Topeka, KS, and Kansas City, MO- Sunday, July 28, 2019

Kansas is supposed to be the heart of America, but the capital of Topeka, Kansas, is a strange place.  It has the Brown vs. the Board of Education National Historic Site- a symbol of the steady (if often frustratingly slow) spread of American freedom and equality.  But it also has the vile, cruel hatred of the Westboro Baptist Church.  We hope that this is not America, but all too often recently, it seems that it is.

We started at the Brown vs. the Board of Education National Historic Site.  It sits within view of the state capitol dome, at the building that was Monroe Elementary School.  The little girl named Linda Brown, who was a kindergartner in 1949, was the daughter of the first named plaintiff of the group of parents and students suing the Board of Education of Topeka for the right to attend this segregated school.  NAACP lawyers under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall combined five cases from across the country, and ultimately brought them to the Supreme Court.  The Court decided unanimously that "...in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place.  Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."  This museum was originally not a scheduled stop for us, but we figured it was a good place to start the day, since we were already in Topeka.  We thought that we would just take some pictures outside, but once we were there we decided to look through the exhibits.  Of course, the first room of exhibits covers the segregated world that came before the decision, and covers the details of the cases involved.  There were a lot of interactive exhibits in this relatively new site, but the most dramatic and disturbing was a hallway that you walked down that had full-sized screens on each side filled with films of segregationists yelling racial epithets at you and damning integration.  It's not actors; the films all come from the time.  The second room covers the world after the Brown decision, and the struggle for equal rights up to the present day.  There is a kindergarten room further down the hall, to show how it might have looked back in 1954 when the decision came down.  One interesting case in the timeline caught our eye.  In the case of Gong Lum vs. Rice, in 1927, the Supreme Court said that Mississippi could force a Chinese-American student to attend segregated schools for Blacks rather than Whites.  Because of time, we skipped the introductory film, and continued on to Kansas City, but we thought that this was a worthwhile stop.

Since both Julie and Emma were disappointed that there was no aquarium in St. Louis, they wanted to go to the Sea Life aquarium in Kansas City.  By the time we got back to KC and had parked the car, it was time for lunch.  We were at Crown Center, which is a rather nice shopping mall and entertainment complex.  We found the food court, but we were a little early, since it was still before noon on Sunday.  Most of the cool looking food places were closed, but we were able to get lunch.  Then we went across the street to the Sea Life aquarium, which shares a building with a Legoland Discovery Center.  We just wanted to see the fish.  The aquarium was small but nice, though the admission price seemed a little expensive for the size of the aquarium.  We did notice that it was very kid friendly, and had many exhibits that were low enough for the small children to see into.  When we took a seat in one of the short tunnels that are surrounded by sharks and rays and other fish, we noticed that Julie was spending more time watching the little kids nearby than she was watching the fish.  However, Julie got perturbed when one mother continually identified the sea dragons as "sea horses" to her kids.  One exhibit that we really liked was the sea turtle rescue tank.  A film was playing that showed the aquarium staff bringing one of the injured turtles from Florida to Kansas City.  It was funny to watch the reactions of the TSA people at the Florida airport as the staff brought the crate carrying the turtle through the inspection, as well as the reactions of the flight crew and other passengers.  We skipped the end activity, but there as an interesting spot where kids (and adults) can draw fish of the their own on computers and the "fish" that they made will appear in a nearby "tank" projected onto the wall.

After the aquarium, it was a very short drive to the National World War I Museum and Monument.  If the temperatures weren't in the 90s, we probably would have walked instead.  Kansas City residents started building a monument to the soldiers lost in the Great War as early as 1919, and this effort formed the core of what Congress now recognizes as our nation's official World War I museum.  We're visiting too late for the World War I centennial, which was last year, but Scott was glad he was going to get a chance to visit now.

A large grassy park lays in front of the monument's tower.   We went up to see the view from the 217-foot tall tower, the Liberty Memorial.   The memorial was dedicated in 1921 and was completed in 1926.  An elevator takes visitors most of the way up, but we still had to climb some stairs, apparently because of the elevator's machinery being in the way.  Once at the top, we had a beautiful view of the Kansas City skyline and were treated to a nice breeze that was blowing as well.  Since we don't know the city all that well, there was not a lot that we could pick out, and apparently the stadiums for the Royals and Chiefs are not visible from that vantage point- either that or we missed them.

After the tower, we went into the exhibits.  The first one that we saw was at the same level of the base of the tower and was called "1919- Peace?" The exhibit covered the uneasy year after the war with many artifacts that illuminated the troubles that were continuing in Europe.  From there, we made our way down underneath the monument, where the main exhibit area is.  A glass bridge takes you over a field of red poppies, memorials to the fallen soldiers, and recalling the famous lines from the poem "In Flanders Fields."  An introductory movie sets the stage of what the world was like just as the war was about to break out. 

It's natural for us to compare this museum to the National World War II Museum that we visited last year in New Orleans.   This museum is much smaller than the one in New Orleans, for one thing.  Another big difference is that the World War II Museum starts with the attack on Pearl Harbor and focuses almost exclusively the American involvement in the conflict.  On the other hand, the first half of the World War I museum has no mention of the United States at all, and focuses on the powers at war in Europe.  That all makes sense when you realize how short a time the United States was involved in the war.  The war broke out in Europe in 1914, and the major powers were all drawn into the fight within a week of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.  The fighting exploded into nightmarish proportions almost immediately.  Meanwhile, the United States sat on the far-side of the Atlantic, relatively safe until 1917.  Among the exhibits in this first half of the museum are recreations of German and British trenches, and of course, lots of artillery, weapons and uniforms from the European powers.

At the half-way point of the museum, there is a large theater called the Horizon Theater that has a wide diorama of a bombed-out trench in front of its screen. The movie there tells how the war in Europe got bogged down in the trenches and mud of the Western Front, and followed the story of how the U.S. was slowly drawn into the war.  The Lusitania was sunk by the German U-boats in 1915, but President Woodrow Wilson "kept us out of the war," and was elected again in 1916. Eventually, the Germans would renew their policy of unrestricted submarine warfare and tried to get Mexico to attack us.  At Woodrow Wilson's request, Congress declared war on Germany in 1917, but most of our boys wouldn't be in the fighting until 1918.  (It was just before this theater that Scott lost track of Julie and Emma.  He had been looking at an exhibit on the pilots in the air war, a subject that he has always found interesting, but couldn't find the girls when he was done.  It felt like the OZ museum, all over again.  We did eventually find each other again, and we stuck closer for the second half of the museum.)

The second half of the museum focuses on the United States' involvement, and naturally, has its own collection of uniforms equipment and weapons.  One of the first items on display is the flag that was flying from the U.S. Capitol when Wilson gave his plea to Congress to "make the world safe for democracy" by declaring war.  There is a replica of a French plane painted with the insignia of the Lafayette Escadrille.  There is an actual battle-damaged French tank, which seems small by today's standards.  One of the odder displays is a recreation of the enormous crater that was all that was left of a French farmhouse after it was struck by a 17-inch German howitzer shell.  In the middle of the two halves of the museum are "interactive tables" that allow people to explore different topics of the war on their own.  Julie used the opportunity to explore the history of Kansas City's involvement.  While she did that, Scott and Emma were in a glass booth, where visitors could select from various things to listen to.  They listened to musical selections like "Over There," "How You Gonna Keep Them Down on the Farm," and "Pack Up Your Trouble in Your Old Kit Bag."

After we were done with the World War I museum, we started to head south.  We left Kansas City, Missouri, and entered the state of Kansas again.  Our goal was to get to Oklahoma, or at least close to it so we have a short drive tomorrow.  Our route took us through Osawatomie again and over Pottawatomie Creek-- We didn't expect to see those so soon again!  We drove for about two hours which brought us to Coffeeville (or as Emma calls it, Covfefe-ville), near the southern border of Kansas.  We had a hotel room waiting for us here, and after checking in, had a comfortable dinner nearby.  We're glad now that we didn't try to go all the way to Dodge City because the weather certainly would have been miserably hot, and we managed to do quite a bit more with the time that would have otherwise just been for driving.