Ingram's May 2024

1983 Charles Price II named Ambassador to Great Britain. First Spinach Festival held in Lenexa.

1984 Royals win Western Division. Sandstone Amphitheatre opens. First Kansas City Spirit Festival held. 2,200 delegates attend NAACP National Convention. Fairfax airport closes.

1985 Royals win pennant, beat Cardinals in World Series, 4-3. Kansas City Kings leave for Sacramento. Vista Hotel opens in Downtown KC.

1986 Kansas voters OK liquor by drink, state lottery and racetrack betting. Bo Jackson signs with Royals. United Telecommuni cations Inc. and GTE Corp. merge to form Sprint Corp. American Italian Pasta Co. opens in Excelsior Springs.

“The Day After” the nuclear-obliteration TV movie filmed in KC, airs.

the national real estate services compa ny—which only counted companies us ing 10,000 or more square feet—roughly 100 companies have migrated in the past 10 years across the state line from Jackson to Johnson County. Moreover, at least for the moment, the exodus is not slowing. Just as the Ice Age carved out the Grand Canyon and the Rocky Mountains, it deposited in Kansas City the unusual geographical opportunity to build a sec ond city below the one that meets the eye. Stretching from southwestern Iowa to the Kansas-Oklahoma border, the Bethany Falls Ledge is exposed in bluffs that overlook the rivers, highways and sidewalks of Kansas City. The warehousing and storage pos sibilities of Kansas City’s underground are well-known nationwide. Articles de scribing these possibilities have appeared everywhere from The Washington Post to Time magazine. Less well-known are the efforts of local businessmen to lure man ufacturing underground to open a new vista for the old caves, based primarily on their evolving asset as an energy efficient environment. Centrality and low overhead have prompted groups to make Kansas City their headquarters. To improve rela tions and cut costs, the 500,000-member Camp Fire youth organization agreed to move its headquarters to the country’s heartland. Aided by financial commit ments from local groups, Camp Fire Inc. chose Kansas City over Dallas in 1977. With that move, Camp Fire became one of a slowly but steadily growing number of organizations relocating their national operations in Kansas City. The Greater Kansas City Chamber of Com MAY Great Midwest Digs In SEPTEMBER Association Roll Call

that era, we now know, was the final straw for voters who triggered the Reagan Revo lution in that year’s presidential elections, setting the stage for an economic boom that would last a generation.)

cording to the Administrative Offices in the U.S. Courts in Washington. Bank rupt businesses nationally are expected to jump nearly 80 percent over last year’s tally of 31,000. In the Kansas City area, bankruptcies are up a staggering 60 per cent over 1979 levels of 2,900. Between January and July, the figure soared to 110 percent. 1981 FEBRUARY The Computer Explosion Sales of minicomputers are soaring as dealers tap the burgeoning small business market. Relatively untapped in the early 1970s, small businesses have become a new frontier for a computer industry that found technology to reduce computer sizes along with their price tags. Kansas City, like most metro areas, has become prime hunting ground for salesmen peddling their smaller wares (both soft and hard). Research groups estimate that at least 1,500 Kansas City small businesses (defined as businesses with fewer than 500 employees) now use computers for general accounting tasks. And the market here and nationally is re portedly increasing 30 percent each year. There’s little stopping the streams of Kansas City businesses flowing to Johnson County. Like the ancient Hebrews fleeing Egypt for the promised land, Kansas City businesses have been steadily migrating into Kansas for more than a decade. The roster of relocated companies reads like a Who’’s Who of area businesses: Coca-Co la Bottling Co., Employers Reinsurance Corp., Allstate Insurance, H.D. Lee Co., Yellow Freight, The Marley Co., to name only a handful. In a study compiled by Coldwell Banker, MARCH Leaving the Livable City

OCTOBER Who’s Building Now?

The jobs are few and far between as inflation, recession and a cut-back in federal projects hammer at the local construction industry. “Maybe we don’t read enough news to be aware there’s a recession on,” quipped William Dunn, president of J.E. Dunn Construction Co., which specializes in commercial struc tures. “We’re every bit as active now as we were a year ago.” Dunn’s sunny assessment doesn’t seem to hold true over a cross-section of the local construction industry. Most companies are as active as they were a year ago, but the activity is of a different kind—they’re hustling harder than ever for business, and it’s been increasingly difficult to find. However, while there’s no building boom in Kansas City, it’s a long way from bust, too. Business may not be as bustling as it is in the Sun Belt, where big popu lation shifts and burgeoning industries like Texas oil and banking and California electronics have kept contractors busy building highways, housing and commer cial structures, but neither is it as bleak as in Montana, where high-interest rates, sparse population and negligible industri al growth combine to slow construction almost to a standstill. NOVEMBER Going for Broke Ain’t What it Used to Be More than 350,000 Americans will rush into bankruptcy courts before the sand in 1980’s hourglass runs out. This number will set an all-time record and eclipse the high of 1975 by 120,000, ac

46

I ngr am ’ s

May 2024

Ingrams.com