Six-Gun Stan

Seventy-four-year-old Stan Glazer climbs atop an avocado-green ’66 Lincoln Continental with suicide doors. He and his 38-year-old wife, Lori, seat themselves high on the Lincoln’s rear end, feet dangling into the backseats, and prepare to surf the Brookside St. Patrick’s Day parade.

“Is this how Truman did it?” Glazer says and laughs.

Three years ago, Glazer lost his bid for mayor against the incumbent Kay Barnes. He likes to say he has never stopped campaigning for the job. The convertible is borrowed from Mark One Electric Company, one of his campaign contributors. He has assembled a modest entourage that includes Lori, longtime friend (and today’s driver) Bill Ramm, and Glazer’s campaign manager, Mike Ferguson.

Glazer thinks that 34-year-old Ferguson can help him tap the youth vote. “These kids need to put someone in office who’s going to open a few doors,” Glazer says. “You know, you’re 18, so God help you if you get caught drinking a beer, but we’ll send you to Iraq to get your head blown off.”

The Lincoln pulls into the parade’s current. People in the crowd give the soon-to-be mayoral candidate a thumbs up or wave. Somebody yells, “I’m voting for you, Stan!”

“Three votes, I just got three votes,” Glazer jokes.

Lori, Glazer’s third wife, gently reminds Stan to look left or wave right. Lori’s presence is one of the things that will set Glazer’s 2007 campaign for mayor apart from his 2003 run. Back then, Glazer managed about 40 percent of the vote against Barnes, even though he didn’t begin his campaign until four months before the primary. Lori was less visible then because she’d started a new job, she says. The woman he calls his “bride,” though they’ve been married for five years, says she’ll be more involved this time. Nearly 40 years her husband’s junior, Lori has luminous blue eyes, blond hair styled in a pixyish haircut, a pert Meg Ryan nose, a big laugh and an even bigger diamond weighing down her ring finger. Lori is the director of sales and customer service at Union Station, but for Glazer, she’s something of an image adviser.

“Are you embarrassed?” Glazer asks Lori.

“No. Are you?”

“Yeah,” he admits.

Somebody shouts, “Go, mayor!”

“Hey! Thank you!”

A trend begins to present itself: the archetypal Stan fan. Male, thirties, beer in hand, wearing a college T-shirt. The Johnny Dare’s contingent. It’s a demographic likely to vote for a guy like Glazer, a former comedy club owner, a businessman who’s watched a few ideas turn into million-dollar ventures and then crash and burn, a man who isn’t afraid to tell racy jokes, someone best-known for speaking his mind (as when he hints that City Hall would be better off if former political boss Tom Pendergast still ran things).

In the parade, Glazer seems a little taken aback by the overwhelmingly positive response he’s getting. “I keep waiting for someone to say, ‘Hey, fuck you, Stan!'”

“Hey, Stan!” calls a mother. Her children wave.

“I wish these little kids could vote,” Stan says under his breath.

Earlier this week, Stan the Man officially kicked off his campaign, making the formal announcement at Fiorella’s Jack Stack Barbecue. Like he says, he’s never stopped running. But behind the new suits, the glossy bio packets and the presidential photos, he’s still Stan Glazer. The brassy personality. The blunt honesty. The big mouth. He can’t run away from that.

Glazer’s in the kitchen of his Plaza condo, dressed in old black sweats, filling little bowls with Fritos and mixed nuts. The Glazer campaign brain trust has started to arrive. So far, it’s Larry Thrasher, a Kansas City North neighborhood activist, and midtown neighborhood activist Mark Esping. Ferguson, Glazer’s campaign manager, is on his way.

Everyone’s feeling loose and joking. Glazer laughs at the fact that he has to be a more courteous driver now that he has big “Stan for Mayor” magnets affixed to the sides of his white Chrysler Crossfire.

Esping recounts a story from a meeting that he attended earlier in the day at the McDonald’s on Prospect with African-American activists who opposed the stadium tax. They were using the n-word, Esping says, until someone remembered he was there and pointed out that you shouldn’t use that word around white people. This reminds Glazer of a joke.

“So St. Peter’s away from the pearly gates, and a messenger comes running up to him and says, ‘St. Peter! There’s a bunch of niggers coming!’ And St. Peter says,” — Glazer claps his hands sternly — “‘Now, we don’t use that word. The proper term is African–Americans. You should know better. You march right down there and you apologize to them.’ And the messenger goes running off. And he comes running back yelling, ‘They’re gone! They’re gone!’ St. Peter says, ‘All those people are gone?’ ‘Not them!’ The messenger says. ‘The pearly gates!'”

Glazer looks around the room as his brain trust chuckles, but the joke’s not exactly a knee-slapper. “That’s racist,” he says matter-of-factly. “But watch any black comedian — they use that word all the time.”

It’s the perfect example of the things that fall out of Glazer’s mouth when he relaxes. Glazer admits that verbosity is one of his faults, a trait inherited by his son Craig, and is something that both of them ought to check. But Glazer’s knee-jerk straightforwardness and his unfiltered mouth also make him instantly likable.

It’s not a common political trait, but it’s one of the things that attracted Ferguson to serve as Glazer’s campaign manager. Ferguson runs a staffing company by day and ran for Missouri lieutenant governor in 2004 as a Libertarian. Ferguson sometimes looks like he wants to put a hand over his candidate’s mouth when Glazer really gets talking. At Ferguson’s urging, Glazer has been practicing conciseness. Lori says she has helped Glazer realize that he doesn’t have to give a dissertation in every answer.

“I gotta be me,” Glazer tells people in his campaign pitch. “This town has got to be marketed, and I’m a marketer. I take distressed things and transform them. I want to be surrounded by people with high IQs who aren’t obligated to anybody.”

Some City Hall insiders have already dismissed Glazer. Worse than his brashness is the fact that he faces a formidable and crowded field of opponents, including at least three City Council members: Al Brooks, Becky Nace and Chuck Eddy. County Executive Katheryn Shields probably is, too.

Councilman George Blackwood — once a mayoral candidate himself and mayor pro-tem during the last four years of former Mayor Emanuel Cleaver’s reign — hasn’t written off Glazer yet. Blackwood says the function of the mayor in Kansas City is to market the city. “They are the head of the marketing department. But they have to surround themselves with people who know how to affect the concepts they come up with.” It’s a job that Blackwood can see Glazer filling, in the same way that Cleaver worked to promote the city.

Blackwood remembers when Cleaver, who now represents Kansas City in Congress, got wind that Transamerica was leaving its San Francisco headquarters. Cleaver went to San Francisco and asked the heads of the company, “Why don’t you come to Kansas City?” Blackwood says Cleaver promised them a parking garage if they did. When Blackwood heard of the promise, he says he asked Cleaver, “How are you going to do that?”

“And Cleaver threw back his head and laughed and laughed and said, ‘I don’t know. That’s why I’ve got you guys.'”

But even if Glazer knows how to sell Kansas City, he still doesn’t know City Hall. For that, Glazer has a plan.

The last time he ran, Glazer dropped the name Mark Funkhouser a lot. The city auditor, Glazer reasons, is like the city’s doctor. He knows what’s wrong. He hopes that Funkhouser will provide a cheat sheet, telling Glazer how to fix it.

So Glazer schedules a meeting with the auditor. Glazer has been running from meeting to business lunch all week; so far, Glazer has met with three pages’ worth of high-powered names to hand out glossy bios and give his spiel.

Funkhouser arrives at the conference room on the 21st floor of City Hall, coffee mug in hand, ready to sit down with Glazer, who has brought Esping. As soon as Funkhouser folds his tall frame into a chair, Glazer launches into his routine. It lasts a good 20 minutes.

“They tell me I was vaccinated with a phonograph needle,” Glazer begins affably. Funkhouser smiles.

Glazer takes a breath. “I like the City Council people, I know them, but I don’t know when the day’s going to come that they start listening to you.” He goes off on a tirade about the new stadium tax. “It irritates me to such a degree that I have to wonder whether this leadership has any business sense or cost accountability…. The only good news I see coming your way is there are six or seven new council people coming in who might listen to you.”

Esping sits quietly at the table in his white sweater, his white eyebrows pointed up like horns. Funkhouser is chuckling along with Glazer, at least, which isn’t a bad sign.

Glazer opens up his campaign dossier and launches into the tales of his sometimes successful and sometimes sordid history in this town. After the ’51 flood washed out the meatpacking industry, a young Glazer and a group of friends bought an abandoned plant and 17 acres around it. The Glazer-Kaufman Warehouse was home to Goodyear Tire and Schlitz Beer.

Then, in 1961, he and two others revitalized a 150,000-square-foot warehouse to build the first Sav-On, one of the first giant discount stores. Glazer was the company’s president and manager. He claims to have been first to introduce Kansas Citians to a new innovation: the shopping cart. Glazer also was involved in Sav-On’s reorganization through bankruptcy before untangling himself financially from the venture.

He purchased and rehabbed the old trolley-car barn at 48th Street and Troost and created an auto auction where, he says, a car was sold “every three minutes.” A black-and-white picture included in his dossier shows a crowd of men in suits and ties gathered around a handsome, auctioneering Glazer. That business was sold and later operated as the Wil-Ray Auto Auction Inc.

Glazer tailors his talk to each listener. He doesn’t mention the Mafia to Funkhouser. To others, he reminisces about Kansas City’s seamy history, when a little corruption was sometimes what it took to get deals done. Back in those days, the crime rate was low. Sure, some guys ended up dead in the trunks of cars, Glazer says, but their names nearly always ended in a vowel. Downtown’s sidewalks were packed shoulder to shoulder, registers were ringing, the clubs were hopping. A guy didn’t have to worry about looking over his shoulder if he wanted to talk with one of the ladies of the evening.

Instead, Glazer tells Funkhouser about his plan for Union Station. In the ’70s, Glazer had envisioned Union Station to include a science museum, hotels, a YMCA and an arena. “If I’m not a visionary, I don’t know what I am, trying to put this plan together back when this city had some dollars to spend,” Glazer says. (A 1972 Kansas City Star article in Glazer’s packet reports that Glazer’s Union Station proposal “failed to generate much steam.”)

Glazer says he also worked up a design in 1972 for a new arena near the site of the American Royal. But Glazer’s arena plan wasn’t chosen; a competing plan’s group had more financial backing. Glazer explains to Funkhouser that his ideas were rejected because the people in power disliked him. “Because of who I was or how I was, all my ideas seemed to go.

“Did it hurt my feelings? No. I went on to start my restaurants, my entertainment businesses, the comedy clubs. I had a radio show.” Glazer’s crowning achievement: founding a chain of Stanford and Sons restaurants and comedy clubs. He has since closed or sold the venues; the last remaining location in the chain, which is entirely his son Craig’s operation, is located behind a Hooters in Overland Park.

He switches gears on Funkhouser, trying to extract a candid, Glazer-type answer from the city auditor. “You gotta be one of the most frustrated guys in the world. This leadership just seems to have tunnel vision.”

Funkhouser replies that it’s his job to come to the Council with his reports. It’s not their job, he says, to go to him.

“Well, it just seems like they should be listening to you. Boy, I would,” Glazer says.

Esping pipes up, asking what Funkhouser thinks the city’s three biggest problems are. Funkhouser cites declining infrastructure, the citizens’ satisfaction levels with basic services, and the city’s poor financial position.

Glazer orders Esping to write all that down. Then Glazer says, “You work with the Council every day. I know ’em. We all smile and shake hands and wish the other would just go away. They’re good people. But do you really see Al Brooks as a mayoral —”

Esping interrupts: “That’s a bad question.” Esping asks Funkhouser what he’d like to see in a mayor.

Funkhouser says, “I’d want someone who can say no, because there’s a lot of no to be said, and someone who can wrestle with the city’s financial problems and be open and honest with the citizens on the choices we face.”

Glazer tries once more to get Funkhouser to complain about the Council. But the city auditor — the guy whose work so often bears bad news — turns out to be an optimist.

Funkhouser grins. “Where there is light, there is hope.”

Later in the week, Glazer is hanging out in his condo in a blue, collared shirt open past the first few buttons, a pair of slacks and dress shoes. He has taken off his jacket since his meeting with the mayor of Leawood earlier that day. He’s waiting for his “kitchen cabinet” of campaign folks to arrive, but no one’s here yet.

Glazer begins a tour of the place but pauses when his Persian-Siamese cat, Princess, wanders into the room. She’s gray and white, with blue eyes that sometimes look crossed. At the sight of her, Glazer completely melts. “I’m the only one who can feed her,” he explains. “And when the TV cuts off at night, that’s her signal to go to my bed and curl up, only on my side, by my head.”

Glazer can credit Princess for helping convince Lori to marry him. They met in 2000, when he spotted her at a Jason’s Deli. Glazer had a friend call and ask her out — to talk business. She firmly told him that she wasn’t interested in anything else. But, Lori says, he hounded her. He sent flowers to her at work, and when Glazer called to make sure she had gotten them, she told him she had given them away. But on the phone, he softened her up, saying that if she wasn’t interested in him romantically, fine, but he thought she was remarkable and wanted to know her better. She surprised him by inviting herself over to his place, where she met Princess. How bad could a guy with a cat be? “Then I had to eat crow, fall in love and move in with the guy,” she says with a laugh. They began dating in November 2000, and by that December they’d agreed to wed. He’s a decade older than her parents. Glazer says of her, “She’s my answer to Sharon Stone. Don’t you see Sharon Stone?”

Glazer’s condo is tidy; he credits his military schooling for his fastidiousness. Leather couches and chairs, off-white carpet, lots of little Roman busts and reproductions of Asian art, a Buddha figure on a table. The sun shines through his patio windows, which look out onto the Plaza. His art includes grandiose depictions of leopards and tigers and zebras. Black-and-white framed photos of his family line the bookshelves, and the walls are covered with framed newspaper clippings.

A case of medals hangs on the wall underneath a mounted rifle and two framed certificates. There’s a Purple Heart in a case. At the mention of his military service, Glazer’s tone darkens.

“I don’t go into that,” he says sternly. “Other than that, I spent two years active duty in Korea and six years reserve.” He says he doesn’t want to talk about his military duty because his records were destroyed in a fire in St. Louis and he fears that if his political opponents look and can’t find the records, they’ll accuse him of fabricating his service history. (A call to Veterans Affairs confirms the plausibility of this story; many Navy military records during the time that Glazer would have served were lost in a fire.)

Asked about the Purple Heart, he says testily: “You bet I got hurt.” He unbuttons the middle of his blue shirt to reveal a 3-inch-long vertical gash in the center of his abdomen.

Upstairs, there are photos of Glazer that he says were taken when he worked as a model in his twenties for a Gillette aftershave ad that never ran. He’s leaning against a fence like a star in a spaghetti Western. In some, he’s drawing six-shooters with a menacing look.

“You hear people say, ‘I wish I would have done this or that,'” Glazer says. “Well, I attempted everything — everything that was legal. I tried paragliding, acting, racing cars, racing speedboats, a lot of things that good little Jewish boys didn’t do.”

He framed his dad’s immigration and citizenship papers from Ellis Island. He says his father was among the group that “nagged” Harry Truman on behalf of making Israel a Jewish state.

“Truman … once went bankrupt,” Glazer says pointedly, alluding to his own personal bankruptcy that was filed when he closed his last restaurant in 1981. He blames the death of the restaurant on President Jimmy Carter, because interest rates skyrocketed during his administration. With a debt of $2.86 million, he had to shut the place down before it went bankrupt with him.

The phone rings. He says hello and then listens for a few seconds. Then he says, in an exaggeratedly cheery tone, “I gotta hang up on ya, buddy, but I’ll talk to ya later.” He explains that the caller was his son Craig.

Craig Glazer is one of his father’s biggest sources of anxiety regarding the campaign. Everyone who knows Kansas City politics knows the stories (though they sometimes get father and son confused). Craig, who jointly owned his father’s comedy club with his brother, Jeff, was busted for cocaine distribution in 2002; his sentence for sharing cocaine among friends amounted to a slap on the wrist.

In the late ’90s, Stan Glazer sued his sons, claiming they’d broken a verbal contract when they took over his Westport comedy club. The way Glazer tells it, he gave Jeff and Craig his comedy club, and they agreed to pay him $5,000 a month. For a time, the sons paid their debt to their father by taking care of his car payments and utilities. Eventually, the payments stopped, so Glazer sued them. Because no written contract had been made between the parties about the payments, a judge ruled in favor of Jeff and Craig. Eventually, Glazer made up with his sons.

The other skeleton in Glazer’s political closet, the accusation that he was caught soliciting a prostitute, was dug up during the 2003 election, thanks to Mayor Barnes’ political ally Steve Glorioso. No charges were filed, and it has never been clear what happened. Glazer refuses to speak of it.

Though he says that he and his sons love one another dearly, he keeps them at arm’s length in public and in the press for the sake of his campaign. For his part, Craig says he’s happy to go on endlessly about his father’s mayoral qualities, but he refuses to discuss anything spicier. His dad would prefer that he didn’t speak to the media at all.

“I’m running for mayor, not him,” Glazer says. “I can just see it now — ‘Craig Glazer, who was caught using cocaine,'” Glazer says, imagining the text aloud. “You know, that judge only gave him 90 days. Don’t you think if it was a bigger deal, the judge would have given him more than 90 days? He and … some others are hanging out, and instead of beer, they get some cocaine, just like young guys.”

None of these things, Glazer insists, have anything to do with his ability to lead the city. You won’t find as much as a parking ticket on Stanford Glazer’s record, he says. And one of the best things he has going for him now is that these so-called scandals are old news.

“Didn’t do anything — that case was dismissed! My son and I went to court over a business lawsuit, a civil trial. They won. I lost. The case was ended. I shook hands with Craig and Jeff — it was five or six years ago — and that’s the end of it. Who cares? Why is that such interesting material? I had some tax problems in business. Yes! Course I did!” Glazer says.

During a phone interview, a mention of a Kansas City Star article in 2000 that dug deep into Glazer’s personal and professional past infuriates him. He gets so worked up that at times he sounds out of breath.

“I know when you get into politics, you’re going to live in a fishbowl,” Glazer says. “But I mean, what I’m trying to say is, once you shoot somebody in the head, you fall down dead. Do you walk up to them and keep shooting them in the head? How many times are you going to do that? We saw it. We heard it. We read it. Next!”

Glazer’s campaign manager says he’s not worried about Glazer’s scandals being rehashed. “We’re not going to try to redefine his image or make him over. We’ll just try to fill in the blanks and tell the rest of the story that was not told in the last election,” Ferguson says. “Nobody’s perfect. We’ll answer it, but it’s not going to be anything new. If that’s the worst they [his opponents] can come up with on Stan, I’d say those candidates are in trouble already.”

The campaign donors from the last election still have his back. As of January, records at the Missouri Ethics Commission show that Glazer has only a couple of thousand dollars in his war chest, which is a ways behind Nace and Brooks. But it’s early yet.

Anyone who doubts that Glazer can get votes should have attended the St. Patrick’s Day parade and watched that green Lincoln Continental pass by. At the sight of Glazer and Lori, most people smiled. Genuinely.

“Tell me a joke, Stan!” someone in the crowd called.

“I need a minute to think of one,” Glazer hollered back. This time around, he’s hell-bent on making sure that his campaign isn’t one.