Daytripper, The Column 1990-91

Birth Of A Tripper

In 1990, I was working part-time as a composition tutor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and contributing occasional reportage to the View, a bi-weekly newspaper. After a change of command, the new editor called a writers meeting and asked us all to bring ten story ideas. I brought nine. I don't think the first eight ever came to anything, but the ninth item on my list, for a local-travel column, scored. Kansas City's daily paper had a local travel column that I found too cutesy, so I proposed something more offbeat. I even had a catchy name for it: Daytripper.

It started as a quirky "local sites" column, which gave me an excuse to do things like going whisky tasting at a local distillery or loitering at Mormon historical sites. As I went on writing the column, I became fascinated with the way the past intersects the present, how the past is often right there at our elbow waiting to be discovered. This was usually a poignant insight in Kansas City, a once bustling place whose colorful past is frequently bulldozed in order to make way for something bigger and blander in hopes of "putting the city on the map" and other gaspy cliches.

Most Daytripper columns arose from a question about some seemingly insignificant local landmark or event. Why is there a train bridge over the intersection of 43rd and Broadway but no rails? What's with that arch up in the trees above the Southwest Trafficway? Why is one part of town called the Trolleybarn neighborhood, and furthermore, if it's a neighborhood, why have all the houses been removed?

Research into the question was followed by a trip to the site and a report on what happened. This was in keeping with all the New Journalism I'd soaked up in college, but the act of going there made a huge difference. There was usually some fortuitous occurrence that brought the place, and then piece, to life. For example, on my way to view the site of Petticoat Lane, a once-busy, later-abandoned retail block downtown, I passed a dead rat laying on the sidewalk. The column pretty much wrote itself.

I usually brought along a Polaroid Land camera I'd picked up at a thrift shop. This provided art for the column that was not only camera-ready but also suitably grainy and "artistic."

I wrote two columns a month (900-1200 words each) until April 1991, when The View went out of business. For my troubles I received $45. The column appeared on the next-to-last page, usually alongside an ad for a massage parlor, a placement I'm still pleased to recall.

A handful of the columns are available on this site. What of the rest? Some are too god awful embarrassing to show anyone, which is not surprising when you consider that I wrote most of them in a panic the night before deadline. Time has rendered other completely irrelevant and making them relevant isn't worth the effort. Others are simply gone, all the extant copies given away or left behind.


An Annotated Tripperography 

Traipsing through our fair environs - 25 July 1990
An introduction and statement of purpose, consisting mostly of platitudes I am no longer young enough to endorse. An Editor's note (written by me) explained: "Ingalls loves to write and he loves to explore. Unfortunately, we can't trust him with anything important around here. To keep him out of our hair, we've decided to send him out on the road."

Antebellum, postdiluvian - 10 Aug. 1990
The first column recounts a trip to Weston, Mo., an antebellum Missouri River town that hasn't been on the river since 1881. My friend Kevin was looking for pictures of "American stuff" to take with him to Japan. Serendipitously, our trip coincided with the annual Reason to Ride rally sponsored by Kawasaki. And what, I ask, could be more American than riding your Japanese motorcycle to the McCormick distillery to taste peach vodka?

Far West, but not west enough - 24 Aug. 1990 - Read it
Before Brigham Young led them to Salt Lake, the Latter Day Saints had plans to settle in Western Missouri. Big plans. God told them so. The locals disagreed.

Out Lonejack way - 7 Sept. 1990
Missouri has had a wine industry since the mid 1800s. Most of it centers around the old German towns of Herman and Berger in the Ozarks, where the Budweiser crowd came for a change of pace. At an increasing number of fests (Maifest, Octoberfest, Wurstfest) brats and funnel cakes were chased with sweet Vidals and Seyvals and Rieslings (and the sidewalks were hosed down daily). Off this well-beaten track, smaller wineries around the state were indulging the quixotic struggle of making wine in Missouri's roller coaster climate. I paid a visit one of these, the tiny Bynum Winery in Lonejack, Mo.

Are you D.R.A.T.E.L.? - 21 Sept. 1990
I went to Abilene, Kansas, to have a look at a particularly well-kept movie house from the 1920s. My horn-rimmed glasses led many people there to assume I was Doing Research At The Eisenhower Library (DRATEL). Abilene is also the home of the Greyhound Racing Hall of Fame, by the way, but no one assumed I was going there.

No copies remain (my mother thinks she has one somewhere but hasn't been able to dig it out yet. We shall see...)

Valentine & the Benton Home - 5 Oct. 1990
Thomas Hart Benton, that is. The cantankerous American painter, muralist, and sculptor spent the last three and a half decades of his life in Kansas City, Mo. The house and studio that he and his tiny wife shared has since become a state historic site. I thought the house was in the Valentine neighborhood. I was wrong. It is a nice place and the ranger on duty that day could not have been cuter.

Poetry, Petticoat Lane and a dead rat - 19 Oct. 1991
No rats were harmed during the writing of this column, but the heirs of one local historiatrix got their noses out of joint when I exercised the Fair Use doctrine of the copyright laws. Oh, well.

It's all in a name (or was) - 2 Nov. 1990 - Read it
Poking into the history of and disputes about several street names in the greater Kansas City area.

Fragrant fudge-like clods between the heel and sole - 16 Nov. 1990 - Read it
I was very excited to receive a press pass (my first) to the American Royal, Kansas City's annual celebration of all the fun you can have with livestock: riding it, roping it, cleaning up after it, and (sometimes) eating it. I did a fair amount of grousing in the two columns about the dilapidated state of the American Royal arena. The building was later renovated and the facilities for the Royal upgraded in time for the 100th anniversary of the event in 1999. A very good thing, indeed.

Como se Llama? - 30 Nov. 1990 - Read it
More fun at the Royal, including a stop at the llama competition. Please pardon the pun (and all the alliteration).

Where my hair grows, there grow I - 7 Dec. 1990 - Read it
A goof headline that I was surprised to see in print. I figured they'd go with "The Bridge to Nowhere." The bridge in question was the Mill Creek Viaduct, a remnant of Kansas City's streetcar system, at its peak one of the most extensive in the nation. Designed in 1928 by Edward Buehler Delk, the bridge outlasted both the creek (which was diverted below ground) and the streetcars (which stopped running in 1959). It stood as a beautiful urban ruin until was finally demolished in 1996.

The Red Cars of the Strang Line - 14 Dec. 1990 - Read it
Overland Park, Kansas, spraws just over State Line Road from Kansas City, Mo. Having assumed it had always been a car haven, I was surprised to find out the Strang Land Company had built a railway to lure people to those sunny suburban retreats. Poking around at the Johnson County Historical Society, I came across a sales pamphlet from the 1920s. My, how things have changed.

A Trolleybarn Requiem - 11 Jan. 1991
The View's offices were near 48th & Troost. To get there from where I lived, I passed through a part of town referred to as the Trolleybarn neighborhood. The neighborhood took its name from the fact that the maintenance and storage facilities for the city's streetcar system where once located there. But why were all the houses being demolished or carted off one by one?

University Park: What fresh hell is this? - 25 Jan. 1991
The Trolleybarn saga continues. This was basically a screed lashing out at the University for destroying the neighborhood to make way for a research park that I thought was unnecessary and poorly conceived. It didn't occur to me until the issue was out that publishing this was perhaps not the best move for a University employee. My supervisor at the time almost giggled himself blue, but I never heard a peep from anyone else at UMKC.

War, Peace and the Rosedale Arch - 8 Feb. 1991 - Read it
The advent of Bush the Elder's Desert Storm was the impetus to visit a World War I memorial in the Rosedale section of Kansas City, Kansas. Unhappy days that, at the moment, seem to be here again.

Busman's Holiday: A California Notebook - 22 Feb. 1991
Berkeley Conversations - 8 March 1991
Of Mice and Malls Monterey/Cannery Row - 22 March 1991
I took a trip to visit friends and family in the Bay Area and it occurred to me that I could write off the trip if I wrote a column about it. Once I got going, I wrote three. Seven months later I packed up my troubles and moved them to Berkeley.

Troubles with Bunnies - 4 April 1991
Every year at Easter, large fiberglass rabbits appear on the Country Club Plaza. They sit there in the spring rain, dressed in suits, their electric eyes glowing. I found the ones with red eyes particularly disturbing.

Scenes from a Mall Without Walls - April 1991
A visit to the Hypermart, basically a Wal-Mart with a gland problem. The View folded before this one ran. The Hypermart has since been renamed a Wal-Mart Supercenter.