The state of Missouri was founded on August 10, 1821

such as his timepiece and a copy of his autobiography – and ponder his role in the Border War-Civil War era, when Younger rode with Missouri bushwhackers raiding eastern Kansas. Museum officials, meanwhile, will hope to see past museum patrons and also meet new ones.

“We see the bicentennial as an opportunity to introduce community members who probably have not been to the museum before,” said Fred Grogan, board chair of the Lee’s Summit Historical Society, which operates the museum.

Historical societies, nonprofit groups and civic organizations across Jackson County have begun observing Missouri’s 1821 entrance into the Union.

While acknowledging the historical anniversary, they also have been making the moment their own - which is what statewide organizers had hoped would happen. The bicentennial celebration is accordingly large, with events and programs planned in all 114 of the state’s counties. The challenge faced by bicentennial planners has been how to make that large event local.

“As a matter of philosophy, we knew we wanted to do something that was truly state-wide,” Michael Sweeney, bicentennial coordinator with the State Historical Society of Missouri, said recently.

“But how do you do that in a state that is, for lack of a better phrase, fairly fragmented? There is the urban-rural divide but, even beyond that, my friends down in the Missouri Bootheel often identify far more with Tennessee and Arkansas.”

In response, organizers across the state – including Jackson County - have planned a long list of events, programs and initiatives. Many, reasonably enough, will include ice cream, given that the bicentennial falls on a Tuesday in August.

FRED GROGAN, LEE’S SUMMIT HISTORICAL SOCIETY BOARD CHAIR, WILL HELP WELCOME GUESTS AT THE ORGANIZATION’S HISTORY MUSEUM DURING THE CITY’S AUGUST 10 BICENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. THE MUSEUM INCLUDES INFORMATION ON COLE YOUNGER AND HIS ACTIVITIES DURING THE CIVIL WAR ERA IN WESTERN MISSOURI.

COME FOR THE ICE CREAM – STAY FOR THE COLE YOUNGER EXHIBIT. Younger, perhaps Lee’s Summit’s most familiar historical figure, is scheduled to be front-and-center during the community’s observance of the Missouri bicentennial on August 10.

A main event on that day, in both Lee’s Summit and across the state, will be ice cream socials. In Lee’s Summit, those lined up for ice cream in the 200 block of SW Main St. also will have the option of free admission to the nearby Lee’s Summit History Museum.

In Lee’s Summit, the ice cream social begins at 5 p.m., just outside the history museum. In 2015 the community’s historical society moved its museum into its new home, a former Lee’s Summit post office built in the late 1930s. Every year since 2015, Grogan said, museum attendance had increased about 20 percent.

“And then COVID-19 hit,” he said. “We had very little attendance during 2020. “We are just now getting back in stride.”

There, visitors will be able to inspect artifacts involving Younger

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The answer was to ask individual communities to come up with their own proposals that showcased individual regions or communities, but also spoke to the larger Missouri legacy.

“We wanted to see some level of local control, but how is that done without being parochial?” said Sweeney. “If you emphasize the local too much, you end up with 100 different things with no unifying theme.”

In Independence, the bicentennial also has allowed the Puppetry Arts Institute to reengage the community following the pandemic. The institute, which offers student workshops in the Englewood district of Independence, resumed operations in May. “We went about a year without any shows, any workshops,” said Kraig Kensinger, institute artistic director.

But this summer Kensinger and his institute colleagues have been celebrating their

On September 11 Raytown residents will celebrate the bicentennial by hosting the Festival of the Trails, which also observes the 200th anniversary of the Santa Fe Trail. The RiceTremonti Home that day will feature a petting zoo and blacksmithing demonstrations.

Kraig Kensinger, artistic director of the Puppetry Arts Institute of Independence – joined here by a Harry S. Truman marionette – in August will help present a bicentennial historical revue for families at the National Frontier Trails Museum

“Missouri Birthday Bash.” That includes a bicentennial museum display at its location at 11025 E. Winner Road, and – on August 7, 13 and 14 – a free revue offered at the National Frontier Trails Museum, 318 W. Pacific Ave. A Harry S. Truman marionette will serve as master of ceremonies for a family-friendly program that will incorporate several Missouri cultural symbols, among them the Missouri mule.

Kensinger believes the institute’s lighthearted presentation sits nicely alongside more weighty bicentennial lectures or symposium focusing on the state’s complicated path to statehood. He also considers the support the institute has received from a variety of funding sources, among them the Missouri Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as evidence of that.

“I personally think we are one of the most unique bicentennial programs,” Kensinger said. “A lot of the bicentennial observance is made up of talks, lectures and slideshows.

But we were one of the few groups presenting a program that people of all ages could enjoy.”

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In Raytown, the bicentennial observance will be held just over a month later, with the celebration of another 200th birthday, that of the Santa Fe Trail. Raytown’s Festival of the Trails, scheduled September 11, is being planned by several community organizations, among them the Cave Spring Association, the Raytown Historical Society, and the Raytown Area Chamber of Commerce & Tourism.

At the Rice-Tremonti Home, 8801 E. 66th St., guests on September 11 will find musicians, a petting zoo and blacksmithing demonstrations- a tribute to William Ray, the blacksmith for whom the community is named. “I always felt that we needed to do something for the bicentennial and I’m delighted that the other groups felt the same way,” said Leigh Elmore, president of the Friends of the Rice-Tremonti Home Association. “The whole trail awareness in Raytown has really come a long way.”

BUBBLING UP FROM BELOW Part of the challenge facing organizers of the state-wide bicentennial observance has been to gently remind Missouri residents that they share a common statewide legacy.

That can be challenging, given that anything that smacks of an official directive from Jefferson City can play poorly among some residents, Sweeney said. That became clear during focus group discussions years ago, he added.

“There was the sentiment that ‘I don’t need the state to come down here and tell me how to do the bicentennial,’" Sweeney said.

In response, Sweeney and his colleagues came up with what they called “Community Engagement” projects. One example was the Missouri quilt initiative. The State Historical Society of Missouri worked with area quilting organizations to talk up a state bicentennial quilt, asking that quilters submit proposed blocks – small squares of fabric – that conveyed some sense of their home county’s history, life or culture. Submissions arrived from across the state and since the quilt’s completion, Sweeney has helped display it in counties across Missouri.

In July he brought the quilt to the Courtyard Community Center in Plattsburg, in Clinton County, north of Kansas City. There Sweeney watched as local quilters first examined the block representing Clinton County – and then stepped back to take in the entire quilt, and consider their own county’s block in context of all the others.

“So, that kind of moment happened,” Sweeney said.

The same logic was at work behind the planning of another community engagement project, the “My Missouri 2021 Photo Project,” which Sweeney said was inspired in part by the nowubiquitous cell-phone camera.

“We got 998 photographs from more than 300 contributors in 97 different counties,” Sweeney said.

Visitors to the state bicentennial website (missouri2021.org) can see all of the submissions. But bicentennial officials selected 200 images to present in a formal exhibit.

Visitors to the Midwest Genealogy Center in Independence could examine the photo exhibit this past July. Rather than arrange the photos by region, exhibit organizers instead presented them by season. Winter snow, the images suggested, looked pretty much the same in northern Missouri as it did in southwestern Missouri.

“The project was an opportunity to connect pieces together that you might not have connected before,” Sweeney said.

Sweeney especially prized the wisdom of inviting ideas and programs to bubble up from below rather than imposing suggestions from above. One example is a photo exhibit on display this summer at Lee’s Summit City Hall, 220 SE Green St.

Visitors to the bicentennial commission website, can find reports detailing the Ozarks Genealogical Society of Springfield, the Madonna of the Trail sculpture, a monument to women of the 19th century westward migration unveiled in Lexington in 1928; and the 74-foot tall “Big Tree” of McBaine, Mo., near Columbia, considered to be the largest bur oak in the state.

Sweeney himself prepared a report about Kansas City’s annual Juneteenth celebration, which commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. For the report, he went back to the observance’s origins in Kansas City, interviewing Makeda Peterson, whose late father, Horace Peterson III, founder of the Black Archives of Mid-America, Inc., organized Kansas City’s initial Juneteenth celebration in 1980.

“The report included how the wanted to see the celebration in Sweeney said. This past June, Sweeney completed his survey, became a federal holiday.

organizers five years,” well after Juneteenth

“Since then, we have endorsed more than 225 projects and programs,” Sweeney said.

If Sweeney expects a criticism to come of the bicentennial observance, it may be how some residents missed a stadium-sized historical spectacular. The “KC150” celebration of Kansas City’s 150th anniversary in 2000 was climaxed by an Arrowhead Stadium pageant that included a flyover of vintage military aircraft, a 1,000-voice choir, remarks by longtime network news anchor (and one-time Kansas City journalist) Walter Cronkite and songs delivered by entertainers Kenny Rogers, Oleta Adams and Little Richard.

But Sweeney believes the money and time invested in supporting and showcasing local community events and programs will prove the more rewarding investment. Residents of communities across the state, he said, routinely have thanked him for coming to see them.

Another Lee’s Summit bicentennial event is a photo exhibit on display at Lee’s Summit City Hall.

One display case features this view of Longview Farm alongside examples of antique cameras.

In mid-July visitors could inspect photographs, exhibited on lobby walls as well as inside display cases, that illustrated life across Lee’s Summit and the state. Some photos depicted the community’s annual Downtown Days celebration; others featured views that immediately signaled their location, such as a view of Longview Farm.

A local artists’ group, Summit Art, supplied the images at the city’s invitation, said Glenda Masters, Lee’s Summit cultural arts manager.

“We had an opportunity to use our calendar to help tie into the bicentennial,” Masters said. “And so I approached them and said ‘Hey, I have this window. Why don’t we work together and create an exhibit?’

“It was a collaboration. Our role as the city was to create the space.”

One of the first projects to receive this endorsement was the Jackson County Historical Society’s ongoing project to process, catalog and digitize the Wilborn Photography Collection. In 2017 the society received the collection as a donation from supporters Steve and Marianne Noll. The approximately 300,000 Wilborn images dating from 1921 through 2007 is considered among the largest collections of historic photographs of the Kansas City region.

“The over-arching message I heard as I did this was ‘No one knows who are are,’ or ‘We are always forgotten about.’ You want to know something that unites Missourians? It’s that.”

But, Sweeney added, that oft-heard sentiment tells him something. “I think that suggests how so many of the bicentennial programs have worked, given the desire that folks have to tell us about their own communities.”

COMMUNITY LEGACIES

Erin Gray, Digital Archivist for the Jackson County Historical Society is dedicated to processing, scanning, and making the Wilborn Collection available to the public online.

Two other statewide bicentennial initiatives have been represented in Jackson County.

The goal of the bicentennial “Community Legacies” program was to showcase Missouri traditions, places and organizations while also building enduring resources for students, teachers and others.

Still another initiative was an endorsement program, through which bicentennial organizers could spotlight various projects, programs and events that represented the state’s bicentennial mission, which is to promote a better understanding of Missouri and its regions, communities and people.

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BY DAVID W. JACKSON

Building Chanute’s Bridge

imagining of the future prospects of the frontier community at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas rivers. I’ve long believed the significance of what first was called “The Kansas City Bridge” has been routinely undervalued. Not only did the bridge make the growth of Kansas City almost inevitable, its legacy now includes more than 150 years of events pivotal not only to Kansas City but the country. David McCullough, who spent 10 years preparing his 1992 Pulitzer Prizewinning biography of Harry Truman, seemed to share this sentiment.

“I cannot think of another landscape of similar size that has had so much American history as Jackson County, Missouri,” McCullough said after completing his book. Little of that history would have happened without the Hannibal Bridge.

An estimated 30,000 people on July 3, 1869 attended the Kansas City dedication ceremonies of the Hannibal Bridge, the first permanent span over the Missouri River. An engraving of this photograph appeared just over a month later in “Harper’s Weekly,“ a national periodical.

As a historian, I am drawn to Kansas City and Jackson County’s origin stories. And, the building and opening of the Hannibal Bridge may be Kansas City’s ultimate origin story. Officials dedicated the span the first permanent bridge across the Missouri River - on July 3, 1869.

Less than two months earlier, boosters at Promontory Summit in Utah Territory celebrated the driving of a final, golden, spike, joining together the Central Pacific Railroad from Sacramento and the Union Pacific Railroad from Omaha.

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The moment represented – at least to its champions at the time – the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in America. But, they were somewhat premature. I believe the completion of the Hannibal Bridge – connecting Kansas City and the territory to its west to Chicago and points east - to be more the transformative event. A permanent bridge spanning the Missouri River at Omaha, Nebraska, and Council Bluffs, Iowa, it should be noted, would not open until four years later in 1873.

The Hannibal Bridge, meanwhile, truly linked two vast sections of the country and – not incidentally –prompted the re-

The Hannibal Bridge made possible a railroad connection between Kansas City and Chicago and points east. The first steam locomotive to cross the bridge after its 1869 completion was the “Marlboro.”

WROUGHT AND CAST IRON The politics involved in securing the bridge for Kansas City are familiar and have been told before, most notably in “Kansas City and the Railroads: Community Policy in the Growth of a Regional Metropolis,” first published in 1962 by historian Charles N. Glaab. That book details the nation’s emerging rail infrastructure and the intense competition among several mid19th century Missouri River trading centers whose leaders competed for the bridge project.

By the late 1850s, area boosters had built a rail line from the northern bank of the Missouri River at Kansas City 54 miles north to Cameron, where it linked up with the Hannibal & St. Joseph railroad. That line soon would offer northern Missouri communities access to Chicago.

BY THEN THE BATTLE WAS ON

BRIDGES TO THE PAST AND FUTURE

Officials representing Leavenworth and Atchison in Kansas and St. Joseph in Missouri competed with their Kansas City counterparts, knowing a bridge across the Missouri River could bring the nation’s bounty through their communities.

Ultimately the Kansas City boosters won congressional approval for the project. The bridge’s completion in 1869 contributed to the growth of a meatpacking district that soon became Kansas City’s dominant industry, processing the cattle being driven from Texas into southern Kansas, where rail lines had been built to ship them a short distance northeast. The city’s population of perhaps 4,000 in 1865 grew to 32,000 by 1870. Kansas City’s Union Depot, built in the West Bottoms in 1878, became one of the busiest in the country.

But how was the bridge actually built?

The two volumes I’ve recently published, Engineered Irony: Crossing Octave Chanute’s Kansas City Bridge for Trains and Teams, 1867-1917, focus on the bridge’s construction and its nearly 50-year lifespan.

The first volume includes the 1870 report, ‘The Kansas City Bridge,’ submitted by engineers Octave Chanute and George Morison. It includes chapters devoted to the bridge’s foundations, masonry and superstructure. The volume also includes a new Chanute biography prepared by area expert Bill Nicks, and a separate essay focusing on the Kansas City bridge’s importance to engineering in the mid-19th century, written by area engineer and past Jackson County Historical Society Board member Brian Snyder.

The second volume includes my work over the last 10 years investigating the bridge’s construction, including revisiting in great detail the 1869 opening and dedication ceremonies.

Volume two also includes a roster of employees that I compiled from original railroad records archived at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Nearly 1,500 individual laborers and contractors were involved on the project between 1867 and 1869. Most were transient workers who appear to have followed the railroads. I also re-discovered and pay tribute to a handful of workers who died building the bridge (plus, one who met his death during its deconstruction in 1917).

I’m very proud of the comprehensive bibliography of just about every source I could find on the bridge, as well as a comprehensive gallery of every image of the bridge over its lifespan.

Among the approximately 1,500 workers employed on the bridge’s construction were several divers who submerged themselves in the Missouri River current to affix one of the bridge piers to bedrock well below the water surface.

This colorized engraving of a photograph taken in March, 1869 later appeared in “Leslie’s Weekly,” a national publication.

Chanute, who moved to Kansas City with his family from Chicago in 1867, designed the bridge to be built with wrought iron and cast iron. The work started with the construction of seven piers. Workers used caissons, large watertight oak enclosures that were lowered slowly into the riverbed.

There the laborers toiled, removing sand to reveal the rock below. Workers then poured concrete to form a foundation and then – on top of that – placed locally quarried limestone.

One aspect that also interested me during my research was how primary documents and other historic materials related to the bridge are scattered in different institutions across Kansas City and the Midwest. The complete story of the Hannibal Bridge – arguably the most significant event in Kansas City history – cannot be found at just one institution. I wanted this 150th commemorative edition to consolidate for the first time, heretofore longlost data about the building of the Hannibal Bridge. I found crucial materials at several area locations, such as the Kansas City Public Library and the Kansas City Museum.

On the campus of the University of MissouriKansas City, I found materials both at the State Historical Society of Missouri–Kansas City Research Center as well as in the LaBudde Special Collections department in Miller Nichols Library. I found still more information at the Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas, the Kansas Historical Society in Topeka, and even the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis.

After completing the Kansas City bridge, Chanute enjoyed a long career. He designed the Kansas City stockyards and platted the Kansas City area suburb of Lenexa. In later years, his research into elevated railroads contributed to the New York City rapid transit system. A longtime aviation enthusiast, in 1894 Chanute published “Progress in Flying Machines,” which influenced the work of flight innovators Orville and Wilbur Wright, with whom Chanute worked. Chanute died at age 78 in 1910.

This image, taken from the Missouri River’s south bank, captures the bridge under construction, with workers standing on the span and the steamboat Gipsey, which played a role in the project, passing through.

His Kansas City bridge would stand for almost 50 years, before being replaced by the Second Hannibal Bridge in 1917. That bridge still stands. Today it serves as a railroad crossing just east of the John Jordan “Buck” O’Neil Memorial Bridge, formerly known as the Broadway Bridge. That triple-arch bridge carrying U.S. Highway 69 across the Missouri River and connecting downtown Kansas City to Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport and many points north - was completed in 1956.

In 2016, area leaders renamed the span for Buck O’Neil, the beloved player and manager of the Negro Leagues’ Kansas City Monarchs.A new $220 million replacement Buck O’Neil bridge is expected to be completed by 2024.

It, like the original Hannibal Bridge, will make possible future events and careers that may continue keep Kansas City ‘on track’ with our nation’s history.

Consider that if the Hannibal Bridge had not been constructed in Kansas City, another town upriver might have become the “Heart of America.” Without that bridge, we wouldn’t have had, for instance, a garment district that rivaled that of New York City, when one of every seven ladies’ dresses and coats was

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The Hannibal Bridge around 1908 from postcard, shown after its reconstruction due to severe structural damage.

“Made in Kansas City.” But with the bridge, our historic meatpacking industry arguably would become just as consequential as Chicago’s, our parks and boulevard system would be emulated across the country, and the Pendergast political machine that would dominate early 20th century also would produce Harry Truman, the country’s 33rd president.

Any one of Kansas City’s origin stories and the countless people who have come and gone . . . through our challenges and triumphs . . . are worthy of documenting as I have done in Engineered Irony.

Let’s continue to bridge those connections like Octave Chanute did 150 years ago. The train is leaving the depot. Tickets! Tickets!

Kansas City without the Hannibal Bridge may never have claimed one-time or fulltime Kansas City area residents who became American originals like animator Walt Disney and his famous mouse, Mickey; actors Jean Harlow, Ginger Rogers, Joan Crawford, William Powell, even Ed Asner, Don Cheadle, and Ellie Kemper; jazz musicians Jay McShann, Charlie “Bird” Parker, and William “Count “ Basie; artist Thomas Hart Benton; greeting card innovator Joyce Hall; sports entrepreneurs Ewing Kauffman and Lamar Hunt; and athletes George Brett and Leroy “Satchel” Paige.

Author David W. Jackson, former Jackson County Historical Society archivist, published the two volumes of “Engineered Irony” to observe the recent 150th anniversary of the bridge’s 1869 completion.

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BY BRIAN BURNES

Veterans Oral History Project

The Jackson County Historical Society, meanwhile, served as a “partner archive” of the Veterans History Project. Today Swanson’s interviews, housed in the Society archives in Independence, represent perhaps the largest collection of World War II oral histories in the country, according to Swanson.

“The thing that I am most proud of is that today we have the greatest collection of World War II stories in one particular city,” Swanson said.

“New York doesn’t have Philadelphia doesn’t.”

what

we

have.

That would be newsworthy enough for Veterans Day, November 11. However, the Kansas City Public Library, over the past year, has been working on a project that will make these recordings easier to access online, and also provide transcripts of the individual stories.

That project could be complete by next summer.

That the collection exists at all is due largely to one tireless volunteer – Gary Swanson of Leawood.

NOT BRAGGING Swanson’s project began almost by accident.

“At the time I was a retired IBM executive and I had time on my hands,” Swanson said. “I wanted to do something that I thought was meaningful.”

Swanson wasn’t a veteran – at least not in his own mind. Swanson did serve, he said, a stint in the U.S. Navy Reserve.

“I had a uniform on at one time,” he said. “But I don’t claim to be a veteran.”

The Jackson County Historical Society maintains its Veterans History Project interviews at its archives in Independence.

STORIES SAVED, TALES TRANSCRIBED More than 16 million Americans served during World War II. Over the course of 10 years, Gary Swanson sat down with more than 1,000 of them. “Every one of them had a story to tell,” he said recently.

Evidence of that can be found today in the Truman Courthouse in Independence.

In 2000 the Library of Congress, through its American Folklife Center in Washington, sponsored the national Veterans History Project, established by

Congress that year. Its purpose was to secure the personal stories of veterans while it was still possible to hear those stories told by the veterans themselves.

While the program, as established, sought interviews from veterans of conflicts ranging from World War I through the Persian Gulf War and beyond, much of the concern driving the legislation was the status of World War II veterans.

In 2001, for example, the Department of Veterans Affairs estimated that World War II veterans - the approximately 5.4 million members of the “Greatest Generation” - were passing away at a rate of 1,100 per day.

Swanson responded to the moment.

Between 2000 and 2010 he resolved to record as many of those stories as he could.

He bought his own video equipment and got going.

“I embraced it,” he said. “Once I started, I didn’t stop.”

With some of the initial World War II veterans he spoke with, Swanson came up with a strategy.

“To each person I would interview I would say “I’m going to send you a copy of this – but you owe me,’ ” he said.

What the veteran owed him, Swanson added, was the phone number of another World War II veteran.

“I never ran out of people to talk to,” Swanson said. “I know exactly how many interviews I did – 1,063 of them.

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Before these flights, Swanson often would convene organizational meetings at public halls like Truman Memorial Building in Independence, drilling the veterans on the protocols of the trip, how early they would have to be at Kansas City International Airport, and when they would return later that same evening.

Then, on the day of the trip, Swanson would report to the airport well before dawn to organize the veterans, some of them using wheelchairs, and get them aboard the aircraft.

Often the airline would get into the spirit of the event, decorating the airport gate with flags and tri-color bunting.

Gary Swanson conducted more than 1,000 interviews for the Veterans History Project.

Anyone listening to his interviews today can hear Swanson’s disarming method.

While focusing his video camera on the subject, he would cite the veteran’s name, list his or her service branch, along with the various locations or actions the veteran was stationed at or present at.

Then, many hours later, the children and grandchildren of these veterans would gather at the appointed KCI gate– worrying aloud about their elderly parents or grandparents and then be amazed to see them arrive wide awake and radiant.

If these veterans had anything in common, Swanson said, it was their concept of duty. He admired their lack of bravado about their wartime service and sacrifice.

“Tell me where you grew up as a kid,” Swanson would say.

“They didn’t come back home and brag about it,” he said,

And so the interviews would begin and then continue, usually for close to an hour. Often veterans told Swanson stories they never had previously mentioned to friends or family members.

“They did their jobs, survived, came home, got a job, got married, had babies and often had great lives.”

After the interviews were completed, Swanson said, spouses listening off-camera routinely told him they had never heard those stories before.

Currently, visitors to the national Veterans History Project website (www.loc.gov/vets/) will be able to find information regarding what appears to be more than 900 interviews conducted by Swanson.

So prolific was Swanson that in 2005 officials at the Library of Congress invited him to Washington and honored him for being one of three individuals across the country who had conducted the greatest number of interviews. He also instructed other volunteers in effective ways of speaking with veterans.

“Nobody has done more interviews than I have done,” said Swanson. “I’m not bragging – just prove me wrong.”

And yet Swanson’s more than 1,000 interviews was not the full extent of his service to the Kansas City area community of World War II veterans.

Beginning in 2008 he also helped organize Honor Flights from Kansas City to Washington, D.C. and back. These flights offered World War II veterans free transportation to visit the World War II Memorial, dedicated in 2004 at the east end of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

ENDURING MONUMENT

The information will list the veteran’s service branch, where he or she served, the highest rank achieved, and so on.

However, only a comparative few of Swanson’s interviews have been digitized to allow online access.

But the project currently being undertaken by the Kansas City Public Library will make many of the Jackson County Historical Society interviews much easier to access – and also will include transcripts of the interviews, which is no small thing.

Transcriptions will render the interviews “fulltext searchable.” That means that any topic discussed during the interview can be identified online by a user without having to listen to the entire interview. The transcripts also will allow those with hearing impairments access to the interview content.

The project is being funded in part by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by the Missouri State Library.

When completed, the locally-based site will make it easier for people to find interviews with veterans in the Kansas City area, while the transcripts will make it easier to search and discover subjects of interest.

In this way the library site could grow over time, encouraging discovery for community students and researchers.

The completed site also would represent an enduring monument to Swanson’s achievement, said David W. Jackson, former Jackson County Historical Society archivist who worked closely with him.

“Plenty of people talk about doing this, or needing to do that,” Jackson said.

“Few follow through or act. For someone who is not a veteran himself, Gary Swanson answered a call and over the course of a decade recorded about 1,000 veterans’ stories for them and their families.

“What a legacy.”

Today Swanson can look back with satisfaction upon the stories he saved. Many of the veterans he interviewed, he believes, have died since he spoke with them.

Today, in 2021, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, about 240,000 World War II veterans remain alive, dying at a rate of approximately 234 a day.

“My object was to have more interviews than anybody,” Swanson said.

As he says – prove him wrong.

OBTAINING INTERVIEWS Oral history interviews, conducted as part of the Veterans History Project at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, are available for download from the Jackson County Historical Society. Anyone interested in obtaining a video will receive a digital file by email in exchange for a $20 donation. For more information, go to https://www.jchs.org/the-veterans-historyproject

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CONNELL’S KANSAS CITY YOUTH

BY STEVE PAUL

Evan S. Connell

Kansas City was the fount of Connell’s early creativity. His family life, which largely played out in the comforts of Brookside and Mission Hills, can be inferred from the pages of his best-known works of fiction, the companion novels Mrs. Bridge (1959) and Mr. Bridge (1969). Those books present an upper-crust slice of Kansas City’s social fabric as it existed in the 1930s and 1940s. The Bridge novels have—or should have—been required reading in Kansas City for decades, alternately loved for their crisp and intimate vignettes and warily regarded for their aching truths and acid views of middle-American hypocrisy.

If Connell’s own boyhood had been shaped by the Great Depression, the evidence is hard to find. His father, the eye surgeon Evan S. Connell Sr., and his mother, Elton Williamson Connell, daughter of a prominent judge, took cruises even then. In the early 1930s, Dr. Connell, who had grown up not far away in Lexington, Missouri, invested in a northeast Jackson County farmstead and soon added another one near Liberty. By the end of the 1930s, the family moved to a columned brick mansion on Drury Lane in what was not yet incorporated as Mission Hills.

Evan S. Connell passport photo, 1953. (Courtesy of the Literary Estate of Evan Shelby Connell Jr.)

EVAN S. CONNELL OFTEN WRESTLED WITH THE CHARACTER OF HIS HOMETOWN In a short story that Evan S. Connell (1924-2013) wrote early in his long literary career, a traveler has come home to a place much like Kansas City and is describing to a group of old friends the sights he saw over the previous 10 years.

The story’s unnamed narrator is a close observer of the wandering traveler J.D. and the distant sights he talks about. He notices the “wind wrinkles about his restless cerulean blue eyes, as though the light of strange beaches and exotic plazas had stamped him like a visa to prove he had been there.”

J.D.’s middle-American, businessmen friends are alternately engaged and put off by his slide-less travelogue: “He had tales of the Casbah in Tangiers and he had souvenirs from the ruins of Carthage.

On his keychain was a fragment of polished stone, drilled through the center, that he had picked up from the hillside just beyond Tunis. And he spoke familiarly of the beauty of Istanbul, and of Giotto’s tower, and the Seine, and the golden doors of Ghiberti.”

When Connell wrote this story, “The Walls of Ávila,” in the 1950s, he, of course, would not have known that decades later he could find a replica of the towering “golden doors of Ghiberti” in his hometown art museum, the NelsonAtkins. But he might well have been amused by that. He certainly would have been impressed or at least on intellectual alert that such a souvenir of the world could be transplanted to the genteel, mostly bland landscape of his youth.

The young Evan S. Connell as an Eagle Scout.

(Courtesy of the Literary Estate of Evan Shelby Connell Jr.)

Connell was a product of the Border Star Elementary School and Southwest High School, each of which was a short walk away from the family’s first home, a typical Brookside colonial, at 210 W. 66th Street, with white siding and green shutters. Connell certainly benefited from a concentrated reading program at Border Star. Some of those who knew him in high school remembered him as a profoundly quiet type. And his record as a relatively average student did not project him as a creative success story.

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More of Connell’s local story is reflected in another early novel, which few people have read. Called The Patriot, the book begins as the protagonist’s family gathers at Union Station to send him off to serve in the Naval Air Corps, as Connell himself did from 1943 through 1945. The Navy chapters provide alternating scenes of poignancy, selfreflection, absurd humor and some haunting, beautifully cast accounts of aviation. From there, the main character, Melvin Isaacs, continues to confound and disappoint his father. He declares that he has no interest in going to law school at the University of Missouri and instead will study art and writing at the University of Kansas, which, in fact, Connell did to complete his college education after the Second World War. (He had started out at Dartmouth.)

Connell had much difficulty writing and revising The Patriot and was never satisfied with it. Most reviewers at the time seemed to think it was a giant step backward from Mrs. Bridge, which had come out the year before.

Still, The Kansas City Star found it of enough local interest to serialize a few excerpts in late 1960. Undoubtedly some of its parts are better than the whole, and I like to think that if Connell had had a better handle on it, he might have ended up with a wartime black comedy equal to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which came out a year later.

HIS INNER MIDWESTERNER Kansas City and versions of Lawrence, Kansas, appear sporadically elsewhere in Connell’s fiction. Late in life he confessed that though he’d long abandoned Kansas City for the West Coast and Santa Fe—San Francisco, he once said, was the best American city—he always felt like a Midwesterner. Those roots go deep.

As he writes of J.D. in “The Walls of Ávila,” “We thought he had left a good deal of value here in the Midwest of America. Our town is not exotic, but it is comprehensible and it is clean.”

At another point, the narrator notices that J.D. “seemed to be struggling to remember what it was like to live in our town.”

Near the end of the story, J.D. scoffs when asked if he’d ever return home for good. On reflection, the friends recall how he’d put it: “He had explained that the difference between our town and those other places he had been was that when you go walking down a boulevard in some strange land and you see a tree burgeoning, you understand that this is beautiful, and there comes with the knowledge a moment of indescribable poignancy in the realization that as this tree must die, so will you die. But when, in the home you have always known, you find a tree in bud you think only that spring has come

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Gale Zoe Garnett, a longtime friend of Connell who had a small role in the 1990 film “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge,” joined him for the movie’s Kansas City premiere that September. (Courtesy of Janet Zimmermann and the Literary Estate of Evan Shelby Connell Jr.)

again. Here he stopped. It did not make much sense to us, but for him it has meaning of some kind.”

As a writer, Connell left a body of work marked by a wide variety of form and substance. He was largely motivated by a search for knowledge and self. He went after anything that interested him, including subjects that had stirred his imagination in boyhood. His style, as evidenced in the passage above, was pure precision.

Perhaps that came from his reading of Chekhov and other masters and mentors; perhaps it owes something to the engineering club at Southwest High School. In life, as many of his friends and acquaintances have attested, he could be ever inscrutable.

In stark, chronological terms, Kansas City and Jackson County accounted for barely a quarter of Connell’s life. He lived here less than 20 years and visited often until his parents died. In 1989, he connected with his boyhood by spending nearly 10 weeks in Kansas City during the making of the Merchant Ivory movie “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge,” an art-house conflation of the two books. He returned a year later for the movie’s premiere.

Connell had several sentimental moments during that period—chatting about Boy Scouts with the producer Ismail Merchant, and connecting, like J.D., with people and places he hadn’t seen for decades. Still, his regard for his hometown always seemed guarded, if not downright critical.

In San Francisco, he once told a Kansas City Star reporter, if he went to a party, he’d meet all kinds of people. In moneyed Mission Hills, he countered, he’d only meet people from Mission Hills.

In a letter to his sister from the early 1980s, when Connell was living in Sausalito, Calif., he describes a dinner party at the home of the writer Curt Gentry. A Hemingway acquaintance and screenwriter, Denne Petitclerc, and his wife told stories from their recent trip to Spain. “Also present were an outrageously homosexual waiter from Enrico’s cafe and a giant bartender who is also an expert professional calligrapher. So it was another quaint unmidwestern evening.”

Connell had a sly and often unexpected sense of humor.

WRESTLING WITH KANSAS CITY’S RACIAL LEGACY Connell was well aware of Kansas City’s stark racial divide. That local characteristic goes back at least to the Civil War era border wars, when one Connell forebear, Gen. Joseph Shelby, rode for the Confederacy, and another owned numerous enslaved persons to tend his hemp farm next door in Lexington, Mo. Connell wrestled with that legacy more than once in his work.

in 1969, clearly reflects the genteel sort of racism that defined Kansas City’s upper crust throughout the 20th century and undoubtedly beyond.

In a lesser-known short story, “Nan Madol,” written more than 20 years later, Connell injects an even more overt strain of racism in a Missouri character. The narrator’s Uncle Gates, from Springfield, is visiting San Francisco, and, on a tour of the area, he makes several cringe-worthy observations about people of color. As with Walter Bridge, Connell once allowed that he was thinking of his own father, the society doctor, Evan S. Connell Sr., as he wrote this story.

RESTLESS TRAVELER The past, as well as the bucolic Midwestern landscape of Jackson County, may well be a foreign country.

In “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge,” Paul Newman portrayed Kansas City lawyer Walter Bridge while Joanne Woodward portrayed his wife India.

In Contact, a San Francisco literary magazine he was associated with for several years, Connell took up the troubling case of a Black couple in Kansas City, Kan., who were caught up in a school segregation case. Instead of sending their children to an inferior Black school, the family opted to teach them at home and thus ran afoul of local officials who ignored the law of the land as spelled out in Brown v. Board of Education. In an editorial, Connell’s magazine expressed concern for their plight and disappointment with local media, including The Kansas City Star, for essentially ignoring the case.

More pointedly, Connell addressed the social reverberations of race in the fictional Bridge family of the 1930s and ‘40s. Race is a constant but quiet presence in Mrs. Bridge, the first of the two novels.

By the time Connell was writing Mr. Bridge, the nation had been transformed by landmark civil rights legislation and disrupted by racial protest and violence, especially following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968. Kansas City, like other cities around the country, experienced eruptions of violent protest and police response.

Seventeen years after writing “The Walls of Ávila,” Connell returned to the template and its characters in another story that resonates in similar ways. “The Palace of the Moorish Kings” once again centers on the traveling J.D. He is “one of those uncommon men who follow dim trails around the world hunting a fulfillment they couldn’t find at home.” By this time J.D. had gone far beyond Europe, wandering “to places we had scarcely heard of —Ahmedabad, Penang, the Sulu archipelago.”

J.D. has hinted in letters that he might be ready to settle down and marry a friend from grade school, who’s now teaching in Philadelphia. Now he’s telephoning his friends to alert them of his plan. The world had become homogenized.

Tourism and commercialism had spoiled the attractions.

“They were putting televisions sets in bars where you used to hear flamenco,” he complained. A war in Asia “that had begun secretly, deceptively, like a disease,” was under way and had ensnared a friend’s son. Yet, nothing much else has changed among J.D.’s conservative and comfortable Kansas City friends. Zobrowski, a surgeon, tells him how irritated and envious they were that J.D. had “enjoyed yourself for a long time while the rest of us went to an office day after day, whether we liked it or not.”

Connell, forgoing Midwestern congeniality, does not tie up J.D.’s story neatly with a marriage and a visit home.

Though his fictional canvas was anchored in a setting three decades earlier, Connell clearly absorbed the realities of the present as he crafted Mr. Bridge. As I write in Literary Alchemist and in an article elsewhere on race and the Bridge novels, that novel, published

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SPECIAL

Book Reviews from the Jackson County Historical Society Bookstore While you will encounter the occasional beach in Jackson County, Kansas City area readers don’t need beaches to enjoy a good read during warm weather. That’s why we thought September would be a good time to remind Jackson County Historical Society members of the great reads available through the Society’s online bookstore.

At jchs.org/books, online visitors will find a curated selection of books, as well as DVDs, that detail some of the more fascinating events and individuals that have helped shape Jackson County history.

Many of the titles listed likely will not be stocked by your favorite big book retailer. For example, we have copies of “Jackson County Pioneers” and “Independence and 20th Century Pioneers”, both by Pearl Wilcox, an early chronicler of Jackson County history. But we also carry newer books, such as “Kansas City Houses: 18851938”, a handsome volume by Michael C. Kathrens that includes photographs of homes designed and lived in by many Jackson County architects and residents.

Also in stock: “Mount Washington Cemetery: In Search of Lost Time”, recently published by authors Judith King and Bruce Mathews, who describe the final resting places of many Jackson County residents.

We recently acquired more copies of “Deaths on Pleasant Street: The Ghastly Enigma of Colonel Swope and Doctor Hyde.” A popular book, difficult to find of late, by former Kansas City Star journalist Giles Fowler, it details the infamous early 20th century deaths among members of the family of Jackson County philanthropist Thomas Swope, and the subsequent murder trial.

For the Society’s September E-Journal, members have reviewed several of the books you can find in the JCHS bookstore. For online orders, Society members receive a 10 percent discount on the listed price (plus shipping).

Some of these books also are available in the gift shop of the 1859 Jail, Marshal’s Home &Museum, at 217 N. Main St., just northeast of the Historic Truman Courthouse.

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Missouri Outlaws: Bandits, Rebels & Rogues Reviewed by J. Bradley Pace. Brad is past president of the Jackson County Historical Society Board of Directors and current E-Journal editor.

Author Paul Kirkman’s 2018 book, “Missouri Outlaws: Bandits, Rebels & Rogues”, is much more than a collection of biographies. It begins with the territory we know today as Missouri being passed back and forth between French and Spanish empires. Kirkman describes early Missouri as a powder keg which would eventually produce larger-than-life men and women of action.

The land grew up wild, with hardy settlers and Native Americans vying for possession.

Opportunity for trading with Indians out west, and with Mexico to the south, kickstarted river traffic and the making of trails. The big Conestoga wagons made an attractive target for bandits and Indians. Many rural towns, especially in the Ozarks, remained isolated. They would be great places for an outlaw to hide.

The lawlessness and violence in pre-statehood Missouri was but a warmup for the bloodshed to come. Kirkman explains how “in Missouri the Civil War came early and stayed late.” Pro and antislavery forces opposed each other on the Missouri/Kansas border. Though Missouri was not a secessionist state, a large part of its population had ties to the South, and many of its communities relied on the slave economy. Fighting spread throughout the state during the war.

The year 1860 found Ohio native William Quantrill teaching school in Lawrence, Kansas. But by the following year he was leading a band of guerrillas ambushing Union patrols, robbing the mail, and causing general mischief. Quantrill and his group, which ranged in size from a dozen to a few hundred men, were constantly pursued by much larger forces. Only the wildest riders and the best shots were fit for Quantrill’s service. He attracted the likes of “Bloody” Bill Anderson, George Todd, Cole Younger and Frank James. Anderson in turn would merit his own followers, including Frank’s younger brother Jesse.

Paul Kirkman First published 2018, History Press, Charleston, SC $22.00

When the war ended in 1865, ex-combatants returned home to find a Missouri badly scarred, both physically and socially. The weight of Reconstruction drove a deep wedge between those who supported different sides during the war. With so many disillusioned former guerrillas and Confederates scattered around the state, the stage was set for the emergence of that brand of outlaw some called criminal, and others called folk hero. Men like Frank and Jesse James would embark on new careers robbing banks. This crime spree soon spread to the stagecoach lines and railroads. Missouri had become the “outlaw state.”

These desperados were hotly pursued by federal forces, possies, and lynch mobs. Despite their hopeless plight, the outlaw could count on finding sympathy and recruits from families who held power and respect before the war but were now marginalized.

We can’t know today what their true motives were, but the Reconstruction era outlaws were admired by many who saw them as still fighting against the enemy. Most of the banks, stagecoach lines and railroads were owned by Eastern and/or pro-Union businessmen. As time went on most of the old guerrillas were either dead, in jail, or had kicked the habit in favor of less dangerous pursuits. Among the last to be killed was Jesse James himself, who was gunned down in 1882, by another gang member for a $10,000 reward. Jesse was only 32.

Author Paul Kirkman paints a vivid picture of the life and times of Missouri’s most infamous outlaws. From dime novels to the Wild West Shows, generations of Americans grew up with the frontier mythos. The public’s fascination with the outlaw’s life of excitement and adventure will likely endure as long as America itself.

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The First Beverly Hillbilly: The Untold Story of the Creator of Rural TV Comedy Reviewed by Brian Burnes For those of a certain age, “The Beverly Hillbillies” was a television situation comedy featuring members of a supposedly unsophisticated country family which debuted to a vast audience in 1962.

The show proved to be television’s top-rated program that year. It inspired two similar shows, “Petticoat Junction” and “Green Acres,” which also featured gentle send-ups of rural residents. Paul Henning, a Jackson County native who grew up in Independence, created “Hillbillies” but never boasted about it or wrote a book about it. His family’s California home included a bookshelf stacked floor-to-ceiling with biographies of successful show business personalities - none of them about Paul Henning. That bothered his wife Ruth Henning enough that she decided to write that book herself.

She completed the manuscript in about 1994, but did not find a publisher. Before her death in 2002, however, she sent a copy to her friend Sue Gentry, longtime columnist and editor with The Examiner of Independence. Gentry died in 2004, leaving no heirs.

Jackson County Historical Society staff members several years ago recovered Ruth Henning’s manuscript from one of the approximately two dozen boxes of papers Gentry had donated to the society. The society, in turn, brought the manuscript to the Mid-Continent Public Library which in 2013 had opened its Woodneath branch, today home of The Story Center, the library district’s community publishing initiative. It published Henning’s book, with the support of Henning’s three children, in 2017. “Hillbillies” depicted the adventures of the Clampett clan, which moved to southern California after patriarch Jed’s stray rifle shot uncorked a subsurface oil field on his hardscrabble property.

Missouri residents whose knowledge of life beyond the Ozarks was minimal. He also had been reading recent newspaper stories about isolated hill people –“hillbillies” – who knew little of modern conveniences, but somehow seemed unbothered by that.

It was about then when a film and television producer called him and asked if he had ideas for a new project. Henning did. He pitched a scenario that included several members of an isolated rural clan, dropped suddenly into sophisticated surroundings. The twist was that the hill folk had been displaced from their home not by flood or tragedy - but by spectacular good fortune. The show that resulted, “Hillbillies,” every week depicted how the Clampett clan often seemed oblivious to the fabulous wealth their new neighbors so clearly coveted.

Not long after, Ruth accompanied her husband to a New York, where Paul explained his new show, “Petticoat Junction,” to a roomful of entertainment industry reporters.

“This show is about a way of life rapidly disappearing from the American scene,” he said, “when people lived simple lives. “They took time to enjoy each other, they helped their neighbors, they weren’t completely dedicated to making money.” Ultimately, that was the kind of script Paul Henning was quite good at writing.

It was a huge hit and Paul Henning, a 1929 graduate of William Chrisman High School in Independence, today can be considered among the inventors of television situation comedy. But how did he come up with that particular “Hillbillies” scenario? That’s what Ruth explains.

Then known as Ruth Barth, she had graduated in 1930 from Kansas City’s Central High School. She and Paul soon encountered one another at the downtown Kansas City studios of radio station KMBC. “Creative young people swarmed the studios at KMBC,” Ruth wrote. “As far as I was concerned, it was the answer to everything.” Soon Paul and Ruth were among those who helped write and act in daily rural-themed serials. One revelation in her book is how, without Ruth, Paul may never have left Kansas City. Ruth, ambitious and confident, decided to move to Chicago. There she became part of the team that produced “Fibber McGee and Molly,” one of the most popular radio shows of its time When Ruth notified Paul that the show’s producers needed scripts, Paul sent one. The producers hired him. Paul soon joined Ruth in Chicago. Eventually they married and moved to California.

Over the ensuing 20 years Paul Henning rose in the Hollywood radio – and then television – industries. Perhaps the only frustration with “The First Beverly Hillbilly” is that Ruth Henning never really details how her husband developed his skill at scripting episodic comedy. But the “Hillbillies” origin story is just weird, specific and random enough to have the ring of truth.

First, Ruth writes, Paul consistently had enjoyed comedy that referenced rural life. She remembers him laughing often while seeing a production of “Tobacco Road” at Kansas City’s Orpheum Theater, reacting to the challenges – played for laughs – faced by impoverished Georgia tenant farmers. He also enjoyed Bob Burns, a radio comedian who, billed as the "Arkansas Traveler,” told stories involving his eccentric relations such as Uncle Fud and Aunt Peachy. Fast-forward some 25 years to 1959 when Henning’s most recent television program had ended, and he was taking a driving vacation.

While marveling at the highway network then being built across the country, he pondered what some 19th century historical figures might think of modern America. He also began remembering his Boy Scout camping trips to southwest Missouri during the 1920s, when he encountered rural

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Ruth Henning Published 2017, Woodneath Press $19.99

Saddle the Pale Horse Reviewed by William A. “Kip” Esry. William A. “Kip” Esry is a local history enthusiast and a partner with the management consulting firm, HumanRoot LLC. Darryl W. Levings’ historical novel, “Saddle the Pale Horse”, is the story of the 1864 invasion of Missouri by Confederate Major General Sterling Price. Told using the language of the day from the vantage of those on both sides of the conflict, the novel paints a vivid portrait of the Confederacy’s last gasp in the west.

Well-researched, the novel at times resembles a work of non-fiction providing a much more factual account than often found in historical novels including actual quotes interspersed within the telling of the story. The epilogue includes photographs, illustrations, maps, chapter notes, a bibliography, and a synopsis of what became of the characters.

Price’s army, primarily cavalry, initially outnumbers the Union forces in his path, but his men are poorly mounted and provisioned. Advancing northward, he abandons any attempt to take St. Louis or Jefferson City and instead marches west. His army, dwindling through attrition from illness, desertion, and field casualties, finds stiff resistance at the Battle of Westport from General Samuel Curtis’ troops entrenched on the western banks of the Big Blue River. Meanwhile, another Union force bears down on Price from behind. Out-manned, out-gunned, and out-provisioned, Price retreats south, is doggedly pursued by Union cavalry, and narrowly escapes back into Arkansas.

While Price carried out his campaign and retreat, he urged Missouri guerrillas under George Todd and Bill Anderson to disrupt rail transportation. They terrorized central Missouri, looting towns and killing Union men including 22 unarmed soldiers taken from a train in Centralia. When a detachment of inexperienced Union militia attempts to run the guerrillas down, they are lured into a trap and slaughtered.

Darryl W. Levings Published 2011, Kansas City Star Books $25.00

There are a good many characters within the fabric of this story. Some are generals and famous men. Most are not. There are both Union and Confederate soldiers, pro-southern guerrillas, girls and women; including a Unionist wife and mother who nurses Confederate wounded in a Kansas City church. There is a Black man held in slavery and another serving as a Union artillery officer, leading other former slaves in the fight for freedom.

Perhaps the most compelling character is a Jackson County youth named Riley Crawford, who was delivered by his mother to guerrilla chieftain William Clarke Quantrill following the murder of his father by Union militia. Now riding with the unhinged Bill Anderson, Riley attempts to navigate the brutality of the most barbaric guerrilla band of the Civil War. Despite having developed friendships such as with a big brotherly Frank James, Riley is reviled by others including Frank’s brutish younger brother, Jesse, and the equally sadistic Arch Clement. As time is running out for the guerrillas, Riley finds himself in a desperate situation, suffering physically, and wanting out. He longs for normalcy, a desire that surely must have been widespread during that fall of 1864 in Missouri.

While there is plenty of heartbreak found within Saddle the Pale Horse, there are also countless acts of courage. Heroism is found on the battlefield as well as by those with everything to lose caught up in the onslaught. With their hopes, fears, and conscience in tow, they find themselves amidst the complete lack of reason that is war. The story concludes with two vignettes; one of tragedy and one of hope. Both bring the reader back to a shared sense of humanity and warn us of its fragility.

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Back in Independence Reviewed by Gloria Smith. Gloria is a past president of the Jackson County Historical Society Board of Directors and a native of Independence.

Mary Paxton Keeley shares her memories of growing up in the early 1900s in “Back in Independence.”

Mary grew up at 614 North Delaware in a family of five children “...in a home filled with books and wise parents to guide my reading”. Her father, John Gallatin Paxton, practiced law in his office on the Square in Independence, and was the attorney for the wealthy Swope family that lived in the Swope Mansion on South Pleasant. Her mother, Mary Gentry Paxton, was a college elocution teacher.

Bess Wallace, Mary’s best friend, lived next door until her father’s tragic death from suicide.

That was when Bess moved up to the big white house at 217 North Delaware with her grandparents. Later Mary would be Margaret Truman’s godmother.

Mary attended the University of Missouri and recalls her engagement to Charles Ross, the high school classmate of Harry Truman and later President Truman’s Press Secretary. Charles was her professor in the MU journalism school. In 1910 Mary was the first female to graduate from the “J” School and her portrait now hangs there.

She went on to become one of the first female news reporters in Kansas City; worked overseas in a YMCA canteen during World War I; authored numerous books, magazine articles, essays, poems and plays; and for many years taught journalism at Christian College (now Columbia).

Mary explains that her book is not about Harry Truman but rather “it pictures the social climate in which he grew up.” Truman was a Baptist and the Paxtons were Presbyterians and “in those days the social divisions were by church.” While Mary and her friends enjoyed a full social life, Harry was working at Clinton’s Drug Store to help his family. Because Harry wore glasses, he could not participate in sports and was often called “four-eyes.”

A big event in Mary’s life was each October when her parents took the entire family to Kansas City to see the Priests of Pallas Parade. Mary could only dream of attending the Ball that followed as she was too young.

At age 14 Mary attended her first formal dance with her father as her escort. It was at the Fairmount Park Pavilion. As Mary matured she had a procession of beaux including Elmer, Pete, Harold, Lawrence, Egbert and Charlie. When an early suitor, Elmer Twyman, visited her on Sunday afternoons, her little brother Eddie did all he could to terrorize the couple. Elmer’s father was Dr. Twyman, the Swope family doctor at that time.

“Back in Independence” is a delightful personal story of growing up in a big family in the early 20th century. It is filled with entertaining characters and events in Independence that make it a joy to read and re-read.

Mary died in 1986, six months after her 100th birthday. She had asked the book not be published during her lifetime and that her friend and cousin, Sue Gentry, write the introduction. “Back in Independence” was published by the Jackson County Historical Society following her death and is available at the JCHS Bookstore at www.jchs.org.

Her colorful description of Independence includes: the south side of the Square was to be avoided because of all the saloons; girls who had the reputation as “spooners” were not invited to nice parties; and visits to the Salisbury Farm where all the Salisbury girls rode horses wearing “divided skirts.”

The book is filled with colorful characters including Jim Peacock, Squeaky Bill, Jim Crow Chiles, Percival, Old Agnes and many others. Mary was fascinated by Arthur Grissom, a poet who was wooing Julia Woods, daughter of a rich banker. Mary recounts the story of their scandalous elopement and short marriage.

The author describes adventures with her siblings including packing a lunch and spending the day in MacCauley Pasture, the shady woodland at the end of Delaware where Willis, their hired man, walked the family cow each day to graze on what is now the lawn of the Truman Library.

One of their favorite activities was fishing in a little stream for crawdads using a long stick with a bent pin and a piece of meat.

Playing with Bess Wallace under the catalpa tree in their yard, Mary and her friend would dress hollyhock ladies using bonnet-like catalpa blossoms for heads and swirling pink and red hollyhocks for skirts. When the Paxton and Wallace boys would gather ripe pokeberries, they would open their “red ink factory.” After mixing the juice from the ripe berries with water they proceeded to dye everything red including dolls’ clothes, dolls’ hair and doll’s bed clothes.

When they “dyed her brother Eddie’s blond hair, it was a bit too much for Mamma!” With the leftover dye they played drugstore.

On hot summer evenings, the Paxton family would often drive their surrey out River Road to Wayne City to the abandoned steamboat landing. The children would play on the trail while Mary sat with her parents watching the mist rise on the Missouri River.

Other summer evenings on Delaware Street were spent watching humming birds or relaxing in “Papa’s Garden.” Many evenings were spent playing kick-the-wicket or run-sheep-run until their parents would call to them that it was nine o’clock and time to come in. Parental curfew was backed up by the presence of the night policeman who was known to snatch up offenders and deposit them on their parents’ doorsill.

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By Mary Paxton Keeley Community Press, Inc $20.00

PO BOX 4241 Independence, MO 64051

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