‘He never moved on’: New book reveals untold account of Kansas City skywalks disaster
Author Eli Paul shines a light on one of Kansas City’s darkest hours in the soon-to-be-released “Skywalks: Robert Gordon’s Untold Story of Hallmark’s Kansas City Disaster.”
If you aren’t familiar with Gordon, that’s understandable. His name wasn’t prominent in coverage of the 1981 tragedy at the Hyatt Regency that killed 114 people and injured more than 200. But, as the lawyer for plaintiffs in the federal class-action lawsuit that followed, Gordon not only was a key player in the skywalks story, but he also became consumed by it.
Paul will discuss his book, published by the University of Nebraska Press, on March 2 at the downtown Kansas City Public Library. The official release date is March 1, though it already is available online.
“I don’t think I’m overstating the case that this really is an untold story,” Paul said. “You wouldn’t have found it in the paper at the time or later on.
“I do tell the story of the skywalks disaster, but it’s through one man’s eyes and experiences.”
Paul, a Kansas City resident, served as head of the library’s Missouri Valley Special Collections from 2011 to 2016. That is when he became intrigued by Gordon.
The lawyer’s son Andy donated 180 boxes of his father’s papers, almost all from Gordon’s federal skywalk case, to the Missouri Valley collections. When archivists reorganized and inventoried them, they discovered a manuscript for “House of Cards,” which Gordon had written but which was never published.
“It’s well over 800 pages of manuscript, and basically buried in there is a real good 400-page book,” Paul said.
Gordon started working on the manuscript after all the skywalks lawsuits were settled in 1983, when it became clear the lawyer would never present his vast evidence in court.
“It consumed his life for the next 10 years,” Paul said.
Gordon’s obsession with the case went far beyond his professional interest in it. So much so that he wound up divorced and deeply depressed before dying of colon cancer in 2008.
“Lawyers (defend) the people who write their checks, and then when it’s over they move on,” Paul said. “That was the thing about Robert Gordon — he never moved on.”
In his manuscript, Gordon concluded that Hallmark, as owner and builder of the hotel, deserved the bulk of the blame for the disaster, and he wasn’t shy about sharing his opinion. That was not a popular stance in a city where Hallmark and the Hall family were universally respected.
Paul doesn’t necessarily buy into Gordon’s conclusions, saying there is plenty of blame to go around. From site inspectors to structural engineers to the CEO, any among a number of people might have prevented the catastrophe.
Previously the museum director at the National World War I Museum and Memorial, Paul takes a historian’s approach rather than a journalist’s approach like previous books on the topic, “Buried Truths and the Hyatt Skywalks: The Legacy of America’s Epic Structural Failure” (2021) and “The Last Dance: The Skywalks Disaster and a City Changed” (2011).
“I think there’s still a lot of people who in the back of their minds are saying, ‘You know, we never really got the real story about what happened,’” Paul said. “And Robert Gordon provides at least a counternarrative. You can argue with his conclusions and some of his evidence, but he does provide a counter narrative. And that’s what I wanted my book to do.”
Having written earlier books about the Wounded Knee massacre, Lakota leader Red Cloud and Maj. Gen. Hugh Lenox Scott, Paul is primarily a chronicler of the American frontier army and the Plains American Indian wars.
“This has really made my colleagues worry about me,” he said. “This is a big departure for me.”
But he said Gordon’s story had nagged at him since he retired from the library in 2016.
“He was very opinionated, very prickly,” Paul said. “The word most people used was obsessed. So basically, you were either for him or against him, and that sort of put you in a camp immediately. But on the other hand, people described him as the life of the party. Very personable, very knowledgeable, interesting.
“He was a full individual, but when it came to this topic, he left no prisoners.”
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Eli Paul book event
Eli Paul will speak about “Skywalks: Robert Gordon’s Untold Story of Hallmark’s Kansas City Disaster” at 6 p.m. March 2 at the Kansas City Public Library-Central Library, 14 W. 10th. kclibrary.org. 816-701-3400.
