Ingram's April 2024

and business icon James Stowers filled that void by financing the transformation of that site into the Stowers Institute for Medical Research. The vast majority of the $2 billion personal fortune Jim and Virginia Stowers had amassed over the life of American Century Investments changed the region’s national profile as a center of life-sciences research, triggering additional investments from companies, non-profits and start-ups that continue to benefit the region with im- proved health care delivery, research breakthroughs, and high-paying jobs. Other healthcare moves during the decade included Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth’s acquisition of Bethany Medical Center in Wyandotte County in 1998, a move that kept the facility on life support, but only for a few more years before 21st-century health-care econom ics wrote its final chapter. Connecting With Business On the higher education front, demand from regional businesses to fill the labor pipeline with a new kind of employee was taking hold. Recall that in 1991, a company making a name for itself with a new communications plat form—the Internet—rebranded itself as America Online, and by the middle of the decade, 5 million Americans had loaded discs with its software to begin com municating with one another through electronic mail. On a national level, things would never be the same, especially with the 1998 founding of an enterprise that

would eventually become an everyday verb: Google. Recognizing the changing nature of commerce, public post-second ary institutions moved to fill the gaps. In 1993, the University of Kansas established an Overland Park campus along the expanding Quivira Road cor ridor south of College Boulevard. By adding a facility that could accommodate more than 1,500 students in Johnson County, KU strengthened its presence in the metro area well beyond the Lawrence campus and the medical school in Wyandotte County. At the associate’s degree level—where academic programming historically has been more aligned with immediate business employment needs than four year schools can provide—Metropolitan Community College added a fourth campus in 1997. The addition to the Blue River site in Independence gave MCC a broad reach across the Missouri side, joining the main Penn Valley campus in Midtown, the Longview campus in southeast Kansas City, and Maple Woods north of the river. The business scene here witnessed plenty of action during the ’90s. One of the decade’s biggest business deals was the 1996 acquisition of Marion Merrell Dow by Hoescht AG. That came just seven years after Ewing Kauffman had sold his Marion Labs to Dow Chemical, a deal that reportedly made millionaires of 300 of Mr. K’s employees. Sprint Corp., still on its rise to becom ing the region’s biggest private-sector employer, took another step in that dir

ection in 1993 with the acquisition of Centel Corp. in a deal valued at $4.7 billion. On the logistics front, Kansas City Southern Railway acquired MidSouth Corp., a regional rail line from Jackson, Miss., with 1,200 track miles. The deal boosted KCS’ track mileage by nearly 50 percent. The 1990s also produced significant merger activity, as three of the area’s top five banks—Boatmen’s, Mercantile and Mark Twain Bank—merged with or were acquired by other banks. Boatmen’s, in fact, was the oldest bank west of the Mississippi and the largest commercial bank in Missouri when NationsBank (eventually part of Bank of America) acquired it in 1996. Mercantile, on its way to becoming the state’s largest bank-holding compa ny, acquired Mark Twain in 1996, then was itself acquired by Firstar Corp. of Milwaukee in 1999 before eventually being absorbed by U.S. Bank. One merger that didn’t go through— but set the stage for another 20 years down the road—came when KCP&L failed to take over Utilicorp United (later known as Aquila) in 1996. Topeka-based Western Resources had been making a play of its own for KCP&L and broke up the Utilicorp deal by advising sharehold ers of the Kansas City company, Great Plains Energy, not to approve it. So, it was not without some rancor when those efforts failed to produce the region’s dominant utility. All’s well that ends well, though: KCP&L’s parent eventu

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April 2024

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