The Right Places Read Online Free Page A

city’s hardest-to-join club since no more than fifty women may belong at any one time. There is the River Club, a downtown eating club high on the bluff overlooking the river—also considered exclusive—which the men enjoy for lunch and couples enjoy for dinner. There is the Kansas City Country Club. There are, in other words, the traditional pleasures and pastimes of moneyed Middle Americans who have “settled in” to middle-sized cities. These families regard such eccentricities as the young McGreevys’ blinking and beeping collection of art as harmless phases which the young will one day certainly outgrow.
    And, in the meantime, Kansas City—as those in the young crowd are so painfully aware—lags a long way behind its rival city to the east when it comes to culture. Compared to what St. Louis can offer, Kansas City’s History and Science Museum is, at best, a third-rate institution, though its energetic young director, Robert I. Johnson, isdetermined to do something about this situation. The Nelson Gallery has one of the three—the others are in Boston and Washington—finest collections of Oriental art in the country. But in other categories its collection is definitely a skimpy one. The most famous alumnus of the Kansas City Art Institute was the late Walt Disney. “Culturally, Kansas City has got to be given a shot in the arm,” David Stickelber says. And the money to do it with is so maddeningly, frustratingly there . Mrs. Crosby Kemper, Jr., who ought to know, says, “This is a tough town in which to get people—the people who really have it—to put two nickels back to back.”
    Some Kansas Citians explain their situation by pointing out that Kansas City has never had a major rich-family benefactor—the way, for instance, Pittsburgh had Mellons, Wilmington had du Ponts, Detroit had Fords, and New York had Rockefellers. On the other hand, many people see it as a city with any number of potential big benefactors, each one too shy—if not too stingy—to make the first big step.
    There is still another explanation. Years ago, St. Louis recognized the cultural wellsprings that could be tapped—and the purse strings that could be loosened—by turning to its large and well-heeled Jewish population. For many years, St. Louis has been inviting prominent Jews onto the boards of its museums and opera and philharmonic orchestra, and has made healthy use of the traditional Jewish interest in the arts and learning. Kansas City, perhaps for reasons of snobbery or ignorance going back to the rawboned frontier days, failed to tap this rich source. As a result, Kansas City’s Jews withdrew into their own tight circle, with their own clubs and philanthropies and institutions. Recently, however, Kansas City became aware of what it was missing and losing, and a definite effort is now being made to draw Jews into the general community. The names of wealthy Jewish families—the Morton Soslands, the Paul Uhlmanns, the Aaron Levitts—now decorate the important boards and committees. Now Jewish girls are being taken into the Junior League and are presented at the Jewel Ball. A few of the old barriers remain, of course. There are no Jewish members of the Kansas City Country Club. Jews have their own, the Oakwood Country Club.
    There is another breed of rich man in Kansas City who may behaving a lot to do with shaping the city’s future—the new-made millionaire. An example of this sort is Ewing M. Kauffman, whose Marion Laboratories, Inc., grew from where, some twenty years ago, Mr. Kauffman was mixing pills and cures and lixiviums in his own basement by the light of a sixty-watt bulb. Today it is a company worth about two hundred million dollars, and Mr. Kauffman himself says he is worth another hundred million. The Kauffman magic formula, according to the man who invented it, is profit-sharing. He operates a generous plan by which his