KC Confidential

The last two years were so intense, tons of stuff fell between the cracks…

For example, the once beloved Aunt Jemima bit the dust last summer, a victim of wokeness and the Black Lives Matter fad.

Did you notice?

I didn’t until my wife asked me to pick up some frozen Aunt Jemima pancakes recently.

Hold it, Aunt who?

Turns out what she really meant was for me to get some Pearl Milling Company pancakes. A web search later, I figured it out.

Just one problem…

In the wilds of Tucson, nobody seems to carry frozen Pearl Milling Company products. They do have some syrups and dry pancake mixes, but until now, even those never jumped out at me.

So just like that, with the local and national media demonizing Donald Trump, forcing folks to get vaccinated, wear purposeless cloth masks and helping raise to millions for BLM, dear, sweet Aunt Jemima went for a dirt nap.

In the meantime, BLM appears to have squandered all those tis of millions of dollars with little to no accounting. All while a pillar of pop culture died and nobody – including the ancestors of the original Aunt Jemima – had a clue as to what happened.

But set aside the never ending story of racism briefly, and let’s look at another famous brand from my lost childhood that went away long ago – one with powerful Kansas City roots – Hydrox Cookies.

For the uninitiated – and there are likely many of you – Hydrox invented what later became the Original Oreo cookie. Famous Kansas City icon Jacob L. Loose introduced and manufactured it, four years before Oreo copied it then left Hysdrox in the dust with better marketing of an arguably an inferior product.

Yep, Jacob Loose – of Loose Park fame – the guy who apparently never owned slaves or championed racism, started the endowment fund for Children’s Mercy Hospital and helped launch the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation –  and built and ran what became KC’s Sunshine Bakery.  Continue reading →

Stonehenge and the pyramids aside, nothing seems to last forever…

Not even Kansas City’s vaunted Country Club Plaza.

Oh sure, it’s changed over the years – long gone are institutions like Woolworth’s, King Louie, Sears and hoity-toity clothiers such as Jack Henry and Cricket West. About the only biz that goes very far back now is the jeweler Tivols.

No biggie, right? Wrong.

With upwards of two dozen vacancies – 12 in the past year – and one of the Plaza’s biggest “gets,” upscale Oak Park Mall department store Nordstrom bailing from its two year plan to relocate to the Plaza, things are looking beyond bleak.

“I’ve never been more worried about the Plaza,” one big shot developer told a local television station. “You see all the big names going away (and) it’s going to have a domino effect. It’s tough to watch.”

So is there anything much in the way of good news?

“Not that I’m aware of,” says Westport businessman Bill Nigro.

There are basically two takes on the Plaza’s problems:

“They have to get their rents in line so people can afford to be in business,” Nigro says. “Nobody can afford the rents there now.”

“And I think Johnson Countians are afraid to go down there,” adds Mission Hills resident Dwight Sutherland. “Five or six years ago they had flash mob problems where the black kids would come and throw the white kids in the fountains, and then go by outdoor restaurants and knock people’s drinks and food off their tables. Then they had the riots two years ago after the George Floyd incident. People in the suburbs already had reservations about going down there and the riots solidified them.”

Now many of the Plaza’s popular businesses and eateries are history.  Continue reading →

Missouri’s basketball struggles are self inflicted with poor coaching hires…

They have NOTHING to do with conference affiliation. Hiring Kim Anderson would’ve been a disaster in the Big 12 or ANY major conference. By any measure, Mizzou basketball is a huge disappointment and should be WAY better than it is.

Football is a different animal.

Mizzou is in the same position as pretty much ALL programs who aren’t a “blue blood.” You are going to have to have everything line up in order to to win a natty.

If it’s ever going to happen, Mizzou’s in the right conference.

To act like Missouri has been some sort of embarrassment in football is unfair, and just plain untrue. They’ve been to a couple SEC championship games and won some major bowl games.

The fiasco that were the nonsensical 2015 protests on campus set the football program back years.

Barry Odom wasn’t the hire anyone wanted after Gary Pinkel, but it was the best they could do at the time. He promptly came on campus and alienated quite a few folks by calling the job a “turnaround,” as if Mizzou’s program had been in the dumpster for years.

He was a total meathead that was gifted multiple NFL players and most importantly, Drew Lock, an NFL quarterback. He did next to nothing.

Once Lock graduated, Odom was on borrowed time. Continue reading →

There are folks who still think I’m a sour grapes guy…

Think again, because my critiques of the Kansas City Star and Pitch have nothing to do with a sense of longing because I’m no longer writing for either.

It’s true, I basically have been screwed by both, but it really doesn’t matter. Even former Pitch owner Hal Brody complimented me for treating him fairly in my columns.

Moving back to Arizona a year ago – where I graduated high school and attended college – means I no longer have to put up with the drumbeat of the Star’s heavy handed editorials. Talk about a relief, it’s like escaping the gravitational pull of an annoying neighbor or ex.

That said, there’s no escaping the mainstream thought police!

Tucson’s Arizona Daily Star is every bit as biased but happily, far less obnoxious.

It comes out seven days a week (not six) in four sections. And keeps me up to date on mundane stuff like local news, crime and weather – and arrives without fail every day by 7 am (eat your hearts out Cowtowners).

It’s also loaded with letters from brainwashed locals who love to bash Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema for having sensible deliberations on topics like not destroying the filibuster.

But back to KC…

You guys are still stuck with Mike “Three Time Loser” Fannin – who never would have been appointed Star editor had publisher Art Brisbane not foolishly opted to move his family to California to take over the Knight Ridder newspaper chain that unbeknownst to him (or anybody else) was soon to be sold.

The rest is history, but it’s hard to imagine that history continuing much longer.  Continue reading →

Think tale of two cities…

In one corner we have the Kansas City Star, ostensibly the defender of “actual news” in what passes for “our” area. In my new, little corner of the globe, lies the Arizona Daily Star, Tucson’s fast fading bulwark of liberal-leaning, “flavored” news.

So even as I managed to escape the dreary daily drumbeat of angry editorials and “fake news” in KC a year ago, unexpectedly I crash-landed in a similarly far left spin zone out west.

Can you believe it?

This from a dude who not that long ago voted twice for Obama and considered MSNBC my cable news channel of choice.

It’s interesting dissecting the two Stars and their similar efforts at trying to micromanage the way folks think. As opposed to merely informing them what’s going on.

I digress.

There’s little doubt both of – what we once called “newspapers” are pursuing the similar “truths” these days.

Meaning just about anybody that passes for woke or liberal is good and correct,  while anyone that skews conservative is pretty much dead wrong, or as Dwight Sutherland likes to say, “evil.”.

Ah, but the difference between Tucson’s Star and the one I wrote for for 16 years is largely in “tone.”

The angry inmates that overran the asylum in KC enjoy berating and bashing the likes of Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall. So while Dr. Fauci recently called Marshall a “moron” (off mic, of course), KC’S Star long ago pegged him and Hawley as cretins. They love nothing more than the opportunity to use WWE-like moves to pull out the hair or deliver a thumb to the eye, when the journalistic referees (editors?) are not looking.

Arizona’s Star loves few things more than posting letters and cartoons sticking it to Kyrsten Sinema for not going along a couple of President Joe Biden‘s loonier policies.

Out here, they can’t bring themselves to full-out bash fellow Dems like Sinema and Joe Manchin. Instead they rely on over-the-top fan mail and heinous, reader donated cartoons to rub their news noses in doo-doo.

Whereas, KC’s journalistas pride themselves in fighting dirty. Continue reading →

Sam the Sham

Things are getting seriously sad at Kansas City’s newspaper of record…

What’s left of its news staff – tails between their legs – exited their historic brick home at 1729 Grand a few years back and moved into, later selling its gigundo $250 million glass house that many assumed was a step up.

It wasn’t.

The Star has been fire selling off assets for a dozen years, trying to keep its head above water as subscribers, readers, columnists and staff fled the fast sinking ship in record numbers. Just prior to editor-turned-publisher Art Brisbane‘s departure in 2006, the newspaper had more than 2,000 employees.

It’s anybody’s guess now, but well under 100 would not surprise.

Take me, for instance…

Convicted felon/editor Mike Fannin continues to hang onto his paycheck, but anyone who one-upon-a-time mattered there is long gone.

Now, the last writer with the slightest semblance of Star power sports columnist Sam Mellinger has left for a cushy PR job with the Royals.

Not a good sign.

At 2021 year end the few remaining news staffers had to flee the newspaper’s downtown glass house to work out of their ramshackle homes and apartments. And now, the Curious George of retired Star newsies, Jim Fitzpatrick, has tracked what passes for the newspaper’s new headquarters to a mere Post Office box on the Plaza.

Yes, it’s come to that… Continue reading →

Is it possible for too many Christmas decorations to be too much?

In cities like Kansas City, the more the merrier. Plaza holiday lights? Bring ’em – let the good times roll.

Then again, whatever happened to tasteful holiday decorated homes that seem increasingly to have become engulfed in garish overkill?

I migrated to Tucson a year ago where the powers that be here decided long ago to limit streetlights, neon lighting, even the outside lights on people’s homes. All in the interest of keeping nighttime skies dark and filled with stars, like the “good old days.”

They do it via strict zoning, the likes of which I’ve yet to see elsewhere.

That doesn’t stop big retailers from hawking all sorts of holiday lighting and inflatable monstrosities.

Did you know that for $399.95 Hammacher Schlemmer will sell you an 18 foot tall, inflatable Frosty the Snowman? Continue reading →

I’m a pretty laid back guy…

Aside from hanging out long ago with the Prime Minister of Canada on the stern of my parent’s yacht, dating a girl long distance in Torino, Italy in the ’80s, running The Pitch, then choking out the highest read column in the Kansas City Star for 16 years, passing out with COVID 19 a year ago just before Christmas while returning a rental car in Arizona and getting married to an amazing, beautiful lawyer who works for the Attorney General of Arizona, “Vanilla” has pretty much been my middle name.

Ah, but once upon time in the early 1970s I loaded up my dirt brown Fiat X 1/9 sports car with as much Coors beer as it would hold and enough clothes to last a year and moved to Mayfield, Kentucky.

You know, last weekend’s Tornado Town.

It was a storybook, small southern city in what is called the “Jackson Purchase.” I went there to learn as much as I could about grading grain and running what is called, a “country grain elevator.”

The Coors was my ticket to ingratiating myself to the elevator owner and locals of the dry county, where they prized the “pure Rocky Mountain spring water” from which it was allegedly came. At the time Coors wasn’t sold “east of the Mississippi.”

Like the early Pilgrims trading beads for Manhattan Island I supplied my rare brewskis and locals reciprocated by introducing me to equally rare, illegal moonshine and the saltiest country ham you probably never ate.

After a few months of living in a small motel just off the main drag downtown – which as of last Friday night is history – I rented a tiny mobil home just west of town, and settled in for a year.

Needless to say, it was a bit on the unglamorous side.

Still lI loved hanging with the farm folk ands locals in Mayfield and fanned out on weekends for exotic places such as Memphis or Nashville to hang with luminaries like Wolfman Jack (honest) and southern belles who had possibly less romantic interest in me than I appeared to have in them.

TMI, anyone? Continue reading →

Is Westport on its last legs?

Nope, times are definitely tough, but it’s more like a changing of the guard. More than a half dozen businesses either have – or are about to bite the dust in KC’s original entertainment district – but a new generation is ramping up to sally forth in the post COVID era,

“Westport is just in a transition period,” explains longtime Westport landlord and businessman Bill Niro. “It’s actually upgrading a little. You know, we’ve still got the Buzzard. Harpo’s and Kelley”s, but we’ve got a big country bar coming in taking the space of the Foundry and the old Hurricane. The southwest corner of Westportand Broadway is going to be the new, big gay club in town called Fountain Haus. And we have Throwback KC and Bridger’s that are both primarily black dance clubs. But you know what? The whole live music scene is now gone from Westport and that’s unfortunate.”

The latest post COVID casualties include the Riot Room, Joe’s Pizza Buy the Slice and Westport Saloon.

A new country bar is taking over the Riot Room space, and  it appears that an offshoot of Joe’s KC BBQ will take over the Joe’s pizza space (that ripped off Pyramid Pizza in the same location with near identical twisted pizza crust and jars of honey for dessert, opening into Kelley’s.

A potential bidding war may erupt where Westport Saloon is concerned.

“The very day they announced they were closing at the end of the year I had two calls asking about the space,” Niro says. “And now I have at least three people interested in it.”

Unfortunately, Westport still has to vie party supremacy with downtown’s Power & Light District.

Speaking of which…how has the P&L fared the past 20 or so months? Continue reading →