When Martha Deardorff Shields and Edwin W. Shields began building Oaklands, they had been married for more than a dozen years and were the parents of a daughter and a […]

Who remembers Alexander Woollcott? For some, what comes to mind is that he was a member of the Algonquin Round Table and a writer for The New Yorker magazine during […]

The third floor of Emery, Bird, Thayer was the site for a May 1937 fashion show featuring everything from beach togs to gardening overalls to bridal dresses, as they were […]

Harold D. Rice learned about community service at an early age. The son of Atha C. Dewees Rice and O. Lee Rice grew up at 4735 Virginia Avenue, in a […]

January 1970 saw the launch of a new soap opera on Channel 9, Kansas City’s ABC affiliate: All My Children, created by Agnes Nixon. One of its stars was Ruth […]

We’re familiar with bling and swag. That said, we’ve never been to a dinner party where the guests received diamonds as souvenirs of the evening. Alas, we were born too […]

“I work quickly, without trying to put any message into my painting,” Gertrude Freyman told the Kansas City Star in 1959. She added, “I don’t think too much about what […]

Two of the most significant events in Carolyn Oechsli Doughty’s life occurred during a very short span of time in 1918. That August, she was widowed after nearly 14 years […]

Robert Ellis Scott was primarily known as Mark Roberts during an acting career that lasted more than 50 years. To his friends in Our Town, he remained Bob Scott. It […]

Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport is located on Lou Holland Drive. Dr. Wheeler, physician, lawyer, and former mayor, is well-known to residents of Our Town – but who was Lou […]

Winifred Wittmann Lunning turned heads in New York – and probably everywhere else she went – back in the 1930s. Long before fashion models were celebrated as superstars, she graced […]

What can you tell about someone just by seeing their picture? In October 1939, in a feature titled, “Names in the News in the World of Kansas City Business Women,” […]

Geneve Lichtenwalter (originally known as E. Geneve Lichtenwalter – her first name was Eva) was an esteemed piano teacher for decades in Our Town. She was born in Iowa on […]

It’s a near certainty that any wedding planned during the past few years has involved challenges that would have taxed the minds of the finest screenwriters during the glory days […]

Frank Fitzhugh Buckner Houston (as an adult, he pronounced his last name “Hewston,” although his brother Sid, a newspaperman, preferred “Howston”) was born in December 1899, near the tail end […]

Wanda Młynarski Labunski and Wiktor Labunski came to Our Town with their two sons in 1937, 17 years after their marriage and nine years after they arrived in The United […]

When Anna Curry and E. Kemper Carter – the E. stood for Evlane – were wed on Washington’s Birthday in 1936, they no doubt hoped to be together for the […]

During the past 50 years, The Parker Foundation has granted funding requests of more than $56 million to improve the lives of people living in San Diego, California. On learning […]

The death on August 18th of Maria Magdalena Habsburg von Lothringen, Archduchess of Austria, Baroness Holzhausen closes the chapter on the story of four members of the royal family of […]

Richard Liggett owned and operated several movie theaters and then, at the behest of his brother-in-law, he went to work for a company that made and sold vacuum cleaners.  You’re […]

Are you as big a fan of Humphrey Bogart as we are? Is The Big Sleep one of your favorite films? In the movie, which is based on the book […]