What Child Is This?

A Christmas mystery fifty years in the making.

Every year I ask the same question.

It started, I think, in 1974, fifty years ago at the Crown Center Ice Terrace, a skating rink located, appropriately enough, in the Crown Center complex in Downtown Kansas City, Missouri. Crown Center is the urban rehabilitation project dreamed up by city leaders and the people at Hallmark Cards in the 1960s.

The Complex has the Hallmark World Headquarters, zillions of square feet of office and retail space, two hotels, a large retail and entertainment area, and a skating rink. It is connected to the Union Station complex by covered walkways. Supporting all this are thousands of spaces for parking, and an open plaza that features the Mayor’s Christmas Tree during the holidays.

I began working in Crown Center not long after my first wife and I moved back to Kansas City from Colorado following the death of my father. This was, by nearly any metric, a bad move, but you make decisions based on what you think is right at the time.

I was a carpenter in Colorado, working for my father-in-law building custom homes in a small town south of Denver when I heard the news about my dad.

Castle Rock, Colorado. Portrait of the author as a young dude.

After the funeral trip to Kansas City and back to Colorado, I made the decision, a unilateral decision, mind you, to move back to Kansas City and into my mom’s house, a tiny bungalow on the city’s Northeast side. The wholly irrational nature of this move hit me only recently after Kathi died. I had known for years that it wasn’t a bright move, but seeing it from the eyes of a grieving spouse changed all the colors to a somber gray. I couldn’t see it then. My wife absolutely should have killed me in my sleep.

Be that as it may . . .

I started checking the want ads for a job. That’s what people did back then. I checked with employment agencies, went on a couple dozen interviews, and even applied for a job as a city building inspector. Man, am I ever glad that didn’t work out.

Crown Center

One Sunday, I was looking at the ads, optimistically scanning jobs for photographers - I wasn’t one yet, but I was ever-hopeful for a future in photography - and saw an ad looking for someone in Photo Sales. Mechanical Eye, Crown Center Shops. There was a phone number.

I was just barely confident enough in my knowledge of all things photographic and my basis in retail to take a chance on this, so Monday morning, I called the number in the want ad, and was told to come on down to 25th and Grand Avenue. I drove my red Mustang to Crown Center, pulled into the massive parking maze and strolled into the second floor entrance of the Mechanical Eye. I had never been to Crown Center before.

Walking in The Mechanical Eye was like walking into a combination camera store, museum, gallery, and amusement park.

View from the back of The Mechanical Eye, Crown Center, 1974

The walls were covered in plush, blood-red, carpet trimmed with white contoured casework. Very 1970s. A slightly built man was busy rearranging the displays in the front windows facing the second-floor hallway. Around the perimeter were inset display cases with every brand of camera that you might imagine - Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Minolta, Hasselblad, etc. In front of them were white laminate pedestals with glass tops and fronts, a stylish chair in front of each one. Toward the back, a row of enlargers, darkroom equipment, supplies, paper, chemicals, and books. I was dizzy with excitement. I waited in the store for a few minutes until a tall, well-dressed man came out of the back room. He introduced himself as “Harry” and we went into the shelf-lined back room to talk.

He told me that had once been a drummer with Milton DeLugg, and I got a sense that Harry was definitely a salesman. We chatted for a bit, and out of the blue he asked me when I could start.

“How about tomorrow?”

He agreed, shook my hand, and called Hallmark HR to make the arrangements. That’s when I realized that I would be working for Hallmark’s Retail Division in The Crown Center Associate Stores. More on that another time.

Much of the rest of this story revolves around working retail in the heart of the city in a complex designed to mimic parts of New York City. My home town, Kansas City, in the heart of Flyover Country, has always had a deep-seated inferiority complex, and the people in charge of Crown Center, especially its retail complex, wallowed and splashed in that complex.

Part of the Crown Center Shops was a twisted warren of tiny boutique shops connected by iron platforms and steps resembling fire escapes. It was called “West Village” a tribute to NYC’s East Village. West Village was scrapped a few years later because it was not easily navigated by those with physical challenges. There’s an understatement. I can’t find pictures of West Village anywhere.

I have a feeling that New York envy was also the genesis of the Crown Center Ice Terrace, and while it lacked the scope and atmosphere of the rink in Rockefeller Center, with its glistening golden Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, it was popular from the beginning.

Working retail in a place like Crown Center could be interesting - tourists, celebrities, sports stars, and the employees of Hallmark and Western Auto all made their way to the shops from time to time. I met a ton of famous and infamous folks - Johnny Cash, Bob Hope, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, the news departments of all three major networks during the Republican National Convention, all stopped by. But my true claim to fame: Muhammed Ali stopped at the front counter of the Mechanical Eye and without a word, shook my hand.

I shit you not. I still have the hand.

On my lunch hours or during the overlap hours while I was waiting to go to work - my then-wife worked in West Village and we nearly always had opposite schedules - she opened and I closed, or vice versa, and the 15 mile trip back to our suburban apartment in Kansas was an extravagance with the gas prices of the day - so we often wandered the complex before or after our work days. We probably spent half our paychecks at George Detsios’ Cheese Shop.

I wandered with a camera. One winter day, I stopped at the Ice Terrace and played with exposure times and apertures, creating blurry, streaky images of skaters. I was still a rank amateur photographer, and it was all new and exciting to me.

Crown Center at Christmas, Kansas City

Then, just as I was starting to think about going back inside, a group of boys - young teens - came crashing into the railing around the rink, laughing hysterically. They struck a quick group pose, I grabbed one exposure with my Olympus OM-1, and then they sped off again, flailing and falling, always laughing.

Then, out of nowhere, one of the boys came sliding back up to the rail and stopped. He was wearing an Oakland Raiders jacket in the distinctive black and silver colors of the locally-hated NFL team. He was catching his breath, and just for a second, he looked up at me, his face partially hidden by his silver leather sleeve. You could tell he was smiling, if only by the sparkle in his eyes.

I focused and exposed one frame of Kodachrome 64, and he sped off again.

I went back to work, and in a few days, after the film came back from Kodak, I saw the face of that kid on skates, cheeks flushed from the cold, stocking cap pulled down over his ears, his eyes smiling back at the camera.

For fifty years I’ve wondered who that kid was, what his life might have become, and where he is now. Was his life a great struggle, or was he successful in all he attempted. Family man, loner, criminal, captain of industry or maybe he became a photographer and repeated this cycle with other kids at other rinks or groups of friends hanging out in parks. Was he from the Kansas City area, or visiting family and friends for the holidays? The possibilities for his future spread out like ripples on a pond, sailing second by second into the infinite.

When I look back at all the changes I’ve been through since 1974 - all the successes, the failures, the loves, the friends, the embarrassments, the victories and horrific defeats, the gains, and losses, the million miles of highway, I realize that I may never know who this kid became in life.

But . . .

For 1/250 of a second in Kansas City in 1974, we connected, his eyes to my mechanical eye.

Isn’t that amazing? I wonder who he is.