How
many young men came through the doors of the Westport Reporter from Westport High School and its neighborhood
looking for work? I was one of them during
most of the sixties. Harold Reddoch, the owner, had a steady supply
of paperboys and office clerks because Kansas City’s Westport was still
stable. Demographics had yet to change
another American city for the worst. I
remember of few names: Randy Becker, Gary Boyle, Ronald Elliott. The Westport
Reporter was called a newspaper although its reach went to just part of
Kansas City, Missouri and was a small "advertiser." Paper routes went
from 27th St. on the north to 75th on the south where the old Fairyland Park
was. State Line was its farthest reach
on the west although we overlapped at KU Medical Center. Troost formed the eastern boundary where 1968
race rioters burned down the entire corridor.
My
job at seventeen was as an office clerk before and during that summer of
1968. I operated a Headliner which
printed out the product headlines for paste-up work long before Photo Shop and
computers. I also did the Wolferman’s store ad
in the picture. Ron Elliott was the lead
paste-up man. The artwork would be
photographed and transformed into an offset printer plate. Harold purchased one of these presses during
my stay and I remember the tickety-tickety noise and smell of the ink vividly. After the pages came off they would be
inserted and joined with others and shuffled in the box type jogging machine
like the paint shaker you see at WalMart.
I
remember Harold. He had a crew cut and
smoked a cigar – no nonsense and driven in a tough inner city. He loved history and once recommended I read Winter War, the story of the Russian-
Finnish War of 1940. I remember Jack
Larson, his lead office person when I started there as a paperboy when I was
still going to Rollins Elementary. He
had an unusually good sense of humor, tolerated us high school kids, and had an
excellent telephone manner with advertisers.
The Westport High kids went off into life like me, but I’m glad at least
one of us can recall and write about Westport and the
people who lived and worked there.
