Kansas City 1980 heat wave amidst paddlefish poaching

CREDIT TO THE KANSAS CITY STAR – 1980 HEAT WAVE SEGMENTS - CHAPTER 14 RESPITE FROM THE HEAT Mid-July 1980

Racer and Andy had returned to the worst Kansas City heat wave since 1954, possibly since 1934. Earlier hot summers had witnessed Kansas Citians sleeping in parks. In early July Chief Norman Carroll’s staff issued a press release indicating that their department could not assure park sleeper safety. The 1980 heat wave proved long and lethal. Those seeking relief largely ignored his no-park sleeping advice; dozens of adults and children slept near Cliff Drive’s slightly cooler slopes.

Rescuers, firefighters from Local 42, discovered heat casualties at a rate of one corpse per hour during July. Morticians at Passantino Brothers, Lawrence A. Jones and Sebbeto’s were overwhelmed by casualties amidst a citywide grief. Water cooler historians ironically recalled Kansas City’s 1979 summer produced few heat casualties.

Purposeless shoppers ambled through Woolworth and Skaggs’ refrigerated aisles pretending to review labels. The public library’s reading tables filled to eight-chair capacity, ladies settling for Field & Stream while elderly men thumbed through outdated Mademoiselles.

Doctors and nurses reviewing case files responded with emotions ranging from sadness to anger: An 80-year-old male in the 2400 block of Lawn, dead in a home with windows painted shut, a 73-year-old female in the 3500 block of Denver expired in a room with a faulty air conditioner, one “pumping-out” hot air; the decomposed body of a 55-year-old male from the 4000 block of 16th street, dead 3-4 days, a thermometer in his bedroom registering 105 degrees.

Rescuers were baffled to find an expired mental patient clad in a heavy wool sweater, perhaps his confused physiologic response to anti-psychotic drugs. Being old, a person of color or even disabled, increased mortality three-fold; add in thyroid or psychiatric diagnoses, and those dangerous odds increased by a factor of ten. An entry beyond pre-existing disease or advanced age matched Karen M. Thompson, headliner at 40-Highway’s Topless-and-More. The coroner was conflicted whether her demise was more attributable to methamphetamine abuse or the heat wave. Speed plus anorexia and dancer status became risky companions.

Glades, pastures and woods above and below Cliff Drive filled with sleepers and campers, many dragging ground cover. Middle-aged females who would have never appeared in a bikini top settled for brassiere-based sleep necessities. The city’s homed and home-less curiously shared common sleeping sites.

USMC Mel hadn’t waited on the 1980 heat wave to visit Cliff Drive-associated glades, pastures and woods. When his 6th Marines made Easter Sunday 1945 Okinawa landings, most of the island palms had been destroyed. When he shipped out three months later, Okinawa’s vegetation was dead, if not burnt.

From the War Department’s perspective, the door closed on Mel’s combat experience when the Admiral RE Coontz, a troop ship, passed into Washington State’s Puget Sound near war’s end. But Mel’s other war had just begun.

Yes, Mrs. Mel worried about his visits to Kansas City’s urban forest. Ostensibly, he went there to gather field specimens but a poor correlation existed between time spent and the harvest. Beneath an arboreal canopy, he sat or knelt, talking to ferns. The beds’ lushness created a visual impression of cool.

Mel possessed favorites, but struggled to maintain objectivity, deftly identifying each according to the characteristics of their slender stalks.

Post-dinner, Mel and she split into respective audio and newspaper camps, Mel tinkering with a reel-to-reel tape player, one whose output was tied to a McIntosh amplifier, trying to create an appreciation of American Airlines mood music in his spouse; Mel’s favorites stretching from Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Aqua De Beber to Trini Lopez’ take on Watermelon Man. He found it annoying when she insisted on reading aloud news stories about gang activity, some centered on Cliff Drive.

One night after they had irritated one other with various musical or gang-related assertions, a call arrived too late for it to have originated in polite company. She accepted the strange person-to-person call, puzzling why Mel referred to the caller as Gunny. The Gunny-person and Mel spoke many minutes until a Bell operator informed him another call awaited their shared line. As nearly as she could tell, Mel didn’t get any rest that night, leaving early the next morning for the Cliffs. When park sleepers joined him in those woods, Mel welcomed persons of color, those with psychiatric frailties, the elderly and disabled, and yes, even brassiere-sleepers.

Other solutions to the July 1980 crisis proved less successful. Post dusk, Olive bathed Otis in cool water, laying out fresh sheets to make him comfortable, if only briefly. Olive put Otis to bed and waited in a straight-back chair for Andy’s stumbling arrival. Twice KCPD had followed behind Andy’s weaving car, a convoy oddly dedicated to traffic safety.

Otis had suffered during Andy’s railroad-imposed absence but even with Andy home it was difficult to get the little boy in bed ahead of Andy’s noisy arrivals. For a year railroad pay masters had kept their promise, rewarding AM Smith biweekly but those funds’ outcome was uncertain. Rather unconvincingly, Andy tried to convince Olive he had been attending Jigger-based meetings, once he described involved another railroad veteran, Diesel Dave. Pressing Andy about his plans to support them, the former popcorn prankster provided a limited answer: Sale of caviar, biologicals, too.

David Diesel Dave Numachev attempted to impress others he had risen to locomotive engineer status.

However more careful review of his personnel record revealed only probationary hostler helper service, time spent shuttling unattached locomotives within a rail yard. While more time-on-task might have led to engineer status but before that could occur Diesel Dave was fired for a Rule-G violation, intoxicated at work.

Diesel Dave poached others’ tales, speaking as though those events involved him. The Jigger’s railroad clients shunned a man they quietly referred to as No-Diesel Dave.

Andy’s listeners similarly questioned why an accomplished railroad chemist stumbled over relatively simple chemical names like glyphosate or Dichlobenil. And then there was Andy’s obnoxious, repetitive use of that odd Tox-E-O-logy expression.

Dave couldn’t believe his fortune when Andy shared news about a southern Missouri trackside experience, the latter man describing encounters with two track-walking Cape Girardeau residents who admitted poaching Ginseng root from the Mark Twain National Forest. Andy also bragged that he had obtained their numbers, plus others for paddlefish poachers prowling the Arkansas and Missouri rivers.

Reaching permanently unemployed status, Diesel Dave took an interest in Andy’s contact information.

While Dave had performed two risky runs for a neighborhood crime crew, these were minor roles involving circulating phony money orders and ferrying expired nursing home drugs. He began to

contemplate higher-level collaborations with a unknown person Andy described as an accomplished herbicide – paddlefish purchaser.

While Ginseng root brought high prices in east coast cities, paddlefish eggs represented Missouribased caviar, sometimes retailing for hundreds of dollars per pound. Andy’s bigger news involved commissions he had negotiated with a buyer later identified as Rolf Weeds-fear-me Wurth.

One day when Andy reached Rolf via the bar pay phone, he passed the receiver to Diesel Dave.

Wurth clarified to Dave he was a wholesale-only merchant, worried this Dave-somebody was a law enforcement plant, oddly suggesting he should mail his qualifications to Wurth’s Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania address. Past repeated versions of Hello Rolf, this is Andy, it was obvious Rolf hung up.

The Jigger’s air conditioner performed flawlessly, hardly the scenario for forty percent of Kansas Citians, people who lacked any form of air conditioning. The city tallied fifty-three miserable days when the mercury rose to one hundred degrees, sometimes higher by noon each day. Temperatures tamed slightly for school children past Labor Day, nevertheless the casualty list extended, duplicate entries among eighty-year-old males and another for a second speeding dancer.