A DRIVE THROUGH MEMORIES

Preface
I wrote this piece for Creative Writing class at Longview Colllege. I hope that I have handled this story in a creative way, but for the most part, it is not fiction. It is only fiction in that I could not have told all these stories on one short drive. I did tell Faye some of these stories, with less detail, as we drove to church, but this was written later as I sat at home in my study visualizing the route we had taken. I wrote these stories as I visually came to each location on the route where they happened. I might say that they are in geographical order. These stories cover a lot of years. They are all true stories, as far as I know.
Dale Douthat, October 29, 2006

My wife’s sister Faye was visiting us. My wife Fern and I took her to Unity Temple on the Plaza where we occasionally attend church. As we left from our home in Independence and passed through our neighborhood and then through Kansas City’s Inner City on our way to church, I was reminded of days gone by and told Faye little stories about the places we passed.
As we passed a patch of woods along Blue Ridge Boulevard, I told Faye, “A human skeleton was found in those woods just a very few years ago. It was after that big ice storm that pulled down tree branches and electric lines. A lineman had gone up a pole at the edge of that woods I was telling you about. He looked down into the woods and saw the skeleton. Independence CSI came to investigate. At first all they could tell was that the skeleton was a woman’s as it was wearing women’s panties. When the story was in the newspaper, a man read it and came forward. That was in January and his wife had disappeared in July. He had not reported her as missing as she was a mental case and often disappeared for long periods. It turned out that the skeleton found was his missing wife.”
As we rounded the corner up a side street that was a shortcut over to Highway 40, we passed a vacant lot. I told Faye, “A woman was murdered somewhere not long ago, and the murderer dumped her body on that vacant lot. I saw that on the 10 o’clock news on Channel Five.”
We passed the I-70 Drive-In Theatre. I told Faye, “Some say it’s one of the very few drive-in movies left in America. There used to be several drive-in movies along Highway 40.” Faye was visiting from Bethany, Missouri where she lives now. Faye is a young 85 years old. She lived in Kansas City and worked at Hallmark Cards years ago, even before there were any drive-in movies. She even lived in New York City awhile during World War II; but spent most of her life in our home town of New Hampton, Missouri up near the Iowa line. Faye speaks with a lot of double negatives and aints, but she is a very intelligent woman. Double negatives and aints are part of the New Hampton vernacular. In New Hampton most words or names that end in a, end with the long e sound. I fall into that vernacular at times myself even though I didn’t live there but a few years and have been gone from there quite a few years. My son, the grammar expert in the family, says that he can hear me change gradually when we travel up that way.
We passed a large trailer court and I was reminded that the Heart of America Airport used to be there. I told Faye, “When I was a boy of nine or ten, we used to pass here on the way in from Odessa to visit relatives in the city. Out there where all those trailers are was an airport. I’d sure hate like hell to fly in or out of this place now; there are too damn many towers around it.”
“I remember you telling stories about almost running into towers in other places,” said Faye.
“Yeah, I came very close to a tower down by the Country Club Plaza one time when I was taking a look at the Plaza lights. Another time I came way too close to that tower up by Ray and Lucy’s house when I flew in low to buzz them,” I said. Ray was Faye and Fern’s brother who died recently. He and his wife Lucy had lived on a farm a few miles north of New Hampton.
On the other side of the road from the trailer court was where a drive-in movie used to be. I told Faye about the giant fly swatter we have which has printed on it “Heart of America Drive-In, the Largest Drive-In Screen in the World.” Whether it was the largest screen or not I cannot say, even though we watched a lot of movies there back in the early 1960’s. There was also a bowling alley along there. The building still stands. It is a place where they sell rocks now.
As we passed another trailer court I was reminded that Fern and I used to live there with our baby daughter Vanessa. Vanessa is 46 years old now, which gives us a picture of how long ago that was. I told Faye, “We used to eat at the McDonalds down the hill once in a while. The three of us could eat for about a dollar as hamburgers were fifteen cents; French fries were ten cents, as was a Coke.”
“One time we were out walking on the new Interstate Highway 70 that was being constructed. Two-year-old Vanessa pointed at the moon and said ‘light.’ We were proud that she had noticed. It was quite amusing to us at the time.”
We turned south on Cleaver II Boulevard which follows the route Van Brunt Boulevard once took. “The Duce,” as the police call it, now goes from this point all the way to the Country Club Plaza. As we sped up the hill past the Veteran’s Hospital, I was reminded of an accident that had occurred on that boulevard many years before. There was a supermarket at the bottom of the hill. I think it was the Justrite Market. Some men had robbed the supermarket and were fleeing up the hill with the police in pursuit when they crashed into the rear of another car. The people in that car were killed. The people who were killed were visiting the city from Bethany, Missouri. Bethany is the town where Fern and I both went to high school, so we were somewhat acquainted with the people who died. Faye didn’t remember them as she didn’t live in Bethany back then.
A little further along we passed a spot where Fern and I had stopped to allow two deer to cross the road in front of us not long ago when we were on our way home from church. As we rounded a curve and headed on west along what used to be called Brush Creek Boulevard, there was a flock of Canada geese grazing in the park. I told Faye, “It is amazing how well wild animals are adapting to city life these days. I think we see wild life more often here than when we come up home.”
“Hunting isn’t allowed here where it is up home. If this trend continues, all the wildlife will live in the city where they can avoid hunters,” chimed in Fern.
We passed the Watkins Funeral Home and I told Faye how Watkins was a city councilman and how Bruce Watkins Drive had been named after him.
A little past the Navy Reserve Center we saw a sign that read “Ivanhoe Neighborhood.” I told Faye, ”My paternal grandparents lived in that neighborhood all of their adult lives. My father was born right up there a couple of blocks on Euclid.” I could not point to my grandparents’ house as it was torn down to make way for Bruce Watkins Drive.
Up to the left I could see the new Paseo High School. I told Faye, “My parents lived in a house near the high school when I was born; it was my first home.”
“I was working evenings at the AT&T Data Center, the largest data center in the world at that time, located at 63rd and Euclid, on the day old Paseo High was imploded. I don’t really understand how imploding works, but it seems to me that if you exploded a building it would throw chunks all over and there would be collateral damage.”
“As I drove down past here, a mighty strange sight appeared at my left. Oh how I wish I would have had my camera along. The old school had been reduced to rubble EXCEPT for the front doors and everything above them. The implosion left a dramatic sculpture that would have made an excellent monument to the old school. The next day as I passed I saw that the accidental sculpture had been torn down. How sad.”
When I was telling Faye about how some of my aunts, uncles, and cousins had gone to school there at Paseo High, I was reminded of something else. My cousin Forrest Young had been a student at Paseo High in 1950. Forrest decided to skip school one day. He borrowed a car from a friend and he and another friend took off. It was something of a freak accident. A spring shackle on the car broke and that somehow broke both boys’ necks. It is said that they did not suffer. They died instantly.
“There weren’t any seat belts in those days,” said Fern.
“I’m don’t know if belts would have saved their lives in that case or not,” I said, “I think it’s just that cars weren’t built as safe as they are now.”
Cleaver II passed from what used to be Brush Creek Boulevard onto what used to be 47th Street. We passed the “abortion clinic,” more properly called the Family Planning Center.
On our right appeared the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum. In the middle of the front lawn stood a giant shuttlecock like the ones some folks play badminton with, only many, many times larger. I knew there were four shuttlecocks, but I wanted to tell Faye more about the shuttlecocks. “There are four of them. They each weigh 5,500 pounds. They are eighteen feet long and about sixteen feet across.”
The Nelson-Atkins is being remodeled and added to at present. I am looking forward to seeing the place when it is finished.
The art museum reminded me of the time my dad took my 7-year-old brother and 9-year-old me there. When we got back to Grandpa and Grandma’s house, Dad told Mom about the statue of a completely naked couple at the gallery. Mom was shocked. I’m sure she vowed that we would never go there again; however, when my entire sixth grade class from Odessa went a few years later, I was allowed to go along. The naked statue was still there, but no one seemed to notice or care that it was naked.
As we entered the Country Club Plaza, Cleaver II Boulevard once again became 47th Street. We attended church at Unity Temple located at 47th and Jefferson.
Being in the Unity Temple on the Plaza reminded me of the time I drove an 89- year-old retired and legally blind school teacher from her home in Bethany, Missouri to Kansas City. “Remember Minnie Kennedy?” I asked Faye. “I brought her down in the OATS bus one time. She wanted to ‘see’ the wood carving of the life-sized Last Supper which was on display at Unity at that time, and she wanted a new hat from Macy’s which was then where the Barnes and Noble book store and the Pottery Barn on 47th Street are now. I think I can say that Minnie and I were friends after that.”
After church we went out the back way and turned on Nichols Road. I told Faye and Fern, “We are passing through where my great-grandfather Spickert had a corn field. I was passing this spot with my Grandmother many years ago. As we passed by on 47th Street, she pointed to the stores and shops at our left.” She said, “My dad used to have a corn field right there.” I believed her story, but I’ve told that story to others who thought I was trying to say that my family got rich from selling that farm land. That is certainly not true. He owned a dry-goods store at 42nd and Woodland. He was never rich, and I doubt that he owned the land where he grew the corn.”
We headed east along Ward Parkway which became Swope Parkway which became Blue Parkway. As we passed along Brush Creek, I told Faye, “For many years Brush Creek had a concrete bottom. A powerful and not-so-honest politician named Tom Pendergast owned Redi-Mixed Concrete Company in Kansas City and wanted to sell some concrete, so he got the city to put the concrete bottom in the creek. A big flash flood occurred here in 1977 when it rained eleven inches in 24 hours. Brush Creek flowed out of its banks causing a lot of damage to the Plaza stores. In the area, that flood caused 25 deaths and property damage came to 80 million dollars. I think there was another such flood a few years later causing property damage, but I don’t think anyone was killed in that one.”
”I kind of remember that,” responded Faye.
We passed a few other memories as we headed east to Blue Springs along highway 350 and then north on Highway 7, but by then I was talked out. Even a blabber mouth like me gets tired eventually.