Chapter 1     Chapter 2     Chapter 3     Chapter4     Chapter 5     Chapter 6

       With the fresh twenties burning holes in our pockets, we all repaired to Goldy’s Bar/… Read full post »

  Chapter 1     Chapter 2     Chapter 3     Chapter4     Chapter 5

       UMKC sat a mile or two from our dead end.  It was an urban campus comprised mostly of stone buildings and… Read full post »

  Chapter 1     Chapter 2     Chapter 3     Chapter4

       Inside our doorway, Dad held the heart-shaped locket in his trembling palm and stared down into it, hard and solemn.

    … Read full post »

 Chapter 1     Chapter 2     Chapter 3

       On the night of my fifteenth birthday, Dad and I were on Mrs. Webster’s patio, putting a deadbolt lock on her flimsy back door.  Mrs. Webster, who lived two houses away/… Read full post »

 Chapter 1     Chapter 2

       One night a couple weeks later I saw flames rising from the northwest, in the vicinity of the thrift store.  I laced my high-tops and sprinted the few blocks in complete dread of what I might find.&nbs… Read full post »

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It was a couple days later when I orchestrated the big grift, from the warehouse of the Su-Preme Thrift Store, which sat on Eightieth just a few blocks from home.

Toby Tippin was the one… Read full post »

       After they got married in the downtown courthouse, my parents threw a party that lasted about fifteen years.  I joined the party in June of 1975, just a few months after it began.  In the photos taken the day of my birth, Dad’s a puny sixteen-year-/… Read full post »

Remind me to never use an animal trap again.  Thrice now in the past couple years I've employed the standard traps we suburban amateurs use—the oblong cages with the spring doors that are tricky to calibrate—and each time they’ve brought nothing but heartache to the critters an… Read full post »

If you use the term “journalism” loosely—and today there’s no better way to use it—you could say my journalism career began when I was eleven and The Kansas City Star published my first letter to the editor, which complained that the Watergate hearings were pre-empting r… Read full post »

Every year during the season of Lent, our parish dads produced “The Passion Play,” which dramatized the arraignment, death, and resurrection of Christ. In the 1972 production, something so big happened that we kids figured it might be the greatest story ever told.

The planning meetings eac… Read full post »

When I was finally old enough to stray from home and explore the neighborhood, my pickings were slim. The other kids on the block were of the public-school variety who went shirtless a lot and had menacing dogs and step-parents. So I often took the easy way out and ended up… Read full post »

I lived in the same house for my entire childhood, and it recently occurred to me that in all those years I had just two neighborhood companions—and one of them was less than half my age. He went by the nickname of Savage. He was a five-year-old who could have passed… Read full post »

For much of my adult life I’ve forwarded the notion that you cannot get through a day without being exposed to some reference to Elvis Presley. When I recently noticed that a morning cartoon has a character based loosely on the late King of Rock and Roll, I cracked my newspaper… Read full post »

When I was a kid, beer was always in plentiful supply around our house and Dad didn’t tinker with his choices. Over time I knew him to be a serious patron of just three brands. For years it was Hamms. Then something scandalous must have happened because he suddenly switched to… Read full post »

The other day, my wife complained there was nothing to do.

I said, “Let’s burn Myrtle.”

She gave me a strange look.

“It’s a long story,” I said. “But listening to it will give you something to do.”

So I recounted how in the mid 1950s my parents bought a hou… Read full post »

Not long ago I spent a good amount of time watching “Most Haunted.” It’s a program from Britain that chronicles the adventures of a handful of excitable, if not reluctant, ghost hunters. When they see anything that strays from the ordinary, they often flee or faint, much like a boso… Read full post »

After a Royals game in 1975, my brother Joe and two of his buddies visited Wimpey’s, a hamburger joint in Kansas City that was a hangout, if not a city-wide destination. They’d been to Wimpey’s a hundred times before, but that night one of the teens was disgruntled by the quality… Read full post »

I realize that fast food is 20 percent sodium, 30 percent fat, 30 percent fecal matter, and 20 percent polymers, and that the chains are ruinous to individuals and communities in any number of ways.

But still I go, once or twice a month.

My earliest memories of fast food involve a… Read full post »

Something that happened on a Saturday in 1981 forever sticks in my craw. It was the first warm day of the spring, and like a million other teens I turtled along in the stacked-up traffic near Kansas City’s hot spot, Bannister Mall. With all four windows down, I listened to a… Read full post »