Ingram's May 2024

1991 Emanuel Cleaver elected first black mayor of KC. Real-estate develop er Ted Ehney pleads guilty to fraud. KC Stockyards holds last cattle auction. Steamboat Arabia Museum opens.

1992 Regulators seize Frank Morgan’s Home Federal Savings. Both KCMO and KCK set record homicide totals.

1993 Chiefs win West Division, sign Joe Montana. Transamerica Occidental Life Insurance Co. moves to KC from Los Angeles. Devastating flood of Missouri and Kaw Rivers causes hun dreds of millions of dollars in damage.

First cattle drive held to kick off American Royal. Ewing Kauffman— “Mr. K”—and devel oper Frank Morgan die. Claire McCaskill becomes first female prosecutor in Jackson County. George Brett

announces retirement.

no doubt, to know the man behind the wheel is also the man behind the money for the new AT&T skyscraper and retail complex. In fact, if there’s any justice, the city fathers will rename Main Street “Frank Morgan Boulevard” when the 38-story tower is completed. Other lesser civic lights have earned such distinction. The AT&T coup is just the latest proj ect Morgan has backed. His money and business acumen have also been behind five major shopping malls—Metcalf South, Oak Park Mall, Metro North, Bannister Mall and Indian Springs—and a handful of smaller shopping centers. (Editor’s Note 2024: Morgan, alas, would see his financial empire crumble and face federal fraud charges, but until his death in 1993, he maintained that he was innocent of any wrongdoing.) Their numbers are few. Fewer than 20 Kansas Citians and a handful of To pekans belong to an exclusive fraternity of mutual fund managers in the greater Kansas City area. Their companies are Waddell & Reed, Twentieth Century In vestors, United Missouri Bank and Secu rity Benefit Life. Yet these few companies, along with Jones & Babson (whose funds are managed locally) and DST Financial Services, have given Kansas City a prominence in mutual funds that no other city this size enjoys. The industry’s numbers are mind-bog gling. At the end of 1983, there were 1,026 mutual funds in operation nationwide with cumulative assets of $293 billion and more than 23 million shareholders. NOVEMBER Death Watch at Union Station The city’s famous landmark is rapidly becoming a monument to decay and ne glect, Kansas City’s biggest and grandest haunted house is 70 years old this month. AUGUST The Money Makers

It’s a wonder that no sharp entrepreneur has opened its doors to hand-holding cou ples and nervous teenagers, who might wander its dark corridors to the sounds of tape-recorded howls and chain rat tling. “Union Station Morgue” could be its name. The price, five dollars say, could be spray-painted on a plywood sign; black cats, ghosts and Frankenstein monster cut-outs could be glued on the windows. Designed to last for centuries by Chi cago architect Jarvis Hunt, Kansas City’s most monumental structure faces an in definite future as a monumental ruin. 1985 MARCH Dressing Up the Garment District Not too long ago, the turn-of-the-cen tury warehouses in the heart of the city’s Downtown garment district were monu ments to idleness and decay. The only traf fic on the streets were rummaging vermin. Today, the buzzing of saws and pounding of hammers send the scaven gers scurrying. Kansas City’s garment district is reawakening after a decade of dormancy, a decade in which the collapse of the city’s garment industry emptied the warehouses and silenced the streets. Victimized by high union wages, cheap imports and stiff regional competition, most Kansas City garment manufacturers were forced to shut down.

It has also given rise to tension between workers and transportation companies, which are slashing labor costs in order to make a profit. But in Kansas City, deregulation has brought about at least two additional de velopments: the establishment of a large Eastern Airlines hub and the establish ment of a big Burlington Northern opera tion. Both companies, free under deregu lation to set up operations wherever they wanted, pinpointed Kansas City as the place to launch a campaign for a share of the Midwestern market. Together, the two companies brought more than 300 jobs to Kansas City and increased the city’s repu tation as a transportation center. 1986 Their story is as old as America. They come for freedom, for jobs, for a better life for their children. The names change, but the story is the same. They are Kansas City’s immigrants, and the fastest-grow ing group among them is Asian. Their influence can be seen by pass ersby on storefront shop signs like Szech uan Restaurant, Hung Vuong Market, or Chung’s Tae Kwon Do School, and the Viet namese character lettering of River Quay graffiti. Less visible, but increasingly impor tant to Kansas City, are the names on fac ulty listings of area colleges, employee rolls of research facilities, medical-staff rosters at the region’s hospitals, and names in the boardrooms and administrative offices of companies engaged in international trade. MARCH East Meets West in Mid-America

MAY Transportation: Two for the Road

Deregulation has revolutionized the transportation business in America by creating a competitive environment for companies in the airline, trucking and railroad industries. That environment has increased options for consumers and sent prices plummeting and soaring.

JUNE The Best Little

Warehouses in Kansas City Remember the industrial park, that real estate creature of the 1950s, where

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May 2024

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