One of my mother’s old beauty shop customers was a middle aged lady, Ester O’Connor. I can remember her now even after more than forty years: gray hair pinned back on the sides and 1950’s glasses with pointed rims secured by one of those librarian chains. Her chief interest in life was birds. In fact, I remember an article in the local papers that gave her that notoriety. She reminded me of Rima the Bird Girl from the book, Green Mansions. She lived in a patch of woods in a bend of Brush Creek at about 4900 Rockhill Road across from the University of Missouri at Kansas City and two blocks east of the Country Club Plaza.
When I was working my way through college she hired me as a handyman to fix up her rentals located reasonably close to her secretive enclave in the woods. I remember she used to get mad at Good Will because they always wanted new discarded furniture. Sometimes, after cleaning out a rental, they would ignore the pieces we placed on the curb. Mrs. O’Conner also had a comfortable little house she shared with her friend, Rilla. My job was to rake the area and do odd jobs like tar-mop the flat roof. Often she would bid me stop so that she could point out and identify some feathery friend. Unfortunately, following the pattern so familiar in Rima’s Amazon, forces beyond her control somehow took the land.
The city fathers decided to rehabilitate Brush Creek because of the negative publicity of the damage that periodic floods do to the Plaza area and further downstream into the black neighborhoods along Van Brunt Blvd. Construction crews made little dams that slowed the water enough so that Kansas City could brag about the new waterway that boasted boats for tourists and thousands of yellow plastic ducks for occasional business promotions. Sadly, the trees disappeared as the whole area was slicked up and became sterile. Those who venture there now are an occasional jogger, homeless person looking for a place under a new bridge, or a city maintenance crew.
I liked Mrs. O’Connor because she real and had a passion about her favorite subject even if it was just birds. Oddly enough, after her disappearance into time, thousands of crows still descend in the same area and create all kinds of mayhem. Maybe it’s an apparition of old Tom Pendergast complaining that the new Brush Creek contractors didn’t use enough cement or maybe it’s something else.
