Personal stories about the magic of aging and the transformative power of time
We know the heart. We’ve mapped it. Repaired and rehabbed it. We’ve strengthened, and saved it. We know the people to whom those hearts belong and celebrate the triumphs of their recovery. We know your heart, and we know there is an unstoppable human spirit at the center of it.
For 125 years, the American Royal has built upon its rich history as a Kansas City institution and is now a trusted resource, championing food and agriculture worldwide.
The American Royal’s mission is to be the nation’s leader for food and agriculture education, events, and engagement. The Royal provides opportunities for nearly half a million youth and adults annually from around the world to engage in high-quality events and experiences. Support from partners, members, and volunteers help the American Royal achieve its vision of a world where food and agriculture are celebrated, and all generations are committed to its future.
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We love Kansas City like family. We know what makes it great, we know how it struggles, and we know its secrets. Through great storytelling, photography and design, we help our readers celebrate our city’s triumphs, tend to its faults and revel in the things that make it unique.
PUBLISHER
Dave Claflin
EDITOR
David Hodes
MANAGING EDITOR
Hyman B. James
ART DIRECTOR
Kevin Goodbar
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Alex Healey
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Dominique Parsow
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Kelsie Schrader
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McKenna Armstrong, Andrew Esser, Mitch Forbes, David Hodes, Hyman B. James, Marissa Johnson and Tyler Shane
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Julie Babcock, Sean McCabe, Jason Hanna, Jeremey Theron Kirby, James Lampone, Laura Morsman and Dana Smith
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LEAWOOD TOWN CENTER PLAZA
OAK PARK MALL
LIBERTY WILSHIRE PLAZA
39TH STREET – INDEPENDENCE
SUMMITWOODS CROSSING
ZONA ROSA
Four Takes on High School as Life Prep / Owners Celebrate Good Ole Dogs / The Alvin Brooks Biopic / The Chris Fritz Show
The ‘Bigs’ Lift / The Power of Shared Sports Moments
One Restaurateur’s Serving of Fond Memories / Iconic Eateries Revisited
Nine
8 OVER 80
1 Bobby Bell June 17, 1940
2 Fred Broski August 22, 1936
3 Jim Chappell October 21, 1942
4 Cliff Cohn August 21, 1938
5 Paul Copaken August 26, 1937
6 John Dillingham January 9, 1939
7 Shirley Helzberg September 29, 1941
8 Ralph Varnum May 26, 1936
To Kansas City Magazine's 9 over 90 & 8 over 80, pillars in which KC has been built upon.
Thank you for your contributions from Putnam Landscape, Kansas City's premier landscaping company.
We all know that the heart of Kansas City reflects the heart of this great country. We Kansas Citians embrace the moral compass of our nation and the determination to thrive within a loving family structure, with our Midwest values, and work harder with a passion to make a better life for our families.
In this issue, you’ll read the stories of Kansas City pioneers who have helped create the magic and continue to inspire—the true heart of our city in every aspect of living and working here. They are the heroes of our community.
We think that you’ll be inspired with the advice they offer in these unfiltered interviews—the thoughtful insights about life, the emotional journeys they took, the power of family and friends that kept them grounded.
We admit that the Kansas Citians profiled in this issue made an impression on the magazine’s writers and photographers and others involved in these interviews. We learned a lot about ourselves as we heard them tell their true life stories. Life is about keeping active and involved, staying focused, keeping close to family and understanding the changes in yourself on the road to living a more fulfilled life with happiness along the way.
Life is about choices, we learned. Living is about embracing the magic of those choices.
My hope is that you, our readers, will be able to take away at least one thing from the 17 profiles of these fantastic people that you can follow in the future, with your own lives and your own families.
When you read the truths of life these Kansas City pioneers reveal—truths that may inform how you choose to live your life and find your own personal magic—then we know we did our job as Kansas City magazine.
Enjoy.
Hyman B. James, Managing Editor
P.S.: Take notes.
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City Council 2023-2027 January 22, 2025
We in the Kansas City City Council believe that our city has many amazing citizens who have important stories to tell about how they live their lives in our great city. This special issue of Kansas City magazine features some of the best.
There are familiar and unfamiliar names featured in this issue, telling their stories about hard work, unique visions, lucky breaks and dedication to their craft. The takeaway we get from their stories is advice about how to live a long and productive life.
But in a one-of-a-kind feature we have never seen explored before in any lifestyle magazine is the unique and often surprising stories from elder Kansas Citians. The feature examines not only what the over-80 /over-90 crowd have accomplished in their business life in Kansas City but also the inspiring life moments they witnessed along the way.
We discovered from this feature that there is so much to learn from them about facing challenges, dealing with the wins and losses life handed them, the importance of integrity and the need to just keep going. Just keep living. Never stop caring.
But more importantly, we found out that we could take comfort from their personal words of wisdom, coming to us from their many years of experience and helping us navigate this bumpy road of life. The feature is a truly eye-opening read.
Thank you, KansasCity magazine. Yes, people say that age is just a number. But your writers and reporters have brought us a new understanding of our ageless futures.
Sincerely,
Kevin O’Neill
Melisssa Patterson Hazley
Darrell Curls 1st District at Large 3rd District at Large 5th District at Large
Nathan Willett
Melissa Robinson
Ryana Parks-Shaw 1st District 3rd District Mayor Pro Tem 5th District
Lindsay French
Crispin Rea
Andrea Bough 2nd District at Large 4th District at Large 6th District at Large
Wes Rogers
Eric Bunch
Johnathan Duncan 2nd District 4th District 6th District
Here, we present insights from four selected 2024 Kansas City-area high school graduates about their time in high school, the challenges they faced during the school year and their hopes and dreams for a productive and fulfilling future
“There was a lot of figuring out who I needed and who was allowing me to be the best version of me I can be, and that comes with time.”
ife moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” – Ferris Bueller, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
I never thought I would look back one day to see that Ferris Bueller was right.
I always thought that quote was just a cheesy thing everyone liked to say about life—but moving fast and looking around once in a while is what high school was to me.
Most people say that high school is either the best four years or the worst four years of their life. I’d say it’s what you make of it. Since graduating high school, life has moved pretty fast. The realization continues to set in that my fun high school years are gone.
My school years were never a movie, but nobody’s is exactly like what you see on the big screen. I wasn’t Ferris Bueller in any way: I didn’t go out that much, I didn’t go to parties, I wasn’t super popular. I was someone that was always kind of in the back of the room.
High school didn’t truly start for me until sophomore year due to the Covid pandemic. Thus, freshman year was a weird year for me. We were all in masks, on a hybrid learning schedule. While the breaks were nice, I chose not to speak to anyone and fell into a hole of wanting to escape everything.
Covid took away a lot of that first year, and I was terrified of the upperclassmen as well. I begged for normalcy throughout quarantine and the pandemic. I wanted my life to look like High School Musical or The Breakfast Club, which, I would learn, were fiction for a reason. Eventually, I ended up joining the soccer team with my best friend, and just like that, the year was over.
Sophomore year, I decided to join the yearbook and became more outgoing through journalism. People began to know me, and if they didn’t, I still knew them, as my journalism studies allowed for highlighting the peers around me. I came out of my shell because I was no longer in a completely new environment. I got to see a lot of clubs while taking photos, so I felt like I belonged to more than just journalism—I was part of the school as a whole.
We all live our lives differently. At my age, some post on social media about it, some go through the waves of drama, and still others prefer to be alone than with people. No matter the political opinion, no matter the family life, no matter the situation, we are all human, and I think that is important to remember. I would encourage other students to give yourself and others some grace. You don’t always know their full story.
Junior year started off with a bang. I dealt with a lot, and I was struggling both mentally and physically through the first semester. While I had a lot of personal things to go through, I still participated in what I could. There was a lot of figuring out who I needed and who was allowing me to be the best version of me I can be, and that comes with time.
Senior year, I joined the early college academy, which is a program that allows high school juniors and seniors to attend college studies before graduation. I highly suggest going to college and high school at the same time if possible and earning dual credit. I was only at my high school for one class a day, which was nice. It felt different walking into a school I had known for so long.
Senior year, I tried to get to every event I could to make up for the ones I missed out on previously. I even ended up on homecoming court, which was a dream for my younger self. I continued to win awards for journalism and succeed while also attending college courses. I gained a passion for sharing the stories of others and the world of journalism, which would lead me to gaining real-world experience. Graduation approached fast, and before I knew it, everything was over.
People like to ask, “If you could go back in time and change anything, would you?” Even through the rollercoaster of life that is high school, the ups and the downs, I don’t think I would change a thing. I find that although my life has been fairly regular, I’ve enjoyed my time here at North Kansas City High School, and hopefully others would say that, too.
While in high school, everyone is just trying to navigate who they want to be versus who they are. While I knew who I wanted to be, it was always someone I wasn’t. Who I was changed depending on the people I was with, which raised a friendly reminder in me: Stay true to yourself. Life really does move fast. If you don’t take the time to stop and look around, it’ll fly right by. Freshman year, I couldn’t have even imagined graduating, and now it’s all said and done. I’ve graduated and I still have the rest of my life to look forward to, and remember—so do you.
As Generation Zers, we tend to keep our heads down in our phones a lot. Instead, we should be making the memories while we can, before it’s too late. Remember the lessons I learned, and try to keep your head up so life and opportunities don’t pass you by. High school is the perfect time to learn and make mistakes.
Find the people who will love and support you unconditionally. Try out for a team. Join the clubs. Sit with those kids at lunch. Study and work hard. Don’t let others’ opinions affect you, and, most importantly, don’t give up on yourself. In the end, you might be grateful for your choices and experience.
After graduating Liberty High School last spring, pictures were taken, lots of hands were shaken, and a new phase of life started.
A couple things I am looking forward to after high school are making new friends at college, surrounding myself with like-minded people and getting to fish Lake Taneycomo near the Ozarks.
After college, hopefully I will be fortunate enough to get married, start a family and travel the world.
But before that happens, I have a few tips about what I have learned while going to high school.
The No. 1 thing to look out for is teachers who have a strict phone policy. Some teachers might be super chill about phones in class, but watch out for the strict ones.
The second thing you want to look out for in high school is dealing with looming deadlines. Pay attention to teachers who have due dates throughout the week. Deadlines can sneak up on you quickly. One way to make sure you don’t miss deadlines is to make a calendar with all your due dates.
The final red flag is post-high school planning. Don’t take advanced placement classes if you aren’t planning on going to college. If you plan on going to college, make sure to check if your AP classes/dual credit classes transfer to the colleges you are interested in. Too many people take AP or dual credit classes just because their friend is going to take the same class.
You don’t have to choose a career path freshman year in high school. I am suggesting that you look ahead and consider some schools or professions you are interested in. This will allow you to take the courses that make the most sense for you.
But don’t worry. There are other opportunities that I took in high school to prepare myself for life after graduation—opportunities that have prepared me for the workforce and college.
The most influential opportunity I took in high school was internships. These internships allowed me to get experience with and exposure to potential career paths. Internships also opened doors for me, helped me make connections and added recommendations to my resume.
The second thing I did to prepare myself for college was taking debate class. This allowed me to formulate arguments, find credible sources and become comfortable with public speaking. If you are having trouble making new friends, I would advise you to join a club like speech and debate or join a sport you are passionate about. In these clubs or sports, you will meet new people and hopefully make some new friends.
The third thing I did to prepare myself for college was taking college-level courses that helped prepare me for the college-level workload to come. The best college-level class I took in high school was college composition, where I learned lots of valuable lessons.
First of all, realize that you will never write the best essay possible the night before it’s due. You need to give yourself time to go through the writing process. In my opinion, the most important part of the writer’s process is the planning. For example, I would write a little bit of my essay outline and then come back to the prompt the next day.
Another one of the best things I learned in high school was to read essays out loud.
Going through high school has taught me a couple things about life. The first thing that high school taught me was to agree to disagree with others. It’s better to leave the conversation with the person who you don’t agree with than to lose a friendship or relationship you have built. I also learned to respect others with different opinions. This has been one of the most challenging things to learn and to keep learning.
The reality is you will not change some people’s opinions, so sometimes it’s just better to respect their views even if you don’t agree with their opinions.
The next piece of advice I would share is to ask meaningful questions. Being an inquisitive character and having a thirst for knowledge will only make you smarter.
The last piece of general advice I can share with you is to listen more than you speak. Doing that will allow you to read the room, ask educated questions and gather more information. Some of the most successful people in America listen more than they speak. They understand that listening is a strength.
Confidence doesn’t always mean being the loudest guy in the room. Sometimes it’s the quiet person who listens and processes information.
High school can feel like a rollercoaster at times. There will be highs and lows. But if you hold on tight, you might just enjoy the ride.
A final word of advice: Show a little kindness to everyone, laugh once in a while, and take some risks. If you do these things, you will thrive—not just survive—in high school. You’ll be ready to take on a new adventure in college or whatever path you choose.
“The No. 1 thing to look out for is teachers who have a strict phone policy. Some teachers might be super chill about phones in class, but watch out for the strict ones.”
Andrew Esser 2024 graduate of Liberty High School
“Navigating high school, like most things in life, comes with some challenges. Adversity is inevitable, and I certainly faced my fair share.”
Before my first day at Rockhurst High School, I stared at my mom’s camera with a half-hearted grin on my face. She was taking her annual photo to commemorate the start of a new school year. Just as quickly as the camera flashed is how these last four years have felt.
As a recent high school graduate, I have been experiencing mixed emotions about my graduation. On one hand, I have a great deal of optimism and excitement for the future. Going off to college offers me new freedom and the opportunity to make new friends. On the other hand, my friends from my hometown and I will be forced to go our separate ways. I will also be away from home for the first time ever, which comes with added responsibility.
Navigating high school, like most things in life, comes with some challenges. Adversity is inevitable, and I certainly faced my fair share. Whether it was an injury that took me away from competing athletically or a low test score that tanked my grade, I encountered many setbacks over my time at Rockhurst.
It may sound counterintuitive, but I am extremely grateful for these shortcomings. They have molded me into a resilient person who maintains a positive attitude through thick and thin. I now realize that success is never achieved in a linear path. Instead, it is often attained through peaks and valleys. When I found myself in a valley, I learned to lean on my friends and family to help me climb out of it. Conversely, when I felt I was on the mountaintop, a new setback would present itself and humble me. High school has a funny way of always returning your ego back to equilibrium.
Over my time in high school, I acquired an abundance of academic knowledge. However, I believe my newfound persistent mindset will be the most beneficial thing for me in my future endeavors. College, like high school, will inevitably present many more obstacles that will test this mindset, but I believe that I am up for the challenge.
To the incoming high school freshmen, I offer a few pieces of advice. First of all, and most importantly, pick the right friends. To put it simply, your friends will determine your future. Ideally, your friends should truly have your best interest in mind. Likewise, you should also want the best for them. Your friends should push you towards your goals, not take you away from them. The best friendships are those that have an unselfish foundation.
Secondly, develop a routine. Having a routine will add structure to your life and set you up for success. It will also boost your productivity and even make you happier. Although procrastination may be tempting, cramming all of your studying into the last minute is not the best option. Instead, dedicate a few minutes every day to your studies; your grades will thank you for it.
Mitch Forbes 2024 graduate of Rockhurst High School
Do your best to avoid spending hours scrolling on social media. In today’s culture, I realize that you might feel unconnected to society without it, but just try to be mindful of how much time you spend on it. You might even set a daily limit of how much time you can spend on social media apps. You will be surprised at how many minutes you will gain back simply by doing this. I would also encourage you to get involved with your school. Do not just be an 8 am to 3 pm student. Find an extracurricular activity or club to immerse yourself in. This will help you to branch out and meet new people. Do not solely hang around the same group of friends that you have known for your whole life. Making new friends will encourage you to see the world in a different light and consider new perspectives. Also, learning to work with other people is an invaluable skill that will bode well for you in your life.
Lastly, enjoy it. You should be able to look back on your high school experience with fond memories. Still, it is important to have fun responsibly. You should realize that even one poor decision could have a lasting impact on your life, so use your best discretion on any choice you make. However, if you remain committed to your academics and extracurriculars, high school will likely be very memorable for you. You only get to go to high school once, so make sure to appreciate it. Believe me, it will be gone before you know it.
Inever would’ve thought May 19, 2024, would’ve come fast enough, but it did and now it’s past, which seems so crazy. Starting kindergarten in 2011, graduation day seemed so far away.
If you asked me 10 years ago what I thought I would have been doing the summer after I graduated, I would have given you the craziest answer. Something like, “ I’m going to be in North China looking for geodes from the Ming Dynasty.”
I thought graduating meant I could do whatever I wanted. But it’s a little more complicated than that. It’s about figuring out what I actually want to do with my life and how I am going to finance it.
I remember my first day of high school. I was sitting in my bed, looking at a computer screen and trying to understand Algebra 1. This was in 2020. Starting high school in Covid was an interesting experience.
I had wellness class my first semester freshman year, and there was this boy who decided that he was going to have fun while in school. Every day, he would put on the craziest backgrounds and wear the most horrendous things in Zoom meetings, and he would sit and participate in class like there wasn’t anything weird about that. This was when more than half the class didn’t have cameras and didn’t ever speak.
One of the best things I decided to do when going to high school was actually doing the work and staying on top of my classes, which I think are the most important things that kids should do. Falling behind is really easy, but catching back up is not.
You don’t want to get to May of your graduation year and be told that you’re missing a credit and may not be able to graduate. I know so many kids who, during their freshman year, decided to slack around. They didn’t have time to catch back up. Some of them graduated during the summer, and I’m not sure what happened to the others.
It’s a different feeling graduating with friends rather than a random group of people you barely even know. Set yourself up in the beginning for success is my advice, and don’t wait till the last minute.
Applying for credit cards, applying for school loans and going to the Missouri Department of Motor Vehicles by myself are some of the things I’ve accomplished since graduating. These new post-high school experiences have been all fine and dandy, but high school always has a special place in my heart. Being involved in choir, student council, theater, orchestra, Girl Scouts, cheer and a couple other activities here and there meant that I spent so much time at the school. It makes me feel that I have no idea what to do outside of school.
My life as a student from kindergarten all the way through high school has been a journey of 13 years. Now, I’m trying to figure out what I like to do besides that.
I wish I could give an answer on what I like to do now, but I’m still a little unsure. As I said, I kept a busy schedule in school. Being able to handle very busy schedules is one thing I’ll definitely take to college with me.
But that’s one of the things I’m a little nervous about in college—handling the classwork, a job and any activities that I want to do. Sure, I could do it in high school, but college seems a little different.
One thing I have been doing a lot of is watching TikTok. I can’t tell you how much time I have wasted mindlessly scrolling. I had my first viral video this summer. It got 276.1K views. There’s so many different people and things on TikTok, and I don’t really keep up with certain influencers. If they pop up on my screen, I’ll take a look at their page, but I don’t keep tabs on everything they do. But some people definitely do.
There was a trend on TikTok where kids would go around public places and take things that usually wouldn’t be taken. For example, at school, someone stole a mirror off the wall. What in tarnation would make a kid do that? Simple answer: TikTok. Now watching these trends is kind of funny, but at some point you wonder, “Are they going to get even more out of hand than they already are?” That’s a little scary. But I hope other kids would have more sense than to just follow a mindless TikTok trend.
Anyway… I’m sad my grade school and high school days have ended. I’m going to college! But my required education is over. I’ll miss getting to see my friends every day, going to a plethora of after-school clubs every day, sitting in the cafeteria but never eating the sometimes-questionable school food. Even though I may have dreaded all these things when they were happening, I’ll never get to really experience them again.
High school will always have a special place in my heart. It made me who I really am today. I want anyone who hasn’t already started high school to make the most of it. Don’t just go to school and then go home and make that be your whole four-year experience. Join clubs, go to dances, take a random class you never thought of taking. Have experiences and make memories.
“One of the best things I decided to do when going to high school was actually doing the work and staying on top of my classes, which I think are the most important things that kids should do.”
Marissa Johnson 2024 graduate of Raytown High School
Our event celebrates older dogs and how they have trained their owners over the years
By David Hodes
There were very compelling entries during the Good Ole Dog contest, sponsored by Kansas City magazine and held Sunday, Oct. 6, at BarK, a people and dog bar in the Berkley Riverfront area down by the Missouri River.
People were understandably proud to show off their dogs and brag about the mutual love they have together. Kim Jones, owner of an eightyear-old mixed breed dog, Olive, described her as “snugly.”
Most owners agreed that their dogs train them. “George is the leader of our household,” wrote the owner of an 11-year-old pomeranian, Ashley Starke. “He has learned he gets whatever he wants.”
The winner of the contest was Harley, a nine-year-old beagle cairn terrier mix owned by Paige Lopez. Lopez wrote: “Harley is the quintessential Good Ole Dog! He loves his daily naps, sun bathing on the porch and giving everyone attitude. Harley loves chewing on his bones and hanging out with his mom. He gives the best hugs when you need them most but will also sideeye anyone. He’s an avid watcher of Chiefs football and always rocks his red for Red Fridays.”
If your dog could talk, what would he or she say? Owners tell us.
Congratulations to Harley and all who participated.
By David Hodes
The life of Kansas City icon Alvin Brooks has now been memorialized in a movie, The Heroic True-Life Adventures of Alvin Brooks, based on Brooks’ 2021 autobiography Binding Us Together.
The movie premiered to two sold-out showings at the Screenland Armour Theater in North Kansas City on June 19, with an additional screening at the Free State Festival in Lawrence, Kansas, on June 30 and a showing on KCPT on July 11. In the audience for the premiere were both Congressman Emanuel Cleaver and Bryant DeLong, mayor of North Kansas City.
The film was written by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Kevin Willmott, currently a professor teaching film and media studies at the University of Kansas.
Willmott says that Brooks is an example of how to live your life. “He is an example of how not to turn bitter when things go wrong, when
people discriminate you and hate on you and attack you, which are all the things that can happen to folks and do happen all the time,” Willmott says. “Alvin turned it around in a positive way. And I know that’s kind of cliche in a way, but he does it in a way that’s really seamless because it really comes naturally from him. That’s the part that’s really beautiful.”
Brooks tells stories in the movie about his struggles to do the crime-fighting advocacy work he felt destined to do—work that helped reshape the core of the inner city away from the destructive crack lifestyle.
Now 92 years old, Brooks says he is an optimist but a realist. “I am hoping and praying that the forces to be become much more conscious of where we are and where we’ve come,” he says. “We’re a great city. But also a great city when it’s inclusive, when it represents all of the citizens equally. We have not dealt with the African-American community equally. And if we had, we wouldn’t have the kind of things we have going on now.”
Kansas City’s promotions whiz tells his tales of memorable moments— and one truly bizarre outdoor concert
By David Hodes
IF YOU LIVED in Kansas City in the ’70s and ’80s, you surely heard of the promotions czar Chris Fritz, the president of New West Presentations and manager of the 18,000-seat Azura Amphitheater, which is the former Sandstone Amphitheater off I-70 in Bonner Springs.
You may have even gone to one of the big rock shows Fritz organized in the 1970s at Municipal Auditorium, Memorial Hall, Royals Stadium, Kemper Arena and
Arrowhead Stadium. “Probably one of the coolest was Summer Rock II in 1978, with the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt and Dan Fogelberg at Arrowhead,” Fritz says. “It was magical. It was very euphoric. Everything was perfect.”
If you didn’t go to a show, you’ve surely heard of “Missouri’s Woodstock,” the notorious 1974 Ozark Music Festival in Sedalia, Missouri, and the biggest rock festival that then-27-year-old Fritz had ever done. Wild public orgies, an over-capacity crowd of fans tearing down fences, people passing out from the heat, badass bikers messing with anyone in their path, drugs being sold everywhere, overdoses here and there, a guy sleeping under a truck getting run over. Whew. It was intense.
Fritz is reportedly banned from Sedalia even to this day. More on that in a minute.
Fritz has seen it all in concert and event promotion. He produced shows at the Hollywood Palladium, the Wiltern Theatre and the Fox Theatre in Long Beach, California, from 1968 to 1971 before moving to Kansas City in 1972.
He’s done it all in concert and event promotion, too— and not just rock shows. He established the Eagle Pro Box Lacrosse League (now called the National Lacrosse League), the AND1 Mixtape Tour, as well as motorsports events, comedy events and more.
A report from the Missouri Senate Select Committee that investigated the concert—which it described as a “relatively new phenomenon known as a rock festival”—spelled out the trouble: “The Ozark Music Festival can only be described as a disaster,” the committee concluded. “Natural and unnatural sex acts became a spectator sport. Sex orgies were openly advertised.”
Drugs—even heroin—were openly sold. Concert gate-busters used wirecutters to cut down fences around the venue, allowing cars to drive in. Biker gangs were beating up people, including other bikers. Over 2,000 concertgoers were treated for various medical conditions, a third of which were drug-related, according to the senate report. Nearly 1,000 overdoses were reported. One concertgoer ended up with a broken back after being run over by a car while sleeping under it.
“That concert ended around 6 pm on Sunday, and I jumped on a helicopter to get out of there,” Fritz says. “We flew down I-70 to Blue Springs, where we had a pretty bad landing.”
The festival was the pinnacle of achievement at the time for Fritz, who started out his event production career at the age of six doing a backyard circus. “We had an organ grinder and a donkey for kids to ride,” Fritz says of that first circus. “I think I made $80 after we sold popcorn and lemonade. Ever since I went to a circus, I think it got in my blood. I was inspired by P.T. Barnum,” he says.
“The Ozark Music Festival can only be described as a disaster,” the committee concluded. “Natural and unnatural sex acts became a spectator sport. Sex orgies were openly advertised.”
Fritz has hung out with some of the biggest stars. Been to the coolest parties. Launched the careers of stars.
He taps into what he calls his sidekick—“that’s my imagination, because it’s the only person I trust”—as he ponders putting together an audience-fun twist or adding something special to an event.
But back to Sedalia. It’s mid-July 1974. An outdoor rock festival in sweltering 100-degree heat gets underway. Billed as a three-day outdoor concert/carnival on the 520-acre Missouri State Fairground, it was expected to draw 50,000 people paying $15 to $20 each to enter or campout. But it became a massive Woodstock wannabe event. Conservative estimates say there were 400,000 concertgoers.
Thirty bands were scheduled to perform, including Bachman-Turner Overdrive, The Ozark Mountain Daredevils, Bruce Springsteen (who reportedly bailed on the concert), Leo Kottke, REO Speedwagon, the Eagles, The Marshall Tucker Band, Ted Nugent and other popular acts of the time. Disc jockey Wolfman Jack was the master of ceremonies. The host of America’s first syndicated rock ‘n’ roll radio program in the 1960s, Jack was featured in a memorable scene in the George Lucas film American Graffiti.
Fritz went at the outdoor festival gig again in 2009 with the Kanrocksas Festival, featuring Eminem, the Black-Eyed Peas and Tupac. That festival experienced some issues with crowd control. The 2010 version was postponed, and Fritz bowed out of the 2011 version, which eventually got canceled.
Fritz got out of lacrosse in 2008 after 25 years of event promotion. He had hoped to develop lacrosse on rollerblades but couldn’t get the rights to the name “rollerball,” which was owned by the producers of the movie Rollerball, originally released in 1975.
The Azura Amphitheater deal came about when Fritz’s company was working Starlight Theatre and Kemper Arena as their main venues. The amphitheater had opened in 1984, then known as the Sandstone Center for the Performing Arts, to generally good reviews. But it changed hands frequently, with naming rights going from Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre (2002-2007) to Capitol Federal Park (2008-2012) to Cricket Wireless Amphitheater (2012-2015) to Providence Medical Center Amphitheater (2016-2021) before becoming Azura in 2021.
Fritz has had a management deal in place for the amphitheater with Wyandotte County since 2007. “The place was a little funky,” he says. “It’s
nothing like it is today. We did the Grateful Dead and other shows in the late ’80s, and then Sandstone went under in 2007. The people at the time with the Wyandotte County government approached us, and we got it.”
Fritz and New West redid the whole place, he says. “We were dirt people for all our motorsports where you would bring in 1,000 truckloads of dirt. So we built the lawn up. Back then, it didn’t have the backstage, so we put in the backstage, a club, all the concession stands, and then opened it in 1993.”
Fritz sold the management rights to media entrepreneur Robert Sillerman, owner of SFX Entertainment, who bought all the amphitheaters that existed. Sillerman sold SFX to Clear Channel, who sold it to Live Nation venture capitalists, who pulled out of the amphitheater deal in 2005. “I was under contract with them to manage the amphitheater,” Fritz says. “We took it back over to the Wyandotte Unified Government to make a deal to keep it open. It was needing a lot of work, so we did a huge renovation when we reopened it, and then we did another renovation in 2016. Last year, we started renovating to even have a new stage built. It’s beautiful right now.”
Asked who his favorite band was to work with and why, Fritz pon-
ders for a moment. “That’s hard to say,” Fritz says. “Obviously all the old-schoolers. There’s fond memories of after-parties and just camaraderie and doing multiple shows with various acts, from REO to Ted Nugent to tons of people.”
The changes he has seen are first and foremost the data that’s become available. “There are a lot of tools to work with to tell you just because some entertainer has 3 million likes doesn’t mean they’re going to sell any tickets,” Fritz says.
The industry is not just sex, drugs and rock and roll anymore, he says. “It’s an industry, and it’s finite and everything. So you need a good production manager. You need a good stage hand group. You need to have a good catering group. You have to have a good marketing group. You have to have a good ticketing company. There’s a lot that goes in. People don’t realize how hard it is on time and energy to make these things work. They’re very consuming.”
Fritz says he is working on a project now that could be “Super Bowl huge.”
Is 75-year-old Chris Fritz done? “F**k no,” he says. “When I expire, that’s it. It’s when the barcode says you’re done.”
Connect How two strangers work together to build social and career development for life
By David Hodes
amily is a life jacket in the stormy sea of life.” – J.K. Rowling.
Family. Just the mention of that word brings warm thoughts to most people about love, security, safety, happiness.
There is nothing more difficult to fix than a broken family. Trust and guidance are diminished or gone completely. Oftentimes, a family’s dysfunction spirals into a painful cycle of fractured relationships that continues generation after generation.
There is hope. There is assistance. There are big hearts willing to step up and patch the pain through careful, hands-on guidance.
Mentors. Among the handful of mentoring organizations in the U.S., one stands out: Big Brothers Big Sisters. It was created in 1904 to help mostly at-risk youth establish and work on life goals, build greater confidence and better relationships and avoid risky behaviors while on the path to educational success.
The organization does this by pairing kids needing guidance with qualified adults in a mentoring relationship for at least 12 months, but most go longer. “Bigs” work one-on-one with “Littles,” following the organization’s mission to “ignite the power and promise of youth.”
Logan Daniels is a “Big.” After retiring from the Air Force as tech sergeant in 2004, he wanted to do something to make himself a “well-rounded airman sort of thing.”
wanted me to get some male mentors, have some male experiences, so I wouldn’t just be on one side and I could see both sides of things. She just wanted someone to steer me on the right path.”
Byers says he was nervous when he first met Daniels. “I didn’t really know what to take from it. I had to sit back and observe because I’m not real social, or at least I wasn’t back then. I didn’t take a whole lot of pictures with anybody, and if I did, I didn’t smile a lot.”
Daniels says Byers was downplaying how quiet he really was. “I would pick him up and he didn’t talk,” Daniels says. “And I’m talking months. You had to ask him yes or no questions. So I decided that I had to ask him open-ended questions to get him to try to elaborate. He wasn’t a talker.”
Daniels and Byers met once a week every month at first. Daniels helped Byers with his homework, especially English. But there were other things to do. “I wanted to do things that were fun, like disc golf and miniature golf and also educational things,” he says. “But it was frustrating because he didn’t talk much. At first I didn’t think he liked me.”
He did come out of his shell eventually, but he is “still a quiet dude,” Daniels says.
Over the years, they developed a mutual trust. “There are a lot of things that I’ll talk to Logan about that maybe my mom has yet to know,” Byers says. “He will find out first before she finds out, or I’ll get his opinion on it to make sure. Maybe it’s something that I could do to make the situation better before I bring it to my mom.”
Daniels’ “Little” is 17-year-old Marquis Byers. Byers lives with his single mother—his father still lives in Kansas City but chooses not to have a relationship with his son. Daniels and Byers were matched on September 28, 2017.
He first volunteered at the Reconciliation Services center on 31st and Troost, an organization that helps feed people and provide social services. “But I was still looking for something else to do,” Daniels says.
His wife, Kimberly, told him about her experience as a Big Sister to two young girls, thinking maybe that’s what Daniels was looking for. “I thought about it for a while and didn’t know if I could handle it because I’ve already raised three kids who are now adults—Logan, Tasia and Martika.”
But he ultimately joined Big Brothers and Big Sisters in Kansas City as a volunteer mentor, ready to make a difference. “You never know what touching one kid’s life could do in the future,” Daniels says. “If you help one kid get through whatever they are facing, that one kid could go and help 100 other kids.”
Daniels’ “Little” is 17-year-old Marquis Byers. Byers lives with his single mother—his father still lives in Kansas City but chooses not to have a relationship with his son. Daniels and Byers were matched on September 28, 2017.
“When Marquis was younger, kids would try to dare him to do something,” Daniels says. “I would tell him that kids only try to dare you to do something to see you get in trouble. You might get hurt. They might get enjoyment out of the dare that you’re taking that you shouldn’t take. So I always tell him to throw it back at them and tell them to do it. And if they wouldn’t do it, why should you?”
Byers’ mom, Les, got him involved in the organization. “My dad wasn’t present, so the whole thing was to get me around more male influences,” Byers says. “My family is mostly females, so she doesn’t want me growing up around a bunch of females my whole life. She
In 2023, Daniels and Byers were named Kansas City’s Big Brother and Little Brother of the Year. Byers wrote on the organization’s website announcing the recognition that Logan has helped him be ready to chase his dreams.
Those dreams are the focus for Daniels and Byers today. First up is Byers’ graduation from high school in 2025. Then it’s on to college, where Byers will pursue architecture or graphic design. He is hoping to get into the University of Kansas.
What now? Daniels says he will be there for Byers along the way. Daniels has plenty of time on his hands now that he is retired. He wants to travel some and maybe take personal development classes. But he and Byers plan to stay in touch.
“Other Bigs and Littles stayed in contact during college and even after they graduate,” Daniels says. “You still have this relationship where you are not officially a Big Brother-Little Brother type of thing, but you still care for each other. I will still be looking out for him.”
Daniels is standing by to give Byers a man’s opinion on, well, just about anything. “You have a young boy going to college where a lot of crazy things happen around you,” Daniels says. “So you have to have good discernment on what’s going on and if you should you participate. I expect him to do good because he’s a smart dude.”
There are a lot of people who maybe have a bad relationship with one parent, and that might be the only parent they have, Byers says. “That relationship, since it’s not the healthiest, it affects them a lot. Like now, even if me and my mom go through something, I got Logan to fall back on. So it’s really just like having that extra person to talk to.”
8 OVER 80
Bobby Bell
Jim Chappell
Cliff Cohn
Paul Copaken
John Dillingham
Shirley Helzberg
Ralph Varnum
Fred Broski
9 OVER 90
Alvin Brooks
Ollie Gates
Anita Gorman
Barnett Helzberg
Judge Howard Sachs
George Toma
Myron Wang
Audrey Wegst
Debbie Granoff
A sporting event brings together family and friends like nothing else
By Hyman B. James
Kirby
There are all sorts of studies about social interaction in various settings and how families and friends react to each other in different settings. And I respect the work that goes into those sorts of studies, don’t get me wrong.
But this is what I experience every week in this town, our KC: When our families and friends come together for a specific sporting event, what I know is what I see, what I hear, what I feel, and, well, other things happening around us in life disappear. What happens can’t be measured or studied scientifically.
I love watching Kansas City sports with my kids, relatives, friends, clients and new relationships. The parties, the get-togethers, the moms, dads, kids, grandmas, grandpas and cousins all suited up for their favorite team, all having fun even before the game begins. Everybody hoping for a win. It makes going to the event a special day trip where everybody is excited on every level.
Sporting events break down barriers between us. We just react with honest emotions. It’s magic. An amazing play can become an ice-breaker between total strangers as well as family members. How many times have we given high fives all around with people who are
Those sports memories of you and your mom and dad who cheered you on become embedded inside you and prepare you for other events in your life. You learn early on that life has winning moments and life has losing moments. When you lose, there’s always another opportunity to win. Sports prepare you for that. And wow, how great are those magical memories?
When people go to the Chiefs games or the Royals games or other events, the fun they are having makes it easy to forget the negative stuff, like whether it’s raining or too hot or too cold. You remember that grand slam to end the game or that field goal with seconds left that wows the crowd. Rain? Cold? Snow? Ha! It only adds to the memory. We never ever forget, and we never want to.
It’s those moments that get the adrenaline flowing. And it’s not just you. It’s everyone around you celebrating. It can be 80,000 people all focused on the same fun at the same time. There’s nothing like the roar that goes up from that many people cheering, whistling, stomping their feet, making noise. And then we look at who we are with and smile that smile that never ever goes away. We are all best friends in those moments.
We have been very lucky in Kansas City to see our Royals win the World Series in 2015 and lose it in 2014. And the Chiefs going to
As you go on in life, the things that were not that important you forget about. But these sporting event memories are the things you never forget and help build the family-and-friends unit.
just as thrilled about something we all witnessed? It was something historic at times and usually a lifelong memory. Maybe even three in a row.
Sometimes there is a burst of excitement through the whole crowd that you feel in your bones because we all know what we just saw was truly incredible and because our team, or a special player, did it. All of us, together, with the same feeling.
That’s just part of the roller coaster of a sports event with family or others. It’s like a microcosm of life in a way. Good days and bad days are like the ups and downs of a game. Your whole mood can change just like that in one second or one minute. And some of those memories of amazing sports moments stay with us for weeks, months or even a lifetime, cemented in our brains, ready to be recalled anytime—usually with great excitement or, sometimes, with disappointment.
Maybe your love of sports started as a kid, with your parents watching you play basketball or football or soccer or volleyball or tennis or swimming. Or whatever. Maybe they videotaped the game that you’ll watch later as an adult and those great memories will come flooding back.
You’re never going to forget that particular moment in your life that brought such joy and fun to you, your family or friends when you were growing up. And everyone with whom you experienced the moment is recalled all the time.
five Super Bowls in six seasons, winning back-to-back Super Bowls in 2023 and 2024 and maybe a third in 2025. These are big-time memorable events. Sure, some call the whole pro sports thing too pricey—tickets are too much, parking is too much, concessions are too much. But you don’t have to go to the big pro games to have great family memories. Even if you’re at home and you’re having a Super Bowl party or a World Series party, you experience the excitement and the rush when your team suddenly scores as time runs out. You get pumped up. Everybody gets pumped up. And we never forget who we were with at that occasion.
Kansas City has always been a big sports city for families. And lately, it’s gotten even bigger. Along with the Chiefs and Royals, there’s the women’s soccer team, the Kansas City Current; our men’s soccer team, Sporting Kansas City; our hockey team, the Kansas City Mavericks; and our minor league baseball team, the Kansas City Monarchs.
We should never lose sight of what those sporting events do by creating a lifetime of memories. As you go on in life, the things that were not that important you forget about. But these sporting event memories are the things you never forget and help build the family-and-friends unit.
The cool thing is there are many more memories to come. How magical is that! And how can we put a price on those priceless memories and other magic memories we never, ever, ever forget?
Thank you to our city. Our Kansas City. Thanks. Enjoy the ride.
My life and times in the restaurant business— what a great adventure
I’ve been a restaurant guy all my life. And now, after 39 years, I’m moving on.
I did it old-school. I started out as a busboy at Homestead Country Club when I was 15, moved up to being a server, then a cook. I managed a Godfather’s Pizza restaurant while in college. Then I went to work for Gilbert/Robinson restaurants for six and a half years and moved around the country a little, learning the ropes, before I came back to Kansas City to manage Sam Wilson’s Meat Market on 103rd.
Next, I was named general manager of the Bristol on the Plaza. After a while there, I thought I knew enough to start my own restaurant with a partner, Michael Peterson, formerly with Grand Street Café. It was called Michael Forbes Grille, the name coming from both of our first names. It opened in Waldo in 1985.
Michael Forbes Grille moved to Brookside in 2012, and it’s been a joy. I have dozens of regulars coming in for lunch and dinner and
and special occasions. When everybody else is having the most fun, you have to work. You’re expected to be there. Early. Late. Nonstop. Whatever it takes. Execution is key. Consistency is key.
Your restaurant is a big part of the fun that people want to have on those special days, and you better get it right every time. Miss a beat, pay the price.
In this business, you are invested in the well-being of other people at all times. You are feeding them. You want to make everybody happy. And you work hard to make everybody happy.
But soon enough, you find out that no matter what you do, some people won’t be happy. Maybe they’re just having a bad day. Maybe they don’t want to be with the crowd they’re with. It probably has nothing to do with you or the restaurant. People will be who they are. That’s how the hospitality business rolls. You deal with the personality quirks, stay flexible, adjust and go for the positive.
I would get up every day ready to make someone’s special event even more special or someone’s great meal the best they ever had.
“So it was with mixed feelings of sadness and gratitude that I announced my retirement from the restaurant on June 5. I guess I just felt like it was time to move on. Maybe slow down a little. Smell the roses and all that other stuff that retirement is supposed to mean.”
other customers doing the things that people love to do at their favorite restaurants. I really take pride in teaching because I believe that you have to be a leader and a teacher and a mentor. The most fun I have is developing relationships with employees and working together as a team.
Customers have chosen my restaurant out of all the restaurant choices they could have made in Kansas City—and there are a lot— and I remain forever grateful. There are 20 times more restaurants in the city than there were 30 or 40 years ago.
I can’t tell you how many family celebrations and wedding celebrations and graduation celebrations and birthday celebrations have happened in my restaurant. But each time I see one of those special events with happy, smiling people, I get a warm feeling in my heart.
I think that this is what a restaurant should be—a homey, friendly place where people can count on good food and good service. Where all the kids and the teens and mom and dad and grandma and grandpa are equally at peace, getting great food and having a great time.
So it was with mixed feelings of sadness and gratitude that I announced my retirement from the restaurant on June 5. I guess I just felt like it was time to move on. Maybe slow down a little. Smell the roses and all that other stuff that retirement is supposed to mean.
I plan on being a consultant going forward because, well, this business gets in your blood and there are a lot of tricky little ins and outs to explain. The big one I learned early on: the importance of location, location, location.
I have spent a lot of time in the local Kansas City restaurant scene and had a lot of experiences, both good and bad. I made friends with a lot of great people.
I’ve been lucky. I have opened and managed 14 restaurants in my career. You may know some of them: Martini’s, Parkway 600, Japengos and Union Cafe.
People say that the restaurant business and the whole hospitality business in general is really tough. You are working holidays, weekends
I’m ready for them when they show up as a new or repeat customer. My servers are briefed. My cooks have what they need. Specials are double-checked. We’re ready to get on with the show.
Me? Now retired? I’ve become the menu item that’s off the list. “Cross is 86ed, Chef.” I hope my management style left a good taste in everybody’s mouth. I hope people remember their experience at my restaurant. “Hey, remember that great time we had at Michael Forbes?”
Cheers to all, and so long. Time for a new chapter.
By David Hodes and Tyler Shane
A restaurant with spectacular city views, another with wildly entertaining owners, a oneof-a-kind disco/eats joint, a cheese and wine place run by monks, a national developer’s flagship restaurant enhancing the Plaza’s elegance—Kansas City had them all. These were the beloved restaurant jewels that have gone away but left their marks in the memories of people who enjoyed a special night out in Kansas City back in the day. Let’s take a look.
2600 S. Santa Fe Road, KCMO
Baby Doe’s Matchless Mine wasn’t around a long time—six years, to be exact—before it very literally went downhill due to foundation issues.
And yet, the restaurant and bar still lives in the hearts of many Kansas Citians.
To say its character was distinctive would be an understatement. The massive restaurant opened in 1980 and resembled an old timey silver mine, meant to only look shaky and tattered on the outside. Unfortunately, the building’s foundation wasn’t too far off from its facade, an overlooked error that eventually led to its demise.
Baby Doe’s awe-inspiring location made it hard to ignore. It was mounted on a peak in Cambridge Circle, and folks could see the restaurant’s weathered exterior, built of lumber from old farmhouses, from both the I-70 and I-35 highways.
Chef Pete Hodes remembers its grandeur well. He helped open the KC location, helming the kitchen for two years before opening more locations in Denver and Atlanta.
423 Southwest Blvd., KCMO (now Rhythm and Booze bar and restaurant)
This was a very lively Italian-American restaurant on the boulevard where owners Tony DiBenedetto and his wife Virginia played the fun-loving hosts, going table to table during dinner, teasing and joking with patrons. The restaurant began as a tavern in 1940 and expanded as a restaurant (with a very small kitchen) that specialized in serving mounds of shrimp delivered in a toy boat… or a toy Tonka truck… or even a little red wagon. Whatever made for patron fun was the order of the day, decorum be damned. Anyone who went there recalled the carved-out watermelon stuffed with fresh fruit, spiked with vodka or tequila or rum, with a selection of straws sticking out of it. Men got suckers, women got roses when they left. Keeping up the fun was reportedly exhausting for the couple, and the crowds of early days thinned out. They decided to close sometime in the early 1990s. –DH
“It was a two-way street leading up there, kind of like you would drive up a mountain if you were in Colorado,” Hodes says. “At its very peak, you were elevated enough to see where the Missouri and Kansas rivers connect, along with the downtown cityscape. Once we put Christmas lights on it, our sales went up 30 percent because people were wondering what that beacon in the sky was.”
The large ramshackled restaurant was inspired by the story of Elizabeth “Baby Doe” Tabor.
According to the Star, Tabor’s husband, the so-called “Silver King” Horace Tabor, was a senator who became one of the wealthiest men in Colorado. One of his silver mines, in Leadville, Colorado, was called the Matchless Mine.
Baby Doe rose to fame alongside her husband as a socialite, but the wealthy couple lost their riches when the price of silver dropped during the Panic of 1893, a four-year economic depression.
As the tale goes, Horace’s deathbed plea to his wife was to keep the Matchless Mine, as he believed it would regain its value one day and be successful. So Baby Doe lived in a shack near the mine until her death.
The Matchless Mine restaurant had chicken and donkeys out front to sell the “Colorado 19th century mine” aesthetic until the health department made the owners get rid of them.
Hodes recalls the restaurant’s 10 dining rooms, which seated around 50 people each. To get to the underground bar, customers would travel down a tunnel into the restaurant’s basement, where saloon-dressed hostesses would greet you. It had a speakeasy feeling to it, which was fitting considering customers would travel across state lines to visit the restaurant and avoid Kansas’ strict liquor laws.
“It got pretty rowdy down there,” Hodes laughs. The restaurant had a steakhouse menu full of prime rib and an appealing happy hour that included free shrimp on Fridays. It was a full house during Hodes’ time. According to Hodes, the KC location took about six years to build, partly because the owner, whom he describes as “a character” and “fanatical,” fired multiple construction crews throughout the restaurant’s upbringing.
Ultimately, the building was built on shale and not properly secured. The shale rock shifted, and the place had to be abandoned. Yet even in just the six years that the restaurant was open, it made an impact on KC’s restaurant scene and is still remembered today. –TS
3935 Central St., KCMO
Diving into the history behind Fanny’s Disco Restaurant yields more articles and accolades about its owner, Victor Fontana, than it does about the actual restaurant. Fontana was a larger-than-life restaurateur and night club owner in KC whose businesses and gusto personality have created a legacy beyond his death in 2012.
Fontana was a memorable character. But out of all his clubs and restaurants, Fanny’s was the most unforgettable.
Today, the term “disco restaurant” may raise some eyebrows, but back in the ’70s, when Fanny’s opened, the two concepts went together like Coca-Cola and Chevrolet. Fanny’s was a restaurant, lounge and nightclub and, yes, all aspects operated at the same time. It opened in 1976 in KC’s Westport district, right in time for the disco boom.
In an article written about Fanny’s by the late Kansas City food writer Charles Ferruzza for The Pitch, he referred to Fanny’s as “glittering”.
The article’s interviewee, Ned, who visited the late restaurant, described it as “an exclusive scene where diners dressed up and the service was very formal, with rolling carts where the waiters prepared Caesar salads tableside and flambé dishes. And the dining room was surrounded by these thick glass walls that looked out on a dance floor. This was during the very apex of disco, so it was definitely the place to be.”
The restaurant served upscale Italian. Not surprisingly, Fontana was Italian himself. Michael Garozzo, another local celebrity restaurateur, was even a waiter there for a stint.
Fanny’s was one of those pivotal establishments for Westport, making the downtown block known as an entertainment district. To say Fanny’s was a hotspot of Kansas City at the time would be an understatement. On weekends, there were lines out the door to get in, and while the dance floor and food were both celebrated, much of Fanny’s success was no doubt due to Fontana’s charismatic reputation.
Ferruzza described Fontana as KC’s first celebrity restaurateur. Craig Glazer, a late local comedy club owner, recalled in an article for KC Confidential, a local news reporting website by Hearne Christopher, that there was a time when Fontana made a “Hollywood entrance” by pulling up to Fanny’s in a flashy car “dressed to the nines.”
Thanks to Fontana, many consider KC’s club scene in the ’70s and ’80s to have been just as prominent to ones you’d find in any other large city.
In Ferruzza’s 2003 Pitch article, Fontana says: “It all started at Fanny’s. The world started there, I think.”
By that interview, Fontana had just opened Frankie’s on the Plaza. Fontana continued on to say that while diners don’t really dance at restaurants anymore, he was trying to keep the good times rolling with Frankie’s. It offered a dance floor, and Fontana was experimenting with how to get people on it.
Fontana passed in 2012, a local legend who left an unforgettable impact on Kansas City’s restaurant and hospitality scene. –TS
Fanny’s was one of those pivotal establishments for Westport, making the downtown block known as an entertainment district. To say Fanny’s was a hotspot of Kansas City at the time would be an understatement.
COSTELLO’S GREENHOUSE RESTAURANT
85th St. and State Line Road, KCMO (now a FedEx/AT&T building)
Vince Costello, a 10-year linebacker for the Cleveland Browns who ended up as defensive coordinator for the Chiefs under Paul Wiggins, decided to dabble in the restaurant business at 85th and State Line in 1979 after he retired from playing (in 1968) and coaching professional football (in 1976). There was some backroom gambling going on (their liquor license was suspended in 1990 as a result), but before the Feds closed in, Costello’s was a destination restaurant for live jazz and Sunday brunch. Bar patrons could catch a moment with an NFL player, such as Chiefs Hall of Fame quarterback Len Dawson, who hung out there on occasion. The restaurant went bankrupt and closed in early 1997. –DH
210 W. 47th St., KCMO (opened in same location as Putsch’s after that restaurant closed)
Fedora’s Café and Bar is another one of those longlost yet beloved late Kansas City restaurants from the renowned Gilbert/Robinson group. It was, of course, a staple on the Plaza for decades, with its heyday taking place during the Reagan years. It sat within walking distance from Plaza III, Houlihan’s, Annie’s Sante Fe, Bristol and Fred P. Ott’s—all also under the Gilbert/ Robinson umbrella. But according to an article written by food writer Charles Ferruzza, Fedora’s Café and Bar was “the liveliest of the lot.”
“Its bar [was] packed every night with Kansas City’s young, beautiful movers and shakers, swilling martinis and goblets of wine as they giggled, cruised and connected,” Ferruzza wrote in his 2001 article for The Pitch.
Fedora’s opened in the early ’80s as a French-inspired bistro, serving a modern American and French menu. The restaurant was decked out with large brass doors and a beautifully tiled bar that hosted more than its fair share of celebratory and joyful evenings.
Like many Gilbert/Robinson restaurants, the hip French bistro went on to become a chain.
Eventually, a location opened in St. Louis’ Union Station and became the first restaurant there to serve haute gourmet American cooking. It was revolutionary for its time, offering dishes like duck served rare and drizzled with a ginger sauce.
“It soon became clear that Fedora’s represented serious food,” Anne Pollack wrote in a 2016 article in St. Louis Magazine. Ferruzza even went so far as to call Fedora’s “the Nicole Kidman of its time, sexy and vibrant, the ‘it’ place to be.”
While the Plaza restaurant closed in the early 2000s after being bought by the Haddad Restaurant Group, Fedora’s Cafe and Bistro is another lauded and late treasure of the Gilbert/Robinson group. –TS
4749 Pennsylvania Ave., KCMO (now True Food Kitchen)
“My dad’s vision was to have KC be a restaurant city like Chicago,” says Karen Byrom, daughter of the late restaurateur Paul Robinson. Having grown up in her dad’s restaurants, Byrom knows the restaurant business well. Robinson was a partner in the Gilbert/Robinson restaurant group. Alongside brothers Joe and Bill Gilbert, the three created what can only be described as a restaurant group empire. It birthed some of KC’s most recognizable restaurants, including
Houlihan’s, Bristol, J. Gilbert’s and more. But Plaza III was “their baby,” according to Byrom.
The fine dining steakhouse was the restaurant that paved the way for Gilbert/Robinson and changed the food scene in KC forever.
Plaza III opened in 1963. As Byrom recalls, dining out in in the early ’60s had yet to catch up to the more upscale practices happening in Europe, especially in the fine dining realm. Presentation, atmosphere and service were elements that weren’t yet expected in U.S. restaurants. That is, until Byrom’s father began traveling.
Before Gilbert/Robinson, Byrom’s father was the general manager of Kansas City steakhouse the Golden Ox. As the tale goes, Robinson and Joe Gilbert struck up a conversation, and the rest is history. But Byrom remembers her father as the “ideas man” between the two. Robinson frequently traveled to Europe, especially London, and with each trip, he brought back inspiration from his fine dining experiences. The Golden Ox was a great steakhouse, but the Plaza III had white tablecloths and table-side service, Byrom says. “I always remember him saying ‘Hot food hot, cold food cold,’” Byrom says in reference to her father’s motto on plateware. “It was the start of the concept of heating and chilling your plates.”
At Plaza III, training the staff was taken seriously. Byrom, along with her other siblings, served in her father’s restaurants. She also went on to train bussers, waitresses, hostesses and bartenders for her dad’s other restaurants while they were expanding across the country. “We were onsite for six weeks,” Byrom says. “That was a whole new concept of training the staff.”
Plaza III was the beginning of Gilbert/Robinson’s takeover of the Plaza. In 1992, the Haddad restaurant group (the same group that also owns Winstead’s) bought the restaurant and owned it until its closing in 2018. It reopened briefly in a strip mall at 122th and Metcalf but closed in 2020.
Even in today’s restaurant scene, Plaza III’s five-decade-long run is impressive, and its loss is still felt amongst Kansas Citians. “It was the place where you went on a special occasion,” says Byrom. “There’s so many choices now, but back then it was really the place to go when you had a birthday or an anniversary. Back then, Plaza III was it when it came to fine dining.”
Robinson set out to change KC’s restaurant scene. Looking back decades later, it’s certain that he achieved his goal. Plaza III and its following sister restaurants changed the trajectory of dining in Kansas City. The steakhouse gave birth to a new era of fine dining restaurants that chefs and restaurateurs have only built upon since. –TS
4640 Wornall Road, KCMO
This beloved upscale steak, burger and prime rib joint on the Plaza opened in 1987 and closed its doors on January 31, 2017. Their Facebook post announcing the closing read: “Despite good faith efforts on both sides, an agreement to extend our tenancy at the Plaza could not be reached with the Lessor. Details surrounding infrastructure improvements that sought to temporarily close the restaurant proved to be insurmountable.”
The post also indicated that the restaurant may come back. “We will be on the lookout for sites (in Kansas City) with unique characteristics that would suit a new restaurant.” Another Houston’s at 95th Street and Metcalf opened in 1984 and closed in 2002. Since 2009, several Houston’s locations around the U.S. have changed their names to Hillstone, which may be the reincarnation of Houston’s in Kansas City someday. There’s been no further word on the result of the owners’ search for other sites. –DH
210 W. 47th St., KCMO (now Kura Revolving Sushi Bar)
When talking about the Plaza’s reputation for stellar restaurants, it’s necessary to acknowledge Putsch’s 210. Virginia and Jud Putsch had already operated a cafeteria-style restaurant along with a cafe on the Plaza. They opened their fine dining concept, Putsch’s 210, near the cafe in 1947. Customers needed to abide by a dress code to indulge in the upscale dining experience, complete with white tablecloths and fine china. It was a unique concept at the time. The fine dining practices of Europe were only just making their way to the U.S., and Putsch’s was on top of it.
Along with working at her father’s Plaza III restaurant, Karen Byrom also worked at Putsch’s 210 for a stint in the ’60s. She recalls carrying large trays out to diners’ tables and lifting the silver dome covers to reveal their dishes.
“It was really elegant,” Byrom says. “They started really worrying about the presentation of the food.
Presentation wasn’t big back in the ’60s. It was this whole new idea about food and restaurants. Suddenly, [restaurants] were focused on lighting, atmosphere and what makes people feel good when they walk in a restaurant.”
Violinists played to the dining room while diners chose their meals from a menu of traditional upscale American fare. Tableside preparation and flambéed dishes like steak diane and bananas foster were a hit.
According to an article written by Jill Silva for Flatland, a local nonprofit PBS news organization, Putsch’s 210’s success can be attributed to African-American bartender Willie Grandison and Mexican-American chef Herman Sanchez. Both Grandison and Sanchez made notable contributions that enhanced Putsch’s dining experience. They made a lasting impact.
“The name Putsch’s resonate[s] with Kansas Citians who associate the Plaza’s golden age with a time when businesses were local, the food was made from scratch and all manner of gustatory tastes were accounted for,” local author Andrea Broomfield wrote in her book
Iconic Restaurants of Kansas City. Broomfield goes on to say that Putsch’s 210 “epitomized fine dining on the Plaza.”
The Putsch family sold Putsch’s 210 to Montgomery Ward, of Montgomery Ward and Company, in 1971. It closed two years later. –TS
U.S. 40 Highway and Lees Summit Road, Independence
If you remember visiting Stephenson’s Old Apple Farm Restaurant, there are probably a few of its quintessential elements that stick out in your memory. For some, it was the classic red barn exterior, the homemade apple cider or the tender smoked meats and family-style sides. For all, however, it was a pinnacle of good ole’ Midwestern hospitality.
The Lee’s Summit restaurant’s roots date back to 1870, when the farm was known as Stephenson’s Fruit Market. The Stephenson family had acres of fruit orchards and sold their homegrown fruits and vegetables to folks traveling between Lee’s Summit and Independence from a little one-room stone building. That stone building provided the base structure for Stephenson’s restaurant, opened by Les Stephenson and his brother Loyd. The restaurant underwent seven remodelings and expansions from that original stoneclad fruit market and eventually grew to fit a capacity of 350 people in its heyday.
Thaddeus Stephenson, Les’ grandson, remembers his family’s restaurant fondly, as he practically grew up in it. “It was a place where everybody was treated with the same care and quality,” says Thaddeus. “Almost like you were going home.”
Because of the restaurant’s popularity, there was always a wait, but according to Thaddeus, the customers didn’t mind. In fact, they may have even embraced it thanks to free homemade apple cider brewed right there from the family’s orchard. Near the host stand stood a massive wooden barrel lined with metal and
Thaddeus is bringing back the flavors of his family’s beloved restaurant— specifically the apple butter. The idea was inspired by a monthly supper club dinner held at Jasper’s.
THE MONASTERY ABBEY AND WINE SHOP
6227 Brookside Plaza, KCMO (now Brookside Barrio)
Talk about a memorable restaurant experience: Guys dressed up in robes looking like monks, serving wine, cheese boards, sandwiches and chili in a velvety dark, bustling-but-intimate setting lit like you would imagine a monastery to be lit. It was an immersive, somewhat RenFest Middle Ages experience.
And late at night after the liquor stores closed, The Monastery’s small wine shop was a perfect place to buy a six-pack of unusual and hard-tofind beer and wine to go, like Mönchshof beer, brewed in a Bavarian monastery beginning in 1349 A.D. The Monastery was non-threatening, spooky, irreverent and fun—a worthy and somewhat trippy destination restaurant for any visitors to the city from 1973-1985.–DH
fixed with a spicket in which customers could pull their own glasses of cider.
Thaddeus reads off one of Stephenson’s original menus and rolls off the list of hickory-smoked meats the restaurant offered (the menu doesn’t have the exact date on it, but for reference, the filet mignon was listed for $3.75). Brisket, chicken gizzards, ribs, pork chops and more were served with an array of family-style sides, including marshmallow salad, baked potatoes, green rice casserole, muffin rolls, fritters, apple butter, corn relish and zucchini souffle, to name a few.
Stephenson’s closed officially on February 12, 2007, but there’s good news for those nostalgic for the late restaurant. Thaddeus is bringing back the flavors of his family’s beloved restaurant—specifically the apple butter. The idea was inspired by a monthly supper club dinner held at Jasper’s featuring the classic dishes of Stephenson’s. The dinner was a hit, and after realizing how badly people were craving his family’s homestyle specialties, Thaddeus decided to start producing the beloved Stephenson’s apple butter. The process of getting it on the shelves in grocery stores is currently in the works, but Thaddeus says locals will be able to snag a jar “soon enough.”
He recommends using it the classic way his grandfather’s restaurant intended it: “On a good soft roll with butter.” –TS
• Our next special edition will be about selected Kansas Citians over 60 and over 70
• We want you to send us your selection(s), and how to contact them.
• Briefly tell us why you selected them.
• Send your selections to: dave@kansascitymag.com
We think it’s time for this new group of Kansas Citians to be recognized for all they have done, and all they plan to do. We want to hear their amazing stories. Help us shine a light on their lives and accomplishments in next year’s special edition of Kansas City magazine.
QUINTON D. LUCAS Mayor
Too often in life, we all fall victim to moving along from day to day, from event to event, without even thinking of the accumulated knowledge we are receiving. It’s true. We learn more about ourselves, and about others, each day. We absorb memories of facts and figures, dates and times, people and locations. And over the years, those memories and experiences shape our lives and give us direction for our future.
We have, in effect, developed a sort of experiential magic that comes with knowing ourselves better. It’s what makes us who we are today.
This special issue of Kansas City magazine explores that magic within some of Kansas City’s most fascinating and longest-tenured residents. Call them seniors, call them golden agers, patriarchs, or matriarchs. But whatever we do, we ought to listen to them, heed their advice, learn from their experiences; and the magazine has given them this opportunity to tell us just that.
I am thrilled to be a part of this special issue of Kansas City magazine, exploring with you the deep insight into lives well-lived from a prominent group of Kansas City’s elders.
In this issue, Kansas City magazine is demonstrating our collective appreciation of these folks. We can all learn about the roller coaster of life from them—the ups and downs, the good and the bad, the great times and the tough times, and what we can do to better our lives based upon those who came before us.
I’m excited to learn more from the eight over-eighty and nine over-ninety awardees. I hope you are too.
Quinton D. Lucas
City Hall, 414 East 12th St., Kansas City, MO 64106 (816)513-3500 | MayorQ@KCMO.org
PICTURED, LEFT TO RIGHT:
FIRST ROW
Bobby Bell, Fred Broski
SECOND ROW
Jim Chappell, Cliff Cohn
THIRD ROW
Paul Copaken, John Dillingham
FOURTH ROW
Shirley Helzberg, Ralph Varnum
These prominent golden-agers talk about lifelong achievements, what they learned through the years, what they are planning on next and how living longer is a rewarding daily adventure
Written by David Hodes
Interviewed
by
David M. Block, David Hodes and Pete Mundo
Birth date: June 17, 1940
Age: 84
“My dad told me, ‘Don’t be doing anything where you have to be looking over your shoulder all the time.’”
If you know anything about Kansas City Chiefs football, you know about the first Chiefs Pro Football Hall of Famer, Bobby Bell. He was also enshrined in the College Football and Missouri Sports Halls of Fame.
what he could do. He never took his success for granted. “A lot of young kids look at these football players or baseball players today as a success,” Bell says. “They think that it came easy. But my dad told me anything that comes easy, you have a tendency to get rid of it. If you work hard for it, you don’t want to give it up. That’s what happened to me.”
Bell was an all-state quarterback in high school and in his freshman year at the University of Minnesota, then switched to offensive tackle his sophomore year at the university. He was the most decorated college lineman of the 1962 season.
At 6 feet 4 inches tall and 228 lbs., Bell was an imposing and inspiring player back in the early days of Lamar Hunt’s American Football League, giving it his all every time he stepped onto the field. He signed with the Chiefs in 1963 for a 12-year run, first as a defensive end and later an outside linebacker.
Bell played in 168 games in his professional football career, including two Super Bowls. His number, 78, was retired in honor of his achievements during his career.
As a linebacker, he was named All-AFL or All-NFL every year from 1965 through 1971. He scored nine career touchdowns off fumbles, interceptions and once, a return from an onside kick.
Football back in the ’60s and ’70s was tough. No heavily padded gear. No help with players suffering from concussions. Everybody played injured.
None of them were earning anywhere close to what today’s players earn. In the AFL in 1968, minimum salaries were $9,000 for rookies and $10,000 for veterans. If you played professional football then, you did it for the love of the game. You played with heart.
Bell was born in a small town down in Shelby, North Carolina, and grew up with small-town values. He had no idea that he would have an opportunity to play football at a big university such as the University of Minnesota, where he showed the college football world
“My dad told me anything that comes easy, you have a tendency to get rid of it. If you work hard for it, you don’t want to give it up. That’s what happened to me.”
It was in Minnesota where he witnessed issues of segregation in the game, realizing in the ’60s, a time of volatile social upheaval, that he was playing a role in changing the game.
Quarterback Sandy Stevens was the first Black All-American at Minnesota. “We had an all-Black backfield,” Bell says. “This was when the whole state of Minnesota was two percent Black. Playing there was for me. I could not let my dad down, my mom, my sister, my brother, my kinfolk and all the Black people in Shelby I represented.”
Bell says he “pushed away a lot of things” to get to where he is today. He fought negative stereotypes and the like. “I look around now and instead of you saying you can’t find a Black quarterback, now you can’t find a white quarterback. It’s changed. It’s flipflopped. Sixty percent of the players that we had in the AFL were from Black universities. That’s the way it was in the AFL.”
Bell was a serious force to be reckoned with on the gridiron: a positive guy always, a serious no-nonsense guy on the field who could be counted on to deliver.
Asked about his intensity on the field in a tough game where linebackers usually get pretty beat up, he says that he wasn’t the one getting beat up. “I was the one beating up people. I was the beater.”
When Bell came to the Chiefs, he told coach Hank Stram he could play any position. “Anything I did, I wanted to be the top guy,” Bell says.
He negotiated his pro football deal directly with Lamar Hunt, who wanted him to be “part of the family.” Bell recalls a story that happened right after signing
the deal. He was traveling to New York for business, and Hunt decided to travel with him. They shared a cab into the city. When they got to Hunt’s hotel, Hunt jumped out and told Bell to pay the cab fare, which included the 15 cent toll. “I then got to my hotel, paid the cab, got checked in, ran upstairs and got on the phone,” Bell recalls. “I called a friend back in Minnesota and asked him if I did the right thing signing and agreeing to what they would pay me. He said, ‘Yeah, that’s enough.’ I said, ‘Are you sure? Because Lamar Hunt is broke. I had to pay for the cab.’”
But that wasn’t the end of the story. Every year, Bell got a birthday card from Hunt until Hunt’s death in December 2006. “On my 60th birthday, I get a card from him,” Bell says. “I open it up. He had pasted 15 cents in the card for the toll from the cab ride. I asked him, ‘Where’s the rest of the money?’ He said, ‘It’s in the mail.’”
During his years with the Chiefs, Bell considered playing football to be his part-time job. He worked full time for General Motors in Kansas City. “It was, ‘Hey, every day, I got to go to work, man.’ So I treated football as my second job. I had to do that. I had to make a living.”
He asked other players about the pay for appearing in the Pro Bowl in 1970, the first of three he played in. “And this guy said if we win it, we get $500. If we lose, we get $250,” Bell says. “We had some guys who were not playing the Pro Bowl because they said they were losing money.”
What’s his reaction to pro football players today making millions—like Chiefs Quarterback Patrick Mahomes’ half-billion dollar deal? “I feel like I came out too early,” he says with a laugh. “I mean, can you imagine? That’s unreal. They make more money in endorsements than they do playing.”
Bell retired from the Chiefs in 1974 and started his own business chain of five stores, Bobby Bell BBQ. He sold them in 2005 to focus on appearances for fundraisers, speaking to kids and going to golf tournaments. He played in 53 golf tournaments in one year, he says, three of them in Kansas City.
During his retirement, he followed on a promise he made to his father when he first left home as an 18-year-old chasing his pro football dream: He would complete his remaining college studies and get his diploma. He graduated in May 2015 at age 74.
“If I say I am going to do something, I’ll do it,” Bell says. “That’s me.”
When he looks back on his life, Bell says that everything started from the University of Minnesota. “If I hadn’t got that chance, I don’t know where I’d be,” he says. “I’d never been on a plane before. I had never been out of North Carolina before. I could have stayed there, but I took that chance. I tell people that you have to take that chance. If somebody gives you that opportunity, take advantage of it. I took advantage of it. Although I was scared, I did it.”
“Anything I did, I wanted to be the top guy.”
Birth date: August 22, 1936 Age: 88
“We should meet everybody with a little bit of happiness, whether you work on TV or you’re famous or not.”
TThere was a time in the 1970s when a television game show franchise called Bowling for Dollars became a hit TV series across the country, from New York to Honolulu and even in Canada. For the game, contestants had three tries to knock down as many pins as possible. Prizes were awarded based on points scored. Each contestant had Pin Pals—viewers at home who submitted postcards, which were then randomly picked out of a tumbling hopper on set. When the bowler won, the viewer at home won.
But the big winner in the Kansas City version was the show’s host, career broadcaster and KMBC on-air personality Fred Broski. “This was the biggest thing that ever happened in my career,” he says. “When this thing came to town, it just flew.”
The show was originally filmed at King Louie West Lanes in Overland Park, but KMBC later installed two lanes in their studio. It was on the air for seven years. Broski was right in his element as announcer, making up dialogue with the bowlers and working directly with everyday people who became his bread and butter throughout his career.
Broski’s long and storied career began in radio because he couldn’t get on television in Kansas City. “I just wanted to be a straight staff announcer, but staff announcers went out of the picture back in those days in the early ’50s,” he says. He went to St. Joseph, then Columbia, then back to WDAF in Kansas City, hosting a show in 1962—his first on-air job in Kansas City—that lasted about five weeks. “I’m waiting for the phone to ring, and nobody calls,” he says. “I’m going around to all the stations every week trying to get auditions. Can’t get an audition.”
Broski built up a production freelance business on the side while working at KBEA radio station, but he still had “this tremendous love to get on television all the time.” He was announcing at a local car racetrack when he crossed paths with an executive at KMBC. He got a job reporting sports, then mentioned that he had done work as a weatherman. And it was off to the races for his television career.
Broski worked at KMBC from 1966 to 1969, had a falling out with management, came back, and then Bowling for Dollars came into his broadcasting life. “That was a phenomenal success,” he says. “My life was so busy with doing the bowling show and my freelance work. I started a bowling tournament attended by 5,000 to 6,000 people a year. It got to be a monster. And the pressure was building on me that I just couldn’t do everything.”
In 1974, Broski would make sales calls on a Monday. Monday afternoon, he did a weather show. Then he would do three bowling shows. Then maybe another weather show. Tuesday, same thing. Wednesday, Safeway commercials. Thursday, work for Farmers Insurance. Friday, Saturday and Sunday—more stuff. “I did this after a while,” he says. “You have all the stuff going on. I have nobody working for me, and I’m running this little cottage industry all by myself. People that hire me and my business don’t hire me for somebody else. They hire me to do their work.”
One night, he says, he just came home and felt like he’d hit a wall. “My blood was just bubbling,” he says. “It was nerve-wracking because I never said no to anything. But I had to have some fun time with my family and my wife because I have a great family. I was born and raised here. I was still hanging out with my old buddies from grade school once in a while and having dinner together when time would permit.”
His stint with KMBC ended in 1979. He then got hired as weatherman at KCTV and wrapped up his TV career working part time there in 1998.
“I’m a maverick,” Broski says. “I wasn’t a long-term employee. I marched to a different drummer. Most people would start off at a company and work five, 10, 20 years, maybe switch to something else and work another 10 to 20 years, and then they’re done. The longest I ever worked full time for anybody was four years.”
The lessons that stuck with him over his career could be summed up as DDD—desire, dedication and determination. “You got to have them all,” he says. “And you can’t be afraid to work. Don’t be afraid to work more than 40 hours a week. It’s just that simple. When somebody asks you to do something extra, you got to do it. You just got to do it. Because you just can’t give all the orders at your younger age. You give orders later, but at the younger age, just do what you’re told and keep your nose to the grindstone.”
The other thing he says he would tell people about living and working successfully is to have a wonderful spouse. “Your spouse needs to love you, and you need to love your spouse,” he says. “I was very fortunate there because, as I do these crazy things and take chances, I sometimes win and sometimes lose. When that person’s by your side all the time, you’re a winner no matter what happens. That’s the best thing is to have somebody go with you and get on that train together.” (Broski’s wife, Jane, passed away in 2022.)
A lot of Broski’s work was flying by the seat of his pants, staying flexible and just keeping the gig going. “When you start off like I did, you have this great desire to be on television, and you don’t have the best vocabulary in the world, and you don’t have the education or anything else,” he says. “You didn’t have teleprompters. You had guys holding cue cards once in a while. But they say: ‘Okay, you’re going to do this kids’ show. You play a cartoon. You have to fill three minutes in between the cartoons. You better think of something.’ So this all goes into the overall deal. You just learn to adjust to the situation. And after you do all this stuff for a number of years and still have the desire to be on television, it’s easy.”
Broski spends his retirement now enjoying time with his two children, Brian and Julie, and five grandkids. He works on oil paintings. Dozens of beautiful paintings hang on the walls in nearly every room of his house.
“I’m a maverick. I wasn’t a long-term employee. I marched to a different drummer.”
He says some of the best advice he got was during his time as a weatherman at KMBC. A viewer called the station and complained about him. “It hurt me because here was somebody who didn’t like the way I did the show,” Broski says. “Then Len Dawson walks in and tells me that is what people go through in sports. He says: ‘You go through high school and everybody’s pulling for you. You go through college, everybody’s pulling for you. You get to the top. You go into pro sports, everybody’s pulling for you. Then you win the Super Bowl, they all try to tear you down.’ He said: ‘You’re at the top. Don’t let them tear you down.’ I’ll never forget that.”
Birth date: October 21, 1942
Age: 82
“If you want someone to be interested in you, be interested in them.”
IIt’s unbelievable. It’s incredible. Stepping through the door into Jim Chappell’s Restaurant and Sports Museum in downtown North Kansas City, voted one of the best sports museums in the country by Sports Illustrated , most people barely get a few feet in before they stop, look around, stare and point, their eyes wide open, grinning and shaking their heads in disbelief.
Because here, in this unassuming restaurant operated by one of the most enthusiastic and entertaining guys you’d ever want to meet, are true treasures of the sports universe.
“I’m an upscale family restaurant that has sports memorabilia,” Chappell says. “They got me in the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame because I had so much of it.”
If he didn’t have this memorabilia, he says, he doesn’t know that this restaurant would have lasted as long as it has. It first opened in 1986 as a politicaland sports-themed bar and grill. “I think that (the memorabilia) is what brings people back,” Chappell says. “You can get a cheap burger anywhere, but you got to have a hook.”
The restaurant-museum hybrid has dozens and dozens of impressive college and pro football helmets hanging from the ceiling and walls. “Hanging up these football helmets was a stroke of genius, but I didn’t plan it,” Chappell says. It happened when USA Today picked out the top 50 sports bars in the country, one from every state. “This guy from Glendale, Arizona, gets his picture on the front page of USA Today because he had a bowl and helmet. I had a World Series trophy. I had two Olympic torches. I had a Dallas Texas warm up jacket. I had a Heisman trophy. But he gets on the front page. So I only had about 50 helmets at the time, and I said I’m going to get 1,000 helmets within a week. Now I always tell everybody I got 1,001 helmets. And I do.”
“Then there’s me, the unconscious competent. He doesn’t know what the hell he is doing but always lands on his feet.”
The real treasure here is the owner. Chappell will take you on a tour any time. Your jaw will drop again and again from the amazing stuff you see. And Chappell takes it all in—your reaction, your surprise—because this 80-year-old-plus guy has spent a lifetime collecting rare sports museum pieces. He wants everyone to have a good time in his place. And boy, do they ever.
You step into this sports wonderland and see Michael Jordan’s autographed Olympics jersey, the boxing gloves Sylvester Stallone wore in Rocky and the home plate from Municipal Stadium signed by the 1955 Kansas City Athletics.
There’s Tom Watson’s putter and the signed photographs of baseball legends Jackie Robinson and Satchel Paige posing in his Monarch’s uniforms. You might see famous people such as Dave Winfield, Marcus Allen, Joe Montana, George Brett, Warren Buffett or Vince Gill hanging out there.
Chappell has a long list of civic and community service work. He’s been a member and chairman of the Kansas City Plan Commission; commissioner of the Kansas City Port Authority; and chairman of the Clay County Board of Election Commissioners from 2002 to 2017. He also ran for Missouri state senator in 1978.
Then, in 2013, he was honored as an inductee in the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame.
Chappell just soaks up that glee and amazement from everybody coming in to his place, with his standard cheery disposition and a glad-hand one-on-one “howyou-doing” attitude that makes everyone feel the special way he wants them to feel amid his collection.
Chappell has been all-in from the get-go. “I was right here in this restaurant every day from 9:30 in the morning to 10:30 at night, and I met everybody at the front door,” he says. “I shook hands with everybody who walked in.”
Chappell graduated from Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, in 1965, then worked at a restaurant in the Ozarks before landing a management job in Kansas City at the Mobile Oil Corporation in 1968—a bad fit. “I’m not a corporate guy,” he says. “Then I was in the insurance business, which I kind of liked doing.” He was a partner in a local insurance company for 20 years, and it was during that time that he decided to open his restaurant. “I opened this kind of political and sports bar, and it just took over my life,” he says. “It just engulfed me, which I’m glad it did. I love doing what I’m doing.”
But owning a restaurant is not for the faint of heart. “You’re a fool for opening a restaurant,” people were telling him. “They actually laughed in my face,” Chappell says. “That ended up being pretty bad advice because it turned out differently.”
Still, Chappell says, he felt a little out of his comfort zone at first. “I am the unconscious competent,” he says. “You have the conscious competent. They know exactly what they’re doing, and they do it right. You have the
“You can get a cheap burger anywhere, but you got to have a hook.”
unconscious incompetent. He doesn’t know what the hell he is doing, and he doesn’t do it. Then you have the conscious incompetent. He knows what he should do, but he goes to the lake on the weekend and doesn’t do it. Then there’s me, the unconscious competent. He doesn’t know what the hell he is doing but always lands on his feet.” If something unpredictable happens in this often crazy restaurant world, which Chappell says happens all the time, he’ll just work it out. “I mean, lightning is not going to strike and kill you or anything. So you just work it out. It may not be fun or it may be uncomfortable, but it’s going to be worked out. It’s going to be just fine.”
People who live the longest have something to do, he says, noting that he owned his restaurant since 1986. He sold it in 2018, but he’s still there, still coming in, still meeting people. He’s still Jim Chappell being Jim Chappell.
“I have kept reinventing myself over my life,” he says. “I always have some interest. I was interested in books at the library. Before that, sports memorabilia, another restaurant and now I’m interested in family history. I would say: Always have a project and always do something you like to do. That’s exactly how I feel. I try to keep a good mental, physical and spiritual well-being.”
What’s the most important thing in life? “I’ve been married for 58 years to Gina, and it’s the No. 1 thing I did right. The No. 2 thing I did right was opening Chappell’s. And No. 3 thing was quit smoking and drinking.”
Birth date: August 21, 1938
Age: 86
“The most dependable people of the hundreds we hired over the years came from a farm. Talk about discipline. Talk about work ethic. I mean, wow.”
CCliff Cohn is chairman of one of the legendary real estate development companies in Kansas City. The story of his company, Yarco Property Management, follows the familiar pathway of other father-to-son success stories from the early 20th century. But there has always been a strong sense of community throughout the company’s history instilled by its founders from the outset.
of school in the seventh or eighth grade because he threw an eraser at the teacher.”
That example of his dad’s level of discipline and commitment to responsibility rubbed off on Cohn as he learned his own lessons about hard work while in high school working for his dad’s plumbing company. One summer he was a plumber’s helper, toting heavy parts up and down four-story buildings. It was tough work. “I weighed 100 pounds then and couldn’t hardly carry and waddle up the steps with the right part,” he says. But he learned the discipline of just doing the job.
Yarco began with two relatives joining forces. Cohn’s father, Harry, was a principled, old-school, early 20th century entrepreneur determined to provide a living for his family. He and his brother-in-law, Norman Yarmo, invented Yarco in 1923 by combining the first letters of their last names.
Today, Yarco is run by the second and third generation of the Cohn family: Cliff, who started at Yarco in the 1960s and is now chairman, and his son Jonathan, who joined the firm in 1990 and became president and CEO in 2005.
“Part of how each of us grows starts at a very young age and has a lot to do with what we see as we grow up,” Cohn says, reminiscing about watching how his dad worked. “I think it speaks to a lot of how we live our life. The generation that I see today, the newcomer young people coming up, seem to have a different work ethic.”
Cohn’s father was “rocking and rolling” in the early part of the last century when he owned a lot of real estate properties. Then, in 1929, the Great Depression hit. “Everything was mortgaged up to the hilt,” Cohn says. “So I asked him, ‘How did you have the wherewithal to pick yourself up off your butt and put it all back together again?’ He said: ‘Well, it wasn’t that big a deal. You knew what you knew. You knew how to do what you knew how to do. So you dealt with that by figuring out a way to put it to good use.’ He took advantage of the tools that he had. And this from a guy that was kicked out
“At the end of the day, it’s all about relationships. It’s all about people. I like the social intercourse. I like the interplay.”
Cohn went to Southwest High School in KC, then the University of Oklahoma, where he graduated in 1960. He married his sweetheart, Pennie, the day after college graduation. “Sometimes I don’t introduce her as my wife,” he says. “I introduce her as my girlfriend.”
He should have then gone to law school, he says. “Not that I wanted to practice law, but I wanted the discipline that I see in the attorneys I have had the pleasure of dealing with. That was one of my regrets. But I also wanted to get involved in the real estate business because that’s what I grew up with.”
He started at Yarco right out of college and was given management responsibilities for the iconic Blue Building on 333 W. Meyer Blvd. in the Brookside area of Kansas City in 1961. “I spent three years of my life in that big blue building,” Cohn says. “Even today, more than 60 years later, I think I know more about that building than anyone on the face of the earth.”
Then, in 1982, Cohn’s 78-year-old dad passed away. Suddenly, it was up to Cohn to keep things in his dad’s real estate business rolling along, working with his cousin, Bud Yarmo, son of Norman. “Bud and I just clicked,” Cohn says. “Maybe more importantly, our wives clicked. That’s the key to success.”
They built the business together until 1990, when Bud died. “It was just ‘boom.’ His death came all at once. So then I was on my own in 1990.”
The rest, as the saying goes, is history. Yarco thrived under the leadership of Cohn and his son, Jonathan, growing over the years into a full-service
multi-family real estate firm, with 10,000 apartment homes and 100,000 square feet of commercial space across nine states, mostly in Florida, Kansas and Missouri. The Yarco Companies partner and client list includes the Missouri Housing Development Commission, Travelers Insurance, the United States District Court of Western Missouri, the federal Bankruptcy Court, SunAmerica Affordable Housing Partners, UMB Trust and others.
One of the major activities today is the company’s work in developing and managing low- to moderate-income housing for families and the elderly. “It became obvious early on that we have lots of residents in our housing that are living below the poverty level,” Cohn says. “It’s a challenge on the landlord side because there are lots of children in many cases. How do you manage that?”
The children would damage the apartments, causing him to spend $10,000 in some cases just to clean up the property. And that got him thinking: “If we have these extra options in connection with where they lived, and not just a roof over their heads but a place for the kids to do something positive with their time, that would be an advantage. People would want to live there. So I did that. I ended up spending more than $10,000 on a program, but the net result was the human benefit that resulted.”
His “extra options” effort morphed into a not-forprofit program 25 years ago—the Phoenix Family Housing Corporation, which provides not just family housing but sustainable social services to at-risk residents. One of the goals of Phoenix is to provide children with school and entrepreneurial opportunities.
Yarco is also developing the last phase of the 24-acre St. Michael’s Veterans Center to create permanent housing for homeless vets.
Cohn sees beyond the practicality of simply having a home. “There’s a great amount of healing in having a home,” he says. “A home is where I have all my stuff. All my secrets. All my goodies. This is where I can cry. I can laugh. I can close out the world if I want to, or I can open up the world. But this is my castle.” When he has been there to witness a homeless vet step into a fully furnished apartment, “the tears just flow” as the healing begins, Cohn says.
Cohn calls the Phoenix Family his greatest achievement. But he is quick to qualify what that means. “It’s like when you go to the Kauffman Center and the orchestra is there,” he says. “They’re all spread out, and the maestro comes out, and everyone claps, and he bows. They do their wonderful presentation, and the audience applauds. It wasn’t the maestro that made the music. It was all those folks back there. Same thing here. I’m not on the ground dealing with these elderly ladies solving the problems or with these kids solving their problems, teaching them how to read or feeding them because there’s
no food at home. I’m not doing that. I’m providing the place for it to take place.
“There’s a great amount of healing in having a home.”
“At the end of the day, it’s all about relationships,” he says. “It’s all about people. I like the social intercourse. I like the interplay.”
His advice for a long and healthy life? “Take care of yourself. You can’t reach out to others unless you take care of yourself first. You’ve got to be prepared to do that. Be honest with yourself, your colleagues and your customers.”
Birth date: August 26, 1937
Age: 87
“Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.”
AAnywhere there’s impressive new commercial development in the city, the name of the commercial development firm Copaken Brooks, formerly Copaken, White and Blitt, is visible. In all their work—from signature properties such as Arterra, the first high-rise apartment project in the Crossroads area, and the District at Lenexa City Center, to Nordstrom at Oak Park Mall and the Town Pavilion downtown—the firm showcases stunning new designs suited to practical office, retail business and apartment living.
The Kansas City Star, reporting on the death of Irwin Blitt in October 2017, noted that Blitt helped Copaken, White and Blitt assemble nearly 2,000 acres of property between College Boulevard, 119th Street and Metcalf and Nall avenues. That large parcel of land would later become the site of major commercial development, including the Sprint Campus.
Copaken’s father, Herman, founded the firm in 1922 known then as Copaken Realty. In the early 50s, Copaken, fresh out of college, became co-founder of Copaken White and Blitt. He was chairman of the committee that produced a multi-year downtown strategic plan that resulted in $8 billion of development in Kansas City.
The firm’s developments truly have been part of the fabric of the city for over 100 years.
The original company was composed of three people—brothers-in-law Copaken, Lewis White and Irwin Blitt. “We were all totally opposite: the one with a gut instinct (Blitt), one who had relationships which were the same relationships he had from the age of 10 years old until he died, and me, a numbers guy,” Copaken says. “They could tell me what to do, and I could go out and figure out how to do it. I had to work everything out. It would take me six hours to come to the same conclusion as my brother-in-law, which his gut instinct could do in six minutes. He was a good partner to have. He definitely had a sort of sixth sense about the retail business.”
“I don’t think there is a secret to a long and healthy life. Do lots of exercise, stay in shape, eat well, and go to work every day.”
Copaken retired in 2012, and today, he concentrates on spending time with his family and working on his personal development.
On any day of the week, you might find Copaken chugging up the hills around his home in Mission Hills on his 10-speed bike. It’s not a relaxing outing. It’s serious ongoing maintenance. He’s been riding a bike nearly every other day since he was five years old, and even in his 80s, he challenges himself when he rides. “I don’t think there is a secret to a long and healthy life,” he says. “Do lots of exercise, stay in shape, eat well, and go to work every day.”
Copaken says that his life has always been very structured. “I always was involved in sports,” he says. “I was a coach of Little League for something like 30 years in various sports. I always came home and coached football or whatever it was, and we always ate dinner together as a family. I didn’t really need to set up a work/life balance goal.”
Business challenges came and went for him and the firm during his career. He recalls two during his time at the firm—one a success and one a failure. That failure came from the only zoning battle he lost, which was for a development deal he was working on in Westport, Connecticut. “It was to build an enclosed mall shopping center in Westport in 1972,” he says.
“We had a hearing that started at 8 pm and was finally over at 4 am. That was when the local hardware store dealer said, and I quote, ‘If you approve this mall, I will have to stay open on Sundays.’ That was enough to sway the winning vote against us.”
The successful challenge was developing the Rockaway Townsquare in Rockaway, New Jersey, which opened in September 1977, a time of increased interest in environmental issues. No one wanted to upset any of the habitats of local wildlife with the development, Copaken says. “That was a several-years challenge, which we won.”
Copaken says there are a lot of moving parts in the commercial development business. “Our normal project would take five to seven years to build,” he says. “Over five to seven years, you can make a lot of
“I would say just be true to yourself.”
mistakes. The whole market can change. The whole industry can change.”
Family has been key to the firm’s success. “For most family businesses, I think the numbers are 60 percent that don’t make it to the second generation and 90 percent don’t make it to the third generation,” he says. “We’ve made it to the third and maybe the fourth generation coming up. The fourth is in training.”
Copaken told all three of his sons to go work for somebody else when they got out of college. If they wanted to, they could come back to work at the firm. If they didn’t want to, they didn’t need to. “Jon and Keith came back and are running the business now. And the third, Jamie, is a psychotherapist who chose not to go into business.”
For people just starting up any business, Copaken says that it’s important to have a clear objective of what you want to do, describe it in great detail and have a path of how you’re going to get there. “That usually involves a product,” he says. “So whatever the product is, clearly know what the market is before you start.”
An example in commercial real estate: If you need 500,000 people in your market area to make it a success and you only have 50,000 potential customers, then you’re not going to win. “It sounds so obvious,” he says, “but I would say 90 percent of the people skip that step, thinking they have a product that everybody wants to have.”
What’s the most important thing for a business person? “I would say just be true to yourself,” Copaken says. “It’s about finding out who you are and being satisfied with that person—with the limitations and with the expectations and with the accomplishments. I can’t think of anything more important than that for happiness or success.”
Has his life been a marathon or a sprint? “It’s been a plodder,” he says, chuckling at the thought. “Is a plodder a marathon or a sprint? I think I’ve gone from day to day plodding, from one thing to another, and it’s not either a marathon or a sprint. It’s certainly not a sprint. I’ve never liked sprinting.”
Birth date: January 9, 1939
Age: 86
“Study history because life works in strange ways, and when you look at the big picture, it makes a lot of sense.”
He was the former director of the 125-year-old American Royal, receiving the title of Honorary Director of the American Royal for Life in 2014. He was the former vice president of the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners, as appointed by Governor John Ashcraft.
Dillingham was the former co-chair of the Friends of the Aquarium. He chaired or co-chaired 10 county or citywide elections for issues and candidates. He led the project to name I-635 after Kansas Senator Harry Darby (I-670 is the Dillingham Expressway, named for his dad Jay).
He is also a former chairman of the American Royal, and the former president of the National World War I Museum. He is the former president of the Metropolitan Community College Foundation and the Missouri Institute for Justice. The Missouri House of Representatives named Dillingham an “Outstanding Missourian” on April 25, 2007.
And on and on. The extensive list is dizzying proof of Dillingham’s skills as a visionary leader, a solid fundraiser and a man of integrity. He carried on the work of his father, and now, he’s working with his son Allen to carry on the work still to be done as the Kansas City stockyards embraces a hip and happening vibe, with new startups crowding into the area.
Sitting in his office on the top floor of the Livestock Building in Kansas City’s West Bottoms, John Dillingham has a file of six pages stuffed with lines and lines of accomplishments, board memberships and honors he earned over the years— all ready for review.
“Your word was your bond here in the stockyards.”
The stockyards were a defining industry in the development of Kansas City. During their heyday beginnings in the late 1800s, the stockyards had a daily quota of 170,000 animals, represented 91 percent of the city’s industrial output, employed 20,000 people, received livestock from 35 states and shipped to 42 states. By the early 1900s, it was the largest horse and mule market in the country and the second busiest stockyard in the country. According to the Kansas City Kansan newspaper, in 1923, 2,631,808 cattle were received
at the Kansas City stockyards. Activity there peaked in the 1940s. The chaotic flood of 1951 essentially killed the business. The last cattle auction was held in September 1991.
The Dillinghams lived on a farm just 10 miles north of the stockyards, the fifth generation at that time to live north of the river. John’s dad, Jay—6 foot 3 inches tall and 250 pounds—was president of the stockyards and a strict disciplinarian that John never crossed. “One of the things my dad told me early on was, ‘You need to do your chores twice a day every day of the week, and then you can do whatever else you want to do,’” Dillingham says. “You take a look at all those pages of accomplishments there I have for review, it shows that I guess I did my chores first and then went ahead and did what I wanted to do.”
Even though times are different now—the only activity at the stockyards now is the American Royal livestock show, horse show, rodeo and barbecue competition held each year in September—Dillingham continues working on the top floor of the historic livestock stockyard building. Three doors down from his office is where the Future Farmers of America was created in 1928, he says.
But he often reflects on the force for the city that the stockyards represented back in the heyday of moving cattle around the country. “‘If it wasn’t for the Kansas City Stockyards, there would be no Country Club Plaza’—my dad told me a number of times he heard J.C. Nichols say that in public,” Dillingham says. Life in the stockyards back in the early days was a roughand-tumble existence for the cattle drivers. Personal integrity was the way people got along back then, and it remains a part of doing business today for Dillingham. “Your word was your bond here in the stockyards,” he says. “If you were to violate it, and people in those days didn’t have cell phones, the word went out and everybody stopped doing business with you, period. You screwed up and you’re out of here.”
The Dillingham family’s colorful history includes John’s namesake (and Jay’s grandfather), Sheriff John Dillingham, who served Platte County. Sheriff Dillingham was shot and killed in Farley, Missouri, in 1900. He was 47 years old. One of his sons, Henry, who was 17 at the time, shot and killed the doctor that killed his dad. Later, at age 22, Henry accepted the offer to stay on as acting sheriff of Platte County and fill out his dad’s term.
Members of a recent ceremony committee that was assembled to honor Sheriff Dillingham found his pistol, pocket watch and handcuffs, which they gave to John. “It was a call out of the blue,” he says. “So was that fate, ability, luck or divine intervention that made that happen? I didn’t know the gun was out there until two months ago. This is a true story that just happened.”
Today, Dillingham stays physically active, with the goal of “staying vertical, keep breathing.”
“I have gotten hooked on the family tree, on Ancestry (the genealogy website),” he says. “Every night, I spend an hour and a half entering names. I’m up to 390,000 in my tree now,” he says. “I’m not even near done. I’m
entering right now, every three or four days, another 1,000 names, one finger at a time, literally. One of the reasons I study history is out of curiosity to learn who these various related folks are because their genes somehow pass through all of us. What percentage? Who knows? Is it 1 percent or 90 percent?”
Is it time to retire now? “What is the meaning of ‘retirement’? Dad was in this office till he was 97. I will have been in one of these two offices next year for 30 years. I live a very regimented life.”
He recommends simply staying busy—and having fun doing that activity doesn’t enter into it. “What’s the definition of busy? Ride a bike, go down and get the mail. Just anything. I got things to do and I do them. One might take five minutes, another takes an hour. It’s just something I got to do.”
One of the challenges he faced in his life centered around his time as a cadet at the Wentworth Military Academy. “We had 600 cadets in those days,” he says. “I went there for junior college my last year. I was the only one in the school to go through the whole year without a single demerit. And they told me that Douglas MacArthur had done that at West Point.”
“What’s the definition of busy? Ride a bike, go down and get the mail. Just anything. I got things to do and I do them.”
Anybody that outranked you could “stick you,” or give you a demerit, Dillingham says. “When I was getting fairly close to the end of the year, and with other cadets knowing that I had no demerits, it was the time that you don’t screw up at all. That becomes an internal challenge. It keeps you out of the pool hall, the beer halls and so forth,” he says. “I’ve been inspired by seeing people achieve whatever it was, and so that always kind of motivated me to be a little better. Do a little better. So if you do that on numerous fronts, you don’t have time to screw up.”
Life is pretty simple, when it comes down to it, Dillingham says, referencing some of what he learned as a Boy Scout. “Do what I call a good turn daily and be trustworthy and tell the truth,” he says. “The older I get, those things I was taught in scouting are real. It’s as simple as the devil. Life is not that complicated. It doesn’t need to be.”
Birth date: September 29, 1941 Age: 83
“I do think there’s luck, but I think if you don’t put the effort into it and the amount of work, I don’t think luck cuts it. I think whatever you accomplish takes hard work.”
IIt was 1967. A major marketing plan was about to be launched that would change the fortunes of a local retail jewelry company. Barnett Helzberg, Jr. was working at his grandfather’s jewelry store, which opened in Kansas City in 1915. His dad worked there, too, as the business flourished. But he died suddenly in 1963, and Barnett took over the business.
Barnett used the momentum his father began for this local, family-run business, growing the jewelry store to more than 200 stores across 23 states by the end of the century. It became the third largest jewelry chain by 2010.
Back in 1967, Barnett was dating a striking young woman, Shirley Bush, a farmer’s daughter fresh out of college who was working at broadcast and advertising agencies in Kansas City. Barnett proposed, and they got married. “It was a quick engagement,” Shirley Bush Helzberg says. “His mother closed the deal.”
The love story goes that Barnett was so happy Shirley said yes that he made a lapel button with the words “I Am Loved” on it.
That slogan quickly became part of a national marketing platform that is still considered today as one of the greatest marketing inventions ever for the retail diamond industry. Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, Joe Namath and President Lyndon B. Johnson all wore the button when it first came out, among other celebrities. It’s one of those rare iconic marketing phenomenons. And it almost didn’t happen.
“Barnett had visited me in California for a weekend at the time,” Shirley says. She was working at a radio station in Los Angeles. “Then, coming back to Kansas City on the airplane, he scribbled that phrase down and brought it into his office. Actually I think he wadded it up and threw it away.”
“You want to really get involved in one or two things and really look at something where you can make a difference.”
Barnett had second thoughts, retrieved the crumpled drawing and showed it to his father. His father said, “Well, if you’re going to do it, do it big.” Barnett was talking about doing an ‘I Am Loved’ pin right from the beginning. His father told him that he would probably bring in a bunch of hippies. “Those hippies will come in and want to get pins.”
The slogan was printed on a banner and flown over a Chiefs game with no explanation about it, just the words ‘I Am Loved.’ “And it just went wild,” Shirley says. “Truly. It went all over the world. Every language, every country.”
As the Helzberg business thrived, Barnett and Shirley became one of Kansas City’s best-known and best-loved philanthropists, with Shirley leading the way. They created a successful business mentoring program in 1995 inspired by their 23-year mentoring relationship with Ewing Kauffman. They led the development of one of the two venues inside the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in 2011— the 1,600 seat Helzberg Hall, where the Kansas City Symphony performs—while Shirley worked as the board president of the Kansas City Symphony. And they got the Kansas City Zoo Aquarium built in 2023.
The Helzbergs are a well-known force of good for the city, with most of their community efforts fronted by Shirley. They support many other arts organizations in Kansas City, such as Starlight Theatre, the Shakespeare Festival and the Kansas City Ballet. Shirley is also a trustee of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
Shirley’s most recent involvement is in the 14th Street railroad bridge development—a new entertainment and event space being built on the old Rock Island Bridge alongside the city’s West Bottoms—designed to help grow riverfront business on the west part of town.
“This is going to be so incredible because there are so many industrial-type structures in this country that could be renovated,” says the engaging 83-yearold. “They’re just sitting there. This railroad is over 100 years old. It was built to ship cattle, so there’s a real connection there with the stockyards and the cattle. And it was built very sturdy.”
Shirley continues her philanthropic work at a steady pace even at her advanced age, fooling everyone who sees her. “People always say to me that I can’t be that old. I say, ‘Oh, thank you.’ They say I look 60.”
Shirley says she’s been involved in a lot of organizations that had challenges, but she found ways to address them. “It took time, and it took a lot of meetings, and it took a lot of listening with the individuals who were involved,” she says. “But we always overcame challenges and made each organization stronger.”
Discovering her own work-life balance was something Shirley says she didn’t accomplish, admitting that she is a “24/7 workaholic,” even today. She recommends working as long as you can get out. “If you can’t get out today, you can work remotely,” she says. “I think it’s good for you mentally. If I do have something that I would probably do differently, it’s to not spend quite as much time in the community and more with family.”
Shirley’s children were involved in some things she did, but she feels as if she may have neglected some close friends and family over the years. “Barnett and I have lost many of our friends (due to death), and I regret that I didn’t spend more time with them. So I think I didn’t have a great work-life balance.”
Regardless, her joy and sheer love of living comes through whenever she speaks to anyone. “I was happiest probably the day before today,” she says. “I’ve always loved whatever period I am involved in, and nothing could have brought me more happiness than having my sons born. Just that experience of cradling a child. I think seeing babies—and life and the beauty of life—are my greatest joys.”
People need to find their focus early in life, she advises, and they can do that by simply talking to other people. “I believe very much in mentors and talking with people that have perhaps experienced a situation,” she says. “Or maybe they have had successes that weren’t successful in the long run and they’re able to share that. If we don’t listen in life, we can’t learn how to do anything, especially in the community.”
Shirley’s business philosophy comes from working with other leaders to do something of real value and finding out how to succeed from those she surrounds herself with. “Often I think about people
who, because I was exposed to being around them and their type of leadership, that type of leadership gets ingrained in me,” she says. “One of the things that I feel about leadership is you should gather information and make determinations by consensus. I think so many people who have leadership roles, such as heads of big boards, want to have a vote.”
Often, when a subject without consensus is voted on, there are always winners and losers, she says. It doesn’t have to be that way. “Gathering consensus is a skill I attribute to Don Hall, who said to me at one point that he never in his community life had a vote. So I always try to get consensus. And in my mind I say thank you Don Hall.”
“We always overcame challenges and made each organization stronger.”
Shirley has a message for the younger crowd—30-, 40-, 50-year-old folks. “I think the most important thing is to really evaluate what you want to do,” she says. “Someone will ask you to participate in something. What I learned is don’t do it because your friend asks you to do it. Do it because you have researched it, you learned about it and it’s something you really enjoy and believe in. You want to really get involved in one or two things and really look at something where you can make a difference.”
Birth date: May 26, 1936 Age: 88
“I’ve come to believe that one of the main traits of personal success for anyone in any business is authenticity.”
CCommercial real estate maven Ralph Varnum has already accomplished so much in his long life—founder, president, director, leader—but he is not winding down his career. He became the founding principal of the real estate brokerage firm Varnum, Armstrong, Deeter, Inc. in January 1969, essentially spinning the firm out from Coldwell Banker.
He has been the national president of the Certified Commercial Investment Member Institute, national president of the Realtors National Marketing Institute, president of the Commercial Investment Division of the Johnson County Board Realtors and past president of both the Overland Park Chamber of Commerce and Shawnee Mission Medical Center. He was also a former director of Shawnee Mission Medical Center.
He still comes to work every day and still does the work. His firm is more involved in managing properties, but it still does a fair amount of brokerage, leasing, and sales. “We rely a lot on our properties that we have developed and still own from over the years, which are mainly smaller retail,” he says.
Varnum stays active with the Overland Park Chamber of Commerce to keep involved in what’s going on around the city.
The real estate business is largely a contact business, he says. It’s who you know and what opportunity they present that can help get the work done, something that’s harder to do when you get older. “And all of a sudden, you realize all your contacts have either retired or are not with us anymore, so it’s easy to feel like you’re not involved,” he says. “You have to stay involved as long as you feel like you’re able to make good decisions. You have to be yourself and don’t try to sell something that isn’t there. You should give honest answers, good or bad.”
Reputation comes into play every day. “From the time you are a kid on, reputation is absolutely everything,” Varnum says.
“There are going to be ups and downs. That’s the norm—ups and downs in life and in any business. So prepare for it, put a little money away, and plan for the long term.”
Commercial real estate is a long-term business. Those who succeed have to have a long-term vision, Varnum says. “It is not a get-rich-quick business at all. Almost every property we have ever developed has struggled initially. You may have to hold it for 10 years before it even stabilizes. Then, long term, it ends up being a good investment.”
All those business plans took a hit during the pandemic, which Varnum called “three lost years” in commercial real estate development. “But we were very fortunate,” he says. “They’re mainly smaller retail. Those tenants did remarkably well during the pandemic. I just admire them tremendously. They’re creative and resilient. They hung in there.”
Varnum works with smaller tenants a lot, but he loves the complicated big deals, sometimes connected to working with startups. “But in terms of just feeling good, it’s from helping someone that’s just trying to get started,” he says. “A lot of times they’re immigrants. We’ve got several businesses run by people from India or China or Asia. These are hard-working, smart people that just make it happen. We’ll roll the dice on someone like that.”
The most important thing in his life right now is his grandchildren. “I’m an old dad,” he says. “Of my three sons, the oldest just entered his 40s. The other two are still in their 30s. So I’m just having grandchildren. And that would have to be the number one thing in my life right now. It’s a real thrill because it is something I wasn’t sure I would get to see.”
Over the course of his business life, Varnum says that he tended to charge ahead without knowing something—and without knowing that he didn’t know something. “I’ve been willing to jump into things, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt that I didn’t have more to learn,” he says.
His advice for 30-, 40- and 50-somethings is to make sure that you really love what you’re doing. “There are going to be ups and downs. That’s the norm—ups and downs in life and in any business. So prepare for it, put a little money away, and plan for the long term.”
He’s been lucky, he says, to be blessed with good health. “So far, most of my marbles are still there,” he says. But if he could magically become an expert in something, it would be international relations. “We’re so globally connected now,” Varnum says. “It’s ridiculous that we’ve got a couple of wars going on around the world. And yet they’re not easy to solve. The people that work in that area and are effective in that area are doing great things. That would be interesting for me.”
Life for Varnum is about figuring out how to get outside of himself. “It’s a very hard thing to do,” he says, “and I’m not there yet. Figuring out how to concentrate on others and let them know you are interested in them.”
Varnum has witnessed social upheaval during his life and is encouraged by the positive change that resulted. “I think it started with Harry Truman and then Lyndon
“You have to stay involved as long as you feel like you’re able to make good decisions.”
Johnson about racial issues,” he says. “We’re at that stage where we’re a long way from where we need to be. But that’s changed a tremendous amount in my life.” He looks back to his childhood and remembers that he never felt he was prejudiced. “But some of the conversations that we had were just natural,” he says. “Some of the things you’d say just automatically back then, what you talked about. Those were very, very racially improper at the time.”
The real secret to life is about how you treat other people, Varnum says, which is something that his religion taught him. He goes to church once a week. His oldest son, Benedict, is an Episcopalian priest in Elkhorn, Nebraska. “When you boil down Christianity, the main commandment is to love your God, treat other people like yourself,” he says. “I think that’s the main message. The best advice I have ever gotten is to take every day one at a time and remember that the sun is going to come up in the morning.”
FIRST ROW
Alvin Brooks, Ollie Gates, Anita Gorman
SECOND ROW
Debbie Granoff, Barnett Helzberg, Judge Howard Sachs
THIRD ROW
George Toma, Myron Wang, Audrey Wegst
The elderly elite of Kansas City share their life journeys, what motivated them along the way, the lucky breaks and tough times, and advice for staying active and relevant in their later years
Written by David Hodes
Interviewed by David M. Block, David Hodes and Pete Mundo
Birth date: May 3, 1932 Age: 92
“Knowing who you are is important. Don’t let other people define you just because of the color of your skin. And always respect yourself.”
There is probably no one in this city in any level of city government who doesn’t know about Alvin Brooks. He was the first Black police officer of Kansas City in 1954. He was an assistant city manager in 1972, during which time he formed the Ad Hoc Group Against Crime. He was mayor pro tem from 1999 to 2007, while Kay Barnes was mayor. In 2010, he was appointed to the Kansas City Police Department Board of Police Commissioners.
TAnd in 2024, at 92 years old, he was elected to the Hickman Mills School District Board of Directors. He’s been honored by U.S. presidents, U.S. senators and civil rights activists. He is nonstop. His daughter says that he still has multiple phones all over the house to keep in touch with everyone who reaches out, whoever that may be.
Brooks has been called the “Prince of Kansas City” for his courageous civil rights work. Stories about his decisive leadership and steadiness in the face of personal danger are legendary.
The arc of Brooks’ life story reads like one of those movies ripped out of today’s headlines of a man facing down the evils of the neighborhoods. In fact, there is a biopic about his life: The Heroic True-Life Adventures of Alvin Brooks. Academy award winner and University of Kansas professor Kevin Willmott wrote and directed the movie, based on Brooks’ 2021 book Binding Us Together
When talking to Brooks, knowing all the injustice he has faced down and the overt racism he has had to endure over the years, one feels the sense of internal calm that he shares with anyone in his space. Maybe
“I believe, therefore, we are all connected. We are all equal, and my faith guides me that way.”
it’s one of those traits that all heroes have: a coolness that’s not aloof but oddly poignant.
But there’s more to the man, especially as he continues his turn as one of the city’s elder gentlemen.
“I’m a person of faith,” Brooks says. “I believe that there is a higher power in the universe. We’re here to protect all of that. I believe, therefore, we are all connected. We are all equal, and my faith guides me that way.”
The highlight of Brooks’ life was marrying his late wife of 63 years (married in August 1950) when he was 18. “We were both teenagers,” he says. “Marriage was important. Fatherhood was important. I have six kids, 17 grandkids, 41 great-grandkids. I dedicated myself to my kids.”
As he grew older, he says, he began to think less about the civic kinds of things he was doing and more about the responsibilities related to the African American community as descendants of enslaved people.
“Those kind of combined together,” he says.
To the young men in the family, he says, he always shares with them that it’s not easy in America being a little Black boy. “I want them to be men with stature and honesty and integrity. Let that manhood be shown.”
“Sometimes we do better protecting the universe than we do protecting each other.”
Brooks describes himself as a “converted Catholic”—though he admits that he has a complicated relationship with the church. Over the course of his life, Brooks discovered troubling facts about the Catholic Church, an organized religion that he says “probably wouldn’t exist in history without slavery,” as they colonized areas of the globe back in the 1500s and 1600s. “The Catholic Church has never apologized for slavery,” he says. “They never apologized for the role they played or didn’t play. That troubles me.”
Brooks was also turned down by Rockhurst University because they didn’t accept the semester credits he had already earned at a local junior college, further deepening his distrust of Catholics. “So I said, ‘The hell with you.’” He instead went to the University of Missouri-Kansas City, eventually graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1959 and Master of Arts in 1973 from the College of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded an honorary doctorate degree in 2012. UMKC also offers the Alvin Brooks scholarship to students majoring in criminal justice.
But then, like a lot of what happened to him in his life, events transpired to right the wrong Rockhurst committed.
Brooks developed a friendly relationship with then-president of Rockhurst University, Fr. Tom Curran, who started at Rockhurst in 2006. “He’s my brother, my friend,” Brooks told the Kansas City Star in an article about the two. Fr. Curran prioritized diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and established a number of social justice initiatives. When the university trustees asked what he wanted to leave as his legacy, Curran told them that he wanted to build a justice center named after Alvin Brooks. And that’s what happened.
The university broke ground on the 10,000-squarefoot, $6 million Alvin Brooks Center for Faith-Justice in December 2022. “So what goes around comes around,” Brooks says.
Now, Brooks is writing his second book, this one for middle-schoolers. He dreams about making his first book, now a 46-minute biopic, into a feature film.
What advice does he have for the kids of today?
“I want to hear from them,” he says. “I think we, as adults, do too much advising. But I would tell them to always be kind, be generous. Never feel that you are better than anybody else. But always remember that you’re as good as anybody else.” Brooks continues to live the part of the protector who gives back to the city. He knows who he is and where he fits in today’s society.
“Sometimes we do better protecting the universe than we do protecting each other,” he says. “And so I see my role as being able to do the best I can while I can. I still think that I have a role to play. That’s my life. I kind of live a life of knowing who I am and how I relate in the universe of other people.”
Birth date: July 3, 1931 Age: 93
“Live your life the best way you can. The world is changing all the time, so you have to change with the times. Roll with the waves.”
TThe best barbecue in Kansas City is always a hot topic of discussion among residents and visitors alike. There are great stories of the best places, the best operators and the best meats that keep the conversation lively. And Ollie Gates, now in his 90s, has a great story to tell about the ups and downs of his popular restaurants, which now employ the fourth generation of his family.
When a customer enters a Gates & Sons Bar-B-Q restaurant and is greeted with the classic “Hi, may I help you?” it already feels like it’s going to be a different experience. Any of the five Gates restaurants delivers the goods in the greater Kansas City area. You got your delicious short ends. You got your killer burnt ends. You got the classic Gates sauce. You got a Kansas City original right there, man, and a proud Kansas Citian in charge.
Gates, a bonafide Kansas City barbecue baron who was cooking and selling barbecue as a young adult, can now be found sitting in a back room or a nearby office (usually at the headquarters on Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard) monitoring business. He’s always watching. Always making sure customers are happy.
It was Gates’ dad, George, who first got the family business rolling back in 1946. Back then, it was called Gates Ol’ Kentucky at 19th and Vine. The business moved a few times—to 23rd and Charlotte, back to 19th and Vine, then to 24th and Brooklyn. It stayed there until 1957, serving the neighborhood and the fans of the Monarchs, who were playing in Municipal Stadium at 22nd and Brooklyn. The Kansas City Athletics moved into the renovated stadium in 1955 and brought more customers.
Ollie Gates graduated from Lincoln High School in 1949, then served two years in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He joined his dad in the business in 1956.
“I never thought about challenges so much because life, to me, is a challenge by itself. So every step is a challenge, as far as I am concerned.”
Then, in 1960, his dad died, and the young engineer took over the business with new ideas on customer service and the design of the barbecue oven. His mother and sister joined in. “I love to build stuff,” Gates says. “That brings me happiness.”
He eventually grew Gates & Sons into several locations in Kansas City, growing out from the oldest store still based on 12th and Brooklyn to two other locations in Kansas City and one each in Leawood, KCK (now closed), Olathe (briefly) and Independence. He also opened a Gates in Las Vegas for a brief period of time “just to test the waters,” he says. “It didn’t do too good.” Gates is credited with inspiring the growth of barbecue businesses around the city as more and more people came to the realization that barbecue was Kansas City’s claim to fame. On September 18, 2021, Gates was inducted into the American Royal Barbecue Hall of Fame, and in August 2023, he was inducted into the Missouri Restaurant Association Hall of Fame.
His work philosophy is simple. “I start in the morning when I wake up, and go to bed when I am through working,” he says. “Everywhere I go, I take my office with me. This is not a job to me. It’s a way of life. I earn my living with the way of life that I live. The restaurant business is a way of life. Period.”
Gates gets home about 2 am most nights and is back at it early the next morning. That’s seven days a week, 365 days a year. “I never had a week of vacation in my life,” he says.
He had a few moments early on when he wasn’t sure going into the barbecue business was the right
thing to do. “When I first started, the smoke was getting in my eyes,” he says. “And I said. ‘I’m going to get away from here and never go to another barbecue place in my life.’”
Any other challenges in life that he had to overcome? “I never thought about challenges so much because life, to me, is a challenge by itself,” he says. “Every step is a challenge, as far as I am concerned. You have to be careful where you are going more than what you are doing. But there comes a comfort level in certain areas. When you are accustomed to anything, there is a comfort level that goes with that.”
That familiar Gates greeting “Hi, may I help you?” came about because Gates wanted to check out his incoming customer in a friendly way. “During the time that I was raised, there were a lot of people that came in to the restaurant, and everybody wasn’t a nice person,” he says. “So we wanted to make sure we recognize everybody that came through the door—good, bad and different—and say ‘hi’ to them. Make sure that they know we’re ready for them, whatever services they want.”
Gates did more than just run a thriving barbecue business. He had a lot of friends in the political arena, he says. He was the campaign manager for Bruce Watkins when he ran for mayor in 1979. Watkins was a civil rights trailblazer who served with the Tuskegee Airmen, and was the first African American elected to the Kansas City Council (Watkins lost to Dick Berkley). Gates was appointed to the Board of KC Parks and Recreation as a result of his work with Watkins. He served on the board from 1980 to 1998 and was president from 1991 until 1998. And speaking of politics: Gates served up meals for Congressman John Kennedy and President Bill Clinton when they visited the city.
The worst advice he ever got was from a small-business associate who told him not to open up a restaurant in Leawood on 105th and State Line. “He said: ‘Don’t do
that. You’re going too fast,’” Gates says. “Let’s see, 25 years now in the same spot. Hmm. Yes, I guess I am going too fast to open up a second one.”
Gates has seen the barbecue business grow substantially in the city. A Kansas City visitors bureau publication reports that there are more than 100 barbecue restaurants in the city. But Gates doesn’t fear competition. When he first started out, there were only about four barbecue places in town. “The more people come into the barbecue business, the more people they bring into the business,” he says. “When they start talking about barbecue, I’m with them. What makes us different from the rest of the barbecue restaurants is that Gates flavor, period.”
“Everywhere I go, I take my office with me. This is not a job to me. It’s a way of life.”
Changing attitudes about nutrition has affected business. “You get all these brains and everybody tells you what you should eat and when you should eat,” Gates says. “We just stay with a basic thing. We don’t have the same amount of clientele that we had at one time, but we have just enough to keep us in business. And that’s important.”
His advice for the younger generation is to exploit the opportunities they are given. “If there’s something that you really like doing, then pursue that and you’ll be better off,” he says. “You do a better job with something that you take a real appreciation for. Be a good citizen. Follow the Ten Commandments. That’s all you need to know. Love what you’re trying to do regardless of how much money you are going to make.”
Birth date: November 17, 1931 Age: 93
“I think we all have to try to recognize that each one of us is put in this place, and we should try to make it a better place.”
WGorman was the first woman appointed to the Kansas City Board of Parks and Recreation Commissioners in 1979. She went on to serve as president of the board from 1986 to 1991. Her fundraising efforts resulted in millions of dollars for Starlight Theatre, where, in 2007, the Anita B. Gorman Court of Honor was created.
Gorman also served on the Missouri Conservation Commission from 1993 to 2005 and was the first woman to chair the commission in 1996. The Missouri Department of Conservation Discovery Center in Kansas City is named after her, as is a hiking trail at Smithville Lake in honor of her restoration efforts.
The list of recognitions is extensive and impressive:
Gorman was inducted into the Missouri Recreation and Parks Hall of Fame in 2015. She was honored with the Jay B. Dillingham Leadership Award for Northland Neighborhood Association in 2008; the Mid-America Regional Council Regional Leadership Award in 2002; the First Woman Award of Kansas City in 2000; the KCI/Northland Regional Chamber Leadership Award in 1996; a Missouri Parks and Recreation Association Citation for Outstanding State Park Commissioner in 1989; the Outstanding Citizen of Kansas City, Missouri, Communications Matrix Award in 1981; and the Missouri Municipal League Outstanding Citizen of Kansas City, Missouri, Award in 1983.
There’s more, always more, with this nonstop nonagenarian who continues her philanthropic and community organizer ways even to this day.
When discussing the life and times of Anita Gorman, who is widely acknowledged as one of Kansas City’s greatest community leaders, it’s difficult to summarize her lifelong achievements in the limited allotted space here. Much of her work was behind the scenes, persuading and fundraising for various city projects. But her name is familiar to keeneyed Kansas Citians because some of her work resulted in special recognition.
Gorman’s family were farmers in Palmyra, Missouri (near Hannibal), until World War II broke out. Most of their farm help was drafted, so the family moved to Kansas City in 1943. Gorman finished 7th and 8th grades here. Her father, Zack McPike, took a job as a mechanic with TWA.
One of her fondest memories was meeting and later marrying Gerald Gorman, who she considers to be her personal hero. Gerald was the first Northlander to attend Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in 1956. He then went on to work in various law firms and as a civic leader in Kansas City. “I knew who I wanted to marry when I was 16 years old,” Anita says, “but I had to wait till I was 22 to get through school.”
The two married in 1954 and had two daughters— Guinevere and Victoria. Gerald passed in 2016.
“You have to help out people that need help. And sometimes you need help. You have to be aware of that.”
Anita Gorman felt lucky to live in a town where “you don’t have to be beautiful or handsome or wealthy or smart or rich,” she says. “If you’re willing to work, you can be on the team. That’s not true everywhere. But here in this town, anybody can be on a team. As a result of that, you can get things done.”
The most important thing is family, she says. “I’ve been very lucky. I’ve had good parents, a good husband, good children, good grandchildren and now good great-grandchildren. I’ve had a few friends who had no family, and that’s really sad.”
One of her first experiences raising money and helping change the status quo of a place occurred after Gerald finished at Harvard Law School and they moved into a house at 901 N.E. Vivion Road. “At the time, it was located on empty land,” she says. “We were told by the neighbors that it was said they were going to put a used car lot there. So we fought that off from 1958 to 1979. Finally, the city said if you raise the money to build a fountain, to be the first fountain north of the river in the city of fountains, we won’t allow the used car lot there. So that’s what we did.”
Gorman recalls the work on the Kansas City Zoo, which the Department of Agriculture threatened to close in the mid-1980s unless it got an upgrade. “We had quite a time with the park board because they hadn’t had an election in decades,” she says. “When you have an election, you have to have money to make it happen. And we were not doing very well. The city auditor at the time (Mark Funkhouser) was not a supporter. But Mayor Dick Berkley couldn’t have been more supportive.”
The board was losing ground because of what Funkhouser was putting out about the zoo, and he began to campaign against them. “We were really getting desperate,” she says. “The week before the election, a young woman that we never heard of gave us $100,000 and said, ‘Use this to get that zoo going and get that election won.’ She helped save the zoo.”
The vote came down in their favor. The zoo today has been ranked as one of the top 10 zoos in the country.
Throughout her busy life, Gorman says that the most important thing for her is her belief in God. “He makes it possible for us to do things,” she says. “You have to help out people that need help. And sometimes you need help. You have to be aware of that.
“If you’re not out working, then you better do some physical working out,” she says. “We’ve been given a life. We’re supposed to do something to be proud of.”
Her ancestors didn’t have long lives, but she has beaten those odds. “I’m kind of a mystery,” she says, “but it makes me think there must be something I’m supposed to be doing that I haven’t gotten done yet.”
So she recently got to work on a new project. “We have a facility called Miles for Smiles. There was a study made that there were lots of children that live north of the river that did not have good dental care. We managed to raise the money and get some help with that. As a result, we got this going.”
Miles for Smiles is a nonprofit organization based that provides free dental and vision care services to low-income children. What started out as services for one or two schools now applies to 30 schools in Platte and Clay counties. “They are to the point where they’ve got to be able to have more room. There is such a backlog where kids have to wait as long as six months to have work done on their teeth. That’s not acceptable.”
And just like everything she has worked on over her life, Anita takes the necessary action, pushes the right buttons to get the ball rolling. She had a mid-year meeting for fundraising for a new location for the dental work. “I can get some things started,” she says.
“If you’re willing to work, you can be on the team. That’s not true everywhere. But here in this town, anybody can be on a team. As a result of that, you can get things done.”
Birth date: July 28, 1934
Age: 90
“I don’t know what advice I would give to someone except to look upon life positively and realize how fortunate you are.”
DDebbie Bretton Granoff describes herself as a “professional volunteer,” doing that for various community organizations over much of her lifetime.
One of her earliest volunteer experiences was with the Jewish Federation of Great Kansas City with Executive Director Sol Koenigsberg in the early 1970s. She was the Federation’s photographer. Even now, in her 90s, Granoff continues her volunteer work with the Federation.
Granoff’s father, Rabbi Max Bretton, had effectively paved the way for her connection to the Federation. He was a graduate of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he met Mary, an aspiring opera singer whom he went on to marry. He was a rabbi in Hammond, Indiana, who fought the Klan in the 1920s and preached racial harmony before moving to Kansas City in 1933. He was offered the position of director of the Kansas City Jewish Community Center. It was around that time that the local Jewish Federation was formed, and Bretton became the first executive director. He held that position until 1946.
So it seemed like destiny that Granoff, his only daughter, would be serving the Jewish community in some capacity. That destiny would come to fruition later in a sort of roundabout way.
In Kansas City, Granoff’s father eventually got into the hospitality business with his own place, Bretton’s Restaurant. Located at 12th Street and Baltimore Avenue, it was one of the classic landmark restaurants in the heart of the city, serving patrons from 1945 to 1976. His daughter would work there occasionally.
“He had a customer that came up to him and said, ‘Max, if you continue to serve them, I won’t be back.’ And my father just put his hand on his shoulder and said, ‘I’ll miss you.’”
“It was considered the place to go,” Granoff says. “All of the celebrities, politicians, anybody who was anybody went there. And part of the reason they came was my father. We were the first restaurant to serve Black people. He had a customer that came up to him and said, ‘Max, if you continue to serve them, I won’t be back.’ And my father just put his hand on his shoulder and said, ‘I’ll miss you.’”
Granoff married her husband, Loeb, in 1953, and they had two children together: Joel and Lauri (Loeb passed in 2015). Loeb was an attorney for a number of law firms, and he eventually started his own law firm, where he spent over 40 years as a trial and appellate lawyer specializing in complex business litigation. He was very active in the Jewish community.
It was during her husband’s years in his law firm that Granoff worked as a child photographer before moving into volunteer work with the Federation.
An article about her in The Jewish Chronicle described her photography of Jewish gatherings and campaign events as prolific. Much of her photography work was published in the Chronicle.
As she got more involved in the activities of the Federation, she became the Women’s Division campaign chair and president while doing other lay leadership functions.
In 1989, she decided to do more with the Federation. The then-executive director A. Robert Gast told her that the Federation needed a director of communications. She applied and was hired. That became her job for over 30 years.
Along the way, Granoff was also named campaign director for a period of time. Even now, she keeps busy part-time with the Federation as the director of special campaign projects. “I’m very comfortable still working,” she says. “I go in three days a week and I don’t know right now what I would do without it. It keeps me going. It stimulates me.”
She also travels a lot, going to places such as Portugal, Spain, Africa, India, China and Cambodia.
Giving advice to younger people is something that Granoff finds hard to do. “I’ll start by saying age is just a number,” she says. “It’s difficult sometimes for me to realize what my age is because being in your 90s is not young. I think you have to grow with the times. You have to be able to change. You have to be able to adapt.
“In 90 years, there’s been a lot of changes, to say the least, and you just have to not be overcome by them—not be overwhelmed by them, which many of my friends have been,” she says. “I mean, they look upon age as not being pleasant.”
What made her feel different about her age was when her son, two weeks after her own 90th birthday, turned 65. “I thought to myself, ‘How can I have a 65 year old son?’”
She continues to work for the Federation today because she is “energized by what we do and the values that all of us have,” she says. “Just being there is a real positive for me.” She celebrated her 30th year with the organization in June 2019. The Federation thanked her for “being our resident historian, our steadfast cheerleader and a lifelong supporter of the Jewish Federation’s mission.”
“I think you have to grow with the times. You have to be able to change. You have to be able to adapt.”
The most important thing to her today is to live life to the fullest. “It’s in knowing what you have and enjoying what you have and being able to give that, in some manner, to others,” she says. “I think there’s so much to learn and so much that is happening, and the world is a little upside down right now. There are a lot of disturbing things to me that are going on.”
Life, to her, is a marathon, but “it doesn’t feel long to me,” she says. “I really enjoy every day. Of course, there are times which are not pleasant and so forth. But I’m extraordinarily fortunate. I’m fortunate in my health. I’m fortunate with my family. I’m fortunate that I’m still working and able to do everything that I do.”
Birth date: December 29, 1933
Age: 91
“The most important thing in life is enriching other people’s lives and adding to their happiness.”
HHe is the former chairman of the board of Helzberg Diamonds, a 109-year-old jewelry dynasty in Kansas City. He is the man responsible for expanding the company from 15 units in 1962 to become the third largest jewelry retailer in 23 states, now with over 200 stores. He is the author of two books on business, the last one published in 2012.
Barnett Helzberg, Jr., the third generation Helzberg owner now in his 90s, is currently the chairman and founder of the Helzberg Entrepreneurial Mentoring Program and co-founder and board member of University Academy, a K-12 charter school in KCMO.
Being in the diamond business was “a neat business,” Helzberg says. “I always said it’s a perfect business because you’re looking at beautiful merchandise and then you’re helping these people be happy and express themselves. So to me, when you compare it to other businesses, it’s really a good place to be.”
Wow. The list of achievements for this stalwart Kansas Citian is deep and impressive, more so considering the work he continues doing even today.
Both Barnett Helzberg and his wife, Shirley, are workaholics, with admitted good and bad outcomes. Asked about work-life balance, Helzberg says he doesn’t get an “A” in that. “I didn’t balance family and work. I had a lot of good times with my boys, but I don’t get a reward for balance.”
Probably one of the most interesting moments in his storied career was a chance meeting with Warren Buffett on a May morning in 1994 in New
“That moment still gives me goosebumps.”
York outside of the famous Plaza Hotel. In 30 seconds, Buffett profoundly changed the future of Helzberg Diamonds.
“That moment still gives me goosebumps,” Helzberg says. “This is my typical luck. We were at the point where we were ready to sell the business (there were 143 Helzberg jewelry stores nationwide at the time). And that’s kind of scary, because somebody could wreck it.”
Helzberg was outside of the Plaza Hotel and heard a lady say “Warren Buffet.” “I turned around and there he was, right after an annual meeting,” Helzberg says. “I walked over and I introduced myself, and I said, ‘Our company fits your criteria for an investment,’—and it did at that time. He said ‘We’re in that (jewelry) business, send me the information.’ I sent the financial information. We had a profitable company with a good balance sheet, and he invited us to come to Omaha. It was so simple and very different from how other people do those types of acquisitions. There were no gimmicks, no tomfoolery. It was pretty unbelievable.”
The company sold to Buffett for a rumored $100 million-plus, but the details are closely guarded. It was probably a sweet deal—the average per-store sales were $1.7 million in 1994, nearly double the industry average. Total sales then were $282 million. Buffet retained the Helzberg name and the company’s leadership.
Helzberg and his wife like to talk about one of the biggest marketing inventions ever done for a jewelry store—the ‘I Am Loved’ buttons. Here’s his version of the origin story for that invention: “That was really weird. I’ve always loved advertising, so I’m home one night and I just write this thing out with stick figures. It said, ‘Give her a button for free or a diamond, but tell her she is loved.’ We put that saying up on a sign at Signboard Hill (the current location of Crown Center Hotel). And the thing went nuts.”
Helzberg Diamonds had great advertising people, and they came up with the greatest ads Helzberg had ever seen. “I guess my favorite was that some school prohibited kids from wearing the buttons to school. So we ran an ad that said: ‘Follow the rules. But after school, you can wear them.’ There were so many good experiences.”
Helzberg’s work seemingly never ends. He points to the University Academy charter school he started in 2000, which had a bumpy beginning with wrong leadership but got straightened out. One of the new leaders they found, Superintendent Tony Kline, took the charter into National Blue Ribbon status in 2017, which is as high as a charter school can get.
“We made a deal,” Helzberg says. “We don’t want to
“I always said it’s a perfect business because you’re looking at beautiful merchandise and then you’re helping these people be happy and express themselves.”
get you in college. We want to get you out of college. So we started a thing called the University Academy Foundation. We follow up and keep in contact with the kids. It’s really helped. And these are kids that are poor kids. In a lot of these homes, they don’t even have one book.”
Helzberg had another idea that he attributes to Ewing Kauffman, who occasionally helped and mentored him. That was the Helzberg Entrepreneurial Mentoring Program started in 1995, and Helzberg is still actively involved in it today. “It really is amazing, the different things they do and what they’ve accomplished,” he says.
“We call it mentoring, but really it’s relationships.”
Good advice can come from anywhere, and Helzberg has proof. “I’ve had some incredible advisors. You just have to know where to go to get good advice.”
Helzberg’s personal hero in life is his wife, Shirley, who is involved in many things—whether as an entrepreneur, mentor or philanthropist. “I don’t understand how she can do what she does,” he says. “I don’t think there’s three people in the world that could cover all these bases. It makes you tired watching.”
The lesson he has learned in his long life is to associate yourself with the right people and learn from them. “I’ve been very lucky to know people with a lot of merits, a lot of accomplishments. That’s very helpful.”
Birth date: September 13, 1925
Age: 99
“I don’t quickly call out winners or losers or form opinions. I keep in mind that there may be some things I don’t know that would affect my ultimate judgment about people.”
Senior Western Missouri District Judge Howard F. Sachs has settled into retirement after a long and illustrious career. Spoiler alert: He’s not really retired. But wow, has he had a knack for being in the right place at the right time.
Sachs graduated from KC’s Southwest High School in 1942 and went on to attend Williams College for two years, which is a private liberal arts men’s college in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He then enlisted in the Navy as an electrician for the USS North Dakota and served until the end of World War II. Sachs witnessed the signing of the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay. He finished college at Williams as valedictorian in 1947, then attended Harvard Law School, where he graduated in 1950. From 1950 to 1951, Sachs clerked for Judge Albert A. Ridge, U.S. District Court, Western District of Missouri, before setting up his own practice in 1951.
Sachs was recommended by Senator Thomas Eagleton as district judge, nominated by Jimmy Carter on May 17, 1979, confirmed by the Senate on September 25, 1979, and received his district judge commission on September 26, 1979.
He took office on October 5, 1979, served as chief judge from 1990 to 1992 and assumed senior status on October 31, 1992.
Sachs guesses that he is the longest serving district judge at this point. “But I’m not continuing forever,” he says. “I’ll be 100 years old in September of 2025, and I don’t think judges should be serving after 100. At one point I was saying 95 and out. But I was going pretty well at 95. I continue on today with some light practice, four days a week.”
“I’m not continuing forever. I’ll be 100 years old in September of 2025, and I don’t think judges should be serving after 100.”
Sachs served as chairman of the Board of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City and helped orchestrate the admission of women and African American lawyers into the Kansas City Bar Association.
During the time he clerked for Judge Ridge, Sachs was assigned the Swope Park Swimming Pool case, which challenged the constitutionality of segregated municipal pools in Kansas City. In 1962, Sachs drafted the ordinance that finally ended segregated public accommodations in Kansas City, Missouri.
He contributed to the opinion in that case, siding with the argument made by the NAACP’s chief attorney at the time, Thurgood Marshall, that segregated public swimming pools violated the constitution of the United States.
Sachs says that probably the most significant case he had was when the TWA flight attendants went on strike and the various issues that came out of that strike. “In fact, it went to the Supreme Court on two different issues,” he says. “The first one, they agreed with me by a four to four vote because there was one judge who had retired, so they had only eight justices.”
But there’s more to this great man, as pointed out by former Kansas City mayor and now Congressman Emanuel Cleaver during a recognition of the judge’s 40 years on the bench, with a tribute in the House of Representatives on October 1, 2019: “Judge Howard
“Reading keeps me happy. That is my principal activity, almost my complete activity.”
F. Sachs is widely known for his unparalleled devotion to the legal profession and his well-analyzed, clearly expressed opinions rooted in the bedrock of justice,” Cleaver said. “Distinguished by his intellectual interest, faithfulness to precedent and reserved demeanor, Judge Sachs has established an inspirational legacy steeped in justice, fairness and due process.” Cleaver added that the judge kept a slate of cases that he worked on. That’s still the case now, five years later.
What Sachs does today is read. A lot. He reads history or biography stories and some politics. “Reading keeps me happy,” he says. “That is my principal activity, almost my complete activity. As long as I have some books to read or a couple of magazines, that keeps me satisfied. I would hope that if I make it to 100 that will still be true.”
He never, or rarely, exercises. He likes to swim, but he sees people “running around the block or something maybe once a week and think they’re losing weight. I don’t go for things like that,” he says.
Is working as a district judge still fun for him? “I think I’m doing some good, particularly in sentencing, which is very important to people, especially in criminal cases,” he says. “I think I can help out the court by continuing to help with sentencing. But I also have some civil cases, too. I like to have the challenge of working to the extent that I do.”
Sachs doesn’t really give out advice, but he has memories of good advice others gave him. “When I came on the court, Judge Ridge, the senior judge at the time, told me: ‘Remember to take your time. Nobody can push you. You should take whatever time you need to decide something or rule on something. Don’t make decisions just because you think you’re under the gun.’”
Sachs had those moments in life where other opportunities presented themselves. But unlike what happens to most people considering what to do next, politics played a role.
He tells the story of being nominated for a vacancy in the Court of Appeals six months after his appointment as district judge. But that court had a different method of delivering justice. On the Court of Appeals, three judges have to decide things. In the district court, the judge is working on his own. “When you’re trying to write up something for three judges, which is the case in the Court of Appeals, you have to say things that you think they would find acceptable. It’s really an advantage to me to decide things on my own and say things that I want to.”
The door to that particular vacancy opportunity was slammed shut when Ronald Reagan won the election in 1980. “With the change of party, my nomination died.” Sachs has seen much over his lifetime, from the invention of television to the revolution of space travel to the sudden creation of the internet. But it’s not really surprising to him. “Basically, it seems to me that life goes on in the same way even though methods change,” he says.
Birth date: February 2, 1929 Age: 96
“I always did the job and then some. You have to give it a little extra. The extra distinguishes the mediocre from the great.”
TTo say that retired professional sports groundskeeper George Toma was a world-class leader in his chosen profession is simply not going far enough. The man was so much more in his 40 years of dedicated work. Even now, in his 90s, he still gets calls about his work. He still helps. He loves doing it.
All the old-timers—the coaches, the stadium managers, the players—remember those times when Toma was counted on to make whatever field he found himself managing work for whoever wanted it to work, in rain or snow, in 100-plus heat or double-digit below-zero cold.
Toma has been called the “Sultan of Sod,” the “Nitty Gritty Dirt Man” and the “Sodfather.” And probably a few other more choice names from the people who experienced his wrath. He remains to this day a man of great insight into people and their motivations. He also maintains a serious point-perfect vision of working on all sorts of natural grass turf.
Toma’s work life was a nonstop marathon. The game or the event was always coming right up. The weather could be a major factor. The grass could be a major factor. The crew could be a major factor.
All of which could make it impossible to meet the deadlines—but not with Toma in charge. He got it done in time, and he got it done right.
Toma expected perfection if you were on his crew because the people he reported to expected perfection. And Toma delivered.
But if you messed up, he’d chew you out. He’d dress you down. He’d make you understand what’s at stake as a groundskeeper for the pros he works for. Groundskeeping was serious science in service of simple practicality.
“You have to make friends with all types of people.”
“I was a little earthquake sometimes,” Toma says. “Or a little volcano. There’s a lot in me. You can ask NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. He had a good ass chewing from me—a very good one. Because he didn’t care about the players. I went on national television and chewed him out. Why? Because for all my years in the game, I was fighting for the cheapest insurance for an athlete from preschool all the way up to the professional level. And that is a safe playing field.”
For the first Super Bowls under Pete Rozelle, NFL commissioner from 1960 to 1989, there were excellent fields, Toma says. “When Roger Goodell took over, the groundskeeper that took over working for him got caught stealing sod.”
Toma says Goodell was working with a third set of staff over the last 17 years that “didn’t do the job. Instead of the fields getting better, they were getting worse.”
The players knew the difference. They didn’t want to slip and slide around on poorly maintained turf and get so badly hurt it could end their career. Toma was in charge, man, and when he’s on the job, the job gets done right.
Toma says that at the Super Bowl, with his people working with the stadium people, everybody worked as one big family. “You have to make friends with all types of people,” he says. “There’s always good people and there’s bad people, too. I always had a way of getting along with new people.”
The students at Lincoln High School and Central High School were the grounds crew for Municipal Stadium in the early days of the Kansas City Athletics when Charlie Finley was the owner. “They were famous all around the league,” Toma says. “They made me. I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you if it wasn’t for those and a few other people.”
That crew could roll out a tarp over the baseball field in 45 seconds, Toma says.
Toma knows all about hard work. He’s from coal country, born and raised in Edwardsville, Pennsylvania. When he was 10 years old, his dad died of black lung disease. Toma had to step up. “In those days, you had to get a job,” he says. “Everybody was poor. Eight year old kids were already working in the mines, and some were killed by being kicked by the mules. They worked with the mules because they led the coal cars down the mine.”
Toma got a job on a vegetable farm. He earned 10 cents an hour picking tomatoes for 10 hours a day, six days a week.
Up the street lived a guy who was the groundskeeper for the farm team of the Cleveland Indians. So in 1942, as a senior in high school, Toma got a job with him. Toma was made head groundskeeper a few years later, and the rest is history.
Toma was groundskeeper at Municipal Stadium for the KC Athletics, the Royals, and the Chiefs through the 1960s. When the Harry S. Truman Sports Complex opened (in 1972 for the Chiefs and 1973 for the Royals), Toma worked as groundskeeper for both. He worked 57 Super Bowls from 1967 to 2023.
Toma was honored by the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2001. He was inducted into the Major League Baseball Groundskeepers Hall of Fame on January 8, 2012, the same year he was inducted into the Kansas City Royals Hall of Fame.
Toma’s work life was exhausting. He was on the road, busy, barking orders, getting crews ready to do their best. It took a toll.
“You have to have time for your family,” Toma says. “I didn’t have much time, so my three children were more or less raised up on a baseball field. They’d come and stay with me and work with me.” His son Chip eventually became the head groundskeeper for the Minnesota Twins.
“I could have gone to Yankee Stadium or White Sox or some other places,” Toma says. “But I fell in love with this town. I didn’t want to live in a big city.”
Toma has great stories, like the time the Beatles came to Municipal Stadium in September, 1964. “I made good friends with some of the Beatles,” he says. “They dressed in my shed in center field on a dirt floor with one toilet. It rained a little bit and we only had a small stage. They brought the Beatles into the stadium in
an old Budweiser beer truck so the fan girls wouldn’t know. The grass was a little wet, so they had to go across the grass and over the red warning track. Chip got some poster board so when they stepped down out of the shack, their footprints were red on the poster board. They autographed it for him. Ringo Starr gave him his drumsticks.”
“I mean, you can still mess me up, but I’ll still love you and help you. I don’t dislike anybody.”
Toma’s legacy continues locally. Students from Central High School are starting a foundation under his name for students who become groundskeepers or have a lawn business. “I love to help people,” Toma says. “I mean, you can still mess me up, but I’ll still love you and help you. I don’t dislike anybody.”
Plenty of people have seen Toma get into it with somebody on the crew. “But 15 minutes later, I’m with that man with a cup of coffee,” he says. “If you don’t want to learn, don’t come near me. If you don’t want to do the job, don’t come near me.”
Birth date: August 18, 1933
Age: 91
“Inches make the champion. Don’t give up. Go another inch to accomplish what you want to do. Don’t stop evolving. Don’t stop creating.”
OOn a coffee table in the living room of former furrier
Myron Wang’s house sits a precious Chihuly glass sculpture. It’s just one of dozens of incredible works of art he and his wife, Nicole, have collected and displayed around the house, along with dozens of framed underwater photos from Wang’s 50 years of ocean diving. Wang’s photos have been seen in the pages of National Geographic and are a big part of the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science, where Wang also lectures. He says he’s given 5,000 images to the university over the years. “I’m still finding images that I never looked at,” he says.
As the fabulous and pricey sculpture is moved out of the way in preparation for his interview, Wang quips that “the most important thing in my wife Nicole’s life is that the sculpture doesn’t get broken.”
“No,” she says. “The most important thing in my life that doesn’t get broken is you.”
Not to worry. Wang has a rigorous athletic program. “I work out every day,” he says. “I do something, either walk or work with my trainer. We do weights and all kinds of exercises. On the off days, I walk. On Saturday and Sunday, I play golf. I used to have 10 partners for golf and now I’m down to two. We are the last of the Mohicans.”
Wang also exercises his mind every day, reading periodicals, the Wall Street Journal and books on the economy. He follows the stock market and his real estate investments. “I do a lot of things to stimulate my mind,” he says. He relaxes by going to the shooting range every so often, and has been a Chiefs season ticket holder “since day one,” he says.
Wang was the second-generation owner and operator of Alaskan Fur, the brainchild of his father Phil Wang and three other partners who operated a wholesale fur business out of New York in 1920 before moving it to Kansas City in 1926 as a retail business. The first Alaskan Fur was downtown, and a second location was added at the Plaza in 1962. The Alaskan Fur flagship salon opened in 1979 at 90th Street and Metcalf in Overland Park.
By the mid-1980s, there was also an Alaskan Fur salon in the local Jones Store, along with fur salons in 11 Bonwit Teller stores across the country.
The company stood out from other furriers in part by offering customers climate-controlled storage vaults and a fur cleaning process invented by Alaskan that not only cleaned furs but also revitalized their natural oils.
In March 2022, the company was sold to a group led by John Hanlon and Tiara Peach, owners of St. Louis-based The Fur and Leather Centre. They kept the Alaskan Fur name, and Wang, 88 at the time, retired.
“When I went into the business, I was going to get an MBA at Harvard,” Wang says. “My dad had a heart attack that June and he asked me in September 1962 if I would mind working in the business a year, delaying my trip to Harvard. I said sure. And he died two months later. I was stuck with this little business downtown with 13 competitors around me.”
“Every day, I think, ‘What if my dad was alive and saw what I paid for my car?’ He would have another heart attack. It’s as much as he paid for his house.”
The first year, Wang tripled sales. “That was the biggest challenge in my life,” he says. “Had I gone to Harvard, I would have gone on to Wall Street or to a big bank like J.P. Morgan or some big finance company because that’s where my mind was.”
He says he never thought much about all of that competition. “I just did what I thought we should do to make our business successful. We’d make our plan and work it.”
Today, that’s one of his mottos: Create a plan and work it. Another one is: If you can’t get someone to cooperate to do something, then just do it yourself. Wang says working the plan to sell Alaskan Fur to the Fur Centre in St. Louis was like losing a friend. “You work for 68 years in a business and one day, you don’t go to work,” he says. “It’s a big shock. But I got over it pretty fast.”
Now it’s his 50-year passion for underwater photography that keeps both he and his wife active, traveling to the Philippines, New Guinea, Australia, the Solomon Islands, the Red Sea or Chuuk Lagoon. They’ve gone to 63 countries in all, and at the end of 2024, they plan on an African safari. “I shot underwater fish on the move for years, but I’ve never shot many animals above water,” he says. “So I got on artificial intelligence sources to see exactly the mystique of shooting lions, tigers and elephants and things like that. It’s a hunt, but you don’t kill anything. You catch it on celluloid.”
One of Wang’s biggest regrets in his life was that he never got to meet his grandparents on either side, who died before he was born. But his regrets are few and far between. He’s lived a long life and witnessed so much change. “Like the computers and the cell phones,” he says. “Every day, I think, ‘What if my dad was alive and saw what I paid for my car?’ He would have another heart attack. It’s as much as he paid for his house.”
What’s the secret to a long and healthy life? “I think genes play a big part,” he says. “My mother’s family lived to very old ages. My father’s family lived to very young ages. So I got the luck of the draw because I got my mother’s genes, I guess. But I think attitude and your mindset plays a big part.
“I refuse to get old,” he says. “If I slouch, my wife punches me in the back and says stand up straight. She refuses to let me get old. I could wish for 50 more years, but I am just hoping for 10 more.”
Birth date: September 5, 1934 Age: 90
“If an opportunity comes to you, grab it and make the best of it because it won’t come again, and that’s often what makes your life interesting.”
TThe youngest person profiled in this section is a woman who has devoted her life to the movement of charged particles. Her infectious energy and impressive knowledge of nuclear energy put her in the right place at the right time throughout her life, generally working as the only woman in a field of men.
It was submarines that figured into her various life experiences.
“When I was a child, it was wartime,” nuclear physicist Audrey Wegst says. “Wartime was a totally different time than we have now. As a child growing up in that, you had a different philosophy, which was when things got better, you knew it and you enjoyed it and you took advantage of it. I think maybe people are more hesitant today to just jump in and do things, and I think that’s a mistake.”
Wegst was born in Connecticut in 1934, a time of economic disaster that quickly led to the beginning of World War II. “I remember my father had to patrol the beach at night, and we couldn’t have any lights in the house because of German submarines. My father actually ran into a submarine on the beach. I think it was after that that he said we were getting out of there.”
The family moved to a rural part of Pennsylvania where Wegst’s grandmother had immigrated from Sweden. The town had about 50 people.
“It was a complete change of life,” she says. Her dad was a chemist working for a company that made steel.
“I think maybe people are more hesitant today to just jump in and do things, and I think that’s a mistake.”
His job was to make sure that the batches of steel were of the right high-grade proportions for periscopes.
Wegst’s uncle helped her get into Mount Holyoke, an Ivy League girls school, where she majored in physics. She graduated in 1956. Once again, her connection with submarines surfaced. “Women didn’t go into physics then,” she says. She went to Bell Labs to look for a job, and they talked up the social parties and the available single men and the possibility that you could find a husband. “I thought to myself: This isn’t why I worked so hard and majored in physics. So I found a graduate program that was sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission, and they were supporting kids to go to graduate school so you could be a radiation specialist on one of the new nuclear submarines. I thought that sounded like fun.”
There were 27 boys and two girls in her class. After she finished, the Navy chased after her because they knew she was properly trained to handle radiation accidents. She didn’t think a submarine was a good choice for her, so she found a hospital that was just starting to use radioactive materials in diagnostic tests at the University of Michigan.
They had an isotope lab and were treating mainly thyroid disease with radioactive iodine. That got her
“So I visited Cedar Sinai Hospital and they hired me on the spot,” she says. “I ended up not liking it.”
That’s when the University of Kansas offered her a job to come and work in nuclear medicine as she studied for her Ph.D. She worked for the International Atomic Energy Agency, traveling and giving lectures, then began working full time for them.
The IAEA is a United Nations agency based in Vienna. They offered Wegst two years of working with them. “At that time, my older son, Greg, went to college, and my younger son, Andy, was in high school,” she says. Greg stayed in the U.S., and Wegst and Andy went off to Vienna. Andy graduated from high school in Vienna.
While working for the U.N., Wegst traveled everywhere. “My job was to encourage nuclear medicine departments in developing countries, and it’s a worldwide thing. So I would just take off and go travel to some good places and some pretty awful places.
“I was always traveling alone,” Wegst continues. “I had a lot of incidents where I really wasn’t sure what I was doing. I was traveling in these terrible places, but I always ended up okay.”
Wegst has always worked with men in the field, many highly educated who acted forceful with colleagues. “But I always stood my ground when needed,” she says. “I felt that it was important to be able to hold your own and do your part and be looked at not as a lower kind of individual. Some of the places I traveled, it wasn’t the custom for women to do that. I found that very rewarding to myself, that I could be respected. I told them what to do and they would follow my suggestions.”
She came back to Kansas City after her U.N. stint and started her own nuclear medicine company, Diagnostic Technology Consultants, where she works to this day.
“When you think of yourself as being 90, you think about what more you want to accomplish,” she says. “I’m thinking of writing a book because I think I could have a fun book to write. I want to do some more traveling.”
into the base level of the specialty that’s now called nuclear medicine. “That was the beginning of it,” she says. “So I was at the ground floor of nuclear medicine.”
Wegst worked there for eight years, watching how radioactive material helped image the organs inside the body and improve diagnosis. She met her husband there, Walter, who was working on his Ph.D. at a nuclear reactor in Michigan and later got a job at CalTech. They moved to Sierra Madre, California. The marriage didn’t work out—she divorced Walter in 1971—and found herself with two kids and no job in California.
“I think we (elders) have a lot of wisdom.”
Wegst says she has been exceedingly lucky with her health. She walks her dog for a mile every morning. “I think feeling good is really important and you have to keep going,” she says. “It’s also about your general attitude, which to me is about getting out and being interested in people and what they’re doing.”
Being older and just joining the 90-plus crowd has created a moment of reflection for Wegst. “I think we (elders) have a lot of wisdom,” she says. “I think a lot of times people downgrade what you could offer them because they think you’re old and, well, that’s it. You’re old. I don’t get treated that way very often. I think you should respect older people and listen to them because I think they have a lot to tell you. You have to keep doing things. If you just sit and ignore everything, you’re not going to be relevant.”
Bobby Bell, Fred Broski, Jim Chappell, Cliff Cohn, Paul Copaken, John Dillingham, Shirley Helzberg, Ralph Varnum
9 OVER 90
Alvin Brooks, Ollie Gates, Anita Gorman, Debbie Granoff, Barnett Helzberg, Judge Howard Sachs, George Toma, Myron Wang, Audrey Wegst
