Laura Hockaday redefined ‘society’ to reflect every Kansas Citian

Laura Rollins Hockaday, who passed away recently, was one journalist who never forgot the importance of getting people into the paper with their names spelled right.

That may sound mundane, but it made for a social revolution in Kansas City in the 1980s and ‘90s — a time when getting people into the “paper for the people” was not happening.

It was a time when leaders at The Star, including me, were slowly awakening to an uncomfortable truth: Our pages didn’t reflect the breadth of our readership. We were enforcing a kind of hegemony — the historical hegemony of white guys with power.

Whole swaths of the community never got their names spelled right, or spelled at all.

Into this social and political vise tripped Laura, whose abiding light-heartedness concealed a strong sense of purpose. She seemed like a most unlikely candidate for social revolutionary, but she was one.

Since learning of her death, I’ve been swapping stories about her with old colleagues and Kansas City friends. It’s nostalgic for me, but also a bit painful, as I recall a time when I fielded the fierce backlash of people who believed the paper reflected racist assumptions about who gets coverage and what kind of coverage they get.

While those strong feelings burned hot, and my colleagues and I attempted to correct the paper’s course, I was acutely aware that over on the society desk, amazingly enough, Laura had already addressed the problem and was years ahead of the rest of us at 18th and Grand.

I puzzled to myself: How is it that the society editor, covering what had been the most antiquated beat in journalism, is blazing the trail for social justice?

Laura was doing this simply by redefining The Star’s notion of “society.” After she got the job in 1982, she moved beyond The Star’s traditional coverage of well-to-do white folks having parties and raising money for their charities.

Laura peremptorily changed this by adding in the parties, organizational work and philanthropic activities of minority communities. Boom. Done.

Unlike the rest of the paper, which was large and run by a hierarchy of incredibly intelligent people (here I am placing a smiley face icon), she made the change quickly and efficiently.

Laura, I learned this week, really didn’t want the society editor job at first. Her boss, Michael “OJ” Nelson and publisher James Hale had to talk her into it. She enjoyed her position as travel editor. If she was going to do it, she told Hale, it would have to be done differently. She would have to be permitted to cover the whole community.

Laura already had the old-line network of news sources. Her mother, Clara S. Hockaday, co-founded the Jewel Ball. So she knew the Kansas City Country Club crowd going back to kindergarten. What Laura needed to do was expand her Rolodex, make new contacts and tap the wider network for story ideas.

Again, boom, done. Allan Gray, who incorporated the Kansas City Friends of Alvin Ailey in 1983, told me the story of how Laura, soon after taking the job, started making weekly calls to him to develop story ideas in the African-American community. And Allan was just one of many she reached out to.

As Laura developed her sources and published her stories — many replete with photos of people rarely or never seen in the paper — she quickly was recognized in minority communities as a different face of The Star.

As a result, Laura got story tips we never used to get. We also got praise from people who previously weren’t handing out compliments.

Laura forced this change in a large institution, not by confrontation, not in anger or revolt. She was a gentle soul who saw the errors and inequities of the way things had been done. She decided to do things right.

This story was originally published October 27, 2017 at 2:35 PM with the headline "Laura Hockaday redefined ‘society’ to reflect every Kansas Citian."