The Star’s glory days offer a glimpse of the way we were

Soon after the cow herd photos appeared on page one of The Kansas City Star, their clippings popped up again on the newsroom bulletin board with brand-new headlines.

“Horsies protest rule favoring moo-cows!”

Farther down on the board, the bovines snapped back:

“Moo-cows decry horsie protest!”

The conflict was over which group was getting the most American Royal animal photos into The Star. The question at issue here was whether a photo with a single horsie should count as just one, while one photo of an entire moo-cow herd could score 10 or 20.

No wonder the horsies were angry!

Reporter J. Harry Jones Jr., was at it again with his Star Animal Derby (SAD), a perennial bulletin-board favorite of The Star newsroom in the 1960s, that happy era for newspaper people. Our esteemed editors thought the American Royal Livestock and Horse Show was vital to our city’s economy. So day after day they plastered our pages with horsie and moo-cow and piggie (and even poultry!) photos.

The Star Animal Derby savagely satirized our editors’ priorities. How strange, then, that they didn’t fire Harry for the satire, if not for the working hours he wasted creating it.

He would thumbtack his latest SAD tale as reporters ambled close to chuckle. Later our editors would stroll past and usually walk away smiling. Possibly they didn’t fire Harry because he was writing award-winning stories about the American prison system, starvation in Africa and Mafia involvement in Kansas City politics.

During those youthful days in our profession, we Star journalists were privileged to cover the civil rights movement as it gained momentum, soon to bring a Kansas City ordinance opening restaurants and movies and other venues to black people. For the first time since our founding in 1880, the paper was hiring black reporters. We covered the women’s movement and even took part — rather early, actually, as Margaret Hamilton, Winifred Shields, Jan Dickerson, Jane Fowler and Betsey Solberg joined us tough guys on City Desk.

The Star’s pay was bad. We griped a lot. But dropping our finished stories in the basket at 1 p.m. as young reporters, we knew they would slap down on 350,000 doorsteps that very evening. With luck, we might get double that many readers of stories we had written the same morning. Seven hundred thousand readers of our words!

“A time it was, and what a time it was…” Simon and Garfunkel were singing then.

Our editors were slowly growing out of the piety that had killed many a good Star story.

Searching for a subject that would hone his literary skills, Charles Gusewelle slept one night in a 50-cent north side flophouse. Or tried to sleep in one of many plywood-walled cubicles guarded overhead with chicken wire and populated with scores of scuzzy down-and-outs. When his story hit page one, Paul Miner, an editor noted for refinement, came smiling back to Gus’s desk.

“So, you finally got ‘fart’ in the paper!” Miner said.

No, no, our copy editors would have deleted “fart.” Gus sneaked past with “flatus” for the aura of the flophouse, a synonym that escaped everyone’s notice except Paul’s. Gus was a stickler for words. He once quarreled with a copy editor who had cut “primordial” from his feature article.

The editor said readers wouldn’t know the meaning. Later Gus found “primordial” (instinctive, primitive, basic, primal) in a Washington Post headline and pinned it on our bulletin board.

“When Post editors find a good word,” he groused in a note alongside, “they put it in a headline!”

Those Gusewelle literary skills served Star readers in books and thousands of his stories and columns over more than half a century.

Most Star reporters rose from the lower half of society, if not lower than that. Our one representative from the upper regions was Laura Rollins Hockaday, whose great-grandfather, James S. Rollins, in the 1860s was a U. S. congressman, later to become known as father of the University of Missouri.

So when the society page editor resigned, our managing editor naturally tapped Laura.

For the 80 years since The Star’s founding, it had appeared that Kansas City had no black “society,” people who attend elegant parties and throw lavish weddings for their daughters. With Laura steering the selection, beautiful black ladies in long dresses appeared again and again on our page as they cut tall wedding cakes. She integrated Kansas City society, at least in our newspaper.

Laura invited the entire staff to her parents’ house for a party on July 20, 1969. We were eating and drinking on the patio after 9 o’clock when she asked for help in dragging a TV outside. Then Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped down from the Eagle onto the dusty surface of the moon. Armstrong says his bit about the giant leap for mankind. Aldrin just blurts out: “Beautiful! Beautiful! Magnificent desolation!”

We wondered: was it just a coincidence, or did Laura order the whole thing up for her party?

Helen Gott Gray and I researched business discrimination in Kansas City, finding several companies with hundreds of employees without a single black one. Helen was the first black reporters hired by The Star, barely in time to rescue our own company from that plight. A top editor called us over to his desk.

“I need to know whether the companies you name here are the very worst discriminators in Kansas City.” Of course, we had no idea whether they were the worst. “Well,” said our editor, “if they are not the worst, we just can’t use this story.”

Instantly, Helen spoke up.

“You know, I got a ticket from a policeman for speeding this morning. I asked him why he didn’t stop all the cars that were passing me, going faster than I was. He said, ‘Ma’am, all we can do is catch’em one at a time.’ ”

Amazingly, Helen’s riposte pushed that story past the editor, right into the newspaper.

Though he wrote many great stories for The Star, Steve Underwood always gave the credit to dumb luck. Never more so than his 1965 tale that (who knows?) might yet propel 89-year-old Charles B. Wheeler to the governorship of Missouri.

Back in the day, Steve got a call from his aunt . His uncle had died of a heart attack. A deputy county coroner was insisting the body go to a particular North Side funeral home. Steve drove to the hospital and told the deputy to shove off. He found out the funeral home owner and the elected Jackson County coroner were “friends.”

“Wouldn’t you try to help your friends?” the coroner inquired of Steve.

That North Side home often got hired for such funeral services; if not, they sometimes embalmed the body for a fee.

Steve wrote the story, kicking up outrage at the coroner and opening a path for the youngWheeler, a qualified forensic pathologist. In the next election, Wheeler won against the “friendly” incumbent and launched his political career.

In 1967, he won office as judge of the Jackson County Court; in 1971 as mayor of Kansas City for two terms; then as a Missouri state senator. In March of this year the 89-year-old filed to run for governor of Missouri.

Never say die, as a politician or a journalist, though Steve Underwood did die in 1993. He was the belated victim of a World War II battle injury. But Steve’s dumb luck persists — that little kickoff he gave it in 1965 still propelling Wheeler’s seemingly eternal political career.

I’m out of space, but I could go on telling tales, including one of a story by John Ratterman about a Kansas City interracial couple who got married in the early Sixties —a story stopped by one editor, passed by another so it hit the paper after all. But no. Enough.

Oh, what a time it was!

Charles Hammer: hammerc12@gmail.com

This story was originally published July 26, 2016 at 10:40 AM with the headline "The Star’s glory days offer a glimpse of the way we were."