The Salvation Army is all Lisa Frost has ever known.
From her exposure to it growing up in Illinois, where her parents were Salvation Army officers for 49 years, to her current assignment as a corps officer in Independence, Frost has become a quiet force of charity and change during the past 17 years.
Karen Downey didn’t necessarily aspire toward one career as she grew up on a farm in Oak Grove.
She just wanted to go to work and earn a paycheck. And so, when a job opportunity came up in the days prior to her high school graduation, she took it.
And the rest, so they say, is history for the now 65-year-old Eastern Jackson County resident and civic leader who has been a partner in the family owned small business Downey Construction for more than 20 years.
What in the world are we coming to, America?
Black Friday this year turned so ugly. A woman pepper sprayed the crowd to clear a path to a display of discounted game consoles. A near riot broke out after a woman dropped an arm load of waffle makers and other shoppers, instead of helping her pick them up, dived in to snatch them for themselves. Robbers waited in a parking lot to steal gifts from shoppers returning to their cars.
I don’t know about you, my friends, but these days I can appreciate any beauty tips that can help me look younger.
As Baby J walked around the living room naked on recent evening, I wondered why no one warned me this would happen.
It would seem that sometime during the nine months of my pregnancy (or at least the 30 years leading to it), there was time to say “Hey, babies are lunatics for the first two years-plus years of their lives.”
Mom had her mammogram on a Saturday. Normally I go with her. It’s all routine. You pop in to the medical office, get your X-rays and your pink ribbon, and that’s it. This year, however, I was sleeping in after working a night shift, and my son drove his grandmother to her appointment. So I wasn’t with her when the technician said “Um, could you wait here for a few moments? The doctor is going to want to talk to you.”
Portia Bowers has always loved acting, but she never got into it in high school.
After she started taking classes at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, she decided to give it a try, taking one acting class. What followed has changed the Independence resident’s life.
“I tried really hard in high school so that no one would notice me. I was a wallflower,” she said. “But then in college, I decided to take that acting class. I just love meeting a new group of people every time I am on stage. It is a different experience every time.”
Somewhere in the past seven decades, Poo lost the “h” on her name, but she gained rooms full of friends along the way.
She is a woman whose name - though not the one given to her at birth - stands alone in Eastern Jackson County. Say the single-syllable moniker, and no one questions to whom you are referring because countless civic and nonprofit organizations have experienced the work of Poo throughout the years.
She says she owes all the credit to one obscure job advertisement that appeared in The Examiner more than 30 years ago.
For Merideth Neal – now Merideth Parrish – it is difficult to determine where the story of her life should start.
Liz McClure found her career niche when she signed on to help revive Independence's Santa-Cali-Gon festival in the mid-1970s. She's been active ever since in a variety of roles that support her community.
