After 100 years, Old World church club in KCK with bowling and a bar has a new allure
He would eventually serve as Wyandotte County’s district attorney for 32 years — the longest tenure in Kansas history — but one of Nick Tomasic Sr.’s first jobs was as a pinsetter at the St. John Catholic Club bowling alley.
“Ten cents a line” — per game — “which came out to about two bucks a night, which was pretty good money back then,” Tomasic, 90, said. “You’d sit on a divider between two lanes and work them both. Pick up the pins by hand and set ‘em back up. You kept busy and you went home dirty. I did it all throughout high school, a couple nights a week.”
Earlier this month, as Tomasic reminisced on a barstool at the church basement club, the ancient scene he described wasn’t too terribly different from the sounds and sights that could be observed over his left shoulder. The human pinsetters are gone — the mechanical Brunswick A-2 pinsetter system has handled that job since sometime in the 1960s — but the Tuesday night bowling league members were rolling on the same six lanes installed in 1947, which replaced lanes that were originally built in the late 1920s.
Behind the bar, Tomasic’s son, Nick Tomasic Jr., was taking drink orders, and Kenny Yarnevich, whose third cousin was the founding president of St. John Catholic Club in 1922, was cooking mozzarella sticks and chicken tenders in the deep fryer.
“We like to keep things pretty old-fashioned here,” said Yarnevich, the club president from 2000 to 2018 and current manager of the bar and bowling alley. “It has served us well for many years.”
One hundred, to be exact: This weekend, St. John Catholic Club will celebrate its centennial with a two-day party filled with Croatian music and food. It will do so at a time of surprising cultural relevance. The club has long been an anchor in the Strawberry Hill community, a hub for the Croatian Catholics who began settling in the area at the end of the 19th century and the cradle from which several Wyandotte County leaders have emerged. But in recent years it has become something else: a place sought out by people from other parts of the metro. A destination.
It is true that, in 2019, the Netflix series “Queer Eye” devoted an episode to giving Yarnevich a makeover, generating local and national interest in the obscure Wyandotte County bowling alley he manages. But in fact the St. John Catholic Club renaissance was by then already underway.
Charmed by the time-warp quality of the place — portraits of long-dead priests on the walls, red-and-white checkered tile, Croatian paraphernalia everywhere, and the vintage bowling lanes, of course — local restaurants and businesses began renting out the club for staff parties starting in the early 2000s, spreading awareness of this Old World relic. During the 2018 World Cup, the club was the gathering spot for Croatian soccer fans; when the team made its thrilling run to the finals, members had to erect tents outside to accommodate the approximately 4,000 people who showed up to watch.
The neighborhood has changed, too. In recent years, Strawberry Hill — a quick five-minute drive from downtown KC — has seen an influx of new residents, rising property values, and amenities that had been absent for decades: a bookshop, a coffee shop, an arts space, new bars, new restaurants, a music venue.
St. John Catholic Club never really changed, though. It just hung around long enough to come back into style.
On the hill
Between Strawberry Hill in Kansas City, Kansas, and the West Bottoms of Kansas City, Missouri, lies the Kansas River and a jumbled concrete knot of roaring highways. The river has always been there. The highways have not.
When St. John the Baptist Catholic Church was organized in 1900, Strawberry Hill sloped down into the river bottoms, where European immigrants toiled by day in meatpacking plants. They walked down the hill to work and up the hill back home. In the late 1800s, Strawberry Hill was home to German and Irish immigrants. But as they found opportunities outside the meatpacking industry, many moved further west, away from the factories.
They were replaced by Slavs who’d come over in droves on ships: Serbians, Russians, Slovenians and Croatians. As it always has been in America, this new wave of immigrants took the toughest jobs and lived in hardscrabble conditions. Some settled on the hill. Others slept in the bottoms. Many couldn’t speak English.
“My dad came here when he was 13,” Tomasic Sr. said. “He came over alone, his parents put him on a boat. He didn’t speak the language, worked in a packinghouse. A lot of guys in that generation were like that. They weren’t very Americanized. Our name was Tomasic. But there were a lot of Tomasics in the parish that changed their name to Thomas because it was easier to get a job that way.”
In 1922, some of the children of these turn-of-the-century Croatian immigrants found themselves idle and restless. These boys were hanging around pool halls and street corners and outside local theaters. It seemed they should have a club of their own, a place to gather. They met with St. John’s parish priest, a man named Monsignor Martin Krmpotic, who gave them his blessing to use the church basement. A few years later, their group had grown from a few dozen to 70 members. In 1924, the club incorporated as a Kansas nonprofit, and the following year the St. John Catholic Club moved into a new hall, where it operates to this day.
Bowling, wildly popular in those days, was central to the activities. But the club also hosted Sunday night dances and performances by tamburitza orchestras playing traditional Croatian folk music. They played checkers and horseshoes. They boxed and competed in semi-pro baseball leagues around the Midwest. By 1939, there were approximately 6,000 Croatians living in Kansas City, Kansas. In 1947, according to club records, St. John Catholic Club boasted 342 dues-paying members.
The 1950s changed everything. First came the flood. In 1951, the Missouri and Kansas rivers spilled over and ravaged the West Bottoms. Much of the industry there, including the stockyards, never fully recovered.
“The flood also destroyed any remaining vestiges of a ‘Croatian Village’ in the bottoms,” says a history of the club published for its 75th anniversary, “effectively ending a colorful page in the Croatian history of Wyandotte County.”
Then came the federal highway expansion of the mid-1950s. To clear a path for Interstate 70, the federal government claimed through eminent domain a large swath of the quilt of homes that stretched from Fourth Street down to the river bottoms — more than 200 houses in all.
“Before the highway came through, we (St. John the Baptist Church) had four Masses on Sundays, all full,” Tomasic Sr. said. “But we lost hundreds of families, probably 90% of them Croatian, with the turnpike. People just left. They didn’t have any choice.”
Several schools and churches in eastern Wyandotte County closed over the next several decades. The congregations shrunk and grayed. White flight was underway. Many Croatian families moved out to the western suburbs, or to Johnson County. Strawberry Hill was mostly deserted after business hours. There had once been several active church bowling alleys; now there were only a few.
But St. John — the church and the club and the bowling lanes — hung on, in large part due to the bonds among those who remained in the area. Having lived in Strawberry Hill his entire life and raised his six kids there, Tomasic Sr. said he couldn’t imagine leaving.
“Some of my children live in the suburbs now, but they don’t live in a neighborhood,” he said. “They don’t even know their next-door neighbors but to wave to them. At my wedding 60 years ago, all our neighbors cooked the chicken for us in their own stoves. I had my 90th birthday a week ago. My wife put a little birthday sign in the yard and one of our neighbors came over with her kids and sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to me. We shared some ice cream. On my street right now, we have Hispanic families, Laotian families, gay couples with kids. We all know each other. I guess that’s just the way I like it.”
In the club
The Old World aesthetic it has retained for 100 years isn’t the only old-fashioned thing about St. John Catholic Club. It is a men’s club — something of an anachronism in the year of the Lord 2022. But the officers of the club and the bartenders who work the private parties and league nights will tell you that, though they are not technically members, women are very much a part of the firmament of the place.
Thursday night, for example, is ladies’ night: Six teams of four out on the lanes. Some of the women have been bowling at St. John for decades.
“I think I’ve been coming for about 35 years,” said Linda Verbeck.
She rolls on a team with her daughter, her twin sister Louise Sachen and Louise’s daughter. They’re originally Breitensteins, and the team is sponsored by the Strawberry Hill bar Breit’s, which is owned by their brother, Bobby Breitenstein.
Also rolling on a recent Thursday were several members of the Kolich family.
“I’ve been in the league since 1989,” said Marie Kolich.
“Our mom bowled here for 40-some years,” said Amy Kolich, one of Marie’s 11 siblings. “She bowled until she couldn’t bowl anymore, and then she’d still come up and coach us.”
Their mother was such a fixture that the club named a fundraiser after her: The Lorraine Kolich Memorial Tournament, which started in 2011, the year she died.
In the early 2000s, the club, which charges $10 per year in membership dues, updated its bylaws related to eligibility. Before, you had to be a current member of the church — which was a problem, because the congregation had been shrinking for years.
“It’s still true that the easiest way to become a member of the club is to become a member of the church,” said Nick Tomasic Jr., the club’s financial secretary. “But you can also join if you’re a direct descendant of a club member. A lot of our members go to Mass at other parishes, but they went to school or church here, and so they qualify.”
He said the club currently has 300 active members and “somewhere between 250 and 2,000 ‘friends’ of the club,” including about 50 widows, who are not technically members but are invited to all events and get the mailings. The club has always been an arm of the church, and it remains so.
“The church owns the building and we’re a nonprofit that rents from the church, and our mission is to support the church,” Tomasic Jr. said. “We meet once a month. The club’s officers meet, and then we meet with the regular club members. It’s pretty standard stuff. There’s no secret handshakes or anything like that.”
Political talk is typically avoided, though it’s also true that St. John has historically been a quiet center of power in Wyandotte County. In the 1970s, around the time Tomasic Sr.’s three-decade run as DA was getting started, the Wyandotte County courthouse was sometimes jokingly called the “Croat house” because of the number of Croatian elected officials there. Several club members have held powerful positions over the years.
That list includes Babe Mikesic (a 14-term Kansas state representative from 1951 to 1979), Al Sachen (Wyandotte County sheriff from 1958 to 1962), and Matthew Podrebarac (Wyandotte County District Court judge from 1978 to 1996). Daniel Soptic, the current Wyandotte County sheriff, is also a member.
“I don’t ask the club for an endorsement, and they don’t really endorse,” said Tom Burroughs, who, in addition to being a Unified Government commissioner and a member of the Kansas House of Representatives since 1997, is also a member of the club. “I married into a Croatian lineage family 41 years ago, and I feel like the people at the club are my family and friends. I will say, though, that elected officials do tend to make their way by the club during election season.”
Tyrone Garner was one of the pols who dropped by the club during the 2021 election season. As mayor/CEO of the Unified Government of Wyandotte County/Kansas City, Kansas, Garner issued a proclamation earlier this year: Nov. 22, 2022, is officially “St. John Catholic Club Day.”
Everything old is new again
Were it not for Kenny Yarnevich, it’s unlikely that very many people outside Wyandotte County would know of St. John Catholic Club.
It was Yarnevich who pioneered the idea, in the 2000s, to rent out the club not just to members and friends but to the community as a whole. They had a pretty distinctive situation, Yarnevich figured: a bowling alley, a bar, a family-friendly atmosphere. The club could provide bar staff and a mechanic to keep tabs on the lanes; the host could bring in whatever catering they wanted; the rental fees would be pretty cheap; everybody wins.
Before long, the club was in high demand for holiday parties. Restaurants and coffee shops — Yarnevich mentioned Harry’s Country Club, Amigoni Urban Winery and Broadway Cafe, but there are several others — began holding annual staff parties at the club. Word slowly spread about this curious time-capsule.
“It’s a change of pace from the usual nightlife of Westport and Power & Light,” Yarnevich said. “You come spend an evening with us and do something entirely different.”
He continued: “You could go to a public bowling alley, but that’s not a private event like we do here. Maybe you can bring in a birthday cake there. Here, we allow you to cater, you get away from the pricey stuff, you can bring all your friends and family. We get a lot of Johnson County and Missouri churches, too: ones with money and ones with not so much money. And they all say the same thing: ‘We wish we had something like this at our parish.’”
In 2018, the Croatian soccer team was making its run to the World Cup finals and St. John Catholic Club began hosting bigger and bigger watch parties.
(The club has seen several waves of Croatian immigrants over the years, the result of conflicts like World War II, the Cold War and the Croatian War of Independence in the early 1990s; the latter group brought with it a love of soccer that eventually rubbed off on existing club members.)
Eventually, the local media showed up and interviewed Yarnevich. It so happened that the producers of “Queer Eye” — in town filming the first of two seasons in the area — caught the broadcast and decided to head over to Strawberry Hill. They met Yarnevich’s sister, who recommended her lifelong bachelor of a brother for a “Queer Eye” makeover.
Yarnevich’s episode aired in 2019, bringing more attention to the club.
“I was told it was one of their higher-rated episodes, which I think is mostly because there was a dog in the story,” Yarnevich said. (In addition to sprucing up his house and wardrobe, the Fab 5 hosts also adopted a dog for Yarnevich, which he named Fab.) “So that caused a lot more calls to come in from people wanting to rent the club, talk about the show, take pictures. We saw a spike in business from that, definitely.”
It continues to this day. Club activity is more or less split between bowling league nights (Monday through Thursday, except in the summer) and private parties (Friday through Sunday, often two per day). And as younger people and artists continue to move into Strawberry Hill, they’re increasingly aware of this gem in their midst. In September, the country duo Plains was photographed inside the club for a story published in The New York Times.
And preparations are already being made for the World Cup next month. “It’s in Qatar, so Croatia plays its first match at 4 a.m. our time,” Tomasic Jr. said.
From behind the bar, he glanced out toward the lanes. Some knocked-down pins had spun beyond the reach of the Brunswick’s rake. Human intervention was required.
“Deadwood on 3,” Tomasic Jr. said, and the club’s mechanic, a gentleman named Ron Weller, headed out toward the pin deck to sort out the situation.
“Ron’s been with us a long time,” Tomasic Jr. said, popping the top off a Miller Lite longneck. “These bowling machines, they’re like Army Jeeps. They’re meant to run easy and be simple to work on. But you’ve got to have a bowling mechanic who knows how these old machines work. It’s not so easy to find those anymore.”
Centennial celebration
St. John Catholic Club, 414 Barnett Ave. in Kansas City, Kansas, celebrates its 100th anniversary this weekend with a two-night party.
On Friday, Oct. 28, European folk act the Baric Brothers will perform at an open house reception, 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. at the club. Catered food will be provided, and the bowling lanes will be open.
On Saturday, Oct. 29, guests will gather after the 4 p.m. Mass for a reception in the club, followed by a 6 p.m. dinner. Tickets to the dinner are $20 and can be reserved by calling the club at 913-371-9690. Landrush, a local cover band, will perform from 8 to 11 p.m.
On Wednesday, Nov. 23, the World Cup watch parties get underway at 4 a.m., when Croatia takes on Morocco. Additional watch parties are planned for the Croatia-Canada match at 10 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 27, and the Croatia-Belgium match at 9 a.m. Thursday, Dec. 1 — and more if Croatia advances.
This story was originally published October 26, 2022 at 5:30 AM.
