Sad But True
Words to Live By, 2001
“In Johnson County, we prefer substance over symbolism.” — County Commissioner Doug Wood, explaining why he opposed a paid day off for county employees to celebrate Martin Luther King Day, January 15
“Target is a sexy tenant … Target is very hot.” — Ward Parkway leasing representative Danielle Short, discussing news that the discount retailer would take over mall space once occupied by Montgomery Ward, March 8
“[I order] the school board to refrain from interfering in any way with the operations of the Kansas City, Missouri, School District.” — U.S. District Judge Dean Whipple, April 19
“It was here or the Kansas City, Missouri, School District. And I do not want to send my kids back to the school district.” — Shawn Gee, a parent who would rather send her kids to asbestos-ridden Benjamin Banneker Charter Academy of Technology than to a Kansas City public school, June 20
“I admit it. I am a tailgater and I do get road rage…. I’ll gladly stop tailgating if slow drivers will stay in the slow lanes. Until that time, you’ll see me in your rearview mirror — probably closer than you’d like.” — Rachael Wilkerson of Gladstone, in a letter to The Kansas City Star, July 14
“I was pleased to see KC Wolf salute the beautiful flags at Sunday’s football game, with his hand over his heart.” — Evelyn Maxey of Blue Springs, in a letter to the editor of The Kansas City Star discussing the proper way to salute the flag, September 29
“We were told to look for certain things in letters and use our own judgment. For me, I believe in God. If something happens, while I don’t want to leave my wife and child, at least I know I’m going to a better place.” — Mission mail carrier Lee Simkins, after two postal workers in Washington, D.C., died of inhalation anthrax, October 24
“[Robert Courtney] would not be able to give his daughter away at her wedding while dressed in a prison jumpsuit and wearing leg chains and handcuffs.” — U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Larson, ruling against the admitted cancer-drug-diluting pharmacist’s request for special privileges
“[New University of Kansas football coach Mark Mangino] will sound like a hypocrite if he doesn’t make an effort to reach his own full potential by shedding a significant portion of the extra weight he carries.” — Jason Whitlock, obese sports columnist for The Kansas City Star, December 5
“To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.” — Ashcroft, defending hundreds of secret detentions, military tribunals and wiretapping of attorney-client conversations to the Senate Judiciary Committee, December 6
“An enormous amount of leadership time is wasted on people who are complaining, finding everything that is wrong, or simply not participating in solutions. We fondly refer to these as the terrorists.” — UMKC Chancellor Martha Gilliland, in a 1997 article unearthed this year by faculty members unhappy with her leadership, which has resulted in the departure of seven academic deans; in December, Gilliland was appointed by President George Bush to serve on his Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a body charged with advising him about research that could help combat terrorism
Air Head
In February, Kansas City Councilwoman Teresa Loar demonstrated her faith in human intelligence by arguing that visitors to Kansas City International Airport, which is undergoing a $183.4 million renovation, might be misled by 7-inch-long bronze arrows inlaid in blue terrazzo in the new floor. The design featured arrows aimed in different directions, in a pattern meant to evoke migration patterns and air currents. But Loar fretted that travelers might take the arrows literally. “In the Midwest, with the Midwestern mentality, if you see an arrow, it’s probably taking you somewhere,” Loar said. “I am adamant that this will cause confusion.” Though the council had signed off on the design a year earlier, it commissioned new art at an estimated cost of $250,000.
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Jacked Up
When a February ice storm sealed all of her car doors, a 68-year-old Olathe woman decided to climb into her car through the trunk. Once she crawled inside, however, the lid slammed shut, trapping her for three hours until a neighbor heard her pounding and called police.
Compassionate Conservatives
In March, Republican leaders, flush with adrenaline after taking control of the Missouri Senate for the first time in 53 years, wanted to cut a dozen Senate office positions. One of the workers targeted was a longtime assistant to Senator Harold Caskey, a Butler Democrat who is legally blind. The Republicans eventually relented, acknowledging that, as Senate President Pro Tem Peter Kinder put it, Caskey “does have special needs.”
Only in America
On September 11, the Corner Rock Tobacco Store in Southwest City, Missouri, charged $9.99 a gallon for gas. Prices were somewhat more reasonable at some stations in the Kansas City area — mostly Conocos — where agitated drivers stocked up in case of impending doom for only $4.99 a gallon.
Under Where?
In July, shoppers at Oak Park Mall noticed a man standing suspiciously close to women who were wearing skirts; he was putting his foot between their feet. Cops found a little camera in his shoe, connected to a camcorder hidden in his waist pack. In October, the man pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of eavesdropping.
Do as I Say, Not as I Do
A Jackson County sheriff’s deputy who was working as a substitute teacher at Bridger Eighth Grade Center in Independence was kicked out of the school in January for cleaning parts of his submachine gun in front of students.
After a January 20 accident in which he allegedly rear-ended a police car, a Kansas City Fire Department captain was cited by Raytown cops for driving while intoxicated.
In March, former Excelsior Springs mayor and city councilman Mike Robertson was charged with letting forty high-school kids drink beer at his house. “It was a lack of common sense on my part, and bad judgment,” Robertson said. “I’m admitting this because I don’t want to have the kids have to lie for me.”
Also in March, a jury found Basehor Mayor John Pfannenstiel guilty of having oral sex with work-crew prisoners he supervised at the Lansing Correctional Facility. Pfannenstiel professed that he’d done nothing wrong and ran for reelection two weeks after his conviction. (He lost.)
Two Jackson County sheriff’s deputies were reprimanded in August for killing baby opossums behind department headquarters; the officers shot the marsupials with beanbags (normally used to stun suspected criminals). Another officer earned a scolding when he clubbed an injured raccoon to death. (He didn’t want to use his gun to euthanize the animal because propane tanks were nearby.)
In September, Wyandotte County District Court Judge George A. Groneman agreed to let the Kansas Supreme Court censure him for letting his assistant work for the Kansas Turnpike Authority while she was also on his clock. Judge Groneman said he didn’t understand the rules.
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In December, reports surfaced that Eldon Audsley, who oversees Kansas City’s liquor-control division, had been removed from the position after he was ticketed for drunken driving.
Also in December, Attorney General John Ashcroft, the son of an Assemblies of God minister, who is known to request that he be anointed with oil before taking any public office and who has said, “It’s against my religion to impose my religion on people,” reportedly praised a German antiterrorist law that, according to the Associated Press, “allows authorities to ban religious organizations used as fronts for extremists.”
Surrender, Dorothy
In June, the Oskaloosa Public Library cancelled a Harry Potter reading program, which had been presented in libraries throughout the metro area, after townspeople complained that it had been promoted as an event for “aspiring young witches and wizards.”
Reading Is Fun and Mental
In August, a Liberty man pleaded guilty to theft charges after he failed to return 389 books he had checked out from the Mid-Continent Public Library the year before.
Country Yammer
The Lake of the Ozarks was hyped in August when Grammy-nominated St. Louis rapper Nelly and an entourage of 3,000 guests showed up at the Shooters 21 nightclub. Because his place was already packed with 2,000 people, club owner John Teichman grew concerned and called the cops, who peacefully dispersed the crowd. Oops, wait a minute. It turns out Nelly was playing a show at the Ice Palace in Florida that night. The club’s general manager later told the Associated Press that Teichman “is not of the generation who would know who Nelly is.”
What’s in a Name?
The owner of two 80-pound Akitas, who faced trial in March because his dogs had allegedly attacked a four-year-old boy in Kansas City, Kansas, was named Andre Huskey.
The Kansas City, Kansas, Area Chamber of Commerce might have been thinking wishfully in March when it hired new CEO Cindy Cash.
Resigning her position at the end of the 2000-2001 school year was Shawnee Mission Northwest swimming coach Ginger Waters.
Thelma Hurt of Independence sued Bayer Corporation in August, claiming that she fell ill after taking one of the company’s cholesterol-lowering drugs.
The fired Kansas City Star editorial-page editor who nabbed a $97,000-a-year job doing public relations work for the Missouri Department of Transportation and its miles of undrivable roads was Rich Hood.
Death Becomes Him
In October, a Miami County man was driving home from his fields when his tractor’s hydraulic hay-moving arm became stuck in the ground; the tractor stayed in gear and started bouncing violently. The driver — whose blood-alcohol level was higher than .2 percent and whose tractor didn’t have a seatbelt — was killed by all the bouncing.
Cattle Call
$450,000: amount of money raised for the American Royal, Friends of the Zoo and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in an auction of sixty fiberglass cows at Starlight Theatre on October 25
$57,000: amount of money raised for the Fund for Families of the World Trade Center at the cow parade auction
$5,000: cost to a corporation, business, group, family or individual to sponsor a cow
$3,000: opening bid for each cow auctioned off October 25
$1,000: stipend paid to each cow-decorating artist
$500: amount of reward offered by CowParade Holdings Company in July for information leading to the arrest and conviction of any individual caught vandalizing, damaging, removing or stealing any of the cows
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$29.99: cost of a miniature “Moovin On Down the Mighty MO” (featuring Paddlin’ Patty completely outfitted for a canoe trip down the Missouri River) cow sculpture by Judy Guyn
$17.97: cost of a CowParade T-shirt at Function Junction
$17.46: cost of Cowparade Kansas City, by photographer Tom Craughwell, at amazon.com
$13.99: cost of 4-inch ceramic flag-painted American Royal cow, by artist Asher B. Johnson
$12.95: cost of Cows Calendar 2002 at amazon.com
free: Day-Glo orange “This Is a Cow Free Zone” posters handed out by artist Larry Buechel, to protest his feeling that “the cows are following me around everywhere”
priceless: joyful smiles brought by the whimsical cows
That Drunk Guy
The newspapers never did tell us the name of the man who fell out of his chair at Arrowhead Stadium in October, tumbled over seven rows of people in front of him, bounced off a fan on the club level below and landed on three spectators on the first level.
Planet of the Apes
A loose monkey kept Corporate Woods security officers scrambling for at least three days in October. On the third day, according to the Star, “Animal control and police officers combed through leafy paths.” Despite traps baited with bananas and grapes, “the search proved fruitless.”
Nowhere’s Safe Anymore
An Independence woman was lying in bed one morning in October when an arrow came flying through her bedroom window, shattering the glass and hitting the wall two feet above her head. After police searched the area, a neighbor told them he’d been target shooting and an arrow had gone astray. “Had she been sitting up, it likely would have hit her in the head,” said Independence police spokesman Bill Pross.
Life on the Edge
When the aurora borealis (otherwise known as the northern lights) brightened the sky in November, the Missouri Highway Patrol received calls from frightened citizens who suspected the red glow might have been “a nuclear death cloud.”
Kids With Guns
In November, the Tarkio school board kicked the Missouri Department of Conservation out of its classrooms. A department spokesman said that because of their blackboards, classrooms were the best setting for hunter-education courses. But that was before a grade-schooler found a black-powder revolver and a .22-caliber pistol in a desk long after the safety teachers had left.
Anthrax by the Numbers:
100,000: estimated number of people, other than members of the American Philatelic Society, who collect “first-day covers” of stamps issued by Kansas City’s anthrax-infected Stamp Fulfillment Services center
50,000: :members of the American Philatelic Society
8,000-10,000: necessary number of spores to cause inhalation anthrax
7,000: pieces of mail from the contaminated Brentwood post office that ended up in Kansas City on October 19
180: number of employees at the Stamp Fulfillment Services center
52: visitors to the Stamp Fulfillment Services center, including jumpy television news reporters, who were interviewed by health department workers about possible exposure
9: number of schools that sent students on field trips to the Stamp Fulfillment Services center after the tainted pallets of mail arrived from Brentwood
3: number of students at Indian Hills Middle School in Prairie Village arrested in October after putting plaster of Paris in an envelope in an attempt to get school dismissed for the day
2: number of grown men arrested for making anthrax hoaxes. One thirty-year-old Overland Park man was charged with making a criminal threat after putting coffee creamer in an envelope as a joke on a coworker, and a 38-year-old Kansas City man was indicted on federal mail charges after sending a threatening fake anthrax letter to a neighbor
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Checking Out
In December, reports from Tornak Farms, Afghanistan, indicated that a Chemical Week magazine bearing the label of the Kansas City Public Library had been found at an abandoned terrorist training camp near Kandahar, Afghanistan. Local FBI spokesman Jeff Lanza opined, “People may think a terrorist was here in Kansas City, but there could be another explanation.”
And for that, we’ll have to wait until next year.
