Regrets, he’s had a few. More important are warm memories, professional achievements

Back in 1968 when I was a hotshot newspaper reporter, my father called me at my desk in that old Kansas City Star building on Grand Avenue.

“Hey, guys down at the Oddfellows Lodge are going fishing,” he said. “We hired a bus, gonna drive up to Canada, sleep on the way.”

Once in Canada they would board an amphibious aircraft and fly to a wilderness lake, where the fish had not heard about hooks.

“Northern pike!” he said enthusiastically. “Lake trout 3 feet long! I want you to come along with me.”

My dad made that trip with his Tulsa Oddfellow buddies, caught fish and ate them every day cooked on campfires along the shore. He snagged a gorgeously dappled Northern pike and had it mounted. For the brief rest of my father’s life, that fish proudly adorned my parents’ living room wall.

I didn’t go with him on that adventure. I was a hotshot reporter, after all, covering important matters, busy with a new house and a wife, Lenore, who actually urged me to go with my dad. But I turned him down.

Looking back at life from age 89, I recall that as one of many choices I regret. I regret that some years later I yelled at my mother because, though ill, she wouldn’t go to a real physician. I shouted at her so hotly she burst into tears. This just begins to cover my lifelong score of regrets.

But I am happy about a few things. When the Star hired me in 1958, most white residents of Kansas City were saying what a shame that Black people “crowd together” when they buy homes, causing racial turnover of neighborhoods.

Then a real estate broker friend, Harry Green, told me what was really happening. Big-time real estate agents and bankers had long blocked any attempt to sell homes west of Troost Avenue to Black families. By walling off most of the Kansas City metro area, they focused all such buying along a narrow southeastward corridor. Neighborhoods there, with their elementary schools, swiftly turned over, going from all white to nearly all Black in three or four years.

This hurt not just Black families but also all who might have chosen to stay in integrated neighborhoods but not in these swiftly changing ones. In two decades from the 1950s through the 1960s, some 67,000 whites — equal to almost one-fifth of Kansas City’s entire white population — moved out of those Southeast neighborhoods.

I wrote many stories about these real estate scams. This might have influenced the 1963 passage of Kansas City’s Fair Housing Ordinance in a city-wide election. Those now mostly past real estate dodges leave us still divided, but less so. Black people have far more freedom to buy wherever and whatever they can afford.

I am have another memory I’m proud of — this time of actually being kind to my mother. After father died, she was alone in her late 70s and frail. I rented a moving van in Tulsa and loaded it with her household goods. My wife, Lenore, and our two kids followed in the family car as my mother and I, in the rumbling truck, drove back to Shawnee and moved her into a home only blocks from ours.

Soon after, noticing a flock of goats in a pasture, I asked the farmer if I could rent one just for my wife’s birthday. For a $5 charge, he agreed. Lenore and my mother loved goats, particularly the little ones called “kids.” The first thing the kid did (hey, that rhymes!) is lower his budding horns and chase our basset hounds all over the house.

But among my best memories is that of my mother and me in that moving van, followed by wife and kids in the car, as we rolled up the highway toward home. Mom sat high on her cushion talking of the two brothers and six sisters she grew up with on her parents’ 160-acre Ozarks homestead where, because the boys were so few, the girls did most of the farming.

“Them old horses tromping on your feet all the time,” she groused, while leaning eagerly forward toward a more happily-populated final two years of her life.

Contact the columnist at hammerc12@gmail.com.