The Curse of Kansas City
This article about the Hyatt Regency disaster published in the Weekly World News on August 11, 1981 has a curious inset.
Continue reading →Old Photos: A Marriage Palace in Leningrad
Every person who grew up in the Soviet Union has photos like these stashed in their dusty photo albums. Not all Marriage Palaces used to belong to the Czar’s family but any self-respecting city had a place where the new units of society were forged or at least registered under the watchful stare of
Jesus ChristVladimir Illych Lenin.Canned Art
My secret awesome tipsters (who are everywhere) alerted me about an exhibition of canned food sculpture at the Union Station.
CANstruction, is a design-build competition, that showcases the talent of Kansas City’s creative community as they create unconventional, astounding structures using only canned and other non-perishable food items.
After the exhibition is over, Union Station will use cans and other non-perishable items to build an army of robotic employees to replace those recently laid off.
Continue reading →Old Photos: Kansas City 1945
Life Magazine photographer Hans Wild traveled through Kansas City in 1945, while collecting materials for the article about the Missouri Valley. These images didn’t get published.
Continue reading →The Face Of The Boss As A Face Of The Business
I could totally turn this blog into a display of old pictures and still be happy with it. Browsing through the old photos always makes me wonder why people’s faces changed so much since the 40’s and 50’s. When was the last time you saw a person who looked like this:
“Roy Allison Roberts (more photos) was a managing editor, president, editor and general manager of The Kansas City Star who guided the paper during its influential period during the Presidencies of Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower”. Looking at Mr.Roberts’s photo I get a sense of a determined decisive person who knows what he is doing. Granted, this impression may be completely wrong, he may have been a total incompetent, but that’s what I think when I look at the picture.
Now let’s take a look at the face of the current publisher of Star Mark Zieman. For all I know, Mr.Zieman may be a future Nobel Prize Laureate but his face doesn’t exactly exude business confidence, assurance, decisiveness and drive. Maybe he is a nice guy and a great person but who do you want to represent your business at a tough time – a man who looks like a nice guy, or a man with a face of a bulldog who looks like his is ready to kick your ass and shove that cigar you-know-where if things are not done, deadlines are not met and orders are not followed.
Even getting fired is more acceptable from a Mr.Roberts-looking guy, than from a an insincerely apologetic person who looks like Mr.Zieman. No amount of cigar smoke can compensate.
Does the path from bosses like Mr.Roberts – tough, larger-than-life personalities, to people like Mr.Zieman – nicer, more intellectual types, reflect the transformation of businesses like Kansas City Star from an influential force in the city to a thin folded stack of paper with color photos and crappy articles? I don’t know the answer but I thought it was a neat theory.
This concludes my amateur face-character analysis session. Make sure to look at the other photos of Roy A.Roberts where is featured on the cover of the Time magazine or pictured talking to President Truman.
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