The Right Places Read Online Free

upholstered walls and Oriental rugs everywhere, even in the kitchen because “it keeps the help happy.” The Stickelber family fortune comes from the manufacturing of a bread-slicing machine—“It’s the only kind there is, you can’t slice bread without it,” as the scion of the company says. Eyebrows went up in Kansas City when Maria Callas came to stay with David Stickelber “to forget” during the period when she was being replaced in the affections of Aristotle Onassis by Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy. “Maria insisted on my creating the illusion that time was passing rapidly,” Mr. Stickelber explains. “So each day I would go into her bedroom and say, ‘This is December. Tomorrow it will be January. Thursday will be Valentine’s Day’—and so on.”
    The bright young crowd in Kansas City speak often—and often bitterly—of their parents’ generation which they feel, with some justification, is not doing what it might to support the arts in Kansas City. It is the older generation, of course, that still manages to hold most of the purse strings. The young group is particularly resentful of such people as the senior R. Crosby Kempers, who, it is felt, with their great wealth could have done much more for the city than they have and who, with the generally conservative banking policies they represent, have actually exerted a negative influence on the city’s cultural life.
    Still, for a number of years Mrs. Kemper senior headed the Jewel Ball, a debutante affair that benefits both the Nelson Art Gallery and the Kansas City Philharmonic. In fact, Mrs. Kemper founded the Jewel Ball—or so she says. The senior Mrs. Hockaday also says that she founded the Jewel Ball, and neither woman will give the other credit. What appears to have happened is that Mrs. Hockaday had the idea of having a ball, and Mrs. Kemper added the debutantes. In any case, it is still Kansas City’s most important debutante affair—indeed, the only one that counts.
    â€œThe Kempers are worth millions and millions of dollars,” says Molly McGreevy, “and so is Miller Nichols. Wouldn’t you think people like that could spare just a few hundred thousand for the Performing Arts Foundation?” So far, the answer appears to be no.
    Then there are rich Kansas Citians like Mr. Joyce C. Hall, the manwho created Hallmark and guided it to where it is, one of the wealthiest corporations in the world. No one knows how rich Mr. Hall is because he is a reticent type and Hallmark is still a family-owned company, with its earnings a closely guarded family secret, but his holdings are said to be vast indeed. The Halls, who aren’t particularly social, have contributed only minimal amounts to the city’s cultural institutions, and the Kansas City Museum of History and Science was happy to receive, last year, a check for twenty-five hundred dollars from Mr. Hall. Meanwhile, the Nelson Gallery does somewhat better, and recently reported Mr. Hall’s gift of fifty thousand dollars. Though the greeting card business might seem to align itself with art, the Halls at the moment are much more interested in a development called Crown Center (the Crown being from Hallmark’s trademark), an eighty-five-acre urban renewal effort in downtown Kansas City encompassing nearly all the land between the old Union Station and the Hallmark headquarters, an area of real estate roughly two-thirds the size of Chicago’s Loop. Crown Center has been designed to contain shops, apartments and office buildings, a new hotel, underground garages, and acres of parks and greenbelts. When completed, an estimated two hundred million dollars of Hallmark money will have been spent.
    The older generation of Kansas City’s rich continues, with a few exceptions, to do what it has always done. There are the hospitals to support. There is the Westport Garden Club to enjoy—probably the