We were in Kansas City much of this past week celebrating my son Isaac’s 16th birthday. (Someday I will have to share our tragic tale of having to become parents in the 6th grade — so young we were — as soon as I make it up.)

The trip included our first visit to the renovated Kauffman Stadium, where the Royals seemed as though they might break their latest losing streak … but then managed to blow a 6-2 lead in the 8th inning. (That game was Wednesday. The streak finally ended tonight, Saturday.) For me, the Royals are the living face of economic decline in the Kansas City region. Only Wal-Mart seems to thrive around here. The Royals are owned by a man who made his money at Wal-Mart and now runs the team like Wal-Mart: a shiny setting in which to sell the cheapest, flimsiest products undemanding consumers will buy. How cheap and flimsy? The Royals’ putative “power”-”hitting” outfielder, Jose Guillen, the best free agent the owner would shell out for, sustained a season-ending leg injury putting on his shin guard the night we were there. Guillen was announced in the starting line-up, then pinch-hit for in the first inning. Baseball fan Isaac focused on Mark Buehrle’s perfect game and the Cardinals’ much-needed trade for Matt Holliday to stay in his birthday happy place.

During our visit, my Mom had on hand the official photographic record of the Missouri School of Mines 50-year reunion Isaac and I attended with my Dad in June, chronicled in my controversial post on Rolla a while back. Readers may recall that this event featured a personal appearance by the King, in the form of Elvis Tribute Artist Rich Vickers, who was in no way an impersonator like those other guys. Accidentally, I assure you, it seems that the official photographic record included a shot of a certain historian studiusly avoiding eye contact with E.T.A. Vickers or his merch-selling Queen:

One more Show-Me travel note. It seems to be a bad idea to label any post as “part 1” or to promise continuations, as I did in the Rolla post mentioned above. I wrote most of “part 2” on our swing through the Lead Belt back then, but only finally finished and posted it yesterday. Exercising my control over space and time on this blog, I backdated the post so the internal references would make sense, but you can read it here. And it involves some actual history.
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Now playing: The Who – Substitute
via FoxyTunes

As part of our broader common interest in geographic minutiae, my son Isaac and I like to find out where all the NCAA tournament schools (and the conferences they come from) are located. Robert Morris University was a new one for us. It seems to be the only one of the Founder-named schools to make the NCAAs, and of course it was doubly interesting to me to discover that someone had named a college after a lesser-known (to civilians) and rather disreputable character from American history. Morris was the “financier of the Revolution,” true, but he was also one of the more Madoffian figures of his day,  running his own Ponzi-like schemes in the area of land speculation (frontier real estate flipping) and ending up in debtor’s prison. The Iroquois distrusted Morris and called him the “big eater with the belly” whose appetites ran to food, wine, and their lands. Read up on the Treaty of Big Tree.

We were pleased to find that RMU has a surprisingly nice, somewhat unsugarcoated page about their namesake on the school site. Debtor’s prison was mentioned. There is even a game you can play, and Robert Morris is given his own tabloid-ready nickname, “RoMo.” Really, more Founders need to have their own games and tabloid nicknames: G-Dub, A-Ham, J-Mad, T-Jeff … the list is endless.

The school seems to be a sort of business-oriented institution, which is appropriate but perhaps not so heartening in terms of whom it would good to take as your role model today. I feel certain that RoMo would have loved credit-default swaps and tried to use them to buy Kentucky or something. “FatCats” might be a better mascot than “Colonials.”