George Washington Cherry

The Central Plains were not settled by a haphazard onslaught of land hungry pioneers.  The real ones were smart enough to follow the paths of least resistance up the Missouri River and adjacent trails to Independence and Kansas City using St. Louis as the ultimate source of supply.  In turn Kansas City became the hub which fed the Oregon Trail and the 800 mile long Santa Fe Trail. Westport, the beginning of the Santa Fe Trail, received supplies from Kansas City a few miles away.

The relevance of George, my great grandfather, is that he was the first Cherry to break from the Cumberland region, head west across the Mississippi River with the Independence Wagon Train, and found the Missouri Cherrys.  After 1850, he went west to California and became a gold miner in Jacksonville, Oregon.  George was a freighter across the Plains from Ft. Leavenworth to all government posts including those of Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah.  On November 1, 1855, he enlisted in the Oregon Mounted Volunteers in D Co. commanded by Captain Miles F. Alcorn and led by Colonel Robert Williams of the 9th Regiment.  At the time of enlistment, he was 5 ft. 11 inches tall, had a light complexion, blue eyes, black hair, and weighed 125 pounds.  He was discharged on May 28th 1856.

Shortly after this, he became a “filibuster” under General Billy Walker in Nicaragua where two hundred army soldiers of fortune fought against 20,000 Nicaraguans for control of that Central American country.  They succeeded for about a year until disease and starvation drove them out.  In November, 1857 George enlisted in the Utah Volunteer Battalion for the Mormon-Indian expedition.  The two stories I heard in my youth about George and the Indians happened here.  He scalped an Indian and left him for dead.  At a trading post some years later that same Indian came up to him and said; “You scalped me!”  George was supposed to have used a hollow reed in the water to hide from the Indians.  On December 12, 1857, he was stationed at Camp Scott, Utah Territory and became Captain of C Co. just three months after the Mountain Meadows Massacre.  He was discharged September 14, 1858 after walking 1200 miles back to Ft.  Leavenworth.  Prior to Kansas and Missouri, George had lived “3 years in Differnt (sic)Places in Oregon and Caliaforne (sic) and Utah” (sic).  After that, he lived “11 years in Kansas and 33 years in Mo.”

He then returned to Kentucky and married Sarah Parrish on December 12, 1858 in Barren County.  They packed up and went to Linn Co. Kansas for seven years.  This was during the time after the Kansas Nebraska Bill of 1854 which admitted Kansas as a free state.  Settlers both slave and free, were encouraged to immigrant there to tip the balance in favor of their particular political persuasion.  “Bleeding Kansas” was not a good place to be.  The newlyweds had no sooner got to Kansas than the severe drought of 1859-1860 happened.  When my grandfather, Isaac Anderson Cherry was born to George and Sarah in Olathe, Kansas April 15, 1861, the War Between the States began.

A Day at the Westport Reporter

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.

The Bird Lady of Kansas City

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.