When the pioneer couple arrived in their wagon they found a place of great beauty, just as nature had left it.
Back during my broadcasting days, our radio station co-sponsored a Johnny Cash concert at the local community center.
In 1939, at age 17, Wesley left his family and twin, Lesley, to join the Navy. After training in Norfolk and then San Diego, he found himself aboard the USS Canopus, a submarine tender stationed in the Philippine Islands. His ship served the submarines around the islands with bombings, and soon under the command of Gen. Wainwright was sent to defend Corregidor.
With an election year coming up and all of the hullabaloo surrounding the search for a Republican nominee, it would do a person good to make a trip over to the Mid-Continent Public Library and check out a book on Harry Truman to remind ourselves of all the hullabaloo that surrounded his presidential terms.
The Ottawa Tribe were our neighbors for a while between 1831 and 1867. Their reservation was about 50 miles southwest of Kansas City in Franklin County.
My mom and dad were both guitar pickers back in their younger days, but by the time I came along, they had both quit performing on-stage and at backcountry honky-tonks. I can easily remember, however, as a young lad, sitting around the living room after dark listening to my dad picking and singing the songs made popular by his country music idol, Hank Williams, and we went to sleep every Saturday night listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio.
Unity Village is a small, rather unique community in Eastern Jackson County, with about only 140 residents spread over no more than two square miles at the northwestern edge of Lee’s Summit.
When we think of war in this day and age, we often think of it as being somewhere overseas and, as a general rule, only affecting the lives of the military soldiers and people of other nations. But that was not the case in this country during the Civil War.
Following the Civil War, the cattle industry was pretty much decimated. What little cattle there were available for market were infected with tick fever, which left them inedible.
Jackson County is probably an anomaly because we have four courthouses. One of those is not even located at the county seat. The big courthouse downtown Kansas City, which was built during the Great Depression, conducts all county business west of Blue Ridge Boulevard. All county business east of Blue Ridge takes place at the county seat in Independence.
