Where Have All the Famous People Gone?

For a complex series of reasons, Kansas City no longer produces famous people the way it once did, and famous people no longer command the universal attention they once did. There is nothing local citizens can do about the latter part of the equation and little they can do about the former, but that little may be worth doing.

Case in point: A year or two ago, upon reading a biography of Casey Stengel, the wildly eccentric manager of the New York Yankees in their heyday, I learned that he grew up in the 4100 block of Harrison and attended Central High. In fact, his Kansas City provenance earned Charlie Stengel the nickname “Casey.”

My daughter, I realized, lived in the house next door to where Stengel grew up. On a subsequent visit, I saw her neighbor standing outside.
Excited to share my discovery, I said, “Hey, did you know you were living in the house Casey Stengel grew up in?” The man, thirtyish, looked at me with supreme indifference and said, “Oh, yeah. Who’s Casey Stengel?”
His answer spoke to several realities of our age. Baseball, like many cultural phenomena, has lost its universal grip on the culture. Many younger people have little interest in the past, and some have almost no interest even in their immediate surroundings. As a result, local history museums everywhere struggle.

This is a shame. Kansas City has a richer history than almost any city of as recent vintage as ours. That vintage, however, can be an issue. Some years back, for instance, the local PBS station, KCPT, approached me about making a fund-raising documentary highlighting the city’s famous buildings. Boston, I was told, had done a video along these lines with great effect.

As I cautioned the execs, Boston had a two-century head start on us. Our oldest building, now Kelly’s bar, dates back only to 1850. Paul Revere never stopped there for a beer. What we did have were famous people. I suggested we focus on the people and put them in relevant buildings. To highlight their reality, I wanted to find the buildings.

In his bestseller, Creators, British historian Paul Johnson tells the stories of the world’s most creative people, from Chaucer to the present. Of the four Americans highlighted, three grew up in Missouri (Mark Twain in Hannibal and T.S. Eliot in St. Louis), with Walt Disney coming out of Kansas City.

The Thank You Walt Disney foundation has done an excellent job in keeping the memory of one of those three creators alive. Born in 1901, Disney spent his formative years at 3028 Bellefontaine, a small house that still stands.

In 1922, after a stint at the Kansas City Art Institute, Disney incorporated Laugh-O-gram Films and set up shop in the newly completed McConahay Building at the corner of 31st and Forest. Thank You Walt Disney, Inc., is now restoring the building to serve as a museum and education center.

Some famous Kansas Citians were not as easy to locate as Disney, jazz great Charlie Parker high among them. After considerable research, I tracked his boyhood home to the corner of Ninth and Freeman in Kansas City, Kan.

What my cameraman Dave and I found at the site was a vacant lot. Next to the lot was a dilapidated house on whose front steps sat several gentlemen drinking 40-ouncers on a Tuesday morning. Warily, I explained to these fellows what two white guys in a van with a TV camera were doing in their neighborhood.

“The Bird? No sh**? The Bird right here?” Yup, the Bird. Unlike the Casey Stengel homeowner, these fellows were generally excited to know their proximity to greatness.

While in KCK, Dave and I went in search of the original J.C. Nichols development. Fortunately, we found “the only guy in the world” who knew where the site was. This fellow was a true original, a hippie mailman whose braided hair hung to his waist. Following him was a parade of at least a dozen mutts of all sizes and shapes.

The street in question had degraded to an alley, and on it sat one of the few remaining homes of this low-end subdivision built to accommodate the West Bottoms residents rendered homeless by the devastating 1903 flood. To assure them their new homes would be high and dry, Nichols, always a savvy marketer, called this development “California Heights.”

Jean Harlow’s girlhood home was not hard to find in South Hyde Park, nor was the site of her education, Miss Barstow’s Finishing School for Girls, then in Westport. Harlow’s chief rival on the MGM lot in the 1930s grew up on the other side of Kansas City’s tracks, the wrong side. Joan Crawford bounced around northeast Kansas City but eventually found legitimate work at Emery, Bird, Thayer & Co., a landmark Downtown department store … razed in 1971.

In the early years of the 20th century, Kansas City seemed to breed movie stars. Ginger Rogers was born at 100 W. Moore Street in Independence, a house that still stands. Spencer Tracy spent his freshman year at Rockhurst High School. William Powell of “Thin Man” fame graduated from Central High and Wallace Beery attended the Chase School at 16th and Paseo.

These people were all household names in their day and are still remembered. Yes, I know; Paul Rudd graduated from Shawnee Mission West, as did Jason Sudeikis. For all their talents, however, I do not imagine there will be film festivals in their honor 50 years hence.

In our increasingly fractionalized culture, we would do well to protect what we can, and a good place to start would be to restore the Nichols name to the world he created. One final, more cheery note: When he sold his home on Harrison last month, the owner listed its Casey Stengel history as a selling point. There may be hope for the culture after all.