Suicide at the Netherlands Hotel

In the late 1950s the Westport area, where I grew up in Kansas City, had its quaint attractions.  At 39th and Main we ran as kids in and out of all of them including Eddie Jacobson’s National Shirt Shop, the Beacon Café, the Roi-Tan cigar shop on the NE corner, and a newsstand owned by an ex-GI and his blond French wife.  We could barely understand a word she said.  Across the street was old Joe the cobbler whose bald head couldn’t conceal a hole that made him somewhat of a celebrity among the local children.  Of course, everyone knew that next to him was the neighborhood model shop stocked with the most gruesome of war machines:  the Hellcat, Hustler, Tiger tank, destroyers, and carriers.  Journal of the Silent Majority has more details about what Westport looked like during that time of innocence.

Most Baby Boomers never appreciated the bubble that was their childhood – at least the early period before 1960 until some harbinger broke that bubble and flung them into a new era.  I’ll make the guess that with me that harbinger came one day when we heard about a suicide at the Netherlands Hotel a stone’s throw from 39th and Main.

 

After school, a friend and I from Rollins Elementary sneaked into the parking lot behind the hotel to examine the scene.  We had always played there anyway, but never got caught or chased away.  As I looked up to the top-most floor that was the 10th I could see a screen pried loose from the small bathroom window.  Directly below on the concrete was the remaining purple splatter marks.  Officials didn’t make much of an effort in those days to clean up the mess.  I do not recall who he was or why he did it, but I’m sure he had his reasons.

What had happened was a graphic anomaly that parents had difficulty explaining to their children ranking up there with the Birds-and-the-Bees.    At least the violence was something that he had done to himself.  That was about to change.  Murder and mayhem in Westport and indeed the nation changed us all beginning in 1960 when utopians rearranged America by casting away hundreds of years of custom, convention, and law to accelerate social change by force and the rule of the bayonet.  For every foot civil rights gained, a yard was lost to the worst elements in the black population who profited from an all too familiar provocation-crisis-reward scenario that broke down law and order and bestowed upon extremists and terrorists an electronic sainthood.  Gangs, prostitutes, pushers, murderers, con artists, rapists, child molesters, and thieves who had been contained, migrated and thrived in decent areas like Westport.  I saw it all and the politically controlled history books still dare not print the truth.

What we as children saw in that suicide at the Netherlands Hotel was merely prelude, but we could never have guessed that or in the course of events, that it was rather benign.  I remember with fondness the fairytale world we lived in even with some of its darker exceptions, but we all knew what happened once Humpty Dumpty was broken.