Arthur F. Duncan & "The Kansas City Star" ...

So, it was in 1962, I was twelve years old and my parents were traveling with Rexall Drug Company and sent me to stay with my great uncle Arthur F. Duncan in Kansas City. My dads aunt Maude was the first female reporter at the KC Star newspaper and he was the Editor. He was married but divorced his first wife and it was a scandal for the time. I also had two other great aunties - Elizabeth and Gertrude. Elizabeth had a big house around the 31st and Troost area in the 1950's and early 60's before that area went black. It was a french style house with a foyer and sunken living room with a fireplace and long dining room, with a kitchen that had a green leather banquette modern and blue silk chiffon curtains, and a basement, with three hundred singing song birds in a hundred gilded cages. If you opened the basement door, and, they were uncovered, they would sing. If you closed the basement door, they would stop. I would open, and close it, and open and close it, and then go up to the second story and it was like a music box, the whole house would vibrate. So, Arthur had a rented apartment at the Sulgrave on the Plaza and a house on Lake Lotawana east of KC a big yellow Buick and a 1958 Corvette. He liked me and he had no son, so he took me all over the city. One night we went to see "Mutiny on the Bounty" with Marlon Brando downtown. Once we shopped at Tiffanys Jewelry store on the Plaza for some Garnets for Maude's birthday and then we three went to Fort Osage and saw the replica they rebuilt in the 1950s had lunch etc.. Also he took me to the Nelson/Atkins art museum, that was great, I really loved that. I went to work with him at the Kansas City Star. I was the copy boy and he took me down to the basement and I met the printer and the press made a lot of noise and I ran the newspaper that summer, fantasy. So, I could of been a reporter for the Star, they offered me a scholarship to go to KU in Kansas but I didn't use it. In 1977 they sold out to ABC/Capital Cities, Warren Buffet was involved in that deal. My Aunt and Uncle paid over a half million dollars in capital gains tax on the sale of there stock. Arthur died shortly after.. he was a great man and had a big influence on me. He used to take his vacation in Scotland and edited books as well, as the newspaper. Maude died in the 1980's she loved those porcelain hummels and had a nice collection of them. I took a picture of Arthur from the tape I made back in the 1980's when the Macneil/Lehrer News Hour did a story on the Star, they called it "a good country newspaper" and him "a scowling editor". He wrote a book review in 1961 about "The Great Epidemic" the plagu

e that came out of Ft. Riley, Kansas .. .