Leespeaks | Scribbles | American Studies | Daytripper

Daytripper - The View
Kansas City July 1990 to April 1991

In 1990, I was working part-time as a composition tutor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and contributing occasional reportage to the View, a bi-weekly newspaper. After a change of command, the new editor called a writers meeting and asked us all to bring ten story ideas. I brought nine. I don't think the first eight ever came to anything, but the ninth item on my list, for a local-travel column, scored. Kansas City's daily paper had a local travel column that I found too cutesy, so I proposed something more offbeat. I even had a catchy name for it: Daytripper.

It started as a quirky "local sites" column, which gave me an excuse to do things like going whisky tasting at a local distillery. As I went on writing the column, I became fascinated with the way the past intersects the present, how the past is often right there at our elbow waiting to be discovered. This was usually a poignant insight in Kansas City, a once bustling place whose colorful past is frequently bulldozed in order to make way for something bigger and blander in hopes of "putting the city on the map" and other gaspy cliches.

Most Daytripper columns arose from a question about some seemingly insignificant local landmark or event. Why is there a train bridge over the intersection of 43rd and Broadway but no rails? What's with that arch up in the trees above the Southwest Trafficway? Why is one part of town called the Trolleybarn neighborhood, and furthermore, if it's a neighborhood, why have all the houses been removed?

Research into the question was followed by a trip to the site and a report on what happened. This was in keeping with all the New Journalism I'd soaked up in college, but the act of going there made a huge difference. There was usually some fortuitous occurrence that brought the place, and then piece, to life. For example, on my way to view the site of Petticoat Lane, a once-busy, later-abandoned retail block downtown, I passed a dead rat laying on the sidewalk. The column pretty much wrote itself.

I usually brought along a Polaroid Land camera I'd picked up at a thrift shop. This provided art for the column that was not only camera-ready but also suitably grainy and "artistic."

I wrote two columns a month (900-1200 words each) until April 1991, when The View went out of business. For my troubles I received $45. The column appeared on the next-to-last page, usually alongside an ad for a massage parlor, a placement I'm still pleased to recall.

A handful of the columns are available on this site. What of the rest? Some are too god awful embarrassing to show anyone, which is not surprising when you consider that I wrote most of them in a panic the night before deadline. Time has rendered other completely irrelevant and making them relevant isn't worth the effort. Others are simply gone, all the extant copies given away or left behind.