My view of the world was influenced by Westport and in Westport there were little stores along Main Street still alive and vibrant in the Mid 1950s. That's where the country began to fade and the city appeared quite dramatically. It’s where Ma finally got her own beauty shop in Kansas City and where I began to see the races and classes interact. As I mentioned in Journal of the Silent Majority the proximity of Rollins Grade School, Westport High School, and Metropolitan Junior College pretty much sealed the deal until we kids grew up.
The apartment building where we lived, the Orinoco, reminded me of one of the pieces on the board game Monopoly: four rentals above, two store fronts facing Main Street, and one in the basement. Swope’s Laundry was a mom and pop outfit that had been there forever. Ma had her beauty shop in our tiny five room apartment on the southwest side of the second floor overlooking four traffic lanes with street car islands separating northbound and southbound lanes (Country Club). I remember old ladies returning on the streetcars from the Starlight Theatre at 11:00 P.M. That was in the safetime – the American Dreamtime before the violence of the Civil Rights Movement tore respect for the law to shreds and gave legions of criminals the upper hand.
In our neighborhood there were no civic centers, malls, or Midnight Basketball to keep the youngsters entertained. They were usually home before dark to start on their homework, a requirement in high school students in those days. To many parents the curfew would be the factory whistles that went off at 9:00 P.M. For the teenagers the closest thing there was to Mel’s Drive-In (American Graffiti) was Winstead’s Drive-In on the Country Club Plaza. On our block, several doors north, was Valentine Drive-In where hamburgers were 35 cents.
Our particular play ground was the rear parking lot of the Orinoco after the cars left. It had one of those coal cinder parking lots no one remembers. There was a row of tiny garages of thin concrete grooved walls and flat tarred roofs. I was always worried about the back porch falling down or leaning too hard on the railing. Since the pictures were taken in 1975 there is an uncharacteristic dumpster shown. Tenants in the 1950s and 1960s burned their waste in concrete burners. There was no regular trash pickup even on the residential streets that I recall. Everyone had a burn barrel and Kansas City would be hidden in a blue haze every fall when people burned their leaves.