Harlem (in Kansas City)

I got an email today from a reporter at The Pitch, an online Kansas City newspaper.  Evidently he found me on Google after typing in "Harlem" as the search word.  Here's what he had to say:  

Hi Donna,
"I am a reporter for The Pitch, a weekly paper in Kansas City. I saw an interesting blog you wrote about the Harlem neighborhood in Kansas City. I'm interested in doing a story of some kind about Harlem, because I don't think a lot of people know it exists. I was wondering if you might have some time to talk soon about Harlem, share your memories, give me some ideas of interesting things about the place. Let me know? My contact info is below. Hope to hear from you!

Thanks,
David"

If you do a search on my blog for Harlem, you will find several entries.  See for yourself by clicking HERE.  

I will gladly share my memories of Harlem with anyone who asks.  I think I have cousins who would remember more than I do, but I'm not so sure if they would be interested in talking about it.  See, I am the one in the family who, in spite of the fact that I am an introvert, doesn't mind spilling my guts online.  I'm not so sure about the others.  

We moved to Harlem once for a brief time, and there was actually a small, three-room, grade school there.  They moved me to a higher grade than I had been in, in Iowa, and I hated it to the point where I even hid under a desk to keep the teacher from asking me questions.  We probably didn't live there more than a month that time.  My parents liked to move.  

The second time we moved to Harlem, we had been living on a farm at Eagleville where Daddy worked as a hired hand and my mom worked at a grocery store and for a while at a cafe/truck stop.  I loved living in the country, and I hated being in the city.  If it hadn't been for the Missouri River, I might have never stopped hating the city; but because I could climb up and over the levee and look at the river, I found some sort of peace.   I also learned to love the Kansas City skyline while looking out the window of our three-room apartment: the KCPL building, with changing colors at night; the Folgers building, with a giant can of Folgers lighting up the sky.  It was a sight to behold.  

Harlem was a poor neighborhood, and we were among the poor.  I wasn't always happy with the hours I spent at McElroy Dagg elementary school, and I have some really bad memories of riding the school bus (why wouldn't the bus driver, who was attending the Baptist seminary, make those boys who were holding me down in a seat STOP?  It didn't go too far, but I was terrified.  

Nevertheless, I have good memories of Harlem.  Our first television.  Living so close to the airport that I could walk a little way up the road and watch planes taking off and landing any time I pleased.  Climbing the steps up to the ASB bridge.  Awesome!

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.  But the good memories outnumber the bad.

It's true: You can't go home again.

I was in the sixth grade when I moved to Kansas City with my parents; we had relocated there a couple of times before, but we always ended up going back to north Missouri.  In 1956, we came to stay.  
Two of my dad's brothers lived with their families in tiny apartments in the unincorporated area called "Harlem".  Our actual address was Kansas City;  Harlem wasn't the most desirable place to live.  
There were four apartments in the two-story building where my uncles lived; they were in the first-floor apartments, and we rented one of the two apartments on the second story.  From my parents' bedroom there, I could look across the Missouri River and see the Kansas City skyline, so close I could almost touch it.  I loved seeing the huge coffee can atop the Folgers building.  My favorite, though, was the light on the Kansas City Power and Light building that changed colors all the time.  
I slept on the couch during our short time at the apartment, because there were only three rooms:  a bedroom, a living room, and the kitchen; all the rooms were tiny.  The bathroom was downstairs, and we shared it with other occupants of the building.  I say "bathroom", but there was no bathtub or shower.  Only a sink and a toilet.  I think maybe Uncle Cecil's family had a bathroom of their own.  They had more kids, so they definitely needed it!  
Cliff had some business to take care of in North Kansas City today, and I asked him to take me on a sentimental journey to Harlem.  He's much more willing to do silly things like that, now that he's retired.  

This building sits where the apartment house was.  Notice the street name on the sign:  "Harlem Road".  Looking up the street on the left-hand side of the picture, you can almost see the location of the house my parents bought later on... the first home they ever owned.  

That house sat approximately in this spot.  There are very few people living in Harlem now, although we did find a few.

 Way over there.  Houses!

Cliff turned down the road so we could see whether people lived in them.  Yes, the houses are occupied.  These are the sort of houses I remember seeing in Harlem in 1956.  

Finally, I found something that hasn't changed much!  Harlem Baptist Church.  My cousin Alice used to sing in the choir here, alongside her grandmother.  I wonder who attends nowadays, and where they come from.  There certainly aren't enough people living in Harlem to keep a church going.  
More than anything, I would love to have gone to the top of the levee like I used to so I could take a picture of the skyline as it looks from Harlem.  

However, the levee is fenced off.    

No more walking to the other side of the levee with my Allen cousins.

No more climbing up those steps that lead to the A.S.B. bridge.  
*sigh*

HARLEM, KANSAS CITY

I was in the sixth grade when we left the farm where Daddy was a hired hand and moved to Kansas City.  I cried for weeks, perhaps months, for my old way of life.

I'd been a free spirit there, after all.  Mother worked all day in a dry goods-grocery store, and Daddy was busy with farm chores.  I could play with the calf in the barn that belonged to the cow Daddy milked twice a day.  There were kittens in the same barn.  I watched setting hens hatch out their babies.  In May, I found wild strawberries along the roadside, and in July there were blackberries, back in the woods.  I was in heaven, and nobody bothered me at all.

Daddy shot my old dog, Cookie, before we moved to the city.  She had a huge tumor on her belly that dragged the ground, and she was at least ten years old.  I remember hearing the gunshot.  It was a mercy-killing, but it was rough for me.

We got an apartment in Harlem, an unicorporated village just across the Missouri River from downtown Kansas City.  I had cousins nearby, and that helped me make the transition from country to city.

Most people, when they hear "Harlem", think of New York City.  Well, Kansas City's Harlem was all white folks, but it was a very poor neighborhood.  There were times I felt unsafe on the school bus.

However, I found some pleasant diversions in Harlem.

Back then, the big airport in Kansas City was the Municipal Airport, and it was only a few blocks away.  Every time a plane took off, it messed up our TV reception.  In summertime, I'd walk down there and watch airplanes taking off, and dream about the romantic places they were headed.  Me and my mom once met Pat Boone's plane when it landed, and on the front-page picture in the Kansas City Star, you could pick out me and my mom reaching toward Pat as he got off the airplane. 

The lady in the left-hand corner, foreground, is my mother.  Her head is covering up my face, but that's me on the left in front of her.  You can see Pat Boone clearly in front of everybody.  She is holding my camera because I had hopes of getting close enough to Pat Boone to have a picture taken with him.  Fat chance!

And then there was the levee.  I'd go up there, walk right down to the riverbank, and watch the strange (and sometimes nasty) things floating past.  I could go right up to the ASB bridge and climb steps that took me to the top, where cars whizzed by.  Below, you see my father leading me and my cousins down the river side of the levee.  I went down there alone, many times.  That's the ASB Bridge in the background.  Back when this picture was taken, it served cars and trains.  Now it's only used by trains... I think.

Underneath that bridge I'd see evidence of the places where hoboes had camped:  traces of campfires, whiskey bottles, and sardine cans (now I find out sardines are one of the safest seafoods to eat, because they are at the bottom of the food chain).

That's some of my Allen cousins.  I loved to go up those steps to where the cars were zooming across!  There was a sidewalk all the way across, and I suppose when the bridge was built in 1911, a lot of people walked across to downtown Kansas City.  Mother and Aunt Ruby did that once.  I thought it was great fun!

These are some of my Allen cousins (my dad's side of the family).  They spent a week with us, shopping for school clothes.  We all had our new can-can petticoats on.  You gotta love the 50's!  This was our yard in Harlem, looking across the street.

My parents became home-owners in Harlem, then sold that house and escaped as soon as possible to "Kansas City, North".

Isn't it strange that I can have so many good memories of such an impoverished place?

Thank you, Henry Hornet!

After we moved to Kansas City (when I was in the sixth grade), I attended various schools in the North Kansas City school district, finally ending up at North Kansas City High School.  I was a loner and wallflower with few friends; I didn't date, nor did I attend the prom.  So when Henry Hornet asked to friend me on Facebook, I figured it was a waste of time because no classmates even knew I existed back then; however, I accepted the friend request.  


Henry Hornet was the NKCHS mascot.  Our vocabulary words were called Henry Hornet words, and even today, if I see or hear one of them used, I immediately think "Henry Hornet word!"  But I digress.  


Henry Hornet, whomever he or she is in real life, sometimes asks a question like, "Do you remember saddle shoes?"  I answered, "Yes!  Mine came from Hills Brothers' Shoe Store, two pairs for five dollars."  


Another question was, "What was your first bicycle?"  


I answered, "I didn't have one; we lived in Harlem.  We were poor."  


Before long I got a private message on facebook from a lady who said she, too, had lived in Harlem.
  
"Did you mean Harlem Mo? I lived there until I graduated high school at I8; am 44 now. My parents name was Raymond and Ann Conner. They had six Kids but one drowned in a swimming accident before we came to live in Harlem."

I answered back:

Yes, we lived in Harlem, Mo. We moved from there about the time I was in 8th grade, but that doesn't mean we were any more prosperous. We rented a couple of places from the Elrods, wonderful people.

And she replied:
"I loved Mrs Elrod. She went to the Salvation Army Church where we first met. Her favorite song was Climb, Climb up Sunshine Mountain. She became my adopted Grandmother. She taught me how to make rasien oatmeal cookies. I use to spend the night at her house with a couple of neighbor Kids. I miss her dearly. I never got the pleasure of meeting her husband but she kept their marriage lisence on the wall in a picture frame and She would always talk about hi. We rented from Mrs Barnes she had a son who had Polio. Its a small world isn't it?"

To which I responded:

"Wow, Mrs. Elrod must have lived a long time! When we first moved to KC, we rented a three-room apartment from the Elrods and there was a teeny-tiny Assembly of God church next door to us where they went to church. Sometimes my mom and I would visit there on Sunday night after we had attended evening services at the Vivian Road Church of Christ. I'm going to have to do a blog entry about this!"  

So, even though nobody knew I existed back in high school, I've still found a common ground with somebody who attended the school twenty years after I graduated.  Old Henry Hornet is good for something, after all.

Thinking about schools (my peripatetic youth)

I rather enjoyed going to Northgate, a brand new school that wasn't quite finished when I began attending there in whatever year it was.  I recall them playing rock and roll music in the lunch room, and kids dancing in the hall after they finished eating.  According to this article I found, it was projected to open in the fall of 1959.  When I look at old pictures and such, I'm sure it opened much earlier than that, because in the fall of 1959 I was back attending North Kansas City High School.    

I think I figured out one reason Mother left out so many of our moves.  There wasn't room in her personal history book for all of them:

As you can see, she took to writing in the margins toward the last, and there were more moves after she stopped entering them.  Of course, she began with her childhood, so that covers a lot of time.  She never moved, though, until she married.  The gypsy fever evidently overtook my parents after they got together.  They were married in 1932, right in the middle of the depression, so I'm sure many of the moves were just a way of finding a job that would keep food on the table; maybe that's what set the pattern.  

I wasn't born until 1944, and by then moving seemed to be a habit with them.  I assume they thought I was adjusting just fine to one school after another.  I kept my thoughts to myself and never complained, but I hated going to unfamiliar schools, often switching in the middle of the school year, trying to adjust to completely different teachers and agendas.  My sister expressed to me how uncomfortable it was for her, too.  Yes, they were moving throughout her childhood too (she is sixteen years older than I).

During their first twenty-five years of marriage, my parents had never owned a home, but that was about to change.  They found a place for sale at a bargain-basement price in Harlem, so I was due for another move and another school switch, back to good old North Kansas City High.  Perhaps one reason they had a tendency to gravitate to Harlem was that Daddy still had two brothers living there.  They weren't in the old apartment building by this time, though.  Both of them had mobile homes in a trailer park there.  

I wasn't thrilled about the school change, but I was happy to return to Harlem, where I had places to roam and cousins who were, actually, the only friends I had at that time.  I loved having the Municipal Airport within walking distance, although it was a bit annoying when planes took off and messed up our television reception.  I still enjoyed climbing the steps up to the ASB bridge, or ascending the levee to get to the riverside.  

I believe this move was in the fall of 1958, because I got a Brownie camera for Christmas that year, and a lot of the pictures I took with it were in 1959; and all those pictures are at the Harlem house.  

I guess I took this picture because my most prized possessions were my stereo and my radio.  Fabian was a cutie, wasn't he?  Terrible singer, though.  You can see my Pat Boone album sticking out from underneath the Fabian one.  Because we lived so close to the airport, my mom and I met his plane and got the backs of our curly heads in the Kansas City paper.  Lots of church friends called to tell us we were in the paper.

My mom and I are in the lower left-hand corner.  She is holding my camera.

  

Reunion

I went to a family reunion Sunday, my father's side of the family.  It's mostly older people in attendance these days, folks my age; young people don't care about relatives they've never known.  I don't intend that statement as a put-down, because I was in that group myself for years, and still am even at this age, to some extent.  Once Grandma and the aunts and uncles were gone, not to mention my parents, I didn't have much desire to attend.  For that matter, after I married I ignored most reunions for ages.  Then Daddy died and Mother was old, and I went to the reunions to please her.

I always saw more of my mom's side of the family when I was growing up; Daddy's mother died in childbirth in the 1920's, so there was no grandma to visit, just a deaf and blind grandpa who mostly sat in the corner and smoked his pipe.  Sometimes we'd swing by one of Daddy's brothers' houses for a quick visit after spending a day with my mom's relatives, but I didn't know the Allens as well, although I do remember playing with the cousins sometimes when we were there.

In 1944, my father and three of his brothers all happened to have baby girls born.  I think I'm the oldest of the lot, born in July.  One of them, Lela, has spent her whole life in rural north Missouri.  The cousins I got to know the best in my father's family are two of them who lived near us when we first moved to the unincorporated area of Kansas City known as Harlem: Frances and Alice.  We later graduated together at North Kansas City High School in 1962.  

When we first moved to Harlem around 1956, our three families all lived in small apartments in the same two-story building, the downstairs of which had once been a mom-and-pop grocery store.  Frances's family had a rest room to themselves, although their apartment was just one big room.  There were seven of them and a parakeet living in that small space.  Alice's family had what I thought was the nicest apartment of the four in the building; they had to share the rest room with us upstairs apartment-dwellers, but it was in a hall right outside their door.  My mom, dad, and I had a cramped three-room space upstairs.  We'd never had an inside toilet or running water before, so that was a first, even if we did have to go downstairs to relieve ourselves.  We didn't have the luxury of a bathtub or shower, the water in the sink only ran cold, and my bed was the the couch in the living room.

I was miserably homesick for the north Missouri countryside, but I got to know my two cousins while we lived there, especially Alice, who has always been very outgoing and cheerful.  Frances was quieter and much more of a private person.  None of us lived in that apartment building long, but the memories of that place have really stuck with me.  We talked about Harlem at the reunion, and how it was living there when we were all so poor.  By the way, I'm still the poorest of the lot, if you count monetary wealth.  But I've lived a wonderful life in the country that I wouldn't trade with any city dweller.

I did enjoy going down memory lane with those two cousins, both of whom are some of the nicest people you'd ever meet.  It was a day well spent, at least on my part.  I'm not sure they care as much about dwelling in the past as I do, but it was fun for me.

I wonder how many more reunions there will be as, one by one, we shuffle off this mortal coil.

Cabin fever, and pictures from old Kansas City

When my parents and I first moved to Kansas City in 1956, we lived in Harlem for three years. It wasn't a slum, but it was a very poor section of town. I was unhappy about our having to leave the farm where we lived previously, but being so close to the Missouri River almost made up for it. Back then, you could walk right to the river's edge. That's my daddy in front, and some cousins following him. The A.S.B. bridge in the background made for a wonderful playground!


You could walk right up the steps and walk across on a sidewalk into downtown Kansas City.

My mom had tons of friends, and she'd come home from work at night exhausted and seem happy as could be to receive calls from all the neighbors. I'm afraid I'm the opposite: When the phone rings, I think, "Oh no."

That's a postcard picture of the old Municipal airport, which was also a short walk from our home in Harlem. This was another fun place for me to hang out. I'd watch airplanes landing and taking off for awhile, then wander through the terminal picking up travel brochures with pictures of exotic places and dream of flying away someday. There were pay toilets there, but that didn't foil me and my cousins. One of us would crawl under the door, use the facility, and then let the others in one at a time.

I've been snippy and grumpy this month, and it's due to the weather, I'm sure. Two of my favorite outdoor pastimes, horseback riding and jaunts on the motorcycle, are put on hold. I've tried riding my horse when it's frigid, but I've found that at any temperature under 45°, my toes go numb with the cold. Unless I confine my ride to fifteen minutes. Which hardly warrants all the trouble of retrieving the horse, grooming him, and saddling him up.

Cliff and I do take our walk in the pasture each day no matter the temperature; once you get moving, you stay comfortable. I have Carharts, you know. And wear a stocking cap. Our walk used to take a half-hour, but with my knees the way they are these days, I have to walk softly so as not to jar them, which has extended the time to about forty-five minutes. I've told Cliff he has his choice: Walk at his own speed to get his cardio benefit, or saunter slowly with me.

I've been watching the ten-day forecasts throughout this month, and all I've seen in my future was bitter cold. Now, finally, weather.com has given me some small hope that we'll warm up. Highs in the forties next weekend? I'll take 'em!

We'll go to Cliff's aunt's funeral today; that's a two-hour drive to Versailles. Last weekend we went to a cousin's husband's funeral in the same town. My mom and dad always said funerals come in threes, so I'm wondering who's next! I hope it isn't me, I want a few more motorcycle rides before I check out.

More Harlem memories

When I think about how my mom used to obsess over terrible things that might happen to me as a kid, it amazes me that I wandered all over Harlem alone without her saying a word.  She and Daddy were both at work all day; maybe I never bothered to mention my wanderings.  
I cried myself to sleep many times when we first moved to the city because we had been living on a farm where my dad was a hired hand, and I loved that place.  I missed the barn cats and my dog Cookie, who had to be shot before we moved because she had a huge tumor on her belly (and we had no place for a dog in the apartment).  So yes, I cried.  
But there were things I learned to love about our new home.

The levee

I loved going on the river side of the levee, sitting on one of the big rocks, and simply watching the Missouri River below.  (I still love the river, and find it interesting that I live so near it today.)  Sometimes a boat would come along; you'd hear a "toot" that was the signal for someone to raise up a portion of the A.S.B. bridge (in the background) to let it through, and neighborhood kids would run up to the top of the levee to watch.  
Up under the bridge were signs that hobos had been there, perhaps taking refuge from the elements:  whisky bottles, sardine cans and such were scattered about.  
Surely my mom didn't know I was wandering up there alone!  

We lived within easy walking distance of the Municipal Airport, which was one of my favorite places to hang out.  It was THE airport serving Kansas City back then.  My mom and I met Pat Boone's plane one time when he arrived for a concert sponsored by Katz drug stores, and we ended up being in a picture of the crowd on the front page of the Kansas City Star.  
Because of our close proximity to the airport, our TV signal often went haywire as planes flew over our house; when they were taking off or landing, the noise was horrendous.  

We drove to the airport yesterday; it's no longer "THE airport", but planes still land there.  Kansas City International Airport lies about fifty miles or so to the north.


While we were in North Kansas City, I asked Cliff to take me to the spot where I went to school when we first moved to the city.  I was halfway through the sixth grade when I was enrolled in McElroy Dagg school, which at that time was a grade school.  Later on it became part of the high school.  

Now the building is gone; in place of the McElroy Dagg building and grounds is Dagg Park.

A couple blocks away stands North Kansas City High School, from which I graduated in 1962.  The old part of the building hasn't changed much, although additions have made it at least double the size it used to be.   One thing that has changed drastically:  In 1962, you wouldn't have seen one black face in the student body.  There wasn't any enforced segregation, it's just that the Kansas City population north of the river was 100% white.   
That seems strange now, doesn't it?  Some traditions are best left behind. 

  Cliff and I saw several faces of color when we drove past the school.

I realize these ramblings are probably of little interest to my readers, but sometimes I need to turn back the years and remember other times, simply for my own benefit.   

I love Kansas City

I think that as I grow older, anything that reminds me of my lost youth is treasured.

So I love Iowa, although I was so young when I left there I barely remember what it was like. After all, it's where I first started school in a one-room schoolhouse. (I'm second from the back in the right-hand row.)


And I love Eagleville. I'm old enough to remember quite a few things about that little town: although if I went back now, very few people would know me, and I'd know fewer of them.

As much as I hated to move to Kansas City when I was in the sixth grade, the memories of laying on a bed in an apartment in Harlem and staring across the river at the skyline, homesick for the country are as strong as though it happened yesterday. Oh how I enjoyed watching the changing colors of the Kansas City Power and Light building. And that huge coffee can atop the Folgers building. I can't help loving Kansas City.


After traveling through Atlanta and Dallas, I realize our Kansas City skyline is pathetic by comparison. But my heart still skips a beat when I see it when we're heading toward the city from the east by way of I-70.

Harlem is still in my blood. That's where I first fell in love with the Kansas City skyline.

I guess it's just an old age thing.

cockroach memories

I was reading this entry in Scribblings from Sarajevo, a new discovery of mine, and was taken back in time to my childhood, reminded of how much my mother hated cockroaches. (That would be the German cockroach, not that huge roach people see so often in the south.)

We changed residences often back then, always living in old two-story houses in small towns and on farms. We'd move in and Mother would immediately wallpaper every room in the house to make it feel like hers. But I don't recall a cockroach problem until we moved to Kansas City.

When we moved to Harlem (a poor section of Kansas City, very near the (then) only big airport in town, we first lived in a tiny, three-room apartment. Downstairs were apartments inhabited by two of my dad's brothers and their families, and across the hall was another apartment. We all, by the way, shared one bathroom.

Mother was a Stanley Home Products addict, and when she discovered we were sharing our home with roaches, she started investing in Stanley Sure-Kill by the case. She'd see a roach scurrying into a corner and she'd leave no furniture unmoved, looking for it, sending up such dense clouds of Sure-Kill that it's a wonder I lived to see adulthood. We wouldn't see any roaches for a day or two, then one of my aunts would spray. And the roaches would come back to our apartment.

My mom, in our Harlem house.

We soon moved up the street where my parents purchased a home, the first one they had ever owned. We weren't greeted by the Welcome Wagon, but the roaches tried to make us feel at home. When a roach was seen heading into a closet, my mom would take out every item inside and spray like her life depended on it. When we went to Church, she'd fog the whole house with Sure-Kill as we left, and shut the doors and windows tight. One time she forgot about my poor parakeet, and we returned home to find him expired on the floor of his cage. I gave up on parakeets after that.

In the sixth grade, the teacher assigned us the job of capturing an insect to bring to school. I told my mom what I needed; she laughed, and said, "You could take a cockroach."

It didn't take us long to find one, in spite of Mother's exterminating efforts. It was a nice, big one, too. I put it in a Ball canning jar and put the lid on loosely so my captive wouldn't die.

Imagine my surprise the next morning (and my mom's too) when we saw the jar was now inhabited by one large cockroach, an empty shell of some sort that had dropped off the back end of its body, and twenty or so tiny baby roaches. That's when we learned how roaches reproduce; up until then, we just assumed they laid their eggs in some hidden place to hatch. Oh no, they carry the eggs in a shell that drops off when the babies are full-term!

Mother never rid that house totally of roaches, but she kept them at bay well enough that when we moved to our next house, we didn't have them any more.

Only one time in my married life did roaches try to invade my home. I called an exterminator so fast, it would make your head spin. I found out that roaches are one of the easiest pests for exterminators to get rid of; I'll bet it would have been cheaper for Mother to have called a professional than to buy all those cans of Sure-Kill. But then, she always did like a challenge.

Peripatetic adventures, the final chapter

My last entry about my parents' Gypsy lifestyle left us back in Harlem in the first house my parents had ever owned.  One would assume that our travels were over, now that we were homeowners:  That assumption would be wrong.  After a year or two, we sold the place in Harlem and bought a home in Crestview, a subdivision in Kansas City, North.    

This was a cheaply-built pre-fab house surrounded by other houses that looked very much like it, but I was thrilled to live in such a "new" house.  It's probably the first house we ever lived in that wasn't at least seventy-five years old.  Oh yeah, and I didn't have to change schools.  I was still attending North Kansas City High School, from which I graduated in 1962.

This house was near St. Pius X High School, so many of our neighbors were Catholic.  I don't think I had ever known a Catholic before then, and it was interesting to learn that they were no different than anybody else .  I had a lot of opportunities to babysit while we lived there, because those Catholics had a lot of kids!  

We must have been moving up in the world, because just before we bought the Crestview place, my parents bought their first-ever brand new car, a 1958 Chevy.

This picture looks across the road from our house.  

This is where I will end the series about all our moves, because the next move, after I graduated and started working at National Bellas Hess, took my parents to Blue Springs (the factory where my dad worked had been relocated), and me down into the heart of Kansas City, where I lived the second story of a house belonging to some church folks.  It had been converted to an apartment.  Guess what?  The house is still there, not looking too bad considering the neighborhood.  Thanks to Google Earth, I have a picture of it as it looks now.

My bed was at a window looking out at the apartment building on the right, and on hot summer nights when everybody had their windows up, I could hear entire conversations that were going on over there.  

My parents continued to move frequently throughout their lives, but Cliff and I have only moved five times, and once we bought this place in 1975, we stayed.  Oh, there was a two-and-a-half-year period when we rented the house out and lived back at Oak Grove (a long and boring story), but we returned, resolving never to move again.

Cousins, then and now

When my parents and I moved to Kansas City, our first home was in a very poor section of town north of the Missouri River known as Harlem. It was there that I first made an almost spiritual connection with the Missouri River; the Harlem levee and the A.S.B (Armour, Swift, and Burlington) bridge became my playground. I'd stroll right down to the river's edge and watch strange (and sometimes nasty) things floating past.


Some country cousins spent a week at our house, and I introduced them to my wonderful playground.

Yesterday at a family reunion some of those cousins and I talked about those days.

Here we are actually on the bridge: The cousin standing in the center, above (Mary), is the one in the center below, in the green. The one with chin in hand above (Carolyn) is the one on the left below in red.



The little girl on the right above, Junie, is the lady on the left below. Her sister Lela ( second from the left above) is on the right below. June hasn't changed a lot in fifty years, has she?

And now, changing the subject a bit: Considering how much I loved the Missouri River back then, do you think it's any coincidence that I ended up living in a place where I can get on my horse and be on the banks of that river in twenty minutes? I believe God hears the desires of a child's heart.

Picture taken at 6:30 A.M. today.

Always moving (part four of a series)

Our next move was just up the street to an old, two-story house owned by the same landlords, who now became our next-door neighbors.  Nothing really changed with this move:  same neighborhood, same school (North Kansas City), same Missouri River, still within walking distance.  We were back to an outhouse, but there was running water in the house, at least.  No hot water, but still, it beat carrying a bucket outside to a pump as we always had before moving to the city.  I don't remember much about this house except that I had a cat I sneaked inside after school, while both parents were still at work.  My mom was allergic to flea-bites, so she soon figured out what I was doing and banned the cat forever from the house.

And now we come to another move my mom left out.  Maybe it was because she ran out of room in her personal history book.  I wouldn't even have been able to figure out when this move took place if it hadn't been for a headline I looked up on newspapers.com:

The night of the tornado, my dad was at work, but Mother and I (and my cat) took cover beneath a concrete bridge near our house on North Antioch Road.  So we had moved away from Harlem before this took place.  We may as well have stayed in the house, since the tornado hit the Ruskin Heights area of the city, nowhere near us.  

I believe when we first moved there I was still attending North Kansas City, which was so overcrowded that they were having split sessions with half the students attending in the morning and half in the afternoon.  But then the brand new Northgate Junior High opened, NKC school went back to full-day sessions, and I went to a brand new school building.  That's where I was going to school when the tornado happened, because I remember taking the newspaper to Northgate school with me, showing everybody the pictures of tornado damage.

I'm pretty sure we lived at this property for the better part of a year.  I remember a Christmas there, and I recall spending time at a creek in either spring or fall that ran behind the house.  There were no neighbors nearby.  With Daddy working nights and Mother working days, I spent a lot of time alone, which was the way I liked it.  I never had an after-school social life and I didn't have friends I called on the phone.  I think my poor mother worried about my lack of a social life, because she was always trying to push me into situations where I would perhaps forge some friendships.  If there were new people at church who had a daughter around my age, she would invite them to our house for Sunday dinner, and later perhaps invite the daughter over after church for the afternoon.  She signed me up for church camp a few times.  Later on, she even tried to set me up with a "good church boy", inviting him over frequently.  I took to heading to my room when he showed up, because I had no clue what to talk about with the guy and I had no feelings for him whatsoever.  

Among the peculiar things I associate with the Antioch Road house is the fact that I remember that's where we lived when I started to develop breasts.  I know, too much information.  (Cliff was reading this entry and started laughing.  I asked him what was so funny and he answered, "I'm reading about you starting to grow your retirement package.) 

The next entry will find us moving back to Harlem.    

I'm tired of spelling peripatetic. Let's call it my Gypsy childhood from now on.

I assume Mother left the Wyant farm out of our wanderings because we didn't actually move out of the Eagleville area, but that isn't the only place she missed, and there is one that I am not sure where to place in our journeys:  Our first stay in Harlem, which is an unincorporated area of Kansas City.  I know I was in the second grade when we were there that time, because they tested me and decided I was ready for third grade.  That would mean we were there at some point before we moved to Eagleville.  It must have been very brief, because I don't even associate a house with that time, only a school I hated.  It was a miserable time indeed.  

Now comes the big move to Harlem from the Wyant farm.  I literally cried myself to sleep some nights in our tiny three-room upstairs apartment, homesick for the country.  Two of my dad's brothers lived in the downstairs apartments with their families.  When one of my aunts would spray for cockroaches, the pesky creatures migrated to our apartment.  Then Mother would spray, and they would move back downstairs.  

There was a bedroom for my parents, a tiny living room, and a tinier kitchen.  I slept on the couch.  I'm sure my parents intended this as a temporary place until we found something bigger, but nobody told me, and I assumed we'd be there awhile.  There were some positive things about the apartment:  For the first time in our lives we had running water, and down at the bottom of the stairs was an indoor restroom, the first we had ever had.  Oh, we shared it with the other tenants, but it was an improvement over the outhouses we were used to.  My cousin Alice, who lived directly beneath us, was my age.  They had a television, and I took to going to her house after school to watch whatever was on at that time.  Alice was excited about Peter Pan (with Mary Martin as Peter) and insisted I join her to watch it one evening.  

Before long both parents had found jobs, and one of their first purchases was a television.  Mother said it was the only way to keep me from moving downstairs with my cousin.  

I don't know how long we lived in the apartment.  I do know we were still there on Halloween, because my cousins and I were trick-or-treating and knocked on the door of an elderly couple who asked where I lived.  "In that big house down there that looks like a barn," I said.  

I didn't know they were our landlords.  My cousins were mortified.  

The only thing that helped me get over my grief at leaving the farm was our close proximity to the Missouri River.  Our apartment house was just across the road from the levee, so all I had to do to find solitude was walk to the top of the levee and then down the other side.  I could walk right to the river's edge if I wanted to.  It was a great consolation to me, and I find it rather poetic that I still live very near the same river.

This picture I took of my dad and some out-of-town cousins at a later time shows the levee on the river side, with the ASB bridge in the background.

More about our day trip to Kansas City

This was at the beginning of our walk.  Beneath the walking bridge are some very busy railroad tracks.  

Flood levels in 1993, 1844, and 1951.

I have been calling this "the riverwalk", but the actual name seems to be the Riverfront Heritage Trail.  

It stretches fifteen miles, and there will eventually be more of it.  

The Hannibal Bridge also reached to Harlem, where I lived.  It let out right at the Municipal Airport, THE airport back then; it was another of my playgrounds.  

With both parents at work, I'd wander down to the airport and watch planes taking off and landing.  I'd walk around inside the place gathering travel brochures from various counters.  If I needed to use the rest room, I crawled under the door of a booth, since it cost a quarter to open the door.  Sometimes I didn't have to crawl under, if some nice traveler exited a booth and held the door open for me.  The down side of living a few blocks from the airport was that our TV reception was messed up every time a plane flew over.    

It seems strange that I would have so many wonderful memories of living in such an impoverished area, but once I got over my homesickness for the farm we left behind, I enjoyed my life in Harlem.