a few blocks from there, in what some people call a rougher part of town, the sidewalks of 12th Street and Vine are worn thin by the heels of whores who strolled where Lieber and Stoller immortalized the song “Goin’ to Kansas City.” Down the street I stopped to take part in a ritual that’s been happening every Saturday night since at least the Roaring ’20s. Well, the ritual began only after Saturday night gave way to Sunday morning, after nightclubs—the Spinning Wheel and Dante’s Inferno, the Hi Hat and the Hey Hey—kicked the last patrons out the door. The musicians regrouped, climbing the creaking stairs to the second floor of a nondescript brick building on the fringe of 18th and Vine Streets, the epicenter of bebop. This building is its schoolhouse, where on early Sunday morning young wide-eyed cats would get a lesson, standing next to Count Basie and Charlie Parker and Big Joe Turner and Mary Lou Williams and Walter Page, who invented the walking bass.
It’s the Musicians Mutual Federation, a union for black musicians, founded back in the days when African Americans were not admitted to white restaurants or white hotels or white country clubs or white Army barracks or white labor unions. Every Saturday night after the bars closed, every major jazz talent who played KC stopped at this address for the regular Saturday night jam. On this late Saturday night, I thought I’d take a turn at the piano. The McFarland brothers showed up with their trumpet and sax and tap shoes and talent, and joined some equally impressive young phenoms. I sat on my hands until 4 a.m., mesmerized, and never got up my courage to play.
I returned to my favorite home away from home, the stately old Raphael Hotel. Almost forgotten, it sits across a creek from the Plaza—the world’s first shopping mall—and has sheltered shoppers in its cozy confines for the better part of a century. It got a makeover recently, and while the guest rooms got new upholstery and pillows and flat-screen TVs, they also kept the bathrooms with the postage stamp-sized white tile, and the boxy little elevator with the retractable scissor-gate door that yearns for its old friend, the elevator operator.
Trumanity, Saddles and Lasting Impressions
It’s safe now.
Any time of day, folks drive between Kansas City and Nevada, Missouri, with little fear of being stopped to demonstrate their allegiance to one warlord or another. Shoot, there’s hardly anybody hiding in the bushes anymore. And telephone poles have replaced bullets as the primary cause of death along these back roads.
Things have calmed down considerably since the 1850s and ’60s, when people in Kansas and Missouri killed each other and kept score with scalps. Everybody hated everybody else. Nobody trusted anybody. And leaving Kansas City for a trip in any direction would agitate a succession of local ruffians, the first of which would likely convince you to turn back, if they didn’t kill you on the spot. Tough crowd. After the Civil War, Missourians began their long journey toward civility. Commerce and people slowly crept back into the towns along the Kansas border. Remnants of families returned to their farms to bury burned bodies and rebuild their charred homesteads.
Today, my trip would be easy. Oh, Missourians still instinctively clutch for weapons at the mention of Kansas, but the modern weapons are footballs and basketballs, mostly. I must admit, when I left the comfort of the Raphael Hotel, that sweet old relic overlooking the Kansas City Plaza, I had no particular route in mind. I just wanted to explore some back roads on my way to the tin ceiling factory in Nevada, three hours south. And I had the luxury of time. The path of least resistance is Highway 71. A recent peacetime project turned this turbulent trail into a four-lane fast track, slicing down through the stack of counties bordering Jayhawk Nation. Leaving KC, my tires rejoiced on the 71 speedway. Nowadays along that route, the telephone poles go by fast.
I can’t blame folks for being in a hurry. It happened to me once, too. So I continually remind myself to slow down and take my cue from gawkers and rubberneckers and Sunday drivers, who avoid such velocity. It traumatizes the neck muscles when your motor outpaces your curiosity. And if you want to absorb the history of this war-torn region, abandon the four lane highway.
So I took the back roads.
Early morning—well, late morning—first stop was a farm in Grandview. There, I stood in the nation’s most talked-about kitchen, even though nobody eats there any more. Almost a century ago, a young farmer stood in the narrow covered breezeway between the hot stove and the farmhouse and uttered the second most famous phrase in the study of human conflict: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” Well, that’s what my tour guide said. Turns out, when Harry Truman ran the farm, the breezeway and the oven weren’t at that spot in the back of the farmhouse. But even though the current cooking area was added after Harry had left the farm, the old cookstove stands as a reminder to visitors that cooking and politics generate a fair amount of combustion. Never mind that Harry probably didn’t originate that quip; he made it famous.
On this farm, Harry used some of the cooking skills his mother taught him to feed farmhands who worked the 600 acres that bordered the railroad tracks, tracks that snaked from nearby Grandview all the way to Kansas City, 17 miles away. This was Harry’s second tour of duty on the farm. First time around as a young child, his mother taught him to be curious about the world around him.
This time around, his mother credits the farm as the place “where he got all his common sense.” He became Grandview’s postmaster, he established Grandview’s Masonic Lodge, and he held Saturday evening jam sessions on the front porch.
Locals didn’t think he’d survive as a farmer. And his culinary skills never transformed his slight frame into anything near a lumberjack’s build, but that didn’t stop him from hard labor. He couldn’t see very well, either, but that didn’t stop him from voracious reading. There’s a pattern here.
During his farming years Harry overcame his deep shyness to pursue a young lady from Independence, so he’d often hop the Frisco and ride the rails to Kansas City’s Union Station, where he’d switch to the Independence train.
Bess Wallace liked Harry, but her folks didn’t think much of the relationship. After all, she was a Wallace, born to wealth and class. And he was a farmer. That didn’t deter Harry. There’s a pattern here.
***
Down the road, Belton shows off its collection of old railroad cars, right downtown. And an excursion train offers a short round trip for nostalgia buffs. I bought a ticket to ride the train, just like Harry Truman did, except his fare was a dime to ride the Frisco High Line all the way to Kansas City. My excursion was two miles each way, and cost about $2.25 per mile. What would Harry think? I suspect he’d bring the railroad to its knees. Still, it’s nice to see somebody maintain a part of this old short line, and offer children a taste of transportation their great grandparents knew as a way of life.
I don’t know whether Dale Carnegey ever rode the short line, but I bet he did. Riding a train is a great way to win friends and influence people. Another way to win friends and influence people is to change the spelling of your name to the predominant Carnegie, the one for which the concert hall is named, thanks to the millions of influential greenbacks behind Andrew Carnegie.
Dale called Belton his hometown, even though he was born up the road in Maryville. Early in his life, his parents moved the family to a farmhouse outside Belton, and it still stands. Dale is buried in the Belton Cemetery, where everybody is equally friendly and influential, except for the size of their monuments. His grave and the neighboring plots of his parents and daughter are simple markers atop door-sized slabs of granite. The granite slabs may be insurance against grave robbers. Early in my travels I began to notice a pattern of heavy cover over the graves of many of Missouri’s rich and infamous.
She may not have been rich, but the lady buried in a nearby grave sure was infamous. This is the final resting
