Letters
The Monarchy
Back in the black: Regarding Greg Hall’s “White Tide” (June 21): While I agree that the Royals should work harder to make Negro League Baseball and the Monarchs part of the experience at the K, avoiding the stadium is not the answer. If more people would go to the games, the Royals could afford to showcase and celebrate the Monarchs at the stadium and afford more notable black players.
Joe Wilper
Warrensburg
Star-Crossed Lover
Star right, Star bright: It was a bit peevish and downright nasty for the Pitch to gloat over The Kansas City Star‘s downturn in fortune under Art Brisbane (Kansas City Strip, June 21).
As you say, The Star‘s editorials under the sacked editor were a bit stale, but they were frequently on the mark, as when The Star admitted some value in light rail and the views of Clay Chastain. The Star‘s decline in readership since 1997 is really not catastrophic and is pretty much the phenomenon for city dailies in the age of the Internet.
As a senior citizen, I cherish my pool of old Roman Catholic, Irish and Democrat genes. The Star is not always kind to my ilk, and its several barrages about the Catholic clergy in an AIDS plague were skewed and selected. Still, The Star shined recently with the pope’s visit to Russia, where even a cool reception from a stubborn bishop did not efface a marvelous witness to courage and moral grace.
Loyalty is rare these days, but twice in the recent past, I worked for The Star as a lowly rep for subscriptions. Seldom have I seen “corporate giants” provide such a fair workplace that was organized and plain decent.
Love it or hate it, The Star is one of those eternal institutions every great city must have. It is there to form a consensus; it can mentor, collect and form the responses of people — and eventually voice the only consensus in our city that can matter.
James V. McCormick
Kansas City,
Missouri
Class Warfare
Schoolhouse rock: Thank you for Joe Miller’s article “The Scholars of Central High” (June 21). I have walked the halls of Southeast, King and Paseo schools and have seen the problems for myself. The students ignore adult authority and have not considered that standards have been lowered to compensate for their unwillingness to put forth all their effort.
The construction companies have benefited the most from desegregation, not the students. Audits should be conducted to locate under-the-table deals and financial discrepancies and to see if equipment purchases actually arrived and are still in inventory. The school board needs to be investigated to discern if the teacher’s union is using them to exert undue control. Evaluations need to determine if the teacher’s union is able to keep ineffective teachers in the classroom. We must also admit that Dr. Taylor was handpicked by this school board.
The students must take responsibility too. Disruptive classrooms, trying to get by while doing as little as possible, students in high school who have not been paying attention since the third grade really exasperate the teachers.
Poverty, single parents and learning environment never discouraged our forefathers, who used to get whipped and have fingers cut off just for reading. Instead of listening to the “Hot Eight at Eight,” catching up on TV shows and movies, watching music videos and talking on the phone, students should be doing their homework — FIRST! The vast majority of students have no excuse!
Imani Malaika
Kansas City, Missouri
Station Misidentification
We interrupt this broadcast: I hadn’t intended to write regarding the KKFI 90.1 debacle (Deb Hipp’s “Fly in the Soup,” May 31), since I said what I wanted to say on my last radio show. However, the eloquent letters by my colleagues Bill Hillburn and Tom Crane in the June 21 issue of the Pitch moved me to add some points.
The new regime at KKFI has made a point of saying that the changes are being done to make the station “listener friendly.” The changes will reduce the diversity of programming that the station was originally founded to present. The bottom line has become the accumulation of money by programming to a “broader audience.”
If you, the audience, have any comment about this, be it pro or con, you should make your opinion known to the station manager by calling 816-931-3122 and leaving a message for Robert Barrientos. Perhaps he will even deign to speak to you. If he does, you might also ask him why he thinks the last fund drive did so badly.
Although some diverse programming remains at KKFI because there are not yet replacements trained to take over, the intent is to narrow the scope of the station to further distance it from its diverse origins. Many more of your favorite shows are going to be sacrificed. Those of us who have either left or been forced out are canaries in a coal mine — we saw this coming long before it happened. The feeling we get watching KKFI slowly die is like watching a historic building being torn down to be replaced by a fast-food restaurant.
Barry Lee
Kansas City, Missouri
