The Right Places Read Online Free Page B

employees are made to feel a part of the company they work for, and a part of its success. Kauffman boasts that at least twenty of his top men now have profit-sharing accounts in the millions. “My receptionist downstairs is worth half a million,” he says. “I just retired a maintenance man who had a quarter of a million. Look at these people—happy, happy, happy!” And, as Mr. Kauffman gesticulates in their direction, his employees smile, and smile, and smile. Part two of the Kauffman formula is that you must work as hard for Kauffman as Kauffman works for Kauffman (often fifteen or sixteen hours a day), or out you go—with your profit-sharing account no more than a memory.
    Ewing Marion Kauffman, who says, “I wanted to be Kauffman of Marion Laboratories, not Kauffman of Kauffman Laboratories, there’s an important difference” (though business rivals hint darkly that he simply invented “Marion” as his middle name) is a man so totally lacking in modesty that his huge self-esteem more or less passes for charm. When he entertains, he urges his guests to make after-dinner speeches extolling Ewing Kauffman. After each tribute, he applauds approvingly. He lives in a huge brick fortress on a hill that prominently displays itself to the street below, and from his house he flies two big flags from two big flag poles, the American because he is proud to be an American, and the Canadian, because he is proud of his blondely beautiful and Canadian-born wife. His house is full of delights, including an Olympic-size swimming pool, a sauna and a steam bath, a pipe organ, a ballroom, and a fountain electronically geared to splash to the accompaniment of music and colored lights. “I’m just learning to use my wealth,” he admits. “Now we give two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to charity every year.” One of his most recent bigoutlays, however, was to purchase the Kansas City Royals, a baseball team, because “my wife wanted them.”
    There are, as they say in Kansas City, not many people around like Ewing Kauffman. At the same time, there are too few people in Kansas City like Mrs. Kenneth Spencer, whose husband died several years ago. In 1966, Mrs. Spencer wrote out a check for $2,125,000 to build a graduate research laboratory at the University of Kansas, her husband’s alma mater. She continues to make sizable gifts to a long list of philanthropies. The Spencers had no children, and so one day Kansas City will doubtless benefit importantly from Mrs. Spencer’s fortune.
    Not long ago a group of young Kansas City businessmen sat at lunch at the Kansas City Club, the downtown eating club for men. The group included Jerry Jurden, vice president of ISC Industries, a securities outfit; George Kroh, a real estate developer, Bob Johnson of the History and Science Museum, Gordon Lenci, headmaster of the Barstow School, one of several private day schools in the city, and Irvine Hockaday, Jr., a young lawyer. No one at the table was over forty, and most were not more than thirty-five. And, as it almost inevitably does, the subject came up of what was wrong with Kansas City’s “image.”
    â€œKansas City had a lot of things going for it around the turn of the century,” one man said. “The Armours were here with their meat business, Fred Harvey’s headquarters were here, all the major truck lines came through here, and of course there was the river port. But look what’s happened to Dallas, compared with what’s happened to us! Compared with us, why should a city like Dallas even exist? Yet Dallas is known as the Big D, and everybody laughs at Kansas City.”
    â€œWe’ve got to overcome apathy,” George Kroh said. “We’ve still got a lot here. We’ve got cattle, oil, industry, a broad economic base—clean air, and no ghettoes. Of course there’s not much glamour in being Mr. Clean. We’ve got