I had an editor one time who told me on a regular basis that I wrote too long. I told him I was giving my writing personality. He said I was boring my readers.
Well, we’re not having that argument today. I have one message:
Cost of the book is $19.95, plus a few bucks for shipping and handling. To avoid those charged, you could pick up a copy at the Children’s Mercy Gift Shops. It’s not yet available at book stores … that’s a whole other story!
As a reminder, here’s how the back cover describes the book:
This is the story of the evolution of pediatric medicine and a prescription for the future, one that goes beyond basic medicine to touch the while child and family. It’s about the growth of psuchosocial care, an advance that leads to healthier children, stronger families and brither tomorrows.
If you want to know more, look back at the most recent blog posts. Better yet, buy a copy.
In the newspaper business where I grew up and where I began my professional career, we learn to begin the stories with the most important information. Not a lot of set up. See, newspapers got it long before the rest of us: people (not just four-year-olds!) have short attention spans and you need to hit them with the good stuff front and center.
If you don’t, they call it “burying the lead.” I don’t want to do that. So, I’ll just come right out and tell you:
“For All Children Everywhere” is at the printer.
The presses will be rolling soon with “For All Children Everywhere.”
No more writing. No more editing. No more pictures to tweak.
“The train has left the station,” my editor wrote last week. “Everything is at the printer.”
Whew! Over and out. Outta my hands. This feels gooooooood.
I honestly didn’t know how difficult it would be to let it go. You know, I have been living with this book for the past couple years. Longer it seems. And now, it’s gone. I’m not “writing the book” any longer. Granted, there are lots of other things to do (like figuring out how to actually get the books into the hands of people who might wish to read it) but the writing part is over.
Someone suggested it must have been like having a baby. I wouldn’t presume to suggest I have any idea what that’s like. (I’ll admit, when it comes to whole child birth thing, I am glad I was born male.)
The best analogy for letting go of the book I can come up is that it’s like sending one of your kids off to college.
Daryl Lynch, our senior medical director of Ambulatory Services, is also a specialist in adolescent medicine. When we first met a couple of decades ago, he told me he was a big fan of teenagers and said they were mostly misunderstood by their parents and others who considered them a big ol’ pain in the rear. (At the time, two of my daughters were teenagers and Daryl’s kids were much younger. I admit I questioned his personal knowledge of the subject.) He told me there was a very good reason for the tension that develops between most teens and their parents. It’s nature’s way, he professed, of making it easier to say goodbye when the time comes.
It goes like this: If you and your teens are on each other’s nerves all the time, you’ll happily send them out on their own. You might even say, “Good riddance” if it’s been a particularly rough adolescence.
So, that’s kind of the way I feel about the book. Not that it’s been all that rough, but … Let’s see. I wrote it and polished it. Edited it. Watched other people edit it. Read it. Re-read it. Re-re-read it. Looked at it every which way. Even groaned a time or two when I sat down with first one proof and then another and then the “final.” It was time for it to go.
And so it did.
But as I said, all this really means is that it’s time to move on to the next phase.
Like what, you ask? There’s plenty.
The day the printer got the book, one of the folks there asked me where I wanted the books delivered. I had thought of this before, but now that it’s becoming more timely, we needed to make some decision. How much space do we need?
Just how much room do 5,000 copies of a book, 9-by-11-inches, 224 pages take? Probably a fair amount.
Try six or seven palates. That’s around 200 boxes, with 25 or so books in each box and accounting for potential overrun of 10 percent. That means, ah, they’re not going in my office. (Not that I am complaining … not at all. I know lots of people don’t even have offices and many people here share theirs with one or even two people. My private space even comes with a nifty view of the Sprint Center.)
A few calls and emails later, I secured some space in a warehouse. “How long do you need the space for,” someone asked? “How many books would you like to buy?” I questioned back.
So, as you can see, even though the writing part of the book is finished, there is plenty more to do. I’ve even begun discussions about a new book, or maybe it’s just an addendum to “For All Children Everywhere.” (One of my answers to the common question of “What’s new?” is, “It’s always something.”)
This got me thinking, too, that it’s time to close down this blog. It is called “Writing the
There’s a comedian in every crowd.
Book,” after all, because that’s what I’ve been doing. The writing is done. It’s time to move on. But I’m not going away.
Instead, I’ve established a new blog, called “For All Children Everywhere.” Beginning next time, that’s where you’ll find me pontificating about Children’s Mercy, its history and the great stories and resonate today.
At “For All Children Everywhere,” you’ll find the same personality. The same heart-warming anecdotes. The same inspiration that keeps me coming to work each day with a dedicated, compassionate and dedicated group of people who are carrying on the dreams of a couple of sisters who defied the odds and challenged us, as their father challenged them, to “make good citizens of your neighbors.”
So see, one door is closing, but another one opens. I can’t wait to see what’s in there.
For the occasion of our 10th wedding anniversary, my wife and I decided we would renew our wedding vows. We gathered the family and some close friends and renewed our commitment to one another and the “us” that we had created.
The first words out of my mouth, as I stood there on the altar, hand in hand with my bride, took some of those in attendance by surprise. (I knew better than surprise my wife at a time like this so she was briefed ahead of time.)
“I had no idea what I was getting into,” I told Carla and anyone else who was paying attention.
After letting those assembled sit puzzled for a few seconds, I went to wax poetic about the extraordinary depth of our love, the wonders of our family and the beauty of life with all of us together. There is no way I could have imagine all this incredible things. I talked about the challenges and the opportunities. About the triumphs and the stumbles.
“You see, I didn’t have a clue,” I said. “Because if I had, I either would have run the other way as fast as I could or I just wouldn’t have believed it. Either way, I’m glad I didn’t know or I might not have gone through with it. And I am sure glad that I did.”
I still feel that way today. And not just about my marriage. I feel that way about “For All Children Everywhere.”
I didn’t know what I was getting into. But I am sure glad I did it.
I was thinking about that the other day when looking as the final pieces of this Children’s Mercy history book came together. And what, you might ask, were those final pieces?
One of them was the index, that comprehensive listing of names and subjects covered in the 200-plus pages of the book. It comes at the end of the process because there’s no reason to build the index until everything else is firmly in place so the index knows where to find it.
Now granted, it’s not the most exciting reading in the book. In fact, I doubt anyone actually reads the index itself. Except for people like book writers and editors. We have to.
And I am glad I did. Because it was quite confirming: boy, is there a lot of information in this book. In tiny type and on page after page, you can see names of people throughout the history of this “hospital of the little people.” You can see topics like Medicaid and managed care; diseases such as polio, the Spanish flu and cancer. It goes on and one and, if I do say so myself, it’s a pretty impressive list of information.
But, if someone had told me two years ago that I’d be writing about all these topics, all these diseases, all these people, I might have run the other way.
I had the same sort of reaction to the so-called Source Notes in the book. This is a six-
In tiny type — it will be more readable in the book, believe me — the Source Notes serve to show readers that information contained in “For All Children Everywhere” is not a figment of the author’s imagination.
page narrative that describes where all the information in “For All Children Everywhere” came from. The book is not an academic text and it’s not a dissertation, so it is not filled with footnotes. I didn’t want to bog down the reading. But we needed to be “on the record” about our sources to instill confidence in the veracity of the stories and to serve other researchers for many years to come. So I wrote these notes.
Again, the detail is impressive. There were dozens and dozens of sources consulted, including newspaper clippings, memoirs of former staff members, published and unpublished histories, Web sites, newsletters and internal memos, board minutes, libraries near and far and historical societies where ever the stories took us. I sipped coffee and ate lunch with dozens of people, all across the country, who would answer my questions and reminisce, sometimes with audio recorders or video cameras capturing it all for posterity.
And again, if I had known how much reading and digging and interviewing I was actually going to have to do, I might not have even wanted to start.
Yet, when I look at finished product, I am sure glad that I did. I hope you will be too.
Because just like my home life, even though I might not have known exactly where it is going to lead, this had all the right ingredients for a good book and was well worth the plunge.
OK, so we’re nearing the end of the this whole writing-the-book process. I know I have been saying that for a while now, but this time, it really, really is close. They’re practically warming up the presses in Marceline, Missouri for “For All Children Everywhere” so there’s only so much more time I have to apply the finishing touches.
So here we are, in these final stages and I have found, at last, what I am sure will be my
The cover of the book will look something like this
least favorite part of the deal.
There were lots of candidates for “worst part.”
Documenting sources and then writing them all down was the first thing I dreaded. Not that I was scared of the research or worried about making things up. But it slows the process down. And I know myself enough to know that working on level of detail is not at the top of my “Fun Things To Do” list.
Turns out it wasn’t so bad after all … it just took a little organization and, all modesty aside, I’m pretty good at organization and keeping track of important information. Once I set my mind to it, at least.
Then there was the fear of the review process. I did not look forward to having a couple dozen people on the Archive Committee and a few others — not to mention the editor — who needed to see and “approve” or “edit” my work before I could check the box and say, “Done.” Again, this wasn’t as bad as I worried. (And is it just me or does that usually happen to most people — the anticipation is far worse that the reality?)
Most people who offered suggestions were reasonable, thoughtful and did so in ways that were constructive, as opposed to being personal and petty. Oh sure, there was an occasional snarky comment or a bit of editorializing and a nit picked here and there, but for the most part, my reviewers helped make for a better book. (Thank you.)
As for the editor, well, I figured he knew what he was doing (he does) so I pretty much let him have at it. I remembered to “accept the things I cannot change.” And as it turned out, I learned a lot for which I am grateful and, in a true symbiotic relationship, I ended up editing him a bit, too. Or at least educating him in the ways of Children’s Mercy.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the need to go painstakingly slow through the whole book. Word for word. Nice and easy. Looking for misspellings, or grammatical miscues. Maybe awkward phrasing, insensitive words or flat-out confusing language, like acronyms that are so blasted popular in medicine.
That was pretty bad. Because I don’t like to read slowly. Usually not, anyway. But that was just the beginning.
Then came the proof stages. Two-hundred-and-forty-pages, 70,000 words. Hundreds of photos and cutlines. It was fun to hold in my hand. But, ugh, I had to read the whole thing again!
And then when others weighed in, I read it again. We would debate a few words here or there: were they quaint or outdated and offensive? Questions would be raised — some for the second or third time — and I’d have to go back to the sources. Sometimes I needed to find additional, new sources, just to be sure.
The quest for accuracy required this fact-checking period and I found myself walking the halls of the hospital, making sure which stained-glass window was on the right and which was on the left. Does the sign on the wall above the Bridge of Hope match the words I used when I named it in Chapter 6? In the list of names of our medical directors, do their terms add up or have I accounted for any times when the position was unfilled? If I said Jack Nicklaus attended the Children’s Mercy Golf Classic six times over 25 years, does his name appear six times in the appendix where the list of Golf Classic guests is presented? I’ll spare you the details of our discussions about ellipses and other fine points of punctuation, fonts and color bleeds.
But you get the idea. Details. Details. Details. Yuk!
There are people at magazines and at publishing companies who do this sort of thing all day long. Copy editors at newspapers count this among their duties. Me? I would rather, er … well, I’d rather not. It reminds me of when we were rebuilding our house in Burlington, Iowa, after it had burned on Christmas Eve, 1976. The contractor was asking all sorts of questions and he finally pushed my mom over the edge with, “How many electrical outlets would you like in this room? And where?” I don’t think I was supposed to hear the words that came out of her mouth.
As I worked my way through the proofs not just once, but twice, I always found things and asked the editor and designer to make changes. Some of my reviewers were a little, shall we say, tardy, in their responses so we had to weigh those too just when we thought we were getting closer to finito.
All of us intimate with the book grew a little weary. “You know, Tom,” the editor told me one afternoon, “there will be mistakes in the book. There just will.”
I know … I do. But we’re trying really, really hard to find them all.
This part is no fun. But, as I said, we’re nearing the end. It won’t last much longer. What a great day is coming.
My wife was scanning through Facebook the other day while we were watching TV (who, us, multi-task?) when she saw something about a nephew who is a professor at the University of North Dakota, where he pursues his passion for chasing tornadoes (among other things, I’m sure, but atmospheric sciences is way over my head so I’ll leave it at that.)
Seems Dr. Matt Gilmore was working with his students to help them summarize their research projects. Instead of presenting pages-long speeches on their projects, the students had a mere minute or two to impress upon their peers and other professors what they were doing and why it mattered.
When I heard about this, I immediately thought about the “elevator speech.” You know, the thing you’d tell people during an elevator ride to give them a good impression of yourself or your work or your company’s product. I also thought about USA Today, which I wrote about here, which in addition to its colorful and graphic-filled design is also well-known for its short stories.
“Anybody can write a long story,” I remember one old gruff editor-turned-teacher at the University of Iowa School of Journalism barking at a Reporting II class. “But it takes a writer to write a short one.” (Hmm. We thought about that one over a cold one at The Deadwood tavern later that afternoon.)
The professor was right, to a certain extent. Of course, not everyone can write a long story. I sometimes forget how difficult writing can be for some people. I am mostly surrounded by people all day at work who know how to write pretty well, or even better. But there are other groups I am involved with where my writing ability stands out as extra special. Like I’ve said, sometimes I take it for granted. So no, not everyone can write a long story. (It never gets old proving the teacher wrong!)
But where he was right was that is sometimes takes a lot more skill, more writing ability and more time, to make your point in fewer words. Reporters are taught, or at least used to be taught, to write in the style of the inverted pyramid. That means the most important information is at the top, followed by the second most important, the third, and so on. The reason for this is two-fold: an editor may need to cut the story to make room for it and this allows the cuts to be made quickly; just cut the paragraphs from the bottom until the story is the right length. The other reason is because people want to know the most important details first; if they want more, they can keep reading.
Writing shorter stories takes discipline. It forces writers to follow my favorite rule in The Elements of Style, “omit needless words.” But sometimes we get lazy. When space is no longer a concern — heck, I could write FOREVER on this blog — it’s easy to just run on and on and on. The English language has wonderful, precise words. Sometimes it is more of a challenge to find just the right one and leave the unnecessary ones out.
In the case of this book, the editor told me nearly two years ago that I needed 60,000 words and panic set in. Without really thinking about it, I began to add all sorts of parentheticals, introductory phrases and whatnot. Gotta fill up those 224 pages. This makes it even harder in the editing phase. Superfluous language has no real place, though the editor and I did argue a bit about what was necessary and what was not. (We think we’re up to about 70,000 words in “For All Children Everywhere,” but who’s counting.)
So, I’d gotten use to writing long. But then, someone comes along and tells you to summarize what you’ve written. Just like those students at the University of North Dakota: it’s easy to talk ad nauseam about the book. But to do it in a few sentences?
There are two places where I’ve had to write especially tight. One is in the blurb that runs on the front inside flap of the cover. This is where a summary of the book goes. You’ve seen ’em before. Just a few sentences so someone can get a sense of what the book is about and whether or not they want to read it. The same blurb is then condensed even more for the back cover. “On the eve of the 20th century, two sisters …”
The other place, and what brings us back to the title of this piece is the “About the Author” bit that goes on the inside back flap.
“Write tight,” my remember my dad reminding me during a writing session we had next
Reporter at a DVT, which was nothing more than a fancy word processor.
to one of the ol’ Video Display Terminals that replaced typewriters in newsrooms in the late 1970s. “Words are your currency.”
“Vigorous writing is concise writing,” Strunk and White admonished in their little style guide. I get it.
But 150 words to tell the world “about the author?” Boil my life, my meaning for future generations who may stumble upon this book, into 150 words. Heck, this blog post is at more than 750 words already and I’ve barely gotten to the point.
What would I say? What would I leave out? What’s important in my life for people to know? What helped make me the writer that I am? The person that I am that poured his heart and soul into this publication?
I looked at lots of other books. Since this is my first, I can’t reference all the previous books I’ve written. Does anybody really care where I went to college? Most authors mention that in their blurbs. (Or maybe their editors or publishers write them.) How about my kids? Should I mention them? If so, how about grandkids? They’re important too. A lot of books tell you where the author lives. Maybe it’s important to know that Anne Tyler lives in Baltimore (and that’s why most of her stories are based there.) But does anybody care that I live in Mission? Does that say something about me? Yes it does. Is it important to the book? Maybe.
This is my elevator speech. Some people think of it as that few words to leave with someone to sell them something. And I writing something to sell myself? To sell the book? To sell the idea of me writing another book?
I’m not going to tell you what’s in my “About the Author” bit. It is written and it accompanies a new portrait of me with an old Royal typewriter that was my mother’s from 1939 and that I used until I got my first personal computer (a hand-me-down Apple II) in the 1990s. You can read what I wrote when the book comes out this summer.
Now here’s something for you to think about. It might seem odd, like writing your own obituary, I mean, but in the meantime, ask yourself: What’s in your elevator speech?
Rushing toward a date with a printer (yes, we really are getting close … or so I think, and dread), there’s not much time for a lot of creative writing this week. So, instead, here’s the rest of the story began last time about the stained glass, as published in The Kansas City Star in 1976. The pictures are mine, not The Star’s. The factual error (the Mercy Hospital Club was young girls, not adults) is the paper’s; the story is reprinted here as published originally.
Enjoy … and when I return, I promise more interesting tales about “For All Children Everywhere.” Assuming it doesn’t kill me in the meantime. (Just kidding.)
The window from the Multae Sorores club, left, is one of three in the old Chapel at Children’s Mercy Hospital on the Adele Hall Campus of Hospital Hill.
Gift to Children’s Mercy adorns chapel after 70 years
By Marge Holler Stephens, A member of the Staff
The City Editor, Kansas City Star, Kansas City, Mo.
Dear Sir,
I am hoping you may be able to assist me in a quest in your city, which, by the way, was the place of my birth and the first 16 years of my life, until California called. My story goes back to about 1905 …
The letter came from Mrs. Paul E. Webb, a 79-year-old homemaker in Claremont, Calif, who has been back to her home town since 1933. The quest: locating a stained glass window in a children’s hospital from another place, another time. She had showed the window to her husband and three sons when they drove through Kansas City in the ’30s.
The window of rose-colored flowers still exists, gracing the chapel at Children’s Mercy
Story from the Kansas City Star, 1976
Hospital at 24th and Gillham Road. It had been purchased at the turn of the century with 100 hard earned dollars raised by a group of children 9 to 11 years old. The children knew only that in some way they wanted to help other, less fortunate children.
Mrs. Webb, the former Margaret Griffin, lived at 2120 E. 7th with her parents, who were bakers.
“My father and mother delivered day-old bread to an orphanage outside Kansas City,” Mrs. Webb recalled in a recent telephone interview. “I always accompanied them; I was left in the buggy to wait. Little children were playing on the playground at the orphanage. One little girl especially appealed to me. It sort of broke my heart. I was crying when my parents came back and my mother asked me why. ‘About the little girl who is waving to me,’ I told her. ‘Well, you could do something about that,’ my mother said.”
Margaret talked with her neighborhood friends and Woodland School classmates, who banded together as the Multae Sorores – a noble name which her brother, who was then studying Latin in high school, deemed worthy of their mission. It means “many sisters,” although one boy, Dexter B. Croswhite, talked his way into the group. The children agreed to raise a handsome sum of money to be put to good use.
“Our purpose was philanthropic with the Children’s Mercy Hospital for our project,” said Mrs. Webb, who was president of the children’s club.
“In those days, about every kitchen used 100-pound flower sacks for tea towels,” she said. “We bought the sacks from local bakeries, laundered them ourselves, after ripping the string and balling it for use, ironed them and then at every meeting we did the hemming of the raw edges.
“Our mothers and friends bought our entire output, almost faster than we could finish them. These we sold for 25 cents and made a good profit. Our customer list grew and grew, as did our membership. Finally, came the great day (it took three years) when our treasurer announced we had a savings of $100, which seemed to us an enormous sum.
“We called the hospital (in 1908 it was at 414 Highland) to find out how our money could
The Multae Sorores window
be used. A new wing was planned at the time which would have a playroom at one end of which a stained glass window was planned. That, then, appealed to us and we immediately got in touch with an artist who worked out a suitable design and would do the window for us at little more than our $100.
“At his suggestion, he placed a panel at the bottom of the window that would have our (the officers’) signatures imbedded. The window was installed shortly there after and Multae Sorores paid the bill in full, inclusive of installation.”
The Multae Sorores were present for a ceremony when the window was installed on Feb. 3, 1908. The window was moved when the hospital moved facilities at 1710 Independence Ave. It was installed in the chapel there. Now it is in the chapel at the new Children’s Mercy Hospital at 24th and Gillham Road, which has been part of the Hospital Hill complex since 1970.
An almost matching window, placed to the right, was donated by the Mercy Hospital Club, a group of adult women. One of those women is still living in the area. A center panel, given several years earlier by Margaret J. Yates, first was in the chapel at one of the hospital’s early locations at 11th and Troost and has been moved three times. Mrs. Yates gave it in appreciation for the care the hospital provided for the poor in the city, often without pay.
The window from Multae Sorores, a gift made almost 70 years ago, care to mind in recent months because Mrs. Webb is writing memories of her mother, whose maiden name was Frances Swartz.
“I’ve been concentrating on my past,” Mrs. Webb said, “so I could leave something for my sons and grandchildren so they will know some of the things of their roots. My mother, an immigrant who came to the U.S. about 1890 from Poland, made a way for herself and her small child. She had been widowed in Poland.
“In those days, when immigrants from Poland came over here, they were looked down on and she had to rise above it … the way she struggled. She went first to Denver and she met my father there in 1893.”
Her mother, Mrs. Webb believes, was the inspiration for her philanthropic interests throughout her life. The family moved to California in 1912. In her high school years at Los Angeles High School, she did social work in the Russian community.
Mrs. Webb met her husband, Dr. Paul E. Webb, at college. He eventually became principal at the high school she had attended years before and for awhile served as superintendent of the Los Angeles school system. The couple has been married 58 years.
Mrs. Webb has been an active member of P.E.O. In 1948 and 1949, she was a volunteer teacher for the YWCA in Japan, where she taught Japanese homemakers how to sew and cook.
Now that her husband is retired and she is approaching 80, she spends a lot of time with her plants and writing about her past.
Mrs. Webb said her mother also instilled a sense of resourcefulness in her, which first became apparent with the tea towel project and later saw her through some difficult Depression years.
In the Depression, Mrs. Webb and her father invented Loomette, which was patented and sold nationally. It produces small squares of woven cloth to make afghans.
Her parents had moved from East 7th Street to the Westport area before moving to California in 1912.
“Business conditions had going very bad for bakers. The great-sized bakeries were coming into existence and the small bakeries were out. My parents opened a retail bakery and delicatessen in California.”
When she came through Kansas City in 1933 with her family and son, Bob Webb, then a child, found in the attic of the weathered house on East 7th an old sign advertising his grandparents baker. It read “Mother Griffin’s Home-Baked Bread.”
Bob Webb remarked by phone recently, “Suddenly, all those stories about my grandparents seemed true. I had real proof. My mother is writing a book about her (his grandmother.) It’s a fantastic tale of a very strong women who picked up stakes in Europe and came here to America with a very small daughter. That would seem incredible today.”
One of the more satisfying, and also frustrating, parts of this whole process has been the uncovering of new information that sets the record straight. My wife used to consider herself a great detective when she’d help the girls recover “lost” items, like shoes or blouses that had “disappeared” like things are apt to do in kids’ rooms. Maybe that’s where I got the thrill of the hunt.
I knew back when we were celebrating our Centennial in 1997 that some of the stories we tell about Children’s Mercy are nearly or completely impossible to verify. And the older the stories get, sometimes the harder they are to prove. No one is around to remember them. Memories fade, or become clouded. No records were kept. Or if they were, they may not have survived: fire has destroyed legions of records, including most of the United State Census of 1890; people threw away much more, often not realizing the value of what they were relegating to the trash heap. (Hoarders are a problem, I admit. But I’ve grown to love savers.)
So I knew some of what I was up against in writing this book.
One of the things we’ve tried to do with “For All Children Everywhere” is to tell the truth the best that we can find it. There are a number of facts that we’re “correcting.” I put the quotes in there because we’ve done the best we can, used the best sources we could find, verified as much as we could. (There were constraints, of course, like time or budget.) I’m sure we’re close.
This is frustrating, in my mind, because nobody wants to be wrong. In this case at least, we want to tell the true stories, not just stories the way we want them, but they way they actually happened. (If anyone is thinking about “alternative facts” here, I’m not intentionally being political … just telling it like I see it.)
What turns this frustration into great satisfaction is when we uncover something that sets the record straight. There’s something cleansing about righting a wrong. I told the story about the shop owner-turned-dentist who married on of our founders, Katharine Richardson. We thought we knew the story and repeated it often. Then, we uncover something, look in a different place, ask a different question and, lo and behold, our understanding is turned completely inside out.
It happened again, just last week.
This trio of stained-glass windows came to Children’s Mercy in different times and from different sources, they they are together today in our old Chapel on the Adele Hall Campus of Hospital Hill.
Rummaging through a box of random newspaper clippings, I found a piece about the stained-glass windows in our old Chapel.
Now, I knew the story about one of the windows. It is engraved with the names of the officers of the Mercy Hospital Club. One of those officers was Sybil Silkwood. We have a park in front of the hospital named for her, thanks to a generous gift from her son James B. Nutter and his family. In an early draft of “For All Children Everywhere,” I told the story this way …
“One of the tools Alice used to remind people of the work of Mercy and solicit donations was a monthly newsletter, the Mercy Messenger. In it, she often reminded readers that the children led the way in philanthropy, too. Young people participated in spelling bees to raise funds. They put on carnivals and plays. They donated canned goods.
“Sybil Silkwood was one of those early, young supporters. When Sybil was a little girl, just eight years old, she and her friends would put on plays in the neighborhoods of Kansas City. The audience at these outdoor affairs would be charged pennies, maybe a nickel, to see the girls’ acting, singing and dancing talents on display.
“Money from those plays was donated to Mercy Hospital.
“The little girls, who called themselves the Mercy Hospital Club, also donated a pair of stained glass windows for the hospital’s chapel. They were dedicated Nov. 8, 1905 and a window lists Sybil as vice president. Those windows are still in the hospital’s chapel, having been moved at least twice. (Sybil is also the namesake of the Sybil Silkwood Nutter Playground in front of the current Children’s Mercy – Adele Hall Campus. A small amphitheater in the playground pays homage to the little girls’ dedication to children less fortunate than themselves. Sybil’s children and grandchildren have continued her spirit of giving into the 21st Century, donating to develop the playground and a garden outside the Lisa Barth Chapel, which opened in 2012.)”
Remember that I told you this was a DRAFT of an excerpt from the book. That’s important because there’s something wrong there. See the copy in boldface type. The Mercy Hospital Club did not donate a pair of windows. Instead, the girls donated just one of the three. Previous histories had said there were two windows. In the early stages of writing the book, I often wrote things that I had not verified independently. In some cases, I found out I couldn’t verify so I’ve repeated what was written before me and said a little prayer for its authenticity. (Or sometimes, I left out some things — including a juicy tidbit here and there — when I couldn’t prove it. Better to omit than be incorrect, I say. Though not everyone agrees.)
Anyway … the Mercy Hospital Club donated one of the windows. It would have been first for the hospital on Highland Avenue, which Children’s Mercy occupied between 1903 and 1917. It was then moved to Independence Avenue and finally, to Hospital Hill in 1970.
The middle window has an inscription that it was donated by Margaret Yates. According to a newspaper article, Yates was an adult who made the donation in recognition for the good works of the hospital. The news article said that window was originally at the hospital at 11th and Troost, where the children’s hospital — not yet called Mercy — was operating from 1898 to 1902.
That still left the third window. A mystery. And I had to let it go since we’re rushing toward the deadline to get the book to the printer in Marceline, Missouri. I moved on to other, more pressing, details.
Until I opened the box of dusty, yellowing newspaper clippings. (Admittedly, it’s easy for me to get distracted.) One headline caught my eye.
Gift to Children’s Mercy adorns chapel after 70 years
Discovery! A rush of adrenaline. As Paul Harvey used to say on his radio program, “… the rest of the story.”
No, now don’t worry. I haven’t gotten all full of myself and believe it’s important to make you endure my words of wisdom and inspiration.
Heck, these days, I don’t feel like I have much to offer anyway. My focus is pretty myopic, owing to lack of sleep and an inability to concentrate on much of anything as the book, “For All Children Everywhere,” careens towards a date with the printer in just a few weeks. If I thought the book was consuming before — now, with real, drop-dead deadlines within days, well it’s hard to keep my laissez faire facade. There are so many details to wrestle with. But I’ll bore you with those another time.
As the representative of Drs. Alice Berry Graham and Katharine Berry Richardson at the Hall of Fame shindig on March 22, I had the honor of spending the morning with living honorees or the representatives of those who had gone before us. And when I say honor, I mean it. It was also humbling … to hear the stories of how others have contributed so much to make Kansas City the great place to live that it is. It reminds you that as great as your own contributions may be, they are a mere part of the mix. It truly does take all kinds. Alice and Katharine were incredible forces of nature and we owe them a debt of gratitude. But there are so many others we should honor, as well.
When I first wrote about the Hall of Fame here last fall, this is what I had to say about those who joined the sister in this second class of inductees at UMKC:
“… there are lots of other women, too, deserving the honor and the thanks from generations of Kansas Citians who have been inspired and whose lives are better because of them. Some of the names may not be familiar, but their stories are incredible: Sarah Coates, Lucile Bluford, Mary Shaw “Shawsie” Branton, Sister Rosemary Flanagan, Mary Kay McPhee, Sen. Yvonne S. Wilson, SueEllen Fried. Women who fought prejudice, because of race and gender and social mores. Women who stood up for children and adults who could not stand on their own. Amazing. Strong. Tough. Relentless. Giving. Caring. Passionate. Humble.”
Coming face to face with these stories made those words ring all the more true.
The morning of the Hall of Fame induction March 22, while crews worked tirelessly to convert the gymnasium into an elegant banquet hall, we had the chance to visit with a group of about 100 Girl Scouts and students from St. Theresa’s. Surrounded by a table full of inspiring women, one of my favorite questions was from a young lady who said, basically, “I want to be like you. How do I do it?”
Sister Rosemary, a fireball nun who marched in Selma, Alabama, during the Civil Rights protests of the 1960s, shot up from her chair, right arm raised high: “Put your hand in the air,” she practically shouted (no need for the microphone!) “Volunteer! There are endless opportunities.”
Once you are involved, the others on the panel said, let your passions lead you. Know yourself. And change the world.
Other words of advice from the panel:
Be persistent.
Have confidence.
Show courage.
Be responsible for yourself.
Kindness, first.
I offered a couple of stories about the sisters, how their parents instilled in them the importance of helping others. It was obvious, as I shared the stories, that many people have no idea about Katharine and Alice and what they did for Kansas City, its children and families. Just like many of us don’t know the story of Lucile Bluford or Mary Kay McPhee. We need to preserve these stories. We need to remember. And learn. The Hall of Fame will help us. Add Martha Jane Phillips Starr to the list of people we owe.
As much as I like talking and sharing, I enjoyed listening to the others on the panel, learning from them and their words of wisdom and inspiration. They may have been intended for the young women in the audience, but I took them to heart as well.
You see, I honestly believe that it’s important that we never stop learning. There is so much we can glean from the past. I was blessed to be in this classroom of incredible teachers.
We’re getting ready to this week induct the founders of Children’s Mercy into the Starr Women’s Hall of Fame at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. I first wrote about this last fall and it’s a pretty big deal.
I have, of course, spent a lot of time in the past couple years thinking about Alice Berry Graham and her sister Katharine Berry Richardson, our founders. But with the Hall of Fame coming up, and with Women’s History Month upon us, it seems like the perfect time to think about the influence that women — the Berry sisters and others — have had in our lives, and in our world.
The Hall of Fame says it “celebrates extraordinary women.” That’s Alice (left, above) and Katharine. They were smart. They were tough. When the odds were stacked against them, they did not back down. They went to dental school and medical school in the 1880s when women weren’t allowed in medical societies; they opened a hospital when women couldn’t own property (unless they were widows, which they both were) and decades before they could vote. They raised lots of money to buy, expand and build again, at a time when men were entrusted with nearly all business matters.
With a strong love for helping others, they began caring for children who were sick, abandoned and poor. Children the rest of society was ready to throw away. “It’s time someone took a greater interest in children like these,” Alice reportedly said one night as she and sister looked at the first little girl they had rescued.
It was 1897. The only hospital that would have them in the cow town of Kansas City was a ramshackle old house next to the train tracks and the coal yard. But they were strong and their commitment was stronger.
Soon, other children came. And then other women doctors.
They didn’t just care about their “own” children. Their father taught them, according to legend, that a woman “derives no special consideration, nothing more than a cow or a horse” for taking care of their own. “The truly charitable woman is big enough to help children other than her own,” he said. They embraced immigrants, printing educational materials in languages other than English and rejected racial segregation, working to take care to African-Americans at a time when few others gave the insanity of “separate but equal” a second thought.
The list of women who have been influential in this hospital begins with Alice and Katharine, but it does not stop there. There was the woman who led the hospital for nearly 20 years after the second of the sisters, Katharine, died in 1933. Imagine the incredible void she stepped into. She had to be tough. There were women who served on the board of directors — only women, of course, until the 1950s. Some of them served for decades. These were busy women, in demand. And they chose the cause of caring for poor, sick children.
And today, we are still led by strong women. Three of our four executive vice presidents are women. My boss the entire 20+ years I’ve been here has been a woman. Our CEO credits his mom, a pediatric nurse, with jump starting his career in health care. The last I checked, something like 80 percent of the employees at Children’s Mercy are women. (If you’re a guy intimidated by strong, powerful women, this is not the place for you.)
This hospital, all the children and families it has helped over the past 120 years, and, in fact, all of Kansas City, owes a great deal to strong women.
So, when I get up on the stage at the Hall of Fame ceremony celebrating a bunch of strong women, I’ll be proud to be representing Alice and Katharine and Children’s Mercy. I’ll be thinking how it’s important for all of us to celebrate the strong women in our lives. Not fear them or shy away. I think of a sign I saw at the Women’s March in Washington Square Park this winter: Women’s Right are Human Rights. We should recognize that women’s strength can become everyone’s strength.
Kate and Allie, as I sometimes refer to the sisters is casual conversation, have become a big part of my life (which is a little weird to be writing.) But I feel like I’ve gotten to know them. And I believe one of the reasons I like them so much — in addition to the fact their work lead me to the best job I’ve ever had — is that they are a lot like my own mother.
My mom, who died Friday, at the age of 93, was extraordinary, too. She was the first in a
Peg McCormally
long line of strong women in my life. She was my first, and dare I say best, teacher. She was a bit younger than Katharine and Alice, of course, but she still achieved a great deal against the odds stacked against women. She went to college and got a master’s degree in the 1940s, a time when, if women worked outside the home at all, their career choices were pretty limited. She is credited by her Pulitzer Prize winning husband as his first editor. She raised seven kids of her own and then, as the “truly charitable” women she was, helped hundreds more children through her work for decades as a Head Start teacher. She embraced diversity, welcoming all around her table and into her family.
Two weeks ago, with the pain of metastasizing breast cancer beginning to rack her body, I had a chance to take her a proof of “For All Children Everywhere,” what was previously known at The Book. Up to the last month of her life, mom was a voracious reader, sometimes consuming three or four books a week — without glasses – in part, she said, because, she said, there’s not a d— thing worth watching on TV.
By the time I got to show her the book, she didn’t have the energy to read the whole thing. (She’d already read drafts of some of the early chapters and declared it “a pretty good read, but too many names.”) So I showed her some of the pictures. She loved seeing the ones of the children from the 1920s, the time when she was growing up, going to dance recitals, playing games, embracing life. Reminded her of some of her playmates, she said. When we reached the 1950s, she saw pictures that reminded her of her own kids. “A miracle you didn’t kill yourselves,” she said, thinking about the antics of her brood.
“But we turned out OK,” I reminded her, squeezing her hand. We shared one of those precious moments when we knew we wouldn’t be seeing each other much any more.
Back to the book, I closed up the proof, returning it to its box.
“Pretty amazing women,” she said.
“Yeah, just like you,” I said, a little louder than normal because her hearing was shot and I wanted to make sure she heard. “Just like you.”
So, now that you know the name of the book, you might be thinking: what’s it mean?
Maybe you’re not thinking that. But I’m going to tell you anyway. There’s no reason to keep it a mystery. It’s actually a pretty good story. But first … a little bit of a detour (not like that is a surprise, I’m sure!)
The other day, before the Oscars were awarded (in one case, twice!), my wife and I went to see one of the nominees for best picture, “Lion.” It certainly was worthy of the nomination for Best Picture, in our humble, not Hollywood-elite opinions. In fact, we thought it was better than the eventually winner. But that’s not the point. The reason I bring it up is because I had to wonder, “Why is it called that?”
“LaLa Land” makes sense from the get-go. Same with “Hacksaw Ridge.” “Hidden Figures” is clever, but still obvious. “Lion?” Not the name of the book. You go all the way through the movie and you still don’t know. Was the main character relentless in his quest, like a lion? Are lions relentless? And then, finally, two hours in … as the credits begin to roll and you’re picking up your popcorn bag and Raisinette box, they put some words on the screen to tell you why “Lion.” The whole dang movie doesn’t explain it. They need to put some extra words on the screen at the end so you get it.
That’s the kind of obscure title I just don’t get. And we’ve avoided that here. You don’t have to wait to the very end. There will be an explanation near the front of the book, I believe. And I’m not going to make you wait that long to know what it’s called what it’s called.
As I mentioned last time, as several of us were discussing titles over the course of writing the book, we landed on the idea of using a quote. There were many of them that we could have chosen. But we didn’t.
The first quote that gained widespread interest from the Children’s Mercy Archive Committee was “Until I’ve Served Them All.” Those are words attributed to founder Katharine Berry Richardson, MD. We liked it because it speaks to aspiration. To work that is never done. To commitment. And dedication. To love of the most vulnerable.
But the closer we looked, we found some issues. First of all, that’s not the actual quote. Facts are facts, despite what some in high-political circles might say. What Katharine actually said, the best we can tell, is “Unless I’ve Served Them All.” That’s different. It doesn’t have the same forward-looking theme to it. There’s also the question of who “them” is. If it’s true, as we like to say, that children are the bosses of this place, then shouldn’t “children” be in the title. Or at least be clear. And what about “I?” This is a place of team work, of doctors and nurses and security guards and generous donors. This is not about “me” or “I.”
Yeah, yeah … now you may be wondering, “This is really nit-picky … it’s just a word.” But this is important. (Word to the wise: never, ever tell a writer, “it’s just a word.” Just saying.) These words will live for a long, long time. Just like I have been reading 100-year-old newsletters and decades-old books, someone generations from now will be reading this work. We want to get it as right as we can.
So, I kept looking around. And in the same context that Katharine said she would not be satisfied “unless I’ve served for all,” she also uttered the words that we have now chosen for the title: That she would work and work until Children’s Mercy was truly “For All Children Everywhere.”
So where did it come from?
The genesis for this quote goes back almost 100 years. The 1920s was a time when Kansas City and the rest of the country was unapologetically segregated. Many people didn’t consider it racist at all; that’s just the way it was. (There’s a great line in the movie “Hidden Figures” when a white woman says to an African-American, “I don’t have anything personal against you people,” and the Octavia Spencer character says, “I bet you believe that, too.”)
White people had their hospitals. African-Americans had theirs. Poor African-American children, especially, suffered because there was limited training of African-American doctors and nurses to take care of them.
Katharine knew this was wrong. She knew there had to be a better way. She knew that all children needed a special brand of care. And yet, she also was smart enough to know that if she began to take care of African-American children herself, some of her funding would cease. At the time, Children’s Mercy operated strictly on charitable contributions. Some of those donations would surely dry up at the sight of dark-skinned children in the beds.
Here’s what happened, according to an early draft of “For All Children Everywhere:”
“Mercy Hospital’s only job is making citizens out of little sick children,” she wrote in the Messenger. “It has no other reason for existence. It has in its wards children of almost all kinds … only the Negroes are excluded …
Few hospitals or doctors would care for them, and hardly any doctors were trained as pediatricians, African-American children often went completely without.
Katharine turned to a friend and colleague, John Edward Perry. One of the rare African-
A training program in the 1920s for African-American doctors and nurses was started by Children’s Mercy to extend its care “For All Children Everywhere.”
American physicians, Perry founded Wheatley-Provident Hospital at 18th and Forest. It was the only African-American owned and operated hospital in Kansas City at the time …
“For ordinary decency’s sake, let’s take the burden of the superior race we claim ourselves to be and teach these colored men the way to make a sick child well,” she wrote, explaining the education mission of the program at Wheatley. “If you could see the surgery done at Wheatley Hospital and done by hands, the blackest of them all, you’d never ask that question again – and you’d come to bring your money and yourself to make one place in all America where any colored man might come and share the knowledge we have no right to keep from him.”
The appeals worked and the donations came … The effort was endorsed by the Council of Social Agencies, which claimed 60 organizations as members. One of the first clubs was The Mercy-Wheatley Quaker Club. Katharine wrote that “the Friends (Quakers) have always stood by the Negro people …”
The clinic opened on April 19, 1923. Dr. Robert Schauffler taught at the first clinic to a roomful of African-American medical students. According to the National Child Conservation League at the time, what was being done to help African American children in Kansas City had not been attempted anywhere else in the United States …
Katharine was proud of the work she’d accomplished.
“For years, the sign over Mercy – The Children’s Mercy Hospital – had haunted and troubled me. I felt the sign was a lie as long as nothing was being done for the unfortunate and suffering Negro children,” she said in a newspaper article. “It is now for all children everywhere.”
And so, there you have it. A title that speaks to an important historical pinnacle; but also to the aspiration we have in 2017, with a shrinking world and a hospital where everyone, truly everyone, is welcome.
There is, of course, much more to the story. That’s why there is a book.
Katharine Berry Richardson, MD, center, and J.E. Perry, MD, top, worked together to establish a training program and pediatric ward at Wheatley-Provident Hospital in the 1920s. Students, doctors and nurses posed on the front steps of the Mercy Ward addition at 18th and Forest funded in part by philanthropists Frank Niles and William Volker
Cost of the book is $19.95, plus a few bucks for shipping and handling. To avoid those charged, you could pick up a copy at the Children’s Mercy Gift Shops. It’s not yet available at book stores … that’s a whole other story!
ask? There’s plenty.
thought about USA Today, 
WritingtheBook 