KCFreePress.com

It’s Wednesday, March 2, 1955. A bright, late-winter afternoon with mild temperatures foretelling spring. You’re standing just beyond center field on Brooklyn Avenue near 21st Street, looking west, toward home. A major-league home, under construction.

Winter’s makeover has transformed Blues Stadium into Municipal Stadium, adding an upper deck, new plumbing and wiring, lights and seats, locker rooms, concession stands, parking. Spring will bring new tenants: the Athletics, formerly of Philadelphia.

You can see Lincoln High School just to the right of the upper deck. If you panned right you would see the sun-washed city skyline a couple of miles distant, where the parade is under way. The Parade of Cars, bearing the Queen of the Motor Show and her 17 princesses through the streets of downtown. The cars are stylish like the Dodge La Femme, or futuristic like the Buick Wildcat II. The queen and princesses are comely young women in tiaras and strapless gowns.

People downtown are talking about the cars. Or about the warm weather. Or the opening of Missouri’s trout season. Or the city election, H. Roe Bartle winning the mayoral primary. Or KU’s defeat of K-State last night in Lawrence, the first game in the new Allen Fieldhouse. Or yesterday’s atomic-bomb test in Nevada. No more radiation than a chest X-ray, so they say.

Downtown clothiers are having sales on wool overcoats as they bring out the new straw hats. A few department stores are advertising air conditioners and lawn mowers. Buy a pair of shoes at Millman’s on Walnut and get a pair of tickets to an A’s game.

It’s a town in transition. Poised between winter coats and spring hats, basketball and baseball, minor league and major league. Between yesterday’s news and whatever’s ahead.

Ahead is Opening Day. Today, here on Brooklyn Avenue, the ballpark is about two-thirds finished. Fourteen hundred miles away in Florida, the Kansas City Athletics have just begun spring training. In six weeks they’ll be right here, winning their first game. Ahead are 13 losing seasons and another move to another city.

Tonight the star Regulus and the springtime constellations will be seen in the eastern skies. But the brightest lights in the heavens still will be Jupiter and the constellations of winter. Tomorrow will be warm, but Canadian air is on its way. The outlook is colder.

Photo courtesy of Missouri Valley Special Collections, Kansas City Public Library, Kansas City, Missouri

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