A Road Trip Into America's Hidden Heart - Traveling the Back Roads, Backwoods and Back Yards. John Drake Robinson
away from the table and paid cash, the customary currency of the small town café, although I hear Harmer’s recently began accepting credit cards.
Taking one last look around, I caught a glimpse of the kitchen through the slit where the cooks pass food to the servers. A rush of gratitude compelled me to stride over and shout a thank-you through the hole in the wall. Cooks don’t hear “thank you” enough. Just ask ’em. On my way out, I fished for a complimentary toothpick from the little metal dispenser on the counter. After lunch, a toothpick becomes more than a toothpick. It’s a memory chip, an afternoon reminder of a satisfying meal.
As the Kansas City skyline jumped above the horizon, I could see the old Art Deco skyscrapers standing defiantly against their sleeker, newer sisters. Behind them is the unique silhouette of a penthouse restaurant shaped like a flying saucer atop the old Hyatt Regency Hotel. Even though the hotel has changed names, the flying saucer still sits atop the building, a constant reminder to me that this was the grisly scene of a skywalk collapse in the hotel’s lobby back in 1981.
The collapse killed 114 people who had gathered for happy hour at a Friday tea dance to celebrate the birth of bebop in Kansas City. The huge crowd was jumpin’ to the music, and the highest skywalk couldn’t bear the weight. It gave way, pancaking dancers on two skywalks beneath, all crashing to the crowded dance floor below. I was driving through Kansas City on that day, and I remember seeing scores of ambulances and rescue engines screaming down I-70. I turned my radio to a news station and got sketchy details of the story. I could see the top of the hotel 20 blocks away. Its flying saucer looked normal. No smoke. No fire. But the lobby was a deadly gumbo of steel and concrete and flesh and blood.
Today I thought about a different Hyatt death story.
I heard about it from the lips of a good friend. Among the things Bob Smith does well, storytelling is at the top of the list. He swears this story is true. Bob’s not dead. But for the purposes of this story, he became a dead guy.
Bob got mad at Kansas City’s old Hyatt Regency Hotel. Earlier he had called the hotel and booked a room for the night. As the day progressed, he realized that his work was finished early, and he could drive home. So he called his assistant to have her cancel the room. But the hotel refused. The hotel’s policy said that rooms must be canceled before 3 p.m. of the day of occupancy. Bob’s assistant called at 3:05. So the room was his.
Fine. He went to the hotel lobby and calmly approached the desk clerk, a young man probably in his first job.
“Can you give me Bob Smith’s room number, please?” Bob asked.
“Are you Bob Smith?”
“No,” Bob lied.
“I’m sorry, sir, but the hotel can’t give out information like that. I’ll ring his room for you....”
“Well, that won’t work,” Bob said. “You see, Mr. Smith died last night, and I’m from the family. We’ve decided that since he had this room, and we couldn’t cancel it, we’d just go ahead and have the visitation here instead of at the funeral home. You know, we’ll save expenses. Oh, and the casket will be here in a few minutes. Can we get a couple of bellhops to help us get the casket on the elevator? And that marquee over there... we’ll use that to announce the floor where Bob’s body will be. Mourners will start arriving about 4:30.”
The blood drained from the desk clerk’s face. “Please, sir, tell me you’re joking.”
“I am,” Bob said. “And please tell your management what I think of their cancellation policy.”
Just 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