Kansas City

Ewing M. Kauffman Stadium is a Major League Baseball stadium located in Kansas City, Missouri, and home to the Kansas City Royals of the American... League. Together with Arrowhead Stadium, home of the National Football League's Kansas City Chiefs, it is a part of the Truman Sports Complex. Since July 2, 1993, the venue had been known as Kauffman Stadium in honor of the Royals' founding owner, Ewing Kauffman. Kauffman Stadium was built specifically for baseball during an era where building multisport "cookie-cutter" stadiums were commonplace. It is often held up along with Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles as one of the best examples of modernist stadium design. It is the only ballpark in the American League to currently be named after a person . The stadium is 38 years old, making it the sixth-oldest stadium in major-league baseball. Kauffman stadium recently underwent a $250 million renovation, which began after the 2007 season and was completed in July 2009. The 2012 Major League Baseball All-Star Game will be held at Kauffman Stadium.
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Kansas City Municipal Stadium was a baseball and football stadium that formerly stood in Kansas City, Missouri. It hosted the minor league Kansas... City Blues of the American Association from 1923 to 1954 and the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues during the same period. The stadium was razed and rebuilt prior to the 1955 baseball season and hosted the Kansas City Athletics of the AL from 1955 to 1967, the Kansas City Royals of the AL from 1969 to 1972, and the Kansas City Chiefs of the AFL and NFL from 1963 to 1971, as well as other short-lived professional teams. Municipal Stadium was originally built as Muehlebach Field in 1923 for the minor-league Blues for $400,000. It was named for Blues owner George E. Muehlebach, who also owned Muehlebach Beer and the Muehlebach Hotel. It was located in the inner city neighborhood near 18th and Vine to house the minor league white Kansas City Blues baseball team and the Negro League Kansas City Monarchs. The first Negro League World Series game was held at the stadium in 1924. Today, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum is a few blocks from the site.
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Kemper Arena is a 19,500 seat indoor arena, in Kansas City, Missouri. It is named for R. Crosby Kemper Sr., a member of the powerful Kemper financial... clan and who donated $3.2 million, from his estate for the arena. Its most recent tenant was the American Royal livestock show, which held its annual livestock show there until 2010, when it moved to the nearby Sprint Center. Having been essentially supplanted by the Sprint Center, according to a report by the Kansas City Business Journal on October 25, 2011 the arena will be razed and be replaced by an Agricultural Events Center which will include a 5,000-seat coliseum. The original concept for the arena in 1972 was to replace the aging American Royal Arena just south of the new Arena that was used for animal shows. However city officials looking to attract a professional basketball and hockey team changed the scope to be a new state of the art arena. Kemper Arena was built in 18 months in 1973–74 on the site of the former Kansas City Stockyards just west of downtown in the West Bottoms to replace the 8,000-seat Municipal Auditorium to play host to the city's professional basketball and hockey teams.
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The TWA Corporate Headquarters' Building was the corporate headquarters of Trans World Airlines until 1964, when the airline moved its headquarters... to New York City; the building is located at 1735 Baltimore Avenue in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. The selection of Kansas City as the headquarters for TWA, initially via Transcontinental Air Transport, was said to have been made by Charles Lindbergh. The building was designed by architects Raymond E. Bales, Jr. and Morris Schechter and built by the Long Construction Company of Kansas City; site work began in May 1955, and construction was completed on October 31, 1956. The building's exterior was decorated in TWA's signature red and white corporate colors. The three-story L-shaped commercial facility was dominated by aluminum panels and corrugated concrete paneling. It was constructed using the Youtz-Slick construction method, in which steel support beams were first erected and then concrete slabs were poured at ground level and lifted into place by hydraulic jacks; the slabs were then bolted and welded onto the beams, which allowed for a reduction in construction costs and construction time.
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Spencer Bonaventure Tracy was an American theatrical and film actor, who appeared in 75 films from 1930 to 1967. Tracy was one of the major stars of... Hollywood's Golden Age, ranking among the top ten box office draws for almost every year from 1938 to 1951. He was nominated for nine Academy Awards for Best Actor, winning two consecutively in 1937 and 1938—the first actor to achieve this feat. In 1999, the American Film Institute named him the ninth greatest male star in American cinema. Tracy decided on acting as a career whilst a student at Ripon College. He studied acting in New York and appeared in a number of Broadway plays, finally achieving success in the 1930 hit The Last Mile. Director John Ford was impressed by his performance and cast him in Up the River with Humphrey Bogart. Fox Film Corporation signed him to a long term contract, but after five years of mostly undistinguished films, he joined the most prestigious movie studio of the time, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. His career flourished with MGM and he became one of their most valuable stars, guaranteeing him top billing in all his pictures from 1940 onwards.
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Joan Crawford , born Lucille Fay LeSueur, was an American actress in film, television and theatre. Starting as a dancer in traveling theatrical... companies before debuting on Broadway, Crawford was signed to a motion picture contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1925. Initially frustrated by the size and quality of her parts, Crawford began a campaign of self-publicity and became nationally known as a flapper by the end of the 1920s. In the 1930s, Crawford's fame rivaled MGM colleagues Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo. Crawford often played hardworking young women who find romance and financial success. These "rags-to-riches" stories were well-received by Depression-era audiences and were popular with women. Crawford became one of Hollywood's most prominent movie stars and one of the highest paid women in the United States, but her films began losing money and by the end of the 1930s she was labeled "box office poison". After an absence of nearly two years from the screen, Crawford staged a comeback by starring in Mildred Pierce , for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress.
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Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr. was an American broadcast journalist, best known as anchorman for the CBS Evening News for 19 years . During the heyday... of CBS News in the 1960s and 1970s, he was often cited as "the most trusted man in America" after being so named in an opinion poll. Although he reported many events from 1937 to 1981, including bombing in World War II, the Nuremberg trials, combat in the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Iran Hostage Crisis, and the murders of President John F. Kennedy, civil rights pioneer Martin Luther King, Jr., and The Beatles musician John Lennon, he was known for extensive TV coverage of the U.S. space program, from Project Mercury to the Moon landings to the Space Shuttle. He was the only non-NASA recipient of a Moon-rock award. Cronkite is well known for his departing catchphrase "And that's the way it is," followed by the date on which the appearance is aired. Cronkite was born in Saint Joseph, Missouri, the son of Helen Lena , and Dr. Walter Leland Cronkite , a dentist.
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Jean Harlow was an American film actress and sex symbol of the 1930s. Known as the "Blonde Bombshell" and the "Platinum Blonde" , Harlow was ranked... as one of the greatest movie stars of all time by the American Film Institute. Harlow starred in several films, mainly designed to showcase her magnetic sex appeal and strong screen presence, before making the transition to more developed roles and achieving massive fame under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer . Harlow's enormous popularity and "laughing vamp" image were in distinct contrast to her personal life, which was marred by disappointment, tragedy, and ultimately her sudden death from renal failure at the age of 26. Harlow was born Harlean Harlow Carpenter in Kansas City, Missouri. The name is sometimes incorrectly spelled Carpentier, which came from later studio press releases in an attempt to sound more aristocratic, and the inaccuracy has been frequently repeated. Her father, Mont Clair Carpenter , was a dentist who came from a working-class background and attended dental college in Kansas City.
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Sandahl Bergman is an American dancer, stuntwoman, and actress. Bergman was born in Kansas City, Missouri. A statuesque blonde, she is 5 ft 10... in tall. She graduated from Shawnee Mission South High School in Overland Park, Kansas. In her 20s, she moved to New York City and appeared in a number of Broadway shows, catching the eye of choreographer Bob Fosse who cast her as a replacement dancer in Pippin. She had a secondary lead in the stage version of the film Gigi in 1973, and later appeared in Mack & Mabel, and as Judy in the renowned "new New York cast" of A Chorus Line . She was cast again by Fosse in his critically acclaimed 1978 dance concert/musical Dancin', which featured many of the top dancers on Broadway at the time. Bergman's movie career began in 1978 with a small role in the TV film How to Pick Up Girls. She followed this in 1979 with a noted appearance as a dancer in the Fosse film All That Jazz. In the 1980 movie Xanadu, she appears as one of the nine immortal Muses during the opening song I'm Alive by ELO as well as the final title number of Xanadu.
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Michael Marisi Ornstein, , is an American actor and painter. Michael studied acting as a child at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York... City, and later studied under Stella Adler. After high school, he enrolled in the Mason Gross School of the Arts. He quit after his first year and moved to New York City to begin working professionally. Ornstein's first film credit was in Crossing Delancey, where he played the minor character "Mickey". Television credits include a recurring role as Detective Bonnaventura on Homicide: Life on the Street, and a two-episode arc on Third Watch, as well as parts in Seinfeld, Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Ornstein's stage acting credits span twenty-five years worth of new plays in New York City, in addition to creating the role of Louis Ironson in the 1991 World Premiere of Angels in America at the Eureka Theater in San Francisco. All through his life, he has practiced oil painting on an almost daily basis and regularly exhibits his work online. Michael plays Chuck Marstein on Sons of Anarchy.
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William Francis Nolan is an American author, who wrote stories in the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres. He is best known for coauthoring... the novel Logan's Run, with George Clayton Johnson. He co-wrote the screenplay for the 1976 horror film Burnt Offerings which starred Karen Black and Bette Davis. Nolan was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He attended the Kansas City Art Institute. He worked for Hallmark Cards, Inc. before becoming an author. Among his many awards, he was voted a Living Legend in Dark Fantasy by the International Horror Guild in 2002. During 2006, he was bestowed the honorary title of Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. In 2010, he received the Lifetime Achievement Stoker award from the Horror Writers Association . Nolan has teamed up with Bluewater Productions for a new comic book, "Logan's Run: LastDay", to be released in 2010. In addition, he will be developing comics based on "Dark Universe" and "Sam Space".
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Wallace Fitzgerald Beery was an American actor. He is best known for his portrayal of Bill in Min and Bill opposite Marie Dressler, as Long John... Silver in Treasure Island, as Pancho Villa in Viva Villa!, and his titular role in The Champ, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Beery appeared in some 250 movies over a 36-year span. Beery was born in Kansas City, Missouri to Noah W. and Marguerite Beery. He was a younger brother of actor/film executive William Beery and actor Noah Beery, who also had long careers in the motion picture industry, and was an uncle of actor Noah Beery, Jr., whose own screen career spanned seven decades. According to U.S. Census records, all three Beery brothers were born to the same parents, making them full brothers and not half-brothers as many biographies have claimed. Wallace Beery ran away from home and joined the Ringling Brothers Circus at age sixteen as an assistant elephant trainer. He left two years later, after being clawed by a leopard. Beery found work in New York City in comic opera as a baritone and began to appear on Broadway.
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Burt F. Bacharach is an American pianist, composer and music producer. He is known for his popular hit songs and compositions from the mid-1950s... through the 1980s, with lyrics written by Hal David. Many of their hits were produced specifically for, and performed by, Dionne Warwick. Following on with the initial success of this collaboration, Bacharach went on to produce hits with Dusty Springfield, Bobbie Gentry, Jackie DeShannon and others. As of 2006, Bacharach had written 70 Top 40 hits in the US, and 52 Top 40 hits in the UK. Burt Bacharach was born in Kansas City, Missouri, but grew up in the Forest Hills section of New York City, graduating from Forest Hills High School in 1946. He is the son of Irma and Bert Bacharach, a well-known syndicated newspaper columnist, and is of German-Jewish descent. Bacharach studied music at McGill University, under Helmut Blume, at the Mannes School of Music, and at the Music Academy of the West in Montecito, California. His composition teachers included Darius Milhaud, Henry Cowell, and Bohuslav Martinů.
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Isadore "Friz" Freleng was an animator, cartoonist, director, and producer best known for his work on the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of... cartoons from Warner Bros. He introduced and/or developed several of the studio's biggest stars, including Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Tweety Bird, Sylvester the cat, Yosemite Sam and Speedy Gonzales. The senior director at Warners' Termite Terrace studio, Freleng directed more cartoons than any other director in the studio , and is also the most honored of the Warner directors, having won four Academy Awards. After Warners shut down the animation studio in 1963, Freleng and business partner David H. DePatie founded DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, which produced cartoons , feature film title sequences, and Saturday morning cartoons through the early 1980s. The nickname "Friz" came from how "frizzy" his hair was at one time. He began going by "Friz" during World War II, after having been credited as "I. Freleng", since the outbreak, after there had been concerns about his German-sounding name.
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John Harold Kander is the American composer of a number of musicals as part of the songwriting team of Kander and Ebb. Kander was born in Kansas... City, Missouri, the son of Bernice and Harold S. Kander. Kander attended The Pembroke Country-Day School and Oberlin College before earning a Master's degree at Columbia University where he was a protégé of Douglas Moore and studied composition with Jack Beeson. Kander began his Broadway career as substitute rehearsal pianist for West Side Story. The stage manager for West Side Story then asked Kander to play the auditions for her next show, Gypsy. During the auditions, Kander met the choreographer, Jerome Robbins, who suggested that Kander compose the dance music for the show in 1959. After that experience, he wrote dance arrangements for Irma la Douce in 1960. His first produced musical was A Family Affair, written with James and William Goldman. He met lyricist Fred Ebb in 1962 and began a songwriting collaboration that would last for more than four decades. Later that year rising star Barbra Streisand recorded two of the duo's songs, "My Coloring Book" and "I Don't Care Much.
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Wesley Reid Scantlin is a songwriter, lead singer, guitarist and the only remaining founding member of the American post-grunge band Puddle of Mudd.... Scantlin graduated from high school in 1990 from Park Hill High School in Kansas City. He also has a son, Jordan, born in 1997 from a previous relationship. Wes Scantlin has been guitarist and lead vocalist for rock band, Puddle of Mudd, since releasing their debut album, Stuck. They released their next album Abrasive in 1997. Four years later, with the addition of three new members, Come Clean was released in 2001. In 2003, the band released Life On Display. Then released the album Famous in 2007. Most recently Puddle of Mudd released Vol. 4: Songs in the Key of Love & Hate in 2009. The first single off this album is 'Spaceship'. Scantlin sometimes tours with Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell, playing acoustic Alice in Chains songs. He was also one of the musicians that participated in Alice in Chains reunion tsunami benefit show. Scantlin was one of the many artists who worked with Carlos Santana on his album, All That I Am, specifically on the song "Just Feel Better".
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