Life of Kemper
Even in a crowd of people who know him, R. Crosby Kemper III is easily overlooked.
He’s a rich, connected man whose name is branded across the metro. His family has made its Kansas City-founded bank, UMB, one of the nation’s most stable, with 135 branches in seven states. His face has been in newspapers and business magazines. His hand is still fresh from the congratulatory touch of first lady Laura Bush, who just presented him with an award coveted by every U.S. librarian. But the Kansas City, Missouri, Public Library director remains inconspicuous, working the room with an almost stealthy charm.
On this October evening, nearly 300 people have packed the stately main floor of the Kansas City Central Library. The high-ceilinged vestibule of the former bank folds discussion among small groups of local politicians, architects and environmental activists into an excited hum. The event about to start is “Conversations on the Environment,” a year-old lecture series put on by the library and a dozen other groups that has become a big draw for the library. Tonight’s speaker, Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, will cite the rehabilitation of old buildings as an act of environmental responsibility and urban-core invigoration.
Kemper stands, hands clasped in front of his waist, a patient smile on his face as he waits for the polite moment to enter each conversation. When he does, he drops historical names and dates with easy erudition, his references meandering back and forth over the line between intellectual vanity and sincere enthusiasm.
Printed matter is always stitched to his right hand — the monthly program of library events, a hardback copy of Reinventing Knowledge by Ian F. McNeely and Lisa Wolverton, a crinkled printout of the latest state assessment of the Kansas City, Missouri, School District. He has the disheveled look of a college professor who has forgotten his last barber’s appointment and left his nail clippers stuck in a history book to hold his place. His suit hangs as though tailored for a man 10 pounds heavier and a couple of inches taller. The sleeves graze his knuckles. His pants sag in the back.
As members of the audience settle into their seats, Kemper scribbles some notes on a credit-card-sized scrap of paper. He climbs the podium to introduce Moe but can’t stifle a sly mention of yesterday’s trip to the White House. His gold medal from the Institute of Library and Museum Sciences, he tells the audience with a conspiratorial smile, was a ploy to save precious symbolic real estate in a time of financial panic.
“Actually, the Asian central bank was trying to repossess the White House, and we were there to stop it,” he says. “We did. So it’s safe for a couple more days. Until they screw up again.” He gets the laugh.
Kemper knows about saving important real estate. He stepped in as library director at a key moment. In 2005, the renovated Central Library had just opened, the new Plaza Library was racing toward its debut, and the library was facing a $1.4 million hole in its budget. The incoming leader would be lauded for the library’s rise to prominence or blamed for its failure to meet expectations. So the banking scion put himself front and center at the library, taking a leading role as no other director had done. Several times a week, he introduces a speaker or an author.
“It helps brand the library,” he says. “It gives us a face.”
As the face of the library, Kemper is staking his legacy on something only a man possessing 23,000 books of his own would attempt: making Kansas City smarter.
Kemper often eats his lunch at a corner table perched a few feet above the Central Library’s café. From there, he can gaze down on dozens of downtown employees lined up to buy personal-sized pizzas and toasted sandwiches. It’s a prime lookout for the encounters between the often overzealous security guards and the homeless men and women who course through the café’s copper doors on their way to the public computers on the third floor.
But he rarely looks up from his reading. Today’s volume is Who’s Your City? How the Creative Economy Is Making Where You Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life. One leg folded over another, eyes locked to the page, he would be soaked by the overhead sprinklers before he heard a fire alarm.
A few minutes later, returning to his unremarkable office, he carefully piles his lunch-hour reading atop his paper-strewn desk. The phone rings.
“Kenny Hulshof,” he says, mostly to himself, as he glances at the caller ID. In 1994, Kemper organized the first political fundraiser for the congressman and failed Republican gubernatorial candidate. Kemper shrugs off his coat and drapes it over the back of his chair. He doesn’t pick up the phone. Moments later, a staffer from the campaign calls back. He wants Kemper to give Hulshof space at the library for a press conference. Kemper shifts slightly forward in his chair, sensing someone looking for a free pass.
“Whatever my personal political view, in the political arena I have to be — how shall I put this? — fair to everybody,” he tells the caller. “I can’t give you guys a deal. I get calls from all the people running. They all think they can be in the library for free. It happens every day.”
That personal political view, he acknowledges, stems from watching his father’s career and from an upbringing that was different from most people’s. He offers his life story as an improvised set of recollections, a wistful cherry- picking of memories: studying at elite boarding schools (Andover and Eton), writing research monographs in midlife, working retail in 1970s New York.
Kemper’s father, R. Crosby Kemper Jr., a powerful man at the helm of a successful bank, diverged from a long tradition of Democratic patriarchs and ran for office as a Republican. Kemper III went to political rallies as a child. In 1964, he improved his math grades in exchange for his father’s permission to attend a Barry Goldwater rally at Liberty Memorial. He had already started reading the National Review, and his eyes still widen when he speaks of meeting William F. Buckley Jr. at the Republican National Convention.
At Yale, he majored in history and spent long hours studying politics, philosophy and Renaissance England. On the political spectrum, the son of the turncoat pulled still further to the right, embracing a libertarian worldview. For Kemper, there’s rarely a bad time to quote libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek.
After Oxford rejected his graduate-school application, he spent several years in New York City, selling T-shirts on 59th Street and working on a book about imperialism. He returned to Kansas City in 1977 to start an on-again, off-again relationship with the family business. Over the next two decades, he fought with his father, took his leave of UMB for a decade and then went back. “It’s something we do in our family,” he says of the quarreling. When his father tapped his younger brother, Sandy, to be president in 1994, Kemper wasn’t resentful. “I didn’t think I had the ambition anyway,” he says. Given his turn in 2000, Kemper dutifully stepped in as CEO. But his career aspirations weren’t confined to business.
“If the system worked for you, you have an obligation to work for others, wherever they come from,” Kemper says. “I think in my family, there’s a basic Christian view of moral equality of human beings. We’re not all equal in how much money we come from. Some people are faster. Some people are smarter. I think that’s all true. But morally, we’re all equal.”
To influence the system, he made his own run at politics, mounting a bid for the Missouri Senate at the dawn of the Reagan revolution. His platform emphasized education and pushed the idea of charter schools before they had a name. “I must have been the only Republican to lose in 1980,” he says.
In the 1990s, he contributed thousands of dollars to conservative candidates such as John Ashcroft and Sam Graves. But he delved further into education and scholarship. He added thousands of volumes to his personal library, including works of philosophy, politics and history. In 1996, he pushed to the side his folders and notes about imperialism and edited a book of essays about Winston Churchill, the man Kemper believes had the biggest impact on the 20th century.
In doing business for the bank, Kemper met St. Louis billionaire Rex Sinquefield, who shared his political views. “I discovered he shared an interest in Thomas Hart Benton, Cardinals baseball, floating Missouri rivers, and starting a libertarian think tank,” Kemper says. In 2005, the two formed the Show-Me Institute, which has, with its studies, angered conservatives hoping to reform the judicial nomination process and outraged liberal transit advocates by arguing that light rail increases crime.
Kemper left UMB in 2004. He says his departure was a family decision and doesn’t explain further. But his father’s legacy stood as a challenge.
“He has had the courage to fight for his convictions in the political and civic arenas, without regard to which side the big battalions are on,” he wrote in the foreword of his 1996 book. “He has sought justice for the weak when it would have been easier and more profitable to do otherwise.”
When Kemper ended his career as a banker, he was a millionaire. But, like his father, he was eager to keep fighting. He just needed to find a new battle.
Kemper is still rubbing his face from lack of sleep when he spreads his notes at the head of the table for an early morning meeting with his library managers. As the employees trickle in — some carrying mugs of coffee, others with McDonald’s sacks — they slide into seats near the door. The chairs closest to Kemper stay empty until the latecomers have no other place to sit.
Kemper keeps things casual, filling them in on his trip to the White House. He jokes about trying to steal a portrait of John Adams that was too big to fit under his coat. He talks up his breakfast with former Sen. Alan Simpson. The Wyoming Republican gave Kemper some tongue-in-cheek advice about being a productive leader.
“Sen. Simpson said, ‘The most important thing you can do is be able to tell people to go to hell and make them believe they’re going to enjoy the journey,'” he says with a chuckle.
It was nothing Kemper didn’t already know. Among these librarians, he remains an outsider — and he relishes the part.
Kemper’s predecessor, Dan Bradbury, had advanced degrees in library science, 10 years on the administrative ladder and three stints directing smaller systems before he took the reins in Kansas City. Kemper had no library experience. He had something entirely different: a relationship with Kansas City’s most important philanthropists.
When Bradbury left the library in 2003, he knew its financial future was tenuous. A thinning stream of public funding has hurt libraries nationwide. Patrons are looking for more materials and services from area libraries just as property tax revenues are down and local governments are gutting their budgets. Olivia Dorsey, former president of the board of directors, says Kemper’s ability to raise private money was a key factor in his hiring in 2005.
His appointment wasn’t applauded by the library community. Organizations such as the Missouri Library Association opposed his selection, something Kemper shrugs off as “a guild mentality.” His inexperience posed a political problem, too. According to Missouri state law at the time, the director of the Kansas City library system had to have a master’s degree in library science.
To get that law changed, Kemper stepped on a few toes, including those of Sharon Sanders-Brooks, then a member of the Missouri House of Representatives and now a Kansas City councilwoman. Kemper asked Jane Cunningham, a St. Louis Republican, to sponsor the bill. “The Kansas City delegation was a Democratic delegation, and he asked a Republican from the other side of the state — and a Republican who was not particularly thought highly of — to sponsor it,” Sanders-Brooks says. “We had some debate about it, and a letter was sent to him expressing our displeasure.”
Kemper says it was a misunderstanding. Since the passage of the revised law, he has mended fences with the MLA and made a fan of Sanders-Brooks. Still, though his demeanor is generally soft, his opinions are sharp. His leadership style is more that of a compassionate military commander than of a baby-kissing statesman. And his library is not a sanctuary from politics.
This year, he attempted to organize debates at the library about the legacy of noted environmentalist Rachel Carson and about Mumia Abu-Jamal, the controversial death-row inmate convicted of killing a Philadelphia cop. He planned to pit liberal authors and academics against his good friend Jack Cashill, a local conservative author.
Not that Kemper needs outside help to start a debate. He sprinkles political insights in everyday e-mails to librarians. In one 2006 exchange about Internet network neutrality, he wrote: “Though I despise their dumbass political ‘thought’ I went out and bought and enjoyed a Dixie Chicks album both to stick it to the man and curry favor with my wife who makes the [Missouri Library Association] Discussion List look like a bunch of Ann Coulter-clones. However … if I’m Clear Channel or PRI or Radio Free Public Library and David Duke, Pat Robertson, and Theodore Bilbo start a group called The Dixie Chiggers am I required to give airtime to their first album, ‘Bring Me the Head of Hugo Chavez?'”
He signed his note “Yr. favorite contrarian librarian.”
When a Banned Books Week display in 2006 featured a copy of the Bret Easton Ellis novel American Psycho, Kemper himself put the book back on the library shelf. “This is not a great book. It’s a sick book,” he says. “Yes, it’s controversial, and people should be allowed to read whatever’s controversial, and the library is the place for that to happen. But I’ll be damned if I’ll promote that particular book.”
The former bank CEO says libraries are like any other business, and he pushes his librarians to work the floor like sales associates. He admits that he’s still not used to thinking of himself as a public servant: “If you’re the CEO, that means most of the time, you do what needs to be done.”
For Kemper, what needs to be done at the Kansas City Public Library doesn’t stop at the bookshelf. His goal is to create a more literate society. “All the way back to the libraries of Alexandria, there’s always been this purpose: to move people up the ladder of knowledge,” he says.
That means the library has to do more than order enough copies of the latest John Grisham novel and keep the shelves stocked with GED study guides. It means being an engine for economic development by offering résumé-writing classes and resources for starting a business. It means creating programs that get people talking about important civic issues.
This vision lies at the heart of the library’s new strategic plan — the one, he sheepishly acknowledges, he was supposed to have finished by the end of 2005.
At the morning meeting with his managers, he tells them that he has revived his effort to complete the plan, and it will be done by the end of the year. He wants to hear how they think the library can broaden its mission. To start the discussion, he shares some ideas of his own. He wants to open a satellite location with computers and free books, at a local juvenile court facility. He explains an evolving partnership with the most successful youth literacy program in the city — the Upper Room — that would help the group significantly increase enrollment.
Before much brainstorming can get under way, Kemper has to leave for another meeting. As he makes his exit, he urges the managers to e-mail him, call him, schedule meetings with him — contribute ideas.
“I’m not a tough guy,” he says later. “I’m a consensus builder. I have a certain amount of humility and genuine interest in what people have to tell me.”
He stops and then laughs. “But I do talk too much. That’s one thing that everybody tells me.”
His reading of history, he says, has taught him that no ideology is infallible and no single perspective is completely right. These lessons haven’t diminished his self-assurance.
“I do believe that I’m right,” he says without blinking. “I have a very strong sense of being right.”
So far, his way seems to be working.
Not quite at home in the library boardroom, with its elegantly burnished clock above the fireplace and high-arched windows ushering light onto wood-paneled walls, Kemper is more fidgety prep-school student than headmaster. He stacks his feet awkwardly under his chair, pulls off his smudged glasses, puts them on again, then slumps forward against his elbows.
At the head of the table sits Jackson County Executive Mike Sanders, whom Kemper has summoned for the September board of trustees meeting. This Tuesday evening is more than six months after Kemper sued the county, claiming it had withheld more than $700,000 from the library because too many people had protested their property taxes.
Kemper won. He got the money back. Now he’s looking for something more.
Because of the way the assessment process works, the library’s share will only keep shrinking. Kemper plans to take the issue to the state Legislature. He wants Sanders’ cooperation.
“I hope we’re on the same page, so we can go to the state together,” he says.
Sanders agrees.
The board moves on, and Kemper tells the trustees that he has found new management for the café, a money loser since it opened two years ago. It wasn’t an easy sell, but Kemper has convinced the company that manages the popular Hereford House to step in. Maybe putting the Hereford name on a sign would lure patrons, he suggests.
The only board member who needles him is his second cousin.
“If we start putting endorsements of corporations on the walls, we’re opening a crack I’d prefer not to open,” Jonathan Kemper says.
“If you had a Starbucks in the library, would you want to hide it?” Crosby responds.
The two debate for 10 minutes before the board agrees with Crosby.
“You win again, Crosby,” Jonathan says with a smile.
In 2005, R. Crosby Kemper III spent his first day on the job staring down a $1.4 million deficit — a huge hole in a $15 million budget. “I became Mr. Scrooge,” he says. By virtue of his spending cuts and financial expertise, an immediate crisis was averted.
Since then, he has expanded the library staff to more than 200 employees and has established a public-affairs team. Henry Fortunato, the head of that new department, speaks in the hushed tone of a librarian but with the quick-fire cadence of his native New York. The suspenders-wearing former marketing executive was working on a master’s degree in history when Kemper found him at the University of Kansas.
Kemper has an assistant, but it’s Fortunato who is often at his side. He’s the one who reminds him of an event in the Jazz District when Kemper is frazzled about forgetting his daughter’s 11th birthday and is about to dash off to Nebraska Furniture Mart to buy her an iPod. He’s the one who not only gets Kemper’s esoteric comments about political or historical trivia but also responds with his own zinger. Most important, he’s the one who has booked the library with authors and speakers with the zeal of a concert promoter.
That spike in activity is the spark in the library’s resurgence. In 2006, the library hosted 58 events. In the first 10 months of 2008, it held 198. Kemper, the library’s face, introduced speakers and gave his two cents on the topic of the evening. Last year, he took the stage himself for what he hoped would become a recurring series.
“I love being in front of an audience,” he says. “I’ve tried to pretend I’m shy and retiring. But I’m not really.”
His 2007 interview with academic Bill Worley, who acted as Kansas City’s infamous political boss Tom Pendergast — dubbed “Meet the Past With Crosby Kemper III” — caught the attention of KCPT Channel 19. The segment earned the library a regional Emmy Award nomination this year. Kemper is already lining up actors to play half a dozen other figures, including Amelia Earhart and Charlie Parker. He’s working on a series about military commanders, too. He says he wants to make going to the library akin to “majoring in history at a good university.”
He has to raise the money to fund it, though. So Kemper spends many afternoons hunched in front of his computer, checking his e-mail as he calls potential donors. “I’ve got two things I was hoping you might, uh, put in your Christmas stocking,” he says in a voice mail to a prominent banker.
He’s good at it. In the three years before he took the job, the library raised a combined $1.43 million in private money. Kemper’s tenure so far has seen private donations soar to about $5 million. The Kauffman Foundation last month announced a $4 million grant —the largest the library has ever received.
Three years ago, Kemper almost passed on the library position. “I kind of thought it was a quiet and sleepy place,” he says.
Now that he has turned up the volume, he wants to make sure his legacy resonates.
On a recent Wednesday night, far from the lectern and the spotlight, Kemper sits at a card table in a dilapidated firehouse near 18th Street and Vine, eating an off-brand granola bar and taking notes on a yellow legal pad. Stacks of cardboard boxes line one wall of the room. An eerie half-mannequin perches on top of a dusty, glass display case across from an ancient yellow stationary bike.
In early 2007, the Missouri attorney general appointed Kemper to the board of the Black Archives of Mid-America, an extensive collection of documents and artifacts chronicling African-American history. He shares duties with Sanders-Brooks. She says she had reservations about the big-name library director imposing his larger institution on the smaller cultural entity. But Kemper hasn’t imposed his ideas or flaunted his influence.
On this night, he tells the board that he has secured a $1 million private donation. The huge financial boost ensures the completion of a new facility just north of the historic Jazz District. When board President Barbara Peterson says she’s having issues with contractors and plans to meet with them, she turns to Kemper.
“I’ll bring the big guns if I have to,” she says.
Kemper says he usually avoids raising money for other organizations, cannibalizing funds that he might have won for the library. But he says the Black Archives complement and enhance the library’s mission. More important, he believes this new museum will have a lasting impact on the city. And that’s really his mission.
In his job, there’s never enough money, never enough resources. This year’s epidemic of home foreclosures means lost property taxes, a hit to the library. Charities will soon tighten their belts. Against these setbacks, there’s not enough time for Kemper to slip away from his computer to find out who left a warm apple pie in his office on a Thursday morning. There’s always a meeting in five minutes or a lunch with a business leader. But that’s not what Kemper struggles with.
“My biggest problem, I think, is the tendency to move very slowly in doing things,” Kemper says of library culture.
So he keeps the momentum going himself.
After the capacity crowd filters out of the Richard Moe event, Kemper and a handful of library board members take their guest to the Webster House. They dine. They raise a toast. It’s nearly midnight by the time the director returns to his two-bedroom Plaza apartment.
He had planned to read a few pages from any of the dozen books that crowd a night table as cluttered as his office desk. There are memoirs by Julian Barnes and Donald Hall. He’s been perusing political writings by Lord Acton and Alexis de Tocqueville. As always, there are copies of the Bible and his favorite book, Boswell’s Life of Johnson.
But after a long day, he doesn’t get that far.
Instead, he falls asleep, still wearing his ill-fitting suit.
♦
