You Can’t

An epiphany this morning regarding boundaries, and representation, and dreams of an open society: you can’t sing along with every word of every song. (Note: this isn’t just about art.)

You — each and every one of us, including you — can’t sing along with every word of every song: not in empathy or sympathy, not in solidarity, not in homage. They are available for us to hear, to appreciate, but not to share.

Some of us believe, if we can’t sing along with every word of a song, that something must be wrong: the song should not have been so composed, or ever sung in our hearing, or the words should be given over to us even though they are not ours to sing.

But I want to live surrounded by great art, including art which isn’t for me or about me, except as another human being. When someone invites you to listen to a song, and you discover that you can’t sing along with every word, be even more grateful for the invitation to listen. It’s hard enough for us to know each other, without some of us always being talked over, or being shut out, or having to hide.

Ancestry

I spent a chunk of this morning communing with my grandparents, though I didn’t realize till it was almost over.

The early morning was a bit stressful. Nothing really noteworthy in terms of effect on me, just mildly grinding, the latest episode in a special feature of this week, itself a present entry in the “Saul Becomes a Parent after All” universe (exclusively available to WYRPA6DAMFASSOFATOS™ — Will You Really Pay Another $6/mo for Another Streaming Service Only for Access to One Show).

So I did what I do under stress, which is eat. And hide. There are connections to my grandparents right away in both, but they’re nuanced and interwoven with my own experience, and speculative, and so on. I don’t know that any of them were stress eaters, although I have a feeling my father’s father, Izzy, and mother’s mother, Georgie, might have been. I know he ate distractedly. I know she was anxious.

Where it gets stronger (but I wasn’t really thinking about this yet) is in what I ate, and where. Not that it was fast food chain drive-thru breakfast — only Poppy Izzy probably would have ever found that appealing on any level. But I went to two different chains, because one has the cheapest soda and the other has the best breakfast sandwich, the latter persistently but secretly available at two for one.

Hitting two different stores to get the best meal for the least money ticks a frugality box which all my grandparents shared, in different ways. Note, this involves more time and more power-cost for the drive (though to be fair in my case, one store was on the way to the other). But each grandparent could be extremely frugal and also free-spending in order to satisfy that frugality (or other priority, and their several priorities naturally differed). Hitting two different stores to get the right mix also hooks very directly to my father’s mother, Rae, who regularly sent my father and his sister to multiple markets because one of them had her standard bread and another had her raisin bread and another had her cottage cheese and another…

That breakfast sandwich has always been the best one, making it a ritual object and trips to get it a ritual for me. Everyone has rituals, including food rituals, but few people have food rituals like my Bubbi Rae, who ate the same things for the same meals on the same days of the week for longer than I knew her. This is not something I do — but it is something I am capable of, and something the appeal of which I definitely feel. (It’s just that random variety also appeals.)

Bubbi Rae would probably never have added that breakfast sandwich to her menu, though. For one thing, the meat on it is pork. Bubbi didn’t keep kosher except de facto (or maybe self-asserted de jure): what she had not already eaten, she was unlikely to eat. For another, the sandwich would certainly have struck her as too “heavy.” (Might she have accepted half? Possibly.)

My Gramma Georgie on the other hand would have had a finely-tuned appreciation for this sandwich. The structure layers are split halves of an actual biscuit: dense but soft, crumbly but moist with shortening, salty, baked to a crisp-but-unburnt edge. The meat is a patty of actual “country” sausage: salty, peppery without fire, balanced hints of onion and garlic and Scarborough Fair, course enough to be crumbly too but fine enough never to put jaw to hard work. What she would have made of the egg — scrambled, allowed to spread thin over a big griddle, and then folded over twice into a square — I don’t know. From the texture it doesn’t seem to have been frozen along the way, at least.

I ordered some of that chain’s little coin-shaped potato cakes. Normally (see food rituals, above) I eat these as I drive home, to keep them from getting cold first. Today’s batch was already cold, but otherwise in unusually good condition. I decided to try to revive them later at home. Considering whether to park and eat the sandwiches, I remembered that I had just crossed Indian Creek, and that there are parking lots in the vicinity which abut the creek. I found one such without having to make any left turns at uncontrolled intersections (an anxiety I’m sure Gramma Georgie would have shared if she’d ever driven a car) and ate creek-side. And that’s my mother’s father, Ren. It’s through and because of him (and my mother) that I know where our creeks are, and their names, and that visiting and traveling them is pleasant (with or without a meal). I also just remembered that I did cross at an uncontrolled intersection, something he positively enjoyed, especially when on foot.

Once home, I briefly considered re-frying the cakes in a pan as more efficient all around than heating the oven. Then I remembered that we’re now in possession of an “air fryer” and decided to risk using it. “What risk?” you may ask: the risk of doing a specific thing for the first time, of a sort which I’d only done a very few times. There’s Gramma Georgie’s anxiety again, though Bubbi Rae’s food rituals betray similar possibility.

I consulted the internet for advice, plugged in the air fryer, loaded the cakes into its cooking drawer, set time and temperature. Everything worked, and the sample cake I pulled out to test after five minutes of cooking was hot without having lost the hallmark textures of deep frying. With my right hand I retrieved the square paper cup the cakes were served in, and began gently shaking/sliding cakes from the cooking drawer with my left hand back into the paper cup. Some pitcher-pouring reflex led me to perform this operation holding both containers over the kitchen sink.

But the cooking drawer, albeit a flat-bottomed bowl with a handle on one side, was not designed as a pitcher. It is wider at the top than the bottom, but fairly steep-sided, with no spout. Crucially, it also has a grill rack set near the base, which rack is removable for ease of cleaning both the rack and the drawer.

I stood there, watching the cakes slide from drawer to cup, anticipating the brief joy of eating the cakes, and in retrospect I can feel Poppy Izzy strongly there. I also felt very pleased with myself for having taken the risk, and for having it pay off, for the opportunity to use a new gadget, for having made so little mess, and just the cleverness and coordination of my own hands. In retrospect, I feel my mother’s parents in their different ways in all of that. In a roundabout way I can also feel in it my Bubbi Rae, who for all of my life and years before had only partial use of one hand.

And then I tilted the drawer far enough that the rack tipped out through the mouth of the drawer and flipped onto my other hand.

My recollection of the rack’s heat is that it was not strong enough to burn, but it got my attention faster than I could evaluate it, faster even than I could recognize what had happened. By reflex I shouted, spread the fingers of my right hand apart and jerked it forward and back, knocking the rack safely away — and flinging all the potato cakes from the paper cup across the bottom of the kitchen sink basin.

I experienced a momentary mental anguish out of all proportion to the loss — Gramma Georgie there — and a purely human momentary fear as my mind caught up with events and I wondered whether or how badly I had been burned. Hours later, I can see and feel two points of contact that are minor burns, on the back of my hand just above my index finger, and just above my wrist. In the moment I didn’t feel them at all, though, and I’m usually very sensitive to them.

I found myself laughing Grampa Ren’s laugh. By this I do not mean primarily that this form of my laughter sounded like his, even in my own ears (although it does sometimes sound like his, to me and to others). I mean that sometimes my laughter feels to me that I am hearing him laugh, and this was one of those times. And, despite years of more recent conditioning, I ate the cakes out of the sink, as I’m sure any of my grandparents would have done under the right circumstances.

I don’t know what precipitated the laughter more, relief or the sudden nearly-complete reversal of my petty triumph and satisfaction. But it was the latter and the laughter itself that brought my Grampa Ren all the way forward to me. Then I was able to look back over the morning and see all four of them.

This is the lesson I now have to somehow teach my living, learning daughter: the lesson I only sometimes know in my heart as well as I do in my mind, because I am grandchild of all four of them and the lesson only came from Ren, and because I am myself and not him. The foundation of all loss, from the smallest to the largest, is absurdity.

Mourning and mirth cannot be substituted for each other, and neither should be engaged at a friend’s or a stranger’s expense, but they are not so different and can even happen together. Look for the absurdity, let the mirth in, if it presents itself, if it will not add to another’s suffering. In life, always mourn loss, but always find a way to keep moving. You can carry the important losses with you, you can laugh the others aside — and sometimes, maybe not right away, you can do both at once.

(My Bubbi Rae also taught me to keep moving, though for all of my life and years before she could not use her legs to do it. Her lesson was not about laughter, though she laughed freely, and not about letting go. Sometimes the only way to keep moving is to hold on.)

The Story We Tell

In the story we tell each other, Jews* left home because of a famine, lived for generations as guests and then slaves in a land not theirs, escaped — or, arguably, were expelled as scapegoats after a series of catastrophes — and traveled for weeks into an adjacent wilderness to camp at the foot of a mountain for nearly a year.

The mountain has many names, but for a long time now is most often alluded to as Sinai. While camped, the people entered into that covenant with the One (known in English as God) which remains, for us, the index of our identity.

We tell each other that each of us, in every generation, is obligated to see oneself as if having personally participated in this exodus. And we provide two supporting assertions.

One is neatly material, rational, an argument recited with the story at Passover: had the One not extracted our ancestors, their descendants (including us) would still be slaves — and, by implication, absent our Covenant, not Jews the way we understand that to mean.

The other assertion is something else entirely: diffuse, fragmentary. We tell each other that, at least at the moment of the establishment of our Covenant, not only the contemporary descendants of Jacob-called-Israel stood at Sinai: rather, every Jew who will ever live. So our Covenant is not an inheritance alone; each of us was there to hear, to learn, to swear.

This other assertion shifts the event, and our Covenant, and us out of time. It needn’t be, in this view, an event that ever happened — because it is always happening. People joining the tribe without having been born into it are always already there. And, critically: the Torah, that Teaching of the One delivered alongside our Covenant, is not only any of the record left to us by prior Jews; each of us stands at Sinai, at every moment in earshot of the thunder.

Hear, o Israel! Does any one of us catch every syllable? Does any one of us listen with all one’s limited attention at every moment? But because we live in time, we have available to us each moment to choose to listen, to compare what we hear with what we heard before, with what others hear. And though we carry the record as whole as we can, we may find it mistaken without making it any less sacred.

What this means for any who have translated, paraphrased, or been inspired by our record is for them to consider.

The Ten Commandments, illustration from a Bible card published by the Providence Lithograph Company, 1907. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Ten_Commandments_(Bible_Card).jpg

* In the story, at the time Jews (as Judah) comprised one of 12 (or so) tribes, all Children of Israel. By the time the story starts to line up neatly with history and archaeology, most of the other tribes were separate from Judah. Their descendants, the Samaritans, would also fall under this umbrella. But, as a group, their view of Torah is different, and I won’t put words in their mouths.

We Need this

Kiddush Table w/ Candles, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

We need this, we mortals, we distinct and limited beings in time.

We need sleep between waking. We need to start things and end things. We need to set things down and pick them back up. And in between we need rest. How much and how often and how long varies among us, and for each of us under different circumstance.

Against the need for rest some duty or desire always calls. But our covenant requires us to refrain. Six days you shall serve and do all your task. But the seventh day is a šabâth, a great rest, to ’Adhonây your God: you shall not do any task — you, and your son and your daughter, and the man who works for you and the woman who works for you, and your beast of burden, and the stranger who is within your gate.

Shabbos is a gift. Like all gifts it requires us to receive it. But key to Shabbos is that list of others. I have to let myself rest, but I have to let everyone else rest too, or it doesn’t work. Because our needs for rest vary and change, there are weeks Shabbos surely feels like a luxury or an impediment — or an afterthought. But every week someone gets this far and really shouldn’t go any further without a break.

So let’s take a few moments of quiet to start receiving and sharing the gift. Let this week go. We can meet the next by starting a new chapter instead of being stuck in the last one.

[Remarks, mostly as delivered, opening a Lêyl Šabâth service at Congregation Kol Ami; Šabâth Mišpât.im 5777 / 24 February 2017]

Upon Hearing the Heartland Men’s Chorus Sing “Oiseh Sholem” at Christmas

There are two points of deep contact between the Jewish and Christian calendars. The first is Easter, which feels to us an amplified and distorted echo of our Passover. The second is Christmas, which… well, perhaps I should have written that there are on the Christian calendar two deep points of contact with Judaism. Because while both are characterized by Christianity’s anchoring itself in our shared past, neither is characterized by a corresponding reach from the Jewish side. Christmas derives nothing recognizable from the Jewish calendar; it echoes a longing for Judaean sovereignty, which has become as complicated for us in our way as what Christianity has done with it, but which for us has never had a particular season.

Both Easter and Christmas are strewn with broken bits of Judaica, recited like half-remembered passwords. Cultural trends in the United States have rendered Easter short and sharp while marching Christmastide relentlessly to the very doorstep of Halloween. Both processes have involved uneven attempts at cutting loose the anchor. There have been significant supporting roles for Jews in these attempts with respect to Christmas (sorry!) mainly in the area of music, so much so that the voice of secular Christmas includes a veiled Yiddish accent. Ironically, though I am a fan of secular Christmas, its music mostly leaves me cold. What I most enjoy hearing or humming along is the old stuff, the early-modern and the mediaeval. But the more of that I seek out or happen across, the more I’m confronted with the mumble-jumble: Yihudoh, Yisroel, Dovid, Imonu El, Beys Lechem, Yirusholayim, Moshiach, Pesach. Eloihiy, lomoh? Omein, Hallelu Yoh.

The blunt fact of this confrontation isn’t a surprise to me anymore, though a new example will sometimes show itself. So I sat through the first third or so of the Heartland Men’s Chorus “Kansas City Christmas” this past Saturday night, with its mix of English and Latin studded with Hebrew, and thoroughly enjoyed the music and the performance of it without giving it much thought of any depth — not even “The First Noël” with its relentless assertion that “born is the ki~ing of I~is-Rah-Yell”.

And then the men began chanting “Oiseh Sholem.”*

Some readers will have come this far and at several points asked me in absentia, “What about Hanukah?” I haven’t mentioned Hanukah because it hasn’t been relevant. Christmas isn’t to Hanukah as Easter is to Passover. Christianity depends on Christmas, while Judaism could mislay Hanukah tomorrow and barely notice. Their suspicious coincidence is most likely due to separate pagan influence on each than to either influencing the other. Their themes, too, only overlap where both touch the deeper springs of Midwinter, in the value of light in dark times and joy at the renewal of the sun.

Because what else is Christmas about? The birth of the one who saves humanity from Hell, yes, but that tends to be left for Easter to emphasize. Christmas emphasizes Jesus’ role as the Prince of Peace. Doxa en ‘upsistois Theôi kai epi gês eirênê en anthrôpois eudokia, Gloria in excelsis Deo et in terra pax in hominibus bonae voluntatis: Honor in the highest to God, and on earth peace, among humanity goodwill. (Luke 2:14)

Shorn of a Judaean nationalism inappropriate to Christian universalism, what remains for Christmas is the utopia which Jewish prophets had attached to a someday-somehow perfect restoration of Judah’s monarchy and priesthood: the proxy-enthronement of God on earth, and the establishment of global peace through global justice.

Hanukah is about a military victory. Sure, it was a kind of Judaean “war for independence” from an empire. But its status as a milestone in the history of political or religious freedom is tainted by it also having been a kind of Judaean civil war between factions partly distinguished by religious positions — and the victors did not share the freedom they had won with the other faction. The victory resulted in a century-long restoration of an independent monarchy and priesthood, but not at all built along the lines the prophets had called for. The regime stands as an embarrassment in Jewish history, which is why “the Hanukah Story” always ends with the victory, and is probably partly why the holiday is minor.

So the impulse to ease the psychallergic reaction many Jews have to Christmas by puffing up Hanukah is something I’ve long resisted, whether done by Christians or Jews. It misunderstands Hanukah, it misunderstands difference, it misunderstands inclusion. I didn’t go to “Kansas City Christmas” with any expectation of Hanukah and, depending on the selection, might have been baffled or bothered had it been there.

But “Oiseh Sholem”… “Oiseh Sholem” isn’t Hanukah. It’s every day, repeatedly. Oiseh sholem bimroimov, hu ya’aseh sholem oleynu v’al kol Yisroel (v’imru omein): [who] makes peace in his high place, may he make peace on us and on all Israel (and we say “truly!”)

The line closes most versions of the “Kadish” prayer (including some daily ones) though that requires the presence of nine others to recite. It also closes the “Amidah” which means there are Jews saying it at least three times a day. And it stands alone as a popular all-purpose song.

It isn’t Hanukah. But it isn’t at all a random choice. There’s a distant dialogue available between it and the “Gloria,” between bimroimov and en ‘upsistois.

I wrote that the men began chanting, not because the style of their vocalization was particularly chant-like but because it was repetitive, at first repeating just those first two words. A soloist stepped forward to sing the line in its entirety, after which the whole chorus took up various longer pieces of it to repeat.

The arrangement was both immediately familiar and strange, so that I’m left with the vivid impression that I remember it clearly but when I reach for the memory almost nothing is there — except a brief invocation of the melody used for Hatikvah, which struck me at the time as one of few overtly Jewish touches in music that otherwise wasn’t out of place in a to-that-point very traditional Christmas collection.

Possibly I was too busy suddenly thinking hard, about Hebrew, about Christmas, about boundaries and what grammarians call deixis: the means available to a language for designating either side of a boundary.

Because when Jews call for peace “on us and on all Israel,” the words mean “on us [Jews here] and on all [other] Jews”. I’m not a universalist, but I am a humanist. The “Oiseh Sholem” is among a host of lines in the liturgy that call benediction for us to the exclusion of — and, indeed, sometimes in opposition to — others. I’ve been bothered by them since I understood the language clearly enough, and I have my habits of substitution: ha’oilom, for instance, “the universe”, instead of Israel. And I’m not alone in this, as I’ve more recently discovered a shared practice of adding or substituting kol yoishvey seiveil, “all dwellers of the world.”

But I was listening to a chorus of gay men, composed primarily not of Jews. The same “on us and on all Israel” from their mouths means “on us and on […] Jews”. The unaltered traditional words, quite altered in meaning. Not as blown-out “everybody over here, everybody over there” as I and others have attempted to be in our devotions, but a startling inclusion of Jews in a prayer for peace, at Christmas, letting our own language speak without getting bogged down in counter-claims about revelation and interpretation and possession.

I have no way of knowing how much of this, if any, was in mind when the song was chosen or sung, but I was touched. The Christian gaze intermittently aimed at Jews as Jews is often blind, sometimes obsessive, and usually uncomfortable at best. This was nice: both welcoming and a welcome reminder that we all need to do better. As I said, I’m not a universalist. Our benedictions for ourselves and for each other should be as different as our needs are, and matched by striving to understand and to meet those differences on their own terms. But no one should be left out of that understanding, including those whose modes don’t include prayer. Next year, kol yoishvey seiveil.

*Note: with a few exceptions, I’ve transliterated Hebrew in this post on the basis of Yiddish (aka Ashkenazi) pronunciation. It started as a way to render the words at the end of the second paragraph less familiar to the eye.

Strategery

Roman Election.jpg
By Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4770357

“You must vote for my candidate so that my candidate’s opponent won’t win!”

The danger posed by any one of your candidate’s opponents, should that opponent win election, is in itself no premise in favor of your candidate’s election. It rather points directly to an over-investment of power in the contested office, and indirectly to the distortion imposed by an electoral system which provides (or privileges) only two choices.

“But, we can’t solve those systemic problems by participating in the election!”

If that were true, it still wouldn’t in itself argue in favor of your candidate. (Though it pains me to say, it would argue — albeit weakly — against participation altogether.)

But it isn’t true. Though outside parties and independent candidates operate at tremendous disadvantage, they aren’t illegal and they do exist and some of them are serious and deliberate and worthy of consideration and support. Their disadvantages should be removed — or, to put it in proper perspective, the privilege assigned to two parties should cease. Likewise, the concentration of power in certain offices and agencies should be dispersed, and the incentives to abdicate accountable power in exchange for privilege (political or otherwise) should cease.

None of this can be the direct result of voting in any number of contests under the present system. But the only electoral means available to weaken the power which results from, and which maintains, the privilege is to vote against both privileged parties; that should therefore be done whenever an agreeable outside or independent candidate presents herself (and, logically, also whenever there are no agreeable candidates at all). In tandem, other-than-electoral means should also be employed.

“That will take forever and could go horribly wrong. Besides, long before we got wherever you imagine us going, my candidate’s opponent would be in power!”

This is essentially applying the fallacious “too big to fail” standard to politics.

“Anyway, I agree with and applaud [all? the preponderance? most? certain?] of my party’s/candidate’s principles, platform, past performance, persona/e to the exclusion of any else.”

You must vote for your candidate, because you have good reason to do so. I don’t have good reason to vote for your candidate; in fact, I have good reason not to do so; I mustn’t vote for your candidate. We can trust or compare each other’s judgement as to the goodness of our reasons. To mistrust each other’s judgement as to the goodness of our reasons without having compared it is groundless.

“Some of your reasons not to vote for my candidate are things my candidate’s opponent asserts.”

I don’t pay much attention to the claims candidates or parties make about each other: I assume they include bias or are designed to induce bias. There may well be some overlap between my reasons and claims made by your candidate’s opponent[s]. My reasons are my reasons because I have judged them good. I do invite your comparison and critique, as my judgement must be imperfect.

“You wouldn’t be so critical if my candidate weren’t a member of Set S. Previous candidates and elects have done some of the things for which you criticize my candidate, and you didn’t criticize them so vociferously: you even voted for some of them. The only difference between them and my candidate is that my candidate is a member of Set S and those others aren’t. You despise members of Set S and want them excluded from politics and power.”

I don’t doubt that there are some people about whom all these assertions are true. The only one of them to which there is some truth in my case is expressed by the second sentence. I willingly own my previous failures to adequately criticize and oppose the faults of those others, whether those failures resulted from poor judgement or inattention. But no one’s (or everyone’s) failure to hold someone to account in the past can excuse that one or another from account in the present. And being deprived of a vote or an election isn’t, properly, a punishment.

The suggestion that I single your candidate out for criticism for any other reason than your candidate’s own deeds and your candidate’s present candidacy and your candidate’s occasional appeal to my principles is beneath my attention except to note the insult (to me and to your candidate and to Set S). I will say this, though. A future without oppression requires that those who have been oppressed also forego any opportunity to oppress others. This may seem unfair in some analyses. But at the very least the generational nature of the human condition renders any more superficially satisfying balance a vicious cycle.

Kansas City Museum is laying out a roadmap for mansion renovation | The Kansas City Star

This bit of news is a great parallel to the announcement earlier (“Two powerhouses of science education in Kansas City will join forces”) that Union Station‘s “Science City” museum is merging with the much older KC institution, Science Pioneers — perhaps best known as the people behind the Greater KC Science & Engineering Fair. Parallel because the contemporary Union Station facility was given its new lease-on-life at the turn of the 21st Century on the shoulders of the Kansas City Museum, whose two traditional focus areas had been KC-area history on the one hand, and science on the other.

For whatever reasons, the relationship between the Kansas City Museum and the revived station never jelled, despite the station (itself vital to KC history) beginning this phase in its history desperate to contain something, and the museum for some time prior being in desperate need of a place to put its collection. But if the split between those two allows each to sharpen its focus and thrive, I’m delighted.

Consultants for the Kansas City Museum are putting the finishing touches on strategic and business plans to set the stage for construction on new exhibit and event spaces in the mansion on Gladstone Boulevard.

Source: Kansas City Museum is laying out a roadmap for mansion renovation | The Kansas City Star

Kemper Arena could gain crucial spot on National Register of Historic Places | The Kansas City Star

Kemper Arena will soon be nominated for the National Register of Historic Places. Such a designation would qualify it for historic tax credits. That’s a key part of the financing to convert the building into a new mecca for amateur sports.

“I’m really looking forward to seeing this process wind up in a positive way. It’s been a long road,” said historic preservation consultant Elizabeth Rosin, who prepared the application for Foutch Brothers, the development company that Kansas City government officials have selected to try to save and repurpose Kemper Arena in the West Bottoms.

[….]

The nomination notes that Kemper was an exceptional civic and community resource and a perfect multipurpose “expression of the times” in midcentury America.

Now, Rosin points out, many old arenas have been demolished, replaced by more elaborate entertainment and sports palaces emphasizing luxury suites and amenities. They cater to the affluent and are less egalitarian.

“Not everyone could enjoy the luxury facilities, and rising ticket prices reduced the number of events that most patrons could afford to attend,” the nomination says. “The public purpose of the arena was lost for the sake of securing the revenue stream demanded by the professional sports teams.”

That’s why it’s doubly important to preserve Kemper Arena, Rosin says, adding in the nomination, “The nationwide loss of mid-twentieth century multipurpose arenas enhances the rarity and significance of Kemper as an example of its property type.”

Source: Kemper Arena could gain crucial spot on National Register of Historic Places | The Kansas City Star