Arts and Lifestyle Wednesday Presented by Cinematic Visions-Hands Up, Expectations Down, Enjoy Yourself

Let’s establish at the top that I enjoyed myself on the Kansas City Gangster Tour.

I took the tour on Tuesday with a couple of dozen of my fellow members of the Kansas City Breakfast Club, an organization that actually dates back to the time explored in the bus tour, and the in-person and video presentation aboard it. It’s a great group of successful businessmen who get together weekly to assist with marketing each others ventures, but often enjoy social events like these. It’s an intelligent and humorous group, who fell right in to the spirit of this outing.

The Gangster Tour has been around for 21 years, and is about a ninety minute event at a cost of $29.00 that has regular sessions at 10 AM and 1PM on Saturdays, and is available other times for group bookings of 15-24 people. We filled the full quota of two dozen for our late afternoon excursion. Refreshments are allowed to be brought on the bus, and our group was armed with coolers, wine bottles, and appropriately enough for the occasion, a few flasks. I boarded with a little cooler with a few beers. A warning, however. About an hour in I got up out of my seat and turned to head back to the facilities for some needed relief. Alas, there is no bathroom aboard, so take that into keen consideration.

Our host for the event is “Johnny Holliday”, decked out in the requisite pinstripe suit and fedora. He is a voluble fellow who combines burlesque-style comedy with tour guide information. His live presentation is combined periodically with video visits from his “brother” (his first name escapes me)., a younger fellow and fellow gangster of sorts with a perfectly cheesy moustache and “dems and dos” patter, “Walter Winchell”, intoning radio news reports, combined with spinning front page news, and “Dollface”, Johnny’s chorus girl companion. The videos tie together some of the tales effectively, served up with plenty of ham, and give the presentation some nice variety.

“Johnny” is a fine tour guide, although he falls in and out of a variety of hard to identify accents, sometimes Chicagoish, other times Bostonian, a little southern, and other times…uhh, well, nothing. All are stereotypically gansteresque, throwing in Damon Runyan perversions of the language, such as “hysterical” for “historical”, and the like. His jokes often fall purposely I think) flat, and he picks out a foil in the crowd who he points out just isn’t “getting it”. The person in this case was seated right next me, an extremely nice man who took it all in stride, which is a good thing, because someone less genial might have gotten annoyed after a while.

The bus takes us over much of the city, to landmarks that are noted in the telling of the tale of Boss.Tom Pendergast which dominates the narrative. Some are still standing in differing permutations, some, like City Hall are still the same, and some are parking lots, or little parks. From downtown to the River Market to MIssion Hills, we get a nice feel for the times. The less you know about the story of Boss Tom and the stories of political corruption, graft, voter fraud, protection, speakeasies, and the like, the more enjoyable the tour, since there is quite of bit of “hysterical” information doled out. For the completely uninitiated, here is a tiny capsule bio of Pendergast…..

“He may bear comparison to various big-city bosses, but his open alliance with hardened criminals, his cynical subversion of the democratic process, his monarchistic style of living, his increasingly insatiable gambling habit, his grasping for a business empire, and his promotion of Kansas City as a wide-open town with every kind of vice imaginable, combined with his professed compassion for the poor and very real role as city builder, made him bigger than life, difficult to characterize”….

A major theme of the tour is Pendergast’s concrete business, which he enriched with countless construction contracts, often using far more concrete than necessary for the job, such as the thirty foot thick runways at the Downtown Airport. There are many tales like that told, sometimes swinging a bit back and forth chronologically, but generally presented effectively. There are numerous other characters, ne’er-do-wells, and low-life’s brought into the picture of the “way things are done here in Kansas City” at the time. Harry Truman and his association with the Boss is also prominent.

The tour begins and ends very conveniently at Union Station, which in itself is a major part of the story and the times. Parking is easy, the bus is comfortable, (which is important since you stay on it the entire time) and the pace is leisurely, working the landmarks and the stops on our journey to good advantage.

If you don’t expect too much, this is worth catching. A rudimentary history lesson with a lot of schmaltz, and a breezy tour of the city, it is a nice little diversion. I would highly recommend doing it with a group of friends or associates, rather than just random tourists or strangers. I think it would be much easier to fall into the light-hearted, and a bit light-leaded, spirit that way.

Likely this is the type of thing that often is enjoyed more by people who are visiting here than the locals. That often happens to attractions of this type everywhere. But I can say that if you bring your fedora, pork-pie, or boa, the proper attitude, and a light taste for Kansas City history, you will have a good time, "If you’s know what I mean”.