‘God picked the right person.’ Sally Firestone thrived after Hyatt skywalks disaster | Opinion
The angels have taken another one from us, this time my friend Sally Firestone.
More than 40 years ago, she inspired this city in the wake of the Hyatt skywalks collapse. But it is all that she accomplished after that terrible night that best marks her legacy. Now her death on Feb. 26, at the age of 76, signals it is likely time for closure from what many remember as Kansas City’s single worst moment.
On July 17, 1981, two suspended skywalks suddenly gave way during a lavish tea dance in the lobby of the new Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel at Crown Center. One hundred fourteen lives were lost. More than 200 others were injured. Of all those hurt, and the many who were hospitalized for months, Sally’s pain stretched far beyond all that other anguish.
She was standing on the second-level walkway, which was crushed by the falling fourth floor skywalk. Sally suffered a broken and dislocated neck vertebrae, a badly damaged spinal cord, a fractured leg and a lacerated scalp. A quadriplegic, she would never stand or walk again, never embrace us anew, never do more than turn her head and shoulders a bit.
She had arrived in town as a preacher’s daughter and college graduate from Illinois. She sold ladies’ clothing on the Country Club Plaza and took a challenging position with IBM as a computer engineer. In her Crown Center office near the Hyatt, she was due for a big promotion. Then the skywalks came tumbling down.
I first met her one wintry night in 2018. In her independent living apartment on Wornall Road in south Kansas City, her charm and thin smile warmed the room. Though she sat in her mechanized wheelchair, here nonetheless stood in my mind’s eye the essence of Sally Firestone — hope, optimism and grit. She had over time assured herself that her injuries in that cursed hotel seemed more like a blessing.
“God picked the right person,” she told me. “I started doing things I had never done before.”
Imagine this: In the hospital ICU, she fears she will die. She hallucinates. Her screams ricochet down hospital hallways filled with other Hyatt victims. But she does not remember the worst of it, being told she was paralyzed.
Picture her next: She is released to her parents’ care in an apartment on Armour Boulevard. They encourage her to turn to God, to accept that this was not his doing. Finally she faces her future head-on. “I became more like, what can I do with the rest of my life? I felt there was no way I could not live because I had so many people praying for me around the world.”
Sally volunteered at the Central United Methodist church and the Saint Paul School of Theology. She sang in the choir. She lobbied City Hall for more accessibility for people with disabilities, more parking spots, more curbside ramps. She helped spark the Whole Person movement in Kansas City.
She also treated herself. She visited Disney World and toured Alaska, the Panama Canal and the Colorado Rockies. Jazz was her great passion too, especially Kansas City jazz, and she sat on the board of the American Jazz Museum in the 18th and Vine Jazz District.
In the Jackson County courthouse downtown, she won a settlement of $15 million, money desperately needed for her constant care in the long years ahead. Legal experts hailed the verdict as the largest personal injury award in the state of Missouri at that time. Sally testified from her wheelchair. She noted that while she once had embraced “the usual goals of a good marriage and a happy family and of course a dream house,” but now she sought other challenges. She could still move her shoulders a little. “Maybe I’ll try to do some sculpting again someday.”
She did not harbor a grudge, not against Hallmark, which built and owned the hotel, or the Hyatt company that operated it. But Sally would have liked an apology. “If the tables were turned,” she confessed to me, “I would have done that.”
Sally and I spoke often over the last five years. Rarely about the old Hyatt drama anymore. Rather, we discussed books, Hollywood and cultural affairs. We last chatted around Christmas, and she invited me for a trip together to the Folly Theater. Again we shared our interests in jazz and she turned me onto Kansas City saxophonist Bobby Watson’s rendition of “Flamenco Sketches.” The cut opens with deep licks from the bass interspersed with bright piano tones. So much like the arc of Sally’s life. Once in a deep dark place, she found a safe haven.
Hers was a full and active life, bursting against the confines of a fragile and frozen body. Sally Firestone moved past the Hyatt skywalks. Maybe we all can now too.
Richard A. Serrano is author of the book: “Buried Truths and the Hyatt Skywalks; the Legacy of America’s Epic Structural Failure” (Purdue University Press, 2021).
