Kansas City needs to show it wants pro sports

Another day. Another era. I guess it's time for me to come to grips with the undeniable fact that the Kansas City I once loved is the Kansas City of my mind and memory. It is gone, never to return.

I find it a pity that an entire generation has grown up with no knowledge of how it used to be.

I keep reading in the paper every day about murder, crime and mayhem and realize where the good city went. Like Horace Greeley said so many years ago, "Go west young man." And the young men and women went west a few blocks across the state line into Johnson County.

It was a lot of those long departed voters who saved both baseball and football for Kansas City when they voted for the bonds to build the twin stadiums that were supposed to include a rolling roof. And this vote came when a man named Charles O. Finley had left a bad taste in the mouths of Jackson Countians. We didn't even have a baseball team then, but a progressive local man named Ewing Kauffman agreed to buy an expansion team that would be all ours after ours left town.

Heck, just a few years before, Lamar Hunt must have wondered what ever possessed him to leave Dallas when after four years in Kansas City home football attendance for any season never once reached a meager 156,000. A story often told is that Finley once approached Hunt with a proposal that they both move their teams to Atlanta at the same time. From the way the story's told, Hunt told Finley where he could go, and it wasn't to Atlanta.

But by 1967, almost overnight after the Chiefs appeared in Super Bowl I, football, AFL style, caught Kansas City by storm.

In those heady days of the late 1960s, it seemed as though nothing could stop Kansas City even though what we saw on the outside, was slowly beginning to crumble from within.

Progress was fabulous, as though it seemed. Changes were coming along with the new sport complex that people wanted so badly. Everyone arriving in Kansas City on I-70 had to pass by that shining monument to the people. Also in the offing were other things to come. Municipal Auditorium was antiquated and lacked parking, so they built that silly Kemper Arena. Municipal Airport was locked in an area where it couldn"t expand and KCI would soon come. Bold vision transformed Signboard Hill to Crown Center. In those late 1960s, Commerce Towers dominated the downtown business scene. Granted, the great old hotels like the Phillips and the President were in decay, but the heart of Kansas City still beat in the central business district.

But I'm sure you've heard of white flight. Most of those people who were scheduled to one day be the city's movers and shakers now go to work in those sparkling Johnson County skyscrapers along I-435. They send their kids to suburban Kansas public schools.

And when you mention movers and shakers, recall that when voters went to the polls to vote on the complex as yet unnamed, one of those who cast a favorable voice and ballot was Harry S. Truman himself. Ground was broken on July 11, 1968, but by the time Arrowhead opened on Aug. 12, 1972, Truman was too ill to attend and would die in four months.

Even Wyandotte County with its racetrack, minor league baseball and Cabela's has passed Jackson County.

On April 4, the voters will decide whether they want to keep the Royals and Chiefs the now aging, living elsewhere and lamentably, deceased generations, fought so hard to acquire. We will get a chance to find out what those who now make up Jackson County's population value. But if they vote down the improvements, in a few years people driving along I-70 will see empty, decaying concrete ghosts of what once represented Kansas City's greatest civic accomplishment. People will drive by, point, and say, "Yeah, I remember when Kansas City had major league sports."