Million Dollar Speedway by John Pierce

THE MILLION DOLLAR SPEEDWAY A NOVEL

John Thomas Pierce

Author of Hospital Safari

No part of this work may be reproduced without the expressed written permission of the author. Any resemblance of characters, living or dead, to real people is coincidental and unintentional. Recommendations and practices described herein have been adapted to storytelling and should not be relied upon regarding any disease or condition. For purposes of storytelling, the communities designated as Dodson and Preservation, also Instanhouding, remain fictional.

ISBN 978-0-578-45168.

MILLIONDOLLARSPEEDWAY.COM

Pierce, John Thomas, 1949 –Authors, researchers and physicians, 20th Century Fiction: Public health, railroads, industrial hygiene & toxicology, bicycle racing, the history of Kansas City.

FOREWORD

If Hospital Safari placed readers at African patients’ bedsides, Million Dollar Speedway takes them inside a 1980-era public health crisis. But what about the book’s references to board track racing, obsolete railroads, long-dead pioneers and a dog?

Board tracks, those adapted to motorized vehicles or various cycles are single-purpose, racing-only venues. Obsolete railroads continue to spur the imaginations of former employees and railfans who refuse to let their legacies disappear.

And why the dog - Hound challenges us to see what he sees, hear what he hears, but particularly to smell what interests, and at other times, annoys him.

And the long-dead pioneer - I’ll let Hound share his dialogues. I’ve laughed and cried while creating these characters and hope you do, too. JTP

PREFACE

Across 1979-81 Kansas City’s residents experienced landfill air emissions, railroad defoliant worries and heavy metal contamination in its neighborhoods. Probing ancestral and nongenealogic succession, Million Dollar Speedway puts its readers inside a vortex of racing and tracked events that adapt the voices of a long-dead pioneer and a special Belgian shepherd.

Medicine’s jargon ironically thwarts broader understanding. I have attempted described blood lead concentrations using simple units that correspond to micrograms of lead present one-tenth liter volumes of blood, deciliter volumes. This odd deciliter terminology is deeply anchored in transfusion medicine and not likely to change.

Across the 20th century’s final decades, public health authorities incrementally lowered concentrations or levels of concern (C-O-C) for lead. Million Dollar Speedway spans the 1979-81 era, a period when the pediatric C-O-C concentration was defined as any concentration exceeding 10-units (or micrograms) of lead per deciliter of blood.

National surveys completed during the 1979-81 era concluded that nearly ninety per cent of America’s children were being over exposed using the 10-unit or greater criteria. Similar 2003-08 surveys posited that fewer than one per cent of US children exceeded the same 10-unit and now obsolete standard.

Reference concentrations for toxic metals such as lead can change (hopefully in favor of a more protective reference). Late in my tale a questioner asks Prof Mel if he has resolved the city’s lead riddle. Mel’s response is relevant to current efforts. “Thanks for asking, we're not finished.”

CHAPTER 1 BELGIAN DAIRY, DODSON, MISSOURI

1852 - 1921

America’s 19th century demanded surveys of its territories. Unfortunately for Joseph Guinotte, a Belgian-born engineer, Mexico’s railway construction project halted with the outbreak of the Mexican-American war. Guinotte needed a fresh engineering project and Kansas City became his answer. Possibly six thousand other Belgians originating in Brabant and Hesbaye regions arrived in Missouri across 1852–56.

Guinotte land-surveyed what was termed the town of Kanza. By 1861 Joseph Guinotte and his Brussels-born bride, Aimée Brichaut had sponsored arrival of nearly one hundred Belgian families. While Guinotte patronage extended to three hundred travelers only about two hundred actually survived the cholera-laden trip shortly adapting tool sheds and shacks near Guinotte’s 3rd and Troost manor as temporary homes.

Joseph and Aimée spent long evenings together in their manor, Joseph, hinged at the waist bent as he peered over a plotting desk, Aimée penning letters. Her interests centering on hospitality, culture complemented his engineering and surveying talents.

Twenty miles south of the Guinotte manor at 3rd and Troost a second België engineer, Charles Jeffreys, created a larger enclave, again staffed by arriving Belgian farm workers. While both Guinotte and Jeffreys had earlier endured the shaky aftermath of Belgium’s civil war neither anticipated a similar American experience.

Jeffreys’ land holdings dwarfed Guinotte’s and featured dual mansions located near both Grandview and Hickman Mills, Missouri. When a Civil War campaign displaced about a dozen Belgian families, Jeffreys allowed those settlers to camp near his

Grandview mansion. Jayhawkers strangely equated that with aiding and abetting the enemy.

By war’s end both België engineers were out-of-favor, but perhaps more importantly, financially sacked. On September 1st 1867 Joseph Guinotte’s lifeless body was discovered east of his manor following the report of a Navy revolver. What would become of their log-home, a place known for hospitality, where guests first experienced gezellig, difficult to define although wonderful. Following Joseph’s death Aimée struggled with personal finances, eventually repurchasing their 3rd and Troost mansion after abandoning thoughts of a Brussels repatriation.

Prior to her husband’s death they had planned a to build a church for Preservation neighborhood, believing a parish there would benefit Belgians and others, too.

While they could have chosen Joseph, Belgian’s patron saint or even Liège’s sponsor, Paul, they settled on Francis, adding a Seraph label as if the Italian saint favored angelic companionship. Early church buildings there were damaged by the Missouri’s 1903 flood and again the year following. St. Francis’ parishioners took twenty years to refresh the property with a more substantial brick version.

While Guinotte and Jeffreys could trace their ancestry to noblemen, others aspired to similar noblesse status. Charles Jeffreys sponsored Billy Dodson’s original journey to Missouri, saving him further farm service near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. While Dodson irritated his patron with ramblings regarding their common Belgian origins, Jeffreys acknowledged Dodson’s ambition, his enterprise, too.

Billy Dodson rather remarkably survived the Civil War without controversy. Post-war his family, by then including two sons and their wives, operated a thriving dairy and cultivated row crops, primarily corn and milo although Dodson worried that he did not actually own the land where they lived and worked. By 1870 most land had been claimed, damp river bottoms paralleling Little Blue River and one of Missouri’s many Indian creeks was an exception, though.

Post-war, reconstruction diminished Jeffreys’ financial holdings forcing him to consider repatriating to Belgium. Rather than 8

traveling to Brussels, though, Jeffreys departed to Philadelphia where he finally deeded two hundred floodable acres to his old friend, Billy Dodson.

The idea of naming the community Dodson originated with a railroad surveyor. After christening Archie, Butler and Drexel as Missouri towns, the surveyor penciled in Dodson as a railroad milepost designator.

Dodson brothers alternated days driving a team and wagon to a Troost avenue icehouse. Heavy milk cans were further subdivided, milk sold by the bucket there, too. With deliveries generally completed by noon, one of them returned to the diary traveling down Blue River road.

Billy Dodson died during 1911’s long winter, the farm passing to Robert, the older son. Younger brother Charles stayed there, too, primarily devoted to row crops. In early March 1921 as Charles Dodson returned from a Saturday milk run he viewed a touring car halted along an access roads near their property.

He straightened his hat, halting his team beside the LaSalle, noting its occupants sported business attire far cleaner than those of a dairyman. Perhaps fretting over a creditor visit dedicated to unpaid invoices, he whistled for Robert to join him.

Robert Dodson recognized the tallest of the four visitors as Kansas City’s mayor, Sam Stroker. After welcoming him to their property, Robert inquired regarding the visit’s purpose.

The mayor introduces his companions, noting they were racetrack promoters: Eric Price, a former English bicycle racer, Clint Doty, son of the National Motor Car Company founder and William Danforth, a principal of the California Rodeo Land and Water Company.

Stroker shared that his companions had expressed an interest in purchasing the Dodson property as a construction site for a large board track dedicated to motor racing, presenting a noisy word picture of cheering race fans and speeding roadsters.

The Dodson’s waited on him to suggest a sales price for their land. Instead, the city’s mayor outlined an odd paid-parking plan, one he said would benefit the Dodson’s, in a city that currently garaged fewer than nine thousand automobiles. 9

While Robert had both driven and ridden in an automobile, Charles Dodson had experienced only one ride, and that was as a passenger. Discussion of thousands of cars parked in muddy pastures and race speeds exceeding one hundred miles per hour fell far beyond their experiences.

But by then, Danforth had unfurled an unedited set of Beverly Hills track plans, and was using their feed lot as a guide for placement of an enormous mile-and-an-1/8th wooden track. Recollections are unclear whether Danforth or perhaps Stroker first proposed a name and a mission for the place.

THE MILLION DOLLAR SPEEDWAY

THE GREATEST DISPLAY OF SKILL, NERVE AND DARING

CHAPTER 2 BOARD TRACK DREAMS

1921-22

Track racing’s ephemeral nature could have been summed as briefly present before disappearing altogether. Every time paint dried on a Kansas City marquee a figurative clock seemed to tick toward its extinction. If track sites magnetized race fans they also suggested alternative uses for those locations.

Elm Ridge Park touched 63rd and Paseo along its northeast corner, surviving from 1904 opening day through 1906 when Jefferson City lawmakers banned gambling. It briefly hosted automobile testing before becoming a golf course. Apparently aged manure and pulverized turf favored fairway construction.

Golf created an exodus of track hangers-on in favor of a more landed crowd. Gleed Gaylord, publisher of Kansas City’s Independent, posited how golf’s fairways had become social stairways. Exclusive clubs like the Priests of the Pallas and the 81Club ladies confirmed her assertions.

Following Missouri’s gambling prohibition, Louis A. Cella, a St. Louis’ bookmaker, transplanted his activities to Hot Springs. Arkansas where legislators were apparently less conflicted, only briefly halting Oaklawn Park wagering.

Whether from a desire for more family-friendly entertainment or perhaps due to letters describing Beverly Hills track events, Kansas City attempted to join an emerging board-based circuit, one promoters claimed would stretch from California to Newark, New Jersey, with intermediate stops in Omaha, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and, yes, Kansas City.

Per the 1920’s railroads transported everything heavy or long, a mile-plus track certainly met those criteria. Lumber baron Robert Alexander “RA” Long became the Liberty memorial’s chief donor when he signed a seventy thousand dollar check, the final installment required for its creation. Long controlled both Louisiana and Arkansas timber tracts, plus a railroad that serviced timber interests there. Likely piqued by the track’s lumber and railway requirements, he identified a suitable Arkansas lumber site and perhaps penned sections of the track’s business plan.

A Cotton Belt freight agent first estimated and later finalized tariffs that sent a forty-unit lumber train to a Hermitage, Arkansas siding. Each flat cars could accommodate either fifty stripped pinpoles or three hundred lumber bundles. Use of untreated pine lumber for the big board track aroused surprisingly few objections. Kansas City’s mayor hinted that public works employees could somehow tarp or even deconstruct the structure if weather turned as Stroker liked to quip, inauspicious.

Mule teams, various Hank and Dan’s and Pete and Maude’s skidded Arkansas logs onto the waiting cars. From St. Louis the lumber traversed Missouri before briefly pausing in Kansas City and two days later reaching the Dodson building site.

When March 1922 delivered more spring-like, and less blustery weather, track construction commenced. As Liberty Memorial construction neared completion, its scaffolders adapted skill sets to those more applicable to a slanted wood structure.

An onsite Army GP-tent protected a one-to-a-thousand mache model that promoters used to impress visitors. A fan of Japanese Kanawa tsugi lumber-joining techniques, promoter Danforth regaled visitors and workers with tales surrounding intricate Japanese lumber-joining techniques. While Kanawa tsugi techniques never figured in track construction there , Danforth’s lectures amused visitors and provided brief rest periods for track constructors.

Sawmill operators limited surface boards to ten-feet lengths, finding shorter entries were better adapted to curved construction. Board-fitting necessitated near-constant board tensioning, new pieces joining previously-bent entries. The pry bar process required

to lodge a straight board into a curved space occasionally generated a tooth-jarring slap.

Construction photographs depict heavy upright two-by-twelve braces anchored into long floor joists, pitching the track’ surface at a forty-five degree angle. Roller-topped ladders were required so to permit its constructors to move along its steep surface.

Rather than Kanawa tsugi joining, construction favored compromises, work-throughs as the promoters described them. A careful student of the track’s business plan might have questioned its two-year operational timeline.

Nevertheless, construction progress attracted motor racing fans. Nearly five thousand Kansas Citians gathered on a late April Saturday afternoon when a Harley Davidson J-model speedster inaugurated the Million Dollar Speedway’s surface. A dozen pocket watches chronicled his lap times and trackside conversations had paused when he completed the mile-and-an-eighth in less than fifty seconds.

On his eighth circuit, the J-pilot sped down the straight before diving into the second turn, accelerating out at full throttle, thereby posting a lap-time of forty-five seconds at a remarkable ninety miles-per-hour. The image of a circling motorcyclist atop an enormous wooden structure, the energy created by his powerful motor and the percussive effect of power and speed atop planks riveted onlookers’ attention.

With the inaugural race planned for mid-September, private rail cars devoted to racing automobiles arrived at Kansas City’s Union Station shortly following Labor day. Engine displacements standardized at one hundred twenty-two cubic inches; the open cars’ sleek fuselages reflected minimalist, aerodynamic designs. Rain on the 16th forced a one-day postponement before September 17th dawned clear.

Guy Doty, National Motors heir and car owner asserted that national records would fall by the conclusion of the event’s three hundred racing miles, claiming that a newly-developed chemical would also eventually transform both range and top-speed characteristics of internal combustion engines.

Tommy Milton won the September 17th event, posting a remarkable average of nearly one hundred seven miles per hour, a new national record. Half a world away, Dutch cyclist Piet Moeskops became the world’s sprint champion on Paris’ much smaller board track.

Subsequent Million Dollar Speedway events attracted crowds, moving its challenges past promotion to satisfying unpaid lumber invoices and railroad tariffs. Engineers JV Hanna of the KC Terminal Railway, EB Black, firm of that name and the Corps of Engineers GC Hayden questioned whether the track’s untreated surfaces could survive Kansas City winters, much less floods.

Other ill-timed news originated at a New Jersey board track where multiple motorcyclist deaths there gained it a Murder drome nickname. Local news sources increasingly referred to the Kansas City track as the Woodyard, home to a million splinters.

Perhaps sensitive to sarcasm, promoters proposed that undertrack carpenters could re-anchor loosened track boards as speeding cars or motorcycles passed inches above. Amidst worries and concerns, Price, the racer-turned-engineer, proposed a novel bicycle racing format, one that curiously involved motors.

CHAPTER 3 TALES FROM THE SHOP

Spanning 1924

Any racer requires a wrench, a curious way of describing someone possessing mechanical skills and knowledge. This wrench was larger in skills and knowledge than in height. His name was Robert, never Bobby, sometimes inaccurately and unkindly referred to a midget. He was three-feet, nine-inches tall, a man possessing large hands and truly incredible resolve

Robert’s shop was located in a garage structure set behind a frame house that had been entered by only him for nearly ten years. A Jolly Roger planning a beer-fueled break-in there would have encountered a No.-5 bear trap positioned under a deceptively inviting bedroom window. Whether or not a potential prankster could have removed the trap’s jaws from a seriously fractured ankle fortunately remains unknown.

Bullying and teasing across adolescent years had been the norm for Robert. When pressed he sometimes appeared hostile but was otherwise pleasant, sometimes even engaging. In the presence of uninvited or argumentative patrons he invariably fiddled with a hand-held tool.

His house was largely undistinguished, one featuring a squatty pyramidal roof. Someone invited there might have questioned the purpose of four tables, each hosting bicycle parts assemblies. The first of the four stations featured a schematic of a New Departure coaster brake, a Roi-Tan cigar box contained all twenty-three New Departure’s components. A second table provided similar Bendix brake applicable drill-and-reassembly opportunities while a third featured a wheel-truing stand and three spoke-filled cylinders.

The tables were close enough to one other that a shop stool could quickly move from one to the next. A war veteran would have displayed an interest in the fourth station or table, one featuring cleaning patches and a bore rod appropriate to a Springfield rifle. Robert’s brother had brought it home from France.

Shop protocols governed disassembly, storage and reassembly of components. Parts were assigned to small glass jars, each lid tacked underneath an overhanging shelf. Tap and die work strengthened weakened threads, consist with Robert’s credo - Always stronger, never weaker.

George Kern wasn’t taller than Robert when he first began assisting there. While other bicycle messengers likely viewed Robert’s shop as merely a means of repair, the young Kern must have appreciated more.

George’s father demanded his son’s presence in the engraving shop through each day’s delivery schedule, nevertheless George learned the bicycle repair trade. Following six months of assisting, an acknowledgment of his proficiency arrived as a personalized apron. Above pencil slots, five scripted letters announced G. KERN

While aware of George’s racing pal mares, Robert remained fairly neutral about his prospects until someone challenged them. A Western Union supervisor retrieving a repair job rather dismissively shared how he viewed George’s stature as a handicap to racing.

Oddly, Robert first learned of an important bicycle race, one featuring what its promoters termed professional racers. Million Dollar Speedway Price visited, describing the newly-devised event, suggesting that a series of two-person matched bicycle sprints would precede a motorcycle-paced finale.

To illustrate his plan Price spun a spool-type conveyor roller behind a repaired bicycle, indicating the bicycle was as a stand-in for a pacing motorcycle, claiming the spinning device would allow racing cyclists to draft close behind their larger motorcycle pacers.

Robert examined the roller arrangement before asking Price a seemingly unrelated question. “Do you know where I could purchase three of these cylinders?”

While Price had no idea why Robert wanted three spinning cylinders, he explained his had originated with a local envelope manufacturer. Robert posed a second, possibly more race relevant, question.

“Is your race card presently full?”

Believing the shop owner might have someone in mind, Price suggested that person contact him directly.

When George arrived for work, Robert shared that Price might add George to the race bill, further describing a gyroscopic roller arrangement had recently devised, one that would permit a racing cyclist to develop or even refine a smooth, effective pedal stroke.

“Let’s lock the shop, grab your bike, George.”

Once inside Robert traded George’s battered wheels for a pair of newly constructed race-ready wheels, ones featuring gorgeous Vermont maple rims set inboard of oyster-hued tires.

At Robert’s direction, George lowered his rear wheel into a foreand-aft roller arrangement that connected to a third roller positioned slightly ahead of his front axle. Robert steadied his friend which allowed George could pedal at a fixed spot atop the odd contraption, relying on gyroscopic steadying for support.

Fewer than three-weeks separated them from what many Kansas Citians would later describe as an evening that featured skill, nerve and daring. Robert’s stopwatch - repair book notes chronicled nineteen evenings spent at a newly-introduced No. 5 skill station, efforts devoted to light-pedaling.

CHAPTER 4 SKILL NERVE & DARING

June 25th 1924

The Kansas City track was large by even velodrome standards. While bicycle tracks were generally limited to five hundred yards, the Million Dollar Speedway’s circumference looped 1.2 miles or nine-furlongs in horse racing terms. Its mile-plus specification favored new motor racing records given other tracks were limited to one-mile circumferences.

Indoor velodromes had already became popular in Europe, sheltering racers from winter squalls while providing fans with opportunities for wintertime betting. Paired two-man race teams there shared direct gear, no-brake bicycles as they circuited short, steep wooden tracks, often for as long as six days.

Similar to Barney Oldfield’s bicycle-to-auto metamorphosis, velodrome contestants migrated from bicycles to other venues, mostly those involving motorcycles or automobiles. As a youth, Price, a Million Dollar Speedway promoter, had contested Paris-based contests where he learned of a race format described as motorpacing, meaning a drafting bicyclist or stayer pedaled furiously behind a pacer motorcycle. Given no automobiles were involved nor were the motorcycles generally ridden at high speeds, the odd format might favor a rapidly. deteriorating board surface.

Valance fender-ed Indian Moto-Cycle displays were complemented by the addition of Indian bicycles. The HarleyDavidson Motor Company manufactured bicycles prior to fitting Vtwin motors into heavier frame triangles. The Schwinn company built Excelsior motorcycles before reversing course on Harley to restrict its production to bicycles. Few physical characteristics differentiated competitive moto- and bi-cyclists, stables of either sport generally featured sinewy, muscular youths. By 1924’s spring the Kansas City track’s exposed surfaces had mostly surrendered to repeat freeze-thaw and flood-related insults.

Even practice (or track) days increasingly generated flying objects ranging in size from splinters to dismembered, nearly missile-like, track boards.

Price had met with the Cincinnati mayor earlier that spring, attempting to gain a permit to create a Queen City-based board track. The Cincinnati’s mayor’s What, another murder drome reaction ended an unhelpful dialogue. Speculating that leaders in nearby Newport or even Covington, Kentucky might be more receptive, Price made pitches there without success. Returning, he convened a local meeting, one in which the promoters agreed on a final objective, milking Kansas City’s Woodyard through a profitable conclusion.

Prior to the creation of sanctioning bodies, police departments licensed motor racing contests, sometimes using them to showcase police motor patrol teams. But police leadership hardly favored high-speed events jeopardized by terrifying board launches, exploding fuel and flying junk. Ghastly New Jersey-based Murder Drome deaths created worries that extended past the Garden state regarding track integrity and spectator protection.

Price met with Kansas City’s police chief regarding a permit for an Independence Day auto racing event to discover the chief was unwilling to issue a permit until the promoters addressed the Kansas City track’s deteriorating surface, if not fan protective features.

Perhaps fearing another Murder Drome declination, Price moved their dialogue toward a non-motorized racing format in which bicycle racing pairs would follow pacing motorcycles. Failing to understand what Price was talking about, the chief asked a simple question. “Who’s doing the racing, motorcycles or bicycles?”

Steering clear of dense stayer and pacer terms, Price opted for a one-word, although deceptive response. “Bicycles.”

While the police chief regarded Price as a pest, he also reasoned bicyclists circling a beat-up track wouldn’t generate many fuel fires or board launches.

Joking, he chief inquired. “Do you know any bicyclists who can pedal forty miles-per-hour?” Price got what they needed, one more revenue-generator.

Western Union offices employed bicycle messengers, youngsters skilled at executing traffic squeezes and pinches. Devotees of drafting behind vehicles, they advanced their skills by sitting-in behind moving autos and executing track stands, balancing acts in which they rocked back-and-forth before springing forward.

A rag-tag bunch, messengers breathlessly appeared in lobbies with telegraphs or parcels. Typically clad in flat caps, moth-hole sweaters and frayed knickers they joined their unionized telegraphy, often earning as much as fifty-cents per hour, sometimes more than an employed parent.

While Western Union was s more recognizable firm, Postal Telegraph employed them, too. Besides delivering telegraphs, messengers worked side jobs, delivering parcels. Wardrobe emergencies could be correct by bicycle-borne dispatches originating with the Novorr brothers, Main street’s tailors. Messengers also allied, covering long distances by relaying telegraphs rider-to-rider, bicycle-adapted successors to St. Joseph, Missouri’s Pony Express.

The chief’s bicycle or motorcycle query prompted Price to devise a novel strategy, one that would convince fans they would witness a motorcycle race. Doing so, however, necessitated identifying headliner-grade moto-champions.

Ralph Heywood and Merkel James had arranged rail transport of race-only motorcycles from a Chicago event to Wichita’s Grand Nationals. The rail car containing their motorcycles had been unfortunately set out at a Union Station service track, close enough to Kansas’ Kaw Point but nowhere near Wichita.

Attempting to remedy the motorcyclists’ transportation dilemma, a railroad freight agent telephoned the Million Dollar promoter, letting Price know that two ranked motorcyclists were guarding race-only motorcycles at Union Station.

Astonished, Price abandoned another Danforth-led Kanawa tsugi lecture to let Heywood and James know that he would personally arrange their machine’s transport to the Wichita Grand National event if they would help him with, as he termed it, a track safety demonstration. Lacking further freighting options they agreed.

Per 1924, Kansas Citians learned of impending Wild West shows and circuses or even races, via posters, ones featuring large black capital letters printed against rainbow-shaded backgrounds. The most important features appeared across fuchsia tops merged into canary middle sections succeeded by lime green bottoms.

GRAND NATIONAL MOTORCYCLE STARS

RALPH HEYWOOD || MERKEL JAMES

Recognizable and important, two inches above...

MOTOR – PACED RACING

And then incidental features...

PROFESSIONAL CYCLISTS 3-ELIMINATION ROUNDS 10-MILE FEATURE

Heralding parades preceded important Kansas City event. Doty and Price drove matching LaSalle’s, their cars’ hoods topped by gaudy Million Dollar Speedway cowl devices. Price piloted the lead LaSalle with motorcycle champion Ralph Heywood in its back seat. Doty similarly chauffeured Merkel James. The two LaSalle’s were trailed by other large black cars, each featuring a dark-suited driver hosting a back-seated bicycle contestant attired in horseracing silks, likely leftover from Elm Ridge. The evening’s race card surprisingly included a wiry Jewish youth Abe Kern’s son, George.

Sidewalk onlookers, recognizing the race contestants as bicycle messengers, jokingly inquired if they had been enlisted for Churchill Downs. “Hey, where’s your horse?”

Drivers and cyclists delivered celebratory waves passing by the Phillips, New Yorker, Muehlebach and Senator hotels. Roaring past the Paramount theater, Carl Schultz hoisted his bike aloft, possibly portending a win.

The final entry in the strange little parade belonged to the city’s mayor, Sam Stroker, that name placarded along both sides. A smart politician, he launched wrapped peppermints toward sidewalk onlookers as three city cheerleaders pom-pom ‘ed across his back seat. Old school pols like Stroker only slowly adapted to the 19th Amendment’s voting changes. Following a downtown lap, the convoy sped east on Armour before turning south on Troost.

Wagering accompanied Kansas City auto races and prize fights but the odd motor-paced bicycling format apparently dissuaded local bookmakers,. Price phone St. Louis bookmaker Louis A. Cella who sent a cousin to Kansas City to accommodate local bettors.

Upon his arrival, the Cella cousin had been overheard commenting that Price likely included the Kern kid as fill-in, noting George’s small stature would likely prove a handicap on a long windblown track before a second speaker stated he had witnessed George edge a field of athletic Sedalia farm boys on a Pettis county track.

The unknown speaker volunteered more, describing how both motorcycle frame assemblies had been adapted to accommodate spinning roller contraptions, ones to permit drafting bicyclists to pedal within powerful wakes, possibly in excess of forty miles-perhour.

The evening’s venue began with a series of matched sprints that bracketed sixteen bicycle contestants. Recognizing his betting-anddrinking audience would remain at their work places until at least four, Price relied upon a saving-the-best-for-last concept while also encouraging early-arrivals to remain for the concluding feature.

Believing they had come there to witness motorcycle racing, disappointment, and even anger, arose during early evening bicycle sprints. Matched bicycle competitors ambled around the track until nearing the two hundred yard flag where they first appeared to halt, motionlessly balancing, daring one other to lead-out. Three out of four times the following cyclist sped past his opponent only inches from the finish. Work-weary fans initially yawned and groaned at that track standing process until they paid attention to what came next, blazing-fast sprints.

The semi-final round featured Carl Spencer, a Postal Telegraph messenger facing Carl Schultz, a local racing sensation, plus Emmett Carpenter, a cyclist and accomplished auto racer, matched against George Kern. Carl Shultz and George Kern emerged as winners, Schultz clad in red-and-white horizontal striped racing silks and George Kern sporting black-&-white checks.

Merkel James’ Excelsior machine was capable of speeds in excess of one hundred miles-per-hour, a motorcycle modified to accommodate Price’s spinning gadget and Kern’s drafting. Ralph Heywood, the second pacer, straddled a curiously spelled Indian Moto-Cycle, one featuring a side-valve Daytona motor. His Indian had previously covered a mile on boards in 32.5 seconds, at an astonishing one hundred-ten miles per hour, one that had been recently adapted to feature another Price-designed roller.

The Cella cousin made book in a makeshift booth erected just outside the main gate. The noisy line of bettors was largely undistinguished excepting a short overall-clad male carrying a cloth-covered tool bucket.

June 25th succeeded the summer solstice by three days, an evening when the Kansas City world felt warm, inviting really. Most present at the Million Dollar Speedway believed they were there witness a bicycle warm-up preceding a full-on motorcycle contest.

Male cicadas strengthened their chorus as a retiring sun extended the grandstand’s shadow and the air around it cooled. Dodson’s herds had settled into evening quiet. Two enormous floodlights directed spectators’ focus toward a mid-grandstand chalked finish line. Mechanics performed throttle checks for the two motorcycle race bikes across the twenty-minute intermission that preceded the evening’s main feature, one that would bring the bimoto race quartet past the grandstand seven times ahead of a bell that would herald the eighth, and charitably for the bicyclists, their final circuit.

Heywood and James shadowed one other until they slowed slightly to allow Schultz and Kern to fold-in behind them. Bicyclists in tow, the foursome completed a warm-up lap ahead of the checkered flag.

In racing terms, this was go-time. Motorcycle exhausts shot combustion gases and sparks at an alternatively roughened and other times oil-stained surface. The roar of two powerful race motors created a palpable excitement, cheering erupted each time the quartet flew past the grandstands.

For spectators accustomed to pedaling heavy bicycles at less than ten miles-per-hour, the image of thirty-five mile-per-hour cycling pair was electrifying. More than one spectator noted a unique feature accompanying the black-&-white checked rider’s pedal stroke, he appeared to be dancing-on-pedals.

Heywood and James maintained constant speeds until the fourth lap, when to the fans’ delight, they downshifted, creating engine roars and more sparks. Across the fifth, sixth and seventh laps, Kern and Schultz up-ed the pace, bumping the conveyor contraptions as if to signal fresh needs for speed. It was as dramatic as if two freight trains had raced across Kansas City’s summer night, the motor-paced finale looked fast and it was.

On the bell lap, James, a keen strategist, brought Kern halfway to the top rail, outlining a straight-line path to a finish line, pushing the Heywood - Schultz duo slightly higher. Heywood, Schultz in tow, rejected James’ ploy, establishing second direct-line path for Schultz.

Barring a single wheelchair viewer, no one remained seated as they closed on the two hundred yard flag on the concluding lap. Following preliminary heats, and after pedaling furiously for twenty-thousand yards, the margin of victory would surely be defined in millimeters. James and Heywood motored off, leaving Schultz and Kern to contest their bicycle-only finish. The messengers’ legs appeared to be driven as if pistons.

Given Schultz’ angular build and broader experience, the Cella bookmaker had set the odds in his favor. Fewer bettors favored Abe Kern’s kid, likable certainly, but mostly unproven. Key features of Robert Anthony’s fifth test station had not been shared with that crowd. Endless roller drills had endowed George Kern with a lively, dynamic pedal stroke, one that defied cramping.

Speedway judges required three-minutes of images before agreeing the win belonged to George Kern.

The first to settle with the Cella bookmaker was a short mustachioed male seen earlier with the bucket. While fans likely concluded it had contained tools, the pail had been used to conceal stacks of worn bills and piles of coins, all traded for four Cella bet slips. Post-race, Robert Anthony exchanged them for banded-stacks of one-hundred dollar bills. Thursday’s Star heralded

SKILL, NERVE AND DARING AT THE DETERIORATING DAIRY

KERN YOUNGSTER DANCES

WOODYARD

TO VICTORY

CHAPTER 5 PRATT & WHITNEY MILLIONS

1924-43

After pacing a victorious Kern and a more disappointed Schultz, Merkel James and Ralph Heywood coughed wood dust during their animated discussion. James was livid, owing to a rapidly deflating tire, the king-of-all-splinters lancing a sidewall. Heywood inspected his, too, finding a second track-derived splinter. The track’s alternatively splintery and other times oiled-slickened sections had proven challenging to both motorcycles and bicycles.

Twenty race cars and drivers, many veterans of Indianapolis’ Memorial Day contest filtered into Kansas City the week following the Price’s bicycle contest. Eight teams withdrew ahead of Kansas City’s checkered flag, citing track safety concerns.

Heywood and James’ splinter concerns were succeeded by an Independence Day disaster, one in which one hundred mile-perhour autos rattled track boards into objects ranging in size from splinters to complete boards. Where was Danforth with his Kanawa tsugi notions when a missile-like two-by-four almost pogoed an open-wheeled racer. Kansas City police stopped the perilous two hundred-lap feature on only its sixty-fourth circuit.

Citing multiple inter alia’s, promoters failed to compensate anyone. An unknown employee, maybe a dairyman, chained locked the gate while a shorter man hoisted the track’s emblematic Skill, Nerve & Daring sign into a wagon. Wisely, Robert Dodson had never transferred the deed to their property, skeptical of Stroker’s paid parking scheme. Attorneys attached liens to the track’s assets, quickly learning junk boards weren’t worth much.

Laborers who had earlier erected the huge slanted track ironically returned to disassemble it. While its braces and floor joists survived largely intact, the same wasn’t true for exposed lumber. Despite warnings from construction engineers, trackdamaged boards found their way into construction projects at the Fairyland amusement park and a National Guard armory going up on Main street.

Weary of winters spent shivering over wood stoves in converted tool sheds, innovative Belgian carpenters spliced shorter boards, creating longer pieces. Lumber loans were curiously arranged by a local bicycle shop owner. Rumors flew regarding his ancestry, some claiming he had been abandoned as an infant at a local orphanage. Belgian mule teams plied an increasingly unsecured lumberyard. While gracious Queen Anne house designs featured long beam arrangements, simpler folk houses, with their equilateral roof triangles, relied upon much shorter pieces of lumber.

Even though grass repopulated most trackside pasture sections, barren rings persisted where racer fuel had been mixed or added. Dairymen quickly learn they needed to separate their herds from such rings. A fugitive cow had broken into a contaminated pasture before repeatedly aborting. Across 1927’s winter and spring, floods and fires washed the last remnants of the Million Dollar Speedway and its ashes into Indian creek.

A parallel cycle of development and decay occurred one hundred miles south of Dodson. Southeast Kansas countryside increasingly featured limestone mounds paired with oddly-tinted reservoirs, curiously termed strip-pits. Across Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma’s tri-state region, miners harvested large chunks of impure lead sulfide, also termed galena. Old-timers likened surface mining to plucking peanuts from partially-buried plants, whether lead or peanuts, pluck-and-pick.

In April 1937 three unannounced visitors arrived at the Dodson dairy. Billy Dodson’s older son, Robert was deceased by then but was survived by his younger brother, Charles who waved for his nephew, Bobby, Jr., to help find out what the visitors wanted

The visitors were siblings, too, Mack, Burt and Ted Purkey, owners of southeast Kansas lead mines. Using terms unfamiliar to the Dodson’s, the Purkey’s claimed they were scouting the Dodson property. Following an unhelpful exchange, Charles Dodson informed let them know Dodson wasn’t for sale nor were its mineral rights negotiable.

Accustomed to mixed land owner receptions, Mack Purkey extended the dialogue. “Did the Dodson’s know a local midget, one that by then would be about forty-years-old?”

Ted Purkey posed a related question, perhaps hinting, too. “Mother, wedlock, Belgian miner?”

The uncle-nephew pair stared at one another before Charles told the Purkey’s to leave.

Oklahoma oil & gas men, self-described mineral lease agents, also surveyed the dairy for expansion of their emerging natural gas distribution system. The humbler Oklahomans must have been more persuasive given the Dodson’s allowed them to pilot a test well in a barren pasture area but like speedway parking it produced no revenue.

While weary of entrepreneurial schemes the Dodson’s desperately needed a second revenue stream, one that would permit the acquisition of pasteurization equipment. Their Door county, Green Bay, Wisconsin, cousins encouraged purchase of refrigeration equipment, too.

Edgar Sengier, director of the Belgian Union Mine had dispatched a valuable commodity, fissionable ore reserves to the United States in 1938. December 7th 1941 impacted every American live, the sons and daughters of Liege and Brussels serving honorably in her armed forces.

In late 1942 the War Department tasked Nebraska-born Leo Leander Pace, a Navy admiral, with identifying a site where the Double Wasp R-2800 radial aircraft engine could be manufactured. His Kansas City meetings were mostly ceremonial in nature given that the National Aeronautical Administration had already selected Dodson, Missouri.

The sole remaining issue, one facing both Pace and Kansas City’s mayor John B. Gage, was that of labeling the place. While Dairyland Engines and Little Blue Manufacturing figured among early contenders, they eventually settled on a much simpler two-word designation, Pratt & Whitney.

CHAPTER 6 GENERAL UNKNOWN

Spring 1979

Brooklyn appeared as if his eyes were about to pop, non-medical terms certainly, yet descriptive. His protruding orbits, the exophthalmos thing, could have as easily been labeled as Marty Feldman disease. Originating in the New York City borough of Queens, his odd nickname was displaced by about ten miles. While descendant of engravers and merchants, his parents welcomed Brooklyn’s scientific interest, chemistry in particular.

At another boy’s bar mitzvah, a middle-aged uncle checked his wrist, noting a fast, racing pulse. Inquiring if Brooklyn felt well, his response spoke volumes. “I feel like I’m going 100-mph, Uncle Bernie. Hey, your eyes pop out just like mine.”

A family physician labeled his disease using two memorable terms, Graves and disease. Like other Bayside boys he registered for Selective Service but when ordered for an Army physical he was quickly disqualified. Perhaps not the best news, or was it, no likelihood of dying on the Korean peninsula nor during Vietnamera recalls.

Matriculating at New York University, NYU as it is often known, Brooklyn had opted for an advanced course in synthetic chemistry. Some of his Graves’ disease characteristics, ones driving academic obsessions, translated into early successes.

After defending his Ph.D. dissertation outlining syntheses of novel organometallic compounds he joined Louisiana-based Big River Corporation, a gasoline additive manufacturer of. Had Brooklyn been posted to their more gentile Virginia-based offices, a different outcome might have ensued. Instead, he was dispatched to their Shreveport research facility, establishing residence in nearby Bossier City, referred to by locals as Bo-Zur.

One day while sharing a beer, possibly two, with an AfricanAmerican man mowing his yard, neighborhood snoops detected a schism between Brooklyn’s values and theirs. Whether from his irrepressible hyperthyroidism or perhaps from that shared beer, his Bo-Zur course shortened.

Each week’s Chemical & Engineering - C&E News, furnished fresh job listings and might have been more accurately titled Chemical Jobs. After pinching the latest edition from Big River’s library, he drove north in possibly the most recognizable automobile in Louisiana, a Citroen D/S.

Traveling northward on US-71 he made it as far north as Pittsburg, no-H, Kansas, before the Citroen’s water pump expired, necessitating a stay at an air-conditioned and fireproofed establishment advertised as the Stilwell. Begging mercy on its desk clerk, Brooklyn emphasized his doctor title.

After reviewing an unreserved room list, the clerk asked. “What kind of doctor are you?”

Brooklyn’s reply was accurate although dense. “Organometallic synthetic chemistry.”

While only the chemistry term particularly registered, the clerk’s response reflected the candor and openness that make small-town life alternatively refreshing but oppressive. “That makes you our second out-of-town visitor for the college’s chemistry post.”

Alone in his room, he placed C&E News on his chest ahead of a nap. Awake, he paged through its listings, spotting a locally relevant one: Research Chemist, capable of teaching general and organic chemistry; industrial or teaching experience preferred. Forward names of three (3) references and a curriculum vita to Pittsburg State University.

Vexed at his Big River release, Brooklyn had sought retribution by monopolizing a Xerox room there, using it to photocopy not only his curriculum vita but multiple copies of two obscure journal articles he helped author. After adapting a black Magic Marker to obscure a pilfered valise’ Big River identifier, he wedged his paper work into the case. By lunch of Citroen repair day one, he had introduced himself to chemistry professors there and also their Eagle-Picher colleagues. gifting everyone he met with a copy of his curriculum vita.

Brooklyn quickly learned that Eagle-Picher owned lead production facilities in both Joplin, Missouri and nearby Picher, Oklahoma and had established a distinguished record relevant to mining, refining and distributing of purity lead.

His new colleagues shared coffee, conversation and scientific interests during the five days required for a rebuilt water pump to be bused in from the nearest Citroen dealer, one located in Boston. While local professors and the Eagle-Picher staff welcomed his interest in the teaching position, Brooklyn reasoned that Pittsburg lacked Graves-relevant endocrinology expertise so his new friends referred him to counterparts at the University of Kansas City, about one hundred miles north.

Similar to Midland, Michigan’s Dow Chemical and Wilmington, Delaware’s DuPont Nemours, Kansas City shared in what were termed 3-per-day synthetic discoveries, meaning patentable chemical inventions. Kansas City’s discoveries better linked, however to regional agricultural needs.

Armed with his blacked-out valise, Brooklyn pointed a fresh water-pumping Citroen northward, arriving mid-day at the Genie, a second-tier hotel featuring advertising inexpensive weekly rates and room service, should Chinese cuisine prove satisfactory.

He ferried soiled dress shirts to Ross Miller’s Independence avenue dry cleaning plant, just east of downtown. The cleaner’s lobby provided no-risk opportunities to test communication skills in a place vastly different from Queens, New York.

Similar to Pittsburg, newly-introduced Kansas City professors offered collegiality, if not friendship. A senior chemistry colleague initiated a call relay, passing the baton to his department chair before identifying an anchorman, their dean. The arranged a schedule to interview him for a similar teaching post.

Ross Miller wasn’t intimidated by a dried Tabasco sauce stain on a red-and-green tie of the same design. Brooklyn’s light blue Enro shirt evenly absorbed starch while the cleaners performed similar miracles on his blue interview suit. College officials readily hired him, considering themselves fortunate to have attracted an NYUtrained chemist.

Evaluations from his first, or even second semester, presented an inconsistent, disappointing picture. Waxing and waning energy status, plus effects originating in multiple thyroid medications created an uneven, scattered lecturer. Frustrated these shortfalls,

Brooklyn questioned his new teaching role. Why were these students all pre-something? What was he, a warm-up act for professional school?

Collegial opportunities fell similarly short of his expectations. A neighboring botanist, Mel-something, mainly appeared catalogue plants. However relevant Brooklyn’s studies were to the 3-per-day process, they were also narrowly focused, short-changing him in the broader aspects of either art or science.

USMC Mel’s profession and devotion shared common characteristics, referring to the science of plants, ferns in particular. While Mel didn’t object to his service-derived nickname he was quick to correct anyone cutely referring to him as a marine- biologist.

Mel had waded ashore to some of Okinawa’s most intense fighting. By the time his 6th Marines departed, no vegetation remained anywhere there. From Easter 1945 forward his mission become that of eradicating what he considered as joint obscenities, those associated with deforestation and defoliation.

His afternoon was devoted to pressing fern specimens into newsprint. Past fifty-five and nearing sixty, he had captured many fern species but Missouri was only one place, leaving ten thousand additional fern species un-pressed. Beyond pressing, Mel scrolled through earlier entries, finding solace in ferns’ eloquence.

While the aroma of plants pressed into damp news print stretches along an axis described as pleasant or possibly neutral, what he smelled would have been more accurately characterized as sulfurous, vile even. A disgusting, pungent aroma arose in a laboratory fewer than forty-feet from where Mel worked.

General chemistry laboratory students there performed a timehonored experiment, one entitled Identification of a General Unknown, in the process creating an irritating, toxic sulfur odor, one that did more than irritate his nostrils; it reminded Mel of burnt hair and charred flesh.

A young chemistry assistant nicknamed Racer presided over this Hell-miniature, one in which eighteen Meeker burners heated individual water baths to limit reaction temperatures to the boiling point of water. Each assembly accommodated about eight test tubes, each one spiked with a sulfur-containing compound that produced hydrogen sulfide, or as chemists quipped, H-2-S.

However anonymous science buildings may have appeared, their occupants could generally identify one another by footsteps. Hearing Mel’s steps approaching, Racer recognized the botany professor would likely convey a request.

“Racer, see if the maintenance people can un-paint the prop-out windows so they can be opened which will help get rid of this nasty odor, here’s a note defining the problem.”

After Racer heard the botanist’s heavy door close, he knew Mel had left, leaving Andy Smith, a stockroom assistant, as his only coworker. Andy had been promoted from janitor status to stockroom assistant duties, ordering supplies and dunning students over broken glassware.

Shoving glassware breakage forms at small groups students, he resembled a crazed baseball fan possibly in search of multiple autographs. This process largely concluded by early afternoon, leaving him to either nap or plot mischief. The previous semester he had shared chemical-packing popcorn with unsuspecting students before revealing the stale snack originated as a packing material for glass bottles containing toxic liquids.

A written reprimand had been placed in Andy’s H-R file and if he and his wife, Olive, had not been raising a developmentallychallenged nine-year-old, staff there agreed he would likely have been dismissed. Whether due to the toxic popcorn incident or perhaps those naps, Brooklyn had instructed Racer to keep Andy on a short leash.

Racer couldn’t depart until the last student submitted findings. Only one remained, a pre-nursing female identified on the rolls as Gigi, parenthetically as Gee. Winged Frankie Vallee-style hair revealed an attractive face, her pink pin point blouse and upturned cuffs accessorized by a link ID-bracelet and leather-strapped wrist watch.

Racer hadn’t decided whether she was simply cautious or possibly slow. She finally penciled her form before handing it to him. Mistakes divided into falsely indicating the presence of an absent metal as opposed to neglecting others actually present. Racer’s placed tilde marks beside all four of this Gee’s selections, minus any x’s signifying errors. “Good job, you batted-a-thousand.”

“Hey, I’m a softball girl and I know what batting-a-thousand is all about. Racer, I’m familiar with the iron and copper entries but what about the other two, lead and antimony, what are their biological roles?”

“Correct, iron (Fe) and copper (Cu) are potentially beneficial, while lead (Pb) and antimony (Sb) are toxic-only. If you take advanced courses, you’ll learn how to measure actual lead concentrations in materials.”

While she had required fewer three hours to identify a chemical mixture, that process could take much longer, maybe a lifetime.

CHAPTER 7 KERN KNOCKS DOWN THE CURBS

Spring 1979

Kol Nidrei: Ve'esarei, Ush'vuei, Vacharamei, Vekonamei, Vekinusei, Vechinuyei.

D'indarna, Ud'ishtabana, Ud'acharimna, Ud'assarna Al nafshatana

Miyom Kippurim zeh, ad Yom Kippurim haba aleinu letovah

Bechulhon Icharatna vehon, Kulhon yehon sharan

Sh'vikin sh'vitin, betelin umevutalin, lo sheririn v'lo kayamin

Nidrana lo nidrei, V'essarana lo essarei

Ush'vuatana lo shevuot.

George Kern’s ancestors completed their second émigré sojourn by relocating to Guinotte manor lands located slightly east of Kansas City’s downtown, leaving the patronage of a Brugge nobleman, Charles Jeffreys, for one provided by descendants of Liege, the Guinotte family. Kerns originated as engravers and watchmakers, skills honed decades earlier in Brussels and other European cities.

Lacking permanent digs, Kern’s homesteaded in what landed Kansas Citians termed informal accommodations, meaning shacks but the expansion of time-critical jobs expanded both time-keeping and engraving opportunities. Multiple jewelry and watch repair shops operated near 12th and Baltimore. Although aware his older brother would eventually inherit their family’s engraving shop, George worked there, too, coordinating engraving duties with his Postal Telegraph assignments.

Letters from Belgium or even America’s east coast questioned whether Kansas City cousins had been consigned to a plains-based Jewish desert, puzzled by a “Kansas-something” address in Missouri. The Kansas City Kerns' joined dozens of other Jewish families in sponsoring construction of a large Moorish-themed temple at 34th and Paseo.

Kansas City’s sons of cycling, Schultz and Kern, were first dispatched to Ft. Dix ahead of U.S. Army European theater service.

Nearly four years following those miserable train rides to New Jersey, Kansas City’s champions returned.

George Kern was grateful for wartime prayers originating from the 34th and Paseo temple. But ahead of his return, he was stunned to learn that Robert Anthony was deceased, passing into history. He wept for the war’s fallen but more so for his great friend and advocate.

All vows: Prohibitions, oaths, consecrations, vows that we may vow, swear, consecrate, or prohibit upon ourselves - from this Yom Kippur until the next them henceforth.

They will all be permitted, abandoned, cancelled, null and void, without power and without standing.

Our vows shall not be valid vows; our prohibitions shall not be valid prohibitions; and our oaths shall not be valid oaths.

Each day before leaving his McGee street apartment, Kern-theretailer shielded himself from Kern-the-Veteran’s memories, finding shop time oddly therapeutic. Once inside K-L-W, he reviewed his racing accomplishment, one documented by a large hanging panoramic photograph. In it Schultz angled his head slightly to the right, his square jaw open and nares flared, his eyes likely defining astonishment. Kern’s gaze was less visible but left an impression of eyes fixed on his wheel’s leading edge, elbows tucked and arms set low, an illustration of perfect form. The photo also depicted a short mustachioed man leaping in delight. A partition separating the backroom from the sales floor featured an ancient sign, one possessing a curiously outdated message.

THE MILLION DOLLAR SPEEDWAY

THE GREATEST DISPLAY OF SKILL, NERVE AND DARING

A smaller photograph featured a seated version of the same mustachioed man, its lighting enhanced by dozens of small glass jars. K-L-W had originated as K-L-Wheel goods, supplier of children’s wagons, pedal cars, bicycles and wheelchairs, the latter differentiating K-L-W from most sports retailers.

Each customer received the same well-practiced “How may I help you” greeting. Needs were quickly assessed and customers

dispatched, usually trading repairable items stiff-card claim checks. Front-to-back the store featured tricycles and kiddie bikes succeeded by balloon tire models, both categories preceding a much smaller inventory of hanging racing entries, the latter accessible by using a tracked ladder.

George Kern and the K-L-W enterprise was less than a mile removed from events that would eventually affect both his shop and personal identities, events originated in the Muehlebach, one by every American president from Theodore Roosevelt through the White House’ present occupant, James Earl Carter.

A young matron had seated herself in its lobby in an elegant, though unwanted Cadillac, an Everest & Jennings wheelchair.

Courtesy of a muscular doorman, her lobby entrance had featured an energetic bounce necessitated by an eight-inch curb.

Mission Hills Margo arrived early, anticipating meeting her friend Hillary for early afternoon Manhattans. The Mission Hills aspect of her nickname arose during the six-weeks required to rehabilitate from Guillain-Barre-associated paralysis.

Margo favored the Mission Hills moniker, distinguishing her from a similarly paralytic, Dallas -Margo. Seeing Hillary hand her car keys to the valet, Margo wheeled toward the lobby’s front doors. And that when an axle retainer, victimized by earlier curb trauma failed.

Margo’s collapsing wheelchair launched her well-coiffed, yet weakened physique onto a soft Persian rug. If heart attacks arose from stress, the general manager would have qualified. However, he was quick on the heels of the maître’, both trailing the doorman. “Ma’am, are you all right? Can we call a doctor?”

Although uninjured, Margo was obviously angry. “I’ve been paralyzed for ten years. It’s a little late for doctors, what I need is a mechanic.”

Following Manhattans, the maître’ summoned the house limo to transport both ladies home, a second driver piloting Hillary’s de Ville behind the house car. Muehlebach management, in keeping with the hotel’s excellent reputation, organized repair of her collapsed wheelchair, selecting K-L-W as their vendor.

Later that week, Kern requested Racer phone their newest wheelchair repair customer to let her know her chair could be picked up on Saturday. When Margo’s driver paused near the store’s loading ramp, he found George Kern there. Oddly seated in the shop’s loaner wheel chair, George rose to assist with Margo’s car seat-to-wheelchair transfer, using it as a means of gathering further human factors data.

While human anatomy permits downward gaze of fortydegrees, neck muscles generally limit upward gaze to twelvedegrees above horizontal. Kern’s breast pocket notebook contained dozens of human factor entries, each one carefully adapted to wheelchair-fitting.

Margo quickly noted the shop-built wheelchair was special, its wheels fabricated from gorgeous Vermont maple interrupted thirty-six-times by washered spokes set inboard of oyster-hued tires. Gaze limitations notwithstanding, Margo craned to absorb the photographic depiction of Kern and Schultz at speed.

Viewing an ancient-appearing bicycle frame hanging from a partition, she ran her hands along the loaner chair’s maple-rimmed wheels, appreciating their previous role as companions to the old frame.

Liveries and stables had served as roadhouses, succeeded by car barns and repair shops. Eclectic mixes of bicycle and, yes, wheelchair racers, viewed K-L-W as their store, initiating rides, runs, and even wheelchair rolls from there.

Boston Athletic Association newsletters, as well as others originating with the Amateur Bicycle League of America in New York City passed through multiple hands, thereby informing potential contestants of both past rankings and future contests.

KLW-based racers initiated what were termed run-and-ties, contests in which two individuals shared a single bicycle, relaying a twenty-five mile run-and-ride. Kansas Citians were amazed at marathon-grade distances in the saddle, much less half that distance spent running, or as otherwise termed, jogging.

Wheelchair racers sought bib numbers, promoters slowly warming to that concept. It took a cardiologist, nearly a diamond, to advance their cause. E. Grey Dimond, Kansas City cardiologist and 40

medical school dean advanced their cause when he scheduled a fitness symposium for May 1974, one featuring a three-mile race open to both runners and wheelchair contestants.

Across the 1960’s, legislators attempted to enlarge access for disabled persons, yet few improvements emerged beyond those in federal buildings, mainly post offices. Public works departments continued their opposition to curb cut-downs, citing water run-off issues.

An unheralded feature of the 1965 Civil Rights Act also expanded rights for disabled persons. The political significance of disabled voters went largely unrecognized ahead of Jimmy Carter’s 1975-76 presidential campaign.

When Kern presented Margo with a refurbished and more durable chair, she glowed. “This is nice, better than new, but how did you know? Also is there an establishment where I could purchase some maple wheels like those on your shop chair?”

Kern furtively glanced at his old Million Dollar frame. “There once was, but maple-rimmed wheels are throwbacks, just like me.”

“George, you don’t look like a throwback. I need a reason to visit here but I don’t want to break another wheelchair.”

“You don’t need a broken chair to visit K-L-W. Come see me soon!”

To shop guys, he created the rules. Perhaps most importantly, George was their champion but this fresh interaction revealed a new dimension. The Kern - Margo duo obviously connected. Her driver shortly appeared, placing her newly repaired chair in the car’s spacious trunk.

Margo handed her business card to George. “If I can be of help, my family and I run a construction business and sit on hospital and medical school boards. George, I’ll try to be more careful. “

Waving goodbye to Margo Kern was distracted by the arrival of a new customer parking immediately in front of K-L-W. The Chevrolet possessed a ready identifier in the form of a corkscrew HA-M radio antenna, white-on-mahogany Missouri license plates announced KO-W0Z’ arrival.

CHAPTER 8 POISON CENTER VISITORS

April 1979

Racer watched as a relatively young university hospital physician extracted an Atala Pro bicycle frame from his car’s trunk. K-L-W’s newest customer recognized Racer as one of the college’s lab assistants. Directing comments toward K-L-W’s owner, their newest customer took the conversational lead.

“Good morning, my name’s Brian Wozniak. I’ve been watching you complete that lady’s wheel chair-fitting process. That’s a skill we need at the hospital, too.”

Moving toward repair issues, the newly-introduced Wozniak person switched to cycling-adapted language. “Since moving to Kansas City I haven’t ridden this Atala. Could you check it out, brakes derailleurs, shifters, cables, give it an update?”

Kern motioned to Racer to join the conversation, believing he might like to meet their newest customer . Racer shook Brian Wozniak’s hand, acknowledging their shared university and hospital connections.

The enforcer of clarity, Kern time-estimated repairs. “We’re working on a seven-ten-day repair schedule. Given we may need some Campagnolo bits, how would a week from Wednesday work for you? “

“That’s fine. To simplify spelling, why don’t you print the repair tag as Woz, my nickname? “ Instead, Racer lettered the claim check as overhaul – complete, Brian Wozniak, MD, University Hospital.

A New York transplant, Woz was a more of a bikie than George and Racer might have appreciated . Years earlier an adolescent Woz had joined Central Park pace lines, below-the-waist identically-attired cyclists sporting black wool shorts, white athletic socks and laced leather cleats complemented by unique jerseys advertising New Jersey delis, the Police Athletic League and Italian bubblegum manufacturers.

Woz’ parents insisted Brian, an only child, wear a cycling helmet, one constructed via three-front-to-back rubbery strips sewn into a thick leather hat band. As TE Lawrence fans, they recognized Lawrence of Arabia’s tragic end, from a motorcycle-related head injury.

Woz watched Racer mount a ceiling-mounted ladder, placing the Atala alongside a F-U-J-I race bike. Viewing Racer at his second job, caused Woz to review some of his obligations.

The preceding week his assistant had handed Woz a bulky questionnaire originating with the American Association of Poison Control. Scanning fourteen response areas, he had puzzled over new requirements for consulting resources in botany and industrial hygiene, noting resumes and contact information were required this time.

While young by physician standards, Woz had witnessed changes that dramatically altered his practice environment. Gall bladder removal charges of $875 and labor and delivery costs of $350 had become extinct.

Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society ushered in an era of contracted fees. Passage of 1973’s Emergency Medical Systems Act or E-M-S-A legislation, partially funded both poison control and burn units. Unfortunately hospital administrators regarded both traumarelated entities as financial losers.

The Kansas City Fire Department, and associated Local 42, both championed burn units. Firefighters waved empty mount-out boots at paused drivers beside Wornall and Ward Parkway red lights, collecting mostly small change.

While most telephone directories included a listing for poison control listing, it typically followed ones for Police and Fire, sometimes trailing Time and Temperature. Oddly, 911 reimbursement did not extend to poison control centers.

Prior to 1957, care at Kansas City hospitals split between patients accommodated at General Hospital No. 1, for whites, and that provided at No. 2, for non-whites. Dr. J. Edward Perry’s ProvidentWheatley Hospital buttressed facilities available at No. 2. While the E-M-S-A legislation may have seemed specific to burns and poisonings, its pushed health care toward a more integrated model.

Early poison control answering schemes were largely modeled after protocols used in other call centers. Senior pharmacy students managed non-life-threatening calls by consulting a Poisondex database linked to microfiche reader device. Microfiche searching resembled serving as usher, quickly matching lettered-andnumbered positions against narratives.

Managing drug-related poisonings could be more straight forward than a similar industrial chemical process. Industrial chemical categories were unnecessarily broad, shoehorning dozens of solvents or paints into a single section entitled hydrocarbonsvolatile or metals – heavy.

Similar terms designated substances with strikingly different toxicities. Dioxane, a common solvent differed by only two letters from dioxin, a remarkably toxic substance. While benzine served as a UK synonym for petrol, a single letter change from i-to-e designated benzene, a potent leukemia causer.

Woz wondered if these new botany and industrial hygiene requirements meant those skill sets had already proven useful. The toxic plant part suggested botanical knowledge but he wasn’t sure what an industrial hygienist either was or did.

Fanning the form’s pages, he reviewed a section entitled Locating Subject Matter Experts, outlining how the botanical expert would distinguish toxic from edible mushrooms, further suggesting that a subset of Certified Industrial Hygienists, or C-I-H’s, were employed by government agencies. He wildly speculated that this requirement might have originated with the C-I-A or its Dulles creators.

Similar to the three-letter C-I-H designation, Dulles issues favored trios, whether names or letters, brothers John Foster Dulles and Allen Welsh Dulles, plus the triple-lettered Central Intelligence Agency. Woz wildly speculated that perhaps the C-I-H person might be a C-I-A super spy? Nevertheless, he needed to identify two consultants and likely generate a plan to compensate them.

The last time he engaged in a serious science exercise occurred as he lettered W-O-Z-N-I-A-K on a botany exam paper. Since then he Wozniak had adapted himself to medicine’s narrow corridors in which the inter- of disciplinary might be as subtle as an internist consulting with a surgeon.

The resume requirement posed an additional handicap. Without the resume requirement, he speculated he could chat up a couple of professor types over a tasty faculty club lunch, waiting for dessert to ask them for business cards outlining their contact data.

So on a Saturday that should have been his day off, Woz applied a popular decision-making approach, one of stewing. After the late afternoon sun created lengthening shadows, he shut his office door and drove home.

Reaching a converted Forest avenue flat, a former No. 2 hospital room, Woz chuckled. For Saturday night he wanted to be KO-W0Z, all shortwave, sans medical designations.

Monday morning necessitated case follow-ups followed by a numbing cascade of meetings. With each came a further realization of the form’s still blank fields.

Lacking further stewing options he phoned the science department. “Good morning, this is Dr. Wozniak. Could you tell me who might advise me regarding botany and chemical exposures?”

While her first instinct was to take a number, Office Lady pursued Woz’ inquiry. It’s true she heard the doctor part, it’s true she recognized the botany term, but past those, his inquiry apparently created an alternative, bizarre meaning.

A big fan of Dick Van Dyke and Danny Thomas reruns, she persisted through credits announcing “Dick Van Dyke wears BOTANY 500 suits” and “Mr. Thomas’ wardrobe furnished by BOTANY 500.” Her fondness for those two suave entertainers may

explain what ensured. “Did I hear you right? You want a professor to remove a chemical stain from your BOTANY 500 suit? “

Skilled in calming, Dr. Wozniak clarified. “No thank you, my suit is fine. But what I need is someone who can identify mushrooms, toxic plants and poisonous berries.”

“Please hold for Dr. Mel.” While brief, the Woz-Mel conversation was scheduled a visit.

Two days later Mel walked over to Woz’ office. Mel’s previous medical contacts primarily featured Navy Corpsmen during the battle for Okinawa. Beyond inter-service teasing, Marines like him generally held Corpsmen, and physicians for that matter, in high regard. Mel speculated whether he could use this new relationship to an expanding passion beyond ferns relative to medicinal chemistry.

Woz was also nervous about soliciting an older professional for a mostly unpaid assignment, perhaps accounting for the interest he showed in Mel’s medicinal plant inquiry. Woz was also pleasantly surprised that the unpaid nature of the consultancy did not deter newly-introduced Prof Mel.

Mel was similarly pleased Dr. Wozniak took his questions seriously, making their sole unresolved issue one of a contact telephone number for Mel who handed Woz his business card to Woz, adding his wife could always find him.

Brooklyn had broken his way through half a box of chalk-sticks by the time Office Lady mimed an arriving call. He had agreed to bonus her with Coke money any time she could rescue him from yet another dreadful pre-med chemistry lecture.

“I have Dr. Wozniak from poison control on hold.”

As if the twenty-year-old’s hadn’t heard, Brooklyn re-phonated through the Dr. Wozniak feature. Sans an apology, he abandoned them in favor of monopolizing her handset, baritone-ing Dr. Brooklyn, as if interrupted midway through a 3-per-day synthesis.

Woz began by complimenting Brooklyn on good things he had heard regarding the chemistry professor’s industrial experience. Indicating he would like to meet in person, they agreed on a coffee for later that afternoon.

Woz pursued the certified industrial feature without clarifying the hygiene element, mostly because he didn’t understand it himself. Brooklyn similarly neglected the hygiene pierce, too, expounding instead on pollution challenges facing Bossier City, Louisiana.

While Woz had no idea how Brooklyn’s Bo-Zur comments related to consultancy duties, he attentively listened, better appreciating poorly-treated thyrotoxicosis.

Woz’ interrupted Brooklyn’s monologue to make sure he would be comfortable with sampling air for benzene and analyzing children’s blood regarding its lead content. The to-and-fro proceeded until Woz over-invested in his personal knowledge by inquiring if Brooklyn possessed Tricorder-like device from a Star Trek episode, taking silence as a Tricorder-no.

Brooklyn then comically inquired if Woz had encountered the award-winning writings of Richard Feynman, where that physicist posited that heart surgery could be accomplished by a swallowed molecular-scale surgeon. Admitting to a lack of tiny surgeon knowledge, they laughed, realizing neither appreciated much of what the other either knew or did.

The pharmacy assistant shortly patched an urgent call to Woz’ speaker phone, one originating from north central Missouri’s Wabash hospital. The physician caller from Moberly explained to Woz that an eighty-year-old gentleman had laced orange juice with three tablespoons of a weed poison. Brooklyn listened as Dr. Wozniak described a bicarbonate protocol to potentially correct metabolic acidosis.

Obviously antsy, Brooklyn pointed to his watch, miming his way toward a departure. Outside he returned to molecules of his choosing, ones far removed from Glyphosate cocktailed into orange juice. Mainly, though, Brooklyn needed a nap.

Only a few days passed before the Brooklyn-Racer team received their first call for industrial hygiene service. The caller shared how someone named Wanda Swearengin had called the poison control number sufficiently, the student answerers recognized her by the sound of her voice.

Mrs. Swearengin’s home lived one of Kansas City’s oldest neighborhoods, one labeled Harlem, a couple of blocks east of the 48

city’s downtown airport. The assistant shared how their client believed vapors from nearby Cook Paint Company were making her ill.

Racer knew Cook paint sponsored a semi-pro basketball team, the Painters. The semi- feature applied to professional-levels athletes who formulated paint ahead of a four o’clock whistle announcing either practice or a night-only home game. While many Kansas Citians could locate Cook Paint by its smell, Brooklyn did not believe emissions from there constituted a serious health issue.

Brooklyn outlined tasks. “Please monitor paint chemicals, toluene and xylene. Depending on what you find, we’ll compare results with references in the 1974 Threshold Limit Value list, my old TLV booklet.”

Given reaching there would require crossing a Missouri river pay bridge, Racer requisitioned George’s Econoline. After placing the TLV booklet in jersey pocket, he bicycled to KLW where Kern provided a trip clipboard and two dimes for Paseo bridge tolls.

Studying the case file, Racer placed the address listed just east of Richards air field. By then converted from commercial to general aviation, its runways accommodated planes using aviation fuel, Avgas as it was also termed, made Racer question whether her concerns were more the result of paint manufacturing or perhaps Avgas.

Upon his arrival Mrs. Swearengin outlined multiple health conditions, describing multiple prescriptions originating with five quite unacquainted physicians. While admitting her struggles had given rise to crank status, she clarified she was sought status as a nice lady crank.

Called inside to quiet a ringing phone, Racer used her absence to open a small leather case, one whose Draeger-lettering announced German origins. He shortly notched two narrow-bow glass tubes, one to detect toluene and the second, xylene. Using a small rubber bulb he drew Harlem neighborhood air across both tubes, anticipating color changes appropriate to either toluene or xylene, although neither tube’s granules darkened.

Puzzled by two negative findings Racer repeated the glass tube drill which again revealed nothing. Mrs. Swearengin returned to the porch where Racer shared his repeat negative results.

Although disappointed suggested he might return another time before presenting him with an unused inhaler device. According to her account she had been unsuccessful in coordinating its activating trigger with her inhalations. Reading aloud from a previously unfolded insert, Racer circled a photograph depicting a robust young male energetically triggering while inhaling. Following a chocolate chip cookie sample and repeat goodbyes, he drove away in Kern’s Econoline.

Later that evening Mrs. Swearengin shared with a neighbor that poison control had sent a doctor to Harlem. “I feel so much better knowing someone is finally taking me seriously. “

Before stuffing the Heartland center’s response in a flat brown envelope, Woz re-read and edited the consultant response section. Restricting himself to fewer than three corrections, he zigged-andzagged across the form via the IBM Selectric’s spacebar, contemplating how he might spoof Brooklyn regarding its very non-NASA spacebar.

Brooklyn corrected a critical typo, one in which an assistant had listed Brooklyn as C-I-A eligible, overtyping C-I-H, as corrected by BWMD. While the Dulles’ brothers may have been limited to three-letter abbreviations, he could handle four.

CHAPTER 9 UPHILL FROM PRESERVATION

Per 1979

I laughed in the morning's eyes. I triumphed and I saddened with all weather, Heaven and I wept together, And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine: Against the red throb of its sunset-heart I laid my own to beat, And share commingling heat; But not by that, by that, was eased my human smart. In vain my tears were wet on Heaven's grey cheek.

James Lawrence, Hound of Heaven

While Wanda Swearengin may have been downwind of Cook Paint, she was certainly downstream of one hundred years of European-American neighborhood traditions. Her Dutch-derived neighborhood originated on the Missouri River’s north bank while a more Belgian-derived Preservation neighborhood emerged to its south.

Belgians migrated east of downtown, their Preservation neighborhood nearly surrounded by the Missouri river and railroad yards. Some residents favored East Bottoms as a label while others preferred Preservation, claiming that term originated with pioneering Guinotte’s. The Irish arrived midway between earlyarriving Dutch in 1822 and Belgians, arriving later across 1850-52. For Indians, distinguishing among various Europeans was less important than recognizing they frequently carried cholera.

Preservation’s separation from the Missouri River may have accounted for it permanence. Unlike many communities, Preservation wasn’t based on a walk-ends-in-the-river principle, instead it was removed from the Missouri river by nearly a mile.

Past humble tool shed origins, combinations of city-based job and Speedway lumber slowly corrected its housing deficits. Lumber wagons departing the failed Million Dollar track traveled east along Bannister Road before passing through five miles of woods and glades set close to the Blue river. Lumber haulers enjoyed northsouth alternatives, Prospect, Paseo and Troost among them. Eastwest travel varied among boulevards labeled as Gregory, Meyer or Brush Creek. The final stretch placed lumber wagons east of downtown but close to the Preservation neighborhood.

Unlike contracted construction projects that generated lumber discards, lumber extras migrated from finished one projects to the next. A few warped, often unusable boards were forwarded sufficiently they acquired nick names, some spoken in English, others in Flemish. Fathers and sons joined other framers, Speedway board housing framing nearly acquired team status.

While cholera-infected Europeans may have been marginally acceptable to Missourians, a similar open-mindedness didn’t apply to diseased cattle. Texas’ drovers originally favored Sedalia as a rail head but mid-Missouri’s cattlemen objected, fearing for their herds. Possibly Kansas’ cattleman raised fewer objections given its Kaw Point became a permanent rail head, meaning rail needed to connect all the way from St. Louis into Kansas.

Set eight miles east of Kaw Point, Preservation became an eclectic mix of African- and Mexican-Americans, Native Americans and former Europeans. Despite varied origins yy 1979 its curious mix of residents generally favored one another. Among the most favorably disposed persons was Consuelo Guzman.

Consuelo, or as she preferred, Connie, was a de facto matriarch. She and her husband, Capataz, a railroad section foreman were neighborhood role models. His pay stubs supplemented hers, ones earned at Nelly Don dressmaking.

When neighborhood snoops counseled her regarding the risks of working outside the home, Consuelo reminded them of risks 52

railroad section workers faced on a daily basis. While separated by nearly one hundred years, she shared interests with Preservation’s foundress, Aimée Brichaut Guinotte.

That Tuesday Consuelo travelled a path created by Belgian immigrants. Alternatively, it could had originated with her ancestors, those accompanying Coronado in 1541 or even the deBourgmont or Mallet pathfinders in 1724. Native Americans were rarely given credit since they had created the trails centuries earlier. But even the Indians had been preceded by a geologic ice age six hundred thousand years earlier, thereby creating the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers, a floodable site that became Kansas City.

Consuelo strode uphill, as she rather ironically neared Kansas City’s downtown. Accomplished and attractive, she was conservatively attired in a brown flannel dress, one hemmed slightly below knee height, an ensemble complemented by polished oxfords. A seamstress reviewing her chocolate-hued selections would have noted efforts originating among multiple dressmakers. While their paid output may have belonged to Nelly Don, self-help projects allowed them to wear Kansas City’s finest garments.

That Tuesday she would venture past her comfort zone. While her medical qualifications may have been thin, Consuelo’s Spanish language skills and dependability recommended her for a recentlycreated medical assisting position.

Nelly Don vice presidents had welcomed Kansas City internist, ID Funk, anticipating he could help reestablish Nelly Don’s inhouse clinic. Born in Philadelphia, Funk he had been raised near the garment trade and had agreed to provide low-cost office visits Tuesday and Thursday mornings, brief medical encounters for about one hundred, mostly female, employees.

Nelly Don workers had decades earlier benefitted from a similar scheme, headquartered at the Lady Garment Hospital, a Colonial Revivalist home where a surgeon-nurse couple transformed its kitchen into an operating theater and re-purposed five bedrooms into patient stay areas. Given house’s single upstairs toilet, bedpans were occasionally required for even ambulatory patients.

By 1979, less dressing-up significantly weakened Nelly Don’s financial status, fashion steering hard left in favor of frayed T-shirts and patched dungarees. Male styles went wide, embracing wide collars and broad, floral pattern neckties. Nat Nast, a Kansas City fashion icon successfully converted bowling shirt designs into clever fashion statements.

A rather chilly reception accompanied Funk’s Kansas City arrival. Beyond medical school and a one-year internship, his clinical skills had been largely acquired while serving as a medical officer on light cruiser. While the occasionally victim of a wardroom prank, he favored Navy humor over indifference he experienced in Kansas City possibly explaining why he worked hard to make Consuelo comfortable in her recent medical assisting role. He carefully described how she would contribute to both chart retrieval and note-ing, having her review earlier notes such as those affecting R. Gutierrez, visit 75 cents, Maria Hernandez, visit 75 cents + 60 cents - aspirin, N. Ramirez, payment deferred, husband an alcoholic.

Within a few weeks he acquired a secondary following, sick or otherwise ill individuals who gathered in the company parking lot ahead of his arrivals. As his Impala nosed in, Frunk was greeted by panels of unofficial patients there. He fixed what he could and other times scribbled doctors’ names on his prescription pads, even phoning medical colleagues in favor of these parking lot patients.

Given his office hours commenced inside, Funk was forced to shortly let the Impala spotters know that he needed to wrap-it-up. A traveling man, by mid-day Funk hustled to Volker Avenue’s Menorah Hospital. Even short drives sometimes consumed an an hour, the side effect of house-calling. Tuesdays and Thursday when he departed for Menorah, Consuelo returned to a shop floor treadle machine.

Her afternoon steps late traced a gentle transition from Charlotte street to paths outlining Columbus Park. From its greenery she trekked grass-worn pathways paralleling Northeast Industrial Traffic way and Guinotte Avenue.

Preservation boasted twin landmarks, ones originating in the Norris grain elevator and its partner, the St. Francis Seraph church. 54

While the church’s spire didn’t height rival the elevator’s cupola, its bell tower cast long shadows across ball fields to its east.

An earlier wooden church had been erected on land parishioners mistakenly believed belonged to the Guinotte’s. Controversy later arose when Joseph’s widow, Aimée, declined to provide officials with a deed. But neither she nor her deceased husband, Joseph, had owned the land where the small wooden church structure had been erected. The small wooden structure was eventually dragged nearly two hundred yards to more purchasable land located on Wyman, an avenue later re-designated as Agnes.

In economic terms, St. Francis parish was poor, landlocked by factories, warehouses and railroads, plus houses of drink and others with an even more questionable purpose. Prior to his pastoral assignment, Father Jacob there had chafed at what he viewed as narrow social justice agendas.

Jacob’s seminary years had been interrupted only twice, once to view Neil Armstrong’s July 1969 moon landing and a second time to witness the 1971 Attica prison riots. While he possessed no ambitions relative to space travel, his witness to the prison riots created a passion in favor of formerly incarcerated persons.

Nearby steel-on-steel rail car couplings possibly strengthened his resolve following Jacob’s first noisy rectory night. The day following he walked door-to-door, business-to-business, when he first encountered Lonnie Proffit, a former San Bernardino Hell’s Angel.

Following his release from prison Proffit adapted an old Preservation tool shed as a plating shop, reinventing himself as a chrome plater, mainly specializing in motorcycle accessories. He used Jacob’s visit to inquire if a cinder-block property on the church grounds might be leasable.

Responsible for more buildings than his parish could either occupy or heat, Jacob warmed to Proffit’s lease proposal. Jacob had coincidentally reviewed a Department of Corrections letter outlining a new program for church’s to supply housing for parolees. Was this lease proposal a possible resolution to a considerably underpowered collection plate.

Admitting he needed consult his council, Jacob returned to the rectory where he penned a letter to the Department of Corrections, outlining how parolees would be housed on the church grounds while learning the electroplating trade. Less than a week passed before a registered Jefferson City-originated letter arrived, signed by multiple officials, all inquiring when first class of parolee platers could begin.

Father Jacob offered Proffit favorable lease terms should the Proffit agree to train roughly a dozen parolee-platers. Proffit’s crew shortly relocated electroplating lines from the Belgian tool shed to larger quarters set in the church’s tin-roofed annex. Preservation residents were fairly neutral about the parolees, fearing too many from eastern Missouri would remain Cardinal fans.

Only two arrived carrying more than a brown sack of stenciled belongings, a young black man carrying a tied bundle of Louis L’ Amour paperbacks and a white male toting a Harley-Davidson manual. Proffit and Fr. Jacob met three more times, mainly to settle on terms regarding utilities, water, electric service and natural gas.

While Preservation wasn’t designated by a formal marker, a Nicholson avenue firm possessed a similar name, the Preservation Sleeper Tie Company. It had originated in 1969 as a supplier of creosote-treated railroad ties and had recently added a second featuring residential pentachlorophenol-treated wood products.

Preservation residents were grateful for the tie-treaters co-location, particularly during mosquito season, claiming the plant’s aroma was more effective than spray trucks in deflecting flying bugs. Parents, older children, too, found its two lagoons unsuitable for either wading or fishing.

Most tie-treaters originated in eastern Jackson county, truckpooling in from Ray or even Lafayette counties, too. Their identities were largely unknown, excepting that of Thomas Jefferson Williams, otherwise known as TJ. Originally a bridge and building or B&B, laborer, he had advanced to lead-man and later foreman before abandoning a promising railroad career in favor of joining his cousin in the creosot-ing trade, contributing fourteen thousand dollars toward relocation of enormous creosote-adapted vacuumprocessing pumps.

During their first seven years the cousins operated as partners but in 1975 a Chicago-based corporate giant purchased both their interests. Windy City-based executives lacked tie-treating expertise, however, and chose to retaine TJ as their Kansas City manager. His cousin already owned a Lake of the Ozarks cabin, retiring there to a more regulated seasonal life, one dominated by crappie, turkey and deer.

Viewed endwise, railroad ties are seven inches deep and nine inches wide, each timber nearly seven feet long. At dawn each Saturday, TJ’s crew activated big vacuum-side compressors that infused creosote into one hundred ton lots of rail cross ties.

Across the 1970 decade nearly three thousand train derailments occurred annually, catastrophic events that sometimes originated in rotted or defective ties. Equipment-on-the-ground became a dreaded expression, referring to a train’s derailment.

Beyond mosquito eradication, Preservation residents held the tietreaters in high regard. If decay were the ties’ enemy, creosote was their ally.

When the big compressors idled late on Saturdays, quiet signaled the conclusion of another work week. A rural Roman Catholic, TJ spared himself Sunday wake-ups by attending St. Francis’ Saturday afternoon vigil Masses where parishioners afforded him a respectful title, that of Boss Man. For the Guzman’s and their neighbors, Preservation constituted a vibrant industrial landscape.

CHAPTER 10 TRACK WENT SILENT

May 1979

To all swift things for swiftness did I sue; Clung to the whistling mane of every wind. But whether they swept, smoothly fleet, The long savannahs of the blue; Or, whether, Thunder-driven, They clanged his chariot 'thwart a heaven, Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o' their feet:Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue. James Lawrence, Hound of Heaven Mediterranean people must have possessed a knack for auto racing. By the 1970’s, Granatelli and Andretti headed racing’s hit parade but in Kansas City the great Vito Calia and contemporaries lit up Kansas City’s Olympic Speedway. By 1936 mules had dragged-out the Olympic’s oval, pulverizing coarse dirt into fines. The family-owned Olympic boasted no boards, no millions, but perhaps most importantly, no out-of-town promoters. The Miller (or Molle) family track was removed from the Million Dollar Speedway mistake by twelve miles and more than a decade.

During late 1935 a modular wooden track had been rail transported to Kansas City before being stored in an unused convention hall, one housing seasonal items like parade floats and Christmas decorations. But before Kansas City could rejoin the national velodrome circuit, in late 1936 fire consumed the old structure, converting floats, decorations, and, yes, the prized modular track into ashes. Kansas City never re-embarrassed itself on the boards, instead the Olympic featured flat pulverized dirt beds. Seating nearly three thousand attendees, it also hosted semi-pro baseball games, professional wrestling matches and even Wild West

shows. Importantly, the race venue was reachable via car, bus or even on foot.

Chins hooked over front seats, unrestrained children bounced like marionettes while their parents drove down Truman road toward the Olympic. Spouses steadied open beer cans while husband wheelmen fumbled with admission change. Race car exhaust aromas added to ones originating in coconut-oil popcorn, boiled wieners and cotton candy.

Little Otis loved the Olympic races, sharing race fan status with his papa. Otis had been held back following the first grade, a similar double circuit applying to the second. Each September he raced through early review of A-B-C’s before stumbling over anything more involved. Even with prompting, Otis could not read aloud at the full sentence level, loudly phonating through a word or two before giggling. By each fall term’s sixth week Olive anticipated the same disappointing call. “Otis needs to be set back a year, maybe two.”

His limitations came as a surprise to parents who insisted he had been an explorative little boy prior to his third birthday.

Andy and Olive shared with relatives that Otis’ problems had originated with a pesky flu bug. Olive related that three-year old version of Otis had been a handful, recalling occasions she had found him hiding under the kitchen sink, another time losing him altogether until she noticed scraping noises originating below the floor, Otis-the-crawler.

Andy and Olive’s relatives numbered among Missouri’s country people, the sole exception being a well-educated, although troublesome female cousin, a degreed psychologist who infected every family gathering with unwanted assessments of incontinent aunts and lecherous uncles. Curiously, she also rejected their assertion that Otis’ three seizures and mental slowness had originated in flu.

When Andy became distant during pregnancy, Olive gorged on gritty cereals and pastes. Otherwise a neat, non-drinker, one day she questioned their pediatrician regarding wallpaper paste’s toxicity. Quicker with the word than his pen, the pediatrician phonated through a four-letter condition termed P-I-C-A.

Pica is fortunately rare, defined by craving and chewing nonfood items. While traceable to the ancients, its origins remain elusive. Twice Olive had discovered Otis using his tiny finger nails to scrape dust from a window sash. She never shared with Andy, certainly not with his cousin, that she had tasted a paint chip-ortwo herself.

School administrators waving Sunny Pines and Quiet Waters brochures created phony bladder wall contractions, launching Olive into ladies’ room privacy. Sweltering August school sign-ups saw her at the head of the line, believing currently enrolled lessened Otis’ chances being institutionalized. His school supplies benefitted from a similar efforts: Pencils (2) , Eberhard-Faber eraser (1), Ink pen, non-fountain type (1).

School worries hardly clouded opening night. Andy and Otis rode the city’s No. 15 bus, joined by an unlikely tag-along. Having peeked at Andy’s calendar, Prof Brooklyn asked to join them.

Olive packed a PB&J sandwich for Otis, waxed paper securing its sticky contents, reminding Andy to remove the tooth pick before passing the snack to Otis. Andy had asked borrowed Prof Mel’s binoculars and Mel had only reluctantly lent them, adding lens cleaning paper and a note emphasizing its importance.

Traveling east on Truman road, Brooklyn noted a shift in recreational choices, explaining a man-of-war encounter he had endured near 12th street’s Kitty Kat lounge. By self-admission, he acknowledged joining a belly dancer’s tassel routine there to be a mistake. “But how was I supposed to know he was her husband?”

Past that Brooklyn’s week hardly improved. While his care givers stressed medication adherence, he strayed far afield of prescribed regimens. Favoring lead toxicity as a lead-in, he also tried to divert each patient visit to a discussion of lead contamination.

Dissatisfied with medical advice, Brooklyn consulted stuffy textbooks, ones describing alarming features attending Graves’ disease, noting symptoms such as racing heartbeats, failed hearts and high fevers.

On his post-Kitty Kat Wednesday, Brooklyn prowled the college library, researching Graves’ disease. Spotting a newsletter that had originated with the Mallinckrodt General Clinical Research Center, he 61

noted it to be a Harvard research arm and the site of early lead toxicity studies. Brooklyn weirdly reconfigured these incidental findings as proof that he had been misdiagnosed with Graves,’ choosing instead to believe he had been lead poisoned at Big River.

The G-C-R-C receptionist taking his call failed to understand how it originated in Missouri given the caller’s unmistakable New York City accent. The internist she paged required almost no time to recognize his caller had been diverting laboratory reagents for risky self-medication purposes, forcibly steering the conversation past contamination toward the inadvisability of self-medication. It is hard to say who first hung up.

Upon their arrival Brooklyn broke into an antsy monologue before disappearing. Anticipating his return, Andy and Otis expanded their belongings along the plank seating. Using Mel’s binoc’s to scan the infield, Andy made a remarkable discovery. “What was Brooklyn doing there, lecturing a panel of mechanics?”

Focusing, Andy viewed a small amber bottle Brooklyn had placed atop an improvised mini-crate. “What was he describing, perhaps an oil or gas additive?” Andy watched as Brooklyn eye dropper-ed tiny volumes from the bottle into waiting fuel cans, mechanics grinning as if he had invited them to a bank vault scramble.

Racing fuel specifications are extensive and sometimes controversial. While none of the mechanics possessed an extensive knowledge, they had all heard of of octane boosters, broadly referred to as good stuff. Eventually an angular crew chief interrupted Brooklyn’s demonstration that the race was about to begin. Turning to Brooklyn, he asked if they could speak post-race.

On the heels of the start flag, no more than two minutes passed before a more composed Brooklyn joined Andy and Otis. All three watched two preliminary heats, warm-up races the preceded the forty-lap finale. Perhaps exhausted by another frustrating school day, Otis’ dozed in his father’s lap.

The 40-lapper featured twelve cars spaced three wide, its roster featuring short country names, two Carl’s, one James, a Junior, a Jud and a Howard. Other colorful entries appeared in the persons of an Iron Head, a Hacksaw and a Grim, plus the great champion, 62

Vito. None were midget-dimensioned, their abundant torsos and helmeted heads filled each long-nosed chassis.

By the bell lap, everyone there stood. Into the final turn, Vitothe-great high-sided Carl-the-first, attracting enough attention for Carl’s car to drift wide. Vito-the-great tapped his brakes and slowed, shortly gunning under -drifting Carl, turning racing’s oldest trick into yet another victory.

Midget racing teased multiple senses, eyes, ears and noses were ramped full-on. Following the evening race card, racers and their crews appeared beat. Not unlike the Cook Painters, midget racers worked day-jobs before competing at a high level. The following evening some would transition to a full-chassis contest held at Odessa, Missouri, more suitable for pilfered octane boosters.

Relieving himself at a waterfall-style urinal, Brooklyn reviewed an eye-level placard. Midgets and sprint cars will be inspected for sound muffling devices on opening day - 1981.

Lines of confused pigeons circled roosts, perhaps anticipating an end to the noise. Birds and race fans would require nearly twelve quiet hours to reset delicate inner ear mechanisms. The track went silent at eleven, one hour past the city’s newly-enacted, although unenforceable quiet hour.

Road guards waved fans’ automobiles onto Truman Road, swinging red-shielded flashlights as if batons, drivers gunning engines as blue-collar salutes to Vito and his contemporaries. Otis walked beside his father and their professor friend, his small left hand linked to Andy’s right.

Last to depart was a cavalcade of trucks and race trailers. The final entry was driven by that angular crew chief who paused to provide the challenged boy and his two adult companions a ride home.

Racing’s legendary bad boy, bootlegger roots prompted mixed responses. How much longer could a family-owned enterprise offer accessible, yet noisy entertainment near Kansas City’s core. While its noise, speed and risk attributes didn’t attract everyone , those Friday nights at the Olympic Speedway were loud, frenetic and so much fun.

CHAPTER 11 WEEDS, TREES & TURF

Mid-May 1979

Mail arrived about ten-thirty, an hour when professors lectured. Their absence permitted Office Lady examine arriving mail absent middle-aged males peering over her work space. She used the mail opening process to vent frustrations, often energetically slitting envelopes and tacking their contents onto a cork bulletin board.

Arrivals served as reminders of a larger chemical enterprise, one originating from firms like Louisiana’s Big River corporation and St. Louis’ Major League chemicals. The science building swelled to capacity by mid-morning, steadied in its capacity through lunch and progressively emptied across the afternoon.

Racer, however, was required to stay until the last student had finished. Nearing Tuesday’s close-of- business, he pushed the water fountain’s valve full-on, attempting to extinguish a General Unknown-acquired sulfur taste.

Perhaps while drinking he absorbed the bulletin board’s most recent entry.

Weed Spray Engineer (Applicant Must Be College Trained in Chemistry), Railroad Exempt Employee - No Phone Calls “Excepted.” Send Salary Requirement Letter to Mrs. RE Goodtoast, Manpower, Missouri-Pacific Lines, 13th & Olive Streets, St Louis.

Following graduation his classmates had sought positions in the chemical industry or resigned themselves to additional indebtedness, enrolling in professional schools, frequently medicine or dentistry, but sometimes even optometry or another hard-topronounce pursuit. Racer’s plans to remain at the college might have appeared unusual but coordinated well with Saturday-based K-L-W duties that merged into racing Sundays.

Not a bad looking guy, he occasionally chatted with female classmates although potential movie dates fell victim to early Sunday race day starts.

The one-more-race principle applied to 1970-80 bike racers who frequently motored through the heartland. Expected destinations like St. Louis or Chicago were complemented by others in Kenosha, Wisconsin or even Bloomington, Indiana. Bike racing’s hotbeds aligned with blue collar communities where transplanted European shared memories and methods applicable to post-war grand tours such as the Giro d’Italia or the Tour de France.

Racer seasons were parceled into successive tanks of gas. Thirsty station wagons and vans overladen with multiple bike racks were as cost-competitive as cramped imports, larger vehicles held more riders. Friday nights witnessed the Econoline packed with racers, bikes, pumps, race food, spare wheelsets and an occasional framed portrait of a recent romantic interest.

While he shared brief glimpses of glory, Racer’s pal mares fell short of record book status. International teams were numerically limited to about forty elites, further limited to eight pre-team selectees and only four travelers. Given school and work commitments Racer questioned if he could replicate even his previous year’s modest placings.

His life pivoted upon combinations of borrowing and improvisation, driving Kern’s van, sleeping in Land Lady’s rented room and instructing students formally assigned to Prof Brooklyn, possibly accounting for why he repurposed one of Office Lady’s discarded envelopes to apply for the Weed Spray Engineer listing

His letter outlined salary requirements, few, employment background, brief and academic accomplishments, top-1%. Affixing two thirteen-cent stamps, he verified a return, Damian X. Race, Suite 4-C, Kensington, Avenue, Kansas City, Missouri. Should the Missouri-Pacific’s Goodtoast respond he was confident Land Lady would interrupt her routine to let him know.

To reach the main post office he pedaled alongside Guinotte Avenue truck traffic before branching onto the Northeast Industrial Traffic way and riding through Columbus Park. He then biked downtown streets before reaching the Liberty Memorial’s neighbor, 66

Kansas City’s post office. After posting the repurposed envelope Racer’s thoughts ricocheted back-and-forth from more attic-living to corporately-compensated weed spraying.

Goodtoast’ announcement yielded only a handful of responses, mostly valiant attempts from liberal artists trying to relate the relevance of French literature or music education to weed eradication causing her to be delighted to receive a promising response from a cum laude graduate with chemical ordering experience. While the promptness of her call-back might have aroused suspicion in a more experienced applicant, Racer simply regarded it as promising.

Goodtoast informed him that his interview would take place in their headquarters building, explaining that he would be deadheaded there via Amtrak. The Amtrak part seemed logical but he puzzled over how the Grateful Dead figured. While that rock band’s 1978 Kansas City appearance did not affect weed eradication but the Bankruptcy Act of 1898 did, its legislation required the Penn Central and its CONRAIL successor to dispose of bankrupted nonrail assets, apparently including a weed spray trainset.

Since Biblical Adam was originally presented with thorns and thistles, humans had attempted to limit weed growth. Tractormounted sprayers figuratively waited on herbicides like 2,4-D. Pine street’s Major League Chemicals, a producer of farm-related substances, headquartered on Pine, only blocks from Olive street’s Missouri-Pacific headquarters.

Sunday school and bowling leagues afforded employees from firms to interact but the place where business was conducted had a name, the Glen Echo golf course. A slogan for the defoliant project apparently originated in a golf foursome there. At Glen Echo’s No. 5 tee box, a railroad attorney named the project Weeds, Trees & Turf.

Racer used an eyeball-only technique to pirouette around 13th and Olive’s corners. He felt out-of-place standing there in a slightly too-large business suit, one lent by Brooklyn. Entering the lobby, he was surrounded by unmistakable aromas originating in railroad coffee and steam-table bacon and eggs. His interview was scheduled for nine, midday for the operating railroad but early by executive standards. 67

The receptionist summoned Ms. Goodtoast who guided Racer to a vacant steel desk to block-letter across new-hire forms. Using a lead pencil, he bore-down-hard, designating next-of-kin, curiously listing George Kern of K-L-W Cyclery in Kansas City as his emergency contact.

Goodtoast didn’t share that his entries placed him within key strokes of hired. Railroads frequently drew from the working poor, recruiting alongside rural tracksides, often in southern states. Satisfied Racer had completed his lettering exercise Goodtoast returned, ushering him into a conference room where two railroad officials shared a single copy of his application.

Acknowledging Goodtoast, the older man rose. “My name is Paul Edwards, maintenance-of-way superintendent for the eastern division.” A second official more reluctantly stood, announced by a single name, “Roadmaster.”

Edwards spoke for his colleague. “Roadmaster Hogg (Hoy-ig) here will own the weed spray trainset but you would be responsible for delivering its chemicals.”

Continuing, Edwards’ comments seemed to trivialize the spray engineer task. “The railroad believes that weed removal detracts from other more important maintenance of way work. We hope Weeds, trees & turf will save time, possibly treating one hundred mile segments of track each day. We’ve traveled back east to Philadelphia where we met the Penn Central’s weed spray engineer who is a fountain-of-knowledge on the topic.”

Edwards had a question. “Racer, is that what you like to be called?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But your application lists your legal name as Damian X. Race.”

“Yes, but I’m Racer and I’ve never been called anything else.”

“Well, Damian, ‘er Racer, the railroad uses only first and middle initials, which would make you, D.X. Race. Roadmaster, any questions for our new weed spray operator here?”

Roadmaster’s question involved his only academically-related interest, varsity sports. “Did you play sports in college, say football or baseball?”

“No, I’m an avid cyclist.”

Racer’s use of the cyclist term generated a sneer. Roadmaster’s response welded ignorance onto arrogance. “Avowed Psych-O?”

The one-word Roadmaster person was wearing thin.

Racer repeated. “Bicycle racer, long distance bicycle racer.”

Fortunately Ms. Goodtoast reappeared, averting an interview impasse, explaining that Edwards and Roadmaster were needed elsewhere.

Edwards spoke last. “Mrs. Goodtoast, thank you for finding someone with both a good haircut and shined shoes. Take him to the tool room so he can draw his MoPac bump cap.”

Racer wondered why he wasn’t being issued a protective respirator and chemical-resistant goggles but remained silent.

Edwards suddenly turned chatty. “Good luck, Racer. Look around for someone over in Kansas City who has a good haircut and might like to be your assistant.”

Racer sensed Goodtoast was hardly their fan. In fact at breakfast she had described Edwards and Roadmaster as Morons 1&2 to her husband.

Weed spraying, or even rail grinding for that matter, were considered accessory functions, causing Goodtoast to question why they were recruiting a promising young guy for what would likely become be a contract function.

Goodtoast arranged a stop ahead of Racer’s tool room visit so he might at least witness railroad-relevant computer activity. Nearing a glassed-in area, she and Racer observed three individuals surrounding a Tektronix 4006 computer. Per 1979, Tektronix devices provided blazing fast calculations and featured screen outputs.

When a female University of Michigan computer science grad opened the computer room’s door, Racer initiated conversation.

“Hi, I’m Racer. Isn’t that a Tektronix 4006?”

“Sure is, I’m Val by the way,.”

Self-identified Val carried a sheaf of pleated computer print-outs and a green-tint lined writing tablet.

Racer continued. “We used a Tektronix 4015 to plot reaction rates.”

Val moved the dialogue toward railroad issues. “We are trying to create railcar switching algorithms.” Adding. “We don’t expect to replace many trainmasters soon, though.”

The interaction pleased Goodtoast, wondering when they might conclude Racer would better suited for Tektronix work as opposed to weed-spraying.

Val redirected. “From your visitor badge, I see you are joining engineering. They’ve been here, too, requesting time-to-failure calculations for heavy rail. Old line execs shake their heads at our computer print-outs so we hand copy data onto these damn’ green-tinted, or as they term them, Eye-ease tablets. What was your name, what is it you’re going to do? “

Contrasted with Val’s flowing discourse, his message required fewer words and less meaning. “Racer - weed spray engineering.”

Val laughed through a goodbye as he continued stare at the computer room.

However ill-advised, Andy’s popcorn stunt, had focused attention on the Smith family’s struggles. Recalling Edwards’ comment regarding a helper, Racer nominated someone. “There’s a technician at the college, Andrew Smith, someone assigned to order supplies and collect student breakage fees. He and his family would definitely benefit from railroad employment.”

Goodtoast borrowed a line from the 13th and Olive play book. “Make sure he has a haircut.”

Racer’s hiring, including the computer detour, took less time than the Amtrak crew required to back Amtrak cars into their departure slot.

During the return trip Racer stared at a rolling Missouri countryside, visualizing how a twelve-mph weed spray process would soak track beds. As the train departed Jefferson City, he awoke from a nap to stare at Missouri’s historic penitentiary. Less than an hour later he reviewed features of Sedalia’s downtown, home to ragtime’s Scott Joplin. Ten minutes after passing Truman’s Independence home, Union Station loomed into his view.

Walking east on Pershing road he loosened his tie, draping Brooklyn’s coat over his shoulder to begin a slow, bicycle-less walk home. A company-issued bump cap provided more of a ball player-like than Roadmaster might have believed possible.

Hearing his footsteps on her front porch, Land Lady interrupted Dick Van Dyke show viewership to greet Racer. Sprawled across a 70

twin-dimensioned bed, he questioned whether his Dead-head interview was much more than a haircut check.

Land Lady’s numbering system must have initialized in the basement’s furnace room, making his third floor 4-C a companion to currently unoccupied 4-B across the hall. Racer infrequently closed his bedroom door, preferring a more a family-like environment, finding the sound of her snoring two floors below both comical and endearing.

The Missouri-Pacific’s Val wasn’t the only professional investigating times-to-failure. Dr. Wozniak wondered whether college studies might have been better devoted to geography. Beyond Baltimore’s poisonous paint chips, toxic releases originated in distant settings, toxic inverting air layers in Meuse Valley, Belgium, 1933, deadly twins of coal dust and sulfur dioxide, Donora, Pennsylvania, 1948 and blower flare hydrogen sulfide, Poza Rica, Mexico, 1950.

While he recognized Jackson and Lincoln as state capitols, the Woz was unacquainted with either Glendora, Mississippi and Nebraska’s Crete, in its lightly-populated Saline County. But derailment of a Chicago, Burlington and Quincy train at Nebraska’s Crete on January 25th 1969 released thirty-thousand gallons of anhydrous ammonia, leaving both cattle and humans similarly tearing and gasp-ing.

The 1969 year also recorded a September 11th railroad incident, near Glendora, Mississippi, in which a locomotive engineer’s braking attempt generated a vinyl chloride mushroom. The incident’s official report identified trespassing-by-hobos as the cause of three deaths. Hobos and beyond, Woz wondered how well his small staff consisting of a handful of pharmacy students, two oddball profs and a KO-W0Z director could respond to a catastrophic-scale incident,.

CHAPTER 12 EVERYTHING HERE IS BIG & HEAVY

June 1979

On June’s first Tuesday, Racer and Andy departed Union Station as rookie maintenance-of-way (M-O-W) employees, passing through northern Missouri before crossing Illinois. Past Chicago they rode an unrecalled train, placing them at Philadelphia’s 30th street train station too late for hotel check-in but too early for even yard office coffee, a time and setting described by a single term, miserable.

The first order of business was a seven a.m. M-O-W safety meeting. While Tuesday’s safety topic, review of Rule G, may have been new to them, it well known to other attendees who rather ironically verified their attendance using a Latrobe Brewery pen tied to a clipboard. The meeting lasted forty-five minutes, its conclusion heralded by pocket watches scooped from overall bibs.

As the MoPac pair departed, a seasoned track foreman chose to introduce himself. A warm, welcoming individual, newlyintroduced Vito inquired about what they had been hired to do and where. Similar to the Val computer room encounter, Racer summed. “Weed Spray Engineer – MoPac.”

Vito’s tone darkened, as if to signal something important. “Everything out there wants to kill you; it’s all big and heavy. Know when and where blue flag protection features apply.”

Softening, Vito added. “Me, I’m an old head. Friday I lay-off for good to begin pension years playing with my grandkids. “

Racer didn’t fully understand what Vito meant by blue flag rule but made a note to learn more. Andy, on the other hand, worked a toothpick, speculating Vito was an older Deadhead. Racer and Andy

shortly encountered a third MoPac employee, a business agent who had apparently flown to Philadelphia to supervise the transfer. The agent was accompanied by a middle-aged man wearing a damaged, possibly even clipped, CONRAIL name badge, identifying ROLF WURTH. The Wurth person packed them into a C-60 doghouse truck before he aimed it down a bumpy track access road. Ignoring their sleep deprivation, he provided a disjointed weed spray explanation as if Racer and Andy’s training needed to conclude by lunch.

Wurth expanded on his relationship with the Missouri-Pacific’s Edwards while neglecting a key piece, that he had been dismissed by CONRAIL in late 1979. While Racer’s knowledge of German fell short of fluency, anytime he heard a der begriff zurückstehen (stand back) declaration, he made sure they were clear of another Weedsfear-me Wurth hose display, ones in which he sprayed herbicides onto track beds that hadn’t seen a weed in decades.

While no question fell beyond the breadth of his self-proclaimed expertise Wurth stumbled over relatively simple chemical calculations. Even polite redirection on Racer’s part resulted in Wurth repeating “Dilution is the solution to Tox-E-ology.”

Before leaving Philadelphia the MoPac agent shared with Racer news regarding Wurth. CONRAIL’s loss control department had organized a series of meetings intended to allay herbicide fears among trackside neighbors. Assigned to a Donora, Pennsylvania session Wurth had chafed at playing a pre-recorded message, choosing instead to introduce himself as Weeds-fear-me Wurth before expansively comparing parts-per-million concentrations with vermouth dropper-ed into gin-laden bathtubs.

Attempting humor, Wurth pointed out a middle-aged attendee, proclaiming him as a gin expert, victimizing Donora’s sole Nazarene pastor. Amidst gasps, he then teaspoon-ed a weed-killer solution into a full water glass before tipping it back and proclaiming the taste as Zehr Gut (very good). The agent was specific in his instructions. “Keep Wurth on a short leash.”

Following four days shuttling through Philadelphia and Newark train yards, Weeds, trees & turf was positioned near the rear of a train, proceeding westward across Penn Central’s main lines. On 74

multiple occasions railroad workers climbed aboard their rather unique railroad equipment to chat. Nearly all the visitors echoed the importance of the blue flag rule, referring to a prohibition on coupling or train movement during repair periods. While its official name was blue signal protection, that was usually just shortened to blue flag rule. The pre-Civil War origins of the rule had been strengthened across decades of rulebook meetings.

Following more Wurth-led ramblings, Racer shared a fourstation practicum with Andy. While Racer was experienced in manipulating and even rebuilding lab-scale valves, he reasoned that repairing or adjusting larger valve counterparts might be difficult, particularly at night or during storms.

Wurth patronized Racer until the younger man explained they weren’t interested in any more spray tests, adding the MoPac agent had nixed further teaspoon-ing stunts. Wurth pouted before devoting himself making some notebook entries.

Station One involved a bolt-and-nut collection. Qualifying required matching bolt-nut combinations by relying upon both tactile and visual clues. Racer timed Andy until his assistant turned-the-tables to test him.

Test Station Two featured a darkened photographer’s shroud which allowed them to simulate night time component re-assembly. Initially Racer let Andy win the timed exercises,, later he did not. New record-setting times were scribbled on the car’s wall.

Test Station Three involved being able to identify key components including agitators, pressure assemblies, Swagelok™ fittings and hydraulic valve couplers. Halfway across Ohio, Racer poured a dozen damaged spray nozzles onto the car’s floor, allowing them to practice repairs, but perhaps more importantly, providing insights into the nozzles’ earlier failures.

At test Station Four Racer mated Swagelok™ fitting sets and a short run of copper tubing, routing the circuit through a tiny highpressure pump. They used the arrangement to practice leak-less reassembly, recalling a Kern credo: Always stronger, never weaker.

Racer frequently pushed Andy’s reset button. “This is what we are being paid to do, keep trying.” He hoped Andy was homesick as opposed to being alcohol-deprived.

The improvised test stations attracted the attention of visitors to their odd trainset. Possibly an unidentified brakeman relayed comments to a Lancaster, Pennsylvania yardmaster who spoke to a Pittsburgh-based road foreman-of-engines, the brother-in-law of a Missouri-Pacific superintendent. Regardless, the railroad’s mechanical department sized up the new guy, one oddly referred to as Racer, a stand-up guy a respecter of the blue flag rule.

When Weeds, trees & turf halted near a yard office, Wurth disappeared to use a telephone. Twice Racer overhead German language conversations involving fishing causing him to wonder if Wurth might be some sort of commercial fisherman, too. Corporate counsel, railroad attorneys, insisted the project be led by someone with knowledge of both chemical technology and toxicology, perhaps fretting that the Weeds, trees & turf venture could devolve into a loss prevention quagmire.

Weeds, trees & turf moved from Gary, Indiana to Chicago’s vast yards. Ahead of their departure, a conductor climbed aboard to let Racer and Andy know that their freight agent friend had arranged for them to dead head back to Kansas City via Amtrak.

Abandoning misgivings, Racer bade Wurth goodbye. Andy energetically shook Wurth’s hand adding that he intended to stay in touch. Absent from Kansas City for ten days dead heading home bolstered their spirits. While hardly railroad veterans they had at least survived their first pay period.

Friday evening Racer joined George at K-L-W. Peering in the store’s window, he viewed an untouched deli sandwich flanked by two beeswax candles.

Kern’s greeting was of a dietary comment. “I’m too full eating both sandwich ends when you’re absent.” That was it, no inquiry about the railroad, not even a short-on-help lament.

Kern then inquired. “You around tomorrow?”

Amidst word poverty, gezellig prevailed.

“Around, yes.”

Time-off, days removed from the railroad was somewhat of a misnomer. Even the Preservation neighborhood experienced railroad-derived noise in 105-decibel increments, twenty more than permitted by the 1972 Noise Control Act. 76

Rail yards also served as tourist attractions, few trainsets attracting more attention than a parked wrecker train, its heavy derrick preceding several support cars. The wrecker’s presence necessitated parental drive-byes, explanations noting its 100-T (ton) stencils. How many post cards mailed to country cousins featured curiously spelled Recker visits?

The Monday following, Racer and Andy found Weeds, trees & turf spotted behind the wrecker derrick, a yardmaster possibly viewed the two unique trainsets as before-and-after catastrophic partners.

Racer and Andy borrowed a C-60 truck to collect a defoliant chemical shipment of fifty-five gallon drums originating with St. Louis’ Major League Chemicals. Racer requested the yardmaster reposition Weeds, trees & turf to one of the railroad yard’s wash tracks, one fitted with high-flow water lines, among the last remnants of the steam age. He and Andy then repurposed the water lines for a more contemporary purpose, filling Weeds, trees & turf’s umbilical-ed tank cars with diluted chemicals.

If the wrecker could lift enormous tonnage, Weeds, trees & turf’s chief attribute was it capacity to both contain and dispense enormous volumes. Concentrates were added in drum-lot quantities, two banded fifty-five gallon drums were diluted with sufficient water to fill each car’s ten-thousand-gallon hold.

By comparison a crop duster’s tank, dispensing liquids, generally contained fewer than five hundred gallons. If large volumes constituted Weeds, trees & turf chief attribute they also encouraged patience, tank car filling often consumed most of a shift. Given the consequences of spills or short-fills, filling also necessitated attention to detail.

In June a photographer, one dispatched to record Weeds, trees & turf’s launch, staged a photo of Andy using Mel’s borrowed binoculars, as if he were scanning the Kansas City’s skyline for weeds. Fortunately the Missouri-Pacific Times appeared biannually, permitting the railroad’s P-R department to misplace the crazy negatives.

Racer parked a recently-purchased Rambler sedan near other work-and-back cars, each windshield blackened by a patina of rail 77

yard dust pasted there by No. 2 diesel. Racer toted a D-cell radio and an olive drab Kern -USA duffel, returning to retrieve grocery staples including coffee and tea, sugar and salt, biscuits and crackers, plus long shelf-life potatoes and carrots.

Last to join the food parade were cartons containing sweet and butter milk. Andy and Racer agreed food selections would needed to extend beyond Wurth’s favored Spaghetti-O’s and Beanie-weenies.

Popping the Rambler’s trunk, Racer shoulder-hoisted a disassembled bicycle frame, one separated from its wheels and a bolt-action 20-gauge shotgun. Using the bicycle frame for the gun’s concealment he hid shotgun beneath a rail car seat. While the railroad forbade firearms, locomotive-less sidings forced certain compromises.

Train movements placed Weeds, trees & turf behind scheduled operations, following other M-O-W functions and even accessory issues, whatever those were. Their spray schedule was generated by a St. Louis clerk using a milepost listing.

By late July they had traced mainlines and sidings across the Sedalia subdivision before being towed into Major League Chemicals’ St. Louis house tracks. Edwards arranged the Major League visit so Racer and Andy could witness use of advanced proportioning flow hook-ups. Ten minutes into a two-hour demonstration Racer concluded Major League’s hook-ups weren’t significantly faster than their Neff yard improvisations.

Two accounts of Racer’s weed spray duties emerged, either a high-order challenge, once incorporating meteorology, botany and even genetics. The other description trivialized his duties as those belonging to a trackside Orkin-man, working and living in a beat-up baggage car featuring a total-loss toilet.

Across main lines, on setout tracks and along sidings and spurs, Weeds, trees & turf crawled, traveling at less than twelve-mph, pausing only with the arrival of dusk. While train crews were restricted by hours-of-service limitations, that rule didn’t apparently apply to sprayers-of-weeds. Occasionally, a time clerk provided a day off but given Andy’s alcohol dependence, Racer was reluctant for them to venture beyond the odd trainset.

Spectators hounded Weeds, trees & turf as if it were a circus train. Rail fans pointed cameras at functioning sprays as if Andy had been dispensing fairy dust but more knowledgeable adults scurried inside, collected children and pets in their wake.

Chemical petitioners waved 2-liter Coke bottles and plastic milk jugs as a sign of universal pilferage. Absent Racer’s exhortations, Andy accommodated chemical pilferers as if he were a store vendor smearing flavored-cheeses onto Ritz crackers. On two occasions Racer discovered his assistant flushing a chemical mixture into anonymous gullies. “That isn’t dishwater, Andy.”

By 1979, trackside tangles, briars and hedges were the last vestiges of a botanical landscape viewed Indians and later by pioneers like Choteau or Guinotte. Absent defoliants, raccoons, foxes, opossums and deer reclaimed trackside habitat as a precarious site to raise their young.

Weeds, trees & turf consumed fifty-five gallon increments of pricy chemicals although its sprayers rarely documented plant growth outcomes, rarely returning to revisit previously treated sections.

Each stream required a carefully timed cease-and-resume spray sequence. The defoliant spectrum was at best a partial match against a broader range of vines, brambles and volunteer trees. As a chemical fog streamed down both sides of Weeds, trees & turf, tiny droplets either interacted with foliage or possibly failed. Twice Racer had discovered Andy asleep in the operator’s chair.

Racer’s worry-based insomnia morphed into nightmares in which Edwards and Wurth brought news of a train crew’s fiery death, one attributed to s negligence on Andy’s part. Print and radio news sources increasingly reported the emergence of herbicide-instigated weed resistance. Train crews sometimes comically suggested that trackside deer populations were more effective than their sprays, sometimes Racer and Andy agreed.

Ironically, trains seeded row crops onto track ballast when grains sifted through cracked boxcar floors. How much oddlyplanted grain was required to misalign a track, worse, a switch?

Racer and Andy’s winter 1979-80 transition was interrupted by trainset repairs at Coffeyville, Kansas R-I-P track plus repeat visits

to poorly-treated Pueblo, Colorado, and another week spotted near weedy Wagoner, Oklahoma. Racer also traveled to St. Louis to outline blanket order inputs, attempting to justify their needs.

Published references were unfortunately expressed as gallonsper-acre as opposed to more applicable gallons-per-mile estimates. Most of his calculations revealed Weeds, trees & turf sprayed nearly two hundred gallons of diluted chemicals per mile, although that estimate was complicated by adjustments to the dilution process necessitated by varying plant density.

While herbicide prices averaged about five dollars per undiluted gallon, Major League attempted to invoice railroad purchasers for more than that. The railroad paid three hundred dollars, sometimes more for fifty-five gallon drums of concentrates.

Racer quickly learned that railroad purchasing agents oddly favored high catalog list prices, taking credit for softball price reductions.

During a January 1980 Weeds, trees & turf budget meetings, Racer indelicately scrawled a ten dollar-per-gallon figure on the conference room’s blackboard sans an explanation. Purchasing representatives present didn’t appreciate Racer’s figure applied to undiluted drug chemicals, not diluted mixtures they actually sprayed.

His blackboard cursive generated a question. “How many gallons do you use per mile?”

Racer answered on an as-sprayed basis. “About 150-200 gallons per mile figured on a diluted basis.” The gap between his reply and what his finance counterpart heard, carried Mississippi River dimensions.

That misunderstanding perhaps accounted for the finance representative multiplying ten dollars per-gallon figure by two hundred gallons per mile for a ten-thousand-mile railroad. Even though the erroneous twenty million dollar chemical cost estimate was eventually corrected, a case had emerged for contracting out the weed spray function. Strike one for Weeds, trees & turf.

In early spring a Neff yard clerk signed for a small shipment of defoliant chemicals, insufficient to support spraying through July, much less end-of-season. Racer and Andy spent March re-palleting 80

the chemicals, repairing equipment and refining their spray schedule.

The bottom line was that enthusiasm for the Weeds, trees & turf project had waned. During an April 1980 meeting Racer bristled at a finance department’s reference to the Agent Orange Train, perhaps their second strike. By May nearly all of their supporters had disappeared excepting a few in the M-O-W department.

While M-O-W crews could hi-wheel down active tracks, highly observable mainlines or even sidings weren’t good choices for naps. Obscure access roads, particularly those recently cleared of brush constituted were better nap sites.

M-O-W support carried a comical price tag, though. Lower the Boom, Agent Orange! Nuke ‘em, Sleepy, unkind references to Andy’s work habits.

A scheduling conflict emerged, one curiously involving railgrinding, meaning powerful grinding wheels that smoothed away slight track imperfections. Even paired with water-cooling, rail–grinding generated sparks, ones capable of producing pyrotechnicquality nighttime displays if not trackside fires.

An ideal schedule would place Weeds, trees & turf ahead of rail grinding, fewer weeds possibly portending fewer spark-started fires. A rail-grinder initiated blaze created a panicked telephone exchange in a railroad official notified a rural fire departments of a purposefully set, yet non-arson fires.

At a place alternatively designated as L-E-R-O-Y, other times as Le-Roy or even Leroy, Kansas, Weeds, trees & turf suffered strike three. The Missouri-Pacific mainline closed in both directions while fire units rushed from as far away as Topeka, Kansas to extinguish a fire the railroad admitted setting. The fact Racer didn’t control train movements didn’t lessen the L-E-R-O-Y incident’s impact.

Beyond L-E-R-O-Y figurative smoke originated in multiple accounts of relatively young Vietnam veterans succumbing to ageunlikely illnesses. St. Louis Post-Dispatch articles describing Agent Orange diseases livened 13th & Olive meetings in which Weeds, trees & turf fate was discussed.

On the second Friday of June 1980 Weeds, trees & turf was halted along another blue-flagged siding. Racer inquired how much longer

Andy needed for a sprayer repair. “Hey Andy, our locomotive is about here. How long before I can pull the blue flag?”

“Not long, I’ve had to cannibalize other broken sprayers because resupply hasn’t reached us.”

Racer noted that Andy had littered the track with damaged spray heads. Given the tool room traded new-for-old, misplaced items counted against Weeds, trees & turf’s strained budget.

Pointing to the damaged heads, Racer wondered if this could be the same stockroom assistant who had once dunned students regarding glassware replacement charges.

Racer tightened his word choice. “Let me know when you’re done. I want to tie-up early so I can drive you home before Otis goes to bed.”

EVERY DAY ON THE RAILROAD WAS THE SAME.

CHAPTER 13 GOOD NEWS DOESN’T ARRIVE WEARING STRAW HATS

Early July 1980

A Chevrolet sedan approached Weeds, trees & turf halted on a Friday morning near Knob Knoster, Missouri and nearby Whiteman Air Force Base. Given they weren’t moving, sprays were similarly halted. From a quarter-of-a-mile away, Racer and Andy viewed a company sedan as its driver struggled to align passenger car wheels with an access road’s ruts.

A railroad management pair, identifiable by emblematic straw hats, began a brambly seventy-five yard hike toward Weeds, trees & turf. Racer recognized the car’s driver, a foreman named Capataz Guzman, wondering why didn’t he join the hiking hats. Noting Guzman’s folded arms and reluctance to leave the sedan, Racer’s fears ricocheted between herbicide-contaminated creeks and sleeping Andy photographs.

The two hats initiated a purposeful dialogue, familiar railroad topics of weather and baseball. The taller official, one a bit older, too, steered in a different direction. “We heard you experienced some spray plugging issues last week?”

Racer chose a more technical conversational axis. “We added a kerosene wash to address that.”

Here further warning here came the hats’ message. “Fellows, the Missouri-Pacific has leased the weed spray apparatus to a contractor. You may wish to touch base with him, Mr. Lonnie Proffit, head man at St. 83

Francis Railroad Services. When you tie up this evening your employment with us is over. We’ll figure your time so you can pick up your checks next Friday. Be sure to remove your personal gear.”

So that was it, no sit-down with Goodtoast, no psycho-type Roadmaster questions, but most critically, no discussion. During his St. Louis visits Racer learned from Goodtoast that he and Andy were had been listed as seasonal, and other times, as vacation relief workers. Their status might have been questioned if others envied their position but no one did. Oddly, M-O-W workers who readily accepted physical risks rejected chemical exposures as far too risky.

As the hats retraced their path, Capataz strode toward Weeds, trees & turf. “That wasn’t right, you should have been carried as exempt employees; I’ll ask the union to see what we can do but don’t expect much.”

Andy had quickly retrieved a previously secreted flask of whisky and shortly attempted gallows humor. “Racer, is there enough time left for me merit a Rule G?”

Unamused by Andy Capataz directed an invitation Racer’s way. “Again, not right but I would like to invite to watch the All-Star game with my family next Tuesday evening? We can speak further in my home less the hats and Andy your comedian friend.”

“Where do you live, Capataz?”

“Preservation, south of Nicholson avenue on Montgall; you’ll spot a surplus caboose repurposed as the kid’s play house. We’ll put something together food-wise and hope to see you at six-thirty or so.”

Racer’s eyes clouded and his voice cracked. “Sounds good, thanks by the way.”

After they tied-up, Racer first retrieved the bike frame, again using it as concealment for the gun, returning a second time for wheels and a stenciled duffel containing herbicide-stained clothing. He abandoned remaining food items, possibly leaving Neff yard’s hobos some leftovers.

Although it windows were obscured by yard dust - No. 2 diesel, the Rambler started on the first attempt. Against Andy’s wishes, Racer delivered his co-worker home before he drove to an Independence Avenue car wash. After addressing window visibility there he drove to Ross Miller Cleaners. Racer triaged five

pairs of Levi’s and three collared shirts, stuffing the remainder of the duffel bag’s contents into a lobby trash-can.

Handing him a claim check, the laundry clerk inquired if Racer wished to donate the clothing discards. He declined. “I think those clothing items belong right where they are.”

Parking on St. John avenue, he popped the Rambler’s trunk before reassembling his bike. With tires inflated, he pedaled toward K-L-W. Although in possession of a key, he attracted George’s attention by rapping on the front window.

Even though most of that Friday’s repairs were complete by then, Racer located a yet unrepaired commuter bike, somewhat of a motor-less counterpart to his Rambler.

Kern cracked ice. “Railroad thing over?”

“Yes, they’ve leased or perhaps even sold Weeds, trees & turf.”

Racer reasoned shop time has concluded given Kern had seated himself, hand scrubbing apparently complete. After lighting two candles, George unwrapped the Hoagie sandwich, one predictably stuffed with three cold meats less further cheese selections.

George moved the agenda. “Are you racing Sunday?”

Although a year removed from the one more race progression Racer answered in the affirmative. “Sure, but where?”

Kern defined the race course. “St Louis, O’Fallon Park. “

“I can drive my Rambler.”

“Why would you do that? The Econoline clipboard and keys are where they have always been kept.”

And with that, Racer and George returned to K-L-W-normal. Neither out-of-town work nor military obligations affected George Kern’s definitions of family.

As others noted Racer’s return, George fielded inquiries K-L-Wstyle.

“Haven’t seen Racer in a nearly a year.”

More word poverty – “Been spraying weeds.”

Sunday afternoon Racer drove the Econoline back from St. Louis. While totally undertrained, he managed to finish surprisingly well. True, he missed the race’s breaks but more importantly, he missed its crashes, netting a tenth place finish, placing him marginally in the prize money.

After parking the Econoline at K-L-W he biked to his St. Johnparked Rambler ahead of driving it to Land Lady’s suite 4-C. She greeted him as if Racer had never left, explaining she dared not rent 4-C, unaware of his return date, possibly making Land Lady the most prescient among those connected with Weeds, trees & turf. Monday morning was dedicated to a college reunion of sort. Brooklyn welcomed Racer back, hardly surprised by Weeds, trees & turf’s corporate demise before explaining that a dentist, a Dr. John M. DeShario, had requested analysis of deciduous or baby teeth for lead content, noting DeShario would likely be the first of multiple lead analysis requestors.

Brooklyn shared DeShario’s thesis that tooth lead concentrations mirrored concentrations in children’s blood. Fatigued by an unplanned race and I-70 drives, Racer listened without adding questions or comments.

Brooklyn elaborated that lead remediation efforts necessitated careful source identification, often using a device originally commissioned for non-clinical purposes.

The favored blood lead testing instrument was identified by two names attached to its developers, Messrs. Jarrell and Ash. Brooklyn’s machine had originally been commissioned in Pittsburg, Kansas. His Citroen water pump oddly accounted for that Jarrell and Ash’s Kansas City relocation.

During his Stilwell hotel week, Pittsburg chemistry professors had introduced Brooklyn to Eagle-Picher industry chemists. Given Eagle-Picher had already donated a similar instrument to the Pittsburg college, Eagle-Picher accountants sought a second recipient. While neither the Pittsburg professors nor Eagle-Picher chemist recalled his name, they certainly remembered Brooklyn’s Citroen water-pump woes. A lined-out Big River business card became their first lead to locating Brooklyn in Kansas City.

Excited by prospects of a donated instrument, Brooklyn phoned his dean conveying a cheery although confusing message, regarding an in-kind forty thousand dollar donation. The dean required a couple of minutes to realize the talkative New Yorker was referring to a heavy bench item as opposed to a bank draft.

The dean suggested Brooklyn borrow the college’s Econoline to bring the Jarrell-Ash to Kansas City. Brooklyn needed nearly two weeks to reassemble it in an exhaust-ventilated alcove.

Brooklyn also shared with Racer that he recently arranged a Special Projects account that would permit them to purchase supplies and deposit receipts derived from analysis. Racer daydreamed as he listened, contemplating an evolution from status weed spray engineer status to that of a contracted velo-chemist, a bicycling chemist.

Before 1980, photographers and artists framed scientific subjects amidst colorful laboratory glassware, bookending faces beside burets, flasks and graduated glass cylinders, depicting more than identities, photographs and painting hinted at means of analysis. Thus, the eye became not only a beholder but the principal means of identification and detection.

By 20th. Century’s mid-point, electronically-based optical techniques began to supplant labor-intensive analysis schemes, completing tasks in less time, but perhaps more importantly, vastly improving on previous detection limits. Lead was on the muchimproved list.

Improvements curiously arose from efforts of non-musical duos, perhaps a Jarrell working with an Ash, a Perkin person collaborating with a (last-name) Elmer or a Hewlett partnering with a (nonautomotive) Packard. Skill sets stretched from optics to physics, connected by engineering. The best remembered instrumental saga like belonged to the Perkin-Elmer duo for their help in freeing Carling’s beloved Black Label beer from copper contamination.

While manual techniques often consumed a work day en route to a handful of results, even a donated instrument like their JarrellAsh could produce that many in less than an hour. Brooklyn shared with Racer that environmental hazards originated in construction activities, lead linked to paint and asbestos incorporated in fireproofing.

Brooklyn ventured past science, editorializing how public health advocates split into two groups, those with access to blood lead testing and others lacking that capacity. A well-trained technician,

meaning Racer, and their relocated Jarrell-Ash, might put Kansas City in an enviable position.

Reasoning the lead project might help Racer put his railroad problems behind him, Brooklyn handed him two keys, one to the building’s outer door and a second to the Jarrell-Ash alcove. They complemented those carried for K-L-W and his Rambler. He didn’t actually have a key to Land Lady’s rooming house given she invariably greeted him at the door.

Climbing the science building’s stairs the day following, he felt keys straining against his pocket. He reached for a light switch he hadn’t touched in a year. Across that July 8th he figuratively fed, watered and groomed the Jarrell-Ash.

Perhaps the scientific counterpart to an unrepresentative firsttime bowling score, his day passed without incident. The JarrellAsh made good on its end of the bargain, by late afternoon producing nineteen lead-in-blood results for nineteen Kansas City children.

Sixteen lead-in-blood readings met current public health criteria while two denoted over-exposures, biologically-unrelated adoptees living on Spruce avenue who oddly generated identical 30.0-unit values. The third lead overage originated in six-year-old girl from the Preservation neighborhood who registered 13.2-units. Per 1980, values exceeding 25-units were red-flagged while 11-24-unit ranged lead concentrations merited further review.

Racer carried his report to the dean’s suite, one equipped with a facsimile (fax) machine. Dialing poison control’s fax number, he listened through two sharps and a flat that confirmed the machines had electronically shaken hands.

Returning to Brooklyn’s office, he joined their speaker phonemediated conversation. “Woz, we analyzed your samples and appreciate your grouping them. It takes nearly the same time and reagents to analyze twenty as opposed to a handful.”

The dialogue switched to his findings. “Sixteen children display readings less than 10-units, that’s good. We won’t be doing much there except forwarding educational materials to their parents. Given the CDC has tracked blood lead levels since 1976 we’ll have the city to send a codes inspector to the Spruce avenue home. The city health department will

work with the girls’ adoptive parents to reduce their 30.0 red-flags. Both girls will need additional blood work and Dr. Beers at the health department may generate some other requirements. Regarding the Preservation child scoring 13.2-units, why don’t you have Racer talk to her parents who need to come up with a figurative lead eraser.”

Past that simplified plan-of-action their conversation migrated to a separate matter as Brooklyn questioned Woz regarding Graves’ disease. Racer waved goodbye to his professor, anticipating an evening devoted to baseball, one spent with a railroad family.

Given the first pitch of first pitch the All-Star game was scheduled for seven, Racer arrived thirty minutes early, ditching his bike slippers before entering. The Guzman’s polished floors hadn’t seen a shoe, certainly no boots, since George Taylor brought it there. Mrs. Guzman reinforced her husband’s greetings, introducing herself as Connie, she asked Racer to refresh himself via fresh salsa, chips and sodas.

Capataz and Racer shortly shared unfinished weed-spray business. Given former employees were unwelcome on railroad property, Capataz had become Racer’s sole information source. He named a hiring official possibly someone named Sweetbread, who had shared news of short line railroad’s improper herbicide use. The misapplication was attributed to a former railroad employee, possibly named Wurst who had been photographed dumping expired defoliant concentrates in Pennsylvania’s Monongahela river.

Capataz’ words carried railroad-specific meanings. “He backed class I railroads off in-house weed-spraying. Bottom line, nothing you could have done but don’t be surprised if they ask you to join their new contractor, somebody named Proffit.”

Racer chuckled at that. “The Rambler isn’t much of a car but I don’t think I’ll return to weed-spotting soon.”

Capataz shared other concerns. “Last month we all received registered letters from the general union chairman noting declines in duespaying members. If these declines persist, we’re in financial free-fall.”

Oddly enough, Racer escape a similar financial free-fall. Phyllis, the credit union’s chief teller greeted him by name. Racer’s June-toJune credit deposits existed intact, totally nearly fifteen-thousanddollars. Given her central role in all-things-railroad, Phyllis was

likely informed of his termination before Racer dropped his Levi’s at the dry cleaners. Learning of the All-Star get-together Phyllis baked them a chocolate cake.

Shortly after he and Andy had been hired, a car clerk collecting grocery receipts from the wrecker trainset had waved at Andy before he inquired “Hey, don’t you guys eat while you’re out on that thing?”

Racer wondered what the clerk meant but responded in the affirmative. “Yes, we sure do.”

The clerk probed deeper. “What kind of groceries?”

Reasoning he meant their grocery list, Racer expanded. “...Usual stuff, coffee, bread and crackers, sugar and salt, no Spaghetti-O,’ nor Beanie-wienies, though.”

The railroad drill began. “Then why aren’t you submitting receipts for your purchases?”

And to that, Racer had no reply, which turned out to be the correct response. The clerk continued. “Let me have your receipts and I’ll see how the superintendent reacts to paying them. When you don’t have any food choices, the railroad needs to feed you.”

The clerk’s efforts created a scenario in which Racer and Andy spent a year living, perhaps more importantly, eating for nothing. Each pay period Racer, the weed wander, deposited his entire check, less a seventeen dollar deduction for Traveler’s health insurance.

The Nicholson avenue All-Star game viewing trio focused on the game. Given Kansas City’s American League affiliation, they were understandably disappointed by another National League victory. One American League player’s name did stand out, though, although for a different reason, a pitcher with first names, Tommy John.

Noting eyes growing heavy, Racer offered combination goodbyethank you's. Once he was astride his bike, Consuelo handed him a wrapped cake portion, requesting he drop it with Olive so the Smiths could enjoy some cake, too. Similar to gezellig, railroad family affections defy easy explanations. Consuelo shortly phoned Olive to let her know Racer was on the way, “Carrying cake.”

A forty-watt bulb outlined Olive’s thin silhouette on their porch. She regretted Andy hadn’t returned from the Jigger, desperately hoping he and Racer could speak. That important conversation would have to wait, though.

CHAPTER 14 RESPITE FROM THE HEAT

Mid-July 1980

Racer and Andy had returned to the worst Kansas City heat wave since 1954, maybe since 1934, summers when Kansas Citians sought relief from heat by sleeping in its parks. Early in July 1980 Chief Norman Carroll’s staff informed the press that his department could not assure the safety of park sleepers.

The 1980 heat wave was long and lethal. Those seeking relief largely ignored the chief’s park sleeping prohibition. Instead dozens of northeast Kansas City and Preservation residents sought relief from heat on Cliff drive’s marginally cooler slopes.

Across July, rescuers, many Local-42 firefighters, processed casualties at a rate approximating one more corpse with each succeeding hour. Passantino Bros., Lawrence A. Jones and Sebbeto’s morticians were overwhelmed by casualties amidst citywide grief. Water cooler historians ironically recalled the preceding summer on that had produced surprisingly few heatrelated deaths.

Purposeless shoppers ambled through refrigerated aisles at Woolworth and Skaggs’ pretending to examine product labels. The library’s reading tables filled to eight-chair capacity, ladies settling

for Field & Stream while elderly men thumbed through outdated Mademoiselle’s.

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 73year-old female in the 3500 block of Denver expired in a room equipped with a faulty air conditioner, “pumping-out” hot air; the decomposed body of a 55-year-old male discovered in the 4000 block of 16th street, dead 3-4 days, a thermometer in that man’s bedroom registered 105 degrees.

Rescuers were baffled to find an expired mental patient clad in a heavy wool sweater, likely a confused physiologic response to antipsychotics. Being old, a person of color or even disabled, increased mortality by a factor of three. Add in thyroid or psychiatric diagnoses and dangerous odds skyrocketed by a factor of ten.

An entry beyond pre-existing disease or age belonged to deceased Karen M. Thompson, a previous headliner at 40Highway’s Topless-and-More. The coroner was conflicted whether her demise was more attributable to heat or perhaps methamphetamine. Speed plus anorexia and dancer status proved to be risky companions.

Cliff drive’s glades, pastures and woods filled with sleepers and campers, middle-aged female sleepers occasionally opting for brassiere-based sleeping necessities. The city’s homed and home-less curiously shared common accommodations.

USMC Mel hadn’t waited on the heat wave to visit Cliff drive’s glades, pastures and woods. When his 6th Marines made their Easter Sunday Okinawa landings in 1945, most of the island’s palms there had already been destroyed by naval gunfire. When Mel shipped out three months later, Okinawa’s vegetation was all dead, most of it burnt.

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

Yes, his wife worried about his visits to Kansas City’s urban forest. Ostensibly, he was there to gather field specimens but a poor correlation connected time spent and fern harvest. Beneath that

arboreal canopy, Mel basically sat or knelt, enjoying conversations with the fern undergrowth. Mel possessed favorites but struggled to maintain objectivity, deftly identifying each plant.

Post-dinner, Mel and his wife split into respective audio and newspaper camps, Mel tinkering with a reel-to-reel tape player, coupled with a McIntosh amplifier. Mel’s favorites stretched from Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Aqua De Beber to Trini Lopez’ take on Watermelon Man. Mel questioned why his spouse read news stories aloud, ones describing Cliff drive-based gang activity.

One night after they had irritated one other with musical and read-aloud diversions, their house phone rang. Mel’s spouse accepted a person-to-person call for Mel, puzzling why her husband referred to the caller as Gunny. The Gunny-person and he spoke until a Bell operator interrupted to let them another call awaited the shared line.

Mel didn’t appear to sleep at all that night, leaving early Sunday morning for the Cliffs. When park sleepers joined him there, he welcomed everyone, persons of color, those with psychiatric frailties, elderly and disabled, and, yes, brassiere-sleepers, too.

Other solutions to 1980’s heat crisis proved less successful. Each stifling evening Olive bathed Otis in cool water, laying out fresh sheets to make the little boy more comfortable. After putting him to bed she anticipated another stumbling arrival. Twice the KCPD had followed behind Andy’s weaving car, a possibly misdirected approach to public safety.

Andy’s railroad-imposed absences had proven difficult for Otis but even with there, it remained challenging to get Otis in bed ahead of his father’s noisy arrivals. Missouri-Pacific pay masters had rewarded A.M. Smith on a bimonthly basis but those funds’ outcome was unknown to her.

Andy bragged he was attending Jigger-based business meetings, describing someone he referred to as Diesel Dave. Pressing Andy about plans to support his family, he oddly replied. “Sale of caviar, biologicals, too.”

Andy’s colleague, David Diesel Dave Numachev claimed locomotive engineer status but a more careful review of his record would have revealed probationary hostler helper service, time 95

spent shuttling unattached locomotives. While additional time-ontask might have merited a promotion, before that occurred he was dismissed due to a Rule-G violation, intoxicated at work.

Dave poached tales from more accomplished railroad veterans, first person-ing their accounts. The Jigger’s railroad clients shunned someone they quietly ridiculed as No-Diesel Dave. Andy’s listeners similarly questioned why a railroad weed spray engineer stumbled over relatively simple chemical names. And then there was his irritating insistence on an odd Tox-E-O-logy expression.

Dave couldn’t believe his fortune when Andy shared details of an experience when Weeds, trees & turf encountered two Cape Girardeau track walkers who were poaching Ginseng root from the Mark Twain National Forest. Andy admitted he wrote down their phone numbers, plus others originating with Missouri river paddlefish poachers and other petty thieves he encountered during his railroad year.

While Dave had performed two risky runs for a local crime crew, mostly ferrying expired drugs to a local nursing home, he recognized he was reaching a status of permanently unemployed. Diesel-or-no, he speculated that Andy’s poaching data might lead to a successful collaboration with a Pennsylvania-based poacher Andy described as Weeds-fear-me Wurth.

While Ginseng root brought high east coast prices, paddlefish eggs constituted Missouri’s caviar, sometimes retailing for hundreds of dollars per pound. When Andy finally reached Rolf on the pay phone, he passed the receiver to Dave. Worried he might be speaking to a law enforcement plant, Wurth clarified to be a wholesale-only buyer, advising his caller that he should forward his information to a Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania post office box. Past repeat “Hello Rolf, this is Andy,” others realized Andy’s call had been disconnected.

The Jigger’s air conditioner performed flawlessly, hardly the scenario for nearly forty-percent of Kansas Citians, those lacking air conditioning. The city tallied fifty-three days when the mercury rose to one hundred degrees F. or more by noon. While temperatures tamed slightly past Labor Day, by then the casualty

list expanded to include duplicate entries for eighty-year-old males and a second speeding dancer.

Despite his attic-like sleeping quarters, heat wasn’t Racer’s primary worry. Notwithstanding his credit union savings account, he required fresh income source.

Anonymous-appearing individuals prowled Linda Hall Science Library’s open stacks on a daily basis, mainly reviewing patent and research narratives. Such prowler–searchers occasionally sought laboratory confirmations that would support their research plans, petitioning local professors to turn students loose as if their pupils resembled orangutans in search of fresh intellectual beach balls.

Brooklyn suggested Racer meet with Dr. Dr. DeShario to field his baby teeth lead analysis request, advising Racer that he would need to negotiate reimbursements for both his labor and chemical supplies.

DeShario had secreted himself in a college chemistry laboratory during his final dental school year, repurposing a Meeker burner there, he completed a prosthodontic (false) teeth project. From that quasi-laboratory experience DeShario emerged as a public health campaigner.

Given perennial worries surrounding the toxicity of mercurycontaining amalgams, dentists attempted to broaden the toxicity dialogue to include other heavy metals, lead included.

It is unlikely the dentist’s appearance attracted adult patients. Beyond being clean-shaven, his wardrobe choices were chaotic,, garish striped sport coats paired with plaid bell-bottom trousers, clownlike ensembles intended to comfort crying kids.

At their meeting the dental doctor recounted how he and his staff had filled file cabinets with children’s shed teeth specimens, bonus-ed by report cards and other medical records, particularly those involving behavioral issues. DeShario shared a series of Pittsburgh-based scientific reprints that he claimed support his primary thesis that high lead levels portended poor school performance, including an off-topic article, regarding intelligence in short-statured males.

While Racer found these expansive declarations interesting, he steered clear of an unpaid orangutan – beach ball trap, being careful 97

to differentiate reimbursable from interesting. Across a second conversational circuit Racer re-directed, insisting he would analyze a dozen tooth specimens for a fixed price. Feigning astonishment, DeShario countered with an uncompensated proposal for four hundred specimens.

Ducking a second orangutan - beach ball trap, Racer countered with a forty specimen maximum, explaining that Office Lady would invoice DeShario for five hundred dollars. The two shook hands on forty tooth lead analyses and five hundred dollars. After DeShario departed Racer penned a comical note in his lab notebook: Messrs. Jarrell & Ash will work hard for $500.

Dr. Wozniak almost avoided July’s heat, spending each day and many nights, too secluded in the air-conditioned hospital, repurposing an empty waiting room there as an improvised sleeping dorm. A gym bag containing clean skivvies and locker room showers spared Woz any more restless nights attempting sleep in a poorly air conditioned apartment.

If the hospital waiting room doubled as a dorm, its vend area took on new status as an improvised doctors’ lounge, one featuring four machines dispensing hot coffee, candy and gum and questionably-dated sandwiches.

On a hot Friday night when many Kansas Citians sought airconditioned refuge in its 12th street entertainment district, two doctors spent their evening in a stark hospital vend area.

Tossing a handful of charts onto the least sticky table, Woz nodded to a seated African-American physician, possibly there for dinner. While they had briefly encountered one other at house staff meetings, neither recalled the other doctor’s name.

Woz squeezed successive coins into a vending slot, one requiring six nickels, persuaded by a back-lit Steaming Hot Coffee illustration. Past five coins, it serially rejected his sixth nickel. Woz’ companion chuckled before handing him a straighter nickel and introducing himself. Dr. Les Miles.

“Thank you, my name is Brian Wozniak, general medicine and toxicology. I’ve seen you at staff meetings, aren't you a surgeon?”

“Yes, a urologist.”

“Well, I haven’t referred a patient to urology recently but nice to meet you.”

Newly-introduced Dr. Miles countered. “Toxicology, you don’t hear that much. Are you involved with industrial cases, I ask that because we followed a series of males in the South, some of whom developed bladder cancer given blue jean azo-dye processes.”

“Well, poison control doesn’t turn away calls, even industrial ones. We recently acquired expertise in industrial hygiene, a field allied with occupational medicine. But you’re the first local physician I’ve met with actual occupational medicine experience.”

Dr. Les continued. “I practiced at the VA’s Tuskegee hospital; the link between blue jean azo-dye cancers and textile manufacturing was hotly contested in southern states. We attempted to build trust where little of that commodity previously existed.”

Woz found Les’ words carried a ring, shortly posing a second question. “Did you also train in Alabama?”

“No, I’m from New York, New York City.”

“You are! Me, too, 108th street, Brooklyn.” Les chuckled. “Almost Heaven, 122nd and Harlem for sure!”

Woz inquired. “Where did you train?”

Les. “Columbia in New York City and medical school at Howard in D.C. Near war’s end, I was commissioned in the Army Medical Corps and trained in urologic surgery at VA Tuskegee.”

“How about you?”

Woz. “I completed undergraduate and medical school at NYU before undertaking medicine and toxicology at Bellevue. Once qualified, I answered an ad for a university post and adapted to toxicology in the Midwest.”

Les then asked Woz if made it back home, sensing regret in his answer.

“Not enough.”

“Same.”

Woz reached past work. “How do you infuse New York City into life here?”

Les. “Impossible but Kansas City is a nice place. Monday nights, if not on duty, I visit 18th and Vine to listen to jazz. Any hobbies you’re neglecting?”

“Well, I’m a H-A-M radio operator so I visit those frequencies and I also own a nice bicycle but haven’t had time to ride it.”

“Well, for now, we are both consigned to the vend room, its twentyfour hour guys!”

Appreciating Les’ sense of humor, Woz summed. “Hey, I hope we run into each other again. Thanks by the way”.

Les sensed that Woz had thanked him for more than a straight nickel. If Kansas City had previously seemed a desert, Woz’ encounter with Dr. Les Miles made it seem less so.

CHAPTER 15 ATHLETIC FIELDS

Late August 1980

And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears, I stand amidst the dust o' the mounded yearsMy mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap. My days have cracked and gone up in smoke, Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream. James Lawrence, Hound of Heaven

Mexican-American softball leagues took root in Kansas towns such as Newton, Emporia and Chanute, each hosting nearly as many Mexican-Americans as Kansas City did. With the United States’ entry in World War I, every ethnic group was enlisted into its armed forces. Mexican-Americans from Rosedale, a Kansas City, Kansas hamlet, dominated the Sunflower state’s 42nd Infantry Division and the 117th Ammunition Train. The wartime departure of more than two hundred residents there created demand for replacement meat packing, railroad and warehouse workers, many of them originating in Mexico. With war’s end, the Rosedale community welcomed returning it returning heroes. On May 12th 1919, Kansas City, Kansas and

Rosedale officials designated nearly a mile of Westport road as armistice-inspired Rainbow Boulevard.

Both the Missouri Pacific and the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe railroads employed multiple generations of similarly-named Conejo, Cruz, Cordero, Díaz, Duran, Garcia, Gonzalez, Guzmán, Hernandez, Herrera, López, Martínez, Montoya, Morales, Pérez, Pineiro, Quiroga, Ramirez, Reyes, Rios, Rodriguez, Sanchez, Sosa, Torres, Villanueva and Zaldívar family members.

Similar to Door County dairymen, railroads were early adopters of refrigeration technology permitting distribution of boxed meat products. Firms like Cudahy and Wilson packers joined Boyle’s, a corned beef specialist. Division points along both those railroads also designated meatpacking towns, communities where MexicanAmerican baseball (male) and more recently created softball (female) leagues flourished. Consuelo Guzman had spent adolescent summers outfitted in a softball uniform featuring screenprinted cardinals perched on opposite ends of a bit.

The American GI Forum, a Mexican-American veteran organization Leagues often sponsored leagues that molded adolescents into more thoughtful adults. A southeast Kansas player might define loyalties along four axes, the American GI Forum and its El Charro fast-pitch team practicing on , St. Patrick’s Church fields in Chanute, Kansas.

Game nights witnessed fan cars wedged against outfield fences, moderately effective as shields against windshield-breaking fly balls. While males’ greater upper body strength generated fenceclearing homeruns, females were often infield all-stars. Gee and Leo were known as softball girls, a term possessing multiple connotations.

Perhaps anticipating a baby boy, Gee‘s Rosedale-based parents considered names like Jorge or George. But with the arrival of a baby girl, George transitioned to Georgina before nine letters were shortened to four, Gigi and later, Gee. Leo’s birth certificate announced baby girl Leonor but by her second grade year a similar three-letter shortening yielded Leo.

Barring car issues or hospitalization, neither woman missed games or practices. While only Gee ran onto the field, Leo served as the team statistician, carefully noting hits, runs and outs.

Relatives, co-workers and neighbors adjusted to a new entity, the rapidly pronounced Gee&Leo. They had recently added a newcomer to a three dog kennel, adopting a Belgian shepherd they renamed as Hound who didn’t miss games either, Hound’s long torso aligned with Leo’s right foot.

While officials likely considered scheduled female play at Argentine, Rosedale or even Penn Valley’s diamonds, male leagues dominated those larger fields. The smaller Northeast athletic fields, located east of the Montgomery Ward warehouse, better accommodated their more compressed league.

On a season-ending Wednesday evening, powerful lights reflected off the Ward warehouse wall onto northeast Kansas City’s diamonds. The 1980 championship game featured Gee’s team, the Jalapeño Hattie’s matched against west-end’s Disco Niña’s. Both were scoreless through eight-innings, although in the bottom of the ninth, a Hattie scraped out a hit, advancing the lead runner to second base.

The count stood at two-and-two when Gee sent a line-drive past the Niña short stop’s left ear, scoring the winning run. Shortly, three clerk-typists, an apprentice auto repairer and two construction laborers, in fact the entire Hattie bench, jumped to their feet, hugging and high-fiving.

Post-game Gee&Leo dominated the 1963 Studebaker Lark’s front seat while Hound shared his seat with a gaudy tournament trophy. The Lark first sped west on St. John before careening southward onto Hardesty and cruising past Budd Park. They shortly rightangled onto Independence Avenue just ahead of Harold’s drive-in where Gee picked a head-in parking slot outboard of a conversion van.

The season should have concluded at an after-party refreshed by two cheeseburgers, a shared order of fries and a light-on-the-ice Doctor Pepper although it did not.

THE

INNATE LANGUAGE OF SURVIVORSHIP

You don’t usually hear my voice but smarter humans recognize that it exists, a system that has served dogs for over twenty thousand years. I don’t know why Gee& Leo both went inside, perhaps they anticipated sharing championship news with Harold’s counter staff.

While inside, a noisy Ford Galaxy pulled outboard of the Lark, a Galaxy model containing trouble in the form of two young men. Its wheelman directed someone he referred to Dog Man to open my door. Despite my growl, this Dog Man snagged my leash and yanked hard. No, I wasn’t expecting him to do that, and, yes, I should have been more observant. Okay, I’ll admit the prospect of Gee&Leo’s burger crumble diverted my best instinct.

This Dog Man controlled any possible movement by lodging my lead through the front seat split. Short-leashed, I could neither see nor breathe there. Amidst a choked misery I heard newlyintroduced Dog Man refer to the driver as Patch.

Dog Man’s word choice raised hairs. “This dog will be ideal for fights; hillbillies will pay plenty to see a pit bull half his size tear him apart, limb-by-limb. “

Dog Man sucked from an open Bud can before announcing “Let’s pull by the Greyhound station: Girls or weed, weed or girls.” As the Galaxy sped westward toward 12th and Troost I tested my ability to lengthen the lead.

Abandoning a bus station rendezvous, Patch proceeded east on Truman Road when the evening took a strange turn. He was likely ten miles-over when the Galaxy’s traffic light transitioned from yellow to red A young woman driving an occupied baby seat Cutlass with a green light proceeded southward on Brooklyn avenue.

Patch must have factored hitting the Cutlass as opposed to the street curb, fortunately selecting the latter. The men’s unrestrained bodies glanced off the dash before crashing into the windshield. I called a swing-and-a-miss on the mom-baby-Cutlass as I listened to the sound of the Galaxy’s right front tire deflating.

Dog Man’s trajectory created dual fractures, ones applicable to him and the windshield. My right shoulder crashed into the rear surface of the front seat but I sprang back uninjured, but perhaps more importantly, untethered.

Patch yelled “Get the dog back.” Too groggy or possibly too drunk, Dog Man deferred. I crouched low, arming my leap.

Baby seat lady had swerved, fortunately missing the Galaxy. Three teenage girls shortly stopped behind Patch’s damaged car. Manual car windows require three-and-one-quarter turns from fully down to the fully up-and-closed position. They were past two, nearer three turns, by the time Patch strode back to their car.

I recognized a window-escape scenario would necessitate a high arching leap, one sufficient to clear the lead’s loop. As I bounded free I overheard Patch’s triple-lie. “Ladies, our dog just got loose. Could you help me locate him while my partner here fixes the Galaxy’s tire?”

Somewhere between the loose and partner, the driver backed fast, cranking hard left, before grazing protesting Patch. I covered ground, risking a single backward glance.

Past Truman Road I crept through labyrinths created by hedges, shrubs and flower beds before identifying a broad lawn whose signage announced St. Paul’s Seminary. That place’s odors were mostly fresh, various kitchen and gymnasium scents, but others suggested a long-past era.

I selected a holly bush near a double-trunked box elder for temporary rest. Evaluating escape routes from there I notice a fenced cemetery to the lawn’s north. Its scents matched those of raccoon families, a mating skunk couple and a yearling deer.

The box elder tree was home to a pair of doves who served as a secondary alarm system. Near dawn I was hungry, settling for a sticky Tippin’s pie retrieved from a nearby waste bin.

My leather lead was a reminder of my good life but it might also trap me, maybe become a noose. Thus I chewed it apart, leaving only a collar-attached metal clip and six-inch leather remnant. If a country person finds that amputated lead, they’ll recognize a creature escaped. Others will likely toss it, finding it useless minus its clip.

My collar and remnant remind me of a good life shared with my kennelmates, Max and Blaze there with Gee& Leo. As dawn neared, I abandoned the box elder-holly in favor of something more secure. A much sadder Studebaker later prowled Northeast’s Preservation neighborhood. KCPD’s Sgt. Vince penned a report pertinent to the dog-napping, hoping the girls’ shepherd hadn’t fallen into bad hands. Red, yellow and black posters appeared on street lights, park trash cans, and even at K-L-W, noting the disappearance, theft really, of a Belgian Shepherd taken form a Lark paused at Harold’s drive-in.

CHAPTER 16 OLFACTORY - “ALL FACTORY” GUIDANCE

Early September 1980

Yea, faileth now even dream

The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist; Even the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist, Are yielding; cords of all too weak account For earth with heavy griefs so overplussed.

James Lawrence, Hound of Heaven

(HOUND SPEAKS) SMELL is a more than a nose. Sense of smell, olfaction, nose sense, these favor my survival. My lair is in the deep forest located below Cliff drive’s west terminus slightly east of the Paseo Bridge, a site somewhat shielded from rail car coupler noise.

Given my recent history I possessed reservations about humans, nevertheless I inched forward toward meeting two new cliff visitors, a middle-aged male with a passion for flora and fauna. The second was a woman, although from the past. To be clear, I am not a wolf and never howled to summon her spirit, that tired old story marches on.

I could have joined them but waited instead. She was not a threat to me and I reasoned the man would prove reliable, too. Her dress folds touched multiple ferns as she sat on her heels speaking to the man.

Following three observational weeks, I allowed them to see me. She spoke first, noting my ancestry. “He’s a Belgian Tervuren but he has some Malinois coloration, too.” The man was more guarded, only noting that my sable coloration provided camouflage. As the days passed, I allowed one or both of them to approach.

I heard him refer to her as Aimée who shared his name, too, USMC Mel. I became comfortable with angling my long axis beside the fern bed visitor USMC Mel called Aimée just as I had beside Leo.

Aimée related how one hundred years earlier she had characterized where we lay as impenetrable, further enlightening us that the community to its north she had labeled Instanhouding, in English, as Preservation.

If I were Julius Caesar’s dog, I might have favored Mel’s Latin descriptions of plant life. Instead, I puzzled why hay-scented wasn’t a sufficient label for a fern. Does struggling to pronounce Dennstaedtia punctilobula change anything? Fern, among other plant histories, began in ancient northern forests where those plants allied with others.

I began to witness Gladstone boulevard residents who insisted on cultivating lonely stands of azaleas and isolated islands of irises. To creatures, single-species approaches neglect important allying.

Near bar closing, an hour when humans’ breath resembles soured berries, I trekked the Indian Mound tree line. Arguments sometimes spilled out of the Jigger onto Belmont regarding the mounds’ authenticity. I could have resolved those differences given my-kind are buried there beside Indian handlers.

Modern humans favor depictions of wolves and coyotes beside American Indians. While Gee favor sun-catchers in her bedroom, Leo insists on hanging an Elvis tapestry in hers. The lone wolf print in Gee’s bedroom, though, is my favorite.

My neighborhood soirees were mainly to seek food, meaning table scraps. I grew to appreciate leftover items originating along Mersington and Kensington avenues. By then I had memorized my two new allies’ names, Aimée&Mel, ones reminding me of Gee&Leo.

CHAPTER 17 FORT HAZARD

Late September 1980

Prior to their marriage, Joseph’s letters to Aimée described a town of Kanza. Guinotte’s original enclave was largely landlocked by limestone bluffs to its south and the Missouri river to its north. His plan was to remove sufficient timber so they could view the Dutch Harlem settlement across the Missouri, a very European relationship.

Aimée’s feminine pursuits included those attached to hospitality, culture and spirituality, hosting stays there for both luminaries and ordinary travelers. Guinotte hospitality created gezellig, an unmistakable, although largely indescribable warmth.

By the 20th century reaching the Missouri river from Preservation necessitated passing through a municipal dump, another Valley of the Ashes. Given Fitzgerald had already used the Valley term for the Great Gadsby-related dump, local public works employees comically labeled their site as Ft. Hazard.

Missouri-Pacific, KC Terminal Railway and Kansas City

Southern tracks separated Preservation from Ft. Hazard and the Missouri river’s southern bank. Prior to the creation of 1920-era “US-numbered” highways, railroads shipped nearly everything physically larger than a bread box.

Eisenhower’s 1950-era highway projects increasingly converted wide strips of farmland into double concrete ribbons termed interstate highways. Curiously-spelled cloverleaf intersections facilitated mergers onto interstates. Construction of a single cloverleaf intersection meant the sacrifice of ten or more acres, and certainly nearby structures, including homes.

Kansas City municipal leaders hardly favored cloverleaf construction in even nearby Blue Springs, Missouri, and certainly 110

not in distant Bonner Springs, choosing instead to place twentythree exchanges within six miles of city hall, close enough to one another that an energetic walker could visit half a dozen by lunch. Even landmark homes such as those perched on Kersey Coates drive faced the wrecking ball, consequences of not only highways and urban renewal but from creation of less-segregated schools.

House-moving George Taylor dragged houses to available lots, favoring one-way trips along wide downtown streets, thus Preservation was a prime moved-house target. His projects commenced at on Sunday dawns sometimes benefitting from lightly-secured railroad jacks Taylor used to lower framed houses onto waiting piers.

Transfer finances originated in fees payable to Taylor who bid removal projects as they were demolitions. Once dislodged his houses were either permanently relocated or squatted somewhere, buzz-canned N-O’s designated squatters lacking permanent addresses. His backward-scrawled N’s suggested George Taylor may not have benefitted from a formal education.

Cloverleaf casualties were towed behind a powerful Mack B-61 tractor, although one lacking doors, windows or even lighting. With George at the Mack’s controls, he inched Kansas City real estate forward, if only one house at a time.

Sunday-only moves freed him for weekday banking tasks. Bank patrons appreciated George’s friendly waves, finding him occasionally as far away as Orrick or even Buckner, Missouri. While possibly illiterate Taylor was a careful student of federallyinsured limits, establishing accounts at dozens of local banks.

Similar to Speedway’s boards, Taylor-relocated structures scattered. Old-yet-new entries joined others along Preservation’s Prospect, Montgall, Chestnut, Nicholson and Agnes avenues. Preservation’s homes numbered about sixty, spread eight blocks north-to-south and six east-to-west. Whether dragged or constructed there they were all located near Kansas City’s Ft. Hazard landfill.

Kansas Citians had originally proposed a port for the Ft. Hazard location but the changing course of the Missouri River discouraged further port planning. Cruel overflows from both the Missouri and 111

Blue rivers created a destructive flooded triangle. Kansas Citians attempted to distance themselves from the Missouri’s tortuous flows by stacking debris along its south bank.

Ahead of 1945 a large rotating steel blade located there reduced waste solids to pellet-sized dimensions before jettisoning the messy mixture into the Missouri. Public works officials possibly theorized that Sni-A-Bar, Sugar and Rock creek outflows would dilute the fast-flowing mess.

If garbage-to-river engineering was a norm to the east, garbageto-pork transitions predominated to the west of downtown. Kansas City’s George Bennett pioneered a consumptive approach, feeding table and restaurant wastes to eight hundred hungry hogs, accurately producing table-fed pork.

A curious cottage industry paralleled Bennett’s garbage-to-pork scheme. An elderly couple there risked hog pen crush injuries while retrieving discarded flatware, relying on monogram-matching to claim small cash rewards. Bennett once asked them why they didn’t settle for Social Security benefits. The wife responded that her husband’s monthly Social Security payments were short of twenty-six dollars; they planned to continue collecting flatware.

By 1953 Kansas City engineers devised a new plan, abandoning river garbage jettisoning and garbage-to-pork schemes in favor of landfilling, meaning they would plow garbage and debris along a four-mile earthen ribbon paralleling the Missouri’s south bank.

Engineers divided the riverfront Ft. Hazard site into thirds: Area-1, set west of the Chouteau bridge, Area-2, contained by the Chouteau and Paseo bridges, and Area-3, east of the Chouteau. The landfill’s business plan was tied to tipping fees, calculated by subtracting an empty truck’s eight from its arrival or loaded weight.

Across nearly three decades nearly every type waste was tipped there. To combat illicit dumping, officials minimized tipping fees and maximized acceptance criteria. Beyond residential refuse the riverfront landfill accepted both manufacturing and construction by-products and even unidentifiable components of hospital waste. Human body parts, such as amputated limbs, were never landfilled at Ft. Hazard. But a similar reverence apparently did not 112

apply to animal carcasses. Deceased, landfilled animals generate what is sometimes termed copious quantities of gas, all of it flammable and most of it toxic.

To her neighbors, the seamstress, wife and mother they knew as Connie Guzman must have appeared an unlikely health advocate. Her passion originated from a bedroom wall’s failure to muffle her son’s asthmatic wheeze.

For the two nights preceding Bill Joe had struggled to breathe, coughing and gasping while a disgusting stench filled the air there. With Capataz posted to Osawatomie, Kansas, Consuelo recognized she would have to resolve this issue alone. The morning following Bill’s all-night coughing, the Nelly Don factory office notified her a school nurse had called requesting she retrieve her coughing child.

At Bill’s school she joined other moms present to retrieve a panel of variably coughing, wheezing, and otherwise loose stool kids. Returning home they encountered the same nasty odor, one whose origin had been purchased eleven years previously.

Unknown to Ft. Hazard’s supervisors, an employee that summer had accepted a bribe to bury a mule in Area-2. Plans to re-inter its carcass at either greater depth were either forgotten or perhaps abandoned.

If the mule’s burial space was limited to five cubic yards, her decaying flesh eventually yielded thousands of cubic yards of gas, replete with toxic hydrogen sulfide and an appropriately named chemical, putrescine. Hydrogen sulfide is shorthanded as H–2–S.

Prior to Maude’s-the-mule’s burial and emissions, their Nicholson avenue home had served them well. But an adolescent’s asthmatic wheeze triggered by an aggravating stench changed matters.

The following morning, with Bill Joe at arm’s length, she joined other parking lot petitioners, all anticipating the Impala’s arrival. By the time Funk’s right foot joined his left on the asphalt, Consuelo had summarized Bill’s chief health complaints. While he might have chosen to be annoyed, Funk admired her motherly resolve.

During the exam, he sat sidewise. oxfords toe-to-toe against Bill’s sneakers, noting breath sounds. Funk then switched places in order to conduct a more thorough exam, one featuring percussion and auscultation, more thumping and stethoscope listening. Noting 113

raspy breath noises amidst wheeze, he tore a sheet from a Menorah prescription pad, scribbling the name of a popular cough remedy, Guaifenesin – Robitussin.

“Possibly, weather and geography are working against us, don’t you think, Consuelo. You should keep Billy away from whatever is causing this.”

Before leaving Menorah that evening, he phoned Wozniak. Acting on Funk’s concerns Woz phoned Brooklyn who passed the H–2–S air hunger issue to Racer, requesting he perform an environmental air assessment at the Guzman home.

Racer reviewed the case file, surprised by the name it noted Guzman, perhaps Capataz’ family. While the file suggested a Menorah doctor had examined Billy Guzman, it never listed the exam’s location.

Preparing for the assessment Racer readied half a dozen lengthof-stain indicator tubes specific for H-2-S. Consuelo had received a call from Dr. Funk that an unnamed chemist would be shortly arrive. She was thus delighted to see they had sent her husband’s friend, Racer.

Respecting Capataz’ absence, Racer carefully addressed her this time as Mrs. Guzman. Amidst screen door pleasantries, it wasn’t clear who initially exclaimed. “What is that awful odor and where is it coming from? “

While Racer was confident H-2-S factored, he knew pin-pointing its source might be difficult. Requesting permission to use her telephone, he phoned Brooklyn to discuss strategy. Overhearing their conversation, Consuelo questioned his use of the term rosediagram, finding nothing rose-like about Preservation’s air.

Racer briefly departed, explaining he would return shortly. Two snoopy neighbors called to inform Consuelo the service man they had noticed on her porch was riding a bicycle on Nicholson avenue. “Didn’t he used to work for M-O-W? Why is he lighting railroad Fusees there?”

While annoyed, Consuelo let them know Racer was performing an air quality check – “Stench problem, you know.”

Snoops phonated through nearly. identical “Oh’s”

The sun had retreated by the time Racer leg-strapped an amberfront/red-rear bike light and perched the leather sampling case atop his handlebars. Bidding Consuelo goodbye, he rode home, contemplating how he would generate a rose-diagram, a plot depicting progressively lower H-2-S concentration spoked away from a source. Halfway up Chestnut traffic way Racer dismounted to climb the stairs connecting noisy Chestnut traffic way with Cliff drive’s solitude.

He slept fitfully, nightmarish images of weed spray shortfalls merging into derailments. Aware he worked late, Land Lady handed Racer a go-cup of freshly-brewed Folger’s the following morning.

Racer shared a recently-created H-2-S rose-diagram with Brooklyn, one suggesting that while Maude wasn’t the only H-2-S gas source, her emissions dominated landfill Area-2 and Preservation’s air.

Preservation’s evening air contained nearly three parts per million of H-2-S, one third of an applicable industrial standard. But how relevant was an industrial standard to a frail elderly and babies, too. Recalling Mel’s aversion to H-2-S, Racer factored in aesthetic issues, too.

After reviewing the rose-diagram, Brooklyn shared their work with Woz who questioned how a deadly blower flare incident in Poza Rica, Mexico, one that resulted in twenty-two deaths, related to this newly created rose-diagram.

After thanking them for the assessment, Woz promised calls to Funk and Consuelo, too. During the Wozniak-Funk exchange, Funk shared concerns that additional exposures risked converting Bill’s childhood, and hopefully, asthma-like condition into something more permanent.

During the Consuelo exchange Woz struggled to explain his misgivings surrounding more air exposures. Sensing her frustration with his muddled message, Dr. Wozniak rather abruptly suggested Consuelo should perhaps consider moving until the air there improved.

While most of his family lived within four subway stops in New York City, a similar proximity didn’t apply to Guzman’s, scattered 115

across Missouri, Kansas and Arkansas. Woz’ relocation suggestion likely coincided with the moment Consuelo initially contemplated a radically-different, advocacy-based course.

Other Preservationists pursued inquiries, too. An amateur detective, aka True Crime, queried landfill workers, rather comically linking a name with the disgusting aroma - Maude, Servant of the fields. The Snoops remained active, too, pursuing their sidewalk dialogues.

Consuelo reserved the St. Francis parish hall and ordered flyers supporting a public meeting The Preservation boot legger’s drivethrough window shortly announced.

PRESERVATION NEIGHBORHOOD MEETING

ST. FRANCIS PARISH GYMNASIUM

TUESDAY EVENING 7 -9 PM, REFRESHMENTS.

That Saturday she and Capataz walked Preservation, leaving flyers at K-L-W, Joes’ barbershop and Monteil’s Grocery. TJ thanked Consuelo for stopping-by while his crew finished another one hundred ton haul out. At K-L-W, her flyer joined an older entry describing the theft of a Belgian shepherd.

When Consuelo called to see if Racer could attend their meeting, she asked if he could address her neighbors’ health concerns. She had emphasized both Racer’s scientific and railroad qualifications. “One of us, educated, too”.

While Brooklyn typically shunned most occasions, he surprisingly indicated he would attend, too. Fr. Jacob stood near the refreshments window as Rosary circle ladies brim-filled coffee cups, perhaps futile attempts at thwarting whiskey supplement-ers.

The stage shortly belonged to Brooklyn, Consuelo and Racer, a Crucifix above her chair may have steered unedited speech past profanity. While invited, city officials chose not to attend.

Calls to the KC public works department had proven unhelpful. Sylvia Bolognese was hardly impressed by a return caller comically asking to speak to Mrs. Bol-Own-E-Knees. Call etiquette dipped even lower at the expense of Belgian-derived Lotte D’hoore.

Calling them to order, Consuelo faced a panel of neighbors seated in uncomfortable stackable chairs. Capataz’ stretched but did 116

not cross his legs, the seated pose of a standing worker. Consuelo allowed each neighbor a chance to speak, carefully scribbling minutes.

While the H-2-S odor was less obnoxious that evening, it remained. Racer’s rose diagram was distributed although he did not address the Preservation neighbors. They all knew who he was anyway, the stand-up weed spray guy. Three individuals proposed additional groundcover after another neighbor proposed an injunction against carcass drop-offs. Early evening, somewhat coffee-fueled enthusiasm, was replaced by fatigue in a blue-collar audience.

Forty-five minutes in, Consuelo politely informed the Call and Northeast News reporters present that her group would conclude in closed meeting status. Neighbors required about fifteen minutes to settle on conducting a roadside protest, one that would interrupt the flow of landfill-bound trucks.

Following Sunday Mass Consuelo rang a Call reporter and one from the Northeast News who passed her news describing the location and time of the planned protest to their counterparts at radio stations WHB and KMBZ.

At eight that Monday Consuelo and Brooklyn blocked the landfill road, opposing truck travel. Met by a brown flannel suit lady and a Mr. Wizard look-alike, the garbage scow pilots were flummoxed, stopping short of the odd pair joined by nearly forty Preservation neighbors positioned on the road’s narrow shoulder. Brooklyn held an all-in-one microphone, freeing her to read aloud. “We will get out of your way but we want to know how the city plans to correct this odor issue, one that is choking our children.”

Recollections are mixed regarding Brooklyn’s words; his comments about ground cover seemed reasonable but his use of the term asthmagen defied everyone’s understanding. Police Chief Norman Carroll had reviewed their flyer, perhaps accounting for the presence of two obviously rattled public works officials.

An asthma sufferer, Chief Carroll acknowledged breathing challenges. Plus, neither he nor the mayor wished to disperse an angry, coughing crowd. Hence, Carroll instructed his media spokesman to ask Mrs. Guzman to wrap-up, to inform her he 117

would speak personally to public works officials on her group’s behalf.

Fifteen-minutes into a no-permit demonstration, his was good news. Consuelo wrapped “We are leaving and appreciate Chief Carroll’s concern. Thank you for attending.”

Weeks later, neither the Snoops nor True Crime rationalized the out-of-season lilac aroma that had noted at the landfill protest site.

CHAPTER 18 NEVER SAW IT COMING

Columbus Day 1980

After the protest, Brooklyn drove Consuelo to the Nelly Don factory, passing Harold’s drive-in on his return trip to his office. Buoyed by a recent sense of accomplishment, he reflected on what a non-thyroid life might be like. Others had tried to help Brooklyn, often in ways he didn’t fully appreciate.

The Woz had shared news of an important examination, one leading to designation as a board-certified industrial something. Brooklyn couldn’t recall the third term, only its three-letter C-I-H abbreviation.

Preservation’s first significant improvement arrived as fill-dirt, soil scraped from Buckner and Orrick, Missouri’s turf farms. Such ground cover gradually lowered H-2-S air concentrations. City public works officials also met with the representatives of the Missouri Gas Cooperative (M-G-C) who offered collector line expertise.

The meetings were likely productive, given the city contracted with M-G-C to remove landfill gases, H-2-S, too. Following blowerflare gas line treatment, landfill waste gases were blended into product lines. While no one at M-G-C recognized the George Taylor house moving legacy, they adapted his B-61-based business plan: “Get paid to remove something what you then sell.” 120

Federal agency involvement in the Ft. Hazard protest wasn’t recorded, possibly none occurred. More Kansas Citians could correctly identify Moe, Larry and Curly as members of the Three Stooges than could name all three federal executive branches.

Federal workers could have been compared to radiation in that while necessary, they were largely anonymous, unrecognized, too. Workers posted to Kansas City generally worked in the Federal Office Building, in abbreviated terms, its F-O-B.

As Kansas City’s largest office building the F-O-B dominated two blocks, spreading north-to-south from 12th to 13th, west-to-east it eclipsed Locust and Cherry. A creative agency staffer had once devised a cardboard F-O-B model by laying a paper-clad box of Grape-Nuts on its side beside a taller 24-ounce Wheaties. Grape-Nuts modeled the F-O-B’s smaller common areas while Wheaties replicated its eighteen-story tower.

Each work day employees flexed their way through its turnstiles, F-O-B elevators delivering them to one of three thousand small work spaces. Each cubicle was close to amenities like drinking fountains, but perhaps more critically, near cork-backed bulletin boards.

Beyond federal holiday listings, workers livened those boards with clippings derived from the Northeast News or Call, entries devoted to bowling scores, youthful scholastic achievements and less frequently, holes-in-one. Following the Ft. Hazard protest, bulletin boards featured clippings pertinent to Consuelo’s success.

Conservative Richard Nixon signed the authorization for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or O-S-H-A, on December 29th 1970, the same year he authorized creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, in three-letters, the country’s E-P-A.

The 91st Senate confirmed lumber executive William D. Ruckelshaus as the E-P-A’s founding director. Although bookies designated the person holding-the-pot as a stakeholder, Ruckelshaus adapted the same stakeholder term to include the public.

The 1980 year witnessed Congressional passage of more environmental acts than any prior or since. Staffers assembled and sent to committee the same number of legislative bills as Newport 121

music festival jazz acts, eight apiece. Non-musical acts included ones applicable to Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety, National Environmental Policy, Public Health and Smoking, Environmental Quality Improvement, Controlled Substances, Family Planning and extensions of the Clean Air Act.

The complexity of regulations baffled staffers, much less public stakeholders. Hundreds of staffers would be required disseminate, if not interpret, thousands of newly-created regulations.

At the F-O-B ID-and-Pass offices a camera flash and a noisy Polaroid cartridge pull rapidly produced a laminated US Gov- name badge, the final step in becoming a federal employee.

Despite the fact twenty U.S. government-sponsored scientists had already won major scientific prizes, agency new hires sometimes found regulation-based science boring, shortly initiating cold calls to non-governmental H-R offices. A non-government offer sometimes shortened customary two-week resignation periods to ones less than four-hours. Certificates for long-term annuitants were clumsily adapted.

Accumulated Federal Service - 0-years, 3-months, 1-week

Region Seven offices accommodated stakeholders residing in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska, geographically centered states that curiously filled the alphabetical mid- region, I-through-N. Given low population densities across there, government cars were frequently driven hundreds of miles to low-impact meetings.

At the St. Francis Seraph Mass following the Ft. Hazard protest, parishioners presented Consuelo with both Call and Northeast News clippings. Reversing the landfill accounts, she spotted an Irish Spring - Limit-One coupon, plotting interrupted visits. From both O-S-H-A and E-P-A bulletin-boarded break rooms a common theme emerged: “If a Nelly Don seamstress can straighten out city hall, think what we should can do. “

The G-S-A motor pool rolled into Preservation on a mid-October Wednesday. Most vehicles there were law enforcement models, although school buses were present, too. Preceding the Columbus Day convoy, a federal marshal had reviewed a St. Francis church bulletin, one welcoming a Potosi parolee to St. Francis’ platers-to-be 122

program. While only two warrant-supported arrests were planned, the presence of a dozen formerly incarcerated individuals must have justified school buses.

As the mechanical posse passed Ft. Hazard, a federal marshal detected a nasty odor. “What’s with that rotten egg odor, Mr. E-P-A man?”

A seatmate comically responded. “Its formula is K-C-M-O.” Apparently either Orrick nor Buckner fill dirt had resolved Preservation’s Ft. Hazard-derived H-2-S issues.

Two C-60 trucks constituted the last floats in the odd parade, their occupants sporting Level-C Hazmat gear. Snoops quickly, although inaccurately, reported that the city must have instigated the mother of all mosquito eradication programs in Preservation.

The Beyond Metro task force had been formed ahead of the Ft. Hazard protest as a law enforcement team dedicated to apprehending persons suspected of violating either environmental or conservation statutes. Three federal marshals, plus a criminal enforcement agent from the US Environmental Protection Agency, and two more from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources descended that morning on St. Francis Metal Finishing.

Rather than weeks of forensic efforts, the raid had origins in a thunderstorm, one occurring during the second week of June 1979. The Star reported that winds had collapsed portions of the Kemper Arena roof, site of the 1976 Republican Convention, adding that an unnamed Preservation plating shop had suffered significant damage, too.

A KCMO dispatcher posted a police officer to the plating shop following the storm who radioed that Fire, meaning the fire department, should send an inspector there. A fire unit secured St. Francis Plating’s gas line pending a more thorough evaluation, one scheduled a day later.

While the inspector’s visit uncovered no storm-related issues, he made an unrelated although disturbing discovery. Behind a crude partition he spotted two large carboys filled with what appeared to be liquid plating wastes, their drain lines further umbilical’d to a legacy well shaft. He shortly used a Polaroid camera to produce eight troubling images.

123

After a pass down Benton Boulevard for an anxiety-relieving Maxine restaurant sausage biscuit, he swung west on 22nd toward the F-O-B, home to E-P-A’s Region Seven.

He circled Locust to Cherry twice, squeezing his K-C-F-D vehicle into a parking space marked for police vehicles only. Fire’s crisp white-on-Royal blue uniform, plus his disturbing account, served him well at Region Seven. Everyone present recalled Fire’s word selection: “Multiple waste lines connected to what appears to be a legacy well.”

Following the storm, nearly three hundred days passed before for criminal prosecution divisions of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Justice, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources and Jackson County assemble their respective cases. Fr. Jacob’s lessee, Lonnie Proffit would face multiple counts of illegally discharging toxic waste.

Hydrogeology calculations, whatever that term means, yielded a remarkable finding. Regulators checked twice before concluding Proffit had dispatched nearly six thousand gallons of contaminated water into that legacy well, in the process contaminating nearly six million aquifer gallons.

A dozen law enforcement officers were assigned to cuff two men, a fifty-eight-year-old plating operator and his priest codefendant. Most of the convict-turned-platers had evaporated by the time the odd law enforcement caravan actually turned onto Nicholson, the exception being a young African-American male who sat across the street eating a sandwich and reading a western novel.

The legal foundation for the charges against Fr. Jacob was a bit of a stretch. While prosecutors agreed Jacob at least signed the lease they were divided over his intent. Unfortunately, Fr. Jacob’s DayTimer record revealed two electroplating facility tours.

A U.S. marshal draped a topcoat over the prelate’s shaking shoulders as Fr. Jacob was seated in the back seat of a police car. Despite policy violations, front-cuffing and the loaned coat were concessions to civility.

Allowed a single call, Jacob’s message to a cheery chancery volunteer was misinterpreted. “I’m being taken to the Jackson County jail to face pollution charges.”

The associate bishop wondered why Jacob had the volunteer hand him a while-you-were-out note that Jacob was distributing Holy Communion at the Jackson County jail, he already knew that.

Seated behind the cruiser’s partition, ex-Hells Angel Proffit advised Jacob regarding representation and bonding. “Father, they don’t make defense attorneys better than Magic Mike.”

Proffitt’s recommendation generated a question from Jacob. “Can he represent me, too?”

Magic Mike’s call to Sharp’s bonding expedited both men's release. Magic Mike chuckled when reporters questioned him not guilty verdicts for a Catholic priest and his Preservation businessman-of-the-year co-defendant.

A released-by-dinner Jacob sat at a lonely dining room table, staring at an uneaten entrée consisting of yellow-hued Morton’s chicken flanked by pasty mashed potatoes and peas that could double as air rifle BB’s. Prospects of a chancery visit to explain his arrest were no more attractive than the cold uneaten entree.

The day after his arrest the chancery volunteer spotted a Star article revealing the non-voluntary nature of Jacob’s jail visit. The old man settled on, Oh my stars, as his response.

Jacob shouldn’t have worried. While requiring three stays, two changes of venue and a rescheduled hearing, all of his charges were dropped. Proffit was eventually convicted of failure to obtain a waste water discharge permit and shortly reinvented himself as a railroad herbicide contractor headquartered in Kingsville, Missouri.

Fr. Jacob requested parish council advice regarding the two remaining men, twenty-six year-old Morris Johnson and thirty year-old Arnie Patchet. A quiet student of Louis L’Amour westerns, Johnson accepted the monotony and even the acid burns associated with plating. Patchet, on the other hand, possessed an irritating, fidgety manner, although to his credit, he also possessed a near encyclopedic knowledge of Harley parts interchangeability. The council suggested an intermediate course, both could remain in

residence there for ninety days while searching for alternate accommodations.

By 1980 attitudes regarding chemicals were colored by fresh concerns surrounding Agent Orange. Enthusiasm for 3-newcompounds per day was tempered by questions surrounding poorlycharacterized effects of chemicals. Even industrial aromas seemed to spike concern, as though chemical toxicity could be sniffed. Big piles of aromatic creosoted railroad ties headed that sniff-focused suspicion list.

An E-P-A supervisor introduced a professionally-attired female, referring to her as Nelda, describing her as a psychologist – slashstatistician, someone skilled in both the design and interpretation of questionnaires.

F-O-B seating patterns mirrored interest levels. Female staffers found front row seats, joined there by a single retirement-eligible male. Younger male employees sifted in late and sought seats along the back row. Front-seated attendees listened and took notes while back row attendees produced sounds associated with chuckles, burps and others of a biological nature.

Having forgotten the speaker’s name, a back-row commando nudged his partner. “What was her name, Nell, Nelda, Nellie?” Freshly-introduced but obviously forgettable Nelda, shortly positioned a transparency sheet on a blinding overhead screen, lettering through what she described as a questionnaire-based approach and lettered as E-P-A’s New Way Forward.

When the presider opened things up, the front row male attendee asked a question. “What if the respondents, our stakeholders, don’t know how to complete the forms?”

Nelda scrawled a two-word answer - Default values. A jokester sharing a sticky box of Jujubes with a co-conspirator inaccurately parroted her words. “Like I said, find fault.”

Glancing at his watch as if piloting a low-on-fuel plane, the presider informed them they were three-minutes into break time. But before they broke, he shared news that the E-P-A mailroom had sent the first questionnaire to a nearby creosoting facility. The New Way Forward approach would be tested in a cross tie-treating firm named P-I-S-C-O. Yes, the back row entertained multiple guffaws. 126

From its origins as Preservation Sleeper Tie Company two buildings served the tie-treaters, the larger one covered ten thousand square feet, hosting two-rail car load points. The smaller structure, a George Taylor transplanted bungalow, served as their office.

Following two boring focus group meetings and a boozy corporate retreat aboard a Lake Michigan houseboat, managers realigned Preservation Sleeper Tie Company as P-I-S-C-O. Only a daiquiri-stained tablet archived its origins: Preservation Integrated Systems for Chemical Optimization.

Daiquiris and beyond, managers tried to diversify beyond Class I railroads. Household decks were rapidly replaced porches and verandas, planked structures better suited to trendy Tiki torch alcoves and party-prompting fiberglass hot tubs. Given no one wanted a sticky creosoted deck, pentachlorophenol, P-C-P as it was also designated, became increasingly popular.

Uninvited to either houseboat cruises or focus groups, Kansas City’s TJ Williams was informed by letter of product line changes. He initially viewed the pentachlorophenol additions as baby projects, given P-C-P haul-outs were generally five-tons or less. Rebranding didn’t affect him that much until the day he signed for a registered letter, one featuring an E-P-A Region Seven return. Adapting his clasp knife to slit the envelope, TJ reviewed contents, including several pages of suggested remediation steps.

The odd New Way Forward document described their on-site lagoons in terms applicable to Times Beach, Missouri even New York’s Love Canal.

D-I-O-X-I-N and B-E-N-Z-O-F-U-R-A-N.

The document’s clarifying features included a useless reference equating sixty to 60-days for their response and an 816-prefixed phone listing designating an E-P-A point-of-contact or P-O-C) . TJ quickly notified Chicago of the new requirements although he struggled to explain what New Way Forward fmeant. Over the next six weeks he telephonically followed-up and even drove to Chicago to discuss the questionnaire. Phoning the 816-listed number, TJ

asked to speak to the P-O-C person but the call yielded only a Jujube-jawed, “Like I said, use default values.”

Nothing of a clarifying nature arrived so TJ pushed on, finishing large haul-outs by each Saturday’s conclusion. Long work weeks and New Way Forward worries perhaps accounted for his noddingoff during Fr. Jacob’s social justice-dominated homilies.

When the federal Office of Management and Budget established ten federal regions in 1974, a joke arose that no two mandated identical guidelines. While E-P-A officials were posted to both Little Rock and Springdale, Arkansas offices were busy with fresh poultry problems, particularly given there were ten times as many chickens as humans in that state.

For E-P-A’s Dallas regional office, neither creosote worries nor Pine Bluff-based wood treatment constituted a priority. Forestry, and by extension, wood treatment, were integral features of Arkansas culture.

Invoices and company announcements marched through TJ’s outbox barring one exception, the New Way Forward questionnaire and its remediation requirements. His recommendation to halt production to permit them to remediate the lagoons was poorly received by Chicago managers. A Friday afternoon conference call connecting him with them transitioned from heated to personal before acquiring disconnected status. P-I-S-C-O matters must paralleled its bimonthly pay cycle.

On a Friday two weeks hence, six heavy thuds announced Chicago managers who shortly shuttered the Kansas City operation. A Chicago H-R person provided workers with pencils, lined-forms and a self-addressed envelopes that would initiate transfers to Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Workers later said he made the transfers sound as if they had won expense-paid trips to the Bahamas.

When workers finally realized Boss Man hadn’t been offered a transfer, they reasoned that if he weren’t going, neither were they. The first to discard his form moved the mesh receptacle to the porch’s edge so others wouldn’t have to climb its steps. The mesh can shortly hosted the self-addressed envelopes, less stamps. TJ’s bunch never saw it coming. 128

Racer had encountered Andy only once since their MoPac days, omitting the Smith front porch cake drop-off. his attitude regarding his former co-worker swung between no-news-is-good toward bigand-heavy outcomes.

On the heels of the failed St. Francis prosecutions, the Beyond Metro task force reassembled one additional time. Their investigations led to one geographically displaced and two local arrests, all judged to be rock solid cases by prosecutors.

Racer’s next communication about Andy came in the form of a phone call from Olive. Sobbing, she related how her husband had been apprehended the previous day as he arrived at the Jigger to meet someone she referred to as Diesel, No -no diesel, Dave. Andy’s jail-based pay phone call suggested that he been booked into the Jackson County jail on charges of exceeding his creel limit.

During their railroad year Racer never heard Andy express an interest in fishing but he assured Olive he would contact Sharp’s bonding about her husband’s release. But what about Andy’s curious goodbye statement to Wurth about staying in touch and occasions he neglected spray tasks in favor of speaking with roothunters and commercial fishermen?

Just because bonding-out Sharp’s required cash, didn’t make it a good time for a K-L-W advance. While he could have tapped his railroad credit union account, going there would likely mean sharing Olive’s sad news with Phyllis.

Pausing the Jarrell-Ash, Racer adapted a lab spatula device in favor of loosening handlebar end plugs, carefully extracting two secreted one hundred dollar bills. He then knocked on Mel’s office door.

“Prof, could I take a look at your paper, I’ll just need a minute.” Racer rattled through three pages before a Community Beat entry caught his eye.

A local resident, Andrew (aka Agent Orange) Smith was apprehended by the “Beyond Metro” task force, officers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Missouri Department of Conservation. Smith attempted to sell two female paddlefish, each weighing more than twenty pounds, plus fifteen pounds of processed paddlefish eggs to an undercover agent for six thousand 129

dollars. The Lacey Protected Species Act protects paddlefish and their eggs. David, aka Diesel Numachev, Smith’s alleged partner was also apprehended relative to the same undercover work at a separate Kansas City address.

A related arrest was made by Fish and Wildlife Service officers in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania who apprehended 67-yearold Rolf (aka Weeds-fear-me) Wurth who was charged with mail fraud, transporting protected species across state lines and fleeing. While Smith has no arrest history, Numachev and Wurth have both previously pled guilty to misdemeanor Lacey Act violations.

Given Sharps’ counsel, Racer waited near the Jackson county jail. Sharps had made it sound as if he were meeting an arriving passenger. If Andy wasn’t aware who might arrange bail, he certainly knew who had carried him during his railroad experience.

As Andy approached Racer didn’t wait for the creel limit yarn, instead he adapted an expression first heard on a miserable morning in Philadelphia. “Everything out there was big-and-heavy, Andy. It all wanted to kill us; we survived in part so you could become a better father.”

Leaving Andy to arrange his own transportation, Racer rode a depleted safety deposit bicycle, wondering where his words had originated, attributing them mostly to Vito, plus an older voice he didn’t fully recognize. The Jarrell-Ash awaited an act two performance that evening, one followed by another trip to the Guzman home, this time in need of a favor.

CHAPTER 19 SGT. VINCE’S NEIGHBORHOOD

Fall 1980

Vince possessed a unique law enforcement background, having been incarcerated twice. His awards for military Purple Hearts totaled three, P-O-W medals only one fewer. He had thus experienced the anguish of being incarcerated, the uncertainties surrounding confinement and the eventual joy of release.

Service as a police officer improved on soldier status, tough European campaigns across 1942-44. Raised in Kansas City’s little Italy, sometimes termed the North End, Vince played multiple sports across Kessler Park fields. His military background meriting a police academy slot, although one delayed three years from Army discharge, class of 1948. Following promotion to sergeant, Vince worked mainly midnights, frequently assigned to Central Patrol.

A few hundred yards south of Cliff Drive a cluster of elegant homes were built across the 20th century’s beginning years. Medical wealth curiously began with erection of carriage houses. A medical family settling for carriage house living meant the larger building’s parlor could serve as a waiting room, its library as an exam area and the dining room - kitchens as surgical suites.

Such large home accordingly became privately-owned hospitals of sorts, ones in which surgeon nurse couples treated mainly industrial patients. Blue-collar work’s risky outcomes assured them a steady supply of surgical candidates.

While Gladstone and Benton boulevard homeowners hardly petitioned city leaders to designate their gracious spaces as Tops, the term Bottoms took root in Preservation eight hundred yards removed from the Beau Arts crowd.

America’s class system partially originated in street addresses. While elegant avenues were generally afforded classy titles such as Somerset or Sunset, plainer through-o-fares settled for far simpler labels, Food Lane or even Asparagus Acres. Vince’s calls to modest Preservation neighborhood Guinotte or Nicholson addresses were 132

handled identically to ones originating from Beau Arts mansions. Vince’s North Star never flickered. A mother suspicioned of shoplifting meat at Monteil’s would be calmly questioned. If her purpose appeared to be one of feeding hungry children, he checked to see whether cheap hamburger or pricy steaks had been pilfered. Steaks generally meant a night in jail but the more believable hamburger story merited a police ride and police donated meat. Snoops would have been too far removed to overhear his advice.

“No more calls from Monteil’s – Capisce?”

Equally unfettered decision-making applied Vince’s domestic roll-ups, including one in which a prized Zippo lighter was hurled out a window by a jealous wife. Vince waited for the yelling to abate and for the couple to go back to sleep. High-pitched screams, though, he didn’t knock, steel-toed boots could clear door hinges as readily as locksets.

Apprehending those engaged in illegal schemes didn’t have much emotional effect on Vince, hardly the case for suicide calls, though. Vince rejected the use of the odd term successful suicide. He invoked the “This didn’t have to happen” the night of Hound’s disappearance. What a lousy start-of-shift, taking report from two women whose dog had been taken while they picked up take-out food.

Opportunities to grow vegetables produced remarkable changes in most St. Francis-based parolees. However neighborhood Snoops had observed one man tilling well past sundown, oddly cultivating out-of-season, too. When his rototilled patch was presented to Patch he devised alternate uses, repurposing it as a stolen parts repository, anticipating an illicit Easter egg hunt. When others made light of his poor yields, Patch countered.

“My stuff will come up when it’s time.”

Following the Columbus Day raid, Patch enlarged his tillage to include an unattended compost pile removed by four sets of railroad tracks. With Proffit dispatched to Kingsville, Patch’s primary concern was being upstaged by a second thief, someone who knew where unearth pricey chrome pieces.

Patch and Dog Man had first encountered one another on July’s fourth Sunday at a 291-highway’s motorcycle swap meet. Patch 133

learned that Dog Man had inherited a farm near Blairstown, Missouri. Not much inclined toward physical work, he had repurposed the acreage as an unlicensed Animal Sports Center, one hosting fight-to-the-death contests alternatively victimizing dogs or roosters. The evil nature of animal fighting was further magnified by large cash purses that attracted unruly crowds.

Aware animal cruelty charges could mean major jail time, Dog Man welcomed alternate illicit tasks. Helping Patch fence stolen parts sounded good. Conversely, Patch reasoned Dog Man’s familiarity with a diverse panel of felons, con-men and scam-artists might enlarge his larcenous daisy chain.

On Thursday preceding 1980’s final swap, Patch phoned Dog Man, confirming his parts crop was ready for harvest, requesting Dog Man help take it to Sunday’s swap meet. Patch fumed that Sunday when Dog Man arrived late, hauling three caged, panting dogs.

They trespassed without incident, shortly unearthing Patch’s shiny parts cache, one they shortly loaded behind the dog cages. If Vince had only noted shiny, lightly soiled parts, he might have given them a pass. But why would a dog breeder haul his canine charges through a rail yard on an early Sunday morning? And why was a gaunt family pet caged beside two Staffordshire pit bull terriers?

Viewing the Henry County truck oddly transporting caged dogs and shiny parts through a rail yard Vince activated his light bar. The dialogue began calmly, reasonable questions posed by Vince, unlikely replies originating with Dog Man and Patch.

Inquiring if the dogs were pets, Vince found Dog Man’s answer uninformative, maybe even deceptive. After radioing-in their licenses, the dispatcher indicated both men possessed outstanding arrest warrants. Confident in his Sunday morning arrest skills, Vince handcuffed and seated them on a nearby curb awaiting jail transport.

The dispatcher indicated Arnie Patchet had graduated to receiving stolen property, alteration of VIN numbers and buying liquor for minors. Dog Man matched Patch in the stolen property and VIN categories but raised him with animal cruelty charges.

Vince’ wife sent him to the job with a thermos of ice water, one he adapted to water three appreciative dogs. While Patch lowered his eyes witnessing Vince ear tickled the Staffordshire terriers but Dog Man stared hatefully straight ahead.

The Harold’s dognapping sequence had never been resolved causing Vince to entertain a you-don’t-suppose thought, wondering if these two losers could have figured. Set back quite a ways, perhaps one hundred yards north of Patch arrest, concealed within a complicated set of understory woods, lay the object of Vince’ concern.

Distinguishing Hound’s concealed outline would have required both binoculars and patience. And unless the sun glanced at a specific angle, creating a glint across his eyes, the chance of seeing him witness his tormenters being taken to jail were remote. “A dog never forgets a scent, though, bad or good.”

With Patchet re-incarcerated, Morris Johnson, Jr was the last parolee residing on the St. Francis church grounds. His criminal justice issues could be summed-up using a single term, car problems. Grand theft auto jail-time complete, Morris sought transportation beyond he world of automobiles, visiting K-L-W in search of a bike.

Morris first fixed his gaze on the panoramic depiction of Kern and Schultz at speed, a photograph displaying multiple selling points. Certainly, Morris sensed race excitement and, yes, he noted the short-man’s exclamatory leap. But mainly Morris stared at a snap-capped African-American male photographed near the track’s rail.

As Kern approached, Morris took the conversational lead. “Mister, that’s you racing on that big lumber track, isn’t it!”

Kern, the master of quickness, reciprocated. “It’s me, all right. Think you might like to do that? “

Perhaps appreciative of the older man’s interest, Morris posed a question. “Yes, but what does it cost to become a bicycle racer?”

Kern, the usual dispatcher of have a nice day comments, searched for something more meaningful. “A lifetime, devotion, hard work, more.”

Staring at the photo Morris matched the facial characteristics of the smaller racer with those of his seventy-three-year-old

companion. The shop guys later concurred that George and Morris connected, leading to speculation whether George was a Louis L’Amour devotee, too.

Following a review of Morris’ height and build, George used the store’s tracked ladder to retrieve a full-on racing bike. As if funding didn’t matter, he provided a sales presentation suitable for an accountant, maybe even a wealthy dentist, outlining attributes of the Fuji-the-Finest’s lugged frame and high-end drivetrain. Handing it to Morris, George concluded. “This just the bike for a guy like you. “

Morris straddled the bike bearing down on the Finest’s handlebars, attempting to replicate George’s photographed posture, the younger man’s back nearly parallel with the shop’s floor. Handing it back to George, Morris’ body language spoke volumes, variably chewing gum, even though none present, hands in-andout of pockets, nothing to retrieve. Sensing Morris’ discomfort, Kern intervened. “What was your name again?”

“Morris, Morris Johnson, Jr.”

“Well, Morris Johnson, Jr., I’ll make some phone calls in your behalf. Come back Monday and we’ll try to find a job for you here at K-L-W. So you don’t forget, here’s a wearable reminder.” George magically produced a flip-billed painter’s cap, one featuring Fuji screenprinted on its bill and Finest scripted along both sides.

After Morris left George initiated two phone calls, the first to Fr. Jacob to inquiring if Morris were, as he quipped, one of the good guys. “No need to violate the Seal, Father, just publicly available information.”

Voicing no reservations, Jacob cleared Morris’ first hurdle. George then phoned Racer, requesting he show Morris the ropes, the basics of amateur bicycle racing. “Racer, I’m going to stake a new guy with a F-U-J-I Finest, maybe make him the next Major Taylor. “

Softly, almost inaudibly, Kern thanked Racer without waiting for a reply. Matters had changed in an instant, actually with a Finest cap. For the first time in his adult life, someone believed in Morris Johnson, Jr. George Kern did.

CHAPTER 20 GUINOTTE HOSPITAL-ITY

October 1980

Mel wasn’t the only one afraid of fire, smoke and chemicals. Dogs are afraid of those, too. While we don’t study the Pythagorean theorem, we appreciate the advantage of standing back.

Despite a long, painful attempt to put her life together following Joseph’s suicide, Aimée wasn’t yet at peace, not preceding her physical death in 1907.

Nothing had been particularly successful about his suicide, making her question the reason she wasn’t given an opportunity to change features pertinent to her husband’s final days. But unlike my standing back, Aimée had more marched at crises, particularly those affecting her beloved manor, Instanhouding as she termed the Preservation neighborhood.

With ensuing decades Guinotte avenue and surroundings acquired a quasi-industrial appearance. While Brussels would never have chosen the Louizalaan or Avenue Louise as a landfill site, Guinotte avenue mainly connected railroads with warehouses. By the time of her physical demise, acres of tool room and shedlike cottages extended from the old manor to the St. Paul deaconess school and seminary about two miles southeast. Even though the St. Paul deaconesses-in-training were professed Methodists, Aimée

reveled in their efforts to aid the poor, and in death, sought a similar, although angelic, role.

The Guinotte manor lands more recently termed Preservation accommodated about sixty families. To Aimée, it was home, a place meriting gezellig, that indescribable sense of well-being. Aimée believed Preservation’s residents merited a clinic, maybe even a hospital there.

Much earlier, nearer 1870 ,she had apparently encountered Andrew Taylor Still, a noted physician and osteopathic theorist. Impressed with his thoughtfulness, she incorporated some of Still’s themes into her own. Whether from her acquaintance with Dr. Still or from her Brussels upbringing, Aimée espoused a curious view of hospital-ity, contending clinics and hospitals were actually medical homes. To date she had enlisted a middle-aged Marine with a fern fascination and me, a stolen shepherd, in favor of her hospital-ity notions.

Mel and Aimée’s initial exchange harkened to a long-past era. “Monsieur, did one of our servants welcome you here?”

“No ma’am, I’ve not met them. But if you need to know more about ferns, I’m your man.”

Aimée beamed. “As a young woman I lived in Belgium and France, both known for scholars.”

Mel confided to us he had not done well when questioned regarding wartime experiences, admitting that even innocent inquiries sometimes produced awkward silences, or worse, brusque who needs to know responses. The first days of November cooled Cliff drive’s slopes, leaving them wet and slippery. More hours of darkness translated into fewer when light filtered through progressively barer branches.

On November’s tenth day, Mel wished Aimée and me happy birthday before adding it was his birthday and then claiming the day belonged to the Marines. He departed early, indicating he was attending a World War II veteran affair being held at the Sheffield neighborhood VFW.

When he returned the following day I noted that Mel appeared troubled. I lay long and prone beside him with my jaw on my

paws, hoping he would replicate a comforting posture dogs have relied upon for eons.

It initially appeared he was talking to himself but as darkness ensued I noted the presence of two other men he referred to as Lance Corporal Davis and Sergeant Higgins. The Marine trio crouched behind the large ferns, plus a fourth man they referred to as their Corpsman.

I detected a displaced aroma of sweat and blood, smelling fear certainly, but more so courage. They would have been in their early twenties when the 6th Marines landed along Okinawa’s northern beaches.

Perhaps the dichotomy separating a quiet, introspective botanist from a troubled who wants to know veteran originated there. When I howl, my vocal folds vibrate as air pushes out. Ghosts or no, I joined them in howling a common requiem

OHHK-IN-AAAH-WAAH.

When Aimée spoke, tiny lady hands pointed out manor properties. Mel and I often turned our heads to appreciate features of a landscape that hadn’t existed in a hundred years plus other features from the present.

Aimée had queried Mel on multiple occasions regarding living conditions in Preservation. If he described abandoned buildings or chemically-scarred properties, those comments obviously upset her. I could tell Mel learned to guard his responses but he once added that he viewed the former manor as a dumping ground for substandard homes and uncertain relationships. Yes, I am only a dog but I found his words poorly chosen.

During another discourse, Aimée described the plight of a small child named Renata. According to Aimée, Renata’s parents had rented a house on namesake Guinotte Avenue where Renata. Had contracted a dreadful illness, one no doctor could explain.

Aimée related during Renata’s first eighteen months the little girl laughed, baby-danced and was considered to be bright. Just short of her nineteenth month, though she became seriously ill, stuporous and non-responsive even, and had to be taken to hospital.

Her doctors were sufficiently worried they that they consulted two specialists, a neurosurgeon and a toxicologist, fearing the girl was a victim of a meningeal infection or possibly a tumor.

Renata was shortly dispatched to the operating theater where a surgical team explored her cranium. Someone apparently known as Dr. Wozniak ordered a metals panel for her blood. Her parents fretted through a worrisome post-op period. On the heels of that a far less animated Renata emerged.

Psychologists adapted gloomy medical terms to describe her prospects: Profoundly low IQ, cortical storms, seizures. An analyst unknown to Aimée repeated the metals analysis before confirming an alarming concentration of lead metal in the little girl’s blood.

A contributing psychologist, one characterized by her coworkers as argumentative and troublesome, shared a similar outcome in a young cousin of hers, a boy named Otis, noting he had repeatedly seized prior to emerging with profoundly low IQ.

I didn’t know angels cried, but Aimée did for two children, ones named Renata and Otis.

I had wondered why Aimée consulted Mel, a botanist regarding lead toxicity issue before recalling how Mel had shared with her that Nikander, a tenth century botanist, had led early efforts to understand lead poisoning. Did Aimée regard Mel as a modern, more contemporary Nikander?

Following that cry session, a more composed guardian angel shared how she planned to bump her angelic chain-of-command regarding the Renata issue while Mel and I stared at Preservation’s Guinotte avenue.

CHAPTER 21

SHOP TIME – PERSONAL TIME

November 1980

A brisk November evening followed a day devoted to laboratory tasks. Arriving early that Tuesday Racer addressed chemical resupply snags before undertaking analyses to assign lead content to twenty-or-so Kansas City children. Nearing close of business he met with Brooklyn, checking and rechecking his calculations. Acknowledging Racer’s long day, Brooklyn offered to lock-up, allowing Racer to depart, hoisting his PX-10 bike over his shoulder and shortly riding to K-L-W.

Creative storytellers took liberties with Kern’s victories. Depending upon narrators, George’s pal mares included besting Olympic medalists, uninterrupted victories and generous estimates of winnings. The only person who could have straightened any of this out chose not to.

If directly questioned about 1924-era races, George was polite although uninformative, always adding that his first time in Paris occurred at war’s end, precluding additional inquiries about the 1924-era Olympiad.

Origins of K-L-W, his Liège-themed shop, opened following his wartime return. Locals attributed its funding to the GI Bill or possibly an inheritance. George’s finances were modest, possibly even austere. Monotonous workday lunches limited to Swiss cheese-on-rye sandwiches were chased by mushy Jell-O featuring outdated fruit.

Racer’s laboratory - K-L-W duties paralleled George Kern’s youthful jewelry runner - bicycle messenger assignments. Past store close he and Racer lingered outside the store’s entrance.

Racer was outfitted in race kit, as in bicycle togs, while Kern’s clothing selections matched his retailer duties, excepting two collared shirts worn over a base layer. While possibly a victim of

chills, he had never shared his rationale for the odd two shirt overlay.

Handlebars doubled as informal podiums for bicycle-related meeting and even their selections carried clues to racers’ interests. Kern’s were of a deep drop velodrome type as opposed to Racer’s flatter, wider ‘bars, ones more suitable for road races.

While retiring to the Jigger or another drinker might have seemed a possibility, bike racers avoiding weekday drinking, believing it could lead to parched throat, headachy race starts. Although decades removed from his last timed contest, George continued with the no-drink protocol. Once a racer, always a racer.

Racer increasingly believed he needed coaching to improve on race performances. George seemed a reasonable source of coaching and mentorship given he had performed at a high level before converting his cycling avocation into a useful vocation, that of a retailer.

Perhaps anticipating an evening spin, they began by reviewing familiar topics, ones ranging from back-ordered parts to fitness issues. Racer redirected, asking George to coach him. They had visited the topic often that he anticipated another declination. Racer was surprised when George responded differently. “I’ll consider coaching but first you need to pass a test of my creation. If you pass I coach, if not, we won’t need to revisit this issue soon.”

Racer asked how he might prepare, anticipating George’s undescribed test might include stopwatch sprints or even timed intervals.

Kern deflected the question. “Do you think you can read my mind? Racer came right back. “Ok, I’ll take your test.”

Here came Kern. “Do you believe little people, ones sometimes unkindly termed midgets, possess physically smaller brains?”

Despite familiarity with George’s eccentricities, this wasn’t consistent with his shop time obsessions or even his mitzvah interests. Did it perhaps originate in a closely-held family issue.

A you-don’t-suppose thought briefly flickered. What about the old speedway victory photograph? Racer regretted not asking about the short fellow depicted making a celebratory leap along the track’s

rail. George helicoptered an index finger indicating time had expired. In racing terms, this was go-time.

Here came Racer. “Short stature doesn’t predict a smaller brain. True, connective tissue deficits can affect the cranial vault’s size, but those are rare, and I don’t believe that’s your focus.”

Kern smiled, complimenting, too. “Why did it take so long? I wouldn’t have asked, if I didn’t think you knew.”

His tone darkened, emotional cracks spaced words. “I know you’ve heard inaccurate accounts of what happened that 1924 track night. My victory there arose from someone else’s efforts. What you see here derives from his unfailing loyalty, shrewdness and hard work.”

Pointing to the mustachioed leaper, George continued. “If present you would refer to him as Robert, never Bobby. Dressing-out at three feet nine, he had experienced ridicule, bullying, too. During the board trackdelivery boy era, I was a fairly typical messenger boy. When a pothole on Baltimore broke two spokes and I visited Robert’s wheel works in search of replacements. He was not only generous with his knowledge but someone I learned I could trust.”

“In 1924 an opportunity arose for me to pursue a large prize but I would have been no match for an Olympic-caliber sprinter barring his coaching help and equipment improvements. I sought the expertise one needed to race on alternatively rough, and other times, oil-slickened surface. Only decades later did I learn that he had bet his life savings on my success. Actually I became a lot like you, working in Robert’s shop while supporting my brother, the engraver.”

“Most Kansas Citians have forgotten the Million Dollar Speedway but the events of June 25th 1924 are fresh on my mind. Many Kansas Citians had come to witness a motorcycle contest, one headlined by the Indian Moto-cycle and Excelsior racers, good guys by the way.”

Schultz and I offered them the real deal when we came around on the last lap. As I edged him you’ll note Robert’s head height matches that of others present along the rail If you ever hear an expression about someone pushing you over a finish line, believe it.

Shortly before I returned from the war, my brother let me know that Robert had passed into history. He and I had spoken prior to my departure but that conversation was more focused on my wartime risks. When his lawyer called me to settle the estate, I assumed I was there to pay

for his funeral. Instead, the lawyer passed a passbook savings book my way, the first time I appreciated the significance of his wager.

Similar to everything else regarding George Kern, a reason existed for the layered shirts. From the breast pocket of the inner garment George handed Racer a fragile envelope. Racer read.

For release by the Trust Department of Commerce Bank.

1 June 1943

Dear George,

On June 25th 1924 you raced Schultz’s legs off, having implications for my financial betterment. George, you may not have been the better racer but we came better prepared, allowing me to take home a substantial amount of the Cella’s proceeds.

Thus I use this article, my will-and-testament, to award George Kern, my repair shop doing business as Robert’s Carriage Works, and my savings account, both held-in-trust.

George, our families originated on Jeffreys and Dodson properties. My father was a Belgian pioneer but mainly unknown to me. As an adult I learned I had been born from wedlock to a Crawford County, Kansas woman who left me at St. Anthony’s orphanage, 23rd and Walrond, hence my surname, Anthony. Each male orphan was assigned “X” as a middle initial. My surname is likely Purkey.

I used the track proceeds to help Belgian families build homes, thereby repurposing the old track’s structure but I preserved the old speedway marquee for you. Sorry to have inflicted that shop time - personal time nonsense on you. George, ditch the baby food racks, make your shop look “pro.”

Your friend,

Robert

Racer delicately inserted the envelope into a rear-facing jersey pocket, noting Kern had left.

CHAPTER 22

PRATT & WHITNEY REDUX

Thanksgiving Week 1980

(HOUND) I was living on Cliff drive’s slopes as autumn delivered comfortable nights, ones more tolerable for a heavy-coated creature like me. In addition to food and water meanderings, I occasionally visited the Northeast ball fields, hoping for a reunion with Gee&Leo. Thatch east of Belmont avenue provided camouflage for my visits.

During happier days I had shared a kennel with Max and Blaze, other adoptees. As days cooled, I thought I caught Blaze’ scent,, perhaps one originating from an intermediate gas stop we had made between Grandview and the northeast Kansas City ball fields.

When a human says a given distance constitutes a drive that means a much longer hike for me. Distance is not the sole challenge, there’s also the challenge of singling out an interesting scent among competing odors.

I usually scent at three, other times at four distinct levels. When my nose is near the ground it means I’m tracking, normal head height means I’m discriminating among odors, but when I point my head toward the sky, I’m attempting to retrieve distant scents, my high-power optics. I possess everything I need for survival, not what is always required for road trip between northeast Kansas City and Grandview, set nearly twelve-fifteen miles apart.

146

Odor-wise, interferents resemble driving into a blinding October sunrise. I knew singling out Blaze’s scent would be hard. A three day trip would also mean multiple food sources, ones beyond a single fat rabbit or even a distracted squirrel.

As I passed near the Armco foundry I witnessed workers there processing scrap iron. They wore small muzzle equivalents, paper masks stretching across their noses and mouths. Those devices must not work well given the men frequently coughed. Are coughs the human equivalents of my barks? What about growls?

A noisy front-end loader there moved what the workers referred to bag house dust. I circled twice before dust extinguished Blaze’ scent. Looping south, I encountered horses stabled near 26th and Lillis. While their odors were comforting to me, I shortly abandoned a possible Grandview homecoming in favor of Paseo’s deep woods near Preservation.

A few days later I attempted a second homecoming. Rain the night previous allowed me to stay on-point past the foundry and that bag house dust issue. I shortly hiked a bare industrial corridor, one occasionally interrupted by wet meadows alongside the Blue river.

(RACER AND MORRIS) Multiple reasons justified Sunday-only races, time off-work and low car counts figuring among them. Saturday evening vigil Masses freed some Catholics for Sunday morning recreational opportunities, Jewish racers were obviously well past Shabbat.

While normal people consumed Sunday mornings by drinking coffee or reading comics, Sunday dawns witnessed bike racers’ cars parked along county roads as potential racers gulped high-calorie breakfast drinks and stuffed jelly biscuits into their pockets.

A late November club championship would conclude the 1980 season. Local championships like these created epic accounts among podium placers and more amnestic effects among those less successful. Ranked cyclists often shunned such championships, fretting they might be upstaged by unknowns, competent enough racers certainly, often supporting family and work commitments.

The course would allow race participants to complete six loops, sweeping down-and-back Blue River road. While the start-finish line was chalked across Oldham road near Swope Park’s Lake of the Woods, the race’s south terminus dogleg-ed onto Bannister Road before reversing in a parking lot. Inclusion of the hairpin would permit leaders to estimate time-back for their successors.

For race start Racer positioned himself on row two, joining his teammate, Morris Johnson, Jr., Kern’s latest protégé. The menthol aroma of a counter-irritant marketed as Cramergesic blended with the scent of a non-showered contestant. While there was no reason to hustle the initial mile of a morning-long contest, somebody always did.

Within five miles and fifteen-minutes, the racers split into three groups, neglecting individual race stragglers. Groupings allowed racers to share pulls-at-the-front, making riding marginally easier.

Racer and Morris formed the first chase group, positioned two hundred yards behind a three-man lead group. Barring change, the leading trio would fill the podium. Most of an hour was consumed acquiring the rhythm of pulls, about forty crank revolutions followed by a wrist flick nominating a fresh leader.

Two sprinter-types constituted the lead group, cyclists known to avoid pulls-at-the-front, plus a third racer known to gut races, motoring home with an expensive bike dangling from his trunk.

While Kern pair might have worked harder to catch the leading threesome the dynamic suggested sitting tight. Hour two was consumed by additional steady work, maintaining tempo covering ground. By the race’s fifth circuit, all of the participants better appreciated the fatigue associated with a morning-long contest.

As the Blue River passing in-and-out of view, Racer and Morris approached the old Pratt&Whitney engine plant, more recently housing the Bannister industrial complex. Racer recalled its early board track purpose, the site of Kern’s emblematic victory.

More recently, eighty industrial acres there had hosted multiple Cold War enterprises, Pratt & Whitney, Bendix and Westinghouse, too. On-site precision parts rework meant the use of odiferous solvents and specialty coatings. Mid-race, however, wasn’t

appropriate for Racer to reflect on Kern’s pal mares or process chemistry.

On their sixth and final lap the Kern-coached relied upon one of Kern’s favored distraction techniques, focusing more on roadside scenery and less on their race-related physical misery. And that was when Racer first viewed the dog.

No, not any dog, the one depicted on the high visibility redyellow-black placards. Across months Racer had memorized the placards’ message.

STOLEN SHEPHERD

STUDEBAKER LARK

HAROLD’S DRIVE-IN

Racer was ten-inches left of Morris’ rear wheel when he first saw the dog, allowing him to watch without up-ending Morris. He noted that the dog was making time, nearly matching their speed, although running on the road’s un-mowed side, opposite the factory.

Racer retrieved a sweat-soaked biscuit before he dismounted, attempting to whistle the dog in, without success. Racer witnessed the dog disappear into a ravine.

(HOUND) I saw the bicycle guys, smelling them ahead of noting their chain-drive chatter. Most aromas weren’t bad, barring one smeared in menthol and another who lack a shower.

Sunday was my third day hiking woods or glades past the Belmont avenue crossing. While still six miles from Grandview, I periodically caught Blaze’ scent.

Several times humans halted cars, trying to entice me closer via biscuits or knee patting. But I was amazed when that bike racer dismounted, trying whistle me toward him. I also watched as he entered into an animated exchange with a darker-coated racing partner.

That complex’s odors were even more distracting than one originating with the baghouse and they dashed any hope I had of maintaining Blaze’ scent. It would take more a rainsquall to me to stay on point past the Bannister industrial site. My sole good news 149

was that cover of darkness would permit me to poach uneaten food from dogs’ tie-out bowls on the way back to the Paseo woods. For then the ground squirrels and rabbits were safe.

(RACER AND MORRIS) The Kern-coached duo missed the podium by a single step, a likely consequence of the dog-whistling incident. Post-race they lashed their bikes inside the van and returned it to K-L-W riding their bikes to Land Lady’s where Morris had established residence, too.

Land Lady placed Morris in 4-B, his nightstand stack of Louis L’ Amour westerns announcing his reading preferences. Morris possibly saw Racer, Land Lady and George Kern as counterparts the Sackett cousins. Adapting a Louis L’ Amour’s tagline. A cousin always has your back.

If preceding weeks were an accurate bellwether, Land Lady’s Sunday play bill would require only a single dial change, from CBS’ 60 Minutes to KMBC and ABC’s Sunday Night Movie series. Morris and Racer agreed she would dig Shelley Winters portrayal of Belle in the Poseidon Adventure.

CHAPTER 23 BIG CITY - LITTLE CITY

December 1980

Dear Neighbor,

I am writing to encourage your child’s participation in a lead testing program. Last year a girl from here registered 37 when a reading of 10 or less is required to be considered non-toxic. Her pregnant mom also registered a dangerously elevated lead concentration. The Preservation Association will sponsor chemical doctors who will perform blood draws ahead of analysis. (No charge!). Please bring your child to the St. Francis School gymnasium this Saturday. God Bless!

Connie Guzman

Dr. Beers contacted the Woz who petitioned Brooklyn to enlist Racer in what Beers termed described as a letter project. Racer drafted the letter for Consuelo’s signature. His duties expanded beyond the Jarrell-Ash alcove, spanning from letter composition to Sharps bonding-based jail releases.

A space shuttle Enterprise photograph dated September 17th 1976, depicted James Fletcher, NASA’s administrator standing beside Star Trek’s Captain Kirk and Spock. While lead-acid storage batteries weren’t integral to the Star Trek set, they had been critical to America’s moon landing and other space voyages.

Storage batteries consumed ninety percent of the production of refined lead, the balance headed for ammunition, paints or fuel. If its history belonged to antiquity, lead’s 20th century uses spread across automotive, aeronautical and even computer applications.

The city’s chief health officer, Dr. Beers, accepted new public health crises corresponded to Monday mornings. Equipped with minimal resources, his work force creatively overcome obstacles. Director Beers learned to embraced gerunds and nouns in the form 152

of allying and allies, selective, though in his choice of allies, recognizing the existence of non-allies, charlatans, who sometimes gave public health a bad name.

While alternative medicine providers were often helpful, that tree included some broken branches and more than a few bad apples. Across unrelated diagnoses, pseudo-scientific chelationists arm-waved patients toward infusion-based chelation therapies. The term chelation nearly rhymed with charlatan. Missouri was standing by its problem, maybe on one, too. By 1980 Show-me miners from there had extracted seventeen million tons of lead ore, most mined near the surface. Education authorities speculated whether Missouri children from places like Festus or Herculaneum Festus were at a disadvantage because they breathed bad air or because they hailed from a non-mainstream places.

Decades earlier an adolescent Brian Wozniak’s cousins labeled him as Woz - the Brainiac. So when he referred to Brooklyn, Mel and Racer as Brainiacs, it conveyed respect.

The load for lead testing slid from Dr. Wozniak to Professor Brooklyn and lastly onto the shoulders of a weed sprayer turned velo-chemist. Racer sometimes questioned if had become a valet to a demanding instrument. The Jarrell-Ash delivered, though, transforming dozens of blood drawtubes into clinically-relevant data.

Unlike railroad chemistry, the children’s drawtubes possessed names, similarly named Garcia and Rodriguez, plus an occasional Brown or Washington, and with war’s end some Tranh’s and Vu’s. As December 1980 progressed Woz found himself increasingly awakened by nightmares of sick kids funneled into those phony chelation clinics.

Blood lead analysis requests originated not only from Kansas City clinicians but from one in nearby Grandview, Missouri. Thus, M.D.’s from Tonganoxie, Kansas joined D.O.’s officed in Peculiar, Missouri in requesting lead analyses.

After making hospital rounding one morning, frustrated by more lead-related requests than resources, Woz drove to Main street’s Gallup Map Company, seeking maps that might prove useful to contamination sourcing. At the Gallup store he selected 153

three identical Kansas City map sets, suggesting to the salesperson that their newest client was an urban geographer. Puzzled by the clerk’s larger-is-smaller scaling comment, the Woz selected 1: 10,000scale maps. Given the size of Woz’ order, the clerk bonus-ed the purchase with three complementary sets of red, yellow & green pins.

Passing Kansas City’s R.H. Macys, Woz parked and entered that department store, shortly purchasing three pairs of Isotoner gloves, holiday gifts for New York-residing Wozniak’s. Maybe a bit homesick he noted the store’s mistletoe greenery, often surrounding painted red berries. Back at the poison control office Woz and one the pharmacy assistants assembled the map-pin sets.

Unfolded, the newly-purchased1:10,000-scale maps could have doubled as area rugs. He dispatched the assistant with individual map sets and notes he had scribbled for Brooklyn and Mel.

25+ units lead (Pb) contamination – Red pin

11-24 units Pb contamination - Yellow pin 10 or fewer Pb contamination - Green pin

While the assistant couriered map sets, Woz answered incoming calls while red-pinning what appeared to be the most heavily contaminated Kansas City homes they had tested to date. Those numbered about forty, locations where one or more children displayed toxic lead concentrations, meaning lead concentrations above 25-units.

Yellow-pins applied to ninety more addresses, homes where children possessed intermediate yet troubling 11-25-unit readings. Green-pins extended to nearly two hundred other tested addresses, about three hundred children residing there registered fewer than 10-units, meriting post card reminders to remain vigilant.

Woz fretted over a course of action should the Centers for Disease Control drop either the 25+ unit toxic red or 11-24 unit criteria in favor of more restrictive recommendation. (Ed: Although obsolete these guidelines are historically accurate per 1980).

Woz’ worry list extended to funding and adequacy issues. What about the tiny Jarrell-Ash laboratory? Racer had already paced a borrowed instrument through five hundred of its dry, ash and atomize cycles. Woz wondered how much longer a repurposed velo154

chemist could be expected to support a city-wide screening program.

Reviewing the maps Woz noted some neighborhoods were littered with dangerous red’s while others displayed mostly greenyellow combinations. He further puzzled over the significance of single, isolated reds surrounded by greens? What could be concluded regarding construction patterns or other circumstances. His original misgivings about moving to a smaller city were being quickly replaced by worries about the adequacy of a lead screening program, applicable to a geographically-enormous urban area stretched across four Missouri counties, plus two more in Kansas. He further mused that neither medical school nor residency training had particularly prepared him for this causing Woz to oddly reflect on what Dr. Les Miles shared that hot summer evening.

Hadn’t Les said that his group had linked blue jean dyes with urological cancers. Why hadn’t he found the time to attend one of the Monday night jazz jam sessions as Les had suggested. Woz deferred an incoming call in favor of initiating one. “Dr. Les, Brian Wozniak here. Are you with a patient?”

An upbeat Les rephrased. “No, I have to ask if you have your nickels lined-up for future canteen visits?”

Following a mutual chuckle, Woz posed a request. “If you are available, I could use some help.”

Les set a time. “We’re finishing rounds so I’ll be back her in forty-five minutes with your favored steaming hot coffee on the percolator.” Woz’ contemplated making two stops ahead of meeting Les.

Stepping into Mel’s office, Woz spotted a Sanborn fire map alongside Mel’s field notebook and an unopened pin box. Mel pored over a coffee table book, one entitled Kansas City Homes & Architecture.

The Woz posed two questions, the first more pleasant than the second. “How’s it going, Mel? How are you progressing with the mappinning exercise?”

Mel’s response was a question. “Dr. Woz, did you know that pyramidal-roof homes were first constructed after the railroad reached Kansas City, pyramidal-roof designs differ from gable-and-wings.”

Woz snapped. “Prof, I hoped you would devise contamination diagrams or statistical models that would help predict lead hot spots, meaning contaminated homes and even problem neighborhoods. How about doing that before expanding your architectural pursuits.”

Hearing frustration, Mel tried harder. “We need a hypothesis, one correlating housing type and age with elevated lead concentrations. Otherwise, we’re guessing. My training is to formulate and test hypotheses.”

With Mel’s use of the training term, two professionals with radically different backgrounds shared common ground. It didn’t matter whether Woz understood Mel’s botanical issues or whether Mel appreciated the nuances of residency training, they agreed on the importance of a trained, reasoned approach..

Not wishing to offend the older professor, Woz attempted damage control. “Let us know soon, Prof, Racer and the Jarrell-Ash lab are overwhelmed and we are exhausting limited resources.”

Mel softened, too. “I’ve visited nearly one hundred properties, home to more than three hundred children, performing follow-ups at each of the red-pinned addresses.”

Woz admitted limitations. “Mel, I’m a physician and not a statistician so we’ll leave that part to you.”

Woz departed, but not before noticing a heavy bookshelf dominated by 1930-era Polk city directories and more fire maps. Brooklyn’s office was only steps removed from Mel’s. Given a Saturday, Woz was mildly surprised to find Racer and Brooklyn checking blood lead laboratory results.

Woz noted that Brooklyn’s city map was heavily pinned with both residential red pins and other red-tasseled industrial entries, applicable to sites such as Armco Steel, Leeds Auto and the Olympic Speedway.

Before Woz could even knock, Brooklyn began an antsy monologue dedicated to justifying the red-tasseled industrial entries before sharing an Olympic Speedway experience. “Here’s what I told the Olympic mechanics, sixty grams of a lead compound furnishes nearly twenty grams of elemental lead in each gallon of gas. Dr. Wozniak, where do you think that goes? Well, first it goes in the air and then it goes into little kids’ lungs.”

Gauging Woz’ disappointed expression, Racer lowered his eyes, recalling his attempt to treat a ten thousand-mile railroad equipped with only a hand-me-down weed sprayer, a popcorn prankster and various miscalculated purchase orders.

Shaking his head, Woz departed. Walking toward Les’ office, he recalled Les’ comments regarding building trust where none previously existed.

“Thanks for your time, Les. I don’t need a urology consult right now but you may still be able to help us. Didn’t you assemble an interdisciplinary team for the azo-dye work, the blue jean - chemical disease study?”

Les followed. “Yes, our efforts were hampered by the fact the workers believed we were screening them for sexually transmitted diseases instead of detecting early stage bladder cancer.”

Woz explained. “Here’s my dilemma. I’ve assembled a team, a chemistry professor who serves as our industrial hygienist and a botanist with a statistical background, but, unfortunately, their approaches don’t converge. The chemist favors a distance-from industry approach while the botanist is attempting to match high-level exposures with housing types. Would you look at their preliminary findings and let me know what you think.”

Dr. Les sought humor. “Leave their report and I’ll let you know what I make of your colleagues work. By the way, why haven’t we seen you at a Blue Room jam session? Get your priorities straight!”

CHAPTER 24 KERN THE ENVIRONMENTALIST

January 1981

Across December 1980 the dimensions of the blood lead project exploded. Turnaround time in the Jarrell-Ash laboratory lengthened from one-day service to nearly a week. Nevertheless, the Woz continued to encourage physicians across the city to test. Perhaps the good news for the city’s children was that Mel elected to forego additional fern-bed sojourns in favor of lead contamination sourcing. Each weekend morning he departed in the same worn patch-sleeve blazer paired with a starched oxford button-down, creased khaki trousers and inspection-ready oxfords. Everything for a reason, nothing left to chance.

He visited red-pinned addresses, searching for characteristics that would differentiate them from lesser-contaminated green- or yellowpinned properties. Referring to the Sanborn fire map data he developed uniform evaluation criteria: Age, number of stories, construction type, roof type, outbuildings, present or not.

Hist transportation was as distinctive as his wardrobe. He owned an ash-door paneled 1949 Chrysler Town&Country for thirty years. The old station wagon sufficiently rare that he had encountered only one other in Kansas City. Yes they waved.

A mechanic had once suggested he might consider trading his Woodie. Mel declined, disliking the both the cocky nickname and suggestion. Mel similarly stayed the course relative to the lead contamination issue. His weekends meant long, repetitive drives.

Mel added thousands of miles to the Town&Country’s odometer that winter, pausing only to satisfy the old car’s appetite for ethylgrade gasoline. A carefully refolded Gallup map and a field notebook were front seat fixtures, joined there by a clipboard. As 158

Racer generated additional red-pinned entries, newer reports joined older entries although the bottom red-pinned entry persisted there.

By mid-December, his drive-bye’s carried big number totals, three hundred houses, home to nearly seven hundred Kansas City children. Each drive segment witnessed the Town&Country paused at another curb, often fewer than fifty-feet from a red-pinned lead another over-exposure.

Each Sunday evening Mel concluded these weekend circuits at the same tired Spruce avenue house, the clipboard’s bottom report. Two stepsiblings residing there had generated Racer’s initial 30.0 unit red-pins. Spruce joined tree-derived Poplar and Cypress avenues, only a few blocks from St. Mary’s cemetery, Joseph and Aimee Guinotte’s final resting place

City residents likely puzzled over why the old car appeared in their neighborhoods so frequently. But to parents whose children had produced worrisome red-pin readings the Town&Country was emblematic of a Marine with a mission.

In late January 1981 a worried parent had approached.. “Lead Man, have you figured this out?”

Polite but short of chatty, Mel answered. “No, but thanks for asking, we’re not finished.”

He was hardly a botanical pioneer in terms of heavy metal issues. Even 900 AD’s Nikander had been preceded centuries earlier by botany’s originator, Theophrastus.,

Years previously Mel had aided a geography professor, a female named Natalie Burpus, relative to the health of her prized Gladstone boulevard-based azaleas. Natalie respected Mel as a scientist, not only because of the azalea assistance, but on account of Mel’s diligence regarding the lead issue. That December Mel requested her help in accessing an exciting new technique termed geographic information systems or G-I-S, that he learned had already proven useful in contaminant sourcing elsewhere.

While Natalie’s G-I-S was only a node, it connected to a more powerful counterpart housed in the National Geographic Society’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. Less than a week into the spring term Natalie phoned Mel with good news. She had arranged for a

subset of Racer and his red-pinned entries to be G-I-S analyzed using the National Geographic’s mainframe.

Mel’s adaptation of their dining room table for service as a G-I-S plotting board irritated his wife. And why was Mel hanging an enormous pinned map from their drapes.

The next indication of his progress occurred on a wintry morning when Mel left the car keys on their dresser, signifying the Town& Country was hers for Saturday shopping. He shared with Melanie that recent G-I-S data suggested a fresh working hypothesis. Lacking further clarification or explanation, Mel walked to work.

Later that Saturday morning Melanie drove the Town&Country to Skaggs drug store. As she exited a young mom accosted her.

“Aren’t you Lead Man’s wife?”

Although slightly startled by the unexpected inquiry, Melanie answered in the affirmative.

Young mom continued. “I thought so, there’s only one Town&Country and we are very grateful for your husband’s help.”

If Mel had entered a more compressed phase of his investigation, the same condition didn’t exist in the status Jarrell-Ash alcove. Each work day a hallway table there collected a series of iced plastic pails that surrounded dozens of blood drawtubes, each one of those tubes requiring a separate Jarrell-Ash analytical cycle.

Brooklyn had established a special projects account intended to satisfy the Jarrell-Ash’s compressed gas and carbon tube electrode requirements, an account that would accept deposit checks such as those originating with Woz in poison control and Dr. Beers at city health.

As invoices arrived, Office Lady speared newcomers onto a rapidly expanding stack. Then on Fridays she inverted the stack, paying oldest-to-newest until funds were depleted. The fact she abandoned her call station to inform Racer the clipboard wouldn’t hold more invoices meant the special projects account was broke.

When Racer heard Mel’s footsteps Saturday afternoon he reasoned there would be a request. “Would you show this list of 1930-era Kansas City names to your bicycle shop friend? I’m interested in what George Kern makes of these people’s origins”.

Preoccupied with an off-scale plotter trace, Racer secured the note in a jersey pocket. “Sure Prof, I’ll be happy to ask George.”

With the Jarrell-Ash under better control, Racer ventured past lab matters. “Prof, you could shorten your walk to work by investing in a three-speed bike, one that would get you here in half the time.”

Mel redirected. Three miles is three miles, road work done right. We were told the more we sweated in peace, the less we would bleed in war, totally untrue. Anyway, thanks for asking your friend about my list.

The Jarrell-Ash’s solenoid clicks served as Racer’s only diversion following Mel’s departure. Daylight had also faded by the time he secured the alcove, pedaling toward K-L-W. He had phoned George the previous day to request a one-day Shabbat postponement.

Two Shabbat candles awaited a book match strike. Rows of cold case meats absent further cheese selections were diagonally cut, filling a crisp hoagie bun. George motioned Racer toward the lavatory, welcoming him to an hour in which they would critique their respective weeks.

Racer didn’t contribute to the usual Mitzvah-all-things-bicycle dialogue, choosing instead to comment on his Jarrell-Ash work.

“We can’t keep up, George. Poison prevention may be important but our laboratory isn’t funded to support city-wide screening. No other hospital shares our commitment, why would they, we’re broke.

George interrupted. “It sounds to me like you should predict which addresses or neighborhoods merit follow-up rather than indiscriminate testing.”

Racer retrieved a tiny graphite analysis tube from a jersey pocket. He watched as George inspected the cylinder, rolling it between his thumb and finger. “Nice stuff, maybe somebody could use it to make bike frames. This one appears to have been furnace fired, though.”

“Yes, to nearly 2000 degrees F. We fire these pricy fifty dollar little cylinders through about seventy-five cycles before each one requires replacement.”

While Racer spoke, George gnawed the brittle bun’s end, dry crumbs matched the velocity of animated speech. “So even a day’s output necessitates another fifty dollar replacement tube?”

Racer nodded, adding. “Another reason why we’re broke.”

Venturing past funding, Racer relayed Mel’s inquiry regarding the list of names. “Our botany professor knows of your Belgian heritage and has listed some early Kansas City names and addresses.”

Racer expanded. “We’ve also completed a lead-in-teeth project for a dentist, someone who claims deposited dental lead predicts learning and behavioral problems.”

Racer related a third, sadder entry, one involving lead poisoning, outlining the worrisome status of a baby girl named Renata.

Kern questioned. “Has your botanist friend matched high lead levels against particular addresses or neighborhoods? “

Racer explained. “Our highest readings, the red-pin sites and DeShario dental outliers match residential repeat offenders, referring to successively rented although un-remediated homes or apartments.”

“Prof Mel and a geography colleague have correlated red-pin entries against what Mel says are piglet roof designs. George, do you know what he is talking about?”

Signaling his turn-at-the-front, George grabbed the hoagie wrapper, shortly producing a tiny paper pyramid.

Here came Kern. “You say your botanist friend used directories to match early residents against 1930-era addresses?”

Racer. “Yes, he said their names sounded Belgian or maybe even Dutch, and would like to know more regarding their origins.”

Kern fiddled his model. “Again, what is the source of these names?

Racer took a turn. “From 1930-era city directories and even older fire maps.”

George delivered a strong Flemish read-aloud.

ERTENS, VERBEKE, BOSMANS, VERLINDEN, VERSCHUEREN, WUYTS, BOWERS, KERN, BOGAERTS, NOËL, PEETERS, JANSSEN, MAES, JACOBS.

While bicycle racing’s turns-at-the-front begin in an orderly manner, as the finish line approaches turns-at-the-front acquire a chaotic, frantic nature. Racer, what do you make of this list?”

“Maybe Dutch or Belgian heritage. I’ve verified none of those people presently reside at these current red-pinned addresses. George how could fifty year-old addresses inform 1980-era lead contamination?”

Here came Kern. “The Speedway’s surface was alternatively bumpy and other times oil-stained, the same true for its surface boards. The stains arose from multiple sources, engine crankcase leaks, exhaust gas and even spilled fuel. My predecessors lacked sufficient long-run lumber to satisfy Queen Anne or even hall-and-parlor designs, settling instead for simpler pyramidal or hiplet-roofed homes that didn’t require long-run lumber.”

Racer retrieved second red-pinned list and added a turn-at-thefront. But how could your pyramidal roof theory explain isolated red-pincontaminated homes in the middle of green-pin neighborhoods?

George examined Racer’s second list, finding names more characteristic of people of Mexican- or African-American ancestry, possibly even the recently arrived Vietnamese.

GARCIA, RODRIQUEZ, MARTINEZ, WILLIAMS, JOHNSON, SMITH, VU

Dancing-on-pedals, here came George Kern the analysist. “The 1930s directories show where the houses were first erected, not where they stand now. Following cloverleaf displacements and urban renewal for what matter, Speedway-derived homes were relocated to more modern neighborhoods. Your second list likely includes red-pin Speedway board homes moved to green-pin neighborhoods.”

While multiple experts had sought to explain the contamination, a partial hypothesis had awaited a store owner’s recollections of times long past. Whether George’s reasoning depended upon Shabbat candles or Hoagie buns is unknown.

Kern planned. “Let’s carve a sliver from the Million Dollar Speedway sign frame. I would to be present when you determine its lead content using your Jarrell-Ash machine. Grab your bike, Racer.”

Coasting was hardly part of a protocol for two cyclists traveling up Chestnut traffic way. While Sgt. Vince disapproved of the pair’s choice of dim leg lights, he quietly folded in behind, repurposing his car as a protective shield against overtaking traffic.

Well into the grade, Vince noted the leading rider was breathing hard, his mouth agape and jaw flung open. By comparison, the following cyclist, one quite a bit older, appeared relaxed, arms set low and elbows tucked tight.

CHAPTER 25 RAND ROUNDS

February 10th 1981

While Kern’s pyramidal roof theory accounted for some residential lead patterns, other times it failed. In particular it didn’t apply well to their index case, that of baby girl Renata.

Brooklyn sought counsel from multiple sources across 1980’s final weeks, sometimes reaching to the east coast but other times more locally. On a snowy February day he phoned his former ridegiver, hoping the Olympic Speedway crew chief would shed new light on his industrially-based Red-tassel assertions.

Instead the crew chief indicated that race car fuel was typically mixed off-site, minimizing Brooklyn’s spillage hypothesis. The professor then rambled to another favorite topic of his, that of takehome poisons, referring to chemicals left where they don’t belong.

Amused by ramblings of a largely unremembered caller, the crew chief add that he worked as a foundry foreman, querying Brooklyn regarding his green sand knowledge.

Brooklyn absorbed the foundryman’s words. “Green sand is a sticky mixture surrounding molten metals, lead included. Sadly, green sand has infrequently found its way into home gardens and even children’s sand boxes.” Brooklyn stared down a figurative rabbit hole, hastily thanking his ride-giver before hanging up to seek Mel’s assistance relative to a road trip.

Given Mel had ridden a recently-purchased three-speed bike to work that day, they drove the Citroen to a Guinotte avenue address. As Brooklyn activated its parking brake–leveler

apparatus, Mel reviewed his notes, those applicable to a battered mobile home structure, enlarged using conventional-framing.

Brooklyn stared at homemade sandbox adjacent to a swing set, noting the sandbox’ contents were anything but beach-like. Both men knelt, scooping its lumpy sand into two date-labeled baggies. The Snoops later editorialized their stooped postures connoted reverence, perhaps the sort that applies to sick children.

Sensing anxiety, Racer explained that their lead-in-sand specimens would have to be analyzed last that day, lest carryover lead contaminate blood specimens. As they commented on Renata’s sandbox, Racer reviewed some of his misgivings, ones surrounding Coke bottle – milk jug herbicides and the Smith’s status. How much had Andy benefitted from five hundred community service hours.

The Guinotte sand specimens took their turn after nine p.m. Both registered yielded sufficiently high readings that serial dilutions were required. Short of ten by only a minute, Racer powered down the Jarrell-Ash before phoning Brooklyn to inform him that the Guinotte sand box samples didn’t just contain lead, their content approximated that of Missouri lead ore.

Other desperate parents, ones seeking similarly inexpensive play options, would tragically repeat the odd green sand scenario. Just as Kansas City had shared dreadful heat wave consequences with St. Louis, children in both cities suffered incalculable intellectual losses from combinations of heavy metals and improperly-applied pesticides.

From humble origins, the Brainiac team expanded, adding environmentalists and code inspectors. Rather remarkably, Racer resumed his cycling avocation, joined by fellow boarder and K-L-W employee, Morris Johnson, Jr. While his world extended past the Jarrell-Ash alcove it never reached the Champs-Elyees. Racer’s senseof-humor possibly pinnacled the day he informed credit union Phyllis that he needed two hundred dollars to restock a bicyclebased safety deposit box. She wondered why Racer didn’t hide his get-out-of-jail money in his boots like the conductors did.

Brooklyn briefly served as spokesman for a radio-based lead prevention campaign. Anyone listening to WHB prior to six a.m. would have noted a pronounced Queens, New York accent. 165

The Call contacted Consuelo as she prepared dinner one evening, Rex sought her opinion regarding take home poisons. Finding his inquiry distant from mule-based air pollution, Consuelo deferred. “Have a good evening, Rex.”

News outlets puzzled how a bicycle store owner had resolved a public health crisis. The Call published an archived Million Dollar Speedway photo, the accompanying story described Indianapolis cycling champion, Major Taylor’s successes. Rex photographed Morris in a Finest cap. “F-U-J-I is my choice, the Finest delivers.” Readers wondered whether Morris were self-referencing or describing his bicycle.

Dr. Les Miles studied news accounts, noting Dr. Brian Wozniak’s name never appeared. He was pleased to find another physician foregoing personal recognition but made a mental note to insist Woz join his Monday jazz jam table. Dr. Beers was similarly pleased to have kept the huckster chelationists at bay.

With spring 1981’s arrival, Mel returned to fern-bed sojourns, meeting ephemeral versions of departed Marines and his friend Aimée near Cliff drive.

Academic meetings require titles. Office Lady may have been pre-occupied with dinner plans as she typed

ROUND ROUND, 3 - 4 PM FRIDAY

Yes, she abandoned her multi-line phone to retrieve entrées – ‘erentries, shortly producing corrected copy.

GRAND ROUNDS, 3 - 4 PM FRIDAY

Brooklyn donned a Big River lab coat before escorting two grand rounds speakers, ones from St. Louis-based Major League Chemicals. Students had pored over corporate reports to verify the Major League speakers’ salaries exceeded pay totals for their eightperson faculty.

A seminar devoted to defoliant issues aroused mixed emotions in Racer. As a Missouri-Pacific employee he and Andy had dispensed Major League herbicides in tank-car volumes, soil sterilants, too. 166

Listening through Ralph Horncastle and Andy Sauerbier’s introductions, Racer questioned the effectiveness of the expensive chemicals they applied. While Major League estimated effectiveness via statistical protocols, its scientists grew plants in controlled plots, but perhaps more importantly, didn’t apply herbicides during hailstorms or floods, not true for the railroad, though.

Listeners struggled to hear Horncastle words over a distracting fan whir originating with the slide projector. Horncastle thanked them for coming and moved to cheery news that Major League would soon market tandem herbicides, ones capable of immediate wilt-and-brown actions paired by pre-emergent spray-and-wait characteristics. The proposed tandem chemical names could have titled action movies

FINALE, COUP D’ GRAS, VERDICT, FINAL OUTCOME.

The Major League speakers asserted that herbicidal growth retardancy was specific to plants and inapplicable to humans, a drill-down that caused both Woz and Racer to squirm in their uncomfortable student desks. Racer suppressed an urge to ask Horncastle about working or living with Sauerbier on a trainset loaded with thirty-thousand gallon quantities of the new tandem chemicals.

Woz’ angst mostly arose from an unhappy outcome surrounding forty-three-year-old woman who had been found unresponsive after drinking two-ounces of a chlorophenoxy herbicide. Suicide or no, she had expired on hospital day forty-two. Dr. Wozniak questioned Sauerbier regarding emergency room resources applicable to herbicide poisonings, asking if material safety data sheets would be helpful Beyond agreeing on the sheets’ importance, Sauerbier didn’t have much to add.

Satisfied with their speaker- salary review, students awaited Prof Mel’s inevitable, and likely unanswerable, questions. But rather than addressing the speakers’ plant-only toxicity assertions, he attacked along an unprotected flank, claiming that the chemicals’ effects won’t persist

Mel carried his rationale in a flat case, one housing two dried horsetail weeds, the second half-again as large as its travel partner 167

Holding them side-by-side, Mel requested a show-of-hands regarding which had been harvested post-herbicide. Raising the larger plant, only the class clown posited it as herbicide-treated. The smaller horsetail plant prompted a nearly unanimous response. Mel tossed a Milky Way to the student comedian for his unlikely, although technically correct response. as clock’s hands nearing four, no one moved. Mel shortly posited that contemporary agro-chemical use resembled another ill-advised practice, that of unnecessarily prescribing antibiotics.

Frustrated with perspectives misaligned with corporate-fueled enthusiasm, Sauerbier searched a valise for a reprint to refute Mel’s assertions. Following two awkward minutes of searching, Horncastle took over, noisily loading their slide carousels in preparation of their departure. Grand Rounds’ conclusion was heralded by the sound of two spring-loaded metal staples fed into matching hasps. Anxious to loosen his Tabasco-stained tie and retire home for a nap, Brooklyn limited further questions.

LET’S HAVE A BIG HAND FOR MAJOR LEAGUE.

CHAPTER 26 AGENT ORANGE TRAIN REDUX

SPRING 1981 UNTIL JUNE 25TH

n a Friday in late March, Mel retired to a fern bed for a session with Aimée and me. As if Aimée weren’t aware, he recounted the Brainiac’s attempts in favor of the city’s children, giving George Kern credit for the pyramidal roof explanation, adding Kern owned a Prospect Avenue bicycle shop.

With his use of Prospect, Aimée initiated a discourse regarding the importance of names, explaining how she and Joseph had named their manor land as Preservation. While she couldn’t recall who named Prospect avenue she hoped they were similarly insightful, gezellig as she put it.

I hadn’t seen the departed Marines, neither Sgt. Davis nor Lance Corporal Higgins and their Corpsman in weeks. Before departing, Aimée made sure Mel heard what she said. “Mel, I’ll be seeing you soon. I love you, Marine.”

And no, I wasn’t left out. “You, too, Pup!”

The VFW sign-in sheets don’t reveal if Mel commemorated the 37th anniversary of the 6th Marines Okinawa landings there. But neither he, Sgt. Davis, Lance Corporal Higgins nor their Corpsman neglected that anniversary.

As I explained in the wake of the dognapping, humans don’t always hear my voice but the smarter ones know that it exists. Due to events others will now describe, my Cliff-era was ending.

HOUND’S VOICE LARGELY DISAPPEARS

When Mel went missing, Melanie called the police, crying through the worst of her worries. When the missing persons call occurred, Sgt. Vince was just signing out, anticipating a Saturday day-off. While concerned with Mel’s cliff wandering, he was hardly worried about gangster activity there. Instead, he feared another veteran-inflicted gunshot. Before leaving he called to let his wife 170

know he would be a bit late returning home. Searching the fern beds just east of Goose Neck drive, Vince discovered Mel’s remains. Damp newspaper pages had been laid out as if Mel anticipated his death. Checking for a pulse but finding none, Vince noted the cyanotic hue of a natural death, likely a cardiac event but thankfully, not suicide.

While radioing, Vince knelt beside Mel’s body, firing positions of rescuer and fallen, those of two American GI’s. A city official, its coroner, but that Saturday a Cliff drive hiker, approached.

Confirming the absence of a pulse, the coroner – hiker detected movement about fifty yards away along a tree line, questioning Vince whether the shepherd he spotted there might be the dead man’s dog.

Startled, Vince stared at Hound who responded in kind. They’ve likely spent time together but I’m almost certain that dog was the one taken at Harold’s Drive-Inn.”

Given the unusual features of coroner-cop collaboration, Vince’s captain approved removal of Mel’s remains. As the ambulance departed, Vince dog-whistled the shepherd. Rather surprisingly Hound complied, launching into the back seat of Vince’s car.

As they departed, Hound peered out the car’s rear window, appearing to search for an unseen person. Vince was surprised Hound didn’t smell bad after living on his own but what about the lilac aroma?

Following a stop to research a Grandview address, Vince drove Hound to Gee&Leo’s home. Knocking twice, his words were extinguished ahead of his dog question. The ladies first hugged Hound and then hugged him. Following Hound’s reunion with his kennelmates, Max and Blaze, Vince informed them he needed to leave.

As Gee&Leo walked him out Hound took the point, secured by a special lead. Gee explained how they had tacked a lost posters on a St. Paul Seminary light pole. Ten days later they had received an interesting, although disappointing, call from a grounds keeper there who had discovered a clip-less lead abandoned beside a double-trunk box elder. They had paid a cobbler to install a new clip, hoping Hound would make it back home. 171

The three remaining Brainiacs, Woz, Racer and Brooklyn, plus George Kern, sat together at Mel’s funeral. The flower sprays were fairly customary excepting a magnificent display of cliff brake ferns. The funeral director read donor names aloud, saving the fern for last. Its tag bore a horizontal representation of Belgium’s black, gold and red flag, calligraphy-quality lettering announcing long-departed pioneers.

JOSEPH & AIMÉE BRICHAUT GUINOTTE, TROOST POINT– L’EDIFICE, TOWN OF KANZA.

Who knows when a guardian angel accepts an assignment or relinquishes one. Perhaps Aimée found peace when the Brainiacs resolved the riddle. Hound lay beside Mel’s flag-draped casket, chin-on-paws, recalling occasions he had attempted to comfort Mel, hoping Mel would mimic his chin-on-paws posture. He was silent until the flag-folding when Hound howled Mel’s requiem.

OHHK – IN - AAAH - WAAH.

As the funeral caravan proceeded down Belmont, parents and their children paused, acknowledging Lead Man’s Town&Country as it brought-up-the-drag. Once a Marine, always a Marine.

(June 25th 1981). Brooklyn and Woz invited Racer to a working breakfast, one scheduled for Thursday at the Muehlebach hotel. Brooklyn had hinted to Racer they needed to discuss lab funding issues causing Racer to linger whole chain-locking his bike to the hotel’s M-G-C gas meter.

Inside its cavernous lobby Racer was astonished to see Kern pushing Margo in the K-L-W loaner wheelchair. Inquiring where they were going, Kern winked. “Cookie and I are having breakfast with you.”

Finding a seat, Racer listened as Margo tapped out her take on Watermelon Man using Muehlebach-furnished flatware and admired her engagement ring. Amidst breakfast small talk, Racer savored fresh-squeezed orange juice, possibly anticipating a postbreakfast trifecta, one in which he would secrete a Danish pastry in each of three jersey pockets.

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As other invitees arrived, Racer was surprised that neither Brooklyn nor Dr. Wozniak convened the meeting. Kern tapped a water glass, signaling their start.

George thanked Racer for his hard work at K-L-W, but more so for his efforts on behalf of the city’s children. Consuelo thanked the Brainiacs, noting not only their professionalism but their honesty.

With those preliminary heats completed, Kern explained the real reason for the meeting, sharing how Racer had petitioned him regarding coaching or mentorship. While finding the request flattering, he expressed his reservations about committing his friend to a life spent behind ‘bars, meaning those of a bicycle.

George curiously added that the meeting date, June 25th , corresponded to the 57th anniversary of his signature victory. Inspecting George’s layered shirts, Racer was confident the inner one concealed Robert’s letter. Racer lowered his eyes as he listened to his friend credit Robert X. Anthony for K-L-W’s successes, imagining a younger George summoned to a law office, possibly to pay for a funeral, only to discover he had inherited a store, one that pivoted between all-things-bicycle and mitzvah generosity.

Moving past K-L-W’s origin George described a reimbursed plan he had negotiated with the medical school’s registrar that would enroll Racer in a novel medical - public health curriculum. Margo interrupted, describing a call she had placed to Dean E. Gray Dimond on Racer’s behalf, sharing how Dimond joked that Racer would likely be the only velo-chemist at the gross anatomy table.

Consuelo adjourned the meeting. We’ll get out of your way now Racer so you can get to your anatomy class. By the way, you’re twentyminutes late, it began at nine.

While others lingered to congratulate the newly engaged KernCookie pair Racer excused himself, but not before promising Kern he would see him that Friday evening.

As dusk approached on June 25th 1981 Racer strapped an amber front/red rear leg light, pedaling north on Belmont. Past the Northeast athletic fields, his world felt warm, inviting really, as he listened to a strengthening chorus of male cicadas. He made a right turn onto a private road, crossing four sets of railroad tracks, carefully meet each set on a perpendicular. Combinations of 173

broken road surfaces, rough grade crossings and poor illumination impeded further riding, forcing a walk. Near the final set of tracks, he witnessed a young brakeman directing a switch engine’s movement, hoping that young man had benefitted from a safety advocate such as Vito.

But Racer hadn’t come there to witness yard switching, he came to say goodbye. Even though its spray booms were chain-locked back, Weeds, trees & turf had found a home there, too.

If good news hadn’t arrived for Racer in straw hats, it certainly had in the persons of George Kern, Land Lady, Brooklyn and more recently, Morris. Decades past Robert X. Anthony’s orphanage days another infant had been surrendered at 23rd and Walrond. His legal name was Damian X. Race but a Catholic sister at the orphanage had favored him with a nickname, made him their Racer.

EVERY DAY ON THE RAILROAD WAS THE SAME. THEN AGAIN, THEY WERE DIFFERENT.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Thomas Pierce was born and raised in southeast Kansas. A researcher and a physician, he has practiced public health on four continents. This is his fourth book, the first two were technical entries applicable to industrial hygiene and toxicology and published by the National Safety Council and the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists, respectively. His third book, Hospital Safari (Leather Publishing - 2005) described sub-Saharan medical care. He is the 2012 recipient of the Rachel Carson environmental leadership award (Environmental Management Committee, AIHA, Falls Church, Virginia) and has raced bicycles at most competitive levels.