Sean O’Byrne stuck his hand in Kay Barnes’ face. “Smell this!” he said. The mayor recoiled as if O’Byrne were holding a fistful of dog poop. “That smells horrible!” she said, then smiled. “That’s the smell of progress!” O’Byrne gleefully told her and the city council members who’d gathered in City Manager Bob Collins’ office on April 4. In his…
Kim Smith was reading in bed one night when she heard a noise, then saw a large rat scuttle toward her. She did the sensible thing: screamed, stood on her bed and hurled magazines. The rat just stared, so Smith dashed from the room. “I just ran out of there and slammed the door!” she remembers with a shudder. “I…
The videotape isn’t the clearest, shot as it was through the window of a car parked across the street from Kristin Eklof’s Independence home. But there’s Dennis Roberts Jr.’s black, four-door F150 pickup parked in Kristin’s driveway in the dark. It’s still parked there the next morning. And there’s Dennis, plodding out of the house, starting the truck and scraping…
The late restaurateur Jasper Mirabile Sr. opened his namesake restaurant (see review) in 1954. The town was filled with independently owned restaurants, many of them with oddball names that, in retrospect, capture the mood and innocence of the era. I wish some of them were still around, like The Flying Saucer, the Spic & Span Café, the Golden Halo Coffee…
