We’ll Drink to This Mystery

Say the name D.B. Cooper to a midtowner and they’ll probably think of the smoky 39th Street bar near the Kansas University Medical Center that opens at 6 a.m. and hosts some wild karaoke on Wednesdays. Many of the bar’s regulars might not even know the story of the real D.B. Cooper, a daring, albeit extraordinarily polite hijacker who jumped out of a Seattle-bound 727 with $200,000 in $20 bills in 1971, never to be seen again.

Kenny Giese, the owner of D.B. Cooper’s on 39th Street, lived in Seattle at the time of Cooper’s heist and became fascinated with the story. “He always wondered if Cooper was in some small town somewhere, tending some tiny bar,” a friend of Giese’s tells us. “So when he bought this bar from the original owners, that’s what he named it.”