Touring

Last Thursday, we flew to Kansas City, Mo., for my 60th high school reunion (more of which later) which began Friday at the cocktail hour for a meet and greet.  We flew in a day early solely to have dinner at Hereford House Thursday with friends and tour Friday until the cocktail hour.

What were we so hot to see?  The World War 1 Memorial and Museum which took three years to build and was completed in 1926.  It had to be closed in 1994 due to structural deterioration in the Memorial Courtyard.  But in 2004 all was well and it was designated as America's official WW1 museum by Congress. (No less.)

Today, despite all of the history presented in innovative ways - a diorama of a battle field with the crater that was once a French farmhouse, destroyed by a 17 in. shell, walls lined with pistols, guns, tanks, helmets, uniforms for everyone involved and this tidbit - 6,261 Brits refused to fight.  40,000 women tried to be nurses with only 3,000 spots available.

 I still liked the outside better than the inside.  On entering, there is a courtyard of 2 to 3 ft. wide red ceramic-finished poppies as if in a field.  It was especially poignant because it was raining.  There are pools, long walks approaching both the memorial tower ( 217 ft. tall) and the museum, all set on a grassy sward overlooking Union Station below.  

Also on the Memorial grounds is the Money Museum which is the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, the regional headquarters of the central bank of the U.S.  Getting in is identical to airport security.  Photo i.d. (passports in our case) metal detector and finally into the exhibition space which is a big room with free-standing, square glass tops showcasing such as "Guess the counterfeit $20?"  Another contained a suspiciously shiny gold bar.  About 15 or 16 of these stands, tracing the flow of money from presses to streets.

The most interesting thing about this was the farewell plastic gift bag of minced money.  Each souvenir bag contains the remains of $165 +/-.

We finally saw humans (other than the uniformed police on entering) down a corridor to a glassed in room with robot carts hauling plastic boxes of bricks of money.  One man, closest to the viewing window, was bagging bricks of money in a second plastic bag and putting these bricks on the back of the mechanized cart.  He obligingly grabbed a sheet of paper and hastily scribbled something on it and held it up to the window - his homemade sign said, "$85,000."

Next we went to Union Station for lunch (covering food tomorrow) and then out a side door, across a courtyard and a ride (FREE!) on the KC Streetcar, a sleek, bullet-nosed streetcar that went down to the River Market (2.2 miles)  There are 16 stops and a fair number of people were hopping on and off, but nothing appealed because it wended it's way through the less salubrious parts of downtown KC - boarded up buildings, offices, bars of dubious reputation and finally the market contained in three-story brick buildings.  Nothing appealed so all we did was sit there which was entertaining enough.

Due to rather languid service at lunch, it was time to skedaddle to the reunion hotel so we had to pass up my last item for the day which was a beer or three at Kelly's, said to be the oldest building in Westport.

To Be Continued