An ailing grandmother’s illness has sparked in a dramatic turn of events where the KC Strip party trolley launch tomorrow is concerned…
“My 103 year-old grandmother Margaret Giblin was going to christen the busses but she has a cold and can’t make it,” says co-organizer Bill Nigro. “So I got Dutch Newman to do it.”
Name ring any bells?
“Westport Road was renamed Dutch Newman Drive a couple years ago,” Nigro says. “She was a waitress at Kelly’s during World War II. That’s when it was called the Rustlers Inn and her father owned it. She’s 82 now and her great grandfather was a marshall in Westport and was gunned down in Westport during the Civil War era.”
Hold it, they had shootings in Westport that far back?
Let me get this straight. They named a street in Westport after a cocktail waitresses whose grandpappy got murdered there?
“Well, she’s also the female version of Jim Nutter in Kansas City,” Nigro says. “If Jim Nutter is the political kingpin of Kansas City, Dutch is the political queenpin of Kansas City. She’s been in charge of the political voting booths in the midtown area for quite a few decades. And she’s backed just about every mayor since H. Roe Bartle. She usually backs the same people as Jim Nutter – she and him have worked together since the early ’60s.”
On Friday, Dutch will break a bottle of Pabst – Nigro’s grandmothers beverage of choice as it turns out – on the bumper of the lead trolly at a 6 p.m. ceremony in Westport outside the Dark Horse Tavern.
And KC Mayor Mark Funkhouser will reportedly do similar honors with a bottle of Boulevard Double Wide. Boulevard, because it’s a KC biz and Double Wide to harken back to Funk’s infamous doublewide campaign headquarters trailer during his election campaign.
Tracy Thomas
Hila “dutch” Newman to be exact!
Honored last year by the Women’s Political Caucus as a pioneer–she made the Democrat Women’s Clubs in Missouri into a powerhouse to rival all the boys’ political clubs.
The best Dutch story I know is:
1972, hot summer, ward caucus meetings to pick the Presidential delegates to vote on the Dem. candidate. Muskie was supposed to win, but we feminists fell for George McGovern and got our butts whipped.
Dutch was for Muskie. She was to run the caucus at Guardian Angels School in Westport. She told HER people, get there EARLY! They got inside by 7pm for the 7:30 caucus. She locked the front doors of the school. The McGovernites were mad! There was no AC at the time, so the windows were open, and the McGovern supporters tried to climb in thru the windows, but Dutch told her people “slam those windows shut–don’t worry about their knuckles. They’re knuckleheads for supporting McGovern anyway!”
The windows were closed, and at least in Westport, the delegates mostly mustered just as Dutch ordered: for Muskie.
She is one tough dame and I love her.
(I was a McGovern delegate the the Miami convention that summer of 1972–from Wichita, by the way! Before I moved to JoCo in the 90’s and became an anti-tax Republican. Tho I wrote in Hillary in 2008. Because: Sarah Palin is white trash dangerous and now a quitter.)
can’t say
U voted in 1972. What were you 12?