People & Places
What Comes Next?
What happens when you can no longer be who you’ve been? Flatland profiles two Kansas Citians — an X-Games champion and a war photographer — who, at a young age, must decide what comes next. — Follow @FlatlandKC on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
Whatever Happened to Smaks?
The elephant on Johnson Drive stopped traffic. “My dad [Bill Fielder] had met a zookeeper and he asked him to bring over an elephant for the opening of Smaks,” Wes Fielder said. “You’d watch the cars out front and people would slam on their brakes to try to figure out what was going on.” The…
Kansas City’s Vietnam Era
Finding Kansas City-area Vietnam veteran John Musgrave for the upcoming PBS documentary “The Vietnam War” was “the most fortuitous thing,” filmmaker Ken Burns said last week while in Kansas City. Musgrave, long known to Kansas Citians as an eloquent and thoughtful commentator and critic on the war, has been referred to as the Shelby Foote of…
As Kansas City Booms And Sprawls, Trying Not To Forget Those In Between
This summer, NPR reporters are returning to their hometowns to see how they’ve changed. Sarah McCammon grew up in Kansas City – on the Missouri side of the state line. Like a lot of places, Kansas City is experiencing a couple of major trends – suburban sprawl and, more recently, a downtown revitalization. My two…
Unimagined and Reimagined Lives
During nearly two decades as a refugee in Nepal, Laxmi Ghimire could only dream of the life she now lives in Kansas City, Kansas. She was among the Nepali-speaking Bhutanese who sought refuge in eastern Nepal in 1990, after they were exiled for advocating for social and political rights. One of their major demands was…