Long ago on independence square (Kansas City, Liberty: sales, transfer, neighborhood)

[sally36]

Gosh I am overwhelmed with all this wonderful info. Twas worth the wait! I correspond with a classmate who was in ROTC and he emailed me a lot of interesting stuff last year when I was recovering from cancer surgery.I'll tell him about your input. I remember Vada Trask. Mrs. Mann was my 2nd grade teacher but I remember the name Miss Lyle! Did you still have "cloakrooms." Long narrow closets in the rear of the room where we hung our coats and left muddy galoshes. My Dad worked at Bostian and yes it faced out on Maple. Also stopped by there on my Indep. visit. Have to go now but will be back asap. Thanks, guys !!

[WCHS'59]

Glad to see that you are back and hope you had a pleasant trip. I wish some more folks would join in.


Slover Park was essentially taken over for the site of the Truman Library and later an educational building complex ran by Central Missouri State. That school complex is now the Independence Academy, which belongs to the Independence School District. It is a charter school of some type.

I recall seeing tennis courts and tables in the northwest portion of the park after the library was built. However, Slover Park is not listed under the Independence Parks department so I am not sure what gives. That northwest portion might be considered as part of the Truman Library grounds.


I had forgotten about bringing my lunch to the Maple Street William Chrisman and eating in the auditorium. In the fall of 1956, the school brought in a TV or two and placed them on the stage of the auditorium and tuned in the World Series. Back then all World Series games were played in the afternoon, I think, and they ran around lunch time at the school. At any rate, if I had not been able to watch the game that day, I could never have said that I saw the perfect game that Don Larsen pitched. I was a lowly (chuckle) sophomore and a Brooklyn Dodger fan. I yelled for Brooklyn to get a hit and a senior in front of me yelled back at me to shut up that Larsen was pitching a no hitter. It turned out to be a perfect game.

At McCoy School, those cloakrooms were along the side in some classrooms and in the rear in others. I believe the “new” addition on the north had the cloakrooms in the back. They were along the sides in the old part. The second grade rooms were on the bottom floor of that “new” addition and the fourth grade rooms were on the top. I cannot recall what grades were in the newest addition that was on the back. It was single story, though, and I recall walking through it but I did not go in the new classrooms.

[WCHS'59]

Besides Sharon Kinne, Independence has another Unsolved Mystery.

At least that is what Robert Stack has said. I had to chuckle when Stack came on and was standing in a large cave. The particular cave he was standing in on the Unsolved Mystery program is in or near Hollywood and has been used in a lot of movies.

Sometime in 1991, a school bus driver found the remains of a body in a cave in a wooded hillside area behind an unidentified Independence, Missouri, school bus yard.

When Stack mentioned school bus yard I immediately thought of the Pace School Bus yards on 23rd Street just west of Chrysler. However, a newspaper article says the location was in the Leeds Industrial District. I was unaware the Independence city limits were even in that area.

For the first five years the bus driver was employed, he felt like he was being watched when he got in and out of his bus in the yard. In 1991, he decided to investigate the hillside and found a hidden cave. Inside he found the remains of a man with a single bullet hole in the skull. As it turned out the man had been missing from Overland Park, Kansas, since 1974.

The killer’s identity is believed to be known but he has not been seen since 1974, either.

[WCHS'59]

In the Cub Scouts, Pack 146 of the Eden Heights church, we got to go to downtown Kansas City and see the radio performers doing their live programs.


Radio was big then and everything was live. If a music background was needed for a program or a commercial, a live musician(s) provided it and the announcer was always live.


Big lights saying "On Air" would come from outside the various studios within the station building that was broadcasting at any one moment.


We sat in front of a big glass window and watched a WDAF radio presentation of a female piano player who was in a formal dress. She had a harp accompaniment and there was one other musician playing.


At KMBC radio we got to actually sit in the studio and provide live applause, on cue, for the Dinner Bell Roundup, a country and western noon time program. The announcer had a locally familiar KC-wide saying when ending the program “Put on the coffee pot Daisy, I am coming home.”

I never was in the KIMO, Independence, station studios.

[WCHS'59]

WDAF TV channel 4 was the first television station in Kansas City sometime around 1949, or so. It was an NBC affiliate. The station belonged to the Kansas City Star newspaper.

At around 5:30 pm each day a test pattern would come on. Apparently, this pattern was for the station to calibrate its cameras for something but it was only a still picture with arrows and numbers that did not move. When we first got the television, my sister and I would actually sit there and watch this stationary test pattern as though we were watching a program.

The station signed on at 6:00 pm nightly and started broadcasting with an Old Tyme Movie, a silent movie. A guy would sit there with a whistle and some other noise makers and narrate the movie in a comical way. A lone live piano played in the background. This guy was funny and I want to say that this guy’s name was Lee Vogel but that may not be correct. After the movie, the local news would come on.

I don’t recall much else but there were Bob Steele cowboy movies and Three Mesqeteers cowboy movies.

Our TV had a seven inch screen. The set was supposed to be a portable but the wood housing dwarfed the screen. We kept it on a table in the living room. It was heavy and contained many tubes. Every time an airplane, large or small, flew overhead, the screen would flop all over the place until the plane was out of range.

We got used to TV in a big way. Around 1951, there was still only one TV channel and the workers at WDAF TV went on strike. There was no television for six weeks. I remember talking to a fellow classmate at McCoy school saying that there was not much else to do without television. By this time, the station was coming on around 3:00 pm and we could see the Howdy Doody show just as we got home from school.

We also now had a huge 19 inch Admiral television set, portable but extremely heavy.

Around 1954, the second TV station channel 5, KCMO TV, came on. It was a CBS affiliate. Then Channel 9 came on the air. Initially Channel 9 was a joint effort between WHB TV and KMBC TV. At some point during the day the announcer would say “This is KMBC TV signing off to WHB TV” and the programming would continue. KMBC was an affiliate of ABC TV and WHB TV was an affiliate of the Dumont Television Network. Both WHB TV and Dumont disappeared in just a couple years.


Channel 2 came out of St. Joseph. Channels 41 and 50 came along later.


CBS had the Edward R Murrow program. He always was smoking a cigarette as he talked to his guests and there always was a lot of smoke swirling around his face. No one cared about smoking back then. Everything was live and I have two recollections of his program.

One recollection is from sometime in 1951 when someone pulled a switch and the first coast to coast TV broadcast took place. Viewers in Independence-Kansas City and New York could see the Golden Gate Bridge live for the first time.

The second recollection is a live broadcast from the Truman home sometime after he left the presidency. I can recall only his housekeeper taking a freshly baked cake or something from the oven. I did not catch it but later some critics were citing the fact the housekeeper took the pan out of the oven without benefit of using a pot holder. In fact, the scene had been staged and the oven had not been on.


Item of note: WHB and WDAF radio and TV were two rare exceptions to the FCC requirement, which specifies that stations east of the Mississippi River must have call letters starting with W and stations west of the Mississippi must have call letters starting with K.

[WCHS'59]

The Cherokee Indian tribe had their Trail of Tears.

I recently took this photo two blocks from the square at the old spring watering place for wagons destined to travel the California, Oregon, and Santa Fe trails. The spring is at the corner of Noland and Truman roads near the old electric power station, which is now the Roger T. Sermon Community Center.

The 1838 initiative to move the Potawatomi tribe was taken by the state of Indiana to move 860 tribal members from Indiana to what is now Osawatomie, KS. Their forced march became known as the Trail of Death.

The US Army allowed the tribe to use Independence as a rest stop before moving on to their destination. The route was 660 miles and only 756 members arrived in Kansas. The Indians were moved from Indiana to Kansas to free their land for white settlement.

The forced move took place from September through November 1838.

In 1861, the Potawatomi were again moved, some went to Oklahoma. However, others moved to Jackson County, Kansas, and their descendents live on an 8 x 11 mile land tract, one of four Indian reservations in modern day Kansas.

[WCHS'59]

My 1959 graduation class at William Chrisman had 401 students.

2012 Graduates:

William Chrisman, 271

Truman, 319

Van Horn, 133

Saint Marys, 24

Independence Academy, 49

Fort Osage, 339

Dont have the figures for the students in Independence who attend Blue Springs schools.

[WCHS'59]

As a post script to #126 above concerning the forced movement of the Potawatomi Indians from the state of Indiana.

The word Indiana means "Land of Indians."

[WCHS'59]

My last ninth grade class of each day at Independence Junior High School was on the third floor in Mr. Hart’s citizenship class.

Before the bell rang to begin that last class, we would drape our arms over the high sills of the old windows; stick our heads out, look down at Pleasant Street and talk.

There was no air conditioning.

On one particular day, a Friday, a huge tractor trailer truck turned the corner off Maple onto Pleasant. It proceeded very slowly and we wondered what this huge truck was doing. We stopped talking and shouted “look!” That big truck attracted all of our attention and it came to a stop right below us on Pleasant where the school buses normally parked. This was in 1955 or 56.

Sitting on the long trailer was the fuselage of the biggest airplane I had ever seen in my life. On the front of the fuselage was the wording “ENOLA GAY.” The fuselage or most of the fuselage was that of the B-29 bomber that dropped the Atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

As we left school for the day to find where our busses were, steps had been placed on the sidewalk leading up to the fuselage. According to a small article in The Examiner, the plane was open for public tours that week end. I cannot recall if there was a charge.

Unfortunately, I could not get back that weekend to see it and by Monday school it was gone.

I was looking through the internet a couple years ago and was surprised to learn that the Enola Gay was not broken down into pieces until 1960. In recent years, the Smithsonian has been undergoing efforts to put it back together. Either, the 1960 date is incorrect or the B-29 stopping in Independence was another airplane. I did find some information that a B-29 had been painted with the Enola Gay name to represent a replica. I don’t know if that was the one stopping in Independence, or not.

B-29s were a dime a dozen back then but only one is flying today.

[WCHS'59]

I have previously mentioned that a Dodge dealer was on the corner of Spring and Maple directly across from the Granada theater.

I am thinking that before the Dodge dealer located there that showroom was for Studebakers.


I am thinking that the Dodge Dealer moved in after the Studebaker dealer went belly up.