Looking for an old friend - Wally Walsh

[KCACJef]

I've been looking for an old friend of mine that I haven't seen in 20+ years. Wally Walsh or Wallace Augustus Walsh (Gus) Wally has 2 brothers Mike and Leo. Wally was into cars and had a Nova in the 70s, he ran a salvage yard on the boulevard in the 80s and drove a Corvette. Later he had a used car business on the blvd in the 90s. Last time I saw him he was a doorman/bouncer off the Plaza in the late 1990s. I've tried everything I know to find Wally but haven't had any luck. If anyone knows anything about Wally please DM me. Thanks.

[KCKev]

What area did you grow up in and what high school did you go to?

[KCACJef]

Prairie Village and I knew Wally first from SM North. Wally lived at 47th and Fairmont but somehow managed to go to SM schools. In the late 70s Wally hung out at Mendoza's Deli on Westport Road.

[normalthings]

Estimate year of birth?

[herrfrank]

47th and Fairmount is of course in the KCMSD, but only three blocks from the old Shawnee Mission North High School catchment area. (The catchment lines changed around 1990, so that SME now runs to County Line on 47th Street and as far west as Mission Road, but the previous SMN/ SME line used to be US56/ Shawnee Mission Parkway).

From the SMSD founding up until the late 1980s, KCMO students were allowed to pay a nominal tuition in order to attend the abutting SMSD high school. I was SME class of 1986 and at least a dozen kids from Ward Pkwy and Brookside environs were in my class. This option was once reciprocal (because JC Nichols thought Mission Hills kids would prefer KC SWHS, and many did), but it became more widespread from MO to KS sometime in the mid 1970s, after the city riots, when Southwest started to be perceived as unsafe. It makes sense also that someone from Westwood on the Missouri side would have been able to pay tuition into SMN.

While this program was not widely advertised, it definitely was a thing. The district began to shut it down under Superintendent Raj Chopra, sometime in the late 1980s, and some students had to get a rental apartment in Prairie Village to finish their diploma at SME.

[KCACJef]

1962 or 1963

Interesting how these lines were fuzzy back then.
Where I live now they don't allow any out of district admissions and have prosecuted some people for breaking the rules by registering children at a relatives house.

[herrfrank]

Interesting how these lines were fuzzy back then.
Where I live now they don't allow any out of district admissions and have prosecuted some people for breaking the rules by registering children at a relatives house.

The lines weren't fuzzy between districts usually -- Blue Valley always started at I-435; Olathe was west of Pflumm (I think). But when the JC Nichols company decided, back in the early 1920s, to include a chunk of Kansas in the boomtown residential district being laid out, "the Country Club district", they had several perception problems among KC citizens. Kansas was perceived as hayseed and hicksville. The Missouri side was more sophisticated. Plus the geography of the Missouri part -- the plateau from Sunset Hill south to Waldo, gave itself to a broad north-south residential axis along Ward Parkway, whereas the Kansas part was hilly interspersed with extensive waterways.

Nichols' main problem was the Missouri land was too good for the several golf courses he wanted to include, so he needed to expand into Kansas and use the lowlands by the creeks. Fun fact: today's Carriage Club was the clubhouse for drinks and dining for JCN's first golf course in the Country Club district (now Mission Hills CC). Johnson County was still dry when MHCC opened, so golfers had to cross State Line for the 19th hole. The county's alcohol rule was changed by the time KCCC opened (and I wager JCN had lobbyists working that angle throughout the 1920s).

Anyhow, the secondary problem was this perception among Missouri peeps about Kansas. So Nichols decided to make the Kansas enclave grander -- larger lots, more like country estates, and he incorporated it as its own city, Mission Hills. He also ensured that the schools serving Mission Hills residents (Prairie School and what is now called SM North HS) would allow kids to remain among their Missouri confreres (at Border Star and Southwest HS). That arrangement was reciprocal, probably at Topeka's insistence, but a modest tuition was required.

Anyhow, some famous Mission HIlls, Kansas residents went to Southwest HS in Missouri in the 1930s and 1940s -- the writer Evan Connell notably, who lived on Drury Lane. By the 1960s, when SME was built and the SMSD had come into its own, this reciprocal arrangement was rarely used, but it remained in place. Then the riots happened, and Southwest had its famous decline. In the 1970s and 1980s, dozens of kids were attending SME every year under the reciprocal arrangement. And it was in the end the Kansas side which shut it down, presumably because the cost was now going onto Kansas books rather than KCMO books as the flow had been in earlier decades.

[KC1963]

Interesting how these lines were fuzzy back then.
Where I live now they don't allow any out of district admissions and have prosecuted some people for breaking the rules by registering children at a relatives house.

The lines weren't fuzzy between districts usually -- Blue Valley always started at I-435; Olathe was west of Pflumm (I think). But when the JC Nichols company decided, back in the early 1920s, to include a chunk of Kansas in the boomtown residential district being laid out, "the Country Club district", they had several perception problems among KC citizens. Kansas was perceived as hayseed and hicksville. The Missouri side was more sophisticated. Plus the geography of the Missouri part -- the plateau from Sunset Hill south to Waldo, gave itself to a broad north-south residential axis along Ward Parkway, whereas the Kansas part was hilly interspersed with extensive waterways.

Nichols' main problem was the Missouri land was too good for the several golf courses he wanted to include, so he needed to expand into Kansas and use the lowlands by the creeks. Fun fact: today's Carriage Club was the clubhouse for drinks and dining for JCN's first golf course in the Country Club district (now Mission Hills CC). Johnson County was still dry when MHCC opened, so golfers had to cross State Line for the 19th hole. The county's alcohol rule was changed by the time KCCC opened (and I wager JCN had lobbyists working that angle throughout the 1920s).

Anyhow, the secondary problem was this perception among Missouri peeps about Kansas. So Nichols decided to make the Kansas enclave grander -- larger lots, more like country estates, and he incorporated it as its own city, Mission Hills. He also ensured that the schools serving Mission Hills residents (Prairie School and what is now called SM North HS) would allow kids to remain among their Missouri confreres (at Border Star and Southwest HS). That arrangement was reciprocal, probably at Topeka's insistence, but a modest tuition was required.

Anyhow, some famous Mission HIlls, Kansas residents went to Southwest HS in Missouri in the 1930s and 1940s -- the writer Evan Connell notably, who lived on Drury Lane. By the 1960s, when SME was built and the SMSD had come into its own, this reciprocal arrangement was rarely used, but it remained in place. Then the riots happened, and Southwest had its famous decline. In the 1970s and 1980s, dozens of kids were attending SME every year under the reciprocal arrangement. And it was in the end the Kansas side which shut it down, presumably because the cost was now going onto Kansas books rather than KCMO books as the flow had been in earlier decades.

Herrfrank - Thank you for the wonderful post and depth of information. I hope you're writing a book about these things.