This Week in KC History

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Strange Bedfellows

December 16, 1931: Nell Donnelly and her chauffeur, George Blair, were kidnapped. Donnelly had become famous after her 1916 founding of the Donnelly Garment Company, which sold stylish but affordable dresses for daily wear by…

The "Godmother of Guadalupe"

January 8, 1894: Dorothy Gallagher was born to a wealthy Kansas City family. Not content to live quietly in affluence, Gallagher gained interest in a Catholic women’s group called the Agnes Ward Amberg Club, which carried out…

Forgotten, But Not Gone

December 11, 1884: Nelle Nichols Peters, was born to a farming family in Niagara, North Dakota. She would become one of the most prolific architects in Kansas City during the 1920s and design nearly 1,000 local buildings. Despite…

Bottoms Up

April 7, 1878: Kansas City's Union Depot opened near the stockyards and meat packers in the West Bottoms. Many observers initially considered the $410,028 building (the largest west of New York) to be excessive compared to the…

Bird Lives

March 12, 1955: famed jazz musician Charlie "Bird" Parker died following a 15-year addiction to heroin and alcohol. The Kansas City native had become one of the greatest alto saxophonists in the world thanks to his innovations in…

Beautiful Dreamer

December 2, 1905: Kansas City lost its lead proponent of the park and boulevard movement with the death of August Meyer. Meyer was born in St. Louis in 1851 to German immigrant parents. As a young adult, he studied engineering in…

Aviation Takes Off

August 17, 1927: A jubilant crowd of 25,000 gathered at the site of the present-day Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport to listen to speeches given by Charles Lindbergh and city officials in order to dedicate Municipal Airport.…

And Then It Happened

April 9, 1968: Frustrated with the slow pace of civil rights reforms and outraged at the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., protestors turned to violence in Kansas City. The uprising shocked many residents of the city,…

And That's The Way It Was

November 4, 1916: Walter Cronkite was born in St. Joseph, Missouri. He lived in Kansas City for the first 10 years of his life, returned to Kansas City again at the onset of his journalistic career, and then went on to become one…

All That Jazz

September 23, 1923: The Bennie Moten Orchestra made its first recording consisting of eight songs. By strict musical standards, the songs themselves were unrefined and not much removed from existing blues music. But the Bennie…