Going Postal

It was a dark and stormy night.

Wind rattled shutters, blew out candles and knocked over fake gravestones in the front yard at 33rd and Karnes, in the prime candy-gathering neighborhood of Coleman Highlands. The full-moon darkness pressed phosphorescently against brittle tree limbs, twisting gnarly shadows over sidewalks scattered with little kids wearing plastic firefighter suits.

But Halloween’s scariest moment came during the World Series, which was interrupted with LIVE BREAKING ANTHRAX NEWS. Mayor Kay Barnes and Kansas City health department director Rex Archer had called a press conference to announce that the gory stuff had infected a cave in north Kansas City — this one devoted not to hiding terrorists but to meeting demand from peace-loving stamp collectors. The vector was a pallet of shrink-wrapped commemorative envelopes from Washington, D.C.’s anthrax-infested Brentwood Road postal terminal.

Kansas City’s Stamp Fulfillment Services center (who even knew we had such a thing?) doesn’t distribute mail to homes or businesses, so Archer and stamp-center boss Gary Stone (who seemed to be wearing a John Ashcroft mask) assured the public that there was nothing to worry about.

Sofa slugs suffering heart attacks due to the frightful interruption of prime-time programming posed a greater public health risk than anthrax. The anthrax was news, but couldn’t it have waited an hour and a half, until 10? Employees at the stamp center had known for more than a week that a load had come from Brentwood Road, and some of them were already taking antibiotics just in case, though nobody felt sick.

Health department officials say they received the anthrax test results at 4:45 p.m. “Around 6 p.m., we decided to hold a press conference at 8 to alert postal employees that they needed to come to the health department [the next morning] to be interviewed and receive a seven-day course of antibiotics,” says Sheryl Woods.

With their panicky burst onto TV, Barnes and Archer grabbed a Kansas City minute in the new-war spotlight. But they should think twice about scheduling their preemptive strikes smack in the middle of The West Wing; compared with C. J. Cregg and her thrilling press conferences, these two looked like schlubs.

At 10 we learned that the people who had reason to be afraid — stamp-center workers — weren’t. “It’s not really fear; it’s just concern for the people actually around it, who handled the mail when it came in,” stamper Marie McElfish told KCTV Channel 5’s Sandra Olivas. “I’m not really concerned about myself.”

But the overkill bled into the next morning with another press conference. Barnes, Archer, Stone, city manager Bob Collins, state health director Maureen Dempsey, the manager of the industrial bunker that houses the stamp center, various bureaucrats and most of the city council (including Troy Nash, who didn’t let recent allegations of wife-beating keep him away from the cameras). So what was the news? The obvious: Anthrax can travel — though, again, no one was sick. While reporters struggled to understand what the Stamp Fulfillment Services center actually does, Rex Archer offered one of his unreassuring reassurances.

“Sometimes we complain about a little bit of humidity in Kansas City, but humidity tends to clump things that are small,” Archer said, suggesting that globby anthrax spores were less likely to travel through the air. “So that’s a little bit of a benefit.”

Just a couple of weeks earlier, at an October 15 meeting with 200 elected officials, firemen, policemen, nurses and EMTs, the ominous forecast from fire chief Smokey Dyer was that if the metro area came under major attack, we were basically screwed: “The ability to handle a large event does not exist.” Congressman Dennis Moore asked whether Archer thought the public was being adequately educated, which elicited another Archerism: “I’ve noticed walking out of restrooms that people are starting to wash their hands more.”

Last Thursday, however, Archer said that public health officials were learning about anthrax very quickly. By that day’s second press conference, at 5 p.m. (this one had fewer council members), Archer said an important lesson had been learned. “A percentage of people did not have updated phone numbers with their employers,” he said. Recent events made it clear that officials should “call on all Americans to update their phone lists.”

Which is all anyone can do, really, in a spooky new world where mailmen become casualties and politicians keep jumping from the hedges yelling “Boo!” We still have to take care of business.

Across the street from Kansas City’s gleaming health department building at 24th and Troost, there’s a crumbling, boarded-up three-story house, stickered with bright orange warnings. For the moment, and for the foreseeable future, that building and others like it skipping south along Troost are bigger public health risks than anthrax. Near the crumbling house, a man dressed in layers of giveaway clothing stops his half-empty shopping cart on the sidewalk. He stands there, methodically salvaging a ribbon of toilet paper tangled in a bush. Who ever interrupts prime time for that guy?